MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
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User ID: 896
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1mo ago
UK is 5 years, of which at least one needs to be as a permanent resident. US is 5 years as a permanent resident, or 3 if you are married to a citizen. So this isn't going to put Italy too far out of step with the rest of the world.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1mo ago
That's spacetime bending, not the world. The world moves along the bent geodesics while remaining resolutely round in its own reference frame.
"So dense light bends around him/her" remains my favourite physicist's insult.
The fifth circuit has already bitten. In SEC v. Jarkesy the 5th circuit ruled that the SEC was unconstitutional because an officer with decision-making power (in this case an administrative law judge) who enjoys two layers of civil service protection (i.e. the formal process to fire an SEC ALJ for cause can only be initiated by the SEC members, not the President, and the SEC members themselves cannot be fired by the President without a formal process) is under insufficient Presidential control to comply with the Appointments Clause. Jarkesy was upheld by SCOTUS on the basis that SEC ALJ's violate the right to trial by jury, without reaching the Appointments Clause argument.
The identical logic trivially applies to the NLRB, and at least one district court in the 5th circuit has already ruled that the NLRB is unconstitutional on that basis. Richard Hanania has a good layman's explanation. This is why there is a sudden spate of lawsuits by everyone and his dog making the argument in different districts and circuits.
Both Jarkesy arguments figure in the Audubon case, although it is less obvious that the jury trial argument applies.
SCOTUS don't want to take the case, but I don't see them avoiding it - there is going to be a circuit split sooner or later. A less conservative Court ruled that the Public Companies Accounting Oversight Board was unconstitutional on similar grounds, but the remedy was to weaken the civil service protections of the board members, not to toss the whole thing out. Thomas, Alito and Gorsuch are going to follow that decision. Roberts is not going to be the fifth vote for an opinion that blows up large swathes of the administrative state, so it comes down to Barret and Kav.
The ACLU has been absolutely hammered in left-wing circles for filing a lawsuit that would blow up the NLRB (a different argument to do with technical defects in the appointment of the NLRB General Counsel) but MSM coverage of the case focused on the substantive argument (which was wokestupid vs free speech - the employee in question was fired for bitching about her manager to co-workers, which would normally be protected under labour law, but which the ACLU said was fireably racist because the manager was black). So I think Audubon would survive, but make a lot of enemies.
Careful about "them" in the context of the Middle East.
The decision to go to war rather than accepting the 1947 partition plan was made by the governments of Egypt, Jordan, and Syria. To the extent that the Arab side is to blame for the 1967 Six-Day War (I am not going to get involved in that hoary old chestnut) it was a decision taken by Nasser for his own reasons, with the Jordanians and Palestinians taken along for the ride. Arafat is declared leader of the PLO by Nasser, and spends the next few years trying to set up a Palestinian pseudo-state in Jordan until the Jordanians kick him out. He then tries the same trick in Lebanon, during which time he gets UN recognition as the representative of "Palestine" based on lobbying by other Arab governments. Eventually Israel invades Lebanon in order to get Arafat, and he is smuggled out by the Americans as part of an American-brokered deal to stop non-Lebanese fighting each other on Lebanese territory. Arafat then hides out in Tunis seeking money from Saddam to pay for terrorism against Israel. "They" did bad things, but "they" do not meaningfully include "The Palestinians" if "The Palestinians" primarily refers to people living in Palestine.
For "The Palestinians" to have a chance of anything they need to have agency. The only time the actual human beings living in the West Bank and Gaza Strip were able to exercise agency was the First Intifada (1987-1993), which saw the emergence of a younger, bottom-up leadership based inside the territories - as opposed to the PLO which was funded by foreign governments and led by emigres. The new leadership was for obvious reasons more interested in the lives of the human beings living in the territories than the grand political narrative of "The Palestinian Cause" and was accordingly the first Arab voice to implicitly support a two-State solution.
