US election 2020 thread

[mauvais]

I only say this by the way because mauvais does actually know my real name, so could legitimately and quite understandably come and burn my house down if he wanted. Fair's fair.

I'm just checking the Covid rules now.

 

[tufty79]

I'm just checking the Covid rules now.

<honk> .

 

[tufty79]

strung out I used to be a health and safety and fire officer at work.

Do you need help formulating an emergency escape plan? Are your smoke alarms installed and tested? Do you have extinguishers and a safety goose?

 

[littlebabyjesus]

I expect in practice that normally happens... Depends very much on circumstances of what it is. The have a word off the record, verbal warning, written warning, adjudication ladder ...
In this Took Part In A Coup claim case I can imagine the pressure to go straight to the process bit. I can well imagine there's been four Trumpy years of moments to try and talk people round.

I've sat on complaints panels for a member organisation, and in practice of course you try to avoid reaching for the nuclear option straight away. Wherever possible, you attempt compromise or reconciliation first. But you have to have that nuclear option of expulsion available to you, otherwise the process is meaningless and you cannot effectively sanction anyone. And as soon as an organisation reaches a size that means not all members will personally know one another, these procedures need to be set out in writing and voted on, otherwise you are exercising arbitrary power.

 

[ska invita]

How fucking dumb/desperate do you have to be to load up images of your driving licence to a platform; ffs

Pretty sure this also happens on Twitter for Verified Accounts... Blue tick ones and others? Anyone can do it if you have x thousand followers iirc .

 

[hitmouse]

It's nice to see that some people are keeping a sense of proportion about all this:

 

[mauvais]

I'm assuming that this stuff about the security state identifying the fash makes sense to those that know about such matters?

View attachment 248308

EXIF data is digital metadata that the camera (or these days, a phone) embeds in the image. Most publishing services strip it out for privacy reasons, at least in the copy displayed to users.

It often contains location data, i.e. lat/lon, although if you're taking photos of a location, that's obviously irrelevant. It describes the phone it was taken on, but only generally the hardware and usually not serial numbers. Given a specific phone and a specific photo, it's often enough to say with some confidence that the latter was taken on the former. Circumstantial though.

I think the utility in identifying anyone is overstated but it varies (my proper camera embeds my name!) and maybe it's useful in some circumstances.

 

[ska invita]

Was watching the airport vids and wondering quite how they'd created the no-fly lists...

The one thing on that Reddit description of the Parler hack that sounded like speculation was that the FBI had got it's no fly information this same way as the hackers.
Maybe they did.
But the US surveillance state is a behemoth and who can truly know its workings and reach. I expect constant scary levels of surveillance exist

 

[mauvais]

I think the utility in identifying anyone is overstated but it varies (my proper camera embeds my name!) and maybe it's useful in some circumstances.

Duh - the mental blank I had here is thinking about tracing involvement in the Capitol attack based on photos taken in the Capitol attack, and not every other picture ever submitted.

Yeah, likely to have GPS coordinates for the photos you took at home.

 

[ddraig]

Everyone*. Anonymity and the associated lack of consequence has been a huge enabler of toxic behaviour ever since the internet became a public platform. We see major improvements to discourse (e.g. YouTube comments) when tied to a meaningful identity.

*caveat of usual real-world exceptions where anonymity is genuinely valuable

Jishop??

 

[Treacle Toes]

.

 

[Yuwipi Woman]

I was looking at life expectancy in the US and it is way lower than you would think compared to other rich countries.

It breaks down weirdly by neighborhood too. In my neighborhood life expectancy is 59. Its where all of the homeless shelters, drug treatment centers, and low-rent apartments are located. Just a few miles away in the more affluent neighborhood, life expectancy is 92. Thirty-three years difference in three miles.

 

[Yuwipi Woman]

Think a big factor may be that impeaching an ex-president could be open to legal challenge, so they need to get it done pronto.

I'm pretty sure the Supreme Court will stay out of that one. Generally, they leave Congress to set their own rules. There's a legal term for it that I'm not remembering at the moment.

 

[Serge Forward]

Cos it sounds posh.
Like "parlour".

I was thinking more along the lines of: "Walk into my Parler, said the spider to the fly"

 

[Sue]

It breaks down weirdly by neighborhood too. In my neighborhood life expectancy is 59. It where all of the homeless shelters, drug treatment centers, and low-rent apartments are located. Just a few miles away in the more affluent neighborhood, life expectancy is 92. Thirty-three years difference in three miles.

I did a project in the NHS once at ward level (not sure if that's more/less granular than your definition of neighbourhoods). The difference in life expectancy and a load of other indicators between wards was stark.

 

[Yuwipi Woman]

I did a project in the NHS once at ward level (not sure if that's more/less granular than your definition of neighbourhoods). The difference in life expectancy and a load of other indicators between wards was stark.

I'm sure its that way everywhere and worse in many places than this.

 

[Flavour]

Another cop has died, not sure if this had been shared yet

Police Officer Who Responded to Capitol Riot Dies Off Duty (Published 2021)

Officer Howard Liebengood had been with the Capitol Police since 2005 and assigned to protect the Senate. The cause of his death was not provided.

www.nytimes.com

 

[Yuwipi Woman]

Another cop has died, not sure if this had been shared yet

Police Officer Who Responded to Capitol Riot Dies Off Duty (Published 2021)

Officer Howard Liebengood had been with the Capitol Police since 2005 and assigned to protect the Senate. The cause of his death was not provided.

www.nytimes.com

Other news outlets have claimed it was by suicide.

