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The Guardian doesn’t have a paywall

In some circumstances it has a registration wall. I recently ran into it on one of my computers, and it prevented me from reading some articles until I removed the modals with browser devtools. Stupid and pointless, and just pushes people away or towards workarounds like archive.is. I've given The Guardian money in the past but I don't have or want an account.

Just because you immediately clicked "yeah sure sell all my data so I don't have to pay" doesn't mean it's not paywalled, please be a little more discerning.

There's no button that says that.

It does. I pay with money (eg I'm forced to pay for a subscription) or ads (I'm forced to pay with resources)



> In the event that someone is directly attacking Americans in America

Didn't Trump have the army attack democratic cities earlier this year?


No, he did not. Where did you come up with this idea?


It's a complicated bit of American constitutional / federal law. Tl;dr...

The US military cannot be used to perform domestic policing functions (Posse Comitatus Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posse_Comitatus_Act ), except in times of insurrection or when state unable or unwilling to suppress violence that threatens citizens' constitutional rights (Enforcement Acts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enforcement_Acts ).

Hence Trump's continual (and false) claims that the cities he's targeting are lawless and dangerous places.

The above applies to federal US military forces. The laws specifically exclude the US Coast Guard. Non-military federal forces (FBI, ICE, etc) are also excluded.

It also, in the more complicated quirk, excludes state military forces (i.e. "National Guard" units). These forces can be activated under a variety of different legal frameworks (see https://www.nationalguard.mil/Portals/31/Resources/Fact%20Sh... ), some of which allow their use for domestic police functions (Title 32 and SAD), because they're still under the command of the state governor (who can use military forces to perform domestic policing functions inside their state or a neighboring state).

There's also a special exclusion for Washington, DC, as technically the president is sort of its governor for many purposes.

Given that background, what actually happened...

- Trump activated National Guard units under Title 10 (aka federal active duty service), because this doesn't require the consent of a state's governor

- Trump then deployed these units to several cities, some with the support of Republican governors and some without the support of Democratic governors

- The administration's legal team realized performing policing functions with the above forces was on extremely shaky ground

- Therefore, they mostly claimed (loudly) that they were deploying "the military", but in actuality used them for extremely limited, non-policing purposes (picking up trash, talking to tourists, guarding federal buildings, guarding other federal agents performing law enforcement functions)

- After state governments sued, the courts generally agreed the deployment was unlawful ( https://www.reuters.com/world/us-supreme-court-rejects-trump... )



I suppose it would help if I could read the whole page: I cannot see the left few characters on Firefox on Android. What did you make this with?

Note that fixing the site won't increase my chances of donating, I'm from the ASML country ;)


Should be fixed now. Cheers!


That's annoying... I made it with Next.js and Tailwind CSS tho. Hosted on Vercel.


I live in the Netherlands for almost 50 years and never heard of it either.


Without paywal: https://archive.is/qOjdE



I'm almost 50 and from Europe, never had to think about this stuff for a second.


Well I remember the fun days of crossing borders before EU, ordering stuff from computer magazines from other countries, having to deal how to pay them across countries, and so forth.

I also happened to work in Switzerland, before they made cross-region agreements with EU, and it was lot of burecratic fun, explaining the situation regarding a Portuguese, living in France and working in Switzerland.


I'm mid fourties and I remember bordercrossings were annoying back in the 90ies. I'm Danish so we didn't enter Schengen until around 2000. I guess it didn't help that I was young enough that we traveled by bus. Once when we were on a school trip to Prauge we had the Slovakia borderpatrol go through our entire bus while waving machineguns around.


> we had the Slovakia borderpatrol go through our entire bus while waving machineguns around

Quite common in Eastern Europe before Schengen. That's why we hate border patrols, police and all sorts of uniformed men in general. They used to cut young people's blue jeans or long hair back in the '80s and bribing them was common before 2005. We also had quite a lot of policemen jokes (they were called militia men before 1990). One goes like "Why do militia men work in couples? Because one knows how to read and the other knows how to write.". I used to wish that we join Schengen so we no longer have to deal with border police any longer and they'd lose their jobs or get moved to a different border. If finally happened. Now Germany Poland, Austria and also other EU states introduce "temporary" border checks. Which they keep extending. Great.


I thought they worked in groups of 3: one knows how to write, the second knows how to read, and the third is there to keep an eye on the dangerous intellectuals.


> Now Germany Poland, Austria and also other EU states introduce "temporary" border checks. Which they keep extending. Great.

Yeah. Though I live close to a Slovakia-Austria border crossing and use it frequently and it is quite apparent these are border checks in the name only. Pedestrians and bikers are not checked at all; passenger cars are waved through and only vans and busses seem to be actually stopped for a check and even that depends. Still sucks compared to no border police presence at all.


I crossed the Austria-Hungary land border at Hegyeshalom in... 2017? They had "border checks" in place. I was driving a German-plated rental car, and my wife and I are obviously of European descent. They waved me through before I could even pull our (USA) passports out to show them.


Germany still does this, to a good fraction of incoming long distance busses (but not trains IIUC)


Correct, and not just Germany. I have travelled all over Europe by bus and train. In recent years borders have been making a comeback, despite Schengen. Buses are target number 1 for border police.

Last year my bus took nearly an hour to get across the Serbia-Croatia border, which is technically a Schengen border, but Serbia is surrounded by Europe so security is usually lax. We all had to get off and go through passport control while the police combed the bus. Meanwhile, car traffic was being waved through without the slightest formality. Infuriating.


The Serbia-Croatia border is definitely not a Schengen border; I assume that was a typo.


Indeed. Typo. Too late to fix.


Wait! It was not a typo. Serbia-Croatia is indeed a Schengen border (Croatia is in Schengen). My point was that there was anti-bus discrimination even at this low-security border.

At the supposed non-borders within the Schengen zone, police are increasingly present. Often they get on buses (and trains) just to check out the passengers, obviously looking for passengers with migrant profiles.

Two or three years ago I crossed the ultra-low-security Germany-Denmark border on a local bus. There was no border security but I overheard the driver making an intentional phone call to someone to say that he had a foreign tourist aboard. Schengen has not completely abolished borders, alas.


Ack. Intra-Schengen versus outer Schengen border. Borders are confusing.

And yes, border controls are almost everywhere again.


Btw, long distance busses have a really strange history in Germany.

The literal Nazis made a law that virtually banned long distance busses inside of Germany, and the market was only liberalised in 2013. Deregulation and liberalisation often get a bad rep, but they have done a lot for us.

(To be more precise, the Nazis didn't outright ban long distance busses directly, what they did was give the government railway monopoly a veto over most bus routes and lots of extra restrictions. Which amounted to the same result as a ban. Just like the US doesn't directly ban buying from the world's most popular electric car brand or importing photovoltaic cells: they just slap outrageous 100%+ tariffs on them.)


I guess you never tried to cross the Iron Curtain in your youth?


The sane side of the iron curtain. We've envied you for the longest time.


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