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From my moderator note the last time I posted here, on the subject of the convict Donald Trump.
I have half a mind to post this on a substack because I don't think it will get a fair hearing here. Out of respect for what TheMotte once was, I'll give it a try.
There's a problem with this inability to recognize evil as evil that is endemic here.
A felony is a kind of serious crime.
It means that a person has crossed a certain line of civility. A transgression against the nature of truth.
Trump is a liar. He lied about something to such a serious degree that twelve citizens were firmly convinced that he is guilty.
If you care at all about law and order, at some point you have to stop endorsing the person who attacks law and order.
I've been the victim of an SJW hate mob. It's one of many things that made me comfortable at a place where people were willing to talk about the deficiencies and self-righteous indignation of lefties.
But you, as in you the people here, you the people reading this message, are not better than the SJWs in this specific way: you demonize rather than argue. If someone makes a short argument, that's somehow bad and unfair and against the rules.
How is that supposed to be tolerating disagreement? How is that supposed to be free speech?
Trump is a bad person. And it's time for him to go.
And if you can't accept that, fuck you.
Any forum in which I'm not free to use my speech like this isn't a free speech forum.
I'm a classic 'law and order' conservative and Trump lost me on January 6th.
We have rules in our society, and he broke them. And your grudge against SJWs, which I share, is no justification for avoiding cleaning up your own shit.
Our entire society is predicated on some amount of trust. Some amount of truthfulness. We have laws about campaign finance. We have laws about falsifying business records. We have laws which brand a person a felon if they are a threat to the public order.
TheMotte became a performative space where people were allowed to tell themselves the story that they were 'grey tribe' neutral at the same time they bitterly denied and resistance any news which made their actual side look bad.
My only side is America. My only side is the Constitution. I am against lawlessness and disorder, and though many Democrats are corrupt criminals, and many SJWs are hysteric shit-flinging busybodies, none of that matters if we can't hold Trump accountable.
Don't you mean the justice-involved individual, Donald Trump? Kidding, kidding. But it really is Russell-conjugations all over the place.
And famously our lawbooks are groaning with such a profusion of them that we each, on average, inadvertently commit three each day. Seriously, criminal laws are often rather vague, and great power is entrusted to the hands of prosecutors to not go off the reservation and become little tinpot tyrants, using their awesome powers to for personal grievances. Unfortunately, this often doesn't work.
Moreover, which act works more harm on the commonweal - Donald Trump classifying payments to Stormy Daniels as "legal expenses" in his personal books, or a mob of 34 people ransacking a convenience store like a swarm of locusts? Because the first is a 34-felony indictment and got millions of dollars in legal resources thrown at it. The latter is a 34-misdemeanor nothingburger that ruins people's livelihoods and blights a neighborhood, but goes ignored by the progressive legal system. I'm not going to bitch at anyone who looks at this and concludes that the law is more than a bit of an ass these days.
The evidence in the case was highly publicized, and other fellow citizens are fully capable of disagreeing on the proper conclusion to be drawn. This isn't a new or controversial point. It's not a defection against the commonweal to argue that Sacco & Vanzetti or the Rosenberg were actually innocent, or on the other side that OJ or Alec Baldwin are actually guilty.
There's law and order, and then there's law and order. I'd actually argue that Trumpian tendencies are much closer to the original understanding of the term, given Trump's hostility to public disorder.
Definitely the one where the mob goes into the government building to try and disrupt the peaceful transfer of power.
Stable institutions of power transfer and robust checks and balances against those who would hijack that are among the only thing that prevents us from sliding into third world style governmental dysfunction.
Someone who would throw wrenches into that system to try to make it malfunction is a “bad person” like the OP claim, and one of the bigger societal risks out there. It’s a much more important case than a street felon.
This may be news to you, but society did not collapse overnight when the halls of power were threatened. There were no repeat attempts. Everybody eventually went home and retreated back to grumbling from their keyboards and patiently waited 4 more years for their next shot. You may argue that the consequent ill will towards Democrats was therefore misplaced and avoidable, but that sentiment was generalizable towards their entire party both before and after J6. It's baked in.
