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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 6th, 2023

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  • Just make primaries mandatory. Banning consecutive terms is not going to accomplish anything worthwhile. The good things it does are more than matched by the bad, plus it’s a literal limit being placed on democratic choice.

    Americans are still searching for simple answers in the form of rules. 'If only we had this rule, then Trump wouldn’t have happened. '. Trump or someone like him was the inevitable result of festering sicknesses in American culture. There are no rules you can come up with that can protect you from that without addressing root causes.



  • The theoretical argument is that any justice system no matter how well thought out and well intentioned, will eventually result in edge cases where justice fails to be done. Especially when implemented on a large scale. There are already appeals, and those can fail too. Plenty of examples of people actually being railroaded.

    You can just accept that , or you turn to democracy to try alleviate the most egregious cases. Thats what the pardon is for - no process, no more appeals. Just the president, the people’s highest representative, and a pen.

    It sometimes works (as in, is probably a net benefit) when the person wielding this power fears the people and will pay (at least) a political price for misusing it. Pardoning someone he knows is a complete of the power. Enriching himself by essentially selling pardons throws the whole thing into the world of comedy. Any talk of the theoretical merits of it is laughable.

    You can argue that this was inevitable. Maybe you’re right. But that was the intent, and it’s failure is another symptom of the American democracy degenerating towards failure. Trump won’t pay a price for this. Even on conservative forums where they hangwring about “not getting why he’s doing this” (as they stare straight at the naked corruption), none of them will change their votes. Nobody is interested in holding him accountable.

    This democratic failure has widespread consequences. The open corruption of the pardons process is actually one of the smaller symptoms of it.











  • Probably, and I’ll denounce and blame them for this just the same. My moral compass is that copyright shouldn’t exist to begin with.

    Cool but that issue is not in play here. That is not even close to a mainstream position and none of the actual players in this are working towards that outcome. Taking one side of this on that basis is silly.