There was an interesting Slow Boring newsletter last week about how men 18-24 would answer questions like "do men have a right to know where their girlfriend is at all times" or "will it create relationship problems if a woman earns more" in a more feminist way then previous generations of men, but self-ID as feminists less. The theory was that young men weren't comparing themselves to the population as a whole they were comparing themselves to similarly aged women and saying 'well if that's feminism I'm not that'.
Basically if the overton window is shifting left we might see an increase in conservative self-ID without major shifts on the actual issues. Have opinions on abortion or gay marriage or women's place in the workplace changed? This article doesn't list individual issues but I doubt it. I would expect their to be a lot of polarization on trans issues people weren't previously paying attention to, and if social conservatism gets redefined as 'no trans women in women's sports, but yes gay marriage' then yeah I would expect a rise in social conservatism.
I had a good friend transition. The early transition phase is difficult and she dealt with it by dressing very androgynously and not really wearing makeup in public until she had been on hormones for a while. She eventually got to the point where she'd get kicked out of men's rooms wearing jeans and a t-shirt and then she said fuck it and started wearing dresses and makeup publicly.
The early transition fashion/makeup phase is really awkward and there were definitely times when it was kind of weird that she would show up to a board game night in heavy makeup and a nice dress. The voice took a while getting used to and was weird at first. But it's been four or five years later she dresses pretty conventionally and things feel normal. I'm really glad there weren't cameras on me at all times and an obsessive fanbase analyzing me for any signs of awkwardness or discomfort, cause there were times when it was weird. But it doesn't feel weird anymore. There wasn't some profound personality change, socializing with her doesn't feel that different. Plus she's still a killer bass player.
I don't envy Mr. Beast or Chris at all, transitioning in the public eye seems like an awful experience. It's not like trans women don't know that large portions of the public views them as 'grotesques'. I've seen her get spit on in public and it's made me much more of a pro-trans partisan.
Fame and fortune can deform relationships in a lot of ways, and I don't know how professional vs. how genuine Chris and Mr. Beast's relationship is. It seems most likely to me that Mr. Beast is a ruthless click chaser and will gradually phase out anything that reduces engagement or merch sales, but it's possible witnessing a friend be subject to mass online harassment will polarize him on trans issues.
Ecgtheow
10mo ago
This is correct. Wokeness is humanities academia fed through the incentive structure of social media. It's purpose is not to signal distinctiveness between blue and red, but between impure blues and properly pure blues. It originates with the overproduced elites on the margin looking for ways to distinguish themselves or get their peers ejected so they can win the next round of musical chairs on their way to tenure. It took existing liberal ideas and upped the extremity to the necessary point to distinguish themselves from other blue tribers.
I think right wingers really misunderstand the role of the institutional democratic party in wokeness. The Democratic Party has to get the votes of an aging electorate in an electoral system designed to over represent rural people. Academia, the entertainment industry and social media back in the 2010s all have much stronger incentives to appeal to the sensibilities of young educated people then the Democratic Party. The Democratic party gets dragged in the direction of wokeness by it's young election campaign staff working a year or two as a career stepping atone but the people invested in it's long term success understand who they have to appeal to.
Obama wasn't pro-gay Marriage in 2008. He ran on an 'all of the above' energy policy and presided over a massive shale boom and a 74% increase in oil production. He isn't responsible for the shale drilling revolution, but he didn't stop it either. He's a competent politician who understands that increasing gas prices is political suicide and the path to cutting emissions is keeping gas prices stable while subsidizing clean energy.
People forget that after George Floyd mainstream Democratic outlets weren't pushing defund the police they were pushing 'eight can't wait', a series of modest police reforms like banning chokeholds and shooting at moving vehicles. Deray McKessen went on Pod Save America, the Bill Simmons podcast and GQ, he got written up by Vox and endorsed by Ariana Grande and Oprah. This got rolled into the George Floyd Justice in Policing Bill the Democratic house passed in 2020 which had a national registry of police misconduct and an end to qualified immunity but didn't cut police funding. But this activist campaign for police reforms got absolutely wiped out by the attention grabbing divisiveness of 'Defund the Police' which took over Twitter and social media. Obama as a competent politician criticized the slogan as an expensive signal saying "do you want to actually get something done, or do you want to feel good among the people you already agree with?"
