I can accept "it's less bad than any other alternative." After all, at least the people are stating explicitly "We want this."
But I despair that political chicanery like gerrymandering or parliamentary maneuvers can too often and too easily be used by a determined minority to simply thwart the expressed will of the voters.
The question posed by the OP relates to people who make it their business to video-record police activities. The OP posits that it is possible for such people to do such things in bad faith and for bad reasons, accordingly achieving bad results. How do we know when they are doing it in good faith?
So, okay, fair point, Andrew. Not everyone is approaching this task free from bias (indeed, I'd posit you can't approach this subject free from bias) and biases like these tend to create a positive feedback loop in other behaviors and in work product. That is human nature and people who operate in good faith at minimum are aware of the existence and influence of their own biases, so they can take measures to minimize them.
So I would look for signs on the part of the watchmen that they are engaged in that kind of self-policing. (Pun unintended.) At minimum, if they post a version of a video that is edited to highlight what they believe are the important parts of an interaction, do they also post the unedited video for others to determine that the editing was done in an honest and contextual way? Do they post videos of police encounters for which they find no fault with the police? Granted that these are uninteresting by comparison, but it would be an important indicator that the person is at least trying to be an honest broker about what they have discovered. Although there will inevitably be sophistry and specious rationalizations offered, do they open up their work product for comment by others? Do they disclose who sponsors them, how they maintain their activities?
Not perfect, but nothing will be perfect. There's no way to keep bad faith actors out of this marketplace. But there are ways to figure out what people are up to, to at least try to sort out the good faith actors from the racketeers.
Mutatis mutandis for the police officers themselves.
However, the section of the indictment that is headed “The Defendant’s Knowledge of the Falsity of His Election Fraud Claims” does fall short. This section lists numerous times in which Trump was told by his advisors that the claims of widespread election fraud were false. Apologists like Erick Erickson have pointed out that Trump could still believe the lie no matter how many people told him the truth. In that case, the “corrupt intent” required by the statutes could be lacking.
It's one thing to say you can sincerely believe something for which there's no evidence. Religion, for instance. As a general matter, you believe whether God is real or not without seeking out or consulting a lot of reliable evidence. Which is fine, because religious issues are ultimately unknowable.
What I think is going on with the kind of "knowledge" Smith is describing in the indictment is not that sort of nobody-can-really-know-so-you-just-believe-something sort of faith. "Who won the election?" is something you can know. Three's a massive apparatus of people and technology aimed solely at answering that question as accurately and quickly as possible, operated by literally hundreds of thousands of people who are all double-checking and cross-checking each other, each with individual incentives to reach the truth. You have a lot of opportunity to know. People are telling you things they call facts. People close to you, people aligned with you, people you have trusted in the past, people who have no incentive to lie to you, people who are subject matter experts in the very field about which they're talking, people whose job and duty it is to tell you these facts, people who ought to be believed not as a matter of faith but as a matter of fact.
If my doctor tells me I have cancer, I'm going to believe her. It's her job to tell me, it's her duty to tell me, it's her expertise, it's not because she wants to hurt me but because she wants to see me get better and respond as best I can to the news. I would not like that news at all. It would scare me badly, upset me badly. But it's not my doctor's fault and I wouldn't simply tell the doctor she was wrong. I might say, "I'd like to I get a second opinion," but that's not the same thing as disbelieving her and when that second opinion came in the same way, there'd be no more room for doubt regardless of my emotions about the situation.
This is much more like the knowledge of the patient after getting that second opinion. Maybe you can say the patient still sincerely believes that no, they don't have cancer, but at that point you're going to explain such a disbelief with words in the neighborhood of "delusion" or "psychosis." Which are not great words to be applying to the President of the United States of America. And "Trump was delusional and acted on his delusions" is not a line of defense that to can apply to someone who wants that job back and is actively campaigning for it.
1. I assume you mean writing into the text of the proposed Constitutional amendment "Notwithstanding any other provision of law, this amendment shall require a threshold of 60% 'yes' votes to pass." Which then is debatably unconstitutional.
2. I'm pleased with the outcome here, because it was clearly aimed at paving the way to restrict what I believe should properly be considered Federal rights and certainly is aimed at restricting rights of some kind. The law and the electorate ought to reject such efforts.
