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Notes -
I finally got around to the last case (well, except for the early ones before I started doing these, which I have no intention of returning to):
Moody v. Netchoice and Netchoice v. Paxton
9-0, as to judgment; 6 is the most any one opinion gathers, with Kagan writing, joined by Roberts, Sotomayor, Kavanaugh, and Barrett, and in part, Jackson.
Alito writes for the other three. Thomas, Barrett, and Jackson all write additional opinions.
The case concerns two laws passed in 2021 regulating internet entities, one from Florida, and one from Texas. The laws restricted content moderation, and required explaining the reasoning behind content moderation restricting users. Netchoice is suing that these violate the first amendment. Netchoice is a trade association containing a whole host of large social media companies—Google, Etsy,
TwitterX, and a whole host more—that exists, it seems, largely to lobby or combat laws like the two passed.In both cases, Netchoice sought preliminary injunctions, and in both cases they were granted by the district court. The Eleventh Circuit held that the platforms' decisions were constitutionally protected speech, and accordingly found that the moderation and disclosure requirements were unconstitutional (the latter because it is too burdensome), with the sole exception of the requirement in Florida's laws that the platform disclose the content moderation policy in general (as opposed to in specific cases). The Fifth Circuit held that NetChoice did not try to show it unconstitutional in all applications, held that the restrictions on moderation were not regulating the Platforms' speech, and upheld the disclosure requirements, both general and particular, due to Zauderer having ruled that it was permissible to compel factual information.
The Supreme Court here unanimously agrees that the cases need to be remanded, as courts did not adequately consider that these were facial challenges—that is, that they must consider the law in general, rather than as applied to the plaintiffs. The laws are broad, and they were only addressed narrowly.
I'll start with the smaller opinions this time.
Barrett concurs. She briefly notes at the outset that she agrees with the court that the Eleventh Circuit (which struck down the Florida law) correctly stated 1st amendment precedent, whereas the Fifth circuit (which upheld the Texas law) did not. The remainder of her concurrences emphasizes that this indicates the difficulties of bringing a facial rather than an as-applied challenge. She notes the various difficulties in evaluating these, even were it only as-applied: the first amendment only protects expressive activity. Are decisions made by AI expressive? Further, what if the corporation is located overseas, and so not entitled to First Amendment rights? Considerations like these would more fittingly be applied in specific cases, instead of attempting to evaluate it all in a single facial challenge. So she would prefer they bring it as-applied.
Jackson concurs in part. She thinks that it is generally clear that some things a social media company may do are protected by the first amendment, and others are not, but it is hard to say more here. She agrees with Barrett that the Eleventh Circuit "at least fairly stated" the First Amendment precedent, whereas the Fifth Circuit did not. But, like the whole court, she agrees that they need to reevaluate it in light of it being a facial challenge. Jackson states that the question, in evaluation of this, is not whether corporations as a class, or a particular corporation, is acting constitutionally, nor even whether, e.g. content moderation fits precedent, but it depends on the way that the activities actually function regarding whether they constitute expression. Jackson would decline to look at the ruling on the merits as-applied to the companies, and hence she only joins three parts of the majority opinion: I (the history of the cases), II (the analysis of it being facial, and so requiring remand), and III-A (the account of the first amendment precedent). It seems she does not join Kagan's application of that precedent to these cases.
Thomas concurs in the judgment. He disagrees with the court's decision to give opinions on the applications of those statutes, as this involves some of the same sorts of analysis that they complained about—looking at specific cases, instead of the broad range. He agrees with Alito's analysis. Thomas first notes two additional considerations: the Courts depend on Zauderer, which stated that "laws requiring the disclosure of factual information in commercial advertising may satisfy the First Amendment if the disclosures are reasonably related to the Government's interest in preventing consumer deception." In classic Thomas fashion, he thinks that should be reconsidered, citing an opinion from himself fourteen years prior. Secondly, he notes that he thinks the lower courts should continue to be guided by the common carrier doctrine, which have certain requirements, especially, service of all comers, and that there is historical precedent for regulating transportation and communications networks like traditional common carriers. (Again, citing his past opinions.) The lower courts addressed this in their analysis previously; they should continue to do so, though that cannot really be feasibly be done under a facial analysis.
With that prelude aside, Thomas turns to the main portion of his concurrence, where he argues that facial challenges violate the command of article III. Article III gives courts the power only over "cases" and "controversies." In such particular cases and controversies, it is the place of the courts to say what the law is, but only in those cases. This is necessary to confine the courts to a judicial role. Facial challenges conflict with this because they ask whether statutes constitutionally conflict in cases not before the court. Facial challenges require that no set of circumstances exist under which it would be valid, or in the case of the First amendment, the looser standard that it has prohibits too high of a ratio of protected:plainly unprotected speech. Facial challenges thus ask courts to issue decisions that are unnecessary to decide some particular case or controversy. Plaintiffs are required to show that they personally have suffered an actual or threatened injury, and must be given a remedy that is limited to the injury. Accordingly, the case is done once they have decided whether it is legitimate as-applied. Deciding whether it would be legitimate as applied to other plaintiffs is not necessary, and should be considered as no more than an advisory opinion, which should not be issued. Facial challenges allow challenging applications of statutes that have not injured him, which is ordinarily disallowed. They also allow enjoining of applications of statutes which have nothing to do with his injury, which is not how redressability is supposed to work, and like a universal injunction, which is itself problematic (citing himself and Gorsuch). Facial challenges further intrude upon powers reserved to the Legislative, the Executive, and the States. They allow for the review of constitutionality of applications of a statute before even it has been enforced, giving courts "a general veto power" upon the legislation of Congress, but the Judiciary has no constitutional role in lawmaking. As-applied challenges minimize intrusion. This leaves the Executive branch free to enforce it in other applications. Facial challenges, on the other hand are maximalist, leaving the other branches with no opportunity to correct things, harming the democratic nature of the government. Moreover, facial challenges can prevent the application of state laws in its particular cases, and usurp power from state courts, contrary to the 10th amendment.
Facial challenges also create practical problems. They harm the adversarial system, by allowing plaintiffs to present a challenge without direct knowledge of how the case might apply to others, and so often depend on speculation.
As applied to these cases, the state officials had no opportunity to tailor the enforcement of the laws, nor state legislatures to amend the statutes prior to their enjoinment, nor state courts to interpret the law. Rather federal courts, with little factual record, did. Thomas notes that some blame here is because of associational standing (e.g. NetChoice, instead of the constituent entities) mucking things up—he opposed associational standing in his concurrence over mifeprestone earlier this year—but the facial nature also plays a role in that. The task before them is impossibly complex.
They are also suspect in their origins, being a result of vagueness and overbreadth. At the time of the founding, the courts correctly understood themselves to only decide particular cases or controversies. The founders four times rejected creating a council of revision, which would evaluate and reject statutes, untied from a case. The narrow understanding of what the court could do was generally adhered to for over a century. The first change to this was the development of vagueness—courts began in 1914 to strike down statutes as unconstitutionally indefinite. In 1940, in the First Amendment context, they struck down a statute as "invalid on its face," as it was a "sweeping proscription of freedom of discussion." The court has never justified this overbreadth doctrine in text and history, "just policy considerations and value judgments." This eventually spread elsewhere, without textual or historical justification. Thomas concludes that the court should put an end to facial challenges.
Enough of the minor opinions, now to the two major ones.
Kagan writes for the majority. After introducing and giving the history of the cases (recall: 5th circuit upheld the law, the 11th circuit struck it down), she addresses the facial nature of the case. The court has made facial cases hard to win, ordinarily requiring showing that they are invalid in every application. It is still difficult even in First Amendment cases, like the present one, where the challenger must show that "a substantial number of the law's applications are unconstitutional, judged in relation to the statute's plainly legitimate sweep." But both parties thus far have only been considering them in more narrow applications (like Facebook's news feed), instead of the full range of applications (Among others, is direct messaging covered? Gmail filters? Etsy reviews?). And then it must be considered whether those applications violate the First Amendment: in the case of the content-moderation provisions, whether it intrudes on protected editorial discretion. Regarding individualized-explanation provisions, whether the disclosures unduly burden expression. These issues have not been considered, so they vacate and remand.
Then: "It is necessary to say more about how the First Amendment relates to the laws' content-moderation provisions, to ensure that the facial analysis proceeds on the right path in the courts below," and this is especially needed for the Fifth Circuit, as otherwise, it would just decide the same way, as it wrongly held that they were not speech at all, and wrongly treated Texas' interest as valid.
In essence, Texas' law requires carrying or promotion of speech, when the platforms would rather do the opposite. The platforms argue that this requires changing their expression, and the Court has held in the past that expression includes curation of speech by others. The precedents: In Tornillo, the Court held a law requiring newspapers give candidates the right to reply to criticism violated the First Amendment, in forcing them to print what they would otherwise not. In Pacific Gas & Elec. Co., a utility company distributed views on energy policy in its billing envelopes, the state required including inclusion of material from a different perspective, and the Court sided with the company, as it was not required to carry speech it disagreed with. In Turner I, they held that rules requiring cable operators to allocate channels to local broadcast stations involved the First Amendment. (Even though they eventually decided it was worth restricting anyway in Turner II.) In Hurley, they decided that a parade was free to decide who to admit. On the other hand, they allowed compelled access in two cases: in Pruneyard, they permitted a law compelling a mall to allow people to distribute pamphlets. And in FAIR, they permitted which compelled law schools to allow the military to recruit on campus. In both of these, it was understood that these did not affect expression of the party.
From that can be drawn three principles: The first amendment protects those who compile speech when they wish to exclude some. Secondly, this includes when they exclude just a few items. Third, the government cannot merely assert an interest in balancing the marketplace of ideas.
Things like Facebook's News Feed involve removing or prioritizing content. This is like the cases before, and so is protected. Texas's law thus is problematic. This does not change by the fact that they allow most speech through. Nor does the fact that users can easily tell that it is the users speaking, not the platform, change anything.
Texas' stated interest does not work—promoting ideological balance among private actors is not a legitimate government interest, as it is inherently censorious.
The remaining major opinion is that of Alito:
Alito opens, in the very first paragraph of his introduction, by stating that everything except the facial unconstitutionality of the case is nonbinding dicta. That is, most of Kagan's opinion is extraneous to the matter decided then, can be dismissed, and is of no precedential value. He agrees that it needs further examination as to whether it is facially unconstitutional. But they should not have gone further.
Alito proceeds to a lengthier discussion of the state laws and history of the two cases before they came to the Supreme Court. Then he turns to the facial nature of the challenge: these are strongly disfavored, and conflict with several principles—they clash with the general principle of not reaching beyond what is needed in court decisions, are antidemocratic, and "strain the limits" of the constitutional authority to decide "cases" and "controversies." Accordingly, the requirements are demanding—generally speaking, it fails wherever there is any "plainly legitimate sweep" to the statute. Netchoice asks that this standard not be applied. This is wrong, as the states have asked for the rules of a facial challenge to be applied, and even were it not the case, they would still be necessary for the courts to follow. Netchoice chose to make a facial challenge; now it must deal with the consequences of that choice.
Alito then turns to whether NetChoice manage to show that it is facially constitutional. He begins by reviewing. The First Amendment protects freedom of speech, which usually involves government efforts to forbid, restrict, or compel expression. But some cases have included presenting an edited compilation for the purpose of expressing a message. But not every compilation is expressive. Accordingly, the First Amendment only protects expressive compilations. To show that a compilation is expressive, they must first show that they exercise editorial discretion, and are not, for example, "dumb pipes" that return whatever is put in. This may vary within the same entity, even—newspapers often will exercise far less discretion in advertisements, which may make a meaningful first amendment difference, or a parade might ordinarily only select groups, and not individuals. (Contra the majority, it can matter how much they include vs. exclude, depending on their methodology.)
Additionally, the compilation must be expressing some (often abstract) point. Chronological organization, for example, isn't really expression. It was for this reason that in PruneYard they were willing to compel a mall to host third-party speech.
Third, they must show that their speech is affected by the speech it would be compelled to accommodate. In PruneYard and FAIR they held that the government could compel speech, because speech in those cases was not expressive.
After it has been shown that the first amendment applies, it then has to be shown that the regulation "violates the applicable level of First Amendment scrutiny"—as in Turner, where they decided that it did involve the first amendment, but nevertheless, the government prevailed. Here, they assert an interest in fostering a free and open marketplace of ideas, as well as preventing discrimination against people who live in Texas, which Alito considers compelling interests.
Netchoice failed to meet this burden. First, it did not establish which entities were affected, which make it difficult to know whether a facial challenge should succeed (might it cover websites like WhatsApp that act more like passive receptacles, without curation, and so be legal at least in those cases?). Second, it did not say what kind of content appears, which might be relevant for the first amendment (e.g. is it political? That might matter). Third, it does not show how they moderate. Reddit outsources moderation, which makes it arguably not reddit's speech.