As bad as J6 was and could have been, watching various leftist riots and harassment campaigns treated with pillows while they spill their anger and hostility onto their fellow citizens did more to damage my trust in institutions than any march on the capitol. Your sacred system means fuck-all to me if it's not going to protect me and mine from street felons.
Sure I can definitely agree that the fact that the attempt to overthrow the peaceful transfer of power eventually fizzled out was a good thing.
Society doesn’t tend to collapse from this sort of thing, so I wouldn’t be surprised at that point. The majority of countries in the world today probably lack a tradition of peaceful transfer of power to varying degrees. But once you interrupt that process, it’s hard to put it back together.
I highly prefer to just vote rather than “I take power illegitimately then you take power illegitimately then…”
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Unfortunately that's not what he was convicted for.
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Marking paying his lawyer to execute a NDA as legal expenses? That lie? This seems to me to be "three felonies a day"ing Trump. Making a mockery of what should be serious and impactful crimes.
Message received. Follow your hostile meta-contrarian opinion or get internet-yelled-at.
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I agree with much of what you say here in a general sense (minus the use of the vitriol aimed at everyone here; I agree with it but I wouldn't say it, because incivility is pointless), but I think it's also fair to say that it's kind of a "meh" case. He paid off a porn star so that disclosure of his affair with her wouldn't hurt his electoral odds, and the payments were deceptively labeled as legal services payments to hide the fact that it was hush money.
This is bad, but: 1) Trump has done so much worse stuff that it's hard for me to care that much about this. Sure, if Biden or Obama did this then the right would talk about it every day for a decade, but that's in part because it would be their biggest known scandal. Relative to the rest of Trump, it's basically a blip. And 2) it feels tough for me to evoke the vibe of "felony" when picturing this case.
It feels a little like the example in Scott's noncentral fallacy post:
It's ironic because I think (in an informal sense) being a criminal is central to who Trump is and I think comparing him to MLK is absurd, but I also think there's a lot of "people don't like criminals, Trump is now technically a criminal and a felon, so we will now call him that every time we mention him forever" going on here. I wish the trials would move forward for anything related to the "alternative electors" plot or at least the classified documents case. Then I'd feel much more comfortable with this.
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Indeed, and yet I find the "crime" that Trump has been convicted of is not serious. It's not a felony. I don't think it's even a crime, except when combined with the horror of having won a national election as a non-Democrat.
Would you please explain which felony law Trump is supposed to have broken? And when exactly was he convicted of it?
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Oh, dear.
I entirely agree that Trump is bad, and that there are people on the Motte who post many terribly stupid ideas. With apologies to my fellow posters, I believe that many of you are gravely wrong on many important issues, and that in some specific cases, you are not merely wrong, but wrong in a way that strikes me as, well, stupid. Foolish. Something you should know better than.
However, the difference is that I'm not demanding consensus in a hostile and frankly rude way. Do I agree with you on the object-level issue? Yes. Why don't I act like you? A few reasons. Firstly, there's a meta-level on which I think that people are owed a measure of civility regardless of their ideas. Secondly, likewise on the meta-level, I don't come to the Motte to canvass support for my politics, and I would roundly encourage everybody else to adopt the same attitude. That's not what this place is for, so I don't come here to do it. Thirdly, insofar as I do want to effectively advocate for my politics and convince people of them, I don't believe that fierce demands like this would be effective. How do you convince dedicated Trumpists to change their minds? Not by yelling swear words at them, certainly.
I think there's one clear nonsense point there, which is the connection drawn between "Trump found guilty" and "Trump is bad". Under the circumstances, Trump being found guilty should be a null update about his character. There are many excellent reasons to hate the guy, but this one - i.e. "if you can find a kangaroo court to convict someone of a crime, that makes him evil" - is obviously bananas; even divine command theory has question marks on it, and this moral precept amounts in practice to "tyrant command theory".
