I suppose he could also have a substance abuse problem. But regardless, I just get touchy when people with mental disorders are lumped in with people who are racist. I guess personality disorders are also mental illnesses. I am still confused by two things:
(1) The lawyer advertises that he has other attorneys, but there’s only one listed on his website. This seems to violate attorney advertising rules? Maybe he hires contract attorneys?
(2) The lawyer advertises a LOT of specialties. Bankruptcy, contract, housing, corporate law. I doubt he’s really specialized in all that…
In NY, where I’m licensed to practice, both of these things could raises ethics concerns.
He reminds me of another Trump apologist that was here a while ago. What was his name? Came off like he had a reasonable argument and ended up being an alt right apologist?
There’s another pattern at play here, that of delegitimization of anyone that has a differing viewpoint. Maybe in some cases that is warranted, but we are never going to have any actual discussion here over anything if that continues. Pushing an agenda? Aren’t we all? Explain to me how this isn’t an echo chamber if no one else is ever a “legitimate participant”?
gman, I’m not making a personal attack or assumptions. I’m stating my opinion based on your pattern of behavior. Also, I would be happy to talk with you. Which means a meaningful exchange of ideas. I frequently discuss issues with people I disagree with, and exchange ideas and sometimes (gasp!) even change my opinion. That’s healthy. Since this board leans pretty strongly liberal, it’s healthy to have some moderate and reasonable conservative posters to push back against the hive mind. However, the far right in America, which your behavior identifies you as being a member of, has crossed the line of critical thinking into epistemic closure.
gman, you have evidenced no interest in engaging in real discussion with people who disagree with you as you routinely ignore good, strong arguments against you and routinely pick nits to derail discussions and waste posters’ time and energy. You have not evidenced any willingness to actually exchange ideas, or to learn anything from people you disagree with. So, you are not engaged in “talking with” the posters on this board.
You are engaged in talking at this board, and using a variety of communication and rhetorical techniques to push a very specific agenda full of incorrect facts, bad ideas, hateful racism masquerading under genteel economic concerns, and so forth.
I fully believe in open discussion with people I disagree with. I and other on this board routinely disagree and discuss. But that’s not what you are doing, gman. Even worse, you are pretending to engage in meaningful discussion but you are not actually doing so. What you are doing is disingenuous and also wasteful of this board’s collective time and energy.
I note you have been posting in the games forum. Feel free to do so and I and others will happily engage. I have a rule of “what happens in P&R stays in P&R” (it’s the only way to stay sane). But in P&R, I decline to waste any more time. Good day, sir.
Misguided, we do routinely have discussions here of differing points of view. Most of us welcome different points of view.
But to boil it down simply, in my view, gman is not engaging in this discussion in good faith. I’m not “delegitimizing” a different viewpoint. I’m delegitimizing communication and rhetorical techniques based in epistemic closure.
If I saw some evidence that gman was actually open to an exchange of ideas, even if his ideas were far different than mine, I would not take this stance. But the overall pattern of behavior is clear, IMO.
Hey that’s your right to not engage with me. I respect that you took the time to explain why.
PS-I have been told this before, and in fact I have been told that to be a public defender (which I was for 2 years), you kind of have to have this kind of personality. Basically, a willingness to defend a seemingly indefensible point of view. Eventually that willingness becomes habit, and a desire to explore all possible/ legitimate avenues of defending the controversial---- that might even appear to others to be disingenuous. I think I had that conversation with tom, before I started posting on these boards. It is something I have noticed people say to me a lot.
you will never meet more 'liberal/progressive people than NYC public defenders. Seriously. But they have to get up each day and give their best for a racist criminal who admits to raping his wife, or beating a child, or whatever. they eventually learn to separate out their feelings from individual cases, and see things as a set of facts to be carefully verified. at some level, public defenders have to do that in order to stay sane. “Yeah, my client hit a kid, but it’s still unfair to keep his bail so high – he’s got a kid and pet at home!” That kind of thing.
One last comment: one of the highest impact casualties of the American right’s descent into cultish, tribal, absolutist epistemic closure is the nigh-extinction of legitimately conservative points of view. There is no constituency in America for true fiscal conservatism, or truly conservative foreign policy, or truly conservative approaches to education, the environment, and so forth.
There are a few people who are “conservative-adjacent” but most of the people who label themselves conservative have gone deeply off the rails into Fox/Limgaugh/Breitbart/Trump land.
gman, that’s the first real instance that I’ve seen of you divulging something meaningful, and it does in fact explain a lot.
Here’s a suggestion: think about how that contrarian personality, when applied to politics in our current politics, where many people including me, feel that basic democracy and the civilized rule of law is under threat, think about how that point of view might not be productive.
