There are at least a dozen reasons why nobody should write this article, so we’re going to lead with a couple of those here because editorially, it’s important to ensure that any subtext of this piece becomes actual text instead. And also important is the fact that I, personally, didn’t want to write this either.
Then again, after sitting on it for six months after the movie was released now, it seems like nobody else did. So here we are.
Parasitic Problematizers and Cont… Contrarians: “Hot Take” a Long Walk off a Short Pier
…and a continuing source of frustration for people looking to resolve complex social problems.
Without delving too far into the subject and derailing the whole piece, let us just identify the obvious: social media incentivizes people to find problems with things and stir up outrage. Thoughtful, earnest, and reasonable takes on any particular subject get fractions of the engagement of those that are controversial, contentious, and most typically, in bad faith. This effect is so pronounced people desperate for attention—any attention—make their whole presence revolve around making themselves look like idiots just go gain a following.
There’s so much noise in the media landscape that people desperate to be heard over it scrape the bottom of the barrel for a take on something that will be unique, or at least relatively novel.
This, as the saying goes, ain’t that, but it can easily be interpted as such. So if you want to complain in the comments section about it, we already see your point. Keep reading though to see ours.
Incel Punks F*ck Off
(Yeah, we have our own platform here and have more than just occasionally dropped an F-bomb or two, but it still feels like a bad thing to put it in a large header font. If this bothers you, you can fuck off too.)
What the hell is an incel? you ask? Well for the purposes of this article we’re just lumping every associated garbage person under that label. This includes MRAs, denizens of the “Manosphere”, and any other expression of radical misogyny. Whether or not they are actually involuntarily celibate, there’s a strong case to be made that they should be.
Nonetheless, this is one of those kind of pieces of content that holds the potential for being picked up and run with by these losers as an example of something that validates their little-dick energy bullshit. The core of this piece, although made in good faith to identify a genuine disparity, is very similar to some of the arguments these chest-thumping beta chimps use in their virtual drum circles to drown out the tiny voices inside their heads shouting in vain that that their lack of hygiene and failure to develop actual personalities are the real reasons for their problems.
Enough Equivocating, Let’s Do This
what the fuck is this
Since actual success in getting clicks on the Internet depends largely on confirming biases and appealing to tribal narratives, we have now whittled down our potential audience to about five people, not including the author, who still doesn’t want to be writing this.
What’s sad is that there was nothing about the magical plot device that demanded Steve Trevor be brought back from the dead into another dude’s body. This whole icky aspect of the story could have been avoided if they’d just had him appear out of nowhere like the extra nuclear missiles the President wished for did—unless those were just ordinary missiles with the spirit of nuclear missiles occupying them.
Failing this, if somehow the laws of WW comic cannon demanded the rock only bring back dead people Quantum Leap style, the entire production team and anyone involved with the light-breeze brainstorming session that resulted in a this then missed what could have been a genuine teaching moment about consent.
A genuinely heroic version of the story would be one in which—recognizing Steve is just a passenger while Mr. Overly Photogenic Engineer’s consciousness is Zeus-knows-where (Hades?)—the two keep it PG because that’s the right thing to do. But nah, Diana needed to get her fuck on, apparently.
Assaulting Up vs. Assaulting Down
Thanks; we hate you.
The question at the heart of this that we really didn’t want to ask, going back to that paragraph about Incels and their smelly ilk, is a crude and thoroughly uncomfortable counterfactual so we’ll try to soften it up a bit with juvenile language.
What if instead of Wonder Woman bringing Steve Trevor back from the dead into another man’s body and then lady-boning that body, it was Superman bringing Lois Lane back from the dead into another woman’s body—and then, super-boning her?
Hell, what if it was the Joker, bringing back Harley Quinn? Or Batman bringing back his mom?
None of those plots would have made it out of any writer’s room with a woman at the table, but somehow this one did? Yes, this is where the minute hand stopped on the broken clock of the manosphere, and the fact that we’ve tripped over it on this topic is annoying the crap out of us. Nonetheless, refusing to acknowledge when even the worst people you know are right about something makes it about those terrible people more than the facts, and by extension makes you almost just as terrible.
It goes without saying that there is a clear double standard at play here.
No, Wonder
If you’re still reading at this point, bless you.
The screenwriter, director, and producers of Wonder Woman 84 were apparently so committed to the 80’s aesthetic and nostalgia that they paid homage to all the other sexual assault in films from that period.
This was unequivocally a rape scene, in a “comedy” movie.
1984’s Revenge of the Nerds, for example, perhaps the most iconic comedy film of that year, featured a scene where one of the titular nerds dresses up in the same costume as the rival jock character and has sex with his girlfriend who assumes it’s the jock. She is only momentarily distressed on finding out it wasn’t the person she thought she was having sex with, because, according to the text of the film, the nerd was really good at sex… somehow.
“But wait”, you say indignantly, “Revenge of the Nerds wasn’t the most iconic comedy film of 1984”. Okay, then how about Police Academy, in which the main character pays a prostitute to hide in a podium and ambush-fellate the commander of the academy while he’s giving a speech, then pretends to have done it himself⚊in an effort to get kicked out.
No, nobody’s making an NWA song joke here.
Yes, yes, comedy ages poorly. This article isn’t about that so take it to the forums. This is about consent which is completely absent from all three of these films. See, when Diana, Princess of Themyscira, daughter of Zeus, bones her dead boyfriend in WW84, she’s not having sex with his body. She’s having sex with the body of the dude he’s been magically inhabiting. Instead of just bringing the character back from the dead body and all, which would have eliminated this teeny little problem, they inexplicably had him occupy another man’s body who was unconscious; also without his consent.
We endeavored to get an actual philosopher to weigh in on this, but the one we asked laughed at us and it felt icky to keep pushing for comments after that. Lois Pineau can be arguably credited the most notable take on the subject, clearly laying out the parameters for affirmative consent by all parties involved; none of which was present in any of these films. Her take came in at the end of the 1980’s, so one can make a good faith argument that while films like Revenge of the Nerds and Police Academy were products of their time, one cannot make that argument about a movie that came out in 2020.
What is supremely baffling here is that there is really no justification for why the creative team of WW84 made this a part of the film’s plot. And yet everyone seems to be okay with it, in a social climate where every frothing outrage-monger and fringe topic crusader has endless incentives to concoct things to be indignant about. But on this perplexing issue it’s just background noise. Yes, the character herself has a deep and complicated history as both an icon of feminism and an object of fetishization. And we’d be remiss if we didn’t reference this. But unless someone is actually going to make the argument that this is some kind of turning the tables thing, which thankfully nobody in their right mind seems to have done in the 6 months since the film was released, frankly, who gives a shit?
WW84 is a terrible movie for about a million reasons, but the people who enjoyed it without reservation are themselves terrible, for this one.
How do you have Kristen Wiig in a film and it still be this bad, unintentionally?
We’ve been meaning to do this for years, but never got around to it: selecting an important book relevant to what we do here for the resident brains trust to consume. There are infinite possible suggestions I’m sure we all have to make for this, which we will get toin due time.
Without much preamble, there is a ton of stuff in this book relevant to what we do around here—especially with regards to helping people actually understand why credible self defense programs are important for women who need one to defend themselves against stalkers, and worse.
When Men Behave Badly: The Hidden Roots of Sexual Deception, Harassment, and Assault
This book is a very uncomfortable read, but it is absolutely essential to confront this subject matter if you genuinely care about understanding it. Towards this end, it helps to keep in mind that there is a difference between why things are the way they are, and how they ought to be. The author regularly makes this point in various ways, being clear to confront the looming accusation that because some drivers behind behavior are innate in our species (and in particular, males), that this justifies or excuses them.
Stalking, intimate partner violence (IPV), and rape, are all a persistent problem in nearly every society even when there are harsh and quickly-imposed legal penalties for such, across all cultures to various degrees, and despite the most well-intentioned approaches to reduce these problems.
For example: Stalking.
One jarring, uncomfortable statistic observed in the book is how effective stalking is for the stalker. From the chapter on Stalking:
Our study of 2,431 stalking victims found that stalking does sometimes succeed, even if the victory is a temporary one. A full 30 percent of women victims agree to meet with their stalkers at their request; 13 percent agree to date them; and 6 percent agree to have sex with them. These numbers are quite conservative in that our study was biased toward including victims of unsuccessful stalkers, so the actual success rates are likely to be higher. Even considering these percentages, however, a 6 percent success rate in regaining sexual access may be better from the stalker’s perspective than the alternative future of becoming involuntarily consigned to total celibacy. Because the stalkers in our study are lower in mate value than their victims, even low success rates can render terror-inflicting tactics worthwhile from the stalker’s perspective, even if it comes at a large cost to the victim from her perspective.
Not content with simply explaining the reasons behind why some men choose to stalk women, the author suggests a specific plan of action for women to overcome this:
Enlist social support from family and friends to thwart the stalker
Cease ALL contact – any contact, even hostile, reinforces the behavior
Fully equip your defenses in expectation of an attack
Document every encounter
Delete your social media
File police reports early and often
David Buss runs the Evolutionary Psychology program at the University of Texas and is one of the founders of the discipline. If you want to pick up the book, Amazon has it on Kindle. It’s also available on Audible.
And if you’re an instructor who teaches self defense to women and would like to read this but are cash strapped right now due to the pandemic, for example, Bullshido can afford to buy one or two copies for that purpose. Shoot me a PM, and we’ll see what we can do. First come first serve, of course.
