Tiber727
5mo ago
I don't know if this is true or not, but, assuming it's true, and assuming that there was a desire to pursue a lawfare attack against him, he could have been charged for what took place between January 20 and May 5. Agreed?
I did cite my source, and the government thought they had enough of a case that they brought it to court. Though that saga ended because they waited long enough that Judge Cannon arguably dragged the case until right before the election then tossed it under questionable circumstances.
He technically could have been charged for what took place before May 5th. On that I am agreed. However, I argue that there is in fact a gentleman's agreement for high ranking government officials to not prosecute over classified materials. And that gentleman's agreement is that if they tell you to return classified documents and you do, then nothing happens to you. My argument is that unlike Hillary or Biden, Trump tried to fuck with them when they tried to retrieve the documents. My argument is that the classified documents case wasn't lawfare because it wasn't primarily about hating Trump because he makes Democrats mad, it was Trump violating the gentleman's agreement and finding out what happens when you fuck around with three-letter agencies for a year and a half.
Tiber727
5mo ago
I'm defining lawfare as trials motivated by animosity or political advantage, and sincere belief that the guilty should be punished is nonexistent or virtually nonexistent. Any disagreement with that?
Ignoring the shield counts if the reason you are doing so is the desire to bring harm to a specific person. I would even say that lawfare against a politician tautologically requires ignoring that shield. Trump has not exactly demonstrated any strong belief in OpSec in any other situation, between his own administration and storage of confidential documents.
Both Letitia and Trump campaigned on arresting a political opponent, and Letitia's admitting of that seems to be the main point where everyone agrees the mortgage fraud case against Trump was lawfare. The main point of distinction among other people in this thread seems to be that Trump abandoned his attempt after getting into office, which I argue that he probably would have gone through with had he not had the problem with his staff not following orders.
Tiber727
5mo ago
Using personal communication methods for government business is a widespread problem. Several members of Trump's cabinet did similar.
In Trump's case, he was asked on May 6th, 2021 to return classified documents. The raid happened on Aug 8, 2022. Trump wasn't being changed for his insecure practices. He was being charged for allegedly spending a year and a half actively stonewalling the government trying to recover all of the documents.
Tiber727
5mo ago
Is that your point?
Close to it. During Trump's first term, he fought to get Sessions out because A) Sessions recused himself from testifying in Trump's defense during the Russia investigation and B) Trump wanted Sessions to engage in lawfare against Clinton and Sessions refused. Erik Siebert resigned allegedly because he refused to go after Letitia. I am saying that if lawfare results in this kind of staff turnover that also doesn't suggest tit-for-tat lawfare is going to be a recurring theme. I'll grant you that 2 cases out of 3 is low sample size to draw conclusions.
Except that his analysis appears to be incorrect, at least according to the text of the US Code and a set of pattern jury instructions I found.
Yes I saw that as well. I don't know that your argument is a slam dunk, though I'm not dismissing it either.
Unless he's willing to post information which would allow his credentials to be confirmed, I wouldn't put much stock in it.
I'm not that jaded that I expect people to dox themselves before I believe them. Rov has been around a while and talks like he knows what he's talking about. That's usually fine for me until someone posts in a way that sets off bullshit detectors.
Tiber727
5mo ago
I'm saying attorneys like winning cases because their professional record is the cases they have won. One of the problems with lawfare is by its very nature it's based on going after someone you hate rather than someone who provably committed a crime. If you are a DOJ employee and your boss tells you to find something to stick John Smith with, you may refuse because there's nothing to stick Smith with. Tit-for-tat lawfare is limited by the DOJ's willingness to be put in shitty situations to appease their boss.
With Letitia, I am reading the other thread with interest. I have a bit of passing knowledge of law, but I'm not going to presume to tell the Motte how I think that will go when The Motte includes actual lawyers. Rov_Scam has an interesting analysis. That said, I was pointing out the the Letitia case is not the only example of lawfare going on right now.
Tiber727
5mo ago
I will die on the hill that, execution aside, that was probably always the direction Daenerys was going in. I think Martin was dropping a lot of hints throughout the series that she was unstable and vindictive, while cleverly always making her the good guy because all her reasons for being vindictive that we had seen were for good reasons against bad people.
