timorl @timorl@qoto.org

@freemo That still doesn't explain why you prefer Trump/Pence over Biden/Harris, the latter makes you only 50% sexist. ;P

@freemo Again, no. It claims it found no evidence. Followed by the second _half_ of the report which investigates why, and which wasn't allowed to end with charging, so the most it could do is suggest impeaching between the lines. Which, well... reading between the lines is an inexact art, but I'm pretty sure it did.

@freemo Wait, which event are we talking about? The G7 thing did not end up happening, so was there another? o.0

@freemo No, the one from the report only states that no evidence of cooperation with Russia has been found. The one about obstruction of justice is pure Barr.

@freemo Aand that is back to concerning again. Although just normally concerning, not rapid-slide-towards-authoritarianism concerning, so meh.

@freemo I am extremely surprized you don't see the difference, especially at scale, but I'm not sure what I could say to convince you.

@freemo Yes, "did not establish". That's why there is a whole part 2 of the report. The wording is also very cerful, since from what I understand it at least established that information was transferred from Russia to the campaign (without coordination or conspiration) regarding the timing of the e-mail leaks. Afaik that's not illegal, so maybe it's a moot point, but it seems at least questionable morally.

The Barr letter is a gross mispresentation of the report and this specific passage is both implicitly contradicted by the report (it stresses heavily that the reasons Trump was not charged are due to the rules and memos on charging the president) and somewhat more explicitly by Muellers response (during his hearings) to the question if Trump could be charged after his term. I don't see a reason to trust Barr in this case, especially since he was appointed by Trump during the investigation iirc.

@freemo Why is that quote hard to find then, even on right-wing sites? And why are you concerned with this singe occadion if he seems to have made clear that his policy is different later?

I didn't claim the murdering of citizens had equivalents (the closest I can think of is the way the pandemic was handled by the administration, but that is much different at least formally, if not morally). However transgender rights definitely have equivalents – the easiest to find was the new "don't ask don't tell" policy in the army which effectively bans them from joining and locks the door on the closet for the ones already there. If we want to look further in the past and for Pence, then there is the handling of the AIDS epidemic (huh, that's a surprizing pattern I didn't notice before...), and it's harder to find a thing with worse impact on the LGBT community in the US historically.

In the videos I saw he seemed slow the way older people sometimes are, but not really suffering from dementia – I had contact with both and they seem much different. However obviously I don't know him personally, so if you have stronger evidence from personal interactions then I cannot argue with that.

@freemo The antifa claims are strange to me – I was under the impression that most people ramming the protests and doing similarly scary stuff were mostly right-wing. Trump supporters and opponents have regular shouting matches (I saw clips in which either side could be considered the agressor) and there are the looters, opportunistic and not strongly politically affilated as far as I can tell. But in this I can well be wrong, since you say you saw that – how exactly did the antifa members self-identify if I might ask?

@freemo I wasn't aware all these positions don't have any power. Why do they require confirmations then, do you know?

@freemo That is very surprizing to me, I thought it was explicitly forbidden by the emoluments law. DId Biden also do this while he was the VP?

Anyway it seems to me that renting to people who by law have to stay close to you is much different to sending planes to your resorts or organizing international meetings in your business, both in scale and in substance.

By the way, since you implied you might know – is there any other place the Secret Service agents could live while staying close enough to Biden?

@freemo I think the FOIA data is actually available, only hard to search, so technically there is no need to believe heresay.

I know revealing tax returns is not mandatory, but it was a nice informal policy while it lasted. There are two main reasons due to which I think it was useful: 1. Making it clear how the candidate gets money, which makes corruption harder to hide. 2. Essentially the reason you pointed out, but not caricaturised – if people feel someone pays less than their fair share of taxes (whatever that may be) this informs them as to what tax policy that person will support, which is a very vald reason to vote for or against someone.

@freemo This response reads as if you haven't read the Mueller report – if that is the case I would definitely recommend at least reading the various conclusion subsections, they are quite informative.

To be more explicit, Russia was influencing the elections and there were undisclosed meetings between Trump campaign officials and Russians – that much was established by the investigation, before it had to focus on the obstruction angle, since it was so disruptive. While this doesn't say much as to whether there was actual illegal activity by the campaign (at least with respect to Russians; other illegal activity of the campaign is matter of public record), it definitely shows the obstruction was significant.

Many instances of obstruction are also clearly documented in the report, if you want more reliable sources than media.

I would also argue that not cooperating with investigations, while may be good advice for most people (although it's scary that it is in the US), shouldn't be the standard by which public figures are held. And, as far as I know, the standard was higher before – I recall at least Clinton having no problems testifying (both of them actually, on separate occasions) and I thought other people from the Obama admin also testified, although finding the instances is harder, so maybe I'm wrong in that regard.

Some examples of Biden abusing power would be nice.

@freemo Thanks for all the responses, I'll try answering all of them in their respective subthreads.

1, 2, 4, 5, 7 and 8 are not really differentiating between Biden/Harris and Trump/Pence, since finding equivalent problems with the other pair is trivial. (I would like use this moment to offer my deepest condolences with regard to your overall political system.) Moreover, at least 2, 4, 7 are in such clear opposition to the current Democratic party positions that they are extremely unlikely to be repeated.

9 sounded to me as an exaggeration and I cannot find anything reasembling that statement. Even right-wing sites only admonish him for not completely ruling out the idea, so I'm not sure where you got it. (Non right wing have some interviews in which he claims that he wouldn't want the mandate to be federal and only take any action if the vaccine was approved by the FDA, so much different to what you said.)