In the meantime, reply here with your own thoughts on the subject.
I find myself returning to the topic of our magnificent financial machinery once more, and I must say that my reasons are not entirely wholesome. Pour yourself a drink for this one, and try to stay in a relaxed state of mind while I unwind some seriously unpleasant stuff.
Previously, on ‘As the Hedge Fund Turns…’
When we last talked about this, we discussed how large Wall Street firms with infinite money, complex software, a smattering of sleight of hand, and a complete dearth of decency can control and bend the price of certain stocks to their will. This is usually done to profit off short selling. To be perfectly fair, short selling is not necessarily evil. It’s a dirty, ugly business, sure. But it actually serves a viable purpose when applied judiciously. The ability to short sell a falling stock provides liquidity to the market and stabilizes the prices. It exists to allow investors to ‘hedge’ against bleeding capital when a stock is plummeting. They can make money when it’s coming up, and they can make money when it’s going down, too. When you settle the ups and downs at the end of the day, investors and markets probably lost less than they might have at the cost of gaining less than they might have. It blunts the effect of volatility.
This is good, until it goes bad. It goes bad when morally bankrupt assholes who see only dollar signs get a hold of it and begin to min/max the system like a coked-up DnD nerd.
Here’s what happens. Companies and stocks that are struggling get shorted, and the shorters then attack the stock vigorously to drive the price as low as possible. Even unto the destruction of the shorted company, which is the ultimate jackpot for the shorters. A short seller does not have to repurchase (cover) shares that don’t exist anymore, making the profit on the short sale 100%. This was what we discussed last time.
What’s Happening Now?
The phenomenon of the “Short Squeeze” and “Meme Stocks” has birthed a movement. The same group of rabid retail investors (poor people) on Reddit who figured out how to squeeze a shorted stock through the complex tactic of buying it at market price and refusing to sell have been on a tear. Assembling large numbers of nerds and directing them at a hated target is the sort of magnificent clusterfuck that single-handedly justifies the existence of the internet. Never in human history have so many staggeringly incompetent people set their minds to a task to such glorious effect. Never underestimate the power of angry nerds with nothing better to do.
High finance is an indecipherable mess of jargon, fuzzy math, legal loopholes, and deliberately obfuscated reporting. It’s more than just hard to understand, it is, by its very design, impossible to understand. It is the mutant offspring of economic theory, legal theory, computer science, game theory, human psychology, and old-fashioned carny hucksterism. A person can master a few aspects of it, but no one really sees the whole thing at once. It takes hundreds of very smart people to make a large Wall Street firm function, often thousands.
But just ask the ancient Egyptians, Romans, Byzantines, Mongols, Vikings, and Visigoths about the power of numbers. They will tell you that almost anything that can be accomplished by a few very smart people can also be accomplished by a larger number of average people, or even an enormous horde of morons.
The hordes of Reddit mobilized, and the veil of mystery protecting the intricate financial machinery of Wall Street soon collapsed beneath a Mountain Dew-fueled wave of weaponized nerdery.
Much of what was found turned out to be useless. Much of it was misunderstood. Many conclusions were incorrect. Most of the searchers barely even understood what they were looking at when a document or a filing was discovered. This did not stop anyone, though. The internet needs neither knowledge nor understanding of a topic to form firm opinions about it, after all. Hundreds of posts appeared with fuzzy images of financial statements, screenshots of balance sheets, graphs, and rambling data dumps. The discussions ran the gamut between serious investigations and mere excuses to hurl memes. The democratization of data is a marvelous unfiltered mess. This is never more apparent than on an internet message board.
They’re Evolving!
Then… oops! The idiots began to learn. If you put two-hundred-thousand eyes on anything for any length of time, stuff will get noticed. People discussing the issues develop deeper understandings and comprehension improves. Soon enough, patterns began to emerge between a few key financial players. Connections that were not obvious before became starkly apparent. Questions were asked, and wiser minds on other platforms answered those questions. After months of learning, growing, evolving, the hive mind of amatuer internet investors made a few startling discoveries.
The world’s financial institutions and the machinery of commerce are at the mercy of a few bad apples. That’s the bad news. The good news is that their bullshit is getting harder and harder to hide.
Canaries in Coal Mines
Canary #1: New Rules Blues
On March 18th, the DTCC issued new rules about a few things. What’s the DTCC? Imagine you want to buy a car from some random guy on the internet. You want some protection from the chance that the car advertised may not even exist (like some shares of stocks don’t actually exist when you buy them). So, you give the cash to a third guy (the DTCC) who holds on to the money until the car is delivered. The seller gives the car to the DTCC and the DTCC ensures that it is the right car and that you have deposited the correct amount of money. If everything is groovy, the seller gets the cash and you get your new whip. This is called “settlement” and the DTCC takes a fee for being the intermediary.
The DTCC is not a government agency, and they operate under rules that they set and stick to. The biggest upcoming rule change (SR-NSCC-2021-801), which has yet to be approved, allows the DTCC to liquidate member positions in the event of a default. That’s a fancy way of saying, “If we think you are being too reckless, we’re going to sell all your shit to cover your stupidity.” This rule has been a long time coming, because the DTCC was notoriously silent on the financial shenanigans that caused the 2008 financial crisis. Shenanigans it appears the DTCC knew about and turned a blind eye to. Imagine that.
A second new rule, (SR-DTC-2021-003) effective immediately, clears up some ambiguity in short-position reporting requirements. Previously, because the rules were written in crayon by a drunk walrus, funds were only reporting their short positions every 30 days. Often, the information reported was for the preceding month, making the reports 60 days in arrears the moment they hit the books.
Remember kids, trades can be made THOUSANDS OF TIMES PER SECOND. How helpful is 60-day old news in that environment? At any given moment, there was no way to tell the quantity of short positions a fund had on the books. This is important stuff to know if you are the agency responsible for ensuring the transactions go through. A fund with too many short positions, or as in the case of AMC and GME, holding VERY BAD short positions, is at serious risk for a “short squeeze.” The losses to that fund can be devastating, causing the fund to default and leave the DTCC holding the bag. The new rule says that a fund must disclose its current positions at any time the DTCC asks. And believe me, the DTCC is going to ask. The scrutiny they suffered under in 2008 left a bad taste in their collective mouths.
But why change the rule now? Why not in 2008? Well, because the 2008 crash was due to risky mortgage-backed securities, and not (necessarily) short-selling. The DTCC smells a similar meltdown coming because of naked short-selling, and they want to be clear of the shrapnel when it all blows up. Make no mistake though, this is the same setup as before, just with different collateral.
Let me reiterate the important bit: the agency that physically completes 90% of all securities transactions is suddenly taking bold steps to protect itself from another version of the 2008 market crash…
Canary #2: The REPO man cometh…
Not that kind of repo man. The REPO man. REPO in this case refers to a special kind of transaction called a “repurchase and reverse repurchase agreement.” It’s like a pawn shop for stocks, bonds, and other transferable securities. If you need cash, you just take your stocks down to the REPO man and swap them for cash. Your stocks are collateral on a quickie loan you use to try to make more than the interest the REPO man is charging you. If you do it right, the borrowed money makes a healthy profit even after paying interest. If this sounds like pawning the family jewels to bet on a horse race, then you are understanding it correctly.
Wall Street hedge funds LOVE these things. They provide tons of instant liquidity for quick moves, and the interest is not terrible if you don’t let the loan stretch out too long. If you default, the bank keeps your collateral.
But what if your collateral is garbage? This is what happened to Lehman Brothers in 2008. They borrowed money against low-quality mortgage-backed securities they had mis-labeled as “sales” to hide the risk. We know what happened next.
Now the new REPO hotness is the 10-year treasury bond. Lenders like it as collateral because it’s really freakin’ reliable. Problem solved, right?
Wrong.
The bastards have been shorting the 10-year treasury bond almost as badly as they have AMC and GME. Treasury bond prices have been declining steadily as a result. That’s not good if you want to use it as collateral…
99% of the $31 BILLION in treasury bonds held by Palafox Trading are tied up in REPO agreements for super-mega-hedge fund Citadel Global. But get this… Citadel OWNS Palafox. Palafox secures treasury bonds, swaps them for cash, and then loans the cash to Citadel. It’s not that complicated. Just look at this helpful diagram from redditor u/atobitt:
This starts to get a little dark. 80% of Cital Global’s $123 BILLION then disappears into the Cayman Islands before returning as investments or… not. Not a joke. Not bullshit. It’s all legal and in their own filings.
How do we know that treasury bonds are drying up? At three separate points in the last year, the REPO rate for treasury notes was negative %4.25. That means REPO market makers were PAYING borrowers 4.25% to borrow money. WHY? Because the borrowers were putting up treasury notes as collateral, and there were not enough notes on the market to cover all the shorts. Why not? Because they were now worth less because of all the shorting.
Wait. Does that mean that hedge funds have shorted more treasury notes than are available to buy?
Yes.
Isn’t that just another kind of short squeeze?
Sure is.
Is Citadel the same company that holds a major stake in RobinHood, and has shorted AMC and GME beyond what is even available to cover?
That’s them.
What happens when Citadel has to cover all of these crazy positions?
They will have to liquidate pretty much everything, triggering sell-offs in other stocks and likely causing a massive cascading crash in stock prices worldwide.
