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Harold Fjord posted:it's important to note that actually the police raided the newspaper at the behest of a local rich person, restauranteur Kari Newell. Which goes back to my question of diluteness. Paranoid idiot Streisands themself and exposes their corrupt good ol' boy relationship with some local cops. The cops told her that the newspaper had made the report to them, so she asks them to do a favor and seize the stuff, because its not enough they aren't reporting now NO ONE IS ALLOWED TO KNOW. There is no dilution, this is just deprivation of rights under color of law, corruptly trying to protect someone from the consequences of their actions. This is an attempt at authoritarianism. In a system where every layer runs on authoritarianism or at least several layers at least partially do, it can work. As you might note, this blew up in the faces of the people who tried it, because one of the things successful democracies do is develop a political and social immune system against this kind of abuse of authority. That's why its national news and not a sob story from a refugee who fled to Canada after being threatened by the states AG or some local militia commander for making a complaint about his bud the sheriff scratching the back of a local elite. Authoritarianism is not any particular set of actions, but a way of structuring power around centralized control of resources. Authoritarian power is extremely corrupt, the mechanism of power is designed to legalize robbing people. The US in fact does have tools that have been abused for this, and opposition to the use of those tools has been a frequent refrain, especially when they are used in rather corrupt manners. Look at the way, for example, you get positions in the US army vs the peacetime Russian army. The US army has a highly technocratic scoring system that promotes people based on time and positions at a certain rank. Assignment to roles requires you to receive specialized and formalized training and evaluation and for most desirable rolls is based on competitive selection and continued good performance. The Russian army, during relative peace, was based on bribery. You had to buy your promotion from your commander, and better postings required better bribes. This inevitably required stripping the peacetime army for scrap metal. The army was a system for stealing from soviet stockpiles and the military budget. And based on the official salaries compared to the sizes of houses and yachts it went all the way to the top. The US army almost certainly suffers from loss and theft to some degree, its bookkeeping is a notorious mess. But its not institutionalized graft, you have to hide it from your boss, not cut him into it.
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Aug 15, 2023 15:27
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The cops hosed the paper pretty hard and haven't seen consequences yet , or even given their poo poo back, that I know of so I don't think her streisanding herself is enough to claim lack of authoritarianism. Even if the newspaper successfully sues the cops, I don't think the taxpayers of the city ending up paying the cops bills while not being able to do anything about the existence of cops in their Town abusing people speaks to lack of authoritarianism either There's a lot of outrage but very little is ultimately done about corruption and abuse by the police. The use of the word centralized is telling because it's diluted among the central authority of the Rich and essentially the claim is that it's not authoritarianism because sometimes the rich disagree with one another. Eta: the co-owner of the paper died right after. She was elderly but she also watched the cops absolutely gut her business while she could do nothing. From the outside of that circle the power looks pretty central . Harold Fjord fucked around with this message at 15:43 on Aug 15, 2023 |
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Aug 15, 2023 15:29
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Zotix posted:The amount of excuses people are making here for not wanting to make simple changes to lifestyle to not be fat is astonishing. Deciding to take the stairs, or purposefully not park close to the store. Or go for a 30 minute walk daily. These things add up. Drinking water instead of soda. Tracking calories, understanding what is a proper portion size of good nutritious food. These aren't hard things. They really aren't. Sorry in advance threads prolly moved on but this thread is hard to keep up to date on. And I just gotta say You’re being an rear end if you think like this. I lost a shitton of weight as a teenager and have kept it off for years. Something like over 200lbs to bouncing around 125-145. I get very much annoyed at people who go « I simply cannot lose weight bc X » But like it’s so much more going on than Just Do It. It’s like telling me to Just Not Drink. Booze literally gave me terminal cancer. Know what that makes me want to do? Buy fifteen boxes of lovely box wine. Intellectually, yes, I know to not do that because it will lead to me screaming at my wife, kicking my cat, and waking up a week later covered in vomit wondering why everyone is mad at me. It’s a constant struggle. Just like food which is an addiction and extremely encouraged by every level of US capitalism. I get it tho, it’s much easier to feel real smug all « I am one of the good Americans, not one of the lazy idiot masses » Edgar Allen Ho fucked around with this message at 15:56 on Aug 15, 2023 |
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Aug 15, 2023 15:54
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Harold Fjord posted:Even if the newspaper successfully sues the cops, I don't think the taxpayers of the city ending up paying the cops bills while not being able to do anything about the existence of cops in their Town abusing people speaks to lack of authoritarianism either Wouldn't losing a lawsuit and having to pay the people who were harmed be "doing something"?
