Rov_Scam
1hr ago
To be clear, I'm not predicting a wipeout, just saying that I'd now put it within the realm of possibility where I wouldn't have earlier. I understand what you're saying, but one of the reasons I see this as a possibility is that each of the wipeouts I've seen in my lifetime—1994, 2006, and 2010—has been preceded by people from the party that got soaked saying that it wasn't going to happen. In 1994 the Republicans had a national strategy of opposing Clinton, and the Democrats insisted that this wouldn't work because people voted for their reps based on local issues and not national ones, certainly not to "send a message" to the administration. In 2010 the Democrats had a supermajority and failed to appreciate the pressure they were putting the Blue Dogs under with the Obamacare negotiations. They had a broad mandate and assumed that the president doing what he campaigned on wouldn't be a liability, and they underestimated the Republicans' ability to regroup after taking a drubbing.
But I want to focus on 2006, because I think it has more parallels with what's going on right now. After the 2004 election everyone thought that the Democrats were dead because they couldn't win any states outside of the Northeast, the West Coast, and parts of the Upper Midwest. Then a series of seemingly minor incidents compounded to make Bush broadly unpopular a year into his second term. With Bush's approval rating in the toilet and polls showing Democrats leading in certain races, Republicans were confident that this wasn't a problem. The districts were gerrymandered to such a degree that there weren't nearly as many competitive seats as 1994. They had a better ground game. They had done all kinds of computerized analysis to show which campaign methods were more effective. They had the greatest number of high propensity voters. It didn't matter; they got shellacked. I see the following items that the Republicans seem to be outright ignoring:
- They keep talking about how horrible a candidate Kamala Harris was. Democrats are largely inclined to agree, but she did pretty well for a horrible candidate. Democrats as a whole lost seats, but both the House and Senate are still close.
- The upshot of the above is that Republicans, and Trump in particular, are governing as though they have a mandate that they don't have, similar to how Biden acted like a guy nominated as a moderate Obama successor would have license to push through a bunch of left-wing policies, even in things like the infrastructure bill where he didn't have to. Trump has managed to go far beyond this, steamrolling previous norms of executive authority.
- New Jersey is being written off as a Democratic win in a Democratic state. But just a few weeks ago, Republicans were looking at close polls as evidence that they had an outside shot of winning, or at the very least that it was on the road to being a swing state. Instead an expected 5 point victory turned into a 13 point victory and Democrats increased their majority in the state house to a level not seen in decades.
- They're writing off Virginia because a lot of Federal workers are pissed that they lost their jobs. Their seems to be no concern that similar grievances may exist in other states.
- They're blaming Jones's victory on his voters being bad people who ignored character concerns. They fail to appreciate that such a bad candidate was nonetheless able to win by double digits.
- They think it's a foregone conclusion that NYC is going to go to hell because of Mandami. They don't consider the possibility that once in office he'll be more pragmatic, which frequently happens when socialists find themselves in executive positions. Sara Innomorato was elected as Allegheny County Executive as a DSA progressive, but her administration so far has revolved around getting the county's fiscal house in order to avoid spending cuts.
- They point to polls showing a low approval rating for the Democratic Party. They fail to appreciate that this isn't necessarily people who like the Republicans. A lot of Democrats are pissed that the party lost the 2024 election. They're also pissed at people like Schumer and Jeffries who come across as spineless cowards. This may change if the party can show that it's better at organizing.
Again, I'm not saying that it's going to happen, but the history of the past 20 years has shown that when parties think they have things wrapped up they get overconfident and start making excuses for minor failures rather than treating them seriously. I've seen no evidence that anyone in the republican party other than MTG seem to be concerned about what could happen if they stick to their "Trump's way or the highway" approach. The stakes are even higher than normal because, for the past decade, the party has been reliant on Trump to a degree that's unprecedented, and it's hard to see where they go next. Finding a successor was going to be hard enough, but it's going to be even harder if they have to reinvent the party.
Rov_Scam
18hr ago
When ICE is raiding Home Depot parking lots,.farms, and restaurants, nobody is under the impression that the people they're rounding up are just there to hang out.
Rov_Scam
19hr ago
From the people I talk to, it isn't so much women being sympathetic for crying Guatemalans as it is concern about what the objective is. When you sell a policy based on the idea that these people are all parasites and criminals, it's a tough sell when you're rounding up hardworking people just trying to make a buck.
I too am skeptical of polls, but you ignore them at your own risk. Especially after elections are sending a clear signal. You don't want to be in a position where you get your doors blown off because you decided that inconvenient information was simply incorrect, based on nothing but gut feeling.
Rov_Scam
21hr ago
Election Grab Bag Post
These are just a few unrelated observations about last night's election that don't really fit anywhere else. One of the first things that struck my attention that hasn't gotten much traction is the PA judicial retention elections. All judges here are elected in partisan races to ten-year terms, after which they have to be "retained" by voters to continue serving for another ten years. They can serve an unlimited number of terms, but must retire at 75. When a judge appears on the ballot for retention, it's technically nonpartisan—there's no R or D next to the name, no opposing candidate, just a Yes or No if they should continue serving. If a justice is not retained, the governor appoints a replacement who serves until the next odd-year election, when a full replacement is selected.