But don’t worry, they’ll pull every dirty trick they know to prevent that from happening.
Canary #3: The Fall of Archegos
Archegos Capital Management was a “family office” fund. It escaped most legal and regulatory scrutiny because it managed a single fortune and did not take on investors. Sounds nice. Well, not in this case because the “family” in question was Bill Hwang. Hwang is a particular type of Wall Street predator, a sort of ethically barren clearing house for greedy ideas unencumbered by the weight of morality. His original firm, Tiger Asia Management was dissolved after getting caught doing literally every illegal financial thing. Banned from ever working in the Financial sector, Hwang set up a modest office to manage his personal fortune. Except his personal fortune was made up of GINORMOUS lines of credit from such brilliant lenders as Credit Suisse, Nomura, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley. Why did these reputable companies agree to hand mountains of cash to a guy famous for being a liar and a thief? Some say they believed in the power of redemption. Some say they refused to let the past define his future. Others imply that the millions in management fees they were getting paid made all other thoughts crumble. All those ethical and legal objections collapsed into a fine white powder not unlike that which a wealthy jerk might snort from the cleavage of an expensive escort. Who can say what they were thinking, really?
Anywho, Hwang used this money to make leveraged bets on a bunch of stocks using a system called “total return swaps.” This meant that Hwang did not actually own any of the stocks in question, and the sellers did not know they were dealing with a notorious con man. Otherwise, he’d have been tossed out on his kiester. Naturally Hwang’s new banking besties made sure no one was the wiser.
Hwang is a pretty good con man, but it turns out he is a mediocre investor at best. When the stocks began to fall, Hwang’s positions relative to how much he had borrowed to get them started to look very bad. His lenders, seeing their money disappear like the aforementioned white powder, suddenly remembered that Hwang was a lying asshole. In a sudden burst of social responsibility, they decided to sell his stocks to get their money back (before it was all gone). This pretty much killed Archegos and revealed to the world that a known scumbag had been sneaking his way into markets right under everybodies’ noses. Archegos held large positions on leverage that when liquidated triggered sell-offs in other areas. Credit Suisse and Nomura lost a total of $5.2 billion combined.
One dishonest con man did that. One. You figure he’s the only one?
Who’s in Charge Here?
The inmates have taken over the asylum, people. Our regulatory agency, the SEC, has not had meaningful control over hedge funds in decades. Both the Republicans and Democrats have failed miserably in fixing this, and who can blame them? The sheer wealth and power of Wall Street exerts enormous influence over our politicians in the form of billions spent on lobbies and donations. If Wall Street was a monolithic entity it would not be so bad. It would act in its own self interests and destructive behaviors like naked short selling and price manipulation would be rare. But Wall Street is composed of competitive entities whose only goal is profit every quarter. For far too many of these, the damage they cause the greater marketplace is irrelevant so long as they keep those profits soaring.
It’s the prisoner’s dilemma: If everybody works together, the results is sub-optimal for the individual but better for the group. If some fuck over the others (naked short-selling, colluding, etc.) then they succeed at the expense of the group. If everybody misbehaves, the outcome is bad for everybody.
We are at the ‘everybody is an asshole’ phase right now. The whole market is risking another meltdown a la 2008 and it’s for the exact same reasons. Whether you call it “margin” or “leverage” or “REPO,” everybody is making too many wild bets with borrowed money. At some point the debts have to be paid, and it’s a frantic scramble to see who gets stuck holding the bag. A bunch of those bets got called this week, and a few of the game’s most recognizable players were left holding and looking like fools. DTCC is acting like it expects more to follow. These are not good omens, folks.
But there is hope.
What is really rattling the hedge funds these days is the rise of the retail investor. A retail investor is a (poor) person who buys and sells stocks on a very small scale for personal reasons. If you use Robinhood or Stash or Webull, you are a retail investor. Retail investors have power for two reasons.
1: They buy with actual money. Not collateralized debt, not swaps. Cash in, cash out. Stable, reliable, instantaneous. Cash is king and the retail investor will accept nothing else. When the little guys are holding the asset (stock) and they will only part with it for cash, it creates a bottleneck in a system that has evolved to move debt. If you want that asset, then you must pay for it at the price the retail investor sets. They aren’t paying interest, or forced to have collateral. The only time the retail investor takes a loss is if they sell below the price they bought at.
2: The retail investor can afford to lose. So many of the games played on Wall Street are built around collateralizing debt, avoiding interest, and finding new ways to shift the enormous risks leverage engenders. The retail investor ignores all of that. The money spent on a stock is gone until the stock is sold. Life goes on. The retail investor has no access to that liquidity anyway, so it is not catastrophic if the stock drops or if it needs two decades to recover. Hedge Funds that dip too deeply into the gray areas of legality and leverage cannot afford to lose. They become desperate and do things like borrow more shares and short them just to cover their previous shorts. Then you get short squeezes like we are seeing now.
In the meantime, the failures of the SEC should probably be addressed. The most egregious shortfall being the structure for fines and the lack of criminal prosecutions. Fining Citadel $275,000 for misreporting one quarter is ludicrous in the face of the hundreds of millions in profit they made. That’s less than their coffee and caviar budget. It’s not a punishment, it’s a line-item expense.
Why is Bill Hwang not in jail? THEY PUT MARTHA STEWART IN JAIL FOR LESS. In total, all the fines levied by the SEC against the worst actors in the 2008 crash do not add up to 1% of the cost of bailing the country out. No one went to jail. The list goes on, but the refrain is always the same: Multibillion-dollar fund pays a few million in fines and goes on its way. This is not a disincentive to bad behavior, it’s a small tax on getting caught.
Everyone has heard some version of that well-known half-witticism warning you not to argue with idiots—whether the analogy involves wrestling with pigs or playing chess with a pigeon or some other insipid variant. Shamefully, even a few true-wits have had a take on this, such as good old Sam Clemens aka Mark Twain:
‘Never argue with stupid people, they will drag you down to their level and then beat you with experience.’
And to be fair, that’s probably good advice nine times out of ten, because ninety-nine out of one-hundred people are themselves idiots on most topics, and one-hundred out of one-hundred are idiots are on entirely too many topics—especially in our increasingly more complicated modern world.
Not to mention in Twain’s era free time was limited and you had more important things to do, such as not dying of cholera, or not dying of botulism, or not dying after getting kicked in the head by a horse outside the bank. So you probably didn’t want to waste what limited lifespan you had in ostensibly-pointless discussions with objectively-pointless people. However, that lack of free time is certainly not the case now, as partly evidenced by the fact that you’re here reading this article.
Samuel Clemens and John Lewis not arguing with friends from high school about the shape of the Earth.
Twain’s whole shtick was an attempt to address complex moral and social issues in a way that was accessible to ordinary people of his day, and he did it better than just about anyone. That’s at the heart of the point first point we want to make here:
1. If you’re going to argue with an idiot, make sure you are also not an idiot
This should go without saying, but anyone who has spent some portion of their wealth of free time on social media should already know that’s not the case—very little goes with saying, which is the problem. The key character attribute at play here is self awareness. Know your limitations, what you have some reasonable expertise in and what you do not. You do not need to be at the top of any field to share an opinion on it, but it would help if you’ve actually traipsed across that field in your bare feet at least once to get the feel of it. In other words:
Don’t be the idiot in the argument.
This is something entirely within your sphere of control, up to and including deliberately dropping your phone in the toilet to stop yourself. Despite how desperately social media tries to prod you to inject your opinion into every discussion and then argue about it for eleventy-thousand replies-worth of free content for them, you have no social, moral, or even biological imperative compelling you to do so. If you absolutely have to chime in for whatever reason (slow day at work, etc.), ask a sincere question and then be genuinely grateful when someone provides you an answer to it, as they have taken the effort to reduce your future chances of being the idiot in the argument.
2. You Should Always Argue With an Idiot
The late Christopher Hitchens said “Sunlight is the best disinfectant” and it’s a popular phrase around here. But sometimes spot disinfection of an idea isn’t enough, and you need to use napalm to render all organic material within a square kilometer into carbon ash. Why, you ask?
Keep in mind that when you’re arguing with someone, you’re not just arguing with that person in a vacuum. You are essentially arguing with everyone in that person’s life who has any influence over them. And in the case of people who don’t like to do a lot of their own thinking, you’re arguing directly with those people and the idiot in question is just their unwitting avatar. Or, perhaps a better, albeit significantly-less polite analogy (which means it’s one I have relied on a lot in the past to explain the concept), smarter people have their hands up said person’s backside working them like a puppet.
And to be fair, it’s not even that most people don’t want to do a lot of their own thinking. It’s simply that the deck is overwhelmingly stacked against all but the most diligent and conscientious people, or those with the luxury to spend hours every day sifting through the endless piles of agenda-driven bullshit in order to have a grasp on one of a million different topics that are all pertinent to modern life. By arguing with a person in a (hopefully) temporary state of idiocy, you decrease the net quantity of idiocy in the world.
3. You don’t argue with an idiot for the idiot
This is the single-most important consideration in the entire pursuit of countering BS on social media and a lot of people who make the mistake of operating from this perspective are more prone to quit out of either simple frustration or rapid onset nihilism when it becomes evident that their best and most rational arguments are having no effect.
