Pulpachair
1yr ago
While I agree it is unlikely, Sy Hersh isn’t exactly a random substack.
That said, this is thinly sourced, would indicate criminal behavior by multiple people in the executive branch, and an act of aggression against a warring nuclear power. I think Biden is an idiot, but I have to think the joint chiefs would have stopped this.
Pulpachair
1yr ago
It would be more accurate to say that in the minds of the authors, the positive traits are held to be positive largely because they correlate more strongly with having white skin. That if non-whites had a greater say in the culture, other attributes (not necessarily the opposite of the “white” traits) would be held as markers of good character.
Pulpachair
1yr ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mattel,_Inc._v._MCA_Records,_Inc. is always a fun read.
Bradshaw v. Unity Marine Corp., Inc., 147 F. Supp. 2d 668 - Dist. Court, SD Texas 2001 is a treat in the sense that you can still see the ring marks where the judge backhanded the attorneys:
Before proceeding further, the Court notes that this case involves two extremely likable lawyers, who have together delivered some of the most amateurish pleadings ever to cross the hallowed causeway into Galveston, an effort which leads the Court to surmise but one plausible explanation. Both attorneys have obviously entered into a secret pact—complete with hats, handshakes and cryptic words—to draft their pleadings entirely in crayon on the back sides of gravy-stained paper place mats, in the hope that the Court would be so charmed by their child-like efforts that their utter dearth of legal authorities in their briefing would go unnoticed. Whatever actually occurred, the Court is now faced with the daunting task of deciphering their submissions. With Big Chief tablet readied, thick black pencil in hand, and a devil-may-care laugh in the face of death, life on the razor's edge sense of exhilaration, the Court begins.
Pulpachair
1yr ago
I sort of feel like Johnson is not a great screenwriter, just flashy, and pulling wool over people's eyes with simple lazy tricks
I hard disagree. Brick and Looper are two of the better-written movies of the last 20 years. He has a good ear for dialogue and gets good performances from his cast. He was absolutely the wrong man to write and direct a Star Wars movie, but the sequel trilogy was doomed from the beginning due to structural problems with the story JJ Abrams and Kathleen Kennedy decided to tell.
Johnson’s problem is that he views himself as an auteur. He definitely makes his best movies when he is constrained by budget or a script supervisor who can put the kibosh on his desire to make “art” instead of telling a good story. He crawled up his own ass when making Star Wars and the fan reaction basically guaranteed he would stay there out of stubbornness. I wish he would come out again and make some good niche movies that weren’t full of swipes at the kids on Twitter who were mean to him for “ruining Star Wars.”
Pulpachair
1yr ago
Over the holidays, I had a relatively pleasant call with my mother. Relatively in that there were only four oblique references to my infidel status.
My wife doesn’t hear it when it happens. She is missing a few decades of history of argument via insinuation, so she leaves the call thinking it was just the nicest call, while I am ranging between annoyed and fuming.
Almost no Hollywood tv shows or movies are made by or for conservative audiences. The closest conservatives get are things like Top Gun: Maverick or Yellowstone, which aren’t exactly conservative. It’s more that they don’t treat conservatives and/or non-coastal Americans with sneering contempt. For most of the red tribe types that I know, they are primed to see microagressions in Hollywood productions. Perhaps the writers and directors are wholly innocent and just repeat what they see on n their milieu. Maybe my mother doesn’t mean to provoke me when she brings up religion multiple times in a short call. It is a significant part of her life and informs her worldview in almost every aspect. The entirety of my adult life, she has used it as a cudgel, but maybe this time she was wholly innocently bringing it up seemingly out of nowhere.
Pulpachair
1yr ago
Griswold v Connecticut. Estelle Griswold was a planned parenthood executive who collaborated with local law enforcement to get charged on the Comstock law in Connecticut. That was enough to get past the ripeness issue that resulted in dismissing Poe v Ullman and Tileston v Ullman. Justice Harlan had already signaled the outcome of a successful challenge in his dissent on Poe, so it was just a matter of creating the set of facts needed.
This sort of gamesmanship is almost de rigueur in any sort of specific-issue appellate practice. I don’t really take issue with the practice because courts do not rule prospectively (unless they want to.) If a law becomes absurd under a set of facts that can be reasonably passed off as naturally occurring, it deserves to be challenged.
Pulpachair
1yr ago
That would indeed be terrible if, you know, Twitter weren't already knowingly penetrated by Chinese intelligence assets.
Pulpachair
1yr ago
When election corruption was a little more blatant in Chicago in the second half of the twentieth century, it wasn’t all of Cook county that engaged in corruption. It was a dozen polling locations where the entire polling apparatus was safely within the Daley machine. Still enough to shore up mayoral and statewide Democrat vote totals, but narrow and focused enough that it wouldn’t disrupt all of the races.
Widespread, persistent election fraud is almost certainly not an actual occurrence. To the extent fraud is occurring, I would guess that it is following the Chicago model and focused on small partisan strongholds with the objective of keeping the graft dollars flowing.
Pulpachair
1yr ago
Current ethics rules in most jurisdictions state that lawyers cannot be managed by non-lawyers. This extends to ownership of law firms - they can’t be owned by corporations or other non-lawyer entities.
In 2021, Arizona broke with the majority and made it so that non-lawyers can hold an equity stake in a law firm. It has been piquing interest from legal-adjacent entities.
