wisdomoftheages's comments

The executive nominates judges, but they hold tenure for life and after confirmation operate with complete independence as a separate branch of government with their own budget etc. The Supreme Court is also irrelevant to this because they do not initiate investigations, they do not oversee prosecutors, and they do not administer the justice system. They only hear cases about Constitutional issues - not criminal issues, so unless there's a constitutional dispute a case has no chance of reaching them.

Judges in general do not oversee or initiate prosecutions, U.S. attorneys do. They're also appointed by the executive, but they operate independently and while, subject to Congressional oversight, he can fire some of them (but not the permanent civil servants who are the bulk of the staff), he cannot directly order them to do anything.

In any case, an investigation of this complexity almost certainly started under Obama, just because they tend to take many years to reach the stage where charges are filed.

Trump frequently claims to have powers that he does not have. He has said many times that he is going to do something only to find that he cannot actually do it, and so it hasn't been done.

The crime is not trading with Iran, the crime is defrauding the US financial system in order to do it. For some reason, this is framed as though Huawei is accused of trading with Iran completely independently of the United States. That's not the case at all.

No doubt he was an extremely serious and devout Catholic. That's why I want to push back against 'catholicherald' propaganda that being a good Catholic requires you to either heterosexual or celibate.

The idea that Meng was arrested as part of a ploy in the 'trade war' is completely unfounded. These investigations take years and are initiated by the independent justice system. Trump can run his mouth off as much as he likes, but the U.S. system is not structured like China and the executive does not have supreme authority to direct arrests and prosecutions.

Meng was arrested for fraud, lying to U.S. banks and violating financial disclosure laws; no different than any garden variety money-launderer.

Most importantly, she's had a day in court, been granted bail in a hearing that was open to the media, and if extradited, will receive due process and a fair criminal trial where everyone will get to see the evidence against her.

These two men have been 'disappeared'. Good luck ever seeing any shred of due process for them. Not even the most shameless Xi mouthpiece can credibly claim that China has anything resembling an independent judicial system.

It's not surprising that all Chinese media and all commentators loyal to the Xi clique have cynically framed this in terms of Meng being 'abducted' or 'held hostage'. The worldview of authoritarian, personal dictatorship cannot even conceive of due process and the rule of law (which also accounts for some of the idiotic off-the-cuff remarks that Trump has made - fortunately, the U.S. still has a semi-functioning government with separation of powers and an independent judiciary, so he's not really in the saddle here)

“Letting the local market compete” is not among the listed reasons, so if that were the true reason the listed reasons would indeed be “bullshit”

Companies pay the lowest amount that workers accept. Some employers can hold down wages because their workers have no other options. Ours have to resort to marginally more sophisticated stratagems.

Well, in the Xi era China has a) become more of an overtly fascist dictatorship and b) harder for Westerners to make money in, so because of b) there's more incentive to focus on a)

Still lots of great stuff happening there, so long as you're not an ethnic minority, religious, LGBT, disabled, an addict, mentally ill, interested in social change, or too poor to afford your own private oxygen and food supply

"Competitive" company cultures are an enormous red flag for me, almost always a mechanism to help executives drain employees to a lifeless husk without having to actually pay for the privilege.

In my experience, companies have three ways to motivate employees.

One is to compensate them at a level commensurate with what is expected of them (too few companies do this, even in tech).

One is to make them feel like they have a genuine stake in the performance of the company, either because they believe in the company's mission (usually impossible for a for-profit enterprise, except among the more gullible employees) or they actually have an ownership stake in the business (virtually impossible with the VC model, papier-mache stock options not withstanding)

The third is to build an artificial "competitive culture", so everyone is so busy pushing themselves to the limit in competition with their coworkers that they never stop to realize that the only prize is more money in the bank account of their investors (who may peel a bills off the top and toss it to them in the form of a 'performance bonus')

This is only partially true; he was devoutly Catholic, but he also had numerous male sexual partners.

I didn't say that there has never been a democratic government in all of history. I said that the Roman Republic could not in any sense of the word be described as democratic. It was fundamentally and wholly governed by wealthy land-owning elites, who derived their position in the system from their wealth, despite the presence of institutions that bear a superficial similarity to institutions present in modern democracies.

I'd really urge you to crack open an academic textbook on the subject. If you'd like to dive a little deeper, I'd recommend W.G. Runciman, "Capitalism Without Classes: The Case of Ancient Rome" (British Journal of Sociology), Wilfried Nippel, "Policing Rome" (Journal of Roman Studies), Peter Baehr, "Caesar and the Fading of the Roman World", Peter Brunt, "The Army and the Land in the Roman Revolution" and Douglass North, "Institutions, Institutional Change, and Economic Performance" which has a large stretch of summary of Roman political economy.

Leaving aside the historiographical issue of how projecting modern descriptive terms onto the past fundamentally distorts our understanding of how people back then conceived of their society, I'm afraid you're laboring under some extreme misapprehensions about the nature of the late Republican government. That Republican Rome was governed by an aristocratic land-owning oligarchy for pretty much its entire existence is an undisputed historical fact. The Gracchi were wealthy members of the ruling elite wielding land redistribution as a political tool in their competition for power with other members of the ruling elite. They weren't ordinary Roman citizens organizing popular resistance from below.

To refer to "democratic norms" or "progressives and reactionaries" is an anachronistic stretch to say the least. A more accurate summation is that the Gracchi championed land reform for the poor (specifically, redistributing land illegally acquired smallholders by members of the senatorial oligarchy) in the service of their own political ambitions, and in doing so they repeatedly violated the norms of the governing oligarchy, which protected their property (itself frequently acquired in technical violation of legal norms) by murdering the reformers and massacring their followers.

The story of the fall of the Roman Republic is not so much a story of the decay of democratic or governing institutions as we know them as it is the story of a ruling oligarchy that gradually loses the ability to discipline its own members and keep them united in a common policy.

To be fair to her, she played it because she heard her daughter listening to it and thought they would be able to bond over it. It must feel terrible to have your kid actively reject something they previously liked because they found out you liked it too, even if it’s a normal part of adolescence.

This reminded me of a classic essay on how a lot of "luxury" branding is meant to appeal, not to the true elite (the kind of people who are born with seven or more figures in a trust fund and / or live off capital gains), but to the aspirations of professional-class strivers (lawyers, doctors, advertising directors, software engineers, etc.):

https://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2011/11/luxury_branding_the_...

There is a book, a mapping project, and a museum exhibit all linked in the first couple paragraphs of TFA. I encourage you to look at them as a jumping-off point into the 40 or 50 years of accumulated historical scholarship on the subject.