The effect of this is that judges are effectively elected to life terms. A judge not being retained is very rare, and has only happened once at the Supreme Court level since the current state constitution went into effect in 1968. In 2005, both houses of the state legislature voted themselves a pay raise in a midnight session just before the term ended. This was a huge deal at the time and the public was outraged. With no other elections that year, voters took out their anger on Justice Russell Nigro, who narrowly lost retention. Another justice won her retention race by only 8 points, when 40 points is the typical margin.
The PA Supreme Court is composed of 5 Democrats and 2 Republicans. The court has, in recent years, issued a number of controversial left-leaning decisions. Three of the Democrats were up for retention this year, and activist groups attempted a "Vote No" campaign. They started running TV ads a few months ago making themselves sound non-partisan, arguing about how it was time for a change and judges should have term limits and we should force an election. This was thin cover for the fact that these were Republicans looking to change the partisan makeup of the court by, if they were successful, possibly winning a couple of those seats in 2027. The fight took on somewhat of a national character, with Trump calling the justices "radicals" and "activists" and urging "NO NO NO". Democrats were forced to counterattack, with Governor Shapiro appearing in ads highlighting their records and commitment to protecting civil rights.
For all the efforts the GOP took to politicize a normally sleepy race, they successfully managed to whittle a 40 point Yes down to a 23 point Yes. This has to go down as one of the most underappreciated lead balloons in political history. This was an unprecedented gambit that took up most of the oxygen it what is usually an uneventful year; no one has ever run commercials about retention before, no one sunk that much money into it, it was just a given that a judge was going to be retained. Even the Nigro thing was more of a grassroots effort that had more to do with anger at the system than partisan politics. The moral of the story here is that you can't get voters fired up about something they don't want to get fired up about, even if there's nothing else interesting happening, especially if you try to trick them into getting fired up about it.
In other PA news, Pine-Richland, a heavily Republican school district in Allegheny County's northern tier, had its school board flip from an 8–1 Republican majority to a 5–4 Democrat majority. It should be noted that, of the 8 Republicans, 5 were raging Moms for Liberty-style MAGA conservatives, and 3 were normal, moderate Republicans. Four of the MAGA members were elected in 2023 in a campaign funded by outside conservative groups with the intention of revising the school's library policy. Which is basically code for removing woke library books. One of the guys had sued the district a few years earlier over their trans bathroom policy. What ensued was an ever-escalating shit show where it took them a year and a half to approve a new English curriculum, culminating in a 7-hour-long board meeting where they denied students the right to speak (over repeated motions) until nearly midnight, the night before midterms. They were regularly confronted by hostile audiences and refused to explain any of their decisions. After a long fight to wrest control over books from the superintendent, they ended up approving all of the LGBT-themed books that had been challenged anyway. Then they decided to ban a book about a black girl's experience during the Tulsa Race Riot from the English curriculum on the grounds that it wasn't difficult enough for ninth graders, necessitating a long retooling of reading assignments (the book is recommended for ages 12 to 17). Residents eventually got fed up with the negative publicity and the last several meetings turned into forums where residents would rip the board for creating a circus. Now they can turn their energies to things like taxes and re-turfing the football field.
While last night's elections weren't particularly meaningful for those not directly affected, they're useful as prodromes for what to expect in the future. While it's expected that the pendulum would shift back toward the left at some point, I doubt many expected that it would happen this quickly or decisively. some in the comments below have brushed these victories off as liberals winning in liberal states, nothing to see here. But I think that attitude is whistling past the graveyard. During Trump's first term, when I would criticize him to a Republican friend and the friend would ask me what he's done that's so bad, I could come up with any number of criticisms, but none that he, as a conservative would care about. And probably none that a moderate with conservative tendencies would care too much about. Democrats could roast him on plenty of things, but the kinds of things they could roast any Republican about and the electorate broadly wouldn't care about because that's what they expect from a Republican. That and personal scandals and gaffes that can easily be reasoned away by anyone inclined to.
He lost in 2020, and didn't take it well. But by the Democrats fumbled the opportunity to right the ship by Joe Biden fucking up Afghanistan, the border, and any number of other things, all the while governing significantly further to the left than one would have suspected based on his campaign. Add in inflation, and despite things not being too bad overall, it was easy to brush away whatever controversy Trump caused four years earlier and look on the pre-COVID past with rose-colored glasses. Was Trump really so bad? All of the terrible things you said would happen never happened. Biden is a disaster. Give the man another chance.
If the Trump of 2025 were similar to the Trump of 2017, things wouldn't have changed. But his time he is doing things that are genuinely unpopular and hard for his base to defend. Tariffs. Aggressive immigration enforcement. Troop deployments to US cities. The George Santos pardon. Mass firings. The Epstein Files. Withholding grant money. Ending healthcare subsidies. This isn't merely bungling like we saw under Biden, but conscious policymaking that could stop at any time. He's making a similar mistake as Biden in treating a narrow victory like a mandate, except he can't even pass a budget let alone achieve any real legislative accomplishments, even with an undivided legislature. At least Biden had the infrastructure bill. He's using the Steve Bannon Flood the Zone with Shit strategy, forgetting that voters don't like being served shit.
