Which claim? That Jobs was not a monster or pedophile? I'm on absolutely solid ground there.
Assuming you mean whether Jobs would intensely dislike Trump, then -- what can I say? You clearly don't know anything about the guy and that's fine. But if you doubt it, you're wrong.
We were far from personal confidantes, but I had several candid conversations with him over the decades. His personal politics were never in doubt, or far from the surface. He held a special revulsion for warmongering, dishonest, scapegoating, and authoritarian-leaning US candidates and administrations.
He was always at least a bit frustrated with US economic policy. He would abhor Trump for all of the above reasons and more.
If memory serves, the trial was covered in a sidebar in _Pen Computing Magazine_ as well as _The Marine Corps Times_, and the whole thing was discussed on comp.sys.newton a bit, with SJ not wanting to be a defense contractor being put forward as one reason among many (not profitable, not working well, bad publicity ("Eat up Martha"), pet project of Sculley, &c.)
Germany is free to exit NATO and close Ramstein. I believe it only requires a 1-2 year notice period.
The defense budget required to operate without US assistance is another matter entirely; you’re looking at doubling existing spending, plus hundreds of billions in one-off procurement costs — and that assumes ongoing access to US weapons systems.
The US subsidizes the massive weapons development programs you currently rely on; cost sharing agreements and unit purchases do not come close to offsetting the full sunk R&D costs the US covers.
Replacing those weapons programs, and the existing US industrial base and supply chain they depend on, would run into the trillions of dollars.
Just the R&D portion of the US defense budget is $150B a year — the entire EU’s aggregate defense R&D spending is only ~€15B/year.
A truly independent EU that did not depend on the US for its security would be a very different place.
Hitler was literally banned from public speaking for two years.
The Nazis came to power through widespread normalized political violence, not speech, and banning Hitler from speaking did nothing but further undermine the legitimacy of the government’s mandate to rule.
The point was how they gained absolute power, and I would also say that there were multiple factors at work, and I doubt that the GP meant that “abusing free speech” was the only method or reason, but was it not a factor at all? There is often so much “not this but that”, folks should consider “both-and”.
When the Enabling Act was deliberated and passed, giving Hitler effectively absolute power, Sturmabteilung paramilitary members were positioned both inside and outside the chamber.
That period of history was fraught with political violence enacted by people who claimed a moral imperative to curtail the freedoms of others.
The law might be a bad one (and probably is) but on balance better that police investigate suspected illegality than don’t. Overall I’d rather be somewhere where even a former royal can be arrested than somewhere the rule of law is optional.
>"[...] But we should claim the right to suppress them [intolerant ideologies] if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols."
The paradox of tolerance is not about censoring others. If anything, censorship lands on the side of the intolerant of this paradox.
It was explicitly an attempt to influence Pence or congress to not certify the election results, attempting to allow Trump to use his fake electors to change the results in his favor.
It was a naked attempt to change the outcome of the election. What are you not understanding about this?
In 2016 there was an organized, and partially successful, effort to get 37 electoral voters to change their electoral vote to somebody other than whom they were pledged to vote - Trump. It was intended to change the result of the election by forcing a "contingent election", in which the House of Representatives would determine the President, owing to the esoteric nuances of US electoral law.
Would you consider this an insurrection? In your terms it was "a naked attempt to change the outcome of the election."
Calling it partially successful when Clinton lost more electoral votes to faithless electors than Trump did and it had zero impact on the outcome of the election is interesting.
But no, because electors deciding how they cast their votes is a matter of state legislation, not federal, and it is a wildly different thing than the candidate himself trying to install fake electors.
The faithless electors were chosen as part of the political process, and the founders expressly stated that the electors having the freedom to cast their vote was part of the safeguard against mob rule by an uninformed electorate. Hamilton, for example, wrote extensively of this in the federalist papers. This is explicitly one of the reasons why we have the electoral college at all, instead of a popular vote. If anything, I wish they had had the foresight to codify it in the Constitution or Bill of Rights so that states could not prevent it from happening. They wrote extensively of what they wanted the EC to be but did not do enough to make reality match their expectations in a durable manner.
Meanwhile Trump explicitly worked to install a group of illegally selected electors while riling up a mob to attempt to put a halt to the certification.
