> Mr. Levandowski has paid a significant price for his actions and plans to devote his talents to advance the public good.
As a thief, he should be in prison. He hasn't paid any price. He's still a millionaire, will probably start another company and raise billions in next 3 years.
much imprisonment is based on just this, even if an action is required to send you on the road to prison your ethics are used as indicator of whether you should actually go there or not.
I'm also only commenting on what the parent wrote to be fair. My point is that being disappointed not to be involved in a death - as that comment suggests - is a level of callousness that goes well beyond accepting the cost of progress.
Since I don't know the man, I prefer to be charitable and am willing to assume he was just being inept in his choice of phrasing rather than assuming he is evil.
I worked on the stab trim gearbox design for the Boeing 757. That gearbox is "flight critical", meaning total failure of it means a crash. I'm very proud that the stab trim system has never caused an accident in the service history of the 757. (Of course, the design was an iteration on the highly successful 747 equivalent, not anything revolutionary.)
Ok, it's fine to make different assumptions about the context. I think you could have made it clearer in your initial response that that's how you saw it.
Where do you get this "the airplane should never have been invented" from? Nobody has made an argument even remotely like that.
What was said, at the most, was that maybe the Wright brothers should have had to face consequences for endangering that passenger. That maybe they acted recklessly.
I don't think that carrying that particular passenger was the one crucial step towards inventing airplanes.
Yes, what is the difference between a passenger willingly getting on an experimental airplane that subsequently crashed and an entirely unrelated pedestrian mowed down by an Uber SUV as a fully predictable consequence of their trash engineering practices?
> Last summer, after a man died in a Tesla that was using the car’s Autopilot system, which allows for autonomous driving on highways, Levandowski told several Uber engineers that they were not pushing aggressively enough. “I’m pissed we didn’t have the first death,” Levandowski said, according to a person familiar with the conversation. (Levandowski denies saying this.)
>This pardon is strongly supported by James Ramsey, Peter Thiel, Miles Ehrlich, Amy Craig, Michael Ovitz, Palmer Luckey, Ryan Petersen, Ken Goldberg, Mike Jensen, Nate Schimmel, Trae Stephens, Blake Masters, and James Proud, among others.
His conviction is based on being a fall guy for Uber’s corporate espionage.
His pardon could be interpreted as a strike against “piracy is theft” mindset and the idea of “intellectual property” in general that HN often rallies against.
I’m quite disappointed by Trump’s pardons but this one is actually a good one.
yeah it struck me as odd. Got downvoted like crazy for this, which is weird since I'd expect people to be leaning towards intellectual freedom here.
It's not as if I said he was not guilty, but rather saying that he would have a lot of information on self driving cars. Which is what he was charged with in the first place.
I'm confused by this comment. It isn't an "or" situation. Thiel is a billionaire and Luckey is pretty close. Those two are powerful primarily because they are rich and they aren't the only two on that list with at least 9 digit fortunes.
EDIT: Or did I completely miss that this was a joke and "powerful" was playing off "white power".
The "ok" hand sign isn't a white power sign just because some people have decided it to be. It's meant ok since as long as anyone can remember. I'm not willing to accept I can't say okay now because some liberal thinkers have decided that that's now become racist. People need to lighten up a bit and not make everything an affront.
The white supremacy sign is a white power sign because white supremacists use it to signal each other. It is called a "dog whistle" because people like you cannot hear it accurately.
Whoa there, Roofus; have a Milk-Bone of information:
"In 2017, users on the message-board site 4chan[40][41][42] aimed to convince the media and other people that the OK gesture was being used as a white power symbol. According to The Boston Globe, users on 4chan's /pol/ ("Politically Incorrect") board were instructed in February 2017 to "flood Twitter and other social media websites...claiming that the OK hand sign is a symbol of white supremacy," as part of a campaign dubbed "Operation O-KKK".[37]
These are such weird arguments. The origins are irrelevant because it wasn't just a trick pulled on normies; white supremacists also fell for the joke. Once they started genuinely using the gesture it did become a symbol of hate. The Wikipedia article you linked says exactly that a few paragraphs below the paragraph you quoted.
The Christchurch shooter, whilst likely in on the "joke", made the gesture in court. At that point, the difference between it being a joke made by a white supremacist, or a symbol of white supremacism evaporates. It is a symbol used by a white supremacist, therefore it is a white supremacist symbol.
Context matters of course, but I don't feel you can truly deny it has taken on meaning outside of the original joke
Context matters of course, but I don't feel you can truly deny it has taken on meaning outside of the original joke
Oh I do deny. Nearly every example ever shown is indistinguishable from accident or people using it for other purposes. Mexican workers "flashes" it while driving around: fired. West Point cadets goofing off, punching each other: sanctioned. Random individuals in photos: obviously white supremacist.
to inflate this non-issue, and then use the very fact of its inflation as justification for its further inflation is reprehensible, and then get actual innocent people labeled as racist. Truly despicable
You asked for an example, so I gave a particularly egregious example of exactly what you asked for. You suddenly switch your position to "nearly every example" and do not address the very specific and relevant example I gave at all.
I was very clear elsewhere what it would take to convince me that there is something to this nonsense. One guy using it in a courtroom ain't it. Did anyone interview him about it? Ask what it was, where he heard about it, what our who he was trying to signal, if he was? Or, did the journalist make up the association on their own?
I'm not here to read your entire comment history. I replied to a specific request of yours with a relevant example. You go off on a mostly irrelevant screed.
Come on. Does it really need to be speculated on? That "one guy" is a white supremacist who killed 50+ people - I think it's pretty clear what his intentions were. On top of that, his written manifesto was a) steeped in 4chan memes and winks to those in the know, b) released on either 8chan or 4chan itself. So it is clear he would know the origins and was playing it up
> I'm not here to read your entire comment history
I wouldn't ordinarily expect that of anyone, except that you had already replied.
Perhaps we should define terms. When people use the term "white supremacist symbol" I hear something that is used by everyone including white supremacists to unambiguously signal white supremacy. A Nazi flag. A burning cross. Shaved head, bomber jacket, combat boots, and most importantly, white laces.
The content of these particular symbols stem self-consciously from their progenitors: putative Aryan heritage in the case of the swastika, the purity of Protestant Christian values for the burning cross, etc
A symbol that everyone uses - including white supremacists - to mean something else - "OK" - is not a white supremacist symbol by that definition.
Its history as a purported white supremacist symbol, a joke on a trolling board, doesn't follow that of actual such symbols
The movement to turn it into a white supremacist symbol is now driven largely by serious, earnest, white leftists, curiously enough. I point to the people who are constantly pointing it out as evidence as my evidence. Why is this, I wonder? It's curious.
> his written manifesto was a) steeped in 4chan memes and winks to those in the know
Assuming that's true, then it's even more evidence to me that OK is not a "white supremacist symbol" his own white supremacy notwithstanding. He, your best evidence that it is, this fellow who used it, is well versed in its origin as a joke.
> I don't feel you can truly deny it has taken on meaning outside of the original joke.
It hasn't. The supremacist using it in court room is using it entirely within the context of the original joke. Within the context of the joke, that is, but not within the joke. He's using it knowingly. The original joke is "get people to see the OK gesture as a racist symbol, so that people are then pranked in situations in which someone who fell for the hoax embarasses himself by calling out someone else who uses the gesture in the usual way and has no idea about the hoax. Hardy har har, hoo hoo."
I'm not a white supremacist or neo-nazi. Can I put a swastika on my jacket, such that everyone understands it's not a symbol of nazism, because I'm not a confirmed nazi, not standing in a court room for crimes connected with my ideology?
You have to start a war and kill at least a few hundred thousand people before you get to hijack a common hand gesture for your ideology.
White supremacists didn't "fall" for the joke; they were obviously instantly infatuated with the idea of hijacking a thoroughly familiar, positive hand gesture for their purposes.
Let's talk about what's really going on here. Certain factions of society would like to present white supremacy as more prevalent than it is, and these include white supremacists, but upsettingly, also include organizations and political stances that "fight" white supremacy. These "opposing" factions would love to hijack the OK symbol as a white supremacist symbol, so that each can claim that white supremacy has more support than it does. Each of these factions will feel satisfaction of fighting their fight, as they point at pictures of West Point cadets, Mexican truck drivers, Japanese tourists, college kids having fun and say "See! White supremacy is everywhere!"
I have contempt for all of these people, who insist that "OK" is white supremacist. They promote white supremacy, irrespective of whether they are for it or against it. They turn a stupid joke into a battle cry, because they want to. This is despicable. Reprehensible. Awful.
If you actively insist that OK is white supremacist, you are a bad person and I have zero respect for you. Noam Chomsky talks about how the most violent of two opposing factions gain prestige within their factions by escalating drama and violence with the other faction. That's you. You "fight" white supremacy by promoting it. Contemptible.
The very next sentence of that comment referred to the previously linked Wikipedia article with its own citations. You were one click away from being able to answer your own snarky comment.
Firstly, the OK gesture is a deeply entrenched, familiar, everyday gesture—at least in North American culture. Only a complete moron could think that it suddenly has to do with white supremacy, and accept it for such use to the point of believing that it is a white supremacist symbol and not the OK gesture any more, so that anyone using it is a racist.
Secondly, anyone who has any doubts about it whatsoever can search for it, and learn about the 2017 4chan campaign in seconds.
Therefore, thirdly, the situations in which the gesture refers to the hoax-induced meaning are very narrow, like someone pulling the gesture on camera behind a black man's back or something like that, or a known white supremacist pulling it in courtroom. Then we know "oh, he's referring to that 4chan meme". Where by "we" I mean that minority of people who are informed about this.
And that's all it is; some damned Internet meme, and a minor one. Nobody will remember it in 5, 10, 15 years.
Do you know Dancing Baby? 1996 3D video meme of a 3D rendered dancing baby: probably the world's first viral video.
Do you remember people saying a delayed "...not!" at the end of a sentence to negate it? "I wanna be your friend ... NOT!"
Ok, let's try an example in which this issue is further heightened. Would you be comfortable displaying a swastika in the western world today? That symbol didn't originate with the Nazis. Most people simply don't care about the origin.
Also I am not saying every use is racist or anything that extreme, but it is clear that in some instances there is a connection between this symbol and white supremacy.
That symbol is associated with mass murder of millions and a world war.
Previous to that, it was not a common, everyday symbol used in western culture.
It's not a dumb little joke from 2017 from 4chan.
The Nazis had a hand gesture: the raised arm Roman salute. You can use that salute today without being dubbed a supremacist or Nazi. Just maybe don't shout heil anything while doing it.
I have to give 4chan credits where it's due, the weakness of the human mind is fully exploited like what happens when nations use massive propaganda machines. A complete non-issue of people "accidently" making a hand gesture has turned into a full-blown conspiracy theory that validates itself by groups willfully coopting part of the ruse. Whats the use of knowing the hand gesture for white supremacy? we've always had gang signs and they were similarly irrelivant outside the groups that use them.
Really makes one think what I believe to be true that just aint so.
“According to the ADL, by 2019 some white supremacists had begun using the OK symbol "as a sincere expression of White Supremacy", and many white supremacists have acknowledged using the symbol as a gesture of White Power.”
When you read "inflammable", you can often, from the context, determine whether it means flammable or not. Sometimes you can't.
The same applies to the OK sign.
Flashing it surrounded by notorious racists after the 4chan hoax leaves no doubt about the intended meaning.
Also, given that's it's now been coopted by nazis, you may want to be careful when flashing it if you want to avoid embarrassing ambiguities, yes. It was probably a fad in these circles, not sure it is still used, but still.
> Flashing it surrounded by notorious racists after the 4chan hoax leaves no doubt about the intended meaning.
Trolling is a meaning. I think in that situation it’s even more ambiguous since the “troll power” is so much greater then.
I think it’s unambiguous that the user is a shit-stirrer certainly, probably an asshole. But not necessarily racist. Or no more so than your average run of the mill “everyone is racist subconsciously” racist.
I think what’s hard is that it’s a negative thing to do that brings more chaos and harm into the world. It could be racist/white power that is super bad, let’s say 100 on the bad-o-meter. Or it could be trolling the pearl clutchers that is mildly bad, let’s say 11 on the bad-o-meter. And for scale, punching someone in the face is 200 and murdering someone is 1000.
It can signal kinship with troll-clan. So it’s used by non-racist trolls. And racist trolls. And racists. And just normal people who aren’t up on current events (eg, elementary school).
Context matters in almost all human communication. And humans are pretty good at negotiating context. Scuba divers won’t lose the symbol. But scuba divers also don’t protect a bunch of people posing with Richard Spencer and making the gesture.
> And humans are pretty good at negotiating context.
In politics? I think people are pretty bad at understanding context about people they see as having different values. The way you handle uncertainty is to fill in the blanks with prior knowledge, also known as bias. When someone has a bias against the person, that turns quite ugly.
My issue with the term "dog whistle" is that it's being abused to attribute nefarious meaning to just anything you want irrespectively of the actual content of the message- by definition the "dog whistle" is something that the message doesn't obviously contain. It's a free interpretation license card.
I think out-of-context interpretation is the major issue of our times: we got used to the idea that it's perfectly fine to report the most damning combination of words in a sentence as if it were the original full sentence; that a joke made on twitter is the same as a political manifesto sent to the press; and that a hand gesture can get the meaning it would have in its worst possible case. This has to stop.
Getting photographed smiling next to two notorious white supremacists is already fishy. The picture was taken after the sign became a notorious rallying sign for racists. Do you really think that Luckey is aloof to the point of not not knowing what he's doing there?
If you borrowed Occam's razor, you may need to sharpen it a bit before using it.
The "ok sign is a white power symbol" thing started as trolling on 4chan. It doesn't mean anything apart from being useful to infuriate other people. You're being trolled.
What evidence? That it used to be (and still is in many contexts) totally non-racist? I agree with that. But it's also been coopted (humorously, but it still is a rallying sign).
To this day, the swastika is still a religious sign in Hindu and Buddhist cultures. It also carries a nefarious meaning in other contexts.
I agree that a bunch of people from 4chan spreading misinformation online could be considered trolling. Taking it into the real world is a step I have a hard time believing. What would the troll's logic be? "I'm going to make all these suckers think I'm a racist"? That seems like an unusual step from anonymous online activity.
Trolling, at least in its original meaning, is not "spreading misinformation". It's saying things for the sake of provoking anger in other people that you despise or you just don't connect emotionally with. So it makes perfect sense to me for rightwing trolls to excite anger and confusion in leftwing people by appropriating a completely innocuous gesture and using it as a provocation. It doesn't really have to mean anything or to capture or express your true beliefs- the important thing is just that others will go nuts over it.
Someone creates a weak troll, like "the OK symbol is now an alt-right symbol" and people go crazy over it.
"Oh it's a dog whistle" no, it's an internet meme that got gratuitously amplified for free (this phrase could also be a summary of the Trump campaign).
(Also "true" dog whistles are not explained - their meaning is extrapolated from context. Kinda like saying "yaml lovers" to indicate k8s users)
The question is, why has it become popular for white supremacists to flash this hand sign? If they are intending to convey that they are white supremacists and we are successfully understanding the message then that is what the hand gesture means. It's like a new word. The trollish origin doesn't change the fact that it has this new meaning in these contexts.
To believe that dog-whistles exist as an actual thing used effectively, one would also have to believe:
a) A group of people (e.g. white supremacists) do not already know that the dog-whistler (e.g. a politician) is a member or sympathizer of their group
b) That this person who sympathizes with this secret group wants to signal sympathy with this secret group, but cannot do it directly (that is, by email or letter or direct contact), and so must somehow signal through public words and deeds
c) This signal will somehow, hopefully, be invisible to everyone who is listening except for members of the secret group
The prototypical example is politicians talking about "thugs" and "welfare queens" as dog-whistling a racist contempt for black people. I can definitely accept that using such language could be such a signal, especially with the context of aligned policy pronouncements, but it's pretty blatant and not a dog-whistle.
Exactly. The only reasonable use of the word “dog-whistle” is ”’dog-whistle’ is a dog-whistle used to signal support of political correctness and belonging to the left-wing elite and/or an unwillingness to engage in rational argument”.
We can't let trolls and white supremacist steal the ok symbol. We must fight back. The problem is that whoever makes the the first step will get called a white supremacist, so nobody want to volunteer.
No, I'll volunteer. It's a stupid conspiracy theory, and I have nothing but contempt for it. I use it all the time, and always will, regardless of context or the presence of gullible idiots around me.
Why do you insist and insult the people who are agaisnt the racist people who call out the symbol. If the symbol is so important to you then your fight should be with the actual white supremacists who have co-opted the symbol and not the people who don't let racists get away with recruitment/trolling/owning the libs by flashing their co-opted gang sign.
It's like you being furious at black people because your great grandparents used to always win their Halloween contest with their pointy hat ghost costume and you're not going to let stupid guillable people keep you from wearing it at parties.
> Why do you insist and insult the people who are agaisnt the racist people who call out the symbol.
Because they aren't against racist people. They are pro-idiocy. They're only pro a good thing (being non-racist) by an accident of history and circumstance, certainly not because of sober reflection and empathy. These are the same idiots who would be all in on bullying the Satanic Panic preschool teachers in the 80s, or burning witches ye olden days, or hunting Communists in the 50s
I think it's a little telling that you're calling out historically conservative movements and trying to conflate them with a very progressive movement of not letting white supremacists use their favorite recruitment tool of "it's just a joke bro... unless you actually believe it"
Supposed dog whistles and the extreme desire to immediately label people based on innocuous gestures/words is the new norm within certain parts of the puritanical left. I never thought I would see the day. It is shocking that what was once the bastion of liberal thought and open-mindedness has become this hyper-judgemental, crucify-all-that-don't-bow-to-our-will movement.
Gems of the left:
Do you want to be on the wrong side of history?
Freedom of speech does not mean freedom from consequences!
Acknowledge your privilege!
It is a trite stick hung above arguments that people want to silence before they even happen which makes it intellectually uninteresting and shallow. And more than anything it is used to further attempt to shame people. There is no compassion in the phrase.
I'm guessing their complaint is not about whether it is technically true, but the hypocrisy of the people saying this when they are the ones who create the consequences. Like if your boss tells you you are free to say anything you want then fires you if they don't like it.
I had to read the Scarlet Letter in high school. Hester Prynn had to live with the outcome of saying whatever it was. It was literally puritanical to make her wear a red “A.” as the outcome of her speech (v-a-v extramarital sex).
I think the point isn’t that speech should have no impact, but that the response to speech should be proportional and what proportional means. The Puritans in Hawthorne’s novel thought that making someone a pariah was a proportional response. They were wrong, I think.
But the lesson, I think, is not that we should be more precise in meting out moral judgement, but that we should judge less.
Or you can use context instead of absolute judgment. When done under water in a scuba suit, it probably means ok. When done when posing with Steve Bannon it probably means white power sign.
That's some hilariously vacuous reasoning. What's your thought process there? People are complex, just because you don't like them doesnt give you the right to judge their every action in the worst possible light. That's intellectually unsound.
Yeah, context is key. We played a game as kids where if you looked at one of us with the ok sign, the one doing the sign got to punch you in the arm. It was joke.
Even though this new origin is a bit of the tail wagging the dog (it started as a joke on 4chan), the ok sign has taken on the meaning of a white power sign in certain situations.
Unfortunately, people have trawled old pics and attacked people for using normal hand gestures. Context and nuance appears to be completely lost on many.
> the ok sign has taken on the meaning of a white power sign in certain situations.
>> When done when posing with Steve Bannon it probably means white power sign.
When a no-kidding, self-admitted, non-LARPing, Stormfront-reading, Klan- or Nazi-party member says "Yeah we've been using the OK symbol for years" then I'll believe it.
But all I've ever seen about this is leftists of a certain type asserting that it's true, with some variation of "I know it's true because all my friends and thought leaders say it's true, and you can see yourself that such people as Steve Bannon use it, and people have even been fired for doing it. Definitely true. Your move, white-supremacy-denier!"
So, no. It's a conspiracy theory, in which denial of the conspiracy is yet more evidence of the conspiracy.
How about the Christchurch shooter flashing it in court? He may have been doing it ironically still, but at that point does it even matter? He was explicitly associating himself and his actions with the symbol. Context matters of course, but what started as a joke has taken on its own life
Wow, that game seems to be surprisingly common! It was played on my school in Munich, Germany.
The rules were: if you look through the loop, you are punched in the upper arm. The puncher has to draw a bull's eye first, then punch, then the recipient must say "thank you" and the puncher must reply "you're welcome" (of course in German, i.e. bitte, danke). Any deviation from the rules is punished by a punch, to be administered in accordance with aforementioned ceremony.
In the southeastern US. I'm a bit older so things like minor scuffles and fist fights with friends wasn't uncommon. We certainly didn't have as many rules as you outlined, and just used it as another reason to pick on and bruise each others arms.
Having researched the issue carefully [0] I would suggest there is an alternative symbolic interpretation. One that goes something like "our opponents believe anything they read on the internet".
Even if it is used extensively as a political symbol, it doesn't represent white power. It represents a political sub-group disrespecting their opposition for being gullible.
Insofar as it even could represent white power - white power to do what? Have political opinions? It isn't seriously associated with anything heinous.
The whole thing was started as a deliberate meme by /pol/ to take an innocent, commonly used hand signal and make the left treat it as a white supremacist dogwhistle. So it can mean anything ranging from "ok" to "this will make the libs angry" to "I am an actual nazi among like minded friends". Which one it is must be discerned from context, meaning that the symbol itself is largely meaningless.
I use the symbol to help identify people who believe anything they read on the Internet.
I don’t think I’ve used this symbol since I was a kid to mean “ok,” and I certainly won’t use it now due to potential association.
But it is nice to be able to easily tell if someone is either stupid or duplicitous by reading them talk about this symbol always meaning white power.
I’m sure if I went looking on nazi sites I would see it used in hate, but every story I’ve read about it has been a waste of time. I only see a few come through threads like this but when I read the link it’s usually someone trolling or ambiguous.
People in this thread must know what plausible deniability is.
When someone is standing next to Steve Bannon posing intentionally with a symbol that could refer to white supremacy, being able to laugh it off as "haha, I just meant OK" gains them the benefits of deniability. (But not very plausible, I think)
People use it precisely for this reason - because it identifies them as a white supremacy sympathiser without being actionable: they keep a trolling or ambiguity defence in their back pocket, wherever that is needed.
Personally, I don't care if someone is elaborately trolling or being ironic by displaying a swastika. They are still willing to display a swastika.
White supremacists - Nazis, the KKK, Evropa - love Trump. They use this symbol. Who cares whether someone is "ironically" using a symbol indicating their support for that cause or sincerely?
Except using as 'this will make libs crazy' means the speaker is still intentionally and loudly embracing racism & racists, even if not their primary aim. So it is a symbol of two forms of racism: direct and supporting. Important to not give racists a free pass just because they are clever, delusional, or are a part of some popular political coalition.
The sedition just happened, and it was because of exactly this kind of manipulative messaging by the same exact people. Breitbart's former editor Bannon even came out of hiding for helping with the riot's speeches and got a pardon in return. I'm hoping that will have been the last straw for most people for tolerating racist double talk and those promoting it.
My take is that Poe's Law is bidirectional. You can't tell irony from extremism, nor extremism from irony.
It might have started as an ironic joke, but if it gets adopted earnestly by actual white supremacists (see the Christchurch shooter using it in court), then in some contexts it can be interpreted as a genuine symbol of white supremacy.
Mr Christchurch Shooter doesn't have that much power. If he wrapped himself in a rainbow flag, it doesn't mean people should stop using rainbow flags. Ditto him using a thumbs up gesture or an OK handsign. His use or disuse of symbol sin his crime is distasteful, but unimportant.
If he thought he could get people to stop using Islamic symbols by displaying them, he would have been festooned with them.
The ok hand sign can be a perfectly innocuous hand sign in some circumstances, or a white supremacist dog whistle in others. The very purpose why it was adopted by white supremacists is this confusion - this has been explicitly researched by human rights groups.
Of course, the symbol itself carries no white supremacist overtones, just like the swastika in itself does not carry any nazi symbolism (as opposed to, say, a crosssed out star of David, which would be an explicitly anti-semite symbol). However, it's association with and repeated use by Nazi Germany is what gave it a nazi symbolism. Even for such a widely reviled symbol, there are still non-taboo uses. In particular, a left-facing swastika (sauwastika) is a common Buddhist symbol, found often in Asian media with no Nazi connotation. That means that a bald person waving a swastika flag could either be a nazi skin head, or a buddhist monk - context will usually tell you which.
This is similar to "states rights" rhetoric - it has both its literal sense, the discussion of the amount of power states should have vs the federal government; but it also refers more specifically to the "right" to slavery the civil war was fought over. When you hear someone speak about it, you need more context to know which sense is being used.
Some of the comments below are rather heated. I’d like to quote an excerpt from the Anti-Defamation League’s page on the “ok” sign. [1] I think it is a reasonable take that acknowledges the validity of the perspectives posted here. Context is important.
> Use of the okay symbol in most contexts is entirely innocuous and harmless.
> In 2017, the “okay” hand gesture acquired a new and different significance thanks to a hoax by members of the website 4chan to falsely promote the gesture as a hate symbol, claiming that the gesture represented the letters “wp,” for “white power.” The “okay” gesture hoax was merely the latest in a series of similar 4chan hoaxes using various innocuous symbols; in each case, the hoaxers hoped that the media and liberals would overreact by condemning a common image as white supremacist.
> In the case of the “okay” gesture, the hoax was so successful the symbol became a popular trolling tactic on the part of right-leaning individuals, who would often post photos to social media of themselves posing while making the “okay” gesture.
> Ironically, some white supremacists themselves soon also participated in such trolling tactics, lending an actual credence to those who labeled the trolling gesture as racist in nature. By 2019, at least some white supremacists seem to have abandoned the ironic or satiric intent behind the original trolling campaign and used the symbol as a sincere expression of white supremacy, such as when Australian white supremacist Brenton Tarrant flashed the symbol during a March 2019 courtroom appearance soon after his arrest for allegedly murdering 50 people in a shooting spree at mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand.
> The overwhelming usage of the “okay” hand gesture today is still its traditional purpose as a gesture signifying assent or approval. As a result, someone who uses the symbol cannot be assumed to be using the symbol in either a trolling or, especially, white supremacist context unless other contextual evidence exists to support the contention. Since 2017, many people have been falsely accused of being racist or white supremacist for using the “okay” gesture in its traditional and innocuous sense.
And if you make the okay sign while posing next to celebrity Steve Bannon, it's up to you how you control your messaging, and it's up to the audience to make a judgment call on receiving your message.
On a more lighthearted issue, Ray Bradbury once abruptly left a guest lecture because students wouldn't agree on themes for his novel. Does a man own his own words? And does a man's meaning belong to him as well? Or is it like sand through one's fingers?
In reality, these days -- along with most other so-called dog whistles it's quite effective in trolling reactionaries on the left. That's all. Everyone is in on the joke.
If I'm Don Jr. or Charlie Kirk or whoever, my prerogative is to invoke liberal "tears" so yeah I'm gonna use all the dog whistle words like "thugs" and flash the OK symbol, because it scores them points with the right, multiplied by the amount of outrage it causes from the left.
Of course this dynamic only really exists in political contexts. Elsewhere it just means "OK" as always. However, it would be equally absurd to assume that politicians haven't caught on to public perception of this kind of stuff and are exploiting it for their advantage (via democrats clutching their pearls and republicans trying to induce said pearl-clutching)
You could use the exact same argument for the swastika. The swastika became the symbol of nazism because the nazis decided it to be. It was a religious symbol for thousands of years at that point.
The key is to use context. A swastika on a temple that's older than nazism? Yeah, not a nazi symbol. A swastika on a flag at a right-wing protest in America in 2020? Probably not a religious symbol.
> The key is to use context. A swastika on a temple that's older than nazism? Yeah, not a nazi symbol. A swastika on a flag at a right-wing protest in America in 2020? Probably not a religious symbol.
What about an Indian student with a swastika tatoo passing by a right-wing protest? Is it a religious or political symbol then?
It is of course possible to construct fictitious contexts in which it is hard to tell what symbols mean. That doesn't mean that those symbols don't have meaning.
I'm going to go around the interesting tech angle here and comment on how many people on this list have been pardoned for petty drug crimes.
*Corvain Cooper – President Trump commuted the sentence of Mr. Corvain Cooper. Mr. Cooper is a 41 year-old father of two girls who has served more than 7 years of a life sentence for his non-violent participation in a conspiracy to distribute marijuana.*
Life sentence for "conspiracy to distribute marijuana" - Unbelievable. There are dozens of similar examples on this list.
It is honorable to pardon or commute the sentence of people in this situation. It seems Trump has only done it for a few dozen people. I can't help wonder why specifically these people deserve this and the hundreds of thousands of other people still in prison for similar charges don't deserve it. If he truly believed these laws were too harsh, he could have worked to change the laws as president.
It was a grassroots effort and, in the end, lobbied through the right channels. He caught a lucky break. Now that Corvain is getting release he'll be lobbying for the release of other non-violent cannabis offenders. It will take time but we'll get all non-violent cannabis offenders released.
Most pardon's are recommended to the President by the Justice department after reviewing cases. Currently, they have a mandate to go over all large sentences of non-violent drug offenders.
Didn't think I'd seen Corvain mentioned on HN. He's actually a great guy and a hell of an entrepreneur. Without trying to take any credit for his release my team was involved in the process of raising awareness of his incarceration for the last year and got deeply involved in bringing his cannabis brand to the California market. We've been early-celebrating all week about his pending release.
I'll also add that his crime was trafficking 37 tons. He wasn't the seller or buyer.
Congrats! If only all inmates unjustly incarcerated could receive fair re-trials / pardons / relief / release depending on circumstances. There are so damn many people in need of justice in this way.
> bringing his cannabis brand to the California market
Could you explain? I'm not following and when I search his story news articles said he opened a clothing store. What was his actual business and was it connected to cannabis?
Corvain was imprisoned for trafficking and had no legitimate cannabis business at that time.
Corvain's wife started 40tons with the help of a lot of industry folks in 2020. The effort was to bring cannabis revenue/profit back to support Corvain's two teenage daughters while he's incarcerated. That's the cannabis brand I'm referring to.
> I'll also add that his crime was trafficking 37 tons. He wasn't the seller or buyer.
Good for him that he was pardoned, but I find it sad that it's those 37tons that make the pardon unsurprising.
I don't think he would ever be pardoned for trafficking 37 pounds.
Maybe he should have just commuted the sentences of offenders like him instead of the likes of Bannon, Levandowski, and Broidy. Makes Marc Rich look tame.
If the goal was real justice, why is this left to the 11th hour storm of bullshit pardons? Isn't this being used as an obvious distraction when it could have happened much sooner?
One theory: they're not in office anymore, so they won't as easily be bothered because [person pardoned] committed a crime, which of course they'll be chased like a hawk for doing, just in case, especially in the case of certain pardoned people.
edit: removed some inflammatory text that was unfair to all involved.
The President is the head of the executive branch. The Department of Justice, on top of which the President ultimately sits, was responsible for prosecuting ~each and ~every one of the people the President pardons, on their first or last day. Someone inside the DoJ thought each and every one of them was guilty of a crime and deserved to be prosecuted for it. Weeks and months -- years, the work of dozens -- went into each and every one of those prosecutions. The convictions, when obtained, were hung like trophies on the walls of the individual careers. Proof they had done their job, proof their work had meaning.
And then the President, with the stroke of a pen, throws it all away.
We all have projects get canceled. We all have invested time and effort and then, through no fault of our own, had our efforts come to naught.
It's bad for morale. Even when the reasons for the laws were outdated or absurd, even when the prosecutions unjust, even when perfidy played a role, even when the people who worked the case no longer fully believe in it ... it still hurts to have your work thrown away by your superior. It still damages the working relationship you have with your chain of command. Why should you work hard in the future, doing the tasks assigned to you, if your boss is just going to ignore it all?
The President pardoning dozens, hundreds, thousands of individuals permanently damages their working relationship with the career employees of the Department of Justice, even (especially?) if the pardons are moral, deserved, merciful, just without a hint of corruption. Maybe that shouldn't defer justice, but it's a reason.
> Stephen K. Bannon – President Trump granted a full pardon to Stephen Bannon. Prosecutors pursued Mr. Bannon with charges related to fraud stemming from his involvement in a political project. Mr. Bannon has been an important leader in the conservative movement and is known for his political acumen.
This one is hilarious. The "political project" was raising money for a border wall via crowdfunding and putting it into his own pocket. He scammed the most hardcore Trump supporters, and got pardoned by Trump for it.
You should recite the facts correctly. Supposedly, Bannon represented to the public that 100% of donated funds were going to build the wall. In fact, prosecuters allege that ‘hundreds of thousands’ were diverted to pay Banon’s personal bills. That’s out of 25 million raised.
The earlier comment implied that Bannon stole all the monies raised, when in fact, where talking about what - 10%? - diverted?
There's no question that 100% of the monies did not go to the construction of the wall. From a practical standpoint, a non-profit that manages to run with a 10% overhead is very unusual. Most non-profits spend most of their money (70%+) on marketing and administration.
> Bannon and another defendant, Brian Kolfage, allegedly promised donors that the campaign, which raised more than $25 million, was "a volunteer organization" and that "100% of the funds raised ... will be used in the execution of our mission and purpose," according to the indictment.
> Instead, according to prosecutors, Bannon, through a nonprofit under his control, allegedly used more than $1 million from We Build the Wall to "secretly" pay Kolfage and cover hundreds of thousands of dollars in Bannon's personal expenses.
According to the unsealed indictment, bannon received $1m through a non-profit, which he used to transfer to pay for unrelated shit using fake invoices.
This is all so hilariously corrupt. I'm not sure I can even muster anger for this, just laughter. (I'll reserve the anger for the pandemic and this administration's callous, frankly criminal handling of it).
(So Levandowski and Jared are going to launch a venture fund soon, right?)
Don't forget to have the additionally-pardoned Michael Liberty join the efforts to attract investors. Over $50 million defrauded [0][2] from investors, and it wasn't his first rodeo with the SEC[1].
A pardon requires delivery and acceptance. (Actually, I think delivery is incomplete without acceptance.) Theoretically an incoming president could recall the pardon if it hasn't been delivered. Not sure what may constitute as delivery; or acceptance, for that matter. I don't think the manner of delivery or acceptance has been tested, let alone enumerated. If it's as simple as a phone call, then presumably nothing could be done.
I think a more interesting question is whether there's a specificity requirement. AFAIU, that hasn't been answered, either.
There was an even more interesting question raised on r/NeutralPolitics about whether the pardon has to even be made public. It seems there's an interpretation of the law where the pardon only becomes public when the recipient makes use of it in a public court.
This is not mentioned anywhere in the text of the pardon power of the Constitution.
What gives you the impression pardons are limited to those that are "delivered" and/or "accepted". How would that even be legally demonstrated to a court.
But realistically if they tried to revoke a pardon today it would certainly go to the Supreme Court again and they would almost certainly rule the other way.
A Youtube video of someone's opinion is not a reliable source.
Looking up Grants revocation of Johnson's pardons - it's hard to find details, but it does seem like a Federal judge took issue that they were not delivered prior to the new president revoking them.
Given that there's no such limitation in the Constitution, I wonder if it would hold up to SCOTUS. ...and maybe that's why they announce them publicly these days.
Of course, there's still the limitation that the State would need to find it's own law that the accused violated - they have no jurisdiction over Federal law (and vice-versa).
Still... it doesn't sit quite right with me. If someone is acquitted by a jury in, let's say, Rhode Island for murder. It doesn't seem right that the Federal government could step in and hold an entirely new trial thereafter. Seems to fly in the face of what Double-Jeopardy is supposed to prevent.
Isn't that exactly why federal hate-crime legislation exists? To allow a do-over in federal court if juries in some jurisdictions ignore crimes against some victims?
And for that matter, even if acquitted in a criminal trial, someone can be found guilty in a civil trial (with a lower standard of evidence). See, famously, OJ Simpson.
The most interesting pardons are the no name ones. Pardoned restaurant chain fraud for an italian not even charged in NY. Sounds like mafia related crime to me.
The other no name money laundering criminals are all related to either his gambling businesses or his place of living in Florida.
He's basically pardoning people he's been doing crimes with for a long time and then if course some big names.
I'm happy to see some rappers pardoned though tbh. Their music has influenced my life, they've done great deal of good outside of music and none of them were in the can for things like harming women or animals etc.
Many pardons are recommended to the President by the Justice department for various reasons. A lot are for non-violent drug crimes that someone in the department felt was too harsh/etc...
It's not like they are all Trump's friends. But obviously conspiracy theories will prevail, sadly.
You must have missed the declass on the origins of the Russia hoax, where Steele admitted that he intentionally leaked information and engaged in info-laundering because he saw Trump as being potentially damaging to UK/US relations.
And where he admits that he leaked info in order to counter the effect of Hillary's emails on the 2016 election. So, literal foreign interference in an election.
You may have also missed the declass that showed Fiona Hill perjured herself when she stated she had no idea who Christopher Steele was- yet actually met with him while he was compiling his dossier.
Gun possession is a non-violent crime. It’s insane that Lil Wayne can’t possess a gun because he once possessed a gun in a place that only the rich, well connected, or retired police officers can possess a gun.
They were pardoned because they paid Trump campaign favors, putting his corrupt administration and their own self interest over the good of a nation in crisis. That's far worse than their original crimes.
"The CAN-DO Foundation thanks President Trump for providing a second chance to numerous deserving individuals through the use of his Executive Clemency powers. Many defendants that receive draconian sentences are individuals who exercised their Sixth Amendment right to a trial and suffered the trial penalty phase by receiving harsh mandatory sentences many times greater than if they had taken a plea. These sentences were often based primarily on the testimony of other co-conspirators who received sentence reductions once they testified and were in many cases far more culpable. Executive clemency represented the last hope for many of these individuals to have a second chance at life since (with limited exceptions) there is no federal parole."
Not to "both sides" this too much, because I do feel like there's a new, special level of corruption and self-dealing on display with this administration, but it's not uncommon for these guys to use pardons for personal gain or the benefits of their friends. For a little context and flavor, remember that Clinton pardoned some real winners on his last day too, including some guy who paid $200k to Hillary Clinton's brother for the pardon [0], Bill Clinton's own brother (codename: "headache" [3]) and a Democratic party loyalist who was convicted of child porn and sexual assault with a minor [2].
p.s. - if you wonder why the Clintons are especially hated in some circles, and if you wonder why people are so quick to believe those Q conspiracy theories, the kernels of truth exist and originate in simple corruption like this
They framed a relevant point that furthers the discussion in a way that was less ambiguous and less likely to do harm.
For me personally, it's frustrating to see comments about things like whataboutism when they're obviously just to deflect and distract.
At the very least, with caveats like saying "I don't support this, but..." there's some level of acknowledgement of, "yes, this might be veering into sketchy waters".
I don't really think it's about "both sides", I think it's about contextualizing the action. Because the Trump administration was so insane in so many ways, we tend to forget (or maybe misremember) that there is a very real and persistent form of corruption in our politics that far predates Trump. The end of the Trump regime does not mean the end of political corruption, not by a long shot, and we would do well to remember that.
I think one of my biggest fears with Biden is that because he isn't Trump, everyone will take a deep sigh of relief, and then ignore the more mundane "political corruption as usual" aspects of his presidency.
Not to agree too much with a both-sidsing of Trump corruption, but in fact I agree here.
This pardon was... really pretty conventional. It's of a non-violent crime and a comparatively compartmentalized one that doesn't impact the nation as a whole. Incentivising industrial espionage isn't "not bad", but it's not that bad.
This is routine Washington stuff, really. The genuinely corrupt pardons, of his family and associates (and potentially himself) for crimes committed during the administration don't seem to have materialized[1]. The list from yesterday is very long, but really pretty unsurprising.
[1] But there is still an hour and a half left. A pardon can be scrawled on a napkin in 30 seconds and then shown to the media to deliver it. There's no formality requirement in the constitution. If he does it before noon then it counts.
If you're going to both sides this you should at least mention Clinton's most corrupt pardon (Marc Rich).
I would say that it is uncommon for presidents to abuse the pardon power like this, it's just not completely unheard of. It's also worth noting that Trump multiplied the total number of corrupt presidential pardons in US history by something like 10 in his time in office. The scale is hard to fully grasp.
As of November 2020, Trump utilized both pardons and clemencies much less than any president in modern history according to Pew Research [1][2].
He granted clemency to 143 more last night which places him closer in line to Bush and G.W. Bush, but there's no way your data here would include that (and that still places him at a very low number), so I'm wondering where you're getting this data, and how you qualify "corrupt."
If we look at a handful of Bill Clinton's corrupt pardons on his last day in office alone as mentioned in the gp comment above:
(1) Susan McDougal who went to jail for contempt of court for him,
(2) Braswell who paid Hillary $200k for the pardon,
(3) his brother Roger Clinton Jr,
(4) Democrat Mel Reynolds who was granted clemency after being found guilty of sexual abuse of a minor.
Thus, Trump must have had at least 40? Where is the source?
Pardons have an interesting characteristic in that you can be both angry at unnecessarily harsh punishment (therefore, be happy with it being undone) but also be angry at the corruption that leads to the pardon (therefore, be angry at it being undone.)
It was criminal to enable pharma to fast track development of vaccines, in half the most optimistic forecasts of how long that would take? It was criminal to invoke the defense production act to make ventilators -- far more than we needed? Building those field hospitals (that were never needed)... the ships?
It was deeply irresponsible to play into political divisions rather than promoting mask use. It was deeply irresponsible to undermine states’ efforts to mitigate spread, to the point of encouraging “lock her up” chants about Gretchen Whitmer that encouraged a kidnapping plot.
He did a few things right, but let’s not pretend the last year hasn’t been mostly political theatre rather than leadership and one man could have led with a different tone.
I don’t know what the current going rate is; we’ll see if Joe Exotic met it.
Supporters of Snowden and Assange have only a few hours to get the cash together.
Well, in hindsight none of them provided enough transactional basis. Mr. Exotic once got 19% of the vote for governor of Florida. Seemed like a natural ally in a swing state.
Earlier in Trumps presidency, one explanation for a Snowden pardon is that he would appear on stage at a Trump rally.
But, it’s not clear what Assange would be pardoned for. He might be in better shape without the guilt conveyed by a pardon.
Will investors put money on him again? Or is he relegated to working on trump’s personal Twitter replacement kind of projects now? Have a feeling this is the only thing he can do now, go deep maga and suck up to the cult
Obviously support their pardons but there was little expectation from me that they would considering the government is prosecuting them so aggressively.
Most of these are people accused of various drug crimes (many nonviolent).
As much as I hate Trump, I support that.
The worst one was this:
Paul Erickson – President Trump has issued a full pardon to Paul Erikson. This pardon is supported by Kellyanne Conway. Mr. Erickson’s conviction was based off the Russian collusion hoax. After finding no grounds to charge him with any crimes with respect to connections with Russia, he was charged with a minor financial crime. Although the Department of Justice sought a lesser sentence, Mr. Erickson was sentenced to 7 years’ imprisonment—nearly double the Department of Justice’s recommended maximum sentence. This pardon helps right the wrongs of what has been revealed to be perhaps the greatest witch hunt in American History.
Yeah, BS. Trump deserved to lose his Presidency then and there.
I also didn't like the special treatment that Stephen Bannon received. There is another person who deserves to rot in hell.
But my guess is that more than 2/3 of these commutations I support. And it has nothing to do with who commuted them.
It does not take a lot of brains to say, "Every outgoing President does this, you should do the same."
And he didn't particularly abuse the power. The record for one day of pardons/commutations is 330, set by Barack Obama on his last day of office. I believe that the record before that was set by Bill Clinton.
I am aware of that. But I was expecting Trump to issue a blank commutation for all "patriots" involved in any way in the Capitol riot. With the purpose of making it harder for legal consequences of the indictment to reach him.
For a previous example, Bush Sr commuted the sentence of everyone involved in the Iran-Contra affair which prevented that investigation from potentially reaching him. (Given excerpts of his diary released after he was in office, it seems likely that the investigation would have been able to nail Bush in time.)
Not an American, but I just learned a few days ago that a good deal of presidential pardons are used to give citizenship rights back to people who have already served their sentence - sometimes decades ago.
After the pardon they can actually vote and hold public office.
Maybe you should, you know, stop taking away people's rights after they're served their court-appointed sentence?
I'm not a US citizen, but to me it seems to be ridiculous to give one person the ability to unilaterally make decisions on the lives of individuals. Not just these pardons, but also the barbaric rushed executions Trump performed. It appears to me to be antithetical to a democracy that claims to have a separation of power.
I believe the US Government (as opposed to states) hadn't executed anyone for something like 12 years (covering 3 transition periods) and then in about 3 months, executed 13.
Right ok, But what I'm trying to find out is if these execution dates were set when the people were found guilty, or if someone just decided the execution dates recently.
In short, there has been a push to resume executions for nearly ten years, and it has accelerated during Trump's presidency (he campaigned on a strong pro-execution platform). In summer 2019 a shortlist was made of prisoners already on Death Row, whose appeals had failed. They then moved as quickly as they could to schedule the executions, quash further appeals and pass litigation to make them happen.
These aren't problems with the power, they're problems with people that abuse the power.
We've had presidential pardons for centuries, and they are both a carry-over from the time of kings, and they could arguably serve as a short-circuit against injustice at the hand of the legislature.
Not everything illegal is wrong. Not everyone in prison is serving a just sentence, no matter what the legal system declares it to be.
Left in the hands of the legislature, no one would ever experience mercy.
After the last 4 years, maybe it is time to realise that a working democracy can not rely on the assumption that those in power will just use their powers responsibly and honourably, and that "checks and balances" need to actually have the ability to both check and balance.
If Trump taught this country anything, I hope that it is 'relying on long-standing norms of the office is a bad idea'. I think we need legislation to make sure the 'norms' are 'required'.
It should also be a good example of the fact that the president of the US has an extremely and unusually large amount of power, which should probably be reduced by quite a lot.
If the argument here is essentially that we should trust the president to know better than the legislature and courts, why don't we just go with absolute dictatorship for all purposes?
The power the President is entrusted with here is solely to remit punishment. The idea is that this is an area where going overboard is less harmful than the alternative.
To add, it's easier to throw somebody back in jail if they aren't rehabilitated than it is to get someone out of 400 year sentence if they are technically guilty, no matter how extreme or ridiculous the prison sentence is for the crime they committed.
> they are both a carry-over from the time of kings
That's kind of the problem, though. Most countries didn't carry them over in the same way.
> Left in the hands of the legislature, no one would ever experience mercy.
In countries with highly regulated pardon powers, some people are sometimes pardoned (though many countries lean more on the power of the courts to overturn convictions).
I think it's very good that you have them, so at least a select few people can get a second chance. Instead, you should get rid of ridiculous penalty stacking and plea deals, an often obviously unjust justice system, and a penal system that systematically violates the most basic human rights and standards of decency.
No offence, but most of these pardons make perfect sense. Unfortunately, Snowden, Ulbricht, and Assange were left out.
Pardons by the executive branch are a weapon of peace. It exists to allow the chief executive, whether the President or a Governor of a State, to settle any matter in their jurisdiction.
At the Presidential level, the power is absolute because the founders believed in the executive branch being centralized in a single individual, the President. Outside of Senate confirmation, there isn't much that limits the powers of the President and it's like that on purpose. The people get to have their say every four years.
Exactly - it's notable that the power of pardon is the tail end of the clause that give the president power over the military - that's not random phrasing.
> The President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States, when called into the actual Service of the United States; he may require the Opinion, in writing, of the principal Officer in each of the executive Departments, upon any Subject relating to the Duties of their respective Offices, and he shall have Power to grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offences against the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment.
Did you read the article? Are you opposed to the pardon of Davidson?
President Trump commuted the sentence of Jaime A. Davidson. This commutation is supported by Mr. Davidson’s family and friends, Alice Johnson, and numerous others. In 1993, Mr. Davidson was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment in relation to the murder of an undercover officer. Notably, witnesses who testified against Mr. Davidson later recanted their testimony in sworn affidavits and further attested that Mr. Davidson had no involvement. Although Mr. Davidson has been incarcerated for nearly 29 years, the admitted shooter has already been released from prison.
It speaks to the inherent flaws in any justice system. Presidential pardons are just one check against that. This lies squarely in line with what a presidential pardon is intended for.
A few people saved largely at random from a broken justice system is no sort of real solution; if anything it may actually make things _worse_, as it acts as an escape valve for sufficiently scandalous cases.
In some cases it can be used to broadly pardon people due to injustice. Carter blanket pardoned all Draft dodgers [1]. It doesn't have to be a "real solution" as that isn't the duty of the president to create law, which falls squarely in the hands of congress.
It doesn't make things worse. The only reason people think it makes things worse is because it at times serves to emancipate people they think are undeserving of it. This is a small price to pay for what broadly serves as a useful tool for justice.
It's arguably a bit of a historical oddity that the US has them at all. In most countries, particularly former British colonies, a pardon power of some sort exists, but in developed ones it's typically not, de facto, wielded by an individual (in the UK, for instance, it's theoretically wielded by the Home Secretary, but in practice a Home Secretary who used it unilaterally would find themselves immediately looking for a new job, and the norm is that it's barely used at all).
The UK used it a lot more at the time that the US became independent, which may be where the US got it from.
I don't think _any_ developed democratic country has a pardon power as unrestrained as the US one (even in countries with executive presidencies it's usually constrained in some way).
There is considerable variation in how pardons are applied around the world. Many with simple checks and balances:
- Require nomination or agreement by the AG.
- Prohibit pardoning of political crimes or other self-interest.
- Require approval by at least on other minister, or the whole cabinet, or some portion of the legislative body.
- Require a published request for pardon, justification of the pardon, and the judiciary's comment about this justification.
- Prohibited during lame duck or caretaker periods.
- Allow commutations only.
- Allow pardons only when someone is actually serving their sentence.
- Eliminate mandatory sentences, allows judges to exercise mercy in sentencing.
Meanwhile, the US is illegally pursuing Assange, and is penalizing Snowden for following the very same values that the US ostensibly holds.
The alt-media is calling Trumpers as the new "Liberty movt.", yet they call for American hegemony on Asia and elsewhere, and their policy directions are equally counter-indicative. Liberty my ass.
Why so negative, a little bit of clemency even if people are guilty will do a great deal to help heal the nation. This list reads like an indictment of the justice system, life sentences for non violent drug offences, yikes. I'm glad for everyone, welcome back.
A counterpoint: Abraham Lincoln had some strong opinions about the events like on Jan. 6, and his opinions were not guided by an idea of "unity." Healing may involve some unpleasant medicine.
I'm guided by the principle for universal love and forgiveness, it is time to leave the past behind, who cares what a dead person would thinks about something he never experienced. You are afraid and grasping at an illusion to keep up the self image of the victim, a powerful image yes, wash the hate from your heart, open the chacra of fear to drain the pool of resentment and let the light enter your soul. I will pray for you my child and I want you to know that I love your for all that you are irregardless of what you did.
Even in the kindest philosophies, forgiveness is conditioned on some kind of regret for the crime (if indeed a crime did happen). Almost none of the people on this list are repentant for their actions - if anything, many are defiant - and I see no reason to forgive them. It may be a kindness to them, but there is also a problem of kindness for their victims.
Healing can not happen without some form of holding the perpetrators to account. Otherwise, society has not shown that the behaviour was unacceptable and the perpetrators are not seeing any consequences for their actions. To give an example, hardly anyone would be able to forgive someone that has e.g. stolen your car, and continues to drive by your house with it and showing no remorse for taking it.
It's also ironic that the demands for unity and forgiveness are now coming from a side who has made law&order a central part of their platform, in a country with one of the most broken judicial systems and one of the highest incarceration rates in the world.
I support a lot of these pardons for non-violent drug offences, mainly because the US justice system issues such needlessly long sentences, and the US penal system is so harsh.
But AFAIK, Trump hasn't done anything to address these while in power, and given his usual rhetoric about "law and order" targeted at a very conservative audience, the cynic in me can't help but wonder if a lot of these pardons are to detract from or excuse the pardons for cronies.
"Trump's endorsement of the Senate's First Step Act stands in stark contrast to some of the rhetoric he has employed while in office"
"Trump, too, at times has argued that drug dealers are not punished enough"
"He has even talked about wanting to utilize the death penalty against drug traffickers" (yikes!!!)
And then there is the executive order that Trump made targetting BLM protesters, where damaging a federal building can lead to up to 10 years in prison, and he spraffed at length about coming down hard on them. Funnily enough, he wasn't saying anything like this about the Capitol Hill rioters...
I think one of Trump's biggest flaws (if we put aside megalomania), is that he wants to be loved by everyone - I always got the impression he'd say anything to anyone if he thought it would get them on side, regardless of whether he actually believed it.
Trump pardons former Uber executive Anthony Levandowski on the recommendation of a panel that includes Peter Thiel and Palmer Luckey.. (EDIT: Palmer Luckey) -> who famously caught on camera flashing a white supremacy sign in a photo with the conspiracy theorist Chuck Johnson and Steve Bannon (who was also pardoned today)- just hilarious levels of corruption all around
Also in Trump's last hurrah is pardoning Kwame Kilpatrick. https://www.crimetownshow.com/ I have no idea how he fits in the profile of Trump's other pardons. Maybe just resonates with Trump as another shameless, corrupt politician.
I see these series of pardons but I don’t get how it works logistically in terms of federal vs state. Let’s say Anthony Levandowski was guilty for California charges, what would that mean?
> The most interesting one to me was President Ford pardoning President Nixon. TIL.
Done in the name and hope of "national healing". There were even talks about Biden pardoning Trump in order to prevent the precedent of a new administration pursuing an outgoing administration by legal overreach... was utter madness IMO even before the attempted putsch by his supporters, but now it's untenable.
Personally, as a half German and half Croat I can only say one thing when I look at the histories of my home countries: for any form of healing to succeed, criminal actions by any government must be dealt with transparently and impartially by the appropriate institutions in a speedy manner, otherwise the only thing that will breed is resentment.
The Nazi regime crimes were dealt with by the Nuremberg trials and the supporters were assessed under de-nazification, the result was that every German could see that high crimes did not go unpunished and that our neighbor countries could trust us again.
Contrast this to the post-Independence Wars Balkans, where half the war criminals of all sides were not prosecuted at all as they died and not much research happened into what they did, and of the other half the majority was protected by their respective ethnic's governments for sometimes decades. The result? Ugly nationalism and hatred are as alive as ever in the region.
Issued on January 20th, 2021.... Didn't Joe Biden just win the popular vote with 51.3% on... November 3rd, 2020, over two months ago? Why does the US political system wait months to enact the peoples' will? I don't understand this at all.
Yeah, it's a serious question. In the 2015 Canadian General Election[0] the new Prime Minister and cabinet were sworn in two weeks later (though others seem to be often about a month later). I recently saw someone talking about their country swearing in the new party the actual next day(!), though I can't seem to find what country that was. Two months seems crazy to me.
I believe, in many parliamentary systems the parliament is dissolved first after which government becomes a caretaker government and cannot enact major new policy changes. After an election is held, new members of parliament are elected and must form a governing coalition that has a majority of the members (sometimes with one party, sometimes with multiple parties) can select a new prime minister and start governing in earnest. Sometimes, they cannot come to an agreement on a governing coalition and they continue without a government for a while until they can. Belgium is infamous for having gone years without a real government that can enact policy due to their failure to establish a majority coalition. This is however very unusual.
Over the past couple years I'm strongly starting to believe that this is a better system of government than the US republican[1] model.
[1] by republican, I mean of a republic, not the GOP
> Or are you suggesting the second we know the winner the previous president should be booted out?
I think GP is asking why it's 2 months instead of something like 2 weeks.
> Or are you suggesting the second we know the winner the previous president should be booted out?
It's not a terrible idea to prevent them from signing new legislation or doing anything else of massive importance. If it was worth doing, it should've been done before the election so that voters had all the information before casting their votes.
So, most developed democracies are parliamentary democracies, and don't have executive presidents. In that case, it's normally pretty rapid. For instance, Ireland held a general election on the 8th of Feb 2020, the 32nd Dail was dissolved on the 14th of Feb 2020, and the 33rd Dail convened on the 20th. In that particular case, the cabinet (the executive) stayed in power as a caretaker government for months afterwards (and took major decisions over covid) because the new Dail struggled to either appoint a new prime minister or call a new election (covid was unhelpful there), but that's very abnormal.
In presidential and quasi-presidential systems, it typically takes a week or so. The US really is an anomaly here.
It's an artifact of history, when 200 years ago it may have taken weeks for states to count votes, certify and send representatives with the results, assuming they made it to the capital and didn't die during travel when their horse fell into a river or something...
Plus, once confirmed (on the 6th), it does take some time to change cabinets etc.
It's pretty swift in a number of European countries, days not weeks.
Fact is the civil service is not being swapped, just the political leaders of the departments. Perfectly fine to just swap ministers in a matter of days.
Assuming the newly elected parliament can agree on a government. This is not always so easy, Belgium are famous for not having a government for years at a time.
This is not a 'Europe is different from USA' thing. Each country/system is peculiar in its own way.
The core of the issue is that the US president has way too much power and does replace a large number of civil service positions. "Just after the presidential election, a revised edition of the Plum Book is published, which lists over 9,000 federal civil service leadership and support political appointment positions which an incoming administration needs to review, and fill or confirm."
> It's pretty swift in a number of European countries, days not weeks.
Unlikely. After election, coalition negotiation starts and that took weeks or months. Only after a new coalition is negotiated then a new government may be voted in by MPs.
For example last EU elections was 2019-05, while new commission was voted in 2019-11.
I'm disappointed in Michael Ovitz, who I've thought well of before now. Why would he stoop to this? Lewandowski was clearly very much in the wrong. Justice was in no way miscarried by his conviction.
I don't know if you've read Mike Isaac's book on Uber? Michael Ovitz very famously screwed over Travis Kalanick when he invested in Travis' first startup.
The Trump saga lasted 4 years though it will probably take the rest of my lifetime for the US to heal from Trump and all the acolytes his administration emboldened; from the radical right, to enabling grifters, to draconian and in humane immigration policies (kids in cages, wtf?!?), and a whole lack and mistrust of science, not to mention the rise of QAnon and just the overall tarnishing of any semblance of American leadership abroad (because he is such a joke and his administration, too).
> I'm sure you've heard this before, but Obama built the cages.
I'm sure you've heard this before, but Obama implemented policies to limit the necessity for their use, while the Trump Administration deliberately maximized their use.
If you commit a crime while having entered the country, you are charged in criminal court, meaning you are put in jail awaiting trial. Your kids can't be put in jail with you, thus they are taken care of separately.
If you don't commit a crime, you are charged in civil court and not put in jail awaiting trial, so your kids aren't taken from you.
Under Trump:
Charge everyone in criminal court [0], take away everyone's kids, despite evidence that it doesn't deter [1], because we are evil vindictive (inferred from facts) [expletive] (assumed).
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 400 ms ] threadAs a thief, he should be in prison. He hasn't paid any price. He's still a millionaire, will probably start another company and raise billions in next 3 years.
Is that price a large sum of money to a particular SuperPAC in the near future?
Great way to make large sums of money if you have skills to raise money.
The man believes manslaughter is the cost of doing business for innovation. He should be in prison for much more than he got.
Evil scientist Boo Evil scientist Boo
Should the airplane have never been invented and the Wrights jailed for trying?
> There's a difference between accepting the costs of progress
I'm not seeing the essential difference here.
P.S. I know nothing about Levandowski, his beliefs, or his statements. Just commenting on what the parent wrote.
I worked on the stab trim gearbox design for the Boeing 757. That gearbox is "flight critical", meaning total failure of it means a crash. I'm very proud that the stab trim system has never caused an accident in the service history of the 757. (Of course, the design was an iteration on the highly successful 747 equivalent, not anything revolutionary.)
What was said, at the most, was that maybe the Wright brothers should have had to face consequences for endangering that passenger. That maybe they acted recklessly.
I don't think that carrying that particular passenger was the one crucial step towards inventing airplanes.
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2017/05/inside-uber-lawsuits...
But correct me if I’m wrong this has no impact on civil suits? So he’s still on the hook for any damages.
I guess it pays to have rich friends.
I have no idea if there is such a thing as a "revenge pardon", but I guess it's a thing now.
(Incidentally, I wanted to use an exact Trump quote in that first paragraph, and I found it here: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/01/19/upshot/trump-...)
His pardon could be interpreted as a strike against “piracy is theft” mindset and the idea of “intellectual property” in general that HN often rallies against.
I’m quite disappointed by Trump’s pardons but this one is actually a good one.
Do you have any evidence that he didn't commit the crimes he is convicted of? Because his lawyers would've loved to talk to you last year.
It's not as if I said he was not guilty, but rather saying that he would have a lot of information on self driving cars. Which is what he was charged with in the first place.
I think corrupt is the right word.
If highly positioned people in the industry asks to have his competence back on the market, maybe it's the best if the president just listens
He was sentenced to 18 months and served 6. Wouldn't he be out on good behaviour after 9 months anyways?
Are you sure you are not just knee-jerking here?
EDIT: Or did I completely miss that this was a joke and "powerful" was playing off "white power".
"In 2017, users on the message-board site 4chan[40][41][42] aimed to convince the media and other people that the OK gesture was being used as a white power symbol. According to The Boston Globe, users on 4chan's /pol/ ("Politically Incorrect") board were instructed in February 2017 to "flood Twitter and other social media websites...claiming that the OK hand sign is a symbol of white supremacy," as part of a campaign dubbed "Operation O-KKK".[37]
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OK_gesture
O-KKK? ... mmmmkay, whatever.
You've been taken for a ride ... a wild-eyed ride with your head sticking out of a rolled-down passenger window.
The Christchurch shooter, whilst likely in on the "joke", made the gesture in court. At that point, the difference between it being a joke made by a white supremacist, or a symbol of white supremacism evaporates. It is a symbol used by a white supremacist, therefore it is a white supremacist symbol.
Context matters of course, but I don't feel you can truly deny it has taken on meaning outside of the original joke
Oh I do deny. Nearly every example ever shown is indistinguishable from accident or people using it for other purposes. Mexican workers "flashes" it while driving around: fired. West Point cadets goofing off, punching each other: sanctioned. Random individuals in photos: obviously white supremacist.
to inflate this non-issue, and then use the very fact of its inflation as justification for its further inflation is reprehensible, and then get actual innocent people labeled as racist. Truly despicable
/shrug
Come on. Does it really need to be speculated on? That "one guy" is a white supremacist who killed 50+ people - I think it's pretty clear what his intentions were. On top of that, his written manifesto was a) steeped in 4chan memes and winks to those in the know, b) released on either 8chan or 4chan itself. So it is clear he would know the origins and was playing it up
I wouldn't ordinarily expect that of anyone, except that you had already replied.
Perhaps we should define terms. When people use the term "white supremacist symbol" I hear something that is used by everyone including white supremacists to unambiguously signal white supremacy. A Nazi flag. A burning cross. Shaved head, bomber jacket, combat boots, and most importantly, white laces.
The content of these particular symbols stem self-consciously from their progenitors: putative Aryan heritage in the case of the swastika, the purity of Protestant Christian values for the burning cross, etc
A symbol that everyone uses - including white supremacists - to mean something else - "OK" - is not a white supremacist symbol by that definition.
Its history as a purported white supremacist symbol, a joke on a trolling board, doesn't follow that of actual such symbols
The movement to turn it into a white supremacist symbol is now driven largely by serious, earnest, white leftists, curiously enough. I point to the people who are constantly pointing it out as evidence as my evidence. Why is this, I wonder? It's curious.
> his written manifesto was a) steeped in 4chan memes and winks to those in the know
Assuming that's true, then it's even more evidence to me that OK is not a "white supremacist symbol" his own white supremacy notwithstanding. He, your best evidence that it is, this fellow who used it, is well versed in its origin as a joke.
It hasn't. The supremacist using it in court room is using it entirely within the context of the original joke. Within the context of the joke, that is, but not within the joke. He's using it knowingly. The original joke is "get people to see the OK gesture as a racist symbol, so that people are then pranked in situations in which someone who fell for the hoax embarasses himself by calling out someone else who uses the gesture in the usual way and has no idea about the hoax. Hardy har har, hoo hoo."
I'm not a white supremacist or neo-nazi. Can I put a swastika on my jacket, such that everyone understands it's not a symbol of nazism, because I'm not a confirmed nazi, not standing in a court room for crimes connected with my ideology?
You have to start a war and kill at least a few hundred thousand people before you get to hijack a common hand gesture for your ideology.
I have contempt for all of these people, who insist that "OK" is white supremacist. They promote white supremacy, irrespective of whether they are for it or against it. They turn a stupid joke into a battle cry, because they want to. This is despicable. Reprehensible. Awful.
If you actively insist that OK is white supremacist, you are a bad person and I have zero respect for you. Noam Chomsky talks about how the most violent of two opposing factions gain prestige within their factions by escalating drama and violence with the other faction. That's you. You "fight" white supremacy by promoting it. Contemptible.
Firstly, the OK gesture is a deeply entrenched, familiar, everyday gesture—at least in North American culture. Only a complete moron could think that it suddenly has to do with white supremacy, and accept it for such use to the point of believing that it is a white supremacist symbol and not the OK gesture any more, so that anyone using it is a racist.
Secondly, anyone who has any doubts about it whatsoever can search for it, and learn about the 2017 4chan campaign in seconds.
Therefore, thirdly, the situations in which the gesture refers to the hoax-induced meaning are very narrow, like someone pulling the gesture on camera behind a black man's back or something like that, or a known white supremacist pulling it in courtroom. Then we know "oh, he's referring to that 4chan meme". Where by "we" I mean that minority of people who are informed about this.
And that's all it is; some damned Internet meme, and a minor one. Nobody will remember it in 5, 10, 15 years.
Do you know Dancing Baby? 1996 3D video meme of a 3D rendered dancing baby: probably the world's first viral video.
Do you remember people saying a delayed "...not!" at the end of a sentence to negate it? "I wanna be your friend ... NOT!"
Same thing, only smaller.
Also I am not saying every use is racist or anything that extreme, but it is clear that in some instances there is a connection between this symbol and white supremacy.
Previous to that, it was not a common, everyday symbol used in western culture.
It's not a dumb little joke from 2017 from 4chan.
The Nazis had a hand gesture: the raised arm Roman salute. You can use that salute today without being dubbed a supremacist or Nazi. Just maybe don't shout heil anything while doing it.
Why are you taking the words of 4chan trolls at face value?
Really makes one think what I believe to be true that just aint so.
“According to the ADL, by 2019 some white supremacists had begun using the OK symbol "as a sincere expression of White Supremacy", and many white supremacists have acknowledged using the symbol as a gesture of White Power.”
I think you're the butt of the joke here...
The same applies to the OK sign.
Flashing it surrounded by notorious racists after the 4chan hoax leaves no doubt about the intended meaning.
Also, given that's it's now been coopted by nazis, you may want to be careful when flashing it if you want to avoid embarrassing ambiguities, yes. It was probably a fad in these circles, not sure it is still used, but still.
Trolling is a meaning. I think in that situation it’s even more ambiguous since the “troll power” is so much greater then.
I think it’s unambiguous that the user is a shit-stirrer certainly, probably an asshole. But not necessarily racist. Or no more so than your average run of the mill “everyone is racist subconsciously” racist.
I think what’s hard is that it’s a negative thing to do that brings more chaos and harm into the world. It could be racist/white power that is super bad, let’s say 100 on the bad-o-meter. Or it could be trolling the pearl clutchers that is mildly bad, let’s say 11 on the bad-o-meter. And for scale, punching someone in the face is 200 and murdering someone is 1000.
Haha, only serious...
Hence, ultimately, a racist (if layered) symbol in this context. It's not been flashed as a joke by non-racist people.
In politics? I think people are pretty bad at understanding context about people they see as having different values. The way you handle uncertainty is to fill in the blanks with prior knowledge, also known as bias. When someone has a bias against the person, that turns quite ugly.
It would only be an issue if you were SCUBA diving with a white supremacist and doing the hand sign.
I think out-of-context interpretation is the major issue of our times: we got used to the idea that it's perfectly fine to report the most damning combination of words in a sentence as if it were the original full sentence; that a joke made on twitter is the same as a political manifesto sent to the press; and that a hand gesture can get the meaning it would have in its worst possible case. This has to stop.
If you borrowed Occam's razor, you may need to sharpen it a bit before using it.
To this day, the swastika is still a religious sign in Hindu and Buddhist cultures. It also carries a nefarious meaning in other contexts.
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/7870768-never-believe-that-...
Someone creates a weak troll, like "the OK symbol is now an alt-right symbol" and people go crazy over it.
"Oh it's a dog whistle" no, it's an internet meme that got gratuitously amplified for free (this phrase could also be a summary of the Trump campaign).
(Also "true" dog whistles are not explained - their meaning is extrapolated from context. Kinda like saying "yaml lovers" to indicate k8s users)
"You think what he said was inoffensive? That's because it's a dog whistle!".
It's not that some dog whistles don't exist (e.g. upon secret societies, etc). It's that it's used as a weapon with the flimsiest of excuses.
It's the 2020 version of "Have you stopped beating your wife?" question.
a) A group of people (e.g. white supremacists) do not already know that the dog-whistler (e.g. a politician) is a member or sympathizer of their group
b) That this person who sympathizes with this secret group wants to signal sympathy with this secret group, but cannot do it directly (that is, by email or letter or direct contact), and so must somehow signal through public words and deeds
c) This signal will somehow, hopefully, be invisible to everyone who is listening except for members of the secret group
The prototypical example is politicians talking about "thugs" and "welfare queens" as dog-whistling a racist contempt for black people. I can definitely accept that using such language could be such a signal, especially with the context of aligned policy pronouncements, but it's pretty blatant and not a dog-whistle.
It's like you being furious at black people because your great grandparents used to always win their Halloween contest with their pointy hat ghost costume and you're not going to let stupid guillable people keep you from wearing it at parties.
Because they aren't against racist people. They are pro-idiocy. They're only pro a good thing (being non-racist) by an accident of history and circumstance, certainly not because of sober reflection and empathy. These are the same idiots who would be all in on bullying the Satanic Panic preschool teachers in the 80s, or burning witches ye olden days, or hunting Communists in the 50s
Gems of the left:
Do you want to be on the wrong side of history? Freedom of speech does not mean freedom from consequences! Acknowledge your privilege!
And other deeply manipulative threats/concepts.
>Freedom of speech does not mean freedom from consequences!
How is that false? You can say what you want, outside of threats and the like, but you also get to live with the outcome of saying whatever it is.
I don't see how that's puritanical. It's a statement of fact. I can tell my boss to go f** himself. I can also get fired for doing that.
I think the point isn’t that speech should have no impact, but that the response to speech should be proportional and what proportional means. The Puritans in Hawthorne’s novel thought that making someone a pariah was a proportional response. They were wrong, I think.
But the lesson, I think, is not that we should be more precise in meting out moral judgement, but that we should judge less.
Even though this new origin is a bit of the tail wagging the dog (it started as a joke on 4chan), the ok sign has taken on the meaning of a white power sign in certain situations.
Unfortunately, people have trawled old pics and attacked people for using normal hand gestures. Context and nuance appears to be completely lost on many.
>> When done when posing with Steve Bannon it probably means white power sign.
When a no-kidding, self-admitted, non-LARPing, Stormfront-reading, Klan- or Nazi-party member says "Yeah we've been using the OK symbol for years" then I'll believe it.
But all I've ever seen about this is leftists of a certain type asserting that it's true, with some variation of "I know it's true because all my friends and thought leaders say it's true, and you can see yourself that such people as Steve Bannon use it, and people have even been fired for doing it. Definitely true. Your move, white-supremacy-denier!"
So, no. It's a conspiracy theory, in which denial of the conspiracy is yet more evidence of the conspiracy.
The rules were: if you look through the loop, you are punched in the upper arm. The puncher has to draw a bull's eye first, then punch, then the recipient must say "thank you" and the puncher must reply "you're welcome" (of course in German, i.e. bitte, danke). Any deviation from the rules is punished by a punch, to be administered in accordance with aforementioned ceremony.
Where did you grow up?
If I recall, there was an additional requirement where the ok hand had to be held below your waist, though.
I have relatives my age in new zealand, and it was also common there.
Memes have an amazing power to spread, huh?
- the person had to look directly at the ok sign
- the ok sign had to be below the waist
Played it in Ireland too!
Even if it is used extensively as a political symbol, it doesn't represent white power. It represents a political sub-group disrespecting their opposition for being gullible.
Insofar as it even could represent white power - white power to do what? Have political opinions? It isn't seriously associated with anything heinous.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OK_(gesture)#White_power_symbo...
As for white power not being associated with anything heinous, yeah "Hail victory" also sounds good. Who doesn't want victory?
Are you going to flash a hand signal that might derail your career if someone "misinterprets the context"?
I don’t think I’ve used this symbol since I was a kid to mean “ok,” and I certainly won’t use it now due to potential association.
But it is nice to be able to easily tell if someone is either stupid or duplicitous by reading them talk about this symbol always meaning white power.
I’m sure if I went looking on nazi sites I would see it used in hate, but every story I’ve read about it has been a waste of time. I only see a few come through threads like this but when I read the link it’s usually someone trolling or ambiguous.
When someone is standing next to Steve Bannon posing intentionally with a symbol that could refer to white supremacy, being able to laugh it off as "haha, I just meant OK" gains them the benefits of deniability. (But not very plausible, I think)
People use it precisely for this reason - because it identifies them as a white supremacy sympathiser without being actionable: they keep a trolling or ambiguity defence in their back pocket, wherever that is needed.
White supremacists - Nazis, the KKK, Evropa - love Trump. They use this symbol. Who cares whether someone is "ironically" using a symbol indicating their support for that cause or sincerely?
The sedition just happened, and it was because of exactly this kind of manipulative messaging by the same exact people. Breitbart's former editor Bannon even came out of hiding for helping with the riot's speeches and got a pardon in return. I'm hoping that will have been the last straw for most people for tolerating racist double talk and those promoting it.
It might have started as an ironic joke, but if it gets adopted earnestly by actual white supremacists (see the Christchurch shooter using it in court), then in some contexts it can be interpreted as a genuine symbol of white supremacy.
If he thought he could get people to stop using Islamic symbols by displaying them, he would have been festooned with them.
[0] https://harpers.org/archive/1964/11/the-paranoid-style-in-am...
Of course, the symbol itself carries no white supremacist overtones, just like the swastika in itself does not carry any nazi symbolism (as opposed to, say, a crosssed out star of David, which would be an explicitly anti-semite symbol). However, it's association with and repeated use by Nazi Germany is what gave it a nazi symbolism. Even for such a widely reviled symbol, there are still non-taboo uses. In particular, a left-facing swastika (sauwastika) is a common Buddhist symbol, found often in Asian media with no Nazi connotation. That means that a bald person waving a swastika flag could either be a nazi skin head, or a buddhist monk - context will usually tell you which.
This is similar to "states rights" rhetoric - it has both its literal sense, the discussion of the amount of power states should have vs the federal government; but it also refers more specifically to the "right" to slavery the civil war was fought over. When you hear someone speak about it, you need more context to know which sense is being used.
Human language is complicated like this.
> Use of the okay symbol in most contexts is entirely innocuous and harmless.
> In 2017, the “okay” hand gesture acquired a new and different significance thanks to a hoax by members of the website 4chan to falsely promote the gesture as a hate symbol, claiming that the gesture represented the letters “wp,” for “white power.” The “okay” gesture hoax was merely the latest in a series of similar 4chan hoaxes using various innocuous symbols; in each case, the hoaxers hoped that the media and liberals would overreact by condemning a common image as white supremacist.
> In the case of the “okay” gesture, the hoax was so successful the symbol became a popular trolling tactic on the part of right-leaning individuals, who would often post photos to social media of themselves posing while making the “okay” gesture.
> Ironically, some white supremacists themselves soon also participated in such trolling tactics, lending an actual credence to those who labeled the trolling gesture as racist in nature. By 2019, at least some white supremacists seem to have abandoned the ironic or satiric intent behind the original trolling campaign and used the symbol as a sincere expression of white supremacy, such as when Australian white supremacist Brenton Tarrant flashed the symbol during a March 2019 courtroom appearance soon after his arrest for allegedly murdering 50 people in a shooting spree at mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand.
> The overwhelming usage of the “okay” hand gesture today is still its traditional purpose as a gesture signifying assent or approval. As a result, someone who uses the symbol cannot be assumed to be using the symbol in either a trolling or, especially, white supremacist context unless other contextual evidence exists to support the contention. Since 2017, many people have been falsely accused of being racist or white supremacist for using the “okay” gesture in its traditional and innocuous sense.
[1] https://www.adl.org/education/references/hate-symbols/okay-h...
On a more lighthearted issue, Ray Bradbury once abruptly left a guest lecture because students wouldn't agree on themes for his novel. Does a man own his own words? And does a man's meaning belong to him as well? Or is it like sand through one's fingers?
/s
If I'm Don Jr. or Charlie Kirk or whoever, my prerogative is to invoke liberal "tears" so yeah I'm gonna use all the dog whistle words like "thugs" and flash the OK symbol, because it scores them points with the right, multiplied by the amount of outrage it causes from the left.
Of course this dynamic only really exists in political contexts. Elsewhere it just means "OK" as always. However, it would be equally absurd to assume that politicians haven't caught on to public perception of this kind of stuff and are exploiting it for their advantage (via democrats clutching their pearls and republicans trying to induce said pearl-clutching)
The key is to use context. A swastika on a temple that's older than nazism? Yeah, not a nazi symbol. A swastika on a flag at a right-wing protest in America in 2020? Probably not a religious symbol.
What about an Indian student with a swastika tatoo passing by a right-wing protest? Is it a religious or political symbol then?
They're even coming up with new terms. Terms like "multiracial whiteness" to fit the new narrative. Who knows how many lists I'm on now.
*Corvain Cooper – President Trump commuted the sentence of Mr. Corvain Cooper. Mr. Cooper is a 41 year-old father of two girls who has served more than 7 years of a life sentence for his non-violent participation in a conspiracy to distribute marijuana.*
Life sentence for "conspiracy to distribute marijuana" - Unbelievable. There are dozens of similar examples on this list.
I'll also add that his crime was trafficking 37 tons. He wasn't the seller or buyer.
Could you explain? I'm not following and when I search his story news articles said he opened a clothing store. What was his actual business and was it connected to cannabis?
Corvain's wife started 40tons with the help of a lot of industry folks in 2020. The effort was to bring cannabis revenue/profit back to support Corvain's two teenage daughters while he's incarcerated. That's the cannabis brand I'm referring to.
https://40tons.co/about/
Good for him that he was pardoned, but I find it sad that it's those 37tons that make the pardon unsurprising. I don't think he would ever be pardoned for trafficking 37 pounds.
edit: removed some inflammatory text that was unfair to all involved.
The President is the head of the executive branch. The Department of Justice, on top of which the President ultimately sits, was responsible for prosecuting ~each and ~every one of the people the President pardons, on their first or last day. Someone inside the DoJ thought each and every one of them was guilty of a crime and deserved to be prosecuted for it. Weeks and months -- years, the work of dozens -- went into each and every one of those prosecutions. The convictions, when obtained, were hung like trophies on the walls of the individual careers. Proof they had done their job, proof their work had meaning.
And then the President, with the stroke of a pen, throws it all away.
We all have projects get canceled. We all have invested time and effort and then, through no fault of our own, had our efforts come to naught.
It's bad for morale. Even when the reasons for the laws were outdated or absurd, even when the prosecutions unjust, even when perfidy played a role, even when the people who worked the case no longer fully believe in it ... it still hurts to have your work thrown away by your superior. It still damages the working relationship you have with your chain of command. Why should you work hard in the future, doing the tasks assigned to you, if your boss is just going to ignore it all?
The President pardoning dozens, hundreds, thousands of individuals permanently damages their working relationship with the career employees of the Department of Justice, even (especially?) if the pardons are moral, deserved, merciful, just without a hint of corruption. Maybe that shouldn't defer justice, but it's a reason.
This one is hilarious. The "political project" was raising money for a border wall via crowdfunding and putting it into his own pocket. He scammed the most hardcore Trump supporters, and got pardoned by Trump for it.
> Bannon and another defendant, Brian Kolfage, allegedly promised donors that the campaign, which raised more than $25 million, was "a volunteer organization" and that "100% of the funds raised ... will be used in the execution of our mission and purpose," according to the indictment.
> Instead, according to prosecutors, Bannon, through a nonprofit under his control, allegedly used more than $1 million from We Build the Wall to "secretly" pay Kolfage and cover hundreds of thousands of dollars in Bannon's personal expenses.
https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/19/politics/steve-bannon-pardone...
https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/press-release/file/1306611...
(So Levandowski and Jared are going to launch a venture fund soon, right?)
[0]: https://www.sec.gov/litigation/litreleases/2018/lr24092.htm
[1]: https://www.pressherald.com/2016/11/30/sec-charges-ex-maine-...
[2]: https://www.pressherald.com/2018/04/02/liberty-in-sec-crossh...
I think a more interesting question is whether there's a specificity requirement. AFAIU, that hasn't been answered, either.
This is literally all it says...
> he shall have Power to grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offences against the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment.
What gives you the impression pardons are limited to those that are "delivered" and/or "accepted". How would that even be legally demonstrated to a court.
The Supreme Court apparently ruled that way in a case a long time ago and that precedence has never been challenged (or come up again for that matter)
See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c9IRZ9FzWEA
But realistically if they tried to revoke a pardon today it would certainly go to the Supreme Court again and they would almost certainly rule the other way.
Looking up Grants revocation of Johnson's pardons - it's hard to find details, but it does seem like a Federal judge took issue that they were not delivered prior to the new president revoking them.
Given that there's no such limitation in the Constitution, I wonder if it would hold up to SCOTUS. ...and maybe that's why they announce them publicly these days.
There's also a difference between state and federal charges - even if they've been pardoned, they can still be charged for related crimes.
As you said, though it's not clear, it need to be a different (though potentially related) crime.
https://www.wklaw.com/double-jeopardy-federal/
Of course, there's still the limitation that the State would need to find it's own law that the accused violated - they have no jurisdiction over Federal law (and vice-versa).
Still... it doesn't sit quite right with me. If someone is acquitted by a jury in, let's say, Rhode Island for murder. It doesn't seem right that the Federal government could step in and hold an entirely new trial thereafter. Seems to fly in the face of what Double-Jeopardy is supposed to prevent.
...and that can happen regardless of criminal conviction.
Sad, all of them!
The other no name money laundering criminals are all related to either his gambling businesses or his place of living in Florida.
He's basically pardoning people he's been doing crimes with for a long time and then if course some big names.
I'm happy to see some rappers pardoned though tbh. Their music has influenced my life, they've done great deal of good outside of music and none of them were in the can for things like harming women or animals etc.
It's not like they are all Trump's friends. But obviously conspiracy theories will prevail, sadly.
And where he admits that he leaked info in order to counter the effect of Hillary's emails on the 2016 election. So, literal foreign interference in an election.
You may have also missed the declass that showed Fiona Hill perjured herself when she stated she had no idea who Christopher Steele was- yet actually met with him while he was compiling his dossier.
Most Trump's pardons bypassed DOJ.
https://www.lawfareblog.com/trumps-circumvention-justice-dep...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/most-clemency-...
"I gotta bring the hood back after Katrina / Weezy F Baby now the F is for FEMA"
"The CAN-DO Foundation thanks President Trump for providing a second chance to numerous deserving individuals through the use of his Executive Clemency powers. Many defendants that receive draconian sentences are individuals who exercised their Sixth Amendment right to a trial and suffered the trial penalty phase by receiving harsh mandatory sentences many times greater than if they had taken a plea. These sentences were often based primarily on the testimony of other co-conspirators who received sentence reductions once they testified and were in many cases far more culpable. Executive clemency represented the last hope for many of these individuals to have a second chance at life since (with limited exceptions) there is no federal parole."
https://www.candoclemency.com/can-do-thanks-president-trump-...
p.s. - if you wonder why the Clintons are especially hated in some circles, and if you wonder why people are so quick to believe those Q conspiracy theories, the kernels of truth exist and originate in simple corruption like this
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Almon_Glenn_Braswell#Unsubstan...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_McDougal#Whitewater_affa...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mel_Reynolds
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Clinton,_Jr.#Conviction_...
What do you think you just did?
For me personally, it's frustrating to see comments about things like whataboutism when they're obviously just to deflect and distract.
At the very least, with caveats like saying "I don't support this, but..." there's some level of acknowledgement of, "yes, this might be veering into sketchy waters".
So not "both siding" too little or too much, but both siding a just right amount?
The “sides” we ought to be considering are corrupt politicians and those of us who object to corrupt politicians.
Framing this as if there are two equivalent and corrupt sides effectively normalizes and excuses these corrupt pardons.
This pardon was... really pretty conventional. It's of a non-violent crime and a comparatively compartmentalized one that doesn't impact the nation as a whole. Incentivising industrial espionage isn't "not bad", but it's not that bad.
This is routine Washington stuff, really. The genuinely corrupt pardons, of his family and associates (and potentially himself) for crimes committed during the administration don't seem to have materialized[1]. The list from yesterday is very long, but really pretty unsurprising.
[1] But there is still an hour and a half left. A pardon can be scrawled on a napkin in 30 seconds and then shown to the media to deliver it. There's no formality requirement in the constitution. If he does it before noon then it counts.
I would say that it is uncommon for presidents to abuse the pardon power like this, it's just not completely unheard of. It's also worth noting that Trump multiplied the total number of corrupt presidential pardons in US history by something like 10 in his time in office. The scale is hard to fully grasp.
He granted clemency to 143 more last night which places him closer in line to Bush and G.W. Bush, but there's no way your data here would include that (and that still places him at a very low number), so I'm wondering where you're getting this data, and how you qualify "corrupt."
If we look at a handful of Bill Clinton's corrupt pardons on his last day in office alone as mentioned in the gp comment above:
(1) Susan McDougal who went to jail for contempt of court for him, (2) Braswell who paid Hillary $200k for the pardon, (3) his brother Roger Clinton Jr, (4) Democrat Mel Reynolds who was granted clemency after being found guilty of sexual abuse of a minor.
Thus, Trump must have had at least 40? Where is the source?
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/11/24/so-far-trum... [2] https://www.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/FT_20...
That's my kind of criminal, if so.
He did a few things right, but let’s not pretend the last year hasn’t been mostly political theatre rather than leadership and one man could have led with a different tone.
Snowden and Assange have no value in the market economy. Lewandowski, on the other side, has some interesting skills
Assange won't, because Donnie doesn't think he'll be useful again.
As much as I hate Trump, I support that.
The worst one was this:
Paul Erickson – President Trump has issued a full pardon to Paul Erikson. This pardon is supported by Kellyanne Conway. Mr. Erickson’s conviction was based off the Russian collusion hoax. After finding no grounds to charge him with any crimes with respect to connections with Russia, he was charged with a minor financial crime. Although the Department of Justice sought a lesser sentence, Mr. Erickson was sentenced to 7 years’ imprisonment—nearly double the Department of Justice’s recommended maximum sentence. This pardon helps right the wrongs of what has been revealed to be perhaps the greatest witch hunt in American History.
Yeah, BS. Trump deserved to lose his Presidency then and there.
I also didn't like the special treatment that Stephen Bannon received. There is another person who deserves to rot in hell.
But my guess is that more than 2/3 of these commutations I support. And it has nothing to do with who commuted them.
"Some look shady, but it's mostly good".
And he didn't particularly abuse the power. The record for one day of pardons/commutations is 330, set by Barack Obama on his last day of office. I believe that the record before that was set by Bill Clinton.
For a previous example, Bush Sr commuted the sentence of everyone involved in the Iran-Contra affair which prevented that investigation from potentially reaching him. (Given excerpts of his diary released after he was in office, it seems likely that the investigation would have been able to nail Bush in time.)
His facing a Senate trial for impeachment doesn't remove the pardon power. That also expires at noon on Jan 20.
We've seen "an American president commutes the sentence of a person convicted by a jury of lying to shield that very president." ~Mitt Romney
And we've seen pardons put up for sale.[0]
Is the US a nation of laws and due process or a Banana Republic where anyone can be acquitted of anything?
[0]https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/17/us/politics/trump-pardons...
Not an American, but I just learned a few days ago that a good deal of presidential pardons are used to give citizenship rights back to people who have already served their sentence - sometimes decades ago.
After the pardon they can actually vote and hold public office.
Maybe you should, you know, stop taking away people's rights after they're served their court-appointed sentence?
[0]https://ballotpedia.org/California_Proposition_17,_Voting_Ri...
Source?
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-55236260
Is this not just a coincidence of scheduling though? Or do courts normally schedule executions for presidential transition periods?
It's definitely not scheduling.
https://www.propublica.org/article/inside-trump-and-barrs-la...
In short, there has been a push to resume executions for nearly ten years, and it has accelerated during Trump's presidency (he campaigned on a strong pro-execution platform). In summer 2019 a shortlist was made of prisoners already on Death Row, whose appeals had failed. They then moved as quickly as they could to schedule the executions, quash further appeals and pass litigation to make them happen.
Look at the dates, from the beginning. To me, it doesn't look like a coincidence.
This story is especially sad. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jan/05/lisa-montgomer...
This sholdn't happen to a dog say dogs.
> We've seen "an American president commutes the sentence of a person convicted by a jury of lying to shield that very president." ~Mitt Romney
It's good to have friends.
> And we've seen pardons put up for sale.[0]
Free market at work.
> Is the US a nation of laws and due process or a Banana Republic where anyone can be acquitted of anything?
Taken into account that it uses it's military and secret service to promote a certain fruit company i will say the later is correct.
> [0]https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/17/us/politics/trump-pardons...
We've had presidential pardons for centuries, and they are both a carry-over from the time of kings, and they could arguably serve as a short-circuit against injustice at the hand of the legislature.
Not everything illegal is wrong. Not everyone in prison is serving a just sentence, no matter what the legal system declares it to be.
Left in the hands of the legislature, no one would ever experience mercy.
It should also be a good example of the fact that the president of the US has an extremely and unusually large amount of power, which should probably be reduced by quite a lot.
That's kind of the problem, though. Most countries didn't carry them over in the same way.
> Left in the hands of the legislature, no one would ever experience mercy.
In countries with highly regulated pardon powers, some people are sometimes pardoned (though many countries lean more on the power of the courts to overturn convictions).
What if someone _did_ commit the crime, and it's proven, but the sentence is wrong (way too extreme) or the crime is now seen as archaic?
Think old homosexuality laws or blasphemy laws.
No offence, but most of these pardons make perfect sense. Unfortunately, Snowden, Ulbricht, and Assange were left out.
At the Presidential level, the power is absolute because the founders believed in the executive branch being centralized in a single individual, the President. Outside of Senate confirmation, there isn't much that limits the powers of the President and it's like that on purpose. The people get to have their say every four years.
> The President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States, when called into the actual Service of the United States; he may require the Opinion, in writing, of the principal Officer in each of the executive Departments, upon any Subject relating to the Duties of their respective Offices, and he shall have Power to grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offences against the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment.
https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/article-2/section-2...
President Trump commuted the sentence of Jaime A. Davidson. This commutation is supported by Mr. Davidson’s family and friends, Alice Johnson, and numerous others. In 1993, Mr. Davidson was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment in relation to the murder of an undercover officer. Notably, witnesses who testified against Mr. Davidson later recanted their testimony in sworn affidavits and further attested that Mr. Davidson had no involvement. Although Mr. Davidson has been incarcerated for nearly 29 years, the admitted shooter has already been released from prison.
It doesn't make things worse. The only reason people think it makes things worse is because it at times serves to emancipate people they think are undeserving of it. This is a small price to pay for what broadly serves as a useful tool for justice.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proclamation_4483
The UK used it a lot more at the time that the US became independent, which may be where the US got it from.
I don't think _any_ developed democratic country has a pardon power as unrestrained as the US one (even in countries with executive presidencies it's usually constrained in some way).
- Require nomination or agreement by the AG. - Prohibit pardoning of political crimes or other self-interest. - Require approval by at least on other minister, or the whole cabinet, or some portion of the legislative body. - Require a published request for pardon, justification of the pardon, and the judiciary's comment about this justification. - Prohibited during lame duck or caretaker periods. - Allow commutations only. - Allow pardons only when someone is actually serving their sentence. - Eliminate mandatory sentences, allows judges to exercise mercy in sentencing.
Does anyone think Lewandowski’s conduct is acceptable or defensible? He defrauded everyone involved in Le Affaire Uber.
Meanwhile, the US is illegally pursuing Assange, and is penalizing Snowden for following the very same values that the US ostensibly holds.
The alt-media is calling Trumpers as the new "Liberty movt.", yet they call for American hegemony on Asia and elsewhere, and their policy directions are equally counter-indicative. Liberty my ass.
A counterpoint: Abraham Lincoln had some strong opinions about the events like on Jan. 6, and his opinions were not guided by an idea of "unity." Healing may involve some unpleasant medicine.
It's also ironic that the demands for unity and forgiveness are now coming from a side who has made law&order a central part of their platform, in a country with one of the most broken judicial systems and one of the highest incarceration rates in the world.
But AFAIK, Trump hasn't done anything to address these while in power, and given his usual rhetoric about "law and order" targeted at a very conservative audience, the cynic in me can't help but wonder if a lot of these pardons are to detract from or excuse the pardons for cronies.
https://www.npr.org/2018/12/17/676771335/how-trump-went-from...
"Trump's endorsement of the Senate's First Step Act stands in stark contrast to some of the rhetoric he has employed while in office"
"Trump, too, at times has argued that drug dealers are not punished enough"
"He has even talked about wanting to utilize the death penalty against drug traffickers" (yikes!!!)
And then there is the executive order that Trump made targetting BLM protesters, where damaging a federal building can lead to up to 10 years in prison, and he spraffed at length about coming down hard on them. Funnily enough, he wasn't saying anything like this about the Capitol Hill rioters...
I think one of Trump's biggest flaws (if we put aside megalomania), is that he wants to be loved by everyone - I always got the impression he'd say anything to anyone if he thought it would get them on side, regardless of whether he actually believed it.
Here's the photo of Palmer Luckey with Bannon. He claims in this tweet that he was flashing the sign "ironically" as a hoax in this reply: https://twitter.com/PalmerLuckey/status/922575384817950726
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_pardoned_or_gra...
Without passing any judgement on the validity of the pardons the sheer number of them surprised me.
Trump - 94 as of Dec 23, 2020 (going up obvs)
Obama - 1,927
Bush - 200
Clinton - 459
Bush Sr - 77
...
The most interesting one to me was President Ford pardoning President Nixon. TIL.
Done in the name and hope of "national healing". There were even talks about Biden pardoning Trump in order to prevent the precedent of a new administration pursuing an outgoing administration by legal overreach... was utter madness IMO even before the attempted putsch by his supporters, but now it's untenable.
Personally, as a half German and half Croat I can only say one thing when I look at the histories of my home countries: for any form of healing to succeed, criminal actions by any government must be dealt with transparently and impartially by the appropriate institutions in a speedy manner, otherwise the only thing that will breed is resentment.
The Nazi regime crimes were dealt with by the Nuremberg trials and the supporters were assessed under de-nazification, the result was that every German could see that high crimes did not go unpunished and that our neighbor countries could trust us again.
Contrast this to the post-Independence Wars Balkans, where half the war criminals of all sides were not prosecuted at all as they died and not much research happened into what they did, and of the other half the majority was protected by their respective ethnic's governments for sometimes decades. The result? Ugly nationalism and hatred are as alive as ever in the region.
Or are you suggesting the second we know the winner the previous president should be booted out?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015_Canadian_federal_election
Over the past couple years I'm strongly starting to believe that this is a better system of government than the US republican[1] model.
[1] by republican, I mean of a republic, not the GOP
I think GP is asking why it's 2 months instead of something like 2 weeks.
> Or are you suggesting the second we know the winner the previous president should be booted out?
It's not a terrible idea to prevent them from signing new legislation or doing anything else of massive importance. If it was worth doing, it should've been done before the election so that voters had all the information before casting their votes.
In presidential and quasi-presidential systems, it typically takes a week or so. The US really is an anomaly here.
Plus, once confirmed (on the 6th), it does take some time to change cabinets etc.
B. There is a process in the US that involves state electors having their votes counted and certified and the new government installed
C. No country in the world instantly swaps governments at election result time.
Fact is the civil service is not being swapped, just the political leaders of the departments. Perfectly fine to just swap ministers in a matter of days.
This is not a 'Europe is different from USA' thing. Each country/system is peculiar in its own way.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/US_presidential_transition
Unlikely. After election, coalition negotiation starts and that took weeks or months. Only after a new coalition is negotiated then a new government may be voted in by MPs.
For example last EU elections was 2019-05, while new commission was voted in 2019-11.
I know the intend behind this 'pardoning' idea, but both in theory and practice this seems very bad.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Separation_of_powers#Compariso...
I'm sure you've heard this before, but Obama built the cages.
I'm sure you've heard this before, but Obama implemented policies to limit the necessity for their use, while the Trump Administration deliberately maximized their use.
If you commit a crime while having entered the country, you are charged in criminal court, meaning you are put in jail awaiting trial. Your kids can't be put in jail with you, thus they are taken care of separately.
If you don't commit a crime, you are charged in civil court and not put in jail awaiting trial, so your kids aren't taken from you.
Under Trump:
Charge everyone in criminal court [0], take away everyone's kids, despite evidence that it doesn't deter [1], because we are evil vindictive (inferred from facts) [expletive] (assumed).
[0] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/09/27/far-more-im...
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/borde...