magicalkittycat
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User ID: 3762
magicalkittycat
2d ago
There's not really much useful to actually be gleaned from native Americans regarding birthright citizenship cause they are a very weird and unique situation.
The Indian naturalization act was necessary because of previous decisions that treated the tribes as sovereign entities of their own. (see Cherokee Nation v Georgia and Worcester v Georgia). Due to this, they actually had a lot of powers that states didn't have like the ability to independently enter into treaties with other nations. So they couldn't be entitled to birthright citizenship because they in a weird legal sense were not considered to be in the US "properly", they were considered to be in the tribal land. Despite that about 60% of indians were already citizens anyway due to the Dawes act, having a citizen parent, treaty agreements (like the Choctaw tribe), and many other factors. And yes even now tribes still exist in a very strange legal status, as "domestic dependent nations". with their own sovereignty rights.
It does make for an interesting possibility depending on how the Indian Naturalization Act is worded. If it is particular enough, it might be possible for a non citizen to give birth on tribal land outside of proper US jurisdiction and therefore not get the kid birthright citizenship. I imagine it would be ruled as included now from the act but it would depend on the actual words there.
magicalkittycat
3d ago
Fine, this particular instantiation of word games was the final straw to a portion of the rationalist-adjacent crowd that had never bothered with Yud's masturbatory sequences, and proved that the considerations of the Bay Arean Social Influence were more important than anything a normal person would call rationalism or utilitarianism for the greatest good of the greatest number of people, and virtually stamped approval of utility monsters- so long as they are utility monsters approved by the Bay Arean Society.
This is still quite lacking. The only actual criticism is an underlying claim that effectively says "rationalism and rationalist communities like those under Yud are more concerned about social approval than reason."
This would be a fair criticism if shown, but it's not shown. It seems to me at least to be motivated primarily off your shock that Yud or Scott Alexander might disagree with you on something you personally consider simple, and instead of asking "could they actually have different perspectives?", you assume it must just be a bad faith appeal to the bay area zeitgeist.
Let's try again: redefining the categories of "man" and "woman" to be useless circular referents makes people less economically efficient and dismantles a functional society that broadly continues to find significant moral, ethical, and economic value in having some legal separation of the sexes.
Now this is an actual argument. It makes actual meat filled claims
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That categories are being poorly redefined in a purely circular manner
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That the redefinitions have observable economic impact.
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They also have observable moral and ethical impact.
Now ethical and moral questions are something hard for rationalism to really tackle because they're so subjective. After all, something like a Muslim claiming it is immoral to eat pigs is correct from their moral perspective. So those are just like, ok it's against your personal moral views. Fair enough.
But we can actually address the other ones, particularly if there is an observable economic impact here. We could look at more progressive countries and compare them to less progressive ones. Do countries that allow or condone transition tend to do better or worse than ones that don't? Or do US states that condone it do better than ones that don't? Or we could look at the before/after economic status of a country/state after a relevant law or ruling happened and see if anything changed. Or whatever other sorts of tests.
There may be some confounding factors here, but we can actually test it. I don't know if it's right or wrong, but you've made a real criticism at least.
Maybe the claim can still survive it, that's not an excuse. Scott has covered this exact sort of topic pretty recently and I think he highlights the problems with "well I still think it anyway so stop nitpicking" defense
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/if-its-worth-your-time-to-lie-its
If it's worth FTTG's and Wesley Yang's time to make claims based off piss poor criteria (and it seems people agree with me, even if they don't wish to admit it, that they are piss poor given no one here actually wants to give an affirmative defense for why trans awareness month should be included but black music month should not) then I'm going to point out that the criteria used is terrible.
Bad criteria like this from the left gets called out by multiple users here. Little reason for me to do the thing everyone else will do. Bad criteria like this from the right when called out gets "how dare you nitpick?" and endless meta complaints. Lots of reason to point out it's terrible then, very few others will. The reaction here is cringe behavior as Scott puts it.
I’m not saying you’re required to correct every little trivial falsehood. Nobody has time for that. But I think if you want to correct it, people don’t get to call you “cringe” or describe it as “well acktually”. What could be more cringe than telling small lies, then bullying anyone who tries to correct you, in the hopes that future audience will be too cowed to speak up?
you want to be reductive, sure. I don't like murder either, or green bell peppers.
