Unlike someone else who is engaging in extreme corruption and is trampling the constitution of his country completely in the open and will likely never face any repercussions.

Maybe... if someone did prosecute him this whole thing could have been avoided?

If you're talking about Orange Man Bad then he was, in fact, prosecuted, and it was a political own-goal by the Dems. Complete and total waste of time and resources for short-term political gains that never actually materialized. And it discredited the institution of impeachment forever. Well done.

> If you think only one party's members are guilty of technical crimes

Never said or implied that. No clue what you mean by "technical crimes" either.

Given that the precedent is that the president can arbitrarily decide that the country is in a permanent state of national emergency and suspend the constitution indefinitely (which is literally what happened with the tariffs) that seems quite reasonable.

Upon hearing these words, pqtyw was enlightened.

Sure, its politics but it shouldn't be a hack for the president to do whatever he wants illegally. Obviously the courts should step in and stop this. Otherwise the constitution might as well be discarded and the congress disbanded.

> s lost when ignorantly amplifying misquotes

Just barely squeezed that ad hominem in, with some plausible deniability. Nice.

In any case - I suppose it could, if one misquoted. Fortunately for me, was intentional as my version seems to reflect the gist of what you're saying: we (the people) shouldn't enforce the law when it comes to the actions of the leaders we elect.

This is untrue anywhere that has the rule of law. (One can run a system where the law is secondary to politics. But it doesn't have the benefits of rule of law.)

> To preserve the law for the common stock, we can't use law against political figures without debasing the currency of law

The entire history of the rule of law runs in the opposite direction. Prosecuting current and former politicians strengthens the rule of law. What it weakens, temporarily, is stability. You need strong institutions to take on and survive prosecuting a former politican, particularly a former head of state.

> If the will of the people can be overruled by the shrewd use of legal challenges then you have a juristocracy, not a democracy

You have a republic. Pure democracy doesn't work.

> legal system can and will be abused when it is used politically

Which is exactly what shielding politicians from prosecution causes.

The Roman Republic had this flaw. One of the perks of magistracy was immunity from prosecution. This not only encouraged corruption, it incentivised lawbreaking during office for politcal advantage and ultimately led to the downfall of the Republic when expiring politicians chose violence over losing immunity.

It is 100% false that prosecuting current and former politicians strengthens law when we're talking above a certain low threshold of corruption. In those cases, it's up to the ruling class to police its own by using the legal code against low-level political figures and officials. The Chinese Communist Party operates this way more overtly but same principle. The incentive to do so is to strengthen the legitimacy of that ruling class, not because the law says you must.

According to the Law, you and I are committing "Three Felonies a Day". If the law were en vigueur then you and I and everyone else would be prosecutable 1984-style. It's at the whim of The Prosecutor to decide whether or not to pursue. Sound good to you? Me neither. The only thing stopping that is politics. When the political will is on the side of prosecution, then there will be prosecutions. We saw this with some heavy-handedness during the early days of the GWOT, 2020, Covid, hate speech legislation, many such cases.

The point being, interpretation of laws is a point of political conflict, often very sharp-elbowed. Even in the cases where laws are unambiguously stated (rare), there's still interpretation of the evidence, which doesn't happen in a political vacuum. Who would disagree?

You don't have to look far in history to see the abuse of the legal system in politics. Watergate is a prime example. Uninformed people think Nixon committed crimes and had to go. Anyone who spends just a little time looking at the details of that episode understands it as a political coup executed using lawfare. Whatever you think of Nixon's politics, the facts support that he was taken down by the anti-communist hawks in the defense establishment, largely in consequence of his opening up China. (The reasons were anti-USSR but given that China subsequently went from an agrarian backwater to a global competitor, one could debate whether they were right for the wrong reasons.)

Impeachment as a check/balance was just recently burned in Congress as a political tool to remove a sitting president. Extremely shortsighted. Or perhaps it just exposed it as a paper tiger. I thought it was burned when it was used against Clinton but it was only singed. Now it's completely discredited and no one will take it seriously ever again. That's the effect of abusing the law for political purposes.

