lmmarsano

He didn’t wait. Massie’s interesting

• No AIPAC funding
• 2025
  • May: rejected Big Beautiful Bill act
  • June: introduced resolution to end unauthorized hostilities in Iran
  • July: only Republican cosponsor of Epstein Files Transparency Act
• 2026
  • March: condemned the “illegal, unconstitutional, and pre-emptive war” on the House floor
  • May: introduced a bill to more tightly regulate AIPAC and other lobbyists representing foreign interests
  • May: primaried out by the administration
  • June: only Republican cosponsor of the reintroduced resolution mentioned before passed by Congress and ignored by the president
  • July: introduced Epstein Files Transparency Act II
  • September: moved onto attempting to impeach Hegseth before elections, but House Speaker Johnson adjourned the House early to preempt a vote.

One of the few Republican legislators doing anything to check the President.

Lemmy’s a slur now, lemmings: it means something so monumentally stupid, it’s practically lemmy. Someone on lemmy said it, so it’s true! Now lemmy needs to change the name. Them’s the rules.

The lack of sense on here to go along with whatever anyone says is incredible: it’s peak lemmy. Someone states a dumb opinion, then all the lemmings agree without question like it’s the undisputed truth.

There’s a word to describe such profound lack of sense. When someone, their choices, or a state of affairs lacks sense or achieves significant stupidity, we call that stupid. That’s not a slur, that’s a judgement that plainly describes.

Found it: stupid^[1].

For the record, I’m not making a free speech absolutist argument.

That’s a really strange disclaimer over a fundamental right akin to

I’m not a self-determination absolutist

I’m not a due-process-of-law absolutist

I’m not a freedom-of-movement absolutist

I’m not a freedom-of-conscience absolutist

I’m not a warranted-search-and-seizure absolutist

Absolutism here isn’t mentioned to disclaim protection of illegal speech, because that’s already unprotected, and no one here would dispute that. In this context, absolutism disclaims protection of unpopular speech people here would denounce, so it disclaims freedom of speech entirely.

This denies the presumption of a fundamental right as protected, which is entirely backward. Fundamental rights are presumed protected, whereas attempts to restrict or challenge them need strict scrutiny. The less common disclaimer

I’m not a censorship absolutist

is an asymmetry revealing a copout.

As for regulation, it’s a private device people are free to denounce, customize, or reject for a competitor. People have the liberty to produce & choose censored junk. An open society doesn’t restrict such choices when it can leverage fundamental rights^[1] to denounce, criticize, and challenge.

So youre saying the actual cops would have responded to Jane does gang rape instead of the “cops, but like we work for Cornell first and ignore a gang rape victim telling us she was gang raped when we write up the summation doc for the DA” cops? Ithaca cops that would have arrested the rapists, and then told the school, who could have then done their own academic action regardless of the frat or not?

That is by no means certain. Cops employed by government rather than a private or unelected employer (the legality of which is completely bizarre in a liberal democracy) have a horrible record of abuse despite their theoretical accountability to the public. The DA wasn’t employed by the university, and they went only by Jane Doe’s signed statement to conclude her allegations contradicted elements necessary to charge for rape as defined in state law. The statement she said she was very confident about was produced in an interview led by a campus police investigator alongside a Title IX investigator, a victim advocate, and Jane Doe’s adviser. Government police would have produced a similar statement, except the interview would have lacked university employees, especially the Title IX investigator.

Title IX is an anti-discrimination law that protects students’ equal access to educational opportunities regardless of sex. As long as the institution’s programs & activities don’t sexually discriminate or deny equal access, and a claim doesn’t allege the contrary, such claims lack Title IX interests. School conduct code violations unrelated to Title IX lack legal obligations beyond terms of contract.

Private conduct (of mostly adults) outside the school environment that doesn’t affect it lacks Title IX interests, and it would make total sense for schools to focus more narrowly on legal obligations instead of assuming responsibility beyond that of independent individuals and organizations responsible for their own conduct.

Ironically, the school so far has imposed more adverse action on the accused than have our public institutions, which have imposed none. If the DA’s initial determination is correct, the state may end up imposing nothing for an accusation negated by alleged facts.

Though the results in practice may be worse, I still think public police are preferable to non-public, because they lack conflict of interest to an unelected employer, and they could be held accountable to the public with sufficient public will and reform.

“Greek life” organizations don’t need recognition of educational institutions, and institutions elsewhere in the world don’t recognize them.

