It definitely seems like the Dems are beginning to manufacture consent for replacing Biden on the ticket. I'm skeptical as to whether that'd be the right play here, but every option needs to be on the table to give them the best chance at preventing a second Trump term.
Justice Sotomayor did not hold back in her dissent:
"Looking beyond the fate of this particular prosecution, the long-term consequences of today’s decision are stark. The Court effectively creates a law-free zone around the President, upsetting the status quo that has existed since the Founding. 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. 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 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. Let the President violate the law, let him exploit the trappings 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. Even if these nightmare scenarios never play out, and I pray they never do, the damage has been done. The relationship between the President and the people he serves has shifted irrevocably. In every use of official power, the President is now a king above the law.
The majority’s single-minded fixation on the President’s need for boldness and dispatch ignores the countervailing need for accountability and restraint. The Framers were not so single-minded. In the Federalist Papers, after “endeavor[ing] to show” that the Executive designed by the Constitution “combines . . . all the requisites to energy,” Alexander Hamilton asked a separate, equally important question: “Does it also combine the requisites to safety, in a republican sense, a due dependence on the people, a due responsibility?” The Federalist No. 77, p. 507 (J. Harvard Li- brary ed. 2009). The answer then was yes, based in part upon the President’s vulnerability to “prosecution in the common course of law.” Ibid. The answer after today is no. Never in the history of our Republic has a President had reason to believe that he would be immune from criminal prosecution if he used the trappings of his office to violate the criminal law. Moving forward, however, all former Presidents will be cloaked in such immunity. If the occupant of that office misuses official power for personal gain, the criminal law that the rest of us must abide will not provide a backstop. With fear for our democracy, I dissent."
The killer here is that we don't really have any recourse. Like, the best case scenario is what, wait until some of the right wing justices pass away and hope that the Democrats have both the presidency and the Senate? And, even then, it would take a long time to undo the damage the Roberts Court has wrought. Maybe THIS will get the Dems to ditch the filibuster and pack the court. Of course, that would require the Democratic party as a whole to show some fight, something they refuse to do for some reason.
I definitely do have to walk a tightrope here, and I am erring towards assuming good faith. A lot of the comments so far have done a great job of pushing back on this, so most of the official actions I have made so far have been to try to prevent tempers from flaring.
But, yeah, I will say that I also am uncomfortable with the implied reverence given with capitalized pronouns. I've held my tongue because I don't want to get sucked into this, and other people have already made my point better than I would have. I don't want anyone to feel as though I'm disregarding their feelings or ignoring your concerns. Moderation of Beehaw often takes a wait and see approach and actions are often only made after the mod team thoroughly comes to a consensus. But, yeah, the thread's run its course and we're locking it now.
I have issued a warning. We'll see how things go.
Speaking of bans, if you are indeed DroneRights, then one of your other accounts has been banned on Beehaw. I'm not entirely sure of the ban evasion procedure here, so I won't act on this. Someone else might, though.
You've been rather hostile in your comments so far. Knock it off. This is a beehaw community and we expect you to be(e) nice here. Sounds like you'd be best off just disengaging and blocking Grail, tbh.
Please keep in mind that OP is the author of this piece. I have seen in other threads people who have viscerally disliked Their writing and Their opinions, and I ask everyone to treat Them with respect, and to respect Their pronouns, even if you disagree with the concept of capitalized pronouns. Be(e) nice.
I can't help but think this is them trying to institute mandatory indoctrination of the so-called 'woke youth". I'm not sure it'd actually work, though. When I was stuck in the military, I met a ton of people from many different backgrounds. If anything, I got even more left-wing in my time there. It seemed that to me, the lifers skewed Republican quite a bit, while junior personnel were all over the place politically.
Why they're floating this now, I have no idea. The draft is something that people tend to vote against, after all.
Wait, "sermon on the mound"? I'm not even Christian and I know it's the Sermon on the Mount.
