431–440 of 996 posts
No Assange, no Snowden. What a fool I am, I seriously envisaged that could happen... Instead it’s just more and more corruption.
I don't think that Levandowski, Snowden, or Assange deserve pardons.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
As a foreigner Presidential pardons + the appointment (and life terms) of Supreme Court judges baffle me. How can a country that claims to be a leader in democracy have these two wildly abused bugs? Edit: fixed use of election instead of appointment
As an American, I agree with everything you said. (Well, except that Supreme Court justices are appointed, not elected.) The other gaping flaw is the systemic, undemocratic bias that determines the makeup of our Upper House.
It's important to note the reason the President has the power to pardon anyone for any reason is it's one of the checks and balances, the Constitution is full of them. It's meant as a check to blunt overzealous prosecutions. Note that the President does not have the corresponding power to convict anyone. An interesting set of pardons was when Andrew Johnson pardoned all the rebels in the Confederacy, including Jeffer…
Constitution has some excellent checks and balances but the blanket pardon isn't one of them. The pardon doesn't do anything to address systemic problems in the justice system and has become a channel for doling out political favors.
Checks and balances essentially don't work in the US. The best bit is simply a decent judiciary, but that was mostly copied from the British. And even that is more poorly executed than elsewhere, due to the political nature of judicial appointees, and esp. due to the tradition of direct elections of some judges. I'd say it's arguably worse than the British model it was copied from, not because the Brits were psychic geniuses, but because of the not entirely unrelated fact that the UK model is much more open to reform; it's aged better because it's less crufty. When lead by a dangerously populist government that might be risk, of course, but so far even populists have turned out not to do too much consitutional harm - might differ in the future.
It's more like: the US constitution was grand it its aims, but pretty v1.0 in its execution. It's full of unintentional (or at least unfortunate) indirect effects that didn't work out too well; such as that congress is likely to deadlock; that the constitution isn't sufficiently amendable; that its form of democracy is subject to unproportional divergence as state population sizes diverge, that by contrast adding new states is way too easy, that elections at all are in no way shape or form necessarily fair (and I don't there there has ever been a particularly free&fair election in the states) due to gerrymandering, state size disparities, imbalanced voting registration requirements, and lack of constitutional protections for elections in general; the presence of systematic biased introduced by winner-takes-all approaches; the lack of a checks on the presidency (clearly not intentional, but impeachment is a purely hypothetical check). I'm sure actual scholars could name a bunch more. Then theres the more general flaws in legal republics, such as that there no systematic mechanism for reform; laws just accumlate leaving extremely outdated wordings on the books forever, and with ever increasingly large rulebooks.
Seriously, name 1 check/balance that's actually particularly good! (I mean, I guess there by sheer scope might be one... but I can't think of one anyhow).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
As a foreigner Presidential pardons + the appointment (and life terms) of Supreme Court judges baffle me. How can a country that claims to be a leader in democracy have these two wildly abused bugs? Edit: fixed use of election instead of appointment
You might want to look at the electoral vote and how 1 vote in Wyoming accounts as much as roughly 4 votes in Texas and California. Pretty serious bug that is enabling the far right to be over represented imo.
As far as 1 WY vote being worth 4 Texas votes, that’s also irrelevant because the president is elected as president of the republic, not the president of individual people.
I have to say there is quite a lot to learn from Levandowski.[0] I am not a fan of corruption but it's undeniable that he played whatever cards he had in life and played them hard. He'll probably be a shadowy billionaire quite soon. One quote stood out to me at the very end of the article: “The only thing that matters is the future,” he told me after the civil trial was settled. “I don’t even know why we study histor…
Santayana was pithier.
I have to say there is quite a lot to learn from Levandowski.[0] I am not a fan of corruption but it's undeniable that he played whatever cards he had in life and played them hard. He'll probably be a shadowy billionaire quite soon. One quote stood out to me at the very end of the article: “The only thing that matters is the future,” he told me after the civil trial was settled. “I don’t even know why we study histor…
To me this is a mind-numbing display of ignorance. Once you understand that you're not the first human being to ever have existed and that the people that came before you (even way before) are not dumber than you, you will immediately realize that there's a lot to learn from what has happened before.
This should be very obvious when it comes to political/social endeavors (e.g. how to push for substantial social change without having things degenerate into some form of totalitarianism), but it's equally as important for scientific and technological ones. For a simple and increasingly popular example just look at Sabine Hossenfelder's line of criticism of contemporary theoretical physics. A lot of it draws on the sociological and historical study of the scientific process.
No Assange, no Snowden. What a fool I am, I seriously envisaged that could happen... Instead it’s just more and more corruption.
Nobody from the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the ACLU is on that list.
We are wasting our time and energy caring about either of those organizations. Let them stick to filing Amicus Briefs in courts, but they clearly have no pull or influence or backchannel despite our tech scene thinking they do.
I have to say there is quite a lot to learn from Levandowski.[0] I am not a fan of corruption but it's undeniable that he played whatever cards he had in life and played them hard. He'll probably be a shadowy billionaire quite soon. One quote stood out to me at the very end of the article: “The only thing that matters is the future,” he told me after the civil trial was settled. “I don’t even know why we study histor…
This seems naive at best. The goal of studying history is not to be paralyzed and constrained by it, but to learn from it. Human behavior seems to be notoriously consistent across centuries, there is much to gain from understanding past mistakes. Nor is every goal of our existence is about “building stuff”, it can also be about just living a just and considered life. These types of boorish egotistical statements from…
It strikes me that this an argument for the uselessness of reading history. People are basically the same as they always have been and just as you can’t simply explain to a teenager that they’ll feel differently about the world when they’re thirty, every generation has to figure life out for itself.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
As a foreigner Presidential pardons + the appointment (and life terms) of Supreme Court judges baffle me. How can a country that claims to be a leader in democracy have these two wildly abused bugs? Edit: fixed use of election instead of appointment
Regarding judges: How would you appoint them? Basically there are three options: - Have a public vote, direct legitimation (or via some extra electoral college or something) this means that judges have to be "popular" and run campaigns and question is, if that's really smart ... - Have the "juristical class" elect within, so judges from lower courts would lick somebody, or current judges elect additional ones. That w…
No Assange, no Snowden. What a fool I am, I seriously envisaged that could happen... Instead it’s just more and more corruption.
Last night Trump also revoked his own 2017 executive order that prevented federal administration officials from becoming lobbyists after leaving government: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-lobbying-execu... This had been one of his only practical actions towards keeping his campaign promise of "draining the swamp."
Levadowski pardon, the spy, the swamp, etc.