I can give actual substanted reasons for why I don't like murder, like "having people live in fear of violence makes them less economically efficient" or "allowing murder dismantles a functional society" or even just the basic "I think murder is morally wrong".
What you provide here is just fluff. Pure ad hominem.
Scott's essay was silly, socially motivated, and shot a hole through the chest of Rationalism as being anything more than postmodern word games with a nerd's coat of hobby paint.
It's disguised in a wordy way to appear sophisticated, but there is nothing substantial said here.
That is what I call damning with faint praise.
But even with the fluff, it's still wrong. These "word games" have been a part of rationalism since at least the sequences, thus Scott playing word games couldn't have blown a hole open, if there is a hole it was already there. So even the fluff is wrong.
Just as the Motte is radical compared to wider society, you're radical compared to the Motte.
One important question, radical to who. The anti western democracy beliefs of a few users here is wildly radical even compared to some of the farthest right corners of mainstream Trump supporters (I live in a Trump >+20 county in NC, I've talked to plenty of normie republicans and I don't think any of them are as wildly anti western democracy as some of the posts here) but might look milquetoast in China or Russia.
My strong belief in free trade is the mainstream opinion of economists and one of the dominant beliefs of the Republican party for like >50 years, and yet when put up to the current ruling politicians as a gauge, I am now radical because the winds have shifted with our pro tariff president. Or actually, I would have been except tariffs are one of Trump's least popular policies and most Americans still seem to be rather pro free trade. So which belief is radical there? Depends on who we use as a baseline, the current president or the American people?
The point FtttG is making overall is, I think, correct, in that it's a bit rich to accuse conservatives of politicising the transgender issue or drawing attention to it. "You brought it up!" is the correct response for conservatives to make, perhaps with a side order of, "If it's so trivial and unimportant, why don't you just give in?"
The conclusion could be overall correct, I didn't comment on that. I specifically went for the clearly bad logic regarding calender days, because that is clearly bad logic.
The criteria chosen for which days or months get included is terrible. It was terrible enough that if it wasn't for "the writer was just being too lazy or stupid to consider if there was other observed days for African Americans that meet the level we use for trans related ones" being a valid explanation, I would assume it was in purposeful bad faith.
The meta complaints about me are really interesting like that. Does someone really lack such self awareness that they don't recognize themotte, a pretty radical spinoff of an already pretty out there and eccentric group (rationalists) would be made up of a bunch of people with wildly different views from general society?
Well yeah probably, this place is bound to be autism central, such deficiency is expected to some degree. But it's like that meme of "autistic person meeting someone else slightly more autistic", like woah.
But I also think such meta complaints are used to mask a lack of meaningful response to the actual comment.
Is there a good criteria in which something like Black Music Month, which has a wikipedia page and congressional approval should not be counted as observed when comparing African American related holidays to trans holidays, but under which trans awareness month should be? Perhaps, I can't think of any but there might be I suppose.
There's been no answer regarding the actual meat of my argument there. Maybe he has an answer and just won't give it, maybe he has a convincing criteria that blows mine out of the water. Where was it?
This behavior is not uncommon for the site. For example consider this discussion where instead of providing any evidentiary meat to chew on to back up the claims that police had charged a protestor for assault when they were just defending themselves (like a Fox News article about it, or the charging documents, or something other than "random x user says so"), commentors get into a meta discussion. Where is it? Where's the meat? No one wants to provide any.
I even said this in a comment then
How about instead of having a meta conversation, we have the actual conversation where someone finally provides semi decent evidence for their claims a guy was charged for bruising and officers fists while blocking beyond "guy on X said so".
It all seems like a way to dodge that maybe said evidence might not actually exist. I couldn't find any! You double checked and didn't find it. So where is it?
Of the 10 people who saw this and down voted, none of them had any interest in providing actual evidence for the claims presented. Same with the original comment asking for any actual piece of evidence, no one seemed to think that providing proof was a reasonable part of discussion?
It's all meta hate, no substance.
magicalkittycat
5d ago
It doesn't matter anyway. I never said no one has ever talked about it or mentioned it. I said that it's not observed in any meaningful way. A single acknowledgement from the San Francisco government about it is not a meaningful observation.
