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@oromagi
So even though we've established that this ballot measure rec'd record popular support, you'd argue it is illegitimate because that popular support represents only 24% of population?
I didn't say it was illegitimate, I said the support for it did not represent a quorum. It may well be constitutional in Alaska but it's a bad idea to let less than the majority make decisions that could disenfranchise the majority. See below:
Trump won the state with 25.9%189,951/733,391Should we toss out that result as well?
No, but what if those 189,951 had decided that Alaska would from that point on be reorganized into the first Alaskan Empire (with Palin as empress and Trump as godhead)?
A majority of the voters may well make momentous decisions (like sending electors for Trump) but they should not be able to choose to do anything that would prevent a full assembly (of the electorate). It is disingenuous to present the vote on prop 2 as "a majority deciding how it will vote in the future", it was a minority deciding how a majority may vote.
If you really want to hold out for true majority participation, Republicans always lose.
because it takes someone who is paying attention to vote republican, not the low information voters who couldn't care less.
Do you support mail-in ballots in Alaska?
Not when a biometric blockchain and early voting is an option.
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Thanks volkswagen, if it weren't for you I don't think humanity would ever have come to terms with the fact that some temperatures are uncomfortable and cause us to stay inside and stare at a computer screen.
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@oromagi
Yesdoes that include children?
because I was ball-parking and didn't want to waste unnecessary time. Now I have and look it's still not a majority:Why would you include children?
174,032 / 553,710 = 0.3143 = 31%
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@oromagi
174,032/733,391
#voted for prop 2 / state census
Please spare me nitpicking such as "well that includes children"
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@Polytheist-Witch
Germanic/ Norse/ Anglo Saxon mythology.
The Norse, Angles, and Saxons are all Germanic cultures. The non-German parts of English folklore are the Celtic parts.
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Republicans change voting rules far more often than Democrats.
I wonder about that. At least this time it wasn't bordering on illegal.
whataboutism
...cannot apply when inequity is the issue.
apples and oranges
...are both fruit.
and false
Make an argument.
1.) Many people don't show up to interim elections where such things are often decided.
- But ranked choice voting was decided in the 2020 General, the same ballots and overwhelmingly Republican majority that voted for Trump +10
- You linked to the 2020 ballot yourself.
- Why are you lying about this?
Why in the world would you put a list with a sub-list, unnumbered; instead of a tiny paragraph? Anyway I didn't lie, it was a general statement that happened to not be true in this case. The ballot link was a post script.
2.) Many more people don't have the time or patience to read and understand propositions and will vote yes or abstain without good causeSo if you think the electorate is stupid you just blame Democrats?
Yea that's the main point of comparison with voter ID = suppression claim.
I don't really think the electorate is stupid (or no more stupid than average ;)), but in order to honestly discard their expressed opinion I would have to. Just like a democrat has to consider those minorities stupid to honestly consider them incapable of proving their identity.
The nasty truth is that some people are stupid, more are uninterested/lazy and when the margins are tight those stupid people can be manipulated to win an election.
That's why democrats love mail in voting (even when they aren't illegally ballot harvesting i.e. cheating), it lets more lazy people vote and democrats can easily tackle high population densities (like deep blue cities) with a ground game. If those people had to get out of their pajamas they would shut the door and watch TV instead.
So the accurate way to describe "ALASKANS VOTED FOR" would be "Some Alaskans voted for" almost certainly not a quorum.That would be an unacceptably biased way of describing the highest voter turnout is Alaska's history both by percentage and raw numbers.
Since the French Revolution any discerning student of democracy must admit that anything less than a popular majority should not be able to change core mechanics of the system... say for example waiting for your opposition to leave the chamber and then voting that they are traitors and no longer part of the assembly.
24% is not a popular majority.
The measure passed with 174,000 votes in a state where there are only 77,000 Democrats. Significantly more Independents and Republicans voted for this measure than Democrats.
Yet the push came from a democrat campaign and it resulted in that democrat winning. Why would these independents and republicans vote for that? Simple, they didn't know either of those facts.
You know it barely passed, what does that mean? That there are 174k *2 - 77K republicans and independents? Yes. It's well known that independents orbit parties without committing to them (meaning they almost always vote for them, they just don't want to be called X). I truly utterly do not care
Your scapegoating Democrats here
Yet the push came from a democrat campaign. That is what makes me blame democrats. Libertarians love ranked choice voting because it means they might get in. I like ranked choice voting for that reason. If it came from libertarians I would not blame democrats. I blame democrats because democrats did it, and accompanied it with a targeted campaign which relied on ignorance of the new dynamics to get a democrat in. Luckily there will soon be a "do over"
is ample enough proof that you are not a reliable interpreter of democratic processes in America.
Who is poisoning the well now?
But I guess we knew that already.
Better watch that schizophrenia, you are in fact only one person.
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@SkepticalOne
@oromagi
@ludofl3x
oromagi: Explain your accusation.
It was all in my post really, campaign staffers for Peltola 'quit' their positions with her to organize the petition for ranked choice voting; knowing full well that they could split the republican vote with the never-paliners and get Peltola in office.
It's not an inherently unfair voting system, but the reason Peltola's campaign pushed it is because they knew that they were going to effectively spread the new strategy while the Palin supporters were not going to be informed of how to use the options tactically.
SkepticalOne: You got to wonder how those NOT in power have the power to change rules to get power...
See next post, also just because someone with an "R" or "~" next to their name in a voter role caves to a democrat demand doesn't mean it wasn't a democrat demand.
ludofl3x: He's talking about the voter approved switch to rank choice voting. You know, the ones ALASKANS VOTED FOR.
If left-tribers can claim that voter ID is voter suppression because somewhere is a hypothetical minority who doesn't have the IQ to find the DMV I can much more reasonably claim that ballot propositions which change voting rules are voter suppression.
1.) Many people don't show up to interim elections where such things are often decided.
2.) Many more people don't have the time or patience to read and understand propositions and will vote yes or abstain without good cause
So the accurate way to describe "ALASKANS VOTED FOR" would be "Some Alaskans voted for" almost certainly not a quorum.
PS I looked it up:
174,032/733,391 = 24%
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@oromagi
Additionally, there was no primary source document linked to in the entire article, only other AP News articles and one New York Times article.No need. I am not sourcing a debate, I am starting a conversation with a news clipping. AP News is credited and anybody wishing to verify can just google the headline.It's not a debate. It is a news clipping.
Yea.... but this is a debate site so you can understand the confusion. Especially since it's so obvious that the last thing this world needs is yet another parrot taking zero responsibility for the veracity of the content of the quotes they repeat.
I mean this is the heart of actual disinformation, not some evil scheme from the top (there is some of that probably), but chain of people filtering claims, taking no responsibility for completeness or confirmation, until the end result is confirmation bias made manifest.
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@oromagi
....we have other interested customers.
Talk about shifting the context. The casual use of "we" claiming representative status over the collective of all humans in the Americas from now into prehistory... just wow
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@Greyparrot
Don't tempt fate. It's easier to destroy than to build.
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Ranked choice voting. Peltola's campaign workers made it happen. As usual democrats change rules at the last minute to get power.
The electorate will adapt, this might actually let a libertarian in once people understand the trick.
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@Public-Choice
Without any citation of primary source documents, [3] it is impossible to determine if the news reporting is factual or complete fiction. From what I could tell, the links were just a Rabbit Hole [4] to more news reports, which linked to more news reports, which then linked to more news reports, at which point I stopped trying because it appeared to be hearsay and not credible reporting.
