MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
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User ID: 896
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1yr ago
Trump did not incite a riot in any way, shape, or form. There is simply no reasonable line you can draw between Trump's statements (which, among other things, were not made at the site of the riot) and the riot. Not by the Brandenburg standard, and not by any standard which has been applied to any politician since Brandenburg.
The line from Trump's speech to the riot is that Trump's speech is a but-for cause of the riot. If Trump doesn't assemble the mob and tell them to go to the Capitol, they don't go to the Capitol. No mob, no riot.
The questions "Did Donald Trump incite a riot?" and "Can Donald Trump be criminally prosecuted for inciting a riot, given the 1st amendment?" are not the same question - "incite" has an ordinary English meaning, and on the ordinary English meaning of "incite", Trump so did. The 1st amendment is, for the obvious good reasons, over-protective of political speech - it isn't surprising that it is possible to incite a riot while (just) staying within the boundary of protected speech. Trump shouldn't be prosecuted for inciting a riot, and he isn't being prosecuted for inciting a riot (both the Federal and Georgia indictments focus on his various attempts to overturn the election before Jan 6th). That doesn't mean he didn't incite a riot.
Growing up in the UK, our pro-free speech tradition has tended to rely on John Stuart Mill's On Liberty for the moral (not legal) limits of free speech in contexts that look like incitement.
An opinion that corn-dealers are starvers of the poor, or that private property is robbery, ought to be unmolested when simply circulated through the press, but may justly incur punishment when delivered orally to an excited mob assembled before the house of a corn-dealer, or when handed about among the same mob in the form of a placard.
Trump assembled an excited mob at the Ellipse, told them that the politicians in the Capitol were stealing an election, and then told them to go to the Capitol and "fight". On the John Stuart Mill test, he has (just) exceeded the bounds of protected free speech. Under the Brandenberg test, he (just) stayed inside it. On this point, the law is on Donald Trump's side, so I am going to pound the facts. Donald Trump did, in fact, incite a riot on January 6th.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
7mo ago
Sarah McBride passes well enough, arguably better than Nancy "manjaw" Mace. Nobody would notice or care if the Republicans weren't grandstanding about the issue. The whole point of the Congressional bathroom rule is to keep a passing transwoman who is not a threat to anyone out of the ladies' room in order to show Republican's disapproval of transgenderism.
In the absence of strong antidiscrimination laws which allow lawfare against people who don't let Jonathan Yaniv into the ladies' room, social enforcement based on presentation works a lot better than bathroom laws based on birth sex or anatomy. In the presence of strong antidiscrimination laws protecting men pretending to be women, neither social enforcement nor bathroom laws work.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
10mo ago
It makes the land generally inhospitable to tyrants.
The practical outcome of the US government being afraid of its armed citizenry wasn't a bulwark against tyranny, it was the enabling of Jim Crow (which, for the avoidance of doubt, was tyrannical oppression from the point of view of its black victims). During WW2, the Feds acquired a large standing army sufficient that the government was no longer afraid of its armed citizenry, the American people elected the man who embodied the values of that army to the Presidency, and the South folded in short order.
Given
- the semi-official status that the Dunning school of history had in the South
- the relationship between 60's and 70's movement conservatism and Southern resistance to civil rights
- the fact that the Cincinnati Coup was led by Southerners (one of whom was probably a racist murderer)
we can be reasonably confident that the modern 2nd amendment movement centred around a politically-active NRA loosely aligned with movement conservatism was founded by people who thought that gun culture was good because it enabled Jim Crow, not in spite of it. The viewpoint that the 1st Klan and the Redeemers were justified resistance to tyranny, that Jim Crow was the liberty the 2nd amendment existed to protect, and that the Feds imposing civil rights on the white South was a tyrannical usurpation, was entirely mainstream in right-wing circles in those days.
The problem of political violence does not have a technical solution - there is no substitute for civic virtue. A government that has the technical capability to protect you from warlords has the technical ability to oppress you if it chooses to. And an (organised or unorganised) militia which has the technical capability to protect you from a tyrannical government has the technical ability to overthrow a non-tyrannical government and take up warlordism* on you if it chooses to. Empirically, warlordism is worse for the people who have to live under it than tyranny. The American approach of setting up the nation-in-arms as a counterveiling power to the armed forces of the democratic state has failed - the worst incident of democratic backsliding in American history was imposed on the democratic state violently by a section of the nation-in-arms. The approach to the same problem taken by the French Revolution was to set up a conscript army in such a way that the nation-in-arms is the armed forces of the democratic state. That approach failed fast and spectacularly in France, though it seems to have worked very well in Switzerland. It remains as central to the democratic mythos of Continental Europe as the 2nd amendment and the Minutemen are to the democratic mythos of Red America.
