Agree. He did more harm in a relative sense (which I think is valid). I think most would agree that the morals around stealing from Walmart are different than the morals of stealing from a senile grandma.
Your examples are good reasons to look at all the details of a crime when determining the punishment. I would say for the second scenario to be considered as bad, the thief would have to know what the money is being used for.
I am not going to argue which gets a larger penalty by law, as not all laws make sense, or have punishments that make sense for the crime.
The line of argument seems to be (correct me if I’m wrong @thunderbolt23), that we should look to the courts for guidance when making personal judgments on the behavior of others, specifically past presidents when using a theft analogy to attempt to quantify the perceived severity and frequency of their falsehoods?
Sorry if I missed something, I’m just following along during dead space in conference calls.
Alternate to everybody else? To each other? I thought here at least we were mostly agreeing. Maybe everyone else doesn’t agree?
Agree, it seemed to come from what I inferred @steelcurtain as saying lying is lying to which I don’t agree (maybe that is not what he meant, just what I inferred). Then the theft comparisons came about.
Not so much that as the justice system reflects what is common sense - if someone rips off someone else to the tune of $200, it’s not aa bad as ripping them off of $2,000. Context can matter at times - a poor person can miss $200 more than Warren Buffet will miss $2,000, but that’s more of a mitigating/aggravating issue, and to suggest there’s facially no difference based on the amounts makes no sense.
I think he is pointing out the irony of @thunderbolt23 statement regarding the construction of fictions when the debate was over a situation that was fictional to begin with.
We don’t have two people in front of us who have actually stolen $1000 and $200. This is an imaginary event.
Okay that’s different and a little closer to what I think most people here are talking about when making a value judgment on someone else.
I’ve burned relationships to the ground for under $200 in damages done to me and let others slide with behavior that cost me a lot more than $1000. Different calculations were taking place.
Trump, and his movement have so fundamentally changed Americans value of truth and honor that he coined the term “alternative facts” in his first days in office… and was celebrated for it. If previous president’s lied, they did their damnedest to hide and deny it because they fundamentally understood that either lying was bad, or at least the American public thought lying was bad.
Trump has proven that lying and falsehoods are acceptable to the American public.
In this fiction I and a few others on this forum agree to work together to make it seem like you are not “Californiagrown” at all. More like RussiaGrown. We present all of this as if it were fact, and as if our sources were rock-solid.
You know this isn’t the case, and you do something CRAZY like accuse us of making our facts up.
I know, I know, nothing like this ever happened and I remain just as convinced as anyone that Trump is Putin’s secret agent. But let’s pretend that it did…
Would you judge the use of “alternative facts” differently?
That term came from Trump’s first “unofficial” spokesperson Kelly Anne Conway.
It was so jaw-dropping when she first said it that 1) journalist were caught off guard because it was such a “Did she actually just say what we thought she said?” moment and 2) it has been something added to the American Lexicon and will seriously go down in history.
(Where has Kelly Anne been recently? Is she in the West Wing?)
Oh she is still killing it in the west wing. That woman is phenomenal at her job, and I have nothing but glowing things to say about her, seriously. She is pitbull loyal, and had the impossible job of defending trump on every major media outlet before his antics became totally normalized. I’ve said it before, but if i ever become rich and an asshole, i will put Kelly Anne on my full time payroll and have her travel everywhere with me.
Also, her husband is hilarious. That relationship is hilarious.
No, i would say you are telling lies. I wouldn’t accuse you of making FACTS up, id accuse you of making that false narrative up. Pretty simple.
Correct me if i am wrong, but the term came about because of Trumps insistence upon proclaiming massively inflated inauguration crowd numbers despite being told by everyone the true numbers. And my girl KAC had to come up with something to refute irrefutable facts, so she came up with the term Alternative Facts on live TV one beautiful Sunday morning. She knew very well she was sent out there to tell lies, but couldnt say her talking points were lies… so she got creative. And parts of america (including the president) ate it up, adopted the term and have normalized its use to make the act of lying funny and acceptable.
It’s a neck and neck race for dumbest. At least “my own truth” implies an interpretation of events. Maybe (hopefully) there would have been more pushback from the far left on its usage if “alternative fact” wasn’t common place for trumpkins.
Sucks when truth and facts get hijacked to mean the opposite
@Mufasa already did correct you and, by extension, me for carrying your assumption over to my fiction.
The point I’m driving at is that the terms “Fake News”, “Alternative Facts” can resonate with people for (in my opinion) perfectly legitimate reasons. The quality of information is so abysmally low right now, and never have the lines between activist and journalist been so blurred as they are right now. The distinction between reporting and opinion has never been blurrier, either.
This is plain to see, in my opinion. Never has there been such a saturation of journalists (not to mention much of pop culture) ready to tell you their interpretation of a President’s words instead of simply conveying the words he spoke, clearly and in the correct context.
I’ve spent about 15 minutes on twitter, aside from checking out a video or seeing what someone shares on facebook. It was a sewer I didn’t care to wallow in, unlike PWI.