Good faith negotiations simply weren’t going to happen after Trump cancelled the deal that was in place an assassinated Iran’s top general in his first term. This war was pretty much inevitable at that point.
Maybe if Harris were President and Trump were in jail trust could’ve been rebuilt and the war could’ve been avoided. Oops… I forgot I was on the “both sides are the same” website, nevermind LOL
The beatings will continue until morale improves.
Uh… they tried that already?
Do you think the Ayatollah was installed by the US?
For sure. It seems the thinking is the Iranian people might rise up and overthrow the regime. But that’s just throwing a dice and hoping for the best. A month ago that could have happened, but the regime has already machine gunned down so many people and executed so many more, that is that going to happen now? A lot of things would have to line up for that kind of thing to work and it’s impossible to make a movement among a population work like a military operation.
Something that seems to have gotten lost in this is the fact that Iran was enriching uranium. The Uranium Iran gets from Russia is already enriched by Russia to the level suitable to be used in their nuclear reactor. People seem to discount the Uranium enrichment as propaganda (because of the lies of W Bush) but this is science. They were enriching Uranium to 60%, if they continued you’d be in a situation where a country that calls the US “the Great Satan” and has officially said they want to “wipe Israel off the map” could have nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them.
All things considered, it would have been best to have continued the agreement Obama made with Iran. The reports from IAEA indicated they were abiding by that agreement. But Trump cancelled that in his first term, which made this war all but inevitable. There is truth to the statement that we can’t have a fundamentalist regime whose goal is to be an existential threat to other counties be in the possession of nuclear weapons. What Trump doesn’t say is he cancelled the agreement that was preventing that before. Iran was unlikely to sign onto a new agreement (at least not in good faith) after Trump cancelled the old one and assassinated their top general. Trump did all of the acts of war in his first term, and only now is having the actual war.
Given the mess Trump created in hist first term, he painted himself into a corner and this war was the most likely outcome. So now there’s nothing to do but wait and see what happens next. I hope for the best for the Iranian people even though it would be a big political win for Trump if it does work out.
We should also remember the many many many innocents killed by the monster that now lays dead.
You say “if the king oversteps” and my point about law and norms and all that is that they shape perception about whether a particular thing is overstepping.
You mentioned before that most people don’t even know about these things. Why is that? Because the norm is the King does as the Parliament wants.
I think you have a very idealistic understanding of what we call democracy these days…if a 60/40 split happened like I talked about earlier came up, you think there would be mass mobilization?
This is what I mean about the people having a strong will. If they do, then yes. If the don’t then we lose democracy.
Again I go back to the example of the US. Them being a republic makes no difference. If the people don’t have the will to stand up to a tyrant, then there will be tyranny.
A crisis doesn’t occur without a context…it would be about something, and certainly something that one side thinks it can win on. I think you imagine any constitutional crisis would be immediately and unanimously handled in a democratic manner by everyone involved, no matter their interest in the underlying matter that lead to the crisis…we’d just all be on-side and do the right thing…I think that is extraordinarily naive!
Sure, but what does the existence of the monarchy have to do with any of that? Trump is a continuous constitutional crisis, doesn’t seem like eliminating the monarchy prevents any of that happening. If anything having a monarch makes it more obvious when there’s an abuse of power. Americans don’t understand that Trump is undermining their precious constitution, I suspect it has something to do with the fact that Americans know the President should have some power they just don’t know which powers he shouldn’t have. We know our head of state is supposed to only be a figurehead. It’s more obvious when someone is taking some power when they’re supposed to have none than someone show’s supposed to have some power taking more than they should.
Khamenei was a monster. It doesn’t matter how or why he’s dead. Good riddance, may he burn in hell for an eternity.
It doesn’t matter whether a monster is killed by someone with noble intentions or a monster is killed by another monster. Either way there’s one less monster in the world.
If the King overstepped, there would just be no more King.
If the King did anything in your hypotheicals, we’d just say “the King is not of sound mind” and either the King would have to abdicate, or we’d elminate the monarchy. No rational King wants to be the one to end the monarchy, and since any action by the King would result in the end of the monarchy, any action by the King would therefore is automatically considered the actions of someone not of sound mind, and therefore should be ignored. If the King didn’t abdicate due to no longer being of sound mind, we’d end the monarchy.
