20 Comments

> when I argued that defendants have slash should have a constitutional right to lie

I think there's a typo in this sentence, though I'm not sure what it is.

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It's an intentional stylistic flourish ✨

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Oh, I get it now; you're using the word "slash" in lieu of the character "/". I was originally interpreting it as one of the word's other meanings, and I couldn't figure out how any of those made sense in context.

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Haha. Yeah, that took me a second too.

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I too am surprised by this. Could it be the Trump's mode if speech trapped him?

It's one thing to deny an allegation and leave it implicit that they accuser is lying. Knowing Trump he probably not only made it explicit, but added some extra colour too.

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It's true that Trump does not do himself any favors, which includes his peculiar way of denying accusations. I left that subject untouched and wanted to just comment on the legal precedent here.

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"A federal judge rejected Trump’s arguments on the grounds that his statements were too far removed from the hallowed marble halls of a courthouse."

Neither Team R nor Team D cares in the least about law, principle, or consistency, when their goal is to hurt the other team.

That goes double for Trump, in his role as Team D Folk Devil. People who ought to know better threw around outlandish conspiracy theories about Trump without regard for whether they were supported by facts or even made any sense. In fact, they didn't care. The intent to harm Trump was all that was needed.

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I'm not aware of any evidence that the system's rules were bent just to hurt Trump, the judge's ruling on this issue followed well-established legal precedent.

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I am saying that I don't think it would matter.

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> Neither Team R nor Team D cares in the least about law, principle, or consistency, when their goal is to hurt the other team.

Amen to that. ICYMI, a relevant quote from Mark Twain's "Cornpone Opinions":

"Men think they think upon great political questions, and they do; but they think with their party, not independently; they read its literature, but not that of the other side; they arrive at convictions, but they are drawn from a partial view of the matter in hand and are of no particular value. They swarm with their party, they feel with their party, they are happy in their party's approval; and where the party leads they will follow, whether for right and honor, or through blood and dirt and a mush of mutilated morals."

http://www.paulgraham.com/cornpone.html

Seems that much of the political -- and scientific -- scene these days is littered with that "mush of mutilated morals" ...

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But surely not you, an independent thinker liberated from the morass of partisan ideology 🙄

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Natch-urally ... 😉🙂

But as a Canuck I don't have any allegiance to either "Team R" or "Team D", though that's not to say that Canada's several parties don't have any of their own "warts".

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The thing that takes me aback, is somehow you don't have to prove the truth of your claim to sue someone for lying.

On the face of it we'd expect Trump would have the greater claim to sue Carroll for defamation on the basis of her accusation, given that that he hasn't been convicted and in any normal order would be innocent until proven guilty.

Its very obvious the lowered standard of evidence for civil cases is being used as a end runaround evidentiary standards for accusations of criminal conduct... Somehow someone can both be "Not Guilty" in the eyes of the law, and yet it be Defamation for them to say what the courts say of them.

in defamation expecially there should be a wide swath, maybe 99% of potential disputes, where one faction is accusing the other of maliciously lying, the other by contesting it is inherently accusing the other of maliciously lying in their counter-arguments...

And the courts should just throw the whole thing out since any reasonable person would say "We don't have the evidence to determine one way or the other with any real confidence", and if we applied the 50%+1 civil standard then literally every insult and disagreement ever spoken, and all property to ever exist, would be at the mercy of defamation courts, and we'd live in a 1st amendment-less property-less totalitarian country.

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Litigation privilege aside, there is a difference between denying that one committed a crime and calling the accuser a liar (or worse). The former is about you. The latter is about her.

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You cannot deny an accusation without logically implying that your accuser is either lying or somehow mistaken. If your accuser denies that they're mistaken and you maintain your denial, is that materially different from calling them a liar?

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"The life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience."

--Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

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"Good judgement comes from experience; experience comes from bad judgement" -- Yogi Berra ... 😉🙂

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/02/23/judgment/

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"Do bears trap in the woods?" 😉🙂

I'll have to do a re-read to fully understand your argument and its context -- time only for a quick skim. But, offhand, it seems to underline Dickens' [?] comment how the law is so often "an ass" -- whether or not it carries a pregnant Mary into Jerusalem or not ...

But something of a case in point is the whole rather risible idea of "self-identification" in the context of transgenderism. Hard to imagine a more idiotic, poisonous, and cretinous idea than that -- UK "politicians" and "lawyers" might just as well have passed laws stipulating that children who "self-identify" as adults can drive cars, or buy booze or guns; that "2+2=5"; that the tide can only come in between the hours of 9 and 11 PM, Monday to Friday ...

King Canute is probably rolling over in his grave, if not in despair then in uncontrollable laughter. Someone once quipped that to those who feel, life is a tragedy, but to those who think, it is a comedy; guess most of us have a foot in both camps. 🙂

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I wish we as a society actually took "innocent until and unless proven guilty" more seriously. It's heartbreaking to see all the years add up on the National Registry of Exonerations and all the profiles on the Innocence Project.

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