3. But with #2 noted, I generally agree with you that a 50% threshold of voters to pass a Constitutional amendment does pave the way to a lot of Constitutional things that really ought to be statutes and restricts the ability of legislatures and regulators to tune things that probably are going to need tuning
and then fine-tuning rather than being fully functional ab initio. Alsotoo it paves the way for the immediate passions of the moment contrary to long-term interests, or a highly mobilized minority to override a content-with-the-status-quo public, thanks to the vicissitudes of transitory public opinion. Prop. 13 in California and later Prop. 8 in California are examples of each of those.
And in support of the in-person-is-better idea, "check your drive mapping" is the sort of solution that a remote worker would need to do a lot of Zooming around to find, whereas an office worker would probably get some advice very quickly. So there is that.
A smart manager would balance that against morale degradation and resulting turnover acceleration and probably come up with "hybridize it." But maybe that's just me.
This is a thought experiment. I'm not sure I completely buy this line of thought myself. But I do think there's some value to playing the game, if only for a couple of minutes.
After all, we think we have a pretty good idea of what a corrupt President would look like. A corrupted President would steer policy towards interests from which he would benefit, either immediately or in the future. He might use a family member as a proxy to collect this graft, but he'd for sure be doing things that we could plausibly translate into actual dollars flowing into his pocket. Debatably, we'd see connections between the President and past associates or donors or sponsors or allies and understand some future repayment after the President had left office.
What would an actually, completely, totally honest and non-corrupt President look like? What behavior could you point to that would tell you the President was being straight up and straight arrow? Could you tell that the President was 100% non-corrupt from their policy decisions? Could you tell? Policy decisions cannot be neutral, after all; there will always be winners and losers.
So I'm not saying that Joe Biden is uncorruptable (although like the OP I don't see evidence that anything in Ukraine has corrupted him despite a lot of ballyhoo by Republicans anxious to find something, anything, for which they might impeach him). But maybe it would be hard to tell if he wasn't.
The best argument I can think of for New Hampshire going early is that it doesn't cost much money, but does take smarts and know-how, to get your message out to the voters. A candidate that has received lower poll numbers and lower fundraising can show up and literally canvass their way to notability.
But a look back on the Democratic side reveals that candidates that did well this way tended to be from New England or relatively nearby: Edmund Muskie, Michael Dukakis, Paul Tsongas, Bill Bradley, Bernie Sanders. That makes me think you kind of have to be familiar with New England culture specifically to get to talk to these voters in a way that not only gets their attention but also their votes. Dukakis went on to get the nomination, but none of the others did (although Sanders did make a big splash).
New Hampshire Republicans seem to have a history of mostly picking the ultimate winners -- in my adult lifetime the only times non-nominees won NH were '96 (Pat Buchanan) and '00 (John McCain). Runners-up are sometimes interesting, but NH does not seem like a place a scrappy, smart, but initially underfunded Republican can get the ear of the electorate and make a camapign-sparking splash.
So I'm not sure that the "NH makes a success by retail politics possible" theory is borne out by actual experience in the mass media age.
I did a Pepsi challenge once with my own homebrew, a purportedly decent craft brew, and a Natty Lite. I correctly identified my own beer, but confused the craft beer with the Natty.
My then-girlfriend tried another Natty Lite product that was the color of Hawaiian Punch. Called it too sweet to finish. Afterwards she reported "I... I don't feel so good."
I was expecting Kamala Harris to kick his ass all over the VP debates. He more than held his own, fly-on-the-forehead incident notwithstanding.
He hasn't a chance of getting past the Trump bloc, I should think, but that's not for any good reason but rather for the thoroughly irrational, emotional reasons that power Trump. Your sober impression of as a politician seems spot on.
And... I'm a big flabbergasted to see you handing the book to him. What a moment!
I'll go further than you, Chip, and say that not only has market based liberal democracy won, so too has the hybridized system of regulation and government participation within the broader market won. The fights are now the degree to which the government intervenes in the market, not whether it does at all.
Here in the U.S., we've opted for substantial but not overwhelming market participation, and doing what we can to make it difficult for the average consumer to actually see in action (as has been noted in several other places in this discussion).
This all makes me seriously wonder about Rudy!'s mental health. It's one thing to be a narcissist and a bigot and generally an asshole. But I kind of wonder if some of what we're reading about here is him interacting with a non-standard version of reality.
