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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   26254 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 22, 2024

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The remaining primaries and convention at this point serve as little more than a coronation for the inevitable Trump nomination. It was discussed last week the unlikely circumstances in which Trump is prevented from running. The questions now are:

  1. The likelihood Trump wins? Betting markets put the odds between 40-60%, which is not that useful but is what I would expect. The election will be very close and come down to the usual swing states like in 2020 and 2016. Biden's approval ratings are precariously low for an incumbent, especially given that the Electoral College works to Trump's advantage.

  2. What will a second Trump term be like? My guess is much like his first term. A lot of hollow populist gestures to his base but not much happens. I still don't understand these people who are otherwise centrist or middle-left like Matt Yglesias and Noah Smith, who predict or expect a foreign policy crisis if trump wins , but always fail to articulate what this entails. I guess they have to keep toeing the 'orange man bad' line even though he was not that bad, and the economy and other metrics did well under his presidency (until Covid, which was out of his control anyway). Key alliances were strained much, as commonly feared in 2016-2017. The leadership of allies like Germany and France begrudgingly accepted Trump, and not much else happened.

I don't have much else to add except that I was reading the WSJ today and several polls showed between 22% and 34% of Republican voters stating that a criminal conviction would disqualify Trump from office.

Huh? How snail-brained are 22-34% of these voters? Why would you care if he gets convicted?

I could understand saying a credible accusation is disqualifying. I could understand saying his behavior was disqualifying in and of itself. But why would you outsource your vote to the jury pool of Georgia?

Huh? How snail-brained are 22-34% of these voters? Why would you care if he gets convicted?

The fact you'd say this is a pretty emblematic of how crazy the US (and this site) have become. This might seem like a hot take, but people generally don't want their leaders to be convicted felons.

Well, maybe that would have held more true back before trust in institutions collapsed. Those 22-34% are the last vestiges of that era. The thought is that anyone can lob an accusation, but a conviction carries more weight. Yes, most people understand that prosecutors would generally only bring cases that have a good chance of winning, but they can still fudge around the edges.

Nowadays, Trump could probably murder someone on live TV and a majority of the Republican voters would say he didn't do it. That's basically what the election loss denialism came down to. Why let evidence get in the way of vibes and dunking on the outgroup!

This might seem like a hot take, but people generally don't want their leaders to be convicted felons.

Better than felons who are unconvicted because a corrupt system protects them.

There are problems in the enforcement of justice, but it's not nearly as bad as you're making it out to be. I presume you're referring to the Hunter Biden stuff? Well, that's largely symmetrical to Trump's Russia investigation: Lots of smoke, not much actual fire (at least by the president himself), yet partisans whip themselves into a frenzy over the issue since they're getting a maximally damning picture due to their filtered media consumption. Biden could very well face a frivolous impeachment trial like Trump did as well.

Last I heard, it's been confirmed that Hunter Biden got his bribes selling access to Joe to foreign entities, and some portion of the bribe money ended up in Joe's bank account. I'm pretty sure that's a felony.

Likewise, Hillary Clinton set up an illegal email server to evade lawful oversight, sent classified documents through it, and then attempted to cover up her crimes. I'm pretty sure there are at least a few felonies there.

Likewise, Bill Clinton appears to have been a rapist.

I'm not sure if George W Bush lying the country into a disastrous war is technically a felony, but it certainly ought to be. Ditto for Obama's administration intentionally supplying arms to Mexican drug cartels, which were then used to attack and murder American citizens, in an apparent attempt to generate support for gun control legislation.

I disagree that it's not as bad as I'm making it out to be. In fact, I think it is pretty much exactly that bad. I do not concede that the existing system retains any shred of legitimacy whatsoever. All that remains is the question of how to coordinate sufficient meanness to allow something more fit to be built on its ruins.

Ditto for Obama's administration intentionally supplying arms to Mexican drug cartels

link for more info would be appreciated

Wiki

Writeup from the first page of search results.

OK, incompetent sting operation technically counts for quoted part.

But

in an apparent attempt to generate support for gun control legislation

is missing.

I don’t see your angle here. Condemning the ATF for causing the deaths of mexican and parisian civilians and that border patrol guy, implies that letting people buy weapons is complicity in murder. You can either condemn the ATF, Obama, and the right to bear arms, or none of the above.

If you're a consistent 2A gunman, you have to, you know, bite the bullet. Obviously some of the legally sold guns are going to kill people. But guns don't kill people, and anyway protection against tyranny is worth it, and so on. So the ATF is perfectly innocent here.

More comments

Operation Fast and Furious

In November 2009, the ATF’s Phoenix field office launched an operation in which guns bought by drug-cartel straw purchasers in the U.S. were allowed to “walk” across the border into Mexico. ATF agents would then track the guns as they made their way through the ranks of the cartel.

At least, that was the theory. In reality, once the guns walked across the border, they were gone. Whistleblowers reported, and investigators later confirmed, that the ATF made no effort to trace the guns.

Wikipedia page

Gunwalking, or "letting guns walk", was a tactic used by the Arizona U.S. Attorney's Office and the Arizona Field Office of the United States Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), which ran a series of sting operations between 2006 and 2011 in the Tucson and Phoenix area where the ATF "purposely allowed licensed firearms dealers to sell weapons to illegal straw buyers, hoping to track the guns to Mexican drug cartel leaders and arrest them". However, as of October 2011, none of the targeted high-level cartel figures had been arrested.

I'm surprised this wasn't immediately recognized, but I guess I'm old, and it was at the very start of the Obama administration.

Or, as my neighbor once said, Obama had a scandal-free presidency. He meant it as an indication that Obama behaved well while in office. I took that to mean that the media did not allow him to suffer from any scandals, including F&F gun running.

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