queermunist she/her

He’s not entirely wrong. Democrats didn’t care about the Epstein files before Trump’s reelection and they don’t have anything else to talk about because most of the party hates the DSA’s ideas. They don’t care about the victims and they’d have been happy to bury this, they’re doing this because there’s no other choice. It’s their best political move.

Don’t get me wrong, Trump is obviously in the files and this is a great political move!

But, Democrats are fair-weather allies.

You will own nothing and be happy.

We wouldn’t really be using our electoral system if everyone was a Supreme Court Justice, it’d be a much more direct voting system without an electoral college and if no result got >50% the Court would be hung and there would be no decision.

Honestly better than our shitty elections.

Trump has never gotten more than 50% of the vote.

That’s basically true, but I think capitalism would overthrow direct democracy.

People would vote for higher wages and then there’d be a coup.

I don’t buy these anti-democracy talking points, the problem in the US has always been that we have too little democracy.

The People are often ahead of the Supreme Court historically - look at same sex marriage. Same sex marriage approval crossed the 50% threshold in 2011 but the Court didn’t reach that conclusion until 2015. Go back farther and look at segregation - the majority of the US approved of desegregating schools and busses at the time of the ruling. If this was a democracy we’d have had those rights possibly earlier because the Court is either in-line with or behind public opinion.

And I know for a fact that a democratic Supreme Court wouldn’t have ruled in Citizens United that bribery is legal.

True, but I see two solutions.

1. Pack the Court and then use the packed Court to dismantle the Republican Party so they can never win again.

2. Make every US adult a Supreme Court member and let them all vote on cases. Just turn it into a direct democracy.

The last election just showed that the shutdown isn’t hurting Democrats even slightly.

They’re not “caving” they’re collaborators that want to help the Republican Party.

“I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.”

If Democrats are ever able to win again they need to expand and pack the Court. However, that was already true before 2024 and they refused and if they had won in 2024 they would continue to refuse. Democrats do not take this threat seriously.

Kind of a chicken-and-egg problem. The only way Democrats would ever consider packing the Court is if the Court was hopelessly rigged against them (even more than it already was, I mean) but by the very fact that the Court is rigged they might not ever be allowed to win another election because a 6-3 Court would probably let Trump cancel elections.

Basically the whole system is fucked. Tear it down.

It’s already a 6-3 Court, it functionally doesn’t matter if Sotomayor dies at this point. Roberts being the most moderate right-wing voice on the Court functionally doesn’t matter either, because they can still do 5-4 extreme rulings without him.

The Court is fucked for decades unless it is expanded.

The 2024 election basically has no impact on the Supreme Court.

They can just do that anyway.

I think it’s more fundamental - they hate the poor and want them to starve. Any higher strategic value is secondary to the suffering. They just want hunger and death.

Not really, if you read the article it only defines political violence as violence that isn’t done by the state:

That figure underscores just how much the spate of attacks — from the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk earlier this year to the attempts on President Donald Trump’s life in 2024 — have rattled the nation.

In addition to Kirk’s killing and the attempts on Trump’s life, there was the gruesome attack targeting former Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi that left her husband, Paul Pelosi, with a fractured skull in 2022; the assassination plot against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh that same year; the plan to kidnap Michigan’s Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer in 2020; and the firebombing at Pennsylvania Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro’s residence earlier this year.

In June, former Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband were shot and killed in their home by a man impersonating a police officer in an attack that Gov. Tim Walz (D) called “politically motivated.” The man accused of killing Hortman and her husband was indicted on federal murder charges. His case is still pending.

Etc etc.

Political violence has been with us long before politicians started getting shot, but political motivations didn’t count before because it was the government doing it.

There’s already political violence, it’s just that we don’t count political violence when it’s done by cops, national guard, or border enforcement.

They already read an article written by ChatGPT that told them the opposite.

Kind of, but religious law wasn’t just about the afterlife. People believed their gods would punish them in this life if they didn’t follow religious law, and that their gods would reward them in this life if they were obedient and followed all the right rules. It helped that the punishment of the gods would be literally carried out by soldiers or executioners. Religious law was also government law.

The skycake was a later development. In the early days, the law of the gods was the law of the land.

Yes, and it was the invention of religion in the previous 4000 years that allowed humans really take off as a planetary species. That only reinforces my point - hundreds of thousands of years as hunter gatherers with very little change, then only a few thousand years later and we’ve basically conquered the world. Religion doesn’t have to be real to be a useful tool for organizing civilization.

It’s all made up, but it was a useful fiction when we were still in the nascent stages of historical development.

I’m not really sure what you want as a source. The only civilizations in human history that developed beyond the gens/clan/tribe had some kind of religious law, so there’s numerous field examples of this phenomenon. I supposed it could just be a coincidence that it happened over and over, and that there aren’t counterexamples? That actually seems like the more extraordinary claim.

This is all value neutral, by the way. I am not saying religion, or slavery, or feudalism, or capitalism are good. I’m only saying that they were stages of historical development that lead us to this point. If history could develop a different way, there’s no way to really test for it. Maybe we’ll find aliens some day that never went through a religious phase of historical development?

Religion was how we organized civilization beyond blood relations. Religious law was the first law.