Thanks for the link. I read the piece and put a comment on it. It's an interesting post but most of the comments amounted to "my side good, the other side bad," with no substance. It made me appreciate the commenting community here and the much larger one on Scott's substack.
I don't think the laptop case was as clear as you do. The suppr…
Thanks for the link. I read the piece and put a comment on it. It's an interesting post but most of the comments amounted to "my side good, the other side bad," with no substance. It made me appreciate the commenting community here and the much larger one on Scott's substack.
I don't think the laptop case was as clear as you do. The suppression of information was while Trump was president but government doesn't consist of just the president; Trump did not succeed in replacing government officials, below the highest level, with people loyal to him.
On the other hand, a lot of the pressure for suppressing the laptop story probably came from Biden supporters not in government at the time.
It's a pity we don't have Posner's comment on the case, given his role in the earlier case discussed in the techdirt piece.
The example of the laptop is a good one to show exactly how this works in reality, that the party formally in power in some ways has less real power than the party formally out of power, if the latter is supported by the unelected bureaucracy, and the former is not.
Unfortunately Becker is dead and I gather Posner is in pretty bad shape. I had my reservations about him — if I had been happy with his law and econ text I wouldn't have had to write my own. But he was very smart, knew a lot, and had a lot of intellectual energy.
Thanks for the link. I read the piece and put a comment on it. It's an interesting post but most of the comments amounted to "my side good, the other side bad," with no substance. It made me appreciate the commenting community here and the much larger one on Scott's substack.
I don't think the laptop case was as clear as you do. The suppression of information was while Trump was president but government doesn't consist of just the president; Trump did not succeed in replacing government officials, below the highest level, with people loyal to him.
On the other hand, a lot of the pressure for suppressing the laptop story probably came from Biden supporters not in government at the time.
It's a pity we don't have Posner's comment on the case, given his role in the earlier case discussed in the techdirt piece.
This is the deep state that the New York Times (arguably among the most friendly media outlets to the party now in power) recently declared to be "awesome:" https://www.nytimes.com/video/opinion/100000009356253/trump-deep-state.html
a mere few years after declaring the same deep state "doesn't exist" when the other party had formal power and was said to be fighting that non-existent deep state: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/10/world/americas/what-happens-when-you-fight-a-deep-state-that-doesnt-exist.html
The example of the laptop is a good one to show exactly how this works in reality, that the party formally in power in some ways has less real power than the party formally out of power, if the latter is supported by the unelected bureaucracy, and the former is not.
Agree on Posner being sorely missed. Would like to think he'd take a dim view of Doughty's judgement (just on grounds of logical reasoning).
And what a treasure the old Becker-Posner blog was. It is easy to take for granted the steady supply of public intellectuals of such caliber.
Unfortunately Becker is dead and I gather Posner is in pretty bad shape. I had my reservations about him — if I had been happy with his law and econ text I wouldn't have had to write my own. But he was very smart, knew a lot, and had a lot of intellectual energy.