I’ve said Will Smith caused each of his movements. There is no transfer of energy from any other circumstantial object to Will Smith, and therefor no other causal force animating his movements. — NOS4A2
I think the idea of “influence” is the sort of magical thinking I’m talking about. — NOS4A2
I'm not debating the semantics of "cause", and I said that already. You agreed that the circumstances are a necessary condition. How do you rationalize the claim that a necessary condition is not a connection?Conditions are connections now? I don’t think so.
The birth of Will Smith caused the slap on Chris Rocks face. You heard it hear first. — NOS4A2
Are we not talking about the same word? — NOS4A2
It is our first amendment right to petition, to influence the government. It’s one of the most important ways to do so. It worked in the case of slavery, for instance. — NOS4A2
America wants to know if the former vice-president was abusing his power for reasons of corruption, and if the DNC colluded with Ukraine to influence the 2016 election. — NOS4A2
The reach and influence of the left is profoundly large. — NOS4A2
But the prevalence of left-wing academics and their influence on the growth of political correctness I think deserves a fair hearing. — NOS4A2
And in fact further proves the naked partisanship, how this is a ploy to influence the next election, and how the case is already doomed in the senate. — NOS4A2
Last ditch deep-state effort to influence the Senate trial. — NOS4A2
The capricious and political use of their labelling and anti-Trump sources, all of whom endorse opposing candidates, makes plain their motives, which seems to me to score points against Trump and to influence the election. — NOS4A2
Meanwhile the Clinton campaign sourced actual disinformation from actual Russian spies and used it to influence the election and any subsequent investigation, thereby putting a democratic election in doubt for years to come. — NOS4A2
For the simple reason that there is no known way of gauging the future influence of rhetoric on human action — NOS4A2
Western conceptions of suicide, I fear, are so much influenced by religion, that the aesthetic, romantic, and interesting qualities have all been stripped away. — NOS4A2
“Fascism” is thus used in the Orwellian sense, as a pejorative, but even worse, as a means to dehumanize and incite violence against political opponents. — NOS4A2
While they openly hate America and incite anti-Americanism they gobble its most ridiculous ideologies. — NOS4A2
No one has ever said nor implied such an idea, and such a dangerous straw man is an incitement to violence. — NOS4A2
You call Americans “fascists” and, like a ghoul, cry foul when your incitement comes home to roost. — NOS4A2
NOS4A2 agreed that the circumstances were a necessary condition for the slap: had Chris Rock not been on stage, and had he not made the joke, Smith would not have been in position to choose to slap Rock. Of course this has no bearing on blame or moral accountability. I don't insist he label these circumstances as "cause" or "a causal factor", although at least some philosophers would do so, but it's absurd to say there is no connection between necessary conditions and the event.Chris Rock caused Will Smith to slap him, but he didn't have to slap him. Wrap your head around the "could have done otherwise" idea. Head exploding emoji here. — Hanover
I won't pester him again to justify his denying a "connection", but his political positioning was shattered when he admitted that circumstances were a necessary condition. For example, access to guns is a necessary condition to most mass killings.I don't think this is really an issue of ignorance on NOS's part but some kind of political positioning. Best just to leave it imo as he seems wedded to the incoherency. — Baden
I honestly don't think he read my posts thoroughly. He keeps going on about use of the word "cause", when I'm talking more generally about there just being a "connection".I wonder if NOS has the self-awareness enough to at least wonder why he’s often seen as either an imbecile, disingenuous, or incoherent. I wonder this sincerely. — Xtrix
This is false. A transfer of energy is how hearing works.
Finally, something physical! Sound waves do affect people. Words are not sound waves, though. — NOS4A2
I never said I don’t use the word. It’s that I’m suspicious of the physics of it. — NOS4A2
We started with "connections":Now we’ve moved to “connections”. It’s too confusing, friend. — NOS4A2
Bullets can tear through a person’s body. Shooting someone is justifiably a criminal act. Words possess no such force, have zero connection to another’s actions, and thus speaking cannot be justified as criminal act. I think your view is magical thinking.
— NOS4A2
I'm sympathetic to your position, but it's false to claim that one person's words have zero connection to another's actions. — Relativist
They do not affect us more than any other sound from the mouth or any other scribble on paper — NOS4A2
As you said yourself, we are predisposed to act upon certain sounds and images because we’ve learned and trained ourselves to do so. — NOS4A2
All that soundwaves trigger is the delicate biology of the inner ear. After transduction it’s all you. The biology—you—does all the work. It causes your hearing; and if any aspect of the biology is messed up along the way, it doesn’t. — NOS4A2
Hillary Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann was acquitted Tuesday of lying to the FBI, in the first trial of special counsel John Durham's investigation.
The verdict is a major defeat for Durham and his Justice Department prosecutors, who have spent three years looking for wrongdoing in the Trump-Russia probe. He claimed Sussmann lied during a 2016 meeting in which he passed a tip to the FBI about Donald Trump and Russia.
The prosecution hung its case on the testimony of one FBI official, James Baker, based entirely on his recollection of a conversation. Baker, however, was foggy on many of the specifics of his interactions with Sussmann, and even testified to Congress that he couldn’t remember if he knew who Sussmann was working for.
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The fact Durham even had to bring this case was a testament to the failure of his probe. He had set out to uncover the FBI’s crimes against Mr. Trump. He was reduced to trying, and failing, to prosecute somebody for lying to the FBI.
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Durham tried to use his charge against Sussmann as a hook for the larger conspiracy theory that he, Trump, and Barr have been expounding: that investigation was ginned up in order to smear Trump in the media before the election. “You can see what the plan was,” Assistant Special Counsel Andrew DeFilippis told the jury. “It was to create an October surprise by giving information both to the media and to the FBI to get the media to write that there was an FBI investigation.”
There are several flaws with this theory. The first is that the Russia investigation was already underway before Sussmann approached the FBI with his suspicions about the server.
The second is that the FBI never leaked its investigation until after Trump was elected. The only reporting on the whole matter before the election was in a New York Times report that the FBI “saw no clear link to Russia.” Meanwhile, the Hillary Clinton investigation had sprung leaks all over the place. So the Trump-Barr-Durham theory somehow posits that the FBI set up a phony investigation in order to leak it and then forgot to leak, instead doing the opposite by telling the Times that the Bureau did not suspect the Trump campaign.
Indeed, the Sussmann trial revealed that the Clinton campaign did not want the FBI to open a probe into the Alfabank server because it feared an investigation would make it less likely that the media would write about the story at all. So to the extent Durham deepened the public understanding of Trump’s conspiracy theory of the Russia investigation, he inadvertently undermined it.
In May 2020, Trump’s Attorney General, William Barr, ordered an investigation into the practice of unmasking. That review, conducted by John Bash — at the time the US Attorney for the Western District of Texas — was finished the following September without finding any evidence of wrongdoing.
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“My review has uncovered no evidence that senior Executive Branch officials sought the disclosure of” the identities of US individuals “in disseminated intelligence reports for political purposes or other inappropriate reasons during the 2016 presidential-election period or the ensuing presidential-transition period,” Bash’s report said.
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