domain:kvetch.substack.com
zeke5123a
5m ago
It isn’t a serious case. It is absurd and my guess is once Willis is kicked off no other prosecutor is going to take it.
AshLael
Just here to farm downvotes
10m ago
It won't occur before the election. Willis may indeed be kicked off the case (and IMO she should be). But it's still an extremely serious case, and it doesn't automatically go away after the election happens.
anti_dan
10m ago
I find burglary very non-analogous, it being a malum in se crime. But even then if you think its a good analogy a person who is charged with burglary is allowed a defense along the lines of "it was cold outside, I was going to freeze to death, I broke in to be warm, there was no intent to commit a felony therein." Trump had an expert witness lined up that said there was no crime being covered up, and he was not allowed to testify.
YouEssAyyy
15m ago
Trump literally ran a university to scam the plebs! He’s the most nakedly predatory man in the game.
I’m very much red tribe and it’s an absolute embarrassment that Trump is the nominee again.
AshLael
Just here to farm downvotes
17m ago
Flippant response: Then you won't mind publishing reporting all of your personal expenditures, right? I mean, you can still spend unlimited amounts of money on whatever you want; you just have to report what you spent. No one could possibly see how an obligation to document your expenditures counts as an imposition on free speech, right?
(Ignoring for the sake of argument that I live under a very different legal regime)
It would certainly be an imposition, but it would not be an imposition on my speech rights. I would find it very annoying to have to constantly detail where I bought lunch, but doing so would not in any sense present a first amendment issue. It would be bad policy, but I fail to see how such a law would be unconstitutional.
After all, while the government doesn't require you to report all your expenditures it does require you to report your income. This is accepted as normal and uncontroversial - as are expenditure reporting requirements for political candidates.
I, a totally random individual, but still presumably subject to independent expenditure reporting requirements, pulled some money out of my pocket and bought the most YUGEASS sign for my teeny tiny front lawn. Like, my lawn is so friggin' small, it can barely hold this sign. The sign definitely cost a few hundred dollars, triggering the reporting requirement. You got to pick the candidate that this sign supports.
My understanding is that if there is no coordination with the candidate there is no reporting requirement. You can spend a billion dollars on "vote Trump" ads and as long as you don't communicate with the Trump campaign there's no obligation to disclose anything.
Suppose Trump pulls two crisp Benjamins out, which happens to be just enough cash to place a "Blue Lives Matter" sign, not on his own lawn, but on a patch of land that cannot be connected to him, personally. He happens to think that this message will implicitly bolster support among people who are likely to vote for him in addition to just personally believing/liking the message and wanting to support the police. Reporting requirement? Criminal?
I think that's a reporting requirement. I haven't gone into any case law, but a plain reading of the legislation would seem to indicate that any expenditure made for the purpose of influencing the election is a campaign expenditure.
Hell, we don't actually need to go all the way to Trump doing it. Could again just say that I, a random ass-individual, spent a few hundred dollars on a "Blue Lives Matter" sign (presumably because you picked it out; I don't think I'd ever do that otherwise), but let's immediately forget that parenthetical and assume that I did it because I thought it would implicitly bolster support for Trump and help Trump's election campaign. Reporting requirement? Criminal?
Neither. Not a reporting requirement, not a crime.
anti_dan
20m ago
The DOJ also was referred this conduct and did not charge it. Saying this was an election law violation requires a tortured interpretation of the statute, and arguably would have put Trump in a catch-22 situation where classifying the expense as a campaign expense would be illegal, but also not classifying it as a campaign expense was illegal.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
21m ago
...And I have zero confidence that the above communicates anything across the gap, any more than it did last time I tried.
What do you think you failed to communicate in that thread?
Let me try to give my own gloss on what I think you were getting at. I often find myself on the side of defending... - subjectivity? I'm not sure what the best word for it is - against those who would argue for a purely rationalist technocratic worldview. I think consciousness is a real phenomenon that can't be explained away as an illusion, I think the arts and humanities are important and STEM supremacists get on my nerves, I think that individual choices matter and people aren't just reducible to their structural roles in the social system.