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Aug 15, 2023 16:00
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Cops don't pay. The taxpayers who ultimately lack influence do. If I have to pay your bills but I can't fire you I'm not the one in authority and I'm not doing anything about your bad behavior causing the bills
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Aug 15, 2023 16:03
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There's a long gear of consequences that needs to turn, because in addition to civil avtion this runs afoul of federal laws protecting journalists from this kind of search and seizure. Those consequences will fall on individual police officers and potentially the judge who signed the order. Like all federal actions, especially those against other government entities, these have a year or more of wind up and investigation but a lot of people involved are hosed.
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Aug 15, 2023 16:04
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Harold Fjord posted:The cops hosed the paper pretty hard and haven't seen consequences yet , or even given their poo poo back, that I know of so I don't think her streisanding herself is enough to claim lack of authoritarianism. I even said its a corrupt and authoritarian act, the cops might even walk, and I would say its a vestige of a vestige of structural authoritarianism: the inherent authoritarianism of slavery as an economic model. The collapse of slavery left the primordial white nationalism it had formed unanchored, and easily used as a power block. one of the ways to please that power block was to corruptly divert us state power against the descendants of slaves. This required cops to go against the law, and so corrupt judges and legislatures came up with some spurious legal theory to insulate cops from the consequences of crimes. This is still in the process of being disassembled and its an ongoing political project to root out the power structures that allow corrupt behavior of the police. But note that it transitioned from a system of hard power (authoritarian) to a system of soft power after a military defeat, and then suffered a series of legislative defeats as people became resentful of its behavior. Its becoming less authoritarian because it does not have control, and the more visible it is the more disgusted people are with these uses of power. Authoritarianism relies on being so pervasive and total the will is crushed. Dismantling this poo poo takes time and effort. Holding a position of disengagement doesn't actually help anyone. 'Sometimes the rich [publicly] disagree with each other' is actually central. In an authoritarian system, the public dissenters are purged or expelled and deprived of power. In a democracy they retain their influence even when out of power. Its possible to control greater resources and thus greater soft power without being in power or favor of power. Being out of political power and wealthy isn't a death-sentence, because protection of the law is protective of wealth from power. I don't like how much rich people control either, but most of them didn't get it through looting of the state or extreme corruption, they ran successful businesses. Oil drilling rights and state contracts go through entire bidding wars with legal fights even on upstanding bids. Fines are issued for actual offenses, not as a tool for punishment of rivals (again, mostly, corruption can form spontaneously). Your looking at people for whom the system works as advertised basically 100% of the time. If it worked like that for everybody things would be great. Compare that to every important oligarch in Russia being dragged into a room to visibly support Putin. Even if they disagreed it was being made clear that power flowed down, not up, and that public dissent was not tolerable on the topic. Barrel Cactaur fucked around with this message at 17:12 on Aug 15, 2023 |
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Aug 15, 2023 16:35
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Harold Fjord posted:it's important to note that actually the police raided the newspaper at the behest of a local rich person, restauranteur Kari Newell. Which goes back to my question of diluteness. According to the newspaper's owner and publisher, it may have actually been because they were investigating the chief of police, since they had tons of coworkers reaching out, off the record, saying he left his previous job because he was about to be demoted and punished for sexual misconduct. The paper warned the city to look into his HR record and they lied and said they had, so he was apparently tipped off.