* I am happy to make the mildly tongue-in-cheek claim that the actually existing form of government in the South between the withdrawal of Federal troops in the 1870's and the establishment of functioning Jim Crow state governments in the 1880's and 1890's was warlordism, but defending it would take more space that one Mottepost.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1yr ago
law & order they remember from their childhood back.
Crime is still lower than it was in the 1970s-1990s pretty much everywhere in the 1st world, and everyone who can actually remember the bad old days knows this. The only people who see brown faces on the streets and assume that crime is out of control are American racists.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
2yr ago
In normal conflict situations, the two are mutually contradictory. Someone who is actually planning to attack just does it. Someone who is making a real threat to attack unless you to submit just does that. Someone who is noisily posturing about their willingness to start a fight isn't "about to throw fists" unless someone else accepts the challenge.
And don't "Jan 6th!" at me, this kind of hysteria was in full flow before ever that happened.
There were warning signs before the 2016 election. At the time I didn't take them seriously, but someone who was better calibrated than me could have done, as could someone who was looking for excuses to hate on Trump. But with hindsight, I think it should have been obvious that Trump was more likely than most other Republicans to do January 6th.
- Trump jump-started his political career by being one of the most prominent people to stick with birtherism after Obama's birth certificate was authenticated by the State of Hawaii - and he didn't finally concede that Obama was born in the US until after he had the 2016 primary sewn up. Falsely claiming that the President is ineligible is an attack on US democracy.
- Trump engaged in mild brownshirt behaviour during the campaign, like leading chants of "Lock Her Up" and encouraging supporters to beat up protesters. This isn't anti-democratic in itself, but empirically brownshirt behaviour is correlated with someone being a threat to democracy.
- Trump either joked about or actively solicited (the GRU didn't get the joke) Russian help in hacking his opponent's e-mails. I don't want to rehash the argument about whether this is collusion or not, but even if it isn't, thinking that attacks on American democracy by a hostile foreign power are a joking matter says something about Trump.
- Trump said in the 3rd 2016 debate that he would "keep you in suspense" about whether he would concede defeat if he lost.
- Even after winning, Trump falsely claimed that millions of people had voted illegally in the 2016 election and that he was the legitimate popular vote winner.
- As President, Trump continues to transgress various norms in a way which constitutes weak circumstantial evidence that he is the sort of person who would transgress the norm that defeated Presidential candidates concede. Notably, he tries to strongarm Zelezny into launching a (probably bullshit) criminal investigation of the Bidens, and to share nonpublic information about said investigation with the Trump campaign.
- Before the 2020 election, Trump again refuses to commit to accepting the results.
Trump was a transgressive candidate - for many of his supporters, that was the whole point. The people who said that this transgressiveness was a threat to American democracy were right, for the right reasons - as confirmed by the events leading up to Jan 6th, even more so than by Jan 6th itself.
Immediately after the 2016 election, everyone knows that Trump is publically badmouthing America's democratic institutions. The Orange Man really is saying Bad things. The question is whether he means them, or whether this is just his schtik. "Orange Man Bad" and "Trump Derangement Syndrome" are memes used by the right (and by the centrist punditocracy which is on its last legs before finally being booted out after George Floyd ODs near a cop) to imply that taking him seriously is cringe. But Trump was serious.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
9mo ago
Very huge issue if true.
The fact that 100% of the anons promoting this meme insist on misnaming Fort Liberty in honour of a slaveholding traitor strongly suggests that it is partisan bullshit. Unless you favour calling it Fort Bragg in honour of Braxton Bragg's noteworthy contribution to the Union victory in the Civil War, which I suppose would kind of make sense.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
10mo ago
I presume that if you had evidence that the actual leaders of the NRA following said revolt were supporters of Jim Crow, you'd have posted it.
The fact that they were Southern conservatives is Bayesian evidence that were supporters of Jim Crow, given that the vast majority of Southern conservatives born before the civil rights era were supporters of Jim Crow. The racist murder that Harlon Carter was convicted of was of a Hispanic, so it is definitely possible that he wasn't shockingly racist against blacks, just unlikely.
