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From my moderator note the last time I posted here, on the subject of the convict Donald Trump.
I have half a mind to post this on a substack because I don't think it will get a fair hearing here. Out of respect for what TheMotte once was, I'll give it a try.
There's a problem with this inability to recognize evil as evil that is endemic here.
A felony is a kind of serious crime.
It means that a person has crossed a certain line of civility. A transgression against the nature of truth.
Trump is a liar. He lied about something to such a serious degree that twelve citizens were firmly convinced that he is guilty.
If you care at all about law and order, at some point you have to stop endorsing the person who attacks law and order.
I've been the victim of an SJW hate mob. It's one of many things that made me comfortable at a place where people were willing to talk about the deficiencies and self-righteous indignation of lefties.
But you, as in you the people here, you the people reading this message, are not better than the SJWs in this specific way: you demonize rather than argue. If someone makes a short argument, that's somehow bad and unfair and against the rules.
How is that supposed to be tolerating disagreement? How is that supposed to be free speech?
Trump is a bad person. And it's time for him to go.
And if you can't accept that, fuck you.
Any forum in which I'm not free to use my speech like this isn't a free speech forum.
I'm a classic 'law and order' conservative and Trump lost me on January 6th.
We have rules in our society, and he broke them. And your grudge against SJWs, which I share, is no justification for avoiding cleaning up your own shit.
Our entire society is predicated on some amount of trust. Some amount of truthfulness. We have laws about campaign finance. We have laws about falsifying business records. We have laws which brand a person a felon if they are a threat to the public order.
TheMotte became a performative space where people were allowed to tell themselves the story that they were 'grey tribe' neutral at the same time they bitterly denied and resistance any news which made their actual side look bad.
My only side is America. My only side is the Constitution. I am against lawlessness and disorder, and though many Democrats are corrupt criminals, and many SJWs are hysteric shit-flinging busybodies, none of that matters if we can't hold Trump accountable.
Don't you mean the justice-involved individual, Donald Trump? Kidding, kidding. But it really is Russell-conjugations all over the place.
And famously our lawbooks are groaning with such a profusion of them that we each, on average, inadvertently commit three each day. Seriously, criminal laws are often rather vague, and great power is entrusted to the hands of prosecutors to not go off the reservation and become little tinpot tyrants, using their awesome powers to for personal grievances. Unfortunately, this often doesn't work.
Moreover, which act works more harm on the commonweal - Donald Trump classifying payments to Stormy Daniels as "legal expenses" in his personal books, or a mob of 34 people ransacking a convenience store like a swarm of locusts? Because the first is a 34-felony indictment and got millions of dollars in legal resources thrown at it. The latter is a 34-misdemeanor nothingburger that ruins people's livelihoods and blights a neighborhood, but goes ignored by the progressive legal system. I'm not going to bitch at anyone who looks at this and concludes that the law is more than a bit of an ass these days.
The evidence in the case was highly publicized, and other fellow citizens are fully capable of disagreeing on the proper conclusion to be drawn. This isn't a new or controversial point. It's not a defection against the commonweal to argue that Sacco & Vanzetti or the Rosenberg were actually innocent, or on the other side that OJ or Alec Baldwin are actually guilty.
There's law and order, and then there's law and order. I'd actually argue that Trumpian tendencies are much closer to the original understanding of the term, given Trump's hostility to public disorder.
Definitely the one where the mob goes into the government building to try and disrupt the peaceful transfer of power.
Stable institutions of power transfer and robust checks and balances against those who would hijack that are among the only thing that prevents us from sliding into third world style governmental dysfunction.
Someone who would throw wrenches into that system to try to make it malfunction is a “bad person” like the OP claim, and one of the bigger societal risks out there. It’s a much more important case than a street felon.
Unfortunately that's not what he was convicted for.
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