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speedyboris Since: Feb, 2010
#278851: Apr 26th 2019 at 7:34:26 AM

The life expectancy wasn't as long back in the 1700s either. A "lifetime appointment" might not have seemed so bad back then.

NativeJovian Jupiterian Local from Orlando, FL Since: Mar, 2014 Relationship Status: Maxing my social links
Jupiterian Local
#278852: Apr 26th 2019 at 7:40:14 AM

Yeah, the idea behind lifetime appointments is to make the judiciary independent — they don't have to worry about keeping anyone else happy, so they can (in theory) make unpopular-but-principled rulings without facing political consequences. You can still impeach them if they do anything really bad, but it's hard to drum up support for impeachment over "they made rulings I don't like".

The down side to this is that the timing for when new justices need to be appointed is (at best) random or (at worst) can be manipulated by the justices themselves deciding to retire when they think the president at the time will appoint a replacement that they (the justice) approves of — which is not how the system is supposed to work.

Personally, I think that the best solution is to move away from lifetime appointments in favor of fixed terms of 20 years or so. With nine justices, you could do 18 year terms and have one justice replaced every two years (two per presidential term), which seems about the sweet spot to me. You'd have to include some rules for what happens if a justice leaves before their term is up, but the idea is to keep it consistent so that one president can't completely reshape the court by appointing a bunch of justices and then the next president doesn't get to make any appointments at all.

Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.
Fighteer Lost in Space from The Time Vortex (Time Abyss) Relationship Status: TV Tropes ruined my love life
Lost in Space
#278853: Apr 26th 2019 at 7:40:24 AM

[up][up]Eh, that's not quite as true as people think it is: infant and child mortality were the primary factors driving down average lifespans before the advent of modern medicine. People could still live as long then as they do today if they remained in good health overall. That's a different and off-topic conversation, though.

Edited by Fighteer on Apr 26th 2019 at 10:40:35 AM

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
TobiasDrake (•̀⤙•́) (Edited uphill both ways) Relationship Status: Arm chopping is not a love language!
(•̀⤙•́)
#278854: Apr 26th 2019 at 7:42:31 AM

I don't think the Founding Fathers really thought too hard about balancing the Supreme Court. I say this because there are zero eligibility requirements for nomination.

None. There are no restrictions for age, for experience, for education. You don't even need to have a law degree. Or be an American citizen. The only check and balance on who becomes a Justice is the requirement that the President nominates and Senate approves; the Founding Fathers assumed that, in and of itself, would be sufficient to ensure a high quality of professionals.

Air Bud can be a Supreme Court Justice. There literally is no rule that says a dog cannot serve as a Justice in the highest court of our nation.

In fact, Chinese Knock-Off Air Bud who has never set paw in the United States can be a Supreme Court Justice. Shit, as long as there's a President willing to nominate and a Senate willing to confirm, we could literally turn the Supreme Court into a real-life recreation of the Dogs Playing Poker painting.

The Founding Fathers had the utmost confidence in the idea that a high standard for quality and professionalism in politicians would be perpetually self-sustaining. A lot of the problems we're having today exist because they just didn't consider the possibility that idiots and assholes might make it into seats of power.

Edited by TobiasDrake on Apr 26th 2019 at 8:46:51 AM

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wisewillow She/her Since: May, 2011
She/her
#278855: Apr 26th 2019 at 7:52:53 AM

Yeahhhh, fun fact, VOTING RIGHTS aren’t in the Constitution until the civil rights amendments (13th, 14th, 15th).

ShinyCottonCandy Everyone's friend Malamar from Lumiose City (4 Score & 7 Years Ago) Relationship Status: Who needs love when you have waffles?
Everyone's friend Malamar
#278856: Apr 26th 2019 at 7:58:29 AM

A big part of the problem is that the constitution was meant to be updated, but certain factions want to keep it as close to its original state as possible. Though I'm fairly sure we're all aware of that second part.