From pretty much any meaningful criteria, black music month is far more observed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African-American_Music_Appreciation_Month
It was initiated as Black Music Month by President Jimmy Carter, who, on June 7, 1979, decreed that June would be the month of Black music.[1] After the announcement by Carter, the bill finally passed in 2000 when activist Dyana Williams' 10 years of effort persuaded Congress
This is officially recognized by Congress and created by a then sitting president. Any criteria that includes "trans awareness month" and not Black Music Month is stupid. Like this doesn't even have room for smart debate, it is the most official one by far. And black music month is still at the bottom of the barrel barely scraping by "meaningful observation".
You are allowed to criticize Wikipedia, of course you are. I am allowed to point out that Wikipedia has their rights as a private organization and their exercise of their rights does not constitute "forcing" a person into anything.
The same way if I were to kick you out of my house for chewing on my couch doesn't force you to not chew on couches. You can go chew on your own. It just means you can not chew on my couch in my home since I have the right to remove you from my home for whatever reason (including no reason!) as I deem. As you leave, feel free to call me a fascist couch Nazi or something.
Give me a break. That's not true.
One random thing from San Francisco is not evidence of it being actually widely observed. It doesn't even have a wikipedia page! TDOV and trans awareness week do. National Ice Cream Month does. The Black Music Month one does. And yet this one doesn't.
So black music month should be counted as far more official than trans awareness month should. In fact the former had a bill about it passed by Congress, it literally is more official! At the very least a count of African American related days vs trans related days should include black music month in it if it includes trans awareness month. If you don't, then you're just applying criteria inconsistently in order to fit a predetermined complaint.
You've been posting a constant stream of things that seem to defend libertarianism but which are either extreme, subtly wrong, or both.
This is just another way to say "things I personally disagree with". Like what exactly is extreme? My reform the FDA ideas are just like the things you'd find on Marginal Revolution. In my argument of ending anti discrimination law, I literally linked this ACX review.
Sure I guess compared to the average person who thinks social security should double, regulations should be endless and businesses are evil I'm extreme but in terms of the rationalist community I'm not uncommon. Maybe you should branch out more among rationalists beyond just this place.
This is a silly complaint in many ways.
1: It's easy to make up as many unofficial days as you want.
For example I just asked AI real quick about June and got
Men's Health Month, Alzheimer's and Brain Awareness Month, PTSD Awareness Month, Migraine and Headache Awareness Month, Scleroderma Awareness Month, National Safety Month, Immigrant Heritage Month, Caribbean American Heritage Month, Black Music Month, Great Outdoors Month, Food-Related Months, National Dairy Month, National Candy Month, National Fresh Fruit and Vegetables Month, Turkey Lovers Month, Iced Tea Month, National Camping Month, National Rivers Month, Rose Month, National Homeownership Month, National Employee Wellness Month, Effective Communications Month, Fight the Filthy Fly Month, Accordion Awareness Month, Candy Month, Zoo and Aquarium Month
And that's just a small portion. Most of those things are not actually observed in any meaningful way. November is not seen as "trans awareness month", I've never seen any LGBT community talking about that ever. In fact I asked what type of month November is considered and it gave me the five of Native American Heritage Month, Veterans and Military Families Month, National Family Caregivers Month, National Adoption Month, and Movember so presumably those, which I've never heard of once, are more prominent.
And it's not even on the national calendar day site. so seemingly something like National Tar Syndrome Awareness Month is still more cared about than "trans awareness month" is.
2: By the same standards, black related days have been drastically undercounted. Such as June also being Black Music Month! Or August as Black Business Month. And speaking of November, it's also National Black Catholic History Month. And don't forget about National Black Family Day or Black Women's Equal Pay Day or whatever else.
The problem is that Scott's essay was silly, socially motivated, and shot a hole through the chest of Rationalism as being anything more than postmodern word games with a nerd's coat of hobby paint.
In other words, you just don't like it. Meta discussions about words and meaning have been here since the beginning of rationalism https://www.lesswrong.com/s/SGB7Y5WERh4skwtnb
HA! You know, I just realized that in context the phrasing highlights quite explicitly the TERF complaint that most trans discourse is inherently misogynistic. Indeed, the categories were made for man.
Speaking of, that's an example! "Man" in Scott's case is referring to humans, homo sapiens.
magicalkittycat
5d ago
I'm against anti discrimination laws and think they should be overturned.
Bostock was not logical. The question is what did the words of the civil rights law mean (not quite the same as intent). It seems obviously clear that in the 1960s the words had a specific meaning and we then used a meaning in the 2020s to read into the historic statutes a specific requirement.
