Looks SO familiar...

Longtime GOP operatives charged with funneling Russian national’s money to Trump, RNC

It's pretty interesting to see how weak Putin looks when confronted with the slightest challenge from the US. 

The constant whatabout-isms when answering questions were painfully wandering and a nice change of pace vs. Helsinki, when Donnie did his PR for him.

It's truly amusing to hear the Right slam Biden for meeting with Putin....when all they could talk about was how Trump was fixing international affairs as he was violated by the world's dictators for 4 years.  

FBI obtained FISA warrant to monitor former Trump adviser Carter Page

 Red_Dragon wrote: 
verified means somebody he knows and trusts?

i'm fairly certain it is normal or not unusual for diplomats to observe and collect data

i'm not up to speed on the shadowy business of government info/data acquisition

i guess what i'm asking is how they define a spy or spying

i see a lot of posturing but not proof

they even admit

So far, no single piece of evidence has been made public proving that the Trump campaign joined with Russia to steal the US presidency - nothing.

if they have something let's see it, if not let them finish the inquiry and let everyone see results

admittedly i'm a little worn on all the political grandstanding

peace

Trump Russia dossier key claim 'verified'

Anti-Putin Exile Gunned Down in the Streets of Ukraine

 aflanigan wrote:
Regardless of whether the namesake's reputation is deserved or not what is now called sophistry is...deplorable.

 NoEnzLefttoSplit wrote: 
I guess I should offer clarification with regard to standards vs. expectations. I believe its appropriate to draw a distinction between the two.

We all have standards we are held to. Legally, we're expected to always obey the law. Morally, we're expected (by those who insist upon morality as a guiding principle, anyway) to always "do the right thing". In employment situations, I'm expected to always make the right call, never make a mistake, etc. Judges and doctors are similarly held to stringent standards ("first, do no harm" does not have qualifiers attached).

In practice, as humans, we don't always live up to such absolute standards. I certainly don't always. I make mistakes at work, as do we all. Thus, my expectation is that even the most diligent and dedicated journalist will occasionally fail to detect evidence of a source trying to manipulate them, or sniff out fraud/a hidden agenda in a proffered piece of "evidence" or document, for example. The salient question is, are these mistakes/slip ups the result of excusable human error, or part of a more nefarious pattern? "Rolodex journalism" is a term referring to the perhaps way too common practice of always seeking out the same handful or sources, which makes it easy to meet deadlines but can lead to laziness and a tendency to not want to scrutinize the motives and value of what you get from such sources too rigorously. There's the rush to get the "scoop" motivation that can provide incentive to avoid being thoughtful and careful in publishing controversial stuff. And of course there's confirmation bias, as L8 has noted. Thus the other question, which can be difficult to answer, is how often do journalists reporting on controversial political topics challenge themselves to look very carefully for signs of laziness, attempted manipulation, possible agendas, etc.

We're not going to get perfection from even the most diligent reporters. The challenge is to root out the avoidable forms of lazy/inept/biased journalism, understanding that some imperfect journalism will inevitably result when humans are involved. 

 Lazy8 wrote: 
But should we really take Plato's word regarding the Sophists at face value? Isn't that something we'd agreed should be scrutinized carefully to see whether he, as a journalist or alleged truth-teller of his time, had an axe to grind against the Sophists?

 IIRC Pirsig's main point about Plato and Aristotle is that in pushing a narrative regarding the true being superior to the good, or dialectic being superior to rhetoric, so as to portray their teacher and mentor Socrates as a true hero, Plato may well have had reason to be less than objective or "rational" when it came to accurately describing the views of Sophists such as Gorgias and Protagoras. Expecting students of Socrates such as Plato and Aristotle to accurately recount the beliefs, disputes, and philosophies of Socrates and the Sophists is kind of like expecting Sean Hannity to accurately comment on the differences between Obama and Trump, or to accurately represent Obama's politics, positions, beliefs, etc. Plato is said to have described the sophists of his time which he critiques in his dialogues as "shadows of the true early sophists", which seems an awful lot like . . . a rhetorical argument/logical fallacy designed to persuade. Sort of a variation on the appeal to tradition?

