site banner
PaperclipPerfector  10d ago (text post)   35698 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 20, 2025

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

5
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Trump Pardons Nearly All 1,500 Jan. 6 Rioters

Letting Enrique Tarrio out of a 22 year sentence is reprehensible imo. Kinda increases the incentives for doing political crimes now. Also, those who committed violence against Capitol police who were doing their jobs and were rightly found guilty, should not be let go. In fact, JD Vance recently said "If you committed violence on that day, obviously you shouldn’t be pardoned", but Trump pardoned everyone that committed violence, the one that repeatedly tased an officer, the one that threw a fire extinguisher at an officer's head, the ones that chased that lone brave officer up the stairs, the ones that used bear spray on officers, used pieces of wood and other improvised clubs to hit officers, and on and on.

You know what would have been really wild? If Biden had pardoned these guys during his final spree.

Better yet, he could have just pardoned the nonviolent ones, closed the investigation, etc. and called it a show of unity. Then Trump wouldn’t get to bulldoze another norm for free points.

I like this idea. They should put you in charge of the Democratic party.

Letting Enrique Tarrio out of a 22 year sentence is reprehensible imo. Kinda increases the incentives for doing political crimes now.

Getting 10 years for burning a man to death was far worse.

Letting Enrique Tarrio out of a 22 year sentence is reprehensible imo. Kinda increases the incentives for doing political crimes now.

The BLM lawyers who firebombed a cop car got 12-15 months.

Letting Enrique Tarrio out of a 22 year sentence is reprehensible imo.

Did he kill anyone? 22 years is what you get for contract murder or multi billion dollar fraud. What is he actually guilty of? The bullshit that he tried to 'overthrow the government' doesn't fly. Wannabe street thugs don't overthrow governments even though they might occupy buildings.

In this case it was a clear set-up by feds, the guy is likely a patsy or an informer who played his part but was betrayed by the blob. It seems, to me, a clearly political conviction.

Giving him 22 years for seditious conspiracy would make sense were he say, a National Guard colonel whose troops arrested the entire senate and occupied the building for days.

Letting him out seems perfectly just. We know the Feds were up to something there with the snow-job related to Epps and the unbelievable fake pipe-bomb plot that's conveniently been memory holed. Or the footage of security opening doors to let the surprisingly well behaved 'rioters' walk around.

Your examples of ‘22 year crimes’ all seem like capital offenses.

Yeah.. it's maybe not the right one. Contract killing is life, no parole here iirc. 22 years might be multiple unpremeditated homicide or a big robbery.

Giving him 22 years for seditious conspiracy would make sense were he say, a National Guard colonel whose troops arrested the entire senate and occupied the building for days.

Okay, I honestly agree with the rest of the comment, but if there's anything that a state should have a death sentence for, surely it's that. Like, at that point it's not even a question of law and order but of naked self-preservation.

I guess the argument would be that life creates an incentive against killing the senate? Hard to say where the stand-off factor is there. This is not exactly a common occurrence, so maybe going all the way to maximal deterrence is fine actually.

In coups and rebellions, death is usually reserved only for the very top. It's pretty common for soldiers and NCOs to get off scot free. After all, them giving up is vastly preferable to having a fight to the death.

If you look around at history, coups are punished surprisingly mildly. Often it's just exile. Sometimes not even permanent. E.g.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_D%C3%A9roul%C3%A8de#Political_life

A guy in the leadership of the '68 Algerian coup run away but was eventually allowed to return to Algeria.

A leaders of the Algiers putch of '61 got 15 years, was out in 6 after De Gaulle pardoned him. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maurice_Challe

It seems riskier to be an armed robber than a coup plotter.

22 years is what you get for contract murder

Why? I understand the arguments for downgrading from the death penalty to life in prison here. I don't understand the arguments for downgrading from life in prison to, say, 22 years.

First example

Anne Arundel County State’s Attorney Anne Colt Leitess announced today that Israel Thompson,19, of Glen Burnie was sentenced to 22 years of active incarceration with the first five years to be served without parole and five years’ supervised probation upon his release in the shooting death of Marc Hill, 25.

The defendant pled guilty to Second Degree Murder and Use of a Firearm in a Crime of Violence on April 28, 2022 and was sentenced on June 10, 2022.

“Following a brief physical altercation between them, the defendant decided to shoot the victim in retaliation and then stole a nearby vehicle in an effort to flee the scene,” said State’s Attorney Anne Colt Leitess. “I’m relieved that the defendant is no longer on the streets and is being held accountable for his actions. I extend my heartfelt condolences to the loved ones of Mr Hill.”

Second example

Neither of those are "contract murder" (well, the second one isn't 100% clear but it doesn't look like one). "Contract murder" (or "contract killing") is working as a hitman - accepting money to kill people you otherwise wouldn't. It's generally considered more depraved than normal murder.

Yeah, I couldn't quickly find all that many contract murder cases, and so generalized out to provide examples.

Also, those who committed violence against Capitol police who were doing their jobs and were rightly found guilty,

Disorderly protest, they hunt you down and throw you in the courtroom with a DC Jury then lock you away for years. Russia doesn't even have as many political prisoners as we had J6 prisoners: I'm glad your political gulag is being broken up!

Maybe Russian dissidents know better than to pull a J6.

They jailed people who walked through the building

Russia doesn't even have as many political prisoners as we had J6 prisoners

Gotta ask though, is it because Russia finds it's easier to just kill their political opponents than jailing them? (whether through execution or other means).

So much for JD trying to talk some sense into his boss.

  • -11

This is sense. Those who didn't get convicted of violence got pardons, aligning them with non-J6 DC protestors caught up in a riot. The remaining got commutations meaning their time in prison ended up being about only 1000% of the average DC rioter caught and convicted of doing violence against law enforcement (note, most non J6 violent rioters were never even prosecuted).

I've been hearing the it was JD's idea. https://thepostmillennial.com/breaking-jd-vance-advocated-for-blanket-pardon-of-j6ers-from-day-one-of-the-transition

Conversation below seems to indicate that the prisoners accused of committing violence have not in fact been pardoned. Rather, their sentences have been commuted, which means that they're still being treated significantly more harshly than the norm for left-wing rioters who attacked police.

And in further news he followed through and pardoned Ross Ulbricht. [Reuters] My little libertarian heart grew three sizes today.

pardoned Ross Ulbricht

Absolutely based. Now he needs to legalize "dude weed lmao" nation wide.

Holy mother of based. Sometimes things do happen.

I had no idea that this was the largest investigation in Department of Justice history.

NYT: Trump Crushes Justice Department’s Biggest Investigation In an Instant [Archive]

President Trump’s pardons in the Jan. 6 case abruptly ended the most complex investigation in U.S. history. It also raised questions about what he will do next against a department he has said is full of his enemies.

From that link:

“It’s a gross misuse of the pardon power, and says that Trump is willing to meddle in a process that helped strengthen the rule of law,” said Joyce Vance, a former U.S. attorney in Alabama during the Obama administration.

These people should really, really, really consider strategically quieting down for a bit. Not to overstate things, but for clarity, when I read this, my thought is "FUCK YOU, YOU DO NOT CARE ABOUT MISUSE OF PARDON POWER". Biden capped off his Presidency with an absolutely deranged sets of pardons and commutations for everyone from his family to random "non-violent" criminals to political cronies to the literal worst murderers on federal death row. My impression is that most people on my side of the aisle feel basically the same way, so the histrionics about undermining juries and judges is going to do worse than fall on deaf ears, it's going to highlight just how impossible it is for me to view these people as anything other than enemies. Yeah, I am well aware that it's a tit-for-tat situation, I don't think it's very good, but the caterwauling deepens my resolve in wanting every last one of them released in order to rub the faces of people like Joyce in it.

Has there been a more bad faith use of the DOJ since Hoover? Most of the other stuff has been far less widespread, and obviously less comprehensive and expensive. Even the Trump specific stuff targeted only his inner circle. Here they were targeting random people that attended a protest in DC at the Capitol (the most legitimate location in the nation to protest) because a few people were able to overwhelm intentionally understaffed security forces.

I am increasingly coming to believe that a sizable portion of the professional managerial class is simply less nuerologically developed than most ordinary people.

Lacking the experience of agency they lack ability to percieve other humans and animals as agents and as such are unable to develop a coherent theory of mind even if/when they are able to recognize the need.

To "really consider strategically quieting down" they would first have to recognize the strategic benefits of quieting down. To do that they would first have to have some awareness of how their behavior looks to an outside observer, which in turn requires the internal concept of an outside observer. It is this internal concept that appears to be missing in a lot of discussions.

In much the same way that Scott alleged that Haitians lack numerancy and the ability to understand hypotheticals, I allege that a lot of the PMC (including Scott) lack the capacity to understand how or why somone might react differently to you based on your prior behavior.

Well...they are part of a culture which, as Freddie de Boer has pointed out, assumes that the right answer is obvious (see point 6) and that the majority already agrees with them (here I'm thinking of his old "We Are All Already Decided" from https://fredrikdeboer.com/2014/04/29/bingo-cards-go-both-ways/ ...which has been deleted and excluded from archive.org BUT I HAVE THE LINK GUYS :D). ISTM even just the first assumption ("the right answer is obvious") would lead its adherents to assume that most people of course agree with them, that there's no way very many people could actually disagree, that the few who do disagree are so evil as to be incomprehensible--so why bother to try?--and so small in number as to be safely ignored. (And can be dismissed as "a basket of deplorables." I mean. I'm a deplorable myself but I do wince in sympathetic understanding of the thought process that led her to that statement.)

But also I'd point out that "weak in theory of mind" is traditionally a core symptom of specifically autism, not "generally lacking neurological development."

"External locus of control as a[nother] possible cause of weak theory of mind"? Not something I've heard of before but an interesting hypothesis.

Can you think of an example of a person who has recognized the need to develop a coherent theory of mind, but seems to have been unable to as a result of external locus of control? (You mentioned Scott; can you think of a Scott post that exemplifies this? Here I saw his handling of the NYT thing as evidence of especially good ToM / social skill...) I'm having a vague memory of someone giving an example that sounds similar (years ago elsewhere on the internet), but in that case I believe the person in the example had NVLD (lower nonverbal than verbal IQ, autism-adjacent) rather than external locus of control.

Lots of the liberal elite seem to lack the theory of mind as to why the chuds don’t trust them, true, but I don’t have a theory of mind as to why Koreans tolerate their education system. I don’t think it’s a lack of brain processing it’s just different culture. Not everything is a neurological difference.

That's a pretty inflammatory claim. Please recall the relevant rule.

Three day ban.

To be clear, which claim was I being punished for? Haitians lacking the ability to understand hypotheticals, or writers for the New York Times lacking the ability to understand other human beings as agents?

"A sizeable portion of the professional-managerial class".

Scott's Haiti article is a good example of actually putting in the effort to be less inflammatory.

Did Scott actually put in effort or did you just not look at it too closely because it wasn't your ox getting gored?

Netstack is a politically moderate engineer in the defense industry, hardly a central example of the PMC types you're talking about.

Seems like an overreaction. Based on his own observations about how these people speak, it's not clear that they understand the effect their words have on people. The psychologizing was maybe a bit much, but I wouldn't call it highly inflammatory so much as a way to explain why certain people continuously make breathless statements that their audience has long ago gotten tired of hearing (e.g. "Trump is a fascist").

Hmm, maybe you’re right. In the spirit of Jan 6, I’ll commute it to time served.

No need to invent new psychology. They've just been in power long enough they got used to it and don't react well to having things imposed on them.

Hubris leading to downfall is a recurring narrative theme for a reason. It's hard to be wise when you can always force the issue. Well until you can't.

Maybe, but I've read too many retarded takes from ostensibly intelligent people in the last year to not suspect something deeper behind it.

To be fair, most mainstream/centrist liberals also were disgusted by the Biden pardons/commutations and have said so publicly.

Much smaller level but the clutching of pearls over the Flag Code when Red States moved the flag to full staff was something. /r/poltiics The fuck have you ever showed a iota of care about the Flag Code?

The fuck have you ever showed a iota of care about the Flag Code?

since it favored our side to do so, [something about arguments as soldiers.]

Wait what? Why was the flag at half staff anyways?

Presidential deaths get 30 days at half staff. Carter died Dec 29th and will have flags at half staff for essentially all of January.

Jimmy Carter's death. The Flag Code calls for the flag to be lowered to half staff for 30 days following the death of a former president.

Thank you (also @Dean). I had no idea that was the case.

Jimmy Carter died.

When former US presidents or notables die, it's normal for the US to have a period of half-mast flags.

Oh bully.

Biden’s had the flag at half staff for, seemingly, the majority of his time in office. Just fly it for once.

I view it as collateral damage.

99% of them should not have been arrested or prosecuted so now they’re all pardoned.

I don't think there's enough information at this time to justify a new thread, and I don't have much commetary beyond "If this is true, heads need to roll", but it seems pretty relevant to the ongoing discussion of the Trump and Biden pardons so I might as well drop it here.

MAGA-aligned internet fora are blowing up with alegations that the City of Washington DC has elected to fight the pardons and there seems to be at least some truth to this as this just popped up on my news feed Newsweek: Officials Stop Release of Jan 6 Inmates Following Trump Pardon.

The alleged reasoning is that the pardons only apply to those already convicted of a crime and as such the 20 or so individuals (reports differ on the precise number) being held by the DC Metro Police in pre-trial confinement are to remain in custody pending a decision by the city on how to proceed.

Update: As of this afternoon the remaining prisoners have reportedly been released. Officialy it seems that @DradisPing was correct, but it's still terrible optics IMO.

This isn't even the start of it. I fully predict Maryland (and maybe even Virginia) will gear up to bring state charges against the real worst-of-the-worst that they can prove conspired within their state to those acts.

I thin it's due to a technicality. While under trial they are held there under a court order.

The prosecutors have to send a notice to the judge to dismiss the case, then they get released.

It's a procedural inefficiency no one has bothered fixing.

I was not aware of this, and it actually makes a fair bit of sense.

But it is also exceptionally bad optics to have the families of J6ers showing up at the city jail to take thier people home only to be threatened with arrest themselves.

The alleged reasoning is that the pardons only apply to those already convicted convicted of a crime

I have no opinion on the actual legal validity of this claim, but team Trump would be perfectly happy if this standard gets used because now all of Biden's ass-covering pardons are invalid and politically motivated prosecutions of the Biden family and Fauci are back on the table... which is why I think this novel legal strategy will fail or be withdrawn in short order.

The alleged reasoning is that the pardons only apply to those already convicted convicted of a crime

I actually agree with this, but we're way past that point (for better or for worse). But I do think it's way past time we had a constitutional amendment that the presidential pardon cannot be used as a way to block charges from being brought, it can only be used to overturn cases that were duly tried in a court of law. It's too late to undo the preemptive pardons of the past, but we should prevent future ones.

It's too late to undo the preemptive pardons of the past, but we should prevent future ones.

Not really, the SC hasn’t ruled on preemptive pardons, and nor will they ever unless somebody who was preemptively pardoned is charged, because that is the only way someone would have standing. And nobody cares about Nixon anymore.

I guess I was thinking more of the absolute shitstorm it would cause, not in legal terms. There would be way too much "but they did X so I want Y to stand", such that it would be hard to sort through. Far more practical (if not ideal) to let the bad pardons stand without sorting all that out.

Send the military to free the political hostages.

Also have Congress revoke the city's charter.

NB: The Newsweek article says nothing about D.C. fighting the pardons, only that they aren't releasing everyone immediately. The claim seems to be that they're dragging their feet, not trying to invalidate the pardons.

The Newsweek article says nothing about D.C. fighting the pardons

True, but it does corroborate claims being made by more "deplorable" sources about how those in pre-trial confinement are still being held.

So what did Fauci and Hunter get pardoned for then?

So what did Fauci and Hunter get pardoned for then?

Loosely translated from Politicianese to English, "whatever malarkey the incoming administration manages to pull out from where the sun don't shine."

The world wonders.

Letting Enrique Tarrio out of a 22 year sentence is reprehensible imo. Kinda increases the incentives for doing political crimes now.

being sentenced 22 years was reprehensible. This pardon commutes it to something more reasonable and commensurate with the crime that was committed. Even BLM protesters whose actions resulted in deaths got shorter sentences.

One angle I haven't seen anyone here bring up yet: someone from the ACX open thread brought up this question (granted in a snarky, annoying way) of whether this would hurt Trump's cred with the "Back the Blue" crowd. This is interesting. I don't expect it will, but I don't know why. At a high level, you'd think there's be a natural separation between populists, and people who enforce state-law, but I find at least where I am that police and their supporters are the most intense Trump supporters there are.

So, will the more avid police-supporters think this is some type of betrayal? If not, then I'm curious to know why.

Almost certainly not. And not because of double standards on the right. Because of STANDARDS.

Back the Blue still believes in free speech. J6 was the ultimate expression of free speech. It was a protest in the nation's capital at the seat of government power. There is no more legitimate place to protest. Most people who were prosecuted were so prosecuted for protest. A few were for trespass to gvmt property (an offense usually dealt with by fines in the low hundreds of dollars) and the few who did actual violence have already served substantial sentences and were commuted not pardoned.

Generally this sort of question is asked because the asker doesn't actually understand the population they are asking about. Back the Blue is about backing them instead of crackheads and fentheads when they maybe go a little overzealous or make a mistake (or dont do either and the media/a local partisan prosecutor is on their ass). Cops and people who know cops don't care about people protesting abortion clinics with signs and pamphlets, other than the part where their idiot bosses force them to arrest those folks. Same with J6. We all saw the videos of people being let in. That is because those officers knew they were not given the staffing necessary, nor did leadership deploy them appropriately, to prevent a breach of the building. Breach was the intended result. People protest and invade that building all the time. Heck, people once bombed it killing many and got their sentences commuted.

Heck, one of the police got super trigger happy and killed a veteran in a situation where in that polity the officer gets huge prison time, and he got nothing but praise.

I don't think there's much of a conflict. The J6 stuff was way closer to a legal protest (that is, a protest where people don't break the law) than most Floyd stuff was. I don't, and never did, view J6 as an actual threat to our democracy or any kind of insurrection. I think that's a fairly typical view too.

I always and continue to feel calling the J6 event an insurrection is a hysterically overblown misuse of verbiage. A bunch of people milling around the capitol building taking selfies is not an insurrection. Blowing up half a federal building killing hundreds as happened in OKC is an insurrection. An insurrection is a violent rebellion. Think targeted destruction of key infrastructure, armed ambushes of government convoys, and the mass assassinations of officials. An insurrection is an attempt at revolution. It is a war, and necessarily causes widescale death and destruction. The J6ers were not revolutionaries and for the most part not even wannabe revolutionaries.

I agree with you on all of that, but I also know that cops are crazy when it comes to ensuring people who threaten cops are put away. If there were people in J6 trying to harm cops at all, that could sway some of those police-loyal folks

A bunch of people milling around the capitol building taking selfies is not an insurrection.

Which doesn't explain why they pardoned a guy that repeated tased a police officer.

Not really because the 'back the blue people' are generally going to side with the Jan 6th protestors anyway.

It wont for the same reason the rank-and-file of the NYPD came out in support of Daniel Penney despite him being a suspected murderer

The back the blue crowd are simultaneously the people most aware of the prosecutoral double standard and the least inclined towards unilateral disarmament.

It's the old "my rules" > "your rules applied fairly" > "your rules applied unfairly" progression in action.

As one of the most pro-law-and-order posters here, I would like to register that I think this is an awful decision — a total betrayal of those of Trump’s supporters who were (and still are) hoping that he will be an effective avatar for our ideology. Starting off your presidency by pardoning violent rioters is a highly counterproductive act as far as what I want from Trump is concerned.

I agree. Sometimes I feel like the only person who wants both the J6 rioters and the BLM rioters to be punished harshly. Lawlessness is lawlessness, riots are riots, violence is violence, and the fundamental duty of the state is to maintain its monopoly on violence by curtailing violent uprisings with great fire and fury.

That being said, I suspect you and I are more Auth than Trump or Trump supporters are, and at least he got this out of his system so we can focus on other things.

I'll join in to all those directly shown committing violence should get serious sentences, those that destroy property should get moderate ones. The rest that aren't on their second offense should get a token sentence and a very clear threat that repeat offense will lead to very quickly escalating punishments.

You're not alone. I want both groups of rioters to get significant prison sentences (like 5 years or so) in order to send a message that such activity is not acceptable in our society. But unfortunately most people are all about punishing rioters right up until they agree with the rioters' politics.

1- Our rules, fairly: both groups punished [prosecution of BLM rioters will be limited due to multiple factors including widespread public support, taking the L here is politically expedient and ultimately conciliatory]

2- Their rules, fairly: both groups pardoned [we are here now]

3- Their rules, unfairly: one group pardoned, one group condemned [we were here a day ago]

Going from 3 to 2 discourages corruption in the demos just like going from 2 to 1 does.

Ideally, we would have stuck with 1, since going from 2 to 1 is seen as the higher road (against the people but for the laws; though you'll recall this was an argument Charles I used and it didn't go so well for him) whereas going from 3 to 2 costs you support mostly on our side (in this case, our non-corrupt voters can be swayed by one faction's arguments that their corruption was Good, Actually, and then the non-corrupt vote them in and we go from 2 to 3 in an action/reaction cycle, in this case BLM/J6).

It's possible to go from 3 to 1; for example, if one tribune of the plebs (with a corrupt faction of the demos behind him) kills another one (who formed a corrupt faction of the demos behind him as a reaction) the survivor still gets banished. This could have happened on Day 1 of Biden's term, with an effective prosecution of BLM rioters on as flimsy a legal pretense as would be used on J6ers, but of course that's not what happened.

Biden did not pardon the Minnesota BLM firebombers.

I take that to be approximately commensurate with (3), except in a retaliatory escalation:

  • They didn't prosecute all but the most violent BLM rioters
  • They prosecuted all the J6ers
  • Therefore we pardoned all the J6ers, even the most violent ones

Make no mistake, this isn't on the path to (1) at all.

I don't believe this is retaliatory escalation. I think the J6ers were ultimately offered up by Trump (he had the chance to pardon them, but refused), Biden had the chance to prosecute BLM rioters for 4 years, and refused to do it.

Biden did not pardon the Minnesota BLM firebombers.

Refusing to prosecute for political reasons is, de facto, a pardon.

And if Trump now goes after the BLMers with renewed vigor (the evidence for the most egregious crimes is still there, of course; kind of hard to erase being caught trying to kill a child* when it's international news), I will accept this is an instance of (3). Until that occurs this is (2).

Naturally, if Biden had prosecuted BLM (and Trump not pardoning the J6ers on his first day in office) we would already be at (1), and if he had pardoned the J6ers like Trump just did (or at least, not pursue them with the flimsiest of pretenses...) we would have arrived at (2) 4 years ago.

* By Blue standards for tribe-aligned militiamen under 18

Refusing to prosecute for political reasons is, de facto, a pardon.

The feds did prosecute Dylan Robinson. It's literally right there in the link that you didn't respond to (or maybe even didn't read).

Biden did not pardon him.

Biden had the chance to prosecute BLM rioters

Democrats did, but did Biden? How many of the BLM rioters were committing federal crimes? It would have been legal but irregular (in a way which sane Dems care about) for the Feds to push DC charges against the DC rioters when the local DC authorities didn't want to.

kind of hard to erase being caught trying to kill a child* when it's international news

Not at all! International news will actually help you erase the murder of children - look at how Hind Rajab's death was reported as the death of a "Palestinian woman" in the international press/media despite her being five years old.

This should be on the sidebar, if we had one.

the sidebar, if we had one

This website does have a sidebar, though it's hidden if your screen is narrower than 992 pixels.

Turns out my screen is wider than 992 pixels but I have sidebar blindness.

