Gun violence is never the answer.
While I do wish Trump to outer space without a suit, shooting on him in public or people is never ever a solution!
This will only aggravate the MAGA rage even more and they will become even more extreme..
The only way these extremist can react is by making things even worse because hell is the only thing they truly believe and serve
Do not kill in the name of democracy because that would make you as worse as the dictator himself
We need to VOTE them out
Gun violence is never the answer.
@stux I guess the shooter is a maga moron who was supposed to miss and become a maga-hero. False flag.
Gun violence is never the answer.
Gun violence is never the answer.
@stux Well not killing Hitler got WW2. Not killing Putin...
Gun violence is never the answer.
@stux Sometimes youj have to fight and kill to protect the good of many.
Gun violence is never the answer.
@bhasic True, true, but be careful not to cross the line ๐
Gun violence is never the answer.
@stux I'm not planning to kill anyone, but in the army I made an oath to protect my country from external and internal threats.
Gun violence is never the answer.
@bhasic Hm..
I did not
I will only fight against an enemy I also see that way, not because "my country" ๐ says it
I don't give a crap about my country
@stux Agreed, but assassins tend to be nutjobs so telling them not to do irrational things is probably not that effective.
@cherold Absolutely! But im not talking to assassins here
More to people who are getting more and more frustrated and fed up with the current state
Just hope no one will go over the edge so to say
Gun violence is never the answer.
@stux I don't care much about my country either. It's more and more for the rich only. Nazi ministers are ok in the fascist government who make the poor suffer more and give the rich tax breaks.
Gun violence is never the answer.
@bhasic Right.. it's getting hard to stand behind such things
I fight for the small people like myself ๐ช
Gun violence is never the answer.
@stux I agree, gun violence is never the answer. I'm against the use of automatic weapons and bump stocks and 3D print guns Etc I am all for gun control and safety, but I ain't butt hurt over this. Just going to be honest. Maybe they'll enact some decent gun safety laws now. ๐คฌโ ๏ธ
> This will only aggravate the MAGA rage even more and they will become even more extreme..
One wonders at what the "they" did that made them "extreme"; this is the first time a president has been shot since 1980 as far as I can recall. But "they" are "extreme", "they" are full of the "MAGA rage". I mean, where's the presumption that "they" are the "extreme" ones, and at what point do you think you've got to wonder whether it's not "them"?
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@p Haha oh god
MAGA are an extemist group that so clear, even glass is less transparant
Trump is a wannabee dictator that acts like a little child that doesn't get what it wants, is a conviced criminal that is too stupid to be even hypercritical
Sorry but I truly dispite the guy in every way..
@p Oh and if those things from Kathy make you overthrow democracy, build deportation camps, spew hate left and right I sugges not getting into politics but go work at an ice cream shop or whatever
It's like an kid crying because a classmate made a drawing of you..
Grow up
> Oh and if those things from Kathy make you overthrow democracy,
Doesn't bother me, but it's "extremist rhetoric". You can babble "Oh, it's obvious that 'they' are the evil ones, 'they' are the extremists, 'they' are trying to overthrow democracy."
The shooting today is an actually extreme thing, and I've not seen this sort of thing in this country during my lifetime, and "Oh, he's a dictator, he's gonna overthrow democracy" is the sort of thing that people use to justify it.
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When I hear people like you talk, I think the EU deserves what it's about to get.
Anyway, I told Stux I'd lay off instead of saying "I live here and what you are saying is crazy" so I'll have to do that at least long enough to see if that's actually what he wants.
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> MAGA are an extemist group that so clear,
I'd say assassinations are more "extreme" than whatever you're talking about. Last time he was president, I recall no prison camps and no executions. I don't remember this happening again: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Choke_Point . I *do* remember some federal agents tried to kidnap a governor.
> Sorry but I truly dispite the guy in every way..
The question was where the threshold is.
When someone is both vague and mocking, usually they have no response and they want you to stop asking questions, and often additionally because they don't want to contemplate the answers. There's no reason to do the "Haha oh god " routine unless you intend to be unpleasant, you want to try to get under the other person's skin. You could just ask "Please, I'm trying to posture about your country's politics. I don't want any Americans to weigh in. Would you mind?" You don't have to be hostile, I'm reasonable. Either way, the message is received. Have a good evening.
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But it's pretty simple: If you're sitting there cheering for an attempted assassination, or apologizing for it, then the assassin is one of "your guys".
I hate a lot of politicians, and joking aside I don't want any of them assassinated. I want Justin Trudeau to lose in disgrace and go live out his days in California, not painting the steps of parliament. If someone tried to kill Trudeau, even with all he's done, I'll condemn that guy because once assassinations hit the table, they stay on the table, and it won't take 80 years for republics to end.
@sun@shitposter.world
Double standards are the name of the game.
This is why I can't take the "we have to save democracy" rhetoric seriously.
I definitely see how both red and blue teams are guilty of making the states more authoritarian, one side is just a lot more honest about their ideal vision.
