I have a friend who had a case before Cannon and told me that she was both one of the stupidest and the meanest judges she’s ever dealt with, which is saying something since she practices primarily in Florida. As a representative of the caliber of judges the Federalist Society has to offer, Cannon is pretty damning… and if we get four more years of Trump, the federal bench is going to be stacked with jurists even worse than her.

I’ve been going back and forth about this all day. On one hand, I think it’s obvious that Trump is a symptom of the right wing’s systemic slide into open authoritarianism, rather than its architect… but on the other hand, I don’t think his cult of personality would have long outlived him (especially if it turned out he was assassinated by a fellow right-winger over his ties to Epstein) and there’s not many figures on the right who would be able to reconstitute it quickly. On the other hand, I don’t think his cult members would go gentle into the night, and there would be ugly, violent reprisals. On the other hand, I fear there’s going to be violence no matter what, and it’s probably better for it to happen before the election than after for a host of reasons. But on the other hand, etc., etc…

A combination of resting on their laurels during AMD’s lost decade, and failure to retain competitive process technology during the extended gestation and ultimate failure of their non-EUV 10nm node. The arrogance of taking their foot off the gas and assuming nobody would ever catch back up to them backfired hard.

The reverse. OceanGate saw how planes were being built and said, “let’s do that for submersibles!” even though in airplanes, composites are subjected to <1 atmosphere of tension loading and <2g aerodynamic loading, whereas their submersible was going to be subjected to >400 atmospheres of compression loading, and a much more corrosive environment.

Composites in aircraft have a fairly long and uncontroversial history, and there’s nothing inherently wrong with them in that application. The biggest problem with composites is what happens with them at the end of their service life. Finding ways to recycle them without compromising safety is a good thing, and if it weren’t for Boeing having such a damaged reputation at the moment I think nobody would bat an eye.

The founders did anticipate direct democracy, the two-party system, and demagoguery. These were much discussed.

…and notably not a part of the constitution they eventually drafted, which was my point. Rather than try to build a democratic system with effective safeguards against demagoguery, they chose to have a system where only “the right sort of person” got a say in the running of government, and assumed that the separations and limitations of power they wrote in to the rest of the document would be sufficient protection against bad actors in that scenario. Now, we have (more or less) representative democracy, but with no additional guardrails to protect against someone like Trump, and SCOTUS is peeling away what we do have day by day.

The argument, such as it is, is that impeachment is the remedy for a Mad King Trump situation, rather than the courts. In fairness, this is not a completely unreasonable reading of the Constitution, but the framers’ intent is almost completely irrelevant to the reality of our current political system. As originally written, the federal government was basically designed to be a vaguely-representative oligarchy, with states free to appoint senators and presidential electors however their legislatures saw fit – the majority of states did not consistently hold a popular Presidential vote until the 1820s, for example. Impeachment by 2/3rds vote is not an unreasonable bar to set when it’s assumed that everybody in government is going the part of the class and social structure, and the President acting as a class traitor would put all of Congress into uproar. The founders did not anticipate more direct democracy, the two-party system, or the vulnerability to demagoguery that those things would introduce into the system.

So here we are now, with a nakedly partisan Supreme Court majority holding that the only way to interpret the law is to ignore the world as it is and instead imagine things are still as they were at the end of the 18th century (mostly because that philosophy plays into the hands of the right wing) and pretending that a 2/3rds vote in the Senate is still a reasonable bar, when in fact the present political reality is that you will never peel 12+ sycophantic Senators away from a dangerous demagogue’s camp for long enough for an impeachment process to succeed in removing him from power. Of course that’s by design, but textualism and originalism paved the road to this ruling.

At this point I’m not even ironically suggesting that Biden should call their bluff and start offing prominent right wingers. The Roberts court is clearly working in the assumption that Democrats won’t play dirty with the tools they’re laying out for their incipient god-king, and it’s looking increasingly like the only way to keep those tools out of their hands is to strike first.

I wonder if the lack of decisions in some of these cases may betray a three-way ideological split on the court that makes it impossible to write a true majority opinion?

Something like Kagan, Sotomayor, and Brown Jackson off in one corner saying “actually we shouldn’t burn it all down for no reason,” Alito, Thomas, Kavanaugh, and Coney Barret in the other chanting “NO CHEVRON DEFERENCE! NO WOMEN’S RIGHTS! BURN IT DOWN, BURN IT DOWN, GIL-E-AD, GIL-E-AD!” while Roberts and Gorsuch are sitting in the middle asking both sides “won’t one of you just sign on to this opinion that only burns it down a little bit? We’d like to go home to our nice comfy lives as wealthy white men who aren’t affected by any of this, please.”

Unfortunately I can’t bring reciepts on account of your screeds getting rightfully binned by the moderators, but there is a difference between:

“The Jewish people have a strong history of valuing education that’s put a lot of them into the middle and upper classes and have also historically been the victims of vicious oppression, and the Israeli state has never been shy about using either of those things as a cudgel to get away with their own human rights abuses”

and

“Israel is secretly in control of Intel and other vast swathes of the Western economy and are manipulating everything behind the scenes for their nefarious ends!”

The latter of which is what you were spewing in the Technology community a few weeks ago and earned the ban-hammer over there, and which makes up a not-inconsiderable part of the rest of your comment history. I find Israel’s history of oppression – which, to be clear, extends not just to Palestinians but to the non-Ashkenazi Jewish diaspora as well – and their current war crime spree in Gaza utterly abhorrent, but you’ve let yourself run all the way to “actually the Protocols of the Elders of Zion were kinda true” in opposition, and that’s some racist shit which you’ve been rightly banned over from multiple communities. You can oppose the Israeli state without engaging in rank antisemitism.

Absolutely nothing? Were you spinning “Israeli interests secretly control the entire world” conspiracy theories over here too, or was that just in c/technology?