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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   28051 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 11, 2023

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Pointwise vs Uniform "badness"

Note: This post assumes the axiom that some people are better than others, and that we can to some degree of accuracy say whether someone is a net contributor to the world or not.

Often when it is pointed out that people who are in group X are a net negative to society (e.g. low paid cleaners who consume a lot more in benefits and general wear and tear on public goods like roads than they put in) others are quick to point out that actually these people are the lifeblood of the country and if they suddenly disappeared the country would collapse within a week (e.g. truck drivers refuse to work, thereby causing collapse as food doesn't get to where it needs to be etc.). This is then followed by the conclusion that therefore these people are not bad for society but rather good for it, and so we shouldn't complain about them at all.

I am completely convinced that they are correct that the country would indeed collapse in short order if truck drivers went on strike, cleaners stopped working etc. However this fact is a statement about the group as a whole, instead of individual members of it. For example: If a factory needs 5 people to work the machines but union regulations require them to hire 25 people instead of 5 then yes, each and every single member of the group of "workers" is a parasite sucking on the teat of the group of people who are "factory owners", even though the "factory owners" need the group "workers". In this case it is not the individuals who are indispensable to society, but rather the group as a whole, and the example above shows, it's possible for the group to be a net positive while every single individual in it is a net negative.

Of course not all groups of people are like this. The group of people who are criminals is a net negative to society full stop (restrict criminals to those who commit non-state sanctioned violence+thieves if your worried about how exactly criminal is defined). The individual members of this group are a net negative to society and the whole group is a net negative too. This is probably why "criminals bad" is a much less controversial statement compared to "street cleaners bad" even though someone who earns enough to be a net contributor plus does some light burglary on the side is probably much less of a drain on public welfare.

To be clear here: the people who are members of a net positive category but themselves are net negative are still those who society would be better off without on the margins. And since all economic decisions are made on the margin it is perfectly valid to say that ceteris paribus the world as a whole would be better off without them in expectation.

I think it makes sense to distinguish these two types of a group being bad for society. Firstly we have pointwise badness as an individual which we define as a person who is on their own a net negative to society ceteris paribus holding everything else the same (i.e. we remove them and just them from society and ask if the result if better or worse in expectation). From this we can define pointwise badness for groups where a group is given this label if most of its members are pointwise bad as individuals (note: here we depart from the mathematical definition, every group has it's saints, I'm sure there are some net positive criminals so we don't require every single member of the group to be a net negative).

As examples the group of Criminals are pointwise bad for society, equally street cleaners are pointwise bad for society because they are easily replaceable and consume more than they output.

Then you have uniform badness, which is when the group as a whole is a negative influence on the world and if we could somehow Thanos snap every single member of it away the rest of society would be better off. Criminals are uniformly bad for the world, while street cleaners, truck drivers and steel mill workers are not. Note that uniform badness sort of implies pointwise badness in the real world (not exactly: a group with 10 good people but 1 Literally Hitler is uniformly bad for the world, while it wouldn't be pointwise bad, the Literally Hitler is pointwise bad as an individual, but none of the others are) much more than pointwise badness implies uniform badness.

There are lots of pointwise bad groups but much much fewer uniformly bad groups. Generally when people are talking about how members of a group are bad, especially when they want something to be done they're talking about pointwise badness rather than uniform badness.

  • -14

This is an obnoxious post. The people who show up on time every day for low status jobs and don't otherwise commit crimes are net positive for any society. On top of that, you seem to slide rather easily between "bad for society" and "bad people". These aren't the same concept, and I'm not entirely convinced the latter even exists.

For example: If a factory needs 5 people to work the machines but union regulations require them to hire 25 people instead of 5 then yes, each and every single member of the group of "workers" is a parasite sucking on the teat of the group of people who are "factory owners", even though the "factory owners" need the group "workers".

Unions are generally net-negative, but economic estimates of the magnitude is relatively low. It's when they co-opt government that it really becomes a problem. When they make it impossible to build a new school to educate more, say, dental hygienists (a sort of 'white collar cleaner', who are massively overpaid relative to the service they provide if our comparison is one where it is free and easy to start a new school that can train/license them), or any of a number of different jobs where they've made it near impossible to build a school, get licensing, certification, approved facilities, etc. Then, rather than being localized teat-sucking in isolated locations in a way that can be managed, it's industry-wide and enforced by the men with guns.

FWIW, the consensus of the anti-occupational licensing crowd is that dental hygienists are underpaid because the law requires them to work under the supervision of a dentist, and the cut they have to pay the dentist is higher than the benefit they get from being licensed themselves.

Hairdressing and interior design are the canonical examples of jobs that are licensed in most states but shouldn't be (neither is licensed in most European countries).

I'm interested; can you point me to a reference that estimates the relative effects? Thanks!

This is the famous paper, but rereading it, I realise that it only looks at the effect of regulations requiring hygienists to work under dental supervision, showing a 10% wage drop (and an even larger loss to consumers). But it doesn't estimate how much hygienists gain from restricting competition. Other work tends to give a premium >10% for licensed workers, which would imply that hygienists are net gainers. In general, most of the literature focusses on the cost to teeth of excessive regulation, not the cost or benefit to hygienists.

This is the only paper looking at both effects that I could find with a quick Google, but the author appears to have run the wrong regressions. One thing it does point out is that Connecticut is the most deregulated state on both metrics (anyone can become a dental hygienist by passing an exam, with no requirement to study at an accredited school or serve an apprenticeship, and hygienists can set up their own practices) and has the highest hygienist incomes - although this is obviously confounded by the fact that it is a high-wage state generally.

Thanks!

One comment about Connecticut in the second paper. They have the highest hygienist incomes on the chart, but the chart only shows three states and the national average. The text says, "Wages, at $67,450, and employment, at 95 DHs per 100,000, are higher than the national average, but well below the highest-ranking states."

And man, super depressing that even though Vermont has the highest number of hygienists per capita, they have one school that had only twenty-one graduates in the year they looked at (2006). That seems appalling to me. That all of the other states are worse really makes me think that we're wayyyy out from the equilibrium were we to significantly increase competition among schools and supply of trained hygienists.

One of those things that should have been obvious to me but that I never considered. I want my teeth cleaned 3-4 times a year. I have little interest in seeing a dentist ever. Why the hell do I have to go to a dentist office? I just want a sweet woman who knows the right amount of polite conversation to make, is gentle with the water pick and scraper, and doesn't ask me questions while a utensil is in my mouth. Why does a dentist get a cut of this arrangement.

Also, I've had great hygienists who I would return to their office indefinitely if I knew where to find them. Instead, I go to the dentist and roll the dice with whomever I get. I can't even show customer loyalty to those who excel and allow them to build a clientele.

Maybe I’m too PC but is there a reason we need to call people “bad”. These aren’t exactly bad people and we could use a better term.

What are you are getting into is marginal value for a lot of these things which is basically any entry level micro econ course.

IMO truck drivers and housekeepers may have similar long term marginal value but you also sort of get into bottlenecks. The economy shuts down if they go on strike but driving and cleaning are about the same complexity of work. Medium to longer term you can swap in labor and their value falls. Short term they have quite high marginal value for a lot of their workers. In the short term a truck driver might have the marginal value of a brain surgeon but a brain surgeon maintains that marginal value long term because of the IQ and training required to be one.

This 'pointwide badness' seems to be mostly a result of the welfare state.

Like sure, an Uber driver in a European country is heavily subsidised by more productive taxpayers. But if you take away the various welfare goods he consumes, then a law-abiding member of the lower working class would be net positive, in as far as whoever is willing to pay for his labour must be deriving some surplus value from the exchange to make it worth it. The same is true of everyone he deals with as a consumer (his landlord, the shop he buys food from etc).

I think you have an idea here, but it isn't quite right. If 5 members of a group are needed for society, but 25 members are not, then the first 20 people you fire are pointwise bad, and the remaining 5 aren't, and you can pick them in a different order and different ones will be "pointwise bad". Furthermore, removing the whole group may be either negative or positive for society depending on whether the first 5 bring more benefit than the last 20 bring harm.

I am completely convinced that they are correct that the country would indeed collapse in short order if truck drivers went on strike, cleaners stopped working etc. However this fact is a statement about the group as a whole, instead of individual members of it.

This is the left-wing fantasy that society is dependent on these people and if they collectively quit society will be forced to heed their demands. What will actually happen is the market will simply adjust to some new equilibrium: new workers will be hired at this new equilibrium . If anything, this would be good for society because the new equilibrium would be more efficient in terms of allocation of resources than the one it replaced, such as too many truck drivers but not enough cleaning ladies.

overpaying for anything is inefficient and bad in that sense.

Truck driving is not a skilled job. There’s this fantasy that it is, but it isn’t. 70 year olds routinely buy gigantic class A RVs and drive them all over the country pulling ridiculously sized trailers all the time.

People buy absolutely massive 5th wheel RVs all the time etc.

I looked it up and while there is data on elderly drivers and crashes, I could find any (large) RV-specific data. It would be interesting to see if they’re a safety risk there.

What is the schooling and licensing for, then? Challenge Mode: answer with a reason that isn't "guild/union-like protection of salaries," as I hear that trucking is not that lucrative for many drivers.

In the EU (and still in the post-Brexit UK), a significant part of HGV driver training is about how to stop illegal immigrants stowing away in your truck.

Regulatory creep. At some point we decided that if people were going to be driving these insane vehicles around mixed in with the public, then they should have some schooling and licensing.

The schooling degraded to the point of not accomplishing anything productive (like coding boot camps), but nobody is ever going to say we should give it up due to safetyism.

One reason for special licensing is to make it easier to prevent truck drivers from engaging in law-breaking arbitrage. Speeding to make delivery times, not sleeping, etc. Once someone is doing something for money there is that extra incentive to break laws. You can see the same thing with Uber - as soon as people started driving for money, there were suddenly a lot more violations of no-stopping zones, transit lanes, parking in bike lanes, etc.

The problem I see with group pointwise badness is it lets you tar saints. The problem I see with uniform badness is it lets you tar normal people. It seems to me that ever talking about groups is less fair than just dealing with pointwise bad people. This is made worse because often when people complain about groups, they gerrymander and redefine things to play games.

You used examples of criminals and human rights crimes, so when it comes to legal justice I would say generalizing is unfair - just punish pointwise bad people.

What's a more appropriate context for when we should generalize groups as being "bad" and ignoring individual differences?

This gets at something of a personal peeve of mine in discussions (especially culture war or political discussion more generally) where generalizations over groups come with a lack of quantifier for the group being generalized over. This might seem pedantic but I think it's important because quantifiers can cause a generalization ("Street sweepers are bad") to range from the trivial ("There exists at least one bad street sweeper") to the absurd ("Every street sweeper is bad"). I think a lot of motte and bailey arguments boil down to two people interpreting the same statement with radically different quantifiers. This is especially the case when there is a lack of charity on either side. It is very easy to read statements by your political opponents in the most absurd way and unclear communication enables such misunderstandings.

I think one problem with this analysis (that is illustrated by the factory worker example) is an unstated assumption that an individuals marginal value or net contribution is some property of the individual that is somehow fixed over time. All humans start out as net drains on society (in the form of infants) and develop our abilities in various ways to be more or less productive. How productive a member of society we end up being is not just down to our personal characteristics but also other social and economic facts of the society we exist in. As in the factory worker example the marginal value of the 5th worker (whoever they are) is very high but the marginal value of the sixth worker (and more) is very low. Our contribution to society is not purely some individual thing, but also a function of the decisions and positions of other people in society.

You might enjoy this John Nerst post on Interpretation Matrices, if you haven't already seen it. Some simple statements are imprecise on multiple dimensions, even.

A very good post, thank you for sharing it. One of those eye-openers that I'm sure I'll see everywhere now.

What does "remove from society" mean here, as regards in particular the 20 teat-sucking factory workers? Job severance? Imprisonment? Or something more sinister?

Yeah - John Smith, the guy with a cushy union factory job, isn't exactly a bad dude. Maybe the union's played hardball, maybe it didn't.

That was my question too. And also, they should have taken account of the non economical consequences of said removal. Like people beeing sad forbtheir beloved ones. Would they really like to live in a world where their beloved ones can be "removed" if someone thinks they are not productive enough?

I think the word "marginal" is much better than "pointwise" here. People already use it to refer to the distinction you're making here (though usually not in the context of "badness", and doesn't require grabbing a tangentially related word from mathematics and abusing it into shape.

Similarly, we can use the word "average" or "group" instead of "uniform"

Additionally, "bad" seems like an unnecessarily loaded term. We might as well refer to the "marginal" versus "average" contribution people in groups make to society and/or the economy. From there, the "badness" of people with a net negative contribution to society is left as an exercise for the reader. This way it's more clear specifically what you're referring to, because there are lots of different ways people can be "good" or "bad".

If you fire an entire group based on this heuristic, then congratulations, your factory no longer runs. If you can extract profit from the factory and people still buy the product for cheap, then you aren't losing anything by having some excess.

Some vague morality points, perhaps.

I don't understand how you can say that "having some excess" (paying 20 extra people) costs nothing but morality points. It costs economy points, however many it takes to compensate 20 people to work for you.

I suspect I'm missing something here.

Those economy points (err, dollars) could be used to pay the remaining workers more, to buy the owner a yacht, to invest in the business (new machine, new/expanded building, lowered sale price of produced good, whatever).

I suspect I'm missing something here.

Allow me to break down my argument further for you, hopefully it will elucidate the meaning.

Assumption: A business existing is better than a business not existing. They provide some good to the market that satisfies some vague demand. Assumption: Per the OP's framing it is better to fire all 25 workers in order to get rid of the excess, because you evaluate the group as a whole, not individuals in the group.

Under these assumptions, and within the OP's thought experiment, would it be better to put the factory out of business to get rid of the 20 parasites, or would it be better to keep the business still running, when the only option is to fire the entire group in order to be rid of the union workers?

My response:

If you fire an entire group based on this heuristic, then congratulations, your factory no longer runs. If you can extract profit from the factory and people still buy the product for cheap, then you aren't losing anything by having some excess.

Some vague morality points, perhaps.

If profit is still being extracted, and the factory is able to continue to run, it is better to keep the factory running, even with the excess. Is it better for a factory to run with an optimal crew-number? Sure, that is not under dispute. In a less contrived thought experiment, you fight the union and reduce the number of workers until you hit a "true"/safe/optimal minimum for your goals, or if demand is high, expand the factory so you can utilize those 20 excess workers and ensure they're producing value.

The thought experiment has a lot of assumptions baked into it. The other issue perhaps, is that I don't use profit or money as an equivalent to calculating utility.

Right, I misunderstood. That makes sense. Thanks for clarifying.