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Ultimatum Disasturbator from the Amiga Forest (Old as dirt) Relationship Status: Who needs love when you have waffles?
Disasturbator
#278857: Apr 26th 2019 at 8:01:31 AM

Remember that at one point they had an 18th Amendment which was a prohibition on alcohol ,I can't imagine anything close to that level of crazy being passed today

Thankfully it was repealed by the 21 Amendment

Edited by Ultimatum on Apr 26th 2019 at 3:02:23 PM

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ShinyCottonCandy Everyone's friend Malamar from Lumiose City (4 Score & 7 Years Ago) Relationship Status: Who needs love when you have waffles?
Everyone's friend Malamar
#278858: Apr 26th 2019 at 8:05:15 AM

[up]Yeah, now we have the opposite problem. Instead of crazy amendments being passed, we now have no chance of any amendments being passed. Though, I call it an opposite problem, I guess it's preferable.

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Soban Since: Aug, 2009 Relationship Status: 700 wives and 300 concubines
#278859: Apr 26th 2019 at 8:10:16 AM

>The life expectancy wasn't as long back in the 1700s either. A "lifetime appointment" might not have seemed so bad back then.

I looked at some data from the 1700s to now and for people who reached the age that justices are appointed at, we've only gained about a decade or so. However, this change seems mostly to be caused by more people living into their 80s rather then the top max changing. John Jay, the first supreme court justice lived well into his 80s. William Cushing, who was one of the first associate justices, served for twenty years on the court.

One thing that might be an interesting way to deal with retirement/death during a 18 year term is with a replacement list. A list updated yearly with a dozen or so approved replacements if something unfortunate were to happen to them. If it did, then the first name on the list who accepts serves the remainder of the term. The idea is that a Judge's replacement list would consist of judges who are likely to rule in similar ways to them.

Edited by Soban on Apr 26th 2019 at 11:18:37 AM

Silasw A procrastination in of itself from A handcart to hell (4 Score & 7 Years Ago) Relationship Status: And they all lived happily ever after <3
A procrastination in of itself
#278860: Apr 26th 2019 at 8:23:18 AM

Long term it might be worth trying to depoliticise the court, which would mean finding a way to make judges less political figures then have them self-select, same as many other countries do it.

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SeptimusHeap from Switzerland (Edited uphill both ways) Relationship Status: Mu
#278861: Apr 26th 2019 at 8:30:23 AM

I suspect that such would require stripping the court of much of its political authority.

"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman
speedyboris Since: Feb, 2010
#278862: Apr 26th 2019 at 8:50:22 AM

It's time for good news, bad news.

Good news: Trump has pivoted to a pro-vaccine stance (at least, for now), due to the measles outbreak in CA.

Bad news: In the same conference, he doubled down on his infamous "very fine people on both sides" remark from Charlottesville two years ago. AGH.

Fighteer Lost in Space from The Time Vortex (Time Abyss) Relationship Status: TV Tropes ruined my love life
Lost in Space
#278863: Apr 26th 2019 at 8:51:21 AM

The justices don't get implanted with political opinions upon taking office. The President and Senate work together to select new ones, and the biases of those branches will lead to justices being selected who match them. I don't see any way to get around this issue.

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
TobiasDrake (•̀⤙•́) (Edited uphill both ways) Relationship Status: Arm chopping is not a love language!
(•̀⤙•́)
#278864: Apr 26th 2019 at 9:09:39 AM

That's exactly why I like that idea that's been kicked around for a rotating Supreme Court, wherein exactly one seat vacates per Presidential term. For instance: five seats, 20-year terms.

It's impossible to fully remove partisan bias from the Supreme Court, but this would result in a Supreme Court whose particular ideas and opinions would always reflect the state of the last five Presidential terms and ten Congressional sessions. When a party has a majority, it will be because the voters have been consistently electing that party into power for the last two decades.

Edited by TobiasDrake on Apr 26th 2019 at 10:10:55 AM

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Fighteer Lost in Space from The Time Vortex (Time Abyss) Relationship Status: TV Tropes ruined my love life
Lost in Space
#278865: Apr 26th 2019 at 9:49:36 AM

I don't hate the idea, but it'd be a tough sell as it would most likely require amending the Constitution.