Tiber727
5mo ago
There's also the part where lawfare works better when the target of it actually commits a crime. It's admittedly early to tell, but Comey's trial might not go so well for the administration.
A prosecutor's job is to score a conviction. Imagine you're a prosecutor, and your boss tells you you're required to stand in front of a judge being berated because the point was just to harass a guy.
Tiber727
5mo ago
While a lot of Trump's supporters wanted to see Clinton, Comey and a lot of other senior Democrats prosecuted, Trump notably did not do this in his first term.
Trump 1 was plagued with people who didn't want to do what Trump said. He fought with Sessions trying to get him to do it and gave up after managing to get Sessions out. He said on Nov 2, 2017
“Hopefully they are doing something,” Trump said of the Justice Department probing Clinton during a radio interview with host Larry O’Connor on Washington’s WMAL. “At some point maybe we’re going to all have it out.”
“The saddest thing is, because I’m the president of the United States, I am not supposed to be involved in the Justice Department. I am not supposed to be involved in the FBI. I’m not supposed to be doing the kind of things that I would love to be doing and I’m very frustrated by it,” he continued.
Tiber727
5mo ago
IIRC, there were two main points of contention.
First was the allegation that Trump was working with Russia, if not formally then in a "friendly nod" sort of way. There was the whole "Russia, if you're listening" comments which he claims was a joke but the left did not take as a joke.
Second was that Trump tried to have Hillary prosecuted but gave up after a drawn-out fight with Sessions that ended in his termination. Source 1. Source 2 (pdf page 319, page 107 of the report).
Tiber727
5mo ago
As someone with only a casual interest in Star Wars and who hasn't read the EU, I once idly thought about what I would have done if TFA were mine to make. Personally, I'd try and go more into what the Dark Side of the Force actually is. The first trilogy implied that the Force had a will and was trying to rid itself of its dark side. I would start with the idea that the Dark Side also possessed a will and was trying to engineer its own return. Keep Kylo Ren as powerful but insecure, and show us force ghosts of the Sith corrupting him.
Tiber727
5mo ago
Hasbro is limping along by milking Magic the Gathering for everything it's worth. D&D was never all that profitable, but Critical Role helped bring a resurgence. Thing is, that's the theater kid crowd. The grognards can either accept it or fuck off. They weren't that profitable anyway.
I think that the model of the progressive mind is that minorities will appreciate the work they are doing, the median American may not notice or care but won't mind, and the right are a tiny percentage that will impotently rage (which is a bonus). I don't think they're entirely wrong about the median American not caring, but they think they can maintain quality while not just giving half the country the heckler's veto. Heck, they veto it themselves before any heckler can even get the chance. But eventually they're recycling the same safe stories and people get bored. They spent all their time on stuff they admit only a minority care about, and the normies will still eventually subconsciously feel that something is missing.
To use the slavery analogy, some of the talk on that Motte is like if Mottizens didn't say they wanted to bring back slavery, but spent quite a bit of time talking about how much worse race relations have become ever since blacks became emancipated. They didn't really propose anything at all really. They just implied that it was better before, and didn't really put much effort into why black people might not agree that those times were better.
Tiber727
5mo ago
Imagine that I am able to spend all of my time operating a Catholic soup kitchen. In my time running it, I have sourced donations, worked hundreds of long days, been a kind and welcoming source of support to many, and fed at least thousands of hungry people. Also, I adhere to Catholic doctrine that gay people are suffering from disordered desires and should not indulge those desires, and that gay marriages are definitely an invalid, sinful concept.
I would be willing to bet that locally, I would have some defenders, but what do you think the theme of any media coverage is going to be once they discover I’m actually attempting to be serious about the whole faith? Do you think anyone who doesn’t actually know me would walk away believing I am a “good person?” From the modern liberal point of view, can any of my good deeds wipe away my sin and create an opening for conversion?
As an atheist I mostly stay out of these discussions, but I can corroborate this. We have a local Christian homeless shelter. I don't know about media coverage, but the randos on the city subreddit seem more interested in being mad that they proselytize than giving them any credit for running a homeless shelter in the first place.
Tiber727
5mo ago
Outside of the bailey of "transwomen are women," there is a motte of the leftist position of transwomen in women's prison of trying to protect transwomen from being raped in men's prisons.
Personally, I was thinking build a few trans-specific prisons around the country with maybe some accommodations for being harder for them to get visitors. Or a few prisons with special sections for trans people.