The population having a strong will doesn’t mean we’re going to break out a guillotine or whatever. It just means being willing to vote, protest, call your MP, etc. It means actually caring about the institution of democracy. If it came down to the King saying one thing, and the parliament saying the opposite, which would the people consider legitimate? Maybe a lawyer could argue that the King’s orders are technically legitimate, but if people care about democracy, they can just ignore the legalisms. That’s how it goes in a constitutional crisis.
Sorry to be the one to tell you this, but it’s not lawyers that protect us from tyrants. It’s just having an educated population that won’t accept tyranny. Americans, are accepting of tyranny, so they’re descending into tyranny. There’s nothing lawyers can do to stop it, because the lawyers on the Supreme court, the lawyers in the DOJ, and the laywers in the GOP are going along with it. The law doesn’t prevent tyranny it’s people not willing to go along with tyranny that prevents it.
We have a King and we won’t go along with the King’s commands unless they come from parliament. We’re aware of the King we know who he is, we know what to watch for. Americans didn’t have a King, but they made their President into a Kings. Most of them don’t even know it happened because they didn’t know what to look out for. They know the President has power, but don’t know which powers he should and shouldn’t have.
We have a King and we know what power he should have: none.
People upset about the monarchy don’t have any real problems in their lives.
Congrats, you must have a real easy life if you’re doing the revolutionary cosplay thing over the fucking monarchy LOL.
The King-Byng affair was in a different time when the Governor General was someone from the UK. So British person overruling the Canadian Prime Minister was a big part of the controversy there.
Now that the Governor General is Canadian it’s kind of a nothing burger. A ceremonial position appointed by the PM. The Julie Payette situation was the only time there’s been any potential for anyone outside of the country might have to do something and that would’ve only been if Trudeau asked the Queen to fire her. But it didn’t come to that so whatever.
You’re a lawyer so you’re going to have a tendency to think about hypotheticals about things that aren’t codified into law. But right now we’re all witnessing the US that has all kinds of protections against these kinds of hypotheticals just ignore those laws. Hypothetically a US President couldn’t abuse power and be completely corrupt because he’d be impeached. The laws say so. But that isn’t happening.
It’s obvious now that the only protection against tyranny is the will of the people. If the King abused his position, we would remove the King from power. Unless we lacked the will to do that. If the King knows he’d be removed from his position if he abuses that position he won’t abuse his position since he doesn’t want to be the guy that ends the monarchy. Right now, no one in the US is being prosecuted for Epstein stuff despite their laws. The brother of the King is being prosecuted.
We see a republic where there’s basically an aristocracy that’s above the law and we see a monarchy where the King’s brother is being prosecuted. As a lawyer do you think evidence from the real world is stronger than hypotheticals?
Seems to me it doesn’t really matter what you put into the laws, if the will of the population is weak, the law will be ignored. In the end you have no choice but to trust the people when these hypotheticals arise.
Authoritarian forms of government will be unstable when there’s no clear line of succession. It’s the reason why monarchies come about. It’s not like people don’t understand that it’s extremely arbitrary, it’s just that it’s better than the alternative: civil wars whenever whoever is in power dies. It’s an agreement among various lords that it’s better they just accept that person over there that’s the son of the King will someday be King rather than having a civil war when the King dies.
And sure civil wars would still happen, but most of the time the succession would happen without bloodshed. When there’s no line of succession, it’s just constant power struggles when the leader dies.
Of course democracy is a far better way to determine who will run things, but that requires a literate population to work. Which didn’t exist throughout much of human history. Sure, there were republics throughout history, but they’d usually become monarchies when the illiterate masses would decide they liked that Julius guy (he threw the best parties!) and hated that Brutus guy who killed him, even if the Julius guy was becoming a tyrant.
So monarchies suck, but they’re better than civil wars. So when the population becomes too dumb, it sucks, but it’s better than the alternatives.
A lot of people have a tendency to want to show loyalty to their country by showing subservience to some rich arrogant asshole that surrounds themselves with gold. See the how a significant percentage of the US population think of Trump for example.
If there is no King the subservient portion of the population will create one. It’s better to have a King that doesn’t have any actual power so that won’t happen. The subservient part of the population don’t really care that their King has no political power, they just want to bow to someone to prove their loyalty to the country and see some pomp and pageantry. For a lot of people the concept of a country is too abstract to understand so they need some person to do all kinds the ceremonial stuff so they can express their loyalty to the country by showing loyalty to that person.
Similar to how having a separation between government and religion, it’s a separation between government and all the ceremonial pomp and pageantry stuff.
Sure, I wouldn’t directly care if there was monarchy was eliminated, but a lot of other people would. And those people would start voting in some wealthy asshole to rule over us like a king. And that’s something I definitely don’t want. So just give the subservient types someone they can bow to so it doesn’t impact the rest of us.
Microsoft is currently pushing everyone to use office on the cloud, so they kinda are making office work on Linux (in a web browser).
Outlook running natively on windows is currently being phased out, Of course the cloud services version of outlook sucks eve more than the native version, and that’s saying something. It looks like it’s just hotmail to me. But that’s what they’re pushing everyone to. I wouldn’t be surprised if the start phasing out other office products running natively in the coming years. Office already does everything it can to save files to one drive.
Cloud services are making them money, so much like how they’re putting AI into everything, they also seem to want to put everything on the cloud because… more cloud money! After all you can’t just continue to use the older version of excel installed on your computer when excel exists in the cloud. You’ll have to pay a subscription to continue using their software because it lives in the cloud.
Yeah your strategy would make sense if Microsoft were still the machiavellian schemers they used to be. But now they just seem to be chasing after money in the short term in whatever looks to be growing (cloud services and AI) with no real long term strategy at all. And they really really want people to pay a subscription to use their software. But in their greed they just might kill their Windows business.
Yeah but did those scientists ever point the James Webb Telescope at that creepy house at the end of my street?
Sodium Ion is a real game changer. But I doubt it will compete with Lithium Ion on energy density anytime soon.
But that’s not necessary to make major changes in the power grid. Solar and wind is already cheapest form of energy generation even considering the expense of Lithium to store the energy when renewables aren’t generating. If you’re just installing stationary battery banks, you don’t care that much about the energy density as you would for a battery in a car or phone. Set up banks of cheap sodium ion batteries strategically and not only do you have plenty of power stored for when it’s not sunny or windy, you may avoid widespread power outages when power lines are downed.
Removed by mod
If Cuba were a democracy then sure. But it’s not. So it’s authoritarian vs. authoritarian. No matter what you do, you’re helping an authoritarian asshole.
Al Capone didn’t go to prison for murder, he went to prison for tax evasion. Do you think it was because Elliot Ness just didn’t care about murder?
Laws are needed for a civilized society. but civilization is a safe area we’ve created for ourselves in a dangerous jungle. When we step outside of our civilization we’re in a lawless place and we’re just surviving based on or abilities and judgement. There’s no legal way to eliminate the jungle, it will always be there. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t bother to have nice things when living in our civilized society.
A lot of these hypotheticals and real world scenarios are just people going out from civilized behaviour to the edge of the jungle. Whether it’s a King making commands or a President ignoring the court, these are things that shouldn’t be done based on the norms and laws of our civilization. So we’re in jungle rules, we have to figure out how to deal with the problem based on just our abilities and out judgement.
Parliament would know. Their job is to represent the will of the people. If the GG or King weren’t doing as they were told by Parliament, the PM has able opportunity to say to the country “that’s not what I wanted them to say.”
There were 50 MLAs that voted against that. How would the LG be able to do this quietly without the 50 people that voted against it knowing about it? When legislation gets royal assent, it’s done so publicly. Someone reads it out in Parliament and the Governor gives it a nod. It’s all a formality really, but who would be the person in parliament reading out legislation that didn’t pass to a Governor in the first place? You’d have to have the Parliament’s Clerks in on the scheme and not have them leak it to the the representatives, And they would be fired if caught doing any of this. Laws obviously have to be published so people like your self can use them in court. How would a GG, LG, or the King himself be able to do something without the elected representatives who voted against it knowing about it?
There’s a lot of process and ceremony involved in this: https://www.ourcommons.ca/procedure/our-procedure/LegislativeProcess/c_g_legislativeprocess-e.html How would you slip some secret laws through all of that process?
And I think you have it backwards. If something like this were to happen, there would be no more King. Even if the King were to force laws to come into being somehow (don’t know how it would happen, so it wouldn’t be the normal process, therefore very obvious) people would know and either the King would have to undo the action and abdicate or we’d just cease to be a monarchy. We’d be in the jungle and we’d be acting on our abilities and judgement.