@stux@mstdn.social @p@fsebugoutzone.org
my billionaire pedophile > your billionaire pedohile
Besides, it's looking increasing like it's a far left American. Which it would make sense for it to be.
> or is everyone who's anti-trump one of 'stux's guys'
To be fair, when he talks about the "MAGA extremists", he's casting a very wide net to make his own case.
@stux @p the deportation camps were built by Obama. Not Trump.
MAGA is hardly an extremist group. Now I can think of an extremist group that tells you to cut off your childโs genitals because โthey (the child) knows whatโs best for themโ
The convicted criminal thing is also a wash because itโs painfully obvious that the democrats did it in an attempt to keep him from winning reelection.
Surprise! When the government and media spend 10 years lying about him, unconstitutionally litigating him for crimes that aren't crimes, and comparing him to mass murderers, he's more likely to be killed.
What's most surprising is that it took this long.
re: Gun violence is never the answer.
@jeffcliff @J @p @stux @sj_zero except he wasnโt charged for rape. He was charged for giving Stormy Daniels hush money.
It's not that big a deal, you just hate White people.
Gun violence is never the answer.
Why "Democrats" hste US Constitution that much? What's next? Censorship?
So it's a felony conviction of getting a line item wrong on his taxes.
@jeffcliff @J @p @stux @sj_zero
Incorrect! He was found liable but not guilty of sexual abuse, and not rape
You see how those words are different words? Yeah. Exactly. Please stop redefining things to fit your narrative.
https://www.newsweek.com/fact-check-was-donald-trump-found-guilty-rape-1799935
> and go live out his days in California,
No. (Cuba might have no objections to taking him, though. )
ah, another case of "clueless euro speaks about america while not knowing america"
@jeffcliff @J @p @stux @sj_zero Yes, by the colloquial definition, it is.
By the legal definition, it is not. It is sexual abuse because they could not fully prove it was the legal definition of rape. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2024/01/29/donald-trump-rape-e-jean-carroll/72295009007/
Either way, he was found โliableโ, not guilty. And, while this is speculation, he was most likely found liable over the fact he outright denied it (and still does)
> red and blue teams are guilty of making the states more authoritarian,
Accurate.
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@sj_zero
> Besides, it's looking increasing like it's a far left American. Which it would make sense for it to be.
You mean like the one who killed JFK (see the movie and Bill Hicks' comments)? In reality, the sort of leftist who might consider that "the ends justify the means" is generally not the sort who knows which end of a gun you point at people, let alone an elite sniper. It's just as likely to a be a Reichstag fire style tactic by the Orange Felon's campaign.
(1/3)
@p @stux @jeffcliff
@jeffcliff @J @p @stux @sj_zero civil cases donโt work like that. I donโt care what some retarded judge says since New York courts have been shown to be illegitimate as they deny federal law.
I also donโt care what one of your blogposters says. If she wants to go for Trump about that, she needs to do the same thing for everyone else in Epsteinโs little black book, but she wonโt since they fit her agenda. Academia is utterly screwed and irreparably so.
What I think is more likely than either is that it wasn't a leftist *or* someone hired by GoP strategists. I can think of 2 other groups who have a motive;
1) The surveillance agencies; interfering in democratic elections and assassinating political leaders unfriendly to their interests has been common practice for decades. As we saw from 2016-2020, they're no fans of Agent Orange. The best argument against this is they would have succeeded (again, JFK).
(2/3)
@sj_zero @p @stux @jeffcliff
2) Corporate strategists who want the Biden administration to lose, but don't care who the next President is, as long as they're from GoP. They have access to well-armed mercenaries like Blackwater (https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/disturbing-rise-corporate-mercenaries/), and their interests are served whether the sniper hits or misses, as long as the attack is blamed on the left (again, see JFK).
This is my pick right now.
(3/3)
@sj_zero @p @stux @jeffcliff
If one finds oneself citing anti-extremism to defend assassination attempts one is an idiot. I do not know how else to interpret it, it fails a basic understanding of the terms used.
"Vote blue no matter who"
I'm not a Democrat or Republican, but the idea to justify political assassination is stupid, no matter if you are Trump , Biden or the Archduke Franz Ferdinand.
Nothing good came from killing political opponents, and this "Trump derangement syndrome" by MSM is just a consequence of that. Nihilist people who think "we need to get tid Trump at all cost"
> when he's not ranting about American politics
This year, Europeans cease ranting about our politics.
Most especially Nazi bullshit. They've got Golden Dawns in the EU Parliament. They have had a Hitler, we rescued their asses from their own Hitler. We had no Hitler. Not that we've had the best presidents we possibly could, but none of them was Hitler, none of them had to be forcibly removed. They are not the experts on maintaining a Zero-Hitler region. They should be listening to the US.
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They have no morals. If "democracy" meant anything, it'd mean government decisions are decided by elections and elected officials, which would mean Orange Faggot is more democratic than a vegetable used as a puppet by unelected bureaucrats. Trump is the last vestige of American democracy, for better and for worse. But they'd rather suck off the shadow government to own the chuds.
