pigeonburger
1d ago
But Trump HAS found a prosecutor willing to go ahead with the prosecution for him. In the future, it might just mean that the Red Tribe might have to look to outsiders, sometimes at the cost of not being able to rely on the person with the most inside/institutional knowledge. I don't think you've quite reached the point where the Red Tribe is unable to find anyone loyal to it.
pigeonburger
1d ago
I think few voters have illusions that their politicians have more loyalty to them than they have class loyalty to one another. The amount of knives buried in Trump's back attests to that.
pigeonburger
1d ago
My wife swears by drinking a shot glass of olive oil for this. I can't speak as to whether or not it helps much, but it's a simple enough thing to try.
Do I need to do something more drastic and mechanical like an enema?
Have you tried a bidet seat? Even the cheap ones with no electronics at all that just shoot cold water up there are a game changer. Angling yourself just right it serves as a poor man's enema (now I wonder if enemas are a rich man's thing), and the mechanical action it provides in there helps a lot!
pigeonburger
1d ago
Yeah, but by asking them to be the instrument to teach this lesson, you're asking a lot personally from Republican-aligned prosecutors, you're asking them to make themselves a named, direct target for the next cycle. You're asking them to stand up to draw enemy fire. James probably felt safe because she thought that Trump would not come back and that the next Republican administration will want to distance themselves from Trump and so they wouldn't retaliate on his behalf. But I don't think any Republican-aligned prosecutor can feel quite so confident that the Democrats are not going to get back into power before this fades from memory, and that they will not be in a revanchist mood.
pigeonburger
2d ago
I'd suggest a possible alternative reason for why prosecutors might want to avoid prosecuting James regardless of the merit of the case: the standard that it establishes exposes them. James is a prosecutor. You're a prosecutor. James did politically motivated prosecutions of your boss. Your boss asks you to prosecute her in retaliation. What's gonna happen to you in 4-8-12 years when the political pendulum swings? You've just walked directly in front of the crosshairs. In contrast, you know your boss' reputation, if you refuse he'll fire you, he might badmouth you a bit, but if you lay low and shut your mouth afterwards, he's not gonna come after you.
pigeonburger
2d ago
Something that always gave me pause in A New Hope in the officer meeting where Vader chokes the guy while saying "I find your lack of faith disturbing", is the way the Empire got rid of the last vestiges of the old republic. According to Tarkin, regional governors are taking over for the republic bureaucracy.
If we ignore the big villain energy he adds with the whole "fear" line, the change sounds... positive to me? In my mind an evil empire would be centralizing power, not decentralizing it. Bureaucracy is at the very best a necessary evil, usually closer to evil than to necessary.
Ultimately, the way things shake out in the prequel trilogy, I find myself rooting against the republic. Fighting separatists? Separatists are people who don't WANT to be in your republic, crushing them puts you on the side of meddling interventionist empires, not freedom fighters.
I mean, I don't literally root against the republic, because since it's work of fiction, it's written so all the cool people are that side, and all the kitten stranglers are on the other. But if you were describe to me in neutral terms with no loaded language and no villain speech about fear the political systems in the Star Wars universe, I don't think I would identify the good guys and the bad guys the way Lucas and Disney seem to think I would.
pigeonburger
3d ago
TFA didn't feel offensive on release, because it smelled enough like Star Wars at first glance. It took hindsight to see it has no substance, no nutrients in it. I literally don't remember what happens in it at all.
pigeonburger
3d ago
TFA wasn't cooked, it was reheated moldy original trilogy. TLJ was cooked, but it felt like a joke meal, like a kid put toothpaste and jellybeans in a steak dinner. And yeah, TRS was essentially doomed, the only thing that could have saved it was starting with Rey waking up in her bed "Whew, what a weird nightmare that was! Thankfully, it was all a dream!"
