Earlier quoted context omitted.
What do you think of this counterpoint from Balaji? "CZ deserves his pardon. His show trial of a prosecution was a combination of regulatory railroading and ethnic persecution for being Chinese-Canadian. Imagine if Macron was held personally responsible for every crime committed by the 67M citizens of France, and you'll get the absurdity of holding CZ personally responsible for the actions of a few of the 250M+ Binan…
Changpeng Zhao broke the law and got caught. Everyone agrees on that. What you present above is revisionist history about "political persecution," which is the favorite justification of the current administration for pardoning convicted felons, even in the total absence of any evidence supporting a conclusion of political persecution. See also George Santos, J6 rioters, etc. I don't think it's really necessary to pre…
Trump pardons convicted Binance founder
951–960 of 1001 posts
Re: Trump pardons convicted Binance founder
#952Earlier quoted context omitted.
What do you think of this counterpoint from Balaji? "CZ deserves his pardon. His show trial of a prosecution was a combination of regulatory railroading and ethnic persecution for being Chinese-Canadian. Imagine if Macron was held personally responsible for every crime committed by the 67M citizens of France, and you'll get the absurdity of holding CZ personally responsible for the actions of a few of the 250M+ Binan…
The law says he should have prevented those bad apples from moving dirty money around, and he did not follow the law. Do you have a rebuttal for coffeezillas assertion that 2 billion dollars of Abu Dhabi money was invested in Binance using the Trump family coin in order to buy a pardon? The president is clearly pro crypto and doesn't think this dude did anything wrong, but he also wasn't gonna give a pardon away for…
I don’t doubt Trump tried to advantage himself when doing this. But I do feel like the Binance charge wasn’t consistent at all.
Re: Trump pardons convicted Binance founder
#953Earlier quoted context omitted.
It already no longer is.
Depends on your metrics of "dominant country" tbh. In terms of GDP the US is leading. In terms of purchasing power parity China is leading. In terms of military prowess the US is superior, if you believe their advertised weapons capabilities. That being said, if we believed what countries said about their own weapons, then Russia has a number of world ending superweapons - clearly they're the leader here /s. If you b…
Re: Trump pardons convicted Binance founder
#954Earlier quoted context omitted.
Depends on your metrics of "dominant country" tbh. In terms of GDP the US is leading. In terms of purchasing power parity China is leading. In terms of military prowess the US is superior, if you believe their advertised weapons capabilities. That being said, if we believed what countries said about their own weapons, then Russia has a number of world ending superweapons - clearly they're the leader here /s. If you b…
America has very little manufacturing capacity, has lost its edge in batteries and power generation, and is soon to be behind on computing. They're politically fractured, losing all their allies, and no longer have a sustainable military advantage. If they decide to flex their aging muscles against China, they will be outproduced, and can't win in a single decisive blow unless they want to initiate a surprise full nu…
>America . . . has lost its edge in . . . power generation
Energy costs are much lower in the US than in Europe or China. China is the world's largest importer of petroleum and of natural gas. In contrast, the US is self-sufficient in petroleum and natural gas.
China's petroleum comes by ship from the Persian Gulf and from Russia's European ports (since there is no easy way for Russia to get its oil to its Asian ports). Beijing's worry that something might happen to interrupt its long supply lines of petroleum and natural gas is why it has made a large risky bet on solar electricity. The US, which has more land with high solar potential than China, can sit back and wait to see how China's bet on solar will turn out before it makes big bets on solar.
It might be that the cost of electricity specifically is lower in China than the US. If so, that is because Beijing has prioritized building a lot of electricity-generating capacity. It engages in many such infrastructure project to keep its young men employed -- something Washington does not need to do because the US economy provides enough jobs without without Washington's spending on infrastructure projects (so Washington tends to spending on infrastructure only when the project clearly makes economic sense).
Beijing imposes tight restrictions on its citizens' ability to invest outside China, so Chinese individual investors, pension funds, etc, put most of their money into deposits into Chinese banks and into Chinese real estate. Most of the funding for infrastructure projects comes from these bank deposits and from borrowing. Governmental debt (including debt owed by state and provincial governments) is a higher percentage of GDP in China than in the US.
Re: Trump pardons convicted Binance founder
#955Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unfortunately, this narrative's utility is pretty low and it's intended implications are severely weakened by the current administration's obsession with revenge, blaming everything on someone else, and persecuting political opponents. If such openly hostile and norms-breaking rhetoric did not exist before the pardons, then the pardons would appear suspicious.
This is nonsense. The Biden administration went after Trump's lawyers, censored American citizens that supported Trump, and put people in prison for years that walked near the capital on J6 (and never participated in the riots). In addition to this, Trump was brought up on federal charges that we still don't know today. They were: Charge 1..2..3..4. If you look at all of the court documents released, they didn't even…
No it wasn't. Trump had to threaten Zelenskyy to accuse him at all, which backfired immediately when Zelenskyy denied the accusations. He still claims that Trump manufactured the charges, and we haven't seen any damning evidence that suggests they were credible. I wager that's because the "evidence" wouldn't discredit Biden unless a court was forcibly compelled to do so.
> Hillary ran an email server from her office that contained government emails
This may be news to you, but government officials are allowed to use third-party communique to transmit non-sensitive and declassified information. The reason Hillary was never brought up on charges was because they never found any proof of wrongdoing. Same as Trump's SCIFs, if you want to go there.
> The real crimes started when Trump was running in his first term and Obama colluded with Russian agents to spy on him.
Again, source? We have no evidence that Obama was a Russian agent, whereas several retired KGB officers have attested to Trump's enrollment. I think you're misremembering a few details, but I beg you to link a high quality source if one exists.
Re: Trump pardons convicted Binance founder
#956Re: Trump pardons convicted Binance founder
#957Re: Trump pardons convicted Binance founder
#958Re: Trump pardons convicted Binance founder
#959The pardon power has been so abused these past few administrations that it's clear there should be constitutional changes in the pardon power, either congressional review, or strip it altogether.
Re: Trump pardons convicted Binance founder
#960Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I think a congressional pardon power to allow national leniency on previously accepted sentences that are now viewed as unjust might be worth holding onto. That sounds like a perfectly reasonable thing to do. For the branch of government in charge of making and changing laws.
It sounds more fit for the branch of government in charge of enforcing the laws. Specifically, with laws that are made by the branches responsible for making/changing them, which would be ridiculous on their face. If the branch responsible for making and changing laws was also responsible for the reversion of enforcing those laws - effectively what a pardon is - then there's absolutely no check on gratuitous law bein…
I mean, it is a normal thing for a legislature to remove and amend old laws. That's not "a check," but it's a normal part of what it means to be a legislature. You're not just appending new laws, you're maintaining the entire set of laws.
And as for checks, judicial review is the obvious one.