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I've recently pointed out elsewhere that I'd expected the feds to go after Rittenhouse, and that didn't happen, and it's meaningful that it hasn't. I've been meaning to do a deeper breakdown on other contemporaneous predictions I'd made, and while the retrospective looks bad, it's not maximally bad. As another example, not seeing Biden pardon Reality Winner helps suggest that there's some goals other than hitting the other team as hard and as unabashedly as possible, as much as situations like the mockery of James Gardner might feel like it.
There's space for other stuff, here. We could have seen prosecutors not immediately respond with another dip to the same well. TraceWoodgrains highlighted, as a specific contrast to calls for unilateral disarmament, the importance and possibility of a Biden administration that would "seek Republicans out and install them into the less overtly ideological spots in his cabinet", instead of dodging court mandates to throw money at people with four-year degrees. We could have some level of insight when major court cases not bother to use any more than a handwave to distinguish a Gadsden Flag from Students for Justice in Palestine with a handwave, or maybe faculty showing a bit more of a standard today. We could have people here respond to my presentations of extremely short sentencing or outright non-prosecution of serious bad actors by showing something similar and/or encouraging such leniency with the political valence flipped, or at least discomfort where pardon of an aggressive sentencing turned into a spurious bribery investigation, rather than demanding increasingly impossible statistical analysis. We could have a FACE Act prosecution on religious matters drop the hammer.
We don't, often. That sort of costly signal is costly, after all, even if not necessarily that costly.
It happens. Stranger things have happened! Just not often.
On the other direction, I'm disappointed, if not surprised, that Abbot and the Parole Board provided very little explanation or justification highlighting the specific evidence they believe justified this pardon. This isn't an analysis; it's an order. I don't think progressives would care whether Abbot was motivated specifically by scattershot of thirty different tiny details from the court record, or some bad process by the judge in question, or a sudden appreciation for limits on jury research, or whatever.
But it would at least open the possibility of debating a matter on the merits or the facts. Instead, rather than risk depending on factual claims that might be wrong, there's nothing here but frame control and leaving space for others to fight over frames.
I am absolutely saving that Tong ruling to respond to crocodile tears about the "free speech" of Hamas supporters.
This country turned into a hysterical parody of East Germany in 2020.
We used to make the Czechoslovakia comparison, but at least "why won't you put up the Workers of The World Unite sign, comrade?" was only an implicit threat.
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