shakenvac
1yr ago
Presidents have ultimate classifying authority
You keep mixing legal arguments with moral ones. Even if we accept that what Trump did was legal (not conceded) you have conspicuously avoided the argument that it was deeply irresponsible. there is no law of physics which says that a former president cannot injure the nation by mishandling such documents. Even if a box in a garage is not as bad as an email on a server (not conceded) you still have to admit that a box in a garage is pretty goddamn bad. And after all that shit he gave Hillary, too. Is it really such a terrible thing to hold Trump to his own standards?
shakenvac
1yr ago
And where do "My rules, unfairly" sit on that spectrum? Trump made an absolutely massive deal out of Hillary mishandling documents and the injury to Hillary was huge (probable cause of losing the election). And now it turns out he's also been mishandling documents and people are making a massive deal out of it and suddenly Mr. "lock her up" is all about forbearance and even application of the law? Even if the basic argument about fairness is true, can you explain to me why I should feel one jot of sympathy for this massive hypocrite?
If politician X in state Y gets prosecuted for smoking weed even though in state Y almost no-one ever gets prosecuted on straight possession, then yeah I would be upset at what I would see as a politically motivated prosecution. If, however, politician X also campaigned like mad to keep weed illegal and made tons of political hay by pointing out that his opponent smoked weed in college? Man, fuck that guy with a stick.
shakenvac
1yr ago
if we accept for the sake of argument that what Trump did is no worse than hat Hillary did, how am I supposed to see Trump as anything more than a rank hypocrite? Trump excoriated Hillary for mishandling documents. He tore her to pieces. He wanted her locked up. Given how close 2016 was it's probably not an exaggeration to say that Hillary's emails won Trump the election. and then at the end of his term he stashes a garage full of classified documents in his house? and then lies to investigators about it? Why on earth should I care that he's getting a taste of his own medicine? Crooked Trump.
If Trump wanted to maintain those documents, as president, that suffices.
If it is true that Trump can psychically declassify documents then I'm sure that Trumps very competent, very well paid lawyers will put together an extremely convincing argument to that effect and get the case dismissed. I'm not holding my breath.
shakenvac
1yr ago
the homicide clearnace rates in the USA have been plummetting since the 1970s. That's because easily solvable intra-family murders have been replaced with nigh unsolvable gangland killings. Therefore what you are saying is far less true today than it was 50 years ago. If anything we should say that murders are not a good proxy for violent crime rates because they probably underestimate wider violent crime rates.
If you say no to the fighter jet thing, but yes to a self-replicating molecular machine finding a stable enough environment in which to proliferate for millions of years, then presumably you would need to explain the asymmetry in your expectations.
Well, if we imagine a fighter jet made of 10,000 different parts, and all these parts just happen to have spontaneously come into existence on some planet, and there's actually a trillion copies of each part on this planet, and this planet has whirlwinds strong enough to constantly clatter these pieces together in different ways, and has plenty of lightning to do the spot welding, and it's not just one planet but an uncountable number throughout the universe, then yeah. I expect you would end up with a fighter jet after a few billion years or so.
why have we been able to create fighter jets, but not engineer a self-replicating molecular organism from inorganic matter?
Probably because fighter jets exist in meatspace where I can manipulate things with my hammer and self-replicating molecular organisms exist in nano-world which we have just barely developed the tools to begin to engineer.
shakenvac
2yr ago
The motive part of it gets much easier when you stop thinking in terms of 'Russia' and start thinking in terms of 'Vladimir Putin'. These pipelines were a threat to his power. To a would be successor they represent a huge amount of untapped income and a ready-made olive branch to the west. With the destruction of Nordstream any individual trying to gather support to depose Putin has lost a major advantage.
McDonalds had more resources than Stella Liebeck
I wasn't being sarcastic. I'm sure they are very competent. Which is why I don't really believe your legal theory. If what you are saying is correct, and it is uncomplicatedly true that Trump axiomatically cannot mishandle documents, then why aren't his lawyers screaming it from the rooftops? Why haven't they made that argument in court? why aren’t there droves of grumbling articles from the New York Times about how 'this is all BS but unfortunately his lawyers do kinda have a point'? Why did his previous lawyers appear to quit over this? Why did Trump try and hide evidence from investigators if what he did wasn't even illegal? It's all very weird.
unless, of course, you're wrong.
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