Republicans will have to defend every one of those policies next year. Some may be defensible to some people, but Trump's actual policies are broadly unpopular, and there's no unifying ideology to bind them. Maybe there's enough hardcore MAGA sentiment out there that the Republicans can ride through 2026 with minimal damage, but I don't know if I'd be willing to bet on it. Trump certainly isn't, hence the redistricting push. The trouble is that if these policies turn out to be losers it's hard for Republican incumbents to distance themselves from them, even if they want to. I don't see the GOP turning away from Trump en masse, and individual politicians have supplicated to the point that they can't credibly repudiate him. MTG can fight against these things and make nice with the ladies on The View, but she has enough MAGA cachet that it won't hurt her much. Trump himself could, of course, back away from his policies, but that would be an admission of defeat, and Trump will never admit defeat. He might chicken out on the implementation, but what would be involved is a complete repudiation, and that's not going to happen, especially when nothing can affect him personally.
A lot can happen within the next year, so I don't want to make any predictions, but I wouldn't rule out a midterm wipeout. We've heard this before, and it hasn't come to fruition, but all I'm saying is that I wouldn't be surprised if it happened, and I wouldn't be surprised if it happened and took the GOP completely by surprise. By wipeout, I don't mean that the Democrats merely win both houses or win all of the "contested" seats, but that they also pick up a few surprise House seats in presumably safe districts that nobody polls, and a few Senate races become spicier than one would expect. Beyond that I don't want to say anything else, because I don't know what will happen, but the amount of personal fealty Trump demands would make things very difficult for Republicans if the electorate turns against him. What will JD Vance do if it become apparent that his chances of winning the nomination in 2028 are akin to those of Dick Cheney in 2008? Are there any John McCain types in the GOP who have national profile but haven't kissed Trump's ring? I don't know the answers to these questions, but htings will sure be interesting.
Rov_Scam
1d ago
Thanks, I don't know what I did there because if Trump had indeed won Virginia that sentence wouldn't have made sense. Corrected.
Rov_Scam
1d ago
Neither would have any power over immigration law or enforcement.
You should have told that to Miyares before the election because that's what he campaigned on. He doesn't have an Issues section of his website, but he does have an Accomplishments section, which he divides into four sections. One is law enforcement and one is immigration. Another one is the opiate epidemic, which is fine, but that's par for the course among people running for AG regardless of party. The other is protecting children, by which he mostly means the Loudon County school incident but also includes a few other non-culture war things. Even with the normal AG stuff he could only offer half a loaf because there was nothing about fraud and corporate malfeasance, which, I don't know his record and Jones attacked him for being too friendly to big business, so maybe there were people he didn't want to piss off.
As for the Trump stuff, it was even worse than @KennethAlmquist points out. The centerpiece of Jones's campaign was that Miyares sat idly by when Trump was running roughshod over the state and didn't bother joining in lawsuits that other AGs were filing. In particular, he didn't join in the one that argued that Federal employees were wrongfully terminated, the result of which was the employees got reinstated in other states but not in Virginia. I don't have to tell you that there are more Federal employees in Virginia than in most other places. Miyares had no response to this, and when confronted drifted into his normal mode of attacking Jone's liberal legislative record and lack of experience as a prosecutor, which is fine when you're winning but doesn't cut it when you're behind. Jones was able to successfully paint Miyares as more loyal to Trump than to Virginians, and it was a fatal blow.
'If only the average voter knew' runs headfirst into what we're imagining that the average voter would do if they did know. And some of them did. Optimistically, maybe one-in-ten? Forget anyone running out into the street and screaming into the sky like a Charlton Heston outtake, forget any member of the Abundance Caucus speaking against the man without being pushed about him first. You'd expect to see someone horrified.
I'd say that most of them knew because Miyares wouldn't shut up about it, to the point that he'd use it as a crutch and bring it up when confronted with a question he couldn't respond to. Miyares, however, had the misfortune of representing a party that has spent the better part of the past decade defending statements from Trump that would have previously been undefendable all the while bemoaning cancel culture and the alleged erosion of free speech. To be fair, at first the Republican establishment did condemn him and try to end his career, but once he secured the nomination these condemnations gradually turned to excuses, and then justifications, and finally admissions that they really didn't give a shit. Republicans are well past the point where they can credibly say that this is the point where they draw the line. Do you seriously think that if similar texts from Trump came to light a month before last year's election that the GOP establishment would be tripping over themselves to endorse Harris? Do you think his voters abandon him en masse? Do you think Trump even apologizes? I think you know the answer to this one.
Rov_Scam
1d ago
By that logic, now, 9 in 10 Republicans have no problem with grabbing women by the pussy and the rate of sexual assault among Republicans should be higher. Sure, there are a handful of loud examples, but nothing systemic. the only conclusion, then is a MASSIVE FRAUD machine that got Trump elected twice.
