Ecgtheow
11mo ago
Conservatives are quite capable of lawfare and they have a 6-3 Conservative Supreme Court majority. If 'intent to intimidate' rulings were shutting down conservative political rallies around the country they're quite capable of funding legal challenges and appealing their way to a court where they have a sympathetic majority.
The cynical view is that Conservative legal elites are completely fine with having their embarrassing white nationalist fringe suppressed and don't expect the statute in question to be applied broadly. The less cynical view is that this guy was charged because he was part of a group that surrounded some counter protestors and is alleged to have menaced them with the torch, which means he's being punished constitutionally for interpersonal intimidation and not political speech.
Ecgtheow
11mo ago
It's specifically a statute against intimidating people with burning objects written for the KKK and now applied to this Tiki Torch guy. I'm not sure how broadly that will apply given most political speech doesn't involve burning objects.
The civil rights takeaway is bizarre. Pro-segregationist southern states set the laws MLK and others were tried under not a vague, establishment. The whole point of the protests was to be arrested in order to produce news footage of well dressed non-violent black people being dragged away from lunch counters. If you look at cases like the 'Friendship Nine' they had the option to pay a fine and get out or do hard labor in prison and they did the hard labor and stayed in prison. King's most famous piece of writing was produced in prison. Jailing civil rights protestors for the six months this guy is set to serve doesn't look like a silver bullet that would kill the movement.
Ecgtheow
11mo ago
If you choked a non-homeless person to death after they verbally insulted you should you face no penalty? The article says he yelled but hadn't physically assaulted anyone yet. Should the law be that if someone makes a verbal threat someone else is allowed to murder them in response?
Ecgtheow
11mo ago
The Right is allowed to say cities are hell hole slums, that they hate NY city values, and that people making less than 25k are lawless leeches who should be disenfranchised because they're the party of the real working class fighting back against elites who disparage deplorables.
Ecgtheow
10mo ago
Kids like wearing costumes. People who start cosplaying at like 11 or 12 because they like the costumes in the manga they read in the school library aren't in it to get simps.
It's difficult to fully disentangle any human behavior from social and status reasons, and anyone who has a hobby that's more popular with the opposite sex will have some dating advantages. Asserting women have no intrinsic enjoyment of hobbies is a misogynistic generalization.
Ecgtheow
10mo ago
I'm not sure going from being the Mayor to the third largest city or a District Attorney to teaching at a college is failing up. In terms of salary it might be, since Lightfoot only made 216k as mayor of Chicago and the average Harvard professor makes 190k she could easily see a raise. I think it's pretty unreasonable to expect one term politicians to sink into ignominy. If you lose in a 70-30 landslide there's still going to be someone with a cushy job to hand out in that thirty percent. And if you look at what Happens to right wing Failures like Sam Brownback or Paul Ryan they usually end up at some Christian College or on the Board of a Major Company.
I'd say the incentive problem is on the other side. Being a high ranking politician is low paid compared to the other options available to those with the skills and connections to get elected, and attracts considerably more unpleasant scrutiny and stress. Teaching undergrads is probably about as remunerative and much more fun than being a prominent politician. That means elected positions attracts narcissists and ideologues and if you want to fix that you have to make retaining the position lucrative and pleasant, so that people do whatever they can to keep winning rather than doing one term, cashing out and kicking back..
Ecgtheow
10mo ago
It's nice that he just kept the war plans in his highly secure hotel bathroom and showed them to memoir writers rather than faxing them to our enemies but that's still obviously illegal.
Ecgtheow
10mo ago
Leonard Leo is a conservative legal activist with a 1.3 billion dollar legal fund. If he thought Virginia anti-cross burning laws found constitutional in 2003 posed a risk to conservative political power these people would have the most zealous representation money can buy. I'm skeptical that a law that bans burning objects for the purpose of intimidation on public property has a broad chilling effect on Conservative political organizations since most political rallies don't involve burning objects.
Ecgtheow
10mo ago
We have had categories of speech that are not protected by the first amendment for a long time, obscenity, threats, incitement to lawless action. It's easy to imagine how these narrow restrictions might be broadened and abused, yet we've had them for a long time without degenerating into a censorious dictatorship. The fact that you can imagine a hypothetical slippery slope isn't significant, the question is if we're actually sliding down it. I'm asking you for evidence that we are.
Ecgtheow
10mo ago
The obsession with virginity is only a way to control women and their sexuality!
Isn't it though? Historically and presently in many central Asian societies they dramatically restrict womens lives in order to ensure virginity. High status men demand paternity certainty, and in order to achieve paternity certainty you have to restrict women's sexuality, and in order to restrict sexuality you have to make sure they're never alone with another man or have the mobility to go somewhere they could be alone with a man. Is there a society that does costly practice like seclusion/hijabs/foot binding to secure male virginity?
Ecgtheow
10mo ago
Could you specify where in the FBI reports they discuss this. Your link goes to a list of forty multi-page PDF's.
I think this is the part of Comey's statement where he discusses the issue
For example, seven e-mail chains concern matters that were classified at the Top Secret/Special Access Program level when they were sent and received. These chains involved Secretary Clinton both sending e-mails about those matters and receiving e-mails from others about the same matters.
