Amezarak

> Such ad hominems are tiresome and more often than not are projection.

Nowhere did I engage in ad hominem. Do you disagree or agree about my statement about executive power waxing and waning? It certainly appears to be the case that people are generally unfamiliar with the details. If you think almost anything Trump has done is meaningfully "unprecedented", that is almost certainly the case! Of course, having a precedent doesn't mean its good, either.

> You have made a number of claims here that simply aren't true.

Feel free to point out what specific claims you believe to be untrue, rather than simply blanketly claiming them so. The only post I see that you responded to before you don't even seem to have understood my question, which was not about the ability of Congress to create agencies, but about its power to create independent agencies, which is indeed heavily circumscribed even under the non-unitary perspective, under any reasonable definition of "independent". The question is how dependent can they legally be.

Here is a direct link the the Convention notes I was discussing, since possibly you take issue with that?

https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/debates_720.asp https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/debates_908.asp

> Mr. PINKNEY & Mr. Govr. MORRIS moved to strike out this part of the Resolution. Mr. P. observd. he ought not to be impeachable whilst in office

> MORRIS: He can do no criminal act without Coadjutors who may be punished. In case he should be re-elected, that will be [FN9] sufficient proof of his innocence. Besides who is to impeach? Is the impeachment to suspend his functions. If it is not the mischief will go on. If it is the impeachment will be nearly equivalent to a displacement, and will render the Executive dependent on those who are to impeach.

> Mr. PINKNEY did not see the necessity of impeachments. He was sure they ought not to issue from the Legislature who would in that case hold them as a rod over the Executive and by that means effectually destroy his independence. His revisionary power in particular would be rendered altogether insignificant.

> Mr. KING expressed his apprehensions that an extreme caution in favor of liberty might enervate the Government we were forming. He wished the House to recur to the primitive axiom that the three great departments of Govts. should be separate & independent: that the Executive & Judiciary should be so as well as the Legislative: that the Executive should be so equally with the Judiciary. Would this be the case, if the Executive should be impeachable? It had been said that the Judiciary would be impeachable. But it should have been remembered at the same time that the Judiciary hold their places not for a limited time, but during good behaviour. It is necessary therefore that a forum should be established for trying misbehaviour. Was the Executive to hold his place during good behaviour? The Executive was to hold his place for a limited term like the members of the Legislature: Like them particularly the Senate whose members would continue in appointmt the same term of 6 years he would periodically be tried for his behaviour by his electors, who would continue or discontinue him in trust according to the manner in which he had discharged it. Like them therefore, he ought to be subject to no intermediate trial, by impeachment. He ought not to be impeachable unless he held his office during good behaviour, a tenure which would be most agreeable to him; provided an independent and effectual forum could be devised. But under no circumstances ought he to be impeachable by the Legislature. This would be destructive of his independence and of the principles of the Constitution. He relied on the vigor of the Executive as a great security for the public liberties.

> Mr. RANDOLPH. The propriety of impeachments was a favorite principle with him. Guilt wherever found ought to be punished. The Executive will have great opportunitys of abusing his power; particularly in time of war when the military force, and in some respects the public money will be in his hands. Should no regular punishment be provided, it will be irregularly inflicted by tumults & insurrections. He is aware of the necessity of proceeding with a cautious hand, and of excluding as much as possible the influence of the Legislature from the business.

Thank you for the link. I will certainly give it a read but I'm sure the HN thread will be long dead by the time I read and absorb it.

My main beef with the tenor of this whole thread in general is people do not seem aware of the historical rises and falls in executive power. For example, perhaps they did not call it a "unitary executive" then, but the executive power surely reached its zenith under FDR, with all sorts of behaviors and actions we would regard now with boggled eyes and before which even Trump's more radical actions tend to pale. [Perhaps most applicable to this thread, FDR openly wielded the power of the 'independent' FCC to silence his opposition, to the point where NBC and CBS felt compelled to announce they "would not air any broadcast that was in any way critical of any policy of the Administration.".] Everything worked out OK.