My unconventional take is that the real missed opportunity was when Arafat was able to take back control of the Palestinian side of the negotiations and establish a Palestinian Authority led by PLO lifers rather than locals. (At the time Arafat was declared President of Palestine, he had spent four years in Palestine as a child and visited twice as an adult, one of those times being as an invading Egyptian soldier in the 1947-9 war) As of now all powerful factions in Palestinian politics (including Hamas and Fatah) are more concerned with using the Cause to appeal to foreign supporters than they are with the actual Palestinians.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1mo ago
This is in issue in real life as much as in fiction. Up to 1900, schoolboy history takes for granted that most wars are fought by patriotic men displaying martial virtue on both sides. (Wars against Muslims may or may not be an exception depending on who is writing - the version of schoolboy history I grew up with made a big deal about how Saladin was as much of a chivalric paragon as Richard the Lionheart. In so far as an actual villain was needed, it is the snivelling, sneaky, backstabbing French or Bad Prince John and the Sheriff of Nottingham on the home front). My favourite treatment of the subject is Kipling's Ballad of East and West, which famously begins "East is East and West is West and never the twain shall meet" but makes clear that it is going to refute this proposition before the first stanza is out - "There is neither East nor West ... when two strong men come face to face". The idea that both sides could be fundamentally good by the standards of the age and be fighting over a genuine irreconcilable difference is unremarkable.
Beginning with WW2, schoolboy history takes for granted that all wars are caused by the fundamental wickedness of one side. Even the footsoldiers can only be excused by denying their agency. The fact that WW2 was mostly caused by the fundamental wickedness of one side helps this transition but the actual tipping point is WW1 - the documentary evidence makes clear that the people starting the war did not think their enemies were driven by wickedness, and serious modern historiography agrees with them. But WW1 was so destructive (as in three of Europe's leading dynasties were cancelled and the British and French traditional elites were so depleted in numbers that they could no longer rule even if the people wanted them to) that conflict theory with sane actors was, with hindsight, inconceivable and mistake theory was morally unsatisfying, so people turned to "the Central Powers were motivated by wickedness" as a cope.
After WW1, institutions like the League of Nations and the Kellogg-Briand Pact are set up on the assumption that most wars are caused by the wickedness of one side and that collective punishment of the wicked is the way to bring an end to war. This is, of course, a midwit view. The "sophisticated" alternative is that some wars are indeed caused by the wickedness of one side, but that most wars are caused by the fundamental wickedness of both sides. The view that sane, neutral or good actors can have a conflict worth fighting over for sane reasons is now fringe.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1mo ago
This is what we did before vote-counting machines existed. It's what they still do in larger countries like India.
India only have one race per election (rarely two), and they don't try to count overnight - they allow a full day for counting after several days to allow ballot boxes from remote rural precincts to be taken to the counting centre.
In the UK, we don't try to count more than one race overnight. If there are multiple races (e.g. Westminster and local elections on the same day) we count the Westminster election overnight and count the local elections the following day. Three races is about the practical limit for a full-day count - I have attended local counts with three open seats per ward, and London mayoral elections also involve three races (Mayor, constituency assembly member, and PR list assembly member) and in both cases the results come out late in the afternoon. London count the mayoral election on Saturday (polling day is Thursday) to given electoral staff and party observers time to recover from polling day - having done a day's GOTV followed by observing a three-race count the next day I understand why they do this.
Taking the largest state as an example, California had 4 major races in 2020 (POTUS, US House, both houses of the State legislature) and 12 propositions. In 2022 there were 13 major races (scheduled US senate, special US senate, US House, both houses of the State legislature, 7 statewide offices, Board of Equalization), 7 propositions, and 4 judicial elections. Add 2-3 county-level races, 1-2 city level races and 1-2 other races (e.g. school board) and you are looking at an average of about 25 races. Hand-counting that at British levels of efficiency (which are above the global average, and well above anything California could manage) would take about two weeks even if there were no contentious recounts. Americans expect the first count to be complete by the early hours of Wednesday morning, and MAGA are already claiming that delayed counts are evidence of fraud.
