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Originally Posted by
wiggin
Honestly, most of these are easy to dismiss. I am pretty sure, for example, that Sessions didn't discuss anything of value with Kislyak; he just got in trouble for failing to disclose said meetings.
Then why didn't he disclose them?
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Trump's actions fit into his broader idiocy and incompetence without in any way presupposing a conspiracy: you pulled out Occam's Razor, but Hanlon's Razor is pretty useful here as well. Etc. By far the most concerning issues, based on the evidence we have today, are the following:
The problem with this - Hanlon's Razor - is that idiocy is random, conspiracy is not. If it was just Trump being stupid in his dealing with Russia, you'd expect that stupidity to take all kinds of forms. He might, for example, be caught in a secret meeting with one of the oligarchs Putin doesn't like. He might be caught on tape by a reporter saying unflattering things about Putin. He might make business dealing which the Kremlin looks unkindly upon. Yet he doesn't do any of those things, all of Trump's supposed idiocy is in one direction: Pro-Kremlin.
I am happy to invoke Hanlon's Razor for individual incidents, but it does not adequately explain a suspicious pattern of behaviour.
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Literally everything else is innuendo. I'd like to propose the following thought experiment: Let us imagine that Russia did not tamper with the election to our knowledge. There were no hacked emails, no Wikileaks releases, etc. Would the connections you note - Manafort's clear pro-Russia bias, Flynn/Page/Sessions taking meetings with Russian officials, Trump saying nice things about Putin - be enough to suspect collusion? As in, we could imagine that Trump won fair and square but Russia might still be trying to influence the presidency through agents/blackmail/bribery/whatever. Would these meetings be enough to convince anyone? I think not.
I think for me they'd be more indicative of what Trump wanted to do going forward rather than anything they wanted to do with the election.
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Induction and inference are indeed powerful tools, but they are also deeply flawed. For an issue of this magnitude - as you yourself said, the foundations of our democracy and the most powerful position in the world - I require a very high standard of proof. Induction and inference can still be used, yes, but only sparingly.
Well, it's not like either of us have any actual power here. I speak merely of what I need to convince myself of what was actually going on in 2016. If I were somehow given the means to prosecute Trump I'd require more proof. But then if I somehow found myself in in that position I'd also have the means to go and get that proof. And if all I'd found after I'd conducted that investigation was basically the same as what is public knowledge right now I'd come to a different conclusion: that Trump probably did not collude with Russia.
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I share your thought that this may be down to epistemology. I have spent the last 1.5 decades or so immersed in a highly empirical world. I specifically work with systems that are so complex that it's impossible to model more than a small chunk of them when I'm trying to understand a set of data. Because of this, I tend to discount the value of theories and logic in favor of cold, hard data - I've seen far too many elegant theories and logical hypotheses get soundly destroyed because the data, stubbornly, refuses to cooperate. Thus, my standard for drawing a conclusion about reality is quite high - requiring a lot of data that attacks the issue from a variety of perspectives that, ideally including direct evidence of causative mechanisms rather than mere correlation of phenomena. This manifests here as skepticism about unwarranted conclusions based on the available data to date, and in other discussions as skepticism about the accuracy of ambitious forward-looking projections.
A rational approach when you're dealing with the behaviour of pharmaceuticals (that is what you do, right?), but not when you're dealing with human beings. Drugs don't make an active effort to deceive you, or conceal information, or make unwarranted assumptions in the things they tell you, or simply refuse to co-operate. Or any of the other frankly weird things people are likely to do.
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I'd like to address the third point. I agree that the 'bad apple' argument, while sometimes valid, is not always a great defense. It's also not really appropriate, however, to condemn an entire organization and their supporters because elements of their tolerated behaviour are wrong. I'd be hard pressed to find an organization that is so upstanding that it doesn't tacitly endorse at least some behaviors that are problematic. My point was that there's a lot of ugly in the Republican Party but calling them all scumbags isn't fair. It's possible to be a broadly decent person who still holds some assholish opinions (or tolerates it in others); in fact, I'd hazard a guess that nearly everyone here falls into that category.
It would depend on the severity of the tolerate problematic behaviour, how widespread it is and how important to the organisation the people carrying it out are.
...and that's why I have no trouble calling the Republicans a garbage party who should get in the sea.
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See, while you respond with contempt, I respond with puzzlement. I want to understand people who voted for Trump - not the fringe racists or misogynists or whatever, but the bulk of his support that was normal Joe Schmoes who would probably be aghast at a neighbor of theirs using the kind of rhetoric (and behavior) of Trump but felt it was a necessary evil. I want to understand why any woman or person of color would vote for him, why any religious person would vote for him, etc. I don't just assume they're all terrible people who will compromise everything they profess to care about just for party affiliation or a SCOTUS nominee, but that they had a good reason to go against their instincts and support someone so clearly unfit for the job.
Well, you could always read one of the approximately 700 thousand thinkpieces that the media has written on the subject since the election. Where the reporter goes off to Bumblefuck, Pennsylvania and talks to Real Americans(TM) in a diner or something.
I wish you luck in your endeavour, but I don't think you're going to enjoy the answers you find very much.