The majority spends much of its opinion specifically talking about how this would apply to the Facebook newsfeed or youtube homepage. Alito points out that this might not even be needed—the fifth circuit can decide on other grounds. He disagrees with their characterization of it as expressive, as they have not revealed how their algorithms were created or work. And they do not consider whether they should be common carriers. And it is not so obvious that what these platforms do in their curation is the same as what editors do—massive scale, post hoc removal, AI algorithms. It also remains to be considered whether "network effects" make any difference. (I'm a little surprised they didn't mention Turner II here, which allowed the government to mandate cable networks carry local stations, despite recognizing that there were first amendment concerns, as otherwise they'd be shut out of the market). He thinks all of these should be resolved in a future as-applied challenge.
Turning to the disclosure questions (saying why messages were censored), they must, under Zauderer, not unduly burden speech. That's hard to know in a facial challenge, and even in the case of YouTube, it doesn't seem like that huge of a burden. This is especially the case for companies that already have to do all that anyway under an EU law.
Let's analyze this in a different direction, by issue.
Should this be remanded due to the facial nature of the challenge? 9-0.
Was the 5th circuit's analysis of editorial discretion problematic? Gorsuch, Alito, and Thomas do not explicitly say; the other 6 are clear that it erred.
For that reason, should the court give further guidance? 5-4 (Alito, Gorsuch, Thomas, Jackson in the minority)
Is the risk of misattribution sometimes the decisive factor as to whether it is protected speech? 5-3, against Gorsuch, Thomas, Alito. (Jackson gives no indication)
Is it ever relevant whether a compiler includes most items and excludes only a few? 6-3, against Gorsuch, Thomas, Alito.
Is an interest in improving or balancing the marketplace of ideas legitimate to compel speech? 6-3, against Gorsuch, Thomas, and Alito.
Does Netchoice's failure to establish which entities are covered mean it fails to show the laws are facially invalid? 9-0.
Is it meaningful that Netchoice has not shown how (delegation of moderation to third parties, like reddit, or the use of algorithms instead of human judgment) it moderates content? At least 5 agree: Alito's opinion, Jackson's (she specifically highlights it), and Barrett's.
Thomas, Gorsuch, and Alito think that the court should at least have addressed the common carrier argument. They also are concerned that there may be further concerns and important differences between editing a newspaper vs. moderating a social media site (size, network effects, algorithmic vs human moderation).
Some additional thoughts:
People, especially on the left, think of Thomas and the court as corrupt. Aside from the extent to which that is bolstered by politically motivated slander, I don't think they realize that Thomas wants to constrain judicial power, seeing its current state as beyond constitutional bounds. Compare to the complaints of Jackson in Trump v. United States, released on the same day, that the court was expanding its own power. And it isn't unique to this case; he's also expressed doubts about certain conventional forms of standing, and a few other sorts of things. I'd imagine Gorsuch concurs with Thomas on a lot of this, though not on everything he said (e.g. I don't think Gorsuch is much of a fan of prosecutors tailoring laws being important, due to fair notice concerns—it's not good, and unfair to the citizenry, to have a bunch of broad laws erratically enforced).
All of these opinions depended heavily on precedent. I have no idea what originalist methodology would say here.
I also don't think I got a sufficiently clear view from either party as to what constitutes expression and what does not. Nor do they really deal with common-carrier questions, which are very relevant, I think.
There have been revelations (though some already speculated before the release of those) that Alito originally had the majority in this case, with Barrett and Jackson siding with him, but they eventually left.
Practically speaking, I'm not sure what's the best policy-wise. With the acquisition of Twitter, it doesn't feel like conservatives are at quite as much of an ideological disadvantage. It seems risky to allow government intervention in speech. I also don't know about jurisdictional questions—does it make sense for states to be able to regulate a shared platform? What if they do so in different directions? Might those who believe in the dormant commerce clause (that is, states being unable to regulate interstate commerce) think it applies here?
Personally, I believe the court should just carve a distinction between curated and carried speech. There is a speech interest in, say, a supermarket curating the newspapers that they carry; there is not a speech interest in a supermarket excluding topics of discussion between shoppers, even though they take part inside their venue. Nobody interprets, say, their Facebook feed as being a communication from Facebook. IMO this should cover both "direct" and "group" messages. There may still be other grounds to block it, such as a stated or implied disinterest on the part of the recipient, or curation by instruction of the recipient, but not venue 1A grounds, because nobody reasonably interprets them to be the voice of the venue to start with.
I take it you're on team Alito, then.
This gets cloudier when it's an algorithm that's deciding what to show you, or at least what to prioritize. Does that affect your analysis at all?
I have no good opinion on that. I think it's a novel thing, so I can't reason about it by analogy, and I don't think it can be considered accounted for under the law in any sort of originalist reasoning or even at all. I think it's a thing where we just have to make up our minds and decide what we want from scratch.
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The culture war seemed subdued in my bubble for a few months, but picked up majorly recently. Oddly enough, the cause (mostly) doesn't seem to be the attempted presidential assassination, the quick Democratic party shifts, the ramping up of tensions in the middle east, or the black female presidential candidate, but the Olympics. Color me surprised.
I see non-stop posting currently about "The Science doesn't support the bigots who think XY chromosomes makes someone a man", "why do they care more about a woman competing in woman's boxing than they do about a literal child rapist competing?", "the people complaining about a woman getting punched in the face by another woman are the same people who don't bat an eye at men beating up women outside of the Olympics". There seems to have been some really high-profile culture war controversies in this Olympics. I really doubt there's more fodder for controversy in the Olympics in general than in everyday life, so why is everyone picking up their keyboards to go vanquish the enemy all of a sudden?
The Olympics are built for TikTok, and then whatever the Facebook version is. You get a huge sporting event where I'm not watching most of it live, and you just pour out highlights and lowlights and controversies. Toss in that the sporting public is even worse informed than usual, and you have a recipe for arguments. ((I am once again begging people to watch the events we're arguing about))
TikTok came out in 2016 after the Olympics were over, and Tokyo was a weird one with COVID and no crowds and a lot of athletes having been thrown off in their training. This is the first real Olympics with TikTok.
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I see no problem with this.
If the meta is transgender females, and people care about winning, let's metagame it to hell together. If the competition for best female boxer is a stacked bracket full of women who were at one point men, let's fucking go. Every country gets the same playing field, let's pump 'em with as much testosterone as possible before the 2028 summer olympics.
If they don't want this meta, then they might as well say so, patch the ruleset and save us all the trouble. If they don't, the smarter countries get to canvass their entire population for DSD athletes and stack every female event they can, we get more competitive sports out of it and more records broken. Everyone wins!
East German swimming coaches weren't wrong, they were just early.
I realize this makes me a dirty accelerationist, but hey, I want to see the cool future of cyborg transhuman roided out boxing. I don't care if they have breasts or not in the ring unless they act as armor, shock absorbers, or offensive weapons.
I don't really think that's worth the hormonal problems and other side effects. I'm fine with the enhanced games because at least you know what you're getting into at that point. But creating the incentives for girls to destroy their bodies if they want to be competitive doesn't sit well with me.
I thought the whole point of banning doping was to prevent just this.
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Seems to me like an attempt to paper over a major hole in their ideological worldview.
I've spoken on the topic before, martial arts, combat sports, and such similar endeavors based on physical prowess in an actual fight for 'survival' against another human remain mostly untouched by the forces of 'woke' and are still a place where masculinity is allowed to exist without suborning itself to female-centric norms of behavior or lefty egalitarianism.
Its a cultural arena where any and all illusions about socially constructed gender norms smack into a wall of sheer pragmatism. Quoth myself: "end of the day, there is simply no amount of social maneuvering that will make up for the strength differential between men and women, and you can't 'fake' martial arts skills without willing participants, which makes entryism nigh-impossible."
A biological male who goes through male puberty has an insurmountable advantage over any person whatsoever who hasn't gone through male puberty. Unironically, If I were forced to bet on a no-holds barred brawl between a barely-trained 70 year old male and a heavily trained mid-twenties female in the same weight class, I am picking gramps for the win. Cardio will 100% be a factor here, but also, old man strength is REAL. (Oh I'm prepared to lose my money, but absent actual medical problems a 70 year old is not as fragile as you think.) I wonder why such a matchup hasn't been done before. Hmmmm.
But biology also has a tendency to be messy and perhaps defies categorization on the margins, so we can have women who produce a lot of testosterone and maybe some weird genetic quirks that trigger the same disgust reaction as a male whalloping on a female even though, technically, if we squint, its still women fighting women. But closer to the center of the respective bell curves for men and women there are no surprises to be found.
The lefties who want to claim the only reason anyone objects to Imane Khelif being in the women's division is wanton transphobia are depending on some very, very rare and unique circumstances to justify the situation that has come about. If we apply the left's logic, literally any person who was "assigned male at birth" who transitions at any age should be eligible to compete in the women's division. That's how they treat every other sport. So if we see some jacked, bearded wrestler sweep a women's karate tournament what exactly are we supposed say that ISN'T transphobic?
But the reason I reject the idea that it is 'fine' to let a trans woman compete in a fighting sport against cis women is mostly what I alluded to up above. Biology is messy but also merciless. Just as one might be repulsed by the image of a muscular male cracking a young lady's skull, the image of a strapping young buck trading blows with a senior citizen thrice his age also tends to also generate pity for the older guy and disdain for the younger who is showing blatant disrespect for his elder and risks hurting, maybe killing someone who is much less able to recover from the damage.
BUT WAIT, age is just a social construct. A 'spectrum,' one might even say! There is no exact set of physical traits that makes someone "sixty years old" other than the date on which they exited their mothers womb! How can you assert that a 25-year-old is going to have inherent advantages in a fight over a 65-year-old? Why should these arbitrary categories justify rules that seek to protect the latter from the former? Somebody can identify as a different age than the one presented by their body, that much is true!
Well, because our current scientific understanding of how aging works... and common sense from what we can observe with our own eyes, tells us that even if we can't precisely predict how 10, 20, 30 years of time passing will impact a human body, we can be certain that the general trend will be that person will become slower, weaker, more prone to injury, and thus overall at much greater risk than the equivalent person who is 20 years younger.
So uh, when our current scientific understanding of how sexual development works... and common sense from what we can observe with our own eyes, tell us that even if we can't precisely predict how 300 ng/dL of added testosterone will impact a human body, we are still going to be certain that the person without that testosterone will be slower, weaker, more prone to injury, and overall at much greater risk than the 'equivalent' person who has 200 times their testosterone levels.
Yes, there's a plethora of other factors and the causal arrow can point in multiple directions, remember I'm granting that biology is messy.
Leaving aside whether women should be competing in combat sports at all, if they're going to have their own league or division, the rules should be focused on mitigating the risks to the competitors (and maximizing 'fairness,' I guess) and thus shouldn't be thwarted by the aforementioned weird edge cases, and definitely not thwarted by someone who can convince the organizers that they REALLY REALLY believe they're a female.
And I would say precisely the same about age divisions. A 30-year-old could in theory have the mind of a 60-year-old, but lets not force the actual 60-year-old into the ring with them because we want to accommodate the younger guy's beliefs... Again leaving aside whether 60-year-olds should be competing at all.
Lefties don't (currently) see the age spectrum as an issue worth fighting over, but dohoho they certainly will take any and every opportunity presented to fight over the gender identity spectrum. Especially when they're desperate to make inroads into the combat sports world which, as I stated elsewhere, is extremely resistant to entryism. This helps them slap a facade over the "males and females are fundamentally physically different in non-trivial ways" hole by arguing "transphobes can't even tell the difference between a trans woman and a woman who is merely huge physical outlier."
Anyhow. Maybe we revisit this topic after the Jake Paul/Mike Tyson fight
This has panned out to be an interesting subportion of the thread. I'm trying to imagine showing this to my wife, and I think an interesting question just occurred to me: where would a feminist land on this question of women's vs men's strength?
On the one hand, they want to believe that women and men can go toe-to-toe in boxing and a woman would have an equal chance. On the other hand, they want us to believe that women are in constant terror at all times that a man might hurt her. And I remember conversations on this very forum where people have been indicating that in certain situations women have no choice but to willingly go along with whatever a man wants her to do in a 1 on 1 setting, because there's a small chance he could get violent if she objected at all.
I have met women who've sincerely asserted that men and women are exactly equal in strength, speed and stamina, and women are underrepresented (not represented, I should say) among top athletes for the same reason they are underrepresented in STEM: the patriarchy favours male athletes and systematically discourages women from pursuing sporting careers which would allow them to reach their full athletic potential. These women are the minority: virtually every woman I've met is abundantly aware that men are stronger than women for reasons that have nothing to do with socialisation. One could persuasively argue that this simple objective reality is the entire impetus behind feminism as a movement - without it, a reasonable response to women complaining about male oppression might be simply "git gud" or "do you even lift?"
There are doublethinking feminists of the kind you're describing: feminists who seem to simultaneously believe that men and women are exactly alike in strength, speed and stamina, and also that all women are living in constant fear of male violence which they are powerless to defend themselves against. But I do genuinely believe that such people are the minority.
