Arotrios

Arotrios OP , 10 months ago to Politics in [Opinion - Legal Analysis] The Constitution bars Trump from holding public office ever again - Donald K. Sherman

Ain't that just the most delicious part of it? What's really fun is that in GA, the same officials who provided evidence for the indictment, including Raffensberger (who Trump dragged through the mud) are the ones who are going to be determining his eligibility for the GA ballot.

So they've already seen the evidence, and the GA GOP is mighty pissed off that Trump cost them a Senate seat. Those good ole boys know how to hold a grudge, and I wouldn't be surprised if they gave him the finger on this one.

Arotrios OP , 10 months ago to Politics in [Opinion - Legal Analysis] The Constitution bars Trump from holding public office ever again - Donald K. Sherman

Yep, and if Trump goes down, it sets a very strong legal precedent for barring them from the next election as well, which is why this particular indictment is so much more powerful than the previous ones. In practice, it probably would only affect the most egregious violators like Hawley, but nonetheless, the potential consequences shouldn't be underestimated, especially in the House elections.

Arotrios OP , 10 months ago to Politics in [Opinion - Legal Analysis] The Constitution bars Trump from holding public office ever again - Donald K. Sherman

I presented it as opinion because the article itself is an op-ed with a link back to the legal analysis. Just trying to follow the rules of the sub.

But I agree with you - it's not a real debate, as the other side has no argument other than "nuh uh!"

Arotrios OP , 10 months ago to Politics in [Opinion - Legal Analysis] The Constitution bars Trump from holding public office ever again - Donald K. Sherman

Relevant text of the 14th Amendment, Section 3:

No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any state, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any state legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any state, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.

Arotrios , 10 months ago to Politics in Trump’s indictment can’t solve the real threat: our undemocratic electoral system

It matters as a gauge of popular support and perceived legitimacy of the President, which affects their ability to get legislation passed. You'll note I didn't argue for a pure majority vote, but rather an adjustment to the system to make it more representative.

Arotrios , 10 months ago to Politics in Trump’s indictment can’t solve the real threat: our undemocratic electoral system

Was Obama a dictator?

Clearly not from the context of the article you provided, as they describe how the cages were part of an expansion to a larger facility that corrected a worse detention situation at the border, where there was no air conditioning. Do I think this was a humane design choice? No, but it was an improvement. At the time they were built, family separation wasn't performed except in extreme circumstances. Nor do I think that Obama was personally involved in the design decisions.

Trump undid that policy, and filled the cages that Obama built. Family separation was the point. And again and again he bragged about it. He was personally involved in the decision, and lauded it.

The Biden administration is still detaining children, but they've drastically reduced the number (see the graph on the article provided), and no longer enforces family separation to my knowledge. More work needs to be done here, I agree, but ignoring the scope to say both he and Trump are the same is lazy thinking.

From a purely leftist standpoint (far left in the US), you're right - the electoral process and two party system as they currently exist will never allow a true progressive to set policy, and we're stuck in a cycle of choosing between bad and worse. It's my hope ranked choice voting starts getting some real traction as a counter, but I'm not holding my breath.

So why should you care?

Because in a choice between bad and worse, if you don't vote, you end up with worse.

Arotrios , 10 months ago to Politics in Trump’s indictment can’t solve the real threat: our undemocratic electoral system

Dictators get elected all the time, Hitler being the one most historians refer to. It's the policies they implement after election that define them as dictators. Trump began the process while in office, but was horribly incompetent at it, as demonstrated by his flailing coup attempt. Moreover, he didn't have Hitler's popular support, effectively getting into office on a technicality.

Biden was elected by both the popular and electoral vote. His policies thus far, while centrist, have been built on bi-partisan cooperation where possible, and he's been as hands off as possible regarding the political elements of the court cases against Trump. He's also been supportive of civil rights, and has rolled back a number of Trump's crueler policies.

The same cannot be said of Trump, nor will it be. You can actually boil it down to one definitive action: Dictators lock children in cages.

Trump qualifies under this definition, having been responsible for the detainment of over 500,000. Biden doesn't qualify under this definition, nor any other. At worst, he's a middling centrist who is most concerned with keeping the country running, as a President should be.

