US Politics: the McCarthy Trials

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

1 hour ago, Phylum of Alexandria said:

It is depressing that all the garbage hiding out in the fringes, shadows, and fever swamps of our culture have all risen to outsize prominence, ever since social media gave them a nuclear-grade amplifier. But the culture of demogoguery and hucksterism that have existed on the right for decades now are also huge factors. The wealthy elites had been juicing up Frankenstein's monster for far too long, and now are surprised that it's banging at their doors.

The Internet was supposed to bring a new Age of Enlightenment.  Its ability to put people in contact with erudite discussion and accurate information was supposed to make us all smarter.  

Instead it has allowed the worst of us, the most paranoid, the most angry, the most conspiratorial to coalesce in groups on line.  While in totality they remain small in numbers.  They feel strong and numerous in their online conglomerates.  All this while caring people retreat from the fray because they are wounded by the lack of sincere engagment and the glee with which vitriol and lies are used to further empower the worst.

Yeats predicted this…

Quote

The best lack all conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity

 

Edited October 6, 2023 by Ser Scot A Ellison

[Zorral]

Quote

 

Katherine Faulders, Alexander Mallin, and Mike Levine of ABC News reported today that sources have told them that former president Trump shared information about U.S. nuclear subs with Anthony Pratt, an Australian billionaire who was a member of the Mar-a-Lago club. The sources say Pratt then shared that information with at least 45 others: more than a dozen foreign officials, his own employees, and a few journalists. Trump allegedly shared the exact number of nuclear warheads U.S. submarines carry, and exactly how close they can get to a Russian submarine without being detected. 

Former defense secretary William Cohen explained to CNN’s Anderson Cooper how information about nuclear submarines fit into the larger picture of what’s known as the nuclear triad, the land, sea, and air systems that protect the U.S. “Out of the triad,” he said, “the submarine is the one that is most secure for us because it's not targetable…. So they're special. And he is giving away special information on what is protecting us around the world.”

FBI agents and the team overseen by special counsel Jack Smith, looking into Trump’s mishandling of national security documents, have interviewed Pratt at least twice. About a year ago, on November 9, 2022, U.S. Navy nuclear engineer Jonathan Toebbe and his wife, Dianna, were sentenced to more than 19 years in prison for conspiring to sell classified information about nuclear-powered warships to a foreign country. ....

 

https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.dcd.258149/gov.uscourts.dcd.258149.74.0.pdf

https://www.politico.com/news/2023/10/05/trump-election-case-immunity-motion-00120225

https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/maryland-nuclear-engineer-and-wife-sentenced-espionage-related-offenses

[butterbumps!]

There’s a good long read in wapo about the concrete effects Republican policy has on health and life expectancy that’s pretty tightly focused and damning — here’s the gifted link.  Not that I expect it to convince rabid Magas, and probably already clear to a lot of us, but a good read anyway.  

Quote

Thirty years ago, Ohio’s health outcomes were on par with California’s, with nearly identical death rates for adults in the prime of life — ranking in the middle among the 50 states. But the two states’ outcomes have diverged, along with their political leanings, said Ellen Meara, a health economics and policy professor at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. She has studied why death rates fell in California, home to some of the nation’s most progressive politics, while they scarcely budged in increasingly conservative Ohio. By 2017, California had the nation’s second-lowest mortality rates, falling behind only Minnesota; Ohio ranked 41st, according to The Post analysis.

…

Many of the state’s public health outcomes are a direct result of political decisions, Skinner and other experts say, pointing to differences in Medicaid and safety net funding, as well as tobacco taxes and highway safety laws between Ohio and its neighbors. They note that Republicans’ stranglehold on the legislature, after defying repeated court orders to redraw state voting maps, has protected those politicians from the consequences of their votes.

For example, the Ohio State Highway Patrol said about 500 people lose their lives every year in car accidents in which those killed were not wearing seat belts, a problem that has outraged groups such as the Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety as well as the 76-year-old governor, who has spent decades pushing to improve motor vehicle safety. DeWine lost his 22-year-old daughter, Becky, to a car accident in 1993.

 

 

[Phylum of Alexandria]

1 hour ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

What is a “Vichy squish”?

