Comment by midasz
Comment by midasz 5 days ago
> which prevents the government from bringing a case
Genuinely, from outside, it seems like your government doesn't give a damn on what they are and aren't allowed to do.
Comment by midasz 5 days ago
> which prevents the government from bringing a case
Genuinely, from outside, it seems like your government doesn't give a damn on what they are and aren't allowed to do.
They are capable of putting you in prison until you unlock your phone, or simply executing you.
They are, but again, district courts have been pretty good, and I would be out of jail in <30 days, unless my case goes up on appeal.
And if I die in jail because I won’t unlock my phone: fuck ‘em, they’ll have to actually do it.
I don’t plan on being killed by the regime, but I don’t think I would’ve survived as a German in Nazi Germany, either. I’m not putting my survival above everything else in the world.
Yes and all of the credulous rubes still whinging about how they "can't imagine" how it's gotten this bad or how much worse it can get, or how "this is not who we are" at some point should no longer be taken as suckers in good faith, and at some point must rightly be viewed as either willfully complicit bad faith interlocuters, or useful idiots.
Learning about WWII in high school, I often wondered how the people allowed the Axis leaders gain power. Now I know. However, I feel we're worse for allowing it to happen because we were supposed to "never again".
Agreed. To see "Never Again" morphed into "Never Again for me, Now Again for thee" has been one of the most heartwrenching, sleep depriving things I've witnessed since some deaths in my family.
Watching it in real time, I still don't understand it. I could see how Trump won the first time around; Hillary Clinton was unpopular with most people outside of her party's leadership, but the second just seems insane. The kinds of things that would happen were obvious to me, and I am no expert.
Worse, I often wondered how some people collaborated. Now I know that many people would rather have a chunk of the population rounded up and killed than lose their job.
"Whoever can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities." and "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
etc, etc. So it goes
You have to remember that "the government" is not a monolith. Evidence goes before a judge who is (supposed to be) independent, and cases are tried in front of a jury of citizens. In the future that system may fall but for now it's working properly. Except for the Supreme Court... which is a giant wrench in the idea the system still works, but that doesn't mean a lower court judge won't jettison evidence obtained by gunpoint.
The courts may (still) be independent, but it feels like they are pointless because the government just wholesale ignores them anyway. If the executive branch doesn't enforce, or selectively enforces court judgements, you may as well shutter the courts.
I would say if you ever want to prosecute these people, then you're going to need a mountain of evidence. Having all these court decisions they flagrantly violate for 4 years is going to great evidence at their trials. It may not give us much solace now, but all of their defenses are going to rest on intent, and it's going to be helpful in proving their state of mind that they willfully defied federal court orders, lied to judges, etc. Because they control all the evidence of their own criminality within the Executive branch, we should expect a lot of it will be destroyed when they are gone. Establishing independent records now through court proceedings will preserve those records past the administration end date.
Evidence goes before a judge
What evidence went before a judge prior to the two latest executions in Minneapolis?
There's a pretty big difference between getting killed in an altercation with ICE, and executing someone just because they refuse to give up their password.
Not really. ICE breaks into your home — remember they don't need a warrant for this. Demands to see your phone. It's locked. Holds a gun to your head and demands you unlock it. You refuse. Pulls the trigger.
Does it really seem that far–fetched when compared to the other ICE murders?
They haven't for a long time, just that most of the time they were doing things we thought was for good (EPA, civil rights act, controlled substance act, etc) and we thereby entered a post-constitutional world to let that stuff slide by despite the 10th amendment limiting the federal powers to enumerated powers.
Eventually we got used to letting the feds slide on all the good things to the point everything was just operating on slick ice, and people like Trump just pushed it to the next logical step which is to also use the post-constitutional world to his own personal advantage and for gross tyranny against the populace.
If civil rights are unconstitutional, you don't have a country.
14th and 15th amendments were binding on government. The civil rights act was binding on private businesses, even those engaging in intrastate trade.
The civil rights act of 1875, which also tried to bind on private businesses, was found unconstitutional in doing so, despite coming after the 15th amendment. But by the 60s and 70s we were already in a post-constitutional society as FDRs threatening to pack the courts, the 'necessities' implemented during WWII, and the progressive era more or less ended up with SCOTUS deferring to everything as interstate commerce (most notable, in Wickard v Filburn). The 14th and 15th amendment did not change between the time the same things were found unconstitutional, then magically constitutional ~80+ years later.
The truth is, the civil rights act was seen as so important (that time around) that they bent the constitution to let it work. And now much of the most relied on pieces of legislation relied on a tortured interpretation of the constitution, making things incredibly difficult to fix, and setting the stage for people like Trump.
Yes, but I’m not going to unlock my phone with a passcode, and unlike biometric unlock they have no way to force me to unlock my phone.
The district courts will eventually back me up on this. Our country has fallen a long way, but the district courts have remained good, and my case is unlikely to be one that goes up to appellate courts, where things get much worse.
There’s an important distinction: the government doesn’t care about what it is allowed to do, but it is still limited by what it is not capable of doing. It’s important to understand that they still do have many constraints they operate under, and that we need to find and exploit those constraints as much as possible while we fight them