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  • Posted by $ 5 years, 5 months ago
    Than you all for your comments. it would seem Impeachment doesn't mean a lot since only twice has a President been impeached. President Johnson who fired the Secretary of State and Bill Clinton who did who knows what. But they both finished their terms so nothing was gained obviously. Amazing Process.
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    • Posted by Riftsrunner 5 years, 5 months ago
      Bill Clinton was impeached for perjury and obstruction of justice in a civil lawsuit by Paula Jones (who was claiming Clinton sexual assaulted her while Governor of Arkansas). There were four articles of impeachment, but only those two passed the House of Representatives. In the United State, unlike other Parliamentary systems, impeachment is akin to an indictment of charges and the Senate tries the impeached individual. So while impeached, both Presidents weren't convicted by the Senate
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      • Posted by term2 5 years, 5 months ago
        Clinton should have been impeached for actually thinking that Monica Lewinsky would actually keep her sex with the president secret. Anyone with that little judgment should NOT be president. As it was, within an hour Monica had told a lot of her friends already what happened.
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    • Posted by $ blarman 5 years, 5 months ago
      There are two parts to the Impeachment process: Impeachment, which takes place in the House and Conviction, which takes place in the Senate. Both Houses of Congress get to weigh in, and Clinton's Conviction vote was a party-line affair where he narrowly avoided getting ousted (but absolutely should have).
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  • Posted by Solver 5 years, 5 months ago
    Good behavior used to mean honesty, civility, being responsible for one’s own actions and respecting individual rights. Sadly, good behavior in these darker days means not wearing the wrong Halloween costume.
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  • Posted by DeangalvinFL 5 years, 5 months ago
    Forgive my laziness.
    Do you have the actual text that you are referring to?
    I know, I know. I should go look it up myself.
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    • Posted by coaldigger 5 years, 5 months ago
      According to Wikipidia:
      Article III, Section I
      Tenure:
      The Constitution provides that judges "shall hold their Offices during good Behavior." The term "good behavior" is interpreted to mean that judges may serve for the remainder of their lives, although they may resign or retire voluntarily. A judge may also be removed by impeachment and conviction by congressional vote (hence the term good behavior); this has occurred fourteen times. Three other judges, Mark W. Delahay,[5] George W. English,[6] and Samuel B. Kent,[7] chose to resign rather than go through the impeachment process.
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      • Posted by freedomforall 5 years, 5 months ago
        None of these removals have happened in recent times. That indicates to me that the behavior of the con-gress (who is supposed to defend the constitution from bad behavior of judges) has deteriorated due to corruption and the people no longer have anyone to expose such behavior. Members of con-gress don't dare expose such behavior in fear of being exposed themselves in retaliation.
        I think that the 17th amendment is a significant factor in the corruption of the Senate.
        Repeal of a few significant laws and amendments passed or ratified in 1913 would scale back considerably the corruption and expansion of statist federal government. Without those laws and constitutional amendments being passed America would be completely different and, imo, Americans would be much more free today.
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  • Posted by freedomforall 5 years, 5 months ago
    Do the supremes determine what is "good behavior"?
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    • Posted by EgoPriest 5 years, 5 months ago
      Not concretely, but in a free country supporting only rational behavior, it does so in principle permitting only such behavior as does not threaten the property or persons of any other, and on the moral premise that all evasion is malicious, but only punished if manifested in action (including threats to person or property).

      So I would say the principles from which our various branches and functions of government proceed are what define good behavior, or rather the philosophers and legal scholars who preceeded the judges and politicians (along with any of the latter who qualify).

      Without your mind, you are nothing. And without the minds to move us forward, we as a people are nothing.
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      • Posted by term2 5 years, 5 months ago
        But with a liberal mind, we are nothing too. Minds can move us backwards too, as they did during the Obama years.
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        • Posted by Solver 5 years, 5 months ago
          Right. The illiberal intellectuals are activity using their minds to figure out how to regress the world back to a more primitive less rational tribal state. Cultural marxism is just one of their spawn.
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        • Posted by EgoPriest 5 years, 5 months ago
          The terms to differentiate a mind are not liberal or conservative, but rational or whim-ridden. (Please do not "politicize" my gray matter.)
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          • Posted by term2 5 years, 5 months ago
            I cant argue with your precise language. All I am saying is that language isnt where the average person (who votes) actually lives day to day. They are so far from being 100% rational that you lose them when you talk like that.

