Text: The Supreme Court has, for example, (1) taken away the right to choose whether to have an abortion, (2) decided that the Courts (packed with Trump appointees) not scientists or experts will get to decide whether our air and water is clean, (3) legalized taking bribery after its own members were caught taking bribes, (4) declared that the violent attempts to stop Congress in an insurrection is not a crime of interfering with Congress, with two members of the majority refusing to recuse even when evidence came out that they supported the insurrection, (5) created out of thin air a new rule that Presidents are immune from the crimes committed in office even though the Constitution specifically says that former presidents are subject to prosecution and the founders wrote that a president can be held criminally liable.
Text: The Supreme Court has, for example, (1) taken away the right to choose whether to have an abortion, (2) decided that the Courts (packed with Trump appointees) not scientists or experts will get to decide whether our air and water is clean, (3) legalized taking bribery after its own members were caught taking bribes, (4) declared that the violent attempts to stop Congress in an insurrection is not a crime of interfering with Congress, with two members of the majority refusing to recuse even when evidence came out that they supported the insurrection, (5) created out of thin air a new rule that Presidents are immune from the crimes committed in office even though the Constitution specifically says that former presidents are subject to prosecution and the founders wrote that a president can be held criminally liable.
@ike Presidents have long has immunity from civil suits stemming from "official acts". The 1982 decision that established that explicitly excluded criminal immunity.
Whether that was right or wrong, gathered as "the people" we still could hold the President accountable for unlawful action, criminal abuses.
Not anymore!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixon_v._Fitzgerald
Judge Jackson: "While the President may have the authority to decide to remove the Attorney General, for example, the question here is whether the President has the option to remove the Attorney General by, say, poisoning him to death. Put another way, the issue here is not whether the President has exclusive removal power, but whether a generally applicable criminal law prohibiting murder can restrict how the President exercises that authority."
The Constitution is not a homicide pact!
Text: Make no mistake about it — this is the most radical, destructive, arrogant Supreme Court in the entire history of the United States of America. John Roberts promised us it wasn’t his job to pick up a bat, and yet he’s spent his time as Chief Justice using a baseball bat to bludgeon the Constitution and the institutions of our government he promised to protect. It’s long past time for us to stop him and his fellow bagmen from the Federalist Society before they finish the hit job they’ve been contracted for. Make no mistake: the Supreme Court will the most important issue of this election, and long beyond that. Democrats need to treat it like the fundamental crisis it is, both on the campaign trail and in congressional committees which must hold in-depth hearings and advance legislative solutions immediately. The Court’s conservative majority has revealed itself to be the most direct threat to American democracy, and any Democrat who is not ready to shelve old fears about “court packing” and get serious about expanding and reforming the Court isn’t made for this moment, period. This is serious. Act like it.
Screenshot of BlueSky post by Ned Resnikoff @resnikoff.bsky.social - 6 days ago - Right-wing SCOTUS majority in Grants Pass: "The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges." But unironically. [Quoting the Supreme Court majority decision in Grants Pass v. Johnson] Grants Pass’s public-camping ordinances do not criminalize status. The public-camping laws prohibit actions undertaken by any person, regardless of status. It makes no difference whether the charged defendant is currently a person experiencing homelessness, a backpacker on vacation, or a student who abandons his dorm room to camp out in protest on the lawn of a municipal building. See Tr. of Oral Arg. 159. Because the public-camping laws in this case do not criminalize status Robinson is not implicated.
when we practice expropriation
we'll call it innovation.
