Supreme Court... declares homeless people not protected from cruel and unusual punishment
As far as I can tell, this is a pretty significant misrepresentation of the ruling.
Johnson v. Grants Pass is a court case originally filed in 2018 that determined it is cruel and unusual punishment to arrest or ticket people for sleeping outside when they have no other safe place to go. The case started in Grants Pass, Oregon when the city began issuing tickets to people sleeping in public, even when there were not enough safe, accessible shelter beds.
The ruling from a lower court was that ticketing people for sleeping outside when they have no access to shelter constitutes cruel and unusual punishment, which the federal constitution prohibits. It looks like the Supreme Court decided took the opposite stance: that ticketing homeless people when there's no shelter available is not cruel and unusual punishment.
This is nowhere near a blanket ruling that "homeless people are not protected from cruel and unusual punishment." A comparison would be if a lower court said exposed toilets in jails constituted cruel and unusual punishment and the Supreme Court reversed. That's not saying prisoners can now be subjected to cruel and unusual punishment of any kind. It's saying that specific practice -- providing only exposed toilets in jail cells -- is not within the definition of cruel and unusual punishment.
This is obviously a bad ruling, but it is not anywhere near as bad as the headline claims. I don't think we do ourselves any favors overstating the severity of issues -- it's The Boy Who Cried Wolf, and the situation is bad enough that the actual facts are all we need.
they want to win but the tools they could use to win are "out of bounds"
Makes complete sense. Medicare for All is incredibly popular, and a serious push for it would win a lot of votes, but they can't do it because it's not friendly to capital.
By the time the fix was in there was nothing that could be done. Spiking the election by running as an independent would have kneecapped the growing leftist sentiment we've seen since. Not every situation has a winning move.
There are too many minor players with career aspirations on the line for "losing on purpose" to make any sense. What we're seeing is:
Obama got Rat Boy and every other centrist candidate to simultaneously drop out/endorse Biden; Warren was left out of the deal so she could continue to siphon off progressive support for Bernie.
We also know:
Abandoning a position because you can't hold it usually involves lots of deaths. Similarly, moving on a position but getting pushed back seems like it would aldo be pretty costly.
I'm skeptical of 10:1, but I'm also skeptical of 1:1.
There is no word that can properly encapsulate the crime being perpetrated against all present and future life. Ecocide? Omnicide?
The priority isn't getting justice for this; the priority is stopping it. Often (and I think this is why Mao's sentiment is echoed in a bunch of other revolutionary writings) the quickest way to stop the harm is to give the perpetrators a way out. If you tell people you'll kill them whether they fight or surrender, what are they going to pick?
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