Supah_Schmendrick
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User ID: 618
Supah_Schmendrick
3d ago
I'd say that when the incumbent prosecutor's election campaign was run on the basis of his experience going after that same candidate as part of a highly-politicized state AG's office, you have a pretty big tell that subsequent cases are more likely to be lawfare than legitimate.
Supah_Schmendrick
3d ago
This is not how the FEC understands campaign contributions:
We could have had testimony on how the FEC understands these things, but Judge Merchan explicitly ruled that Brad Smith couldn't testify to anything substantive on that front, because allegedly only the Court had jurisdiction to rule on legal interpretations like the meaning of statutes and regulations - even ones outside the Court's proper jurisdiction, apparently.
Supah_Schmendrick
3d ago
Trump was summoned into existence by his followers.
His "followers" didn't give him $2 billion of free media coverage during the 2016 cycle. When Trump declared, he was only polling 10% in the GOP primary. He didn't break 40% until March of 2016. He was lucky enough to be running against a weak and numerous slate of wooden neocons who hadn't seen which way the wind was blowing and couldn't get out of each other's way. When Ben Carson is your closest competition, you know things are pretty dire.
Supah_Schmendrick
3d ago
he and his close associates pushed all manner of blatant nonsense that failed to get any traction because of a stark lack of evidence.
Like Mrs. Clinton's ginned-up "collusion" theories in 2016? Those managed to derail half a presidential term.
Supah_Schmendrick
3d ago
Well, usually a politician would have quit in disgrace before getting to this point. So kind of.
Except that what's happening here isn't actually unusual. Hillary Clinton's campaign and the DNC got fined $100k by the FEC for the exact same thing (i.e., misreporting campaign expenses - in this case, the "Russia-gate" dossier - as "legal expenses"). The unusual thing is that state legal systems got involved (in cooperation with the White House and under the direction of former White House lawyers, for admittedly-political reasons.
Supah_Schmendrick
3d ago
A prediction market as I view it is ultimately just a systematic way to keep track of who makes errors the most and who makes them the least, so you can put the people who make them the least into power.
Goodhart's law. You're only optimizing for the ability to game a prediction market, not the ability to be a wise ruler.
Calling something like the USSR or Nazi Germany just a regular human mistake isn't an acceptable conclusion to me.
Why not? Totalitarianism and militarism are pretty common human modes of social organization. Look around the world and you'll find more dictators than not, and even putatively democratic countries can sure be repressive when they want to be (e.g. UK speech offenses, Canadian asset-freezing the trucker protests, etc). There's also a lot of military aggression even today (it just tends to take the form of gangs or paramilitaries in third world countries rather than stomping around with flags and tanks, but even there see Russia/Ukraine, Armenia/Azerbaijan, Saudi/Yemen, China/India/Pakistan's periodic kerfuffles, North & South Korea, any number of insurgencies in Africa and SE Asia, etc.) Totalitarianism and militarism are even more common if you look back more than 70 years in the past. Same for genocides. The Nazis only stand out because they came along right when mass media was first becoming a thing. The Soviets too only stand out because they were a geopolitical rival for half a century.
Supah_Schmendrick
3d ago
There's a reason that "to err is human" is a truism. People aren't omniscient, and are going to make mistakes. You don't escape that by delegating to a committee, or prediction market. So long as people are involved, there are going to be mistakes and errors.
Supah_Schmendrick
3d ago
What is really the best way for a government to decide policy?
To have virtuous and wise people doing the deciding, and public-spirited and moderate people doing the implementing. Personnel is policy, and all the procedural gilding in the world won't save a government made of the petty, venal, and stupid.
Supah_Schmendrick
6d ago
It was the nature of the work. Sugarcane is a thick, tough grass with similar dimensions to adult bamboo.
During planting, the slaves hade to dig 4-6 ft. square holes half a foot deep (60-100 squares per slave per day, or between 1k-2k cubic feet of earth each), use that earth to build up banks/causeways between the squares, then emplace cane seeds in the squares, surrounded by a few dozen pounds of manure (which had to be collected from cattleyards and carried to the fields by hand or basket as well).
During harvesting, the slaves had to (1) cut down the stalks by hand, (2) strip and de-leaf the cane stalks, and (3) carry bushels of the cut and stripped stalks from the squares to the processing stations. They then had to (4) see the juices extracted from the stalks via milling, (5) carry away the pulp, (6) boil and render the cane juice through successive sets of boilers and pans down into syrup, tempered with lime juice just before the crystallization point, then left to cool into molasses (distilled in turn into rum) and semi-refined sugar crystals.
Harvesting was especially brutal because once cut, the juices in the cane would spoil and rot incredibly rapidly. As a result, plantations during harvesting seasons ran around the clock in two 12-hour shifts, as fast as the workers could go. This led to many deaths from exhaustion in the fields, loss of limbs from crushing underneath millstones, and all the other types of industrial accidents that can happen in large-scale agriculture. Slaves also died in large numbers to all the ordinary tropical diseases and malnutrition endemic to the early-modern Caribbean.
This was the standard method basically everywhere that sugar was grown on New World plantations, and was absolutely brutal.
Supah_Schmendrick
7d ago
The steel-manned case is a telephoned pickup of "Christian nationalism," a small dissident-right movement that a lot of progressive and anti-right-wing media have picked up on as a major enemy du jour.
Supah_Schmendrick
7d ago
I normally think generational trauma is bullshit, except for Haiti, it was literally hell on earth and they had to keep importing slaves because the natural birth rate couldn't hold a candle to the death rate on the sugar plantations
Haitian sugar plantations weren't much different from Barbadian sugar plantations, Jamaican sugar plantations, or even Louisiana sugar plantations. They were all absolutely horrific places to work, and chewed through human lives at ridiculous speeds.
Supah_Schmendrick
7d ago
There's a reason the north didn't have slaves on its wheat farms
Initially, African-descended people had less comparative advantage in the North because their malaria-resistance conferred little or no advantage in a colder climate. Additionally, several crops that slave populations purchased from west Africa had prior special experience with (e.g. rice, indigo) were not widely viable outside of particular regions along the southern Atlantic (NC, SC, GA) and gulf (LA, MS) coasts. There are other reasons as well, but these are two particularly-interesting ones.
This was a country founded explicitly on anti-imperialist principles of popular sovereignty and democracy.
Well, beneath the rhetoric was a pretty solid foundation of impatience with British refusal to let colonists swarm past the Appalachians and conquer more Indian land, so YMMV.
Supah_Schmendrick
7d ago
East Tennessee is another good example. I don't know of too many books about the subject, but here's one I have read: "War at Every Door: Partisan Politics and Guerrilla Violence in East Tennessee, 1860-1869." There's also this article about Unionist sentiment in north Alabama: "Civil War Unionists and the Political Culture of Loyalty in Alabama, 1860-1861."
The idea of Unionist Southerners being willing to turn on the Confederacy was prominent enough that Lincoln based Union war strategy on appealing to them for a significant portion of the war.
Supah_Schmendrick
7d ago
Africa has ethnic boundaries that often don't match borders very well
You could have said this about Europe as well. What did the Welsh have to do with the Scottish or English? People in Provence, Brittany, and Isle-de-France didn't even speak the same languages. Italian only coalesced as a basically-uniform and mutually-intelligible language in the last couple hundred years, and at the time of the discovery of the New World there was no "Spain", but instead "the Spains" because they were a bunch of fiercely-independent kingdoms with their own privileges and rivalries, bound together through fragile personal unions. Prussians, Brunswickers, Saxons, Badeners, and Bavarians didn't have much in common. Russia is a giant, multi-ethnic and multi-linguistic empire, and even today eastern/south-eastern europe don't match ethnic and national borders well - they certainly didn't back in the bad old days of the great Habsburg empires.
Second, it's just hard to get out of dictatorship once you're in it. One group can't suddenly decide to be noncorrupt all on hts own, and the power needed to stop corruption by fiat enables corruption by the group with the power.
Up until the late 19th century, just about every significant country in Europe was some type of monarchy (i.e. dictatorship), mediated by local elites (as is the case in Africa as well). How did they escape this seemingly-impossible corruption trap?
Supah_Schmendrick
10d ago
Sympathy to a cause has very little to do with analysis of the behavior of that cause's partisans in a particular instance.
Supah_Schmendrick
11d ago
The same one as John Adams, thank-you-very-much.
Supah_Schmendrick
11d ago
I mean, if your only reason for becoming a lawyer is "it will pay me a squintillion bucks," then yes. This is a very good reason not to be a lawyer, and frankly, good riddance. The law is too important, and the current profession too corrupted as it is.
Supah_Schmendrick
11d ago
Civil disobedience properly is directed at the governing authority; not random citizens.
In a democracy, particularly one as deeply run by small-scale voluntary and communal organizations as the US used to be, there often wasn't much of a difference between the two.
Of course, the U.S. hasn't been that kind of democracy for a long time.
Supah_Schmendrick
11d ago
So has installing "self-defense cannon" in a structure as an anti-mob measure. But law has, for better or worse, evolved on that question.
Supah_Schmendrick
11d ago
The issue is the American (mostly Red Tribe) culture of escalatory self-defence.
What about the Blue Tribe culture of aggressively taking over and blocking explicitly public transit spaces? That action happens to be illegal (at least as the laws are written) in most US jurisdictions.
Supah_Schmendrick
12d ago
That was the focus of the prosecution that he was cauding people to feel hreatened, which was the contention on why Rosenbaum may have felt threatened and c harged Rittenhouse and thus had a self defence claim.
The problem is the link you're smuggling in between "feeling threatened" and "charging." Not "shoving someone away from you" or "running away" or "hiding" but "charging". Actively running towards the person who you think is threatening you.
Supah_Schmendrick
12d ago
she happily took an OF career over a law career.
This doesn't tell you anything. I graduated with decent grades from a T-15 law school in a major US metropolitan area and didn't crack $80k/yr for several years out of law school. Lawyer pay is extremely bimodal, and there's a lot of people who get their newly-minted JD only to find themselves with 5 or 6-figure debts but making significantly less than the Assistant Manager at the local Panda Express.
Supah_Schmendrick
12d ago
simp/soyboy/nerdy men (perjorative terms used to denote an archetype succinctly)
The problem is that this archetype (because less attractive) includes lots of men with low social skills, and (because inexperienced romantically) badly wrong ideas about women. Women aren't looking for a grubby and immature man-child either. There's no quick fix here.
Supah_Schmendrick
12d ago
The point of this piece is just to push back against toxic sex positivity without back sliding into toxic purity
"toxic" aren't traits of impersonal "sex positive" or "purity" cultures - they're attitudes and actions of individual people, which are going to exist no matter the "culture" or "norm" you set up. There's no systematizing your way around human imperfection and failure, including but not limited to shittiness and evil.
The NYT is a liberal, secular- and reform-Jewish-dominant newspaper. These people are just about fully-assimilated WEIRD anti-nationalists, and have no more love for the conservative religious right in Israel than they do for the conservative religious right in the U.S.
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