Trump Thread

[Montmorency]

Perhaps it is because these others break the law more often?

On the topic of racist government violence, you should be leerier about suggesting 'The police are brutal toward everyone, but maybe they should be more so toward blacks because they're uniquely dangerous.'

And in my opinion, the police reaction is a natural thing to happen in a country where firearms could be borne by almost everyone.

And yet, most of the civilian firearms are held by white conservatives, who tend to receive the most deferential or light touch. Which is not just a problem of fairness but one of institutional integrity as police departments are notoriously overrun by Neo-Nazis and the like.

I could offer half a dozen factors off the top of my head (and after putting on my thinking hat as many more) that could be seen by conspiracy-minded people and blown out of proprotion by the media (mind you, I don't know much either of the victim or of perpetrators, but all kinds of factors may be found and given a proper slant):

1) The victim was a Russian-speaker and the cops were Ukrainian-speakers.
The media: "Ukrainian nazis of whom current law enforcement bodies consist rape a Russian-speaking woman. Let's disband the police."
2) The victim was a Ukrainian-speaker and the cops were Russian-speakers.
The media: "Russian-speaking cops who are FSB agents under cover rape a Ukrainian patriot. Let's disband the police."

If the victim was of a different ethnicity from the offender, the possibility of a hate crime should be evaluated. Especially in the context of ongoing violent national conflict.

You didn't read carefully what I wrote. I repeat: the perpetrators should be punished. BUT: I see no reason in making a saint or martyr out of an average рецидивист.

Your assumption is not the case.

As for homework, look up "structural racism" and "overpolicing."


I'm put in mind of this old ditty.

Маленькие дети!
Ни за что на свете
Не ходите в Африку,
В Африку гулять!
В Африке акулы,
В Африке гориллы,
В Африке большие
Злые крокодилы
Будут вас кусать,
Бить и обижать,-
Не ходите, дети,
В Африку гулять.

В Африке разбойник,
В Африке злодей,
В Африке ужасный
Бар-ма-лей!

Он бегает по Африке
И кушает детей —
Гадкий, нехороший, жадный Бармалей!

И папочка, и мамочка
Под деревом сидят,
И папочка, и мамочка
Детям говорят:

«Африка ужасна,
Да-да-да!
Африка опасна,
Да-да-да!
Не ходите в Африку,
Дети, никогда!»

I guess my contention is that we should strike out 'ideological' from the list. He certainly has his partisan bend but the Obamacare case and his constant "do better" rulings to the Trump admin demonstrate he is respectful of the process above whatever slant he possesses. My point is that that's a much more respectable account to bestow than what the left is currently trying to portray.

I don't understand. These episodes indicate the opposite. And why do you strike out "ideological"? That current should be evident whether or not you approve of it.

The main contention for his decisions being activists and ideological is the disregard for 'stare decisis' to achieve GOP/business favored outcomes. But I have to say Monty, the left really needs to move beyond venerating the practice of 'stare decisis' as applied to SCOTUS in the same way we have been moving beyond the Fillibuster in the Senate. Both are practices and not rules codified into our system. As far as I am concerned, there are many just as bad decisions within the US legal code that stare decisis protects than otherwise. The mid 20th courts disregarded precedent in rulings we now consider landmark cases for the better.

That's like a mirror image of the anti-Democrat reasoning that if Democrats complain about Trump undermining American foreign policy, they're a bunch of reckless imperialists. What's going on here, over and over, is that Roberts makes pretensions to calling "balls and strikes", respecting tradition, precedent, and constitutional and statutory text, but will happily employ flimsy pretexts and ignore his stated principles to rule against laws or doctrines that protect labor/civil rights or hinder Republican power.

Whether or not liberal judges should act this way - and I don't really care right now to examine the balance of judging and revising precedent on the merits of legality or justice versus promoting stability in governance - is a separate question from how to evaluate Roberts and his court.

[Hooahguy]

So the latest Gallup poll has Trump's approval rating at just 38%. He is at at 91% with Republicans, 33% with independents (which is down 10 points from earlier this year), and just 2% with Democrats. Yikes. According to the poll its the widest partisan gap ever so thats something. But man, that 91% approval rating with Republicans. They are really all-in aren't they?

[Montmorency]

He had no restrictions or repercussions from ruling in a more overtly conservative opinion but he chose not to rule that way. An ideological man places his ideas above the process at hand

Yes, that's the point! The thread through his rulings that have disappointed Republicans is 'give me a better pretext next time.' The exact point I made is that there are some limits to Roberts' process - it's up to us to reason through them.

His ruling indicate a partisanship toward a side, but I just don't think you can simultaneously be 'ideological' and 'strategic' at the same time. To be pragmatic in making slight changes over time is by definition a reformist, incrementalist attitude not a radical ideological one.

I don't understand the dichotomy you're proposing, let alone what "reformer vs. radical" has to do with it.

Putting it this way, an overtly ideological conservative wouldn't compromise on such an issue as abortion, to an ideological conservative abortion is murder and there is no justification for keeping the practice legal in any way shape or form, precedence be damned. I think you are trying to have it all, he is somehow a mastermind of both pragmatism and activism, of process and ideology.

No? That he tries to juggle multiple priorities according to his own worldview. That he's not as rigidly absolutist on some things as Alito or Thomas does not make him non-ideological.

Just because he is a hypocrite doesn't mean we should default to admonishing him for rejecting stare decisis, or smear with the label 'activist'. We should be focusing on the importance of having more liberal justices on the court to overturn bad conservative rulings, so to argue in this manner only hurts the left's case in the long run. That's the extent of my point. Label Roberts as a liar for saying one thing and doing another, but lets not act as if stare decisis in itself is somehow good and not to be messed with.