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Aug 15, 2023 17:31
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Harold Fjord posted:Cops don't pay. The taxpayers who ultimately lack influence do. In the hypothetical case of a successful lawsuit the government pays. Government in the form of cops fucks up, they lose a lawsuit and the government is one form or another is forced to pay compensation. DeadlyMuffin fucked around with this message at 18:25 on Aug 15, 2023 |
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Aug 15, 2023 17:58
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Harold Fjord posted:it's important to note that actually the police raided the newspaper at the behest of a local rich person, restauranteur Kari Newell. Which goes back to my question of diluteness. Huh, I had heard a different reason for the raid. I heard it was because the newspaper received a lot of tips about the incoming Police Chief, so they investigated, found out he was a sexual abuser who got the catholic priest treatment (Read as: Covered up, 'retired', moved to a different police district). Turns out I was wrong, or maybe I'm jaded enough to 'read through the lines' and figure out the actual reason. This article elaborates on what I thought was the reason, and also shows just how shady the police chief is being. https://www.npr.org/2023/08/14/1193813087/kansas-newspaper-raid-police-chief-investigation
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Aug 15, 2023 18:03
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I wouldn't be surprisedvat all if the police chief had his own agenda while executing a request from someone else or used that request as cover
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Aug 15, 2023 18:48
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DeadlyMuffin posted:In the hypothetical case of a successful lawsuit the government pays. Government in the form of cops fucks up, they lose a lawsuit and the government is one form or another is forced to pay compensation. Taxpayers paying lawsuits does nothing to punish the cops. That's why nothing has changed despite all the lawsuits.
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Aug 15, 2023 18:49
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The United States figured out that you don't have to be authoritarian. Let the people vote, let them march and protest and file lawsuits and speak freely and then ignore them and do whatever you were going to do anyway. France has also figured this out, all you have to do is wait out the protests then go ahead with your plans.Mellow Seas posted:MPF, I am curious what you think, as relates to the shifting characteristics of "fascism": do you think that with the right kind of populace and conditions, a country could be legitimately fascist and legitimately democratic at the same time? It seems to me to be theoretically possible, but I (perhaps naively) assume enough good nature in humanity that any sufficiently large and representative group of people making a decision will not do actively malicious things. (People may roll their eyes but I think there is a ton of evidence for this.) I say any such arrangement would be unsustainable, not because there's any inherent goodness in humanity (lol), but because Fascism as an ideology is obsessed with eternal self-destruction in the guise of 'purging weakness'. Fascism is not a conservative or even reactionary ideology, although it draws its strength from those sentiments - Fascism seeks to create a new society and thus has to change things. Eventually, the Fascist government will get around to oppressing lefthanded people or banning dancing or some other action that gets the formerly supportive populace irritated that their actions are being restricted, and either the democratic framework will be removed or the government will collapse - it's just that that will happen too late for all the minorities in the camps.
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Aug 15, 2023 18:57
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I have to imagine that the DOJ is looking into charges in the newspaper raid, and if they bring them then those cops are probably hosed.
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Aug 15, 2023 18:58
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Byzantine posted:any inherent goodness in humanity (lol), I think “people are inherently crummy” is actually about the most anti-leftist argument you can make: at its core, leftism is about spreading power to the citizenry as widely as possible. If you say people are generally bad, then you are implicitly arguing for a “good” person to come in and tell all the jerks what’s what. Which is exactly what authoritarianism is.
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Aug 15, 2023 19:05
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Dull Fork posted:Huh, I had heard a different reason for the raid. I heard it was because the newspaper received a lot of tips about the incoming Police Chief, so they investigated, found out he was a sexual abuser who got the catholic priest treatment (Read as: Covered up, 'retired', moved to a different police district). Turns out I was wrong, or maybe I'm jaded enough to 'read through the lines' and figure out the actual reason. This article elaborates on what I thought was the reason, and also shows just how shady the police chief is being. Why would you assume the old article from last week is accurate and tells the whole story, and this current one with new information is wrong?  Why couldn't they both be true, and just describing different aspects of the case and events leading up to the warrant?
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Aug 15, 2023 19:13
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Mellow Seas posted:I think “people are inherently crummy” is actually about the most anti-leftist argument you can make: at its core, leftism is about spreading power to the citizenry as widely as possible. If you say people are generally bad, then you are implicitly arguing for a “good” person to come in and tell all the jerks what’s what. Which is exactly what authoritarianism is. Leftism is about spreading power as widely as possible because no single person can be trusted with it.
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Aug 15, 2023 19:26
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Byzantine posted:Leftism is about spreading power as widely as possible because no single person can be trusted with it. So, you might say Mellow Seas posted:any sufficiently large and representative group of people making a decision will not do actively malicious things.
