Well, Trump got a 10 day extension as well as only needs to post a smaller bond, 175 million dollars from 464 million dollars.

Last few weeks so many legal YouTubers were explaining how Trump's ask to the court of appeal had basis in law whatsoever, never been done etc.

Likely Trump will be able to secure this smaller bond; it is at least claiming he will. Definitely easier than half a billion.

Seems all these legal cases are going to be dragged out until the election, since as long as Trump can post bond then the appeal processes can go on for quite some time.

I think the main thing is that Trump will likely now avoid the embarrassing seizing of his properties. That would have been a near fatal blow, as it would just look "weak" which is not a good look for him as a rich "strong man" type (as far as his base is concerned).

:lol: I'm not even a "liberal" (or member of the Democratic Party). Pro tip: stop disinforming yourself with FOX Noise (or other MAGA media).

Again, here's an undisputable Conservative, ex-GOP campaign consultant/operative you (& @NOSA2) can learn something from (other than "alternative facts") ...

https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/890305

↪boethius :lol: I'm not a even "liberal" (or member of the Democrat>c Party). Pro tip: stop disinforming yourself with FOX Noise (or other MAGA media). — 180 Proof

Please do provide a definition of liberal and explain how you aren't a liberal and aren't in a liberal echo chamber at the moment.

You post that Trump is losing support, I go check the polls (maybe it's true) and get back to you that he's in fact gaining support, and then you respond that polls aren't predictive until within 2 months of the election but continue to insist that Trump is losing support due to random pundit hot takes.

That's called being in a echo chamber of only considering what you want to hear.

As for FOX News and MAGA, I'm not American, I don't live in the US. I live in a country that has free health care, free upper education, sends pregnant women a box of essential baby supplies (while paying maternity leave even if you've never worked). I happen to be a citizen by one of my parents, but I choose to live here because it's about as far democratically left as you can get on the planet, and I want to go even further to the left supporting salary caps, nationalization of any monopoly, UBI to replace the patch work of social security, direct democracy and so on.

Although studious of Marx, I wouldn't call myself a Marxist for the simple fact Marx believed industrial capitalism brought some good things, whereas I view industrial capitalism as a grave error from the start that has brought nothing but industrial wars, loss of humanity, loss of community and loss of nature.

So I'm no ally of Trump or the Maga movement.

However, because of the total corruption of the American elites I do see why Trump is appealing to a lot of Americans (appealing enough to win the presidency once and win the latest primary).

It's just objective fact needed to understand US politics, which as a Canadian, it's a national sport to follow and shake our heads at.

I also honestly don't see how the neocons are better than Trump, and I honestly think Trump is better for the world than Biden and the usual suspects (of a long list of war crimes, including participation in this latest literal genocide).

Although I do not believe the dictum that 'the enemy of my enemy is my friend' holds true in all cases, I do think it's worth entertaining when it comes to Trump. Trump is in a fight with some of the most powerful and evil networks of people the world has seen in arguably over half a century.

I say: let them fight.

As for FOX News and MAGA, I'm not American, I don't live in the US. — boethius

And you are entitled to your conspicuously uninformed, spectator's opinion, sir/mam. :victory:

Today in Trumpenfreude:

The old fat orange f*cker's latest grift – launched during Holy Week no less – is a $60 "Trump Bible" for gullible, faux-Christian, "Trump sneakers"-wearing MAGA cultists. You can't make this stooopid stuff up. :lol:

https://apnews.com/article/trump-god-bless-usa-bible-greenwood-2713fda3efdfa297d0f024efb1ca3003

*Biden-Harris 2024* :cool:

Somehow I picture him coming upon a large consignment of misprinted bibles about to be discarded and he just has the cover glued on.

And you are entitled to your conspicuously uninformed, spectator's opinion, sir/mam. — 180 Proof

Again, you state that Trump is losing support, I go check the polls to inform myself whether this is really true or not, and turns out he's not losing support.

Information that you then dismiss in favour of random pundit hot takes because polls aren't predictive.

... Well are random pundit hot takes based on Republican primary voting more predictive?

Feel free to inform us, to use your language.

As for spectator opinion; we all participate in the American empire, so it's hardly spectating. But even if it was a spectators position, you'd still need to justify why it's less worthy to consider. In more than a few cases spectators can far more easily discern what's going on than participants.

Again, you state that Trump is losing support, I go check the polls to inform myself whether this is really true or not, and turns out he's not losing support. — boethius

:rofl:

Checked the polls again just now.

YouGov has Trump leading by 1.

HarisX has Trump +2 in one poll and even in another.

Leger conducted two polls both with Trump +4.

Beacon Research/Shaw & Company Research has Trump +6, +5 and +5 in three polls.

Quinnipiac University has Trump +1 in one poll and Biden +3 in another concurrent poll.

The numbers could be different, could be exactly as you say that Trump is losing support and I'd go check and see the polls confirm what you say and come back and be all like "yep, Trump is tanking".

However, what the polls actually say, what multiple expert groups in trying to gauge public opinion conclude based on data, is that Trump is gaining support.

I understand you don't like it, but welcome to the real world.

:clap: :lol:

Here's the "real world", kid –

https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/890076

– a historically-informed US voter's perspective on the pending US presidential election of 2024.

Here's (a link to post with youtube discussing) why an explosion of terroristic political violence is more likely than not after Biden is reelected this fall (or even sooner in June/July when Criminal Defendent-1 is convicted of dozens of felonies in Manhattan) ...

https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/892493

↪boethius :lol: I'm not even a "liberal" (or member of the Democrat>c Party). Pro tip: stop disinforming yourself with FOX Noise (or other MAGA media). — 180 Proof

You continue to astound.

You continue to astound. — AmadeusD

And you continue to bore.

What a horribly bad existence you must lead.
Take acid. Buy a hooker.

Says the bore who goes around commenting on discussions he’s not involved in to demonstrate his self-righteousness as an empathic communicator. That existence must be a healthy one indeed, I’m sure.

You could have not made your comment. But you did.

I shall collect the rent next time.

You could have not made your comment. But you did. — AmadeusD

Brilliant observation.

True, I like to respond to banal, sanctimonious bullshit when I see it— occasionally.

My suggestion is to grow out of being a broody 15 year old. Might be taken seriously.

Oh look, a sanctimonious Twitter troll giving advice. Cool! :up:

Why are you talking to a non-existent audience in a performative act reminiscent of a broody 15 year old?

And further, why have you taken Twitter speak "Oh look, ..." and imported it to a comment where you apparently denigrate Twitter trolls? Bizarre.

I'd have takenthe advice.

Riveting.

Is the US ready...?

Pro-PRC DRAGONBRIDGE Influence Campaign Leverages New TTPs to Aggressively Target U.S. Interests, Including Midterm Elections
^{— Mandiant · Oct 26, 2022}
Pro-CCP ‘Spamouflage’ network pivoting to focus on US Presidential Election
^{— Elise Thomas · ISD · Feb 15, 2024}
Much Ado About ‘Somethings’
^{— Max Lesser, Ari Ben Am, Margot Fulde-Hardy, Saman Nazari, Paul J Malcomb · FDD · Mar 27, 2024}

How effective are these campaigns anyway? When I encounter these stories (or effects thereof), it's almost always from US MAGA'ers.

Here's the "real world", kid –

https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/890076

– a historically-informed US voter's perspective on the pending US presidential election of 2024. — 180 Proof

The conversation is:

1. You claim Trump is losing support
2. I go check your claim against the polls
3. Your claim doesn't check out, so you move the goal posts to polling doesn't matter but Trump is still losing support because a large, but still minor, amount of Republicans didn't back Trump in the primaries.
4. I point out you're obviously living in a liberal media bubble where claims.
5. You then deny being in anyway a liberal, but refuse to provide a definition of liberal of which you are not, all while trying to accuse me of being an American conservative (which I'm happy to not only deny the charge but actually explain what I am instead of being an American conservative).
6. Instead of learning something from being totally wrong, you then just move your ad hominem to me being a spectator and that somehow disqualifies my participating on this forum (mostly run and maintained by Europeans, from what I gather); not clear why being not-American is disqualifying, just does for some reasons (aka. random walls you erect to maintain your echo chamber, instead of going out and building a real wall that matters to protect America!! Shame on you.).
7. I point out that your new claims have nothing to do with your first claim; if polls don't matter much until 1-2 months before the election, ok, but what's your evidence that primary votes do matter? Considering Trump won in 2016 with an important faction of Republican #Nevertrumpers. To which your evidence to explain this hodgepodge of inconsistent claims is random YouTubers that represent said liberal media bubble.

