The issue isn't that they were doing their own preg checks, it's that they were operating and advertising a business that did it for other people for a fee. You can write your own will, for instance, but if you write wills for other people it's the unauthorized practice of law. Now, we can make the argument that that requiring a vet to do this is both unnecessary and outside the bounds of the statute, but there are two general problems I forsee with that.
The first is that the introduction of technology makes a lot of things that used to be the domain of trained professionals increasingly accessible to the general public. Take land surveying. Anyone of average intelligence can pull a deed from the courthouse, buy pro-grade survey equipment, and locate a pin, which is probably enough to do the trick if you're trying to see where you can put up a fence on your own property. But the field is deceptively complicated, and when the same guy decides to go into business for himself as a surveyor with no more training than basic YouTube tutorials, he's asking for trouble. The second problem is that most professional fields are so varied that it's impossible to define every specific thing one needs a license to do. The legislature can't run back into session every time someone comes up with a new medical procedure to make sure that you need a license to do it.
As for specific problems with allowing unlicensed people to do preg checks as a business, I can't comment on because I don't know anything about vet science. But if this is something that's plausible then the solution is to lobby the state legislature to clarify the law to specifically allow it; God knows the farm lobby in PA is powerful enough to make it happen if there's that much of a call for it and the only real opposition is from vets that don't like it. But the solution isn't to start a business doing it and ignore the state when they tell you to stop.
Rov_Scam
1mo ago
I'm not a conservative so I don't worry about these things. As for them, I don't expect them to do anything other than stop bitching about people who need handouts and then asking the government to set policies that are basically handouts for them. And if you want AI to do legal services, be my guest; I'll make more money undoing the mess...
Rov_Scam
8mo ago
And if they get Trump they're toast. That's the problem. And if they can't find him off now they won't be able to in 2028 either, regardless of how old he is. The GOP has underperformed for three straight election cycles, and they're barreling into four with abandon. The only way they're going to win back the voters who have abandoned them is to convince them that this party is a different one than the one they voted against in 2020. Instead we get a full-throated embrace of election denial/ January 6th nonsense that won't go away. They need to pull off the bandaid but are incapable of doing so. It's like an episode of Bar Rescue where the owner is going down with the ship because he's worried about alienating regulars. That's usually good advice, but when the regulars can't keep you in business then something's got to give.
Rov_Scam
1yr ago
I wasn't discussing the actual law, I was discussing the rhetoric from conservatives in my social circle that suggests that a cop has the right to do anything to force compliance. In any event, the case you referenced states that they aren't allowed to use deadly force unless "the officer has probable cause to believe that the suspect poses a significant threat of death or serious physical injury to the officer or others." In practice this isn't a particularly difficult standard to meet. Recall the Antwon Rose shooting where the officer shot a fleeing suspect and was acquitted by a jury with three black jurors and a black foreman. In an attempt to quell protests that erupted in the wake of the verdict, the foreman went on local television and explained that the law gives police wide latitude in these situations and changing that law is the job of the legislature, not a criminal jury. While my own underage drinking experience probably wouldn't fall into that kind of situation, the Rose case was pretty big here and most conservatives defending the police were of the opinion that anyone who ran deserved to get shot, and I used my own experiences to push back against this argument.
Rov_Scam
1yr ago
Having recourse isn't the same as getting what you want. You could have challenged the matter in the courts. You could have voted for and campaigned for politicians who were opposed to the policy. You could have petitioned the existing government to reconsider the policy. Even though there was an eviction moratorium, it wasn't the same as the government saying you had to allow squatters—the tenants still owed whatever you were charging on the current lease, and you can still go after them for it once they are finally evicted. And if they don't pay there are mechanisms by which you can enforce the judgment. And if you engage in any of these activities, the risk to your personal safety or livelihood is low enough that it isn't an issue. Contrast this with a drug lord deciding to appropriate your apartment for one of his friends. Who are you even going to complain to? What could potentially happen if you do complain? Yeah, it sucks when you lose money because of a government policy you disagree with, but it's a much better situation than when you lose money because of a criminal you disagree with.
Rov_Scam
2mo ago
They didn't take the company away; they levied a fine. It's a large fine, but dissolving the company would have involved appointing a receiver and liquidating all of the company's assets.
