So, genuine question … who’s willing to predict whether Biden will go to the election or not?

I’m a not a USian or plugged in that much, but this topic feels strangely fractured. Anyone with some certainties they’re willing to put online?

Edit: not a USian.

Quoting from Sotomayer’s dissent (pp 29-30, paragraphing my own):

This new official-acts immunity now “lies about like a loaded weapon” for any President that wishes to place his own interests, his own political survival, or his own financial gain, above the interests of the Nation. Kore- matsu v. United States, 323 U. S. 214, 246 (1944) (Jackson, J., dissenting).

The President of the United States is the most powerful person in the country, and possibly the world.

When he uses his official powers in any way, under the majority’s reasoning, he now will be insulated from criminal prosecution.

Orders the Navy’s Seal Team 6 to as- sassinate a political rival? Immune.

Organizes a military coup to hold onto power? Immune.

Takes a bribe in ex- change for a pardon?

Immune. Immune, immune, immune.

They go on with an incisive critique of the majority’s reasoning:

Let the President violate the law, let him exploit the trap- pings of his office for personal gain, let him use his official power for evil ends. Because if he knew that he may one day face liability for breaking the law, he might not be as bold and fearless as we would like him to be. That is the majority’s message today.

Well yea, which would be the point. The Other parts of the country’s government using their power to impose a limitation (congress and the states).

How well would a constitutional amendment fly? (I’m not a USian)

Could a states’ rights pitch be made for enshrining some legal limitation on presidential action?

The only Constitutional restriction on them is impeachment and removal,

… and constitutional amendment … a democratic process

But if your not willing to consider that an executive might at some time be right in saying “no”, then they are effectively all powerful. That’s the “optional” part.

Then would the country have any option to being subject to the Executive’s power to override the court? You sidestepped my most important question … what kind of governmental power is ever “optional”? And I suspect that’s because you haven’t thought through what happens when you override one branch’s power with another’s.

Moreover, in highlighting how easy it is to ignore the court, you’re strangely acknowledging my “least worrisome” point but then folding that into an argument that they should therefore be ignored by the executive … because “they can” or “they might be right”. Which only highlights the danger of this line of thought … if one reads between the lines, it’d be fair to conclude that you favour the more powerful parts of government flexing their muscles. The danger being that there’s no outline here of what happens next and whether there are then more or fewer “options” for the country. If the executive can just say “nah” … what law is there? What constrains the government from its natural vice of abusing power, compared to a court that can only say somethings are not permitted?

Otherwise, if a politicised court is a concern (which I generally agree with and probably like you feel should be taken more seriously to the point that formally I actually endorse your arguments, just not substantively) … I think there are various other things that can be done without throwing the baby out with the bath water. Unfortunately, I’d fear that the politicisation of the court, to the point that controlling it’s makeup seems like half of the point in a presidential election, and the constitution (or its “hot topics”) has gone too far for any side to be willing to “let go of the rope”.

It’s the least worrisome because it can be abolished (selectively)

I’d say it’s because they don’t command the police or military and are completely subject, without input, to the democratic levers of government including, not least, amending the constitution itself.

They sit completely under the constitution, and it itself is a democratic entity. If the amendment process doesn’t feel democratic enough, well then we get the elephant in the room about how much democracy do you want and whether that’s maybe your main problem.

If cooperation is not at least partially optional, then it’s not the weakest branch

What other branch is partially optional?

In the case of a court, they’re role is passive. They only act when prompted by a party who brings a case. Legislators and the Executive do what they want when they want. So surely they’re by the most optional. Honestly have no idea what you’re trying to say here … the point of governmental power and law is arguably not to be optional.

It’s interesting to see these kinds of ideas. Can’t help but feel it’s reactionary and superficially “anti-government” without looking at other deeper issues.

What is “law” without judicial enforcement? If you don’t have constitutional law, then a big pile of power balancing is thrown out, so you have to make sure you want that. That the Court is by far the least democratic institution is pretty obvious (but to be fair, in a two-party system, I’m not sure how much “democracy” there really is to start off with). But it’s also the least worrisome if you care about individual’s rights/freedoms, which is part of the reason why it’s special status makes sense: it relies entirely on cooperation from everyone else.

So, why abolish its power to enforce the constitution? Because it’s unreliably politicised? Then I think that might be the underlying issue.

It’s our generation’s cigarettes.

“I don’t know, everyone was just doing it” is what we’ll say and what prior generations have said about smoking everywhere all of the time.

The stimulation from and addiction to nicotine or social dopamine … it’s the same shit. The weird marketing, branding and business capture big tech has now could look just like the marketing and wealth of cigarettes in the past.

Kinda funny, not too long ago it was a fun mental exercise if you were paying attention to the tech industry to try to think of the ways in which Google or MS could fall.

Now, AFAICT, neither are falling any time soon, but there certainly seems to be a shift in how they’re perceived and how their brand sits in the market (where even so I’m still probably in a bubble on this).

But I’m not sure how predictable it would have been that both would look silly stumbling for AI dominance.

And, yea, I’m chalking recall up to the AI race as it seems like a grab for training data to me, and IIRC there were some clues around that this could be true.