Neil Gorsuch addressed this already as a staunch textualist.
An employer who fires an individual for being homosexual or transgender fires that person for traits or actions it would not have questioned in members of a different sex. Sex plays a necessary and undisguisable role in the decision, exactly what Title VII forbids. Those who adopted the Civil Rights Act might not have anticipated their work would lead to this particular result. But the limits of the drafters' imagination supply no reason to ignore the law's demands. Only the written word is the law, and all persons are entitled to its benefit.
Gorsuch is a remarkably consistent textualist when it comes to statutory interpretation. Maybe you disagree with textualism as a concept, but it is a coherent and understandable legal philosophy.
Congress should get rid of such anti discrimination laws, but that is not the court's job so long as they do not violate the constitution. It is to adjucate interpretation, and from a textualist standpoint I agree with Gorsuch that Title VII includes LGBT people.
magicalkittycat
5d ago
I think we're all negotiating on price. Like, to give the obvious example, do you think kids should be allowed to kill themselves?
It's not illegal for a kid to try to kill themselves. Most kids don't commit suicide for the simple reason that they don't want to kill themselves and of those kids who do, it is not the law that serves to prevent their deaths. No suicidal child says "I was gonna jump off the roof but 5(b) makes it a criminal charge with a two year probation if caught".
magicalkittycat
5d ago
the US, the FDA defines what "SPF50" even means. They have norms and test protocols to ensure this significance. Without the FDA, coconut oil has SPF50 for all intents and purposes. Could some other industry committee define "SPF", and sue cosmetic companies that use it wrongly? Sure
A government organization could still exist to define things in a certain way and charge people for fraud if they make the false claim to fit the government set definition when they don't, without having to also ban access to anything and everything that doesn't fit. If the government wants to define ice cream as a certain x% butterfat then so be it, as long as I'm still allowed to buy things that aren't at that percentage.
(Ironically, those old aromatics are still in use today in US sun screen, most other countries have moved on to newer, larger and better organic filters, which the FDA hasn't evaluated yet and which pass through the skin much less readily)
It is not ironic that the market has already moved into safer and better filters while the central bureaucracy at the FDA has failed to keep up. It is a major part of my complaint. It's not just that paternalism treats us like morons, it's that paternalism is also done by morons whose priorities and definitions don't align with everyone else. People want those better filters, but isn't there someone you forgot to ask?
Yes, without doubt. I'm not actually all that pro regulations. But that doesn't mean we can just remove them all, Chesterton’s Fence is there for a reason - maybe not a good reason, but I like my food and my drugs well tested. My barber may be held to lower standards.
There should also be good reason when regulations are put up too. And just because it's "safety coded" doesn't even mean it makes an impact. Look at the push for single stair reform for instance, the two means of egress model not only costs way more money but an actual irony here, can end up hurting people more due to the other design decisions forced by such choices.
Regulations can hurt people a lot. Like why don't many apartments have elevators? Over regulation on the size, maintenance and labor requirements wildly drive up prices so they no longer pencil in for many new developments. How many people suffer trying to haul furniture up multiple flights of stairs because of this? I have a friend who was injured moving a dresser once, that could have been prevented if it wasn't for regulation blocking elevators.
The alternative is clearly worse. Because what sucks more than not having Euro sunscreen? Giving someone money for a jar of "SPF50 coconut oil" and burning lobster red. Giving somebody money for bootleg Asian sunscreen and getting a batch contaminated with benzene (carcinogenic in California, and everywhere else). Both happened. Both are worse than having a small selection of reliable sunscreen.
That's called fraud. We can enforce against fraud without requiring genuine suppliers to pay tens or hundreds of millions of dollars "proving safety" of something widely used around the world without issue. People lying about the contents of a product or what it can do is a different category than "here's product A, it's used as a sunscreen in Countries X, Y and Z"
And don't get me wrong, the FDA isn't really doing a good job here. But it's a job that needs to be done, and probably to a standard that's not so far removed from what is done today. Regulations are written in blood, ect.
Some do get written in blood sure, but tons of regulations are just made up. Lots of regulations are even made just to make it more difficult for competition to exist, like why does being a barber in NC require almost 1600 school hours plus a 12 month apprenticeship? Do we genuinely think that this is because there was a bunch of wild barbers out there chopping people's ears off like they're Sweeney Todd? No. It's to make it more difficult for haircutting alternatives and drive up prices.
magicalkittycat
5d ago
You're dodging the central point, which is that ancient cultures already knew that geuevedoces weren't women.
