Criminal’s lawyers demand his conviction be thrown out because it would be “destabilizing” to let it stand.

Donald Trump’s attorneys are demanding the judge who presided over his New York hush money trial and conviction immediately throw out the case, saying it would be “uniquely destabilizing to the country” otherwise.

Hey, you know what’s really destabilizing? Electing a convicted criminal president.

“Immediate dismissal of this case is mandated by the federal Constitution, the Presidential Transition Act of 1963, and the interests of justice, in order to facilitate the orderly transition of Executive power following President Trump’s overwhelming victory in the 2024 Presidential election,” attorneys Todd Blanche and Emil Bove argued in a letter to Judge Juan Merchan that was made public Wednesday.

The interests of justice forsooth. No, the interests of justice mandate not letting a ruthless criminal get away with some of his crimes because he’s too famous and rich to face punishment.

The letter also cited presidential immunity as a reason to dismiss the case, and maintained Trump is already protected by it.

You mean already and retroactively. He was found guilty, but now that enough people thought it would be a fun joke to elect him president anyway, he becomes not guilty? That’s not justice, it’s borderline dictatorship.

In a letter to the judge Tuesday, prosecutors from Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office said they would not object to the sentencing being postponed while Trump’s lawyers file further legal arguments asking the case be dismissed.  

They said they would challenge efforts to toss the case, but agreed the situation is unprecedented.

“The People deeply respect the Office of the President, are mindful of the demands and obligations of the presidency, and acknowledge that Defendant’s inauguration will raise unprecedented legal questions,” their filing said. “We also deeply respect the fundamental role of the jury in our constitutional system.”

They respect all those things, but Trump doesn’t. Trump doesn’t respect anything but himself.

Some reactions to that “why won’t you let men into your changing room” interview on the women-hating BBC Woman’s Hour:

There are lots more of the same kind.

Ugh I’m probably going to have to transcribe every word of this disgusting conversation on Woman’s Hour – because the very first thing Nuala McGovern the woman host of WOMAN’S HOUR does is confuse the issue by referring to the man in the women’s changing room as “a trans woman” instead of a man or a male. Ok Nuala McGovern so why talk about women on Woman’s Hour at all? Why not just make it all about trans women instead? Why not replace you with a trans woman? Eh?

Off we go.

The presenter Nuala McGovern:

Want to turn to Bethany Hutchinson, she is one of eight women, all nurses, who are taking their NHS Trust to an employment tribunal for allowing a trans woman to use their changing facilities at work. Bethany works in Darlington Memorial Hospital in County Durham, and when I spoke to her I asked her when she first became aware that a colleague who is trans was using the women’s changing room.

Bethany Hutchinson: Yes so this kind of kicked off in July 2023, so without any sort of warning or consultation from senior management, we became aware of a male changing in the female changing room, and this has led to nurses having panic attacks before their shifts, it’s led to international nurses wearing clothing underneath their uniform because obviously culturally they can’t be exposed in a state of undress in front of any other male other than their husband – and generally just a feeling of anxiety amongst many female members of staff, you know, looking over their shoulder worried that this person’s going to walk in and see them in a state of undress.

McGovern: Emmm you talk – use the word male, but what you mean is a trans woman colleague.

Hutchinson: This person self-identifies as female, this person has had no surgery, does not take hormones, is having sexual intercourse with a female as far as I’m aware, so I would say a male.

McGovern: And the person you are referring to would use she/her pronouns –

Hutchinson: Yes

McGovern: – but you don’t agree to using that?

Hutchinson [firmly]: I don’t agree to using that, no.

McGovern: And why?

Hutchinson: Because they’re a male, they have all their parts in place, and I believe that this is a biological fact, it’s not interchangeable.

End of part one.

It’s interesting that Hutchinson is a nurse, and it’s her job to be familiar with these “parts” and to know who has which kind, while McGovern is a BBC talking head, so it’s her job to be familiar with words. The two have different vocational habits of thinking. McGovern can mostly forget about the parts while she’s working, while Hutchinson cannot.

The Guardian insults women yet again.

For many trans and non-binary people, top surgery – the process of removing breast tissue to get a flatter or masculinized chest – is not an elective procedure. It’s essential to them feeling at home in their bodies.

