FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
No bio...
User ID: 675
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
4mo ago
There are people who make the argument that gun sellers should be held responsible for anything done with their product, but it's generally laughed out of American society. Especially by the right wing, given the long history of focusing on personal responsibilities.
If by "laughed out of society", you mean an opinion fervently held and actively implemented by half the country, in which pursuit they have proven willing and able to violate black-letter federal law and support the murder of innocents.
Drugs are not equivalent to guns. Drug dealing is not a victimless crime. Drug Cartels are a very close aproximate to classical examples of Hostis Humani Generis. But more damningly, even if these facts were not the case, even if the equivalency you are drawing were not entirely spurious, I am confident that you personally would be willing to offer people like them significantly more protection from the law than people like me no matter what I or my side says or does now or in the future, so I do not recognize value in preserving some hypothetical form of detente here. You will never be willing to treat me and mine with the care and respect you steadfastly insist must apply to narcoterrorists.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
4mo ago
but when it came to it, the CCP let millions of people starve so they could pretend to the world that everything was going great.
...I would like to think that I am not inclined to take a rosy view of the crimes of communist regimes, but I generally adhered to the narrative that the CCP "let millions of people starve" until a recent conversation here resulted in another commenter quoting details. Paraphrasing: "Mr So-and-so and his wife were accused of hoarding. Their fellow villagers beat them to death. Their children were turned out and denied food and shelter by the rest of the community until they starvced to death", repeated over and over again, leaving the distinct impression that this fate was routine for unfortunates in the period in question. In my view, that's pretty clearly murder.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
4mo ago
It seems to me that you and @faceh are framing this as though law and public sentiment are two distinct things, and are wondering why Trump is making appeals to public sentiment when he could simply use the law. But it is evident that the law is much weaker than legible public sentiment, even disregarding the legal mechanisms by which law emerges from public sentiment in the first place.
The current era is best understood as a massive, distributed search for ways to hurt the outgroup as badly as possible without getting in too much trouble. Coordinating public sentiment is the most effective method possible for reducing the amount of trouble one gets in when hurting the outgroup. The law is a whore, and public sentiment is the coin she trades in; if public sentiment is on-side, paper rules are no impediment at all.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
4mo ago
That's not to diminish that there are plenty of pretty bad women out there, but, statistically, if a member of a couple is being killed, it's usually the wife by the husband.
What does the math look like when you include suicides?
Let me make the question a bit more explicit.
Within the existing system, what is the proper way to respond to Blue Tribe weaponizing the justice system to partisan ends? Because if the answer is "there isn't one", it behooves us to find alternatives outside the existing system.
People accuse me of being an accelerationist, but what's the alternative? We've seen recently that rifles and rooftops are certianly an option on the sociopolitical conflict menu, with the understanding of course that such actions cannot reasonably be attributed to the tribes from which they might emerge because stochastic terrorism abruptly stopped being a coherent concept. What other options are plausibly available?
This does indeed seem to be a plausible description of the thought process of these prosecutors.
If I, as a citizen, believe that this is in fact the calculus being performed by members of the executive branch, what conclusions should I draw?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
4mo ago
This sort of post is obviously against the rules here, as you appear to be aware. You have no mod history, positive or negative. This is not a great way to start things off. You don't have to agree with people, or even like them. You may even believe that they are enemies who should be fought to the death. But here we do not fight over words, but meet the arguments of others with arguments of our own.
Normally we start with a warning, but again, you seem to understand the rules and are choosing to egregiously ignore them. Banned for three days, and if you continue to communicate in this way, the bans will escalate rapidly.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
4mo ago
Best orcs are Project Long Stairs orcs. Wattsian P-Zombies that breed explosively and instantly learn and integrate any tactical behavior they observe.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
4mo ago
I heard of them back in the day, and have no memory of how they ended up. Definately interested in the effortpost.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
4mo ago
The post was filtered. I have approved it on the sole theory that you would have banned the person if you thought more than a warning was necessary, not in an endorsement of its worthiness.
It was ATF, not the FBI, but the attempts to entrap Randy Weaver demonstrably were part of the radicalization of McVeigh, although Waco was probably a larger factor and as far as I'm aware wasn't "entrapment" per se.
Not entrapment, no, but very clearly corrupt. There is overwhelming evidence that the investigation was being run as a PR operation, and this focus on generating press rather than law enforcement is the direct cause of the subsequent disaster. Not least because there is strong evidence that the crimes the Davidians were initially being investigated for were entirely fabricated by the ATF.
Waco is one of the worst law-enforcement scandals in American history. Federal Agents and their agencies very clearly committed numerous felonies in an attempt to curry favor with the incoming Clinton administration, and then to cover their asses when it all went horribly, horribly wrong right in front of the TV cameras.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
5mo ago
You beat me to it.
The FBI is and always has been a fundamentally corrupt organization.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
5mo ago
True, but media has also been undergoing a major structural disruption due to the internet for the past twenty years; they're desperately trying to do whatever it takes to keep eyeballs.