Rov_Scam
2mo ago
Where do you get the idea that nobody has ever been prosecuted for this? A recent AP article suggests that there have been nearly 150 actions under the law since it was passed in 1956.
Rov_Scam
9mo ago
I don't think he colluded and never said he did. I said he had extensive business dealings with Russians, which is well-documented and uncontroversial. The fact that Joe may have had a stake in something involving the Chinese doesn't point to corruption barring other evidence, and no one has shown me other evidence.
Rov_Scam
9mo ago
As long as you have federal crimes you need someone to investigate them. And if it's not the FBI it's going to be someone even more political, like the local US attorney, or even more disliked by the right (any votes for giving the ATF more power?). It's like the calls to eliminate the IRS that don't realize that unless they want government spending limited to customs revenue, any other tax collector is going to be just as bad.
Rov_Scam
10mo ago
What, exactly, was she hiding? I don't know and that part barely even matters to my evaluation that her behavior was the behavior of someone that's trying to hide what she's doing.
I shouldn't have to tell you this but most people—including major public figures—have some expectation of privacy when it comes to their private lives, even if it isn't anything that most people would find embarrassing or inappropriate. Once when I was younger a cop who wanted to search my car gave me the classic line about "why do you have a problem with it if you have nothing to hide", to which I shot back that when we were done maybe we'd go to his house so I could go through his stuff since after all, he presumably has nothing to hide either. On a more down to earth note, I serve on the board of directors of a small nonprofit and we deal regularly with state government officials, outside contractors, and other interested parties, and we often speak candidly about them, or express our frustration with them, or talk about how to strategically deal with them. You don't think that Hillary Clinton speaking candidly about a high-level official or venting frustration to a friend might not be something she wants bandied about the public square, especially if it deals more with a personal relationship than official business? You can, of course, make the argument that as a Secretary of State and presidential candidate she should be subject to greater scrutiny than your average Joe, but that doesn't mean that the desire for privacy isn't there, and it's a pretty slippery slope if we decide that certain government officials effectively have no privacy at all. It's the same thing with Trump's tax returns; every left-wing pundit thought that Trump was hiding something, but no one considered that the real reason he didn't release them was because he thinks it's none of our damn business.
Rov_Scam
1yr ago
Those political entities (the city and state of New York) have chosen to do otherwise. That means the locals either must put up with the subway-screaming bums no matter what they do, or they must use less-measured force.
Or, alternatively, they can empower the city and the state to use such necessary force to lock them up. The fact that they haven't suggests that the people would prefer to deal with the occasional nuisance of subway bums than subject them to what they feel are the deleterious effects of "the system". To suggest that individuals should have the power to unilaterally decide to take matters into their own hands makes a mockery of any pretense to having a rule of law. What if a similar mob thought that certain posts on The Motte were inherently racist and not appropriate for civilized society and therefore, since the state and national legislatures have chosen to do nothing, track down the authors of those posts and beat them within an inch of their lives? Would you find this behavior opprobrious? Once you come to the conclusion that individuals and mobs should trump the laws of political entities you disagree with, you empower all such people to act as they will, not just the ones you happen to agree with.
Rov_Scam
1yr ago
A better test would be - can an outsider - or, horrible dictu, even a deplorable - ever get to the levers at all? What challenges would they encounter - besides the obvious "convince the voters" ones?
Outsiders get in all the time. Ed Gainey was a state rep before he became mayor, and he was elected to that post after defeating a 30-year incumbent on the third try. Plus, Pittsburgh's one of the whitest major cities in the country and Gainey is probably the first black guy to get elected to any city office that isn't a council seat representing a heavily black area. He's endorsing Sara Innamorato for county exec. She's another state rep, a DSA member who beat an incumbent who belongs to another prominent local family in a white working-class district. As I alluded to earlier, the ACDC endorsed a vocal Trump supporter and ACA opponent over an autistic LGBT activist. the Trump supporter lost the primary, but if the litmus test for a political system not being a machine would be something akin to a Republican who loves AOC and tweets against Trump's immigration policy winning a GOP primary in the Bible Belt, I don't know what to tell you.
