Only in a time of great political polarization can you prosecute your political enemies and stay in power. If things are at all bipartisan your supporters will not look kindly on throwing the other side in jail. This is part of why Trump was impeached twice, why he is being charged with so many crimes, and why I fully expect Biden to be impeached before the election. This is a very polarized time and if everyone hates each other they don't mind if you threaten the other side this way.
Possibly. But Trump's vulnerability to prosecution may be due to the fact that he is not a politician. He did not rise through the system, making deals, compromising, working with enemies. In that sense, nobody in Washington owes him anything.
Biden, on the other hand, has been playing the game for many years. He knows where the bodies are buried, and therefore has a higher level of immunity. Or he did.
No, the reality is that Trump was a life-long criminal.
Hunter Biden is a drug addict who happens to be related to someone very important, and pretended to be someone important himself to make money. The fact that he was always a mess of a human being is not much of a secret.
The problem is, Joe Biden isn't Hunter Biden, while Donald Trump committed a bunch of crimes personally.
After Trump demonstrably sent violent traitors to attack the Capitol, even Senate Republicans realized he needed the threat of removal hanging over his head, to prevent more treason. Had they not realized that, they would have immediately acquitted him as they had the power to do, rather than waiting until he'd left office. His "acquittal" in the Senate was an ill-considered reward for his choice not to defect to Russia.
I think there's a < 50% chance of Biden being impeached before the election, because I think the Republicans will have difficulty agreeing on a plausible pretext.
I think the Republicans have been very wary of impeaching Biden in a way that seems like revenge for Trump's impeachments. Republican voters hated the Trump impeachments and many would be similarly bothered by what they feel to be false or overhyped accusations against Biden. Not that they like Biden at all, or don't want him impeached. It's that they are now even more against false impeachments than if Trump had never been impeached.
As far as what do impeach Biden for, the obvious answer is corruption relating to Hunter Biden. It is now incontrovertible that Hunter was selling influence while his dad was VP, and that Biden was both aware and in some way involved. That millions of dollars was being paid by foreign nationals to Biden's family (including mostly incompetent Hunter and various grandchildren too young to be doing anything of value) is not in doubt. The defense at this point is that Hunter was selling the "illusion" of access, rather than denying something was being sold. That's a flimsy excuse at best, considering the amount of money being paid - someone expected results. Even if true that there was no quid-pro-qua because Biden didn't actually change his behavior, admitting that you took bribes but then reneged on your end of the deal doesn't seem much better. Both seem very impeachable.
Hunter Biden reminds me a lot of Neil Bush or Roger Clinton or Billy Carter - the unsuccessful (and probably incompetent) relative of a VP/President who makes money off of the shared surname and presumed connection to the VP/President. Even Obama had Malik.
The question for me is whether Hunter was selling access to Joe and the buyers got access to Joe, or whether Hunter was selling access to Joe and the buyers didn't get access to Joe, ie Hunter was conning people. Neither reflects well on Hunter, but no-one's voting for him (and, I note, he is being prosecuted). The former would not be acceptable for Joe: whether it extends to being impeachable or even illegal (political donations to gain access to politicians are entirely legal, even though they shouldn't be) is another question that I'd need to see a lot more details to answer.
Recent Congressional testimony by Devon Archer, business partner to Hunter, says that Biden was actively involved and would meet with Hunter's business associates. Other business associates have gone on record that Joe himself was receiving money. There's emails to and from Hunter saying not to use Joe's name directly, and other emails talking about getting a cut for "the big guy." I'm not sure how much evidence you would need to be at least suspicious.
Recent testimony of Devon Archer reveals that Hunter would occasionally call his dad and put him on speakerphone while they talked about the weather to prove to his clients he had a direct line. And Devon Archer was on Tucker Carlson the other day basically admitting that moves by the Obama administration in Ukraine during the time this was all happening actually fucked over their biggest client there. So... Maybe don't state this all as fact.
Thanks for this correction, I was surprised at the earlier post and was intending to review the testimony myself because it seemed to overstate the case.
The impression I'd got was that Hunter Biden had been trying to hype up his business connection to his father and Devon Archer believed the hype, and your post concurs with that.
Which means Joe Biden made the choice to help prove Hunter's connection and access and had to have done so knowing that the implication he was making was that a powerful actor was available to help the business. What else does his proximity have to do with anything?
The general consensus here seems to be that prosecuting political opponents is always political. It follows that there is no impartial justice that can be applied to politicians, and therefore no law that can constrain their actions. Only politics can.
I think that's basically the argument, one even very high level people are making. The best counterargument I've heard is that legal proceedings have explicit and tested methodology for determing facts, which obviously doesn't apply to politics.
I think the elephant in the room for a lot of these discussions of Trump's legal trouble is that Trump did, in fact, do an incredible amount of blatantly illegal shit.
Now of course when a politician is facing the consequences of doing a lot of illegal shit, the standard defense is for their party to shout "the other party is doing it too and they're facing no consequences" (I heard it a lot in France when Sarkozy got a prison sentence for violating campaign finance limitations).
In that case, though, what is Trump's equivalent on the left? Hunter Biden comes to mind; he did some tax evasion, had a gun illegally, and was maybe involved in some influence-trading selling access to his father for cushy positions. All of that is bad (though Trump bragged about doing the first, Republicans tend to consider the second shouldn't be a crime, no comment about the third); none of it reaches the level of "incited riots that broke into the Capitol with a deliberate goal of intimidating the legislature as it ratified the election that didn't go his way" or "deliberately and knowingly kept classified documents he had was no clearance for, showed them to people who *definitely* didn't have clearance, refused to give them back when asked and lied about it multiple times".
A lot of the politicians on the left and right get away with illegal and immoral behavior, but they at least have plausible deniability to shield themselves with. Trump faces a lot of legal trouble because he not only did a lot of illegal shit, he did it in a way that made it extremely obvious to anyone how illegal it was and how much he didn't care.
Trump has yet to be charged with "Incitement", despite this being a potential crime that somebody could potentially be charged with. In the theoretical realm I mean.
That is, this idea that Trump very blatantly incited riots to do all these things you said is just a talking point. If it was real, then the media narrative and the legal indictments would be in sync. But they are not. Indeed, that they are not in sync is evidence for this being political persecution.
The only legal case against Trump that currently makes any sense at all is the documents case, but unfortunately, this is the case where those equivalents you ask for are the strongest. Said equivalents would be Biden and Hillary Clinton.
But it’s gotten lumped into “incited the J6 INSURRECTION” in the public mind, which sort of poisons the well. Ironically, I think the chance of legal success against Trump might be higher if the riot hadn’t happened.
As I mentioned above, you heard him incite the violent treason of Jan 6, and indeed his "legal" strategy had no chance of success without minions stealing electoral ballot boxes, so as to create legal uncertainty where none had existed before. Actual lawyers explained in detail, well before Jan 6, why he could not possibly succeed without violence.
Yes. There were ongoing legal challenges during the 2020 election as well. This would seem to be the point of alternate slates, which, far from being some criminal scheme, are in fact the standard legal procedure when there are ongoing major legal questions in the presidential election. It is the equivalent of filling out paperwork so that if things proceed in your legal favour, you can immediately have them processed.
Let's briefly go over what the process involved is supposed to be. First, the states certify their electors in accordance with state law. On the day of voting, the electors have to complete six Certificates of Vote, and one of those goes to Vice President, as President of the Senate. Congress, presided over by the President of the Senate, counts the votes.
However, in the 2020 election there were several ongoing legal battles leading up to the day of the electoral college vote. The strongest of these was probably Georgia, in which there were enough known problems mainly derived from people voting in the wrong county, that the state arguably should have held a new election. Another state with issues was Pennsylvania, in which it was unclear if the voting laws were changed in accordance with the Pennsylvanian constitution. If they were not, this would mean the electors were invalid. Whether or not the charges were legally spurious or not is immaterial to the point that in the United States, we are supposed to be allowed a redress of grievances and in this case, there are legal avenues available to pursue.
Most of these involved the Trump campaign. Some of them involved the states themselves. Therefore, alternate slates of electors were sent, in case any of these cases happened to turn the other way in time for election day. If that were to have happened, the states would have certified the alternate electors, and things would proceed as normal. There was a legally questionable case in which Mike Pence could have done something himself, but by legally questionable I mean that the laws involved are vague enough that a case could be made, even if unpersuasive and likely to be dismissed.
What you are saying is that actually, this completely normal legal process in which Trump may have been operating under bad legal advice which would have been (and in some cases was) ignored, was in fact a criminal scheme which doesn't make any sense whatsoever. "Scheming" is in fact not a legally defined crime as far as I'm aware. If we are to criminalise it, what we're actually criminalising is the right to address grievances in the court of law, and the right to legal council.
The DC indictment doesn't charge anything about "incitement" because his conduct on January 6 2021 isn't the focus / necessary to prove the plot to anti-democratically retain office. It's clear his speech that day was in furtherance of the illegal conspiracy, but the prosecutor has no need to get into freedom of speech debates because the advance coordination actions for the coup are both less (affirmatively) defensible and also more incontrovertible.
The idea that "the media narrative" about a coup attempt and the legal indictment about it should match exactly in their details would be bizarre. (But I assume that is the claim you are making because otherwise you're characterizing the DC indictment as not being about a coup?) Why would you expect prosecutors to necessarily charge all and exactly the crimes ascribed in the media?
A potential incitement charge is not evidence to a greater plot, it would be a criminal charge. The idea that we would not prosecute because we don't need it to prove our case in this other indictment is absurd. That's not what prosecutions are for.
As to all this stuff about an illegal conspiracy, if it was an illegal conspiracy is the question that the Government has to prove. And if it can actually prove this, rather than convince people like you that Trump is a criminal and use DC courts to indict no matter the evidence, is in fact the primary question above all others.
Here's the crux of my point about the media narrative. And you demonstrate it yourself as well. Criminal charges have pre-requisites And these aren't secret, you can look them up. And they must be cited when used.
What the media is doing, and what you and basically everybody who believes them is doing, is using vagueness to deliberately cloud the issues involved. When you say things like "It's clear his speech that day was in furtherance of the illegal conspiracy," you are claiming there was an illegal conspiracy, of which there is no evidence, and then assuming you can peer into the heart of Trump to find his intent, which you can't. I'm sceptical that Trump can peer into the heart of Trump.
And this is in the backdrop of previous political persecution, including the Russiagate stuff. Why would anybody believe the media, or you, when you can't make the actual legal case? Why would anybody believe the legal cases, if nobody even tries to describe them accurately, even when to describe things accurately to the public is the ostensible job of the Media?
Sure, charges come before trials come before convictions, with attrition between steps.
There's lots of evidence for the conspiracy; have you read the indictment? (Link below - it seems like probably you haven't.) Among the most incontrovertible, dozens of electors swore falsely to submit their slates to Congress - this is just objectively true, presumably you don't dispute that?
There are memos and other communiques among Trump's core group and then out to those electors showing that the fraud was centrally coordinated with the goal of violating the Electoral Count Act to get Trump named the next President even though Biden won the election. The fraud with central coordination gets criminal conspiracy by itself; the plan to apply it to circumvent the Electoral Count Act gets the obstruction charges.
Paragraph 12 of the indictment lists a bunch of stuff Trump said at the Ellipse; Smith considers this more appropriate as contributing evidence to the broader conspiracies, than as a separate charge for inciting a riot. That is exactly his job as prosecutor - apply discretion to charge the most appropriate stuff (usually we talk about discretion in terms of reducing the severity of charges, but either way it's reducing the volume of charges).
Sure, let's talk about the indictment. I've read the indictment. I also generally know how laws work. We can go through it "briefly".
The first thing I need to repeat to you, since you seemed to have missed it, is that a crime is a defined thing with prerequisites. One can look up the relevant statutes. Here are the charges put forward in the indictment, as per page two of the indictment.
A conspiracy to defraud the United States in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 371
A conspiracy to corruptly obstruct and impede the January 6 congressional proceeding in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 1512(k)
A conspiracy against the right to vote and to have one's vote counted, in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 241
Let us go through them in order. 18 U.S.C. § 371 lays out two primary offences. Being involved in a conspiracy to violate a federal criminal statute, and/or defrauding the US. Jack Smith is not alleging the former, but rather the latter. Unfortunately for him, fraud generally refers to money in some way. In previous cases involving this statute, defrauding the US Government means extracting money from the government in some way, or lying to avoid financial obligations to the government, or lying to avoid legal liabilities, and so on. That is, we're talking about things such as Bank Fraud, Insurance Fraud, or Tax Fraud, because that is what fraud means in the context of United States Law. This first charge requires a nonsensical reinterpretation of what "fraud" is supposed to mean within the legal context, and so it in fact fails to establish the criminal acts required by statute.
Moving on to the second count, the use of 18 U.S.C. § 1512(k) is so silly as to be laughable. In fact it is similar to the New York state indictment. 18 U.S. Code § 1512 is about witness tampering or messing with informants. The specific citation states, I quote, "Whoever conspires to commit any offense under this section shall be subject to the same penalties as those prescribed for the offense the commission of which was the object of the conspiracy." This is the direct citation Jack Smith provides. Okay, so... what is the offence under this section that is being alleged by Smith, in regards to Trump? The Indictment says "Conspiracy to Obstruct an Official Proceeding". In order for 18 U.S.C. § 1512 to be relevant at all, we must identify an informant, witness, or victim, in which Donald Trump tampered with in the relevant ways, such as killing, violence, or harassment. Donald Trump needs to have called somebody on the phone or shown up in person, and threatened them, or pressured them to lie, or strangled them. He would also have to do this knowing that what he is doing is in service to a crime.
Finally we have 18 U.S.C. § 241. This follows the pattern of not having anything to do with the allegations. 18 U.S. Code § 241 is about direct voter intimidation, that is, per the statute, "...go in disguise on the highway, or on the premises of another, with intent to prevent or hinder his free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege...". In order for this to apply, Donald Trump would have had to, either by himself or with others, gone on to voting premises somewhere and torn up votes, or threatened citizens from voting, or physically stopped them from doing so. Somebody's individual right to vote would have to be infringed here, not by proxy through the certification of the electoral vote.
Now we can return to my initial point, the disconnect between the narrative and the criminal charges. Everything that Smith talks about is in fact irrelevant to the criminal charges he's bringing forward because he didn't bring forward incitement charges or charges relevant to this supposed conspiracy. This is why the disconnect is important, and evidence of political suppression. What does it matter if "dozens of electors swore falsely to submit their slates to Congress"? It's neither illegal, nor even alleged to be illegal within the indictment to pursue legal regress, receive legal council, or prepare for potential legal victory either in general or in the way Trump has done. It is not illegal to prepare an alternate slate. It is not illegal to submit alternate votes in preparation for legal victories, even if those victories never come. It is not illegal to operate under spurious legal theories, even if these theories are found to be spurious. It is not illegal to continue to operate under these theories, even if you are informed that they are spurious. Doing these things isn't even illegal if the indictment consistently uses the terms "fraudulent", "co-conspirator", "sham election," or "falsely claimed" when referring to them. If it were illegal, if these words were applicable, then perhaps Smith should have found the laws they were breaking that applied to them specifically, rather than slapping these words onto innocuous actions in an attempt to prove other charges that they have no clear legal relation to.
Tax evasion is a crime. Using legal tax loopholes is not. Trump was "bragging" about using the tax code to his advantage to lower his tax bill (which is what made him "smart", a statement with obvious bad PR). These loopholes are all there for reasons, some of which seem sound, others of which might be pork-barrel compromises.
He routinely valued assets at low $ for tax purposes and at high $ for collateral purposes. I think that sort of behavior is generally what people mean when they talk about his 'tax evasion'; certainly it's what I think of. [That and tax deducting 'donations' to his / family-managed pretend charitable foundation(s?).]
I'm not a forensic accountant or tax lawyer, so I'll leave off any technical claims, but I assert that double-think about the value of an asset is not within the conventional scope of 'tax loophole'.
That Hunter was selling access to his dad while his dad was VP doesn't seem like an issue to you? He made millions of dollars from this, and despite denials it seems that Biden himself was receiving portions of the money (and undeniably various family members did). Specifically, Hunter was getting lots of money from Ukrainian sources, and now Biden is pushing headlong into a war on the side of Ukraine. If there's a connection between the bribes paid to Biden and him throwing billions into a questionable war with no end game, that seems quite relevant to us! Nobody thinks Hunter was getting bribed for anything he himself could do, the money was for his dad.
And seriously, anything you say about Trump and classified documents applies similarly but worse to both Biden (who had lots of unsecured classified documents at his home and offices) and Clinton (who set up her own unsecured email server to avoid FOIA, which she used to send and receive classified documents). We can argue about who was worse, but in my mind they're all very similar charges. Either they should all be punished, or none. There's no good line you can draw where some are perfectly okay but the others are not.
Funding Ukraine still has a lot of bipartisan support and near unanimous support among democrats. Seems like a stretch to tie that to Hunters influence peddling.
There's a lot of shady stuff going on between the US and Ukraine, long before Trump or Biden became president. The CIA was actively involved in setting up a pro-western government under Obama. I'm not suggesting that Hunter was able to cause any of that - I think he took advantage of good timing and placement (likely at his dad's direction) to get some money for things already happening. The problem is that whenever and wherever there would be a conflict between what Ukrainian individuals want, and what the US wants, we have to doubt that the US interests are top of mind for Biden. If Ukraine had not paid any money to Biden, would he be as likely to support Ukrainian interests? Did he force Ukraine to fire the prosecutor going after Burisma (while Hunter was on the board) because that prosecutor was corrupt, or because he was going after Burisma? At the best we have to doubt Biden's intentions here.
I'm not saying nothing shady happened, but almost the entirety of western europe is also supporting Ukraine. It seems like in this case the obvious answer is the most likely, which is that regardless of who was in power they would tend to support Ukraine over Russia because that advances western geo-political interests in general by maintaining the current international prohibition on territorial land grabs by any large state, and because Russia, being one of the few even remotely threatening states that are actively opposed to the west, is better off as weak as possible.
Are there other more personal motivations under the surface? Maybe. But I find it highly unlikely they have much sway in how things are going. The overall picture seems to dictate the policy here much more than the interests of any individual actor of even any individual country.
I'm much more skeptical that the President of the United States taking multiple bribes from a country has no effect on the country's foreign policy decisions. I do agree that, at least in the case of Ukraine, Joe's bribes are in the same direction as US policy otherwise. Is it the same magnitude? More doubtful. Are there times and places where they are at odds? Hard to say, but getting a prosecutor who was investigating corruption fired sets off some alarms for me.
I prefer a general rule that says if you take bribes, everyone should repudiate you and never vote for you again. Even if you never betrayed your country because of those bribes.
Hunter Biden was scamming people into believing he had the ear of the Vice President of the United States. He was selling people the illusion of access, as his own co-conspirator admitted - the scam was that because Hunter Biden was related to someone powerful in the US government, that meant he himself had power.
The problem is, there's zero evidence that Joe Biden actually did anything at the behest of Hunter Biden, and indeed, the actions of the US government were contrary to Hunter Biden's interests - for instance, the corrupt prosecutor who was dismissed at the urging of the US government was in the pocket of the people he worked for.
Having a corrupt relative is not an impeachable offense. Hunter Biden is obviously a scumbag that has made money off of being related to Joe Biden, but there's no evidence that Joe Biden did anything wrong.
It's not illegal to have a criminal relative. It's only illegal if you are actually participating in their illegal schemes - something there is not any evidence for.
Trump’s impeachments were legitimate and necessary…removing him would have been counterproductive because then Pence would have become president and the goal of both parties is to get one of their establishment elected president. Btw, the group that orchestrated the coup against Trump were Bush Republicans aka the Deep State. All of the FBI leadership were Bush Republicans which is why Rosenstein had greater respect for Comey than Trump and appointed Mueller.
The reason why Trump is being prosecuted is because he committed a huge number of crimes.
The reality is that the Republican party has fallen really badly into corruption since George W. Bush was president, which is why the Republicans are becoming increasingly anti-federal law enforcement - they're violating a lot of federal laws. The IRS has been attacked because a lot of Republican donors are committing tax fraud; the FEC is attacked because they are responsible for keeping track of campaign contributions and the top Republicans have been getting a lot of money illegally (and engaging in various forms of graft).
Trump made this a million times worse, but he rose to power precisely because of the high level of corruption within the party enabling him; he is a con man with a long history of drawing money from non-profits to line his own pockets and various forms of fraud and tax evasion. He basically ran for president to try and claim that he was being prosecuted for political reasons rather than a long history of criminal behavior finally catching up to him (the IRS had been after him for tax fraud for years prior to him becoming president). It is obvious he was keeping multiple books on his real estate, one to show the banks and the other to pay taxes on, and it is likely that both were fraudulent. And we know he was using non-profits as his own personal piggy-bank and his family is now banned from running them in New York.
The present fraud he's engaging in is getting his followers to pay his legal bills; he is desperately trying to get re-elected as president because if he isn't, he is going to prison. He has long managed to delay criminal investigations into him, but he is no longer able to do so now that his crimes are sufficiently obvious and he has been so brazen in his illegal activities.
He is being prosecuted in multiple states for numerous criminal violations, ranging from financial fraud to his attempt to overthrow the US government in 2020.
Reading the "comments expressing concern" section has further confirmed my suspicions that Bay Area Rats and SSC/ASC folk aren't capable of thinking about policy, and somehow this remains the case in spite of being vastly superior at doing actual policy research (and at thinking in general).
I honestly don't have a solution here. If you talk to another bay area rat, you won't get any better, because they're just as bad at thinking about policy. I guess you move to DC and meet a ton of EA-adjacents there?
It would be nice if you made some specific points here rather than just saying "I see this group of people is bad at reasoning about this", as written this comment just comes across as substanceless.
Now that I think about it, this post was definitely a step in the right direction, even if the Gell-Mann Amnesia is still strong.
These systems are just way harder to observe than people think it is. This Quirrel quote from HPMOR sums it up well:
"Mr. Potter, the stupidity of Quidditch is transparent to you because you did not grow up revering the game. If you had never heard of elections, Mr. Potter, and you simply saw what is there, what you saw would not please you. Look to our elected Minister of Magic. Is he the wisest, the strongest, the greatest of our nation? No; he is a buffoon who is owned in fee simple by Lucius Malfoy. Wizards went to the polls and chose between Cornelius Fudge and Tania Leach, who had competed with each other in a grand and entertaining contest after the Daily Prophet, which Lucius Malfoy also controls, decided that they were the only serious candidates. That Cornelius Fudge was genuinely selected as the best leader our country could offer is not a suggestion anyone could make with a straight face. It is no different in the Muggle world, from what I have heard and seen; the last Muggle newspaper I read mentioned that the previous President of the United States had been a retired movie actor. If you had not grown up with elections, Mr. Potter, they would be as transparently silly to you as Quidditch."
Harry sat there with his mouth open, struggling for words. "The point of elections isn't to produce the one best leader, it's to keep politicians scared enough of the voters that they don't go completely evil like dictators do -"
"The last war, Mr. Potter, was fought between the Dark Lord and Dumbledore. And while Dumbledore was a flawed leader who was losing the war, it is ridiculous to suggest that any of the Ministers of Magic elected during that period could have taken Dumbledore's place! Strength flows from powerful wizards and their followers, not from elections and the fools they elect."
"The election's campaigning was focused on leadership of the country and its postwar future. Churchill sought to use his wartime popularity as part of his campaign to keep the Conservatives in power after a wartime coalition had been in place since 1940 with the other political parties, but he faced questions from public opinion surrounding the Conservatives' actions in the 1930s and his ability to handle domestic issues unrelated to warfare. Clement Attlee, leader of the Labour Party, had been Deputy Prime Minister in the wartime coalition in 1940-1945 and was seen as a more competent leader by voters, particularly those who feared a return to the levels of unemployment in the 1930s and sought a strong figurehead in British politics to lead the postwar rebuilding of the country. Opinion polls when the election was called showed strong approval ratings for Churchill, but Labour had gradually gained support for months before the war's conclusion.
...Ralph Ingersoll reported in late 1940:
"Everywhere I went in London people admired [Churchill's] energy, his courage, his singleness of purpose. People said they didn't know what Britain would do without him. He was obviously respected. But no one felt he would be Prime Minister after the war. He was simply the right man in the right job at the right time. The time being the time of a desperate war with Britain's enemies".
That excerpt just reminds me why I can't read HPMOR. I know Harry is supposed to be an idiot, but if this Quirrell is the better version, I'm sticking with Rowling. This is about as subtle a temptation as "hello little boy, get into my van, I have candy and puppies".
"Strength flows from powerful wizards and their followers, not from elections and the fools they elect" - therefore Voldemort *should* have won the war because he is the Stronk Independent Wizzard who don't need no mudbloods.
Except he didn't, because being the Stronk Guy with the Stronk Followers who would do whatever it takes wasn't good enough.
I did pick that up, but honestly if Harry is supposed to be So Smart, why is he falling for this obvious "come to the Dark Side, we have cookies" bait?
Are we the readers supposed to fall for it? Because I get the sinking feeling every time I see HPMOR excerpts that yeah, we're supposed to find VoldyQuirrell really convincing (even if we think he's wrong) and I just - don't?
Maybe it works if you're twelve and do not, in fact, know nothing like as much as you think you know.
I only read the first three books, but I always thought Harry had no great intellect, with no amazing talent for magic. I thought Hermione was the smart one, if only book-smart.
I think the one of the key things about dialogues between Quirrell and Harry are that they are *dialogues* with neither being strictly correct; their views are meant to be foils to each other, each presenting their own insights.
Harry is naive in that he is too idealistic and not cynical enough about human nature due to being young, and Quirrell is more experienced but still naive because (spoilers) he is a sociopath so lacking in empathy that he literally cannot model individuals behaving altruistically or with genuine moral principals.
And of course, both positions suffer from the fact that Eliezer is not a politician (and also grew up in a different dimension than the rest of us so cannot fully understand Earth politics)
>I agree this is a much more likely threat model, and I’m interested in what factors generally restrain criminal prosecution of opposing politicians and journalists (even if you think it happens sometimes, why doesn’t it happen more?). Virtue/norms/gentleman’s agreement? Or is there some balance of power consideration that makes it hard to do?
I think the primary limiter is a party's confidence level about the progress of their capture of an institution. The FBI, CIA, and other intelligence agencies are approaching that tipping point. The Universities and Press already have. Our courts are probably the only limiting factor right now, but unfortunately for the country, lots of cases pertaining to politics can be brought in DC, which has a corrupt jury pool and a pool of mostly captured judges.
Can you describe some relatively Trump-free evidence for the assertion that Democratic capture of intel agencies is advanced? This just seems inconsistent with assessments I see elsewhere.
So ignoring the last 8 years is a requirement in your mind? Or does the obvious cover up for Hillary in 2016 count? What about the Biden slow walk to intentionally let SOLs expire and attempted sweetheart deal to keep him from rolling on Joe? What about the sudden FARA switch to an aggressive stance when it comes to the right generally?
No, I didn't ask you to ignore 8 years. First, for precision, I didn't say "pre-Trump", I said Trump-free. So I haven't foreclosed anything about the "biden slow walk" etc. Please tell me all about that, and FARA, and Hillary, and so on.
Second, I'm also curious about your Trumpy evidence, but Trump is such an extreme outlier that confounds around him should be harder to ~disprove, so it seems worthwhile to assess the strength of the evidence without him at all, and then add him in afterward.
I mean, Hillary is the obvious one. She clearly violated the statute with intent (to evade public disclosure laws). Comey covered for her by making up a new legal theory never before applied. Then the FBI found more incriminating evidence on Anthony Weiner's laptop and tried to not disclose that until after the 2016 election, but they were caught by the NYPD. And right before Guiliani was going to release the Weiner news, Comey then frontran that announcement to try and downplay it.
Additionally, I find the FBI's lack of interest in voter fraud fairly telling. Where are the sting operations? Where is the fisking of voter rolls? Where is the surveillance of vote harvesters?
Ok. So, so far, the argument is "this one very prominent individual that one time was let down easy, and days before an election they were hesitant to talk about inconclusive progress updates in her investigation, therefore clearly her political party has achieved institutional capture of all the investigative authorities." I remain open to hearing an actually credible argument.
Have you considered that the FBI might be rightly considering proactive involvement in managing voting rights without probable cause any of i) a violation of constitutional civil liberty and/or ii) violation of constitutional federalism, or iii) a significant waste of resources since it is vanishingly rare? (citation for waste: https://evidencebasedliving.human.cornell.edu/blog/what-research-tells-us-about-voter-fraud/ )
Because Donald Trump and his family were engaged in corrupt dealings with Russia, and that investigation was not disclosed to the public by the FBI.
We literally have emails about their corrupt dealings with Russian contacts who were associated with Russian intelligence.
The "Hillary emails" thing was always a scam; the reason why Hillary Clinton was never charged was because she didn't do anything illegal. There was never any evidence of criminal behavior.
This is in sharp contrast to Donald Trump, who we have recordings of talking about classified materials he knowingly, illegally kept, as well as recordings of him trying to hide and move around said documents.
>You said: "As for the Democrats, I think it’s against their ideological DNA to do Mafia-style killings. I’m not being some misty-eyed optimist here"....
>I stick to my distinction between the mainstream Democrats and FALN, just as I would make a similar distinction between mainstream Republicans and right-wing terrorist militias.
Exceedingly low hanging fruit, but the Weather Underground, a far left criminal gang bombed banks and government buildings including the Capitol Building. One member, Kathy Boudin, murdered a bank guard to steal $1.6M and then went on to be the mom of Chesa Boudin, Democratic DA of San Francisco, who to my knowledge has never denounced her. That's at least one Democratic politician with "Mafia-style killings" in his ideological/actual DNA.
Bill Ayers was also accepted into the mainstream left after he ceased being a fugitive. Bill Gates even funded his "small schools" idea (though fortunately STOPPED funding it once the evidence produced showed it to be ineffective).
I went to one of these small schools in Berkeley! In fact, it was one founded by Bill Ayers brother, and we even met him once (though he had long since retired by then). Ineffective as they may have been in studies, I had a great time and felt the social environment of small school really did have an edge over the larger programs at my high school. I think theres something to a school with some kind of unusual pedagogy attracting more motivated teachers, too. You get more of the "true believer" types and less of the tenure-having-unfirable-child-haters.
All that to say, by the time you're letting a former weather underground member found a school and come and regale 15 year olds with tales of the things he got up to, you're definitely approaching endorsing violence (he walked us through how they boosted Timothy Leary out of prison, mostly). I don't know that you're all the way to politically motivated killings, though. The weathermen always warned people before they set off their bombs, and anyway the environment of the time was just more violent in general, so I think they have to be judged in that context (consider the Kent State shooting, for example). Being in the Bay Area, the Black Panthers were obviously much celebrated, too, but always insofar as they were opposing the violence of the state being visited on their neighborhoods. Both of those cases are far from political assassinations, I think, and more along the lines of the violence your typical radical lefty would endorse.
That one statement from Scott also came across as very naive to me, it's as if he thinks that politicians are actually driven by "ideals" rather than self-interest, and that those ideals will somehow prevent them from using extreme violence to secure power if they can get away with it.
It’s interesting and worrying that in the US people can consider it naive to assume that politicians aren’t psychopaths. Is it naive because everyone is a psychopath, or are political candidates special?
It's not really that most politicians are psychopaths, it's just that they tend to have enough power to exert violence and commit all sort of crimes over others without fear of consequences. Same applies to police, soldiers and all sort of authorithies, if not you'd have to wonder why for example Nazi germany or Imperial Japan had so many psychopaths back in the day. So yes, everyone is a psychopath, and every human being (or at least the vast majority) will commit atrocities given a selfish incentive and the power to get away with it. Much like studies on our extremely violent relatives chimpanzees have shown, we're only more peaceful when there's a balance of power between groups, or in Scott's words, when government has checks and balances, not when the people in charge are "not psychopaths", because at the end of the day power works for power, not the people.
Nonsense. Psychopath is not merely a person capable of doing bad things under the right circumstances (yes, such definition would include us all), but rather a person literally incapable of feeling the "nice" emotions. Psychopaths are not "victims" of the circumstances, they actively create them.
If you show a kitten to 100 small kids, 99 of them will instinctively be like "aww, cute" and 1 of them will be like "I wonder how much fun it would be to skin the kitten alive; I have to grab it when no one is paying attention". The latter is a psychopath. This is different from saying that if those kids e.g. grow up in the Nazi Germany, half of them will later become Nazis.
You're partially right. I did read on psychopathy once, and if I remember correctly they can indeed feel all sorts of emotions the difference between them and normal people being that the former are a lot more impulsive, thus they are not actually "eviler" than other people, they just lack self-control normally acquired during socialization, and humans are a extremely violent species, so when that self-control is gone due to psychopathy or power which invalidates fear of repercussion the results are always gruesome.
I am not an expert, but this doesn't sound plausible to me. For a person who only differs from others by lack of self-control, it would be quite difficult to get into a position of power. Maybe you don't need self-control when you are at the top of the ladder, but you definitely need it while you are climbing there. You don't become a successful politician by acting impulsively.
Lack of certain emotions is what make psychopaths such successful liars. Normal people feel certain tension when they lie, and we can often unconsciously detect that "something is not right". Non-psychopathic scammers try to mask this e.g. by talking fast and creating a false sense or urgency (so that when we detect the tension, we incorrectly attribute it to the urgency). But a psychopath can tell the same lie completely relaxed, looking at your eyes with a gentle smile, thus overcoming your evolved lie-detection instincts, because he just doesn't feel the tension at all. (Even if he knows that soon you will find out that he lied, he honestly doesn't give a fuck. A normal person would feel some shame, even if they decided to do it regardless.)
It's not that politicians are psychopaths, it's just that they tend to be self-regarding. Having seen a sample of the breed up close at local level, there's a combination of "you need to believe you *are* that important in order to do the job, because it's hard slogging and a thankless task" and "if you believe you *are* that important, then other people are not as important as you and you should always get your way".
Getting power, holding on to power, using power, losing power, regaining power: that's the political cycle. Sometimes, then, you have to crack a few eggs to make the omelette. And if you don't like egg cracking, there can always be someone on your side, or in the general vicinity of it, who does it and is good at it. As has been pointd out, there were Democrat politicians in power who were plenty happy to send the police in to crack heads.
The political violence of the 70s was revolutionary (or wanted to be), but part of the reason why the survivors were able to parley having served jail sentences into posts in academia and mainstream politics was because they represented themselves as political prisoners and not common criminals, and the remainder of 60s counter-culture that 'we'd all been fighting the corrupt state and state violence' (Kent State shootings, the police sent in to bash protesters) and the romantic aura of the rebel, the Civil Rights fighter (even if that was a peaceful protest/non-violent movement), of being against the Establishment which was perceived as Republican party. So they could slide in beside the Democrats, or whatever socialist party allied with the Democrats.
The more cynical mainstream politicians on the liberal side may not have liked the new bedfellows, but they were useful to bring along a particular constituency, and besides - you always need leg-breakers.
