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Selective rigor is not a marginal problem that you have the luxury of ignoring.
This is a war. How do you expect a war to operate?
[EDIT] - My estimation of your reasonableness and sincerity has been trending upward of late, so let me put a little more effort into this.
If you offer people a choice between "laws are enforced against you, laws will not be enforced against your enemies" and "laws will not be enforced at all", some people will choose the former and some will choose the later. The people who choose the former will die out, and you will be left with only the people who choose the latter. When this happens, the problem is not that people aren't upholding the law, the problem is that there is no law to uphold. A lot of people, myself included, believe this is the situation we find ourselves in. Appealing to the majesty of the law is not going to shift us, because we do not observe majesty of the law, but rather fractal deceit. You can think such an assessment is foolish in the extreme, but at some point you should probably consider explaining why it is foolish. Just for starters, I note that Trump does not appear to have used the FBI to censor conversation of and cover up evidence of his alleged corrupt activities, as we now know the previous administration absolutely did. In your view, does the Trump administration get points for not engaging in this particular "arms race to see who can be worse?"
Thank you for this, not just for the compliment but the longer post as well that makes for a far better discussion point.
My overall philosophical retort is this post.
To this point specifically, I'm not appealing to the "majesty of the law". I agree that if one side is selectively enforcing rules against you while exempting themselves, then unilaterally disarming is suicidal. I essentially said that in the hypocrisy post, that some hypocrisy is justified when refusing to reciprocate leaves you permanently disadvantaged.
But the point where I disagree is the jump from "the outgroup abused power" to "there is not law to uphold" or "our side now gets a blank check and none of our sins count" as I've been effectively hearing from MAGA apologists on this site and on others. Most of Trump's corruption doesn't directly advantage MAGA as a movement, and in fact does some amount of harm. MAGA as something other than just a Trumpist personality cult would be stronger if everything else was the same, except that Trump didn't sell off pardons. There would be some momentary discomfort as the right had to undergo self-criticism, but it would emerge stronger for it. The fact that it mostly refuses to do so is a cancer that eats it from the inside.
My position isn't "never fight back", it's that people should be very clear about what counts as fighting back, and not trying to launder every act of corruption as defensive necessity. If the claim is "the law is already dead", then the burden is on you to explain why a specific escalation improves the situation rather than just helping to bury it.
Yes! Or rather I'd frame it as Trump not losing points in this instance while Biden would have.
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