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[Reelya]

I am kinda curious;  If trump is fully impeached, and told to leave the whitehouse, do you think he will comply willingly or will they have to remove him with police assistance?

Worst case is Pro-Trumpist military units occupy the Whitehouse, Pro-Trump police refuse to remove him, state of emergency is initiated and 2020 elections never happen, anti-Trump Congress members are detained, and Trump becomes de facto dictator. But of course, that's the absolute worst case.

EDIT: maybe highly unlikely, but if any president in US history was going to try and pull that shit, nobody is actually likelier than Trump.

[sluissa]

What about the likelihood that the white house is going to need to be steam cleaned of piss before anyone else moves in?

Honestly, for all his bluster, Trump doesn't actually like fighting. He just likes talking big. He'll leave the white house. He'll leave the presidency. And then he'll become what he was before, a loud mouth criticizing everything being done to try to fix the mess he made. Time and time again whenever he's come up against strong opposition, he's backed down. Only way I see him pulling some sort of shit like that is if his supporters actually surround the white house and refuse to let him leave. Only way to make him march into battle with an enemy is to have an even scarier group of supporters behind him ready to tear him apart if he displeases them.

[wierd]

while the stains might be yellow, it is probably not piss.

(That spray-on tan tends to get on everything you know.)

[JoshuaFH]

-

[PTTG??]

I do believe that if Trump doesn't get impeached, but does lose the election, then he'll basically shut down the government for his lame-duck period.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

He will 100% at least call the election faked by "millions of illegals voting". He'll probably dogwhistle on twitter to try and cause terrorist attacks. He might try to have the Supreme Court validate him as the winner. He probably won't get the support of the military or the CIA, but if the winner is Bernie by a landslide the chances go up considerably. Fortunately, Bernie also has the most donations from enlisted personnel of anybody including Trump, so that's one ace in the hole.

[Iduno]

In non-election news, I haven't heard anyone talking about this story.

TL;DR - someone allegedly stole from a store 2 belts and a shirt from Wal-mart (~$25?). The police started searching for him, he broke into a house, so the cops destroyed the house (~$300-400k?). Not exactly proportional, and also it wasn't even the suspect's house. They "were being shot at by the suspect", but they didn't find a gun. The city's response was "that sucks, but the police did it so No." The courts also said, "Nope, cops destroying your home because someone else was there, hope you don't need a place to live." It's not like they were even the suspects, they just got broken into, and now they don't have anywhere to live.

Just because you're innocent, or even around, doesn't mean you aren't a target.

[LordBaal]

That's just stupid. As a public law enforcement or a gov agency the damages to third parties should be covered by them. It's like a firetruck smashing in your living and then saying you can't have that repaired by them because they are firemen and were in a real hurry to extinguish some fires....

[Iduno]

That's just stupid. As a public law enforcement or a gov agency the damages to third parties should be covered by them. It's like a firetruck smashing in your living and then saying you can't have that repaired by them because they are firemen and were in a real hurry to extinguish some fires....

It they were any other government agency, they would have been required to repair what they broke or pay for it. I know our water utility has trucks for replacing people's grass when they need to dig up a water/wastewater line, even if the property owner caused the problem they were fixing. The constitution forbids the government from taking or destroying your property without paying, but they've apparently decided "except for police, even though that's not written anywhere."

I'm also guessing insurance doesn't cover "government blew up house", because 1) the government is required to fix/pay for that and 2) you need special insurance for animals, hurricanes, earthquakes, floods, etc.

[Lord Shonus]

The core reason for the disconnect is a rise in "weaponized lawsuits", where advocacy groups will launch suits to drain funding from someone they oppose even if the suit has no merit. Instead of switching to a "loser pays" system on a broader scale, lawmakers have instead started issuing broad immunity provisions to certain subgroups that are a frequent target of advocacy groups (with both honorable and dishonorable motivations). This is a greater issue than it seems because a significant part of that rise is imaginary - a rather high percentage of legitimate suits are smeared as this sort of activism, to avoid taking hits for things that they deserve to be hit for.

A contributing factor is the concept of monopoly of force. Both sides of the political isle have groups deemed as "targets" that they want to use the police to go after. When those "targets" have the ability to resist the police, either through physical means or through procedural ones, not only do you make it harder to go after them but you risk alienating the police force you're using as a club in the first place. In a sensible world, the solution to this is "don't use the cops as a club", but this isn't a sensible world.

[SalmonGod]

In a sensible world, enforcement of the law would be weighed against other concerns.  But we live in an extremely authoritarian society that values enforcement and flexing over community well-being and justice.  A single tweaked-out shoplifter, even with a pistol, shouldn't warrant an aggressive military-grade assault on a section of neighborhood.  At most, it should warrant temporary lodgings for the homeowners while authorities camp and wait out the suspect.  There are plenty of potential solutions to a problem that don't involve a torrent of gunfire.

[LordBaal]

If violence doesn't solve your problem... you arent using enough?

[Lord Shonus]

One thing I learned recently that's probably contributing to the problem is a little complex.


See, back during the late WWII and early Korea period there was this guy called S A Marshall. He had this theory that people have a deep-rooted aversion to killing, and this contributed to a massive reluctance of newly-trained troops to actually engage in combat. He supported this with a lot of troop interviews both group and solo, and published his findings, recommending changes in training to break down this aversion.


Much later, a Colonel named Dave Grossman dug up these old findings and built a whole range of training material designed to do just that. Besides being the basis for a lot of the "murder simulator" rhetoric built around violent games, it was also adopted not only by the military but by a lot of police forces on the grounds that if a cop is in a position where he must resort to force, hesitation risks the lives of not just the cop but innocent bystanders as well. This is because that is the engagement threshold that cops are supposed to have programmed in during training.


The problem is that Marshall's work was bunk, but the derived material works. Commanders don't report any ingrained reluctance to fire - quite the opposite. The biggest problem with raw troops was their tendency to start blasting away at every shadow out of fear. Investigation proved that most of the interviews he recorded either didn't happen, or were nothing more than a five-minute session that he "extrapolated" from. Moreover, even in his actual interviews he went out of his way to explain away valid reasons not to shoot -not actually being in contact during that engagement, being ordered to hold fire for tactical reasons, uncertainty of target identity, things like that. Most people going over his work have concluded that his much touted "aversion to killing" either does not exist, or is far weaker than he claimed.

However, Grossman's training programs based on that "research" do, in fact, successfully make trainees more comfortable with the notion of killing. Since the aversion was a myth, that has had the result of seriously eroding the engagement threshold for lethal force.

[Naturegirl1999]

a video about the US Census

[Iduno]

The core reason for the disconnect is a rise in "weaponized lawsuits", where advocacy groups will launch suits to drain funding from someone they oppose even if the suit has no merit. Instead of switching to a "loser pays" system on a broader scale, lawmakers have instead started issuing broad immunity provisions to certain subgroups that are a frequent target of advocacy groups (with both honorable and dishonorable motivations). This is a greater issue than it seems because a significant part of that rise is imaginary - a rather high percentage of legitimate suits are smeared as this sort of activism, to avoid taking hits for things that they deserve to be hit for.

Either those immunities are provided at the cost of a higher-level group (the state government pays directly instead of the police force), or they're unconstitutional, and the courts should have nullified them while finding for the homeowner. The idea of the constitution is supposed to be that the government can't just ignore it.