volkris @volkris@qoto.org

@McPatrick Well if you want to approach it from that direction, what the Supreme Court found was that no court has the legal authority to determine whether Trump is an insurrectionist for purpose of the 14th amendment.

So technically, it couldn't make that determination if it wanted to, because it found that it took lacked that legal authority.

That's not quite how it works, really the court just didn't answer the question because under the way US courts work they can't answer questions that they don't have to answer, and they didn't have to answer that question given their ruling.

Like you said, they didn't answer the deeper question. The reason they didn't answer it is because it WAS the deeper question and the answer to the shallow question resolved the matter before them.

However, yeah technically, even if they wanted to go to the deep question they couldn't have because they found that they legally couldn't.

@wjmaggos It sounds like you might be talking about the actual rollout rather than the protocol itself, which is kind of a different issue.

The AT protocol is decentralized even if nobody takes advantage of that feature. So it could be theory versus reality, and I'm talking about the theory, even if in reality right now the network isn't particularly built out yet.

But speaking of the protocol, as I recall one difference is that, the way you frame it, your mobile doesn't have to talk to A relay. It can talk to multiple relays, as many as it wants, it's in control. The control over who to talk to is distributed down to your mobile.

AP puts everything at the instance level. Your mobile has to talk to your instance, no other instance. And not multiple instances. Your mobile is bound to your instance.

With AP your mobile is really just an extension of the instance. With AT the relays work for the mobile.

@Hyolobrika

@McPatrick No, that's a long-standing principle of how courts in the US work.

It's a long-standing principle that courts should not touch issues that they don't have to touch in order to resolve the question before them. They didn't have to look at the underlying question because they were able to answer the major question without going there.

There are other complications that would have come up had they looked at that underlying question, but suffice to say, it's just how the US courts work.

@McPatrick it's kind of a legal shortcut.

Rather than take up court time resolving something that arguably is something for courts to handle, a thing like age verification is handled by state officers because it's anticipated that serious disputes will be so easily resolved and far between. So they built in a shortcut just to get it done with.

Technically, yes, any dispute about a nominees age could go through the rigmarole of court hearings and evidentiary hearings and due process and on and on, but they figure those cases should be so easy that they'll just use this shortcut instead.

But a question like is this person guilty of insurrection is much less straightforward, so it doesn't get the shortcut. It still has to go through courts.

It's a difference of practicality due to complexity.

@gkmizuno The resolution to the paradox comes from noting that you're begging the question.

This is the core of the quotation that I think you quoted above.

IS an insurrectionist holding office? That itself is the question. Without the legal determination that somebody is an insurrectionist, legally there isn't an insurrection is holding office, even if you are I personally believe that person to be an insurrectionist.

As far as the law is concerned, there's no problem with that person in office, because they have not been legally found to be an insurrectionist, so no paradox.

@exchgr regulatory changes made it more accessible to more people, so with those lower barriers to entry or people found it more valuable.

@Hyolobrika Definitely.

And so I'm really transfixed on the idea that we need to educate people better in pretty much all walks of life, whether it's how to engage with government or how to engage with technology.

Knowledge is power! 🙂

@wjmaggos Well the other half of the ax that I grind is that I wish Fediverse developers had much more of a focus on end users, on letting end empowering end users to shape their experiences the way they want so that different people can use the same platform in different ways.

We do see some of that with, for example, picture posting sites existing alongside the microblogging sites. Different interfaces just have to figure out how to handle different types of content coming across.

But taking it a step farther, this is why I emphasize ActivityPub being not so much decentralized as centralized around instances. That is a constraint that prevents this platform from being as flexible to different users.

And I think ATProtocol seems more decentralized and more flexible so that more users can have different sorts of experiences all on the same network.

In a way it's like how web traffic and email all coexist on the internet. If you decentralize more control you can have more different approaches to the experience.

@Hyolobrika

@jamusb@mastodon.sdf.org No, because Presidents don't have the authority to declare dictatorship

@casjo2022

@jchyip Well, almost.