Apart from what @hydroacetylene said, I'll try to give you a more complete answer. You have to go back to 2020 and the Virginia GOP's decision to have a convention instead of a primary. Virginia had been a Republican stronghold for years, but in little more than a decade had become reliably liberal. A lot of conservatives like to blame Federal employees in Northern Virginia for this shift, but that's a bit of a cop out; NoVa had been reliably Republican well into the 2000s, and the shift was occurring in other places, like suburban parts of Richmond and Hampton Roads. Biden won Virginia Beach in 2020, the first Democrat to do so since the days of the Solid South. This sudden shift left the state GOP scrambling and rudderless. While Republicans found ways to win in liberal strongholds like Maryland, New Jersey, New York, Massachusetts, Vermont, Rhode Island, and California, no Republican had won statewide office in Virginia in ten years. Rather than look to these other states as examples of how to win in hostile territory, the state GOP appealed to rural voters in the western part of the state more closely aligned with West Virginia and Kentucky than the Tidewater. But running up the score from a 60% win to a 75% win doesn't do much if the county has 5,000 voters, and it was clear to some in the party that this was a formula for continued irrelevance.
In February 2020, state delegate Amanda Chase announced that she would be seeking the gubernatorial nomination. Ms. Chase dubbed herself "Trump in Heels" and represented the far-right fringe of the party. She had been disciplined by the state GOP in the past and had taken every opportunity to publicize her maverick image. As 2020 wore on, and COVID restrictions came into place, she was representing her district from a plexiglass box she was forced to sit in due to her refusal to wear a mask during sessions. She had previously open carried in the state house. As 2020 drew to a close and Trump lost the election (and by double digits in Virginia), she became a vocal proponent of the MASSIVE FRAUD narrative, part of the fringe who genuinely thought there was a chance of Trump being sworn in for a second term in January. She was completely unelectable. She also had a decent shot at being the Republican nominee for governor.
The party establishment was alarmed, and devised a plan to prevent her nomination at all costs. Per state law, they had the privilege of holding a convention rather than a primary. In a primary, Chase could win the nomination with 30% of the votes, with three serious candidates and several minor ones splitting the remaining 70%. But in a convention, the nominee would need a majority, elected by screened delegates. the establishment's push for a convention led to all-out war within the party. MAGA hardliners had by this point made sizeable inroads into party leadership, and sought to thwart what they saw as a rigged nomination process. The convention went forward, but rules and logistical challenges turned it into a mess.
The idea was that delegates would be seated in an "unassembled convention" whereby they would submit ballots at 37 locations throughout the state. Ranked choice voting would be used, and delegate votes would be weighted based on Republican turnout in the previous election. Most importantly, since Virginia does not include party affiliation with voter registration, delegates would be screened by the local party before they would be seated, ostensibly to weed out Democrats, but realistically to ensure that only committed party men would go through the process. As the May convention approached, the party bragged that over 53,000 delegates had qualified, but only 30,000 showed up, a far cry from the over 300,000 who participated in the last primary. The byzantine process had critics describe the whole thing as a mess that only made the GOP look worse, but it achieved its objective: Chase finished third, and that November, Virginia elected its first Republican governor since 2009.
A seemingly minor side-effect of this whole debacle was that Winsome Sears was nominated as Lieutenant Governor. Sears had served a single term as state delegate 20 years prior, but was otherwise a small business owner from Winchester and occasional minor candidate. How she won the nomination appears to be a mystery, since I can find nothing about how this happened. I suspect, though, that it's largely a combination of the unusual nature of the nominating process and sheer luck. I can't find much in the way of traditional campaigning, no one seems to have paid much attention to the LT side, she only got 32% of the vote on the first ballot (compared to 22% for second), and that just may have been the way the cookie crumbled. If anyone has any information that explains this, I'd love to hear it, but whatever happened, I think it's safe to say that she didn't win the nomination through running a traditional campaign.
So she essentially lucks into the LT role after Youngkin wins. And he's able to do so by shying away from MAGA rhetoric and focusing his campaign on a few key issues that were big at the time. In the process, he cements himself as one of the rising stars within the party and a possible presidential nominee. He maintains a decent approval rating in a state hostile to his party, even after Trump Harris carried it in 2024. He can't run for reelection, but it's clear to the party that the best way to stay in power is to extend his governorship the best way you can. And the obvious person to do that is the lieutenant governor. By this point the party is in agreement about the best path forward, so they have a primary, except there's only one name on the ballot.
The upshot of all of this is that, in 2025, Sears found herself as the major party nominee for governor of a larger state, her only record of having won a competitive election on her own being state delegate race in 2002. She hadn't even run in a competitive race since 2004. She lucked into the LT nomination because of an unusual situation, got elected LT in the general by virtue of being ticketed with Youngkin, and won the nomination in 2025 without a primary opponent. The state party failed to realize that this was a recipe for disaster.
Several things ultimately did her in, and contributed to her image as an unserious candidate. The first was a series of glitches and booboos. The kind that a seasoned candidate wouldn't have made. The kind that a seasoned candidate may have made, but not so many. The kind that a seasoned candidate who made as many as she did could have recovered from by responding better. Things like putting watermarked stock photos on your campaign website, and likening DEI to slavery. I wouldn't say these alone sunk her campaign, but they didn't giver her an image as a good campaign manager running a well-oiled machine.
The second was that her inexperience was underscored by her inability to raise money. This is where I'd lay the most blame on the state party, because they should have considered this and had a plan to counter the problem. It was unrealistic to expect her to suddenly raise large sums of money when she hadn't had to before, and they needed to either get on the horn for her or teach her how to dial for dollars or whatever it took. It was clear this was going to be a problem the minute her candidacy was announced, and a party that cleared the path for her nomination should have been rolling in dough to give for the general. There is absolutely no excuse for this.
The biggest problem, though, was that she had very little in the way of policy, and what she did have was an object lesson in what not to do. The only two policy positions she seemed to care about were anti-abortion and anti-LGBT. She could mouth conservative buzzwords like school choice and what have you, but there was no real substance to her campaign. the Issues part of her website was buried at the bottom of the Meet Winsome section, and outlined five positions: lower taxes and government spending, be tough on crime (and illegals), school choice, right to work, no trans in sports. Nine total paragraphs. In 2017, the Republican nominee had pages and pages of policy positions down to minutia like how much money should be allocated to increase enrollment at the University of Virginia at Wise. Apart from the paucity of substance, these are not winning positions in this kind of race. Youngkin may have been elected, but it's still a blue state. Generic conservative talking points are not going to win the election, because the conservative isn't the default candidate. Youngkin understood this. She didn't, and the party didn't. The ultimate illustration of how inept she was at this came towards the end of the campaign, when she hammered the airwaves with commercials reminiscent of the "they/them" ads that critics found especially damaging to Harris. Apart from the blunder of fighting the last war, it wasn't even her last war. Trump was trying to win marginal votes in swing states; there was no expectation that those ads would get enough votes for an unexpected victory.
She completely misunderstood the election she was running in and either forgot or didn't realize that to win in Virginia, you have to attract the kind of voter who wouldn't normally be inclined to vote for you. And as these failures became evident, so did the final failure, the complete lack of a ground game. She didn't tour the state. She didn't respond to media requests. She didn't respond to voters. She disappeared the last month of the campaign. Whether it was from lack of money, lack of experience, or a sense that the enterprise was a lost cause, dropping off the face of the earth during crunch time isn't the mark of a serious candidate. At least take your best shot. You're a major party nominee for the governorship of an important state. When you launched your campaign, it looked winnable. Act like it still is, don't just throw in the towel. I don't think that this hurt her too much since she would have lost anyway, but it took the party from looking like geniuses who managed the improbable to inept jackasses who mishandled an important candidate in a winnable election. They moved heaven and earth to come back from the dead four years earlier, but, depending on how they handle things going forward, the view of Youngkin's win may go from a rejuvenation to a last gasp.
Rov_Scam
1d ago
California can reliably elect Democrats, but when it comes to specific issues, the ballot initiatives don't always go the way one thinks they would. Looking at recent years: Funding greenhouse gas initiatives by raising taxes on incomes over $2 million? Failed. Raising the minimum wage? Failed. Expanding the ability of local governments to impose rent control? Failed. Two initiatives to legalize certain forms of gambling failed. The measures voters actually approved in that time period were ones for increased funding for arts and music education, two involving healthcare, and one that increased sentences for certain drug and theft crimes. I don't know how much the party apparatus was involved in pushing or pushing against some of these, but there's no clear pattern here, and the left-coded ones that were approved were of the more boring variety. This probably received more attention than any of the others, but the margin by which it passed sends a pretty clear signal.
It doesn't if you consider the fact that very few people are going to the polls because of an AG race. Down ballot candidates ride the momentum of the headlining act, so to speak. If a lot of Republicans weren't sufficiently motivated to turn out for Earle-Sears, they weren't going to turn out against Jones.
Rov_Scam
2d ago
I watched a video and I just don't see this catching on. The thing took 5 minutes to load a few items into a dishwasher, and that was with 100% remote operation. You can talk about minefields all you want, but the bigger minefield is that 100% teleoperation is expensive. I'm sure the robot itself costs no small sum, and beyond that a portion of the $20,000 purchase price has to go towards paying someone to do housework more inefficiently than they could in person. And the "housework" they do seems to be limited to light tidying up; you aren't going to get one of these things to clean the bathroom, or dust and vacuum. In other words, it doesn't do anything that you'd actually pay someone to do. It's useless! And the operator needs special training to do things that need no special training, and presumably having an operator actually available is key to the whole thing since you don't want a robot that's an expensive paperweight because there's no one there to remotely operate it. So, unlike an actual maid, you have to pay someone to be on call constantly in case someone wants you to move a book from one table to another. For $20,000 I can hire a cleaning service who will undoubtedly do a better job.
