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US axes website for reporting human rights abuses by US-armed foreign forces

bbc.com

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Re: US axes website for reporting human rights abuses by US-armed foreign forces

#341

Post by AndrewKemendo »

jkestner wrote: post #162
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If a population decides to let themselves be run this way then who is at fault? People get the leaders they deserve

We love to blame the common clay, don't we. You can win a majority of voters and lose an election. There are systemic problems, starting with money in politics, two senators per state, the electoral college and gerrymandering.

George Carlin said it best:

“Well, where do people think these politicians come from? They don't fall out of the sky. They don't pass through a membrane from another reality. They come from American parents and American families, American homes, American schools, American churches, American businesses and American universities, and they are elected by American citizens. This is the best we can do folks. This is what we have to offer. It's what our system produces: Garbage in, garbage out. If you have selfish, ignorant citizens, you're going to get selfish, ignorant leaders. Term limits ain't going to do any good; you're just going to end up with a brand new bunch of selfish, ignorant Americans. So, maybe, maybe, maybe, it's not the politicians who suck. Maybe something else sucks around here... like, the public. Yeah, the public sucks. There's a nice campaign slogan for somebody: 'The Public Sucks. F*ck Hope.’”

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/78321-now-there-s-one-thing...

Video version: https://youtu.be/rVXekzwkz10?si=90VqlzOLiUS_7yFx

Re: US axes website for reporting human rights abuses by US-armed foreign forces

#343

Post by positus »

butlike wrote: post #330
rayiner wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your comment reflects a common, but fundamentally mistaken, understanding of the constitution. You're thinking of the government like an operating system with a microkernel that is trusted to neutrally enforce the "law," with the three branches of government running in userspace. That's not the system the founders created! They understood that everyone is political, and no one can be trusted. The founders understood…

SCOTUS lifelong appointments checking in to say "hi"

SCOTUS has life-long appointments because it is designed to move and operate slowly and be the least political of the branches. Parties that try to legislate from the bench when they cannot successfully get something through Congress are the issue.

Re: US axes website for reporting human rights abuses by US-armed foreign forces

#344

Post by the_gastropod »

revnode wrote: post #314
wahnfrieden wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The house is similarly disproportionate

How so?

The House is not as skewed as the Senate. But it still has a "rural" bias through two mechanisms: 1. gerrymandering, and 2. the 435 cap on the number of representatives.

Both parties do gerrymander. But there are more "red" states than blue, so it systemically favors one party.

The cap on reps also skews things. Nebraska, Wyoming, Alaska, and Vermont all have less than 1/435th of the U.S. population, so they're over-represented in the House. That over-representation comes at the expense of big states like California being under-represented.

You can see this effect by looking at the popular vote vs the representation in The House. In the 2016 election, Trump won the election with just 46.1% of the popular vote. Republicans maintained control of The House with 55.4% control. In the 2020 election, Joe Biden won 51.3% of the popular vote. And Democrats gained control with slightly less than that, 51.03% of The House. In the 2024 election, Trump won 49.81% of the popular vote, Republicans won 50.8% of seats in The House.

Re: US axes website for reporting human rights abuses by US-armed foreign forces

#345

Post by _heimdall »

rehevkor5 wrote: post #310
docdeek wrote: post #64

This seems like a bad decision to me. Not only does it seem not to be in the spirit of the law (you can still report but not as easily now) but it's not clear why they shut it down at all. Cost? Inefficiency? Just wasn't getting used much? They have a better solution? On the other hand, the US seems so partisan now that had the current administration told the world they were taking huma' rights abuse reporting seriou…

It seems to be an extension of aspects that he talked about in his speech https://www.war.gov/News/Transcripts/Transcript/Article/4318... Specifically: > allow me a few words to talk about toxic leaders. > The definition of toxic has been turned upside down, and we're correcting that. That's why today, at my direction we're undertaking a full review of the department's definitions of so-called toxic leadership, bully…

To be fair (ignoring whether Hegseth really deserves that), what he describes is a very common view of military leadership during war time.

"War time" is the key there though. The US is not a nation at war. We have allies at war and the executive branch has taken it upon itself to take warlike actions without Congress, but we aren't st war - especially not a war the scale of which is seen as existential and leads to these kind of views on conduct and policy.

Hegseth seems to be playing out what Eisenhower tried to warn us about decades ago. When a wartime general turned President leaves office with a final warning of the dangers of the new military industrial complex, everyone should listen.

Re: US axes website for reporting human rights abuses by US-armed foreign forces

#346

Post by shadowgovt »

itsoktocry wrote: post #305
outside2344 wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing the founders didn't foresee was that a president could basically threaten to remove any member of Congress by 1) driving their campaign contributions to zero or 2) threatening to sic his mob on them.

> 1) driving their campaign contributions to zero or 2) threatening to sic his mob on them. What's so crazy about comments like this is they have an air of, "we are actually the good guys in the right, but the system works against us!" You got out-voted.

The President is currently rocking about a 39% approval rating and 56% disapproval.

The numbers suggest that he is not doing what the electorate elected him to do, in general.

(In addition, the Legislature and Executive are designed and intended to be functionally independent, and regardless of the preference the electorate expressed via simple majority, to the extent that independence is threatened by executive action, it's unconstitutional. The President doesn't have a mandate to interfere with that indepdendence for the same reason his election didn't give him a mandate to institute non-carceral slavery).