Your arguments might very well have no effect on the idiot you’re arguing with; in fact, you should frankly be shocked if they have any effect at all. The reason for continuing to argue with someone who has demonstrated they are immune to reason, evidence, logic, and facts has nothing to do with that person themselves. In cases like this, you don’t argue with an idiot for the benefit of the idiot, you argue for the benefit of the audience.
That’s because this is one of those “if your life can’t serve as a shining example it can at least be a dire warning” things. The usefulness of idiots isn’t limited simply to bad actors and people looking to take advantage of the easily-duped to sell unnecessary junk or win elections. People operating in good faith with a solid moral footing, in pursuit of the common good—albeit with perhaps a bit fewer hang-ups about being nice in the process—can make use of a recalcitrant, unapologetic, shameless moron in the same way a pro fighter invites the press to one of their workouts to watch them beat on a punching bag: to showcase a professional level of skill.
You don’t argue with an idiot for the benefit of the idiot, you argue for the benefit of the audience.
3a. Never argue with an idiot without an audience
Self-explanatory. Moving on.
4. Keep the Receipts
Very few idiots are genuine idiots. In fact, the way we’re operationalizing “idiot” for this article isn’t necessarily a judgement of a person’s intelligence as much as it is an assessment of the quality of their interaction on a contentious topic. Indeed, many people who can be safely called “idiots” aren’t making garbage arguments because they are incapable of doing otherwise, some of them are doing it explicitly and cynically as a rhetorical tactic to frustrate you, cloud the issue, deflect from evidence that undermines their position, or simply to be an asshole for its own sake. Perhaps the best quote on this comes from Sartre.
From Jean-Paul Sartre’s “Anti-Semite & Jew” (1944).
In such cases, particularly when there is a high likelihood that you may encounter the same person again making the same garbage arguments, you might want to have a record of the previous exchanges; again, not because anything so crass as “evidence” would change their minds, but dropping such things into an argument is like a titanium rod on an orbital platform in its effect on the bystanders and leaves a smoking crater left in the other person’s credibility.
But even more important than keeping receipts to use as a strategic nuclear reserve, the practice can actually help maintain your own resilience in the face of the overwhelming amount of stupidity and other forms of oxygen theft. From the perspective of someone who has two full decades under his belt of dealing with this kind of thing, it is all too easy to slip into a nihilistic attitude, which leads to an abandonment of your own moral imperatives and personal values.
One of the things taught in US Army resilience courses is the concept of “hunting the good stuff”, and while that sounds utterly goddamn corny, it is a validated cognitive-behavioral approach to dealing with adversity; even if the adversity you are facing is just the unwashed moron horde on social media. The “good stuff” in this case, is great for your own mental well-being, albeit sometimes at the expense of someone else’s. Which, given the reason for arguing with them in the first place isn’t such a bad trade-off unless you’re just a smug, humorless deontologist (no, seriously, if you want to cure yourself of a sense of humor, read what Kant wrote on the subject).
So if you’re going to argue with idiots at the risk of your own appreciation for the human race, keep the receipts for your own gratification as well as a strategic reserve. Heck, circle back to make a highlight reel out of them if you want. Here are a few of my personal favorites from the semi-recent past. Names have not been redacted, because, frankly, fuck these people.
Note “A BLACK”
Told you we’d publish these screenshots.
Afterthoughts
There are at least a full-dozen other points that could be made on this topic, from how to spot the difference between someone who is simply ignorant on a topic but otherwise harmless and someone who is willfully and maliciously ignorant, and how not to be the socially-challenged guy who whips out logical fallacies at the first opportunity as if they’re a Draw 4 UNO card while everyone else is playing Monopoly. But the title included the word “brief” so we’ll reserve those for the forthcoming book on the topic.
Wall Street is a really exciting place these days, huh? There is a lot of weird arcane black magic that goes on within the byzantine halls of our financial empires. This wizardry is far beyond the ken of mortals like me, and so I have mostly ignored it. However, there has been a great upheaval in the fiscal firmament of late, and I have found myself sliding further and further into fascination with the intricate web of, well, bullshit, that keeps our investment giants wealthy and strong. One conclusion is inevitable and I type it here merely to hear the sound of it echo inside my own skull.
Billionaires do not play by the same rules as the rest of us.
This, of course, should have been obvious. In my defense, I have always understood this. But watching what happened when a bunch of guerrilla investors attacked the richest and most powerful people among us has illustrated in concrete terms what has always been more of a conceptual understanding of this phenomenon. Let’s see if I can wrap my meager understanding of financial sorcery around it all, shall we?
The Stage:
Welcome to the world of high finance, dear reader. It is a place unlike any other you have ever been. What you think is real is not, and what you would assume is formless vapor drives billions of dollars back and forth with no effort whatsoever. Investment is neither science nor art. It’s magic. The magic of sophisticated computer algorithms and complex financial instruments wrought from game theory and good old-fashioned cons like 3-Card Monte. Except there are now 58,000 cards and the queen is a loosely-defined concept that only exists for brief moments at a time in any given space.
At the most basic level you have large companies that like to do well so their stock prices stay high. We are not going to deal with these right now. They are not the problem, here. Neither are most of the big name investment firms that deal in blue chips and long-term investing. In this article we will talk about the companies that trade in that stock to make a profit fast and hard. Specifically, we want to talk about hedge funds. What is a hedge fund? Glad you asked, because the definition is clear as mud. According to Investopedia, a hedge fund is a company that:
“… deals in alternative investments using pooled funds that employ different strategies to earn active returns, or alpha, for their investors. Hedge funds may be aggressively managed or make use of derivatives and leverage in both domestic and international markets with the goal of generating high returns (either in an absolute sense or over a specified market benchmark).
It is important to note that hedge funds are generally only accessible to accredited investors as they require less SEC regulations than other funds. One aspect that has set the hedge fund industry apart is the fact that hedge funds face less regulation than mutual funds and other investment vehicles.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
Hedge funds are actively managed alternative investments that may also utilize non-traditional investment strategies or asset classes.
…
Well. That does not help much at all, does it? Think of a hedge fund as the rogue cop in a bad 90’s action movie. He does not like to play by anyone’s rules and danger is his middle goddamn name. A hedge fund is a high-pressure boiler room where creative investors work out new and occasionally outlandish strategies for making money. They’re rebels, mavericks, ruthless gunslingers. Whatever. The point is that to play in this arena, you need nerves of steel, powerful computers, well-heeled investors, a couple of pet politicians, and a schill so smooth it’s frictionless. There is nothing illegal about what most hedge funds do… on paper. A major part of what a strong hedge fund does is to find loopholes and exploit weaknesses in regulations in ways that increase profits. They’re creative and aggressive, and that is not necessarily illegal. That’s gaming the system. This point will be important later.
What’s Happening?
Not quite Cowboy Bebop
Well, a bunch of idiots who get together on Reddit decided to buy a whole bunch of stock in Gamestop (GME) and AMC. The term for regular folks who buy stocks is “retail investor,” and most hedge fund types cannot say that without snickering into their $1,800-dollar handkerchiefs. Who cares about unwashed nerds buying up stocks of underperforming companies? No one, at first. Then lots of people started to care a whole lot when it became clear what those uppity peasants were really up to.
You see, a bunch of hedge funds had been ‘shorting’ all those stocks.
What is shorting a stock? It’s when you borrow a bunch of stock you think is losing value to profit off the difference in sell price later. To make this work, the hedge fund needs to buy back a bunch of stock for a lower price than the price they borrowed it at (called “covering” their shorts). The problem facing a couple of these big hedge funds right now has a few different facets.
First: GME stock was shorted for more shares than actually existed. That should not be possible. But it is. How? Fucking magic. Basically, the hedges were so sure that the stock price was going to tank they shorted the same shares more than once. Think about that. Bask in the stupidity of it. There was almost no way for everyone to cover their shorts in the first place. Somebody was going to lose their ass no matter what, and the hedge funds did not care who because they were playing with other people’s money, anyway.
Second: The morons from Reddit are holding most of the shares they needed to buy and uh… they aren’t selling them for nickels. They are holding out for a big payday.
Economics 101 time! In the case of both AMC and GME stock, there is not currently a lot of SUPPLY. The hedge funds HAVE TO BUY BACK THE SHARES THEY BORROWED, no matter how expensive they become. With those contracts looming, there is now a ton of DEMAND for those stocks. I don’t want to dumb this down too far, but when you have a lot of DEMAND and very little SUPPLY for a thing, prices are gonna get to climbin’.
And climb they did. Gamestock shot to about 4,800% of the short price. This is called a “short squeeze’ and it sucks for you if you shorted that stock. The hedge funds lost their minds, and also a few BILLION dollars in value overnight. The retail investors smelled blood, and they set their sites on another stock that was heavily shorted: AMC.
This time the hedge funds were ready, though. Do you think they took that shit laying down? Hell no. Now things get a little dark.
There’s No Such Thing as a Short Ladder Attack!
The first salvo fired by Wall Street hedge funds in response to these coordinated short squeezes was their most basic. Several popular retail investing apps like Robin Hood suddenly stopped letting their customers buy AMC or GME stock. Period. They just said “Nope. Can’t do it. Nuh uh.” By cutting off the flow of regular joes gobbling up the stocks, they sliced off a huge chunk of the DEMAND that was driving the stock price up. If no one is buying (because you won’t let them), then the hedge funds who need that stock at a low price can breathe easier. Robin Hood is already being sued for this, and several very loud voices in the federal government are demanding answers. RobinHood has claimed that the sudden increase in volume exceeded their required deposits and so they HAD to shut off those stock trades. This may in fact be the case, but it does not excuse the fact that it is their responsibility to execute the trades as required by their customers and their responsibility to provide services as advertised. They did not, and they failed in a way that was suspiciously advantageous to the many hedge fund investors who had also invested in RobinHood. If that smells fishy to you, then your nose is working properly.