Rov_Scam
3d ago
The argument against that is that more or less over the weekend lockdowns went from something totally unthinkable to something every governor in America was mandating regardless of ideology. Liberals always took the virus more seriously than conservatives, but the dominant narrative among normal liberals in the wild was that this meant taking relatively conservative approaches to stopping spread, like washing hands more often, staying home if sick, and maybe banning large events at the most drastic. This attitude prevailed as recently as a week before mass lockdown, and there was a sense among a lot of people on the left even after the lockdowns started that the media was being a bit sensationalistic. The idea that businesses would shut down en masse and people would be discouraged from visiting family members was beyond the pale. From conservatives, the dominant narrative ranged from not caring at all to thinking that it was a big scam to make Trump look bad.
In an alternate timeline there could have been a stable equilibrium where things went on like this until either the vaccine came out or people moved on to other concerns, but two things happened in quick succession that I think tipped the scales. The first is what happened in Bergamo; we could write off China as an overenthusiastic authoritarian state, but seeing mass deaths of elderly people in a modern, Western country scared a lot of people, especially local government officials who didn't want their city to be next. The second thing was that we started seeing cases in people who hadn't recently traveled. This may seem like an inevitability in hindsight but remember that COVID had been in the Pacific Northwest for a while without any real community transmission, and a lot of people thought that whatever precautions they were taking there were enough to keep it from spreading.
If the lockdowns were merely a liberal reaction to Trump's apparent apathy then red states wouldn't have been likely to impose them, nor would neoliberal ghouls like Tom Wolf. If they were simply a far-left extravagance they would have been limited to the West Coast and a few large cities.
Rov_Scam
3d ago
If your HR department only has two active employees, unless your company has well under 50 total I doubt that either of them are scouring internet calendars looking for interesting fake holidays. They're probably pulling these from a third party service and distributing them without looking too hard.
Rov_Scam
3d ago
The Game, by the recently departed Ken Dryden. It has a reputation as unquestionably the best hockey book of all time, and possibly the greatest sports book of all time, and while I understand where this comes from, the whole thing comes off as a bit overrated. The first thing you need to know about Ken Dryden is that he isn't a typical athlete. His career was remarkably short for a Hall of Famer. He was 23 when he made his debut in the 1971 playoffs, winning the Conn Smythe Trophy and the Stanley Cup before he was technically even a rookie. He retired at age 31 following the 1978–1979 season. He only played 7 full seasons and the aforementioned playoffs of an eighth, having sat out the 1973–1974 season due to a contract dispute and his desire to finish his legal training, and won Stanley Cups in six of those seasons.
As Dryden didn't have a typical career, it stands to reason that he wouldn't write a typical sports book. Athletes usually write standard memoirs, talking about their childhoods and how they got into sports before spending the bulk of the time on their professional careers, and then a nod towards their personal lives and what they've been up to since retiring. Then there's the tell-all memoir, which is exactly the same as the standard memoir except the athlete has some controversial aspect to his life and there's a chapter that deals with the controversy. The Game touches on some of this but doesn't dwell on it; if you didn't know anything about Dryden's career before reading it the book isn't going to fill in the blanks for you. Instead, he ostensibly focuses on a week in the 1978–1979 season but really uses it as a jumping off point to discuss various subjects related to being a professional athlete.
Well, more like related to be being Ken Dryden, because I don't see most athletes having his level of insight, and, as I said, his experience was atypical. One gets the impression that he didn't particularly want to be a pro athlete and just sort of lucked into the job. Almost every review of this book talks about how it discusses "the pressures of being a pro athlete", and while this is certainly part of it, this aspect is overstated, as the pressure he describes isn't universal. The book's biggest strength is that Dryden is candid to a degree that was unheard of at the time. He talks about how being part of a dynasty directly led to his decision to retire, as the thrill of winning had been replaced by the fear of not living up to expectations. He talks about how players have to push for higher salaries even though it ruins the game. Most importantly, he talks about how being a professional athlete necessarily means peaking early in life and becoming alienated from having any semblance of a normal life progression. As he puts it, you go from extended adolescence to premature middle age. When he retires at 31, he knows that whatever he does with the rest of his life he will always be "former" or "ex". He realized that he didn't even want to be a lawyer but always stuck to the idea so he could pretend that hockey was just what he was doing while he could before he got his real career on track, but as the reality of not having hockey becomes clear he admits that was just an excuse.
And he's aware of all the contradictions. The book's second greatest strength is that he knows how to write, but he's aware that he has the image of an intellectual, so of course this will be expected of him since people have been calling him "articulate" his whole career. And he's aware of how image can be manufactured by both players and the media (at one point he says that if you want to cultivate an image as a theatergoer then go to the theater once after a good game and tell a journalist about it, and people will assume you're really into theater). And he's aware that most NHL players have to work hard to stay on rosters and that the ones who are good, like teammate Guy LaFleur, have a "love of the game" that he simply doesn't.
