Man. The writers for this timeline really are lazy pieces of shit. How can they just reuse the same stale plot line and continue to collect paychecks? This show has really gone downhill.

This is very clearly an example of bad AI, but maybe it was trying (and failing) to convey this?

Basically, 1/3 + 1/9 + 1/27 + 1/81 + … + 1/3^n = 1/2.

Probably not. But maybe.

When there were three TV stations, did any of them highlight police brutality? Overincarceration? The military industrial complex?

This is a very fair point. True, having very limited news options didn’t allow for a lot of deviation in agreement on observable reality, but to your point, it could also easily paper over a lot of very ugly parts of the actual reality. Chomsky writes quite a lot about this in his book “Manufacturing Consent”, which basically is a dive into how media organizations can be used as the propaganda arm of the government. Everything from choosing what you show to choosing how you talk about things goes towards bolstering an underlying narrative that you want to project.

I’m not sure what a solution would look like, if one is even possible. But solution or no, the narrative divergence in this country has primed us to detest each other, which is the first crucial step towards mass violence.

I really don’t understand why anybody is demanding anything of him, as if he was some normal candidate who is running for president. He’s not.

He is a traitor who is running to stay out of prison, and because he personally appointed a bunch of them to their stations, the agents of the US “Justice System” are allowing this. Demanding Trump provide medical records, as if he were just some normal, legitimate candidate, is in a sense normalizing him. He’s not a normal candidate. He’s a symptom of the rot at the core of our democracy. We should be treating him as such.

I’m less worried about that, not because there aren’t evil people among the Democrats, but because the Democrats are positioning themselves as the anti-fascist party at the moment. Starting up a fascist movement of their own at the moment would be bad business.

Long term, though? 100% agree. Can’t trust none of these fucks. Hopefully, the Interstate Popular Vote Compact kicks off before that happens, and we can do away with the EC. Won’t completely solve the problem, but it will help.

True, but have you looked at the “intelligentsia” of the Republican party? They’ve got nobody. Just grifters and sycophants. It’s one more small mercy. Obviously, this situation can’t be counted on to continue indefinitely, but once Trump is gone, the only thing ready to take his place is Trump-based nostalgia, and people looking to profit off same.

I think that the US is primed to have a civil war. Ever since Reagan fucked the fairness doctrine in 1987, we’ve been getting more and more divided. Gonna sound like an old fogey here, but it used to be that everybody tuned into the same news, and watched the same anchors deliver the same updates about the same world events. We had differing opinions on world events, but we all agreed on what was and what was not reality.

We don’t have that now. It’s like two completely separate universes occupy the same physical space. In one universe, climate change is fueled by anthropogenic forces and is causing more and more catastrophic damage, viruses are real and vaccines are effective tools to combat them, and thousands of traitors tried to overthrow the government because their cult leader lost an election. In the other? Climate change isn’t real, and also the Democrats have secret hurricane machines that they are using to punish Florida for being a red state, COVID isn’t real, and also it’s a super virus concocted in a lab in Wuhan at the request of Hillary Clinton, vaccines don’t work, and also vaccines are secretly a government tool to kill people, and Jan 6th was a peaceful protest of patriots, and also it was a violent insurrection by Antifa.

We don’t share the same reality with each other. In one reality, Democrats are basically similar to milquetoast conservatives from any other first world nation, and they care much more about maintaining the status quo than they do about making progress. In the other reality? Democrats are evil incarnate, and they’re waging an active campaign to round up all of the patriots and send them to concentration camps, and they’re also pedophiles and Marxists. In that reality, it’s far more preferable to vote for a dead pimp than it is to vote for a standard, run-of-the-mill Democrat.

And it’s not just the whole two-realities thing. Ever since Obama became president, the brains of a huge chunk of people in this country just broke. Some of the nicest-seeming people you’d ever met instantly turned into vile, hate-spewing racists, and started mass subscribing to every single conspiracy theory feed out there. That was 16 years ago. Their rhetoric has been getting more violent every year since. That’s to say nothing of the huge increase in terrorist incidents since then - according to the CSIS:

The number of domestic terrorist attacks and plots against government targets motivated by partisan political beliefs in the past five years is nearly triple the number of such incidents in the previous 25 years combined

So yeah. I think that this country is primed for organized, mass violence. At this point, all that it’s lacking is the organization. Thankfully, Donald Trump is an incredibly stupid man. I don’t think he’d be capable of organizing people to that level. He can stoke their hatred, for sure. He can inspire the craziest among them to firebomb a mosque or shoot up a Democrat’s office… but he ain’t built to lead people. If someone who had even 1/10th of his prowess as a cult leader, but who was actually intelligent and had a tactical mind came along… hoo boy.

Nothing really points to him being a wannabe assassin, other than the fact that he had guns near where Trump was and bogus paperwork. The guy’s a sovcit. Being armed to the teeth and having fake papers is what they do. As for why he’d be at a Trump rally, well… it’s the same reason you’d find klansmen dancing around a burning cross. Guarantee the Trumpers are going to throw this guy under the bus immediately, though, despite the fact that there’s nothing indicating he wanted to kill Trump, and despite a lot of Trumpers being open carriers themselves.

Well that’s not true. You’re very pro-genocide, as long as it’s against Palestinians. That’s pretty political.

I mean, every piece of copaganda is like: “look, see? We’re just your friendly, neighborhood guys! We like playing basketball with black kids! Isn’t that cool??”

I don’t know that they specifically had a campaign that said: “we’re not a gang”, but that’s kind of the subtext of all of the PR they do.

For a group that wants to distance itself from gangs, it sure doesn’t help their case when they jump in new recruits.

