Are you able to expand a bit?
Is it, now? He’s a corrupt convicted felon who brags about lying, which despite that was elected president. Do you think he gives a shit about anyone’s allegations? He’d sell your mother for a pack of peanuts. And why not? From his point of view he can do anything he wants and there will be no serious consequences.
I recently learned, thanks to another HN comment, that more than half of the USA population has a literacy level below the 6th grade. Suddenly it answered so many questions.
https://www.thenationalliteracyinstitute.com/post/literacy-s...
Kinda says it all.
People in polls repeatedly select stupid answer either due to confusion, trolling, bad poll design, not caring about what they select and so on.
See https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/12/noisy-poll-results-and... ("Lizardman’s Constant Is 4%")
> (a friend on Facebook pointed out that 5% of Obama voters claimed to believe that Obama was the Anti-Christ, which seems to be another piece of evidence in favor of a Lizardman’s Constant of 4-5%. On the other hand, I do enjoy picturing someone standing in a voting booth, thinking to themselves “Well, on the one hand, Obama is the Anti-Christ. On the other, do I really want four years of Romney?”)
> It may be you who lacks the critical reasoning skills. Did you happen to think about the fact that 23% of the population is actually younger than age 12, meaning they wouldn’t even be in 6th grade yet?
This is incredibly ironic. It’s 54% of the adult population, which is abundantly clear by the provided link (in a bullet point, it’s hard to miss). It only takes a minimum of good faith and critical reasoning skills to:
1. Realise that of course the statistic will not include people younger than the level used as the threshold.
2. Click through and at least skim the link to steel man someone’s argument.
From the link.
They completely changed their post after the Tronno reply, which made the replies look out of context.
Their original post, quoted verbatim in my other comment¹, was:
> It may be you who lacks the critical reasoning skills. Did you happen to think about the fact that 23% of the population is actually younger than age 12, meaning they wouldn’t even be in 6th grade yet?
What did they find? He was convicted for paying with his own money to pay a pornstar to hide an affair, in a case that CNN’s own head legal analyst said “contorted the law.” https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/trump-was-convicted-...
At a certain point you gotta put up or shut up.
Where is what?
> 90% of lawyers are partisan democrats who have hated Trump from day 1 because he is a threat to the professional managerial class.
That is clearly a conspiratorial statistic taken out of nowhere.
> He was convicted for paying with his own money to pay a pornstar to hide an affair
He was convicted of falsifying business records with intent to defraud and conspiring to “promote or prevent the election of any person to a public office by unlawful means”.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-charges-conviction-guilty...
95% of law firm contributions in 2019 went to Biden: https://news.bloomberglaw.com/us-law-week/snubbing-trump-law.... This support wasn’t out of economic interest. The overwhelming majority of lawyers are ideologically captured and hate Trump at a visceral and irrational level for not subscribing to that ideology.
> He was convicted of falsifying business records with intent to defraud and conspiring to “promote or prevent the election of any person to a public office by unlawful means”.
Why quote the statute instead of the facts, which aren’t really in dispute? After he had already won the election, he reimbursed his lawyer for paying off a pornstar through his family business, and booked the reimbursements as “legal expenses” instead of “pornstar payoffs.”
Brilliant minds came over from top law firms to fit those facts into to a clever legal theory. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carey_R._Dunne. They figured it out, just like the figured out how to make Google’s profits magically all materialize in Ireland. But the underlying conduct remains a politician covering up an affair. That’s the best the legal industry could do after eight years of digging.
Do you think Trump's being paid by ByteDance to lift the ban?
There is never a need to be that direct. Republican and Democrat donors tell politicians what positions to take. Trump doesn't need to take money directly from a company. He takes it from his donors, who in turn take it from the company in some form.
In this case, the theory is that billionaire Jeff Yass (an investor in Tik Tok) has "persuaded" Trump to flip his position.
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/jeff-yass-billionaire...
