EverythingIsFine
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User ID: 1043
EverythingIsFine
1yr ago
I’m going to paste in Matt Levine’s newsletter bit because it’s so incredibly good.
Here is a simple model of a pension fund. You know you will need to pay out a bunch of money 30 years from now, so you buy some 30-year government bonds and hold them to maturity. When the bonds mature in 30 years, you have money, which you give to the pensioners, and you’re done. This model is obviously oversimplified, [1] but it’s a good start.
Let me make three points about this model. First, a financial point: Doing a pension fund this way is expensive. Thirty-year UK gilts (government bonds) paid about 2.5% interest this summer. If you want to have £100 in 30 years, and bonds pay 2.5%, you’ll need to put aside about £48 now, which will grow at 2.5% over 30 years into £100. [2] If you are a company or government, you might not be jazzed about putting aside almost half the money now to pay pension obligations in 30 years. What if you bought some stocks instead? If stocks return 8% a year on average, you can put aside just £10 now to get back £100 in 30 years. That’s a much better deal, for you, now. Of course the gilts pay 2.5% guaranteed, while the 8% stock-market return is just a guess; in 30 years, you (and your pension beneficiaries) might regret your riskier choice. But it saves you money now, and it’ll probably work out fine. Or, you know, you do some mix of super-safe gilts and riskier corporate bonds and stocks, etc., still targeting £100 in 30 years but putting less money in now and taking more risk to get there.
Second, a financial-stability point: Structurally, pensions are about the safest form of investing. Most big investors in financial markets are, to some degree or other, structurally short-term, in ways that make markets fragile. Banks borrow most of their money short-term (from depositors, from capital markets), and if there’s a run on the bank then the bank will need to dump assets to pay back depositors. Mutual funds let their investors take money out every day, and if a lot of investors want out then the funds will have to dump stocks to give them their money back. Hedge funds let investors take money out and also tend to borrow money from prime brokers; if their assets go down then they will get margin calls from brokers and will have to sell assets to meet them. The common theme is:
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You buy some assets with other people’s money.
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The assets go down.
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The people — depositors, investors, prime brokers — call you up and say “you used my money to buy assets, and the assets went down, so now I want my money back.”
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They have the right to do that.
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You have to sell assets to pay them back.
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This makes the price of the assets go down more.
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Go to Step 2.
More or less every bad story in financial markets is this story, a “deleveraging” or “run on the bank.” Pensions are immune to this. Pension funds own assets (gilts, stocks, etc.) with other people’s money, in the sense that they are ultimately supposed to use those assets to pay benefits to pensioners. But the beneficiaries can’t take their money out if the fund has a bad year. They just have to wait. There are no runs on pensions. The pension has to come up with £100 in 30 years, but that’s it; it can’t be forced to sell early along the way.
This means, for one thing, that if you run a pension you can confidently invest in risky assets like stocks: If stocks go down one year, you can make it up next year; you’re not going to have to shut down your pension fund because investors withdraw money after a year of bad returns. It also means that pensions are not supposed to destabilize financial markets: They are long-term investors and are not forced to sell when markets go down.
Third, an accounting point. Take the simple model of a pension: You buy a bond today to pay £100 in 30 years. I said above — with some simplification — that you pay about £48 for that bond. That is the value of that bond: The value of getting £100 in 30 years is £48 today. How do you account for that? What does the balance sheet look like? At some conceptual level, the balance sheet looks like “in 30 years I will have pension liabilities of £100 and assets of £100,” so it balances. But in practice accounting doesn’t work that way. In practice you will record the value of the bond as an asset, today, at £48. But by the same logic, you will record the value of your liability at £48: The cost of paying £100 in 30 years is £48 today, so you have assets of £48 and liabilities of £48 and it all balances.
What happens if interest rates change? Let’s say that the interest rate on 30-year gilts falls to 2%. This means that the market value of your bond goes up, to about £55. Do you have a windfall profit? Can you sell a portion of the bond? No, of course not. The market value of your bond has gone up, but you don’t care about that. The bond, for you, is a long-term, hold-to-maturity investment. For you, the bond pays £100 in 30 years; you don’t care about its market price now. But by the same logic, the present value of your liabilities goes up: Your obligation to pay £100 in 30 years is now “worth” £55, using a 2% discount rate. So your balance sheet still balances.
