because he assumed that the press would not believe anything he had to say
"Believe"? The theory is that they're part of the conspiracy.
They put him in a position where any move was a losing one.
Cover it up, get him on the cover-up and then it becomes (stupid) conventional wisdom - "the cover-up is what gets you" (which doesn't apply when you're (for example) Sandy Berger who only got two years probation for removing and destroying classified material from the National Archives). If he doesn't cover-up then they get him on the crime and never mention this floating hypothesis that "the cover-up is the real crime".
Prediction before reading is that they think affirmative action is no big deal as far as getting low IQ blacks - ("it's about the underfunded schools!") into college but also totally essential to overcome the inherent systemic racism enshrined in powerful institutions such as college admissions committees.
Empires require expansion, and there are few good provinces left for the US to incorporate
The reason empires require expansion is because the parasitic imperial class grows (it takes an interest in the system as a whole to slow this growth and everyone in the system is interested only in maintaining his position in the system - hence, no one checks the growth of the parasitic load). The US empire is mainly a system of parasitism on Americans rather than one where foreign conquest yields returns.
Even the foreign clients are much like domestic USG clients - an excuse to take money from Americans, take a cut and give it to the foreign client in exchange for their main service - hostility to USG enemies (Americans).
This makes the historical comparisons difficult - this is rather a unique historical situation.
Of course the one way that USG actually does collect a benefit from running its empire is that the empire uses dollars and USG controls those and can issue them at will - that acts as a silent tax on the entire empire that can't be evaded.
The question is: would NATO accept to lose to Russia in a war of attrition, with all that means for its credibility and for viability of major land grabs, or would it rather accept some upfront cost to de-mothball military production lines
Because the actual enemy of USG and it's satrapies are the people who would gain wealth by producing things such as arms. Deindustrialization of the west wasn't an accident and it wasn't the result of "economic forces" - it was the result of a series of deliberate choices. Reversing that trend after the Regime has gone mask off would be very high risk.
Other than CNN telling you that it's so, is there actually any post-1991 evidence that Russia is, in fact, our "long-term adversary"
They don't have gay pride parades.
NYT only doesn't lie so that when they do it has the maximum chance of being believed when they do - a problem which is not unique to NYT but is shared by everyone who explicitly or implicitly has a utilitarian ethical framework.
The implication here is that we mainly have an epistemology crisis.
Most people aren't going to be as competent and trained in argumentation to spot these evasions but a big problem our society has is that even our "elites" can't spot them when the evasions are done as long as they're being done for reasons the NYT would support.
Implicitly their epistemology is "believe the implication of the NYT - don't look for the missing factual content or added non-factual content".
Very few people can reason out an epistemology on their own - most need to be educated in it. At the very least almost everyone needs to read about it and to do that one would have to find the right reading material. This means there's a lot of power in getting to set the ground rules of evaluating claims and installing a faulty epistemology - look at wikipedia and how it launders progressive claims through the "reliable sources" rule. The wikipedia rules are rules for deciding what should get printed on the site which implicitly makes them rules about discerning truth.
Progressives want to install rules like "trust the NYT" (which wikipedia has as a literal rule) because progressives known that other progressives control those institutions. Progressives still have a back door of "ignore the NYT when it says things we don't want to hear", of course.
Are you implying that "get woke go broke" is going to actually work to restrain progressive religious proselytizing in tech?
Here's how it will actually work - prog approve companies that filter their results in prog approved ways will be permitted to use the payments system and ones that don't, won't. VCs won't fund the compute time to build an ungimped model because "you'll just get cut off from the banking system anyway" (if the VC doesn't already share the prog goals, that is).
He's very light-skinned but has highly African features. I'd guess closer to quadroon or even mulatto than octoroon.
Yet somehow it happens now and didn't happen 10 years ago.
Do you have a source for this claim?
No, there aren't newspaper reports from 10 years ago saying "today no one got shoved in front a subway train".
On the other hand, there are videos of it today.
This is an amazingly disingenuous request intended to both shift the burden of proof away from you - not great but part of the jockeying - but also to set yourself up as the arbiter - "sorry, just not proven to my satisfaction - maybe they were covering up all those subway deaths" and should actually result in a banning if people want this place to have good norms of discussion.
