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The executive nominates judges, but they hold tenure for life and after confirmation operate with complete independence as a separate branch of government with their own budget etc…

The crime is not trading with Iran, the crime is defrauding the US financial system in order to do it. For some reason, this is framed as though Huawei is accused of trading with I…

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

The idea that Meng was arrested as part of a ploy in the 'trade war' is completely unfounded. These investigations take years and are initiated by the independent justice system. T…

Meng was arrested for fraud, lying to U.S. banks and violating financial disclosure laws; no different than any garden variety money-launderer. Most importantly, she's had a day in…

Of course not. But one shouldn’t repeat untrue facts, especially when they come from a source with an agenda.

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

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

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

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

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

I didn't say that there has never been a democratic government in all of history. I said that the Roman Republic could not in any sense of the word be described as democratic. It w…

Leaving aside the historiographical issue of how projecting modern descriptive terms onto the past fundamentally distorts our understanding of how people back then conceived of the…

To refer to "democratic norms" or "progressives and reactionaries" is an anachronistic stretch to say the least. A more accurate summation is that the Gracchi championed land refor…

To be fair to her, she played it because she heard her daughter listening to it and thought they would be able to bond over it. It must feel terrible to have your kid actively reje…

This reminded me of a classic essay on how a lot of "luxury" branding is meant to appeal, not to the true elite (the kind of people who are born with seven or more figures in a tru…

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