Hm, I'll grant that's true. The Trump conviction did not alter my opinion of Trump in any substantial way - he was bad before and he continues to be bad. I have no very strong view on whether or not he is guilty of falsifying campaign records - that case could have gone either way and it would have made no material difference to my voting intentions, or what would be my voting intentions were I an American citizen.
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Why am I expected to argue with this? This is, literally, not an argument.
Your entire post is based on some kind of appeal to emotion, or rhetoric, or whatever, it's a definitional problem, it's probably just bait, because it's actually a very simple idea to anyone who isn't rationalizing-whatever. Just because something is named a felony, or a woman, or low inflation, or whatever doesn't make it so. 12 people voted guilty, OK, mistakes and unjust verdicts don't exist, nothing about this persecution is illegitimate, I'm supposed to, what now? Not vote for Trump because that's moral? Sure, whatever, I'll do whatever you want because the magic words have been invoked. I guess that's what arguing is. I think I'd rather jerk off.
"You, the people here," "we hold Trump accountable," I don't know what you're talking about. "I'm a classic conservative," what does this mean? These are all just empty categories.
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Which action of his? Organizing a rally in the capital city of the polity he resides? Giving a speech at said rally? Encouraging his attendees of said rally to peacefully march to the most legitimate building to protest around in the capital city of our republic?
Trump certainly did not organize the incompetent security lines. He was not in charge of the police force that managed to let an unarmed crowd of humans sac the equivalent of an 19th century fort by checks notes walking around erratically.
We used to have such laws, and still do. They are what we properly consider felonies: Murder, burglary, embezzlement. Trump didn't do any of those things, he wrote a thing was expense type A, and the prosecutor thought it was expense type B. Neither that, nor campaign finance laws (themselves an assault on our freedom) are proof of a threat to the public order. Rather. The person making such an argument is said threat.
Didn't federal prosecutors consider Trump's actions and determined he didn't violate Federal campaign finance laws? Or at least didn't bother charging him.
Yes, but that doesn't mean I can't rail against them anyways.
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A felony is words on a page. I don't let the Word of God bypass my moral reasoning (I'm not a very good Catholic), and I definitely won't let the US Criminal Code bypass it either.
Let me turn the question back on you: If/when Trump successfully appeals that verdict, will your moral judgment change? He literally would not be a felon, and you are placing a lot of importance on that. Assuming that his felony-free status wouldn't change your mind, why would you think that his felony-convicted status would change anyone else's?
For a lighter story about how the law can be misaligned with morality, see this article:
There's a certain debate strategy that gets on my nerves. I'm sure there's a formal term for it, but I call it a "prohibition on reason".
I see it here, with "felon = evil". I saw it during the pandemic, where public health measures were treated the same as risk factors ("The virus knows if you're sitting or standing, so it's only safe to sit unmasked in a restaurant"). I saw it in cancellation campaigns where an activist NGO is treated as infallible ("The 'okay' handsign is a white supremacist dogwhistle. The trucker should be fired.")
As an aside, this sort of argument by ridicule can be used against any Schelling point rule meant to identify an easy cutoff point between two undesirable extremes (see also the old "she was only 17 years and 364 days old, you monster" jab). Clearly the intent was to make people wear masks as much as possible, except when incompatible with other desiderata like being able to consume food in a public setting; what do you think would have been a better rule to settle this trade-off without causing uncertainty and enabling a lot more disruptive haggling?
As for people like OP, who fail a sort of "guardian-guarded distinction" and transfer some of the sanctity of the things a rule or law is intended to defend against onto the rule or law itself (or conversely treat violators of the law as instances of the bad thing the law was meant to prevent), I understand your annoyance but it's also easy to see how they are part of the grease that makes our society run. Their existence protects against sliding into the sort of illegible system where the written rules are never the actual rules, enabling corruption and causing friction everywhere.
