We've gotten feedback that many of you don't like political polling stories. So here's a headline you may like: "Will Trump’s guilty verdict hurt him? Read this story (not the polls)."
I had a student who was chewed up by the justice system in NYC— he was in my calc III class at the CC — and he could have gone on to a 4 year school with a scholarship— but that was not to be it’s a very nasty and remorseless system and I have no sympathy for someone who has only seen the concierge in kid gloves version.
Our justice system screws up with the innocent.
Our justice system abuses the guilty far beyond that which they are ostensibly sentenced.
And so my patience is rather thin for those whom it has gone out of its way, far beyond any standards of decency or justice, who can only now cry foul.
1/ Okay, while the Trump verdict has been very riveting, I'd like to talk about failure states in democracies for a bit.
Any stable democracy needs peaceful transfers of power. If a ruling government loses in an election and thus loses power, they are free to moan about it - but in the end, they should leave office without violence because (unless they screwed up bigly) they realize that they will likely return to power one day. They are invested in the system, and do not want to overthrow the basic democratic order of their country - because it works for them.
Thus, a country needs multiple parties with an investment in democracy, who are willing to form a government - but who are also willing to leave peacefully. If this is not the case, then the democracy in question is in a failure state.
An good (or rather, very very bad) example of a "proportional representation" democracy in a failure state was the late Weimar Republic. Starting in 1932, the NSDAP (Nazis) and the KDP (Communists) received a majority of the vote and thus representatives. Both wanted to overthrow the Republic and its democracy in its own way, and thus it became impossible to form a democratic government - let alone switch between different ones. But the Weimar Republic had problems in this regard even earlier, since there were numerous miniscule parties with only a very small number of candidates. They only cared about a small number of issues, had no motivation to compromise, and thus were not willing to join a working government.
4/ We are seeing what this means in the #USA (I don't follow #UK politics as closely, but my impression is that it's not quite that bad yet). The #Republicans have fully committed to #fascism . The #Democrats are the only viable non-fascist voting option, and thus must not lose power if whatever democracy the USA has left is to survive. In a healthy democracy, voters could voice their dissatisfaction with the ruling party by voting for another party - but that's no longer possible in the USA, because if they do that in sufficiently large numbers, the USA will no longer have a democracy.
Thus, the only hopes the USA have of surviving this is for the Democrats to hold out until either (a) the Republicans reform themselves and purge their fascists (which seems exceedingly unlikely), or (b) collapse and are replaced by a party that is committed to democracy and the peaceful transform of power. Which also seems exceedingly unlikely.
The whole situation in the USA is horrible, and I feel for all Americans who suffer under it - although if the USA becomes a fully fascist nation, no person on Earth will ultimately be safe. But I feel that this whole mess is also a searing condemnation of the "First Past the Post" voting system, since it makes reaching such a failure state fairly easy.
The US state department falsified a report earlier this month to absolve Israel of responsibility for blocking humanitarian aid flows into Gaza, overruling the advice of its own experts, according to Stacey Gilbert, a former senior US official who resigned this week.
Gilbert had been one of the department’s subject matter experts who drafted the report mandated under national security memorandum 20 (NSM-20) and published on 10 May.
"The conviction comes at a critical moment in the campaign...
Trump’s entire persona is built around the facade that he is a powerful strongman, impervious to attacks and solely capable of defending his followers. Now he stands for election as a convict, a weak man too cowardly to take the stand who was bested by a local district attorney." https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/05/30/trump-trial-convicted-impact/
It is obviously wonderful that #Trump was finally found guilty... But the US has a far bigger problem than him. He's just a symptom of a wider issue.
The problem is that fully one half of their voting population lives in a fabricated alternate reality where any attempt to move back to normality is fed back in to reinforce its persecution narrative.
How do you resolve a situation like that, where every normalising step intensifies the problem? How do you recover?
Trump’s campaign donation page tonight after Donald J. Trump was found guilty of 34 felonies by a jury of random citizens chosen by both Trump and prosecution lawyers.
A group of ordinary citizens plucked from the masses sat in judgment over one who had been and could yet again become the most powerful person on the planet and it returned a conviction.
A momentous victory for the rule of law and the idea that all citizens are equal before the law.
@cstross is right. There are fairly stringent requirements about an overt act and whom the accused is giving aid and comfort to.
It's not trivial to convict for treason, precisely because of centuries of abuse of what treason was in Europe before the U.S.A. was founded. They didn't want to perpetuate that problem.
You can still see the reason why today, with all of the people in #USPolitics screaming "traitor" at one another at the drop of a hat.