In any case the claim I was trying to make was the slightly weaker claim that the leaders of the Cincinnati revolt were people who accepted the moral assumptions of the Dunning School of history (which would have been taught as uncontroversial fact in the high schools and colleges they attended) and would therefore have seen the 1st Klan as an example of righteous-but-doomed resistance to tyranny and the Redemption-era white militias as a good example of successful resistance. The set of people who thought that the 1st Klan were the goodies in Birth of a Nation (which was not small - the movie enjoyed mainstream success) is much larger than the set of people who were actively working to bring back Jim Crow in 1977. The Sons of Confederate Veterans gave Nathan Bedford Forrest a posthumous honour in 1977, so "the 1st Klan were the goodies" was still comfortably within the Overton window at the time.
I am happy to admit that I have no evidence whatsoever that Neal Knox was a segregationist apart from the fact that it was normal for white Texans who attended segregated Christian colleges in the 1950's to be segregationists.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
8mo ago
By contrast, the sense I get from Blue Tribe is not "the process has succeeded, we have discovered his crimes and punished him for them", but rather "we've barely scratched the surface, he's obviously guilty of a thousand times worse offences, and the fact that he isn't in jail is an indictment of the system."
From a sane anti-Trump perspective, Trump's worst crimes are the rapes (where in a non-clownworld justice system he unfortunately gets off because of the statute of limitations and the he-said she-said lack of evidence), the unlawful retention of classified documents on a grand scale, and the various frauds committed as part of the attempt to overturn the 2020 election (of which the fake electors scheme is the most clear-cut crime). Both Jack Smith federal indictments (one for the documents, one for the election) are stalled because of legally dubious rulings by Trump-appointed judges. The Georgia election indictment is stalled because Fanny Willis couldn't keep her legs closed, which isn't the same but probably feels like it to people who have been brought up to believe that slut shaming is BAAAD. In none of these cases did the case get far enough for Trump's guilt or innocence to be relevant.
So the Blue Tribe position is "We caught Trump, we nailed him, and he is getting off because he successfully corrupted the US justice system before leaving office."
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
5mo ago
Calling "Ukraine", the self-chosen English language name of a sovereign state "the Ukraine", an obsolete toponym for an ill-defined region of Tsarist Russia, is a tell. In this case it is also a factual error - "the Ukraine" has never been an independent state, and didn't become one in 1991. If you want to spread Kremlin talking points on a forum where the average IQ is north of 115 then you should, as they say round here, git gud.
It is also, of course, relevant that Ukraine had not actually violated its purported obligations of neutrality at the time Putin invaded.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
5mo ago
Musk, like the rest of the American establishment, demonstrated by his response to the Epstein scandal that he does not find industrialised sex abuse of chav-tier teenage girls abominable when the perps are rich white men like him. He just spent a nine-figure sum of money putting one of Epstein's best buddies in the White House - you don't do that by accident, you do it because you think that condoning Epstein is no big deal.
Musk's attitude to poor women is the same as the vast majority of rich, powerful men who aren't required to be sexually continent by genuinely-held religious belief.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1yr ago
a matter of retroactively revoked consent a decade later.
She was his employee. I have a policy of not reading salacious details beyond what is necessary to form judgement, but my wife tells me that the specific sex acts involved were such that the prior on "my boss made me do it" is higher than "I thought it was a good idea at the time". I don't think the sex was euvoluntary in the first place.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
3mo ago
When you strike at the King, you must kill him.
The whole point of America is that the President is not a King. The whole problem here is that Trump is acting like one.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
9mo ago
I agree with your points on the merits of "Fort Liberty". "Fort Sherman" or "Fort Burnside" would have been better given both generals won important victories for the USA in the area. But ostentatiously refusing to use the official name of the base is clearly an attempt to dogwhistle something, and the rules of this board require me to charitably assume that what they are dogwhistling is support for the MAGA campaign to retain military bases named after white supremacist traitors, rather than actual support for white supremacism or treason.
In any case, "Troops from nearby Fort Liberty have not been deployed to the relief effort. Does anyone know why not?" is an attempt to "Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion." "Fort Bragg or whatever it's been renamed to" (when the correct name is well-known and can be found with thirty seconds' Googling) is what you say if the only audience you care about is the kind of person who cares strongly about naming military bases after white supremacist traitors.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1yr ago
He actually is a good golfer, even if he lies about his scores.