Re: US axes website for reporting human rights abuses by US-armed foreign forces

#347

Post by [deleted] »

giraffe_lady wrote: post #241
docdeek wrote: post #64

This seems like a bad decision to me. Not only does it seem not to be in the spirit of the law (you can still report but not as easily now) but it's not clear why they shut it down at all. Cost? Inefficiency? Just wasn't getting used much? They have a better solution? On the other hand, the US seems so partisan now that had the current administration told the world they were taking huma' rights abuse reporting seriou…

Hegseth is publicly just a huge fan of war crimes and this is probably the main reason he got the job he has now. The big thing he's been signaling, and not really even in a sly or dogwhistly way, is that war crimes are ok to do now. If your goal is to do war crimes and enable others to do war crimes then removing the war crime reporting tool may not directly benefit you much but it certainly doesn't hurt you. And th…

[deleted]

Re: US axes website for reporting human rights abuses by US-armed foreign forces

#348

Post by rayiner »

jjk166 wrote: post #303
rayiner wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Congress's silence becomes de-facto acceptance. Congress choosing to not do oversight becomes a de-factor repeal of the law. Yes, but why is that surprising? If a majority of any legislature doesn't care to see a law enforced, they could vote to repeal the law anyway. It's only because of the artifice of the filibuster in the U.S. system that there's a meaningful difference between those two things.

Because the whole point of laws is that they are not merely the whims of whoever currently sits on the throne. They provide guidance to people as to what they can reasonably expect will and will not be permitted, and the obligations of various people to eachother. Laws need to be changeable, because the world changes, but that process is purposefully made somewhat difficult so that only worthwhile changes are made, s…

> Because the whole point of laws is that they are not merely the whims of whoever currently sits on the throne.

That views laws as self-executing abstractions, which they are not. Laws necessarily are enforced by people. For that reason, in the U.S., law enforcement is typically assigned to elected officers and their delegates. From the beginning of the republic, enforcement of federal law has been a political activity: https://www.bu.edu/bulawreview/files/2017/04/MARKOWITZ.pdf

“While there was no direct conversation about the general power of prosecutorial discretion in the record of the framing of the Constitution, prosecutorial discretion was an uncontroversial power of the President from the start. President George Washington personally directed that numerous criminal and civil prosecutions be initiated and that others be halted. It has been observed that President Washington’s control over ‘prosecutions was wide- ranging, largely uncontested by Congress, and acknowledged—even expected—by the Supreme Court.’ In the earliest days of the Union, future Chief Justice John Marshall had the opportunity to opine on the nature of the President’s prosecutorial discretion authority in discussing the decision of the President to interrupt a prosecution of an individual accused of murder on board a British vessel and to instead deliver that person to British authorities. On the floor of Congress, then-Representative Marshall described the President’s prosecutorial discretion power as ‘an indubitable and a Constitutional power’ which permitted him alone to determine the ‘will of the nation’ in making decisions about when to pursue and when to forego prosecutions.”

Re: US axes website for reporting human rights abuses by US-armed foreign forces

#349

Post by deathanatos »

rayiner wrote: post #150
mikeyouse wrote: post #5

> Tim Rieser, former senior aide to Senator Leahy who wrote the 2011 amendment mandating information gathering, told the BBC the gateway's removal meant the State Department was "clearly ignoring the law". We're in a really bad place... with a servile congress, it turns out there aren't really any laws constraining the executive branch. When everything relies on "independent IGs" for law enforcement inside executive…

Your comment reflects a common, but fundamentally mistaken, understanding of the constitution. You're thinking of the government like an operating system with a microkernel that is trusted to neutrally enforce the "law," with the three branches of government running in userspace. That's not the system the founders created! They understood that everyone is political, and no one can be trusted. The founders understood…

You should look at what gerrymandering has done / is doing. For example, the entire city of Nashville, TN, has been utterly and obviously gerrymandered out of existence, and the city has no representation in the House. (They used to be TN's 5th.)

This of course does not apply to Presidential elections. The President has multiple times indicated disdain for elections, his party has used "third term and beyond", his supporters have openly floated the idea of repealing the 22A, he's called himself "king" and "dictator".

The VRA is quite literally before SCOTUS right now.

> or, as a last resort, impeachment

"a servile congress" — they understand impeachment. If an attempted coup doesn't get impeachment, nothing will. Regardless, the GOP is going along with the president, so impeachment isn't something that's going to happen.

Re: US axes website for reporting human rights abuses by US-armed foreign forces

#350

Post by jjk166 »

wonderwonder wrote: post #60

Lots of people seem to think Trump is some sort of king or going outside the law. Fact is he was democratically elected and working within the system of checks and balances established by our founders. Congress can stop him from doing things but the democratically elected congress allows him to continue. So they agree with his actions and are doing their job. Checked and balanced. The courts can stop him and indeed h…

> Fact is he was democratically elected

Mussolini was democratically elected; the Nazis were democratically elected; Caesar was elected; Putin was elected. Currently 56 out of 91 autocracies are electoral autocracies. Being democratically elected is in no way a counterargument against someone being an autocrat, or working to become one.

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