When I got my dog at the shelter, they told me two things about him:

• He liked to eat garbage.

• He liked being held like a baby.

He was a good size for it too, about 30 lbs. Big enough for a real hug, but not too heavy to lift comfortably. He would press his neck against mine when I held him - I think that was his way of reciprocating. The funny thing is that he was jealous about my hugs. If I hugged another person, he would whine, stand on his hind legs, and try to push that person away from me with his front legs.

I’m not sure how that’s related to what I wrote.

The actual Economist editorial is here (paywalled but archived).

Perhaps some leading election deniers are motivated by a psychological defense mechanism, but I think that many realize the strategic benefit. The members of the public who are convinced that Democrats steal elections will vote Republican. They’ll also be more willing to accept a Republican refusing to leave office after losing an election, if things come to that.

I don’t have a dog in this horse.

Get thee behind me, anything beyond extended ASCII.

True self-sacrifice.

It’s unfortunate, but Leland Dudek is doing his job. Some people appear naive about what his job is.

Edit: Perhaps I should explicitly say that I’m not happy with the administration’s agenda, and what I mean is that this guy won’t be punished because he’s doing what he was hired to do. I don’t mean that this is what his job ought to be in some moral sense.

Of course as a resident of NYC I am angry about this. Not only is he a criminal but he’s also selling out the city to Trump. I would enjoy knowing how much he was squirming if the case was dismissed without prejudice like Trump wanted it to be, but I suppose it’s better that Trump has less control over him.

I do see a bit of humor in all this, because he accepted such small bribes.

From Wikipedia:

Adams took over $100,000 in bribes from Turkey in exchange for using his powers to help open the Turkevi Center. These bribes mostly took the form of free and discounted luxury travel benefits. These benefits included free hotel rooms, free meals at high-end restaurants, free entertainment while in Turkey, free and heavily discounted flights, and similarly free and discounted flight class upgrades.

I would understand why he might be tempted to give up his integrity and accept the possibility of being caught if large sums of money (millions at least) were involved, but $100,000 is less than his yearly salary would be in the NYPD and he didn’t even get it in cash! I don’t earn as much as an NYPD captain like him (but enough to be comfortable) and I would experience zero temptation to take such a risk even if I had no moral objection to bribery. If I was the mayor then I would even be offended by the offer - who do they think I am if they expect me to sell myself for so little?

He’s just a petty crook higher up in the world than he knows how to be. Pathetic.

I’m not a bee, you’re not a bee, so it sounds like a them problem.

(On the internet, nobody knows you’re a bee.)

Ah, then I don’t think we disagree. Still, the CBG might be overkill when a simple phone call would have sufficed. After all, they don’t want him. We’re paying them to keep him.

Then again, since we’re already threatening Canada and Greenland, maybe we should threaten El Salvador too? We can accuse them of imprisoning residents of other countries who were sent to them extralegally without a trial or any other sort of official procedure. It’s unethical! They would be so confused.

I think that is the most based I have ever seen a machine be. Soon AI will be more based than any human.

Such public benefits now fall prey to the whims of the president with his pardon of a cryptocurrency company that smacks of political corruption.

So a man who promised to pardon his friends and allies, once elected, pardons his friends and allies. Is that corruption or is it just government policy by this point?

deleted by creator

I don’t think that’s a claim that the Trump administration is actually making, even though it’s in the title of the article. Here’s what the article quotes them saying:

“The individual in question is a member of the brutal MS-13 gang — we have intelligence reports that he is involved in human trafficking,” DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement to The Independent. “Whether he is in El Salvador or a detention facility in the U.S., he should be locked up. Remarkable that The Atlantic and other MSM continue to do the bidding of these vicious gangs and ignore their victims.”

The programmer’s answer?

We don’t support that use case.

I wonder if that’s actually true, because I think that he is to some extent literally psychotic. What happens when someone who actually has enormous wealth and power still goes through manic phases or experiences something like grandiose delusions? He might really believe that he’s saving the nation and the world, and that this should be obvious to all.

It’s like those movies (I can’t remember which ones but I’m sure I’ve seen some) where the king thinks of himself as good and is genuinely surprised and confused when he learns that the common people feel oppressed by him. Except in this case the king does not (and probably can not) learn a heartwarming moral lesson.

There are certain things that a court can’t (Constitutionally) order you to do, like letting soldiers live in your house during peacetime. That’s true even if you’re alone in a huge mansion and housing those soldiers would be trivially easy for you.

I don’t think a court could reasonably order the government to threaten another country like that - a judge doesn’t get to make such major foreign-policy decisions. My very basic understanding is that the government is saying that, according to this principle, a court can’t order it to make any foreign policy decisions. (Otherwise who gets to decide what foreign-policy decisions is major?)

The government is clearly in the wrong here morally, and letting them do this would seem to authorize a lot of abhorrent behavior. (Can the government have anything they want done to you without recourse as long as they take you to a foreign country and pay that country’s agents to do it?) Still, as a matter of legal principle this isn’t entirely straightforward.

That’s not exactly ICE’s argument. Their argument, as I understand it, is that the judge doesn’t have the authority to order the feds to do that.

Consider a similar but more sympathetic example. The government accidentally releases information which reveals the identity of an American agent working in a foreign country, and that agent is arrested. The agent’s family sues the government, arguing that the judge should order the government to carry out a prisoner exchange. The government says that revealing the agent’s identity was a mistake, but now undoing that mistake would require negotiations with a foreign country and such negotiations are not something that a court can order the government to carry out. The government’s argument in such a case would seem reasonable to me.