Ecgtheow
11mo ago
Of the OECD countries America has the third fewest doctors per Capita. U.S. Doctors have the highest average pay and average net worth. Med Schools began to limit the number of graduates in 1980 leading to the number of med school graduates shrinking relative to the population from 1980 to 2005 (figure 4). The U.S. government also ceased giving grants for the construction of new med schools under Reagan. The 1997 budget act limited residency slots as a cost-saving measure though that was repealed under Obama.
The AMA and the Graduate Medical Education National Advisory Committee predicted that there would be a physician oversupply in 1980, this could be just bad demography or you could note that restricting the supply of future physicians helps keep wages for current physicians high and current physicians are the membership of the AMA. A lot of it is also penny-wise pound foolish thinking from the government. Cutting residency slots and not building new med schools saves money in the short term, but as long as you're committed to paying for the medical care of the poor and elderly you're going to have to purchase doctors labor so you want to keep the supply of doctors high.
Doctors' salaries aren't the main cause of healthcare spending, it's maybe 8-10% of the overall costs. But increasing the number of residency slots and the supply of doctors seems like the low-hanging fruit of health care reform that avoids major ideological schisms.
Women's decisions are the big change but women's behavior is downstream of massive change to economic conditions. Gender norms that evolved in economic conditions where women were economically dependent on men, and where the opportunity cost of child raising was small aren't going to survive in a deindustrialized economy where nurses out earn factory workers.
Being the primary caretaker of children, as most wives end up doing, is a really bad career decision. You're committing to a part time job that doesn't build skills you can use in other careers, and you can't move easily between "employers"/husbands. Unlike other jobs where success increases your choice of employers, being a 10x mother probably isn't going to help you land the hot rich doctor if your husband turns out to be a wreck. Furthermore you're expected to make this long term choice at a young age with limited ability to predict the course of your partners future life.
Is signing a 20 year contract with a non-compete clause to do ~30 hours of unskilled work a week for a similarly aged peer in exchange for a share of their future earnings an advisable career choice? Only if you think their future income is much larger than yours would be if you pursued your own career.
Traditional cultures evolved in settings where men's superior strength at manual labor was really important and domestic labor was a time consuming full time job. Now it's not obvious that men always have higher earnings potential, domestic labor has been largely automated, and the nuclear family model means stay at home moms are often isolated. Travel and entertainment is cheap, healthcare education and housing are expensive. For educated people social status comes from career achievement, and available careers can be highly stimulating and meaningful rather than rote drudgery. The opportunity cost of motherhood gets larger and larger and so unsurprisingly fewer women are choosing it.
If the opportunity cost of marriage and motherhood relative to singledom keeps getting higher and higher is it unsurprising women have higher and higher standards for men? If cultural and gender norms evolved under conditions with massive disparities in economic power would we expect them to change if economic power equalized? Aren't men going to have to 'sweeten the pot' and offer a better deal in order to get women to sign that long term childcare contract?
My read on this is that economic power shapes relationships. We have millennia of human cultural evolution where men have had way more economic power and that has shaped the cultural models for relationships between men and women. Now that we have a few decades where economic power has been somewhat equalized those norms are going to start shifting slowly but surely. The question isn't why has women's behavior changed, that's obvious, it's how will men's behavior change to adapt.
Ecgtheow
8mo ago
I think the old concept of masculinity is less benevolent than you're construing it. If women are dependent on men to provide the necessities of life and physical protection then men hold substantial power over women. Without doing a massive cross cultural study I think it stands to reason that the physically stronger member of the relationship who provides the calories/income gets their preferences catered to more than the weaker member who in a pre-industrial world would be pregnant and physically dependent on their partner for prolonged periods of time. Cultural norms surrounding relationships evolved over centuries where men had substantially more power than women.
What's happened recently is that first industrialization and now the shift towards a service sector economy has largely equalized economic power. Guns and the modern state reduce the value of a husband's physical protection, and the gender wage gap is pretty minimal once you control for career choices. Feminism's defection from the old marriage bargain is only possible because the old marriage bargain was produced by a difference in economic power that no longer exists.
My read on this is that the masculinity influencers are pushing for a return to the old bargain under an individualist framework. Go out and make so much money and become so physically powerful that there will be something approximating the pre-industrial power differential and you can get a young wife who caters to your preferences. Emba is basically saying that men need to accept less. Derive meaning from providing for a family but without the power and deference your grandfather received.
While all the justices agreed that the EPA was wrong in this particular case the liberals and Kavanaugh authored a separate opinion because they disagreed with the majority's interpretation of the clean waters act. The issue is that water flows downstream, you can't protect the navigable waters of the U.S. without preventing people from dumping things into the marsh that flows into them. Congress wasn't super specific about what wetlands the EPA has authority over, I'm not a lawyer but a lot of the wrangling is over distinctions between waters that are "adjoining", "adjacent" or have "a significant nexus" with covered waters.