OK, but that's kind of orthogonal to the issues I was raising, in defining Roberts as a political operator (c.f. Barr).

No. How you view the role of the court and what its limitations ought to be, would definitely color your evaluation. I can't admonish Roberts for doing what I would like to see done to policies I disagree with. If I was in Robert's shoes, I would write any argument to remove Qualified Immunity in its current form. I can criticism him on the decisions themselves, but not the method in which the ruling was given.

This is new to me, since I thought you said you valued sound jurisprudence for its own sake. Many on the far left would disagree with me - I showed you some such - and argue that judges need to be totally results-oriented and that we just need to, to the extent we have a system with judges, pick judges compatible with radical ideals, but personally I certainly would criticize the Roberts court on independent grounds for producing decisions that are dismissive or contortive of the letter of the law. Rectitude matters to me; interpretation needs to fall within some outer bounds of legal text.

So your next hometask: re-read my post on it and try to explain why having disproportionate number of blacks in the police (as the statistics have it) results in the boost in the excessive use of force (as you claim).

Aside from blacks not being disproportionately represented in police, how can you justify your assumption that POC police won't participate in police maltreatment of POC communities?

Aren't preventive measures a kind of self-defense in advance?

As it happens, no, basically never under any system of laws or rules that I am aware of. Ukrainians might recognize it as the logic of a Stalin or a Putin however.

Perhaps it is because there are more whites in the USA? And I'm more than sure that most guns owned by non-whites (who are poorer) are non-registered and illegal.

Conservative white men own more guns than there are conservative white men. Plenty of "urban" black people are legal gun owners, for better or worse. There are very few states in the country with any requirement to register guns for normal possession; there are more states that ban registries than maintain them in any form.

So a disproportionate percentage of blacks in the police work back to back with Neo-Nazis and never mind it, moreover they learn from them to mistreart their race?

Exactly so. There are many benefits to having non-white (or women) patrol cops, but they still act within the same corrupted and corruptible institutions.

My post was to show that sometimes a crime is just a crime so there is no need to try to see some ideology behind it. Or, alternately, if you wish to see ideology behind every crime it won't be hard to find it.

When actions are consistently racially-biased in practice, it can be exceedingly difficult to distinguish whether any single incident arises from this bias or from another cause. It becomes a pure distraction to try to split these hairs.

Painting the victim as an angel (by the way, he was arrested on suspicion of forgery - was it just an unjustified suspicion or did he have fake money on him?) and burying him in a golden casket is quite enough to engender my assumption. If you see it differently, it is your assumption. I believe mine isn't worse than yours.

He was arrested on suspicion of intentionally submitting a counterfeit $20 bill for payment, which accusation was without any evidence known to the police at the time and in abstract sounds beneath the notice of authorities, let alone the intervention of multiple police units. The business owner went on record that he knew and liked Floyd well and that the call to police was made by a young and inexperienced employee, a call the employer would have countermanded had he been present.

Who says he was an angel? The George Floyd incident was incorporated into the Movement for Black Lives - not the Movement for the Sanctified George Floyd - because it was another representation of the societal adverse treatment for which so many demand redress.

I remember you defending the character of Stepan Bandera as Ukrainian national hero and sometime-anti Nazi - but he was indisputably a much worse person than George Floyd could ever have been. If one can very charitably extend you the opportunity to sublimate a flawed person into the ideal of national liberation or identity, then you should be able to do the same with a mere reference point in a valid list of grievances.

So you think this children's poem is racist? And Africa wasn't used for the sake of rhythm? So if the poetic meter required "America" or "Asia" Chukovsky would still use "Africa" because he was a racist?

Give me a break, this is a poem written a hundred years ago about how children should not go to Africa because it is awful, dangerous, and full of scary animals and cannibals. The idea that someone could have written this poem, which contains so many familiar contemporary tropes about Africa and its inhabitants, about America or any place other than the "Dark Continent" is

This cultural artifact, perpetuated across generations, is exactly the kind of obscurantist prejudice absorbed by the general population of Europe at the time and even to this day. It has no other context or genealogy and your resistance to acknowledging racism puzzles me.

But his violent and unjustified death doesn't atone for his crimes committed against other people who did nothing to deserve it either. But his violent and unjustified death doesn't atone for his crimes committed against other people who did nothing to deserve it either. Consequently, no eulogies for him, no stories of how good and merciful and nice he had been, no golden caskets and knee-bending. No matter what race he was.

Whether he atoned for his crimes (by most accounts he was an upstanding citizen since he got out of prison) is both irrelevant and not something you seem placed to determine. The reality of it is that which cases get the most attention is a matter of timing and media coverage, not according to some private hierarchy of virtue and innocence. Your fixation on Floyd's character misses the point.

[Hooahguy]

Should someone tell Junior that there's a typo in the title of his new book? Guess they call him the dumbest son for a reason.

But on a more serious note, Trump's ICE is starting a pilot program to train civilians to arrest undocumented immigrants. Perhaps their uniforms should be brown?

[Seamus Fermanagh]

Should someone tell Junior that there's a typo in the title of his new book? Guess they call him the dumbest son for a reason.

But on a more serious note, Trump's ICE is starting a pilot program to train civilians to arrest undocumented immigrants. Perhaps their uniforms should be brown?

I thought the tradition was to use whatever uniforms were left over, in bulk, from the last colonial deployment that was cancelled...

[Montmorency]

November 2020.

[Strike For The South]

I've said this to Monty thousands of times, John Roberts cares! The Trump presidency has made him dig in on the independence of the court. Now Monty may say this is to preserve its power and prestige. I, more hopeful, say its a man robustly defending the common law.