To hand-count all races in a typical US election in a one-day daylight count, let alone overnight, would be a bigger commitment of resources to vote-counting than any other country has ever made. There is a reason why the US adopted voting machines long before voting machines that actually worked were available - remember the Florida 2000 "chad" debacle. I'm not sure, but it looks like the US starts using voting machines around the same time that the media starts to expect next-day results. Would it be a good idea? Probably. Is it technically feasible? I don't know. The number of races you can count in parallel is limited by the size of the available count venue and the bandwidth of key senior people who need to review every result before it is announced. You also run out of sufficiently distinct colours of ballot paper. I remember the time the city council election was on blue paper and the county council election was on lilac paper - it caused several hours of delay and the administrator responsible was transferred.
Would convincing the media that they could wait two weeks for the state and local results to allow for a hand count to happen at reasonable speed be a good idea? It depends if it would actually increase confidence in elections. My gut feeling is that in today's America it would not.
Would reducing the number of directly elected positions so that there are fewer races to count be a good idea? Almost certainly in my view, but the argument about whether or not to elect the dog catcher is not primarily about ease of election administration.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1mo ago
If your problem with Reform is that it lacks a coherent internal structure
I don't have a problem with Reform - I support proportional representation because I think the way that excluding 20% of the population from meaningful political participation (whether that is the populist right in the UK with the globalists in control of the Conservative party, or the centre-right in the US with MAGA in control of the Republican party, or various left-wing equivalents) is bad for democracy, and that Reform should have more MPs than they do. I profoundly disagree with Reform and I am proud of the fact that my country is more resistant than most to their kind of politics, but getting along with your political opponents is part of living in a civilisation.
I think that Nigel Farage's decision to take up anti-lockdownism in 2020 was not the result of a social movement. You implied that it was. The presence or absence of an internal democratic structure in Reform is relevant to this question.
re-founded during a time when the organisation of something akin to Conservative Associations or Constituency Labour Parties would have been mostly illegal.
This is incorrect. Reform was founded (as the Brexit Party) in November 2018 long before the pandemic. The name was changed during the lockdown, but if Farage had wanted to stand up a normal party organisation he had had over a year to do so. In any case, Alba (founded February 2021) was able to stand up a more normal political party organisation during a COVID lockdown (although, I agree, not a full set of local associations).
GB News is not foreign media.
GB News hit the air in June 2021, after Farage's attempts to run a US-style anti-lockdown campaign had failed. In 2020 his most lucrative gig appears to have been Fox News.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1mo ago
The election security procedure that is universal in Europe and Asia but not the United States is public or semi-public hand counting of paper ballots. This would be prohibitively expensive in the US because of the large number of races in an American election - it is very unusual for a European election to include more than two or three races, whereas a typical US election includes dozens of state and local races as well as up to three (President, House, Senate) federal ones.
Countries which have complete, accurate and up-to-date lists of resident citizens (i.e. not the Anglosphere) have meaningful citizenship checks to register to vote, and generally require a national ID card (which proves citizenship as well as identity) to be shown when voting. Countries which don't do Papieren, Bitte culture generally have weak voter ID cards which could be defeated with a $10 fake ID if anyone actually wanted to commit retail in-person voter fraud, which empirically they don't. (Postal vote fraud is much easier.) Apart from a few red states in the US, no country without a citizen register requires proof of citizenship to register or vote. (In general, in countries without a citizen register, the only strong documentary proof of citizenship would be a passport)
My browser ate an effortpost on this point, but the fate of ERIC demonstrates that the MAGA activist base is not acting in good faith on election integrity issues, so there is no point in the Democrats trying to co-operate with them or appease them. The median voter (quite correctly) doesn't care enough about election integrity for it to be a winning issue for either side in the general - the noise about election integrity is there because it is a winning issue in Republican primaries full of Dale Gribble voters.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1mo ago
Easy procedural decisions are the ones where a political court is least likely to make a political decision on the underlying merits - the cost of making the legally correct decision is usually low (because the litigant who goofed can often refile, and in any case it doesn't set a bad precedent on the merits) and the cost of making the politically correct decision is high (because it messes up the body of precedent on what should be an easy procedural question, which generates extra work for every judge in the jurisdiction). There is also the possibility that the procedural issue itself has partisan political implications - in fact it almost always does, with left-wing judges favouring civil plaintiffs and criminal defendants. And an appeals court deciding a procedural issue knows that the procedural precedent usually has more impact than the substance of the case at bar.
A good example from the other side is the mifepristone case - SCOTUS decided 9-0 on standing with Thomas' concurrence saying that the plaintiffs lost even harder on standing than the majority - even though Thomas and Alito at least would probably have sided with the plaintiffs on the merits.
This is also why Media Matters stand a better change than you might think of winning on appeal in the 5th circuit if Musk wins the "ads on Nazi posts" lawsuit at trial - the procedural precedent created by allowing an anti-free-speech lawsuit to go ahead in a forum-shopped jurisdiction is on balance a pro-left one and the Fedsoc judges who dominate the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals know this.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1mo ago
I remember Nassim Taleb trying to push back against the "Black Roman" discourse on the grounds that it was erasing proto-Arabs from history. (The question of to what extent modern-day Arabic-speaking North Africans are descended from historical Berbers vs the Arab colonizers is hoary, but "African" i.e. North African Romans were plausibly related to modern-day Arabs in a way that they are not to sub-Saharan blacks). It didn't work - even in the UK blacks are comfortably further up the progressive stack than other ethnic minorities.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1mo ago
I know exactly what a company is - my day job involves managing a regulated Group with separately licensed legal entities.
I also know why the entities registered with the Electoral Commission for the Conservatives, Labour and Liberal Democrats are unincorporated associations, with the company set up to hold the asset being a company limited by guarantee whose members are certain elected officers of the unincorporated association.
The fact that Reform is set up as a company limited by shares is linked to something important about the internal democratic processes of Reform, namely that there are none, and that Nigel Farage retained (literal and figurative) ownership even during the period where Richard Tice was leader and Farage held no party office. There is a reason why non-profit companies (whether or not they are charities) are usually limited by guarantee - the Koch-Crane feud at Cato being an example that was briefly famous in US right-wing circles of what can go wrong if they are shareholder-owned. Reform (and Cato back in 1977) chose to do the weird thing for a reason.
If a normal political party with Reform's level of support decided through its internal democratic processes to campaign on COVID lockdown blame, that would be a sign that a substantial movement was doing so. If Reform's owner decides that Reform should campaign on COVID lockdown blame, it is a sign that one man is doing so. Given that one man's primary source of income is his appearances on foreign media, it is more likely than not that the "substantial movement" he is representing is the one paying him - he certainly didn't find himself leading a substantial movement of still-salty-about-lockdown libertarians in the UK given Reform's anemic poll performance at the time.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1mo ago
Reform UK Party Ltd is a private limited company with a single controlling shareholder, not a substantial movement. By the time Reform was polling above 5%, Farage had resigned as leader and it had gone back to running a standard-issue right populist campaign based around dubiously-funded tax cuts and reduced immigration. COVID wasn't mentioned in Reform's 2024 election campaign, at least as far as a random voter who was paying attention could see.
Right populism in the UK is fundamentally about Islamic immigration. The attempt to make US-style public health skepticism part of the movement failed.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1mo ago
Is this COVID fatigue? Narrative control in a friendly media? Is it really a nothing burger? What do you personally think is going on here?
Whatever it is, it is US-specific. In the UK, officials who broke their own lockdown rules and got caught consistently suffered career-ending consequences. Partygate broke after COVID was "over" for us, but was still the multi-month-long all-consuming scandal that brought down a Prime Minister.