In tandem, the Discord server being used by many retail investors squeezing GME shorts was shut down for “hate speech.” The accusation is widely derided as laughable, and the influence of hell-heeled investors is suspected in the strange decision. The AMCstock subreddit disappeared for 36 hours as well, with no clear explanation for the absence. I suppose it could all be coincidental, but that is a lot of coincidences to parse.
Bullshido’s Discord server… for the time being, apparently.
The next bit of financial witchcraft employed in the war with Redditors was much more insidious. Overnight, lots and lots of AMC and GME stock trades were going through. Hundreds and thousands per second. This is not that abnormal. It’s called ”high-frequency trading.” Clever little bits of software buy and sell stocks rapid-fire to take advantage of tiny little fluctuations in the prices. High frequency trading is not illegal. Colluding with other investors to use HFTs to affect stock prices is.
Where the hedge funds may have screwed up a little is in hiding their tracks. First they sent their little bots to beat the price downward by trading the stocks to each other at reduced prices. The actual volume of stock traded and the size of the individual positions stayed the same, but thousands of repeated trades at incrementally lower prices drove the average price downward. You can spot this manipulation when the stock price drops a lot on a high volume of trades that move very little actual stock. Normally, you need a lot of volume to see a big price change when actual market forces are in play. When a lot of people want to buy or sell a lot of something, the price fluctuates because a lot of that thing is being traded. That is not what is happening here.
To make this trick work tons of these tiny little trades have to happen really really fast. Hundreds a second, even. Each time the bot sells the same stock for fraction of a penny less, slowly eroding the average strike price and bringing the reported stock price down. That is what happened (and is still happening) to AMC and GME. But these bots don’t really have the ability to randomize what they do because little of either stock is actually being traded. Rather, tiny bits of it are being traded OVER AND OVER AGAIN in a repeatable pattern.
Behold the following two charts. These are the stock prices for GameStop and AMC on Feb 1st. Almost every single peak and valley is duplicated in real time, despite them trading at different price points and being different companies in wildly different markets.
It’s worse in after hours, because MOST retail investors cannot make trades after hours. During the day, retail investors can punch back by buying the stock when this pressure drives the price low (“buying the dip”). When that happens, demand comes up and the price starts to climb again. With very few retail investors trading after hours, the bots can run wild.
Since AMC closed at 13.80 Feb 1, there has been a concerted attack on the stock during after hours trading. People have been calling this a “short ladder attack” and irritating lots of smug know-it-alls. There is no record of the term “short ladder attack” anywhere outside of the Reddit boards and this has caused a lot of poo-pooing. To many stock-savvy types it’s just high-frequency trading doing its thing. What’s the problem? We’ll get to that.
Is this illegal? Probably? Maybe? Hard to say. But what happens when the price drops? People get scared and sell to avoid losing more. Supply starts to go up, prices stay low, and the shorts get to cover at a lower price. The goal is to trick retail investors into selling at a lower price by making it look like the price was tumbling. Even if no one is really trading the stock and the price should not have moved at all.
Misinformation is Still Information, Right?
FIgures don’t lie, but liars often figure. The complexity of these investments makes them ripe for misinformation campaigns. A particularly troubling example of this occurred on Feb 9th. Let’s talk about Fintel.
Fintel is a big old financial reporting think tank. They monitor more than 9500 funds on Wall Street, and many funds and investors rely on their data to make important financial decisions. This data is the product they sell and why Fintel exists. Last week they committed a bit of an “oopsie” that they are very sorry about. What did they do?
Why does this matter? Well, it did not happen to any other stocks they report on, and it was an oddly convenient error at an oddly convenient time. If you are a hedge fund, that is. You see, if a stock is heavily shorted, then rogue investors (poor people) can buy it up and squeeze the hedge funds for a higher stock price. If it’s not heavily shorted, this won’t work. Fintel’s little faux pas changed the short volume by half on two stocks that are being squeezed pretty damn hard right now, giving the impression there was a lot less squeezing…
They got caught, of course. Not by a regulatory body or eagle-eyed SEC official. No. It was a regular guy who suspected foul play and took the time to look. He contacted Fintel and they replied with “yeah… we counted wrong. Sorry.”
More specifically, what Fintel did was to (accidentally?) alter their data in a way that is beneficial to hedge funds who shorted GME and AMC. They claim the current data is the correct data, except it’s radically different from what they had reported for MOST OF A YEAR up to that point. They changed it overnight on a weekend, where fewer people were likely to see it happen, too.
In the interests of objectivity, it is entirely possible that Fintel’s excuse of “whoops, our bad,” is legitimate. Mistakes get made all the time. Now picture yourself filing your taxes. At some point in doing so you make an honest mistake that nets you a big return. How will the IRS react when they catch that mistake? Will they care that you didn’t mean it? Or will they demand what you owe with interest and penalties?
The case of Fintel’s mistake falls into one of two categories: Gross negligence or outright collusion. It’s an ugly look that on it’s own would cause a rueful head shake. But when added to the high-frequency trading with no volume, retail platform shutdowns, and other market manipulations surrounding these stocks, Fintel’s mistake should not be treated so lightly.
If you or I made that kind of error, we’d be in jail.
Which Leads us to This:
What the actual fuck is going on in these hedge funds? There is a strange, fuzzy, nebulous line between clever gamesmanship and market manipulation that seems to have faded into outright invisibility. High Frequency Trading is literally a license to change a stock’s price any time you want. Wealthy investors have criminal levels of influence over the tools regular people use to participate in the stock market, and when that doesn’t work they can just lie with impunity. Let us not forget that in 2008 bad investments nearly destroyed the US economy. The taxpayers had to bail out several large (HUGE) companies just to prevent another great depression. Those bad actors are still rich and none of them are in jail. Thirteen years later and nothing has changed.
Well… something has changed. The veil of obscurity protecting these behaviors gets thinner every day. The Morlocks are getting smarter, and man, there are a lot of ‘em. I think the Eloi are getting nervous.
When a bunch of angry retail investors jumped into the same pool where the big funds swim and started to play by the same (lack of) rules, the response was predictable and disgusting. Market manipulation, purchase restrictions, collusion, manipulation, and outright lies were applied with no hesitation whatsoever. The sheer indignance of some hedge funds about the audacity of regular folks gaming the system in the exact same way they have been for years was telling. CNBC, Bloomberg, MSNBC and other media outlets were flush with angry billionaires calling for censorship of any place where people might talk about doing things to hurt their profits. Doing their part, most of these media outlets played along with the funds by refusing to acknowledge the bad behavior at play, and instead focussing on the recklessness of retail investors.
This is not a photoshop.
It’s truly fascinating. Wall Street is now dealing with something it cannot automate or plug into a risk table: The sheer unshakeable stupidity of angry people with nothing to lose and a lot to gain. The average retail investor is playing with their savings account, not a multibillion-dollar portfolio. They can afford to be reckless. You don’t have to be Sun Tzu to understand where the hedge funds might have gotten in trouble, here. When you and your enemy both have a lot to lose, risk must be considered and effects measured to the fourth decimal point. There’s billions at stake for both sides, after all. When you are dealing with an opponent who does not care about the risk and just wants to see you bleed? Well, it turns out that is an altogether different thing. When there are millions of these frothing barbarians? Ouch.
There is no hiding where we are at. Actions that would earn lengthy prison terms for you or me are being done a hundred times a day on Wall Street. The audacity of the players is simply breathtaking. When regular folks banded together to stick it to ‘em, the hedge funds did not even try to hide what they were doing. Why should they? The fines for their transgressions will be less than the losses they might take or the profits they may realize. Screwing over the little guy is part of the process and paying SEC fines is merely the cost of doing business. That is how little they respect the regular person and the rule of law. I suppose we always knew that, but watching it happen in real time is a touch disconcerting.
For historical context, ask a Roman about what happens when you exploit disgruntled barbarians with little to lose and much to gain. Whether or not the lying, manipulation, and securities fraud works this time, and it looks like it could, the game is probably changed forever.
The global Coronavirus pandemic has had the secondary effect of reducing incidents of school and workplace violence, especially shootings. But as the deployment of vaccines and recent shifts in policy prove likely to get the virus under control, something resembling the previous “normal” finally seems to be on the horizon. Unfortunately, the occasional mass shooting was also a part of that condition of normality.
Morgan Ballis, an expert on mass violence, comes on the episode to explain how and why much of the so-called “Active Shooter” training taught in workplaces and schools is of dangerously low-quality, and how to address that problem.
Morgan is an emergency management consultant, Marine infantry veteran, and nationally recognized firearms instructor currently pursuing his PhD in active assailant preparedness and risk perception. You can find his website and organization, the Campus Safety Alliance here.
Listen below, or Subscribe on your favorite podcast platform
What the hell is going on with GameStop? Why are your nerdy friends furiously buying a previously worthless stock with looks of pure malice on their faces. What is money? Why are we here? Is there any meaning in the universe? Well if you want answers to the first couple of questions, you’ll want to listen to this episode of The Art of Fighting BS Podcast.
