in reality the way to fascism, is that the democracy fails to protect itself against it.

Yeah, uninspiring centrists don’t like to do the whole protecting democracy thing because it might be controversial, so not really seeing your disagreement with this (admittedly simple and meme-ified) model

USA is very much a flawed democracy. Where all the checks and balances don’t work, when the executive branch is filled with corrupt traitors that don’t give a shit about decency or democracy.

Couldn’t agree more

AFAIK congress cannot overthrow a president for being unworthy or acting illegally.

It’s called impeachment under our system, but I think that’s a lot higher vote threshold than a general no confidence vote like what I think you’re suggesting would be

And yeah, our legislature being filled with the same kind of corrupt traitors that don’t give a shit about decency or democracy as our executive makes this essentially impossible

Americans probably thought they were safe, because they have about 200 years of tradition for democracy, so they thought it was so ingrained that it couldn’t fail, because the country is built on it, and the institutions would protect it.

I would also blame the uninspiring centrists who didn’t want to upset their potential voters by telling them the truth about the dire situation we were/are in. Everytime they brag about some bipartisan legislation like bipartisanship with fascists is a good thing the picture gets muddier for the average voter.

deleted by creator

People didn’t vote for Trump, they voted against Biden.

This chart might be a little bit out of date by this point, but the basic pattern it’s pointing out is still pretty obvious

I have heard from others this website can be really helpful for getting yourself going on this - https://5calls.org/

I don’t think that’s a fair characterization of this crime. She told her husband to “kick [the victim]'s ass” (after the victim taunted her for being raped by a relative of his, because this whole story is just awful), her husband then strangled him to death while she watched and drove the car the strangulation happened in (she claims to have been in shock at that time). She then later helped her husband dismember the victim to hide his remains. For what it’s worth this all only came to light later on when her husband stabbed her multiple times but then brought her to the hospital (presumably out of some kind of remorse for trying to murder his wife while he was on a meth bender) where she was put in a coma to recover and police interrogated him (when he was presumably feeling that remorse and decided to confess every shitty thing he’d ever done, including this murder police had no idea they were a part of).

She should have absolutely done some been convicted of some crime for creating foreseeable risk of murder by telling her husband to kick his ass and doing nothing to stop the murder (also, abusing the victim’s corpse and further traumatizing the victim’s family), but I would personally call this some kind of manslaughter or second degree murder and would probably find an extremely heavy probation an appropriate sentence (like, wear a monitor, check in with your PO once a week and do ten million hours of community service and drug rehab heavy). I think this is less of a callous murderer and more of a person who’s made fatally awful decisions.

Yeah, I hate putting my trans homies and the misguided third party voters I hope to someday turn into Democratic party voters on blast, but

it was obviously self-defeating

I can’t argue with that.

On a related note, I will never stop being infuriated by the screw ups of the Harris campaign and Democratic party that put us in this situation and lost those winnable votes. Layperson voters are going to be dumb and vote with their hearts because they’re laypeople, professionals who work for political campaigns should have known better than the campaign they ran.

Her conscience wouldn’t have been evil at all imo, she wanted to vote for his innocence but was persuaded that the next best thing was all she could do

She was playing 27-D chess instead of her fucking job. She [was] a moron who sent an innocent man to prison at the best [who clearly feels bad about it now and is doing everything she can to fix it, but that probably won’t have any effect now and doesn’t excuse her prior mistake of not exercising her power when she had it, and there is an important lesson there we should be applying in our own lives today]

imo

I would say she voted for what she believed to be a lesser evil instead of voting her conscience, But jury decisions are quite different from electoral decisions so I’m not sure how much utility the underlying analogy has

I tend to agree, but there is maybe a little nuance here (archived)

Although I believed Mr. Myers was innocent at the time of trial, I made a terrible mistake. The other doubting jurors and I wanted to spare Mr. Myers’s life. But we were afraid that if we were a hung jury and there was a mistrial, a subsequent jury might find Mr. Myers guilty and sentence him to death. As a compromise, we worked out a deal with the jurors who were determined to find Mr. Myers guilty. We agreed to join them and unanimously find him guilty, but then we voted to give him life without parole.