"Vichy Republican" has been used to describe the appeasement of institutional Republicans to Trump's incipient fascism, a nod to the Vichy Republic of France, who appeased Hitler.

https://www.jpost.com/us-elections/donald-trump/new-term-vichy-republican-enters-us-election-lexicon-462338

I don't know what the intended meaning was in mcbigski's comment, given that he seems to be at least somewhat sympathetic to the bomb-throwing/conspiratorial faction.

9 hours ago, mcbigski said:

Unfortunately, only about 10% or less of the House Republicans are actually for the median person

Just some stats nitpicking: wouldn't "mode" be more appropriate for describing a central tendency among people than average or median? It's more about frequency among whole persons than about a blend or a middle distance. 

[Ormond]

2 hours ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

The Internet was supposed to bring a new Age of Enlightenment.  Its ability to put people in contact with erudite discussion and accurate information was supposed to make us all smarter.  

Instead it has allowed the worst of us, the most paranoid, the most angry, the most conspiratorial to coalesce in groups on line.  While in totality they remain small in numbers.  They feel strong and numerous in their online conglomerates.  All this while caring people retreat from the fray because they are wounded by the lack of sincere engagment and the glee with which vitriol and lies are used to further empower the worst.

Yeats predicted this…

 

Yeats wasn't predicting anything, he was describing his feelings about the immediate Post World War I world he was himself then living in. If you think that line describes things today even better, fine, but let's not attribute any great prognostication powers to Yeats.

The Internet has done an amazing job of allowing people with all sorts of minority statuses to connect with each other. This has been a great boon to people with rare diseases or emotional problems, and those interested in all sorts of things, from ancient history to baby names to the novels of George R. R. Martin. But of course it also lets people with fringe and conspiratorial political and social opinions find each other.  Now you can think of there being some positive as well as negative to that because it also allows others to monitor what these fringe political and social crazies are thinking much more quickly than they were ever able to before. That can allow us to counter some of their craziness in better ways, though it also probably helps make us a little crazier worrying about these people. There is no way to put this genie back into the bottle, so we have to figure out how to use the monitoring of these people the internet allows to help us feel better empowered to counteract them, instead of giving in to despair about their new ability to contact each other. 

Edited October 6, 2023 by Ormond
correct a mistyping

[Ormond]

1 hour ago, butterbumps! said:

There’s a good long read in wapo about the concrete effects Republican policy has on health and life expectancy that’s pretty tightly focused and damning — here’s the gifted link.  Not that I expect it to convince rabid Magas, and probably already clear to a lot of us, but a good read anyway.  

 

Thanks so much for posting that article. This is one of the better pieces of journalism I've read in a while, with its comparison of three counties adjacent to each other though in three different states on the south shore of Lake Erie.

My family actually lived in Ashtabula for a couple of years when I was a very small child. My younger sister was born there, and my very earliest memories are from when we lived there. So it is sad for me to read about how their death rate is so much higher because of Ohio state policies.  I guess I am very lucky my family was able to move away when I was so young.

[Rippounet]

2 hours ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

The Internet was supposed to bring a new Age of Enlightenment.  Its ability to put people in contact with erudite discussion and accurate information was supposed to make us all smarter.  

Instead it has allowed the worst of us, the most paranoid, the most angry, the most conspiratorial to coalesce in groups on line.  While in totality they remain small in numbers.  They feel strong and numerous in their online conglomerates.  All this while caring people retreat from the fray because they are wounded by the lack of sincere engagment and the glee with which vitriol and lies are used to further empower the worst.

Wild thought though... But couldn't this merely be the initial steps of a long process?

I can't quite prove it, but it seems to me that if you give humans instant communication, it's to be expected that the immediate effect will be the coalescion of nonsensical or vacuous thoughts, while the long-term positive effects of connection will take significantly longer to be identified, because the nonsensical stuff has to be progressively eliminated through a long process of evaluation that may entail trial & error. So even if we were at the beginning of a process eventually leading us to a new Age of Enlightenment we'd have no way of knowing, because the initial stages would mean a series of extreme periodic regressions.

[Maithanet]

5 minutes ago, Ormond said:

Thanks so much for posting that article. This is one of the better pieces of journalism I've read in a while, with its comparison of three counties adjacent to each other though in three different states on the south shore of Lake Erie.