The full list of notorious fired lockdown-breakers includes:
- Boris Johnson (Prime Minister)
- Dominic Cummings (de facto Chief of Staff to Johnson)
- Neil Ferguson (leading pandemic modeller at Imperial College and SAGE member)
- Catherine Calderwood (Scottish chief medical officer)
- Margaret Ferrier (SNP MP)
- Matt Hancock (Health Secretary)
I don't know why US figures survived this kind of stuff. I think the British approach to elites breaking their own lockdowns was a lot healthier, and is part of the reason that we don't have a substantial libertarian movement trying to relitigate COVID.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1mo ago
Sorry for bumping last week's thread, but I rediscovered what civil defence nerds seem to agree is the best "how to survive nuclear war" book out there - Cresson Kearney's Nuclear War Survival Skills. The 1987 edition is available free online in numerous places (the 1999 edition adds a one-page low-content update downplaying the risks of nuclear terrorism, but is otherwise identical). The 2022 version (updated by Steven Harris after Kearney's death) is only available in paper format. I haven't read it and can't vouch for the quality of the update.
If you are going to attempt to build the "Kearney Fallout Meter" then you will need a published paper copy because the calibration of the meter relies on actual-size templates in the book. Given the unreliability of computer tech post-nuke, I think a (possibly self-)printed copy is a nuclear prep essential in any case.
The primary audience for the book is urbanites and suburbanites who are planning evacuate a city when the Soviet tanks are crossing Germany (or equivalent) and need to build a fallout shelter in 48 hours or less when they arrive at their bugout destination with the contents of a 1980's-size family car plus locally available materials (and potentially with the military-age male family members absent - he specifically includes shelter designs that can be built by average-strength women). There is a reasonable amount of content about a permanent pre-built shelter though (the basement as is doesn't offer enough protection if you are downwind of a groundburst or it rains during the key fallout window), which would be more relevant given that Bendigo is outside any plausible blast zone.
Given Kearney's background at Oak Ridge, this book is almost certainly the civil defence advice that the US government developed and then decided not to publish because they didn't want the plebs to think that nuclear war was winnable. You can tell it is written by someone who is serious about this because it takes for granted that you will not be trying to follow normal radiation-safety rules in the aftermath of a nuclear blast - for example it recommends prioritising airflow over radiation safety because you will need a lot of airflow to keep the shelter occupants cool in hot weather and the risk of airborne contamination is low, whereas official government advice on both sides of the Cold War was to minimise ventilation to the minimum needed to keep CO2 levels down.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1mo ago
But can you eat any man opposed to Jackson?
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1mo ago
Yes. In this model, there absolutely are missionaries wandering around with magic underwear under their cheap suits calling themselves Latter-Day Saints and insisting that there are no Mormon Christians and that the word "Mormon Chrisitan" is a Satanic dog-whistle. And in ten years' time they will be saying that "Latter-Day Saints" is a dog-whistle too.
But the debate among Motteposters appears to be about whether "Mormon Christians" are Christians.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1mo ago
It's like going into a restaurant and complaining "this food tastes like sewage", then getting told that you're a liar because the food doesn't taste like sewage, it tastes like feces, so tasting like sewage is a literally false belief.
This isn't a perfect analogy, because feces is a major constituent of sewage, and indeed is a large part of what makes sewage noxious. I don't know how one would taste the difference between sewage and feces, whereas is an obvious meaningful difference between cats and dogs - try throwing sticks for a cat to fetch. What you mean is that there is no difference in the political impact, if true, of immigrants eating cats and immigrants eating dogs. You are obviously correct about this, possible quibbles about traditional Korean or Vietnamese cuisine notwithstanding. If the immigrants were, in fact, eating cats, then you could call "they're eating the dogs" directionally correct, but that appears to be a Motte-specific usage and truthy is what most very online people would call it.
But in an environment where people care about the factual truth and falsity of statements and not just the political impact, a cat is not a dog. If you report a cat theft to the police and it turns out that the missing animal was actually a dog, you are going to get in trouble for, yes, lying. Trump could have misspoken, but saying "dog" when you mean "cat" isn't a particularly common mistake. If Trump meant to say "dog" when the social media posts he was signal-boosting said "cat" because he didn't care about the difference this says something about his communication style - namely that he is 100% concerned about the political impact of statements and 0% concerned about their factual content. If the ratio was 90-10 like it is for most politicians, he would have said "cat" because, as you point out, "they're eating the cats" is no less politically impactful than "they're eating the dogs".