It's naive because an extremely prominent likely blackmailer of US politicians recently "committed suicide" in his jail cell under unbelievably irregular circumstances. Because of that, many US citizens have become cynical on the question of whether our politicians would carry out a political killing. Scott is espousing a view that was more common before that event than it is now.
How about a different selection process? Start with jury duty. From among all the jurors who served in trials where the result was accepted as fair by those involved (rather than being appealed to a higher court), whoever did the most hours of community service since their last round of jury duty gets to be mayor. At the end of that term, out of all the municipalities in the state, whichever mayor had the fewest unresolved complaints goes on to be governor. Similar process from state governor to president.
Bicameral legislature could have one set installed by popularity contest, with anyone who can stack up 30,000 supporters automatically getting a term, but the other house selected based on competence and familiarity with the existing body of law: each voter has the right to submit one multiple-choice question on the subject of "under such-and-such circumstances, what would the law permit / require / imply," with anonymized editorial feedback for questions with no right answer among given options, or which are otherwise ill-formed. Then, probably through some secure electronic interface, they can try to answer as many other people's questions as they like. One senate seat per state goes to whoever got the most questions right, the other goes to whoever wrote the question that the most other candidates got wrong. A senator can be removed at any time by somebody who beats their record. A question is invalidated when whoever submitted it loses the right to hold office (due to e.g. death or committing a serious crime) or when relevant laws change enough that the original answer set is no longer accurate. In the latter case, the writer can submit a new question. Thus, somebody who took office on the strength of spotting a particularly nasty catch-22 and calling attention to it with a trick question will usually leave as soon as that issue is resolved.
If your best evidence is that someone's mother was a terrorist, and so somehow he has Mafia-style killings "in his DNA" (whatever that means), perhaps your argment is not very strong.
Susan Rosenberg as well. (Though, as our esteemed fact-checkers at Snopes note, she was merely a member of a bombing organization and got arrested for the possession of a shitton of explosives, There's no universally agreed upon definition of terrorist, so we should shy away from calling her one.)
While I’m not happy that establishment Dems are cozy with retired terrorists whose causes (if not methods) they mostly support, whitewashing 70s radicalism is still a far cry from straight up whacking people with the state security service.
A better recent example would probably be Jeffrey Epstein, if he was in fact whacked.
If we're spouting conspiracy theories about Epstein there's no reason to believe it was Dems who whacked him compared to Republicans given that it is the Republican AGs who gave him sweetheart deals in his previous legal situation and may not want information to come out.
I’m not really trying to “spout” anything, just trying to point out that the conspiracy version of Epstein’s death is a much better analogy to what Putin has apparently done, compared to the Dem relationship with various 20th century political terrorists.
Certainly lots of people from lots of different groups had apparent motive to whack Epstein, which is part of why his death is so suspicious.
Murdering a security guard in a bank heist is extremely objectionable, but it actually just doesn't seem germane to violent authoritarianism.
Also I'm skeptical of the work being done by 'denounce' in this discussion of the son. What does this mean? If he won't agree that it would be better if his mom hadn't killed a bank guard, that's dubious. If he won't agree that his mom is a terrible person, that's unsurprising and irrelevant and an appeal to fundamental attribution bias fallacy. If he won't agree that she should have gone to jail for the murder, that is potentially dubious but also depends on the work being done by 'she murdered' - did she shoot the gun, or was she outside keeping the engine warm?
> Perhaps Philip Short's or Steven Lee Myers's books might have been the better choice, a little more detached from Russian inside baseball. (Or perhaps inside basketball; there's a Nets joke in there somewhere)
> I’m interested in what factors generally restrain criminal prosecution of opposing politicians and journalists (even if you think it happens sometimes, why doesn’t it happen more?).
It's pretty easy to prosecute enemies, but it is very hard to get convictions in America. The Judiciary is mostly independent, and you can never count that you'll get a judge that is in your side. Juries are almost certainly going to have members from both parties, even in a place as Blue as DC, so you have to convince someone to convict one of their own tribe. You could use bribes or threats, but if that gets out, you'd start a civil war.
Finally, if you successfully convict the person, they are likely to end up a martyr, see Trump's rising poll numbers, there's a small chance he might get elected from prison at this rate. If you fail to convict beyond a reasonable doubt, then he can claim full exoneration and complain about the witch hunt.
Countries where this can work would already need the media completely under their thumb to limit the potential downfalls, but it's not a great way of getting the media under your thumb from the current status quo.
>It's pretty easy to prosecute enemies, but it is very hard to get convictions in America.
Who needs convictions? The process is the punishment, and I think a more effective one than a thuggish beating.
Aaron Swartz wasn't convicted of anything, but he still wound up dead. For pissing off a prissy little cabal of university administrators and academic publishers, never mind any serious political ambition. Part of that was probably his own emotional fragility, but still. See also Bruce Ivins, and nobody had a grudge against him at all, the FBI just needed a scapegoat.
Granted, you can't always *count* on your targets committing suicide, but if they don't, they still go through years of living hell, interrogation and detention and trial, life savings turned into legal fees, reputation utterly trashed. And you get none of that back just because you were ultimately acquitted. That's going to deter an awful lot of would-be opposition leaders, and materially incapacitate a lot more.
There has been a norm of sorts against doing this to actual opposition politicians, but I don't think it's a strong one. At this point we're clearly supposed to be focusing on Donald Trump's election-interference indictment, because that one is probably well-deserved and substantial. But Bragg's NY indictment for not filling out the right paperwork when he paid his mistress's hush money from allegedly the wrong slush fund, is a nominally literal example of a trumped-up charge. Approximately zero chance of conviction, would not have been brought against e.g. a Cuomo or an ordinary citizen, purely for the harassment and publicity.
I think the norm still holds to the point where only a two-sigma partisan outlier of a judge or bureaucrat will play that game. A would-be American Putin can't count on an Al Bragg or a Pete Strzok when he needs one. But I don't think it is at all implausible that we could reach the point where that does become plausible.
> Juries are almost certainly going to have members from both parties, even in a place as Blue as DC, so you have to convince someone to convict one of their own tribe.
Donald Trump got 5.4% of the D.C. vote in 2020. For lack of a better idea, let's assume that .054 is also the Trump-leaning share of the population eligible for jury duty.
According to https://stattrek.com/online-calculator/binomial, with 12 jurors and a 0.054 probability of a Trump-leaning juror, the chance of getting at least one such juror is 0.486. This assumes everyone eligible is equally likely to be selected for the jury.
Actually, prosecutors seem likely to use their 6 (felony) or 3 (misdemeanor) peremptory challenges to keep eligible Trump-leaning potential jurors off the jury. In D.C. more than anywhere else, I imagine that a person's occupation is a good clue as to whether they lean Republican - which is a good clue as to whether they lean Trump. So the probability would drop below 0.486.
(The defense has the same number of peremptory challenges. This probably has no impact on the number of jurors leaning anti-Trump.)
So I estimate that it's more likely than not that there will be nobody who leans Trump on the jury for a given Trump-related D.C. federal criminal trial.
No, I had no idea how liberal DC was, which is ironic for someone who lived there. I guess being a member of the Federalist Society made me feel less outnumbered. I retract that claim and understand better why Republicans complain about DC jury pools. Thank you for doing the research and correcting me.
Trump's favorability rating has been going down, not up. He's not seeing any great successes, and present polling suggests that, if the election was run today, Trump would again lose Nevada, Michigan, Arizona, Georgia, and Pennsylvania.
He's also going to have major issues campaigning if he is convicted of one of the numerous crimes he committed before the election and is incarcerated.
Alex wrote this: "This account misses something fundamental in my view. I myself was born in Russia and lived most of my life there, participating in some of the events described in the post, such as the 2011-2014 protests. What is really crucial for understanding how Putin came to power is *how bad the 90s were*. The GDP per capita fell by half (by way of comparison, the GDP per capita fell only about 25% during the Great Depression in the US)."
I will add that ALSO Russia's economy absolutely took off in the ten years after Putin came to power. Something like a 6x increase in Russian GDP in a decade:
1990: $500B
2000: $250B
2010: $1,500B
*I* would be (EXTREMELY) skeptical about the folks and the ideology who where in charge from 1990 - 2000 and be willing to put up with a lot to (a) have it stop, and (b) see my standard of living actually rise and rise a lot.
What would the arguments against Putin look like? Russia never tried REAL liberal democracy/capitalism?
At this point, the argument is mostly "Putin is bad for Russia because we (the US and its allies/vassals) will try to destroy Russia as long as he's in power." It's a reasonably sound argument.
I was going to write a longer reply about the two big mistakes in your formulation.
Bur really, a much simpler take is that instead of showing strength, he showed weakness, which we are now exploiting. A competent Russian leader would not have done this, therefore he is not (or, is no longer) competent, therefore he is bad for Russia. Q.E.D.
This presupposes that in the counterfactual Russia would become an ally/vassal of the West. But it's a faulty assumption, there's not much appetite for that from either side. The West isn't willing to overlook Russian "transgressions" like subduing Chechnya, whereas Russians generally believe that Russia deserves to be a superpower, at the very least having a "sphere of influence", which definitely should include Ukraine. I don't see any realistic way of changing this status quo, short of Russia getting thoroughly crushed and occupied, Germany/Japan style, but due to the nuke situation that's very far from being on the table.
If by "happy" you mean treating him as a mostly irrelevant if distasteful tin-pot dictator, then sure, I guess. Although I would put the real start of "public enemy number one" treatment at the 2016 election. Meddling in some Middle Eastern shithole is one thing, meddling at the heart of the Free World™ is quite another.
Well, Democracy™ is just about the last thing that everybody in the West agrees is a Good Thing, so a direct attack on that is probably the most explicit symbolic gesture that one can make.
Just wanted to flag that this comment is an obvious unsubstantiated nonsense. Probably not against the rules, though. I will not be engaging in further discussion in this thread.
Indeed. At the minimum, if the sole evidence for Putin and Putinism is GDP growth, we have to note that Russian GDP has only grown 16% cumulatively since 2008, compared to a global average of 57%, and USA's growth of 82%. Some countries with similar GDP per capita as Russia grew even more: Malaysia and Bulgaria grew 85%, Chile grew 100%, and Costa Rica grew 153%.
That’s actually a motive for invading Ukraine—Putin has failed to develop value added exports for legacy Soviet era manufacturing. So the Irkut MC-21 needs to be used by more than just Russian airlines. Btw, the new Gazprom skyscraper looks like the Avengers HQ…but exporting hydrocarbons isn’t value added manufacturing.
The US was actively trying to feed Russia's economy throughout the 1990s and early to mid 2000s, precisely in order to help boost Russia away from Communism.
The problem is, you can't actually fix another country's economy, and we were unable to do so because the problems with Russia go beyond communism. It has cultural problems that cripple its economy.
Rather than address these issues, Putin tried to divert attention outwards by engaging in blaming of everyone else for Russia's problems, and aggression against its neighbors.
This predictably resulted in the Russian economy going bad (because the problems weren't fixed) and Russia being isolated economically, resulting in it being way worse off.
If Russia had instead become a modern, non-corrupt democratic state, the US would probably be helping it out against China, with money and resources flowing into it, and because the US has strong interests in anti-corruption, the US would be helping to fight against corruption there, as we fought against corruption in Ukraine.
An argument I saw floated (it didn't gain much traction) against Trump was "yes, Trump has been great for the economy, and has been good for you personally, but you should be willing to suffer hardship for the greater good (involving abstract causes like norms, decency, human rights, Liberalism, etc.)" That applies just as well (or not) to Putin.
If you are not willing to suffer for abstract causes like norms, decency, human rights, liberalism, economic and political hardships will soon follow, even if initially it might seem that the life is good even without those values. Without values societies unravel: it is sometimes hard to apperciate, it is so obvious, how much of our legal and political system depends on basic decency of people, shame and societal pressure. You think you can have economic success in a dictatorship? Perhaps, on the sufferance of the dictator which is a fickly thing. In a dictatorship you do not own anything really.
Well, wealthy Chinese seem to take care to put a significant part of their wealth in the West because they know their assets can be taken from them any time CCP changes their policy or they simply run afoul of CCP politically. And I never claimed a country under dictatorship cannot be doing very well economically for a time, just that this situation never lasts long, which, incidentally, is precisely what we are seeing now with all the economical/ecological trouble in China, large part of which seems to be self-inflicted by political decisions. Incidentally, I had the impression (maybe injust) that many of the commenters here who are very sceptical of any claims of democratically elected politicians (and I guess not without some reason) but at the same time fail to apply the same healthy scepticism to the claims of totalitarian goverments, like self-reported GDP. Chinese sustained (until recently) economical growth was long considered miraculous. And we should all be very sceptical about miracles, especially measured in GDP which can be severely distorted even without resorting to outright cheating. But even if all of this was true, there is this extremaly naive belief (which seemed to be part of unofficial "social contract" both in Putin's Russia and in China until very recently) that undemocratic goverments can leave people free to earn money and live their lives as they wish to as long as they do not engage in politics. But it never happens, not for long. In the end, everyone is bound to find out (as they are now finding out in Russia and China) that it was all a lie, and real economic freedom comes in a package only with political freedom. And in case someone claims some problems, say in Putin's Russia or in China are not so different from what happens in the US, so what's the diff, then well, democratic countries have issues, in case of dictatorships issues do not even start to describe it.
Additionally, even China's success needs to be kept in context. Even accepting the GDP numbers at face value, China still has a GDP per capita lower than Russia - less than a fifth of the USA, in case people don't know how poor Russia is.
I don't think anyone worried about having their assets taken from them is going to put them in the West, given what happened to Russian oligarchs recently. Especially a Chinese, whose country's conflict with the West could escalate at any time.
Also, there's just no plausible reason for Chinese decisionmakers to prefer fake data over genuine (and no plausible mechanism for the real data to be obscured from them). If you have one to propose, present it, but in the absence of it, claims in the form [they surely must have cheated because they totalitarian] are not skepticism, they're... cope, basically. (I have to note claims of this kind used to be much more common maybe two decades ago, they stopped once images of modernized China started flooding the world. You can't fake impressive infrastructural projects. You can fake their importance, build them for show, but again - for what purpose, if you can just build legit ones and get richer through that? But more importantly, you can't fake billions of photos and videos of regular people in essentially modern setting.)
You seriously do not see any advantage of presenting fake, better than reality data to the external world and to their own society? I was not talking about internal classified info for the highest ups only. Even democratic goverments try to massage this kind of data, but at least there are usually a lot of independent agencies even within the goverment. Also look to the Mallard comment above for some actual data. But in fact, from what I heard (and correct me if I am wrong, I cannot find the citation now, so I may be wrong here), GDP is self reported even inside China by provinces. And of course provincial governors have their own incentives to play down any problems and look better than reality in the eyes of their superiors, and this mechanism is repeated all the way to the top. Again, the same happens in democracies, but at least with free press and other checks and balances you cannot hide the truth for long. So it is not clear to me that even top brass in China is aware of all the problems.
And yes, you can fake bilions of photographs and videos. But in this case nobody is suggesting that *ALL** of China development is fake.
China, at least until recently, truly was a factory of the world and it did develop enormously since the 80s. Some parts of China are genuinely wealthy and modern (although, have you ever heard the term "tofu dreg project"? It is another consequence of corruption inherent in dictatorships), others are not, to put it mildly. There is a plenty of actual achievement there the Chinese can be proud of. The real issues are: the real scale of development, how widely distributed the fruits of this development are, and, above all, how stable this development really is. Recent events suggest rather strongly that the contradictions of free market economy in totalitarian state may be now derailing Chinese miracle. Remember, in the 80s there were still economists wondering when will Soviet Union overtake US, and the fall of Soviet Union, and the depth of this fall took many specialists by suprise.
Trump wasn't good for the economy. His bungling of COVID led to a massive drop in GDP, and none of his policies were actually good for the economy (he actively hurt our agricultural industry, for instance).
GDP growth under Trump was below that of Obama and Biden, indicating that GDP growth was in spite of Trump, not because of him.
Russia's GDP actually increased tenfold from a minimum in 1999 (when Putin became PM) to the maximum in 2013 (though it was less in real terms). However, this has to be seen in the context of the oil prices, which constituted a significant part of that GDP and rose by a factor of 5-8 (depending on your starting and end point). I think a wide-held opinion is that, while Putin pursued quite sensible macroeconomic and fiscal policies during the first decade or so of his rule, he was also very lucky to have had windfall incomes to work with. There was a huge amount of cake to go around, and he made good use of it.
One issue, looking at this data, is that it looks like the rubles to USD exchange rate has tanked massively; in 1999, it looks like it was about 20 rubles to 1 USD; by the early 2010s, it was more like 50 to 1; today it is 100 to 1.
This suggests to me that very bad things have been happening to Russia in terms of inflation.
I mean, an economic argument against Putin is that both his invasions of Ukraine are obvious disasters for Russian economy. GDP per capita fell in the wake of the first invasion in 2014, and got back above 2013 level only in 2018. It is true that it was largely caused by the collapse in oil prices, but that collapse itself was probably largely caused by Saudis becoming confident Russia won't be able to steal their market share during a price war due to sanctions and related problems.
What is true, however, is that such an argument would be hard to make BEFORE 2014. Then you would have to rely on abstract notions of "autocracy bad since ruler might do crazy things without constrains". Interestingly, many Russians actually did that. There were large protests in Moscow in 2012 against prolongation of Putin's rule.
If you continue that series in GDP data, Russia has barely grown since 2010, as in its 2020 GDP was still $1,500bn. Compared to former soviet countries than embraced the West, like Lithuania, Poland or Estonia, Russia has really fallen behind. At the same time the population is declining and life expectancy is still far below the level in China, the US or even countries like Poland.
I suppose you can argue the 90s were bad, the 2000s were better, but the 2010s have been stagnant. If Putin had stepped aside in 2010, perhaps he would be remembered fondly at this point.
The USSR dissolved at the very end of 1991, and Putin came into power around 1999/2000, right? 7 or 8 years isn't a lot of time to evaluate economic policy in the wake of such a massive change. Obviously, it would feel very different for people on the ground who saw such chaos and economic hardship--7 years (plus however long recovery took) is not a short period of time when living it on the ground.
As others pointed out, the economic recovery later stagnated, with both events possibly tied to oil prices. I would say that even more fundamentally, all of these events are possibly what one would have expected (obviously this is easy to say in hindsight; I'm sure in 1992 I would have said something different): A collapse of an empire caused short-term economic recession, which then gradually recovered, before hitting the ceiling of what's possible in a corrupt, kleptocratic, autocracy.
I was NOT trying to make an argument that Putin is/was a good leader for Russia or for Russians.
I WAS trying to add some context beyond the "things were very bad before Putin took over" to show that also "and things were VERY GOOD after Putin took over."
I hope it isn't a mystery (for folks at Astral Codex Ten at least) that for non-economist Russians living through a 50% GDP decline (2x as bad as the US Great Depression) in the years leading up to Putin followed by a 500% GDP increase after Putin took over ... well, Putin would look pretty good?
Yes, yes, the Russians SHOULD have expected their economy to totally crater and for pensioners to be begging in the streets after the Soviet Union collapsed. Of course. No reason to blame the policies followed during those 8-10 years when it could not be helped.
Still, lots of folks aren't totally rational about these things and did a simple "Great Depression x2 bad; roaring economy good" calculation and noticed that one was correlated with western liberal democracy capitalism and the other was correlated with Putin. For these folks it should be obvious why Putin was popular . I hope.
And, yes, the Russian economy kinda stagnated around 2010 ... as it often has historically after a huge run up in oil prices. If Putin had retired in 2010 he would probably go down as one of the great European leaders of the past few hundred years (deserved or not).
But even after the stagnation, lots of Russians still remember the 1990s.
> What would the arguments against Putin look like? Russia never tried REAL liberal democracy/capitalism?
I was trying to answer that question.
> Still, lots of folks aren't totally rational about these things and did a simple "Great Depression x2 bad; roaring economy good" calculation and noticed that one was correlated with western liberal democracy capitalism and the other was correlated with Putin. For these folks it should be obvious why Putin was popular
Yes, and I even specifically pointed this out. I don't think we disagree on much so I'm not sure why you're so exasperated.
One problem is that the 1990s also were associated with the end of the Soviet Union lying about how good the economy was.
From what I can tell, the economy actually was terrible in the 1980s as well; the Soviet Union just lied about it incessantly. Their own leadership even admitted in the 1980s that if they knew how much better off Americans were than Russians, there'd be a revolution.
We talk about a 50% decline in GDP, but the Soviet GDP numbers were never trustworthy; I've seen 1980s Russian supermarkets, and they were terrible places, which seemed to suggest to me that people were very poor back then, too.
Your figures are slightly misleading, because you are looking at nominal gdp, not real gdp. In real terms, Russia under Putin grew at 7% per year from 2000 to 2007, which is still quite good, but not quite as impressive, as it only means 72% growth over 8 years. Also note that economies tend to grow faster when recovering from a period of extreme underperformance, and that the price of oil also began to rise again right around the time Putin came to power, and this was due to factors outside his control. Still, international observers whom I would not expect to be biased in his favor were impressed by his administration’s handling of the economy, not to mention that most of what he did seems to me (with my admittedly amateur understanding of the Russian economy to be all great ideas) so it was probably also in part good management. I imagine the people also approve of how he reminded the oligarchs that they have to obey the government, not the other way around.
Unfortunately, the economy has stagnated since the 2008 crisis. Oil prices have never truly recovered, and Russia suffers from several structural problems, like a dependence on oil and gas, widespread corruption (which was there before Putin and will no doubt be still there when Putin is naught but bones in the ground)*, etc. Putin’s administration is still quite technocratic, and even American economists who approve of the sanctions slapped on Russia and think Putin is a mass murdering tyrant have gone on record praising the people Putin put in charge of the Russian central bank, and the Russian government’s response to the 2008 crisis was widely praised by economists. But Putin has not been able to deliver growth. Not surprisingly, a few years after the stagnation started, when Putin decided to run for a third term, Putin who had once been immensely popular (he rigs elections, but in 2004 and 2008 this meant that he or his favored candidate won in an astounding landslide, instead of merely winning in a landslide) faced a lot of protests. He still probably won a plurality of the actual vote by a wide margin, but might not even have secured a majority of the vote if it weren’t for election rigging. Putin has responded by becoming more repressive, previously, descent was suppressed, but not anywhere as vigorously as it’s being suppressed now. The change wasn’t abrupt, but Putin has been more and more restrictive of dissent over the last 10 years. Putin did manage to restore his popularity to 2008 highs by annexing Crimea, but that began to fade after 2018, as the economy showed no signs of reviving. Putin’s popularity took another hit after covid19 and accompanying hardships. So he tried to restore his popularity by invading Ukraine, even though the strategic benefits were modest and outweighed by the cost of western sanctions (though I should note that Putin losing popularity could seriously destabilize Russia and result in widespread violence and there is even some chance that it could escalate to violent and bloody revolution or civil war, not that Putin is likely to care about such altruistic concerns). Part of why I think attacking Ukraine was about domestic considerations rather than foreign policy considerations is that nothing relevant to the foreign policy concerns changed in favor of invading between 2014 and 2022, in deed 2014 Ukraine’s army was something of a joke, as Ukraine expected to rely on Russian help in its defense, while 2022 Ukraine obviously had an actual army, even if its actual strength wasn’t so obvious. If, as Putin rationally believed and as every other major government, including the US, expected, Putin had been able to overrun Ukraine in under a week, it probably would have worked. Ensuing sanctions would be quite painful,, but if the war had ended quickly and left the west with a fate accompli, the sanctions wouldn’t have been quite so severe, and people would soon lose the political will to continue with the costlier sanctions, as it wouldn’t hurt Russia’s war effort. But now Putin is left with an unwinnable conflict that he can’t withdraw from without completely losing face and most of his support among both the public and the powerful. Russia right now will either doo well on the battlefield and so be able to keep fighting a useless war for several years, at the end of which maybe they get a settlement and are still stuck with the sanctions and a stagnant economy and with Putin or his successor losing support experience a lot of instability. Or they do badly, Putin gets overthrown by the FSB and army, he is replaced by somebody who sues for peace, and has to make a lot of concessions to the west, which will be super unpopular especially because Russian interests (like having a sphere of influence in eastern Europe and having the strategically important port of Sevastopol in friendly hands) are often in direct opposition to the west. Suffice it to say that Russian instability will be even more of a problem in this case, though there might be fewer sanctions still in effect, and there will be far less loss of life and valuable resources in a pointless war.
*I don’t mean to downplay Putin’s own corruption, but widespread corruption was if anything even more of a problem in the previous administration, and there would in fact be as much corruption under any other president. Corruption in Russia is not a problem caused by Putin, its caused by hard to combat social and cultural factors. Not to mention that actually doing something about corruption would piss off everybody powerful in Russia, as they all do it, so this would greatly increase the risk of being overthrown, or at least force the president to expend a huge amount of personal capital when they could instead just sit back and ignore the problem, so no president is actually likely to even try.
One problem with this is that it assumes that GDP actually fell massively in the 1990s, but by all indications, it had actually been bad throughout the Soviet Era, the USSR just lied about it constantly.
The "drop" in the 1990s seems to coincide with the end of the lies rather than a massive decline in actual GDP; people were having major economic problems in the 1980s in Russia, which even Soviet leadership commented on (one literally noted if the people in Russia knew how much better off people were in the US, there would be a revolution in Russia).
The fact that some people are still thinking that "the shock therapy" was justified makes my blood boil. We should have properly learned the historical lesson that "anything but communism" is a terrible stance after the rise of Adolf "the lesser of two evil" Hitler to power and the consequences of it.
Communism in Russia was severely descredited and lacked political will behind it. People were optimistic to the change of course. All that had to be done to ensure that the old regime didn't return was not to tremendously fuck everything up with the new market economy. Which wasn't supposed to be that hard, considering how inefficient the command economy was, nearly any possible move should have been an improvement. But tremendously fuck up they did, creating the most strawmanish form of crony-cleptocracy as if directly from soviet propaganda thus discrediting democracy, market economy and liberalism to even highter extents and inoculating several generations from this ideas.
Of course, this directly led to the rise of a quasi-fashist dictator who at first looked as a savior just by contrast. And lo and behold, this quasi-fashist dictator is now waging a "blood and soil" war in Europe. And yet, even ofter all this, we seem not to have learned our lessons.
I share a bit of your outrage, but I wonder what a viable alternative would have looked like. I kind of believe that the rise of the oligarchs was to some extent inevitable.
When Soviet enterprises were privatized, the authorities gave shares to everyone. Most people had no money and we're happy to sell their shares. This led to the accumulation of ownership in the hands of the oligarchs, who in many cases were the very men who ran these enterprises during Soviet times. These were the so-called Red Directors.
Let's say that privatization had never happened and the government simply held onto these enterprises and attempted to manage them in the public interest. These Red Directors would have still been in positions of tremendous power and influence and may well have been able to use this to enrich themselves. This is pretty much what ahppend in South Africa when the ANC took over. There wasn't a privatization in South Africa. In fact, it was the opposite. But a small group of politically connected people were still able to transfer a massive amount of wealth from the state to themselves.
I think that we can overestimate the power of political systems and underestimate the power of path dependency.
Ideally, it should've been switch to Georgist system, nearly perfectly suited for Russia with such amount of land and resources and also being closer to socialism in ethos and thus easily understandable for the general population. Keeping social guarantees of old regime but using the benefits of markets instead of trying to combat them would've been the best of both worlds.
But even something much cruder as general market reforms at a slower pace like they happened in China would've been much much better than whatever the clusterfuck actually happened.
Likewise, privatisation should've happened but not when starving people hand over their shares just to buy groceries, while gangs are ravaging the streets. You can't expect a properly functioning stock market in such conditions.
"He was even a co-signer of this famous open letter to Gorbachev in 1990 urging the Soviet premier to establish a Land Value Tax to provide a stable basis for the new economy as Russia struggled to rise from the collapse of communism. Other co-signers included four Nobel Laureates: Franco Modigliani, Robert Solow, James Tobin, and William Vickrey, not to mention William Baumol of Baumol's cost disease. Unfortunately, the Russian authorities went with Harvard Professor Jeffrey Sachs' "shock therapy" instead, and the rest is history, as anyone who lived through the post-Soviet chaos can tell you."
A counter-argument would be central/eastern Europe, where an analysis of the transformation shows better standard of living in countries which used the "shock" method (e.g. Czechia) compared to those that chose slower pace as you call it (e.g. Hungary). Of course the countries differed in other ways as well, but this is basically agreed fact among mainstream economists.
Okay, look, to get this out of the way, I find the notion that you can distinguish between the central european states' approaches to regime change enough to make this kind of claims (I mean any of: clustering them into "shock" and "slower" camps; getting meaningful signal while controlling for their idiosyncracies; comparing the success of each approach - much less all of them at the same time) absurd. Especially with how little they ultimately differ, how they aimed at, and reached, essentially the same place (EU and its economic/law system) at roughy the same (in case of Czechia/Hungary, exactly the same) time.
But I guess what puzzles me the most is - how do you define a "shock" method anyway? Is the term refering to speed, or scope? Around here, Central-Eastern Europe that is, Czechia is kind of envied for not destroying its economic base and public services as much as its neighbors. And given that this destruction was a long, planned process, that had to unwind for decades over strong opposition from the public, I can't help but wonder whether, if we looked at the precise measures and definitions employed, the take-away wouldn't become simply "Czechia stopped crippling itself faster than Hungary did".
Alright I think it doesn't make sense to continue. Basically all the claims you make - how little the countries ultimately differ (I live here and boy they differ), how they essentially reached the same place, and most unbelievably, a claim that the economic transformation since 1989 was a long planned destruction - I find all of those preposterous and just plain wrong. There's zero common ground, sorry, I think it's best to leave it.
Surely, you could try to demonstrate my claims wrong by providing arguments from underlying reality?
But I don't think anything I said is at all controversial. Like, what's a meaningful difference between several countries on a similar development level, with similar history, operating under the same set of rules (EU law)? (Czechs are irreligious and have a functional train transport. Otherwise, I feel at home there. I feel at home as far as Slovenia, really, the entire region has markings of the same development path imprinted all over it.) Or, what do you think the "shock" in "shock therapy" even refered to?
Boring truth is that Czechia was richer than Hungary even during communist times (also further back to the Habsburg times) and stayed that way until today.
Differences between their transformation policies in the 90s were, it seems to me, not that important, and I really doubt your assertion that mainstream economists agree they are responsible for current difference in living standards. Otherwise I would have to lower my respect for mainstream economists:-).
If the divergence between these two countries is widening, which is arguable, although I haven"t checked for that, it is a more recent phenomenon having little to do with the level of 90s "shock", whatever that might mean.
By body count for intentional killing, Stalin was far worse (3X+ worse). You can blame WWII on Hitler to inflate his body count, which I think is fair, though then you're trying to determine how to rate the intentional killing of a person against unintended but obvious consequences of war. Even then Stalin doesn't look great with his meatgrinder tactics of throwing millions of his own men into battle with little chance of survival.
Otherwise, naming Hitler as worse comes down to valuing the types of people he killed over the types of people Stalin killed. I don't put much stake in that, but if you're Jewish I could certainly understand it.
I hope we can all agree that both of them were monsters.
As someone who is staunchly anti-communist and has Stalin near the top of the short list of 'worst people in history', the one thing that sets the Nazis apart from everyone else (except perhaps the Aztecs) is the industrial genocide, building an industry (tools, workers, facilities, and organizations) specifically to kill mass numbers of civilians in an organized fashion based on their heritage, including planning to get what 'value' you can out of them before they die (and ghoulishly after they die as well).
I think focusing on the body count misses something. There's a difference between people thrown in prison camps to rot for the rest of their miserable lives, people killed by callous starvation, people killed in deliberate slaughter during the course a war, and industrial mass murder, and industrial mass murder comes down as the worst of the lot. The Mongols slaughtered an incredible number of people, yet I don't think they wanted to rack up a body count; slaughtering an entire city was a way to try to get the next city to surrender without a fight. Stalin and Mao didn't care about the peasants that starved to death, but I don't think their goal was a body count high score. Hitler wanted the Jews dead, entirely, and built an industry to accomplish that.
While they didn't event special tools to do it, the basements of the Lubyanka building had people being executed by gunshot to the back of the head every night during the Great Purge. 750,000 or so altogether were executed between 1936 and 1938 (not all of them in the Lubyanka, but they stayed busy). Provincial officers were given quotas to round up and execute, and they often went above the quota in an attempt to please Moscow.
I'm not sure it would have been morally worse if those 750.000 had been killed in gas chambers then by individual bullets to the back of the head. "Racking up a body count" did seem to be most of the point.
If a senior NKVD officer had admitted to Stalin 'we're having trouble finding enemies of the people to kill, so we've been rounding up people that we don't like to pad our numbers', he'd probably be pretty quickly added to the total himself. That the system evolves horrific incentives below the top level to carry out the top level goals of the system is one of the reasons totalitarian states are so horrible.
This is all academic anyways; if Stalin is behind Hitler in 'worst humans of the 20th century', it's not by very much. Lubyanka and the gulags might not be as horrific as Auschwitz and the extermination camps, but they're still pretty damned horrific.
> the one thing that sets the Nazis apart from everyone else (except perhaps the Aztecs) is the industrial genocide, building an industry (tools, workers, facilities, and organizations) specifically to kill mass numbers of civilians in an organized fashion based on their heritage
This also happened under communism. Under Chinese communism the victims were "landlords"; under Cambodian communism it was anyone who wore glasses.
There's a Chinese movie called "To Live" (活着), a retrospective on the Communist period, in which (pre-revolution) the young-and-feckless protagonist inadvertently saves his own life years down the road by gambling away everything his wealthy and powerful family has, forcing them all to live on the street.
If one accepts the most recent figures (post-opening-of-archives: Wheatcroft, Ellman, Snyder, and so on) he was not. Depending on where you stand on the intentionality of the Holodomor (I'm ambivalent to negative) the currently accepted ceiling for Stalin is 9 million non-combatant victims, while Hitler's tally has for a long time hovered around 11 million.
That said, I feel it's a shabby exercise to argue that one historical villain was somehow better than another because he intentionally killed fewer people, certainly if they land within the same order of magnitude. It gets you within nose-pinching distance of those wretches who quibble over the six million.
The more important question is why each killed them. For Stalin, this boils down to monstrous paranoia and disastrous impatience with land reform. For Hitler, of course, the goal was to physically eliminate all people who did not fit a particular scheme of racial and corporeal purity. (Jews first and foremost but also disabled people, queer people, etc.) I consider the first set of reasons incomparably less evil than the second.
I'm not Jewish or a member of any of the groups mentioned (though it's quite possible Slavs would have gotten their turn had Germany won the war), but given a dilemma I would still prefer to live in the Soviet Union at the height of the Great Terror than in the Third Reich. Few things are clearer to me.
Oddly enough, Robert Conquest, the historian responsible for the highest estimates of the victims of Stalinism (circa 20m, accepted in the West throughout the Cold War), is reported to have felt the same way.
