stevenpmillies.com
professor | author | political theorist | ersatz theologian | Chicago southsider | bylines National Catholic Reporter, The Hill, The Conversation (AP), Religion News Service, others | "great work on behalf of normality" | personal account
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...Wim Wenders and Tarsem and Spike Jonze elevated these 3 minute product promotions to real art. These were wonderful things, and I miss them.
So, okay. Thank you Talking Heads and Mike Mills.
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...and nearly thoughtless. Largest group.
The almost sui generis Replacements Bastards of Young video that invited us to be in on the joke, mocking that 1st group. OK Go's entire video oeuvre probably fits here too.
But then there's the 3rd group, because eventually filmmakers like...
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...are the problem.
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...and this is democracy too. This is what they look like when enough of us have shirked duties of citizenship, failed to take them seriously for too long.
There's no quick fix because the garbage coming out is the garbage that was inputted by the highest authority in the US, us.
We the People...
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...delegitimize an outcome or a lawful use of a lawful power given by the people to someone selected democratically.
This all is to say that this was all settled on Nov 5, all the way down to deploying the armed forces in LA and greenlighting Israel's attack. This is constitutional govt too,...
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...you don't approve? Great. You have that constitutional protection (if the govt we chose will protect it).
You want to say you didn't choose this govt? Well there's the Catch-22. Democracy means accepting outcomes the other guy voted for. It's a poor way to defend democracy when you...
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...selected the person who holds it.
The only real curb is the power of other officials selected by the people to impeach and remove, and that power is theirs to use or not again because it was given to them by the people and the people selected the ones who are not using it.
You want to say...
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...courts, and a POTUS. Those institutions have power because they express the people's will under procedures to which the people assented.
So the courts cannot snatch away the president's power to define an invasion or say one is happening because the people gave that power to the office and...
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...find a way for a court to overrule that. I am not sure they can.
The solution isn't at the 9th Circuit, it was on Nov. 5.
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It's a weakness of the system that it defers to officials selected by the people when they use powers the people gave to them. The stickiest question is whether there is an invasion underway, and constitutionally that judgment belongs to the POTUS only. So it's going to require some doing to...
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All times are
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I feel quite sure Sen Padilla is constitutionally immune from arrest here.
This is even more disturbing than it looks.
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WHAT is???
A "shall"? It's a strange idea that words restrain bad actors. I have nothing else to add here because there's no magic formulation, nobody coming to save us. It has always been every generation's duty to live what the words say and this one failed. That's all—all it ever was.
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You're putting more confidence in word choice than the facts warrant. In any event it always was understood to be absolutely a legislative power until quite recently.
There is no arrangement of words that will stop a bad actor who is determined, or a people who will let him. None.
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OK. So we fix the flaw by... not letting people govern themselves?
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No.
It is few words to say that freedom is an important responsibility because it means our fates are in our own hands, no magic generation of constitutional founders can save us from ourselves.
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Infallibly, they already are the best team in baseball (2 Cor. 5:7).
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You're still digging.
A system of checks and balances exists and is strong. Or, rather, it is as strong as the voters' will to elect someone who cares.
You cannot have any free system of govt that is better than the people. The people are the problem. Systems don't save us.
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You want idiot-proofed... freedom?
Think hard about that for a moment. Or, perhaps, read The Federalist.
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"Jean Valjean, folks. I like to say that name! Jean Valjean!! But he isn't very nice, isn't very nice. He stole some bread!! He stole it!!! How can you have a country when people are stealing bread. By the way, he probably should've stolen something more valuable, not too smart."
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We don't need more activists. We need more journalists.
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It was our job to use them correctly.
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They did anticipate parties.
They warned us about them, and how party government would reward a despot.
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Spending just a little time reading them would reveal how precarious they knew the system was because they entrusted it to the people.
We failed, not the system.
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It's the whole darned shootin' match.
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Agreeing its almost an entirely they-wont-come-to-us problem, still some characterizations of them are a kind of unwelcoming.
Open hearts, open arms.
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And.
*Anyone* unwilling to welcome the "Catholic traditionalists" who in good faith want to share the Church with the rest of us since May 8 also doesn't comprehend how fundamentally the situation has changed.
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John Ganz wrote this after October 7 and I keep coming back to it.
www.unpopularfront.news/p/the-trap
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