US Politics

Dershowitz is a fucking schill. He will (eloquently) defend anyone for money and attention. He's the guy who got OJ off. And got Epstein a sweet deal, despite sworn accounts from dozens of women. Now defending Trump is his next logical step. Piece of shit.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/08/05/alan-dershowitz-devils-advocate

also dershowitz:

If we are to have torture, it should be authorized by the law

then there's his fun relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, the - at least two - accusations from women that they were forced to have sex with him against their will, and his public arguments for the lowering of the age of consent.

he seems nice.

If we are to have torture, it should be authorized by the law

^ that’s a totally logical and reasonable argument: the law doesn’t authorise torture therefore we should not have it (not on black sites, not on-behalf of Americans, not via loophole etc).

A reasonable person would never say “if we are to have torture” as a reasonable person would disavow torture entirely. Perhaps the fuller quote is more illuminating:

The real debate is whether such torture should take place outside of our legal system or within it. The answer to this seems clear: If we are to have torture, it should be authorized by the law. Judges should have to issue a "torture warrant" in each case. Thus we would not be winking an eye of quiet approval at torture while publicly condemning it.

I.e. dersh is advocating not against torture, but for it to take place inside a legal framework. Which I guess is logical, but also disgusting.

Well, only disgusting if it was possible. Which it isn't. So he's basically saying torture shouldn't happen.

I.e. dersh is advocating not against torture, but for it to take place inside a legal framework. Which I guess is logical, but also disgusting.

Well... or you can read it this way: he is arguing for the rule of law to be upheld. He's telling people that if they want torture, they should be honest about it and plainly state they want the law to allow torture (which, one might suspect, they would not actually want to do, as it makes them look bad). And conversely, if they don't want that, they should actually be against it, at all times. Avoiding the "winking an eye of quiet approval at torture while publicly condemning it".

As much as I am against all torture in all cases, that argument in itself is not a bad one - of course for me the logical and direct conclusion is that torture should just never happen, full stop.

Fucking hell the state of some of the comments on the last page?

Lfgss proving some people on the left give just as few fucks for the rule of law as any MAGA nutter.

what is legal and what is civil and just are often mutually exclusive.

arguably every liberty we enjoy today was arrived at by someone breaking the law.

apartheid was the law once.

The normal way to argue for the rule of law to be upheld is to argue that people don’t break the law, not that the law be changed to accommodate the law breakers. This argument is sophistry, pure and simple.

Would torturing one guilty terrorist to prevent the deaths of a thousand
innocent civilians shock the conscience of all decent people?

To prove that it would not, consider a situation in which a kidnapped child
had been buried in a box with two hours of oxygen. The kidnapper refuses to
disclose its location. Should we not consider torture in that situation?

Torture advocates always love to bring out the ticking time bomb as the Sensible Person’s We Can All Agree Torture Is OK example. And it’s pretty clear where Dershowitz is standing here. And so there isn’t a distinction between them and him, he’s saying, we should be torturing in this circumstance and we should be able to do so within a legal framework.

This isn’t hard to read. If you’re opposed to torture, you don’t write this sort of shit. You don’t fantasise about buried children, you don’t conjure up “torture warrants”, you don’t hem and haw and sow the seeds of doubt. You say torture is morally hideous and we shouldn’t entertain it under any circumstances. And this isn’t some kind of crazy extreme left position, it’s enshrined in international law and the Geneva conventions.

https://youtu.be/UI5jnlcdMy0

Clickbaity title but yeah. Sanders takes equal-top number of delegates and wins the popular vote despite mediocre overall turn-out.

He should really be smashing Iowa and New Hampshire if he’s to get the nomination so just a ‘pretty good’ result.

( I’ve never seen Sanders and Larry David in the same room. Am I onto something? )

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I bet he’s wearing converse. Those are two legendary grandads of our time.

I didn't read the article, I was responding to the specific paragraph you quoted which could definitely be read in two ways.

I also have no clue who that guy is, btw, so I'm definitely not defending anything he's saying.

Lol at Black Hawk county publishing their results directly onto Twitter. The DNC held them for > 24hrs before they emerge with Sanders votes shifted to minor candidates. Why? No explanation.

I’m trying to believe this was innocent incompetence.

was funded to the tune of $40k by the Buttigieg campaign

'Funded' meaning they paid for some services of the same company, but not that actual app, right?

I'm not 100% on this, I keep hearing different versions (from 'Shadow was an inside Buttigieg job' to 'Bernie supporters are making every single bit of this up') - some quick research online did not yield particularly solid evidence that the Buttiegieg campaign was actually involved in the company itself, or the development or funding of that specific app (which is not all the company ('Acronym'?) does) . But I'm not really sure either way.

What is however highly suspicious is just how much of a shit show the entire thing was, and, as you say, how almost all of the late results were good for Sanders. I don't know. I'm trying not to go the tinfoil hat way, but... they're making it hard. Extra stuff like highly suspect coin tosses (I mean... even the concept of this...) and fudged numbers isn't helping either.

The DNC are definitely doing their best to fuck Sanders over. Same as last go round.

I want to think this is photoshop

If we're posting reddit top posts, here's how it happened too:

Class!

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Lel.