Trying to compare electors casting their vote based on how the founding fathers envisioned the electoral college as working to a sitting president being involved in a coordinated effort to create and install fake electors, cause the certification of the election to fail by inciting a mob to storm the capitol, and oh, telling Georgia to "find me the votes" is absurd.
It doesn't matter the margin by which Clinton lost. The point of trying to turn the electors is that the US constitution requires a candidate receive a majority of electoral votes. If nobody does, then the House of Representatives gets to determine who becomes President. And they came far closer to overturning the election than some guys rioting around the Capitol did, since there was a viable path towards the goal.
Your perception of the electoral college is somewhat biased. The college itself serves a practical purpose - elections in the US are extremely decentralized by design. States can do pretty much whatever they want, only later constrained by various constitutional amendments. So when a state A gives you a number, that number does not necessarily mean the same thing as when state B does the same. The electoral college normalizes election results by requiring each state to convert their numbers into a common format. And instead of relying on the Federal government trying to deal with millions of votes, it's only 538.
Similarly, the scheme in support of Trump was not only not illegal, but even anticipated by the electoral count act which made it such that if the House/Senate disagreed with votes included or excluded by the Vice President, then they were free to overrule it by a simple majority vote. The VP's role was then later changed to a purely ceremonial one in a new law passed in 2022, largely to prevent this angle in the future.
And you're still trying to compare mechanisms that exist within the system and are codified with someone attempting to operate entirely outside of it. And no, they weren't far closer at achieving their goal - they didn't get anywhere near the number of required faithless electors and were never going to get anywhere near the required number of faithless electors. Meanwhile, attempting to delay or totally obstruct the certification allowed for several pathways that Trump and his team viewed as potentially viable. Hell, just convincing Raffensperger to do what Trump wanted him to do would have also gotten him most of the way there.
And yes, obviously part of the point of the EC is dealing with a smaller number of votes instead of every vote. None of that is a counterargument to what I said. Again, the founding fathers literally wrote about how faithless electors were a feature and not a bug in their eyes. There's a reason they had the 'Hamilton Electors' moniker.
What would you say is somebody operating entirely outside the system? When the system specifically included text for dealing with a controversy on how the VP counts the votes, it's rather literally within the system. And that was their big Hail Mary. Trump probably envisioned the Capitol being surrounded by thousands of protesters just chanting or whatnot to encourage Pence to do it.
He certainly would have foreseen at least some shenanigans, but that was probably unavoidable. And the protestors and rioters could have been trivially dispersed at any moment by the Capitol Police which not only has a force of thousands, but even has heavy equipment and gear enabling them to respond to even extreme things like an aerial attack on the Capitol. Instead they deployed a tiny fraction of their force with minimal equipment, and just watched things unfold, all while Twitter actively censored Trump saying things like:
- "Please support our Capitol Police and Law Enforcement. They are truly on the side of our Country. Stay peaceful!"
- "I am asking for everyone at the U.S. Capitol to remain peaceful. No violence! Remember, WE are the Party of Law & Order – respect the Law and our great men and women in Blue. Thank you!"
As for the Electoral College, I am saying that you're taking a fringe view that was indeed genuinely held, but then inappropriately broadly applying it. Hamilton absolutely had a streak of authoritarian elitism in him. And so speaking of the Founding Fathers as a whole, on an issue like this, is not reasonable. Hamilton was highly divisive, and managed to push away just everybody - even those also more in favor of a Federalist system.
So if someone emailed Pence and said they would stab him if he certified the election would that be an insurrection? They are attempting to influence him to change the result of the election.
Surely the level of organization and possibility of success need to be taken into consideration? Otherwise every moron with a social media account or a sign could be guilty of insurrection.
Congresspeople either intimidated or emboldened into rejecting some or all of the state electors to annul the actual electoral result and declare Trump the 46th president. We know this was the outcome Donald Trump's wanted because he said so several times.
I assume the individuals that brought zip ties had more specific plans for the elected officials they didn't approve of.
It wasn't a well-planned insurrection but neither was Yong Suk Yeol's
Not doing anything and preserving maximum agency is an entirely valid choice.
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