Rov_Scam
10mo ago
PMC control as opposed to what? The last I checked Musk was both professional and managerial. It's not a term I've ever heard used by anyone other than an online conservative who isn't exactly blue collar.
Rov_Scam
5d ago
For years, on this very forum (well, fine, you have to come buck to the /r/SSC days), whenever someone pointed out the advances of the SJ movement, the response was something to the effect of "it's just a couple of crazy kids on college campuses / Tumblr", or alternatively there'd be an attempt to "steelman" the movement to make it look more reasonable than it actually is ("defund the police doesn't really mean defund the police"), something later dubbed "sanewashing" by other elements of the left.
It was more than that, but not much more. There was a lot of media rhetoric from the left and teeth gnashing on the right about certain things, but in the end it doesn't seem to have amounted to much. But beyond some limited effects at the local level, most of the media coverage from the left amounted to little more than trend pieces (where a fringe phenomenon is puffed up into something bigger than it is), and the right's reaction had all the hallmarks of a moral panic. I can't tell you how many arguments in bars I got into where someone would insist that this school district just down the road was teaching kids that white people are bad blah blah blah and can you believe what these kids are hearing about gay people only to find out that they got this information from their neighbor's cousin's kid, or something, which is the equivalent of them just admitting that they got it from some dubious social media post. I have yet to talk to anyone with actual firsthand knowledge of any of this who could reproduce lesson plans or anything.
And at the national level, this rhetoric was soundly rejected within the Democratic party. Regardless of how the Republicans would like to portray them, there are few woke Democratic elected officials. The Squad is the most notorious, but those are a few House reps in safe seats, and even some of those got primaried the last go-round. AOC may be nationally known, but it remains to be seen whether she's that popular outside the Bronx. And when woke politicians do get the opportunity to go national, they fall flat on their faces. If there was ever an election where wokeness could triumph over the Democratic establishment, it was 2020. The woke lane was there for any Democrat who wanted to take it. Who did? Kirsten Gillebrand and Beto O'Rourke. Arguably Kamala Harris, though she wasn't very convincing about it. The Democrats ended up nominating Joe Biden, about as an establishment candidate as you can get. Hell, Mayor Pete made a convincing run as a moderate and even led early on despite being the mayor of a town most people couldn't point to on a map.
Rov_Scam
5mo ago
This is a total myth that was fabricated by the Right to excuse the absolutely inexcusable behavior of Trump supporters. If you spent the summer of 2020 watching Fox News point to a few high-profile incidences of police cowardice or listening to NPR's defund the police nonsense then it's understandable how you would get that impression. But if you watched local news or actually paid attention to what was happening you'd have seen that there was no shortage of people who were arrested and charged. Hell, here in Pittsburgh there were news reports on an almost weekly basis that consisted of a grainy photograph of people the police were looking for in connection to spray painting buildings, or throwing rocks at police, or some other minor crime that wouldn't even merit a mention in the newspaper let alone a media-assisted manhunt. I can't speak to this happening in every city, but I know the same was true for Los Angeles and Atlanta, and the Feds were looking for a ton of people as well, which is interesting considering that they only had jurisdiction over a small percentage of the total rioters.
The reason you didn't see many high-profile convictions is because the BLM protestors were at least smart enough to commit their crimes at night and make some attempt at concealing their identities. For all the effort police put into tracking these people down, if there's no evidence there's no evidence. To the contrary, the Capitol rioters decided to commit their crimes during the day, in one large group, in an area surrounded by video cameras. Then they posed for pictures and videos and posted it on social media. Were these people trying to get caught? Which brings me to the dismissals. Yes, a lot of the George Floyd riot cases were dismissed, and conservatives like to point to this as evidence of them being treated with kid gloves. But the prosecutors often had no choice. The tactics of the Pittsburgh Police (under the administration of Bill Peduto, no one's idea of a conservative) were to simply arrest everyone in the immediate vicinity the moment a demonstration started to get out of hand. Never mind that they didn't have any evidence that most of these people committed a crime. If a crowd throws water bottles at the police and they arrest everyone they can get their hands on, good like proving that a particular person threw something. Unless you have video or a cop who is able to testify, you're entirely out of luck. So they'd arrest a bunch of people and ten the DA "(Steven Zappala, no one's idea of a progressive) would drop the charges against the 90% against which they had no evidence. In any event, I didn't hear about Biden or any liberal governor offering to pardon any of these people.