It seems plain to me that practically anyone would much rather be an ordinary German in the Third Reich than an ordinary Russian in Stalin's USSR. The sense in the USSR was that no one was safe. That's real terror.
Meanwhile, to my knowledge, after the Night of the Long Knives, the Nazis never engaged in another major internal purge of the Party or military, at least until Stauffenberg's plot (in which case, whatever else you want to say, the response wasn't exactly paranoid -- the attempted coup and assassination were very real).
We have to think, if Hitler had been Stalin, he would have killed a large percentage of the rank-and-file SA and a fair number of key Nazi officials out of sheer paranoia or frustration at their failures (Goering at absolute minimum).
I can look at the biography of someone like Bonhoeffer, who despite being a well-known critic and political opponent of Nazification of the church from the early 1930s, was still allowed to work for the Abwehr and wasn't imprisoned until he was basically caught actively engaging in wartime treason in 1943 and still wasn't executed until after he was linked to Stauffenberg's plot.
Was there any internal critic of Stalin or Stalinism who was treated with 1/10th as much leniency in Stalin's lifetime? I mean, the NKVD was prepared to unperson you for being the first to stop clapping.
I'd go so far as to argue that being a member of a disfavored ethnic minority in Hitler's Germany wasn't even uniquely bad. Stalin killed something like 1/3 of the Volga Germans in the process of forcibly resettling them. Roughly 60% of Germany's Jewish population fled prior to 1939.
What made Hitler uniquely bad was starting WW2, setting Europe on fire purely for the sake of Lebensraum. Which is also what allowed the Holocaust to assume the scale it did, and there's a certain diabolic malevolence contained in the fact that Jews who made all-out efforts to get the hell away from the Third Reich and flee elsewhere in Europe were nonetheless conquered and exterminated anyway.
"It seems plain to me that practically anyone would much rather be an ordinary German in the Third Reich than an ordinary Russian in Stalin's USSR. The sense in the USSR was that no one was safe. That's real terror."
You are familiar with the Blockleiter surveillance system and the political courts it served, yes?
It's not remotely plain to me. I suppose if I were a member of the Herrenvolk, able to demonstrate adequate racial purity, and happy enough to acquiesce to the murder of those who are not so "fortunate", such a preference might be justified. And, being a sparsely-inscribed-slateist, I can accept that being born into a different situation might alter my perceptions profoundly, perhaps even sufficiently to reach that point. But I can only speak for myself as I am.
"I can look at the biography of someone like Bonhoeffer, who despite being a well-known critic and political opponent of Nazification of the church from the early 1930s, was still allowed to work for the Abwehr and wasn't imprisoned until he was basically caught actively engaging in wartime treason in 1943 and still wasn't executed until after he was linked to Stauffenberg's plot."
It helped that Bonhoeffer had spent most of the thirties abroad and on the run, but your point is fairly taken.
"Was there any internal critic of Stalin or Stalinism who was treated with 1/10th as much leniency in Stalin's lifetime? I mean, the NKVD was prepared to unperson you for being the first to stop clapping."
I suppose Osip Mandelstam would come closest. He wrote a deliberately insulting poem about Stalin in 1933 (accusing him of killing peasants, among other things) got arrested for it, admitted authorship, and was spared by Stalin... for no very good reason, except perhaps for being exceptionally talented. He was exiled from the major cities, but otherwise allowed to keep writing. Stalin got to him in the end, of course, (he died of illness on the way to Siberia) but he had lasted another five years following his open insolence.
"I'd go so far as to argue that being a member of a disfavored ethnic minority in Hitler's Germany wasn't even uniquely bad. Stalin killed something like 1/3 of the Volga Germans in the process of forcibly resettling them. Roughly 60% of Germany's Jewish population fled prior to 1939."
Sorry, but that is a ridiculous line of argument. Hitler managed similar numbers among the Romani alone, and for much more clearly 'ethnic' reasons. Which, to me, remains the crux of the difference. For Stalin, the killings were incidental to the political project. For Hitler, the political project -was- genocide.
In any case, I have little appetite for being drawn into actual apologetics for Stalin. Being better than Hitler - even far better than Hitler - is still a very low moral bar to clear. I'm content to join 1956-vintage Khrushchev in denouncing him in every context except being (eventually) instrumental in stopping Hitler.
USSR also tried to make an alliance with UK and France before making a pact with Germany. Whatever it takes to make Germany UK's problem before USSR's problem.
Yeah, my takeaway reading the comment on "shock therapy" was "you're describing people looking at a crumbling country, with incentives to keep it crumbling, and parroting their justifications for why sabotaging the country is the best thing to do for its citizens".
I don't think communism was severely discredited in Russia. During the 1996 presidential elections, Yeltsin was forced into a run-off by communist leader Zyuganov, despite massive (and unsavory, to say the least) influence by many oligarchs and their media.
Certainly. But the reforms only started in earnest in late 1991, and in the parliamentary elections in late 1995 the communists already received as many votes as the second- and third-placed parties together.
My point is: people were certainly really enthusiastic about democracy, freedom and the market in 1991 (and, importantly, I think they didn't really distinguish between the concepts, expecting a good life to come from them in a kind of cargo cult). However, I'm not sure communism was really discredited, especially if it just took four years to become the solution again.
> We should have properly learned the historical lesson that "anything but communism" is a terrible stance after the rise of Adolf "the lesser of two evil" Hitler to power and the consequences of it.
Hitler was allied with the Soviet Union and was loathed by the West. Indeed, the Communists helped Hitler rise to power by attacking the moderates in Germany, and the Communists helped Nazi Germany at the start of World War II and tried to formally join the Axis in 1940.
Pointing towards Nazi Germany is grossly disingenuous; the West was deeply alarmed by Hitler.
The "shock treatment" in the Soviet Union was an attempt to fix the Russian economy by decentralizing it.
Thought experiment: in the unlikely scenario where Ron DeSantis becomes frontrunner for the Republican nomination, do you expect him to be indicted? I think the obvious answer is no. And that's because Trump's indictments (and impeachments) were caused by Trump having an unusual disregard for the law, rather than by Democrats abusing power to prosecute their enemies.
That doesn't follow. You have dropped many requirements. To be a fair test your scenario would read:
In the unlikely scenario where Ron DeSantis becomes frontrunner for the Republican nomination where DeSantis polls enough to have a reasonable chance of beating the democrats (he doesn't) and also strongly suggests he will go against the mainstream on significant issues such as the Ukraine (which he will not), do you expect him to be indicted?
I don't. If the Dems were pursuing some Putinesque effort to seize permanent power, they'd simply had had Trump arrested in 2016 before the election on some made up charge, sent him to a penal colony (Guantanamo?) and left him to rot. That's ridiculous, of course, because the Dems are nothing like Putin and America is no where close to becoming a mafia state.
I expect the Dems to use whatever means they have to hand, judicial or extra, against the frontrunning opposition candidate. I expect that the Republicans would do the same, except that they don't have control of the media.
Fox News is heavily aligned with mainstream republicans. Until recently they've had some prominent populist/trumpian voices, but they're now working to change that; See the departure of Tucker Carlson. (and, unsurprisingly, they're hemorrhaging viewers as a result)
I don't know about indictments, but good old Slate is already running the "Horrid Popish Plot" scare article about him (and I had no idea this outdated 'can you vote for a Catholic in a democracy?' attitude was still on the go). I'm presuming they wanted to raise the spectre of a revivified Religious Right or Moral Majority, then bumped up against the awkward fact that he's not Evangelical, but hey, any stick will do to beat the dog;
"So, what, exactly, is DeSantis doing here? Why was his Roman Catholicism essentially a secret? Faith can be no private matter for a Republican presidential candidate. As Politico and others noted recently, DeSantis’ presidential campaign has outlined educated white evangelicals as being his gateway to the nomination. So is this Catholic-evangelical two-step how he’s trying to court voters, and if so, is it a good strategy? What, exactly, is Ron DeSantis signaling to Republicans with how he presents his faith?"
Well gee, Molly Olmstead, if people like you are going to write scare stories about THE DOGMA LIVES LOUDLY WITHIN YOU, just maybe that's why he didn't make his faith front-and-centre? And why confine it to Republican candidate? Biden and Pelosi have made mention of being Catholics. Is there a 'right' kind of Catholic and a 'wrong' kind?
"DeSantis has made it clear that Catholicism is not central to his image. Unlike President Joe Biden, who is known to pray the rosary and identifies proudly as Catholic, DeSantis keeps things generically Christian. Even the prominent Catholic masses he has attended could be justified by non-Catholics as political in nature: one at the culture war–infused Ave Maria University, and one at a “Blue Mass” for police officers who died while on duty. His fight against abortion certainly taps into a traditionally Catholic battle, but it’s a battle that Protestants co-opted decades ago. When he speaks of his faith in interviews, he speaks of “faith”—not the church’s teachings or anything more distinctly Catholic in flavor. If this choice is a matter of identifying as—or appealing to—a generic white Christian American, it doesn’t sound that different from his recent efforts to pronounce his own name in a less European way.
But from the way he speaks at events and in interviews, it does seem that DeSantis isn’t just trying to seem less Catholic. It sounds like he’s also trying to seem more evangelical—or at least one specific kind of evangelical."
Blue Mass? Let nobody tell this lassie about the Red Mass, she might have conniptions and with her delicate sensibilities it could do her an injury:
"One of the better-known Red Masses is the one celebrated each fall at the Cathedral of St. Matthew the Apostle in Washington, D.C., on the Sunday before the first Monday in October (the Supreme Court convenes on the first Monday in October). It is sponsored by the John Carroll Society and attended by some Supreme Court justices, members of Congress, the diplomatic corps, the Cabinet and other government departments and sometimes the President of the United States. Each year, at the Brunch following the Red Mass, the Society confers its Pro Bono Legal Service Awards to thank lawyers and law firms that have provided outstanding service."
I like the bit about "the culture war-infused Ave Maria University", I really do. Still sniffy about those nouveau riche proles trying to "build their own" academia, Molly? So fortunate no other universities in the entire USA are culture war-infused, isn't it? 😁
Biden praying the rosary - A-OK because we know he's going to decide the 'right way' on the topics we value. DeSantis using Scriptural passages - bad because he's (now let me get this straight) pretending not to be Catholic but trying to appeal to Evangelicals?
Okay, now I'm confused: I can't tell if it's good to be Catholic or bad when you're running for office. Seemingly it's okay so long as you cool it on the martial imagery?
"“Overall, it 100 percent makes sense from a Catholic perspective,” said Lauren Horn Griffin, a professor in the philosophy and religious studies department at Louisiana State University. “There’s a real prevalence of military metaphors in Catholicism.” She cited the Knights of Columbus, a popular Catholic men’s organization. “Knight imagery, crusader imagery, are very common. And that often leads to spiritual warfare language. So I think that there’s definitely a spiritual warfare rhetoric in the Catholic past and present.”
I finally understand the temptation to declare DEUS VULT online because with a set-up of pearl-clutching like that, it's really hard not to want to jump out and go "Boo!" at them 😀
Though I am highly impressed by Miss Olmstead's strict disciplinary attitude towards accepting the rebuke and instruction of your bishop. I am sure she held the same when it was Nancy Pelosi being rebuked by the American conference of bishops:
"Repeatedly, Catholic bishops have chastised DeSantis for his positions on the death penalty and on immigration. But DeSantis has shown no sign of moderation or remorse at the bishops’ criticism."
That was a meal in itself, thanks Ron for being the casus belli of the Slate "you're doing your religion wrong" ticking-off for my entertainment!
Very few people seem to think that the government does anything at all that it wants to - an open dictatorship. The voters and popular opinion both still matter. Charges need to be based on something real, even if made out to be worse than they are, or the people will sour on politicians doing it. Bragg's indictment of Trump about using campaign funds was a bad idea, politically, because it hurt Democrats more than it hurt Trump - it looked like, and was, a political prosecution. Both sides seem to agree on that.
I definitely believe that if the Democrats felt that they could indict DeSantis without it *looking like* a political prosecution, they absolutely would. I mean, they already have been trying to accuse him of kidnapping illegal immigrants to send to various places (Martha's Vineyard).
Of the four, I think c is the closest to my position. I don't think "wink, wink" is the right terminology, though it's in the right direction. I think it's more like when Clinton was caught using a private server for classified information, but Comey said that "no reasonable prosecutor" would pursue the claims. He flat out said that she broke the law, but that there should be no prosecution (he didn't have that authority, but the FBI saying not to do it on national TV tends to have that effect anyway). Bragg's indictment is the opposite - taking a novel criminal claim that's on the edge of illegality at best and literally making a federal case out of it. Very few people seem to think that it's a valid legal theory or likely to result in Trump's conviction, yet it was pursued anyway despite Trump being a former president and leading presidential contender.
Former high level Republican candidates likely would have received the same deference that Clinton did. Trump seems to be the anomaly here.
As with most people, I have mixed feelings about high level politicians literally getting away with crimes. The alternative is generally considered worse, banana-republic kinds of things where the state apparatus can be (and therefore will be) use against politicians in order to win elections. Other than with Trump, it appears that our approach is to err on the side of letting things go. There's no way that 250 years of US presidents never had one break a law after they were in office until just now.
Have you considered that Trump is special less in how people react to him than in the way he acts? Again, he literally led/orchestrated a coup when he lost the election, and there were people who predicted that he would engage in that class of behavior years before he actually did it. This really should yield an update against the idea that those people are irrationally biased.
His entire personal/business history consists of doing whatever he wants, frequently in violation of laws and/or contracts, and then tying up complaints in civil litigation. It is unsurprising that he would have done whatever he wanted while campaigning, in violation of laws w/r/t/w most other candidates at his level work to maintain compliance. Particularly if you didn't have prior experience with him, you might underestimate the degree to which this is a close analogue of "They got Al Capone for tax evasion." He's been making enemies in the NY metro area for decades both by being unscrupulous in ways that are only enforceable in civil courts, and by violating the law primarily in ways that are hard to prove and/or informationally contained (ie, it's predictable that criminal acts are potentially provable given the first domino of probable cause evidence to justify further searches, but without the first piece of PC evidence you can't justify the subpeona/search to get more.)
Perhaps it is the case that former presidents have broken the law many times before, but what evidence of that existed contemporaneously?
Framing the Stormy Daniels payment as "wrote from the wrong account" is strawmanning. They took active measures to conceal that money was being spent at all, and made a broader effort to suppress other prior affairs, which makes sense at that time only because publicity close to the election might be bad.
"Again, he literally led/orchestrated a coup when he lost the election, and there were people who predicted that he would engage in that class of behavior years before he actually did it."
To be fair, for literally every US President since Ronald Reagan, I heard many, many people predicting that they would lead or orchestrate a coup if they lost an election. I'm only going to update my assessment of people who made that prediction of Trump but *not* of Bush Jr or Obama.
Sure, I could be more specific. There were 'serious' people who normally are pretty centrist and non-committal or otherwise stay out of domestic politics, as well as a lot of people who are predictably partisan, who bucked their normal trends to say that Trump was dangerous. He then proved to be so.
Who made comparable predictions about Bush 43? I remember people going as far as, say, calling his policies 'creeping fascism', but I don't remember someone actually saying 'this guy behaves like an authoritarian and might deliberately break the democratic system'.
Trump was a criminal long before he ran for president in 2016. He had been committing various forms of financial fraud, sexual assault, etc. for years. He ran for president to make it seem like his crimes catching up to him were political persecution, rather than the result of a life of being a criminal.
He committed very brazen crimes to try and stay in power and to suppress investigations into him because he knew he would be prosecuted the moment he wasn't in charge for his crimes.
> the conspiracy version requires us to believe that insurgents like Shamir Basayev were willing to lie about the origin of the bomb to help Putin for some reason.
Shamil (not Shamir) Basaev disavowed the bombings in 1999.
“Today, in an interview with Radio Liberty, Khattab said that he does not fight women and children. According to him, Russian law enforcement agencies are trying to blame him on their failures in the fight against unknown terrorists. "He set specific military tasks, and explosions of peaceful houses in Moscow or in other Russian cities are not among them," Khattab said. The field commander admits that some of his words, spoken between battles, may be misinterpreted by journalists, but Khattab says that he never threatened to kill the civilian population of Russia. "Dagestan's destruction from the presence of Russian troops," he says. According to Shamil Basayev, professionals working in the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the FSB of Russia know perfectly well who can be behind the explosions of residential buildings in Moscow. He is sure that statements about his involvement in the attacks are designed for the layman. Basayev claims that the explosions in the Russian capital are the result of a power struggle in Moscow. "The main thing is that the President be elected democratically," Basayev believes.” September 1999
Short quotes Basayev as saying that the first explosion was "not our work, but the work of the Dagestanis" in an interview with Lidove noviny, September 9, 1999. Lacking the ability to read Czech and track down the article, that's as good as I can do for sourcing.
It would be nice to see one of those ACX Adversarial Collaborations on the 1999 apartment bombings, although I lack the skills to participate. The whole thing is intriguing to me because it's really important in Putin-understanding. In Short's narrative Putin starts out half-decent and becomes evil. If he came to power by killing 300 innocent people in their sleep, that narrative disintegrates.
The original interview does not appear to be online, but here is what claims to be the key excerpt from it, in Czech: https://legacy.blisty.cz/art/11987.html. You can translate it by google translate or something like that (excerpt is only middle part of the article, beginning and the end are author's own commentary plus another two excerpts).
That author has credibility issues, but I think this is genuine. And Basayev is quoted as saying what Short says he did say.
Wow, thank you for digging this up. Yeah, beyond the direct Short quote, the longer passage is basically "I condemn terrorism, now here is why it was justified"
“Majority of Russians hardly believe in God, but find some kind of church desecration (and what Pussy Riot did would qualify in people's mind) to be disgusting”
I think that’s fairly universal. In your head substitute mosque or synagogue, if not.
As a person who grew up in a third-generation atheistic family in Russia I found it as least distasteful and unnecessary. Funnily their intent was not of desecration - it was a prayer to the Lord and Mother Mary to save Russia from Putin. There were very few visitors in the church at that moment, so hardly a lot of damage to religious sensitivities was done. So it was not a huge deal until it was made into one, Russia has a minor criminal offence for such cases. The powers above decided to make a witch trial out of it and the penalty - 2 years of prison was absurdly excessive. The whole thing was a seed for Putin's capitalisation on conservatism. There are few things that Russians enjoy then public flagellation of various "abnormals" (incl gays, liberals, feminists, and now anti-war activists). It was the same year when "gay propaganda" because penalised. And the public support for Pussy Riot prosecution paved the way to introduction of a new and separate criminal penalty for "the offence of religions sensitivities (feelings)".
It does seem like there's a debate to be had as to whether the first domino has fallen with regards to political prosecutions in the US. It feels like it could go either way from here.
Ultimately, there may be other ways to accomplish the things that a political prosecution accomplishes, that are even easier to get away with.
> Soviet / Russian universities sometimes admit and keep mediocre students who are good in sports to score some cookie points with the higher authorities
As opposed to American universities? (Yes, I know they're doing it for a different reason.)
I think it was largely for the same reasons. There were no professional sports leagues in the USSR. There were college sports (and universities needed good athletes for prestige) and for "major leagues" you had teams of athletes who at least nominally worked in the same state enterprise (usually a factory).
There has to be a balance between prosecuting politicians who commit crimes and not prosecuting them when it's just political persecution from their opponents.
If every politician gets prosecuted, that's bad, but if no politicians get prosecuted, that's also bad. The challenge is striking the right balance. In the last 50 years, three Presidents (Nixon, Clinton, Trump) have face serious legal peril (Nixon was pardoned after resigning, Clinton was impeached but not convicted and then beat a bunch of attempts to prosecute him before they went to trial, Trump is ongoing). The other six (Ford, Carter, Reagan, both Bushes and Obama) were clean enough not to really have too much to worry about (even Iran-Contra never got near the Presidents).
That strikes me as a reasonable level of balance: if you do the normal sorts of things that Presidents do, you'll be OK, even if some of those could technically be regarded as a violation of a law. If you cross a line, then you'll get prosecuted. And that applies to both parties: Clinton was shady enough that he got into a lot of legal difficulties.
At lower levels, criminal investigations and prosecutions (mostly for political corruption) happen often enough that they're not even necessarily headline news, but the vast majority of politicians go through a career without facing legal consequences.
Worth noting that Clinton didn’t completely evade legal consequences. He was disbarred and paid $850,000 to Paula Jones. When he left office he was more than $16 million in debt
I think an open debate is happening about what it means to "cross a line" between normal stuff and things that should be prosecuted. My read on Trump is that the only thing he really did different was being a giant blowhard and uncouth. If "lying" were the offense, then just about every president in the last 100 years would qualify - and both Clintons similar to Trump. Otherwise I'm not seeing a fundamental difference. You name the crime, and variations of it seem to also apply to Biden, Clinton, and sometimes even Obama. Not to mention Obama ordering the extrajudicial killing of an American citizen, which is something that I don't know of any other president ever doing.
They all had problems with illegal and illicit campaign donations. They all had problems with classified documents after leaving office. You can say J6 was different, but that's only in 1/3 of the indictments and they were going after Trump long before January of 2021.
Take a look at the classified documents cases: the core difference seems to be that the others (not just the Democrats, but Pence and Bush and Cheney) either when they themselves noticed or when the National Archives caught them, apologised, agreed to send the documents back, and generally weren't assholes about it. Trump tried to claim he didn't have to send them back, tried to hide it (not just from the public but from the National Archives or the prosecutors or even his own lawyers) and generally was an asshole about it.
Letting people off with a warning when they accept they've done wrong, make it good (ie return stuff) and promise not to do it again is a thing that all sorts of police and prosecutors do.
I do think that Trump's core problem is that he's an asshole and he antagonises prosecutors and investigators. If you're an FBI Special Agent or a United States Attorney, you expect people to be scared of you and deferential to you. Trump isn't, and that makes them want to cut him down to size.
But also - there is a difference between "I made a fuck up, I'm sorry, I'm returning everything" and "those documents are mine, come fite me". I think this is what the old saying "it's not the crime, it's the cover-up" comes from: admitting you did something wrong when caught can reduce the penalties dramatically; trying to hide it and fight it is always going to result in the prosecution coming down hard.
But that says nothing about political bias or politicisation of prosecutions and everything about idiosyncratic aspects of Trump's personality.
That's why I think that someone else who'd implemented Trump's policies - a Greg Abbot or a Ron DeSantis - would not have faced prosecution at the time, and if elected as President in 2024 would not be prosecuted ... and that's why I think this isn't a political persecution.
I agree with you enough to say that I'm uncertain. I completely agree that Trump's attitude and presentation make it easier to accuse him of things, and more likely it will happen.
On the other hand, I have seen enough Republican presidential candidates get accused of random things to have serious doubts about any specific accusation. They called John McCain a racist and harassed Mitt Romney because he thought we should be more wary of Russia. For that matter, they called Romney a racist too. Bush 2 was accused of just about everything you can imagine. And even before he announced for office Ron DeSantis was being pilloried by partisan Democratic outlets for things that shouldn't have been a problem even if true (or as Deiseach shared above, are completely normal like being a Catholic - which Biden himself is!).
Sure: but Democratic candidates also get accused of random things, like Obama being born in Kenya or being a Muslim; Biden being a radical socialist; Hillary Clinton being involved in the murder of Vince Foster, etc. That's just how politics works at the moment. I'd like it not to (and I really admired McCain for standing up to it when he told someone in a town hall that Obama was "a decent family man and a citizen and[sic] I just happen to have disagreements with on public issues") but I don't know how to fix that.
The difference is that when they're saying this about a Republican, the MSM (places like the NY Times and Washington Post) will say "people accuse Republican X of being a racist", but they'll say "people falsely accuse Democrat Y of being a socialist" They don't endorse the dubious claims, but they are much more likely to positively reject them in one direction than the other.
His agent, and not on the cover, but on the official bio they distributed to promote the book. But yes, that happened. In 1991.
People make stupid mistakes and going from "Obama's father was Kenyan" to "Obama was born in Kenya" is the sort of mistake that some junior staffer who hasn't read the book is likely to make.
My point here is that a number of people who didn't like Obama jumped at this, not because any kind of serious assessment of the evidence led them there, but because it provided an excuse to attack someone they didn't like. There's a lot of that in American politics, and there has been for a long time: "The Paranoid Style in American Politics" dates back to 1964.
>Take a look at the classified documents cases: the core difference seems to be that the others (not just the Democrats, but Pence and Bush and Cheney) either when they themselves noticed or when the National Archives caught them, apologised, agreed to send the documents back, and generally weren't assholes about it.
The obvious rebuttal to this is Hillary's disingenuous response to being caught running an email server with classified documents where she pretends not to know anything about what happened to the server under her control ("Like with a cloth or something?") definitely doesn't meet this criteria. There are also a lot of other convenient cases of 'nope, all the hard drives / phones have been destroyed! Sorry we have nothing to hand over! Tee hee!' And then there's Sandy Berger, the former National Security Advisor that walked out of the Archives with classified documents and then destroyed them.
That "cloth" response was sarcasm, and it is bad faith to act otherwise.
The use of private email servers for such purposes was common in the Bush administration. The Hillary Clinton email "controversy" was fake news.
The private email server never had much classified information on it; it was incidental leakage, the sort we are seeing constantly happen because the government has a hard time keeping secrets.
>I do think that Trump's core problem is that he's an asshole and he antagonises prosecutors and investigators.
Gee. Why could that be? They certainly didn't wiretap his campaign manager based on intelligence they knew was bogus and then try to undermine his presidency for 4 years. They certainly didn't attempt to manipulate the media in both his electoral runs against him by suppressing stories negative to his political opponent. Gee whiz. You'd almost think he should be enthusiastic about bending over and spreading when they request his temperature.
I think the assumption you have here and that Trump shares that the prosecutors and investigators are the same people as did all of those other things is one of Trump's bigger problems. They aren't. These are lots of different people from various different factions, many of whom hate each other, and Trump doesn't have the ability to divide and rule.
The thing about being uncouth and a giant blowhard is that it undermines the tolerance for Presidential skullduggery which is in part based on maintaining an air of professional plausible deniability.
As in “we’ll let you get away with this, but you need to give us *something* we can use to justify not nailing you for it”. Trump’s general attitude of “I’m the president I can do whatever I want”, tendency to go for “big lies”, and lack of competent counsel make it very believable that he’s failed to do the pro forma ass covering necessary to get away with “normal” behavior.
While I agree with all of that, I have to ask if that's really the "line" that we want? As long as our politicians deny it in a particular way, and have good legal counsel, we're okay with it? That seems like a really crappy way to differentiate the same behavior.
The alternatives are 1) take the laws off the books or 2) aggressively prosecute every politician. So “business as usual so long as you make the appearance of respecting the rule of law” might be the lesser of evils.
Really comes down to whether you consider “typical” political bad behavior to be more like murder or speeding.
I can agree with that. Unfortunately, when the people have knowledge (or strong reason to believe) that the crime was committed either way, it erodes trust to prosecute one and not another. As mentioned above, Hillary's "like, with a cloth?" comment about erasing evidence of an actual crime doesn't hold water with anyone. And Trump is denying claims against himself too, just often in a similarly unbelievable way.
I struggle with how Clinton was treated (publicly stated that we should not prosecute her for known crimes) and how Trump is being treated (people actively talking about how to get some kind of charges against him, along with at least some of the charges against him being weak and not something we would prosecute anyone for, let alone a major candidate).
This is honestly the thing that bothers me no end about the various Trump prosecutions.
Trump, like Biden and every other living president, is flagrantly guilty of crimes against humanity on a massive scale. And violating his oath of office, as well as presumably various and sundry corruption. But heaven forbid we touch any of that. let's go after classified document process crimes and novel legal theories about inciting insurrection.
I had to do some checking to even find this reference - I think you mean Nawar al-Awlaki? Your depiction that the order "was to kill a little American girl" is flat out wrong. She did die in a raid, but the raid was not against her and her killing, though very unfortunate, was not intentional. Several US presidents have incidentally killed American citizens, which aligns with my previous point about Trump doing things others have done. Obama's order was targeted by name, knowing that the target was a US citizen.
I will agree with Antimemetics here that the real crimes are being ignored while we go after process crimes. The real crimes implicate other presidents more than Trump, but we're used to ignoring all of that.
Not only did a little American girl die but a Navy SEAL along with multiple innocent civilians died and it was FUBAR from the jump…almost like the Deep State wanted Trump compromised and he fell for their trap.
I'm not sure what your point is - that Trump is mostly innocent and people are out to get him? That he's responsible for Navy SEAL tactics on the ground? Someone told him the results would have been a little girl and a Navy SEAL dying and he said something like "oh, yeah, make sure both of them get killed!"
If you're arguing, as Antimemetics did, that the US should not raid and assassinate individuals like we do, I agree with you. Anything more specific about Trump, or saying he did the same thing as Obama in ordering the murder of an American citizen, is false.
So Obama and Hillary aren’t responsible for Benghazi?? And Trump appointed Rosenstein who appointed Mueller and so Trump did a lot of dumb things in his first two years.
I’ll admit upfront that this is fuzzy, but I get the sense that a difference between Trump and Nixon/Clinton is a public consensus that what he’s accused of doing, if he actually did it, is so bad as to warrant actually prosecuting him. I think that’s necessary to overcome the (healthy) aversion to prosecuting politicians for more ambiguous sins. No, Trump cannot get away with shooting a guy on 5th avenue. But could he get away with obstructing an investigation people thought was trivial or unjust in the first place? Maybe (and maybe he should)?
Burglarizing and spying on your political opposition, with your direct involvement and knowledge provable? Bipartisan agreement that that crosses the line.
Sexual harassment and assault? Bad, if provable - but note that Clinton (partially) escaped once it devolved, in the public eye, into just trying to nail him for lying about a BJ.
With Trump, there is a sense that motivated prosecutors are throwing shit at the wall to see what sticks. They have been shown their man and are now trying to show you his crime. The NY prosecution (by a politician who literally ran on a platform of prosecuting Trump) is using a fairly tortured interpretation of the law to try to nail him for what would be a federal crime, except that the Feds declined to prosecute. The “insurrection” indictment is tainted by the fact that there is no consensus that J6 was actually an insurrection in the first place (as opposed to just a particularly high-visibility “mostly peaceful” riot, of which we’d been conditioned to accept).
The classified docs stuff seems like the most straightforwardly obvious “he did an illegal thing, lied about it, got caught, and is being prosecuted the way you’d expect such a thing to go down”. But even there, you’ve got the problem of his two most prominent political opponents having their own very public problems with document handling, and not facing direct legal consequences for them, creating the appearance of impropriety.
Some of this is the objective difference and some of it is raw polarization, I’ll concede that, but I do think the main thing I’m scratching at is important: if you want a prosecution of a politician to not look like political persecution, the underlying crime needs to be broadly seen as unambiguously worthy of prosecution.
"there is no consensus that J6 was actually an insurrection in the first place"
I wonder if this new law review article, coming from two prominent conservative legal professors who are active members of the Federalist Society, will encourage such a consensus?
If a 126 page law review article published 2.5 years after the fact is required to explain why the event was an insurrection, I feel fairly confident that the type of public consensus I’m talking about here is unlikely to be reached within the lifetime of any of the principals.
It took 1.5 years after the Senate Watergate hearings for national polling on whether Nixon should be removed from office to shift in stages from 81-19 "no" to 60-40 "yes". Articles explaining how his actions were real crimes (my father remembered it that nobody he knew had even heard of "obstruction of justice" before), were part of that.
"This sounds like a conspiracy theory on par with "9/11 was an inside job".
..."
There are several reasons why the two are not comparable. First there is basically no evidence that Bush did 9/11, whereas there is plenty of circumstantial evidence Putin was behind those bombings. It would also be a lot more difficult to get multiple people to sacrifice their own life for your conspiracy compared to just placing a couple of bombs in an appartment building.
Second, Putin could just have the lower level people executing on this assasinated.
Third in a deeply corrupt system without rule of law where bribery and assassination of political enemies is not exactly uncommon, it is a lot easier to get away with a scheme like this. For starters Putin would probably know a fair number of people who he could order to kill someone from his FSB and St Petersburg days. He would have a lot more tools at his disposal to punish/reward co-conspirators than Bush would have. It would be far more riskier to blow the whistle on Putin than on Bush.
In a system with stronger rule of law where this would be very uncommon, the moment Bush would approach someone to assassinate someone, that person would now have a lot more leverage over him than in the same scenario with Putin's Russia in the 90's, early 2000's that has more of a "law of the jungle" system as opposed to "rule of law". And there would be powerful institutions that could be used to persecute and make Bush's life very difficult in the US. Which were not really present in Russia during that time.
You would also need a proper free press to blow the whistle and properly spread this information, which was missing in Russia and present in the US. Further incentivizing people to keep quiet.
Finally we even have strong evidence of at least 1 assassination associated with the bombings, Litvinenko!
I think it's much more interesting to ask if the CIA did 9/11 than if Bush did. I can imagine a situation where the CIA is pissed off Bush is taking Iraq more seriously than Bin Laden, and scrabble together a Bin Laden attack to try to force his hand.
About Navalny. It is true that his earliest agenda is ultranationalistic and bad, but since then he has become undoubtedly a force for good in Russian politics. He exposed a LOT of corruption in the government, and led efforts to consolidate voting against the ruling party officials (so called Smart Voting), which succeeded in many places despite the elections being rigged. Then he was poisoned by the FSB, managed to recover, and returned to Russia knowing he would be arrested, and has been in prison ever since. When he tried to run for president in 2018 and when he made public (from prison) his views on the desired future for Russia, there were no traces of the ultranationalist agenda. In this context, seeing him dismissively mentioned (guy doing a genocide infomercial) exclusively in the context of his old views feels wrong and unfair (for me as a liberal Russian), and not unlike judging a person by their 15-year-old tweet which they now disagree with.
In 2020 he also (falsely) blamed Putin's power on ethnic minorities and condemned Russia's exploitation by "Tatar elites":
>Ну а другая сторона сделки, то есть Путин, дает татарским элитам воровать так, как не снилось самым наглым московским единороссам
>Well, the other side of the deal, i.e. Putin, allows the Tatar elites to steal in a way that the most brazen Moscow United Russians could not have dreamed of
Lukashenko did the same thing, and then became a terrible dictator.
And it was a little bit more than 1 tweet. And there were more recent things as well.
In essences there are no good guys here. That is the problem with Russia. Their culture is deeply rotted from the inside through and through.
Westerners would like a narrative where some shining knight in white armor will come in and turn Russia around and defeat all the bad guys, but this will likely not happen anytime soon.
I was looking forward to this post, dictator's club comment highlight articles are nearly as good as the articles themselves.
