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@ADreamOfLiberty
That is perhaps more true as technology is advancing, but there was a time when an ink pen was almost impossible to undo and a contract with a signature represented something exceedingly difficult to fake, same with an audio recording.
You missed the point entirely.
I was addressing your fallacious appeal to certainty, which has become a theme in your arguments. Certainty is not only not required, is not rational. We believe what we find to be the most reasonable conclusion, so the conversation is about which argument is more reasonable.
There were no checks and balances to prevent the fabrication of evidence submitted to FISA courts, there was no check and balance to prevent a single document commissioned by a paid political operative from generating literal years of controversy intentionally prolonged and enlarged by the FBI, there was no check and balance to prevent agents from preempting the laptop story (and thus running deeply afoul of the 1st amendment).
To the first, the check and balance is the inspector generals office who prosecuted the individual who falsified the documents. That individual had his law license suspended and was sentenced to 400 hours of community service.
That was an incredibly stupid thing to lose his career over. And ironically, the judge said he probably would have approved the warrant anyway, which not only shows how pointless it was, it also shows how the scale of this controversy is being completely blown out of proportion.
Your second example refers to the dossier, a document complied by a British intelligence officer, so even if you take the entire thing as a lie (not one thing in that dossier has been proven false), that still has nothing to do with the FBI.
The only connection you can draw there is that they used the document in their quest to get a warrant, that doesn't discredit anything. No one is claiming it was proven, if that were the case they wouldn't be investigating it. They used it because it corroborated the information they already had and the threats posed were serious enough to warrant investigation. That's how getting to the truth works, only the most partisan and ignorant would twist this into proof of the FBI's dishonesty.
The last is just a claim made by a self professed Trump supporter. If that's your proof you have incredibly low standards.
The only difference I see is that Trump's paid political operative works alone and Clinton's paid political operative can throw a snowball on the hill and the FBI turns it into a boulder.
I know that's the only difference you see, that's the problem. It's a common right wing tactic to disregard context and focus only on the end result in order to make everything seem equal when they're not.
So when a British intelligence officer shares information damning to a presidential candidate, the intelligence is treated as serious findings rather than being blasted on CNN, the information corroborates what the FBI already had, and so the FBI takes that seriously, you see it as politicization.
But when a paid political operative who goes to other countries in search of political dirt on his client's opponent comes across a laptop handed to him by a Trump supporter weeks before a presidential election claiming to belong to the son of his political opponent, goes on TV to talk about all of the damming information found on this laptop even as former intelligence officers warn that this has the hallmarks of Russian propaganda, following an election where Russian propaganda proved consequential in shaping public sentiment, results in extreme caution before accepting this information and spreading it... You see that as politicization.
It's not that this demonstrates a double standard, it demonstrates a flagrant disregard for standards in favor of whatever suits your narrative.
The dossier, despite being in the FBI's hands well before the election, was never disclosed to the public or even congress until well after the results were final. Meanwhile the fact that Clinton was being investigated again for her emails was made public knowledge 10 days before the election and arguably handed Trump the White House. Yet you argue the FBI is politicized by the left? It's beyond absurd.
It's what you've been told to believe.
I take this at pure projection.
before the laptop plenty of people recognized that it beggared belief that Biden was the prime mover in removing a prosecutor who moved against the corrupt foreign company where his very American son was inexplicably 'employed' with an absurd 'wage'.
It's yet another example of what I just described. If you disregard the context it all sounds ominous, but that's why the context matters.
But more to the point, just because something seems suspicious doesn't mean it is whatever you're thinking. The only thing that would qualify as actual evidence rather than just conjecture are the emails hence my point, they are the line that connects the dots.
Your deductive argument failed, you cannot rule out personal motivation or even rule out the possibility that Biden engineered the anti-Shokin movement. Thus...
It's not a deductive argument. The fact that the entire intelligence community and international community were in full agreement on this makes it perfectly reasonable to presume that Biden was motivated to act within the US's best interest. Add to that the fact that Hunter was never in any legal jeapordy and claims that Biden was really motivated by personal interests competely violates Occam's razor.
I've made this basic argument clear from my first post on this. The fact that you would twist that into a deductive argument speaks volumes about how you are not engaging in good faith.
Articles published by intelligence agencies?
Intelligence agencies do not publish articles.
The reversal is only being caused by your double standards. I agreed it implicated Shokin because I was being objective, later when you refused to accept the implications of the "good job" letter I pointed out the double standard.
My standards have nothing to do with your position, or at least they shouldn't. If they do then it's no wonder your arguments rely on such inconsistencies and logical fallacies.
I didn't refuse to accept the implications of the "good job letter". I explained to you in detail why the letter was not what you were claiming it to be. Rather than address my points you just retreated to a game of "no fair", because I wouldn't accept your letter the same way you accepted the implications of mine.
If there is a clear example of arguing in bad faith this is certainly it.
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@Ehyeh
I did, but then I went on to explain how this shows us that refuting god's existence requires us to start with a clearly defined example, and since everyone will define him differently there is no way any one person can conceive of let alone take a position on the existence of every god proposed.
The point here is twofold; first it explains what atheists are mostly talking about when they say god is not real. That is, they're talking about whatever they are conceiving him to be, not necessarily what you are. This is why the burden of proof is on you to provide evidence for it, because if you want the conversation to be about the god you believe in then you need to propose it first. And the burden is on the person who makes the claim.
It also explains why atheism should not be defined as the belief that God doesn't exist, because no one who holds such a belief could possibly do so while taking into account every god concept. Lack of belief is far more rational and accurate understanding of the position, because that is the one thing every atheist has in common.
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@Tarik
Simply wanting something isn’t an imperfection, only God can be the judge of that.
A desire to be worshipped, and to act on that desire by creating an entire species and then instructing them to do so, demonstrates a serious deficiency. Without said deficiency, none of this would have been necessary.
To claim only god can judge it is to claim that you are not capable or perhaps not allowed to think for yourself and form you're own opinions, in which case what you say no longer carries any weight.
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@Ehyeh
The point of this sentence is simply a hint at the fact there isn't any certainty to the fact of an outside world. It acts as a hint at empiricism not being as robust as people think in their day to day idling.
This has nothing to do with my post, in fact I'm pretty sure I made clear that this is a complete distraction from the conversation if whether a God exists or if empiricism is accurate.
world "perfect" at least when it comes to character/behaviour implies moral conduct. To say god cannot be perfect for wanting to be worshipped, i would consider unjustified if its a moral argument. As i imagine you're incapable of proving what something would need to be like to be morally perfect without appealing to a subjective moral code/emotions.
Again, I went through this already when I pointed out that all one needs to do is change the requirement by redefining what perfect means. You responded by redefining what perfect means.
Feel free to read my post again and address the points I made.
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@Ehyeh
If the things we see cannot be proven to be mind-independent or real, Why are people so quick to assume God is a logical absurdity?
Not sure what these two things have to do with each other.
What you're touching on is the concept of absolute certainty, which is really nothing more than a distraction here. Theism and atheism address what we believe. Certainty isn't required in either sense.
As far as God being a logical absurdity, that's just the result of mutually exclusive qualities being asserted at the same time. I have no issue telling you that the God of the bible doesn't exist because he is self refuting. He is asserted to be a perfect being and yet created us wanting us to worship him. The need for worship demonstrates a serious deficiency, which contradicts the idea of him being perfect. Therefore this God cannot exist.
The problem is that any theist can simply tell me the answer is simple; God is not perfect. And just like that, my argument has no application here. This highlights another problem; in order to claim God doesn't exist one must begin with a conception of God. And since every theist has a different conception of god there is no way for any atheist to take a definitive position on whether they all exist. This is why asserting atheism as the belief that no gods exist is useless and the vast majority of atheists understand this. I could tell you that every god concept I've ever thought about definitely doesn't exist. That still does not mean I refute every god concept within theism.
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@TWS1405
There is a reason we have mainstream media, and right wing media. Unlike the latter, the former has journalistic standards.ROTFLMAO!!!!!
The most reputable right wing network and the only major right wing news source that pretends to be the product of honest journalism is Fox News, an organization whose literal founding document described it's mission as "putting the GOP on television".
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@PREZ-HILTON
It's more likely to lead to your eventual arrest unless the killing is completely random. So no I don't get this at all. If I ever killed somebody, I'd definitely use a method that gave me more plausible deniability.
In very specific circumstances, and especially when not getting caught is the primary consideration, people might choose another means to kill someone. But again, other methods require planning and precision, which greatly diminishes the odds of their success.