"You should wear a mask except when predominently engaged in activities that require being maskless". Eating takes up most of one's time in a restaurant.
Trump's prosecution was already a case where the written rules aren't the actual rules, because people are not usually prosecuted for his crime. The OP was being a concern troll, not trying to follow a universal rule.
But then you would get people trying to lawyer "predominantly", walk around with food in hands or just pockets to avoid wearing masks (lots of people, myself included, already did this seated), ...; also there is an argument that when walking around you cover more ground (germs don't fully disperse in dining settings, cf. those norovirus outbreak analyses where correlation with seat distance is seen).
Doesn't mesh with my understanding of that term, and OP seems to be my political near mirror image. Boomercons hating Trump for breaking rules and decorum seems consistent.
OP is almost certainly not a boomercon and her writing style is a near exact match for rdrama's favorite reddit mod Bardfinn or ex-Mottizen Impassionata.
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If it was safe enough to eat in a restaurant sans mask, it was safe enough to walk into the restaurant without a mask and around the restaurant without a mask. There is no trade off in that scenario.
What does "safe enough" mean? COVID had a transmission rate that was far from "approach infected person -> you get infected immediately 100%", so the appropriate mental model is that there is some positive correlation between time length of exposure and likelihood of transmission. If you believe masks reduce the likelihood of transmission while you wear them, then wearing a mask half of the time is strictly better than never wearing a mask, and wearing a mask always is strictly better than either. However, if you wear a mask 100% of the time, you can't eat. There's your tradeoff.
You are sitting in a room full of patrons. They are eating and drinking and talking. The idea that a mask worn while going to the bathroom would have any meaningful impact on concentration of virus is fanciful.
It still takes time (and time you are moving around, covering more area), so under the assumptions that believers make it might well reduce transmission risk per visit by like 10%. Do you have any proposals other than just "you don't have to wear masks in restaurants", which is reasonable if you believe they don't do anything anyway but clearly not a solution to the "what easy rule can maximise mask wearing while allowing people to eat" problem that the rule-setters were trying to solve? What you are doing seems analogous to someone who believes air travel is evil and unnecessary asserting that plane designers are stupid for putting wings on planes because they could save materials if they didn't.
The base rate of people having Covid at all is very low, this was true even during the height of the pandemic, especially if they show no symptoms. The reduction in transmission from masks is also very low, even if worn correctly(they won't be). Wearing a mask only part time reduces this further. If you multiply all these low probabilities together you get an absurdly low probability.
The whole thing was security theatre. That 10% reduction sounds like a lot until you realize the base rate is .01 and no one is actually following the protocol enough to actually reduce it by 10%, more like 1%
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"Takeout only"?
Outside seating only if dining in.
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Not the person you're talking to, but I think "restaurants are closed" would have been a reasonable policy. So would "you don't have to wear masks". It's the halfway point of "wear a mask but not the 90% of the time you're at your table" which I found ridiculous.
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All the ended up being unimportant as the end point of the pandemic was everyone gets some natural immunity.
The big difference between the entire town locks themselves in a basement and plays twister for 48 hours and everyone always maintains 6’ of difference is the twister playing people all get covid the first week and the 6’ people it takes 3 months for the entire town to be infected.
(Of course there were reasons to delay infection early for hospital capacity and waiting for vaccines but the true end point was everyone gets it)
The question whether COVID rules like this particular one are reasonable ways to implement a particular goal (reduce transmission rate) given particular assumptions (masks work, ...) is orthogonal to the question of whether the goal and the assumptions are sound, and I doubt we'll get much out of relitigating the latter here for the gorillionth time. It is possible for COVID policy to be misguided, masks to be ineffectual, and the restaurant masking policy to be reasonable (as in sensible given its proponents' beliefs) yet susceptible to the sort of anti-arbitrary-cutoff zinger that the poster above posted, simultaneously.
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Scott (PBUH) referred to this as the Noncentral Fallacy and furthermore dubbed it the worst argument in the world
That's not quite it, but it's related. If I look back at the canon, the closest ones I can find are Epistemic Learned Helplessness and Semantic Stopsigns.