Wrong. Sorry. “Feeling at home in their bodies” is indeed elective. Removing breasts to feel at home in one’s body is like removing a leg to feel at home in one’s body. Both are elective because they are not physically necessary. Emotionally necessary is elective territory. If you had to triage patients waiting to have their breasts removed you wouldn’t (one hopes) put the “at home in my body” ones ahead of the breast cancer ones.

To put it another way, feeling at home in your body is a luxury, not a medical necessity.

Top surgery is a form of gender-affirming healthcare that can be used to treat dysphoria, the sense of deep unease one feels when their identity or appearance doesn’t match up with the gender they were assigned at birth.

Luxury. That right there is luxury.

The number of gender-affirming surgeries rose steeply in the US between 2016 and 2019.

Why? It couldn’t possibly be because it’s a fad, could it?

Despite the baggage that can come with one’s scars, they can also become symbols of pride and resilience.

Baggage? Scars and baggage? What kind of baggage? A duffel bag, a backpack, a 5-piece leather set?

But seriously, people really do need to learn the difference between necessary and elective.

He’s a guy.

He’s a guy.

Noah Berlatsky on the murderous ignorance and arrogance of Worst Kennedy:

It really should go without saying by now, but despite what RFK Jr. claims, vaccines are in fact one of the most transformative medical advances in human history.

The smallpox vaccine eradicated a 3,000 year old disease that killed 300 million people just in the two decades between 1900 and 1920. Before the measles vaccine became available in 1963, 400 to 500 Americans died of the disease every year, and some 48,000 a year were hospitalized. In the early 1900s, polio paralyzed hundreds of thousands of people a year; a devastating 1952 outbreak in the US killed 3,000.

And then of course there’s covid. Researchers believe that in the first year after covid vaccines were introduced, they prevented 19.8 million deaths globally. They could have prevented even more with better vaccine coverage.

But apparently Bad Kennedy has a problem with that.

Most people are aware that measles and polio outbreaks are bad and recognize that vaccines have been a huge boon. That’s why vaccine deniers like Kennedy insist they are not vaccine deniers. Instead, he shuffles and equivocates.

“If vaccines are working for somebody, I’m not going to take them away. People ought to have choice, and that choice ought to be informed by the best information,” Kennedy said in a recent interview.

No, people ought not to have choice when it comes to spreading disease. People ought not to have choice to drive 100 miles an hour on city streets. People ought not to have choice to fire machine guns into crowds. People ought not to have choice to set fire to occupied buildings. “Choice” is not sacred.

Kennedy and his Children’s Health Defense organization have for years pushed completely debunked lies claiming that vaccines cause autism in children. Kennedy has also lied by claiming that a mercury-based preservative called thimerosal, which used to be used in some vaccines, causes adverse health effects. Kennedy insists the negative effects of vaccines have never been studied or fully revealed — which, again, is simply untrue. Vaccines are considered safe because studies have repeatedly found them to be very safe, not because officials are keeping the truth from the public.

As head of HHS, Kennedy would be in a unique position to spread vaccine misinformation and downplay the dangers of refusing vaccination, as he did with the Samoa outbreak. He could block the CDC from making vaccine recommendations, undermining school vaccine mandates that help keep vaccine rates up and prevent deadly outbreaks. He could slow vaccine production, creating shortages. He could prevent the approval of new vaccines — an especially dangerous prospect considering the ongoing threat of covid and the need for better protection. (Some 650 people a week are still dying of covid globally.)

Therefore, Trump chose him of all people to be the Secretary of Health and Human Services. Trump wants more of us to die of communicable diseases.

It’s a very small group of people in one city, but……..well, it’s that kind of very small group.

Ohio officials have denounced a small contingent of neo-Nazis who paraded Saturday afternoon through a Columbus neighborhood – waving flags featuring swastikas and shouting a racist slur – in the latest public demonstration by White nationalists in recent years across the United States.

Around a dozen people in black pants, shirts and head coverings – their faces obscured by red masks – marched along the street near downtown Columbus as three carried black flags emblazoned with red swastikas, footage provided to CNN affiliate WBNS shows.

At least one person yelled, “N***er,” again and again, according to the video that’s garnered online attention far beyond Ohio’s capital. The group strode past low-rise brick buildings housing a salon and a clothing boutique, along with cafés serving tacos, coffee, cookies and bar grub, as its leader shouted through a black bullhorn.

It could be just 12 people annoying the neighbors…or it could be part of the beginning.

Oh dear oh dear confused muddled baffled person is at a loss to figure out which sweet Italian grandparent to emulate in which toilet! Be concerned!! Be very concerned!!!

I wonder though why cmbp is so upset about that rather than the fact that xir has several pieces of metal poking out of xir face. Kid! Watch out! You have bits of shrapnel in your face! That’s gotta sting!

I don’t know. Why do people put this kind of thing out in public where just anyone can see it? “Hello, watch me performing Whiny Sniveling Self-obsessed Fool.” Do they think it makes them look good?

This is very telling.

No of course we wouldn’t piss on a trans person’s car, not even if the person were a man. We talk, we write, we wear T shirts with slogans on them. We don’t piss on cars or pour soup over people or fracture the skulls of elderly women. We’re profoundly irritated, but we’re otherwise normal. Team Give Me Whatever I Demand, not so much.

Oh but it’s so complex, you outsiders can’t possibly understand it because of the very complex complexity of it. The BBC reports how complex it is:

A protest over the Football Association’s transgender inclusion policy took place outside Wembley before England men’s match against the Republic of Ireland.

It was sparked by the banning of a teenage girl over remarks she made to a transgender opponent in a grassroots match.

So what is the background to what the FA calls “a complex case”?

Earlier this month, a 17-year-old female footballer was banned for discrimination after she was found to have repeatedly asked a transgender opponent during a match “are you a man?”.

But what does “a transgender opponent” mean? As always, the Beeb carefully obscures the issue by saying “transgender opponent” as opposed to “male opponent.” Transgenderism carries its own defense mechanism with it this way, because the male advantage is always kept under the concealing garments.

The BBC has not seen the FA’s ruling, but it has been claimed, external that the 17-year-old – who reportedly has suspected autism – had denied being transphobic, had concerns about her safety and had sought guidance from the referee over the eligibility of her trans opponent.

Does it all over again. Why did she have concerns over her safety? Oh we can’t tell you that…all we can tell you is that she sought guidance over the eligibility of her trans opponent.

The teenager, who has not been named because of her age, was banned by the panel for six matches, four of which were suspended. The FA has said it has also received notice of an intention to appeal.

The teenage girl was punished for not wanting to compete against a boy in a girls’ match.

Kick It Out, who[m] the BBC has approached for comment, has an equality policy, external through which it aims to ensure “that fans, players, staff and others are treated fairly and with respect”.

“Kick It Out is continually committed to promoting inclusion and to confronting and eliminating discrimination,” the group’s policy states.

But of course you can’t do both of those. You have to pick one. If you’re promoting “inclusion” of men in women’s sports you can’t also ensure that fans, players, staff and others are treated fairly and with respect. Once men are in women’s sports, the women in the sports are not being treated fairly or with respect. They are being insulted, and they are being put at risk. In no way are they being treated fairly or with respect.

Finally, halfway through the long article, the Beeb manages to tell the truth at last.

The case has highlighted the FA’s policy of allowing players who are biologically male, but identify as female aged 16 or older, to play in the women’s game.

Exactly so.

The policy, of course, is idiotic and an insult to women.

In its rules, the FA says it has “undergone a review of its policy on transgender players in line with its commitment to promote Football for Everyone. It is the FA’s firm view that gender identity should not be a barrier to participation in football which is governed by the FA.”

However, it also recognises: “Football is a gender-affected sport of a competitive nature where the physical strength, stamina or physique of average persons of one sex could put them at a disadvantage compared to average persons of the other sex as competitors in a football match.

“English law provides that because of this, separate sporting competitions can be organised for men and women. The general position is that the participation of trans people in competitive sports cannot be restricted unless it is strictly necessary to pursue a legitimate aim, namely securing fair competition and safety of other competitors.”

And who decides when it is strictly necessary to secure fair competition and safety for girls and women? Not the girls and women. What business is it of theirs?

We need some clarity on the details.

President-elect Donald Trump on Monday confirmed he would declare a national emergency to carry out his campaign promise of mass deportations of migrants living in the U.S. without legal permission.

Interesting ambiguity there. Which without legal permission? Migrants living in the US or Trump carrying out mass deportations?

Already, he’s tapped several immigration hard-liners to serve in key Cabinet positions. South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem was picked to be homeland security secretary, pending Senate confirmation. Former Acting U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Director Tom Homan was named “border czar.”