If you have an affinity for those positions, then perhaps we're not as far apart as you might think. Even if I might disagree with some specific formulations you put forth.
I was thinking in terms of systemic control, doing my utilitarian calculations, shutting up and multiplying
Well, I'm certainly no utilitarian and never have been.
death is deeply natural and that Good Deaths exist
I'm in complete agreement.
I think I understand the difference in perspective you're trying to articulate here. But, as usual, I simply disagree that it divides the space of political ideologies cleanly in two.
Tenaz
24m ago
I mean, one person mentioned that Zorba should talk with you about whether you want to remain part of the community. The others were just saying you should no longer be a mod. The latter is pretty reasonable on a few levels and not comparable to saying you shouldn't be part of the community.
At the end of your conversation, nobody was threatening any longstanding impact or indicating that they would treat you differently moving forward.
I think the main difference is that I had no clout to begin with. If I were a mod I'm sure that one guy would have been calling for my de-modship. As-is he just advocated for less respect to be given to religion here. "Time to burn some witches". Hard to treat me differently moving forward if I am not really a character on this site the way you were--most of these people won't interact with me ever again regardless. I don't have much goodwill to lose in the first place, at least not nearly as much as you did.
Dismissal isn’t comparable, either. People weren’t coming around en masse to tell Kulak he didn’t belong in the community after the article. They just disagreed with it!
Sure. The nature of the sin was different--idiocy versus dishonesty. Not to mention Kulak has never had (and certainly doesn't now have) the influence here which you wielded at the time that piece was released.
I still haven't read the vast majority of the responses to your piece. I'm sure you know more about it than I do. I just think you took the wrong lesson away from it. The bad reception was because we're highly committed to honesty, not because we're highly committed to the Right.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
28m ago
This is the small question thread, and I have a small question.
what the fuck is this? Link is a youtube timestamp, listen for about a minute and you'll get the idea. Seems AI generated to me, I guess they were just looking to pad runtime? But why do this rather than just looping the original track?
The people who pushed the consensus that kendi and diangelo were serious thinkers about "whiteness" and that arresting people for going to the beach or a hike in the woods (but not a BLM riot) was perfectly normal have backed off those extreme positions, so there's less open fighting.
But the people they were pushing it on remember and do not extend the same spirit of charity any more.
It feels like many people have been waking up from a 4 year bender of religious mania and don't quite remember what they did or why their friends give them strange looks and don't return their calls now. Suggesting "covid amnesties" the way a drunk at brunch might sheepishly ask "what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, right guys?"
CertainlyWorse
Dedicated Pessimist
39m ago
The behavioural data can be used in some ways in intelligent buildings for legitimate purposes (like telling app users that the company gym is at capacity so you don't bother grabbing your gym bag), but the data will absolutely be used to make profit for the provider at some point.
CertainlyWorse
Dedicated Pessimist
41m ago
Thanks for this, as its related to my work. Using bluetooth apps for Electronic Access Control raises some interesting usability challenges. Like why would you want to have bluetooth open on your phone all the time. Also the app can probably track your location through the facility, which while it can have some great functionality in theory like aiding fire evacuation (even though in practice no fire warden will bother opening the app in a real scenario), its more likely to be used to monitor your work in the same way keyloggers do for company laptops.
Can you request a separate access control swipe card?
zeke5123a
42m ago
The argument here would be targeted prosecution. But it reminds me of the speech about the awesome power of the prosecutor. A guy like Bragg should be a million miles away from such power.
zeke5123a
44m ago
Agreed (I make the point below that intent here is different from inferring intent in say “murder”).
What’s also become more and more a democrat playbook is they take law X and try to shoehorn it into an area it clearly was not meant for but say “the words say.”
Here, the business record falsification with intent to commit other crime was clearly about something like cooking the books to hide embezzlement or a Ponzi scheme et al. This case clearly was not what the law was about in any way.
dasfoo
47m ago
I just did a search for "dar leaf dominion emails" and didn't find anything substantial. Care to share what you found?
popocatepetl
48m ago
example replies can be found eg here, here, here, here, or here
It's strange. When I visit old /r/themotte threads, the discussions seem hotter and the tone more aggressive, while downvoting unpopular opinions was rarer. You'd figure those two behaviors would move together.
