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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   32359 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 2, 2024

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A tweet from June 6th:

Riddle me this MAGA: how has Biden weaponised the Justice Department if his own son is on trial and he's saying he will not pardon him if convicted? Your whole argument kinda crumbles, doesn't it? Embarassing.

A reply to this tweet, today:

Oh.

Sure enough, in his final month in office, Joe has pardoned Hunter, after repeatedly promising not to do exactly that. No less than the Guardian and the BBC are calling Joe Biden a hypocrite and saying that this latest action legitimises some of the criticisms Trump has lobbed at Biden.

A few weeks ago there was a discussion here on what Biden might do with his final few weeks in office to ensure his legacy, knowing that he'll never hold public office again. Negotiate a last-minute but inevitable peace deal in Ukraine, to snatch that opportunity from Trump's grubby claws? Recognise the Armenian genocide at last? Pass a bill mandating the creation of a new national park? Step down so that Kamala can legitimately claim to be the first female POTUS, if only for ten minutes?

I guess we have our answer as to what he'll do with his legacy: piss all over it, exposing himself as no less of a corrupt nepotist than Erdoğan.

Not happy with this. There's a reason we still remember Lucius Junius Brutus today and commemorate the time he sentenced his own sons to death for treason against the nascent Roman Republic. We even memorialize the event in high art thousands of years after it happened: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lictors_Bring_to_Brutus_the_Bodies_of_His_Sons

Joe Biden could have been like Brutus but now he just looks like a hypocrite.

It seems unsurprising as realpolitik: he's a lame duck, the election is over, and the corporate news media is currently focused on disasturbating over everything Trump is even thinking about doing. What's anyone going to do about it--impeach him? He was a pretty bad president, he may as well take the opportunity to do one last thing for his son (and also maybe cover his own ass a bit, by making the pardon broad enough to ensure the Justice Department can't use Hunter's Ukraine dealings to get to his dad).

Where are all our "no one is above the law, not even the President['s son]" American news reporters? Presumably explaining that a pardon is a part of the law and so there is nothing to see here! Which they will of course immediately forget should Trump deliver on some riot-related pardons of his own. (In fact I already see many social media comments to the effect of "criticizing this makes Republicans the real hypocrites, actually.")

(See, if it were me somehow in Biden's exact shoes, I would pardon Hunter and the Capitol rioters in the same batch, just to screw with everyone. It would also have been funny to pardon Trump at the same time, if only because I suspect Trump would be inclined to turn it down. Of course, my own mischievous nature is likely sufficient to prevent me from ever holding elected office, much less one capable of extending pardons.)

I would be surprised if anyone cynical enough to regularly post here will be surprised by the pardon, but it really does clear the rhetorical decks for Trump to hand out a whole mess of pardons, should he feel so inclined. "Accuse your enemy of what you are doing" apparently equates, in the Biden administration, to "do what you plan to later accuse your enemy of doing."

disasturbating

Fantastic word, never come across it before.

I would pardon Hunter and the Capitol rioters in the same batch, just to screw with everyone. It would also have been funny to pardon Trump at the same time, if only because I suspect Trump would be inclined to turn it down.

Love it, I would be entirely on board with this, though I'd note that as a Brit, I find the concept of Presidential pardons to be pretty odd, and in tension with the idea of legal equality of all citizens.

though I'd note that as a Brit, I find the concept of Presidential pardons to be pretty odd, and in tension with the idea of legal equality of all citizens.

OP's post lead me on a minor rabbit hole about government pardons. Apparently we do have them in the UK, although they are rarely used. The last couple were Alan Turing (posthumously) and Steven (nominative determinism) Gallant, a convicted murderer who, while on day-release, fought against the jihadi who carried out the London Bridge attack in 2019.

Although if I'm honest, pardoning a relative totally feels like something Boris Johnson would have done.

Steven (nominative determinism) Gallant, a convicted murderer who, while on day-release, fought against the jihadi who carried out the London Bridge attack in 2019

How have I never heard this story before? This is incredible. What a redemption arc.

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-humber-66945566

Quite a story! Convicted murderer Gallant was out of prison on license for the first time, when the attack occurred and he battled down the terrorist. Talk about having a really unlucky and lucky day!

I was curious about the case, so I decided to look it up. As I suspected, it turns out that the original murder was a case of vigilantism against, allegedly, a habitual abuser of women. When it was put in the public spotlight, many years later, by the London Bridge attack, apparently much of the public felt that, lawful or unlawful, he'd done the right thing in the first place. The whole story felt very British.

it turns out that the original murder was a case of vigilantism against, allegedly, a habitual abuser of women.

This is an interesting claim—suspiciously convenient but not implausible—so I was interested in learning more. Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be much reported in the coverage of the pardon about the original conviction. Can you point me to your source for this?

Here's the main article I'm going off of, although its same claims seem to be reported elsewhere as well:

https://www.theguardian.com/society/article/2024/jul/31/my-ex-was-brutally-murdered-then-his-killer-was-hailed-a-national-hero

Thanks. It seems you are correct: Gallant may be a murderer, but his victim was truly nasty. I not a supporter of the death penalty, and vigilante justice is inherently problematic for a variety of reasons, but it's clear that Gallant and his co-convicted were taking care of a problem that the justice system had failed to.

Does the crown have the authority to pardon, or perhaps parliament itself?

I would be surprised if anyone cynical enough to regularly post here will be surprised by the pardon

I'm sure there are some Hanania-cels in shambles

It's also probably not the worst pardon in history. I was under the impression domestic terrorists had previously been pardoned. Bill Clinton pardoned Linda Evans and Susan Rosenberg from the Weather Underground and granted clemency to 16 members of the FALN terrorist organization (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Clinton_pardon_controversy).

I think commuting the sentence of someone who has already spent 19 years in jail is a very different thing to a pre-conviction pardon that ensures someone escapes justice.

Commuting a deserved life sentence to 19 years is a violation of the rule of law, but then any pardon except of someone who appears to be factually innocent is a violation of the rule of law. But I don't see how it can be egregiously bad compared to the standard issue lame-duck cash-for-pardons job.

"Accuse your enemy of what you are doing" apparently equates, in the Biden administration, to "do what you plan to later accuse your enemy of doing."

Trump isn't the enemy to Joe Biden, not any more. Trump is fargroup; the part of the Democratic party that ousted him is outgroup and his enemy. Not that this pardon is about them, it's about protecting Hunter, and I join the multitudes who say "well, of course".

Not that this pardon is about them, it's about protecting Hunter, and I join the multitudes who say "well, of course".

This pardon is about protecting the Biden family because Hunter is dead-to-rights on a variety of crimes he recorded himself committing and even provided commentary in text messages to other family members, who also committed those crimes or helped him commit the crimes.

By pardoning Hunter Biden for the entirety of the active years of the "fake, Russian intel operation" laptop, Joe Biden is stopping a liability from being used to incriminate the entire crime family. He protects Hunter from ever suffering the negative effects of him being a wanton criminal, drug addict, and general piece of shit, and also prevents Hunter being used against the family. I seriously doubt this will be the last pardon w/re the Biden family or any of its confidants.

edit: although a counter argument would be the sheer breadth and long time period of the pardon removes Hunter's protection under the 5th Amendment and he would therefore still be subject to subpoena and investigation into these various ties. This is why I believe there will be more pardons coming down the pipe.

Good for him. This was the virtuous thing to do. The world needs more humans, and fewer bots who are governed by algorithms (even, and perhaps especially, when that algorithm is the algorithm for “justice”).

Would TheMotte really be here condemning Trump if he pardoned Don Jr. in a tax fraud case? Be honest now.

This was the virtuous thing to do.

Why?

The world needs more humans, and fewer bots who are governed by algorithms (even, and perhaps especially, when that algorithm is the algorithm for “justice”).

What a bizarre way of saying "there's no point in having rules or laws of any kind".

Would TheMotte really be here condemning Trump if he pardoned Don Jr. in a tax fraud case?

I would.

Why?

  • Why should a father not protect his son when he is able to? This should be the default position (not an absolute position of course, but the default one, at least) - especially for a crime as minor as tax fraud.

  • There's something heartwarming about the party that has recently been so obsessed with procedural norms and maintaining the moral high ground learning that there are, in fact, situations where a strict literal interpretation of the norms should be suspended. This may be more of a tactical consideration than a purely ethical one, because it helps Republicans illustrate how absurd the prosecution of Trump has been.

  • It's an appropriate parting "fuck you" to a political establishment that conspired to replace him without his consent in the 2024 election.

What a bizarre way of saying "there's no point in having rules or laws of any kind".

That's not what I said, and that's not the position I endorse.

Why should a father not protect his son when he is able to?

A father should protect his son when he is able to - when the son is a child. Even if Hunter was in his early twenties, it'd be a lot more understandable if Joe pardoned him - sowing your wild oats is what youth is for. But Hunter is 54 years old and has been a fuckup and prodigal son for essentially his entire adult life. Tough love has to come into effect at some point.

especially for a crime as minor as tax fraud

One of the crimes Hunter was indicted on was providing false information when purchasing a firearm, namely lying when asked if he was a drug user. "Crack cocaine addicts should not be carrying guns" seems like a rare gun control policy proposal that I could imagine a lot of 2A diehards getting onboard with. Given Joe's outspoken support for gun control (e.g. his support for the federal assault weapons ban of 1993; his longstanding support for universal background checks; the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, which he signed into law two years ago), this makes his leniency all the more hypocritical.

There's something heartwarming about the party that has recently been so obsessed with procedural norms and maintaining the moral high ground learning that there are, in fact, situations where a strict literal interpretation of the norms should be suspended. This may be more of a tactical consideration than a purely ethical one, because it helps Republicans illustrate how absurd the prosecution of Trump has been.

I see nothing heartwarming about this naked hypocrisy and corruption. Espectially seeing as, contrary to your interpretation, I have zero confidence that this pardon will prompt reflection among Democrats and they'll realise "you know, maybe it's more about the spirit of the law than the letter, perhaps we should be more forgiving when the Republicans overstep in future". No - the takeaway from this will be, as always, "it's okay when we do it".

It's an appropriate parting "fuck you" to a political establishment that conspired to replace him without his consent in the 2024 election.

It's weird that I specifically asked you why you think this action was "virtuous", and part of your answer is, in essence, that was a wonderfully spiteful act of malicious revenge. Which is quite far from what I typically think of when I hear the word "virtuous".

"Crack cocaine addicts should not be carrying guns" seems like a rare gun control policy proposal that I could imagine a lot of 2A diehards getting onboard with.

I agree in the abstract, but it's still not a serious enough infraction for me to change my assessment of the situation.

It's weird funny that I specifically asked you why you think this action was "virtuous", and part of your answer is, in essence, that was a wonderfully spiteful act of malicious revenge. Which is quite far from what I typically think of when I hear the word "virtuous".

Spite and malice can be virtuous. Who told you they couldn't?

Virtue is the appropriate response in the appropriate situation. It's not a static table of naughty and nice feelings that can be drawn up in advance. There's no reason a priori to think that spite is never an appropriate thing to feel.

To give a simple example, if a criminal is breaking into your house uninvited in the middle of the night, then the virtuous thing to do is certainly to respond with malice.

"Spite" may be an appropriate emotional reaction in certain situations, in the sense that it was what we would expect the average person to reasonably feel in that situation. That's quite a ways from saying it's the virtuous emotional reaction. The whole point of virtue as a concept lies in recognising that many times our instinctual emotional reactions to situations are both morally wrong and often counterproductive.

Not only is being spiteful not virtuous almost by definition, in many cases it's counterproductive from the perspective of pure pragmatism - hence the phrase "cut your nose to spite your face". It's an ugly and irrational emotion.

To give a simple example, if a criminal is breaking into your house uninvited in the middle of the night, then the virtuous thing to do is certainly to respond with malice.

Hard disagree. The virtuous thing to do in that situation is to defend yourself from home invasion using no more than force than is strictly necessary (which, yes, can escalate into lethal force depending on the specifics of the situation). In the hypothetical situation in which you can point a gun at the criminal, force him to surrender and wait for the police to take him away, what do you stand to gain by using additional force beyond that?

The malicious thing to do would be to maim the criminal breaking into your house and then sadistically torture him for hours on end. Your immediate response to hearing someone breaking into your house in the middle of the night should be concern for your and your family's welfare, not "oh goody, now I have a blank cheque to be as vicious and cruel as I please!"

"Bullshit - if someone breaks into my house, beating the shit out of him is a totally understandable, even reasonable response." No argument here. We're not discussing what's understandable - we're discussing what's virtuous. The standards are higher, by design. I can't even truthfully say that this is a standard of behaviour I would succeed in meeting in the heat of the moment - but this is a failing on my part, not a failing of the moral standard I've set myself.

Good for him. This was the virtuous thing to do.

I don't know that it was virtuous, but certainly I would have done the same thing, as a parent. I would not, however, have promised in the first place to not do it. The public discourse on this is disheartening but unsurprising; everyone accuses everyone else of being hypocrites, no one makes any efforts toward not being a hypocrite because hey, then you're just giving the advantage to those other hypocrites.

It's weird reading some of the commentary on reddit, where several posters are bemoaning "this is what sucks about being a liberal, we're constantly doing the reasonable thing while the Republicans break all the rules and take unfair advantage of our tolerance and longsuffering." As if this weren't precisely why the Republican party has been moving away from Buckleyan conservatism.

Would TheMotte really be here condemning Trump if he pardoned Don Jr. in a tax fraud case?

I expect @Folamh3 would; probably others also. I'm not sure why you're referencing "TheMotte" here as if it were a hivemind, particularly when you're only the fourth person into the thread.

I would not, however, have promised in the first place to not do it.

This is reasonable. It's rarely a good look to contradict yourself so blatantly in public.

I'm not sure why you're referencing "TheMotte" here as if it were a hivemind, particularly when you're only the fourth person into the thread.

I was combining this thread with the post in last week's thread on the same topic, which got 3 additional replies that were critical of Biden.

Would TheMotte really be here condemning Trump if he pardoned Don Jr. in a tax fraud case? Be honest now.

TheMotte is not a person. But yes, I am happy to condemn both Trump and Biden for pardonning their family members. Rule of law means that everyone is subject to the law, not just those who sit outside the ruling family (which itself is a bizarre thing to have to say about a republic).

This is just corruption. Biden is less corrupt than Trump, but as we see here he is clearly somewhat corrupt.

Meh, it isn’t human to prioritize an abstract law over your own flesh and blood.

Bring forth chatgpt as ruler or deal with president’s sons getting away with drug use.

Meh, it isn’t human to prioritize an abstract law over your own flesh and blood.

