Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Anthony Levandowski Pardoned

trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

401–410 of 996 posts

Re: Anthony Levandowski Pardoned

#401

Post by kjakm »

sittingplant wrote: post #383
kjakm wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a foreigner Presidential pardons + the appointment (and life terms) of Supreme Court judges baffle me. How can a country that claims to be a leader in democracy have these two wildly abused bugs? Edit: fixed use of election instead of appointment

If I understand correctly, the lifetime appointment is meant to avoid political pressure. Don't you think the judges might be swayed to vote one way or another if they knew there was a vote coming up in a couple years and they'd be on the chopping block?

Couldn't this be mitigated by making terms a fixed number of years? e.g. UK Supreme Court - No life terms. Justices selected by peers + independent committees. There is one member of the government with a veto that is rarely used and highly scrutinised when it is.

Re: Anthony Levandowski Pardoned

#402

Post by pavlov »

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.

Last night Trump also revoked his own 2017 executive order that prevented federal administration officials from becoming lobbyists after leaving government:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-lobbying-execu...

This had been one of his only practical actions towards keeping his campaign promise of "draining the swamp."

Re: Anthony Levandowski Pardoned

#403

Post by yonaguska »

gowld wrote: post #256
koheripbal wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many pardons are recommended to the President by the Justice department for various reasons. A lot are for non-violent drug crimes that someone in the department felt was too harsh/etc... It's not like they are all Trump's friends. But obviously conspiracy theories will prevail, sadly.

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 the declass that showed Fiona Hill perjured herself when she stated she had no idea who Christopher Steele was- yet actually met with him while he was compiling his dossier.

Re: Anthony Levandowski Pardoned

#404

Post by machinecontrol »

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.

So, will you and others learn from this? The next time a politician asks for your money and promises that this time, it’s different maybe we should all think twice before falling for the same game again.

Re: Anthony Levandowski Pardoned

#405

Post by throwaway2245 »

prepend wrote: post #267
mechEpleb wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The whole thing was started as a deliberate meme by /pol/ to take an innocent, commonly used hand signal and make the left treat it as a white supremacist dogwhistle. So it can mean anything ranging from "ok" to "this will make the libs angry" to "I am an actual nazi among like minded friends". Which one it is must be discerned from context, meaning that the symbol itself is largely meaningless.

I use the symbol to help identify people who believe anything they read on the Internet. I don’t think I’ve used this symbol since I was a kid to mean “ok,” and I certainly won’t use it now due to potential association. But it is nice to be able to easily tell if someone is either stupid or duplicitous by reading them talk about this symbol always meaning white power. I’m sure if I went looking on nazi sites I would…

People in this thread must know what plausible deniability is.

When someone is standing next to Steve Bannon posing intentionally with a symbol that could refer to white supremacy, being able to laugh it off as "haha, I just meant OK" gains them the benefits of deniability. (But not very plausible, I think)

People use it precisely for this reason - because it identifies them as a white supremacy sympathiser without being actionable: they keep a trolling or ambiguity defence in their back pocket, wherever that is needed.

Re: Anthony Levandowski Pardoned

#406

Post by r00fus »

johannes1234321 wrote: post #386
kjakm wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a foreigner Presidential pardons + the appointment (and life terms) of Supreme Court judges baffle me. How can a country that claims to be a leader in democracy have these two wildly abused bugs? Edit: fixed use of election instead of appointment

Regarding judges: How would you appoint them? Basically there are three options: - Have a public vote, direct legitimation (or via some extra electoral college or something) this means that judges have to be "popular" and run campaigns and question is, if that's really smart ... - Have the "juristical class" elect within, so judges from lower courts would lick somebody, or current judges elect additional ones. That w…

Lifetime appointments are the problem not the method of appointment.

Re: Anthony Levandowski Pardoned

#408

Post by mwigdahl »

dkarl wrote: post #370
kjakm wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a foreigner Presidential pardons + the appointment (and life terms) of Supreme Court judges baffle me. How can a country that claims to be a leader in democracy have these two wildly abused bugs? Edit: fixed use of election instead of appointment

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 aristocracy (in the sense of Plato's Republic).

The Republic is actually quite prescient in its analysis of forms of government and how they decay from one form to another. The USA today very much resembles an oligarchy (class-based rule by the rich) being pushed rapidly into social media-driven democratic mob rule.

Were we already farther down that path, Trump might have been enough to push us down the hill even farther, from democracy to true tyranny.

Re: Anthony Levandowski Pardoned

#410

Post by user-the-name »

Loughla wrote: post #265
user-the-name wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After the last 4 years, maybe it is time to realise that a working democracy can not rely on the assumption that those in power will just use their powers responsibly and honourably, and that "checks and balances" need to actually have the ability to both check and balance.

If Trump taught this country anything, I hope that it is 'relying on long-standing norms of the office is a bad idea'. I think we need legislation to make sure the 'norms' are 'required'.

Exactly.

It should also be a good example of the fact that the president of the US has an extremely and unusually large amount of power, which should probably be reduced by quite a lot.

Post reply on HN