Evil Dictators Happyland wrote:Hiroko Marsden wrote:I created an account recently and have been posting around to make people familiar with me, maybe I should have waited until later to post, wasn't aware that new accounts are suspicious. Sorry
New accounts are suspicious because they're likely to be alt accounts made by someone (usually someone in the thread) to hide their identity.
Why would they hide their identity to make such an innocuous remark?
They're that desperate to be seen as the cool
new thing? Pull the other one.
Ah. Thanks.
Such an enumeration would seem to tally with what I've taken away from Hyperpower's reply.
Diarcesia wrote:Shofercia wrote:Not that it matters. If you're talking just about the charge of obstruction, then a person can view that charge as non-impeachable, and continue on with their daily life, without being a sycophant, at least not in the minds of those whom I'd consider sane. If no president was impeached for it, then setting a new precedent might drive the nation even further apart.
Richard Nixon.
On a semantic point of some considerable importance, let me emphasise that when I say sycophants I (at least**) am not talking about people like you. I am talking about people like Barr who have positional power. Sycophant means sycophant not some shorthand gloss for "people with unreasonable interpretations of the Mueller report brought about by their sycophantic desires to please Trump" (c.f. "a person can view that charge as non-impeachable, and continue on with their daily life, without being a sycophant"). I'm not clear if Rogue Hyperpower used sycophant in the same way (obviously... I mean, my point was literally that I didn't follow their post) but I would hope not and even if it's only for that reason do not believe Hyperpower used sycophant in such a fashion.
This thread also seems best by another semantic game... the conflation of "collusion" with "criminal conspiracy".
Rogue Hyperpower wrote:Collusion. You can have collusion without having a criminal conspiracy, but you can't have a criminal conspiracy without some sort of collusion. Mueller did not find conspiracy. He found plenty of collusion and attempts to collude.
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I would like to offer my own take on the distinction that Hyperpower is drawing here. And therefore I am.
I am reminded of an idiotic series of posts that I couldn't avoid during a brief flirtation with Medium by one Caitlin Johnstone or something like that. I can't remember if it was a point in her posts or the comments attached to them but you'd often here the refrain that "collusion is not a criminal charge". This is a deeply problematic conflation because what Mueller was asked to investigate... broadly speaking... was the presence of criminal activities but the popular discussion was about collusion. That newspapers and so on used the term "collusion" to describe the idea of what Mueller was up to did not and could not* affect the nature of what Mueller was doing. Now that Mueller's finished his investigation, his commentary are not and cannot be seen as comments about collusion because that's
not what he was looking into.
Collusion is a broader, looser and generally much more nebulous concept than, say, criminal conspiracy. This is not a nice proposition to disagree with since it's naturally very fluid or difficult to operationalise. That latter point should immediately serve as a clue that anyone charged with investigating collusion isn't actually investigating collusion but rather something with a similar essential idea. If you look at this from the other angle though... the fluidity of collusion makes it a great reason to object to something since, after all, how can you judge someone fairly by an unfair and unoperationalisable concept? You can't really. But, as I said, this is a clue that no-one tried to.
People talk about semantics like it doesn't matter, but it does. This explains the footnote incidentally. Deconstructionists... I may have forgotten the technical name but if the name Hayden White means anything to you or the Linguistic Turn, this is what I'm talking about... are quite correct to point out that what we call something affects its meaning. On the other hand, they're wrong to believe that this implies a linguistic construction of reality. Ours is a dual world. There is what happened or is... e.g. a Mueller investigation, a river or a shadow on the wall of a cave... but there is also an actual thing that is/was. The folk wisdom is completely correct: a rose by any other name does smell as sweet... the difference is, you just might not be able to buy it when you walk into a shop. If someone says "it's all semantics" that usually means it's time to pay much closer attention.
If you can convince someone that something doesn't matter... then it really does become that... but this is not a process that people have to take lying down. It is something people carefully work to achieve. Or accidentally create by not stopping to think about the underlying reality. The part of the world I'm from has an idea called "the fair go" (NZ actually has/d a TV show called Fair Go). It's unfair to give phenomena meanings that do not reflect their true nature: to call sweetly smelling roses foul flowers isn't fair. And, yeah, you might say calling something unfair sounds childish, but that doesn't mean it is fair, right or even that unfairness is something we shouldn't care about. All it means is that you have thought of a way of dismissing an inconvenient truth. Whether people let you succeed in that dismissal... that largely brings us back to the starting point about semantics.
I'm not sure if conflating "did not establish" with "no evidence" is a semantic no-no or a formal logical fallacy. But semantics is a field of logic and linguistics so maybe it's necessarily both. On the logical end.. an easy analogy: "not bad" and "good" are not the same statement.
*If you're a deconstructionist, know that your premises are correct but your conclusions are wrong.