In the simple case, none of this matters and it is sort of a confusing fiction. You have to pay £100 in 30 years, you have an asset that pays £100 in 30 years, you’re done; market fluctuations don’t affect you at all. Accountants will want you to record the value of your asset and the value of your liability at their discounted present value, and that value will fluctuate with market interest rates. As rates go up, the value of your bonds will go down but the discounted cost of future pension benefits will go down; as rates go down, the bonds will go up but your cost will go up too. In the simple case these things will always offset and won’t trouble you very much.
But once you move beyond the simple case this gets worse. Let’s say you have to pay £100 of benefits in 30 years, and you plan to pay for that using half bonds (gilts worth £24 today) and half stocks (stocks worth £5 today). If gilts yield 2.5% and stocks return 8% per year for 30 years, that will give you £100 in 30 years, enough to pay those benefits. But today, you have assets of £29 (£24 of gilts and £5 of stocks), and liabilities of £48 (the present value of that £100 pension obligation in 30 years at a 2.5% discount rate). So your pension is underfunded, by £19. [3] It happens! It might be fine, if you get the returns you want. But it could make you nervous. One way to overcome this nervousness is to invest in even riskier assets with higher returns, so that next year you have, you know, £33, and are less underfunded.
The bigger problem is what happens when interest rates change. Again, say that the interest rate on 30-year gilts falls to 2%. Now you have £55 of liabilities (the present value of your pension obligations discounted at 2%). The value of your gilt holdings has gone up to £27.50 as rates fell. The value of your stock holdings might not have, though; stocks don’t move automatically with interest rates. Still, let’s say that your stocks have gone up, by 20%, to £6. Now you have £55 of liabilities and £33.50 of assets. You are underfunded by £21.50 instead of £19, which is worse. You have “lost money,” in a very accounting-fiction-y sense. Your actual pension obligations (how much you need to pay in 30 years) have stayed the same, and the market value of your assets has gone up. But your accounting statements show that you have lost money.
Notice that what this means is that, on a reasonable set of assumptions, pensions are short gilts: They lose money (in an accounting sense) whenever interest rates go down (and gilt prices rise), and they make money (in an accounting sense) whenever interest rates go up (and gilt prices go down). [4] Notice also how counterintuitive this is: In its simplest form, a pension fund just is a pile of gilts. The basic default move for a pension manager is to take a bunch of money and put it in gilts. Intuitively, she is long gilts: She has a pile of government bonds, and as rates go down the value of her holdings goes up. But as long as she doesn’t put all of it in gilts, and as long as the pension is underfunded, then she is as an accounting matter short gilts.
I said above that pension funds are unusually insensitive to short-term market moves: Nobody in the pension can ask for their money back for 30 years, so if the pension fund has a bad year it won’t face withdrawals and have to dump assets. Still, pension managers are sensitive to accounting. If your job is to manage a pension, you want to go to your bosses at the end of the year and say “this pension is now 5% less underfunded than it was last year.” And if you have to instead say “this pension is now 5% more underfunded than it was last year,” you are sad and maybe fired; if the pension gets too underfunded your regulator will step in. You want to avoid that.
And so the way you will approach your job is something like:
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You will try to beat your benchmark, buying stocks and higher-yielding bonds to try to grow the value of your assets.
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You will hedge the risk of rates going down. If rates go down, your liabilities will rise (faster than your assets); you are short gilts. You want to do something to minimize this risk.
.. continued below
EverythingIsFine
1yr ago
Part 2….
The way to do that hedging is basically to get really long gilts in a leveraged way. If you have £29 of assets, you might invest them like this:
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£24 in gilts,
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£5 in stocks, and
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borrow another £24 and put that in gilts too. [5]
That way, if rates go down, the value of your portfolio goes up to match the increasing value of your liabilities. So you are hedged. You were short gilts, as an accounting matter, and you’ve solved that by borrowing money to buy more gilts. In practice, the way you have borrowed this money is probably not by actually getting a loan and buying gilts but by doing some sort of derivative (interest-rate swap, etc.) with a bank, where the bank pays you if rates go down and you pay the bank if rates go up. And you have posted some collateral with the bank, and as interest rates move up or down you post more or less collateral.
This all makes total sense, in its way. But notice that you now have borrowed short-term money to buy volatile financial assets. The thing that was so good about pension funds — their structural long-termism, the fact that you can’t have a run on a pension fund: You’ve ruined that! Now, if interest rates go up (gilts go down), your bank will call you up and say “you used our money to buy assets, and the assets went down, so you need to give us some money back.” And then you have to sell a bunch of your assets — the gilts and stocks that you own — to pay off those margin calls. Through the magic of derivatives you have transformed your safe boring long-term pension fund into a risky leveraged vehicle that could get blown up by market moves.
I know this is bad but I find something aesthetically beautiful about it. If you have a pot of money that is immune to bank runs, over time, modern finance will find a way to make it vulnerable to bank runs. That is an emergent property of modern finance. No one sits down and says “let’s make pension funds vulnerable to bank runs!” Finance, as an abstract entity, just sort of does that on its own.
Anyway, as I said above, 30-year UK gilt rates were about 2.5% this summer. They got to nearly 5% this week, and were at about 3.9% at 9 a.m. New York time today. You can fill in the rest. Here are Loukia Gyftopoulou and Greg Ritchie at Bloomberg News:
Fund managers running billions for pension funds faced collateral calls on strategies meant to give them exposure to long-dated assets to help match obligations that can extend decades. The so-called liability-driven investment, or LDI, funds were forced to post more collateral after receiving margin calls when gilt prices collapsed.
The central bank stepped in Wednesday after the calls threatened to push the gilt market into a downward spiral. The BOE had been warned by investment banks and fund managers in recent days that the collateral requirements could trigger a gilt crash, according to a person familiar with the BOE’s deliberations before they stepped in.
“The BOE intervention was required to prevent a vicious cycle becoming even more dangerous for pension funds forced to sell their gilt exposures,” Calum Mackenzie, an investment partner at Aon, said after the BOE intervention. “The market’s swift and significant reaction underlined the big risk faced by pension funds who have had or who could have had their liability hedges reduced.”
Firms including BlackRock Inc., Legal & General Group Plc and Schroders Plc manage LDI funds on behalf of pension clients. The pension firms use them to match their liabilities with their assets, often using derivatives.
The size of the LDI market has exploded over the past decade. The amount of liabilities held by UK pension funds that have been hedged with LDI strategies has tripled in size to £1.5 trillion in the 10 years through 2020, according to the Investment Association. These trades are typically used by defined benefit pension schemes. ...
When yields fall the funds receive margin and when yields rise they typically have to post more collateral. After the spike in gilt yields on Friday and into this week, LDI fund managers were hit by margin calls from their investment banks.
LDI collateral buffers are partly set using historical data to build models based on the likely probability of gilt price movements, according to Shalin Bhagwan, head of pension advisory at DWS Group. The sudden recent surge in gilt yields “blew through the models and the collateral buffers,” he said.
And here is the Financial Times on the BOE’s intervention:
The bank stressed that it was not seeking to lower long-term government borrowing costs. Instead it wanted to buy time to prevent a vicious circle in which pension funds have to sell gilts immediately to meet demands for cash from their creditors. That process had put pension funds at risk of insolvency, because the mass sell-offs pushed down further the price of gilts held by funds as assets, requiring them to stump up even more cash. “At some point this morning I was worried this was the beginning of the end,” said a senior London-based banker, adding that at one point on Wednesday morning there were no buyers of long-dated UK gilts. “It was not quite a Lehman moment. But it got close.” …
“If there was no intervention today, gilt yields could have gone up to 7-8 per cent from 4.5 per cent this morning and in that situation around 90 per cent of UK pension funds would have run out of collateral,” said Kerrin Rosenberg, Cardano Investment chief executive. “They would have been wiped out.”
And FT Alphaville has two very good explainers of the LDI problem, one by Toby Nangle and another by Alex Scaggs and Louis Ashworth, which I have drawn on here. And here is Nangle’s prescient LDI explainer from July. Modern finance made UK pensions vulnerable to runs, and then there was a run on those pensions, and the Bank of England had to step in to buy gilts to save them, because that’s what happens in a bank run.
EverythingIsFine
1yr ago
I think if you’re making an “ad absurdium” argument the onus is on you the poster to clearly communicate that with at least one phrase.
Single phrase responses that read like rhetorical smack downs is precisely the kind of thing this site tries to avoid… like literally the whole point of the rules in my perception is to avoid one-liners submerging real content and thought out arguments.
The fact that most people consider your comment racist is an orthogonal issue and not, IMO, ban-related, though the mods can speak for themselves.
EverythingIsFine
11mo ago
I was recently torched and told it is a red flag to not sort and match your socks when you do laundry. I have a drawer full of the unmatched pairs and I just find a match the morning of. Is this actually a red flag or bad? Is it actually that uncommon?
EverythingIsFine
11mo ago
It was compared to having velcro shoes type flag
EverythingIsFine
11mo ago
That’s a good way to phrase it. It’s maybe 40% I’m lazy and 60% I think finding a good match for a sock pair I like is a very tiny but nice part of the morning
EverythingIsFine
11mo ago
I have 95% dissimilar socks, but don’t mix and match. I also have maybe 30 pairs by now? Don’t know if that’s relevant or not.
EverythingIsFine
10mo ago
Just some anecdata for the Reddit blackout, unless everyone is sick of it; I went through all my own personal subscribed subreddits and looked for their stance on the blackout:
NOT joining blackout: 135 subreddits. Of these, less than 10 actually posted why. Most ignored it entirely.
STILL DECIDING: 9 subreddits. Of those with public vote totals, overwhelming majorities for blackout and majorities for indefinite duration.
YES, for 24-48 hours set duration: 39 subreddits.
YES, for AT LEAST 48 hours: 20 subreddits. Most copied and pasted a vaguely worded post that implied only 48 hours but threatened longer, so hard to say how many conversions to the next category.
YES, INDEFINITELY: 16 subreddits. Honestly I'd be scared as shit as a mod that my mod powers would be permanently taken away from me. I sense from some of these announcements a real grieving process.
Overall if all the fence sitters black out, that's a good 84/219 going dark. I don't plan on visiting reddit those two days, but even if I did, that's a 40% reduction in content (number pretty fuzzy though). Not quite critical mass to be noticeable to me or to another user if I were representative, but surely enough to degrade the experience. A lot of the bigger content subs aren't participating, so maybe more like 30%.
So, my main two takeaways. One, most moderator teams genuinely don't seem to care, at all. I think almost any truly conscientious mod would at least address the issue head on rather than ignore it. The ones who did make an actual post saying they won't participate in the blackout generally had good motivations and impressed me, (which made the lack of response elsewhere even more deafening). One case was /r/manga, they didn't want to attract attention to a copyright-skirting sub. Another few think they are the online equivalent of support subs, or "essential workers", mostly fair arguments. One was scared of the sub being banned as it almost had under previous lax moderation, as a one-man mod team without an easy replacement.
The second takeaway was looking at the general quality of the subreddits that aren't participating. There's a few with obvious admin ties/ mod plants. But the bulk of them were either very small one-issue subs, or in most cases the nonparticipants all had one thing in common: low-effort, often comedic TikTok-esque video subreddits. I enjoy them, obviously, or I wouldn't be subscribed. But only about 3 or 4 that I recall actually decided to shut down (shoutout to /r/videos, a massive sub that is going completely dark). What's the implication of this anecdata? I predict that reddit is clearly headed even more strongly toward TikTokification, if the blackout fails. Ironic, because the official app does so poorly at displaying and loading videos!
EverythingIsFine
10mo ago
I think in this particular case, though Trump is just a terrible client and that's why MOST lawyers leave him, I believe that here due to the timing the lawyers are dropping out on purpose to try to obtain a trial delay, thus kicking the trial as late as possible (i.e. after the election).
