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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   38687 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 15, 2024

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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:

Suppose someone wants to build a statue honoring Martin Luther King Jr. for his nonviolent resistance to racism. An opponent of the statue objects: "But Martin Luther King was a criminal!"

Any historian can confirm this is correct. A criminal is technically someone who breaks the law, and King knowingly broke a law against peaceful anti-segregation protest - hence his famous Letter from Birmingham Jail.

But in this case calling Martin Luther King a criminal is the noncentral. The archetypal criminal is a mugger or bank robber. He is driven only by greed, preys on the innocent, and weakens the fabric of society. Since we don't like these things, calling someone a "criminal" naturally lowers our opinion of them.

The opponent is saying "Because you don't like criminals, and Martin Luther King is a criminal, you should stop liking Martin Luther King."

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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