To be charitable to their position, they percieved Trump as breaking all sorts of norms. Mostly to do with decorum, as he offends what their aesthetic preference for what a president should be like, and they didn't feel like they would be to blame for breaking another norm in retaliation (the one against engaging in lawfare against the outgoing administration, which Trump upheld in his first term despite rhetoric to the contrary during the campaign).
pigeonburger
3d ago
With regards to your secondary question. The Democrats don't percieve their lawfare as unprovoked, at least not the rank-and-file and the voters. I remember during Trump's first term, there was a very strong sense in their mind that Trump is a criminal, that he was "getting away" with crime. First, he's wealthy; wealthy people are by default sinful, everyone knows that you can't get rich without stepping on poor people, probably with crime, and can only really get absolution by supporting Democrat pet causes. Apart from that, Trump was extra criminal, probably this was because they hadn't had to deal with a really adversarial presidency in a while, but from hearing Democrats talk it felt like them losing was somehow against the rules. That senate refused to go along with the impeachments really cemented that he was getting away with crime. And Jan 6 made them lose their mind in that regard; there must be some crime in there, look what they did! So even if they lacked anything specific to point at, going on fishing expeditions was justified in their mind.
pigeonburger
7d ago
Funny anecdotes are likely the ones that will be the most appreciated, as long as the deceased is not the butt of the joke.
Personally I see it often as a good trait, because it is predictable and easy for the population to align it with their own interests. Trump is a self-interested narcissist who wants the adoration of the masses, and maybe be remembered as a "big important" president like Reagan? Then all he needs to do is do a good job according to half the population and everyone gets what they want. The ones that are harder are those with complex or unscrutable loyalties. The Bushes, Hillary, McCain, etc... People that you can suspect have a long list of favors to repay once and if they get the big job.
pigeonburger
7d ago
What's funny is that she's consistently a 00's, pre-woke feminist, so her refusal to take the next step into the intersectional performative debasement is laudable for the right, but she's going to chafe at fitting in either side. She played her cards well and has achieved enough independent fame and name recognition that she doesn't need the ideologues to prop her up anymore, but she's not at JK Rowlings level of fuck you success, so she has to be careful not to alienate, well, everyone.
pigeonburger
10d ago
"News" exists to create opinion, not inform it.
As an aside, I learned that about 15 years ago, as I started getting involved in politics. I had joined a new political party. From talking to the public, we had a considerable amount of sympathy, people liked us and our positions and cheered for us, but felt that voting for us was a waste of their vote since our polling numbers were too low to have a chance. I was thinking maybe that was just a hard chicken-or-egg dillema that all new parties have to overcome. But at the same time, the media were hyping the IDEA of a party that didn't exist yet, of a politician that expressed maybe he'd like to start one, adding THEM as an option in polls (while leaving the party I was in, a party that actually existed and had a member in the national assembly as a write-in only option). Of course that made that nonexistant yet party start out with siginificantly higher polling numbers.
At that point it became rather obvious what the issue that was dooming us was; we needed media buy in. Or maybe media hacking (the way Trump knows how to do it). But media was the first step in the cycle of public opinion.
pigeonburger
10d ago
I think you already know what you need to do. You need to have a fully open discussion about how to move forwards, that includes financial limits, but also logistical/emotional/medical limits and how far the both of you are willing to compromise to move forward, with neither side holding back anything that they'd be willing to do in hope that the other will compromise before they have to. If you're not able to find any overlap, then it's probably time to call it, but otherwise, you'll need to negociate a fair point within that overlap.
pigeonburger
10d ago
What is the sense in which Democrats are responsible that does not also apply to Republicans?
This is about the messaging around who's responsible, not about who's actually responsible. Which would be Congress in general or, upstream of that, american voters who failed to elect a filibuster proof majority. But that's not going to make the party who says it very popular.
But the messaging "they're the one doing it" followed by (essentially) "why did we allow it to reopen without getting anything?" makes obvious that the narrative is bullshit.
pigeonburger
10d ago
with what seem like no material concessions
That's WhiningCoil's original point; how can you claim that it's the other side shutting down the government, while also asking concessions to allow it to open?
I'm not saying the Republicans necessarily had more consistent messaging, but come on, it's clearly double-speak.
pigeonburger
11d ago
Blaze Media claims the gait analysis was a 94% match but I'm unsure as to how unique that match is or how suspects were selected for matching or how many suspects were tested.
