• 2 Posts
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Joined 10 months ago
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Cake day: August 22nd, 2023

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  • That’s the most frustrating thing about all these back and forths. So much angst and arguments when the first question that needs to be asked is “do you live in a state that’s in play?” If not, then you don’t need to tell anyone who you’re not voting for and no one needs to tell you you shouldn’t, because your vote doesn’t matter and you’re not making the decision based on who you’d prefer to see in the White House. Deep-X votes are being decided in relation to their irrelevance and both shouldn’t be shamed as supporting migrant death camps and also shouldn’t be an opinion someone in a swing state should look to when making their own decision.

    I’m in a deep blue state. Usually I vote for Democratic presidential candidates merely to drive up the popular vote total and make the argument against the electoral college stronger. That’s all my (presidential) vote is worth, so if I decided not to cast it, it’s in that context, and someone in Georgia should be making their decision in an entirely different context and ignoring the position declarations of people whose votes really don’t matter.






  • Honestly have no idea what you’re trying to say here … the point of governmental power and law is arguably not to be optional.

    If the Supreme Court has the final and unreviewable power to decides what the law means, and their proclamations are simply followed without question by the Executive, then they’re not optional in any way and they have ultimate power under our system of rules. Congress can make new rules that the Supreme Court can declare unconstitutional or twist to their viewpoints, the executive can take action that is then declared unconstitutional.

    The only Constitutional restriction on them is impeachment and removal, but they’re the people who decide how the Constitution works. And impeachment is basically an irrelevant fantasy. The actual check is what’s not given to them. All they can do is publish words, which are supposed to be followed but which they don’t have any actual power or money to force into being without cooperation. But if your not willing to consider that an executive might at some time be right in saying “no”, then they are effectively all powerful.

    That’s the “optional” part. Requiring some dupe to bring a case is trivial, it doesn’t make them optional, it’s that their power can be vetoed by simply being ignored. And it’s a power that needs to be held over them the further they stray into being an entirely political body.



  • So someone is arrested for flag burning… and the case is immediately dismissed by a judge.

    Ok, and? What makes you think they then get released from prison? Cause they just have to?

    Pretty much everything the government does to “enforce” their will can be challenged

    If the executive doesn’t empower the judiciary, then no, everything cannot be challenged. You can assert your right to challenge an arrest before a judge however much you want, if your jailer says “nah”, you don’t get out of jail. The court is the veneer of slow and steady legitimacy validating the force of the executive, but rulings are just words, the thing that actually makes you have to listen to them is force.

    This is, to be sure, a constitutional crisis likely to end with chaos. The real result would likely entail some sort of attempt to stand up a new “Supremer” court or decide that certain types of cases cannot be appealed or governors relying on their state courts and refusing to bend to a Supreme Court ruling they and their constituents don’t agree with.




  • This is unhinged. Someone building the mainline of an interoperable communication service should absolutely be helping others making software trying to interoperate with it. Complaints can be made about Rochko rejecting PRs, but complaining that other people’s time is going towards a thing they don’t want is insane.

    “So they reached out to us and we had conversations about what they want to do, how they can do it, and we had more detailed conversations about how to do X, how to do Y protocol-wise. We helped them resolve some issues when they launched their first test of the federation because we want to see them succeed with this plan, so we help them debug and troubleshoot some of the stuff that they’re doing. Basically, we’re talking with each other about whatever issues come up.”

    But from the perspective of hundreds of instances have signed the anti-Meta FediPact, and hundreds more are blocking Threads without signing the pact, any resources devoted to to improving the Threads/Mastodon integration are wasted.