...what the fuck? How the hell is this a reasonable response? Most of these people are fine as long as they are on their meds
I don't care at all about the hypothetical situation where a subway murderer might be fine. If you want to argue "well, he's not responsible for his actions - couldn't help himself - schizophrenia and all" then the appropriate response is "well then obviously he must be executed and very quickly because a man who can't understand cause and effect who enjoys hurting people is basically a rabid dog".
This is normal discourse, you simply "disagree on the object level" but if my interpretation of the object level is correct then the metadiscourse is meaningless. You can wonder why this position or that is being taken by progressives and speculate about the forces of this or that but if you've ruled out the actual explanation all you can do is introduce epicycles into your increasingly ornate model like Scott with his absurd claim in his Toxoplasmosa of Rage essay where "you see, they pick fraudulent cases that fall apart immediately because those are better loyalty test" - that's an epicycle to avoid noticing that they pick fraudulent cases that fall apart immediately because their alleged world-view is a cover story for the destructive changes they want to impose and the cover story itself isn't related to reality but is the outcome of a media / academic / bureaucratic machine that is in the narrative creation business.
The thing they're not lazy about is making sure they have ownership of a clip before they play it on air since the system of who/whom that we call a legal system actually recognizes media ownership claims as important (for now at least) so they would have obtained rights to the video before playing it.
I’m going to ignore your claim that low crime is the thing progressives are objecting to, in itself, rather than them just being stupid.
Seeing as how that's the crux of the argument then there's not much productive discussion that's going to happen here. Progressives really object to "Jim Crow" not because "it's an offense that cries to heaven for redress" but because it worked to make a racially mixed society livable - that's the part progressives object to. You can't claim that certain people being second class citizens due to their ancestry / species / race is the greatest crime in the universe is your guiding moral principle because that is what we have now with zero objection from progressives except to point out that blacks aren't venerated enough. The alternatives are Jim Crow or something functionally like it - apartheid, Rhodesia's laws, Singapore / Dubai / Qatar style treatment of guest workers, etc. or race communism then it's a super easy choice to pick the former (unsurprisingly enough progressives hate all of those adaptations - anything that doesn't result in massive crime and a one-sided race war offends progressives). Progressives pick the latter because they like the outcome.
Thanks for the link - this person is easily recognized as having significant SSA ancestry.
Based on some recent discussion in the CW thread (I believe), it seems like a lot of the specific issue of "pushing people in front of trains" is schizophrenics going off their meds. Their behavior is not based on a logical reasoning process and therefore cannot be influenced by a cultural more that (allegedly) allows some people to get away with such behavior.
Yet somehow it happens now and didn't happen 10 years ago. "He was arrested 36 times for violent assaults and let go each time" has something to do with it as well as noticing that "deranged men" (euphemism used in one of the news reports by the only source willing to actually notice these things happening) are sane enough to shove smaller, less dangerous people in front of subway trains. Oh look, there is a logical reasoning process going on there related directly to cause, effect and consequences. Calling the person "schizophrenic" doesn't remove that and if it did then that's all the more reason to immediately execute those people as an uncontrollable danger to everyone around them.
More so inside the Soviet Union than in America, though.
More likely to find a Pravda believer on the faculty at Yale than in Moscow.
But I think it goes deeper than that - I don't think the right currently has a cohesive ideological framework (at least that I can articulate or grasp) for dealing with society's ills in the same way that Reagan did (cut taxes/regulation, business does great and the lower strata of society will prosper along with everyone else) or that woke people do (patriarchal white supremacist ableist society needs to be checked for the lower strata to prosper).
Do you think that's fairer, or still off the mark?
That's fair from my perspective but it's also necessary due to the asymmetry between the left and right.
The left is the side of "do something [that just so happens to make the problem it's claimed to solve worse and enriches my team and hurts my enemies] then never look at the results of that something but use the failure as evidence that the problem was not enough progressivism".
It can and does work piecemeal (even if you think my above description is "uncharitable") - you can support "more money for better teacher pay" and "more enforcement of diversity quotas in employment" and "more money for addict services" and etc. because each of those is ultimately a parasitic drain on private society - parasites are only in competition if the host is terminal.
On the other hand, the right has to come up a positive vision of what society should be and how it should be ordered - can't have a monarchy and some kind of restored republic so the only thing the right can agree on is that the left has to be stopped from doing more things.
More accurately, everyone wants the ends - the society that would exist that way but almost every erosion that progressives put through was individually popular.
