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Suppression in Belarus

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Boydstun

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In Putin's Russia, the Arrests are Spreading Quickly and Widely

"Mr. Kolker, the physicist, entered the hospital in the Siberian city of Novosibirsk last week for treatment for late-stage cancer, so weak that he was unable to eat. The next day, agents for the Federal Security Service, or F.S.B., the successor agency to the K.G.B., arrived and, accusing him of treason, flew him to a Moscow jail. Over the weekend, he died in custody."

Edited by Boydstun
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4 hours ago, tadmjones said:

Stephen

Do you find it worrying that in all the above linked stories is a contemporary American counterpart?

Do you mean a literally corresponding counterpart or do you mean something akin to the actions of those governments that leans in the same direction?

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Not a one to one correspondence, but enough akin-ness for there to be some there , there.

One example , the first I thought of while looking through the linked articles , was Roger Stone's arrest by the FBI . And yes the difference maybe that Putin wields more power in a person , but that the actions of the 'Federal" govt of the US toward political opponents/dissidents is strikingly similar. Stone, in this case, didn't die in custody , but the overt and highly publicized nature of his arrest serves the same/similar effect for the respective regimes. Or should 'we' be happier and stay contented in that it was more showy and less seemingly brutal?

Popular unrest in connection to 'rigged' elections, efforts to curtail opposition positions in the 'national' media , things like these and similar 'flavors' of things , are they examples of what the state always has to challenge from the public eg 'qua' state or are these 'challenges' similar in that they seem to emanate from 'populist' or 'reactionary' resentment of authoritarianism ?

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Tad, I think a tremendous advantage we have in the US is the very long tradition of democratic process under rule of a constitution concerning law-making and law-enforcing. I mean really, the fact that these ways here are so widely accepted by the citizens as wise. It's harder for prosecutions to happen here without due process of law under our constitution, at least in recent times. At times, vigilanteism has been a problem. German Americans were terribly persecuted during the WWI era. An uncle of my stepmother was tarred and feathered by a gang in that era (he could not speak English). Steinbeck writes about it, as adolescent persecutors, in his own family history within East of Eden. I have been able to dig into old newspapers online of violence against American Black people in the '20's and '30's in the South and in the "Little Dixie" area of my birth state of Oklahoma. It seemed as if no allegation that a White woman had been unwillingly touched or had been raped, but what a Black man would be accused pretty quick out of thin air. I saw one case in OK in which an accused Black man in custody in such a case was gotten out of the custody of the law and lynched. The law was not always in collusion, thank goodness. At least in that case, a couple of the men who took the law into their own hands were tried and executed.

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MAGA is equivalent to the Belarusian diaspora and the liberal democratic regime of the permanent state in the US government , disrupted only by the Trump administration in the past few decades , is equivalent to Belarus regime. 
It is so obvious it is comical , was this posting meant to be ironic?

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Posted (edited)
15 hours ago, Boydstun said:

Tad, that post is only an update addition to the information in this thread and a review of the history (when you scroll down in that link). I think you need to get in mind a wider and longer view of diasporas (black Americans and young men drafted during the American war in Vietnam) within the US and from the US to Canada and raise concern over the actual, physical, life-or-death concretes as in sharp distinction to the metaphorical and the myth-making of politicians du jour.

Sell everything for tickets, get your family on the Katy, and get out.

Exodus to Canada

Edited by Boydstun
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I am curious about this notion of a “permanent government” in the US. Now we know that Lukashenko has been the absolute ruler of Belarus ever since it separated from the Soviet Union, Putin been has ruler of Russia de jure or de facto since 1999. Many African nations have been ruled by single absolute rulers for decades, e.g. Equatorial Guinea, China is controlled by a de facto permanent ruler. Iran and Burma are essentially run by permanent councils / juntas with an irrelevant figurehead. In the US, OTOH, we change president relatively often, and Congressmen individually last about 4 terms in the House and 2 terms in the Senate though there are individuals who last for decades. Of course, the federal appellate judicature is composed of life appointees.

Clearly, this permanent government of which you speak isn’t composed of the executive, legislative or, realistically the judiciary. What I’d like to know is, what or who is this permanent government in the US? I suppose you might be talking of career military and civil service employees. In what sense to the various park rangers, TSA agents, clerks in the bureaucracy, embassy grunts and so on constitute a government? And if you aren’t speaking of the clerks and cops, who are you speaking of? In what was was this supposed government “disrupted” by Trump (and how was that disruption not exactly the same as the “disruption” created by the Carter-Reagan, Bush-Clinton, Clinton, Bush, Bush-Obama or Trump-Biden transitions)? Is this government distinct from the shadow world government run by the Illuminati?