You probably think that's a coup de grace but to me it looks like a reversion to an ideological bromide, thinking with labels and not with information. So I'm done here because I'm satisfied you didn't care to read or understand a thing I wrote to try and dialogue with you, and I don't care if you think you "prevailed" in this exchange.
Indeed, and discussing the unintended consequences of proposals is an important part of policy discussions. "Free food for all" certainly sounds good but it's very much within the scope of the kinds of discussions we ought to have to discuss what unintended but likely negative consequences might arise from adopting such a policy. That's not what this post does.
In my world, Hunter Biden's failson antics are a nothingburger and always have been. I've never seen a link between them and any political action Joe Biden has taken and all of these investigations still haven't come up with anything. For instance, we were told that there was a $5,000,000 payment to a "Biden family" account at some point that seemed to lack any sort of explanation, only we now find that the two witnesses for this are both convicted felons, one of them a fugitive from American justice for being an unregistered agent of Chinese arms manufacturers and the other for defrauding a Native American tribe to the tune of sixty million dollars. Both of these relate directly to their lack of propensity for veracity.
What they'd been hearing turned out to be a bunch of recycled versions of the Biden-Ukraine conspiracy theories that they'd heard shouted at them from FOX News. What they hadn't done was read the Wikipedia article I just linked. They conceded that the summary on the Wikipedia page "made sense" after I sent them the link.
I can only imagine that following Archer's testimony, FOX News will shout only the parts about Joe Biden speaking on the speakerphone to, or shaking hands with, Hunter's business partners, as proof that Joe was "in on it all." There will be scant mention, only during the hard news reporting portion of FOX's broadcasts and not during the prime-time, personality-focused opinion shows, of Democrats "claiming" that in fact Joe only spoke of banal matters and largely to be polite and not give his son a brush-off because... Rep. Goldman is right, what is Joe Biden supposed to do when his then-forty-six year old failson calls him up and puts him on the spot? He knows Hunter is a troubled guy and is probably aware that Hunter is trying to trade off of his last name and Joe's own plans to run for President, but he also still loves his son, which strikes me as what a parent is supposed to do. How else ought Biden have mediated those pressures?
I'm not saying Biden is necessarily free from corruption and certainly would not have been free of temptations. But if Biden did sell his soul to anyone, it would have been American labor unions, and he did it before he first ran for President wa-a-a-ay back in 1988. If such a thing happened, it would also have been done in a way that complied with the law if not necessarily the ideals of public ethics. Again, I think his personal finances, described in the first link in this comment, are revelatory: it doesn't look like he really ever cashed in on his public service in any meaningful way until the books-and-lectures circuit following his Vice Presidency, which is perfectly legal and could, in theory, even be ethical.
Let's set aside the clumsy and (per the OP) inaccurate parlance of food as a "right."
Maybe it's to the advantage of society as a whole that everyone in it has adequate nourishment. That makes it more likely that nearly everyone can engage in productive work of one sort or another, after all, which increases the aggregate level of wealth because nearly everyone is adding value to the economy all the time instead of only searching for sustenance; certainly if people needn't spend substantial amounts of their time resolving sustenance issues, a higher percentage of them can thus add value.
If that proposition were true, while we perhaps oughtn't characterize food as a right per se, it maybe ought to be considered an entitlement or, alternatively, part of the infrastructure, from a mutual benefit perspective. And if some people are clumsy in their language and refer to such things as rights when they aren't technically this, inaccurate nomenclature amongst the laity probably doesn't much matter all that much in the long run.
Diminishing the importance of expertise, rendering people with substantial education and experience no more reliable than the layperson or indeed less reliable than "common sense" is a thing that seems to appear, historically, when political figures seek to consolidate power in smaller and smaller groups of people whose real experience and knowledge is bureaucratic infighting. This allows them to annoint "real" experts who say and do things pleasing to their power, and proclaim themselves and the "common people" they purport to represent to be the "real experts." Sometimes, which the powerbrokers are religious, they claim to be the sole arbiters of Truth, with Truth being much more important than Fact. Other times, the Party favors Lysenko despite the fact that Lysenko's theories are, from the conventional expert's perspective, nucking futs, and fail every time they are implemented.
