Ogles ought to be more concerned about the kids he ogles than whatever some famous dude does at a sports show. Humping the air is tamer than humping children, so get on your dear leader’s case about that instead.

They should be smarter and use Mastodon!

“Smart” depends on the purpose. If you want miniblogging without corporate control, sure.

If you wanna reach many people, Mastodon isn’t smarter than any of the large platforms with way more people. It sucks, but Twitter and TikTok and Instagram all have a wider audience.

Yeah I’m sure Palestinians are stoked to know that Americans are now dealing with a state-sponsored terror force, but it doesn’t help their situation either way

I also don’t think execution / capital punishment should be regarded with less distaste, but that’s probably a contentious opinion in many places

Gaslighting about transparency is a sour kind of irony

I won’t give him a pass on that, it’s the job he signed up for and got paid our tax dollars to do.

And you shouldn’t give him a pass either. Let’s hope his heart is in the right place and his courage will catch up.

Though it looks like the federal military frowvs upon states making significant investments along those lines…

Yeah, obviously the federal government and its organs would prefer to centralise power. That’s not a (good) reason to give up state power, particularly given the historical context, as is now becoming painfully obvious.

In a way, it’s a far more macabre version of the motivation behind the Fediverse: Central power is much easier to abuse.

I think the added difficulty here is the collision between state and federal power, but not just a more-or-less standard “let the courts fight out whether that law applies” situation but an actual violent one. Even the most non-bastard “trying to uphold the law” cop might not be able to tell whether the executive power of the federal government can legitimately sanction these actions.

Essentially, “the law” they’re supposed to enforce is not actually as clear as morality would have it, and the courts are taking their sweet time sorting it out.

Exactly. That such a decision requires public pressure is, for once, a system working as it should. The question is which pressure he’ll give in to: The feds’ demands or his people’s.

Well, discounting the fact that it probably did also serve as means self-defense in an era and place where any form or central peacekeeping force would have logistical difficulties coming to anyone’s rescue in a timely manner:

Way back when the colonies had newly and violently won their independence, the idea of just voting a corrupt government out of power would have been laughable to them: What if that government prevents that vote from taking place at all? Why would it respect what a bunch of unarmed civilians have to say? How would those civilians stand up to the might of a professional army under control of that government?

Because of those concerns, they greatly reduced the size of the army after the war was over, so no central government could wield such power again. Instead, citizen militias were formed that, if necessary for defense, would convene and fight together, but couldn’t individually take over the country. Thus, there needed to be a constitutional right for those militias to arm themselves. Essentially, it was a way to decentralise military power.

It should also be noted that “arms” back then will not have been the automatic guns we have today. A single gunman wouldn’t have done as much damage in the same time as modern-day shooters can. As so many other laws, it’s something made ages ago and never adapted to the changing times.

(But also, I’m not really sure how you’d hold such a plebiscite today either. Even if there was some law to formalise it, I imagine it would face the exact same issue: being suppressed by said corrupt government.)

He absolutely should do something effective, agreed. He’s made Holocaust comparisons, if I caught that right, and “blasted” the federal government, but right now it appears to be mostly rhetorical posturing (which is still important preparation for any non-rhetorical face-off, but isn’t yet enough to effectively stop them).

I understand that it’s a delicate situation to be placed in, because confrontation may prompt the deranged terrorists into targeting him, which would most likely escalate into civil conflict of some scale. If that happened, he’d want all ducks lined up and ready to make that conflict as quick and decisive as possible so the rest of their force doesn’t have a foothold and hopefully decides to write off the incident rather than continuing to escalate.

He’s in too critical a position to just do nothing out of fear, but he’s also a civil administrator with military training handling what’s liable to become a military affair with civilians in the crossfire. It’s a fucking powder keg and he doesn’t want to blow it up if he can avoid it, whether for his own sake or for that of his people.

Still, like I said, keep pressuring him. His people need to show “we’re willing to fight these terrorists, whether with or without you.” If he’s hesitant to inflict this on his people, it eases the weight of the decision. If he’s hesitant for his own sake, it risks making him the enemy. Better to pressure him into an organised response than to wait for an uncontrolled one.

