gorge
2mo ago
When mothers express woe, it is difficult to discern ...
- what is just complain-bragging and they actually do really enjoy being mothers
- what is real pain, but not inherent to motherhood, but rather a result of modern parents and especially mothers being terrible at discipline.
- what is real pain and unavoidable even with better parenting know-how
gorge
2mo ago
It's blatantly obvious that parenting is full of unpleasantness,
A lot of parenting issues that look very unpleasant from the outside are far more rewarding when actually experienced as the parent, because it is your child. Even holding my two-year old in my arms while he throws a tantrum is rewarding for me, even if unpleasant to the person passing me in the store.
gorge
2mo ago
The author, a woman, makes a reasonably well-articulated case about why women don’t want to have babies, and it amounts to “pregnancy and childbirth are just an absolutely brutal experience for most women, and it’s totally natural and inevitable that they should wish to avoid going through it.”
This is true and definitely under-discussed by both men and women. Men don't appreciate it, and women prefer to blame external factors (lack of male support, housing prices, etc.) then admit that they simply don't want to endure the same struggle their female ancestors endured.
But -- this explanation has its limits. Modern women endure many painful undertakings at a high-rate, from training for marathons, to grinding for grades, to getting ACL tears from competitive sports, to climbing the corporate ladder, to pulling all-nighters for law school, etc, and they do this because they are told this is what good girls do and this is what gives them status. Even something like, "travel" is often unpleasant but considered worthwhile because of the benefits of the experience.
We shouldn't underestimate just how much modern schooling and culture is careerist. From the moment girls enter kindergarten its, "what do you want to be when you grow up?" Thus they are encouraged to struggle for the status of career, whereas motherhood is treated as an optional hobby. If treated as an optional hobby, and not a worthy struggle that is an essential part of a life well-lived, then of course many women are going to pass. Not going to college is an unthinkable failure -- but not becoming a mother is a "choice" that must be respected and no one has the right to pressure or shame women about this very personal choice.
His ability to hang out with us, to do any activity or attend any venue that is not friendly to small children, is massively constrained by access to childcare.
Perhaps this is cope on my part, as I have kids and don't get out much any more -- but kids also completely reset what one thinks as important. Much of the "going out" I did in my 20s, from trivia nights at the pub to going to the movies to trying out the new exotic restaurant now seems frivolous and uninteresting. At a deeper level, a lot of young adult socialization is about forming networks that allow us to access status and ultimately money and sex. Having reached a stable level of both, socialization becomes a lot less interesting, and most of my socialization is now with fellow parents, since we have more common goals.
It's also nigh impossible to convey the wonderful parts of being a parent to a non-parent. Think of how much people used to look forward to the new Pixar movie. Now imagine having the cutest thing imaginable -- the thing that the cute character in the movie is only a pale imitation of -- and this cute creature is doing new and interesting things in your own home every single night. Why go "out"?
His oldest daughter is at an age where she constantly demands and monopolizes attention, such that any gathering which includes her inevitably requires at least one person to be fully attentive to entertaining and indulging her, lest she become a terror.
Part of the problem here is that modern parents absolutely suck at discipline. Most parents never learn or never feel empowered to tell their kid "Go play by yourself and if you interrupt me or pester me you will get a punishment." Modern parents are grudgingly allowed to punish kids for blatant infractions like hitting or stealing. But it has become unthinkable to punish kids for pestering or interrupting. This really needs to change. With proper discipline, most four year olds are perfectly capable of playing by themselves and not interrupting for an hour.
I don’t know, but honestly I just don’t see a viable path forward for forcing a critical mass of women to do something that’s manifestly going to wreck the lives of so many of them.
Well certainly in the confines of existing American democratic politics, no, nothing can be done. But the existing political situation is not long-term stable, and under a new paradigm many things could be possible. The question is whether returning to above replacement fertility is a regime-complete problem -- or a civilization-complete problem.
