According to a special counsel investigation Joe Biden willfully and knowingly stole classified documents, even some Ukraine documents that he lifted during the time his corrupt son was working for Burisma. But according to the investigator he’s too old and feeble to be prosecuted. Luckily a recent court decision against the immunity of former presidents, and the conduct of his own DOJ, leaves Biden’s prosecution open for when he finally leaves office.

But the worst indictment was of his mind. The most popular president in the history of US politics turns out to be also the most feeble and absent-minded.

It all raises the both hilarious and tragic question of who is in charge of the most powerful country in history?

I’ll put forward one theory. A recent scoop suggests the country is actually run by Biden aides and Jill Biden.

Scoop — Jill Biden after 2022 news conference: "Why didn't anyone stop that?"

Zoom in: It was Jan 19, 2022. President Biden and top aides were gathered in the Treaty Room, the president's study in the executive residence, after a press conference that ran nearly two hours. He made several factual errors.

Suddenly, the group saw Jill Biden in the doorway, Rogers writes in "American Woman":

"She had watched the news conference, and the look on her face told everyone in the room — from the president on down — that they had some explaining to do."

"Why didn't anyone stop that?" she demanded.
Behind the scenes: "This dressing down ... illustrated the degree to which she is her husband's fiercest protector," Rogers continues:

"Everyone stayed silent, looking at one another, and then at her, and back to one another. That included the most powerful man in the world. Her husband essentially played along, not offering an answer, even though aides had slipped him a card suggesting he end the press conference."

"Where were you guys?" the first lady asked the aides. "Where was the person who was going to end the press conference?"

https://www.axios.com/2024/02/09/forthcoming-book-jill-biden-why-didnt-anyone-stop-that

Yikes. Biden stole classified documents and gets off. Never did he have the unilateral declassification powers a president had. A former president who had those powers is subject to prosecution by Biden’s own DOJ. Banana republic.

The point I made is that you are asking for me to 'do my worse' as a matter of debate where the wrong argument is made to seem to be the true one. Plato and Aristotle both relegate that practice to be sophistical diversions.

You brought up the possible harm words can do. Against what measure of benefit is your claim made against? Your response dodges that question.

If you can injure someone with words, why wouldn't you demonstrate it? Because it's tantamount to sorcery.

You could not mean something by using them if the words did not have meaning. Your meaning something by using them means that they are not just random, meaningless sounds and marks.

They are not random words. I create them and organize them at my own discretion. But the sounds and marks themselves are without meaning. One simply cannot look at a symbol and find meaning in it, and there lost languages to prove this. The reason someone cannot decipher the meaning of a lost language is precisely because there is no meaning in the words.

Words are not meaningless symbols that become meaningful when you provide meaning to them. And words are not meaningless symbols that become meaningful when we the reader provides meaning to them, as you also claim. If that were the case then when you say "A" you might mean 'X' while one reader might provide the meaning 'not X' and still another reader 'neither X nor not X'. Language would be impossible.

That’s not the case. The meaning of A is not the same as the word A. Refer to a dictionary. Word on one side, definition on the other.

And one can literally mean anything by using any word he wants, such as in cryptography, or by using any number of figures of speech like double entendres, innuendo, allusion, homophones, synecdoches.

You are objecting to a problem of your own making. It is by separating words and meaning that it appears to you that words must be supernatural objects if they are to have force. You limit the meaning of the word 'force' to physics and biology and wrongly conclude that if words were to have force it would be action at a distance.

Words don't have any force or energy or anything, so I see no problem refusing that silly metaphor, and the justification for censorship and violence that arise from it. I am open to any characterization that doesn't utilize action at a distance and magical thinking to describe speaking and listening. We need not pretend that meaning is sitting in the text, or that it is riding on a sound wave, only to jump into the soul when it finds an eye or ear, only to animate a listener or reader to this or that action. So perhaps we can work on revising this ancient superstition.

Your wanting to write something about them is part of what it means for words to have force.

Can you describe this force and how it works?

There is always an excuse.

You have been extended far more than a little good faith! But no matter how often I point out the contradictions you either cannot see them or refuse to acknowledge them. You deny that words have meaning and yet claim that there is something you mean that you are clarifying with words.

Your contradictions are not in fact contradictions. The fact that I deny words have meaning does not contradict that I mean something by using them. Can you notice the difference? The words meaning something vs. I meaning something? I have been saying all along that I engage in meaning, that I provide meaning to those symbols. So it appears you are struggling to put together the most basic of logic.

Why raise objections if words are nothing more than sounds and marks? Why use some sounds and marks to argue against the sounds and marks of others? The reason is because words are not just sounds and marks. The acquiescence of a budding tyrant like Glaucon has consequences. He is prompted to act, just as you are when you object. Despite your denial you admit the

I am raising objections to the treatment of words as supernatural objects. It's true, I read the words and wanted to write something about them. But none of this insinuates that the words made me do it. Though we may make a text and a reader the subject and object respectively, the grammar cannot alter the physics and biology of the interaction. The dynamics of persuasion has it backwards and a belief in it only leads to censorship, violence, and tyranny.

A man can confer the greatest of benefits by a right use of these, and inflict the greatest of injuries by using them wrongly.

Perhaps you can demonstrate. Inflict upon me the greatest injury by using your words.

The word “Influence” and its various synonyms are words I’m going to try and avoid from here on out, if such a feat is possible. Perhaps if we recognize their figurative and metaphorical upbringing, we can avoid the pitfalls, but otherwise we reduce ourselves to magical thinking by using them. This is because, as verbs, they do not refer to any literal act of any thing, and worse, people confuse themselves upon reading them. We maintain a false grammar with their use. Through the application of this false grammar people have made of words subjects and people objects, where the exact opposite is the case. They can come to believe prose acts upon a reader instead of the other way about.

But refusing to use them is difficult, only possible through a sheer act of will. Note your own application: “Words don't cause influence, they don't cause inspiration, but people can be inspired or influenced by words.” This to me is a distinction without a difference. If we step out of the passive voice and into the active, it would be “Words can inspire or influence people”. The words on a page become a subject, while the reader is relegated to the status of a passive object. Perhaps the middle voice in Ancient Greek, and the absence of it in many languages, leads to this sort of conundrum.

So no, an orator cannot incite a crowd to violence and create a violent situation with words. It’s physically and biologically impossible. We can try it as an experiment. Incite me to violence or hatred or any other species of act or emotion. Through your words, inspire, goad, persuade, fuel, instigate, provoke, excite, foment, instigate, exhort, agitate, some sort action or emotion. I wager we’ll find that I am the agent of such acts and emotions.

You do not know Plato well enough to know that nothing in the dialogue supports your claims.

I never claimed it supported any of my claims. I merely used the quote as an example.

Again you skip over the issue - words have meaning. It is evident that words are important to you - as a form of auditory autoeroticism. You get off on hearing yourself talk.

The issue is what I wrote about in the OP. You haven’t touched anything I’ve claimed, I’m afraid.

If words do not have meaning then how can you expect to clarify what you are trying to say by using them?

If words do not have meaning then the sounds and symbols used are not important. They can be replaced arbitrarily by any other sounds and symbols.

That’s up to you. I assume you can read and that you have enough understanding and experience to supply the text you see here with some sort of meaning. I can only clarify what I mean as much as I can. The rest is up to you, but a little good faith might be in order.

You have it backwards. It is exactly the opposite. I am the agent of my own ability to guard against being persuaded by false arguments. In in passage you cited from the Republic, those who are to become guardians must be guarded against false arguments while they are young and do not yet have the agency to guard themselves. They will eventually become agents who guard against others having their true opinions taken away from them.

Like I said, Socrates’ arguments are unconvincing. So of course I have an opposing view. In my opinion the value of the work is not in its arguments and the resulting doctrines, but that it invites me to assess the arguments given and come to my own conclusions. The acquiescence of a budding tyrant like Glaucon ought to prompt a discerning reader to raise objections.

Perhaps no one can change that you believes what you want, but certainly rhetoric can change what it is one wants to believe. It can persuade someone to want to believe that instead of this because that seems to be true and this does not.

