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What is the point on reporting about the spouses of Supreme Court Justices? This headline and the previous ones I remember on Ginny Thomas seem publicized just for waging the culture and rallying voters. The court members are appointed for life and I doubt these there is political appetite to impeach a justice for their beliefs or family associations after they are already seated on the bench. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/10/us/politics/alito-pride-flag.html The reporting on the gifts received by the justices makes sense to me since that would speak directly to concerns of an impartial judiciary. These type of stories remind me of the reporting and reactions to the Butker speech, wrong beliefs equals condemnation no matter the context.
Taking a step back, I see the same culture war reporting from the other side; see Conservative media reporting on Biden, Pelosi, AOC or Rashida Talib but don't recall where beliefs of their family members was reported as news.
Slow news cycle, I guess.
Remember the Pelosi break-in?
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The sleazy behaviour of the President's son and brother been a top-3 Republican talking point for some years now. The possibility of John Podesta's brother being a paedophile was also a major right-wing talking point. There is as much evidence that Joe Biden delivered any of the bribe-service implicitly promised by Hunter and James' schemes as there is that Clarence Thomas participated in his wife's insurrectionary plotting or that Samuel Alito participated in the petty harassment of a left-wing neighbour - i.e. none whatsoever in the legal sense, and not much in the Bayesian sense beyond the normal assumption that families stick together.
Anything that is Bayesian evidence that a prominent government official is disloyal is legitimately newsworthy. And a close family member engaging in obviously disloyal behaviour is weak Bayesian evidence that the principle is disloyal because families do, in fact, stick together and more powerful family members do, in fact, have a degree of control over less powerful family members' behaviour. This isn't a legal point, but the court of public opinion isn't subject to legal rules of evidence. Nor is employer discipline - I work for a bank, and if my wife were to get caught trading stocks on my employer's watchlist I would lose my job. If I told my wife "Please don't trade this stock - you could get me fired." and she did it anyway, I would be in a shockingly dysfunctional marriage. So my employer's compliance department assumes that she is doing it with at least my tacit approval.
The Alito incident should be less newsworthy because flying a controversial flag to troll a neighbour (and we now have tapes which, if genuine, prove that this is what is going on) is not disloyal behaviour. I am not obliged to believe a conservative Christian who insists that he has no control over his wife's behaviour. I can (and do) conclude that Alito doesn't take the kind of behaviour his wife is engaging in seriously enough to ask her to knock it off. But that just means he is a cockwomble - it doesn't mean that he is disloyal or corrupt. Given that six/seven of the nine Supreme Court justices (I am excluding Thomas, Roberts and possibly Gorsuch here) are partisan hacks appointed to rule the way their party wants, arguing about whether they are cockwombles or not is unproductive. But critically, the fact that Martha Ann Alito was trolling a neighbour rather than expressing support for an insurrection wasn't known at the time.
The republican talking point isn’t that Hunter and Jim are sleazy. The argument is that Joe was clearly involved. Now you might not believe it, but there is an obvious potential direct connection with Joe and there is documentary evidence supporting that connection. Smoking gun? Doesn’t seem. Enough to get to say more likely than not? Sure.
I don't think we disagree very much here. The Republican talking point is that Joe Biden has probably taken bribes from non-ally foreign countries in a way which is both corrupt and disloyal. Why should anyone think this? Given the lack of direct evidence unearthed by the Comer investigation, the main piece of Bayesian evidence is that Hunter and Jim are sleazy and that Joe presumably could have stopped them, but didn't. We both agree that Hunter Biden's behaviour is Bayesian evidence that Joe is a crook, and therefore is newsworthy - even in the absence of hard evidence against Joe. The question is why some people on this thread (including OP) have trouble applying the same argument to Ginni Thomas's involvement in the events leading up to January 6th.
Whats the issue with Ginni? She organized a conservative protest?
I don’t even think she’s been charged. What’s the issue here?
I 100% agree that Ginni and Clarence are both very conservative. They both organize (legally) conservative groups. In Clarence case it’s generally the Federalist Society where he’s a big swinging dick.
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Well I think there is more than that. For example we know Hunter made payments on behalf of Joe. We know Jim transferred money to Joe (allegedly as a loan repayment). We have testimony from people that Joe was involved. We have emails and texts from the participants saying Joe was involved. We have evidence that money was directed to many Biden clan members despite them not being involved in the shady business dealings (many grandparents want to send money to their kids). There is a lot more smoke here compared to Gini Thomas.
