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domain:alexepstein.substack.com

And those people are going to vote for who exactly? Certainly not Joe 'Mostly Peaceful' Biden -- even among throwaway votes RFK doesn't really appeal to this crowd, and I can't see them getting too excited about putting the 'Libertarian' in LGBTQ.

The cohort you are talking about are also the 'you don't vote, you can't complain' guys -- so I can't even see it hurting on turnout much here.

ETA: I'm not really talking about quirky geek forums here either -- if you wanna put your finger on that particular pulse I'd reccomend ar15.com -- those guys are the most law abiding, letter-of-the-law dudes you will find, and maybe even more right wing than here. I haven't had cause to be down that rabbithole lately, but I guarantee they will have something to say about this.

I mean, republicans aren’t stripping women of rights other than the right to have an abortion. The Israeli settlers are forcibly expelling Palestinians.

You say he doesn’t understand the Israeli religious right. I’ll buy that he’s wrong- what is it, then? What’s its place in Israeli politics, its main appeal to voters, strongest policy positions?

LOL. Shortening Ben Gvir to ‘Gvir’ is like shortening ‘McDonald’ to ‘Donald’. You’re betraying a ridiculous lack of familiarity.

Yeah I'm not that familiar. If you want to provide a good defense of why his actions are acceptable instead of just criticzing my familiarity, go ahead.

The analogous act would be that republicans tried to overthrow American democracy on January 6th, and that your former president told you to grab women by the pussy.

Those were pretty bad too. Better or worse than Ben Gvir's? I'm not sure.

This is interesting, and I might be persuaded.

Scenario A:

Let's say I mistakenly think that some completely legal act is illegal, like buying paperclips. Every time I buy paperclips for my office, I intentionally misclassify these transactions as "legal services" because I don';t want the law to know that I bought paperclips.

In this scenario, I have committed a felony, because I was attempting to conceal a "crime," and therefore fool the state, regardless of the actuality of any crime being committed.

Scenario B

Let's say I think that buying paperclips is embarassing but not illegal. In this case, I would be committing only a misdemeanor by misclassifiying the purchases, as I was not trying to conceal what I thought was a "crime?"

Scenario C

I'm not sure if buying paperclips is a crime, so just to be safe, I'm never going to admit to buying paperclips on paper. I'm going to send my lawyer out to buy my paperclips for me with his own money, and since he's my lawyer, when I pay him back, I'm going to classify the expense as "legal services," because he's my lawyer. I think I have successfully avoided admitting to the actual act and insulated myself from any crime if any crime exists. What is this? I have created layers of insulation between my willful ignorance and reality. Can intent be proven here?

...

McCain-Feingold's (and I think NY law) definitions of electioneering communications are not limited to advertisements. Famously so, given that Citizens United revolved around a case where the FEC both prohibited ads for a movie and simply showing that movie.

There are exceptions for contributions (ie costs) by independent news media reporting bonafide news, but the "stand by your ad" rules, reporting provisions, and time provisions do not have such exceptions, and some of the Federalist newspapers probably would fail the modern independence test (if only because almost all newspapers at the Founding Era were tied heavily to local political parties, or were vanity press). In practice, the FEC almost never takes such charges, because at least some would fail Mills (though Mills was about uncoordinated expenditures, and Hamilton was clearly coordinating them), but the strict text would allow them.

Doesn’t China have like a month of good weather for crossing the strait, like all year long?

And more to the point, the reasonable move is the second scenario. Pearl Harbor is just fucking retarded. For that matter it was just fucking retarded, the Japs got their asses kicked. A Taiwan war would be won or lost by the first Chicom soldier landing on Formosa. Drawing in Japan and the US turns a major war into a really big war.

To make your defense more explicit, are you arguing that now that you’re done with the genocide, it has become immoral? Was it not immoral in the 19th and 18th centuries, only arbitrarily now when it’s convenient for you?

Do you think that paying Stormy Daniels to keep her quiet is "express advocacy"?

Clearly not. Accordingly, if some random individual with no connection to Trump paid her to keep quiet, that would not be a reportable expenditure.

We've been doing this question-and-answer thing for a while, and I'm still not sure where you're going with it. It seems like you think election finance law is unconstitutional under the first amendment for some reason, but I'm failing to see how and none of these hypotheticals have gotten me any closer to understanding your position.

Gvir

LOL. Shortening Ben Gvir to ‘Gvir’ is like shortening ‘McDonald’ to ‘Donald’. You’re betraying a ridiculous lack of familiarity.

