anti_dan
14hr ago
The uproar about Hunter Biden always felt farcical. From Clinton's emails to Mar a lago documents.
Hunter Biden wasn't farcical inherently, the DOJ's handling of his cases were. They decided to go for the least important crimes he committed, the gun, the taxes, and ignore FARA and anything else that put the microscope anywhere near Joe (see also the total lack of investigation into the classified documents found in Joe's garage, basement, and Chinese-funded university office). Hunter has never been about Hunter any more than busting any street dealer for dope is about that dealer. The target of a legitimate investigation is the Biden crime family whos head and chief operating officer was, for most of the most know relevant potential crimes, vice-president Joe Biden. Joe ran an open air corruption market getting his failson sinecures in return for official government acts, as well as his brother, and his wife.
anti_dan
14hr ago
Biden might be mad at Kamala and Democrats, but he certainly is not working with Trump, particularly on J6. I think Biden has truly internalized a lot of the propaganda and thinks Trump is a Putin puppet who tried to overthrow democracy on J6. Just like with the fake DUI claim he made about his dead wife, there are many Bidenisms that are no longer lies for him. As George Costanza would say, its not a lie if you believe it.
anti_dan
17hr ago
I would think no defense counsel would agree to basically any of your plan.
anti_dan
21hr ago
By the time they guy is arrested and booked our officer and store clerk are probably on hour 10 of their shift. You want them to hang out for another 2 for some sort of preliminary hearing, then another 3 for a jury trial (where are these jurors coming from, and who is doing voir dire by the way?).
anti_dan
2d ago
Yeah. All the prison reform projects I even fisk run into the issue that the primary purpose of prison is incapacitation.
The other issue with prison reform is that all these problems are correlated. If your prisons are expensive, it is because progressive activists have won a lot of victories, why do you think policing and the courts aren't similarly being tied up by progressive activists?
anti_dan
2d ago
I'd credit fraud and fraud-adjacent activity much more for that given what we have seen.
anti_dan
2d ago
They are of course lying their asses off. Harris took multiple multi-day breaks in the campaign. She really wasn't that busy, judging by presidential campaign standards.
I remember specifically on the day that it was announced she officially wasn't doing Rogan they tried the talking point that he should come to her and do a shortened interview because she was so busy. On that day she had a single event scheduled starting at 7 PM.
anti_dan
2d ago
I think the Trump campaign was surprised because they thought:
- Democrats and the media (but I repeat myself) would never give up on their "he's totally not senile" psy-op;
- Joe would make them take it from his cold dead fingers.
anti_dan
2d ago
As context, Harris's campaign did a lot better than we expected, and than the democratic establishment expected. They made a very visible pivot towards the center, especially on immigration and the border. I'm not sure many of us would've predicted Harris, if she ran, would be able to brand herself as a "tough border-state prosecutor" a year ago. It's easy to have an impression that 'harris campaign maximally bad' without keeping context in mind.
I think the idea was correct. Democrats do much better by campaigning to the right. Clinton was a good ole southern boy, Obama was against gay marriage, Biden was a return to normal. Sure these were all obvious lies, but they worked for a part of the electorate. But Kamala was incapable of selling the lie. She couldn't get even one step outside of her talking points without crashing and burning, and that was the problem. She was quite keen to tell us all that she was "the only one in the race who had prosecuted international criminal organizations" but oddly she was never able to elaborate on this. No names, dates, stories. Its almost like that was a fabrication.
anti_dan
2d ago
The reason the average trial takes so long to commence is defendant delay. If you shoot a clerk at 7/11 and get picked up that day. You'll be charged by tomorrow, in bond court the day after, indicted and arraigned within 30 days, and the prosecution will be ready for trial in 60. But your public defender (because lets be honest you dont have and cant keep a real job) wont be. And you will flirt with a private attorney half a dozen times. And they will lose the discovery the state already gave them and demand the same video surveillance 10x before trying to get you to plea, and you will flirt with said plea for 3 years before demanding a trial that you will lose. But now it will be a big pain for everyone because the murder detective retired to Florida and all the 7/11 employees who used to maintain that video system now work for wal mart on the other side of the state.
anti_dan
5d ago
Agree, just as Science + Politics = Politics, such is true for most classroom discussions as well.
anti_dan
6d ago
She also cynically accused Mace of trying to exploit the issue to get her name in the papers. Mace responded by calling AOC dumb and her suggestion disgusting, but she didn't offer any alternative enforcement mechanism.
I think this is one of the dumbest possible critiques of this policy. The simple answer is, "whatever happened when a man went into a ladies room in 2000." Which, quite simply, is if they did their business in a quick and non threatening manner, nothing happened. Maybe some women would look at him askance or ask him if he is lost. Only when said man started ogling women and girls, whipping out his junk, etc would security be contacted. And such is a perfectly reasonable enforcement mechanism. On top of that the bright line rule, is very convenient as an escalation or extra charge for the police/prosecution and as evidence of criminal intent.
anti_dan
7d ago
That is simply an example. But before I would consider wokeness to be in decline I'd like to see good hard data on real world results. Decline in trans prescriptions would be an interesting one; several prestigious colleges admitting 0-1 blacks in their freshman (or 1L law school) classes; several other tech companies following the Musk Model and firing 80% of the employees (the retained being overwhelmingly male and white+asian). Maybe you can think of some more, but those are ones off the top of the head.
anti_dan
8d ago
I haven't seen any evidence that puberty blocker hormone prescriptions are down or anything of the sort.