The jury voted for life without parole 9-3. I left the courthouse feeling like that compromise saved Mr. Myers’s life. I thought, at least he would still be alive to be a father to his young son, whose testimony at trial moved many of us to tears. We had been told the judge could override our sentence but that it was such a rare occurrence that we didn’t worry about it. That practice is now illegal, and it should be. Seeing it happen in Mr. Myers’s case was a betrayal of the care we jurors put into considering his fate. It was unjust.

Ultimately, if you ever find yourself in a position where you are concluding that voting to convict an innocent person of a crime is the best way forward you made a mistake in your reasoning somewhere and you need to go back to step one, but I can appreciate thinking that you have to do what you can to work around corrupt systems. Like, highly educated and professional defense attorneys tell clients who say they’re innocent to plead guilty for a lesser sentence all the time, it’s no wonder jurors get the same ideas.

At least now that trump is doing it again, other people will care again

It’s sorta like how you don’t need a flashlight once you’ve been set on fire

a Dem that agrees with trump as much as Biden, is always going to be a tough sale to Dem voters. So hopefully our next candidate tries to differentiate from trump rather than imitate.

This can’t be repeated often enough, this country can survive Donald Trump, but we won’t survive Donald Trump and an opposition party that tries to normalize elements of his agenda

The funds were in the city’s bank account, and the Trump administration went into that bank account and took the money back without telling the city.

Close, but the reality is even scarier imo - a random bank employee who was not part of the Trump administration went into that bank account and took the money back without telling the city because the Trump administration ordered them to, even though that order was probably illegal

I think Adams is still firmly on Trump’s side and Trump just doesn’t care about the specific outcome of this particular lawsuit as long as it stays in the headlines and he can use it as an excuse to complain about migrants

I mean, it’s a petition asking for a rule change, so that’s where my concern about surprise rule changes is coming from.

I do think you and other users should be able to petition the mods for rule changes, but I would prefer a system that didn’t allow petition posts from users at any point in time, but instead encouraged petitions to be DM’d to the mod team so they could post them on a standard day of the week at a standard time and leave them pinned for user feedback for a standard duration, because that way all petitions would get as equal of consideration as reasonably possible.

There ought to be rules governing these posts to keep users who don’t check the community on weekends or off hours from being blindsided by rule changes. Something like a designated day of the week for meta posts and a minimum time duration they need to be considered for.

Posting this because no one else seems to want to,

Maybe because it’s a bad idea that wouldn’t solve something that’s not even a problem but would make the community more difficult to use.

• Frequent posters don’t hold any more special influence than irregular posters, posts are sorted by their upvotes and downvotes not by who posts them.
• A community with stupid rules that removes your post for no reason because you went beyond some arbitrary limit will discourage new members from participating
• It is dumb to think about a news community in terms of quality and quantity. Not every news article should be some 10000 word Pulitzer prize winning deep dive, some of them are just going to be two paragraph breaking news updates. Also, there are some days where not a lot of news happens and some days where a ton happens, and this idea would just make the community struggle to be relevant and up to date on those big news days. If somebody posts a dumb news story, downvote it and leave a comment about why it’s dumb and post a better one.
• I don’t want you or anyone else determining the value of another post for me beyond your up/downvote and comment. If the post actually breaks a community rule that we’ve all been informed about and agree to by participating then a mod can remove it, but if you just don’t like what’s being discussed then just downvote and deal with it, and if you just don’t like the person who posted it then please fuck off with your incivility to another website.
• People who really do want to push misinformation will just make alts that will work around this system, so you’ll be making the community harder for people to use transparently while doing nothing to discourage bad actors

and it’s a discussion worth having outside of drama or personal conflicts.

If you wanted to avoid personal conflicts maybe don’t propose a rule judging posts based on who posted them and what else they’ve posted instead of the content of the post itself

How would this rule prevent alts? Seems like it would encourage their use if anything