[ExI] Gender-Neutral Side Note

[Adrian Tymes]

On Sun, Nov 16, 2025 at 12:28 AM <spike at rainier66.com> wrote:
> ...> On Behalf Of Adrian Tymes via extropy-chat
> >...The rest of us look at the documentation and see that the courts said he was guilty of felonies, full stop...
>
> The rest?  Adrian that view is the minority.  The rest of the voters (the majority)

I was referring to the "us" that are participating in this
conversation on this list, not to the voting public in general.

I suspect it is safe to say that the majority of voters - both pro and
anti Trump - are unaware of the details of the case, let alone put any
significant thought into it.

> >..."But it was just record-keeping" is irrelevant...
>
> Record keeping violations are misdemeanors.  The statute of limitations had run out.  It was the felonies they never identified.

And that is irrelevant.

> >...If the court says it found him guilty of felonies, then it found him guilty of felonies...
>
> What were these felonies please?

Again: that is irrelevant.  You may think it is highly and obviously
relevant - how can someone possibly be found guilty of felonies if
everyone does not know what they are - but it is not.  Among the
multiple fallacies inherent in that question, it implies that everyone
has to know every single detail of the case in order for the court to
make a judgment, which is incorrect.

> >...Now, whether it properly did so - whether, perhaps, the crimes he was found guilty of should not have been counted as felonies...
>
> To answer that, we would need to know what the felonies were.

And we are not the ones answering that.  The appeals courts are
charged with answering that, and the information has been provided to
them.

> If the court system is allowed to convict one defendant of an unidentified felony, then it can convict you.  It can convict me.  It can convict John.  It sacrifices the presumption of innocence on the alter of political expediency.

This has always been the case.  This is far from the first or last
case in which that accusation was made.  Trump is certainly attempting
to order the courts to convict people for political expediency
regardless of whether they are actually guilty, and while most such
cases have not gone the way he wished, I suspect that not all of them
have.  The counterpoint - which you will need to address if your
continued objection is to have any merit - is that very few if any
such incident has ever gotten to the level of 34 counts, which makes
this particular incident seem unlikely to be that.

> Adrian I presume you didn't commit any felonies

There are parts of the world where being an atheist, or other ways of
how I live, would be considered a felony (or the local equivalent)
with the death sentence attached.  In practice, were I to go there and
be arrested, it would likely be by someone trying to make a political
point rather than literally following what the law actually says,
which means this applies to certain parts of the US as well (in
practice, regardless of what the law actually says).  I try to avoid
those parts of the world.

> >...or whether there was other critical information that should have made him be found not guilty - is a matter for the appeals courts.  IIRC, the case is being appealed.  But that the court did convict him is a matter of historical record...
>
> Of what felony please?  You don't know?  None of us do.  The court never told us.

It says it did.  You may (and apparently do) dispute if those are
properly felonies, but the court said they are.

There is a distinction between whether the court properly did a thing,
and whether the court did that thing at all.  The latter is what is
being asserted.  Your objections that it was improper do not counter
that.  You do yourself a disservice to state your objection by
confusing the two, by - for example - constantly asking what the
alleged felonies were, when that information has been supplied.

"But what were they?"  Ask the court.

"But those aren't felonies because..."  That would be a more credible
objection, but it's not the one you're most often repeating.

I trust you see the difference between these two objections.