Tiber727
5mo ago
First of all, that's not what "objectively" means because this was a subjective question.
Insinuations of violence are very wording, context, and tone specific, which tends to make for bad analogies and also bad over text. If someone said those exact words while making direct eye contact and aggressive body language, sure. Someone says those exact words in response to, "How do you feel about MLK being shot?" Throw in a shrug and an eye roll and it's being dismissive. Said by a man who looks like if a woman punched him he'd run for his life, it looks the opposite of threatening.
Tiber727
5mo ago
I am not arguing that "celebrating" a man's death (though I would argue that a portion of those accused weren't celebrating, some were apathetic and some were objecting to his being made a martyr) is good. I am arguing that the word "threat" has implications that don't fit. A threat is a claim or insinuation that you are willing to perform a violent action, and looking past the "punch Nazi" larping they aren't. As per my analogy, it's like finding money on the street. You didn't cause someone to lose their money so you have nothing to feel guilty over, but you are happy that something happened that benefited you. That first part, that "I didn't cause it," is how they justify it to themselves. "Shit happens, but this time it happened to a bad person so it works out I guess."
Tiber727
5mo ago
Neither. It feels like (paraphrasing their view), "I am not going to harm someone but nor would I mourn one fewer asshole in the world." A threat means you are motivated to cause something to happen, this is either apathy for or emotional relief/positivity that one negative thing in your life has gone away. It's like the difference between being happy to find money laying on the street and stealing money.
Tiber727
5mo ago
Trump specifically thinks that having a trade deficit (importing a larger sum of goods than you are exporting) is bad and probably also that access to the U.S. market is a privilege that should be paid for.
Tiber727
5mo ago
For the record, that's more on the civil rights groups than the people they're supposed to represent. Wanting less policing is a minority position among all groups, notably blacks. Most are happy with the current levels, and with the exception of Asian Americans, "more policing" is more favorable than "less policing."
Tiber727
5mo ago
Yeah, that's my argument, that's why I never said "at the left's behest" but "for things offensive to the left". Because the right has a higher diversity of views they end up having in-group disagreements, and thus policing their extreme elements in a way that makes the movement less offensive to their opponents. No such mechanism exists on the left, therefore the conduct of the two movements is not equivalent.
Potato, potato. It's still a framing that reduces it to the left, in much the same way as "Republicans pounce." Praising Hitler is something the right also opposes, so if someone (particularly their boss) does not take the view that it was "locker room talk" then it was just the right firing the right for offending the right (and the left was there, too).
Doesn't that say something? If the "center left" exists, it should be mainstream, the places where they exist should be clear and obvious. If it's just a niche that no one knows where it congregates, the very concept of the "center left" becomes a bit dubious.
Not necessarily. The right makes up a half of the voting public, but I have no idea where the right congregates online relative to their numbers. And I think that the left is more online in a general sense. This old but not that old study suggests that progressives are the minority of even the Democrats, but things that are loud are the things that are noticed.
You can compare the reactions to the attack on Rand Paul with the reactions to the attack on Paul Pelosi, if you want. To compare either to the assasination of Charlie Kirk is a bit absurd.
They're both celebrations of violence, even if the level of violence differs.
Then consider me extremely confused. If calling them out is pointless, then why are you upset at all the "who cares" arguments, and demand that people not accept arguments that they'd find unacceptable if they came from the other side? What specifically do you want to see from MAGA? Is the thing that you want to see being provided by the center-left, and if not, why should MAGA be the first one to start?
Because you're conflating two different things. "Caring" and "policing" are similar but different. You can care about something but not be able to police it, because a notable aspect of police is they have the power to punish you. You can also police something without caring, for instance if you punish a subordinate for offending a crowd even though you had no problem with the behavior (which you seem to be implying about the Young Republicans). In the case of the Young Republicans, they are an organization with leadership, and the only "policing" that matters was what those bosses thought. When Obama tries to tell progressives to chill out a bit, he has no power to make them (because being an asshole is legal), so you dismiss that he made the gesture. When Trump does something crass, he polices the people who criticize him for it.
Kimmel is most comparable to the Young Republican situation, and you do have something of a point there, though I would argue it was complicated by A) the right suddenly being very pro-cancellation was culture war fodder and B) The Trump administration threatening ABC became politics fodder.
