> Mr. Levandowski has paid a significant price for his actions and plans to devote his talents to advance the public good. What a laugh. Significant price? How so?
I thought the price was $2M.
That's the going rate for Trump pardons
Anthony Levandowski Pardoned
671–680 of 996 posts
Re: Anthony Levandowski Pardoned
#672Earlier quoted context omitted.
He was investigated for 2 years and is still accused to this day for Russian collusion. Pardoning either Snowden, who is in Russia right now, and Assange, who is accused of being a co-conspirator in the Russia collusion accusations, would be like throwing gasoline on that fire. I don't see how he could do it without alienating most of his establishment support, which he still needs after leaving office.
IMHO nobody (including and especially members of the establishment) seriously believes Snowden or Assange are actually Russian spies, really. Snowden just had to flee to Russia because that was the only counterpart to the US which is sufficiently powerful and interested to possibly hide him and also just enough civilized&westernized to tolerate.
> IMHO nobody (including and especially members of the establishment) seriously believes Snowden or Assange are actually Russian spies, really.
If there was a Trump pardon, I guarantee every major news outlet would bring up their Russian connections and Twitter would lose its mind. What people "seriously believes" changes rapidly.
Re: Anthony Levandowski Pardoned
#673Earlier 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…
> 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.
Chess is an abstract turn-based zero-sum discrete 1-on-1 board game with perfect information sharing. In other words, it's completely different from real life in every possible aspect, and thus any drawn parallel is likely to be worthless. Real life is not Chess.
Re: Anthony Levandowski Pardoned
#674Earlier quoted context omitted.
Please stop down voting posts like this. If we want HN to remain a welcome space for civil discourse for everyone, we need to respect other people's candid statements. Remember, Trump won 47% of the popular vote which likely includes a large number of HNers. We should not alienate those people.
Trump supporters have done nothing but alienate and engage in acts of harassment and violence against non-white folks, religious minorities and members of the LGBTQ community for the past 4-5 years. Should we be civil toward members of the KKK as well? Why is it always on us to be nice to people who hate us and want us dead?
Just like how you've been brainwashed by the TV into thinking the "others" are evil, trump people are brainwashed into thinking you hate them and want them dead.
Both sides see themselves as the victim and the others as the attacker.
>Why is it always on us to be nice to people who hate us and want us dead?
Do you see how this is perpetuating the problem?
Re: Anthony Levandowski Pardoned
#675 HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found
Content-Type: text/html
Last-Modified: Wed, 20 Jan 2021 03:48:59 GMTRe: Anthony Levandowski Pardoned
#676Whats up with sprinkling of "xyz is an upstanding citizen and father to n beautiful children." ? They are clearly not an upstanding citizen - otherwise they wouldn't require a presidential pardon. Being father to children is not an achievement and any two consenting healthy adult man and woman can produce them irrespective of their standing in society. And beauty of children is a criteria for pardon now? What if the…
I would argue that creating a new human being is an act of charity. Most people are very happy to exist, and probably grateful that their parents chose to create them. Especially given the fact that parenting requires a huge investment of time and resources. That doesn't mean that parents can't be bad people, or that parenthood is the only criteria of goodness. But knowing that somebody chose to become a parent stron…
plenty of people don't choose or choose under a kind of duress (religious guilt)
Re: Anthony Levandowski Pardoned
#677Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Human behavior seems to be notoriously consistent across centuries, there is much to gain from understanding past mistakes. It strikes me that this an argument for the uselessness of reading history. People are basically the same as they always have been and just as you can’t simply explain to a teenager that they’ll feel differently about the world when they’re thirty, every generation has to figure life out for i…
> People are basically the same as they always have been And you came to this conclusion without reading any history? This is too absolutist a statement. Sure, some things need to be relearned through experience, but there are also plenty of cases where you don't want to waste time reinventing the wheel.
The downvoters are thrashing a straw man. Obviously nobody believes you're supposed to recreate society every 20 years ex nihilo. What I'm arguing is that the case for reading history has been overstated. Specifically, I was reacting to the claim that, "Human behavior seems to be notoriously consistent across centuries." I agree. It is. Human beings react to the same emotions and incentives they always have and there's no library big enough to change that.
This is like arguing about whether dieting "works." On the one hand, obviously, yes, it works. There's no credible debate about the efficacy of calorie restriction for losing weight. It simply works. On the other hand, most human beings can't actually follow a diet, so, no, it doesn't actually work, for any reasonable definition of "works."
Reading history is probably a lot like that.
Re: Anthony Levandowski Pardoned
#678Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hello deadlock! Come on down!
> Hello deadlock! Come on down! Deadlock is not the worst thing, and the solution to it is not necessarily to remove as many locks as possible. The actual problem in the US right now is that checks and balances are strong enough to allow one party to block things, but not strong enough to deter waiting until your party stochastically has enough power to get things done. This is exacerbated by having one party's ideol…
I think we know that Mitch would have blocked every Biden appointment if the Dems hadn't won Georgia. Waiting 2/4/6/8 years to resolve a deadlock isn't a great idea. The checks and balances in the Senate were ignored by Mitch to get things done, rather than compromise.
Since Congress makes its own rules, and 51/49 is enough to change a rule ('the nuclear option'), supermajority would have to be a constitutional amendment... And then 45% would be enough to halt government. I guarantee you this would then happen regularly.
Other systems have mechanisms to force elections if deadlocks are persistent. Of course, you also need mandatory voting, PTO for voting, full franchise, etc and that isn't going to happen in America while this Supreme Court lasts.
Re: Anthony Levandowski Pardoned
#679Earlier quoted context omitted.
Please do not propagate unproven rumors. Most of that 73 person list are people who clearly don't have anywhere near those amounts.
Its not a rumor, its an outright accusation by former CIA operative John Kiriakou
CIA operatives don't lie for political gain purposes?
Re: Anthony Levandowski Pardoned
#680Earlier quoted context omitted.
This myth that the US constitution is in any way "good" is weird. It's one of the earliest; and fortunately others leared from its mistakes. Including the US itself, when it had considerable influence in drafting the WW2 losers constitutions, which uncoincidentally are quite different from the US. Checks and balances essentially don't work in the US. The best bit is simply a decent judiciary, but that was mostly copi…
>Seriously, name 1 check/balance that's actually particularly good! The person in charge with executing the law is different from the people in charge of crafting the laws to be executed.
I don't believe this helps, at all. If anything it makes things worse, because it lets congress off the hook, and that's exactly what happens in the US - lots of congressional powers are abrogated to the executive, which is essentially a monarchy that hasn't devolved into a dictatorship simply because of tradition and popular unease at that route - but it's really unsafe.
The real protection here is that a simple majority can't throw out the minorities voice entirely. But that doesn't require the separation of the executive to achieve, it merely requires either a supermajority, and/or a differently composed senate (which doesn't need to be unrepresentative either, the differing election schedule would suffice, and it doesn't even need a veto - an election-cycle delay would be enough).
Incidentally, from memory, all sliding-into-dictatorship democracies I can think of did so behind a strong "executive". Empirically at least that would suggest that simply not having such a strong executive sounds like a sound protection against despotism. Intuitively, that would suggest that it's pretty hard to rally a country behind a dictatorship that originates in congress; a powerful figurehead matters. Finally, I'm not really sure to what extent a constitution really can or should protect against popular despotism - at best it can delay the process; but part of the point of democracy is self-rule; and taking away that rule to avoid despotism also takes it away for other reform - and it's not really going to work anyhow, because if enough people want to dump the laws, they will, even if the letter of the law begs to differ.