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
tclittle Professional Forum Ninja from Somewhere Down in Texas Since: Apr, 2010
Professional Forum Ninja
#278866: Apr 26th 2019 at 10:14:36 AM

At a meeting with employees, the person working on Twitter's algorithm for moderating tweets explained they can't ban white nationalists like they've done with ISIS because it would target Republicans as well.

    Article 
At a Twitter all-hands meeting on March 22, an employee asked a blunt question: Twitter has largely eradicated Islamic State propaganda off its platform. Why can’t it do the same for white supremacist content?

An executive responded by explaining that Twitter follows the law, and a technical employee who works on machine learning and artificial intelligence issues went up to the mic to add some context. (As Motherboard has previously reported, algorithms are the next great hope for platforms trying to moderate the posts of their hundreds of millions, or billions, of users.)

With every sort of content filter, there is a tradeoff, he explained. When a platform aggressively enforces against ISIS content, for instance, it can also flag innocent accounts as well, such as Arabic language broadcasters. Society, in general, accepts the benefit of banning ISIS for inconveniencing some others, he said.

In separate discussions verified by Motherboard, that employee said Twitter hasn’t taken the same aggressive approach to white supremacist content because the collateral accounts that are impacted can, in some instances, be Republican politicians.

The employee argued that, on a technical level, content from Republican politicians could get swept up by algorithms aggressively removing white supremacist material. Banning politicians wouldn’t be accepted by society as a trade-off for flagging all of the white supremacist propaganda, he argued.

There is no indication that this position is an official policy of Twitter, and the company told Motherboard that this “is not [an] accurate characterization of our policies or enforcement—on any level.” But the Twitter employee’s comments highlight the sometimes overlooked debate within the moderation of tech platforms: are moderation issues purely technical and algorithmic, or do societal norms play a greater role than some may acknowledge?

Though Twitter has rules against “abuse and hateful conduct,” civil rights experts, government organizations, and Twitter users say the platform hasn’t done enough to curb white supremacy and neo-Nazis on the platform, and its competitor Facebook recently explicitly banned white nationalism. Wednesday, during a parliamentary committee hearing on social media content moderation, UK MP Yvette Cooper asked Twitter why it hasn’t yet banned former KKK leader David Duke, and “Jack, ban the Nazis” has become a common reply to many of Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey’s tweets. During a recent interview with TED that allowed the public to tweet in questions, the feed was overtaken by people asking Dorsey why the platform hadn’t banned Nazis. Dorsey said “we have policies around violent extremist groups,” but did not give a straightforward answer to the question. Dorsey did not respond to two requests for comment sent via Twitter DM.

Twitter has not publicly explained why it has been able to so successfully eradicate ISIS while it continues to struggle with white nationalism. As a company, Twitter won’t say that it can’t treat white supremacy in the same way as it treated ISIS. But external experts Motherboard spoke to said that the measures taken against ISIS were so extreme that, if applied to white supremacy, there would certainly be backlash, because algorithms would obviously flag content that has been tweeted by prominent Republicans—or, at the very least, their supporters. So it’s no surprise, then, that employees at the company have realized that as well.

This is because the proactive measures taken against ISIS are more akin to the removal of spam or child porn than the more nuanced way that social media platforms traditionally police content, which can involve using algorithms to surface content but ultimately relies on humans to actually review and remove it (or leave it up.) A Twitter spokesperson told Motherboard that 91 percent of the company’s terrorism-related suspensions in a 6 month period in 2018 were thanks to internal, automated tools.

The argument that external experts made to Motherboard aligns with what the Twitter employee aired: Society as a whole uncontroversially and unequivocally demanded that Twitter take action against ISIS in the wake of beheading videos spreading far and wide on the platform. The automated approach that Twitter took to eradicating ISIS was successful: “I haven’t seen a legit ISIS supporter on Twitter who lasts longer than 15 seconds for two-and-a-half years,” Amarnath Amarasingam, an extremism researcher at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, told Motherboard in a phone call. Society and politicians were willing to accept that some accounts were mistakenly suspended by Twitter during that process (for example, accounts belonging to the hacktivist group Anonymous that were reporting ISIS accounts to Twitter as part of an operation called #Op ISIS were themselves banned).

