US Politics Mega-thread - Page 4860

On August 31 2016 10:47 xDaunt wrote:

And where exactly has the Supreme Court ruled that Trump can't file lawsuits against people where he ultimately is going to lose on summary judgment for failure to demonstrate actual malice? Where exactly does the First Amendment prohibit that? Or any law?

I'll just cut to the chase: it's perfectly legal for him to do it, and it's well-within his rights to do so. Which is my point.

On August 31 2016 10:47 xDaunt wrote:

And where exactly has the Supreme Court ruled that Trump can't file lawsuits against people where he ultimately is going to lose on summary judgment for failure to demonstrate actual malice? Where exactly does the First Amendment prohibit that? Or any law?

I'll just cut to the chase: it's perfectly legal for him to do it, and it's well-within his rights to do so. Which is my point.

On August 31 2016 09:33 farvacola wrote:

The long and short of it is that Apple filed as a non-resident yet still Irish company in Ireland(this is where the peculiarities of Ireland are at play, to what extent I'm not entirely sure), was accordingly subjected to a massive exemption via its non-resident status under Irish law, and then because of active international agreements, this status precluded collection of the same tax in other nations, namely the US. That's my rough understanding of it, though admittedly, it's difficult to parse exactly how they got away with something that looks like naked fraud. If this were before a US court, the Judge would find an Irish lawyer right away

For the past few decades, presidential elections have been dominated by voters of the Baby Boom and previous generations, who are estimated to have cast a majority of the votes. But their election reign may end this November, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis of census data.

Baby Boomers and prior generations have cast the vast majority of votes in every presidential election since 1980, data from the Census Bureau’s November Current Population Survey voting supplement show. In 2012, Boomers and previous generations accounted for 56% of those who said they voted. And these generations dominated earlier elections to an even greater degree.

But the ranks of Millennial and Generation X eligible voters have been growing, thanks to the aging-in of Millennials and naturalizations among foreign-born adults. These generations matched Boomers and previous generations as a share of eligible voters in 2012 and are now estimated to outnumber them. As of July, an estimated 126 million Millennial and Gen X adults were eligible to vote (56% of eligible voters), compared with only 98 million Boomers and other adults from prior generations, or 44% of the voting-eligible population.

Although the electorate is increasingly comprised of younger generations, this does not imply that the electorate as a whole is getting younger.

Perhaps more importantly, eligible voters don’t necessarily translate into actual voters – that all depends on who shows up to vote on Election Day. Whether Millennial and Gen X adults outnumber Boomers and other generations in November will hinge on voter turnout.

In the 2012 election an estimated 70% of eligible voters in the Baby Boom, Silent and Greatest generations voted. Turnout among these generations was similar in 2004 (70%) and 2008 (69%).

If (and it’s a big if) 70% of Boomer-and-older eligible voters turn out in November, Millennials and Xers could match them even by turning out at much lower rates. A turnout rate of 70% among older voters would translate to 68.6 million votes. Millennials and Gen X could match that number of votes with a turnout rate of 54.5%. This level of turnout among the two younger generations seems plausible based on past elections.

In the 2012 election, 53.9% of Millennial and Gen X eligible voters turned out. Turnout among these generations was even higher in 2004 (54.2%) and higher still in 2008 (56.6%).

Historical patterns of voter turnout by generation also suggest the likely end of dominance by Boomers and prior generations. In general, as a generation ages, turnout rises, hits a peak, and then declines.

And I will be bringing more libel suits as people -- maybe against you folks. I don’t want to threaten, but I find
that the press is unbelievably dishonest. In the case of O’Brien, I liked it because I cost him a lot of time and a lot
of energy and a lot of money knowing that the case -- the judges said, well, you may be right, but -- it never really got
litigated because they never let it go to court.

R O'H: How much did that case cost? That must have costs both sides a lot. What do you think the total was?

Donald Trump: It costs them a lot. It didn’t cost me very much because I make good deals with my lawyers.

On August 31 2016 10:35 KwarK wrote:

Hi,

Paying a shitton does not mean that it's not disproportionate if you're a billionaire and they're not. Trump is a billionaire.

