Negatory
2yr ago
Well the FBI disagrees with your sentiments and you do not seem to be accurately representing how events transpired.
Furthermore, using a tool to mass delete data, particularly that contains PII, is a standard practice.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/08/11/trump-fbi-search-hillary-clinton/
She was an idiot for mixing personal and business emails, but she would have been an even bigger idiot to have used it for whatever it is you mean by “darker stuff”.
Negatory
2yr ago
To put a finer point on it, you have the causation backwards.
Even if I grant you all the lies, the lies happened because there was already critical mass where it was important. The “science lies” were a prop, not a significant load-bearing element of the cultural change machine. Now the Hollywood propaganda was load-bearing I think, but the gays had already long conquered the arts so what can you do.
I was raised in a very religious environment and served under DADT. I personally made the transition to support gay rights, and witnessed that in many others, including the devout. “The science” was an afterthought compared to knowing gay people. (I think I made the shift before actuality personally knowing a real-life homosexual, due to reading a prominent gay intellectual for several years as a teenager.)
The biggest factor for most people was the personal relations bit. Back then, being gay was certainly not a fun preference to indulge if you were from a background like mine or wished to serve in the military.
The same playbook won’t work nearly so well on trans issues because of the complications I already described, as we are witnessing.
Negatory
2yr ago
I’m telling you that I lived through that transition and the lies you allege were just not a significant factor.
It’s not like the Red Tribe is convinced by “well if science says so”, and the Blue Tribe accepting it was a foregone conclusion, science or not. What gives this issue a strong majority is similar to the case of abortion: independents and a decent chunk of right-leaning people support the other side.
Negatory
2yr ago
I’d laugh in this context because the Clintons at least waited until leaving office to start their grifting, whereas Trump was still actively involved in running his company, despite the million different opportunities for conflicts of interest and other obvious ethical issues that should have been unthinkable to permit.
Negatory
2yr ago
It’s mostly about two things:
- The sensitivity of the info.
- How badly/brazenly/irresponsibly rules were broken.
The Hillary server was known to the State Department and others in government because she used it for her job. It was a bad idea and poorly executed, but clearly de facto permitted. The emails were not classified, but upon investigation some of them had content should have been.
This last bit is not a result of the server; it’s a result of the State Department constantly straddling classified and unclassified worlds. I have no idea if Hillary and her close associates were more or less irresponsible than average people in her position because we don’t have investigation results to compare. I do know that the classification business is a pain in the ass and can involve judgement calls that are easier in hindsight.
Trump, on the other hand, absconded with dozens of boxes of highly classified documents, as if he wanted a personal collection. We know he talked about them and shared them, and not for official US government business. And when the US government asked for them back, he put up a fight. If he had just given them back the chance it would have gone any further was very low.
The remarkable bit is that the president is the absolute classification authority and Trump (falsely) claims he had declassified them. Now, if he had gone the formal declassification route then that would have been a scandal (declassifying sensitive things because you want them in your collection is not a good luck), but he wouldn’t have broken the law. (At least, I’m pretty sure there is no legal restraint on a president declassifying things because it’s an executive branch program; the reason congress is so cavalier with classified data is because they can’t be prosecuted for breaking those rules.)
Hillary made mistakes. Trump (almost certainly) committed a crime.
Negatory
2yr ago
It’s not much actual Turkic ancestry. My understanding is that there is a huge genetic overlap between the Balkans, Greece, and Turkey, and the latter two try to pretend otherwise.
Negatory
2yr ago
By “break serious laws” do you mean the email server? Or are we talking the theories out there about darker stuff?
If we’re talking about the email server, then I’d say the level of drama was way overblown relative to the actual significance. And, well, Trump has her beat with his personal presidential library he had going.
If you mean something more serious than the email server, then we are going to be in a disagreement about the evidence for those claims.
(If you bring up claims of general corruption related to the Clinton Foundation then I’m going to laugh at you, for reasons that should be obvious.)
Negatory
2yr ago
“A bet is a tax on bullshit” is not meant to say “government fines are a good thing.” The guy who wrote that article is not really a fan of government power being used to decide such things.
Lindell choosing to place a bet is a good thing. He just made a bad one for himself. His “misfortune” on this particular issue is all self-imposed by him, it just took a judge to force him to comply with his own promise.
Lindell is not being punished such as he is for supporting Trump. One can, theoretically at least, support Trump and not engage in blatant lies and other violations that will attract the ire of social media platforms.
The super ironic thing is that Lindell lost his phone due to an FBI investigation over election tampering at the county level. Contrary to what a lot of posters here believe, the US government takes election issues quite seriously and Lindell trying to doing vigilante election security backfired on him a bit. Somehow I doubt if that Mesa County official ends up convicted it will change anyone’s mind, because the case hasn’t made enough of a dent in people thinking it’s not too hard to screw with county election results.
Not that it proves you wrong, but it’s hard to take your complaints seriously based on how say Hillary got treated. Both sides of the aisle do a lot of shit that is indecent.