I could be wrong but it seems to me that the recording(s?) in and of itself contains literally 90% of the court case against Trump in one short recording. I think they have him dead to rights. It blows up intent, it blows up the classification issue (though the charges are structured so the classification status isn't all that relevant), it blows up the recipient of that intel, all at once. The relevant laws are relatively broad so I think the only true issue is one of proving intent. I think the orders to move boxes around is more than enough, and if coupled with the broken attorney privilege as you mention, it's even easier. I say that as someone who has never thought any other single legal case against Trump has been worth much.
EverythingIsFine
10mo ago
I mean, friendly reminder that criminal cases like this require unanimous juries, as they should. Not a single dissenter. That's always a bit of a high bar. The article rightly points out that this is potentially more of a judge issue than a jury issue, for allowing a certain line of defense with a very tortured fruit of the poison tree type argument. I wish we had a slightly better system for voting in and retaining judges.
EverythingIsFine
10mo ago
More importantly, the statute is short for a reason. It’s not a healthy democratic activity to perpetually start jail hunts for defeated politicians.
Hillary wasn’t jail-punished, but she was election-punished. She lost it in large part because she couldn’t shake the liar-insincere (plus “rules don’t apply to me”) label she picked up primarily because of the email saga and her changing answers.
The whole point of this saga is that Trump had an easy way to avoid all of this. Give back all the damn documents! He does this, there’s no case. It’s also presumably what every other former president does when asked to do something like that.
EverythingIsFine
10mo ago
On the contrary, the statement being vetted by so many people and subject to so much scrutiny implies it’s a very solid and defensible statement…
EverythingIsFine
10mo ago
To provide a further excellent piece of evidence, let’s ask Bill Barr, former Attorney General FOR TRUMP, who has decried other efforts as “witch hunts”.
In differentiating this investigation from others that examined Trump’s conduct, Barr said he had defended Trump in the past — including in response to Alvin Bragg’s recent indictment in New York — but this case is different.
“This idea of presenting Trump as a victim here, a victim of a witch hunt, is ridiculous,” Barr said.
“Yes, he’s been a victim in the past. Yes, his adversaries have obsessively pursued him with phony claims. I have been at his side defending against them when he is a victim. But this is much different. He is not a victim here. He was totally wrong that he had the right to have those documents. Those documents are among the most sensitive secrets the country has.”
I think that’s pretty telling that Barr also claims Trump is doing unprecedented and serious things. This is not some partisan hack. It is someone republicans trusted to run the entire Justice department. And he agrees with the charges!
EverythingIsFine
10mo ago
Wouldn’t your point be considerably undermined by the near indisputable fact that Nazism was, in actual fact, a severe threat to both fundamental human right to life as well as world peace? And the fact that despite all this FDR actually failed to bring the US into war against the Nazis? There is no global Jewish conspiracy.
EverythingIsFine
10mo ago
Yeah that’s exactly where it breaks down, that’s a misunderstanding. Germany declared war on the US! Not the other way around. It wasn’t actually a total given that we would have preemptively declared on them first. And if we had declared first, it would have been a much more difficult sell to the public. Being the recipient, even if it may seem a bit of a technicality, nevertheless quieted a lot of domestic opposition. On top of all that, there’s the military reality of the Pacific campaign — pure numbers aren’t useful, as you need lots of ships to make use of those numbers, and time. While Europe was a lot easier to just ship over men by the hundred thousand much sooner, once the war is truly Axis vs Allies.
EverythingIsFine
10mo ago
I don’t think you can simply call the entire body of WWII scholarship “suspicious narrative building”. I’m especially astonished to see an actual argument… arguing that the West’s meddling caused the war? Dude. It was brutal and vicious German expansionism, abetted by Soviet greed, that caused the invasion of multiple neighbors, an outright war of conquest. And that’s not even getting into the obvious Holocaust and associated war crimes angle. I do appreciate the source but it’s the height of narcisssism on the part of the two Americans quoted to take full responsibility for the UK going to war. They aren’t as influential as their egos think. Don’t forget Poland was the last straw of a long string of events and invasions. If you want to find a culprit, Munich is a good start as even Hitler admitted he was willing to back down if push came to shove. But the acquiescence gave him a false sense of weakness for later moves. In particular, it’s well documented Hitler thought until the very end that the UK wouldn’t join in and was a bit in denial when they did — but a lot of that had to do with his idea of Britain as a racially superior country, and in his schema the racial winners didn’t fight each other, and less the actual actions of the UK itself.