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There is a way to thread a needle wherein they argue that men just train more because they don't get harassed out of the gym and thus are more likely to get good at fighting, so you end up with men tending to be strong and 'dangerous' and women who are less so, unless they power through all the harassment and naysayers to trains as much as a comparable man. Thus they could willfully believe that a trained woman is able to take on a trained man but that most women are still 'at risk.'
However, I really wonder if anyone believes that female powerlifters could match male powerlifters if they were just given the chance to start training as early and train as hard as men.
There does seem to be a large-ish contingent who want to deny that going through puberty awash in testosterone and having an elevated level of same later on equates to VASTLY improved muscle development and bone density... even though they tacitly acknowledge that it DOES make one more aggressive overall and thus makes men more likely to assault others.
Also, I laugh a bit at the argument that women are harassed or threatened and THAT is why they won't train in certain sports as much as men... which just implies that women are unable to handle being insulted or verbally abused as well as men can, so they're still 'weaker' in a certain sense.
Well, no. It implies that women are harassed more. "If men were harassed more than women, then men would be the ones intimidated" is well within the realm of that kind of argument.
Men are harassed more. Women suffer from gendered harassment more, the definition of which is designed specifically to make women suffer from it more in order to be able to dismiss the harassment men face.
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If thats the argument then WHY are they harassed more?
Are men trained to harass females from a young age or do they have some psychological tendency for it?
Kinda just pushes the argument back a level.
The answer's generally "because society has been set up so that it works to empower men more than women; that's what 'patriarchy' means". As for why did it happen to be set up like that originally, please ask actual radical feminists, I don't know.
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I honestly don't agree with this. I went to BJJ for a couple of months just prior to starting dialysis. I was strong, not super strong but pulling 1 rep-max of 50kg over my 75kg body weight on a pullup kind of strong. I had no technique just strength and the technique was developing, but only enough to resist tapping to white belts for the 5 minute hard sparing periods. And for some of the novice white belts I was pretty comfortably in top position against (just had no idea how to submit anyone). I went up against a judo girl about the same size and weight as me. Absolute utter domination. She had been doing this since she was very young. I think I got tapped out like 3 times in the span of 3 minutes. This was in the first week of my short bjj bout, but still.
I have utter respect for BJJ as a discipline, and its one of the few areas where a female with technique can win under the rules of the sport against a male, since many submissions use leverage rather than strength. And you can get choked out at any size.
Under the rules of BJJ.
I'm not certain a female fighter can get a male to go to the ground, where the techniques work best, if he doesn't want to go down there. She certainly risks catching a devastating strike or getting body slammed in the process.
We always started standing. I mean she was a judoka so, it wasn't that hard for her to get me to the ground. If you are so heavily out skilled and you have the same weight, the strength makes very little difference. She isn't going to let you body slam her and might do the same herself. Most women are very much NOT the same weight as me, indeed majority in the sparing sessions were about 20kg lighter. Which means it would probably go down as you are proposing, weight + large strength difference. But this was the only big Dutch woman there hence the result.
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Would it have been different if you could have used strikes? Remember, no-holds-barred was the premise.
If you know how to fight standing then I think it goes without saying strength matters a lot. But I also did a few weeks of MMA (Friday was like sparring from standing with strikes allowed) I remember going against a person who was vastly superior striker (with my 2x MMA striking, you can imagine my state). But I shot quiet fast and took him down and there it was quiet easy. I imagine, given that she was so good at judo (coming from that background), etc, unless I got lucky or for some reason she just couldn't deal with striking being a part of the game, she would similarly take me down and go to town. As I replied to faceh, similar weight + huge skill imbalance is where you would get a woman absolutely dominate. If she was 20kg lighter (as is usual) I think it would be a very different story.
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I drew a similar analogy here. Why couldn't one have a "weight identity" distinct from one's biological mass?
Props to you for making that point against someone who seemingly was hellbent on ignoring it.
We could enumerate all the reasons why weight classes are necessary and good but I like to just post this video of Connor McGregor fighting the Mountain. Even under playful conditions I think its clear why this is not a 'fair' fight, and its not because Connor is/was a top 1% MMA fighter.
I wish I could believe that they'd never try to remove weight classes but yeah, if they don't care about the advantages gender confers, that might very well be on the agenda.
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A strange aspect of this phenomenon I've noticed is people somehow misremembering facts into existence that are the exact opposite of reality. I encountered this Tumblr post, where OP and several people in the notes seem to believe that Serena Williams "famously" beat a bunch of men at tennis, when the only professional match she ever played against a man she lost, and he was ranked 203rd.
It's hard to have a discussion when half of the people are wishcasting their opinions into existence. (I say this as one of the people on this forum more generally sympathetic to trans inclusion across a variety of social domains.)
My brother pointed out that whenever this debate comes up, feminists always go back to the well of the Billie Jean King vs. Bobby Riggs tennis match (that is, a 29-year-old woman beating a man almost twice her age, in which there were credible allegations that Riggs had deliberately thrown the match to get out of some gambling debts). What's striking about the match is what an outlier it is: in essentially every battle of the sexes before and since, the man has come out victorious: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Sexes_(tennis)
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Just yesterday I was reading twitter conversations spurred on by the Olympic shooting event memes and getting people confidently stating that the reason these sports (and similar competitions) were segregated was men were scared of losing to women and women were sick of being harassed by men. Community notes swoops in to point out that the decision to segregate happened in 1991 and the female winning was 1992, so something else was probably afoot.
THIS one had 24k likes. And sure maybe there's some element of that but you can directly point out that in most cases women are very much allowed to compete against men if they want. But they choose not to and usually they don't place well when they do.
Like sure, on some culture war issues a difference of opinion can be sustained because the facts on the ground are ambiguous. But thousands of people sustaining a false outlook on the world that could be refuted by simply looking at the reliable records is some serious epistemic collapse.
I wonder if there are 'strength truthers' out there who believe that female powerlifters could absolutely catch men's records if they started training as intensely as possible as early as possible and weren't being harassed out of the gym by the 'bro culture' or whatever. Actually, now that I've said it, I'm now certain there's people out there who believe that.
I would caution against taking community notes at face value without checking their underlying reference. The relevant underlying quote is :
That is, the proposal was accepted for later IOC approval in December 1991. Since the IOC's 84th session had been in September of 1991, this means that final approval must have been in the 85th or 86th session, the earliest of which was in May, three months after the 1992 Winter Olympics.
It's not clear where the note is getting "women requesting the IOC to do so" from. UIT was the (French) name for the shooting organization that eventually became the ISSF, but pretty much every group of every Olympic sport launders their calls to action through the international sporting org, so that's not proof against. But the UIT wasn't (and the ISSF isn't) exactly a knitting club when it comes to demographics, and their contemporaneous claim was that they couldn't support the matter as "only a handful of women shooters are able to qualify against men for major competitions."
((There's also a longer history; as the underlying link points out, separation of men and women's shooting sports had begun in 1984, well before 1991, with trap and skeet being the last to swap. More broadly, women were arguing in favor of discrete Women's events for new sports, an argument they had mostly won in 1990, but existing sports were as often recast as 'mixed', some of that persists to this day. There was also a contemporaneous movement, mostly from eastern europe, in favor of gender segregated sports over mixed ones, not because but because of social/religious norms.))
I'm very skeptical of the harassment explanation, especially for the shooting sports, but women do compete, albeit rarely, in non-Olympic shooting sports. Some have gender-segregated roles, some have mixed-gender competitions, some do both. Handgun work generally favors men slightly,
Bigger issue is that there's just not as many women interested. USPSA tends to have had the best luck getting interest from the fairer sex, both due to match style and for historic reasons, despite the best efforts of IDPA to try and poach. But while you have women like Justine Williams and Jessie Harrison that are absolute terrors, you don't have anywhere near the number of 'almosts'.
Yeah I just fundamentally don't believe that wanton sexism is the explanation for segregating out womens divisions.
It seems unlikely that one lady winning one medal in one year is enough of an impetus to create new divisions by itself.
Blatant corruption is always on the table.
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This doesn't pass the sniff test to me. Digging up one robust 70 year old example doesn't change anything. 70 year olds have a 3% chance of not even making it through the year on average. They are, in fact, rather fragile.
Granted I have some bias on this issue because I train with guys approaching 70, so the availability heuristic has me thinking of the most robust members of that age cohort.
But it is hard to understate just how advantaged, pound for pound, a male is over any given female. I stipulate same weight class and the average male weight for an over-60 is about 190 pounds. I want you to try and imagine what a 190 pound woman looks like. Especially if we assume she's NOT freakishly tall (another factor impacted by testosterone).
In my mind, the theoretical fight really comes down to whether the woman can avoid the guy long enough until he's mostly gassed, and then execute a successful submission. Similarly, if the guy manages to grab hold of her and keep her from getting away, dropping her with a strike to the head or slamming her hard to the ground are likely finishes. I'll stipulate that a lightly trained male is almost certainly not choking out a heavily trained female.
I assure you that the average 190 pound male looks like a sack of dog shit.
And if a 190 pound male manages to lie on top of a 190 female, she's going to have a hard, nearly impossible time getting unpinned regardless of how he looks.
We're talking about a heavily trained woman and almost untrained man. That scenario seems unlikely.
Yes, that's why its fun to consider, since we really have almost no real-world examples to prove up one side or the other definitively.
On the other hand, I watch a lot of videos of street fights, and virtually none of them depict a female KO-ing a man in any context.
Here's a Mixed MMA fight from about two months ago between TWO females and one large dude:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=lQllTuPzOXU?si=H90MBAshtGUD2IL4
The women were allowed headgear and he wasn't. Notice him turning all his attention to one and not even reacting as the other woman hits him from behind at about the 2:00 mark. Skill is not really the determinant factor here.
I cannot overstate how huge the physical advantage is for the male, even if that guy gets gassed its still not safe for a female to approach lest he grab her and just SIT on her.
How many street fights involve seventy year old men, let alone a seventy year old man and a young woman?
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Hell, even if that was a barely-trained mid-twenties male and a heavily trained mid-twenties female in the same weight class, I would probably bet on the woman.
Since she's heavily trained, she will keep her distance, avoid the telegraphed punches and grabs and attack the joints and the groin until she can go for a throw and an armbar.
Male and female weight classes are different, a male and female in the same weight class is one where the male has a mass advantage.
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Hard disagree, the male will compensate for poor technique with brute strength and mog her.
Really? I am a mid 20s decently fit male who knows nothing about boxing and has never been in a ring. I don't think I'd manage to hold a candle against the women competing in my weight class at the olympics.
The gap is much larger than what popular culture lets people believe.
Lucia Rijker one of the best female boxers and kickboxers got knocked out by an amateur Muay Thai fighter. Polish arm wresler Ula Siekacz got in an MMA fight with Piotrek Muaboy and he brutally mauled her.
Technique helps but it doesn't substitute for all the biological advantages even an average man gets: they just hit a lot stronger and can take a lot more punishment.
Realistically the average fight between a man and a women is over as soon as he grabs her and/or she gets knocked out. You can compensate a lot with technique so top women can probably take on men that don't exercise, but introduce any sort of strength training and it's just over.
An amateur Muay Thai fighter is a huge step up from a barely trained rando like me or BC.
I am quite sure that I could pound a woman into submission if I got on top of her, but getting on top of her is the problem. You need several months of training as an adult to be able to avoid cheap shots if you didn't grow up fighting in the playground.
I'll admit I don't know how much that matters in that particular configuration. Could an expert woman neutralize the average dude in at most a couple of blows? I guess you just go for the nuts and the eyes. But you can't really go hard for that in any sort of sanctioned fight so unless you can go for a knockout that's going to involve some level of wrestling, and it's very hard to compensate the strength advantage then.
Seems like you have to thread a needle to make it work.
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I sincerely think you would perform better than you think. Even a man's skull is harder than a woman's, the woman's punches won't hit as hard.
I used to row in a past life and happen to sort of know one of the Olympic GB female rowers. Despite the fact that she almost the same height as me (height is very important for rowing) and basically the same weight class as me (if not lighter) she had a 15-20 second faster 2K erg than me (this was before she went professional), although the caveat is that I was only training 3x a week while she'd have been doing 7+ sessions a week.
Perhaps boxing isn't like rowing but equally in the other sports where I can do a direct comparison easily (like weightlifting), the Olympic women in my weight class are miles and bounds ahead of me. The lowest score for the snatch was 90kg in the 76-kg category in Tokyo 2021 while I topped out at like a 50kg snatch back when I used to train for rowing.
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I mean, if we're being 100% literal, yes, BurdensomeCount would almost certainly lose a boxing match. If he knows nothing about boxing, he doesn't know which moves are illegal, so he'd get DQed.
@faceh's thought experiment specified a "no-holds barred brawl" rather than a boxing match with rules and a referee.