On the contrary, that is the highest praise one can give a human. A good person should be able to put abstract ideas ahead of base instincts.

Whatever Don Jr's failings, which I've never investigated enough to be properly informed of, I'm not aware of Don Jr doing anything close to:

-- Fucking his own sister in law

-- Fathering a child on a stripper and then denying paternity, up to and including refusing to invite the child to Biden family gatherings

-- Buying a firearm illegally

-- Leaving hard drugs in a rental car

I'm aware that all of those sins have nothing, in particular, to do with the tax fraud case. But they're going to color people's opinions of Hunter, and of Hunter getting off scot free.

I honestly just assume, based on his business association, that you could probably get Don Jr on some kind of tax fraud charge if you looked hard enough and played exactly enough with the statutes. But I know nothing about him personally other than I think he hunts? I've read a million drive-by tweet accusations or thowaway magazine lines about how he's "coked out" or something, but idk.

If Don Jr. were publicly scum in the same way that Hunter was, for over a decade, then I guess we'd have a rough equivalence?

Charles Kushner, the father of Jared, wanted revenge on his brother in law, so he paid a prostitute to have sex and record the encounter, and then he sent the video to his sister:

https://apnews.com/article/donald-trump-charles-kushner-new-jersey-elections-crime-0155d15fa31108fd2c0e6360a3b597dd

He was pardoned by Trump four years ago and was now nominated as ambassador.

Maybe this is just the availability heuristic, but it does seem to anyone else that the two major political families in American politics (the Trumps and Bidens) are two of the most uniquely toxic and dysfunctional families in the US? This would sound contrived if it happened in a soap opera.

Why is the Trump family dysfunctional? What is "uniquely toxic" about the Trump family?

The story above, coupled with:

  1. Trump's weird habit of openly lusting over his own daughter

  2. Trump's ex-wife accusing him of rape

  3. Trump's second wife almost certainly being unfaithful to him

  4. Trump's current wife's obvious distaste for him

  5. Trump paying a porn star to have sex with him, along with his numerous other extra-marital affairs during at least two of his marriages

  6. Trump Jr. getting embroiled in a messy divorce and custody battle

Point 2 is a big nothingburger. She admitted she only claimed that to squeeze him in divorce proceedings. She later clarified that he never physically raped her, but his emotional distance was a sort of emotional rape.

I'm sure what you're saying is true, but do you have a source?

More comments

No.

I agree with you. IMO both Biden and Trump are in the bottom 25% of presidents generally, they're dysfunctional people who made it to office because of how awful the rest of our political class has been for the past 20-30 years at responding to real economic and social problems in society. Personally I think our politics are just generally degrading, our whole society is degraded now and thus so are our leaders.

Have you already forgotten about the Clintons? What about the Kennedys?

Obviously the Kennedys held the mantle during the period in which they were the preeminent political family in the states, and probably the Clintons as well.

Chris Christi prosecuted Kushner for "one of the most loathsome, disgusting crimes" he's ever prosecuted, but agreed to a plea deal which resulted in a felony conviction and a mere 14 months in a federal prison camp? Gee, must be a low bar.

Kushner served his jail term, went to a half-way house to complete his 2 year sentence, completed his probation, and Donald Trump gave him a full and unconditional pardon only for that conviction 14 years later claiming as justification 14 years of reformed behavior and charity. Do you think that's a difference in kind from a complete and total unconditional pardon to a son for any criminal behavior over the last 10 years, known and unknown, and for which son hasn't spent a single day in prison, let alone completed the sentence and gone on to lead a reformed life with charitable works?

Not only is the Charles Kushner pardon the sort of dime-a-dozen pardons we see every single admin, but it's hard to even criticize it much.

Are you saying this is the equivalent that I should be crying out against?

Kushner served his sentence a decade before the pardon. The pardon primarily removed some residual attached bars from things like voting or practicing law.

In an above comment, I stated directly that Hunter should have gone to prison for a few months. After that I think the pardon would have seemed neater.

That's interesting. I kind of feel the same way, in that it is absolutely virtuous for a father to protect his son, and ensure his family has a future. But this also makes the future of his political party more difficult, along with worsening the state of partisan politics in the world, as it gives the other side both a bludgeon against his party and an excuse to do corrupt things like this themselves.

ensure his family has a future

I'm curious what you mean by this. Pardoning Hunter ensures his family will have a future?

Well, I really don't know too much about the Biden family's situation, so I could be wrong. But my general assumption would be that it'd destroy his family if Hunter were in prison. It'd be detrimental to Hunter and his kids to have a father behind bars, creating emotional trauma and financial and logistical hardships that could last generations. As opposed to if he is pardoned, he could still be a father and go on to still achieve things.

Hunter has three children from his first marriage, the youngest of whom was born in 2001. He has two young children, one from his current marriage and the illegitimate child he fathered with a former sex worker. This comment got posted prematurely, the full comment is here.

Yeah, I'm somewhat aware of that, though I didn't know all details. I still think that for all parties involved, having Hunter in prison would have far more detrimental effects, emotional, psychological, legacy-wise, and otherwise, than not.

This was intended to be a lengthier comment but my phone posted it before I could finish it. I replied to you with a full comment.

Hunter is known to have fathered at least five children. The first three of these he fathered with his first wife, the youngest of whom was born in 2001. The fourth he fathered illegitimately in 2018 with a former stripper, denying paternity until a paternity test proved otherwise, followed by a court ruling. The fifth child he fathered in 2020 with his current wife.

I have a hard time imagining that Hunter is terribly present in the life of the girl whose father he denied being and whose mother had to sue him for paternity (as noted elsewhere in the thread, said daughter was pointedly not invited to Biden family events), so if he'd gone to prison I can't imagine said daughter would've noticed. I agree that his youngest daughter with his current wife probably would have felt his absence. But as upsetting as it is for a young child to have a father behind bars - is it so much more upsetting than having a father who's addicted to crack cocaine and unexpectedly disappears for weeks at a time to go on crack binges and have sex with prostitutes? Sort of sounds like much of a muchness to me, to be honest. There's even the possibility that a short spell in an environment in which crack cocaine is markedly harder to come by than outside might have straightened him out by forcing him to go cold turkey.

Finally there's the point about Hunter providing for his children financially, to which my only response is a high trill of gay laughter. Whether Hunter had gone to prison or not, I think we all know that, either way, his children would have been financially provided for by their grandfather, not their father. Hunter has been a wastrel for his entire adult life, and I don't think even he would dispute that whatever gainful employment he's had (e.g. his seat on the Burisma board) came about purely as a result of his family connections.

But even in the counterfactual world where Hunter had his shit together and was capable of providing for his minor children on his own merit and was a positive role model for all of them - either his crimes are serious enough to warrant jail time, or they aren't. This seems like "one death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic" - why is the welfare of Hunter's children being elevated to being a point of material concern in whether or not he should serve jail time, and not the welfare of the children of all the other people who've been convicted under the same laws he's deemed to have violated?

I think for all his children, but especially his youngest, it could take a big emotional toll to have a father in prison. I just don't really know how they feel about him, but I could see that it could cause anyone to have additional layers of self loathing and feelings of inadequacy to be told that they come from someone that is deemed as not worthy to participate in society.

Finally there's the point about Hunter providing for his children financially, to which my only response is a high trill of gay laughter. Whether Hunter had gone to prison or not, I think we all know that, either way, his children would have been financially provided for by their grandfather, not their father

Yeah, that's probably true. Though I don't know much specifics at all. It may be a drop in a bucket, though, but it is generally costly to a family to have a father in prison.

Hunter's children being elevated to being a point of material concern in whether or not he should serve jail time, and not the welfare of the children of all the other people who've been convicted under the same laws he's deemed to have violated?

Well, I'm definitely not saying it's fair, or the right or just thing to do, or that Hunter shouldn't serve jail time. I'm just saying what I would do as a father if I had the power to. But also that Biden may also wish to think about how such a move may have repercussions for his party or the political system.

I could see that it could cause anyone to have additional layers of self loathing and feelings of inadequacy to be told that they come from someone that is deemed as not worthy to participate in society.

He has already been deemed not worthy to participate in society -- that's what the pardon is for!

If the Bidens want to protect their young'uns from emotional harm, Hunter should have made better choices. He should have thought about the impact of his actions on his family. Hell, he impregnated a stripper and then rejected paternity until it was proven; maybe he should have thought of his youngest when his then-youngest's mother was asking him to pay for his daughter's upkeep.

I'm sorry, but I'm entirely unwilling to base my concept of justice on not hurting the feelings of the children of criminals. It's not the job of the state to make sure no children ever feel sad. It's the job of the state to enforce the law.

But like I said, I don't think it's "justice" in any way to pardon him. I just think it's what a father would want to do, and maybe should do, because fathers should always protect their children in any way possible.

In a similar situation Trump would have pardoned his son before the election.

Good for him. This was the virtuous thing to do.

By the treatment of Hunter's own daughter, this is not some demonstration of higher code to one's family. I understand you want to make Nietchian strong-man arguments, but exercising one's power to meet their ideosyncratic preferences is not virtue, it's tautology of will to power, even when your preference is for your family to prosper. Loyalty to smallest possible tribe, at thee xpense of other duties to one's station, natuion, and culture. is not the ur-virtue by almost any standard. It's just mob behavior. It's the definition of corruption.

I am supposed to appauld someone for taking advantage of power to enrich their personal loyalties as virtue?

Finally, Biden is a professed Catholic, and there's nothing in Catholic morality that upholds loyalty to flesh as virtuous (quite the opposite, tfh). If we want to appaud Biden's virtue, he should start by renouncing the all the other duities and affiliations that this virtue undermines. Or is it also virtuous to exercise raw familial enrichment through deception and expressions of false standards of morality?

Would TheMotte really be here condemning Trump if he pardoned Don Jr. in a tax fraud case? Be honest now.

I would, of course. Corruption and personal loyalty over loyalty to either the American people, or the principles he was elected on are among the biggest criticisms of Trump. Why would I bury my head if Trump further legitimized those criticisms?

I understand you want to make Nietchian strong-man arguments

I briefly outlined the reasons for my judgement in another comment in this thread. None of them have anything to do with Biden's "strength". (And for the record, the idea that "good = being 'strong' and doing whatever you want" is, at best, a highly simplified distortion of Nietzsche's actual views.)

I am supposed to appauld someone for taking advantage of power to enrich their personal loyalties as virtue?

It does depend on Biden's motivations to an extent. If it was done out of genuine love, then yes, you should applaud. If it was a purely self-interested act of political calculation, not so much.

Finally, Biden is a professed Catholic, and there's nothing in Catholic morality that upholds loyalty to flesh as virtuous (quite the opposite, tfh). If we want to appaud Biden's virtue, he should start by renouncing the all the other duities and affiliations that this virtue undermines.

Forsaking your flesh for Christ - there's at least a real dilemma there. That's at least an interesting problem. But forsaking your flesh for the abstract idea of democracy and the rule of law? Well, I'm afraid that's where I'll have to part with Catholic morality, if that's what it recommends.

Forsaking your flesh for Christ - there's at least a real dilemma there. That's at least an interesting problem. But forsaking your flesh for the abstract idea of democracy and the rule of law?

I know that this view (I'm not sure what to call it, post-Rationalist?) has a cadre of supporters on TheMotte as I've seen it numerous times over the years. I imagine because it has a certain meta-contrarian appeal and draws on a yearning of reactionaries that perceive modern western Whites as too domesticated, too deracinated and slavishly devoted to abstract Enlightenment concepts to the point of their own destruction. This view seems to have a kind of admiration for the naked tribalism of American blacks ("He wuz a good boy!") that supersedes any attachment to honesty or justice.

This view is just repellent to me. I'm all for White nationalism and family loyalty and nepotism and blah blah blah, but Hunter Biden is 54 not 18 and Joe Biden is the President not some random guy. If the cops found a teenager's drug stash and his father stepped up and claimed the drugs to be his, taking the fall to protect this son, sure, I could see that as honorable and respectable.

Hunter Biden is 54

Man how the hell does he still look so good at that age with that lifestyle? He easily looks 10 years younger than he is.

It's incredible. Even his father didn't have nearly as much hair at that age.

Finally, Biden is a professed Catholic, and there's nothing in Catholic morality that upholds loyalty to flesh as virtuous (quite the opposite, tfh).

Aside from the fourth commandment, the traditional understanding of which has been to consider loyalty to relatives morally obligatory.

Also, subsidiarity would imply that you should do charity to the once close to you first before you move to larger circles.

The world needs more humans, and fewer bots who are governed by algorithms

The world has enough humans. We need more bots, or at least people who recognize some higher principle than blind tribal loyalty. Especially when you are president of the United States. Nepotism is for peasants.

This is precisely the sort of behavior I despite Trump for, and while I think there's a dramatic difference in scale, that's not going to make me say "actually Biden doing it is good."

Would TheMotte really be here condemning Trump if he pardoned Don Jr. in a tax fraud case?

We don't have to speculate. Trump pardoned his father-in-law for substantially more egregious conduct.

To be fair to both Trump and Biden, this is honestly not that unusual. The core function of the presidential pardon power is exonerating politically favored individuals. To be less fair, it's not clear to me why this is an essential piece of executive discretion. I'd rather have amnesty be a congressional function where it is not dependent on the whims of one man and where you're going to get fewer instances of blatantly political pardoning of friends and allies.

Trump pardoned his father-in-law for substantially more egregious conduct.

Yes, with the key distinction being that pardon was after the prison sentence was completed, not before.

Well, they're not condemning Trump for pardoning Kushner's dad and then naming him to the post of Ambassador to France.

Pardoning his son in law's dad after serving a prison sentence, not before.

The decade of preemptive not-yet-charged or even just hypothetical crimes pardoning is the shocker here. Hunter is already convicted for some of his many crimes, but yet to be sentenced. He got free pass on those too.

A father should do what's best for his son. It's debatable whether get-out-of-jail free cards and general leniency qualifies as such. (I'd suggest it doesn't.)

I mean, he’s in his fifties, not his early twenties. It’s probably too late to scare him straight; cleaning up so he can’t do too much damage to himself before an early grave(likely baked in by the history of drug use) is the best that can be done.

A father should do what's best for his son.

You do realize how controversial this statement is?

Should a father murder to cover up the crimes of his son if he thinks that this results in a net increase of his expected utility?

Most people would grant that people have some moral obligations to their children, that it is fine and good to spend your money to feed them before you feed random strangers. But people also have other moral obligations (i.e. not to murder), and sometimes they rank higher thank family.

I didn't say a father should cover up crimes. In fact I am suggesting subtly that to do so is not, ultimately, best for his son in that it's a model of criminality and a lack of basic ethics, and that a father should model these.

