Oh yeah, it was worthy of a serious investigation, but what I suppose I'm really going for is that, the Democrats are losing their "Russia" excuse for the loss of Clinton and (neo-)liberalism more broadly.

I'm with everyone though that I hope Mueller finds some strong enough evidence to basically require congress to impeach Trump, and we should be better prepared for Russia in the future.

At the same time, I think some of these #resistance guys are nearing a type of hysteria, which ironically reminds me a bit of the Benghazi conspiracy.



True but the right also has that strain of antiHollywood/antiCultural Marxism/Nazism strain that makes them like anti movie. Think of the people who said TFA was a conspiracy to cuck white men. I don't think the liberal are quite that far gone.

Also knew a guy in high school whose favorite scene of American History X was the curb stomp scene. This kid also hated the black students. Wonder where he's at today...

Lol of course anyone can buy drugs in pretty much any currency, I just mean it's a particularly strong part of Bitcoin's value.

I used to argue that was the value of Bitcoin. That its value is in how it facilitates and anonymizes crime. But the recent prices, I dunno, my suspicion is the Tethers scam/bubble blew up the price enough to drive a buying hysteria that's far beyond anything we've seen before.

Oh hey. Another 100 million of Tethers were printed today.

Kind of, yeah. It's like Benghazi, if about once a month there was a massive bombshell in the news that suggested there were credible reasons to continue to suspect foul play beyond what currently available evidence supports. To mix metaphors: about once a month, someone throws another can of oil onto the fire, it explodes in a flurry of hysterical media hype, and then it retreats to a slow burn, simmering in the background, until the next round. To put it more concisely: Unlike Benghazi, the concerns aren't groundless. But, there's still relentless conspiracy theorizing that resembles the right's response to Benghazi.

But yeah I think the comparison to Benghazi is accurate. It probably is testament to just how unhealthy our democracy is that the Trump-Russia scandal has become a leftist version of Benghazi. The same kind of scandal -- where you have congressmen conducting investigation into criminal wrongdoings of a presidential administration, spurred on by media campaigns encouraging the base -- attacks and questions the very legitimacy of an administration and whether it is qualified to rule. It indicates that the left is just as unwilling to accept a Republican administration as the right was unwilling to accept a Democratic one. Right now, each part you sees the other governing as an existential threat.

Have we ever talked about how the global speculation bubble has driven up the prices of every asset class beyond any productive use and generally crowds out all other kinds of investment?

Because that thing I said.

One of my biggest problems with bitcoin is exactly that, it’s lost its utility as a medium of exchange, and due to price instability even as a store of wealth. It is only useful for speculation. So I hate it, the same as I hate ICOs and modern VC strats and startup culture and the financial industry and else like it. It’s all worthless and useless. Nothing but kindling on a raging conflagration that is burning up the whole world.

https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/7m046d/how_the_bilderberg_group_the_federal_reserve/

Oh, nevermind, Bitcoin has nothing at all to due with sheer delusion, ballsy scams and fraud, engineered off the money from dumbasses and criminals. It's really the lizard people banking conspiracy trying to topple our FreedomCoins* from the paradigm of currency which mathematically prevents speculation.

Christ, the more I learn about Bitcoin, the less confidence I have in the "technically savvy".

100% agreed. I think we basically all know there was collusion, the only question that remains for me is whether anyone, and if anyone then who, will be prosecuted. I'm not holding my breath for Trump going down, but I'd very much support it.



I agree, but I'm not sure I would call this "leftist" - at least, the socialist groups I interact with aren't nearly as nutso about the Trump collusion story as the more pro-Hillary people I know. I think it's more of a liberal conspiracy, by that I mean basically the more right-wing, centrist form of people who support Democrats but oppose single payer, and think Bernie supporters were all sexist and voted for Trump instead of Hillary. But otherwise, agreed, there's a growing divide in this country - two "camps" of people whose narrative and beliefs about the world are diverging with no common ground.

Not to mention the explicit antisemitism in the comments. Are Nazis fans of Bitcoin?

From where I sit, the idea that Russia was an excuse for losing was a far-left and right-swing talking point that never really resonated with me. It also seems kind of dated at this point, now that we have indictments and clear evidence of shady dealings. It heard it more often back in the early months of Trump's presidency. But even then, it always to me looked more like a smear than something grounded in evidence or even compelling argument. When HRC made excuses for losing -- which she definitely did do --, she generally stressed the Comey letter. And now that Trump could feasibly be indicted for obstruction of justice for firing Comey, the guy has become a hero to Democrats, so there's much less eagerness to attack him for the letter.



Fat chance. Our discourse on impeaching Trimp is entirely ****ed up. The constitution grants congress the right to impeach for high crimes and misdemeanors. But the founding fathers didn't mean by this phrase a criminal act. In fact, they specifically thought that a president should be impeachable even if he didn't commit a crime. The problem is that since so few people have been impeached, there isn't a very good understanding what should qualify as an impeachable offense. Many have assumed that if the special counsel concluded that Trump committed a crime, it would be some kind of objective metric that Trump did something really bad that would somehow convince Republicans to impeach. But it doesn't work like that. As we've been hearing all year, impeachment is still a political process: even if it turns out Trump did commit a crime, it would still require a critical mass of Republicans to vote to impeach in order for anything to happen.

I think Democrats have effectively been asleep at the wheel by waiting for an indictment or some other indication of criminality to talk seriously about impeachment. Criminality is neither sufficient nor necessary for impeachment, but it's agonizingly clear already that Trump's campaign did things that are treacherous. There are reasons to question his loyalty to the country. An indictment against Trump may feasibly make it easier to make the public case that Trump did something wrong. But we're crossing line after line after line and still Democrats aren't pulling the impeachment trigger. It might be too late for to convince the public at this point.

I meant leftist in the vaguer sense of... people who are on the left. (That is, center-left liberals, and far-left socialists, or whatever else... the whole left, in other words, not the left when that term meant to be contrasted with center-left liberals.) There are plenty of "Bernie supporters", to use a metonym, who aren't Russia skeptics. It's too reductive to say that it's a neoliberalism conspiracy theory. I think it probably correlates most frequently with people who really, really hate Trump and are engaged in wishful thinking that his presidency will be cut short by the special counsel. To that effect, I'm sure there are some center-right Republican #NeverTrumpers who are engaged in hysterics.

Going back to this: I do think Democrats have tried to unite the party around hatred for Trump because it's effective and mobilizes people. And one thing that they're trying to do by mobilizing around hating Trump is avoid having to weigh in on various issues that were so divisive in the 2016 Democratic elections. Especially because the party is reeling from a loss that made it feel directionless and unsure of what it stands for, I think the calculation is just that it's safer to unite around Trump than to unite around an issue and risk losing the support of either the voting base on the one hand or the donor base on the other. But I don't really see Democrats focusing on Russia in order to justify and defend their economic policies, or to conceal that that is why they lost (of course, for that to be true, a Democrat would have to think that is why they lost!). I can't remember seeing a clip of anyone of any importance on the left where that was clearly the subtext. But show me a clip and I'll admit I'm wrong.

https://www.google.co.il/amp/s/www.washingtonpost.com/amphtml/business/technology/bitcoins-boom-is-a-boon-for-extremist-groups/2017/12/26/9ca9c124-e59b-11e7-833f-155031558ff4_story.html

I keep hearing that the "nature of the blockchain" or the "mathematics of the new paradigm" make it immune to speculation, fraud, etc.

What is the substance behind this claim? I mean, what do the people who are saying this think they mean??

Surely they are memeing?

IRC 988 doesn't seem to exactly apply but the same idea behind it does. I found a pdf that does shed light on this issue:

https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-drop/n-14-21.pdf

To be paid by an employer with bitcoin is a scary mental image.

A friend of mine is an attorney and is getting paid in crypto regularly. Not nearly the same situation is an employer paying you in crypto though.

https://www.rt.com/usa/414864-trump-nuclear-button-north-korea/

This is the way the world ends,
This is the way the world ends,
This is the way the world ends,
Not with a whimper but with a dottering oaf bragging about how big his things are.

I literally won't be surprised if this is how we go to war. Since Trump has no hopes, dreams, or convictions.

Because: being black is racist.



https://pagesix.com/2018/01/02/russia-probe-grand-jury-looks-like-a-black-lives-matter-rally-says-witness/

why would black people have a problem with president trump tho?

Reddit wonders whether the source was Stephen Miller calling to testify.

Which would make sense, since he is racist as ****

These right-wing ****bag writers don't even realize what they're saying, anymore.

Mandating juries "be fair" or "be unbiased" to the president during an investigation of possible criminal activities is how you get ****ing dictatorship. Like no bones dictatorship, this is the kind of demands people make that want dictatorship.

It's also why people need to accept politics is not about decorum, or principle, it's a ****ing power struggle, and we need now more than ever to create movements to stop the (face it, Republican-centered) loons from weakening democracy for the petty political gains, i.e. the ****ing HB2 bill in NC.

People don't get what's at stake here. America's going to be a ****hole by 2100 if we allow ****heads like this to have and exercise power in our society.

Bonus round: there's an interesting theory I heard about cultural zeitgeists being dictated by politics, and post 2008 with the rise of superhero films, what we've really seen is the change in perception that the political changes that need to be made can't be done by humans, they need to be done by "superhumans", and this "superhuman" ideal, the will to be protected by a much larger, stronger superperson is somehow correlated with why you have so many Republicans today mindlessly in support of Trump, even eschewing Republicanism.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury_selection#Voir_dire

Somehow not very surprising.