You seem confused about the analogy, as well. The analogous act would be that republicans tried to overthrow American democracy on January 6th, and that your former president told you to grab women by the pussy. Does that make more sense now?

I was wrong about Russia invading Ukraine so discount accordingly, but I think the odds of China invading Taiwan are very low in the short term.

First we have to ask whether China even wants Taiwan. Sabre-rattling about Taiwan serves as a reliable way to stir up nationalistic feelings in the people. This is useful when the dear leader starts to lose the favor of heaven. Taiwan as a rebellious province has more use to the regime than as a subdued enemy. In other words, would China capturing Taiwan be like the dog that catches the car?

But let's say that China does want Taiwan. I think in the near term, the logistics of an amphibian landing are impossible. China's military has essentially no actual combat experience (unless we count fighting Indian soldiers with melee weapons on remote Himalayan passes). While we are in the early stages of a revolution in military technology, I think the U.S. carriers groups and air superiority fighters would still win the day.

In the long term, I am much more bullish on China's chances. Demographics are a headwind, but China will still have 3 times the population of the U.S. in twenty years. Furthermore, the world's reliance on Chinese trade grows stronger every year. China is eating the world. They dominate most industries and are on a path to domination of the rest. China's spending on military equipment is remarkable, and their ability to create more grows while the abilities of the West fade. The West's existing stock of legacy material (F-35s and carrier groups) will matter less in the future.

So China can just sit back and let its advantages compound. When they have naval superiority and a more secure supply chain of natural resources they will strike. And when they do take Taiwan it may be without even firing a shot.

There are some avenues for appeal where a fact is improperly admitted as evidence or testimony, or where a jury makes an improper decision of law, albeit with a fairly high standard of error...

But it doesn't really matter. Trump (probably) can't even file an appeal until after sentencing, and there's zero chance that the New York Court of Appeals will decide the case before November (and might not even hear the case before then), in the likely event that they refuse, it'll be a year or longer for federal courts to get involved, and there are extremely limited grounds where a federal court can bypass state courts.

And while a lot of the errors here are reversible, or even cause to mandate recusal by the judge, they're not severe enough to throw out the case; even a 'victory' just starts the trial over again, and Bragg will not be dropping this case.

I think a lot of the progressive legal sphere is assuming that even if this case is overturned, it'll happen after Georgia/federal documents/whatever gets him, too (or Trump will self-moot sometime), but to anyone that isn't as far buying every charge against Trump as AshLael is, there's a non-trivial chance that Trump will eventually be found not guilty of multiple different cases... in 2025 and 2026. After he's lost the election.

Thanks. I'll take a look. This sounds like another one of those data dumps that tries to impress by volume but which really contains very little actionable information. But the mere presence of it with the suggestion that it's important convinces motivated bystanders who never scrutinize it themselves. You would think that if there were damning evidence inside, someone would already be highlighting it, specifically.

Let me say this in a different way. It seems quite clear that if Trump structured the transaction differently (though with the exact same economics) even under the prosecution’s theory of campaign finance law Trump would be innocent.

It is therefore again unreasonable to allow inference here. It is just so far afield if your store example to be a different category. The nature of these laws are so different we need a more exacting search for intent.

If Trump were really sloppy as you allege, prosecutors would have been able to find more serious charges to bring against him.

Not necessarily. As we can see in this case, it can be really hard to create the semi-coherent appearance of a case out of a bunch of nonsense and make it just opaque enough to pay off. If a guy is racking up hundreds of little process violations because HDGAF about process, the trick is to turn those into a felony in one of the jurisdictions jaded enough to convict without ever questioning the premises. It's probably easier to charge and convict a smooth operator who is knowingly committing crimes because once you catch them in act with intent, you have your smoking gun. If someone is carelessly racking up violations by just not caring, it's going to be really hard to prove an intent that never existed.

It certainly seems like wokeness has traveled far enough down the barber pole that my age cohort is starting to lurch rightwards.

What does left and right even mean here, and in what way does it influence US policy towards China invading Taiwan? In Germany, the Green party is the local wing of the US progressive establishment, and they have been considered the most militaristic party (within a US-approved framework) since Afghanistan, which earned them the derogatory moniker "olive-greens" (as in the colour of camo). There is some understanding that culturally military~right, but interventionism and globalism are now more closely associated with the left.

But that’s the entire point. You needed to do it with an intent to defraud and commit another crime. If he wasn’t thinking at all about that, then that is proof he didn’t commit the crime.