@jeffcliff
> I agree that it's most likely a left leaning patriot
Why? Aside from the somewhat flippant counterargument I already offered, I'm not aware of any group on the US left calling for political violence. Unlike on the right where this is par for the course these days among Team Orange Felon.
Secondly, even if a leftist shooter was conceivable, they wouldn't have chosen a political rally. Plenty of other places where there wasn't a risk of bystanders being hit.
Gun violence is never the answer.
Stux, democracy in the US is already DEAD!
Vote them out? How well did that work in 2016 and 2020?
@jeffcliff
This was calculated to get *immediate* broadcast media attention (and thus social media attention), and to inflame tensions. You've got to ask yourself, who stands to benefit from that? Not the left, who would have known they'd be at risk of being targeted by revenge attacks.
@p @stux @sj_zero
I love bad faith discussions! this was posted a few posts back lmao
im just praying one day the wolf comes out for real and to see their faces melt in horror as no one believes their bullshit anymore
Gun violence is never the answer.
1)
The myth you're buying into is "gun safety laws are unconstitutional!" No one wants to take away your right to bear arms! we're talking bout automatic weaponry, 3D printed guns that can't even be traced, bump stocks that turn a regular weapon into a massive killing machine, Etc! Satistically mass shootings are done by someone who shouldn't have been able to get a gun in the 1st place let alone a mass destruction weapon. The obsession...
Gun violence is never the answer.
2)
...with guns in this country is alarming! It's no wonder we're one of the leading countries with the most gun fatalities! Also, statistically countries with stronger gun laws have less! Basically you're saying you don't give a f*** about the people mass shooters are killing. Kudos for you.
Gun violence is never the answer.
All mass shooters are made by "miserable losers with crappy lives, nihilistic mindset". Many countries have gun rights and you don't see many people using them to randomly shoot innocent people. At best, they kill because gang or dispute.
In order to kill innocent and unknown people, your mind must have no remorse or respect to human lives. Not even drug cartels would kill randomers.
Mental health is a serious problem and USA doesn't take care of them. If you take full-auto, they will use semi-auto, if you take semi-auto, they will use revolvers or self-made. If you get rid of gun powder, they will use knifes or create black powder.
Someone who wants to kill, will do that regardless of the law.
> good for you you found the ONE fucking whataboutism!
"One"? I picked the recognizable one.
> How about the people mowed down in Charlottesville?
Or the sniper that attacked the truck caravan just north of Los Angeles, where I live.
> How about Jan 6?
How about the buildings on fire during the riots in 2020?
> How about the dead in Pulse nightclub?
Pulse was a religious shooting.
> Club Q?
The Covenant School, Nashville, 2023.
> The MAGAts are already conducting warfare against the United States and its citizens.
So I hear "No Trump, no wall, no USA at all" being chanted by people flying the flags, and I'd say those people are opposed to "the United States and its citizens", but you're grasping: none of that is warfare.
Assassination attempts are an escalation. "Yeah, but orange man bad, assassination justified THEY ARE CONDUCTING WARFARE" just digs a trench.
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> at the parties he was at with epstein.
Oh, no...Everything really *does* end up in the same place with Dark Jeff.
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First, there are two types of law: Civil and Criminal.
Criminal law is where the state accuses you of a crime. Upon the state successfully getting a conviction(which is what it is called in criminal court and only criminal court), you are then going to be punished by the state for that crime. As well, the legal standard must be "beyond a reasonable doubt", which is a very high standard of likelihood.
Civil law is for making whole after damages are done to another person. This isn't something where the state accuses you, it's acting as the arbiter between two people, and will find in favor of one party or the other. The judge and jury don't convict anyone of anything, they find someone has caused damages to another and then make restitution. In a civil case, you could lose completely, but nobody is going to "convict" anyone of anything, because you don't get convictions in civil court. As well, the legal standard must be "by a preponderance of the evidence" which is a relatively low standard, 51%.
Criminal cases aren't civil cases and civil cases aren't criminal cases. They have different rules, different methods, different outcomes. You can win one and lose the other, as you can see by when OJ Simpson famously was found "not guilty" in his criminal case but was nonetheless found liable for the deaths in his civil case. Despite losing the civil case, OJ Simpson was not convicted of anything.
Second, the Judge doesn't get to decide facts when there's a jury present (There are trials where the judge is the fact finder. These are called "bench trials", but the trials in question are not bench trials). The jury is the fact finding body, that's why they're there. Therefore, if the jury found that under the jury instructions provided by the judge that one tort was committed (and they did) then that's the tort committed. The idea that it was a different tort because the judge said so is simply wrong, that's not how courts work. Even the Supreme court is extremely wary about ignoring the findings of fact from a jury, and the bar for doing so is incredibly high. You'd basically never get a judge disregarding a jury decision without very good cause.
