And for whatever it’s worth, threads like this factor into my decisions about whom to engage with. I’ve argued against Bricker’s positions vehemently in the past, and I’m sure I’ll do so in the future–but I always feel like I’m debating against someone who’s operating from legitimate principles and that I don’t really need to waste time figuring out whether my debating opponent is debating in good faith.
Again: I disagree with many of those principles. (For example, I think Bricker puts far too great an emphasis on process over product, to the extent that he often treats outcome-based arguments as contemptible). But compare that to other folks I oppose, who operate more from underlying prejudices or partisan teamsmanship or other ugly motives, and I’d much rather debate someone who will attack their own “team” or support the other “team” when their principles demand it.
It’s not worth worrying about what everyone thinks of you. There are liberals and conservatives on this board that I think are morons, and I don’t give a crap what they think about me. But it’s worth worrying about what respectable opponents think of you.
But as a practical matter, most people - perhaps that should read “all people” - have a very tough time assessing whether their opponents are “respectable” in isolation from what these opponents think of them. So this approach just leads to a lot of self-validation without the practitioners realizing it.
For me, that only works on the negative side, never the positive. I don’t weigh a good thread versus a bad thread. Anyone can have a good thread, and it can be from just as partisan or self-interested a motive as a bad thread.
And if that comes up clean, they’ll demand the “real” or “secret” server, and we’ll end up with Whitewater all over again, where they’ll spend thirty million dollars to investigate one thing, and end up finding nothing at all relevant.
Fishing expeditions are forbidden by the Constitution. There is no probable cause, and no particular description of the place to be searched. You just want everything Clinton ever wrote, without limit, hoping that something bad will be found there.
WTF? It has indeed gone way, way off topic, and I have no more desire to continue talking with you about this issue here than I did there, six months ago. Unless you’re gonna break out the boombox and start serenading me beneath my bedroom window, leave it alone already.
Even if that’s true…so what? By itself, it does not provide grounds for search and seizure.
Someone in your state received blackmail letters recently: we’d like to look at your server, just to be sure. You might have written them. We don’t have any evidence, but if we had your server, we’d know. After all, the whole point of you having your own server is so there will never be evidence…
People are innocent until proven guilty, and immune from search without probable cause. You appear to want to reverse those doctrines.
Uh huh. Is that the Nixon in you talking or do you really think it’s OK for the Secretary of State to hide emails? Maybe she didn’t understand her title because it had the word “Secret” in it.
Why are you defending what is obviously a negative component in how she conducts herself?
Not to mentino innocent until proven guilty applies only to criminal justice. In politics, public servants must prove to the citizenry that they are being honest. In politics, people hide things because there is something to hide.
You can’t seize someone’s papers, files, or effects against their will without a warrant, whether you’re conducting a criminal investigation or just an ethics investigation.
Yes but you are defending it. There are a number of FOIA lawsuits over this so the purely legal side will be decided in court. Whether something comes of it or not does not change her original actions.
Oh, that’s what you meant. A warrant requires only probable cause though. Clinton conducted all State Department business from her personal account. Therefore, there is a case to be made that her personal account is not private. Not that it matters, since she deleted everything in a way that makes it non recoverable.
So really it’s just up to the public to decide if she’s innocent or guilty. Court of public opinion.
That’s the fallacy of argument from ignorance. People hide things because there is something to hide? This thread contains a plethora of counter-examples. People sometimes hide things for other reasons.
In particular, people who have already been subjected to fishing expeditions in which the goal was self-evidently “find something, anything” may well believe their best course is to hide everything in order to avoid that sort of unjustified treatment.
OTOH people who have been subpoena’ed before, claimed they didn’t know about documents under subpoena for years, then the documents in question show up on her library table with her fingerprints on them, are less likely to receive the benefit of the doubt.
What, specifically, do you believe causes her to lose the benefit of the doubt in that story? How, specifically, do her fingerprints serve to discredit any single thing she said or did?