Homan previously discussed his vision for mass deportations, saying they would first concentrate on expelling criminals and national security threats. He didn’t rule out deporting families together.

It’s not clear how they plan to distinguish among criminals and non-criminals. It’s not clear how they will know which are which, or even how they think they will know that.

There are an estimated 11 million unauthorized migrants living in the U.S. without legal immigration status. Removing them could cost billions of dollars per year, according to estimates from the American Immigration Council.

If that’s true, why not issue them legal immigration status? Why have it both ways? Having it both ways just gives the trumpists ammunition.

With little consolation anywhere we have to take some from internecine quarrels.

Elon Musk weighed in over the weekend on the increasingly tense battle for Treasury secretary in the second Trump administration—and that has reportedly raised the hackles of some Trump advisers, who worry his influence might have grown too large.

Oh surely not. Musk is a very cautious humble self-effacing guy.

The Washington Post reported that Musk’s endorsement via social media of Howard Lutnick, who is co-leading the Trump transition team, could add confusion to the process. One adviser suggested to the Post that Musk was acting as a “co-president” and could be overstepping his advisory role with Trump.

Not possible. He’s a genius. There’s no such thing as overstepping when you’re a genius.

Musk played a significant role in Trump’s re-election, putting over $100 million of his own money into a political action committee focused on Trump and appearing at several rallies.

This is good. Bad men with way too much money are the ideal people to run a government.

Yet another iteration of Margaret Atwood v the wicked gender critical women.

The evidence for it is as always promptly forthcoming.

The good old slug sex :) defense.

https://twitter.com/yatakalam/status/1858108974660219128

Sometimes speed is not the goal. Sometimes it’s downright dangerous. That’s why speed limits exist.

Trump is zooming.

President-elect Trump has set a modern record for staffing his government, with 12 Cabinet-level appointments in the 12 days since the election.

That’s five times faster than President Biden made the same number of picks for his administration — and four times faster than Trump’s pick for his first administration, according to calculations for Axios by David Marchick, dean of the Kogod School of Business at American University and an expert on presidential transitions.

And it’s confirmation that he’s a reckless brainless wrecking ball.

Trump either “has the best and most efficient transition ever,” Marchick said, or “is blowing up all norms and making picks on the fly without vetting, research or Senate consultations.”

And it could not be more obvious which explanation is the right one.

Alex Massie writes a think piece about whatisawoman without much apparent thinking.

Few people, after all, hold a GRC. Nevertheless the theory also matters, not least because expanding the definition of woman, and indeed, that of man, creates a cascade of further questions. The distinction between people who have been diagnosed with gender dysphoria and hence qualify for a GRC and those we might dub “lifestyle” trans people is both important and, I would add, a means of protecting GRC-holders themselves.

What is legal, after all, is not the same as what is decent. The social reality of trans people and their rights to dignity and respect, including being addressed and, typically, treated as they would wish to be, is not altered by the court’s ruling one way or the other. There are worse things than indulging a material fiction and most of the time, in most circumstances, little if any harm can come from doing so.

Notice anything missing?

What about the social reality of women? What about women’s rights to dignity and respect? Since when is it a “right” for people to be “addressed as they would wish to be” in the sense of “addressed as something they are not/the opposite of what they are”? Since when is it a “right” for men to be addressed as women?

That’s not a genuine right. It’s a pseudo-right, a neo-right, an invented right, a right too many. There is no “right” to lie about yourself; in many official contexts it’s a crime. Playful fictions that don’t make any difference to anything are one thing, and men insisting with menaces that women have to pretend the men are women are very much another.

I’m tired of men being flippant about this issue that doesn’t do them any harm.

I honest to god thought this was just one more Twitter fool mouthing the platitudes, but it turns out she’s an MP and government minister (in Canada…of course).

It’s certainly way more than anyone else gets. Other marginalized or neglected or persecuted sets of people get one day if they’re lucky. Trans people The trans communinny get multiple days, weeks, months. Why is that?

Will they ever grasp that all this overkill simply fosters annoyance at best and hostility at worst? Skip the luxury pseudo-persecution and focus on people who really do need attention and assistance.

And the replies are taking this completely seriously.

Right, because rules to avoid contagion during a pandemic are exactly the same as Nazi genocide.

Good old reliable BBC.

Graham adds: it’s not real, it’s chat gpt. Which is a good joke in itself, real or not.