Negatory
2yr ago
To nitpick, she was not a novice FBI agent when she was assigned to the legally shady task force as the liaison.
Her level of tactical experience doing law enforcement operations doesn’t particularly effect her ability at grappling.
Negatory
2yr ago
Granting #1 as written is not justified.
Manipulating the vote count 1-2% at the county level takes a political machine to pull off and protect. Doing so consistently without detection is a tall order, and even if you think you have the local/county/state politics figured out, the Feds can get you.
Furthermore, the place where the incentives are strong (swing states) tend to (by definition) have a mix of partisan power, making it harder to coordinate and conceal such activity. Being in a blue county in a red state would make it a very risky proposition to piss off the majority party’s state prosecutor. And there’s no incentive to run up the vote where it is single-party rule so why risk it?
You can’t look at Tammany Hall and extrapolate to the present.
Plots to manipulate the vote at any scale are very hard and rare, but mistakes and small cases of fraud do happen. 2020, Covid, and mail in ballots were a particularly ripe situation for strange things and mistakes, and for people to be hyper-concerned about it.
Negatory
2yr ago
So we need to reframe the plot to kill Kennedy as the Deep State taking action against the Kennedy machine rigging election.
Negatory
2yr ago
It’s just literally not much of an ask in concrete terms, relative to say implementing the ADA, or the Civil Rights Act(s), or the various complexities of trans issues.
The gay people I know personally are quite gay, and disproportionately the type who risked/suffered a great deal personally to live as such. They weren’t lying about their reality. Some countries still execute gays. Hell of a preference to satisfy.
I’ve seen a number of instances where religious gay men tried to make a heterosexual marriage work and it didn’t pan out. The “genderqueer/fluid” crowd is a different beast, as is the whole thing with bisexuals, but most of that has emerged in more recent times and among the youths, after the popular perception tide had turned.
Graduating high school in 2006 is utterly different than in 2016 with respect to the gays. The people that can’t remember 9/11 also can’t really remember a lack of societal acceptance of gays. Even if the courts had not ruled in favor of gay marriage when they did, the cultural change was already a foregone conclusion.
Negatory
2yr ago
As I pointed out a few times earlier, if Trump honestly believed the 2016 election was rigged against him with millions of fraudulent votes (they just barely didn’t have enough to quite win the electoral college…), then his first order of business should have been a major investigation such that it couldn’t happen again.
Actually, even if he didn’t believe it and was merely saying it for propaganda purposes, it would have been a classic political maneuver to use a pretense for a major corruption investigation to defeat enemies and ensure ongoing political power.
Trump has the right instincts to be a strongman, just not the heart to follow though. Same thing goes for the meddling in the 2020 election outcome and that whole bit where Pence was supposed to play along, but instead there was a March on the Capitol to threaten his decapitation. It’s like a LARP of a would-be autocrat (along with threatening to imprison Hillary, bombing various countries, etc.). Trump has plausible deniability in the minds of many due to the half-hearted and bumbling attempts. I’ve had arguments with Trump supporters/defenders where one will say “of course he doesn’t mean it” and another will say “I’m excited for Trump to expose the corruption and jail the pedophiles.” A lot of MAGA takes him seriously and literally.
While I think plenty of Trump’s most vocal critics have cried wolf more than once (I define “TDS” as anyone who is more critical of Trump than I am), it does amaze me that people I formerly respected as “constitutional conservatives” don’t seem too concerned about Trump’s antics in terms of their present effect, or the potential effects down the road. I’d be a lot more concerned if Trump was 55, but his lasting effect on the GOP might still be pretty bad after he is out of the picture.
Hopefully we regress to a more sane political climate mean instead of pursuing a downward spiral.
Negatory
2yr ago
Negatory
2yr ago
Wait, what.
Evaluating individuals as individuals, independent of any group affiliation, is definitely my preferred policy and personal approach. Equality before the law and focusing on individual ability/merit would mean no affirmative action and gut DEI. Bring back meritocracy!
“Blank slatism” leads to creating government interventions around race or gender that do not reflect reality. “Systemic racism” and “heteronormative patriarchy” have to be invented to explain disparities that are not resulting from actual evidence of discrimination, because classic racism and sexism have already been defeated.
I’m not sure how representative I am of the typical Motteposter who accepts biological effects on group averages, but I doubt you’re portraying things accurately.
Negatory
2yr ago
Mike Lindell has been ordered to pay up for his challenge to disprove some election interference evidence.
It’s a remarkable situation. Evidence of election interference should be investigated by law enforcement agencies, with no need for a bounty to disprove the validity.
The great thing is that the man who met the challenge voted for Trump twice. (I wonder if he will a third time.)
If Lindell didn’t trust government authorities to properly investigate election interference claims, he should have also known not to trust the courts to fairly (from his perspective) enforce an arbitration issue about it.
Had Lindell set the bounty to prove the veracity of the evidence (beyond a reasonable doubt), he’d still have his money.
