July 2, 2024

Anti-immunity Constitutional amendment as feature of Biden's campaign

As hard as it is, and perhaps unlikely, to amend the Constitution, I would suggest proposing a Constitutional amendment to undo the disastrous SCOTUS immunity decision, making it completely explicit that the President of the United States must answer to the law.

We should use this proposal, even if unlikely to ever actually be adopted, as a selling point for Biden and a way to point out the danger of Trump.

As part of the same amendment, Presidential pardon power should explicitly reject a President pardoning himself, anyone in their own administration, or even anyone who is deemed to have been committing a crime for the benefit of the President.

It's a hard sell, unfortunately, to get many Americans to wake up to the autocratic threat we're under. Biden making a clear and forceful push to limit his own power could help sell that message.

July 1, 2024

About "experts" who've correctly predicted many presidential races

Let's say you've been making election predictions for forty years, so, for ten different elections.

Let's say you merely use a coin toss to predict winners.

Your odds of a perfect record are 1 in 1024 doing it that way. Your odds of getting it right all but one time out of 10 are 1 in 102.4.

There are thousands of people out there in the world predicting presidential races. It's never going to be that hard to find several "experts" with perfect or near-perfect track records.

Take into account that you don't have to be that smart or have an impressive "system" for predicting elections to do better than a mere coin flip, and the potential for the illusion of expertise goes up dramatically.

June 5, 2024

The Principle of Charity

I'm not talking about contributing your local soup kitchen or Doctors Without Borders. I'm talking about how people conduct an argument.

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_charity:

As much as I love DU, sadly this principle is too often lacking when disagreements crop up here.

A good example recently (although not one of the more active, contentious threads), had the subject, "I don't watch the news and I vote".

For all the people who took a moment to read the thread and make sense of what the poster was talking about, the topic was clearly about people who vote even though they aren't paying much attention to the news IN ANY FORMAT.

NOT just about TV news.

Applying the Principle of Charity no one would or should snap back angrily about how they literally don't watch the news, because they're reading the news or listening to it.

Other subjects get a lot testier. God forbid, for example, someone use wording (say "illegal immigrant" instead of "undocumented alien" ) that some DUers associate with the right wing and right wing talking points.

Some people are either just looking for a fight, or have decided they are the Fierce Guardians of DU, vigilantly patrolling the perimeter on the lookout for trolls and nefarious propagandists trying to sneak in.

Rather than applying the Principle of Charity, the apparent top priority among the Guardians is fast, snap identification of the enemy. These people respond to posts that set off their overly-sensitive danger indicators with utter self-assuredness that they've got one. Once that snap judgment has been made, there's no escape from it. The Guardians will interpret any attempt to defend or explain the offending post as the imagined offender merely trying to "squirm out of it".

While, of course, most DUers aren't like that, there certainly aren't many who will jump in and help try to defend someone who has been subjected to summary judgment -- most others on the sidelines just want to stay out of these feeding frenzies, even if they don't agree with what's being done.

PS: Applying the The Principle of Charity myself, I realize some people responding to the "I don't watch the news and I vote" thread were merely clarifying their own news consumption habits, and did understand the real meaning of the thread. Some, but not all.

February 15, 2023

How much of the deterent-to-future-insurrectionist-insider value has already been lost?

Our justice system isn't here primarily to enact revenge. As satisfying as it might be to see bad people pay for their crimes (and I'm not so high-minded that I'd pretend I don't wish for that), that's the least important reason for a justice system to mete out punishment.

The most important purposes of judicially-imposed punishments are deterrence of future crime, and preventing criminals from committing more crimes.

So where are we now with effective justice for the events of 1/6, and all of the associated coup plotting leading up to that day?

Potential future street rabble might be deterred a bit by now, or some of the marginally brighter "patriots" might at least have learned to cover their faces better and not post self-incriminating evidence on social media.

But the powerful and connected people who would plot against our democracy, the future equivalents to Trump and his cronies, if not Trump and the original cronies themselves?

What they are learning is, no matter how brazen their assaults on this country, if they meet the not-so-demanding standard of being at least as smart as Trump, they'll get at least a good two-three years to keep plotting, keep undermining, keep cashing in, keep waiting for favorable changes of administrations and judges and legislatures, during which they can either pick up their insurrection yet again, or at least wiggle out of serious consequences.

They can see that lots of free time will be provided to them before possibly facing any music.

If they are on the older side, they can reasonably figure either death or becoming unfit to stand trial will claim them before any actual trial might occur.

No one is going to come down on them like a ton of bricks for attempting to overthrow the government, that's for sure.

They most definitely will not be treated as an imminent threat. That standard of treatment is reserved for more directly physical crimes, like murder, rape, and robbery. Or, say, driving while black.

My problem with this? No, it's not as some apologists for our "justice" system might have it that I think mob mentality should prevail, that all safeguards of the legal system should be bypassed, or anything like that.

It's that I see the coup plotters as an imminent threat, which should be treated as such. Not only are they a threat to the perhaps intangible ideas of "freedom" and "democracy", but just like bank robbers and serial killers, they are actual threats to property and life. And they should be treated as such.

January 22, 2023

A poll doesn't have to be an accurate predictor of electoral victory to provide useful information

DISCLAIMER: I personally think Biden has been a great President, I want him to run, and I think he can win. Anyone who would misinterpret this post as anti-Biden, or as support for any particular pollster, isn't as good at reading between the line as they might imagine themselves to be.

A poll doesn't have to be an accurate predictor of electoral victory to provide useful information

I'm really, REALLY tired of the knee-jerk reactions around here when people post polls.

"I don't believe in polls anymore!"
"That pollster is a right-wing hack!"
"They're just trying to manipulate us!"

You don't have to, however, "believe" that a poll is as good as a magic crystal ball to extract rough information from it.

You should understand that many polls are a form of advertising for marketing services -- it does a pollster no good to get elections wrong over and over and over again by baking in political bias. That tells the world that they're survey techniques are crap, and cuts the prices they can charge paying customers.

Even if some pollsters are merely political vanity projects, I've never heard of any solid studies that prove either the assumption that bad polls discourage turnout, that good polls cause complacency, or, if either effect is real, that the two effects don't come close to canceling each other out anyway. So people should stop acting as if either of those things are true unless they can back it up with more evidence than simply believing these supposed effects are "common sense".

What so many people aren't appreciating is that even if a poll isn't accurate enough to tell you who's likely to win a tight race, even a poll that's off by 10% gives you a rough idea of where the electorate stands.

Take the Harvard/Harris poll someone recently posted, which shows many more people favorably inclined toward DeSantis than Biden.

Of course that poll doesn't mean shit at this point for who will win is 2024. But the poll DOESN'T HAVE TO be supremely accurate or a good electoral predictor to tell you something that's very useful to know.

What it tells you is we have an enormous problem in this country because an overwhelming majority of voters haven't learned from the Trump experience that anyone even vaguely like Trump is dangerously unacceptable. Biden SHOULD beat Trump or DeSantis or any of these MAGA-ish monsters by so many points that the crappiest poll would show Biden way ahead.

Either too many Americans are so ignorant and out-of-touch as to not understand the important differences between Biden and these clowns, or they're nasty enough to actually understand what Trump and DeSantis are, and to want them to win because of that.

You can learn THAT from the Harvard/Harris poll. It's both sad and important to know it.

This post is a repost of any earlier thread. I got locked out of responding to my own thread, so I deleted that one to start again fresh. There was nothing about this OP itself that was cited.

September 22, 2022

The Leticia James lawsuit, happy as I am to see it, does more to confirm my cynical view...

...of our so-called "justice" system than to improve it.

Look at how egregious Trump's criminality had to be before action was taken.

Look at how much Trump had to brazenly call attention to himself in order to be investigated - in James' own words, it was Michael Cohen's testimony in Congress that sparked the NYAG's investigation, despite that fact that Trump's cheating ways had been an open secret for decades.

Look at how much time and effort this took. Three years was spent putting together the case against the Trump organization. If the violations of law were so blatant and flagrant, it seems to me only the fear of failure in court, which is clearly far more acute when going against prominent people than the average citizen, would make people work so hard for so long to nail a case down so completely before daring to move forward.

Think of how much shit other rich and powerful people are getting away with if this is what it took to go after Trump. Think of how little capacity our legal system has to pursue wrongdoing among the elite when prosecutors are afraid to go after the elite without devoting an enormous portion of that capacity to each case.

Leticia James stated very clearly what she though about there being two tiers in our legal system, and how she wasn't going to let that inequality favor Trump.

That's a good and gratifying start. But it's also makes it clear that there is so much further to go.

July 9, 2022

I hate the way the media thinks it's their job to channel stupid people

Our news media should inform AND ENLIGHTEN.

It's bad enough a great deal of the media falsely confuses (and in many cases, perhaps I'm being overly generous attributing this problem to mere confusion) fairness with both-siderism. While the media should, of course, strive to be objective and neutral, a free press needs to be very partisan about being pro-democracy. Without democracy and basic liberties, their mission to inform is doomed.

On top of the both-siderism, however, the media are constantly framing political stories in terms of how a fairly ignorant, not-very-analytical, not-very-engaged public will react to the dribbles of information they receive, often misunderstand, and often forget in ridiculously short periods of time.