Trump is hard to ideologically nail down, or at least ascribe a single label to. Different factions of the right desperately wants him to their guy but he keeps veering off script. For example, he occasionally hints at a blood and soil type nationalism ("they're poisoning the blood of our country"), but then he also repeatedly calls for increased immigration, most recently from the oval office yesterday as he was signing EOs. And like I said yesterday, he sometimes intimates in directions that makes the alt-right hopeful, but then makes it clear he is very much a 90s color-blind type liberal. I also don't think he is particularly dogmatic about transgenders, and I predict that once the culture war dies down on this particular topic (i.e., the mainstream consensus becomes that children are out of bounds but adults can do anything they want with their bodies), Trump wouldn't be averse to adopting a "third gender" policy like in Argentina. I can see him on stage doing his silly little dance with a Travesti during his term.

Same reason "Defund the police" crowd becomes all for throwing the book at Jan. 6 "insurrectionists", or locking people up for "hate speech", or guns, or whatever.

Guys, don't feed the troll.

Kinda increases the incentives for doing political crimes now.

Do you also agree that providing bail funds and free legal counsel for left-leaning protestors also does so?

Just wondering.

Because a LOT more actual violence occurred across the country on some random day in 2020 than on January 6, 2021.

Everyone should have access to free legal counsel, regardless of political orientation or the nature of the crime. It is in the interest of justice that all individual defendants be defended by lawyers who are as capable as possible, because this decreases the gap in resourcefulness between the individual and the government-supported prosecution. If this isn't possible all the time, one can still be pleased when it is. Here, the harms of incentivization pale before the benefits to justice.

Providing bail funds is a different matter, as it provides a degree of immunity to punishment. This is still different to a presidential pardon insofar as bail circumvents part of a punishment whereas a pardon overrules the justice system. An organization providing bail must expend some of its resources to do so, and this provides a lower bound to the extent to which the organization is truly convinced that the punishment is unjust. Presidential pardons are issued without sacrifice, at least in the short term. Pardons overrule the justice system, sending a stronger message incentivizing the crime. They are issued with less sacrifice (so potentially less conviction and consideration) than bail, which merely circumvents punishment and therefore sends a weaker message of incentivization.

Aside: I think your comment is whataboutism, but I've never been convinced that whataboutism is a bad form of argument. Why shouldn't one side complain about being held to a different moral standard than the other?

In a debate over X, asking “what about Y?” raises two questions.

  1. Is Y similar to X?
  2. What’s the correct position on Y?

Whataboutism is when the parties disagree on 1. At best, they’re now having a second debate which may or may not affect the original.

The side which was asked is going to find this more frustrating, since they assume it’s not even relevant. This asymmetry makes “what about Y?” very appealing to trolls.

I think your comment is whataboutism, but I've never been convinced that whataboutism is a bad form of argument. Why shouldn't one side complain about being held to a different moral standard than the other?

Succinct, good point, quality contribution sentences.

I think your comment is whataboutism, but I've never been convinced that whataboutism is a bad form of argument. Why shouldn't one side complain about being held to a different moral standard than the other?

It is a really simple test to see if the person is arguing because they support their team, or if they have an actual consistent stance that they will apply to any situation.

That informs the rest of the discussion, from my perspective.

I'm really on board with your first paragraph but not your second. Despite being used like it, bail is not and should not be a form of punishment. It's a way to convincingly vouch that you'll show up to a trial.

I have very mixed feelings about bail funds. I lived in Seattle and watched them repeatedly bail out violent criminals who would go on to do entirely foreseeable violent crime. At the same time, these people haven't been convicted of anything. Knowing someone's guilty is enough to put them on trial, but not enough to keep them in jail.

Bail and the cost of legal counsel are not intended to be punishments for crimes.

Yes but what is the INCENTIVE it creates, if people are aware they'll be 'cared for' if they get hauled to jail for political crimes?

Does it make such actions seem more appealing or less appealing on the margins?

It's incentive for people who have committed crimes to give their money to the justice system, which supports the justice system. That's the benefit it provides society as a whole.

They also do not necessarily prevent punishment for crime.

The January 6th rioters should be treated the same as the summer of 2020 race rioters were treated by the Democrats. For the 2020 rioters, virtually no rioters were prosecuted or punished for merely being there, in fact, they got rewarded with civil lawsuit settlements! Rioters who committed property crimes generally got diversion, and the rioters who actually committed assault against the cops appear to have gotten about a year in prison. AFAICT, no one got in trouble for organizing any of the riots or egging them on from afar.

Ideally, the 2020 rioters should have been more harshly treated. But they weren't, so there is no reason for Republicans to accept harsher treatment of their own team.

Pardoning the non-violent offenders for January 6th and commuting the most violent ones to time-served basically just matches how the Democrat rioters were treated. Actually not quite -- the January 6th people need to sue the DoJ and then the DoJ can settle with them in court for millions of dollars. That will match how the Democrat rioters were treated.

Pardoning the non-violent offenders for January 6th and commuting the most violent ones to time-served basically just matches how the Democrat rioters were treated.

To be sure, you're advocating that Dylan Robinson have his 4 year sentence commuted to time served?

Obviously not, which is kind of the point. The BLM rioters were, by and large, let off. But there was some amount of discretion shown and the worst were prosecuted. Can't say Trump returned the same.

The BLM rioters were, by and large, let off. But there was some amount of discretion shown and the worst were prosecuted. Can't say Trump returned the same.

"the worst" in one set are significantly worse than "the worst" in another set. BLM rioters murdered people with guns and burned down police stations. What is the worst crime that a J6th rioter committed?

So you have literally nothing to say about the specific defendant whose sentence was not commuted by Biden.

See the response here:

I am not willing to accept significant disparities in law enforcement breaking along the lines of partisan ideology. You have pointed to a BLM rioter who got a serious sentence for a serious case of arson. I would even be willing to overlook the many, many BLM rioters who did not commit serious arson, and agree that any J6er who committed arson should receive a similar sentence and a similar lack of pardon; only, there aren't any, are there? I would even be willing to agree that the person who planted pipe bombs in the capitol building should receive a harsh sentence and no pardon; only, the FBI seems to be oddly incapable of finding them, claiming that all the video evidence has oddly disappeared from FBI custody. I would be willing to write off any J6ers who shot people, or shot at people, or even who brandished firearms to threaten people, but it doesn't seem that there are any of those either.

I am not willing accept an equivalence between scuffling with the police and burning down a police station or shooting people or staging an armed takeover of a portion of a city. I have no idea why I should, but I'd be happy to hear arguments to the contrary.

What is the worst crime that a J6th rioter committed?

Broke into the capitol building in order to overturn an election? I feel like people really undersell how crazy it is that we had an angry mob break into Congress. For national respect and social cohesion that’s so much worse than burning down a police station.

  • -11

You're getting downvoted pretty hard, but FWIW I do think you have a point regarding the difference in significance.

Broke into the capitol building in order to overturn an election?

You mean "walked through the Capitol building after being ushered in by the police and while being followed by the police, while changing exactly nothing and having absolutely no effect on anything"?

I feel like people really undersell how crazy it is that we had an angry mob break into Congress.

Or people actually know that such things have happened before, multiple times (including multi-day "occupations" of state Congressional buildings, for example), and yes, done for explicit purposes of influencing the policies, only since it has been done by the left, people who get their news from CNN didn't even hear about it. In fact, angry mobs did much worse than walking through a building (like burning down the said buildings, yes) and nobody really noticed. It is a very common pattern in the US - the left is doing something for decades, then the right half-ass doing it once and everybody in the press screams "You see how crazy it is? How the right is breaking all the established norms?!". Unfortunately, they are doing it because it works - zero-information voters - like Chattooga here - eat it up wholesale and are convinced this is actually what is happening.

For national respect and social cohesion that’s so much worse than burning down a police station.

Please don't pretend you worry about "social cohesion" while simultaneously preaching "it's ok for my side to do everything but not ok for your side to do anything". It's not called "cohesion", it's called "submission" but fortunately it's not what American people are into. If the only way to reach "cohesion" is for everybody to submit to the ultra-left, this "cohesion" has zero value so stop promoting it as something that is universally valuable. We will know the left wants actual "cohesion" and "respect" when they start condemning their own ultras with at least half the energy they spend on condemning ones on the right. Not holding my breath waiting for that to happen though.

P.S. Here's one example out of many, just saw it today: In 2017, son of Senator Tom Kaine rioted (with others, using smoke bombs, incendiaries, etc.) at MN Capitol, fought the police, was arrested, got zero jail time: https://freebeacon.com/politics/tim-kaines-youngest-son-arrested-in-minnesota/ Kaine never even half-assedly condemned the violent riots but of course he's whining about J6 pardons now, because it's not supposed to work both ways.

My point is obviously not that “it’s okay for my side to do anything but your side can’t do anything”. I get that you’re frustrated by a double standard but don’t project that onto me.

My point is that widespread generic protests cannot be equivocated to this specific event. It’s unlike anything in recent election history.

J6 was clearly not peaceful, and its goals were not, like almost all major protests in the last century, to influence politics through voicing discontent. It was to upend an election, and for some, to kill specific members of Congress.

Now, of course it was an uncoordinated mess, but it’s incredibly embarrassing, and yes, is bad for cohesion. Especially after Trump pardons all the people involved. Say what you will about left leaders handwringing or outright supporting riots (as you should), but none of those people stood to benefit from the rioting.

Honestly I think it’s fair to still be angry about the lack of response in 2020. What I can’t stand is the complete denial of J6 as a significant and unique event.

My point is that widespread generic protests cannot be equivocated to this specific event.

Of course not. "Widespread" means they were doing it many times, in many places - while the right did it just once. And was suppressed with furious force, way over what has been necessary to restore order, while much worse behavior from the left is routinely going unpunished - or frequently even rewarded - for decades.

J6 was clearly not peaceful

Would you buy "mostly peaceful"? Because that's what we've been sold about Floyd riots, which did billions of damage and actually caused deaths. By the standards of those - again, for which virtually nobody is punished, select one-off sweetheart plea deals aside - they were extremely peaceful. I mean, they didn't even set the building on fire, amateurs. And a number of people on record for inciting the violence turned out to be suspiciously close to governmental "assets".

to influence politics through voicing discontent

Oh, you know perfectly well the leftist protestors do way, way more than "voicing". I know it, you know it, you know that I know it - why do this? How much contempt must you have for your opponents to throw them a lie right in the face in full knowledge that both sides know it's a lie?

It was to upend an election, and for some, to kill specific members of Congress.

Nobody tried to kill specific members of Congress. Oh, my bad, somebody did try it - James Hodgkinson - only he was from the left. So, no national conversation on this one. No Congressional hearings orchestrated by Hollywood producers.

What I can’t stand is the complete denial of J6 as a significant and unique event.

Because it is not true, and it is the correct behavior to deny it. J6 was a significant event, true, but in no way unique (except in a trivial way that every event is literally unique, being the only instance of itself), and especially not unique in the way that the left is trying to present it, as an unprecedented instance of political violence or insurrection - which is total falsity, political violence has been common on the left for decades, and there was no insurrection (come on, the bunch of gun nuts from the most gun-owning nation on earth stage an insurrection to overthrow the government and don't bother to bring a single fucking gun?! you really think we are extremely dumb here, do you?). It has been turned into political theater aimed at suppressing the Right's participation in the public politics (to some measure of success - the Left has several movements capable of turning out thousands to the street and produce political violence - or "mostly peaceful" if they want so - on demand, the Right has none) but nobody on the Right - or in fact on any side - owes to participate in this theater.

How much contempt must you have for your opponents to throw them a lie right in the face in full knowledge that both sides know it's a lie?

I dislike language like this because you’re needlessly raising the stakes. This is an Internet forum, we’re just talking. My point isn’t that all other protests are peaceful and the leftist are angels. Please step out of the bad faith arguing loop where you assume I’m trying to lie to you.

I’m trying to say that J6 was unlike other protests because of the nature of its goal and the scale. They didn’t want to affect the democratic process, they wanted to control it. Again I want to stress: Say what you will about left leaders handwringing or outright supporting riots (as you should), but none of those people stood to benefit directly from the rioting. Trump directly stood to gain from J6. And again, we’re talking about a mob breaking into the capitol building while Congress was in session. It’s never happened before!

I just don’t see your view that ‘the left’ is regularly using political violence and getting no pushback on it. The BLM protests were mostly half-heartedly condemned and under-punished, but they did hurt public opinions of democrats and especially far left figures. It was not forgotten.

More comments

I feel like people really undersell how crazy it is that we had an angry mob break into Congress.