This is like the inverse of the Balaji Srinivasan bet on inflation and Bitcoin. I think it’s great when the wealthy put their money where their mouth is. We need more bets taxing bullshit.
Negatory
2yr ago
In the US, Persians definitely are a net positive.
Iranian brain drain selects for the talented and secular.
Negatory
2yr ago
Leaving aside the whole issue of government involvement in the institution of marriage and the court deciding things, the popularity battle was not won by lying.
I can grant your claims of some lying, but the biggest factor is that what the gays wanted was not that much of an ask, overall. It was about social acceptance, without too much of a real burden. The exceptions, of course, revolve around the trade offs with religious rights, because freedom of association and freedom from association are murky unresolvable problems.
This is not the case with trans issues. There are significant health concerns, as well as the major biological differences between men and women being pretttty difficult to overcome. It’s asymmetric of course; almost all the Culture Warring is over MtF issues.
Negatory
2yr ago
The “anything to back this” is the explanation I go on to give. You can also read Cato, who also mentions the points that immigrants tend to take jobs we citizens don’t want, and that the large-scale entry of women into the workforce is another point of comparison for significant labor force changes.
It’s not a hypothetical, in other words. We can observe countries with different levels of population growth from births and immigration over time, as well as women entering into the workforce. What matters most is productivity. Scarcity of labor only drives up wages to the point a firm can afford.
Remittances aren’t a major variable and also foreigners buy US products.
The Rust Belt needs to adapt to a changing economy. Trying to lock in a given situation, changing factors be dammed, is the very definition of stagnation. I don’t want to end up like Europe thank you very much.
Empowering China was not a problem in pure economic terms, it was a problem in geopolitical ones. In a better world, we would had given more business to say Mexico/Canada/Brazil until China had demonstrated actual willingness to play nice with the US-led international world order. In other words, the Rust Belt can still get fucked for not being a competitive place to run a factory. Whining about it and trying to use government intervention to prevent the outcomes of markets, instead of doing a good job of competing for new industries, is some leftist bullshit that makes me very annoyed at today’s GOP.
That actually brings up another point. If you don’t let labor come to the US sufficient to keep up with hiring demands, you drive up the incentive to outsource production to where there is available labor.
So support free trade and sensible immigration policy. (I’m in the Tyler Cowen/Garret Jones camp, not the Bryan Caplan one.)
Negatory
2yr ago
Cancel culture doesn’t have the power of the medieval church, thankfully.
But mostly because genetic science is casting light on the finer and finer details of our traits and so it won’t be easy to bury one’s head in the sand.
Negatory
2yr ago
The measured correlation is obviously a modern development because before then we didn’t measure it.
But also having knowledge economies is a modern thing. A genius farmer in the days of yore couldn’t leverage his intellect like a genius investor or programmer or general white-collar professional can. The gains from intelligence are much higher now than in the past, as is the gap in wealth between countries.
Negatory
2yr ago
Obviously much of the historic difference in height is environmental. Look how fast it changed once nutrition improved all over the world, and the longstanding gap that emerged between North and South Koreans.
But certain parts of Europe average close to 6 ft. It’s not like the Dutch have had some special nutrition better than say us in America.
My favorite part is that now you have to explain how we’re going to catch up to the Ashkenazim and their standard deviation advantage over whites.
Half standard deviation is still a substantial gap, by the way. The shift in direction really affects the tails and it would be noticeable. Asians have to be discriminated against at Harvard for a reason.
Your theory is self-contradicting.
If you’re going to set up your own server to evade scrutiny, then you should probably also invest in making it highly secure.
Government IT tends to suck, which Clinton knew, and so she stupidly tried to avoid that by just using what she already had. It should not been allowed and certainly won’t be ever again.
Clinton turned over many thousands of emails to the State Department. The FBI managed to find even more. But at the end of the day there was no bombshell and it’s wishful thinking by her opponents to believe she successfully covered up all the really nefarious stuff. (Anyone with half a brain would do the nefarious stuff separately anyway.)
https://abcnews.go.com/amp/Politics/hillary-clinton-deleted-33000-emails-secretary-state/story?id=42389308
You’re just immensely wrong about how you characterize the Trump case. You have to significantly downplay the dozens of boxes of very sensitive documents he purposely took, and then the refusal to comply on top. It’s par for the course to have a situation like Biden’s and many other senior officials and presidents have. Trump is on his own golf course here with a totally unprecedented effort to keep classified material.
Some of the Trump documents were sufficiently sensitive that the classification itself is classified, due to belonging to special programs, and has to be partially redacted in court documents.
https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/what-are-the-classified-documents-in-the-trump-indictment
So all of the “but her emails” crowd who thought Clinton was terrible for exposing sensitive information that should have been classified in the course of her official duties as SecState, if their true concern is the responsible handling of classified information, ought to be utterly outraged at Trump for simply wishing to possess and share very classified documents for his own personal benefit.
More options
Context Copy link