People don't want to evaluate the merits of some particular case because it's quite complex (Trump bad? Covid's transmissibility and risks? White supremacist messaging?). They find a simple and authoritative answer to one small aspect of it (Convicted! The Health Ministry said you can X! The NGO said OK is a symbol!), and then not only do they stop looking at the issues, they try to impose that same stopping point on me as well. The counterarguments are simple and the inadequacy of those claims is (IMO) obvious, but they're still heresy.
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Judges do not get to decide who is evil. And you have failed to parse "accountability" as the ruling elite crushing it's opposition.
Trump could actually be much worse than he is (and there is a LOT of room) and people would still support him, and be right to do so if he is their only champion.
Appealing to law, to rules, to civility is a luxury only afforded to those who are beyond politics because they have already won. The rest have to actually fight to get what they want.
You want things to be as they were 20 years ago, you want to live in a mostly united society where the people who share your beliefs have won and there is no need to fight.
You don't live in that. Liberalism is dead. Make peace with it and take new sides or become a weird pariah like those who were still soviet communists after 1991.
There is no alternative. The world you thought you lived in does not exist anymore.
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Do you have anything here? Anything at all, besides some vitriol?
Is it now? Suppose you're going to an airport. Your flight is canceled and the next one's not for a few hours, so you drive over to the nearest bar. You have some food, a few beers, head outside to have a smoke and realize you don't have a lighter with you, so you snag a couple of packs of matches from the bar (which still gives them out) and have a smoke before driving back to the airport and getting on your flight. What crimes have you committed? Well, DUI, but that's possibly just a misdemeanor. But also you've violated 49 USC 5124 by knowingly carrying TWO packs of matches aboard the aircraft; only one is allowed. Thats a felony carrying up to 5 years in prison. That's how serious a felony is in this day and age.
You're not fooling anyone.
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Replying to your top-level, though I did read the follow-ons.
So, BLUF, you're banned. Good-bye.
Now, working from the bottom up: Yes, your posts have (had) to be manually approved, because you are an infrequent poster who posts angry rants that get heavily downvoted, hence you were stuck in the new user filter like everyone else. Had you made any effort to be a reasonable participant, that wouldn't have happened, but instead, your posts sat in the new user filter while we mods discussed "Should we just remove this angry drunken rant, or approve it and then ban him, or what?" (Spoiler: we decided the latter.)
You should have reread that mod note of mine you quoted above, because I was trying to steer you in the direction of actual productive engagement.
"Trump bad" is a perfectly valid opinion (and contrary to what you seem to think, it is not unique or even that rare here on the Motte).
"Trump bad and everyone who thinks differently is bad fuck you" is not.
You're a classic law and order conservative who loves America and the Constitution? Good for you. Wish you'd been able to express yourself without over-the-top rage and contempt, because it would have been good to have a little more of that, some more diversity of thought.
So why did I ban you, if we wanted more diversity of thought? Because someone who only seems to be able to participate by raging at his enemies isn't actually contributing anything. We've had your type before (usually, though, they are Impassionatas or Marxbros or other leftists), who are so implacably convinced of their objective and provable correctness and righteousness that they are literally incapable of good faith engagement because everything to them is a scissor statement.
There is almost no forum that is a "free speech forum" in the sense that you get to say literally anything you want. Such forums rapidly turn into shitshows and there is a reason people generally prefer moderated forums, no matter how much they disagree over how the moderation should work (usually, "ban more of my enemies and let me say anything I want," but so it goes). This is a free speech forum in the sense that we don't ban any views. No one gets banned for having the wrong opinion or having unthinkable thoughts or unpalatable beliefs. Instead, they get banned because instead of wanting to talk and actually hear what other people think, they just want to dump shits on the floor, or pour gasoline and light a match, or shit on the floor and then pour gasoline over it and light a match.
