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ymeskhout  10mo ago (text post)   2924 thread views

The Bailey Podcast E035: Ray Epps Does Jay Six

Listen on iTunes, Stitcher, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Podcast Addict, and RSS.

In this episode, we talk about the deep state, J6, and Ray Epps.

Participants: Yassine, Shakesneer.

Links:

Jack Posobiec's Pipe Bomb Allegation (Twitter)

Pipe Bombs in Washington DC (FBI)

Meet Ray Epps: The Fed-Protected Provocateur Who Appears to Have Led the Very First 1/6 Attack on the US Capitol (Revolver)

Social Media Influencer Charged with Election Interference Stemming from Voter Disinformation Campaign (DOJ)

'I started a riot for the sitting president': Why Ali Alexander won't go to jail for his role in Jan. 6 (Raw Story)

J6 Select Committee Interview of Ray Epps

Ray Epps Defense Sentencing Memo (Courtlistener)

Proud Boys Sentencing Memos (Courtlistener)

Wishing For Entrapment (Yassine Meskhout)

Recorded 2024-01-19 | Uploaded 2024-01-22

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What's the evidence that Clinton administration stuffed DC bureaucracy with partisans? The number of federal employees declined significantly by around 340,000 or 11% over the Clinton years.

This is a terrible metric to discuss the question. What does the number of federal employees have to do with anything? The only publicly available data (at least I think it's publicly available, since people post fancy charts with that every once in a while) I'm aware of that could maybe resolve the question one way or the other, is which party the political donations of the employees went to, and if that changed over the Clinton years.

I wasn't given a metric for the phrase "purposeful stocking of the DC bureaucracy with partisans" so I went and looked for my own. Coming up with your own interpretation is a natural response when encountering an ambiguous statement. Even if we establish that political donations among federal employees shifted between 1993 and 2001, how do we rule out other causes besides whatever "purposeful stocking" was supposed to mean?

If you're going to criticize political donations data for not answering the question of whether the hiring and firing decisions that made it so were purposeful, it makes even less sense for you to put forward the number of federal employees as a metric, as it cannot prove or disprove the purposeful nature of the shift, nor there even being a shift in the first place.

Mostly I'm just annoyed at the rat sphere's insistence on quantitative analysis, and it is the next exhibit in the case for dropping the entire framework in political debates. There's no guarantee something will even be arguable with quantitative data in the abstract, in the case it will be, there's no guarantee the data will be gathered, if it is, there's no guarantee it will be available to the public, so expecting someone to actively provide it to back their argument makes no sense. It makes even less sense to act like dropping some random number not even related to the question provides a valid counter argument. It's fine if you want to ask why he think Clinton stocked the federal bureaucracies with supporters, but then just ask that, instead of doing this weird dance with "evidence" that can't even answer the question.

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