MSC

You're probably right, this isn't the only comment they have made that has come across as absurd after all. The comment about "All politicians and all scientists" being incompetent was pretty telling. I don't even know why I responded to be honest. How anyone can not see the irony in rejecting the need for equality, when your username literally has the word "princess" in it, is beyond me. I'll hold out some hope that this persons account is for satire and reductio ad absurdum purposes, but I won't hold my breath. Pretending that's why the account exists makes it kind of funny at least! Even though it's more likely the account belongs to Karen.

For one; equating a potato and a dog to the dichotomy of a wealthy or privileged to that of a poor or disenfranchised individual is blurring the lines of degree of morphological differences in physiological diversity within one species. Secondly, whether their are greater or smaller degrees of differences between people is besides the point, who decides what variant is more valuable than another? Thirdly, the argument you are currently employing is not unlike the arguments that were used to justify slavery and eugenics. At one point in time, it would not have been a surprise to hear this variation of your argument: Maybe now you'd like to show us your slideshow on Phrenology? Your entire argument seems to imply that those who happened to be born in privileged groups are somehow superior to those that weren't. Which is a slap in the face to everything we know of human history. Privilege resides where power resides, power resides where people believe it resides, peoples beliefs are fickle. We are never more than one revolution away from power and privilege moving on to a different group. If you want to argue against equality, defined as the fair and just treatment of everyone, then you're going to have to justify why any of these differences between groups of people has weight in determining who should be valued more. Women and children first? Rich people first? Monarchy? Politicians? Best and brightest? Church? God? Are the altruistic or self serving more deserving of the support of society? You'll also have to explain why this ruling class of yours, does not seem to be able to keep a hold of power for prolonged periods of time. If there is a natural order to things, then why do people never seem to fall into and stay in order?

Although it is laid out as legal in the constitution; I agree with the spirit of your questions. I think ultimately, the pardon was probably intended so that if a law saw many incarcerated, and it was later found to be an unjust law, anyone with pardoning power from state governors to presidents can expedite the release of the incarcerated. I could see there being grounds to pardon someone who has technically committed a crime by literal legal interpretation but in spirit really had no other choice. For example if someone went down for committing a crime but was later found out to be under duress/blackmailed by someone believed to be notoriously ruthless, intimidating and manipulative like a cartel. Since I agree with the spirit of what you said; I do think that the scope of the pardon power needs to be reigned in and more clearly defined and I'd feel more comfortable if I knew there were set criteria for pardoners to meet before granting any pardon. As for a president pardoning another president for crimes they committed while in office, I see it as a bit of a conflict of interests for any president to give pardons to their predecessors. No President should be entitled to set their own precedents when it comes to interfering with justice finding their predecessors. As it could set the standard for how their own crimes are to be perceived should they commit any themselves.

Then these two statements are at odds with one another. On the one side, you have the imputation of guilt and carries a confession, prior conviction. The false imprisonment or miscarriage of justice pardon would come after a guilty conviction where the accused has pleaded innocent or changed their plea to innocent during incarceration. In the first pardon instance; there is an assumption that a guilty verdict will be reached in the future hence the need to pardon ahead of time instead of letting the judicial system determine whether or not you are innocent first. In the second; the pardon is being given after the guilty verdict has already been handed out, in the miscarriage of justice case. So although there is only one description of the pardoning power, there are variety of different precedents that can be set by it. I think what the SCOTUS decision in Swansonts comment should be taken to mean; if someone is innocent of a crime, instead of a pardon being given, or in that case accepted, they should be going ahead with their trial. If a Jury finds guilty, if the President deems it too controversial they may pardon on the basis of a miscarriage of justice. If however the pardon is being granted in place of a charge or a conviction, it could be viewed as either a complete lack of faith in the judicial system to exonerate you (which it should be pointed out that if the President granted a pardon on this basis, the president themselves is casting doubt on that system), or an admission of guilt. Making it a Clemency based pardon, which cannot be granted for impeachable offenses. While in the presidential office, committing almost any crime is impeachable. Even shielding yourself or obstructing the investigations of such a thing is considered impeachable, that was ultimately led to Nixon resigning, it wasn't just that he'd been caught, but that he also made attempts to obstruct the investigation afterward. The crime and the obstruction could have both been separate grounds for impeachment. Fords pardon, amounted to an effectively endorsed obstruction of justice to determine Nixons guilt or innocence. No jury got a say in it. It was a subversion of the judicial branches right to have any say whatsoever. The verdict was being pre-emptively determined. After all, why would an innocent person feel the need to avoid court by asking for clemency in the first place? Unless they themselves are assuming a guilty verdict will be reached? Why would they think that?