Me saying “I understand why he’s holding back so far” doesn’t mean “He should keep doing that”. It’s an appeal to remember the human that’s being faced with a terrible choice, so that efforts to pressure him may do so in a conscious, focused manner.

But he must be pressured.

What’s with this apologism for feckless liberals?

It wasn’t intended to absolve him from the responsibility of having to do something, if that’s how it came across. In the context of people calling on him to mobilise the NG and use them to drive out ICE, I wanted to point out that it would be akin to starting open civil war, and that any responsible commander would and should grapple with that decision. It’s not about excusing so much as understanding.

sending state police to brutalize protestors at the site of the most recent public execution.

I didn’t know that at the time I made the comment. Like I said, I was mostly seeing people call for military action left and right.

I don’t give a fuck if he feels a heavy weight, it’s nothing compared to the families of the dead.

And if he orders the NG to deploy against ICE, there will be even more dead and more grieving families as a result of his orders. I think you’re a little too quick to dismiss the weight of that decision. Yes, people will die if he does nothing as well, which is why he has to do something. I’m not excusing his inaction.

In an escalating time of violence and rage, I’m trying to remind people of their humanity: Pressure him to do his job, by all means, but do so in full awareness what you’re asking of him.

State-sanctioned murder is also called execution. Both terms fit.

If I were in his shoes, I’d be really fucking reluctant to give any order that would result in a bloodbath. I mean, we can all guess by now that it will end up that way, but I don’t think we should be so quick to condemn a man that doesn’t lightly order violence.

Pressure him into taking action, because that pressure may ease the weight of responsibility, but understand that it’s a heavy weight to bear. Pretty sure he didn’t go into that job expecting to face a civil war.

IIRC countries make contributions to the UN too, but it’s more transparent about where the money goes and not quite as lopsided in terms of power balance.

(Yes, the veto powers blocking shit are annoying, but on the other hand, that’s what keeps the UN a forum for negotiation rather than an object of power struggles over who gets to control it.)

You make a convincing point

Couldn’t the newly raised tax revenue be used by the government to prop up the economy and mitigate the effects? I’m admittedly not particularly familiar with the effects you mention, nor how they came about.

A law that’s not enforced is a suggestion

For one, the framers weren’t entirely exemplary, but others have pointed that out, so I’ll try a moderating argument:

Even a genius at that time couldn’t have really comprehended or predicted the impact of technological development. I don’t just mean this in a “hindsight is 20/20” or “technology is developing faster” sense, but rather that the study of history itself wasn’t quite as developed as it is today.

Modern communication, investigation, restoration methods have massively increased the wealth of sources any given scholar has access to. Lacking that, it’s far easier to fill gaps in knowledge with assumptions from your own experience or what bits of knowledge you do have and assume that some things have been constant for a long time. Conversely, it’s hard to imagine those things might change. The best you can do is observe contemporary developments, attempt to guess where they might lead and try to take precaution against the most likely or most dangerous possibilities.

One such precaution is to create a system whereby the many can stop individuals from abusing their power, strip them of that power and do all of that with due process and careful deliberation. But then, the speed at which the powerful could do damage was also more limited.

As technology changes, so too should systems of government. What worked two centuries ago just isn’t viable any more. Many developments in the last century would probably have prompted different decisions by well-meaning, educated and intelligent people.

I don’t think the breakage of a system that failed to adapt is the fault of the people who first penned it. They included tools to change that system itself with what seemed like a reasonable hurdle at the time. They can hardly be blamed if those tools aren’t used (or at least not for good).

In conclusion: it’s possible that the framers had the best intentions, considerable intelligence and a high level of education for their time, and still couldn’t have done better.

That isn’t to say they must have had those purest intentions or been that smart. Hell, just the disconnect between advocating for liberty and holding slaves points to a significantly different understanding of liberty. I could write a whole paragraph here, but my core point is that the system of checks and balances breaking isn’t (just) the error of a few elite politicians, underestimating the potential for corruption, but rather of many generations of politicians eroding what protections those politicians might have put in place.

If you believed in the power of the people, their desire to be free, just came out of a bloody struggle to be free of one corrupt tyrant and unwittinglu projected your own level of education on them, would you realistically foresee that they’d vote this stain into office not once, but twice, and that all the other representatives would stand by idly while their own power is being undermined?

When the error bars are larger than your dataset