Ironically, of course, that's also the guy who was probably most responsible for the explosion of the size of the administrative state - he really, in a meaningful sense, refounded American government. And while there was good and obvious reasons for the immense expansion of the administrative state, and I'm open to legal reasons either way, I'm becoming increasingly convinced that there's really good social reasons to not have "independent" agencies - I suspect more direct democratic input (the President does X) nets out better in terms of social trust and cohesiveness even when it makes often much dumber decisions.

Actually, the founding fathers were mostly worried about the President being dependent on Congress. They were very worried about that and didn’t want him to be! That impeachment cases would be tried in Congress was very controversial and ultimately agreed to because they figured they wouldn’t become politicized.

You can read the Convention notes yourself! Don’t let other people tell you what they thought.You might be surprised! For example, many argued that the President should not be impeachable at all!

It seems controversial that Congress could create independent executive agencies. Could they make the entire executive independent except for the military? Why or why not?

And while I agree we don’t want the DoJ treated that way, that’s how it’s been operated since its beginnings! If anything the past few decades have been relatively not so bad. And regardless of what I want that doesn’t answer whether it would be within Congresses power to make it independent of the President.

Very little of what has happened is novel.

Where did the constitutional idea of an independent agency come from and what was its justification? I’ve heard a lot about the “unitary executive” but I never see what the counter argument is except for “it would be good to have independent agencies because sometimes democratic input produces bad outcomes and experts do better.” Which yeah, makes sense, nobody argues that democracies make sane decisions - but it’s always an outcome-based argument instead of a legal one.

??? When I type ping x.x.x.x on Linux it sends pings until I ctrl c.

> If your country actually stands for freedom, justice, and universal human rights, then another human working from those principles would reach the same conclusion you do.

These principles are not objective moral axioms that we can all reason from.

We decide, as sovereign countries, what they mean to us, how they should be implemented, or even if we (as a country) don't value this or that. There is no magical tablet of Rights that we can spiritually commune with to determine "X is a right but Y is not." These are all politically and culturally determined.

So it absolutely matters, very, very much who decides, and millions have died as a consequence of those decisions. It does not make much sense for anyone to hand those decisions over to the ICC. Unless and until we have a single global culture and moral framework the whole idea is absurd...except as a vehicle for the power plays of different factions at the international politics level.

Because they are politically and culturally determined, because they are not something that people are just born with the innate ability to find, is exactly why handing decisions over to people belonging to different cultures/societies/institutions is highly dangerous. The only way to actually protect our rights is to not accede to institutions like the ICC. It's absurd to say that because billions of people could be trained to believe in things they don't believe in we must act as though the things they don't believe in are universally true, or else we will lose our freedoms. We can simply live in sovereign countries that do hold these beliefs - and as for the countries that do things we find revolting, we can pressure them or ignore them or war with them as we see fit and as has been done since the dawn of time. But ultimately you have to accept that different cultures have different values, even if you're one of those that want to do something about it. You can't just stick your head in the sand and pretend the ICC actually adheres to these ideals.

OK, but the proposed battleship is what the GP described: a souped-up Arleigh Burke with hundreds of missile launchers, which are described as the primary battery.

The guns are described as secondary and, other than the proposed single railgun, are basically the same as a cruiser.

I'm not sure what your problem is with sheetrock, but you can achieve pretty high levels of sound isolation with sheetrock walls.

> Whereas something like doing your own oil change requires a lot of preparation to get right

No, it doesn't. It's very simple on most cars, and certainly you could also see it with a YouTube video. Remove one (drain) bolt. Drain oil into a bucket. Put the bolt back. Fill the car up from the top with the oil listed on the cap in the amount listed on the owners manual. Take the bucket of oil to the nearest auto part's store and dump it there for free.

If you change the filter too, you just...unscrew the filter and screw a new one back on. Make sure you the whole filter came off (the gasket didn't separate) and smear a little oil on the new one.