But he wasn't a rebel leader, he was the leader of the United states. It does not alter the fact that at the time, Nixons rebellion could only be handled via impeachment. You cannot impeach a rebel leader, you can absolutely impeach the recognised leader of the executive branch, which is what Nixon was. Furthermore, Nixon was the head of one of the branches of the constitutional government and his crimes involved targeting the out of power opposition. Did Murphy ever try to appeal the district court decision with the circuit courts or SCOTUS? This district judges dismissal of the case seems to rest on the basis that Nixon was to be viewed as a Rebel leader, yet when he committed the crimes he was the president of the united states. Not a rebel. It does not change the fact that at one time, Nixons offenses were deemed as impeachable. Therefore Ford should not have been able to pardon those crimes. As Swansont says, a pardon is tantamount to a confession in order to accept said pardon. By accepting it, Nixon was confessing to impeachable offenses at the time the offending acts were committed. Which would put it outside the broad definition of the presidential pardoning power. I suppose, the only reason I brought it up; I can't help but wonder about whether or not someone like Trump would have been deterred from seeking office if the whole book had been thrown at Nixon? I can't help but wonder if by not throwing the book at Trump, the US would just be enabling someone like Trump to try again, since even an attempt to overthrow the United states can ultimately be forgiven, all because no one wants to send a "rich" man to jail. Another question that comes to mind, if accepting a pardon is tantamount to confessing guilt, can a pardoned individual run for President? Edit: In case it has not been made clear, I ask out of deep concern that Trump or another Populist despot will have us all back to these worries in the future. I detest Trump and never want to see his like again while me and mine are still alive.

What about new evidence? What about preemptively pardoning before a charge has even been brought? Which would be the case if the Trump resigning to Pence scenario were to come to pence. It seems to me that without Trump essentially being willing to say he did infact commit federal crimes, then the pardon given by Pence would essentially just be a catchall from the period where Trump's presidency began and ended, on the assumption of a guilty verdict in a trial that has not taken place yet nor any formal process to federally charge Trump begun. Thank you, the rest of your answer clears up some of the things I was wondering about. I have another question about something related; Do you think Fords pardon of Nixon was unconstitutional? As far as I can make out from the Constitution, the pardon power does not give the president the authority to pardon for crimes that would have led to impeachment. The reason Nixon resigned was that he knew he would have been impeached otherwise. It seems to me like an abuse of a technical loophole that led to Nixon escaping true justice via a President who did not really have the authority to pardon for Nixon's impeachable offenses. However I'm not a lawyer so my interpretation should be taken with a grain of salt. It's just how it appears to me at this time.

I know right? It's adorable. I mean, they aren't even wrong. A watch is indeed a clock bracelet! Your three year old obviously knows what a talent show is, because they are a walking one!

No, but Russia has room for everyone. Hell, it's why they are so protective of themselves and put so much effort into diversion and division of their perceived enemies. The paranoia that comes with having a massive border is staggering. The thing that interests me about this scenario; if Pence pardoned Trump, does Biden have to honour that pardon? INow said no, but didn't explain why or point to evidence. So it's still up in the air as far as I am concerned.

Having read the constitution and finding it kind of open to interpretation how the pardon power works, I'm no closer to finding a good answer for this. Can a President pardon themselves? Is one question. Can the next President revoke that pardon? Is another. Obviously we are only talking about pardons of federal charges. Can Trump even pardon himself for a federal charge that has not been formally filed yet? If so, where does it end? Why shouldn't every president end their time with giving themselves a pardon for any federal crimes they may have committed while in office? It all seems so confusing to me. If it is the presidential office giving out the pardons, what is to stop Biden from revoking any pardon given by Trump to himself or others?

Not at all. Your tangents are always welcome with me. In fairness I probably should have made it clearer I was using a broad but context specific definition, in order to be charitable to the kids. Yeah, Mr Wednesday visits our house too. He likes all kinds of awesome foods. He never stays for very long though. Mr Wednesday actually likes my butternut squash chilli, my kid... Not so much 😄 What do you think are some good follow up questions with my sons current answer to the meaning of life? I was going to start by pointing out that some people can live with doing some things and that some people can't bring themselves to do those things for fear that they may in fact be bad things to do. Even the neediest can over-empathise to the point of declining charity, for fear there may be someone needier out there they may be depriving, which would leave them feeling guilty. it's all very well to say do anything and everything you can live with, there is a certain maximalism implied in that way. But what can we live with and what can't we? How are we defining living exactly? Is living just, breathing, excreting waste and taking in nutrients? Or is that just surviving? Then it would be as simple as not doing anything that could potentially kill you. Which covers quite a lot of ground and left open to interpretation, could lead to an extreme of avoidance of every day dangers like crossing the street or just going outside. Now, obviously I cannot go into this much detail with my kid yet, but it would be nice to have discussions in this thread about some of the things kids have said that could lead to interesting discussions. That and I could use other perspectives on how to get my kid to think more and expand on his thoughts. Side Bar: Thank you so much for your contribution to this thread and the work you did as a care manager. I have a lot of respect for people who work in care. jeez! Poor Robert, I really hope he isn't giving that advice based on first hand experience.. Ouch! Frank Gallagher on Shameless did that too, peed on a generator though! Eileen, you had me at baptize.. Thanks for sharing Michel! +1

Humour can be wisdom! Sounds to me like your son has something important to say about the meaning of language. I believe it was Wittgenstein who said that a serious and influential piece of philosophy, could be written consisting entirely of jokes. Someone should go to Wikipedia and alter the etymology of a merry-go-round. Amerigo round the world!