 aflanigan wrote: 
I must have read that about 25 years ago - can't remember the sophist angle of it but attitude to life came across good and strong. 

 islander wrote: 
yep, that is basically it. Though Lazy8 and Aflanigan were actually debating the minimum requirements to be placed on journalists, (probably because both have given up all hope of finding any saving grace in the Trump team)

Ancient philosophy was not just about meaning in the narrow sense of "what do these words mean" and "is this argument logically consistent or not", or reason.
A lot of it was about how to live. Vice and virtue played a really big role and the general agreement was to bring reason, emotions and morals into the perfect balance to enable you to live a happy life.

The stoics believed that you can't change some things in the world and you should therefore apply your reason to keep your emotions in check (which gives rise to our current use of the word stoic). "Sophist" is a really wide term, which as Aflanigan correctly points out, was initially not pejorative at all (even Socrates is sometimes classified as a sophist) but described the group of thinkers who pursued intellectual discourse for its own sake.. (basically the philosophical endeavour).. This endeavour went off the rails as people lost track of the other two aspects of the triangle, morality and emotions. However, some would think that even the stoics also went too far in denying emotion, which is why I am a big fan of Epikur/Epicurus (no, not just for the drinking). 

btw, please don't get the notion that I know what I am talking about.. I don't really, this is all regurgitated stuff from my BA in philosophy 25 years ago.. I am no expert, and certainly not an expert of the classics, though it is mind-blowing how much relevance ancient Greek philosophy has for our modern society.
 
back to today... I would say Trump and the alt-right have dumped reason and morality and are swinging their program on the strength of emotion alone. That can work for the short-term but it is ultimately "headless" - out of control and will fail. OTOH reason alone doesn't cut it either and can end up in a post-modernist vacuity.  And there is also the need to consider morality, however you want to define that.. Getting the three into balance is the trick.

edit:  philosophy should not just be an intellectual endeavour but a holistic attitude to life. How you live is just as important as what you say and think. .. 

/off to open a bottle of wine and read some Epicurus. 
 

 NoEnzLefttoSplit wrote: 
I'm not up on my philosophy, but wasn't the pitch of the sophists to use creative arguments to support specious facts?  My impression is that the pejorative use of the term came from their support of disprovable arguments?  This reminds me a lot of the trump team....  Maybe we should be tuning up our fiddles in case there is a fire? 

 Lazy8 wrote: 

Crikey, I hope that is not a normal evolutionary course for an advanced society:

Insight, debate, resolution - rinse and repeat - until all insight and resolution has faded away and one is just left with circular (and hollow) debate.. our future looks kind of grim if that it is the case.

 aflanigan wrote:
Sophistry became a pejorative because of the juvenile wordplay of later sophists, much as modern academics have squandered their reputations with postmodernism. Plato ripped into the sophist pretty hard.

They began as teachers of rhetoric—which by itself is not a bad thing—but much as in our time it became a substitute for reasoned debate. Clever wordplay is not thought, or even evidence of thought, as shown by this passage from Euthydemus, in which Euthydemus and Dionysodorus accost Clesippus:


Rather than seek precision in language to reach clarity of thought they exploit the vagueness of language as a substitute for thought. The sophists intellectually bankrupted themselves, at least if we are to take Plato's word for the state of their school in his time.

 aflanigan wrote: 
Still being investigated by FBI, according to CNN

 Red_Dragon wrote: 
Why take the easy way out. Stay. Drink. Polish the floor with care worn mental laxatives...

 oldviolin wrote: 

I think I'll find a process proceeding somewhere and totally corrupt it...What fun that'll be...

 aflanigan wrote: 
hate me whup me piss on my daffodils, but please don't fling me in that briar patch...

 oldviolin wrote: 
Dude, don't MAKE me open up a can of metaphysical WHOOPASS on your ass.