There are some minor variations on this process depending on the exact model of car, but that's it. Variations might be stuff like "the drain bolt is normally covered with a plastic cover that requires a screwdriver" or "the manufacturer recommends you replace the washer on the bolt." (It doesn't actually matter.)

> and then you still have the issue of disposing of the oil.

I mentioned it above but because I see this comment a lot: your auto parts store or even Wal-Mart will take your used oil. Disposal is not an issue.

For some time now, neglecting radiator coolant and power steering fluid has essentially no impact. (The service interval on my coolant is either 150k or 200k miles.) Power steering is usually electric these days. I'm not sure what would ever call for valve cover gasket maintenance, unless you're removing it for some reason.

"Topping off" with oil is not really a thing, generally, unless you have a very old car with engine problems. Nor can you put the "wrong gas" in, typically, unless you have some sort of specialty car that "requires" (you could get away with it for a long time) higher efficiency gas or you have a diesel - and someone who went the extra mile to get these will be aware.

EVs also have brake fluid, so that's something EV owners also have to pay attention to - but like ICE cars, you can pretty much can just ignore it. It's not recommended but nothing is likely to happen.

There has been much higher fertility during much worse times. They don’t really have much explanatory power on their own.

They did not revoke "the subsidies." The ACA subsidies are still in place. What was allowed to expire was the temporarily increased COVID subsidy levels, which were sold as a temporary emergency expansion. If they had originally passed a genuine and permanent ACA expansion, rather than an expiring one, there's likely nothing that could have been done to "revoke" it by those currently in power.

Maybe you mean this, but it's important to be clear about the distinctions we don't mislead people, and then someone tells them the whole truth, and then they wonder what else we were wrong about.

> So actually, your remixed music you could play live, as a DJ.

No, you can't. You have to procure a license to DJ publicly. A Public Performance License is offered by most of the major music conglomerates, or you have to find a venue that has or will pay for such a license. Profiting off infringement worsens your situation legally, but any copying and distribution by any means of copyrighted material is illegal without a license.

They are trending illiberal because of the tension between elites who think ignoring and censoring the popular will on various issues is wise and the voters who see that and think the only solution is a drastic one.

Several western countries could kill their more extreme parties overnight simply by enacting a few reforms with immigration and/or affordability.

Why is it this line of reasoning never goes into questioning just who the forces endlessly propagandizing about the need to censor social media are? Is this not sowing distrust in democracy itself? (If you can’t trust your electorate not to believe Chinese propaganda, what does that say about your attitude towards democracy as a system?) Who is doing this and why? That would seem to be very salient since much of the reporting on bot campaigns has since been discredited, with whole organizations confabulating these stories then laundering them through the media to push their desired political outcome. (C.f “new knowledge.”)

Foreign propaganda in democracies is as old as democracies themselves. It is by no means anything new; foreign influence campaigns spent enormous sums and labor trying to sway democracies from the very beginning - often very successfully. I don’t see why it’s any different for it to be published on Facebook instead of laundered through print media and rumor mills. At the end of the day you either recognize these problems and appreciate that trusting your electorate/having a liberal democracy is the best option we have compared with the alternatives…or you don’t.

OK, so who is deciding what information makes people “anxious and depressed” and therefore what Facebook is allowed to republish in feeds? Would it be reasonable for Facebook to censor all information about the climate emergency to protect people from feelings of anxiety and depression, even if they engage with it?

Right. So instead, a central authority determines what is true or not and therefore what is allowed to be published. Easy - there’s clearly a neutral arbiter of truth we can all depend on! So the problem was never that the algorithm let people see content that was depressing and anxiety-inducing - that’s okay - but when it does so and it’s not true. How the goalposts move.

You’re right back to what authoritarian states say and do, and diametrically opposed to what underpins liberal democracy: the idea that the demos decides what is true and good. That idea has lots of very obvious problems but we decided it was preferable to the other systems, one of which you are now advocating for. In a liberal democracy we all are responsible for persuading the people that lies are lies, not censoring them.

