This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Is presidential corruption still culture war?
You may or may not remember that back in January of this year President Trump, in his personal capacity, sued the Internal Revenue Service for $10 billion in damages related to leaks of his tax returns by a contractor back in 2018-2020. I don't want to dig into the merits of the case as such, except I'll note the legal discussion I've read seems to have a consensus that the case is very weak. It is also very unusual for a sitting President to be suing the government he is in charge of. There are obvious conflicts of interest involved. So much so the judge in that case issued an order for the parties to explain how they are actually adverse to each other, how they disagree, so that the cases and controversies requirement of the constitution is satisfied.
As of today, it seems we may never find out how good the claims are or aren't, how adverse the parties are or aren't. Trump filed a motion to voluntarily dismiss his lawsuit, pursuant to the establishment of a $1.8 billion "Anti-Weaponization Fund". It's not even clear to me the fund is going to be administered by the United States government, as paragraph C provides:
Is this going to be the new normal? If you're President and Congress won't give you the money you want to pay your friends and allies you can get however much you want with this one weird trick!
ETA:
ABC reports that the fund will be overseen by a five-member commission appointed by the Attorney General, but the members will all be removal at-will by the President.
Only Donald Trump could pardon the January 6 defendants and then ruin their lives under the guise of charity. Here's how I see this playing out:
More options
Context Copy link
This is just spoils, which is somewhat politics as normal. What is more worrying is his pure vindictive streak in relation to spoils. For example, the House and Senate both unanimously passed an anodyne bill to fund water supplies for rural Coloradoans - Trump vetoed it and the House bowed down and didn't un-veto it. A few days ago, Colorado governor Jared Polis pardons Tina Peters, the lady who tried to demonstrate election fraud (and ended up showing that it was her own Republican number 2 that caused an 'anomaly') - and Trump passes the funding. Lauren Boebert even points this out but doesn't stop kissing the ring.
The hilarious part of this too is that being rural, they were likely a more MAGA centric area. So Trump was taking revenge on his own supporters and hoping Polis wasn't a cruel monster and would have enough empathy for the rurals to play ball.
This is not unique behavior from Trump
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
This is old stuff, this is how lawfare is done. You troll around the courts until your party is in office, then you settle the case for yourself, and give billions of taxpayer money to "Charitable organizations" that happen to be your political allies, and that's how you fund your politics. The only thing that is new is that Trump is doing it on the Republican side, rather than this being a one-party thing due to the control of major cities.
Complain about corruption if you want, but no tool of lawfare stays in only one toolbox. The entire reason the left hates Trump is that he does politics back to them. They used the Deep State to leak private financial records? Now Trump hits back. After a hundred felony counts and the blanket decade-pardons, I don't ever want to hear a criticism of Trump's dirty dealings without the full disclaimer. It's not corruption when the other side has been doing it for eighty years, but it is very precious special pleading.
We used to have the question of "who was president in 2020?", now we have the question of "who was president in 2018?". He was the guy in charge! He's suing himself for his own administration's failure to properly secure information.
Do you think we should abolish the Civil Service? Going back to the patronage system would make your position here much more tenable.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Looking into this, and wow, Congress really did pass an indefinite uncapped appropriation for the federal judgement fund with no substantive limitations. The statute for unauthorized tax information disclosure which Trump sued under allows punitive damages with no statutory cap. This settlement is actually 100% legal.
How many other loopholes like this are there in the United States Code?
More options
Context Copy link
The incredible part is that the lawsuit isn't even just about something the federal government did, but something the federal government did under Trump. Regardless of your thoughts about the Biden or Obama admins, allowing this logic is insane and incentivizes every future president to "harm" themselves or allies (and they of course don't even have to actually show any real harm cause it's all done through settlements!), sue themselves, and then distribute taxpayer money among themselves, their friends and other allies. It blatantly turns the government, and the American taxpayer, into a personal piggy bank.
