Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
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User ID: 373
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
1d ago
The median sentence for participating in Trump's attempted self-coup was 60 days. I looked through a few of the longer sentences and they seemed justified given the violence that had taken place. I don't consider BLM leniency to be an excuse because I also would have liked for the book to be thrown at those protestors as well.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
1d ago
Have pardons ever been realistically used as a political check against other branches like this? If I squinted I could maybe see something like Carter's pardoning of draft dodgers or Obama's pardoning of non-violent drug offenders, but neither of those really seem like they'd fit that well. I don't think it works that well as a check even if it had been. The real check the Executive has over the Legislative is the ability to dominate one party of the split chambers which has effectively rendered Congress inert. Kicking the can to pardons being punished by the President's relationship with Congress also doesn't work that well since, again, that implicitly relies on voters punishing politicians who don't do what they want. If they don't really punish the President, why would they be expected to punish Congress indirectly?
I disagree with the notion that the J6 protestors were politically prosecuted, at least insofar as participating in Trump's self-coup wasn't already political. The median sentence was 60 days, with those receiving substantially longer sentences mostly having engaged in violence. I don't like the framing of comparing it to BLM leniency, because two wrongs don't make a right. This isn't a prisoner's dilemma, it's just blatant hypocrisy. If anything, this will just make the situation worse as Democrats can now use this pardon to do another round of their own nonsense when they retake the White House at some point.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
1d ago
This is the only sane take. The people claiming this is like a prisoner's dilemma are crazy, given that the prisoner's dilemma involves some level of personal gain (or at least losing less) for playing. Here, it's just pure negative. Nobody here gained from Biden's pardons, nor did they gain by the J6 pardons.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
1d ago
Perhaps the better idea would have been to reduce pardoning power, rather than responding with "the other party is corrupt, so that means I'll be extra corrupt!"
After Biden's pardons and now this, it's pretty clear that the President's unilateral ability to grant clemency to anyone ought to be dramatically reduced, if not removed entirely. Literally every president in my lifetime has abused this power, and the expected guardrails (voters will punish bad pardons) mostly don't work.
There's nothing to stop a president from goading political violence or corruption, and then pardoning afterwards (or hell, even before!). It's a highly abuseable, very obvious point of failure.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
1d ago
The leftist take is generally that the female prostitutes are either empowered women or hopeless victims, and that the Johns should all burn in Hell. Some feminists prioritize the empowerment of women while mostly ignoring Johns (they still think they should probably burn in Hell), while other feminists think the presence of Johns is so terrible that the entire industry needs to be incinerated. Sometimes one or the other group will dominate. Other times there'll be compromises like in Sweden where prostitution is legal for women to sell, but illegal for men to buy. It's truly a shining model of feminist equality.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
1d ago
Thanks for the clarification. I broadly agree with this.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
3d ago
What other benefits? Aside from legal protections around having children, there's little else that marriage offers to men that a close male friend couldn't also provide, oftentimes at higher quality. And there's the issue of "marriage" and "close male friends" are often substitutes, i.e. men often lose their male support groups when they get married either due to time constraints or from the woman covertly sabotaging things (e.g. controlling the social schedule and deprioritizing them).
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
3d ago
"human fleshlight, plus domestic labor" lens (and the far-left and far-right agree that this is the best a woman can do in life
There's a lot of horseshoe in gender discussions when it comes to the far left and far right, but I'm not sure the far left would go that far. Care to elaborate a bit?
Gynosupremacists are simply making sure there's no competition for domestic women, so they can get a higher price for their assets ('why buy the cow' and all that). Casting aspersions about the safety and morality of the competitor's products is a classic sales tactic.
I definitely agree there's a ton of this going on. I'd say "sex cartel" concerns account for roughly 80% of the discussion around prostitution, although nobody would admit it obviously.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
3d ago
It just looks like he’s socially pressured by middle aged women into parroting a feeling he doesn’t share or agree with.
Yeah, there's definitely a lot of that going on. "Age gap" discussions have always been farcical. It's OK for a 20 year old woman to take a loan or a job from a 60 year old man, but not to have sex with him? The double-standard is extremely obvious, and it's clear that most "age gap" stuff is just older women being angry at older men not finding them attractive as they once did.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
3d ago
"the poor have no agency" is fairly mainstream. (I would reckon that acceptance of sugardaddying and luxury escorts is far higher.)
