So many far left conspiracy theories in here, blatant false accusations, assertions and wild fallacies.
Does this news not make you frown? I wonder what level of censorship would it take for some people to stop and ask questions.
US axes website for reporting human rights abuses by US-armed foreign forces
441–450 of 453 posts
Re: US axes website for reporting human rights abuses by US-armed foreign forces
#442Earlier quoted context omitted.
So the televised raid? Is that normal operating procedure for the DOJ? Did that happen with Biden's classified docs?
> So the televised raid? Is that normal operating procedure for the DOJ? Did that happen with Biden's classified docs? It is normal for news trucks to show up once a news event has been learned of. And yes, the same thing happened with Biden: news broke, and footage was recorded: * https://abcnews.go.com/WNT/video/fbi-search-biden-vacation-h...
This is not a serious response. The raid was intentionally leaked in order to maximize news coverage.
Re: US axes website for reporting human rights abuses by US-armed foreign forces
#443Earlier quoted context omitted.
> So the televised raid? Is that normal operating procedure for the DOJ? Did that happen with Biden's classified docs? It is normal for news trucks to show up once a news event has been learned of. And yes, the same thing happened with Biden: news broke, and footage was recorded: * https://abcnews.go.com/WNT/video/fbi-search-biden-vacation-h...
This is not a serious response. The raid was intentionally leaked in order to maximize news coverage.
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Re: US axes website for reporting human rights abuses by US-armed foreign forces
#444Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I seem to remember that the civil rights act and voting rights acts got passed through congress and upheld by the supreme court during the 20th century.
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Re: US axes website for reporting human rights abuses by US-armed foreign forces
#445Earlier 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…
Turns out that separation of powers was incorrect. Each branch needs its own enforcement arm and our plan of having the Executive carry out the law instead of just enforcing the law was a bad idea.
No, because then you’re just centralizing power in the hands of a specific group of people—Ivy League law school graduates—that have distinctive cultural and class interests. Maybe you think that’s a good idea today. But in the mid-20th century these institutions were the bastion of WASPs, long after that group lost electoral control of the country due to immigration. (Watch the movie The Good Shepherd.) Your system would’ve given the FBI/CIA/DOJ powerful tools to destroy the presidencies of FDR and JFK. There’s a reason the conspiracy theory exists that the CIA assassinated the first catholic president.
The founders were right that nobody can be trusted to neutrally enforce “the law.” If you could trust Harvard graduates as a class to do that, there would be no reason for checks and balances or separation of powers.
Re: US axes website for reporting human rights abuses by US-armed foreign forces
#446Earlier quoted context omitted.
Turns out that separation of powers was incorrect. Each branch needs its own enforcement arm and our plan of having the Executive carry out the law instead of just enforcing the law was a bad idea.
No, because then you’re just centralizing power in the hands of a specific group of people—Ivy League law school graduates—that have distinctive cultural and class interests. Maybe you think that’s a good idea today. But in the mid-20th century these institutions were the bastion of WASPs, long after that group lost electoral control of the country due to immigration. (Watch the movie The Good Shepherd.) Your system…
> The founders were right that nobody can be trusted to neutrally enforce “the law.”
Well my point is two-fold. First, what you say here is my point, all branches need an _enforcement_ arm. Today Congress has the Sergeant at Arms and courts have bailiffs and may deputize members of the Executive Branch.
However that's clearly inadequate in the face of the Executive's current balance of power. A rebalancing is necessary imo.
Could that result in a Roman-esque problem of the three branches having "tug of wars" with each other's law enforcement arm, but I don't think so. We have this problem today with the dozens of law enforcement organizations within the Executive...which brings me to my second point!
My second point is that carrying out the law in the Executive was clearly the wrong choice. The Legislative branch should actually carry out the law, i.e. USPS should live under a committee in Congress, and mail fraud would continue to be prosecuted by the Executive.
I'll caveat that I'm had waiving a lot here, but I hope we can all agree at least on the problem statement; too much power has concentrated in the Executive and _drastic_ measures would be required to resolve that situation.