In the latter case, my money's on the trained woman (if for no other reason than the man fighting cautiously out of fear of accidentally breaking the rules) - and it might well come out with the trained woman getting knocked out, but winning by default by referee's decision, because the man broke a rule.
In the former case, my money's on the untrained man: assuming he's reasonably fit for his age and body mass, he will absolutely dominate the woman through brute force alone, no matter how much training she's received.
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For my part, it seems like the primary epistemic sin of the left is Biodenialism. It underpins so much confused and counterproductive discourse about inequality, race, and gender. Among the most prominent defenders of this ideology in the West have been highly educated white women. The more examples we get of cases where Biology Matters, Actually, the greater the likelihood of an emergent class consciousness among the segment of society that most ardently defends Biodenialism. In this regard, the olympics are very elucidatory, as are cases where trans women misbehave in women’s prisons etc.. The correct responses from the Bio-pilled segment of the political sector should probably still be accelerationism.
I understand where you're coming from, and I hope you're right. But the black pilled part of me makes me think that accelerationism will just accelerate the denial. That's what I tend to see.
When I wrote
The Science doesn't support the bigots who think XY chromosomes makes someone a man, it was paraphrased from several people I saw writing about this. I can't actually ask these people what actual biology and science support the notion that being a woman is distinct from the presence of XY chromosomes, and how that was determined by these biologists and scientists for fear of outing myself as a heretic and being yelled at by people who probably don't really want to explain it anyhow. I really am curious, because it seems if I'm being charitable, "being a woman" is a social state that they're arguing for definitionally. And definitions like that are neither provable by biological science nor disputable. As Scott says:What good is a definition that doesn't define a boundary? If they're not provable and they're not disputable they're not actually useful for anything to anyone.
The people who campaign for this stuff ignore that they're forging ther own rhetorical weapons out of marshmallows and candyfloss.
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Because a man punching a woman shouldn't be an Olympic sport. Its much more visceral than the three XY males that took the medals in one event during the 2016 olympics.
Images like this are powerful.
https://twitter.com/HazelAppleyard_/status/1820091385199865963
The fact that he groped his first opponent after the match was terrible too.
Too many people didn't care about "just" the women losing out on scholarships, victories, and fame. Too many people don't seem to care about the injuries suffered by teenaged girls playing soccer, rugby or volleyball with much stronger males. But here we have a dude punching a woman in the face so finally more people are saying "you know what, maybe thats not fair".
Serious question - what’s the use in calling a phenotypically female intersex person a “man” due to XY chromosomes? They have a vagina, grew up perceived and socialised as a woman, and some even have ovaries and the ability to get pregnant (if it’s Swyer Syndrome). Prior to the invention of genetic sequencing, there’d be no way of telling they’re not say, female with some hormonal abnormality. Look up CAIS - people with it look 100% like women to the point where historically they weren’t told they were anything but infertile normal women.
Barring intersex athletes from competing with women is perfectly reasonable if it’s a condition that gives them an unfair advantage. However, having pronouns and gender be tied to chromosomes seems to me like it would cause the same issues as what some trans activists request. If you’re intersex, you have to “include chromosomes in bio” so people can call you a dude/a lady despite you not looking like one at all. You’re, ironically enough, saying that men can have vaginas, some men can get pregnant, and that women can have penises.
It's a soldier in the pro vs anti transgender argument war. The person you described, as you noted, is intersex. They're not male, and they're not female. They were born with a very unusual mixture and biological expression of what are typically considered biological male and female characteristics. They're not transgender. Strictly speaking they have no relevance to the transgender debate other than serving as a prompt to explore the issues (read: muddy the waters) of the transgender debate. Transgender debate aside they're also, strictly speaking, not a woman and shouldn't be participating in women's sport. That doesn't mean they're a man either in the same way a mule not being a horse doesn't mean it's a donkey. It's its own thing.
That doesn't mean that men can have vaginas. It means that some vanishingly small number of people were born with phenotypically female sex organs despite having other biological markers of being a male. Society doesn't have a social class that can accommodate those people so they get swept into one of the two bins that they'll never completely fit inside of, and any closer inspection of why they don't fit requires unpacking a biology textbook of initialisms and polysyllables and revealing that there's not even a single class of intersex in the same way I've just found out that there's a second horse-donkey hybrid that doesn't belong with the mules.
If you flip a coin enough times eventually it will land on its edge but we don't ask people to call heads, tails or edges, we say "Holy shit I've never seen that before, is this a magic coin? Also we'll have to flip again to settle the call". That doesn't make a trick coin that has heads on both sides into an edge call, and it doesn't make it worthwhile specifying the precise 0-360 degree Z axis orientation of the edge call when you're arguing about whether a heads is a tails.
You're right about the men-with-vaginas irony but in turn what you're saying could imply that there's no such thing as a woman. IIRC you're a transwoman. I hope you appreciate what showing there's no such thing as a woman would imply for people who claim to identify as such. This is why the intersex issue has no relevance, because it doesn't serve either side of the debate. It's a blind soldier (not even a soldier, more like a conscientous objector) being pressganged into battle and ordered to open fire.
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It's extremely and unequivocally pro-trans rhetoric to say that some women, who are born with female genitalia, have an invisible issue they are born with that adjudicates that they are actually male and should live as men.
No, the unequivocally pro-trans rhetoric is "...and if he believes that he's a man". No pro-trans rhetoric currently known to me, whether tucute or truscum, states that someone "should" live as a particular gender because of any kind of traits they have, visible or not - indeed that's what the "assigned male/female at birth" language is striking at.
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Do we? Perhaps if you have reason to trust IBA's judgment despite them being quite abrupt and tight-lipped about it, you believe it. I don't, and the other info appear to be coming out the other way. As found by other posters, Khelif's record is not the dominating streak one would expect from a male fighting women, neither do her other fights suggest she is a stronger if unskilled fighter.
Given that you were criticizing me for engaging in precisely the same type of skepticism, I think you shouldn't be allowed to use it here. The ICO is just as cagey, they never bothered denying that the IBOs tests took place, or their accuracy, nor have they made a statement about their own tests show something different. Instead,l they're focusing on accusations of corruption, or decrying the fairness of the tests having been done at all / not testing all the other athletes.
That's not info "coming out the other way". This does not prove the athletes sex one way or the other, and is nothing but a deflection from a very simple question.
If you want to stay completely agnostic on the athlete's sex, be my guest. Even if I accept a 50/50 prior (which is ridiculous, approximately no one, not even the die-hard gender-non-assumers do that), performing on par with other female-patterned boxers is info.
I'm not engaging in "precisely the same type of skepticism". You said you can't know her sex one way or the other without evidence. I'm saying I can, in fact, know "one way", even if it's not 100%. I trust my eyes more than I do Olympic (or formerly Olympic-certified) commissions, that's all.
I'm leaning towards them being dudes, but I'm not going to act like it's based on "info coming out the other way". My point us you're selectively playing a skeptic, all the while you were acting outraged that I asked for concrete evidence earlier.
The whole idea of using Bayesian analysis for these sorts of controversies was a disaster for rational discourse, so I don't particularly care what priors you pick.
Performance is irrelevant, this matter can be resolved with a simple test, and people claiming these athletes are women are bending themselves into pretzels to avoid having these tests done, which is highly suspicious behavior.
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I didn't hear about that, source?
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One could likely become King, Queen, or anything in between, of MMA Twitter for a day by swapping out the Viagra for DUDE Wipes.
The relationship between Woodley and DUDE Wipes is oddly wholesome and endearing; they go back to before the UFC Reebok days. Find someone as loyal to you as Woodley and DUDE Wipes are to each other.
Athletes would legitimately be a pretty good advertising pathway for Viagra. Viagra is useful to middle-aged and old men for expected reasons, but it can also be quite useful for young men to counteract coke or whiskey dick, or just for greater peace of mind that they'll be able to perform when it's show time.
Pfizer beat you to the punch (pun not intended) by about 22 years. It was in NASCAR, though.
Color me surprised that there are other people here who follow NASCAR.
Every day I wake up and lament that Mark Martin never won the Cup.
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Well, not follow, but YouTube has taught me more than I ever thought I wanted to learn about it.
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Trans is ground zero for the culture wars, the olympics are a major event, and Khelif is from Algeria, hardly a progressive powerhouse. Honestly even if people didn't inaccurately think she was trans I'd expect progressives to root for her because they inaccurately think she's black(after all, Algeria is in Africa, right?).
There's multiple governments and international organizations involved to turn it into a news story and there's footage which speaks a thousand words.
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I see the same memes circulating at high speed through Facebook and Twitter. I have a couple of friends whom I can very reliably expect to let me know what the current talking points are with smarmy reposts from accounts with names like "CatLadiesWhoKnowThings" or "Social Justice Tiefling" or "Jedi Tea Witches." (Not actual accounts, but you get the idea.)
JK Rowling has jumped into the Imane Khalif controversy with both feet, outright stating she's a man, which is always good for turning up the heat on a constantly simmering issue.
The other thing I'm noticing is that "Weird" seems to be the Woke Word of the Week (and The New Republic has discovered Curtis Yarvin).
Wasn't the "weird" thing pretty clearly an organized campaign, with the first shot being that commercial with creepy actors strawmanning about reproductive politics? I figure they found an attack vector on Vance that played well with focus groups and are now committing all resources on it.
It started with Tim Walz doing an interview on MSNBC where he used the phrasing and Democrats loved it and piled on. The ad was part of the pile on.
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Weird was pretty clearly a campaign, but it seems like it got overplayed and they're now backing down just a bit.
Specifically the 'weird' campaign somehow came off as making fun of the appearances of republican politicians instead of a description of oddball quotes. This backfired because the republican politicians who look weird tend to have sympathetic reasons for doing so(and JD Vance is almost aggressively normal-looking to the point of being nondescript), while most political figures who look weird because of, say, alternative lifestyle choices are progressive.
If this is really what's happening (I'm not really plugged in to social media) then @IGI-111 should get a medal for predicting this as the likely result. "The left accusing the right of being the weird party seems like throwing stones in glass houses. Do they really want to play that game?"
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I just can’t figure out how they expect this to play for anyone other than their own camp. It’s not a real accusation by any stretch of the imagination. There’s nothing behind this other than a sneer and especially for people who don’t follow politics until after the conventions, it’s actually not that good. They’re weird like weird how exactly and why should I, the drone of sector 7G care about this? What is the message here? What agenda do either groups have? How are you going to get groceries and gasoline and housing to the place where the median American family can afford to live with only one job per adult? How are you going to fix my kid’s school? Crime? Why is republicans being “weird”, whatever the heck that actually means, affect my life?
It’s a stupid tactic because it’s so nonspecific that the public can easily disregard it as just name calling. At least the fascist thing was an actual accusation, a charge that would mean something objective and negative to most people. But they can’t do that anymore because it’s seen as too mean to a guy who got shot in the ear. They can’t run on the record, because they didn’t make life better for most Americans. They can’t bring up either schools or the border because they lose on both. So they have the equivalent of being a Becky and sneering at people they consider beneath them even if it’s silly. This is a campaign that would come out of a junior high.
Honestly I think the motivation is that leftists have a bunch of internalised self-consciousness about weirdness. Part of that's driven by the fact that they are broadly the on the side of transgenderism, drag time story hour, polyamory, and other non-mainstream lifestyle choices. Republicans have spent ages hammering them for being insufficiently patriotic, for not caring about the heartland of America, etc etc. And Democrats reject those attacks, but they still hear them and get kind of defensive about it. It's like right wingers and accusations of racism.
And so in my interpretation "Republicans are weird" is the mirror of "Democrats are the real racists". It's not actually an argument that is going to convince any of the people you might plausibly be aiming it at, it's more a story your side is telling itself about why the people who don't like you are actually guilty of the thing they keep accusing you of.
I mean you’re not wrong, but in context of this being an apparent campaign message from the top of the democrat party ticket, I just don’t understand what they how to actually accomplish here. Most of the too-online liberals are already completely sold on “vote blue no matter who” so there’s no need to appeal to them. They’d vote for a moldy peach if it was a registered democrat. And as far as reaching anyone outside the circle, as a strategy, it makes no sense. We aren’t voting for homecoming court members, we’re electing a government. Just saying “they’re weird” doesn’t convince outsiders that they should vote for you. And right now, it’s the middle of the country she has to convince.
I think it's a case of typical-minding. Progressives like the message, so they spread the message thinking that other people will like it too. Republicans do the same thing - "I am your retribution" is not a selling point to anyone not already on the Trump train.
I think you over-estimate the amount of secret coordination that occurs. Coordination happens a lot, but it often happens pretty publicly. Politicians frequently use the media to talk to each other. I don't think this was a case of the Harris campaign circulating memos saying "hey we're going to call republicans weird". I think it was a case of one guy saying a thing, other progressives liking and repeating it, and still other progressives going "Oh I guess this is the line we're running with now? Sounds good, let's reinforce it." Now, possibly somewhere along the line we get an actual focus group message testing this pitch to see how it does with swing voters, and possibly the line gets dropped or modified in response to that research, but I don't think that's the first or even the fifth step in this process.