2020 dug deep into a well of insanity that we still haven't climbed out of in many ways.

For national respect and social cohesion that’s so much worse than burning down a police station.

I get a certain argument about the symbolism of DC and institutions, but I still believe the passé attitude so many liberal-progressives had about widespread street violence displayed much more disregard for social cohesion. It was a rejection of social cohesion on the national "territory," not the national "map," so to speak.

Say what you will about national socialism J6ers, at least it's an ethos they took their aggrievement where they thought it belonged, not against random businesses or apartment buildings or freight trains that happened to be nearby.

They didn't even break in. They were let in because of inadequate staffing. Also, criminal trespass to property is in a different league than arson.

Calling it ‘criminal trespassing’ feels bad faith. Sure, it’s technically true, but it downplays the obvious severity of the situation.

I want to treat people like adults and say that if you are climbing through a broken window into the Capitol of the United States with the express intent of halting proceedings, you are taking on the consequences of that action.

Was all of the sentencing fair relative to 2020? Maybe not, but this was an enormous national and international embarrassment, and I’m not too worried about the government being too harsh on the category of “people who break into the capitol to stop an election”.

Is your point that some were let in, while your ignore how others broke in?

Or is your point that a broken window "lets in" anyone who would like to enter?

Broke into the capitol building in order to overturn an election?

It had been previously established that it was entirely acceptable for mobs to declare themselves sovereign from local, state and federal law enforcement, and to enforce this claim by burning police stations and courthouses, denying access to the actual police, arming themselves with rifles and shooting people in the street. When I and others like me stood appalled at the leniency applied by the government to such behavior, we were told that this lawless, organized and widespread violence was "mostly peaceful", that acting against these mobs would only "inflame tensions", and then that it was fine because they didn't actually achieve anything, ignoring of course the mass victimization of their fellow citizens and the mass intimidation of those who disagreed with them.

It seems to me that the same arguments apply here. The January 6th protest was in fact significantly more mostly peaceful than many of the leftist riots that preceded it. The protesters did not arm themselves with guns, did not shoot people in the street, and did not set the capitol building on fire. They scuffled with police, conducted an unscheduled tour of the capitol building, had an unarmed woman among their number fatally shot by security, and then left. To the extent that they intended to "overturn an election", it seems to me that numerous leftist protests involved similarly dire goals, and took far greater action toward achieving them to boot, and were given far more lenient treatment even when their crimes included serious violence with guns and arson.

Mobs have "mostly peacefully" disrupted government functions before, and it was not treated as insurrection. I see no reason why this should be treated any more harshly than previous mob disruptions, particularly given the violence allowed during the Floyd riots.

For national respect and social cohesion that’s so much worse than burning down a police station.

I disagree. My perspective on the riots is that Blue Tribe legalized political violence committed by their partisans against people like me within a significant portion of the country, and made it stick for the better part of a year. That is a profoundly corrosive action against any conception of "national respect" or "social cohesion". I now know for a fact that reasonable, thoughtful Blues are in fact willing to look the other way while my civil and human rights are violated and while lawless violence is committed against me or my family, because I watched them do exactly that, and I watched them argue at length that it was good, actually. That's the meaning behind "burning down police stations." January Sixth was not even close to that bad.

I understand that you think 2020 had a vast under response. Broadly I agree that there should have been less hand-wringing and more condemnation. But I don’t think that describing politics as Blue Tribe and Red Tribe actually justifies tribal argument. Many ‘blue tribe’ people I know were also outraged at the rioting and destruction.

You describe J6 like it was an overeager group of tourists ducking under a velvet rope. I can’t really figure out what to say to that. Generally I try to respond as genuinely good faith as I can, but this seems like a major break to me.

Members of J6, broadly:

Fought with police instructing them to disperse

Tore down crowd barriers

Broke and climbed in windows

Opened doors to let in others

Went through desks and offices of capital building members

Pressed further into the building, including secured areas.

Babbitt climbed through a broke window directly adjacent to a guard with a drawn weapon.

All of this in one of the most importantly political buildings in the country, second only to the White House. While Congress was in session. With the express intent of stopping the proceedings and in some cases calls for the execution of its members.

What about the situation am I missing that leads you to dismiss it? I don’t think this is comparable to previous protests since to my knowledge no previous protest has led to the occupation of the capital building.

It had been previously established that it was entirely acceptable for mobs to declare themselves sovereign from local, state and federal law enforcement, and to enforce this claim by burning police stations and courthouses, denying access to the actual police, arming themselves with rifles and shooting people in the street.

I think there's still a big difference in kind between effectively micro-secessionism and fucking with the election. One is an attack on one area of a city, the other is an attack on the entire country.

I think there's still a big difference in kind between effectively micro-secessionism and fucking with the election.

Correct. One, if accomplished by force, is literally treason, and the other is normal. It's the micro-secessionism which is treason -- "making war against the United States". Having a protest against election results in a democracy is normal. Having the protest become a riot is regrettable but also not uncommon.

To me it's not a matter of category but scale. And micro-secessionism does not affect the rest of the country, whereas fucking with the election does.

More comments

That’s fine, punish them both.

But don’t commute the sentences of violent J6ers (even if they are less numerous! which underlines your point!)

It's argued elsewhere in this thread that BLM rioters who attacked cops were given ~1 year sentences. Assuming that's accurate, why should J6ers who committed similar crimes but who have already been in prison four times as long, and at least arguably in significantly worse conditions, remain in jail even one day more?

Nor does it seem that punishing BLM rioters is still possible, given that they have in many cases served their sentences and have been released. Presumably your view is that this is regrettable, but we should stand for the principle in any case?

No, my point is that many BLM rioters that committed violent acts are still in prison right now.

And Biden, after pardoning everyone under the sun, didn't so much as lift a finger for them.

Both of these are just basic facts about reality.

No, my point is that many BLM rioters that committed violent acts are still in prison right now.

This is true, for certain values of "many". I'm sure I could find at least a dozen examples of BLM rioters still in prison, and a dozen is certainly fits the general definition of "many".

Do you believe that most BLM rioters that committed violent acts are in prison right now? I would say that is certainly not the case, but perhaps you disagree.

What would be your estimate of the percentage of BLM rioters who committed violent acts and were then imprisoned? I would say less than .0001%; does that estimate seem in the right ballpark to you?

What would be your estimate of the percentage of BLM rioters who committed serious violence, like shootings, stabbings, severe beatings or arson, and were then imprisoned? I would estimate less than 1%. What would your estimate be?

Of those who committed serious violence and were then imprisoned, what percentage received notably lenient sentences given their crimes? My estimate is that most of them did, because that is how the large majority of the cases I followed at the time and in the aftermath went; what's your view?

Another way to frame it is that, roughly speaking, the overwhelming majority of BLM rioters who committed violence were not arrested, of those arrested a large majority were not prosecuted, of those prosecuted a majority were not not imprisoned, and of those imprisoned a majority received unusually lenient sentences. By contrast, it seems to me that J6ers got much harsher treatment at pretty much every step of this process. Do you disagree? If so, on what basis?

I am not willing to accept significant disparities in law enforcement breaking along the lines of partisan ideology. You have pointed to a BLM rioter who got a serious sentence for a serious case of arson. I would even be willing to overlook the many, many BLM rioters who were not punished for serious arson, and agree that any J6er who committed arson should receive a similar sentence and a similar lack of pardon; only, there aren't any, are there? I would even be willing to agree that the person who planted pipe bombs in the capitol building should receive a harsh sentence and no pardon; only, the FBI seems to be oddly incapable of finding them, claiming that all the video evidence has apparently disappeared from FBI custody. I would be willing to write off any J6ers who shot people, or shot at people, or even who brandished firearms to threaten people, but it doesn't seem that there are any of those either.

I am not willing accept an equivalence between scuffling with the police and burning down a police station or shooting people or staging an armed takeover of a portion of a city. I have no idea why I should, but I'd be happy to hear arguments to the contrary.

It's disappointing, especially after Vance said they wouldn't pardon violent offenders. Edit: I may be wrong, see below.

I suppose this was expediency, since the administration doesn't have the resources to review all the cases. And from a political standpoint, it's better to rip the bandaid off rather than have a slow drip-drip-drip of news.

Still, this is better than if they hadn't pardoned anybody. The abuses against J6 defendants (such as novel legal theories, solitary confinement, and extra long sentences) should shock the conscious. We treat murderers better than some of them were treated. Probably at least 90% of the pardons were a good thing. These are real people whose lives have value beyond just as a political symbol.

It's disappointing, especially after Vance said they wouldn't pardon violent offenders.

Were the violent offenders pardoned or commuted to time-served? I see a list of 14 people who only got a commutation, not a pardon. If the latter, this would match how Democrats are typically treated, I remember seeing a case of a Democratic client group attacking the police in NYC and they only got a year in prison.

After Biden's pardons and now this, it's pretty clear that the President's unilateral ability to grant clemency to anyone ought to be dramatically reduced, if not removed entirely. Literally every president in my lifetime has abused this power, and the expected guardrails (voters will punish bad pardons) mostly don't work.

There's nothing to stop a president from goading political violence or corruption, and then pardoning afterwards (or hell, even before!). It's a highly abuseable, very obvious point of failure.

The POTUS has no way of knowing if someone is under investigation or will be investigated, so the preemptive pardon covers this before the statute of limitations runs out.

Counter-point- pardons are not a bug, but a feature, of governmental design.

The point of American governmental powers is not as a tool for angelic figures, but as a check against other branches. That it can be used to block investigations / prosecutions of 'legitimate' crimes is a merit, not evidence of failure, because 'I'm just cracking down on corruption' is an archetypical basis for political purges of political opponents. The checks and balances of government are far more concerned about the later- the abuse of judicial processes- than they are the former- the ability of guilty people to get off free.

The Pardon-power is an executive check against both the legislature (which could legislate unreasonable laws that none could fail to break, and then use said breaks arbitrarily to disqualify), but just as importantly the judiciary (whose power revolves around process conclusions). Just from a system design, if you want to remove a check on the executive against other branches, you are implicitly either replacing it with a new- and as to date not norms-established power- against the other branches, or you are refusing to replace it. Either of these are destablizing changes to a system.

In turn, the guardrails against veto abuse aren't just voters (note the lame-duck rush as opposed to the years before Biden lost the election), but inter-party and inter-branch politics. If the President, Congress, and Judiciary are on board with the same abuse, there's no particular limit (or need) for the veto regardless. The challenge comes when the President and Judiciary are at odds, and Congress is the wavering party. If Congress supports the President, the Judiciary is at a loss regardless, and the veto is just a means by which it is done. But if Congress opposes the President, the limitation on the veto is the limitation of the President's relationship with Congress- the president needs Congressional support for other things, and even outgoing presidents have political considerations.

In this week's context, the Pardon worked twice as a balancing function limiting the capacity to carry out and sustain politically motivated prosecutions. That mitigation can be a way to limit future politically-motivated prosecutions (Trump against Biden; more historically, the Nixon pardon), and mitigate past politically-motivated prosecutions (Biden against Jan 6 rioters, when the Jan 6 cases are contrasted against BLM / 2016 rioters). That you can view both of these (or neither of these) as 'actual' crimes does not change the politically charged nature of the prosecution (or potential prosecution) as viewed by substantial amounts of the public.

By contrast, limiting the ability of a President to grant clemency doesn't prevent the politically motivated prosecutions in the first place, but would make them harder to undo, which is less preventing future abuses as much as protecting them more if not even a change of governing party could reverse them.

Have pardons ever been realistically used as a political check against other branches like this? If I squinted I could maybe see something like Carter's pardoning of draft dodgers or Obama's pardoning of non-violent drug offenders, but neither of those really seem like they'd fit that well. I don't think it works that well as a check even if it had been. The real check the Executive has over the Legislative is the ability to dominate one party of the split chambers which has effectively rendered Congress inert. Kicking the can to pardons being punished by the President's relationship with Congress also doesn't work that well since, again, that implicitly relies on voters punishing politicians who don't do what they want. If they don't really punish the President, why would they be expected to punish Congress indirectly?