And that's what your post is doing. What exactly do you think anyone who supports Trump (or even, not necessarily supports him, but thinks he's maybe not the most damaging person in US history) is supposed to say to your rant? Do you think they would have any expectation that calmly explaining why they support Trump would get anything more than another round of angry "fuck you"s and "repent sinner"s?
So you got your shot off, and now you're banned, because you're an angry ranter who got warned four times and banned twice for doing the same thing.
Only some people here call themselves "gray tribe." There are leftists and rightists and moderates here and people who don't neatly fit into any particular label. No matter how much critics try to insist this place is all a bunch of Trump-apologist red tribers (when they aren't screaming at us for being too accommodating to Blue Tribe sensibilities or being converged by Da Joos or whatever), it's not, and your anti-Trump arguments would have been welcome here, except what you tried to do was enforce consensus. Like, literally your entire post was an argument that we should all get on the same page about how bad Trump is. You can go somewhere else looking to force everyone into agreement with your position or browbeating those who won't, but if you actually want to participate here, you have to do so accepting that people are not going to agree with you and you need to deal with them, civilly.
Thanks for explaining the full thought process behind the moderation. I was confused by his comment that his comments were in moderator jail.
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He (or one of his accountants) labeled a payment for an NDA as a legal expense. If that's somehow a felony then either the law making it such is terrible, or the jury instructions were terrible, or both. That's before you get into the time travel aspect of this (Trump's mislabeling of a payment made in 2017 was in furtherance of another alleged crime, that being unlawfully interfering in the 2016 presidential election).
There were many other things wrong with the NY trial. But where it falls flat is that an election isn’t a purity test. Are we to believe Biden isn’t a liar? Are we to believe the democrats—of the summer of love ilk—are exemplars of law and order? Hell, what reason does OP have to believe the process in NY was fair?
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Furthermore,
No. Not only no, hell no. Not only no, a thousand times no.
Dictators are never good. Open calls for authoritarians are a sign of deeply misplaced idiocy and ignorance.
Our Founding Fathers did not create a bulwark against sheer hellish authoritarianism, they did not rebel against a king just so some shitbrained internet commentators who got hurt by a blue haired person once could lust after the inherently violent nature of a dictatorship.
I reject utterly this uncivilized madness.
All dictatorships are dysfunctional. Anyone who says otherwise is making a partisan and inflammatory claim.
The entire point of rejecting the authoritarian left is to avoid the hell that is a dictator in charge.
Singapore would disagree.
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I’m not convinced that every instance of Autocracy is pure unadulterated evil. There are great emperors in history. The emperor of Japan managed to turn a backward medieval civilization into a state able to go toe to toe with world powers. Peter the Great built Russia into a civilization. Augustus Caesar brought peace to Rome. There were great rulers in China as well.
The vast majority end up bad. But at the same time, democracy has done some bad things as well. Democracy nuked Hiroshima. Democracy installed Hitler. Democracy dumped metric tons of Napalm over Vietnam.
I don’t think, at the end of the day, the exact form of the government matters nearly as much as the character and intelligence of the people running the government. No society run by the kinds of people our current democracy is putting in power is going to do well simply because they’re not the kinds of people capable of leadership, integrity and intellectual agility. Do you honestly believe that Biden or Trump are capable of modernizing American systems to the needs of the 21st century and the challenges of AI? I’m not convinced either one can set up a router without help. I don’t think they’re that intellectually curious (even before Biden’s debate performance).
I think it's good to separate the principle from the instances. One can theorize or perhaps identify an absolute autocrat who is "good" by some standard. The principle of dictatorships, and therefore the act of ever advocating for any dictator to be installed in any nation, is 100% bad. This is one of the many issues I have with Yarvin and Yarvinism.
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I think for example Pinochet was probably net good for Chile. Salazar may have been a net good for Portugal.
More to the point, the administrative state already exercises near dictatorial powers. Look at what they’ve done to Latin Mass Catholics. Look at what they’ve done with locking up some of their opponents while not locking up their own for the same transgression. Look at what they did to parents at school board meetings?
