Trump apologizes for boasting about groping women, says he'll be talking about Bill Clinton more now

Thank you.

:slight_smile:

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Wow, you really don’t know what a trial does to rape victims, do you?

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Well, not anymore, it seems. Now we think it makes them suspect. Better to have someone with no experience instead.

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It getting played up this election certainly is. But given what’s going on with voter ID/supression and it’s explicit ties to immigration and racist positions on the right. I don’t really trust that it’s just dick waving.

Black lives matter, the innocence project, anti-death penalty groups, the ACLU, And all those lovely true crime documentaries that are all the rage these days. All of them have been making a really public case for the restitution and protection of just these rights for years now. The right isn’t just opposed to this push. They’re spiteful of the subject. Given that these rights exist unquestionably. Advocating for their removal is a pretty good way to embed the status quo for good. And they generally seem to like how things are.

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But in Mother Russia, it would be english teacher because, like the French, they don’t capitalise the adjectives.

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I’m second best English teacher in all of Mother Russia.

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The catch with that is that saving his life would enable him to be put on trial and then locked up with only an out of date games console for amusement, so saving him wouldn’t be nice.

And the Right can’t then go around screaming “vengeance on the murderers of Anders Breivik”, another benefit.

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And I am second worst Russian speaker in all of Mother England. Your point being?

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Wow, you really don’t get that I was suggesting she quit before the cross examination, where she was the person doing the horrible stuff to the victim.

How hard is this to follow: She reached her personal conclusion before her cross.

So funny to see the reactions of supporting a system that every other article has you all agreeing is broken. Sustaining self-victimizing establishments because it’s the best option anyone can imagine and from some sort of I guess ancestor worship?

Automatons and people who are so afraid of self examination and honesty they actively convince themselves that doing wrong in service of an abstract on an individual basis is a good thing.

Financiers have an ethic to return maximum profit, their system is older and more deeply enshrined than our legal system. They work in service to their system and the culture surrounding it. Trump’s argument against paying taxes is ethically in line with the prevailing operant wisdom here. He was doing the “right thing” under his legally established and enshrined paradigm.

The Republicans who are sticking with the party ticket are honoring the structure of their political device by ignoring or excusing their candidate’s individual behaviors because it is in service to a “system”. But we laud the Republicans who see the system as broken and who defy it.

I don’t think much of people who apply different standards to themselves than they do to others. Your system is not more valuable to you than their system is to them. Ethics as they are being defined here are only of value to society if they are in service to a moral code and not in service to self-perpetuation.

I don’t need to lie to myself about doing the “right thing” when my options are between “the wrong thing” and “a passably decent thing”.

Legal/customary/best available choice: none of that means “good” inherently.

I don’t plan on being “feature complete” until I die.

Which also fits with the “non-white people are keeping us down” narrative. Believing oneself superior just by dint of being a white penis-haver is appealing if you have no - and will never have any - accomplishment that can give you any similar feeling of elevation.

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Here’s a pertinent quote:

My life has been on hold for over a year, a year of anger, anguish and uncertainty, until a jury of my peers rendered a judgment that validated the injustices I had endured. Had Brock admitted guilt and remorse and offered to settle early on, I would have considered a lighter sentence, respecting his honesty, grateful to be able to move our lives forward. Instead he took the risk of going to trial, added insult to injury and forced me to relive the hurt as details about my personal life and sexual assault were brutally dissected before the public. He pushed me and my family through a year of inexplicable, unnecessary suffering, and should face the consequences of challenging his crime, of putting my pain into question, of making us wait so long for justice.

Now, imagine that year is almost over, you can almost get back to your life, and then the defense attorney withdraws, forcing another year of “anger, anguish, and uncertainty,” of “inexplicable, unnecessary suffering.”

If you’re the defense attorney, and you know that whoever replaces you will most likely be equally competent, and will re-traumatize the victim in the exact same way, how is it morally better for the victim to have to face the same thing, plus another year of that, all in the name of saving your conscience because you don’t want to do the job you chose to do by becoming a lawyer. That you swore to do to the best of your ability. That all accused criminals, guilty and innocent, are depending on lawyers doing to the best of their ability. How does that make you a better person, a more moral person?

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That sucks. Not a great option.

Tell me how that makes Hillary’s tone during the cross examination morally good.

