zlacker

You appear to be confused about the difference between a pardon and parole (and even parole doesn't entail monitoring "for life").

Also, your response didn't respond to what I said (which was about previously only responding to a straw man I didn't say). I like to think we strive in good faith for a little higher level of discourse here on HN. Try to do better.

>>mrandi+(OP)
Bravo to you - I don't think I could have been as mature and respectful as you in the face of these repeated refusals to respond to what you actually said.

>>antiso+VO
Thanks for saying so. I'm human like anyone else but practice helps. We all need to be the change we want to see. Also, my internal goal is rarely to convince anyone who disagrees with me. My focus is articulating my position clearly along with my reasons for currently holding it. Then to understand their position and reasons. This is sometimes surprisingly difficult. Other times it's enlightening and occasionally leads to adjusting my own position.

I try to interpret what others say with maximum charity and construe their arguments in their strongest possible form, even if they weren't expressed that way. I'm interested in discovering why we disagree, not winning debate points. The hardest discussions are often those where they never seem to understand my position or are unwilling to respond to it. This leaves me with little choice but to meta-up to the 'protocol level' to re-establish productive communication.

In the conversation above, I suspect, based on hints in the last response, that the root issue may have been that a moral equivalence between Ross and Pablo Escobar was neccessary to make Trump pardoning Ross a maximally negative talking point against Trump.

If so, the discussion could never really be about what it appeared to be about: the relative criminal or moral weight of Ross' crimes or the appropriateness of the sentence. Which is a shame because it prevented ever reaching more interesting ground. For example, I wish the pardon had been a commutation instead because Ross was justly convicted of significant crimes before he was over-sentenced. The wrong which needed to be righted was the sentence not the conviction.