The EPA's argument was that the Sackett Family was filling in a wetland that had a subsurface flow into Priest lake and so needed federal permits. This got championed by Pacific Legal Fund, an organization founded by Ronald Reagan's former welfare reform team, because they saw a significant opportunity to loosen environmental regulation on property rights. Alito wrote the Majority opinion establishing a new test that only wetlands with a continuous surface connection to navigable waters are covered by the Clean Water Act, which would exclude a lot of wetlands that have been traditionally covered.
Kavanaugh actually broke with the conservative majority and sided with liberals on this issue because he thought that test was too strict. He argued that Alito's continuous surface connection test ignored the common meaning of "adjacent". It would exclude waters separated by man made barriers, such as marshes next to the Mississippi Levees, or swamps that drain into the Chesapeake Bay through subsurface connections. Pollutants dumped in these waters will end up in navigable waters and excluding them from coverage is nonsensical.
As usual with the Supreme Court it does look like Congress really needs to step in and clarify their law. The burden placed on property rights by saying that no one can build on their land if it has a tiny ditch that flows into a covered body of water is too high. But excluding swamps next to rivers without a surface connection from environmental protections seems to ignore basic hydrology.
The pre-modern marriage arrangement is something like men offer physical protection and income in return for chastity, sex, and domestic labor. The marriage 'deal' is being renegotiated because the male contribution has been devalued; physical protection is provided by the state, women make 80% of what men make. Women's domestic labor has largely been devalued too with the exception of childcare. Women's chastity used to be essential to make sure she didn't end up a single mother in a world where agricultural labor was essential, and to indicate paternity certainty. Now we have DNA tests and birth control, female chastity doesn't serve some essential social purpose it's just something men like.
You act like accepting a 'slutty partner' is some unthinkable conflict with masculinity but for most of the past 1000 years would a high status man have accepted anything less than a virgin? Women have already parlayed increased economic power into different norms about how much female promiscuity is acceptable, and their relative economic power keeps increasing.
Like most Intra-gender competition, promiscuity is something of a collective action problem. If every girl in the village is a virgin the one who fucks one guy is unmarriageable. If everyone fucks ten guys then the girl with only one body is practically a virgin. The function of stories where "slutty" women get "it all" in this context should be obvious, they help coordinate reduced intra-gender competition to be chaste. As women and men's economic power equalizes you would expect women to have to cater less to male preferences overall, and the role of such feminist media to be coordinating and normalizing this.
This may lead some people to sort of 'overplay' their hand and stop catering to male preferences at all. The woman who sleeps with fifty dudes, the woman who gives up on makeup and shaving her legs, they're probably going to have to accept low status mates or be single. Whether women systematically holding out for too good of a deal is responsible for low marriage and childbearing rates over all is difficult to say.
While marriage rates overall have fallen they've fallen way more for less educated women. Women 40-45 with Bachelor's degree went from 85% married in 1968 to 75% in 2015, women with a high school degree fell from 80% to 60%. If feminist indoctrination at college and in upper-middlebrow media was the culprit we might expect the opposite. Maybe the issue is that non-college women are huge sluts, but I suspect that a big factor is that real wages for high school educated men have declined since the 1980's so there's fewer marriageable men.
https://www.hamiltonproject.org/charts/changes_in_real_hourly_earnings_by_education
Rasmussen does lean right but 538 has applied 'House effects' to various pollsters to deal with right/left bias for ages. The posture of 'banning' biased pollsters rather adjusting for bias is a bad omen.
I think this is an also an instance where actual expertise is expensive and replacement level biased writers are cheap. Part of the reason Nate Silver is out is because he had a big contract and 538 itself didn't make money it was purchased as a prestige booster for ABC news.
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
I think you're too focused on trying to win obvious rhetorical concessions against very online urbanist YIMBYs and not really dealing with the issues at hand. Except for some urbanists and WEIRD people, I think most people would love to live in a suburban neighborhood in a beautiful location with people of only their socioeconomic class and culture and a short commute to work with easily available parking. I'm on the YIMBY side, but I have no issue admitting I would absolutely love that living situation, but the issue is that maintaining such environments in the face of economic headwinds isn't done through Coasean negotiations but through government restrictions on property rights that create deadweight economic loss.
