I'm a game developer, professionally!

You may know me from things like: Where the Water Tastes Like Wine, The Museum of Mechanics: Lockpicking, Gone Home, Bioshock 2, or maybe something else.

Right now I work as a Technical Narrative Designer at Remedy Entertainment in Stockholm, Sweden

Perhaps there are other aspects of my personality that may also be revealed here on this website


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Johnnemann

Taking Trump off the ballot is a positive, but man the text in the 14th Amendment is such a mess it really stretches to see how it could possibly work. There's no specified process for deciding if someone has engaged in insurrection, the idea just seems to be "well everyone knows". Which means of course that anyone can use it to bring insurrection charges against anyone else.

Plus, this is a state supreme court decision, which means it's going to the US supreme court, and I don't think there's any mystery about how they're going to rule. So on one hand you give ammo to Trump and his supporters because they get to say "look! The legal system is trying to keep us down, without even a trial they're trying to pull us off the ballot!" And the case is so weak and such a novel application that it kinda DOES look like institutional suppression of a candidate. Even people who don't like Trump might think this looks like bullshit.

And then on the other hand, of course, you accomplish nothing because the Supreme court is going to say "yeah this is bullshit", again for any number of totally valid reasons that will not even seem like an unreasonable decision.

So you get Trump on the ballot but give him a totally plausible thing he can point to and say "They're trying to suppress your voice, when we claim stolen elections they say we're overreacting and it's beyond the pale, but look they're trying it right now AND they are hypocrites".

This whole thing was such a huge strategic mistake. About the only thing it did was create another court case for Trump to spend money and effort on but I bet it will raise way more than it cost.


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in reply to @johnnemann's post:

Right and why send another tennis ball over the net to those corrupt a-holes, knowing exactly what they'll do with it? It feels more like a Gesture at efficacy rather than something that will stick or even uh, have consequences. And coming at the current moment when a lot of people are dying on the president's watch. It's hard to shake the sense of "we got nothin" from the party. We need you to have somethin, guys.

it extremely does not matter, there is zero difference between the court ruling for "good" reasons or in a naked exercise of power if the latter does not lead to their replacement and the rest of the federal government is flatly unwilling to override them.

Half the reason a lazy huckster like Trump could just saunter in and take power from these clowns in the first place is the liberal conviction that God's somewhere in the process holding up a scorecard, that a really carefully phrased dissent during the rout over Roe is what really matters on some insubstantial level that cannot be measured in mere effect on anyone's lives. It doesn't, he isn't, there can be no "specified process" for defining insurrection that makes it more effective at anything but specifically applying only to the previous attempt and no level of procedural goofing around will overcome the lack of a real enforcement mechanism. American criminal law is a centuries-old tradition of dealing with the imperfection of language by casting a wide semantic net and letting the authorities pick and choose what cases qualify at their discretion, and it's such an anomaly that they ever decide against authoritarian rightwing plutocrats under any circumstances that you're recoiling against a totally standard by-the-book application of law.