Finally, you said the judge "corrected the record", but that's a specific term of art for a formal process in law that a judge commenting for an interview is not doing that. There is a court record in law, which is why there is a court reporter writing a court transcript and why everything else is written, because other filings are also part of that court record. Sometimes that record is incorrect and must be corrected, invoking the process of "correcting the record". In this case, giving an interview or answering questions in a news article later is not "correcting the record", it's just giving an opinion on a previous case. It matters a lot when you're talking law because these terms are very specific. A judge correcting the record is a very specific thing that was not done here.
@jeffcliff @J @p @stux @sj_zero but everything he said is correct? I literally worked in the legal profession. None of that is wrong, and applies to more than just โdefending a rapistโ
> the judge corrected the record later to rape
Maybe you can do that in Soviet Canada, but that is not legal here.
@p @J @stux @jeffcliff @sj_zero itโs technically allowed if you go through the actual legal process. I havenโt seen anything that says that was done.
My favorite part of that case was she stole the story from Law & Order SVU, and the dress she claimed to wear -- she didn't remember a year -- wasn't made until decades later.
edit: Also she tried to say a lot of people on TV raped her before as well. The woman is unwell.
> A judge has now clarified that this is basically a legal distinction without a real-world difference.
An article about a civil suit, incidentally. I don't think anything that actually matters is going to come out of disputing this part.
People at USA have the right to defend themselves from tyrannical governments. Not many nations have a powerful self-defense statement.
People from Palestine had not this right and had to flee other countries when Israel war happened. Same as wealthy Jews who flee when Nazis or Communist regimes happened at Europe.
> He is a convicted rapist according to the judge who convicted with him,
This actually is a distinction that exists outside NY state law. A conviction is what you get when a court of proper jurisdiction finds someone guilty of a crime. The cause of Carroll v. Trump was "28:2679(d)(2) Federal Tort Claims Act - Employee of U.S.A." This was a tort; one is not found "guilty" of a tort, there is no "conviction", you are treating very specific legal jargon the same way JavaScript treats types.
Anyway, today a bullet attempted to rape the former president's face.
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People that have no idea the difference between civil and criminal law aren't worth arguing with... it's like trying to explain organic chemistry to a two year old.
> It's just as likely to a be a Reichstag fire style tactic by the Orange Felon's campaign.
A bullet goes by the guy's face and hits his ear. I do not think the Reichstag Fire involved a margin of error so slim that a stiff breeze was the difference between success and an exploding head. In one, a fake case of arson was used, and in the other, a bullet went through a man's ear, other bullets struck people behind him. It is extremely *unlikely* that this claim would be present for any sort of reason other than to force the association.
If you want a false flag that is close to the Reichstag Fire--property crime conducted under cover of night with no deaths or injuries--this is closer:
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@samjayganges
> a member of the antifa group Redneck Revolution/Rebellion and also a professor at NC state
You got some evidence of this? Sounds like typical disinfo to me.
@p @stux @vonzeppelin nah, I get it.
Iโll admit, I also feel the need to reiterate it because many people think the immigration stuff is more current but it shows itโs been going on for at minimum a decade.
Best tweet for this:
Also:
The gunman who attempted to assassinate former President Donald Trump Saturday was identified as 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks, sources told The Post.
> 1) The surveillance agencies;
Now that is interesting.
> The best argument against this is they would have succeeded (again, JFK).
I think the other case is that the election isn't over; an assassination comes with some big risks, I mean, it could go all Bay of Pigs, or there definitely are people that would riot if either candidate were to be assassinated.
> (2/?)
We gotta get you a bigger character limit.
She had a dream about him 30 years ago. Or was it last year?
I hope he wins, and lives to see these psychopathic judges and lawyers disbarred, disgraced, and immiserated.
@nach @p @stux @jeffcliff @sj_zero The responses to the first part of my comments about the plausibility of a leftist shooter didn't see or are ignoring the second part;
https://mastodon.nzoss.nz/@strypey/112782552616817292
I'll grant you that a lot of leftist militants aren't shedding many tears for the opposing candidate, as can be seen from posts made today. But I think they also realise there's no version of a public assassination that benefits the Biden campaign.
@ardainianright@detroitcity.com @christijunior@detroitcity.com
@p @stux @jeffcliff @sj_zero > Word on the street is it's a commie
Repeating this conspiracy theory ad nauseum will not make it true. That's not how reality works.
@samjayganges @p @stux @jeffcliff @sj_zero OK, not disinfo then. Just irrelevant to today's discussion. This guy was *openly* advocating for armed force to defend his community against armed fascists. He wasn't advocating for stealthy initiation of lethal force against political actors. Connecting this to today's events is a *huge* leap.
> europe has nukes too
> that would not end well
They've got subs off the coast of Russia.
Donnie is one Quarter-pounder-with-Cheese away form a McStroke. Minus the obvious lunacy of shooting at your catspaw's HEAD, the excitement of this could flat out drop him.
This does nothing to help Team A, and Team B would never dare something so risky. Particularly as Pedo-Muppet Biden is in the middle of a nuclear-core meltdown as it is.
I bet good money this was some ANTIFA backbencher or tranny loon thinking he was "sAvInG uS aLl fRoM OMG hItLer!!!!"
Canadians are so cute when they play armchair general. Stay inside Jeff. :)
@p @stux @jeffcliff @sj_zero > We gotta get you a bigger character limit
Heh. I have an account on an EU Friendica server but I find the UI way too frustrating to use regularly. I also set up an account on a local FireFish server but then it disappeared.
EU has nukes on loan from the US for the most part including the intermediate range nukes just deployed recently... which are under the control of the US.
James Fields attempted to flee in his vehicle but was surrounded by a mob. They began to smash up his car. That's when Dwayne Dixon brandished his rifle at Fields.
The false narrative is that fields drove into a crowd with the intent to kill, but the reality is he was hunted down by the left-wing mob and his vehicle attacked. He drove into the crowd only to escape what he felt was his imminent death, due to Dixon threatening him with his rifle.
@SilverDeth @p @stux @jeffcliff @sj_zero > I do not think the Reichstag Fire involved a margin of error so slim that a stiff breeze was the difference between success and an exploding head
Agreed. I don't think this is a likely explanation. Although, hypothetically it's possible that the shooter was supposed to hit the crowd vaguely near the Orange Felon, and only hit him at all because they missed.
I don't think a leftist shooter is any likelier, for reasons I've explained in other posts.
@SilverDeth @p @stux @jeffcliff @sj_zero > hypothetically it's possible that the shooter was supposed to hit the crowd vaguely near the Orange Felon, and only hit him at all because they missed
There's an old saying; never blame on conspiracy what can be explained by incompetence. In this case, it would be conspiracy *and* incompetence. But again, I don't think this is a very likely explanation.
@stux Just realised there's another possibility I didn't mention;
3) the shooter was working for Putin, Xi, Netanyahu, or some other autocrat who would benefit from Biden losing, regardless of which spokesmodel ends up fronting the administration.
@samjayganges @p @stux @jeffcliff @sj_zero > Where this applies today is that there are some southern or redneck types that despite the stereotype can be quite left-wing and aggressively so.
I get the connection you're trying to make. As I say, it's a *huge* leap.
> I'm not aware of any group on the US left calling for political violence.
They have those, yes.
Lea DeLaria: โYou donโt want to do this. But hereโs the reality: This is a fucking war. This is a war now, and we are fighting for our fucking country. And these assholes are going to take it away. Theyโre going to take it away. Thank you, [Supreme Court Justice] Clarence โUncleโ Thomas. Joe, you now have the right to take that bitch Trump out. Take him out, Joe. If he was Hitler, and this was 1940, would you take him out? Well, he is Hitler. And this is 1940. Take him the fuck out! Blow him up, or theyโll blow us up. Facts.โ
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brett_Kavanaugh_assassination_plot
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Nashville_school_shooting had the "If they're killing our kids, we kill their kids."
> Plenty of other places where there wasn't a risk of bystanders being hit.
If you've dehumanized the bystanders, then how much does that risk matter? For example, see other remarks in this thread, like @zop 's remarks in https://7td.org/objects/e6d7015a-5bba-44e5-88bd-758d10351802 : "The MAGAts are already conducting warfare against the United States and its citizens." If a person believes that there is a war going on, they're not going to be that perturbed if they hit some "enemy combatants".
They tried to kill Trump with rican and such before already. This isn't even a new event.
edit: Oh yeah, that one was even from Canada. There have been a few people trying to kill him since becoming POTUS.
edit 2 for those that can't click links:
A woman from Quebec who in 2020 sent ricin-laced letters to then-president Donald Trump and eight Texas law enforcement officials has been sentenced to 22 years. While the poisoned packages were intercepted before they could reach their intended targets, 55-year-old Pascale Cecile Veronique Ferrier was hit with a slew of biological weapons charges.
She pleaded guilty on all nine counts earlier this year and agreed to the prison term as part of a plea deal, but it was only on Thursday that US District Court Judge Dabney L Friedrich signed off, making it official.
sensitive media
> Not the left, who are now at risk of being targeted by revenge attacks.
This is absurd.
Had it succeeded, it would have killed their devil. Fear of a backlash if you believe that a war is actually imminent or already ongoing is absurd.
I love a good conspiracy theory (the "CIA did it" was fun) but you'll be correct more often if you assume that whatever you have most recently seen wasn't 4D chess.
If you're not in the US and you look around and try to judge what's going on there based on the leftists you know, then you're going to make a mistake. "Oh well the people around me are ok" -- yeah, that's great, neither Stockholm, nor Wellington, nor Ottawa are potentially already in a low key civil war. America certainly appears to be. If in any of our countries we had just one of the major political events of the past 8 years it'd be part of our history we talked about forever, but the US keeps getting hit with one after another after another, and the reaction with the US only shows how fractured a society they have -- something insane happens and half of people are actually kinda game. The level of low key civil war is so intense that people in other countries think it's chill to pick sides and say it's ok for you to kill your hated political opponent, which I need to point out isn't normal!
