I can't even finish an article like this. The levels of corruption are insane. Can anyone who is a Trump supporter actually defend this pardon with any coherence? I'm really willing to listen.
I expect a defence could be offered, the laws around KYC and money laundering tend to be fundamentally authoritarian and unsound in principle.
But the broader perspective is the US government is irredeemably corrupt, $300 million for a White House ballroom is relatively minor biscuits compared to the really nasty stuff and there is some level of bad behaviour that just needs to be tolerated. The pardon power is, almost by definition, only exercised to corrupt and bypass what people agreed was an appropriate legal process.
I'd be pretty surprised if past pardons were consistently above board; given the low-risk nature of a corruptly offered pardon I'd assume it is pretty routine. If I look through Wikipedia I see pardons that look superficially similar to Zhao's in other presidencies. Financial crime, sentence served out in the past, president intervenes to pardon them. Why did the president take an interest? Probably not because they were outraged at the moral implications of some banker being mistreated by the justice system.
> the laws … tend to be fundamentally authoritarian and unsound in principle.
Let's take the (big) step of presuming that that statement is true. We could further agree that changing the laws would be best — both to prevent future injustice and feasibly to relieve ongoing harms. That would be far more democratic and acceptable to society. The pardon power could also undo ongoing harms where legislative changes are impossible, if it were used across the board. Leave aside the queries of whether doing so would violate separation of powers by acting as a form of super legislation or super veto; and would violate the "faithfully execute" clause. The singleton use of the pardon of such offenses, only in a case of quid pro quo, does not remedy the posited unjust laws.
> But the broader perspective is the US government is irredeemably corrupt … and there is some level of bad behaviour that just needs to be tolerated.
In brief: this reduces to whataboutism (a form of the fallacy tu quoque); the fallacy that additional evil remedies the original evil; and presumes the validity of the conclusion as a premise en route to justifying it.
> The pardon power is, almost by definition, only exercised to corrupt and bypass what people agreed was an appropriate legal process.
Its proper use is as a retrospective safety valve to account for human fallibility in predicting the future and setting down prospective legislation. I think we would need to see some data to claim that it is only (or even predominantly) used to "corrupt" the legislative intent instead of remediating its imperfections.
> I'd be pretty surprised if past pardons were consistently above board; given the low-risk nature of a corruptly offered pardon I'd assume it is pretty routine.
This is mostly speculation, not argument. And corrupt pardons, especially at this scale and in large quantities (take the January 6 pardons, although many would say those were not so much corrupt in the monetary sense as corrupt in the sense of condoning those who helped try to grant someone power outside the system's rules) are not low-risk at all, from the considerations of adherence to the rule of law and institutionalism / systemic integrity.
> If I look through Wikipedia I see pardons that look superficially similar to Zhao's in other presidencies. Financial crime, sentence served out in the past, president intervenes to pardon them. Why did the president take an interest? Probably not because they were outraged at the moral implications of some banker being mistreated by the justice system.
If so, perhaps we should be able to find an example or twenty of quid pro quo after the passage of so much time. If not, that lack of evidence would undercut the posited defense substantially. Other possibilities are that the guilty somehow redeemed themselves through recompense and further good behavior. Regardless, the posited defense is largely speculation again, and reduces to the same fallacies noted above.
> In brief: this reduces to whataboutism (a form of the fallacy tu quoque); the fallacy that additional evil remedies the original evil; and presumes the validity of the conclusion as a premise en route to justifying it.
That is a common and subtle error - tu quoque is a fallacy but whataboutism is typically logically valid.
The core of tu-quoque is asserting a claim's truth because of unrelated actions of some unrelated party. Doesn't make sense. For example, I might argue that drinking is bad for you while holding a glass of something - the claim may or may not be correct and observing that I am drinking doesn't influence the truth of it because my behaviour doesn't control what is healthy in the abstract.
Politics is about picking one of a several available options, where "I compared the options and picked the best one based on their relative behaviour" is fundamentally reasonable. You can't choose who/what to vote for without making comparisons and engaging in whataboutisms. It is a comparative exercise. Most voters can't just vote for what they think is best in the abstract because the politicians are often homogeneous in their policy positions leaving little room to make real choices (it is a bit sad watching how consistently the US public tries to vote for the anti-war candidate and how dedicated the political class is to not getting the message).
Claiming that Trumps actions are, in abstract, correct because of poor behaviour by others is a fallacy. Claiming they are routine and therefore tolerable because there isn't an alternative is a different claim and logically coherent.
It's actually a pretty good argument too, it is a good showcase of how unprincipled most people are that they only seem to get worked up about, eg, politicians lying when it is Trump doing it. It has always been a baffling line of attack that people accuse Trump of being a liar like they expect it to be a problem. You'd almost think they had a room full of honest and principled politicians somewhere that were about to stand for election but then it turns out they're about to vote for the usual suspects in mainstream politics. Maybe they don't watch political debates for fun, I dunno. There is a great case for voting 3rd party in the US.
Fair enough regarding the subtleties of tu quoque, and thank you for the insight.
Whataboutism provides no support, or extremely weak support, to justify the pardon at issue. Nor does the rest: first, the "no other alternative" injects something entirely new into the discussion; and second, it does not justify the pardon, but attempts to justify either the person effecting the pardon or, more expressly, voting for that person.
On a more-pedestrian level, all that sounds like a shrug while saying "Trump gonna Trump!"
President going to president. I'd advise most people save their outrage for when Trump pardons his extended family at the end of his term a la Biden. I expect it'll be an ongoing feature of presidential politics and that seems like a bigger problem with corrupt pardons than this excessive ballroom. There should be an expectation that presidents - and their families - are not above the law.
> Nor does the rest: first, the "no other alternative" injects something entirely new into the discussion
I'm engaging in whataboutisms. Talking about the alternatives is very much already in the conversation. Trump isn't a president because everyone thinks Trump is the best man in the US for the job, it is because the alternative was the Biden/Harris administration or some generic Republican failure. And despite the quality of the opposition it still wasn't a sure win for him, which says a lot about how people are viewing the situation.
Bold to presume that Trump supporters even consider it defensible, as opposed to just what he wants / they want to do, or just burning it all down. Not everyone operates within the context of rationality and the concepts of argumentation and dialectic.
The cult of Trump is a team sport. There is no defending actions or rational. It’s Trump winning against the ‘deep state’, the ‘media’, and the ‘libs’. Anything and everything he pulls off is just another ‘win’ for team Trump- and the losers are the above mentioned groups. There is no ‘us’, there is no ‘nation’, there is no ‘rule of law’. There is not even an ‘after Trump’. It’s the here and now. You are either on Team Trump and winning when you see these articles- or you are a loser.
I can't even finish an article like this. The levels of corruption are insane. Can anyone who is a Trump supporter actually defend this pardon with any coherence? I'm really willing to listen.
I expect a defence could be offered, the laws around KYC and money laundering tend to be fundamentally authoritarian and unsound in principle.
But the broader perspective is the US government is irredeemably corrupt, $300 million for a White House ballroom is relatively minor biscuits compared to the really nasty stuff and there is some level of bad behaviour that just needs to be tolerated. The pardon power is, almost by definition, only exercised to corrupt and bypass what people agreed was an appropriate legal process.
I'd be pretty surprised if past pardons were consistently above board; given the low-risk nature of a corruptly offered pardon I'd assume it is pretty routine. If I look through Wikipedia I see pardons that look superficially similar to Zhao's in other presidencies. Financial crime, sentence served out in the past, president intervenes to pardon them. Why did the president take an interest? Probably not because they were outraged at the moral implications of some banker being mistreated by the justice system.
> the laws … tend to be fundamentally authoritarian and unsound in principle.
Let's take the (big) step of presuming that that statement is true. We could further agree that changing the laws would be best — both to prevent future injustice and feasibly to relieve ongoing harms. That would be far more democratic and acceptable to society. The pardon power could also undo ongoing harms where legislative changes are impossible, if it were used across the board. Leave aside the queries of whether doing so would violate separation of powers by acting as a form of super legislation or super veto; and would violate the "faithfully execute" clause. The singleton use of the pardon of such offenses, only in a case of quid pro quo, does not remedy the posited unjust laws.
> But the broader perspective is the US government is irredeemably corrupt … and there is some level of bad behaviour that just needs to be tolerated.
In brief: this reduces to whataboutism (a form of the fallacy tu quoque); the fallacy that additional evil remedies the original evil; and presumes the validity of the conclusion as a premise en route to justifying it.
> The pardon power is, almost by definition, only exercised to corrupt and bypass what people agreed was an appropriate legal process.
Its proper use is as a retrospective safety valve to account for human fallibility in predicting the future and setting down prospective legislation. I think we would need to see some data to claim that it is only (or even predominantly) used to "corrupt" the legislative intent instead of remediating its imperfections.
> I'd be pretty surprised if past pardons were consistently above board; given the low-risk nature of a corruptly offered pardon I'd assume it is pretty routine.
This is mostly speculation, not argument. And corrupt pardons, especially at this scale and in large quantities (take the January 6 pardons, although many would say those were not so much corrupt in the monetary sense as corrupt in the sense of condoning those who helped try to grant someone power outside the system's rules) are not low-risk at all, from the considerations of adherence to the rule of law and institutionalism / systemic integrity.
> If I look through Wikipedia I see pardons that look superficially similar to Zhao's in other presidencies. Financial crime, sentence served out in the past, president intervenes to pardon them. Why did the president take an interest? Probably not because they were outraged at the moral implications of some banker being mistreated by the justice system.
If so, perhaps we should be able to find an example or twenty of quid pro quo after the passage of so much time. If not, that lack of evidence would undercut the posited defense substantially. Other possibilities are that the guilty somehow redeemed themselves through recompense and further good behavior. Regardless, the posited defense is largely speculation again, and reduces to the same fallacies noted above.
> In brief: this reduces to whataboutism (a form of the fallacy tu quoque); the fallacy that additional evil remedies the original evil; and presumes the validity of the conclusion as a premise en route to justifying it.
That is a common and subtle error - tu quoque is a fallacy but whataboutism is typically logically valid.
The core of tu-quoque is asserting a claim's truth because of unrelated actions of some unrelated party. Doesn't make sense. For example, I might argue that drinking is bad for you while holding a glass of something - the claim may or may not be correct and observing that I am drinking doesn't influence the truth of it because my behaviour doesn't control what is healthy in the abstract.
Politics is about picking one of a several available options, where "I compared the options and picked the best one based on their relative behaviour" is fundamentally reasonable. You can't choose who/what to vote for without making comparisons and engaging in whataboutisms. It is a comparative exercise. Most voters can't just vote for what they think is best in the abstract because the politicians are often homogeneous in their policy positions leaving little room to make real choices (it is a bit sad watching how consistently the US public tries to vote for the anti-war candidate and how dedicated the political class is to not getting the message).
Claiming that Trumps actions are, in abstract, correct because of poor behaviour by others is a fallacy. Claiming they are routine and therefore tolerable because there isn't an alternative is a different claim and logically coherent.
It's actually a pretty good argument too, it is a good showcase of how unprincipled most people are that they only seem to get worked up about, eg, politicians lying when it is Trump doing it. It has always been a baffling line of attack that people accuse Trump of being a liar like they expect it to be a problem. You'd almost think they had a room full of honest and principled politicians somewhere that were about to stand for election but then it turns out they're about to vote for the usual suspects in mainstream politics. Maybe they don't watch political debates for fun, I dunno. There is a great case for voting 3rd party in the US.
Fair enough regarding the subtleties of tu quoque, and thank you for the insight.
Whataboutism provides no support, or extremely weak support, to justify the pardon at issue. Nor does the rest: first, the "no other alternative" injects something entirely new into the discussion; and second, it does not justify the pardon, but attempts to justify either the person effecting the pardon or, more expressly, voting for that person.
On a more-pedestrian level, all that sounds like a shrug while saying "Trump gonna Trump!"
President going to president. I'd advise most people save their outrage for when Trump pardons his extended family at the end of his term a la Biden. I expect it'll be an ongoing feature of presidential politics and that seems like a bigger problem with corrupt pardons than this excessive ballroom. There should be an expectation that presidents - and their families - are not above the law.
> Nor does the rest: first, the "no other alternative" injects something entirely new into the discussion
I'm engaging in whataboutisms. Talking about the alternatives is very much already in the conversation. Trump isn't a president because everyone thinks Trump is the best man in the US for the job, it is because the alternative was the Biden/Harris administration or some generic Republican failure. And despite the quality of the opposition it still wasn't a sure win for him, which says a lot about how people are viewing the situation.
Bold to presume that Trump supporters even consider it defensible, as opposed to just what he wants / they want to do, or just burning it all down. Not everyone operates within the context of rationality and the concepts of argumentation and dialectic.
The cult of Trump is a team sport. There is no defending actions or rational. It’s Trump winning against the ‘deep state’, the ‘media’, and the ‘libs’. Anything and everything he pulls off is just another ‘win’ for team Trump- and the losers are the above mentioned groups. There is no ‘us’, there is no ‘nation’, there is no ‘rule of law’. There is not even an ‘after Trump’. It’s the here and now. You are either on Team Trump and winning when you see these articles- or you are a loser.
Crypto is good, it's freedom.
Related:
Donors for Trump's $300M White House Ballroom Include Google, Apple and Palantir
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45682174
Zhao's Binance Aided Trump Family Crypto Venture Before Pardon
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45722104