Re: US axes website for reporting human rights abuses by US-armed foreign forces
#447Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am saying that these are real conservative values. It is not true that these would be just something conservative party does while claiming to believe something else. Instead, if you read what conservative people write and say, in journals, books, talk shows, anywhere ... this is exactly what they believe in.
It may be my European context / political definitions, but at least around here the word "conservative" would include vigorously defending the rule of law and courts (along with property rights and so on). E.g., letting people who attacked police officers on Jan 6 out of prison is about as anti-conservative as you get. I was trying to point out that conservative as a political philosophy != whatever Fox news preaches…
> t least around here the word "conservative" would include vigorously defending the rule of law and courts (along with property rights and so on).
When exactly was that last time? Note that rule of law would include demands that police follows the law too. As far as I can tell, it was never rule of law in the sense of "everyone must follow the law". It was "people we dont like must follow the law and we will max punishments for them".
> letting people who attacked police officers on Jan 6 out of prison is about as anti-conservative as you get.
Only because this time, police was standing against what conservatives wanted. When it was helping them, yes, it was different.
Re: US axes website for reporting human rights abuses by US-armed foreign forces
#448Earlier quoted context omitted.
We already bastardized the senate by electing senators by popular vote. Senators are supposed to represent each states government, not the people of the state. As a single member of the union a state doesn't need more senators. Making ingredients the proportional to population just makes the senate another house. The people have the house. The cap of representatives has also been harmful to the voice of the people be…
Well, yes, the senate is useless. It was useful to check the South’s power in the Great Conpromise, but now the most deliberative body is not needed when the House can slow things down all by itself. Unicameral works for me. Representatives would be more representative if not for gerrymandering.
It doesn't for me. That is an acceptance that we are a single federal government and the states are nothing more than administrative units of that federal government. For states to remain as sovereign entities that have collectively created the federal government the entity of the state must have representation at the federal level.
As for returning back to the original state appointment of senators, that is required for the senate to appropriately represent the state government at the federal level.
The original house apportionment had representatives that had about 35000 people. The size of the house was locked at 435 in 1913. Before then the number of representatives grew slower than population but still grew. After the last 2020 census there are 761,000 people per representative. The unevenness of how many constituents a representative from Wyoming has vs a representative from California has is a point of contention in higher population states. The complaint is that the representatives from smaller states have more proportional power. I think that is a bit ridiculous but that is what some Californian's told me. Increasing the size of the house to have a more proportional representation would alleviate that point of contention between states.
Gerrymandering is a side effect of not increasing the size of the house.
Re: US axes website for reporting human rights abuses by US-armed foreign forces
#449Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I would think email is a lot easier than a webform. why
>> I would think email is a lot easier than a webform. > why Because email is a well-honed tool with lots of excellent implementations. You've got formatting, attachments, a text-entry region bigger than a peephole, etc. A "contact us" webform is a crappy tool, usually quickly thrown together, that probably just sends an email anyway.
You are comparing 'excellent implementations' with 'crappy tool'. Technically, both can be equally good.
I would not prefer email for multiple reasons:
- First, you always need an account to send one, and therefore have to decide which identity you want to attach to a communication. With a form, you sometimes can skip that decision. However, I suspect that in this case, this argument does not apply, because you probably have to attach an identity either way.
- However, email is one of the most unreliable protocols due to its poor solutions for handling spam. For example, if someone from outside my organisation tries to contact me, I can never be sure whether the email reaches me, due to various factors in spam detection. Sometimes an email is delivered to my mailbox, sometimes to the spam folder, and sometimes it just gets lost in transmission. I had even cases where I sent an email to two people in the same organization, and one would receive it and the other would not, even though they were using the same email server.
Re: US axes website for reporting human rights abuses by US-armed foreign forces
#450It sounds like this was mainly being used to report abuses by US allies, ie “US armed IDF forces” according to the article. Obviously there is something more to this than the headline and tone of the piece indicate. For one thing, the law written by Leahy was passed in 2011, but this website went online in 2022, so how can removing the site make it impossible to abide by the law? What was going on between 2011 and 20…
i was with you until:
> journalists like Glen Greenwald and outlets like Wikileaks who are reliably independent.
independent from whom?