Do you understand what Aristotle meant when he said that rhetoric is the counterpart to dialectic? Although it can be used to steal away true opinion, it can also be used to secure true opinion. The noble lie is a good example of the latter.

Rhetoric can displace the air outside of the mouth, propel waves of sound, and can mark a medium such as paper. It cannot change a human being in such a way as to lead him to want this or that. That’s a simple matter of physics and biology. It cannot steal nor secure anything.

The continuous and circular metaphorical descriptions of persuasion only serves to belie its own premise of forceful discourse and the supposed efficacy of words.

If you care to understand it and are not just mining for statements that seem to support your claims, then you would do well to start by acknowledging that you do not understand.

I understand your claim I’m just not sure I agree with it.

So you do not find what you do not understand persuasive?!

I did not find Socrates’ arguments persuasive. What’s not to understand?

You quoted me but did not address the bolded statement:

On the one hand, you claim that the words are not important, that what is important is that the reader provides them with meaning.

Sure, that is also important. But I never said nor believe words were not important, and one should not assume, wrongly, that because words have no power that they are unimportant or that anyone is arguing such a thing.

It is your belief that the reader provides words with "some semblance of meaning", but when the reader (in this case me) provides those words with meaning you, you point to your words, to what you said, as if the words have a particular meaning established by the words themselves.

The argument is self-defeating. You use words in an attempt to persuade the reader that words are not persuasive. You put it in the form of a question:

No I’m only clarifying what I was trying to get at by using those words. That you come up with a different meaning than me only makes the case more clear. No meaning is conveyed from point A to point B.

The answer to that question is no. You have not persuaded me. And based on what others have said, you have not persuaded others either. Your argument is weak and incapable of persuading anyone who is able to evaluate it rationally.

This is just your latest and most likely not your last attempt to separate Trump from his responsibility for what he says.

Just more evidence that you are the agent of your own persuasion. You decide and no one else does. You believe what you want to. No amount of rhetoric
can change it. But that you have to resort to sophistry to defend it is enough to persuade me that you do not really believe in anything like truth or justice, but in self-preservation, self-adulation, and self-seeking.

but do not understand what it is he has in mind. The founder of the noble lie does not believe his own lie. His power is not in his believing but in having others believing his story. The power lies in the story being persuasive, in the words being believed.

I’m not so sure of that. At any rate, I was only pointing out the arguments Socrates was making, and they were wholly unpersuasive.

Have you stolen that belief from yourself? On the one hand, you claim that the words are not important, that what is important is that the reader provides them with meaning. But on the other, it is not the meaning the reader gives to them but the words themselves, what you said, that is important.

I’ve never said words are not important. I love words. I don’t want to see any of them censored or banned or treated like anything other than what they are. I’m fact, my whole stance is a defense of words against those who seek to take them from us, or criminalize their use. Rather, I’ve only claimed words do not have the power people often ascribe to them.

The power of the words is comes from believing them to be true.

Believing is the power of a believer, not words.

It is not that they are unaware of their beliefs. It is that they are unaware that their belief or opinions are being taken from them. Two reliable translations:

I never said they were unawares of their beliefs. I said “Men are able to use argument in order to strip each other ‘unawares of their belief’”. I used the translation of Paul Shorey, which appears in the quote.

In sum, speaker and auditor are a kind of dance couple. The speaker leads, and the quality of his leading influences everything that follows.

“Influence”. I wrote about this word and detailed its etymology. I’m trying to avoid the use of it because the sense of its definition is figurative and supernatural. If I were to ask “What do you mean when you say the speaker influences everything that follows?” You would have to trade “influence” with some other figurative synonym and the whole ordeal becomes circular.

It’s not that I don’t enjoy your figurative language, it’s just that I want to describe the interaction in a more literal fashion, without the use of the “magical idea” I expressed earlier. Then and only then can we dispel the myth of the efficacy of words.

You, it appears, allow the speaker to say anything at all without responsibility. And as noted above that is not how the world works or how the world understands.

No, everyone is responsible for what they say, it’s just that what they say is without the efficacy and power we often make them out to be, and therefor what they say never requires a disproportionate response like censorship.

Why blame me and not your words? Perhaps because you realize you are not the agent of persuasion in the formation and defense of mine or any one else’s beliefs. Given the underlying premise about the power and efficacy of words of sophistry in particular and rhetoric in general, you can either admit that the powers of your own words are weak and lacking, or you can afford me some sort of agency in the governing of my own beliefs. It would be better for both of us if it were the latter, and we can use each other's ideas instead of having them use us. The latter seems more conducive to philosophy and human nature.

At any rate, I’m open to any way of describing persuasion that does not evoke action at a distance and includes me as an agent of my own persuasion. Perhaps we can come up with one.

Are you using words or making them? You use your mouth or fingers to create them, certainly, but beyond that this is where your relationship with them ends. And like any other sound or mark that you may make the words fall wherever they may, whether to dissipate in the wind or collect dust. You put your instruction into the world and that's the end of it.

Rather, the reader uses them. He comes upon them, examines them, understands them, and provides them with some semblance of meaning to suit his own purposes. Or, like Polemarchus, he can just refuse to listen. This important interaction is completely beyond your power and control.

I neither asked nor said that it came from Latin. I said that it can be traced to latin. You said "Nuh uh". But the etymology proves unequivocally that it can. There is no point in quibbling about it.

I expect more of this in the future. Physicalist explanations of consciousness are all pseudoscience. It just hasn't sunk in yet.

The entire field of consciousness is pseudoscience. At best it's folk psychology; at worst it's superstition. I wager that physicalist explanations will come to this conclusion before non-physicalist ones.

Nicely put. I would also the 16th amendment to your list. It relegates plunder and forced labor to a legitimate act of government.

That's the gist of it.

In my view, rhetoric in general promotes the magical idea, that speakers are like sorcerers, and I think this underlying beliefs is one of the distinctions between the sophist and the philosopher. Besides having little evidence to support the magical idea, I think it proves disastrous insofar as it robs the listener of agency and justifies a tyranny.

I don't argue for unconstrained speech—I believe in manners—only that the words are wholly innocent and need not be made out to be something they are not. We need not fear them or pretend that they will push us around should we hear or read them. We need not believe they possess powers and forces they do not. To do so is to weaken people, to relegate them to status of a slave, where the truth is that people have the force and the power to be the agent of their own persuasion.

You don’t think the word “inspire” can be traced back to the Latin word “inspirare”?

inspire (v.)
mid-14c., enspiren, "to fill (the mind, heart, etc., with grace, etc.);" also "to prompt or induce (someone to do something)," from Old French enspirer (13c.), from Latin inspirare "blow into, breathe upon," figuratively "inspire, excite, inflame," from in- "in" (from PIE root *en "in") + spirare "to breathe" (see spirit (n.)).

https://www.etymonline.com/word/inspire

There is nothing to echo. Through their grift they reveal their own malfeasance. That’s one thing. But another is that Anti-Trumpism is a license for corruption. By pretending to save the republic, protect our democracy, or whatever the phrase is, they provide their fellow travellers with justification to excuse poor behavior and to support it.

Someone like me gets to sit back and watch as politicians, pundits, and their gullible readers have to turn around and cheer on and defend everything from political persecution, the weaponization of the courts and the justice system, censorship, to spying on political campaigns. It reads like an Orwell novel.

I’m quite looking forward to climate change. I’m not sure what all the doom and gloom is about, but anything that keeps us in the The Holocene is right by my book.

I predict those who are seeking to save us from some impending climate holocaust are going to kill us long before the sun does. My guess is they’ll try darken the skies or poison the atmosphere if they don’t tax us to death first.

Fanny Willis is corrupt. End of story. But it’s a common thread throughout the anti-Trump movement. They reveal themselves to have no moral standing and are often worse than their folk devil. It’s all a grift for power and money and the adulation of millions of gullible news readers.

Persecution 101

Dissolving Trump’s business empire would stand apart in history of NY fraud law

Within days, Donald Trump could potentially have his sprawling real estate business empire ordered “dissolved” for repeated misrepresentations on financial statements to lenders, adding him to a short list of scam marketers, con artists and others who have been hit with the ultimate punishment for violating New York’s powerful anti-fraud law.