I'm starting to grow a theory myself about how dictators come to be dictators and holding on to power: it's never against or in spite of the people. Dictators also need consent, but in a different currency than democratic leaders. On the other hand, in the zero-sum game a dictator wins when becoming and staying a dictator, somebody needs to be paying. That is the middle class in its entirety and most of the upper-middle class. A dictator who only slightly tilts elections (5% or so) and holds the media power only needs around 30-40% of the voters to stay loyal to him. The cheapest loyalty to buy is the loyalty of the poorest, which can be in the form of generous unemployment benefits (I mean minimum wage generous, not Norwegian unemployment benefits generous), early retirement schemes, benefits for people who look after others in their homes, direct monetary benefits to rural farmers instead of subsidies which would necessitate for them to actually farm their fields so they can now directly cash the checks while fields lay empty, and the kind. Once a dictator-to-be who is merely a democratically elected leader for now chooses to buy the cheapest 40% of the people, which are usually the least educated 40% and secures the next elections with them with a landslide, next is to this way or that way take over media. Media in itself is barely profitable, so fellow oligarchs who are fed gov't contracts can be ordered to buy media outlets as the price of those contracts. Once the 40% and the media are in place the rest is easy. Win every election, stuff the judiciary with your people, and get the productive people of your country to pay for all that.
Many productive people will immigrate to better pastures, but the majority either has too many connections in the country to leave, has a job that's only valued locally (for example lawyers who are proficient with your country's laws and cannot enter bar in another), or simply cannot find a job abroad yet (it's not easy). In a decade or two, professions that used to earn a couple of times the minimum wage will be earning more or less the minimum wage. They might just choose to do an easier job and make a similar amount of money, but not everyone does that because they respect their jobs or something. In the end, the extra taxes that they pay are fed to the 40% and the system goes on.
I don't want to make this post any longer, but so far any hole I can think of in this scenario has a fix unfortunately. I would've thought in the long run the loss of productivity would tank the economy so hard even the 40% would be impossible to buy, but then the education becomes so bad it becomes easier to buy them.
So I can say that the secret ingredient to a dictator rising is him making the top 0.1% and bottom 40% allies, squeezing all the juice in the middle among themselves and keeping the system running.
There must be *some* "hole" in your theory, or else all nations in the world would be sham democracies, run by dictators with minority support.
What I mean is that there must be some powerful counter-weight to this process that arrives at a sustainable balance point short of sham democracy/functional dictatorship.
Ah, so only "flawed democracies" are vulnerable to this risk? What flaws do you see as making this possible. What makes a population "cheaply buyable"?
Think Hungary, Russia, Turkey, Franco's Spain, Salazar's Portugal, Pinochet's Chile... Any country with more human capital than a natural resource to capitalize which cannot dictate with everybody at gunpoint but create some kind of consent but not too much human capital so that it's still possible to buy off the cheapest 40%. With less human capital you can just be a dictator keeping everyone on gunpoint like many sub-Saharan African dictatorships or Latin American banana republics. With more human capital it's too expensive to buy a big enough block to consistently win flawed but not completely sham elections.
More or less so; not with regards to population size but with regards to the ratio of government budget to the income of the 60% percentile (poorest 40%). There's also the tradition of democracy in the population which has an effect, but I'm not sure how much.
When the people are really poor related to the government, they can just be held at gunpoint. All this scheme is only necessary when the easier option of holding at gunpoint isn't doable.
Now when I was writing this reply, I thought about the Western countries having the problems with their 40%ers, the yellow jackets in France, the Brexiteers in UK, the farmers in the Netherlands, the whatever is going on over there in USA; I wonder if a savvy populist demagogue would just embrace them and use them to proper themselves and stay in power. All a prospective dictator needs to do is to, after getting democratically elected, to create schemes, incentives, etc that would directly pay his electors selectively, and little else of the population. That's easier than it sounds. It hasn't been done in a country that has a long running history of democracy (Russia, Hungary etc are ex-iron curtain countries; Spain, Portugal were relatively just out of monarchy; Chile had some history but USA put their finger on the scales too much there; Turkey had some history of democracy but hasn't fallen all the way into dictatorship yet) so there might be some other factors; but it might also be that no self respecting politician in an old democracy dares to try this. We'll see more in the upcoming decades :)
Perhaps the 40% also needs to like you on an emotional level, which is based on random factors. It’s not rocket science to enact (or promise) some populist measures, but then the 40% just deem you not charismatic enough.
I used to work as a management consultant in corporate type settings, and I could regale you with tale after tale of upper management types who tried and failed to convey a sense of understanding and caring about their subordinates. Clueless attempts at a superficial sense of sympathy can do more harm than none at all!
yes, the good old nationalism, the "world is against us" discourse, some twisted kind of traditionalism, a created cult for the leader; they're all tools they use.
of course, some are just better at this than others. they either should believe their own crap, or at least act good enough that people believe. The moment it seems like he's just putting on a show it hurts their chances of success a lot.
By the way, this is exactly what happens sometimes to good democratic opposition. The people want a strongman-ish person, so seeing they're behind on the polls they try to act like one but that being an act becomes too evident and it becomes counterproductive.
I think your getting confused because Putin started out as a democratic leader of a severely flawed democracy, and as his popularity from creating order and higher oil prices waned, he became increasingly more authoritarian and corrupt.
In fact corruption is a feature of authoritarian rule, without it you cannot really stay in power.
Thanks for the link, I didn't know about this and find it enlightening but I think it agrees with me. I say countries with a certain setting are prone to their leaders (elected or appointed) finding the cheapest winning coalition and milking the rest of the country with that winning coalition plus the oligarchs. That's very similar for example of Putin and Erdoğan.
"Soviet / Russian universities sometimes admit and keep mediocre students who are good in sports to score some cookie points with the higher authorities..."
Wow, that sounds deeply corrupt. So glad we don't do that here in the US.
Here's a conversation I had with a Chinese friend:
[me] Compared to China, no respectable US school has any transparency at all
[me] There are schools with transparent admissions, but there are no good schools like that
[her] But SAT, that's still a transparent number? Right?
[her] How much does it weigh in enrollment?
[me] SAT is a transparent number, but the effect of your SAT score on admission is a mystery
[me] You send your application and you hope
[me] It is called "holistic admissions" - holistic 基本是“主观”的意思 ["holistic" basically means "subjective"]
[me] So I had 满分 [a perfect score - note that this sounds much more impressive in China, where perfect scores on the gaokao don't ever happen], but I was not accepted to Stanford 😜
[her] geeeez
[her] how can you guys stand this unfair system so long
-----
The simple model of the Chinese system is that you take the university entrance examination, you apply to a school, and the school admits applicants top down in order of examination score.
There are a lot of wrinkles to that (in particular an extensive system of affirmative action by geographic location) and there are side channels by which it's possible to be admitted without a qualifying score. But the simple model really does hold, modulo geography, for a majority of Chinese university admissions.
Mostly correct. You frequently hear how high party officials send their children to study overseas in order to spare themselves the embarrassment of having a child attend a mediocre school.
The high officials do still have some advantages; in particular, admissions thresholds for Beijing are noticeably lower than for most other places in China.
Regarding the comment suggesting that Putin is smart, I don't think it's evidence for that claim.
Maybe he's smart, maybe he's not. But it's not at all clear that ability to hire talented, smart advisors is even positively correlated with intelligence. Indeed, you might even imagine that smart leaders have more trouble bringing themselves to hire competent managers because the want to inject their own ideas into everything or assume that they can do everything better than the experts (think physics disease).
Probably, ability to select and listen to talented advisors is more important than being smart. Unfortunately, there is a temptation to use 'smart' to describe whatever trait causes one to make good decisions.
When talking about the FBI having political bias, don't forget that James Comey, director of the FBI, broke with precedent to make an announcement about the whole Clinton email situation 1 week before the election specifically to sabotage her and get Trump elected.
Ultimately, I think the CIA and FBI are not Democratic leaning at all, they just appear that way because they're conservative in the traditional sense of the word and opposed things like the ending of the Iran deal, America lessening its NATO obligations, anything else that made America less of an international influence, which Trump was strongly pushing but which wasn't otherwise a mainstream element of Republican policy until Trump made it so.
If you were to ask most senior CIA/FBI/military officials what kind of leader they would most prefer, I'm pretty sure they would pick a Mitt Romney/George H.W. Bush type pro-military conservative over any Democrat, but any centrist Democrat over an isolationist anti-establishment Trump type of politician.
I think you're confusing what Comey *did*, with what Comey *intended*.
Comey probably did move the needle just enough to push Trump over the top in the swing states he needed in an extraordinarily close election, and so in a sense Comey "got Trump elected".
But that was not something that anyone could realistically have planned. At the time Comey made that decision, polling put Trump at ~20% if you believed Nate Silver, and I think <5% for just about everyone else. The election was predicted to go to Hillary by a substantial margin, and Comey's late revelation pushing a few of the tiny fraction of voters who hadn't already made up their minds away from Hillary, would not have changed that.
As a plan to swing an election, that's about like throwing a small hamster onto the trolley tracks to save the five innocent trolley-god sacrifices, then finding out that the trolley was horribly unbalanced and right on the brink of derailing anyway. And no, the FBI does not have a secret election superduperforecasting division that knew how the election was actually going to turn out.
What does make sense for Comey in that position, is to realize that the Wiener investigation and the second Hillary email cache, were going to come out *eventually*. If they came out after the election, coupled with the knowledge that Comey had sat on them beforehand, that would look like a coverup and damage the legitimacy of both the new (Hillary) administration and of the FBI. In an environment when Trump and the GOP were already doing everything they could to tear down both.
An executive-branch agency head engaging in conspicuous transparency to protect the integrity of his agency and of the administration as a whole, seems unobjectionable in intent.
> What does make sense for Comey in that position, is to realize that the Wiener investigation and the second Hillary email cache, were going to come out *eventually*. If they came out after the election, coupled with the knowledge that Comey had sat on them beforehand, that would look like a coverup and damage the legitimacy of both the new (Hillary) administration and of the FBI.
Pfizer doesn't seem to have suffered any consequences for seeking and getting permission to break from its published research plan so as not to have to release any results before the presidential election, and the FDA (?) doesn't seem to have suffered any for giving that permission.
For those who like decision theory applied to Putin and his cronies contemplating to kill 300 countrymen to boost his reelection chanches, you are likely to enjoy Taibbi's story about how the people behind the "9/11 conspiracy" must have weighted the pros and cons, before they reached their decision. I copy-paste part of the story here, as it does not seem to be available through google.
Scene: A secret meeting of the Project for a New American Century, April, 1999.
In attendance are Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, Irv Kristol, and ... others.
Cheney, standing at the head of the table and glaring downward, addresses the group:
Cheney: Gentlemen, we stand at a crossroads.
Kristol: (whispering to Feith) I love it when we stand at a crossroads!
Feith: (giggling) Me, too. But I never know what to wear.
Cheney: Do you assholes mind?
Kristol: Sorry, Dick.
Feith: Me, too.
Cheney: Okay. (Clears throat). As I was saying, gentlemen, we stand at a crossroads ...
Kristol: (in Bill Murray-esque fashion, mimicking suspense-movie soundtrack) Dunh-dunh-dunh!
Feith: Okay, okay. (to Cheney) No, it's okay, Dick, you can go on.
Cheney: You're sure? No more jokes to make? Guys want to do your goddamn Katherine Hepburn impersonations or something?
Kristol: (Channeling "On Golden Pond") Come on, Norman! Hurry up! The loons, the loons!
Feith: (whispering) Shut up, for Christ's sake! (to Cheney) Our lips are sealed, Dick. Honest.
Cheney: Okay. Jesus. As I was saying ... we, uh, stand at a crossroads.
(Pauses warily, continues). I think we all know about Marion King Hubbert's projections about the future of oil reserves. Once oil "peaks," America -- an empire whose power is based almost entirely upon its oil dominance -- will officially be on the decline.
Wolfowitz: So what's your point? We're all old anyway. Who cares what happens 20 years from now?
Cheney: The point, Paul, is that the American empire as we know it will collapse within 20-30 years unless we find massive new supplies of oil and find them fast. By 2010 we're going to need to find fifty million additional barrels of oil per day. And there's only one place where we can get that much oil ...
Kristol: Sweden!
Feith: Of course. Let's invade! I hate those goddamn speed-skaters anyway.
Cheney: No, you assholes, not Sweden. Iraq. It's the only major oil-rich state whose reserves haven't been mostly exploited. There's probably seven million barrels a day minimum just sitting in those fields -- and the worst thing is, unless we get in there soon, it's all going to go to the French, the Russians and the Germans, since Saddam will sell to all of them long before he deals with us, assuming his UN sanctions get lifted at some point.
Wolfowitz: My God.
Cheney: So it's clear we've got to get in there. Are we agreed on this?
All: Agreed.
Cheney: All right. Well, I've got a plan.
Wolfowitz: We get George elected in 2000 and go in, right? Tell the public Saddam's in violation of his UN restrictions or some shit like that? He is anyway, isn't he?
Cheney: No, that would never work. The public would never stand for it.
(Everyone bursts out laughing)
Cheney: Seriously.
Wolfowitz: Oh, wait -- you're serious?
Cheney: Absolutely. No, I think the way to go is to cook up some kind of justification. Something that will really get the public behind the invasion ...
Feith: I know! We go to the UN, show bogus photos of Saddam's secret store of chemical and biological weapons, evidence of his nuclear weapons program. Tell the world he's planning to attack.
Cheney: No, no, that's not vivid enough, not Band of Brothers enough. We need the people all lathered up, their mouths full of spittle, howling for blood, like pit bulls. You guys need to think to scale, think big, think like Michael Bay.
Feith: Michael Bay, Jesus. Okay, okay, what, then?
Cheney: We bomb the World Trade Center.
Kristol: Perfect! And blame it on Saddam!
Cheney: No, we bomb the World Trade Center and blame it on Osama bin Laden.
Feith: Oh. How?
Cheney: Easy. First, we cultivate 19 suicidal Muslim patsies from a variety of Middle Eastern countries, I'd say mostly from Saudi Arabia. We bring them to the U.S., train them at U.S. flight schools. They
should be high-profile terrorist suspects who are magically given free reign by the security agencies to travel back and forth to various terrorist training camps to study passenger jet piloting. Actually that
process is already underway now. Our friends in the Clinton administration are seeing to it that four groups of Arab men are being brought along by the FBI and the CIA.
Wolfowitz: How is it that the Clinton administration is already helping us with this, when we haven't even planned this yet?
Cheney: They just are. Okay?
Wolfowitz: Okay, fine. And what do we do with these hijackers?
Cheney: We sit idly by while they plot to hijack a series of passenger jet planes and crash them into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and the White House.
Wolfowitz: And how do we get them to do that?
Cheney: We just do. You see, we worked with these people back in the old mujahadeen days in Afghanistan. So naturally we're still thick as thieves with them.
Feith: Oh, of course. So we get them to fly into these buildings. And the impact from the planes will bring down the World Trade Center.
Cheney: No, Doug, dammit, you're not following me. The impact from the planes most certainly won't be sufficient to knock down the Towers. We know this because we've privately conducted studies which show that the Towers will easily be able to withstand impact by two jets loaded to the
gills with jet fuel. That said, the jets will likely cause skyscraper fires hot enough to kill everyone above the point of impact; we're going to have to assume, of course, that the exits from the higher floors to
the lower floors will be mostly blocked after the collisions. So assuming we crash the planes about two-thirds of the way up each of the towers early on a business day, we're looking at trapping and killing a good three, four, maybe even five thousand people on the upper floors.
Feith: Fantastic. I love killing people in the finance industry. It's too bad the people on the lower floors will get to escape.
Cheney: It is too bad -- especially since we're going to blow up the rest of the building complex anyway.
Feith: We are?
Cheney: Yes. You see, the way I see it, our best course of action is to first crash planes into each the towers, trapping and killing those thousands on the upper floors of each building. After the impact, of
course, the people on the lower floors will find their way out of the building and on to the street, where they will achieve relative safety -- at which point we'll finally detonate the massive network of
explosive charges we've secretly hidden in the buildings in the weeks and months prior to the attacks.
Feith: Wait, why did we do that again?
Cheney: Because the buildings wouldn't have fallen down unless we did.
Wolfowitz: But why do we need the buildings to fall down?
Cheney: Because the events of the day will be insufficiently horrifying and impactful without the building collapses.
Feith: So why don't we detonate the charges earlier, so that we can kill the people on the lower floors, too?
Cheney: That's a good question. At some point we have to sacrifice effect for believability. You see, if the planes crash into the buildings and the buildings immediately collapse, everyone will be
suspicious and they'll immediately be onto the presence of the explosives. So what we have to do is let the planes crash into the building, give the jet fuel time to start fires that will "soften" the
building core, and then we detonate the charges. Afterwards, we'll be able to argue that the fires coupled with the impact actually caused the buildings to collapse.
Feith: Why will we be able to argue that? Didn't our studies show that impact and fire alone wouldn't have caused the buildings to collapse?
Cheney: Those were our secret, far-more-advanced studies, done with secret, far-more-advanced military technology. The vast majority of the world's civilian structural engineers, however, can be counted on after the incident to conclude that the buildings collapsed due to a combination of fire, impact, and the knocking off of fireproofing from the building beams.
Feith: Why can they be counted on to conclude that?
Cheney: Because that's what our secret research shows their not-secret research will show! Jesus Christ, work with me on this, will you?
Wolfowitz: I think I get it. We crash the planes, kill everyone above the impact of the planes, let the people underneath the impact out to safety, then collapse the buildings about an hour or so later using the explosives that we pointlessly incurred months and weeks worth of career- and life-threatening risk to covertly plant in a building complex visited by hundreds of thousands of people every week.
Cheney: Exactly! The actual deaths will mostly be caused by the planes. But we'll incur the massive additional risk simply to destroy the building, for effect, because it will look cool and scary on television.
(Excerpt from Matt Taibbi's book " The Great Derangement", Spiegel and Grau 2008.)
Pray tell, why did we get involved in the 1991 Persian Gulf conflict??? Oil!! So do you really believe that 2003 wasn’t about oil?? And do you understand that oil is a global market and so there is no way to “steal” oil because it always impacts the global market. And do you know that America was in an energy crisis from 2001-2009 and Tillerson was actually working on a solution to our lack of new natural gas production—he was investing tens of billions of dollars into Qatar to export LNG!! Tillerson is a member of the Bush inner sanctum. So Bush wanted to do to Iraq what Tillerson was doing to Qatar—make them wealthy beyond their wildest imaginations!!!!!!
If there's no way to "steal" oil because it's always going to reach the market, then how is 2003 "about oil"? The oil was always going to reach the market, and the profits were always going to go to the Iraqi government. The only question is *which* Iraqi government was going to get Iraq's oil revenues.
The United States did have an interest in that, and it's one that has nothing to do with oil that was always going to reach the market and profit one group of Iraqis or another.
Because in 2008 oil hit $130 barrel…had Iraq been producing 6 mbd on its way to 10 mbd then the price of oil never gets that high. Most people didn’t know what Tillerson was up to at the time because LNG was a novel form of energy…in 2023 it’s all very obvious.
That the premise for invading Iraq, according to the conspiracy theories at the time, is idiotic is Taibbi's initial (implicit) point.
Space allowed for comments does not allow presenting the full parody (and I also had to edit down the part I copy-pasted). But if you lack an entertaining read to start the week, here is Taibbi on how the conspirators reasoned with regard to the fourth plane, the one that fell down before hitting its target:
Kristol: That only leaves the last plane, I guess.
Cheney: Right. This one -- this one I think is going to be tricky.
Feith: How so?
Cheney: Okay, bear with me on this, okay? The plane takes off. Passengers, patsies, the whole deal. The hijackers take over the plane and start steering it toward the White House. But fuck them, okay? We step in, our jets scrambled, and we blow those fuckers out of the sky.
Feith: Boom!
Cheney: Of course, we can't exactly admit that we killed American passengers, even for a good reason like this would be. So we'll dream up a story about passengers overpowering the hijackers and downing the plane themselves. "Let's roll," a wife will hear her husband say on his cell phone, as he and his brave party of vigilantes storms the cockpit ...
Wolfowitz: Oh, I see, right. Because they learned from their families, by talking with them on their cell phones, the terrible fate of the World Trade Center. So they give their lives to save the White House ...
Feith: Wow. I'm going to cry, that's so beautiful.
Cheney: In reality, though, it'll be us downing the plane with an F-16 or something. The pilots will never talk, never. Nor will the air traffic controllers ...
Kristol: Oh, I like that. It's patriotic. So why do we shoot the plane down, though?
Cheney: Well, because otherwise the hijackers will crash into the White House. But we can't admit that to the public, they'll be horrified.
Kristol: But they're not real hijackers, are they? Aren't they patsies?
Cheney: Oh, right. Shit! Man, I'm getting confused. We should probably break for lunch soon.
Wolfowitz: No, Dick, I've got that one. You see, here's the thing. Maybe the passengers really will overpower the hijackers. If that happens, it goes without saying that we have to shoot the plane down. We can't let them land, because then the hijackers will talk, and our whole evil plan will be exposed.
Cheney: Right, right, that's exactly what might happen. So it goes without saying that we have to be prepared to fake a crash site to make it look like a crash, even though it'll really be us shooting the plane down.
Kristol: But how can we prepare a phony crash site in advance if we don't even know for sure right now that the passengers will overpower the hijacker-patsies? Or where or when that will happen? That shouldn't even be entering our minds at this point.
Cheney: Well, um ... fuck. Right again. Paul?
Wolfowitz: I don't know, man, I'm getting tired at this point. But I'm down with the general idea of shooting that plane down.
Cheney: If we have to.
Wolfowitz: Right, if we have to.
Kristol: But, wait -- also, don't we want the plane to crash into the White House?
Cheney: What, are you crazy? And kill innocent Americans?
Wolfowitz: Irv, come on, now.
Kristol: Guys, we've just decided to blow up the World Trade Center. Like five minutes ago.
Cheney: Well, but the White House.
Wolfowitz: Irv, the White House. You're talking about the White House.
Kristol: Okay, whatever. You know I'm all for it, whatever we do.
Cheney: Look, the point is, we do the Towers and pin it on bin Laden. That leads us to invade Afghanistan. A year and a half later, we invade Iraq.
Feith: And we blame the whole WTC thing on Saddam.
Cheney: Right, and ... wait, what? No! No, actually we never make that connection, because none exists. I figure we can just say he's in violation of his UN restrictions, and that will be a good enough reason to invade. He is anyway, right? In violation, I mean?
Bush failed to prevent 9/11 just as Trump failed to prevent China from unleashing a bioweapon into America…those are the facts. Why they chose not to prevent the attacks is irrelevant.
You seem invested in whatever narrative was fed to you…but do remember the Big 3 automakers going bankrupt?? That had to do with oil prices spiking and SUV sales crashing. You don’t think the elite knew the American economy was made possible by low oil prices?!? Everyone knew that in 2000 which is why Bush/Cheney had a plan to keep oil prices low…only they screwed up the plan.
>At each step in his career, he was promoted for no particular reason, or because he seemed so devoid of personality that nobody could imagine him causing trouble.
> I stick to my distinction between the mainstream Democrats and FALN, just as I would make a similar distinction between mainstream Republicans and right-wing terrorist militias.
Why? Two sentences prior, the post you quote points out:
> Obama commuted the sentence of of Oscar Lopez Rivera, the leader of the FALN Puerto Rican terrorist group.
If former President Obama is not a mainstream Democrat, who is? What's the type specimen for a mainstream Democrat who is far removed from Obama? What non-laughable definition of a mainstream Democrat excludes Obama?
That stuck out to me too. You have deep official partnerships between several different mainstream Democratic organizations, including the Democratic Party itself, and the left-wing terrorist militias. But you have to keep in mind the vast difference between the militias and their base of formal support. Apparently.
It's interesting that people don't think the Democrats have the stomach for this given Assange's position. Trump started it, but the Democrats are the ones effectively torturing him now.
>> Many of the worst perpetrators are still free and supported by the left: For example, Obama commuted the sentence of of Oscar Lopez Rivera, the leader of the FALN Puerto Rican terrorist group.
I'm disappointed no one understands the real story behind why shock therapy worked in Poland, but not Russia. Jeffrey D. Sachs, the architect of both programs explains why here. https://www.npr.org/transcripts/1097135961
Basically the US wanted Poland as an ally and wanted to crush Russia. The key would have been some monetary support to tamper down the inflation, the US blocked it and that somewhat forced the firesale of state assets that created the oligarchs.
"After the Watergate and COINTELPRO scandals of the early 1970s, several laws were passed to restrict police intelligence gathering within political organizations and tried to make it necessary to demonstrate that a criminal act was likely to be uncovered by any intelligence gathering proposed. Many files on radicals, collected for decades, were ordered destroyed. The unintended effect of the laws was to privatize the files in the hands of 'retired' intelligence officers and their operatives."
I agree it appears there's not enough common reality between us to make progress on the original disagreement. I observe that it was significantly my meta-framing of the discussion that made the level of disconnect evident instead of just shouting at each other. I will endeavor to respond to new ideas/analysis, and in some cases to consolidate/summarize on an idea that you didn't address, without relitigating; this is still a lot to say because yes this has gotten voluminous and also most of your final post is totally new-to-this-thread content disputing the consensus view of what the Insurrection was/did (much more extreme claims than skepticism about one particular grand jury bill). I will primarily follow your ordering of ideas, because the benefits of restructuring mostly apply in dialogue.
>> Normal people can't read laws and understand them. That's why lawyers ... exist
The civil court system is substantially skewed toward common law, where encyclopedic knowledge and understanding of precedents matters a lot. All aspects of the system are technical and opaque so that there is a lot of comparative advantage time value in having people specialized in it. However the US criminal law system is conventionally a codified system built on a common law foundation for axiomatic understanding of undefined terms; if you can read the statute, that tells you what the law is. You consult a lawyer on criminal matters because a) if you're charged or otherwise interacting with the CJ system, then the comparative advantage expertise argument applies, and b) it's hard to figure out which laws you have to look up. However, looking up a law is sufficient to know that law. (Non-rigorous citation: https://www.upcounsel.com/lectl-common-law-legal-system-and-the-criminal-law) So EG the statute on fraud that I cited representing it as ~"lies of all sorts" supersedes any common law convention that was more narrow to financial crimes. Of further note, if I'm reading the code annotations right, section 101 was initially enacted in 1948, so it post-dates and therefore wholly supersedes the Hammerschmidt citation vis-a-vis federal code.Incidentally, it seems like you disapprove of the common JD prerequisite to bar exams; if so, we found a place where we are copacetic, I agree that this denigration of apprenticeship in a trade that is almost entirely craft and experience is rather a shonda.
>>"not a Bayesian"
"Bayesian evidence" means the idea that small evidences can be meaningfully suggestive, especially in combination, even when short of dispositive proof, and that this is important because dispositive proof is rare. Maybe you're unfamiliar with that meaning, even though you're commenting here? I'm not especially "a Bayesian" myself, but there's a more fundamental disconnect if you don't accept that this concept is valid. Your reaction is what I'd expect if I had said "incontrovertible proof for Bayesians, who are of course the ultimate arbiters" (which, fair, Bayesian absolutists can be annoying) and you made no substantive response to my observation that 'lawsuits ALL failed, some dismissed with prejudice, some resulted in sanctions against involved parties". This fact pattern should make it harder for us to believe that the true thing is "they were working legitimately" and easier to believe that the true thing is "they were working illegitimately", in a way that neither "suits all dismissed" by itself nor "1 or a few suits, of which 1 dismissed with prejudice/sanctions" would require (dismissals are marginal if any evidence about good faith, even if ratio'd; 1 red flag could be aberrant). It probably also makes it easier to believe that the true thing is "there is a fundamental conspiracy against them", but rule of law isn't a conspiracy and many of our systems depend on operators applying good faith, so if operators demonstrably apply bad faith, it makes sense to sanction that. Obviously 'demonstrable' is a question of fact not law, and we'll probably disagree about whether it's true / court-provably true.
>>Exceptional... even Nixon wasn't charged
It's worth reiterating: the charges / act of charging is exceptional because the circumstance is utterly unprecedented, mobs have never before roamed the Capitol looking to capture and hang the VP. The most consequential act of Gerald Ford's presidency was that he nigh-immediately pardoned Nixon so that he couldn't be prosecuted for crimes, it was otherwise considered almost inevitable that he would have been. So the implication that this treats Trump's crimes as "more serious than Nixon's" isn't going anywhere. But also... these are more serious than Nixon's crimes: whatever else he did, Nixon let the votes speak when people cast them; he may have been all about putting fingers on the scale, but he never actually tried to knock the scale over and record his own ideas as official weights.
>>Mueller reportMueller left open some questions about Trump specifically because DOJ policy prevented him from considering charges against the President, but he indicted 20+ Russian operatives for election interference under charges like 'conspiracy to defraud the US' and 'conspiracy against the US', and he convicted Rick Gates and Paul Manafort on the same (campaign chairman and deputy chairman, not trivial lackeys, corruptly pardoned by Trump). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mueller_special_counsel_investigation#Criminal_charges"Collusion" as you well know was never a legal term, Mueller conservatively interpreted it as quid-pro-quo and other direct agreements. Anyone who wants to take up the banner of "Trump technically didn't violate any specific laws when he collaborated with an opposed foreign power to get elected" is welcome to it - specific legal violations really aren't the point when it comes to recognizing the difference between personal and national interest, and the prioritization between them. https://www.factcheck.org/2019/04/what-the-mueller-report-says-about-russian-contacts/
We know conclusively that infiltration of the Capitol was planned by Proud Boys etc. There are an extraordinary number of data points, including criminal convictions of leadership in groups that Trump specifically communicated with in advance, demonstrating that the Insurrection riot was deliberately coordinated. You won't acknowledge this, asserting that 'riots can just happen', etc. Obviously you doubt whether particular people planned it when you doubt that it was planned; but that prior doubt is factually incorrect. https://time.com/6277254/proud-boys-verdict-jan-6-insurrection/
Given this, Trump must have: wanted to stop it, or been indifferent to it, or wanted it to continue; he must have: been surprised, or known about it in advance. Etc. A theory that accepts the riot was planned, and explains the apparent communications and motivations between Trump / WH and rioters, and explains the memos proposing subversion of the ECA, while maintaining Trump didn't conspire to use those people to disrupt the Joint Session, would be interesting and impressive. Hand-waving it all way isn't.
Only in a time of great political polarization can you prosecute your political enemies and stay in power. If things are at all bipartisan your supporters will not look kindly on throwing the other side in jail. This is part of why Trump was impeached twice, why he is being charged with so many crimes, and why I fully expect Biden to be impeached before the election. This is a very polarized time and if everyone hates each other they don't mind if you threaten the other side this way.
Possibly. But Trump's vulnerability to prosecution may be due to the fact that he is not a politician. He did not rise through the system, making deals, compromising, working with enemies. In that sense, nobody in Washington owes him anything.
Biden, on the other hand, has been playing the game for many years. He knows where the bodies are buried, and therefore has a higher level of immunity. Or he did.
Interesting times.
No, the reality is that Trump was a life-long criminal.
Hunter Biden is a drug addict who happens to be related to someone very important, and pretended to be someone important himself to make money. The fact that he was always a mess of a human being is not much of a secret.
The problem is, Joe Biden isn't Hunter Biden, while Donald Trump committed a bunch of crimes personally.
After Trump demonstrably sent violent traitors to attack the Capitol, even Senate Republicans realized he needed the threat of removal hanging over his head, to prevent more treason. Had they not realized that, they would have immediately acquitted him as they had the power to do, rather than waiting until he'd left office. His "acquittal" in the Senate was an ill-considered reward for his choice not to defect to Russia.
I think there's a < 50% chance of Biden being impeached before the election, because I think the Republicans will have difficulty agreeing on a plausible pretext.
I think the Republicans have been very wary of impeaching Biden in a way that seems like revenge for Trump's impeachments. Republican voters hated the Trump impeachments and many would be similarly bothered by what they feel to be false or overhyped accusations against Biden. Not that they like Biden at all, or don't want him impeached. It's that they are now even more against false impeachments than if Trump had never been impeached.
As far as what do impeach Biden for, the obvious answer is corruption relating to Hunter Biden. It is now incontrovertible that Hunter was selling influence while his dad was VP, and that Biden was both aware and in some way involved. That millions of dollars was being paid by foreign nationals to Biden's family (including mostly incompetent Hunter and various grandchildren too young to be doing anything of value) is not in doubt. The defense at this point is that Hunter was selling the "illusion" of access, rather than denying something was being sold. That's a flimsy excuse at best, considering the amount of money being paid - someone expected results. Even if true that there was no quid-pro-qua because Biden didn't actually change his behavior, admitting that you took bribes but then reneged on your end of the deal doesn't seem much better. Both seem very impeachable.
Hunter Biden reminds me a lot of Neil Bush or Roger Clinton or Billy Carter - the unsuccessful (and probably incompetent) relative of a VP/President who makes money off of the shared surname and presumed connection to the VP/President. Even Obama had Malik.
The question for me is whether Hunter was selling access to Joe and the buyers got access to Joe, or whether Hunter was selling access to Joe and the buyers didn't get access to Joe, ie Hunter was conning people. Neither reflects well on Hunter, but no-one's voting for him (and, I note, he is being prosecuted). The former would not be acceptable for Joe: whether it extends to being impeachable or even illegal (political donations to gain access to politicians are entirely legal, even though they shouldn't be) is another question that I'd need to see a lot more details to answer.
Recent Congressional testimony by Devon Archer, business partner to Hunter, says that Biden was actively involved and would meet with Hunter's business associates. Other business associates have gone on record that Joe himself was receiving money. There's emails to and from Hunter saying not to use Joe's name directly, and other emails talking about getting a cut for "the big guy." I'm not sure how much evidence you would need to be at least suspicious.
Recent testimony of Devon Archer reveals that Hunter would occasionally call his dad and put him on speakerphone while they talked about the weather to prove to his clients he had a direct line. And Devon Archer was on Tucker Carlson the other day basically admitting that moves by the Obama administration in Ukraine during the time this was all happening actually fucked over their biggest client there. So... Maybe don't state this all as fact.
Thanks for this correction, I was surprised at the earlier post and was intending to review the testimony myself because it seemed to overstate the case.
The impression I'd got was that Hunter Biden had been trying to hype up his business connection to his father and Devon Archer believed the hype, and your post concurs with that.
Which means Joe Biden made the choice to help prove Hunter's connection and access and had to have done so knowing that the implication he was making was that a powerful actor was available to help the business. What else does his proximity have to do with anything?
Unfortunately Neal Bush is the only competent member of the Bush family…and he’s been on China’s payroll for 25 years. NOTHING TO SEE HERE!!
How do you make it illegal to pay for access to politicians? Is there a working example of an existing law somewhere that you support?
Yeah, that's why it is legal.
It's morally wrong, but there's no practical way to make it illegal.
The general consensus here seems to be that prosecuting political opponents is always political. It follows that there is no impartial justice that can be applied to politicians, and therefore no law that can constrain their actions. Only politics can.
I think that's basically the argument, one even very high level people are making. The best counterargument I've heard is that legal proceedings have explicit and tested methodology for determing facts, which obviously doesn't apply to politics.
The average Trump supporter wants Biden impeached. Maybe you are around activist Republicans that deep down hate Trump??
I think the elephant in the room for a lot of these discussions of Trump's legal trouble is that Trump did, in fact, do an incredible amount of blatantly illegal shit.