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Aug 15, 2023 19:31
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Mellow Seas posted:So, you might say No, because a representative group of Kentuckians would still elect Mitch McConnell. Byzantine fucked around with this message at 19:46 on Aug 15, 2023 |
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Aug 15, 2023 19:43
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People are inherently selfish ergo you need a society built to function upon the assumption that every person is always pursuing selfish choices. The capitalists were right all along.
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Aug 15, 2023 20:25
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Byzantine posted:No, because a representative group of Kentuckians would still elect Mitch McConnell. (That said, if you said, sorry Kentucky, your Senator is Russ Feingold now, that would be unpopular within the state and they would consider it a malicious act of deprivation of rights. You’ve theoretically made the Senate better but you have applied a lot of authoritarian action.) I agree, koolkal, that people are generally selfish. That is an argument for leftism; that we all basically act as a check on each other’s worst impulses. We don’t want anybody to do wrong to us, and neither does nobody else, so we prohibit doing wrong. It’s really complicated, people are complicated. All virtues and vices are products of the human brain - nobody thinks a wolf is “selfish” for killing a fawn’s mother - so they are all traits we see within ourselves. Mellow Seas fucked around with this message at 20:52 on Aug 15, 2023 |
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Aug 15, 2023 20:43
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“Small-d democratic does not mean ‘good’” is the natural inverse of MPF’s “authoritarian doesn’t mean bad” point. I think anti-democratic viewpoints are very common in leftist circles, and I think people should be honest with themselves about that and reckon with it. Most westerners consider the principle essential to creating a just society - but many, many people through history have disagreed, and you’re still allowed to disagree even if you’re an American raised on the belief that it’s the one “true” answer. (I like democracy tho)
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Aug 15, 2023 20:56
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Mellow Seas posted:It irritates me that people across the political spectrum find this laughable. The sheer amount of goodwill and cooperation required to make a society as large and complex as ours function is overwhelming. This was one of the philosophical pillars of late monarchy, that people were inherently evil and needed a strong guiding hand and ridged social structure to prevent them doing sins. https://iep.utm.edu/hobmeth/#:~:text=Hobbes%20also%20considers%20humans%20to,all%E2%80%9D%20(L%20186).
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Aug 15, 2023 21:07
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I don't think people are inherently lovely, but I do believe that there's a tipping point between what is best for society at the cost of the individual, and what is best for the individual at the cost of society. At a certain point the soft centre-left will attempt to strike the worst balance, and it will drive people to individualism and conservatism. I have no solution to this problem, other than magically creating trust in government and, through such, allowing them to improve society somewhat.
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Aug 15, 2023 21:24
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Mellow Seas posted:“Small-d democratic does not mean ‘good’” is the natural inverse of MPF’s “authoritarian doesn’t mean bad” point. I think anti-democratic viewpoints are very common in leftist circles, and I think people should be honest with themselves about that and reckon with it. Most westerners consider the principle essential to creating a just society - but many, many people through history have disagreed, and you’re still allowed to disagree even if you’re an American raised on the belief that it’s the one “true” answer. The Constitution is anti-democratic by design, even the parts that everyone generally agrees are a good thing. I don't just mean the use of represenative democracy rather than direct democracy, or the electoral college or anything: the bill of rights is a big list of things that can't be changed by a vote of the majority. During the peak of the post-9/11 reaction, "Just ban Islam" wasn't on the table even if the government could and did harass Muslims and "It's not a religion, it's an ideology" was a common right-wing stance. When Loving vs. Virginia struck down laws against interracial marriage, only 20% of Americans thought it was acceptable: it was an unpopular consequence of the 14th Amendment. In both of those cases there's a "remedy" for the majority (amending the constitution) that involves a pretty large supermajority, and technically that has a democratic route. And creating those rights in the first place required the same route of putting them into the constitution. But all the same, putting something into the constitution is all about making it harder for future democratic processes to alter.
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Aug 15, 2023 21:28
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That’s a great point, if a government has things it isn’t allowed to do (under the rule of law), it can’t be totalitarian but it also can’t be a true democracy.