Andy Meade, an economist out of the Pacific Northwest, comes on the show to explain everything happening right now, and unpack a hundred years of Capitalism into a little over an hour. Listen below, or on your favorite podcast service. Don’t forget to subscribe, and comment below to continue the discussion
My Facebook and twitter feeds have been inundated with bad legal takes related to impeachment. It’s exhausting if you are, like me, unable to see rampant stupidity and flat-out wrong information not corrected immediately. So, instead of continuing to argue individually, I figured I’d do it here to make my life a little easier. I’m gonna walk you readers through the background, structure, and history of the Constitution and the impeachment clauses generally.
BACKGROUND
The House voted to impeach President Trump for his actions on January 6th, 2021. They transmitted the Article of Impeachment to the Senate on January 25th, thus beginning the impeachment of formerPresident Trump. Immediately, calls of the impeachment being “unconstitutional” abounded from nonlawyers. Heck, even a few well-respected lawyers like Prof. Turley and Prof. Dershowitz expressed the view that it’s unconstitutional. We’ll get to those arguments later.
This is flat out and totally wrong. First, let’s examine the constitution. It is broken up into different articles. For our purposes, we’re only concerned with Article I and Article II.
THE CONSTITUTION: ARTICLE I
Preamble to the Constitution
Article I concerns itself with the goings-on of Congress. It establishes their authority and the contours of their power. It gives the House the sole power of impeachment and the Senate the sole power to try impeachments. In relevant part, it states that “Judgment in Cases of Impeachment shall not extend further than removal from office and disqualification [from holding future federal office].” This doesn’t actually mandate any penalty for impeachment and does not specify that only current office-holders may be impeached. It literally only states the range of potential penalties that flow from impeachment. Remember this point: it does not mandate any penalty but instead limits the range of penalties.
This idea of limiting the range of penalties is not new in the Justice system, either. Most states have criminal sentencing schemes that provide a range – a minimum and maximum penalty — for a particular crime committed in a particular way. The Judge can’t generally exceed the maximums or go below the minimums. But they are generally free to choose whatever penalty they want within the range.
Thus, Article 1 — the Article of the constitution that defines the contours of Congressional impeachment authority does not actually specify a penalty. Nor does it specify that only current office-holders may be impeached. To be clear, it also doesn’t expressly state that former office-holders may be impeached, as well. This is called an ambiguity. With ambiguities, legal scholars look to the original meaning of the words, the history of the text, and the expectations and understandings of the drafters.
So, did the Founders contemplate ex officers being impeached? Yes. It was a common practice in England, was referenced in the federalist papers, and has happened in numerous instances in our country’s history. Remember, the House has the sole power of impeachment and Article 1 does nothing to limit who may be impeached. Moreover, it makes no sense to allow an individual to resign prior to conviction in order to evade the consequences of their bad conduct.
But wait, can anyone be impeached?
Surprisingly, this will not be the worst pun in this article…
No. To be impeached, you must hold an office. You can’t be impeached for doing a bad job if you don’t have a job. Plus, the text makes it clear that only current or former officers may be impeached and tried because Article 1 states that removal from office anddisqualification are the only punishments allowed. In short, you can’t be impeached unless you held an office of the United States.
Okay, back from that detour. So the Founders understood that impeaching and disqualifying former officers was permissible and allowed. Has it ever happened before? Well, yes and no. The closest case was that of former Secretary of War Belknapp. Belknapp did all sorts of bribery schemes and was impeached. Prior to trial, he resigned. What happened?
Belknapp argued the Senate had no jurisdiction to try him because he was no longer a current officer. The Senate disagreed and, before commencing trial, affirmed its jurisdiction by vote. Belknapp was tried and narrowly acquitted.
But those senators who acquitted did so because they didn’t have jurisdiction…
Wrong and misleading, imaginary contrarian. While the Senators who voted to acquit may have done so because they didn’t believe they had jurisdiction, that doesn’t actually mean jurisdiction didn’t exist. It did — the Senate affirmed that before commencing the trial. It’s more like jury nullification rather than anything else. Juries are free, generally, to disregard the law and find a factually guilty defendant innocent. It doesn’t change the facts and it doesn’t change the law. It’s one jury deciding that, in their view, the law shouldn’t be applied in this instance.
No, not this either.
So, in summation, yes, the Senate has authority to try and even to convict former officers even if some Senators don’t believe they have jurisdiction. It’s no different from a jury finding a defendant accused of possessing marijuana “not guilty” even if there is video of that defendant smoking pot and saying “I love having marijuana in my front right pocket all the time”. That particular jury may not believe that the conduct should be punished but it doesn’t change the fact possession of marijuana is, generally, a crime.
Having examined the contours of Article I’s impeachment clauses and their application throughout history, let us move forward to Article II
ARTICLE II
Section 4 of Article II states that the “President, Vice President, and all civil Officers of the United States shall be removed from office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of . . . high Crimes and Misdemeanors”. Some laymen and bad-faith legal scholars construe this to mean that only current, sitting officers may be impeached. This is wrong.
First, Article II concerns itself with the Executive power of the United States. It contours and defines the authority of the President and other civil officers (think cabinet secretaries and the like). Stop and think for a second: Why would limitations on the exercise of impeachment power (defined and articulated in Article I) be modified and narrowed in the Article that deals with Executive power?
I’ll help you: it wouldn’t and it doesn’t. Article II, Section 4 (the part that says that civil officers shall be removed…) doesn’t actually limit the scope or authority of Congress. It only mandates that, upon conviction, a sitting office-holder shall be removed. Nothing in this text expressly or impliedly limits the scope of impeachment power because this Article doesn’t actually deal with the impeachment power. It simply says that if a civil officer is convicted they shall be removed. It doesn’t even mention disqualification. It sets a mandatory minimum for a certain class of individuals but it does nothing to limit conviction or impeachment to former officers
OKAY BUT THE CHIEF JUSTICE ISN’T PRESIDING SO ITS UNCONSTITUTIONAL
Chief Justice John Roberts (Right)
Hard disagree, imaginary contrarian. While I definitely believe the Chief Justice should preside over the trial of any former President, the text of the Constitution makes it fairly clear that such a requirement is only necessary when the sitting President is on trial. Otherwise, it’s up to the Senate rules — and the Supreme Court likely won’t question that. Why?
Let’s talk Nixon, no, not that Nixon. Judge Nixon, an Article III* judge, was convicted and incarcerated for perjury. Yet, despite being incarcerated, he refused to resign from the judiciary. Thus, we had a federal judge in federal prison earning a federal salary for doing absolutely nothing. The only way to remove an Article III judge who refuses to resign is through impeachment. So, the House impeached and the Senate delegated a committee to hear evidence and make recommendations. The committee recommended convicted and the Senate quickly voted and convicted Judge Nixon, removing him from Office.
Judge Nixon sued, stating that he was not afforded a “trial” as contemplated in the Constitution. The Supreme Court refused to adjudicate the case because it constitutes a “political question”. The political question doctrine is a doctrine that keeps the Supreme Court from overly interfering in matters wholly within the purview of another branch. Essentially, they said “the Senate has sole power of trying impeachments and we’re not gonna second guess their determination of how trying impeachments should go.” Of course, textually, its clear that the Chief Justice must preside at the trial of a sitting President yet no such requirement exists for trying someone who is not the President at the time of the trial. Again, to be clear, I believe the Chief Justice should preside but there is absolutely no requirement that he must do so in this instance.
BUT I’M STILL NOT CONVINCED
Now this isn’t even a damn pun…
Okay, I’ll give it one more shot. If impeachment and conviction applied only to current sitting officers, an impeached President could resign before conviction and avoid being removed or disqualified from future offices. A President could resign to avoid impeachment, be appointed Vice President by the current President (who is the former Vice President), and then the current President could resign and the impeached President will become President again. Is that how you think the Founders intended the system to work?
A Cabinet Secretary can be impeached, resign, and be re-appointed in order to avoid conviction and removal. Is that how the Founders intended the system to work?
Limiting impeachment only to current office-holders renders the disqualification clause toothless and creates an unintended and inequitable loophole by which bad actors can escape the consequences of their actions. That is not justice and that is not what our Founders contemplated when drafting the Constitution or the impeachment clauses.
BUT WHAT ABOUT DERSHOWITZ?
Great question. Prof. Dershowitz argued in the Wall Street Journal that you can’t impeach a former president. It does a terrible job. The crux of his argument is that Article II, Section 4 states that the President shall be removed upon conviction. He then adds in the Article I language discussed above “judgment in cases of impeachment shall not extend further than to removal and disqualification”. This is contradictory and misleading for a number of reasons.
First, as discussed above, Article II, Section 4 only prescribes the minimum required punishment for a sitting official who is convicted after impeachment. Removal. That’s it. Article II, Section 4 does not mandate even disqualification. Indeed, the issue of disqualification would be, per Senate rules, a separate vote after an individual is convicted.
Secondly, Article I, as discussed above, sets the maximum punishment for individuals who are impeached and convicted. They may only be removed and disqualified. They cannot be jailed or incarcerated by Congress. By omitting mandatory disqualification in Article II (the part of the Constitution regarding executive authority), the Founders clearly intended to convey the possibility of an ex-office holder being impeached and convicted. Prof. Dershowitz’s argument that the “and” in Article I mandates that both removal AND disqualification are required for a constitutional Senate trial is defeated by the plain text of the Constitution. If both elements were required, then Article II would have included mandatory disqualification along with mandatory removal.
