Tomato
5mo ago
I saw this explanation somewhere else but it's actually very straightforward.
Burglary is a crime of entering someone's house in order to commit some other crime. To prove that someone is a burglar you just need to show that they entered someone's house and that they intended to commit some other crime. It's okay if some people on the jury think the burglar was going to commit theft and some people on the jury think the burglar was going to assault the homeowner. The burglar himself may not even have been sure which he was going to do---he just had a crowbar and was playing it by ear.
Similarly here. Falsifying business records in the first degree is when you falsify business records with the intent to commit some other crime. As with burglary not everyone needs to agree on what the other crime was.
Tomato
5mo ago
Well, imagine a boot stamping on a human face— forever.
Man, what the heck are you talking about? Americans have never been richer, had higher incomes, had more political and economic freedoms. The job market has been stronger-for-longer than it has in years. Inequality is on a downward trend. Things are incredible right now. Whose boot is stamping on whose face??
If tiktok zoomers entering the real world for the first time, and wanna be coal miners instating on a maintaining a antiquated fantasy instead of getting a real job in a real city think things are bad now, wait until we get a normal economy.
Tomato
5mo ago
"1" seems to completely normal political campaigning. E.g., The Hillary Clinton email server thing.
Tomato
5mo ago
White Americans are becoming poorer.
Is this true? I can see it being true in a relative sense as other groups catch up, but it seems totally fantastical given that basically everyone has become massively richer over the past 40, 30, 20, 10, 5 years.
If you do nothing politically or culturally productive, nothing will happen.
They are incapable of doing that because the right has no human capital
- Bloomberg and Giuliani obviously come to mind here
- Here's a list of prosecutions against political people. https://www.cnn.com/2024/05/14/politics/doj-republicans-democrats-what-matters/index.html
- Falsification of business records is a common thing to prosecute for. Here: https://www.law.com/newyorklawjournal/2023/04/06/new-york-state-has-issued-nearly-9800-felony-charges-of-falsifying-business-records-since-2015/
I hear have an underlying apprehension of violence that rises by the day including today. I don't believe in their hearts these people want violence, but as the right is the political alignment predicted by having superior-to-average faculties at assessing danger, I think even if only intuitively they understand and greatly fear how swiftly we approach violence as the only way out. Blessed are the meek, blessed are those who know when to draw the sword. If and when it happens, it will be the right and only time.
Can you self reflect for a second about how ridiculous this LARPing fanfic is? This is the right's equivalent of lefty women breathlessly imagining the Handmaids Tale is going to come true. The core Trump demographic is old, obese, uneducated people. They are unhealthy. They have no human capital. They live in the middle of nowhere. Their entire personality is centered around talking about how scary they imagine New York to be. Any people like this who are actually talented, have human capital, and are capable of acting with agency have moved to the coasts to participate in the real world.
They are a party of losers. Their greatest political achievement is electing an elite who openly scorns them and handed out tax cuts to other elites. Their second greatest political achievement is one of them having a heart attack during their protest in DC. These days they comically threaten to "boycott" New York, as if the Red Lobster in Times Square will even notice that they aren't there. They aren't some dark brooding populist force that's going to be the vanguard of the revolution. They're a bunch of people who have been left behind and resist the grownups' efforts to help.
It is about a man who refused to kneel when demanded by seated power and has risen to threaten their entire existence. This conviction heralds the imminent arrival of the pivotal figure of American history. It doesn't have to be Trump, but where we are in the reverberations of history is no earlier than the election of Buchanan.
Trump is a talented guy who recognized there are a bunch of losers out there and figured out how to manipulate them. These people spend their political capital on banning lab grown meat to own the libs. They're not leaving anything of note behind in history.
my enemies’ lawfare, my rule of law
It’s hard to take the lawfare accusations seriously.
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there are tons of high level republicans who are not subject to prosecution, with the obvious explanatory difference being that they, you know, didn’t commit crimes
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dem DOJs go after dem politicians for similar violations
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the same DA goes after normal people for similar violations
This looks like a case of “man does crimes, gets prosecuted for said crimes.” The only remarkable thing is that this man is a former politician with a loser cult of personality.
Let me flip it around: can you honest to god hand on the Bible imagine a scenario in which Trump committed a crime and you don’t call the resulting prosecution “lawfare?”
Edit: I also suspect that the venn diagram of people calling for Trump to lock up Hillary over the made-up email thing and people calling the prosecution of Trump "lawfare" is close to a perfect circle.