Now of course when a politician is facing the consequences of doing a lot of illegal shit, the standard defense is for their party to shout "the other party is doing it too and they're facing no consequences" (I heard it a lot in France when Sarkozy got a prison sentence for violating campaign finance limitations).
In that case, though, what is Trump's equivalent on the left? Hunter Biden comes to mind; he did some tax evasion, had a gun illegally, and was maybe involved in some influence-trading selling access to his father for cushy positions. All of that is bad (though Trump bragged about doing the first, Republicans tend to consider the second shouldn't be a crime, no comment about the third); none of it reaches the level of "incited riots that broke into the Capitol with a deliberate goal of intimidating the legislature as it ratified the election that didn't go his way" or "deliberately and knowingly kept classified documents he had was no clearance for, showed them to people who *definitely* didn't have clearance, refused to give them back when asked and lied about it multiple times".
A lot of the politicians on the left and right get away with illegal and immoral behavior, but they at least have plausible deniability to shield themselves with. Trump faces a lot of legal trouble because he not only did a lot of illegal shit, he did it in a way that made it extremely obvious to anyone how illegal it was and how much he didn't care.
Trump has yet to be charged with "Incitement", despite this being a potential crime that somebody could potentially be charged with. In the theoretical realm I mean.
That is, this idea that Trump very blatantly incited riots to do all these things you said is just a talking point. If it was real, then the media narrative and the legal indictments would be in sync. But they are not. Indeed, that they are not in sync is evidence for this being political persecution.
The only legal case against Trump that currently makes any sense at all is the documents case, but unfortunately, this is the case where those equivalents you ask for are the strongest. Said equivalents would be Biden and Hillary Clinton.
The phony electors scheme has plenty of evidence.
But it’s gotten lumped into “incited the J6 INSURRECTION” in the public mind, which sort of poisons the well. Ironically, I think the chance of legal success against Trump might be higher if the riot hadn’t happened.
As I mentioned above, you heard him incite the violent treason of Jan 6, and indeed his "legal" strategy had no chance of success without minions stealing electoral ballot boxes, so as to create legal uncertainty where none had existed before. Actual lawyers explained in detail, well before Jan 6, why he could not possibly succeed without violence.
Trespassing is not violent treason and Trump didn't incite it anyway.
Except the same thing happened in 1960 and is why Kennedy eventuallly was awarded Hawaii's electoral votes.
There was an ongoing recount case in 1960. The recount was eventually finished and the electoral votes awarded. A judge signed off on the process.
Oh and those votes were counted by Richard Nixon, the loser and sitting VP. Just like Mike Pence.
Yes. There were ongoing legal challenges during the 2020 election as well. This would seem to be the point of alternate slates, which, far from being some criminal scheme, are in fact the standard legal procedure when there are ongoing major legal questions in the presidential election. It is the equivalent of filling out paperwork so that if things proceed in your legal favour, you can immediately have them processed.
Let's briefly go over what the process involved is supposed to be. First, the states certify their electors in accordance with state law. On the day of voting, the electors have to complete six Certificates of Vote, and one of those goes to Vice President, as President of the Senate. Congress, presided over by the President of the Senate, counts the votes.
However, in the 2020 election there were several ongoing legal battles leading up to the day of the electoral college vote. The strongest of these was probably Georgia, in which there were enough known problems mainly derived from people voting in the wrong county, that the state arguably should have held a new election. Another state with issues was Pennsylvania, in which it was unclear if the voting laws were changed in accordance with the Pennsylvanian constitution. If they were not, this would mean the electors were invalid. Whether or not the charges were legally spurious or not is immaterial to the point that in the United States, we are supposed to be allowed a redress of grievances and in this case, there are legal avenues available to pursue.
Most of these involved the Trump campaign. Some of them involved the states themselves. Therefore, alternate slates of electors were sent, in case any of these cases happened to turn the other way in time for election day. If that were to have happened, the states would have certified the alternate electors, and things would proceed as normal. There was a legally questionable case in which Mike Pence could have done something himself, but by legally questionable I mean that the laws involved are vague enough that a case could be made, even if unpersuasive and likely to be dismissed.
What you are saying is that actually, this completely normal legal process in which Trump may have been operating under bad legal advice which would have been (and in some cases was) ignored, was in fact a criminal scheme which doesn't make any sense whatsoever. "Scheming" is in fact not a legally defined crime as far as I'm aware. If we are to criminalise it, what we're actually criminalising is the right to address grievances in the court of law, and the right to legal council.
The DC indictment doesn't charge anything about "incitement" because his conduct on January 6 2021 isn't the focus / necessary to prove the plot to anti-democratically retain office. It's clear his speech that day was in furtherance of the illegal conspiracy, but the prosecutor has no need to get into freedom of speech debates because the advance coordination actions for the coup are both less (affirmatively) defensible and also more incontrovertible.
The idea that "the media narrative" about a coup attempt and the legal indictment about it should match exactly in their details would be bizarre. (But I assume that is the claim you are making because otherwise you're characterizing the DC indictment as not being about a coup?) Why would you expect prosecutors to necessarily charge all and exactly the crimes ascribed in the media?
[EDIT - wrong homophone of your]
A potential incitement charge is not evidence to a greater plot, it would be a criminal charge. The idea that we would not prosecute because we don't need it to prove our case in this other indictment is absurd. That's not what prosecutions are for.
As to all this stuff about an illegal conspiracy, if it was an illegal conspiracy is the question that the Government has to prove. And if it can actually prove this, rather than convince people like you that Trump is a criminal and use DC courts to indict no matter the evidence, is in fact the primary question above all others.
Here's the crux of my point about the media narrative. And you demonstrate it yourself as well. Criminal charges have pre-requisites And these aren't secret, you can look them up. And they must be cited when used.
What the media is doing, and what you and basically everybody who believes them is doing, is using vagueness to deliberately cloud the issues involved. When you say things like "It's clear his speech that day was in furtherance of the illegal conspiracy," you are claiming there was an illegal conspiracy, of which there is no evidence, and then assuming you can peer into the heart of Trump to find his intent, which you can't. I'm sceptical that Trump can peer into the heart of Trump.
And this is in the backdrop of previous political persecution, including the Russiagate stuff. Why would anybody believe the media, or you, when you can't make the actual legal case? Why would anybody believe the legal cases, if nobody even tries to describe them accurately, even when to describe things accurately to the public is the ostensible job of the Media?
Sure, charges come before trials come before convictions, with attrition between steps.
There's lots of evidence for the conspiracy; have you read the indictment? (Link below - it seems like probably you haven't.) Among the most incontrovertible, dozens of electors swore falsely to submit their slates to Congress - this is just objectively true, presumably you don't dispute that?
There are memos and other communiques among Trump's core group and then out to those electors showing that the fraud was centrally coordinated with the goal of violating the Electoral Count Act to get Trump named the next President even though Biden won the election. The fraud with central coordination gets criminal conspiracy by itself; the plan to apply it to circumvent the Electoral Count Act gets the obstruction charges.
Paragraph 12 of the indictment lists a bunch of stuff Trump said at the Ellipse; Smith considers this more appropriate as contributing evidence to the broader conspiracies, than as a separate charge for inciting a riot. That is exactly his job as prosecutor - apply discretion to charge the most appropriate stuff (usually we talk about discretion in terms of reducing the severity of charges, but either way it's reducing the volume of charges).
DC Indictment, 8/01/23:
https://www.justice.gov/storage/US_v_Trump_23_cr_257.pdf
Sure, let's talk about the indictment. I've read the indictment. I also generally know how laws work. We can go through it "briefly".
The first thing I need to repeat to you, since you seemed to have missed it, is that a crime is a defined thing with prerequisites. One can look up the relevant statutes. Here are the charges put forward in the indictment, as per page two of the indictment.
A conspiracy to defraud the United States in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 371
A conspiracy to corruptly obstruct and impede the January 6 congressional proceeding in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 1512(k)
A conspiracy against the right to vote and to have one's vote counted, in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 241
Let us go through them in order. 18 U.S.C. § 371 lays out two primary offences. Being involved in a conspiracy to violate a federal criminal statute, and/or defrauding the US. Jack Smith is not alleging the former, but rather the latter. Unfortunately for him, fraud generally refers to money in some way. In previous cases involving this statute, defrauding the US Government means extracting money from the government in some way, or lying to avoid financial obligations to the government, or lying to avoid legal liabilities, and so on. That is, we're talking about things such as Bank Fraud, Insurance Fraud, or Tax Fraud, because that is what fraud means in the context of United States Law. This first charge requires a nonsensical reinterpretation of what "fraud" is supposed to mean within the legal context, and so it in fact fails to establish the criminal acts required by statute.
Moving on to the second count, the use of 18 U.S.C. § 1512(k) is so silly as to be laughable. In fact it is similar to the New York state indictment. 18 U.S. Code § 1512 is about witness tampering or messing with informants. The specific citation states, I quote, "Whoever conspires to commit any offense under this section shall be subject to the same penalties as those prescribed for the offense the commission of which was the object of the conspiracy." This is the direct citation Jack Smith provides. Okay, so... what is the offence under this section that is being alleged by Smith, in regards to Trump? The Indictment says "Conspiracy to Obstruct an Official Proceeding". In order for 18 U.S.C. § 1512 to be relevant at all, we must identify an informant, witness, or victim, in which Donald Trump tampered with in the relevant ways, such as killing, violence, or harassment. Donald Trump needs to have called somebody on the phone or shown up in person, and threatened them, or pressured them to lie, or strangled them. He would also have to do this knowing that what he is doing is in service to a crime.
Finally we have 18 U.S.C. § 241. This follows the pattern of not having anything to do with the allegations. 18 U.S. Code § 241 is about direct voter intimidation, that is, per the statute, "...go in disguise on the highway, or on the premises of another, with intent to prevent or hinder his free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege...". In order for this to apply, Donald Trump would have had to, either by himself or with others, gone on to voting premises somewhere and torn up votes, or threatened citizens from voting, or physically stopped them from doing so. Somebody's individual right to vote would have to be infringed here, not by proxy through the certification of the electoral vote.
Now we can return to my initial point, the disconnect between the narrative and the criminal charges. Everything that Smith talks about is in fact irrelevant to the criminal charges he's bringing forward because he didn't bring forward incitement charges or charges relevant to this supposed conspiracy. This is why the disconnect is important, and evidence of political suppression. What does it matter if "dozens of electors swore falsely to submit their slates to Congress"? It's neither illegal, nor even alleged to be illegal within the indictment to pursue legal regress, receive legal council, or prepare for potential legal victory either in general or in the way Trump has done. It is not illegal to prepare an alternate slate. It is not illegal to submit alternate votes in preparation for legal victories, even if those victories never come. It is not illegal to operate under spurious legal theories, even if these theories are found to be spurious. It is not illegal to continue to operate under these theories, even if you are informed that they are spurious. Doing these things isn't even illegal if the indictment consistently uses the terms "fraudulent", "co-conspirator", "sham election," or "falsely claimed" when referring to them. If it were illegal, if these words were applicable, then perhaps Smith should have found the laws they were breaking that applied to them specifically, rather than slapping these words onto innocuous actions in an attempt to prove other charges that they have no clear legal relation to.
Tax evasion is a crime. Using legal tax loopholes is not. Trump was "bragging" about using the tax code to his advantage to lower his tax bill (which is what made him "smart", a statement with obvious bad PR). These loopholes are all there for reasons, some of which seem sound, others of which might be pork-barrel compromises.
He routinely valued assets at low $ for tax purposes and at high $ for collateral purposes. I think that sort of behavior is generally what people mean when they talk about his 'tax evasion'; certainly it's what I think of. [That and tax deducting 'donations' to his / family-managed pretend charitable foundation(s?).]
I'm not a forensic accountant or tax lawyer, so I'll leave off any technical claims, but I assert that double-think about the value of an asset is not within the conventional scope of 'tax loophole'.
That Hunter was selling access to his dad while his dad was VP doesn't seem like an issue to you? He made millions of dollars from this, and despite denials it seems that Biden himself was receiving portions of the money (and undeniably various family members did). Specifically, Hunter was getting lots of money from Ukrainian sources, and now Biden is pushing headlong into a war on the side of Ukraine. If there's a connection between the bribes paid to Biden and him throwing billions into a questionable war with no end game, that seems quite relevant to us! Nobody thinks Hunter was getting bribed for anything he himself could do, the money was for his dad.
And seriously, anything you say about Trump and classified documents applies similarly but worse to both Biden (who had lots of unsecured classified documents at his home and offices) and Clinton (who set up her own unsecured email server to avoid FOIA, which she used to send and receive classified documents). We can argue about who was worse, but in my mind they're all very similar charges. Either they should all be punished, or none. There's no good line you can draw where some are perfectly okay but the others are not.
Funding Ukraine still has a lot of bipartisan support and near unanimous support among democrats. Seems like a stretch to tie that to Hunters influence peddling.
There's a lot of shady stuff going on between the US and Ukraine, long before Trump or Biden became president. The CIA was actively involved in setting up a pro-western government under Obama. I'm not suggesting that Hunter was able to cause any of that - I think he took advantage of good timing and placement (likely at his dad's direction) to get some money for things already happening. The problem is that whenever and wherever there would be a conflict between what Ukrainian individuals want, and what the US wants, we have to doubt that the US interests are top of mind for Biden. If Ukraine had not paid any money to Biden, would he be as likely to support Ukrainian interests? Did he force Ukraine to fire the prosecutor going after Burisma (while Hunter was on the board) because that prosecutor was corrupt, or because he was going after Burisma? At the best we have to doubt Biden's intentions here.
I'm not saying nothing shady happened, but almost the entirety of western europe is also supporting Ukraine. It seems like in this case the obvious answer is the most likely, which is that regardless of who was in power they would tend to support Ukraine over Russia because that advances western geo-political interests in general by maintaining the current international prohibition on territorial land grabs by any large state, and because Russia, being one of the few even remotely threatening states that are actively opposed to the west, is better off as weak as possible.
Are there other more personal motivations under the surface? Maybe. But I find it highly unlikely they have much sway in how things are going. The overall picture seems to dictate the policy here much more than the interests of any individual actor of even any individual country.
I'm much more skeptical that the President of the United States taking multiple bribes from a country has no effect on the country's foreign policy decisions. I do agree that, at least in the case of Ukraine, Joe's bribes are in the same direction as US policy otherwise. Is it the same magnitude? More doubtful. Are there times and places where they are at odds? Hard to say, but getting a prosecutor who was investigating corruption fired sets off some alarms for me.
I prefer a general rule that says if you take bribes, everyone should repudiate you and never vote for you again. Even if you never betrayed your country because of those bribes.
Hunter Biden is a drug-addicted scumbag.
Hunter Biden was scamming people into believing he had the ear of the Vice President of the United States. He was selling people the illusion of access, as his own co-conspirator admitted - the scam was that because Hunter Biden was related to someone powerful in the US government, that meant he himself had power.
The problem is, there's zero evidence that Joe Biden actually did anything at the behest of Hunter Biden, and indeed, the actions of the US government were contrary to Hunter Biden's interests - for instance, the corrupt prosecutor who was dismissed at the urging of the US government was in the pocket of the people he worked for.
Having a corrupt relative is not an impeachable offense. Hunter Biden is obviously a scumbag that has made money off of being related to Joe Biden, but there's no evidence that Joe Biden did anything wrong.
It's not illegal to have a criminal relative. It's only illegal if you are actually participating in their illegal schemes - something there is not any evidence for.
>I fully expect Biden to be impeached before the election.
What odds would you assign to that? Because I will happily take that bet.
Yea I'm interested too (in taking the "no" side of that).
Manifold has it at 16%: https://manifold.markets/Predictor/will-joe-biden-get-impeached-in-his
Trump’s impeachments were legitimate and necessary…removing him would have been counterproductive because then Pence would have become president and the goal of both parties is to get one of their establishment elected president. Btw, the group that orchestrated the coup against Trump were Bush Republicans aka the Deep State. All of the FBI leadership were Bush Republicans which is why Rosenstein had greater respect for Comey than Trump and appointed Mueller.
The reason why Trump is being prosecuted is because he committed a huge number of crimes.
The reality is that the Republican party has fallen really badly into corruption since George W. Bush was president, which is why the Republicans are becoming increasingly anti-federal law enforcement - they're violating a lot of federal laws. The IRS has been attacked because a lot of Republican donors are committing tax fraud; the FEC is attacked because they are responsible for keeping track of campaign contributions and the top Republicans have been getting a lot of money illegally (and engaging in various forms of graft).
Trump made this a million times worse, but he rose to power precisely because of the high level of corruption within the party enabling him; he is a con man with a long history of drawing money from non-profits to line his own pockets and various forms of fraud and tax evasion. He basically ran for president to try and claim that he was being prosecuted for political reasons rather than a long history of criminal behavior finally catching up to him (the IRS had been after him for tax fraud for years prior to him becoming president). It is obvious he was keeping multiple books on his real estate, one to show the banks and the other to pay taxes on, and it is likely that both were fraudulent. And we know he was using non-profits as his own personal piggy-bank and his family is now banned from running them in New York.
The present fraud he's engaging in is getting his followers to pay his legal bills; he is desperately trying to get re-elected as president because if he isn't, he is going to prison. He has long managed to delay criminal investigations into him, but he is no longer able to do so now that his crimes are sufficiently obvious and he has been so brazen in his illegal activities.
He is being prosecuted in multiple states for numerous criminal violations, ranging from financial fraud to his attempt to overthrow the US government in 2020.
Donald Trump told his supporters to commit violent crimes, on camera, three times before he was even the nominee. His followers remembered that when e.g. he told them to march on the Capitol. Stop pretending there's any comparison, and Read The Manual: https://www.google.com/books/edition/Coup_d_%C3%89tat/bA7bCwAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=luttwak+coup+d%27etat+%22indistinguishable+in+form%22&pg=PT169&printsec=frontcover
Reading the "comments expressing concern" section has further confirmed my suspicions that Bay Area Rats and SSC/ASC folk aren't capable of thinking about policy, and somehow this remains the case in spite of being vastly superior at doing actual policy research (and at thinking in general).
I honestly don't have a solution here. If you talk to another bay area rat, you won't get any better, because they're just as bad at thinking about policy. I guess you move to DC and meet a ton of EA-adjacents there?
It would be nice if you made some specific points here rather than just saying "I see this group of people is bad at reasoning about this", as written this comment just comes across as substanceless.
Now that I think about it, this post was definitely a step in the right direction, even if the Gell-Mann Amnesia is still strong.
These systems are just way harder to observe than people think it is. This Quirrel quote from HPMOR sums it up well:
"Mr. Potter, the stupidity of Quidditch is transparent to you because you did not grow up revering the game. If you had never heard of elections, Mr. Potter, and you simply saw what is there, what you saw would not please you. Look to our elected Minister of Magic. Is he the wisest, the strongest, the greatest of our nation? No; he is a buffoon who is owned in fee simple by Lucius Malfoy. Wizards went to the polls and chose between Cornelius Fudge and Tania Leach, who had competed with each other in a grand and entertaining contest after the Daily Prophet, which Lucius Malfoy also controls, decided that they were the only serious candidates. That Cornelius Fudge was genuinely selected as the best leader our country could offer is not a suggestion anyone could make with a straight face. It is no different in the Muggle world, from what I have heard and seen; the last Muggle newspaper I read mentioned that the previous President of the United States had been a retired movie actor. If you had not grown up with elections, Mr. Potter, they would be as transparently silly to you as Quidditch."
Harry sat there with his mouth open, struggling for words. "The point of elections isn't to produce the one best leader, it's to keep politicians scared enough of the voters that they don't go completely evil like dictators do -"
"The last war, Mr. Potter, was fought between the Dark Lord and Dumbledore. And while Dumbledore was a flawed leader who was losing the war, it is ridiculous to suggest that any of the Ministers of Magic elected during that period could have taken Dumbledore's place! Strength flows from powerful wizards and their followers, not from elections and the fools they elect."
So instead of properly argumenting your point why "rationalists are bad at thinking about policy" you bring up a citation from a rationalist author?
Don't you notice the irony?
It might be a bit clearer if, instead of HPMOR, you quote the relevant bit of "Yes, [Prime] Minister"?
War leaders are not necessarily who you want to lead the country in peacetime, which is why Churchill lost the election after the war:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1945_United_Kingdom_general_election
"The election's campaigning was focused on leadership of the country and its postwar future. Churchill sought to use his wartime popularity as part of his campaign to keep the Conservatives in power after a wartime coalition had been in place since 1940 with the other political parties, but he faced questions from public opinion surrounding the Conservatives' actions in the 1930s and his ability to handle domestic issues unrelated to warfare. Clement Attlee, leader of the Labour Party, had been Deputy Prime Minister in the wartime coalition in 1940-1945 and was seen as a more competent leader by voters, particularly those who feared a return to the levels of unemployment in the 1930s and sought a strong figurehead in British politics to lead the postwar rebuilding of the country. Opinion polls when the election was called showed strong approval ratings for Churchill, but Labour had gradually gained support for months before the war's conclusion.
...Ralph Ingersoll reported in late 1940:
"Everywhere I went in London people admired [Churchill's] energy, his courage, his singleness of purpose. People said they didn't know what Britain would do without him. He was obviously respected. But no one felt he would be Prime Minister after the war. He was simply the right man in the right job at the right time. The time being the time of a desperate war with Britain's enemies".
That excerpt just reminds me why I can't read HPMOR. I know Harry is supposed to be an idiot, but if this Quirrell is the better version, I'm sticking with Rowling. This is about as subtle a temptation as "hello little boy, get into my van, I have candy and puppies".
"Strength flows from powerful wizards and their followers, not from elections and the fools they elect" - therefore Voldemort *should* have won the war because he is the Stronk Independent Wizzard who don't need no mudbloods.
Except he didn't, because being the Stronk Guy with the Stronk Followers who would do whatever it takes wasn't good enough.
(spoilers)
Quirrell is Voldemort. His opinion on the virtues of electoral democracy are not necessarily to be taken at face value.
I did pick that up, but honestly if Harry is supposed to be So Smart, why is he falling for this obvious "come to the Dark Side, we have cookies" bait?
Are we the readers supposed to fall for it? Because I get the sinking feeling every time I see HPMOR excerpts that yeah, we're supposed to find VoldyQuirrell really convincing (even if we think he's wrong) and I just - don't?
Maybe it works if you're twelve and do not, in fact, know nothing like as much as you think you know.
I only read the first three books, but I always thought Harry had no great intellect, with no amazing talent for magic. I thought Hermione was the smart one, if only book-smart.
I think the one of the key things about dialogues between Quirrell and Harry are that they are *dialogues* with neither being strictly correct; their views are meant to be foils to each other, each presenting their own insights.
Harry is naive in that he is too idealistic and not cynical enough about human nature due to being young, and Quirrell is more experienced but still naive because (spoilers) he is a sociopath so lacking in empathy that he literally cannot model individuals behaving altruistically or with genuine moral principals.
And of course, both positions suffer from the fact that Eliezer is not a politician (and also grew up in a different dimension than the rest of us so cannot fully understand Earth politics)
He doesn't fall for it, though.
>I agree this is a much more likely threat model, and I’m interested in what factors generally restrain criminal prosecution of opposing politicians and journalists (even if you think it happens sometimes, why doesn’t it happen more?). Virtue/norms/gentleman’s agreement? Or is there some balance of power consideration that makes it hard to do?
I think the primary limiter is a party's confidence level about the progress of their capture of an institution. The FBI, CIA, and other intelligence agencies are approaching that tipping point. The Universities and Press already have. Our courts are probably the only limiting factor right now, but unfortunately for the country, lots of cases pertaining to politics can be brought in DC, which has a corrupt jury pool and a pool of mostly captured judges.
Can you describe some relatively Trump-free evidence for the assertion that Democratic capture of intel agencies is advanced? This just seems inconsistent with assessments I see elsewhere.
So ignoring the last 8 years is a requirement in your mind? Or does the obvious cover up for Hillary in 2016 count? What about the Biden slow walk to intentionally let SOLs expire and attempted sweetheart deal to keep him from rolling on Joe? What about the sudden FARA switch to an aggressive stance when it comes to the right generally?
No, I didn't ask you to ignore 8 years. First, for precision, I didn't say "pre-Trump", I said Trump-free. So I haven't foreclosed anything about the "biden slow walk" etc. Please tell me all about that, and FARA, and Hillary, and so on.
Second, I'm also curious about your Trumpy evidence, but Trump is such an extreme outlier that confounds around him should be harder to ~disprove, so it seems worthwhile to assess the strength of the evidence without him at all, and then add him in afterward.
I mean, Hillary is the obvious one. She clearly violated the statute with intent (to evade public disclosure laws). Comey covered for her by making up a new legal theory never before applied. Then the FBI found more incriminating evidence on Anthony Weiner's laptop and tried to not disclose that until after the 2016 election, but they were caught by the NYPD. And right before Guiliani was going to release the Weiner news, Comey then frontran that announcement to try and downplay it.
Additionally, I find the FBI's lack of interest in voter fraud fairly telling. Where are the sting operations? Where is the fisking of voter rolls? Where is the surveillance of vote harvesters?
Ok. So, so far, the argument is "this one very prominent individual that one time was let down easy, and days before an election they were hesitant to talk about inconclusive progress updates in her investigation, therefore clearly her political party has achieved institutional capture of all the investigative authorities." I remain open to hearing an actually credible argument.
Have you considered that the FBI might be rightly considering proactive involvement in managing voting rights without probable cause any of i) a violation of constitutional civil liberty and/or ii) violation of constitutional federalism, or iii) a significant waste of resources since it is vanishingly rare? (citation for waste: https://evidencebasedliving.human.cornell.edu/blog/what-research-tells-us-about-voter-fraud/ )
How about the FBI labeling (right-wing) parents that speak up at school board meetings as domestic terrorists?
The cover up for Donald Trump, you mean?
Because Donald Trump and his family were engaged in corrupt dealings with Russia, and that investigation was not disclosed to the public by the FBI.
We literally have emails about their corrupt dealings with Russian contacts who were associated with Russian intelligence.
The "Hillary emails" thing was always a scam; the reason why Hillary Clinton was never charged was because she didn't do anything illegal. There was never any evidence of criminal behavior.
This is in sharp contrast to Donald Trump, who we have recordings of talking about classified materials he knowingly, illegally kept, as well as recordings of him trying to hide and move around said documents.
>You said: "As for the Democrats, I think it’s against their ideological DNA to do Mafia-style killings. I’m not being some misty-eyed optimist here"....
>I stick to my distinction between the mainstream Democrats and FALN, just as I would make a similar distinction between mainstream Republicans and right-wing terrorist militias.
Exceedingly low hanging fruit, but the Weather Underground, a far left criminal gang bombed banks and government buildings including the Capitol Building. One member, Kathy Boudin, murdered a bank guard to steal $1.6M and then went on to be the mom of Chesa Boudin, Democratic DA of San Francisco, who to my knowledge has never denounced her. That's at least one Democratic politician with "Mafia-style killings" in his ideological/actual DNA.
Bill Ayers was also accepted into the mainstream left after he ceased being a fugitive. Bill Gates even funded his "small schools" idea (though fortunately STOPPED funding it once the evidence produced showed it to be ineffective).
I went to one of these small schools in Berkeley! In fact, it was one founded by Bill Ayers brother, and we even met him once (though he had long since retired by then). Ineffective as they may have been in studies, I had a great time and felt the social environment of small school really did have an edge over the larger programs at my high school. I think theres something to a school with some kind of unusual pedagogy attracting more motivated teachers, too. You get more of the "true believer" types and less of the tenure-having-unfirable-child-haters.
All that to say, by the time you're letting a former weather underground member found a school and come and regale 15 year olds with tales of the things he got up to, you're definitely approaching endorsing violence (he walked us through how they boosted Timothy Leary out of prison, mostly). I don't know that you're all the way to politically motivated killings, though. The weathermen always warned people before they set off their bombs, and anyway the environment of the time was just more violent in general, so I think they have to be judged in that context (consider the Kent State shooting, for example). Being in the Bay Area, the Black Panthers were obviously much celebrated, too, but always insofar as they were opposing the violence of the state being visited on their neighborhoods. Both of those cases are far from political assassinations, I think, and more along the lines of the violence your typical radical lefty would endorse.
That one statement from Scott also came across as very naive to me, it's as if he thinks that politicians are actually driven by "ideals" rather than self-interest, and that those ideals will somehow prevent them from using extreme violence to secure power if they can get away with it.
It’s interesting and worrying that in the US people can consider it naive to assume that politicians aren’t psychopaths. Is it naive because everyone is a psychopath, or are political candidates special?
It's not really that most politicians are psychopaths, it's just that they tend to have enough power to exert violence and commit all sort of crimes over others without fear of consequences. Same applies to police, soldiers and all sort of authorithies, if not you'd have to wonder why for example Nazi germany or Imperial Japan had so many psychopaths back in the day. So yes, everyone is a psychopath, and every human being (or at least the vast majority) will commit atrocities given a selfish incentive and the power to get away with it. Much like studies on our extremely violent relatives chimpanzees have shown, we're only more peaceful when there's a balance of power between groups, or in Scott's words, when government has checks and balances, not when the people in charge are "not psychopaths", because at the end of the day power works for power, not the people.
> So yes, everyone is a psychopath
Nonsense. Psychopath is not merely a person capable of doing bad things under the right circumstances (yes, such definition would include us all), but rather a person literally incapable of feeling the "nice" emotions. Psychopaths are not "victims" of the circumstances, they actively create them.
If you show a kitten to 100 small kids, 99 of them will instinctively be like "aww, cute" and 1 of them will be like "I wonder how much fun it would be to skin the kitten alive; I have to grab it when no one is paying attention". The latter is a psychopath. This is different from saying that if those kids e.g. grow up in the Nazi Germany, half of them will later become Nazis.
You're partially right. I did read on psychopathy once, and if I remember correctly they can indeed feel all sorts of emotions the difference between them and normal people being that the former are a lot more impulsive, thus they are not actually "eviler" than other people, they just lack self-control normally acquired during socialization, and humans are a extremely violent species, so when that self-control is gone due to psychopathy or power which invalidates fear of repercussion the results are always gruesome.
I am not an expert, but this doesn't sound plausible to me. For a person who only differs from others by lack of self-control, it would be quite difficult to get into a position of power. Maybe you don't need self-control when you are at the top of the ladder, but you definitely need it while you are climbing there. You don't become a successful politician by acting impulsively.
Lack of certain emotions is what make psychopaths such successful liars. Normal people feel certain tension when they lie, and we can often unconsciously detect that "something is not right". Non-psychopathic scammers try to mask this e.g. by talking fast and creating a false sense or urgency (so that when we detect the tension, we incorrectly attribute it to the urgency). But a psychopath can tell the same lie completely relaxed, looking at your eyes with a gentle smile, thus overcoming your evolved lie-detection instincts, because he just doesn't feel the tension at all. (Even if he knows that soon you will find out that he lied, he honestly doesn't give a fuck. A normal person would feel some shame, even if they decided to do it regardless.)
Possibly this ran aground on technical vs lay distinctions between "psycho" vs "socio"-pathology?
It's not that politicians are psychopaths, it's just that they tend to be self-regarding. Having seen a sample of the breed up close at local level, there's a combination of "you need to believe you *are* that important in order to do the job, because it's hard slogging and a thankless task" and "if you believe you *are* that important, then other people are not as important as you and you should always get your way".
Getting power, holding on to power, using power, losing power, regaining power: that's the political cycle. Sometimes, then, you have to crack a few eggs to make the omelette. And if you don't like egg cracking, there can always be someone on your side, or in the general vicinity of it, who does it and is good at it. As has been pointd out, there were Democrat politicians in power who were plenty happy to send the police in to crack heads.
The political violence of the 70s was revolutionary (or wanted to be), but part of the reason why the survivors were able to parley having served jail sentences into posts in academia and mainstream politics was because they represented themselves as political prisoners and not common criminals, and the remainder of 60s counter-culture that 'we'd all been fighting the corrupt state and state violence' (Kent State shootings, the police sent in to bash protesters) and the romantic aura of the rebel, the Civil Rights fighter (even if that was a peaceful protest/non-violent movement), of being against the Establishment which was perceived as Republican party. So they could slide in beside the Democrats, or whatever socialist party allied with the Democrats.
The more cynical mainstream politicians on the liberal side may not have liked the new bedfellows, but they were useful to bring along a particular constituency, and besides - you always need leg-breakers.
It's naive because an extremely prominent likely blackmailer of US politicians recently "committed suicide" in his jail cell under unbelievably irregular circumstances. Because of that, many US citizens have become cynical on the question of whether our politicians would carry out a political killing. Scott is espousing a view that was more common before that event than it is now.
You're talking about Jeffrey Epstein?
Of course politicians are special, they're selected for power-seeking.
For that reason, I have come to the conclusion that almost anyone running for office is someone you don't want in power.
The Zaphod-Frodo Conjecture
How about a different selection process? Start with jury duty. From among all the jurors who served in trials where the result was accepted as fair by those involved (rather than being appealed to a higher court), whoever did the most hours of community service since their last round of jury duty gets to be mayor. At the end of that term, out of all the municipalities in the state, whichever mayor had the fewest unresolved complaints goes on to be governor. Similar process from state governor to president.
Bicameral legislature could have one set installed by popularity contest, with anyone who can stack up 30,000 supporters automatically getting a term, but the other house selected based on competence and familiarity with the existing body of law: each voter has the right to submit one multiple-choice question on the subject of "under such-and-such circumstances, what would the law permit / require / imply," with anonymized editorial feedback for questions with no right answer among given options, or which are otherwise ill-formed. Then, probably through some secure electronic interface, they can try to answer as many other people's questions as they like. One senate seat per state goes to whoever got the most questions right, the other goes to whoever wrote the question that the most other candidates got wrong. A senator can be removed at any time by somebody who beats their record. A question is invalidated when whoever submitted it loses the right to hold office (due to e.g. death or committing a serious crime) or when relevant laws change enough that the original answer set is no longer accurate. In the latter case, the writer can submit a new question. Thus, somebody who took office on the strength of spotting a particularly nasty catch-22 and calling attention to it with a trick question will usually leave as soon as that issue is resolved.
If your best evidence is that someone's mother was a terrorist, and so somehow he has Mafia-style killings "in his DNA" (whatever that means), perhaps your argment is not very strong.
Susan Rosenberg as well. (Though, as our esteemed fact-checkers at Snopes note, she was merely a member of a bombing organization and got arrested for the possession of a shitton of explosives, There's no universally agreed upon definition of terrorist, so we should shy away from calling her one.)
While I’m not happy that establishment Dems are cozy with retired terrorists whose causes (if not methods) they mostly support, whitewashing 70s radicalism is still a far cry from straight up whacking people with the state security service.
A better recent example would probably be Jeffrey Epstein, if he was in fact whacked.
If we're spouting conspiracy theories about Epstein there's no reason to believe it was Dems who whacked him compared to Republicans given that it is the Republican AGs who gave him sweetheart deals in his previous legal situation and may not want information to come out.
