As I have noted before, F-P is in active pursuit of finding as many reasons to doubt things as he can possibly find. In his mind, he’s pointing out logical gaps that others have made and is just “making sure that everyone is considering all sides”, with the belief that people are not aware when they’re making overly broad generalizations or just stating a hope, not a belief.
But, F-P, while some people are overly believing of some of the more Liberal content, I will say that most of the posters here are aware of it when they’re painting with a broad brush and when they’re being too hopeful. They do not need you to point it out for them. And, as I have said before, I do not believe that you are doing this for “their sake”.
All evidence for a thing can be insufficient evidence. It’s the aggregate of all data that makes a case. Smoking guns, while nice, are not the end-all and be-all of proof. Simply finding reason to doubt everything does not change anything. Denialism may be fun, but it’s also a worse logical gap than those that you accuse everyone else of, all of the time.
I don’t know why I have to keep repeating myself on this. I’ve been as explicit as possible that I’m not doing this for anyone else’s sake. This is all for my own entertainment, and nothing else.
I mean, naturally I think people should profit from my posts, but that’s incidental at most. I’m well aware of the nature of this board, and I don’t think many people are persuadable on matters of this sort. So I would never make that a goal of mine - that would only lead to frustration.
I agree with the general point here.
The problem is that if you take a lot of things which are ultimately little or nothing and combine them all, you don’t get much more than nothing. There are people who write at great lengths arguing cases which are built on numerous facts each of which is in itself little to nothing, and all of which are in total also nothing.
And the problem is that it feeds on itself in a circular and self-fulfilling manner. If you have an overall view of events then this overall view influences your interpretation of every piece of evidence, and when you look at the picture you naturally see a much more compelling case than actually exists if you stripped out that view. And this is something which might well be invisible to you yourself.
For example, in this case, if you have an overly sinister view of the Trump people and begin with the assumption that they’re probably guilty of every conceivable crime (an attitude shared by many people here, as it just happens) then this will influence your interpretation of every individual incident or piece of evidence, and you’re likely to interpret each one in a manner which is consistent with your overall view. Then, when you think you’re looking at the big picture comprised of “the aggregate of all data” you’re really not. You’re really looking at the aggregate of all data as interpreted by your view of the big picture.
So I get where many of you are coming from. You’re seeing things like the Trump Tower meeting and thinking “hey, who are you trying to fool? Yeah, if you really want to twist things you can say there’s no real proof from this, but do you really think these Trump people weren’t conspiring some sort of collusion, probably email related? I mean, we’re talking about the Trump people who have done all these other suspicious things and who have all these other Russia connections etc. etc.” But this ignores the fact that most or all one of those other things are similarly being made more suspicious based on the same type of reasoning.
Most conspiracy theories are based on this same type of reasoning. 100 inconclusive pieces of evidence but once you have so many of them you think “hey, what’s the likelihood that every one of these are all wrong, and you’re naïve if you try to explain them all away …” But in life, the supply of inconclusive pieces of evidence is virtually infinite, and this reasoning is not valid.
Either you’re hoping to learn someone or dissuade yourself of something by interacting with others. If your sole purpose in your interactions are for “entertainment” then there is a specific term for that.
Are you sure that you want to stay with this argument?
I don’t think what I do counts as trolling by the definition applied on this board. But that’s a call for the mods.
Either way, it is what it is. I’ve been pretty clear in the past and I repeat again here that this is about entertainment, for me, and is not about “learn someone or dissuade yourself of something by interacting with others”. (Can’t say that (what I assume this garbled phrase means) never happens but that’s not what it’s about, for me.)
In my book intent (get dirt on Hillary from the Russians) and action (attend the meeting) is sufficient, just as if Junior was planning and acting to meet a ten dollar hooker, regardless of whether the end encounter was with a prostitute or a cop.
Exactly. Isn’t just attempting to get in contact with a hit man to contract a killing still a crime even if the client and the hit man don’t come to an agreement?
Someone on one of the cable shows made the point, recently, that if the news of the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting (with the Russian government-connected lawyer and Don, Jr. and Manafort and Jared Kushner) had just broken now, it would be a major blow to Trump—one that even congressional Republicans might have to do something about. Talk of impeachment would be almost impossible to dismiss.