From the linked substack:
women did not have the information and/or power to do anything about it. Now they do, so that’s that...So right-leaning men should stop being in denial about this fact, and more specifically, about the source of their feelings....What you do with that information is another question, but please at least admit that is is a biologically wired-in divergence, and not something that's strange or confusing or a symptom of cultural malaise. It's merely exactly what we should expect to see, even if one was an alien who knew nothing whatsoever about humans other than how their reproduction works....This will happen in every culture and community where women have access to facts, and enough options and agency to make decisions about their own lives. All over the world. Yes, even the mormons. So stop trying to find a magical cultural or memetic solution. There isn’t one.
This is an interesting instance of "woke more correct" or of horse-shoe theory. She is making the same argument that ultra-rightist Dread Jim makes -- women are not hard-wired to preserve civilization or to choose reproduction. Every historical instance of women's liberation has led to cratering fertility and the destruction of that society. Therefore the rightist must go all the way: either women's emancipation gets rolled back or Western civilization will die.
More from the substack
I’ve set forth below the sex-based risks and costs that are fairly standard, and relative risk level. I haven’t included the rare, freakish things that happen to some women, nor all the risks. ...I did not intentionally try to get this to come out at a million dollars. I was just putting in guesstimates about what I thought was a reasonable amount an average man would need to be paid to accept the risks, and only tallied it up after the fact.
One million dollars? Your offer is acceptable.
gorge
3mo ago
It's kind of sad because it means I can't get any of the sacraments, but what can you do.
Have you inquired into a radical sanation?
A lot of people online will say stuff like "you don't have a valid marriage so leave",
That kind of rules-lawyering makes me furious. This shows the downside about having a lot of explicit rules, people think that the explicit rules in canon law or the catechism matter more than basic moral law of keeping sacred vows.
gorge
3mo ago
He did a podcast interview with Adin Ross, but that was a friendly interview. So that makes two, one friendly, one tough. But more importantly, Trump has also been campaigning a long time as being top of the ticket, and has done many interviews, both hostile and friendly. Kamala has an obligation to now speak for herself and represent herself to the American public, now that she is not under the obligation of supporting Biden.
Also, has far as I can tell, Kamala has never done a tough or hostile interview during her entire time running for VP, as VP, or running for president. (If you can find an example, I'd like to see it.)
gorge
3mo ago
Has she taken any questions during these appearances? Any non-screened questions? Any tough questions?
gorge
3mo ago
Is Kamala choosing a midwestern white guy a form of DEI?
It is has always been the case that party bosses have chosen political candidates based on superficial and identitarian reasons -- whether that be their home state, their pedigree, or simply being tall and handsome.
However, we were always allowed to notice that and critique that. Therefore, if it is in-bounds to argue, "Ronald Reagan isn't actually a competent executive, he is a handsome and well-spoken movie star who is an actor playing the role of a competent executive" or "Going to Yale and Phillips Andover doesn't prove GW Bush was smart, because he was a rich legacy and probably got in because of that", then it is also in-bounds to argue that Kamala is not actually that accomplished, she simply has collected a lot of high positions on her resume because she was picked for because of her race and sex.
The other thing is that most of us Americans were taught in grade school that while it is ok to show preferences based on some demographics features ("He was raised on a farm and chopped wood every morning" "She is the daughter of a teacher and a blacksmith, she has the common touch") it is double plus ungood to show preferences purely on race. Even though we were later taught that that race-based affirmative action is a thing and it is good, seeing it in blatant form still creates a dissonance at a very basic level between with what was drilled into us as children.
gorge
3mo ago
If you are reasonably careful, you can probably avoid getting labeled a hate group. However, you may do an enormous amount of work, have a partial victory, then five, ten years later when the public is safe and less concerned about crime they will retroactively demonize your group for criminalizing poor people, and so for all your work, you will be seen as a villain instead of a hero. This is what happened to some of the 'tough on crime' folks from the 80s and 90s.
gorge
3mo ago
What are some actionable ideas, things that might actually help, whether it is some sort of viable plan for forming a vigilante militia or a plan for influencing local elections?
- Organize with your local neighborhood association to raise money to hire private security. I have seen this done moderately successfully.