I disagree with the notion that the J6 protestors were politically prosecuted, at least insofar as participating in Trump's self-coup wasn't already political. The median sentence was 60 days, with those receiving substantially longer sentences mostly having engaged in violence. I don't like the framing of comparing it to BLM leniency, because two wrongs don't make a right. This isn't a prisoner's dilemma, it's just blatant hypocrisy. If anything, this will just make the situation worse as Democrats can now use this pardon to do another round of their own nonsense when they retake the White House at some point.

Jefferson pardoned everyone who had been charged under the Sedition Act. His party had taken power with a mandate to remove them, and I guess he was implementing his part.

I’m willing to bet that pardons were part of the normal political sausage-making that was the norm through…I don’t know when it fell apart. Reagan? Clinton?

Have pardons ever been realistically used as a political check against other branches like this?

Yes, just now.

I mean, the previous Trump term should've been a sign. And if not that, Obama's tenure, or Bush's, or...

the expected guardrails (voters will punish bad pardons) mostly don't work

The other main guardrail is supposed to be removal from office, but that's happened exactly once (technically never) and in the meantime the GOP has made it abundantly clear that they have no will or ability to hold Trump accountable.

The majority of the J6 prisoners had the book thrown at them for minor crimes and impartially enforcing the laws against your own kin is a lot to ask- on the contrary, I think the pardon power is fine. Instead, weaponization of the justice system is the problem- and most of the j6 defendants would already be out without it.

The median sentence for participating in Trump's attempted self-coup was 60 days. I looked through a few of the longer sentences and they seemed justified given the violence that had taken place. I don't consider BLM leniency to be an excuse because I also would have liked for the book to be thrown at those protestors as well.

impartially enforcing the laws against your own kin is a lot to ask

it's something we ask of everyone in government, especially people involved in prosecuting and judging crimes, and it's very reasonable and useful

Really?

I thought judges and prosecutors are expected to step aside and let someone else handle the case when their relatives are involved.

Ok I clearly should've written more than one sentence. Yes, that is what I meant, and we should also restrict the president's pardon power to not apply to their relatives.

How about just "No pardons between presidential election day and the next inauguration"?

I realize this wouldn't prevent Trump's Jan 6 pardons, but as a dem, I find Biden's pardons worse than Trump's. I hope Trump may face some political price for this BS, but nothing can be done to Biden.

You know, restricting the formal powers an elected official has, between an election and the next guy formally taking his job, isn't a bad idea. A caretaker President, so to speak. Common in parliamentary democracies.

Maybe move it back to a week before the election? In an abstract sense, I'd agree that maximizing the effect of pardons on a subsequent election would be one of the most straightforward ways to trim back the unilateral power of the Presidential pardon.

Probably would have hampered Biden's recent spree, but you'd just get any second-term president trying to front-load controversial pardons so that everyone will have forgotten about them by the time his successor needs to campaign. (as we are seeing at the moment to some extent; although Trump will of course have his own lame-duck period in which to get really crazy)

More comments

And the pardon on both federal and state levels is an important check on law fare against those on the other side. If the State knows that no remedy exists outside of the judiciary, the temptation to use it to silence opposition is pretty strong, as only a few of those wrongfully convicted will have the money to continue to fight the state apparatus for often a decade or more the economic and psychological damage done by a decade lost to prison etc would be a pretty hard thing for most people to take.

Further, the knowledge that lawfare is a thing and that the state will come after you creates a huge chilling effect. How many people would be afraid to go to a protest if they had reason to believe that the state would start combing through their past to find something they could be jailed for? Or that tge state might well just make something up. Even expressing support might make you a target.

Further, the knowledge that lawfare is a thing and that the state will come after you creates a huge chilling effect. How many people would be afraid to go to a protest if they had reason to believe that the state would start combing through their past to find something they could be jailed for? Or that tge state might well just make something up. Even expressing support might make you a target.

This is a good point and I feel like further adding that this was actually done to Trump in his first term - people who earnestly and in good faith signed up to work in this administration knew that the Eye of Sauron would be pointed directly at them. It claimed multiple scalps as well. While a lot of the people who ended up in trouble had actually done bad things, if the same standard and scrutiny was placed on just about anyone in Washington you'd be able to find deeds that were worse or just as bad.

The entire J6 and Trump prosecution campaign has at least IMO raised valid questions about the representation and "peer"-ness of urban juries for crimes committed more abstractly against the state. Why do DC and NYC juries, which are overwhelmingly left-leaning metropolitan areas, get to decide such nationally-important (or at least state-wide in the case of the NY state charges) cases exclusively? There's plenty of Civil Rights Era case law suggesting that non-representative juries are disallowed in the American system.

For example, I think it might be reasonable to (randomly?) shuttle national cases to other jurisdictions, or summon jurors from around the country.

Maybe, but once you start doing that you start undermining the fiction that consent of the governed is equally geographically distributed. It isn't, obviously (really, it's NYC/NJ, DC/MD, and Bay Area vs. the entire rest of the nation), but the shared pretense that it is legitimizes the government even in places over times where their regional interest parties lose elections.

once you start doing that you start undermining the fiction that consent of the governed is equally geographically distributed

I think doing such things would be explicitly acknowledging that the current methods are such a fiction, and that it would be an attempt to deliberately re-establish that geographical distribution: give some folks from Iowa, or even California a say in how violence against their Capitol should be tried in court.

it's something we ask of everyone in government, especially people involved in prosecuting and judging crimes

Is it really though?

The benefits of prosecutorial discretion and the need to consider a prospective defendant's race, gender, politics, etc... when exercising that discretion has been a core progressive belief/talking-point since the first Clinton administration.

Why is considering the specifics of a defendent's circumstances not impartial?

Democrats have always been the first to defect on this sort of stuff, letting terrorists become professors and respected figures

I wonder what the arguments from either side would be if "the other guy did it first" wasn't acceptable to the voting public, and we held all of our public officials accountable to serving the good of the public as a primary purpose. While I agree that both leftists and democrats do bad things and have for a long time, I don't think refuting the partial benefits along with the outright bad/ridiculous is best.

Unfortunately, things are so heated that any political discussion is less about how society should be run to benefit the people living in it, and more about finding ways to stick it to the other guy. That might help placate half the country emotionally, but I'm not sure it does any material good for people who aren't politicians or above a certain income/class.

Absolutely. I'm not really sure how it should worded though. Because you definitely want to avoid the ability to pardon people the President himself encouraged or enabled to avoid the ability to wilfully break the law on his behalf. But you can't entirely say "no political crimes" in a broad enough sense without preventing good pardons. Like the go-to example I keep thinking of is Julian Assange, who should be/should have been pardoned, so any rule needs to make sure that people like that still can be.

It’s a ridiculous power. It works when it’s the King, because a king is in office for life and his heirs and successors are considered his heirs and successors in a way that the president of one party isn’t considered the heir to the president of another.

But to give someone in power for only 4-8 years the power to pardon someone with no long term consequences is dumb.

I wouldn't want a monarch like King Charles to be able to pardon people either, as their lifetime status makes them even more shielded from consequences of corrupt pardons.

For absolute monarchs, the ability to pardon basically just kills the rule of law. The only recourse people would have is outright revolution. It's a terrible system.

To the contrary, lifetime status means reputational consequences that don’t exist in a presidency. If King Charles pardons someone (of his own will rather than on ministerial advice) and then he goes on to commit a series of horrific crimes, his image suffers. If a president pardons someone, leaves office, and then that person commits a series of horrific crimes, the next president can just throw up their hands and say they had nothing to do with it.

This is America, ridiculousness is a feature not a bug.

When most liberal democracies have it, that takes the sting out of the word "ridiculous".

something can be 'ridiculous' as a result of its content, not its social context

Sure, I don't necessarily have anything against that argument, but I think it should be made clear what type of ridiculousness we're talking about.

I think liberal democracy is ridiculous, so it still works for me.

Precedent in almost all of them is that the power is used extremely rarely, as an event, and often subject to the intense scrutiny of a leader’s own allies. Lastly, the power typically sits with a ceremonial president with no real political power besides, in some cases, the ability to call an election.

Precedent in almost all of them is that the power is used extremely rarely, as an event, and often subject to the intense scrutiny of a leader’s own allies.

Investigating each and every country would be a bit of a pain in the ass, as they don't exactly share the number of pardons on Eurostat, but my impression is that pardons are seen as completely mundane and boring. I'd eyeball-estimate something on the order of 100+ each year in any mid-sized country.

A wholesale pardon of deplorables would indeed cause quite a stir in Europe, but that has nothing to do with pardons themselves being haram.

Germany keeps the identities of those pardoned a secret, but a recent court case revealed that the number totalled 15 during Steinmeier's five-year tenure (2017-2022), or 3 a year.

Looks like it might be going out of fashion.

German wiki

In 2006, around 4,000 applications for clemency were submitted in North Rhine-Westphalia; the clemency offices of the regional courts, the Ministry of Justice and the Minister President decided in favour of every tenth application.[14] Pardons granted by the Federal President are secret and the Office of the Federal President does not provide any information on positive or negative clemency decisions by the Federal Presidents.[15][16][17]

From July 1, 1974 until the end of Joachim Gauck's term of office on March 18, 2017, 898 disciplinary pardon decisions and 97 criminal pardon decisions were made by the Federal Presidents.[18]

Some French website

As a consequence of the end of the use of collective amnesty laws and the lesser consideration given to requests for pardons, the figures have fallen considerably since the mid-1990s, and more precisely since 2011. Indeed, since Jacques Chirac's election as President of the Republic in 1995, the number of pardons granted has fallen, to around one hundred or less per year, compared with between two and seven hundred the previous decade. In 2007, the year of Nicolas Sarkozy's election in May, the figures halved, from 98 pardons granted in 2006 to 43 in 2007, then 94 in 2008, 28 in 2009 and 61 in 2010. From 2011 onwards, when 19 requests will be examined, the figures will continue to fall. In fact, no requests were granted in 2014 or 2017.

The benefit to justice outweighs the small injustice here. This is a signal for future courts and agencies that if you over-punish a thousand people, we will under-punish the batch in full. The government and courts now have an incentive try and punish everyone fairly, or else even those who deserve their punishment go free. A similar mechanism is already at work in our law: if you violate rights in obtaining evidence, that evidence will be thrown out, as otherwise it incentivizes the police to continue violating rights.

A similar mechanism is already at work in our law: if you violate rights in obtaining evidence, that evidence will be thrown out, as otherwise it incentivizes the police to continue violating rights

This aspect of American legal environment is a prime example of failed incentive structure. It disincentivizes bringing to court evidence gathered obtained by violating citizens' rights, and nothing more. Thus the police may choose to use methods that violate rights and building the court case with parallel construction. Likewise, court cases that hinge on whether some procedural forms were followed in collecting evidence or testimony rather than whether the evidence is true and correct. Incentivizes rules-lawyering rather than finding justice.

I'd rather recommend sticking to system where defined violations are crimes that carry penalties as codified in the law -- or if some violations are deemed necessary for the functioning of the government, the cases for those violations are defined by the law.

Back to presidential pardons: sounds likely that instead of drawing the conclusion you propose, the courts and the government may learn a different lesson. There is zero direct incentives for increased respect for the law, more thorough investigations, or fairer punishments. Whether or not Biden's family-members were guilty of anything, or Jan 6 people received fitting punishment or not, everyone will note that the perhaps-crimes committed in service of the POTUS or favorably influence his re-election chances may be pardoned. In immediate future, the noblesse de robe will adapt to in anticipation how Trump will wield the pardon. Long-term, it incentivizes fights for the presidential throne to be more vicious.

If you truly believe that will happen, I can only say I don't think you've been paying enough attention to politics the past decade. Nobody has ever changed their behavior for the better when their opponents smash the "defect" button, it simply galvanizes them to do the same thing in return. The last 10-20 years of US politics has just been a cycle of parties playing dirty with each other every chance they can, and it has only spiraled into worse and worse offenses. There's zero reason to believe that this time it'll have a positive impact because it'll send a message about incentives.

Trump did not lock up Hillary. There were no show trials with extreme penalties for Floyd rioters. The both-sidesism is wrong; the Democrats have been dishing it out a lot more than they've been taking it.