Beehaw would be far more thriving if they let users make communities instead of restricting us to the current generic ones. I think that’s the single biggest factor preventing this place from booming.
Honestly, I think the generic communities work better for us for now. We don't really have the userbase for anything niche yet. Letting people create their own communities here would just lead to an awful lot of ghost towns. Doing it this way also lets us sidestep the reddit mod fiefdom problem, where anyone can create a sub and abuse the mod powers.
🫂
I think I disassociated heavily as well. I wanted nothing more than to be alone with my thoughts, because at least there I was treated as a woman. Daydreaming got me though a couple decades of the closet. It may not have been the healthiest way to cope, in retrospect. I ended up completely aimless in life, going where others pushed me because I had no real will to run my own life.
I had the bad luck of having the 2008 recession happen a couple years after I graduated high school. I hadn't gotten my feet underneath me yet, and college wasn't an option due to my mediocre grades(thanks a fucking lot, adhd), and the fact that my sister lost her full ride scholarship, so my parents had to pick up the bill. They had to straight up tell my brother and I that they wouldn't be able to afford helping us go to college. I was jobless and living at home when the recession hit, and I could not find a job for the life of me. I applied to a McDonald's and never even got an interview. I struggled for about a year before my dad abruptly told me "You're joining the navy." I didn't argue. I didn't fight it. I was terrified, because I knew I'd be a terrible fit for the military, but I accepted my fate.
However, because the military was so backlogged, I had to wait a year to report to boot camp after I enlisted. When you enlist in the military, you are made to report to a processing station. We were given a hotel room for the night and would be woken up a 4:30 AM. I have always been a nightowl, and I had almost never woken up that early. Still groggy, we took job aptitude exam(which I actually did very well on; I was appalled at the fact that there was so much stuff on there I learned in freaking elementary school). Most of the rest of the day was spent standing in line, doing various physical exams, and filling out mountains of paperwork. Finally, at the end of the day, my barely awake ass is dragged to a clerk that asked me what I was interested in doing. I told him that I'd like to be an interpreter. The clerk nods and tells me that requires another test, but before I can take it, I need to sign up for another job in the interim, in case I don't pass. He asked me if I liked computers, to which I murmured agreement. "How about Submarine Electronics and Computer Field?" I was completely fucking fried at this point, so I go, "yeah, sure, whatever". What this asshole didn't tell me is that once you volunteer for submarines, you can't get out of it. I had been bamboozled into an all male service, and there was nothing I could do.
Of course, I was livid. But I kept my mouth shut, and endured five years of military life on the submarine base. For five years, I was the only woman around. And submarines are hard, annoying work. Every fourth day I'd have to stay behind as everyone else left, and spend the night on the sub and stand watch. When I went on deployment, I spent 60 consecutive days underwater and was glad to see Bahrain, of all things. I think I may have gone crazy had I not had a year and a half spell on med hold. Somehow, I think that maybe people subconsciously knew something was up with me. Nobody questioned that I seemed to hate the boat more than anyone else, even the people who had more bullshit jobs. I never got the same kind of treatment as the guys, like they knew they needed to be a bit more gentler with me. I don't know. I do know that I was generally well-liked, despite the fact that I wasn't very good at this navy thing.
I did get into college once my enlistment ended, and I started to get more serious about finally transitioning once I got my feet underneath me. Then Trump happened, and all I could see were the chuds flirting with fascism. That scared me back into the closet. I would later drop out of college(thanks a fucking lot, adhd, again) and move back across the country to my parents' house. It took a year or so to get my independence back. I get settled down in Seattle, annnnnnd covid. Honestly, the pandemic did a good job of helping convince me to go ahead and transition.
It definitely seems like it. There's also been surprisingly high amounts of upvotes on questionable comments lately. I wouldn't be surprised if lemmy as a whole is getting astroturfed, but I can't say that for certain because I rarely venture out of Beehaw. Don't be afraid to make a report if you see something.