Rov_Scam
5mo ago
The problem is that the implicit point of public monuments is to celebrate historic figures. The fact that Lee is well-known is purely due to his decision to take up arms against the United States; the same can be said of almost every other Confederate. And it's not appropriate to celebrate those who opposed us in war. In other words, Lee's stature as a war hero is comparable to that of someone like General Howe or Santa Ana or Erwin Rommel. There may be statues of the former two in the United States, but if there are I guarantee they're somewhere like a battlefield where the context is clear and they generally build statues of every prominent person who fought there. But I doubt anyone would advocate for putting them in a position of honor such as a town square, and if you built one on your own property people would be right to suspect your motives.
Add to that the fact that they weren't seceding because of tax policy or some other anodyne complaint but to preserve an institution that's now globally recognized as a reprehensible denial of the most basic human freedoms, in a country whose founding principles were explicitly meant to advance those freedoms, however imperfect the execution was in its infancy. I don't see any situation where you can have a statue of a person whose entire professional career was at least implicitly dedicated to such an institution on the courthouse lawn or the park in the center of town and excuse it by saying that you don't celebrate it too much.
Rov_Scam
8mo ago
You speak as though Biden's presidency (and candidacy, for that matter), was a fair accompli. In May of 2017, there wasn't even much media speculation about who the Dem nominee would be. If Trump gave Putin a million dollars right now, it would certainly be a problem, but it would be more a political problem than a legal one unless there were actual evidence that Putin expected something in return. Even then, the insinuation would be different; it's a political problem because Trump has a record of appearing soft on Russia and this opens him to accusations that he's not exactly disinterested when it comes to certain foreign affairs questions. I have yet to hear anyone on the right make the argument that these alleged deals have had any impact at all on how Biden deals with China. It's a lead balloon as a political question so they're trying to dress it up as a crime when it isn't.
Rov_Scam
8mo ago
You can bribe private citizens in the colloquial sense but not in the criminal sense, which is the only sense that matters here. It's also unclear what Joe Biden was supposed to have done in return. It also seems noteworthy that Joe apparently turned down the offer.
Rov_Scam
11mo ago
I'd think that someone posting here would be more cautious about making arguments that presume that the opinions of a few people are representative of some kind of consensus. The fact that some people have filed lawsuits is no more dispositive than me arguing that because Brittney Griner, Megan Rapinoe, and Billie Jean King came out in favor of trans athletes then that counts as some kind of consensus. I made that comment because I don't see any measured attempt to find out if a consensus actually exists. I see people saying that their participation is unfair but they're not saying this as competitors, or parents, or even fans, just as people with no stake in it but who don't like the idea of it. I have no problem with a ban personally, but if one is implemented it should be at the request of those who are actually impacted, not because of culture war busybodies. I've seen no attempts or even calls for at least running some kind of poll to get a pulse on the situation, just people who have already made up their minds about the appropriate solution.
Rov_Scam
5mo ago
I have no problem with respect. But I don't think anyone would argue that the South's erection of statues in prominent places was merely out of sober respect for an enemy. Are there any other of America's war foes who you feel we should be "respecting" at that kind of clip?
Rov_Scam
7mo ago
I'm not arguing that most of the fraud arguments are made in bad faith, regardless of how terrible I think they are; I'm arguing that this particular argument is made in bad faith. Republicans had no particular opposition to mail voting until Trump decided he could get some kind of advantage by making a big deal about it. This isn't some long-held Republican principle, it's a convenient argument to a self-serving end. That's where your Christianity analogy fails; I'm Catholic myself, and if a sincere Protestant wanted to have a conversation about faith with me I'd be happy to discuss it with them, even if their aim was obviously evangelical. But I'd be less happy if I found out they had recently converted because there was some personal advantage to them doing so that was wholly unrelated to their spiritual needs. I think people like Joel Osteen get a little too much flac from irreligious types because he seems like an obvious huckster. But I'm reluctant to join in on the dogpile because, despite his wealth, there's nothing in his past that suggests he isn't sincere. That, and I've actually listened to his sermons and it's obvious that his critics haven't because nothing he says is remotely objectionable. But I'd probably feel different if he were a twice-divorced advertising executive with a conviction for writing bad checks who became a self-ordained minister at the age of 40 after realizing that a combination of Billy Graham and Tony Robbins was a license to print money. And who also was a frequent visitor to tit bars and had been kicked out of every country club in the Houston area because he was too much of an asshole for the members to want to deal with.
