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Anthony Levandowski Pardoned

trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov

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Re: Anthony Levandowski Pardoned

#521

Post by ardy42 »

CyberRabbi wrote: post #413
dgellow wrote: post #363

No Assange, no Snowden. What a fool I am, I seriously envisaged that could happen... Instead it’s just more and more corruption.

He pardoned a literal spy who was convicted of espionage of state secrets but he did not pardon Assange. Incredible.

> He pardoned a literal spy who was convicted of espionage of state secrets but he did not pardon Assange. Incredible.

Assange and Snowden remain unpopular with Senate Republicans, and my understanding is that he was told pardoning them would hurt his chances of avoiding a Senate conviction in his second impeachment.

He was also recently steered away from pardoning himself, his family, and some Republicans that may have helped the capitol rioters (and he apparently got the message), but who knows if he'll change his mind in the next couple hours.

Re: Anthony Levandowski Pardoned

#522

Post by Bakary »

CydeWeys wrote: post #424
Bakary wrote: post #382

I have to say there is quite a lot to learn from Levandowski.[0] I am not a fan of corruption but it's undeniable that he played whatever cards he had in life and played them hard. He'll probably be a shadowy billionaire quite soon. One quote stood out to me at the very end of the article: “The only thing that matters is the future,” he told me after the civil trial was settled. “I don’t even know why we study histor…

Is there a lot to learn from him? His amorality has left his reputation in tatters. Yes he earned some money but at what cost? Is being a reviled shadowy billionaire really worthy of praise or respect?

I don't know what his personal life is like. But a person with the freedom to do the things they want and the energy to embark on ambitious projects will have no trouble having a genuine social circle and having great experiences barring some serious psychological obstacle in doing so like Howard Hughes.

This is far more important than this vague idea of reputation. Just because a person has a good reputation doesn't mean they are respected or loved. It could just be that they do not figure at all in people's minds. You can live up to people's expectations and die having never really lived.

Honestly it's somewhat reflective of the infamous slave morality vs. master morality debate

Re: Anthony Levandowski Pardoned

#523

Post by deeeeplearning »

vmception wrote: post #437
dgellow wrote: post #363

No Assange, no Snowden. What a fool I am, I seriously envisaged that could happen... Instead it’s just more and more corruption.

Pay attention to that list, each pardon has a list of people who supported each pardon. Nobody from the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the ACLU is on that list. We are wasting our time and energy caring about either of those organizations. Let them stick to filing Amicus Briefs in courts, but they clearly have no pull or influence or backchannel despite our tech scene thinking they do.

What a strange criticism. That these orgs are useless because they couldn't get Pardons from a President more or less totally opposed to their goals? It's completely unreasonable to expect otherwise.

Re: Anthony Levandowski Pardoned

#524

Post by lern_too_spel »

yonaguska wrote: post #403
gowld wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "conspiracy theories" were in Trump's pardon documents, like the "Russia hoax".

You must have missed the declass on the origins of the Russia hoax, where Steele admitted that he intentionally leaked information and engaged in info-laundering because he saw Trump as being potentially damaging to UK/US relations. And where he admits that he leaked info in order to counter the effect of Hillary's emails on the 2016 election. So, literal foreign interference in an election. You may have also missed…

Nobody was convicted on the basis of Steele's dossier.

Re: Anthony Levandowski Pardoned

#525

Post by knuthsat »

tomComb wrote: post #495
knuthsat wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that all a POTUS does after presidency is enrich oneself, it's quite clear where the motives are. The moment when POTUS is unable to profit off of his presidency is the moment where these things wouldn't happen. POTUS becoming a multimillionaire after presidency is just a sad display of moral corruption. Edit: Not talking about Trump, just in general about POTUS. It's my impression that in the last 50 years…

If they get rich by selling books and speeches I have no problem with that, and am surprised by the number that do. People might not like that, but it isn't corruption. If, on the other hand, a president makes his presidency about doing favours for the rich and powerful then he won't have to write books and speeches afterwards.

I have a problem with that. It shows moral corruption. It's not corruption in the legal sense but outlines the issue of why the pardons do not make sense.

ex-POTUS is still an influential individual and is just profiting after the binds of the position are lifted.

I think it would be a pretty nice decree to disallow the president to become extremely wealthy X years after presidency. Let the influence slowly fade and let's see if POTUS as an individual, after being elected to do public good, can produce some value outside of benefiting from being elected.

Re: Anthony Levandowski Pardoned

#526

Post by leto_ii »

twox2 wrote: post #500
leto_ii wrote: post #436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "But what already happened doesn’t really matter. You don’t need to know that history to build on what they made. In technology, all that matters is tomorrow." To me this is a mind-numbing display of ignorance. Once you understand that you're not the first human being to ever have existed and that the people that came before you (even way before) are not dumber than you, you will immediately realize that there's a…

I don't think it's ignorant, it's just another framework of looking at the world. Consider a chessboard that's in the middle of a game. The moves up to that point don't matter. Only the current state of the board matters and you make the best move given the current position. This is how this person sees technological progress, and I'm inclined to believe he's right... within the context of technology. Beyond that, I…

> Consider a chessboard that's in the middle of a game. The moves up to that point don't matter. Only the current state of the board matters and you make the best move given the current position.