So ok, I get it, you want to live in your self-identified not-liberal echo chamber where Trump has no chance of winning and you feel the need to bring your echo chamber into this forum for further validation.

But feel free to correct me where I'm wrong.

I wouldn't try to tease this one out. Not necessarily a comment about 180, but these types of political discussions are basically snowballs. No one keeps track of their claims, everyone just ends up yelling at each other and nothing is achieved.

I initially expected better of this type of forum, but politics gonna politic i guess. Twitter nonsense is inescapable when its political talk.

I initially expected better of this type of forum, but politics gonna politic i guess — AmadeusD

There are few threads like this one on the Forum. Lots of others concern one very dead philosopher vs another very dead philosopher. Those are milder.

↪boethius I wouldn't try to tease this one out. Not necessarily a comment about 180, but these types of political discussions are basically snowballs. No one keeps track of their claims, everyone just ends up yelling at each other and nothing is achieved. — AmadeusD

I'm keeping track.

Not out of personal or philosophical interest, but moral and civic duty.

And not because anything said on this forum is of any monumental political consequence, but rather to develop strategies for dealing with bad faith debate.

We are, in my view, repeating the circumstances of the original development of Western philosophy arising out of, and in opposition to, sophistry.

Precisely due to democratization of the public sphere in Greek democratic traditions (though none of them are actually democratic in a modern definition, more just large aristocracies, still far more democratic than top down rule).

This democratization of the public sphere in the Greek context was due to the Agora where all citizens could talk. For us cause of this is the internet. In between similar accrued with the printing press and pamphleteering.

Whenever the public sphere is democratized there is first dominance of bad faith tactics because people haven't learned yet to deal with them. In the greek context philosophy emerges; anyone can say anything but there are methods to separate truth from falsehood, better than no method. In the renaissance journalism emerges; anyone can write anything about what's happening anywhere, so we need people and institutions that build up a reputation to have an a priori set of probable facts (not all true, but at least a starting point to apply the reasoning methods bequeathed to us).

Today, anyone can copy and paste what the reputable journalistic institutions write, destroying their business model and undermining the entire system of public discourse built up since the invention of the printing press. Likewise, anyone can make an audio / visual emotional appeal promoting anything directly to the entire public.

This is a short summary of the history (there's also radio and television), but the point is that we're in a discursive environment where bad faith arguments dominate, exactly as you say everything political is just a snow ball fight.

In the previous philosophy forum, in the "before times" of the internet where television talking heads were still referring to everything on the internet as "blogs" and noting what was on "blogs" simply to post of it's irrelevant whatever it is, I focused on philosophical topics. This was literally 20 years ago and I was in my formative years, so genuinely didn't know if my beliefs held up to scrutiny (and of course they didn't and required a lot of reformulation). I then went off to accomplish my purpose and unfortunately the forum was disappeared from the internet.

This new forum emerged, public discourse degraded due to the above processes, and I just so happened to have gained considerable amount of experience debating with bad faith actors as corporate board director and oft times CEO. People will come up with the craziest shit when they want to under-deliver, underserved money or intellectual property, and managing corporations involves dealing with a considerable amount of bad faith.

Discerning good from bad faith, and how to deal with each, I would go so far as to say nearly entirely summarizes what management is about. Ipsofacto, seemed an additional dutiful purpose to join this forum to further develop and demonstrate methods of debating bad faith actors.

