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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 2nd, 2023

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  • To give a serious answer: The short answer is probably, the long answer is no.

    The opinion was deliberately vague on that issue. A dissent said they could under Roberts’ opinion, but Roberts calls that “fear mongering” without elaborating whether that’s true or not.

    It’s also a pretty complicated opinion so bear with me. The whole thing comes down to this vague idea of official vs. unofficial acts which are supposed to be immune according to the court. Really, there’s multiple factual allegations and the court said each one has some level of immunity (and if you think these are full of contradictions, I know):

    • Asking the DOJ to pressure states to investigate obvious spurious “fraud” claims and pressure states to throw out their results, and threatening to fire them if they refuse - here Trump is “absolutely immune” because the DOJ is part of the executive branch and the president has power to fire them, I guess for any reason now.
    • Trying to get Mike Pence to refuse the vote count and throw the whole country into a chaotic power struggle - presumptively immune, because the president and vice president can talk about their duties. Can be rebutted if the government can prove a prosecution wouldn’t pose a danger of intrusion into executive branch functions, whatever the hell that means.
    • Trump personally telling state officials to change electoral votes - here Roberts says there’s no basis for Trump to claim immunity because there’s no presidential power to try and coerce state officials. However, he then says it’s up to the lower court to consider if it’s official or not before proceeding, and is entirely unclear on who has the burden of proof here.
    • Using twitter and a speech to organize and then start a riot at the capitol - similar to the above, the president has official duties relating to speaking but yada yada yada it’s sent back to the lower court to decide whether this is official or not.

    Conclusion: Ordering an assassination of a rival certainly sounds most like the first - the president has several official duties relating to giving military orders, and the military is part of the executive branch. The FBI is also part of the DOJ, so if Trump can order the DOJ to do something criminal, that itself could be an assassination. But as described in the article below, one could make an argument that no, the opinion doesn’t actually say he do that with the military specifically, because congress has some powers relating to war (not convincing). However, to be fair to that opinion, this immunity ruling is such a stinker that lower and future courts will limit its holding as much as humanly possible. Plus seemingly contradictory aspects to it (Trump can order the DOJ to do things he can’t do himself?) could be used to argue for exceptions to the overall immunity. But reading the opinion at face value, yes the president could order an assassination, and even fire generals who refuse to pass along those orders.

    Longer answer though: This is the real world. If Biden gave such an order, it would likely result in a coup and an overthowing of the Constitutional order as a whole. And if order were somehow restored and Biden brought up on criminal charges, you could be your life that the 6-3 Republican majority on the court would find a way to either limit or perhaps overturn their prior ruling as it pertains to Biden.

    For an alternative perspective on the same topic, here’s a center-to-slightly-right-leaning law professor’s take on this which does a pretty plausible job sane-washing the opinion.








  • I’ve been in multiple relationships by now but I pretty much never dated or only very sparsely through my 20s, depending on what you’d count. A few reasons:

    • When I was younger online dating was much worse than today and had even fewer women, and I feel like approaching women in real life was much harder for several reasons, especially for me given my social anxiety, nerdiness, and lack of opportunity to cross paths with women in my life.
    • Financial difficulties - I was living with my parents as an adult and was focused on fixing that situation, and was embarrassed/pessimistic about dating.
    • I don’t really fit in easily with the vast majority of people in terms of race, religion, activities, or attitudes about several things like money. It feels like race and religion have become less of an issue today, but I still struggle to find women I can relate to in terms of attitudes.
    • Overall questionable appearance - OK physique but with bad hair and clothes.

    Sidenote: One thing that annoys me is the attitude of measuring people, both men and women, by their level of relationship success. There’s very little that’s fair or rational about attraction, in fact it’s the best example area where rationality would be almost entirely futile. So don’t feel bad about it, just do what you want for yourself and ignore judgmental people.




  • I’m just making an appeal to evidence. We can’t go back and know what changed minds, obviously many factors are at play. But what we can say for certain is that, because the stall-in didn’t happen:

    1. The stall in was unnecessary for the civil rights act to pass.
    2. We don’t know what would’ve happened if the stall in did happen.

    I’m guessing most historians would say it wouldn’t have made a difference. But even if it were 99% likely to make no difference, if we had a time machine there’s utterly no reason we’d go back and risk that 1%. Point being, even in the best case scenario, the stall in logically cannot be evidence of such tactics being successful.

    Speaking of riots, I think a more clear example is the protests following the killing of George Floyd, which sometimes descended into riots, with every last bit of chaos being lapped up by Republican media and used as an argument against reform. Ultimately that tactic succeeded and very little actual police reform has passed following a shift in the mood. It got so bad that Congress, with many Democrats signing on, took the rare and extreme step of overruling a DC local criminal code reform in 2022 that was actually quite ordinary, but was very dishonestly portrayed in the media as radical decriminalization. As someone who followed that closely, I definitely think the perception of criminal justice reformers being a brainwashed radical mob, helped along by the riots, was a necessary part of killing that reform. That reform effort also was started in 2016, before the Floyd protests - so it seems that the actual effect of these protests was to set back criminal reform efforts rather than advance them.

    You also refer to suffragettes vandalizing museums, which is more similar to this action. It seems this was primarily a British thing, and as this article explains, art vandalism occurred in the sprint of 1914, while suffrage wasn’t granted 1918 for some women, and 1928 for all women. Notably, between 1914 and 1918 there was a world war. So it’s hard to imagine that in 1918 or in 1928, that the public was still thinking about the vandalism years before. And maybe that’s why it was able to pass.

    I think we should recognize that these tactics persist for reasons other than their effectiveness. Mainly they’re a great way to get attention, even donations. But that attention is pretty much always the wrong kind, and those donations might be coming from the people who aren’t truly interested in the cause (see how Russia has donated to more angry/violent protest groups on all sides). In essence they’re good for protest leaders, bad for the movements.





  • Yeah but what are they saying when they’re talking? Most people are saying “look at these crazy climate people, something is clearly wrong with them”. Maybe the protesters should do something that makes people say “maybe we should care more about climate change” instead.

    This is a common problem I see with modern protests. Protesters of a certain other cause I won’t name spray-painted my neighborhood. I try to be a logical person, and logically I’d like to think my perspective on the issue they were spraypainting about is unaffected. But I can’t help but notice that on an emotional level, I really do not want to be on the same side as the people who disrespected me and my neighbors by spraypainting our neighborhood. To the point where if someone says they find that cause important, I actually feel a slight uncontrollable pang of disdain for them.

    I don’t think most people try to be as aware of how their emotions affects their thinking as I do.