• 36 Posts
  • 634 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 11th, 2023

help-circle
  • If a Kbin member requests deletion of their personal account and they happen to be a community owner, would ownership of that community default to the moderator with the next-longest tenure? That’s how it worked at the bad place, is it the same way here?

    Not sure, but account deletion is a manual process here. I suspect what actually happens is that the magazine is tranferred to the default owner / first admin account. On kbin.social that would be ernest.

    See for example https://kbin.social/m/trans - a sub with few threads. I think the original owner successfully requested account deletion which is why that sub is owned by ernest now.

    See also https://kbin.social/m/kbinMeta/t/258090/How-does-Delete-Account-work-currently

    How long does account deletion normally take after the deletion is requested?

    Not sure of the historical average time. It’s a manual process though so it will take some time for the admins to get to it.

    Also, do the posts get nuked along with the account, or do they remain on Kbin?

    I saw an example of this some months ago. It seems like the posts do get nuked, though with recent updates I’m not 100% certain that this is still the case. Again see /m/trans - most likely it was one of those subs where most of the threads were started by the owner posting, so when the owner’s account was deleted, so to did those threads and posts.

    Actually it’s worse than this - as the entire thread is gone, including other commenters’ replies.



  • Well, if nothing else I’m glad that Clinton v. Jones means he’d not be immune to a civil lawsuit in that case.

    I’m pretty sure this would be wrong and couldn’t happen. Remember then-commander of the US Strategic Command Air Force General John Hyten saying that he’d refuse to follow an illegal presidential order to launch a nuclear attack? Or retired Air Force General Robert Kehler saying the same thing?

    Edit: references:

    https://truthout.org/articles/the-duty-to-disobey-a-nuclear-launch-order/

    https://apnews.com/article/14eb66de62fc49b181680ccbd7394646

    Almost certainly Seal 6 and the military chain of command above these folks would refuse to obey any such order.

    And if this guy were to do it himself - well the duties of the President don’t include using weapons, let alone assassination - so a good argument would be made that this was his own personal conduct rather than something stemming from the duties of the Presidential Office.

    Finally, the murder would almost certainly occur in a State - so even if federal folks have their hands tied, he could be tried and convicted by a State court in absentia. (Perhaps State Troopers wouldn’t be able to actually get their hands on him until after he left office, but unless he dies in Office this guy would eventually have to pay for that crime.)


  • It’s been a long time since we’ve had a major redrawning of parties in the US - remember the Whig party? Heck, Dems and Repubs were once a single party - the Democratic Republicans.

    I wonder if a loss would mean the effective end of the GOP, but perhaps a split in the Dems as more liberal (e.g. Basic Income supporters) break off from some more conservative Dems, leading to a new two party system…


  • One possibility I see is that the SC tries to retain some credibility by punting this back to the states. They rule something along the lines of, without explicit guidance from Congress then each state may come up with their own rules for determining how the insurrection clause applies, and these rules will hold until such time that Congress speaks up, even if they are inconsistent with or even outright contradict the rules from another state.

    Thus he technically loses, and is stricken from both democratic Colorado and Maine, but no one will be able to use the SC ruling to get him off the ballot in e.g. Texas or Alabama.

    The other way the SC could punt is simply to run out the clock, and when the GOP primaries have been decided simply declare the issue moot. (This wouldn’t work if the guy ends up winning the Presidency as then they’d have to resolve the question of his ineligibility at some point - but if he loses in the end they can just wait for him to lose and then say it’s moot, because deciding the answer wouldn’t have changed the outcome - he wouldn’t have become President again either way.) The cynic in me can see the SC preferring to punt this way as it leaves the door open to actually ruling in favor of using the insurrection clause this way - in some future election cycle against a Dem presidential candidate who doesn’t deserve it.


  • The new article links to an academic article which describes the full legal theory, https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3978095

    The short version, from the news article, is this:

    “It appears to the Court that for whatever reason the drafters of Section 3 did not intend to include a person who had only taken the Presidential Oath.”

    The academic article goes on in some detail hypothesizing why this might have been the case. Basically at the time it was written, every former President had been some other kind of Officer first, and even today Drumpf is the sole exception, so the omission of the P and VP might have been a sort of compromise to make it easier to get that amendment passed.

    The academic article does a good job of proposing that it’s not a simple oversight - remember that a former US President had joined the Confederacy at that time, so this sort of thing was exactly at the top of their minds.

    As much as I would personally disagree with this, I have to admit that the legal arguments made seem very sound to my layman’s understanding of things. Really unfortunate, though I do see a silver lining here - most other challenges have dealt with how hard it is to define an insurrection and if Drumpf really participated or not. At least the judge here did indeed agree with the fact that Drumpf was part of an insurrection.

    Perhaps States can pass laws that, in addition to requiring presidential candidates to release their tax returns to be eligible to stand in that State, also require that candidates a) never took part in an insurrection or b) apologized for it. As Drumpf would never apologize, he’d thus not be eligible to stand.