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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   20516 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 14, 2024

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Trump ordered to pay $355 million in penalties in New York Fraud case. He's also banned from operating any business in New York for three years, the Trump Organization is banned from borrowing money from any financial institution registered in New York for three years, and Eric and Don Jr each get their own $4 million dollar fines, and the former CFO Alan Wiesselberg owes a million. However the court also reverses its earlier ruling to cancel defendant's business certificates (aka the "corporate death penalty"). Instead an Independent Monitor will continue at the Trump Organisation for three years to ensure that it meets its financial reporting obligations.

All the penalties come with interest, so the defendants collectively owe around $450 million, not counting the $80+ million owed to E Jean Carroll. Even for Trump, that's serious money. Trump has of course said he will appeal, but to do so he will need to put up the full amount in bond first, and it's not clear he has the liquidity to do that - and as mentioned above he's now limited in his ability to borrow. And even if he manages to get the cash together, it doesn't seem to me that his prospects on appeal are at all good. Higher courts typically defer to the trial court's fact-finding, and Judge Engoron is not kind in his assessment of the credibility of Trump and his witnesses.

Someone with a solid chance of being President next January is always going to be able to borrow the money.

Are you sure the amount they have to pay won’t be reduced on appeal? Isn’t it usually in these kinds of cases?

It could be, if he's able to appeal. I suspect his lack of contrition and persistence in committing fraud will weigh heavily against him though.

I respect you for being the resident leftist. We probably actually share some personality traits of liking to play in difficult terrain. For me that’s posting in any non explicitly leftist Reddit sub.

I’ve worked in finance. I’ve done some academic work in real estate finance. I see nothing here. I’ve posted more on this case in prior threads but a few things stand out.

  1. No one has ever been prosecuted before for this

  2. It’s a wealth statement for the personal guarantee. Not the direct loan docs for the exact property/asset securing the loan. IMO if he has a loan for 250 million and claims he’s worth 5 billion but is really worth 2 billion it doesn’t really matter to the bank. So he didn’t profit at all.

  3. The judge is already on the record doing really stupid things. Confusing tax appraisal with market value and claiming Mar-a-Lago is worth $15 million

  4. For the most part he didn’t sign anything that lied about the particular assets. (Some debate condo was doubled in size). He owns Mar-a-Lago. The asset he said he owns he does in fact own and the rest is a valuation question.

This case is almost a litmus test for me on am I talking to a partisan or talking to someone who will say they are just playing games but for media consumption will play the game.

As Ash says, he's not a leftist partisan; he's purely an anti-Trump partisan. TDS knows no pre-existing political boundaries.

Calling someone a partisan is okay (most people here are partisans in one way or another), but accusing people of TDS (another way of saying "You aren't rational, all your arguments are coming from blind partisan hatred") is not.

accusing people of TDS (another way of saying "You aren't rational, all your arguments are coming from blind partisan hatred")

I disagree. Psychology Today says:

There is no shared lay understanding of TDS, mainly because it is a folk category rather than a professional category. As such, there is currently much armchair speculation about the nature and existence of TDS, without consensus.

The name itself explicitly suggests a "syndrome," which the Oxford English Dictionary defines as "a characteristic combination of opinions, emotions, or behavior." Several commentators have run with this, putting forth suggestions about opinions, emotions and behaviors characterizing TDS.

Shared amongst these is a notion that the everyday activities of President Trump trigger some people into distorted opinions, extreme emotions and hysterical behaviors.

Given a concept so vague, there is obviously lots of room for a 'spectrum' here. It is notable that what I said was about TDS, not about Ash. I said:

TDS knows no pre-existing political boundaries.

That is, I am remarking on the incredible nature of TDS, which I would posit is really just shorthand for, "Significantly higher than an individual's normal level of political disgust, specifically in response to Donald Trump, which does not seem to be associated with a clear set of prior political commitments". That is, the value of the term is twofold: 1) It is, indeed, a heightened level of political disgust, which often carries with it some level of "extreme emotions" that PT speaks of, and 2) It is a unique phenomenon that seems to be attached to Trump, himself, rather than traditional politics, therefore in want of nomenclature. I think that some people with TDS manifest with distorted opinions and hysterical behaviors, but the ontologically-prior nature is simply political disgust. (I would admit that this comes must more closely intertwined with "extreme emotions" than the others.)

I think one could be an anti-Trump partisan without having TDS. Primarily, if they don't experience a higher-than-typical (for his or her self) level of political disgust about Trump. I don't get that sense from AshLael. I don't see him posting about, say, anything in Aussie politics in a way that oozes disgust for the spectacle.

One could also be an anti-Trump partisan or even have TDS, yet still make rational arguments. I think there is a huge distinction between a person's personal level of disgust and their tolerance/capacity to make rational arguments in spite of their disgust. Sure, there are some people who cannot tame their disgust, but there are absolutely others who can. I'm sure you can identify several posters here who are absolutely, at their core, disgusted by some of the topics they write about, yet continue to hold themselves to high standards of rationality. The point of rationality, as I understand it, is not to eliminate all emotions, even strong ones or ones concerning disgust. It is not to simply rest on nothing but cold, hard, logic. Instead, it's to understand those emotions and that disgust, and to value it properly, while remaining rational.

Finally, I will absolutely maintain that I did not say that AshLael is being irrational. I spoke merely concerning his partisan valance and to note that this partisan valence, being a somewhat unique phenomenon that seems to be incredibly linked to disgust, does not correlate with prior political divides.

EDIT: If you have a suggestion for an alternate term I could use to indicate this concept, I'm all ears and will switch with haste.

To be clear, is it supposed to be higher-than-typical unjustified disgust, or merely higher than typical disgust? If the latter, are you operating under a model where all politicians deserve an equal level of disgust?

I don't think my model has a concept of justified/unjustified disgust, nor a sense in which all politicians deserve an equal level of disgust. Just that individuals have a possibly noisy level of general political disgust, and that Trump created an unprecedented increase, well above the noise level, of disgust in them. This disgust can have different outcomes in different folks (in ways that are path dependent), but the core linkage between them is this outsized disgust, which does not correlate with prior political commitments. In fact, it is due to the fact that it does not correlate with prior political commitments that it can have different outcomes in different folks.

EDIT: If you have a suggestion for an alternate term I could use to indicate this concept, I'm all ears and will switch with haste.

"Anti-Trump partisan" will do. If you want to make the much longer argument you made above - that "TDS" is actually a thing and represents more than simply hating Trump - then you will have to do so, by making that argument (and explaining why it applies to the OP). I am not impressed by citations from Psychology Today. You may recall that back in the late 90s and oughts there was something of a cottage industry of articles from psychologists and linguists and others arguing very soberly that, essentially, conservatives are all mentally ill and/or fascists whose mommies didn't love them enough. I'm sure you would not be receptive to someone "shorthanding" this concept in such a way as to simply label conservatives crazy.

I respect you for being the resident leftist.

I'm very much not a leftist.

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