This is a total myth that was fabricated by the Right to excuse the absolutely inexcusable behavior of Trump supporters. If you spent the summer of 2020 watching Fox News point to a few high-profile incidences of police cowardice or listening to NPR's defund the police nonsense then it's understandable how you would get that impression. But if you watched local news or actually paid attention to what was happening you'd have seen that there was no shortage of people who were arrested and charged. Hell, here in Pittsburgh there were news reports on an almost weekly basis that consisted of a grainy photograph of people the police were looking for in connection to spray painting buildings, or throwing rocks at police, or some other minor crime that wouldn't even merit a mention in the newspaper let alone a media-assisted manhunt. I can't speak to this happening in every city, but I know the same was true for Los Angeles and Atlanta, and the Feds were looking for a ton of people as well, which is interesting considering that they only had jurisdiction over a small percentage of the total rioters.

The reason you didn't see many high-profile convictions is because the BLM protestors were at least smart enough to commit their crimes at night and make some attempt at concealing their identities. For all the effort police put into tracking these people down, if there's no evidence there's no evidence. To the contrary, the Capitol rioters decided to commit their crimes during the day, in one large group, in an area surrounded by video cameras. Then they posed for pictures and videos and posted it on social media. Were these people trying to get caught? Which brings me to the dismissals. Yes, a lot of the George Floyd riot cases were dismissed, and conservatives like to point to this as evidence of them being treated with kid gloves. But the prosecutors often had no choice. The tactics of the Pittsburgh Police (under the administration of Bill Peduto, no one's idea of a conservative) were to simply arrest everyone in the immediate vicinity the moment a demonstration started to get out of hand. Never mind that they didn't have any evidence that most of these people committed a crime. If a crowd throws water bottles at the police and they arrest everyone they can get their hands on, good like proving that a particular person threw something. Unless you have video or a cop who is able to testify, you're entirely out of luck. So they'd arrest a bunch of people and ten the DA "(Steven Zappala, no one's idea of a progressive) would drop the charges against the 90% against which they had no evidence. In any event, I didn't hear about Biden or any liberal governor offering to pardon any of these people.

Seriously. The Capitol rioters were morons operating under the assumption that their sugar daddy Trump would bail them out because he agreed with their politics. If he wanted to give clemency to people who got swept up in the crowd and trespasses where they shouldn't have, I could understand that. But by pardoning people who assaulted police officers, broke windows, and the like, he shows a complete disrespect for law enforcement and the rule of law. And all of it coming from a guy who is supposedly about law and order. It's absolutely disgraceful.

  • -14

My man, the J6 investigation is the most expensive in DOJ history. They tracked down people's cell phones just for being geolocated somewhere in the general area and then combed through more video evidence than they would for 1000 murder trials just to pick people up. They then presented cases to DC juries that the person was geolocated in the area, so they must have committed a crime (the restricted area they have claimed is much larger than the building itself, and there is evidence that there were no guards at the doors of the building turning people away for most of the protest).

This thread seems relevant, as does my post responding to it.

The reason you didn't see many high-profile convictions is because the BLM protestors were at least smart enough to commit their crimes at night and make some attempt at concealing their identities.

That is certainly part of it. But then, there's this:

Rittenhouse was subjected to a malicious murder prosecution in the face of multiple-angle video evidence showing his attempts to retreat from his attackers. His attackers were not charged in any way, despite solid evidence that they had broken the law.

The McCloskeys were charged with felonies for defending their home from a criminal mob, but managed to mostly defend themselves from the worst consequences.

Gardner was hounded to suicide with the able assistance of his local and state governments.

Bacca pleads guilty and will go to prison.

Daniel Perry has been sentenced to 25 years, but might get a pardon.

On the other side:

The CHAZ gunmen were allowed to slip away unmolested after one murder and an unknown number of attempted murders, with the implicit cooperation of local government.

Reinoehl committed cold-blooded murder, on camera, which was then publicly celebrated by his allies, again on camera. He died shortly after in a shootout with federal law enforcement, which the press spent some time spinning conspiracy theories about.

Dolloff shot a man to death for, at most, punching and pepper-spraying him, and witnesses were uncertain even of that much. The authorities declined to prosecute him, instead punishing his employers while he walked free.

Masks work. Anonymity works. Not just for the basic reasons of making a positive ID harder, but because it makes every effort to cover for you by your allies downstream in the press, the activist scene and in government easier as well. It widens every subsequent zone of plausible deniability, lends credibility to every argument about why there's just nothing to be done about your exercise of coordinated political violence.

Institutional support is crucial for control of the streets, and thus the public. What these people did can't be done without a cooperative press and local government, and especially a firm handle on the police. Again, plausible deniability is key.

Manipulation of procedural outcomes is the name of the game, surfing that line between clearly communicating that you are above the law, and exposing yourself to real backlash and severe consequences. Making it clear that your side will tend to walk even when you murder, while the other side will be prosecuted even for defending themselves from you is an integral part of the strategy. Remember, even if it takes a while, even if the hit-rate is not 100%, your opponents are risk-averse and have a whole lot to lose, so it doesn't take much to shift the calculus. You or your allies need to control interpretation and implementation of the procedures. All else flows from that point.

Here's what it comes down to: Reds believe that our justice system is politically compromised, and it seems to me that they believe that because there is a very large stack of evidence that it is, in fact, politically compromised. You can disagree if you like, but their belief has grown sufficiently strong to allow them to coordinate the winning of elections and the exercise of bedrock power based on that belief. At some point, you and people like you are probably going to need to start taking those arguments seriously, simply out of simple pragmatism if nothing else.

Or to put it more succinctly, "no justice, no peace." Or what did you think that slogan meant?

What are the arguments that it is compromised? I don't know that I have seen a well laid argument. I have seen many piecemeal or specific cases that people bring up, but I have seen that from both sides, where evidence is cherry picked. In fact, it might be fair to say that in terms of public opinion, the justice system is pretty bad. No one is satisfied. Both sides can be correct even if they disagree on the problems (just as ADHD can be both over diagnosed and under diagnosed, to use an ACX example). I haven't seen a non-partisan (or even close to non-partisan) take, outside of Scott's recent post on prisons, which only scratches the surface of one part of the justoce system.

  • -14

I don't know that I have seen a well laid argument. I have seen many piecemeal or specific cases that people bring up, but I have seen that from both sides, where evidence is cherry picked.

What would non-cherry-picked evidence look like? What separates cherry-picking from representative sampling?

Would it be cherry-picking to look at the Rittenhouse case? I don't think so, because it seems to me that the Rittenhouse case was typical of how the Justice System handled Red defendents. Ideally, we could discuss whether or not his treatment by the Justice System was legitimate or acceptable; my position is that it was neither. If you agreed with me on that assessment, we could then ask whether there are examples of pro-BLM actors engaging in similar behavior, and then looking at how they were handled by the Justice System. If we found that their treatment was typically much gentler than that applied to Rittenhouse, that would support my thesis. If we found that their treatment was generally similar, that would undermine my thesis.

Above, I laid out an attempt to do that, using "prominent cases of BLM-riot-related shootings" as the category. I noted that the pro-BLM shooters had clearly worse facts and clearly better outcomes in general. Which Red Tribe protestors got caught red-handed committing federal destructive device felonies, and had their prosecutors recommend a sentence well below the floor of the applicable sentence? This generalizes; how many Progressives have been prosecuted under the Logan act? Did the FBI illegally spy on the Obama or Clinton or Biden or Harris campaigns? Confronted with a very large mass of data, what approach is better than starting with the outliers and working from there?

My argument would be that for the last several years, Red Tribe defendants have received unusually harsh treatment, and Blue Tribe defendants have received unusually lenient treatment. An obvious counter-argument would be to present cases of Blue Tribe defendants receiving unusually harsh treatment, given the available facts. Do you have any at all?

Things like general statistics, trends that can be gained from a large volume/scale of evidence, while being able to sort for other factors that are justice ajacent. I am not arguing a case for the "Blue Tribe". I am genuinely asking if you know of an overview that attempts to be non-partisan. The blue tribe talking points are systemic, but also clearly lop-sided and cherry picked.

Did you read the ACX article On Prison and Crime? (sorry, I would link it but I am a luddite and am on a phone). That is the sort of overview I find compelling, in part because the ground floor view of the justice system is absolute chaos. Alternatively, case studies might suffice, but non-partisanship is important to me because I am non-partisan myself and I don't follow news cycles.

I am also way less interested in politically big cases than what affects average people. What happens in my neighbourhood (and other neighbourhoods more generally) is way more important to me than a politically charged case, but unfortunately a lot less interesting to talk about. I am skeptical that the most newsworthy cases make good case studies because they are, by definition, exceptional. I am more interested in how crime and punishment impacts life more generally - economics, safety, etc. Questions like, "can the justice system be more efficient?" Or, "if we change x about the justice system, what are the pros and cons that will result?" In theory, those things are answerable, but the discussion is rarely about that.

More comments

It's a myth that Trump didn't lock up Hillary? It's a myth that there were no show trials with extreme penalties for Floyd rioters? No, neither of those are myths. Not even rioters in Washington D.C. ended up facing long times in prison based on novel legal theories. Not even the Kavanaugh protestors who buttonholed Jeff Flake got charged with disrupting an official proceeding.

I'll just say that this is blatant historical revisionism and leave it at that. The usual flip between "it's a glorious uprising for racial justice" (and they always used the word "uprising"), to "it never happened, Republicans made it all up, it was a cop riot"

Anyone have that screenshot of Robert Evans bragging about burning down that police station? He was mad the media were excusing it as an accident when he wanted credit for the "successful operation." I'll care about "norms" when he and the CHAZ murderers are rotting in prison. Until then my only concern is getting a better class of shock troop to fight the next corporate-sponsored "uprising" in my town

Nah, you’re operating under a myth here

https://www.reuters.com/legal/judge-sentences-second-new-york-lawyer-molotov-cocktail-case-2023-01-27/

One year sentence, for attempting to burn police officers to death.

J6 trespassing grannies get decades long sentences by comparison

There is no argument here, the double standards are incredibly obvious

In any event, I didn't hear about Biden or any liberal governor offering to pardon any of these people.

Nah, but we had liberal mayors ordering police to stand down. Kind of hard to make arrests when you’re not even allowed to do so, crazy how that works

Oh, who was raising funds for their bail by the way?

Just to point out the police car they molotoved was empty as your own link states in the first paragraph. Still bad but not murdering police officers bad.

Did they know it was empty?

Presumably, it had already been vandalized with the windows smashed out as mentioned in the linked article. Seems unlikely from the facts described they wouldn't know it was empty.

Can you link me any non-violent Jan 6er, granny or otherwise, who got one decade or more?

Edit: I'm asking this in good faith, and I will preemptively agree that anyone getting 10 years for walking around the capital on Jan6 is completely tucked and a travesty.

Jason Barnett was a 60 year old who got 4 years for being photographed with his feet on Nancy pelosis desk

Thomas J Patterson was a cop in off duty who got 7 years for basically the same thing as Barnett, being photographed in the capitol, ie trespassing

Possibly excessive. Definitely not a "decade". Not sure why you think exaggeration helps your point. I was genuinely sitting here thinking "Holy shit, they gave J6ers 10 years for trespassing? That's insane. Wtf." Now I'm left thinking "Don't believe the **** J6 supporters say."

Echoes of the beginning of the end for republican Rome.

The Optimates believed that by pulling out all the stops to strike down Gracchus they could silence the movement he represented and return to the status quo ante.

Instead they got a new Gracchus who was both angrier and less restrained.

Tiberius and the senate both had blood on their hands; this was a pissing match between two factions breaking the mos maiorum. Particularly Tiberius’ deposition of a fellow tribune.

Very much so. I can only hope that people will learn from history and stop repeating it, but I don't have a lot of hope. People are blinded by hatred.

The first lesson of history is that nobody ever learns any lessons from history.

And the second lesson should be that you can learn as many contradictory lessons from history as you care to look for, which no one ever bothers to after the first lesson they want.

I think it was a good move. It sends a message. Anyone who committed real crimes still spent 3-4 years in prison. That is more than if you had done the same thing in a bar, even for the worst offenders.