- Less effective: Attend community meetings with police, community meetings with politicians and make your voice heard.
- Potentially most effective, but very high effort, haven't seen it done: Start a political advocacy group that creates a scorecard for all politicians on how well they are doing on public safety issues. Publicize your scorecard, publish endorsements, so all the citizens in your city know who to vote for if they care about public safety. Once you have enough of a following, you will be able to command meetings with politicians to get your greivences heard.
What stops me is that I quite simply disagree with the laws against recreational drugs on a very fundamental level. I am sure that I am not the only one. I cannot in good conscience side with the cops who enforce such fundamentally illiberal laws.
If someone was stinking up a park with marijuana, and a woman with children asked you to get them to stop, would you have a bad conscience about that? If a street had become notorious for open air dealing and people shooting up and leaving needles around and the police chief told you to make arrests and clean up the street, would you feel bad about that?
AFAICT, urban police in the 2020's are not in the business of arresting people for private use of marijuana in their homes. Their not in the business of jailing people for personal use amounts of marijuana. They police drug problems only when it becomes a major public nuisance.
My problem with the drug war is not just rooted in my libertarian-esque attitudes about the proper bounds of government. It is also rooted in me seeing that the war on drugs turns the banned drugs into a highly valuable and easily produced form of underground currency and thus directly leads to the growth of drug gangs and cartels that are, clearly, responsible for a good share of the street crime that I am seeking to curb.
I think this was always motivated reasoning on the part of left-liberals. They wanted the cause of crime to be something that they opposed anyways, and so such arguments got signal boosted. But in you look at it, Singapore and China don't have a crime problem because of drug prohibition. Loosening up on drug prohibition hasn't reduced crime in the United States. And frankly, the strictness of drug prohibition was always overblown. I recommend this old blog post ( https://devinhelton.com/drug-crimes ) and specifically this excerpt from a news article about policing drug dealing:
That’s just talk to officers, who say the revolving-door punishment makes for an unwinnable game. They know the dealers and users they arrest today probably will be back tomorrow, selling the same drugs and prompting the same neighborhood complaints.
“The dopers know it, too,’’ says Sgt. Rick Lehman, a 26-year veteran who supervises the District 4 Violent Crime Squad. ”They’ll say, `I’ll be back out in a couple hours.’ "
The real drug war was never tried. Those dealers should have been getting a half-dozen whacks with a cane then put in a workhouse until they were able to move to gainful employment.
gorge
3mo ago
Major bummer dude.
I don't think this was a shit test, I think another red-pill unpleasant truth applies: "What they hate, hate, hate hate hate, hate with a hatred hotter than a thousand suns, is that some guy whom they had sex with turns out to be substantially less alpha than they thought."
In this case I think she just wasn't that in to you, but with since she was drunk and it was her birthday and she probably felt like she should let loose (or perhaps she was feeling sad and vulnerable, who knows birthdays can bring out weird feelings) she was open to kissing you. But then in the sober light of the next day she moderately regretted it. Sorry :-/
This is what my life is like. Nothing ever, ever works out,
FWIW, the girls I "crushed" on never worked out even if I got a date with them. It's easier if you aim a little lower and go for the girls who are crushing on you, without you having to put in extraordinary effort.
Also I second 2frafa. A future wife isn't supposed to share all your interests, that's what your guy friends are for, and you will have enough common interests once you have a household together. And she isn't supposed to be manic pixie dream girl, that will get old.
She was tasked to solve the 2021 border problem, namely, migration originating from a few specific countries..... It’s an awkward situation for democrats to communicate because clearly at the time she was the “border czar,” formally or not, for the 2021 border problem.