My family actually lived in Ashtabula for a couple of years when I was a very small child. My younger sister was born there, and my very earliest memories are from when we lived there. So it is sad for me to read about how their death rate is so much higher because of Ohio state policies.  I guess I am very lucky my family was able to move away when I was so young.

I also liked the piece.  Seat belts and cigarette taxes save lives.  Like a LOT of them.  And while people understandably bristle in the face of the government "infringing on freedom", sometimes the benefits to society are pretty overwhelming. 

Going beyond the scope of the article, it really drove home that there are some policy interventions that REALLY work and often they get lost in the wash with policies that sort of work, or work on a much smaller scale.  Like seat belt laws and bike helmet laws both fall in a similar category of nanny state laws that generally conservatives disapprove of, but seat belts save several orders of magnitude more lives.  Likewise with COVID, if you compare vaccines and masking.  Masking really works if everyone does it (see: Japan/Korea), but government requirements to mask really have not worked (and are often not followed) in this country.  Compare that to government funding and support of vaccines and it's no comparison, vaccines are just vastly better (at least in the US). 

Yes, I understand it's not either/or, but often in these policy discussions things that really work get lumped with things that only sorta work, and then political opposition to both on principle results in some really bad choices.  Which were illustrated in the article. 

[Phylum of Alexandria]

6 minutes ago, Rippounet said:

Wild thought though... But couldn't this merely be the initial steps of a long process?

I can't quite prove it, but it seems to me that if you give humans instant communication, it's to be expected that the immediate effect will be the coalescion of nonsensical or vacuous thoughts, while the long-term positive effects of connection will take significantly longer to be identified, because the nonsensical stuff has to be progressively eliminated through a long process of evaluation that may entail trial & error. So even if we were at the beginning of a process eventually leading us to a new Age of Enlightenment we'd have no way of knowing, because the initial stages would mean a series of extreme periodic regressions.

I was thinking something similar, if only because the advent of the printing press also led to such wild political turmoil. If so, I imagine we've got a ways to go before the process is worked out!

[Zorral]

George Santos's 'fortune' is a lie just as everything he says and has done his entire life is a lie.  Color us yet again unsurprised by what we already knew, being who he always has been, always is, and the the fascists voted for him.   Also, the sorts of shyte The Racketeer-in-chief has been doing all his life, too, for which he, too, has been indicted, and is being tried.

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/weve-finally-solved-the-mystery-of-george-santos-mysterious-fortune

Quote

 

. . . Federal prosecutors said Santos’ fortune never existed at all.

The criminal information filed by prosecutors on Thursday accused Marks of working with Santos on a “scheme” to qualify for “financial and logistical support” from a program run by an unnamed party committee by inflating the amount of money his campaign had taken in. The court filing alleged that Santos’ supposed loans were crucial to furthering the plan.  And not only did he not make a $500,000 loan which he claimed to, but he “did not have the funds necessary to make such loans at the time,” the filing said.  

Prosecutors did not identify the “National Party Committee” that ran the program, which Santos ultimately qualified for. However, details appear to point to the National Republican Congressional Committee, which leads efforts to elect GOP House candidates. The NRCC did not immediately respond to a request for comment. 

According to prosecutors, the committee program was based, in part, on a campaign’s fundraising efforts and required candidates to bring in at least $250,000. Prosecutors accused Santos and Marks of falsely filing documents that showed their family members made donations to the campaign that were not actually received. 

Santos and Marks allegedly conducted much of the scheme over text and email, messaging each other the names and amounts that relatives would be marked as contributing, with Santos complaining at one point to Marks that he was “lost and desperate.” His anxiety apparently turned to relief once he was accepted for the program. 

“I GOT [THE PROGRAM]!” he purportedly texted Marks on Feb. 23, 2022. . . . .

 

 

[Zorral]

1 hour ago, Ormond said:

let's not attribute any great prognostication powers to Yeats.

And, um, why not?  Plenty of people were prognosticating exactly what was happening was going to bring about what it brought about.  Why do you think such a perceptive and sensitive poet had less understanding than all those, which included many within the circles he inhabited?   This just seems ... incredibly short-sighted of you.

[Gaston de Foix]

I think it's a pretty safe bet at this point that we will have Speaker Scalise.