What I want to see, from all sides really, is self-reflection. The left demands the right apologize and think they have nothing to apologize for. The right demands the left apologize and think they have nothing to apologize for. You point out that the right has factions but so too does the left. I do think the latest election was the moderates being fed up with the far left, or at least the ineffectualness of Biden going after niche issues and ignoring bread and butter issues like the economy.
Tiber727
6mo ago
I thought you specifically mentioned "the median Republican" in your argument, so I'm a bit confused why this is suddenly about the Motte community. Again, I'm pretty sure we're a much better example of crazy right-wingers than Trump is.
Mostly I was referring to the median Republican, but I guess I found it casually dismissive. I took as if you were saying "Oh some other people elsewhere flip-flop, big deal," and I think "Yeah but The Motte looks to me the exact same in that regard." But still I'd argue that, if nothing else, Trump's trade policy is crazy, and I have seen the right complain about it, they aside from grousing about it a bit don't seem to care.
No, I said they got fired for saying things offensive to the left. Your examples would be akin to me saying "look how good the Republicans are in policing their own crazies, they fired this guy for being too permissive on abortion, and that guy for being in favor of no-fault divorce".
You did say that. But you also said that the right is not unanimous and that some on the right found it offensive. I am suggesting that rather than, "The right canceled the Young Republicans at the left's behest," the more plausible scenario to me is "Some members of the right found it offensive, some didn't. Ultimately the members of the right who found it offensive won out. The left was also complaining, but they were immaterial to the decision." If we were talking about some guy being fired at Microsoft, sure I'd say the left canceled him. But we're talking about the Young Republicans. It sounds to me like they'd be pretty likely to tell the left to fuck off if the left tried to cancel someone there. And besides that, the Young Republicans weren't fired for policy positions, they were fired for praising Hitler (yes I know, not really).
Oh wow, looks like the Neocons are not only the crazy-wing of the right, they're so far off they're actually left-wing according to you.
Oh wow, the notably unbiased and always reliable wikipedia called them conservative. You know you can go to the page and look at the names, right? Here you go: Harper's Letter. Kmele Foster, John McWhorter, Yascha Mounk, Kat Rosenfield, J.K. Rowling, Jesse Singal, Chloe Valdary, Andrew Solomon, Bari Weiss, Thomas Chatterton Williams, Matthew Yglesias, Cathy Young, Fareed Zakaria. I know these names and they are not neocons.
That doesn't bother me, but I just haven't seen the jeering at all, let alone at the same volume. When Jimmy Kimmel got cancelled, the left rallied around him, and as far as I can tell kept mostly quiet about the people who said something egregious enough to get fired for good.
There's been a bit of it, see here, but I'll be honest that I don't actually know where most of the center left congregates online, and they're the ones most apt to condemn it. If you want to say the left is worse on the subject of celebrating deaths, sure. Though the Paul Pelosi incident doesn't make me feel that the right is that much better.
That still works more in my favor than it does yours, if we're debating whether or not it's bad to say "I don't care" to the excesses of your side. That thesis only works if it's reasonably certain that the sides are symmetrical, if it's merely debatable, then well... my mind is open, but you'll need a bit more to convince me to care.
I'm not trying to convince you that the left is better than the right, and I'm not trying. It's debatable because "badness" is subjective. But I don't think the goose and the gander need to be exactly symmetrical for the goose/gander principle to hold.
Look, there's other strains of evidence for the right policing itself more than the left that don't boil down to the observer's bias. The right has more diversity of thought within itself, as per actual studies and their endlessly memed graphs, so it will contain more loud disagreements.
My point with Obama and this is the very idea of "policing" one's side is pointless. Plenty of the right have criticized Fuentes, but he still has a sizeable audience. Plenty have criticized Trump, and if anything they came out worse. It's the old, "So you called me a racist, now what?" You can't make them do anything or actually go away. Calling them out is kinda the most you can do, and if they ignore it not much you can do except maybe sabotage yourself by switching to a party whose policies you actively disagree with.
Side note that your links aren't useful. One seems to link to this comment chain and I wasn't sure if that was pointing to anything, and the other is a scatterplot with no context.
