Why are any of you even arguing about this? The article itself doesn’t even agree lead played a role. It’s like everyone in here just read the headline only.
> Not everyone agrees that lead did cause a drop in violence. It’s one theory
Obviously. That's what we're discussing. I am simply presenting evidence to contradict the GP comment, which claims (falsely) that Europe did not see a drop in crime similar to the US's. The fact that Europe did see a drop a crime is not conclusive evidence of the lead-crime theory, but it leaves that possibility open.
If you have another theory, you are welcome to share it.
First, what you're describing is not consistent with the definition of serial killer [1].
Second, even if we include governmental killings, it's not clear how to allocate blame. For example, how many people are responsible for the Holodomor [2]? Just Joseph Stalin himself? His deputies? Every employee of the Russian government? If we consider each instance of state-sanctioned murder as ultimately being ordered by the head of state, that would not greatly increase the number of murderers, and certainly not in comparison to the daily count of civilian-on-civilian murder in the US.
Third, if we are going to include governmental killings, we should definitely include the various illegal wars that the US has engaged in, and continues to engage in. I think that would nicely balance the tables. It's important to understand that fascism and Communism do not hold a monopoly on civilian deaths [3] [4] [5]. Let's also not forget the US's continued use of the death penalty.
I agree, except you don't understand my point. Europe has just a TON of sanctioned sadomasochistic sex-related murder crimes. Just a ton. Before Jews were stuffed into ovens many were forced to perform sex acts on their guards. So many that it was formally organized and done in the open. Exactly the sort of thing that a serial killer does. So if you're a serial killer in Germany, or Russia, or Eastern Europe, or Yugoslavia you just get a job with the secret police, and engage in your sadomasochistic rape and murder without worrying about the police finding out because you are the police. If you are a serial killer in Western Europe you might have to go to Algeria or Vietnam if you are French, or India or Africa if you are British, etc etc, plenty of places where serial killer behavior would just be ignored or encouraged. You can't even find statistics on how often this happened because nobody cared enough to keep records of it because human life was so cheap it's not worth the paper.
Are you saying that thr industrialized rape and murder of millions of people is morally equivalent to deporting people? Inside your head, is it just a limp piece of cabbage?
I think that you're breaking several, but the closest one to "no personal insults" is "When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names."
There is no further reason to pay any attention to your arguments.
This is one of the most ridiculous, pedantic bike shedding discussions ever.
If you’re making this absurd argument, the Germans are minor leagues on a per capita basis. Julius Caesar was responsible for the death or enslavement of 2% of human population.
> In all of these 6-3 cases where Sotomayor writes the dissent, she writes entirely for the press and reserves only the last few pages to engage in anything like the legal arguments. Her effect in these cases is profoundly pathological on the public discourse.
That's one interpretation. On the other hand, I can understand her reaction at the conservative majority's repeated disrespect for stare decisis and existing case law, their tendency to craft non-textual and ahistorical reading of the Constitution to suit their short-term political goals, and their seeming bottomless capacity for subservience and deference to an obviously unlawful executive branch that has repeatedly evinced contempt for the judicial.
So, given the extraordinary depths that the majority is sinking to, her dramatic dissents are more justified than you think.
I'm unclear on which cases you're referring to. Roe v. Wade is the closest I can think of -- its not clear to me that this being handled by changes to state constitutions hasn't been a net benefit to the robustness of abortion law in the US. Or perhaps you mean presidental immunity.
However, either way, its very hard to defend the view that the US constitution entails a democratic limit on abortion.
When the SC rules that something is required or forbidden by the constitution, they mean that it is beyond the power of congress to permit or prescribe it; it is is completely outside of democratic control.
The majority of the court today have a judicial philosophy which was common to the court for most of its history whereby one would only, in extremely certain cases, rule an issue entirely outside of the democratic process -- ie., decided entirely by the constitution alone, as interpreted by 9 people.
It isnt the job of the SC to make america moral, or require the whole of the US to follow how you wish things to be -- their constitutional role is to prevent the operation of democracy in extremely clear cut cases.
As for presidential immunity -- all constitutional centres of power (congress, the courts, the president) have immunities in the exercise of that power. These are required to enable them to function as balances of power against the other. Eg., if the president could arrest a judge for a bad judgement, the courts would not balance the executive.