Instead, people have gotten numb to the fact that the meeting itself (and the surrounding emails and phone calls to blocked numbers, etc) is pretty close to being a smoking gun, conspiring-with-Russia-wise.
I also find myself wondering what sort of information Team Trump thought they could get from Russia. I mean, is there anyone whose life has been more examined and picked over than Hillary Clinton? Is there a day of her life in the last 25 years that isn’t accounted for? Republicans had Hillary Clinton in their sights to some degree since her health care proposal in 1993, or at the very least since her Senate campaign in 2000. If the Russians had anything on her that wasn’t already publicly known, seems to me it had to come from some clandestine source. Would the Trumpists have accepted and used information that came from a foreign government spying on a U.S. citizen?
F-P is sitting in a house choking with smoke and still denying that there is in any way fire. Until the hair on his ass is burning off, and I think he’ll just ascribe it to friction even then.
And I’m sure his so-called objectivity would drop away in a nanosecond if it were President Hillary who were accused of a tiny fraction of this shit.
We’ve already established that the “smoke” to which you’re alluding is actually vapor and so any and all analysis of any of said “smoke” is there for null and void. The obvious fact that you just can’t comprehend this, despite the facts being clearly laid in front of you tells me that that we can no longer take your opinion seriously. Good day, sir. I said, Good day.
“A trio of key Democratic senators is calling on agency watchdogs to investigate why the Trump administration has not fully implemented mandated sanctions on Russia.The lawmakers sent a letter Friday asking the inspectors general of the State Department, Treasury Department and the intelligence community to examine the administration’s failure to impose the financial penalties on Russia.”
It’ll probably end up being ignored by Republicans like any other issue bearing the word Russia.
*[INDENT]DJT tweet:
Reports are there was indeed at least one FBI representative implanted, for political purposes, into my campaign for president. It took place very early on, and long before the phony Russia Hoax became a “hot” Fake News story. If true - all time biggest political scandal!
Put aside for a moment whether it is actually scandalous for the FBI to use an informant to uncover evidence of criminal conduct. The argument is that the clear purpose of this maneuver was to influence the 2016 election. … Here’s where the sinister plot was going:
Sometime in April, the law firm Perkins Coie (on behalf the Clinton campaign) hired Fusion GPS, and Fusion turned its attention to Trump-Russia connections. The job of any good swamp operator is to gin up a fatal October surprise for the opposition candidate. And what could be more devastating than to paint a picture of Trump-Russia collusion that would provoke a full-fledged FBI investigation?
This sounds like a genius plan: Plant a spy to launch an investigation, and then spring the “fatal October surprise.”*[/INDENT]
In some ways, it’s like watching an 18th-century “natural philosopher” spend untold amounts of effort defending phlogiston theory. Everyone has, over time, realized the theory is full of shit, but this one guy who has a lifetime dedicated to it… well, he has a lifetime dedicated to phlogiston! Whaddya expect him to do? Say he dedicated his life to a lie, one looking increasingly silly as the evidence pours in? Admit he was wrong and the overwhelming evidence correct?
Of course not - Phlogiston-Phipps here has gotta double-down on that shit.
And if Felix Sater was the informant, as has been speculated, then wouldn’t he have been inserted into Trump’s circle in 2005 or so, in the Trump Soho days? Which is “very early on” indeed. Because the feds have known that Trump is dirty for a very long time. Which is why they all freaked out when he decided to run for President and started surrounding himself with other criminals, like something out of a Batman reunion episode. I don’t blame them for using the tactics that they use when investigating organized crime. Because, technically, that’s what we have here although “organized” may be a bit of a misnomer
.
One of the downsides of believing in conspiracy theories is that these people - like Trump - genuinely believe that people get away with outrageous stuff, like staging mass shootings and faking 9/11 with holograms. Which leads them to believe that they can get away with outrageous stupid stuff. Which is how we got to stupid Watergate. Now it doesn’t seem that anyone but Trump is putting much effort into pretending to be innocent anymore —mostly they’re just screaming about how the cops that caught them were out to get them ( Duh, law enforcement IS usually “out to get” criminals, that’s what they do) and not playing fair.
