Re: Doesn’t Matter Who Wins the K Race; We’re All the Same
 

I didn't say it didn't exist. That's you rephrasing it. I said:

"And I also don't believe the rule of law really exists in this country the way you think it does."

The rule of law is a relative concept. Everybody's got his own practical idea of it (regardless of the academic definition your con law professor may have told you). Your idea of it seems self-serving. You seem to think that the law should be applied viciously to those you don't like and you don't accept results of its application that you don't like. Barr's giving Trump a pass follows the black letter. He played the chess game within its rules. (Don't offer me some bullshit about how Barr lied. He walked to the door of lying and knew they couldn't nail him for it, which most people would call aggressive lawyering... all within the rules of the game. A lie ain't a lie unless it's proven, and this one cannot be and will not be proven.)

You're no different than the people on the right arguing about Benghazi or Hillary's emails. You think the rule of law has been subverted when it works against you.

The rule of law is subverted in many ways, every day, as thousands of people are unfairly tried and sentenced for the crime of not having cash to raise a defense. The rule of law is perverted by law enforcement all day long, in a system where the deck is stacked against defendants. You want to talk about that? I'm happy to do so.

But in a political power game, where you're just pissed your side was out-gamed, hiding behind concern for the "rule of law"? Please. You lost the Mueller battle. You don't like it. And I think you also don't like the fact that a clown who you feel is beneath you in every regard is pulling off this shit. Well, have a drink and see what happens in November of 2020. I think there's a solid chance you dispose of this guy without having to play any more games in the legal system.

Re: Doesn’t Matter Who Wins the K Race; We’re All the Same
 

There truly is something the fuck wrong with you.

TM

Re: Doesn’t Matter Who Wins the K Race; We’re All the Same
 

Let me remind you of what you said: "Others were biased and have used the investigation for political ends ... Ohr, Sztrock..."

You believe that Ohr and Sztrock "used the investigation for political ends?" Because that's just stupid.

The Whine of the "Bullshit" Classes
 

How much of your criticism stems from the fact that free trade benefits you? I don't like Trump's tariffs. Why? One reason: They raise project costs, which adversely impacts me. I could offer some high minded basis. But it'd be untrue.

Over the last few days, I read David Graeber's Bullshit Jobs, which one can acquire for free here. Aside from describing what you do, I do, your broker, r/e agent, insurance agent, accountant, and the armies of finance people, administrators, and managers we ultimately work for do (or pretend to do) for a living, there's a great explanation between the Left leaning managerial and "soft professional" (non-hard science) classes in this country and the Right leaning populations (both rich owners of businesses and poor workers). Below is a passage that highlights a lot of the friction between many Trump supporting sorts and the "soft professional" classes that voted against him (emphasis mine).

The "caring" classes Graeber references are underpaid largely service workers who provide a real social value to society. The "managerial" and "professional" classes are overpaid service workers engaged in "bullshit jobs" of little to no social value ("FIRE" gigs, mostly). He's effectively saying people like us are sucking a disproportionate amount of money out of the economy and providing little of social value in return and tending to support "progressive" policies because those would placate the underpaid "caring" classes without actually redistributing significant wealth to them by either eliminating our useless "bullshit" work or devaluing it (giving us shit wages people who provide no social value deserve) in relation to the caring classes' work.* (One could simplify his opinion of the views commonly seen on this board to "limousine progressivism," with an impact as pernicious as Right wing "let them eat cake-ism.") Anyway, here's the passage:

Before the industrial revolution, most people worked at home. It’s only since perhaps 1750 or even 1800 that it’s made any sense to talk about society as we typically do today, as if it were made up of a collection of factories and offices (“workplaces”) on the one hand, and a collection of homes, schools, churches, waterparks, and the like on the other—presumably, with a giant shopping mall placed somewhere in between. If work is the domain of “production” then home is the domain of “consumption,” which is also, of course, the domain of “values” (which means that what work people do engage in, in this domain, they largely do for free). But you could also flip the whole thing around and look at society from the opposite point of view. From the perspective of business, yes, homes and schools are just the places we produce and raise and train a capable workforce, but from a human perspective, that’s about as crazy as building a million robots to consume the food that people can no longer afford to eat, or warning African countries (as the World Bank has occasionally been known to do) that they need to do more to control HIV because if everyone is dead it will have adverse effects on the economy. As Karl Marx once pointed out: prior to the industrial revolution, it never seems to have occurred to anyone to write a book asking what conditions would create the most overall wealth. Many, however, wrote books about what conditions would create the best people—that is, how should society be best arranged to produce the sort of human beings one would like to have around, as friends, lovers, neighbors, relatives, or fellow citizens? This is the kind of question that concerned Aristotle, Confucius, and Ibn Khaldun, and in the final analysis it’s still the only really important one. Human life is a process by which we, as humans, create one another; even the most extreme individualists only become individuals through the care and support of their fellows; and “the economy” is ultimately just the way we provide ourselves with the necessary material provisions with which to do so.