Because of the meaning of the word disproportionate which you clearly didn't know until I called you out on it and you fucking looked it up. You know how I know you didn't know it? Because you used it incorrectly. Right fucking there. When you argued that he couldn't "bleed others' time and money disproportionately" because "he's paying a shitton".

If we were to take a random sample of people who know the meaning of the word disproportionately and ask them the question
"If something costs two people money and one of them is paying a shitton does that mean that the other one cannot be paying disproportionately more?"
you know what they'd say?
They'd say "no, it depends on how much they have because of, you know, the meaning of the word disproportionately".

I don't know if the retards you work with let you get away with this shit but any idiot reading this exchange knows that paying a shitton does not preclude bleeding them disproportionately. The trick is to know the meaning of the words before you use them to avoid getting called out.

But you then immediately jumped in to a different defence, which incidentally undermines the first one. You see it now doesn't matter that you attempted to prove that the costs couldn't be disproportionate because Trump's costs were a shitton (literally what you said, read your own damn quote above).



So it turns out you now believe that Trump wasn't paying more than they were to drag them through the mud. So we disregard the "it can't be disproportionate because it was a shitton and I totally know the meaning of the word disproportionate even though I used it wrong" argument and we move to "no, I actually knew it wasn't disproportionate because I knew Trump didn't spend very much".

That lasts for all of one fucking post and then we're back to

At which point we can conclude that Trump probably is paying a shitton, probably more than them but probably not proportionately more than them, and you've abandoned your Trump quote defence and have moved back to the "I totally know the meaning of the word disproportionate but I can't tell you right now" defence.

At this point you're so fucking lost you couldn't find your way back to your own argument with a fucking lighthouse. Get a pen and paper and draw a map of what you have argued in the last few hours. See what you find.

On June 13 2016 11:05 xDaunt wrote:
I think Kwark's ban of Testie in the Orlando shooter thread shows all that I need to see about why the US Politics Thread was closed. This isn't about a new, worse tone or lessened level of discourse. Let me be blunt: the level of discourse has always been shitty from various participants. And the fact that Kwark is the one who shut the thread down is incredibly ironic, because he, of all of the mods who posted in that thread, did the most to create precisely the environment about which he now complains.

On August 31 2016 11:16 KwarK wrote:
xDaunt's wild adventure on whether Trump can/does/should use lawsuits he knows he cannot win to attack journalists who offend him.

Act 1, in which xDaunt claims Trump cannot use lawsuits to attack journalists because they'll win the money back so it doesn't happen so why worry about it
+ Show Spoiler +

Unfortunately for xDaunt Trump had this to say on the matter



In which he explained that he cost O'Brien a lot of money with legal expenses and that he will be doing the same to other journalists unless they start treating him better. Doesn't really look good for xDaunt's defence that Trump couldn't possibly do that. But fortunately we can then move on to Act 2.

Act 2, in which xDaunt claims that Trump can attack these people with lawsuits and that he should
+ Show Spoiler +


Thus bringing us to Act 3 in which xDaunt concedes that Trump can't win these cases which Trump says exists purely to cost the journalists legal fees
+ Show Spoiler +

And the dramatic conclusion
+ Show Spoiler +

It was a wild ride from pages ago when xDaunt talking down to Plansix and saying that the threat was hollow because Trump couldn't do it anyway but I for one am glad we went on it.

On August 31 2016 11:38 xDaunt wrote:
it's not even worth talking to you anymore.

On August 31 2016 12:03 Aquanim wrote:
What exactly is the argument you are trying to make, @xDaunt?

Are you arguing that Trump is morally and legally justified in levelling lawsuits he knows are very unlikely to succeed at journalists for the purposes of costing them time and money, even when they do not succeed?

Is the argument something along the lines of "if Trump believes somebody has committed libel, but Trump can't prove it, punishing them with legal fees, etc. is a reasonable thing to do in this situation, in lieu of any formal legal mechanism through which he can act on that belief"?

Are you arguing that he is, or is not, actually succeeding in this objective?

This argument has gone around in circles a lot and I am no longer clearly following everybody's position.