I’m not really trying to “spout” anything, just trying to point out that the conspiracy version of Epstein’s death is a much better analogy to what Putin has apparently done, compared to the Dem relationship with various 20th century political terrorists.
Certainly lots of people from lots of different groups had apparent motive to whack Epstein, which is part of why his death is so suspicious.
Sorry, misunderstood your previous post. I agree with you but find this and the other allegations of murder by democrats unlikely.
Prosecutors were 100% controlled by the Bush family.
Agreeing with GbDub:
Murdering a security guard in a bank heist is extremely objectionable, but it actually just doesn't seem germane to violent authoritarianism.
Also I'm skeptical of the work being done by 'denounce' in this discussion of the son. What does this mean? If he won't agree that it would be better if his mom hadn't killed a bank guard, that's dubious. If he won't agree that his mom is a terrible person, that's unsurprising and irrelevant and an appeal to fundamental attribution bias fallacy. If he won't agree that she should have gone to jail for the murder, that is potentially dubious but also depends on the work being done by 'she murdered' - did she shoot the gun, or was she outside keeping the engine warm?
> Perhaps Philip Short's or Steven Lee Myers's books might have been the better choice, a little more detached from Russian inside baseball. (Or perhaps inside basketball; there's a Nets joke in there somewhere)
Or perhaps a Nyets joke?
> I’m interested in what factors generally restrain criminal prosecution of opposing politicians and journalists (even if you think it happens sometimes, why doesn’t it happen more?).
It's pretty easy to prosecute enemies, but it is very hard to get convictions in America. The Judiciary is mostly independent, and you can never count that you'll get a judge that is in your side. Juries are almost certainly going to have members from both parties, even in a place as Blue as DC, so you have to convince someone to convict one of their own tribe. You could use bribes or threats, but if that gets out, you'd start a civil war.
Finally, if you successfully convict the person, they are likely to end up a martyr, see Trump's rising poll numbers, there's a small chance he might get elected from prison at this rate. If you fail to convict beyond a reasonable doubt, then he can claim full exoneration and complain about the witch hunt.
Countries where this can work would already need the media completely under their thumb to limit the potential downfalls, but it's not a great way of getting the media under your thumb from the current status quo.
>It's pretty easy to prosecute enemies, but it is very hard to get convictions in America.
Who needs convictions? The process is the punishment, and I think a more effective one than a thuggish beating.
Aaron Swartz wasn't convicted of anything, but he still wound up dead. For pissing off a prissy little cabal of university administrators and academic publishers, never mind any serious political ambition. Part of that was probably his own emotional fragility, but still. See also Bruce Ivins, and nobody had a grudge against him at all, the FBI just needed a scapegoat.
Granted, you can't always *count* on your targets committing suicide, but if they don't, they still go through years of living hell, interrogation and detention and trial, life savings turned into legal fees, reputation utterly trashed. And you get none of that back just because you were ultimately acquitted. That's going to deter an awful lot of would-be opposition leaders, and materially incapacitate a lot more.
There has been a norm of sorts against doing this to actual opposition politicians, but I don't think it's a strong one. At this point we're clearly supposed to be focusing on Donald Trump's election-interference indictment, because that one is probably well-deserved and substantial. But Bragg's NY indictment for not filling out the right paperwork when he paid his mistress's hush money from allegedly the wrong slush fund, is a nominally literal example of a trumped-up charge. Approximately zero chance of conviction, would not have been brought against e.g. a Cuomo or an ordinary citizen, purely for the harassment and publicity.
I think the norm still holds to the point where only a two-sigma partisan outlier of a judge or bureaucrat will play that game. A would-be American Putin can't count on an Al Bragg or a Pete Strzok when he needs one. But I don't think it is at all implausible that we could reach the point where that does become plausible.
> Juries are almost certainly going to have members from both parties, even in a place as Blue as DC, so you have to convince someone to convict one of their own tribe.
Donald Trump got 5.4% of the D.C. vote in 2020. For lack of a better idea, let's assume that .054 is also the Trump-leaning share of the population eligible for jury duty.
According to https://stattrek.com/online-calculator/binomial, with 12 jurors and a 0.054 probability of a Trump-leaning juror, the chance of getting at least one such juror is 0.486. This assumes everyone eligible is equally likely to be selected for the jury.
Actually, prosecutors seem likely to use their 6 (felony) or 3 (misdemeanor) peremptory challenges to keep eligible Trump-leaning potential jurors off the jury. In D.C. more than anywhere else, I imagine that a person's occupation is a good clue as to whether they lean Republican - which is a good clue as to whether they lean Trump. So the probability would drop below 0.486.
(The defense has the same number of peremptory challenges. This probably has no impact on the number of jurors leaning anti-Trump.)
So I estimate that it's more likely than not that there will be nobody who leans Trump on the jury for a given Trump-related D.C. federal criminal trial.
Have I made too many dubious assumptions?
No, I had no idea how liberal DC was, which is ironic for someone who lived there. I guess being a member of the Federalist Society made me feel less outnumbered. I retract that claim and understand better why Republicans complain about DC jury pools. Thank you for doing the research and correcting me.
> rising poll numbers
Trump's favorability rating has been going down, not up. He's not seeing any great successes, and present polling suggests that, if the election was run today, Trump would again lose Nevada, Michigan, Arizona, Georgia, and Pennsylvania.
He's also going to have major issues campaigning if he is convicted of one of the numerous crimes he committed before the election and is incarcerated.
Alex wrote this: "This account misses something fundamental in my view. I myself was born in Russia and lived most of my life there, participating in some of the events described in the post, such as the 2011-2014 protests. What is really crucial for understanding how Putin came to power is *how bad the 90s were*. The GDP per capita fell by half (by way of comparison, the GDP per capita fell only about 25% during the Great Depression in the US)."
I will add that ALSO Russia's economy absolutely took off in the ten years after Putin came to power. Something like a 6x increase in Russian GDP in a decade:
1990: $500B
2000: $250B
2010: $1,500B
*I* would be (EXTREMELY) skeptical about the folks and the ideology who where in charge from 1990 - 2000 and be willing to put up with a lot to (a) have it stop, and (b) see my standard of living actually rise and rise a lot.
What would the arguments against Putin look like? Russia never tried REAL liberal democracy/capitalism?
At this point, the argument is mostly "Putin is bad for Russia because we (the US and its allies/vassals) will try to destroy Russia as long as he's in power." It's a reasonably sound argument.
I was going to write a longer reply about the two big mistakes in your formulation.
Bur really, a much simpler take is that instead of showing strength, he showed weakness, which we are now exploiting. A competent Russian leader would not have done this, therefore he is not (or, is no longer) competent, therefore he is bad for Russia. Q.E.D.
This presupposes that in the counterfactual Russia would become an ally/vassal of the West. But it's a faulty assumption, there's not much appetite for that from either side. The West isn't willing to overlook Russian "transgressions" like subduing Chechnya, whereas Russians generally believe that Russia deserves to be a superpower, at the very least having a "sphere of influence", which definitely should include Ukraine. I don't see any realistic way of changing this status quo, short of Russia getting thoroughly crushed and occupied, Germany/Japan style, but due to the nuke situation that's very far from being on the table.
The west was perfectly happy with Putin until the Syria era. Around then.
If by "happy" you mean treating him as a mostly irrelevant if distasteful tin-pot dictator, then sure, I guess. Although I would put the real start of "public enemy number one" treatment at the 2016 election. Meddling in some Middle Eastern shithole is one thing, meddling at the heart of the Free World™ is quite another.
“ heart of the Free World™ is quite another.”
I’m surprised anybody believes that. And no I’m not a right wing American but a largely leftist European.
“ Meddling in some Middle Eastern shithole”
Interesting turn of phrase. They tend to get shittier though after American involvement.
Well, Democracy™ is just about the last thing that everybody in the West agrees is a Good Thing, so a direct attack on that is probably the most explicit symbolic gesture that one can make.
That Russia was involved in meddling in the 2016 US elections is incontrovertible fact.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_interference_in_the_2016_United_States_elections
Sorry to tell you, but if you believe otherwise, you hang out with people who consume large amounts of Russian propaganda.
Just wanted to flag that this comment is an obvious unsubstantiated nonsense. Probably not against the rules, though. I will not be engaging in further discussion in this thread.
Indeed. At the minimum, if the sole evidence for Putin and Putinism is GDP growth, we have to note that Russian GDP has only grown 16% cumulatively since 2008, compared to a global average of 57%, and USA's growth of 82%. Some countries with similar GDP per capita as Russia grew even more: Malaysia and Bulgaria grew 85%, Chile grew 100%, and Costa Rica grew 153%.
That’s actually a motive for invading Ukraine—Putin has failed to develop value added exports for legacy Soviet era manufacturing. So the Irkut MC-21 needs to be used by more than just Russian airlines. Btw, the new Gazprom skyscraper looks like the Avengers HQ…but exporting hydrocarbons isn’t value added manufacturing.
The US was actively trying to feed Russia's economy throughout the 1990s and early to mid 2000s, precisely in order to help boost Russia away from Communism.
The problem is, you can't actually fix another country's economy, and we were unable to do so because the problems with Russia go beyond communism. It has cultural problems that cripple its economy.
Rather than address these issues, Putin tried to divert attention outwards by engaging in blaming of everyone else for Russia's problems, and aggression against its neighbors.
This predictably resulted in the Russian economy going bad (because the problems weren't fixed) and Russia being isolated economically, resulting in it being way worse off.
If Russia had instead become a modern, non-corrupt democratic state, the US would probably be helping it out against China, with money and resources flowing into it, and because the US has strong interests in anti-corruption, the US would be helping to fight against corruption there, as we fought against corruption in Ukraine.
An argument I saw floated (it didn't gain much traction) against Trump was "yes, Trump has been great for the economy, and has been good for you personally, but you should be willing to suffer hardship for the greater good (involving abstract causes like norms, decency, human rights, Liberalism, etc.)" That applies just as well (or not) to Putin.
If you are not willing to suffer for abstract causes like norms, decency, human rights, liberalism, economic and political hardships will soon follow, even if initially it might seem that the life is good even without those values. Without values societies unravel: it is sometimes hard to apperciate, it is so obvious, how much of our legal and political system depends on basic decency of people, shame and societal pressure. You think you can have economic success in a dictatorship? Perhaps, on the sufferance of the dictator which is a fickly thing. In a dictatorship you do not own anything really.
<i>You think you can have economic success in a dictatorship?</i>
China seems to have done pretty well for itself.
Well, wealthy Chinese seem to take care to put a significant part of their wealth in the West because they know their assets can be taken from them any time CCP changes their policy or they simply run afoul of CCP politically. And I never claimed a country under dictatorship cannot be doing very well economically for a time, just that this situation never lasts long, which, incidentally, is precisely what we are seeing now with all the economical/ecological trouble in China, large part of which seems to be self-inflicted by political decisions. Incidentally, I had the impression (maybe injust) that many of the commenters here who are very sceptical of any claims of democratically elected politicians (and I guess not without some reason) but at the same time fail to apply the same healthy scepticism to the claims of totalitarian goverments, like self-reported GDP. Chinese sustained (until recently) economical growth was long considered miraculous. And we should all be very sceptical about miracles, especially measured in GDP which can be severely distorted even without resorting to outright cheating. But even if all of this was true, there is this extremaly naive belief (which seemed to be part of unofficial "social contract" both in Putin's Russia and in China until very recently) that undemocratic goverments can leave people free to earn money and live their lives as they wish to as long as they do not engage in politics. But it never happens, not for long. In the end, everyone is bound to find out (as they are now finding out in Russia and China) that it was all a lie, and real economic freedom comes in a package only with political freedom. And in case someone claims some problems, say in Putin's Russia or in China are not so different from what happens in the US, so what's the diff, then well, democratic countries have issues, in case of dictatorships issues do not even start to describe it.
Indeed. As far authoritarian regimes padding their GDP numbers, studies have looked at the relationship between nighttime light visible by satellite and reported GDP to find that authoritarian regimes pad their GDP numbers. See e.g. here: https://www.voanews.com/a/satellites-shed-light-on-dictators-lies-about-economic-growth/6813119.html.
Additionally, even China's success needs to be kept in context. Even accepting the GDP numbers at face value, China still has a GDP per capita lower than Russia - less than a fifth of the USA, in case people don't know how poor Russia is.
And the massive progress that China *has* made, has been specifically due to the sorts of anti-communist liberalization being decried above. See my comment here: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/dictator-book-club-putin/comment/21923152.
I don't think anyone worried about having their assets taken from them is going to put them in the West, given what happened to Russian oligarchs recently. Especially a Chinese, whose country's conflict with the West could escalate at any time.
Also, there's just no plausible reason for Chinese decisionmakers to prefer fake data over genuine (and no plausible mechanism for the real data to be obscured from them). If you have one to propose, present it, but in the absence of it, claims in the form [they surely must have cheated because they totalitarian] are not skepticism, they're... cope, basically. (I have to note claims of this kind used to be much more common maybe two decades ago, they stopped once images of modernized China started flooding the world. You can't fake impressive infrastructural projects. You can fake their importance, build them for show, but again - for what purpose, if you can just build legit ones and get richer through that? But more importantly, you can't fake billions of photos and videos of regular people in essentially modern setting.)
You seriously do not see any advantage of presenting fake, better than reality data to the external world and to their own society? I was not talking about internal classified info for the highest ups only. Even democratic goverments try to massage this kind of data, but at least there are usually a lot of independent agencies even within the goverment. Also look to the Mallard comment above for some actual data. But in fact, from what I heard (and correct me if I am wrong, I cannot find the citation now, so I may be wrong here), GDP is self reported even inside China by provinces. And of course provincial governors have their own incentives to play down any problems and look better than reality in the eyes of their superiors, and this mechanism is repeated all the way to the top. Again, the same happens in democracies, but at least with free press and other checks and balances you cannot hide the truth for long. So it is not clear to me that even top brass in China is aware of all the problems.
And yes, you can fake bilions of photographs and videos. But in this case nobody is suggesting that *ALL** of China development is fake.
China, at least until recently, truly was a factory of the world and it did develop enormously since the 80s. Some parts of China are genuinely wealthy and modern (although, have you ever heard the term "tofu dreg project"? It is another consequence of corruption inherent in dictatorships), others are not, to put it mildly. There is a plenty of actual achievement there the Chinese can be proud of. The real issues are: the real scale of development, how widely distributed the fruits of this development are, and, above all, how stable this development really is. Recent events suggest rather strongly that the contradictions of free market economy in totalitarian state may be now derailing Chinese miracle. Remember, in the 80s there were still economists wondering when will Soviet Union overtake US, and the fall of Soviet Union, and the depth of this fall took many specialists by suprise.
+100
Also to Hitler
Trump wasn't good for the economy. His bungling of COVID led to a massive drop in GDP, and none of his policies were actually good for the economy (he actively hurt our agricultural industry, for instance).
GDP growth under Trump was below that of Obama and Biden, indicating that GDP growth was in spite of Trump, not because of him.
Russia's GDP actually increased tenfold from a minimum in 1999 (when Putin became PM) to the maximum in 2013 (though it was less in real terms). However, this has to be seen in the context of the oil prices, which constituted a significant part of that GDP and rose by a factor of 5-8 (depending on your starting and end point). I think a wide-held opinion is that, while Putin pursued quite sensible macroeconomic and fiscal policies during the first decade or so of his rule, he was also very lucky to have had windfall incomes to work with. There was a huge amount of cake to go around, and he made good use of it.
One issue, looking at this data, is that it looks like the rubles to USD exchange rate has tanked massively; in 1999, it looks like it was about 20 rubles to 1 USD; by the early 2010s, it was more like 50 to 1; today it is 100 to 1.
This suggests to me that very bad things have been happening to Russia in terms of inflation.
I mean, an economic argument against Putin is that both his invasions of Ukraine are obvious disasters for Russian economy. GDP per capita fell in the wake of the first invasion in 2014, and got back above 2013 level only in 2018. It is true that it was largely caused by the collapse in oil prices, but that collapse itself was probably largely caused by Saudis becoming confident Russia won't be able to steal their market share during a price war due to sanctions and related problems.
What is true, however, is that such an argument would be hard to make BEFORE 2014. Then you would have to rely on abstract notions of "autocracy bad since ruler might do crazy things without constrains". Interestingly, many Russians actually did that. There were large protests in Moscow in 2012 against prolongation of Putin's rule.
If you continue that series in GDP data, Russia has barely grown since 2010, as in its 2020 GDP was still $1,500bn. Compared to former soviet countries than embraced the West, like Lithuania, Poland or Estonia, Russia has really fallen behind. At the same time the population is declining and life expectancy is still far below the level in China, the US or even countries like Poland.
I suppose you can argue the 90s were bad, the 2000s were better, but the 2010s have been stagnant. If Putin had stepped aside in 2010, perhaps he would be remembered fondly at this point.
The USSR dissolved at the very end of 1991, and Putin came into power around 1999/2000, right? 7 or 8 years isn't a lot of time to evaluate economic policy in the wake of such a massive change. Obviously, it would feel very different for people on the ground who saw such chaos and economic hardship--7 years (plus however long recovery took) is not a short period of time when living it on the ground.
As others pointed out, the economic recovery later stagnated, with both events possibly tied to oil prices. I would say that even more fundamentally, all of these events are possibly what one would have expected (obviously this is easy to say in hindsight; I'm sure in 1992 I would have said something different): A collapse of an empire caused short-term economic recession, which then gradually recovered, before hitting the ceiling of what's possible in a corrupt, kleptocratic, autocracy.
Sigh.
I was NOT trying to make an argument that Putin is/was a good leader for Russia or for Russians.
I WAS trying to add some context beyond the "things were very bad before Putin took over" to show that also "and things were VERY GOOD after Putin took over."
I hope it isn't a mystery (for folks at Astral Codex Ten at least) that for non-economist Russians living through a 50% GDP decline (2x as bad as the US Great Depression) in the years leading up to Putin followed by a 500% GDP increase after Putin took over ... well, Putin would look pretty good?
Yes, yes, the Russians SHOULD have expected their economy to totally crater and for pensioners to be begging in the streets after the Soviet Union collapsed. Of course. No reason to blame the policies followed during those 8-10 years when it could not be helped.
Still, lots of folks aren't totally rational about these things and did a simple "Great Depression x2 bad; roaring economy good" calculation and noticed that one was correlated with western liberal democracy capitalism and the other was correlated with Putin. For these folks it should be obvious why Putin was popular . I hope.
And, yes, the Russian economy kinda stagnated around 2010 ... as it often has historically after a huge run up in oil prices. If Putin had retired in 2010 he would probably go down as one of the great European leaders of the past few hundred years (deserved or not).
But even after the stagnation, lots of Russians still remember the 1990s.
You asked:
> What would the arguments against Putin look like? Russia never tried REAL liberal democracy/capitalism?
I was trying to answer that question.
> Still, lots of folks aren't totally rational about these things and did a simple "Great Depression x2 bad; roaring economy good" calculation and noticed that one was correlated with western liberal democracy capitalism and the other was correlated with Putin. For these folks it should be obvious why Putin was popular
Yes, and I even specifically pointed this out. I don't think we disagree on much so I'm not sure why you're so exasperated.
One problem is that the 1990s also were associated with the end of the Soviet Union lying about how good the economy was.
From what I can tell, the economy actually was terrible in the 1980s as well; the Soviet Union just lied about it incessantly. Their own leadership even admitted in the 1980s that if they knew how much better off Americans were than Russians, there'd be a revolution.
We talk about a 50% decline in GDP, but the Soviet GDP numbers were never trustworthy; I've seen 1980s Russian supermarkets, and they were terrible places, which seemed to suggest to me that people were very poor back then, too.
Your figures are slightly misleading, because you are looking at nominal gdp, not real gdp. In real terms, Russia under Putin grew at 7% per year from 2000 to 2007, which is still quite good, but not quite as impressive, as it only means 72% growth over 8 years. Also note that economies tend to grow faster when recovering from a period of extreme underperformance, and that the price of oil also began to rise again right around the time Putin came to power, and this was due to factors outside his control. Still, international observers whom I would not expect to be biased in his favor were impressed by his administration’s handling of the economy, not to mention that most of what he did seems to me (with my admittedly amateur understanding of the Russian economy to be all great ideas) so it was probably also in part good management. I imagine the people also approve of how he reminded the oligarchs that they have to obey the government, not the other way around.
Unfortunately, the economy has stagnated since the 2008 crisis. Oil prices have never truly recovered, and Russia suffers from several structural problems, like a dependence on oil and gas, widespread corruption (which was there before Putin and will no doubt be still there when Putin is naught but bones in the ground)*, etc. Putin’s administration is still quite technocratic, and even American economists who approve of the sanctions slapped on Russia and think Putin is a mass murdering tyrant have gone on record praising the people Putin put in charge of the Russian central bank, and the Russian government’s response to the 2008 crisis was widely praised by economists. But Putin has not been able to deliver growth. Not surprisingly, a few years after the stagnation started, when Putin decided to run for a third term, Putin who had once been immensely popular (he rigs elections, but in 2004 and 2008 this meant that he or his favored candidate won in an astounding landslide, instead of merely winning in a landslide) faced a lot of protests. He still probably won a plurality of the actual vote by a wide margin, but might not even have secured a majority of the vote if it weren’t for election rigging. Putin has responded by becoming more repressive, previously, descent was suppressed, but not anywhere as vigorously as it’s being suppressed now. The change wasn’t abrupt, but Putin has been more and more restrictive of dissent over the last 10 years. Putin did manage to restore his popularity to 2008 highs by annexing Crimea, but that began to fade after 2018, as the economy showed no signs of reviving. Putin’s popularity took another hit after covid19 and accompanying hardships. So he tried to restore his popularity by invading Ukraine, even though the strategic benefits were modest and outweighed by the cost of western sanctions (though I should note that Putin losing popularity could seriously destabilize Russia and result in widespread violence and there is even some chance that it could escalate to violent and bloody revolution or civil war, not that Putin is likely to care about such altruistic concerns). Part of why I think attacking Ukraine was about domestic considerations rather than foreign policy considerations is that nothing relevant to the foreign policy concerns changed in favor of invading between 2014 and 2022, in deed 2014 Ukraine’s army was something of a joke, as Ukraine expected to rely on Russian help in its defense, while 2022 Ukraine obviously had an actual army, even if its actual strength wasn’t so obvious. If, as Putin rationally believed and as every other major government, including the US, expected, Putin had been able to overrun Ukraine in under a week, it probably would have worked. Ensuing sanctions would be quite painful,, but if the war had ended quickly and left the west with a fate accompli, the sanctions wouldn’t have been quite so severe, and people would soon lose the political will to continue with the costlier sanctions, as it wouldn’t hurt Russia’s war effort. But now Putin is left with an unwinnable conflict that he can’t withdraw from without completely losing face and most of his support among both the public and the powerful. Russia right now will either doo well on the battlefield and so be able to keep fighting a useless war for several years, at the end of which maybe they get a settlement and are still stuck with the sanctions and a stagnant economy and with Putin or his successor losing support experience a lot of instability. Or they do badly, Putin gets overthrown by the FSB and army, he is replaced by somebody who sues for peace, and has to make a lot of concessions to the west, which will be super unpopular especially because Russian interests (like having a sphere of influence in eastern Europe and having the strategically important port of Sevastopol in friendly hands) are often in direct opposition to the west. Suffice it to say that Russian instability will be even more of a problem in this case, though there might be fewer sanctions still in effect, and there will be far less loss of life and valuable resources in a pointless war.
*I don’t mean to downplay Putin’s own corruption, but widespread corruption was if anything even more of a problem in the previous administration, and there would in fact be as much corruption under any other president. Corruption in Russia is not a problem caused by Putin, its caused by hard to combat social and cultural factors. Not to mention that actually doing something about corruption would piss off everybody powerful in Russia, as they all do it, so this would greatly increase the risk of being overthrown, or at least force the president to expend a huge amount of personal capital when they could instead just sit back and ignore the problem, so no president is actually likely to even try.
One problem with this is that it assumes that GDP actually fell massively in the 1990s, but by all indications, it had actually been bad throughout the Soviet Era, the USSR just lied about it constantly.
The "drop" in the 1990s seems to coincide with the end of the lies rather than a massive decline in actual GDP; people were having major economic problems in the 1980s in Russia, which even Soviet leadership commented on (one literally noted if the people in Russia knew how much better off people were in the US, there would be a revolution in Russia).
The fact that some people are still thinking that "the shock therapy" was justified makes my blood boil. We should have properly learned the historical lesson that "anything but communism" is a terrible stance after the rise of Adolf "the lesser of two evil" Hitler to power and the consequences of it.
Communism in Russia was severely descredited and lacked political will behind it. People were optimistic to the change of course. All that had to be done to ensure that the old regime didn't return was not to tremendously fuck everything up with the new market economy. Which wasn't supposed to be that hard, considering how inefficient the command economy was, nearly any possible move should have been an improvement. But tremendously fuck up they did, creating the most strawmanish form of crony-cleptocracy as if directly from soviet propaganda thus discrediting democracy, market economy and liberalism to even highter extents and inoculating several generations from this ideas.
Of course, this directly led to the rise of a quasi-fashist dictator who at first looked as a savior just by contrast. And lo and behold, this quasi-fashist dictator is now waging a "blood and soil" war in Europe. And yet, even ofter all this, we seem not to have learned our lessons.
I share a bit of your outrage, but I wonder what a viable alternative would have looked like. I kind of believe that the rise of the oligarchs was to some extent inevitable.
When Soviet enterprises were privatized, the authorities gave shares to everyone. Most people had no money and we're happy to sell their shares. This led to the accumulation of ownership in the hands of the oligarchs, who in many cases were the very men who ran these enterprises during Soviet times. These were the so-called Red Directors.
Let's say that privatization had never happened and the government simply held onto these enterprises and attempted to manage them in the public interest. These Red Directors would have still been in positions of tremendous power and influence and may well have been able to use this to enrich themselves. This is pretty much what ahppend in South Africa when the ANC took over. There wasn't a privatization in South Africa. In fact, it was the opposite. But a small group of politically connected people were still able to transfer a massive amount of wealth from the state to themselves.
I think that we can overestimate the power of political systems and underestimate the power of path dependency.
Ideally, it should've been switch to Georgist system, nearly perfectly suited for Russia with such amount of land and resources and also being closer to socialism in ethos and thus easily understandable for the general population. Keeping social guarantees of old regime but using the benefits of markets instead of trying to combat them would've been the best of both worlds.
But even something much cruder as general market reforms at a slower pace like they happened in China would've been much much better than whatever the clusterfuck actually happened.
Likewise, privatisation should've happened but not when starving people hand over their shares just to buy groceries, while gangs are ravaging the streets. You can't expect a properly functioning stock market in such conditions.
"He was even a co-signer of this famous open letter to Gorbachev in 1990 urging the Soviet premier to establish a Land Value Tax to provide a stable basis for the new economy as Russia struggled to rise from the collapse of communism. Other co-signers included four Nobel Laureates: Franco Modigliani, Robert Solow, James Tobin, and William Vickrey, not to mention William Baumol of Baumol's cost disease. Unfortunately, the Russian authorities went with Harvard Professor Jeffrey Sachs' "shock therapy" instead, and the rest is history, as anyone who lived through the post-Soviet chaos can tell you."
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/does-georgism-work-part-3-can-unimproved
A counter-argument would be central/eastern Europe, where an analysis of the transformation shows better standard of living in countries which used the "shock" method (e.g. Czechia) compared to those that chose slower pace as you call it (e.g. Hungary). Of course the countries differed in other ways as well, but this is basically agreed fact among mainstream economists.
Okay, look, to get this out of the way, I find the notion that you can distinguish between the central european states' approaches to regime change enough to make this kind of claims (I mean any of: clustering them into "shock" and "slower" camps; getting meaningful signal while controlling for their idiosyncracies; comparing the success of each approach - much less all of them at the same time) absurd. Especially with how little they ultimately differ, how they aimed at, and reached, essentially the same place (EU and its economic/law system) at roughy the same (in case of Czechia/Hungary, exactly the same) time.
But I guess what puzzles me the most is - how do you define a "shock" method anyway? Is the term refering to speed, or scope? Around here, Central-Eastern Europe that is, Czechia is kind of envied for not destroying its economic base and public services as much as its neighbors. And given that this destruction was a long, planned process, that had to unwind for decades over strong opposition from the public, I can't help but wonder whether, if we looked at the precise measures and definitions employed, the take-away wouldn't become simply "Czechia stopped crippling itself faster than Hungary did".
Alright I think it doesn't make sense to continue. Basically all the claims you make - how little the countries ultimately differ (I live here and boy they differ), how they essentially reached the same place, and most unbelievably, a claim that the economic transformation since 1989 was a long planned destruction - I find all of those preposterous and just plain wrong. There's zero common ground, sorry, I think it's best to leave it.
Surely, you could try to demonstrate my claims wrong by providing arguments from underlying reality?
But I don't think anything I said is at all controversial. Like, what's a meaningful difference between several countries on a similar development level, with similar history, operating under the same set of rules (EU law)? (Czechs are irreligious and have a functional train transport. Otherwise, I feel at home there. I feel at home as far as Slovenia, really, the entire region has markings of the same development path imprinted all over it.) Or, what do you think the "shock" in "shock therapy" even refered to?
Counter -counter argument: Slovenia. Doing better than Czechia and its transformation was successful run by a conservative autocrat
Yeah Slovenia is doing well, but wouldn't say better than Czechia. Both GDP per capita and PPP are essentially the same.
Boring truth is that Czechia was richer than Hungary even during communist times (also further back to the Habsburg times) and stayed that way until today.
Differences between their transformation policies in the 90s were, it seems to me, not that important, and I really doubt your assertion that mainstream economists agree they are responsible for current difference in living standards. Otherwise I would have to lower my respect for mainstream economists:-).
If the divergence between these two countries is widening, which is arguable, although I haven"t checked for that, it is a more recent phenomenon having little to do with the level of 90s "shock", whatever that might mean.
Sell off 10% a year for 10 years?
It's amazing that there are still people who think that Stalin was a lesser evil than Hitler.
It's amazing to me that there have emerged people who do not think that.
By body count for intentional killing, Stalin was far worse (3X+ worse). You can blame WWII on Hitler to inflate his body count, which I think is fair, though then you're trying to determine how to rate the intentional killing of a person against unintended but obvious consequences of war. Even then Stalin doesn't look great with his meatgrinder tactics of throwing millions of his own men into battle with little chance of survival.
Otherwise, naming Hitler as worse comes down to valuing the types of people he killed over the types of people Stalin killed. I don't put much stake in that, but if you're Jewish I could certainly understand it.
I hope we can all agree that both of them were monsters.
As someone who is staunchly anti-communist and has Stalin near the top of the short list of 'worst people in history', the one thing that sets the Nazis apart from everyone else (except perhaps the Aztecs) is the industrial genocide, building an industry (tools, workers, facilities, and organizations) specifically to kill mass numbers of civilians in an organized fashion based on their heritage, including planning to get what 'value' you can out of them before they die (and ghoulishly after they die as well).
I think focusing on the body count misses something. There's a difference between people thrown in prison camps to rot for the rest of their miserable lives, people killed by callous starvation, people killed in deliberate slaughter during the course a war, and industrial mass murder, and industrial mass murder comes down as the worst of the lot. The Mongols slaughtered an incredible number of people, yet I don't think they wanted to rack up a body count; slaughtering an entire city was a way to try to get the next city to surrender without a fight. Stalin and Mao didn't care about the peasants that starved to death, but I don't think their goal was a body count high score. Hitler wanted the Jews dead, entirely, and built an industry to accomplish that.
Very good points.
While they didn't event special tools to do it, the basements of the Lubyanka building had people being executed by gunshot to the back of the head every night during the Great Purge. 750,000 or so altogether were executed between 1936 and 1938 (not all of them in the Lubyanka, but they stayed busy). Provincial officers were given quotas to round up and execute, and they often went above the quota in an attempt to please Moscow.
I'm not sure it would have been morally worse if those 750.000 had been killed in gas chambers then by individual bullets to the back of the head. "Racking up a body count" did seem to be most of the point.
If a senior NKVD officer had admitted to Stalin 'we're having trouble finding enemies of the people to kill, so we've been rounding up people that we don't like to pad our numbers', he'd probably be pretty quickly added to the total himself. That the system evolves horrific incentives below the top level to carry out the top level goals of the system is one of the reasons totalitarian states are so horrible.
This is all academic anyways; if Stalin is behind Hitler in 'worst humans of the 20th century', it's not by very much. Lubyanka and the gulags might not be as horrific as Auschwitz and the extermination camps, but they're still pretty damned horrific.
> the one thing that sets the Nazis apart from everyone else (except perhaps the Aztecs) is the industrial genocide, building an industry (tools, workers, facilities, and organizations) specifically to kill mass numbers of civilians in an organized fashion based on their heritage
This also happened under communism. Under Chinese communism the victims were "landlords"; under Cambodian communism it was anyone who wore glasses.
There's a Chinese movie called "To Live" (活着), a retrospective on the Communist period, in which (pre-revolution) the young-and-feckless protagonist inadvertently saves his own life years down the road by gambling away everything his wealthy and powerful family has, forcing them all to live on the street.
If one accepts the most recent figures (post-opening-of-archives: Wheatcroft, Ellman, Snyder, and so on) he was not. Depending on where you stand on the intentionality of the Holodomor (I'm ambivalent to negative) the currently accepted ceiling for Stalin is 9 million non-combatant victims, while Hitler's tally has for a long time hovered around 11 million.
( https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2011/03/10/hitler-vs-stalin-who-killed-more/ - I'm linking to a piece by Snyder in the steelman spirit because I think his assessment is the highest of the post-revision historians.)
That said, I feel it's a shabby exercise to argue that one historical villain was somehow better than another because he intentionally killed fewer people, certainly if they land within the same order of magnitude. It gets you within nose-pinching distance of those wretches who quibble over the six million.
The more important question is why each killed them. For Stalin, this boils down to monstrous paranoia and disastrous impatience with land reform. For Hitler, of course, the goal was to physically eliminate all people who did not fit a particular scheme of racial and corporeal purity. (Jews first and foremost but also disabled people, queer people, etc.) I consider the first set of reasons incomparably less evil than the second.
I'm not Jewish or a member of any of the groups mentioned (though it's quite possible Slavs would have gotten their turn had Germany won the war), but given a dilemma I would still prefer to live in the Soviet Union at the height of the Great Terror than in the Third Reich. Few things are clearer to me.
Oddly enough, Robert Conquest, the historian responsible for the highest estimates of the victims of Stalinism (circa 20m, accepted in the West throughout the Cold War), is reported to have felt the same way.
It seems plain to me that practically anyone would much rather be an ordinary German in the Third Reich than an ordinary Russian in Stalin's USSR. The sense in the USSR was that no one was safe. That's real terror.
Meanwhile, to my knowledge, after the Night of the Long Knives, the Nazis never engaged in another major internal purge of the Party or military, at least until Stauffenberg's plot (in which case, whatever else you want to say, the response wasn't exactly paranoid -- the attempted coup and assassination were very real).