As to the legitimacy of America's electoral process, I absolutely agree that it needs to be reinforced, but I don't believe that there was any substantial fraud in the 2020 election.

I would ideally like to see all voting machines require paper trails, and have universal mail-in voting, as it's been a resounding success in OR and CA. I would also like to see a restructuring of the electoral college that more accurately reflects the popular vote while still allowing rural areas to have a significant voice - after all, urban needs can easily override rural ones to the detriment of all citizens. In a perfect world, that balance would also be properly reflected in Senate seats, to more properly represent the country as a whole.

Arotrios , 10 months ago to Politics in Trump’s indictment can’t solve the real threat: our undemocratic electoral system

If Trump takes office without winning the popular vote, it will very likely lead to civil war. Not because the people will rise up to defend Biden, but because his policies are simultaneously cruel, poorly implemented, unjust, and most importantly to the wealthy who run the country, unprofitable. There were a lot of people in the business community who haven't forgotten the China trade war of 2020. And the fact of the matter is that with climate change beginning to have a real affect on the economy, an unsteady hand on the wheel is the last thing Wall Street wants.

Dictators that successfully put such policies in place do so after the fascist state is established to quell dissent. Trump can't even establish a state of denial.

Could he win? Possibly on a electoral vote basis - I think the popular vote is far out of reach for him. But I don't see the country lasting for long if he does - he doesn't have the skill to run a fascist state, much less build one, and he'd be completely out of his depth confronting a real uprising. DeSantis, on the other hand, could build such a state and has been somewhat successful in laying the groundwork in Florida. I don't think Trump will chose him as VP, but if he does, that's a match made in hell.

Arotrios , 10 months ago to Politics in Trump Announces Plans to Finally Go Ahead and Prove Election Was Rigged

This is poetry:

Trump
is gonna own you libs
this time just
you wait

Our 4D chess GOD
has sat on this report
for years

He could have released it
right after the election
but you fools just don't
see the whole board
like
he
does!

This is the perfect
time for it
so he can watch you
dummies seethe in rage
and
take back the country

I'm so happy to be
one of the God Emperor's
Chosen, I've donated all
I can
to his fund

and you should
too

-Uncle Magafash

Arotrios , 10 months ago to Politics in Trump Announces Plans to Finally Go Ahead and Prove Election Was Rigged

Hmm... seems a bit late to bring this report forward.... makes me wonder if it was stored in the same place as the GOP replacement plan for Obamacare and their policy platform, which has been missing for the last 7 years.

Arotrios , 10 months ago to Politics in Newest "anti-woke" tantrum: Right-wingers don't think kids of different races can be friends

Per the article, this is part of an organized effort on the part of formerly respected institutions on the right to actively push a racist agenda. Our star villain in this case is the Claremont Institute:

Last week, the New Republic published a lengthy and terrifying investigative article by Katherine Stewart about the Claremont Institute, once a vaguely respectable conservative think tank and now among the leading right-wing organizations pushing the anti-education and anti-democratic agenda below the surface of the Conroe incident. One of the many Claremont alumni Stewart profiles is Christopher Rufo, who spearheaded the recent hysteria over "critical race theory" in education. In reality, critical race theory was an approach used in law schools and other graduate-level academic spaces, and had basically nothing to do with public schools. Rufo's ingenious idea was to turn it into a catch-all scare term that could be used to demonize any and all forms of anti-racist education, even something as previously noncontroversial as a poster depicting interracial friendship.

Here's the more detailed article on Claremont from the New Republic. Excerpt below:

The saga of the Claremont Institute in the Trump years is readily told as one of moral collapse. Once upon a time, the men of the Claremont Institute (they are almost all men; more on that in a moment) idolized George Washington for his “prudence” and “civility.” From its founding up through the Obama years, the institute was certainly situated on the right, but it was not, or did not seem to be, conspicuous for its extremism. It was probably best known for publishing the Claremont Review of Books, which was sized and laid out to resemble The New York Review of Books, as if to suggest that it was in direct competition with its more established and exalted Manhattan counterpart.

