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@TWS1405_2
my reading of what you wrote exactly as it reads within the context and word choices given therein, making the obvious observation, isn’t a “gotcha” word game.Also, last I checked it is you and I having this exchange, I don’t know who Martine Barrat is, and they clearly are not a part of this conversation. Martine didn’t write what you wrote, you did.
Ok, let me help you out. Martine Barrat is the person who famously said "You do the crime, you do the time". A statement you have no doubt heard many times before in your life as nearly everyone has. And at no point anywhere in your life, or that of just about anyone elses have you or anyone else ever sat there and said "wait, which crime exactly is he talking about? Which criminal statute"
The reason for this is because it is painfully obvious to anyone who speaks English - "the crime" is a not a term anyone uses when they are pointing to a very specific criminal statute. It's a general term applied to whatever crime is being alleged.
This is very basic stuff.
Morover, here is the exchange which lead to this silly little deflection of yours:
He clearly was not plotting to steal anything when he genuinely felt/thought that the left was trying to steal the election with magical numbers appearing overnight for Biden.As has already been pointed out to you, believing he really won does not absolve him of the crime.
Notice how the topic of your post began with the idea that he can't be guilty if he didn't think he was doing anything illegal, and my post was in response to that very idea pointing out how your argument there was nonsense.
So did you respond by explaining why your original argument stands up and why my rebuttal fails? No, that's what an intelligent poster with a desire for productive rational conversation would have done. Instead you tried to change the subject to 'show me which criminal statute you are claiming Trump is guilty of'.
But because I saw right through your attempt to deflect and am not letting you wiggle out of having to defend this absurd argument, you unsurprisingly decide to go back to your usual pathetic "duh you're a denialist" rant.
I have no interest wasting anymore time pointing out huge lack of writing skills and obvious intellectual cowardice denialism. And yes, third time is charm!!
Clearly, this is all you are interested in. Every conversation we have ends just like this with you dropping every point I made so you can pound your chest and declare yourself intellectually superior despite having given up once you were pushed to rationally support your own nonsense.
I would be disappointed, but this is just par for the course for you. To be honest I'm just surprised you lasted this long.
Good day.
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@TWS1405_2
Read your own typed words…“…does not absolve him of the crime.”Of…[the]…crime.That, within the context in which it is written, clearly denotes a single crime. [A] crime. Not two crimes. Not three or more crimes. ONE CRIME!
"You do the crime, you do the time" - Martine Barrat
Enlighten me... when Martine Barrat famously stated these words, which specific criminal statute was he referring to?
Or if you prefer, we can drop the silly little "gotcha" word games and instead focus on the point I was actually making.
A lot of the tripe that flows from his mouth is hyperbole, vague, nonsensical, and quite often never very specific. So yeah, you have to learn to read between the lines with a lot of what he spews. But it really isn’t that difficult. Just stop trying so hard, you might actually get it vs your made up garbage along with the rest of the garbage being fictionalized.
Note that you dropped every point I made in order to just call my argument garbage and repeat your original assertion.
You have yet to provide any criteria by which Trump's words should be interpreted. "Just stop trying so hard" is not a criteria for anything, it's just another data point proving that he is infallible in your view to the point where you will bend the very meaning of the English language to excuse him.
You are correct about one thing though, he does have a particular way of expressing his wishes. Let's hear from his personal attorney and fixer for 10 years;
“He doesn’t give you questions, he doesn’t give you orders, he speaks in a code. And I understand the code, because I’ve been around him for a decade” - Michael Cohen
His supporters understood this code very well because it's not complicated.
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@cristo71
When you label an example as “opinion,” I’m not sure what point you are trying to make. I am pointing out media narratives which turned out to be false.
Then I don't know what your point is.
Looking back you did start off when you presented the list as stories citing them as having turned out to be false, but when IWR responded telling you none of them were lies you never corrected his critique making clear that this was not what you were alleging.
So as I just addressed to ADOL, news stories "turn out to be false" all of the time because we're not omniscient. The only thing we can do is work with the information we have, and since the job is to report what is happening in real time this is going to be a frequent occurrence for any news network.
So what is your point? Why should I or anyone else care that you can list a number of stories over the years that turned out to be false in the end?
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@ADreamOfLiberty
Maybe the point is that your algorithm for determining what is "reasonable" is broken if you keep thinking reasonable beliefs turn out to be completely wrong (or unsupported).
I don't think reasonable beliefs "keep turning out to be wrong", that is your interpretation based on your views. From my viewpoint it is you're bless that turn out to be wrong. The way we address this is to put our vows to the test through debate and/or otherwise productive discission.
With that said, reasonable beliefs can be wrong and in fact are wrong all the time. That's the nature of not being omniscient, we can only work with the information we have. As we learn more we adapt and adjust appropriately. That's what happens in many of these cherry picked examples.
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@cristo71
which example or examples are valid in your view?
My thoughts below.
1. Nick Sandmann as white supremacist
Don't know who this is so I'll have to pass on this one
2. Rittenhouse as gun trafficking, murderous white supremacist
He killed two people and was probably a white supremacist. Understand that white supremecy means something very different to minorities and especially black people than it does to white people.
3. Policeman later died after fire extinguisher beating on January 6
They did.
4. Governor Cuomo is a great, great governor
Opinion
5. Michael Avenatti could become president
Opinion, and one that could could have seemed plausible to some at the time
6. Steele Dossier as legit intelligence
It was every bit as legit as most of the reporting took it for
7. Law enforcement cleared protestors for Trump’s photo op
They did
8. Laptop not a legit story (WaPo was actually on the correct side of this one)
The MSM worked with the best information they had at the time.
9. ICE whipping migrants
There were instances of this. How heavily it was reported compared to how often it was happening I don't know.
10. Lab leak theory as “conspiracy theory”
This is a misinterpretation of what was widely being covered. The lab leak theory was prevalent among the conspiracy theorists when the evidence was not clear (it still isn't).
11. “Don’t Say Gay” bill in Florida
It's not a literal criticism, "don't say gay" is a description of the laws chilling effects, which is accurate.
12. Inflation as “transitory”
Not aware of who was saying this but this sounds like a failed prediction, not a lie.
13. Columbus police shot an “unarmed” Ma’Khia Bryant
Don't know who this was, but this sounds like an example of working with incomplete information in the early stages of a story.
14. CRT is not taught in grade schools
It's not
15. Anti lockdown protestors neglect to wear masks; BLM protestors need not wear masks (not a lie but glaring double standard)
It's kind of odd to complain about the attention being paid to a lack of masks at an anti mask rally (where obviously no one is wearing a mask) vs a protest against excessive police force where many if not most are wearing masks.
16. BLM protests are “mostly peaceful”
They were, just like most of the J6 protesters were peaceful.
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@TWS1405_2
believing he really won does not absolve him of the crime.And what crime is that, specifically?
The many election related crimes he's been indicted for. If you want the list you can Google them.
My point there was not to say there's definitely proof beyond a reasonable doubt of [insert criminal statute here], I was responding to your argument that he didn't commit a crime because he believed he won. That isn't how it works. Believing yourself to be the rightful winner of an election does not give yourself legal justification to try and take it.
Trump speaks in a different language, and one needs to know how to understand it in order to interpret it correctly. It's like learning a foreign language, except this is Trump's elitist, obnoxious and albeit ignorant language. When Trump says, "find 11,780 votes," he means 'look long and hard to ensure the vote count was on the up and up.'
So when Trump says "I just want to find [the exact number of votes I need to flip the state to me]", what he's really saying is, "I just want you guys to make sure that you've counted everything accurately to ensure the rightful winner is declared, whoever that might be"
This is the most sycophantic defense of Donald Trump I've ever heard. You're literally arguing that he meant the opposite of what he actually said, and you're justification for that is that we just "need to know" how he speaks.
It's not just that this defense is completely devoid of any logical or factual basis, it's completely unfalsifiable and demonstrates that you have given Trump a green light to say literally anything he wants and you will just spin it into his innocence.
suggesting people peacefully gather and make their voices heard in a dignified manner =/= go riot and break into the Capital in order to impede a judicial process.
Let's break this down.
For the entirety of the 2 months between the election and January 6th, Trump has repeatedly and consistently told his supporters that the election was stolen and that their voices consequently didn't matter.
Then he calls for all of his supporters to come to the capitol on January 6th saying it "will be wild".
Then when his supporters arrive he tells them to "fight like hell or you're not going to have a country anymore".
Then he tells them to March down to the capitol to "peacefully make their voices heard".
One of these things it's not like the others.
This is what legal experts refer to as a false exculpatory. It's a cleverly worded phrase that one inserts in order to be able to point to it later on. It's like when an internet pedophile spends weeks soliciting a child for sex, but then at the last minute says he's coming over to "hang out", or when a prostitute names their price but tells you it's "for their time". Anyone with two brain cells to rub together can easily figure out what this means, his supporters certainly did.
To point to this one sentence is a blatant attempt to ignore the incoherence of his message interpreted this way. Let's take Trump at his word that this was his true intention... The case then is that after spending two months telling his supporters that their voices have been stolen, the remedy for this according to Trump is to March to the capitol and make their voices heard. Yes - The ones that just got stolen.
And if that isn't incoherent enough, they're going to make their voices heard to the exact same people who just flipped them off by stealing it telling them they couldn't care less what they want.
And when he said it will be wild, he just meant it will be wild that people are peacefully protesting.
I don't give Trump's supporters much credit, but even they were not stupid enough to think this.
And if all of that wasn't bad enough, then Trump, after seeing that his supporters badly misinterpreted his message by attacking the Capitol, didn't bother to say word about it till 3 hours later. Didn't make a single phone call to anyone in law enforcement, didn't put out a single tweet telling his supporters to go home... Till HOURS later.
But he did have time to call a couple of senators and congressmen to tell them to use the delay to further the plan to stop the certification.
This is a brazenly incoherent interpretation of the events of that day, there is no way any rational person would honestly try to argue this.
In addition to proving Capital Police opened the doors letting them casually walk inside, and certain agitators within the crowd (CIs and undercover agents, for example) egging the crowd on.
Please explain what you think happened. Do you really believe left wing government agents conspired to incite the riots to what... Blame Trump? What was the plan here?
allegations of a crime =/= a crime actually having been committed
No one is arguing this. The point of pointing to the grand jury is to demonstrate that the prosecution had to have something in order to proceed and no prosecutor worth half their salary would bring a case they weren't confident could unanimously convince a jury beyond a reasonable doubt.
You seem to like misinterpreting my arguments as all or nothing propositions. This is about strength, and the strength of the case against Trump here is damning. At the very least it's absurd to suggest this is all just political nonsense with no basis whatsoever in truth or the law.
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@TWS1405_2
Until the actual crime has been committed with evidence linking you to those ski masks is obtained, IF the exact ski masks purchased were even used, your “what IF” is a huge nothing-burger, bunkis.
The grand jury had already weighed in and told us there is evidence. Next step is the trial where we will all be able to see and evaluate it for ourselves. To pretend no evidence exists without knowing exactly what they have would be remarkably dishonest.
He clearly was not plotting to steal anything when he genuinely felt/thought that the left was trying to steal the election with magical numbers appearing overnight for Biden.
As has already been pointed out to you, believing he really won does not absolve him of the crime.
Take the call to Brad Raffinsburger as an example. A legal action would have been to call him and ask him to look long and hard to ensure the vote count was accurate. Trump didn't do that. Instead he asked him to "find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have".
The motivation here couldn't have been more clear, Trump was not calling him to ensure voter integrity or ballot counting accuracy, he was calling him to get him to flip the result in Trump's favor. There is no rational argument that this was not a crime.
He incited nothing of the kind, which is clear as Crystal given the language he used and the FACT that no one is charging him with incitement of a riot. No incitement, no riot.
So clear that all of the people rioting said they did so because the president told them to.
The language was clear, and anyone who understands English and holds basic human interaction skills understood what he wanted. When a mob boss tells you "nice family you got there, would be a real shame if something happened to them" they are not expressing concern for the safety of your family.
Everyone knows this.
As far as the lack of charges, that's because proving a case beyond a reasonable doubt in a court of law is a far higher standard than proving something as an obviously reasonable conclusion. The special council did what most of us would have done, focus on the case they know they can prove to a jury.
It’s already been firmly established that the FBI undercover agents and CIs within the crowd present that day were the ones who incited the riot.
Was the capitol riots a bad thing or not? It never ceases to amaze me watching Trump defenders shift back and forth from claiming January 6th was just a few tourists taking photos, and it was also a massive left wing conspiracy to make Trump look bad.
AND it’s painfully obvious that the lefty George Soros funded DAs and Special Prosecutor keeps charging DJT with BS stretched thin legal theories in order to divert/deflect all attention away from the Biden Crime Family with all their bribery, extortion, and treasonous activities. Smoke and mirrors.
Do you have any evidence for any of this? No, of course not.
Last time you boasted about the Hunter Biden star witness coming to testify it turned out to be someone who told Congress that as far as he saw Joe Biden had no knowledge or involvement in any of Hunter's business affairs.
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@cristo71
I think you should spend some time thinking about how much of your criticisms of me are really just projection.
I didn’t offer details on why these examples meet the criteria I described because you essentially just spammed them in there. As always however, I was and remain more than willing to go into detail on any one of these examples if you care to focus on one instead of spamming them.
When I’m the one willing to explain and defend my position and you are the one offering nothing more than negative personal assessments before walking away from the conversation, that says a lot about which one of us is really just outright denying and dismissing the viewpoint of others.
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@TWS1405_2
Things that are now illegal according to the Georgia indictment:– Asking people for phone numbers– Reserving rooms in a Capitol building– Telling people to watch TV– Getting people to attend legislative
If I go to a store and buy a couple of ski masks I did nothing remotely illegal.
If those ski masks were purchased so that they could be used in a bank robbery then I’ve taken part in the commission of a crime and can be prosecuted for it.
Pretty basic stuff.
Queue the “YOU’RE AN INTELLECTUALLY DISHONEST DENIALIST!” rant.
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@Greyparrot
Every tyrannical regime needs to make an example to keep people from getting the wrong idea.
This is exactly why we have a criminal justice system, which right wingers used to pretend to care about.
This is the typical MAGA up is down left is right thinking we have seen, where when someone commits the crime it’s not the criminal that was in the wrong but the people who prosecuted them.
Trump has now been indicted by 4 separate grand juries in 4 separate jurisdictions. His defense is that each of them is out to get him and the MAGA cult just follows him down the path of conspiracy absurdity. Notice the remarkable absence of defenses from him or his sycophants arguing he is innocent.
When republicans voted to acquit Donald Trump for his plot to steal the election culminating with him inciting a mob to attack the US Capitol they said the remedy for this was not through the political process but to hold him accountable through the law. Now that he’s being held accountable through the law they are saying it should be decided through the political process, the very same one he tried to steal.
To say the intellectual dishonesty on the right knows no bounds is giving them way too much credit because it assumes honesty and a commitment to logical consistency is still a supposed a virtue. It’s not, the dishonesty is the point. It’s like when Vladimir Putin has one of his antagonists killed and the official cause of death is that they fell out of a window. It’s no longer about pretending your guy is virtuous, it’s about power being impressed upon the other side by being so insultingly dishonest that the other side is forced to reckon with the fact that your side isn’t constrained by the things we all used to be.
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@cristo71
You once related to me that you, too, respect Professor John McWhorter’s insights and opinions. In light of that, I post this very recent video of him and Glenn Loury discussing the fallout regarding this issue, although it seems a bit “late to the party” now:
For the most part I don’t disagree with his criticisms but he’s doing here what most do, attacking the low hanging fruit. There are certainly those who are demagoguing this and taking it to the extreme, but most of the criticisms on the left about this are not that. This is no different than the left bolstering Marjorie Taylor Green as the face of the Republican Party, although I would argue she’s far more representative of it than this is of the left.
The main part here that keeps coming up is this idea that the section which discusses this was about the resilience of the slaves to make the most out of a terrible situation. Well neither I nor anyone else can read minds, but we can read words. That’s not at all what it says.
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@cristo71
I’m not going to sift through incorrect narratives proffered by NYT and WaPo in particular, but here are well over 5 media narratives which were found to be inaccurate:1. Nick Sandmann as white supremacist2. Rittenhouse as gun trafficking, murderous white supremacist3. Policeman later died after fire extinguisher beating on January 64. Governor Cuomo is a great, great governor5. Michael Avenatti could become president6. Steele Dossier as legit intelligence7. Law enforcement cleared protestors for Trump’s photo op8. Laptop not a legit story (WaPo was actually on the correct side of this one)9. ICE whipping migrants10. Lab leak theory as “conspiracy theory”11. “Don’t Say Gay” bill in Florida12. Inflation as “transitory”13. Columbus police shot an “unarmed” Ma’Khia Bryant14. CRT is not taught in grade schools15. Anti lockdown protestors neglect to wear masks; BLM protestors need not wear masks (not a lie but glaring double standard)16. BLM protests are “mostly peaceful”
Reading through the list it’s mostly a combination of opinions, stories that understood properly are true, or stories that may have turned out to be wrong at the end but were reasonable given the information available at the time. So what exactly was the point here?
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@Tradesecret
I could quote a definition from the shorter or larger catechisms if you wanted. But for me - the definition of God is not actually relevant to the proving of god.
If the goal is to have a rational dialog, it is not possible to have a conversation about whether something exists if you don’t define it.
I understand your point about someone proving one aspect of your definition wrong not disproving the concept itself, but without a definition we don’t even know what the concept is. It has to start there. If the person you’re interacting with is being intellectually honest that’s not going to be a significant hindrance.
how does an agnostic form a conclusion that god's existence is not knowable? It requires some form of definition of god, which most agnostics would not want to admit or concede.
I have no idea where you are getting that last part. Again, without a definition there’s nothing to discuss.
Agnostics are not the ones asserting a god, so I don’t understand why you think accepting a definition as provided by the theist asserting it for the sake of conversation is an admission.
But to the first part, agnostics assert that god is unknowable based on the general definition of god most frequently asserted. The details differ tremendously throughout the religious community, but generally speaking a god is said to be an all powerful being that exists outside of space and time. The problem is that we don’t have access to what if anything lies beyond space and time, so without having access to it we could never know if anything could exist there let alone does.
since it is a self contradictory statement and it proves - ipso facto that god exists. At least on a philosophical level at a 100% level.
A contradictory statement is nothing more than a statement that is logically inconsistent with itself. That does not prove the existence of anything.
what is the purpose of an athiest wanting to define God? The primary reason is to disprove he exists. Not to explore whether God exists - but to disprove.
Some atheists may only be interested in disproving your god assertion, that’s irrelevant to the fact that we cannot have a rational discussion about whether something exists without a definition of it.
But to your greater point here, the way we go about removing bias is to focus on our methodology for determining what’s true so that we can check ourselves against it. This is why we study epistemology, logical fallacies, etc. Anyone sincerely interested in truth will recognize that the only thing we should pride ourselves on is our ability to stick to valid logical principals in our evaluations and decision making. i.e. If you can show me the error in my thinking, I’ll correct it regardless of what that means for me or my stated position.
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@ADreamOfLiberty
You admit Shokin is corrupt. You admit Ukraine is corrupt. You admit Zlochevsky is corrupt. The only people you don't admit are corrupt are the most unequivocally corrupt: the non-Ukrainians with zero engineering experience, providing no capital, offering no service except corrupt services from western governments on the board of Burisma.
Benefiting from a corrupt system and facilitating it are not the same thing.
You are trying to hold private citizens cashing in on their family connections accountable on the same level as public officials entrusted by the people to act on their behalf. That makes no sense and have you provided no reason why anyone in the US should care about what a Ukrainian oil company pays its board members for.
You are also begging the question by asserting that these board members were offering actual services from western governments. That’s the very allegation you’re trying to prove here.
The US has a vested interest in ensuring the aid we send to Ukraine is going to the right places, it’s the public officials we rightfully hold accountable to that, not its private citizens.
Everybody is J-walking, one guy gets arrested; turns out that one guy refused a shakedown and the cop is dirty (i.e. his family is getting money from the shakedown operation).
Shokin was not “one guy”. He in your analogy is the guy whose job it was to make sure anyone who j-walks is held accountable. And he wasn’t arrested for j-walking, he was removed from his position since as you put it… everyone was still j-walking.
If this propaganda/psyop was the only reason to believe in the conspiracy then direct evidence would be required. The first, best, and still unconquered reason to believe in a conspiracy is the enormous unlikelihood of Hunter Biden collecting money in the one country and from the one company that was tangled in government machinations his father was manipulating.
It wasn’t a coincidence. The very thing that drew Hunter to Ukraine as a private citizen looking to cash in wherever he could, is the very same thing that drew the US’s attention towards it.
Moreover, the fact that his dad was heavily involved in the country is the very thing that gave his last name such value.
You are acting as if Hunter threw a dart at a map and it just so happened to land on his dad’s “territory”. That’s not at all what happened.
You are also factually wrong to assert Burisma as “the one company that was tangled in government machinations”. There is no evidence for that. At all. Burisma was just one of many companies Shokin was not investigating. Biden’s involvement hurt the company, not helped it. This is just a lie.
That's the work of weeks to be complete. I have laid out their likely plans in regards to burisma and Shokin in this thread. I'll not break my back for someone who shows no willingness to apply a fair objective eye to the matter.
Says the guy who doesn’t need evidence to support his claims.
You didn’t lay out their likely plans, you laid out your suspicions of what they might have been up to, supported by nothing more than your deep state conspiracy theories.
So... are you saying Joe Biden wasn't financially involved with Hunter?
I’m saying there is no evidence of this.
Which by the standard of Trump's impeachment is already beyond doubt. For Trump it was enough that there was personal gain that could be had.
No, for Trump it was the exact same standard. You have to evaluate the evidence to see what likely happened and consider whether the benefit to himself personally was the deciding factor.
Among many pieces of evidence which makes this blatantly obvious, we have the call notes and testimony from state department officials which made unmistakably clear that Trump tried to withhold aid in exchange for the investigation.
When it comes to the motivation for this move, again among many other points, we have the following
- This scheme was carried out by his personal attorney in secret. If it were a legitimate operation he would have used the many resources he had at the state department and elsewhere
- Once the hold became public he immediately released the aid without the investigation and denied the allegations
- His own officials testified that the goal was not an actual investigation, but rather an announcement of one.
There is no way you can seriously argue that these are the actions of a president using his power on behalf of the people he was elected to serve.
How can you say that with a straight face? A national prosecutor is not an international office and Since Joe R Biden bragged about such interference it does have something to do with him now doesn't it?
I’m talking about US policy as it has been carried out for about a century now. No, that has Nothing to do with Joe Biden. Please respond to my actual points.
Again, your opinion of what the US should or shouldn’t involve itself in has nothing to do with whether Joe Biden was acting corruptly here. His actions were in line with US foreign policy as every administration since WW2 has exercised it. This is an irrelevant point.
Circumstantial evidence requires the ability to evaluate the probability of coincidence and relate it to all other probabilities
Let’s just recap.
So your argument is essentially that Joe Biden was clearly acting corruptly because Shokin was just one guy in a sea of corrupt people whom Joe went after who just so happened to be in the one country where his son was and just so happened to be going after the one company his sleazy son was getting paid millions to be a part of with no experience.
But as I have explained:
- Shokin was not just one guy, he was the guy responsible for stopping the corruption you fully acknowledge was rampant
- It wasn’t a coincidence his sleazy son ended up in this corrupt country
- Burisma was not being targeted in any special way by Shokin
- Joe’s involvement in Ukraine is the very reason Hunter’s last name was valuable to them
- We have a perfectly reasonable explanation for Joe’s involvement without all these conspiracy allegations
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@Greyparrot
Ignoring the central point of my post yet again. Noted.
The job of the media is to bring real world issues to the table and cover those stories proportionally to both their impact and the strength of the evidence supporting them. That’s exactly what the media has done with regards to their insurrection coverage.
The standard for proving a crime beyond a reasonable doubt in a court of law is much higher than the standard for which any claim is reasonable to believe. Trump supporters love to confuse a court of law with the court of public opinion because it gives them permission to shut off any critical thinking abilities they have. Your conflation of these two different things is yet another example of the OP’s point being demonstrated.
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@Greyparrot
You mean the Corporate media cartel talking endlessly about an insurrection that happened 3 years ago with no indictments for insurrection?
No, I was explaining why corporate media is irrelevant to the indictments themselves. Let me know when you would like to respond to my post.
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@Greyparrot
“In the past I’d followed them in the news, but now I don’t care to read the details.”That's the only wise reaction to corporate media propaganda spam.
This is exactly the point the OP was making. The strategy on the right is to attack “the media” so that any story which comes out can be dismissed without any thought being applied at all. It is a strategy geared towards stupid people, or to be more charitable, people who take comfort in their own ignorance.
The indictments themselves have absolutely nothing to do with corporate media. Anyone with an internet connection can right now pull them up and look at the allegations and evidence for themselves. Only a less than intelligent or not intellectually curious person would accept the notion that it is valid to dismiss the indictments on the basis of any previously held belief about corporate media.
Republican talking heads all know this, but they also know that their base will do exactly what you described. The lack of intellectual rigor here is not a secret, it’s the foundational premise of their entire political strategy.
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@ADreamOfLiberty
I never said that, I said that just as you feel comfortable dismissing Shokin's statements because you believe they are self-serving so I too can infer that from the timing even technically true statements may have served as fertilization for actions aimed at ulterior motives.If everybody is J-walking and one out of a thousand people have the mayor lambasting them for it (followed by all the papers reporting that the mayor is lambasting this person) that is suspicious. If you find out later that this one J-walker was in someway presenting a problem to the mayor's agenda ulterior motives are a probable conclusion.
Your analogy starts off with “if everyone is J-walking…”. so you begin with ‘everyone is corrupt but only Shokin takes the heat’. You then assert the timing, a reference to the allegation that Shokin was “in the way” of another conspiracy. And these two things justify why as you allege, Shokin’s removal for corruption wasn’t actually a removal for corruption.
Essentially, you began with the conspiracy and worked your way backwards. Can you provide evidence for any of the premises you are starting off with here?
I never said that the majority of contemporary outlets denied Shokin was corrupt. I'm saying I read them, and they all said the same thing because they were all reporting on the same original source of information namely a manufactured scandal which did not (as far as any evidence shows) predate by any significant margin the US ambassador's complaint and the UK police types throwing up their hands.
Provide evidence that the scandal was manufactured
That's your question, not mine. These are my questions:Was Shokin an impediment to the plans of the deep state?
Please provide evidence that there was a “deep state” and what their plans were.
Was Shokin an impediment to Biden's (or any other DC swamp monster) personal gain?
Please provide evidence that Biden had anything personal to gain from Shokin’s removal. And no, you don’t get to beg the question by asserting Joe Biden’s involvement with Hunter as evidence that Joe Biden was involved with Hunter.
What gives the US the right to demand Ukraine change its government?
We’re taking about whether Joe Biden was corruptly involving himself in Hunter’s behalf. Your opinion on whether the US has a moral right to involve itself in Ukraine’s governmental affairs is completely irrelevant to that. Once again, whatever your opinion of it is, the US has been involving itself in international affairs for about a century now. That has nothing to do with Joseph Robinette Biden.
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@ADreamOfLiberty
If you read "news" you will see there is very little of "CNN asserts X" it's "CNN is telling you that Y asserted X".
That's why we have journalists. This is why news networks tell you all the time "we have not been able to independently verify this story". If it turns out the story is false, it becomes a much bigger story and the networks have every incentive to find that out.
That is not to say their is no truth to what you are saying. You are correct that outlets report what officials say all the time and that public officials do lie. But that doesn't justify asserting that a public official making a statement itself disqualifies that statement as credible. Again, we're talking about evidence in terms of strength vs weakness, not absolutes. Most public officials do not have a cult following, they actually have to be careful with what they say and not getting caught lying or being on the wrong end of an issue.
Those are the articles you found. A US ambassador dropped a rant in consort with one faction of Ukrainian politicians, a few British cops, and a few unelected EU bureaucrats and all you found were a few outlets relaying or parroting the claim.
This is like me asking 10 people whether they like Trump and 8 of them say yes, then I continue to claim Trump is deeply unpopular because 8 random people saying they like him doesn't mean anything.
Let's try this; let's approach this with the scientific method. The question here is; Was Shokin corrupt?
Hypothesis; if I want to know whether Shokin was corrupt I will [insert experiment here] and I will find that [insert results here].
Please fill in the blanks.
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@Greyparrot
I find it odd that exactly zero people have been charged for the crime under Title 18 U.S. Code 2383. Much less convicted.
Do you think the fact that no US President has ever incited an attack on the US Capitol might have something to do with that?
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@IwantRooseveltagain
TWS Greatest hits!
I used to think Donald Trump was the king of projection, I think TWS has him beat.
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@ADreamOfLiberty
You know that’s not what we’re saying.No I don't.
Then you are not reading the arguments you are responding to. I have repeatedly and consistently framed my points within Occam's razor, explicitly arguing that my position is stronger than the alternative, not that the alternative is somehow not possible or even that it couldn't be some combination of both.
It does, because if Shokin was corrupt then Biden’s involvement in getting him fired is easily explainable as him acting within the US’s best interests.It doesn't matter if it's explainable by motives other than personal or subversive if those motivations do exist and are the most probable cause.
For instance Trump asking for an investigation was most probably motivated by wanting Biden to look bad, BUT it was also in the best interests of the American people.
Again, if the deciding factor is that of personal interests, then the decision betrays the trust of those who put that person in their position. That's corruption.
If the decision merely aligns with the individuals personal benefit but did not effect the end result, that's nothing more than a conflict of interest.
The former describes Donald Trump which you admit to. The latter is the best you can possibly establish with Biden, and I'd argue you haven't even came close.
Because of this, the stronger the case for Shokin's corruption, the stronger the case for Biden's personal benefit needs to be to legitimize your case.False, It doesn't matter how corrupt Shokin is or was in any way.
Nonsense.
If Shokin was corrupt, then Biden had every legitimate reason to force his removal.
If Biden had every legitimate reason to force his removal, then the case for his personal benefit needs to be stronger to outweigh the benefits to US interests, otherwise what you have is not corruption but rather a conflict of interests as I described.
If Shokin was corrupt, then Biden had every legitimate reason to force his removal.
If Biden had every legitimate reason to force his removal, then the case for his personal benefit needs to be stronger to outweigh the benefits to US interests, otherwise what you have is not corruption but rather a conflict of interests as I described.
It also requires you to address the fact that Shokin's corruption was the reason why many officials throughout the US and internationally wanted his removal, so that strengthens the case that Biden was or would have been pushed into this decision either way. In other words, he was acting on behalf of the US, not as the arbiter of foreign policy.
You claim this doesn't matter because in your opinion, the US didn't have a legitimate right to take such action in the first place, but your opinion on that issue is irrelevant to this. That's the framework in which US policy is being decided and has been the case for decades, which has absolutely nothing to do with Joe Biden.
You claim this doesn't matter because in your opinion, the US didn't have a legitimate right to take such action in the first place, but your opinion on that issue is irrelevant to this. That's the framework in which US policy is being decided and has been the case for decades, which has absolutely nothing to do with Joe Biden.
They could easily have invented the need they claimed to have and then dropped the statements about Shokin not fulfilling those needs.
Another baseless conspiracy theory invoked to justify a conspiracy theory.
It's like when Trump goes around saying "people tell me X, I don't know but that's what they say." and then 50 bloggers and fake journalists reprint X is slightly different phrasing.
Nobody checked if X was true, not even Trump; worse Trump was the one who decided that X even mattered.
Exactly, this is the state of today's political right.
But setting that aside, even if you could successfully argue that mainstream media works the same way, this is specifically why I keep pointing out the fact that the articles I provided were all written at the time before any of this was politicized.
The reason Trump's ridiculous statements become fact on the right is because people are emotionally vested in believing his bullshit, so others have a vested interest in selling it to them. And when people become vested, facts no longer matter. Politicization corrupts people's ability to apply critical thinking, it's why Trump politicizes everything.
That wasn't the case here. No one outside of Ukraine had anything to gain by making up bullshit about their prosecutor, and no one had any motive to believe the bullshit they were supposedly being fed. Your backwards rationalization here defies basic human nature.
But setting that aside, even if you could successfully argue that mainstream media works the same way, this is specifically why I keep pointing out the fact that the articles I provided were all written at the time before any of this was politicized.
The reason Trump's ridiculous statements become fact on the right is because people are emotionally vested in believing his bullshit, so others have a vested interest in selling it to them. And when people become vested, facts no longer matter. Politicization corrupts people's ability to apply critical thinking, it's why Trump politicizes everything.
That wasn't the case here. No one outside of Ukraine had anything to gain by making up bullshit about their prosecutor, and no one had any motive to believe the bullshit they were supposedly being fed. Your backwards rationalization here defies basic human nature.
You people claim that you can read Biden's mind and know that personal gain wasn't a motivator. You give him the benefit of the doubt. Trumpers give Trump the benefit of the doubt. Complete symmetry (except for the fact that the bulk of evidence is in right-triber favor).
You believe the bulk of the evidence is in right tribe favor because you do not follow the basic rules of evidence.
Going back to the articles as an example, they establish very clearly that Shokin was corrupt. Yet you assert, that they are nothing more than a product of a few politicians inventing an erroneous record and feeding this narrative to the public which everyone else mindlessly bought as part of some corrupt scheme.
You have no evidence that Shokin's public record was somehow falsified.
You have no evidence that the information every public official and every journalist was relying on was the concoction of some small nefarious group.
You haven't even attempted to show that Shokin was not corrupt, aside from quoting Shokin himself saying he was not corrupt.
So to be clear, your argument here works only if we begin with your conclusion that Biden was doing this all for his own personal benefit, and then reverse engineer a conspiracy theory to fit the narrative devoid of any facts to back it up. In other words, you invented a conspiracy theory as evidence to support your conspiracy theory.
That is not how evidence works. You have presented nothing to inform us of Biden's alleged mindset that doesn't already rely on a presumption of Biden's alleged mindset.
In Trump's case, we presume to know Trump's mindset for many very basic reasons. For one, the quid pro quo was literally in writing. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to know what "I need you to do us a favor THOUGH" means. Then there's also the fact that Trump's own hand picked ambassador to the EU testified under oath that this was an attempted quid pro quo.
Do you not see the difference between the standards of evidence you are applying here?
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@TWS1405_2
There is nothing in post forty to dismantle. No legal argument rebutting the legal analysis given.
Whether Trump merely engaged in a series of isolated actions which should be judged as such, or an intentional scheme is every bit as relevant to the legality of this indictment as anything Shapiro said. Your refusal to even acknowledge that demonstrates every bit of the intellectual cowardice and denialism you baselessly accuse me of.
But that's fine, not like I ever expected you to put together a coherent rebuttal with premises, logic, and a conclusion. The only time anywhere in our thread that you offered anything with a beginning middle and end was when you decided to dedicate an entire post to boasting about your accomplishments, which I frankly do not believe. There is no way someone capable of accomplishing what you claim would find it worthy of their time to spend so much time acting like such a jackass. Every post of yours is nothing but a declaration of your superiority followed by insults, all while accusing me of denialism. It's pathetic, and honestly I only engage with you or of sheer fascination of the hypocrisy you put on display.
Good day.
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@Tradesecret
The agnostic premise is this: Nothing about God can be known. And it is a useful statement as it is essentially the starting premise for most scientists and atheists. And even for some theists.This is a self-contradicting statement. It proves God exists on a logical and philosophical level. It says - for those who can't figure out how it is self-contradictory the following:The one thing we can know about God is that we can know nothing about God. It is akin to another famous self-contradiction. There is absolutely no such thing as an absolute.
If you are claiming this proves God exists it would really be helpful to start by defining God.
Beyond that, the agnostic premise is not that nothing about God can be known. This is wrong in two ways:
1) Agnosticism is the position that God's existence is not knowable. This is as I just stated, a position (aka conclusion), not a premise. How one arrived at that conclusion is another question and ultimately unique to each individual.
2) It's a contradictory statement because you structured it that way. When you say nothing about God can be known, you're saying it as if it's a given fact that God exists. Well of course, of one presumes to know that a God exists while also presuming to know that nothing about said God could be known, that sounds like a contradiction. But that position is by definition, not agnosticism or atheism.
Lastly, even if we accept your premise, how does those prove a God exists?
what would be acceptable evidence to prove that such an actual God exists? Who will fit the criteria and the measurements for such an equation? Someone who believes in that God or someone who doesn't. Both persons are going to be either biased in favour or biased against. That is unavoidable and therefore produces a dilemma. There is no such thing as an unbiased person in this situation. Someone who is neutral. It, therefore, means that according to our own scientific methodology that such a study would never achieve an unbiased result.
Bias is not the arrival of a conclusion that differs from someone else's, it's a cognitive phenomenon where one's starting presumptions impair the individual's ability to follow valid and consistent logical processes to it's conclusion. Or more simply, it's what causes one to lead the evidence rather than follow it.
The idea that we begin with a belief, and then find a methodology to fit said belief is itself a description of bias. To claim that is unavoidable is to claim it's not possible to think about this logically.
The evaluation of any existential claim must begin with an epistemological methodology. We then follow that methodology to arrive at our conclusion. If you're arguing that this is biased against God then you're arguing against logic itself, which is untenable.
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@ADreamOfLiberty
This for that” is the Latin translation and is what the term means, but when we’re using it in the context of corruption (which is this entire conversation is about) then its meaning becomes very specific; “this” is referring to something that is given from a position of trust, “that” is referring to something given in return for personal benefit.
It's the most basic form of corruption; using the power that was entrusted within you for the benefit of yourself over the benefit of those who trusted you.
To suggest that anything which can be placed into the English phrase “this for that” qualifies is to render the term completely meaningless. We’re talking about corruption.
In the case of Biden, the entire dispute is over whether his threat to Ukraine qualifies. In other words, we’re debating whether it was in fact a quid pro quo in the corrupt sense. Since that is the debate in question, it comes off as disingenuous when you use it within the course of our discussions. That’s why I asked you to define it.
So you're claiming the only possible reason...
You can stop there. I notice you have a penchant for doing this; you rephrase everything that I and others say as black and white statements spoken from a position absolute certainty. You know that’s not what we’re saying.
No one said anything about the “only possible reason”. I am making the case why the explanation I accept is the one with the fewest assumptions and why yours completely defies that concept. These are arguments evaluated based on the strength of the evidence, not a matter of logical validity.
I see some "razor violations" with that notion, namely the fact that if they already agreed Shokin needed to be fired, extortion wouldn't have been required would it?
The premise was never that they agreed he needed to be fired, it was about whether they understood he was corrupt. They could have easily understood this and not cared, that’s the nature of a corrupt regime. It’s literally what got Zelensky elected, because the people had enough of the corruption within their government.
That looks like an unprovable and highly unlikely assumption to me.
You really need to explain that statement. Our intelligence agencies exist for the purpose of ensuring the President is well informed of what is going on around the world to aid his decision making. There is nothing Biden would have access to that Obama would not have.
That doesn't refute my case at all.
It does, because if Shokin was corrupt then Biden’s involvement in getting him fired is easily explainable as him acting within the US’s best interests. We no longer need to go down the conspiracy corruption path to explain it, thereby flipping Occam’s razor entirely against your position.
You know this, that’s why you hand waive away every piece of evidence demonstrating it with no evidence to the contrary. It’s why I could post over a dozen articles all written before this became politicized talking about his corruption and you just dismiss them wholecloth meanwhile citing Shokin himself saying he is innocent as credible.
You have been constant in the erroneous claim that if Shokin was corrupt or was believed to be corrupt by any relevant actors then Biden could not have been acting corruptly. This does not follow.
Another example of strawmaning my position as a black or white.
Corruption is a scale, not an either/or. One crosses the line into corruption when the decisions they make are such that personal benefit becomes the deciding factor. So even if you could demonstrate that Biden would have benefitted from Shokin’s removal (which you have not) that does not clear the bar. You need to show that the decision to remove Shokin would not have happened but for Biden’s personal benefit.
Because of this, the stronger the case for Shokin's corruption, the stronger the case for Biden's personal benefit needs to be to legitimize your case. It's not that both can't be true, it's that the latter must weight out the former.
Regardless Obama could believe Shokin was corrupt because essentially Biden told him so. Biden could do that directly and/or cause reports to be generated from the intelligence "community" to support his claim
Shokin’s actions (or lack there of) were public knowledge. There is no possible way Biden or any “deep state parasite” could have invented them.
This in itself is corruption and conspiracy. It is not in the best interests of the American people; but it is wider than one corrupt politician lining his pockets.Biden sent Hunter to collect bribes as personal scheme for personal enrichment. That was not a deep state plot, that was Biden's plot
You are more than welcome to provide evidence to support your claims.
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@TWS1405_2
No one needs to go to trial to become an authority let alone an expert in the law.The education is what matters, not the fucking experience. Many who graduate law school turn right around and become law professors. Explain that one, DR!If they are good enough to teach new students the law, legal analysis, etc. without any courtroom experience...well shit, then Shapiro has the exact same qualifications to speak on a federal bullshit indictment dreamed up through asinine novel legal theories just to go after Biden's political opponent.
You do not understand what an authority is in a logical context.
We're talking about logical fallacies, so the question here is about what would render a conclusion to be rational.
The qualification of someone as an authority is relative to the access one has to the needed expertise and the selection process that follows.
If I am feeling ill and I call my cousin who is a nurse and she tells me I'm fine, I am being rational in that situation to accept her as an authority on my ailment because among us she would know far more about this than I. If I later go to a hospital and am diagnosed by a doctor with 30 years practicing medicine who tells me the opposite, my cousin is no longer a valid authority because I now have access to someone with higher crudentials.
When you have access to people with higher crudentials and you decide to accept the word of someone with lesser crudentials, you are exercising selection bias. That entirely defies the concept of an authority.
In this case we're talking about a federal indictment in a highly politicized case. You could right now use Google and find the legal opinion of prosecutors, judges, legal scholars, etc. all over the world weighing in on this. Yet you skipped over all of them to pick some guy on the basis that he passed the bar exam, something literally millions of people in this country have done. That's called cherry picking.
As I have already explained, you keep qualifying him on the basis that you find him smart and you agree with his analysis. If that's the case then you are not listening to him because he's an authority, you are listening to him because you personally determined his analysis to be the correct one. That is not an appeal to authority.
I stood up. Pissed them off to no end. Got five attorneys fired, as well as the firm in the end.So no, one does not need a "trial," civil or criminal, to be an "authority" on the law.
It's a cool story, but has little to do with the concept of an an authority. The jist is that you managed to be successful in a venture where you were disadvantaged from the standpoint of experience in formal education. Anyone in theory, could accomplish the same, so this argument if anything supports the position that there are no authorities.
Before I said that what makes someone an authority is experience. Clearly with you I need to be more precise so I started using the word crudentials. Crudentials is better because it's all encompassing, it includes experience, education, and most importantly... A track record of getting results.
You don't become an authority among your profession in law, science, medicine, etc with education. Everyone has that. Experience? Everyone has that too. You become a leading expert/authority when you can demonstrate that you know what you're doing by getting results. A lawyer who keeps losing cases is not an authority. A doctor whose patients keep dying is not an authority.
An authority is someone you have reason to listen to before you know what they are going say. I have no reason to listen to Ben Shapiro about federal indictment over, say, a former attorney general who Trump hand picked himself.
Being an authority does not mean you are right. It means one is being rational to give your analysis greater weight on the basis of your crudentials.
So, I know what I am talking about, and you CLEARLY do not.
Then you should have no problem dismantling my argument without having to resort to insults and bold declarations of how right you are.
So go on, finally... dismantle post 40.
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@ADreamOfLiberty
A quid pro quo is when someone in a position of trust provides something of value that doesn't belong to them in exchange for something of personal valueI reject that definition
Please define quid pro quo.
Why would their failure to go over Biden's head also mean Obama was in on it?
I already explained that.
Either the Ukrainians believed they were being extorted by Joe Biden for his own personal benefit or they did not.
If they did not, that logically leads to the conclusion that they understood their prosecutor was in fact corrupt, which removes the core of your case.
If they did, then you add to your position the assumption that they would have accepted being personally extorted rather than to have taken the issue up the chain. That's a huge assumption which defies Occam's razor.
Why does Obama's approval of the extortion imply that he must have approved of the extortion for the exact same reasons Biden was motivated to seek it
Because Obama is working with the same information as Biden.
If Obama approved of this he either believed based on the intelligence Shokin was unacceptably corrupt (again refuting the core of your case) or he did not believe that and instead just went along with Biden extorting a foreign nation without at best, knowing why, and at worst, going all in on Biden's scheme to use the power of the executive branch to illegally protect Hunter Biden.
The former refutes your case and the latter defies Occam's razor.
but not equally suspicious. It would be good for Joe regardless for Obama to say he knew everything Biden was doing and approved.
They don't need to be equally suspicious. The fact that you consider both options of a true dichotomy suspicious at all speaks to a lack of commitment to logical consistency. It's a pointless game of heads I win tails you lose.
Not to mention you've answered your own original question; Obama doesn't speak on this because there's no point. It's not possible to appease people who will take issue with whatever you do, so there is no point in trying. His efforts could be much better spent elsewhere.
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@TWS1405_2
What part of the cited quote did you obviously fail to comprehend!?! -- the authority must be qualified to speak on the subject being discussed...
The part where you assert that someone who's never practiced criminal law a day in their life should be accepted as an authority on a federal criminal indictment.
He does not need to have a trial under his belt, let alone a criminal trial, in order to read, interpret, understand and correctly apply legal analysis debunking the novel legal theories within it.
Correct, and neither does anyone else. The question in dispute here is not whether he is correct, it's whether he is an authority on the subject.
To be an authority on a subject you need to have expertise on that subject. Expertise comes from experience. He has zero experience with criminal indictments whereas you can easily find the opinions of thousands of others who have such experience, therefore it is irrational to gloss over their expertise in favor of Shapiro's non-expertise. That's about as clear of an appeal to authority fallacy as there is.
Do you understand that there are different types of lawyers? Would you go to a criminal defense attorney to represent you in a real estate deal?Out comes the narcissistic obnoxious ad hominem...
It's not an ad hominem, the insinuation is the logical extension of your stated position. You are invoking someone who's only experience in law is business law as an authority on criminal law. So you are arguing that one type of lawyer should be accepted as being just as qualified in other fields as they are in their own.
The fact that my insinuation, which was an entirely accurate portrayal of what you have argued, came off as so silly and insulting that you read it as an as hominem should really make you think about what you're arguing.
Sadly it won't. Queue the "duh well you're just being a narcissistic denialist blah blah blah"
This topic is about a legal analysis of the novel legal theories in a flawed indictment by one attorney of that criticizing another attorney.
No, that's what I tried to make it about in post 40 where I explained why his analysis was flawed. You responded without a single word of critique of the actual argument I made and instead just called it a dumb analogy and then touted Ben Shapiro as an authority on the subject.
If I agree with his analysis, that translates to his analysis being my analysis since I agree with it in its entirety.
Then respond to my critique of it by offering something better than "duh that was a dumb analogy"
Great argument.Yup. And you just dropped rebutting it. I'll accept that as your concession.
Concession of what? You didn't offer a damn thing but assertions that my analogy fails along with insults.
Do you know what an argument is? Can you provide one?
and has argued many times that he doesn't believe presidents should be prosecuted. His biases would be towards Trump.And there is the concession right there. Thank you. You finally admit it. He is biased against (towards) Trump.
It wasn't a concession genius. Being biased towards Trump is the opposite of being biased against Trump. Inserting parenthesis with your own words saying the opposite of what I just said doesn't change my argument.
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@Greyparrot
Just curious, what was the deal supposed to have been about?
Don't know, tried to research it but hard to find anyone who will explain it beyond noting that Biden is the big guy. The most I've gotten is a vague description of a scheme to charge someone for giving him access to Biden. Essentially, the guy would have been paying to be a lobbyist.
If this is accurate then it sounds fairly shady, but also remarkable if this is the supposed corruption the republicans are so obsessed with uncovering and even more so if they're really trying to compare this to Trump.
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@Best.Korea
Reason requires a person. Person can be wrong. Reason can be wrong. Observation can be wrong.
Then on what basis do you believe anything?
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@HistoryBuff
so there is a text that so far can't be confirmed to be legitimate. In that text there a section for "H" and that he would hold money for the "big guy". It does not say who "h" is. It does not say who the "big guy" is.
The text actually was confirmed, and it's author has made clear that H was referring to Hunter while "the big guy" is Joe Biden, so that's not in dispute.
What they ignore however is that the text was literally just one of Hunter's colleagues asking if he should include Joe in the business deal to which no one responded that he should. About a week later a contract for that deal was drawn and Joe was no where on it, and there remains to this day no evidence that Joe ever even knew about the deal let alone was part of it or benefited from it.
So to be clear, a colleague of Hunter asking in a text whether Joe should be part of a deal is a smoking gun for Joe's corruption, but Trump's hand picked ambassador to the EU saying under oath "there was a quid pro quo" is worthless. MAGA logic.
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@ADreamOfLiberty
Why then would Obama not admit to confirming the quid pro quo when the Ukrainians supposedly called him?
Because it's not a quid pro quo. A quid pro quo is when someone in a position of trust provides something of value that doesn't belong to them in exchange for something of personal value. Telling Ukraine that the US will withhold aid if the prosecutor is not fired is a decision made by the US to benefit US interests. Not the same thing.
Also, I never said they did call him, we don't know if they ever did. I pointed out that Joe told them to call him because that just adds to the problems with your allegation. Again, if they were being extorted by Joe for his own personal benefit they could have easily went up the chain, so either they didn't or that didn't work which means Obama was "in on it", which totally defies Occam's razor.
Surely he would be interested in clearing the record and helping his old pal given that this was all in the interests of the amreican people (and countless others by HistoryBuff's account).Why like Joe take all the credit when taking credit could destabilize the narrative against Joe?Hec when I put it like that I'm not sure I would even take Obama at his word.
Exactly. If Obama stays quiet, that's suspicious. If Obama speaks up, that's suspicious.
This is the kind of illogic I'm talking about when I explain why "conspiracy theorist" is a pajoritive.
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@TWS1405_2
"Legitimate appeals to authority
As we mentioned earlier, there are some instances where supporting a claim with an expert’s insight is logically sound. For an appeal to authority to be legitimate, the authority must be qualified to speak on the subject being discussed, and their statement must be directly relevant to that subject."Ben Shapiro is qualified to speak on the subject being discussed
Again, you are appealing to someone who has never tried a criminal case in his life as an authority on a criminal indictment. If you can't see the issue with that I cannot help you.
He has the academic and professional credentials in the legal arena, having graduated from Harvard Law School and worked for one of the largest law firms in the world. One doesn't need to practice criminal law in order to read, interpret, understand and accurately analyze the law and apply said understanding based on their academic and professional experience equipping him with the requisite knowledge to do so.
Do you understand that there are different types of lawyers? Would you go to a criminal defense attorney to represent you in a real estate deal?
His legal analysis was spot on.
Then you are relying on your understanding of the subject, not his. Why then, are you so determined to hide behind him? Why not present your own arguments and defend them against rational scrutiny? Are you afraid of that?
Post #40. Learn to read.BWAAAHAAAHAAAA!!! That is not a refutation. That's a subjective - non-legal - opinion based on a stupid irrelevant baseball ticket analogy asserted in a failed attempt to discredit 3 different legal analysis on 3 different charges within the J6 indictment. I have made this observation each time you keep doubling down on it, it is to YOU who needs to learn to read.
Great argument.
Barr's biases discredit him
Barr is an extreme right wing legal expert who was handpicked by Trump to be his attorney general and has argued many times that he doesn't believe presidents should be prosecuted. His biases would be towards Trump.
You are very clearly just disqualifying anyone who disagrees with you. From the same person who accuses me of denialism, the projection is astounding.
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@ADreamOfLiberty
you think the vice president has the power to put pressure on a foreign government? the VP has basically no power whatsoever, other than what the president says he does.So no evidence, you just assumed that because the constitution doesn't spell out that a VP can extort a foreign country it can't happen without the president's knowledge and action.
He's assuming that a foreign ally would have basic knowledge of how the US Constitution works, which would be an odd thing to argue against given that this information is easily available to anyone with an internet connection.
Given that they knew full well the VPOTUS had no actual power, it is beyond unreasonable to accept that they would have allowed themselves to be extorted by Biden without Obama's knowledge. In Biden's story, the one you are basing your entire argument on, he even recounted telling the Ukrainians to call Obama.
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@Greyparrot
Do you think Vivek has a point here?
No.
This is a common tactic among the right to conflate Trump's baseless claims of election fraud with assertions that the election night have been different if [insert issue here] was more widely known. They're not remotely the same thing, this is just a cop out to avoid having to address the fact that Trump lost fair and square.
Pakman afterward did a breakdown where he addressed this and the other problems with the interview, this is a pretty good illustration of why I don't find Vivek to be a serious voice in politics. My assessment of him is that he's just good at making silly arguments sound smart and insightful to people who don't know any better.
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@ADreamOfLiberty
Looks like you're going to do the red herring thing. Counter strategy is to force to one point at a time.Everyone who has ever worked for Donald Trump knows who "the boss" is. You are really grasping for straws on that one.Who is the big guy?
Accusing me of a red herring while ignoring everything I just said in order to invoke a false equivalence as a whataboutism. Ok.
The big guy is Joe Biden. If you decide however to look further than the salatious headline, this story in no way justifies what you are arguing..
This nickname was invoked in an email from one of Hunter's business partners regarding who would be involved in a business deal. It wasn't an insinuation of anything, it was literally just a question. A few days later a contract was drawn, Joe Biden was not a part of it. To this day there is no evidence that Joe was ever part of these discussions or even knew about them.
So you are trying to equivocate someone whom Joe Biden had no known dealings with asking if he would be involved in a business deal... with an employee of Donald Trump changing his schedule to fly to MaraLago to tell the IT guy that Trump wanted the servers deleted. An act that would have in no way benefited the employee to make up or carry out on his own and in fact of he were acting on his own against Trump's wishes would have been seriously risking his job.
These are not remotely comparable in terms of a presumption of guilt being validated by the facts.
And as a side note, let's just assume Joe was entirely involved in this business deal... What is the allegation here? This would be illegal or corrupt how exactly?
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@ADreamOfLiberty
You quite hilariously pretend that you can't figure out that Hilary ordered the servers wiped but didn't bother to apply your standard of proof to Trump.
The standard is to apply logic and reason to the facts and determine, based on all available evidence, what explanation is most likely correct and to what degree.
You don't seem to believe in this, instead you latch onto the headlines and with no critical thinking involved and accept what appears to be the best explanation on the surface. Maybe I'm wrong, let's see.
Let's look closer at Hillary Clinton's servers and what happened. First, you claim people don't smash data devices, that's nonsense. Most people don't but some do. And in this case you use it to insinuate something nefarious here. This information came from the testimony of one of Clintons employees at the state department who testified that he smashed two of her phones to ensure the data was not retrievable. Why? Because she got new phones and didn't want to risk classified information falling into the wrong hands. All of this occurred before the subpoena so there is absolutely no reason to suspect anything nefarious here. It's common sense that you don't want to risk losing a phone where someone could access highly sensitive info.
But it sounds nefarious if you disregard all that so it makes the headlines.
And not sure if you know this, but Bleachbit is a software program that deletes emails. She didn't use bleach.
Regarding her emails, there are a few facts here that are inconvenient to the narrative. First of all it was a regular practice at the state department to delete personal emails, it's literally in the state department manual
"Messages that are not records may be deleted when no longer needed,” - State Department Foreign Affairs Manual (5 FAM 443.5)"
Second, she had an entire staff handling these things. You seem to think Clinton had some personal aid doing her bidding when it wasn't anything like that. Her chief of staff testified to what the departments protocols were, and there was literally an procedure followed that went multiple layers down from her chief of staff, to a department supervisor to his subordinate. So not only would Clinton have had to involve them all in the deletion, but then she would have had to get them all to risk jail time for lying to the FBI. As Trump has shown is, this rarely if ever works.
And let's also not forget that the attorneys at the state department had to first review all emails to be deleted, so they would have to be part of the conspiracy as well.
And all of this for what exactly? What could Clinton possibly have been hiding that was this serious that she needed a full blown conspiracy to cover up in the first place?
None of this makes any sense.
So is it a simple matter of "I think Trump is bad but Hillary seems aay ok"? No, that's just silly. This is a matter of looking at the entire picture. And still, Clinton could very well be guilty here, but to make that claim you need evidence, not just a salacious headline.
A.) Does that tape of employees actually exist? Was it deep faked? You don't know, you presume.
Yes I presume. Just like I presume Australia exists even though I've never been there.
B.) If Hilary's employees can randomly decide to destroy data, why can't Trump employees randomly decide to destroy data?
Because as I just explained, it wasn't random. It was a department operation put in place for good reason. There was no reason for Trump's server to be deleted other than to avoid federal investigators from finding out what's on it, but they did.
Why can't they randomly decide to say their boss wants it. What if their boss is someone slightly higher up the hierarchy but not Trump who just happened to want to destroy data without orders
Everyone who has ever worked for Donald Trump knows who "the boss" is. You are really grasping for straws on that one.
Moreover, Occam's razor very clearly points to the conclusion that if one of his employees is telling another the boss wants the servers deleted, it came from him.
But that's not all they have. The employee who told the other to delete the server was at the time Trump's right hand man who was scheduled to fly out with Trump that morning. But the day before Trump learned his video was being subpoenad and right afterward called the employee and had a 22 minute conversation. The employee then immediately changed his travel plans booking a flight to MaraLago. That evening he texted the IT guy asking if he was going to be around the next day. The rest is on the video.
The story is beyond clear.
C.) How do you know which server was being referenced
See above
You're doing nothing but painting a picture of just how blind you are to your own biases.
I think you need to look in the mirror.
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@TWS1405_2
In no way shape or form have I cited Shapiro in a way that was unsound. His legal analysis is on point. Therefore, my appeal to his authority is proper and NOT a fallacy.
The appeal to authority fallacy is when you cite someone to advance your argument who is not an authority. Ben Shapiro is not an authority. He's a political commentator who spent about 10 months practicing law which was not even criminal law.
If you want to argue his analysis is sound, you are free to do so, Shapiro at that point would be irrelevant. You have not even attempted to do so, and when I explained in a few simple sentences why his analysis fails all you have in response is to tell me about my denialism. You should really spend some time reflecting on why you are so averse to making your own arguments.
On the other hand, if you find one or two other attorneys (clearly a leftist progressive democrat who hates Trump) that will support your stupid Ticketmaster baseball dugout analogy, that, by definition, would in fact be a logical fallacy
So far Bill Barr, Micheal Cohen, and Ty Cobb have all publicly talked about how the indictment is sound and Trump's defense is laughable. All of which have personally represented Trump and one that was handpicked by Trump to be his attorney general. Not to mention Chris Christy, a former republican governor and prosecutor. Tell me again about how the only one's who agree with me are leftists.
And those are just the ones I have personally seen interviewed, I have no idea how many more haber stated the same publicly.
To date you have NOT refuted any single aspect of Shapiro's legal analysis of the J6 indictment. FACT!
Post #40. Learn to read.
There is no irony at my end, just yours.I have committed no fallacy, but you would be if you cited Bill Barr.
Right, a right wing commentator who makes millions feeding the MAGA base what it wants to hear who has never practiced criminal law is an authority on Trump's indictment. But Trump's own hand picked attorney general is not.
I would ask if you're serious but you've made that clear.
You need help.
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@ADreamOfLiberty
So it's a way to disguise saying "You're wrong stupid" in a way that isn't so obviously pointless.
The idea is that it opens up the door to more a substantive and nuanced conversation in a way that calling someone stupid doesn't because it's a far more specific critique. But when you have no interest in that conversation then it doesn't really make a difference.
Your suspicion of what Joe Biden might have done if he were in the same position Trump was is not an argumentIt is irrelevant to me if you consider it an argument or not.
And it shouldn't be because it's not about what I say, it's about whether your argument has any validity.
You bring this contention up relatedly as a means of equivocating between Trump and Biden. But it fails both politically and legally.
We judge people for their actions, not for the actions we believe they might have taken if they were put in a certain situation. So abstract insinuations do nothing to help us form any rational conclusion of ones character.
We don't charge people for crimes they would have committed if they were given the opportunity, so this contention cannot be used to argue Biden should also be indicted, which is what you would need to argue to claim Trump's indictment is unfair.
The only thing this argument might accomplish is to argue that the DOJ is being unfair by asking for Trump's documents back and not Biden's, but that argument only works if you can show that there is no significant difference between what each of them did to capture NARA's attention. But you won't even attempt to go down that path, all you do is hand waive away the very reasons they provided which the Trump team is not even contesting.
If you think you can demonstrate a contradiction in my stated positions don't hold back.
My point here wasn't about stated contradictions, it was about the hypocrisy of equivocating your guy vs the other guy on the basis of what you believe the other guy would have done had he been in the same position.
If Biden were found guilty of illegally obstructing an investigation into his son, and my defense was that Biden should somehow be excused because if one of Trump's children was being investigated he would have done the same thing, you wouldn't for a second accept that argument for anything.
Yet you accept it for Trump. Why?
Do you see the difference here?I am in a state of pity for you if you see a difference.
Don't have time for this today. Will respond to the false equivalences here tomorrow.
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@TWS1405_2
Cherry picking attorneys espousing factually inaccurate legal assessments (like Bill Barr) to support your wrong interpretation is by definition an appeal to authority fallacy.And if you even could find some attorneys (it won’t be thousands), they would be easily debunked.The point is you have zero credibility in your failed position put forth with illogical baseball ticket analogies, whereas Shapiro has credibility given his legal, academic and professional background establishing his credibility.
Is this a joke?
You are the one invoking an authority (Ben Shapiro), I am pointing out why your "argument" is not an argument at all (because it is nothing more than an appeal to authority fallacy - hence the "so what" at the end of that sentence).
So you are responding to my pointing out that you are committing a logical fallacy by lecturing me about that same logical fallacy.
And you don't even see the irony here.
But even looking past the fallacy that you are engaging in, the remarkable logic pretzel you are contorting yourself into is quite impressive. You claim that Ben Shapiro, a podcaster and political commentator who has about 10 months experience in law, none of it in the criminal justice system, is somehow a more reliable source here than Donald Trump's own hand picked attorney general.
They're really are no words.
I never retort with posts the likes that you claim
You just did.
You posted a link to the Ben Shapiro show explaining why this indictment doesn't hold up. I refuted it in a few sentences. You responded without a single word responding to my argument. You're entire post was to tell me I have no credibility and Ben Shapiro knows better.
You cannot seriously think what you provided was anything reassembling an intellectual point.
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@ADreamOfLiberty
Trump took far more documents with no warning or coordination with the agencies than we've ever seen.So you've been told.Not to mention the fact that he took home top secret nuclear documents.Doubt it.
So essentially, you're going with the nuclear option; just doubt everything so that you have an excuse to believe whatever you want. Got it.
There is nothing remotely suspicious about the fact that NARA noticed them missing and asked for them back.To you
To any rationally thinking person. Again, Trump's 325 documents along with Top Secret SCI markings would be expected to catch NARA's attention by anyone who knows anything about classified materials.
But then again when you give yourself the freedom to just reject wholecloth what Trump took, everything or nothing can look suspicious. Your choice.
you don't find Hunter Biden on the Burisma board suspicious
Suspicious of what exactly? The son of a prominent politician using his name and possible influence to cash in? Everyone knows this.
You can't possibly believe Trump is sitting around cataloging documents and writing letters to NARA. Some low level lawyers were doing it, in contact with the FBI. They made a good faith effort, and then they were given an offer they can't refuse.Speaking of that and long standing legal traditions that are absolute abominations the idea that you can extort testimony by offering to withhold charges will rightly be looked upon in the future as similar to trial by combat.Sure you can get mafia with it, you can also get Mother Theresa.Now please do something incredibly ironic like saying "oh that's just a conspiracy theory"
It is. This is just baseless rambling with no evidence or logical reasoning whatsoever.
Let me repeat; Where Trump crossed over into illegality is when he was notified that they needed to be given back and lied to federal investigators before hiding the very same documents from them.That's a conspiracy theory you know. A theory that there was a conspiracy....
Pretty sure I've explained this to you at least half a dozen times already.
Conspiracy theory in the pajoritive sense doesn't simply refer to a theory that there was a conspiracy. It refers to a theory based on a specific type of flawed thinking characterized by fallacies such as argument from ignorance, argument from incredulity, backwards rationalizing, and an inverse of Occam's razor.
That's exactly what your mafia fantasy follows. You have no evidence of any of it, it just lines up with your preferred narrative so you accept it and by default everything that conflicts with it now becomes far fetched so you get to deny it with no work involved.
No it doesn't because nobody tried to do it to Biden. I'm sure Biden could be railroaded just like anyone else.
Again, completely irrelevant. Your suspicion of what Joe Biden might have done if he were in the same position Trump was is not an argument, legal or otherwise, that Trump is innocent.
The fact that you continue to trot this out speaks volumes to the weakness of your argument. You would never accept this line of thinking if our positions were reversed and I think you know that.
I forgot you need to prove intent with deep staters. Duh only independents like Trump are presumed malicious.
We determine intent through an application of reason.
With Clinton the emails were deleted by an aid. That's all we know. We can infer malicious reasons why it could have been done intentionally, but that's nothing more than suspicion which does not hold up in a courtroom.
With Trump we know how intentions with regards to his security server because we have his employees on tape discussing it - "the boss wants the server deleted"
Do you see the difference here?
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@TWS1405_2
Shapiro is a lawyer, you’re not.
And I could show you a thousand lawyers who agree with me. So what?
He has credibility, you do not.
Her had credibility among the MAGA base. No one outside of that takes him seriously.
His argument(s) is sound.Yours is not.
Do you even know what sound argument is? Hard to tell given that all you ever post are these stupid and childish "I'm right and you're wrong, so there" posts.
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@Greyparrot
But even you admit simply charging him would be enough to have him removed from the political race. Winning the case in court isn't nearly as important.
I've never said nor suggested that simply being charged of a crime should remove him or anyone else from a political race. The question is what the individual is being charged with and what is the evidence against them. The public needs to weigh the case accordingly.
The case against Trump is overwhelming, and most of it occurred right there in plain site. His legal team isn't even contesting most of the key facts, they're just trying to spin this into an attack on his free speech, which is ridiculous.
The court of public opinion does not have the same standards or requirements as a court of law and for good reason; we're not debating whether citizen Trump should retain his freedom, we're debating whether we should entrust him with the most powerful and consequential job on earth. Proof beyond a reasonable doubt does not apply here.
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@TWS1405_2
What about those statutes is not supposed to be used this way?Well shit, had you clicked the link and listened to Shapiro break it down you would know the answer to this question.
The indictment alleges that Trump engaged in a scheme to defraud the United States. Ben Shapiro's entire breakdown refutation was to look at each action individually and claim none of these actions are individually a crime. He missed the entire point.
It's not illegal to lie and claim I have seats behind the dugout when they're really nose bleed seats.
It's not illegal to sell nosebleed seats for the price of seats behind the dugout.
Put those two things together, you now have fraud, which is a crime.
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@Greyparrot
So why are there no indictments for insurrection?
Probably because the bar in a court of law would be too high.
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@Greyparrot
It's a basic first amendment right to question the government without fear of retribution or retaliation. He had the right to challenge the election results through legal means like filing lawsuits and seeking recounts or audits. You have to wonder why they're charging him with these felonies if he indeed had the constitutional right to do those things.
If I sat here telling you I had tickets to the MLB all star game sitting right behind home plate, it doesnt matter if I'm lying. There's nothing illegal about me doing so.
If I then sell you my tickets with that understanding which turn out to be nose bleed seats, I've now committed fraud.
The indictment goes to great length to clarify that Trump did in fact have the right to lie about the election. It becomes illegal when he uses the lies he told to advance illegal activity.
Advancing that activity includes organizing the fake electors scheme and his many attempts to get the states to change their election results. That's why he's being charged.
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@Greyparrot
If you want to claim that NBC noted a "notable" lack of public support outside of the questionnaire, feel free, quote that study from NBC, and I will look at that evidence.
Address Q1 and Q2 and perhaps you'll discover that you don't need me to provide you with a study to review.
If you actually expected all 44 questioned in the article you cited in your OP to say "yes"...
No one has suggested a unanimous verdict was needed for anything, so the remainder of this is a strawman.
either Not talking to NBC or OTHERWISE not publicly supporting Trump =/= does not support Trump, publicly or privately.
If someone does not publicly state that they support Trump, then by definition, they are not publicly supporting Trump. That follows from the definition of "publicly".
Whether they support him privately is another question, and of course, not supporting him publicly does not tell us anything about their attitude towards Trump privately.
But when you zoom out, this does in fact become notable. Any individual could have their personal reasons for not saying anything, but when only 4 will just say he should get reelected... That raises some serious red flags about the overall attitude towards him, especially when you have a chunk of them speaking out against him.
Do you seriously think Biden's cabinet or Obama's cabinet would be so quiet?
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@ADreamOfLiberty
The sophistry of charging is uninteresting to me.
Which explains why you don't understand it and why the arguments you are presenting make sense to you.
The real world is complicated, understanding it takes an appreciation for nuance. If you're not interested in then why bother?
The essential truth is that the deep state asked Trump for documents where no other official has ever been asked.
I already explained this.
Trump took far more documents with no warning or coordination with the agencies than we've ever seen. Not to mention the fact that he took home top secret nuclear documents. There is nothing remotely suspicious about the fact that NARA noticed them missing and asked for them back.
Moreover, this is completely irrelevant. Even if the government didn't ask other presidents for their records back, that doesn't make it legal for Trump to lie to investigators and defy a federal subpoena.
You can ignore these facts all you want. They still refute your argument.
Biden had documents in multiple locations for far longer and never had the unilateral authority to declassify, and was never asked to inventory what he took, nor was he swatted after his lawyers and the FBI supposedly made a mistake. Those are the differences that justify "stapler"
And yet none of those differences are relavant here.
Trump is not being charged for having documents in multiple locations, for having them for a long time, because they were classified, or because he didn't inventory them first.
Where Trump crossed over into illegality is when he was notified that they needed to be given back and lied to federal investigators before hiding the very same documents from them.
Let me repeat; Where Trump crossed over into illegality is when he was notified that they needed to be given back and lied to federal investigators before hiding the very same documents from them.
Again, you can ignore these facts all you want. They are still facts. Biden didn't do any of this, which completely refutes your argument.
BS. You don't know what he took. If you did it wasn't very sensitive information was it?
We know what he was charged for. You can close your eyes and plug your ears all you want, you still have no actual reason to deny those charges, especially considering that the government will be forced in the upcoming months to disclose these documents to the jury and they know this full well, so the presumption that they don't have it is ridiculous.
Facts and logic disagree.
You aren't even presenting facts and logic, just non sequiturs that ignore the facts within this case.
Whatever would be upended by that principle should be upended and should never have been allowed to become normal in the first place.
Right, in other words obstruction of a federal investigation should have always been legal. This is the absurdity that comes along with the MAGA hat.
So in your example you committed a crime and this is somehow supposed to illustrate why obstruction should be a crime regardless of whether you did anything immoral?What about Hilary's servers and blackberries?
If you have any evidence that Hilary ordered her server to be deleted to evade federal investigators, you know, anything close to the level of evidence that the government has on Trump, you are free to share it and we can discuss.
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@ADreamOfLiberty
The only difference that matters to me is that Trump keeping his own documents is treated as a crime when Trump does it and not when Biden does.
I've already explained to you in great detail that the mere keeping of the documents is not what Trump is being charged for, so not only is your premise entirely false but you admit that you do not care about facts or logic.
Biden was found to have had 20 documents marked classified. Trump had 325 including some marked top secret. Yet you paint Biden as a guy with a stapler down his pants and Trump with a few paper clips. The intellectual dishonesty of that comparison is beyond words.
The documents Trump took were far more numerous and far more serious, so of course the archives were more likely to notice them missing. But you ignore this fact because it doesn't suit your narrative. And in ignoring it you pretend there was unequal treatment from the start thereby allowing you to excuse everything that Trump did afterward. It's logical fallacy being used as an excuse to ignore reality.
Indictments are handed out to people who (allegedly) commit crimes. Trump committed crimes. Biden didn't. These are the facts no matter what excuses you make up to ignore them.
There must be an underlying crime, "resisting arrest" is not sufficient when the arrest would have been unjustified if it had not been resisted.
Like many crimes, resisting arrest is a "tack on" crime that isn't always charged. It depends on the totality of the situation, the legitimacy of the underlying arrest being an important consideration.
But Trump defenders have taken this concept to the absolute extreme. Now they say, you can't obstruct an investigation unless a crime is found. Such an absurd notion if accepted would upend or entire justice system.
We don't learn of crimes having been committed unless we investigate them. If the investigation can be obstructed, our ability to uncover them becomes severely restricted and as a result it becomes far more likely that the crime will never be proven. So if for example, my cell phone records are subpoenaed and I know they will prove a crime, I can just delete them. No crime proven so no obstruction.
You are essentially advocating for the legalization of the cover up.
This is a perfect example of why Donald Trump is so dangerous. This is something no one would have argued before, but suddenly Trump puts it out there, his pundits who know better repeat it, and before you know half the country believes it.
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@Greyparrot
Q1: Do you know what the term "Public" means?
Q2: If I told you "person A has never publicly apologized for [insert controversy here]", would you know how to verify this statement yourself?
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