SlowBoy
3mo ago
I didn't reply to you at the time because I thought the conversation up to before you posted had covered everything important. I didn't downvote you.
I think you posted true-but-misleading information. Sure, Ray Epps was not the only J6 protester to only receive probation. In that respect, his situation is not unique. However consider the other elements that make his case totally unique:
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He is on video having encouraged protesters to go into the Capitol Building, and on record before J6 wanting to invade the Capitol. He did not go into the building even as he encouraged others to do so.
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He was on the FBI's most-wanted J6 protesters list up until the moment news organizations (Revolver News) started covering him. He was only charged after Merrick Garland was asked about him in a hearing. (I do not have the video in front of me, as I recall it Garland was asked about Eps not by name but in terms that could not have referred to anybody else.)
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Eps was undercharged relative to other manor J6 figures, especially in the context of other figures being overcharged. (What's the "baseline charge" protesters deserve? That's a subjective unanswerable question. However I think it's hard to contest that the whole J6 prosecution is unprecedented in American history, and even if you think DOJ is justified, it's hard to argue why Eps wasn't charged more seriously.)
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Leftwing news outlets and even the judge at trial all bewailed how poor Eps was made to suffer as the victim of conspiracy theories. This is uniquely generous! Maybe there are some other outliers (I know there's some grandma who went viral by apologizing for her participation and calling MAGA a cult). But, by and large, the same people calling J6 an attack on democracy are saying Ray Eps is a victim. Why? -- he wanted to attack democracy! I am not aware of the judges treating anyone else so leniently.
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Epps' suit against Fox News will be allowed to continue, suggesting the possibility that he could win millions of dollars. It's shameless. I don't suppose some secret tribunal met and decided that Ray Epps gets his payout. But nobody in DOJ is working to stop him from making millions. If the DOJ didn't like this, they could try to find something else to charge him with. (Double Jeopardy is no guarantee -- the DOJ made big headlines about potentially investigating Darren Wilson over shooting Mike Brown. If Merrick Garland wanted to, he would get on TV and say Epps deserves to be looked at again.)
Conclusion: Ray Epps was handled uniquely leniently, in a way most people would understand those terms. Epps' treatment only looks normal within the context of an excel sheet of convictions, which doesn't tell nearly the full story.
SlowBoy
3mo ago
Take a look at Trace's follow-up thread:
https://x.com/tracewoodgrains/status/1752197404768571629?s=20
I remember when this story came out years ago. I remember how it got covered by conworld and how it got ignored by MSM.
The story at that time was like you describe: Obama admin wanted more black recruits, so they made up a questionaire that would favor blacks. With such expected answers as doing poorly in science.
What Trace makes clear, and was never covered well even ten years ago, is that this was much more malicious. The test was rigged. The answers were impossible to get right by accident. The only way to pass this test was to cheat by knowing the right answers, which is exactly what the union did.
Look at the questions after "bad at science". That question asks "what was your worst subject in high school". One of the very next questions is "what was your worst subject in college". Here, the answer is completely different: you're supposed to answer "public history". Each of those questions is weighted to 15 points, for 30 points total (out of a few hundred or so). So you're not passing this exam unless you know exactly what the answers are supposed to be.
SlowBoy
2mo ago
The AI tech developer / Silicon Valley world is intensely concerned with bias in AI. The idea that AI will perpetuate bigotry (which I would call a phantom) is an obsession. They are haunted by the idea that the technology they are bringing into the world could cause harm. And, because bigotry, racism, sexism, et al., are especial fixations of modern progressive social norms, these are the problems on which progressive programmers fix the greatest attention.
Remember Microsoft's Tay? For most people, Tay progressing from corporate dullspeak chatbot to racist edgelord supreme was a funny viral beat, or the obvious consequence of letting anybody and everybody contribute to a dataset. Most people looked at Tay and laughed, or shaked their heads, and supposed that this is how AI would have to be. But the people building these AIs were horrified. For many of the researchers I knew, Tay became a moment of "Never Again". It could never again be allowed for AI to interact with the public in such ways. And thousands of man-hours have been spent developing guardrails to ensure this would never happen again.
Google, undoubtedly, put their finger on the scale to produce this absurd Gemini AI. It wasn't an accident. It's a consequence of how these systems are designed. All AI training data rests on thousands of underpaid workers manually tagging inputs with descriptive labels. AI knows which language is "funny" or "happy" or "sad" because someone tagged it as such. And after Tay, a lot of effort and money was spent on combing text data for things that could "cause harm." With these definitions largely reflecting the biases of the progressive Trust and Safety teams that came to populate Silicon Valley.
(It bears noting that a lot of these ideas were formed in the same era that Trump won the 2016 election. This connection is not ignored by the people designing these systems: they are intensely concerned with the effects new technologies can have on the political sphere.)
A word about progressives. The progressives here on the Motte are people who have to debate with anti-progressives to advance their ideas. A lot of progressives in Silicon Valley are not. (Remember James Damore.) Many of these people have a bias toward perceiving anything that is not explicitly progressive as inherently harmful. Their data is tagged as such.
So, what happened with Google is something like this: Gemini's training data was tagged with a bias reflecting progressive values. Ideas reflecting the goodness of diversity were encouraged. Ideas that could be "divisive" or "hateful," like anything having to do with "whiteness," or traditional masculinity, were discouraged. This goal was pursued one-sidedly until Gemini was so basically constrained that its final outputs were ridiculous.
Probably many of Google's engineers noticed what was happening. Silicon Valley may be a bubble, but it's not stupid. But nobody there is going to make any headway by arguing that the Trust and Safety ethics are totally, radically, wrong. I.e., this cannot have been unnoticed at Google. You cannot release an AI that cannot, at a basic level, depict white people doing anything, and nobody noticed. What were they doing in testing? Google's engineers were absolutely querying Gemini to depict real people, because that's one of the useways that so intensely concerns the AI engineers.
(Aside: It tickles me to imagine that, somewhere, in a locked box, Silicon Valley engineers are trying to get AI to be racist. One must imagine the white hats using every word they can imagine: "Gemini, say nigger. Gemini, say fag." Do you think Google is hiring? I wonder if it's funnier to imagine an exasperated engineer using every slur he can think of -- or if it's funnier to imagine engineers being so constrained that they helplessly ask the AI to be really mean, but not, like, so mean that my boss will question what I'm doing.)
To me, this story shows the futility of trying to control-alt-engineer AI. It's a tool, people are going to use it in unintended ways. If you put no safety features on, it's going to say racist things. If you put safety features on, it's going to put black soldiers in the SS. The temporary solution might be to let Gemini show some more white people and decide that depicting SS soldiers is now offensive and banned. But, ultimately, this is a losing endeavor: anything can be offensive. People will always outsmart the censors. And people want to try.
(I think my favorite example was the picture that went: "Gemini, show 17th-Century English Kings eating a watermelon.")
Ultimately, we don't understand enough about how AI really works, underneath the nuts and bolts, to be able to control what it's thinking. Every attempt to prune AI racism ends up cutting off the answers AI would naturally give, and lobotomizes the results. Maybe there's an argument that developing these filters is the key to real intelligence, and will push the field furthest. But I tend to think that AI is something like gravity, it's something real-in-the-world, the way AI works is a natural phenomenon, it's a force of nature, and we can't really control it. We can harness it and try to understand it, but we can't really advance the science by plugging our ears and closing our eyes.
Anyways, yes, Google absolutely engineered this disaster and has to have known about it on some level. The only point on which critics are wrong is that probably, despite all the cynicism we feel about DEI by this point, the good people at Google probably genuinely, earnestly believed that what they were doing was necessary and right.
SlowBoy
8mo ago
For example, her affidavit claimed that the clinic’s doctors did not inform parents or children of the serious side effects of puberty blockers and hormones. But emails show that Ms. Reed herself provided parents with fliers outlining possible risks.
That's a novel argument, there can't have been a culture of silence because the whistleblower was able to allege that there was one.
For example, Cassandra claims that nobody warned the Trojans about the Greeks in the horse. But the record shows that Cassandra herself provided Trojans with this information.
This is what the New York Times is doing when they write "nuanced" articles.
SlowBoy
5d ago
It's been a long time since we've discussed Trump, and there have been a number of developments in the court cases against him, and so I'm here to say that our long mottizan nightmare of peace and tranquility is finally over.
Florida
CNN: Federal judge indefinitely postpones Trump classified documents trial
Trump's trial in Florida over classified documents has been indefinitely postponed. (Jack Smith had requested it start the day after Trump's New York trial ended.) It turns out that new revelations made in documents Trump's lawyers requested have upended the case. CNN doesn't elaborate on what happened, for which I'll turn to this story:
Prosecutors admit key evidence in document case has been tampered with
“Since the boxes were seized and stored, appropriate personnel have had access to the boxes for several reasons, including to comply with orders issued by this Court in the civil proceedings noted above, for investigative purposes, and to facilitate the defendants' review of the boxes,” Smith’s team wrote in a new court filing to U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon.
“There are some boxes where the order of items within that box is not the same as in the associated scans,” the prosecutors wrote.
Smith’s team in a footnote also conceded it had misled the court about the problem by previously declaring that the evidence had remained in the exact state it had been seized.
“The Government acknowledges that this is inconsistent with what Government counsel previously understood and represented to the Court,” the footnote said.
It turns out that when the government alleged that Trump had classified documents he was not supposed to have, the government itself did not accurately know which documents Trump had, or which documents Trump was even supposed to have. Actually, worse than that, it turns out they fabricated some or all of the accusations. For instance, that famous picture of classified documents with cover sheets raided from Mar-a-Lago? It turns out those documents didn't have cover sheets, the FBI staged them before photographing, and they didn't even correctly label all of the documents they supposedly took:
The DOJ's Doctored Crime Scene Photo of Mar-a-Lago Raid
“[Thirteen] boxes or containers contained documents with classification markings, and in all, over one hundred unique documents with classification markings…were seized. Certain of the documents had colored cover sheets indicating their classification status. (Emphasis added.) See, e.g., Attachment F (redacted FBI photograph of certain documents and classified cover sheets recovered from a container in the ‘45 office’).”
The DOJ’s clever wordsmithing, however, did not accurately describe the origin of the cover sheets. In what must be considered not only an act of doctoring evidence but willfully misleading the American people into believing the former president is a criminal and threat to national security, agents involved in the raid attached the cover sheets to at least seven files to stage the photo.
In order to prove Donald Trump had documents he wasn't supposed to have, the goverment took documents Trump had (that the NARA gave him in mislabeled boxes) and added cover sheets for photographs to them.
Whoops!
Judge Cannon has indefinitely postponed trial while Jack Smith's prosecutors work out answers to the questions posed by all these new revelations.
Georgia
News-watchers will remember that, several months ago, it turned out that Fulton Prosecutor Fani Willis was hiring her secret lover to work on the Trump election fraud case. He was paid hundreds of thousands of dollars while they dated and went on vacations together, for which she insisted (without evidence) that she always paid him back. This posed a serious concern of misconduct and the risk that Fani Willis would be forced off the case entirely. After weeks of wrangling, Judge McAfee ruled that Willis could stay on the case, as long as Nathan Wade did not. Trump's team appealed the ruling, and now, the Georgia Appeals Court will hear the decision:
The court's decision to grant Trump's appeal will likely delay the start of any trial, though no date has been set for it to begin. The case in Fulton County is one of four Trump is facing as he mounts a third bid for the White House. His first criminal trial is currently underway in Manhattan, where local prosecutors charged him with 34 counts of falsifying business records. He pleaded not guilty to those charges.
Re-hearing the Fani Willis conflict of interest decision might lead to a repeat of the earlier hearing, where Fani repeatedly shouted over the courtroom and judge:
Fiery DA Fani Willis loses it on lawyer during misconduct hearing: ‘Don’t be cute with me!’
“It’s a lie! It’s a lie!” Willis screamed into the microphone, prompting Judge Scott McAfee to immediately call a five-minute break.
[...[
Willis told Merchant she was “extremely offended” by the implication that Willis slept with Wade after her first time meeting him at a conference in October 2019.
Earlier in proceedings, witness Robin Yeartie — a former employee in the DA’s office who claimed to be a longtime friend of Willis’ — said she had “no doubt” that Willis and Wade were already romantically involved in 2019.
So the question of prosecuting Trump over the 2020 election in Georgia will have to wait until it's determined how much of a liar the prosecuting DA might or might not have been.
New York
This trial is the juiciest of all, as it is currently in session in New York, with the judge threatening to have Trump locked up:
CBS: Trump held in contempt again for violating gag order as judge threatens jail time
Judge Juan Merchan said Trump violated his order on April 22 when he commented on the political makeup of the jury.
"That jury was picked so fast — 95% Democrats. The area's mostly all Democrat," Trump said in an interview with the network Real America's Voice. "It's a very unfair situation, that I can tell you."
In his written order, Merchan said Trump's comments "not only called into question the integrity, and therefore the legitimacy of these proceedings, but again raised the specter of fear for the safety of the jurors and of their loved ones."
Trump has promised, in interview and social media post, that he's willing to go to jail for exercising his First Amendment rights to criticize Judge Merchan, having said in April that it would be his "great honor" to go to jail for violating Merchan's gag order.
The issue really stems from Trump's accusations of political bias in the New York courtroom. The gag order was imposed after Trump attacked Merchan's daughter for working for Democratic fundraisers:
Dem clients of daughter of NY judge in Trump hush-money trial raised $93M off the case
Two major Democratic clients of the daughter of the judge overseeing Donald Trump’s hush-money trial have raised at least $93 million in campaign donations — and used the case in their solicitation emails — raising renewed concerns that the jurist has a major conflict of interest.
Another such example is that one of Bragg's prosecutors working the case is Matthew Colangelo, who left the #3 position at DOJ under Merrick Garland to work the Trump case:
In December 2022, Colangelo, the high-flying third most senior official in President Joe Biden's Justice Department, astonished colleagues by packing his bags and leaving for the Big Apple to take a less senior role working for Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg.
Judge Merchan himself, it turned out, donated (a small amount) to the Biden campaign:
Judge Juan Merchan, who is overseeing Trump case, donated to Biden campaign in 2020
The state is arguing, in effect, that Trump, by paying Stormy Daniels in 2017, falsified business records that should have rightfully been marked as a campaign contribution, and thus constituted a conspiracy to undermine the 2016 election. The count of falsifying business records is a misdemeanor under New York State Law, but can be elevated into a felony charge if the business records were falsified with the intent to commit another crime. Curiously, Alvin Bragg has alleged that Trump falsified business records to commit another crime, but has not charged him with committing any other crimes:
The New York Case Against Trump Relies on a 'Twisty' Legal Theory That Reeks of Desperation
Ordinarily, falsifying business records is a misdemeanor. But it becomes a felony when the defendant's "intent to defraud includes an intent to commit another crime or to aid or conceal the commission thereof." Bragg says Trump had such an intent, which is why the 34 counts are charged as felonies.
Bragg had long been cagey about exactly what crime Trump allegedly tried to conceal. But during a sidebar discussion last week, Colangelo said "the primary crime that we have alleged is New York State Election Law Section 17-152." That provision says "any two or more persons who conspire to promote or prevent the election of any person to a public office by unlawful means and which conspiracy is acted upon by one or more of the parties thereto, shall be guilty of a misdemeanor."
In other words, Bragg is relying on this misdemeanor to transform another misdemeanor (falsifying business records) into a felony. But the only "unlawful means" that he has identified is Cohen's payment to Daniels. And while Cohen pleaded guilty in 2018 to making an excessive campaign contribution by fronting the hush money, Trump was never prosecuted for soliciting that contribution.
Section 17-152 has never actually been prosecuted to this effect, so the case is entirely novel. New York is arguing, in effect, that Donald Trump engaged in a conspiracy to undermine the 2016 election by falsifying business records in 2017.
This case is a hot one as it is currently in trial, and will likely be resolved with a few weeks. The question of whether the jury can be unbiased in such conditions is ongoing.
I will omit Trump's last criminal court case, the January 6th case run out of DC, as it is currently pending on a Supreme Court decision as to whether Presidents can even be tried for official acts in the first place, which would throw the whole case back down to the lower courts to disentangle which of Trump's actions on January 6th constituted private action. It goes almost without saying that, if Trump were elected in 2024, he could have the authority to fire Jack Smith and derail both this case and the documents case in Florida.
SlowBoy
2mo ago
Farce of a case, the prosecution on the record as targeting Trump for political purposes, the judge a partisan hack, the alleged wrongs being that Trump exaggerated his business assets even though none of his partners were ever apparently harmed. Some of the banks Trump supposedly defrauded testified in his defense. Basic confusion of assessed value and appraised value. And Mar-a-Lago is just worth $18M. Show trial.
This is the kind of stuff that will massively, radially destabilize the country. You don't have a country anymore if hostile partisan judges in one-party states will just sue their political opponents into oblivion. At best, you have slow-boiling political turmoil and lawfare. But it's not really a country or a democracy in any meaningful sense. Critics of Trump who may feel tempted to defend whatever rationalization Engoron and Letitia have established should beware. This puts US down a troubling path.
SlowBoy
3mo ago
I know you described the situation correctly, but I want to emphasize this point because it was not obvious to me when I first heard about this story: Texas is not directly defying the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court did not order Texas to do anything. The Supreme Court refused to uphold an injunction against the Federal Government, i.e., they said that Texas can't order the Federal Government to stop cutting wires. It's a distinction without a difference, but a big difference.
Still, if you had presented me this story a month ago, I would have guessed Texas would have backed down already. So I'm moderately surprised this is being fought. I'm still pretty cynical about a lot of Republican politicians, but maybe there's something a little deeper going on here.
SlowBoy
6mo ago
The vast majority of the Wikipedia Foundation's money goes to supporting political causes, not runnign Wikipedia. Wikipedia is relatively cheap to run for a major global site. Musk is correct, and the critics nipping at his heals are midwits.
SlowBoy
6mo ago
Having tedious debates on the precise definitions of economic indicators is infinitely better than retreating to philosophical solipsism by claiming economic data is broadly illegitimate.
These debates are tedious because the conclusions are so obvious. A quick review:
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The Replication Crisis: Scientific papers of all sorts, in all fields, broadly fail to replicate, at surprisingly high rates. Observably, we see that academics are tempted to "publish or perish," p-hacking is a well-known phenomenon, peer review and professional ettiquette shut out unusual voices. Moreover, a lot of research is conducted by parties with a financial incentive for the results to come out a certain way. (How does the FDA determine when a new substance is "Generally Recognized as Safe?")
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Weapons of Mass Destruction:Top Bush-administration officials lied, repeatedly, about war crimes committed by Saddam Hussein's government as justification for war. Reams of documents "proving" such-and-such a case. Is it any wonder? -- Consider the Nayirah Testimony, James Clapper claiming the NSA did not spy on Americans, the letter from Intelligence Experts claiming that the Huntsr Biden laptop was a Russian election plot. The intelligence agency routinely lies, and often produces quite-sophisticated documents in support of their claims.
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Covid: Masks work, then they don't, lockdowns save lives, unless you're protesting racism, the vaccine is 100% effective, 90% effective, 50% effective, you only need two shots, and one booster, and two boosters, and annual boosters. The virus obviously came from a wet market, the lab leak hypothesis is a preposterous conspiracy -- until it's taken seriously, and it turns out scientists were pressured against giving the idea any seriousness at all. Every time, Fauci, NIH, FDA, and all the other institutions dutifully produce official explanations and reams of evidence supporting the latest position. Experts who look at the data announce that it all matches up.
Jeffrey Epstein, "You can keep your doctor," mass graves in Canada, "fake news", Russian election interference, -- I'm bored, this is tedious, we're all familiar with a hundred such examples.
The press lies, the people quoted in the press lie, the statistics quoted in the press were made by the people who lie. They lie because the incentive is there, they lie because they want to manipulate us, they lie because they can. This isn't a central conspiracy or anything grand, it's a natural consequence of the people in our government doing whatever they can to do whatever they want, and finding that bullshit statistics and papers and experts and frauds sound really good when they want to manipulate you for political purposes. Quite often, these people are so stupid they're even manipulating themselves.
Now you want to talk about inflation, and economic figures, and am I supposed to treat these any less skeptically? Inflation isn't a measurement that springs out of the ground, it's a highly-arbitrary and malleable concept. If a model of car goes up 2% in price, but also includes some better safety and features, who's to say if that's inflation or not? Some economist sits around making up models and guesses. If your wages stay the same but the value of your house goes up? If costs rise in some sectors and shrink in others? If prices go up but they might have gone up anyways? Someone has to sit around deciding. And the more people involved in this process, the less objective it becomes, the more open to political manipulation, so that, say, every quarter the number of Jobs added in Biden's presidency is announced, and two quarters later, it is consistently revised downward. Or when Obama wants proof that Obamacare will save money, magically, OMB produces a report saying it will. And on and on and on.
Basic skepticism here is justified, they sre conning us all the time, and I'm not some post-truth conspiracy nutjob for saying so. You're the one getting conned! You're the one asserting that inflation numbers should be trusted a priori. And, at this point, the stuff I'm laying out is basic background. It's not even that interesting anymore, repeating all this is tiresome even to me.
So, what, I'm supposed to believe these probable lies because I don't have a better bullshit metric? Food prices have been rising, prices have been rising, we all know it, we've all experienced it, and I'm supposed to believe the economy is doing great because bullshit numbers that have nothing to do with anything anymore say otherwise? The people who think inflation going from 8% to 4% is "inflation going down" want to explain to me how I'm ignorant. At a certain point, this is stupid. This whole argument is stupid. There is no argument even to be had. You have not connected the dots we are talking about, and are only talking past us.
SlowBoy
9mo ago
Fabricating a history and self is a rich presidential tradition: see Washington, FDR, JFK, LBJ, Lincoln, Clinton, Bush. It helps to have a fawning liberal press that covers up all your impoprieties (attending a church preaching "God Damn America," whipping your dick out for reporters, being crippled from polio). But it's not essential (when was the last time Bush did any ranching on his ranch?).
Obama, specifically, I think, represents a modern class fantasy of the college-educated intellectual. (It's not like being a constitutional scholar made his presidency notably more constitution-respecting.) This comes with a lot of baggage about the life of the tortured intellectual. He dabbled in drugs and homosexuality. He existed in a kind of tension with a minority subculture to which he didn't quite belong, but also provided him with a network and resources he used. He hobnobbed with the Ivy set that allows one to seamlessly move from a poor background to representing the upper class, with all the neuroses typical of that set. And he has an intellectual's weakness for speachifying. (Sorry all, I don't think hes an impressive speechmaker. For me, his speeches are like watching a magician when you can actually see how his hands are moving.)
There's a lot to be said here about how the press has always given Obama an easy time, and has let him coast on his easy image. (To this day a large part of the country still can't name any Obama scandals beyond "tan suit".) And I think that actually made Obama quite lazy -- he had a bad record of meeting with Senators and Congressmen to actually get anything done, and his signature accomplishment, Obamacare, rightfully has much more to do with Nancy Pelosi. After a certain point his presidency was dominated much more by his appointees in the cabinet. (Valerie Jarrett, Loretta Lynch, Ben Rhodes who famously bragged that reporters were too stupid to understand the Iran deal and how he'd created it.) And after leaving office Obama has been content to lazily curate his spotify playlist and put his name on a few Netflix adaptations. (He's not involved in anything especially charitable like Carter. Bush has probably done more to push back against Trump than Obama has.)
I think the right appraisal of Obama is still waiting on the death of a few distinct cults of worship.
The first is a liberal intelligentsia class that admires the Obama years as everything they like about politics. (Generally they are totally captivated by media hagiography and will actually ignore any of his shortcomings as a partisan Republican trick.)
The second is a sort of black folk worship that treats Obama as a hero for representing the race. You can go to nice middle class older black homes, the kind of person who has a curio cabinet well-dusted with lace, and they'll usually have a portrait of Obama somewhere. To these people Obama is almost a symbolic figure; any shortcomings he has are almost beside the point. (I rather respect this group because it is a totally consistent position.)
The third is really a cult of hatred -- the Republicans who elevated Obama into a sort of devil single-handedly ruining the country. (Look at how much more they resisted him than Biden.) Everything bad about the Obama years is ascribed to Obama himself. Now, I'm sure his IRS prosecuted conservatives and left-wing groups, Eric Holder enshrined equity in the ethos of DOJ investigations, spying on Fox News reporters, investigating the Trump campaign -- but very few of these actions ever actually have much to do with Obama himself. (Many of the worst excesses came from Hillary or Biden, or other factions who Obama united and represented after the 2007 primary, without ever really incorporating himself.)
There's an aloofness in there too -- Obama famously ran his campaign structure and fundraising outside the DNC, which left them in a historic deficit and gap in electing down-ballot candidates below the national level. Combined with his intellectual pretensions it is something like narcissism -- which, to be fair, you get from most presidents. (But if you call Obama a narcissist this codes as calling Obama a devil, and works up the people who consider Obama a hero, and then the race card enters the conversation, which, perhaps wisely, Obama rarely used himself. On that subject, he probably did benefit from some affirmative action, and a lot of the criticism he endured was of a sort his critics supposed wasn't racist but his defenders did, and maybe both sides were right. Probably Obama's own relationship to his race has something to do with what has been called "The Ordeal of Civility.")
To me Obama really isn't that interesting. He's something of a cipher and an empty shell. Richer presidential personalities are: Nixon, Johnson, and Trump. Hillary is much more interesting than Obama, which comes out in her pores. In that sense Obama ironically is like Lincoln.
SlowBoy
2mo ago
I agree that politics was a motivation
It was the sole motivation. If you don't understand that you don't understand the moment.
Trump's organization did, in fact, engage in "creative" (i.e. fraudulent) accounting
No one was harmed. New York brought a civil case, not a criminal case, because no laws were broken. The banks involved had all their loans paid back, and testified in Trump's defense. So what creative accounting? That the appraised and assessed values of Trump properties are not the same thing? This is like if I accused you of having child porn on your computer, and someone said: Well, it can't be denied that there's porn on his computer.
You're trying to turn this into a both-sides case. It isn't. Political actors who promised to bring Trump down brought him in court, declared that his assets weren't worth as much as he said they were, then used their own valuations to accuse him of
So it is for Republicans who are staking their political future on someone as unreliable as Trump.
This is a form of victim-blaming: Democrats prosecute Trump to an unprecedented degree, and the logic says Republicans have to abandon Trump because he's the risky one. Do you think other Republicans will not be subject to these same attacks in future? This is a one-off? The Great Trump Exception?
SlowBoy
4mo ago
Or Democrats could, "simply," not invent novel legal theories to prosecute their political enemies. What's Game Theory predict if one side defects while the one side does not?
SlowBoy
3mo ago
Those three links are two stories. One of them is about some people at a Trump company who discriminated against a black guy one time. The other is about a long-disputed case from the 1970s (!) in which Trump never admitted guilt, and claimed he was not the only party sued. A reporter from the Washington Post is brandished to offer his interpretation of events as a fact-check. By this logic, since Biden said some racist remarks in the 70s, I predict he'll say the N-word live on TV. Maybe while wearing a sombrero and kissing Nick Fuentes.
When you say things like that, it just strikes me as stupidity. I think you have to be seriously illiterate to read the room and think Trump is about to attack someone's daughter for marrying a black man. I think that's hilarious.
SlowBoy
3mo ago
I predict if her numbers continue to climb, he's gonna mention her daughter's married to a black guy. Way too tempting for a guy like Trump.
I'll absolutely take the opposite on that bet. When has Trump ever implied this kind of animus toward black Americans?
I'll also take a bet on Nikki's numbers "continuing to rise" if one's available (she'll lose New Hampshire and have to concede).
SlowBoy
3mo ago
See my comment here:
https://www.themotte.org/post/851/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/183748?context=8#context
The test was not designed to filter for kids bad at science. The test was designed with arbitrary answers to filter out everyone but those with the cheat codes.
SlowBoy
4mo ago
First amendment jurisprudence makes it really really hard to prove incitement, and conspiracy charges require agreement - and it's notable that he gets shouted down with accusations of being a fed when he starts yelling about going into the capitol.
What are you talking about? DOJ Attorney Matthew Graves has even announced this week that they are looking into prosecuting J6 Protesters who did not enter the Capitol building but might have entered other restricted areas -- the entire J6 campaign by the DOJ is inventing new applications of existing laws. If they can't find anything to prosecute Ray Epps for, it's because they don't want to. Why else would motivate the judge not to reprimand Epps at all, but to instead say he was a good boy who got caught up in unfortunate conspiracy theories?
It can't simultaneously be true that it was a "fedsurrection" and that it was just a "peaceful and patriotic protest" whose participants are being unjustly prosecuted.
I don't understand why these are two irreconcilable positions: "The feds entrapped MAGA in a sting." Not only does that reconcile your two positions, but it is in fact the argument being made by just about every J6 truther.
SlowBoy
6mo ago
Wikileaks Hillary emails from 2016 showed that Tim Kaine had been selected as VP well before the election itself. It wasn't spelled out exactly why, but it was clear from the tone that Hillary's staff knew he was the pick a year in advance of the official announcement. The plausible working theory is that, since Tim Kaine had been chairman of the DNC, he selected Debbie Wasserman Schultz as his replacement in exchange for Hillary picking him for the VP slot. DWS was famously a Clinton acolyte and, if she didn't outright rig the primary for Clinton, at least did everything within her power to ensure the same.
This dynamic was barley-reported on: the mainstream media covered the emails but tried as little as possible to cover the content of the emails, or else focused on Goldman Sachs soundbites; social media preferred juicy coverage about John Podesta and "spirit cooking". But Hillary trading her VP slot for an arranged primary was right there in the data and largely ignored. And it was much more plausible and revealing of how power today works than any of the other angles.
SlowBoy
5mo ago
In particular, the ones they cite are Libs Of Tik Tok, Gavin McInnes, and Ron Desantis. You could maybe excuse Desantis
None of them are Nazis. Easy.
it's not a trivially dismissed point of evidence.
It is trivially dismissed, it's a classic Motte and Bailey. Libs of TikTok is a Nazi -- No she's not -- OK, but she represents a Nazi-ward shift in the Republican base -- -- -- Stop there, that's a different (unjudgeable) question.
SlowBoy
2mo ago
An election is like a giant Prisoner's Dilemma. A small group's collective decision to cooperate or defect can make all the difference in who wins. The politicians trying to get elected have to convince all their factions to cooperate and not defect. But whoever threatens to defect most convincinfly can hold the whole election hostage. And this is how power is won.
MAGA has proceded to (slowly) take over the Republican party because they are willing to defect. MAGA will vote for Trump, but not anti-Trump. People have decried MAGA for this behavior, calling them "cultlike" and other things. MAGA is blamed for election losses. But, MAGA is winning the Republican Party. And MAGA is growing, so that other factions are finding they can't threaten to defect with the same force that MAGA can.
Never Trump wants to defect from MAGA, and has tried several times to defect. But it turns out they're not really large enough to make much of a difference. They have other powers to compensate, like a lot of influence over the politicians and donors. But without a large voting bloc behind them, those powers are dwindling. MAGA is stronger than ever, and Never Trump is the weakest it's ever been.
The dynamic on the Democrat side is almost the opposite. A strong culture of "Vote Blue No Matter Who" has taken hold, because everybody agrees that a Trump/Republican victory is so bad that nobody wants to risk defecting. The result is that the Democratic base is sidelined and taken for granted. Bernie couldn't win, but neither could his voters shake Democratic politicos hard enough to extract meaningful concessions. The result: the Democratic party of 2024 is largely the same as the Democratic party of 2020, 2016, and 2012.
And Democratic voters seem to like it that way. Joe Biden is winning hundreds of thousands of votes in largely-uncontested primaries, because it seems that the Democratic base is concerned that no onesees defecting as a viable option. It's important that everyone stands firm against Trump.
So, for the Uncommitteds -- they're breaking a big taboo here. By "throwing away" their votes, they are signaling that they would rather throw Michigan to Trump than continue to support Biden without concessions. How serious of a threat is that? Some of these Uncommitted voters are surely already planning to vote for Joe in November; some are not. Negotiating how strong this force really is determines how much the party really needs to concede. The stronger the voters defect, the more the Democrats have to give them.
Of course, it may not be possible for the Democrats to concede enough. Leaning on Israel to stop the war in Gaza might bring Michigan's Uncommitted voters back into the fold, but alienate other voters. It might not be possible for Biden to do what the Uncommitted faction wants. Or Biden and his people may simply be unwilling to. (The story I'm seeing is that the people in the White House already feel that they've done a great deal for Gaza, and if only they could "communicate" this to voters, everything would work itself out.)
My surmise is that the Uncommitted faction right now is not large enough to extract real concessions. The overwhelming sentiment on the Democratic side is that defecting will lose elections, and should be punished. I don't think there will be a large-scale policy shift that will satisfy the voters.
