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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 21st, 2023

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  • not some arm chair IANAL basement dweller

    BTW, I never called you this. I was making an arbitrary comparison to any number of us having a conversation about the ruling and saying “not some arm chair IANAL basement dweller” compared to “a sitting SCOTUS jurist who dissented” in terms of “we better pay attention”

    I think you were downvoted because your post implies you agree with the majority. You have clarified it by saying:

    [you agree with] conclusion that it was the wrong ruling.

    Probably should have started with that.

    I responded more directly since your ire seems to be pointed at me.


  • was this ruling incorrect

    Yes. The decision is fundamentally flawed and if the US survives this, it will be discussed in law reviews for decades to come.

    If so, how do you square that with the majority of justices ruling that way

    Are you presuming that a reactionary majority in SCOTUS ruling something squares with “correct”? Setting that aside for a second, I’ll answer it by saying their decision makes it legal for the president to commit crimes in an official capacity, and that decision is wholesale incorrect by virtually any standard other than “Conservative Party go Brrrrr”. Say that out loud a few times: “it’s legal for the President to commit crimes in an official capacity”. This is defacto opening to kingship / authoritarianism. If you go read the entire constitution (it’s pretty short) and you’ll recognize that these same 6 jurists cannot back this decision up with anything remotely resembling what the constitution says. It goes against all of the language holding our government officials accountable to the law. So yes… I square it quite easily by saying that all 6 of the majority decision jurists are wrong and just because it’s a majority doesn’t make them right.

    Or do you as a fellow armchair ianal basement dweller get special privileges when it comes to your legal opinions vs that if scotus judges?

    This argument doesn’t go as hard as you think. My whole point centered around the fact that you shouldn’t pay attention to me, but that you should pay attention to the dissent WITHIN THE SUPREME COURT itself. My opinion here truly doesn’t matter (which I suppose negates my first to responses above, but you asked…) but Sotomayor’s legal opinion surely matters. That was my point.

    All I’m saying is that if I’m POTUS and I’m considering a questionable “official act” i know who I’m going to to clear it first.

    The SC put it on the lower courts, which means any challenge to “what’s an official act” will just come back to the SC upon appeal. The conservative majority can choose to hear or not and if they do, hear any challenge, they can rule along party lines in favor. Sotomayor is saying, rightly, that other than a mild delay, this is effectively a rubber stamp for the President to commit any crime while in office. Further, my argument is that if Trump gains office again, he won’t bother clearing anything - he’ll go straight into persecuting anyone he deems disloyal. He’s already saying Kinzinger and Biden and Liz Cheney should meet a military tribunal (though there is absolutely zero jurisdiction). In any authoritarian country, this means at least life imprisonment if it doesn’t mean a firing squad. And he can do it and THEN see what the SC says. He’s not going to clear anything because he knows they are in his pocket, and he can use their own decision to eliminate them if they don’t play ball on ruling what is official or not. The SC may think they have power right now, but take this forward a year from “First day dictator Donny” and tell me the Supreme Court can do shit? They’ve created their own monster.



  • Did you read the fucking dissent? That’s a sitting SC Justice saying that quote, not some arm chair IANAL basement dweller:

    “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 assassinate a political rival? Immune. Organizes a military coup to hold onto power? Immune. Takes a bribe in exchange for a pardon? Immune. Immune, immune, immune,” Sotomayor wrote.

    If one of the dissenting justices thinks it likely, we better pay attention. The whole “They were very clear that non-official acts are not covered.” is a pillar built on sinking sand - what defines non-official becomes subjective real fast. Biden could assassinate every conservative justice on SCOTUS and get his own in there to make it all legal. Threats of the same to any in congress who won’t play ball.

    And if someone can’t imagine Biden doing it (I can’t), I’m thinking that there are quite a few citizens who believe Trump abso-fucking-lutely would pull that shit. With a majority on SCOTUS already he could just start going after political rivals and keep SCOTUS themselves in check with threats of the same. If SCOTUS has done anything they’ve painted themselves in a corner and only Congress can unfuck us with impeachment (as unlikely as that seems!)





  • F-that! Take pride… Mint is ridiculously good. Well managed, stable, “just works” and yet has all the capabilities you want, including auto-running near the edge for current kernels (backed down to stable) without doing jack. You can run at the bleeding edge if you want to manage it yourself.

    And for any haters - here’s my take: I’ve been working with Unix for 30+ years, I installed Slackware off of floppies when 16MB of RAM was god-like. I have built, compiled and managed nearly every distro at some point certainly the upstream giants. I’ve been there for the birth of all of them. I’ve also professionally worked on AIX, SunOS/Solaris, HPUX. Yes there’s a lot of fun in maintaining and running things to your satisfaction, but when you hit a certain inflection point of balancing your real life and maintaining distros across multiple machines and decide “This is the way” - Mint just fits the bill on so many levels.

    Mint is the bomb and I’m done pretending. Fight me (not you, OP, you’re cool)



  • If you’re going to repeat russian propaganda - it’s TWO fucking candidates blind to genocide and the one who is now the first ever US President convicted of a felony has repeatedly made comments that he wouldn’t even hold back on Gaza and likely would accelerate it to “finish the job”. Biden is no fucking hero here, but Trump is objectively worse on Israel-Palestine if you are a single issue voter. And Isreal-Palestine generally doesn’t break the top 5 for single issue voters in the US, so please… please… stop with this.





  • Vastly overestimate? You mean against their self-reported and self-serving emissions monitoring numbers? What a crock. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2oL4SFwkkw has a very well researched (and entertaining for this sort of topic) video. You show us all this “legitimate proof” of actual real-world emissions and we’ll see who funded it and when. Oh, and it better be current because we have satellite emissions tracking of the entire world which show JUST how full of shit industry numbers have been. Methane is 80x worse as a greeenhouse case than carbon dioxide. We’re leaking it globally at MASSIVE rates. We should be making it so expensive to have emissions that every petro company on the planet seals those leaks. At least when it’s burnt it’s mostly CO or CO2 and H20 emissions.

    Go ahead - let’s see who is defining the “real-world data” estimates, who funds that research, and maybe then I’ll consider believing the “softening” paragraph at the end that this is somehow just a thoughtless over-reach because the current administration couldn’t afford to wait. This isn;'t government overreach, this is a planet dying from greenhouse effects and in the midst of the anthropocene extinction (i.e. human activity killing species all over). If we don’t curtail the petro industry, then WE. ARE. FUCKED.