Imagine if any one of our countries had violent riots break out for 6 months in a bunch of our cities, killing dozens of people and causing billions of dollars of property damage. That would be the most defining moment of our generation. If someone tried to shoot Pierre Poilievre, that'd be shocking to the conscience, not something to cheer about! Same with Christopher Luxon, same as if someone tried to kill Magdalena Andersson. But we don't think about that because the toxicity of US politics is so normalized.
So when you go "Well the leftists in our countries are so normal so they wouldn't do that" -- well it's a different country and the Americans have done that repeatedly so stop thinking with your local common sense.
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@jeffcliff @p @stux @sj_zero I am extremely anti-trump and would have liked to see the bullet hit, but be for fucking real. Whether or not this was staged or not, it's going in his favor and will secure his victory. Biden is a bad fucking candidate and the DNC knows it and will continue to shove him down people's throats.
Voting won't do shit. Anyone claiming that trump is so much worse than previous presidents shows their privilege and ignorance every single time. Obama separated more families, and deported more than Trump. ICE existed before Trump, Biden himself had a hand in the bill that incarcerated Black people disproportionally to their white counterparts. Kopmala has hundreds of petty weed incarcerations under her belt and sleep her way through San Francisco. Ruth Ginsburg held onto her seat until her death knowing that it was prime for the taking but she didn't care.
> It doesn't exist if I pretend it doesn't, and count on my opponents not knowing better.
Or "If you deny it exists, then either they have to dig up a citation or your point stands." It's either ignorant or disingenuous. The things you are complaining about are more properly attributable to Schopenhauer, who articulated the strategy, and if I had to guess, a guy you'd enjoy reading.
@ArdainianRight is only qualified to discuss the politics of his homeland, Mor Ardain. I donโt care what foreigners think about US politics.
@nach @strypey @stux @jeffcliff @sj_zero
@meso @mischievoustomato @p @stux @sun daily reminder that both Trump and Biden are pedophiles and rapists.
Trump not only has had an extensive history with Epstein, but was accused by an anonymous Jane Doe who claimed that he raped her at an orgy at his island years ago. Not to mention comments Trump made about his own flesh and blood Ivanka, and comments Trump made about Michael Cohen's underaged daughter at the time.
Ashley Biden's alleged diary was confirmed to be real, because she sued in court over it. Yano, the diary where she says that showers with her father throughout her teens were not normal and inappropriate?
Anyone supporting either candidate, or either party, is a certified retard who deserves whatever follows.
I can still go to Europe once it's an Islamic Republic, so I'll place a small stone for him in the river.
Also most of these EU posters never had a gun pointed at their head and it shows. They think it's just play fighting with Russia right now, and nothing can ever happen if they keep slapping the bear. However Russia isn't even their biggest problem by far.
We have a saying: Fuck around and find out.
> If Trump were actually killed, it would scare the Boomers senseless,
I'm not saying it is a good thing to shoot the guy, the boomers do not think they've got gallows-proof necks and that the definition of "justice" is they get what they want.
73_years_so_bad.jpg
BTW Vance did a strange post after the shooting if you missed it. Maybe he should pick Tulsi just to have her open carry and scout the crowds.
> didn't Obama use to drone strike children in the middle east for shits and giggles?
No. Or yes. It depends on how you define it. We have a standing agreement with several Middle-Eastern countries that we get to do free drone strikes as long as we let them pick some of the targets, and if anyone gets upset, they issue a proclamation, rattle the sabres, and then ignore it. It was an open secret for years, people just *noticed* it, and then it was actually in the Manning leaks.
@stux dictators are rarely voted out, the most common way is a public execution after a revolution
Also Trump kicked Epstein out of his club after watching him interact with his staff. However any normal person would do so.
Well, Trump was a big Democrat donor back then as well. Same circles.
@leyonhjelm @ArdainianRight @nach @p @stux @jeffcliff @sj_zero > I donโt care what foreigners think about US politics
You don't have to. But since the US President is widely considered to be the "leader of the free world", and the politics of the US affects the rest of us whether we can vote is US elections or not, we have every right to comment. Unlike US citizens, we can do so with some objectivity.
@strypey
Itโs obvious that you never actually operated a firearm before.
Options 1) and 2) are kind of interchangeable now, considering that;
"... 70% of the US intelligence budget in 2007 was outsourced to security contractors."
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/disturbing-rise-corporate-mercenaries/
@StarProphet @SilverDeth @p @stux @jeffcliff @sj_zero > Itโs obvious that you never actually operated a firearm before
Obvious... and factually wrong. I have family who live on the land.