One ancient culture, which also isn't even fully true as plenty do continue to live as women
Imperato-McGinley's thorough medical investigations showed that in most cases their new, male equipment seems to work fine and that most Guevedoces live out their lives as men, though some go through an operation and remain female.
So even in the specific Dominican Republic culture, 5ARD is not always man.
No, she didn't live life as a woman. She lived as a girl until puberty. Then when girls started to develop into women, Khelif developed into a man.
A man with female on their birth certificate and presumably female appearing outer genitalia treated as a woman in an extremely anti trans Muslim country. If Algeria with religious fatwas ordered against transitioning considers Khelif a woman, perhaps she is in many contexts and it's not a "lie".
Humans knew about the male and female sex before the discovery of chromosomes. You don't need to know the genetic details to understand that males and females are built differently.
Sure, but they didn't (couldn't) test it through genes but instead stuff like the outer genitalia. Which Semenya and Khelif both seem to have female presenting outer genitalia. They would have been considered female by many people in many areas such as the anti trans Algeria!
It's settled science that Imane Khelif is a man in all ways that matter for the purpose of boxing.
Declaring it settled doesn't mean it is. Again Algeria, a country even more anti trans than many of the people here, considers her as a woman. The doctors who handled her at birth considered her as female. Clearly there is still dispute.
Sometimes the broader society is against discrimination, while some areas within it are less enlightened. (This was approximately the case with the origin of anti-discrimination laws.)
This was actually one of the reasons why big business pushed for the anti discrimination laws. General society wasn't open to blatant discrimination anymore, but there was strong enough pockets left they feared it could create a market niche and enable smaller competition to take their more bigoted customers away. The solution then was to make sure that couldn't happen by enshrining it everywhere as illegal instead.
There's actually an incredibly easy way to check this simply by looking at how Semenya and Khelif were treated before their intersex conditions were known. Semenya was assigned female and raised as a girl, and lived through her life as a woman. Likewise Khelif was also assigned female, raised as a girl, and lived through her life as a woman. Their specific lives were as girls and women.
This varies between cultures, obviously, but for example, in the Dominican Republic boys with 5ARD are called guevedoces (literally: penis-at-twelve) and they are considered men who only grow a penis when they hit puberty. They aren't considered women, which makes sense, when they don't have any of the traits of women: they don't have breasts, wider hips, they don't have ovaries or a uterus, and cannot give birth. But they can impregnate women, like men, just like Caster Semenya has.
Yes it does vary among cultures, which is a great example of how even biological categories can be really fuzzy. After all, categorization systems are created by humans for humans. The map is not the territory.
It also depends on the intersex condition in question too, there is way more than just 5ARD so even if every case of 5ARD in every single culture throughout all of history was treated as men, we would still have tons of other fuzzy conditions to consider. And things like the SRY gene test can not be following the historic definition, as genes were not known until very recently. It is literally impossible unless time travel is invented and someone taught our ancient Germanic/Norse/whateverelseispartofEnglish ancestors about genetics.
Seeing them legal and encouraged has really strained my principles here. If I'm absolutely forced to choose between the two realistic options ... I'd pick legal for everything to deny the state the capacity. But if they already have the capacity, I'd be picking illegal for some things. Gender reassignment is probably one of them.
Well do keep in mind that there's also illegal and encouraged. People will just ignore the law and at some point you're stuck fighting a losing battle trying to actually enforce it too much. You haven't actually stopped it, you're just harassing people every once in a while.
Traffic enforcement is at constant odds with this issue, no one wants speeders in their neighborhood but everyone wants to speed in other neighborhoods. People even get pissed at you if you don't speed. We all accept it as technically against the law, but there's no winning the fight here. You can't even automate the process because no one wants it. We will not stop the speeders, so we just give everyone a x% chance of being unlucky and paying a fine each time they drive.
It's the same thing with a lot of drugs, and prostitution and gambling. There's just only so much you can do, because lots of people want it and they want it very much. And enforcing against it can just make them pissed. Joe Rogan famously smokes weed on his podcast despite being in Texas. Will Texas authorities ever go after him? No. Actually enforcing Texas's marijuana laws like that is unpopular and they know it.