If you believe that the Algorithm is just too powerful and you can’t compete in the marketplace of ideas against people lying - well, you don’t believe in liberal democracy. You believe in an ideologically authoritarian state that tells you what’s true or not, and where people are not allowed to make free, (un)informed decisions.

Liberal democracy does not mean that the government and other authorities hide information and opinions from people for fear it might make them “anxious and depressed.” I gave you a specific example: should they stop letting people see content relating to the climate emergency because it makes many people anxious and depressed?

That is the view of paternalistic authoritarian states whose primary concern is public harmony, not liberalism.

OK, well, I support liberal democracy and all that entails. So we’re kind of fundamentally at odds here and probably won’t be able to find common ground.

OK, so, in the vein of the original thread, can you explain how Facebook would be "sowing discord" or "making people depressed and anxious" in some specific way that isn't just spreading other people's speech (ideally, in a way that is based on some objective metrics like engagement) that is Very Bad and shouldn't be allowed?

For example, are you suggesting that Facebook begin censoring information about the climate emergency because it makes people depressed and anxious? Should Facebook make sure that people don't see content they disagree with, because that promotes discord? Or is it the other way around - they shouldn't see content they agree with, because that creates an echo chamber which increases discord when they do encounter other views?

"How long and often" people engage with content is a perfectly reasonable metric to optimize and a very close correlate of interest. There are, in fact, plenty of things going on in the world people should get mad about, or that they should worry about. Some people think that's climate change, some people think that's migration, some people think that's rising fascism, some people think that's Mamdami opening grocery stores. The fundamental problem people have is when other people get mad about stuff they like. That's the "fear", "anger", "hate." People who get mad about the things I like are obviously just irrational, emotionally driven puppets of The Algorithm whereas I am Englightened, Rational, and came to my opinions only through Reason and Logic.

What people don't like is huge masses of people coming together and having opinions that counter our modern mainstream elite consensus. Because elites are generally pretty smart that means a lot of these opinions are, frankly, dumb. Some of them simply represent different values (pro vs anti immigration, as one example.) Both are considered intolerable.

It is also perfectly true that people spend lots of time on non-politicized content. Baby videos, cat videos, feel-good human interest stories, all sorts of positive stuff is also massively popular on these platforms. That gets ignored in favor of inveighing for tight control over the political discourse because social media spreads crimethink.

The Western democratic ideal is that you have to convince the masses you're right - a disturbingly large portion of the movers and shakers have decided that instead, we should control what the masses are allowed to say and know, so we don't have to fight those battles.

If the rise of fascism and hate is due to people being able to talk to each other on Facebook with insufficient censorship, it seems your actual problem is the system of governance that gives everyone a right to vote, even if they do it based on some nonsense they read online.

Speaking for GP, I want to have both a reasonable legal system and safe, clean drinking water.

We can have both, and the former precludes the idea that plaintiffs and judges can simply invent new fundamental rights that require enormous sums of money and labor to implement without any democratically designed framework because they're a good idea.

We have a route to do this, it's legislation and regulation. Note that in this particular case, while these things did not work perfectly - the Jackson water system had a lot of well-reported problems, and the lawsuit was filed in response to that - there's been hundreds of millions poured into remediating the problem. It is not simply being "ignored". People are not doing "nothing." The EPA, MSDH, and Jackson authorities have been working on the problem, not ignoring it because it's not a Constitutional right. In late 2025 the work resulted in the Jackson water supply once again meeting Safe Drinking Water Act requirements.

Here is the latest comprehensive water quality report, on a reporting website that the DOJ, EPA, and courts forced JXN to create:

https://jxnwater.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/JXNWater-202...

You dispute that the officer was shot in the neck?

> Several people got decades in jail because the FBI successfully convinced a jury that setting off fireworks near a detention center on the 4th of july was actually detonating bombs. And that because one idiot brought a gun and shot it, they are all guilty.