Disrespecting subject matter experts in their various fields is not something that is generally associated with expansion of liberty and democratization of power. Historically, one finds very little dismissal of subject matter experts during eras like the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. Experts in these fields certainly critique one another quite a lot, but there isn't a lot of common suspicion that such people are suspect and dishonest and immoral; rather, they tend to be admired and deferred to.
I don't propose a cause-and-effect relationship between "acceptance of experts" and "expansion of liberty," nor the converse, merely a correlation.
There's also the joke about how the Pope dies, and goes to Heaven, and St. Peter shows him the condominium where he'll be spending eternity, a very nice complex with several other of the deceased Popes inhabiting other nearby units. Then the tour continues and they see the lawyer's estate, with rolling hills and an equestrian compound and the degree of luxury that the Pope had thought Heaven would have afforded all of the Righteous Called Home.
"I don't want to seem like an ingrate, St. Peter, but I do wonder about the disparity. I'm quite sure the attorney here was a good person, and lived a righteous life, else she would not be here at all. Yet why the accommodations much larger than my own? I was Pope, after all!"
St. Peter looks at the recently-deceased Pope and says to him, "Your Holiness, this is Heaven. We get a LOT of Popes here."
On “Ohio Issue 1 Soundly Defeated”
I can accept "it's less bad than any other alternative." After all, at least the people are stating explicitly "We want this."
But I despair that political chicanery like gerrymandering or parliamentary maneuvers can too often and too easily be used by a determined minority to simply thwart the expressed will of the voters.
On “Is The Rise of “Auditors” Helping Or Hurting Police Reform Efforts?”
The question posed by the OP relates to people who make it their business to video-record police activities. The OP posits that it is possible for such people to do such things in bad faith and for bad reasons, accordingly achieving bad results. How do we know when they are doing it in good faith?
So, okay, fair point, Andrew. Not everyone is approaching this task free from bias (indeed, I'd posit you can't approach this subject free from bias) and biases like these tend to create a positive feedback loop in other behaviors and in work product. That is human nature and people who operate in good faith at minimum are aware of the existence and influence of their own biases, so they can take measures to minimize them.
So I would look for signs on the part of the watchmen that they are engaged in that kind of self-policing. (Pun unintended.) At minimum, if they post a version of a video that is edited to highlight what they believe are the important parts of an interaction, do they also post the unedited video for others to determine that the editing was done in an honest and contextual way? Do they post videos of police encounters for which they find no fault with the police? Granted that these are uninteresting by comparison, but it would be an important indicator that the person is at least trying to be an honest broker about what they have discovered. Although there will inevitably be sophistry and specious rationalizations offered, do they open up their work product for comment by others? Do they disclose who sponsors them, how they maintain their activities?
Not perfect, but nothing will be perfect. There's no way to keep bad faith actors out of this marketplace. But there are ways to figure out what people are up to, to at least try to sort out the good faith actors from the racketeers.
Mutatis mutandis for the police officers themselves.
"
I agree. Alas, these sorts of actions are inconsistent with strong police unions.
On “Trump Indictment Is Not About Speech”
It's one thing to say you can sincerely believe something for which there's no evidence. Religion, for instance. As a general matter, you believe whether God is real or not without seeking out or consulting a lot of reliable evidence. Which is fine, because religious issues are ultimately unknowable.
What I think is going on with the kind of "knowledge" Smith is describing in the indictment is not that sort of nobody-can-really-know-so-you-just-believe-something sort of faith. "Who won the election?" is something you can know. Three's a massive apparatus of people and technology aimed solely at answering that question as accurately and quickly as possible, operated by literally hundreds of thousands of people who are all double-checking and cross-checking each other, each with individual incentives to reach the truth. You have a lot of opportunity to know. People are telling you things they call facts. People close to you, people aligned with you, people you have trusted in the past, people who have no incentive to lie to you, people who are subject matter experts in the very field about which they're talking, people whose job and duty it is to tell you these facts, people who ought to be believed not as a matter of faith but as a matter of fact.
If my doctor tells me I have cancer, I'm going to believe her. It's her job to tell me, it's her duty to tell me, it's her expertise, it's not because she wants to hurt me but because she wants to see me get better and respond as best I can to the news. I would not like that news at all. It would scare me badly, upset me badly. But it's not my doctor's fault and I wouldn't simply tell the doctor she was wrong. I might say, "I'd like to I get a second opinion," but that's not the same thing as disbelieving her and when that second opinion came in the same way, there'd be no more room for doubt regardless of my emotions about the situation.