Seriously. The Capitol rioters were morons operating under the assumption that their sugar daddy Trump would bail them out because he agreed with their politics. If he wanted to give clemency to people who got swept up in the crowd and trespasses where they shouldn't have, I could understand that. But by pardoning people who assaulted police officers, broke windows, and the like, he shows a complete disrespect for law enforcement and the rule of law. And all of it coming from a guy who is supposedly about law and order. It's absolutely disgraceful.
Rov_Scam
6mo ago
So how if woke stuff never polls over 60% in California are there pride flags in classrooms in Galveston, TX, entire wings of hospitals dedicated to choppping off 12 year olds penises and breasts in Nashville, TN, and admissions departments giving scholarships to Black Lesbian 'B' students with a 24 ACT and stumbling over themselves to keep out a 4.0 White Dude with a 35, in Gainsville, FL?
The fact that you have to resort to obvious hyperbole proves my point.
Rov_Scam
9mo ago
So, I guess you'll be voting for Harris then? That's the only reasonable conclusion I can draw based on the timeline here. The protests happened in 2017, and the decision to drop the charges came in 2018. That's well into the Trump presidency and well into Jessie Lieu's tenure as US Attorney for Washington DC. If Trump had a problem with these non-prosecutions it was well within his power to put pressure on the US Attorney's office or fire Lieu if she didn't comply, but there's no indication he did either. Instead, he tried to get Lieu promoted! You can say the same thing about January 6. Sure, Trump wants to pardon them now, but he could have done a great deal to prevent the prosecutions if he'd actually acted before he left office. While he was warned of the unclear legal ground a blanket pardon would stand on, it would have made prosecutions a hell of a lot more difficult. And 30 of the perpetrators had been arrested by the time his term expired, including most of the prominent ones. Seeing all those guys walking free and the rest having defenses that would take a Supreme Court decision to resolve would have at least delayed proceedings long enough to dampen the Biden Administration's enthusiasm for pursuing the charges. But, of course, he didn't, and here we are.
Rov_Scam
2yr ago
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".
Rov_Scam
17d ago
See my comment above, but voluntarily interacting with the mental health system isn't what gets you barred from owning a gun; it's avoiding the mental health system until things get so bad you're forced into it.
Rov_Scam
1mo ago
It isn't a feature of the current era, either, but an excuse guys who can't get dates use to justify why it isn't their fault. Dating apps are easy mode compared to how it used to be. Yeah, you may have a better chance of getting that cute girl to talk to you if you ask her in the real world rather than like her profile on a dating app, but in the real world chances are you aren't going to cross paths. In the real world there isn't a seemingly bottomless well of single women advertising their availability. In the real world you might get a prospect once every couple months maybe she'll go out with you if you ask. I doubt there are many people who had a ton of game pre-app and are now getting nothing but crickets.
Rov_Scam
1yr ago
I take it you've never been to law school before, but it goes something like this: You read cases as your class assignments and the professor asks questions about them. Most of the questions are hypotheticals that change the facts slightly to see if you can apply the principles of the ruling to different situations. Then the professor poses a hypothetical that's nothing like the original fact pattern and asks what the result will be. Then when finals come you get more questions like that where nothing is exactly on point and you have to argue based on broad principles alone. Then you get to do the same thing in the bar exam, especially the multistate, where they might give you a fact pattern where you read it and you think "okay, the guy is clearly liable" and the final question asks "If the court finds that the defendant isn't liable, what is the probable reason?" and gives you four crappy answers from which you have to choose the most plausible.
As a practicing attorney, yes, most cases are boring and straightforward, and don't require too much creativity. But this isn't always the case. New situations require new legal theories. Look at autonomous vehicles; there's a whole universe of potential problems that could arise there that the law is seemingly unequipped to deal with, except through general principles. "No one has been convicted based on this specific fact pattern before" isn't a defense. This is especially true in the world of white collar crime, where the argument isn't so much that the defendant didn't do what the prosecution said he did but that what the defendant did wasn't a crime at all. Not everything is going to slot into convenient and obvious categories, and unless there's a viable legal argument for why a particular course of action shouldn't be a crime, a jury is going to get to decide.
Rov_Scam
1yr 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
10mo ago
If you read my recent post on the South Side, you'd remember that I mentioned a spare of shootings in 2021 and 2022. I didn't get into it then, but almost everyone they arrested pled self defense. These were all groups of black kids who got into altercations outside of nightclubs, and their claims of self defense were much stronger than this guy's. Sometimes they were the result of scuffles similar to the one described here. By your logic, these shooters weren't threats to public safety, but a legitimate response to dangerous situations.
