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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:
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.
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?
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!
Better than felons who are unconvicted because a corrupt system protects them.
What always trips me up about sentiments like this is that I agree with them... and that's a big part of why I'm a prison abolitionist, you can't trust the justice system to deliver real justice and shouldn't premise everything on it's ability to do so.
But most people expressing these sentiments are not prison abolitionists, many of them among Republicans want to be tougher on crime with harsher sentencing and so forth, and I don't understand the epistemic state that lets someone dismiss the justice system as obviously corrupt when it works against someone they like, but reliable enough to throw people in jail for life willy-nilly otherwise.
You straightforwardly don't, though. The fact that you have a critique of an element of the justice system and I have a critique of an element of the justice system doesn't mean that those critiques share any meaningful overlap, whether in focus, hypothesized mechanisms, evidence presented, standards by which that evidence is measured, proposed solutions or standards by which the effects of those solutions should be assessed.
I could, as you have, claim to likewise be in favor of prison abolition, on the understanding that I and people like myself will simply band together to punish criminality directly through immediate and severe violence against perpetrators rather than deferring to sclerotic, compromised and increasingly incompetent institutions. After all, if there's no jail to send criminals to any more, than naively one might assume that there's no jail to send those who simply beat or shoot criminals to, either. Only, I don't think this is actually what you have in mind by the term "prison abolition", and it seems to me that blurring the distinction between our positions and values only generates misunderstandings and frustration without advancing meaningful conversation.
I don't recall you ever making a case for prison abolition, though I'd certainly be interested in discussing it if you ever chose to. As with your recent post on race, I'm interested in the discussion, but that requires an actual willingness to discuss, rather than limiting oneself to laments over discussion that isn't happening. I've provided some examples of why I consider the justice systems deployed against Trump to be compromised; if you've got a similar list for why you consider the justice system deployed against ordinary murderers and thieves to be compromised, I'd be interested in seeing it.
Whoever you reesponded to, their post is still marked as filtered, and I can't see it.
It was darwin. He must have finally triggered something in the site code.
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