But in 2015–16, the Claremont men threw their support behind the man who descended that golden escalator with a mouthful of hateful rhetoric. In an earlier time, they defended intellectual rigor against the alleged relativism of contemporary academic culture. But now they provide a platform for white nationalists, racist “replacement” theorists, and the Pizzagate man. Nate Hochman, the erstwhile DeSantis staffer who was fired after he reportedly created and distributed a campaign video featuring Nazi imagery in July, is a former Claremont Institute Publius Fellow (2021). ”Most haunting of all—they once hailed the United States as “the best regime in Western civilization.” But in the aftermath of Trump’s defeat in 2020, Claremont board member John Eastman was instrumental in the plot to recruit fake electors and overturn the election—and the men of Claremont rose to his defense. Eastman currently faces potential disbarment in California and appears to be a person of interest in special counsel Jack Smith’s investigations. Yet Claremont board member and founder Christopher Flannery has called John Eastman a “hero” and has asked us instead to condemn “the Stalinist machine” (meaning U.S. federal law enforcement) for persecuting him. Eastman was the unidentified (and uncharged) co-conspirator 2 in the August 1 indictment of Trump over his January 6 actions. (Claremont did not respond to emails from The New Republic asking if the institution endorsed Eastman’s behavior on this matter, in addition to some other issues addressed in this piece.)

The Claremont Institute’s seeming embrace of political violence against the government of the United States is not limited to Eastman’s efforts to whip up the mob that gathered at the Ellipse in preparation for the assault on the Capitol, nor can it be excused as mere metaphorical excess in the war of ideas. “Given the promise of tyranny, conservative intellectuals must openly ally with the AR-15 crowd,” argues author Kevin Slack, a professor at Hillsdale College, in a lengthy book excerpt published in Claremont’s online magazine, The American Mind. “Able-bodied men, no longer isolated, are returning to republican manliness in a culture of physical fitness and responsible weaponry. They are buying AR-15s and Glock 17s and training with their friends, not FBI-infiltrated militias or online strangers but trustworthy lifelong friends to build a community alongside.”

Arotrios , 10 months ago to Fediverse in When you block a user on kbin and they're so butthurt, they ban you from their "magazines."

Lmao - gotta say it's creative. There are trolls on my ban list that could use a multi-century sentence.

Arotrios OP , 10 months ago to Fediverse in Lemmy.world is down again

Aaaaaand it's back as of 8:52 PST

Arotrios , 10 months ago to RedditMigration in Squabbles, another recent reddit alternative, seems to be taking the doomed "free speech" path

This is why when a social media site gets past a certain size, the admin team and the moderation need to be clearly defined, and siloed from each other's core responsibilities, so the admin team focuses on running the site and the mod team focuses on making it sing.

Looks like the people actually moderating clearly had a handle on the situation. The admin was clearly overworked and didn't agree with the direction the community was taking, and made a quick decision that was poorly thought out.

The reason admins are admins is because they're good at running machines. You can turn a machine off if it's broken, and change how it runs with the flip of a switch.

A community requires a much different approach, and never, no matter how wise the decision, reacts well to being told how to act. It takes a different skill set to properly moderate and run a community than it does to run a server - in fact most admins I know make notoriously bad moderators (myself included, although I'm no longer an admin).

To be honest, the admin here is acting exactly like your stereotypical libertarian tech-bro computer guy who pays lip service to the left while pocketing the more palatable pieces of the philosophy of the right. I've worked with a lot of them in tech. LGBTQ+ is hard stretch for these guys in general - they'll declare gays have rights but won't march in Pride, use slurs when in like company, and generally see LGBTQ+ as a lifestyle choice and not an inescapable biological state of being.

They don't understand that it's not a switch you can flick on and off.

Just glad I'm on the Fediverse where this particular admin's meltdown doesn't matter too much, but I have a feeling Squabblr's fate is going to be the same as Voat (which was cool for about two weeks before the alt-right overran it).

Arotrios OP , 10 months ago to Politics in [News] Trump Pushes Total Lie About Georgia Prosecutor Sleeping With Gang Member

Now you know how Ivanka feels...