I don't think there is any difference between him and McCarthy, i.e., I'm pretty sure Scalise agreed with McCarthy's major decisions even if he has his own view of McCarthy's tactical errors.   Look we are basically a year away from Presidential elections.  The case for keeping Kevin was just to keep the show on the road and struggle through the dysfunction in the hope that a defeat in 2024 would chasten MAGA/nihilists. 

Maybe that's a dubious premise, but 2024 elections would bring in a new house with a new majority, so it was clearly an estimable (if modest) aim.  

There was NEVER going to be cooperation for permitting reform or anything other than Ukraine aid and McCarthy had throttled that in a way that made it unlikely he could bring it up again without a new MTV.  

The case for getting rid of McCarthy is maybe the Republicans will also get rid of the MTV in a way that allows the House to function without this loaded firearm in the hands of every single congressperson.  The noises about expelling Gaetz have been quieted as folks have realized they will need his vote for speaker especially if there are other dissenters.  

Whoever the new speaker is, the government is going to shut down on Nov.13-14 for an extended period.  I would advise people to plan accordingly.

Maybe we can get permitting reform passed together with some deficit reduction measures and a dollop of Ukraine aid before XMas.  That would be the best case scenario. 

[horangi]

56 minutes ago, Rippounet said:

Wild thought though... But couldn't this merely be the initial steps of a long process?

I can't quite prove it, but it seems to me that if you give humans instant communication, it's to be expected that the immediate effect will be the coalescion of nonsensical or vacuous thoughts, while the long-term positive effects of connection will take significantly longer to be identified, because the nonsensical stuff has to be progressively eliminated through a long process of evaluation that may entail trial & error. So even if we were at the beginning of a process eventually leading us to a new Age of Enlightenment we'd have no way of knowing, because the initial stages would mean a series of extreme periodic regressions.

You Marxists and your dialectics!   Actually I am hopeful this is the case.  Nature and evolution tend to work in a similar way. We just have to hope that the resting energy state of human nature is something enlightened vs something more sinister. 

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

2 hours ago, Ormond said:

Yeats wasn't predicting anything, he was describing his feelings about the immediate Post World War I world he was himself then living in. If you think that line describes things today even better, fine, but let's not attribute any great prognostication powers to Yeats.

The Internet has done an amazing job of allowing people with all sorts of minority statuses to connect with each other. This has been a great boon to people with rare diseases or emotional problems, and those interested in all sorts of things, from ancient history to baby names to the novels of George R. R. Martin. But of course it also lets people with fringe and conspiratorial political and social opinions find each other.  Now you can think of there being some positive as well as negative to that because it also allows others to monitor what these fringe political and social crazies are thinking much more quickly than they were ever able to before. That can allow us to counter some of their craziness in better ways, though it also probably helps make us a little crazier worrying about these people. There is no way to put this genie back into the bottle, so we have to figure out how to use the monitoring of these people the internet allows to help us feel better empowered to counteract them, instead of giving in to despair about their new ability to contact each other. 

I hear you.  However, social media has given 8 people on the far fringe the confidence to shut down the US Congress knowing that there is enough of a fringe to back their actions.  I agree… the only way past this is through.  The genie will not flow back into the bottle.

I’m just discouraged about the process of returning to some level of stability and normalcy.

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

1 hour ago, Rippounet said:

Wild thought though... But couldn't this merely be the initial steps of a long process?

I can't quite prove it, but it seems to me that if you give humans instant communication, it's to be expected that the immediate effect will be the coalescion of nonsensical or vacuous thoughts, while the long-term positive effects of connection will take significantly longer to be identified, because the nonsensical stuff has to be progressively eliminated through a long process of evaluation that may entail trial & error. So even if we were at the beginning of a process eventually leading us to a new Age of Enlightenment we'd have no way of knowing, because the initial stages would mean a series of extreme periodic regressions.

Of course.

I’ve said before if anything this reminds me of the era after the advent of movable type in Europe where the flow of information was exponentially increased.  It took quite some time for “trusted” sources to develop and for society to stabilize.  

What genuinely frightens me is the process of “stabilization” including the “Wars of Religion” the “Thirty Years War” European Colonialism and other very… unpleasant… events before some degree of equilibrium was obtained.  I don’t want to see the analogs of those event in modern day.