What happened to the Roman Republic was overdetermined, but the Senate's threatened political prosecution of Caesar is historically understood to have been a motivating factor in his "crossing the Rubicon". If they hadn't threatened him with lawfare, would the Republic have survived a little longer? Perhaps.

Everything we’re discussing is made up. That’s what social constructs like law, politics and language are.

> up to the ruling class to police its own by using the legal code against low-level political figures and officials. The Chinese Communist Party operates this way

You’re inspired by Legalism. It rejects the rule of law. It stands in conflict to the institutions of a republic, specifically, of voting.

(Also, the Chinese would execute someone for doing what Sarkozy or Trump did. Eliciting foreign interference in a domestic political contest and challenging the outcome of one with open violence. Former Presidents have been treated roughly for worse.)

> the Senate's threatened political prosecution of Caesar is historically understood to have been a motivating factor in his "crossing the Rubicon"

The Senate didn’t threaten Caesar with prosecution until after he crossed. Cato, personally, was threatening him.

> a political coup executed using lawfare

Impeachment and conviction is lawfare according to you?

> Now it's completely discredited and no one will take it seriously ever again. That's the effect of abusing the law for political purposes

It’s been “discredited” before. The teeth are in removal from office, not impeachment per se. (That’s just American civic ineptitude.)

To the extent that we’re abusing the law, you’re correct. I’ve seen serious brainstorming on how a D President can use Trump’s precedents to act swiftly ahead of Congress and the courts, for example, to accomplish policy goals that are popular but have been difficult to do precisely legally. If the President is above the law, he doesn’t need to worry about that constraint anymore.

> If they hadn't threatened him with lawfare, would the Republic have survived a little longer? Perhaps.

It did. Caesar didn’t end the Republic. That was his son, Octavius.

The point is when the Republic’s laws stopped applying to Caesar, it was effectively dead. There is no point calling for votes in that context.

We have a large number of authoritarian fascists in America. (There are also authoritarian leftists. They have not been politically empowered like the right has been.) The historic solutions to those were through law and then violence. If the law doesn’t apply, that leaves only violence. That’s civil war.

We’re not there yet. But we do need to make a concerted effort to ensure these folks are politically incapacitated while a basic civic education campaign can be completed, since basic concepts like “rule of law” isn’t taught outside the elites.

You’re citing history, ancient and modern, inaccurately to push an edgy narrative. I don’t know if you’re trolling or have been unwittingly trolled.

I don't want to digress into Ancient Roman history but it's specious to argue that Caeser was only threatened after he broke the law. That's just not a plausible reading of history. It's well-established that crossing the Rubicon was the culmination of political conflict with the Senate, not the inception. Octavian would not have been in a position to end the republic if not for his uncle.

Impeachment is lawfare, of course. It is almost by definition a political act of parties in Congress. What could be more lawfare than that? Use the courts to attack your political enemies. Removal from office in a western democracy is "mostly peaceful" but I agree that removal from office is the solution with teeth. The parent post is about prosecuting former heads of state. That's 3rd world shit. At least in the 3rd world you would do that to remove a rival. Here it just seems to be vindictive. At best a shot across the bow of Sarkozy's patrons. If that's the motivation it's at least understandable. My objection is when people are propagandized to the point of being traumatized by political fights that have zero impact on their lives.

I don't believe terms like "fascists" have any meaning in the current political discourse and immediately suspect people who use that term casually. If half the country is fascist then we've really lost the plot. Nor do I think narratives about civil war are creditable at this time. The sectarian ingredients are not present in this country. Bringing it up is an appeal to extremes to discredit the vast middle ground.

What is the curriculum of that "basic civic education" campaign you propose should be completed? Sounds ominous.

Well yes. That's certainly the case when the system is deeply corrupt and only superficially democratic. They shouldn't be above the law nor their opponents should have the power to abuse it.

Then you don't have either rule of law or, very soon, a democracy. What is obeying the outcome of an election but a legal matter? What's to stop the head of state from simply wiring the contents of the Treasury to his personal bank account? Deciding he doesn't like the official residence and having it demolished to build a palace?