Tomato
5mo ago
Russia is encircled
I genuinely don't understand this. What are you talking about? Russia has a border with a a couple of NATO countries. Where's the "encirclement"?
and powerless
Russia sucks, West to blame
Tomato
6mo ago
Almost everything and everyone still connected to Open AI strikes me as incredibly creepy and scammy but this is one of those things where I feel like we as a society will just have to get over. Did they steal her voice? Did they hire someone who sounds just like her? It hardly matters; soon enough it will be trivially easy to create deep fake virtual porn with a realistic voice saying whatever nasty shit you want it to. There's no putting the lid on this.
Tomato
6mo ago
Yeah I tend to agree, I met a 30 year old virgin on a dating app. She was good looking and socially normal, just had never really gotten around to it.
Tomato
6mo ago
The premise that “24 year old female virgin” is a rare specimen is in itself pretty interesting.
Tomato
6mo ago
"problematic" optics of a non-Japanese person running around slaughtering a bunch of Japanese people
For sure the battle lines would be completely inverted if he were white.
Tomato
6mo ago
I just don’t think you should be able to tell your neighbor what he can do on his land.
Tomato
6mo ago
California’s housing problem and people’s political views on it is completely orthogonal to national party differences. It’s caused by local zoning restrictions which is basically older incumbent homeowners versus younger new entrant renters. Through demographics it’s probably accidentally related to national party affiliation but that’s likely weak and completely incidental. Whether the locals like Trump or not has nothing to do with whether they’re in favor of multi family apartment building construction. The state (Democrat) has implemented pro-building policies that short-circuit local power to restrict it but again you should think of this as largely orthogonal to D vs R. Viewing this as a Trump-related culture war issue totally misses the mark IMO. (I’m responding to your comment but this goes for everyone in this thread).
Tomato
6mo ago
If that’s a priority for you there are tons of places in the country where demand is low enough to allow that. It’s totally crazy for us as a society to empower someone to prevent his neighbor from doing what he wants to do with his own land in the most productive, in demand location on the planet.
Tomato
6mo ago
The entire sunset district could look like Manhattan. It’s not like we don’t know how to build buildings that are taller than two stories. It’s a completely self-inflicted space constraint.
Tomato
6mo ago
Most of the US has gotten much richer and has also gained population. Prices are particularly so much higher in the Bay Area because it’s impossible to build new housing in the Bay Area. In other words, demand has increased everywhere but supply has been flat (or even negative given depreciation of the existing stock) particularly in California, due to incumbent local NIMBYs.
Tomato
6mo ago
No one has an obligation to sell you their home just because it would improve your commute and they're not commuting any more.
They have made it illegal for their neighbors to use their land how they want to use it (e.g., build higher density apartment buildings). Nobody is forcing granny to sell her home; granny is preventing other people from doing things with their own land. That's a real economic harm.
Tomato
6mo ago
There are plenty of people who want to sell, the problem is that their neighbors have made it illegal to build higher density on their own land.
Tomato
6mo ago
I'm sure that the wealthy home-owning Indians and Asians are voting for policies that keep their home prices high. But most wealthy homeowners in the areas you're thinking about are old white people. Indians and Asians are mostly renters. If you have some data on what they're voting for I'd be very interested.
Idle Hispanics and Blacks are not living in the Bay Area and are certainly not the reason that your parents' old home sold for $3m. That's such a ridiculous thing to say to be honest, I'm sort of shocked that you connect these two things. Hispanic immigrants, particularly those in the Bay Area, tend to work really hard and be model citizens compared to the natives.
Bay Area prices are high because incumbent (mostly) white people don't allow new construction.
Tomato
6mo ago
House prices are high because of policies that people like your parents voted for. Hispanics, Asians, and Indians aren’t voting for zoning restrictions and fighting tooth and nail for Prop 13 and similar policies. At least guys like Newsom are wielding power at the state level to force lazy freeloaders (65 year old whites) to make California livable for normal hardworking people (30 year old Hispanics).
I genuinely cannot think of a single "smart" device that has made my life better but it's easy to think of a ton that have made my life a little bit worse. This isn't a privacy or security thing. The devices are genuinely pointless and annoying. We recently unplugged our Alexa because it was pointless and annoying. There was probably a week where I could come up with contrived tasks for it to help with so I could pretend it wasn't completely stupid. I'm tired of tech people telling me I need this or that and making it impossible to find a house in the Bay Area with a normal boring thermostat. It's an immense treat that the used grill I just bought has no electronics built in.
The best argument for IoT devices was that they were a lot cheaper than normal devices because a VC was spending some pension fund's money to "build market share."
We can quibble over the specifics of how "similar" you want examples to be but the broader point is that dem DOJs go after dems when they do shady white collar activities too.
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