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Obama is seriously considering a pardon for Chelsea Manning

businessinsider.com

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Re: Obama is seriously considering a pardon for Chelsea Manning

#41

Post by [deleted] »

interNeds wrote: post #9
frozenport wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree, I think you can draw a straight line from him to the election of Donald Trump. The one sided, anti-us nature of WikiLeaks, including perhaps incomplete content, hint at editorial digression with a clear motivation. I can't come up with a single way this helped America, but it certainly hurt our prestige around the world.

There's a bit of cognitive dissonance in your claims. America's prestige was destroyed by none other than George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Bremmer, Rupert Murdoch, Colin Powell, Condoleeza Rice and several others, for a number of reasons, but most of all the 2003 invasion of Iraq, from which you can draw a straight line to ISIS. How you "connect the dots" and manage to wander your way from Manning a…

[deleted]

Re: Obama is seriously considering a pardon for Chelsea Manning

#42

Post by tdb7893 »

harry8 wrote: post #12
sparky_z wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pardons can certainly be corrupt, but I don't think they're corrupt by definition. I think of them as a last line of defense-in-depth against unjust convictions. After all, no organization made up of humans can be perfect, and the court system (of any nation) is no exception. Of course, pardons are misusable . I would support, for example, disallowing presidential pardons in the last year of a presidential term, so t…

If the conviction is unjust either the law is unjust and should be reformed or the system is unjust in not providing a reasonable, equitable and useful avenue of appeal to overturn the injustice. Corrupt by definition because it is always a corruption of "equality before the law"

You seem to be arguing for a legal system completely without human discretion as humans being able to make decisions is inherently unequal (for example sentencing is different based on time of day). I'm not sure a legal system with no human discretion is tenable, though.

Re: Obama is seriously considering a pardon for Chelsea Manning

#44

Post by sctb »

owlee wrote: post #40
oshoham wrote: post #20

Chelsea Manning is a trans woman, please don't misgender her.

Chelsea Manning is a man LARPing as a woman. If you think he's a woman just because he says he is, then you are being willfully ignorant.

Please don't post like this on Hacker News. We're trying to have a civil discussion here and this doesn't pass muster.

Re: Obama is seriously considering a pardon for Chelsea Manning

#45

Post by sctb »

xyzzy4 wrote: post #36
oshoham wrote: post #20

Chelsea Manning is a trans woman, please don't misgender her.

Chelsea Manning isn't reading the HN thread, so why does it matter what gender you use? It's like telling someone to use Kolkata instead of Calcutta.

> It's like telling someone to use Kolkata instead of Calcutta.

No, it's not like that for everyone.

Part of having a civil discussion within a community is understanding and accepting our differences—especially ideological ones. That means recognizing when what you say has the effect of moving us away from our shared goal of gratifying our intellectual curiosity and adjusting accordingly. It might not be possible to succeed in this all of the time, but we have to try, and this is a case with an obvious path forward.

Re: Obama is seriously considering a pardon for Chelsea Manning

#46

Post by oshoham »

sctb wrote: post #43
oshoham wrote: post #20

Chelsea Manning is a trans woman, please don't misgender her.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13379559 and marked it off-topic.

I'm a little disappointed, honestly, because now the original comment that I responded to is still on the parent thread, without any response that suggests that it's not okay to misgender a trans person.

Re: Obama is seriously considering a pardon for Chelsea Manning

#47

Post by totalZero »

ionised wrote: post #31
totalZero wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US wasn't founded to serve as a beacon of prestige. The point of the government has more to do with its obligations to, and relationship with, its people.

> The US wasn't founded to serve as a beacon of prestige. The point of the government has more to do with its obligations to, and relationship with, its people. Its rich people.

Some comments go "zing!" without going "aha!"
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