I heard it becomes more true the more you repeat their spin. — NOS4A2
to set favorable voting conditions — NOS4A2
pressures social media to suppress unfavorable information — NOS4A2
and opposes one candidate’s efforts at every single step — NOS4A2
Of course, it all favored one candidate. — NOS4A2
Republican efforts to impeach President Joe Biden suffered a blow after fresh evidence emerged showing his bid to remove Ukrainian Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin in 2015 represented U.S. government policy.
Then-Vice President Biden met Petro Poroshenko, the Ukrainian president at the time, in December 2015, after which he claimed he'd threatened to withhold $1 billion in U.S. aid to Kyiv, unless Shokin was removed from his post, which he subsequently was.
Some conservatives have suggested Biden was attempting to protect Ukrainian energy company Burisma, the board of which his son, Hunter Biden, had joined in 2014, by moving against Shokin. However a pre-meeting memo prepared for Biden by the State Department, dated November 25, 2015, made it clear that removing Shokin was the Obama administration's policy.
You should recommend that he give a state of the nation speech to the Rada in which he reenergizes that effort and rolls out new proposed reforms. There is wide agreement that anti-corruption must be at the top of this list, and that reforms must include an overhaul of the Prosecutor General’s Office including removal of Prosecutor General Shokin, who is widely regarded as an obstacle to fighting corruption, if not a source of the problem.
He fired them because they were not willing to do their job. — javi2541997
A Ukrainian investigation of gas company Burisma is focused solely on activity that took place before Hunter Biden, son of former U.S. Vice President Joe Biden, was hired to sit on its board, Ukraine’s anti-corruption investigation agency said.
...
The National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU) said an investigation was ongoing into permits granted by officials at the Ministry of Ecology for the use of natural resources to a string of companies managed by Burisma.
But it said the period under investigation was 2010-2012, and noted that this was before the company hired Hunter Biden.
...
The NABU’s investigation related to the 2010-2012 period is not particularly active, Kholodnytsky added.
“At the moment, this case is up in the air, so to speak. Up in the air means that there is no active investigative work ongoing. At the moment, detectives and prosecutors do not understand what they are supposed to be investigating,” Kholodnytsky said.
THE CHAIRMAN: So let me ask you a little bit more again about this false narrative since recanted. Just to be absolutely clear about this, when the Vice President was asked to make the case, or help make the case for Shokin's firing, this was the policy of the State Department, and the State Department was asking the Vice President to assist with the execution of that Policy?
MR. KENT: That would be a correct assessment, yes.
THE CHAIRMAN: And it was the policy of other international organizations as well that recognized that Shokin was corrupt?
MR. KENT: Correct. He was not allowing for reform of the prosecutor general Service, and in contrast, he actually was actively undermining reform of the prosecutor general service and our assistance.
What if it is not merely not the case, but is also physically impossible that we could be brains in a vat? — Janus
since everything would then be an artificial construct — Janus
If a physicist says it is physically impossible for something to travel faster than the speed of light, are they begging the question? — Richard B
However, as you put it, this does not refute the possibility that this experience of “scientists demonstrating the BIV cannot function” was not fabricated in some BIV. But why should we say logical possibility trumps physical impossibility? — Richard B
This is where this type of metaphysical reasoning fails, it starts out trying to say something about the world in which we live in, but quickly degrades into phantasm where it logically excluded any verification, falsification, confirmation gathered by our experiences. — Richard B
When I shake someone’s hand I believe I experience the situation with my entire body, since the entire thing is being used to perform the act. My trouble is with the biology of it. My question is: How can one take every experience of a handshake, from standing to grasping someone’s hand to leaning forward etc, and put all that as an experience in the brain? — NOS4A2
Stimulating the visual cortex with electrodes in the blind is a far cry from mimicking reality. — NOS4A2
I'm not following this. If you accept semantic externalism, the object language "I am a brain in a vat" does not and cannot speak to the meta language assertion that the speaker is a brain in a vat. — hypericin
I think the fact that both Putnam and Descartes remove the senses and the rest of the body from their thought experiment is telling, as if experience could occur without blood and bones and lungs.
