Victim of Communism

  • 30 Posts
  • 138 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
Cake day: June 14th, 2023
  • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.worldtopolitics @lemmy.world•The US founders made a grave error in granting presidents pardon powerEnglish
    1·
    10 minutes ago

    Back then, politicians were assumed to be honorable Gentlemen.

    https://www.americanheritage.com/verdicts-history-iv-scandalous-malicious-and-seditious-libel

    In 1803 the infant American Republic was running a high political fever. The ferocity of the verbal warfare raging between the Federalists, the party created by Alexander Hamilton, and the Democratic-Republicans, led by President Jefferson, has rarely been matched in American politics, even by the diatribes of today’s New Left and Ultra Right.

    The first fusillades had been fired during Washington’s Presidency. The Jeffersonians, with not a little help from the Sage of Monticello himself, had set up journalists such as Philip Freneau and Benjamin Franklin Bache with one mission, to deflate and discredit an administration that was, in Jefferson’s view, “galloping fast into monarchy.” They soon had the Father of His Country in a state of near apoplexy. “That rascal Freneau,” as Washington called him, insisted on sending his scurrilous National Gazette, published in Philadelphia, to the President’s house even after he had cancelled his subscription. Freneau spent most of his abuse on Hamilton. Baclic preferred Washington as a target, calling him “treacherous,” “mischievous,” “inefficient,” and sneering at his “farce of disinterestedness” and his “stately joumeyings through the American continent in search of personal incense.”

    These verbal guerrillas soon had imitators. Among the more savage was William Duane, Bache’s successor as editor of the Philadelphia Aurora. Washington, he wrote, had “discharged the loathings of a sick mind.” Even this was topped by an English newcomer, James T. Callender. In the Richmond Examiner he declared that “Mr. Washington has been twice a traitor.”

  • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.worldtopolitics @lemmy.world•The US founders made a grave error in granting presidents pardon powerEnglish
    1·
    9 minutes ago

    I don’t think US founders ever expected that such a moron would manage to be elected, and use that power for himself.

    Within a single presidency, you had early Americans calling one another idiots, tyrants, and foreign plants. Washington himself wasn’t above suspicion.

    Everyone from Patrick Henry to Aaron Burr reviled one another and accused each other of plots to reinstate some kind of monarchy.

    We need the midterms to allow for a possible reform of the constitution

    That won’t happen. The American system will continue to revert to the 19th century mean, until the bureaucratic mechanisms fail completely.

  • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.worldtopolitics @lemmy.world•The US founders made a grave error in granting presidents pardon powerEnglish
    2·
    20 minutes ago

    That wasn’t a mistake. It was absolutely intentional.

    It is vital to understand the early American state as a patronage system and the president as the ultimate patrician through which power flows. If you look at early Plantation society, and the subsequent networks of power that flow from landholders to merchant brokers and from yeomen to their wealthy oligarch neighbors, all of this fits neatly together.

    The problem the American Founders saw was with the upstart plebians and landless workers. Pardons and vetos check the power of popular judges and legislators, as intended.

  • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.worldtoLinux@lemmy.ml•Killed by Ubuntu, Linux Mint is Bringing This Classic Feature BackEnglish
    21·
    52 minutes ago

    Hey, while we’re sucking off Linux Mint, can anymore explain why my box basically bricked itself with

    /usr/lib/polkit-1/polkit-agent-helper-1 isn’t setuid root

    Off a routine update? I’ve found conflicting guidance online, the AI prompts are (predictably) not very helpful, and since I’ve lost Internet everything has to be done by juggling a Windows laptop with a dozen help guides open on one hand and Linux on the other.

    I swear to God, this is what makes me regret using a Linux system. One bad update and it’s a weekend running down obscure errors.

  • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.worldtoTechnology@lemmy.world•Solar Panels Are Now Producing So Much Power That They’re Leaving Nuclear Plants in the Dust: "Solar is now the engine of the power transition."English
    1·
    18 hours ago

    AT&T was effectively a government-supported monopoly

    It was certainly a monopoly. But hardly government supported. The government has issued major sanction against the company no less than three times.

    • The Kingsbury Commitment, which forced AT&T to divest its stake in Western Union, stop acquiring competing independent local phone companies, and allow other companies to connect to its long-distance network
    • The 1956 Consent Decree, requiring AT&T to stay out of the emerging computer/data processing market and license its transistor patents royalty-free
    • The 1984 Bell System Breakup, which formally split the comment company eight ways.

    Solar R&D was hardly private. You’re completely excluding things like the U.S. National Science Foundation’s Advanced Solar Energy Research and Development Division.

    The NSF has always languished in funding and has historically failed to deliver major breakthroughs, much less any kind of physical rollout, of a public solar/wind energy grid.

    If anything, it has operated as an echo chamber of the fossil fuel industry, downplaying the efficiency and ultimate profitability of a renewable grid.

    Hardly a subsidy.

    And yet, my point is, even they’re still subsidizing solar orders of magnitude more than nuclear!

    Show me the solar powered submarine.

    Show me the solar powered aircraft carrier.

    Show me any meaningful federally contracted project to implement solar power for domestic or international consumption.

    At the very least, I can point you towards Georgia’s Vogtle 3 and 4. Nothing like that exists in the renewable space.

  • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.worldtoComic Strips@lemmy.world•Trickle-DownEnglish
    61·
    20 hours ago

    What power do the castle ppl have if literally everyone else is poor?

    One of them is a Democrat. One of them is a Republican. And it’s a two party system. Who else are you going to vote for?

    Make the castle people obsolete, create alternative systems while they languish in their walled gardens

    You can’t make the castle system obsolete without a 3/5th majority in the Castle. That’s just not realistic this cycle. But maybe if we can get the right people in charge of the castle, we can make an incremental change.