There is a saying which people use to acknowledge that they are mainly concerned about the political impact of statements vs their factual content: "it has the added advantage of being true". Based on Trump's beliefs at the time, he had the opportunity to make a politically advantageous claim that had the added advantage of being true, and didn't take it. Given the discussion on this thread, there is a non-zero number of people for whom this is a positive signal - Trump is implicitly saying "I am not like those smarty-pants intellectuals who care about the factual accuracy of sufficiently truthy political claims."
"it's really cats, not dogs, so Trump is a liar"
I explicitly didn't call Trump a "liar". We all agree that what is going on is more complex than that. The whole point of this thread is to discuss how a man whose statements frequently evaluate as "false" when parsed using standard English grammar has a reputation as a straight talker among his supporters. I am proposing that "bullshit" is a better framework for understanding it than "liar".
I think the "Cultural Marxism" discourse on the Motte tends to go down rabbit holes due to arguments about the meaning of words. The core facts are:
- The thing that right-wingers are talking about when they say "Cultural Marxism" is real, is broadly on the left, and is bad viewed from both a liberal and a conservative perspective.
- The thing changes what it calls itself frequently in order to avoid being named by its political opponents. (See Freddie de Boer).
- At some point in the past, some but not all of the people doing the thing called it "Cultural Marxism", but they stopped when right-wingers started using the term.
- Some, but not all, of the people doing the thing consider themselves Marxists. Almost all the people doing the thing agree that it rejects certain tenets of orthodox Marxism, they just disagree on whether they reject enough to make them a continuation of Marxism, or to make them something else.
- The orthodox Marxists that still exist (including Freddie) are very clear that they do not consider the thing to be Marxism. Mostly, they hate it as much as we do.
- All the people doing the thing are influenced directly or indirectly by Marx, but that isn't saying much because everyone (including his opponents) is influenced by Marx. In most cases this line of influence passes through Gramsci.
The argument about whether or not "Cultural Marxism" is really Marxism is analogous to the argument about whether Mormons are really Christians, and is equally unproductive. From the perspective of outsiders using the word to attack something we dislike, the more interesting question is whether thinking of "Cultural Marxism" as a form of Marxism helps or hinders our efforts to defend against it. *
From a liberal perspective, "Cultural Marxism" and orthodox Marxism are bad for sufficiently different reasons that lumping them together makes you dumber. In terms of epistemics, orthodox Marxism claims to know things which aren't true, whereas "Cultural Marxism" wrongly accuses its opponents of knowing nothing. In terms of political impacts, orthodox Marxism rejects individual action because it might lead to economic inequality, whereas "Cultural Marxism" tries to prevent effective collective action by saying it is impossible until we have all completed therapy for our internal systems of oppression. I oppose using the term "Cultural Marxism" because orthodox Marxists, most "Cultural Marxists", and intelligent liberals all agree that "Cultural Marxism" is not a subset of Marxism, so the word is misleading.
From a cultural conservative perspective, both "Cultural Marxism" and orthodox Marxism are godless, anti-cultural, and anti-us, and lumping them together is harmless. I think this is a bad case of outgroup homogeneity bias, but I understand where the cultural conservatives are coming from.
FWIW, I call the thing "Wokism"
* In the Mormon analogy, it is logical for anti-Christians to think that Mormonism is Christianity regardless of the theological arguments because they oppose it for the same reasons.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1mo ago
In this case it's "'they're eating the dogs' is a statement intended to induce the false belief in listeners" that is a false statement intended to induce the false belief in listeners, and this is precisely why people have had it with "lying like a lawyer" types.