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Aug 15, 2023 21:34
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Mellow Seas posted:That’s a great point, if a government has things it isn’t allowed to do (under the rule of law), it can’t be totalitarian but it also can’t be a true democracy. So are human rights undemocratic now?
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Aug 15, 2023 21:39
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Nenonen posted:So are human rights undemocratic now? Yes, obviously, on a fundamental conceptual level? (edit: not as in "human rights are inherently opposed to all democracy" or whatever, if that's unclear, but that sort of a central component of what most people consider human rights is that you shouldn't be able to just democracy them away by getting enough people to agree with you) Man, the last pages have been hella confusing in terms of people not grasping that different things are different, good/bad things are scoped, and interests can compete. GlyphGryph fucked around with this message at 22:41 on Aug 15, 2023 |
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Aug 15, 2023 21:49
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Nenonen posted:So are human rights undemocratic now? This is waffles posting. Human rights aren’t democratic or undemocratic. They exist outside the categorization for those two words. You can have a human rights regime that is arrived at via democratic means, or one arrived at via a theocratic pronouncement. There’s no meaningful connection between how you get the thing and how the thing works, unless you believe a right to a say in how government works is a human right, which some folks would argue is an easy road to rolling back human rights. Is a human right one that can be decided exists or not via a vote? I’d argue it’s not a human right then, it’s just another privilege you get that is mislabeled. Human rights, in the ideal, exist outside the bounds of temporal human political structures. That’s not realistic, of course, because human rights get trampled all the time both judicially and extrajudicially. Democracy is obviously not a human right in any meaningful sense in the US because of the way we police how you are allowed to participate in it, or prevented from doing so.
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Aug 15, 2023 21:50
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Nenonen posted:So are human rights undemocratic now? In that they are not subject to a 50.1% referendum making it ok to violate them, yes. "Democratic" being "good" is reliant upon a given population having good motives. This is very often not the case.
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Aug 15, 2023 21:52
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Nenonen posted:So are human rights undemocratic now? If you believe that stifling the will of the majority is undemocratic, sure. If human rights were consistently accepted by a majority you wouldn't need the equivalent of constitutional protections for them since regular statutes passed by the majority would do so and would be non-controversial. If there's a constant risk of the current majority voting to take rights away from the minority, and you create protections to make that more difficult, it's an antidemocratic action. But important for preserving human rights. "Democracy" is not a person that can suffer, but a member of an oppressed minority is. This is only a real problem if you hold "more democratic= good/less democratic=bad" as a primary philosophy.
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Aug 15, 2023 21:55
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I disagree entirely with the notion that the decision making process behind acts carries such moral weight. Intent and outcomes are drastically more significant. Which is to say I don't hold that. The President (hypothetical) should be put on trial for war crimes whether or not they were authorized by Congress I give the difference 10% weight compared to everything else I can think of. Democratic processes are about as valuable as spelling your name right on the test, in most respects. Harold Fjord fucked around with this message at 22:39 on Aug 15, 2023 |
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Aug 15, 2023 22:09
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GlyphGryph posted:Yes, obviously, on a fundamental conceptual level? I think a lot of people have trouble keeping multiple independent axes of categorization in their head at once without blurring them, and with considering different levels of abstraction. This combines with off-the-cuff, heuristic based thinking in ways that make productive discussion difficult.
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Aug 15, 2023 22:12
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Blue Footed Booby posted:I think a lot of people have trouble keeping multiple independent axes of categorization in their head at once without blurring them, and with considering different levels of abstraction.  Humans: We're more alike than different!
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Aug 15, 2023 23:00
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Harold Fjord posted:Democratic processes are about as valuable as spelling your name right on the test, in most respects. That usually matters quite a bit, especially if it's recorded into a database to be cross-referenced.
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Aug 15, 2023 23:37
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Democracy, as a system, isn't just about getting 50.1% of the votes; it requires a degree of respect even for people you disagree with, something that is expressed everywhere from rights guarantees to the peaceful transfer of power when you lose elections. Otherwise it corrodes, which is pretty much what you are seeing with the institutions of democracy and of the rule of law being slowly hollowed out by the GOP.