He says 'concern matters' rather than 'contain materials' which seems to imply a discussion of something classified Special Access rather than the transmission of the special access materials themselves.
Ecgtheow
10mo ago
Did he do fraud? He plead guilty to failure to pay, but not evasion. They're not alleging he set up some illegal shell companies to hide his income, just that he didn't pay what he owed.
The game theory about how to punish attempted fraud vs. late payments seem meaningfully different.
Ecgtheow
10mo ago
Sure, but are trans people claiming to literally have wombs and produce eggs or are they claiming to be their preferred gender for all socially relevant intents and purposes? A step-father who is closely involved in his wife's kids life from a young age does have lived experience as a father. If you exclude him from father-daugher themed events or correct his kids whenever they call him dad are you standing up for scientific accuracy or being a jerk?
Ecgtheow
10mo ago
On page 15 they have him on tape bemoaning the fact that he didn't declassify the plan of attack on a foreign country.
Ecgtheow
11mo ago
Is Trump only getting roughly 440 miles of border wall constructed a story of deep state subversion or the constitutional order functioning properly and the president being unable to build large infrastructure projects without congressional support. Trump only got a small congressional authorization for the Wall, roughly 1.5 billion. He tried to fund the rest with money authorized for military construction and drug interdiction and got held up in court with legal battles. Biden won and undid the reallocation of DoD funds to the border wall.
That's what typically happens when the president tries to govern by executive order, he's hampered by lawsuits and undone by the next president.
Ecgtheow
11mo ago
Eh, I have the opposite aesthetic preference. I wasn't raised on the KJV so when I hear verses I know with the Ye's it feels kind of cringe and ren faire-y.
Ecgtheow
11mo ago
Right, which is why you shouldn't escalate a confrontation unless it's necessary to prevent imminent violence. If this guy was about the attack someone and he intervened imperfectly then it's self defense gone wrong. If he was simply spouting profanities and throwing (non-injurious) trash then the person who decide to escalate the confrontation to physical violence shoulders the legal risks of that violence going wrong.
Ecgtheow
8mo ago
Then why do men struggle to find women who want to be homemakers?
My answer is people are status seeking and prefer to marry within their class. Middle and upper class women have unprecedented career opportunities in a society where status comes from career rather than family. The absolute standard of living for home makers has never been higher but the opportunity cost of motherhood is also at an all time high. Lower class women don't face the same opportunity costs but upper and middle class men don't want to marry lower class women and deindustrialization destroyed the ability of lower class men to support a family.
Ecgtheow
10mo ago
George W. Bush went to Yale and he was famously seen as an idiot by the left in the 2000's merely because he had a few malapropisms and committed the largest foreign policy blunder in my lifetime. If your family is loaded and you're not an eloquent speaker people will assume that your degree wasn't really earned. The right is similarly dismissive of Jill Biden's PhD because she got it after Joe became a senator.
Ecgtheow
11mo ago
Was there a time in history when the art that was championed by elites was also popular with the masses? I genuinely don't know. Renaissance artists never had the chance for economic reasons. Picasso and Monet were successful in their time but were they successful among non-art snobs of their time? Was there some period where the mass public and the art establishment agreed or has the mass public just accepted the past judgement of art establishments from centuries ago because old things are classy.
I don't think the issue with the MLK sculpture is that it's meant to be transgressive or groundbreaking. It's Martin and Coretta embracing, it has a straightforward meaning. The artists just did a bad job of considering what their sculpture would look like from all angles and the people involved in the procurement process didn't push back. That one seems like more of an indictment of city purchasing processes than the art establishment.
Ecgtheow
11mo ago
Yes, but as well know from British period dramas like Bridgerton the black share of the population was much higher back then and that it explains crime rates /s
Ecgtheow
10mo ago
I'm sure it's a 10,000ft overview rather than a plan with all the details and specifics, but that'd still probably be of interest to foreign intelligence. I'm also not sure how seriously to take Trump's claim that he just 'found' this document and it wasn't something he intentionally took from the White House. The fact that there was some sensitive intelligence in them suggests he didn't just mix them in with his mementos, but I also highly doubt he had some plan to sell this stuff to foreign countries. Why he took on serious legal jeopardy to hold on to these things seems pretty inexplicable other than the belief that he is personally immune to document retention laws or something.
Ecgtheow
10mo ago
The top public donors to the Pacific Legal fund which championed the case are the Dunn Family Foundation for The Advancement of Right Thinking and the Sarah Scaife Foundation. The Dunn's run a capital management firm and Sarah Scaife is the niece of Andrew Mellon. I don't think they're personally billionaires but they probably have net worths in the hundred millions and manage family foundations.
I don't think you're wrong that the media is more favorable to affirmative action than the public but this post is a low effort restatement of what I suspect is a widely held opinion here and so doesn't add much value If you found a non-opinion article from a mainstream news source covering the opinion and demonstrated how the subconscious bias influenced their writing that would be a lot more interesting.
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