That's an interesting perspective. Sure, we don't let poor people sell their own kidneys, but we certainly let them do a ton of other degrading or dangerous stuff, like be garbage collectors or work in coal mines. I haven't noticed the acceptance of sugardaddying and luxury escorts to be higher, and I'm highly certain it's not far higher.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
3d ago
I feel like there'd still be a lot of pushback to sex tourism in a relatively wealthy country like Japan or South Korea or Taiwan, which would presumably be at the same level of concern in regards to "sex slavery". With the contempt I've seen, it seems more like an ugly guy in the US shouldn't be able to just go to another country to have sex, as that's cheating!
Few people who are in a decent sexual relationship visit prostitutes.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
3d ago
There's plenty of non-exploitative prostitution where the woman comes in as an independent provider, works whenever she feels like it, and stops of her own accord at some point. There might be some abuse on the sides, but that'd be far more easily stopped with legalization + regulation than attempting total bans.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
3d ago
Nice book review.
I too wonder why prostitution or sex tourism is still so shunned. It's clear why the far left and far right hate it: the Fascist-Feminist Synthesis holds that women have no agency in such a situation, and that they must be protected from their own decision to offer themselves to beastly men.
But why does the center go along with this still? Residual Puritanism might explain some part, but I doubt it's the whole answer.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
3d ago
Is it though? His base will never leave him so long as he dunks on the libs, no matter how much he scams them.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
8d ago
It sounds like we agree on almost everything here, we just use different language.
The only bit I'd raise an objection to is the "THINK OF THE CHILDREN" excuse being a good reason for much of anything.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
8d ago
Biden had already been pestering the Israelis to GTFO, with Bibi hoping Trump would come to the rescue and give him a free hand. Trump signaling "no" ends those hopes.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
8d ago
They were only "diplomatic victories" in an Israeli sense, not an American one. Israel got a ton of stuff it wanted while the US increased its presence and exposure in the region for negligible gain.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
8d ago
The Fascist-Feminist synthesis that the majority of normies implicitly agree with is that men viewing explicit material is metaphysically damaging in some way, and thus it must be curtailed as much as possible. There's a bunch of laws that obliquely touch on these aspects (often relating the "production of child porn"), as well as a ton of potential PR damage. That's why webhosts, credit card processors, sites like Patreon, etc. have always been weirdly prudish about any explicit material. We should expect the same thing to happen to image generators. It'll probably reach a similar steady-state eventually, with explicit stuff existing on the periphery while facing periodic crackdowns.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
8d ago
The vast majority of posters here (and everywhere) aren't willing to change their mind about anything they have strong pre-existing convictions on. Discussions are still worth having regardless.
Does this mean we should never have discussions that start with the assumption that the Holocaust happened?
I feel there should be more affordance for orthodox ideas to skip debate on some of the assumptions than for heterodox ideas. Otherwise we could end up with situations like the following:
"I believe elites are all pedophiles who rape children in the basement of a certain pizza parlor. I'm not willing to debate this. This discussion is only for people who agree with me on this point. With that said, how do we stop these evil elites from doing this???"
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
9d ago
I don't see why Newsom would be impacted that much by the fires. Most people understand state governors aren't absolute dictators that are responsible for everything that goes wrong. I checked here and he's still one of the most likely candidates for the D nomination in 2028. There's not a lot of history so I can't see if it's moved much recently, but I doubt it has.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
9d ago
My comment was meant for OP who seems open to alternative ways of seeing reality. Not for you a somewhat unknown entity clearly ready for an argument.
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
9d ago
Take a hard Look into evolution and realise that natural selection is not enough to explain how we (humans) came to be in our current form.
Proactively provide evidence in proportion to how partisan and inflammatory your claim might be.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
9d ago
When ancient humans encountered something like lightning, they probably thought the same thing about mundane phenomena. "We have no explanation for this sudden bolt of energy... so it must be Zeus!" We know they were obviously wrong now. We know what lightning is, after science has advanced sufficiently to explain it.
The metaphysics questions you asked are mostly like that, to the extent they're falsifiable at all. The only correct answer is to say "we don't have enough information right now to know". You're not a truth-seeker if you just default to "it must be proof of God" when you encounter any difficult question.
I wouldn't want a monarch like King Charles to be able to pardon people either, as their lifetime status makes them even more shielded from consequences of corrupt pardons.
For absolute monarchs, the ability to pardon basically just kills the rule of law. The only recourse people would have is outright revolution. It's a terrible system.
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