Rov_Scam
1yr ago
"Inventing new legal theories" is an inherent part of the common law system. Let's take a fairly straightforward case: Smith agrees to by a cow off of Jones for $100, with no terms regarding the order of performance. Several weeks go by and the transaction is not consummated. Each sues the other for breach of contract. This situation vexed judges for literally hundreds of years, until one brilliant judge finally ruled that, to the extent practical, in the absence of any contrary terms both parties are to perform simultaneously. This ruling seems obvious in retrospect, but it was a new idea when it came out. This obviously doesn't involve a lawyer arguing that, since he'd be admitting that the other party hadn't breached the deal, but lawyers use "novel" legal theories all the time. The law as it exists doesn't cover every exact situation, and when you feel that your client has been wronged, or has been unfairly sued, or even that certain evidence should or shouldn't be admitted, you're probably making a novel legal argument.
Rov_Scam
1yr 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
Honestly, the immigration thing is the easiest issue on which to thread that needle. The people crossing the border are mostly normal people in really desperate situations who hope they can have a better life in the US. While there are practical reasons why we can't let everyone in, Trump and the Republicans lack any sense of compassion whatsoever and have dehumanized them almost completely, giving them license to enact whatever brutal policies they can dream up. His political career literally rests on his belief that the vast majority of illegals are rapists and fentanyl traffickers who are only here so they can commit crimes. Her earlier positions were merely a reaction to Trump's policies at the time, and she was also young and idealistic. Ten years in politics has taught her the practical realities of governance, but we at least need to acknowledge that we're dealing with real people here and not faceless monsters.
Some of her other positions are going to be harder to backtrack from, but she has the advantage of coming into office young enough that she both gets a pass for her earlier positions and develops into a shrewd politician by the time she needs to.
Rov_Scam
1yr ago
The thing that you and a lot of Trump supporters seem to miss when discussing the case is that you assume that the prosecution had to prove that Trump had to have committed the FECA violations himself in order to be criminally liable. That's not true; neither party disputed that the law applied to covering up misfeasance by someone else. Here, they had Cohen testify that he knew the payments were illegal at the time he made them, and that Trump reimbursed him through phony invoices for nonexistent legal work. That's the prima fascia case right there. Cohen was investigated and pleaded guilty (though his plea couldn't be used as evidence in Trump's case), so there's nothing controversial about whether a FECA violation actually occurred, unless you want to talk theoretically, which is pointless since Cohen isn't going to appeal.
Whether or not the case is preempted is a trickier matter, but New York didn't charge Trump with any campaign violations. He was charged with creating fraudulent records. In fact, the fact that this law has never been applied to FECA violations before actually tips the needle against preemption. If the law isn't aimed at regulating elections but at preventing fraud generally, then it's harder to argue that it's intruding on the policy goals that congress reserved to the Feds. Courts have already ruled that consumer protection issues relating to campaigns aren't preempted, even though they're directly related to campaign violations, so it's less likely that anyone would do so here. Not that there isn't an argument to be made, it just isn't as strong as some think it is.
I'm not an expert on the NY constitution so I'll leave that question to the Court of Appeals, who have the final say. I will say that whether or not Sharia Law applies in and of itself is a moot point. I imagine Sharia Law prohibits theft, and I don't think you'd have too much of a cross-jurisdictional issue if the predicate offense was theft in a country that has Sharia. If it's one of the things we Americans find more offensive, then prosecution would likely be barred on the grounds that it's contrary to public policy. It's an interesting question but crimes in other jurisdictions being used as the basis for related charges in others isn't exactly unheard of.
Rov_Scam
1yr 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
1yr 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
1yr 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
2yr 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
22d ago
Why don't you link to an article where the New York Times editorial board defends violent rioting. Just one.
Rov_Scam
6mo ago
So if a tourist from the US does something similar next week should the EU ban all American tourists? There's more of us entering Europe every year than the entire Arab population of the continent.
Rov_Scam
1yr ago
There might not be anything exactly on point, but there isn't any case law I'm aware of that explicitly prohibits it, and the "lay of the land", so to speak, suggests it's okay. The courts have already ruled that Federal offenses could count for the old "habitual criminal" laws, and RICO cases usually involve state predicates. Neither of these is exactly on point, but they are indicative of the idea there isn't any problem with the cross-jurisdicational aspect of the case. I'm not entirely sold on the idea that there isn't an argument here, so if you have one, I'd love to hear it, but nothing I can think of off the top of my head suggests that this would be a problem.