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Ding ding ding. Walz probably said it in a folksy calling-it-as-I-see-it manner, but the democrat embrace of it is telling. To use weird deflects that appellation, rubber glue style. Its not just the transgressive quality of progressive beliefs that is weird unto itself because it subverts or attacks existing norms, its that by making the right the weird ones it allows the left views to be laundered into normality.
Most nonsense like this is ultimately ingroup signalling, with the outrage from the right about the label weird being the fact that democrats are transparently trying to pass off THEIR craziness as normal. It just becomes more proof of institutional capture by an out of touch progressive elite that is not able to consider that proles can have their own opinions.
They can't. COVID proved that. The proles will believe what CNN tells them to believe, and if that means Rachel Levine is normal while J.D. Vance is weird, then Rachel Levine is normal while J.D. Vance is weird.
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Ah, I didn't realize that. That might account for why more people are paying attention to this issue.
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This probably comes off as trying to paint a political gotcha, but really I just think that turning this frame around is kind of insightful, so hear me out…
Is Kamala choosing a midwestern white guy a form of DEI?
Let’s go through some scenarios.
If the ticket was two women it’d be seen as overly feminine, there’s no male voice. I do believe personally that this could be an issue and I suspect the political right would agree.
If it was two black people, white people wouldn’t feel represented.
Even choosing the gay white gay is sort of problematic and probably won’t happen even though he’s midwestern and an excellent speaker.
I’m a white guy who is critical of DEI and particularly its excesses, but having the shoe be on the other foot does give more of a felt sense of where this idea comes from originally.
For the average white guy, he wouldn’t feel represented if the president and vice president were both black. He’d probably suspect that deep down the needs of his community are not a priority.
If it was two women, he likely wouldn’t feel that his demographic is being represented well either. There needs to be a masculine voice in there.
Kamala Harris picking a white midwestern guy is essentially done so that the ticket has more diversity and inclusion. An all black ticket would be seen as problematic among white people. An all female ticket would be seen as problematic among men. A black woman and a gay guy probably doesn’t cut it to pander to the straight white male demographic in the way that it needs to so they feel comfortable to pull the lever.
We’re probably not that long away from the point where white men feel the need to make a case for inclusion so that decision making bodies have more diverse voices at the table to better represent the communities that might otherwise not be prioritized.
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.
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If its Shapiro/Kelly, or someone like that, it would be fairly silly to call it a "DEI selection." They (and most of the others whos names have been floated) would be VP considerations without taking into account race/sex. Consider:
Harris is a former senator from a coastal state and current VP in an administration who's record she cannot run on because it is an unpopular administration with a record repellent to voters. Harris also can't run on her senate record, as again it is repellent to voters. So she has to forge a new identity that isn't repellent to voters. To do this she has to appear to tack to the center and she needs someone else's record to basically run on. A midwest or southern governor who is popular in their own state makes perfect sense, as does a veteran + senator who is seen as somewhat moderate.
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The electoral college is DEI for white people so given the system it makes sense to have a DEI white candidate.
Explain??
Without the EC the popular vote would practically always favor the Dems because in most red states the cities (which are less white than the countryside) are blue.
I feel like you're skipping half the argument, and I can't fill in the blanks on my own. Is it:
or something else?
Yes? I do not preclude a realignment with the GOP going through a crisis and reinventing itself, but the EC as it is right now ensures that it is competitive even when having less people willing to vote for its candidate.
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In addition to the things other people have written i'd argue that there is an issue similar to that of main characters is in major movies, in that only white men (or maybe men) are allowed moral complexity and actually be characters. Women get pigeonholed into a particular cardboard cutout role and it's similar with minorities in politics. Since they are a minority their being a minority is what defines them politically (to a very large extent).
Choosing a white man isn't the same as choosing a "minority" because you're expecting something more than white man than merely being a white man, racist as that may be. Is there some form of representation thinking going on here in the choosing of the VP? Sure, but they're also choosing between popular politicians in key states that can help drag the ticket across the finish line. That their colour doesn't matter much is precisely because there already is a DEI pick on the ticket, IE. Kamala. They don't have to care about "representation" so they can pick whoever has the greatest political value, of which Kamala has none or even negative.
If there was a popular black or asian governer in Pennsylvania rather than a Jew I'm sure they would receive strong consideration but since Buttigieg isn't popular enough and Whitmer has stated numerous times that she doesn't want the position we're left with three (or four) people who are white, male and straight (although one is Jewish).
To be fair I think that even if Whitmer wanted the job, and was the most qualified, it’d probably be smart to still choose someone else anyway, and the same for Buttigieg.
The optics (u/dasfoo below is making a point to differentiate this from DEI, Perhaps that’s fair) of this just doesn’t work well.
Two women, that’s a very feminine government.
A woman and a gay guy, the right wing attacks about the decline of the west to DEI write themselves!
But I wrote below that I think merit and inclusion should be thought of as two axes.
Let’s say for the sake of the argument that Buttigieg is the most meritous candidate (tbh this is my opinion, if the game we’re talking about is to rhetorically dismantle your enemies talking points on national tv and flip it on them, he’s extraordinarily gifted).
But high merit pairs with low inclusion for him. He represents the Midwest but he’s likely to make straight independent and center right guys feel not represented by a woman/gay guy ticket.
Thus the inclusion axis dictates that it should be a straight white guy. And the electoral map dictates that he should be from a swing state to make that state feel included. When inclusion wins over merit, that to me is what we usually mean by DEI.
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I think what you're talking about it more "optics" than "DEI," unless the intent is to remove DEI from the context that actually makes it negative.
A lot of VPs are picked to balance out the weaknesses of the main candidate. Trump picked Pence to give his ticket someone grounded in traditional GOP politics. He picked Vance to give his ticket some youth. Obama picked Biden to balance "inexperienced young black" with "seasoned journeyman white," etc. etc.
DEI is a subset of optics, and more cynical one. Not many people would argue with the generic values of "diversity, equity and inclusion" if defined broadly (well, "equity" is problematic unlike "equality") but the specific policy implications of brand-name DEI as practiced by its proponents is corrosive, and the acronym just becomes a shorthand for criticizing those implications.
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I agree, it's at least analogous to DEI. A lot of picks for important positions (CEOs etc) have basically had to be white men in the past in order to win the trust/loyalty of other white men (such as shareholders). In this instance it is the novelty of a black woman as lead candidate that makes the need for a white male VP stand out in an especially legible way.
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I saw someone making this sort of up their own ass and out the other side argument before. They expanded the context of DEI to the point where they claimed all vice presidential picks have been "DEI" picks. Because they are largely chosen on the basis of choosing someone based on identity to shore up the political coalition you are the head of.
I think that's bullshit, and that's not DEI. DEI is way, way dumber than that. DEI is the hammer that thinks every problem is a nail. In no world where George W Bush is choosing a "DEI" VP candidate to shore up his political coalition does he choose Dick Cheney. There were darker motives at play there.
DEI in practice is putting the cart before the horse. It's an almost religious belief that merit is a myth, and that you can assign job positions of the highest importance based on "equity" and the poor oppressed peoples denied the chance to prove themselves will rise to the occasion. It almost goes out of it's way to hire unqualified diverse candidates to make that point. Then it frequently obfuscates all markers of success or failure in the position. Frequently when the failure is so naked to see it cannot be obfuscated, it acts like success or failure was not the point, but only "equity".
So when people call Kamala Harris a DEI VP, it's because of that. Because Biden, bafflingly, didn't just pick a "black" woman. He picked the most unpopular, least qualified, dropped out first candidate from the roster. The fact that the always loser Stacy Abrams was also in the running is telling. As opposed to Tulsi, Yang, Buttigieg or any of the other people who hung in past Iowa that still count as "diverse" and might have actually brought some coalition building to the ticket.
Now if Kamala picks an absolute loser idiot white guy because she feels the need to placate white liberals, I could accept that being DEI. But it's looking like she's going to pick someone that actually brings something to the ticket, unlike she did in 2020. Most likely counting on Josh Shapiro to deliver PA's electoral votes.
FWIW I tend to agree with you in practice. DEI attached to an ideology that merit doesn’t matter or even in a more toxic form, that measures of merit are relics of white supremacy and patriarchy are pretty obviously ridiculous, and a road to ruin for any organization or institution that gets infected by this.
But I think you can also steelman the DEI ethos and get at some core realities underlying it.
Namely, there’s all sorts of implicit biases and lived experiences that might make it likely that for example, a black president/VP combo would prioritize issues that affect black communities and leave white guys feeling somewhat unrepresented, whether for legitimate reasons or even just illegitimate vibes based reasons.
This obviously is a framing that I set up to convey to white guys such as myself some of the gut level reactions that people who historically were never really represented in the way that us white guys have experienced as the norm.
Once you flip that, I think even conservatives would start to understand some typically progressive language, such as the importance of having diverse voices at the table, the dynamics of inclusion vs marginalization, equity for different groups when in comes to what decisions are made by the power structure, etc.
These terms have all become sort of strawmen and the well has become poisoned by all the crazy excesses that have gone on.
But at the core, IMO these are fundamental concepts of any race or cultural relations in a society and the typically dominant group would very quickly find themselves having to wrangle with similarly coded language if suddenly they were excluded.
So I could foresee a future in which conservative white guys see a need to argue for inclusion, I think it’s just a part of being in any multicultural society that representation at the seats at the table of power is going to be one of the primary sources of resentment.
And going all the way with this, it can even make sense why in some cases the inclusion of different groups at the table in some cases supercedes pure meritocracy in a democracy.
This is essentially why we aim to have representatives from all districts of a state. Say there’s a state with a blue tech hub but also an underdeveloped and neglected red district with some Appalachia or Deep South type issues regarding education, infrastructure, health, addiction, etc.
We should have some representatives from that community even if they aren’t at the top of the meritocracy.
That way they have a seat at the table and can at least provide a voice for that communities needs. Otherwise it’s just the tech hub guys and the backwoods are out of sight out of mind.
But there’s this delicate balancing act where meritocracy still has to form a fundamental pillar. Part of what I see the left wrangling with is trying to arrive at the synthesis of how to balance tribal desires for inclusion especially in a system where bias exists with meritocracy and the consequences of not giving it its due.
I think that flipping the frame to consider other examples helps think through the problem better. For example, how do we increase the representation of conservatives in academia? Should we? Is it pure meritocracy or are there a bunch of subtle factors and biases that led to the current state of affairs? Wading into the weeds of all this helps illuminate the culture war better IMO.
Flipping the frame does not work because the frame is held on by power.
You're not going to get academia to not be racist against whites because they don't hold these ideas for scientific reasons. You can't debate with power.
And attempting to dislodge power by remaining in its frame is a fool's errand.
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So do you think Biden deliberately picked the worst black woman available? Isn't it much more likely he thought/thinks she was the best on some measures?
I mean, given how broken his brain is, I can't rule it out.
But the vibes I always got is that he gave an on the spot pledge to pick a black woman as VP without thinking it through, and then when push came to shove picked the least threatening VP possible. Someone without the acumen or political capital to get "uppity". Because one of the things we've always heard about Biden was that he's controlling, and increasingly so in his old age, and doesn't have any patience for people questioning him, talking back, or having their own ideas. It's one of the most consistent behind the scenes characterizations of him we've had since he entered politics.
Even this, well, not exactly a steel man, but the only reason I give aside from "Biden's brain is broken", isn't very far off from "Yes, he picked her because she's a fucking idiot."
Now we have Kamala crowned his successor without anyone ever voting for her, despite her never having accomplished anything, and having a history of everything she ever touches turning to shit.
I think once you've locked yourself into picking a black woman it's entirely defensible to go with Harris over a Stacy Abrams or a Susan Rice. Harris was a US Senator, Abrams used to be a member of the Georgia legislature and lost the race for Governor, Rice thought about running against Susan Collins in Maine but decided not to.
There is also the option of going for someone thats not a politician, i suppose.
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We don't need to speculate too much. We have most of the facts. We know he committed very early on to pick a woman (maybe I'm misremembering but the Black half of that I think came later?), and that's mostly due to the overall political environment and happens on both sides for at least a decade, and also to offset the fact that he's extremely white and also quite old, so having some counterbalance is mostly common sense. He has to uphold at least some of the Obama diversity legacy, after all.
But when I say we don't need to guess I mean it. We have some good quality reporting for example here and especially here that explains what the process looked like. Kamala specifically won the final round because of a mix of personal comfort and Biden liked her pitch on being loyal.
...
I think these points are extremely consonant.
I mean, basic reasoning/logic my friend, just because she's loyal and Biden valued loyalty doesn't actually mean she has a lack of other positive traits. At least, it doesn't necessarily follow. There's a stereotype of dumb but loyal sidekick, but it's just that, a trope, and each major politician needs to be evaluated on their own merits.