Since when is reality like a game of chess? Setting aside human history for a moment, just think about natural history (Levandowski mentioned dinosaurs and Neanderthals). Evolutionary biology is to a significant extent a historical discipline - it looks at the record and tries to come up with ways in which animals have changed over time under all sorts of pressures. Can that endeavor be done a-historically? How about even something like cosmology - the origins of the universe etc.?

The universe is not a Markov process. Thinking of it as such is incredibly limiting as an intellectual paradigm.

To be honest I'm not even sure I can think of a way you can completely ignore history and still be able to do useful work of any kind.

Re: Anthony Levandowski Pardoned

#527

Post by dkarl »

mwigdahl wrote: post #408
dkarl wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The people who created the system and decided on lifetime terms for Supreme Court judges had a lot of enthusiasm for democracy, but they could see it had flaws, and they wanted the judiciary to be much less sensitive to the mood of the public than the rest of the system. As disappointed (and angry) as I am to see the Republicans steal the Merrick Garland appointment and then replace RBG with someone who has flaunted…

While I agree with virtually everything you're saying here, I'm not convinced the Founders had a high opinion of democracy itself. The Federalist Papers are full of warnings about mob rule, and the goal of the Constitutional framework was explicitly to insulate government from populist and direct democratic influence, while setting up structures that were supposed to mold the government into the form of an aristocrac…

What we call oligarchy now and what they called democracy then -- it's the same picture. Re democracy's weaknesses, I think the most important factor was that whatever their radical ideas, they were living in a country that had been born out of a revolution / civil war and were living through the failure of one attempt at creating a country (the Articles of Confederation) so they were primarily concerned with creating a system that could actually work for a while and maintain stability through turbulent times. They were true believers in (what they called) democracy, enough to bet the future of the country on it, but they also believed it had weaknesses, and they did not want to embarrass and discredit it by building a democracy that failed because of something that seemed inherent to democracy itself. That's one reason they were obsessed with its weaknesses. Another other reason is that they had to sell their new system to democracy skeptics. So, they had to convince both themselves and others that their system built around the idea of democracy was designed in a way that guarded against its weaknesses.

Re: Anthony Levandowski Pardoned

#528

Post by SV_BubbleTime »

mywittyname wrote: post #441
spiderfarmer wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He was very clear about this goal even before his campaign in 2016. In 2000 Donald Trump told Fortune magazine, “It’s very possible that I could be the first presidential candidate to run and make money on it.”

Thankfully, he end up being the first presidential candidate bankrupted by the position. The dude's primary asset, his brand, is not completely toxic and can no longer be used to prop up his other failed ventures. And the only bankers wiling to finance him will the the predatory ones, who will all extract every penny left then leave him with nothing.

> is [now] completely toxic and can no longer be used to prop up his other failed ventures

You are underestimating something. I remember how Bush was literally Hitler and Cheney was an impossibly evil name.

But now Bush is a lovable cook, Biden admin was taking with Dick Cheney about foreign affairs and Liz Cheney was just celebrated by the left/media for dumping on Trump.

Trump brand won’t be what it was, but it’s something different now. I think the political left did themselves a great disservice by not giving in to election fraud investigations, when people were asking for signature matching, observer access, proving compliance with Article2, scanned ballot uploads, whatever else was reasonable and we should expect our election system to provide without question. Even the most rabid TrumpHater5000 should have supported that because it would have proved he was wrong. Now in some people’s eyes we will never truly know. For practically half the country Biden has an asterix by his name. That doesn’t seem like a great start and it didn’t actually tarnish Trump Brand except to the people who hated him already including the establishment GOP. His approval among supporters is not lower since Jan 6th, as difficult as it may be to understand.

Re: Anthony Levandowski Pardoned

#530

Post by Bakary »

dionidium wrote: post #420
Bakary wrote: post #382

I have to say there is quite a lot to learn from Levandowski.[0] I am not a fan of corruption but it's undeniable that he played whatever cards he had in life and played them hard. He'll probably be a shadowy billionaire quite soon. One quote stood out to me at the very end of the article: “The only thing that matters is the future,” he told me after the civil trial was settled. “I don’t even know why we study histor…

I’d go further. Most current news is purely entertainment. You really don’t need to know everything that’s going on. Almost none of it is actionable. It’s fine as entertainment, but people are convinced they’re doing something important when they read the news, when as far as I can tell it’s just something they enjoy as a leisure activity.

I wholeheartedly agree. I am currently trying (and failing miserably) to quit news-watching altogether.
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