YIMBY's are mostly progressives trying to convince blue city governments so they make arguments about egalitarianism and diversity but I don't think economic development is inherently progressive or egalitarian. Logically as a city increases in population some part of it will have to increase in density or it will sprawl infinitely. The point of YIMBYism/fewer restrictions on property rights is to let the market decide where density increases, not which neighborhood is better at lobbying the local political system.
Now you may say, my backyard is special and I value it over economic efficiency because I discount the value of future/geographically distant people who may want to move there. But if everyone applies this logic to their backyard we make it impossible to increase housing density anywhere, we underproduce an important commodity, and we get a housing affordability crisis. That's great for you because it increases the value of an asset you own, but it's bad for society as a whole because it reduces economic dynamism which libertarian economists are keen to remind us has diffuse benefits
For example, the value produced by biotech firms gets siphoned off by Madison area homeowners who used control of local government to enact regulations that restrict housing supply, raising prices, so that biotech firms have to offer higher wages to induce skilled workers to move there. This slows the creation of an agglomeration effect in biotech and reduces the margins of biotech firms, slowing the rate of innovation which would be beneficial to society as a whole.
Economic geography changes all the time; the places where young talented people want to move changes as different innovative fields develop new industry clusters, the places where hardworking blue-collar people migrate from or to changes as different extractive or manufacturing industries rise and fall. If we want a dynamic economy we have to accept there will be large population transfers and we need a system of housing production that facilitates such transfers. The people who live in a place affected by such a transfer will resist the change to the place they live, they'll want subsidies for public services in half-empty cities, or to ban housing to be built for newcomers where the market determines it should be built. If everyone is allowed to impose regulation or appropriate public funds in order to preserve the character of the place they live in the way it was when they got there we get sclerosis and massive deadweight loss. You don't have to train yourself to be a self-denying online YIMBY who insists that there's no downside to living next to a homeless shelter, but you do need to come up with an argument for why NIMBYism isn't just everybody defecting in a prisoner's dilemma.
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
Kavanaugh was peak scissors/toxoplasma because there was an object level dispute about what happened. This is the 'everyone agrees shooting kids is bad but the cause is the thing that supports our desired policy and definitely not the thing that supports your desired policy' that happens every mass shooting. Throw in a dash of 'your militant rhetoric led to this' that we got with the Buffalo shooter and immigration, Gabbie Giffords and posters with crosshairs, and the Republican caucus shooter. The structure is identical the content is novel because trans people seem to commit mass shootings in rough proportion to their very small share of the population so there aren't many of them.
Trans Resistance Network has 500 twitter followers and no links to any external organizations in their profile, do they speak for anyone significant? It's kind of frustrating that the decline of mass-membership organizations means that we don't have a trans NOW or NAACP to present some sort of 'official stance of the trans community' on a variety of issues.
This looks like it's something from Europe and I don't know much about that. In the U.S. the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System exists and my understanding is that it's basically a log of any clinically significant adverse events that happen to someone in a certain timeframe after vaccination. Doctors and members of the public can report these adverse events, and it's not required that they know the vaccine caused the event. This data is useful if you contrast it with base rates for particular conditions and demographics, e.g. if men 18-24 are showing up with myocarditis in the VAERS system much more often than they are in the general population of hospital admits. Looking at the raw total of VAERS events isn't helpful since the purpose is to do broad data collection about adverse events occuring after vaccination whether or not they can be definitively traced to the vaccine.
My guess is that this is something similar, that there were 1.6 million reported adverse events in some population of European vaccine takers but that doesn't tell you anything unless you contrast it with base rates.
Ecgtheow
11mo ago
I first heard of bussy from cis gay male friends in college. The Wikipedia article references donutussy (the center whole in a donut) which seems a good indicator that appending -ussy to things is mostly a joke and not some deep aspect of gender identification. I am not in the habit of discussing trans women's anuses but my guess is that with most jokey euphemisms for genitalia the appropriateness depends overwhelmingly on context and personal dynamics and can't be deduced from the etymology of the term.
It seems somewhat accepted around here that a lot of career path differences are based on "men like to work with things, women like to work with people". Video games are way better at representing interactions between "things" than novels are, both "things" as physical objects to shoot and explode and strategic management of mechanistic systems. I don't think games are actually that good at representing complex social interaction between individuals, because of the cost of producing the visuals and dialogue for each branching path they really can't get that complex. It makes sense to me that survival games might replace male interest in survival novels like "Robinson Crusoe" or "My Side of the Mountain" but dating sims aren't really going to replace women's interest in complex interpersonal relationships portrayed in novels. This is of course describing the centers of different bell curves and not to suggest that there are no women interested in strategy games and no men who like Jane Austen novels.