This is much more like the knowledge of the patient after getting that second opinion. Maybe you can say the patient still sincerely believes that no, they don't have cancer, but at that point you're going to explain such a disbelief with words in the neighborhood of "delusion" or "psychosis." Which are not great words to be applying to the President of the United States of America. And "Trump was delusional and acted on his delusions" is not a line of defense that to can apply to someone who wants that job back and is actively campaigning for it.
"
TFG's strategy, plan A: Win the election, pardon himself of everything, crush his enemies.
TFG's strategy, plan B: Upon losing the election, flee to Russia and thereafter resist extradition.
On “Ohio Issue 1 Soundly Defeated”
Several thoughts:
1. I assume you mean writing into the text of the proposed Constitutional amendment "Notwithstanding any other provision of law, this amendment shall require a threshold of 60% 'yes' votes to pass." Which then is debatably unconstitutional.
2. I'm pleased with the outcome here, because it was clearly aimed at paving the way to restrict what I believe should properly be considered Federal rights and certainly is aimed at restricting rights of some kind. The law and the electorate ought to reject such efforts.
3. But with #2 noted, I generally agree with you that a 50% threshold of voters to pass a Constitutional amendment does pave the way to a lot of Constitutional things that really ought to be statutes and restricts the ability of legislatures and regulators to tune things that probably are going to need tuning
and then fine-tuning rather than being fully functional ab initio. Alsotoo it paves the way for the immediate passions of the moment contrary to long-term interests, or a highly mobilized minority to override a content-with-the-status-quo public, thanks to the vicissitudes of transitory public opinion. Prop. 13 in California and later Prop. 8 in California are examples of each of those.
"
Query if Wisconsinites understood that they were choosing permanent minority rule.
On “Zoom To End Full Time Work From Home. No, Seriously”
And in support of the in-person-is-better idea, "check your drive mapping" is the sort of solution that a remote worker would need to do a lot of Zooming around to find, whereas an office worker would probably get some advice very quickly. So there is that.
A smart manager would balance that against morale degradation and resulting turnover acceleration and probably come up with "hybridize it." But maybe that's just me.
On “Did Impeachment Just Fizzle?”
This is a thought experiment. I'm not sure I completely buy this line of thought myself. But I do think there's some value to playing the game, if only for a couple of minutes.
After all, we think we have a pretty good idea of what a corrupt President would look like. A corrupted President would steer policy towards interests from which he would benefit, either immediately or in the future. He might use a family member as a proxy to collect this graft, but he'd for sure be doing things that we could plausibly translate into actual dollars flowing into his pocket. Debatably, we'd see connections between the President and past associates or donors or sponsors or allies and understand some future repayment after the President had left office.
What would an actually, completely, totally honest and non-corrupt President look like? What behavior could you point to that would tell you the President was being straight up and straight arrow? Could you tell that the President was 100% non-corrupt from their policy decisions? Could you tell? Policy decisions cannot be neutral, after all; there will always be winners and losers.
So I'm not saying that Joe Biden is uncorruptable (although like the OP I don't see evidence that anything in Ukraine has corrupted him despite a lot of ballyhoo by Republicans anxious to find something, anything, for which they might impeach him). But maybe it would be hard to tell if he wasn't.
On “New Hampshire’s First in the Nation Primary Is Good for Everyone”
The best argument I can think of for New Hampshire going early is that it doesn't cost much money, but does take smarts and know-how, to get your message out to the voters. A candidate that has received lower poll numbers and lower fundraising can show up and literally canvass their way to notability.
But a look back on the Democratic side reveals that candidates that did well this way tended to be from New England or relatively nearby: Edmund Muskie, Michael Dukakis, Paul Tsongas, Bill Bradley, Bernie Sanders. That makes me think you kind of have to be familiar with New England culture specifically to get to talk to these voters in a way that not only gets their attention but also their votes. Dukakis went on to get the nomination, but none of the others did (although Sanders did make a big splash).