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I don't think that we should give people a free pass for policy positions that have bad outcomes, but I don't think it's productive to paint them as evil (most of the time); that stifles useful debate and completely eliminates the possibility of compromise.
The GOP made it crystal clear throughout Obama's term that they're totally unwilling to compromise on anything.
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For example, I think you'd have to be an idiot not to think that the ACA could use a fix at a minimum and that rising healthcare costs need addressing. It also seems likely that GOP attempts to fix the ACA will substantially decrease access and will not decrease healthcare costs much or at all, especially those costs borne by certain individuals. Yet rather than suggesting that the GOP are full of heartless stooges for insurance companies who just want to screw poor people, don't you think it would be better to engage them on their actual priorities?
Why on earth would I want to do that when they won't reciprocate?
Their "priorities" are a load of bollocks anyway.
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Leftists should talk to them about how to create a system with sustainable growth in healthcare costs without drastically cutting benefits, about how to avert looming budgetary disaster with a mix of policies that might actually preserve access and reduce cost. Democrats definitely don't have a politically workable solution for healthcare, and it looks like the GOP doesn't either - but casting one side as evil means there's no value in negotiating with them.
Leftists should save their breath.
If the GOP was an actual, functional and responsible political party with legitimate policy goals with which I happen to disagree and an genuine interest in dialogue and compromise, then what you say has a lot of merit. But that hasn't really been true of the GOP since the Tea-Party, and is getting less true by the minute.
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Now obviously that is a pure policy debate and we're talking about something much more primal - the inviolability of our democratic process. And while I think we should avoid using a caricature, I do think that certain of Trump's actions and policies are hard to see in a positive light. When he himself tells you he wants to ban Muslims from the country (a deeply unAmerican and unconstitutional move) and then proceeds to do it, it's important to call a spade a spade: the policy is wrongheaded, period. But even then it costs us nothing to call out the policy without resorting to calling Trump himself a racist. He might be a racist (actually I suspect he almost certainly is) but it doesn't gain us anything by calling him one; instead we can cast the policy as racist and leave ad hominem attacks to the cable news.
What it costs us is a situation where calling someone racist is seen as worse than being a racist, and where racists consequently feel empowered to be racist, knowing the won't face any consequences because everyone is too polite to call them what they are, and thus leaving the people who are the targets of racism, and who don't have the luxury of such high minded abstemiousness, high and dry to deal with their abuser on their own, without the support they deserve from the rest of us.
Basically? Fuck that.
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I apologize; I did not intend for that to come off as a personal attack. I guess my issue stems from the fact that I would be hard-pressed to come up with a contemporary situation where I would ever describe a political grouping with the language you use; as such, I assume you're quite emotionally invested in opposition to the GOP rather than a disinterested observer. It matters little, though; let us discard my assumptions about you (sorry!) and just say that I don't think that Mitch McConnell or Paul Ryan are just politicians calculating which policies will keep them in power/wealth, or how they can stick it to whatever groupings I imagine they dislike while helping people like themselves. I think that while there's an element of that in every politician, they genuinely believe that their proposals are the best (politically feasible) way forward for the country.
I don't doubt their motives by default, like you I will assume someone is acting in good faith until shown otherwise.
Unfortunately, the Republicans have shown me otherwise. From the contrast between their loud protestations of patriotism and attacks on leftists for lack of same compared to their utter indifference to what Trump is doing to their country or relatively trivial things like Mitch McConnel calling the block of Obama's supreme court nomination nearly a year out from the end of his presidency the 'proudest moment of his life' to whining when democrats did the same thing less than a year later they have demonstrated quite clearly to anyone willing to listen that their words and professed beliefs mean nothing and that they are willing to say whatever is convenient to get what they want at that time.
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I, too, have been troubled by the relatively muted protests by large chunks of the GOP rank and file in Washington, especially in the House. But I think you discount the truly remarkable and unprecedented things that have happened since Trump became the presumptive nominee. The Speaker of the House publicly doubted Trump's conservative credentials and openly criticized a number of his signature policy proposals, and indeed has largely ignored Trump's policy proposals that require legislative approval. A number of senators openly opposed his nomination and publicly refused to vote for him, in some cases going so far as to openly support alternative candidates. Trump's policy initiatives have gotten even less traction in the Senate (and his nominations have been subjected to a surprising amount of GOP grilling in addition to the expected opposition grilling). His public comments and demeanor have been repeatedly criticized by a wide range of GOP leaders. Etc. This is not normal, and I think it is rather more consequential than some 'mild grumbling'.
Sounds like the very definition of mild grumbling to me, but I won't press the issue.
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I think you have to put yourself in a GOP lawmaker's shoes: You have an opportunity to pass important legislation that has a chance of not being vetoed, and to do so you need the cooperation of a famously volatile and egotistical guy. Should you (a) ignore his bullshit and get on with the business of governing, (b) voice full-throated denunciations over every ridiculous tweet, (c) some mixture of the two? Most lawmakers have done (c), voicing criticism but tempering it some in the hopes of having a functioning government.
B.
The answer is B.