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The Dept of Interior, the Dept of Homeland Security, the Dept of State , the War dept, er sorry the Dept of Defense in the US are under direct civilian control via popular election of officials, my bad. The Illuminati , weren't(aren't) they dissidents? , they can't' run' things , lol.

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22 hours ago, DavidOdden said:

Clearly, this permanent government of which you speak isn’t composed of the executive, legislative or, realistically the judiciary. What I’d like to know is, what or who is this permanent government in the US? I suppose you might be talking of career military and civil service employees. In what sense to the various park rangers, TSA agents, clerks in the bureaucracy, embassy grunts and so on constitute a government?

The US now has the largest government ever in world history.

The White House, the Congress, and the Supreme Court together make up less than 1% of it.

Although there are millions of low-level "grunts," the people at the cabinet-level and just below that probably each have more power than any single Senator or Representative, even under normal circumstances, and right now they probably have much more power. Unchecked, unaccountable power. And some of these people each have annual budgets larger than any one billionaire could accumulate over his lifetime.

If you want some particular evidence you can see where Mayorkas told a House panel that they weren't showing him the proper respect. I'm sure that's how all the cabinet-level people feel. (The House has decided to impeach Mayorkas but I don't think the Senate will go along with it.)

We don't really have a President right now, he's too busy drooling or eating ice cream or shaking hands with people who aren't there, so of course the cabinet-level people are running things, and the President probably does whatever they want him to, which is just the kind of President they prefer to have.

Edited by necrovore
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28 minutes ago, necrovore said:

The US now has the largest government ever in world history.

First: do you have a factual basis for that claim (I assume you're not just intuiting what you think reality is) – gimme a number, and what nation has the second largest government? Second, are you claiming that the fact of having many government employees establishes that we have a "permanent government"? As far as I can see, this is just a right-wing meme, the counterpart of the left-wing meme "The Man". Every nation has some substantial set of employees which doesn't get traded out every two of four years. I'm just trying to understand what this invention "permanent government" even means.

Law provides checks on the power of government employees. The problem is not with employee tenure or the fact that federal janitors are un-elected, it is the scope of government in the first place. It is the minimally-fettered power of a few hundred federal lawmakers to actually make those laws (and the also minimally-fettered of the various tens or hundreds of of thousands or state and municipal lawmakers to make lower-level laws), that is the source of "the problem".

Evidence is strong that Mayorkas is not part of some permanent government: he was first appointed 3 years ago, and at most could serve another 5 years. It seems to me that the word "permanent" in this meme "permanent government" is redundant, people just mean "the government", though specifically "the government that I disagree with".

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51 minutes ago, DavidOdden said:

First: do you have a factual basis for that claim (I assume you're not just intuiting what you think reality is) – gimme a number, and what nation has the second largest government?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_government_budget

$6.4 trillion dollars for the US. The runner up is China at $3.9 trillion dollars (based on currency exchange rate).

And I think US spending is higher than ever, even higher than during World War Two, even adjusting for inflation. So put those two facts together.

51 minutes ago, DavidOdden said:

Law provides checks on the power of government employees.

In theory but not necessarily in practice. Who is in charge of enforcing these laws? Who watches the watchers?

51 minutes ago, DavidOdden said:

The problem is ... the scope of government in the first place.

Agreed. (This is why I think calls for "term limits" are missing the point.)

51 minutes ago, DavidOdden said:

Evidence is strong that Mayorkas is not part of some permanent government: he was first appointed 3 years ago, and at most could serve another 5 years.

That's not what "permanent government" really means.

Individual bureaucrats shift around from job to job, and also sometimes they rotate between working for the government and working in the private sector (like helping companies with "compliance"), but that doesn't change anything much. They all have roughly the same opinions about The Way Things Should Be Done (which naturally includes the present and increasing scope of government), and they get into positions to enforce those opinions.

These are largely people whose careers keep them in the government or pretty close to it, and in positions of power and influence, at all times.

Edited by necrovore
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Okay, so your metric of government size is in terms of absolute dollars spent. I submit, then, that your use of the word “now” is less accurate than the alternative expression “for a very long time”, though the Wiki data only goes back 10 years.

 

2 hours ago, necrovore said:

In theory but not necessarily in practice. Who is in charge of enforcing these laws? Who watches the watchers?

