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What makes it hard for me to care about the meme coin is that crypto is inherently speculative. The coin itself is not worth anything, and in order to cash out for real money, someone needs to want buy the coin from the hold co. If stupid people want to give Trump money by buying his shitcoin that's their choice. I don't think the government needs to be in the business of telling individuals which worthless investments they can make. I've seen some reporting that its used as a monetized access channel but is that any different than normal political bribery, "donate to my super-pac, give my failson a board seat and I'll have you over for dinner"
I don't think it should be reduced to "stupid people falling for an obvious scam". It seems to have been a vehicle for bribes.
But anger at this is either just TDS or weird edge case rules lawyering. People are "ok"* with the former ways of taking bribes so outrage over this new and improved way of taking a bribe (that is in some ways far more visible) is just special pleading
*: People are ok with it in that they accept that its a common practice, they might dislike it but because its accepted practice they aren't outraged by it. Having arbitrary rules on how a bribe can be taken is just that: arbitrary.
People are not in fact OK with the current method of "bribes" but more to the point I've literally never had a conversation about modern bribery in US politics that didn't end with someone conceding "oh yeah well actually those rules on the books actually make at least a half decent amount of sense". People's perception of how bribery works (even a good chunk of otherwise smart and informed people) almost always involves a pretty inaccurate mental model that doesn't represent the facts as we know them.
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"People are okay with nudity when there's a fig leaf covering the genitals, but are outraged when the leaf isn't there!"
The meaning of nudity is that there's no fig leaf covering anything and, as such, someone being okay with fig leaf covering the genitals isn't being okay with nudity, they're being okay with something close to nudity but isn't nudity. Corruption, on the other hand, is something that exists mostly orthogonal to what is or isn't covering it (there's certainly an appearance component of corruption, where the mere appearance of corruption is corruption in itself, even if, in actuality, behind closed doors, everything is on the up and up, but I don't think that's relevant in this case).
I think there is a good case to be made that a fig leaf is still nudity. If I see the bare ass of someone, I will not say hm, they might be nude, but they might also be not nude because they have covered their genitals. Phrases like full frontal nudity exist to describe the notable absence of any fig leafs.
Corruption also exists on a spectrum. A company bankrolling a congressional candidate will generally not be stupid enough to make an agreement in writing where the candidate pledges to vote in their interest. No, they are merely supporting democracy and exercising their freedom of speech rights, which seem pretty unlimited for corporate citizens as of Citizens United. When the congressman later listens carefully to the company's representative making their case, that is merely because the company is a big employer in his state, not because they are a donor, you see. It will be very hard to prove the opposite.
Other cases are more blatant. Foreign powers gifting Trump airplanes. Fraudsters getting presidential pardons in exchange for investing in his memecoins.
Fair enough, but then the analogy largely breaks down, because the reason that fig leafed genitals are less outrage-inducing or more okay is that they are, in some meaningful sense, less nude than non-fig leafed genitals. In terms of corruption, corruption that is covered up/hidden/unknown isn't somehow less corrupt by nature of it being covered up in the same way that genitals that are fig leafed are less nude.
It may be true that Trump is meaningfully more corrupt than other POTUSs (if I had to bet, and this were possible to adjudicate in any fair way, I would bet yes - but I'd prefer not to bet, because I know that my judgment on him and his actions is too biased to make a judgment that I have any confidence in being accurate), but that has nothing to do with the fig leaf analogy.
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Anyone who complained about Hunter Biden's exploits should also be complaining about the multiple private events Trump has held for coin holders. Instead, MAGA shows volcanic rage at the former while the latter is shunted to the realm of "hard for me to care".
Also, Trump is using the coin as a conduit to basically sell off pardons.
Yeah because MAGA folks are just tribal conflict theorists. Expecting any sort of nuanced or balanced take from them, any sort of principles, is something they shed long ago in their quest for vengeance and power. And the apple does not fall far from the tree here, the mirror behavior is the TDS or Prog folks who show volcanic rage at this but hardly care when its some progressive causes. Trying to hold either to a set of principles is futile because they have none.
A more accurate way to phrase this would be "principles are clearly not adaptive in the current sociopolitical enviornment."
This is not a mistake blues or reds are making. Principles are not, in fact, adaptive, and fixing that is not something individuals or even individual tribes can accomplish, and probably is not something that can be accomplished at all in a values-incoherent environment.
Sure, I've never been accused of having good phrasing. Other people always word things better than I can.
Are principles ever adaptive? A core part of the value of principles is that they act as a very costly signal. If it were easy to have them, or they are adaptive to an environment it wouldn't be a very good signal. People would adopt them for the adaptability. The value of having principles is that it communicates that people can trust you, and depend on you. Regardless of the shifting tides of the sociopolitical currents.
Absolutely, in a values-coherent environment.
Sure. What they are supposed to signal is "I am making a significant sacrifice to maintain something we both care about". But this assumes "we both" actually do care about it. Signals are for communication; you don't need signals to draw your own conclusions. If the response is "I don't care about the thing you are maintaining, and will not sacrifice to maintain it", then the question becomes whether solo maintenance is worth it (probably not), and whether solo maintenance is even possible (probably not).
Yes, and the result is that rule-following becomes normal and expected, and rule-breaking becomes unusual and disturbing.
Many people claim a principle of following the law. Few people will actually follow a law that demands they docilly allow a subset of their neighbors to murder them and their family with machetes. Most curious! How can we explain this inconsistency? Assuming such a law were passed legally, it would in fact be a law, so shouldn't they follow it? Don't they have principles? Well, no. Humans are human. They are not going to cooperate in upholding a system that they perceive to be ruinously hostile to their interests. Society depends on a supermajority perceiving it to be strongly positive-sum. If you want to continue to have a society, you need to maintain that perception. If you fail to maintain that perception, appeals to rules or norms or principles will not save you.
Very, very few principles are actually worth unlimited commitment. If you want a society based on principles which receive unlimited commitment, it is going to look very different than our current arrangement.
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I don't really know about (or care about) crypto, so it was more than the few minutes I was willing to spend to unravel that Forbes article to understand what was going on there.
But I'll go on the record and say that generally, offering pardons to people who have made you personal money is Bad.
Thanks, I genuinely appreciate that. That’s the kind of thing I wish were more common.
MAGA can think Democrats are worse. They can think Republicans are the lesser evil. But at some point, if your own side does something bad, you have to be able to say so without immediately changing the subject.
That kind of logic would go a lot farther if you could start it by admitting when your side does something bad. This conversation starts with the IRS illegally leaking Trump’s records and those of a hundred of his allies and we’re supposed to quickly trot past that so we can discuss the latest Trump Bad crying wolf.
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Yeah, that's one of my hobby horses. The things we argue about are very granular! No single sub-sub-sub argument is going to change someone's macro conclusions (and in most cases, they shouldn't!). Conceding a point is like folding a hand in poker. It hardly means you're out of the game, much less a career, unless you got wildly out over your skis.
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