I understand this but I'm not letting the Dems off the hook. The reason it is awkward to communicate is because it is has been the Dem position that 'harsh' and punitive border policies are bad and the way to fix the immigration crisis is to fix the 'root causes' of the migration. So according to the Dem's own position back in 2021, 'fixing the border' 'addressing root causes' 'border czar', and 'addressing push factors from key Latin American countries' are all the same thing. Since they believed that the key to fixing the border crisis was to fix the push factors -- "To address the situation at the southern border, we have to address the root causes of migration. " -- not beefing up punitive enforcement along the actual border -- so in fact Kamala was in charge of fixing the border crisis. Only now are they trying to back away from this messaging when it turns out that 'addressing root causes' didn't actually fix anything and the old messaging is now inconvenient for them.
gorge
3mo ago
https://www.themotte.org/post/1087/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/233839?context=8#context
One thing I noticed is that her 2019 podcast with "Pod Save America" she seemed somewhat more expansive and smarter than in recent performances. So I think part of this is that as VP she has been conditioned into not saying anything interesting. But, even in the 2019 interview it was all softballs and no real dialectic so she did not come across to me as very smart, she just came across as less stupid then she seems in some of the more recent clips.
Probably the wrong crowd for this, but I'll ask anyways...
Does anyone know of any long-form podcast interviews with Kamala from a tough or adversarial interviewer? I've listened to three different interviews with her (from Pod Save America, I've Had It, and Sharon McMahon) and they are all of the form "ask softball question, let her say her talking points." None actually interrogate her to try to see if she understands the potential problems with her policy ideas, or to make her defend against the most common criticisms of her policy ideas, or get her to pass any kind of intellectual turing test. Part of the reason I went down this rabbit hole is because I'm curious if Kamala is actually smart or not. But it is difficult to tell if someone is smart if they are never pushed to defend their viewpoints. I'm also curious if she can actually understand the right-wing critique of her immigration positions, or actually lives in such a bubble she has never actually engaged with the critique.
As a dirty-not-left-winger, it is apparent to me that a voting majority of the United States holds views, that if actually followed in practice, will lead to a great squandering of our potential, in the medium term will lead the US to be a third-world country, and in the long-term will lead to ultimately to the destruction of the nation.
At this point my advice to the GOP would be to ditch policy and ideology altogether, that is, just refuse to have any platform or ideology, and instead just try to run a decently competent, smart, charismatic fellow who promises to govern in the best interests of the people.
The problem is that any smart, non-leftist probably has a paper-trail of past statements that the current zeitgeist views as repugnant, eg, JD Vance. So very hard to find the guy who the party knows is solid but that hasn't tainted himself to the general public.
It seems to me that they are on the attack - it's just a very stupid, self-destructive form of attack. Calling Kamala a "childless cat lady" just makes Vance look like a weirdo who has been marinated too much in online right-wing men's chats,
This was not a new campaign attack against Kamala. This misquote comes from a resurfaced Tucker Carlson interview from three years ago when JD Vance had just entered the Republican Senate primary.
Here is the full quote by the way:
We’re effectively run in this country via the Democrats, via our corporate oligarchs, by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made. And so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too. And it’s just a basic fact. You look at Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, AOC, the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children. And how does it make sense that we've turned this country over to people who don't have a direct stake in it? I just wanted to ask that question, and propose that maybe if we want a healthy ruling class in this country, we should invest more, we should vote more, for leaders that actually have kids because those ultimately are the people that have a more direct stake in the future of the country.
So she is not directly singling out and attacking Kamala as being miserable cat lady, there are two separate sentences.
like a weirdo who has been marinated too much in online right-wing men's chats, normies don't feel the anger towards childless women that is evident in such circles - like, to me, a childless aunt is the literal childless aunt of our kids (i.e. my sister) who doesn't own cats or drink wine but helps us often and is beloved by the kids.
Dread Jim has a take that the problem is childless older women who haven't played a role in raising their nieces and nephews tend to end up hating children. I think there is something probably to this, and the childless women who have climbed the corporate ladder are probably less likely to have played a role in the lives of their related children than your sister. I don't know how active a role Kamala played in the life of her nieces and nephews, but there are several clips of her giving a cackling laugh at the plight of parents, and that does make me uneasy. And she is a wine-drinker.
Anyways, I do agree that calling out Cat-Lady-Occupied-Government is bad politics, even if it is a real problem worth being concerned about.
gorge
5mo ago
I think the podcast was this one:
Given the stuff that did come out on the other tapes, it seems odd to think that there was one 18 minute conversation worth erasing.