Third, the rest of Prof. Dershowitz’s article notes that Congress did not impeach and try Nixon after he resigned. This, of course, ignores the glaringly obvious point: Nixon was not eligible to run for President again. There was no need to seek disqualification and no office to remove him from.
What does Prof. Turley say? Essentially the same thing as Prof. Dershowitz. Prof. Turley essentially argues that because disqualification is an optional step, the predominant purpose is removal of unfit officers. While this argument does seem to have merit, it is ultimately unpersuasive. The Constitution enumerates only two penalties available for impeached and convicted officials and there is no reason to artificially limit one of the two simply because the official isn’t subject to the other. Again, the Founders did not intend to allow an official to escape the consequences of their misconduct by resigning.
In the end, both pieces argue essentially the same thing: That impeaching former officials would be disastrous, have far reaching consequences, and be a political WMD. While those are valid points, they do not render the action unconstitutional. Bad politics doesn’t make something violative of the Constitution no matter how many times people scream that it does.
WRAPPING IT UP
In short, the Founders were well-versed in post-office impeachments and trials and expressly contemplated the possibility in their contemporaneous writings of the time. They did not include any language that limits the impeachment and trials in the Constitution and there is no evidence that they intended to do so. Contrast this with things like Bills of Attainder or ex-post-facto laws, which are expressly prohibited. Barring former officials from being impeached and tried renders the disqualification consequence entirely toothless (indeed, Belknapp resigned in an attempt to evade the consequences of impeachment). And, several times in our history, former officials have been impeached and tried. Thus, there really is no good-faith debate about this issue: Former officials can, and if appropriate, should be impeached and tried. It comports with the text, the history, and the historical practice of impeachments going back centuries.
Lastly, a few disclaimers because I’m a lawyer (but not your lawyer) and I love disclaimers: This article is not intended to communicate or advocate any position on whether conviction is proper, necessary, or factually/legally supported. I’m only discussing whether former officers CAN be tried, not whether they should be convicted. Secondly, all opinions are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of any of my employers.
*That’s another article.
…and yes I’ll show myself out for that amazing pun.
Editor’s note: this piece is bleak so we’re going to soften this up a bit with memes.It’s not going to help any, but we can say we tried.
What the actual fuck, America? I thought I was done. Once was enough, more than enough, really. I never thought I’d have to do this again, but here we are. This is your fault, so fuck everyone and here we go!
Not Again…
aT LeAsT hE’s tAKinG a sTAnd…
We just can’t have nice things, can we? Unless you have been literally trapped beneath an actual rock for the last few days, you know what happened in our nation’s capital last week. Let’s pretend you don’t know so I can sum it up here: On January 6th, a bunch of intellectual amoebas stormed the US Capitol building and tore the shit out of it. They did this while our elected legislators sat down for the largely formal and symbolic task of certifying the results of the 2020 presidential election. It’s not enough that the behavior accomplished nothing beyond embarrassing the US as a nation and highlighting just how poorly a large chunk of us understand how a democratic republic works. No. That’s merely humiliating. The tragedy is that actual people died. People that did not need to die, and people that did not deserve to die. It makes precisely zero difference how you feel about the politics or positions of the dead people, because they are dead. What matters is that our society and culture continues to fail so badly that stupid people have to die stupidly to reinforce how stupid we all are.
Let’s break this thing down, shall we?
In The Beginning…
Where to start? I suppose we should start where the problem really began. No, not the moment Cain slugged Abel over the cost of universal health care. We’ll begin with the 2020 United States Presidential Election. This was a real barn-burner, folks. The Democrats fielded their least-offensive cardboard cutout of a politician while the Republicans doubled down on their… well, whatever he is. I dunno, Vaudeville act? Cartoon character? Whatever.
Just like every other election in my lifetime, most of us did our duty as patriots and citizens. We marched out to the polls, closed our eyes, held our noses, and reluctantly made the selection we felt would result in the least horrific outcome. Well, a lot of us mailed it in this time, literally and figuratively. Anywho, we voted, the votes got counted, and the cardboard cutout won. It all really could have ended there. It should have. But it didn’t, because we are fucking stupid.
Failure #1: It’s Only Cheating if You Cheat
Target Sisters Riot
Even before the polls closed that fateful Tuesday in November, there was a great disturbance in the force. It was as if millions of idiots cried out all at once, and then they never shut the hell up. Accusations of voter fraud surfaced in many important districts that went for the Democrats. Almost all the tales were outlandish and easily dismissed by those who understood the process or took the time to examine the claims with a critical eye. A few warranted a closer look before being dismissed as spurious. Unfortunately for the United States, many (oh-so-goddamn-many) people were simply unwilling or unable to believe that a faded two-dimensional photocopy of a statesman was capable of winning a fair election against their demagog- er -candidate.
When the dust of election night settled (quite a few interminable days later), a huge chunk of the population just plain refused to accept what the rest of the country, nay, the world, already knew.
Mighty Donald had struck out.
If the drama ended there, the clusterfuck in DC doesn’t get to happen. But the drama most definitely did not end there.
Failure #2: Let it GO, Elsa.
Donald Trump is many things to many people. To some, he is a mere philanderer and cad. To others, he is a shrewd businessman. Though there is some debate about that. Okay, even his own tax returns show he’s a pretty lousy businessman. What is relevant to the asshattery that went on at the Capitol is this: much of the country thinks he is exactly what we need to become great as a nation once more. To be fair, that is a good thing to have if you want to run for president. As far as his candidacy was concerned, he was well-positioned. He was elected fair and square in 2016. Pretending that his victory in 2016 was a fluke or that he was not “your” president doesn’t make you smart or woke, either. That shit happened. Work through it like an adult. Lots of folks still support him today because what he says resonates with many of your friends and neighbors. If you can’t handle that like a grown up, you’re part of the problem.
What Donald Trump is not, is a graceful loser. Trump’s reaction to the election result was redolent of a tween who just found out that their favorite YouTube celebrity has been banned for using the N-word in the middle of a rant about Fortnite dancing. He screamed an inarticulate stream of invective, stamped his feet, and declared, “This is bullshit! It’s a conspiracy against me!”
Dear Boomers, this is a person that does exist, but you don’t really need to know beyond that. Call him “Mister Nintendo” if you want, that’s fine.
From that day hence, enormous piles of money have been spent attempting to prove that the election process in many key districts was either woefully broken or deliberately subverted by vile Democratic ninjas. To that effect, Trump and his crack team of legal experts have attacked the election results with stacks of evidence detailing the failings endemic to those districts where he lost. Well, not exactly ‘stacks.’ More like… well… none. Seriously. I want to be as fair as possible on this because objectivity is important to maintaining my extremely cynical worldview. Trump’s own people, in their own public filings, have yet to produce ANY evidence that even a single district he lost experienced fraud on any level. Here’s his actual legal scorecard:
For the record, “Appeal ongoing” means he lost and is trying again. “Denials” refers to all the cases where the judge looked at the documents and laughed in his face.
I’m going to hit this one more time so it sticks: Trump has spent millions of dollars trying to get a single fraud case to stick, and to date ZERO evidence has been presented. Literally zero. Trump has been laughed out of the courtroom in some cases. As is his nature, Trump has not let unvarnished reality affect his assertions. No quantity of humiliating court losses has fazed, shaken, or even altered the unending refrain of “Election Fraud” from Trump. If he had either the sense or the dignity to accept the evidence of his own eyes, then the riot in DC would never have occurred.
Failure #3: A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals and you know it.
Cribbing a line from “Men in Black” for this one. It’s appropriate.
Donald Trump’s insistence on the presence of voter fraud culminated with a speech he made to his supporters on the day congress was to certify the election results. He stepped out just before noon, and gave a rousing (rambling?) address to his assembled admirers where he exhorted them to march on the Capitol building and said things like:
“You will never take back your country with weakness… you need to show strength…you have to be strong.”
“We’re going to walk down Pennsylvania Avenue… and we’re going to the Capitol and we’re going to try and give… our Republicans, the weak ones… the kind of pride and boldness that they need to take back our country.”
Just what the chocolate-frosted fuck does that even mean? I don’t think even Donald knows for sure. He was just sort of spitting out poorly formulated word salad filled with bits of rhetorical flotsam. I mean, that’s always been a big part of his mystique. But for the crowd of angry, enthusiastic, and extremely stupid people in attendance, this could mean only one thing: The moment had arrived. The hour was at hand. The days of talking were over and it was now time to PEACEFULLY PROTEST!
Yeah, right. They went apeshit.
Whether he understood what he was doing or not, Donald Trump’s speech was merely the last ingredient in a powerful cocktail. He spent months whipping his followers into a frenzy over fictitious election fraud claims, and then with a few poorly-constructed sentences he flung the frenzied and frothing mass of blind followers into the streets of DC. Did he want a riot? I can’t really say and neither can you. I’m not sure he understood what he was doing, and his subsequent back-pedaling is not a good look. Either way, if he had kept his great orange corn-hole shut, the whole country would be better off right now.