Rov_Scam
1mo ago
This comment seems to echo the fantasy among some dateless conservatives that if only they were born in some bygone era where women didn't have nearly as many options then they'd surely get a girlfriend almost by default. I hate to break it to you, but if you can't get a date now, you weren't getting a date then. And I suspect that these guys never once consider that they're being just as selective as the women they're criticizing. I grew up in the Mon Valley, an area that's not exactly hot at the moment. If anyone here is seriously interested in getting married to a woman who is young enough to have a lot of children and doesn't mind staying home and not working, DM me and I will be glad to take them to the kind of bar where their chances of meeting an overweight, chain-smoking phlebotomy school dropout who's willing to date them are nearly 100%. Hell, you don't even need a good job; a steady, decent job is more than enough, considering most of the guys these women date are the kind of guys who quit because they got into an argument with their boss. Where I'm from these girls are a dime a dozen.
Rov_Scam
4mo ago
I have a proposition for you: We hand all political power in the US over to the blacks. As a white guy, you'll probably be forced to live in a designated area an hour outside a major city, where you'll be forced to take a bus in every day to do manual labor for ten bucks an hour. You will be barred from most public accommodations, and will have to get official permission before traveling anywhere outside your home; even going to work will require you to present proof that you actually have a job. Your own political power is nonexistent, and the government doesn't even pretend that you have anything resembling civil rights. The tradeoff is that the United States sees unprecedented GDP growth. Do you take this bargain?
If you're worried about wokeness, you should honestly be voting Democrat. When Trump was elected, the idea of wokeness was relatively new and was foreign to much of the Democratic party. By 2020 it had metastasized to become an overarching narrative, even as the party's nominee tried to distance himself from it. I remember on the old SSC board a number of people said they were voting for Trump in 2016 for similar reasons as you outline above, namely that a Trump victory would smack down this nascent wokism once and for all. Of course, it had quite the opposite effect; wokism was much more pervasive and much more mainstream at the end of Trump's term than it was at the beginning. Most of the perceived excesses of the movement, such that it existed, were more a direct reaction to Trump's election than to any overarching policy goals of the Democratic party.
Hillary Clinton wasn't woke in the slightest; anyone who could be remotely described as such was already in the tank for Sanders. Had Clinton won, it would have been a direct repudiation of the more radical elements of the party, and it would be at least 8 years before the wokes would get another crack at mainstream influence, if they still even existed. Trump's victory, however, allowed them to create a narrative that the party's loss was due to Clinton's intransigence when it came to social issues and more radical leftist policy. If Sanders had been the candidate, he would have trounced Trump and led America into a new era of prosperity. But the Democratic party insisted on running as a continuation of an Obama presidency that leftists had soured on and that conservatives had unfairly demonized. Add in the fact that no one really liked Hilary Clinton and Trump's victory seemed inevitable.
So now there is a large contingent of the left that is now stuck living with a Trump administration that, by the day, seems to be trying to outdo itself with how inept it can be, and with a president who is confirming all the suspicions they've had about the latent racism among a large part of the electorate. The presidency is a lost cause, but there are other routes. The Squad comes to power. The non-governmental institutions controlled by the left take a more active stance in promoting their ideology, or at least putting up guardrails against Trump's policies. By the time the absolute explosion in woke rhetoric happens in the summer of 2020 Trump has been in office for four years. His administration had an entire term to prevent what they saw on the horizon in 2016, and they failed absolutely miserably. The thing that irks me the most about right-wing complaints about wokism is that the most egregious examples of it — COVID policy, defund the police, riots, DEI — all happened under Trump's watch.
And then, as soon as Biden was elected, things started to cool down. Two members of The Squad were voted out of office this spring, and AOC has become a mainstream Pelosi acolyte. DEI people are being laid off. Robin D'Angelo is unemployed. Ibram X. Kendi hasn't published anything in years. Kamala Harris still has some vaguely woikish things in her arsenal, but she's backtracked on most of the woke positions she took in 2019. Republicans are criticizing her for this. Republican complaints about wokism seem anachronistic at this point; the only time most of these policies even come up is when Republican candidates mention them.
If Trump gets elected, what do you think is going to happen, that his opponents will just shut up? No, we're going to left-wing opposition to absolutely every one of his policy proposals, regardless of whether these proposals are actually right-wing or not. The entire Democratic apparatus will shift into a mode of limiting the damage as much as possible, and this will include protests, and resistance to policy changes and all the other bullshit that happened during the first Trump term. And Trump will be about as effective in stopping it as he was in his first term, unless he wants to turn the country into a full-on police state. I'm not saying you shouldn't vote what you feel, but if you seriously think that a Trump presidency will put an end to whatever woke bullshit you're concerned about, I have some swamp land in Jersey that's for sale.
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