 

[Puddy_Tat]

Do you have extinguishers and a safety goose?

we'll have no propagander on this thread, thank you...

 

[Crispy]

we'll have no propagander on this thread, thank you...

That's fake goose

 

[tufty79]

we'll have no propagander on this thread, thank you...

Wrong sex for this sexy goose

 

[Smangus]

Honk if you like this thread.

 

[tufty79]

Honk if you like this thread.

 

[ska invita]

For sure:
"the State itself will be absolutely over the moon right now. It’s neutralised Trump as an annoying political wildcard, was handed a perfect excuse to wipe up an assortment of troublesome far-right types while re-establishing “both sides” theory in the public mind, has unlocked a huge amount of surveillance data and gone a long way to re-rooting business as usual amid a situation that had been starting to look a bit dicey"

The Senate invasion was a gift to the State: don't wrap it up for them - Freedom News

In the wake of the invasion of the US Senate it’s been mildly disappointing, if not surprising, to see some lefties joining in to call it terrorism and/or sedition. It’s understandable that liberals might come up with this guff, after all they’ve always had their hypocritical streak when the...

freedomnews.org.uk

 

[littlebabyjesus]

For sure:
"the State itself will be absolutely over the moon right now. It’s neutralised Trump as an annoying political wildcard, was handed a perfect excuse to wipe up an assortment of troublesome far-right types while re-establishing “both sides” theory in the public mind, has unlocked a huge amount of surveillance data and gone a long way to re-rooting business as usual amid a situation that had been starting to look a bit dicey"

The Senate invasion was a gift to the State: don't wrap it up for them - Freedom News

In the wake of the invasion of the US Senate it’s been mildly disappointing, if not surprising, to see some lefties joining in to call it terrorism and/or sedition. It’s understandable that liberals might come up with this guff, after all they’ve always had their hypocritical streak when the...

freedomnews.org.uk

I agree with most of that, but not with this bit.

First, this was a nadir for our side and one that’s going to stick around, requiring a lot of public organisation to put down. We just watched an assortment of incoherent, rambling idiots doing whatever the hell they wanted with little to no public opposition — providing a very clear lesson about the idea of leaving it to agents of the State to sort these things out.

There are a few good reasons why they didn't meet with direct public opposition on the day, not least of which is that we're in the middle of a pandemic. And I don't see how this show of (a lack of) force by the idiots did anything other than weaken their side. IMO, the total absence on the scene of anyone who might be called 'antifa' just left the r/w idiots to own their embarrassing debacle totally for themselves. The presence of an opposing crowd may well have been very counterproductive in this specific instance, imo, and showing up how the agents of the State were really terrible at controlling such a relatively small and uncoordinated group isn't a bad thing either, is it?

 

[mhendo]

Think a big factor may be that impeaching an ex-president could be open to legal challenge, so they need to get it done pronto.

It would no doubt be challenged, probably by Trump himself, but there are a considerable number of constitutional scholars who argue that impeaching a former president would be well within the bounds of the Constitution. This includes conservative legal scholars like Michael Paulsen, who believes that Trump should be impeached and removed from office immediately, but who also argues that there's no constitutional reason they can't do it later.

There is a fair argument that the Constitution would permit impeachment, conviction and disqualification from future office even of a former president, in order to impose the punishment of disqualification. Impeachment is the exclusive method for removing a president from office but nothing in the constitutional text literally limits impeachment to present officeholders. Moreover, it would seem almost absurd to permit a miscreant officeholder to frustrate completely the possibility of receiving the constitutionally contemplated punishment of disqualification from future office by quickly submitting a pre-emptive resignation, hoping to launch a new bid for office in the future. The impeachment power thus arguably extends to former officeholders.

If the ONLY possible penalty resulting from impeachment and conviction were removal from office, it could probably be argued that impeaching and trying a former president would be both unconstitutional as well as sort of pointless. But one of the possible penalties upon conviction in an impeachment trial is the disqualification from ever holding elected office again, and that's the one that would be really significant in Trump's case.

I'm pretty sure the Supreme Court will stay out of that one. Generally, they leave Congress to set their own rules. There's a legal term for it that I'm not remembering at the moment.

The Constitution does allow each house of Congress to make its own rules, but the Supreme Court still often weighs in when the actions of Congress might be in conflict with the Constitution. Impeachment of the President is something that is explicitly discussed in the Constitution, so if Congress impeached a former President and he challenged the impeachment, I think that the Court would feel obliged to decide the matter.

One thing that would make life difficult for Trump, in such an eventuality, is that there is nothing in the text of the Constitution itself that restricts impeachment to Presidents who are currently serving, or that prohibits impeaching someone who has already left office. Given the number of textualists on the Supreme Court bench these days, I suspect that they might let impeachment stand, even if the guilty verdict comes after Trump leaves the White House.

 

[MrSki]

So the FBI & airlines are banning the internal terrorists from flying.

 

[BigMoaner]

So the airline unions are banning the internal terrorists from flying.

Excellent. Lovely stuff. 10/10.

 

[killer b]

So the airline unions are banning the internal terrorists from flying.

I've seen the flight bans being at the request of unions talked about on twitter, but no sources - have you got one?

 

[MrSki]

I've seen the flight bans being at the request of unions talked about on twitter, but no sources - have you got one?

Well it was discussed in congress.