Very few people who are afraid of going to jail for life to the point they would choose a method such as poisoning, would find it worth while to kill someone else at all. And people are inherently lazy, so if they can accomplish their goal with a bullet most would just do that instead.
This conversation isn't about you or any other anecdote, it's about society at large. Guns are by far the easiest and most effective way to kill someone else, that's literally what they are designed to do. To argue that gun homicides would just be replaced by other means is silly.
The issue is that negative rights could more easily mean the government picking favorites and making biased decisions while focusing on positive rights can pretty much eliminate all government bias in decision making. That is why positive rights are unethical to legislate.
I really don't understand the argument here. You start off by attacking negative rights by pointing to them being more easily biased and then conclude that this is why positive rights are unethical. I think you misspoke somewhere.
I also take issue with this article. In it he makes the case that:
"“Positive rights” trump freedom. According to this doctrine, human beings by nature owe, as a matter of enforceable obligation, part or even all of their lives to other persons."
But this is not true. A right to an attorney is a positive right but no attorney is being forced to represent you, it simply means the state is providing one for you (as in paying for it). Of course it's true that a state forcing someone to provide a service to you would be considered a positive right but the issue there is not the concept of a positive right but rather how that right is being applied. Just because something can be used in an unjust way does not mean it is inherently unjust.
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@ADreamOfLiberty
Did the laptop come encrypted and you know for a fact that the key was only given to you? If the answer is "No" then it could all be fake. Because of this I know that claims of "russian hackers" are guesses. There is no such thing as leaving evidence behind that can be definitely shown to not be intentionally planted frame job.
There is also no such thing as words spoken or written that can definitely be shown to not be a lie, so if you're information is coming from words it can all be faked.
This is why we don't talk in terms of absolutes. Everything we believe is based on assessing the probability and plausibility of the claim based on what we are presented with. In this case all of these claims are coming from a single laptop that was in the hands of Rudy Giuliani, a man who is literally being paid to dig up dirt on Joe Biden. So given the fact that the chain of custody includes his hands and as I pointed out does show signs of tampering, it is frankly absurd to take that as a reliable source of information.
The fact that you think Giuliani touching it discredits it but FBI touching it doesn't do the same is a testament to the unbridgeable tribal gap that has already formed in the USA.
Agreed 100%. The idea that you would consider these two even remotely even in terms of credibility is remarkable and speaks to why we refer to Trumpers as cultists. On the one hand we have a federal law enforcement institution whose most basic principal is to remain apolitical, with checks and balances, career employees who have been hired under and worked for democratic and republican administrations, and where every piece of communication is subject to subpoeana and congressional oversight. On the other hand you have a paid political operative.
But you think these two are even.
The amount of mental gymnastics and confirmation bias needed to reach this conclusion is almost impressive.
Even republican politicians recognize how dumb it is to talk about the FBI as some purely politicized institution, that's why when pressed they always revert to clarifying that they are not attacking the career public servants who work there but are suggesting that it's the leadership they are attacking, except that the director of the FBI was appointed by Donald Trump which goes right back to the point; this is isn't an argument born from logic and reason, it's the product of a cult, pure and simple.
Giuliani was a famous anti-crime mayor of one of the leading cities of the world, but to you he's some sort of conniving minion who wouldn't think twice about fabricating evidence.Think about that fall from grace in your opinion, now imagine those same feelings about the FBI. That's how the other side feels.
The fall from grace is certainly remarkable, but it's what we have observed from him. The fact that he enthusiasticly supports the most childish, ignorant, narcissistic, fascistic, petulant, vile president we've even seen is bad enough. Add on top of that everything he's done, Mr. "Truth isn't truth", the guy who thinks the election was stolen and when and under oath about false claims he made publicly stated it wasn't house job to fact check information before putting it out there.
You can feel the same way about the FBI all day, but you do not have the facts to back it up.
The obvious go to in response for those on the political right is the Carter Page controversy, but not only is that no where near the level needed to support such a position, it was also discovered through an internal investigation which just makes my point about checks and balances.
Anyway we have every reason to take them at face value, they fit perfectly into the puzzle.
A piece of evidence fitting into the picture created by the totality of the evidence does strengthen the case overall, but the evidence itself is still just as weak as our would otherwise be. Again, the source of these claims is a hard drive that was handled by political operatives who were being paid to dig up dirt on Joe Biden. That should give anyone pause before taking them seriously.
And as far as your puzzle goes, no one is denying that Hunter Biden was profiting from his dad's position. Once again, this is about Joe Biden's reason for pushing for Shokin's firing. The emails don't merely fit into the puzzle, they are the line that connects the dots.
I'm not the one with a burden of proof to show that Biden engineered the whole thing, I'm simply saying it's possible and you have failed to rule it out...If we could know for sure that the anti-shokin sentiment was not created or amplified by Biden it would be a dent in the circumstantial evidence against him...That cannot be established, or at least no one has in this thread established it.
This is a reversal of the burden of proof. You are the one claiming without evidence that Biden engineered this, so the burden is on you to provide evidence for that claim. The fact that we cannot disprove your baseless assertion does not validate your argument.
You can't keep your story straight, in order for Shokin to take revenge on Slovchesky as a proxy for Biden he must have known Biden was the one who made it happen.
When I said the meeting was private, that simply means it wasn't public. There is no reason to think the target of the conversation wouldn't have been made aware, especially since he was Porshenko's hand picked guy.
you do realize that you haven't posted anything to do with "intelligence", you got news papers talking past tense about complaints and a letter from senators which is extraordinarily vague.
Two of the articles I posted were published in November 2015, a month before Biden's meeting with Porshenko.
We've already been through the Senate letter, you've already acknowledged they were talking about Shokin. You can stop with the bad faith reversals.
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@PREZ-HILTON
All I know is that if I wanted to murder somebody, the presence of lack of a gun wouldn't make the attempt any more or less likely.
I think you know very well that this claim is just silly. When gangs decide that someone who crosses them needs to die, one thing I doubt anyone has ever heard of is a gang poisoning.
People use guns because they are easier, meaning it takes far less effort and less precision to kill someone. Those are the very qualities that impact likelihood of success. This is not a debatable point.
Than it would probably help your point if instead of framing the debate as pro or anti gun, that people who want to propose these policies state which policy they support rather than make vague generalizations about people who are pro gun.
It's not my fault nor that of any gun advocate that those who are in disagreement do not bother to listen to and understand opposing view points.
The debate is often framed as pro gun or anti gun because how we view guns in general tends to determine which proposals we ultimately accept as beneficial to society, so it is worth diving into our core values and beliefs on this as opposed to starting off with specific proposals.
The same can be said the other way around as well. This is part of why the country is so divided. The fact is that most people are far more in agreement on the basics than we think, but we spend so much time demonizing each other to bother to listen to each other.
For example the right to free healthcare would impose the duty of providing that healthcare
No, it doesn't. Rights in this sense don't mean that someone had a right to this service even if there is no one willing to provide it. We're not talking about putting a gun to a doctor's head and forcing them to work for free. It means that we as a society will take responsibility for providing it by funding it. The right to a trial by jury is another positive right, but I've never heard of anyone taking issue with that on the same grounds.
I'm curious as to why you went there however since the right I am talking about is a negative right, and because there is no dispute on whether negative rights as a concept are any less legitimate than positive rights, this entire point seems mute here.
Again, my position is that the right to enhance ones personal protection by carrying a firearm comes at the expense of reducing the safety of everyone around them. Do you believe it is therefore justified to allow this?
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@ADreamOfLiberty
I will go duckduckgo on this one, but I find it very suspicious that anyone does not know the evidence for this already. If you truly don't that speaks volumes to the news bubble you live in.
Yes, it certainly does.
There is a reason we have mainstream media, and right wing media. Unlike the latter, the former has journalistic standards. And when you have such standards one thing you don't do is report on information that cannot be verified and even shows signs of tampering.
All of your evidence is coming from the NY Post and the Daily mail. These are not news organizations, they're tabloids. And the source of all of their claims comes from hunter Biden's laptop drive which had been shown to be copied and very possibly tampered with dozens of times over.
"Approximately 128,500 emails allegedly from the Hunter Biden laptop. The emails are dated between 2009 and 2019. There are anomalies with the dates and emails, in addition to concerns about the chain of custody. There are considerable issues with this dataset including signs of tampering."
After scowering the internet, I could only find two of the controversial emails circulating were externally verified. The one mentioning "10 held by H for the big guy" and the one where an executive from Burisma thanked Hunter for the chance to meet his dad.
The latter merely showed that they had dinner. That tells us nothing nor is there anything remarkable about someone being thrilled at the chance to meet the VPOTUS.
The former sounds bad except that right wing media leaves out other verified emails that put those into context by showing that they also referred to his dad as "the chairman" and another saying "the chairman" gave him an "emphatic no". Not to mention that the deal never happened, which fits. So at worst this shows that Hunter was trying to get his dad to go along with the deal and his dad refused.
So does this mean all of the emails are faked? No, it means we have no reason to take it at face value and given that this laptop ended up inn the hands of Rudy Giuliani, it's crazy to think they wouldn't tamper with the material to put it out there given that right wing media couldn't care less about verifying this stuff before reporting on it.
But I do have to give credit where it is do, Fox news has for the most part stayed away from it, which would never happen if this information was at all reliable. Instead they have focused most of their attention attacking left wing media fort burying the laptop story and implying that it's all real without talking about the specific contents that appear to have been tampered with. Again, their audience doesn't care about parsing through what is verified so by going about it this way Fox gets to continue pretending they have journalistic standards where the Post couldn't care less.
It is the timing I relied on to say that there was no international consensus before Biden got involved and it was ALL after Hunter was laundering.
Uh, yeah, there was no international consensus... Until there was. That's how it works when someone is in a high profile position and after 10 months has done nothing to fix the problems they said they were going to fix. This is not evidence nor logical support for anything, it's exactly what we would expect.
You act as if no one noticed a thing until Joe Biden came out and told the world "look over there", then suddenly the world agreed. That is just cartoonish and there is no evidence Biden lead the world in this consensus. The meeting he had with Porshenko was private, that's why no one knew about it until Biden told the world about it two years later. Not surprisingly, no one had an issue with the US pushing for Shokin's removal until right wing media saw the opportunity here to slander a Democratic presidential candidate.
I can't argue against your faith in institutions, faith has no supporting arguments.
It's not faith, it's common sense. It's basic human nature for people who work with intelligence and make entire careers out of discerning truth from fiction to resist narratives being fed to them that they cannot verify. It's also common sense that intelligence comes from those working in the field, not from the people they are feeding their intelligence to.
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@Tarik
Because you tried to distinguish humanity from personhood and in the same breath called personhood subjective, my quote proves that it’s OBJECTIVELY not.
I distinguished the term "human being" from personhood. Human being is a biological term, we're not talking about biology.
As I already pointed out, when we talk about what makes someone a person we're talking about things like the ability to feel, think, self awareness, etc. What qualifies as the criteria is whatever we value, making the term inherently subjective.
Your example compared a fetus to animals, something that has nothing to do with this conversation. It prices nothing.
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@Tarik
No, hence why we only refer to humans and not other species as persons because they’re OBJECTIVELY not persons.
What does this have to do with what I said?
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@Greyparrot
How could you possibly explain away the negligence required to take 500 days to suspect a crime?
First of all, it is remarkably dishonest to claim it took 500 days to"suspect" a crime after they literally conducted a search warrant, a process that alone took weeks.
I notice you also ignored my point from earlier about how the political right has gone crazy alleging that the FBI did not do what it could have to avoided taking this drastic step. This is yet another example of where facts and logic have no meaning. If they search house home right away it's obvious politicization of the FBI. If they take too long, it's obvious politicization of the FBI.
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@ADreamOfLiberty
The money is the money paid to Hunter Biden.
This conversation isn't about Hunter Biden.
Now which part of the premises I recounted to you reject? Do you reject that Hunter was paid the money? Do you reject that he was utterly useless in that role? Do you reject that Biden was the policy maker of a very nosy and involved US Ukraine tentacle that could very well help keep burisma out of legal trouble and getting all the permits and favours it needed? Do you reject that Hunter's financial prospects are indistinguishable from his father's?
I reject your assertion that Joe Biden somehow was in control of the opinions of all of US intelligence as well as international intelligence and even opinions within Ukraine - a premise essential to argument that the best explanation here is that Joe did what he did not because it was in the US's best interest, but to interject to save his son from an investigation that we don't even know was when going on at the time and one that wouldn't have targeted Hunter anyway.
I also reject as unsupported the notion that Hunter and Joe were entangled financially. Provide the evidence.
The only alternative (which you suggested) required Shokin to be aware of the corruption to be plausible.
It's not the only alternative. This is a classic argument from incredulity.
The first letter is as much evidence of "no problem" as the second is of "problem".
Complete nonsense. Let's once again go through the points you will continue to pretend were never made;
The letter you provided was delivered 4 months into Shokin's tenure, which is not enough time to develop a full assessment of his performance. When a public official starts a new high profile job there is this thing we recognize as the "honeymoon period" where public sentiment starts off high and then declines once people begin to see the actual results. Gallop has found that this period for US presidents is about 7 months which sounds about right. So there is nothing at all remarkable about the idea that people thought highly of Shokin 4 months in and changed their tune 10 months in. To some extent this would even be expected.
And as I've already pointed out, the "no problem" letter explained what they were happy with, and it had nothing to do with him delivering any actual results. It was entirely about the reforms he declared he was going to make and the agenda he had publicly set. Meanwhile, the "problem" letter came 10 months in and talked about the results he was failing to achieve. Again, nothing remarkable about the turn around here.
Yet, somehow, you seem to think these letters cancel each other out and show disagreement amongst US intelligence. You can only arrive at that conclusion by fundamentally ignoring both the timing of these letters as well as what they actually said.
You display a fundamental misunderstanding of political epistemology. People do indeed rely on others to tell them what to believe, often starting from a group of conspirators that could fit in one room. Once the assertion is out in the wild it is amplified and modified by those with pre-existing reasons to favor it, like a giant game of telephone.
This is an example of jaw dropping projection. It is in my observations perfectly normal amongst the political right and especially in MAGA world to have to wait to be told what to think by the dear leader. We're talking about people who actually work in US intelligence. If this is honestly how's you think the world works it's no wonder that you buy into these nonsense conspiracy theories.
They don't need to be stupid. They don't need to be pawns. They don't even have to be wrong, they just need to have relied on information that originated with Biden's actions
US intelligence does not come from the Vice President, it comes from boots on the ground and makes it's way up to the executive branch. This is really basic stuff.
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@Greyparrot
Also, just out of curiosity... Let's assume, just for the sake of argument, that Trump was in violation of the law by storing top secret documents in an unsecured location posing a threat to national security, and then despite multiple requests to give them back including a subpoeana that Trump ignored and Trump's lawyers lying to the FBI telling them all of the documents were returned when they were not... What should the FBI have done?
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@Greyparrot
Despite superficial appearances, the raid of Mar-a-Lago was not an act of law enforcement. It was the opposite of that. It was an attack on the rule of law.
They really should have gotten a federal judge to sign off on it first, that would have alleviated the concerns of politicization here.
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@Greyparrot
If the Biden administration really believed Trump had dangerous secrets, if they really thought Donald Trump possessed documents that posed an imminent danger to American national security, then you have to wonder, why did they wait a year and a half to do anything about it?
Trump defenders: 'If this was so serious they shouldn't have waited so long, they should have just went right in there and gotten the documents'
Also Trump defenders: 'This is a very serious action to take against a former president, they better have all their I's dotted and T's crossed cause we're going to investigate all of them'
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@PREZ-HILTON
I take from your statement you would ban guns entirely. Am I interpreting that correctly?
I would prefer to live in a society where no one outside of law enforcement is permitted to own a gun, but I live in a country with a constitution, history, and circumstances which make that a practical impossibility. So if I had it my way I would put in place a number of restrictions to include expanded background checks, waiting periods, assault weapons ban, extended magazine ban, etc.
Stabbing is to high risk of losing the fight.
I'm far more concerned that everyone involved and even those who were not live.
An intelligent murderer will just turn to things like poison, which could affect innocent bystanders.
I've never understood how this argument makes sense to anyone.
If we were to ban guns, how many gun homicides every year do you seriously believe would be replaced by poisonings? It's the same logic as me arguing that we should stop locking our doors at night because someone can just break into a window.
Besides that, many guns are counterfeit and imported from South America. We also have the ability to make what's known as "zip guns". So you can't really eliminate access to fire arms. Best you can do is disarm people who previously had the legal ability to defend themselves.
Two different problems here.
The fact that technology has gotten to the point where a gun can be manufactured at home is not a reason to throw our hands up in the air. It's a problem we can solve if we want to. It reminds me of the freak out in the wake of Napster, saying the music industry was toast. Never happened because we decided to do something about it.
The second is the idea that all we can do is disarm law abiding citizens, which is a nonsense talking point. No one is proposing we pass laws telling criminals they're not allowed to be criminals. What were talking about are laws that restrict gun dealers, which are overwhelmingly law abiding citizens. Criminals still have to attain the guns, if there are less of them out there and more hoops to jump through them that will reduce the number of "bad guys" who get their hands on them.
But beyond that we also have to remember that every criminal starts off as a law abiding citizen, so this notion that we can somehow distinguish who in our society is a good guy vs a bad guy is a very childish way of looking at things. It is only after the crime has already been committed that any of this comes into play, by that point it's too late.
That's because you are using the incorrect definition of rights. When people speak of rights. At least people who have studied political philosophy, they are narrowing that definition to mean "negative rights" mostly because what philosophers refer to as positive rights, are really just ways to restrict the negative rights of others.
There is nothing incorrect about my usage of the term and none of this is relavant to my point.
A negative right is a right not to be subjected to the actions of another while a positive right is the right to be subjected to the actions of another. The right to not be shot is a negative right, the right to trial by jury is a positive right. Neither is more legitimate than the other.
My point is that one's positive right to carry a gun conflicts with the negative right of everyone around them to be safe from a potential flying bullet. You can disagree with that statement, but there is nothing unreasonable about that.
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@TWS1405
Moreover, the two quotes from that article is a matter of settled case law. If Clinton and every president before him and after him can do it, so can Trump. The fact that the raid took place is of grave concern to us all.
Well for starters we can begin by using the correct terminology as that does matter because words carry connotations - this was an executed search warrant, not a raid. Trump by getting ahead and telling the world how to think about this has once again succeeded in shaping the narrative for those who want the narrative to be handed to them.
I do agree however, the ESW is of grave concern. What was in those documents and on earth was Trump planning to do with them? And who has already seen them? These are questions the American people should have answers on.
The Clinton example is the usual false equivalence we've come to expect from the political right. They've perfected their strategy; anytime Trump is found committing an egregious act, scower the archives to find any occurrence that has some resemblance and then pretend the two examples are exactly the same. They're not.
The Bill Clinton tapes were made by him and taken from the White House to assist him in writing house memoir. This is arguably a violation of the presidential records act but as the judge noted, the president is the primary source for what qualifies as presidential records. So given that we do not know what is on those tapes, the burden is on those advocating for their seizure to show that possession of them is in fact in violation of the law and that the public interest to attain them outweighs the privacy concerns and political concerns of seizing the possessions of a former president. They failed to meet that burden.
Now contrast that with Trump.
First off, were not even talking about the same law. The concern here is not that he violated the presidential records act, it's that he violated the espionage act. The documents he held in his possession were classified, many of them to the highest degree. Furthermore some of those documents involve nuclear weapons which Trump cannot declassify by himself. Second, the documents were asked to be returned and then eventually subpoenaed, Trump ignored them and his lawyers lied to the FBI telling them all classified documents had been returned.
The search warrant was their last option, all others had been exhausted.
So when looking at these two examples, they are not even close. But as usual, this will spread all over Fox News, OANN, and right wing talk radio uncritically and repeated endlessly. As long as they keep pushing it the base will believe it because the overwhelming majority of them would never dare to read a post as long as this one.
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@TWS1405
Greyparrot understood, because he read it.Clearly you did not.
I read it in full, I'm wondering if you did.
Again, you're the one who posted it on response to my post, presumably in an attempt to deflect because you know how absurd it is to be even more supportive of republicans in response to their standard bearer being raided by the FBI and in serious legal trouble, so you instead try to change the subject to a perceived double standard that if you actually read the article you posted and gave it some thought would realize is nonsense.
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@ADreamOfLiberty
The circumstantial evidence is overwhelming. Hunter had no skills that were of any value to burisma. Hunter did not speak Ukrainian. The only possible reason to pay Hunter a single dollar much less how much he was paid was his connections. We know from the laptop, emails, and the whistle-blowing partner that Hunter was financially entangled with his father to the point of sharing bank accounts. The "Big guy" has been fingered as Biden and contextual evidence of texts strongly supports this.Biden was the "policy maker" in Ukraine.
I asked you for evidence of a money laundering case, which is what you have been claiming. Yet you seem to have forgotten the most important part... Money. An email suggesting they may have shared a bank account is not evidence of money laundering. Please connect your dots.
You're stubbornly sticking to an absurdity
No, you're stubbornly caricaturing it as an absurdity despite me explaining it's simplicity to you multiple times. And once again, I am not the one alleging to know what this was about. I am merely pointing to an alternative possibility but unlike yours, my position is not based at all on what happened here.
The seizure does not prove that Shokin was actively investigating Burisma at the time Biden engaged in the "quid pro quo". That's the point. That's the only point here.
It is in US interests to not have its foreign policy sold for personal enrichment, it is also in US interests to know when a candidate for public office does things like that.
We don't just investigate things because some guy on Fox news made an allegation. There has to be actual evidence of wrongdoing first, not merely the potential.
I said nothing about "starting over" but a "good job letter" does indicate that there was not at that time an international consensus that Shokin must go.
You absolutely argued that his time was effectively starting over when you pretended that the international community only had 6 months to evaluate his performance despite him being on the job for 10.
And once again, the "good job letter" only spoke of his agenda and ambition, not his results, so the idea that there was some consensus that he was doing a good job is just silly. Once again, look at all of the articles I provided, none of that was written at the time of the letter. Public sentiment regarding public officials isn't set in stone, they change over time based on how people perceive them to be performing in their duties.
The push by the US executive branch to remove Shokin cannot be separated in time with what can only very generously be called international angst against him. Biden was the "policy maker" in Ukraine and it is therefore reasonable to believe that despite what may be written in your civics power point Biden was the US executive branch when it came to Ukraine. As such his personal motivations could very well have steered focus and his orders led to US officials (like ambassadors) pushing a narrative against Shokin.
Once again, you show a remarkable disregard for basic critical thinking in favor of classic conspiracism. You presume, with no evidence nor supporting reason, that various individuals within our government and throughout the world have no idea what's going on and cannot form their own opinion, but instead defer to the ultimate conspirators to tell them what to believe.
You disregard example after example provided to you of displeasure regarding Shokin from within our own government, around the world, and even within Ukraine, but latch onto one letter written months before the time period in question as evidence that outweighs all of it. It's confirmation bias personified.
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@TWS1405
This is completely irrelevant to the point I just made.
And did you have a point of your own?
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@TheUnderdog
Argument 1: A zygote isn’t a human being.
No one is claiming a zygote isn't a human being, the argument is that it's not a person, which has nothing to do with biology. Personhood is subjective and determining who and/or what qualifies is entirely a question about values, but most people agree on the basics; sentience, self awareness, memory, etc. Non of which apply to an early stage fetus.
Argument 2: A zygote is a human being, but bodily autonomy outweighs the right to life.
The argument isn't that one right outweighs the other as if there was no surrounding context, the question is whether the fetus has the right to use the mother's body for it's own development against the mother's will.
Argument 3: A kid set up for adoption gets messed up so badly it’s worse than death.
Never heard this argument before.
If you are going to criticize the pro choice position you could at least take the time to understand what it is.
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@PREZ-HILTON
Obviously without guns you can't have gun violence. I am asking about whether the focus should be on what causes somebody to want to shoot another person to start with.
Both should be addressed, but someone wanting to shoot someone else is irrelevant if they don't have the means.
And let's not forget that many people who get shot were not the intended target. People love to pretend if we take away the guns then they'll just use other means to commit murder. I've never heard of an innocent bystander getting accidentally stabbed.
It reminds me of a concept in physics called potential energy. Think of a bowling ball on the ground. The potential energy is basically non existent. Raise that bowling ball to your waste, the energy is now enough to break a bone or two. The same concept can be thought of here. Put ten people in a room with no guns. The effort necessary to kill someone is very high. Now arm just one of them. Suddenly killing someone is easy to the point where it could even happen by accident.
The presence of guns makes everyone within proximity of them less safe. That's not debatable. What's debatable are our rights. I'll never understand the idea that I should have the right to increase my own protection by reducing the safety of everyone else around me.
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@TWS1405
Even the FBI raid on Trump's home may seal the fate not of Trump, but the left and Democrats.
Imagine how deluded one has to be to learn that the FBI executed a search warrant on a politician's home which was approved by a federal judge resulting in the removal of multiple sets of classified documents that were not authorized to be stored there, and for this to be viewed not as a reason to abandon that politician, but as a reason to vote against the party challenging him.
It really is a cartoonish narrative that the people taking this position would have sworn would never be them less than a decade ago.
America really is a frog in slow boiling water, and it's starting to bubble.
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@ADreamOfLiberty
Wrong, if Biden was not running a money laundering scheme then it wouldn't be a coincidence that someone started investigating it for revenge.
I've been ignoring you're money laundering scheme assertion because that's a whole other conversation. Clearly, since it has gone uncontested you continue to pretend it's a given. Do you have any actual evidence for this claim?
And I've already explained the scenario where Shokin concocts defense and followed it through. It wasn't about revenge, if you were being honest you would know this and adjust your argument accordingly. Not surprising that you haven't.
investigating Hunter Biden in connection to Burisma was also in US interests.
Please enlighten me as to why.
4 + 6 = 10When someone tells you that you are not doing good on the job, you have to count the whole tenure.You dodge the point.
The point is that it's disingenuous to pretend his tenure started over because he was sent a good job letter.
What point do you think you made?
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@ADreamOfLiberty
One narrative works, the other is silly.
That's because you caricatured it.
Again, Biden pushed Porshenko to fire Shokin and Shokin got fired. So we know that Shokin would play the victim, and that Biden was the likely scapegoat. The only coincidence at that point is that Hunter worked for Burisma, which everyone acknowledges is a problem.
The reason your version of the story sounds ridiculous is because you pretend that everything that happened after that is a seperate coincidence and not all part of one plot by Shokin to save face by pretending he was the good guy and his scapegoat was the bad guy.
Well since you have so spectacularly failed to rule out personal interest for Biden
I told you already that at worst, Biden's interests aligned with US interests, so my argument doesn't hinge on ruling out his personal interests.
I'm not going to let this turn into a red herring, but the differences between Biden gaffes and Trump gaffes is that half the Trump gaffes are hearsay (sometimes hearsay^2 or hearsay^3) where Biden gaffes are always recorded.
The difference between their gaffes as I already explained and you ignored is that Biden's gaffes at worst show instances of momentary confusion which are perfectly normal for a man his age. Trump's gaffes meanwhile demonstrate a cartoonish ignorance of basic facts any man in a position like his should know.
And two of the three examples I gave you were on camera in front of a crowd. There are so many more, those are just of the top of my head.
I have seen no evidence of "wide spread" it has been entirely limited to a very finite set of politicians and diplomatic officials.
We've shown you the evidence. You just hand waived it away.
What did you use google for? They link to the letter in the article. You assumed they were unreliable and you didn't even read far enough to find that link.
I used google to confirm when Shokin was hired, because of course the article wasn't going to mention that.
You dismissed it as an "introduction letter" and stated that it was "only 4 months on the job which is not enough time to make any significant impact", but it was only 6 months before Joe Biden decided that he needed to go.4 months = just got in the door6 months = enough time for an international consensus against Shokin to form
4 + 6 = 10
When someone tells you that you are not doing good on the job, you have to count the whole tenure.
It just so happens that the simplest explanation for all known evidence is that Biden was one of them.
The simplest explanation is that when Biden in his capacity as the VPOTUS went to Ukraine to push for the firing of Shokin that he was doing so for the same reason all of US intelligence as well as the rest of the world wanted him fired.
But you can convince yourself that this is not the case by ignoring the evidence in front of your face and pretending simple things are massively complicated if you like, to each his own.
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@ADreamOfLiberty
the only way he would know to strike in that direction is if he suspected/knew of the Biden's corruption with burisma.
All he needed to know was that Joe Biden’s son worked for Slovchesky. From there, if he was in fact guilty of the negligence everyone around the world was accusing him of, it would make perfect sense for his next move to be going after Slovchesky to reverse engineer this Biden quid pro quo story. That’s not an over the top scenario, and even you understand that the fact that the seizure occurred after the “quid pro quo” makes it questionable.
In other words, there is more than one legitimate explanation for that. Which means, logically, that the seizure is not evidence of either narrative because it fits into both.
Not everyone, at least not before the pressure campaign from the white houses started:
This article is another example of how propaganda works. They’re depending on the reader to not look at the letter they’re referencing and certainly to not use Google.
Shokin was hired in February of 2015. The letter is dated June 2015 - only 4 months on the job which is not enough time to make any significant impact. In the letter it states:
“We have been impressed with the ambitious reform and anti-corruption agenda of your government… The ongoing reform of your office, law enforcement, and the judiciary will enable you to investigate and prosecute corruption and other crimes in an effective, fair, and transparent manner,"
Nothing in this letter talks about anything he actually did, it’s all talking about what he said he was going to do. It’s basically an introduction letter.
This does bring up an interesting point, if it's "ok" for Biden to have some personal interests as long as there is also a "public" interest, why is it not ok for Trump to have some personal interests if the truth would also be in the public interest?
I never said it was ok for Biden to have personal interests involved, I said “worst case”.
In any event, conflicts of interest are not a good thing, and no one is saying that Hunter Biden’s position at Burisma was anything good. But what actually matters in matters of corruption is whether the conflict of interest was the driving factor in the decision that was made. There is absolutely no evidence of that here, whereas with Trump it is very clear that Trump’s primary interest was slandering his political opponent.
You just said Biden has not shown himself to be "that stupid", have you uh... seen the internet the past three years?
Biden has definitely lost a step over the past decade, which is perfectly normal for any man approaching 80. What he displays is moments of confusion, which again, is perfectly normal. What Biden has never done is tell a crowd that clean coal is when you take coal out and scrub it with a brush. Or that the answer to California’s wild fire problem is a rake. Or ask his team why we can’t just drop a nuclear bomb in a hurricane.
Pressure in the US admin and anti-Russian elements in Ukraine could very easily cause the perception that Shokin was corrupt to spread around. Most 'news' simply parrot each other and do not represent independent sources.
The most telling comment of your post.
In the face of clear evidence that there was in fact wide spread international support for the firing of Shokin, your reflexive response is to assert, without any evidence, that they may have just been duped.
This brings me back to the point I already made, everyone is either part of the conspiracy or duped by the conspiracy. It can’t possibly be the case that intelligent professionals used their own thinking skills to reach their own conclusions and found that the thing you are saying is BS, so you have to default to whatever explanation doesn’t include that idea.
This isn’t how evidence works, this isn’t how logic and reason works. Let me know when you have a case that doesn’t hinge on some grand conspiracy where the entire world was too stupid to know anything other than what Vice President Joe Biden told them.
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@ADreamOfLiberty
Your rejection of the Biden quid pro quo as nefarious (or at least as nefarious as the claimed Trump quid pro quo) rests entirely on your assertion that Biden could not possibly have seen Shokin as a threat to his money laundering. Yet you simultaneously have to claim that the seizure was the result of revenge against Biden and not an ongoing investigation to maintain that claim.
You haven’t read a word I’ve said.
My rejection of the idea that Biden’s involvement in Shokin’s firing was nefarious is the result of a basic Occam’s razor test that takes into account the entire picture. This one part about the seizure and what best explains it is once again, completely irrelevant and a total red herring. But I’ll humor you anyway.
When I said it was more retaliatory, that doesn't just mean he’s out for revenge, it also means he’s trying to save face. He’s a public official fired for corruption, that’s humiliating and like anyone else he has a reputation and legacy to protect. So of course he’s going to do whatever makes him look like the victim of political persecution, this is routine for politicians. Seizing Slochevsky’s assets was just one way to lend credibility to the idea that he was doing nothing wrong. And clearly, it works.
What’s remarkable is the hypocrisy and double standards you apply to this. The “quid pro quo” you are alleging occurred in December 2015. When I argued that all of US intelligence as well as the rest of the developed world wanted Shokin fired you asked for evidence before the quid pro quo. Clearly you saw anything after that as insufficient as it was better explained to you as the result of conspiratorial actors trying to rewrite the story. Yet here you are pointing to a seizure that occurred two months after the quid pro quo as evidence of what occurred before it.
The fact that the seizure took place after does not mean it was illegitimate, but it also doesn’t mean it was. That’s the point here. We don’t know. And because we don’t know this part of the story tells us nothing. That’s the only point I was making.
Going back to the bigger picture, the fact that nearly everyone wanted Shokin out of office because he was corrupt alone is what makes the Occam’s razor test clear. At worst, Biden’s personal interests aligned with US interests, but even in that scenario he was still acting as the VPOTUS.
What’s also remarkable is that the entire story of the quid pro quo came from Biden himself. So your Occam’s razor explanation not only defies the obvious state of international affairs at the time, but includes the idea that Biden acted corruptly and decided to tell the whole world about it two years later as he was preparing for a presidential run. Trump has definitely shown himself to be that stupid, Biden has not.
And as far as evidence goes, here are a few more for you:
Here’s the Irish times back in March of 2016 reporting on the European Union’s hailing the firing of Shokin:
Here’s a report from March 28th 2016, a day before the firing on protests outside the Ukrainian Capitol demanding Shokin’s removal:
Here’s an article from the Atlantic Council back in November 2015 talking about Shokin’s corruption and why he needs to be fired:
Lastly, here’s an article from November 2015 from the UKRWeekly
“Mr. Shokin is the second procurator general appointed by President Poroshenko (and approved by Ukraine’s Parliament) who has been widely criticized for not only failing to prosecute high-profile crimes, but also providing cover for corrupt officials and resisting EU reforms.
Criticism that had been circulating among Western circles became public in late September, when U.S. Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt said in a speech to the Odesa Financial Forum that corrupt prosecutors are “openly and aggressively undermining reform.”
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@Greyparrot
It is the mindset that there exists this superior class that has dominion over the lesser class.
I know, that’s my point. You people are so butthurt by feeling looked down upon it really is remarkable.
I think you are being a little disingenuous here. Hillary slandered groups and classes of people where Trump slandered individuals. There's no way you can sugarcoat that fact with false analogies.
She was specifically talking about the racists and the misogynists. If you don’t think that group of people are deserving of slander then there is something wrong with you.
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@Greyparrot
While Biden is shaking hands with the air
No matter how many times a claim is debunked you will just keep repeating it. Reality be dammed.
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@Vici
When trump does it, it's "oh he's a racist". when sleep sniffing Joe does it, the public left just let it slide. Where's all the outrage from the lefties???
It was never about the physical wall. The wall became a symbol of America’s racism which Trump was harnessing. So yes, it’s very different when Biden does it.
But to the actual reasons these are not the same, the problem with Trump’s big border wall was that he wanted one huge wall to cover the entire border like the Great Wall of China. Essentially, he wanted a monument. That’s financially stupid because we have better ways to spend our resources to stop illegal immigration than that. The smarter solution was always to have wall where we needed it and use other means elsewhere. That’s what Biden is doing here.
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@Greyparrot
Nice deplorable speech. Hillary would have been proud.
It never ceases to amaze me how butthurt conservatives were by that one comment.
But it does speak to the remarkable disparity in standards each party is held to. On the one side you have someone whose literal political brand is crassness and vile behavior towards anyone he considers his opposition. On the other hand you have someone who one time said something not nice about her opposition. The same people who enthusiastically support the former are offended by the latter. It’s pathetic and ridiculous.
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@ADreamOfLiberty
Answer my questions honestly, I think you're deflecting because you know the corner you backed yourself into.
It’s not a corner of anything other than a red herring.
Shokin knew Biden played a large role in his firing and he knew either then or would soon thereafter learn that Biden’s son worked for Slovchesky. And again, the conversation regarding Shokin’s firing took place in December and the seizure took place in February.
These facts alone tell us nothing, but you have offered up an explanation based on them that you are using as evidence for your case. So I offered up the alternative that the seizure was connected as it was the closest Shokin could get to the Bidens.
So does this narrative make sense? Not really, which is why I don’t care about this and why it’s irrelevant to our conversation. Your narrative doesn’t align with the facts either, so where does that leave us? No where. This part of the story is useless.
Neither of us are basing our positions on this specific part of the story, so why are you all of a sudden so fixated on it?
My opinion on what constitutes the "deep state" is irrelevant. We can discuss it at a later time, but I won't let this be used as a red herring.
Actually, your opinion on it is very relevant because it underpins everything you’re arguing. You’ve mentioned the deep state in at least half of your responses and asserted with no evidence whatsoever that they are likely behind whatever suspicions you are basing your position on. Here’s an example…
I am suggesting he was fed false information that Shokin was corrupt because it was in the interest of the deep state, particularly Biden to do so.
This is the point where it became clear (if it wasn’t already) to anyone reading this exchange that you believe what you do not because of sound logic and reasoning but because of fallacious conspiratorial thinking. You have no other information here other than the fact that a bipartisan group of 8 US senators all expressed in writing to Ukraine that they wanted the prosecutor fired, and from that you concluded that they believed what they did because they were fed misinformation by the conspirators.
This is a hallmark of conspiratorial thinking; everyone is either duped by the conspiracy or a participant in it. So when faced with this information you just hand waive it away. This tells me a lot about how you are approaching the information here, which tells me a lot about why you believe what you do.
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@thett3
The left would fight tooth and nail against…
If the proposals were made specifically as you described both parties would reject them. I mean the government creating factory jobs and deciding to put them in rural areas? No one would go for that. The point I was making though was that the root problems you are highlighting are problems democrats would be far more likely to consider worthy and a government responsibility to address.
It’s a microcosm of the broader issue I have with leftist philosophy
The only philosophy inherent in this issue is the idea that people should be able to live their lives as they see fit, provided they aren’t hurting anyone else.
I think college educated voters are moving dem and working class voters GOP largely bc politics are realigning along a nationalist vs globalist dynamic and college educated people in major metro areas pretty much do have their interests aligned with globalism.
Well, that is a theory…
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@ADreamOfLiberty
Retaliation for what?
He was taken down so he decided to take others down.
I succeeded in focusing in on the important part. There is no point meandering around a bazillion little points if you are willing to evade the heart of the matter.
This isn’t the heart of the matter, it was a nonsense throw away line that you decided to cherry pick out of everything discussed because you think it makes a point.
Again, I am not the one claiming that the seizure of Slochevsky’s assets is evidence of anything. You are. Whether it is best explained by retaliation is completely irrelevant to whether Biden did what he did as a corrupt rogue VP or he was acting within the best interests of the US.
Let me know if you plan to address the points I made.
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@Vici
God is logic, the foundation. Logic is his essence.
Logic is the process by which we arrive at conclusions from a given set of premises.
God is (allegedly) the most powerful being in the universe.
These are categorically different concepts. To claim they are the same is logically absurd, you might as well be telling me the sky is October.
so if you cant justify logic, why ought i believe anything you say?
Because you gave it some thought and realized that what you’re arguing is senseless.
Logic can’t be justified, it is foundational. You have to assume its validity in order to use it and to argue against it also requires the use of it, so you’re either using logic to validate logic or using logic to argue against logic. Neither of those work, yet you’re trying to do both by claiming God justifies logic or that without God logic would not be valid.
he is subject to them in the same sense that humans are subject to breathing. It is there nature.
Humans do not account for breathing, so it’s not the same sense.
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@thett3
I think the real “white privilege” was being a full member of society (or having your parents or grandparents) as early as possible. We can see in history and recent developments that as the economy continues to develop and the country gets older (demographically speaking) wealth gets more and more difficult to build and social status gets more and more frozen.
I agree with you 100% and we’ve had this conversation before where I made my views clear. The issue today is that wealth/income inequality has greatly surpassed the disparity of people’s contributions to society, placing an intense focus on how we got here. And no, it’s not just about who’s parents and grandparents got here first, it’s about how they got here. Being hauled off on slave ships and being the white mans property for the first 400 years is not exactly advantageous.
But the problem as we both see it is that how we got here cannot be reversed and does little to inform us about how we move forward to fix this.
The issue I have is that people like yourself decry the left for approaching this the wrong way while ignoring the fact that at least they’re trying to fix it. What are the republicans doing about it? Not a damn thing. They talk about jobs and opportunity, but then pass trillions in tax cuts that go almost entirely to the top 1%. Almost every policy you mentioned is far more likely to be proposed by the democrats than republicans.
It shouldn’t be legal to cut off a 13 year olds breasts or genitals for elective reasons. I’ll die on that hill.
So the short answer is; you get to make this decision.
Or more accurately, the government gets to decide, which you support.
We can agree to disagree on that, although I assume this means that you’ve never been on this site and will never be in this site preaching about small government.
What I still don’t get is why? Why this hill? What is so important about this issue that it rises to the top of the list when it comes to a conversation about where we differ? What about healthcare? Education? Or hell, what about our democracy itself?
Do you have a good theory? One thing I’m sure of is that because the left captures institutions so effectively, it’s much more dangerous when wrong
I think reality seems to have a left wing bias.
Conservatism comes from the word “conserve” which is inherently ideological. It’s all about maintaining comfort.
Liberalism is pragmatic. It’s why liberals are ok with taxes being raised. No one wants to pay them, but my personal desire to keep all of my money doesn’t outweigh the need of everyone to contribute to society.
When you are in a position where you don’t need to deal with the full reality of a situation, it’s easy to default to how you’d like for things to be or think they should be. Our institutions are not in such a position. The people at the top of our society are the ones dealing with these realities so they know better. It’s why I believe there is such a large gap now in the college educated voting democratic. They understand how the world actually works.
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@ADreamOfLiberty
I never made a claim other than stating the facts. I said that this was better explained by retaliation than the natural evolution of an alleged ongoing investigation into Burisma, but whether that is the case is irrelevant.
You are the one claiming that the seizure of Zlochevsky’s assets shows that Shokin was actively investigating Burisma at the time Biden pushed for his firing. I’m saying no it doesn’t.
So since you failed to respond to anything else, let’s just do a quick recap;
Hunter was never in any personal danger, so the idea that Biden would upend US foreign policy to intervene on his son’s behalf is already a stretch.
Biden did not have the authority to do what he threatened Ukraine with and Ukraine knew this, making it even more unlikely that this came from Biden
We know that there was a consensus among various US intelligence agencies as well of many of our own foreign allies to get rid of Shokin, making it irrational at best to argue that this was all about Hunter.
The reason they wanted Shokin gone is because he wasn’t properly dealing with corruption, so removing him would have served no purpose.
There is no case here, this is yet another right wing conspiracy theory that doesn’t pass the sniff test.
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@Vici
God cannot do that which is inherently against his nature.
If God cannot defy the laws of logic then God does not account for them. He cannot both be the arbiter of them and be subject to them.
what is your account for logic?
I don’t pretend to “account” for them, whatever that means exactly. This is just a game of infinite regress where if one of us mentions something that accounts for it the other just asks how we amount for that. The only reason you are convinced your answer is correct is because you have essentially defined God as “the answer to all problems”, so when a problem comes along you insert God as the answer without any thought. Well that might be comforting, but it certainly does not justify your answer any more than me saying “it’s magic”.
Going back to the laws of logic, the reason they cannot be accounted for is because they are the laws of existence, which means existence itself is subject to them. So if you’re trying to argue that god exists then of course he will be subject to them.
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@Vici
In this case the premise is that there exists this phenomenon we identify as logic. So the question is, how do we explain this?Well I as the theist can justify it because I can owe it to a transendental being. You cant sine you are an atheist.
You can claim all day that attributing logic to a transcendental being accounts for it, it still doesn’t.
Again, this transcendental being… is it subject to the laws of logic? YES or NO?
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@thett3
It’s not a caricature. It’s policy downstream of the anti-white position held by the left
1. Do you believe white privilege exists in this country?
2. If yes, do you believe we as a society should be doing something to ensure everyone has an equal footing?
3. If yes and yes, what policy could possibly be proposed to address this that you would not consider anti-white?
But I think systemic child abuse of mentally ill kids is pretty much the epitome of evil. And any ideology that is good with this is something I’m adamantly opposed to. After all, if someone’s starting assumptions are so wrong that they think a double mastectomy on a 13 year old girl is a reasonable action…what ELSE are they dreadfully wrong about?
In a situation where a minor, the minors parents, and their doctor all get together to discuss a possible medical procedure, who do you believe should get to decide what happens next?
There’s no equivalent to Fox News on the left because there doesn’t need to be. It exists because previous institutions were ideologically captured by the left to the point that a market opportunity for a right leaning network existed. Obviously it’s a propaganda network to tell republicans what they want to hear. I wouldn’t dispute that.
So basically, there was a market on the right for a propaganda outlet to tell right wingers what they want to hear. Yes, I agree.
The whole idea of all of our institutions being captured by left wing ideology always tickles me though. What exactly do you think is behind that? Do you not question why that is?
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@ADreamOfLiberty
The idea that what you might read on a .gov civics lecture is a perfect representation of what really happens is absurd
We’re talking about the powers of the Vice President. The way to learn what that is is to read. And again, nearly everyone on earth can look it up, so it’s beyond ridiculous to suggest the Ukrainian government didn’t know how this works.
I asked for evidence that there was a general desire to remove Shokin before Biden started gunning for Shokin, afterward it makes just as much sense that Biden was using his influence to increase the pressure.
Are you seriously suggesting that senators like Ron Johnson signed off on the letter asking for the prosecutors removal because of Biden’s influence?
If you seriously are suggesting that a super-rich oligarch was being stripped of his property and it had nothing to do with an investigation into his giant oil firm I can only conclude you are not engaging honestly.
Or you are not getting it.
We’re talking about Hunter Biden and what inspired Joe’s involvement. The only plausible explanation for Biden doing everything you claim is that he was doing it to protect his son, but his son wasn’t in any danger.
You used the Slochevsky example as evidence that Burisma was under investigation, which is why it’s relevant that they seized his personal property and not Burisma’s. It means they were not targeting the company, and if the company itself was not the target then Hunter had no exposure. But we knew this already because the time period Burisma was being investigated for was 2010 through 2012 and Hunter joined the board in 2014, so none of this was ever about him.
Once again you get the timing wrong (and it's kind of important, what with cause and effect being a thing):
The conversation Biden recounted where he pushed for Shokin’s revival occurred in December 2015. Shokin was not removed on the spot, it would take months before finally being voted out by the Ukrainian parliament.
The audio recording of the call between Trump and Zelenzkyy that was "whistleblown" and turned into one of the most transparent and ridiculous impeachments that I hope the USA will ever see.
I don’t know what you’re talking about. There is no audio recording of that call, there is only the transcript.
And what makes Gordon Sondland a “deep state Sycophant, besides the fact that he defected from the dear leader’s narrative?He changed his story, I guess sycophant was uncharitable
How did he change his story?
It's an abstraction not a small group of bond villains conspiring to take over the world. Well I mean there might be such a thing, but the vast majority of what is meant by "deep state" are unelected bureaucrats individually working towards their own ideological focus and cooperating in collective action without explicit conspiracy.
So in other words, it’s just people you disagree with operating in such a way that you disagree with. You have no evidence of any alleged participation of whomever this group encompasses, it just sounds about right.
Got it.
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@thett3
I’m not comfortable around people whose policies include the idea that people like me or my family should be passed over for positions and school slots we are qualified for in order to give those slots to unqualified people, that we should be the first to go when there are layoffs, that our very presence is violent or oppressive or in general a bad thing.
But this is for the most part little more than a caricature. The example you have isn’t even a law, it’s a contract provision negotiated by the school district and the teachers union. I think it’s a terrible way to do things, but to pretend that this “is” the left is hardly any different than me pretending that “liberals eat babies” is the political right.
What’s actually happening is that the individual gets hyper fixated on a certain idea, an impossible idea, of the “self” unencumbered by social history or biology, somehow being transferred to a different body. When the fixation gets too out of control it eventually consumes the entire personality and the victim engages in self harm/mutiliation to try and brute force their body into resembling something it will never be.
Will never be says who? What do you know about a trans person’s struggle and what is driving them to make the ultimate decision to go under the knife? And why does this matter to you to the point where is factors into how you vote?
What I am seeing here through your whole post with regards to this position is an overwhelming sense of you having the right to decide what’s best for other people and how other people should live their lives, and again, it’s to such a high degree that this is one of the big issues that would have you vote for someone like a Donald Trump.
Isn’t conservatism supposed to be about small government? What ever happened to get government out of our lives? Never ceases to amaze me how fast that goes out the window once it comes to anything the right disagrees with.
I would disagree that cancel culture is worse on the right.
As the former president continues to end the political careers of everyone who spoke out against him.
To talk about the FBI for example, a whistleblower recently leaked that there was intense pressure from high up in the organization to mislabel as many incidents as possible as “right wing domestic extremism”, and an additional whistleblower came forward to allege that the FBI intentionally falsely portrayed the Hunter Biden laptop story as false/disinformation …I would say your group being slandered by an organization that runs cover for your political opponents is good reason to distrust it.
I have to note the irony of how trustworthy whistleblowers are these days in the right.
But more to the point, this is a classic example of propaganda at work. The complaints alleged in these reports are clearly from low level staffers talking about high up officials - in other words with multiple levels of separation. Do you know how messages get twisted when being passed down from level to level? It’s not that I think these reports are made up, but rather that one’s propensity to feel like their boss is pressuring them into something like this is not exactly a reliable way to understand what is happening.
But yet, on the political right, this counts as proof that the entire organization, run by a republican whom Trump appointed, is corrupt against republicans.
The real tell for me as to how absurd the whole FBI is against republicans thing is on the right came in the immediate aftermath of the raid by which I’m actually talking about an executed search warrant. The right lost it’s mind talking about corruption, planting evidence, defund the FBI, political hit job… all before any of us had the slightest clue what happened and why. Trump could have been hiding an actual nuclear bomb in the basement and republicans still attack the FBI for doing their jobs.
You can disagree with the way an organization handled any given situation, but when you attack them without even knowing what the situation is you make it clear that you don’t really care about what you’re complaining about. This is just the latest example of the political right playing the victim.
I mean the things I’m complaining about are a facet of our social and political environment just as much as election deniers are.
They’re not though. They are as much of a facet of our news diets because of the asymmetrical polarization of our media system.
Vox had a really good video on this where they talk about what they called the “hack gap”. Simply put, there is no equivalent on the left to Fox News. Left wing media still tries to act neutral, which is what news is supposed to be. Fox News meanwhile started off with the explicit mission of “putting the GOP on television”. And because of the desire of actual news organizations to seem legitimate they constantly play to whatever Fox News is talking about, giving them incredible power to set the agenda.
So what does this power look like? In a conversation between two people on opposite ends of the spectrum discussing their differences the two biggest topics that have come up are gender surgeries and election denying, two things that would not be news anywhere if not for right wing outlets like Fox News making it news.
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@Vici
Prove that god “made” logici work backwards. i see there is logic. i observe that, in order for this to be the case, there MUST be a thing which has created a standard for operation.
You don’t observe logic, you use it.
Logic is the process by which we arrive at conclusions from a given set of premises. In this case the premise is that there exists this phenomenon we identify as logic. So the question is, how do we explain this? You claim a god explains this but that doesn’t work. Is God himself not subject to logic? Can god create a rock so heavy he can’t lift it? Can god both be the supreme ruler of existence and not the supreme ruler of existence? Can god exist and not exist at the same time in the same sense?
The problem you have is that there is no way possible to square your claim. God is either subject to logic or he is not. If he is then he couldn’t be the creator and arbiter of it. If he is not then, by definition, your argument is inherently irrational.
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@ADreamOfLiberty
The bureaucracy is not transparent.
The US government is probably the most transparent government on earth in terms of who is responsible for what and anyone with a computer and a phone line can easily Google the powers of the Vice President. The idea that the Ukrainian government didn’t know how this works is absurd.
You trust Obama to not do something shady? then I trust Guilani. Stalemate.
Setting aside the absurdity of comparing Rudy Giuliani to Barack Obama in terms of trustworthiness… Obama was the president of the United States. He had way more to lose than anything he could have gained by allowing Biden to strongarm an ally to save his son or whatever the charge here is.
Double failure:1.) Doesn't mention Shokin.
Because they didn’t have to. Shokin was in charge of the office. This is like someone says we need to replace the US government and someone like me comes along and says “dUh they didn’t mention Biden”.
2.) 2 months 6 days after quid pro quo
Your link is to a calendar. Not sure what value you thought that added to the conversation.
You asked me to back up the claim that the pressure on Ukraine to get rid of Shokin was coming from more than just Biden so I linked you to a letter signed by 8 senators including 3 republican senators back in 2016, a full 3 years before any of this stuff would come out asking for the prosecutors office to be purged. That’s the reality. Adjust accordingly.
You mean this Kasko:
Yes. Your argument hinges on the personal defense of the man trying to save face after having just been fired for corruption, so I gave you the word of his deputy who had nothing to do with any of this. The latter option on its face certainly seems more reliable.
A comment befitting a naive child.
A comment adding nothing of value whatsoever to the conversation except to showcase a bit of ego and condescension.
But I didn’t expect you to engage honestly with that, because there is no argument here. Your claim is that Shokin’s seizure of Zlochevsky’s assets shows that the investigation into Burisma was very much alive, but setting aside that the seizure did nothing to target Burisma, the seizure occurred almost 5 months after Biden got Shokin fired. This is far more easily explained as retaliation than an honest investigative move, especially considering that everything was dropped months later after Shokin left.
This point does nothing to forget your case.
He didn’t care whether they were investigated, according to Gordon Sondland anyway, all he cared about was that the investigation was announced.According to the recording he did care if they were investigated. Deep State Sycophant vs hard evidence? I'm going with hard evidence.
I have no idea what you are talking about. What tape?
And what makes Gordon Sondland a “deep state Sycophant, besides the fact that he defected from the dear leader’s narrative?
He was no more a political opponent than Sanders, Warren, Buttigieg, Yang, Gabert, etc..
Complete nonsense. Biden was the clear front runner at that point, and he polled better than any other democrat against Trump by far. Trump knew this.
There are multiple independently plausible explanations that don't involve Trump asking for a frame job
And none of them fit the puzzle better than the conclusion that Trump attempted to use foreign aid to extort a foreign ally into helping him slander a domestic political opponent.
And not for nothing but I notice you continue to keep blaming everything on this imaginary deep state bogeyman MAGA world concocted. Do you have any evidence of who is in this deep state and what they have done, you know, actual evidence, or do you find it logically valid to just slide them in wherever it is convenient?
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@thett3
Leftists casually use the term “white male” or “white people” as an insult or a term of invective, so it would take quite a bit for me to put in with the side that does that. I’m sure you can understand.
Not really. My politics is based on my values and policy preferences. I don’t understand the whole team sport thing.
the American leftist position is firmly that these children should be offered puberty blockers and other “gender affirming care” up to and including surgeries.
The leftist position, if there is one here, is that these kinds of decisions should be left up to families and their doctors. I couldn’t care less what the statistics say, one day if my daughter is going through this I will go to a doctor with my wife, learn about and understand the issue, then make whatever decision makes the most sense. Til then voting based on this seems ridiculous to me.
Censorship is unfortunately much more of a left wing value than a right wing value in todays politics. For example, 65% of democrats believe that the government (!) should intervene to suppress “false” information compared to 28% of republicans
I think the rhetoric has a lot more to do with the disparity than any difference in values. If it were the left was the side constantly calling for civil war I’m pretty sure the right would find plenty to censor there.
I mean look at how there are now calls to defund the FBI, cancel culture is not a left wing thing. The right is far more egregious with it, they just don’t have popular support for the things that bother them within our society.
I wish that none of those people were winning primaries. Does it bother you at least a little bit that the Democratic Party has spent millions boosting “election deniers” because they think they’ll be easier to beat?
I don’t care for it, they’re playing with fire. But those crazies would not be a threat if a significant portion of the base didn’t want this. So while you talk about being against cancel culture and gender surgery, two examples of things no one on the left cares about, right wing voters are on the cusp of putting election deniers in actual office overseeing actual elections. When it comes to relevance and significance these two things are not equal.
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@ADreamOfLiberty
That does not follow.1.) He could be bluffing, for all the Ukrainian government knew he could stop the funds alone.2.) It could be coming from him, with Obama going along as a favor.
The Ukrainian government knows how the US government works, it’s not a secret.
Obama wouldn’t go along with stopping foreign aid to an ally unless there is an actual reason. This isn’t something you do and no one notices, just ask Trump.
Provide evidence, from before the quid pro quo.
That is not what Viktor Shokin said
It’s what Vitaly Kasko says.
nor does that claim line up with the fact that Mykola Zlochevsky's assets were seized around 4/2/2016.
His personal assets were seized, there’s no indication that had anything to do with Burisma. If it did they would have seized company assets.
There is no other plausible motive. Why would Trump want Hunter and burisma investigated if he didn't think there was corruption?
He didn’t care whether they were investigated, according to Gordon Sondland anyway, all he cared about was that the investigation was announced. And what do you mean no plausible motive? He wanted the investigation announced so that he could use it to slander his political opponent. That’s clearly what this was all about.
Let me ask you a question, if you believe Trump was legitimately trying to stop corruption in Ukraine and that Trump believed he was right… why did Trump all of a sudden resume the payments to Ukraine after this story broke? Was the corruption fixed? Did anything change? Mission accomplished?
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@Vici
if you contend, you are using logic, which he made
Prove that god “made” logic
so you are using god to disprove god which is silly logic.
No, I’m using logic to demonstrate that your position is baseless.
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@thett3
I subjectively believe that what the left does is worse. I roll my eyes at people who think that the election was stolen but I could never be in a coalition with people who think I’m evil because of the way I was born, want to give mentally ill kids puberty blockers/opposite sex hormones/surgeries, support censorship…
The examples you gave have almost nothing to do with the left. As a hard leftist myself, I’ve never met anyone who thinks anyone is evel because the way they were born (are you saying because your white?), I’ve never actually seen a situation in real life of giving kids puberty blockers or whatever, and censorship is not a left wing thing. These are all right wing boogeymen concocted by Fox News and OANN.
Meanwhile the election was stolen claims are not some lunatic fringe thing. We have republican candidates running for high offices all over the country and winning republican primaries in some cases almost exclusively on this platform. If they win their races they will do everything they can to ensure elections are fixed for their side. That’s not hyperbolic and that’s not some left wing bogeyman. These two things do not compare.
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