"whatever it takes" notably didn't involve breaking the story that the President was mentally incompetent, and before that it didn't involve breaking the story that the president's son was selling access to his father to foreign interests. In fact, there's no shortage of stories that could have earned the news corps an avalanche of eyeballs that they passed on for clearly ideological reasons. This argument that the media class is fundamentally mercenary and are just seeking to maximize attention and ad revenue might have been weakly plausible in 2014, but at this point it is pretty clearly an undead argument immune to any degree of contrary evidence.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
5mo ago
It's clear to the camera. It's not clear that the shooter, having just been blindsided, knocked flat, and then advanced on, had time and cognition to process the half-step back.
I opined at the time that I was willing to accept convictions like that one in an edge case for pragmatic reasons of keeping the peace. That willingness has pretty much gone away given subsequent events.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
5mo ago
For what it's worth, I also don't think you violated any rules.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
5mo ago
The same way I defend Trump's failure to fire the generals who admitted to lying to him to prevent his lawful orders from being carried out. My assessment is that the Bureaucratic layer is out of control, and I'm much more worried about getting it back under control than I am about ensuring that the Executive is giving maximally-good orders. Given the choice between assigning blame to the bureaucratic layer and assigning it to the executive for failing to punish the bureaucratic layer... If we punish the executive, how does this translate to the bureaucratic layer receiving accountability for their fuckups?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
5mo ago
Arguably Biden's pull out from Afghanistan was a move against that paradigm...and it was roundly panned by everyone, sometimes on dishonest technical ground, but really for spiritual reasons.
Your general point is correct, but every time this comes up I feel compelled to point out that it's the one thing I have and will always unequivocally praise Biden for. I've had some interesting debates with @Dean on the subject.
It has already happened, and other than the last item, they already did.
Now it appears that what Brennan told congressional investigators was false. The current CIA director, John Ratcliffe, who used to be one of the House investigators looking into the Russia matter, has declassified documents from Brennan’s time at the agency which show that, far from keeping the dossier at arm’s reach, Brennan actually forced CIA analysts to use it and overruled the analysts who wanted to leave the dossier out of the Intelligence Community Assessment.
Ratcliffe asked the CIA’s Directorate of Analysis (DA) to review the tradecraft used in producing the assessment. First of all, the DA found what it called “multiple procedural anomalies” in the CIA’s preparation of the assessment. There was “a highly compressed production timeline,” too much “compartmentalization,” and “excessive involvement of agency heads,” which led to “departures from standard practices in the drafting, coordination, and reviewing” of the assessment. Together, all of the “anomalies” “impeded efforts to apply rigorous tradecraft,” the DA concluded.
There was no doubt the FBI wanted to include the dossier in the Intelligence Community Assessment; the CIA self-investigation found that “FBI leadership made it clear that their participation in the assessment hinged on the dossier’s inclusion.” FBI officials “repeatedly pushed” to include the dossier in the assessment.
But career CIA analysts did not want to include the dossier. The CIA’s deputy director for analysis sent Brennan an email saying that including the dossier’s information in any form would threaten “the credibility of the entire document.” That was when Brennan made the decision to overrule his experts. From the CIA’s Directorate of Analysis:
Despite these objections, Brennan showed a preference for narrative consistency over analytical soundness. When confronted with specific flaws in the dossier by the two mission center leaders — one with extensive operational experience and the other with a strong analytic background — he appeared more swayed by the dossier’s general conformity with existing theories than by legitimate tradecraft concerns. Brennan ultimately formalized his position in writing, stating that “my bottomline is that I believe that the information warrants inclusion in the report.” [Bolding mine.]
Director Ratcliffe has also declassified a 2020 House Intelligence Committee report, which the CIA had kept under wraps, that outlined Brennan’s involvement in the dossier. The report, based on the committee’s interviews with CIA staff, said that “two senior CIA officers,” both with extensive Russia experience, “argued with [Brennan] that the dossier should not be included at all in the Intelligence Community Assessment, because it failed to meet basic tradecraft standards, according to a senior officer present at the meeting. The same officer said that [Brennan] refused to remove it, and when confronted with the dossier’s many flaws responded, ‘Yes, but doesn’t it ring true?’”
...For what it's worth, I think your prediction is probably accurate in the sense that you intend it. Buy as I asked last week,
Several of the effort-posts I don't have time to write any more are simple surveys of old discussions with links to the evidence answering the questions since. I have a pretty strong impression of how this has gone on balance, but it'd be better to have hard data to make the case.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
5mo ago
Use of the federal security agencies to illegally gain partisan political advantage against the opposition seems like a fairly bright line.
"Don't resist our lawbreaking, interfere with our operations or inform on us to the authorities."
See here.
See here.
I fundamentally disagree with this characterization. The middle-east wars were sold with pseudo-white-man's-burden arguments, and opposed over concerns of their harmful effects on the locals. Neither represents a lack of concern for the human rights of middle-easterners.
To the extent that we tolerate supermarket theives, we do so from the belief that they are only occasional theives and might yet amend their ways and rejoin productive society. Those who make victimizing others a fundamental part of their identity and way of life are not productive targets for this type of forebearance.
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