That's true, and I think it's a short term strategy that might win them seats for the next half-decade, but won't last long term. Because the lessons the DNC learned from Alabama and the VA gov race were that they can run the moderate centrists who won't do much to change anything for the positive, but at least stand for the opposite of Trump's racism.

As in, their strategy I guess is to lose elections so hard you get absolute moron ****head Republicans in that are so repulsive you look better by comparison. I mean, it is a strategy.



I think Democrats are going to use the Republican ****show to sweep the economic discussion under the rug for 2018/2020 and basically move on. I'd really, really like economics to come to the forefront in a big way, but there are very strong voice that have a seat right next to the DNC that are pushing against topics like single payer, and I don't think they'll be forced out easily.

The saddest part of the story I quoted IMO was the lack of awareness that calling black jurors inherently biased against Trump was at once:

1. Incredibly racist
2. Tacit admission that Donald Trump has every reason to be afraid of what black people might think of him (see #1).

Yeah, I do get that. Juries can be stacked. But this isn't a jury for a criminal trial yet, though. Unless I'm really oblivious I don't see how you could conceivably "stack" a grand jury in this way.

I should be more clear I'm really annoyed that the writer seems to be doing the "treat us fairly" thing in contexts where it amounts to something more like special treatment than an actual demand of fairness.

Just to be clear, this is a jury from Washington DC. If Trump didn't want his associates to be judged by a jury of their peers, I guess he picked the wrong town to move to.

I guess black = stacked, though.

I mean: after decades, centuries of oppressing black people and still in denial about it, isn't it a little pathetic to cry in fear of anti-white bias as an explanation for any ill will they may have toward you?

The only reason any of us have even heard of Donald Trump is because he was prosecuted for discriminating against black tenants.

That doesn't bother me much. I'm fine with non-ideological, "moderate" candidates who hold views that belong to the other party (e.g., pro-life southern Democrats, like Doug Jones) and who faithfully reflect the spectrum of beliefs held by their constituents. I'd rather that than domination by a single hard-line party that unilaterally enacts sweeping change without the consent and against the wishes of the opposition party, and, therefore, half the country. In a country where there are reasonable concerns about creeping authoritarianism, the legitimacy of representatives is a bulwark.

I'm a little less cynical about this. I don't think that's their strategy. I think they've taken to heart what one finds in Frank Bruni or Thomas Friedman op-eds: you can't fight the trump unless you have political power, so you need to win seats by whatever means possible. This is no time for ideological purity. I think Democrats are tired of noble defeats, and recognize how utterly naive they were to believe that the "arc of history"/demographic change will bring political victories (at least in the short term). They need to take advantage of how wildly unpopular Trump and the Republican party is, and reap the benefits of low Republican voter turnout and Republican disenchantment with Trump. They need to push candidates that will work in that kind of environment.

What? You're watching it happen. I mean, by alluding to BLM, peace t-shirts and Berkeley protests, they're effectively talking about blacks as a proxy for Democrats. Their logic is pretty clear. The Trump people think: blacks are more likely to be Democrats than Republicans, which means they're more likely to be Trump critics than Trump supporters, which means if they can remove the black people from a jury and replace them with white people, they're more likely to have a jury that's sympathetic to the president. Therefore, do what they're doing.



I see it as a fairly common way that powerful, wealthy people use their wealth and influence to abuse the American criminal justice system in order to generate better outcomes for themselves.

Maybe I have a mistake in my reasoning, and I'm going to get really abstract, but here goes:

I'm skeptical that "faithfully reflecting the spectrum of beliefs held by constituents" is a good thing. Not, at least, without some important caveats. Because faithful reflection, in certain contexts, can mean Jim Crow laws or other bare discrimination and immoral laws.

It's not a conscious thought, but I think the way you spoke of this also supposes that somehow, each person has a set of "Platonic political beliefs", as in, each person has a list of things they believe, and that with the right political infrastructure on top of people, we could tap into the "pure beliefs" and get out the best result. I don't really think people work that way: there are large and serious propaganda efforts that do actually have an impact on people's beliefs, and any political system which can't account for this won't work.

For instance, imagine a close senate race in a very properly Democratic state, but Russian targeted propaganda hit a few areas that actually swung the vote to the other side. During the moment of the election, that result accurately reflects the views of the people. Would it be fair to say that's a "faithful reflection"? In a naive sense, yes, but I think we'd agree no, that people's exact beliefs can be tempered in various ways, and that matters.