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Aug 15, 2023 23:40
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Fuschia tude posted:Why would you assume the old article from last week is accurate and tells the whole story, and this current one with new information is wrong? The main reason appears to be the Police Chief thing. The pretext of the lady's DUI is just the most laughable of fig leaves excuse. The whole DUI thing only came out because she publicly claimed that's what they were doing. The timeline as I understand it is. -Restraunt lady loses licence, drives without a license, and drives drunk. -Restraunt lady starts a messy divorce -New Police Chief comes to town. -Paper starts getting reports that new Chief might be a sex criminal. Also gets weird tips about the restaurant lady's driving record. It's not really clear which actually happened first. -Paper notifies the cops about the weird tip about Restaurant Lady, believing it to be some sort of plot against them. Also notify local government about tips on the new Police Chief. -A Representative(I'm unclear if they're Kansas House Rep or US House Rep) holds a meet and greet for constituents at the restaurant. They invite the local paper. -Restaurant Lady flips out, throws out the press, and publicly claims their trying to expose her for DUI and driving without a licence. -Paper prints an article that is basically, "We actually weren't going to say anything, but yeah she did the thing she said she did." -Politician apologies to the press, since they invited them. -Restaurant Lady and the Police go to the world's dumbest Magistrate for a clearly illegal and also clearly baseless search warrant. Magistrate approves, and the rest is history.
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Aug 15, 2023 23:47
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TheDeadlyShoe posted:Democracy, as a system, isn't just about getting 50.1% of the votes; it requires a degree of respect even for people you disagree with, something that is expressed everywhere from rights guarantees to the peaceful transfer of power when you lose elections. Otherwise it corrodes, which is pretty much what you are seeing with the institutions of democracy and of the rule of law being slowly hollowed out by the GOP. The "institutions of democracy" you're referring to aren't democracy or democratic, they're liberal rights constructs and civic republican checks and balances.
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Aug 16, 2023 00:56
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Mellow Seas posted:That’s a great point, if a government has things it isn’t allowed to do (under the rule of law), it can’t be totalitarian but it also can’t be a true democracy. I wouldn't say that's true at all. Even a democracy needs basic ground rules. In fact, a strong democracy which needs to have systems for soliciting political participation from the entire population needs such ground rules far more than an authoritarian system does. The only rules a dictatorship needs to keep the basic system functional are "obey what the Great Leader says", "don't defy the Great Leader", and "don't give any military authority to anyone with the slightest hint of ambition or conscience". Democracy, being far more systematic than a single person ruling by fiat, naturally needs more rules about how to administer, uphold, and protect the system. We're getting pretty deep into political philosophy at this point, though. What's more democratic? A system where the people can vote to overturn "one person, one vote" as easily as if it were a zoning ordinance, or one which holds "one person, one vote" as a protected rule the people aren't allowed to democratically vote away?
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Aug 16, 2023 01:10
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TheDeadlyShoe posted:Democracy, as a system, isn't just about getting 50.1% of the votes; it requires a degree of respect even for people you disagree with, something that is expressed everywhere from rights guarantees to the peaceful transfer of power when you lose elections. Otherwise it corrodes, which is pretty much what you are seeing with the institutions of democracy and of the rule of law being slowly hollowed out by the GOP. So then, (talking to myself here, sort of) who cares about something that could never possibly exist, anyway? What you are talking about - roughly, "liberal democracy" - is a more applicable real world concept. It's reasonable to use "democracy" to refer to any system that holds that ideal of popular control as a true core principle, even as it moves further and further into representationalism. And the other thing, that doesn't exist, you could call, I don't know, "Bioshock Infinite." Main Paineframe posted:I wouldn't say that's true at all. Even a democracy needs basic ground rules. In fact, a strong democracy which needs to have systems for soliciting political participation from the entire population needs such ground rules far more than an authoritarian system does. The only rules a dictatorship needs to keep the basic system functional are "obey what the Great Leader says", "don't defy the Great Leader", and "don't give any military authority to anyone with the slightest hint of ambition or conscience". Democracy, being far more systematic than a single person ruling by fiat, naturally needs more rules about how to administer, uphold, and protect the system. Mellow Seas fucked around with this message at 02:54 on Aug 16, 2023 |
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Aug 16, 2023 02:49
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