Say someone is legally elected president of France. They serve their 5 years term, doing their job. They get out of Elysée Palace, draw a gun and shoot a passer by. Do they get a free pass? Wouldn't that victim deserve justice?

That person, not a divine being, a mere mortal like the rest of us, has been convicted of serious offences. He is now serving his sentence as any other person would (well, not exactly, for instance he gets a clean solo room and 24/7 security detail).

If your point is "an elected head of state should not be prosecuted by a standard court of justice" (a point I still disagree with btw), the french judicial system got that covered with "cour de justice de la république".

For offenses committed while doing their jobs. Use your elected position as president to steal money? Cour de justice de la république it is. Not a walk in the park, judges & a "jury" of members of the Parliament. Aggravating circumstances (committing an offense while in an official capacity) means theoritically harsher sentences.

What he's been convicted for was as a private citizen. Standard judicial system. As should be, nothing naïve about this.

(Huge simplification of the french judicial system, the actual nature of his current legal status, etc as this case is utterly complex. Judge's ruling is over 400 pages long, and he's appealing, and he'll mostly spend a month in the lam and the rest under house arrest)

And tell sad stories of the death of kings;

How some have been deposed; some slain in war,

Some haunted by the ghosts they have deposed;

Some poison’d by their wives: some sleeping kill’d;

All murder’d: for within the hollow crown

That rounds the mortal temples of a king

Keeps Death his court and there the antic sits,

Scoffing his state and grinning at his pomp,

Allowing him a breath, a little scene,

To monarchize, be fear’d and kill with looks,

Infusing him with self and vain conceit,

As if this flesh which walls about our life,

Were brass impregnable, and humor’d thus

Comes at the last and with a little pin

Bores through his castle wall, and farewell king!

Cover your heads and mock not flesh and blood

With solemn reverence: throw away respect,

Tradition, form and ceremonious duty,

For you have but mistook me all this while:

I live with bread like you, feel want,

Taste grief, need friends: subjected thus,

How can you say to me, I am a king?

We’ve recently moved, and our new house’s crawl space has a Santa Fe dehumidifier in it that seems SO LOUD at night. I don’t think it’s broken - it’s just a compressor and fan with no engineering put into keeping them quiet. If I could get one that was as efficient and well built, but I knew would be quiet, I’d replace it in a heartbeat - but manufacturers don’t advertise noise levels.

Surely I can’t be the only one who’d pay substantially more for an appliance that was guaranteed to be quiet?

It's super easy if you live in the European Union, thanks to the Energy Label [1] which is mandatory on every appliance.

[1] https://energy-efficient-products.ec.europa.eu/ecodesign-and...

I've never had issues with HF noise out of a refrigerator. It's always been the opposite kind of noise that has been a problem.

    “Do you think we’re going to die?”
    “No.”
    “We’re not?”
    “No.”
    “Why not?”
    “Because we’re carrying the fire.”
    “What fire?”
    “The fire inside. Goodness. That’s what we’re carrying.”

In the spirit of fairness, I found some fan favorites from /r/cormacmccarthy and if these are representative of his most powerful prose I don't know what to say:

"It was a lone tree burning on the desert. A heraldic tree that the passing storm had left afire. The solitary pilgrim drawn up before it had traveled far to be here and he knelt in the hot sand and held his numbed hands out while all about in that circle attended companies of lesser auxiliaries routed forth into the inordinate day, small owls that crouched silently and stood from foot to foot and tarantulas and solpugas and vinegarroons and the vicious mygale spiders and beaded lizards with mouths black as a chowdog's, deadly to man, and the little desert basilisks that jet blood from their eyes and the small sandvipers like seemly gods, silent and the same, in Jeda, in Babylon. A constellation of ignited eyes that edged the ring of light all bound in a precarious truce before this torch whose brightness had set back the stars in their sockets."

A "heraldic tree...left afire"? That's, er, not good. It's actually bad. And "auxiliaries routed(?) forth into the inordinate(?) day"? This is like the guy in the Community Arts writing class who gets a lot of praise but could really use an editor.

