they excuse her –– can’t you see she is just owning the libs
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When I was a kid and I somehow managed to convince my youngest brother to do something stupid, the defense of, “I didn’t think he’d actually do it/ he should have know it was stupid” never worked out for me. In fact my punishment was always worse when I preyed upon my brother’s gullibility.
As adults, especially ones in power (or access to power), punishments should be harsh for those who act like asshole older brothers who take advantage of those who look up to them (or heed their advice). Powell or Jones or xxxx (latest shit-heel o’ the times) should be no different. There should be ZERO tolerance for such a defense and if you use it, you should be stripped of the position you hold. PERIOD.
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‘Sidney Powell’s lawsuit defense: no reasonable person would be stupid enough to believe me’
She may not have noticed, but her target audience are not ‘reasonable’.
Slavering fuckwits on the other hand lap up this malicious falsehood.
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Hoisted by her own petard!
Well, yeah, but it’s obvious that she didn’t mean for people to take her seriously, because when people who did believe in her statements acted on them, she immediately held a press conference to make it clear that she didn’t mean what she said and that she was horrified at the resulting loss of life and suffering, and was terribly, terribly sorry anyone took her words at face value…
Oh wait. She didn’t do that, did she…
And they are used to peddling their own shit.
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I almost just quoted this in another thread, but here it is, from Sartre’s Anti-Semite and Jew fromt 1944:
Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play.
They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.
Their (powell, carlson, jones, etc.) words never meant anything in the sense that they never attempted to communicate an idea. They only attempted to accumulate power. Hopefully the courts don’t accept that as an excuse this time.
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May not be a tweet, but it’s sure aged well.
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Sidney Powell did in fact make claims about Dominion in an actual lawsuit. She was as far as I know the only one of the many, many incompetent lawyers bringing claims to do so. She also of course made many similar statements in press conferences.
Not picking on you specifically, your’s was just the closest post expressing the sentiment most pithily, but while it is of course fun to make fun of Sidney Powell, the actual pleading does not assert that no resonable person would have believed the claims. That’s a really bad summary.
The argument is that any reasonable person would have understood her statement as being assertions made by a lawyer advocating for their client that require testing in court and/or as political rhetoric both of which they say are protected.
And certainly, if we’re going to have lawyers giving massive press conferences about their cases (and we seem to be stuck with it), being able to sue them for talking about over claims they are making/are going to make in court seems a bad idea.
Admittedly, they are saying that the court should find that argument particularly persuasive because the claims are so bonkers.
Which is admittedly unkind to their client but it’s Sidney Powell so…
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Well, she may be making that argument, but it doesn’t seem unfair to characterize it as “no reasonable person” because she also makes that claim, too. The motion explicitly says, “no reasonable person would conclude that the statements were truly statements of fact” and then tries to shore up that argument by pointing out that “Plaintiffs themselves characterize the statements at issue as ‘wild accusations’ and ‘outlandish claims.’… They are repeatedly labelled ‘inherently improbable’ and even ‘impossible.’”
It seems like she’s engaging in (at least) two different, contradictory defenses here, one of which is “I was making good-faith arguments on behalf of my clients” (leaving aside that she didn’t make all those claims in court) but also “those claims wouldn’t be seen as statements of fact by reasonable people.”
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That either adds up to filing frivolous lawsuits or damaging and knowingly untrue public statements, or both. It can’t be none of the above.
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Could they be coalesced down to “Yer honor, my clients are not reasonable people.”?
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Part of the problem for her, it seems to me, is that she can’t entirely pin these statements on her clients. So it’s more, “Yer honor, I’m not a reasonable person.”
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They are saying “no reasonable person” would conclude they were statements of fact. But by “statements of fact” they don’t mean “things she believed to be true”.
The term they are using has a specific technical meaning in this context. It is contrasted to statements of opinion. Which can be genuinely held beliefs but are not actionable.
Her lawyers are looking to argue that no reasonable person would have concluded that her statements were actionable “statements of fact” but would instead have understood from the context that they were properly to be characterised as “statements of opinion”.
Reasonable Persons are expected to be pretty damn hot on legal nuance sometimes.
And yes, they are being pretty unflattering about their client. But their arguments aren’t contradictory.
Saying that no reasonable person would have concluded they were “statements of fact” doesn’t conflict with her promoting them as good faith claims in a legal case (or even as potential claims which she didn’t in the end proceed with, if you want to make something out of whether she pleaded everything she ever said in a talk show or tweeted or whatever).
Well, it can - for the simple reason that being something that “no reasonable person” would have understood to be a “statement of fact” as opposed to a “statement of opinion” does not equate to “something no reasonable person would conclude at trial to be true” or even to “statement which the maker of the statement does not believe to be true or believe will succeed at trial”.
I don’t know that she will succeed with that defence, I certainly doubt she’ll succeed in getting the case dismissed without going any further.
I personally take the view that she probably left the option of arguing she was speaking as an advocate behind a long time ago. She entered the arena as a political operator not as a lawyer.
As Shuck says:
But then that is also part of their defence. Either she was an advocate and entitled to protection on that ground or she was a politician engaged in political speech and entitled to protection on that ground.
Both can be true. I’d like there to be a requirement for strict separation of professional activity from political stunts but I don’t think there is one, sadly.
I also don’t like lawyers spouting off in the media but then I am an old fuddy duddy shouting at clouds.
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This all seems rather insane to me, even worse than “no reasonable person would believe this.”
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Oh well, I don’t claim it’s sane…
It’s defamation law after all.
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But that’s simply not what she did. She made statements about Dominion as statements of fact, with no hemming and hawing. No wiggle words. She made statements that not just flat out assumed that they were fact but that they were obvious to anyone with eyes.
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It may well not be. According to her lawyers’ argument, that’s a decision for the court to make.
Just because they argue it obviously doesn’t make it correct.
But it is a different argument than the headline or the article set out.
And given the obvious facts of the case, she should be disbarred, found liable, or both. So now we’ve come full circle.
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