Yeah, I agree. But Trump is his own worst enemy and creates most these problems for himself. It's hard to feel sympathy for him when he is essentially dooming himself by repeating the same mistakes over and over rather than adapting -- even though I think he is being unjustly persecuted in a way that really hurts the entire country. Even if he's the least-bad part of this whole debacle, I can only shake my head in pity at mess he's put himself in.

I haven't read that case and I don't intend to.

I don't know what to say other than to note that if one boldly declares that they intend to remain willfully ignorant of first amendment law, then most people should probably significantly discount what they have to say concerning first amendment law.

Not a reporting requirement nor a crime, because a "Blue Lives Matter" sign does not constitute "express advocacy".

Do you think that paying Stormy Daniels to keep her quiet is "express advocacy"?

RE: Federalist papers

As usual, @gattsuru has an absolute banger of a comment. I would only add that he is citing the specifics on "electioneering communications", which is much more narrow than the extremely broad sounding statutory statement we started with on "expenditures". It is fundamentally this huge gap between extremely broad sounding statutes and very narrow slivers of actual behavior that the FEC tries to enforce (due to the knowledge that going further is likely to catch the Court's ire) that is the core of the inferential distance on this issue. Most people simply don't realize that many many many things that might at first glance appear to be a violation of campaign finance laws will never be enforced, and that if it were tried, the laws would be struck down. The core of my position is that the claims against Trump are in this category. It superficially sounds plausible that the events could be captured by campaign finance law, but if you actually had to argue the case, the law, and the Constitution all the way to SCOTUS, it would not work. It is only because they specifically didn't have to actually argue the law and the Constitution on the issue of campaign finance law (especially not in an appeals court or "court of law", rather than a trial court or "court of fact") that it was able to get to this point.

I'd lean against.

A serious move against Taiwan is likely to trigger a longer-term economic realignment away from Chinese manufacturing and towards all of their regional competitors. I'm doubtful that the Chinese economy is strong enough to weather such a thing. Main wildcard is to what extent Chinese leadership either doesn't believe it will happen, or doesn't care.

The PLAN and PLAAF don't have much recent experience AFAIK fighting blue-water naval battles, amphibious invasions, air battles against air forces that aren't total clusterfucks, etc. Trying for something like Indirect Control is taking a big risk that their bluff will be called. Their leadership will look pretty bad if they try it and it ends up being a flop. Even worse, a flop of the army and navy trying to assert control over Taiwan is much less likely to generate a strong Chinese domestic backlash against whoever did it, presuming they don't do something boneheaded like major attacks against mainland Chinese civilians.

If China wanted to be taken more seriously as a threat to Taiwan, I'd think they ought to get some practice in somewhere. They've been dealing with Africa for a while, why not pick whichever African country is being particularly annoying to them and go over and smash them? If they can't, or aren't willing, to pull that off, it makes it seem like they aren't really much of a threat to Taiwan.

The US Navy

More importantly, they might be building a lot of frigates and are starting to build aircraft carriers, but the PLAN has basically no institutional experience. They have negligible ASW and submarine capacity, any surprise invasion plan has to contend with an unknown: how many US SSNs and SSGNs are in or in range of the South China Sea right now?

The only way the Chinese can succeed is if there is enough political hesitation to intervene from the US.

Bribery is not 'shady white collar activities', it's 'high crime' on par with treason. The fact that you would try to conflate the two makes your reasoning suspect at best.

I'm still not really getting it. I was under the impression that the Federalist papers were a series of essays published in newspapers. As far as I know, they weren't ads. Why would they be governed by the rules that apply to modern ads and not the rules that apply to modern newspaper editorials?

I think this comment should have been allowed. Almost all of the negative statements about Trump voters here are demonstrating a counterargument to @jake's claim that a Trump voter revolution is nigh. The tone is 20% more biting and recriminatory than the argument itself, but that could also be said of a lot of @FCfromSSC comments I enjoy reading.

It certainly seems like wokeness has traveled far enough down the barber pole that my age cohort is starting to lurch rightwards

None of this implies we can let up in our fight against it. Wokeness is like kudzu, if you leave even a single vine intact it'll come back, and faster than you think.

I'm always interested in learning more about the domestic politics of other countries. What are some things you think are important to understand that media outlets like the NYT don't tell people?

I'm not saying that res ipsa is sufficient on its own

That's literally what res ipsa loquitur means.