Ecgtheow
1yr ago
On page 15 they have him on tape bemoaning the fact that he didn't declassify the plan of attack on a foreign country.
Page 15 of the indictment is worth a quick read. Trump is recorded with his knowledge and consent by an unnamed writer and a publisher working an upcoming book, at the time (July 2021) he was being critiqued in the press by a "Senior Military Official" (probably Mark Miley) who claimed he was concerned Trump was going to order him to attack [Country A] (probably Iran ) and he dissuaded Trump. Trump wants to convince the writer and publisher that this criticism is unwarranted, so he opens this recorded meeting by saying "Look What I found, this was [the Senior Military Official's] plan of attack, read it and just show... it's interesting". Later in the meeting, Trump says:
Trump: I just found, isn't that amazing? This totally wins my case, you know. (*Here I am assuming he means the public disagreement not a legal case) *
Staffer: mm-hmm.
Trump: Except it is like, highly confidential.
Staffer: Yeah [Laughter]
Trump: Secret. This is Secret Information, Look, Look at this. You attack, and--
Further in the conversation
Trump: This was done by the military and given to me, Uh, I think we can probably right?
Staffer: I don't know, we'll, we'll have to seem Yeah, we'll have to try to--
Trump: Declassify it.
Staffer: Figure out a -- yeah.
TRUMP: See as president I could have declassified it.
Staffer: Yeah [laughter]
Trump: Now I can't, you know, but this is still a secret
Overclassification is definitely a problem, and every administration seems to have some sort of classified documents mishandling scandal, from Colin Powell, to Petraeus, to Clinton, to Nikki Haley and now Trump. That said, recording yourself showing some random writer a 'plan of attack' for a potential invasion of "Country A" while bemoaning that you forgot to declassify them while you were president is an astounding own goal. I just have trouble buying this is 'the Deep State' cleverly ensnaring Trump when he could have just returned the documents or not done ridiculous things like this. It can be true that they are out to get him, and that also he lied to his lawyers and blundered into putting himself in legal jeopardy over an easily resolvable document handling issue.
They also have him on tape showing a writer and book publisher a 'plan of attack' on 'Country A' and then bemoaning the fact that he didn't declassify it while he was president.
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
Hanania was asked to speak to the Yale Federalist Society, i.e. a bunch of future red state judges and clerks, about his 'Woke Institutions are Civil Rights Law' hypothesis. While he seems remarkably devoted to biting the hand that feeds him by expressing his contempt for the conservative base he is not without influence.
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
This is correct. Wokeness is humanities academia fed through the incentive structure of social media. It's purpose is not to signal distinctiveness between blue and red, but between impure blues and properly pure blues. It originates with the overproduced elites on the margin looking for ways to distinguish themselves or get their peers ejected so they can win the next round of musical chairs on their way to tenure. It took existing liberal ideas and upped the extremity to the necessary point to distinguish themselves from other blue tribers.
I think right wingers really misunderstand the role of the institutional democratic party in wokeness. The Democratic Party has to get the votes of an aging electorate in an electoral system designed to over represent rural people. Academia, the entertainment industry and social media back in the 2010s all have much stronger incentives to appeal to the sensibilities of young educated people then the Democratic Party. The Democratic party gets dragged in the direction of wokeness by it's young election campaign staff working a year or two as a career stepping atone but the people invested in it's long term success understand who they have to appeal to.
Obama wasn't pro-gay Marriage in 2008. He ran on an 'all of the above' energy policy and presided over a massive shale boom and a 74% increase in oil production. He isn't responsible for the shale drilling revolution, but he didn't stop it either. He's a competent politician who understands that increasing gas prices is political suicide and the path to cutting emissions is keeping gas prices stable while subsidizing clean energy.
People forget that after George Floyd mainstream Democratic outlets weren't pushing defund the police they were pushing 'eight can't wait', a series of modest police reforms like banning chokeholds and shooting at moving vehicles. Deray McKessen went on Pod Save America, the Bill Simmons podcast and GQ, he got written up by Vox and endorsed by Ariana Grande and Oprah. This got rolled into the George Floyd Justice in Policing Bill the Democratic house passed in 2020 which had a national registry of police misconduct and an end to qualified immunity but didn't cut police funding. But this activist campaign for police reforms got absolutely wiped out by the attention grabbing divisiveness of 'Defund the Police' which took over Twitter and social media. Obama as a competent politician criticized the slogan as an expensive signal saying "do you want to actually get something done, or do you want to feel good among the people you already agree with?"
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
George W. Bush went to Yale and he was famously seen as an idiot by the left in the 2000's merely because he had a few malapropisms and committed the largest foreign policy blunder in my lifetime. If your family is loaded and you're not an eloquent speaker people will assume that your degree wasn't really earned. The right is similarly dismissive of Jill Biden's PhD because she got it after Joe became a senator.