The court confirmed only that the president has no more or less the necessary kind of immunity that each branch has -- and this is a clear requirement of the balance of power system set up in the constitution.
They left open, very widely, grounds on which a president acting outside of the duties of the office, could be prosecuted. And they clearly believed trump could be on at least some of those grounds.
> I'm unclear on which cases you're referring to. Roe v. Wade is the closest I can think of
I wonder if you misread my comment or just aren't aware of recent court history. The current conservative majority did not decide Roe, which is a case from 1973.
An example of a non-textual reading of the Constitution is last year's Trump v US case, wherein the conservative majority decided, apparently without any basis in law or Constitution, that the President is entitled to presumed criminal immunity for all official acts. You seem to have completely misinterpreted what this case was about: it's not about charging the president for "bad presidenting", it's about holding him accountable for criminal acts. Judges who violates criminal law are not exempt and enjoy no immunity.
Or how about Snyder v US, wherein SCOTUS decided to neuter the federal statute on official corruption, because their reading of "bribe" required money to be proffered before and not after the corresponding official act.
Or how about today's stay of the injunction against enforcement of the wildly unconstitutional attempt to void the 14th amendment, essentially giving the president the right to violate constitutional civil rates as long as he does it in states that support him against people who can't afford effective legal representation.
> Your entire understanding of the SC here, under trump, has been completely distorted by emotionally-disregulating media narratives designed for those purposes.
Ah yes, the classic misogynist attack: I can't possibly understand the law because I'm too emotional. If only I were logical like you.
> Today's result also does not prevent state-wide injunctions, indeed, that's what they court has basically suggested.
Yes, state-level injunctions are allowed. All that this means is that different citizens will get different Constitutional rights depending on which state they live in. That's not how the Constitution is supposed to work.
> Congress can just change the statue. As it does a very large number of times every year.
What's the point of the changing the statute when SCOTUS insists on interpreting statutes in a way contrary to their text?
> That is the only impact of that ruling. It had nothing to do with criminal actions by trump.
It absolutely has to do with criminal actions. Notably, any official act cannot even be used as evidence in prosecuting a criminal act against the president. So if the president conspires with the AG to illegally prosecute a political enemy, that is unprosecutable. Since anything the president does is potentially an official act, this means that there in no way to hold the president responsible for his actions, which is the opposite of the intent of the Constitution, which provides for "checks and balances." Did you fail your high school civics class?
The Framers know how to provide immunity, as they do in the Speech and Debate clause. You may have a reason for supporting presidential immunity, but you can't deny that there is no basis for it in the Constitution. SCOTUS made it up, precisely at a time when their favorite president was found in flagrant violation.
? I'm entirely unaware of your sex. I imagine many of the hysterical people in this thread are men.
> That's not how the Constitution is supposed to work.
Correct, the SC is supposed to resolve that. And in this judgement, they affirm that they will.
> What's the point of the changing the statute
If the SC wanted to make bribery constitutionally permissible, they would not have made the ruling statutory. By making a ruling on statutory interpretation they are explicitly inviting congress to over-turn their ruling by amending the law. That's deliberate.
> So if the president conspires with the AG to illegally prosecute a political enemy...
No, this is illegal and prosecutable. A "political enemy" of the person of the president (eg., trump) is a private action. You can read the decision, it has nothing to do with allowing the person-who-happens-to-be-president to do whatever they want. A very wide class of criminal actions of this person are still criminal, this is explicitly there in the judgement.
They even clearly imply many of the things trump has done are prosecutable, and iirc, this is raised in oral arguments.
I don't know where you're getting your information, but it has little to do with these SC judgments or their reasoning. The constitutional powers afforded to the president (, congress, courts) are the very foundation of the constitution. All "immunity" here means is that insofar as these powers are concerned, *obviously*, they can only be changed via a constitutional amendment.
The actions of the president, to form the executive, constitute his presidental power. Just as, eg., writing a court opinion is the power of a judge. A judge cannot "make illegal" constitutional actions of the president, just as the president cannot arrest a judge for a judgement.
Presidental immunity in this case has nothing to do with immunity of the person of the president from criminal action taken to further his private interests, that is explicitly illegal in the ruling
The ruling made such a case unprosecutable as it made any possible evidence in such a case inadmissable. You've been told this multiple times but gloss over it for some reason.
