dingus

Dealing with a criminal ex-president who is running for reelection has never happened before to the country, so there’s not an operating procedure to follow.

Bush didn't run for re-election? Reagan didn't run for re-election? The only criminal President you can say didn't run for re-election was fucking Nixon.

Literally the point of this post is that we have, time and time again, chosen not to prosecute them, despite plenty of evidence.

Reagan making deals with terrorists in the Iran-Contra affair. Bush signing off on torture, which is a war crime. (We literally prosecuted low level soldiers for torture, but claimed it was just "bad apples" and not a painfully obvious systemic problem. Torture facilities don't spring up from nothingness without anybody in the chain of command making a choice to torture people. The orders come down from somewhere and when you're supposed to be the Commander in Chief of the armed forces, sorry, it kind of falls on you.)

It's been a problem because we keep kicking the fucking can down the road to ignore the question of "can we prosecute a former President."

Forgive me, you're correct. I stopped using it when it dropped SMS, because I had only ever able to get people on it through SMS, but at the time had read plans about eventually dropping the phone number requirement. I mixed those things up in my head.

From what I understand, they're fully invested in dropping the phone number requirement though, and some more googling says that they've had versions of Signal PNP (phone number privacy) running for a while now.

You're correct, that part hasn't actually changed over yet, but it's in the works.

GPS was short for Google Play Services, not Global Positioning System. Sorry.

Signal is always encrypted by default. Same with Matrix. Telegram you have to choose for it to be an encrypted chat, and you can't do encrypted group chats.

I agree with that take, but this is an example of an "Oops I won't do it again I promise" attitude in Washington DC politics in general. The "having documents you're not supposed to" has happened with a lot of ex-officials, including Democrats, but it's usually hand-waved away as long as they destroy/return them. I don't think that is Biden trying to not appear partisan as much as it is Standard Operating Procedure with politicians, and they just didn't expect an actual all-out criminal to refuse to give them back, like Trump.

Earlier this year. It no longer functions as an SMS service and you now have a username instead. I think the changeover was in March or April.

Because a lot of people who live on a fixed income like social security or disability simply don't have the privilege of being able to do so?

They often can't afford to live anywhere but a Food Desert, and often don't own a vehicle in a city with few public transit options. Things like this can severely limit their choices on which company to spend money.

The reality is poor people shop at Walmart because in a lot of cases they really can't afford not to. This is what people fighting against expansion of companies like Walmart twenty years ago said was going to happen. They will dominate with low prices until they've pushed out all other viable businesses, and then you'll be left with no choice but to spend your money with them. This was all on purpose at the corporate level. Not sure why you're blaming 20-30 years of corporate choices with very little pushback from city governments on the people who don't have other places to shop anymore.

If you trust Telegram you're naive. Here is a great breakdown earlier this year from Kaspersky.

https://usa.kaspersky.com/blog/telegram-why-nobody-uses-secret-chats/27662/

Signal isn't perfect either, but their mistakes are far less egregious. They also have removed some of the more egregious mistakes, ~~like needing a phone number~~ (edit: incorrect, see below) or google play services to function. It can be run on a device without Google Play Services because it only uses Google Play Services for push notifications.

Sans' favorite game.

So only the US can prosecute their President for war crimes, and it has to be based on US laws? That's not a legitimate discussion, I'd say.

So the people who write the laws just write it so that they didn't break the laws. That's literally what Obama did for Bush, legalizing warrantless spying, ramping up the drone war, etc.

I mean, that's literally the point of the ICC, is that governments can just be like "we didn't do anything wrong" and then continue abusing the world. So you take them to a neutral third party.... the ICC.

You usually send war criminals to The Hague and then it's outside the hands of the nation in question. Many nations like to do a lot of "we investigated ourselves and found no wrongdoing."

I guess US law trumps international law and laws governing war, huh? No wonder the US refuses to join the International Criminal Court.

https://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/war-crimes.shtml

Oh look, shocker, torture is in there.

It's the tipped employees who don't realize they are getting fucked and maybe their clients shouldn't be the people expected to fill the shortfalls of their paychecks instead of, you know, their boss. It's not the people who work regular jobs themselves where they are not tipped.

Source: Working the first tipped job I have ever worked and motherfucker these people are entitled. Delivering pizza to poor people living off of disability and judging them for not tipping. It makes me fucking furious. I live in a state with one of the highest minimum wages in the country, it's not like these people are being paid $2.13 an hour. Depending on the day they can make $30+ an hour when you include tips. They're so fucking angry and shitty and petty when people don't tip. It's like, I guess fuck anyone who just wanted some comfort food in the middle of their shitty lives and it's not their fault your boss doesn't pay you better. I have previously only worked jobs where I was never tipped but still had customers acting entitled. People who demand or expect tips on top of the highest minimum wage in the country are fucking crybabies angry at the wrong fucking people. That's on them, not the people tired of the bullshit tipping culture.

I will never label "best President of my lifetime" the guy who let war criminals walk and then legalized and codified some of the worst aspects of the War on Terror.

Why is Donald Trump walking free? Because we couldn't/wouldn't even begin to prosecute war criminals.

Milquetoast Obama letting war criminals walk literally set the stage for this. You don't get to be shocked about the kid-gloves treatment for Trump after knowing "the best President of your lifetime" chose to not prosecute war criminals because it "might appear partisan" or some dumb shit. It's literally the same dumb hand-wringing we get with Trump today. We are stuck with Trump because Obama didn't have the fucking balls to prosecute war criminals.

Why are they scared to prosecute a former President? Because we have refused to do it again and again when it matters.