            I think that is one reason AR hasnt really caught on with the public, even though her thinking was brilliant.
            AS was written on a lower level (EXCEPT for that speech by Galt, which I have to say would have had more effect if it was written in a more understandable way for the average person.

            Branden attempted to bring the philosophy down to where the average person lives, and for that I applaud him. I really didnt get into who did what to whom relative to Ayn Rand, so I dont pass judgment on that at all. I did find that his writings did help average people to understand objectivist principles on a more personal level.
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            • Posted by EgoPriest 5 years, 5 months ago
              The language of Galt's Declaration runs throughout the novel, not just in the dialogue (e.g., in the Gulch) but in the startlingly evocative literary descriptions Ms. Rand employs to illustrate the scene and layers of implications: moral, practical, metaphysical etc).

              It is only from perception and in "language" that people live or function at all. The only battle is whether we concede our world to mediocrity-worshippers who would burn or toss aside such literary monuments without a second thought.

              You don't fight for a value by renouncing it or setting it aside for even one moment or momentary "gain." Not if your life is your standard of value.

              Now tell me honestly, do you actually perceive any gains by the wishy-washy approach, can you point to anything that could count as real success in reversing the trend toward totalitarian statism?

              All is I see is people Going Backwards (Depeche Mode)

              We are not there yet
              We have not evolved
              We have no respect
              We have lost control
              We're going backwards
              Ignoring the realities
              Going backwards
              Are you counting all the casualties?

              We are not there yet
              Where we need to be
              We are still in debt
              To our insanities
              We're going backwards
              Turning back our history
              Going backwards
              Piling on the misery

              We can track it all with satellites
              See it all in plain sight
              Watch men die in real time
              But we have nothing inside
              We feel nothing inside

              We are not there yet
              We have lost our soul
              The course has been set
              We're digging our own hole
              We're going backwards
              Armed with new technology
              Going backwards
              To a caveman mentality

              We can emulate on consoles
              Killings we can control
              With senses that have been dulled
              Because there's nothing inside
              We feel nothing inside

              We feel nothing inside
              (We feel nothing, nothing inside)
              We feel nothing inside
              (We feel nothing, nothing inside)
              We feel nothing inside
              (We feel nothing, nothing inside)
              We feel nothing inside
              (We feel nothing, nothing inside)
              We feel nothing inside
              (We feel nothing, nothing inside)

              Because there's nothing inside
              Because there's nothing inside

              Songwriters: Martin Gore
              Going Backwards lyrics © Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC

              https://youtu.be/B5oO0PT_-Ao
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              • Posted by term2 5 years, 5 months ago
                "Now tell me honestly, do you actually perceive any gains by the wishy-washy approach, can you point to anything that could count as real success in reversing the trend toward totalitarian statism?"

                I didnt vote for Trump to reverse the march to collectivism. I voted for him because I thought he could slow down the speed of that march. He has done that, IMHO.

                I see the march to collectivism as the result of some sort of unstoppable force that appears to be rooted in some aspect of human nature that is not being addressed by AR.

                This country will continue down the path outlined in AS until it is destroyed. Maybe then people will be willing to listen to reason.
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                • Posted by EgoPriest 5 years, 5 months ago
                  I do NOT want to "slow it down." Neither did John Galt. Why prolong the agony? It only gives the time they need for those who can only roll out their tyranny by imperceptible degrees, jolts and starts on the downward spiral.

                  Atlas Shrugged launched a revolution, only people by and large have been too stupid or cowardly to wake up to the fact. It wasn't intended as a worse-case scenario any more than Patrick Henry's speech or Thomas Paine's essays were: they said plainly and clearly that the revolution was here and now.

                  Only because people woke up and took note was there the possibility for a Republic of Freedom in the first place. Today, people were not ready to wake up and took comfort they could write Rand off as fiction and the Dark Ages spawned by Plato's fictional symposiums as the only lasting reality.

                  Well, time is running out, has run it, is running backward. And still the endless quibbling over principles or "practicality."

                  Your biological cynicism is not unlike Dr. Robert Stadler's, to whom (among others) Galt says:

                  "When you declare that men are irrational animals and propose to treat them as such, you define thereby your own character and can no longer claim the sanction of reason -- as no advocate of contradictions can claim it. There can be no 'right' to destroy the source of rights, the only means of judging right and wrong: the mind." (AS, 1021)

                  Earlier, she says: "The key to what you so recklessly call 'human nature,' the open secret you live with, yet dread to name, is the fact that man is a being of volitional consciousness. Reason does not work automatically; thinking is not a mechanical process; the connections of logic are not made by instinct. The function of your stomach, lungs or heart is automatic; the function of your mind is not. In any hour or issue of your life, you are free to think or to evade that effort. But you are not free to escape from your nature, from the fact that reason is your means of survival -- so that for you, who are a human being, the question 'to be or not to be,' is the question 'to think or not to think.'" (AS, 1012)

                  To concretize your thinking on the fundamental issue of free will, I would strongly encourage you to listen to "How to Understand Free Will" by Charles Tew: https://youtu.be/W0wM0nJ4UBI

                  Also, the recent 2018 book by Dr. Ed Locke: "The Illusion of Determinism: Why Free Will Is Real and Causal" offers the most comprehensive study of the issue and thoroughly refutes every one of the arguments arrayed against human choice or freedom: https://www.amazon.com/Illusion-Deter...

                  If you persist in maintaining that there is "some sort of unstoppable force," then I would suggest you stop doing anything to stop it, get out of the way and let it take over completely. (After all, if it were true that a person's mind could actually be changed by sticking a gun in their face, there would be no argument against force).

                  But if you decide you are wrong (as I maintain) then I hope you will join the revolution that officially began precisely 61 years ago tomorrow with the publication of Atlas Shrugged on October 10, 1957.

                  And then we can stop wasting time thinking or talking about Trump or any of the other losers going down in the same old ship of fools as has chased and "weathered" the storm for millennia. Then those sailors who are truly seaworthy can set sail for Atlantis instead.
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                  • Posted by term2 5 years, 5 months ago
                    The problem is that the existence of the concept of gree will does not guarantee that anyone will actually choose to think rationally.

                    The other argument is that we only like perhaps 80 years, not nearly long enough to stop and reverse collectivism in this country. My selfish interest is to live in as good a country as I can during the time I am alive. We have already spend 61 years essentially achieving nothing but watching a further slide into collectivism. I can see it taking generations from now to reverse this process. I dont have that time, and I doubt you do either. I dont want to live as venezuelans are, and we are headed full force to that. The next 50 years are going to be hell, and I would rather slow it down so I have a better time while I am still alive.
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                    • Posted by EgoPriest 5 years, 5 months ago
                      You haven't listened to the video, and I cannot keep going around in circles with you. Like you said, there's not enough time.

                      Ask yourself why things only get worse. Then go back and look at your own arguments for going along in the hopes that you can slow down the corrosion long enough to avoid taking a stand, or sticking your neck out. You're a luckless pedestrian on a frozen train, waiting for someone to "do something."

                      Please listen to the video I recommended on Free Will. It might not slow things down. It might, if fact, speed you up instead.
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        • Posted by EgoPriest 5 years, 5 months ago
          I do not grant to statists the word that can only, in reason, mean an advocate of liberty. Ask yourself why everyone is so willing to grant to a non-absolute a word coined by absolute revolutionaries for order and liberty.

          For the same reason I do not mix cronyism with capitalism, as non-absolutes on both "sides" are also so fond of doing.

          A liberal can only be an advocate for individual liberty from any of a myriad of possible forms of statism that have but one thing in common: force, making each and all illiberal. So if you must, go with the ironic designation: illiberal "liberals."