You take a sentence I posted out of context (I go on to point out that bullshit is a better framework for this type of statement than lies), and respond with a bunch of barely-parseable word salad that looks like (and is, when finally parsed) an allegation of dishonesty, and you accuse me of lying like a lawyer?
Trump said that immigrants in Ohio were eating dogs and cats. As a result of him saying this, some of his target audience of low-information swing voters now believe that immigrants in Ohio are eating dogs and cats, and are therefore more likely to cast an anti-immigration vote at the election in November. Generating this change in belief was a major purpose of making the statement. Given background that motteposters know and the debate audience probably didn't, the fact that Trump said "dogs" and not "cats" may reveal interesting information about his thought processes that I hope to elaborate on in a later effortpost.
I am making the conjunction of the above claims, with the intention that they be taken seriously and literally. If you disagree with me about the facts, the spirit of this board is that you should identify the claim you disagree with rather than spewing insinuations.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1mo ago
Laws are specific. Laws about lying in the US have to be particularly specific, because the First Amendment protects some, but not all, lies.
There are laws which broadly criminalise lying to federally regulated banks. There are laws that broadly criminalise lying about publically-traded securities. These laws don't apply to private lenders or shares in closely-held companies, where the only lies which are criminal are ones which constitute common-law fraud. (Obviously lying about your startup can reach the level of common-law fruad, as Elizabeth Holmes learned the hard way).
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1mo ago
It seems to me that a question we ought asking is "is Trump really lying?". Not in the sense of whether a given statement is false? so much as in the sense of is he really deceiving any one or otherwise behaving dishonestly?
"They're eating the dogs" is a statement intended to induce the false belief in listeners that immigrants are stealing and eating pet dogs. Even if the rumours Trump based the claim on had been true, they were about cats, not dogs.
The fact that Trump doesn't care about the factual truth or falsity of the words that come out of his mouth to the point where he says "dogs" when he could easily have said "cats" and been making a defensible claim about facts that were in dispute at the time is a perfect piece of smoking gun evidence as to what is actually going on. In the Harry Frankfurt sense, Trump is rarely lying but he is constantly bullshitting.
I'm at work at the moment but effortpost to follow.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1mo ago
The teamsters have most of their membership in warehouses IIRC. I think a lot of it is just working class voters favoring Trump even when they’re making good money.
But "working class voters" in general haven't shifted to Trump by 35 points since April - they have supported him ever since 2016.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1mo ago
Phylloxera is another example. There is still no way of controlling it even with 21st century technology - if it wasn't for the good fortune that vitis vinifera grows well when grafted onto the rootstock of American vine species with natural resistance (but which produce undrinkable wine) we would have lost >95% of our ability to grow wine.
As a (technical) Irishman and an oenophile, I am genuinely conflicted about whether potato blight or phylloxera is the worst thing to come out of America. But both make high-fructose corn syrup and The Phantom Menace look like nothingburgers.
The "inmates taking over the asylum" theory is that junior staffers at lefty orgs are pushing wokestupid at the expense of the mission of the org, and management are unable to stop them. The ACLU case is the opposite. A manger fired a staffer for what they claimed to be wokestupid reasons, but was probably actually just powertripping management, and the ACLU doubled down because the manager was black. Unless you think the black first-line manager counts as an inmate taking over the asylum, this is a wokestupid vs free speech type case. The Audobon case is nothing to do with wokestupid - the underlying labour law case is a highly technical issue about information exchange in union contract negotiations.
In both cases, I think management hired outside counsel and told them to put anything in that looked like a winning argument, which is standard practice in cases where the stakes are high enough. And given the Jarkesy situation I discuss further down, these things are potentially winning arguments. I doubt either the ACLU or Audobon leadership read the briefs being submitted on their behalf, although their in-house lawyers should have done and should have spotted and escalated this kind of thing. I work in a bank and one of the subjects of the fun, fun, mandatory online trainings we do every quarter is that it is everyone's job to stop and escalate if they see something that could be an utter public humiliation (or reputational risk, as the corporate types call it).
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