The reason I say this is overrated is because, for all his insight, there's nothing universal about anything he says. Most athletes are lucky to win one championship and don't have to deal with the expectations that come with having won five. There simply aren't than many dynasties, and even on dynasties, most of the players are only there for a short period. He says early in the book that retirement was a difficult thing to consider because he had always assumed that his playing days would end when a coach told him in the fall that he didn't make the team; but that didn't happen, and now he has to decide how and when to make his exit. Well, the same is true for most pro players; they don't make the team out of camp, or get waived, or don't get signed to new contracts, or whatever. Even the ones lucky enough to announce their retirements have usually played as long as they realistically can. I could go on, but very little of Dryden's concerns would appear to be common to pro athletes as a whole.
The other reason it's overrated is because it just isn't that fun to read. Dryden is a good writer, but he's such a good writer that he's more quotable than readable. When everything a guy says is profound it's hard to just get lost in the book. I think sportswriters overrate this because they're usually nerds who can't play sports at all and spend their careers trying to make sense of guys who live up to "dumb jock" stereotypes, so when a guy like Dryden comes along and shows he's one of them they all start drooling over his profound insights and pretty words. There are also several boring sections where he's not musing on personal stuff and trying to give one the atmosphere of a dressing room by quoting players and narrating the antics and whatnot, and it's pretty boring. Maybe when I'm done with this I'll have rated it higher, but I don't know what this book is supposed to say about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Rov_Scam
3d ago
I think he was referring to the loading speed of the site. There was a hardware problem a week or two ago that has since been fixed, but some of the lag was back over the weekend.
Rov_Scam
6d ago
My apologies for the misspelling but I'm glad you found the post! I get what you're saying with the first argument, but the same could be said about someone who shoots and misses. Suppose the perpetrator only intended to scare the victim and used a gun he loaded with blanks, and an inspection of the gun proves it was loaded with blanks and the perpetrator told several people beforehand that he was going to scare the victim. The victim was not, at any point, in danger of being injured. We can prove this with hindsight. I think we both agree that the victim would have been privileged to use lethal force, but assuming he did not, do we only charge the perpetrator with simple assault since we know, with hindsight, that the victim wasn't in any danger?
Rov_Scam
6d ago
What you're missing here, and the reason I limited my examples to cases where there is no injury, is that the actual injury is only one component of the crime. A strong arm attack can be aggarvated assault in the right circumstances, including if the injuries are severe enough. But the other component is apprehension of imminent harm, and we grade simple assault lower in this respect because of a recognition the the amount of harm anticipated by the intended target of a missed punch is lower than that of the intended target of a missed shot. If you're arguing that lethal force is necessary in cases of unarmed attacks (and with no special circumstances) where the victim is not injured on the theory that you don't know what is going to happen and the attack could result in serious injury or death, you're saying that the amount of apprehension the victim of such an attack suffers is comparable to that of someone who was shot at but not hit.
Rov_Scam
6d ago
Except Biden isn't the boss anymore, and she's questioning the judgment of the people who are in charge now. If she had just kept her mouth shut then she might have had a future. Then again, maybe she knew she had no future, and figured her only chance was to criticize D leadership for the election loss.
Rov_Scam
7d ago
I'm going to respond here, but I'm going to tag @FistfulOfCrows, @Southkraut, @JeSuisCharlie, @self_made_human, @zeke5123a, @ulyssesword, and @The_Nybbler because all of these comments are in the same vein and merit similar responses. I understand the concern that things like punching, tackling, etc. can result in serious injury or even death. My issue is that, regardless of the true degree of risk, it is built into the criminal law that some kinds of attacks are inherently more dangerous than others, regardless of the actual injury inflicted, and penalties for those acts that we view as especially dangerous are increased accordingly. I'm going to use Pennsylvania as an example but it's similar everywhere; suppose you have the same Hayes attack except instead of it ending with Gannon being shot, they roll around for a while and Gannon is either stopped or withdraws, and Hayes doesn't suffer any injuries. Gannon would be charged with simple assault and, assuming no prior record, sentenced from anywhere between 30 days of Restorative Sanctions (fines, community service, restitution, etc.) and 1 year of probation. By the same token, if instead of tackling Hayes Gannon shoved a gun in his face, he'd be charged with aggravated assault causing fear of serious bodily injury, with a dangerous weapon enhancement, and, again assuming no prior record, sentenced to 9–18 months of jail time.
I used examples that didn't involve any injury because the law recognizes that apprehension of injury is sufficient to invoke criminal liability. In turn, the differing severity of penalties reflects a presumed greater level of apprehension that arises from attacks involving dangerous weapons compared with attacks that involving strong arming. The law entitles one to defend oneself using force proportional to the threat. If we say that punching and tackling are threats that warrant the use of lethal force, we are saying that they cause the same kind of apprehension that being shot at or threatened with a knife does. The logical conclusion, then, is that the criminal penalties for punching or tackling someone without causing injury should be similar to those that involve shooting at someone or threatening someone with a knife or gun without injury. Additionally, the idea of sentencing enhancements for using a "deadly weapon" or firearm doesn't make sense, insofar as these enhancements do not also apply to someone who punches or tackles someone. The upshot is that all assaults would now be aggravated assaults, excepting those where the level of contact is so minimal that in most cases they are rarely prosecuted anyway, such as the aforementioned shoving in a grocery store line.