I think there's a decent chance she's actually somewhat dumb (or at least as dumb/deluded as someone who is eventually able to pass the bar exam can be) but I'm going to give her a month or so to demonstrate it one way or another. I really don't give much of a shit about DA records, I have zero confidence in my ability to distinguish an effective or good DA from a bad one, but her Senate record which I do keep an eye on looked pretty thin (although it's still worth noting that her entire time was squarely during the Trump years where they basically had little to no room to work with). But all of this is beside the point. You're trying to present her very selection as VP as evidence of her incompetence, but that's not actually evidence. Nor is "uppityness" a good proxy for effectiveness either (and I'd be hesitant to use that word anyways, because it actually does have a legit and documented history of racial and discriminatory use, so it's a little too close to a slur for comfort).
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I think Biden picked her less because she's an idiot and more because she's a machine politician who does what she's told.
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I feel like we can think of meritocracy and inclusion as two axes.
Is it dumb to only consider the inclusion axis?
Obviously, someone with negative merit would be a terrible choice.
But should we neglect the inclusion axis and only look at the merit axis?
I think that’s also a mistake when we’re speaking about a representative democracy with very different communities inside of it.
But that brings the question, what’s the relative importance that we should assign to the merit axis and to the inclusion axis?
This part is tricky and has been the source of missteps for the left which has lost them a lot of political and cultural capital.
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I'm not sure you can call it DEI, in the sense of being non-meritocratic. Harris isn't planning to pick a midwestern white guy because she believes that midwestern white guys are unfairly underrepresented or suffer discrimination or she believes that x% of politicians should be midwestern white guys because of vague equity reasons.
She's planning to pick him because she thinks it will help her win, and helping her win is the VP candidate's only job (at least before the election). In that sense, she's trying to pick the most qualified candidate.
Now of course there are cases of quotas where 'representation' may actually be part of the role, even if it isn't exactly part of the job's day to day tasks. For example, in Northern Ireland the police force had quotas for Catholic recruits in order to get rid of the (basically correct) perception that the force was a protestant militia. This is very different from the recent case with air traffic controllers.
When people criticise DEI quotas, the criticism is usually directed towards the latter and much less towards the former. Having a police force that is trusted by the majority ethnic group or having a ticket that wins an election are far more sympathetic aims than getting (percentage) of (demographic) in (industry) for unproven assertions that (industry) would be exactly (percentage)(demographic) without claimed discrimination.
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Not a large post, but a brief update on something I've been keeping an eye on. It looks like the Washington Post got their hands on some transcripts of at least police comms the day of the Trump attempted assassination here and, these are the three most relevant pieces of info you should know:
The first report that the guy had a gun was not until 30 seconds before shots broke out. Local police were tracking him down in the last few minutes, even mobilizing their own QRF towards the building, and apparently some felt until very late in the game confident they would nab him. He was spotted on the actual roof only about 3 minutes before (two minutes after first scaling the roof) and the sheriff inside the USSS post was told 1 to 2 minutes before about someone on the roof, though where on the roof was unclear to almost everyone. That the roof guy was not a cop was communicated however. Photos of the suspect had first started circulating 25 minutes before, but bad cell service means if many of these went through or not is unclear, at least some pics did not (these circulated photos include the 4chan pic, meaning it could have been any of the dozen or more cops in the loop who leaked it). So the most crucial period of time, that last 30 seconds, did not see the local post contacting the USSS at all, instead they were mobilizing the local QRF towards the building at the time shots broke out.
The local police and Secret Service command posts were different, far away from each other (900 feet or so and twice the distance of the rally site itself, and separated by a pond to boot), and with no direct communication line (they were using ad hoc cell phone calls, for example local cops would call a sheriff in the USSS post, which happened at least 3 times in 30 minutes). It’s unclear how quickly info disseminated to the USSS but it appears to involve at least four layers in the telephone game. With this in mind, we must ask ourselves how quickly did info make it down the chain in those 30 seconds? Apparently, the answer was not fast enough: the USSS was not notified that the shooter had a gun by the time shots broke out! We had seem some claims that the Secret Service perhaps did not open fire on purpose despite knowing about the threat, and those claims are much weaker now.
What was the local PD counter sniper team in the second floor of the building doing? Apparently at least one person was very mobile looking out several of the windows and moving internally, trying to track where the shooter went. He was responsible for the initial rangefinder call 20 minutes before and possibly the picture too. Most of their attention was in the opposite direction. The new timeline only has the shooter on the roof for about three minutes and identifies where he scaled the roof which was kind of in the middle of the complex - local PD including some taken away from traffic duties was tracking him around the outside, and where he scaled was on the opposite side as the window where you could lean out and see the final shooting position that was featured in Eli Crane’s video. The local sniper second floor's initial setup direction was a third direction away from the rest of the building entirely. I wonder how many people were on this floor and if any considered getting out on the roof themselves, I don’t think the article says, but it sounds like there was likely only the single guy! It's unclear what actions they were taking in the final two minutes.
I had initially said this was more likely a combination of bad inter-service communication, plus poor planning, plus maybe some local cop incompetence and a chance of ROE type concerns, and so far the info lines up pretty consistently with this. In other words, organizational issues, not malice, so far seem to be the overriding factors. Note we do not yet have or know many details about the Secret Service comms side of the story, AFAIK.
The comms failure is, to use a popular parlance, "weird." If the Secret Service is in charge of security for an event, and commonly enlists local LEO as support for their mission, it's baffling to me that it's common practice to silo local LEO's ability to communicate with the SS. If it's not common practice, then it's doubly "weird" that it happened to coincide with here with so many other seemingly obvious breeches in protocol.
In security, in the event of a breach, speed of communication between different layers of the responding force is crucial, and this system seems to have been designed to prevent responder communication from the bottom to the top.
It does call to mind the comical depiction of the FBI in the movie Die Hard, which suggests a derisive elitist attitude from the Feds toward the locals, but it's shocking to see it play out in real life like this.
Tropes often have a basis in real life, IMO. Much of the classic media we've grown up with was created by people who had the real-life experience to back up their storytelling, so it should figure that the trope of "fed-vs-non-fed tension" has very real roots in reality.
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While we're discussing this: any news on motives? I'm amazed that no one has doxxed the guy on Reddit/chan/whatever by now, no friends have come forward.
That would've been before the Gab posts.
As for his general internet use
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It’s definitely odd given his age. You would expect at least some internet profiles somewhere to have popped up by now.
Based on all of the public information, my speculation is that he was simply a classic school shooter type (wanting attention, to remind society of his existence) that decided to target a politician instead.
That's my current theory too based on at least the fact he also made at least some Biden searches too, but it's complicated by the fact that it's at least possible that he was actually self-aware that he had a decent chance of being caught (despite his remote bomb distraction idea to get away after the shooting) and thus would have watched his own searches and online activity at least in the near term lead-up accordingly. My degree of confidence is still quite low however.
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Unironically, even though this incident was bungled pretty badly, national politicians are much harder targets than elementary schools, and I'd much prefer suicide-by-countersniper to a bunch of dead kids. This does assume that those counter snipers are willing and actually manage to shoot first, though. And maybe that's asking too much.
Agree that we’d be way better off as a society if these psychopaths decided to target politicians or shady businessmen or something.
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I've read somewhere he had a Gab account he used to troll people with (of all things), but I couldn't confirm this to any certainty.
The angle where he got rejected from the shooting team is the closest I've seen to a coherent motive, i.e.: "I'll show them.", but I may be biased by the irony of him missing such an easy target.
Thing is, even with historical perspective, would be regicides surprisingly often lack coherent motives. Especially those that act alone. So while it is certain that law enforcement now suppresses political manifestoes and the like, it's still quite possible he's just a random nut who got lucky.
The posts Andrew Torba shared don't seem particularly charged. I have no idea if that's a selection of his posts or all of them, but those aren't the comments of deranged 20 year old leftist shouting online. Without further context those read pretty close to the median internet argument. We can go read far less reasoned comments on reddit all day. For all we know those comments are evidence he liked to pass time as a devil's advocate. This forum has seen a few.
If Torba provided that selection to demonstrate Crooks as frothing leftist I don't buy the framing. Which makes his actions more puzzling. He probably wasn't a committed online ideologue, so why do what he did? More evidence towards CIA LSD mind control device from beyond the Ice Wall.
He did not. He provided it to rebut the FBIs claims that Crooks was a frothing rightist.
Yeah, specifically the pattern of events was that Paul Abbate, the FBI deputy director, testified to the Judiciary Committee that:
The interesting bit from Torba is not so much that the content of the linked social media account is particularly extremist, but that the EDR less than a week before thought the account was specifically "associated with" the shooter. Allegedly, neither account has been confirmed as the attempted assassins, nor to my knowledge has the FBI said that the Gab account has since been found not to be the shooter's (or proven to be that of an associate of the shooter).
But it makes it quite hard to argue that the federal investigation representative in charge of this wasn't lying before Congress in order to present a more politically useful scenario.
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According to Andrew Torba of Gab he posted on Gab arguing in favor of Biden/Democrats on various issues such as migration and mandates.
https://caldronpool.com/fbi-forced-to-backtrack-gab-account-suggests-trump-shooter-was-biden-supporter/
And here is Elon Musk responding to it: https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1818340245139554333
The FBI claims he had another social media account with over 700 posts including the anti-semitic and anti-immigrant stuff. There's no independent confirmation or refutation of that one, so you can believe it or not.
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I've seen a lot of "confirming" he was a groyper, but I generally disbelieve that anything so convenient can happen to the worst people in the world.
Did you mean groyper?
No.
Internecine elite warfare between the lizard people who rule us and the fish people who do their dirty deeds
Stay woke, friend
I always knew there was something fishy about this whole story…
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Thanks. Not a word I use frequently.
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The stakes are such that anything but hard evidence for his motives is suspect.
We may never actually know.
At least this isn't as conspicuously glowing as the Las Vegas shooting.
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So incompetence , facilitated by maliciously denying Trump additional SS resources. As I understand there weren't many trained SS protection detail agents because of some Jill Biden event.
And let's not forget the constant Hitler comparisons in media.
Malicious? Ehhh, maybe? but probably not? We have definitely seen reporting that in general, resources were denied to Trump, and we also know that the USSS just as a policy (probably a stupid one, but it is what it is) simply does not provide sitting-president level support to nominees. Around the time of the event, there was a Jill Biden event, also an upcoming Joe Biden Austin event, but also crucially there were some resources working on the upcoming RNC convention too, and some agents had just come back from the NATO thing in Europe as well. WaPo for example specifically said that "multiple counter-sniper teams and hundreds of agents" were already sent to the convention! They also always have a fair amount of people moving around, but the core details don't seem to change all that much, so for example it's somewhat doubtful that Jill Biden specifically reduced resources for Trump, that doesn't seem to be how their scheduling works according to what I've read (though at the end of the day it is at least a little bit a zero-sum game, but that's just intrinsic to the process).
And in fact, both people in Trump's orbit as well as the Secret Service were, around this same time, apparently tussling to a high and loud degree about how big the security perimeter should be at the RNC, so it's even theoretically possible (I'm not sure how highly to weight this) that his own team's requests for more protection would have reduced, or even did reduce, protection at the Butler event. One thing we know for sure however is that at least for the Butler event specifically, there were no denials. (Still, as I think Jim Jordan put it, "Maybe they got sick of asking"). Examples of denied requests mostly related to wanting more metal detectors and related resources (potentially impactful in this case), and rarely but still occasionally counter-sniper teams, though most of these requests seem to have been centered around bigger, more public/natural appearances like in the middle of a city or at a football game or the like.
One thing I should have mentioned is the updated timeline answers one key question, which was "Why wasn't Trump delayed on taking the stage?" Trump had already been speaking for about a minute when the shooter climbed the roof. So I think most people would think the shooter's status wasn't quite on the level of delaying the event, and it's always a tough call to interrupt Trump mid-speech.
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The comms situation sounds more and more like an absolute shitshow. Podunk or small-time operators underestimating how much impact even a small surge crowd can have on cell reliability is a pretty common sort of mistake to make -- even local femtocells/microcells often struggle badly, and you aren't going to get them in place for a one-off -- but the flip side is that it's so common that the USSS should not only consider it in planning but also have some (if jank) solution, here.
That doesn't necessarily mean indoctrinating every police officer near a USSS operation into Slack (b/c there's a few CJIS-compat other tools), but ... 900 feet is the sort of distance you can close with 150 USD in 2.4ghz links for data, and almost any radio for voice. Frequency deconflict (and since Butler County does seem to have used encryption, getting signed into the right trunk) is not trivial, but it's a minutes thing, not an hours one. There are arguments against introducing new technology in mission-critical situations, but 'train a handful of people to use new comms' is literally someone in that room's job.
All of that said, that this a) supposedly including transcripts and b) almost all of the local police leaves me more than a little skeptical its origin came from a pure-hearted interest in solving problems. There's been a lot of effort on the feds side to not-so-subtly point at the local cops, and this sorta release, especially with the pointed gaps for any comms to the USSS depot, would fit in that category very readily. Some of this is genuinely bad comm discipline -- the report's trying to highlight the Sheetz misdirection, but "we got him" is the sort of thing that should never be going over a voice channel in this sort of circumstance -- but they're the sort of problems that pop up when your swiss cheese model is down to the last bit of wax paper.
I don't know how much to trust Grassley (politician, mouth moving), but he's been claiming that the local police had a meeting that morning at 9AM, including specifically passing radios to sniper teams, which is what I'd expect, and that the feds didn't attend.
Plus, cell phone jammers aren't hard to get, I understand, and would be a pretty obvious part of any plot that was more sophisticated than "one guy with a boomstick." I can hardly believe that SS was comfortable relying on "let's swap cell numbers," that seems crazy to me.
I'm pretty certain that the USSS are used to a threat model of "one guy with a boomstick". The vast majority of people who shoot at a President are uncomplicatedly crazy.
Absolutely true, but imho they ought to be prepared for something more sophisticated than that. (It's been reported, for instance, that Iran is interested in retaliating against Trump for bombing Soleimani.)
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The new USSS director seems to have yo-yo'd a bit between taking the blame directly and shifting it to local PD, and at least in public has stressed that the USSS is taking ownership. Of course at the end of the day, "we trusted local police" is not a sufficient answer for the Secret Service, it's their responsibility, and ultimately their plan too and on some level they obviously realize that. I'd also say that it's likely a little bit easier for local police comms to leak than Secret Service stuff just due to classification type stuff and more people in the loop. It will probably make it into the final report, due in December (at least the House one will be). It's fair to suspect some PR angle. Such as, he's saying things like they'll fire someone if they find a "policy violation", but that's totally missing the point!! We get that you're short on manpower but at least one head needs to roll, there's no way the blame is that distributed. However, based on the info we have, even with its bias, it current seems that the most direct, practical kind of blame is indeed on the police, even if that responsibility ultimately lands upwards in the chain. Final judgement remains pending in most meaningful ways.
Personally I don't think the USSS have truly respected how different the MO and incentives of a county police department are from their own. And of course, Secret Service can't run purely on trust either. They need to be more intimately involved with local PD if they are going to rely that heavily on their manpower. Really, they need to take a leaf out of the book of orgs like the NTSB and NASA about how to handle both investigations as well as tighten up their way of doing things to avoid common mistakes. There's a reason both pilots and the actual military are so anal about saying things a certain way and using phrases and comms efficiently. But there's always the human question -- why fix it if it aint broke? They hadn't had such an immediate threat for a while, maybe even decades depending on the severity of the cutoff, so someone being a squeaky wheel about how the make communication better might not be listened to.
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Trump attacking Georgia governor Brian Kemp and his wife during rallies and on social media, and Kemp's response to this is a lame "We need to focus on Kamala!" (paraphrased):
https://x.com/BrianKempGA/status/1819851284343832838
The behavior of Republican politicians regarding Trump is absolutely fascinating. Guy is insulting your wife, your governorship, your very character in front of millions, and you're openly announcing that you'll still be voting for him. Exact replay of Ted Cruz falling meekly into line after Trump loudly deemed his wife unfuckable.
At what point would these guys actually draw a line in the sand?
It's hilarious because these Repubs think of themselves as the party of Real Men, but this is absolutely womanly behavior.
Well, maybe not womanly, if Kemp's wife has said she's not voting for Trump even if her husband is, lol.
I think it’s simply the hold Trump has over the base. If he turns on you he takes the base with him. And it’s obvious just looking at the messaging in campaign ads. Every single republican running for office is in some way claiming Trump’s name over their campaign. They absolutely want his endorsement and play up any way they might have helped him. And the base is committed mostly to him and the MAGA movement— they’re after Rinos who won’t do everything possible to help Trump.
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Trump is not just another politician. He is the arbiter of reality. If you are a Republican governor and he says your wife is ugly, then your wife is ugly. In fact, Kemp will probably struggle to find her attractive again – in a way, it's noble for him to still be with her after her stock has taken such a blow.
Kemp isn't MAGA-pilled - the reason why the argument is happening is because he knows (and is unwilling to conceal that he knows) that Trump is just another lying politician, in fact one who lies even more often that average. There certainly are men who would re-evaluate the hotness of their wife or whether black is white based on Trump telling them to, but Kemp isn't one of them.
Kemp (and his ally Raffensperger) are unusual in that they have already seen off Trump-backed primary challenges, so they probably have more freedom to oppose Trump than anyone else in the GOP.
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It seems you are promoting a distorted picture and acting as if never trumpers never didn't do nothing and it is all the bad Trump. Trump is attacking Kemp for not promoting unity and his wife not endorsing Trump after according to Trump benefiting from Trump's endorsement and in private acting much differently. THEN we see Kemp's response. You accept the frame that Trump is the one promoting disunity even though it isn't as clear and you then endorse further disunity as the way for republicans to prove they are men.
I don't know the details of why Kemp's wife wouldn't endorse Trump, but the screenshot it self shows the picture you are trying to paint to be misleading.
Of course the republicans who are a party submisive to big donors, lobbies, and the left aren't that great. Kemp's wife is not manly for not voting for the republican candidate. She might like a greater proportion of women than men, be part of this problem, although we need more details to ascertain what is going on. Women are not manly nor courageous for being more liberal than men and that might be part of what is happening.
Trump isn't really all that great but republicans would be even greater losers for listening to such blatantly bad advice to become disunited to prove "manly" against the meanie Trump. They have a problem of people who hate the right being part of it. And even though Trump himself has some of this problem too, much of the opposition to him has to do with the successful subversion of western center and right by the left. Basically symbolically Trump represents more of an opposition than they are willing to tolerate. This doesn't make supporting Trump to be automatically correct, but it does argue against bad reasons for opposing Trump.
It seems you are promoting that you want republicans to be against their own candidate to prove they are men. This is wrongheaded and if the republicans are a political opposition to you, well it looks like you promote division against your political opposition so they lose. Of course neither republicans, nor outsiders should listen to such claims at minimum. Actually if we want to encourage republicans to be acting in a more bold manner, they should be more aggressive against attempts of subversion.
There is a constant repetition of people willing to offer "advice" to what they see as part of the right that goes that to win elections, to prove you are compassionate, non racist, manly, principled, respectable, true Christian, not a far right extremist, etc, you ought to act in this X,Y, Z self destructive manner. Opposing that and powerful donors, and lobbies promoting what is destructive to their civilization is what right wingers should show some genuine courage towards. Doing what is right even if someone would call you a bad label to try to manipulate you, or there is a possibility of genuine cancel culture. It takes zero courage to be self destructive over irrelevant petty drama and therefore enable the left to dominate politics.
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If you're Brian Kemp, what are you supposed to do? The consequences of a Kamala victory are pretty dire for conservatives. And Trump has the special ability to speak to the rubes without which your whole party falls into irrelevance. So conservatives have to hold their nose and support Trump.
What Kemp is demonstrating is actually manly behavior. Putting the good of the country ahead of your own personal honor is what men do. Dignity culture is the highest expression of manliness. Pursuing vendettas against people who insult you, like some 15th century Italian, shows a childish lack of discipline. Are you a man, or are you Marty McFly?
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Ironically, I think more of them might cowboy up if they actually thought Trump had a permanent movement in place to maintain power over time. Right now Trump is strong enough that you can't control a winning GOP without controlling MAGA, but there's no MAGA bench behind him. Desantis, Rubio, Cruz, Kemp all think that Trump is going to disappear. Maybe in November 2024, maybe in January 2028, maybe at any given moment if the bullet had been aimed a cunt hair to the right or if a glob of Wendy's-induced-cholesterol gets stuck in the wrong tube. And when Trump shuffles off the scene, the Never-Trumpers will not inherit the party. No matter how he goes, Nikki Haley's career is over, she gambled on Trump getting sent to prison and lost. They're all angling to pick up the pieces and unite the party after Trump leaves, Kemp and Cruz think they just need to endure Trump for a few years then they'll be freed.
Pointless obscenity
Sometimes you write a thoughtful essay combining fresh interpretations of classical literature and current events and get crickets, sometimes you use the term cunt hair and spark a vibrant discussion.
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You're literally waging the culture war.
"Cunthair" is bog-standard slang for the smallest perceptible distance on construction sites (and, I've heard, in many other red-tribe blue collar industries), and language policing is one of the classic culture war tactics.
If my guess is correct, you would defend the use of African American Vernacular English, and object to most attempts to suppress it. I think that's a decent policy, and also apply it to Construction Worker Vernacular English.
No, cunt hair would be considered uncouth in most of the core red tribe. Construction workers or drunk guys using it is an indication of poor breeding.
Red Tribe hasn't quite gotten the message about context collapse, so they're perfectly likely to use it in situations where couth is not called for.
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I dunno man. Construction workers are obviously among the most crass in all of America, so there's some bias right away, and even to this day, the word "cunt" is seen as the most genuinely offensive and vulgar and strongest bad word without any contest. "Cunt hair" is doubly obscene because, you know, pubic hair isn't really typical in polite conversation, and it forces the meaning to be physical and sexual rather than merely colloquial. So you really are double layering there. No culture warring necessary. In a forum assuming it's deliberate antagonism is for sure the default.
Not that I think we should be schoolmarming each other over naughty words, but I’m pretty sure that title belongs to “nigger” for most normies.
I’d say “cunt”’s like an inverse Scalabrine (who is closer to LeBron than you are to him) in being closer to “faggot,” “tranny,” or “retard” than it is to “nigger,” maybe even ranking behind them. After all, “cunt”’s featured in a lot of well-memed quotes in Game of Thrones-related subreddits, hard to imagine “nigger” being thrown around so casually and merrily on Reddit. Even for comedians, "nigger" is viewed as an edgy, risky thing to say in a way that "cunt" is not; a certain Seinfeld alumnus experienced this the hard way.
As @The_Nybbler mentioned, “cunt hair” in this context is less offensive as a humorous unit of measurement—not more—much less “doubly” so. It’s not like “dickhead” or “asshole” are twice as obscene as calling someone a “dick” or an “ass,” and those don’t have measurement-specific niche use-cases. Well, not yet at least, perhaps one day they can come to serve as common units of radii.
Plus, the offensiveness of a bald “cunt” without “hair” can be mitigated—or even canceled out—by throwing a “white” in front of it when describing or insulting a woman.
Well, to be clear I think that although the line is obviously never clear-cut, I do distinguish between vulgar bad words and slurs, which I do consider to be in different categories both in meaning and the situations in which they are used. There's a long human history of words that are sexually or scatologically oriented that pop up across cultures pretty regularly (the "vulgar" category). Offensive people-category and behavior/intelligence words do also show up (the more general "slur" category), but their use and deployment seems to often form a parallel path, rather than one that frequently intersects and has interchangeability. Mind you, a foul-mouthed person is more likely to employ more words on both axes, but in more independent situations -- at least it seems that way to me.
Of course in the case of "cunt", there might be a little more crossover due to its frequent use as a gendered insult, but I'd argue the word still has more to do with the personality of a person rather than their identity, when used solo.
When it comes to adaptations, yeah it's pretty variable, and obviously highly contextual, something greatly missing over text. But I'd still say that "asshole" is stronger than "ass", as the vulgar connection is stronger and more direct (referring more explicitly to a "dirty" bodypart), but "dickhead" to me seems about as strong as "dick". "Dickhead" is a little weird because it usually is taken as referring to your head on top of your body as opposed to the glans, and yes there's a humor element too which can be a diminisher. But I don't think adding "white" does anything to the offensiveness at all.
Bad words are funny things, because they are at once extremely flexible and context-dependent, and highly culture-dependent too, but also seem to rhyme quite often across cultures which suggests something deeper at play.
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Eh, I think this is a reddit thing. Lots of people who are at least more normie than a typical motteizean would find 'cunt' incredibly offensive and 'nigger' merely very offensive. These people skew female and would probably not use either term themselves. Like, my grandma wouldn't be happy to hear either word, but she'd get a lot more offended at 'cunt'. Honestly it seems like the normies accept that 'nigger' sometimes gets used non-offensively- mostly by blacks themselves- but that 'cunt' almost never is.
It's not just a Reddit thing, as the comedian examples illustrate.
If I had a Twitter account under my real name and called a black person a "nigger," even if such a black person is on video battering/homiciding someone—for example, sucker-punching an Asian American grandparent on the street—I'd almost certainly get canned from my job within a business week, perhaps the next business day.
Whereas, if I called an woman a “cunt,” I'd probably still be let go, but at lesser probability and immediacy. If I stuck a "white" in front of the "cunt" in calling some chick a "white cunt," my survivorship probability might very well be above 50%. I could probably fend that off.