In this framing, politicians, their actions, and their policies, are primarily judged not on their inherent merits, but how what they do will be perceived by an ignorant, disengaged public. It's much more important, apparently, to spend the most time talking about whether people will notice or care that a policy is good for them, rather than discussing if it is good for them.

This idea that "perception is everything" becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Our press should being doing more explaining, more enlightening, should be doing their best to drag people out of their ignorance and disinterest, rather than treating the ability of politicians to hammer through or work around that ignorance and disinterest as the gold standard of good politics and good policy.

February 12, 2022

Any solid statistical analysis of the apparent huge increase in people acting like dicks?

I'm pretty certain that it's a real phenomena at some level, and that a big part of it is that Trump gave an awful lot of somewhat quietly reserved but inwardly nasty people the feeling of freedom they craved to let their asshole flags fly high and proud.

Some specific things, like unruly airline passengers, are well-documented. 2021 had a 600% increase in incidents over the previous year.

I'm not sure how well other things are tracked, on the whole spectrum from adults throwing loud and childish temper tantrums all the way up to unhinged, violent assaults triggered by petty annoyances like a fast-food employee forgetting to put pickles on a burger. It would be interesting to further to separate out non-COVID-related dickishness from the maskholes and the belligerent anti-vaxxers.

As a non-COVID example, a video someone posted earlier today on DU, where a woman was freaking out because there weren't any yachts available for her to rent. (Talk about zero-eth world problems.)

The ubiquity of cellphones both captures a lot of this bullshit, but distorts how much there is at the same time. We can all be sure, for instance, that police abuse of power has had a long and inglorious history going well back before video cameras, and then cellphones, helped reveal what had long been hiding in the shadows.

So where are we really at? 10% more dickishness? 50%, 300% more? I really have no idea. My almost certainly distorted media impression feels like 1000-1500% more. For what I encounter in real life personally, it's more like the 10% range. The truth is probably somewhere in that wide swath of uncertainty in between.

February 10, 2022

If I were caught with a couple of kilos of cocaine, the police wouldn't simply confiscate...

...the drugs and get back to me some time a year or so later after pondering long and hard about what charges, if any, to bring against me. I'd immediately be going on a little ride down to the police station -- either that, or possibly a ride to a hospital or the morgue if, you know, I twitched slightly the wrong way after the police bashed down my door, shooting first and asking questions later.

So why doesn't it work that way when you're in illegal possession of stolen government documents, some of which are apparently classified?

January 13, 2022

People should be deliriously happy for just the simple fact that Biden isn't Trump

I don't understand the low poll numbers for Biden. Or perhaps I do understand, in a way, but that just makes me angrier.

We collectively dodged a fucking bullet when Trump lost, but the stupid, ignorant masses don't on the whole realize this. They don't care how so many of the problems we currently face, including inflation and ongoing COVID strife, are the aftermath of the mess Trump created, and that Biden has done very well given the hand he was dealt. They further ignore all the good news in the economy.

Instead of appreciating what Biden has accomplished with the slimmest of margins in Congress, and seeing that the answer to getting more out of Congress is adding MORE Democrats, they're quite willing to blindly hand control right back to Republicans again, no matter how much they've lied about the last election, no matter how unprincipled Republicans have proven themselves to be, no matter how cravenly they've debased themselves to curry favor from their ignorant, sniveling narcissist king, no matter how brazenly they work to rig the next election in their favor.

The public certainly doesn't appreciate enough the basic decency of Biden, even when held up against the so-recent example of the childish, petulant, empathy-lacking, constantly-gaslighting inhumanity of Trump.

How is it that we even have to use the expression "memory hole" to describe what happens all the time in our politics, when voters either literally forget things that happened mere months ago, or at least forget they might have cared, and then vote as if a dull, uninformed, and probably distorted impression of current circumstances, all credited or blamed on the party of the current President, is all that matters.

I fully understand what Churchill meant when he said democracy is the worst possible system of government... except compared to all of the others we've tried.

I'd never make it in politics or punditry because I have very little respect for voters in general. At best they are a notch above dictators, not a leap above, and sometimes they're so stupid they'll gladly vote to put dictators in power, giving their own power and freedom away.

Messaging? Democrats aren't good enough at messaging? Do you know what messaging is?

It's the process of treating voters like stupid, ignorant children while praising their non-existent wisdom at the same time. It's fighting to turn complex, nuanced policy into bumper-sticker slogans digestible by tiny, distracted minds. It's sometime sacrificing good policy for mediocre policy because the mediocre policy is easier to package and sell.

I'm sick of it. I want to live in a country, or on a planet, where we can expect and demand more out of the voters themselves instead of constantly blaming politicians for not meeting voters on their simplistic, ignorant, short-sighted level.