convolver.bsky.social
What good is seeing-eye chocolate? What good is a computerized nose? What good’s Sanskrit read to a pony? Not much, I guess, not much at all.
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It’s the one place where the aristocratic assumptions of the Founders are most on display, and the one place where you can, I think, fairly argue that widespread democracy acted to weaken the stability of the system they designed.
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I'm moderately pro-Cicero, but of course so much of our source material is either his or derived from him, so it's almost impossible to disentangle what's his own biases and puffery from more objective history! And, of course, it's hard to find /anyone/ in the late Republic not out for themselves…
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Yeah, you could sub Cicero in there, but Polybius had the more worked-out political theory, old Tully was just cribbing from his notes like all the other Romans.
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Presumption of regularity taking some serious body blows under this administration.
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He was a family man!
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How is Neagle a "starting point" unless you're beginning with the idea that Congress cannot statutorily constrain in any way the President's use of the military?
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Beyond that, when it comes to voter intimidation I feel like AD/NG military is pretty far down the list compared to, say, a bunch of III%ers or random DHS three letter agency guys lurking at the periphery.
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To the Dems’ credit, they took advantage of adding a new service to fix the USMC loophole a few years ago.
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USMC welcome pack:
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Not so much crossing the Rubicon as splashing around in the shallow end, but incompetent tyranny is still tyranny.
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Deploying active-duty forces against civilians in opposition to the host state government’s express wishes without even a fig leaf of invoked statutory authority is so many levels of outright illegal and abusive tyranny I’m having trouble processing the extent of it.
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Hill Country's what, three blocks away?
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Just gonna say that Imbler immunity rests on a presumption of regularity that can no longer be supported by the weight of the evidence. At a minimum, as soon as the Dems have both houses they need to open the throttle on allowing tort cases against Administration malefactors.
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This is what they’re doing with nothing else really going on; imagine what Trump II faced with an actual honest-to-god crisis (like, you know, the ones from his first term) will do!
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The legal scholars will fight out whether a Presidential "requisition" is binding on a governor, vs the governor having a co-equal role in the calling out of the militia absent a formal invocation of the Insurrection Act, but it feels like this is one of those areas no one really wanted to litigate.
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Ike and Little Rock complicates this a bit, but I feel like once you designate “making it tough to enforce civil laws” as insurrection, the parade of horribles writes itself, much of which is decidedly not congenial to anti-regulation conservative states that like to flout federal regulatory law.
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guess its official, welp
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Favorably comparing oneself to Belloc’s Blood is quite the choice (though Musk is more of Sin).
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Certainly no reason for Newsom to concede an interpretation injurious to California’s interests in advance, I’ll say that.
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I mean, I’m just some guy on the interwebs, but it certainly seems that, while it unquestionably applies to the President, it’s an open question as to whether the mandatory shall applies to the governor here.
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Other than the actual Miller-style white supremacists, the most evident example of country-of-origin animus comes from a robust minority of (primarily Texan) Latinos, who may be in part mirroring Mexican attitudes towards Central American migrants.
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complicated by the fact that a majority of Americans also support grandfathering in anyone who’s undocumented but been in-country for a long time, so duration is also often a proxy for “this is a good person, they should be allowed to stay if they want”).
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A majority, surprisingly! Basically, a lot of anti-undocumented immigrant sentiment is driven by a belief that it’s pretty straightforward and easy to get a green card — more like a DMV line than a Kafkaesque labyrinth — and so anyone who doesn’t go through that process is “cheating.” (This is /
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(And, to your other point, an anti-immigration hysteria that in the US was driven mostly by media hype and social media misinformation; when you poll Americans on what they think immigration policy is and should be, they’re significantly more pro-immigrant than actual US law and administration!)
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Yeah, I think that’s right — the social issues stuff really resonates with a kind of professionally-centrist media and political elite for whom the election confirmed their priors that minorities should be thrown under the policy bus, when the election was driven mostly by COVID/inflation hangover.
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America’s freedoms and liberties now rest on the shoulders of the E4 Mafia (motto: “Semper Fugiens Laboris”).
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The two kinds of Democratic governors are those who watched Harris lose in 2024 and think they really need to vocally oppose trans kids playing sports, and those who watched Trump win in 2024 and think they really need to vocally oppose right-wing state tyranny against their citizens.
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1868, perhaps.