This was already standard practice under Obama and Biden. https://www.cato.org/blog/justice-department-revives-slush-fund-settlements
Those were real lawsuits that the government filed where the defendants were going to have to pay someone no matter what, the only question being how much and to whom. It's not a practice I endorse, but it's in a totally different league than personally suing an entity you control in a case that would go nowhere for no reason other than extracting money out of them that they wouldn't have to pay if the suit actually went forward.
More options
Context Copy link
Both settlements mentioned in that article were between adverse parties. The innovation in this case is that Trump is funding a slush fund settlement by suing himself.
I agree with @JTarrou that the fundamental tactic is a very old left-wing one. Trump's version is more brazen in its corruption in two ways:
More options
Context Copy link
Different type of settlement use. I'd agree it's abusive still but those aren't the case of the defendant and plaintiff being the same person, nor are they over actions their own admin did. Those settlements are a pretty common thing to see at the state level too.
Meanwhile not aware of anything like what Trump is doing in political history, even at the state level.
I double checked with ChatGPT too
Starting a lawsuit against your own admin for actions under your authority and control while in office isn't even precedented at the state government level.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
You mean things that Trump tried to stop and complained about as they were happening?
Can it really be the case that you are arguing that Trump would never play 4D chess?
More options
Context Copy link
Was Trump not president during 2019-2020? The IRS was under his control. Now maybe he was too incompetent as a boss to ensure that the workers under him don't leak things, but that seems like his fault and I don't get why the American taxpayer should have to pay him or his allies for his own fuck ups.
More options
Context Copy link
Yes, but if you establish this as a precedent then the next president to come along can just wink wink nudge nudge and trigger similar events performatively: publicly complaining while secretly encouraging it behind closed doors in order to enrich themselves. Even if Trump as trailblazer did not set this up on purpose, it is a trail we do not want blazed.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
The IRS under Obama targeted conservatives. They looked at your political action group and determined if you were conservative before deciding if you would get an audit or not. This is all public knowledge and nobody was made to suffer for this except Lois Lerner eventually losing her job.
We even had a fight a few years later in the Biden years over expanding the IRS and adding more agents so they could audit more people. Nothing was ever done to make sure they won’t target conservatives again, but we will just pretend that that isn’t related because those are two separate storylines so connecting those two dots is a non-sequitur. Result: the IRS that targeted conservatives and was never punished for it got more powerful.
Now that the government reaches a settlement every Trump critic wants to call this a Trump corruption case. ? Well, what is the federal government supposed to do? In fact, we now have a richly-established norm of NGOs and activists suing the federal government and so that their political allies who run the government can settle. Welcome to the world you made. This kind of thing happened all the time under Obama, all the time, all the time! — remember when companies were made to pay settlements directly into DOJ slush funds?— and I still hear about how the only scandal Obama ever had was his tan suit.
It’s very unusual for the government to target conservative political groups! And the sitting president over made-up stories that he colluded with Russia. And all of his allies for process crimes such as entrapment while being interviewed by FBI agents who didn’t tell you they were investigating you. And et cetera et cetera etc. It would have been really easy for Trump not to sue the government if they hadn’t wronged him in the first place!
I would really actually enjoy a good argument about why exactly this is even corruption. All I see online is a lot of pointing from people very selectively not mentioning the government’s extremely well-documented political campaigns against conservatives, Trump, and Trump’s allies. What else did we think would happen? People who were harassed by the government actually have a right to settle to make themselves whole, and this is what happens when those same people win control of that government. What did you think would happen after spying on his campaign? $1.776 Billion is getting off easy.
