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@oromagi
except that the paper you quoted contains demonstrably false claimsI did not quote anything. I am 100% confident that you did not read the National Academy of Science's report.
You didn't quote anything? What the hell is that supposed to mean?
You linked to an article by one person but you advertised as "3) The National Academy of Sciences" :
Here is a link to that actual NAS document: https://nap.nationalacademies.org/read/25120/chapter/7#103
You sure as hell did quote from something, and if 3RU7AL was mistaken about it coming from NAS that would only be due to you misleading him about who you quoted. Above you said "I'm more likely to prove persuasive .", clearly honor and truth isn't particularly persuasive given the history of politicians, or perhaps like Biden you've forgotten the first page of this thread.
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@3RU7AL
the IN-PERSON verification is EXACTLY THE SAME as the current IN-PERSON verification already used at polling places
Which is not perfect but much better than mail in.
The in-person verification is based on the accuracy of voter registration; i.e. the assumption that people who aren't going to vote will remove themselves from the voter roles.
In my county name, address, and date of birth will get you a ballot; but obviously in person means you would have to go to different polling places lest you be recognized by the poll watchers/judges.
So if you want to cheat in person (without inside help) you need to know name, address, apparent gender, and age of a registered voter who probably won't vote in any other poll district.
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No evidence of racism, never will be any proof that the documents were classified at the time of leaving the white-house.
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@oromagi
1.) I didn't say "stupid" I said "ignorant", you for instance are probably not stupid but you are ignorant and/or biased (or at least doing a good job of conveying that impression)fine. Let's agree that you fallaciously poisoned the well by ad homming any who disagree with you as ignorant or corrupt.
Let's agree that you pretending that was the case constitutes ceding my original point.
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@Double_R
All of your evidence is coming from the NY Post and the Daily mail. These are not news organizations, they're tabloids
Uh huh, but in this case we can side step that old tired game of pressing F to doubt the other side's blogs because you admit:
And the source of all of their claims comes from hunter Biden's laptop drive
but you go on to say
which had been shown to be copied and very possibly tampered with dozens of times over.
I know more about how software actually works than 99.99% of people. Let me tell you an absolute truth that Hollywood and your vaunted mainstream media won't tell you because they don't know. It's also something your vaunted intelligence agencies won't tell you because it implies that they are simultaneously impotent and very dangerous.
Anything that is not encrypted is inherently falsifiable! because writable storage is rewritable.
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.
After scowering the internet, I could only find two of the controversial emails circulating were externally verified.
The only way to verify an unencrypted email file is to see that it was sen or received through or by a system you trust. The emails are corroborated, this list includes many that recipients and senders corroborate.
This lends credence to the cache, it does not prove the cache. Nothing will prove the cache without independently corroborating every part of the cache.
The latter merely showed that they had dinner. That tells us nothing nor is there anything remarkable about someone being thrilled at the chance to meet the VPOTUS.
Hey, you ever thought about owning your very own bridge?
So at worst this shows that Hunter was trying to get his dad to go along with the deal and his dad refused.
Bribe wasn't big enough maybe?
So does this mean all of the emails are faked? No, it means we have no reason to take it at face value and given that this laptop ended up inn the hands of Rudy Giuliani, it's crazy to think they wouldn't tamper with the material to put it out there given that right wing media couldn't care less about verifying this stuff before reporting on it.
The fact that you think Giuliani touching it discredits it but FBI touching it doesn't do the same is a testament to the unbridgeable tribal gap that has already formed in the USA. Giuliani was a famous anti-crime mayor of one of the leading cities of the world, but to you he's some sort of conniving minion who wouldn't think twice about fabricating evidence.
Think about that fall from grace in your opinion, now imagine those same feelings about the FBI. That's how the other side feels.
Anyway we have every reason to take them at face value, they fit perfectly into the puzzle. Hunter Biden has no other business running around the world being paid huge sums by foreigners. That's what circumstantial evidence is. Individually it can all be explained away, collectively the number of coincidences required render it unlikely to be innocent.
It also is corroborated by testimony of a sacred whistleblower [chimes sound] Bobulinski, Of course I always forget that whistleblowers are only infallible when they're alleging something bad about Trump or Trump affiliates.
You act as if no one noticed a thing until Joe Biden came out and told the world "look over there", then suddenly the world agreed. That is just cartoonish and there is no evidence Biden lead the world in this consensus.
I really can't think the words "world in this consensus" without snickering, once again a few specifically interested appointed bureaucrats does not constitute "international consensus". If I used that phrase I should have put it in quotes.
I'm not the one with a burden of proof to show that Biden engineered the whole thing, I'm simply saying it's possible and you have failed to rule it out which should have been quite possible if real complaints preceded Biden's beef. You were the one who originally asserted that there was an a pre-existing call so as to rule out personal interest for Biden. It worked together with your other assertion that Biden did not know his money laundering was in danger.
Your argument fell without both premises. If we could know for sure that the anti-shokin sentiment was not created or amplified by Biden it would be a dent in the circumstantial evidence against him because that would mean it's a coincidence that firing Shokin benefited Biden and that Biden had a preexisting excuse for demanding the firing.
That cannot be established, or at least no one has in this thread established it. Before I counted the coincidences, even the singular coincidence may not have been a coincidence if Biden stirred up the anti-shokin movement. Even with the coincidence it has been established by the absurd nature of your alternate theory that Shokin was a threat to the money laundering, although probably via simple investigation (as he claimed) and not a panicked attempt to frame someone for the crime they happened to have been actually committing already.'
The meeting he had with Porshenko was private, that's why no one knew about it until Biden told the world about it two years later.
You can't keep your story straight, in order for Shokin to take revenge on Slovchesky as a proxy for Biden he must have known Biden was the one who made it happen. So by "no one" you mean Shokin.
I can't argue against your faith in institutions, faith has no supporting arguments.It's not faith, it's common sense. It's basic human nature for people who work with intelligence and make entire careers out of discerning truth from fiction to resist narratives being fed to them that they cannot verify. It's also common sense that intelligence comes from those working in the field, not from the people they are feeding their intelligence to.
Without ceding the slightest trust for "the intelligence community": 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.
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@oromagi
When Dream pontificates a fairly controversial opinion in the blockchain community and declares "only the stupid or corrupt could possibly disagree" that is a classic "poisoning the well" form of abusive ad hominem. One excellent retort is to put some well recognized example in the position of being poisoned. That exposes the poisoner as the fallacious.
1.) I didn't say "stupid" I said "ignorant", you for instance are probably not stupid but you are ignorant and/or biased (or at least doing a good job of conveying that impression)
2.) In order for my dichotomy to be recognized as a fallacy it has to be advanced as a substitute for a real argument. That did not happen. When presented with claims and some very informal supporting statements I did not simply repeat the dichotomy and dismiss the source as "ignorant or corrupt", I found the incorrect assertions and where there was supporting statements I debunked them.
I argued against the argument, not the man, when there was an argument. Yet the dichotomy remains true.
A much better candidate for poisoning the well is disparaging comments against the man when specifically refusing to advance other arguments.... say something like this:
"But only a Trump voter or other cult member would refuse to consult
expert opinion on the subject at hand. That's just anti-critical
thinking."
after specifically saying: "In any case, I was not offering an argument of any kind."
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@oromagi
We have already demonstrated that you don't understand that an appeal to authority must be shown to be irrelevant to thesis in order to be fallacious.
You have done no such thing. At best you have appealed to authority to conclude that appealing to an authority is not a fallacy, which is ironic and reminds me of trying to reason with a megachurch attendee.
You wouldn't ignore your doctor's opinion regarding your CAT scan on the grounds that he is an authority on the subject.
No I wouldn't, being a claimed authority is not grounds to reject assertions. That would simply be an inverted appeal to authority and fallacious for the exact same reason: The truth value of the assertion does not depend on the asserter.
I did not reject anything because it came from a source you find authoritative, I simply recognize that what you consider an authority constitutes at best an inductive argument and even that inductive argument sputters into deep weakness the moment that purported authority asserts something which is known by strong or sound argument to be false.
I do not care if Alex Jones or Albert Einstein said the 2 + 2 = 5. It doesn't, and I can prove it so I don't need to rely on authority.
In any case, I was not offering an argument of any kind.
Already noted.
I was merely illustrating your arrogance.
When you went out and copy pasted the first google result you liked into this thread you knew you were ignorant but you still asserted (by proxy) with confidence. That is worse than arrogance.
Speaking of which I know you're responding to 3RU7AL here but since you have annoyed me:
If power outages and DoS attacks can substantially suppress voting what's to keep Roger Stone from calculating exactly which Democratic strongholds need to be out of service in Wisconsin and Georgia for a couple of hours to guarantee a MAGA win and then ordering some DoS or well-timed transformer explosions?
Don't worry, I'm sure Roger Stone could have a bunch of government agencies claim the election was the freest and fairest in history if he could plan and execute all that. Plus that's a conspiracy theory, we know conspiracies don't exist right?
If voters can prove how they voted from their phone, doesn't that increase the opportunities for coercion and vote-selling? Say, Milo Yianopoulos goes onto a traditionally liberal voting campus and puts the word out that he'll give $20 to anybody who can prove they voted for Trump? How would we detect this kind of vote-selling? Say an abusive husband demands that his wife prove that she voted for Trump when she comes home?
As opposed to mail in voting where anyone can take a photo of their ballot (or a ballot)?
Wouldn't it be true that any election official with access to the secure lockbox would be able to check voter's ballot? Would that kind of vulnerability violate voters' Constitutional right to anonymity?
As opposed to mail in voting where PII is packed in the same envelope as a marked ballot?
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@oromagi
I just thought it was funny that you proclaimed "There are two types of people who don't immediately agree {with me]1.) People who don't understand the technology and distrust those who do.2.) People who fear democracy, and deep down know their interests and ideals are best served through fraudand The National Academy of Sciences is so obviously neither.
If this is your final response, I am, as anticipated annoyed.
The dichotomy holds true, NAS or not. I need my speech on appeals to authority in a .txt so I can easily find it, it comes up so often.
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@thett3
I don’t see how you could possibly win that debate. Even if you can win that the vote was fraudulent there isn’t a constitutional mechanism for overturning it two years later. As far as I know states can award electors however they choose, even through a rigged election
Look at the resolution "should", should refers to the ideal; what ought to happen. It makes no claims of how.
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@oromagi
David Jefferson: Blockchains do not provide the anonymity often ascribed to them.* In the particular context of elections, voters need to be authorized as eligible to vote and as not having cast more than one ballot in the particular election. Blockchains do not offer means for providing the necessary authorization.Blockchains do not provide ballot secrecy. If a blockchain is used, then cast ballots must be encrypted or otherwise anonymized to prevent coercion andvote-selling.
and blockchains can't make you a PB&J sandwich either! Of course a computer system isn't going to magically differentiate citizens from non-citizens.
