Edit- look, we’re missing each other because I am arguing a larger cultural issue, you are arguing specific laws

That was the only thing I was actually asking about. I especially agree with your points about our government/politicians. It appears that the main disagreement we might have is if rape culture is the normalization/glorification of sexual assault specifically or a wider classification of power dynamics in any form.

I think anyone who commits the crime of rape is a rapist and rightly so, but am just leery about watering down the definition of rape.

I do not care how legal this might have been

I want to be clear that it wasn’t legal. Gaetz 100% committed statutory rape under current criminal law. It’s a strict accountability law, you don’t have to knowingly do it to commit the crime.

The only reason I posted at all was that after reading the article I didn’t think the persons comment you replied to was necessarily a great example of rape culture.

My point was that at one time separate but equal was considered enlightened by a majority of the population. I agree that short societal memory is a curse we have to work around.

The Constitution is not permanent and unchangeable, it is a living document that can and has been amended to suit new or changing needs. That’s why they are called Amendments in the first place. It is by design a lot more difficult to change than other laws, and this is a good thing, but the Founders knew they couldn’t get everything right for all time.

The 40 year old ID-ing the women he has sex with at a party is icky for sleeping with someone half his age (double so if he is specifically looking for 18 year olds), but that is not illegal. Should that be lumped under rape culture though? Should sex work in general be lumped under rape culture?

If she was not 18, regardless of if she had a fake ID, it is still statutory. There is no mens rea required for statutory. It is however harder in such a case to secure prosecution and conviction.

He may very well have known his friend brought an underage girl to sleep with him, or asked him to find probable underage girls advertising as 18 for plausible deniability. He also may have paid his friend to pay for prostitutes for the party. I won’t give Gaetz the benefit of the doubt on anything, but the article doesn’t indicate any of those things happened.

At least we got a conviction for the person with the least plausible deniability, because we rarely get that unfortunately.

While it doesn’t make Gaetz not a shitbag, unless the article is wrong he wasn’t the person who solicited her, set it up, or paid her. It’s also still statutory even if she lied about her age and had a false ID (and we don’t know if Gaetz was actually lied to and checked her ID), but I am not sure if this is a good example of rape culture.

100% unequal power dynamics being a rich politician sleeping with an 18 year old escort at a party, but in the case all parties are 18 or older is it sex work or rape?

Joel Greenberg, the one who actually met her and did the soliciting and paid her, was charged and convicted for child sex trafficking and ID fraud/identity theft for this. I am pleasantly surprised he was both charged and convicted given track records on both of those things. If 11 years is a sufficient sentence is another story.

The problem with being unable to change or supercede laws is the hubris to assume the laws passed are perfect for all time. We have all of human history to prove we are not the peak of civilization.

Getting bribery out of politics by removing lobbying and campaign finance is probably the best thing we can do. Having every politician run with the same amount of money and banning retired politicians from working as lobbiests or board members after office would do the most for eliminating corruption.

Even if you make laws unrepealable or changable, if the government won’t enforce it then it solves nothing. We have no higher entity to complain to and get enforcement or satisfaction. And if there is some higher entity empowered and capable, we then put all trust that whatever is enforcing law can never be corrupted or coerced or have its own adjenda.

That’s my point, there never was anything to fear for the rich. They don’t fear guns in the hands of the people because they know that they’re safe. They know a few AR-15s are not a threat to them.

Looking at the difference in how the police handled peaceful protests when the protesters were openly and obviously armed compared to when they weren’t, the boots on the ground doing the enforcement are the ones who care.

It’s not the rich who will be breaking into your house in the middle of the night to disappear you.

Plus, as we’ve seen recently, even when there’s a actual fascist taking power and trampling on people’s civil liberties, people aren’t actually going to use their guns.

Do not trust that the amount Americans will bend in the face of tyranny is infinite. They colonists attempted years of bargaining and peaceful solutions before the revolution. Only 20-30% of the population at the max think Trump is an actual fascist who will seize power and overthrow the democracy, and that group is both the least armed and most violence averse. It will take something completely overt and undeniable to get people to throw what comfort they have in life away to initiate armed rebellion.

This doesn’t mean the right move is to give up that option completely and hope that capitulation isn’t too bad.

Somewhat true, though the US loosing for 30 years to peasant armies in the Middle East proves military technology hasn’t changed as much as you might feel it has, but that wasn’t my point. Disarming and giving all power to the elite is still neither preferable nor a good idea.

Labor gave up their economic weapons (unions) because times were peaceful and prosperous and their overlords promised they’d be safe, and now they are debt slaves working gig jobs with shit or no benefits. The monopoly of economic violence belongs to the FAANGs and Walmarts.

Doing the same for guns and the government is rolling out the red carpet for the jackboots to break in because there is nothing to fear. Giving up freedom for safety means you will get neither still holds. A government that doesn’t righteously fear (as in healthy respect) it’s governed is not of and for the people, but over and above the people.

Human nature and society hasn’t changed since then. Hell, it hasn’t changed since wide spread written history. Go read ancient Greco-Roman graffiti. We are not fundamentally different than our ancestors, and it is the height of arrogance to pretend we are the enlightened peak so far above them.

The reasons for Marx’s statements and the reasons the founders wrote the 2nd amendment have not changed, and technology has not changed sufficiently to invalidate that.

My issue with that is putting permit requirements on constitutional rights is a bad idea. We are sliding closer and closer to needing permits for free speech world wide, and I can see this administration giving out 4th and 5th amendment permits if you submit to pre-screening by ICE and the police.

Gun safety and training should be free and part of our mandatory education system to ensure what you want, rather than gate kept by certifications and permits. The administrative bureaucracy will find a way to be discriminatory with any steps in a shall issue chain.