          (It's certainly Orwellian enough).
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          • Posted by term2 5 years, 5 months ago
            I would say that you are correct in principle. I would argue that there are so few pure objectivists around that talk of absolutes quickly loses most people in the language. NOT to say that the absolute talk is incorrect, just that its difficult to get people to concentrate long enough to understand it when presented that way.

            Most people look at things on a relative basis. Taxes are lower with regime #1 than regime #2. If they keep thinking that way, eventually they will choose regime #n that has NO taxes.

            I voted for Trump and would do so again, because he is better than the alternative in a number of ways. He is NOT intellectually consistently Objectivist in his thinking, nor would he ever have been elected in our culture today if he were Objectivist . Our choice was Trump OR Hildebeast. Next time it might be Trump vs Hillary again. If someone more rational than Trump ran in 2020, I would vote that way.
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            • Posted by EgoPriest 5 years, 5 months ago
              Unless one is correct in principle, one is entirely incorrect.

              There are no pure or impure "objectivists." The are Objectivists and non- or anti- Objectivists. And it doesn't lose people who are not already lost (presenting it any "other way" is what loses them).

              Most people don't "look at things" at all. Most people look not to things but to "most people."

              Which way you attempt to move on a slippery slope of the kind you present makes no difference in the end (it's an issue of "a little bit of poison").

              Trump, any more than Mr. Thompson, isn't any kind of Objectivist (never thought I'd be offended at it being spelt with a capital "O," but in this context I am, deeply). Had he been other than, at best, an Atlas who refuses to shrug, then he never would have run to "expose" anything (other than his own rank hypocrisy).

              Given the full moral and political context, I would say there is no one less rational than Trump. He is the traitor keeping things together only enough to deliver us ultimately into the hands of our enemy at whose enduring patience he temporarily "rules."
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              • Posted by term2 5 years, 5 months ago
                If you think Trump is the least rational, I suggest you listen to speeches by Schumer, Pelosi, Hillary, Maxine Waters, and most of the celebs in Hollywood. THEY are the really irrational ones with essentially NO redeeming value.

                The Spelling correction in my computer put a capital O on Objectivism for some reason.

                I have no objection to you being very precise in thinking at all. I am just suggesting that outside of very limited intellectual circles, people will be turned off or just bored by what you say. If you want to convince people, I think one needs to start from where THEY live.
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                • Posted by EgoPriest 5 years, 5 months ago
                  Good. I do not consider rationality a matter of degree. It is a matter of consistency. So of course, those most trying to be consistent will seem the most irrational if their premises are irrational.

                  But far worse is the pretender to true premises unconcerned or positively (pragmatically) opposed to acting on such principles consistently.

                  It is only our supposed "friends" that are in a position to do real and lasting harm to our cause to that degree that they do not understand what it means to think in principle, or who are unable therefore to act consistently on principle.

                  As Ayn Rand famously observed, "The evil is not consistent and does not want to be consistent."

                  "The evil is delighted to compromise."

                  And no, I am not a second-hander whose chief concern is others. Those who are able to understand might be of some value to the revolution. Those who are not able or willing can only get in the way.

                  My advice to you is to stop worrying about other people altogether and focus instead exclusively on your own grasp of reality. If you see for yourself, you will save a lot of time otherwise spent in efforts to indirectly persuade yourself through others' unaccountable "agreement."
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                  • Posted by term2 5 years, 5 months ago
                    We live in a society which forces its will on the people who live here. I dont do a lot of "convincing" at all actually. I just pick and choose friends who think as I do. Its getting harder and harder to find them. I agree its better to think only of my relationship to reality and not bother with other peoples' views. Except I would say that when confronted by evil trying to control me, it can be effective to somehow convince them to STOP making me do what they want.
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                    • Posted by EgoPriest 5 years, 5 months ago
                      Force and mind are opposite. There is no reasoning with it. One of the favorite tactics of power-lusters is to equivocate on the issue to the purpose of enlisting individual men as accomplices to their own murder, by tricking them in effect to argue themselves into the grave their busy trying to dig their way out of.