New Hampshire Republicans seem to have a history of mostly picking the ultimate winners -- in my adult lifetime the only times non-nominees won NH were '96 (Pat Buchanan) and '00 (John McCain). Runners-up are sometimes interesting, but NH does not seem like a place a scrappy, smart, but initially underfunded Republican can get the ear of the electorate and make a camapign-sparking splash.
So I'm not sure that the "NH makes a success by retail politics possible" theory is borne out by actual experience in the mass media age.
On “Making Love in a Canoe”
I did a Pepsi challenge once with my own homebrew, a purportedly decent craft brew, and a Natty Lite. I correctly identified my own beer, but confused the craft beer with the Natty.
My then-girlfriend tried another Natty Lite product that was the color of Hawaiian Punch. Called it too sweet to finish. Afterwards she reported "I... I don't feel so good."
On “The Time Bryan O’Nolan Met Mike Pence at a Foreign Policy Event”
I was expecting Kamala Harris to kick his ass all over the VP debates. He more than held his own, fly-on-the-forehead incident notwithstanding.
He hasn't a chance of getting past the Trump bloc, I should think, but that's not for any good reason but rather for the thoroughly irrational, emotional reasons that power Trump. Your sober impression of as a politician seems spot on.
And... I'm a big flabbergasted to see you handing the book to him. What a moment!
On “Rights vs. Needs: Communism and Slavery”
I'll go further than you, Chip, and say that not only has market based liberal democracy won, so too has the hybridized system of regulation and government participation within the broader market won. The fights are now the degree to which the government intervenes in the market, not whether it does at all.
Here in the U.S., we've opted for substantial but not overwhelming market participation, and doing what we can to make it difficult for the average consumer to actually see in action (as has been noted in several other places in this discussion).
On “Rudy Giuliani’s No Good, Really Bad, Horrible Day: Day 2”
This all makes me seriously wonder about Rudy!'s mental health. It's one thing to be a narcissist and a bigot and generally an asshole. But I kind of wonder if some of what we're reading about here is him interacting with a non-standard version of reality.
On “Rights vs. Needs: Communism and Slavery”
You probably think that's a coup de grace but to me it looks like a reversion to an ideological bromide, thinking with labels and not with information. So I'm done here because I'm satisfied you didn't care to read or understand a thing I wrote to try and dialogue with you, and I don't care if you think you "prevailed" in this exchange.
"
Indeed, and discussing the unintended consequences of proposals is an important part of policy discussions. "Free food for all" certainly sounds good but it's very much within the scope of the kinds of discussions we ought to have to discuss what unintended but likely negative consequences might arise from adopting such a policy. That's not what this post does.
"
Focus on desired policy outcomes rather than ideologically-laden nomenclature.
On “Open Mic for the week of 7/31/2023”
100%. Would see, albeit with sincere worries that Axl makes it onto the stage.
On “Devon Archer Day In Hunter Biden Congressional Hearings”
In my world, Hunter Biden's failson antics are a nothingburger and always have been. I've never seen a link between them and any political action Joe Biden has taken and all of these investigations still haven't come up with anything. For instance, we were told that there was a $5,000,000 payment to a "Biden family" account at some point that seemed to lack any sort of explanation, only we now find that the two witnesses for this are both convicted felons, one of them a fugitive from American justice for being an unregistered agent of Chinese arms manufacturers and the other for defrauding a Native American tribe to the tune of sixty million dollars. Both of these relate directly to their lack of propensity for veracity.
I've some ConservaBoomers in my immediate family, for whom Hunter Biden is a noxious, criminal agent personally responsible for corrupting his father far beyond credibility, trustworthiness, or even good intent. They presume that of course Joe Biden was talking with Hunter's business associates and this was the mechanism by which Joe Biden became wealthy. (N.b., he's well off and lives well, but not extraordinarily so, and his money all seems to have come during the Trump years when he was out of office from legit sources.)
What they'd been hearing turned out to be a bunch of recycled versions of the Biden-Ukraine conspiracy theories that they'd heard shouted at them from FOX News. What they hadn't done was read the Wikipedia article I just linked. They conceded that the summary on the Wikipedia page "made sense" after I sent them the link.