Shepard covers this in chapter 11 of his book, available on libgen, if you are interested.
What's your position on the various other Nixonian controversies? One of the problems that Nixon had, in my mind, was the variety of other scandals hiding just under the surface of Watergate and the plumbers. The Milk Price Fixing, the Chennault affair, the Ellsburg break-in.
From reading Caro's LBJ series, Flynn's book on FDR, skimming Lasky's "It didn't start at Watergate", reading an establishment history of the FBI, etc, it seems like there was a much higher-level of criminality and dirty tricks in politics from FDR onward than what the American people were aware of. The FBI performing break-ins, for instance, was something they had been doing for a long-time. I remember talking to a Trump-hater about how he stank of corruption due to all his dealings with foreigners -- she had simply no idea of that this kind of stuff is par for the course for any modern elite, see the Clinton Foundation, or Bush dealings with the Saudi's, etc. I suspect that Nixon, like Trump, was actually more law-abiding than average because he knew he was in less of a position to work the system in his favor. That is why Nixon did not just simply destroy the tapes early on (and he did not destroy them because he thought he was innocent and thought there was nothing incriminating on them).
The bombing of Cambodia
This is an interesting case because under classical international law a 'neutral' country forfeits its rights of sovereignty if it cannot prevent one of the fighting powers from using it as a base of operations. USA was fully justified in entering Cambodia to get the Vietcong. However, it certainly makes me queasy to use bombing to get the Vietcong, a method of warfare with a very high rate of collateral damage, especially when that collateral damage is on peasants in a country that wanted to stay out of the war. I'm not sure what I would have done if I was President in that situation. Maybe just build a big concrete wall from the sea all the way to the Mekong at the 17th parallel?
I've never done a deep-dive on Watergate, I've never read competing accounts and compared who's footnotes are getting everything right versus who is being dishonest. I did do a deep-dive on Trump's Russia-gate scandal, and basically my conclusion was that Trump was innocent of any sort of "collusion" or obstruction of justice, albeit he did lie to the public on certain things and that the special prosecutor team was on a malicious fishing expedition. So I am predisposed to believe Shepard's account, that the same thing was done to Nixon.
From the limited amount of I've checked up on Shepard's account:
- I haven't seen any liberal de-bunkings of his book, mostly they seem to ignore it.
- On a key point (the "smoking gun" tape conversation being not about Watergate at all) Shepard quotes John Dean's book from 2014 and it seems like the original quote does partly corroborate Shepard but that also Shepard cut pieces from the quote in order to make it seem more exonerating than John Dean intended.
gorge
5mo ago
Nixon's Attorney General appointed a Kennedy man, Archibald Cox, as special prosecutor.
From Wikipedia:
The president publicly welcomed the selection and, consistent with his new public relations offensive, commended Richardson's "determination" to get to the bottom of the affair.[109] Privately, Nixon seethed with anger. In his memoir he said: "If Richardson searched specifically for the man whom I least trusted, he could hardly have done better."[110] Richardson, however, thought he had the best man for the job, because once Cox cleared the president there would be no hint that he colluded with Nixon or even that he was sympathetic. Richardson had perhaps been misled about what his assignment was (and what the president's true intentions were) when the president instructed him the night Kleindienst was dismissed to "get to the bottom of it" "no matter who[m] it hurts."
Notice that last bit of editorializing by Wikipedia ... perhaps Nixon was actually genuinely earnest when he said '"get to the bottom of it" "no matter who[m] it hurts."' because Nixon knew that Nixon was innocent and actually wanted the real criminals rooted out and for Nixon to be cleared.
Beyond that...the entire "east coast liberal establishment" hated Nixon, and so by default if you staff a team of aggressive lawyers in Washington you are going to staff it with east coast Ivy League liberals who hate Nixon and would love nothing more than to make a name for themselves by bringing down a president. So he was likely to get an office staffed with anti-Nixon partisans unless one specifically sought ought either conservative extremely principled neutral lawyers.