Biglaw took a major hit in 2008 that it never really recovered from and will take another one when tight belts force companies to get creative in how they deal with legal needs.
Pulpachair
1yr ago
Lay doomer take.
I’ve been expecting a recession since late 2020 and was surprised that it took until q1 2022 to actually arrive. You think the fundamentals aren’t as bad as 2008 - I disagree. The 2008 financial crisis was a US-created speculative bubble that had knock-on effects in other countries. The EU was stronger then. China was ascending. Russia was not engaged in self-immolation. There were limits for how much damage US housing speculation could inflict.
Right now, all I see are dominoes. Europe is facing a major energy crisis. Russia’s economy is being strangled. China was always a house of cards. The current US administration does not appear capable of recognizing things that have already happened, let alone accurately predicting coming events. We ate a lot of seed corn during COVID, and have continued feasting afterwards too. What possible backstop is there against a major downturn?
—
I think your evaluation of legal hiring is a bit optimistic, though your identification of “safe” areas of law is apt.
Since 2008, the big 4 consulting firms have been building larger legal services departments. It has really only been large corporate legal departments, which are almost entirely composed of biglaw alumni, that has kept corporate finance from moving the largest part of legal work to cheaper legal services providers. Recession-type hits to the bottom line should be enough to force gc’s to look for ways to trim the legal budgets, which will mean moving significant amounts of money away from biglaw. Cut off those revenue streams from biglaw firms, and I think you will see hiring freezes generally while law schools continue to churn out new grads. If and when the law firm hiring picks up again (expect a lag behind the end of the recession) you’ll have double or triple the number of applicants looking for the same number of jobs.
I predict the major earthquake for law to be ABA permitting Arizona-style changes to rules about who can own a law firm, meaning Deloitte can have its own subsidiary law firm covered by MSAs that already exist with most fortune 500 companies. If that happens, biglaw is going to take more than a haircut.
Pulpachair
1yr ago
This deepfake youtube series of Gandalf commenting on The Rings of Power seems particularly tuned to the interests of a significant number of users here.
Pulpachair
1yr ago
I would venture that he's denying victim status to the two people Rittenhouse killed and the third he wounded - Rittenhouse being the victim. From the conservative perspective, they were aggressors who happened to aggress someone holding a loaded weapon.
Pulpachair
1yr ago
Also, generally speaking, a community less likely to weigh in on subjects where they have no knowledge base. I appreciate Stefferi’s Finnish culture war entries, but never comment on them as my knowledge of Finnish politics could be contained in a matchbook, with plenty of room to spare.
Pulpachair
1yr ago
Say your roommate brings in a homeless guy from the street and tells you he needs to sleep on the couch you just bought. Maybe you put your foot down; maybe you decide to be a good Christian. If you're feeling really charitable you might even try to offer aid of your own.
The calculus changes if your roommate calls your friends, coworkers, and pastor and hints that you're going to lose your shit. Might you feel a little...constrained? A little incentivized to prove him wrong in front of your social circles?
Either way, it's not ambiguous who's to blame.
Let me help tie your analogy to the view of the right. Every night for the last 40 years, you've been inviting homeless people to stay in your roommate's room. Whenever he objects, you loudly and publicly denounce him as a bigot who hates the less fortunate, and correspondingly congratulate yourself on your depth of character. Sure he's been stabbed a few times, his belongings have been stolen, and his room is used as a stash house for a drug trafficking ring, but, as you are constantly reminding him, that's a small price to pay to make the world a better place.
On the night in question, you greet the homeless person graciously, tell them how much you appreciate them being there and the struggle they are going through, offer them a few jelly beans and then, as soon as the pastor leaves, you have the police escort them from the premises. You then post to facebook that your roommate is history's greatest monster for using a human being as a prop in your little domestic spat.
A bit further back than 1997, but still after the purported demise of the machine politics era, the grand jury report for the 1982 Chicago election is informative on the different fraud strategies used to generate over 100,000 fraudulent votes in the midterms that year. The specific strategies included
Absent voter canvassing - paid canvassers who were supposed to correct voter rolls instead used canvassing to identify voters who had died, moved, or had no intention of voting as targets for fraudulent votes.
Fraudulent use of absentee registration - precinct captains and canvassers would convince residents to sign up for absentee ballots, then fill out the ballots themselves voting party line
Paying drunks, homeless and aliens to vote
Manually altering the vote counts
Harvesting ballots from nursing homes
Of those methods, manually altering the vote counts is more difficult now. The other methods are no more difficult or much, much easier to pull off. In the 41 years since then, we have expanded the mail-in vote to be broad enough to cover everyone. Ballot harvesting is now explicitly legal in quite a few jurisdictions with minimum verifications in place to ensure that the ballots are actually cast by the person on the registration card. In jurisdictions where it is illegal, there is an awful lot of wink and nod non-enforcement.
Much of the opportunity for fraud is now outsourced to GOTV organizations tied to both the local and national parties. They conduct the registration drives, canvassing, and harvesting with a degree of separation from the party proper so that when an employee is caught being "inadequately supervised" it doesn't implicate the party.
While I assume that both parties engage in fraud to the extent they can get away with it, I would expect that Democrats benefit from it more simply due to the parties' positions on whether greater voter fraud protections are needed. I think it's unlikely but not impossible that the 2020 presidential election was within the margin of fraud.
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