On that, we can both agree. I'm Scottish, swearing is an art form to us. Young people have morals? Since when?! Do you expect us to believe you weren't an ass as a teenager? In all serious though, teens swear more than I do. The best insults in Scottish though don't really have a lot of swearing. You can cripple a guy just by telling him his da sells Avon. True story

A pragmatist ought not to disregard optimism, planning for their best while preparing for the worst. That's all I'll say on that here though. Might have to start a topic about Pragmatism and the neo-pragmatic schools of ethics and epistemology. I think you'll enjoy it and I imagine you are already somewhat familiar with the subject anyway. Side bar: I'm glad we seem to be getting along now. Sorry for telling you to fuck off before.

Is that a foregone conclusion itself? Georgia by election is still to happen. I'll need to check the polls of those races myself but as I understand it, Reps have 48, Indies have 2, Dems have 46. If Dems were able to take both seats in Georgia, then the Independents and the vice presidents tie breaker vote would be the pivotal votes. Then you have the 2022 senate elections where, depending on a number of things, but also association with Trump, we may see a dem majority then, or even a Republican one again if Biden's first two years are perceived and received badly by the public. An extremely funny image there! Let me add to it by saying, I'm not the guy oblivious to playing a game with a chaos monger. I'm the guy waiting to Han Solo a bitch with a trigger trained on them, ready to fire the moment I smell burning or see a cheese puff. Even chaos has a pattern and trends. Ultimately, their are rules, even to chaos. Just because I think like a fox, doesn't mean I don't know how to act like a lion or think like one when I need to, Lions fuck up hyenas and jackals. A real worry for me too. What can I do but have a measure of healthy optimism that democracy can defend itself? I can be ready to act pragmatically should a more pessimistic outcome come to fruition. As it is, I cannot generalise that all Republicans or even Trump supporters are chaos-mongers as you seem to imply sometimes, don't know if that's intentional or not. I assume not. Can this be avoided?

"Nooooo, my inventions are meant to help mankind, not to destroy!" You'll get a laugh out of this, Major Agnew

We all hear a lot of doom and gloom when it comes to man-made climate change. What I hear less of, is what science, technologies and policies are being developed that might have the potential to halt it. So here is a scenario; imagine we have access to the military budget of every nation and we could use it to fight climate change. What should we do with that money in this scenario? Assuming all nations agreed to cessation of all military conflicts until the climate is no longer under threat from us, for the time being. Obviously this is a highly unlikely scenario, but for the sake of argument I want to know what could be done with a massive re-prioritisation of resources in favour of fighting climate change. This is not my AOE outside of the ethics of it, so forgive my ignorance. Appreciate anyone who takes the time to respond.

Depends on how you define wise. Having the wisdom to turn an awkward situation into a humorous one is sometimes no small feat sometimes, wisdom can come from what we say after we've done something kind of strange. Your cousin sounds like he thinks fast on his feet and on his ass 😄 Kid's are awesome Pragmatically explaining consequentialism. Invade my personal space with your hands, I'll invade yours with my urine. Wisdom haha

God dammit! Can we bring them back for five minutes so I can rail them for wasting my time being nice to them? Haha

No? I'm not sure I'm catching your drift but the point of this thread isn't to debate whether or not children have the capacity to be wise, the point is to share your own experience of when a child has said something interesting at the very least, even if it doesn't fit your definition of what it means to say something wise. I want to hear from other people about what they have heard and was sharing my own story to get the ball rolling. It wasn't really an open invitation to have a proxy debate with a 6 year old. Be careful though because you're currently in the territory of ageism and I don't appreciate anyone trying to invalidate my kids development. If you are comparing him to you, that's quite frankly not fair on him at all. He's not even 7 yet. So in line with the spirit of this thread, has a child ever said anything to you that has made you stop and think? Something you found interesting?

Which we acquire more of everyday of our lives, from the first day onwards. Children too, it's just about figuring out where the milestones are and considering what they say charitably. Admittedly, if an adult had responded to that question in the same way I'd not have been impressed but as a parent you've got to be able to see the forest for the trees and figure out what is wise or intelligent depending on stages of development. An example might be; it's not impressive for a 20 year old to tell me that the square root of 81 is 9, but it's very impressive if it comes from a three year old. Seriously, why do you carry the Worcestershire sauce around?