Concerning 6 I'm very _very_ skeptical towards any claims of health problems of candidates. This seems to be a standard practice by Cambridge Analytica et consortes, which seems to work unusually well for some reason. I encontered it first with Hillary Clinton, who, as we all know was only months from death in 2016 due to pneumonia (afaik she's still doing fine) and later with Bronisaw Komorowski, who literally had a rapidly progressing case of dementia (since you might not know – previous president of Poland; as of now doing fine, although he lost the election). I can go deeper into the CA connection if you want, but it's mostly my suspicions based on relatively flaky evidence, so it probably shouldn't convince you. Anyway, claiming a candidate is very sick and creating video evidence of the "fact" seems to be common recently.

3 is actually a very strong argument, I wasn't aware of the fact (US citizens also being victims of the drone strikes) earlier (although the phrasing you used did not make looking for more information easy – most sites that revel in the word "murder" are so right-wing they tried very hard to avoid giving any details about the people targeted and justifications for targetting them, for obvious reasons). All the facts surrounding the case make it somewhat less clear than the way you presented it, but it's definitely a very bad thing. Thank you very mich for pointing it out.

@freemo
Final note

I restricted myself to only instances where I believe Trump damages the democratic and rule of law systems in the US, specifically omitting other policy. That is due to the fact that I believe the continued
adherence to these systems of checks and balances is crucial for the continued wellbeing of a nation, without them it risks sliding rapidly into authoritarianism. There are still rational reasons to vote for the man (the closest to my heart being the fact that he did not start any new wars), but I struggle to imagine a reasonable person choosing them over democratic standards. Again, I am not a US citizen, so the impact
on me is limited and unclear whether bad or good (legitimizing dismantling democracy vs an actually more isolationist US foreign policy), so I would mostly like to learn whether the above beliefs arose due to propaganda or they are actually correct.

Thanks for any answers, but please don't feel pressured if you have better things to do or are sick of the topic.

@freemo
Five: Endorsements of violence and extremism

The most relevant example is still fresh -- the "I LOVE TEXAS!" tweet with the video of trucks surrounding a Biden campaign bus.
There were many earlier examples too, the "fine people on both sides" comment, "stand back and stand by" directed towards a militant group, the main reaction to the Michigan kidnapping attempt being criticizing the attempted victim (and afaik no actual condemnation of the attempt?).

I am not completely sure that I have all the facts right in these cases, in particular as to how dangerous the various endorsed groups are, but at least the first one is very clear-cut. I looked at the context of the statements and it ranges from somewhat lessening the impact, but still bad (with the both sides comment) to actually worse (with the "stand by" comment). I would have this point higher, since political violence is a very serious thing, but it is known that Trump says whatever his saliva brings to his tongue (to borrow an expression from my native language), so hopefully the impact of his words is lessened by fewer people taking him seriously. This is, however, quite a terrible excuse.

@freemo
Four: Appointments by decree

This one I'm actually very unsure about, but it's not topic, and learning that I am wrong would be useful. Supposedly Trump appointed multiple people as "Acting $POSITION", bypassing Senate confirmations. By itself this is not a problem, but the claim is that this happened to significantly more positions than in previous administrations and for a longer time without the confirmation.
What is surprizing and especially suspicious to me is that the current
senate is generally aligned with the president, so why would he even do that? This is both suspicious in the sense that I'm less inclined to trust what I think I know of this case, as well as in the sense of arousing suspicion of foul play if it actually happened.

@freemo
Three: Profiteering and corruption

There are a couple really obvious cases, like the military planes being re-routed to Trump properties, or him suggesting a G7 summit should happen at his resort. There are also less clear ones, like the Saudis renting rooms at Trump's hotel, which I would label as coincidental normally, but the brazen ones plus the lack of transparency I mentioned before raises my priors for foul play.

The blatant profiteering seems pretty clear-cut, the actual political corruption less so. Again, maybe I lack knowledge about the US system, but I was under the impression at least the two former points were clearly illegal.

@freemo
Two: Lowering transparency

I am a bit biased towards the importance of transparency, hence the high position on the list. I believe it is crucial for any system
we want to keep working to be transparent, and complicated ones like
politics are especially sensitive in this regard.

This is somewhat connected to the first point, discouraging people from testifying, but it is much more prevalent. The refusal to publish taxes returns is the poster boy for this issue, but there are also White House visitor logs, the significant increase in rejected FOIA requests, and, most recently, the restrictions to access of COVID-19 data.

I am much less sure about this point than the previous, especially the FOIA part -- I would be very surprized if the media lied about the increase, but the ones I was able to find didn't specify whether the total number of requests also increased. That data is not easy to query (sic), but checking a couple of data points on the foia.gov web page seems to confirm the claims -- the increases in the number of requests seemed in line with previous years and lower than the claimed increases in rejections.

@freemo
One: Obstruction of justice

Trump took multiple actions to hinder the Mueller investigation, including firing and pressuring people to resign, publicly verbally attacking people who cooperated with authorities, and ordering his subordinates to thwart the investigation in various ways.

The Wikipedia page on the Mueller report provides a reasonable overview of the situation, but the report itself is obviously the main source, and I have read significant fragments of it (but not everything).

This issue seems like an obvious abuse of power to me, and the facts associated with it are mostly a matter of public record, so I don't think I am a victim of propaganda in these regards (although I am open to somehow being wrong here). If I were to guess what I might be getting wrong -- maybe this is not unusual for US politics, and such abuses of power are normal there? And in this case the propaganda only highlighted Trump's abuses to me, despite them being a common occurrence?