volkris @volkris@qoto.org

@theconversationau this article really misses what's going on in the population, falling into the same old trap of taking Trump literally if not seriously, as was the line from his last election.

But the focus on Biden and the economy here distracts from the bigger problems of general frustration with institutions that lead so many people to look for the punk rock solution that Trump represents to them, the irrational rebellion.

It's not a very big problem for the future of American democracy. That is missing what is going on. This IS American democracy representing its loss of faith in institutions.

@mhjohnson Well with regard to the old growth forests I think a lot of people are missing the opposite effect of those trees reaching the ends of their life cycles and releasing a ton of carbon as they decay.

It's not as environmentally friendly as a lot of people want to think of it as.

And yeah, wildfire risk is another issue.

@hkrn

Make us? No.

We just decided to do that for fun.

@bigheadtales first, step one, president names a nominee. Doesn't appoint.

I think you might be missing that steps two through five are optional.

If the president names a compelling nominee the Senate doesn't have to do any of that, it can just simply approve the nominee any time our elected senators want to.

So it's not that the GOP blocked step 5. That's not how the process works.

The Constitution requires the president to nominate somebody that the Senate is willing to approve. It's not about blocking, it's about approving.

Any time that a vacancy goes unfilled it's because the president failed in his job to put forward a nominee that our elected senators would feel like showing up for voting for.

To put it a different way, when you describe it as the GOP blocking a nominee it's like Taco Bell complaining that I blocked to my purchase of a taco today: no, I just didn't want a taco so I didn't go there.

It's not blocking. It's that the system of checks and balances requires the president to put forward somebody that our elected officials would feel compelled to approve.

Same as how with the way the world works if Taco Bell wants my business it has to make the food that I feel compelled to eat.

@TheConversationClimate and that's why the Paris Agreement targets were never serious.

@petersuber problem here is the judgment call over whether it's reasonable to question impartiality on these grounds.

They really come across as petty accusations.

@spaceflight Well I'd say those are part of technical strengths.

Ariane was lacking in technical strengths related to agility and operational performance.

Seems like we should call that what it is.

@ericjmorey because email doesn't generally take the form of physical objects that one would pay a service to transport for them, you know, the post.

@guacamayan

@bigheadtales the Senate is free to consider any candidate the president cares to nominate.

There is no prevention from consideration. There's merely a procedure saying that the president has to put forward a good enough candidate to get the approval of the people we elect to the Senate.

I call it a critical element of how the US government works, and misunderstanding that is a huge problem because it prevents us from holding powerful officials accountable for their actions.

What in the world are you talking about the Constitution having proven to be extraordinarily weak and fragile? I think everything we see around us shows how durable it is.

But then if you don't even understand how federal judges make their way through checks and balances, I don't think you understand current events enough to have a fair judgment of that anyway.

@bigheadtales again, that's not how the process works.

It's not about blocking; it's about affirmatively moving forward.

And no you are completely wrong about the government being designed based on assumption of best intentions by all. In fact the folks that designed the constitutional system wrote about this explicitly in the famous men are not angels paper, maybe by Hamilton himself.

No the government is absolutely not designed based on assumption of best intentions. Rather it is designed with the assumption that people won't have the best of intentions, and so they will guard their authorities and keep an eye on each other.

The whole point of the design of the US government is that we can't assume the best of intentions from politicians.

@bigheadtales you keep talking about blocking but that's not how the US system works.

Judges are only approved with the active involvement of the people we elect. It's not like they just get out of the way; instead they have to actively consent to the appointment.

So no, it's not that the process was blocked. It's that the process moved forward considering these nominations and determining that they were qualified.

And remember that the Senate is not subject to gerrymandering. That's the House.

@slightlyoff personally I would focus on standards being a matter of documentation or process rather than anything involving intent or openness.

That appreciates the standards that are either expensive to access or never really intended for widespread use, that are more exercises in staking IP ground.

And to your point it further pushes back against overly rosy perceptions of standards.

The main thing that annoys me is people pushing to adopt a standard because it is supposedly the standard when in reality it is one of many standards, and maybe not even the best of the standards on offer.

@jeffcliff Well then let's have other platforms around here make easier interfaces.

Let's out compete.

Build up, don't tear down.

@Soy_Magnus @thegreatape

@bigheadtales cripple the process? No, the people we elect are actively involved in approving those judges.

We should probably stop electing idiots.

But until we do, well, we elect these people.

We get the Congress that we vote for.

@jemal@jemal.contact ha, I was going to reply, but you pretty much made my reply for me 🙂

Yeah, a compelling story with a handy villain is pretty much what social media is these days.

@gcblasing@mstdn.social ah, one of those cases of trying to blame someone for what they literally didn't do

@davidtoddmccarty I mean, they have been outed as having just made shit up, or at least having really violated journalistic standards.

And since we are in a moment when the administration is left leaning, the support of those papers really fits the definition of propaganda quite well.

In my opinion the right wing outfits are just utterly dumb, they really don't have the staff that has the expertise to know what's going on in the world.

But when the left leaning outfits publish stuff that isn't true, well that's a lot more insidious, supporting the ones in power and avoiding accountability for them.

@wjmaggos just to name one particular example, I found it amazing that Trump was impeached through processes in Congress where people for and against the impeachment showed absolutely no interest in figuring out what was true or false.

The hearings had people on two sides of the aisle standing up and recounting completely different versions of events, and they even called witnesses that rejected the factual claims being put on the table, but none of that even seemed to matter.

I don't think that would have been tolerated previously but now that is celebrated.

Like I said, there's nothing new about falsehoods and fabrications circulating in society. The difference is that now we generally tolerate and even celebrate them.

@freemo

@bigheadtales sure, because the people that we chose to elect determined her to be qualified.

That's how the US system works.

@wjmaggos again I don't think it's true that the odds of seeing a false claim are particularly higher now. Yellow journalism has always been a thing. Political parties and special interest groups and kooky conspiracy theorists and just plain fiction writers have always been around.

The reason I think people are less critical now range from changes in academia where ideas like postmodernity have become more prevalent even in hard sciences through changes in the consumers of media where people actually seek out content that's really vapid and uninformed.

The fictions have always been there. It's just that these days I'm seeing more and more people eager to believe them.

@freemo