Jumping up and down on the “defect” button is not the kind of humanity I appreciate.

And while I agree that our Trump stans would bend over backwards to justify such a pardon, I don’t find it admirable.

How was it a defect button? The president has the power to pardon crimes. This is a known power.

But I think it's fair to say that it's highly questionable for the President to use that power to prevent his loved ones from facing legal repercussions for misconduct. If the presumption that it's illegitimate for a Republican President to do such a thing, but legitimate for a Democrat President to do it, that is a defection.

Where did I say it would be illegitimate for a Republican to do the same thing?

You said that a President pardoning someone isn't hitting a defect button.

If two teams have agreed not to use the power of Presidential pardons for illegitimate purposes, then if one team goes ahead and uses them for that purpose, that team is defecting.

When was this agreement ever a thing?

Every time Trump has been accused of nepotism (e.g. the Jared Kushner appointment) or of abusing the power of Presidential pardons for nepotistic reasons (Kushner's father), Democrats are implicitly appealing to said agreement.

Both options in the prisoner’s dilemma are known, too.

Pardoning your kids is eroding a common good to benefit yourself and yours.

Jumping up and down on the “defect” button is not the kind of humanity I appreciate.

How is this more defect button than Trump pardoning the Blackwater massacerers? I think killing 14 civillians is bad, and I don't want private security firms representing America to do that on the world stage. I definitely don't want the world to get the message, "we'll accept any level of misconduct, and the perpetrators won't even face a tiny amount of justice."

I don't think Joe Biden should have lied about pardoning his son, and if Joe himself was personally involved in corrupt dealings, I want all of that information set before the American people. However, I don't think the mere act of pardoning his son is a bad thing. It is only bad if Joe Biden was personally involved in corrupt dealings, and is now pardoning his son so that Joe's connections are never made public.

I don’t like that either.

Though I’d have pointed to Charles Kushner, or maybe to Roger Stone and Steve Bannon, rather than PMCs with no personal connection. Trump openly showers favors on people in his orbit; he has somehow passed this off as mundane instead of scandalous.

That doesn’t make me feel better about Hunter Biden.

I'd respect it if he did it the same day Don Jr. got arrested.

The behavior here is just gross in its attempted manipulation of the American people.

I said last year that if Hunter had any decency, he would go to his father and beg to be put in prison. It would have been a perfect political move to plead guilty, go to prison, and let Biden (or ultimately Kamala) point to him in prison for a multi-year sentence as evidence that "no one is above the law."

If the intent was always to pardon Hunter, why not let him get convicted and spend a nominal amount of time behind bars? That sacrificial lamb would have been massively politically advantageous.

This is (hopefully) the final act in what has been a disasterclass from the Democratic establishment in anointing Biden against his long record of mediocrity and the inevitable ravages of time.

I said last year that if Hunter had any decency, he would go to his father and beg to be put in prison.

I mean, it's Hunter Biden.

If the intent was always to pardon Hunter, why not let him get convicted and spend a nominal amount of time behind bars? That sacrificial lamb would have been massively politically advantageous.

Biden doesn't have time to make this happen, and even if he did, he'd have no reason to care. He lost, he feels betrayed by the current DNC leadership, and he's a few short years away from dying in a nursing home surrounded by people he thinks are someone else.

I said it last year, when it would have made more sense.

I contend that if Hunter were currently in prison, since say April, he would be in a better position in every way right now. People would be more understanding about the pardon, he'd have a redemption arc, he wouldn't be perceived as a political football in the sand way.

How very Confucian:

The Duke of She said to Confucius, “Among my people there is one we call ‘Upright Gong.’ When his father stole a sheep, he reported him to the authorities.” Confucius replied, “Among my people, those who we consider ‘upright’ are different from this: fathers cover up for their sons, and sons cover up for their fathers. ‘Uprightness’ is to be found in this.”

Yes, this reflects badly on Biden as US President, and by extension on the Democratic Party. Giving such an unprecedently-broad pardon to his own son--prior to sentencing--is hypocritical on so, so many levels. And yet, one of my favorite Borges short story is the Three Versions of Judas:

"God became a man completely, a man to the point of infamy, a man to the point of being reprehensible—all the way to the abyss. In order to save us, He could have chosen any of the destinies which together weave the uncertain web of history; He could have been Alexander, or Pythagoras, or Rurik, or Jesus; He chose an infamous destiny: He was Judas."

This is the wrong take. From a less speciously confucian standpoint:

Pardoning Hunter sends the message that it's not worth sacrificing the interests of yourself or your family to uphold the institutions of law and order that sustain the United States.

As president of the United States, JB's duty is to uphold said institutions. As a leader, he's meant to set a moral example for other citizens. Perhaps following his example is most prudent in the present day, but I wouldn't call it moral by any means.

As president of the United States, JB's duty is to uphold said institutions. As a leader, he's meant to set a moral example for other citizens. Perhaps following his example is most prudent in the present day, but I wouldn't call it moral by any means.

Do presidents try to be moral exemplars any more? I can't think of a president in my lifetime who I've looked up to as a true paragon of morality. Most of them haven't been openly and brazenly corrupt either (at least not in ways that are illegal in the US), but I can't recall thinking even once, "Gee, so-and-so is just the most morally upright and saintly human being I've ever seen. I'm truly glad such a virtuous person represents America to the world."

The Renaisance Humanists might have believed that virtue confers the moral legitimacy to be a ruler, but I feel like modern representative democracies haven't believed that in practice for a long time.

People that supported Bush Jr generally thought he was a moral exemplar as a person and not just a good leader. In fact there are still a lot of people who think he was and remains a moral exemplar as a person, certainly more than believe he was a good leader.

I know little about Confucianism, but isn't there an idea that duties go both ways and generation to generation? Joe should cover for Hunter, but also should have acted as proper father in other respects by uprising an upright son; Hunter should cover for Joe and handle many other filial duties virtuously (acting like a proper father to his kids, too). The Biden family and Hunter specifically shows very little Confucian virtue. I have not much respect for Confucius, if he praises a single act that coincidentally aligns with Confucian virtue that otherwise continues a cycle of unvirtuous behavior.

Meh, nothingburger. But he missed an opportunity here - he had to pardon Trump and the Jan 6 rioters too. With - let's tone down the political persecutions message. I think the democrats would have been too confused to exactly what to be outraged about, that they would just stay silent AND the republicans would let it slide. And he would take some of Trump's wind.

Oh, that would have been clever. Biden could even commute the sentences for the Jan 6 people rather than pardon them. That's a difference people can point at. This action indicates Biden doesn't seem worried about blowback on his party or the politics. I don't really blame him. Pardoning Trump as a deflection is a no brainer if you want a deflection, but if you're not concerned about the politics, why bother? Dark Brandon indeed.

I had little hope for a presidential pardon for Trump had he lost the election. Dems so fully committed to get him on legalities that I don't think POTUS declaring a time to heal would even have had the state prosecutions pack up shop. We passed the point of no return. I hope America hasn't seen its last overt act of graciousness in the service of moving forward peacefully. Hopefully post-Trump world sees some amount of useful grace return to politics. I do not have high hopes for it in now-Trump world. I would like to be surprised!

As The Motte's most rabid Trump partisan: I really don't care. I'm not sure what people expected.

Maybe this will finally end years of gaslighting about Hunter and Joe. The idea has always been that Hunter traded money for connection to Joe, and Joe was in on it, and took a cut. The rest of Hunter's crimes were just personal antics, of a kind any normal person would have received worse punishment for. But it wasn't really "political" except from bungling Republicans who couldn't sell the connection from Hunter to Joe, so made it look like all this uproar was over dick pics et al.

Personally I like the pardon power and am glad it exists. This is probably a much better outcome than the alternative. The example of other nations shows thay prosecuting presidents and their families is much likelier to lead to coups and crises than genuine justice and law.

Personally I like the pardon power and am glad it exists.

The biggest issue is Biden's blatent lying about it to collect on the facade of justice when expedient and avoid the consequences when not. This is what tears at the credibility the most, not the pardon in itself.

This is probably a much better outcome than the alternative. The example of other nations shows thay prosecuting presidents and their families is much likelier to lead to coups and crises than genuine justice and law.

Moderation in all things. You need a stalemate here, which has been perilously broken on both sides by the left now inside of a year. Yes, escalation in prosecuting the opposition's family leads to bad outcomes. But so does flagrantly demonstrating that overt familial corruption and enrichment are given a blank cheque, as long as one obtains / stays in power. The family in power gets to break laws sell influence and avoid prosecution as a perk, is a bad overt admission.

By both prosecuting Trump on nonsensical charges & by pardoning Hunter who was overtly criminal and corrupt after repeatedly stating letting it play out was the justice-based approach, the left has broken both sides of what should be a schelling point of stability.

I don't really mind Biden lying about it, I don't take the word of politicians to be all that sacrosanct. Politicians lie all the time, and I don't just mean in small ways that amount to fodder for a rant on facebook. A reasonable person would have accepted the possibility of Biden lying; and people who earnestly posted pro-Biden No Pardon propaganda made themselves easy marks.

I agree with you overall, but I'm struck by the helplessness of the frame the discourse has taken. Biden lied, Biden pardoned Hunter, Biden prosecuted Trump, Biden demonstrated that the first family gets to break laws and get away with it... but, voters legitimized this. Final responsibility lies with the American people. Even if we take 2020 and fraud and Hunter's laptop and say, "Americans were cheated, it wasn't our fault," people up and down the line endorsed all of this. Biden chose to run again and the Democratic party allowed him to. RFK tried to primary Biden and was thoroughly shut out. Millions of Democrats turned out to vote for Biden in the primaries, record turnout, far exceeding what Obama got in 2012. Biden tanked the debate, and while they made him stand down from re-election, nobody made him stand down, or even offer a plausible explanation for why he should remain in office if he's not fit to run.

Whatever people are saying now, they endorsed this, the American people allowed this to happen. Yeah, Biden lied, but at a certain point that should have been priced in. It's naive that it wasn't. And the Democratic electorate had every opportunity to change course and didn't.

I don't really mind Biden lying about it, I don't take the word of politicians to be all that sacrosanct. Politicians lie all the time, and I don't just mean in small ways that amount to fodder for a rant on facebook. A reasonable person would have accepted the possibility of Biden lying; and people who earnestly posted pro-Biden No Pardon propaganda made themselves easy marks.

It's not about you minding it. It's the audicity of this specific propoganda. This particular lie carried an incredible amount of water across the media, specifically to discredit Trump by contrast as a subversion of the rule of law, and to counter serious accusations of a politicized justice department

See supercuts like this: https://x.com/mazemoore/status/1863563615858577505

In a world where this wasn't a not just major campaign theme, but an active judicial attack on Trump, no the lying wouldn't have mattered so much. If this was just a test of Biden's trustworthiness or integrity, that's one thing. Its the context of Biden using the lie to provide attack ground and further discredit criticism of his judicial weaponization, that make his lies so bad here.

The uproar about Hunter Biden always felt farcical. From Clinton's emails to Mar a lago documents.

Temporary talking points and weapons that you're supposed to look down on for the enemy but the other way when it's your team.

Typical political shitflinging. It means nothing, was noise, is noise, and will continue to be noise. Useful for filling the air and giving the playmakers background latitude, however.

There is considerable evidence that Hunter was selling access to Joe. That is, by itself, quite illegal and highly objectionable.

It gets worse when "illegitimate foreign influence" has been a consistent talking point against Trump and anyone else who went against the Blue Tribe policy consensus.

It gets worse when Trump was impeached for attempting to direct the justice department to investigate the evident corruption.

It gets worse when the Justice Department evidently slow-walked investigations and attempted to cut sweetheart deals to provide political advantage to Biden.

It gets worse when The federal government and state governments have been bending and outright breaking laws in an attempt to destroy Trump legally and politically.

It gets worse when this is not a recent problem, and in fact Trump made opposition to it central to his campaign in 2016.

The media is, of course, in no hurry to assemble the facts into a coherent, easily-digestable normiefeed narrative. That doesn't change the weight of the actual facts. There is path dependence here, and the result is that you will never, ever get trust and cooperation across the aisle in this area ever again.

As i said, mostly noise.

  • -21

If you think broad-based consensus on the legitimacy of the justice system's interactions with politicians isn't something that we should consider terribly important, then sure. It's not as though such questions have been a chronic flashpoint for the Culture War over the last decade. I'm sure it'll be fine.

If your reality predicts collapsism stemming from the Hunter Biden Pardon, go for it, it is your reality, and a useful rhetorical weapon.

  • -22

So look, you can take the position you do, but engage in good faith, don't snarkily dismiss people as "living in their own reality." I am annoyed by this comment not because you're being rude to @FCfromSSC (he can take it, and he and I don't agree on much politically) but because it is the sort of comment that's been flying a lot lately, the Twitter-dunk, the dismissive "Wow," the failure to engage except to the minimum degree necessary to snidely express your contempt.

Don't do this.

Do you think Kushner soliciting billions of dollars in Saudi money while Middle East envoy (almost certainly for a word in Trump’s ear) is corruption that deserves to be investigated? Everybody seems to do this.

Damn, that sounds pretty bad. I wonder why no one ever bothered to look into that? Hunter Biden pretty clearly engaged in money laundering and tax evasion in an attempt to conceal earnings from his illegal activities. Did Kushner do that? If so, why has he not been charged?

...On a deeper level, it seems that this topic highlights a salient difference between our perspectives. I do not "trust the system". I am opposed to the "manipulation of procedural outcomes." I am in fact opposed to corruption, but at the moment it seems to me that corruption is best opposed through an adversarial process, not a cooperative one. I think Biden's corruption is best prevented by Republicans prosecuting him. I think Trump's corruption is best prosecuted by Democrats prosecuting him. The Democrats have shot their wad, and have nothing to show for it. Now I want to see the Republicans take a good, honest swing. I am not swayed by arguments that "everyone does it", because I have observed that these appeals to informal "norms" are one of the primary mechanisms by which procedural outcomes are manipulated. If Kushner is corrupt, which I do not particularly believe, Democrats have had ample opportunity to prosecute him and their failure to do so is their own failing. It seems to me that the best path toward low corruption is to enforce the laws fairly but mercilessly against Democrats where my side is able, and trust self-interest to compel Democrats to do the same to my side where they are able. To the extent that corruption has been normalized among our elites, with a common understanding that a blind eye should be turned to bribery and influence-selling, defecting on that understanding seems like an excellent way to break it for good. And since that understanding seems entirely against the public interest, this seems like a good thing to do.

