In fact, I need to continue and possibly expand my use of the word.Originally Posted by wiggin
To address your points, though:
1) The American legal definition of treason is just stupid. It is restricted to working enemies of the United States, defined as I understand it to anyone in a state of declared or open war with the United States. Under this definition, you cannot call, for example, the Americans who spied for the Soviet Union traitors. There may be good constitutional reasons to have such a restricted definition (I understand that, back in the day, certain American politicians were in the habit of calling anyone and their dog traitors, thus being the fine American political tradition of taking a perfectly serviceable pejorative word and running it into the fucking ground) but it is silly to say that the US legal definition is how the word should be used in general conversation.
2) I am not American
3) America is a nation founded not on ethnic or national identity, nor on religious creed but on an ideal. When you undermine that ideal by e.g. conspiring with hostile foreign powers to undermine American democracy and the legitimacy of it's political institutions then you have betrayed American in just about the most profound way it's possible to betray something. Because without it's democracy, and it's institutions, what even is the point of America.
You understate the case.Ever major presidential campaign in the US likely has associates or operatives who have some sort of Russian connection. They're one of the largest and most powerful countries in the world with an important (albeit contentious) relationship with the US. Certainly Manafort's Russia-boosting is unusual for a campaign manager (as was nearly everything about the Trump campaign), but merely having Russian contacts - or even being positively inclined toward Russia - does not make you a traitor. This is not the McCarthy era.
Off the top of my head, we know the following suspicious pieces of information:
* Michael Flynn, national security advisor, forced to resign for failure to disclose conversations with Russian officials before taking office. He also failed to disclose money he had taken from Russia and/or Russians for a speaking engagement
* Carter Page, placed under surveillance because of a trip to Russia in July 2016. We, or at least I, don't know much, but apparently it was enough to raise some spook eyebrows because they obtained a warrant to intercept his communications and prompted them to take a serious look at links between the Kremlin and Trump.
* Paul Manafort was basically just a flat out Kremlin lobbyist
* Sessions failed to disclose two meetings with a Russian ambassador.
* Trump Jr met with someone claiming to represent Russia offering dirt on Clinton
* Then we come to the Steele dossier. To answer your earlier question about it, a couple of minor facts in it - conversations which it says took place - have been verified by the US intelligence community. Nothing else has. If you want my opinion, it contains a kernal of truth but the more sensational aspects (pee tapes) of it will turn out not to be true. It was compiled by a credible person, so I think it was put together by the intelligence community to put Trump on notice.
* Speaking of the intelligence community, they're leery of Trump and some reports have been that they've basically been refraining from sharing intelligence with the Whitehouse because they do not believe it was secure. I believe that intelligence agencies do not do stuff like this without a jolly good reason, and they're in a much better position to know what's up than us
* Trump fired the head of the FBI in an attempt to stop the Russia investigation. Occam's razor says: he did it because he didn't like where it was going
* Trump asked Russia to hack into the DNC so he could have a look at Clinton's emails in the middle of a speech or something lol jk just kidding. cough.
* Trump shared classified intelligence with a bunch of Russians in a meeting in the Whitehouse
* Trump has numerous links with Russia going back decades, some of which are of the decidedly shady persuasion
On their own, none of these facts is particularly damning (at least to Trump himself, some might get some of his associates in very hot water) but together? Suss.
One suspicious looking connection with Russia is probably innocent, two is co-incidence... 10 or more is beginning to look a lot like treason.
Well, I recall our SpaceX conversation and I think we have difference standards of what we consider proof and somewhat different epistemological philosophies (???) , which is fine. But induction and inference are damn useful tools in my day to day life, and I see no reason not to use them which I try and figure out whether or not Trump needs to use the following entrance when he visits the Tower of London on his state visit over here:But the key point here is that we can't let our antipathy for the bozo running the US to cause us to eschew appropriate procedures and standards of proof.
(he does)
1) it isn't just one politician, it's like... most of themDo you not realize that in one breath you're saying that the foibles of one politician are not representative of a general failing of a party or its policy prescriptions and then turn around and tar the entire Republican party and their supporters with one giant brush?
2) I said philosophy, not party
3) OK, so when you as an organisation - talking about any organisation here - have 'a few bad apples' and you, that organisation, comprehensively fail to deal with those bad apples in an appropriate fashion and even go further than that by actively covering for those bad apples then you, as an organisation, are just as bad as those bad apples.