The USG has a somewhat different description of events, and appears to have had video that they showed a jury.

> The defendants dressed in “black bloc”—dark clothing with head and face coverings that concealed their identities—designed to hide each individual’s identity but also to aid and abet those members engaged in illegal acts by making members indistinguishable from one another to law enforcement. Evidence introduced at trial revealed that the defendants brought eleven firearms, body armor, and eleven military-grade first aid kits with tourniquets and other items to treat gunshot wounds to the scene of the attack. [...] After ANTIFA Cell members arrived at the detention facility, they began shooting off and throwing fireworks (explosives) at the facility and vandalizing vehicles and a guard shack on Prairieland property. [...] Witnesses testified that an Alvarado police officer responded to the scene after correctional officers called 911. When the officer began issuing commands to defendant Nathan Baumann, Benjamin Song can be heard on police bodycam video yelling, “get to the rifles!” and then he opened fire on the officers, striking the Alvarado police officer in the neck as the unarmed correctional officers ducked and ran for cover.

https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/leader-antifa-cell-members-no...

Note you can see in the pictures they were definitely not just setting off fireworks "near" the detention facility, but from the camera stills its obviously intended as harassment. And "some idiot" didn't bring a gun, they were all part of a group, they brought lots of guns, and he actually shot a police officer during their "protest." Note also that the USG explicitly uses the word "fireworks", contrary to your framing.

Yeah, sorry, if you a) join a group that states it wants to overthrow the USG b) go with a bunch of members to a federal facility as part of a violent protest c) set off fireworks, vandalize everything in reach, and d) shoot a cop, you are all going to prison, and that makes perfect sense.

> Are passages about killing infidels and the other xenophobic garbage is a historical metaphorical and nuanced stuff which must be interpreted very different nowadays? Fine. But then all the other things should be also interpreted heavily - like there is no need to saran-wrap women because "the intention" or "the author's meaning" was about simply protecting them from the desert sand a-la medieval hiking handbook. There is no need to avoid specific animal meat in the age of refrigerators. And so on it goes.

I always find this mindset peculiarly baffling. From a secular perspective, we've understood since at least the 1800s that "morality" is simply the pro-social instincts that we've developed as a social species of apes, and that they are historically contingent on a million different factors for any particular group of humans, such that the exact manifestation of "morality" differs widely from culture to culture and over time. Yet comments like this invariably accept Christian moral realism as a given (and granted, it's obviously a large genealogical contributor to Western social norms today) but then sever its grounding from God and place it in...their personal feelings about right and wrong. So God using the Israelites/Babylonians/Romans/etc as his instrument of divine justice is evil "xenophobic garbage"...because divine justice is real (xenophobia is objectively evil) but the God described in religious texts actually has nothing to do with it, and actually its wrong because....uh...we say so and we're the final and ultimate arbiters of right and wrong I guess? Us, specifically, that is.

It really seems like this is the genealogical origin of the idea of "progress" you see throughout these comments as well - people are "better" now, because you can clearly see over time a large subset of people developing social norms closer and closer to our own! And unlike theirs, ours are objectively right and true, or at least closer to it. This is certainly a historically unusual view, which may have typically been rather provincial and close-minded, but which certainly did general not have this universalist, and dare I say, colonialist bent, that all must agree.

Is it possible that other anti democratic forces are working to instill the notion that the ideas of their ideological opponents are illegitimate and when voters hold those beliefs it’s only because they’re been propagandized and deceived? The idea in a democratic society a large proportion of voters cannot be trusted to make their own decisions seems extremely dangerous, and one that massively benefits centralizing authoritarian powers and oligarchs.

What about a high public salary implies corruption? If anything, it would seem to be a signal in the opposite direction - a very highly paid police officer is not out to collect bribes.

Also, is there any inherent reason why police salaries should not exceed "physician administrators, investment managers and top elected officials" and other fields the article mentions? Also noted in the article is that some of these people are working ~30 hours a week average in overtime (70 hour weeks.)