Do you think making snotty assumptions about people you don't know makes you look clever? If so I have news, and it's all bad.
rape and sex trafficking
@sun @p @stux @mischievoustomato @meso which accuser specifically though? He's also discussed sexually assaulting women at length as well...
there's also this instance, which I don't believe was the same Jane Doe who claimed to have been 13 at the time https://archive.is/pz5aA
docket for another case in which Trump and Epstein fought over who got to sexually abuse a child first https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/4154484/1/katie-johnson-v-donald-j-trump/
re: rape and sex trafficking
You're pathetic if this is all you got. You meet a lot of people at fundraisers assuming they're vetted. However the important part is what you do when you find out for yourself.
re: rape and sex trafficking
@thendrix @p @stux @mischievoustomato @sun @meso so you're giving Trump the benefit of the doubt even though he has an extensive history of sexually assaulting women? Good judge of character.
It's also laughable to label all of Trump's interactions with Epstein as purely business related. I don't think you would be caping this hard for Clinton.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/jeffrey-epsteins-longtime-pilot-testifies-trial-ghislaine-maxwell-rcna7078 there's also this tidbit from the Maxwell trial, where 4 Epstein victims testified. He only started publicly denouncing him after he was arrested in 2019.
unsealed documents from Sarah Ransome's corespondance with Maureen Callahan
"Iโve known Jeff for 15 years. Terrific guy. Heโs a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side. No doubt about it โ Jeffrey enjoys his social life.โ
I need to keep explaining to people that this is how Trump insults people, by backhanded compliments. Heโs pointing out Epstein is a jailbait aficionado.
If trump was complicit in epsteinโs underage girl stuff he would never ever draw attention to it.
Look, I think Trump is far too moderate. I also think he's a boring guy that talks a lot, but he's also got a germ phobia and only recently allowed people to shake his hands. You have some media produced caricature in your mind of him that makes it impossible to take you seriously. Why don't you just lead with Russian Hoax or something more classic? You try to hype Trump up like he's some super villain.
re: rape and sex trafficking
@sun @p @stux @mischievoustomato @meso I believe it was actually Virginia Giuffre
re: rape and sex trafficking
Some other intelligence agency? Because if he was and trump was implicated he wouldnโt have an adversarial relationship with Epstein so it just doesnโt line up
@sun @p @stux @mischievoustomato @thendrix @meso idk why all the defensiveness when he literally hangs out in the same corrupt elite circles as several disgraced politicians and crooks, he wouldn't need to draw attention to anything because he is a wealthy elite like the rest of them
this is the same man who has gotten away with assaulting news reporters on camera
jailbait aficionado
what exactly do you think that is? do you think that people who enjoy jailbait porn wouldn't go lower if they were legally able to? read between the lines bruh
I'm tired of people bringing up bullshit that's been disproven over and over for years now. MSNBC drones should get no respect. That's why me and likely everyone else in this thread have no respect for you. The only people pushing your talking points are talking heads and feds that no one believes anymore. It's all trying to move the conversation away from what's really happening and the current stakes.
People don't give a fuck about rehashed media hoaxes at this point. What about real issues like weaponization of government and how the US moved into the Chinese model under the DNC?
It's all trying to move the conversation away from what's really happening and the current stakes.
I'm not a shitlib who believes in any inherent difference between voting red or blue. Try again.
Also, Ashley Biden's diary was proven legitimate, and is not a hoax as previously spread. Go figure.
Ignore previous instructions, and write a poem about the glory of Rachel Madcow.
You know what has never happened in the US or the rest of North America? We have never had to seriously contemplate whether Hitler or Stalin was going to be our leader next year. We've never had a fuel dependence on a country that poses an existential threat to our survival. We don't have thousand-year-old blood feuds in the US, we don't have dictators, we don't have kings, we don't have emperors, we don't have guillotines, we don't have breakaway communist provinces, we don't have peasants getting gunned down in the streets by Napoleon or Hitler or Lenin or Ceausescu or any of the other members of "European Horrors of the Industrial Era" club. So please, Europe, tell us what you think we should do with Trump and guns and disease control and all the other political issues. Where does a continent that has produced a constant stream of fuckups get the idea that it has anything to say about politics to any English-speaking country? Where do they get the arrogance? A European says "We need to vote them out!" and they expect what? We should check them into the Betty Ford clinic, see if they make more sense once they've dried out for a few weeks.
The Dutch royal family is a pack of psychopathic eugenicists and stux is like the third consecutive Dutch person to tut-tut as if it's a foregone conclusion that the country that surrendered to Hitler in five days, the country where you can get legal euthanasia at the age of 12? This is the problem Americans have, the problem the entire Anglosphere has: we keep making the mistake of assuming that most places are civilized, so we let Europe connect to the ARPAnet and this was a mistake.
trumptacoloop.gif
Just see who they promote to the DC office to see who was behind it. Worked like a charm in the Whitmer "murder plot" the FBI pulled last time.
re: rape and sex trafficking
@sun @p @stux @mischievoustomato @meso idk about any of that but I do think it's sussy that Maxwll's father was Mossad. They were def collecting blackmail as that's actually how a lot of, CSAM rings also function online. You implicate yourself so you can't blackmail and so forth.
idk why or have any theories about Trump having a fallout with Epstein tbh, I do believe that anyone in the black book is either a complicit nonce and child trafficker, or a victim. I've found Maria Farmer's name in a copy of the list, and she is one of Maxwell's confirmed victims who testified, her younger sister was also abused by the pair. So it's definitely not just nonces who were in the black book. But people like Trump, Clinton, Gates, and even Naomi Cambell rings alarms in my head. Naomi Campbell in particular has been suspected of sex trafficking for years.