Let’s take a simpler case: who is in charge of enforcing laws against murder or theft? There is not a single answer (even setting aside the jurisdiction matter). The police may actually implement force to arrest and detain a suspect, but the individual officer does so by following objective procedural rules spelled out by their superior (the chief of police). The chief of police is (usually) appointed by the elected mayor, though a sheriff may be elected. Apart from arrest power, there is prosecution power, which is held by a different government employee, perhaps a hired city attorney (subordinate to the mayor) or an elected prosecuting attorney. Actual enforcement is the product of a further step, a trial which involves a cabal of civilians who decide certain facts, lawyers who make arguments, and judges who procedurally oversee the interaction between lawyers + witnesses and jurors. The judge may be appointed or elected, depending on level. At the state level, higher level judges (justices) tend to be elected and trial judges tend to be appointed by a cabal of superiors). Ultimately a judge gets to decide what the law says regarding the force to be used in a case, and other judges above him get to decide whether he has correctly applied the law. If upheld, the judge orders another agency to use force (for example haul his ass to prison and keep him there for 10 years). In short, what is enforcement.

In no system of government is there a guaranteed mechanism for compliance with the law. In the US system, any person who has been wronged can appeal to the judicial system, and you can have your day (week, month) in court. The courts fail not because the courts are corrupt and unsupervised dispensers of justice, but because the elected creators of law are on average unprincipled evil bastards, which is because they are elected by a popularity contest that has no discernible relationship to a real political issue. The media will be happy to declare some spurious cause-effect relation so that if the Republicans lose a few seats and the Democrats win a majority in the three elected federal sub-parts, where will be plenty of post hoc analysis lacking any rational basis in reality. At most it will amount to the emotional reaction “I hate Trump”. Or, “I hate Biden”. (Admittedly, Trump stepped out in a surprising way last time with his “Build the wall” promise, I don’t expect to see any concrete issues in House and Senate races, recalling that it is the House and Senate that write the laws and POTUS that enforces them).

At the federal level, the “watcher” is POTUS, who is empowered to command enforcement of the law. The voters are the watchers of the watcher, and generally speaking I don’t think that those higher-order watchers are doing a very good job (they have no idea what the watcher- and commander-in-chief is actually ordering to be done). POTUS commands a secretary to enforce a particular law in a specific way, you get to comment on the announced plan for enforcement, if you’d like. The real problem with law enforcement at the federal level is the interpretive deference rule known as “Chevron deference” which holds that the governments interpretation of the law is presumed to be correct, unless it is plainly incorrect. It remains to be seen, and not soon enough, what if anything will remain of that doctrine.

I still don’t understand that this notion of a “permanent government” refers to. Dollars spent? Number of employees? Subjective law?

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On 3/2/2024 at 11:17 AM, tadmjones said:

MAGA is equivalent to the Belarusian diaspora and the liberal democratic regime of the permanent state in the US government , disrupted only by the Trump administration in the past few decades , is equivalent to Belarus regime. 

The US government has a lot wrong with it, but it is much more rights-respecting than the Belarus regime.  They are not equivalent.

MAGA consists of people who have let the lying demagogue Trump stir up their emotions to dangerous levels.

 

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33 minutes ago, DavidOdden said:

Let’s take a simpler case: who is in charge of enforcing laws against murder or theft?

A true power-luster wouldn't be satisfied with catching murderers and thieves.

33 minutes ago, DavidOdden said:

The courts fail not because the courts are corrupt and unsupervised dispensers of justice, but because the elected creators of law are on average unprincipled evil bastards, which is because they are elected by a popularity contest that has no discernible relationship to a real political issue.

A lot of is is that Congress doesn't really write laws that say "such and such behavior shall be illegal" anymore; instead nowadays they write laws to create an agency which will have such-and-such purpose and have such-and-such budget. The head of such an agency will end up with a great deal of discretionary power because they can write pretty much whatever regulations they want as long as they can plausibly claim that the regulations are intended to have the goals Congress has decided for that agency.

With legislation like that, how could a Deep State not form?

33 minutes ago, DavidOdden said:

The real problem with law enforcement at the federal level is the interpretive deference rule known as “Chevron deference” which holds that the governments interpretation of the law is presumed to be correct, unless it is plainly incorrect. It remains to be seen, and not soon enough, what if anything will remain of that doctrine.

The "Chevron deference" is part of the problem, but the real problem is that a law that merely lists the purposes of the agency and doesn't itself clearly list what behaviors are allowed to the citizenry and what are prohibited, should be held as unconstitutionally vague.

In some ways Congress is delegating its power to the agency, and that is also a problem because it violates the separation of powers (because the same agency is part of the executive branch, and therefore writes the regulations and enforces them, and some agencies even have their own special courts, too). This is how you get an unlimited, unaccountable government.

33 minutes ago, DavidOdden said:

I still don’t understand that this notion of a “permanent government” refers to. Dollars spent? Number of employees? Subjective law?

Some government agencies have been around for decades. They have become "permanent" in the sense that they are difficult to get rid of. They exercise government power, they have very little oversight, and what oversight they do have is very slow and not always effective. They have identities as institutions (and an identity and culture as a group of institutions) even if the individuals in them change roles every now and then.

Edited by necrovore
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