If you think this should be the case, then you're entitled to your opinion, and I'm not here to argue the appropriate grading of crimes. What I would point out is that, if this is indeed your opinion, then the problem stretches far beyond one case in Massachusetts to thousands of cases annually in all 50 states and Federal jurisdiction. Simple assaults are among the most common cases prosecuted in the US, and if every case of punching or tackling, or whatever else you can say Mr. Hayes suffered placed the victim in apprehension of imminent death or serious bodily injury then the common practice of sentencing perpetrators to probation and community service is one of the grossest injustices imaginable.
On the other hand, if you do wish to preserve the practical distinction between aggravated assault and simple assault, then you have to recognize that there are few bright-line rules that govern when a victim is licensed to use deadly force. The privilege to use lethal force against an intruder in one's home without an independent showing of necessity is one, but even it is a creature of statute that only dates to the 1980s. While not a strict rule, an armed assailant is usually presumed to be sufficient grounds to use deadly force. But beyond that, it's hard, and I'm not going to fault a prosecutor for deciding to charge a shooting when there is no applicable bright line standard that says he shouldn't. It ultimately comes down to a question of reasonableness, and I can't think of a better way to determine that question than to present the evidence to a cross-section of the community and ask them. If you can't convince a single member of a 12-member panel that you're actions were reasonable given the circumstances, then it's a good indication that they weren't.
Rov_Scam
7d ago
Let me ask you a question. Consider the following scenario: The facts in the Hayes case are the same, except instead of crossing the street, Gannon stays on his side of the street and brandishes a gun in a manner obviously intended to intimidate. Is Hayes privileged to shoot Gannon? If Hayes doesn't shoot Gannon, what crimes, if any, should Gannon be charged with?
Rov_Scam
7d ago
I can appreciate that the risk of being tackled, or punched, or kicked, or whatever is greater than the general public appreciates. But can you tell me with a straight face that it's comparable to being shot or stabbed? Because that's the current standard. You can argue that the standard should be changed, and that's fine, but by that same token the penalties for punching someone without killing them should be comparable to those for shooting at someone without killing them.
Rov_Scam
8d ago
And it's still not to the level where one can take claims that an objective person would have been in reasonable apprehension of death or serious bodily harm at face value.Why not let a jury decide?
Rov_Scam
8d ago
The issue in that case wasn't that he had an opportunity to retreat but didn't, but that the force used was disproportionate to the threat. Gannon committed a pretty clear case of misdemeanor assault and battery, but that's it. There was no gun involved, no other dangerous weapon, no immediately obvious risk of suffering severe bodily injury. There was certainly the possibility of sever injury or death, to be sure, but that's the slippery slope that people warn about and which point you're proving; to pro-gun people, any physical contact is a potential justification for use of deadly force in response. You can brush off the grocery store sample above as hyperbole, but it's not too far off from what happened here.
Hayes was prosecuted and strong-armed into accepting pre-trial probation: he loses his license to carry, he has to take a course on "civil discourse" and he's banished from the city of Newton.
Hayes was charged with a felony and he got off with a slap on the risk. You omitted the fact that pre-trial probation means that the above conditions only applied for 90 days following the agreement, at which point the case was dismissed. Prosecutors had a pretty clear-cut case of assault with a deadly weapon and they bent over backwards to ensure that they wouldn't have to try it and that the guy wouldn't even have a record. I'm not necessarily arguing that they should have nailed his ass to the wall, but this is about as light a sentence as you can expect. As for Gannon, if he hadn't gotten shot he'd probably be facing a similar sentence anyway, so I'm not sure what you think they were supposed to do to him. You can argue that he won't have a record, but he did get shot and will likely have some sort of permanent impairment because of it, so it's not like he got off too easy.
Rov_Scam
8d ago
At first I couldn't tell whether OP was complaining about the quality of conversation dropping or how the internet ruined his own ability to engage in normal human interaction. People telling boring personal anecdotes is hardly a new phenomenon. And the timing of this alleged bad conversation (lunch on a Tuesday) suggests a work context, which means that yes, you're going to have to talk to people you wouldn't normally talk to in your personal life. Part of having social skills is being able to have these kinds of conversations. One of the things that the RETVRN people need to realize is that, if we went back to the 50s in terms of social etiquette, we'd be having a lot more of these inane conversations, not less.
This was more of an idle observation than anything else, but to the extent it's a criticism, it's because they bungled the approach by initially hiding the fact that they were urging Nos for partisan reasons, as if they could trick enough people into voting their way. If they had come out and said that the court was too liberal and would remain liberal for another decade unless they could kick those three out and elect a few conservatives in a couple years, they might have been able to motivate some low-propensity voters to vote in an election they'd otherwise ignore.
More options
Context Copy link