This logic has been a huge part of the value of Trump generally, in my eyes. We all knew the system was corrupt, but no one involved was interested in burning their own meal ticket, and so all involved cooperated in maintaining and concealing the corruption. The solution was to feed the system something it couldn't cooperate with, and this has worked astonishingly well. The system can conceal its corruption and it can suppress attacks on its legitimacy, but it can't do both at the same time while also fighting a war with itself. And so, we see the perceived legitimacy of large parts of the system outright collapsing, and direct attacks on major institutions are now within the Overton window.

Joe built his political career on peddling political influence to foreign nationals. Hunter was both the ultimate proof, and a terrible distraction because Republicans couldn't close the sale. It looked like political cornball. If this had been 60's, this would have dwarfed Watergate. But nobody cares anymore because every politician does it, and every politician does it because nobody cares.

Sadly, selling out Americans and the working class has been a pasttime of the oligarchy for the last 60 years, agreed.

Hopefully tariffs will begin to reverse the trend, but we will see!

The uproar about Hunter Biden always felt farcical. From Clinton's emails to Mar a lago documents.

Hunter Biden wasn't farcical inherently, the DOJ's handling of his cases were. They decided to go for the least important crimes he committed, the gun, the taxes, and ignore FARA and anything else that put the microscope anywhere near Joe (see also the total lack of investigation into the classified documents found in Joe's garage, basement, and Chinese-funded university office). Hunter has never been about Hunter any more than busting any street dealer for dope is about that dealer. The target of a legitimate investigation is the Biden crime family whos head and chief operating officer was, for most of the most know relevant potential crimes, vice-president Joe Biden. Joe ran an open air corruption market getting his failson sinecures in return for official government acts, as well as his brother, and his wife.

I have to admit darkly enjoying the NPC's switching their talking points from "Biden respects institutions and would never attack the legitimacy of our justice system by pardoning Hunter Biden" to "Biden proves what a great father he is by protecting his son from the selective and unjust prosecution of the politicized DOJ". But it is going to cause me to have a stroke at Christmas when my FIL sperges out about Trump apropos of nothing.

I'm continually amazed at the cognitive dissonance of the people who buy into the rehabilitation of Joe Biden. This is a man with a career longer than most of us have been alive. A career consistently marked by crass shameless lies, retarded own goals, and a long reputation for being highly inappropriate with women and children. So much so Obama was joking about Biden's "special backrubs". Who's raised deeply troubled and dysfunctional children, so bursting at the seems with the horrors of their parentage that it continually leaks out through forgotten journals and laptops.

And somehow people believed in the span of 6 months of propaganda that Biden was an honest, decent man, and his administration would be a "return to normalcy". Ignore everything you knew about the man for 50 years. Ignore that his previous failed presidential run became a historically remembered punchline of a campaign.

I've seen a few people remark that the pardon isn't even a pardon for specific enumerated crimes, but a blanket pardon for everything Hunter did from 2014 through now. Things we know, things we don't know, you name it. Is that typical? It reads like one of those Hollywood tropes where some supervillian has a hostage tied to a biological weapon hidden in a school for blind molested girls, and demands a blanket pardon or he'll give all those poor kids Super AIDS.

It would tickle me pink if Biden turned out to be just like Trump, in that the pardon is written so poorly and hastily that it doesn't hold up in court. But somehow I doubt such a sloppily issued order will receive an ounce of the legal scrutiny a Trump order received.

Is that typical?

I don't think it is atypical in cases that warrant it. In cases where crimes may have been committed over a period of time pardons will apply to a time frame in addition to specific crimes. Otherwise the pardon has potential to not feel very pardon-like in a few years. Who knows what kind of goofy antics Hunter was up to we don't know about? The draft dodgers pardons, general amnesty pardons, and a pardon like the one Nixon received apply to chunks of time rather than a pardon for only a specific crime.

As I understand, presidential pardons are basically magical spells. Make'em how you want. Biden wants his son safe from prosecution, so he casts a more powerful spell. Biden may know there is more dirt to find, fears or knows of Republican intentions to go digging, or simply doesn't trust his son with an ounce of mud to be honest about things. If you're going to pardon him properly, then it's best to pardon him for the time period he was a bad boy.

The breadth of Hunter Biden's pardon is unprecedented, with Ford's pardoning of Nixon the closest comparison. That source goes through other presidential pardons in history for comparison. Since it's MSN, I take it as a sign that Democratic Party partisans are less-than-pleased with Biden pissing in their well.

Okay, fair enough. Kudos to me for thinking of all the same examples as an MSN journalist. Eek. Bad of me to assume that should mean more. So sure, unprecedented in some ways, but it adheres to the spirit of the pardon in this case. For the good and bad reasons

It makes sense to be unprecedented. We don't see many mob bosses who require big blocks of time washed away receive pardons. That article led me to reporting on Bush 2. At the end of his second term in 2008 he issued then rescinded a pardon. All to avoid a look of impropriety. The concern? The recipient had donated to Republican candidates. How far we've come in 15 short years!

Another thing that article led me to was this 2020 paper from a bygone and never ending era. I skimmed. It's by a UConn professor that argues the presidential pardon has a "specificity requirement" based on the practices in English common law at the time of the American Founders. It doesn't seem like a great paper, but maybe I will finish it and report back.

Yes a lot of people believe pardon power is unfettered but what if SCOTUS ruled it wasn't and you had to specify crimes? What good would a pardon be if you couldn't get your son off the hook because he probably can't even remember all his crimes? I suppose it'd be fine if it was more like a guilty plea, so long as it still had broad power.

The Galaxy Brain move for Biden would be;

  1. Privately ask Trump, now, to pardon Hunter on Day 1 of his admin. Trump does seem to genuinely love his kids and so the father-to-father humility would work.
  2. Trump does this even though it pisses off some of his more conspiratorial supporters - but they forget about it in a news cycle when Kash Patel is defenestrating FBI bureaucrats or something.
  3. Biden publicly thanks Trump and shakes his hand at a rose garden meeting or some other photo op.

The only fly in this ointment is that the left has really gone all into the "Literally Hitler" line. It's not that Trump would be so vengeful to rebuff Biden if the Delaware Destroyer himself were to come, hat in hand, to Mar-A-Lago to ask for the favor, it's that Biden, BidenWorld, and the rest of the Left Establishment is so permanently apoplectic over Trump's continued existence that they cannot see a clever- but straightforward - move here. Pride before the fall. Lack of humility. Richness of spirit. And they wonder how they become the villains.

(Quick) Edit: Ah, well. Guess I was wrong

It could even have been a quid pro quo — “Donald, give me a list of people it would cost you political capital to pardon. I’ll pardon some of them, and then you pardon Hunter when you’re sworn in.”

(Quick) Edit: Ah, well. Guess I was wrong

Don't read too much. Right now trashing Biden is zero cost for Trump. So he is doing it.

Kind of loving the fact that Biden, being old as shit, on his way out, and having been betrayed by his own party is willing to torch anyone and everyone who was counting on him to remain sidelined for the remainder of his term.

Also as usual I love that Twitter is a pretty good archive of public figures' stated positions on issues in the past so they can be dredged up when they blatantly alter said position without cause.

Community Notes is having a field day.

Not under the illusion that this will cause any contrition or self-reflection, but these folks are soon to be out of power for a while so I can take humor from this, rather than annoyance.

And finally, I generally support the Office of the Presidency having unilateral, unquestioned authority to pardon (federal) criminals although for somewhat obvious reasons which I can elucidate if needed, I think the pardons need to be precise and specifically define which crimes are being pardoned. And of course has to actually be retroactive, not prospective.

So Biden's approach to blanket pardoning Hunter's crimes during a broad period of time is raising my eyebrows quite a bit. Not claiming anything specific but if it comes out later that he did something, I dunno, treasonous that would be a HORRIBLE look.

I think the pardons need to be precise and specifically define which crimes are being pardoned

Nope. With the discretion that the prosecutors have and the US penalty code vastness - let's say for Jan 6 participants, anything but a blank pardon will leave further door for prosecution.

Pardoning someone for any Federal crimes they committed specifically on the date of January 6th, 2021 and maybe even narrowing it to crimes that did not involve bodily injury, is not that difficult to do.

And that is literally a blank pardon with a small asterisk

Insufficient; clever prosecutors would get them for conspiracy, committed on the date they decided to go to DC.

Trump should have the Ukraine extridite and prosecute him as part of the peace negotiations.

The other obvious lawfare strategies would be to find a red state prosecutor with whatever nebulous nexus to bring state charges not subject to the pardon according to lots of blue media ink ("lied to a patrol officer about the nature of his travel"). Or to use the pardon to compel unfavorable testimony (voids the fifth amendment right to avoid self-incrimination) or face even further charges.

Not that I'd endorse these, they just seem the logical escalating responses.

I suspect republicans would rather make political hay, because there’s no real advantage to prosecuting a single drug user.

It also would remove the Republican talking point, largely true, that the Democrats are uniquely destabilizing because they use the court system to persecute political opponents.

Pretty pathetic. I thought he genuinely cared about the rule of law and his legacy, as you point out, but it seems I've been insufficiently cynical. I suppose politicians will only be honest insofar as voters can punish them for defection.

Nonono, not even that.

You still aren't even close to in the vicinity of the ballpark where cynicism once played.

What’s actually wrong with this? It’s his son. He shouldn’t have said he wouldn’t pardon him but that’s not actually what he said, was it(he said something like ‘let the justice process take its course’).

  • -16

He shouldn’t have said he wouldn’t pardon him but that’s not actually what he said, was it

Yes it was:

The president's decision to pardon his son is a sharp reversal from months of vows from the White House and Biden himself that he would not use the power of his office to benefit his family. After his son was convicted in his gun case, the president said he would "abide by the jury decision. I will do that and I will not pardon him.”

What’s actually wrong with this? It’s his son.

That is exactly what's wrong with it. Using power to grant favorable outcomes to friends and family is a bad thing.

If he had taken his son and defected with him to North Korea, I would respect his decision a lot on grounds of familiar ties. (Of course, that would be complete overkill. Realistically, his son could likely escape to a neutral country and continue his lifestyle there during Trump II, or he could risk having to spend some time as a VIP prisoner for his misconduct. Neither would destroy him.)

The problem with accepting that of course, people in power will use that power to help their family members is that it will result full-on nepotism.

  • "Naturally the CEO gave that cushy managerial position to his nephew. Who would not put family first?"
  • "The Don basically had to order a hit on the witness accusing his son in law. Should he deprive his daughter of her husband?"
  • "Of course the general leaned on his adjutants to quickly promote his son."

Improperly helping your family is just as selfish as helping yourself personally. If you accept that of course elected officials will do that, then you basically end up with a banana republic.

At the end of the day, every accused is someone's son or daughter, but most fathers and mothers are not in a position to put their hand on the scale.

I'm not 100% that this is pissing all over his legacy, per se.

An interesting "culture war" piece of this is why it was a blanket pardon stretching back to when Hunter first joined Burisma. The "innocent" argument is that even if Biden simply pardoned Hunter for the gun/IRS charges, there would be continued lawfare trying to tie the Bidens to shady backroom dealings in Ukraine.

The less innocent argument - the one that will spawn a thousand conspiracy theories - is that there's a lot of "there" there and Biden is protecting himself, not just his son. And seeing how much rationality gets expensed towards the "innocent" theory will be interesting to watch unfold.

The discussion along party lines have also been eye raising. The three things I've seen from Dems have been "Trump pardoned/will pardon worse!!!", "guess I won't vote for Biden again, hurr hurr" and "wow cons are melting down!!" The three things I've seen from cons are "I'm a father, I get it," "well, Biden lied," and the aforementioned "so... Why ten years?"

There's a reason why exit polls had voters listing Democracy as their #1 issue had those voters breaking 50/50. "Democracy" is not a winning issue for Dems when their messaging on this stuff sucks. The cons are acting more conciliatory about this than they are.

I mean, I'm mostly curious as to how Hunter will behave going forward.

If they really want him, seems like Trump could direct an ongoing investigation into him and keep him under tight surveillance and ding him for any new crimes he commits.

It's a tad hard for me to believe that Hunter will just go completely straight after this.

Uh, this doesn’t seem like something trump or Bondi would do. Hunter has always been much more useful as a tool of political grandstanding(for which he’s most useful when free) or a means to get at Joe Biden(who’s now irrelevant, free to live out his life in the memory care facility he so clearly needs to be in). Republican grandstanding about Hunter was not based on genuine horror of his crack habit, otherwise it wouldn’t have been a matter for congress.

It's a tad hard for me to believe that Hunter will just go completely straight after this.

He'll still be into hookers and blow, but he won't be making any corrupt deals, because he no longer has the quo that others would provide the quid for.

I doubt Biden (if he’s lucid) is particularly scared of Trump going after him. He didn’t go after Hillary and Trump disliked her much more than he dislikes Biden.

Aside from which, the idea that an elderly dementia patient poses a threat to anybody is farcical.

An amusing theory, albeit unlikely. But actually burning down the Democratic Party is probably the biggest gift Biden could give to the left (i.e. the leftist wing of the Democratic Party + those disenchanted due to being even further left), since they've been claiming for decades that the Democratic Party is too far right and the "real people" want a leftist party. Of course, building up a new political party from the ashes of the Democratic Party would take several years, and would likely just be filled with leftist populist grifters and not actually make anyone happy. And it's much more likely the Democratic Party just limps along continuing to not leave enough air for another party to take its place opposing the Republican Party.

In the meantime, republicans win senate races in New Mexico and Virginia, making the left decidedly unhappy, and the new party may call itself socialist but in practice moderates into centrist machine politics faster than a barefoot jackrabbit on the blacktop in july.

Biden might be mad at Kamala and Democrats, but he certainly is not working with Trump, particularly on J6. I think Biden has truly internalized a lot of the propaganda and thinks Trump is a Putin puppet who tried to overthrow democracy on J6. Just like with the fake DUI claim he made about his dead wife, there are many Bidenisms that are no longer lies for him. As George Costanza would say, its not a lie if you believe it.

My LLM-sense is tingling, but let's leave that aside.

As a work of futurism, this sucks. Bold statement, yes, but it seems to belong to the category of prediction that goes:

"1 (ONE) major thing changes in the course of technological advancement, nothing else is allowed to significantly advance, nope, not even when we've got clear evidence of it happening or you should at least muster good evidence of why you don't think it's relevant"

It's the equivalent of writing The Martian exactly as-is after SpaceX announces and test flies Starship.

What are the cardinal sins? Well, it seems to assume that over the course of several decades or millennia (long enough for sub-speciation!):

  1. No significant advancements in AI or robotics, which would obviate the need for a very skilled, astronaut-tier colonist pool. Assuming there's demand for meat and bones humans at all.