The majority went out of there way to make the president unprosecutable. Not only did they make "official"
(whether or not something is an official act is something this very same majority will decide!) acts unprosecutable they ensured that even if immunity doesn't apply then NONE of the evidence is admissible.
The simple and irrefutable fact is that the ruling allows the president to have a political opponent killed and be wholly immune to any possible prosecution.
For example:
- President has political opponent killed by any means (ask CIA to do it or whatever), or accepts a bribe from someone in return for sending weaponry or anything else
- President's term ends
- Former president is charged for his obviously criminal acts
- Former president's lawyers argue their actions were "official acts"
- Prosecutor appeals
- Gets all the way to the supreme court
- Supreme court decides that the crimes commited were official acts because the president did them (and thus must be official)
or if the court tries to look marginally less ridiculous and corrupt:
- Supreme court decides the crimes themselves weren't official acts but any and all communication related to the acts themselves were official acts and are this inadmissable (making the prosecution impossible)
MAYBE the 'justices' have integrity at that point and don't rule that way... too bad. The president can just have pre-emptively have disloyal 'justices' killed and personally appoint loyalists... and have them rule the way he wants. It's all an official act, after all.
Can you show me what part of the ruling prevents the above?
Whether or not you believe the above is "unrealistic" or "fearmongering" is irrelevant as this is what the majority's absurd opinion allows for. It's simply unjustifiable, unconstitutional, ridiculous and there's no excuse for it.
> ? I'm entirely unaware of your sex. I imagine many of the hysterical people in this thread are men.
How is that relevant? The fantasy that any opinion that differs from yours is based in emotional interests, whereas your opinion is objective and logical is the root of many misogynistic attacks.
> Correct, the SC is supposed to resolve that. And in this judgement, they affirm that they will.
Your argument is tautological. You're saying "SCOTUS's job is to interpret the Constitution, and there is no appeal to their decision, therefore their interpretetation must be correct." Your position makes it impossible to ever find that SCOTUS is incorrect. So what's the point of your argument?
> If the SC wanted to make bribery constitutionally permissible, they would not have made the ruling statutory. By making a ruling on statutory interpretation they are explicitly inviting congress to over-turn their ruling by amending the law. That's deliberate.
What's deliberate is they opened the door to official corruption, despite the obvious intent of Congress to make that activity illegal. When their judgement goes against the plain language and intent of the written law, SCOTUS is wrong. Now, those wishing to commit official corruption have a clear, SCOTUS-approved blueprint of how to do it. They have, with their decision, ensured that only the most inept cases of official corruption can be prosecuted. And they know full well that Congress, in its current state of disfunction, will not ammend the law.
> No, this is illegal and prosecutable. A "political enemy" of the person of the president (eg., trump) is a private action. You can read the decision, it has nothing to do with allowing the person-who-happens-to-be-president to do whatever they want. A very wide class of criminal actions of this person are still criminal, this is explicitly there in the judgement.
You have clearly not read the decision. Any official act using powers vested in the presidency gets presumptive immunity. Conferring with the AG is an official act. All the president has to do is claim a good-faith attempt to enforce the law, and the act cannot be used as evidence in any prosecution against him.
> They even clearly imply many of the things trump has done are prosecutable, and iirc, this is raised in oral arguments.
I don't believe they did. Please provide a citation from the decision.
> I don't know where you're getting your information, but it has little to do with these SC judgments or their reasoning. The constitutional powers afforded to the president (, congress, courts) are the very foundation of the constitution. All "immunity" here means is that insofar as these powers are concerned, obviously, they can only be changed via a constitutional amendment.
This is completely irrelevant. No one is talking about changing the powers, only requiring that they be used lawfully. The president takes an oath to carry out the law; your position, and that of SCOTUS, seems to be that that oath has no meaning.
> The actions of the president, to form the executive, constitute his presidental power. Just as, eg., writing a court opinion is the power of a judge. A judge cannot "make illegal" constitutional actions of the president, just as the president cannot arrest a judge for a judgement.
Again, a tautalogical argument: if his act is Constitutional, then it can't be illegal. That's missing the point. The president can have the Constituional power to command the army, while still not having the legal power to command the army to murder Joe Biden. Do you honestly not see the difference between a means granted by the Constitution and an illegal use of that power? Well, if you don't, you belong on the SCOTUS.