I’ve seen some decent conversations over on Mastodon about how the democrats taking the black vote for granted is causing real damage. Not criticise or focus on you personally at all, but your response kinda backs up the point.

In a hard two party system, what else was going to happen?

Yep.

And it’s why I bring up the journal system in every one of these conversations. That happened right under academics’ noses and they all bought into it. They were manipulated and fell right into it without caring or even thinking about the wider implications let alone having the culture to act on any issues. Like the Boomer generation and the climate, previous generations of academics let the rest of us down and we’ve not got a tertiary education system in real trouble but also tied up in so many parts of the broader social institutions that it’s gonna be hard to undo. I’m no lover of tech-bro “disruptions”, but tertiary education and high level research is actually an area where the (western) world could to with a good dose of that.

I am also struck by what this movement says about the state of universities. It reveals a deep rift between students and administrations. The latter have grown hugely over the past decades and become massive bureaucracies, also generating their own corporate interests. The voices of students and faculty have been gradually marginalised in the process, making productive dialogue often difficult.

Yet we must also be vigilant about the academic culture: when we say that universities must be a “safe space”, this is not only true in terms of physical and emotional integrity (which are paramount) but also in terms of intellectual integrity: a university is a space in which one can be, and should be, safely challenged, rather than confirmed in their convictions.

I’ve been saying for a while that western civilisation, whether you’re a fan or not, has been dying in the universities and that this will leak out to the rest of the culture. The corporatisation, commodification and production-line-ification have been rampant from the educational to the research aspects of the institutions … all without dismantling the underlying feudal structures which are quite good at corrupting higher values in the name of succeeding at the KPI games of the commodification etc.

Unfortunately it’s a boiling frog situation and many academics idealise detatchment from the real world however problematic their institution is. That the for-profit journal system could be built entirely around academics’ labour simply by offering “prestige credits” is astonishing for an allegedly intelligent demographic but tells you all you need to know about how corrupted by libertarian values and behaviours a bunch of clever people trying to attain prestige by proving how clever they are … can get.

So I’ve been ranting lately (as have others) about how big tech is moving on from the open user-driven internet and aiming to build its own new thing as an AI interface to all the hoovered data (rather than conventional search engines) …

which makes this (and the underlying Bing going down) feel rather eerie.

How far away (in time or probability) is a complete collapse of the big search-engines … as in they just aren’t there any more?

Big issue IMO. Never touched it for that reason.

A personal knowledge system has to be designed to last the rest of your life.

I’m scared of cults and not ever being truly enlightened is a risk I’m willing to take. Maybe one day.

Seriously though, in terms of longevity, where I want the dependencies of my system to last for the rest of my life and to be easily installed on as many machines throughout the rest of my life, SQLite (and pure Python for the wrapper, using only the std lib) seem like good bets. Better bets than emacs and org-mode, perhaps not, but certainly without the baggage of being bound to a text editor.

EDIT: just clicked the link, lol.

LOL (I haven’t actually met someone like that, in part because I’m not a USian and generally not subject to that sort of type ATM … but I am morbidly curious TBH.

your own hacked together wrapper around sqlite as a plugin for your text editor of choice

Great take.

Older/less tech literate people will stay on the big, AI-dominated platforms getting their brains melted by increasingly compelling, individually-tailored AI propaganda

Ooof … great way of putting it … “brain melting AI propaganda” … I can almost see a sci-fi short film premised on this image … with the main scene being when a normal-ish person tries to have a conversation with a brain-melted person and we slowly see from their behaviour and language just how melted they’ve become.

Maybe we’ll see an increase in discord/matrix style chatroom type social media, since it’s easier to curate those and be relatively confident everyone in a particular server is human.

Yep. This is a pretty vital project in the social media space right now that, IMO, isn’t getting enough attention, in part I suspect because a lot of the current movements in alternative social media are driven by millennials and X-gen nostalgic for the internet of 2014 without wanting to make something new. And so the idea of an AI-protected space doesn’t really register in their minds. The problems they’re solving are platform dominance, moderation and lock-in.

Worthwhile, but in all serious about 10 years too late and after the damage has been done (surely our society would be different if social media didn’t go down the path it did from 2010 onward). Now what’s likely at stake is the enshitification or en-slop-ification (slop = unwanted AI generated garbage) of internet content and the obscuring of quality human-made content, especially those from niche interests. Algorithms started this, which alt-social are combating, which is great.

But good community building platforms with strong privacy or “enclosing” and AI/Bot protecting mechanisms are needed now. Unfortunately, all of these clones of big-social platforms (lemmy included) are not optimised for community building and fostering. In fact, I’m not sure I see community hosting as a quality in any social media platforms at the moment apart from discord, which says a lot I think. Lemmy’s private and local only communities (on the roadmap apparently) is a start, but still only a modification of the reddit model.

Yea but this feels quicker than anyone expected. It’s easy to forget, but alpha Go beating the best in the world was shocking at the time and no one saw it coming. We hadn’t sorted out what to do with big monopoly corps yet, we weren’t ready for a whole new technology.

Oh yea, it’s basically a vibe now for those who see it, which I was mostly channeling.