The Constitution sets limits on who can take office, but it doesn't set limits on our choices. I can choose my dog to be president, but that doesn't mean my dog can actually issue executive orders.

This is a detail but a critical one.

@gkmizuno but I repeat myself 🙂

When I want to know what the Supreme Court says I read what the Supreme Court says, and that also includes being pretty skeptical of positions and claims that the Supreme Court did not take up.

Often enough justices write things in their dissents that are just plain wrong, leading to the court not taking them up. And so what is written in the dissent Is just as questionable as something Conway wrote.

We have the ruling in front of us. We can see what it says for ourselves. The dissent is functionally little more than questionable commentary for us.

@wjmaggos

It's a really important point that different people use social media differently and expect different things out of social media.

The reason I think this point is so important is because too often users will think the system works one way and expect it to work that way when in reality it's working a different way.

That applies here. You bring up the idea that most of what we do on social media is targeted toward the public, and platforms like Twitter and Mastodon seem very focused on that mode, and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that.

However, a user that expects more privacy and less targeting toward the public might find themself surprised if their content is much more public than they were expecting.

So that's why I grind that ax pretty regularly.

@Hyolobrika

@christianschwaegerl but we can read for ourselves that it's wrong.

The ruling does not close the door on a circumstance where an insurrectionist does something, but rather it focuses on the question of determining insurrectionist in the first place. Once an insurrectionist has been determined, the majority ruling doesn't stop any action consistent with law.

The minority opinion is wrong. The whole court was correct in not taking up the incorrect opinion.

@gkmizuno I'm mainly interested in listening to the Supreme Court when I want to know what the Supreme Court said.

I think your quotation is pretty apt. To the extent that it disagrees with Conway, I'm going with the quotation.

@christianschwaegerl keep in mind that the minority dissent was not accepted by the Court, which is why it was a dissent.

You can't put too much stake in those claims on their face, as the Court didn't accept them as correct.

@panamared27401 SCOTUS didn't say states can't interfere in federal elections.

It said that states can't use this federal claim without federal statute as the basis for acting.

States can still interfere, just not this way.

@christianschwaegerl only with regard to state ballot access.

A state cannot act based on this federal claim without federal authorization, but that doesn't mean the amendment can't come up in many different federal contexts.

For example, if Trump takes office and attempts to issue any order at all, that order could be challenged by the one impacted by it as invalid since the 14th says that Trump can't be president.

Or, the 14th still provides cover for the normal procedures to find the presidency vacant, triggering the normal line of succession.

This ruling doesn't nullify the 14th. It just limits what states can do.

@gkmizuno but the court did not say that the Constitution can only be enforced by a law signed by Congress.

What it said was much narrower, much more specific.

What it said was that state actors can't use this particular constitutional provision as basis for action against a candidate without federal authority.

The Constitution can be enforced in many ways with and without congressional legislation, it's just that states can't use this federal claim in their election systems.

It's not a paradox, it's a detail of what the court said is the constitutional design.

@Geoff

*Edit: Well, see my last paragraph below because what you're asking is a complicated question based on perception 🙂*

Yes, something a lot of people misunderstand: by law the EC counting is not at all ratification. It is a counting of ballots including processes for questioning ballots, so it can't be ratification because there was not yet a count to ratify.

In other words, despite what so many say, there was not an election for congress to recognize or certify or whatever word you want to use because they were in the process of going through the election. It had not happened yet.

One reason this is really important is because they were going through the process that was there specifically to avoid something like the January 6th riot, but because so many were denying that the process existed, many rioters ended up misled as to what was going on.

It's akin to somebody attacking someone else when they feel wronged because they were told that courts didn't exist so that option wasn't there for them.

Or, well this is complicated, on the other hand maybe you are absolutely right that the rioters were trying to prevent ratification, which is a shame because ratification wasn't actually happening, they were trying to prevent something that wasn't real in the first place.

@RejoinEU

@wjmaggos I think that the AT protocol is MORE decentralized, not less, because of that: it decentralizes past servers/ instances, so that there's less server to server interaction is a result of being less centralized around servers.