If you did it in a bar to a private citizen, probably. But I think there are severe sentencing enhancements for assaulting public officials in the line of their duty, and especially cops, and especially with a weapon (per se or improvised) of any sort. And I reckon there should be. I'm kind of shocked by this on behalf of the cops.

DC cops are laughing at you. Battery to a PO in a major city getting 4 years is like multiple repeat offender shit nowadays. In a Dem run city, you probably get deferred pros or probation for a first time offense.

I do think nuance in pardons was the smart move but... after Biden's last second pardons I kind of don't blame him. The blatant abuse of the pardon that JUST happened a few days ago almost demands a response. It's sad but true.

You might be on the wrong side of history if... your excuse for the wrongdoing on your side is, "the other side does it too", or "the other side does it more".

Tit for that is the provable optimal strategy in an iterated game of prisoner's dilemma.

Also history doesn't have a direction unless you believe in whig myths.

Tit for that is the provable optimal strategy in an iterated game of prisoner's dilemma.

I do not believe this. I don't even think it makes sense to say, game theoretically. Source?

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/002200278002400301

I guess I'm overstating the case a bit since it's not generally better in literally all cases and isn't a strategy for a perfect information game that produces deterministic outcomes and that's the technical meaning of optimality, it's worse than unconditional defectors at defending itself against a population of unconditional defectors, for instance. It depends if you're playing with infinite iteration, etc.

But it wins against all other strategies in noncontrived cases and has desirable (GOOD) equilibrium properties. That's about as good as you're going to get given the game. So sure, it's only optimal in a colloquial sense, my mistake. Still applies here though.

History is written by the victors. The only wrong side of history is losing.

Rather depends upon who wins, doesn't it?

Might, but it does not necessarily mean that. There's plenty of cases where this is accepted reasoning (self-defense, military response to invasions).

In any case righting a wrong done by the other side is not itself wrong.

Perhaps the better idea would have been to reduce pardoning power, rather than responding with "the other party is corrupt, so that means I'll be extra corrupt!"

Letting Enrique Tarrio out of a 22 year sentence is reprehensible imo.

This would be the Enrique Tarrio who wasn't even present in DC for the riots?

Also, those who committed violence against Capitol police who were doing their jobs and were rightly found guilty, should not be let go.

There's no way to distinguish at this point. The time for such individualized determinations would have been the trials, where you could figure out whether someone was committing violence against the police, merely defending themselves against cops enjoying the opportunity to give out a beating, or simply standing near people who were. The prosecutors decided not to do this, instead throwing the book at everyone they could knowing DC juries would convict. A pardon for all is the best Trump can do.

(Personally I'd except those on film vandalizing the Capitol, since it's clear the building itself did no wrong. But it may be too difficult to distinguish even them)

Democrats let out actual leftist terrorists like Weather Underground and FALN Puerto Rican separatists (responsible for 130 bombings). Turnabout is fair play.

It’s especially relevant given that some of those Puerto Rican separatists stormed the congressional chambers and shot several congressmen

Biden (and other Democrat presidential) pardons of leftist activists wasn’t the precipitating cause of the J6 pardons. The two primary complaints about the J6 prosecutions were 1) the partisan zeal combined with the DC venue meant that an impartial jury of ones peers was not in the offing, and 2) that J6 was being used as an info Op as part of the “Get Trump at all costs” campaign from 2021-2024, and MAGA grannies were collateral damage.

Turnabout is fair play.

Er, what? Two wrongs make a right, according to you?

Two wrongs don't make a right, but they do sometimes cancel each other out.

Two wrongs make a right, according to you?

No, I am questioning the "two wrongs" part.

"Yes, I know they keep firing on our position. But that doesn't make it right to shoot people. I'm taking a principled stance against using weapons on people."

Or even "I know they keep firing on your position. But from my position, well safe and far away, that doesn't make it right for you to shoot people."

"Think about how upset being shot at makes you. Isn't it hypocritical of you to want to shoot back?"

As an aside, I hate how hypocrisy is now the cardinal and only sin in certain discourse. Since, as the theory goes, all morality is subjective, it leaves one who swallows the subjective-pill unable to point out how someone else's culture, values, or religion are evil and wrong. However, it's always possible to point out hypocrisy since virtually everyone falls short of their professed values in some way or the other. It is the universal argument. "No I don't believe in your backwards, primitive, parochial morality but then again you don't perfectly live up to the virtues you profess so really neither do you nyah nyah nyah." But there are worse things than being a hypocrite, namely: not being a hypocrite because you have no virtues to fall short of. There are only two types of non-hypocritical people: saints and the amoral, and there are many more of the latter than the former.

As an aside, I hate how hypocrisy is now the cardinal and only sin in certain discourse.

Arguments over hypocrisy are the last stop before total values incoherence. Previously, we would have argued over the implementation of shared values, but those values are no longer shared in any meaningful sense. Having accepted that there is no meaningful overlap of shared values, we appeal to the meta of consistency. If consistency fails, there's not really anything left to talk about.

There's literally centuries - millennia actually - of discourse over morality and what it is and should be. But first you do need to accept that morality exists.

There's only nothing left to talk about if both sides believe values are merely subjective and that, therefore, no values can be more correct than any other in any absolute sense. Even totally incoherent contradictory values aren't wrong - after all, thinking that someone's beliefs shouldn't contradict themselves is itself just another merely subjective value judgment.

There's only nothing left to talk about if both sides believe values are merely subjective and that, therefore, no values can be more correct than any other in any absolute sense.

I observe a set of people who share my values, and a set of people who do not share my values.

When dealing with the set of people who share my values, appeal to those values we share is a viable method of conflict resolution; we agree on ends, and are only arguing about means.

When dealing with the set of people who do not share my values, I can't appeal to my values because they don't share them, and so such an appeal would be meaningless, and I usually have no interest in appealing to their values, because I don't share them and they don't generally support the argument I'm making.

Once I recognize that a set of people doesn't share my values, what is there to do? Even if I believe my values are objectively correct, I have no way of forcing this set of people to agree. Any further discussion depends on a retreat to subjectivity to even be possible. If I'm not willing to consider that my values might be wrong, why should I expect them to do so?

More comments

You'll have to unfilter him

thanks, approved the rest of the filtered posts too while I was at it.

Sometimes, yeah. We tacitly acknowledge this with all punitive justice - we may not be able to make a right, but the best we can do is visible punishment of transgressors.

Additionally tit-for-tat is a better game theoretical strategy than cooperating with a defectbot.

In any case, the situation can't be addressed with cliches, at least not adequately. The response like what @satanistgoblin is expressing above is largely about the complete intellectual and moral bankruptcy of people that have excused all manor of political terrorism in the past (including the recent past, when BLM rioters killed dozens and destroyed billions in property) suddenly deciding that a riot that got out of hand requires tracking down everyone present and charging them under novel interpretations of statute that had never previously occurred to anyone.

We tacitly acknowledge this with all punitive justice - we may not be able to make a right, but the best we can do is visible punishment of transgressors.

I don't know that visible punishment as its own end is why we have punitive justice. Most proponents will cite things like deterence, or prevention (i.e. keeping dangerous people in jail), or in more leftist societies rehabilitation. The point being the result: reduction of crime, a safer society. Punitive justice seems like an archaic tool that still has contemporary benefits, similar to old rules about the sabbath that gave people community, or old rules about what to avoid eating to prevent disease.

The punitive aspect is, in part, that we have that as a means available (familiar, common sensible, and traditional). But contemporary societies realized to varying degrees that punishing conditions don't help in themself. Hence why torture isn't allowed, or prison conditions aren't totally uncomfortable (in other countries at least).

As someone who isn't American, it's sad to see that American society is unable to come to a point of real discussion about what is better for the function of their country, and instead resorts to arguments about what the other side has done. It seems to me that both sides are unhappy with the justice system and how it can be abused to treat people unfairly. That seems to be a problem beyond either side, but it is highlighted when either side can cherry pick examples.

From an outside perspective, I am deeply concerned that Trump will do nothing to help the structural issues. But to be fair, I don't think the Democrats had any better chance.

it's sad to see that American society is unable to come to a point of real discussion about what is better for the function of their country,

The issue is that both sides do already have at least low-resolution ideas of what we can do to improve said function, we just can't agree on which ones to implement.

That may have been a problem in the past. I haven't seen good faith discussion between tribal lines in a hot minute. It seems to me that it is often less about disagreeing about the solution, and disagreeing about framing altogether, e.g. the left framing abortion as a women's rights and bodily autonomy issue, the right framing abortion as a religious and ethical issue. Part of this is political posturing (saying that murdering babies is fine isn't a popular move), but part of it, to me, is missing the fundamental reason for government and politics (what makes for a more successful/stable/flourishing/insert adjective society?)

In the abortion example, the cold calculation is something like looking at the impact on the economy, birth rates, education, and many creative ways of gaugibg the effect. Usually the answer to whether something is a good idea in hat sense is contextual and not an absolutist stance (compare a country with a popukation that is too large to support, versus one that cannot replenish its population).

In the abortion example, the cold calculation is something like looking at the impact on the economy, birth rates, education, and many creative ways of gaugibg the effect. Usually the answer to whether something is a good idea in hat sense is contextual and not an absolutist stance (compare a country with a popukation that is too large to support, versus one that cannot replenish its population).

This frame for abortion can only make sense from a pro-choice framework. The Pro-life framework obviously brooks no compromise. It'd be like asking for a pro/con breakdown on allowing violent nonconsensual rape and taking seriously the boons to the economy and fertility rate. This, and many problems just actually grounds out in values differences which you can't really do utility calculous on because you have different utility functions.

abortion example, the cold calculation is something like looking at the impact on the economy, birth rates, education

Aren't the majority of abortions in the USA to underclass women? Ye's claim there were more black babies aborted than born in NYC.

I've not heard an economic argument from the pro-abortion tribe.

I've not heard an economic argument from the pro-abortion tribe.

I don't think I've heard one from either side, but that's the point. The moral ground for either side is imovable and never addresses the other point.

I respect that many place importance on the morality of policy and laws on both the left and right, and I think that deontological rules are an important boundary for unchecked utilitarian thinking (which can go off the rails). But from my perspective, utilitarian thinking is mostly absent these days, in favour of emotional arguments that do not take into consideration the full range practical issues. Everyone seems very concerned about how wrong the other guy is, but not so interested in looking at why both sides are dreadfully unhappy with things. This is exacerbated by hot button issues like trans people, who are a minority minority, when there are huge day-to-day economic changes in the past 10 years.

I wish the government was more concerned with being a transparent public service that deals with things the private market tends to bungle, rather than invested in tit for tat status quo or promoting an idealistic agenda. To me this seems worse in the USA than my country, but it is present here too. And I don't think one side is better than the other in that regard, when so many of the messages are "the other guy did it first". Hold politicians accountable to being productive rather than performing.

More comments

I don't know that visible punishment as its own end is why we have punitive justice.

As others have covered, I vigorously disagree. Others ends can be legitimate as well, but retribution is a good reason to do punitive justice. Retribution is a good and legitimate motivation and the inclination to suppress it is perverse. Mere restorative or preventative measures deny victims of crime their just outcome.

I guess we just disagree. In a hypothetical world where a caught criminal could instantly be turned into a productive, law abiding member of society without punishment, there is nothing but benefit in my view. (You can find ways to tweak that thought experiment in ways that make it closer to our messy reality, or make the result less clearcut; but as a over simplified thought experiment, it demonstrates how I feel very well).

To me, retribution seems like the heat that happens when you are trying to optimize for light.

Retribution is a way to discourage criminals from doing crime before they commit it, something that rehabilitation can't do (unless you have a way to do it to everyone preemptively).

There are mixed findings on punishment as a means of preventing crime, which matches my impression of most low level criminals (not a rational pro/con crowd) and understanding of why crime is committed (passion, opportunity). I don't think people commit crimes with the thought they will get caught and punished. Keeping criminals imprisoned seems to have a bigger effect on general crime (i.e. keeping them from doing it again because they are locked up).

I would guess the pre-emptive way to discourage crime is to make it so that crime doesn't pay. People are less likely to commit crimes when they have more to lose, can gauge the benefits and downsides and see the downsides are greater, or live comfortable and stable lives with loved ones in a safe community. Someone without a home, food, family or friends is way riskier than someone with any of those things.