If so, talking about “values”—which are valuable because they can’t be reduced to numbers—is the way that we have traditionally talked about the process of mutual creation and caring.[219]

Now, clearly, if we assume this to be true, then the domain of value has been systematically invading the domain of values for at least the last fifty years, and it’s hardly surprising that political arguments have come to take the form they do. For instance, in many major American cities, the largest employers are now universities and hospitals. The economy of such cities, then, centers on a vast apparatus of production and maintenance of human beings—divided, in good Cartesian fashion, between educational institutions designed to shape the mind, and medical institutions designed to maintain the body. (In other cities such as New York, universities and hospitals come in second and third as employers, the biggest employers being banks. I’ll get back to banks in a moment.) Where once left-wing political parties at least claimed to represent factory workers, nowadays, all such pretense has been discarded, and they have come to be dominated by the professional-managerial classes that run institutions like schools and hospitals. Right-wing populism has taken systematic aim at the authority of those institutions in the name of a different set of religious or patriarchal “values”—for instance, challenging the authority of universities by rejecting climate science or evolution, or challenging the authority of the medical system by campaigns against contraception or abortion. Or it has dabbled in impossible fantasies about returning to the Industrial Age (Trump). But really this is something of a bitter-ender game. Realistically, the likelihood of right populists in America wresting control of the apparatus of human production from the corporate Left is about as great as the likelihood of a Socialist party taking power in America and collectivizing heavy industry. For the moment, it would appear to be a stand-off. The mainstream Left largely controls the production of humans. The mainstream Right largely controls the production of things.

It’s in this context that the financialization and bullshitization of both the corporate sector, and particularly the caring sector, are taking place—leading to ever-higher social costs, even at the same time as those who are doing the actual frontline caring are finding themselves increasingly squeezed. Everything seems to be in place for a revolt of the caring classes. Why has none yet taken place?

Well, one obvious reason is the way that right-wing populism and divide-and-conquer racism have placed many of the caring classes in opposite camps. But on top of that, there’s the even stickier problem that in many areas of dispute, both sides are supposed to be in the “same” political camp. This is where banks come in. The entanglement of banks, universities, and hospitals has become truly insidious. Finance works its way into everything, from car loans to credit cards, but it’s significant that the principal cause of bankruptcy in America is medical debt, and the principal force drawing young people into bullshit jobs is the need to pay student loans. Yet since Clinton in the United States and Blair in the United Kingdom, it’s been the ostensibly left parties that have most embraced the rule of finance, received the largest contributions from the financial sector, and worked the most closely with financial lobbyists to “reform” the laws to make all this possible.[220] It was exactly at the same time that these same parties self-consciously rejected any remaining elements of their old working-class constituencies, and instead became, as Tom Frank has so effectively demonstrated, the parties of the professional-managerial class: that is, not just doctors and lawyers, but the administrators and managers actually responsible for the bullshitization of the caring sectors of the economy.[221] If nurses were to rebel against the fact that they have to spend the bulk of their shifts doing paperwork, they would have to rebel against their own union leaders, who are firmly allied with the Clintonite Democratic Party, whose core support comes from the hospital administrators responsible for imposing the paperwork on them to begin with. If teachers were to rebel they’d have to rebel against school administrators who are actually represented, in many cases, by the exact same union. If they protest too loudly, they will simply be told they have no choice but to accept bullshitization, because the only alternative is to surrender to the racist barbarians of the populist Right.

I have myself smashed my head against this dilemma repeatedly. Back in 2006, when I was being kicked out of Yale for my support of grad students engaged in a teacher unionization drive (the Anthropology Department had to get special permission to change the reappointment rules for my case, and my case only, in order to get rid of me), union strategists considered a campaign on my behalf on MoveOn.org and similar left liberal mailing lists—until reminded that the Yale administrators behind my dismissal were probably active on those lists themselves. Years later, with Occupy Wall Street, which might be considered the first great rising of the caring classes, I watched those same “progressive” professional-managerials first attempt to co-opt the movement for the Democratic Party, then, when that proved impossible, sit idly by or even collude while a peaceful movement was suppressed by military force.

_______
* He is not using "value" in its exclusively economic definition, Adder. The book is not an econ text. One of its arguments is that exclusively using economic metrics and analyses is giving us an incomplete picture of society's general health and stability.

ETA: An excellent review of the book (that hits uncomfortably close to home):

"[It] leads to a realization that Graeber circles but never articulates, which is that bullshit employment has come to serve in places like the U.S. and Britain as a disguised, half-baked version of the dole—one attuned specially to a large, credentialled middle class. Under a different social model, a young woman unable to find a spot in the workforce might have collected a government check. Now, instead, she can acquire a bullshit job at, say, a health-care company, spend half of every morning compiling useless reports, and use the rest of her desk time to play computer solitaire or shop for camping equipment online. It’s not, perhaps, a life well-lived. But it’s not the terror of penury, either."

https://www.newyorker.com/books/unde...lshit-job-boom

Re: Doesn’t Matter Who Wins the K Race; We’re All the Same
 

This sort of dissembling is why you're frequently replied to last. If you've nothing to say, say nothing.