  2. No genetic or cybernetic enhancement that would directly address many of the consequences of Martian existence, or that would simply allow useful traits to rapidly flow through the gene pool.

  3. You can already deal with some of the downsides of low gravity by embedding centrifuges on the Martian surface so everyone can get in some single g time.

Further ink spilled on the new Martian Ubermensch is a complete waste of time, and that's coming from someone who advocates for space colonization, and Mars as low hanging fruit, even if we really ought to be aiming at asteroids as well (it'll happen anyway, if launch costs keep dropping).

Even leaving aside my previous concerns and my own interest in space colonization, the odds of Mars brain-draining Earth are... low. It is rather unlikely that we have millions of people clamoring to move there, or that losing them makes any damn difference. Mars is not a very attractive place to live, we'll go there despite that inconvenient fact, not because of the excellent sea-side views in the Hellas Basin.

Agree with you on all points. But I'd also add that the original premise is probably wrong, I'm guessing the main selection effect for moving to Mars will be a willingness to leave Earth entirely behind.

The first few hundred or few thousand might be WHIMs, but the first million will merely be those who are willing to leave Earth behind. And the individual reasons why people are willing to do that won't always be good or even neutral. The anti-social, the misfits, the failures, and the criminals will all end up in the mix at some point.

Willing to leave Earth behind, and also able to afford to leave Earth behind. Musk thinks that Starship can get Mars one-way-ticket prices down to $500K in the medium term and $100K in the long term. I'd append another zero to those numbers (and I'm a huge SpaceX fan! others may prefer larger grains of salt still!), but even if I don't, it's hard to see the most anti-social/failure/criminal element ever managing to front the dough. Some of the misfits will (I'm also a huge capitalism fan in general) but I'd bet the net selection effect is still not in their favor.

We ain’t any different than Tombstone or Dodge City or San Francisco. First come the dreamers. Then the bankers. Then the salesmen. Then the sharks. Then the desperate. And then the thieves.

That’s a quote from the new Taylor Sheridan series Landman. It’s about an oil boom town in Texas, but it would fit the pattern of New World settlement, and probably the settlement of any new world. There’s 8 billion people on the planet, I doubt Musk or anyone else would have trouble finding a few thousand fit, motivated, high IQ people who would be willing to truck out to Mars. If the deadbeats and the penal colonists and the political refugees ever show up it probably won’t be until quite a while later

Also @self_made_human - some more ellaboration on what I meant:

I was imagining white collar criminals, fraudsters, or illicit business men. They would have the cash, but be in danger of losing it if they remained on Earth. They'd be willing to tolerate the risks, and have specific reasons for getting off of Earth. The criminals.

There are people with engineering and technical talent that don't fit in well on Earth, I've worked with plenty of engineers like this. They might get it in their heads that being on a different planet would somehow change their social skills. The anti-social.

There are people that are for various reasons largely unattached. Maybe their families have died or they've cut each other off. They aren't interested or good at dating, so they avoid it. They can still work and make money, but without family or social connection they simple accrue the money without much way to spend it. The misfits.

There are people that dun goofed. Had a good family, and a great life, but they got caught cheating with their secretary. Now they are divorced, hated by their family, fired from their job, and generally a pariah to all their former friends. Maybe they embezzled from their business, did a brief stint in Jail, but the family and money are all gone. They went big and lost it all, but they still have a bit stashed away. The failures.

I would suspect that these gentlemen are more likely to end up sipping Mai Thais on the beach in the seedier parts of southeast Asia than end up on Mars haha.

Could you cobble up a few thousand disaffected but reasonably wealthy men if you tried hard enough? Eh, probably, but you'd have to be quite lax in terms of screening. I'm not sure Musk wants his colonies to have that particular make, but I suppose he's going to have to compromise somewhere.

My contention is that the number of people who are driven enough to want to settle Mars at a quality of life reasonable in the next few decades of colonial tech are very few, at least if they're paying for the privilege. Larger if you pay them, but then the question arises, what are you paying them for? They're unlikely to be financial positive, but of course, we must account for the fact that the biggest backer here is distinctly uninterested in an ROI (my Twitter has been bombarded with people arguing that point, but it seems clear to me money is far from Musk's primary motivator for Mars).

I would suspect that these gentlemen are more likely to end up sipping Mai Thais on the beach in the seedier parts of southeast Asia than end up on Mars haha.

Maybe for the criminals, but I think the world will be shrinking in the future. Fewer places to hide and disappear.

Could you cobble up a few thousand disaffected but reasonably wealthy men if you tried hard enough? Eh, probably, but you'd have to be quite lax in terms of screening. I'm not sure Musk wants his colonies to have that particular make, but I suppose he's going to have to compromise somewhere.

Beyond a thousand participants its unlikely musk will be personally interviewing anyone for the project. To some extent I'm assuming organization success for him. That this project actually gets off the ground and there is a reproductive and successful group of humans on Mars. If it is successful at all, then at some point it will turn into something that not one single human can manage.

My contention is that the number of people who are driven enough to want to settle Mars at a quality of life reasonable in the next few decades of colonial tech are very few, at least if they're paying for the privilege. Larger if you pay them, but then the question arises, what are you paying them for? They're unlikely to be financial positive, but of course, we must account for the fact that the biggest backer here is distinctly uninterested in an ROI (my Twitter has been bombarded with people arguing that point, but it seems clear to me money is far from Musk's primary motivator for Mars).

I like your contentions. But you are stopping at a few thousand. And I don't think the OP is stopping at a few thousand. Break ten thousand and I feel that things change significantly. Above ten thousand you go from some chance of managed by a single person to zero chance.

I do believe Musk in what he says he wants. Which is a multi planet species. And I think he is working as hard as he can to get there. I do think there is a limitation of wealth and resources at our current level. Right now he can support a few people on mars. In a decade when he makes things cheaper it might be up to 100 people. In two decades when he continues making things cheaper and maybe grows his wealth a bunch its 1000 people.

I don't think this project can solely rely on Musk to break 10k people on Mars. And when that limitation strikes, I think the groups I have outlined are the colonists available.

I think there might be maybe a few thousand people who meet the definition of WHIM who would be willing to pay for the privilege of moving to Mars (let's say in the first two decades since the first colonists land with permanent intent). I think to get significantly more people there, especially talented or motivated people, you'll have to subsidize them or outright pay them to be there.

I personally doubt that the intersection of people willing to go to Mars and those who can do something useful there isn't very large!

I'm all for Mars colonization, but even I acknowledge that it's a rather miserable place to be. For most intents and purposes, it's an actually worse lifestyle than permanent Antarctic habitation (you won't die from asphyxiation if something goes wrong, and you get decent ping on the internet). If someone is inclined to argue that antarctic colonization is restricted by treaty, how many people are running off to Siberia or northern Canada and Greenland?

What sells Mars is the romance. And it's not a novel. By the time technology advances enough that living on Mars is as comfortable as living here, there will be little intrinsic reason to. Not x-risk, not the pay, little but because you want to be on the human frontier. I might pay to visit Mars once, but you'll have to pay me a pretty good premium to live and work there longterm. And I suspect the economic incentive to employ people there isn't going to be very large, but might be brute-forceable. And I personally expect that human presence won't be economically compelling by the time we have regular Starship fleets.

It doesn't seem like we're in a space opera future where humans spread through the cosmos because we have no alternative. It seems that if we're going to have large numbers of people off world anytime soon, it's by paying them to be there or them paying for it, all off the backs of taxing far more economical machines. Robots will take over from humans as the most useful entities to have on Mars, and it remains to be seen if we even get there in time.

Which is fine by me, if I'm chilling in an O'Neill cylinder, I'm not fussed about the fact that I'm not employed there. I want to be in space because it's cool! With creature comforts not found on rusty iceballs!

My LLM-sense is tingling

Oof, yeah. The overuse of adverbs and adjectives as color and the lofty but imprecise language which avoids making a directly controversial point.

Hate to say it if this is a poster's own hand writing, but that's a lot of words to poorly explain the real essay.

I'm not particularly anti-LLM, but my opinion is that if I can tell, you've largely wasted my time, and probably used a bad model or prompted poorly. (This is not Official Motte Policy, I have my mod hat off, and some people use LLMs solely to be obnoxious).

At the very least, proofread and exercise some editorial discretion! Their summary adds absolutely nothing to the original essay, which I've read halfway, and sells it short. It certainly makes the mistakes I mention, but at least it mentions that the author has a "we'll wait and see" approach to AI, as opposed to skipping it outright and just regurgitating things uncritically.

Anyone else dream of colonizing Mars? In The WHIMS of Mars, anonymous shitposter John Carter outlines what it might look like. ... [snip]...

Does this' anonymous shitposter John Carter' fella, also go by Unshacked sometimes?

The WHIMs on Earth are less fertile than average in a country already experiencing sub-replacement fertility. How does a Mars colony deal with that?

He is essentially describing the European settlement of the USA, but moreso. The people striking the earth then were either like the Puritans (high social trust, virtuous, extremely educated, high IQ) or like the borderers (intrepid, enterprising, indomitable, competitive), both bootstrapping civilization in hostile environments, alone. So, 'elite human capital'. This is unlike the South American/Mexican example where heavily armed free companies set themselves up as feudal lords over extractive slave empires.

North America's competitive advantage lasted for its first few centuries, and the USA really became something of a City on the Hill institutionally. But this advantage has evaporated with its advantage in human capital (and no, I don't just mean IQ), along with the inevitable loss of virtue and social cohesion that comes with prosperity. America's supposedly amazing new institutions are sagging under the stress. (You'll notice that its genius constitution flops when you try to govern Liberia with it.) My prediction is that liberal democracy as the default political model will not survive the century. We will retvrn to, if not the old ways, something that tastes of the old ways.

So with the Mars colonies, if they even happen. There's nothing new under Sol.

AI slop detected. A human would get bored meticulously laying out the same obvious ideas over and over and assume the reader can draw a conclusion or two. The next step in LLMs will be them being able to pretend to get bored with things instead of being eternally patient and obsequious.

Also, couldn't conditions of extreme danger and tightness of resources create a society of extreme communalism where no one's allowed to do anything without group approval?

Or a society trained to military order. Maybe Fremen would be a better model than an IQ-jerkoff fantasy.

A man's body is his own; his water belongs to the tribe.

Also, couldn't conditions of extreme danger and tightness of resources create a society of extreme communalism where no one's allowed to do anything without group approval?

I think the early founding of America is on-point here. It seems quite possible that such a society would be individualistic (in the sense of having high standards and expectations for each individual and rewarding individual prowess and merit) but I also expect that it would be much less liberal. (The military might be a good idea of what that might look like.) Antisocial behaviors have always negatively impacted the community, but on Mars things like "not working" mean you're putting the entire colony in danger by consuming valuable resources that you are not helping to produce, not that you're consuming a fractional amount of tax dollars or irritating passers-by in the street.

Ah, this is basically the setting for The Expanse series of books and the show.

Mars got colonized and colonists are in the process of terraforming it, and eventually traded some of their advanced tech for their independence. Despite vastly lower population, their people are cream of the crop, their ships are therefore top of the line, and their population is ideologically aligned. Earth is using aging tech, its people are demotivated (some huge portion of them are on UBI handouts), and of course would have had the disadvantage of fighting an expeditionary war.

Mars has a HUGE chip on their shoulder, and its military wing is so Jingoistic that there are some whisperings of invading earth if they ever have to fight it out.

So Mars is basically optimized for churning out elite soldiers and navy, and elite scientists. They'd much rather churn out scientists but they can't ignore the fact that earth has sheer numbers on them, and earth has strong economic motivation to bring them to heel.

The books also have a third 'faction' from those who colonized the asteroid belt, who are looked down upon by both Earth and Mars and who really hates both of them.

Anyhow, pulling on that thread a bit, my one objection is that its not necessarily the case that extreme selective pressure will produce an all-around superior specimen. It seems just as likely to produce a specimen that is hyperspecialized for a particular niche but pretty useless outside that. I'm thinking, for example, of creatures that live in deep caves and thus don't have eyes because they'd be a waste of energy. Intelligence is obviously important for survival on Mars, but it wouldn't be the end-all be-all, and thus those who are the most fit for survival might not exemplify all the traits the essay is suggesting will be necessary for that first wave of colonists.

It'd also assume that Mars wasn't an IQ shredder of massive proportions where the colonists are so zeroed in on survival that reproduction is fully secondary concern, and they count on a continuing supply of mental elites to keep emigrating. Even in The Expanse it becomes clear that Martian society is actually harsh on its citizens because it has to squeeze resources into both military defense and terraforming, and any projects aside those two get ignored as a waste, and any person who can't contribute to one or both projects is also ignored, as a waste. So Mars doesn't have much in the way of an arts scene and despite all its great technology can't really provide prosperity for its people because they have no 'spare' resources to dole out.

I dunno, I do want to travel to Mars to be part of a permanent colony, but I do want to hedge against being too idealistic about what that will mean for the quality of the people there. I can't think of any previous examples of a colony that, subject to the pressures of survival, managed to outperform its home country in a few generations merely by dint of attracting a far more talented population.

Even the United States had to get a boost from France to actually beat England off.

Whether or not settling Mars is practically possible is beyond my wheelhouse.

But one thing I'm sure of is that it won't be our best and brightest. I'm pretty sure the bulk of people who would sign up to go and live on Mars would be those who haven't been able to make satisfactory lives for themselves on earth. Something between Victorian convicts sent to Australia and modern day boat-people. I can't imagine any women willingly making the trip, so good luck breeding a race of superhumans.

My first thought was along your lines, since pretty much all previous colonizations followed a similar pattern.

However, 3-5 years in a spaceship to land on a barren wasteland is vastly different. The voyage of the Mayflower was 2 months across the Atlantic to a land of unmatched natural bounty. The migrants floating across the Mediterranean only have to stomach a couple of days before landing on a rich, permissive welfare state with prebuilt infrastructure. Even with SpaceX bringing back indentured servitude to cover travel costs, the first folks landing on Mars will be a different breed than previous colonists. It's going to be much more like Antarctica, which, from what I understand, is generally an elite crew compared to the rest of humanity.

This is an interesting discussion but clean up your AI slop. Literally just delete most of the content.

I have removed this post and permabanned the poster, because it is pretty obviously a copy/paste from an LLM, from a user account with no history. I don't know if it is Substack spam or what, and I don't mind if people want to talk about colonizing Mars, but this is not a place for dumping LLM posts.

Thank you - good call!

New Turing Test - get a 100% AI-written post into Quality Contributions.