This post assumes the axiom that some people are better than others,

Alright, cool…

and that we can to some degree of accuracy say whether someone is a net contributor to the world or not.

There’s the catch. I don’t think it’s trivial to assess this. At the extremes, we can say a brain-dead patient must be a net sink, or a genius engineer adds value. But we are specifically looking at the margins.

Take, for example, your marginal cleaner. His continued employment is proof of some economic value. Erasing him from existence doesn’t erase the demand for his labor. It just removes one of the many frictions in price discovery.

Labeling a group as “pointwise bad,” then, is a claim that the market is wrong at least half of the time. I don’t share your certainty.

The first-order consequence of liquidating all minimum-wage cleaners is that every gas station now looks like a Valero. The cost of gas is heavily driven by inputs, so I wouldn’t expect too much change. Same for their incredibly cheap (if dangerous) tacos. To get any significant benefit, you have to start hypothesizing about second and third order effects.

"equally street cleaners are pointwise bad for society because they are easily replaceable and consume more than they output"

Aren't you the guy crying about how you are never going to have the beautiful life you are entitled to due to your education, etc.?

Well, I guess you're just one of the people on the margins, and you're a net negative to society, so you're in the situation that best fits you and quit whining about it.

@sodiummuffin and greyenlightenment's points below are correct: underpaid "essential workers" only have low wages because there are so many people able and willing to do their jobs at low wages, relative to the "need" for those jobs.

Several years ago I saw a cleaners strike happen at a university. (The cause was dissatisfaction with a middleman temp firm which was taking a large cut of the budget allocated for cleaners' salaries). The hallways and lecture halls were messy after only 2~3 days, and after two weeks they were full of trash. At which point graduate students were paid extra to clean up the hallways and lecture pits. To have graduate students cleaning the hallways was much more expensive than having the cleaners do it, but the labor market was suddenly artificially tight, and the department feared that having trashy lecture halls would result in undergrad enrollment dropping.

In labor markets flush with workers, salaries are completely unrelated to the infrastructure that makes it possible for jobs to be done, as well as completely unrelated to the upper limit of what people would pay for that job to be done (i.e. what would be paid if there were absolutely no workers), despite the net value of their jobs to other people in society being several orders of magnitude larger than the prevailing salary. They cannot negotiate higher salaries because if they do then someone else will come in and replace them, getting the job by undercutting their wage.

The same is true in reverse: if there were only one person able and willing to do plumbing in the entire country, that person would be paid millions of dollars per hour servicing nuclear reactors. If there were only one person able to clean in the entire country, they would be paid handsomely to work in a semiconductor fab.

It's called paradox of value, or water-diamond paradox (water is a lot more useful than diamonds, but the price of diamonds is higher).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_value

I don’t think it’s a paradox of value. Realistically everything in every market has a consumer surplus. But prices settle where the marginal costs equals the marginal value.

If t-shirts were $10k I’d probably own one shirt and take really good care of it but since I can buy shirts for $20 I end up buying shirts until the very last one meets my utility.

Paradox of value though is an extreme example of a supply and demand curve. The diamond/water example is just the extreme where one product has very tight supply and one has very abundant supply. Cleaning services is really just more of a normal supply/demand curve where supply is available and adjustable. While the diamond supply has been relatively fixed in the short/long term (until recently since lab diamonds are taking over the market).

The paradox of value is that things that are more useful than others as a whole, like water, have a lower price than other scarcer things like diamonds.

Replace water with cleaning ladies and diamonds with software engineers and you get exactly the same situation as above

My point was both of these are just cases of normal supply and demand curves intersecting. Which also occur in every single market of which a cleaning lady isn’t in any way special compared to every other market. Nobody says the market for jeans is special and cleaning lady’s are similar to that market.

We don’t go around calling every market a paradox of value but ya clothes are valuable or I’d freeze. Oxygen is interesting because it causes death quickly when you don’t have it but the supply curve for the earth is unlimited quanitity at zero costs on earth.

Paradox of value is not a market, it's a phenomenon that can appear in any market: some things have a higher price than others that seem more necessary. It's something that must be explaned by the theory, and every economical theory (eg theory of labour value) has tried to explain it.

Supply and demand cruve intersecting is just a possible explanation of this phenomenon in marginal utility theory. Perhaps someone one day will come with a better theory and a better explanation, but as long as it is an economical theory it will have to provide an explanation for the paradox of value.

Seems like you are debating the entirety of Econ theory the stuff everyone agrees with that’s taught in intro to micro.

No I'm just explaining you the difference between the facts (the explicanda of the theory), like the price of diamonds and water, and the explanation of those facts (the theory itself), like supply and demand. It is true, however, that the theory is always more precarious than the facts

More comments

The way you're grouping and valuing people seems fundamentally nonsensical. What does it even mean to talk about cleaners hypothetically vanishing? If you need a cleaner and don't have one then you put out a job ad, with the wage increasing as necessary until someone accepts, until you add cleaning duties to some other job and find someone willing to accept (perhaps yourself), or until you have to go out of business because you can't afford to get it done. People who have some job are not a fixed group with fixed properties, and they certainly don't have fixed wages, fixed value, or fixed levels of unnecessary employment across different societies.

The value of low-skill labor varies widely based on the opportunity cost of accomplishing it some other way in your society. If a job has a low skill floor and a low skill ceiling it tends to hire the less competent members of society, but that is relative competence. If there was a mass genetic-engineering/eugenics program such that the least-competent bottom 10% of society had an average IQ of 130, high conscientiousness, and low rate of mental or physical illness, and that society hadn't completely replaced cleaners with robots, then presumably you'd be hiring those people as janitors since that would be a lower opportunity cost than hiring from the other 90% (so they accept lower pay). The only differences are that they would do a somewhat better job (such as less incidents of janitors destroying cell samples, to reference a post linked here a while back) and you would have to pay them much more because the overall prosperity of society would have increased and even the bottom 10% would have better options you need to compete with. Of course, the overall prosperity of society increasing generally also means you can afford to pay them more. They're only going to vanish if there are alternatives preferable to the additional expense, like how personal servants have largely vanished in first-world countries.

I agree. Stuff like that always weirds me out. Presumably we all want someone to hang the sheet rock, clean the toilets, or wait our tables. I can completely understand the person saying "Why doesn't this person want more from their life?" but really that question is "why doesn't this person want to do a job that is more exclusive." Well, getting fulfillment from having a job that requires very specific and exclusive skill sets is a huge privilege. There are by definition going to be a lot of people who are kind of average (or kind of below average) at almost everything. They me need a job that is easy (intellectually) or requires micromanagement or direction. Who cares? If you want those jobs to be done you should want the person does them to have a dignified life. Also many of these jobs do benefit from some type of talent which isn't universal. I'm pretty great at building financial models, but I've never made my bathroom sparkle like a professional cleaner can, even if I spend way more time. They do have a skill set and develop techniques, learn the best cleaning products, and know the right tool for the job. Good for them.

Obviously people with the lowest common denominator skill sets will get paid less, but anyone doing productive labor is almost certainly a net benefit to society and 100% worthy of dignity and respect.

Who has ever said that cleaners are a net negative on society? Why do you believe they can be classified as net negative because their wages are low? In a medieval agricultural society, you could argue that every farmer is “net negative” individually because the Lord provides more in resources for their protection and administration… but this would be forgetting that those resources are wholly the result of the farmers. If I own a cleaning company and I hire illegal migrants and I take most of their wages just because I can, and then I hire an overseas Indian to oversee my fiefdom company’s day-to-day, who is bad for society here? Isn’t it me? So I don’t think a wages-only analysis works here.

If a factory needs 5 people to work the machines but union regulations require them to hire 25 people instead of 5 then yes, each and every single member of the group of "workers" is a parasite sucking on the teat of the group of people who are "factory owners"

Why? You are alleging it’s now better for society to have less people employed, less people paid more, which means more people stressed, more people unhealthy, more health problems, less civic engagement. You want to live in a society where more people are worse off, so that someone “at the top” who may not even be financially or socially invested in the community has more to spend on overpriced foreign goods and overpriced foreign women. You really need to flesh out your argument more instead of assuming your wages-only premise is correct.

I was more or less going to type out your comment. Why would anyone easily assert that cleaners are net negatives? Talk about a claim in need of serious justification.

In a free market the cleaners would never be a net negative utility to the rest of society. The issue are the government programs which provide them extra pay which can be argued is good on being a human terms. One can certainly build economic models that certain workers due to socialism in our society have negative utility to society and the math would be solid.

The problem with this calculation is "the rest of society" excludes the cleaners themselves.

https://apple.news/APEuOPHP2TWqeUTR_h8QypA

So the Republican speaker of the house has decided to open an impeachment inquiry into Joe Biden’s business dealings with hunter. I have serious doubts that this will go very far as democrats still control the senate. This looks like an attempt to stir up the base for re-election season.

I personally see this as a big distraction as we have a lot of very serious problems that need to be addressed. BRICs, Taiwan, Ukraine, inflation, and

This is just grandstanding via toxoplasma. "The Dems impeached Trump so we've got to impeach Biden!" In the conversations I've had with people on this site who think there's a huge scandal here, I've never heard of any solid evidence about direct bribery other than the wishy-washy "money for the big guy" statement. On the point of "meetings for money", nothing Hunter did was worse than what Kushner flagrantly did during Trump's admin, and nobody even really questioned that. House Repubs haven't been able to get any better evidence after months of searching. There's basically 0 chance that they can convince 18 dem Senators to flip.

The only evidence missing is Hunter flipping on dad - which won’t happen since his dad has pardon power or a taped phone call between Hunter/Joe which won’t happen because Hunter isn’t going to record calls with his dad.

Everything else is there. Laptop with Hunter saying dad got paid. Joe meeting many business partners. Insiders saying Joe was involved. Money changing hands.

None of it matters that it’s a strong case you will never convince partisans to turn on their only electable candidate.

Laptop with Hunter saying dad got paid.

There's no solid evidence that Joe got any money despite Republicans aggressively looking for it for years now.

None of it matters that it’s a strong case you will never convince partisans to turn on their only electable candidate.

Correct. Even if it was a slam-dunk case, it still probably wouldn't matter. "Impeachment" has become little more than a press conference with some adornments.

Honestly there isn’t a good reason for the money to directly go to Joe. Just more taxes when Joe eventually dies and the money becomes Hunters trust fund.

Just because impeachment isn’t much more than a press conference doesn’t mean that they shouldn’t hold him as accountable as they can for probably the largest bribery scandal in a century.

probably the largest bribery scandal in a century.

Assuming there actually was bribery, which, again, is still very much unproven despite months of a Republican led investigation to find evidence of exactly that.

Under the standard of “proven” you are using nothing is ever truly proven in this world. Outside of Joe or Hunter confessing we will never hit your standard of proven.

For a jury trial I’d convict him beyond a reasonable doubt on many of the accusations.

On bribery and treason against American interest he’s guilty.

Under the standard of “proven” you are using nothing is ever truly proven in this world. Outside of Joe or Hunter confessing we will never hit your standard of proven.

Strawman. I don't have some crazy burden of proof like you're saying I do. I really don't think asking for more evidence than hearsay that doesn't even refer to Joe by name is absurd.

Hunter is clearly a dirtbag, although he had far, far less influence than Kushner, who actively shaped many of Trump's policies and who's received billions in Saudi funding as a result.

Resorting to whataboutism when you can’t defend your position.

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Kushner should be investigated. But there is a lot more evidence than merely hearsay that doesn’t refer to Joe by name. See other posts.

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A quibble, but just under a century if you mean "since Teapot Dome", which was 1921-23.

More seriously, it is only the biggest bribery scandal because we don't know what Jared Kushner did for the $300 million or so the Saudis are bunging him ($300mm is my best guess of the management fee he will be getting on the $2 billion investment in his PE fund). The Jack Abramoff scandal is also bigger than Hunter in terms of dollar amount and had sympathetic victims, but it isn't clear it counts as a bribery scandal (Abramoff was prosecuted for bilking the Indian tribes who hired his lobbying firm).

My view is that the worst US bribery scandal in recent years would be the Clinton-era Chinese campaign contributions. Biden isn't accused of doing anything nearly as bad as turning a blind eye to Chinese nuclear espionage in exchange for the money.

Hunter had office space had Joe on the lease with a CCP operative. Less proven than the Burisma stuff but the Bidens seem to have been getting bribed by the Chinese too.

https://dailycaller.com/2023/09/14/hunter-biden-office-mates-joe-chinese-business-associate-emails-show/

End of the day every thing assumed ends up being true so ya Bidens were probably selling secrets/access to China against American interests knowingly.

The Saudis are throwing money at a lot of people. I have a friends dad who’s a former big exec on their payroll too.

I think we do know what Kush did. The worst interpretation was helping with pressure from Kashoggi. The best would be they worked with him on the Abraham Accords which I don’t know anyone who thinks they were bad or against American interests. The Kashoggi stuff has been American foreign policy for decades of looking the other way as long as the Saudi gas station stays open. And Biden has stayed allied with them.

I hate Kush for taking their money. His background is fine for being the face guy for a pe firm. And I think he could have raised the money in more traditional routes. High ranking administration officials do get those sort of gigs. Rahm was a well paid investment banker. Peter Orszag popped up recently as the CEO of Lazard.

$300 million could be right. Tough to know. I’d assume 2 and 20. So $40 million a year in management fees and most pe firms want 2.5 CAC return goal so if he hits that’s would be $3 billion in profits or $600 million to the firm. But of course he needs to invest well and pay his people.

I am positive Kush is getting 2&20. 2% mgmt fee and then carry of 20%. So if he got 2b in funds mgmt fee would be 40m. The real money is in the carry but that requires doing successful deals.

I estimated $300m based on $40m per year over the life of the fund, which is usually 5 or 7 years, plus a conservative estimate of the carry on the assumption that Kushner is a mediocre investor.

The carry is a free option (the fund manager gets paid if the fund beats the hurdle, but keeps the 2% fee if it doesn't) and if Kushner just invested in the S&P500 the Black-Scholes EV of the carry would be about $26 million. With some reasonable assumptions about using leverage to add volatility, I get numbers in the $100-150 million range.

money for the big guy" statement

How is that wishy washy? You have to contort yourself into a pretzel to come to any other conclusion.

Because Republicans haven't been able to find any evidence to verify it despite looking very hard for years now.

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This is just an incorrect statement.

They have found plenty of evidence. They haven’t found a smoking gun. But they also haven’t had complete access to bank records.

They've found evidence that Joe has taken meetings/calls with people at the request of his son, but not that anything ever came of these, or that Joe ever benefitted monetarily. Republicans have had subpoena power for years and have had a full investigation going for at least several months, and still haven't found the bribery part of the whole "bribery scandal."