CertainlyWorse
Dedicated Pessimist
56m ago
I feel like I'm taking crazy pills. Is this how other people have been watching videos all this time?
anti_dan
57m ago
Attempt crimes always have allowed for mistake of fact and are not given the same sentence as the crime itself. Not only is this set of facts enough to prove burglary, it also would prove attempted murder.
This is not akin to the Trump case, because in your case we would know that the alleged felony that the burglar had the mens rea to commit was murder. But in the current case, we do have an exact crime. Instead the prosecution waved at a bunch of statutes and said its possible that Trump committed those crimes (while they and the judge didn't let Trump put on an expert witness who would have said he, in fact, did not violate those laws). This is a novel application of the law in many ways, so its not really serious to compare it to burglary.
Nor even something else like criminal conspiracy, where again you need not succeed in robbing the bank, but it is enough for your gang to buy guns and masks and bags with money signs on them, then drive to the bank, go into the bank, and if you get arrested at the front door, you still are guilty of conspiracy to rob the bank. Again, totally unlike the current situation.
TracingWoodgrains
57m ago
I do relate, honestly, to being a believer in a space full of nonbelievers and the sense of isolation it can provide as people attack your deeply held beliefs. The particular reply you link is obnoxious, low-quality, certainly unpleasant to receive—and downvoted, with no meaningful support from others. And it’s true—you were staking out a minority viewpoint difficult to defend in a forum like this, and receiving harsh responses for doing so.
You very badly misunderstand the situation and the comparison at hand, though. I’ve been in heated conversations before. I’ve had slapfights, I’ve had controversial posts that get a lot of pushback. That’s all well within the norm.
What is extremely far from the norm is having people en masse accuse you of being a shill, tell you your reputation has been destroyed, tell you you don’t belong in the forum, and receive mass support (see eg upvote totals) for doing so. You’re fixating on one person who respects me—and was still calling me a shill—and a handful of supportive replies, in the middle of a flood of vitriol. I didn’t link the worst ones—I linked some of the ones with the most support and one drive-by potshot in the middle of the flood. At the end of your conversation, nobody was threatening any longstanding impact or indicating that they would treat you differently moving forward. There were no spiraling ramifications, no deep-felt expressions of hatred. It’s apples and oranges.
Dismissal isn’t comparable, either. People weren’t coming around en masse to tell Kulak he didn’t belong in the community after the article. They just disagreed with it!
Like, you can see in the links—note particularly the one mentioning it was clearly costing me a lot of goodwill. People there were extremely well aware at the time that it was an extraordinary reaction in an extraordinary situation; to treat it otherwise is to badly misread it. I’m not going to act like nobody on this forum has ever faced worse—particularly around flameout posts—but I can emphatically tell you that the reaction here was uniquely ugly, of all the places that took note of the event.
CertainlyWorse
Dedicated Pessimist
59m ago
Bit of a quick one:
The Victorian state government (Australian) has failed in its 4 year bid to halt the processing of a Freedom of Information release of documents related to the reasoning behind the Covid lockdowns. The documents were to brief the state's chief public health officer and Minister for Health prior to lockdown public orders.
The court involved noted there was a large public interest in the justifications for the lockdowns and that it would not be an undue burden on department resources to process the FOI request. It should be noted the same political party (Labor) is still in continuous power since the time of the lockdowns.
Hopefully the public can get some answers for why Melbourne suffered the longest Covid lockdowns in the world.
AshLael
Just here to farm downvotes
1hr ago
I would vastly prefer to be in Trump's shoes in New York than in Georgia. The bar for proving RICO is so low there and it comes with a 5 year minimum sentence.
The_Nybbler
Does not have a yacht
1hr ago
but it doesnt seem like it was orchestrated by people with leftist goals.
Since Fidel Castro figures as the person who ordered it in some of the theories, I don't think that's necessarily true. The (Soviet) KGB is also a common suspect.