Without recognition, they become unaffiliated associations (like the moonies) outside the purview of the educational institution. Alleged crimes and misconduct outside the educational institution are matters entirely for authorities unrelated to the institution.

While I would love that, the more moderate republicans who argued to impeach & convict Trump last time were ousted, so that leaves the Trumpiest core to work with. GOP shittiness & general hostility to the government working in any sense for the American people can’t be underestimated. Plus, convicting Trump results in Vance replacing him.

I think some highly guarded optimism is warranted. Blocking hideous legislation and Trump appointments isn’t too bad of a check if they’re unable to pull off anything better.

See? No serious alternative.

What part of what you wrote contradicts anything written about democracy? The destruction & abuses you list could be far worse in governments with unchecked power.

Democracy isn’t a magic salve that instantly cures everything it touches. Liberal democratic institutions permit reforms through a nonviolent, deliberative process to address everything you stated. To check abuses of power that could end democratic, open society, they also limit government capacity to unilaterally impose swift, sweeping changes. The institution trades sweeping state power that’s riskier to abuse for more limited, checked, deliberative state power likelier to sustain the democratic system. You don’t get democratic reforms without that slow, power-constrained work to protect the system.

All that money the obscenely wealthy dumped into the elections didn’t get the results they paid for. Lack of action according to your timetable isn’t legal immunity.

While your criticism gripes about the problems we can observe, no one is discounting them. We are criticizing your failures to consider all the problems we can’t observe (because the system of limited government avoided them) and the strength of nonviolent, popular reform.

Your criticism looks like just griping that doesn’t seriously weigh the tradeoffs, which is fine to commiserate, but not a rational basis to weigh alternative systems of government.

A democracy can change those rules & technicalities, it just takes time & popular will.

As argued by the same person who articulated the paradox of tolerance (widely distorted on social media), an overlooked strength of liberal democracy is the institutional framework (driven by competitive choices of the people open to rational debate) to institute reform without violence. To check abuses of power by the state, the people need to sustain such institutions that allow for open inquiry and grant all citizens extensive rights against their governments. They argued that strict limits on the power of the state limit bad or incompetent rulers from doing too much damage (eg, damage that outright ends a democratic, open society). Those limits on government with Democrats in legislative power are also why MAGA control of the legislature and executive hasn’t yet prevented elections and we don’t have to fight frequent revolutions to take back control.

Democracy can reform itself nonviolently, presidents can be prosecuted when they leave office, and you’re not suggesting a serious alternative, just grief lacking nuance.

Not how that works: without supermajorities in the legislature to override a veto or convict an impeachment, the president can still block all legislation.

Kind of wild how it’s always radio silence from the “Vote Blue No Matter Who” brigade in comment sections like this, where you have a centrist Dem using their platform to bash a progressive or leftist candidate just a couple days prior to elections

Starting from a counterfactual isn’t a strong argument. El-Sayed won the primary for a reason and gets massive support in similar comment sections from Democrats overwhelmingly agreeing that Stevens can go fuck herself.

How you divine who is & isn’t “the Vote Blue No Matter Who brigade” is the real mystery. Supporting commentary looks the same no matter who writes it, and it’s hardly needed when an upvote will do. Are you a mindreader? Do you consort with a higher power? Please show us your mystical, sagely ways.

It’s especially comical because Vote Blue No Matter Who unsurprisingly means doing that regardless of whom blue is. It doesn’t necessarily imply broadcasting commentary everywhere about it to your satisfaction.

It seems you’re agitating for some poorly articulated conflict in your deluded fantasy when the “Blue No Matter Who” crowd is embracing your candidate.

That just seems like more classic patriarchy.
Calling it psychopatriarchy makes it seem badass and gives it subversive appeal.
I could easily imagine right-wing social media running with it and squawking “pSyChOpAtRiArChY!!” with gusto like dumbass Beavises going “fire! fire! FIRE!”.
Not sure what that’ll do for public discourse.
Calling it before it happens.

Don’t you think it’s fucked, though, in terms of accountability & integrity of government authority? Some people might assume police authority belongs exclusively to the government and ultimately answers to the public through elected officials, yet here we have unelected private employers setting their conditions of employment and directing policy with no inherent duty to the public. That scheme seems at odds with basic premises of liberal democratic governance. Private employment of police officers isn’t necessary to assign public officers to beats at campuses with specialized policies.

Law enforcement is bad enough when accountable to the public. Despite the results, severing that accountability & governance is in principle unsound.