Nate Silver wants to share what he wrote in his journal with you - LINK -

He's couching it as a "Reader Q&A" but it's a self-reflective series on him, his substack, the election, polls, and politics in general. If you're already fed up with Mr. Silver, it could be an exasperating read. I am not, however, and do find Nate's straight political takes (without any of the bulllshit "data journalism" or woo-woo risk and gambling stuff) to be better than the average pundit.

Just before the paywall, Silver concludes with a paragraph that reveals the rot at the core of the PMC-liberal elite;

For me, “Trump’s even worse!” worked one last time and I voted for Harris — largely because of January 6 and because Trump, like Biden, is too old. But maybe some of my gut feeling that Trump would win was because I sympathized with voters’ instincts to punish the Democratic Party more than I did in 2016 and 2020. Being willing to take a short-term hit to discourage coercion or punish broken promises is probably a pretty good default, an attitude that’s close enough to rational more often than not.

Dishonesty has a price. The Liberal/Left coalition has been held together by ducktape, glue, and the continued adherence to the idea of a "better tomorrow" as guided by the experts. But they're all inveterate liars and the American people finally called them out on it. Is it a full moon, Nate's turning into a self-awarewolf.

Being willing to take a short-term hit to discourage coercion or punish broken promises is probably a pretty good default, an attitude that’s close enough to rational more often than not.

Ahem.

Yes.

Although the goal should be to restore symmetry, not create a different class of elites who are beyond reproach and punishment.

the goal should be to restore symmetry, not create a different class of elites who are beyond reproach and punishment

Is such a thing even possible?

YES, just put me in charge of everything! /s

I think history has shown long term symmetry is all but impossible, but it sure seems like you can achieve it for short periods of time and a lot can get done during that period.

I think the current challenge is that this used to be the purview of religion. Elites had to behave well insofar as they believed that a higher power could punish them.

We're in an era where not only is belief in a higher power waning, technological wonders are making it seem like you can 'become' a higher power. I don't know how to maintain symmetry between someone with access to a networked drone swarm and someone who can barely use the internet, honestly.

Silvers main point is if voters punish “their” party (by not voting, or voting third party), even if it means the enemy gets into power. He thinks yes, because that is how he felt:

Turning back to national politics, there are two times when I’ve felt betrayed by the Indigo Blob, my term for the unofficial alliance between the Democratic Party and the progressive expert class. If you’ve been reading me for a while, you can probably identify them because they’re the two huge fights I’ve had with the left in the past several years. One was with COVID stuff. When the pandemic began, I was one of those people who was like “Welp, we ought to just trust the experts here!”. Many of those experts did a great job under impossible circumstances. But I felt betrayed by a minority who were clearly using the pandemic to advance their political agendas: their utter hypocrisy in endorsing the George Floyd protests after having spent weeks telling everyone to stay home, for instance.4 And then they did profound harm with prolonged school closures.

Then there was Biden’s decision to run again. I thought this actually did present an existential risk because of an 86-year-old president’s questionable decision-making abilities in a crisis. At some point, it even became farcical, with Biden referring to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy as “President Putin” in a press conference meant to reassure the nation about his cognitive fitness. You’d get yelled at by a certain type of Democrat if you didn’t play along and pretend that this was normal.

After the June debate, I was willing to put my foot down; I would have voted third-party5 if Biden had remained on the ballot. Maybe this was intended to “teach the Democratic Party a lesson.” Or maybe it was an emotional reaction more analogous to revenge. But either way, being coerced into voting for a man who clearly wasn’t fit for another four years: sorry, that’s where I was going to tap out.

Other voters may feel betrayed by the Democratic Party for other reasons, particularly too much wokeness, too much immigration, and too much spending. In 2019, Harris ran far to her left. Although many pundits claim that Harris pivoted to the center this year, she was making mostly empty gestures. She backed down from many of her 2019 positions without providing any rationale or proposing much in the way of substantive policies to replace them, or doing anything to offend the various “groups” and nonprofits that dominate the Democratic Party’s policy-making infrastructure. And faced with a decision that did have real consequences — her choice of a running mate — Harris went with what the progressive wing wanted instead of the moderates.

Isn’t Trump also hypocritical and prone toward promising lots of things he can’t deliver? Sure, but his promises are also more tangible: less immigration, less crime, less inflation and most importantly, owning the libs and thumbing his finger in the nose of the establishment through the mere fact of his election.

Then there was Biden’s decision to run again.

I really don't like how commentators act like this was a choice when there was no political reality where he could conceivably not run for reelection. The only way this could conceivably make sense is if there was some obvious candidate who wouldn't draw any opposition and who would be running as a continuation of the present administration. In other words, they would have had to name Kamala Harris as heir apparent and hope nobody credible wanted to challenge her. They weren't going to get that. The administration's shortcomings were manifest enough and Kamala's popularity weak enough that at least one squeaky wheel would emerge who would seriously threaten to derail the whole thing. At that point you're just guaranteeing a repeat of 2016 or any incumbent who faced a serious primary challenge.

On the other hand, you could (probably) keep Harris out and have an open primary with the usual large cast of candidates. But when do you start this process? Most candidates announce in the spring or early summer of the year prior to the election, and the first primary debates are held in the late summer or early fall. But the candidates need time to form exploratory committees and the like and get their campaigns together before they announce, so add an additional month or two of lead time. It's worth noting that Trump's nomination was not a fait accompli at this point, so there was a reasonable concern that the GOP candidate would have an advantage in the general if given more lead time. The latest Biden could have realistically waited to announce that he wasn't running would have been May or June of 2023, but more realistically it would have been made in March or April.

At this point, his presidency effectively ends. any new legislative proposals or foreign policy initiatives are now political hot potatoes that are discussed more in terms of their effect on the primary election than on their own terms. Support from his own party is no longer guaranteed, so better just to ditch anything the least bit controversial. This isn't good for the party, either, since changing candidates doesn't exactly guarantee a Democratic victory. This is put more starkly when you consider that the second half of Biden's presidency went much better than the first. Inflation cooled, the border crisis subsided somewhat, and COVID and Afghanistan were increasingly in the rear view mirror. Any attempts for the party to win back voters or simply do what they feel is right go up in smoke; they've effectively conceded to half a term. And to compound the error, Biden's tenure as president is frozen at that point, and it becomes the record that Democrats are running on, including those who would be willing to question Biden's decision making.

A Biden candidacy wasn't ideal, but he had already beaten Trump once and there weren't any candidates who could step in and make an obvious improvement. If Biden has a normal, boring performance at the first debate then he doesn't drop out and, who knows, maybe he wins. Conversely, if Biden doesn't run and Trump wins anyway then the pundits are writing articles about how the Democrats sacrificed 2 years of power in order to expose intraparty divisions and nominate a candidate who was stuck with Biden's record anyway and had no real chance of winning. So pick your poison.

I really don't like how commentators act like this was a choice when there was no political reality where he could conceivably not run for reelection. The only way this could conceivably make sense is if there was some obvious candidate who wouldn't draw any opposition and who would be running as a continuation of the present administration. In other words, they would have had to name Kamala Harris as heir apparent and hope nobody credible wanted to challenge her. They weren't going to get that. The administration's shortcomings were manifest enough and Kamala's popularity weak enough that at least one squeaky wheel would emerge who would seriously threaten to derail the whole thing. At that point you're just guaranteeing a repeat of 2016 or any incumbent who faced a serious primary challenge.

Granting all this is true: it's still Biden's fault and he should have stepped down.

I'm sorry, I thought he was the adult in the room? Part of being an adult is being blamed for your decisions, not acting like they're sudden currents that swept you away for no reason.

He, the grownup, chose not only an unqualified but deeply unpopular and incompetent candidate. And he did so for explicitly racial reasons. Whose fault is it? The VP's only essential duties are to break ties in the Senate and to stand as a second for the President.

I also reject the self-serving notion that Bernie is what did in Hillary. She's always been unpopular and Bernie being relevant at all was the public desperately begging Democrats to take their money. Democrats didn't lose in 2008 because someone actually challenged at a primary instead of letting the party grandee be anointed. The party could also have leaned on Kamala to allow an open primary.

A Biden candidacy wasn't ideal, but he had already beaten Trump once and there weren't any candidates who could step in and make an obvious improvement. If Biden has a normal, boring performance at the first debate then he doesn't drop out and, who knows, maybe he wins.

So if Biden wasn't Biden it'd be okay?

Like, this is part of what drove me crazy about the media spin on this. They made it seem as if Biden's mental decline was nothing more than a campaigning issue . So I suppose, in that light, it can look as a bad roll of the dice, bad tactics, a very good but rare counter that knocked Biden out. Some sort of July Surprise? Shit happens, move on.

No, Biden was unfit, physically and mentally. The reason the debate settled the matter is that it was undeniable proof of what people were told wasn't happening (and they had to keep being told because they didn't believe it). Biden hid the extent of this for months upon months not only from the public but from some of his colleagues and the media. This likely affected not just the campaign but his administration (given all of the reporting of stage-managing) Biden then couldn't hold it together under the stress of a full campaigning season, like Democrats like Dean Phillips warned ahead of time. By the time it finally came out, it was too late.

That is still Joseph Biden's fault. Why are we talking about this stuff like it just happened to him? Even if he could have white-knuckled it, he shouldn't have. Because the office of the President is too important to be left to a convalescent. And Biden, as the adult, should know that.

All of this happened against a backdrop of voters making it absolutely clear his age was an issue. Biden pushed through, thinking some combination of his policies (both the ones he claimed and the ones he tried to row back from), Trump's legal cases and general unfavourability would all win him the day - essentially holding the voters hostage, as Silver puts it. He gambled, and lost.

It was not at all practically impossible for an old President to step down and let the party battle it out. I understand that it felt that way psychologically for Biden. But Biden's political judgment doesn't seem to be so self-evidently sound that we can take it as Gospel.

We're hearing now from Democratic insiders like PSA that his polling showed a 400 Electoral College loss and even then he had to be dragged out. What about this implies some sort of judicious weighing of the options? It's just ego. He's way more like Trump than the media hagiography has implied. Worse: Trump actually does seem to be irreplaceable to his base.

No, Biden was unfit, physically and mentally. The reason the debate settled the matter is that it was undeniable proof of what people were told wasn't happening (and they had to keep being told because they didn't believe it). Biden hid the extent of this for months upon months not only from the public but from some of his colleagues and the media.

The question is how many months. Remember, we're not talking about whether or not Biden should have dropped out earlier, but whether he should have run in the first place. He announced he was seeking a second term on April 25, at which point there were only two groups of people arguing that any kind of age or cognitive issues should keep him from running. The first was Republicans, but they had been arguing that Biden had dementia since at least 2019 and thus had no credibility on the issue. The second was people like Dean Phillips and James Carville, along with a bunch of rank and file Democrats, but their arguments were just that he was too old generally and not that he was experiencing any kind of specific decline. If he had instead announced that he wasn't seeking a second term then he would have been a lame duck immediately and all the problems I mentioned above would have come into play. Hell, his cognitive decline wouldn't have even been noticed, for precisely the same reason that no one is looking over his appearances from the past four months to find signs of further decline.

And he did so for explicitly racial reasons.

I don't know what the big deal is about this. It's not exactly a secret that running mates are chosen more due to political considerations than anything else. Hell, Trump's choice of Mike Pence over the more well-known Newt Gingrich and Chris Christie was pretty much a naked ploy to shore up his unsteady support among the Christian Right, yet I never hear criticism that he was chosen for religious reasons. By your criteria, he's an even worse choice than Harris, as his chances of winning a national election as second in line are roughly on par with Rick Santorum or Mike Huckabee. Harris, for her part, chose a white guy after only considering white guys and after pretty much every commentator said she should pick a white guy, yet I never heard any criticism of her for choosing Tim Walz for racial reasons.

I also reject the self-serving notion that Bernie is what did in Hillary. She's always been unpopular and Bernie being relevant at all was the public desperately begging Democrats to take their money. Democrats didn't lose in 2008 because someone actually challenged at a primary instead of letting the party grandee be anointed.

I agree with you there; Hillary was a bad candidate, and the Democrats should have seen that in 2008, but you go on to conclude

The party could also have leaned on Kamala to allow an open primary.

First, it wasn't Kamala's decision but that's not my main point. For all the talk I've heard about about having some kind of contested primary, I don't see any scenario in which it wouldn't have made the situation worse. Suppose Biden drops out immediately after that debate; what then? The convention is in less than two months and the election in just over four. The mechanics of scheduling new primaries in all 50 states less than a month after the last ones were completed is a tall order in and of itself, but even assuming the problem could be overcome it only distracts from the real issue. Who is going to jump of the couch to contend for a presidential nomination with that kind of lead time? Remember, nobody other than Biden has any fundraising apparatus or campaign staff at this point. You're asking candidates to start from scratch on short notice. And for the winner, what are the spoils, exactly? The opportunity to run an abbreviated campaign as part of a reclamation project.

Even if they were to dispense with actual elections and simply have a contested primary where candidates would lobby delegates, I doubt the party's best and brightest would be the ones signing up. Do you really think that an up and comer like Josh Sapiro or Gretchen Whitmer is going to waste political capital to take over the presidential bid of an unpopular incumbent? Why not wait a few more years to become more seasoned and make a normal bid where, if nominated, you have the time to run the campaign you want and you're going against a GOP running someone other than Trump for the first time in a dozen years? A contested primary or convention that only attracts b-listers and also-rans only makes the party look even more incompetent, in addition to exposing the internal divisions I spoke of above. Is Deval Patrick or Marianne Williamson a stronger general election candidate than Kamala Harris? Is Kamala a stronger candidate after beating one of those two? Easier to just endorse her and lobby for support rather than open up the clown car.

For having no credibility on the issue, the Republicans seemed to have gotten it right. Maybe you are wrong and they did have credibility but you didn’t listen.

Being eventually right isn't the same as being right. My grandmother had dementia in 2014. If I had continually said she had it beginning in 1995, I would've eventually been right, but only after nearly 20 years of being wrong. Additionally, the claims were always beyond anything that's been demonstrated thus far. While he clearly isn't as sharp as he used to be, nothing he's done publicly has shown any indication he has dementia. His debate performance was bad, but the actual answers he gave weren't anything one wouldn't expect from a garden-variety bad debate performance. The criticism was more on his energy and demeanor than anything substantive. From my experience with the disease, this is not what one would expect from someone with that kind of cognitive decline.

Yes — in your hypo sure. But if you started mentioning grandma is slipping in 2010 you would’ve been correct. That hypo is closer to reality.

The republicans did talk about lack of energy (he did run a basement campaign after all) but pointed out he kept on making weird gaffes (eg confusing his wife with his sister, losing his train of thought). It got worse over his presidency but there was a pretty clear line.