This blockchain system would be designed around non-fungible vote tokens, one for every type of ballot, issued by the government running the election.
Of course if it was merely that it would be no better than mail-in (well faster and easier to count-audit but not fundamentally fixed).
The issuing of vote tokens could/should be secured via biometric hashing and video recorded. Note: A biometric hash is the reduction of things like fingerprints and eye scans to a single number with rounding controlling repeatability.
So the gov publishes an election (which defines ballot options) to the blockchain, they also publish the public ID of that election so that everyone knows which election is the real one.
Everyone who wishes to vote registers, that is they provide the simple information that is currently used to 'verify' a vote during in-person polling. Name, address. This creates a record on the blockchain, it need not be encrypted. Names and addresses are not now nor do they ever need to be secret.
They are then issued a list of private pre-verification tokens [PVT] (one for each ballot, lets focus on one for the sake of grammar). The government seals a previously collected biometric hash as well as any other typically secret(ish) PII that can be thought of. Social security number, driver's license, etc... In order to vote every person must have had an appointment where the biometric hash was initially recorded.
"seal" means that the government can decrypt that information in the PVT, but the person they gave it too (and the general blockchain observers) cannot.
The citizen, who has only given name and address so far, must take his/her PVTs to a voting booth. The voting booth is a sound/EM/light proof structure with room for only one person. They give fingerprints, have eye scans, give all the PII the PVT header requires. Then they encrypt it with an identity private key [IPK] + current date, this is not the same as the ultimate private key so that during audits PII can be revealed without revealing ballot choices. A third copy is wrapped in a key specific to the booth.
They are video recorded while doing this, obviously not everything they input, but their face.
The resulting token contains three sets of PII, the one the government provided from the original appointment, the one recorded in the booth encrypted by the IPK + date in the voting, and finally the one recorded in the booth encrypted by the booth key. This token is recorded in the blockchain. An encryption algorithm can be chosen such that the three sets can be compared without decryption. Thus the public can see every attempt at issuing a vote token and they can see if the PII matched or not.
Now people make mistakes sometimes putting in data, and sometimes there are glitches in biometric scans. These can be minimized by various means in the booth but it will sometimes happen. So mismatched PII is not instant proof of fraud, but only a matching set can be used as a voting token; so they will have to try again. Every attempt is recorded both in the block chain and by video.
The video is not stored on the blockchain, this would obviously be infeasible; however a hash of the video is so that the fully copy of the video which the government may host (but must be publicly accessible for a certain amount of time) can be verified as the same. Keep in mind the name and address information is available unencrypted so the public always has access to name, address, and video of attempted vote token issuing.
It would be wise to have law enforcement monitoring the block chain when the polls are opened, people trying too many times to create a valid voting token could be a sign of intentional disruption or a really stupid attempted fraud.
The government has the ability to decrypt the PII entered via the booth key so they could follow up on investigations, however the general public could identify the videos where PII mismatches occurred and follow up with name and address information.
A fully matching verification token can then be combined with the UPVK on the voter's device to create a 'spendable' ballot token. At this point a valid voting token assures beyond any reasonable doubt either the identity of the person in the booth or the ability to discard the vote due to wearing a ski-mask or something.
They could be allowed to leave with the voting token assigned to their 'account', however they could then try to sell that token. Once they leave all of the verification is attached to their account and the token. They could not transfer the token to another account but they could simply give their account info out for money.
Thus I would recommend that they are forced to vote in the booth in the same session as verification. So opening the booth door will instantly cause the booth to issue an expiration notice to the blockchain which would cause any attempt to post the ballot token afterwards to be publicly identified fraud and it would not be counted.
As for bribery of the sort where someone is paid (or compensated or coerced) to go vote a certain way, that's technically thought crime and there is no way to deal with it except good police work. However the kind of bribery that is possible now is orders of magnitude less difficult, simply show up to a poor person's house and say you'll give them $50 for their mail in ballot.
David Jefferson: While E2E-V voting methods may provide the necessary cryptographic tools for this, ordinary blockchain methods do not.It may be possible to employ blockchains within an election system by addressing the security issues associated with blockchains through the use of additional mechanisms (such as, for example, those provided by E2Everifiability), but the credit for addressing such problems would lie with the additional mechanisms, not with the use of blockchains
I don't care if you call it the Democrator 4000 HD+ Black Edition, it's possible to have a publicly auditable and secret ballot system at the same time and the key missing ingredient was the collection of cryptographic strategies referred to as "block chains"
oromagi: and how their use of bitcoin, despite the “perceived anonymity” of blockchains, was then exploited by investigators to identify the operatives
Monero
P.S. I also remember when Russian pirates were blackmailing all those companies including Colonial Pipeline in the Spring of '21 and hearing how the FBI was able to go into Russian networks and retrieve millions of dollars paid to the pirates in bitcoin- theoretically, that's supposed to be impossible but the US did it in like 48 hours, then they were able to trace the pirates and give the names to Putin who had them arrested in January.
If they got the private keys of the pirates they could simply transfer the money back. Otherwise it is impossible and if they claim they did it without the private keys they are lying. I also believe they lied about breaking the encryption on an iphone.
They aren't stupid, if there is a system that defeats them they don't tell the world it defeated them; they say it was "SOOO EASYYY" to scare opponents away from using it and into using systems with back doors (like paid VPNs).
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@oromagi
There are two types of people who don't immediately agree:1.) People who don't understand the technology and distrust those who do.2.) People who fear democracy, and deep down know their interests and ideals are best served through fraud3) The National Academy of Sciences
I'll answer quoted sections but if you're in #1.) and can't engage with my responses it will annoy me. People who know they can't debate a subject should not be throwing around links as a substitute.
The first obvious error on my first read through is the assumption that "blockchain" means one and only one thing, I described a system that was not some kind of carbon copy of say bitcoin but it is no less a blockchain for it. A tank is no less a vehicle for the armor. I will point out how the system I refer to indeed does what I say it would.
David Jefferson: 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.
3RU7AL's commentary is adequate summary, I'll expand:
First the absolute error, the voter could very well know of the error (as 3RU7AL said) because he/she would have an ultimate private view key. You have spoken else where (almost smugly) of how you can lookup your 'ballot' online.
The ballot is the ledger of your voting choices, it is not a letter purported to establish identity sent with a mail-in-ballot. It is not a receipt or some electronic version of an "I voted" sticker.
So I asked you, and you have no answered, can you see who you voted for?
If you can see who you voted for that does not mean that was how the vote was counted. They could be seeing your request and sending you back HTML that makes you feel secure that has nothing to do with the actual tally. It also means that they have a database of people and who they voted for, if that database were leaked it would represent the total destruction of ballot secrecy. It's mere existence in a form decryptable by government officials is a violation of the principle of a secret ballot.
Finally it gives you no confidence that the votes recorded for others are true and legitimate.
To fix each of these problems one at a time leads to a system which falls under the definition of "blockchain".
1.) To allow you and only you to see your ballot (who you voted for) you generate your own ultimate private view key [UPVK] (I'm saying ultimate because this system would have multiple types of view keys). You use that to generate your vote, and only that key can be used to decrypt the full ballot. You can make that private key public by choice or (theoretically) by letting malware on your computer, but that does not remove your ability to verify your ballot.
If you installed malware which basically disguised itself as the voting software and it changed your vote as you sent it, it would simply be a matter of taking your UPVK to a clean machine and checking. The government could provide clean machines and millions of other citizens would also have the software.
A system for ballot retraction could be included, but it is unlikely to be heavily used because:
2.) Malware is a defeated disease for moderately informed computer user. By attack vector almost all malware originated from overly broad API access of JS to the underlying operating system. They have been plugging holes for a while and at this point they have finally (and wisely) decided that there ought to be no bridge. Modern browsers allow the retrieval of some information but do not allow the unsolicited download of executables or the unmanaged manipulation of files.
The only way to get malware now is to choose to download some form of executable (.exe, .bat, etc... ) and then double click on it. Being delivered a trojan horse executable when you try to download a useful program is of course a problem, but one that has also been solved using checksums and HTTPS + certs.
To put this in concrete terms, if the government runs a website where you can download the voting software and it is HTTPS with a .gov then that is where the executable came from.
Don't trust the federal government? Fine get it from a source you do trust, a local government, a bunch of anti-government militia, the BLM IT division. Doesn't matter, whoever you trust can compile the code and they're all looking at the same files.
So you see the accusation "the voter may not know of the alteration" is true of paper ballots and uniquely not true of a properly designed decentralized cryptographic voting system.
David Jefferson: 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. Election officials need only, for example, post digitally signed versions of relevant election-related reports for public observation and download.
This statement is made from a profound ignorance of the vulnerabilities of the current system. Hourly totals may provide evidence of certain kinds of fraud but in no way do they solve the problem. This is akin to suggesting the adding of sprinkles to solve the salmonella in the ice cream.
The dangerous fraud is people fraudulently requesting (or just collecting) ballots which they fraudulently fill out or order to have filled out. That is why mail in voting was such a big deal. That is why "all of a sudden" everybody was concerned about fraud, because all of a sudden an unauditable form of fraud became tens of thousands of times more accessible.
David Jefferson: Ballots stored on a blockchain are electronic. While paper ballots are directly verifiable by voters, electronic ballots (i.e., ballots on a blockchain) can be more difficult to verify.
This is the opposite of reality, a giant pile of paper ballots under seal tape, lock, and key is not accessible to the public at all. Its counting is left to machines and officials individually approved by local bureaucrats.
This however is missing the point. A giant pile of ballots is count-auditable, that is; with enough political pressure one can have a third party come in and count the pile. That is more or less what happened in Arizona. Some foul play was indicated, but focusing on this form of audit is (like assertions about dominion machines connecting to Venezuela) a red herring.
It's like saying "Look, we proved the money wasn't printed with an inkjet on office depot paper so therefore it's not counterfeit"
Blockchain totals are truly accessible to the public, but more importantly a bio metric and video recorded issuing of voting tokens would be public origin-auditable.
David Jefferson: Software independence is not, therefore, achieved through posting ballots on a blockchain: as ballots are represented electronically, software independence may be more difficult to achieve.
It's called "open source", an article written after 2018 really shouldn't be so uninformed.
David Jefferson: The blockchain abstraction, once implemented, provides added points of attack for malicious actors. For example, blockchain “miners” or “stakeholders” (those who add items to the blockchain) have discretionary control over what items are added. Miners/stakeholders might collude to suppress votes from certain populations or regions. Furthermore, blockchain protocols generally yield results that are a consensus of the miners/ stakeholders. This consensus may not represent the consensus of the voting public. Miners/stakeholders with sufficient power might also cause confusion and uncertainty about the state of a blockchain by raising doubts about whether a consensus has been reached.
This is a common myth/fallacy about blockchains. It's often referred to as the "51% attack".
What can be accomplished by a 51% attack is confusion. What cannot be accomplished is undetected fraud.
The integrity of the blockchain is the result of the referential encryption, not consensus. Consensus is what tells you which version of the file is the complete one, but your own CPU can tell you which versions are accurate.
When in doubt a citizen, a state government, the military, congress can each trust their own "mining" and choose what to do as appropriate. As the constitution is currently written state governments can send electors based on the results of a chess tournament, so it can be presumed that the state government would select electors based on the version that their own mining agrees with. If 50,000 citizens & state military with guns can see from their own devices that the state government has chosen the incomplete blockchain and are therefore attempting to ignore votes it is incumbent on them to deal with the treason.
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Just dropped in to say you can have a secret ballot which is auditable by anyone with a computer and where the only method of fraud requires a conspiracy to issue false vote tokens, and that conspiracy could be detected by sufficient surveillance.
It's called blockchain tech, it works; combine it with with biometric hashes and a video camera in every booth and it's problem solved.
There are two types of people who don't immediately agree:
1.) People who don't understand the technology and distrust those who do.
2.) People who fear democracy, and deep down know their interests and ideals are best served through fraud
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Half of phone apps are just specialized website viewers, I would say it would thus be simpler to just get the site mobile responsive but having done that a few time I know that the CSS and HTML needs to be designed with that in mind from the start.
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@Greyparrot
Also, Trump didn't use to FBI to destroy any of his rivals despite what some of his more extremist supporters chanted.
That is very true, although it's hard to tell if that's because he didn't realize that he had to replace the whole hierarchy to do it or because he is trying to avoid a civil war.
Unfortunately the indoctrinated tribal TDS swarm haven't a clue what's going on. Their handlers so emboldened by media and big tech backing that they think they are above the 'laws of psychohistory'.
In short they saw the hand of civility reaching towards them.... and tried to rip it off with their bare teeth. Which means that everyone who said Trump made a mistake by not attacking first have been vindicated.
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@Public-Choice
I think someone on this site had a backup of forums and debates. It is a shame, a lot of good conversations were had on there. It's twitter that deserves to be forgotten.
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@Sidewalker
What we can judge, however, is his handling of classified material, as he once did with Hillary.True, and so the approprite response is "Lock him up, lock him up, lock him up"
That is strawmanning of the opposition. People do not want Hilary locked up because she made a mistake with classified materials. They want her locked up because she destroyed evidence, probably pertaining to her highly suspicious handling of Benghazi and general corruption.
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@Double_R
The money is the money paid to Hunter Biden.This conversation isn't about Hunter Biden.
Oh boy, I'm going to throw that one back in your face you can bet your bottom dollar on that. 1:10 ratio, you show that kind of inane obtuseness once and I'll route it back to you ten times.
I reject your assertion that Joe Biden somehow was in control of the opinions of all of US intelligence as well as international intelligence and even opinions within Ukraine - a premise essential to argument that the best explanation here is that Joe did what he did not because it was in the US's best interest, but to interject to save his son from an investigation that we don't even know was when going on at the time and one that wouldn't have targeted Hunter anyway.
Strawman + Reassertion
I also reject as unsupported the notion that Hunter and Joe were entangled financially. Provide the evidence.
Sometimes people start to try and sneak out of a debate they're losing by 'playing teacher' and by that I mean they give a bunch of homework hoping to exhaust their opponent. Sometimes it's more obvious than others, a sign is demands to establish well known facts.
I will go duckduckgo on this one, but I find it very suspicious that anyone does not know the evidence for this already. If you truly don't that speaks volumes to the news bubble you live in.
https://nypost.com/2022/04/09/hunter-biden-frequently-covered-family-expenses-texts-reveal/
"It’s really hard. But don’t worry, unlike pop [Joe Biden], I won’t make you give me half your salary." - Hunter Biden
"It’s really hard. But don’t worry, unlike pop [Joe Biden], I won’t make you give me half your salary." - Hunter Biden
Hunter received a series of text messages from a former agent who repeatedly urged him to come out of his hotel room and reminded him “this is linked to Celtic’s account.” “Celtic” was Joe Biden’s Secret Service code name when he was vice president.
Screenshots of the same: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9757117/Hunter-Biden-complained-half-salary-went-paying-Joes-bills.html
In a 2018 email to one his own assistants, Hunter complained that he had been shut out of his own bank account and that his father had been using it.
Before Joe left office, he was referred to as 'the big guy' and described in an email from a Ukrainian executive at Burisma which suggested he'd gotten access to him through Hunter.
Another former Hunter Biden partner, US Navy veteran Tony Bobulinski, later revealed that “the big guy” was Hunter’s dad, then the Democratic candidate for president, saying, “I have heard Joe Biden say he has never discussed his dealings with Hunter. That is false.”
The only alternative (which you suggested) required Shokin to be aware of the corruption to be plausible.Double_R: It's not the only alternative. This is a classic argument from incredulity.
It is the only alternative with supporting evidence in the same order of magnitude as the rejecting evidence which is in fact only the assertions of the replacements.
Yet, somehow, you seem to think these letters cancel each other out and show disagreement amongst US intelligence. You can only arrive at that conclusion by fundamentally ignoring both the timing of these letters as well as what they actually said.
It is the timing I relied on to say that there was no international consensus before Biden got involved and it was ALL after Hunter was laundering.
We're talking about people who actually work in US intelligence. If this is honestly how's you think the world works it's no wonder that you buy into these nonsense conspiracy theories.
I can't argue against your faith in institutions, faith has no supporting arguments.
They don't need to be stupid. They don't need to be pawns. They don't even have to be wrong, they just need to have relied on information that originated with Biden's actionsUS intelligence does not come from the Vice President, it comes from boots on the ground and makes it's way up to the executive branch. This is really basic stuff.
Sometimes it comes from the lawyers of presidential candidates and makes it's way up through intelligence agencies before being used by the executive branch to spy on politician opponents.
This is really basic stuff.
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@oromagi
Any complaint about 500 days is entirely due to Trump's lying and criminal activity on a very personally engaged basis. At any time before Aug 8th, Trump could have avoided the search and halted a criminal investigation by returning all stolen items.
Watch as this narrative crumbles to pieces bit by bit over the next two years, but by then it will be old news and oromagi will be on to new conspiracies to allege.
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@Double_R
The circumstantial evidence is overwhelming. Hunter had no skills that were of any value to burisma. Hunter did not speak Ukrainian. The only possible reason to pay Hunter a single dollar much less how much he was paid was his connections. We know from the laptop, emails, and the whistle-blowing partner that Hunter was financially entangled with his father to the point of sharing bank accounts. The "Big guy" has been fingered as Biden and contextual evidence of texts strongly supports this.Biden was the "policy maker" in Ukraine.I asked you for evidence of a money laundering case, which is what you have been claiming. Yet you seem to have forgotten the most important part... Money. An email suggesting they may have shared a bank account is not evidence of money laundering. Please connect your dots.
The money is the money paid to Hunter Biden. It's laundering because it was paid to Hunter Biden in an auditable record as opposed to an unrecorded direct bribe. The reason people Launder money is so their apologists, usually only their lawyer, but in this case politically biased persons such as yourself can tell themselves it was all legitimate.
Now which part of the premises I recounted to you reject? Do you reject that Hunter was paid the money? Do you reject that he was utterly useless in that role? Do you reject that Biden was the policy maker of a very nosy and involved US Ukraine tentacle that could very well help keep burisma out of legal trouble and getting all the permits and favours it needed? Do you reject that Hunter's financial prospects are indistinguishable from his father's?
Or do you simply choose to ignore the obvious shape these dots line up in?
The seizure does not prove that Shokin was actively investigating Burisma at the time Biden engaged in the "quid pro quo". That's the point. That's the only point here.
That's the only point you're acknowledging. The only alternative (which you suggested) required Shokin to be aware of the corruption to be plausible. That implies not only an investigation, but an investigation that is definitely dangerous to Biden's personal interests.
It is in US interests to not have its foreign policy sold for personal enrichment, it is also in US interests to know when a candidate for public office does things like that.We don't just investigate things because some guy on Fox news made an allegation. There has to be actual evidence of wrongdoing first, not merely the potential.
Like Russiagate? Like Vindman feeling "uncomfortable"? There was evidence of wrongdoing, that's why Trump asked for the investigation and that's why wrongdoing was uncovered.
And once again, the "good job letter" only spoke of his agenda and ambition, not his results, so the idea that there was some consensus that he was doing a good job is just silly.
You dismiss only the implications you don't like. I granted that the senate letter indicated displeasure with Shokin, but if I had the level of bias you here display I would have dismissed it as vague and not indicating anything about Shokin's performance. Indeed when I pointed out that he was not mentioned by name you would have none of it. You do not apply rules of evidence equally.
The first letter is as much evidence of "no problem" as the second is of "problem".
The push by the US executive branch to remove Shokin cannot be separated in time with what can only very generously be called international angst against him. Biden was the "policy maker" in Ukraine and it is therefore reasonable to believe that despite what may be written in your civics power point Biden was the US executive branch when it came to Ukraine. As such his personal motivations could very well have steered focus and his orders led to US officials (like ambassadors) pushing a narrative against Shokin.Once again, you show a remarkable disregard for basic critical thinking in favor of classic conspiracism. You presume, with no evidence nor supporting reason, that various individuals within our government and throughout the world have no idea what's going on and cannot form their own opinion, but instead defer to the ultimate conspirators to tell them what to believe.
You display a fundamental misunderstanding of political epistemology. People do indeed rely on others to tell them what to believe, often starting from a group of conspirators that could fit in one room. Once the assertion is out in the wild it is amplified and modified by those with pre-existing reasons to favor it, like a giant game of telephone.
That's where Russiagate started. That's where the holocaust started. That's where Trump's claims of election fraud started.
You disregard example after example provided to you of displeasure regarding Shokin from within our own government, around the world, and even within Ukraine, but latch onto one letter written months before the time period in question as evidence that outweighs all of it. It's confirmation bias personified.
I disregard examples of echos bouncing off the walls. I'm sorry that the world is like this and it's hard to impossible to figure out the truth sometimes, but it is the way it is.
It would be just as dishonest to claim "everyone wanted Hunter investigated", millions do now; but whether it is a legitimate desire or not it did not come from them it came from a few people, through Giuliani, through Trump.
Trump was not responding to international consensus or public outcry, how do we know? Because the outcry didn't exist before Trump's request.
You do not seem to understand the logical reason for my focus on dates and the relation to the conclusions that can be drawn. I have debated in good faith in expecting that you understood what it was you were trying to prove/show to be probable.
If you are attempting to show that Biden's quid pro quo was not motivated by his personal agenda then you cannot use anything that could be echoes of his agenda to establish a motivation.
You strawman me by implying that I remove all agency from these people who could be playing telephone. They don't need to be stupid. They don't need to be pawns. They don't even have to be wrong, they just need to have relied on information that originated with Biden's actions... and if that can't be ruled out (via timestamp) it is no more evidence of Biden's motivations than existence of "2000 mules" is evidence that Trump's motivations in claiming election fraud were not personal.
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@sadolite
@Double_R
IwantRooseveltagain: Money from the Federal treasury to the states AND THE PEOPLE WHO LIVE IN THE STATES includes Federal aid, ... , money for education, SS payments, Medicare, Medicaid, federal pensions, federal salaries, etc…
So useless waste.
sadolite: "Ukraine got 20 times more federal money than Alaska and Ukraine isn't even a state." Enough said on this subject . LOL
Indeed, even if you presume that every dollar spent counts as a benefit (which again is fallacy #2); the fact that money is sent overseas proves beyond a shadow of doubt that the net disbursement to or in the states must be less than the collections (no inflation cheating allowed).
Wrong, if Biden was not running a money laundering scheme then it wouldn't be a coincidence that someone started investigating it for revenge.Double_R: I've been ignoring you're money laundering scheme assertion because that's a whole other conversation. Clearly, since it has gone uncontested you continue to pretend it's a given. Do you have any actual evidence for this claim?
The circumstantial evidence is overwhelming. Hunter had no skills that were of any value to burisma. Hunter did not speak Ukrainian. The only possible reason to pay Hunter a single dollar much less how much he was paid was his connections. We know from the laptop, emails, and the whistle-blowing partner that Hunter was financially entangled with his father to the point of sharing bank accounts. The "Big guy" has been fingered as Biden and contextual evidence of texts strongly supports this.
Biden was the "policy maker" in Ukraine.
What Hunter was selling to burisma could only be doubted by the most prejudiced observer.
Double_R: And I've already explained the scenario where Shokin concocts defense and followed it through. It wasn't about revenge, if you were being honest you would know this and adjust your argument accordingly. Not surprising that you haven't.
You're stubbornly sticking to an absurdity, I said I had explained it for the last time (fourth attempt) and I meant it. If someone else besides you has questions I'll return to the subject.
investigating Hunter Biden in connection to Burisma was also in US interests.Double_R: Please enlighten me as to why.
It is in US interests to not have its foreign policy sold for personal enrichment, it is also in US interests to know when a candidate for public office does things like that.
The point is that it's disingenuous to pretend his tenure started over because he was sent a good job letter.
I said nothing about "starting over" but a "good job letter" does indicate that there was not at that time an international consensus that Shokin must go.
What point do you think you made?
1.) You twist the perception of relative time as it suits you. Three months is plenty of time when it comes to revenge, but four months is "just the start" as if he walked in the door and couldn't have accomplished or corrupted anything yet. One day is enough time to plot revenge or show yourself to be corrupt.
2.) The push by the US executive branch to remove Shokin cannot be separated in time with what can only very generously be called international angst against him. Biden was the "policy maker" in Ukraine and it is therefore reasonable to believe that despite what may be written in your civics power point Biden was the US executive branch when it came to Ukraine. As such his personal motivations could very well have steered focus and his orders led to US officials (like ambassadors) pushing a narrative against Shokin. Finding those people in EU and Ukraine who were annoyed with him and amplifying their voices. Using the drummed up complaints in reports to the US Senate.
TWS1405: Even the FBI raid on Trump's home may seal the fate not of Trump, but the left and Democrats.Double_R: Imagine how deluded one has to be to learn that the FBI executed a search warrant on a politician's home which was approved by a federal judge resulting in the removal of multiple sets of classified documents that were not authorized to be stored there, and for this to be viewed not as a reason to abandon that politician, but as a reason to vote against the party challenging him.
Imagine if the said federal judge was associated with a global black-mailing pimp and the brownshirts who raided their political opponents were the same unit that conspired to frame that same political opponent and may well have been seeking to remove evidence against themselves.
Imagine if people in 1930s Germany had the courage to see something like that and instead of cowering and voicing support for the nazi party voted against it even harder while stockpiling weapons and muttering that it would be better for Germany to disintegrate than be unified under those terms.
I think maybe we have learned from the past. We'll see.
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@Greyparrot
No state gets more back than they put in.
Yes I suppose that could have been said from the start... The methodology of smartasset remains a mystery.
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I agree with him that there are times when dishonesty is justified.
I don't believe he understands that such a time is identical to a state of war because the only time you should not care if you can be taken at your word is when you are certain your enemy cannot be dissuaded from violating rights by words alone.
As Ben Shapiro pointed out, this fuels doubt in the election more than an infinite amount of hand waving about dominion modems.
The trust lost is lost as far as this generation is concerned, that's how trust works; hard to gain and easy to lose. To avoid civil war the only course is divestment and unprecedented transparency.
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@Greyparrot
I looked at the source stats and your posted source only looks at State income taxes and ignores revenue from federal tax income.
But Alaska is on their list and Alaska doesn't have state income taxes.
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What the hell is election interference that is not election fraud?
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@Double_R
Again, Biden pushed Porshenko to fire Shokin and Shokin got fired. So we know that Shokin would play the victim, and that Biden was the likely scapegoat. The only coincidence at that point is that Hunter worked for Burisma, which everyone acknowledges is a problem.The reason your version of the story sounds ridiculous is because you pretend that everything that happened after that is a seperate coincidence and not all part of one plot by Shokin to save face by pretending he was the good guy and his scapegoat was the bad guy.
Wrong, if Biden was not running a money laundering scheme then it wouldn't be a coincidence that someone started investigating it for revenge.
Since he was, that was a major coincidence. It cannot be expected with any significant confidence that when you want revenge on a politician your fabricated scandal happens to be true. Or if that can be expected then it can also be expected that politicians do most of what they do to cover their corruption.
Probabilities are related, given X what is the probability of Y when Y causes X. Whatever the probability that an investigation was not honest may be on first glance, once you know the crime was actually committed it is far less likely that the investigation was dishonest. In this case far less likely that the investigation started solely out of revenge and was non-existent before the motivate for revenge appeared.
So, for the last time (and I mean it): If you're claiming that shouting "fire" was a lie for revenge, it's an enormous coincidence that a house burned down.
I told you already that at worst, Biden's interests aligned with US interests, so my argument doesn't hinge on ruling out his personal interests.
I do not believe that accurately represents your claims, but even if it did that would mean you've been wasting a lot of time then because investigating Hunter Biden in connection to Burisma was also in US interests.
4 + 6 = 10When someone tells you that you are not doing good on the job, you have to count the whole tenure.
You dodge the point.
The simplest explanation is that when Biden-
Pure counter-assertion.
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I don't Give a fuck what states get what or how much government gets paid. It's still leeching.IwantRooseveltagain: The citizens in Red states are leeching. They don’t pay for the services and benefits they get.
Primary Fallacy of Taxation #2: The amount stolen is proportional to the services and benefits that are gained when compared to the services and benefits that would be gained without the stealing.
Case in point, the red states are getting almost nothing (of value) for the federal taxes they pay because nobody is. Almost invariably if you find a federal service that is actually helpful or efficient, it doesn't cost that much to run.
The primary purpose of federal income taxes (private and corporate) is to steal money from the states, and then use it to blackmail them into obedience on federal policy or else "you won't get your own resident's money back, and say thank you for the aid before you leave"
Another point that is striking is the moral comparison between people who you call leaches but whom would not and have never supported stealing from other states to the people who in favor of stealing regardless of whether their states are getting the better end of the scheme or not.
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Trump claims he declassified all the documents at Mar-a-Lago. Even if that’s true, it probably doesn’t matter.
That's true, it doesn't matter to anyone. The attacks will continue, they will continued to be perceived as a fascist takeover, and civil war draws ever closer.
IwantRooseveltagain: By people you mean wack jobs?
As someone who argues from a minority position almost all the time, very little gives me as much satisfaction as watching someone who thinks they are part of a super-majority slowly realize they aren't.
The last place on earth I would look for information is the news mediaIwantRooseveltagain: That’s because you’re an idiot. Read the news paper!The Washington PostThe Wall Street JournalThe New York TimesThe Boston GlobeThe LA TimesReutersThe Associated PressThe BBCTIME MagazineNewsweek MagazineThe Atlantic Magazine
"I don't trust X"
"That's because you're an idiot. Read X"
... but he doesn't trust X, you sound like a bible thumper "If you haven't found god yet, read the bible again, maybe it's a problem with you; certainly ain't god"
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@PREZ-HILTON
IwantRooseveltagain: That’s a lie. There is a process that has to be followed and it has to be documented. Don’t be an idiot.
No that's true. Also he wrote a memo to do the process, they just ignored him.... (because they are a captured institution, and that's how you know there is a deep state; something causes the FBI to ignore one POTUS and protect another)
WyIted: Politifact a left leaning fact check organization disagrees with you. https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2017/may/16/james-risch/does-president-have-ability-declassify-anything-an/
Politifact is known to be unreliable, but I guess they just couldn't bring themselves to lie this time...
That's the day of his firing. Four months after quid pro quo.IwantRooseveltagain: JC you idiot, the article by The NY Times was published the day he got fired. The article reports how Shokin was believed to be corrupt since he was appointed back in 2015.
If it was believed when he was hired why not bring an article saying that when he was hired? -> because on the day of the firing a controversy existed and it's very easy to find someone who will lie or imagine that they "knew she was a witch from the start".
This is a basic rule of history, when the accounts claim something happened in the past and you have records from that time there should be mention or else it is suspect. Without that rule, Shokin's claim that he was investigating burisma would have to be taken with just as much credibility years later as if he had said it the day before Biden's quid pro quo.
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@Double_R
the only way he would know to strike in that direction is if he suspected/knew of the Biden's corruption with burisma.All he needed to know was that Joe Biden’s son worked for Slovchesky. From there, if he was in fact guilty of the negligence everyone around the world was accusing him of, it would make perfect sense for his next move to be going after Slovchesky to reverse engineer this Biden quid pro quo story. That’s not an over the top scenario, and even you understand that the fact that the seizure occurred after the “quid pro quo” makes it questionable.In other words, there is more than one legitimate explanation for that. Which means, logically, that the seizure is not evidence of either narrative because it fits into both.
No it doesn't. It only reasonably fits into the investigation narrative because of the number of odd assumptions required to make the revenge theory work compared to the simple theory that there was an investigation and the investigation found corruption. Let's count the coincidences:
Investigation:
1.) anti-russian elements in US and EU governments don't like Shokin for a different reason than Biden.
Total coincidences: 1.
Revenge that was planned an executed entirely after 2016:
1.) Biden just happened to be the most prominent and possible origin of the push to fire Shokin who claimed he was investigating burisma where Biden was routing bribes through.
2.) Shokin just happened to zero in on Biden as the one to revenge against (despite there being an international chorus against him?)
3.) Shokin managed to learn that Hunter was inexplicably working for burisma and decided to use that to frame Biden with a personal motive that oh-so-noble Biden never had. Reminiscent of Smaug in the movie adaptation, has thieves in his mountain and decides to wipe out laketown.
4.) And the whopper of coincidences, the frame job Shokin prepared just happened to be essentially true!
Total coincidences: 4
Let's put the same amount of coincidences in a simpler setting:
Bob's son is running around lighting fires
1.) Bob says the fire dept is evil and useless and pushes them to get fired (pun intended), but he's not alone; in fact a the entire city council sent him on that task (he and his supporters claim)
3.) Fire department decides to get revenge, but instead of going after the city council or anyone else they focus entirely on bob
4.) Fire department learn that Bob has a son, they follow Bob's son with the intent to make it look like Bob's son was committing arson, but when they find him he was committing arson!
Vs:
Bob's son is running around lighting fires
1.) Fire department is suspicious of Bob's son and Bob gets wind of it.
1.) Bob says the fire dept is evil and useless and pushes them to get fired (pun intended), he's working hard to get the city council to agree with him.
3.) Fire department can see what is happening and decides they need to catch Bob's son in the act before they are ousted
4.) Fire department follow Bob's son and find him committing arson.
One narrative works, the other is silly.
Not everyone, at least not before the pressure campaign from the white houses started:This article is another example of how propaganda works. They’re depending on the reader to not look at the letter they’re referencing and certainly to not use Google.Shokin was hired in February of 2015. The letter is dated June 2015 - only 4 months on the job which is not enough time to make any significant impact. In the letter it states:“We have been impressed with the ambitious reform and anti-corruption agenda of your government… The ongoing reform of your office, law enforcement, and the judiciary will enable you to investigate and prosecute corruption and other crimes in an effective, fair, and transparent manner,"Nothing in this letter talks about anything he actually did, it’s all talking about what he said he was going to do. It’s basically an introduction letter.
Nothing in the senate letter mentioned anything he did, it's basically a vague complaint letter. Apply your rules equally.
There is absolutely no evidence of that here, whereas with Trump it is very clear that Trump’s primary interest was slandering his political opponent.
Well since you have so spectacularly failed to rule out personal interest for Biden, how about you explain how you know Trump was more interested in slander than the truth.
Keep in mind you've been absolutely comfortable with rejecting the testimony of people if you thought you could come up with any reason they might want to lie. I will definitely be holding you to the same standard.
What Biden has never done is tell a crowd that clean coal is when you take coal out and scrub it with a brush. Or that the answer to California’s wild fire problem is a rake. Or ask his team why we can’t just drop a nuclear bomb in a hurricane.
I'm not going to let this turn into a red herring, but the differences between Biden gaffes and Trump gaffes is that half the Trump gaffes are hearsay (sometimes hearsay^2 or hearsay^3) where Biden gaffes are always recorded. Weird....
Pressure in the US admin and anti-Russian elements in Ukraine could very easily cause the perception that Shokin was corrupt to spread around. Most 'news' simply parrot each other and do not represent independent sources.The most telling comment of your post.In the face of clear evidence that there was in fact wide spread international support for the firing of Shokin, your reflexive response is to assert, without any evidence, that they may have just been duped.
I have seen no evidence of "wide spread" it has been entirely limited to a very finite set of politicians and diplomatic officials. It was entirely out of the public eye for even years after with the exception perhaps of urban Ukraine.
This isn’t how evidence works, this isn’t how logic and reason works. Let me know when you have a case that doesn’t hinge on some grand conspiracy where the entire world was too stupid to know anything other than what Vice President Joe Biden told them.
I wonder what counts as a "grand" conspiracy? How many people? If disinformation takes such a large conspiracy of people then why do so many "intelligent professionals" call it a threat?
You can lecture me on evidence and logic, but I won't take it to heart. You find reasons to reject counter-narrative evidence no less than I. Logic is how you find out which rejections are justified, although aside from causality these are very inductive arguments.
For instance when you dismissed the clintonfoundationtimeline.com link you said:
This article is another example of how propaganda works. They’re depending on the reader to not look at the letter they’re referencing and certainly to not use Google.
What did you use google for? They link to the letter in the article. You assumed they were unreliable and you didn't even read far enough to find that link.
You dismissed it as an "introduction letter" and stated that it was "only 4 months on the job which is not enough time to make any significant impact", but it was only 6 months before Joe Biden decided that he needed to go.
4 months = just got in the door
6 months = enough time for an international consensus against Shokin to form
3 months = enough time to find Hunter and go after Zlochevsky in an attempt to frame Biden as being personally motivated to protect the corruption that was actually happening
Time works strangely in Ukraine, or when you have a narrative to protect.
It's pretty obvious that Shokin pissed off some powerful people in those six months. It just so happens that the simplest explanation for all known evidence is that Biden was one of them.
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@PREZ-HILTON
That's not quite a "genuis" (as trump would say) take.
Trump is betting on republicans being smart enough to see a troll and the cult elements of the democratic party being too desperate and crazed to pass up an opportunity to bash their rivals.
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@Double_R
IwantRooseveltagain: NY Times, 3/29/16
That's the day of his firing. Four months after quid pro quo.
IwantRooseveltagain: I mean all you’ve got to do is read. Read and use critical thinking skills
Critical thinking skills like looking at dates.
When I said it was more retaliatory, that doesn't just mean he’s out for revenge, it also means he’s trying to save face. He’s a public official fired for corruption, that’s humiliating and like anyone else he has a reputation and legacy to protect. So of course he’s going to do whatever makes him look like the victim of political persecution, this is routine for politicians. Seizing Slochevsky’s assets was just one way to lend credibility to the idea that he was doing nothing wrong. And clearly, it works.
Yes it does work because the only way he would know to strike in that direction is if he suspected/knew of the Biden's corruption with burisma. If he knew/suspected then he was not ignorant as you claimed. If he was not ignorant he was a threat and Biden did have a personal motivation in protecting his corruption.
If Shokin was corrupt and seeking revenge against the Bidens, but there was no suspicion/investigation of burisma in connection to them he would not have gone after Slochevsky. He would have done some other frame job.
An analogy would be Biden hiding a gun, and then demanding a cop be fired; but you're saying he couldn't have been motivated by stopping the cop from snooping around his hiding spot. Yet as soon as the cop hears about being fired at the behest of Biden he goes RIGHT FOR THE GUN. This only makes sense if he knew where the gun was hidden already.
What’s remarkable is the hypocrisy and double standards you apply to this. The “quid pro quo” you are alleging occurred in December 2015. When I argued that all of US intelligence as well as the rest of the developed world wanted Shokin fired you asked for evidence before the quid pro quo. Clearly you saw anything after that as insufficient as it was better explained to you as the result of conspiratorial actors trying to rewrite the story. Yet here you are pointing to a seizure that occurred two months after the quid pro quo as evidence of what occurred before it.
There is nothing wrong with inferring the past from something that happened later. The error is in confusing causality.
Pressure in the US admin and anti-Russian elements in Ukraine could very easily cause the perception that Shokin was corrupt to spread around. Most 'news' simply parrot each other and do not represent independent sources.
In the case of the seizure we have two possibilities for causality: Caused by investigation before quid pro quo or caused by revenge after quid pro quo, i.e. quid pro quo caused revenge.
I never denied that since the quid pro quo happened before the seizure it should be examined to see if could have caused the seizure. I was surprised however that you suggested that it could have caused it, because either scenario shows Shokin was onto the Biden corruption. In fact the revenge hypothesis is more compelling. An investigation might have been threatening but yet to discover the Bidens involvement. Revenge skips right past that.
And because we don’t know this part of the story tells us nothing.
I've explained what it tells us at least three times in three different ways at this point. I probably won't explain it again unless someone besides yourself has questions.
Going back to the bigger picture, the fact that nearly everyone wanted Shokin out of office because he was corrupt alone is what makes the Occam’s razor test clear.
Not everyone, at least not before the pressure campaign from the white houses started: https://clintonfoundationtimeline.com/january-31-2022-new-memo-reveals-senior-state-officials-praised-ukraine-prosecutor-general-shokin-months-before-vp-biden-demanded-his-firing/
At worst, Biden’s personal interests aligned with US interests, but even in that scenario he was still acting as the VPOTUS.
"US interests" harumph, I already suggested above that his personal interests aligned with the interests of others. Shokin was suspicious of the maidan riots that insurrectioned (Jan 6 style) the 'pro russian' government. He certainly had enemies inside and outside Ukraine, and the war hawks in the US executive branch were among them as they wanted a complete wipe of anything remotely pro-russian in Ukraine.
One doesn't simply show up to a country and demand money when being a corrupt leader. The reason Biden had such influence in the new regime was because he and others attached favors to backing them. There is a recording of US officials discussing Ukrainian high offices like a pokemon game. The investigation into burisma was probably simply the last straw that lit a fire under Biden.
This does bring up an interesting point, if it's "ok" for Biden to have some personal interests as long as there is also a "public" interest, why is it not ok for Trump to have some personal interests if the truth would also be in the public interest?
What’s also remarkable is that the entire story of the quid pro quo came from Biden himself. So your Occam’s razor explanation not only defies the obvious state of international affairs at the time, but includes the idea that Biden acted corruptly and decided to tell the whole world about it two years later as he was preparing for a presidential run. Trump has definitely shown himself to be that stupid, Biden has not.
You just said Biden has not shown himself to be "that stupid", have you uh... seen the internet the past three years?
Biden and his allies against Shokin did a good job spreading the anti-Shokin message. That's why it was a bragging point for him. Trump would probably have done the same thing in due time if his house wasn't full of traitors. He probably wouldn't brag that he saved his money laundering operation.
It's two things that together make the quid pro quo "threat" (which he bragged about) + "money laundering" (which he did not brag about, but we have confirmed independently)
In Trumps case the personal motivation is ostensibly harming a frontrunner democratic candidate, not something that was or could be hidden. The threat remains pure hearsay.
Here’s the Irish times back in March of 2016
Same time as firing
Here’s a report from March 28th 2016, a day before the firing-
You said it for me thanks
Here’s an article from the Atlantic Council back in November 2015 talking about Shokin’s corruption and why he needs to be fired:
Now that's much earlier. Looks like you accidentally pasted the same link three times.
Criticism that had been circulating among Western circles became public in late September, when U.S. Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt said in a speech to the Odesa Financial Forum that corrupt prosecutors are “openly and aggressively undermining reform.”
US officials spreading the word to go against Shokin in Ukraine... what did I say?
These four prosecutors have been identified by Transparency International as Yanukovych administration holdovers who are loyal to the current president and will compromise the independence of the specialized prosecutor’s office.
Again what did I say? Turning Ukraine into a EU/US puppet might be in someone's interests but not mine. Maybe if these people hadn't had their hands so deep in Ukrainian internal affairs this war wouldn't have happened.
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They did not, they asked for reform in the office he headed 2 months after the quid pro quo. Don't exaggerate. They did not mention him by name, for all you know they didn't even know his name. Senators don't have their own private intelligence agencies, they eat reports given to them by the likes of the US ambassador to Ukraine?IwantRooseveltagain: Bullshit. The U.S. State Department, the bi-partisan committee of 8 Senators, and our allies in Europe all wanted Shokin gone. It was not some plot by Biden. Read the newspapers dummy!
Why did they want him gone and when?
The only evidence presented in this thread is from after the quid pro quo and after Shokin said he was investigating the corruption at burisma. It also does not mention Shokin by name, nor does it mention firing. In fact it is super generic political speak. "reform" like "healthcare reform", a word which exists so that people who don't agree at all can pretend they want the same thing. It probably means "fire Shokin" but I am not at all convinced the people who signed the letter knew that.
If you can't disengage your political bias for even one moment, consider this example: "Everybody, wanted Biden's corruption investigated. Millions of Americans and Europeans wanted it investigated. Senators and congressmen wanted it investigated. A democratic presidential nominee wanted it investigated."
You see that's all true, but it only happened after Trump made a big deal of it by asking Ukraine to investigate. Before that it was only a few people who paid a hell of a lot of attention.
To pretend like there was some giant outcry and Trump was only going along with the crowd would be dishonest. Just as it is dishonest to pretend there was some giant outcry that Biden was only going along with. Six months before his quid pro quo democrats were saying Shokin was just great.
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@Double_R
Shokin knew Biden played a large role in his firing and he knew either then or would soon thereafter learn that Biden’s son worked for Slovchesky. And again, the conversation regarding Shokin’s firing took place in December and the seizure took place in February.
Ooookay, so your theory is that: There was no investigation into burisma, not for at least four years, Hunter never even came up on the radar, Hunter's money laundering services were not in any danger real or imagined.... but when Shokin caught wind of Biden pressuring for his firing he learned (in 2 months of not-investigating) of Hunter being at Burisma and decided to punish Slovchesky for being involved with the Bidens.
Alternatively: There was an investigation into burisma, Shokin knew about Hunter (like he later said he did), and when Biden brought the full diplomatic pressure of the US to bear (via quid pro quo among and more) Shokin accelerated the investigation and seized Slovchesky's assets for some reason, perhaps revenge or perhaps to put pressure on Slovchesky to flip.
So I offered up the alternative that the seizure was connected as it was the closest Shokin could get to the Bidens.
And thereby admitted that Shokin saw the Bidens and Slovchesky as a package deal. Something he certainly would not do if he never investigated the connections between them. Yet there were no (known) connections before 2014, which means Shokin investigated burisma after 2014 noting Hunter's odd habit of being paid large amounts of money by them.
The simplest explanation tends to be correct. Instead of believing in an investigation that stopped in 2012 and then restarted for 2 months after the quid pro quo, Shokin's story fit the facts with fewer assumptions.
Your rejection of the Biden quid pro quo as nefarious (or at least as nefarious as the claimed Trump quid pro quo) rests entirely on your assertion that Biden could not possibly have seen Shokin as a threat to his money laundering. Yet you simultaneously have to claim that the seizure was the result of revenge against Biden and not an ongoing investigation to maintain that claim. You jumped from the frying pan into the frier because if Shokin reacted to the quid pro quo by going after Biden's money laundering then clearly Shokin was quite capable of being a threat to the money laundering and to the objective observer probably already was, your hypothesis of lightning investigations motivated by revenge strain credulity.
It was your claim (bolded above) that failed in the face of evidence. Sure you can claim that Biden's motivations were as pure as the driven snow, but you cannot prove it and the balance of evidence shows that there was a personal motivation.
Trump's request too cannot have personal motivation ruled out, as you said Biden was the front-runner; not exactly a super strong motivation but possible. However the corruption he asked to be investigated was quite real, he didn't ask for anyone to lie or plant evidence. Therefore the claim that Trump is as pure as the driven snow stands at least as strong as your claim that Biden was only motivated by stopping corruption.
There is the objective difference however that Biden admitted to making threats, while the transcript of Trump's call showed no threat.
You have no other information here other than the fact that a bipartisan group of 8 US senators all expressed in writing to Ukraine that they wanted the prosecutor fired
They did not, they asked for reform in the office he headed 2 months after the quid pro quo. Don't exaggerate. They did not mention him by name, for all you know they didn't even know his name. Senators don't have their own private intelligence agencies, they eat reports given to them by the likes of the US ambassador to Ukraine.
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@Double_R
Let me know if you plan to address the points I made.
Oh your 'points':
The idea that what you might read on a .gov civics lecture is a perfect representation of what really happens is absurdWe’re talking about the powers of the Vice President. The way to learn what that is is to read. And again, nearly everyone on earth can look it up, so it’s beyond ridiculous to suggest the Ukrainian government didn’t know how this works.
Strawman
I asked for evidence that there was a general desire to remove Shokin before Biden started gunning for Shokin, afterward it makes just as much sense that Biden was using his influence to increase the pressure.Are you seriously suggesting that senators like Ron Johnson signed off on the letter asking for the prosecutors removal because of Biden’s influence?
I am suggesting he was fed false information that Shokin was corrupt because it was in the interest of the deep state, particularly Biden to do so.
If you seriously are suggesting that a super-rich oligarch was being stripped of his property and it had nothing to do with an investigation into his giant oil firm I can only conclude you are not engaging honestly.Or you are not getting it.We’re talking about Hunter Biden and what inspired Joe’s involvement. The only plausible explanation for Biden doing everything you claim is that he was doing it to protect his son, but his son wasn’t in any danger.You used the Slochevsky example as evidence that Burisma was under investigation, which is why it’s relevant that they seized his personal property and not Burisma’s. It means they were not targeting the company, and if the company itself was not the target then Hunter had no exposure. But we knew this already because the time period Burisma was being investigated for was 2010 through 2012 and Hunter joined the board in 2014, so none of this was ever about him.Once again you get the timing wrong (and it's kind of important, what with cause and effect being a thing):The conversation Biden recounted where he pushed for Shokin’s revival occurred in December 2015. Shokin was not removed on the spot, it would take months before finally being voted out by the Ukrainian parliament.
This is the only relevant point because it is the only one that speaks to your only coherent argument that Biden was not protecting his corruption. I am certainly not letting this one drop. See the end of this post.
The audio recording of the call between Trump and Zelenzkyy that was "whistleblown" and turned into one of the most transparent and ridiculous impeachments that I hope the USA will ever see.I don’t know what you’re talking about. There is no audio recording of that call, there is only the transcript.
I remember hearing it, maybe I remembered wrong. Either way there is a transcript so this is irrelevant.
And what makes Gordon Sondland a “deep state Sycophant, besides the fact that he defected from the dear leader’s narrative?He changed his story, I guess sycophant was uncharitableHow did he change his story?
My opinion on Sondland is irrelevant. We can discuss it at a later time, but I won't let this be used as a red herring.
It's an abstraction not a small group of bond villains conspiring to take over the world. Well I mean there might be such a thing, but the vast majority of what is meant by "deep state" are unelected bureaucrats individually working towards their own ideological focus and cooperating in collective action without explicit conspiracy.So in other words, it’s just people you disagree with operating in such a way that you disagree with. You have no evidence of any alleged participation of whomever this group encompasses, it just sounds about right.
My opinion on what constitutes the "deep state" is irrelevant. We can discuss it at a later time, but I won't let this be used as a red herring.
Double_R: I never made a claim other than stating the facts. I said that this was better explained by retaliation than the natural evolution of an alleged ongoing investigation into Burisma, but whether that is the case is irrelevant.Retaliation for what?Double_R: He was taken down so he decided to take others down.
At random? It was just a coincidence he targeted Zlochevsky? Out of all possible rich people? He just decided that Zlochevsky once looked at him funny and that taking him down a notch would be his final act?
Double_R: You are. Whether it is best explained by retaliation is completely irrelevant to whether Biden did what he did as a corrupt rogue VP or he was acting within the best interests of the US.
It is profoundly relevant, and if you can't think of how I will explain once you answer my questions. In post #119 IwantRooseveltagain said:
IwantRooseveltagain; I don’t think these guys deserve such a complete and thoughtful response. It’s impossible to counter nonsense with facts. Sometimes asking questions can provide more light than offering answers. Maybe they will see the light if they answer your questions honestly.
Answer my questions honestly, I think you're deflecting because you know the corner you backed yourself into.
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@Double_R
I never made a claim other than stating the facts. I said that this was better explained by retaliation than the natural evolution of an alleged ongoing investigation into Burisma, but whether that is the case is irrelevant.
Retaliation for what?
So since you failed to respond to anything else, let’s just do a quick recap;
I succeeded in focusing in on the important part. There is no point meandering around a bazillion little points if you are willing to evade the heart of the matter.
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@oromagi
oromagi: Well, we certainly had the most transparent and most audited election in US history in 2020.
The first step is admitting there is a problem. Nobody ever built a house if they already lived in an illusion-house.
Here in Colorado I get my ballot in the mail a month before the election and I can track its progress by barcode through the counting process and then see the scanned copy of my vote on file any time I like for seven years via the same app that documents my state licenses, vax records, etc.
Are you claiming you can lookup your ballot at any time you wish? See who you voted for?
and we have high confidence in the accuracy of our votes.
No, you have high confidence in the accuracy of the vote because that fits your narrative. The pro-democracy crowd care about reality not your contentment.
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@Solaris1
I guess I'll like you to provide a concrete example.
Alright you said:
The Aztecs believe the theory, because they believe the human has rights, but they everyone will die if the human is not sacrificed, so they have to protect the tribes rights.
Then their moral theory involves contradictions that must be solved by quantitative analysis. The greater deprivation is paid for with the lesser deprivation.
My moral theory was developed with the understanding that contradictions are a sign of error. There are no contradictions between rights in my moral framework, only contradictions between interests. Thus my ultimate principle of liberty would certainly break before it could be twisted enough to justify human sacrifice even if the gods demanded it.
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@Greyparrot
Well "The science" (trustworthy be his name) was on the verge of losing them an election. Pandemics and recessions are only allowed when unsavory people can be blamed for it.
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@Double_R
Once again you get the timing wrong (and it's kind of important, what with cause and effect being a thing):The conversation Biden recounted where he pushed for Shokin’s revival occurred in December 2015. Shokin was not removed on the spot, it would take months before finally being voted out by the Ukrainian parliament.
Oooooohh so you're claiming that after the quid pro quo but before Shokin was actually fired, Shokin knew he was going to be fired at the behest of Biden and even though there was no on-going investigation he decided to take revenge on Biden for his imminent removal.
Is that what you're saying?
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Then I hope they find jobs where the upper management aren't captured by the deep state.IwantRooseveltagain: But didn’t Trump himself appoint the upper management of the FBI?
I don't personally know, nor do I care. Trump seems to appoint or hire a lot of people who stab him in the back and work against him. Either some other people make much more convincing arguments against their loyalty (blackmail) or Trump is a terrible HR person. That's the #1 reason I would vote against him in a primary.
How can you drain the swamp when you can't tell clean water from putrid?
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@Double_R
The bureaucracy is not transparent.The US government is probably the most transparent government on earth in terms of who is responsible for what and anyone with a computer and a phone line can easily Google the powers of the Vice President. The idea that the Ukrainian government didn’t know how this works is absurd.
The idea that what you might read on a .gov civics lecture is a perfect representation of what really happens is absurd. Leftist sources say things like "Biden become a policy leader on Ukraine" Yea I bet he did. He was very interested...
Obama was the president of the United States. He had way more to lose than anything he could have gained by allowing Biden to strongarm an ally to save his son or whatever the charge here is.
He had nothing to lose because the apparatus of the deep state backed him. That is the media establishment, the DOJ, IRS, etc.. etc... would not even dream of creating a scandal out of it. Indeed Biden wasn't even afraid to brag about it. Only an outside like the people who told Trump would dare, and at that point they could not dream someone like him would hold high office.
Furthermore there was probably more than Biden's personal interest in establishing a deep-state friendly government in Ukraine See [1] below.
1.) Doesn't mention Shokin.Because they didn’t have to. Shokin was in charge of the office. This is like someone says we need to replace the US government and someone like me comes along and says “dUh they didn’t mention Biden”.
Granted
2.) 2 months 6 days after quid pro quoYour link is to a calendar. Not sure what value you thought that added to the conversation.You asked me to back up the claim that the pressure on Ukraine to get rid of Shokin was coming from more than just Biden so I linked you to a letter signed by 8 senators including 3 republican senators back in 2016, a full 3 years before any of this stuff would come out asking for the prosecutors office to be purged. That’s the reality. Adjust accordingly.
I asked for evidence that there was a general desire to remove Shokin before Biden started gunning for Shokin, afterward it makes just as much sense that Biden was using his influence to increase the pressure.
[1] Keep in mind it likely wasn't just about burisma but also the crowd-strike servers and the role of corrupt Ukrainian elements in the fabrication of russiagate. A conspiracy does not require that everyone who aids it knows of it. People on the senate committee for Ukraine could well have been fed reports from the corrupt US ambassador and executive branch that led them to believe Shokin was corrupt.
You mean this Kasko:Yes. Your argument hinges on the personal defense of the man trying to save face after having just been fired for corruption, so I gave you the word of his deputy who had nothing to do with any of this. The latter option on its face certainly seems more reliable.
Hardly, just as Vindman was canonized a sacred whistleblower when Trump wanted to fire him, I give credence to the one who was fired for asking too many questions, not the one who kept his job.
It was not solely Shokin's statements that indicate the investigation was ongoing, what you dismissed as "personal property" remains convincing to those of us who aren't naive children:
A comment befitting a naive child.A comment adding nothing of value whatsoever to the conversation except to showcase a bit of ego and condescension.
If you seriously are suggesting that a super-rich oligarch was being stripped of his property and it had nothing to do with an investigation into his giant oil firm I can only conclude you are not engaging honestly.
But I didn’t expect you to engage honestly with that, because there is no argument here.
No there really wasn't an argument. People's assets aren't frozen if they aren't under ongoing suspicion (real or for show).
... but setting aside that the seizure did nothing to target Burisma ...
I set it aside instantly because it is an absurd notion on the face of it.
Your claim is that Shokin’s seizure of Zlochevsky’s assets shows that the investigation into Burisma was very much alive, ... the seizure occurred almost 5 months after Biden got Shokin fired.
Once again you get the timing wrong (and it's kind of important, what with cause and effect being a thing):
Seizure:
Date: About Feb 4th 2016.
Shokin being fired:
Date: March 29, 2016
Now does March come before or after February?
This is far more easily explained as retaliation than an honest investigative move, especially considering that everything was dropped months later after Shokin left.
So from no-investigation to not honest investigation. You forget the context, Biden wouldn't care if Shokin was out for revenge or was doing an honest investigation. He would be protecting his money and perhaps other less obvious deep state interests either way.
He didn’t care whether they were investigated, according to Gordon Sondland anyway, all he cared about was that the investigation was announced.According to the recording he did care if they were investigated. Deep State Sycophant vs hard evidence? I'm going with hard evidence.I have no idea what you are talking about. What tape?
The audio recording of the call between Trump and Zelenzkyy that was "whistleblown" and turned into one of the most transparent and ridiculous impeachments that I hope the USA will ever see.
And what makes Gordon Sondland a “deep state Sycophant, besides the fact that he defected from the dear leader’s narrative?
He changed his story, I guess sycophant was uncharitable. He could be the victim of blackmail. You see this would be considered "lying to congress" and he'd have been swatted if he wasn't willing to play ball (Like Stone and others).
He was no more a political opponent than Sanders, Warren, Buttigieg, Yang, Gabert, etc..Complete nonsense. Biden was the clear front runner at that point, and he polled better than any other democrat against Trump by far. Trump knew this.
He was the front-runner that's true.
There are multiple independently plausible explanations that don't involve Trump asking for a frame jobAnd none of them fit the puzzle better than the conclusion that Trump attempted to use foreign aid to extort a foreign ally into helping him slander a domestic political opponent.
It's not slander if it's true, and it's not extortion without a threat.
And not for nothing but I notice you continue to keep blaming everything on this imaginary deep state bogeyman MAGA world concocted. Do you have any evidence of who is in this deep state and what they have done, you know, actual evidence, or do you find it logically valid to just slide them in wherever it is convenient?
It's an abstraction not a small group of bond villains conspiring to take over the world. Well I mean there might be such a thing, but the vast majority of what is meant by "deep state" are unelected bureaucrats individually working towards their own ideological focus and cooperating in collective action without explicit conspiracy.
They (probably) form conspiracies implicitly by suggesting ideal outcomes and openly speculating about potential scenarios.
You can tell these things are happening from timings that are beyond coincidental. The media arrive at Roger Stone's house before the swat team. How? A grand conspiracy? No, it only took one ideologue to send them there. It took a few more to decide that a middle aged political character warranted dozens of people with assault rifles much less handcuffs. To make such a decision required an awareness of optics and the desire to embarrass Trump or project the image that he is a dangerous criminal surrounded by dangerous criminals.
That is a conspiracy if only a small one. Many small conspiracies may link together without need for central direction. The scale of the deep state is inferable from the reactions that don't occur. If there was no deep state of considerable size, the small conspiracies would have backlash. There is never any.
We're about to be treated to another round of "oopsies" just honest mistakes that led to the FBI taking just about everything in the Trump estate in search for records that were probably declassified and definitely known to be there for a long time.
One little conspiracy to search for anything to feed the dying monstrosity of the Jan 6 committee. One little conspiracy to get it to a judge which might be reminded whose island he might have flown to. One little conspiracy to suggest there were nuclear secrets. One little conspiracy to suggest they were sent to Russia. One little conspiracy to suggest the death penalty for a former president.
That's what corruption looks like, when people think the ends justify the means and they are on the same page about who needs to disappear no grand conspiracy is necessary; but the results are the same.
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rofl, the Jan 6 committee is the laughing stock of the free world.The only that that is a laughing stock to the free world is Trump and his supporters - Asking how can so many Americans be that stupid?
Your bubble is so complete you aren't even aware... sad
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@oromagi
The FBI is about as core a Republican organization as you will find.
Then democrats shouldn't have any objection to its abolishment no?
The FBI is just pro-American, pro-rule of law
Then I hope they find jobs where the upper management aren't captured by the deep state.
Liz Cheney
rofl, the Jan 6 committee is the laughing stock of the free world. An obvious kangaroo court that avoids all questions of jurisprudence by saying "well we're not actually a court we don't have to follow those rules"
If that's what you mean by "pro-rule of law" you are a danger to society if ever placed into a position of authority.
All of the guys you're talking about pled guilty to their crimes and all of their crimes (except D'Souza) are pretty fucking anti-American.
They were likely blackmailed like Flynn and signed what they did on the (bad) advice of lawyers looking for plea deals. Plea deals are problematic in of themselves but when combined with a justice system where the agents of the state never face consequences for false charges/arrests they are even worse.
It is well documented that people will take plea deals simply because the right to a speedy trial will certainly be denied as it currently is for Jan 6 political prisoners. It would be even worse for these poor people because the only reason they were attacked was to get them to lie about Trump, something some of them did.
As far as I am concerned there were no crimes. It takes trust for me to believe there was evidence of crimes, and like I have explained elsewhere my trust in federal agencies has expired. You can call me a cook, you can dismiss me as I dismiss the assertions of the FBI; and I'm sure you'll get around to it, but that won't make me and the millions who think like me disappear.
If you truly believed in your narrative you would advocate for a shift to a level of transparency where the lost trust is no longer a requirement. That is the only way this ends peacefully.
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@oromagi
Your eyes boxes pulled out from under the table but your eyes don't tell you that those boxes were filled and closed and sealed just one hour before in front of the press and plenty of public observers.
Why don't my eyes see that? Was the camera off at that time?
Nobody asked the press and observer to leave.
That's not what the observers said and that is besides the point.
The independent observer and the investigator required by State Law were present and the entire process entirely above board.
Point them out on the video. Then find a recording of them saying that they were there.
You don't know what a normal scanning process looks like and aren't curious enough to find our for yourself.
Ironic, I've been trained on ballot scanners.
"And by doing the hand tally, we saw two specific numbers that were me — met. The hand tally got us to a .1053 percent off of the total votes cast and .0099 percent on the margin, which is essentially dead on accurate.
If that was true it would prove there was no multi-counting. I don't trust election officials after they lied though. At the very least the water leak was a lie and that led to the removal of the observers. Everyone else who subsequently denied this also marked themselves as willing to lie for "democracy".
What you saw was brief clips out of context and then you allowed Giuliani to tell you a story about what think you are observing, rather than interrogating those facts yourself.
Out of context? You haven't corrected a single smidgen of the context as I see it. I'm ignoring all of this psycho-narrative bullshit about Giuliani in case it isn't obvious. Although I could easily write similar stories about how BLM's supposed example cases were programed into them and it would be far more grounded in reality.
My lying eyes vs AP reporting on 'officials', tough one.Nobody disputes this fact, not even Giuliani.
It's your error that I have any particular faith in Giuliani.
they just left because everybody thought it was over for the night
Because they were told it was over for the night...
AP News is generally most reliable becau-
Let me cut you off right there, if a light shone from heaven telling me that god is real I would ask it some questions. If it said the AP is reliable I would take cover. I know you're quite comfortable believing them and dismissing anyone who doesn't while also dismissing any sources that disagree. But if you were self-aware you would admit how vulnerable to misinformation that makes you.
Prove it.
- The independent monitor noted that between 8:15 p.m. and 12:43 a.m., the change in total ballots went from 89,381 ballots to 99,133 ballots — so a difference of 9,752 votes. But after the callback it looks like there's only one scanner going, maybe two. So very roughly between 1/11th of total scanner production= 887 ballots and 2/12ths of total scanner production=1,625. That's just my estimate, nobody official has gotten more specific than 9752 votes between 8:15 and 12:4
So you can't.
Claims of fraud is not necessarily proportional to fraud.
- No but claims of fraud generally exceed actual fraud.
You have no way of knowing that.
When the results of an election with no complaints matches very well to the results of an election just 8 weeks prior, that provides an additional level of confidence.
The lessening of complaints was due to the threat of fascist goons attacking you if you doubted elections. The method and protocol in which the election was conducted was identical leading to no additional confidence in the wise observer.
I beg your pardon but you are clearly preferring the testimony of one drunk, biased, non-witness lawyer for the losing candidate based on a brief clip of video to the very consistent testimony of every person in the room
I watched more than a brief clip, there were two or three people in that room as far as the video shows; and if there were more there should have been cameras on them too. In fact the election should have been and could have been secure and auditable.
5 or 6 investigations in the face of death threats.
Yea, saying the words "we conducted an investigation" doesn't count as an investigation.
Let's recall that same lawyer told Republican leadership confidentially that he he had no evidence of fraud even as he was pursuing this very claim in court.
Must have been an idiot because I found evidence of fraud using only the internet. Either that or this is a false story.
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@Solaris1
You're correct that everyone would agree with "We cannot violate someone's human rights without really good reason" but only because the word "rights" in that sentences invokes and contains the whole diversity of ethical theories.
Nazis or Aztec priests all think they're doing the right thing and that those they harm don't have a right to not be harmed.
There are people the average voter in the EU or USA is willing to harm in certain ways and they don't feel they're doing anything wrong either.
There certainly is genuine moral disagreement because people genuinely disagree on moral principles and the rights they imply. Some people even deny moral principle and appeal directly to power be it democratic or otherwise.
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You see, like the BLM advocate, we have an alternative theory as to why the agents of the state were attacking.IwantRooseveltagain: That’s because you have TDS, and you are racist or at least ambivalent about racism. Republicans are the party of White Grievance and White Fragility.
Your reading comprehension is poor.
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@oromagi
oromagi: An utterly corrupt statement.Reversing corruption is not corruption.There's no such thing as "reversing corruption." You are admitting here that you endorse corruption so long as you think of it a revenge corruption. Reversing corruption with corruption is just as corrupt as reversing murder with murder is still just more murder.
I said reversing corruption is not corruption. Not that it is even more corruption. Just like using deadly force to prevent or punish murder is not murder.
Obviously DAs and cops shouldn't charge and jury/judge shop based on political judgement but when Pandora's box is open...But DA and cops can't ignore obvious crimes just because they're Republican which is what you claim when you say "DOJ treats X like criminal insurrectionist" and "X" is a republican, that's not convincing anyone. You're essentially saying that is is not a crime if a Republican commits it.
No, I'm saying republicans didn't commit it. Just as inner city cops have burned up their benefit of the doubt when arresting black men because they "smelled something" federal bureaucracies have exhausted their benefit of the doubt when arresting members of Trump's campaign or administration.
"He once had a roommate whose cousin considered learning Russian" doesn't cut it.
It's hard to keep track of all the political charges, entrapments, and frameups they've committed but I do know of some:
Dinesh D’Souza - Victimless crime that is almost never prosecuted nor can a reasonable person be expected to know of. He may as well been hit with 5 years at supermax for speeding for all I care.
General Michael Flynn - entrapped and blackmailed, he went from answering one question "I don't recall" to "I think so" in two different interviews and they called that lying to the FBI and perjury. Then they threatened to charge his child if he didn't sign a confession.
Bannon - I don't know about the mail fraud claim, but it's awful convenient. Contempt of congress? Give me a break. Contempt of the Jan 6 committee should be a requirement for citizenship.
Paul Manafort - Tax fraud, a heroic act if true probably not since the tax code is unspeakably complex and lawyers get it wrong all the time. Obstruction of justice? Obstructing the DOJ is an act in furtherance of justice.
Roger Stone - The guy they swatted out of his house while he was in pajamas, from such obvious theater I need look no further to know the motivations were political.
"Lying to the FBI", It is simply the easiest way to attack someone with federal agents. Compel them to come answer your questions, ask the same questions in slightly different ways, claim there was a contradiction bam perjury.
Always the juries just happen to be from downtown DC or something similar.
Retry it in rural Texas or Florida and tell me whose guilty.
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@Double_R
That does not follow.1.) He could be bluffing, for all the Ukrainian government knew he could stop the funds alone.The Ukrainian government knows how the US government works, it’s not a secret.
The bureaucracy is not transparent. Furthermore Biden bragged that he had Obama on his side, that could have been a bluff. Then even if his victims "knew" only POTUS could stop the funds they may have believed Obama and Biden were in bed.
2.) It could be coming from him, with Obama going along as a favor.Obama wouldn’t go along with stopping foreign aid to an ally unless there is an actual reason. This isn’t something you do and no one notices, just ask Trump.
You trust Obama to not do something shady? then I trust Guilani. Stalemate.
Provide evidence, from before the quid pro quo.
Double failure:
1.) Doesn't mention Shokin.
2.) 2 months 6 days after quid pro quo: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=February+12%2C+2016+-+december+6+2015
See:
That is not what Viktor Shokin saidIt’s what Vitaly Kasko says.
You mean this Kasko:
"After the creation of the Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office in September 2015,
Joe Biden, US Ambassador to Ukraine Jeffrey Payette [sic] and the
leadership of the Ukrainian office of Transparency International openly
lobbied Kasko’s appointment as head of this department, including by
exerting pressure on members of the selection committee through
non-governmental organizations and the media information."
nor does that claim line up with the fact that Mykola Zlochevsky's assets were seized around 4/2/2016.His personal assets were seized, there’s no indication that had anything to do with Burisma. If it did they would have seized company assets.
A comment befitting a naive child.
There is no other plausible motive. Why would Trump want Hunter and burisma investigated if he didn't think there was corruption?He didn’t care whether they were investigated, according to Gordon Sondland anyway, all he cared about was that the investigation was announced.
According to the recording he did care if they were investigated. Deep State Sycophant vs hard evidence? I'm going with hard evidence.
He wanted the investigation announced so that he could use it to slander his political opponent. That’s clearly what this was all about.
He was no more a political opponent than Sanders, Warren, Buttigieg, Yang, Gabert, etc.. The difference between them and Biden was that they weren't selling US foreign policy and laundering the money through their idiot son who can't keep laptops encrypted, and then bragging about shielding his operation to a room full of cameras. (that's also why they lost the primary, deep state doesn't want honest democrats anymore than honest republicans)
There is a test to see if he was only interested in potential political rivals, did he mention anyone else? Yes he did, he said the US ambassador was "bad news".
Let me ask you a question, if you believe Trump was legitimately trying to stop corruption in Ukraine and that Trump believed he was right… why did Trump all of a sudden resume the payments to Ukraine after this story broke?
There are multiple independently plausible explanations that don't involve Trump asking for a frame job. With rough probability:
1. 80%) Trump didn't stop payments, had no intention of stopping payments, and as the recording shows did not threaten to stop payments. i.e. that was a lie perpetuated by deep-state-sycophants like Sondland. Any real delay in payment was due either to normal bureaucratic friction or as part of a frame.
2. 10%) Some deep state pawns told him he couldn't prevent payment, there sure were a lot of them around him based on how many of his own hires stabbed him in the back. He believed they were corrupt, but couldn't trust the people around him to keep the pressure on.
3. 10%) He was afraid of witch-hunt impeachments, both completely reasonable fears given the fact that the democrats in power were in a mind set of total political war and did in fact try to impeach him for the "high crime" of asking for an investigation despite the fact that you yourself admitted it is within POTUS discretion to stop funds to foreign nations.
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@Vici
the argument is like this. if the europeans didn't come and swoop into the land of the indigenous, the indigenous would still be in their primitive lives without medicine, security of housing, nutritious food etc. but since the european boys came, even tho they enslaved some of them, OVER ALL, we can see that black people live better lives than they did 500. years ago.
This viewpoint is infected with collectivism, a lot of viewpoints are but most people have not trained themselves in philosophy well enough to spot it. Once I point out the collectivist premise it will seem obvious:
"the indigenous" who is that? What set of individuals is that?
"still be in their
primitive lives without medicine, security of housing, nutritious food
etc"
That gives us a clue as to what the author meant, but you can see that this is absurd on the face of it. Slave kidnapping occurred hundreds of years ago. They would not in fact be in their primitive lives, they would be dead.... of old age if nothing else.
What the author means is the racial collective would still be X. Descendants would still be X. That's true, but blood lines don't have rights and neither sin nor glory is inherited (it is a common ethical error to believe they are).
The evil remains, regardless of what good it may have led to in others be they complete strangers or descendants. "I'm doing this for your own good" is the siren song of the collectivist tyrant.
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@oromagi
IwantRooseveltagain: Trump himself is now considered a flight risk and has had his passports taken away by the FBI.
When will you people realize that when you say "DOJ treats X like criminal insurrectionist" and "X" is a republican, that's not convincing anyone. "we" react the same way a BLM advocate would react if someone suggested "Floyd obviously deserved it otherwise he wouldn't have gotten kneeled on by a cop"
You see, like the BLM advocate, we have an alternative theory as to why the agents of the state were attacking.
oromagi: An utterly corrupt statement.
Reversing corruption is not corruption.
oromagi: Obviously, no President should ever pardon friends or associates and certainly not based on any political judgement, which simply can't help but be biased.
Obviously DAs and cops shouldn't charge and jury/judge shop based on political judgement but when Pandora's box is open...
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