> Presidental immunity in this case has nothing to do with immunity of the person of the president from criminal action taken to further his private interests, that is explicitly illegal in the ruling
This interpretation is not to be found in the ruling.
Based on your responses, I'd say that you are the one letting your emotions get the best of you. You're clearly in the bag for Trump and are willing to distort reality in order to justify your preconceived position.
> This interpretation is not to be found in the ruling.
Then you haven't read it. It's explicit.
> they opened the door to official corruption,
Their job is not to make America moral, that's the job of the congress and the democractic process of government. If they say a statue means A rather than B, it is then the job of elected representatives to clarify they mean B. Or else you believe 9 unelected people should govern the country. Congress often modifies law in light of SC rulings to make these clarifications.
> Your position makes it impossible to ever find that SCOTUS...
I don't think you've understood my point. My point was only that today's ruling asserts what you are asserting. The SC has explicitly said that they will still impose universal injunctions, still invalidate executive orders, etc. Only that district courts cannot.
There is nothing in this principle which means that the courts can no longer constrain the executive. The constitution only prescribes one court, the supreme court -- all others are created by congress and must therefore be granted these powers by congress.
What the SC has said is that these powers were not given to district courts by congress. They still can be if congress wishes. So congress can grant these powers.
All of this is irrelevant anyway, as K explains in his concurrence, that there are many ways to universally challege this order that do not require extraordinary powers to be given to district court judges, powers never given to them by congress.
> Their job is not to make America moral, that's the job of the congress and the democractic process of government. If they say a statue means A rather than B, it is then the job of elected representatives to clarify they mean B. Or else you believe 9 unelected people should govern the country. Congress often modifies law in light of SC rulings to make these clarifications.
I don't recall using the word moral. In this case, their interpretation is not supported by the text or intent of Congress. When they do that, it's called legislating from the bench, which are you are okay with, because in your mind SCOTUS can never be wrong.
> that there are many ways to universally challege this order that do not require extraordinary powers to be given to district court judges, powers never given to them by congress.
There is nothing extraordinary about it. They've been doing it for centuries, but strangely SOCTUS chooses this moment to break with history. And again, you're fine with it, because "rule of law" does not mean anything to you.
The role of the judiciary is to interpret and apply the law. If the executive branch is not constrained by the law (as in your reading, judges cannot tell the executive what to do), then the executive branch is above the law. That's a monarchy. We fought a war to avoid just such an outcome.
EDIT: I feel like you're arguing with someone else. You respond to arguments that I didn't make and ignore the arguments that I do. You've been so conditioned to performatively support "your side" that you can't even bring yourself to read what the other side says. I never suggested that SCOTUS has an obligation to behave "morally", only that that must interpret the law and the Constitution, and then I pointed out cases where they have failed to do that.
Their responses were unnerving and it's honestly frightening that anyone can be so deluded. They've lied multiple times about the contents of the ruling, they've repeatedly ignored your arguments and hallucinated you making arguments you never even implied, and all of that wrapped up in a transparent facade of civility. It is twisted and vile.
There's two types of person I could be arguing with: one who has just misunderstood the ruling by being credulous of the discourse around it; and one who has misunderstood it by having a partial understanding of the legal context. My goal was the address the former by explaining the judgement. A person of the latter kind would take much more of my time than I can give. I'm not trying to win an argument, I'm trying to be helpful by adding explanatory context.
If a person has read the ruling and insists that it places the person of the president, privately, above the law -- then I'd need several hours to explain all the relevant issues. A comment thread isn't a viable place to conduct a seminar on constitutional law, nor exegesis of a SC legal opinion to that depth.
I had hoped I could just explain that the congress and the courts have immunities, and this is just confirming that the office of the president has exactly the same kind of immunity. And that this immunity does not transfer privately to the holder of that office, just as a senator cannot murder someone.
There are deep technical issues surrounding the status of the attorney general which muddies the waters, because this is not a constitutional position, and the constitution does not foresee any one but congress holding the president (as president) to legal account. In that sense, it places the president (as president, not as a private person) outside congress' modern established processes for federal law -- but that's what the constitution actually says. But this process has never worked anyway: the AG is an executive position the president already controls, so it has never made sense to imagine they are answerable to the AG.