It's mostly in "nigga" form when it comes to black usage. But as always, Who? Whom? Blacks can also otherwise use terms like "cunt" more freely with lesser or no repercussions. For idpol reasons for several decades now, black men (and women) have more latitude by which to call women bitches, whores, sluts.
For the most part, the only thing blacks have been called out, and on occasion faced repercussions for, in the mainstream is alleged antisemitism.
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"Cunt hair" in this context, while still extremely vulgar, is rather less offensive than "cunt" used to refer to someone.
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Kind of a shame that us Americans have taken a word which is pretty fun and lighthearted form of obscenity in the rest of the Anglosphere and made it like the be all end all of the worst things a person can say.
I’m still salty that I once was banned from /r/askanAmerican for using the word cunt with an Australian who came to ask a question.
I wouldn't say "cunt" is a lighthearted form of obscenity in the UK. It is one of the three words you really can't say on TV (along with "nigger" and "Paki"). Using the term to refer to actual female genitalia or to insult a woman would be shockingly misogynistic. Using it to insult a man in earshot would be fighting words. You wouldn't use it to rib a casual acquaintance the way you might in Oz.
The difference between the British and US contexts is that the word is permitted to insult people who it is okay to offer otherwise-unpardonable insults against, such as the manager of your team's arch-rivals or the Prime Minister. There is no misogynistic connotation when the word is used to insult a man.
I am 50-50 on whether "nigger" will turn out to be acceptable (obivously only in the UK) in this context if the Tories elect a black leader, which is less likely than it was a fortnight ago but still very plausible (Jenrick has overtaken Badenoch as the bookies' favourite, but she is still 9-4 and Cleverly is still in the race).
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Now you know how Cajuns feel about coullion.
The point is words with the same definition can have different valences from culture to culture.
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I was about to say it's common in the military as well, but then again they aren't known for decorum either.
Thing is, this is an anonymous internet forum, so we also have a specific cultural substrate. Ever since september 93 never ended, normalfaggotry has been tolerated on the series of tubes, but it is not the endemic culture. Interference with our ancestral traditions of variable geometry language registers is in fact the uncouth behavior.
When in Rome.
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First time I ever heard the expression was from a Brit.
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Meh. Like feet, cups, tablespoons and teaspoons, it’s something I have around the house.
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The Swedish equivalent and literal translation "fitthår" has seen frequent use at least as long as I've lived and we use the metric system.
Granted, fitta doesn't have exactly the same connotation as cunt. You generally don't call some a fitta and its not a gendered insult, its more of a general expletive, eg. you stub your toe and yell out fitta. Furthermore, its more of a comical extension/version of the expression "det var på håret" (that was a close one, literally "that was on the hair"), "det var på fitthåret".
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It's practically a term of art.
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Eh, I rather like a bit of pointless obscenity as long as it's not pointed at anyone in particular. It's part of what makes this place feel like a social club, rather than a generic forum of smart well-informed people.
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Don't forget Trump implicating "Lyin'" Ted Cruz's father in the JFK assassination.
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I'm beyond expecting Dems to follow the norms of martial-hierarchical honour culture, but I have higher hopes for the modern GOP; as we say round our way, ξιφοδηλήτῳ, θανάτῳ τίσας ᾇπερ ἦρχεν. Maybe Kemp should follow Hanania's (sadly unpursued) advice to DeSantis, and challenge Trump to a fight.
If he was the type to do that, Trump likely wouldn't be picking on him.
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So, the NATO-Russia prisoner swap is a done deal now.
On the one hand, prison swaps are a staple trope of the cold war. Instead of letting professional spies rot in prison, swapping them is a win-win.
On the other hand, this seems not what was happening here. Going through the list, you have:
Some thoughts on this.
With regard to Krieger, there are three possibilities. Either he is innocent, then trying to make concessions to get him back will just mean that more Germans will get arrested to serve as hostages. Or he is guilty and was carrying out sabotage for the Ukranians, in which case the negotiations should be left to the Ukranians. Or he is guilty but was acting on behalf of Germany. In that case, the German agencies have some serious explaining to do, but they might rationally want to get him back.
With regard to Krasikov, it is important to remember that Putin has been enacting murders (and attempts) in Europe with impunity, sometimes with flashy means such as Polonium-210 and neurotoxins. Sometimes an agent gets caught and convicted to life is literally one of the only drawbacks of that policy.
Now, it has been pointed out that his victim was a jihadist of the kind the West likes to eliminate with missile strikes, and it is hypocritical to cry foul on Russian assassinations but not Western ones. Honestly, I don't see it -- there are a few important differences between Ismail Haniyeh, recently killed by an Israeli missile strike, and Zelimkhan Khangoshvili, who was shot by Krasikov. For one thing, the latter was not running a terrorist organization from Berlin, and the chances to get the Germans to extradite him to Russia likely were much higher (back in 2019) than the chances of the Iranians extraditing the Hamas leader to Israel. Also, Germany does not have a history of providing short range missiles to the Baltic countries which these then routinely fire into Russia.
From a Great Game perspective, I think this exchange was a clear win for Putin. Apart from the agents exchanged on either side, he got his hitman back and paid for with a few domestic dissidents nobody cares about, plus the odd Westener taken hostage.
I think that there are two main reasons why he came out ahead on that deal. First, he can deploy much harsher punishments, thereby increasing the pressure for a diplomatic solution. Russian penal colonies are likely a bit harsher than German prison. The other reason is that as an absolute ruler, he has to cater less to public opinion (even though he did get great photo ops out of it). If some Russian citizen is sentenced to death in some shithole country with a terrible human rights record, Putin can just sit this out and tell the media to burry the story. If a German citizen is sentenced to death in Belarus, Scholz can not simply state his objection, but also indicate an unwillingness to make any deals because this would make Germany vulnerable to all sorts of blackmail and thus be bad policy, because the average voter does not understand this.
I am looking forward to other countries like Iran or the Taliban regime trying this. "That bomb-throwing jihadist you have in prison? We really like him back. In exchange, we offer you a bunch of women who were sentenced to death for violating Sharia law, plus the your odd citizen we captured."
Highly agree. This seems like a near total disaster for the US and NATO. Russia gets real assets back and NATO got some idiots and Russia's political version of the Washington Generals.
From a cursory glance, Russia imprisons western nobodies on trumped up charges just to have something to trade in these exchanges. Bad incentives to keep trading for them.
Let's be real, any competent spy who got captured looks like a nobody NGO employee who got got on trumped up charges.
If they have a few agents in the lot they should be trading and not telling you which is which.
And that goes for the Russians as well, who will also pretend all theirs are honest businessmen the West unjustly imprisoned for no reason.
Everyone is lying, but I like to believe in the funniest theory which is that everyone involved is actually innocent and these are bouts of mutual paranoia.
Right. Particularly since the people who caught them are unlikely to reveal the methods by which they did so.
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Do you really think the CIA is going to admit that they were spies?
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Israel has set the bar for bad prisoner exchange deals so low that this feels like a glorious victory in comparison.
You don’t have to win every trade when you’re already way ahead.
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There's no need to point out other absurdities with the plot here- if you want, see e.g. this summary, the odds of getting contaminated with a nerve agent at your home, then going for dinner, somehow being fine for 2 hours, then passing out and then being found by probably one the highest ranking military officers qualified to deal with nerve agents. Those are absurd odds and nothing about the affair makes any sense at all.
From the standpoint of “cui bono” it makes sense. Russians willingly swapped Skripal for their own spies. If Russia wants to do spy swaps in the future (like yesterday?) it is in their interest to not kill the spies the swap. It is especially not in their interest to attempt to kill them on foreign soil using neurotoxins that trace back to Russia and few other places, using known FSB members in the vicinity. This harms their relationship with Europe when their geopolitical interest is to cozy up with Germany. Would anyone with a 105iq really think that the UK wouldn’t test this guy for toxins when he dies (or suffers)? Now let’s consider that intelligence agencies are run by 140+ iq realpolitik wizards who are specifically trained in out-of-the-box thinking and a century long tradition of psychological operations. And then let’s factor for “cui bono”. For British intelligence, poisoning Skripal is beneficial in a few ways: it makes Russia off as a pariah state, hence reducing their influence in continental Europe and abroad, and it increases the public’s distaste for Russia, which may be important come an eventual and long-predicted conflict over Ukraine. There is little risk in ever getting caught because the area in which the poisoning occurred is surveilled heavily by British intelligence, and anyone who asks “false flag?” will be ridiculed, let alone given no platform in popular media.
You realize that Soviet intelligence has previously killed people on foreign soil with weird poisons, right? It's basically a known MO at this point.
Russia's geopolitical interest is to bring all their European neighbors into the fold, but the best they can do is invade Ukraine and alienate said neighbors. We're not dealing with a hypercompetent foreign ministry here.
And? Everyone has people killed.
Pretty sure Americans have killed people with weird poisons too. Why do you think CIA had a 'heart attack' gun showed off during the Church Committee hearings?
I'm not disputing that Russia kills people in weird ways that include poison - I'm disputing that it makes sense in this concrete sense. Because it doesn't.
The other notorious case of Litvinenko - the guy was seen as a traitor, but one who run away and wasn't swapped. And who instead of being quiet in his exile or at least low profile published very incendiary and probably nonsensical information of the type "Putin is a pedophile" / Russia trained Al-Qaeda etc.
They presented Putin with a choice:
watch Ukraine smash the separatists, greatly angering Russian opposition thus making Russian internal politics worse and humiliating Russia by painting it as inactive and weak. Ukraine
go to war and force Ukraine to see sense.
The heart attack gun was probably bullshit. It's unlikely that a small projectile like that would be ballistically stable while remaining frozen and being able to penetrate clothing.
Well, there's a few reasons the British didn't swap him.
He's a British citizen
He's not imprisoned
He's been dead 18 years
So far Ukraine has not seen sense. I am sure it will be great when they, best case scenario, annex the smouldering ruin that will be Ukraine after the war.
In case you missed it, I'll repeat that there is in fact a third option, which is to be a more compelling geopolitical partner than the US. However, as I said, this is beyond the ken of the Russian foreign ministry.
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I would guess that the "he was acting on behalf of Ukraine" story is correct, but Ukraine is not about to burn any trump cards on rescuing impressionable Germans (who I have anecdotal evidence Ukrainians mostly only feel disdain for) and as long as it is essentially German government policy to gently encourage its citizens to make sacrifices for Ukraine that go above and beyond what they feel they can defend as official policy, it would be counterproductive for them to not take the opportunity to bail him out.
Sure, but this is already a low bar. Chechens (who even the SJW contingent of Western Europe seems to need to hold their noses about) are one thing, but Khangoshvili had aligned himself with the pro-European forces in Georgia, who continue to be the EU's baby; his likelihood of extradition would have been in the ballpark of that of the US extraditing some Chinese dissidents to the PRC.
I have heard some rumours that he continued supporting (materially? ideologically?) the Caucasus Emirate which is generally recognised as one, though this is one of those cases where it's impossible to discern what portion of claims/counterclaims/debunkings is credible.
All in all, I do agree that Putin comes out looking like the winner here to an extent that makes me wonder what was in it for the Western side. Are they hoping that they could reanimate the white-blue-white-flag exile opposition with the emergency injection of Kara-Murza? Was there some secret addendum with further favours that are not being made public for PR reasons (e.g. Russia releasing more valuable spooks or unambiguous terrorists)? Is this meant to establish goodwill for future trades (e.g. Griner)?
As a German, I generally value Russian hitman being in prison where they belong above rescuing people playing spy for third countries and failing. I mean, if he had been caught during a scheme to kill Putin, then that would be something within German geostrategic interest, and it would be in Germany's interests to bring him back. Doing a bit of sabotage to hamper their war effort feels rather minor by comparison.
Right, assuming there were not in fact hidden additional elements, this trade does of course look flat out disadvantageous to Germany. I'm just trying to argue that the Germans did get something out of it (standing by conspicuously doing nothing as the US bails all of its citizens in trouble in the Eastern Bloc out might also be a bad look, and German media sure seemed to be fixated on the guy for several days/weeks before the trade while the hitman's release is already being buried). Ultimately, such is the life of the vassal; sometimes you have to humiliate yourself to help your master save face.
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Return of reporters in exchange for support of Harris.
So, we should expect a column from Evan Gershkovich in support of Harris?
No need for them to be that obvious about it. Just more favorable coverage from the WSJ in general.
Pay attention kids, that's how a pro traps his prior.
That's how a pro avoid an obvious gotcha.
It's not a gotcha to expect beliefs to interface with reality in an observable way.
It's certainly a gotcha for you to make a prediction on my behalf.
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Are you positing a counterfactual timeline in which journalists conclude that whatever the alternative to Harris is acceptable for them, and have enough class consciousness and coordination to punish the establishment by tanking her because they wouldn't protect one of their own?
One of the reporters was from the Wall Street Journal, which is less hostile to Trump than the usual mainstream publication. Keeping them on-side may well have been a goal.
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I suspect that the DNC is really up its own asshole enough to believe such a thing, even if it's very likely not true.
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