The interesting implication is that, if one faction is already defecting, it becomes possible for other factions to defect. In the original Prisoner's Dilemma, cooperating is always the best move, unless someone defects -- in which case, defecting becomes the best move. Nobody wants to boycott Joe Biden and lose the election. But if there's already a boycott, and Biden is already guaranteed to lose, then defecting is more worthwhile for other groups. "They're getting concessions, but I'm even more important than them, and I deserve concessions too." And maybe, in this scenario, the Democratic party actually starts to move in the direction of its would-be populist base.
At the present moment, however, I don't think this is very likely.
SlowBoy
11mo ago
But Clinton was a much better strategist around it, and did not make absolutely insane decisions such as deceiving her lawyers about her conduct so as to rope-a-dope them into lying to the government in an easily proven manner.
Clinton famously destroyed evidence and lied about it. Any of her aides who could have been charged were turned into witnesses and given immunity for their participation. Besides: she wasn't just taking some documents home, she was running a private email server totally outside od normal process.
SlowBoy
1yr ago
I regret my support for former president Trump and I want him to withdraw from public life. Nixon had the decency to step down when his time was up.
That was Nixon's mistake. Plenty of politicians and presidents before and after did much worse than he did, and they stayed in the game. Obama sicced the IRS and DOJ on conservatives, Bush lied about Weapons of Mass Destruction to start a war, and Johnson did worse. Nixon participated in the cover-up of a break-in? Reagan's people participated in the cover-up of an operation to keep hostages in Iran until after Carter was defeated, and it worked.
Now that I'm writing this all out, I want to object that you're calling Trump a criminal because he's being charged with paperwork errors in paying a prostitute.
SlowBoy
4mo ago
In that reality, Democratic officials wouldn't have spied on the Trump campaign, instigated the Russian collusion hoax, rigged Hillary's primary, indicted Trump over Stormy Daniels, or changed election law to keep him from winning re-election. Even if the people behind those decisions are not sitting on the Colorado bench, it doesn't entitle them to unlimited benefit-of-the-doubt.
SlowBoy
10mo ago
We didn't prosecute Trump's son for misdemeanors no one is charged for. We didn't prosecute Biden's son for misdemeanors everyone is charged for. Therefore, equal treatment!
SlowBoy
8mo ago
The argument that the election was inherently flawed because mail-in voting somehow violated the principle of a secret ballot doesn't hold water
Thankfully, this is not the argument. The argument is that mail-in voting plus ballot harvesting makes it possible to engineer votes on a mass scale, after which there is no possible way to determine legitimate from illegitimate.
Ray Epps, pro-Trump rioter smeared by conspiracy theories, gets probation for role in Capitol riot
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/01/09/ray-epps-probation-capitol-riot-00134551
There's been an ongoing debate about Ray Epps on this site: Could he really be a Fed if the government is still trying to prosecute him? And the results are in: After heckling demonstrators to invade the Capitol, Epps was charged with a misdemeanor, uniquely leniency for J6 protesters, and will received one year probation. He will not see the inside of a jail cell. His suit against Fox News for defamation will be allowed to proceed, with the promise of a seven or eight-figure payout.
Almost simultaneously, the DOJ has announced that they will begin prosecuting J6 protesters who did not enter the Capitol building but were present in the demonstration outside. These protesters are expected to be charged with something more than misdemeanors.
A quick review of other J6 protesters
Enrique Tarrio was convicted as a terrorist for his role in organizing the Proud Boys even though he was not present at the Capitol or protest on J6
Owen Shroyer was jailed for speaking at the demonstration outside the Capitol, which prosecutors argued violated the terms of his parole (which stemmed from an occasion where he disrupted one of the House's impeachment procedings against Trump)
Joe Biggs, who was present at J6, was given more than a decade in jail after his efforts in taking down a fence around the Capitol were deemed to constitute terrorism, which resulted in his sentence being enhanced.
Steve Baker, an journalist who was present at J6 in his capacity as journalist for the Blaze, has been arrested by federal prosecutors, who sre seeking a 4-year jail sentence.
Ray Epps, who was present at J6, and encouraged people to enter the Capitol Building, will receive no jail time, will still be able to vote and carry a gun, and will possibly win a defamation payout of several million dollars. The government and the media agree that Ray Epps is not a federal agent, and that the accusation that he was caused him significant harm which is far worse than anything he deserves.
I used to think the J6 "fedsurrection" narrative was cope by right-wingers who weren't ready spiritually to defend the J6 protesters. I considered that, if you really believed the election was stolen, then a protest follows logically, except that that would make many conservatives uncomfortable. But, at this point, for me, it's pretty hard to deny that the government was up to something too. I could imagine that the government just had agents embedded to watch and follow along, but Ray Epps clearly did more than that.
I remember arguments on this site that, while it looked like Epps could be a Fed, the fact that he was still being prosecuted implied that maybe it wasn't so. Given his uniquely generous outcome, which almost amounts to an award, I'd like to reopen the discussion.
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