More comments

Accepting the terms of the thought experiment, I would still want retributive punishment to match the crime. Even if you could absolutely assure me that a man that robbed my home could be turned into just a perfectly decent man and that no punishment would impact others, I'd still want him caned. He deserves the suffering for inflicting it on others and to deny his victims that penance is an injustice. So, yeah, that's probably not a reconcilable value difference.

There is one more benefit of punitive justice: satisfaction for the victim. If you suffer, or people you care about suffer, it is satisfying to see the perpetrator of suffering to suffer in return. It’s a restitution of sorts.

You don’t see this argument being made though, even though this is extremely obvious and natural to most people (you can find millions of examples on X of people, both on left and right, full of glee from people being punished by criminal system), because it is obviously invalid in the enlightened liberal framework under which the discussion is happening.

Retribution is even one of the textbook reasons for criminal punishment: deterrence, incapacitation, rehabilitation, and retribution. (Sometimes restitution is included, sometimes treated separately)

I don't personally consider that a benefit. In fact, I think it is a flaw because it causes people to act in ways that are less utilitarian/net good. I think the feeling of retribution and satisfaction is the primary driver for justice in a small society/community and serves the purpose of banding people together. But i do not believe it is a good in itself, and it should be tempered by rationality to discern the best course of action.

Like other intense emotions, it acts as an indicator for a desired change (the crime should never occur again, for example). But it does not indicate the exact course of action that should happen for the greatest benefit, especially on a social level.

In fact, I think it is a flaw because it causes people to act in ways that are less utilitarian/net good.

the exact course of action that should happen for the greatest benefit

Yeah, that’s the enlightened liberal framework I was talking about. Most people (fortunately) do not subscribe to utilitarianism, but nonetheless this is the dominant framework for the discussion, along with some specific assumptions, like granting substantially similar value to utils received by the perpetrator and the victim.

Is it the dominant framework for the discussion? I don't think I have ever spoken to someone about utilitarianism outside of rationalist ajacent circles.

To me the important question for government is, how do we get all of society's moving parts to work well together? How do we build a stable society for the future? It is, for better or worse, not a very warm approach (that's just how I tend to approach problems in general though). I acknowledge the human need to feel better about wrongs, but I think it can do more harm than good in a society of many. I also think preventing future crime is more important than punishment; it is preventable and crimes that have already happened are not. There is little evidence to show that punishment acts as a deterent for crime in our current society.

The other issue with something like retributive justice is that everyone's sense of what constitutes proper retribution is different. Retribution is not just a concern of conservative justice, it is the foundation for a lot of social justice movements. I take the same stance there. If the solution creates a bigger problem, it is not a solution (obviously this is a bit of a tautology). Or a step further: if retribution is a solution but there is a solution with better outcomes that does not involve retribution, the latter is better.

I don't think the desire for retribution isn't an important factor, just that retribution in itself isn't something to maximize as a value for me. I think the greatest pitfall of retribution in a large society (versus a small one, where it makes a lot more sense) is that the moving parts are no longer in sync. You can see this with public shamings that target relatively innocent people with great impunity and consequence. Or when two groups take opposing sides, and the desire for retribution is an infinite push back and forth.

More comments

Sometimes - for example, if someone hits you you can hit back and it counts as self defense.

It's not even a wrong because J6ers have been tortured with solitary confinement, charged using obscure civil war laws etc. Dems had their fun for 4 years, enough.

charged using obscure civil war laws etc.

"etc" here including charging protestors with Sarbanes-Oxley violations, a tactic which the courts ultimately limited but refused to strike down entirely.

Why not? I'd normally say that it's wrong for Ukrainians to launch rockets into Russian territory, but two wrongs do indeed make a right in some cases.

No it's not. Both sides mashing the defect button just makes everyone worse off.

Players that always cooperate are always worse off than players who do tit-for-tat. They only get equal if they play against each other since tit-for-tat players don't initiate defection.

The optimal way to act against people who always cooperate is preemptive nuclear strike. If you want anybody to not break the rules against you, they need to know you will do so against them, or they have nothing to lose.

What would you have Trump do instead?

I would have him not engage in the same detestable behavior Biden did. I don't fucking care if it means that the Democrats get to perpetuate bad things and get one up on Republicans, that is still preferable to the current state of affairs. If I get screwed over by only one side hitting defect, I'm better off than the status quo where I get screwed over by both sides.

  • -16

You understand why, from my perspective, I expect Trump to engage in these kinds of minor shenanigans to protect my tribe from democrats, even if they’re still shenanigans?

I do not, because he isn't protecting anything. Nobody has gained here, there are only losses.

  • -10

I mean, the J6 prisoners sure gained a lot.

The overcharged J6 protestors gained something. There's some measure of injustice being removed.

The people locked up for political reasons sure gained a lot.

This is just 'Don't fight back when your bully hits you' schoolyard reasoning writ large.

Yes, in a proper, preferable world, the bully wouldn't be hitting you. Or the school administration would do something swiftly and render further altercations impossible for either side.

Lacking any sort of higher recourse, often times the best option is to draw blood and continue to do so until they stop.

Have you read Romeo and Juliet? A schoolyard bully is mano e mano. A feud between groups is much messier, with innocents caught in the fallout.

Equating abuse of power to Shakespeare's criticism of idiotic teenage romance is not a comparison I would make.

I am making it as a simple comparison, because there is a difference between a man vs a man, and the political situation where it is group vs group. The obvious difference to me is that the most vocal, violent, and dissident points of view control the dialogue (and retaliatory actions from each side continue indefinitely) while other people, who are not involved, are caught in the crossfire. Hence the tragicomedy of Romeo and Juliet.

To the other comparisons to war, which are also group vs group: defecting in this sort of political dilemma, rather than war, serves to improve the standing of specific people within the society, and not the group as a whole. The difference should be that the detriment of your neighbours is a sign of the detriment to yourself. Even if you believe that defecting helps the party who does so (to me it seems like a defect-defect downward spiral, not a defect-cooperate situation where there is any benefit), it does not folow that a benefit to the party is a boon to the people of the country more generally. But as long as people are happy to watch politicians (pretend to) club each other over the head, happy that their outgroup experiences tribulations (which means everyone gets a turn), and happy that the other side is upset, I don't see how anything constructive can happen. The reality is that the politicians will drink Johnny Walker with one another after the show is over, but the general public will have no such consolation.

That works with bullies because it's a single person who you can hurt to get them to stop hurting you. In this case it's more like you're fighting a crowd of people, and to hurt them hurts yourself just as much. It's stupid to fight under those terms.

hurt them hurts yourself just as much

...no? No, it doesn't.

(I'm dimly reminded of a lynch mob trying to fall upon someone, only to have them pull out a gun and have said lynch mob descend into a horde of individuals. When was that...)

Again, we've tried the entire 'be a bigger man' tactics of politics. The past two to three decades have been a demonstration of the GOP 'taking the higher road' or 'loosing gracefully'.

While we're not out of those woods yet, there seems to be some light coming from behind the trees. And thank goodness for that.

I'm dimly reminded of a lynch mob trying to fall upon someone, only to have them pull out a gun and have said lynch mob descend into a horde of individuals. When was that...

A scene in huckleberry Finn.

More comments

The past two to three decades have been a demonstration of the GOP 'taking the higher road' or 'loosing gracefully'.

Are you joking? They absolutely have not been that. The GOP has been fighting every bit as dirty as their opponents. To paraphrase the old quote about Christianity, acting right hasn't been tried and found wanting, it has been found difficult and not tried.

More comments

Do you think most of his constituents want him to not engage in this behavior?

I couldn't begin to guess. I would certainly hope not, but given that people here are willing to make excuses for him it may be that most voters want him to.

Nobody's hit "defect" here but the Democrats. First by pardoning actual terrorists, then by inflicting harsh punishments on people who did many of the same sort of things that are commonplace and go unpunished or lightly punished in leftist protests.

It doesn't make everyone one worse off, it only makes those who were already defecting worse off.

No, it really does make everyone worse off. Not only have we now pardoned even more criminals who should be serving punishments for the things they did, Trump has now given the other side incentive (and justification, no matter how flimsy) to defect further.

Trump is perpetuating the cycle of badness and I refuse to accept bad reasoning like "oh well they do it too, turnabout is fair play" trying to justify it. I'm sick and tired of being caught in the crossfire between these people.

Trump has now given the other side incentive (and justification, no matter how flimsy) to defect further.

The BLM rioters were already de facto pardoned by Blue.

By their own definition, this is not an abuse of the process. Blue can always change their definition so it isn’t corrupt as fuck in the future.

But then again, I’m ok with the metaphorical battered housewife hitting back, even if that predictably results in an escalation where the batterer murders her. This is the ‘die on your feet/live on your knees’ question (or more generally, safety vs. dignity) all over again.

Since Red is the dignity party at the moment (they can’t out-safety the safety party) this reaction is natural.

There is absolutely nothing dignified about this. It's not "dying on your feet", it's getting down in the mud and shit to flail around with a knife before dying from an infection because you cut yourself.

No it really doesn't.

In the standard formulation of the dilemma, the ideal outcome in terms of individual gain for any single player in a single round is "I defect while the other guy cooperates". By extension the worst possible outcome from the perspective of any individual player is to cooperate with someone who then chooses to defect. This is why defect-defect is a natural equilibrium.

The Democrats wanted tolerance and have been given tolerance.

This is the only sane take. The people claiming this is like a prisoner's dilemma are crazy, given that the prisoner's dilemma involves some level of personal gain (or at least losing less) for playing. Here, it's just pure negative. Nobody here gained from Biden's pardons, nor did they gain by the J6 pardons.

The recipients sure gained. And some J6 protestors appear to have been overcharged and given excessively long punishments. If pardons and clemency should exist at all, it should exist for this situation.

The claim that nobody gained here is preposterous.

The Biden family and thier inner circle of supporters absolutely gained from Biden's pardons.

The protestors who've spent the last 4 years rotting in prison for acts that would have them little more than a slap on the wrist (assuming the got prosecuted at all) had they not been Republicans absolutely gained from Trump's pardons.

Your tribe suffering a setback is not the same thing as everyone being worse off, no matter how similar they may feel in the moment.

Fine, I'll concede the point that a handful of specific individuals have gained. But literally everyone else gained nothing, and in fact is losing by this. So this is still by far a net loss even if a handful of people gained significantly. Your rebuttal "but some people have gained" makes it come off even worse if anything, because now it's hurting the vast majority just to benefit a token few.

Better 10 guilty men go free than one innocent man should be imprisoned falsely.

A severe injustice has been overturned. The world is a little bit brighter, freer, and more just.

It saddens me that you can't see this.

I am filled with joy for the political prisoners and their families who were railroaded by a weaponized legal system. Those who perpetrated and defended this monstrosity ought to be jailed for at least as long as those now freed.

More comments

Not only have we now pardoned even more criminals who should be serving punishments for the things they did, Trump has now given the other side incentive (and justification, no matter how flimsy) to defect further.

Which is the same thing they'd most likely do if he decided to pardon everyone except those who provably committed violence against the police.

So what? This line of argument fails twice:

  1. Trump isn't responsible for what they do, he's responsible for what he does. He deserves criticism for provoking others even if they would have acted the same anyway.

  2. Even if you discount his moral responsibility to act right, he still shouldn't do it. This pardon still has screwed everyone over by releasing criminals and further weakening the (paper thin at this point) norms of our country. Even if it's guaranteed that the left would do the same next time they get power, we are still better off if he doesn't pull the same stunt. Fewer outrageous pardons is an unalloyed good, no matter what the left chooses to do when they have the reins.

Why is it always my tribe that has to unilaterally disarm?

  1. It's not, I demand the exact same thing of both sides. But I'm not willing for either side to wait until the other side starts, because then nothing will ever happen.

  2. Even if it were, that would still be better than having all out breaking of norms on both sides. Better for you as well as for them, in fact. Because again, this shit hurts everyone.

  3. Because a good person acts right regardless of what others do. You can't control their behavior, only your own.

More comments

Welcome to Culture War, where you can choose between fighting to the detriment of everyone and surrendering for the benefit of your enemies and the detriment of your own.

Or, as we used to call it back on the day, "war".

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats