Comments by "Peter deWolf" (@StoneShards) on "Trump Applauds Fairness and Due Process, gets Criticized by Democrats" video.

  1. People are under the mistaken impression that the epithets, "democrat" and "republican", are essentially meaningful: you cannot identify someone as rep/dem and on that basis KNOW what he thinks. You can make certain reasonable assumptions based on a person's self-identification. But "knowledge"? No, not possible. This is important because the currency of the argument is "confidence, especially approaching certainty". Because you can't "know", you must chose to "believe", or not. Many intellectual types are unwilling to embrace "belief", so they inflate/falsify the value of what knowledge they do have, making improper assertions of "fact". So they may appear thoughtful, even while their reasoning is faulty. Participating in a two-party system forces the choice of "side"; so each party has to accommodate a wide variety of perspectives, has to appeal widely. When neither party is willing to accommodate a given perspective, a new party is needed. Since that ain't gonna fly, the parties end up compromised from within, distorting the party's image/behavior, through snarky in-fighting and contradictory messaging. This quality of corruption is endemic to the system.
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