There is lots of evidence of complicated payment schemes that the IRS whistleblowers have stated they need more resources to investigate than were allocated, and some avenues were explicitly blocked (like GPS queries on Joe Biden).

They already have the Quid (payments to family members count, as does tipping them off in insider trading) and the Quo, the only thing lacking is the quo, which is the hardest element in any bribery case, because few people write checks with a "Bribe for XX" written on it. This case is already dozens of times more compelling than the Bob McDonnell case that eventually SCOTUS threw out.

If you are objecting that he didn't get all, or most, of the money, why is that relevant? If you were 70 and could get money for free, or have your kids get money wouldn't you prefer your kids? I am 35 and, over basic expenses, prefer my kids get the money.

The fact that some avenues of investigation were blocked isn't evidence of much. This happens all the time. Trump famously refused to even interview with the Mueller investigation while it was ongoing.

There's a big difference between crimes committed by the son, Hunter, and those by Joe. It's clear that Hunter is a fuckup and tried to parlay his father's status into connections and money. Going after Hunter is therefore justified, but the evidence against Joe is much more flimsy. That's why Republicans only make vague mentions of Joe's connection to this whole thing, before quickly trying to tie him to his son as much as possible as if they were functionally the same person, when it's clear their relationship has always been strained at best.

Also, I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on whether Trump deserved to be impeached for all the corruption Kushner got up to, including some recent developments.

I reject the Jared-Hunter comparison. One was allowed to marry into a billionaire's family based on his personality, potential, etc. The other was borne into a politician's family. That they both make money at times is not the same. In fact, even the timing isn't similar. Hunter's payments were during the potential peak of Biden's power (few anticipated him ever being president) the other happened at the lowest of lows of Trump's influence.

Anyways. Hunter's crimes are Joe's crimes if Hunter and several other witnesses are not liars. Joe's lawyers are welcomed to impeach such witnesses at the hearings. You think they will be successful, I am not sure they will be.

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Isn’t what you described like the definition of bribery. Hunter gets paid and Joe talks to the business associates?

There’s a question of whether Joe did anything bad for the money like say fired the prosecutor at their request.

But it’s clearly been established that the Bidens were paid for access to Joe and Joe gave them access while he was the VP. That’s bribery.

Isn’t what you described like the definition of bribery. Hunter gets paid and Joe talks to the business associates?

If they were a single person, perhaps. But considering they are in fact two different individuals, things are different. Is Hunter guilty of something? Almost certainly. Is Joe though? If he had knowledge of Hunter's deal and/or if he got payments himself, then yes. But that's critically where Republicans haven't been able to produce evidence despite years of trying.

There is no way he didn’t know about Hunters deal. Many in the state department were not happy with Hunter and thought it was causing them issues. Biden met with Burisma executives. And the White House official statements now is that Joe called Hunter everyday. Hunter flew on Air Force one with Joe to see clients.

In summary Joe was bribed.

He did have knowledge!!! He set up Robert Peters email and reached out for a call with Burisma and CCed Hunter. He met with numerous Hunter business associates.

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That's bribery

That's lobbying. The professional lobbying industry is rife with legal-but-sleazy cash-for-access schemes. It is completely legal, and SOP in DC, for a government official to meet with people because they hired a lobbying firm that donates to their campaign/hires their failson for a cushy job/promises to hire them for a cushy job after they leave office/block-books a large number of rooms in their hotel at an above-market rate. A lot of this stuff can't be banned, because petitioning the government is 1st amendment protected activity.

The difference between selling influence and selling access is hard to prove, but it is critical to bribery law. It also matters to the situational ethics of the DC swamp - selling a policy change for cash is against the "Code" even if you manage to do it in a way which skirts bribery law.

It’s bribery when the VP personally financially benefits from the arrangement. It’s allowed for campaign contributions. Being that the VP did personally financially benefit its bribery. Also, first amendment doesn’t apply to Burisma.

Let’s start by removing the partisan valance, going back to first principles, and just thinking about how people try to corrupt government officials. You start off thinking, “Man, it’d be really nice if I could get this government official to do things that are favorable to me. In order to accomplish that, I could give him something that he wants. Then, either implicitly or explicitly, he’ll take official acts that are favorable to me.” If the expected monetary outlay required to push these officials is less than the expected gain of favorable action, you try to do it. This is Crony Capitalism 101.

Your first idea is, “Everybody likes money. I bet that government official would like it if I gave him a bag of money.” And early/unsophisticated bribery schemes do this. Naturally, the public decided, “BUT THAT’S CORRUPTION!” and decided to outlaw such behavior, raising the cost of trying to do something so brazen. Ok, you respond, “Let’s go back to the drawing board. What are my options?” You can probably come up with a variety of possible schemes to get around the law.

One option could be, say, giving campaign contributions. It’s a totally legal and totally cool way to give the government official a bag of money! This money has slightly less value to the government official than a bag of personal money, so you’re going to need to give a little bit more in terms of campaign money than you would have had to give personal money, but so long as the expected cost is still less than the expected reward, you still do it. Naturally, the public decided, “BUT THAT’S CORRUPTION!” and decided to put limits on campaign contributions.

You go back to your list of options. “Well, this government official is kind of old, and he’s got lots of money already. Probably more than he can realistically spend. Even if I could have given him money directly, that’s not ideal for him. Not only does he have to worry about it being illegal, he then is probably going to want to just give the money to his kids in the form of inheritance, and that brings taxes and public knowledge of the gains, and it’s complicated, risky, and more expensive. I know! What if I give bags of money directly to his kids! This isn’t illegal, and it’s a cheaper way of doing what he really wants to do with the money anyway! It’s a win-win!” Or maybe you think, “What if I set up a political fund that I can use to mirror the politician’s talking points, giving him a boost that is kinda like giving campaign contributions, but isn’t directly violating the law?” Sure, again, that’s a little more expensive again, but expected value yadda yadda.

Naturally, the public wants to say, “BUT THAT’S CORRUPTION!” They want to outlaw it. I think the public is still having debates over the latter activity because it comes so close to the core of our free speech values, but it’s a little easier for them to outlaw the former scheme. Both of these schemes are quite difficult to prove in detail. That (combined with the free speech concerns) is why the Court decided to adopt a position requiring some amount of proof of a quid pro quo in Citizens United. It’s why when we see enforcement of FCPA that maybe you end up with gigantic settlements rather than criminal charges. It’s tough to get the requisite proof. And yes, when you enforce it, it’s probably easier to enforce it against the guy giving the money than the guy taking the money. Do you need to show that the guy “taking” the money in a campaign finance case like CU had knowledge of the scheme? Maybe, because of the speech interests. Do you need to show that the guy “taking” the money in a pay-the-kids case like JPMorgan had knowledge of the scheme? Wellll... maybe not. Maybe the best you can do is go after the guy giving the money. If you can find evidence that the guy taking the money had knowledge of the scheme, too, then maybe you can try to go after him. But that’s going to be hard to do.

Ok, maybe back to some political valence. Maybe the best outcome you can get is that the guy taking the money ends up with a political hit. This would not be irrational behavior from the public. If the children of a politician, say Donald Trump, continually show up within arms’ reach of these corruption cases (say, JPMorgan paid a settlement in a case that involved one of Trump’s kids, HSBC paid a settlement in a case that involved another one, Company X... and so on, as the list builds), then it’s potentially rational behavior for the voting public to say, “BUT THAT’S CORRUPTION... and I want to punish corruption. There are impediments to doing it with criminal law, but I can at least vote against politicians like that.” This raises the costs of engaging in such a scheme and at least theoretically reduces the likelihood of future politicians doing likewise. This is basically how things worked for the left. They thought (and trumpeted to the public as loudly as possible) that Trump's kids were getting benefits, even though there wasn't a "smoking gun". You're just not really going to get one; it'll just be labeled something that is just ambiguous enough. Not ambiguous enough that we wouldn't go after international companies like HSBC when they give money to kids of Chinese politicians, but ambiguous enough that we're probably not going to go after many domestic politicians. Different reasons why here could be believed by different people. "The elite will protect their own." "No use running the risk of turning these investigations into a constant partisan shitfest or becoming a banana republic."

Obviously, there are third party costs to this method (Donald Trump’s kids and companies who may want to legitimately hire them have to avoid the appearance of corruption and so may not want to engage in trade that might otherwise be totally legal and totally cool), but pretty much all schemes to punish corruption have third party costs. It’s probably up to the voting public to determine where to draw the lines (if it goes so far as to make all kids of politicians totally unhireable, that disincentivizes potentially good politicians from seeking office). “Appearance of corruption” is an even harder-to-define standard, so voters have to wade through potential hit pieces and skewed defenses in pursuit of this goal. I think that so far, we’re not close to making kids of politicians totally unhireable, especially if they just take sorta ‘normal’ jobs, but trying to balance these factors are necessarily going to reduce the options of those kids at least somewhat.

So, in a sense, you’re right. We’re almost certainly not going to hold Joe Biden (or Hunter Biden) criminally accountable for any corruption (or impeach him and remove him from office). But there’s no reason why his political career can’t take a hit in service of the public’s goal to root out the appearance of corruption IF it’s the case that his kids keep popping up in cases that very strongly appear to be corrupt (I want to give even more emphasis on the “if”; I’ve seen the hit pieces that try to show an appearance of corruption; I haven’t really seen many defenses of the core situations besides, “There’s no way to criminally prosecute these guys anyway, so stop talking about it,” (basically how I read your defense) so I really strongly believe that the level of uncertainty is high).

Of course, at the end of all this is that we now have a right who has seen exactly how much respect the left has for these sorts of long-standing détentes. They've seen that it doesn't matter how ambiguous, how novel, how theoretically problematic the prosecution/impeachment is; it's going to be pursued to "get Trump". So, frankly, it's not surprising to see them also abandon the détente. They need to demand, "If we're going to be setting new rules for how various superweapons can be used against political opponents, we're going to make sure you agree to the rules when they're threatening your politicians. If we can't trust that this whole domain will remain benign, we need to set some precedent, and it's better to get you on the record when you're sympathetic to the 'defendent'."

  1. Joe doesn’t personally need to benefit. If he directs payments to his family members that would be sufficient. And lo and behold his entire family got money — millions of dollars— for no apparent reason.

  2. As late as October 2015 the state department sent emails stating it believed Ukraine under Shokin made significant anti corruption efforts. Indeed Nuland had sent Shokin a letter stating that then Secretary of State Kerry was impressed with Shokin personally.

  3. The European Commission praised Shokin’s anti corruption progress nine days after Biden issued his ultimatum.

That is, both the Europeans and State believed Shokin was doing a good job. Yet Joe Biden pressured Ukraine to fire Shokin.

  1. Shokin was a problem for Burisma.

  2. A credible FBI informant told the FBI Biden was paid to get Shokin fired.

  3. Republicans entered the impeachment inquiry to grant incremental power to obtain bank records. If they can corroborate the amounts paid with what the informant told the FBI, then it seems Biden is dead to rights.

PS what are you talking about with years? They have had 9 months.

Here’s your source

https://nypost.com/2023/09/08/despite-bidens-claim-europeans-werent-trying-to-oust-ukraine-prosecutor-targeting-hunters-firm/

I’ve been hearing on Reddit for years that Shokin was corrupt and everyone wanted him fired. Turns out that was just Bidens team invention after they fired him.

Yep. To me this is the equivalent of the smoking gun. State loved Shokin. The Europeans loved Shokin. Then Biden got him fired and after that tunes changed.

Why did Joe get involved with the firing of an AG that was at worst not hindering anti corruption efforts? Well we have a witness claiming it was because he got paid millions.

Who's the big guy? Can you prove beyond a shadow of a doubt it's Biden, and not some other person Hunter meant? Hunter is about as credible as a fox in a henhouse with the feathers sticking to his mouth claiming that he's a vegetarian.

Any halfway decent lawyer should be able to throw enough doubt on that statement.

This is silly. If you think this, you would never convict on basically anything. Hypothetical:

John is married to Jill. Joe pork's Jill in John's bed. John sees this. John writes reddit post about how he saw this porking. He then berates Jill repeatedly causing her to make several reddit posts about the issue, as well as to call friends about it.

2 Days later John reports a boating accident where all his guns were lost.

10 Days later Joe is dead, gunshot to the head.

Various guns are found on the bottom of the lake. One matches the ballistics of the murder of Joe.

Fingerprints of John are found in Joe's death room, but, he's been there before. Joe met Jill because Joe and John were friendly (pre-adultery).

So, in most jurisdictions, John is dead to rights here. And his case is less compelling than the case against Joe (Biden). You just don't like to admit what is actually happening. Circumstantial evidence convicts thousands of people a day. Particularly on the portion of the charge that everyone tries to claim is not "proven" in this case: Motive. Motive is almost always entirely circumstantial evidence. Do people honestly think lots of murderers have direct evidence of "malice aforethought"? Hell no. Even the dumbest murder defendants rarely say, "I killed that man because I hated him and had for a long time" to the police.

One matches the ballistics of the murder of Joe.

Ballistics matching is pseudoscientific nonsense.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-field-of-firearms-forensics-is-flawed/%3famp=true

Ok. There is one gun. It matches John's serial # and has the same bullets as were used to kill Joe. In fact, the magazine is missing the exact number of shots that were taken at the scene. And this particular bullet company stamps batches, and its the same batch as those that killed Joe.

He's still guilty. He probably is without the gun for most juries.

According to the guidelines, sufficient agreement is the condition in which the comparison “exceeds the best agreement demonstrated between tool marks known to have been produced by different tools and is consistent with the agreement demonstrated by tool marks known to have been produced by the same tool.”

Fucking what?! We've been putting people in jail based on this shit?

PS if you want to link the article without Google's amp nonsense, click the share icon at the very top of the page on the right (you might have to scroll down a bit to get it to drop down, but it's designed to be at the top of the page no matter where you are in the article.)

I'm aware, I was just in a rush combined from "Someone's being wrong on the internet" and "there's 10 patients I need to see after I leave the shitter" haha. Amp is cancer.

Lol I figured you would know, but I was compelled to respond by the slight chance you didn't and my loathing of amp.

Burn pattern and bite mark analysis are similarly bullshit. Ditto psychological profiling, but no points for that one. Given the pattern, it's likely that other aspects of forensic science are bunk as well.

From what I gathered from this article, they didn't show ballistic matching was "nonsense", only that it doesn't have the rigor expected of the scientific method.

They provide an example of forensics not classifying "inconclusive" reports as errors. However, I agree with the forensics here. If you look at ballistic data and say "I can't tell for sure Joe was shot from this gun", that's not an error, that's working exactly as intended.

Justice isn't an exact science, in general.

Wow, here's my daily redpill. You're saying all those cop shows don't accurately predict the process of law enforcement? :'(

Theres corroborating testimony grom one of his business partners, plus other statements by Hunter from the laptop complaining that Joe took half of what other family members made, including Hunter.