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The flippant answer is stochastic terrorism. They want the conservative justices to know that they can ratchet up faux outrage on literally anything imaginable and to fear that the next Nicholas Roske won't be so timid. They don't actually need something that serious to happen; it's the fear that matters. It's not even just the fear of physical death, it's that every time you get up in the morning, there are protesters outside your house; no matter where you move to, your neighbor will be very unneighborly; every time you go out somewhere, you have to be wary of anyone nearby carrying either concealed weapons... or milkshakes; every time you talk to literally anyone, you have to think, "Imagine this is being recorded; how could that recording be twisted on Twitter to make all of the above even worse?"
Your choices are that life... or maybe have a miraculous come to Sagan moment and start making lefty rulings. Then you'll get to, like, hang out with Beyonce and stuff.
Supreme Court justices are lifelong appointments with security details and both Thomas and Alito are tradcaths whose wives are unlikely to care very much what non-co-religionists think about them.
Right, so it's not even, "I'm gonna go in for a few years, make the maximum I can out of my time there, even if I'm hated, because at least after I'm done and gone, they might still remember hating me, but they won't care to try to make my life miserable anymore." With life tenure, there is no light at the end of the tunnel.
I don't know what the current state is of SCOTUS security details. I recall reading sometime in the not too distant past that most of the time, they went about their lives without any security. That it was more of a "special circumstances" or specific threat driven thing. I saw some articles around the time of Dobbs which said that they had round-the-clock security, but this was specifically a departure from the normal state of affairs. The delta between the security team protecting the president and the security team protecting John Roberts is gigantic. He's not being whisked around in motorcades, accompanied by tens of agents, following a forward team who already scoped out the destination. My sense is that if he goes out to a restaurant or just wants to take a walk around town or whatever, then if there is any security (which honestly, there might not be in the absence of a specific credible threat or a significant event like a polarizing opinion dropping or a hack journalist releasing a secretly-recorded trap conversation), it's more in the ballpark of, "Dude's got like one bodyguard to walk around with him and keep an eye on stuff."
I mean, I'm not sure why this really matters? They can still have to fear all manner of general harassment and threat. In any event, from the recent brouhaha, it appears that at least Alito's wife very much cared about what their random neighbor thought.
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The point is to get clicks.
It gets clicks by frothing up lefties about how awful and illegitimate those terrible republicans are and they're a danger to democracy, can you imagine what's going to happen to us in a country where a judge's wife can hang a flag the wrong way up, etc, etc. There's a demand for "Republicans are the spawn of satan" stories, so they get shoveled out the door.
The media is awful, but in most cases it's because the audience is also awful.
Isn't it curious they don't try to get clicks by reporting on the police siding with local rape gangs, child castration fetishists influencing a medical standards setting body, or Epstein running a child prostitution ponzi scheme?
The "mundane" "for the clicks", or " they just do it for the profit" explanations run into obvious problems very fast. Conspiracy theories seem a lot more consistent with reality.
No, that isn’t the market they’re serving.
The market is news, and it's news,and would bring them clicks.
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There's also a market for conspiracy theories of course, and outlets dedicated to filling that demand.
Yeah, but what does that have to do with what models reality more correctly?
I'm making the point that different outlets are serving different markets. Vox.com is not running stories about castration fetishists influencing medical standards for the same reason BTS isn't putting out death metal songs: that's not the market they're serving. Someone else does that.
There's plenty of clicks to be had running stories about how the perversion of the left is leading to the downfall of society. That's why the Daily Wire exists.
And why are you framing it as a left vs. right thing? Are left wingers inherently protective of Epstein's prostitution ring?
Because there's a market for left-wing stories and there's a market for right wing stories and these are clear and distinct markets.
If you're asking why left wing outlets don't run stories about Epstein stuff, well, they do.
I'm asking why no one except for conspiracy theorists covered him until about 2018, IIRC. You're the one that's making it about left vs. right, and it's not making any sense. Like, you're literally saying they didn't cover it because that's somehow a right wing story, even as you're telling me left wing outlets are actually covering it.
