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this post was submitted on 04 Jun 2024
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Different question. How is it that in the USA it is legal to run for president when you are a convicted felon? I mean you obviously do not qualify for the job.
Same reason felons can vote; if being a criminal removes your ability to participate in the political process then the government suddenly has a very strong incentive to criminalize their political opponents.
Felons mostly can't vote, though.
Sorry, I always forget how things work down in Freedom Land.
TBF, if trump gets elected again, then the SC is going to legitimize political assassination, so being able to run from prison becomes a moot point.
Afaik the idea is that you want to avoid someone to be able to convict their opponents. So make it impossible to take them out using the legal system. Makes total sense to me.
I think the reasoning is that otherwise opponents can block political candidates by using the justice system. The opposite of what's happening now.
The founding fathers haven't theorized that this particular situation could happen.
Which you can't even blame them for, honestly. Who in the 18th century would have thought a huge chunk of the country would want a known despot?
Well there is the French 16 th century thinker Etienne de la Boétie who wrote a discourse on voluntary servitude in which he argued that men do tend to simp for tyrants over being free a lot of the time:
Very interesting thank you!
Spinoza asked "why do people fight for their servitude as if it were their salvation?"
Fear, and superstition; ideology. Under certain circumstances, the masses want fascism.
When the left buys in to the game of fear, hatred, passivity, and superstition - a game turbocharged by social media - we become complicit.
"Instead of politics, we engage in chatter. And it is a sad chatter, whose prevailing form is denunciation. The practice of denunciation debases the multitude. In the place of action, it accepts hatred, which merely externalizes the sadness of passivity; in the place of agency, it accepts fear, and pleads for security; in place of the collective democratic subject, it accepts the superstitious mob.
Superstitious mobs can only serve tyrants, as Spinoza knew well. We now face a new theocracy of our own making, one which through the chatter of social media decomposes our powers and makes politics impossible."
https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/news/3844-why-do-people-fight-for-their-servitude-as-if-it-were-their-salvation
Thanks. I love me some Spinoza. I just wished they put a citation as to where to find this quote.
The Spinoza quote? As far as I understand it, it could actually be Deleuze paraphrasing Spinoza, perhaps Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, or maybe better said as "Deleuze' translation of Spinoza."
I see, thanks!
Yes! Thank you for the interesting look at Étienne de La Boétie. Deleuze wrote Spinoza: Practical Philosophy and it's pretty cool.
That's silly, if you're powerful enough to do that, you can just imprison them. No one probably thought about this, that's all
It's not that silly if law enforcement officials and judges are elected, like how they are in the American system. Ideally the court/justice system is entirely loose from politics.
Also don't forget that the founding fathers did all partake in sedition, many of them not really having a clear slate whatsoever.
But yeah this particular instance hasn't crossed their minds at all.
My argument being if you can convict a person through the judges you influenced, you can sentence them to imprisonment similarly as well. So it's a moot point.
We have less qualifications to run for president than we do for working at McDonald's. Per the constitution you need to be born in the USA, be 35 by the day you are sworn in, and have lived in the USA for the last 14 years.
But as others have said, the felony thing prevents weaponizing the justice system against political opponents.
Campaign donators need some sign that you will bend to their demands, and so having a decent felony record is a good indication that you will play ball.