Wokeness has lost a lot of battles, particularly in court recently, but that doesn't mean it stopped trying. Its just more land they still need to conquer.
anti_dan
8d ago
We'll probably move out to the burbs when we have out kid of school age for the better schools, not because we fear the area.
This is exactly the kind of problem Democrats need to solve if they want to win people back. People dont want long commutes and to move out for schools, but the reality is that if a default place requires very close oversight of a 2 year old, its not really fit for humans. If there is glass on the ground or shit, perhaps you have a dog and have had to pull them away in your neighborhood. Kids shouldnt be on leashes, they are humans that need to learn, but learning not to step in the dog shit is not so valuable a lesson for a 2 year old. Particularly when that dog shit is mixed with glass in a kids playground where, in more normal places, you can trust to just let said 2 year old march around while you enjoy a coffee.
Plus the playground bullies are out of control ATM in cities. Many biters. Cops will charge YOU if you discipline or physically separate a kid while defending your own. Particularly if the stack isn't in your favor.
And you know all this. You know "better schools" is a euphemism for better peer students and peer parents. No amount of Stuyvesant and Stevenson teachers would make Haitian kids learn. And I sure as heck know the Stevenson kids dont have any broken glass on their feeder campus.
anti_dan
8d ago
Youtube comments sections have gotten signifigantly further right over the last 3 years. That's basically social media.
You'd still get banned for saying "you cant be a woman and have a penis" so its still far left of the center.
anti_dan
8d ago
The answer for me would be:
- Crime;
- Education;
- Immigration.
Most things that are expensive right now (and even pre-Covid) are not so because the are inherently so. Most cities and areas are not like SF/Silicon Valley. More are like Chicago and DC where a large part of the COL is caused by crime. Your groceries are more expensive because the store has 10% losses via theft and breakage, your commute is 100% longer because close to your work is a bunch of burned out homes from the 1940s occupied by squatters, your house itself is on more land that you need because property values need to be high to keep your kids safe, and because parks can't be kept safe.
Similarly education is expensive. We spend so much for so little, all you can possibly get is a good peer group by, again, paying for it with property values or tuition. And sometimes that doesn't even work (we are having trouble getting our son separated from a problem child despite all this). And that is just standard ed. Higher ed needs to be gutted. People are rightly feeling exploited. People dont understand the loans; or the degrees, and graduate feeling entitled to something they were sold but never actually deserved/earned. The people most affected want a handout, but that will only marginally help them and would make the problem worse. What we need is metaphorical arson.
And last is immigration. It causes problems with the first two, plus social cohesion. The cost of ESL in education and society is enormous. Immigrant populations routinely shelter criminals (very common crime being covered up is sexual exploitation of minors in my experience) and make policing generally more difficult by just committing so much low level crime it cant even be policed (think the 2001 New England Patriots defense, but as a whole community littering, setting garbage fires, having 100 free range cats, etc). There is then the signage, the court and other legal costs they add up.
For part 4) Id just end all transfer payments to people not injured on the job. Of course, that makes 1-3 (already impossible IMO) appear modest. The two biggest problems in the US are Medicaid and Welfare. Social Security and Medicare are a close 3/4. The only reason the feds should be cutting someone a check is if they got a limb blown off in Iraq or cut off while working in a factory. And ideally we restructure the factory portion of that so the factory is paying that shit.
anti_dan
8d ago
Are you talking about quantity or reach? Because the lowest quality grifter with the most reach in America is Ibrahim X. Kendi. Next you have the 1619 project, all BLM related orgs, etc. RW orgs with that much reach are people like Daily Wire and Vivek. You might not like their positions on everything, but those aren't grifters. One is a legitimate media business that has really innovated in the space, and the other is a serious politician and thinker, although odd.
anti_dan
8d ago
I think the "peak woke" line is cope on the center left and right for different reasons. The center-left keep writing these articles as a smokescreen to let their radicals reload, and the people on the right are just deluding themselves that the extremists will give up and/or that the center-left will ever side with them.
anti_dan
8d ago
Legacy media is left wing. New media isn't conventionally left or right, but the most popular versions tend to lean republican.
These are related. Just like how Fox News was the biggest cable news channel, despite being a drop in the bucket overall. They were the only people putting out a product lots of people wanted. In addition to that effect, the current crop of left wing views cannot sustain themselves in a questioning environment. Joe Rogan and the podcast sphere didn't start on the right, they slowly walked there because that is what happens outside of the left wing censorship regime.
anti_dan
8d ago
If something is happening at your hospital like once a year, that seems inevitable.
anti_dan
9d ago
This is plausible. But the real world data is that P is very high compared to R. So Rs are being subsidized with not-Rs in the post-R environment. All indicia point to X>C
anti_dan
9d ago
If that were true it would be self-fixing. You'd have the number of surgical residents that are needed to do surgeries going forward. Or at least, current demand. But instead all these positions are basically people working more hours than is healthy a day, making a paltry salary, and then once freed from the artificially contained program immediately making 4-10x they were.
I'd respect it if he did it the same day Don Jr. got arrested.
The behavior here is just gross in its attempted manipulation of the American people.
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