When was the last time Trump played a round of golf where his score was verified by someone other than a MAGA ally or a subordinate? His best scores all seem to come at his own golf courses.
You can't estimate the ground truth by adjusting the words of a lying liar.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1yr ago
My understanding of the Zimmerman/Martin case is that there are no witnesses to how the altercation started between Martin and Zimmerman that ended up with Zimmerman on his back and forced to shoot Martin, but there is plenty of circumstantial evidence that it was a "fighting" situation. Clearly if you start the tape with Zimmerman on the ground then it looks like Zimmerman defending himself against a criminal attack by Martin, but there is no reason to think that Martin (who was going about his lawful business peacefully at the time, regardless of his rapsheet) would respond to Zimmerman following him in a car by hiding in the bushes on the offchance that Zimmerman came back to confront him on foot allowing Martin to jump him.
The most likely scenario and, roughly, the prosecution theory of the case, is that Zimmerman (legally but stupidly) confronted Martin to ask what he was doing, Martin took offence, two hotheads verbally escalated when they should have de-escalated, and blows were thrown. The tape starts when Martin has already won the fistfight and is trying to finish the job, and we see Zimmerman pull out a gun and finish it his way. Classical "fighting" scenario, except someone bought a gun to a fist fight. With reasonable doubt as to who threw the first punch, a clear acquittal under SYG.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
4mo ago
you may as well give up the entire American project right now
The framers were very clear that the system they were setting up relied on the electors exercising a certain discernment in the choice of President. If mixpap is right about Trump's character, and he is susceptible to low-effort social media campaigns in a way which the vast majority of people who are paying attention and have 90+ IQs are not, then the willingness of the electors to elect a man like that to the highly responsible and sensitive office of President of the United States is a "you may as well give up the entire American project right now" level failure of the system.
there's no hope left, the Russians could hit anyone lower down in the government with the same weapon.
No - the weapon doesn't work close to universally. We know that because Tim Pool and Lauren Southern had to be paid to spout Russian propaganda on Twitter. If Russian social media trolling worked on all MAGA midwits they would have done it for free.
Of course, the alternative hypothesis, that the alternative media and other voices have been correct about the US' pivotal role in starting the Ukraine conflict
I was alive and awake in 2014 and 2022. The troop movements were detectable by satellite - the invasion was definitely coming from Russian-controlled territory and not, say, the United States. The people saying now that the US started it were mostly spending January 2022 insisting that Russia wasn't going to start it, so I don't see why you find them so correct that you would believe them over your lying eyes.
he doesn't actually want the war to continue,
Nobody wants the war to continue. That Trump wants the war to end with a Russian victory is not in doubt - Trump has said it, Lavrov has said it, Trump's opponents have said it. That other people (including sufficiently many Ukrainians to sustain the level of war effort we are seeing) want it to end with a Ukrainian victory is also not in doubt. Russia is not currently open to peace without victory, and Ukraine probably isn't either. The rest of us can either shut up or pick a side. Trump has picked the Russian side, and the rest of us can judge him accordingly.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
4mo ago
If my experience of Brexit is any guide,
If my experience of Brexit is any guide, the people who told the necessary lies to get the median voter to believe that the government was their enemy and the system that had delivered decades of peace and prosperity should die in a fire are high on their own supply and it is going to end in avoidable harm to the country, landslide election defeat, and wailing and gnashing of teeth in opposition.
To take an obvious example, if DOGE and its supporters believe what they are saying on social media about how closing down USAID is successfully defunding a vast left-wing conspiracy then their OODA loop doesn't have ground truth in it.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
5mo ago
"Nothing happened" is obviously false, given January 6th and the events leading up to it.
Trump made a serious effort to stay in office despite losing the 2020 election, including (definitely) assembling a riotous mob outside the Capitol in order to intimidate Pence and Congress and (based on poorly-corroborated eyewitness testimony, but not seriously challenged) meeting retired generals in the Oval Office to discuss the possibility of a military autogolpe. That isn't nothing.
The people who said that Trump was a threat to democracy were right, even though American democracy was in fact able to brush off the threat.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
2yr ago
You don't have to be morally deformed when you torture the first prisoner. You just need to believe that this time there really is the ticking bomb in the school, and that you are being morally serious and avoiding Just World fallacy and all the other things torture apologists have said on this very thread. So you hold your nose and turn the handle.
