On Fri, 30 Aug 2024 23:58:12 -0700 (PDT), micky wrote:
I knew it's been bothering me for quite a while: Peacful transfer of
power. I finally figured it out. Wrong phrase.
Have you heard the phrase "term of art"? Lawyers call a word or
phrase a "term of art" if it means something specialized to lawyers,
and different from how laymen use the same word or phrase.
A classic example is "actual malice" -- not just "malice" but
"_actual_ malice". The Supreme Court of the US invented that phrase
in Sullivan v. New York Times. They handed down a decision that a
public figure could not prevail in a libel action merely because the
statements in question were false and damaging. The defendant had to
have acted with "actual malice", by which the Justices meant that
defendant either knew the statements in question were false or
published them in reckless disregard of whether they were true or
false. A defendant can have no ill feelings -- "malice" in its
ordinary sense -- toward the plaintiff, but still have been so
severely negligent in checking the facts before publishing that a
court would find they acted with "actual malice" by the Supreme
Court's definition.
"Peaceful transfer of power" is maybe not quite a term of art, but
it's close. It means not only refraining from setting the Reichstag,
or the Capitol, on fire, but also not doing violence to the law by
interfering in a material way with the process of counting the votes
and establishing a winner as the law directs.
A lot of ways to steal
the election would have been peaceful. There was a 5-stage plan, and
any of the first 4 stages could have been sucessful and they were all peaceful. Only stage 5 was not. By talking about peacefulness instead
of legality, they minimize and even tend to obliterate the problems of
the first 4 stages, and of the plans, in progress and yet to come, to
steal future elections with different plans.
All of these would do violence to the law. In English common law an
action for trespass routinely claimed that the defendant had entered plaintiff's land "with force of arms" (vi et armis), even if it was
as simple as opening an unlocked gate. Like the Church, the Law has
its own terms, which grew out of history, and they do not change
quickly.
Another phrase that bothers me is "free and fair elections". Like the phrase above, there is something wrong with this phrase. But I haven't figured it out yet. It's seems okay, but my gut tells me it's either
missing something, adding something, or for completeness, possibly
distorting something. And my gut is rarely wrong.
I don't have the insight of your intestinal flora, but this phrase
doesn't seem problematic to me. I'll leave it to others to weigh in.
--
Stan Brown, Tehachapi, California, USA
https://BrownMath.com/
Shikata ga nai...
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