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A significant wing of the Democratic party with media allies has committed to a deligitimization campaign of the Supreme Court, specifically targetting Republican justices. Tactically this is to pressure the justicies to recuse themselves from specific cases, more broadly an attempt to scandalize them into resigning in general so that they can be replaced by more compliant partisans, and even more broadly delegitimize Supreme Court rulings against the Democratic partisan interests and build support for future potential court packing schemes.
It's sad to me that the campaign has been so uneven. It kind of reminds me of how the MeToo movement as a side effect started to erase differences and nuance in the broad phrase "sexual assault". You have frankly spurious, nonserious bits like the Alito recording recently (I hate that most media I read practically didn't mention the fact that Roberts was also taped and - spoiler - he's actually basically more or less just as upstanding as he presents himself), this flag thing, etc. but on the other, serious end of the spectrum you have the Thomas gift scandal. And maybe the Ginny thing too, I'm not decided on how serious or not that is. But all of these offenses are being blurred together and made as if they are equal. They are not.
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It’s to justify attempts at impeaching the justices.
Of course there will never be support for impeaching a Supreme Court justice because Twitter isn’t real and most democrats are fairly moderate and skittish about such things.
Not that I completely disagree with you - but I remember a lot, a lot of hand-waving away what were at the time called SJWs because "it's just tumblr, it isn't real" or some variation thereof. Pronouns, transgenderism, all of the facets of what is today PC culture may not have been born on tumblr or twitter or wherever, but they certainly gestated there for a time before springing forth into the cultural consciousness.
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How can you say twitter isn’t real? Is Trump not a felon? Does he not have a 500 million judgement against himself? Did the respectable Ivy League people all pretend a mentally ill man was the nations best female swimmer? It almost seems normal that the Harvard President got fired because on the other side of the world a bunch of Jews at a music festival got raided and their women raped and Harvard basically took the side of the rapists.
It seems like the “it’s just someone on the internet” actually has power in the real institutional world. It seems to me like the craziest things I could imagine in 2005 in the darkerst of the internet are now occurring in real life.
I don't think it's clear that the causation of these issues all flow in the direction you suggest. Isn't it more likely to you that twitter (a large, lowest common denominator website) users' beliefs about these popular (the president, harvard, and the olympics) issues are reflective of the real-life happenings?
In my personal opinion (not OP), the actual problem with Twitter (and maybe TikTok soon) is that journalists mine Twitter for scandals and things to write about instead of doing legwork to find things that people actually care about. Twitter activists realized this feedback loop, and deliberately exploited it. It was easy for Twitter activists, and short-term beneficial for journalists on the individual level, too. They could write a story saying "people are upset about __" or "people are saying " in a matter of minutes instead of whatever longer process they normally would follow of dredging up something newsworthy or interesting.
In that sense, Twitter as viewed through the media was not at all representative. And with algorithms in play, I can't say for sure if it's generally representative either. Plus, you have to talk actual market penetration. The actual userbase in the US isn't very large. It's a small enough percentage of the population that distortion can occur.
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I think that kind of stuff seeps through eventually. The pre-internet generation is still alive, and mostly in charge - that won't last forever.
Considering the relative retirement ages of politicians vs Supreme Court justices, it’ll last long enough to obviate the question.
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Most Democrats used to be fairly moderate and skittish about a lot of things they are now extreme and vocal about, with propaganda spread on social media the thing that changed their consensus-mediated understanding of reality.
The propagandists understand how this is done and are now doing it with court packing. Appealing to the moderate position makes no sense when it's being manufactured and changed at will.
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The idea is to attempt to pressure the justices in question (or more probably, to pressure Chief Justice Roberts to pressure the justices in question) to recuse themselves from cases where they would vote against the interests of those doing the reporting.
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It always strikes me as silly in that there's no causal explanation, no indication that Thomas or Alito would have voted differently on anything but-for gifts/wives/whatever.
I don’t think Thomas would have moved left. First he seems like the true believer ring-leader type. His wife was an organizer of 1/6. And seems like a true believer type that the election was stolen - by real fraud - and not the mass mail-in voting by definition is fraud type arguments found here.
Also he’s black. It seems to me that minorities in a group tend to be all-in and not the type of people that jump around groups.
I guess you could argue money kept him on the court but he seems like a believer in the mission. And of course money can’t buy the status of being a Supreme Court Judge. You need like Bezos money to get that.
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