They’ve put some on a watch list. Have they done anything else?
No, they haven't even run a surveillance program.
I was shown the internal report from the SSPX. It broadly agrees with the FBI's story- there was a crazy person at a traditional Parish trying to recruit parishioners into a terror attack, the pastor reported him, and the FBI tried to recruit the latin mass community into running sting operations to catch domestic terrorists. "No, we want nothing to do with that" got escalated up to some senior leaderships and a few FBI agents showed up to recruit CI's, stood around awkwardly, and then either went native or left.
This program was stupid, but it was never directed against Latin mass Catholics- it was intended to convince us to use our streetcred with the actual literal far right to infiltrate white supremacist groups for the FBI. When we declined to do so and couldn't be convinced, the FBI gave up.
Interesting! And rather reassuring!
Is there anything published where I can read more about this?
Not in view of the public, although the report from the FBI that was broadly interpreted as an ass-covering exculpatory lying is more-or-less in agreement with what traditional Catholic leadership themselves thought was going on. I mean it cites things like the SPLC but the factual description of the program in the leaked internal memo was "we intend to recruit tradCath CI's who can infiltrate white supremacist groups using their existing street cred with the far right". This didn't happen and was always a dumb idea. But there don't seem to have been any pressure tactics other than requests from regional headquarters, which did the common sense thing and wanted nothing to do with such a program.
This was a convenient rhetorical cudgel for Josh Hawley, but an actual threat to the community- no, not really. TradCaths are too connected to conservatives with actual power to have their first amendment rights blown out of the water- freaking scientology gets theirs respected, and an eccentric sect of the largest religion in the country with two members on the supreme court is somewhat more protected.
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That is enough. The whole point of putting someone on a watch list is designed to discourage the relevant group. There is zero reason to put LMC on a watchlist. It is evil.
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Was Cincinnatus in the wrong when he briefly became dictator to solve a crisis in Rome? Are there really no scenarios where a dictator has done good?
When people use the word dictator they use it in the modern sense, which is a bunch of military generals subverting supposedly democratic revolutions for their own personal gain and power. This is also how Julius Caesar used it in the waning days of the Roman Republic.
Cincinnatus was a great dictator, just like George Washington was a great general and president. But, we don't call Washington a dictator, because he went out of his way not to become one. A feat not replicated by the various revolutionaries that have given us the modern definition of dictator.
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Dictators have a long history of being great. It all depends on the world you find yourself in and the situation of those to be governed.
Now I think a Republic was correct for the people of the early United States this is not the situation most countries find themselves in. The most extreme form of Democracy probably won’t work in sub-Saharan Africa. War time Ukraine is likely better with less democracy.
Of course I can fairly obviously state that you yourself are not in favor of Democracy. I’ve yet to meet one person in favor of one world government where the votes of Africa, China, India would absolutely crush the votes from the people of western governments. The more you think about Democracy the more you realize it’s not the core American feature and never could be.
Agreed. The core American principle was respect for property rights and general freedom with a Republican government designed to protect those rights. See the eleventh amendment.
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Dictators in the literal sense are a perfectly acceptable solution to pressing existential problems.
Temporary absolute monarchy to solve a specific crisis such as war is a political tradition so successful most republican regimes feature a clause for it.
Washington was essentially a dictator. Lincoln was unquestionably one. FDR was one in all but name.
Dictatorship isn't just a common tradition. It's a common American tradition.
What you are railing against is tyranny, not dictatorship.
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And I can see that my comments have to be manually approved. Good God. The moderation here is simply bad.
The demand to be able to curse anyone who disagrees with you with nothing to throttle you isn't really supporting the pro- "classic 'law-and-order' conservative" and anti- "demonize rather than argue" stance you're claiming here. The moderation here is correctly identifying some of your posts as bad, even when agreeing with your conclusions, because it actually is pro-order and pro-argument and anti-demonization.
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