If we believe Shepard's story and sympathetic to Nixon, we would say that his Attorney General Richardson dramatically underestimated just how ruthless and Machieavelians the liberal-Democratic establishment would be. Richards expected a thorough investigation, but expected that they would still be playing it fair.
This is somewhat belied by Nixon's own decision making, he probably could have survived the break-in had he come clean about it early, it was only the long cover up that sank him.
Have you read Geoff Shepard's book (The Nixon Conspiracy) or listened to any podcasts with him? Shepard was a young aide in the Nixon White House and as part of his junior lawyer duties was one of the first people to originally listen to the tapes to review them for problematic material. Recently, as an older man, he got access to a lot of the prosecution documents and then wrote a revisionist history. I haven't read the book in full, but Iistened to a podcast with him and it was very interesting.
Basically, he argues Nixon was completely unaware of the break-in, he was not trying to cover it up, but that he fired special prosecutor Cox because Cox had totally gone rogue, including giving the person much more responsible (Dean) a slap-on-the-wrist plea bargain. The specific trigger point for the firing was Cox reneging on a deal about the tapes, which Nixon thought would show people that Cox was being plainly unreasonable.
Shepard also argues that:
-
The 18 minute gap was actually likely due to a mistake by the transcriber and it is extremely unlikely that it covered up any key conversations. He additionally notes that it was Nixon's lawyers inside the Nixon White House that discovered the gap and told the judge, but it was then portrayed to the public like the special prosecutors had on their own discovered this nefarious destruction of evidence.
-
Another famous incriminating line from Nixon supposedly showing Nixon calling for a cover-up was actually a mis-transcription and mis-interpretation of a very low quality tape.
-
The famous "smoking gun" tape in which Nixon is giving the OK to tell the CIA to stop the FBI from interviewing a certain witness, turned out to have nothing to do with Watergate, but was due to wanting to cover-up a legal campaign donation that was coming from a well-known Democrat (who did not want it known that he supported Nixon).
So all-in-all, Nixon did not try to cover-up Watergate, he could not come clean about it because he actually did not know about it. What got him in trouble was thinking the special prosecutors team was actually trying to find the truth about what happened, when in fact they were on a fishing expedition to take down Nixon. At that point he was screwed, if he tries to block them, it looks incriminating. If he allows them to do anything they want, well, besides the embarrassment of having all the internals of the presidency leaked to the press, no presidency can survive a team of prosecutors going Beria ("find me the man I'll find the crime") on his entire staff.
gorge
5mo ago
Trump is accused of using personal money for a campaign purpose.... The accusation is that this is a campaign finance violation because this benefited his campaign and therefore should have been marked as such.
It should be noted that this "accusation" is not actually in the indictment.
gorge
5mo ago
Well, he LARP'ed going to war with the establishment, and the establishment had reasons, both valid and more Machiavellian for taking his LARP seriously. The "lock her up chants" were unprecedented norm-breaking, even if he never followed through with it. In many ways, Trump did the worst possible thing by taunting the bear but then being actually very weak in power and letting the establishment run roughshod over him (eg the Russia-gate investigation leading to a crippling investigation and imprisonment of his men).
I think the thing that legitimately scared the establishment is that he would transgress certain taboos, and verbally come out against the bipartisan consensus on certain issues, and rather than groveling after such transgressions he would plow ahead. That meant he could not be controlled by establishment norms in the same way most high-profile Republicans in the past have been controlled.
gorge
5mo ago
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
No the obvious difference is that they never went to war with the establishment the way Trump did. Also, admittedly Trump is publicly a liar and sleazeball so that makes a lot of people think that he must be a criminal too, which creates a favorable environment for pursuing a prosecution.
This looks like a case of “man does crimes, gets prosecuted for said crimes.”
No he did not commit a crime.
- Paying hush money to a mistress is not illegal
- Paying hush money as a pre-tax company expense to avoid embarrassment for the CEO is not illegal
- Paying hush money from non-campaign funds is not illegal, in fact, arguably the opposite would be illegal. This is an area where the law is inherently ambiguous and something of a catch-22.