About the Kennedy Hazard:

Even among the chaos generated by Donald Trump’s recent cabinet picks, one stands out for the extensive suffering and lasting institutional damage it may cause: his choice of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to lead the Health and Human Services Department.

Modern public health is one of civilization’s great achievements. In 1900, up to 30 percent of infants in some U.S. cities never made it to their first birthday.

But that’s 124 years ago. Nobody has a personal memory of it. There are probably some people who have sorrowful memories of parents who never got over an infant death (or two or more) but none who held the dying baby themselves.

The danger isn’t merely that Kennedy — who has almost no experience in government or large-scale administration, and who has shown a sometimes breathtakingly loose connection to the truth — would be incompetent or misleading. At the helm of a department with over 80,000 employees and a $3 trillion budget, one that oversees key agencies such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Food and Drug Administration and the National Institutes of Health, he would have control over the nation’s medicines, food safety, vaccines and medical research. With that power he could inflict significant harm to the public health system — and to the public trust that would be needed to rebuild it once he’s gone.

And the trouble is, he’s like Trump in being supremely convinced of his own sagacity. Two stupid ignorant men who think they know better than those pesky nerds who actually studied disease and disease control.

Outside of the medical community, few people still know about all the diseases whose safe and effective vaccines he is lying about, so let me remind you about one of them: diphtheria. Once known as “the strangling angel of children,” it causes its young victims to slowly and painfully suffocate, turn blue and gasp as a thick film fills their throat. They lie dying for many agonizing days. The disease has been all but wiped out, but in Spain a few years ago, it cost the life of an unvaccinated boy of 6. His distraught antivax parents promptly vaccinated their surviving child.

Kennedy doesn’t mention those gruesome realities. The core of his method is to mislead and confuse with selective citations that overlook key, even overwhelming evidence. He has falsely suggested that AIDS isn’t caused by H.I.V. With no evidence, he once mused that Covid was deliberately made to target Black and Caucasian people, while ensuring that “the people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.” 

So naturally Trump put him in charge of public health. If it ain’t broke, smash it to pieces.

Originally a comment by Bjarte Foshaug at Miscellany Room.

We are all familiar with attempts to classify ideologies and political systems in terms of different axes, or dimensions, or coordinate systems (individualist vs. collectivist, egalitarian vs. hierarchical, libertarian vs. authoritarian, universalist vs. identitarian etc.). There is a tendency to lump one’s political rivals together by selectively emphasizing the axes along which their positions happen to coincide to the exclusion of all the others. There is also a tendency to distance oneself from groups one does not like to be associated with by selectively emphasizing the differences and ignoring the similarities. E.g. back in my movement atheist days accomodationists often accused “militants” like myself of being “just like the fundamentalists” (“just as dogmatic”, “just as intolerant of opposing views” etc.), and from a certain point of view they were right: Even if hard-line atheists and religious fundamentalists disagreed on pretty much all the specific answers, not to mention how those answers were derived in the first place, at least they both agreed that the answer mattered, and to the accomodationists that was exactly the problem. Accomodationists and moderate believers also disagreed on the specific answers, but shared the same indifference to truth and reason, as well as the same commitment to bland, indifferent centrism and bothsiderism.

I’m increasingly inclined to think that the main battle of our time is not between “the Left” and “the Right”, but between those, whether Left or Right, who still respect facts and logic and care about classical liberal values (universal rights, individual liberty, free expression, academic freedom, basic democratic rules of the game etc.) and those who don’t. As I keep saying, Trumpism and wokeism are both post-truth ideologies. As much as the woke crowd hate Trump (i.e. not nearly as much as they hate the “wrong kind” of leftists!), they absolutely love what he has done to factual discourse. For all their mutual antagonism, Trump-supporters and wokesters both want to live in a world in which sound volume and endless repetitions trump (no pun intended) facts and the biggest bully, capable of mobilizing the biggest mob, has a blank check to take whatever he wants and destroy anyone who gets in his way.

We keep talking about the political “Left” vs. the political “Right” as if it were obvious what we are talking about, when, in fact, these are umbrella terms, each covering a vast range of very different, and even mutually hostile, movements, ideologies, political systems etc. Talking in terms of “Left” vs. “Right” makes it sound like the people on the “Left” are all on the same side against everyone on the “Right”, when in fact a person on the moderate center-Left who believes in liberal values almost certainly has more in common with someone on the moderate center-Right who also believes in liberal values than either of them does with Fascists, Communists, Trump-supporters, or wokesters.