It's rare that I agree with you but you're 100% right about this. It's a travesty that groups who are subject to wrongs perpetrated by the very governments that are supposed to protect them are often left with no recourse and no compensation. While I can certainly sympathize with a small group of conservatives who were unfairly targeted by the IRS under the Obama administration, that is unfortunately nothing compared with the millions of Black Americans who are still suffering as the result of official government policy. First, after being brought here against their will to perform manual labor, slavery was enshrined within the US Constitution for the first 80 or so years of our nation's existence. Following abolition, things didn't get much better, as they were routinely discriminated against, often as a matter of official government policy, and routinely denied the very rights the Reconstruction Amendments sought to recognize. Even in areas where discrimination was not enshrined into law, they were still almost universally denied the opportunity to work in good jobs, live where they wanted to, and otherwise be treated like any other member of society. The results of these centuries of discrimination have been nothing short of catastrophic for Black Americans; even as we enacted legislation to address these wrongs in the 1960s, Blacks still lag behind others in almost every metric.
Given these circumstances, one would think that providing some sort of reparation for the harms the government has inflicted upon blacks would be a no-brainer in these more enlightened times, but that has unfortunately not been the case. Fully half of the country seeks to blame Blacks themselves for their own plight, arguing that if they only were willing to work a little harder things would magically improve for them. Some even wave their hands and explain the situation through the simple intellectual and moral inferiority of Blacks, echoing the slave masters of 200 years ago. Even on the left, the more wishy-washy white people voice concerns about what reparations would look like, who would qualify for them, and a host of other practical concerns that would threaten to sink any program from the beginning. Righting these wrongs has become all but politically impossible.
Luckily, though, Donald J. Trump has unlocked the cheat code to get around an ineffective, even hostile Congress. All that is needed in the next Democratic administration is for a civil rights group to file a class action suit against the US government. No legitimate claim? No problem! This will never get close to an actual courtroom, as president AOC will be more than happy to offer a generous settlement package before the first motion is filed. No debate, no working out the messy details, just pick a strategy and go for it. Because when you look at all that's happened, $1.619 trillion is getting off easy.
Insane compromise- every black American gets a one time payment of $1,000,000. Fiscal constraint is fake anyways. In exchange, we get a civil rights act for conservatives, decades of official favoritism, entire government departments dedicated to protecting conservatives from blue state governments, a school curriculum about the plight of conservatives, etc.
After sixty years we can swap around who's in what seat again.
More options
Context Copy link
Eh, not a great comparison.
Trump is a case of a specific wrong against specific people perpetrated by specific agencies. Its then a general payout from the government to the conservative movement in general.
Black slavery was also all of those levels of specificity. But with enough time removed it is instead all moved to generalities. Its black people in general that were wronged, its white people in general that carried it out, and its supposed to be paid for by all americans in general.
The areas where I say "general" are the problem.
For IRS targeting: I would have liked to see specific people in the IRS or the Obama administration sent to jail for the IRS tax targeting. I'd like to see unconstitutional orders treated the same way the military treats illegal orders. "I was ordered to break the constitution so its not my fault" should be an admission of guilt not a defense against prosecution. Bribing off the republicans seems like something that politicians on both sides are happy to take as a "compromise" rather than handing out punitive sentences and discouraging similar things in the future.
For slavery I'll give you a very specific example. I'll remove as many generalities as I can.
My ancestors owned slaves. We are close to a 100% certain that we know some of the descendants of those slaves (slaves tended to take on the last names of their former masters when they were freed). Lets say we can identify approximately 100 descendants of both the slave owner, and 100 descendants of the slaves. Its been about 5 generations. Assume no intermarriage so everyone is generally tracing only 1/32ndth of their ancestry to this generation.
None of the wealth acquired from the slave owning is still around. There is one house that was the former plantation house, but it was lost in bankruptcy and then re-bought. Nearly all other wealth of the slave owning family was also lost in that bankruptcy (took place in the 1880s).
How much do I a descendant of the slave owner owe to a descendant of the slave?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
If I recall, that used to be a major issue with shipbuilding. Might still be, even.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
The "$1776 million" is, astonishingly, missing from most headlines, which is almost as insane to me.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link