+1, Love Voltaire

I was at the park with my son today. Last night he'd been asking his mother some really big questions. Why are we here? What does it all mean? Why do we have to have blood when it's so messy? Things like that. He is almost 7 now, if you're familiar with CDP, you'll be aware that around his age, we start to form the cognitive faculties we need to be able to utilise logic. So I asked him today "What do you think the meaning of life is? Answer honestly, I won't judge what you say." His response was this; "To do everything that you can live with." So what little wisdom gems have you heard from a child that were pretty interesting to hear, despite their age? I mean to ask him more questions about his answer later, for now I think it is a good start to let him have a simple answer to a complex question, for a little while.

Good point. That being said; if there had been evidence of voter fraud specifically (not foreign interference as that takes place on social media) would Hilary Clinton have went about the legal routes in the same manner as Trump? Probably not, but then since voter fraud was a non-issue in both cases, it doesn't really matter what a reasonable person would do if they justifiably suspected fraud. As it is, the reaction of MAGA toward the results have been extremely corrosive. Raffensperger, the election chief in Georgia was a Trump support and still purports to be, yet he is now a pariah in the Republican party and the president called him a RINO for certifying the result for Biden. His wife has even received death threats via text. I actually feel really bad for him, he's probably one of the few who put duty over personal politics to call the state for Biden. I can understand a Republican being suspicious of votes in Democrat run states, it makes no sense to be suspicious of Georgia though. A good comparison might be the claim that the moon landing was faked. Raffensperger is doing what Russia did in that Russia, despite having wanted to win the space race themselves, have never once claimed that the Americans faked it. The result in Georgia by comparison, ought to have been accepted by Republicans as it was one of the few races where the result could not have been more free of political bias, when even the state appointed election chief there wanted Trump to win and still called the state for Biden. If that isn't a sign of a secure election, I don't know what is. One thing I have been thinking about recently, why I don't think Trump will be able to overturn the result, even by force. Is that quite frankly the bulk of his supporters lives are just too comfortable, to actually risk it all in the violent takeover that it seems Trump is trying to seek, through political theater. If his base were actually part of an objectively deeply and historically disenfranchised, excluded and abused group, that had little to no prospects in life due to that exclusion, then maybe we'd be seeing more desperate acts en masse to overturn the results of the election. As it is, what seems to be keeping this at bay, is in fact the privilege most of the MAGA crowd claim they don't have. This puzzles me too. He won by such narrow margins in 2016 and has spent the last four years not only demonising democrats, but any type of Republican who ever so slightly disagrees with him. Someone with as tiny a lead as they had, could simply not afford to alienate any of their voters. Especially when it's only a two party system in practice but not theory. I know of a few that voted libertarian because they could not stomach voting for Trump or Biden. The libertarian party was always more likely to win votes from the Republican party than it was the democrats. It will be interesting to see how Biden plays the next four years. If he is smart, since he won electoral votes by narrow margins, if he wants a second term he will have to follow through on his Unity talk with efficacy.

Most groups enjoy testing the newbie. Not putting them down. I was the newbie here a few months ago and had similar feelings as yourself then. I took a hiatus and asked the moderators to suspend my account for a month. Which meant I could just be a fly on the wall and observe how people interact and engage on here. For example; me and INow butted heads and I even told them to "fuck off" at one point. Since being able to observe their responses without any bias of them being directed at me, while I can recognise that me and INow both have conversation styles that can be construed as abrasive to some, I've come to be appreciative of their responses in my own AOE and recognise we aren't nearly as different as I first thought we were. Admittedly aided by another member here who did a good job of helping me reach a different and fairer perspective of the other users here, including INow. What do you mean by not shoving it in your face? Shoving what in your face exactly? Disagreement with you? I really would not take anything too personally or seriously here, including yourself. I say that as someone who already made the mistake of doing just that. It only leads to stress and it isn't even constructive stress at that. Keep in mind that what good and bad manners are, tend to vary between cultures. This forum has it's own culture. If someone on here is genuinely being unhelpfully rude to you, the mods will deal with it. If they don't, it's probably because it wasn't rude by this forums standards. I think what INow was getting at, is that although it's a nice thing to try and say, it's off topic for this thread somewhat. It also comes across as virtue signalling since you are aware that you are preaching to the choir. I wouldn't feel upset about INows criticism as you yourself said you should probably delete it, so you yourself weren't even sure if it was appropriate to this thread. You are absolutely allowed to have an opinion and I commend you for being brave enough to voice it. Just save it for the appropriate threads is all. If you want to talk about how this relates to Trump stealing the election, be our guest.