ADreamOfLiberty

[Greyparrot] Floyd himself testified that he could not breathe before he was put on the ground. 

He would not have said that if the drug overdose was not causing breathing problems. I don't think Floyd was lying about that.

[ADOL] the order of events limiting the possible chain of causality.

Imagine a physical constriction so intense that it travels backwards in time and causes someone to not be able to breathe before force is applied.

He couldn't breathe because of the fentanyl. Cause comes before effect. Effect does not come before cause.

[Public-Choice] And this is the crux of my argument here. Most Americans are so fucking devoid of critical thinking abilities that they magically switched sides on the issue and kept debating it, not realizing they suddenly became the position they demonized just a few months before.

Yea I watched the whole trial and read all the documents already. I'm afraid science, common experience, and the full video record outweigh politically motivated opinions regardless of the source

So now the coroner performing an autopsy and issuing his findings as to the cause of death… is a politically motivated opinion.

And this is being alleged by someone who, despite having no relevant medical expertise, has “read all of the documents” and “watched the whole trial” to arrive at his own conclusion as to the cause of death.

But it’s the coroner who’s politically motivated here.

This reminds me very much of arguing with 9/11 truthers who, despite having no expertise in physics or structural engineering, would spend untold hours reading the National Institute of Science and Technology’s report and refuting it by explaining how the mechanics of building collapses don’t work the way they claimed.

[Greyparrot] A press release document isn't an official coroner's report.

we have footage of Floyd suffocating from his own drugs for over 9 minutes.

I’ve never witnessed someone suffocating from their own drugs so I didn’t know what that looks like. Imagine my surprise to learn that the visual of this occurrence includes a police officers knee to the throat.

you put more faith in AP opinion than the order of events limiting the possible chain of causality.

The projection is astounding. Imagine being so reliant on being told what to believe by others that one cannot recognize the logical connection between someone dying of suffocation, and that same person having a knee to their throat for 9 minutes at the time of their death.

And then there’s this…

https://content.govdelivery.com/attachments/MNHENNE/2020/06/01/file_attachments/1464238/2020-3700%20Floyd,%20George%20Perry%20Update%206.1.2020.pdf

Well technically fighting with al-Qaeda would not be a misdemeanor but I take your point.

All unjust incarceration must have consequences for those who made the decision to imprison or continue imprisonment.

i believe they were being held "pending charges"

I have not directly or intentionally watched fox news since they censored Trump. That marked them as a propaganda organization. News doesn't censor matters of public interest.

You are a full blown MAGA whack job. Supporting Trump most likely because you are a white man who is afraid of what equal rights for all might mean for you. 

This level of disregard for the very foundation of the nation is treasonous.

I bet you have no concern for any black Americans held without bail.

Bullshit.

They have been charged and they were charged with felonies and they were charged because they broke the law.

Search your feelings, you know it to be true!

feelings?

Are they being treated unfairly? Is it not fair? Trump and these losers sound like a child.

STOP WATCHING FOX NEWS! IT JUST MAKES YOU DUMBER!

“Statistics provided by the District of Columbia US Attorney’s office reveal that more than a quarter of those arrested

280 people have pleaded guilty

255 defendants — have been charged

An additional number of defendants — around 40, according to a report by two Republican members of Congress released in December — are housed in a facility at the District of Columbia jail because they have been determined to be too dangerous to release

or have violated their release conditions. 

America has always held some accused criminals without bail to await trial.

They have been charged with crimes.

That’s a lie.

You’re a liar.

Another lie. You’re a habitual liar just like Trump.

[Double_R] You yourself admitted that because the seizure came well after Biden’s meeting with Porshenko we could not draw any definitive conclusions about what motivated it, so you were in fact agreeing with my point.

[ADOL] Oh it is to @Double_R who claimed there was not investigation at this point in time (November 2015)

[Double_R] To take that and say that I claimed there was no investigation prior to the meeting and that this was in fact “revenge” against Joe Biden - despite me explaining multiple times that this is not what I argued -  isn’t just arguing in bad faith, it’s flat out lying.

[Double_R] The investigation into Burisma was dormant at the time Biden did this, and the events that were under investigation occurred on 2010, years before Hunter joined the board so he had no personal exposure regardless.

[ADOL] He claimed there was no threat against burisma and therefore Joe had no personal reason to protect burisma.

[Double_R] I never claimed this. I said there was no threat against Hunter. Big difference.

[Double_R] The investigation into Burisma was dormant at the time Biden did this (quid pro quo), and the events that were under investigation occurred on 2010, years before Hunter joined the board so he had no personal exposure regardless.

[Double_R] The only reason this point matters is because you are using it to make your case by presenting the seizure as evidence that Shokin was in fact prosecuting corruption, so the burden is on you to show that his motivations were clear.

[Double_R] You cannot do that, so you have to lie.

[ADOL] Double_R never once suggested that Biden's threat was not the prime mover behind the firing, indeed that fact was central to his explanation of the movement against burisma.

[Double_R] I never claimed to know what the prime mover was, I accepted for the sake of argument your premise to demonstrate that even if we grant that, your argument still fails.

[Double_R] Your claim is that Shokin’s seizure of Zlochevsky’s assets shows that the investigation into Burisma was very much alive, but setting aside that the seizure did nothing to target Burisma, the seizure occurred almost 5 months after Biden got Shokin fired. This is far more easily explained as retaliation than an honest investigative move, especially considering that everything was dropped months later after Shokin left.

in support of 1-6 mob members who are being held in jail.

MAGA Republicans are a disgrace trying to claim the police officer murdered Babbitt.

According to the Trump administration

According to the deep state which Trump failed to purge....

According to Steve Mnuchin and Ron Johnson in 2020 but even Giuliani now admits he's a Russian Spy.  

You saw the part where he literally betrayed Ukraine, right?  He actually  organized security teams to secure border gates  and bridges for the Russian tanks of Feb 24th.  

and you know because US intelligence told you so....

Well, US intelligence always called him KGB (his father openly represented KGB in Ukraine, Andrii was trained by KGB in the late '80's).  I'm saying Trump insiders now admit that PC-'s source is an active, open, traitor to his country spy for Putin.

According to the Trump administration

Derkach was a Russian spy working for Putin in the Ukrainian government for "more than a decade," wanted in the US for interference in the US election.

wanted in the US for interference in the US election.

Be clear- you are literally just parroting information fed to you by Russian intelligence.

Trust narratives where people's motivations explain the outcome, not the words they say.

While I do agree motivations matter, I think that is not the best way to weigh statements.

Why not weigh their statements against logic and the all of the fact themselves and then we can determine whether it is the truth or not?

I think that is better than just relying on motivations. 

You continue to cite Shokin's replacement. Assuming he is more credible than Shokin is begging the question. The nazi officials which replaced previous judges also had radically different opinions and people also claimed that the previous officials were corrupt or useless.

It's a "he said she said" situation if you look at testimony alone. You need to look at contextual evidence to go further.

Trump was impeached for conspiring against Biden by trying to get Ukraine to investigate Hunter Biden or just state publicly they were investigation Hunter Biden.

If you tried as hard as you possibly  could, I don't think you could come up with a more biased or  less reliable source  of information about corruption in Ukraine.

Oh it is to @Double_R who claimed there was not investigation at this point in time (November 2015) and indeed that Shokin's seizure of the oligarch's assets was revenge against Joe Biden for getting him fired.

We’re not sure whether there was an investigation at the time: and it’s hard to claim shokin arranged a seizures as revenge for something that hadn’t happened yet.

We’ve known about this email for well over a year - it’s not new.

This confirms that not only was there a threat of investigation but that Hunter Biden knew there was and was being tasked with shielding the oligarch. This is of course the reason for the bribe, oligarchs aren't compulsive gift-givers after all.

Given that there was a major push by western powers for Ukraine to investigate - and this oligarch had been mentioned; the threat wasn’t an unknown - and is likely why blue star was being engaged in the first place; rather than any actual investigation.

Ooof. The last time I saw projection this strong - it ended up killing luke skywalker.

they managed to convince the Vice President to do what anyone can see he probably would have done anyway

This elaborate scheme was shared in email, involving another trusted company, as some master plan - despite Hunter Biden still being on the Burisma board at the time - rendering the whole thing this some weird pointless roundabout way of talking to your board member to exercise his dads connections.

You can’t actually get your dad to do anything at all

So from my understanding of this article; the argument is that there are some emails in which Burisma engages Hunters company to apparently lobby for them in order to get the investigation dropped. This is not new information.

Now there needs to be dissent huh?

Uh, yeah genius. That's what the word consensus means.

What if it's just that nobody else knew or cared about Shokin enough to protest the US executive branch demands?

First of all, you once again ignore the fact that the US was not the only country pushing for Shokin's firing. The reforms that Shokin was expected to put in place and was seen as ignoring came from the EU. No matter how many times I explain this to you you continue to pretend the US was at it alone.

1) Ignore the fact that other countries wanted the same thing and when forced to deal with this fact pretend they were just following the US

2) Pretend that every article I posted covers every single individual who agreed so that you can pretend the number of people in agreement is as small as possible.

3) Attack the credibility of anyone who wrote any literature on this subject as a middle man just parroting what they were told to say by some nefarious force

4) Presume that anyone who agreed with Biden within the US government was just saying what Biden wanted them to say.

No evidence could ever be presented to you because they're either duped by the US government, or being controlled by Joseph R Biden. You have effectively put your conclusion inside of a box impenetrable by any facts or logic. It's classic conspiracy theorist logic.

Now any one of these points on their own could be the result of a reasonable assessment, but that's where this conversation is remarkably lacking. When pointed out that you have no evidence for any of these assumptions you've made you just revert back to "well it's possible"

First all, "could not" is not in my vocabulary, it's in yours. Please stop projecting.

Rudy Giuliani was the president's personal attorney. He reported to no one else but Donald J Trump. Not the same thing.

That aside, it's perfectly within reason to suggest that the US ambassador may have been improperly influenced, but that would require evidence.

You have none, except for the fact that his actions conflict with your narrative

Giuliani meanwhile, has proven himself to be completely in the tank for Trump. From Mr. "Truth isn't Truth" to his all out pushing of the stolen election lies, his dishonesty and disregard for reality has shown no bounds. After being confronted for pushing objectively false election claims said it wasn't his job to fact check claims before repeating them, and his malpractice for Trump literally got him disbarred.

I never decided the ambassador was not taking direction from the executive branch. I said his words are evidence of his position, because that's what words are. So in the absence of evidence to the contrary, the reasonable presumption is that he believes what he said he believes. You of course just hand waive it away because it doesn't suit your preferred narrative.

The claim I've made from the start is that the evidence very clearly supports that there was wide spread consensus on the need for a new persecutor in Ukraine.

I'm still waiting for you to present anything showing the opposite.

But we both know why, because this point is nothing but a matter of faith to you.

Shokin was under public criticism from the UK and US for not being willing to continue existing investigations into  Mykola Zlochevsky and Burisma.

Firing Shokin did not kill any of those ongoing investigations.

The  main investigation into Mykola Zlochevsky ended two years later Dec 2017.  New charges were filed in Mar 2018 regarding Zlochevsky's giving favored contracts to Burisma when he was  Minister of Ecology and Natural Resources in 2011/12.  After just 3 months back in Ukriane, Zlochevsky had to flee  the country again and is probably hiding out in Cyprus with other Russo-Ukraine Oligarchs.  If the Bidens were being paid to keep Zlochevsky from being prosecuted they did the opposite since Shokin was the only prosecutor who was cutting   Zlochevsky slack and there's only been a brief period when Zlochevsky was not being sought for prosecution.

But the sad truth is that message boards are dying out.  Social media platforms and reddit have replaced them. 

Russia is a Communist country. It was a threat to the democratic countries in NATO and going nuclear only increased the threat.

The west and NATO countries would welcome a denuclearized Russia after Putin.

The West needs to be ready for Putin's end and start preparing irresistible incentives for a post-Putin Russia to become more democratic, open for immigration and ideally, itself a member of NATO.

No. There’s two separate elections with run off system. A voter Can make an informed choice after someone has been eliminated for sure. With RCV you cannot make an informed decision based on who has been eliminated. Only a guess.

Very wrong and very wrong. Animal intelligence has not been objectively defined, that's why none of the tests match up and why they haven't a clue if they're getting warmer or colder in artificial intelligence.

I feel like having a conversation about our differences on AI will probably go nowhere. I think a bunch of scaling (i.e., increasing compute to be similar in size to the human brain) and improving the efficiency of a large model are enough to get a system able to do most tasks that people can do. And I think a system that can do that, make copies of itself on the Internet, and be able to do some of the calculations computers can do much better than humans is potentially really dangerous.

I recommend this resource for one argument for why we’re reasonably close. I don’t think it depends on having a definition of intelligence. I also don’t think you need to be a “telekinetic god” to pose a serious threat to humanity.

The market isn’t moving quickly on nuclear. You need tons of government subsidies and loan guarantees to make nuclear viable. Deregulation is enough to make solar viable. 

I disagree that it’s as scalable as you think it is. That’s because nuclear is really expensive, and solar is incredibly cheap.

Even if we cut nuclear costs in half in the US through something like deregulation, making it cheaper than any country on Earth, it would still be more expensive than solar.

Another important factor is that nuclear plants take a long time to build -- ~5-10 years worldwide in general, compared to under a year for solar.

Taxes are immoral, CO2 is almost certainly not warming the earth.

Both bare assertions. 

14 out of 17 climate models between 1970 and 2001 predicted future warming accurately

And I remember 16k did a BOTEC a few years back that suggested that even a 1.2 degree Celsius equilibrium climate sensitivity suggested that CO2 emissions explained ~60% of post-19th century warming -- so a 1.8 to 5.6 degree range suggests that a lot of the observable warming is a function of CO2. 

So efforts to decarbonize the world seem good.

But I’ll also emphasize that a major part of the argument for pollution taxes is that outdoor air pollution causes six percent of all deaths in the world (and indoor and outdoor combined cause twelve percent of global mortality) -- that’s a huge externality that should probably be taxed. 

If 58,973 who preferred Palin over Begich put down Begich as their 1st choice (lying as it were)

they should not lie

you can't fault a system

if the voters are lying

tactical concerns may contradict with honest preference.

explain to me which voting system doesn't have this "problem"

If the Palin voters had strong reason to believe that Begich would be eliminated and not enough Begich people would go to Palin the tactical option would be to put Begich as 1st and Palin as second despite Palin being their ideal choice.

run those numbers

would that have made any difference ?

NO

THE SECOND CHOICES ARE RARELY CONSIDERED

ONLY THE SECOND CHOICES OF THE LAST PLACE RANKED CANDIDATE

ARE EVEN LOOKED AT

Epistemic nihilism is false. I’m not sure its truth can actually be evaluated, but at minimum, it’s useless and unproductive.

God almost certainly doesn’t exist.

Highly uncertain about this, but free will probably exists. 

Moral realism is probably true, though highly uncertain.

Common sense morality is, all things considered, a pretty good metric.

The best approximation of a good moral theory that I can think of is preference utilitarianism, albeit somewhat skittish, accounting for moral uncertainty with either expected choice-worthiness or a parliamentary model, and incorporating some unusually strong common sense intuitions. 

Creating new happy lives is a good thing, though not as good as making existing people happy. Creating new bad lives is a bad thing (though not as bad, other things equal, as inflicting suffering on existing people). 

Countries don’t have very large special obligations to their own citizens. They should prioritize their citizens a bit more than non-citizens, for pragmatic reasons, but policy should, in general, focus a lot more on the rest of the world.

Individuals have a moral obligation to assist those in need. 

We should care, morally, as much about future generations as the current one. Of course, for practical reasons, it often makes sense to prioritize the interests of people alive today, but the moral worth of someone 300 or 3000 years from now is no different than the moral worth of someone alive today.

Come on why would you come up with your own numbers when you can just use the ones I posted. Is it not true that it wouldn't matter who the Palin voters put as their second due to the elimination of Begich? Isn't it a problem then that the second choices (if any) of the Palin people are not considered?

their second choices are NEVER considered UNLESS palin is at the BOTTOM of the list

and somehow i doubt she was ever out of the top 3 and probably in the top 2

Factory farming should be illegal. Animal suffering is the world’s most pressing immediate problem. 

It sounds weird, but there’s a legitimate risk that artificial general intelligence (AGI) could cause human extinction -- I’d say something like a 1 in 20 chance in the next 100 years. There’s also more plausible-sounding risks like a sharp rise in inequality from being able to automate most tasks in the future. We should regulate companies like DeepMind and OpenAI more carefully, and fund labs working on making AI go safer. 

Nuclear power is good, but overrated. The focus of climate policy should be solar, wind, and, more speculatively, geothermal. 

Gas tax holidays are bad. Gas taxes should be coupled with carbon taxes on corporations. 

Developed countries are underpopulated. The US doubling its population would mostly have positive consequences.

When does something shift from correlation to cause?

Nor did he try to overturn an election and start an insurrection.

As president, I only judge them for what they do during their presidential term.

only if their first choice received the least total votes

RCV IS DEMONSTRABLY SUPERIOR

Do you support mail-in ballots in Alaska?

Not when a biometric blockchain and early voting is an option.

please explain