Failure #4: Hypocrisy… It’s Not Just For Politicians
So… you have a mob of angry and unruly protestors marching toward the hallowed halls of government. What do you do? You call in the cops, the national guard, and everyone else you can and you deter those folks from taking their grievances into places that aren’t safe. It’s civil safety policy one-oh-one, right? I’d like to say that this is what happened in DC. But we all know that’s not true. In America, it seems, riot police, water cannons, tear gas, and flash bang grenades are what you do when BLACK people protest. When it’s a predominantly WHITE angry mob you let them go wherever the fuck they want, it seems.
After a long summer of protests-cum-riots across this great nation, I find myself physically incapable of extending my middle finger hard enough to express my frustration and rage over that hideous, disgusting, pants-shittingly illustrative example of how much work we still have to do as a society. If you think for one second an angry mob of BLM protestors (who don’t have a great track record of peaceful protesting themselves… sorry folks. That’s a fact.) would have made it to the steps of the Capitol unopposed you are not living in the same country I am.
Let’s make a few things clear: Protesting is awesome. Civil disobedience can be a gray area. Rioting is a goddamn crime for a good goddamn reason. You wanna bring your grievances into the street so the lawmakers know you mean business? Great. You want to loot somebody’s liquor store? You want to burn down the Arby’s on the corner? You want to maybe kick down the doors of congress? Well then, assholes, you’ve crossed a damn line. It’s a good and fair line, too. It’s a line we all agreed on a long time ago. It’s called insurrection.
So where was law enforcement during all this? Well, DC Metro PD was on the job, so was Capitol security. They were horribly outnumbered, of course. And thus easily overrun by the throngs of “protestors.” Where was the National Guard and other federal agencies, then? You know, like they were in Portland or in Kenosha?
Sigh.
The mayor of DC begged for the national guard’s assistance, that much we know for sure. In DC, the national guard is under the purview of the Department of Defense who answers to… well… who the hell do you think the DoD answers to? That’s right, the president. Right now the Pentagon and DC officials are in a furious finger-pointing match over exactly why the DC guard took so damn long to show up. In defense of the DoD and Trump, it appears some of the blame rests with the mayor of DC’s inability to phrase the request with any clarity. It turns out shouting “We need help!” into the phone and hanging up is not particularly stellar leadership. It also looks like DC refused earlier offers of assistance from the Guard which left them out of position to respond. This has not stopped a lot of folks from claiming that Donald trump himself prevented the National Guard from responding, though as time passes it’s looking like this is merely the bleating of angry Democrats. The full complement of Guard members were eventually deployed on January 6th, far too late to stop the unfolding catastrophe, sure. But it’s starting to look like this was the result of administrative gamesmanship and partisan bullshit from every side. Which is not a good look for any of us.
In any event, a strong and organized law-enforcement presence would not have struggled in keeping the protesters out of the Capitol, and likely would have left us with nothing more than an amusing news story about some protestors in downtown DC.
Failure #5: Stupid Should Hurt, Not Kill.
Let’s get to the real tragedy.
Five Americans died during this useless temper tantrum of a clusterfuck. One died doing his job: Brian Sicknick. He was a police officer who was dragged into the open and beaten by a crowd of real American badasses. And by “badasses,” I mean frothing pawns with neither the will nor the intellect to ascend any higher than vicious cowardice. Picture this. Put it in your brain. Imagine being the degenerate motherfucker that killed a cop with a fire extinguisher. Describe for me the type of person who just up and ended the life of a man you’ve never met, doing his job. You grab a random piece of loot, shout “hold my beer” to your buddies, and with a the cock-eyed grin of a person entirely ignorant of the relationship between actions and consequences, you take that bad boy and clock a downed cop in the head. What do you care? So what if he is entirely unaware of how brave you are (because he’s already being thumped by about ten other people) and you have no actual goal other than indulging your sadistic glee. He’s just a jack-booted tool of the leftist-socialist-zionist america-hating-antifa-sheeple anyway. Holy shit, bro, did you see me bash that cop right in his dome! High-five! MAGA baby! Yeah. It caused a stroke and he died. Nice work, asshole.
Ashli Babbitt
Then there is Ashli Babbit. A thirty-five year-old, fourteen-year veteran of the USAF. She went to Washington on the 6th to make her voice heard and take back her country. She believed in many of the Qanon conspiracy theories about election fraud perpetrated by a secret Satan-worshipping cabal, and was passionate about Donald Trump. In her own words on January 5th:
“Nothing will stop us. They can try and try and try but the storm is here and it is descending upon DC in less than 24 hours …. dark to light!”
By all accounts she was a fiery, passionate person. Babbit also had a history of letting her passion overcome her judgment. Two separate restraining orders were filed against her by her husband’s ex-girlfriend in 2018. It seems Mrs. Babbit rear-ended the other woman three times and ran her off the road. Why is this relevant? Because this reflex to violent action got her killed on January 6th. She attempted to breach a barricade defended by plainclothes police protecting the very halls of congress. Despite several clear warnings and the presence of a firearm pointing in her face, she yelled “let’s go!” to her accomplices and leapt through a gap in the improvised barrier. She was shot in the chest and died later in the hospital. I have a soft spot in my heart for people who have courage to match their convictions. So few people do these days. You cannot say Mrs. Babbit lacked courage. I just wish she had been smarter. She died doing something stupid because she believed the rantings of madmen. You mad yet? I am.
Three others died of medical issues, currently unspecified. There’s probably something pithy and acerbic I could say about that, but I’m tired.
So Here We Are Again
Why do we keep doing this to ourselves? How do we keep ending up in this same place? Each disaster, each crisis we inflict upon ourselves, they all have a common thread. We are an angry contentious species, us humans. There is a lot to be said for that. In many ways pugnacity is a positive trait and I’ll fight anyone who says otherwise.
But our desire to be right and our need to surround ourselves with like-minded people has birthed a weakness that is getting exploited every day. What happened in DC on January 6th was the logical outcome for most of the people who participated. In truth, there was no other way it could have gone for them, because every step along that path they refused to believe the evidence of their own eyes. In short, Donald Trump lost the 2020election the same way he won it in 2016: Fair and square.
But his people believed in him, and they assembled some really batshit conspiracy theories to avoid accepting that. We all paid a price for that on January 6th, some of us more than others. Worse now for those who went to the Capitol, even their anointed leader has abandoned them. As is the way of all spineless demagogues, he has thrown his minions to the wolves to save himself. There is nothing left for them but to accept that they were lied to and used. Of course, many of them won’t accept it. There is always another Qanon. And the cycle continues.
Are We Doomed?
No, we are not doomed. What we are is immature and whiney. Let’s start with the waxy orange elephant in the room…
The need to believe in something is powerful. For many Americans, that something was Donald Trump. Love him or hate him, his connection to much of America cannot be understated. His supporters trusted him and believed in him enough to risk their jobs, their freedom, and even their lives to flock to his banner on January 6th. When he called, they came. When he demanded action, they acted.
Were all these people racist fascist imbeciles? No. Were many of them racist fascist imbeciles? Yeah, probably. But before you jump on your Trump hate bandwagon and begin the hurling of memes, ask yourself what the best outcome for the USA is:
A: The vicious and humiliating castigation and prosecution of these morons coupled with a lifetime of internet ridicule and infamy.
or:
B: Living in a country with many fewer racist fascist imbeciles.
Okay okay, fine…
C: Both A and B.
One of these is fun, the other is a solution to a problem. The third is my sincere hope for the future.
Did you reach out to a Trump supporter and talk to one? Do you engage in meaningful dialogue online, or do you post low-content memes spouting simplistic ad hominem across the electronic aether? Can you accept that some of the things that are important to those who supported Trump might be worth exploring?
I can hear you already, internet hate machine. There’s just no talking to a Trumper, right? No reasoning with fascists, right? What’s that Kyle? We punch nazis, not talk to them? Well, enjoy the next catastrophe, then. That’s how you act when you want to win, but you aren’t interested in solving the problems. It’s a Pyrrhic victory at best. That air of smug self-righteousness feels good for a while, but costs us so more in the end because nothing changes. The solution is education and elevation, and it always has been. Society improves when we bring people up, not stoop down to scrap with each other at the lowest level. Even when you know you’re not getting anywhere you are supposed to try, people. Ashli Babbit understood that, and she was pretty stupid.
But… People Who I Disagre With Are DUMB!
Everybody is born stupid, but ignorance is a choice.
If you think you’ve got it all figured out then you are no better than the guy who believes lizard people have taken over the government. You hold positions in your head right now that somebody somewhere thinks are silly or even abhorrent. Are they? Have you checked? When was the last time you took your opinions for a spin in an environment not specifically constructed to reinforce them?
I hear crickets. Who the hell brought crickets?
America, we do not reconcile our conflicts by fortifying ourselves into militant thought camps that riot whenever we don’t get our way. Gird your goddamn loins for some philosophical combat and for the love of all that’s holy be prepared to lose a few rounds! If the people storming the Capitol had stopped for one second to consider they might have been wrong about a few things, then this whole bullshit fiasco would not have happened. I could write ten more of these rants and it will all still boil down to the same thing:
We live in a world of instantaneous communication across millions of people, and we still can’t have a civil conversation about what really matters. How is this still a problem? Even when you know you’re not getting anywhere you are supposed to try, people. Ashli Babbit understood that, and she was pretty stupid.
(Memes courtesy of the Capitol Riots Meme Archive on our forums, and, of course, the people who actually made them… but that’s how memes work.)