That can be true even in war. 9/11 didn't do much to directly hurt the USA, and for that matter neither did the American invasion of Afghanistan do much to hurt the Taliban. Now, I will agree that in times of peace, and within a nation the dynamics are somewhat different, but not completely so. There's a reason for why conservatives were looking for ways to get a Supreme Court majority to overturn Roe v. Wade, and didn't just pack to court the moment they had the chance.
I'm more saying that politics is fought with weapons that are, long-term, useless. Anything you do can be undone. Even Roe v Wade could later be restored, albeit with difficulty.
Tiber727
6mo ago
What do you want me to say, "first time?" I remember when the war in Iraq was the most important issue ever, right up until Obama got elected. Or the surveillance state. Or antisemitism. People do this stuff all the time, and the idea that the Republicans are worse than the Democrats in that regard seems baseless. What's more, if we accept this argument it would mean that Biden and Obama are the Demicratic crazies.
Doesn't have to be the first time to be true. Nor does it have to be exclusive to one party. But I'm not just talking about parties in general, I am referring to The Motte community. I certainly remember all the talk about lawfare.
Not only is it not entirely analogous, most of these examples are missing a critical component, other than the cancellations over Kirk, these are examples of the left cancelling itself for things offensive to other parts ot the left, not the right. Even the Kirk example is missing the other component of left-wingers jeering at the left wingers that just got fired.
Hold up, there's a hidden assumption in this. First you said Republicans are not in solidarity because otherwise it wouldn't have been leaked. But then you pivot to saying the Young Republicans were fired because the left demanded they be fired. Why do I have to grant that the left was the determining factor in them being fired? You yourself pointed out that that there are some on the right that have standards, and I don't think the left really has influence over an explicitly right-wing group.
As for the Kirk example, your "critical component" was never mentioned before. I grow a little tired of the whole, "My example was on a Tuesday, yours was on a Wednesday so it doesn't count." Comparisons are never exact, deal with it. Also, I posted Kotaku because that was the link I had, but the people who would jeer at it would not be found on Kotaku.
I know. You were trying to show how, if we take the right-wing arguments seriously, it would mean that the broader right-wing is there to cover for it's crzies, the same way they accuse the left of doing so. My point is that this argument doesn't work, because there is no symmetry in the conduct of the two sides.
Debatable. And there are people on the left that call out the left. The Harper Letter crowd for instance. Hell, Obama himself has called out progressives for some of their behavior.
I'm sorry I'm not seeing how anything in this paragraph connects to whether or not people of the Motte hate left wingers for saying "who cares" about their crazies.
I'm saying that "the left" is treated an amorphous blob. And yes, the right is too by the left, but they're not here right now. I'm saying that in order to say that "John Smith" should have his visa canceled because "protestors" have committed harassment is to say that the way for the left to not deserve this is to police their crazies. I'm using this as an example of how people might not think they are doing something when in fact they are.
Deterrence works almost exactly like that in war, and war is part of politics. The mechanics might be a big different during timesnof peace, but I'm not seing any fundamental issues with it working there as well.
War involves people dying or the threat of dying. Politics involves a pendulum of the people who temporarily lost coming back into power and often just undoing whatever the other person did as much as they are able. None of your deterrence is actually hurting people outside of making them angrier and more motivated to act again. Political arguments don't really have the power to really act as deterrence.
Isn't that literally what you asked me to do earlier?
In which part? Because overall what I'd say I want is for people on the Motte to stop and think, "Would I accept this line of reasoning if my opponents used it against me? Or would I try to find some excuse to invalidate it?" Again I do this too, but I'd like to think I try.
Tiber727
6mo ago
Whatever you think of him, most Republicans either aren't all that bothered by it, or think the Neocon wing is worse, therefore it is them that are the "crazy Republicans", not Trump.
All I can tell you is these are the things that seemed to make the right upset when a Democrat was doing it. To the point that from this side it looks like them being mad when a Democrat did it was outrage bait.
The kids from Yong Republicans got fired for making edgy jokes. If the right existed to provide cover for "crazies" like that, their messages would never get leaked in the first place, but if they did you'd see a unified front of Republicans actually covering for them. What you see instead is a significant of infighting between the "muh principles" wing of the Republican party (represented for example by James Lindsay or Seth Dillon) and the "don't do cancel culture against our own people, ffs" (for example Matt Walsh). I don't think there was an example of a similar amount of infighting on the Democratic side over one of it's subgroup saying something offensive to conservatives.