That same eradicate-everything approach, applied to white supremacy, is much more controversial.

“Most people can agree a beheading video or some kind of ISIS content should be proactively removed, but when we try to talk about the alt-right or white nationalism, we get into dangerous territory, where we’re talking about [Iowa Rep.] Steve King or maybe even some of Trump’s tweets, so it becomes hard for social media companies to say all of this ‘this content should be removed,’” Amarasingam said.

In March, King promoted an open white nationalist on Twitter for the third time. King quote tweeted Faith Goldy, a Canadian white nationalist. Earlier this month, Facebook banned Goldy under the site’s new policy banning white nationalism; Goldy has 122,000 followers on Twitter and has not been banned at the time of writing. Last year, Twitter banned Republican politician and white nationalist Paul Nehlen for a racist tweet he sent about actress and princess Meghan Markle, but prior to the ban, Nehlen gained a wide following on the platform while tweeting openly white nationalist content about, for example, the “Jewish media.”

Any move that could be perceived as being anti-Republican is likely to stir backlash against the company, which has been criticized by President Trump and other prominent Republicans for having an “anti-conservative bias.” Tuesday, on the same day Trump met with Twitter’s Dorsey, the President tweeted that Twitter “[doesn’t] treat me well as a Republican. Very discriminatory,” Trump tweeted. “No wonder Congress wants to get involved—and they should.”

JM Berger, author of Extremism and a number of reports on ISIS and far-right extremists on Twitter, told Motherboard that in his own research, he has found that “a very large number of white nationalists identify themselves as avid Trump supporters.”

“Cracking down on white nationalists will therefore involve removing a lot of people who identify to a greater or lesser extent as Trump supporters, and some people in Trump circles and pro-Trump media will certainly seize on this to complain they are being persecuted,” Berger said. “There's going to be controversy here that we didn't see with ISIS, because there are more white nationalists than there are ISIS supporters, and white nationalists are closer to the levers of political power in the US and Europe than ISIS ever was.”

Twitter currently has no good way of suspending specific white supremacists without human intervention, and so it continues to use human moderators to evaluate tweets. In an email, a company spokesperson told Motherboard that “different content and behaviors require different approaches.”

“For terrorist-related content we've a lot of success with proprietary technology but for other types of content that violate our policies—which can often [be] much more contextual—we see the best benefits by using technology and human review in tandem,” the company said.

Twitter hasn’t done a particularly good job of removing white supremacist content and has shown a reluctance to take any action of any kind against “world leaders” even when their tweets violate Twitter’s rules. But Berger agrees with Twitter in that the problem the company is facing with white supremacy is fundamentally different than the one it faced with ISIS on a practical level.

“With ISIS, the group's obsessive branding, tight social networks and small numbers made it easier to avoid collateral damage when the companies cracked down (although there was some),” he said. “White nationalists, in contrast, have inconsistent branding, diffuse social networks and a large body of sympathetic people in the population, so the risk of collateral damage might be perceived as being higher, but it really depends on where the company draws its lines around content.”

But just because eradicating white supremacy on Twitter is a hard problem doesn’t mean the company should get a pass. After Facebook explicitly banned white supremacy and white nationalism, Motherboard asked You Tube and Twitter whether they would make similar changes. Neither company would commit to making that explicit change, and referred us to their existing rules.

“Twitter has a responsibility to stomp out all voices of hate on its platform,” Brandi Collins-Dexter, senior campaign director at activist group Color Of Change told Motherboard in a statement. “Instead, the company is giving a free ride to conservative politicians whose dangerous rhetoric enables the growth of the white supremacist movement into the mainstream and the rise of hate, online and off.”