Then you hear the screams. The screams of the hated, defeated enemy. It feels good. An better still, he screamed a name. You got actionable intelligence - you did the right thing. (You don't know at that point that he gave the same name to the FBI in exchange for coffee and a hot meal three weeks ago). And you did this. You had to overcome your fear of the tofu-eating wokists of North London to do the right thing. Actually, you're kind of a hero. The sense of power is good for the ego too. Your testosterone levels go through the roof. The sex with your wife that night is special.
They bring the guy he named in. The second time is easier. You get another name. But perhaps he is holding back - he is supposed to be the higher-up after all. So you arrange another session. Nobody broke after only one round of torture in the old books, after all.
The third time is even easier. You tell him he needs to name names to make the torture stop. In between the cries, you get name after name.
They bring those people in. You start to realise that they don't talk as easily. They must be particularly hard cases - you have hard evidence that they are baddies, after all. The second guy said so under torture, and if he was lying you would have put him through another session, and he wouldn't want that. You don't consider the possibility that they aren't talking is that they weren't baddies and don't know anything. It would mean you are out of a lucrative job. So you dial up the pain.
Two days later you hear that one of the guys you left in the cold cell overnight died of hypothermia. Can't make an omlette without breaking eggs, after all. But you aren't morally deformed. You are just doing a difficult, unpleasant job that most people are too prissy to do. And you have also tortured an innocent man to death.
You have also booked a one-way ticket to the eight circle of Hell and your family is accursed down to the thirteenth generation.
A moderately interesting interview with Eric Trump just dropped in the FT. (Limited-use gift link - the article is paywalled but may also be accessible on a 5/month basis with free registration)
The headline is "Eric Trump opens door to political dynasty." It isn't explicit, but applying bounded distrust it looks like the FT reporter raised the issue and Eric responded mildly positively. It is consistent with the Trump family's general approach of keeping the idea of an illegal 3rd term and/or a dynastic successor in the public eye while maintaining plausible deniability about actually doing it.
I don't find Eric's denials that the family is making money off the Presidency interesting - the Mandy Rice-Davies principle applies. Eric is lying here and the FT makes this clear to a reader who is paying attention while avoiding words like "lie" and "falsely". It is an interesting example of a political reporter trying to write about a lying politician without engaging in either hostile editorialising or "opinions about shape of earth differ" non-journalism.
If I had to guess, Eric is positioning himself, personally for a future move into politics. Over the last few years Eric has been running the Trump Organisation while Don Jr and Barron support their father's political operation. With Barron taller and more talented, but still a long way off 35, Don Jr is the obvious dynastic successor at the moment. But the bit of the interview about a Trump dynasty is explicitly about the idea of Eric and not Don Jr being the politician.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
3mo ago
The problem is that the people who are extreme are uniformly Democrats, and that gets projected on to the rest of the party. It doesn't help that these people tend to, by their nature, be the most motivated, loudest, and most likely to get signal-boosted by their political opponents.
Trace isn't on the left at all. He is a dissident conservative who is trying to build bridges to the centre-left because the centre-right in the US appears to no longer exist.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
9mo ago
Reform UK Party Ltd is a private limited company with a single controlling shareholder, not a substantial movement. By the time Reform was polling above 5%, Farage had resigned as leader and it had gone back to running a standard-issue right populist campaign based around dubiously-funded tax cuts and reduced immigration. COVID wasn't mentioned in Reform's 2024 election campaign, at least as far as a random voter who was paying attention could see.
Right populism in the UK is fundamentally about Islamic immigration. The attempt to make US-style public health skepticism part of the movement failed.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1yr ago
I don't. Jews who are paying attention can see the rising anti-semitism on the right. (And in particular, Jews who care about Israel know who was blocking the aid bill). Left-wing anti-semites are more dangerous individually (because they are more violent) but the anti-semitic right arguably includes people like Elon Musk and has far more access to the corridors of power than the Columbia protestors do.
Will more anti-semites be invited to the White House in a second Trump term or a second Biden term (not counting Gulf Arab diplomats etc. who are discreet about their anti-semitism)? It is a surprisingly difficult question to answer.
Do you pay off pornstars with company money and cook the books to cover it up, conspire to prevent the duly elected President assuming office, or continue to keep a trove of classified docs at your home after the Feds explicitly ask for them back?
None of the things Trump is being charged with are three felonies a day bullshit. All four criminal indictments involve malum in se behaviour - the theory for the false accounting being a felony based on a predicate campaign finance violation is a stretch, but the fact that Trump committed misdemeanor false accounting was clearly established in Court.
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