My understanding now is that now we've shifted from "ByteDance pays Trump to flip" to "American businessman Jeff Yass meets with Trump and convinces him to flip"
I hope you can understand that as a non-American observer I see a lot of distance between those two claims and find myself confused when they're treated with equivalency.
Non-democratic places have more direct path for bribes but otherwise its same.
I think that local level corruption in my small town in Canada or in yours in Switzerland is pretty markedly different from what’s been originally presented, which is that DJT was paid directly by ByteDance to adjust his position.
I'd still love your clarification though - do you still stand by the claim that Trump is being paid to reneg on his position re. TikTok, as per https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42755872 ?
Often this is accompanied by a public message of flattery or a donation to his "political" coffers.
An easy way is for TikTok to just promise to algorithm away any criticism of him in the US.
Politicians take political decisions, not logical ones.
The waters get pretty muddy if we're willing to suggest that American presidents are "paid" by other nations to enact policy which benefits said nations, it's not unreasonable to ask for clarity about such claims.
What I think you’re describing is political favor, something entirely different from what was originally presented.
Exactly. Money is the decree – the concrete representation of debt. A recognizable token that can be given to someone that says "I owe you something", which can subsequently be exchanged back by the recipient to get the something of value that they are owed. Which you already know if you've ever used money before, and no doubt you have.
But, as it pertains to the topic at hand, in cases where there is no reason to delay delivery of the actual value, you can skip holding the debt. You could go through the motions of receiving money, and then giving it right back in exchange for the thing of value that you are owed, but there is no practical difference between that and cutting money out of the picture and simply accept the thing of value as payment.
> What I think you’re describing is political favor
Money might be a tool used in offering political favor, I suppose, but that is well beyond the content of my comment about the function of money. How did you manage to reach this conclusion?
I think it's fairly obvious, no? The originally presented case was that Trump had received payment for assuring TikTok's survival. I've noted a few times in this thread that this is a really poor framing, and that it's more likely his actions were motivated by politics, not fiduciary gain.
Do you have some insults you’d like to sling?
None you have ever heard before, and which you most likely know you deserve. No need to feed you with any of that.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
Edit: it looks like we've had to warn you about this kind of thing more than once before, e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26742673. However, the good news is that it seems to be rare in your otherwise very good commenting history (for which, thank you!) so it should be easy to avoid in the future.
To my knowledge, if I'm understanding rbanffy's position correctly, this would be the first time in history US president was directly being bribed by a foreign actor, so I still maintain it's worth seeking clarification.
Am I wrong in holding skepticism here? I don't doubt there are political points to be gained for Trump here, especially given the domestically controversial nature of the ban, but I'd really love for someone to hold true to the original notion under question that someone (ByteDance, CCP, etc.) is "paying the incoming president", as rbanffy suggseted.
Certainly. The whole corruption setup is always done in such a way that there is never direct proof, only some more or less well hidden ones. So if you expect somebody here will post a recording of their bribe negotiations, that won't ever happen, Trump would directly order CIA to eliminate such person with extreme prejudice, and that's how it would have been done.
Look, he is crook, smart, properly fucked up man baby with issues that no psychologist could ever fix, but he is a crook at the core. These are facts. Enough evidence with few seconds of googling to condemn 10 such persons of highly amoral and sometimes also criminal behavior. And everybody knows it, even here. So folks understand how to deal with such currently most powerful person, so they do.
I don't get where your doubts come from. Facts are out there, you only need to connect few dots.
As somebody coming from a third-world country, it’s a matter of fact that the people view politicians as a corrupt group. They think they are better than the people they represent, they are multiple times richer than the population and campaigns range from distorted truths to clear lies.
Proven or unproven, a claim that a given politician received bribes to influence something is not met with skepticism, but a mere “yeah, of course”!
Some say the US is a rich third-world country, or becoming one.
Why do we bother with the farce that elected representatives are better than us? They are looking for their own interests.