TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
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User ID: 373
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
16d ago
If you cared about corruption by anyone as much as you claim, you should already have investigated the claims against the previous administration, and you would have had no choice but to conclude that it at least looks fishy
Again, I must insist you list out a few examples of the corruption you're talking about. Because I did investigate some of the more major allegations. The claim Biden "stole" the 2020 election was 99.9% pure hallucination/confabulation. The Hunter Biden stuff was true in regards to Hunter being a dirtbag but critically lacked the link connecting to Joe, which was always the point in the first place.
So what exactly are you talking about?
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
16d ago
You really don't know? How can you claim Trump is worse if you can't even list a few things off the top of your head. I even gave an example in the other comment (though you did remove it when quoting it, so maybe there's some gaze-averting going on).
Which comment are you referring to? I'm not trying to be obtuse here -- I did a ctrl+f on all your comments in this thread and nothing immediately stood out, but maybe I'm just missing something.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
16d ago
I specifically referred to Biden since I knew much more about his scandals than Nancy Pelosi's alleged insider trading. If Pelosi is doing that then it would obviously be bad, although I haven't seen much evidence that she's actually doing it. Not that I've looked super hard, I'm aware of it on the periphery of my knowledge but I've never delved that deeply. If you have an article or two that make convincing cases I'd be more than willing to give them a read.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
16d ago
Just because the outgroup is spamming untrue attacks doesn't abrogate responsibility for one side. I'm reading through Original Sin right now, and the fact that Republicans constantly made incorrect attacks against Biden and Democrats more broadly was a big part of why the Dems ignored Biden's mental decline -- they could treat it as just another desperate attempt to smear Biden in the long gish gallop that was always going on. To them, the "Biden is senile" line could be treated as just another "Obama was born in Kenya" or "Joe is pocketing bribes from Hunter" line. If the Dems had a responsibility to actually report Biden's decline (and they absolutely did, IMO), then Republicans have a responsibility to clean up their side too, no matter what the other side is saying or how untrustworthy they are.
I'm not claiming one scandal was worse than the other (MAGA will always claim anything Biden and co. did was infinitely worse than what Trump is doing), I'm demonstrating the principle.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
16d ago
what is there to actually do here?
Stronger internal criticism, like what MAGA did when Musk implied we must have open borders for Indians back in December. That would at least be a good start.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
16d ago
They're smuggling because they have a chip shortage, and the smuggling isn't meeting all their needs.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
17d ago
Good catch. I'm sure there will be many more examples to add to the pile by the end of Trump's term.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
17d ago
Both the enforcement and the law were broken.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
17d ago
What corruption were the past few Democratic administrations engaged in that exceeded the level of magnitude and blatantness that Trump is now engaged in? Even if you can list examples, why is your response to imply that makes Republicans immune from criticism now, rather than asserting that both parties deserve criticism when they're doing bad things?
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
17d ago
But that is not where he's actually focusing his efforts.
Yes, and that's a bad thing. He's spending his (legislative) efforts right now passing regressive tax cuts that will blow out the deficit even further. It would be much better if he focused on long-term immigration reform instead.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
17d ago
People should be critical of every US politician to the extent that they actually engage in corruption. Tons of Republicans made accusations that Joe Biden was receiving huge kickbacks with Hunter as an intermediary, but that was mostly false in regards to Joe actually getting any money. I did criticize Joe for pardoning his son though. The problem here is that the two parties are not equal in corruption, at least for now. It's plausible that Dems will become worse in the future and use Trump's current actions as justification for their own awfulness. I'll criticize that if it occurs.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
17d ago
Corruption in the military is particularly hard to deal with since much of it is secret, and it's not like a society can just totally disband its military if things go too wrong. Perun has a good video on this, with his bit at the end being particularly pertinent. Even though corruption will always exist to some degree, it's much better to live in a society where it's at least not blatant and generally seen as a bad thing that should be dealt with, as opposed to a country like Russia where it broadly runs rampant.
Exploding or minimizing the definition of "corruption" largely seem like post-hoc justifications for bad behavior rather than genuine attempts to understand the issue. If the valences were reversed, e.g. if Hunter Biden received a $200M jet and gave it to Joe, do you think Republicans would make a stink about it? I certainly do.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
17d ago
And revealed preferences are showing that people don't actually care about this stuff much at all, that they only pretend to care to use it as a cudgel against the other side. To someone who genuinely thinks corruption is bad and should be stamped out as much as possible, that's horrifying.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
17d ago
You're just venting.
And it seems by the parts of my reply that you ignored that you just don't want to talk about this topic.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
17d ago
Trump could absolutely make the job of anyone seeking to explode immigration harder by changing the law, i.e. passing legislation, not just executive orders.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
17d ago
Trump has temporarily gotten it back to the levels that Obama had. He's done almost nothing in regards to helping ensure that will continue long-term.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
17d ago
It specifically contrasted against Hunter Biden that Republicans spent years fishing for evidence against. It might not have done a line-by-line comparison against the rest of the claims, but nobody can really point to anything past administrations have done that have the same magnitude and blatantness as what Trump is doing.
If a news report came out that e.g. claimed that Biden was embezzling $100M dollars, would you similarly handwave it if it lacked a detailed comparison to what past Presidents had done?
I think you need something to back that argument
That's... what the NYT article was about?
Is MAGA worse than you in that regard? I don't recall you criticizing Biden
I personally criticized Biden plenty, from his free pass to many levels of wokeness, to his defacto open-borders immigration policy, to his pardoning of Hunter Biden. I'm reading Original Sin right now, and plan on doing a book review at some point.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
17d ago
What? My position is that Trump is far worse in terms of corruption, and that nobody really cares at this point -- MAGA will never care about Trump doing bad things (they'll just rationalize it afterwards no matter what it is), and the left sort of cares but doesn't see it as a particularly potent attack vector. The result is that this could easily become the new baseline of corruption that any President engages in if they want to, and that's a bad thing.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
17d ago
I don't agree with this at all. Populists have hallucinated that there's massive amounts of corruption already going on, but in reality Trump is taking it to a new level of magnitude and blatantness.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
17d ago
NYT has a primer on all the corruption that Trump has been engaging in:
- There's a film about Melania that will pay $28 million directly to her. Did you know about this? I certainly didn't. This could have been a major scandal in past administrations, but at this point it barely registers at all.
- The Trump meme coin has collected $320 million in fees. Noah smith has written about the coin a while ago, and since then Trump has invited coinholders to private events as a reward.
- Justin Sun was accused of fraud by the SEC, but Trump put the investigation on hold after Sun bought $40 million in Trump coin
- The luxury jumbo jet from Qatar that has been heavily featured in the news. In what I'm sure was a total coincidence, Trump announced a big AI deal with Qatar, KSA, and UAE that's almost certainly a big net-negative for the USA according to Zvi.
- Trump's family are raking in cash head-over-heels by monetizing perceived access to the president, with Kushner, Trump Jr., and Eric Trump each individually dwarfing the amount that Hunter Biden ever received from doing similar activities, but basically nobody cares about that at this point.
- Previous presidents have divested their business holdings prior to coming into office to head off allegations of corruption, and of course Trump never did, and basically nobody cares about that at this point.
Beyond this article, you could probably add a bunch more, like how White House aides are buying and selling stocks suspiciously timed around tariff announcements to make big profits.
The response to all of this from MAGA has been next to nonexistent. A handful of people have implied that maaaaaaaybe Trump shouldn't be doing this, but none of them remotely push the issue. When the left try to criticize this, most of MAGA either retorts with the broken record of Shellenberger arguments, or otherwise claims something Biden did was somehow worse, and Trump's corruption is implied to be good, actually. Isn't it wonderful living in an era when negative partisanship is the only political force that matters? Scandals and corruption used to be a thing that allowed the other party to come in and try to do better, but now they're used as a justification for the other side becoming even worse.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
21d ago
If you're talking about a wealth tax or just seizing the money, almost no first-world country does that sort of thing for very good reasons.
If you're talking about subjecting the money to a similar tax rate that normal capital gains have, that's a lot less unreasonable, but universities have historically been granted exemptions since they fund a lot of basic science -- stuff that all of society benefits from, and almost nobody else wants to do. There's really not that much money in endowments relative to, say, what Medicare or Social Security churn through on an annual basis, and the sum long-term contribution to investing in science is much, much higher than it is to funding welfare for old people.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
22d ago
I find this unlikely. It might happen in a few years if current progress continues but this year is too early. If I arbitrarily set the threshold of a "film" at >75 minutes long, and set some baseline quality standard of say >50 on Metacritic, and stipulate that principle photography must be done entirely through AI (humans doing minor touch-ups would be fine), I think people would be very hard pressed to do that in the very short term. The scaffolding and pipelines don't really exist yet to make that feasible.
In fact, I'm writing this one down in my list of predictions that won't happen to keep track of.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
22d ago
What a silly shitshow. Thanks for writing it out, that was a fun read.
My question is why doesn't the board or president or whoever just launch a crackdown on pro-Palestinian protestors? Students have almost no political power in universities -- they're customers, not constituents. Most of them have political views that are only thinly-held, so just start issuing expulsions for some of the ringleaders and the rest will likely get over the whole thing. If they don't, keep issuing expulsions. Columbia has enough prestige that it won't realistically run out of students willing to go there. Faculty might be a trickier matter and some might protest out of principle, but if the students aren't protesting then that would probably take the wind out of their sails.
People who have actually read the book will understand that it gives a fairly scathing account overall. Collecting all the anecdotes along with the storyline of how it happened very much is good journalism.
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