Rov_Scam
1yr ago
I think the problem is that there's really no good data on the subject, and the data there is seems a bit too motivated. Gun advocates cite the Kleck data, but that has the disadvantage of being both really old and self-reported and almost certainly grossly overestimates the incidence of defensive gun use. Gun control advocates cite data involving actual police reports which has the disadvantage of being overly selective and almost certainly grossly underestimates the incidence of defensive gun use. This bickering comes off as pointless since there's no agreed-upon threshold at which either side will concede the other's points, i.e. it's not like gun control advocates are going to start campaigning for increased access if there's strong data to suggest that DGU reduces crime by 90%, and gun advocates aren't going to start calling for restrictions just because similar data shows that DGU is a marginal phenomenon. They're just going to move on to other arguments.
On the whole, though, I think the whole DGU argument actually helps gun control advocates more than it helps gun advocates. The most common explanation I've heard regarding why there's such a discrepancy between the data each side provides is that by relying on police reports gun control advocates are biased toward counting the most obvious and serious of defensive gun uses. When someone actually gets shot the police are almost certainly going to investigate and the circumstances surrounding the shooting are likely to be discovered. When someone uses a gun defensively but the criminal runs away as soon as the gun is visible, there's little point in reporting the incident (because it's probably not getting investigated), and some downsides to doing so (the defensive user might be carrying illegally, for example). I'm going to ignore the scenario where the gun is fired but nobody is hit because it seems rather rare and nobody appears to be using it as the basis of their argument.
If we assume that both sides are fundamentally right—that defensive uses that result in someone getting shot are rare enough so as not to justify concealed carry, but defensive uses where the perpetrator disengages after the victim exposes his weapon, then the deterrent factor is mainly because of the mere presence of the weapon and not its actual utility, because few perpetrators supposedly stick around long enough to get shot. Hence, a gun control advocate can justify a much more restrictive regime than a gun advocate would find comfortable. For example, a .22 revolver is lightweight, inexpensive, easy to conceal, easy to maintain, and takes cheap ammunition. It's obviously not the most powerful gun in the world, but I wouldn't want to find out what it's like to get shot by one at close range. It's also not the most reliable gun in the world, but it's reliable enough that when staring down the business end of one I wouldn't be too confident about it misfiring. And, of course, given the situation, it isn't likely the assailant will have the knowledge or time or proper illumination to even identify what's being pointed at him before it behooves him to hightail it.
As for the rest? Yeah, I'm sure it doesn't have the stopping power of something bigger and the limited capacity is useless in the event of multiple assailants, or that it has any one of the dozens of other problems gun advocates will tell me make a .22 revolver a bad choice for self-defense. The problem is, that all those arguments assume that the gun is actually going to be fired, and since that's a statistically slim possibility, it's irrelevant. But tell gun advocates "OK, we agree with you on the self-defense angle, we'll let you have a .22 revolver" and it probably won't go over so well.
Rov_Scam
1yr ago
This reminds me of the irony I see among certain NFL fans. If the league puts "End Hate" or "End Racism" on the sideline then these people complain about how the NFL should stay out of politics. But during the Kaepernick debacle nearly all of them felt that the league was obligated to make an affirmative stance in favor of patriotism and require players to stand. There was no way out of this controversy. Before a game Steelers coach Mike Timlin asked players if any of them planned to kneel. When a few of them came forward, he opted to keep the team in the tunnel during the national anthem to avoid controversy. This only served to piss of conservatives even more, as Tomlin was evidently obligated to make sure that everyone on the team was out there standing. I get the impression that if the NFL had suspended Kaepernick pending an apology and made a statement that a similar fate would befall any other player who refused to toe the line, this would have been greeted with enthusiasm among them.
This isn't to say that those on the left can't be equally hypocritical. After the Bruins 2011 cup run Tim Thomas didn't attend the team's visit to the White House because he didn't like Obama. One sportswriter blasted Thomas for his decision, saying that Obama invited the team, not Thomas, so it wasn't his place to refuse an invitation. When the Penguins won the cup in 2017, the same sportswriter blasted Sidney Crosby for accepting Trump's invitation and claimed that Crosby had a moral duty to refuse to attend. "Keep Politics out of Sports", like most things, is really only dependent on whether one happens to agree with the politics in question.