To me the defining feature of “leftism” is that “leftists” tend to “side with the underdog” as they see it (in practice, of course, seeing it that way in the first place may require acceptance of some extremely dubious truth claims, academic theories, ideological doctrines etc., but still…). They tend to see the world as inherently unjust and unfair, i.e. as a place where certain groups, simply by accident of birth, start out at a major disadvantage while others get an almost insurmountable head start. Furthermore, this inherent injustice perpetuates itself from one generation to the next, leaving the disadvantaged groups perpetually last in line. Breaking out of this vicious cycle is going to require active political interventions, from gradual reform to armed revolution.

For most of my life, “leftists” tended to be the ones who were trying to get away from boxes and labels and different standards of treatment for different groups of people (judging people by the “content of their character” rather then the color of their skin etc.). As (iirc) Nick Cohen once pointed out, women, ethnic minorities, homosexuals etc. were not asking for special treatment: What they were objecting to was precisely the fact that they were given special treatment. That’s what “discrimination” means! Woke identity politics, by contrast, is all about boxes and labels and treating people differently according to group identity.

Despite efforts to equate wokeism with “cultural Marxism”, Marxists believed in objective truth and claimed it for themselves. To the woke any appeal to “objective truth”, as well as “evidence”, “logic” etc. is just a naked exercise of power to force oppressed groups into accepting the self-serving narratives of their oppressors. Marxists were mainly concerned with class, the one axis of privilege and marginalization that the woke don’t care about at all. As many others have pointed out, “Marxism” without any consideration of class is rather like a doughnut after you have removed everything except the hole: Pretty much indistinguishable from nothing. Both Marxists and wokesters invoked a concept of “false consciousness”, but according to Marxism the oppressed (i.e. the working class) were blind to their own oppression, and therefore needed the Communist Party to do their thinking for them. According to wokeism it’s the oppressor classes themselves who are blind to their own privilege etc. etc.

The people on the “Right”, on the other hand, tend to see themselves as siding with “the deserving”. Fiscal conservatives and libertarians interpret “the deserving” in meritocratic terms (the hard working, the competent, the achievers etc.). The “American Dream” was all about being “self-made” and making it to the top through personal effort without outside help. Indeed, the greatest heroes were the ones who managed to overcome great obstacles and opposition and prove everybody else wrong (“I did it my way” etc.). Fiscal conservatives and libertarians also tend to see the world as inherently just and fair. Or, if there is anything unfair about it, it’s mainly unfair to the deserving who keep getting held back by burdensome regulations while having the fruit of their accomplishments confiscated and redistributed to the undeserving (the lazy, the incompetent, the bums). By contrast cultural conservatives, religious fundamentalists, fascists etc. see their own group as more deserving than all others by virtue of their superior ancestry, ethnicity, culture, religion etc. Everyone else is considered undeserving by virtue of who they are, rather than anything they’ve ever done.

There is a tendency among leftists to portray Trumpism as simply the logical consequence of what “conservatives” have been up to all along, when, in fact, the betrayal of the idea of meritocracy in favor of a system that favors personal loyalty to the leader over accomplishment is almost certainly more offensive to the old-school conservatives than to leftists who think there is no such thing as “meritocracy” anyway: Just unearned privilege perpetuating itself from one generation to the next. Traditional conservatives also tended to emphasize values like character, integrity, and personal responsibility (far more than Leftists who are more sympathetic to blaming the “system” for personal shortcomings), whereas fascists emphasize brute force and the ability to bend the world to one’s will, and dismiss any appeal to such fake “values” as “slave morality” rooted in resentment, envy and the need to discredit what one is too weak to do oneself (cf. Nietzsche). The same disdain for “do-gooders” and the same amoral commitment to winning by any means necessary is obvious in kleptocrats like Trump and Putin. The sentiment is admirably captured in this quote from the gangster movie Goodfellas:

For us to live any other way was nuts. Uh, to us, those goody-good people who worked shitty jobs for bum paychecks and took the subway to work every day, and worried about their bills, were dead. I mean, they were suckers. They had no balls. If we wanted something, we just took it. If anyone complained twice they got hit so bad, believe me, they never complained again.

This is not the inevitable implication of favoring lower taxes, more privatization, and less government spending.