Flippant response: Then you won't mind publishing reporting all of your personal expenditures, right? I mean, you can still spend unlimited amounts of money on whatever you want; you just have to report what you spent. No one could possibly see how an obligation to document your expenditures counts as an imposition on free speech, right?
Slightly less flippant response: It's kind of amazing, but the Court in Citizens United managed to not talk about reporting requirements at all. Like, they introduce the history of the case and say that CU was challenging the disclaimer, disclosure, and reporting requirements as well, but they literally never talk about the reporting requirements. It just disappears entirely. Almost like they were dodging the issue, so they didn't feel political pressure to falsely say that they were okay, instead perhaps coyly preserving an openness to address the issue later in a follow-on case. Diffusing the hits over time is tried-and-true Court Stuff.
Perhaps more concrete: Surely there are some bounds which contain these requirements. See McIntyre v. Ohio Elections Comm'n, for example. Perhaps the Court has to date avoided addressing the issue in context of campaign finance laws (again, hilariously coincidental that CU magically disappeared any discussion of reporting requirements), but this smells to me like it's just begging for a case. Let's say you and I got together, we conspired, hacked the source code of the universe, but only just a little. I, a totally random individual, but still presumably subject to independent expenditure reporting requirements, pulled some money out of my pocket and bought the most YUGEASS sign for my teeny tiny front lawn. Like, my lawn is so friggin' small, it can barely hold this sign. The sign definitely cost a few hundred dollars, triggering the reporting requirement. You got to pick the candidate that this sign supports. Together, our source code hack accomplishes one thing: it gets the FEC to bring an enforcement action against me, and that enforcement action is now in front of the Supreme Court. How do you think it goes? Does McIntyre v. Ohio Elections Comm'n figure into the picture somehow? How so?
(FYI, note very briefly that I currently rent, and do not own, the teeny tiny yard in front of the house that I rent. Passersby may be able to surmise, "Someone who lives there must really like this guy that Ashlael picked," but they wouldn't be able to use any public records to figure out who I am, unlike what would be the case were I required to publicly report it.)
Changing directions a bit, but bringing us back closer to Trump: the good news is that those reporting requirements, whether ultimately constitutional or not, are only attached to things that "expressly advocate" the election/defeat of a clearly identified candidate. But of course, what Trump did was very much not "express advocacy". So now, on top of that other bundle of issues with reporting requirements generally, we're going to have a slew of killer hypos pulling on this thread, too. Suppose Trump pulls two crisp Benjamins out, which happens to be just enough cash to place a "Blue Lives Matter" sign, not on his own lawn, but on a patch of land that cannot be connected to him, personally. He happens to think that this message will implicitly bolster support among people who are likely to vote for him in addition to just personally believing/liking the message and wanting to support the police. Reporting requirement? Criminal?
EDIT: Hell, we don't actually need to go all the way to Trump doing it. Could again just say that I, a random ass-individual, spent a few hundred dollars on a "Blue Lives Matter" sign (presumably because you picked it out; I don't think I'd ever do that otherwise), but let's immediately forget that parenthetical and assume that I did it because I thought it would implicitly bolster support for Trump and help Trump's election campaign. Reporting requirement? Criminal?
That's a perfectly reasonable position to have. Unfortunately, it's not one that makes for an easy defense of Trump. We're talking about a guy with a history of questionable business behavior who surrounds himself with the kind of people who, if not exactly operating within the criminal world, were squatting near the margins of it. He's been sued numerous times, and lost quite a few of those suits. Whether or not he actually did what the New York DA says he did is irrelevant in your world because he's already proven himself to be the exact kind of person who would do something like that. There's debate above on whether the hush money payments were campaign expenses and how was Trump supposed to proceed without getting into hot water but that's irrelevant; whether they were improper campaign contributions or not, I can tell you that what you don't do is have your attorney make the payments out of his own pocket and then create phony invoices and ledger entries as part of a reimbursement scheme. According to your logic, that alone should be enough evidence of suspicious activity regardless of his past. I'm personally not in favor of getting rid of plea bargaining because I don't think it's going to have the effect some people think it will, but if you're going to take the position that people who engage in suspicious activity deserve what's coming to them, I don't see how you can defend Trump in this situation.
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