what you get here

This is not a blog which opines on current events. It rather uses incidents, books (old and new), links and papers to muse about our social endeavours.
So old posts are as good as new! And lots of useful links!

The Bucegi mountains - the range I see from the front balcony of my mountain house - are almost 120 kms from Bucharest and cannot normally be seen from the capital but some extraordinary weather conditions allowed this pic to be taken from the top of the Intercontinental Hotel in late Feb 2020

Tuesday, July 2, 2024

The US has destroyed its last claim to be a democracy

I have several times on this blog drawn attention to the falsity of claims that the US is a democracy. We now have final confirmation of that reality. 

In a 6-3 ruling, the Supreme Court of the United States has ended the fundamental principle of democracy that no one is above the law. If you are one of the people who’ve argued for a long time, the US is not a real democracy, you have the final argument you need.

In a bid to save Trump from further prosecution, the Supreme Court opened a can of worms that could have all kinds of consequences going forwards. It ruled that Trump, and other US presidents, have absolute immunity for official acts and presumptive immunity for acts that extend to the outer perimeter of their office. However, the court ruled that any non-official act could still be considered criminal.

What this means is that any violation of the law carried out by a sitting US president in his official duties cannot be prosecuted. Say, for example, a president wants to supply the bombs to a genocide, or commit a genocide themselves, that would apparently be fine because they would be acting in their official capacity.