But enough abstract stuff, let's try to bring this concrete. When you say "Doug Jones represents the people of Alabama", my response is: what exactly do you mean by that? It's not at all clear that it's okay for him to be pro-life, representing Alabama, if the reason Alabama is majority pro-life is the result of the pernicious effort of Evangelical loons spreading propaganda and disinformation to confuse people about the discussion, and there's also the plain truth that most Southern red states are voter suppression states.

That being said, I have no problem with Doug Jones and am super relieved he won over Roy Moore. I'm just being typically postmodern-skeptic towards that framing of "belief" as something which can be accurately represented by democracy, or particularly how much such an idea stays coherent beyond a first approximation.



Oh, absolutely, no disagreements at all, in the grand scheme of things I'd take a Hillary presidency over a Trump presidency, even if that means compromising on political goals. However I'd still like those political goals



Lol I meant that rhetorically, that the Democrat's goal is to lose until the Republicans look so bad they can win. It was a joke about how the "gains" actually aren't a result of any level of.. frankly politics, but simply due to how awful the Republicans are.



Oh, I agree absolutely about ideological purity, and I think they should absolutely do what they can to win seats and kick Republicans out, any, all, especially the Paul Ryans in congress. I'm just worried they're going to take this short term advantage but not pivot into a long-term policy program that maintains support and helps stabilize the country long term, but they'll go for basically what they wanted with Hillary, which will only teeter the totter back and allow grievances to fester.

Oh, I agree definitely that Republicans want to stack the jury, I was directing my comments at the Republican (not really accusation but whatever-you'd-call-it) belief that the jury is stacked against Trump.

And yeah, wealth buys you a free pass in America. I have no good thoughts on how to fix the entire justice system though so I'll leave my thoughts there.

That's easy.

First thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers.

I don't think a lot of this is necessary for the current discussion, though we can go into it further if you'd like. We can go into it more deeply if you feel like I'm dismissing you -- there's definitely a discussion to be had there, and maybe I could convince you that I don't believe a lot of the things you seem to think I believe (you've attributed views like this to me in the past, as well). But very quickly regarding the abstract stuff, rather than talk about Plato here, I think it'd be more fruitful to talk about early modern notions of "will", political representation and consent (for example, in Hobbes, or Rousseau). I agree that political will is mere conceptual abstraction, and that it isn't real.

But for me, what we're talking about boils down to this: do a critical mass of people who voted against the candidate who runs their state/country/whatever see them as a legitimate representative, even though they didn't vote for them? Part of securing that critical mass is to create a situation where such voters will recognize that, even though they don't agree with their representative about everything, they still agree with them about some things, and so even though they didn't vote for them, the representative still makes choices people who didn't vote for them would want their representative to make.




So how did you feel when Hillary reached out and tried to win over Republican voters? A lot of people criticizing her from the left thought that was bad.



I know, I was trying to make my point with a light touch



Assuming you're using Hillary as a proxy for "establishment politics"... yeah, probably. But they'll also score some wins for their voters. Parties these days have to strike out a balance between the interests of their voters and the demands of their donors. The best way to put an end that is to vastly restrict the amount of money that goes into politics.

Or to vastly restrict who is allowed to vote.

When I talk about "faithfully reflecting the view of constituents", I'm not making a metaphysical claim. I'm pointing out: it would've been dumb to run a pro-choice candidate in a state where a majority of people believe that abortion should be illegal, just because Democrats have decided in the national discussion that pro-lifers are backwards uneducated chauvinist rapists who haven't read any book other than the Bible. It'd be a bad judgment call to impose the national discussion on local, state-wide politics, just as it'd be a mistake to assume that people who call themselves Democrats everywhere in the country all mean the same thing by it. Locality still matters, and we need to talk about local politics as if it matters, rather than as if everyone who disagrees with the perspectives coming out of big coastal cities are simpletons whose ignorant beliefs will thankfully be wiped out by the passing of time. The representatives of states should be cognizant of some of the distinctive concerns that preoccupy people who live in their state, and fight for their interests, rather than simply be a reliable vote for their party's national agenda. That's the whole freaking point of having representatives.

That said, as you're alluding to with your mention of Jim Crow, there is a genuine conflict between liberal values on the one hand and national sovereignty on the other. A healthy liberal democracy needs to find a balance between these two different outlooks: rigid liberalism divests people of self-representation, and national sovereignty can entail divesting minorities of political rights and privileges. Unfortunately, if you like democracy, it doesn't mean you're guaranteed to live in a society of full equality, because democracy doesn't grant equality: liberalism does. What democracy grants the right to consent to be governed. Which means that a democracies can choose to restrict the liberties of their own people, if thats what the nation decides.

And despite the post-Bush 43 xenophobic populist turn in the Republican party, I think there's a strong case to be made that the problem is actually that we need more national sovereignty, not less.

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/948359545767841792

Amazing.

By now, I think that the actual question w.r.t. Trump has come to this and only this: was the FGR of 2008 right all along?