Poor choice of phrasing on my part, now that I look at it. My intended gist was that he'd been recognizably trying to pretend he'd really always known <insert topic he'd expressed and demonstrated ignorance of> long before people started calling him out on, and that I suspect that people's initial willingness to set it aside because it just wasn't worth pursuing had emboldened him into thinking that he'd successfully bluffed us rather than the lot of us just rolling our collective eyes at the transparent lie and moving on.Excuse you?!
Suffice it to say that I find it to be very telling that you're now trying to claim knowledge of defamation and the generalized existence of non-protected speech while trying to prove that you're familiar with the concepts of incitement and solicitation, indicating that you're still unfamiliar enough with the topics that you remain unable to distinguish between them.You think I don't know you can get in trouble from threatening people or defamation or saying "bomb" on an airplane?
Not remotely. Setting aside for a minute that I'm explaining existing precedent to you and listing out the factors that indicate Mens Rea and culpability, the specific point you're referring to there was that Trump riled up a mob that he had reason to believe had violent intent, specifically moved to better enable that by telling security to stop checking for weapons, and pointed them at a target that they then violently assaulted. This is, once again, where the imminent lawless action test comes in: It centers on speech directed to and likely to incite imminent lawless action (e.g. an immediate riot).You do realize you then have to apply this to EVERYONE right? If you say you can't rile up a crowd if you know there are weapons, then people riling up BLM protesters with speeches will have the same applied to them. You can just easily shut down any protest by having someone purposefully come with a gun and tell the person giving the speech that they have a gun and then the speech wouldn't be able to be made. Pretty dangerous precedent you're wanting to set here that can effectively squash any protest you want. And, this is all because you don't like Trump.
That your takeaway from that is to claim you could shutdown any speech by telling the speaker that you had a gun is both dishonest and...well, stupid. For starters, the proportionate remedy would be removal of the weapon or the person with the weapon if they get belligerent about it. Second, once again, we're specifically referring to an instance wherein the speaker allegedly specifically told event security to stop checking for weapons because he was sure that they weren't going to be used against him, which is a very different beast than simply hearing that somebody had a gun. Rather it's circumstantial evidence indicating that Trump expected a lot of his rallygoers to be armed as they marched on the Capitol with the goal of making Congress overturn the results. And finally: If a speech riling up a crowd results in a riot: OF COURSE THEY'RE GOING TO BE CHARGED WITH INCITEMENT! For fuck's sake, it's literally in the books! "(d) Any person who willfully incites another to engage in a riot and that inciting results in a riot or is directly and imminently likely to produce a riot is guilty of a Class A1 misdemeanor." and escalating from there.
Yet again, you make the critical mistake of assuming that the people you're talking to must be as intellectually lazy as you are and therefore cannot have actually researched their points.
And yet again you fall back to arguing that since he said peaceful one time in an hour long speech that is all you need to know about it and nothing can ever convince you otherwise.Trump literally gave exact specifics on marching to the capitol peacefully to have your voices heard. Everything about "fighting" and whatnot were generalities, the same a coach of a team would say in half-time locker room speech to fire up the team. Specifics outweigh generalities. If there were specifics about directly being violent that would then make null the peaceful specifics. But that didn't happen.
If you were arguing the virtues of any one state being able to make a sweeping declaration, that would be one thing. But that's not what you've been arguing. What you've been arguing is that the evidence doesn't show Trump to be an insurrectionist and insisting that arguments suggesting his guilt were "all because you don't like Trump", and mischaracterizing the evidence so you could scoff at it as irrational.One state shouldn't have a say in this manner, that is the point. You can't have states, based on federal law, interpreting it differently. Trump should be on all the ballots or none of the ballots, anything else can't happen. If the argument of the case isn't about Trump being an insurrectionist or not, it's on the prosecuting attorneys for presenting the case with an asinine argument that's just a waste of everyone's time. If they are challenging that a state has the right to interpret that amendment how they please, then they are challenging the wrong thing.
Notice how you also said that you "feel the case is paper thin against Trump". Also recall that my first statement to you was about how you kept on invoking the song "Right to Party" as if it were some zinger of a comparison that proved that the case against Trump was irrational hysteria that didn't stand up to scrutiny.This was like my first reply to you. What I meant by "I haven't seen anything that would make him an insurrectionist" is referring to his Jan 6th speech. Notice how I said I don't know everything he's said and did?
And the point that you've consistently failed to understand is that I was providing context on the circumstances behind the speech that made the characterization of it as incitement far more warranted than claiming the same about a 30 year old that thought yourself clever for declaring it equivalent to.Then when you say there is more than just the speech, I replied with the following:
Let me quote for you what I actually said:I get yelled at and called ignorant and not understanding basic legal frameworks when the decision was unanimous. But according to you guys (not you necessarily Bedinsis, I don't think you called me ignorant and whatnot), I don't know what I'm talking about, and SCOTUS will just "make up shit" and Trump will win because the conservative judges will outvote the liberal ones. Yeah, none of that happened.
Since I evidently have to explain even this to you, "merits of the case" mean judging based off the facts of the case that would either establish guilt or innocence. "Based on the evidence, how do you find", to put it directly. So when I say that a court is making a decision irrespective of the merits of the case, that means that they aren't judging whether or not the case proves guilt, but instead entirely on technical or procedural issues (e.g. when the statute of limitations has run out, evidence of guilt doesn't factor in). My analysis, such as it was, was that the justices had indicated that they weren't judging the case based off the evidence of whether or not Trump was guilty of insurrection, but instead on whether or not the courts should be allowed to make such a ruling as a matter of course, on principle if you will. And I specified this because your arguments with me have been focusing on whether or not the evidence showed Trump's guilt, and you asked me whether or not Trump would legally be declared an insurrectionist. My answer was that what I'd seen indicated that the upcoming ruling was going to sidestep that question and instead void the decision by declaring that courts could not rule on the matter at all.And again, even without that, this kind of case is the type that makes the Supreme Court cagey to begin with, and for this specifically, one the justices are giving every indication that they aren't actually judging the merits of the case but rather have been focusing on the political ramifications of the case irrespective of those merits. They've been openly contemptuous of the very concept, to the point that Kagan out and said that "the question that you have to confront is why a single state should decide who gets to be president of the United States ", which feels like a pretty strong indication that their ruling will likely be decided as a matter of political principle with little to no regard for the evidence for the case, and basically boil down to declaring that the courts shouldn't be allowed to rule that Trump was guilty of insurrection, specifically because such a decision would impact the election. Not to put too fine a point on it, Kagan's stated logic reads as "Not guilty because he's a political frontrunnner" rather than "Not guilty because the evidence didn't show it". Hence the "if we're judging the case purely on merit" qualifier. Statements from the Justices at this time indicate that the merits of the case are going to have very little to do with their decision.
And if you stop and read the ruling, you might notice that that's exactly what happened, even going a bit further than I expected in that I had presumed they'd simply say the state courts could not make that judgement, but the ruling actually goes as far as to say that the Federal courts can't do it either, instead declaring that it is something that only Congress can do (which, frankly, is a judgment I share Ag3ma's concerns about).
Last edited: