Reblogged:Will Independents Save the GOP From Itself?

[Jon Letendre]

Who wants to tell that man the retarded mantra I've heard so many times from certain quarters, "we can survive four years of Biden"? You think he is confused about who is ruining his life? And when they put Trump in prison and this guy is looking at another winter outdoors in the frigid northeast?

Tens of thousands of veterans are homeless, like that man. They have much more to resent, they don't just work hard forty hours a week, they were sent to some shithole desert at risk of their lives to kill strangers (and haven't forgotten how.) And now their country isn't keeping them off the streets. They're dying in the cold while we import trash and provide comfortable housing to the trash, instead of our own heroes.

Trump is going to promise them the world over the next few months. Then, the politicians they well understand to be their destroyers are going to imprison or murder Trump.

Buckle up.

Edited February 4 by Jon Letendre

[Boydstun]

3 hours ago, necrovore said:

Because the standard of proof is lower in civil trials -- "preponderance of the evidence" instead of "beyond a reasonable doubt."

You may remember they found no shortage of people who were "raped" by Kavanaugh, too. Or by Julian Assange. Or by Russell Brand. Anybody who is inconvenient to the government.

The law under which Trump was convicted had been modified recently in order to make convictions like that possible.

Sexual Assault Statute of Limitations

Accusors of rape by Kavanaugh had no court adjudication supporting their claims by "a preponderance of the evidence." And I'd think it reasonable to suppose him innocent until there is such a legal proceeding finding that he did it (supposing it is possible to file suit against a Justice at all).

Edited February 4 by Boydstun

[Jon Letendre]

Donald J. Trump, Jan 6, 2021:

"You have to go home, now."

"We have to have peace."

"We have to have law and order."

"We have to respect our great people in law and order."

"We can't play into the hands of these people; we have to have peace."

"Go home and go home in peace."

They went home in peace and thus ended the terrible "insurrection" lol.

Next time, his supporters won't hear his pleas for peace, he will be silenced next time, in prison or dead, like all the Never Trump Morons want so badly.

 

Donald Trump tells supporters to 'go home' after they storm Capitol (youtube.com)

 

Edited February 4 by Jon Letendre

[Boydstun]

3 hours ago, Jon Letendre said:

It is a preposterous insult to Donald Trump's very person to suggest he would go near that gross woman. He accessed professional models his whole life, the notion is ridiculous.

. . .

Jon, if you are on a jury, that thinking is against your logical and legal responsibility. I can believe that Mr. Trump never earned an honest dollar in his life. But if I am on a jury in a case against him, that is not pertinent to any case that might be brought against him in the law. All that rightly matters for the juror is whether the evidence allowed for consideration in the proceeding and credence in the presentation thereof suffice to show the accused guilty beyond a reasonable doubt or (in civil suit) more likely to have done the proscribed deed than not have done the deed.

[Jon Letendre]

I'm not on a jury and I don't care what the instructions would be if I was.

I'm just sitting here understanding how comically preposterous it is.

Cling to all the tyrannical bullshit as though it might be on the up and up, none of us care anymore.

Yeah, he raped her. Put him in prison. Epstein him there. Do it. Find out.

Edited February 4 by Jon Letendre

[Jon Letendre]

2 hours ago, Jon Letendre said:

 

 

[Jon Letendre]

https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/158/408/104/playable/42472a86c8089196.mp4

 

 

[Boydstun]

Economic Freedom – Haley!

Vote for Haley in the Primary in your State! Anti-intellectualism is one reason, which, joined with others, Rand condemned the Presidential candidate of '68 George Wallace and his movement as proto-fascist. Trump should be condemned just as Wallace and for those same reasons and more. Wallace was not the nominee of either Party. Still, he won seven Southern states and a million votes. Had he gotten the Democratic nomination, as earlier in that century he could have, he could have won the presidency. Support for our constitutional democratic form of government is actually pretty weak, I gather, among the anti-intellectual portion of the citizens. Mr. Trump stirs that weak portion for support. Plenty of shallow sloganeering all around, of course, as ever.

I gather Haley will be in this at least through Super Tuesday, with her bloc-dollars from Mr. Koch and pals, with at least that money source. Her turn to raising the issue of economic freedom, I notice, coincides with the unwavering support of that by Koch across the decades. 

Edited February 5 by Boydstun

[Jon Letendre]

4 minutes ago, Boydstun said:

Support for our constitutional democratic form of government is actually pretty weak, I gather, among the anti-intellectual portion of the citizens. Mr. Trump stirs that weak portion for support.

Projection, genius! Yeah go with that -- pretend you didn't notice an election was stolen and busy yourself accusing the other side of not caring about stuff like that.

[Boydstun]

[Doug Morris]

On 2/3/2024 at 8:51 PM, Jon Letendre said:

Who wants to tell that man the retarded mantra I've heard so many times from certain quarters, "we can survive four years of Biden"? You think he is confused about who is ruining his life?

We have a better chance of surviving four years of Biden than of surviving four years of Trump.

 

[Doug Morris]

22 hours ago, Jon Letendre said:

pretend you didn't notice an election was stolen

Rather, recognize that the election was not stolen.

 

[necrovore]

  

On 2/3/2024 at 2:18 PM, Jon Letendre said:

One thing that really sticks out to me is that in my experience with leftists, Trump haters, democrats, liberals, they never, and I mean never, bring facts to me that I didn't already know about.

Whereas they are constantly responding to me with "what? I never heard that. You think that's true? Where could I look into that?" LATER: "OK, so it is true, but so what?" This happens to me over and over and over. They can't immediately see the SO WHAT because of SO MUCH more they don't know about, but good luck explaining any that to one of them.

They are not informed.

AND THAT'S OK.

But why they won't take the responsible and logical next step of not voting I truly don't understand.

I don't think it's OK. It's evasion, pure and simple.

Among some people familiar with Objectivism this evasion sometimes takes the form of "don't look in the closet, because anything you see in there is arbitrary and has to be dismissed from rational consideration."

When the mainstream media is very biased and refuses to report facts that don't support their point of view, one has no choice but to look for those facts in alternative media. It's difficult to dig through alternative news sources where facts that you can't find anywhere else are intermingled with articles about the Second Coming of Jesus and who knows what else. The alternative press consists of "rags"; it consists of scruffy rebels with small budgets; all they have is whatever facts they can find to report on. If they find important facts, they try to get them out, and usually have to square off against official and unofficial censorship in order to do it. But then they'll sometimes reach very wrong conclusions with those facts, and this is because many of their abstract principles are not reality-based, and are neither mainstream nor Objectivist. The facts they report are never the ones that poke the holes in their own mistaken principles, but they are, nevertheless, facts, and often poke holes in establishment principles.

What you have to do to find out the truth amounts to "rag-picking." You have to go through the "rags" anyway. Their facts are often undisputed, but their principles may be wrong. Keep the facts, discard the Jesus. And of course discard the antisemitism and the UFO aliens.

The thing to understand about "alternative facts" is that they are not alternatives to facts; they are facts that the establishment doesn't want anyone to know and would prefer everyone to ignore.

Maybe some people haven't learned to distinguish between statements of fact (which can, in principle, be verified, or wrong) and statements of opinion (which rest on abstractions, and those abstractions might be true, false, or arbitrary). Or perhaps they know how to make the distinction but find it to be a lot of effort. Or maybe they think that, since the rag-writers' principles are wrong, their facts have to be wrong, too. It's much easier to go along with the mainstream press where everything is neatly packaged for you and you don't have to think about it.

And then there are people who have become part of the "aristocracy" in some way or other, and they guard their positions jealously, and they need to be seen looking down their noses at certain facts because those facts are socially unacceptable among the aristocracy. (The aristocracy seems to include the legal profession, which has become an aristocracy itself, and has developed its own principles and traditions which are older than Objectivism, some of which are probably incorrect in light of it, and will be difficult to make correct.)

There is one more important thing.

Most people understand deductive logic and reasoning, so they start with certain principles and then plug in the facts and deduce downward from there. Deduction has been well-understood since ancient Greece, and it's also easy to write a deductive argument on a piece of paper and check it for correctness.

However, there is also an inductive side to reasoning, and this is not as well understood -- but almost all of the arguments for Objectivism are inductive in nature. Induction is the only way to come up with new principles. Induction is why Ayn Rand wrote novels and essays and not just syllogisms. Induction is like figure-and-ground to deduction; whereas deduction requires examples, induction requires for its proof an absence of counter-examples. So it is reasonable, as part of an inductive argument, to show that you have really looked for counter-examples, everywhere, systematically, and not found any. This is also how you prove Newton's Laws. This is why evasion is a fallacy that you don't much hear about outside of Objectivism. Evasion is almost completely inapplicable to deduction. Evasion "works" to prop up incorrect abstractions by suppressing the facts that would disprove them. The arbitrary, in turn, is just a larger example of evasion; it ensures the necessary absence of counter-examples by suppressing all of reality. The arbitrary is that which is impervious to evidence. You can't identify something as arbitrary unless you can identify at least the type of evidence that it would be impervious to; it's even better if you can identify the evidence itself.

But that requires reading those "rags"...

Edited February 7 by necrovore

[necrovore]

https://www.theepochtimes.com/opinion/cultural-marxism-and-the-corruption-of-common-law-5587345?utm_source=partner&utm_campaign=ZeroHedge

[Boydstun]

The Legal Concept of Evidence

Necovore, I don't know if the preponderance-of-the-evidence rule for civil suits is itself from the Common Law Mr. Brooks purports he would like to be maintained, but most tort law is developed by the Common Law. So he might well need to blame the Common Law for that standard of proof in a charge such as that brought by Ms. Carroll; I don't know. What was the evidence for her claims rated by the jury as having more than 50% likelihood of being true? (I'd imagine Mr. Trump's former boast that you can grab 'em by the pussy if you are a star [entered as pertinent evidence in the present case] probably added some weight against his claim of innocence in the present case.)

Mr. Brooks provided no specifics to his claim that "over several generations Marxist intellectuals have been transforming the American justice system" to their political ends. Which intellectuals of any stripe transform the American justice system. Did Posner's economic analysis of law? Did Epstein's writings on the takings clause in the Constitution? (No on Epstein's, though I wish that they do, and I've still hope they will.) Where in Mr. Brooks's article are specified the law review articles by and names of these alleged Marxist intellectuals who have transformed the American justice system? Surely he knows that such Marxist intellectuals would have to be specific individuals, not air through which his hand waves, and surely he knows that if he speaks the truth in naming such individuals, he is defended against libel by the truth of his claim (proven by preponderance of the evidence). So far as I know, we've the same old common law in this sector of it, undermine confidence in the legal system day after day by hollering "Marxist", "prejudiced", or "rigged" for your political ends as a Mr. Brooks might.

Are intellectuals who think there is "social justice" over and above "justice" (which is a myopic view of "justice") people who have influence on the American legal system? Specifics are lacking for the sweeping declarations of Mr. Brooks. Are such intellectuals all Marxist? Can't intellectuals have wrong-headed social ideas without being Marxist or brainlessly led by Marxists? Of course they can and do. It's easier to cry "Marxist"—and catchier to an audience stuck in whatever learning they or their elders got of social thought 50 years ago—than relaying Rawl's A Theory of Justice with its Principles, including the Principle of Liberty, or the writer in jurisprudence A. J. David Richards based on Rawls or relaying Nozick's counters to Rawl's theory. Or rendering the illuminating classics: Hart's The Concept of Law and Fuller's The Morality of Law. Of course Mr. Brooks likely has read much from those works at some point and has a fair guess as to what quarters hear which of them sympathetically or with hostility. His piece is the usual for broad public consumption: name-calling and lies for a political cause.

Edited February 18 by Boydstun

[tadmjones]

Absence of proof is not the same as proof of absence. Mr. Brooks' argument may lack citation of specifics, but in the area of argumentation in legal theory, eg 'stare decisis', surely a broader context is admissible, pun intended.

The whole E Jean Carroll vs Trump legal affair is predicated on or reliant on the constitutionality of the NY state ASA which allowed judges to disregard previous statute of limitations on bringing suits. The state appellate courts upheld the constitutionality of the Adult Survivors Act based on a finding of the state supreme court ruling for the constitutionality of the Childhood Victim Act, proposed in the same state legislative session as the ASA though it(the ASA) was not passed until after Cuomo resigned.

The 'look back windows' that has allowed suits to be brought was argued on the grounds of correcting injustices perpetrated on victims (groups)via time limitations,  and has been hailed in legal circles as a needed 'progressive' measure by states to fully acknowledge the need for protection against and remediation for those whose rights would otherwise be oppressed by the legal precedents of limitations of time to bring such suits. That's a lot of Marxist-y thought right there , no ?

If 'progressive legal actions' are unfairly characterized by being solely motivated by Marxist ideologues, the idea that granting exceptions to statute of limitations based on the class of victims being child doesn't/shouldn't necessarily automatically grant those same exemptions to cases that involve adults at the time of their victimization , unless the legal theory is based on an appeal to an over-arching definition of the class of victims. And since these cases are involved in civil litigation, compensatory money rewards are the remediation sought. Again not solely the province of 'marxist' retaliation( especially in the case(s) of minors at the time of victimization , but a case could surely be made that the motivation for allowing what was heretofore a time limited action for adult victims is predicated on a legal theory that too broadly extends a 'class' to incorporate more members to be considered oppressed upon, no ?

 

[necrovore]

13 hours ago, Boydstun said:

(I'd imagine Mr. Trump's former boast that you can grab 'em by the pussy if you are a star [entered as pertinent evidence in the present case] probably added some weight against his claim of innocence in the present case.)

It's completely improper to consider such a thing to be "evidence."

It's like saying Johnny Depp's performance in Sweeney Todd is "evidence" that he cut someone's throat.

Some rap music has lyrics that convey certain attitudes toward women, which would probably not look good if those rappers were accused of rape, but I think it's improper to consider those lyrics as "evidence" that the rappers committed rape. It's entirely arguable that the rappers say that stuff, not because it's true, but because they think it sells more records.

It seems even more improper that such statements should be used against Trump, but similar statements made by his accuser (and cited in the William Brooks piece), which would tend to reduce her credibility, didn't seem to be considered.

[tadmjones]

The context of that leaked and "assumably" 'off the record' comment was clearly a comment on how some people react to those deemed 'above' them in fame or wealth. In the context of rap culture , they were relating and in a surprising manner how far 'liberties' extend to personal space if someone believes they can somehow benefit for granting the space. Bitches be gold diggers , not necessarily prey as the picture was trying to be painted.

[DavidOdden]

2 hours ago, tadmjones said:

The whole E Jean Carroll vs Trump legal affair is predicated on or reliant on the constitutionality of the NY state ASA which allowed judges to disregard previous statute of limitations on bringing suits.

As far as I know, ASA does not “allow” judges to set aside the earlier statute of limitation in specified cases, it requires them to, that is, discretion rests with the plaintiff, not the judge. Since statutes of limits are legislative creations and not constitutional rights, I see no possible constitutional question. SOLs are often changed, and changes are not held to be unconstitutional simply because a number is changed by an act of the legislature. There is no denying that there is a political agenda in increasing SOLs for politically-incorrect torts while decreasing SOLs for a politically-correct tort would be equally consistent with that agenda (for example, consumer complaints – an increase is okay – but debt collection – a decrease is okay). Again, this is not a constitutional issue, it is a plain old political question (proper vs. improper government).