Rov_Scam
8mo ago
Joe Biden had been out of office for months at the time that email was sent. You can't bribe a private citizen.
Rov_Scam
8mo ago
There was no indication in any of the laptop data that Joe Biden took bribes from anyone. There was evidence that he was once briefly in the same room as one of the Burisma guys (and witnesses to that exchange confirmed that the conversation was limited to pleasantries), and there's some China stuff that took place when Biden was out of office. Any suggestion that Joe Biden was influenced by any of his son's business dealings is nothing more than conjecture at this point.
Rov_Scam
11mo ago
Riley Gaines's problem wasn't that she criticized the eligibility requirements but that she went full-bore conservative culture warrior. She appeared at Donald Trump rally and in a Rand Paul campaign ad. The event she was confronted at was sponsored by Turning Point USA, not exactly an uncontroversial group.
Cancelled from the left, certainly, but as these things go, it's only the people who are willing to become the mascot for the right that are willing to risk cancellation from the left. Which is then used against their credibility and to question their motives.
Martina Navratilova's been saying the same basic thing as Gaines but she still has her commentating job at The Tennis Channel and gets interviewed in mainstream news and sports outlets about other things without any throat clearing or even mention of her opinions on trans athletes.
Rov_Scam
8mo ago
Again, this is all stuff that happened in 2017 and 2018 during the brief period in Joe Biden's life when he was neither in public office nor running for public office. To be clear, I have no problem with this stuff being investigated, I just haven't seen anything come out of the investigation that would suggest there's any ethical concerns let alone criminal liability. It's a political question, and while people are certainly free to come to the conclusion that Biden's relationship to these deals was too close for comfort, we need some perspective here. The evidence presented so far suggests that Joe Biden may have had peripheral involvement in a couple of his son's business ventures that ultimately went nowhere. Then you have his likely opponent, who had extensive business dealings with Russians for a period that lasted nearly 30 years and continued well into his presidential campaign, which campaign was staffed by a few people who had their own questionable dealings with Russians. And yet Trump supporters were furious at the mere idea that anyone would even think this worthy of investigation. So unless you're only voting Republican if someone like Tim Scott wins the nomination, I don't see how this factors into the equation much given what we know now.
Rov_Scam
7mo ago
To take your arguments one by one:
So like Barack Obama in 2008? Or 2012? (when Democrats worried absentee voting would drive old-people votes which harmed them).
I don't remember this. I do remember some kerfuffle where the Obama campaign sued Ohio because they passed a law giving the military three extra early voting days, and the conservative media tried to spin it as him trying to restrict military votes when the lawsuit sought to give the rest of the population the same early voting window as the military. Obama's been pretty consistent about "more voting, not less".
Or Trump whining about it for months before the election as the scheme was being ramped up by executive fiat in explicit contravention to election laws across dozens of states?
I clearly limited my argument to before 2020. And the states that ramped up mail-in voting by executive fiat weren't ones that were at issue in the 2020 election. Only 5 states changed absentee voting requirements through executive action—less than half a dozen, not dozens—and among them, three are clearly red states controlled by Republicans (Alabama, Arkansas, and West Virginia), one (Kentucky) is a red state with a Democratic governor, and one (New Hampshire) is left-leaning with a Republican governor. There was no clear liberal pattern here.
There are dozens of high profile examples over the last 2 decades...
I don't know about dozens, but I'll admit there are a few. But I'm not sure what this is supposed to prove. Everything involves tradeoffs. Suppose, for the sake of argument, it were conclusively proven that voter fraud could be eliminated entirely if we limited voting to polling places in major cities. The ultimate effect of this, of course, would be that the rural vote would be rendered entirely irrelevant and elections would have a decidedly partisan lean, probably to the point that our politics would realign entirely. If these now disenfranchised voters complained, I'd respond that people who find it too inconvenient to drive a couple hours to vote obviously aren't motivated enough to deserve any say in government, and people who can't afford the trip obviously don't have enough "skin in the game" to deserve a say in government. If the primary goal is the elimination of fraud, why wouldn't this be an ideal solution? We both know the answer to this question. The question isn't whether fraud exists, it's whether it has enough of a practical effect to make additional restrictions worthwhile.
Each time mail-in or absentee voting legislation has been passed, this was discussed repeatedly with additional security requirements and conditions because of those concerns.