- Keeping the payment of the hush money secret from the American public is not illegal
- Trump never tried to hide the payment from the tax authorities.
- A CEO making a false description of some expense in order to avoid potential leaks and embarrassment of a business the CEO wholly owns is not illegal. The NY law is against making "a false statement with intent to defraud." This is used in cases where an employee is defrauding the CEO or shareholders, or the tax authorities, etc. Trump cannot make a false statement that is somehow defrauding himself.
So to get a felony conviction here, the prosecutor, judge and jury had to introduce multiple unprecedented or ridiculous leaps:
- Claiming that any false entry is inherently fraud against the state of NY. This is novel, no one gets tried for this.
- Claiming that the false entry was in furtherance of another crime ... without actually including that crime in the indictment and without that crime ever being adjudicated in court
- Hinting that the false entry was in furtherance of some kind of attempt at electoral fraud, but without that charge ever actually being adjudicated.
- Arguing that this crime corrupted the 2016 election even though the crime happened in 2017
- They had to infer that Trump actually intended to "defraud" someone, despite there being no direct evidence of this. Again, intending to make a false entry to avoid embarrassment is not a crime.
Here is an establishment liberal explaining why this prosecution was so unprecedented: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/trump-was-convicted-but-prosecutors-contorted-the-law.html
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?”
Yes, of course.
The thing about Trump is that he is a sleazy guy who lies a lot, but he is ultimately a show-man Boomer business man who listens to his lawyers and doesn't do obviously criminal things. He is not mobbed up. His faults are those of a carnival barker, not of a Bernie Madoff. There has been an enormous media campaign to portray Trump has some kind of obvious fraudster criminal but that is not actually who he is.
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.
I'm in the tiny sliver of people who thought Comey got it right. He was right to have the press conference explaining what she did wrong to the American people, but also right not to prosecute. Her violation wasn't serious enough to try warrant overriding the electoral process with a judicial process.
When it comes to prosecuting the highest-level politicians, I would use this rule of thumb: If you explained the crime in a few sentences to George Washington, would he say, "what? I don't even understand why that is a crime in your era." Or would he say, "Of course that is a crime." Actually taking bribes, deliberately leaking secrets to enemy powers, executing opponents, etc, are all real crimes and should be prosecuted regardless of the person. But prosecuting high-level officials for technical crimes and gray-area crimes and crimes invented in the last 80 years gives far too much power to the bureaucracy.
gorge
5mo ago
One pound of a leanish steak (eg top sirloin) gets you to about 90g of protein and 1000 calories. I find a rare steak with salt to be perfectly satisfying and delicious, more satisfying than many more complicated meals and more satisfying than body-building foods like chicken breasts.
After that pretty much any other medium sized meal will get you an additional 50g of protein and 1,000 calories, whether that be a chicken burrito, mac&cheese or an 8oz cheeseburger.
Or you could do 20oz - 25oz of a fattier steak like rib-eye or chuck roast and 200-400 calorie supplementary meal of your choice.
gorge
7mo ago
I have the impression of NPR as their spin being similar to NYT: representing the most milquetoast "centrist" corporate Dem position possible,
This was true, but even then, NPR would be "too far to the left" since it is selling itself as a politically neutral, government funded non-profit and so ostensibly would be taking a position at the American political center, not the Democratic party center.
But even to the extent your critique was true, it is a stale critique.
The entire 'corporate Dem' position has moved sharply to the left in the past ten years (that is, it has moved left of where the American center was in 2010), and these political positions have enormous real world impacts. It's not just cheap signaling. For instance, the massive inflow of migrants we see are all downstream of NPR et al spending years denouncing necessary border enforcement as being inhumane in some way. We also see stats like how percent of white men among TV writers has declined from around 60% to 35% in the past 10 years. That is a major change with major impact for the media environment we all live in. There were many policy changes around police stops and bail reform and public order enforcement, etc, all downstream of NPR/NY Times media coverage on police shootings, and those policy changes have had massive real world impact. I could go on and on.
I think it's a combination of things:
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