An adequate summary of the epistemology of the left-tribe circa 2012 - present
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@Double_R
International consensus does not mean every country in the world agreed, nor does it even mean every major political figure in the countries involved all agree. It means that major political figures within multiple countries agreed and there is very little sign of dissent.
Now there needs to be dissent huh? What if it's just that nobody else knew or cared about Shokin enough to protest the US executive branch demands? That is what one would expect of an appointed position having to do with internal affairs in a non-major country.
Under some theories of international world order, it's no one's damn business how a government handles its own law enforcement and many many many countries follow that guideline. US, CCP, and back in the day USSR are of course exceptions. Constantly sticking their noses everywhere in an attempt to establish or defend hegemony.
All your articles keep doing (besides supporting my case) is repeating that the given reason for Shokin being fired was corruption. It is not counter-evidence in the slightest.If people from around the world saying that they wanted Shokin fired because he was corrupt, and celebrating his firing because they say he was corrupt, does not qualify to you as evidence that the world thought he was corrupt... then you do not know what evidence is.
Or you do not know the difference between propaganda and evidence. I may remind you of that when Biden is impeached and a bunch of people celebrate. We'll get into who exactly "people" are below.
Recap:US ambassador started the campaign against Shokin in late September (your source)Yes, which supports my argument. You're claiming that Biden did what he did for personal reasons. ... this means that for Biden's to successfully abuse his power he needed other US agencies to follow through with his plot. You can claim all day that this "could have happened" ... What you need is actual evidence that Biden improperly influenced these people for your claim to warrant serious consideration.
What you deem worthy of serious consideration is beyond my power to control. The fact remains that people who would basically have worked for Biden at the time do not count as indicators of sound motivation.
The equivalent claim would be that Trump could not have been personally motivated because Giuliani would have to follow through with his plot.
You have no problem imaging that Giuliani, who was delegated any power he might have from the executive branch (i.e. Trump) would have every reason to consider Trump's interests as his own. You have indicated as much.
You may weave a poem about the lustrous honor of various appointed positions and agencies in the executive branch, but when reduced to bare facts an ambassador (for example) is just as vulnerable to being fired and just as likely to have been appointed for the cause of loyalty as Giuliani.
Anyone who serves at the pleasure of the president can be assumed to be serving the interests of the president without additional evidence. Presidents delegate, sometimes to a vice president; and that is what contemporary reports and simple inference shows happened with Biden in Ukraine. He was the executive branch in Ukraine at this time.
Shokin is fired due to quid pro quo (source = Biden)No one denies Biden's involvement and influence
Remember that before you claim I have no evidence.
You are either lying or you don't read. I made clear, multiple times, that we don't know what Shokin's motivation here was, and made clear, multiple times, that the fact that we don't know how motivations was my point from the start.
You were the one who suggested the motivation was revenge against Biden. It does make perfect sense, it is the most likely explanation given what we know. You are simply upset that your own common sense betrayed your narrative for a moment.
If anyone else is following this and doubts it I can go find the post number.
That's why he garnered attention and that's why the attention started with US executive branch action and ended with US executive branch action.Again, if you read the articles you would know that "the attention" did not start with Biden. As one of the articles you ignored put it "Even top Western officials, including the US ambassador to Ukraine, have publicly criticized Shokin".
So in the absence of direct evidence you have decided that the ambassador wasn't taking any direction from the executive branch, decided to start railing against prosecutors, and he made such a convincing case that Biden himself took note and came down to personally quid pro quo the prosecutor out of office and that just happened to save burisma's oligarch.
Or... Shokin was nosing around Burisma, Biden asked for some research on this guy, found that there was some local controversy about diamonds and annoying a few EU officials and decided to use this to get rid of him. Phoned up the ambassador told him to make it an issue of "US interests". What would have been routine political turbulence that goes on all the time in every country (especially Ukraine) is turned into a major issue for the US. The (two?) guys in the EU working on some Visa program puff up their chests like it had anything to do with them and agree Shokin should be fired.
But Shokin isn't fired because he was actually a handpicked guy of the president (of Ukraine). So Biden and the deep state turn up the temperature, circulating the "dirt" on Shokin (which in reality was common knowledge accusations in Ukraine), the senate committee reads and and wags a finger, but that doesn't get Shokin fired either. No, in the end Biden needs to go there personally and use basically the entire foreign policy of the US in Ukraine as a cudgel to quid pro quo Shokin out.
The later story is the one that fits with Hunter Biden collecting bribes. The former, besides being bizarre on the face of it; does not. The probabilities are related and because of the fact of personal motivation the later is an order of magnitude more likely.
You know when the left is trying to tie things to Russia they consider any Russian an agent of Putin. No need for any formal employer status, just coming from Russia and doing something is proof enough... but when it comes to a democrat administration an explicit hierarchy isn't enough to consider an ambassador as an agent?
Who are "top western officials"? You have said that an international consensus doesn't need popular awareness, it doesn't even need more than a few officials in a few countries. Who are these people? We have the ambassador to Ukraine for one. Biden. Anyone else?
I'm curious about the number, five people? eight?
In other words, the fact that the US was getting involved came as a surprise to some since the main voices here was coming from there EU.
Now why would it surprise anyone if there was an international consensus? If it was normal for the US to barge in and demand corrupt prosecutors be fired?
It wasn't normal because Ukraine wasn't just any other country to Biden and the Obama admin.
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@oromagi
I guess I'd have to disagree. I consider LOTR and the Hobbit very English and classic works of literature in the best sense.
I didn't say it wasn't English. I didn't say it wasn't a classic. I said those aren't the reasons people like it. Do you like it because it's an English classic or do you like it because of the themes, characters, and plot?
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@Shila
Once again statistics is wielded by those who don't know the rules.
More likely given the same circumstances or more likely per total population? No doubt the number you quote is the later. There is no contradiction, and the in-circumstance statistic is more relevant since it speaks to the presumption you expressed.
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@Shila
Almost no one likes LOTR because it's British or a classic.
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Let no one imply that the abomination currently being shielded from reviews on Amazon Prime Video belongs in this thread. 95% of fan fiction is superior.
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@Double_R
I provided a dozen articles reporting on this at the time, you hand waived them all away as "middle men" parroting what they were told.
At the time of firing or quid pro quoing, parroting the same things.
Those articles included multiple examples of politicians around the world agreeing with his firing, you hand waived that away as a 'small number of bureaucrats'.
Shall we count them?
There is no reason the whole world apart from those working closely with Ukraine would have cared about this.
Indeed, which is why the claim of "international consensus" (or other similar language) incurred a burden of proof you couldn't bear from the moment you said it.
You also pretend there is some 'infamous acts' for which there would have been mountains of evidence showing Shokin's guilt. If you actually read the articles you'd know that Shokin was acused of not investigating corruption, so your claim that there would be evidence of his actions is a non sequitur.
There is the claim that the diamond arrests (if they happened) were frame jobs. Regardless your claim here only supports my position that the kind of international attention you implied existed would be absurd. As if U.S. interests hinge on some appointed position not doing his job fast enough in a distant non-NATO country.
There are plenty of cops and prosecutors in the US not doing their job very fast, none of that attracted international attention or federal quid pro quos.
I will continue to believe, without certainty, but with the balance of the evidence available as support; that Viktor Shokin, whatever else he failed to do, was an obstacle to the installment of a US puppet regime in Ukraine and a direct threat to the related bribery of one Joseph Biden. That's why he garnered attention and that's why the attention started with US executive branch action and ended with US executive branch action.
And of course, you dismiss the fact that you have no evidence showing anything else.
