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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 20, 2025

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I had no idea that this was the largest investigation in Department of Justice history.

NYT: Trump Crushes Justice Department’s Biggest Investigation In an Instant [Archive]

President Trump’s pardons in the Jan. 6 case abruptly ended the most complex investigation in U.S. history. It also raised questions about what he will do next against a department he has said is full of his enemies.

From that link:

“It’s a gross misuse of the pardon power, and says that Trump is willing to meddle in a process that helped strengthen the rule of law,” said Joyce Vance, a former U.S. attorney in Alabama during the Obama administration.

These people should really, really, really consider strategically quieting down for a bit. Not to overstate things, but for clarity, when I read this, my thought is "FUCK YOU, YOU DO NOT CARE ABOUT MISUSE OF PARDON POWER". Biden capped off his Presidency with an absolutely deranged sets of pardons and commutations for everyone from his family to random "non-violent" criminals to political cronies to the literal worst murderers on federal death row. My impression is that most people on my side of the aisle feel basically the same way, so the histrionics about undermining juries and judges is going to do worse than fall on deaf ears, it's going to highlight just how impossible it is for me to view these people as anything other than enemies. Yeah, I am well aware that it's a tit-for-tat situation, I don't think it's very good, but the caterwauling deepens my resolve in wanting every last one of them released in order to rub the faces of people like Joyce in it.

I am increasingly coming to believe that a sizable portion of the professional managerial class is simply less nuerologically developed than most ordinary people.

Lacking the experience of agency they lack ability to percieve other humans and animals as agents and as such are unable to develop a coherent theory of mind even if/when they are able to recognize the need.

To "really consider strategically quieting down" they would first have to recognize the strategic benefits of quieting down. To do that they would first have to have some awareness of how their behavior looks to an outside observer, which in turn requires the internal concept of an outside observer. It is this internal concept that appears to be missing in a lot of discussions.

In much the same way that Scott alleged that Haitians lack numerancy and the ability to understand hypotheticals, I allege that a lot of the PMC (including Scott) lack the capacity to understand how or why somone might react differently to you based on your prior behavior.

That's a pretty inflammatory claim. Please recall the relevant rule.

Three day ban.

To be clear, which claim was I being punished for? Haitians lacking the ability to understand hypotheticals, or writers for the New York Times lacking the ability to understand other human beings as agents?

"A sizeable portion of the professional-managerial class".

Scott's Haiti article is a good example of actually putting in the effort to be less inflammatory.

Did Scott actually put in effort or did you just not look at it too closely because it wasn't your ox getting gored?

Netstack is a politically moderate engineer in the defense industry, hardly a central example of the PMC types you're talking about.