Also, prolonged exposure to that kind of contrarian work environment, where you deeply disagree with the hive-mind, can push you further into a contrarian singularity.
I know what you are talking about. and I understand what you are saying; I’m an insurance defense attorney; however I’ve always managed to avoid defending the indefensible, partly due to my approach and partly due to the fact that California actually has regulations with teeth to keep workers’ comp insurance companies from being too evil. When I switched to the insurance side, my promise to myself is that I would never deny a benefit in bad faith, and I’ve managed to hold to that. But I have worked with many people who were happy to deny every benefit they could, for any worthless reason, and I can see how that would affect your POV.
Consider putting the contrarianism aside and questioning your own assumptions. What if Trump really did have a lengthy criminal engagement with Russian interests including tens of millions of dollars of tax evasion and money laundering? What if Trump really did work with Russian in violation of the election laws and in violation of the IP laws to cheat in the 2016 election. What if the GOP really does want to cheat the voting rules so that they will have power even if most people don’t vote for them? What if the GOP really does want to break the rule of law, and establish single party rule? Etc. Some of those ideas are pretty far left, but try thinking about them a bit. If you reject most but find a few of them illuminating, then we might be able to actually exchange ideas.
Not to mention whether Trump is acting unconstitutionally with respect to his businesses based on the emoluments clause. The hotel he has in DC alone appears to be in direct violation of the constitution. Yet the GOP does nothing about it. It appears as though the GOP doesn’t care if the laws of the land are broken, and the norms of our democracy are weakned or destroyed, as long as it is for their team. If you wish to defend their actions, please do it in a way that uses facts that show the GOP are not doing things that are illegal, rather than saying the equivalent of ‘but her emails’.
And for the record, her emails were investigated and found not to be worthy of litigation. And Trump has a private email server and uses his personal cell phone to conduct state business. So yeah.
He provided literally zero evidence to back up his claim.
It’s illegal for illegal immigrants to receive benefits. If someone is going to claim that they actually are receiving significant benefits and costing the system money, then you need to provide more evidence than simply saying, “people might be breaking the law!”
All actual studies have concluded that illegal immigrants have a massive net positive in terms of government revenues.
This isn’t true. He’s continuing to what’re in a reasonable manner.
You aren’t going to get him to shift his worldview over night. Stuff is going to bounce off. It’s human nature.
However, it’s worth pointing out that not quite “all actual studies” have agreed that illegal immigration is a net positive on government revenues. There was this Heritage report from 2013 that, for all I know, isn’t great (it apparently got a ton of negative feedback, including a hammering from the Cato Institute, which said it was too speculative), but it concluded that undocumented households receive more taxpayer benefits than they pay in taxes. https://www.heritage.org/immigration/report/the-fiscal-cost-unlawful-immigrants-and-amnesty-the-us-taxpayer
And of course, there is the question about the impact of immigration/illegal immigration on low-wage workers, which I also know nothing about. But I feel we can conclude that the lawyer’s comment revealed a misunderstanding about benefits though, which is a misunderstanding I shared.
I appreciate you saying this, but it’s important to note that even if you cannot change someone’s whole world view, so to speak, you can certainly point out inaccuracies and mistakes and help them improve in that way, as you did in this post.
It’s two parts, each about an hour, and is a fantastically deep look into the impacts.
The short version is: there is some impact, but it’s small (we’re talking in the hundreds of dollars per year) and absolutely dwarfed by other factors. Primarily automization and executive compensation.
Yes, but does the podcast cover the terrible impact of the immigrants raping the white women and going around speaking Not English to each other? I bet it ignores that - fake news!
Undocumented immigrants are not eligible for most benefits, but they may be eligible for a small number.
Regardless of their status, not-qualified immigrants are eligible for emergency Medicaid if they are otherwise eligible for their state’s Medicaid program. The law does not restrict access to public health programs that provide immunizations and/or treatment of communicable disease symptoms (whether or not those symptoms are caused by such a disease). School breakfast and lunch programs remain open to all children regardless of immigration status, and every state has opted to provide access to the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children (WIC).
Short-term noncash emergency disaster assistance remains available without regard to immigration status. Also exempted from the restrictions are other in-kind services necessary to protect life or safety, as long as no individual or household income qualification is required. In 2001, the U.S. attorney general published a final order specifying the types of benefits that meet these criteria. The attorney general’s list includes child and adult protective services; programs addressing weather emergencies and homelessness; shelters, soup kitchens, and meals-on-wheels; medical, public health, and mental health services necessary to protect life or safety; disability or substance abuse services necessary to protect life or safety; and programs to protect the life or safety of workers, children and youths, or community residents.