An Associated Press analysis of nearly 70 years of civil cases under the law showed that such a penalty has only been imposed a dozen previous times, and Trump’s case stands apart in a significant way: It’s the only big business found that was threatened with a shutdown without a showing of obvious victims and major losses.

Lawyers for the state in Trump’s monthslong civil trial have argued that the principles of fair play in business alone are enough to justify a harsh penalty, but even they aren’t calling for the prospect of liquidation of his businesses and properties raised by a judge. And some legal experts worry that if the judge goes out of his way to punish the former president with that worst-case scenario, it could make it easier for courts to wipe out companies in the future.

https://apnews.com/article/trump-fraud-business-law-courts-banks-lending-punishment-2ee9e509a28c24d0cda92da2f9a9b689

The golden rule? Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

Not a fan.

Never heard of it.

Close enough.

I am absolutist in that regard.

He spoke. You don’t like what he says. The eternal desire to shut him up is the sine qua non of anti-Trumpism. His voice—or at least, the excerpts chosen for you by political operatives— is the source of your moral panic, and censoring him is the only cure for your anxiety.

All I know is there is no evidence, just like what you claim to know about Trump. I just disagree with your method of believing things without the evidence to do so.

I think a presidents past is relevant and they should be deeply scrutinized. Isn’t Hunter’s laptop relevant?

If Trump was buying drugs and prostitutes and engaging in high-level corruption it would be deserving of scrutiny, because all that is criminal activity than none of us plebes could get away with. But I simply cannot care about Trump's pickup skills.

Yes, he's been accused of sexual assault, and all during his foray into politics. I think it is relevant that these sorts of accusations magically appear during such a time, even if it's over 30 years after the fact.

The persecution is wild on this one. Democrat Anti-Trump law-makers invented a law with her in mind. Gave her a year-long window to sue. No evidence of any crime. No guilty verdict or criminal trial. Cannot remember the year or date so cannot give alibi. Won’t allow DNA test of alleged dress she wore. Anti-Trump judge. Lawyers funded by Reid Hoffman and other dark money. Defence not allowed to defend. Arbitrary punitive damages. Law disappears. Bring back statute of limitations. Trump calls the psycho a liar. Sue again.

New York is a shit-hole.

The indictments are a consequence of a two-tiered justice system and politically-motivated prosecutors. There is no evidence of any crime; there are no victims; and the indictments read like deep-state dinner-theater. In my mind one should care a little bit about an unjust justice system.

According to a recent amicus brief Jack Smith was unconstitutionally appointed. He was a private citizen who now has more power than any of the other US attorneys in the DOJ. Unlike the other attorneys he was neither appointed by any president nor approved by the senate. I wonder why that is?

I was just trying to make the point that appealing to law is fallacious. You made an effort to point out to me that laws were broken by rioters, and no laws were broken by those involved in the coup. So what?

Sorry, google say the Armenian genocide is a precedent to the Nüremberg and Tokyo trials. Try again?

Here I thought we were talking about law. Sorry, but the declarations of the UK, France, and Russia do not represent “international law”. I suppose you should google again.

You're asking me if I think slavery is fine. Clearly you are confused.

You’re the one who appealed to law, I’m afraid. Or can you think of any other reason why slavery is wrong without appealing to law?

It demonstrates more grave stupidity to confuse international criminal laws with domestic laws.

They invented the law after the fact in order to prosecute the Nazis for a crime. They were violating no law. Therefor what they did was fine, correct?

It demonstrates yet more grave stupidity to confuse centuries-old laws with current laws.

There is nothing to confuse. They broke no law, therefor what they did was fine. Isn’t that so?

Clearly I was speaking about his crimes against humanity, which were not crimes. That their actions weren’t illegal or that they were just following orders was the same argument the Nazis used to avoid responsibility at the Nuremberg trials. It was also legal to own slaves, to beat your wife, if you’d prefer.

That’s right. I answered your question. I can’t find that they broke any laws. Hitler never broke any laws either, so appealing to law is a grave stupidity.