Presidents say shit all the time, though. Just saying that there is a major problem is newsworthy, but it’s all worth a hill of beans if it doesn’t lead to lasting changes. I believe that he was right in that an amendment will be the securest way to enumerate the boundaries of executive authority, as it will be much harder for the Supreme Court to fuck that up, but there is an extremely high bar to pass to get an amendment through. If he decides to go the legislation route instead, any new laws that are passed by Congress are potentially subject to being overturned by the courts.

As for the optics of Republicans opposing supreme court reform or curtailing of executive authority… meh. We all watched nearly every single Republican in the House vote to not impeach Donald Trump on two separate occasions, for incredibly stupid reasons, and most of those people won re-election. Relying on the public to make good decisions when faced with bald-faced congressional corruption is a losing proposition.

I mean, no argument from me. The fact that the Supreme Court basically just ruled that the President can operate independently from the law, like a fucking king, would have every single one of those guys spinning in their graves fast enough to power a city. It’s just the latest milestone in a decades-long quest by the Heritage Foundation to convert America’s government into a Christian theocracy.

I only disagree with the term “murder” when it’s applied to Obama’s authorization of the strike that killed Anwar Al Awlaqi.

Yeah, that’s fair enough. “Murder” is a charged term. I prefer it because it emphasizes that it is an unlawful killing of a person, and I take issue with the denial of due process. I think it’s doubly applicable when it concerns the US killing of his 16-year-old son.

I would feel way more comfortable if the term “public danger” could only be applied to specific individuals rather than broad descriptions(like the one you referenced from Trump).

Yup. Shit like this is exactly why I’m so cagey any time new precedents are set, because things that could be justified in certain hands can be tyranny in others. I feel like a deep familiarity with the law and US history naturally leads to a certain paranoia, and for good reason.

Sorry, I posted something else, but upon reviewing it, I felt that I had to make some major revisions, so I just opted to delete the post and make a new one instead.

“Due process” isn’t really defined in the constitution, but it is mentioned in both the 5th and 14th amendments. Here’s the text of the fifth:

No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a grand jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the militia, when in actual service in time of war or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.

Because it’s not explicitly defined, the Supreme Court has had to interpret what “due process” actually means. Here’s a breakdown of how it interprets procedural due process (process for civil and criminal cases):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Procedural_due_process

Of note is this bit:

At minimum, a person is due only notice, an opportunity to be heard, and a decision by a neutral decisionmaker.

This is a very low bar, especially when facing capital punishment. But in the case of Al-Alwaqi, even this low bar was denied to him.

I really like your metaphor about the bank robbers - it’s a very good comparison on the basis of similarity of imminent public danger. The thing is, though, police actually have certain rules about when they can use deadly force, and though they very, very often get away with it even in situations where no deadly force is warranted, they are still occasionally indicted for it. Like Derek Chauvin, for example. One of the guiding lines for when use of deadly force is allowed is when there is an imminent danger either to the officer or to the public. But even this is subjected to review. Granted, it’s not great review. But there’s still something. There is no process for reviewing governmental use of deadly force on US citizens with drone strikes. In fact, since most military operations of this type are classified, we actually have no idea how many US citizens have been killed in this way.

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The court’s job is explicitly to interpret the laws made by congress.

No, not quite. The supreme court’s job is to interpret the constitution, not laws made by congress. Any law made by congress can be subject to review by the courts if a case involving that law is brought before them. As an example, the Supreme Court ruled in Federal Election Commission v. Ted Cruz for Senate (2021) that a portion of section 304(a) of the Campaign Reform Act of 2002 was unconstitutional, specifically the part that established a $250,000 limit on the amount of post-election campaign contributions that can be used to repay a candidate for personal campaign loans made pre-election.

If Congress makes a law establishing certain limits on presidential authority, and that law gets challenged in court, future supreme court sessions will have to determine if it is constitutional. One of the many ways they do that is to look at past precedent from previous supreme courts. They’re not bound by past precedent, but they make use of it quite often.

I think you misunderstand me: I’m not questioning his involvement in al-Qaeda. But the fact remains that he was a US Citizen. Being a citizen typically entitles people to certain perks, like due process in a court of law. This was denied to him, which is why the ACLU took up the case. The state has the power to execute someone, but up until this precedent was set, it was only able to legally do so after they had been convicted in a court of law. Intelligence agencies do not fall under that umbrella.

The country he was seeking refuge in had even ordered him to be captured dead or alive.

This is entirely irrelevant to US law. If, say, I was in Bolivia, and the Bolivian government had an active dead or alive warrant on some US expat, it would still be a capital crime for me to kill that man on Bolivia’s behalf.

He was alleged to be the leader of Al-Qaeda in the Arabian peninsula. But, of course, he was a US citizen, and the drone strike happened in Yemen, a country we were not at war with. So it raised a significant number of ethical and procedural questions. Also, we killed his 16-year-old son (who was also a US citizen) with a drone strike several days later, also in Yemen.

but I don’t think your example is comparable.

Well, that’s the thing. Precedent is a tricky mistress. Sure, Obama had what he considered very good reasons for crossing that line, but it set a precedent that any subsequent president could follow. It’s like how George Washington set the precedent for presidential pardons by pardoning two men who were sentenced to be executed for protesting a tax on whiskey, and then a couple hundred years later, Trump was just straight up selling pardons to people for two million bucks a pop.

The point is, what seems reasonable when justified by a good president could easily be turned into something horrible by a bad president. The precedent set by Obama is probably not going to be as narrow as: “the US president is free to order the killing by drone strike of any US citizen who US intelligence agencies believe is a high ranking member in a terrorist organization (or a member of their family), as long as they are currently located in a middle eastern country”, just like the precedent set by Washington wasn’t: “The US president is free to pardon anybody who is accused of protesting a tax on whiskey”.