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National News See other National News Articles Title: Why The Roger Stone Brouhaha Is Not Simply A Rorschach Test Of Your Politics Why The Roger Stone Brouhaha Is Not Simply A Rorschach Test Of Your Politics February 18, 2020 By Daniel Lee A bit of video has been making the rounds of the Internet lately, showing at some distance a guy on a swing set. The distance and the low light in the clip makes it one of those reversible images; he seems at first to be swinging with his back to you, then with a certain effort of perception you can make it switch, and hes suddenly swinging as a mirror image to the first, facing you. Its like an animate version of those optical illusions that seem to toggle back and forth between a young woman and an old crone, or two candlesticks and two human faces nose to nose. Although calling these optical illusions isnt really correct, they arent an illusion. Both images are latent in the picture. Which you see in a sense is a matter of which you choose to see. That in turn is reminiscent of physicist Erwin Schrodingers famous speculation, involving a much put-upon cat, about the quantum state of subatomic particles being only definable by the very act of observing them. Frankly its hard not to see the similarity in the current controversy over Attorney General William Barr urging a reconsideration of the sentence handed down in Roger Stones conviction on jury tampering, obstruction, and lying to Congress. The matter is being played in the press as pure political interference by President Trump to benefit a friend. Trump and his allies, on the other hand, insist Barr is trying to fix political tampering of an opposite sort among the anti-Trump staff at the Justice Department. In this case two of the prosecutors were members of Robert Muellers investigation, and the jury foreperson has been outed as a vigorous anti-Trump advocate, which somehow escaped the notice of the prosecution during jury voir dire. The political world has lined up on one side or the other, depending on their view of the DC establishment, and there is a temptation to just throw up ones hands and call it a draw, a matter of perception. But is it really about personal preference, similar to the young lady/old crone or candlestick/faces paradox, a matter of will and choice, the truth latent not just in the situation but with the observer? Is Stones status like Schrodingers cat: undefined, dependent on whos doing the observing? No, because an important distinction makes the Stone case more like the man on the swing set video clip, which is different from the image paradoxes and Schrodingers cat in an important way: The man is actually swinging facing the camera or not. We may see it one way or the other because of the limitation of the information available to us, but there is an underlying truth there independent of how we see it. Thus with Stone, and for that matter the presidents clashes with the DC establishment generallyenvironmental restrictions, shipping Agriculture Department staffers out among the populace, emoluments clause, collusion, obstruction, Mueller, Ukraine, impeachment, the purge, and all the other contretemps weve been watching for the last three years and more. Yes, how we see all this can depend upon our ideological presets, which, lets be honest, do have the effect of limiting our vision in order to satisfy an innate longing for the comfort of confirmation bias, illusory though it is. That is exactly why the Robert Mueller investigation, and for that matter, the impeachment inquiry, shouldnt be the end. We need serious examination of the entire rats nest, to tease out whether Trump really is an incipient tyrant determined to root up the very foundations of the republic, or the target and victim of an entrenched institutional state that, at the very least, has a natural interest in preserving a system that serves them so well, never mind an understandable big-state preference ideologically. But this time lets investigate with people who are legitimately independent, not members of one side of the dispute. Both sides are right about one thing: the future of the country is at stake. That much at least is no illusion. But we need to find out who and what poses the actual danger. Poster Comment: You need to put on your thinking cap for this one. Post Comment Private Reply Ignore Thread Top Page Up Full Thread Page Down Bottom/Latest
#1. To: BTP Holdings (#0)
Stone has nothing to worry about, President Bone Spur, Trump, will pardon him.
Indeed, 7 to 9 years in the can for "process crimes" is excessive to say the least. ;) "When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one." Edmund Burke
Needs at lest 20 years to get his mind right. What we have here is a failure to communicate. |
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