While he clearly isn't as sharp as he used to be, nothing he's done publicly has shown any indication he has dementia.

Or, alternatively, Democrats lived in denial for years and dismissed every evidence, until the mountain of evidence got so large it was impossible to ignore anymore, and then they decided this is the moment from which credibility is counted. Very convenient for them, except some people still have memory and can notice that there was plenty of indications and plenty of evidence.

Bigger point is it doesn't matter at which point the medical diagnosis of "dementia" is supported. Maybe he will never be medically diagnosed with it. The point is he was mentally unfit for the rigors of President's job when he was elected, and he only got worse since. And that's exactly what Republicans were saying and Democrats were denying. Pretending like Republicans just got a bit of blind luck because perfectly fit Biden suddenly became unfit in some random freak accident is just bizarre cope by this point. It is absolutely clear Republicans were right from the start and Democrats were lying from the start (those - and there were many - who knew) or were deceived by the former category and willingly accepted the deception despite the evidence in front of their own eyes.

It's a fascinating setup:

R: Biden is senile!

D: How dare you to say such things without any evidence!

R: Here's evidence Biden is senile

D: Bullshit, this is just stutter.

R: Here's more evidence that Biden is senile, also he never had any stutter before

D: Bullshit, he's perfect and anybody can make a mistake. Trump said "covfefe" once!

R: Here's more evidence that Biden is senile beyond anything that anybody who is not senile have experienced

D: Well, maybe he occasionally looks imperfect, but it's just shallow looks, on the substance he's great, the best president ever

R: His every public appearance is a disaster, he can not be effective President.

D: Sure he can, and he will be for the second term too, and anyone who says otherwise is a crazy Qanon!

R: Here's more disasters from Biden

DNC+Obama: Biden, GTFO

Biden: OK, I decided to GTFO

R: Told ya so.

D: You had no credibility on the issue since when you first told us so, we did not agree with you.

The question is how many months. Remember, we're not talking about whether or not Biden should have dropped out earlier, but whether he should have run in the first place. He announced he was seeking a second term on April 25, at which point there were only two groups of people arguing that any kind of age or cognitive issues should keep him from running. The first was Republicans, but they had been arguing that Biden had dementia since at least 2019 and thus had no credibility on the issue. The second was people like Dean Phillips and James Carville, along with a bunch of rank and file Democrats, but their arguments were just that he was too old generally and not that he was experiencing any kind of specific decline.

So the Republicans said he'd drop out (which was a "conspiracy theory") then he did but they just got lucky? Okay. Maybe. Maybe they simply have a clearer view into their opponents, unclouded by sympathy, but it's possible.

As for Philips and Carville...even if they said it that way, so what? Ezra Klein, in his little push for Biden to drop out, also said he thought Biden could do the job but couldn't campaign for the job/convince people. This seems like bullshit to me. Campaigning for a second term while juggling other balls has always been the job. People gave Obama a bit of a pass on the first debate due to the "rigors of the Presidency", but after he proved he could win on the next one.

Why frame it this way? Because, if Biden is incompetent-incompetent, the Democrats are guilty of malpractice beyond the electoral kind and that's a discussion no Democrat wants to have because it indicts some of their fellows, people they're on a first name basis with. Questions would need to be asked about how the administration runs. Better to - absurdly - pretend that Biden's condition is a merely electorally damaging one.

Long story short: I think it's absurd to believe that Dean Philips burned his rep taking the extraordinary step of primarying his President with just a generalized fear of age. It's that he's of a particular age and is showing decline enough that the voters are noticing.

I don't know what the big deal is about this.

Because it was a bad choice. Grownup, remember?

Biden trapped himself looking for a unicorn: a connected, nationally palatable black female because he kept stacking identity classes of who he would pander to. First it was a woman, then it was a black woman. He didn't need to lock in a woman, or then insist on a black woman afterwards.

You can pick a base-pleaser. The problem here is that it's a) unclear that Kamala was even a base pleaser. It may be what Jim Clyburn wanted but how much did it shape the general? And b) if you're old you should maybe factor in that this person may have to take your seat.

For all the talk I've heard about about having some kind of contested primary, I don't see any scenario in which it wouldn't have made the situation worse. Suppose Biden drops out immediately after that debate; what then? The convention is in less than two months and the election in just over four.

I don't think it should have come to that. He should have never run for a second term, and he should have announced that earlier. It should never have come to the debate.

Even dropping out on the day he announced (and he should have dropped out earlier) would have been better in terms of letting people dip their toe into a primary.

Remember: I think Biden was clearly declining before he admitted it/the debate utterly discredited any argument against it. He would have had good days and bad days. But he would have seen it creeping up on him. The principled thing to do would have been to drop out before.

Even if they were to dispense with actual elections and simply have a contested primary where candidates would lobby delegates, I doubt the party's best and brightest would be the ones signing up. Do you really think that an up and comer like Josh Sapiro or Gretchen Whitmer is going to waste political capital to take over the presidential bid of an unpopular incumbent?

The incumbency damage cannot be known given that they actually would be a fresh candidate, unlike Kamala. I'm inclined to think a lot more Democrats and Democrat-leaners give them some slack compared to Kamala.

They would also have an independent staff - which Kamala didn't seem to have - which would allow them more leeway in shaping their own image.

I'm picturing a longer time period than you since Biden, in my view, should have dropped out earlier. Even in the shorter view, there is an argument for putting candidates under pressure. Bernie Sanders wasn't seen as any sort of national politician before he resonated with voters. Kamala likely would have been filtered out.

Trump has high unfavorables. It's not outside of the realm of possibility that even on a narrow window ambitious Democrats get involved. It's much more likely if Biden drops out early: as much as he hates the guy, he could coordinate with party grandees like Obama to feel things out.

In many ways the last minute scramble to see someone willing to burn their turn is just another result of Biden's malpractice. Imagine if he came out early and stated he wasn't running. Imagine if he put out signals even before that. You think no one would bite? Everyone was run off because 2028 was there anyway and no one wanted the perception of having kneecapped a stubborn President. He pulls out early and it's a different ball game.

He should have never run for a second term, and he should have announced that earlier.

I thought he actually did at one point.

There is one main reason it's not especially Joe Biden's fault: he's not in his right mind. One of the things about senility is that it can remove your ability recognize that you are senile.

The blame should be spread far wider. This is the fault of everybody else around him, who absolutely did know the condition he was in, and lied about it anyway. Most centrally, Kamala herself had a responsibility to say something, but she covered it up on the calculation that it was better for her personally. But she's hardly alone. Obama must have known. Pelosi must have known. Surely every senior Democrats in DC who interacted with the president knew, along with staff.

They all covered it up. The only party leaders who can claim they were not involved are governors and minor House members.

Pick your poison? Between letting supporters of the Democratic party pick a nomination for president and then dealing with the challenges that arise, or predicting the challenges you expect, doing a cost benefit analysis and then deciding to coronate a drunk because you literally have no choice after the cognitive decline of the guy you have been claiming is sharper than ever becomes so apparent that gaslighting no longer works, as a result forcing your supporters to spend the next hundred days claiming things like her inability to give candid interviews/string three unrehearsed sentences together isn't a deal breaker when you already know it is then using every event that occurs to justify your decision because you claim to be data driven as you poison the data with more lies, which means you have actually just been wish casting this entire time?

One of those isn't poison, it's medicine.

The graveyards are filled with indispensable politicians, which is to say there are no indispensable politicians, merely politicians who don't want to let go.

There absolutely are political realities in which Biden didn't run again, starting from untimely death of old age and going to political competence. Biden's choice was a result of ambition, not urgency.

If Biden has a normal, boring performance at the first debate then he doesn't drop out and, who knows, maybe he wins.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/biden-polling-trump-votes-harris-election-b2644079.html

In that world Trump gets 400 electoral votes.

I see this mentioned a lot and I want to push back a little bit. As the article notes, the claim was made by Jon Favreau on Pod Save America. I happened to be listening to this shortly after it came out, and it's clear from that context that Favreau wasn't sharing this to show, as we say in the law, the truth of the matter asserted. He was trying to make a point about the Biden campaign and their contention that he still represented the candidate most likely to beat Trump. There is no other source for this number; no one has produced the poll or polls in question, and Favreau isn't likely to have seen them himself. The context was consistent with him casually tossing off a bit of Beltway gossip that wasn't intended to be taken literally.

What I think is most likely is that one poll or set of polls showed Biden losing certain states that correlated to Trump getting 400 Electoral Votes. Unless this is the only polling they did, its mere existence doesn't really say much about Biden's chances of winning. Hell, it doesn't even say much about Favreau's original argument. To the extent that such a poll probably exists, it's probably an outlier and was probably treated as such. It seems highly unlikely that internal polling was repeatedly showing a 400 EV Trump win. If that were the case, it would mean that either they or the publicly available polls were off by an order of magnitude heretofore unseen, or that the internal polls were flawed, and common sense would point to the latter. Paying to much attention to this would be like Trump changing his campaign strategy based on the Selzer poll.

What map do we think Trump can have 400 electoral votes, even against a dementia patient?

If we assume Trump v Biden, electric boogaloo, flips Virginia, New Mexico, Minnesota, New Hampshire, and Maine, that's nowhere near. If we throw in New Jersey, Connecticut, and New York, you're still not there.

This logic is why democrats lost. Having a mentally competent commander in chief is more important than ensuring everyone sticks to party talking points. Having an open primary is not some optional feature you only do when it's convenient to rev up enthusiasm. Perhaps the party wouldn't have needed to win back so many voters if they didn't betray the nation's trust.

I believe the Democrats also lost because they didn't have a competitive primary in 2020. Or 2016. Actually, the last time the Democratic party had an actual competitive primary where they truly let the party membership decide who they should nominate, the people went against the Clinton machine and picked Obama, who won in a landslide and then won again, despite intense oppositon.

And when the Republicans last had an open primary, they picked Trump, who won in 2016 in a surprise victory and then won the popular vote in 2024.

Open primaries win elections. Machine politics loses them. 2020 was the singular exception, and it was all due to COVID, an unprecedented social disruption.

How was 2020 not an open primary? There were like 700 candidates.

Obama forced a lot of people out of the race through back room dealing.

I really don't like how commentators act like this was a choice when there was no political reality where he could conceivably not run for reelection.

It was a choice, period. Biden is a free man and not some kind of slave, nobody constrained him to choose to run. He would not have been thrown in prison or something. You talk about "political reality", but the man is in his 80s. His life is almost over, let alone his career in politics. Acting like political calculus means he "had to" run is just absurd.

"Did prediction markets and other indicators that called the race correctly just get lucky?"

Is beyond the paywall, if anyone happens to have access beyond the paywall and is willing to C+P ....

(semi-relatedly, I would love a substack setup where you could buy say 10 (or whatever number) of general purpose credits and use them across any substack. I would absolutely sign up for something like that. Signing up for 10 different substacks for the sake of reading the 1 or 2 articles a month that interest me .... not so much).

(semi-relatedly, I would love a substack setup where you could buy say 10 (or whatever number) of general purpose credits and use them across any substack.

This is the use case that I'm annoyed Crypto hasn't managed to fill.

Same with newpaper articles. I'm not going to create an account and subscribe to read the couple articles per month I find interesting with every news outlet.

But if I could pay like 15-150 cents to read a particular article on the spot, with just a couple of clicks, I'd be pretty happy to do so.

I’m actually surprised enough that there is no newspaper subscription service which comes with, say, 50 free articles/mo from whatever selection of newspapers that I assume it falls afoul of anti-trust law somehow.

Because a large number of subscribers presumably read only a few articles each month and might cancel their subscription in favor of that cheaper model across multiple papers.

There are aggregators like PressReader that include every major news source but cost hundreds of dollars a month for full access (the ‘professional’ plan) and there’s Bloomberg, which also has every major news source but costs tens of thousands of dollars a year.

It's in no ones interest to move to a worse revenue model in a field where almost noone pays anyway

Substack seems to have proven that's a problem with the content, not the audience.

Why on earth would you need crypto to solve this rather than just a credit card?

Credit-card processors impose fees that can be major impediments to small transactions. One page describes a fee of 2.9 percent plus 30 cents. In that environment, making a 15-cent purchase is not feasible, because the fee would be literally twice that much. (See also all the small businesses that refuse to accept credit cards for any purchase smaller than 15 or 20 dollars.)

It wouldn't work like that. The aggregator would only bill the card monthly, or when it reaches a certain amount.

Then they're extending credit. Which they certainly do not want to do.

Nah, the dollar amounts are low enough that one month of access wouldn't be a problem. That's the way a lot of court vendors that provide online access work. When the product only costs 50 cents a page or whatever they aren't going to bill each transaction, especially since most of their customers are professionals making a lot of transactions. Instead they just bill monthly, and PACER only charges if you spend more than $30 in a billing period. If this is too risky, then they can always set up a draw-down account where you pay, say, $30 up front and it bills your account until it reaches zero before automatically replenishing.

Thanks. I thought that the length of the blockchain was making transfer costs go up... has this issue been solved?

I don't know that much about cryptocurrency, but it's important to note that different cryptocurrencies have vastly different transaction fees. According to this graph:

  • Bitcoin itself (BTC) is quite bad for small transactions, because its transaction fees are enormous—at present, 3 to 6 dollars.

  • Monero (XMR) has fees of 0.05 to 0.07 dollar, in addition to offering anonymity.

  • Litecoin (LTC) has fees of 0.007 to 0.008 dollar.

To add onto ToaKraka's reply, crypto is literally designed to be transferred in increments that total up to sub-cents. Micropayments were one theorized method of paying for the Internet, but were deemed to be impractical. Brave's BAT was created as a sort of alternative to the modern ad-driven internet we have.

Credit card processing fees are about 25 cents, IIRC. What are they going to do "If you pay the credit card company $0.15, I'll pitch in another $0.10 and let you read the article."?

This was also the idea behind Patreon: a 100 fan to 100 artist transaction would take 10000 payments normally, but Patreon could reduce it to 200 and some internal accounting. (That didn't last too long, though.)

That didn't last too long, though.

What do you mean?

At launch, Patreon was focused on bundles of $1 payments to each creator. Then it focused on bundles of $10 payments. Then individual $10 payments, billed separately. Now it's largely the same as any other content hosting/discovery/payment platform.

Because credit cards are very bad at EXACTLY these kinds of small and inconsequential transactions, especially at scale.

And it's in large part because they have to worry about, e.g. fraud and money laundering protections and massive regulatory burden.

The other part is the infrastructure to handle the bandwidth of that many transactions, which crypto has as well.