I can only imagine that following Archer's testimony, FOX News will shout only the parts about Joe Biden speaking on the speakerphone to, or shaking hands with, Hunter's business partners, as proof that Joe was "in on it all." There will be scant mention, only during the hard news reporting portion of FOX's broadcasts and not during the prime-time, personality-focused opinion shows, of Democrats "claiming" that in fact Joe only spoke of banal matters and largely to be polite and not give his son a brush-off because... Rep. Goldman is right, what is Joe Biden supposed to do when his then-forty-six year old failson calls him up and puts him on the spot? He knows Hunter is a troubled guy and is probably aware that Hunter is trying to trade off of his last name and Joe's own plans to run for President, but he also still loves his son, which strikes me as what a parent is supposed to do. How else ought Biden have mediated those pressures?
I'm not saying Biden is necessarily free from corruption and certainly would not have been free of temptations. But if Biden did sell his soul to anyone, it would have been American labor unions, and he did it before he first ran for President wa-a-a-ay back in 1988. If such a thing happened, it would also have been done in a way that complied with the law if not necessarily the ideals of public ethics. Again, I think his personal finances, described in the first link in this comment, are revelatory: it doesn't look like he really ever cashed in on his public service in any meaningful way until the books-and-lectures circuit following his Vice Presidency, which is perfectly legal and could, in theory, even be ethical.
On “Rights vs. Needs: Communism and Slavery”
Let's set aside the clumsy and (per the OP) inaccurate parlance of food as a "right."
Maybe it's to the advantage of society as a whole that everyone in it has adequate nourishment. That makes it more likely that nearly everyone can engage in productive work of one sort or another, after all, which increases the aggregate level of wealth because nearly everyone is adding value to the economy all the time instead of only searching for sustenance; certainly if people needn't spend substantial amounts of their time resolving sustenance issues, a higher percentage of them can thus add value.
If that proposition were true, while we perhaps oughtn't characterize food as a right per se, it maybe ought to be considered an entitlement or, alternatively, part of the infrastructure, from a mutual benefit perspective. And if some people are clumsy in their language and refer to such things as rights when they aren't technically this, inaccurate nomenclature amongst the laity probably doesn't much matter all that much in the long run.
On “Additional Indictments In Trump Classified Docs Case”
This is a pleasant fiction, isn't it?
On “Mini-Throughput: Einstein’s Greatest Mistake Edition”
A hypothesis:
Diminishing the importance of expertise, rendering people with substantial education and experience no more reliable than the layperson or indeed less reliable than "common sense" is a thing that seems to appear, historically, when political figures seek to consolidate power in smaller and smaller groups of people whose real experience and knowledge is bureaucratic infighting. This allows them to annoint "real" experts who say and do things pleasing to their power, and proclaim themselves and the "common people" they purport to represent to be the "real experts." Sometimes, which the powerbrokers are religious, they claim to be the sole arbiters of Truth, with Truth being much more important than Fact. Other times, the Party favors Lysenko despite the fact that Lysenko's theories are, from the conventional expert's perspective, nucking futs, and fail every time they are implemented.
Disrespecting subject matter experts in their various fields is not something that is generally associated with expansion of liberty and democratization of power. Historically, one finds very little dismissal of subject matter experts during eras like the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. Experts in these fields certainly critique one another quite a lot, but there isn't a lot of common suspicion that such people are suspect and dishonest and immoral; rather, they tend to be admired and deferred to.
I don't propose a cause-and-effect relationship between "acceptance of experts" and "expansion of liberty," nor the converse, merely a correlation.
"
There's also the joke about how the Pope dies, and goes to Heaven, and St. Peter shows him the condominium where he'll be spending eternity, a very nice complex with several other of the deceased Popes inhabiting other nearby units. Then the tour continues and they see the lawyer's estate, with rolling hills and an equestrian compound and the degree of luxury that the Pope had thought Heaven would have afforded all of the Righteous Called Home.
"I don't want to seem like an ingrate, St. Peter, but I do wonder about the disparity. I'm quite sure the attorney here was a good person, and lived a righteous life, else she would not be here at all. Yet why the accommodations much larger than my own? I was Pope, after all!"
St. Peter looks at the recently-deceased Pope and says to him, "Your Holiness, this is Heaven. We get a LOT of Popes here."
On “Additional Indictments In Trump Classified Docs Case”
Imagine how future historians will boggle at the complexity of misdeeds committed by Trump & Co.
On “No, I Will Not Try That or Even Go to Your Small Town”
Your words: "There is a problem with black urban criminality."