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
Possibly the way search engines changes thing is that now if you say a city is bad everyone from that city can share it on social media and yell at you? Celebrities have a weird code now we're they basically never say anything non-positive about other celebrities because they know if they do it will cause a minor social media flare up and they have to decide if it's worth it rathr than just venting.
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
It does seem relevant that progressives are in favor of downward redistribution though. "The market needs to set wages based on scarce traits like intelligence, but the unintelligent should still get healthcare, free college, public housing, and childcare subsidized by redistribution from the intelligent" might imply a different moral judgement of the unintelligent than 'the unintelligent should be at the bottom and get nothing but their market wages".
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
It's hard to square this idea that progressives are relentlessly devoted to engineering the human condition with Scott's piece "Galton, Ehrlich, Buck" which describes progressives as considering Eugenics so taboo that they oppose even oppose sperm banks of very talented people or attempts to inform people with rare genetic conditions so that the don't marry people with similar genes The 'eugenic instinct' is dead, replaced by deep concerns about ableism.
Your examples of how the liberal engineering drive would function in response to HBD don't make much sense to me. Recruiting international scientists isn't about eugenics it's about meritocracy. You don't need HBD or hereditary IQ to justify it. You'd still want whoever the smartest people in the world are currently working in your labs regardless of how their children turn out.
I think it's less profound and more historically contingent. As with Eugenics where a regime of forced sterilization made the whole field taboo obviously segregation made the entire study of racial difference taboo. Even where that difference is not facially threatening to liberalism, like explaining black athletic achievement, genetic explanations are taboo (with maybe an exception for Ethiopians because they're a subset of black people and there's the environmental explanation of altitude). There's no IQ gap that would be small enough to not be taboo, because we're all the way down the slur cascade.
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
Yeah OP is wrong that this is the pet projector a single billionaire, it's a legal non profit funded by an array of ideologically motivated foundations and wealthy individuals. Whether this is the healthy functioning of civil society or a conspiracy of dark money depends on whether you like the outcome.
We don't actually know who funds the PLF, but the donations they do disclose are mostly from wealthy libertarian family foundations. They don't try to make themselves seem grassroots by touting the number of donors or average donation size. Maybe it's a bunch of blue collar types fired up about taking property rights cases to the supreme court and donating $27 each but if their private donors are anything like their public donors then they're a bunch of extremely wealthy libertarians.
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
The top public donors to the Pacific Legal fund which championed the case are the Dunn Family Foundation for The Advancement of Right Thinking and the Sarah Scaife Foundation. The Dunn's run a capital management firm and Sarah Scaife is the niece of Andrew Mellon. I don't think they're personally billionaires but they probably have net worths in the hundred millions and manage family foundations.
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
wetlands adjacent to waters (other than waters that themselves are wetlands)", where adjacency required "means bordering, contiguous, or neighboring"
How far is "neighboring", they're 300 feet away from the lake.
This case is weird because the objectionable part doesn't seem to be the idea that the ditch on their land has some relation to the water quality of the lake, but the treatment of gravel and sand as pollutants. If they had been dumping highly toxic waste on marshy land next to a ditch that flowed into Priest Lake we wouldn't care whether it's technically adjacent or not, we'd understand that some amount of the water-soluble pollutants are going to make it into the lake. The maddening part is treating construction sand like toxic waste.
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
Those Prediction Markets are predicting the Republican nominee not the general election. It's totally plausible Trump is extremely popular with the Republican base and not popular with the general electorate.
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
We have had categories of speech that are not protected by the first amendment for a long time, obscenity, threats, incitement to lawless action. It's easy to imagine how these narrow restrictions might be broadened and abused, yet we've had them for a long time without degenerating into a censorious dictatorship. The fact that you can imagine a hypothetical slippery slope isn't significant, the question is if we're actually sliding down it. I'm asking you for evidence that we are.
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
What is the similar law? There is specifically a Virginia statute against burning objects on public property with the intent to intimidate. Show me the law against 'protesting with an intent to intimidate".
While all the justices agreed that the EPA was wrong in this particular case the liberals and Kavanaugh authored a separate opinion because they disagreed with the majority's interpretation of the clean waters act. The issue is that water flows downstream, you can't protect the navigable waters of the U.S. without preventing people from dumping things into the marsh that flows into them. Congress wasn't super specific about what wetlands the EPA has authority over, I'm not a lawyer but a lot of the wrangling is over distinctions between waters that are "adjoining", "adjacent" or have "a significant nexus" with covered waters.
The EPA's argument was that the Sackett Family was filling in a wetland that had a subsurface flow into Priest lake and so needed federal permits. This got championed by Pacific Legal Fund, an organization founded by Ronald Reagan's former welfare reform team, because they saw a significant opportunity to loosen environmental regulation on property rights. Alito wrote the Majority opinion establishing a new test that only wetlands with a continuous surface connection to navigable waters are covered by the Clean Water Act, which would exclude a lot of wetlands that have been traditionally covered.