I think FanFic writing rates make a strong case that this is pretty organic. If you look at the video game modding community and it's 80% male and then you look at video game developers and they're 80% male do we need some big hiring practices conspiracy to explain it? There aren't institutional barriers to putting your Skyrim mod up on the Nexus or Steam Workshop or putting your fiction on AO3 or fanfiction.net. This survey of AO3 Users says they're 80% female, this study of fanfiction.net says people who joined in 2010 were 76% female. Goodreads has a 76% female userbase, though that's book reviews not fanfiction.
This NBER paper has a graph of share of books authored by women. It bounced around 10% for the 19th century and then begins a steady linear increase starting in the 1970's breaking 50% around 2020.
Are there many media forms where if the consumers and amateur practitioners are primarily one gender the producers remain the other gender? It seems like once most readers are women, then probably most writers will be women, and eventually, most editors and publishers will be as well and this generational overturn is to be expected. These spaces are woke because they're women-dominated not women dominated because they're woke.
There's been a meme for some time that goes something like, "men don't understand women, but women understand men - maybe even better than men do themselves", which I find to be quite obnoxious. If there is any "misunderstanding", then it surely goes both ways.
I'd put slightly better odds on women understanding men than vice versa. This is some weak back-of-the-envelope evo-psych but generally, I'd expect there to be stronger selection pressure for women to be able to predict and manipulate male behavior then vice versa, since they are physically weaker, calorically dependent, and extremely vulnerable during pregnancy. If early men wants something from early woman (say monogamy) violent coercion is an option, whereas early woman can't really coerce her partner unless she can get the whole group to do that for her.
Ecgtheow
10mo ago
There's no way this is a stable arrangement. You can't get this close to successfully doing a coup and just go back to things as before. Putin can't let Pirghozin keep his power base, and Pirghozin has to know he's a dead man if he loses his power base. Why Pirghozin would take that deal is bizarre, maybe rank & file Wagner didn't want to go through with it?
Supposedly they're even leaving Rostov and going back to Ukraine? This is insane.
Ecgtheow
10mo ago
Let's check and see if there is any non-outrageous explanation for this. Skimming some news articles available it looks like the legal argument made was that her initial detention of him was illegal and so their ensuing struggle was self-defense. The Deputy says his own mother called the cops on him and was holding a knife when the Deputy arrived, leading the deputy to assume the schizophrenic man was a violent threat so she put his hands behind his back and a struggle ensued.
The video opens with them already struggling and her gun is in her hand. The gun fires twice while they're struggling with it then he gets it and she runs out of frame, he fires in the direction she ran out of frame. The defense lawyer says they found the bullet hole from that shot in a nearby garage door and it was in a different direction from the bush she says she ran to for cover. It's possible she changed direction once she was off camera and he wasn't aiming at her.
If they show he's not aiming at her with forensics, and we only have her testimony that he fired the gun and it jammed I can see the jury acquitting him of attempted murder. The jury hung on the charges of resisting arrest, battery against an officer, and removing her firearm. I guess the defense lawyer convinced at least one member of the jury that the initial detention was unlawful. I wouldn't have guessed that you can legally resist unlawful detention and I'd be curious if anyone with legal expertise wants to comment on that.
I feel about this post the way I feel about articles that say wine or chocolate in moderation has mild health benefits. Maybe there are some people who would benefit from adding a small amount of dark chocolate to their diet and this is valuable information to them, but most people are going to use that information to justify excessive consumption. Maybe there are some people who are so devoted to steel manning that they're missing out on important insights because they accept too many bad-faith weakman objections, but most people need to be pushed to focus on their opponent's best arguments. There are many, many sites on the internet that can be described as a magnifying glass focused on the outgroup's crazies, and most of them produce circle-jerks and dunk contests rather than a burning pyre of illumination. There's no alpha left in trying to detect structural flaws in your opponent's position based on their dumbest arguments.
There might be a tiny tiny bit of alpha in trying to explain the outgroup's collective epistemological dynamics, but "my opponents say they believe this because of x, but they really are motivated by y" is not exactly an untapped field of inquiry online either.
Any honest and rational believer needs to grapple for an explanation for how the crazies managed to all be accidentally right despite outfitted — by definition — with erroneous arguments. Such a scenario is so implausible that it commands a curious inquiry about its origin.