ETA:

What really bothers me is the re-emergence of incredibly noxious ideas like racism and sexism as things people can and will argue in favor of in public.  It is wearying in the extreme to battle the same evils that should have died decades ago.

Edited October 6, 2023 by Ser Scot A Ellison

[Phylum of Alexandria]

40 minutes ago, horangi said:

You Marxists and your dialectics!   Actually I am hopeful this is the case.  Nature and evolution tend to work in a similar way. We just have to hope that the resting energy state of human nature is something enlightened vs something more sinister. 

The problem is that, while this trial-and-error process may ultimately lead to adaptations that improve the social media sphere and the societies linked to them, it might be at the cost of entire societies, or across several eras of conflict and instability. I agree that things will probably work out over time, but that's papering over a lot of potential wreckage.

[Jaxom 1974]

7 hours ago, Fragile Bird said:

Well, hell’s bells, don’t we all just want to gossip about the salacious bits from our last job? It’s only human, right?

 

 

[Fragile Bird]

3 hours ago, butterbumps! said:

There’s a good long read in wapo about the concrete effects Republican policy has on health and life expectancy that’s pretty tightly focused and damning — here’s the gifted link.  Not that I expect it to convince rabid Magas, and probably already clear to a lot of us, but a good read anyway.  

 

Holy smokes, I found the motor vehicle fatalities statistics appalling, and wanted to compare them to Ontario, where I live.

Ontario has a population of 14.57 M, Ohio 11.78.

Ontario had 359 MV fatalities in 2022, Ohio had 1,096. According to a road safety piece I saw, only 5% of Canadians don’t use seat belts. The overall, number for the US is 90% use them, but the Ohio number is only 84.5%. In Ontario it’s as high as 98% in some areas, it looks like 96% is a reasonable number. 

Of the 359 fatalities in Ontario, 61 were unbelted, or 17%. In Ohio, out of 1,096, 527 were unbelted, more than 48%. In other words, seat belt use alone would likely slash the fatality rate by perhaps 40% (some would be fatalities anyway). 

But overall, US statistics are twice as bad as Canadian statistics. Deaths per 100,000 population is 12.9 versus 5.8, deaths per 100,000 vehicles is 16.1 versus 8.9. Ontario’s death per 100,000 pop is actually only 3.63 (there are some bad drivers in other provinces!).

I always thought of guns being the biggest difference, and still is, but idiots behind the wheel looks like it ranks right up there.

And btw, it seems people driving pick-ups are likely to be the highest number not wearing seat belts.

[Bironic]

14 minutes ago, Fragile Bird said:

Holy smokes, I found the motor vehicle fatalities statistics appalling, and wanted to compare them to Ontario, where I live.

Ontario has a population of 14.57 M, Ohio 11.78.

Ontario had 359 MV fatalities in 2022, Ohio had 1,096. According to a road safety piece I saw, only 5% of Canadians don’t use seat belts. The overall, number for the US is 90% use them, but the Ohio number is only 84.5%. In Ontario it’s as high as 98% in some areas, it looks like 96% is a reasonable number. 

Of the 359 fatalities in Ontario, 61 were unbelted, or 17%. In Ohio, out of 1,096, 527 were unbelted, more than 48%. In other words, seat belt use alone would likely slash the fatality rate by perhaps 40% (some would be fatalities anyway). 

But overall, US statistics are twice as bad as Canadian statistics. Deaths per 100,000 population is 12.9 versus 5.8, deaths per 100,000 vehicles is 16.1 versus 8.9. Ontario’s death per 100,000 pop is actually only 3.63 (there are some bad drivers in other provinces!).

I always thought of guns being the biggest difference, and still is, but idiots behind the wheel looks like it ranks right up there.

And btw, it seems people driving pick-ups are likely to be the highest number not wearing seat belts.

If you're interested in road safety maybe this might interest you...

https://bigthink.com/strange-maps/road-deaths-us-eu/

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2022-11-03/why-us-traffic-safety-fell-so-far-behind-other-countries

https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/international/motor-vehicle-deaths-in-the-u-s-compared-to-the-world/

 

[polishgenius]

lol bye