Additionally, we know from Hunter's Chateau Marmont prostitute binge that he and Joe shared a joint bank account - Hunter overpaid the prostitute and then started getting frantic calls from the Secret Service about why VPOTUS's bank accounts were transferring tens of thousands of dollars to shady escort services.

Further, we also know that Joe didn't disclose $5.2 million in income that cant be explained by known income sources (salaries, etc.).

Its all very suggestive.

All the pieces fit. You just don’t have the final cornerstone that connects it beyond any doubt.

Edit: there’s actually testimony from multiple business parties.

If all the pieces fit, it is because it is very easy to fit anything into the glaringly big voids this jigsaw leaves us. 'It totally could be Joe, see, see!' isn't enough in court and it shouldn't be enough for much else, either.

With due respect, I think there is a lot more specific evidence here compared to “it totally could be Joe.”

We have three persons saying the big guy is Biden. No one has even proffered a suggestion it was someone else.

I don’t know why the standard here is “beyond a shadow of a doubt.” Until there is other evidence, it has been satisfied to the reasonable doubt standard.

When it comes to impeachment, there's no defined standard of evidence anyways. "Preponderance of the evidence" is as valid a standard as "beyond a reasonable doubt".

Indeed. My preferred standard is "smells kinda fishy". We passed that point a long time ago.

How is that wishy washy? You have to contort yourself into a pretzel to come to any other conclusion.

It is wishy washy because Hunter Biden is a liar, and it was a statement he made at a time when he was motivated to lie - the foreign crooks he was dealing with wanted to bribe Joe (although paying Hunter for access would be 2nd best), and would be much more willing to pay off Hunter if they thought the money was reaching Joe.

The "10% for the big guy e-mail" is one crook sending a note to another saying he was going to put aside some money for the big guy, but no money was actually put aside for Joe Biden except, possibly, in Hunter's head (unless there is non-public information about a segregated account, but if the Republicans had that I suspect they would have leaked it by now).

The fundamental problem with making "Joe Biden personally was on the take via Hunter" stick based on a jigsaw of weak evidence is that normally a lifestyle that exceeds known clean income is a key piece of the jigsaw, and Joe's lifestyle between VP and President was entirely consistent with what he has always claimed to be in his financial disclosures, i.e. an old guy with a net worth in the low double figure millions.

It is wishy washy because Hunter Biden is a liar, and it was a statement he made at a time when he was motivated to lie - the foreign crooks he was dealing with wanted to bribe Joe (although paying Hunter for access would be 2nd best), and would be much more willing to pay off Hunter if they thought the money was reaching Joe.

This. Hunter is perfectly capable of thinking it'd be a great idea to squeeze more money out of the guys bribing him by saying "yeah but I need some vigorish for the big guy (wink wink nod nod)" and bumping up the take that way.

How bout when he emailed his daughter saying “at least I don’t make you give 50% of your money to me like pop does?”

How bout the fact that everyone in the Biden family was getting paid (why was Hunter so generous and wasn’t everyone else a bit suspicious “hmm why am I getting all of this money for nothing”)

How bout when he emailed his daughter saying “at least I don’t make you give 50% of your money to me like pop does?

If I were Hunter's parents, I'd be taking 100% of his money because the guy is a spendthrift wastrel who thinks it's a brilliant idea to post dick pics and photos of himself taking drugs and fucking hookers online.

That line could be lies, or it could be true, but if it's true there's no reason to think the money is a bribe/passing on baksheesh, rather than the family trying to ensure Hunter doesn't spend every last dollar and there's something in reserve to pay bills for him.

That line could be lies

the family trying to ensure Hunter doesn't spend every last dollar and there's something in reserve to pay bills for him.

Either of these could be correct ... so why are we having to guess here? The latter in particular sounded like a cool theory when I first heard it from an apologist, but the more time elapses the more suspicious it gets not to hear any clarification from the Bidens themselves. If the apologia are false, they still reduce public suspicion so there's an obvious reason to neither confirm (and risk getting caught in a lie) or deny (and risk the follow up question of "what was Hunter talking about then?") anything. But if an innocent theory is true, why not just confirm it by this point? Wouldn't either of these theories be an even more impressive exoneration if its source was "claimed as a fact by the Bidens" rather than "suggested as a hypothesis by some guys on the internet"?

Also Biden has already been caught in numerous lies on this topic. It is weird to me that so many people are trying to come up with innocent explanations that aren’t pretty complex to be true.

Also, these explanations always seem to work for some but not all of the evidence. The only explanation that fits all the know issues is the simplest — corruption.

  1. What leverage do they have over him to make him fork over 50% of his income? He isn’t 18. He doesn’t seem to like the situation. They have no control unless the reason he gets the money is because of them.

  2. It also doesn’t explain why all of the other Biden’s were benefiting from Hunter’s largesse.

  1. Simple, Hunter is selling what Joe produces. It's a partnership. Why would Joe continue to risk his political career making these moves for Hunter if Hunter didn't pay him his share of the proceeds?

  2. This seems like a pretty tight knit family. It's completely plausible that Joe directed Hunter to include Jim and others.

Joe is clearly in charge here. At any point he could have informed Hunter's business partners that 0 favors or consideration would be given to anyone giving Hunter money and Hunter would have stopped receiving money. I'm positive that Joe made a decision to maintain at least ambiguity so the money keeps flowing even if Joe isn't getting any personally.

On 1) failsons who get bailed out as often as hunter does have good reason to go along with parental requests of the sort.

How is his dad bailing him out? Be specific.

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trump was impeached...and it accomplished nothing. At this point it's all an optics show

A few news articles I've read have mentioned that McCarthy announced the inquiry without a vote of the House because he thinks he wouldn't have the votes to get it to pass. The article you linked even quotes a Republican who says they'd vote against it. If McCarthy doesn't have the votes to even open an inquiry I'm skeptical he would have the votes to actually pass any articles they had drafted. It would be a pretty amusing end to this that Republicans spend all this time investigating Biden and aren't united enough to actually pass the articles that are the result of that investigation.

Somewhat amusingly Politico reports there's a Trump era Office of Legal Counsel memo that claims federal executive agencies can ignore subpoenas in impeachment inquiries unless those inquiries are opened in response to a vote of the House.

I think Republicans are making a category error. They think Ukraine and Lewinsky impeachments hurt the impeaching party because Americans don’t like impeachments.

The alternative explanation is Americans don’t like bullshit impeachments. Watergate helped democrats. Indeed, once the evidence mounted if the democrats didn’t do something it would’ve hurt them.

I imagine if the inquiry is able to put together a very strong case (there already is a very large amount of evidence — the inquiry will need to find a bit more hard evidence and put it together) republicans and even some democrats will be forced to vote to impeach.

The best thread to pull on imo is probably Biden blackmailing Ukraine to fire Shokin during Shokin's Burisma investigation. With that, you have Biden on tape admitting he did withhold the aid, you have the FBI whistleblower stating the guy under investigation paid Hunter and Joe $5mil each, and you have the $5.2mil discrepancy between Joe's tax documents and government disclosures as likely leads. And I think that most people would agree that taking a $5mil bribe in exchange for blackmailing a US ally is pretty bad if they can find hard evidence.

  1. You are missing a lot of the data if you think it is only about the laptop.

  2. Here is the case (ignoring everything else that adds to it).

A. The Biden family got paid (at least) roughly 20m for Hunter’s actions. Note “family.” Kind of weird that Hunter was so generous for his activity.

B. These payments alone generated 72 suspicious activity reports by banks. One or two is well odd. 72 is astounding.

C. We know Joe was aware of what Hunter was doing. Indeed, Joe met in person with a certain Russian oligarch that then paid Hunter 3M. Oddly, that oligarch hasn’t received sanctions like the rest.

D. Beyond just meeting, Joe using an alias emailed Burisma CCing Hunter.

E. Burisma was in trouble. They needed per two witnesses testimony help from DC. Hunter got Joe to talk to them (again with the alias)

F. The State Department internal emails show in the couple of months before Joe’s visit that they were impressed with Shokin and his anti corruption efforts. They were caught off guard when Biden strong armed Ukraine into firing Shokin. Likewise, the European Commission 9 days after Joe’s visit praised Shokin. The idea that it was general US policy to get Shokin fired simply wasn’t true. It appears Joe changed that policy and the only explanation was it benefited Burisma.

G. There was a credible informant who stated Joe was paid millions to make Shokin go away.

You put all of that together and it paints a picture of bribery.

  1. In the tax law, if I perform services and tell you to pay my kid it is still income to me. Same principle here.

  2. Other people in the family other than Hunter (including people not involved) got paid.

  3. Re the meeting it was a private dinner. Not an event with a +1. https://nypost.com/2023/08/10/inside-dcs-cafe-milano-where-joe-biden-met-hunters-cronies/

  4. I messed up my memory. Joe called the president of Ukraine with Hunter Cced after the call came in for help.

  5. It isn’t hard to litigate. The state department determined internally that Shokin did enough to qualify Ukraine for funds. John Kerry was impressed. The turnabout was a surprise. Maybe there were internal discussions that disproved the written communications but Biden needs to show that (ie the burden has shifted).

  6. Your comment that it must be activity after he became president is risible. Some but not all of this info was known before the election. So we have in fact learned NEW facts; our understanding has evolved. Moreover, at the time of the election you had 50 intelligence agents claiming it was Russian disinformation and on that basis social media quashed the story. Now we know that was all bullshit (and in part engineered by Biden’s campaign). So no we aren’t limited to what happened after Joe took the presidency and suggesting that is almost per se bad faith

You do understanding being a guy? Most of us want to have a legacy or pass on our genetic heritage - basically have ourselves exists in others our descendants. That is why men care about making far more money than we could ever spend in a lifetime so that our children have money to reproduce.

Hunter getting money is as beneficial to an old guy like Joe (probably more for tax reasons) than Joe getting money directly.

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  1. Your first mistake is using WaPo. That particular story has had to been corrected about a million times approximately. See https://nypost.com/2023/08/09/washington-post-quietly-updates-hunter-biden-story-after-devon-archer-testimony/

Contra your statement, Devon Archer testified Biden was there the entire dinner. The oligarch thanked Hunter for making the introduction afterwards. Archer could go to jail if proven to lie.

  1. The IRS wanted to investigate why Valerie Biden — Joe’s sister — received what appears to be a large sum from Hunter.

  2. No your standard is bullshit. The age of the allegation doesn’t matter. The only question is did participate in a bribery scheme. You can’t say the American people knew these facts and voted for it anyhow when (1) they didn’t know all of the facts and (2) the literal deep state colluded with Biden to unjustly and inaccurately label the info misinformation. If Joe participated in a bribery scheme, he cannot be president. This is basic stuff. Demanding absurd specifics (ie that Joe specifically directed money) is absurd. All that matters is that he knowingly participated.

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Until recently you knew it was a bribe because people don’t just send you money to be their friend but lacked some elements.

Where is the MSM on this case? I had never heard that every other big player in Ukraine including Kerry praised Shokin days before the firing. The research and article was done by the NYPost, it should have been in the WaPo or NYT like in 2016.

As the saying goes. Democracy dies in Darkness.

This isn’t just a bribery case. That is treason. Joe knew official US policy was developing Ukraine and that involved fighting off corruption was in US and their allies interests. He then took money and sacrificed US interests.

days before the firing.

Days before the December meeting at which Biden is supposed to have demanded the firing.

By the time Shokin is actually fired in March, essentially everyone has turned against him. There is timestamped publically-available information that the EU, the IMF, Victoria Nuland, Shokin's deputy Vitaly Kasko, Radio Free Europe (US government-owned), the Kyiv Post and various Ukrainian good-government groups all praised the firing when it happened.

The 2-3 month gap between Biden demanding Shokin be fired within 6 hours and the time Shokin was actually fired is inconvenient for both the pro- and anti-Biden theories of the case, as is the fact that the proximate cause of Shokin going was Kasko resigning on February 15th.

An even more bizzare complication is that Shokin applied for a freezing order against Zlochevsky's personal assets (the founder of Burisma, although he had sold most of his shares and was no longer an executive by the time Hunter Biden joined the board) on 4th February. As far as I can see, this was the first public move in the Zlochevsky/Burisma investigation since Shokin was appointed.

Ya the time gap is interesting. But it’s not that long. I believe at the end you left off that Shokin froze assets of the Burisma boss.

Of course there always was a simple solution to this if Joe was acting in good faith. He could have told Hunter to resign. And I don’t see how Joe wouldn’t have the power to strongman Hunter into resigning.

Ex-boss. The Burisma investigation related to crimes committed while Zlochevsky was boss, but Zlochevsky had sold Burisma before Hunter Biden joined the board. The UK SFO unfroze Burisma's UK accounts in 2015. The pro-Biden theory is that this is because the evidence of corporate criminality against Burisma (as opposed to personal criminality against Zlochevsky) was thin. The anti-Biden theory is that this is because Shokin's predecessor had failed to file necessary paperwork.

That seems consistent with Joe changing policy instead of the other way around.

So, your position is that Biden asked for the firing in December and three to four months later, Shokin was fired due to a change in public opinion, almost as if a whisper campaign had changed something behind the scenes. Some good luck that Biden was out ahead of the pack in thinking Shokin should go.

As far as I can see, there are basically three narratives consistent with the publicly-available information.

  1. Something actually happened between September 2015 (when the first mutterings against Shokin show up) and March 2016 (when he is fired to near-universal praise) such that all important actors in Ukrainian politics turned against Shokin, and Biden was slightly ahead of the curve. Whatever this event was, it left no trace in English-language media.
  2. Someone working for Burisma (either directly or via Biden) pulled off a scheme to discredit Shokin such that everyone apparently independently turned against him and he was fired. But if you can pull that off, why the December request from Biden - a key rule for pulling off this type of scheme is that you spread the rumours first, then demand action on them.
  3. Biden successfully suborned the US Deep State, the EU, the IMF, the Kyiv Post, Vitaly Kasko, and large parts of Ukrainian civil society to tell lies in support of his corrupt scheme, and did so while leaving no fingerprints despite two US and one Ukrainian investigations.

As I was trying to say in my earlier post, none of these are particularly plausible. But whatever Joe Biden's motives were for making the demand in December, it was neither a necessary nor a sufficient cause of Shokin's firing in March. Something else was going on.

I imagine if the inquiry is able to put together a very strong case (there already is a very large amount of evidence — the inquiry will need to find a bit more hard evidence and put it together) republicans and even some democrats will be forced to vote to impeach.

Color me skeptical. What is the evidence, not currently known, that this inquiry will find that will convince the currently skeptical Republicans and Democrats to vote for articles of impeachment?

Bank records

Only Taiwan is problem and it is problem until the chips industry in US picks up speed. The others are as it was known during the great game - questions. While US wants empire it doesn't need it.

I think inflation is a bigger problem as if people can’t afford necessities, that tends to lead to recession. If it gets bad enough, people have revolted because of food insecurity.

The US doesn't have an empire. It is the hegemon within a state system. Abandoning the hegemony doesn't mean it can go back to ignoring the rest of the world and nothing bad will happen to it, it means there will be a new hegemon who will remake the system in its image and without reference to the interests of the United States.

Isolationism worked in the 19th century because the UK decided to be nice to us and no one else had the ability to touch us. Today, the UK is a minor power with no real wooden walls to hide behind, and now anyone with an ICBM can touch us.

Doesn’t seem like whether it is an empire or hegemony matters for this option. Won’t both an empire an a hegemon both find themselves in a dangerous situation if they abandon their dominance?

Can you define what the difference is? Are you saying that an empire is more unipolar?

It's dangerous for both to abandon their position, but empire is more costly and doesn't have as many benefits as it seems like it should. The hegemon is always tempted to empire, but benefits more from staying merely hegemon.

But the USA is a nuclear power with a first rate military. Even with quite a bit of decline, nobody’s going to attack us directly.

I mean Russia and China don’t have to worry about it.

More bread and circuses. Americans, it is very clear, prefer to identify themselves as being in perpetual conflict with near symbolic enemies than far actual enemies. It's an indictment of democracy that people prefer to project their emotional hangups onto political figures (either as avatars of good or evil, depending on partisan valence) than to view them as flawed mortals to be pressured to achieve national objectives.

Although we might benefit from having angels as our political leaders, that's unrealistic. And I don't think anyone can plausibly say we deserve angels.

Ugh, I know “Twitter isn’t real life” is commonly used to refer to liberals but this feels very much like a “Twitter isn’t real life” moment for republicans. Total waste of time.

What is the other more important task they should be working on while the Democrats control the senate and presidency?

How about increasing funding for asylum adjudication, so that the wait for adjudication is 6 months, not several years? That will pretty much eliminate the border issue, since it will massively decrease the incentive to enter the country and give asylum a shot. That would have bipartisan support, especially from people like Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, who for all intents and purposes really control what passes the Senate.

How about a law to preserve the substance of the Pico plurality decision, which is probably no longer good law, to prevent red schools from removing ideas they don't like, and blue states from doing the same?

How about a law to preserve the substance of the Pico plurality decision, which is probably no longer good law, to prevent red schools from removing ideas they don't like, and blue states from doing the same?

That sounds like a horrible idea. I can see why blues would go along with it on the assumption it will hurt reds more, but why would anyone else agree to it?

  1. I don't understand why you frame it as which side gets to hurt the other more, as opposed to both sides benefiting from ensuring that their ideas are not censored.
  2. Have you not heard of cancel culture, and the like? Do you think that only conservatives try to censor ideas that they don't like? A law that prevents censorship benefits all sides.

Because realistically the way that law would play out is that school libraries have to keep the actual porn that got stocked because it’s gay, but academic cancel culture is unaffected.

I’m not just nybblerposting here- academic cancel culture is mostly done through pressuring academics to resign. Actual use of hard power to reshape anything to do with schools is extremely red coded.

Except that my suggestion was re codifying Pico, which does not prevent the removal of material because it includes sex, or profanity, or violence, etc. It only apples to removal of books based "upon disagreement with constitutionally protected ideas in those books, or upon a desire on petitioners' part to impose upon the students of the [school] a political orthodoxy to which petitioners and their constituents adhered."

So, absent Pico, blue schools will almost certainly remove books that are supposedly "racist."

Because libraries in general, but low-resourced ones like the ones in schools in particular, will not keep every book that has ever been published. There will always be curation of content, it seems the only question here is whether parents should be allowed to overrule librarians, and I don't see why the answer to that should be "no" whether we're talking about blue, or red parents. Whether or not both sides will benefit from lack of this kind of "censorship" will also depend on whether librarians tend to have a bias towards one side or the other.

it seems the only question here is whether parents should be allowed to overrule librarians, and I don't see why the answer to that should be "no" whether we're talking about blue, or red parents.

No, that isn't the issue. The issue is whether a majority of parents can silence all views with which they disagree, and whether schools should only provide information on one side of political issues. That certainly is not the norm. Most school districts, be they red or be they blue, have "controversial issues" policies which require teachers to teach such issues objectively, and to provide views on all sides. Even the supposed "anti-CRT" laws generally do not ban those ideas from class but instead provide that discussion thereof is perfectly fine if "instruction is given in an objective manner without endorsement.".

And, you would be OK if your kid's school only taught Das Kapital, and only had Marxist works in their libraries, and blocked all websites other than those that gave Marxist interpretations of history, economics, politics, etc?

Whether or not both sides will benefit from lack of this kind of "censorship" will also depend on whether librarians tend to have a bias towards one side or the other

School boards, not librarians, are ultimately responsible for deciding what books can be in libraries, and school boards often are asked to remove books which are not politically correct.

No, that isn't the issue. The issue is whether a majority of parents can silence all views with which they disagree, and whether schools should only provide information on one side of political issues.

If that's not the issue, then please explain how this law would prevent librarians from curating away books they don't like, and if it wouldn't, please explain how that state of affairs would be superior to having it done by the majority of parents.

And, you would be OK if your kid's school only taught Das Kapital, and only had Marxist works in their libraries, and blocked all websites other than those that gave Marxist interpretations of history, economics, politics, etc?

Presumably that would mean I'm living in a school district that is majority Marxist. Aside from the fact that at that point I'd have far bigger problems than the school library, yes I would be a lot more ok with that than having these decision made by a single librarian., actually forget about "a lot more than" I'd be ok with it without qualification. Communities have a right to maintain their culture. If Marxville wants a library full of Marx, it's their right.

It also looks like you were trying to address the other part of my comment but didn't get around to it?

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That will pretty much eliminate the border issue, since it will massively decrease the incentive to enter the country and give asylum a shot.

Oh, yes: only having a piddling six months to be let out into the community on the promise of 'cross your heart and hope to die, you'll turn up for the hearing in six months time' is really going to deter people who think American streets are paved with gold and they can just go live with their cousin's uncle's best friend in one of the big cities and work in the black economy?

I think sorting out genuine asylum seekers from "I was so persecuted that I fled my own country into Mexico, then fled Mexico for the USA, honest" economic migrants is vital, and cutting down adjudication times is a very good idea, but I don't think it's a magic fix-it.

I would argue that by definition, anyone who has snuck into the US is an economic migrant. Even Mexicans facing cartel violence can move to other parts of Mexico.

Developed countries need to abolish the asylum system. As long it exists as a last resort for illegal immigrants who get caught, illegal incursions will never be stopped.

Australia's system works because boat people are guaranteed to never be granted residence in Australia. As long as you hold out the carrot of legal residence (or in parts of Europe, an indefinite, all inclusive hotel stay), immigration enforcement will always have one hand tied behind it's back.

Under current circumstances, an asylum seeker can apply for a work permit and then work legally for years until their hearing takes place. Not only does that pay far more than the underground economy, in the meantime they might develop grounds for acquiring legal status even if their aslum application is denied: Maybe they will get married, or find an employer willing to sponsor them for a work visa. A lot can happen in 8 years. And that creates an enormous incentive to come to the US and give it a shot.

All those incentives disappear if applications are adjudicated in 6 months. Far fewer people are going to come here in order to work in the underground economy forever than are willing to come and a) work legally; and 2) have a shot at a green card.

Honestly doing nothing would be better than needless partisanship fights.

I disagree that this is solely about that. I think it is also a necessary part of the House exercising its oversight powers on the DOJ. We have several whistleblowers who have produced clear and convincing evidence that the DOJ attempted to cover up Hunter Biden's tax fraud, ignore his multiple weapons felonies (even their softball agreement that temporarily was about to be in effect only discussed one charge of many available to them), ignore at least 3 unique, but possibly almost a dozen unique (as in different entities) FARA violations, and cover up other possibly criminal conduct, it is no reach to think they are suppressing evidence that connects Joe to those or other related crimes. Plus we already know they double standard-ed the heck out of the documents case WRT Joe.

An impeachment inquiry should, ostensibly, give them jurisdiction for all those documents, and the ability to call all those witnesses. Which they very much need to do for non-political purposes. Do I think it was a tactical error in opening it into President Biden as opposed to AG Garland? I do think so. But it might be a necessary in-caucus compromise with some of the hardliners. Also it does avoid the very serious prospect of Garland just resigning and blowing up that inquiry.

ignore his multiple weapons felonies

That's the one that really should be hurting the Party of Gun Control To Stop These Senseless Massacres, not "well did he mean Joe by 'big guy'?" parsing.

‘Shut the government down until Asylees are deported to a third country until their case is resolved, no exceptions ever under any circumstances’.

Perhaps relevant is the looming government shutdown while Chip Roy(one of the ringleaders of the speakership debacle) promises to sabotage any deal until the southern border is secured. This could be a distraction for the house freedom caucus.

Thats what I'd been hearing - impeachment articles (whether or not it goes through) would be a trade for not shutting down the government.

I don’t expect most of Roy’s 14 backers to sign on to that deal- at least Van Duyne and Roy are deadly serious and both are rising stars who don’t want to be left standing alone- but it might keep Marjorie Taylor Green from calling enough attention to it to derail some sort of bipartisan deal.

The potential for smoking gun corruption proof is very far from zero percent. I think if the DOJ was politically reversed (in actuality, not just Bill Barr vs. the world) there'd already have been one or more AGs getting over their skis and indicting this case. The bank records are there. The emails are there. The Quos are there. There are witnesses who have stated that there is a quo. Its by no means a slam dunk, yet, and probably never will be, I trust Joe's advisor's competence at least that much. But there are all of the elements of corruption floating around, waiting to be puzzled into place.

While this is terrible because of the polarisation which it will do nothing to calm down, part of me is going "Good. What's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander".

Because they've been throwing everything they can think of at Trump for years, and that means that if the accusations of fraud around the alleged election fraud is correct, it's been subsumed under the tide of "But he wasn't supposed to win, there must be some way we can get him for that!" suits and impeachments and the rest of it.

So what might be a genuine solid case of attempting to interfere with the results of a presidential election has been churned into the muck of partisanship, and that makes me angry. There's little to no way to unwrap it from the whole mess of "throw enough mud to see if some of it will stick" and the hysteria about coups, fascism, and dictatorship (I've read one online pronouncement that 'Trump has said when he gets into power he is going to kill Biden, he's literally plotting an assassination!') which means that a grave charge about something that affects a democracy is now just one more stick in the bundle.

See how you like the frivolous, time-wasting, 'there must be some way we can get him' impeachment when it's your guy on the line.

I mean if there weren’t very serious issues facing the average American, I’d have little problem with investigating and inquiries and so on. I’d have little problem with the UFO hearings in that situation. My biggest issue with this is that while we’re wasting time and money and attention on theatrical issues, there are lots of other issues that are being neglected that need attention. We have a huge drug problem, the border is basically nonexistent, a huge fire in Maui, a hurricane in Florida, inflation, a proxy war with Russia, people being unable to afford to buy homes or have children, and probably a few problems I’m forgetting.

And this is exactly how you end up with real deal fascist governments. The problems are not addressed by the elites and eventually the frustration grows big enough that the entire government loses legitimacy in the eyes of the people.

You’re not wrong, but wasn’t this also the case for the Trump impeachments and the Jan 6 committee? The first Trump impeachment started in December 2019 when COVID was first acknowledged in China and continued while it spread in Italy. The second impeachment came during some of the most strenuous arguments about continued lockdowns. Objecting to a political hit because of the “state of the world” is special pleading unless all political hits are off-limits forever and ever.

I guess we're officially in the era of every US president henceforth being impeached by the other side.

I guess we're officially in the era of every US president henceforth being impeached by the other side.

I still doubt Biden will be actually impeached. This move was made to 1) Placate a subset of the caucus, and 2) To theoretically increase the House's legal position in battles for documents and witnesses.

And plus, the whole idea of Biden being impeached would be a nonstarter for Republicans if Biden's whole family hadn't gotten at least $20 million from foreign characters from corrupt countries (it aint like Hunter is doing his business in Japan and France everyone!), with the less proven, but indicated number being closer to $200 million. If Joe was currently VP and this conduct had occurred when he was SOS, he'd already be out. If Kamala was a viable candidate in 2024, he'd already be out.

Treating this like its a tit-for-tat is silly. There is no comparison between this and the Ukraine impeachment of Trump. You could debate the J6 impeachment if you want, but I find that to be mostly a genuine attempt to punish perceived bad behavior brought on by Democrats gaslighting themselves about how protests evolve into riots on occasion.

There is a very real chance that Republicans uncover massive funds that will cause everyone to agree Joe has to go. The WH is acting scared right now. I still wouldn’t bet Joe will leave but the odds are probably in the 15-20% range.

What could they possibly find that wouldn't follow the pattern "The Republicans claim they have a smoking gun, the Democrats say it's nothing, the press agrees with the Democrats (except Fox which doesn't count), nothing happens"?

Bank records showing dirty foreign money flowing to Joe or Jill Biden (or a for-profit company owned by them) would probably cause the Deep State to flip on Biden, and the MSM would follow the Deep State.

Evidence that Joe Biden did a favour for one of Hunter's clients that the Deep State didn't want him to do would also probably work.

Parts of the MSM would flip on Biden if Hunter turns out to have taken money from Russian oligarchs who were still in Putin's good books. (Hunter's only Russian client according to the House Oversight Committee report was Yelena Baturina who had bugged out to London in 2010, and hired Hunter in 2014).

Or if say Michelle Obama declared herself a POTUS candidate. Then there is no reason to protect Biden.

Bank records showing dirty foreign money flowing to Joe or Jill Biden (or a for-profit company owned by them) would probably cause the Deep State to flip on Biden, and the MSM would follow the Deep State.

Why would the deep state care? As long as they're still running things, there's no reason for them to care that Biden's getting a cut.

If the anti-Biden theory of Burisma/Shokin is true, then Biden has already rolled the Deep State once - by getting Victoria Nuland and Radio Free Europe to change their opinions on Shokin's performance between Biden meeting Poroshenko in December and Shokin actually being fired in March.

And a compromised Biden is far more dangerous to the Deep State as POTUS than as VP.

Polling that Kamala is running away with it in the general election ;)

LOL, maybe Trump can commission some.

That era started in the early '90s. Every president in the last thirty years has had at least an impeachment attempt. This is nothing new, this is chapter and verse, US modern politics.

There were attempts to impeach Reagan also, though they didn't get all that far. And he committed an arguably impeachable act (violating the Boland Amendment).

Honestly each one deserves one (with Clinton the least deserving).

  1. GWB was a war criminal who sanctioned torture.

  2. Obama murdered US citizen teenagers and illegally entered into a war with Libya.

  3. The first impeachment was largely BS (yes Trump was politically motivated but he also smelled obvious corruption and there is nothing wrong with trying to find corruption even if some of your motive is to harm your political opponent) but I do think his dereliction of duty on Jan 6 was impeachable.

  4. Where to start with Joe. We could start with his unprecedented attack on the First Amendment (numerous examples including siccing the FBI on parents for going to school board meetings, the case the Fifth Cir just decided, using extreme force against anti abortion activists). Or his blatant disregard of the SCOTUS opinion on the renter moratorium that he restarted purely for political reasons after the court said in effect this is illegal but since the government said it will end we will allow an orderly end. Or his disrespect of separation of powers as shown in the student loan fiasco. Or of course his relatively obvious bribery. He is corrupt and probably exhibits the most disregard for the constitution of any president in my lifetime.

Starting to look like it! Next thing cage deathmatches on the end of one administration? You win, you don't get impeached, you lose, well you're not gonna worry about the impeachment when you're six feet under, now are ya?

We're going to end up in the Metal Wolf Chaos timeline, aren't we?

People may want a sequel to Bloodborne, but we all know what FromSoftware should really be working on.

And the reason is...

If it's the norm rather than something weird and unusual, it might make sense to just turn the President's Special Prosecutor into an office that gets appointed by the opposition at the start of each Presidency. Maybe this is an incredibly stupid idea, but I generally prefer formalization to pretense, and if it's going to be done either way than I'd rather just have an institution that's explicitly dedicated to adversarial investigation of the President than pretend that this President has done something especially unusual and bad.

I like this idea. Probably does end up with more executives hiding what they are doing though.

Slowly reinventing shadow government would be a funny outcome. You can take Americans out of England, but you can't take the English out of Americans.

I am convinced Biden is guilty of corruption so I like the impeachment. I do not believe it’s primarily about pumping up the base. The Dems are running on Trump being a criminal. Impeaching Biden helps with the moderates so they have him impeached as a criminal too. The average median voter who thinks about the election a week or two before the election will be bombarded with all the bad stuff Trump has done. Which ya some of it was bad and stupid and the files at Mar-Lago feels like a valid case to me. The point of impeaching Biden is to have it one the record the evidence he was taking bribes all over the world and at a decent probability forced Ukraine to fire a prosecutor to make his family money. He want get convicted in the Senate but for that median voter there will be a stack of bad things Trump did and a stack of bad things Biden did and the median voter will either have to choose a candidate on a different issue or stay home instead of voting for Biden.

I don’t make the rules and the GOP doesn’t either. The election the country wants is the guy who loses goes to jail. Perhaps, we have more important things but I’m not a member of the party that ran two impeachments.

Inflation would be easy to deal with. Last decade government spending averaged 21.5%. Since COVID it’s been around 24%. If we just returned to last decades spending my guess is inflation would fall back to last decades inflation and interest rates would fall back to last decades interest rates.

But I do disagree with those saying it’s all an optics show. The election will come down to in all likelihood getting 50k votes in the right places. Impeach we must.

The problem is that it isn't clear that the Republicans will have the votes for impeachment, and a failed impeachment attempt could be more detrimental than no attempt at all. With Trump's first impeachment, the evidence that he did what he did was conclusive; the only question was whether such behavior merited removal from office. With a Biden impeachment, the question is whether he did anything at all, and there are serious questions as to whether the Republicans have any real evidence. I'm reminded of the famous Lionel Hutz line: "We have plenty of hearsay and conjecture, those are... kinds of evidence". This is actually a true statement, but hearsay and conjecture aren't generally admissible in a court of law, and even with the relaxed standards of an impeachment hearing, it's still pretty shitty evidence. Let's look at the Burisma evidence:

-Hunter Biden, Joe's fuckup son, gets a seat on the Burisma board despite being unqualified

First, Hunter wasn't publicly known as a fuckup when he got that seat; his personal problems wouldn't become common knowledge until years later. And while Hunter didn't have any oil and gas experience, his resume wasn't horrible. Board seats aren't necessarily given to people within an industry; just look at Exxon Mobil's board. He was on the Amtrak board, owned a lobbying firm, worked as a consultant for MBNA, worked for the Department of Commerce, served on the board of the World Food Program, and co-founded a number of investment and venture capital firms. Not the greatest resume, but it's not like they picked him out of the gutter.

-He was selected because of his political connections

This is probably true, but it's still conjecture. Unless you can get former Burisma insiders to testify that this was the case or find documents to that effect, you're jumping to conclusions. Without this kind of evidence, you'd have to lay your foundation very carefully to have a 50/50 shot at being permitted to ask a jury to reach this conclusion in a real trial.

-Joe's ultimatum was the result of pressure from his son

Now you're not only past the point where any judge would let you ask a jury to draw that conclusion, but Joe can counter pretty easily. the prosecutor in question was notoriously corrupt, and had been the subject of calls for action for months from half of Europe. To suggest that the factor that tipped the scales toward Joe's involvement was motivation from his son being able to keep his cushy paycheck is a stretch. Biden's actions were public, and he would have needed the backing of the rest of the executive branch. You're going to have Obama administration officials up there outlining the entire process by which it was determined that this ultimatum should be made, and it's highly unlikely that any of them are going to testify that Hunter Biden had anything to do with it. Then you add in the fact that the Hunter's selection predated Shokin and the investigation predated Hunter and that the Obama Administration was supposedly concerned that Shokin was deliberately slow-walking the investigation to extract bribes and were frustrated to the point they considered launching their own investigation.

You're going to have weeks of this on TV, witness after witness who has direct knowledge of what really went on with the Shokin debacle while McCarthy is going to call who, exactly? Some of Hunter's old drinking buddies who say that he definitely gestured toward the fact that this whole international debacle was really about Hunter's salary? It won't convince the MTGs of the world, but it may convince a dozen or so guys from swing districts who are up for reelection and can't be seen as in the thrall of the MAGA wing of the party. I'm not saying this is how it plays out but it's damn risky. At least the Dems knew they could get an impeachment.

Hunter Biden, Joe's fuckup son, gets a seat on the Burisma board despite being unqualified

People who think this proves anythng don't understand how corporate boards work. Especially for a relatively young company, board memberships are largely about creating appearances. That is why the former president of Poland was on the board of Burisma, and why Theranos added people like George Schultz to their board. And that is even more the case in in a country with high levels of corruption, like Ukraine; putting big names on the board makes investors think the company has connections and the advantages that come with that. What Burisma needed from Hunter Biden was the appearance of advantage, not so much actual advantage.

People who think that the fact that the practice is widespread proves anything doesn't understand how the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act works. This is 100% illegal if we catch companies with a suitable US presence doing it for children of foreign politicians.

It is illegal under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act to have a relative of foreign politician on the board of a US company?

Depends on details. See also.

From your link: "Officials are trying to establish whether the bank hired young workers from prominent, well-connected Chinese families in order to curry favor and win business."

Yes, that is obviously improper. But that begs the question, right? The assumption that if a company puts a famous "unqualified" name on its corporate board, it must be for an improper purpose, is highly naive.

The assumption that if a company puts a famous "unqualified" name on its corporate board, it must be for a proper purpose (and that saying that you're simply getting "appearance" benefits is a magical incantation which guarantees that it's a proper purpose), is highly naive.

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People who think that the fact that the practice is widespread proves anything doesn't understand how the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act works. This is 100% illegal if we catch companies with a suitable US presence doing it for children of foreign politicians.

Most 1st world countries have laws like FCPA which prohibit their companies from bribing 3rd world governments, with broad extra-territorial application and broad definitions of bribery. It isn't per se illegal to put a relative of a foreign politician on your board, but if you do it in a notoriously corrupt country then you are going to be spending some time helping the police with their enquiries into precisely what your motives were.

The reverse case - a 1st world politician accepting a bribe from a 3rd world company - comes under domestic bribery laws which are far harder to convict under - basically you either need a quo that is so outrageous that no honest politician could have delivered it, or smoking gun evidence linking the quid to the quo.

The people who write the laws think have a much lower prior on a domestic politician accepting a bribe than on a foreign politician accepting one.

What Burisma needed from Hunter Biden was the appearance of advantage, not so much actual advantage.

I agree with that, but it still means he got the seat because his surname was "Biden". If he was "Hunter Morrissey" with the same résumé, would he have been picked? Hard to know because hindsight is always right.

But then again, "trading on your connections" is another way of saying "networking", and we're all supposed to network for the sake of our careers!

Yes, no one doubts that he got the job because of his name. That is my point: As is often the case in corporate boards, it is the name that the company is paying for.

He wasn’t just “networking” or “trading connections” he was at a bare minimum using his name as a sort of mafia style protection. The prosecutor in Ukraine or the President of Ukraine isn’t going to want to go after a firm with Hunter on the board because they would assume if they built a case they would be getting a phone call being told to drop the case. Which according to the Ukranian prosecutor he did get that phone call to back off.

Networking is like I have a smart friend who would be perfect for your company to get their work done. What Hunter was doing was promising political protection. Otherwise known as corruption.

When the least corrupt interpretation plausible is that Vice President's crackhead son accepted six or seven figure payments or no-show jobs to intentionally create the appearance of a corrupt bribe scheme in a country where the Vice President was leveraging American spending to have prosecutors removed, this is still a huge scandal by any reasonable interpretation.

I know this is a waste of time, but:

  1. That is not the least corrupt interpretation, since it is Burisma (like all companies), not Hunter Biden, that wants to create the appearance of connections (not "a corrupt bribe scheme"). And, Viktor Shokin was not appointed Prosecutor General until February of 2015; Hunter Biden joined the Burisma board months earlier, in April of 2014. I would note also that in late 2015, the US ambassador to Ukraine called out Ukrainian prosecutors for failing to cooperate with a UK investigation into Burisma.
  2. It might be a scandal for Hunter, but not for Joe. It is Hunter who is the crackhead, after all. Though acceding to the request, "please come on our board; investors in Ukraine are so used to corruption that they will assume you will be able to influence US policy, even though it is not true" is perhaps not that huge a scandal, in the grand scheme of things in the world of big business.

"please come on our board; investors in Ukraine are so used to corruption that they will assume you will be able to influence US policy, even though it is not true"

Being cynically blunt, isn't it true that being related to/the mistress of powerful people both gives you the opportunity to do favours, and encourages people to be nice to you so that you can do favours for them?

I'm reading a lot of biographies of figures in the Tudor courts recently, and it's a recurring theme: people using connections to old school friends, neighbours, distant relations and former employers/servants to send what are practically begging letters, often accompanied by a present, to ask for "so I hear that this job is going now... any chance of considering me/my son/my useless brother that the family needs to get a soft job for?"

The day after Sir Thomas More’s resignation, the king showed his favour towards his chief adversary by granting Cromwell and his son Gregory the lordship of Romney in Newport, south Wales. Cromwell’s wealth increased in direct proportion to his influence with the king. His meticulously kept accounts include innumerable references to well-filled purses, gloves, cheeses and other gifts left in his apartments by men eager for preferment.

Borman, Tracy. Thomas Cromwell: The untold story of Henry VIII's most faithful servant

I don't think the Ukrainians are unique in making that kind of assumption; I know if I heard that So-and-so's cousin got a nice quango job, or a former top civil servant has moved to work for private industry in the field they formerly oversaw, I'd be making the same kind of assumptions in my own country 😁

That is not the least corrupt interpretation, since it is Burisma (like all companies), not Hunter Biden, that wants to create the appearance of connections (not "a corrupt bribe scheme").

And what, Hunter is just so earnest that he failed to notice that his employment was based on creating the appearance of the ability to influence the highest level of American politics? I said the least corrupt plausible interpretation, which doesn't imply willingness to accept an utterly ridiculous level of obliviousness to the implications of accepting payments from a corrupt company in Eastern Europe.

No, I did not say he doesn’t notice. I actually said the exact opposite in #2 above.

The point is that those who think that there must have been a bribe, because why else would Burisma want an "unqualified" person on their board, are being very naive.

This wasn’t just any board. It was of a company under investigation for corruption. It wasn’t some trinket maker. They needed a very specific thing - a person able to give them political protection.

This wasn’t even say a Theranos looking to add a name to get investors to look at their investment pitch and renting legitimacy. It was a firm looking specifically to not have their assets seized and go to jail.

It also ignores the fact that Hunter at minimum delivered on the access to his dad. And his dad arranged a call with the company using an anonymous email. Mr. Peters has a lot of explaining to do.

It also seems utter bullshit. This dumb crack addled son was able to pull a fast one on both his father and hardened Eastern European oligarchs? Come on.

Hunter didn't pull a fast one on Joe. Joe is familiar enough with politics to know that Hunter was selling access to him, and happily continued to meet with Hunter's "clients" in order to facilitate Hunter's scheme. On Joe's part this is sleazy, but it is neither unusual nor illegal - selling access to politicians is what professional lobbyists do for a living, and meeting with clients of a lobbyist who donates to your campaign/hires your relative/might hire you after you leave office is SOP for DC swamp creatures. On Hunter's part it is a FARA violation and, it seems, tax evasion. (But FARA is almost certainly unconstitutional).

If you believe the official story (that Burisma hired Hunter as an "OK name" to make them look more respectable for a possible future US floatation) then no fast one was pulled - having Hunter on the board got them the access they were paying for. If Hunter did pull a fast one on Burisma then this would not be surprising - lobbyists promising influence but only providing access is an extremely common scam.

FWIW, if someone told me they could buy me the VP of the US for a mere 5 million USD, I would consider the offer too-good-to-be-true.

With Trump's first impeachment, the evidence that he did what he did was conclusive; the only question was whether such behavior merited removal from office.

No, whether it was impeachable was also and remains a question.

Thank you for pushing back on this “consensus”.

The depth of corruption in Ukraine may result in two Presidents’ impeachments, both disputed by each side, and I dearly hope and pray it doesn’t end in WWIII.

The problem is that it isn't clear that the Republicans will have the votes for impeachment, and a failed impeachment attempt could be more detrimental than no attempt at all.

McCarthy has been tactical his whole reign. If he doesn't have the votes he won't call a vote.

FARA violation may be the most directly provable. Hunter wasn’t registered and there is hard evidence Joe spoke to his foreign business partners.

That being said the standard of proof for impeachment isn’t reasonable doubt. Which makes conjecture not a problem. On fire the judge they have better evidence than Trumps rape verdict. It’s he said she said where Hunter was getting paid and the prosecutor in charge of the corruption probe Joe said he fired him. But again the standard isn’t reasonable doubt.

Also fairly certain Burisma insiders have said why they hired him and from memory I believe that was the top guy.

It will be up to McCarthy to whip up the votes. And likely career suicide for anyone unwilling to convict. Plus any GOP campaign money would be cut off if they don’t.

I don’t think you’ve been keeping up with the news. Emails have surfaced from the state department praising the AG’s efforts. The idea they wanted him gone simply appear untrue.

The pro move for Democrats would be to use this to replace Biden with someone with a pulse.

30 years ago Bill Clinton was POTUS, John Major was PM of the UK, Kim Campbell was PM of Canada, Paul Keating was PM of Australia... these people are now half-forgotten relics of yesteryear, and all of them are younger than Joe Biden.

I think they might offer an exchange: Biden for Trump. The cathedral wants to gain back respectability. Biden is increasingly a drain on respectability, Trump was in itself a drain on respectability, and the actions they're taking to prevent Trump from getting power again (indictments and at the least in the eyes of about half of the US election shenanigans) are the biggest drain of respectability of all. But they can't stop because they've made Trump very very motivated to embark on Stalinian purges if he gets back in power; they won't be able to keep him busy and sheperded in a second term.

I can imagine the system being very keen for this exchange: both Biden and Trump publically renounce politics (Trump immediately and Biden as soon as his term ends) and drop from the 2024 race. In exchange, Biden pardons Trump of federal crimes, leans on state prosecutors to drop charges for Trump, Biden pardons himself and Republicans drop the inquiries. Everyone walks away, Biden stumbles through a speech about how it was necessary to put behind divisiveness and the strain on the democratic process that prosecutions and impeachments etc... the opposing side was causing. The cathedral gets back at least the veneer of respectability. Republicans lose Trump, but having the stronger candidate field below Trump they probably win 2024. The cathedral can let that happen because they don't really care about Republicans or Democrats, just Not Trump. It would help rebuild some of the credibility the electoral system lost. Democrats lose Biden, who was never a powerful candidate and was increasingly embarassing to keep around (too old, unfocussed, dwindling coherency, increasingly appearing corrupt). They had to sacrifice everyone else to prop Biden up and now they have no credible contender under him, but without the extreme imperative to win against Trump they can send Kamala get slaughtered against DeSantis or Ramaswamy and rebuild their field for 2028. I don't know if Trump would go for it, but if he believes himself he probably should. He has 3 ways out of the indictments: legal victory, electoral victory or PR victory. But his stated opinion is that the judges are unfair, elections are rigged and the media are against him. What exactly are his paths out of this mess then?

Biden pardons himself and Republicans drop the inquiries

Seriously? So what's to stop Trump going "Well if he can do that, then when I'm back in power I can pardon myself, I don't need this deal".

He can swear it publically and drop out of the race before the pardon. As for running in 2028, he's gonna be 5 years older, obviously and unambiguously breaking a sworn oath by running, facing a more established candidate (an incumbent Republican president, quite possibly), that's probably enough to guarantee him a loss. If Trump believes he's gonna win 2024 he might not go for such a deal, but his stated position is that the last election was rigged; does he believe he can win, enough to risk jail? Enough to refuse an offer to make it a draw and walk away with dignity?

He can swear it publically and drop out of the race before the pardon

If you actually think this is a possibility I do not trust your estimations of American politics. Do you think his base would be happy with that? Do you think he'd be willing to trust the system given everything that's happened to him (crossfire hurricane, everything strzok touched, judge Chutkan's public comments...)?

I think he's just raising it as a hypothetical. I agree it's not realistic in the slightest, though for a different albeit related reason - I just think it would be wildly out of character for Trump.

Trump doesn’t act rationally and would never take the deal. He wants the throne. He would rather go to jail than give it up. In many ways he’s a lot like SBF who wasn’t able to just be a billionaire but had to keep going. And when he’s on bail he keeps doing shit.

This is a fantasy scenario, because the Democrats have no reason to sacrifice 2024. They can win Biden v Trump II and still rebuild their field for 2028.

So far the Biden v Trump II is far from in the bag for either side. There's also some hidden information Biden and his inner circle know that we don't: they know how deep and how damaging the corruption story goes. If it's not much worse than what we have now they might decide to take their chances with the election, but if that rabbit hole keeps going and going, they might want to stop inquiries before they get too far.

And there's also the Cathedral element to consider; a lot of people high up in both parties care more about the system and the broad global neoliberal consensus than they care about their party winning, and to these people, Trump being sucessfully prosecuted and Biden winning 2024 is still in large part a loss. The US ends up looking increasingly like a one party banana republic where political opposition is jailed, Biden's public gaffes are only going to get worse with time and the system in general looks a lot less legitimate than it would if, say, DeSantis won.

The corruption story doesn't matter because the press says it doesn't matter. You could find a letter on stationary from the Office of the Vice President and signed by Biden says "Thanks, Hunter, for all your help in obtaining graft via Burisma" and a list of detailed figures below, and the New York Times and Washington Post wouldn't print it and nobody who didn't already oppose Biden would pay attention to Fox and the Wall Street Journal's stories on it.

If you don't mind me asking Nybbler, if we are destined to lose why aren't you jumping ship?

There's no place to go.

Become Amish.

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I believe he means more the deep state or regime. Desantis in my opinion is a more competent Bush era GOP. My guess is he’s very much a neocon at heart he was after all the lawyer for Guantanamo. I guess it comes down to whether the regime is all in on teaching kids to be trans in public schools. And if they actually care about black people as saints or would mostly be fine with treating them the same as white people. Those are useful tools to bash maga but I don’t know how many in the PMC actually believe that stuff.

Democrats of course would want to take their shot but a lot of people believe there’s a regime behind them that is fine with not MAGA and doesn’t really care between a Bush or Clinton type team player.

I guess it comes down to whether the regime is all in on teaching kids to be trans in public schools. And if they actually care about black people as saints or would mostly be fine with treating them the same as white people. Those are useful tools to bash maga but I don’t know how many in the PMC actually believe that stuff.

There's also the possibility that Desantis himself personally doesn't care that much about these things and that as he got into power, he would pivot his priorities into ones that get bipartisan approval (read: the priorities of the PMC/cathedral) so he can line up some quick wins and would only make weak ineffectual gestures at placating his base on these topics.

Maybe but DeSantis hasn’t been overly pro PMC. What makes you think he changes?

I don't think he would himself change so much as I believe him to be more cynical than idealist, and a strategy pandering to a reddish-purple Florida would become obsolete once president. And I believe the PMC reaction to him ("Worse Than Trump!") is strategy from the PMC understanding that appearing to play ball with the establishment right now is poison to any Republican's primary campaign.

That doesn’t really explain his covid reaction or LGBT reaction. He took positions deeply at odds with prevailing PMC attitudes. Also Florida was a purple state he turned red.

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None of them have any reason to sacrifice 2024. The deep state will be happier whispering into Biden's ear than subverting DeSantis.

Why would anyone trust anyone else to stick to that bargain?

I believe voters would punish a defection on a very simple unambigious sworn promise like that. Ok, maybe many/most people wouldn't but with elections being decided by razor's edge margins it wouldn't take a lot of them to effectively put victory out of reach.

That is wildly optimistic.

Funny to see Kim Campbell in that list. Amusingly, you're literally correct about her being PM 30 years ago; but her entire reign lasted 4 months, and the only reason she's remembered at all is that in the next election her party went from 156 seats in parliament to 2. (Yes, TWO. T as in Total, W as in Wipe, O as in Out.) Which was really Mulroney's fault, but she was the scapegoat.

I think that'd be a mistake, even a year ago. Maybe if dems could privately choose the nominee, someone like Warnock - but they can't, do you want Kamala? Or a contested primary where you're just as likely to get someone worse than Biden.

Nate Silver's thoughts on why biden didn't have a primary challenger https://www.natesilver.net/p/democrats-think-kamala-harris-would

Unless there’s a last-minute health scare or scandal, Joe Biden is almost certain to be the Democratic nominee for president again in 2024. RFK Jr. and Marianne Williamson don’t have traditional qualifications for the job — remember, Democrats still care about experience if Republicans don’t — and are nowhere close to Biden in polls.1 And it’s probably much too late for someone else to jump into the race and build out the campaign they’d need to seriously contend — let alone actually defeat a sitting president.

And his thoughts on how big of an issue biden's age is: https://www.natesilver.net/p/of-course-bidens-age-is-a-legitimate

It isn’t just that. If Biden has to resign in disgrace, the question is do you end up tainting the Democrats with the same brush especially after they defended him zealously until it became undeniable?

It's obviously not going to happen. But the age issue really is a serious problem, and the corruption allegations have enough substantiation to also be a drag.

Parliamentary systems have a big advantage in that they allow parties to dump unpopular leaders. That's much harder to do in a Presidential system, so the party just goes down with the leader. One of the few opportunities a party has to offload dead weight is an impeachment proceeding like this. But I guess Americans aren't politically ruthless enough.

Harris is obviously not a particularly appealing replacement, but she could just keep the seat warm. Newsom or Whitmer or whoever could easily jump in at a moment's notice once Biden goes. But even if it's Harris, she can at least speak in full sentences and isn't going to have a stroke on stage.

Having said that, I do put some credence to the idea that part of Biden's rationale for picking Harris for VP was specifically so he didn't have a more popular replacement waiting in the wings.

Parliamentary systems have a big advantage in that they allow parties to dump unpopular leaders.

To be fair, they also allow parties to play musical chairs with who's in charge; between 2007 and 2019 Australia had a mid-term ouster in every single term (a couple of them plausibly justified, a couple not). But this is somewhat self-correcting insofar as doing it gets the voters angry and often results in election losses.

I disagree, changing leader usually results in a better election result - if it didn't the party usually would not change. Yes, we went through a period of frequent political knifings - but is anyone seriously arguing that the Liberals would have won 3 elections in a row if they had stuck with Abbott? Or that the 2013 Labor wipeout would not have been far worse if they hadn't switched from Gillard to Rudd to save the furniture?

Neither do I think it's somehow inherently problematic or undemocratic to change PM mid term. You elect your local MP, he remains your local MP. If political alliances shift and change throughout the term of Parliament, well, that's the job.

I think the 2013 election would probably have gone better for Labour had they not switched back to Rudd. Knifing Abbott was a good idea.

Not sure what you mean by "save the furniture".

If political alliances shift and change throughout the term of Parliament, well, that's the job.

There is a point at which excess knifing gets in the way of governing; that's what I'm getting at. As I said, though, mostly self-correcting; note that Labour put in a "no more midterm knifings without a resignation" policy after 2013.

I feel like you've forgotten how brutal the polling for Labor was under Gillard. The last Newspoll before she was knifed had a two-party-preferred vote of 57-43 and primaries of 48 to 29 in favour of the Liberals. Those numbers immediately improved once Rudd took over, and though the sugar hit faded somewhat by the time of the actual election, the result was a much more manageable 53-47 kind of split.

This was the whole reason Labor made the change - most of them absolutely hated Rudd on a personal level and quite liked Gillard. But they also knew that they were going to get gutted and lose an extra 20 or 30 seats unless they knifed her. Thus the decision to "save the furniture" (flood metaphor - you can't stop the house from getting flooded but you can at least save the furniture and mitigate the losses a bit).

forgotten

I don't follow polls that much. Only looked at the Voice polls and made the OP because somebody mentioned them.

You win this point.

Problem is, who do you replace him with? Kamala Harris? She seems to be regarded as unelectable. Governor Newsom? Yeah, right. Elizabeth Warren? Shot her bolt. Any other possible candidates have all been clawed at by their rivals so that suggesting A means "yeah but remember the accusations about A the last time they ran?"

I've seen a few names floated, but they all have the same problem of not really being able to deliver on "yeah the nation as a whole wouldn't hate them". Either their appeal is strictly local and won't scale up, or they're "who?", or they've been clawed by rivals so it's "you really think people will vote for the person who bullies their staff, or the person who is a hypocrite on [thing], or the person who....".

Cuomo would have been good as a national candidate but the power played him out of NY. He still has the personality of being a person from a time and place that people can connect to sort of like Joe. He would have some COVID death issues but every candidate has something.

One theory I've heard on this is that the Clinton campaign went around and made sure that there would be absolutely no prospective challengers to her running in the future after Obama, and so put pressure on the DNC to subtly shift funding and resource allocation in order to make sure that there wasn't another Obama that the people could pick instead of her. It sounds like cartoonish villainy, but it is the same campaign that made "make sure everyone sees lots of Donald Trump" their election strategy (lol).

There does seem to be some evidence that the DNC was in hock to the Clinton campaign to get it out of debt, and afterwards the campaign treated the DNC as their personal fiefdom, funnelling the money into their own hands, etc. Donna Brazile came out with a tell-all book in 2017 and excerpts/publicity in the media before it was published, but that seems to have quietly faded away. Having Trump as the all-purpose bogeyman seems to have helped there - you can't attack us while Orange Man Bad in power. Presumably the tell-all had less shock effect coming from Brazile, who had already fielded allegations of leaking to the Clinton campaign, so it could be seen as sour grapes on her part:

I had promised Bernie when I took the helm of the Democratic National Committee after the convention that I would get to the bottom of whether Hillary Clinton’s team had rigged the nomination process, as a cache of emails stolen by Russian hackers and posted online had suggested. I’d had my suspicions from the moment I walked in the door of the DNC a month or so earlier, based on the leaked emails. But who knew if some of them might have been forged? I needed to have solid proof, and so did Bernie.

...As Hillary’s campaign gained momentum, she resolved the party’s debt and put it on a starvation diet. It had become dependent on her campaign for survival, for which she expected to wield control of its operations.

...The Saturday morning after the convention in July, I called Gary Gensler, the chief financial officer of Hillary’s campaign. He wasted no words. He told me the Democratic Party was broke and $2 million in debt.

“What?” I screamed. “I am an officer of the party and they’ve been telling us everything is fine and they were raising money with no problems.”

That wasn’t true, he said. Officials from Hillary’s campaign had taken a look at the DNC’s books. Obama left the party $24 million in debt—$15 million in bank debt and more than $8 million owed to vendors after the 2012 campaign—and had been paying that off very slowly. Obama’s campaign was not scheduled to pay it off until 2016. Hillary for America (the campaign) and the Hillary Victory Fund (its joint fundraising vehicle with the DNC) had taken care of 80 percent of the remaining debt in 2016, about $10 million, and had placed the party on an allowance.

Having Trump as the all-purpose bogeyman seems to have helped there - you can't attack us while Orange Man Bad in power.

This was specifically before the election had started. They promoted Trump and wanted media organisations to give him airtime because they thought that he was so bad that he'd drive voters away from the Republicans just for considering him.

who had already fielded allegations

I like the rest of your post but I think this is being a bit too nice. "Fielding allegations" is not really a strong enough term to use given that there's clear and unequivocal evidence that the allegations were true. She actually did leak to the Clinton campaign and she even admitted it (though based on the timing on that same article she apparently then went back and said it was alleged afterwards).