Not every bad idea is Marxist. The Republican party is full of bad ideas and bad philosophy, but it isn’t all Marxist.

[Jon Letendre]

Modifying statutes of limitations is fine so long as applicability is limited to new cases.

Extending a statute of limitations so as to capture an event that had previously expired for statutes of limitations is a plain violation of individual rights and the Constitution.

[tadmjones]

17 minutes ago, DavidOdden said:

As far as I know, ASA does not “allow” judges to set aside the earlier statute of limitation in specified cases, it requires them to, that is, discretion rests with the plaintiff, not the judge. Since statutes of limits are legislative creations and not constitutional rights, I see no possible constitutional question. SOLs are often changed, and changes are not held to be unconstitutional simply because a number is changed by an act of the legislature. There is no denying that there is a political agenda in increasing SOLs for politically-incorrect torts while decreasing SOLs for a politically-correct tort would be equally consistent with that agenda (for example, consumer complaints – an increase is okay – but debt collection – a decrease is okay). Again, this is not a constitutional issue, it is a plain old political question (proper vs. improper government).

Not every bad idea is Marxist. The Republican party is full of bad ideas and bad philosophy, but it isn’t all Marxist.

Yes the judges are required.

As to the constitutionality of jerking around SOLs , there as to be something to the idea of creating and closing 'look back windows'? What is a principled argument that allows for 'periodic extended jeopardy'(?) I can understand having a relatively extended SOL ( + 50 yrs in some cases)  in the specific area of sexual abuse/abuse of minors and especially involving institutions. Being no legal expert , I still assume there probably exists a jurisprudence in these matters of right's protections and keeping legal avenues open to compensation to individuals that were minors at the time of victimization, that would separate similar strictures for plaintiffs bringing suit when the victimization occurred while they were of legal majority age.

And yes also, not all bad ideas are Marxist, but a whole lot of them are!

[necrovore]

1 hour ago, DavidOdden said:

Not every bad idea is Marxist. The Republican party is full of bad ideas and bad philosophy, but it isn’t all Marxist.

Bad precedents set in the course of persecuting Trump can also be used by religionists later.

[DavidOdden]

Starting from the fact that lawsuits and criminal prosecutions are (ideally) seeking redress for violation of a person’s rights, justice is not served by an arbitrary time-based curtailment of the right to justice. Any time limit on justice demands proper justification, and “it has been a long time since the wrong was done” is not valid justification. The basic rationale for statutes of limitation is that miscarriage of justice is more-possible because of the unavailability or unreliability of witnesses after a certain number of years. A crucial presumption of SOL is that a person who has suffered a wrong will diligently seek justice, which of course requires that they have discovered the wrong, where for instance a surgeon who fails to remove an internal tumor can be sued for malpractice longer than the standard 3 years for personal injury, owing to the fact that the surgeon’s wrong is effectively un-discoverable.

The proper political question (not constitutional) is, at what point should a person’s right to justice be terminated by the state? The primary limit should be based on the miscarriage of justice problem of litigating stale cases, where the witnesses are dead or cannot be trusted to remember: and we need an objective rule governing that limit, it should not be treated on a subjective case-by-case basis. Victim awareness of the wrong (the discovery rule) is also a valid reason for exceptionally extending the limit backwards, but this backwards extension should not provide an easy excuse for indiligence in protecting one’s rights.

In the particular case, the New York Legislature simply abandoned the rational underpinnings of SOL law, by picking out an arbitrary subset of wrongs deserving of a longer limit on justice. It is not as though the victim was unaware of what purportedly happened, she simply chose to not care until she found a reason to care. So then why can’t I sue a contractor for defective workmanship 20 years ago?

[necrovore]

13 minutes ago, DavidOdden said:

So then why can’t I sue a contractor for defective workmanship 20 years ago?

Well, good news: if the contractor changes careers into politics, and runs for office, and is in the wrong political party -- then you can!

[tadmjones]

And you will be able to from April 2025 until June of that year.