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.
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.