She should have done a Schindler. You know about Oskar Schindler? He contravened his nation during a war in defiance of law and custom and culture over a moral imperative. What an unethical man, he even took money for this.

Ethical adherence to a moral bad is a moral bad.

I feel like I’m trying to explain color to people who didn’t evolve chromatic vision.

Yes, I really think those are two (well, or three) sides of the same coin.

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I guess I could see a parallel if the Dr. chose to save the life of the attacker at the expense of a victim or at the expense of allowing the attacker to go unpunished or to receive a lesser punishment.

Is this the case?

BTW, are you all arguing that she’s a morally good person or that I’m wrong about legal ethics?

Because nobody is arguing about what a ethical saint she was when she shielded Bill and shit on the women he’s preyed upon.

Shit, I feel like I’m playing pretty fair by not bringing up her youthful racist political affiliations or her vocal support of her Husband’s racist crime bill.

There are plenty of problems with our justice system. “Defense attorneys putting forward arguments on behalf of their clients” isn’t one of them.

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Many things are illegal that shouldn’t be. That’s broken.
The prisons are adopting methods of cruel and unusual punishment instead of rehabilitation. That’s broken.
Police are harassing people based on race, religion, and income. That’s broken.

One of our few defenses against all of the above are a system that, in theory, is heavily weighted in favour of the defendant, because the government has vast resources to play with that the average citizen doesn’t. And yet the system still convicts and imprisons a ridiculous proportion of the population.

And you’re suggesting that part the problem is that the defense attorneys should be choosing their morals over their ethics if the two conflict.

The balance does not need to be thrown any further towards the prosecution, thank you very much.

Whose moral code, though?

The problem with morals is that they aren’t universal. Lawyers, as a group, can agree on a standard of ethics, but as a species, we’re horrible at agreeing on morals.

Ask a cross-section of various Americans the following questions, and see how many of them will agree that it is morally good/right/okay:

  • to be in a consensual unmarried sexual relationship
  • to be in a consensual same-sex sexual relationship
  • to be in a consensual polyamorous sexual relationship
  • for the state to execute a convicted murderer
  • to steal money or food in order to keep yourself from starving
  • to steal money or food in order to keep your child from starving
  • to torture a suspected terrorist for information on the terrorist network
  • to subject prisoners to prolonged solitary confinement
  • to use [insert chemical] to make an unbearable situation more bearable
  • to use corporal punishment to discipline a wife or child

I could probably make this list much, much longer, but I’ll stop there.

You’re saying that people should, at all times, value their morals above their ethics.

How is that supposed to work in a country with such a diverse view of what is “moral?”

I’m arguing that, as a professional bound to a code of ethics, choosing to stand by that code of ethics in morally dubious situations is not, in itself, an immoral choice. I’m arguing that choosing to swear to follow a code of ethics that will result in sometimes having to choose ethics over morals is also not an immoral choice. But, more than that, I’m arguing that providing a service necessary to the functioning of a society based on the rule of law, and doing so ethically and to the best of your ability, is a moral good in itself, which can be weighed against any morally dubious actions you take in order to provide that service.

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Someone else also responded to you and pointed out in detail that the entire judicial process is difficult for rape victims, not just the cross examination. You ignored that post entirely, and then responded to my post – which snarkily suggested that you didn’t understand how hard the judicial process was for victims – by in effect admitting that you don’t understand how hard the entire judicial process is for victims.

So, you might want to learn more about how hard the entire judicial process is for victims, and then you’ll understand why putting them through it multiple times just because a defense lawyer doesn’t want to do their court-appointed job isn’t in the victim’s best interests.

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You seem to be faulting her for doing the job she had sworn an oath to do. That she should have shied away from her duty rather than fulfilling a role that has been crucial to our society since before we were even a nation.

So yes, I think you are wrong about legal ethics.

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I’m pretty fucking prolific, I’m like 20% of this thread because I have been responding to people repeating questions, trying to modify phrasing to clarify and generally avoiding Godwinning (although I did mention Schindler out of frustration in looking for as easy and well known an example of defiance of societal ethical guidelines).

I’m doing this while having had one decaf, four hours sleep, and trying to write a set for a show.

And after 20 posts I asked about if people feel she’s actually a “good person” and I got a deflecting response that ignored the examples not related to the trial specifically.

But I’m fucking up by not answering one redundant?

Come the fuck on, man.