                      That's why there can be no compromise with the evil, the willfully irrational or subjective. All one can do is speak up loud and proud with anyone remotely open to reason, and encourage them to do the same.

                      In addition to universal principles of constructive/destructive interference in nature, another natural principle that can apply to human action is the ripple effect with which patterns of interference combine, adding to or subtracting from the cumulative effect.

                      Thinking in principle means activating your mind through a conscious training process or praxis for building one's readiness to deal with issues or actions that effect one's own quality of life, one's own flourishing. So it's a virtuous circle or spiral.

                      It matters not what one chooses from the literary cannon of liberty amassed from Ancient Greece, the Dawn of the Enlightenment to the present. But passively quibbling on the sidelines of history will make no difference to you or anybody.

                      If you're open to being radicalized then pick up a copy of The DIM Hypothesis: Why the Lights of the World Are Going Out by Leonard Peikoff. He begins by recommending other books that will prepare you to comprehend what he's saying, and chapters you will find accessible even if you're not familiar with the earlier books.

                      AS launched the revolution. DIM gave those who have grasped the philosophy of John Galt our marching orders, a survey of the hostile terrain and the cultural combatants that populate the landscape.

                      Endless concretes will swamp your understanding unless you first grasp the philosophic fundamental, which you will only grasp if you know how to think in principle (another useful book is Binswanger's "How We Know.")

                      Or we can just argue endlessly back and forth, me feeling like a hypocrite for wasting my time advertising a revolution no one here is prepared to join or even comprehend.

                      To them I say Good Luck, and So Long.

                      I'll stop wasting everyone's time and let honest minds come to me, to my posts, not theirs.
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    • Posted by $ Olduglycarl 5 years, 5 months ago
      Congress does...doesn't it?...Oh boy! are we in trouble if it is...
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      • Posted by $ blarman 5 years, 5 months ago
        And that is the real problem - as demonstrated in the entire Brett Kavanaugh hearings debacle. The Democrats basically determined that "good behavior" means being a Justice who is more concerned with social justice than preserving the Constitution. They don't want anyone undoing all the destructive rulings which have come out of the Supreme Court - especially since the 1960's.
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        • Posted by Solver 5 years, 5 months ago
          Social Justice (in the Supreme Court) is what is being collectively preached in all level of schools, and our children are our future. Get ready for brutal collective punishment against individuals that match illiberal targeted identities, for the “greater good.”
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          • Posted by $ blarman 5 years, 5 months ago
            And what's most disingenuous is the notion of the "greater good". It doesn't exist, because inevitably it gets stuck at what profits the social elite - leaving everyone else hanging.
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            • Posted by Solver 5 years, 5 months ago
              How about the, “morally superior?” When a collective believes that they are morally superior, then anything goes when dealing with those who are not.
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              • Posted by $ blarman 5 years, 5 months ago
                That is the arrogance of the elitist, absolutely. And with that arrogance comes the inevitable mindset that rules only apply to "other people" - not me.
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  • Posted by Temlakos 5 years, 5 months ago
    Because the Congress has not removed a Justice of the Supreme Court on impeachment for/conviction of a "high crime and misdemeanor in office" since 1804.

    Now I happen to think patent infidelity to the Constitution ought to be grounds for such removal. But obviously those who actually serve in Congress have never agreed with that.

    Until today.

    Now you have the opposite problem. You see someone threatening to bring Articles of Impeachment against someone for what they regard as a "high crime and misdemeanor" long before he held any office of honor, trust or profit under the United States, or even was eligible to hold any such office.
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    • Posted by freedomforall 5 years, 5 months ago
      Even if there was any evidence, and so far there is nothing but unsupported hearsay, the statute of limitations on the alleged action is long past.

      Based upon recent experience I don't expect rationality or ethics from US con-gress critters of either major party.
      If there was any way for people outside the con-gress to bring charges against members of congress who have violated their constitutional oaths, I doubt that any member of con-gress could survive. They all deserve to be tarred and feathered and deported.
      They all survive only because of the ignorance and stupidity of the voters.
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