Crypto could fill the same niche that used to be filled by carrying around a few spare quarters.

they're all inveterate liars

I'm reading the instructions at the top of the page: "We ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War: ... Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike."

I mean we literally just had a discussion with someone arguing that inveterate lying was perfectly valid, after a campaign season full of the most shameless lying I've ever seen.

There are limits. I think people would appreciate an apology for the lies before extending any more charity. At least for the whole "our internal polls agreed with the prediction markets that trump was winning but we still called them insane cryptobro conspiracy theorists who did their own research (gross! Ick!)". Or "Biden's not senile you're just a rabid maga partisan for noticing." Or "the economy is amazing and Biden solved Trump's crime wave, illegal immigration isn't happening and you're imagining the price of eggs and why do you care anyway, you're weird!" All lies that were used here with no consequences for the liars other than going on some people's mental lists of sociopathic manipulators.

There's a point where you can't just get done with another round of lying and go "hey bro no hard feelings bro I was just using rhetoric to destroy your ability to understand reality and gaslight you into thinking you were insane for questioning our lies, leaving you helplessly adrift in a sea of mass propaganda to serve my own interests. Come on bro we've all done that, I do it to you all the time you can't stay mad at me! What about charity bro?! What about niceness and understanding?!"

It's time to coordinate some meanness against this tactic, because it's antithetical to everything this place tries to do, and it incinerates what little trust anyone has left. I want to come here to read people who will help me understand things I'm unaware of or confused about, not to get force fed this week's edition of "Blob Propaganda Magazine"

Ah, the old pivot from one persons "They are inveterate liars and it's smart and great, which I can attest to due to my decades of working in politics" to "You can't call them liars, that's against the rules!" I don't know what else to call them after this political cycle. Is there one single truthful thing they actually said?

To be fair, I am 1) Not American, 2) Not a Democrat and 3) A Mottezin so how much you can extrapolate from me to the people you are talking about is an entirely different ballgame.

If you want to say SSCReader is an inveterate liar, then certainly yes for much of my career I was. But of course, I also worked for both Right and Left wing parties. So as much as I am an exemplar for Democrats it is also going to implicate Republicans.

Who is "they"?

You can call Nate Silver a liar. You can call (specific) Democratic politicians liars. You can call any particular organization or individual a liar (if you can back it up). You can argue that specific statements are lies or that people who claimed to believe something were lying. You cannot just say "Democrats are liars." Unless you think you can actually make a case that every. Single. Democrat. Is a liar. If you really believe that, write your effortpost about how Every. Single. Democrat. Is a liar. Otherwise, yes, culture warring with "Democrats are all liars" will get modded.

Of course if someone came in and said "Republicans are all Nazis," you'd expect that to be modded (and you know it would be). But then you'd continue to be pretend to be confused and indignant when "Democrats are all liars" gets modded.

LOL. "Liar" is on the same level as "Nazi". I mean I know Nazi has been thrown around so much it's been severely devalued, but I don't know it had fallen all the way to "Liar". Good to know, good to know.

Again, stop pretending to miss the point.

"Nazi" is not the same as "liar," and you know I do not think "Nazi" is the same as "liar," and you are not LOLing.

I took two very common generalizations we actually see, by way of illustrating the point. If I thought you honestly needed something with exact moral equivalence, I'd come up with more closely-matched pairs, like "Nazi/groomer" or "liar/misogynist" or whatever. But (1) this would be pointless, you'd just pedantically argue the equivalence; (2) it's not necessary, you didn't really miss the point.

You got the point.

Don't tell me I'm not LOLing. I just woke up my sick wife with my LOLing, and the dog too. I LOLed in a deep, throaty way, from deep in my gut. It was the LOL of a man deeply satisfied, and you can't take that away from me.

Edit; I mean, seriously. If you are about to mod in so silly and unserious a fashion, so much so you can already anticipate how I'll object (because it's true), but you plow on ahead anyways, and then you get all butthurt for your deserved mockery, just hang up your hat dude. You're cooked.

Edit; I mean, seriously. If you are about to mod in so silly and unserious a fashion, so much so you can already anticipate how I'll object (because it's true), but you plow on ahead anyways, and then you get all butthurt for your deserved mockery, just hang up your hat dude. You're cooked.

I wasn't about to mod you, and as much as you wish it were so, I don't get "butthurt" by your tantrums. That said, unless you are trying to get modded so you can feel more persecuted, editing in personal attacks makes it a lot harder to treat you as having (another) bad day.

More comments

Who is "they"?

More seriously? The entire apparatus around Joe Biden that hid his dementia. Here is an article from 6 months ago, after the debate. It described how years before that his dementia was obvious to everyone who worked around him. There was an anecdote about how when they were trying to get the Inflation Reduction Act passed, he met with congressional democrats for the last time to try to whip votes. He was so obviously demented, Nancy Pelosi had to excuse him and try to make his comments make some sort of sense.

They all lied All of them. Every single one of them, to a person, lied about Joe Biden's mental state for years. The entire party, the media handlers, every single person who had met with him and saw how demented he was. They are all liars.

There, done. It wasn't even that hard.

I mean honestly, I don’t think the press just started doing thing. I’ll be honest, I’ve near zero trust in the mainstream media as a truthful source of actual news. And I don’t think an apology fixes it. The issues are too deep for that, and they won’t change just because they promise to do better. I think at this point, the press need to clean house, top to bottom. Until then, I think it’s just reasonable to ignore the media and look for actual news.

I knew that they were lying about the polls when suddenly the “Keys” history professor showed up everywhere telling people how he’d never been wrong and only he could turn the keys. And if you paid attention, the keys he was talking about were either clearly false or manipulated to become true. Kamala was declared the incumbent, for one, which isn’t true. No major wars (just forget about Ukraine and Israel, both of whom were funding), a good economy (stop noticing the price of things). I felt like I was watching Baghdad Bob declare that there were no tanks in Baghdad while a tank rolls by behind him. More ridiculous than anything, but I felt like this was an insult to my intelligence. They couldn’t possibly think people would fall for this.

Oh the press has been doing it since before JournoList, that's baked in. What's new is spreading it to places like this through sophisticated distributed propaganda campaigns: delivering talking points to partisans and using them to manipulate people who trust them.

Take the surge in shoplifting for example. It wasn't just MSNBC or Vox lying about it, they had explainers on how to lie to family members about it. They had people showing up even in tiny communities like this to dress up the propaganda line in rationalist colors and make it go down smoother. They had YouTubers paid to go on rants about how it was all in our imagination and anyway it was just Corporate Greed.

What do you even do against a fully distributed and inescapable reality distortion machine like that? Obviously this election showed the limits of convincing people to ignore their lying eyes, but it took an amazing set of circumstances to wake people up.

they had explainers on how to lie to family members about it. They had people showing up even in tiny communities like this to dress up the propaganda line in rationalist colors and make it go down smoother. They had YouTubers paid to go on rants about how it was all in our imagination and anyway it was just Corporate Greed.

Don't take this the wrong way (I agree with you), I'm not trying to pull a Reddit "source?" move, but I would genuinely love to see links for each of these things.

I'll see if I can still find them. Those particular ones were on the motte reddit I think.

My mom's told us a story a bunch of times about how, when she was in school as a kid, one day she and her classmates were told to head out to the sports field because some reporters wanted to take a picture. So the reporters had her and her classmates sit on the bleachers, and took a couple pictures, and then they told the kids to start make fists, start yelling and waving their fists in the air, look real angry. The kids did it, and the reporters took a couple more pictures. The next day, one of those last pictures was in the paper for a story claiming that she and her fellow classmates had staged a race riot.

Point being, it's definitely older than Journolist.

Man, this is a bit off the path of this topic, but it's been months since the hurricane fucked up western North Carolina, and I still can't tell fact from fiction. All I see are randos on twitter talking about FEMA kicking people out of shelters, and then taking their kids because they don't have adequate shelter. Some road a bunch of good ol' boys cut through a mountain to Chimney Rock that FEMA closed down, despite there being no other road. Some guy devastated that FEMA stole the building he'd leased for his business, and since his home was washed away, now he has absolutely nothing. There was definitely that one lady who instructed FEMA workers to skip houses with Trump signs, and apparently she went out trying to take everyone down with her, claiming those orders came to her from higher up as well. Was that ever substantiated? I don't know!

It reminds me of the oral tradition from the Great Depression, about FDR stealing gold from lock deposit boxes and slaughtering entire herds of cattle to fight deflation. Visiting local national parks there are exhibits about all the people forced off their land by FDR to establish some of those parks, and how they were totally given a fair market value when they were forced off. I'm pretty sure the worst allegations about FDR stealing people's gold might not have happened exactly the way it's described. But this debunking does not inspire hope as it's full of the usual managerial weasel words I'm used to. FDR didn't steal the gold. He just passed an executive order requiring it be sold to the government at a price they immediately raised after they'd gotten it all. And even when the government did confiscate people's gold, it's because they committed a crime. Like not obeying the executive order to voluntarily sell their gold to the government.

It's time to coordinate some meanness against this tactic

Why not demonstrate they are wrong or mistaken? Is that mean enough? If there's specific concern trolls you are concerned with, then it'd be good to point them out to Mom--erators. People should be allowed to be wrong here. They should be allowed to make bad, misinformed arguments. They should be allowed to be duped and fall for the latest propaganda and regurgitate it with a fresh coat of polite paint on it here. They should be allowed to be embarrassed, apologize, or quietly slink away and come back with a new humility. You should be encouraged and motivated as you easily dispel provably false things. Easily dispelling provably false things is a major contribution and part of the immune system. Then for things that are not provably false you maybe can take it easy?

I don't make it around all the way through every thread, but I haven't seen an epidemic of DNC concern trolls here.

There are liars on that side of the aisle. There are also those who believe the lies - the lied-to (and some allies of convenience as well). Call the liars liars; don't call the lied-to liars.

I mean, at a certain point you become complicit in the lies. Like, if you catch me, bloody knife in hand, body at my feet, the body of a person I've had decades of animosity towards and threatened to kill, and I go "He fell", clearly I'm lying. Or at least you'd have significant reason to believe I'm lying. But if you turn around and repeat to everyone "WhiningCoil didn't murder anyone! The poor man just fell and anyone who says otherwise is a nazi!" I'd say you are also a liar.

The entirety of the Democrats and the media lied about Joe Biden's cognitive state for years. In private many of them knew he was thoroughly demented. When the dam finally broke and the rats fled the sinking ship, hoping if they came clean first they could salvage some of their credibility, you heard stories going back to his inauguration. The worst, and the one that condemns the most Democrats, is when he went to Capitol Hill to try to whip votes for the Inflation Reduction Act, he spoke with all the congressional democrats, and he was so obviously demented Nancy Pelosi had to excuse him and "clarify" what he was "trying to say". That was at least two years ago.

There were all the times in public he was obviously demented that got hand waved away. The media knew it was lying then. We all have the same eyes in our head. There were the times the media claimed Joe Biden had a stutter that he's wrestled with for years, despite five decades of public speaking stutter free. They definitely knew that was a lie and repeated it.

The conspiracy to hide Joe Biden's dementia, and the willful lying, or credulous complicity, damned every Democrat and every media mouthpiece that played ball. This isn't in the same class of lying as making and breaking campaign promises, exaggerating your record, denying corruption or moral failings, crass political posturing and the like. It's unlike any act of political dishonesty I've ever even heard of. And they were all in on it, and they didn't even care that it was obvious they were lying to everyone, because we all have the same eyes and ears on our head. If they could have bullied enough people into voting blue no matter who to drag a corpse across the finish line they would have.

If you say "these people are gullible and/or stupid and/or highly-mindkilled; what they say is apparently not significantly correlated with the truth and you should ignore it", that's a solid argument and one I'd actually mostly agree with.

If you say "these people are gullible and/or stupid and/or highly-mindkilled, and we should chop them up into little pieces", well, I don't accept that argument for a variety of reasons, but ultimately that's a matter of opinion; there's logic to that position and it's been taken before.

If you say "these people are all liars", then I'm going to call you out. "Lying" is saying things you believe to be false with the intention that others will believe them to be true. It is highly useful to have a word for that, and I think that's worth protecting against hyperbole like yours. There are definitely some liars among the Democrats, but less than you might think.

How many people do you think would be less than I think? Like I said, I already consider all congressional Democrats liars for this. They all met with a demented Joe Biden trying to whip votes for the Inflation Reduction Act. They lied about his mental state for 2 years. Maybe that does not indict every single congressional staffer, or literally every single person who is a registered Democrat, or every single person who voted D. But it absolutely indicts almost every single person of rank and consequence in the DNC. Now that the beans are spilled, we know they all lied for years, and they knew they were lying.

As I said, call the liars liars. But target discrimination like this is important, damnit. It's the point of that rule, and it divides discourse from rhetoric.

How have I not done that? You keep banging on about how I'm casting too wide a net. Do you think I'm wrong to consider every Democrat of rank and consequence a liar for their conspiracy of silence around Joe Biden's mental state? Do you think it's wrong, if every Democrat of rank and consequence in the DNC is a liar, to claim that the DNC is full of liars? Do you think it's somehow ambiguous who I'm talking about when I say capital D-Democrats are liars? Do you think someone is confused that I'm actually talking about their Nana who heard on the news that Trump is Hitler and voted for the first black female president instead? Here?!

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If you say "these people are all liars", then I'm going to call you out. "Lying" is saying things you believe to be false with the intention that others will believe them to be true. It is highly useful to have a word for that, and I think that's worth protecting against hyperbole like yours.

I don't think that's the singular definition of lying. Phrases like "lying to oneself" and "lying by omission" are quite common, and I don't think they're being ironic or hyperbolic. Often, lying to oneself is considered a lesser evil than knowingly saying false things with the conscious intent to make others believe them to be true, but I'd also argue that, often, the truth is so obvious and the false thing that someone believes when they "lie to themselves" is so blatantly self-serving that it's at least as much an evil.

Man, I want to argue with you on the merits, but I can’t get past the smug disdain.

You know better than this. Talk about specific groups. Steelman their positions. Add more commentary than “haha, other team bad!”

Just for avoidance of doubt - my post is considered unacceptable?

I wouldn’t say unacceptable. I’d say it’s not up to your usual standards.

Nate Silver makes a good point. Historically, democrats have done very poorly with progressive ideology as a platform- Clinton won by moving to the center, Obama ran as a technocrat. And crucially they were essentially honest about those things- they may have thrown bones to progressives by going after cultural conservatives a bit, but Obamacare was not the universal single payer system that the left flank wanted and Clinton promoted 'safe, legal and rare', not 'shout your abortion'.


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