EverythingIsFine
10mo ago
You asked about the Comey statement specifically. It was an independent investigation. And by all accounts Comey agonized about which phrasing to use and the conclusions and knew that whatever he said would be gone over with a fine toothed comb by the media as well as politicians alike. He knew that it was in some sense a no win situation for the FBI’s reputation, but the exact phrasing needed to be as defensible as possible to protect said reputation.
So yes, I think it’s very fair to say that every phrase was closely and carefully chosen to be accurate yes but also legally sound. That’s what the “sanitizing and proofing” is designed to do — not that anyone in the White House had much control over the contents!
EverythingIsFine
10mo ago
He said Trump was wrong. He also said and I quote from earlier in the article, “almost anyone else in the country would have returned the documents if asked”.
Sure the word unprecedented doesn’t specifically appear. But in terms of Trump scandals, from media hype to legitimate offenses, it’s clear Barr is saying that this particular scandal is far worse than any other that he witnessed. That’s along the same lines (no cross party comparison is directly made however).
EverythingIsFine
10mo ago
I think you’re being pedantic and uncharitable. It is unprecedented for Trump himself to be in the wrong, per Barr. But that’s a hang up that you’re focusing on while missing the point, which is that Hillary or anyone else is an irrelevant distraction. The substance is: the fact that Barr calls this lawsuit out as different than past (alleged) “phony claims” is pretty telling. We should therefore be paying close attention to the indictment and resist the urge to write it off as yet another exercise in partisan hackery/deep state persecution. Because here we have an ardent Trump defender and an unquestionably experienced legal leader admitting Trump is in the wrong. Isn’t that enough to take it seriously? It should be viewed more or less on par with Jan 6th, or more seriously, because the wagons that you’d expect to circle aren’t actually circling.
EverythingIsFine
10mo ago
This is just off the cuff but honestly I’d expect the 90s research to be better not worse. My impression is online IQ tests with heavily self selected populations are too influential and hurt generalizability.
EverythingIsFine
10mo ago
So what? That might sound flippant but it's truly not. What is the implication or application to politics here? What are we supposed to do with this information/what is the logical call to action? I think that's almost as important as discussing the actual contents.
Example. A lot might read your post and linked article, and let's say for the sake of argument it's all true. Some might say, "well this means Trump shouldn't be charged for the crimes he's currently accused of." Nothing could be farther from the truth.
Because at the end of the day, intent does matter. While Hillary is certainly guilty of thinking she's above the law, used to be coddled by the media, and having her wishes fulfilled by government bureaucrats, and being dishonest on top, she didn't intend to expose confidential or classified information and most of the email saga came down to a mixture of negligence and pride. Contrast Trump in the most recent classified docs saga. It's NOT an issue of over-classification (though it does exist). It's NOT a case of negligence, as he was given a number of chances to cooperate. It was WILLFUL retention of government secrets. It's not like he couldn't access these secrets -- I'm almost certain former presidents are given access to these materials if they are writing their memoirs, for example. It was the pride of "owning" them, though they manifestly weren't his. It doesn't matter how the investigation started, only how it ends.
Vague gestures at other would-be conspiracies sound much like the Steele Dossier inspired ones. Hunter Biden has gone through at least one GOP led congressional investigation. So far, not a whole lot to show.
