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Trump Indicted: https://www.cnbc.com/2023/03/30/donald-trump-indicted-in-hush-money-payment-case.html
This is a major enough story that I think it goes beyond needing more than just a link.
Is that what this is about? I thought they at least had tax fraud receipts. What the fuck?
His crime was winning the 2016 election. It was the crime that prompted two impeachments, and now an indictment. Trump cannot be allowed to get away with it, and so Democrats have overreached at every opportunity, grasping at straws, to get something, anything, to stick to him.
Hence many misdemeanors going unprosecuted in NY, while this particular misdemeanor gets up-jumped to a felony in order to finally charge Trump.
The mod team has discussed this comment in response to a couple of user reports. The result is mixed. I am explicitly not giving you a warning at this time--but I need to say a little more about that, because we are probably going to be dialing up the sensitivity on posts like this in the near future.
This is connected with @Amadan's moderation of @firmamenti and @cjet79's partial modhat comment about it. Since moving over from reddit, moderation has gotten both easier and more difficult in interesting ways. We have far fewer bad drive-by comments and much less brigading from trolls (although, importantly--not zero troll brigading!). We seem to have more users paying attention to AAQCs, both in terms of crafting them and in terms of nominating them, such that many excellent posts don't make the roundup simply because there are so many plausible nominations. These are positive developments!
On the downside, though, low effort comments from more regular users also seem to be turning up more frequently. There is a tendency to rely on shorthand arguments that are both low effort and obfuscatory for new users. This is understandable--as the community coheres it can often feel like certain individuals are just re-treading old ground. But that is something we want to try to mitigate. In this particular comment, your substantive position (that the primary impetus for targeting Trump is purely political, as evidenced by the ceaseless barrage of unusual, contorted, or even spurious charges raised against him) seems defensible, but the way you raise it as though it were obviously true (implicitly building consensus), without furnishing either evidence or argument, brooks no discussion on the matter. That is antithetical to the foundation of the Motte.
I will be writing a longer top post about low-effort posts in the near-ish future, but it seemed worth mentioning here to get people thinking a bit about the problem, hopefully.
I'd like to give a defense of my comment here, since I [obviously] disagree with the idea that mine was a low effort/drive by comment.
The story and the thing that is here to be discussed is the story about Trump being indicted. This is a uniquely big story, and my "take" on this is going to serve (in my opinion) as a distraction from the main story. From my perspective, posting "Trump Indicted" and a clean link to the story (I intentionally chose CNBC as the most 'neutral' source I could find) is me being courteous to fellow forum users by not distracting from the topic of discussion.
I think that this sits in contrast to things like constant stories about trans people misbehaving, conservatives saying stupid things, etc. There is a functionally infinite number of those stories happening every single day, and so for those the requirement/expectation is that a user should add additional thoughts/context to raise the story above the noise floor.
However, "Trump Indicted" itself rises above that floor, and in fact posting a "lukewarm take" as one user called it will do nothing but bring the story closer to the background noise.
Another user implied that posting a simple story like this is a way of getting a dopamine rush, but again I think the opposite is true. I'm not posting this so that people can talk about me, or what I said, or my take, or even engage with me at all. I'm posting a huge story, then standing aside from it to allow the story to stand on its own, and due to the nature of the story, I think that it is able to do so. Me adding a take turns the post towards my take and not the story itself which, again, is large enough to rise above the noise floor in a way that something like trans people shut down a street doesn't.
If I wanted to post something like activist stands on car during Trans Day of Vengeance, then yes I absolutely need to write a post about why this matters, why we should talk about it, etc, since there are dozens of identical stories being posted on this topic ever day.
"Former president and presumptive presidential candidate criminally prosecuted by his political rivals ahead of election" is, at least for now, a unique story that is not happening constantly and a post about this is only made worse by an inclusion of my "take" on this.
In fact, just talking about forum etiquette, the best/most polite thing to do if I wanted people to talk about my take (instead of the story itself), and get the dopamine hits that somebody was talking about, would be to post a clean link "Trump Indicted" as an anchor/catchall/megathread type post, and then reply to myself with whatever take I had.
To summarize: I think this story is unique, I think it is courteous to stand aside from it, and I think that posting a place for discussion about this topic in a different way would have been rude and narcissistic. Posting the way I did was good forum behaviour and is the type of thing that should be encouraged, not threatened with banning.
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