Recap:
US ambassador started the campaign against Shokin in late September (your source)
Shokin is fired due to quid pro quo (source = Biden)
Shokin moved against Burisma, you admit that the only motivation would be to go after Biden and therefore Shokin knew Biden was connected to Burisma
All your articles keep doing (besides supporting my case) is repeating that the given reason for Shokin being fired was corruption. It is not counter-evidence in the slightest. The reason they keep doing the same thing is because they are not original sources, there was one source, you can easily tell by nearly the exact same list of events and quotes; I don't have the time nor interest in finding out what it is because it doesn't matter.
I addressed everything in those reports and they are consistent with my theory. What makes my theory better than yours is that it fits the other facts. Facts like the money laundering, Shokin's statements, the lack of action against Shokin before the quid pro quo, the Russian commentary at the time, etc...
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@Double_R
Let's assume for one moment - just for the sake of argument - that there was in fact a wide spread consensus amongst the US and international community that Viktor Shokin should be fired.Q1: What evidence would need to be presented to convince you of thisQ2: What method would you say we should follow to determine if this was the case?
Well to start off, consensus requires awareness.
It would be extremely odd, almost unheard of; for an appointed bureaucrat in a country of only middling notoriety to be the subject of global awareness. In this case he was not; but for the sake of argument this consensus existed so it follows that he is uniquely infamous.
We would expect this infamy and the specific acts which caused it to have been reported on and discussed by pundits and politicians around the globe. There would be clips of such discussions (dated to a time shortly after the infamous act was discovered).
There would be skeptics who were beaten back by the force of evidence proving the acts, for if they weren't beaten back there would be no consensus. The evidence itself would be publicly available (at the time) lest the skepticism only grow.
It's a hard scenario to analogize because it is so unlike anything that has happened in recent history. Plenty of postulations have had global awareness with an acute lack of consensus. For instance the claim that there were WMDs in Iraq before the invasion.
Perhaps the moon landings, that is global awareness with global consensus. Lots of independent original sources.
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Democracy is under threat. Those who threaten it are enemies of the people.
Who really believes in democracy: the one who demands that the ballot count reflect the honest will of the majority or the one that demands such complaints be punished?
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@Double_R
If we cannot agree on the most basic facts then further conversation is pointless. This is why I scaled the conversion back to one very simple question, was there a wide spread consensus amongst the US and international community that Viktor Shokin needed to be fired? Yes or No?
No. Your definition of the "US" as a relatively small number of people in the executive branch is rejected as well as the definition of the "international community" as a relatively small number of EU diplomats.
Under such a definition the "US" asked for Hunter to be investigated.
The rest of this debate is pointless if we cannot agree on this one point.
Well I'd say (and did say) the debate on whether Biden could not have been using the quid pro quo for personal reasons would be lost by you and won by me: If you don't have both this concession and a concession on Biden being ignorant about any threat to his money laundering.
So I posted a dozen articles from the time period in question, a time period far before the political right politicized this issue in the wake of Biden's public comments on it. A time period where it would have made absolutely no sense to write articles about anything other than what was actually happening.
The stated reason for the firing was corruption, they wrote about that. Them writing about that at the time is at best evidence that the stated reason was corruption.
I also laugh at the notion that so long as the American right-wing aren't interested second hand reporting is intrinsically infallible.
Your response to this was as telling as it was predictable; you hand waived away all of it beforehand as a collection of "middle men" writing about whatever they were told to believe. That speaks volumes about the issue here; you do not care about logic and reason.
You have a collection of middlemen relating what they were told (often with direct quotes instead of assertions of fact) confused with logic and reason.
You have no evidence whatsoever that there was not a wide spread consensus on this, and you disregard all of the evidence that there was.
The evidence you have provided supports the theory that there was never a "wide spread consensus", that the limited consensus that did exist was spawned by the actions of US officials who almost certainly reported to Biden, and that said consensus is only a consensus by definition. i.e. you define the group as everyone who wanted Shokin gone and then you say "look, everyone in this group wanted Shokin gone".
Well the vote in the Ukrainian parliament and the fact that the president of Ukraine didn't do anything about Shokin until he was "blackmailed" by Biden is not what consensus looks like. In fact it looks a lot more like Shokin was a controversial figure that wasn't going anywhere until a corrupt politician from a necessary ally showed up to make him go away.
It's a bit of a "The vote was 100% in my favor after I killed everyone who didn't vote for me" situation.
Until you can present actual evidence of your alternative narrative, something other than "dUh eVeryOnE wAS jUsT lISteNeNinG tO biDEn", there's no point in continuing.
I did when you posted the two articles originally. One of them said it started with a US ambassador in late September.
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@n8nrgim
the link shows a study, that almost every time the phrase "bear arms" was used in the founding days, it meant to use a gun in a militia.
Bearing arms certainly could be expected to be correlated with a militia since a militia must be full of people bearing arms. It cannot be inferred from that correlation that the phrase "bear arms" is meaningless outside of the context of a militia.
Since the invasion of Ukraine the word "invasion" has been correlated with "Ukraine" and "Russia" in the set of all publications and recorded discussions, but that does not mean that "invasion" has no meaning outside of those contexts and subsequently that if you see a historical document calling for "invasion" that they are calling for the invasion of Ukraine.
if the second amendment is talking about a right to a gun, there would be evidence that the founding fathers supported that right.
There is, some in this thread have already provided quotes.
they specified a purpose for a militia, but they didn't specify a purpose for everyone having a right to a gun even, especially if they aren't in a militia.
Yes they did, a preface clause as an justification in that form was extremely common then and is still seen today.
A cake needing flour, it millers should be allowed to grind grain.
The justification for the right was the militia, the militia's justification is destroying oppressive governments. The reason they made it a right and not a privilege is because it would defeat the purpose of the militia if a potentially oppressive government decided when it needed to be destroyed.
The right to self-defense is not part of the 2nd amendment, it was at that time already deeply entrenched in common law. The only interaction between them is that you have a right to defend yourself and you have a right own and carry a gun. The combination of the two rights means you have a right to shoot someone to defend yourself.
at the very least, you seem to be admitting that your argument about the right to a gun, can only be implied historically, given there's no evidence outside of one possible interpretation of the amendment.
I admit no such thing. The plain English reading of the 2nd amendment is clearly the establishment of a natural right to weapons. Arms and weapons are synonyms. Guns are weapons and thus arms.
You challenge that reading using the historical claim that "bearing arms" didn't mean "carry weapons" back then. Of course if you make a historical claim like that the only response addresses the history you claim.
If you claimed that "freedom of the press" meant freedom to press apple juice out of apples in the context of the writing of the amendment that would be another historical claim.
the way gun nuts express it, there's nothing clearer than the right to a gun
It's one of the clearer ones.
when all evidence is the opposite of that.
I haven't seen any evidence against that interpretation being the original intention.
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@n8nrgim
the phrase "bear arms" historically meant to use a gun in a militia.
Make an argument. I sometimes follow links out of curiosity but I have no duty to respond to an assertion + link pattern. References are for pure data, like a link to the imagine or transcription of an original document in this case.
also, it is very weak to argue that right to a gun was so well established that no one talked about it.
Not in combination with the fact of nearly universal exercise of that right. After all it doesn't say you have a right to wear clothes in public does it?
You only need to say there is such a right when somebody is trying to strip everyone. That someone was the British Empire, hence the 2nd ammendment.
what, they slipped, fell, and accidentally wrote the second amendment with the intent to give everyone a right to a gun, but never talked about it?
The 2nd amendment is them talking about it. Saying things like "people is plural therefore it doesn't apply to individuals" 200 years later is picking at straws like sexual deviants and shell-fish guzzlers picking at straws in Leviticus.
every right in the constitution they talked about the purpose. they wouldn't have not did the same with the right to a gun.
They did specify the purpose, it's the first sentence. The purpose is to counter-attack oppressive governments.
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@n8nrgim
Well you didn't get my point, so I'll make it more explicit:
You cannot infer from the desire to enumerate a right in a state constitution that it was perceived not to exist in the federal constitution. They did not think that way, they were writing constitutions for sovereign states that had to be complete in on themselves and even if they weren't there is nothing wrong with saying the same thing twice.
As for 'evidence' your interpretation of "bearing and keeping arms" is somehow not an individual right deletes evidence. They did not know that you would be unable to understand what those words meant so they never knew they had to describe it in an alternative way.
For instance if in 200 years somebody claims that "abortion" actually meant collective right and not an individual right nobody could ever find any contemporary source describing abortion without using the word "abortion". A person has an abortion, not a collective.
The fact is that at the time it was so well understood to be an individual right that no controversies arose because no government would ever dream of trying to bar ownership. A person owns a gun, not a collective. The collective ownership of weapons was a well known phenomenon at the time, they called it the continental army; and that is not the language they used.
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@n8nrgim
i think this must be referring to a state specific event. there are plenty of states the considered gun rights in their state constitutions and rejected the idea. doesn't really make as much sense if they thought gun rights were already protected.
That is one of the sillier things you've said, how about you read some of those state constitutions. Everyone I've read is extremely similar to the federal in preamble and discussions of rights and principles.
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@Double_R
I see that there was an error with the links I provided
Yea, I know; I said it twice. If you read my posts instead of skimming them you would have noticed.
Spoiler alert... Here are the results:
You seem to have missed a key part of my last post, here it is again:
ADOL: It is a fact that the official reason (given by Poroshenko and the parliament) that the reason was corruption. From that actual event spawned the AP (or equivalent) original story. From that story all the middlemen stories were spawned. You go around googling all the middlemen and convince yourself you're uncovering mountains of evidence that Shokin was corrupt.I do not deny the fact that it was the reason given, I deny that you have uncovered mountains of evidence.
It's also remarkable that you had to search through another language, which goes to show how little out there supports your objections.
It's remarkable that you can't think of an alternative theory besides "only anglophones speak truth".
So does this prove that Biden was purely motivated by US interests? No. Does it prove that Shokin was in fact corrupt? No.What it proves is that Biden was not some rogue actor when he pushed for Shokin's firing.
Ah, so all of this linking and talk of senate letters was a waste of time because as we all know if the good and honorable Joseph R Biden says something we know it's on the level because the people who worked for him agreed with him.
It proves that the simple Occam's razor test for what best explains Biden's motivations are at the very least matched by the prospect of him acting to get Shokin fired because Shokin was believed by nearly everyone to be corrupt.In other words, it proves that your assertion that Biden really got involved for his own personal interests is at best just one possible explanation out of other possible explanations which are just as reasonable.
You continue to ignore the related probability of corruption actually occurring. The world is wide, and there are a lot of corrupt people Biden go could personally quid pro quo out of power. It would be an enormous coincidence that he just happened to attack the one in all the world that was a threat to his corruption.
Occam's razor favors simple explanations, simple explanations are explanations with the least total improbability.
Also it wasn't everyone. It was a bare majority of the parliament and only after the quid pro quo.
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@Double_R
But you take issue with people peacefully protesting outside the houses of Supreme Court justices (not one violent incident occurred).
Attempted assassination?
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@Double_R
Well I was curious how hard it would be so I went and did it:
Auto Translated: "If we look for points of intersection with the interests of US corporations, then American officials and their agents like The Minister of Economy Aivaras Abromavicius and Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk talked, among other things, about the privatization of such large assets as the Odessa Port Plant (the leading producer of ammonia) and Centrenergo (one of the leading producers of electricity). And in this vein, employees of the Prosecutor General's Office are a universal resource both in order to instruct people's deputies to "vote correctly" and in order to cool down the "hotheads" from among the oligarchs and raiders who may risk standing against the commercial interests of the United States in Ukraine.
Подробнее: https://eadaily.com/ru/news/2016/03/29/shokin-i-trepet-za-chto-ssha-uvolili-generalnogo-prokurora-ukrainy" - 29 March 2016
Auto Translated: "In this case, it would be more correct to say that all the "Maidan parties" voted for the dismissal of the Prosecutor General, unwanted by the United States, regardless of which of them now belongs to the parliamentary coalition, and who has signed up for the opposition.
Подробнее: https://eadaily.com/ru/news/2016/03/29/shokin-i-trepet-za-chto-ssha-uvolili-generalnogo-prokurora-ukrainy" - 29 March 2016
Auto Translated: "Since the decision was made at the very top, it was clear from the start that there would be enough votes.
Подробнее: https://eadaily.com/ru/news/2016/03/29/shokin-i-trepet-za-chto-ssha-uvolili-generalnogo-prokurora-ukrainy" - 29 March 2016
Note that "the top" refers to Poroshenko, the man Biden quid pro quoed.
You see when you fire someone to protect your corruption and get them out of the way for your political agenda to move forward, you don't say that's what you're doing. Once again a reminder, I do not resort to the authority of this eadaily, I do not cede authority over truth to any entity. This is merely to point out that the political analysis I have also made was made at the time.
It is a fact that the official reason (given by Poroshenko and the parliament) that the reason was corruption. From that actual event spawned the AP (or equivalent) original story. From that story all the middlemen stories were spawned. You go around googling all the middlemen and convince yourself you're uncovering mountains of evidence that Shokin was corrupt.
I do not deny the fact that it was the reason given, I deny that you have uncovered mountains of evidence.
Address the arguments I made.
I have, many times. Apparently so many times you've forgotten some of the things you argued.
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@Double_R
Must be nice, if they are caught, convicted, and wrist slapped only though whistle-blowing and special prosecutors you say "see no problem here" and if they aren't you declare that it's a conspiracy theory and once again "see no problem here"The fact that you cannot meet the burden of proof you give yourself when you make a claim is not my problem.
A pitiable misdirection. You attempted to redefine all evidence of corruption as evidence of self-policing. The evidence of corruption remains.
I incur no burden of proof in pointing out your semantic deception.
You have repeatedly asserted it, but you have not presented convincing evidence. A few articles talking in the past tense about how some bureaucrats aren't happy is not a national and international consensus.Ok, let's run through this... Again.As I have repeated multiple times now, I presented 6 articles from all over the world talking about Shokin and his corruption.
You presented four links, two unique links: https://www.debateart.com/forum/topics/7829-trump-is-an-idiot?page=6&post_number=134
Only one link was from before the quid pro quo, November 6th; and it described the US executive branch as the one to kick off the public campaign in late September. https://www.ukrweekly.com/uwwp/new-round-of-western-criticism-targets-procurator-general-shokin/
Two of those articles were not as you describe "past tense", they were written in November 2015, before Biden got involved in the push for Shokin's removal. I explained this to you multiple times.
You have no idea when exactly Biden got involved. You only know about the date of the quid pro quo and only because he bragged about it. He was the policy leader in Ukraine from about the same time Hunter started collecting.
I also showed you a bipartisan Senate letter once again, saying the same thing.
Not exactly.
Just for the heck of it, I went through Google and found 4 more articles from that timeframe saying the same thing.
Well I must have missed those because my link count is still at 2, don't kill yourself though. I already told you I don't considered every article an independent source.
You dismiss all of these, not with conflicting evidence, but just because it's not enough to meet your high standards of evidence.
I reserve the right to evaluate the credibility and possibility of specific factual claims, but I did not dismiss any specific factual claims from the articles you posted. I simply pointed out that they fail to establish a timeline or scale that is inconsistent with Biden being motivated by personal corruption and the deep-state interest in removing any pro-russian elements in Ukraine.
So this appears to be the heart of our disagreement. You continue to pretend that there is some other reality where Shokin was not corrupt, seemingly as a matter of faith.
Yes! my faith in the AP is lacking. Even when they claim that someone besides themselves asserted something, I have... doubts [priest who looks exactly like Brian Stelter on other side of confessional shakes head]
The fact of the matter is that if you actually use Google and look this up yourself, you'll notice that Every. Single. Peice. Of literature about Viktor Shokin written in late 2015 or early 2016 all says the same thing; that he was a corrupt prosecutor fired for not prosecuting corruption. Find one article written by any major publication saying otherwise. I'll wait.
That's why they went for the schools and the media. First they teach them that debate is exchanging citations, and then they control the source of citations.
I'm sure some pro-russian paper in Ukraine (or Russia) wrote that it was a political hit job at the time, but when you include "major publication" why would I go through the effort to find it? You'll simply dismiss it as not major, or if not major not trust worthy (like fox news).
You're playing a meaningless minigame called link-wars and even that you can't win without rigging the rules.
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@Bones
Rape is also evolutionary advantageous - it allows for one to expand their gene, which is the driving function of evolution.=
Took the words out of my... keyboard.
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@Greyparrot
I agree with Greyparrot that I would include censorship as a keypoint, but it could be part of media. If you click on the link it's basically just a brochure. I don't see any way to access anything more substantial.
The reason people stop trusting is always the same, they feel that trust was betrayed.
If a group of people have stopped trusting institutions you can be sure it's because they perceived a breach of trust, such as a lie.
Trust is hard to build and easy to destroy, and anyone seeking to restore that trust has got to be willing to address every single perceived breach without minimizing or sidestepping them.
The censorship is real, many people on the right have experienced it first hand or know someone who has been banned/suspended/etc... for expressing doubts or asking questions.
Once you know that people are being censored it is only rational to infer that any apparent consensus could be manufactured.
It doesn't take Hari Seldon to figure this dynamic out, the founders certainly knew the dangers of censorship, it's so obvious that some have speculated that it might be an intentional attack on social cohesion.
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Impeach em both at the same time.
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@Double_R
As I anticipated, you're classing special counsel Durham as a natural check which is pure semantics.And I anticipated that you would hand waive it away without any attempt to explain what is wrong with it.Again, the individual who presented the case to the judge lost his law lisence for over a year and was sentenced to 400 hours of community service. If that is not a check to you then you do not speak English.
Must be nice, if they are caught, convicted, and wrist slapped only though whistle-blowing and special prosecutors you say "see no problem here" and if they aren't you declare that it's a conspiracy theory and once again "see no problem here"
By such a standard there was never any problem with the Trump presidency, after all they impeached him right? If that's not a check I don't know what is.
You do not know what the FBI is or is not doing with it, that's not public information nor has there been much reporting on it.
Well we come back to the fact that the AP is not the fountainhead of truth. While I have not been given a vision by our lord and savior AP (credentialed be its name) I have in fact learned of it through a dark and demonic sorcery known as "alternative media" who have informed me of whistleblowers.
They knew before the 2020 election the laptop was corroborated, they chose to claim it was Russian disinformation instead.
This part is just made up whole cloth.
If whole cloth was common sense and whistleblowers...
So when you say they 'claimed without evidence' that it was Russian disinformation you are either being intentionally dishonest, or you are demonstrating your willingness to accept and repeat right wing talking points without the slightest interest in verifying them first.
Well in this case I don't care if that's what the letter said because that just shifts the dishonesty to the timing and the mainstream (although dying) press (credentialed be their name)
But then, despite repeatedly showing you how there was a national and international consensus regarding the desire to fire Shokin
You have repeatedly asserted it, but you have not presented convincing evidence. A few articles talking in the past tense about how some bureaucrats aren't happy is not a national and international consensus.
even article after article after article written at the time
.. written at the time of firing, there was one that was written before the quid pro quo, and I'm not sure I ever saw it. I think you mislinked to it and I never actually got to see it.
well before this issue became politicized in the US
But not before US ambassadors (who should be considered agents of Biden) were telling Ukrainians how they should feel about Shokin.
Moreover, if Shokin was (as you have suggested) not corrupt and actually holding public officials and oligarchs to account, all you have to do is provide the examples.
No I don't, there is no dichotomy between corruption and failing to make a big enough splash to have people write stories. Then again they did write a story about how he went have Burisma's main oligarch and we know Burisma was corrupt...
So when it comes to claims that suit your narrative, all you need is to hear it on Fox news or OANN to accept and repeat it, but when it comes to claims that don't, suddenly source after source after source all saying the same thing and no source saying otherwise is not enough.
I've explained to you that AP parrots do not constitute independent sources. I bet concession that you've rejected more original testimony (that is from witnesses) during this debate than I have. Deal?
It wasn't "a scenario", it was what your letter actually said.
A microcosm of the double standards I've been talking about. You insist on literalism only for the letter I found. If you applied litteralism to the senate letter you would admit that it doesn't contain the words "fire Shokin"
You presented a letter written months before the time period in question to argue that it showed there was no consensus, which already fails.
To show the public campaign hadn't started at that point. Not to show that there was no public campaign.
I then pointed out that the "Good job" remarks you were focusing on explicitly talked about his "agenda", which logically translates into "we're excited to see what you're going to do", not "we're happy with what you've done".
And the scenario you thus posit is that the letter writers did not think he was doing a good job because there was some kind of natural angst against Shokin.
The simplest explanation is that they did not warn Shokin to do better because the campaign against Shokin had not started yet so there was no angst against Shokin to speak of.
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@Ramshutu
I don’t think republicans are monolithic - but they are far more homogenous than the democrats. With Maga republicans even more so. On the maga side, in most cases that grouping is typically in pretty keen lockstep in a way democrats could only dream of. There is an complete multi-way bun fight if you suggest what Colour tie to wear between progressives, centrists, and activists.
The fact that you have a separate name for "MAGA republicans" puts trial to the claim of homogeneity.
The fact of the matter is there are three major popular factions in the republican party and four bases of power.
The factions are: MAGA, traditionalist/religious, and liberal.
I'm a liberal, that's what I dream of, that's my moral compass. These people aren't held together by a shared moral vision, although there is some broad agreement that people should be left to their own devices via localism.
They are held together by a shared perception of reality. They are united by the institutions they don't trust any more. They are held together by an enemy they feel but cannot see.
The forth base of power are the oligarchs, they rise to the top and they are in the democratic party to an even greater degree. They have no moral vision besides power, they want to manipulate the popular perceptions of reality. As far as the right-tribe can tell what they want is war! war! war!
The right-tribe calls them the "deep state", it used to be called "the military industrial complex", and the republican party used to be its primary home when it started two wars in Iraq and passed the patriot act. Back then most of the liberals were democrats. ACLU, Tim Pool types, Dave Rubin types. They questioned narratives about necessary war. They questioned secret courts. They questioned the integrity of intelligence agencies spying on everybody.
Not any more, the deep state forgot the working class; left em to rot, Trump did what they did not believe possible and overnight they lost all control of the republican party. Six years later democrats cheer wars, cheer secret courts, cheer opaque unaccountable federal 'cops'.
This shift was accomplished by changing the narrative. The liberals who are left in the democratic party are the gullible, the ones who left are the informed. The left-tribe is united by their shared trust in institutions which have one by one been subverted by the racial collectivism of BLM and the sexual collectivism of the LGBTQ+++ cult. Those cults have significant overlap, notice how they have created a joint flag.
Antifa wants to watch the world burn, like all communists they think the world is naturally perfect and if they destroy the artificial impediments to its perfection things will improve.
The third popular faction on the left, as I said, are the gullible. It's hard to tell how many of them there are, but probably more than the other two combined. In either case the whole tribe believes what the oligarchs of the deep state want them to believe and that means everything else they believe doesn't really matter.
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@sadolite
Is that what I am? A "Right Triber"
Sure looks that way.
And all along I have despised the Republican Party all parties for that matter.
Yes but that's not what I mean. I can tell from the things you believe which tribe's narrative's you hear. Politics isn't about what you think should be the case anymore, it's about what you think is the case. That's why it's crumbling.
Fuck all your left right dullard shit.
That won't make it go away.
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You know what I've noticed around here. Anytime a right-triber makes a thread the first five responses are right-tribers and any time a left-triber makes a threat the first five responses are left-tribers.
There are like 10 regular posters on here and even with so few it's oil and water.
Anyway there are very very few pure STDs (as in only realistically transfered by sex) because viruses don't care about why you're transferring fluids.
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@Ramshutu
However, I can for example, point to Trump specifically reaction to two individual Michael’s. Sussman, and Flynn.
That doesn't really fit the bill. People of course are going to have disparate reactions to disparate cases. We're talking about reversing full generalizations.
For instance BLM didn't see the Floyd video (where he wasn't murdered), and go "this specific cop is a problem" they went "ACAB", systemic problem; abolish the whole thing.
The problem with reckless emotional generalizations if of course that you're probably wrong. People reacted as if they were talking about all police everywhere, which most weren't. Most were just talking about police in their deep blue urban hellscapes shaped by sixty years of democrat policy. People in a polity of course have a right to abolish any part of their government and start again if they feel it has become so corrupt or dangerous that it cannot be reformed. At least that is the theory of the USA.
Now the MAGA crowd is saying "Abolish the DOJ" in much the same manner. They, like BLM, aren't claiming that there is no need for justice; they're saying somebody else will need to do it because there is no saving these institutions.
They did not have the opposite opinion in any recent time. In fact they have mistrusted the FBI for as long as there has been a MAGA movement. It's just getting worse.
On the other hand - you have a handful of pretty extreme - all cops are bad in everything they do - on the far left, I don’t know who they are. I haven’t heard their specific commentary on the FBI.
I bet if I paid more attention to defiant Ls I would have seen something along those lines, but alas I'm alergic to signing up to twitter so...
It’s often not the case, and is mostly projection as the broad voice you hear on the right tends to be more heterogenous than the left.
That got a giggle out of me. Hope it was intentional, so you say that people in one tribe mistakenly assume the opposing tribe is monolithic.... because you assume they're monolithic... and then you used "heterogeneous" when you clearly meant "homogeneous"
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@Ramshutu
Mmmm, differentiation between individuals. What a concept!
Alright, which "MAGA
crazies" are you talking about?
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@Ramshutu
the FBI are so toast this November.MAGA crazies: The FBI are Biden’s Gestapo, they need to be defunded, it’s politically corrupt and can’t be trusted. How dare they prosecute criminals that I like.*Hunter Biden is indicted*MAGA crazies: EvErYbOdY ChAnGe PlAcEs!
I agree with this prediction.
A lot like the ACAB->"poor capitol police"/FBI is super trustworthy->back to abolishing the police
Nobody hates power, they hate power in the hands of their enemy. The only way civil war is avoided is if we slowly restore the perception that the justice system is not the enemy of any political group.
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@Double_R
I was addressing your fallacious appeal to certainty, which has become a theme in your arguments.
It is you who missed the point completely.
To the first, the check and balance is the inspector generals office who prosecuted the individual who falsified the documents.
As I anticipated, you're classing special counsel Durham as a natural check which is pure semantics. If god smote them down you would say "look the FBI is self-policing"
That was an incredibly stupid thing to lose his career over.
He was a scapegoat for a systemic problem.
And ironically, the judge said he probably would have approved the warrant anyway, which not only shows how pointless it was, it also shows how the scale of this controversy is being completely blown out of proportion.
It shows that this judge should be immediately removed from power both abstractly as a member of an unconstitutional secret court and specifically as someone who would approve a warrant to spy on a political campaign without strong evidence of treason.
(not one thing in that dossier has been proven false)
I wouldn't be surprised if that is a false claim, but how did you put it "it is frankly absurd to take that as a reliable source of information"
It wouldn't be a problem if the "intelligence community" was consistently skeptical or consistently paranoid, but they aren't. They are given the Hunter laptop and they sit on it, intentionally; and a bunch of them claim (without evidence) that it is Russian disinformation.
If a bunch of high ranking intelligence officials (present and former) had signed a letter saying the dossier is probably Russian disinformation there wouldn't be a problem. Instead:
The only connection you can draw there is that they used the document in their quest to get a warrant, that doesn't discredit anything. No one is claiming it was proven, if that were the case they wouldn't be investigating it. They used it because it corroborated the information they already had and the threats posed were serious enough to warrant investigation.
So the only connection that can be made is that it was literally used as "probable cause" in an investigation which lingered for years with overblown accusations periodically being leaked.... yea....
The last is just a claim made by a self professed Trump supporter. If that's your proof you have incredibly low standards.
If Zuckerberg is a self-professed Trump supporter our victory is imminent. Also you may not be aware that FBI agents who played critical roles in the witch-hunt investigations have been proven to be anti-Trump by text messages, to the point of suggesting that a plan existed to remove Trump before he was sworn in.
I know that's the only difference you see, that's the problem. It's a common right wing tactic to disregard context and focus only on the end result in order to make everything seem equal when they're not.
Well in case it isn't obvious I am disregarding sentences like this which are merely wordy dismissals (or ad hom if you claim they are relevant).
the intelligence is treated as serious findings rather than being blasted on CNN
Well... MSNBC at politically strategic times....
the information corroborates what the FBI already had
Or at least that's what one guy in the FBI told you.
and so the FBI takes that seriously, you see it as politicization.
Only in the full context, if a single document written by someone in contact with political opposition having no hard evidence behind it warrants two years of investigation and strategic (but essentially false) speculation then the entire democratic leadership would currently be under six or seven investigations at all times.
Only in the context of FBI agents who said they would wouldn't let Trump be president (which is apparently a conspiracy to commit insurrection by the rapidly evolving standards).
Only in the context of slaps on the wrist to agents and democratic candidates on one hand while swatting unarmed middle-aged pajama wearing men.
Only in the context of agents who have been banned from applying for warrants from secret courts due to their past political hit-jobs are allowed to continue with political hit jobs.
You see I don't ignore context.
But when a paid political operative who goes to other countries in search of political dirt on his client's opponent
He was searching for the supposed pro-democrat "interference" run out of Ukraine. He was informed of the money laundering during that investigation.
comes across a laptop handed to him by a Trump supporter weeks before a presidential election claiming to belong to the son of his political opponent, goes on TV to talk about all of the damming information found on this laptop
Which is probably true.
even as former intelligence officers warn that this has the hallmarks of Russian propaganda,
...but happened to be true...
following an election where Russian propaganda proved consequential in shaping public sentiment, results in extreme caution before accepting this information and spreading it...
The Russian propaganda being? Oh yes the real emails of the DNC and Clinton. Boy these Russian hackers are an honest bunch.
You see that as politicization.
Unequivocally.
The dossier, despite being in the FBI's hands well before the election, was never disclosed to the public or even congress until well after the results were final.
Well it is rather ridiculous in its assertions, but the political investigations (Mueller witch-hunt) were published well before the election was final:
Meanwhile the fact that Clinton was being investigated again for her emails was made public knowledge 10 days before the election and arguably handed Trump the White House.
Who made that decision?
It's not a deductive argument.
Then it is irrelevant.
Add to that the fact that Hunter was never in any legal jeapordy and claims that Biden was really motivated by personal interests competely violates Occam's razor.
The bribe and the secrecy of the corruption was in jeopardy.
you do realize that you haven't posted anything to do with "intelligence", you got news papers talking past tense about complaintsTwo of the articles I posted were published in November 2015, a month before Biden's meeting with Porshenko.Articles published by intelligence agencies?Intelligence agencies do not publish articles.
Then you cede my point.
The reversal is only being caused by your double standards. I agreed it implicated Shokin because I was being objective, later when you refused to accept the implications of the "good job" letter I pointed out the double standard.My standards have nothing to do with your position, or at least they shouldn't. If they do then it's no wonder your arguments rely on such inconsistencies and logical fallacies.
Of course they should. In deductive arguments it doesn't matter, but inductive debates are by definition a matter of relative probability.
Thresholds of doubt change everything and asymmetric thresholds compound with every layer of inference. With a sufficient number of layers even a small asymmetry could produce an argument chain that makes it seem more likely that the US army committed the holocaust instead of the SS.
Where the threshold should be is itself somewhat arbitrary, but that they must be equal to have any hope of evaluating relative probability is not.
I explained to you in detail why the letter was not what you were claiming it to be.
You explained a scenario in which the implications I drew were wrong without further evidence. Just like I explained a scenario in which the senate letter did not have the implications you drew without further evidence.
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@Double_R
Did the laptop come encrypted and you know for a fact that the key was only given to you? If the answer is "No" then it could all be fake. Because of this I know that claims of "russian hackers" are guesses. There is no such thing as leaving evidence behind that can be definitely shown to not be intentionally planted frame job.There is also no such thing as words spoken or written that can definitely be shown to not be a lie, so if you're information is coming from words it can all be faked.
That is perhaps more true as technology is advancing, but there was a time when an ink pen was almost impossible to undo and a contract with a signature represented something exceedingly difficult to fake, same with an audio recording.
That is profoundly different from rewritable memory.
So given the fact that the chain of custody includes his hands and as I pointed out does show signs of tampering
You didn't understand the implications of what I said, there is no such thing as a "sign of tampering" that could not have been placed there intentionally. I might just download this cache to see what is being talked about, but if it's "last edit date" metadata that can be caused by opening with a less than perfect editor even if you didn't change anything.
it is frankly absurd to take that as a reliable source of information.
No more absurd than taking some people at their word but not others.
On the one hand we have a federal law enforcement institution whose most basic principal is to remain apolitical, with checks and balances, career employees who have been hired under and worked for democratic and republican administrations, and where every piece of communication is subject to subpoeana and congressional oversight.
Sounds so good when you say it, unfortunately it's a propaganda poster. There were no checks and balances to prevent the fabrication of evidence submitted to FISA courts, there was no check and balance to prevent a single document commissioned by a paid political operative from generating literal years of controversy intentionally prolonged and enlarged by the FBI, there was no check and balance to prevent agents from preempting the laptop story (and thus running deeply afoul of the 1st amendment).
Every piece of communication is subject to subpoena except every one that they might claim relates to an "ongoing investigation", and gee they decide when an investigation is over.
Congressional oversight? Have you looked at what happens during those oversight sessions? It's not pretty, it's congressmen and women (from one side of the isle) shouting that the FBI can't be trusted and the FBI representative saying essentially "Ok boss" over and over again.
Your theory does not match the evidence.
On the other hand you have a paid political operative.
The only difference I see is that Trump's paid political operative works alone and Clinton's paid political operative can throw a snowball on the hill and the FBI turns it into a boulder.
But you think these two are even.
No I think the FBI is far far more dangerous and dishonest.
Even republican politicians recognize how dumb it is to talk about the FBI as some purely politicized institution
It's dumb to think the non-political parts of it matter to this discussion. When you use the FBI badge your actions reflect on the FBI and that's exactly how it should be. People given the privilege to kidnap you without consequences should have a zero tolerance policy for dishonor.
the director of the FBI was appointed by Donald Trump
If I was one of these Trump cultist you talk about that would imply that I must approve of him, but I don't. Trump did a terrible job draining the swamp.
The fall from grace is certainly remarkable, but it's what we have observed from him.
It's what you've been told to believe.
The fact that he enthusiasticly supports the most childish, ignorant, narcissistic, fascistic, petulant, vile president we've even seen is bad enough.
No racist? Well maybe there is hope for you.
and when and under oath about false claims he made publicly stated it wasn't house job to fact check information before putting it out there.
Funny, that's also what your mainstream journalist say when someone sues them for liable or slander.
You can feel the same way about the FBI all day, but you do not have the facts to back it up.
I keep repeating the facts and more keep coming as we speak (talking about Zuckerberg reveal), there will be more in the future provided they don't go full Hilary on their own classified documents.
The obvious go to in response for those on the political right is the Carter Page controversy
That is one of the boulders in the mountain, yes.
it was also discovered through an internal investigation which just makes my point about checks and balances.
Are you call the Durham probe an internal investigation? That's pure semantics, and I'm uninterested.
Once again, this is about Joe Biden's reason for pushing for Shokin's firing. The emails don't merely fit into the puzzle, they are the line that connects the dots.
They are another dot, before the laptop plenty of people recognized that it beggared belief that Biden was the prime mover in removing a prosecutor who moved against the corrupt foreign company where his very American son was inexplicably 'employed' with an absurd 'wage'.
This is a reversal of the burden of proof. You are the one claiming without evidence that Biden engineered this, so the burden is on you to provide evidence for that claim. The fact that we cannot disprove your baseless assertion does not validate your argument.
My assertions are far from baseless and were in fact the conclusion of a strong argument. The only reason I engaged with your claims of preexisting motivations was because it was a necessary component of your claim that Biden could not have been motivated by personal corruption.
The only reason I engaged with that claim was that it was deductive and would have beaten the strong argument from circumstantial evidence.
Your deductive argument failed, you cannot rule out personal motivation or even rule out the possibility that Biden engineered the anti-Shokin movement. Thus the circumstantial evidence retains its throne.
So, no the burden of proof is not reversed.
you do realize that you haven't posted anything to do with "intelligence", you got news papers talking past tense about complaints and a letter from senators which is extraordinarily vague.Two of the articles I posted were published in November 2015, a month before Biden's meeting with Porshenko.
Articles published by intelligence agencies?
We've already been through the Senate letter, you've already acknowledged they were talking about Shokin. You can stop with the bad faith reversals.
The reversal is only being caused by your double standards. I agreed it implicated Shokin because I was being objective, later when you refused to accept the implications of the "good job" letter I pointed out the double standard.
Inductive arguments are never air-tight, but if you allow unequal standards of evidence they are even less reliable.
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@K_Michael
and not clicking on sketchy links.
... and if you do click on sketchy links do not execute anything you download. It's really not that hard these days.
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@ebuc
The other side is saying the same things. When the talking stops and the voting is mistrusted the fighting starts. I would hate to go to war wondering if I could have done my part to prevent it by not cutting people off and dismissing them as beyond the pale.
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@Public-Choice
It is the arguments and furnishings of evidence, and the methodologies used to arrive at the conclusions in the evidence, that count. Not who says them.
Exactly.
I've heard a great many experts state things that are fundamentally wrong about the topics they are experts on.
Then were they really experts? What makes an expert?
Smart people say stupid things sometimes. That doesn't mean they're stupid nor does it mean the stupid thing is smart. They were not smart in that moment.
An expert can be an expert, but that does not mean everything they say is expert.
Thus the only definition for "expert" of use to a rational and virtuous person is "the one with the best arguments", and that depends on the context of the moment.
Or in other words, appealing to authority is a fallacy no less than appealing to popularity or appealing to force. They are all proxies of various kinds, proxies for the best argument and proxies don't beat the real deal. In almost any other context using the fuzzy logic of proxies could be forgiven, but not in debate. Debate is the one time to set aside as much fuzzy logic as can be set aside given the subject.
It's like relying on a weather forecast for the current moment instead of looking out the window. Raindrops falling on your head beat a theory that there wouldn't be any precipitation. The theory of authority is that they are right because they have the best argument, a debate is where the best argument should be brought forth.
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This is the technological equivalent of applying leeches. You don't understand what's happening, you're just doing something that seems to have an effect sometimes and now you're ascribing magical anti-malware (exorcist) properties to it.
Intermittent DNS and IP routing failures are almost always caused by DHCP refresh configuration errors (mismatches).
Just like a combustion engine's faulty carburetor might be "fixed" by hitting it with a hammer you can force DHCP refresh by unplugging the router; but now you're telling people to hit your combustion engines with a hammer regularly to keep the gremlins from nesting.
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@oromagi
The AP News does not give a single fuck about what emotion you are feeling
I doubt that very much.
they are accountable to the thousands of news outlets who purchase their stories for the facts alone and they can't afford to get their facts wrong or the customer moves on to Reuters.
Oh their customers will move on at the first whiff of 'alternative facts' huh? Now why would they do that? The customer of the customer perhaps?
It comes down to just what sort of people you think follow AP vs follow that hypothetical youtube personality.
No major news outlet leans heavier on AP than FOX
and to you this proves what?
FOX is little more than AP News plus anodyne white ladies reading the opinion manufactured for them by right-wing politicians.
Yes they are missing those 'real' journalists like Stelter, Cuomo, Acosta, Lemon, and the greatest journalist of them all Rachael Maddow.
I do a little more than just cut & paste. I clean up all the captions and links to other stories and ads and when I'm to lazy I try to reformat the text into with an extra line between graphs for improved legibility. I'm trying to make it so you can absorb the relevant facts in 1 min read rather than sitting through a 30 minute YouTube pundit.
As long as you feel appreciated...
The idea is to start a conversation from a fact-based place rather than starting with off with propaganda and lies and try to correct backwards to truth.
With that attitude your conversation will necessarily involve only those people who trust your source, which could be your goal; but don't shut the curtains and act surprised there are people on the other side.
I can easily see why such practice would make you feel uncomfortable.
Why is that?
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@ebuc
If we post something invalid, then please identify, otherwise your just blowing hot air. :--()
Well whenever oromagi is copy pasting AP he's usually safe from outright falsehoods, they are professional propagandists over there and know exactly how to program an impression without making the claim themselves.
For instance a single line "Here are top takeaways of what the document revealed:" covers the ass, and they can go on for pages asserting things that may or may not be true as far as they know and if ever challenged say "well that's what the FBI said"
It's amazing how useful it is to refrain from investigating anything yourself, that's why they cut all the investigative journalism from their organizations. If you never claim to know anything or claim anything you assert was "pure opinion" that's apparently an airtight defense. Alex Jones need only have said "somebody told me Sandy Hook was a false flag"
That's why you went:
my hats off to his time and efforts to seek out truth and lay waste to the Trumpet cultist false narratives.
No narrative has been laid waste and even if a narrative was contradicted by the assertions FBI people who perceive a witch-hunting FBI are unlikely to consider that a debunking of the narrative.
"The government has investigated itself and found that it did nothing wrong and that everything it does is justified" - ooooh wow, TRUTH!
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@ebuc
Oromagi sure knows lot of political stuff, my hats off to his time and efforts to seek out truth and lay waste to the Trumpet cultist false narratives.
He's copy pasting AP articles for the most part, which I suppose qualifies him as a mainstream journalist these days.
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@Greyparrot
This is unlikely to be true
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@oromagi
sorry, I was still writing my correction when that came in.
I regret making an insult out of the possibility of a mistake.
All of your remarks this morning were addressed to David Jefferson's blog, not the NAS paper, right?
I attributed the quotes to him because that's the person who was marked as the author of the page you linked to. The text I responded to was from your quote and your quote contained a copy-paste from pages 103 - 105 of the NAS article.
David Jefferson used full paragraph quotes from the NAS document while in no way marking it as a quote. Such as "The use of blockchains in an election scenario would do little to
address the major security requirements of voting, such as voter
verifiability. The security contributions offered by blockchains are
better obtained by other means. In the particular case of Internet
voting, blockchain methods do not redress the security issues associated
with Internet voting."
To people who are focused on authority following back links wrapped in other links might seem a worthwhile endeavor, but I engage with arguments. The only link I agree has a place in a useful debate is a link to hard data. If you had posted the link alone I would have probably ignored it, and wisely so because a person who cannot make his own arguments in the first place will likely not be able to respond in a coherent way.
I was just pointing out that puts people like Josh Benaloh, Senior Cryptographer at Microsoft Research and Ronald Rivest (NAS/NAE), at Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology in that ignorant or corrupt bucket.
Whoever wrote the NAS article carefully couched their claims to mislead by giving the impression of a problem without claiming there is a problem. For instance:
https://doi.org/10.17226/25120 pg 105:Blockchains do not provide the anonymity often ascribed to them.
https://doi.org/10.17226/25120 pg 105: Blockchains do not provide ballot secrecy.
This article was written in 2018, Monero was launched in 2014. An expert in cryptography could not possibly have missed that, and when I say "expert" I mean an expert. I'm not talking about the position they may have been given or the degrees they have been assigned.
So there is again a dichotomy, the author in 2018 either knows damn well that ballot secrecy and anonymity can be statistically guaranteed by the a blockchain system designed to have that feature, in which case this is misleading (intellectually corrupt) or they didn't know that in which case they are ignorant.
A truly ignorant writer would have made more mistakes, some of the mistakes would directly contradict reality instead of deception by omission. See also:
https://doi.org/10.17226/25120 In particular, if malware on a voter’s device alters a vote before it ever reaches a blockchain, the immutability of the blockchain fails to provide the desired integrity, and the voter may never know of the alteration.
What a strategic word "may", yes they may never check; but a properly designed system would allow them to check.
That is not to say that 3RU7AL is incorrect about demonstrably false statements:
https://doi.org/10.17226/25120. While it is true that blockchains offer observability and immutability, in a centralized election scenario, observability and immutability may be achieved more simply by other means.
This is equivocation or it is false. Equivocation if the "observability and immutability" referred to in the later part of the sentence is different from the observability and immutability that a properly designed voting blockchain system offers. False if they mean the same thing.
Now you seem to believe that what you've quoted qualifies as "people who don't immediately agree" with the system I described, but if I ran into one of these guys in a coffee shop they would almost certainly claim that they were not thinking about the system I described.
If after giving the description I have in this thread they still made these allusions, then my dichotomy would hold. If they were a Senior Cryptographer at Microsoft I would ask how they conned that job, well no I would maneuver them into displaying their ignorance to be sure and then I would not ask because I don't like to embarrass people without cause.
There is no claimed authority that I will ever place above a sound argument. I know too much history to have faith in social norms and what you find so compelling about the a job title is a social norm. You call it arrogance, and so would the priest trying to sacrifice young children. I will endure being called arrogant for the sake of reason.
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