I would have initially put money on it being an Onion article, but no, it’s sadly real.

Now I voted (not that it would have mattered as Kamala was going to win my state regardless), but for the sake of argument I also didn’t see minorities NOT being brutalized and killed under Biden or Obama. Or Clinton for that matter.

You’re either actively against them, or you’re part of the problem.

I’ll take this whole section generously as a nebulous “you” and not you directly calling me either “one of them or a useful hateful racist”.

Two things can both be wrong, it’s not a zero sum game between open borders and fascist police states. Treating it as such caused the Democrats to lose some amount of support base, and did contribute to Trump getting reelected. The increase in Trump support from Hispanics and other immigrant groups was partially from resentment with treating illegal immigration as equivalent to legal immigration.

Yes, the poem on the Statue of Liberty is wonderful, and should still apply as the US is and should remain a nation of immigrants. That is not the same as having open borders for anyone and everyone, and it never has been.

So who and how many from those hostile countries to we have to kill to stop them from being hostile? Do we do it blitzkrieg style or Gaza style until all the hostiles are gone? Do you have the reeducation camps ready to ensure whatever resulted in the countries becoming hostile in the first place can’t happen again?

I don’t know about you, but this is starting to sound like a lot more work (and maybe a lot more death) than just dealing with borders.

“illegal immigrants” (whatever that’s supposed to mean)

Attempting to violate constitutional law through executive order is vile, and all law enforcement should be in uniform and identifiable (and held to higher standards than non-law enforcement) so I am completely against everything Trump is doing, but let’s not pretend illegal immigration isn’t a thing as a knee jerk in the other direction.

Illegal immigration is crossing the border without legally passing through customs to establish a legal right to be in that country, or overstaying your legal right to be there (Visa). People who are in a country illegally are rightfully subject to deportation back to wherever they are citizens. Pretending otherwise just helps more moderate people buy into the propaganda and let’s the ratchet work more easily.

We are all rightly complaining about Trump violating the law, so how is it also not a problem for people to violate immigration law? This is the problem I have that leaves me stuck in the middle.

Sanctuary cities that flaunt immigration law are, while not just as bad, still bad. When Trump (lies) and says he only wants to target people here illegally who commit crimes, and a sanctuary city prevents law enforcement cooperation with ICE, that just adds to the narrative of felon illegal immigrants and then you have ICE going after those people at home and grabbing everyone around them as by catch. This only helps the Trump.

Removed by mod

The vast and rapid modernization and industrialization of Russia at the start was a success, but my opinion is that Marxist-Leninism stopped in the USSR when Stalin seized the country and turned it into a crony dictatorship. I don’t believe that lasted long enough to be truly called a success, as it immediately fell to the authoritarianism it overthrew from the monarchy.

If you don’t think that Stalinism was the death of Marxist-Leninism in the USSR then the bread lines, famines, forced labor and relocation, imperial expansionism, etc. as broadly reported by those that lived there and lived through it are a product of socialism. I also believe that would count as failures of socialism and not proof of success.

I agree with you that the PRC is still nominally socialist, but believe they also went Stalinist instead of Marxist-Leninist. I would call them Stalinist Communist rather than socialist. I also do not think the juice was worth the squeeze with the number of dead in the revolution and aftermath, but there is no telling what an alternative would have looked like so that is just, like, my opinion man. I personally don’t consider China as a socialist success story, but instead another warning example for how easily Communism can be corrupted/captured from within.

I totally give you that Marxist-Leninism was the defining ideology of the 20th century, but I’d call it the fuse that lead to “Communism” the failed authoritarian ideology. Like the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand is to WWI. That is a hell of a lot more than Georgism ever got, to be sure, but would still say there has never been a successful Marxist country because they never remain Marxist for long.

I know I’m going to get downvoted for this, but since the USSR was a historical failure and Marxists claim China isn’t actually Communist but Capitalist, can’t we say the same for Marxism? An interesting historical curiosity, but it was never actually implemented and thus can’t be said to have ever taken off.

Both Georgists and Marxists get to complain about how things would be so much better if someone would actually just do it the right way for once. I say this as a left leaning Georgist Libertarian, to my heart in the right place Marxist cousins.

But the gun stuff is a constitutional issue, which is the complete opposite of states rights.

Abortion was pushed back to a states rights thing because there was no federal laws on the books and they scrapped the right to privacy interpretation it was previously under. The right wing is happy to argue against states rights for a national abortion ban, especially when they are losing at the state level.

That would require the federal election committee to violate the constitution by putting him on the ballot, then the same for every State government. This is an order of magnitude beyond the attempts to keep him off the ballots for Jan 6, as he was never convicted of or tried for it. The Supreme Court would need to destroy the constitution to rule favorably on it, and thus remove all their own power as the third branch of government.

The US is not yet as corrupt as the CCP or Russia, and Trump doesn’t have the political and personal capital of Xi or Putin to rewrite the constitution to allow more/unlimited presidential terms.

I do see the possibility, but if it is true then the only way to stop it is armed insurrection against a tyrant. Trump would have to dismantle the courts, blatantly violate the constitution, and fundamentally alter the government. The military would have to go along with it too. The problem is that you cannot make a preemptive strike or you give Trump a casus belli to do just that. Whomever acts first loses, and it should be the administration commiting unambitious treason first if you want to stop it. Until then, you need to keep working through the established legal system.

I still don’t think Trump has the personal or political charisma to line up every hole in the swiss cheese of constitutional, legal, moral, and cultural protections to pull it off, but I’ll be prepared to eat crow if he does succeed in overthrowing the government and becoming a dictator.