Re: Doesn’t Matter Who Wins the K Race; We’re All the Same
 

You're a dupe, it's been pointed out to you and yet, you're still a dupe.

Re: Doesn’t Matter Who Wins the K Race; We’re All the Same
 

You're in short pants. You've always been in short pants.

Re: Doesn’t Matter Who Wins the K Race; We’re All the Same
 

Try responding to something I said.

Re: Doesn’t Matter Who Wins the K Race; We’re All the Same
 

What you said:

If you don't care about the rule of law, that's between you and your God, or whatever.

I don't share your definition of "rule of law," which I stated in my reply.

But even if it's far from perfect, on which surely everyone here agrees, the idea that the rule of law doesn't really exist is just moronic.

I didn't say the rule of law doesn't exist. I said it was relative. You said I said it did not exist. Again, this was stated in my reply.

Sometimes your contrarianism leads you say things that should be beneath you.

Sometimes when you say I said something I didn't say, and then tell me that my so advising you is a non-response, I develop the suspicion you need another coffee.

Re: Doesn’t Matter Who Wins the K Race; We’re All the Same
 

I haven't defined the "rule of law," but I did start this recent exchange by quoting at length from TPM about Trump's threat to it. Instead of responding to what I said, you are pretending that my concern about the rule of law is a fig leaf for unhappiness that Mueller did not indict Trump, or something else I haven't said. I am not the people you saw on MSNBC or CNN, and I do not necessarily share their views.

Re: Surely your village could have found a better idiot, Sebby?
 

Re: Doesn’t Matter Who Wins the K Race; We’re All the Same
 

I am responding to the words you wrote. You started that exchange by stating that Trump was a danger to the "rule of law." I disagreed. You are correct that you then did not define "rule of law." And consequently, I don't know what your definition would be, which is why I stated that I was responding to what it "seemed" to be.

Because it seems that you are exercised about Trump subverting this "rule of law," while in the past, where others have been accused of subverting the rule of law by their political enemies, you have not been so exercised. In fact, in certain instance, such as Hillary's email mess, you have defended the accused. (It's not a defense to assert that Hillary was cleared, btw, any more than it is a defense that Trump was cleared. [Unless, bizarrely, you assert that being given a pass by Comey is valid while being given one by Barr and Rosenstein is not, which would be you submitting that you are in a position to judge the appropriateness and inappropriateness of such decisions.])*

When Bush was in office, you cited Krugman regularly for the proposition that Bush Admin was engaged in various criminal acts. (Yes, you did.)

Also, you have been very vocal about your disgust at how Barr gamed the release. This betrays bias. I think that bias has two prongs:

1. You view Trump as unfit and a threat;
2. You have a static view of the rule of law, believing that power and politics does not and should not influence how that rule works as much as they do.

I agree with you that Trump is unfit. But I do not see him as some enoromous threat. And I do not see the rule of law as some set of fixed rules or notions which Trump is subverting. I see a battle for power being played out using the law as an instrument, which is how political battles are often fought these days. Those aligned against Trump are using the law to attack him, and he's testing its limitations in response.

__________
* For the record, and to avoid some tedious reply from Adder, I did not support the investigation into the Clintons because it was political, and I'm glad she got a pass. Do I think she engaged in possibly unethical and illegal shit? Yes. But as I've said elsewhere, so do all politicians unwittingly and by necessity, and I doubt anything she did - including improperly directing or pressuring staff or counsel to erase emails, if she did that - is something for which she should be prosecuted under the circumstances. She was being subjected to a partisan witch hunt. She is allowed leeway in such an unfair investigation.

Re: The Whine of the "Bullshit" Classes
 

I'm way too shallow to even think this deeply- I just think Trump is insane and playing to increase haters to feel he is their messiah- not one economic thought- maybe because I can be above money, or maybe because the stakes of what this fuck might do/ has done are way too high.

Re: Doesn’t Matter Who Wins the K Race; We’re All the Same
 

You have to be kidding. You do not see the difference between an experienced prosecutor and member of the opposition party concluding that no prosecutor would charge and Barr, having auditioned for the job by calling the investigation invalid, doing what he was hired to do, arguably in direct conflict with the report itself? (Oh, which he did without reviewing any of the underlying evidence too.) Man.

Yes, if she did a thing that nobody ever claimed she did, she should have been prosecuted. Great.

Like, what kind of leeway? And what did she so to obstruct the investigation? And which investigation, because wasn't the deletion before the investigation into the deletion?

And she didn't need leeway. She didn't do anything meaningfully wrong.

No, technical non-compliance with government records processes when government systems weren't up to the task doesn't count.

Re: Doesn’t Matter Who Wins the K Race; We’re All the Same
 

No, you aren't. Here they are. It only took me about five seconds to go back and find that post. You can do it too.