They knew what he was, they knew what he'd do and who he'd do it to, and they voted for him anyway. That makes them worse in my book. I have nothing but contempt.Yes, I'm deeply concerned with the direction of the Republican Party as a whole - its rhetoric has descended into identity politics, it has ugly elements, it is often needlessly obstructionist, etc. I won't bother drawing comparisons to the Democratic Party because two wrongs don't make a right here, and it's perfectly reasonable to be repelled by much of what has gone on in the GOP in recent years. But this does not mean that I think that everyone who voted for Trump was a 'deplorable', or that supporters and politicians of the GOP are necessarily racist, misogynist scumbags. They might be, but membership/support for the GOP does not equate with that. To use the latest election as an example, most of the people I know who voted for Trump were dismayed by his rhetoric but voted for him anyway, despite his ugliness as a candidate and person. They had all sorts of reasons - policy preferences, distaste for HRC, etc. This isn't to say that you didn't get white male racists who also voted for Trump because he's an asshole, but it does mean that you can't lump them all into a single category.
Counterpoint: when you refuse to paint your opponents of caricatures of evil and corruption when that is what they are, that's how you end up with even more corrupt politicians who are caricatures of evil. It is how you end up with a culture of impunity. Exploiters and abusers respect no unwritten norms, they will not reciprocate your restraint by refraining from using it as cover to get away with whatever they can get away with. High standards of proof will simply be used as a sort of cheat sheet for how sneaky they need to bother being about their underhand affairs. Unwritten rules about what you 'can't say' about politicians are simply things they know they can get away with being.IMO one of the most pernicious trends in politics today - on both the left and right - is to question the motives of one's political opponents. Democrats must not care about little people, they just are in the pockets of big unions and buy votes with handouts and race/gender based identity politics. Republicans don't care about smaller government or libertarian ideals, they are in the pockets of big banks and corporations. Etc. It's possible to have a disagreement over policy that is either based on different weighting of conflicting priorities or by disagreements about the effects of said policies. It doesn't make everyone who disagrees with you a bad person - they might be wrong, still, but their motives are not suspect. When we instead paint our political opponents as caricatures of evil and corruption, we poison the well of rational public discourse - there's no point in arguing with someone about policy if they don't have the welfare of the country at stake, is there?
I'm not 'assuming' anything, wig, simply observing their behaviour. If we're not assuming things, you can't assume I'm throwing these words around lightly or because the Republicans are my political opposites.I'm not trying to say that there aren't venal politicians more interested in their own power and self-aggrandizement than thoughtful governing. I'm just saying that we can't assume that all of our opponents (or even most) fall into this category while, naturally, assuming that our own side has only the purest of motives. We can't just write off an entire party because you don't like some things about them. This is as true for you as it is for the Lewks of the world. And if being committed to seeing one's political opponents as being at least slightly decent-minded people means that I require solid evidence before bandying about words like treason, then that is what I will do.
You're in deep fucking shit over there. Time to stop pretending everything is normal.
acta non verba.Obviously hyperbole, but you realize that the level of criticism and party rebellion Trump has faced - even measured and lukewarm as it has been - is pretty unprecedented in modern American history. A President in his honeymoon period controlling both houses of Congress should generally get a lot of traction on nominees, policy proposals, and party unity over political attacks and scandals (IIRC the only two recent times POTUS started his term with both houses of Congress were Obama and Clinton, and much before that Eisenhower; before that you'd have to go to FDR). Yet lots of Republicans - both before and after the election - have broken ranks in one way or another. There's an entire chunk of the party and its supporters who define themselves as 'Never Trumpers', for crying out loud! It's not crazy for Congressional Republicans to be a bit mealy-mouthed in their criticism of Trump, given the political realities and their desire to enact policy, but even the amount of rebellion we've seen is pretty substantial. And when you look at people who aren't beholden to the President - e.g. the Republican intelligentsia - nearly no one supports him.
Also, Trump himself is unprecedented, so I'd expect the Republican response to him to be a bit more unprecedented than some mild grumbling, even if it is early term.
Also, I would have expected even Republicans to prioritize, you know, their country over their repulsive agenda or their pissant careers when the stakes are this damn high.
I was wrong.
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