Point of order: it's not my view that your average Dem/Rep voter is covering for crazies. It's something that in my view gets thrown at me by members of the right when I say I vote left because I think the right is worse. That said, the left is perfectly willing to cancel its own, just not generally at the behest of the right (and yes, the right do try to cancel people for non-"turnabout" reasons). Not entirely analogous I admit, but I remember Al Franken. And yes people on the left have in fact been fired over Kirk comments. Or here's an old issue I remember about a lefty making an edgy joke about Africa.
Well, I think you're wrong about who is hated and why. I don't hate the people who say "who cares" about their crazies, I hate the crazies. The people who say "who cares" only start being annoying when they acting outraged over me saying "who cares" over my side's crazies, and thus demand that I hold myself up to a standard they never followed themselves.
This ties into group culpability. I had a rather long back and forth with JarJarJedi not too long ago. One of the things I'm reminded of is Trump canceling the student visas of people who protested Israel, on the logic that members of said protest harassed people. Whether the person whose visa was cancelled was one of the people harassing was irrelevant. Where I'm going with this is that many of the arguments made require group culpability in order to make sense. Someone can say "I don't believe X" and then support a policy that relies on it, and at that point I would say they're in denial about it. Note that this is a generic comment, I don't remember everything you specifically have said.
To be honest I don't really want to keep score for either side. Historical memory is good when someone starts acting like whatever media-invented outrage is unprecedented, but my goal in punching back isn't equalizing of scores, it's deterrence. If I'm reasonably sure I'm not going to get sucker-punched again, because I taught a belligerent a lesson that I can hold my own, I don't need to leave him with the exact same amount of stitches he originally gave me. But we're nowhere near this point, I don't even see the other acknowledging they did anything wrong, let alone incapacitating their crazies so it doesn't happen again.
That's not how politics work. By and large it's somebody punching in your general direction because they feel someone punched in their general direction. It can hotter or colder, but it will never stop and never admit wrongdoing. They don't care whether you think they did something wrong, they only care either if they think they did or, rarely, if a critical mass of the public thinks they did.
Tiber727
6mo ago
Why is Trump supposed to be the crazy wing of Republican? The wokes being called crazy is a result of the moderate Democrats not wanting to be associated with them, but Trump being deemed crazy is purely the result of outgroup slander.
Disagree. Even from a right-wing perspective, he lies habitually. Republicans may be protectionist, but his trade policy constantly changes. He's weirdly deferential to Putin (whereas the median Republican might not want to get involved in Ukraine but still admits Putin is bad), and his Ukraine policy is incoherent whether you think we should be involved or not. There's pretty much everything relating to RFK. He's pardoning corporate fraudsters. People are completely silent on his own blatant lawfare.
as to whether the right exists me to provide reputational cover - I dunno no man, half of them are doing some weird "neener-neener" bit about the YR kids getting fired, can you provide a similar example from your side?
Sorry I'm confused what point you are making here. Could you rephrase?
I don't know about you personally, but hasn't the majority of the left, in fact, taken that license?
The more charitable interpretation is they consider their bad apples to fall under the lizardman constant, similar to the responses I'm seeing regarding the right. But let's say yes anyway, because that is my criticism of the left. That they do so is in fact what I think is why The Motte hates the left so much. So why would you do it yourself? Yes the constant refrain is "Why should I better than my opponents, when that will only result in losing?" My point rests in how exactly one keeps score. It's relatively fine to say, "I'm keeping track of the bad things both sides do, and I think side X is worse." It's another thing to say, "I'm going to keep counting the score of my opponents, and stop counting my own." At that point you've decided you want to keep your head in the sand and have become just a rage reactionary. Your opponents are fully justified then in playing dirty, because you're saying you can be as corrupt as you want and it doesn't matter.
From the Clinton investigation:
Of course, that was Clinton, and I understand the assignment is that many here will say it's because she's a Democrat. Mike Pence cooperated with the search and no charges were brought. Here's a good read about some of the details of prosecution related to John Bolton, though I suppose it depends on if you're willing to believe it.
Looking back, it might be less a gentleman's agreement and more that prosecutors have typically been relying on proving intent. And if you can prove that you've given them several warnings and chances that would clear that bar.
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