Kavanaugh actually broke with the conservative majority and sided with liberals on this issue because he thought that test was too strict. He argued that Alito's continuous surface connection test ignored the common meaning of "adjacent". It would exclude waters separated by man made barriers, such as marshes next to the Mississippi Levees, or swamps that drain into the Chesapeake Bay through subsurface connections. Pollutants dumped in these waters will end up in navigable waters and excluding them from coverage is nonsensical.
As usual with the Supreme Court it does look like Congress really needs to step in and clarify their law. The burden placed on property rights by saying that no one can build on their land if it has a tiny ditch that flows into a covered body of water is too high. But excluding swamps next to rivers without a surface connection from environmental protections seems to ignore basic hydrology.
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
Leonard Leo is a conservative legal activist with a 1.3 billion dollar legal fund. If he thought Virginia anti-cross burning laws found constitutional in 2003 posed a risk to conservative political power these people would have the most zealous representation money can buy. I'm skeptical that a law that bans burning objects for the purpose of intimidation on public property has a broad chilling effect on Conservative political organizations since most political rallies don't involve burning objects.
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
Southern State Legislatures were the ones making Jim Crow laws, why didn't they increase the sentences?
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
It's specifically a statute against intimidating people with burning objects written for the KKK and now applied to this Tiki Torch guy. I'm not sure how broadly that will apply given most political speech doesn't involve burning objects.
The civil rights takeaway is bizarre. Pro-segregationist southern states set the laws MLK and others were tried under not a vague, establishment. The whole point of the protests was to be arrested in order to produce news footage of well dressed non-violent black people being dragged away from lunch counters. If you look at cases like the 'Friendship Nine' they had the option to pay a fine and get out or do hard labor in prison and they did the hard labor and stayed in prison. King's most famous piece of writing was produced in prison. Jailing civil rights protestors for the six months this guy is set to serve doesn't look like a silver bullet that would kill the movement.
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
Conservatives are quite capable of lawfare and they have a 6-3 Conservative Supreme Court majority. If 'intent to intimidate' rulings were shutting down conservative political rallies around the country they're quite capable of funding legal challenges and appealing their way to a court where they have a sympathetic majority.
The cynical view is that Conservative legal elites are completely fine with having their embarrassing white nationalist fringe suppressed and don't expect the statute in question to be applied broadly. The less cynical view is that this guy was charged because he was part of a group that surrounded some counter protestors and is alleged to have menaced them with the torch, which means he's being punished constitutionally for interpersonal intimidation and not political speech.
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
I'm not an anti-death penalty activist and I think there is some acceptable number of innocents killed by the state. I don't really believe that vengeance has any value beyond deterrence. If we end up in AI utopia with limitless resources then I wouldn't want to give anyone the death penalty, but in the present the state needs to balance deterrence, cost, and accuracy/fairness.
I don't think your conflation of death with life imprisonment as things the state should never do on the off chance it does it to an innocent makes much sense. You can say that some harm to innocents in order to confine violent criminals is okay but once they are already confined killing them has minimal benefit and raises the possibility of such immense harm to an innocent that it's not worth it.
Let's say that we develop a technology that lets people experience not just death but a virtual lifetime of torment in hell before their execution. Maybe this has an additional deterrent effect, and so it's worth consigning some innocents to VR hell. But we keep cranking this up and up, it's not just one life time it's 10 lifetimes, a hundred, a thousand. Do we at some point hit diminishing returns on deterrence while the repugnance of an undeserving person suffering this becomes unbearable to you?
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
We went through an era where a number of convictions made under old forensic regimes got overturned by DNA evidence which reduced a lot of people's faith in the trial system. You might say if person did x they should die, but I'm only 95% certain they did x, so we'll confine them but not kill them on the off chance evidence emerges to vindicate them. Maybe then you give the prisoners who have no hope of such evidence emerging the option to kill themselves.
Though it's hard to ignore the perverse incentives that the worse you make prisons the more people will kill themselves and then you'll save money so it's a bad idea overall.
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
Is Trump only getting roughly 440 miles of border wall constructed a story of deep state subversion or the constitutional order functioning properly and the president being unable to build large infrastructure projects without congressional support. Trump only got a small congressional authorization for the Wall, roughly 1.5 billion. He tried to fund the rest with money authorized for military construction and drug interdiction and got held up in court with legal battles. Biden won and undid the reallocation of DoD funds to the border wall.
That's what typically happens when the president tries to govern by executive order, he's hampered by lawsuits and undone by the next president.
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
Yeah I voted this was warning worthy because it was exceptionally rude but I 100% agreed with the basic point. We're forum posters and not professional writers and so most literary stuff is going to be not great but people should be allowed to experiment with writing style without extremely rude criticism.
It's nice that he just kept the war plans in his highly secure hotel bathroom and showed them to memoir writers rather than faxing them to our enemies but that's still obviously illegal.
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