"As Thomas Jefferson once wrote, under judicial review, the Constitution 'is a mere thing of wax in the hands of the judiciary, which they may twist and shape into any form they please'…the Court has…deleted both of the Constitution’s anti-bribery clauses for the president…The Roberts Court recently deleted Section 3 [of the 14th Amendment], which forbids traitors and rebels from serving in the govt, once again to protect Donald Trump from accountability." @ryanlcooper https://prospect.org/justice/2024-07-04-supreme-court-roberts-murdered-constitution/
@sqrtminusone "smart" is not unidimensional. people can be canny businesspeople and idiotic in philosophy or historiography. (people can make bad products and still be canny businesspeople. lots more than product quality determines business success.) it's a bad idea to short bitcoin. that doesn't imply that bitcoin is in any nontautological sense a high-quality product (or a token representing anything else of high quality). 1/
@sqrtminusone re fear of change, i think it's fair to say that from the postwar period until very recently, technology and innovation have had very positive, almost utopian connotations, and recently that is shifting, inverting even towards quite dystopian expectations. i think you are right that "dawn of the Renaissance" is projecting ex-post hagiography of the Renaissance backwards too loosely. 2/
@sqrtminusone nevertheless, if we change dawn of the renaissance to (a bit ironically!) dawn of the Atomic Age, i think the proposition holds pretty well. science fiction used to predominantly describe the contours, conundra, and paradoxes of world we could recognize as "more advanced" even if we could entertain questions of what was lost along with what was gained. 1984-style dystopias, cyberpunk, were smaller subgenres, minority reports if you will. 3/
@sqrtminusone i think that relationship has now inverted. at least measured by prominence and popularity, contemporary science fiction is predominantly dystopian, with "solar punk" or "star trek"-type fantasies, or more neutral space operas or Asimov's Three Laws speculations now the minority. something has changed, in literature and in life, very quickly i think. /fin
“For the first time since the dawn of the Renaissance, innovation is now feared by the vast majority of people. And the tech leaders, once admired and emulated, now rank among the least trustworthy people in the world.” #TedGioia https://www.honest-broker.com/p/how-did-silicon-valley-turn-into
Choose from five colors.
“technocracy tends to provoke a backlash, because it creates an opportunity for populists to argue – reasonably – that there are no uniquely rational solutions to complex problems, and that democracy is supposed to be about choice and popular participation, not elites decreeing that there is no alternative.” #JanWernerMueller https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/why-macronism-failed-by-jan-werner-mueller-2024-07
From @Dahlialith #MarkJosephStern https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2024/07/supreme-court-maga-john-roberts-trump-handmaiden.html
Text: And make no mistake about it: When a court that has been battered by near-weekly reports of undisclosed oligarch-funded vacations (and gifts and super yachts and tricked out RVs and secret conferences with high-paying Koch supporters getting access to justices) decides to make it easier to bribe public officials—as it did in Snyder v. U.S.—that’s a very public signal that the conservative supermajority does not care what you think. When a court that has been caught with not one but two justices who have spouses who were excited by insurrectionist activity and symbols stands up those same justices as dispassionate and objective deciders of three separate Jan. 6 cases, that’s a very public signal that the conservative supermajority doesn’t care what you think. And when that self same court makes it illegal for homeless people to sleep in parks because not one of these members of the conservative supermajority will lose sleep over homelessness, climate change, housing policy, or any of the other root causes of being forced to sleep in a park, it’s a very, very public signal that the justices don’t care what you think. Whatever braking mechanism once existed at the court is now broken. We wake up this summer in a new government order.
from @walterolson @olson.walter https://www.cato.org/blog/court-went-too-far-presidential-immunity ht @SharonK
Text: Nowhere in the Constitution is there mention of executive immunity, which was a topic of peculiar interest to the Founders and Framers. Alexander Hamilton wrote in Federalist 69 that unlike the “king of Great Britain,” the chief executive of the United States would “be liable to prosecution and punishment in the ordinary course of law,” and in Federalist 77 named “subsequent prosecution in the common course of law,” in addition to impeachment, as checks on “abuse of the executive authority.”
[new draft post] No longer a liberal democracy https://drafts.interfluidity.com/2024/07/03/no-longer-a-liberal-democracy/index.html
There's a lot of good philosophy of (social) science thinking in this piece by #KevinMunger https://crookedtimber.org/2024/07/03/does-social-media-cause-anything/
Text: “Evidence-based policymaking” at the scale of responding to social media is simply the fantasy of policy without politics — in the cybernetic terminology of Dan Davies’ fantastic recent book about Stafford Beer, it is an “accountability sink.” Technocratic politicians love it: they don’t have to be leaders, merely followers of the evidence—if things turn out poorly, well, that’s just how science works, it never claims to be perfect, merely self-correcting. It certainly wasn’t my fault—what do you want me to do, ignore the evidence?
"Notice, by the way, how the Republicans claim Joe Biden is a tyrant and a dictator, yet they explicitly grant him dictatorial powers, confident that he will not use them!" @adamkotsko https://itself.blog/2024/07/02/what-do-they-think-is-going-to-happen/
"cynicism is the defense mechanism of the irresponsible, and sincerity is the only way to counter such poisons." @profmusgrave https://musgrave.substack.com/p/teaching-politics-during-hard-times
@csaltos that was just one example one day. (some time ago!) i like apple products too, but i think they are remarkably terrible about some things.