I think the situation is actually less desperate than people imagine. The problem lies with the progressive wing of the DNC having so much influence on narrative, particularly in media. There are real options for them. Sherrod Brown, Joe Manchin, and Bob Casey have shown the ability to win many elections and appeal to electorates more similar to the country than California and NY. They just so happen to be white guys that aren't known for aggressively pissing off rural and suburban people, like a certain old white guy in the White House. So they aren't treated as serious options for now. But they will be if Biden is off the table, and they could do well.

Holding an unusual position is not enough to make someone a compromise candidate. You’re not going to win elections by being “the Democrat who hates abortion” or “the Democrat who just loves coal.” Especially in a saturated field, that just pushes the moderate Democrat voters off to other candidates.

I suspect it’s much easier to rule someone out than in. That would suggest compromise candidates who are closer to blank slates—they offend the fewest members of the base. Honestly, I think Biden’s campaign was in that category. He made vaguely appropriate mouth sounds and didn’t promise much. Did he win on the strength of Not Being Trump? Maybe.

Point is, Manchin and Casey and (previously) Sinema don’t have crossover appeal any more than Bernie Sanders. They just alienate a different group of people.

Did he win on the strength of Not Being Trump? Maybe.

No, he largely won on the strength of the intelligence community and social media knowingly suppressing true stories about his various scandals.

If you don’t punish the most obvious bribery scandal at the national level in probably a century, then you clearly invite more bribery. All of the other things are more important in the short term, but for the long term health of the government you must punish obvious bribery.

Also, it isn’t clear it won’t go anywhere. If the inquiry can show (1) that Joe Biden personally benefited, (2) that State Dept didn’t want to fire the prosecutor (which seems like it was already proven) and (3) there were payments to Joe Biden shortly afterwards, then (4) Democrats would be forced with either trying to rally behind an obviously corrupt unpopular president or dumping said president for someone who might not be as tainted.

The real question is can the inquiry provided enough hard evidence to make the case beyond a reasonable doubt. Right now the Republicans have enough evidence that most people believe Biden is a crook. The question is whether this inquiry will turn that belief into knowledge. If so, then even democrats will vote to convict (or more likely Democrats like Obama will pull a Barry Goldwater)

I don't think there is enough evidence, aside from Biden being way too lenient with Hunter. And the Democrats are not going to want even the notion of corruption associated with the party, as it would be if they dumped Biden or even co-operated with this effort. Their only bet is to keep denying and keep fighting.

Besides, remember Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky, and the big name feminists who made jokes about giving Bill a blow-job in return for what he and the Democratic Party did/would do for 'women's rights' in power. There's a lot of rotten behaviour both parties will tolerate in Their Guy if he's in power and seems the best chance for them to hang on to that power.

What is the evidence that isn’t compelling to you?

Is it the fact that multiple people have stated Biden was to get money doesn’t seem fishy? Was it Biden using aliases to set up calls with Burisma while CCing Hunter not being blatant enough? Was it that the state department believed in the AG that Biden fired in contradiction to state department policy being just an internal disagreement? Was it the massive string of corporate shells set up that triggered 72 money laundering alarm bells being just a way for Hunter to avoid taxes? Was it the statement by an FBI informant that is consistent with those shell corporations being just a statement from an informant? It must just be normal in the Biden family for all members to get paid for nothing from Hunter’s activities. Do we just accept that Biden met with people at Cafe Millano to just discuss the weather? Is it that to date no one has been able to prove any alleged facts are incorrect but maybe at some point someone will?

I’ve left out other evidence. There is a pattern and practice here.

If they have solid evidence, then the impeachment may well go ahead.

The problem then is, will they impeach? All this allegedly happened when Joe was VP in the last but one administration. Can a sitting president be impeached and removed for what he might have done in a different role?

This is genuinely legally interesting to me, if anyone has any news, views or informed opinion (or even uninformed speculation!)

Dershowitz takes the view no. I disagree. If it was impeachable while he was VP and he was impeached at such time, he would be ineligible to become president. Since there is no apparent SOL, it seems to me that one cannot escape being impeached for a crime while one was an officer of the United States even if not currently that office.

There was a lot of discussion when Trump was being impeached the second time.

If it was impeachable while he was VP and he was impeached at such time, he would be ineligible to become president.

Not necessarily. Impeachment trials do have the option to remove the official without disqualifying him/her from future office, and this happens fairly often.

Also, impeaching a VP has never been done and would be somewhat Constitutionally weird, since the judge at an impeachment trial is normally the VP and the only exception is if the impeached official is the POTUS. So the VP would be judge at his own trial.

Certainly impeaching/removing/disqualifying Biden while he was VP would have prevented him from becoming POTUS, though.

The Constitution says one may be impeached for high crimes and misdemeanors, it does not limit them to the time period one is in office to be impeached from.

I've been told repeatedly that impeachment is a political process, not a legal one, and the Presidents can be impeached for anything and everything that Congress considers a problem -- is this only true if the president's initials are D.J.T., or what?

I mean Clinton got indicted for getting a blowjob.

So you're saying that the middle initial has to be J?

AP covers it with the stock phrase "claiming without evidence" that we saw so much of in 2020.
Is there a word for that kind of use of cliché? I think Orwell wrote about it being omnipresent in '30s propaganda.

It’s the definition of npc to include those phrases. I am sure you have seen the video smash ups of dozens of news crews say the exact same phrase. That’s one of the approved phrases for the story. And if you go thru Reddit you will see dozens of people using it in a thread.

For a news organization it’s obviously bad to repeat that lie. They could say bad evidence but without is false.

Or they could say “no smoking gun.” Honestly there is a lot of evidence. Perhaps enough evidence that it Joe Biden was long retired but this came to light AUSA’s might not have a problem indicting him (especially if he had an R instead of a D after his name).

I dunno, I reckon Hunter talking about money for the big guy is a gun with a pretty smoky whiff about it. The defences are more "But you didn't see the bullet actually leave the gun, did you?"

Seems like there is even more than just that. Hunter told one of the Chinese business men his father wanted to understand why he wasn’t laid yet. Weird threat unless Joe had previously been involved.

There is also the fact that it seems US and European policy actually supported Shokin until Joe got him fired.

Hunter told one of the Chinese business men his father wanted to understand why he wasn’t laid yet.

I assume that "laid" was a typo for "paid", but it's Hunter, so I'm not 100% certain there...

Either way, could you link a source for this?

Honestly, I've wanted to reply to like half your comments with that same request. There's so much playing Telephone on the internet and so many people playing it poorly that my first instinct is to filter out anyone who makes a surprising claim without either an identity plus word-for-word quote or a hyperlink to the claim's source. It's bad enough when places like CNN so often do that, but if TheMotte commenters can't be held to a higher standard than mainstream reporters then what are we even doing here?

I would add perfectly fair to ask for a source. As I admitted below, one particular part of the story my memory played tricks on me. I post from my phone so hard to do a long comment c/p sources but if asked I will find.

At the same time, I am equally annoyed when people claim there is no evidence when they appear unwilling to have looked for the evidence. You can’t just say “cite please” so there is an advantage there.

Happy to find cites for whatever other questions you have. Note I provided a cite for the above statement in a separate message.

A button to set up a link would be a godsend here. It wouldn't have to be the fancy kind that does it all for you, just one that appends square brackets to a URL and then adds regular brackets afterwards for people to write in would make a huge difference.

Ha laid. That’s a funny autocorrect.

https://nypost.com/2023/06/22/hunter-biden-used-joe-as-leverage-in-china-biz-deal-text/

Thanks!

Perhaps enough evidence that it Joe Biden was long retired but this came to light AUSA’s might not have a problem indicting him (especially if he had an R instead of a D after his name).

If he was merely VP right now he'd already have been forced to resign.

It’s made me wander a lot if the human brain has been broken the past few years or most of society has just always run on going with I guess I can call it your tribal truths.

It’s honestly made me illiberal. I use to believe things like the way you defeat bad speech is with good speech. If you just have better evidence you win. But now I don’t have that belief and if something is really bad then censoring it is the thing to do. And of course Trump is really bad so censoring anything positive for him is good. If I controlled the news I’d probably just censor all tran stuff and eliminate them.

The last few years we have had an information over load. I wander if we just reached a point where humans couldn’t process all the noisy data entering their life.

The picture perfect example of this mindless repetition for me was when it was asserted that Donald Trump said "without evidence," that Kyle Rittenhouse acted in self-defense. The entire interaction of course, was on video, which was publicly available and used as evidence in the court of law which acquitted him.

Yeah. They don’t seem to understand what the word evidence means. Well, I’m sure they do. They just don’t mind lying.

Is there a word for that kind of use of cliché?

It's just classic propaganda principles:

  • Avoid abstract ideas - appeal to the emotions.
  • Constantly repeat just a few ideas. Use stereotyped phrases.
  • Give only one side of the argument.
  • Continuously criticize your opponents.
  • Pick out one special "enemy" for special vilification.

I am a tennis fan. On the tennis Reddit page, they are discussing Novak’s comment that he isn’t anti-vax but stood for the proposition that bodily integrity meant he shouldnt be forced to take the vax.

The five bullets you list explain perfectly how the propaganda affected the main heavily upvoted response on Reddit.

The highly upvoted poster makes the claim taking the vax isn’t about freedom but that Novak was selfish putting others at risk by refusing the jab and thereby not getting to herd immunity.

This was a common refrain during the pandemic. It appealed to people’s emotions, it repeated a simple idea, it didn’t wrestle with other arguments, and it vilified a small subset (the selfish people refusing to take a safe jab to protect everyone else).

The poster never seemed to stop and think about the particulars. For example, Novak already had covid. Why did he need a vaccine? Why would a vaccinated person need protection from non-vax? How far did this principle go (ie should fat people be required to have medical surgery to lose weight given that their fatness imposes a strain on the health system)? How effective were the vaccines at creating herd immunity compared to a prior infection? How deadly was covid? If someone was very scared of covid, what protections could they take themselves instead of demanding everyone else take precautions? Did susceptible people have the right to force medical interventions onto others so that susceptible people could live their lives more normally? What amount of risk is appropriate to impose on someone for the good of the collective? Who gets to determine what is the appropriate risk? What process should be used?

There are a ton of meaty issues there. Maybe you determine on net you are still pro socially sanctioned vaccine taking but it isn’t obvious and it isn’t obviously selfish to oppose it. Indeed, in Novak’s case he sacrificed a lot for his principle (skipped numerous tournaments which could’ve cost him the all time slams lead) so kind of weird to even call him selfish — seems a lot more selfless compared to the redditor smugly denouncing him with no cost to the redditor. But I think it’s because propaganda worked. The pro vax redditor repeated the simple talking points drilled into his or her head during an emotional time and identified Novak as a villain.

What’s really odd is that the propaganda still works on vaxes! The redditor continues to make these claims in light of the severe underperformance of the vaccine in stopping the spread. You would think that would cause him or her to say “did I make a mistake somewhere in my thought process” but nope.

Makes me think “where do I have these blinders.”

I think this is a perfectly legitimate analysis of provax propaganda. Especially as we know for a fact that States engaged in deliberate propaganda tactics in this specific issue.

But be careful to consider that such rethorical tools are just that: tools. Anyone can wield them. Indeed you could very well take some antivax discourse and apply this analysis there as well.

The important lesson here is twofold:

  1. Rethoric is powerful and somewhat amoral
  2. While rethorical arguments can be used to conceal untruth, their deployment alone does not refute the underlying proposition

It also didn't help that COVID was compared to the 1918 flu; while it was worse than a typical flu season, it's more comparable to the 1957 or 1968 flu pandemics than 1918, which took out a lot of healthy young people. Our public health institutions and memes are in a very real way coasting and riding on the mind-boggling gains we got from the discovery of germ theory to the advent of cheap and readily available antibiotics. COVID's bad, but smallpox it is not.

I'm still amazed people managed to convince themselves to destroy the economy for something this mild. Especially when the same experts who said we should ran simulations before and were quite happy to write down that this was the worst possible thing you can do when experiencing a much harder challenge. We gamed it out to be prepared and then threw away the playbook day one.

I guess I shouldn't be surprised we got a cowardly middle manager response when we select politicians to be cowardly middle managers.

That clip of the republican primary debate where a question is asked and everyone but Vivek is glancing at everyone else to see if they should raise their hand or not is a perfect model of what happened.

Vivek being China of course. For which nothing but a hard response was ever in the cards. And then most of the west aligned because nobody in power had any guiding principles or leadership, so they just followed the lead of whatever seemed to have any authority.

I'm still amazed people managed to convince themselves to destroy the economy for something this mild.

They were convinced to sell the entire manufacturing sector to the Chinese for ...nothing at all afaict, so this isn't that surprising.

Bill Clinton sold trade agreements to the Chinese in exchange for buckets of Chinese cash. The manufacturers sold their capabilities to China in exchange for increased profitability. The American Consumer got cheaper goods and thus cheered it on.

The only people that got nothing in exchange were the manufacturing laborers, but their careers were a sacrifice the rest of us were willing to make.

Part of it was that we could afford it. Part was our public health institutions being designed a century ago to deal with real pandemics and disease outbreaks.

Novak already had covid. Why did he need a vaccine?

I sometimes wonder if "sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" is an even more effective description of human psychology than it was intended to be.

In the technological explanation of how vaccines work, the fact that they resemble the disease-causing virii is a good thing: the closer a vaccine molecule resembles the virus, the more effective the antibodies we learn to produce in response to it will be in response to the virus. We can't make a vaccine resemble a virus perfectly, because we would like to have it be a lot less harmful than the virus, but a virus has a perfect resemblance to itself, so a priori we'd expect the virus to produce the most effective immune response. There are possible second-order complications we might discover, but with Covid-19 we didn't. The benefit of a vaccine isn't "you're more likely to get better immunity than from an infection", it's just "you're much less likely to be debilitated or killed in the process".

In the subconscious magical explanation of how vaccines work, the Law of Contagion imbues them with persistent magical links to other people/objects/contexts, giving them power independent of the mere molecules they're made of. Sometimes these bonds can be removed by a "formal cleansing, consecration, exorcism, or other act of banishing", as Wiki says, so the same molecules which when bonded to Trump's Vaccine Can't Be Trusted might later lose that non-material bond to evil Trump and be instead bonded to The Science, which Says Everyone Needs a COVID-19 Booster Shot—and Soon. But sometimes those bonds are more immutable: a vaccine can be bonded to Medicine and Health and The Science, but a virus is irrevocably bonded to Disease and Death. How could something bonded to Disease and Death make you less likely to get a repeated disease later? That's just not how magic works.

This is my new favorite explanation for the blinders phenomenon


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