Rov_Scam
1mo ago
As someone who grew up middle-class in an exurban area my thoughts were the same as yours... until PA announced it had provisionally implemented Voter ID and suddenly my grandmother was effectively disenfranchised. She hadn't driven in years and let her license expire. She could get a state ID, but that required a birth certificate, and she didn't have that. Getting a copy from Vital Records isn't difficult, but since she didn't have a driver's license we had to go to one of the "other" forms of ID, and then present the newly-acquired birth certificate to the DL center with an entirely different group of required documents that some people might not have (e.g. you need a Social Security card, and if you lost yours then you have to go to SSA to get a replacement which is a whole other process). So yeah, I can understand why this could be disenfranchising for elderly people who don't drive and don't work. There may not be many people like this in rural areas, but go to some neighborhoods in Pittsburgh where the average age is deceased and there are a ton of them who use the bus to get around since it's free if you're over 65. These people aren't at the fringes of society, they're just pensioners who live on Social Security and aren't going to maintain a license to drive a car they don't have and who have no reason to get a photo ID.
The big reason I think voter ID failed nationally was that its proponents made it sound like people without IDs were bums who, as you suggest, are a vanishingly small part of the population and who probably have no interest in voting anyway. If instead they had acknowledged the problem and worked towards rectifying it and maybe kicking in some money for outreach efforts or modernization of the ID system then they may have been more successful. But they instead stuck to the argument that we didn't need to worry about these people. For their part, the left didn't do a good job of defining who these people were in a way that would be understandable to Republicans — the more moderate ones just said such people existed in urban areas and left it at that while the more dedicated proggies trotted out their tried and true sob stories about a homeless woman of color with a glass eye and a wooden leg who was forced to make a living collecting cans behind Wal-Mart, which did little to disabuse conservatives of their preconceptions. But that doesn't mean that the Democrats didn't have a point.
Rov_Scam
5mo ago
There's no cross-party appeal, though, the way there was in 2016. Trump has a base who loves him and had the incumbent advantage in 2020, but still lost to a milquetoast whose strongest asset was how uninspiring he was. The whole MAGA brand is fucked, and their incessant culture warring and inability to focus on issues that actually matter have alienated them from a broad swath of the American electorate that's necessary for them to maintain power.
Look at the PA Senate race. I'm a Democrat but I voted for Toomey and wouldn't have been averse to voting for a Toomey-like Republican, especially since Fetterman was such a lousy candidate for reasons totally unrelated to his health. But first they back Sean Parnell, a guy so slimy he was forced to drop out before the primary. Then they go to two carpetbaggers and nominate one whose only selling points are already being a celebrity and having a Trump endorsement. Here and in so many other places, they seem intent on snatching defeat from the jaws of victory because they insist on running campaigns based on MAGA nonsense. Deep bench indeed.
Rov_Scam
5mo ago
Really? The only people in the Trump Administration I can think of who were prosecuted were Steve Bannon, who briefly held a position that was created specially for him, Michael Flynn, and Mark Meadows. So two people in important positions he actually had to appoint. There were a few minor aides indicted in Georgia but nobody of any consequence. Kellyanne Conway was accused of Hatch Act violations but nothing ever came of it. The wave of Trump associate indictments is mostly people outside of government — personal lawyers, campaign advisors, Trump organization employees, etc. Other than those I mentioned above, I am unaware of any high-ranking Trump Administration officials who have been blackballed from polite society because of their associations with him. There are plenty of conservative think tanks and consulting firms out there who are willing to put people from any administration on the gravy train. It certainly beats working for a living.
The article you linked to doesn't cite any instances of any generals disobeying orders. It lists three names—Mattis, McMaster, and Kelly—none of whom were active military at the time and only one of whom, Mattis, was in any position to carry out orders; McMaster and Kelly's positions were purely advisory. Now, Mattis did ignore Trump's orders on a number of occasions, but as a civilian he isn't subject to military law regarding insubordination. As a political appointee, if he refuses an order Trump's remedy is to fire him, which he declined to do.
As to whether it's treason, luckily, the constitution is pretty clear on this:
Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court. The Congress shall have Power to declare the Punishment of Treason, but no Attainder of Treason shall work Corruption of Blood, or Forfeiture except during the Life of the Person attainted.
Simply disregarding an order can hardly be described as levying war against the country, and it's not clear which enemies Mattis would have been giving aid or comfort to. Furthermore, the language of the clause implies that an overt act is required, not simply failure to act. Indeed, there are only a few instances in criminal law where one can be liable for failure to act, so the general presumption is that the law requires an overt act unless otherwise specified.
More importantly, I don't see how this really applies to discussion about a so-called Deep State. These were all people Trump picked himself to serve in high-level advisory positions. They weren't military lifers he was stuck with and couldn't fire. This whole situation, if nothing else, is emblematic of Trump's lack of fitness for the office. He said in 2016 that his lack of experience wouldn't be an issue because he would find the "best people" to advise him. Then he didn't like what the best people had to say, so he got rid of them and replaced them with other people whom he didn't want to listen to, either. If your own hand-selected panel of experts tells you something is a bad idea, and this happens multiple times, maybe the problem isn't with the experts.
Rov_Scam
9mo ago
To those people who are suggesting that library science isn't a real thing, I have a simple exercise for you: Suppose you are managing a very basic, but busy archive that adds dozens if not hundreds of new documents per day. Each document is assigned a sequential number, and has several names associated with it. When each document is entered, an index entry for that document must be created. Without a computer, how would you organize such an index to make it quick and easy for someone to find documents associated with a particular name?
Rov_Scam
9mo ago
I don't know that any of what you said really changes based on race, though, at least from a practical perspective. Yeah, black guy approaching me in a grocery store parking lot is probably going to ask me for money. But I can't think of many situations where I white guy doing the same thing doesn't end the same way.
Even the canonical example of an urban looking black guy being treated suspiciously for walking around a white suburban neighborhood at night doesn't make sense when you think about it. Yeah, black people commit more crime in general. But most of that crime isn't committed in white suburbs. Disaffected urban youth who want to rob houses aren't likely to drive 45 minutes to an unfamiliar neighborhood where they'd be about as inconspicuous as a brontosaurus at a time when the home is all but guaranteed to be occupied. The modal burglary takes place in the middle of a weekday by a guy driving a panel van who doesn't linger too long. But no one ever reports those guys as suspicious because they're so inconspicuous.
Rov_Scam
10mo ago
The FARA allegations weren't anywhere near strong enough for the government to prosecute. Having business dealings with foreign interests isn't illegal; it's only when you take the next step of lobbying for these interests without disclosing it. This is where the theory fails, because the evidence of any actual lobbying is weak. The most I've seen from conservative outlets is that he made numerous trips to visit his father while he was involved in these foreign dealings, which, yeah, the guy visited his father. He probably would have visited him regardless of what business he was doing at the time. The defense attorney in that case is going to call every person on the White House visitor log who could have conceivably been in the room with Hunter and Joe on the days in question and they're all going to invariably deny that any lobbying on behalf of foreign interests took place; meanwhile, the prosecution won't be able to put forth a single witness who would be able to testify that it had. This isn't evidence, it's conjecture, and the prosecution would never be able to get this in front of a jury. I'm not familiar with any potential drug charges so maybe you could clue me in on those.
Rov_Scam
11mo ago
It's more of a celebration than an activist event, so it's going to exist as long as there are gay people around. The same reason there are still Italian festivals, and Polish festivals, and Rusyn festivals. And most people haven't even heard of the last one (most people think they're Russian), so it's pretty hard to claim that they're still experiencing significant discrimination—though there was a time when all "hunkies" were lumped together and discriminated against—but that doesn't change the fact that they're proud of their culture and want to celebrate it. When the various Byzantine Catholic churches in the coal patches and mill towns around Western Pennsylvania stop having Carpatho-Rusyn festivals, you might be able to say that pride festivals will become "unnecessary" in the future.
Rov_Scam
11mo ago
I apologize that the language I used was probably stronger than what was warranted. But the general point remains—it's a less relevant side issue to attack a bigger idea. The problem is that attacking the bigger idea doesn't make sense unless there are concrete reasons to do so. If the best concrete argument you have for attacking the idea of transgenderism is that it has the potential to create unfair disparities in women's sports, then it doesn't come across as much of an argument to me, especially if criteria are put in place to mitigate those concerns and keep people from abusing the system. If the real reason you want to attack the idea of transgenderism simply boils down to "I just don't like the idea of it", then that's a pretty thin rhetorical reed.
If that's the case then it's a classic motte and bailey. The reason they use the word "machine" is to invoke images of Daly stuffing ballot boxes in Chicago and the like. But when you point out that the system of political organization that allowed this to happen doesn't exist anymore in any meaningful sense, they retreat back to saying that it's really just a vague understanding among elites.
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