You can change a fair bit with law, and you can harass random people every once in a while like we do with traffic enforcement and prostitution stings but in general if people want it they'll just do it anyway. The people who really want to gamble will find a way to gamble. The people who really want a prostitute will find some sort of escort loophole. The people who really want drugs will get it. And the markets will respond, the demand pulls in more supply. There's a reason why Trump's drone strikes on traffickers hasn't done much, because markets. If supply goes down then price goes up and there's more reward to providing new supply. Even Singapore struggles.
But even the data we do have show the number of detained drug users steadily rising, especially among youth under 20. If demand didn't exist, smugglers wouldn't regularly risk their lives muling their product into the country.
And likewise people who really want to transition will find a way. People manage it in Russia of all countries, they will handle it here.
magicalkittycat
6d ago
You are allowed to disagree with them, you have just as much rights as any of them do. The only reason I'm pointing this out is because the comment included them as an example of
suspect you know that most people's main objection is to forcing the rest of society to play along. That includes:
Wikipedia is not forcing you to "play along". If they were using the threat of violence in some form they would be. But as is, they're a private organization that gets to decide their own policies.
You were the one who implied he shouldn't criticize Wikipedia, by giving the "but it's legal" retort. Come on now.
But he said
suspect you know that most people's main objection is to forcing the rest of society to play along. That includes:
He is allowed to criticize Wikipedia. In the same way I am allowed to point out that Wikipedia exercising their rights is not "forcing" him to do anything.
If Wikipedia was actually forcing him to do something that would be wrong. But they aren't.
The problem with this response has always been is that categories vary wildly between groups.
Even something as simple as "what is a sound?" gets a fierce debate when you ask if a tree falling in a forest with no one around makes one. No one contests the base level reality, that the air around the tree vibrates. They disagree over whether or not the vibrations itself counts as sound, or if it's the perception of said vibrations that do.
We see this everywhere. Is water wet? Is a hot dog a sandwich? Is a palm tree a tree?
And the words themselves can shift depending on the context they're used in. The tomato as a fruit vs a vegetable is a common example of this. And Scott's own example of whales and dolphins as dag for the department of dag.
And words change over time too. And it's not just trans activists who commit this either. When someone refers to Caster Semenya, Imane Khelif or other intersex individuals with female presenting genital as a man, they have changed the definition of man and woman. They are applying a new modern definition over words far far older than chromosomes were known to exist for. Historically intersex people like Semenya and Khelif would have been women, it is the changed definition that says otherwise.
The trans debate is often like this. A debate over categories, a debate if sound is the vibrations or the perception. A debate if a tree is the morphological structure of a tall perinnial plant with a trunk and crown and thus the palm tree is included, or if a tree is that but also as a woody plant with secondary growth. Or if we wanted to define it even more exclusively, we could do a woody dicot with secondary growth and exclude stuff like conifers as well since they're of a different lineage. We can do all sorts of things like that! And we do. And we argue about them all the time. Categories are made for man, not man for the categories.
This is strawman libertarianism. People should have a right to do these things, but that doesn't mean they shouldn't be criticized for doing so.
In what way have you not been allowed to criticize Wikipedia?
The only thing that libertarians require here is that it not be made illegal
Yes. Government actions and private actions are different things. Government has a monopoly on violence and everything they do is with violence backing them up. Individual bad actors do sometimes use violence too (we can not constantly monitor and control every person 24/7), but that is illegal and we lock them up and punish them for it when we can prove it.
Or put it this way, John calls his boss's wife a whore.
His boss punches John in response: Not acceptable.
His boss calls the police chief and John is locked up via government force: Not acceptable
His boss fires John: Acceptable. He has free association for his business.
And if you say "that isn't a strawman, I really believe that", I don't believe you, unless you follow that to its logical conclusion and say that, for instance, employees should be able to fire people based on race.
I believe they should be able to do that if they wish. Let the market and the private actors they associate with respond to that as they please.
If it's "pretty clear" then why haven't charges been filed, an indictment secured and a guilty verdict found? It must not be that clear after all then. Even putting aside a guilty verdict, just an indictment alone is widely known to be a really low standard by itself, so why hasn't it happened?
Especially when we put it into the surrounding context that the Trump admin's standards against political opponents are so hilariously low that they'll even do blatantly bullshit charges like this. Therefore when casual allegations are made by the admin that don't result in any further action, we can reasonably assume they're so weak they don't even pass the nonsense "Comey threatened the president with seashells" level.
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