EverythingIsFine
10mo ago
I think presumably the implication is that the FBI believes that ISIS truly does recruit online and that by re-routing some of the would-be terrorists to them, they are taking away "real" terrorists. This assumes that a) there is a finite number of people who would commit a terror attack for ISIS online (thus being a sort of zero-sum thing), and b) if the FBI doesn't help them, they will go to someone real who can. I think assumption A is probably fine, I don't really think that the FBI is somehow generating additional potential recruits by their actions, so a fixed pool generally seems to make sense. Assumption B is a bit trickier, but from a law enforcement perspective, is it truly worth the risk of ignoring potential terrorists because you're hoping that they aren't serious and that they will grow out of it or something? Furthermore, I don't have much sympathy to be honest for the so-called "false positives" in this kind of scenario. Even if you are (let's say) hoodwinked and egged on by the FBI to do things you don't want to do in actuality... nothing's really stopping you from just stopping these conversations? Unless their process violates assumption B (the honey traps somehow radicalizing MORE than a comparable "real ISIS" control group) I can't see this being a concern keeping many people up at night. It's not like going to a terrorist training camp is the kind of "whoopsie" that anyone could be suckered into doing.
EverythingIsFine
10mo ago
Well the Clintons had undergone multiple decades of scrutiny before the election so it makes sense there's only so much "new" stuff. Whitewater, for example. If she had been new to politics like Trump, you'd see a similar level of scrutiny. And in fact if you sum up all the investigations on the Clintons over the years you probably get a similar scope. Trump has so many investigations because he was a businessman in a famously shady business (real estate and show business both tend to be full of obfuscation and do often hide real crime), not because of being a "threat" to the "establishment". And note that Justice was indeed served at the end of the day, most of the investigations didn't turn up too much and the one that did (impeachment) went through the normal process and he was found not guilty. End of story. I know people were bitter about investigations starting but in the end he wasn't actually harmed all that much?
It also makes zero sense that Hillary would deliberately allow her personal email to be hacked. That's an insane suggestion and you should feel bad for making it. Note that I never accused Trump of actually cooperating with a foreign power or anything. Just like in Hillary's case, it's a pride thing, but manifested a different way. When you're no longer the President, you are no longer the President! You can't just make your own rules, much less retroactively, you have to "declare" them and then follow them. That's what the whole presidential order system is for. Trump even himself admitted that he could have but did NOT declassify these things in order to keep them. And either you're being disingenuous or are misinformed when you say we don't know what's in the documents. We have a decent idea of at least a few articles, and they are most definitely classified. And remember, the classification system exists to protect harmful secrets from becoming public. It defeats the whole purpose if you arbitrarily declare manifestly harmful secrets to be declassified (read: non-harmful) when they clearly still have the same potential for harm.
Don't get me wrong, I DO think Hillary should have been charged with a lesser crime of negligence and maybe obstruction, but in terms of setting a precedent it's more important to convey to future leaders Cabinet level and up that negligence is bad and will hurt you politically but willful disobedience will result in criminal charges. That's a reasonable precedent in my opinion. After all we don't want to make a habit of charging former officials left and right, it leads to a cycle of retribution. You might ask, well won't this Trump thing lead to it? It wouldn't have if there wasn't WILLFUL lawbreaking involved.
EverythingIsFine
10mo ago
I don't think you read my comment closely enough. I claimed both of them were due to shortsighted pride but one of them was a lesser, "omission" type deal and the other is a much more brazen "commission" type, which I do think should be treated differently. I think most people agree the intent of the server was to avoid embarrassing FOIA type revelations rather than a deliberate and insecure discussion of top secret stuff.
I feel a lot of empathy for this point of view and I almost agree, but there are at the same time some implications in your comment that are truly horrifying.
The notion that any degree of actual attempt at political involvement is an actively bad thing is one that is acutely poisonous to democratic society at large, in addition to being morally repulsive to me. What happened to civic duty and responsibility? Meaningfully participating in communities more broadly? I’m not sure you can simply separate “oh, this is a local issue” and “oh, this is a national issue I am powerless about”. People drastically undersell the network effects of sharing their own opinion, let alone actually volunteering for a candidate. While it’s true a lot of people find themselves in an endless cycle of outrage and fear, egged on by the national media and political cycles, it’s also seems to be true that the antidote is the moderating influence of interpersonal discussion. It’s not a catalyst for more outrage, it’s a set of social brakes.
Perhaps this is an inaccurate read of your comment but my first impression was definitely one preaching political inactivity as a virtue, which it is not.
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