The SC confirms the plain text of the constitution which is the office of the president is one of the three branches of government which is held to legal account only by impeachment by congress. The office holder, eg., trump, can still be prosecuted as a private citizen for crimes, in his own private interest, taken during office, when he isnt the president.
Rather than re-write your scripts to store temp files into /dev/shm, you can just mount /tmp using the tmpfs file system and get the same benefit for all your programs. Some distros do this by default.
The relevant line from fstab is:
tmpfs /tmp tmpfs noatime 0 2
Now any program that writes to /tmp will be writing to a RAM disk, thus sparing unnecessary wear on my SSD.
I do mention this offhand in the article: "The existence of /dev/shm is a boon for me mostly because it means I never have to worry about whether /tmp is really RAM-based again."
Now you have to worry about whether you can access /dev/shm. Please encourage people to use supported interfaces instead of random voodoo (anything under /dev that wasn't there in 1995) for day-to-day tasks.
$ ls -ld /dev/shm
drwxrwxrwt 3 root root 120 Jun 32 02:47 /dev/shm/
Incidentally, "30 years ago" is the cutoff date for music being considered the oldies. This just made me realize Nevermind is now an oldie, and soon The Lonesome Crowded West will be too.
A past role in a past life had me installing security services on servers. One server had incredibly awkward permission sets across its common directories so our deployment script failed. The fix? Just throw it into /dev/shm and install it directly from there. It worked great.
> /dev/shm is typically world-writable by default:
You are relying on random implementation details instead of universal APIs that work across OSes and environments. Please stop.
So help me God, if I make a Linux system, I will make it _not_ have a /dev/shm just to avoid people relying on non-standard stuff for no good reason. Honestly, it's because of stuff like this that we need Docker.
I'm not really seeing a right or wrong here anyway unless you're distributing a script that's meant to run on all sorts of Linux systems. In which case you probably aren't concerned with the physical storage medium being used.
It's because of people doing random nonstandard shit that we need to Docker-ize a lot of software these days. People refuse to lift a single finger to adhere to conventions that let programs co-exist without simulating a whole god damn computational universe for each damn program.
/tmp is not specified to be a RAM disk by POSIX. Just that things in there are considered to be not persistent after a program stops (with implications for backups and disaster recovery). Sure, RAM disks work if the amount of /tmp space you need is less than your free physical RAM but sometimes that's not the case, either.
Back in the day you might place /tmp in a good spot for random access of small files on a disk platter. /var is vaguely similar but intended for things that need to be persistent.
Anyway it's not uncommon for systems to persist /tmp and clean it periodically from cron using various retention heuristics.
Ultimately POSIX concepts of mountpoints are strongly tied to optimizing spinning rust performance and maintenance and not necessarily relevant for SSD/NVME.
> /tmp
A directory made available for applications that need a place to create temporary files. Applications shall be allowed to create files in this directory, but shall not assume that such files are preserved between invocations of the application.
It doesn't say anything about what it's backed by.
file-hierarchy(7) states /dev/shm is tmpfs and that "all users have write access to this directory", so I think you'd have to be making a non-systemd distro
> Usually, it is a better idea to use memory mapped files in /run/ (for system programs) or $XDG_RUNTIME_DIR (for user programs) instead of POSIX shared memory segments, since these directories are not world-writable and hence not vulnerable to security-sensitive name clashes.
$XDG_RUNTIME_DIR usually points to /run/user/${uid}, so you're guaranteed that other users won't write there, and possibly won't even be able to read there.
I did this for a while, but writing files to ram can be dangerous, since most things assume unlimited disk space. I noticed that updates would fail on machines that had 16 gigs of ram unless I logged out of my window manager and did it from the TTY. Took quite a long time to realize it was because of all the compiles writing to /tmp. Much easier to just let the SSD get used.
You know what, your comment actually reminds me that this happened when I also had a bug in my configuration that was causing me to not actually use swap. I assume running out of tmpfs uses swap like anything else? I might give tmpfs another try.
We are both wrong to a degree, but you are more correct than I was.
According to the docs[0]:
tmpfs ... is able to swap unneeded pages out to swap
space, if swap was enabled for the tmpfs mount.
So `tmpfs` does not unconditionally use swap, but can use it if possible. What I was thinking about is `ramfs`, which doesn't support swap, but that is not the topic of the question to which I replied.
Anf your voting record and your attendance of protests.
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