Other more fundamental perceptual and sensual cues would be absent, for instance the perception of up and down, the effects of gravity, wether one is standing or sitting, or the fact that he forever has to see his own nose in his periphery, not to mention that such a being could never be alive in the first place. — NOS4A2
Should this be, "If semantic externalism is true then we cannot claim to be brains in a vat"? — hypericin
I am curious, do you all believe that a "BiV" is possible? If so, why do you believe it is possible? Just because you can imagine it? — Richard B
But wouldn't he be referring directly to the light and the patterns, even if he mistook them for a real tree? — NOS4A2
If the person is awake, they are aware that they are BiV. — NotAristotle
In that case, he would directly see the headset — NOS4A2
To be the same principle the body would in some way need to be silenced, or asleep, or unconscious, as in the movie Matrix. — NOS4A2
I agree with you, but that's different than saying that if semantic externalism is true then we cannot be brains in a vat. — NotAristotle
And you'd be like, "a real tree is not a BiV tree." But of course you'd be assuming that the tree you were pointing to was not a BiV tree. And that's the problem. There's no reason that you, the scientist, are not also a brain in a vat. The semantic externalism argument against BiV only goes through by assuming not BiV. — NotAristotle
The assumption that the body only keeps the brain alive and does not factor into phenomenal experience is a materialist form of dualism that ought to be dismissed as nonsense. — NOS4A2
But he assumes that we are not BiV in proving it. — NotAristotle
Doesn't semantic externalism require some kind of distinguishability? — NotAristotle
A Trump employee who monitored security cameras at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate abruptly retracted his earlier grand jury testimony and implicated Trump and others in obstruction of justice just after switching from an attorney paid for by a Trump political action committee to a lawyer from the federal defender’s office in Washington, prosecutors said in a court filing Tuesday.
David Shafer, former chairman of the Georgia Republican Party and one of the 19 defendants in the Georgia election interference case, claimed in a court filing that he and the other Republican electors who tried to falsely certify Donald Trump as the winner in Georgia were acting at the former president's behest.
Appearing to contradict former President Donald Trump's primary public defense in the classified documents case, former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows has told special counsel Jack Smith's investigators that he could not recall Trump ever ordering, or even discussing, declassifying broad sets of classified materials before leaving the White House, nor was he aware of any "standing order" from Trump authorizing the automatic declassification of materials taken out of the Oval Office, sources familiar with the matter tell ABC News.
When knowledge is defined as a justified true belief such that the justification necessitates the truth of the belief then the Gettier problem is no longer possible. — PL Olcott
The anti-nepotism statute, moreover, may well bar appointment only to paid positions in government. See 5 U.S.C. § 3110(c). Thus, even if it would prevent the President from putting his spouse on the federal payroll, it does not preclude his spouse from aiding the President in the performance of his duties.
Subject to the provisons of paragraph (2) of this subsection, the President is authorized to appoint and fix the pay of employees in the White House Office without regard to any other provision of law regulating the employment or compensation of persons in the Government service.
The nepotism I was referring to happened in the 2016-2020 time frame when President Trump hired Jared and Ivanka in defiance of the anti-nepotism statute 5 U.S. Code § 3110. — GRWelsh
Are these the same indictments published before the grand jury got a chance to decide whether to indict him or not? Yes, yes they are. — NOS4A2
Another farce, almost like everyone is infected with the same disease, rendering their sense of justice impotent.
At all times relevant to this Count of the Indictment, the Defendants, as well as others not
named as defendants, unlawfully conspired and endeavored to conduct and participate in criminal enterprise in Fulton County, Georgia, and elsewhere. Defendants Donald John Trump, Rudolph William Louis Giuliani, John Charles Eastman, Mark Randall Meadows, Kenneth John Chesebro, Jeffrey Bossert Clark, Jenna Lynn Ellis, Ray Stallings Smith III, Robert David Cheeley, Michael A. Roman, David James Shafer, Shawn Micah Tresher Still, Stephen Cliffgard Lee, Harrison William Prescott Floyd, Trevian C. Kutti, Sidney Katherine Powell, Cathleen Alston Latham, Scott Graham Hall, Misty Hampton, unindicted co-conspirators Individual 1 through Individual 30, and others known and unknown to the Grand Jury, constituted criminal organization whose members and associates engaged in various related criminal activities including, but not limited to, false statements and writings, impersonating public officer, forgery, filing false documents, influencing witnesses, computer theft, computer trespass, computer invasion of privacy, conspiracy to defraud the state, acts involving theft, and perjury.