No, it wasn't. I live in Pennsylvania. When mail-in voting passed in 2019 the biggest issue about the bill was that it also eliminated the straight ticket option, which led to some Democrats voting against it in protest. It otherwise passed unanimously, and was quickly signed by the governor. Every single Republican voted for it, including arch-election truthers like Doug Mastriano. I'm sure you can find some concerns if you look hard enough, but as someone who lived in the state, I don't recall it coming up once, and this is a politically diverse state with the largest legislature in the country. Similarly, in Michigan, the biggest criticism of Prop 3 wasn't that it expanded mail-in voting but that it was making something that should have been a legislative item into a constitutional one.
No one is arguing mail-in voting is inherently "unconstitutional."
I was writing this on my phone at work so I apologize. The OP said that it "violates every principle of Democracy", which I misinterpreted. Feel free to substitute the correct language.
We're not talking about millions of votes needing to swap, but ~40,000 in any of 5 different states
Well, no. Flipping one state wouldn't have been enough to turn the election in favor of Trump. At best he would have needed to flip two, provided they were Michigan and Pennsylvania. Realistically he needs to flip three. And if he goes the flip 2 route then he needs about 80,000 votes in PA and over 100,000 in MI, at least double the 40,000 you mentioned. What's the largest mail vote fraud scheme you can find? How about the average? Remember what I said about tradeoffs?
if a single one did something as simple as requiring canvassing hundreds of thousands of votes which had no signed chain of custody receipts (and no election officials have yet been charged despite this being a crime in multiple states like AZ).
Ah, yes, the old "the previous five audits we requested didn't find anything, but if we do a sixth one we're pretty sure the whole edifice will come crashing down because a televangelist saw something in a viral video that PROVES that Biden and the Democrats committed MASSIVE FRAUD by forging hundreds of thousands of illegal ballots under the cover of night but being too dumb to think of forging chain of custody receipts along with them". I'm sure the Kraken will finally be unleashed.
If two people raced bikes all over France and then the loser tested positive for PEDs, do you think they should both get a do-over race or otherwise we're not talking about "principles"?
Are the PEDs supposed to be a stand-in for fraud, or for mail-in ballots generally? If they're a stand-in for mail-ins generally, then they aren't a banned substance and there's no problem; you can't claim a race was unfair just because you don't like the rules. If they're a stand-in for fraud, then you do get to win the race, but I don't see what this has to do with the election—in one case you found actual evidence of cheating, and in the other you didn't, you just argued that the rules made it easier to cheat. What you're suggesting is more analogous to a race where PEDs are banned and your opponent never tested positive, but you want to rerun the race because you're pretty sure he cheated but can't actually prove it.
The Federal Government is currently abusing laws made 150 years ago in response to the Civil War as well as stretching interpretation of other laws way past their breaking point...
Well, what do you think a more appropriate charge would have been. If organizing a plot to take over the Capitol building in order to prevent the lawful transfer of power of a democratically elected president so that it will remain in the hands of the guy who lost isn't seditious conspiracy, what is exactly? What line do you think he needs to cross? And how is the jury biased? Unless you're arguing that he didn't actually do what the government said he did, there's no room for bias here. Jury nullification isn't something you can expect from any jury, and isn't something you should expect in this case unless you seriously think attempts to overthrow the government should be legal.
Do you follow election disputes/protests over "local judges and clerks," closely?
lol, I'm a lawyer. I deal with these people all the time, and yes, it makes a difference. I not only follow them closely, I follow them closely in counties and even states where I don't live and can't vote. If you want I can fill you in on the drama in West Virginia's First Circuit judicial retention election, or tell you about the recurring pissing match between the current and former Recorders of Deeds in Westmoreland County, PA.
Rov_Scam
7mo ago
There's no point in ruminating on the Deep State or what it means because it means whatever the person deploying the term to make a political point wants it to mean. Christopher Wray has been accused of being "deep state" almost since he replaced Comey as FBI director, despite the fact that he's not only a political appointees but one whom Trump appointed himself. Deep state is nothing more than a smear against anyone in government who does something Trump disagrees with.
As for the actual civil service, part of the problem is that they're subject to laws passed by Congress and aren't just subordinates of the current administration. Part of the reason Trump is so often accused of being a wannabe dictator is that he expects the apparatus of government to do his bidding regardless of whether there's any legal basis for it. If Joe Biden told the Social Security Administration to stop sending checks to certain counties for whatever reason, the SSA would be correct to ignore him. Trump's concerns weren't as blatant, but he willfully ignored the normal avenues by which executive action is taking, and ended up confusing and pissing off the people he was relying upon.
Rov_Scam
11mo ago
I don't see how a trans journalist writing an op-ed criticizing her approaches cancellation.
But if you can find a prominent progressive activist defending her right to make those arguments, and only criticizing her choice of platforms, please give a link.
This isn't the litmus test. Prominent journalists don't, as a matter of course, write op-eds defending other people's positions.
Rov_Scam
11mo ago
As @rae alludes to below, the culture war implications of trans women in sports overshadow any actual concern for female athletes. The attitude of conservatives towards women's sports in my lifetime has been blase at best and condemnatory at worst. The most popular women's sport by far is tennis, but even there, a quick perusal of the world rankings reveals no household names. The biggest women's college event of the year is the NCAA tournament, and that isn't exactly a hot ticket. When Pitt basketball student tickets were hard to come by, the lottery system in place gave you credit for the number of women's games you went to just to boost attendance. The discussion about Title IX below had an air of incredulity about it, suggesting that if it were costing OCR this much to enforce equality among men's and women's sports, perhaps we were better off without it. I doubt many conservatives would care too much either way; they might not exactly rail against the idea of a school being forced to spend ungodly sums on unprofitable women's sports because they spend millions on the football team, but if the law changed tomorrow and colleges started shutting down women's teams or at least restricting them (playing locally as independents rather than flying them all across the ACC footprint or whatever) I imagine the arguments would mirror those they make when one someone suggests WNBA salaries should be on par with the men.
And then when a trans person goes from being ranked 400th nationally to 38th in a sport no one cares about regardless of what gender is playing it because they won some tournament that most people haven't heard of but is supposedly kind of prestigious, women's sports become a sacred thing that must be protected at all costs. I understood that there was real concern in the early days of the trans saga when advocates were arguing that personal identity trumps all and it raised the specter of failed male athletes ticking a box differently just to get a chance to compete, or for scholarship money, or whatever. But the relevant governing bodies imposed testosterone limits, and while we can argue that those limits are too high or too low, we can't argue that no man is meeting the most lenient ones without taking supplemental estrogen. The effects of taking supplemental estrogen are such that it's doubtful that any man would undergo this treatment just for a shot at playing organized sports in a discipline that offers no hope of making any money as a professional. Do they have a competitive advantage? Maybe, but I don't really care. The trans population is small enough that it's probably not a huge difference in the grand scheme of things, and you never hear about the trans athletes who don't win anything. One thing you never hear about is what the actual women athletes have to say about this. Governing bodies don't seem to be too concerned, and polls have repeatedly shown that the competitors aren't either. And if those most at stake don't care, then why should we? After all, when it comes to the priority of things, sports are pretty far down the list.
Rov_Scam
1yr ago
I agree with your premise, insofar as you're arguing that Twitter engaged in censorship for political purposes that can't be justified by normal standards of rationality. What I don't understand is why I should care. Businesses make decisions all the time, both political and otherwise, that I find disagreeable, but only rarely do they rise to the level that some sort of public call to action seems warranted. And what action is warranted vis a vis Twitter? The people who put these policies into place no longer run the company. Some would argue that government intervention is warranted, but it seems unusual that those (such as yourself, presumably) who are coming at this from a more conservative position would really find this to be the ideal solution, especially considering that a large component of this scandal is that there was already too much government influence of Twitter's content policies.
Rov_Scam
11mo ago
It depends on what other evidence is available at the time. If there's a recording of you talking about how you like to grope women because they'll just let you do it, it might be enough to move the needle to 51% in a pure he-said-she-said.
Rov_Scam
11mo ago
In other words, you hope your country loses a real war in order to make some parallel statement about culture war politics? That's in the same league as the assholes who hoped Trump would lead the country into a recession so it would help them win midterm elections.
Rov_Scam
30d 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
30d ago
I don't know that Vance is the best example. While he called out hillbillies (and I use that term loosely because the Rust Belt white trash he's describing in Ohio are decidedly different from Appalachian white trash) in his book, his actual politics started veering into the "lack of agency" lane as soon as Trump's success made it a veritable requirement for him to do it. I can't tell you how many times I heard from conservatives that nobody owes you anything, stop whining, buck up and take that menial job because you aren't above working at McDonalds just because you have a college degree, nobody wants to work anymore, etc. (not to me personally, but the sentiment). One night I was at the bar and a bunch of them were bitching about immigration. They weren't white trash, but obviously successful guys from a wealthy suburb. My view on immigration are complicated, to say the least, but when they started about Mexicans taking jobs from Americans it pissed me off so I turned it around on them: "Why do we owe them jobs? Why should I pay more for stuff because some whiny American doesn't want to work for what I'm willing to pay. Those Mexicans are damn glad to get my money, and besides, they do the work and don't complain. Besides, they're the only ones who seem to want to work anymore." Or something along those lines. It didn't work, of course, because as soon as anyone brings up market forces to a conservative in an argument about immigration, they just do a u-turn and talk about welfare instead, not realizing the inherently contradictory nature of those arguments. And, as a putative conservative, I couldn't really argue back.
The same thing applies more directly to employers. There's one older guy I know we call "Pappy". He's big in the whitewater community arouind here and is an excellent boater, and teaches free lessons at the park and cheap roll lessons at a scum pond on his property (only charging to cover the insurance). He's very generous with his time, especially considering these lessons are always 8-hour marathons. Not so much with his money. He owns a garage and auto body shop and refuses to pay his employees. He also constantly bitches about the quality of the help he gets. I once couldn't help but comment that maybe if he paid more than ten bucks an hour he'd find decent people. I knew this would get him fired up, because he was great at going on these kinds of rants; "Hell, when I started out I made 2 bucks an hour and was glad to get it. When I opened this place you couldn't ask no god damned bank for any money because they wouldn't give it to you. I had to save my money to buy all this and earned all of it. These people don't want to work, they just want to sit on their asses and collect a check. And you lawyers are half the problem. When my wife and I bought our first house the mortgage was one page. One. When I took out a loan last year it was a god damned book. And it's all because you lawyers found lazy fucks who didn't want to pay and tried to weasel out of it, and now the banks have to make sure that you can't."
I wasn't thrown by the change of tack because he never missed an opportunity to dunk on my profession. I would note that my brother was an inspector for a major industrial company that does global business and they had him paint some equipment. The quality steadily deteriorated over the years to the point they had to cancel a very lucrative contract because nothing he did would pass. I've known a few people who took their cars to him for work and now aren't on speaking terms after the work was so bad they had to withhold payment. His intransigence is literally costing him money, but he won't budge on principle.
I bring up these examples because they're evidence of this mentality not among the white trash that Vance talks about, but among normal, successful people. As for Vance himself, he plays into the same ethos wholeheartedly, and doesn't seem to understand the contradiction with the argument that gave him fame. If he continued in the Reagan mold of bold free market principles, or took the opposite tack of siding with the lefties in "What's the Matter with Kansas?" sense, I could take him at face-value. But instead he's latched onto the same victimization worldview of those he previously complained about. He was once a moderate and anti-Trumper; now his "National Republicanism" is just an amalgamation of the worst protectionist ideas Trump had to offer. Maybe it's a cynical response to give him more political credibility, I don't know. But it's certainly a contradiction with what he used to be.
Rov_Scam
8mo 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
10mo ago
I do not think the EPA knows what navigable means. A plain language reading would be a waterway that you could travel along by boat.
Plain language is irrelevant when the term is defined by statute. The CWA defines navigable waters as "waters of the United States", and gives the EPA authority to define that further, pursuant to their usual rulemaking authority. So the relevant definition here isn't of "navigable" but of "waters of the United States", and those are defined pretty thoroughly in the regulations as well as by at least three supreme court decisions. Even if I took your definition at face value it woudn't make sense considering the purpose of the act. The stream closest to my house definitely isn't navigable by any plain language definition of the term, but it feeds into a major navigable river only a few miles downstream, where it flows across the property of a steel mill. To say that the mill could avoid the need for an EPA permit simply by dumping into the stream instead of the river itself would completely subvert the purpose of the act. So the definition naturally includes any waterways that connect to actually navigable waterways.
Rov_Scam
11mo 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.
Exactly, which is my point in general. It's not about sports, it's about using sports as a pretext to attack trans people. This is why I'm not as quick to dismiss progressive claims of racism, or sexism, or various phobias as I used to be. There is a core of true believers who are genuinely concerned about women's sports, and then there's a huge cadre of bandwagon jumpers who are simply disgusted by the entire notion of trans people and fear that any concession, no matter how minor, is going to poison the well and lead to a slippery slope where as Homer Simpson would put it, "the entire world's gone gay".
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