For the strategies appropriate to good faith and bad are not the same. The first thing a bad faith actor will do is take advantage of your ill adapted good faith habits. For example, if you're only accustomed to good faith debate (with friends and family and class mates and colleagues and so on) which is most of the time in real life, you'll likely have all sorts of bad habits when it comes to dealing with bad faith actors. For example, in good faith debate you assume your opponent seeks the truth as much as yourself, has at face value as credible premises as your own, and is speaking what they genuinely believe to be true. In short, in a good faith debate you pay a significant amount of respect to your interlocutor. Once you get into a management position of any significance, you immediately realize that a bad faith actor will take advantage of all of these good faith debate habits to harm you and people you're responsible as well as the entire world. It is not an intellectual debate, it is a conflict in which winning is important.

How do you win against a bad faith actor (often highly paid lawyers in a corporate context)?

First rule: respect is earned. Respect is earned by being good faith. If someone's good faith with me, I'll be good faith with them. If someone's bad faith with me, I will not be bad faith with them but I won't give them the benefits I extend to those of good faith either. Rather, I will, entirely legally and metaphorically, get my thumbs into their eyes and squeeze until they desist from attacking me, and the interests I represent, any further. I won't give them any ground whatsoever (i.e. I'll make them do the work of proving even those things that I know to happen to be actually true), I won't give them any respect (i.e. I won't assume their positions are on face value as credible as my own and continuously call out their bad intentions and deceptive practices), and above all I will make them understand I will never stop (i.e. they can't tire me out and I'll go to what would be, for many, irrational lengths in any quarrel: time, effort, pain, suffering, is of no consequence compared to satisfaction).

In short, if you want to deal with the bad faith actors of the world you must be, to them, a monster from the deep.

Transposing these methods to political public debate is my project here. We are in a time where everyone must become CEO's, unless we are to be ruled by our inferiors.

Haha. I agree with that, generally. Still here; looks like I will be for some time :)

In short, if you want to deal with the bad faith actors of the world you must be, to them, a monster from the deep. — boethius

Yeah, but this is a weirdo forum for weirdos.

But feel free to correct me where I'm wrong. — boethius

Been there, done that. :lol:
.

Yeah, but this is a weirdo forum for weirdos. — AmadeusD

Well, whenever someone denigrates the forum, I am always skeptical of these claims of irrelevancy. Maybe it is, maybe it's not. You're here, I'm here, a bunch of other clever people are here, we can't know who's lurking in the shadows. Honest clever people do seek out analysis that can withstand scrutiny from opposing view points, and I always ask where there is a better forum of such debate and I never get an answer. Of course you have to be peculiar to actually participate in the debate, but maybe less peculiar and more important people, the non-weirdos as you say, come and watch and learn something. Maybe not, who knows.

However, my project isn't simply to engage with bad faith debaters here but to build up examples of the method of dealing with bad faith debaters in the context of political discourse.

I suppose the next step is to write a book or something and try to make the knowledge more accessible. For now, the forum permits creating material for the project in a reasonable amount of time, due to the stewardship of the moderators. And why does the moderators work make these sorts of discussion feasible to begin with? Because they get rid of bad faith actors (without purging their good faith political opponents and so create an echo chamber) that would simply destroy the space of discussion as their next bad faith tactic as a retort to being demonstrated to be and faith. So, the mere example of there being entirely opposed views "allowed to exist" here on the forum and the world doesn't end and actual debate between people who disagree can then take place, is as valuable a lesson as what approach to bad faith tactics are effective within the discursive battle field.

Well, whenever someone denigrates the forum, I am always skeptical of these claims of irrelevancy. Maybe it is, maybe it's not. You're here, I'm here, a bunch of other clever people are here, we can't know who's lurking in the shadows. — boethius

I'm not sure how this relates. My point is that this Forum is not a good indicator of the real world.

I suppose the next step is to write a book or something and try to make the knowledge more accessible. For now, the forum permits creating material for the project in a reasonable amount of time, due to the stewardship of the moderators. — boethius

More power to you. That's a good project!

So, the mere example of there being entirely opposed views "allowed to exist" here on the forum and the world doesn't end and actual debate between people who disagree can then take place, is as valuable a lesson as what approach to bad faith tactics are effective within the discursive battle field. — boethius

Im unsure why this is nested in the rest of hte comment. I agree, but didn't cover anything around this in my reply earlier.