Yes, that is a bugbear I have with the way the media uses statistics. To the statistic ignorant, it sure sounds like they're 94% certain that's the person, but that is not what a 94% match is. I imagine 100% is the exact same gait and that with time, clothing, weather, urgency the same person might not match themselves 100% every time, but what is a standard % match variation for the same person at a different time? Is it never under like 98%? How many people match at 94% on gait? Do gaits cluster?
So much missing information tell if this is significant or not.
pigeonburger
14d ago
Recently I had a friend lament that there was no counterbalance to corporate lobbyists and I had to remind him that nonprofits existed, that their goals are not axiomatically good and uncontroversial.
My gut feeling is that there is still likely a majority of people immediately translating in their head "nonprofit" as "charity", and who generally think of them as non-partisan, non-political, altruistic, net-positive.
pigeonburger
14d ago
Yeah, I'd agree it's plausible but far from trivially true. Which I why I wonder about it. How many boats would they have needed to sink? And you can look to Palestine to see how long some people can insist on taking basically suicidal actions even against a grimly determined superior force.
I probably end up thinking more like you on this, but to try and steelman BahRamYou's point, you have to take into account what was the likely mindset the story was written with. It's from the #MeToo era, written by a lesbian writer, in The New Yorker, and it depicts a man as a villain, in a way that even seems to go against most of the story itself. What are the chances that Roupenian thought: "that's what men are truly like, they're children who become nasty and wound you when you don't want to have (more) sex with them"? I think it's quite possible. It's also possible she didn't think so and just wrote the story that wanted to write itself using random details of a relationship she heard before, and despite harbouring no ill will towards men in general decided right at the end to turn the guy into a total asshole. Maybe she thought it would help the story get picked up, or maybe she just made a bad writing decision, or maybe I'm wrong and in decades we'll be looking back at this story and decide she made the best literary choice by doing this heel-turn. We'll likely never know because it's not quite as fashionable to admit having this kind of prejudice against men now as it was when the story was written. But it's almost impossible for me to think that it's not the reason The New Yorker picked it up. If prejudice against men was intended, it does make the revelation that it's based on a story where the man wasn't at all like that seem intellectually dishonest. Prejudice can be understood and forgiven if it's driven by experience or ignorance, but it's much harder to explain and forgive if the person did actually know better.
pigeonburger
15d ago
Their explanation is always plausible, but my basic issue is that if the stock market is generally just on a random walk, and you always grasp for the nearest plausible explanation, you're going to be completely wrong about why the market was up or down in a given day a lot of the time.
To begin with, explaining market reaction is a less credible version of divination. Even things that should have a straightforward effect up or down are polluted by second, third, fourth, nth-order reasoning of frontrunning the reaction and frontrunning the frontrunners and turning positive news into a negative if it's not AS positive as the frontrunners assumed (or vice-versa), and etc...
pigeonburger
15d ago
When I hear of "migrants dying on rickety boats trying to cross to Europe" I keep wondering if the tally would be positive or negative and by how much if Europeans countries had been sinking the unidentified vessels with unlawful intentions approaching their coasts right from the start. Sometimes, real mercy is harshly disincentivizing bad and dangerous behavior.
pigeonburger
17d ago
The justification for the hatred she gets fits within the restrictive moral framework of the people Jonathan Haidt identified in The Righteous Mind as WEIRD (Western Educated Industrial Rich and Democratic): she's evil because she's harming trans people. WEIRD pretty much only see the care/harm and fairness/unfairness as far as morality go.
Personally I am/was raised WEIRD, and while I cannot express why specifically, some examples Haidt used to test moral foundations outside of harm and fairness still trigger primitive negative emotion in me even if I cannot find a way within myself to condemn it intellectually. The real, original moral instinct as to why JK Rowlings is so hated might still be because she's undermining the consensus (not going along with the group is an affront to the loyalty moral foundation), or from expressing ideas considered sacrilegeous, but having a negative reaction to someone because of that is not allowed by our universalist mindset, so it has to be laundered as her being harmful.
The case against her existed before Trump wanted to prosecute it. The FBI simply declined to pursue it. Is ignoring the political shield that protects a politician from prosecution that actually anyone else would be subject to the same as lawfare?
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