We have to think, if Hitler had been Stalin, he would have killed a large percentage of the rank-and-file SA and a fair number of key Nazi officials out of sheer paranoia or frustration at their failures (Goering at absolute minimum).
I can look at the biography of someone like Bonhoeffer, who despite being a well-known critic and political opponent of Nazification of the church from the early 1930s, was still allowed to work for the Abwehr and wasn't imprisoned until he was basically caught actively engaging in wartime treason in 1943 and still wasn't executed until after he was linked to Stauffenberg's plot.
Was there any internal critic of Stalin or Stalinism who was treated with 1/10th as much leniency in Stalin's lifetime? I mean, the NKVD was prepared to unperson you for being the first to stop clapping.
I'd go so far as to argue that being a member of a disfavored ethnic minority in Hitler's Germany wasn't even uniquely bad. Stalin killed something like 1/3 of the Volga Germans in the process of forcibly resettling them. Roughly 60% of Germany's Jewish population fled prior to 1939.
What made Hitler uniquely bad was starting WW2, setting Europe on fire purely for the sake of Lebensraum. Which is also what allowed the Holocaust to assume the scale it did, and there's a certain diabolic malevolence contained in the fact that Jews who made all-out efforts to get the hell away from the Third Reich and flee elsewhere in Europe were nonetheless conquered and exterminated anyway.
"It seems plain to me that practically anyone would much rather be an ordinary German in the Third Reich than an ordinary Russian in Stalin's USSR. The sense in the USSR was that no one was safe. That's real terror."
You are familiar with the Blockleiter surveillance system and the political courts it served, yes?
It's not remotely plain to me. I suppose if I were a member of the Herrenvolk, able to demonstrate adequate racial purity, and happy enough to acquiesce to the murder of those who are not so "fortunate", such a preference might be justified. And, being a sparsely-inscribed-slateist, I can accept that being born into a different situation might alter my perceptions profoundly, perhaps even sufficiently to reach that point. But I can only speak for myself as I am.
"I can look at the biography of someone like Bonhoeffer, who despite being a well-known critic and political opponent of Nazification of the church from the early 1930s, was still allowed to work for the Abwehr and wasn't imprisoned until he was basically caught actively engaging in wartime treason in 1943 and still wasn't executed until after he was linked to Stauffenberg's plot."
It helped that Bonhoeffer had spent most of the thirties abroad and on the run, but your point is fairly taken.
"Was there any internal critic of Stalin or Stalinism who was treated with 1/10th as much leniency in Stalin's lifetime? I mean, the NKVD was prepared to unperson you for being the first to stop clapping."
I suppose Osip Mandelstam would come closest. He wrote a deliberately insulting poem about Stalin in 1933 (accusing him of killing peasants, among other things) got arrested for it, admitted authorship, and was spared by Stalin... for no very good reason, except perhaps for being exceptionally talented. He was exiled from the major cities, but otherwise allowed to keep writing. Stalin got to him in the end, of course, (he died of illness on the way to Siberia) but he had lasted another five years following his open insolence.
"I'd go so far as to argue that being a member of a disfavored ethnic minority in Hitler's Germany wasn't even uniquely bad. Stalin killed something like 1/3 of the Volga Germans in the process of forcibly resettling them. Roughly 60% of Germany's Jewish population fled prior to 1939."
Sorry, but that is a ridiculous line of argument. Hitler managed similar numbers among the Romani alone, and for much more clearly 'ethnic' reasons. Which, to me, remains the crux of the difference. For Stalin, the killings were incidental to the political project. For Hitler, the political project -was- genocide.
In any case, I have little appetite for being drawn into actual apologetics for Stalin. Being better than Hitler - even far better than Hitler - is still a very low moral bar to clear. I'm content to join 1956-vintage Khrushchev in denouncing him in every context except being (eventually) instrumental in stopping Hitler.
The problem with blaming WWII on Hitler is that Stalin ALSO started WWII.
Nazi Germany and the USSR were in an informal secret alliance at the start of the war and the Soviets tried to join the Axis in 1940.
USSR also tried to make an alliance with UK and France before making a pact with Germany. Whatever it takes to make Germany UK's problem before USSR's problem.
Yeah, my takeaway reading the comment on "shock therapy" was "you're describing people looking at a crumbling country, with incentives to keep it crumbling, and parroting their justifications for why sabotaging the country is the best thing to do for its citizens".
I don't think communism was severely discredited in Russia. During the 1996 presidential elections, Yeltsin was forced into a run-off by communist leader Zyuganov, despite massive (and unsavory, to say the least) influence by many oligarchs and their media.
There is nothing contradictory about people wishing for change in 1990 and, having gotten the change, wishing for it to be reverted by 1996.
Certainly. But the reforms only started in earnest in late 1991, and in the parliamentary elections in late 1995 the communists already received as many votes as the second- and third-placed parties together.
My point is: people were certainly really enthusiastic about democracy, freedom and the market in 1991 (and, importantly, I think they didn't really distinguish between the concepts, expecting a good life to come from them in a kind of cargo cult). However, I'm not sure communism was really discredited, especially if it just took four years to become the solution again.
> We should have properly learned the historical lesson that "anything but communism" is a terrible stance after the rise of Adolf "the lesser of two evil" Hitler to power and the consequences of it.
Why? Communism was much worse than that.
Hitler was allied with the Soviet Union and was loathed by the West. Indeed, the Communists helped Hitler rise to power by attacking the moderates in Germany, and the Communists helped Nazi Germany at the start of World War II and tried to formally join the Axis in 1940.
Pointing towards Nazi Germany is grossly disingenuous; the West was deeply alarmed by Hitler.
The "shock treatment" in the Soviet Union was an attempt to fix the Russian economy by decentralizing it.
Thought experiment: in the unlikely scenario where Ron DeSantis becomes frontrunner for the Republican nomination, do you expect him to be indicted? I think the obvious answer is no. And that's because Trump's indictments (and impeachments) were caused by Trump having an unusual disregard for the law, rather than by Democrats abusing power to prosecute their enemies.
That doesn't follow. You have dropped many requirements. To be a fair test your scenario would read:
In the unlikely scenario where Ron DeSantis becomes frontrunner for the Republican nomination where DeSantis polls enough to have a reasonable chance of beating the democrats (he doesn't) and also strongly suggests he will go against the mainstream on significant issues such as the Ukraine (which he will not), do you expect him to be indicted?
You are not comparing like for like.
I mean, I still wouldn't expect him to be indicted in that scenario.
I don't. If the Dems were pursuing some Putinesque effort to seize permanent power, they'd simply had had Trump arrested in 2016 before the election on some made up charge, sent him to a penal colony (Guantanamo?) and left him to rot. That's ridiculous, of course, because the Dems are nothing like Putin and America is no where close to becoming a mafia state.
I expect the Dems to use whatever means they have to hand, judicial or extra, against the frontrunning opposition candidate. I expect that the Republicans would do the same, except that they don't have control of the media.
They don't have control of Fox News and Twitter/X?
Twitter/X absolutely not.
Fox News is heavily aligned with mainstream republicans. Until recently they've had some prominent populist/trumpian voices, but they're now working to change that; See the departure of Tucker Carlson. (and, unsurprisingly, they're hemorrhaging viewers as a result)
I don't know about indictments, but good old Slate is already running the "Horrid Popish Plot" scare article about him (and I had no idea this outdated 'can you vote for a Catholic in a democracy?' attitude was still on the go). I'm presuming they wanted to raise the spectre of a revivified Religious Right or Moral Majority, then bumped up against the awkward fact that he's not Evangelical, but hey, any stick will do to beat the dog;
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2023/07/desantis-religion-catholic-evangelical-vote.html
"So, what, exactly, is DeSantis doing here? Why was his Roman Catholicism essentially a secret? Faith can be no private matter for a Republican presidential candidate. As Politico and others noted recently, DeSantis’ presidential campaign has outlined educated white evangelicals as being his gateway to the nomination. So is this Catholic-evangelical two-step how he’s trying to court voters, and if so, is it a good strategy? What, exactly, is Ron DeSantis signaling to Republicans with how he presents his faith?"
Well gee, Molly Olmstead, if people like you are going to write scare stories about THE DOGMA LIVES LOUDLY WITHIN YOU, just maybe that's why he didn't make his faith front-and-centre? And why confine it to Republican candidate? Biden and Pelosi have made mention of being Catholics. Is there a 'right' kind of Catholic and a 'wrong' kind?
"DeSantis has made it clear that Catholicism is not central to his image. Unlike President Joe Biden, who is known to pray the rosary and identifies proudly as Catholic, DeSantis keeps things generically Christian. Even the prominent Catholic masses he has attended could be justified by non-Catholics as political in nature: one at the culture war–infused Ave Maria University, and one at a “Blue Mass” for police officers who died while on duty. His fight against abortion certainly taps into a traditionally Catholic battle, but it’s a battle that Protestants co-opted decades ago. When he speaks of his faith in interviews, he speaks of “faith”—not the church’s teachings or anything more distinctly Catholic in flavor. If this choice is a matter of identifying as—or appealing to—a generic white Christian American, it doesn’t sound that different from his recent efforts to pronounce his own name in a less European way.
But from the way he speaks at events and in interviews, it does seem that DeSantis isn’t just trying to seem less Catholic. It sounds like he’s also trying to seem more evangelical—or at least one specific kind of evangelical."
Blue Mass? Let nobody tell this lassie about the Red Mass, she might have conniptions and with her delicate sensibilities it could do her an injury:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xVbSvwIyUgU
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Mass#United_States
"One of the better-known Red Masses is the one celebrated each fall at the Cathedral of St. Matthew the Apostle in Washington, D.C., on the Sunday before the first Monday in October (the Supreme Court convenes on the first Monday in October). It is sponsored by the John Carroll Society and attended by some Supreme Court justices, members of Congress, the diplomatic corps, the Cabinet and other government departments and sometimes the President of the United States. Each year, at the Brunch following the Red Mass, the Society confers its Pro Bono Legal Service Awards to thank lawyers and law firms that have provided outstanding service."
I like the bit about "the culture war-infused Ave Maria University", I really do. Still sniffy about those nouveau riche proles trying to "build their own" academia, Molly? So fortunate no other universities in the entire USA are culture war-infused, isn't it? 😁
Biden praying the rosary - A-OK because we know he's going to decide the 'right way' on the topics we value. DeSantis using Scriptural passages - bad because he's (now let me get this straight) pretending not to be Catholic but trying to appeal to Evangelicals?
Okay, now I'm confused: I can't tell if it's good to be Catholic or bad when you're running for office. Seemingly it's okay so long as you cool it on the martial imagery?
"“Overall, it 100 percent makes sense from a Catholic perspective,” said Lauren Horn Griffin, a professor in the philosophy and religious studies department at Louisiana State University. “There’s a real prevalence of military metaphors in Catholicism.” She cited the Knights of Columbus, a popular Catholic men’s organization. “Knight imagery, crusader imagery, are very common. And that often leads to spiritual warfare language. So I think that there’s definitely a spiritual warfare rhetoric in the Catholic past and present.”
I finally understand the temptation to declare DEUS VULT online because with a set-up of pearl-clutching like that, it's really hard not to want to jump out and go "Boo!" at them 😀
Though I am highly impressed by Miss Olmstead's strict disciplinary attitude towards accepting the rebuke and instruction of your bishop. I am sure she held the same when it was Nancy Pelosi being rebuked by the American conference of bishops:
"Repeatedly, Catholic bishops have chastised DeSantis for his positions on the death penalty and on immigration. But DeSantis has shown no sign of moderation or remorse at the bishops’ criticism."
That was a meal in itself, thanks Ron for being the casus belli of the Slate "you're doing your religion wrong" ticking-off for my entertainment!
Very few people seem to think that the government does anything at all that it wants to - an open dictatorship. The voters and popular opinion both still matter. Charges need to be based on something real, even if made out to be worse than they are, or the people will sour on politicians doing it. Bragg's indictment of Trump about using campaign funds was a bad idea, politically, because it hurt Democrats more than it hurt Trump - it looked like, and was, a political prosecution. Both sides seem to agree on that.
I definitely believe that if the Democrats felt that they could indict DeSantis without it *looking like* a political prosecution, they absolutely would. I mean, they already have been trying to accuse him of kidnapping illegal immigrants to send to various places (Martha's Vineyard).
>> Bragg's indictment ... was a political prosecution.
People get indicted on campaign finance violations all the time. Usually it isn't a president / presidential candidate. How are you distinguishing b/w
a) violations identified get prosecuted regardless of level, but presidents usually don't break the law / don't get caught,
b) violations at that level have generally been wink-winked, but we're trying to be less corrupt now,
c) violations at that level will get wink-winked except that Trump is special because we dislike him
d) violations at that level will get wink-winked for our guys and prosecuted for their guys
Feel free to reword c or d, I'm trying to represent your hypothesis somewhere in that space.
Of the four, I think c is the closest to my position. I don't think "wink, wink" is the right terminology, though it's in the right direction. I think it's more like when Clinton was caught using a private server for classified information, but Comey said that "no reasonable prosecutor" would pursue the claims. He flat out said that she broke the law, but that there should be no prosecution (he didn't have that authority, but the FBI saying not to do it on national TV tends to have that effect anyway). Bragg's indictment is the opposite - taking a novel criminal claim that's on the edge of illegality at best and literally making a federal case out of it. Very few people seem to think that it's a valid legal theory or likely to result in Trump's conviction, yet it was pursued anyway despite Trump being a former president and leading presidential contender.
Former high level Republican candidates likely would have received the same deference that Clinton did. Trump seems to be the anomaly here.
As with most people, I have mixed feelings about high level politicians literally getting away with crimes. The alternative is generally considered worse, banana-republic kinds of things where the state apparatus can be (and therefore will be) use against politicians in order to win elections. Other than with Trump, it appears that our approach is to err on the side of letting things go. There's no way that 250 years of US presidents never had one break a law after they were in office until just now.
Have you considered that Trump is special less in how people react to him than in the way he acts? Again, he literally led/orchestrated a coup when he lost the election, and there were people who predicted that he would engage in that class of behavior years before he actually did it. This really should yield an update against the idea that those people are irrationally biased.
His entire personal/business history consists of doing whatever he wants, frequently in violation of laws and/or contracts, and then tying up complaints in civil litigation. It is unsurprising that he would have done whatever he wanted while campaigning, in violation of laws w/r/t/w most other candidates at his level work to maintain compliance. Particularly if you didn't have prior experience with him, you might underestimate the degree to which this is a close analogue of "They got Al Capone for tax evasion." He's been making enemies in the NY metro area for decades both by being unscrupulous in ways that are only enforceable in civil courts, and by violating the law primarily in ways that are hard to prove and/or informationally contained (ie, it's predictable that criminal acts are potentially provable given the first domino of probable cause evidence to justify further searches, but without the first piece of PC evidence you can't justify the subpeona/search to get more.)
Perhaps it is the case that former presidents have broken the law many times before, but what evidence of that existed contemporaneously?
Framing the Stormy Daniels payment as "wrote from the wrong account" is strawmanning. They took active measures to conceal that money was being spent at all, and made a broader effort to suppress other prior affairs, which makes sense at that time only because publicity close to the election might be bad.
"Again, he literally led/orchestrated a coup when he lost the election, and there were people who predicted that he would engage in that class of behavior years before he actually did it."
To be fair, for literally every US President since Ronald Reagan, I heard many, many people predicting that they would lead or orchestrate a coup if they lost an election. I'm only going to update my assessment of people who made that prediction of Trump but *not* of Bush Jr or Obama.
Sure, I could be more specific. There were 'serious' people who normally are pretty centrist and non-committal or otherwise stay out of domestic politics, as well as a lot of people who are predictably partisan, who bucked their normal trends to say that Trump was dangerous. He then proved to be so.
Who made comparable predictions about Bush 43? I remember people going as far as, say, calling his policies 'creeping fascism', but I don't remember someone actually saying 'this guy behaves like an authoritarian and might deliberately break the democratic system'.
Trump was a criminal long before he ran for president in 2016. He had been committing various forms of financial fraud, sexual assault, etc. for years. He ran for president to make it seem like his crimes catching up to him were political persecution, rather than the result of a life of being a criminal.
He committed very brazen crimes to try and stay in power and to suppress investigations into him because he knew he would be prosecuted the moment he wasn't in charge for his crimes.
> the conspiracy version requires us to believe that insurgents like Shamir Basayev were willing to lie about the origin of the bomb to help Putin for some reason.
Shamil (not Shamir) Basaev disavowed the bombings in 1999.
“Today, in an interview with Radio Liberty, Khattab said that he does not fight women and children. According to him, Russian law enforcement agencies are trying to blame him on their failures in the fight against unknown terrorists. "He set specific military tasks, and explosions of peaceful houses in Moscow or in other Russian cities are not among them," Khattab said. The field commander admits that some of his words, spoken between battles, may be misinterpreted by journalists, but Khattab says that he never threatened to kill the civilian population of Russia. "Dagestan's destruction from the presence of Russian troops," he says. According to Shamil Basayev, professionals working in the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the FSB of Russia know perfectly well who can be behind the explosions of residential buildings in Moscow. He is sure that statements about his involvement in the attacks are designed for the layman. Basayev claims that the explosions in the Russian capital are the result of a power struggle in Moscow. "The main thing is that the President be elected democratically," Basayev believes.” September 1999
Short quotes Basayev as saying that the first explosion was "not our work, but the work of the Dagestanis" in an interview with Lidove noviny, September 9, 1999. Lacking the ability to read Czech and track down the article, that's as good as I can do for sourcing.
It would be nice to see one of those ACX Adversarial Collaborations on the 1999 apartment bombings, although I lack the skills to participate. The whole thing is intriguing to me because it's really important in Putin-understanding. In Short's narrative Putin starts out half-decent and becomes evil. If he came to power by killing 300 innocent people in their sleep, that narrative disintegrates.
The original interview does not appear to be online, but here is what claims to be the key excerpt from it, in Czech: https://legacy.blisty.cz/art/11987.html. You can translate it by google translate or something like that (excerpt is only middle part of the article, beginning and the end are author's own commentary plus another two excerpts).
That author has credibility issues, but I think this is genuine. And Basayev is quoted as saying what Short says he did say.
Wow, thank you for digging this up. Yeah, beyond the direct Short quote, the longer passage is basically "I condemn terrorism, now here is why it was justified"
I mean, it took like a minute, since I can read Czech :-). Probably whole interview is somewhere on the webs, but it is hard to find.
“Majority of Russians hardly believe in God, but find some kind of church desecration (and what Pussy Riot did would qualify in people's mind) to be disgusting”
I think that’s fairly universal. In your head substitute mosque or synagogue, if not.
As a person who grew up in a third-generation atheistic family in Russia I found it as least distasteful and unnecessary. Funnily their intent was not of desecration - it was a prayer to the Lord and Mother Mary to save Russia from Putin. There were very few visitors in the church at that moment, so hardly a lot of damage to religious sensitivities was done. So it was not a huge deal until it was made into one, Russia has a minor criminal offence for such cases. The powers above decided to make a witch trial out of it and the penalty - 2 years of prison was absurdly excessive. The whole thing was a seed for Putin's capitalisation on conservatism. There are few things that Russians enjoy then public flagellation of various "abnormals" (incl gays, liberals, feminists, and now anti-war activists). It was the same year when "gay propaganda" because penalised. And the public support for Pussy Riot prosecution paved the way to introduction of a new and separate criminal penalty for "the offence of religions sensitivities (feelings)".
It does seem like there's a debate to be had as to whether the first domino has fallen with regards to political prosecutions in the US. It feels like it could go either way from here.
Ultimately, there may be other ways to accomplish the things that a political prosecution accomplishes, that are even easier to get away with.
> Soviet / Russian universities sometimes admit and keep mediocre students who are good in sports to score some cookie points with the higher authorities
As opposed to American universities? (Yes, I know they're doing it for a different reason.)
I think it was largely for the same reasons. There were no professional sports leagues in the USSR. There were college sports (and universities needed good athletes for prestige) and for "major leagues" you had teams of athletes who at least nominally worked in the same state enterprise (usually a factory).
There has to be a balance between prosecuting politicians who commit crimes and not prosecuting them when it's just political persecution from their opponents.
If every politician gets prosecuted, that's bad, but if no politicians get prosecuted, that's also bad. The challenge is striking the right balance. In the last 50 years, three Presidents (Nixon, Clinton, Trump) have face serious legal peril (Nixon was pardoned after resigning, Clinton was impeached but not convicted and then beat a bunch of attempts to prosecute him before they went to trial, Trump is ongoing). The other six (Ford, Carter, Reagan, both Bushes and Obama) were clean enough not to really have too much to worry about (even Iran-Contra never got near the Presidents).
That strikes me as a reasonable level of balance: if you do the normal sorts of things that Presidents do, you'll be OK, even if some of those could technically be regarded as a violation of a law. If you cross a line, then you'll get prosecuted. And that applies to both parties: Clinton was shady enough that he got into a lot of legal difficulties.
At lower levels, criminal investigations and prosecutions (mostly for political corruption) happen often enough that they're not even necessarily headline news, but the vast majority of politicians go through a career without facing legal consequences.
Worth noting that Clinton didn’t completely evade legal consequences. He was disbarred and paid $850,000 to Paula Jones. When he left office he was more than $16 million in debt
I think an open debate is happening about what it means to "cross a line" between normal stuff and things that should be prosecuted. My read on Trump is that the only thing he really did different was being a giant blowhard and uncouth. If "lying" were the offense, then just about every president in the last 100 years would qualify - and both Clintons similar to Trump. Otherwise I'm not seeing a fundamental difference. You name the crime, and variations of it seem to also apply to Biden, Clinton, and sometimes even Obama. Not to mention Obama ordering the extrajudicial killing of an American citizen, which is something that I don't know of any other president ever doing.
They all had problems with illegal and illicit campaign donations. They all had problems with classified documents after leaving office. You can say J6 was different, but that's only in 1/3 of the indictments and they were going after Trump long before January of 2021.
Take a look at the classified documents cases: the core difference seems to be that the others (not just the Democrats, but Pence and Bush and Cheney) either when they themselves noticed or when the National Archives caught them, apologised, agreed to send the documents back, and generally weren't assholes about it. Trump tried to claim he didn't have to send them back, tried to hide it (not just from the public but from the National Archives or the prosecutors or even his own lawyers) and generally was an asshole about it.
Letting people off with a warning when they accept they've done wrong, make it good (ie return stuff) and promise not to do it again is a thing that all sorts of police and prosecutors do.
I do think that Trump's core problem is that he's an asshole and he antagonises prosecutors and investigators. If you're an FBI Special Agent or a United States Attorney, you expect people to be scared of you and deferential to you. Trump isn't, and that makes them want to cut him down to size.
But also - there is a difference between "I made a fuck up, I'm sorry, I'm returning everything" and "those documents are mine, come fite me". I think this is what the old saying "it's not the crime, it's the cover-up" comes from: admitting you did something wrong when caught can reduce the penalties dramatically; trying to hide it and fight it is always going to result in the prosecution coming down hard.
But that says nothing about political bias or politicisation of prosecutions and everything about idiosyncratic aspects of Trump's personality.
That's why I think that someone else who'd implemented Trump's policies - a Greg Abbot or a Ron DeSantis - would not have faced prosecution at the time, and if elected as President in 2024 would not be prosecuted ... and that's why I think this isn't a political persecution.
I agree with you enough to say that I'm uncertain. I completely agree that Trump's attitude and presentation make it easier to accuse him of things, and more likely it will happen.
On the other hand, I have seen enough Republican presidential candidates get accused of random things to have serious doubts about any specific accusation. They called John McCain a racist and harassed Mitt Romney because he thought we should be more wary of Russia. For that matter, they called Romney a racist too. Bush 2 was accused of just about everything you can imagine. And even before he announced for office Ron DeSantis was being pilloried by partisan Democratic outlets for things that shouldn't have been a problem even if true (or as Deiseach shared above, are completely normal like being a Catholic - which Biden himself is!).
Sure: but Democratic candidates also get accused of random things, like Obama being born in Kenya or being a Muslim; Biden being a radical socialist; Hillary Clinton being involved in the murder of Vince Foster, etc. That's just how politics works at the moment. I'd like it not to (and I really admired McCain for standing up to it when he told someone in a town hall that Obama was "a decent family man and a citizen and[sic] I just happen to have disagreements with on public issues") but I don't know how to fix that.
The difference is that when they're saying this about a Republican, the MSM (places like the NY Times and Washington Post) will say "people accuse Republican X of being a racist", but they'll say "people falsely accuse Democrat Y of being a socialist" They don't endorse the dubious claims, but they are much more likely to positively reject them in one direction than the other.
Agreed on all points.
Obama's publishing company claimed he was born in Kenya (or Malaysia) on the book cover of Dreams from my Father. Thats an own goal.
His agent, and not on the cover, but on the official bio they distributed to promote the book. But yes, that happened. In 1991.
People make stupid mistakes and going from "Obama's father was Kenyan" to "Obama was born in Kenya" is the sort of mistake that some junior staffer who hasn't read the book is likely to make.
My point here is that a number of people who didn't like Obama jumped at this, not because any kind of serious assessment of the evidence led them there, but because it provided an excuse to attack someone they didn't like. There's a lot of that in American politics, and there has been for a long time: "The Paranoid Style in American Politics" dates back to 1964.
>Take a look at the classified documents cases: the core difference seems to be that the others (not just the Democrats, but Pence and Bush and Cheney) either when they themselves noticed or when the National Archives caught them, apologised, agreed to send the documents back, and generally weren't assholes about it.
The obvious rebuttal to this is Hillary's disingenuous response to being caught running an email server with classified documents where she pretends not to know anything about what happened to the server under her control ("Like with a cloth or something?") definitely doesn't meet this criteria. There are also a lot of other convenient cases of 'nope, all the hard drives / phones have been destroyed! Sorry we have nothing to hand over! Tee hee!' And then there's Sandy Berger, the former National Security Advisor that walked out of the Archives with classified documents and then destroyed them.
That "cloth" response was sarcasm, and it is bad faith to act otherwise.
The use of private email servers for such purposes was common in the Bush administration. The Hillary Clinton email "controversy" was fake news.
The private email server never had much classified information on it; it was incidental leakage, the sort we are seeing constantly happen because the government has a hard time keeping secrets.
It's just a lie to equate the situations.
>I do think that Trump's core problem is that he's an asshole and he antagonises prosecutors and investigators.
Gee. Why could that be? They certainly didn't wiretap his campaign manager based on intelligence they knew was bogus and then try to undermine his presidency for 4 years. They certainly didn't attempt to manipulate the media in both his electoral runs against him by suppressing stories negative to his political opponent. Gee whiz. You'd almost think he should be enthusiastic about bending over and spreading when they request his temperature.
I think the assumption you have here and that Trump shares that the prosecutors and investigators are the same people as did all of those other things is one of Trump's bigger problems. They aren't. These are lots of different people from various different factions, many of whom hate each other, and Trump doesn't have the ability to divide and rule.
The assumption that there is a "they" is wrong.
The thing about being uncouth and a giant blowhard is that it undermines the tolerance for Presidential skullduggery which is in part based on maintaining an air of professional plausible deniability.
As in “we’ll let you get away with this, but you need to give us *something* we can use to justify not nailing you for it”. Trump’s general attitude of “I’m the president I can do whatever I want”, tendency to go for “big lies”, and lack of competent counsel make it very believable that he’s failed to do the pro forma ass covering necessary to get away with “normal” behavior.
While I agree with all of that, I have to ask if that's really the "line" that we want? As long as our politicians deny it in a particular way, and have good legal counsel, we're okay with it? That seems like a really crappy way to differentiate the same behavior.
The alternatives are 1) take the laws off the books or 2) aggressively prosecute every politician. So “business as usual so long as you make the appearance of respecting the rule of law” might be the lesser of evils.
Really comes down to whether you consider “typical” political bad behavior to be more like murder or speeding.
I can agree with that. Unfortunately, when the people have knowledge (or strong reason to believe) that the crime was committed either way, it erodes trust to prosecute one and not another. As mentioned above, Hillary's "like, with a cloth?" comment about erasing evidence of an actual crime doesn't hold water with anyone. And Trump is denying claims against himself too, just often in a similarly unbelievable way.
I struggle with how Clinton was treated (publicly stated that we should not prosecute her for known crimes) and how Trump is being treated (people actively talking about how to get some kind of charges against him, along with at least some of the charges against him being weak and not something we would prosecute anyone for, let alone a major candidate).
Trump’s first military order as president was to kill a little American girl…how can you not know that??
This is honestly the thing that bothers me no end about the various Trump prosecutions.
Trump, like Biden and every other living president, is flagrantly guilty of crimes against humanity on a massive scale. And violating his oath of office, as well as presumably various and sundry corruption. But heaven forbid we touch any of that. let's go after classified document process crimes and novel legal theories about inciting insurrection.
I had to do some checking to even find this reference - I think you mean Nawar al-Awlaki? Your depiction that the order "was to kill a little American girl" is flat out wrong. She did die in a raid, but the raid was not against her and her killing, though very unfortunate, was not intentional. Several US presidents have incidentally killed American citizens, which aligns with my previous point about Trump doing things others have done. Obama's order was targeted by name, knowing that the target was a US citizen.
I will agree with Antimemetics here that the real crimes are being ignored while we go after process crimes. The real crimes implicate other presidents more than Trump, but we're used to ignoring all of that.
Not only did a little American girl die but a Navy SEAL along with multiple innocent civilians died and it was FUBAR from the jump…almost like the Deep State wanted Trump compromised and he fell for their trap.
I'm not sure what your point is - that Trump is mostly innocent and people are out to get him? That he's responsible for Navy SEAL tactics on the ground? Someone told him the results would have been a little girl and a Navy SEAL dying and he said something like "oh, yeah, make sure both of them get killed!"
If you're arguing, as Antimemetics did, that the US should not raid and assassinate individuals like we do, I agree with you. Anything more specific about Trump, or saying he did the same thing as Obama in ordering the murder of an American citizen, is false.
So Obama and Hillary aren’t responsible for Benghazi?? And Trump appointed Rosenstein who appointed Mueller and so Trump did a lot of dumb things in his first two years.
Trump committed a huge amount of financial crimes - both tax fraud and bank fraud, as well as diverting non-profit money into his own pockets.
He ran for president to make any prosecution of him for these crimes seem "political".
His crimes around the 2020 election were many, and have been clearly laid out in the indictment.
What you believe is objectively false.
I’ll admit upfront that this is fuzzy, but I get the sense that a difference between Trump and Nixon/Clinton is a public consensus that what he’s accused of doing, if he actually did it, is so bad as to warrant actually prosecuting him. I think that’s necessary to overcome the (healthy) aversion to prosecuting politicians for more ambiguous sins. No, Trump cannot get away with shooting a guy on 5th avenue. But could he get away with obstructing an investigation people thought was trivial or unjust in the first place? Maybe (and maybe he should)?
Burglarizing and spying on your political opposition, with your direct involvement and knowledge provable? Bipartisan agreement that that crosses the line.
Sexual harassment and assault? Bad, if provable - but note that Clinton (partially) escaped once it devolved, in the public eye, into just trying to nail him for lying about a BJ.
With Trump, there is a sense that motivated prosecutors are throwing shit at the wall to see what sticks. They have been shown their man and are now trying to show you his crime. The NY prosecution (by a politician who literally ran on a platform of prosecuting Trump) is using a fairly tortured interpretation of the law to try to nail him for what would be a federal crime, except that the Feds declined to prosecute. The “insurrection” indictment is tainted by the fact that there is no consensus that J6 was actually an insurrection in the first place (as opposed to just a particularly high-visibility “mostly peaceful” riot, of which we’d been conditioned to accept).
The classified docs stuff seems like the most straightforwardly obvious “he did an illegal thing, lied about it, got caught, and is being prosecuted the way you’d expect such a thing to go down”. But even there, you’ve got the problem of his two most prominent political opponents having their own very public problems with document handling, and not facing direct legal consequences for them, creating the appearance of impropriety.
Some of this is the objective difference and some of it is raw polarization, I’ll concede that, but I do think the main thing I’m scratching at is important: if you want a prosecution of a politician to not look like political persecution, the underlying crime needs to be broadly seen as unambiguously worthy of prosecution.
"there is no consensus that J6 was actually an insurrection in the first place"
I wonder if this new law review article, coming from two prominent conservative legal professors who are active members of the Federalist Society, will encourage such a consensus?
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4532751
A high-profile co-founder of the Federalist Society, Steven Calabresi, has endorsed the article.
If a 126 page law review article published 2.5 years after the fact is required to explain why the event was an insurrection, I feel fairly confident that the type of public consensus I’m talking about here is unlikely to be reached within the lifetime of any of the principals.
It took 1.5 years after the Senate Watergate hearings for national polling on whether Nixon should be removed from office to shift in stages from 81-19 "no" to 60-40 "yes". Articles explaining how his actions were real crimes (my father remembered it that nobody he knew had even heard of "obstruction of justice" before), were part of that.
I want to push back against this:
"This sounds like a conspiracy theory on par with "9/11 was an inside job".
..."
There are several reasons why the two are not comparable. First there is basically no evidence that Bush did 9/11, whereas there is plenty of circumstantial evidence Putin was behind those bombings. It would also be a lot more difficult to get multiple people to sacrifice their own life for your conspiracy compared to just placing a couple of bombs in an appartment building.
Second, Putin could just have the lower level people executing on this assasinated.
Third in a deeply corrupt system without rule of law where bribery and assassination of political enemies is not exactly uncommon, it is a lot easier to get away with a scheme like this. For starters Putin would probably know a fair number of people who he could order to kill someone from his FSB and St Petersburg days. He would have a lot more tools at his disposal to punish/reward co-conspirators than Bush would have. It would be far more riskier to blow the whistle on Putin than on Bush.
In a system with stronger rule of law where this would be very uncommon, the moment Bush would approach someone to assassinate someone, that person would now have a lot more leverage over him than in the same scenario with Putin's Russia in the 90's, early 2000's that has more of a "law of the jungle" system as opposed to "rule of law". And there would be powerful institutions that could be used to persecute and make Bush's life very difficult in the US. Which were not really present in Russia during that time.
You would also need a proper free press to blow the whistle and properly spread this information, which was missing in Russia and present in the US. Further incentivizing people to keep quiet.
Finally we even have strong evidence of at least 1 assassination associated with the bombings, Litvinenko!
I think it's much more interesting to ask if the CIA did 9/11 than if Bush did. I can imagine a situation where the CIA is pissed off Bush is taking Iraq more seriously than Bin Laden, and scrabble together a Bin Laden attack to try to force his hand.
The truth is far far worse—Bush stole the 2000 election and then lied us into an asinine war all the while selling us out to China.