"Cut cost disease" is exactly the same as "get rid of public sector feather bedding" AND "get rid of 'reasonable environment protections'" AND "get rid of simple rules to ensure justice in hiring", etc.
Ultimately it's a case that the framework of rules that progressives push for that is somewhat popular simply because it permeates all society is "everything must be approved of by a committee using lots of words to ensure fairness". None of it changes without a cultural change and it takes something pretty extreme to change a culture that way.
ACLU was formed as the legal defense fund for CPUSA - they haven't betrayed their principles.
https://www2.law.ucla.edu/volokh/blog/baldwin.pdf
The famous cases like Skokie Illinois was classic "signal boost people that make the other side look bad" (only works when you have total control of the press) combined with "create a reputation for our organization as principled that will allow us to be more effective a boosting left wing causes".
Amazingly "optimistic" of you to think they didn't do any due diligence rather then that they did it and didn't care at all.
They had to watch the video to edit it down to what they showed.
Micheal Bloomberg demonstrates that you cannot allow progs any power or voice because they actually hate good governance because it's good governance.
Here's the cycle:
Traditional methods controlled crime pretty well
Progs wanted to undermine traditional methods and had a broad spectrum attack on them - legal about "rights" mainly (case clearance rates drop precipitously after the Warren court inventions)
As a way to head off a reaction to their attack, they create nonsense social science where they claim that crime cannot be solved without addressing "root causes" - the root causes being lack of programs. You see echos of this with the modern "trained deescalation personnel instead of police"
Progs win, crime skyrockets throughout the 60s and 70s, plateaus in the 80s and jumps in the 90s
Over time progs come to believe their own lies about "root causes" - that's what they're taught in universities and what trickles down from there
Giuliani / Bratton introduce the idea of addressing crime by addressing crime - Giuliani won in NYC due to support from more blue collar whites and progressives didn't go full out against him because they knew addressing crime by addressing crime couldn't work - it didn't solve the "root causes"
It did work, gets copied in lots of places - progressives are horrified by the decline in crime and pretend that concern over racial injustice is the reason they object to doing things that actually do lower crime - these objections escalate over time
Bloomberg is able to hold out against these objections because he's more entrenched but progressives elect the next mayor who basically undoes it all
Ultimately the problem is that their objection to enforcing the law isn't based on anything that they say it is - the racial unfairness angle falls apart under inspection - their objection is to anything effective. That's the only way to make sense of their behavior because every single thing done was done still under the framework they set out as being within the rules. No executions, no speedy trials, no executive authority vested in cops, no approval of men defending themselves, etc. - just very PMC style "dispatch the cops who follow proper procedure and protocols that follow every explicit progressive rule". There are no crime control measures that are effective that they will support and if they support it and it turns out to be effective, they'll withdraw support when it's shown to be effective.
Link?
and avoid addressing any of the counterarguments I and others have made.
Blatantly false.
An example - your argument:
For this to be true, you would have to explain why so many blacks are in prison.
Addressed here:
Because they commit an absurd amount of crime - most of which is "unsolved", a good portion of which is unreported.
If you want to ask for evidence for this then you run right into progressive "manipulation of procedural outcomes" - progressive academics straight up lie so you have to go to anecdotal evidence that nonetheless contains valuable statistical information and that shows that, yes, blacks are basically immune to the law. An example elsewhere in this thread was a black guy who killed a few people in a home invasion who served 4 years of an 8 year sentence then killed someone else when released. You can find dozens of examples on the NY Post twitter feed of "this person was arrested 47 times on felony charges previously". To which you rebut "Chinese robber" but the argument implied there is one that assumes the conclusion. "You can find examples of anything because there are a lot of people" is the general argument but it's simply impossible to find examples "arrested 47 times, committed a newsworthy crime" where the perp wasn't black - certainly you can't find dozens of examples of this. You can't find videos of whites behaving the way blacks do such that there's a joke "new Street Fighter level just dropped" when you can watch a new video on a daily basis of blacks having mass brawls in public.
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Why would you think that instead of the opposite?
There were communists in the OSS and CIA when the US was supposedly in a conflict with the USSR - IOW, when there would have been pressure on them to hide that fact.
After the collapse of the USSR there's been a CIA director who voted for CPUSA - any pressure to hide radical left wing affiliations is long gone.
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