And the 'ands' are just interminable. And this and that and the other thing and one more and something totally different but also this and that. Good lord, someone give this man a period, or even a semi-colon. Here's another exemplar of a sentence that runs on more than the horses in it.

"That night he dreamt of horses in a field on a high plain where the spring rains had brought up the grass and the wild flowers out of the ground and the flowers ran all blue and yellow far as the eye could see and in the dream he was among the horses running and in the dream he himself could run with the horses and they coursed the young mares and fillies over the plain where their rich bay and their rich chestnut colors shone in the sun and the young colts ran with their dams and trampled down the flowers in a haze of pollen that hung in the sun like powdered gold and they ran he and the horses out along the high mesas where the ground resounded under their running hooves and they flowed and changed and ran and their manes and tails blew off of them like spume and there was nothing else at all in that high world and they moved all of them in a resonance that was like a music among them and they were none of them afraid horse nor colt nor mare and they ran in that resonance which is the world itself and which cannot be spoken but only praised."

"that resonance which is the world itself" is just royal purple prose.

I apologize for disliking something others like, it doesn't seem fair, but I get the feeling that Cormac McCarthy is one of those "favorites" for people who don't have a lot to compare it to. Anytime someone tells me their favorite author is Cormac McCarthy, I'm always tempted to ask, "Who's your second favorite?"

I really liked the long run on sentence about the horses you pasted in. It's lyrical and preachy, maybe a little breathless. It drones and twirls like dervish

I found it broke down In my head Into verses Alternating Between a few And several syllables each And lo! I heard it sung By Bono By Jim Morrison By Johnny Cash and David Byrne Each having His own band Accompaniment Alike unto his kind.

I can't really represent it as I experienced it. But the prose really lent itself to some of the more epic pop music in my head.

It was a minute of cinema piped directly into my mind. Quite a treat. Thank you for dereferencing them!

Having said all that, it's still a cheap shot of dopamine that leans heavily on this reader to pick and layer his own poisons for effect.

I'd dare say another reader more skilled in poetry might be able to dice it into various meters and recite to different types of music.

Werner Herzog's voice, pronunciation, and pacing are fun to use to read these

Kermit the frog? Hilarious!

But as you point out, you're bringing a lot to the equation. If all we had were Jim Morrison's lyrics they wouldn't be that interesting. He just wasn't that great of a poet compared to what's available in English poetry. Without the music it doesn't have much magic.

A more irrecoverable criticism is if something lends itself to parody. My sense is McCarthy's prose style is extremely parodyable. How could one distinguish between it and something an LLM generates? Not in the fragmentary incantatory cadence or questionable semantics. Not in the meaning, or the symbolic and metaphoric content? So where then?

"This is a good example of what I call the andelope: a breathless string of simple declarative statements linked by the conjunction 'and'. Like the 'evocative' slide-show and the Consumerland shopping-list, the andelope encourages skim-reading while keeping up the appearance of 'literary' length and complexity. But like the slide-show (and unlike the shopping-list), the andelope often clashes with the subject matter, and the unpunctuated flow of words bears no relation to the methodical meal that is being described."

On the point about punctuation, you just infer where they should be. It takes some getting used to but once you're in the rhythm and cadence of the style (& era Cormac writes about) you kinda don't notice it and pause at the natural places.

Anyway I like his stuff. Not all of it but plenty of it. One of my more favourable lines from him (Blood Meridian I think): "All progressions from a higher to a lower order are marked by ruins and mystery and a residue of nameless rage"

McCarthy has his champions among ordinary readers but he also won many "serious" awards. Which authority could satisfactorily bless his work if not the reading public and not professional critics/professors/writers?

I like McCarthy, but I also understand not liking authors that other readers love. Hillary Mantel's Wolf Hall garnered widespread acclaim, and I generally like historical fiction, but I had to give up on it after a few chapters. Sometimes an author doesn't fit with one's tastes. Trying to persuade a reader to feel differently is like trying to persuade someone who loves/hates fish how they should feel about grilled salmon.