About Navalny. It is true that his earliest agenda is ultranationalistic and bad, but since then he has become undoubtedly a force for good in Russian politics. He exposed a LOT of corruption in the government, and led efforts to consolidate voting against the ruling party officials (so called Smart Voting), which succeeded in many places despite the elections being rigged. Then he was poisoned by the FSB, managed to recover, and returned to Russia knowing he would be arrested, and has been in prison ever since. When he tried to run for president in 2018 and when he made public (from prison) his views on the desired future for Russia, there were no traces of the ultranationalist agenda. In this context, seeing him dismissively mentioned (guy doing a genocide infomercial) exclusively in the context of his old views feels wrong and unfair (for me as a liberal Russian), and not unlike judging a person by their 15-year-old tweet which they now disagree with.
+1, thank you for saying that.
In 2020 he also (falsely) blamed Putin's power on ethnic minorities and condemned Russia's exploitation by "Tatar elites":
>Ну а другая сторона сделки, то есть Путин, дает татарским элитам воровать так, как не снилось самым наглым московским единороссам
>Well, the other side of the deal, i.e. Putin, allows the Tatar elites to steal in a way that the most brazen Moscow United Russians could not have dreamed of
[Cited and discussed here: https://twitter.com/kamilkazani/status/1509985685255688193].
Worse, in an interview earlier in 2020, Navalny said:
>Я написал пост, в котором называл грузин грызунами, за что извинялся. Могу извиниться еще раз. Но по сути я своего взгляда не изменил.
>I wrote a post calling Georgians rodents, for which I apologized. I can apologize again. But in essence I have not changed my views.
Lukashenko did the same thing, and then became a terrible dictator.
And it was a little bit more than 1 tweet. And there were more recent things as well.
In essences there are no good guys here. That is the problem with Russia. Their culture is deeply rotted from the inside through and through.
Westerners would like a narrative where some shining knight in white armor will come in and turn Russia around and defeat all the bad guys, but this will likely not happen anytime soon.
I was looking forward to this post, dictator's club comment highlight articles are nearly as good as the articles themselves.
I'm starting to grow a theory myself about how dictators come to be dictators and holding on to power: it's never against or in spite of the people. Dictators also need consent, but in a different currency than democratic leaders. On the other hand, in the zero-sum game a dictator wins when becoming and staying a dictator, somebody needs to be paying. That is the middle class in its entirety and most of the upper-middle class. A dictator who only slightly tilts elections (5% or so) and holds the media power only needs around 30-40% of the voters to stay loyal to him. The cheapest loyalty to buy is the loyalty of the poorest, which can be in the form of generous unemployment benefits (I mean minimum wage generous, not Norwegian unemployment benefits generous), early retirement schemes, benefits for people who look after others in their homes, direct monetary benefits to rural farmers instead of subsidies which would necessitate for them to actually farm their fields so they can now directly cash the checks while fields lay empty, and the kind. Once a dictator-to-be who is merely a democratically elected leader for now chooses to buy the cheapest 40% of the people, which are usually the least educated 40% and secures the next elections with them with a landslide, next is to this way or that way take over media. Media in itself is barely profitable, so fellow oligarchs who are fed gov't contracts can be ordered to buy media outlets as the price of those contracts. Once the 40% and the media are in place the rest is easy. Win every election, stuff the judiciary with your people, and get the productive people of your country to pay for all that.
Many productive people will immigrate to better pastures, but the majority either has too many connections in the country to leave, has a job that's only valued locally (for example lawyers who are proficient with your country's laws and cannot enter bar in another), or simply cannot find a job abroad yet (it's not easy). In a decade or two, professions that used to earn a couple of times the minimum wage will be earning more or less the minimum wage. They might just choose to do an easier job and make a similar amount of money, but not everyone does that because they respect their jobs or something. In the end, the extra taxes that they pay are fed to the 40% and the system goes on.
I don't want to make this post any longer, but so far any hole I can think of in this scenario has a fix unfortunately. I would've thought in the long run the loss of productivity would tank the economy so hard even the 40% would be impossible to buy, but then the education becomes so bad it becomes easier to buy them.
So I can say that the secret ingredient to a dictator rising is him making the top 0.1% and bottom 40% allies, squeezing all the juice in the middle among themselves and keeping the system running.
There must be *some* "hole" in your theory, or else all nations in the world would be sham democracies, run by dictators with minority support.
What I mean is that there must be some powerful counter-weight to this process that arrives at a sustainable balance point short of sham democracy/functional dictatorship.
Of course it's not for all nations, it should be a somewhat flawed democracy with at least 30-40% cheaply buyable low educated population.
Ah, so only "flawed democracies" are vulnerable to this risk? What flaws do you see as making this possible. What makes a population "cheaply buyable"?
Think Hungary, Russia, Turkey, Franco's Spain, Salazar's Portugal, Pinochet's Chile... Any country with more human capital than a natural resource to capitalize which cannot dictate with everybody at gunpoint but create some kind of consent but not too much human capital so that it's still possible to buy off the cheapest 40%. With less human capital you can just be a dictator keeping everyone on gunpoint like many sub-Saharan African dictatorships or Latin American banana republics. With more human capital it's too expensive to buy a big enough block to consistently win flawed but not completely sham elections.
So there's a "Goldilocks' Zone" for dictators with regards to population size?
More or less so; not with regards to population size but with regards to the ratio of government budget to the income of the 60% percentile (poorest 40%). There's also the tradition of democracy in the population which has an effect, but I'm not sure how much.
When the people are really poor related to the government, they can just be held at gunpoint. All this scheme is only necessary when the easier option of holding at gunpoint isn't doable.
Now when I was writing this reply, I thought about the Western countries having the problems with their 40%ers, the yellow jackets in France, the Brexiteers in UK, the farmers in the Netherlands, the whatever is going on over there in USA; I wonder if a savvy populist demagogue would just embrace them and use them to proper themselves and stay in power. All a prospective dictator needs to do is to, after getting democratically elected, to create schemes, incentives, etc that would directly pay his electors selectively, and little else of the population. That's easier than it sounds. It hasn't been done in a country that has a long running history of democracy (Russia, Hungary etc are ex-iron curtain countries; Spain, Portugal were relatively just out of monarchy; Chile had some history but USA put their finger on the scales too much there; Turkey had some history of democracy but hasn't fallen all the way into dictatorship yet) so there might be some other factors; but it might also be that no self respecting politician in an old democracy dares to try this. We'll see more in the upcoming decades :)
More are sham democracies run by oligarchies with minority support.
Can you clarify what you mean by "more"? Can you give some examples of nations that you believe are sham democracies?
Greece, for example. Ukraine. Egypt. Lebanon.
Ok, fair enough. Personally, I see "democracy" as a continuous spectrum, with some governments being more democratic than others.
Perhaps the 40% also needs to like you on an emotional level, which is based on random factors. It’s not rocket science to enact (or promise) some populist measures, but then the 40% just deem you not charismatic enough.
I used to work as a management consultant in corporate type settings, and I could regale you with tale after tale of upper management types who tried and failed to convey a sense of understanding and caring about their subordinates. Clueless attempts at a superficial sense of sympathy can do more harm than none at all!
yes, the good old nationalism, the "world is against us" discourse, some twisted kind of traditionalism, a created cult for the leader; they're all tools they use.
Yes, but my entire point is that many wannabe dictators try this but few succeed.
of course, some are just better at this than others. they either should believe their own crap, or at least act good enough that people believe. The moment it seems like he's just putting on a show it hurts their chances of success a lot.
By the way, this is exactly what happens sometimes to good democratic opposition. The people want a strongman-ish person, so seeing they're behind on the polls they try to act like one but that being an act becomes too evident and it becomes counterproductive.
The Selectorate theory is a better model, and states the opposite.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selectorate_theory
I think your getting confused because Putin started out as a democratic leader of a severely flawed democracy, and as his popularity from creating order and higher oil prices waned, he became increasingly more authoritarian and corrupt.
In fact corruption is a feature of authoritarian rule, without it you cannot really stay in power.
Thanks for the link, I didn't know about this and find it enlightening but I think it agrees with me. I say countries with a certain setting are prone to their leaders (elected or appointed) finding the cheapest winning coalition and milking the rest of the country with that winning coalition plus the oligarchs. That's very similar for example of Putin and Erdoğan.
"Soviet / Russian universities sometimes admit and keep mediocre students who are good in sports to score some cookie points with the higher authorities..."
Wow, that sounds deeply corrupt. So glad we don't do that here in the US.
Here's a conversation I had with a Chinese friend:
[me] Compared to China, no respectable US school has any transparency at all
[me] There are schools with transparent admissions, but there are no good schools like that
[her] But SAT, that's still a transparent number? Right?
[her] How much does it weigh in enrollment?
[me] SAT is a transparent number, but the effect of your SAT score on admission is a mystery
[me] You send your application and you hope
[me] It is called "holistic admissions" - holistic 基本是“主观”的意思 ["holistic" basically means "subjective"]
[me] So I had 满分 [a perfect score - note that this sounds much more impressive in China, where perfect scores on the gaokao don't ever happen], but I was not accepted to Stanford 😜
[her] geeeez
[her] how can you guys stand this unfair system so long
-----
The simple model of the Chinese system is that you take the university entrance examination, you apply to a school, and the school admits applicants top down in order of examination score.
There are a lot of wrinkles to that (in particular an extensive system of affirmative action by geographic location) and there are side channels by which it's possible to be admitted without a qualifying score. But the simple model really does hold, modulo geography, for a majority of Chinese university admissions.
Of course, that system takes no account of an applicant's background.
Mostly correct. You frequently hear how high party officials send their children to study overseas in order to spare themselves the embarrassment of having a child attend a mediocre school.
The high officials do still have some advantages; in particular, admissions thresholds for Beijing are noticeably lower than for most other places in China.
That's interesting, it implies that the Chinese system is less corrupt than ours in many respects.
the system of USA is I think the most corrupt I know of the developed and developing world.
The recruitment process may be, though I think the actual education is less so.
Regarding the comment suggesting that Putin is smart, I don't think it's evidence for that claim.
Maybe he's smart, maybe he's not. But it's not at all clear that ability to hire talented, smart advisors is even positively correlated with intelligence. Indeed, you might even imagine that smart leaders have more trouble bringing themselves to hire competent managers because the want to inject their own ideas into everything or assume that they can do everything better than the experts (think physics disease).
Probably, ability to select and listen to talented advisors is more important than being smart. Unfortunately, there is a temptation to use 'smart' to describe whatever trait causes one to make good decisions.
When talking about the FBI having political bias, don't forget that James Comey, director of the FBI, broke with precedent to make an announcement about the whole Clinton email situation 1 week before the election specifically to sabotage her and get Trump elected.
Ultimately, I think the CIA and FBI are not Democratic leaning at all, they just appear that way because they're conservative in the traditional sense of the word and opposed things like the ending of the Iran deal, America lessening its NATO obligations, anything else that made America less of an international influence, which Trump was strongly pushing but which wasn't otherwise a mainstream element of Republican policy until Trump made it so.
If you were to ask most senior CIA/FBI/military officials what kind of leader they would most prefer, I'm pretty sure they would pick a Mitt Romney/George H.W. Bush type pro-military conservative over any Democrat, but any centrist Democrat over an isolationist anti-establishment Trump type of politician.
The FBI leadership has been Bush Republicans for at least 23 years. Obviously Bush Republicans hate Trump but they are still Republicans.
I think you're confusing what Comey *did*, with what Comey *intended*.
Comey probably did move the needle just enough to push Trump over the top in the swing states he needed in an extraordinarily close election, and so in a sense Comey "got Trump elected".
But that was not something that anyone could realistically have planned. At the time Comey made that decision, polling put Trump at ~20% if you believed Nate Silver, and I think <5% for just about everyone else. The election was predicted to go to Hillary by a substantial margin, and Comey's late revelation pushing a few of the tiny fraction of voters who hadn't already made up their minds away from Hillary, would not have changed that.
As a plan to swing an election, that's about like throwing a small hamster onto the trolley tracks to save the five innocent trolley-god sacrifices, then finding out that the trolley was horribly unbalanced and right on the brink of derailing anyway. And no, the FBI does not have a secret election superduperforecasting division that knew how the election was actually going to turn out.
What does make sense for Comey in that position, is to realize that the Wiener investigation and the second Hillary email cache, were going to come out *eventually*. If they came out after the election, coupled with the knowledge that Comey had sat on them beforehand, that would look like a coverup and damage the legitimacy of both the new (Hillary) administration and of the FBI. In an environment when Trump and the GOP were already doing everything they could to tear down both.
An executive-branch agency head engaging in conspicuous transparency to protect the integrity of his agency and of the administration as a whole, seems unobjectionable in intent.
> What does make sense for Comey in that position, is to realize that the Wiener investigation and the second Hillary email cache, were going to come out *eventually*. If they came out after the election, coupled with the knowledge that Comey had sat on them beforehand, that would look like a coverup and damage the legitimacy of both the new (Hillary) administration and of the FBI.
Pfizer doesn't seem to have suffered any consequences for seeking and getting permission to break from its published research plan so as not to have to release any results before the presidential election, and the FDA (?) doesn't seem to have suffered any for giving that permission.
For those who like decision theory applied to Putin and his cronies contemplating to kill 300 countrymen to boost his reelection chanches, you are likely to enjoy Taibbi's story about how the people behind the "9/11 conspiracy" must have weighted the pros and cons, before they reached their decision. I copy-paste part of the story here, as it does not seem to be available through google.
Scene: A secret meeting of the Project for a New American Century, April, 1999.
In attendance are Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, Irv Kristol, and ... others.
Cheney, standing at the head of the table and glaring downward, addresses the group:
Cheney: Gentlemen, we stand at a crossroads.
Kristol: (whispering to Feith) I love it when we stand at a crossroads!
Feith: (giggling) Me, too. But I never know what to wear.
Cheney: Do you assholes mind?
Kristol: Sorry, Dick.
Feith: Me, too.
Cheney: Okay. (Clears throat). As I was saying, gentlemen, we stand at a crossroads ...
Kristol: (in Bill Murray-esque fashion, mimicking suspense-movie soundtrack) Dunh-dunh-dunh!
Feith: Dunh-dunh-dunh! Dunh ... duh-duh-dunh!
Cheney: Oh, for fuck's sake.
Kristol: (laughing) Okay, seriously, Dick, I'm sorry.
Feith: (still laughing) Duh-duh-duh ... .
Kristol: Shhh!
Feith: Okay, okay. (to Cheney) No, it's okay, Dick, you can go on.
Cheney: You're sure? No more jokes to make? Guys want to do your goddamn Katherine Hepburn impersonations or something?
Kristol: (Channeling "On Golden Pond") Come on, Norman! Hurry up! The loons, the loons!
Feith: (whispering) Shut up, for Christ's sake! (to Cheney) Our lips are sealed, Dick. Honest.
Cheney: Okay. Jesus. As I was saying ... we, uh, stand at a crossroads.
(Pauses warily, continues). I think we all know about Marion King Hubbert's projections about the future of oil reserves. Once oil "peaks," America -- an empire whose power is based almost entirely upon its oil dominance -- will officially be on the decline.
Wolfowitz: So what's your point? We're all old anyway. Who cares what happens 20 years from now?
Cheney: The point, Paul, is that the American empire as we know it will collapse within 20-30 years unless we find massive new supplies of oil and find them fast. By 2010 we're going to need to find fifty million additional barrels of oil per day. And there's only one place where we can get that much oil ...
Kristol: Sweden!
Feith: Of course. Let's invade! I hate those goddamn speed-skaters anyway.
Cheney: No, you assholes, not Sweden. Iraq. It's the only major oil-rich state whose reserves haven't been mostly exploited. There's probably seven million barrels a day minimum just sitting in those fields -- and the worst thing is, unless we get in there soon, it's all going to go to the French, the Russians and the Germans, since Saddam will sell to all of them long before he deals with us, assuming his UN sanctions get lifted at some point.
Wolfowitz: My God.
Cheney: So it's clear we've got to get in there. Are we agreed on this?
All: Agreed.
Cheney: All right. Well, I've got a plan.
Wolfowitz: We get George elected in 2000 and go in, right? Tell the public Saddam's in violation of his UN restrictions or some shit like that? He is anyway, isn't he?
Cheney: No, that would never work. The public would never stand for it.
(Everyone bursts out laughing)
Cheney: Seriously.
Wolfowitz: Oh, wait -- you're serious?
Cheney: Absolutely. No, I think the way to go is to cook up some kind of justification. Something that will really get the public behind the invasion ...
Feith: I know! We go to the UN, show bogus photos of Saddam's secret store of chemical and biological weapons, evidence of his nuclear weapons program. Tell the world he's planning to attack.
Cheney: No, no, that's not vivid enough, not Band of Brothers enough. We need the people all lathered up, their mouths full of spittle, howling for blood, like pit bulls. You guys need to think to scale, think big, think like Michael Bay.
Feith: Michael Bay, Jesus. Okay, okay, what, then?
Cheney: We bomb the World Trade Center.
Kristol: Perfect! And blame it on Saddam!
Cheney: No, we bomb the World Trade Center and blame it on Osama bin Laden.
Feith: Oh. How?
Cheney: Easy. First, we cultivate 19 suicidal Muslim patsies from a variety of Middle Eastern countries, I'd say mostly from Saudi Arabia. We bring them to the U.S., train them at U.S. flight schools. They
should be high-profile terrorist suspects who are magically given free reign by the security agencies to travel back and forth to various terrorist training camps to study passenger jet piloting. Actually that
process is already underway now. Our friends in the Clinton administration are seeing to it that four groups of Arab men are being brought along by the FBI and the CIA.
Wolfowitz: How is it that the Clinton administration is already helping us with this, when we haven't even planned this yet?
Cheney: They just are. Okay?
Wolfowitz: Okay, fine. And what do we do with these hijackers?
Cheney: We sit idly by while they plot to hijack a series of passenger jet planes and crash them into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and the White House.
Wolfowitz: And how do we get them to do that?
Cheney: We just do. You see, we worked with these people back in the old mujahadeen days in Afghanistan. So naturally we're still thick as thieves with them.
Feith: Oh, of course. So we get them to fly into these buildings. And the impact from the planes will bring down the World Trade Center.
Cheney: No, Doug, dammit, you're not following me. The impact from the planes most certainly won't be sufficient to knock down the Towers. We know this because we've privately conducted studies which show that the Towers will easily be able to withstand impact by two jets loaded to the
gills with jet fuel. That said, the jets will likely cause skyscraper fires hot enough to kill everyone above the point of impact; we're going to have to assume, of course, that the exits from the higher floors to
the lower floors will be mostly blocked after the collisions. So assuming we crash the planes about two-thirds of the way up each of the towers early on a business day, we're looking at trapping and killing a good three, four, maybe even five thousand people on the upper floors.
Feith: Fantastic. I love killing people in the finance industry. It's too bad the people on the lower floors will get to escape.
Cheney: It is too bad -- especially since we're going to blow up the rest of the building complex anyway.
Feith: We are?
Cheney: Yes. You see, the way I see it, our best course of action is to first crash planes into each the towers, trapping and killing those thousands on the upper floors of each building. After the impact, of
course, the people on the lower floors will find their way out of the building and on to the street, where they will achieve relative safety -- at which point we'll finally detonate the massive network of
explosive charges we've secretly hidden in the buildings in the weeks and months prior to the attacks.
Feith: Wait, why did we do that again?
Cheney: Because the buildings wouldn't have fallen down unless we did.
Wolfowitz: But why do we need the buildings to fall down?
Cheney: Because the events of the day will be insufficiently horrifying and impactful without the building collapses.
Feith: So why don't we detonate the charges earlier, so that we can kill the people on the lower floors, too?
Cheney: That's a good question. At some point we have to sacrifice effect for believability. You see, if the planes crash into the buildings and the buildings immediately collapse, everyone will be
suspicious and they'll immediately be onto the presence of the explosives. So what we have to do is let the planes crash into the building, give the jet fuel time to start fires that will "soften" the
building core, and then we detonate the charges. Afterwards, we'll be able to argue that the fires coupled with the impact actually caused the buildings to collapse.
Feith: Why will we be able to argue that? Didn't our studies show that impact and fire alone wouldn't have caused the buildings to collapse?
Cheney: Those were our secret, far-more-advanced studies, done with secret, far-more-advanced military technology. The vast majority of the world's civilian structural engineers, however, can be counted on after the incident to conclude that the buildings collapsed due to a combination of fire, impact, and the knocking off of fireproofing from the building beams.
Feith: Why can they be counted on to conclude that?
Cheney: Because that's what our secret research shows their not-secret research will show! Jesus Christ, work with me on this, will you?
Wolfowitz: I think I get it. We crash the planes, kill everyone above the impact of the planes, let the people underneath the impact out to safety, then collapse the buildings about an hour or so later using the explosives that we pointlessly incurred months and weeks worth of career- and life-threatening risk to covertly plant in a building complex visited by hundreds of thousands of people every week.
Cheney: Exactly! The actual deaths will mostly be caused by the planes. But we'll incur the massive additional risk simply to destroy the building, for effect, because it will look cool and scary on television.
(Excerpt from Matt Taibbi's book " The Great Derangement", Spiegel and Grau 2008.)
Pray tell, why did we get involved in the 1991 Persian Gulf conflict??? Oil!! So do you really believe that 2003 wasn’t about oil?? And do you understand that oil is a global market and so there is no way to “steal” oil because it always impacts the global market. And do you know that America was in an energy crisis from 2001-2009 and Tillerson was actually working on a solution to our lack of new natural gas production—he was investing tens of billions of dollars into Qatar to export LNG!! Tillerson is a member of the Bush inner sanctum. So Bush wanted to do to Iraq what Tillerson was doing to Qatar—make them wealthy beyond their wildest imaginations!!!!!!
If there's no way to "steal" oil because it's always going to reach the market, then how is 2003 "about oil"? The oil was always going to reach the market, and the profits were always going to go to the Iraqi government. The only question is *which* Iraqi government was going to get Iraq's oil revenues.
The United States did have an interest in that, and it's one that has nothing to do with oil that was always going to reach the market and profit one group of Iraqis or another.
Because in 2008 oil hit $130 barrel…had Iraq been producing 6 mbd on its way to 10 mbd then the price of oil never gets that high. Most people didn’t know what Tillerson was up to at the time because LNG was a novel form of energy…in 2023 it’s all very obvious.
If Saddam is in power we had to sanction Iraq and the oil industry would always underperform…so I think we are more or less on the same page.
That the premise for invading Iraq, according to the conspiracy theories at the time, is idiotic is Taibbi's initial (implicit) point.
Space allowed for comments does not allow presenting the full parody (and I also had to edit down the part I copy-pasted). But if you lack an entertaining read to start the week, here is Taibbi on how the conspirators reasoned with regard to the fourth plane, the one that fell down before hitting its target:
Kristol: That only leaves the last plane, I guess.
Cheney: Right. This one -- this one I think is going to be tricky.
Feith: How so?
Cheney: Okay, bear with me on this, okay? The plane takes off. Passengers, patsies, the whole deal. The hijackers take over the plane and start steering it toward the White House. But fuck them, okay? We step in, our jets scrambled, and we blow those fuckers out of the sky.
Feith: Boom!
Cheney: Of course, we can't exactly admit that we killed American passengers, even for a good reason like this would be. So we'll dream up a story about passengers overpowering the hijackers and downing the plane themselves. "Let's roll," a wife will hear her husband say on his cell phone, as he and his brave party of vigilantes storms the cockpit ...
Wolfowitz: Oh, I see, right. Because they learned from their families, by talking with them on their cell phones, the terrible fate of the World Trade Center. So they give their lives to save the White House ...
Feith: Wow. I'm going to cry, that's so beautiful.
Cheney: In reality, though, it'll be us downing the plane with an F-16 or something. The pilots will never talk, never. Nor will the air traffic controllers ...
Kristol: Oh, I like that. It's patriotic. So why do we shoot the plane down, though?
Cheney: Well, because otherwise the hijackers will crash into the White House. But we can't admit that to the public, they'll be horrified.
Kristol: But they're not real hijackers, are they? Aren't they patsies?
Cheney: Oh, right. Shit! Man, I'm getting confused. We should probably break for lunch soon.
Wolfowitz: No, Dick, I've got that one. You see, here's the thing. Maybe the passengers really will overpower the hijackers. If that happens, it goes without saying that we have to shoot the plane down. We can't let them land, because then the hijackers will talk, and our whole evil plan will be exposed.
Cheney: Right, right, that's exactly what might happen. So it goes without saying that we have to be prepared to fake a crash site to make it look like a crash, even though it'll really be us shooting the plane down.
Kristol: But how can we prepare a phony crash site in advance if we don't even know for sure right now that the passengers will overpower the hijacker-patsies? Or where or when that will happen? That shouldn't even be entering our minds at this point.
Cheney: Well, um ... fuck. Right again. Paul?
Wolfowitz: I don't know, man, I'm getting tired at this point. But I'm down with the general idea of shooting that plane down.
Cheney: If we have to.
Wolfowitz: Right, if we have to.
Kristol: But, wait -- also, don't we want the plane to crash into the White House?
Cheney: What, are you crazy? And kill innocent Americans?
Wolfowitz: Irv, come on, now.
Kristol: Guys, we've just decided to blow up the World Trade Center. Like five minutes ago.
Cheney: Well, but the White House.
Wolfowitz: Irv, the White House. You're talking about the White House.
Kristol: Okay, whatever. You know I'm all for it, whatever we do.
Cheney: Look, the point is, we do the Towers and pin it on bin Laden. That leads us to invade Afghanistan. A year and a half later, we invade Iraq.
Feith: And we blame the whole WTC thing on Saddam.
Cheney: Right, and ... wait, what? No! No, actually we never make that connection, because none exists. I figure we can just say he's in violation of his UN restrictions, and that will be a good enough reason to invade. He is anyway, right? In violation, I mean?
Wolfowitz: I think you're right, he is!
Bush failed to prevent 9/11 just as Trump failed to prevent China from unleashing a bioweapon into America…those are the facts. Why they chose not to prevent the attacks is irrelevant.
COVID probably did escape from a lab in China, but it was neither "unleashed" nor a "bioweapon". Thank you for reminding us to not take you seriously.
You seem invested in whatever narrative was fed to you…but do remember the Big 3 automakers going bankrupt?? That had to do with oil prices spiking and SUV sales crashing. You don’t think the elite knew the American economy was made possible by low oil prices?!? Everyone knew that in 2000 which is why Bush/Cheney had a plan to keep oil prices low…only they screwed up the plan.
The question I really want to know after reading this is "Is Putin smart or just lucky?"
His teachers and KGB bosses never seemed to think he was anything special.
>At each step in his career, he was promoted for no particular reason, or because he seemed so devoid of personality that nobody could imagine him causing trouble.
There's a satiric comedy episode where Putin is shown as Klein Zaches called Cinnabar https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KO4cENShCZI
(Klein Zaches hasn't been translated to English, AFAIK https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Zaches_called_Cinnabar)
> I stick to my distinction between the mainstream Democrats and FALN, just as I would make a similar distinction between mainstream Republicans and right-wing terrorist militias.
Why? Two sentences prior, the post you quote points out:
> Obama commuted the sentence of of Oscar Lopez Rivera, the leader of the FALN Puerto Rican terrorist group.
If former President Obama is not a mainstream Democrat, who is? What's the type specimen for a mainstream Democrat who is far removed from Obama? What non-laughable definition of a mainstream Democrat excludes Obama?
That stuck out to me too. You have deep official partnerships between several different mainstream Democratic organizations, including the Democratic Party itself, and the left-wing terrorist militias. But you have to keep in mind the vast difference between the militias and their base of formal support. Apparently.
It's interesting that people don't think the Democrats have the stomach for this given Assange's position. Trump started it, but the Democrats are the ones effectively torturing him now.
Posting comments of your commentary I find quite rewarding to read. Different perspectives widen the view. Thanks
>> Many of the worst perpetrators are still free and supported by the left: For example, Obama commuted the sentence of of Oscar Lopez Rivera, the leader of the FALN Puerto Rican terrorist group.
>> A summary of this is here: https://status451.com/2017/01/20/days-of-rage/
Scott replies:
> I stick to my distinction between the mainstream Democrats and FALN,
> just as I would make a similar distinction between mainstream Republicans and right-wing terrorist militias.
Huh, I didn't realize a Republican President had pardoned the leader of a right-wing terrorist militia. (I bet it was Reagan.)
I'm disappointed no one understands the real story behind why shock therapy worked in Poland, but not Russia. Jeffrey D. Sachs, the architect of both programs explains why here. https://www.npr.org/transcripts/1097135961
Basically the US wanted Poland as an ally and wanted to crush Russia. The key would have been some monetary support to tamper down the inflation, the US blocked it and that somewhat forced the firesale of state assets that created the oligarchs.
I recently heard of the "Western Goals Foundation" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Goals_Foundation
Quoting verbatim from Wikipedia:
"After the Watergate and COINTELPRO scandals of the early 1970s, several laws were passed to restrict police intelligence gathering within political organizations and tried to make it necessary to demonstrate that a criminal act was likely to be uncovered by any intelligence gathering proposed. Many files on radicals, collected for decades, were ordered destroyed. The unintended effect of the laws was to privatize the files in the hands of 'retired' intelligence officers and their operatives."
Seems related.
I agree it appears there's not enough common reality between us to make progress on the original disagreement. I observe that it was significantly my meta-framing of the discussion that made the level of disconnect evident instead of just shouting at each other. I will endeavor to respond to new ideas/analysis, and in some cases to consolidate/summarize on an idea that you didn't address, without relitigating; this is still a lot to say because yes this has gotten voluminous and also most of your final post is totally new-to-this-thread content disputing the consensus view of what the Insurrection was/did (much more extreme claims than skepticism about one particular grand jury bill). I will primarily follow your ordering of ideas, because the benefits of restructuring mostly apply in dialogue.
>> Normal people can't read laws and understand them. That's why lawyers ... exist
The civil court system is substantially skewed toward common law, where encyclopedic knowledge and understanding of precedents matters a lot. All aspects of the system are technical and opaque so that there is a lot of comparative advantage time value in having people specialized in it. However the US criminal law system is conventionally a codified system built on a common law foundation for axiomatic understanding of undefined terms; if you can read the statute, that tells you what the law is. You consult a lawyer on criminal matters because a) if you're charged or otherwise interacting with the CJ system, then the comparative advantage expertise argument applies, and b) it's hard to figure out which laws you have to look up. However, looking up a law is sufficient to know that law. (Non-rigorous citation: https://www.upcounsel.com/lectl-common-law-legal-system-and-the-criminal-law) So EG the statute on fraud that I cited representing it as ~"lies of all sorts" supersedes any common law convention that was more narrow to financial crimes. Of further note, if I'm reading the code annotations right, section 101 was initially enacted in 1948, so it post-dates and therefore wholly supersedes the Hammerschmidt citation vis-a-vis federal code.Incidentally, it seems like you disapprove of the common JD prerequisite to bar exams; if so, we found a place where we are copacetic, I agree that this denigration of apprenticeship in a trade that is almost entirely craft and experience is rather a shonda.
>>"not a Bayesian"
"Bayesian evidence" means the idea that small evidences can be meaningfully suggestive, especially in combination, even when short of dispositive proof, and that this is important because dispositive proof is rare. Maybe you're unfamiliar with that meaning, even though you're commenting here? I'm not especially "a Bayesian" myself, but there's a more fundamental disconnect if you don't accept that this concept is valid. Your reaction is what I'd expect if I had said "incontrovertible proof for Bayesians, who are of course the ultimate arbiters" (which, fair, Bayesian absolutists can be annoying) and you made no substantive response to my observation that 'lawsuits ALL failed, some dismissed with prejudice, some resulted in sanctions against involved parties". This fact pattern should make it harder for us to believe that the true thing is "they were working legitimately" and easier to believe that the true thing is "they were working illegitimately", in a way that neither "suits all dismissed" by itself nor "1 or a few suits, of which 1 dismissed with prejudice/sanctions" would require (dismissals are marginal if any evidence about good faith, even if ratio'd; 1 red flag could be aberrant). It probably also makes it easier to believe that the true thing is "there is a fundamental conspiracy against them", but rule of law isn't a conspiracy and many of our systems depend on operators applying good faith, so if operators demonstrably apply bad faith, it makes sense to sanction that. Obviously 'demonstrable' is a question of fact not law, and we'll probably disagree about whether it's true / court-provably true.
>>Exceptional... even Nixon wasn't charged
It's worth reiterating: the charges / act of charging is exceptional because the circumstance is utterly unprecedented, mobs have never before roamed the Capitol looking to capture and hang the VP. The most consequential act of Gerald Ford's presidency was that he nigh-immediately pardoned Nixon so that he couldn't be prosecuted for crimes, it was otherwise considered almost inevitable that he would have been. So the implication that this treats Trump's crimes as "more serious than Nixon's" isn't going anywhere. But also... these are more serious than Nixon's crimes: whatever else he did, Nixon let the votes speak when people cast them; he may have been all about putting fingers on the scale, but he never actually tried to knock the scale over and record his own ideas as official weights.
>>Mueller reportMueller left open some questions about Trump specifically because DOJ policy prevented him from considering charges against the President, but he indicted 20+ Russian operatives for election interference under charges like 'conspiracy to defraud the US' and 'conspiracy against the US', and he convicted Rick Gates and Paul Manafort on the same (campaign chairman and deputy chairman, not trivial lackeys, corruptly pardoned by Trump). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mueller_special_counsel_investigation#Criminal_charges"Collusion" as you well know was never a legal term, Mueller conservatively interpreted it as quid-pro-quo and other direct agreements. Anyone who wants to take up the banner of "Trump technically didn't violate any specific laws when he collaborated with an opposed foreign power to get elected" is welcome to it - specific legal violations really aren't the point when it comes to recognizing the difference between personal and national interest, and the prioritization between them. https://www.factcheck.org/2019/04/what-the-mueller-report-says-about-russian-contacts/
This extends a long tradition of GOP campaigns actively undermining the national interest for their own advancement against incumbent Democratic administrations - Nixon interfered in LBJ's Vietnam peace talks in 1968, Reagan interefered in Carter's Iran hostage negotiations in 1980. https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/08/06/nixon-vietnam-candidate-conspired-with-foreign-power-win-election-215461
https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a43368900/reagan-iran-hostages/
https://oldgoats.substack.com/p/the-october-surprise-inside-carters
>> January 6th
We know conclusively that infiltration of the Capitol was planned by Proud Boys etc. There are an extraordinary number of data points, including criminal convictions of leadership in groups that Trump specifically communicated with in advance, demonstrating that the Insurrection riot was deliberately coordinated. You won't acknowledge this, asserting that 'riots can just happen', etc. Obviously you doubt whether particular people planned it when you doubt that it was planned; but that prior doubt is factually incorrect. https://time.com/6277254/proud-boys-verdict-jan-6-insurrection/
Given this, Trump must have: wanted to stop it, or been indifferent to it, or wanted it to continue; he must have: been surprised, or known about it in advance. Etc. A theory that accepts the riot was planned, and explains the apparent communications and motivations between Trump / WH and rioters, and explains the memos proposing subversion of the ECA, while maintaining Trump didn't conspire to use those people to disrupt the Joint Session, would be interesting and impressive. Hand-waving it all way isn't.