We all know the OP is after a way to call Hillary Clinton a felon. Hillary is alot of things, not limited to but including making bad decisions and mistakes. But she most decidedly is not a felon. She is not charged or convicted of any crime. Conservatives can scream ‘lock her up’ til doomsday, doesn’t make her a felon. Sorry, but this is a non-issue.
Much depends on the state and magnitude of Gellin’.
I tend to see felon more as a legal term; a felon is a person who has been convicted of a felony. The more generic term for a person who has committed a felony is a criminal. Or you could identify them by the specific crime/felony they committed; a murderer, a rapist, a thief, an arsonist, etc.
And right there the author of that word problem has set you up for logical failure.
“You murder someone.” Right there it assumes the conclusion. The rest is not a logical syllogism, merely error strung after error. All flowing invalidly from assuming the conclusion.
How about this alternative formulation:
[quote]
[ol][li]You kill someone. That makes you a killer, someone who has committed a killing. “Kill / killing / killer” is a statement about facts.[/li][li]You are tried for the crime of (some specific flavor of) murder. The specific crime is defined in the relevant law as a felony. “Murder / murdering / murderer” is a statement about law. As is “felon / felony / felonious”.[list=a][]You are found guilty. You are now a murderer in addition to a killer. You are also now a felon since you have been adjudged to have committed a felony.[]You are found not guilty. You are not a murderer despite being a killer. At least flowing from this case you never have been and never will be a murderer. Therefore you are not, at least due to this case, a felon.[/ol][/list][/li][/quote]
It’s amazing how easy this stuff is when you (any you) don’t fall into the deliberately baited trap in the first three words.
Dang, that was nice LSLGuy!
You are incorrect. But thanks for playing; try harder next time.
Yes, you are, by definition.
Oh, I am so glad that an expert on me showed up to set things straight. But would you mind looking through this thread and pointing out where I have mentioned Hillary Clinton?
Oh, you can’t? Then your post is just a meaningless cheap shot. Try responding to the OP instead of making incorrect assumptions about me or my intentions.
We all know your intent. Prove it’s not.
Past record
In other words; “I’m not touching you!” “I’m not touching you!” “I’m not touching you!”
Then I will just say that I personally would not call Donald Trump a felon; both because his guilt has not been proven and because I can’t imagine the context in which I would call him a felon without it being an attempt to discredit him as an ad hominem.
Chalk that up on whatever side of however you are measuring your responses.
There is no “controversy.” It’s all in your head. You’re the one who wants to call an unconvicted person a felon, and in a legal sense, you’re wrong. I can’t imagine why you would even raise this question–again–on this board. You had to know that most of us have access to dictionaries and can think. The simple definition of the word, legally, is someone who has been convicted of the type of crime considered, legally, as a felony.
Trump is probably a felon, but I won’t certainly call him a felon unless/until he’s convicted. Same with Flynn and other likely Trumpian felons.
Context is everything, people. It should come as no surprise to adult speakers of English that the same word can have more than one meaning, and that the precise meaning invoked by any particular use of the word is going to be heavily influenced by the context.
In a legal context, you’re innocent until proven guilty, and therefore the legal status of “felon” only attaches to people who have been convicted of a felony.
However, there’s no reason why in a non-legal context you shouldn’t use the word of anyone who is guilty of a felony, whether or not they have been convicted, charged or even detected or suspected. Felon actually entered the English language as an adjective meaning cruel, fierce, terrible, wicked; it could be applied to people or to their actions. (It;s related to “fell” and “foul”.) In due course it became a noun, meaning a vile or wicked person; a villain. Only later did acquire a legal jargon sense, a person who has committed an offence of the class called “felonies”.
Felony similarly started out with a broad general meaning - anger, wrath, deceit, treachery. Only later did it acquire a technical legal sense (“An act on the part of a vassal against his feudal lord which results in the forfeiture of his estate”). Only later still did it come to refer to a particular class of crimes which, originally, was those crimes for which the penalty included forfeiture of land and goods. And, by now, there are many parts of the English-speaking world where, at law, the felony/misdemeanour distinction has long been abolished.
So you can use this word as loosely as you like; you’re not wrong (linguistically speaking). But if you live in a jurisdiction in which there are still legal consequences attached to the status of “felon”, be conscious that those consequences won’t affect a felon until he or she has been convicted.
I realize words can have multiple meanings. But the point of language is communication. So we should try to use words in a generally agreed upon context, so that the message will be communicated.
If I made the statement that “Charles Manson was not a felon” most people wouldn’t understand that I’m communicating that Manson was not a vassal who forfeited his feudal estate. If that was my message, I should have chosen to express it with different words.
Sure. I’d only use the word to invoke the feudal sense in a context in which that was going to be apparent.
But “[prominent public figure] is a felon”, in a context which the point is that PPF is subject to the disabilities attached to felon status (e.g. can’t vote, is disbarred from office, whatever) is only true if PPF has been convicted of a felony. Whereas “[prominent public figure] is a felon” where the point is that PPF is of low moral character and has done felonious things, does not imply that PPF has necessarily been convicted of doing felonious things; just that he or she has done them.
Why do you even to bother to post this here when you won’t accept anything contrary to your own opinion?
Obviously the critical point, as Little Nemo almost said, is that words have both narrow and broad meanings.
A common and deeply dishonest rhetorical device is to thread the needle on narrow meanings and then claim “Hey presto this works for all the larger meanings too!”. This can be used in both the selling and in the denying mode. e.g. “Hillary is a felon (since we all wink wink fervently believe she did X, Y, and Z).”, and “Bill: I did not have sex with that woman (for certain restricted definitions of ‘sex’.)”
At the end of the day, so much of speech aimed at an audience has devolved into mere trickery. Word chosen deliberately to deceive with the barest of fig-leaves in a faint nod towards modesty (AKA plausible deniability). It’s almost like the legitimately much-derided deconstructionists have won and the only thing a sentence reliably “means” is “I’m projecting my agenda at you and here it is: <blah blah blah>”. The only true message is the agenda and any resemblance of the word stream to actual parsable English or true fact is effectively accidental.
We can take our discourse back. But to do so we must be vigorous, clear, public, and intellectually honest about which definition is used at every stage. I was all that in my last post, as have been several other participants. Others not so much.
I take from that difference a message. Which ISTM is the real message of the thread.
It is the self deception on self estimation of the cleverness.
and of course well protected self deception by the extensive use of blocking
it makes his use of “precious snowflake” very funny for its not intended ironical content.
I think this is a good point, but I would spin it in even a slightly different way.
One can easily say, “Donald Trump is a felon! Bill Clinton is a felon! Roy Moore is a felon! Hillary Clinton is a felon!” and then argue about how many angels dance on the head of a pin as to whether the word “felon” precisely applies in each situation.
Or, one can easily say, “Donald Trump is a tax cheat! Bill Clinton is a rapist! Roy Moore is a child molester! Hillary Clinton is a… a… an email mishandler!” Whether each charge is true, at least that’s a substantive debate.