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NativeJovian Jupiterian Local from Orlando, FL Since: Mar, 2014 Relationship Status: Maxing my social links
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#278867: Apr 26th 2019 at 10:18:50 AM

[up][up]I don't believe it would; the Constitution just says basically "the Supreme Court exists and Supreme Court justices are appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate" and that's it. Everything else — the size of the court, the length of the terms, etc — is set by law, not in the Constitution directly.

I actually like the idea of five justices with 20-year terms better than the nine justices with 18-year terms that I mentioned earlier. It'd be messy to reduce the current court down to five, and the "what do you do if a justice retires early or dies in office" question becomes more important, but one judicial appointment per presidential term works nicely.

Edited by NativeJovian on Apr 26th 2019 at 1:20:26 PM

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Soban Since: Aug, 2009 Relationship Status: 700 wives and 300 concubines
#278868: Apr 26th 2019 at 10:22:15 AM

Article III, Section 1 states "shall hold their Offices during good Behaviour", which is thought to imply it is a lifetime appointment.

ShinyCottonCandy Everyone's friend Malamar from Lumiose City (4 Score & 7 Years Ago) Relationship Status: Who needs love when you have waffles?
Everyone's friend Malamar
#278869: Apr 26th 2019 at 10:27:01 AM

[up][up][up]If Twitter can't ban white nationalism without banning republican viewpoints, if anyone there cared, they'd realise why that is and realise why not banning those viewpoints has worsened so much trouble.

Hey, they could even leave the dogwhistles and only remove the blatant stuff. That would still be a major improvement.

Edited by ShinyCottonCandy on Apr 26th 2019 at 1:29:45 PM

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wisewillow She/her Since: May, 2011
She/her
#278870: Apr 26th 2019 at 10:28:54 AM

I would say 5 is too few; 9 permits a wider range of experiences and perspectives. Do 9, with staggered 18 year terms. Not sure of the math, but try to stack so that each president gets 1 appointment.

MarqFJA The Cosmopolitan Fictioneer from Deserts of the Middle East (Before Recorded History) Relationship Status: Anime is my true love
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#278871: Apr 26th 2019 at 10:53:46 AM

RE the Supreme Court: Has anyone thought of having the justices be nominated by an independent, apolitical/non-partisan body?

Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.
wisewillow She/her Since: May, 2011
She/her
#278872: Apr 26th 2019 at 11:01:11 AM

We can barely make that happen for redistricting reform.

PhysicalStamina i'm tired, my friend (4 Score & 7 Years Ago) Relationship Status: Coming soon to theaters
i'm tired, my friend
#278873: Apr 26th 2019 at 11:03:22 AM

Such a body would have to comprise of people. Said people need sufficient knowledge of politics to do the job. They would therefore hold political views, and would have some sort of bias.

So that's a nonstarter.

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Rationalinsanity from Halifax, Canada Since: Aug, 2010 Relationship Status: It's complicated
#278874: Apr 26th 2019 at 11:04:18 AM

And it doesn't solve the problem of many/most American judges being partisan hacks.

Politics is the skilled use of blunt objects.
DeathorCake Since: Mar, 2016
#278875: Apr 26th 2019 at 11:04:40 AM

[up]x4

Won't work, not when they have as much power as they currently do. You'd just get a politicised Court that is even more institutionally opaque, even less vulnerable to popular pressure and has slightly more of a right-wing institutional bias and veneer of impartiality than the "constitutional" excuse manages already, if the "independent" central banks are anything to go by. Technocrats aren't "apolitical" or "unbiased", they just don't have a party logo next to their name.

Personally I'd abolish the Court's ability to explicitly override Congressional legislation along with doing something drastic about gerrymandering, the Electoral College, the filibuster and voter suppression. If the Republicans can somehow beat you in a fairish election then OK, they can have the extra latitude. I don't see giving that much power to a drastically undemocratic and unaccountable institution as a "check and balance" worth a damn.

Edited by DeathorCake on Apr 26th 2019 at 6:07:16 PM


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