I don't think this is as unlikely as you say. Many political issues are directional in the near term (e.g. should taxes/welfare/prison sentence length go slightly up or down relative to status quo). Many crazies who you disagree with about the optimal tax level are going to end up on your side of the "should taxes go up or down' debate. Your opponents and engagement-driven social media have strong incentives to emphasize the crazies on your side, and you have a strong incentive to downplay their extremity by sane-washing them.
Ecgtheow
6mo ago
This isn't made explicit in much of the coverage but Bowman pulled the fire alarm in the nearby Cannon House Office Building and not the Capitol Building. The NYT article says that the Office Building was evacuated as a result but doesn't say whether there was any disturbance in the Capitol Building as a result.
Ecgtheow
10mo 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
1yr ago
#2 Is straight up witch-hunt logic. Defending yourself by saying the sculpture David is non-pornographic does not suggest you were on other occasions showing kids pornography.
These are all the cognitive biases that goes into cancel culture just pointed the other way. If someone assigns Huck Finn should we assume there is some part of them that loves making kids read the n-word? If you become hyper-vigilant for any signs of secret child molesters/secret racists then this becomes the terrain on which institutional politics are fought.
Only 1/50 parents actually objected to showing David and they fired the school principal not just the art teacher. My money is that this is some internal conflict between board and principal and they used this as pretext because right wingers are in a frenzy about this stuff right now.
Ecgtheow
11mo ago
A lot depends on what exactly happened in that subway car and everyone has gotten way over their skis on this. If someone inadvertently chokes off the blood supply of someone who was throwing glass bottles or metal cans that's a very different act than gradually choking out someone who issues nonspecific verbal threats and flung some papers. Is Neely vaguely muttering threats or is he up in a specific person's face telling them he's about the punch them out? Penny's self defense case hinges on a lot of information we just don't have.
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
The Civil Rights Act was passed by democratically elected legislature, the 101st was deployed by a democratically elected president. People have had fifty years to organize a majority to overturn the civil rights act and it remains broadly popular. It was legally imposed by the majority of the country on the South for sure, but why did the rest of the country support it?
It's interesting we've switched from 'politics is downstream of culture' to 'culture is downstream of politics' and politics is just whatever elites decide.
Ecgtheow
10mo ago
Trump's conduct here is bizarre, what is the upside of retaining these documents? Why consent to being recorded and then say "hey rando, check out these top secret invasion plans I definitely didn't declassify." Why lie to your lawyers about moving the documents? If you're willing to not just "accidentally" misplace some classified documents, but defy a subpoena to return them why be so sloppy? Why not have Nauta photocopy them and return the originals?
I can buy that Alvin Bragg's indictment was a politically motivated hit job advancing a novel legal theory, but I just can't see that with this. They gave him an out when they asked him to return the documents and he lied to his lawyers about returning them all. This isn't the clever deep state ensnaring Trump, this is him agreeing to be recorded showing classified military plans to some writer. It's either idiocy or some genuine belief that he's above document retention law.
A relevant fact that I don't think has been established is what the typical outcome is for a drug user who says "no" to question six on form 4437 (which asks if the purchaser is "an unlawful user of or addicted to marijuana or any depressant or stimulant drug") but isn't charged with other crimes. The fighting has mostly been Democrats suggesting that since felons who "try & lie" on form 4437 aren't prosecuted it's unusual for Hunter to be prosecuted and Republicans rebutting them and saying that Hunter is different since he actually got the gun where "try & lie" felons are denied. This still leaves the question unanswered of what is the typical outcome is for a drug user who lies and successfully obtains a gun but isn't charged with other drug-related or violent crimes. Can anyone provide examples of someone who did a similar crime and compare what penalties they faced?
The Republican-controlled House Ways and Means Committee put forth an interesting example of a tax case that closely fits what Hunter did. Steven E. Smiff was a Florida Lawyer who didn't file taxes from 1997-2011 for the ~8 million in profits from his law firm. He paid the back taxes and got thirteen months in prison. Hunter didn't pay taxes for two years on roughly three million, paid the money back, and got two years probation in conjunction with the gun crime. Hunter's offense seems less severe since it was 1/7th of the years and 1/3 of the money, but maybe he should have done four or five months for failing to pay. It does look like Hunter got off a bit light for the tax stuff, but if that's the closest comparison a Republican congressional research team can find then the five years jail per count that The National Review suggests was never on the table.
I used to be a token progressive on here but then I left because I took shrooms and decided hiking was a better use of my time than arguing on the internet.
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