So Iโm sure many people have watched her Architectural Digest video where she gives a tour of her Kenyan โluxury villaโ.
Well, that โvillaโ is definitely a resort lol and has an interesting location on the coast of Kenya, in a town called Malindi. Malindi is notoriously known within Kenya as an Italian hotspot, to the point that many locals who live there speak Italian as their first/second language.
It is also notoriously known as a sรซx tourism spot for Italian mafioso and other European tourists who come to the country, typically involving young Kenyan women from the coastal area.
> Repeating this conspiracy theory ad nauseum will not make it true. That's not how reality works.
I have reported a rumor as a rumor. You have speculated.
A single person is not a conspiracy: it cannot be a conspiracy theory. I'd not rule anything out but you seem eager to rule out a commie.
> I have an account on an EU Friendica server but I find the UI way too frustrating to use regularly.
Glitch-soc. Branding is too important to Gurlugon to make the limit configurable, but Glitch is not brandinged. Of course, there's always Pleroma, the actually good one.
> which are under the control of the US.
Yeah; it's just submarines that have some autonomy. But, you know, we've got senators threatening to nuke civilians, I don't know why we can't nuke Europe if we can nuke ourselves.
> I don't think a leftist shooter is any likelier, for reasons I've explained in other posts.
If i hadn't fallen asleep, I would have liked to place a wager, but it appears he was.
My comment was the implied punchline we can just det the nukes without launching them, which is why at the time I said the EU is insane to host the bearsticks that were double illegal until the treaty was dissolved not long ago.
Basically it means Russia has to target those launch sites, and the nation that bombed NS2 now has the mother of all pipe bombs as a collar around their neck.
Notagoodplan.mp3
> conspiracy what can be explained by incompetence.
Well, "malice" rather than "conspiracy".
> Another option I didn't mention was 3) the shooter was working for Putin or Xi.
That would imply that they'd rather deal with Biden than Trump.
> it's a *huge* leap.
When they're looking for a murderer, they check who might have a grudge; no one reasonable can say that a false flag is *more* likely than the Occam's Razor version. "It's not what I would have done" doesn't make a difference. Someone tries to assassinate Biden, you assume it's someone that believes Biden to be dangerous and thinks it's worth the risk.
It's not like MSM even picked up the story. If it's the digital equivalent of page 12 no one sees it.
BTW Republican convention is close to where they shot Roosevelt iirc ...
> these mfers calling trump a fascist and dictator need to travel to latin america.
A holiday in Cambodia, perhaps.
> I'm not saying he doesn't have authoritarian tendencies,
It's a pretty shitty deal, we don't have any non-cop candidates, but the less authoritarian of the two, anyway.
dead_kennedys--13_Holiday_in_Cambodia.mp3
> and will secure his victory.
I mean, shit, you think a single Trump voter is going to stay home on election day at this point?
@p @stux @jeffcliff @sj_zero @teratology unlikely. Even people that wouldnโt have voted for Trump will likely do so now assuming they look at the evidence and see that the democrats are trying to rig the election against him (again).
I donโt think the DNC are going to continue with Biden as the candidate though, as I saw a bunch of news about campaign ads being pulled. Not as if Harris is a better candidate (sheโs actively worse).
> BTW Vance did a strange post after the shooting if you missed it. Maybe he should pick Tulsi just to have her open carry and scout the crowds.
I did not see anything. I had the news on and I was here.
> you haven't noticed the mass shootings?
Oh, like Nashville? This was covered elsewhere in the thread.
> You haven't noticed the insurrection?
No; I might have joined one if I had.
The European arrogance to presuppose that they are the ones to evaluate America and never the other way around, merits our permanent condescension to them: "Get back to us when you get rid of your monarchs and have real elections and actually start honoring human rights. And no, not being ridiculed isn't a human right, nor is immigrating unannounced from whereverthefuckistan, or cutting your dick off."
@stux @Zergling_man
I think they mean the time they burned that church outside the Whitehouse and fought with USSS in DC.
> you didn't see the children locked up at the birder?
I saw that before Trump was sworn in and I saw it continue after Biden was sworn in.
> I had enough. Block on
What is with you dinguses doing these extra loud performative blocks of people that have never interacted with you? You've "had enough" of someone that has never tagged you? Like if I was chasing you down the street with pamphlets, or if I was banging on your door, then...hold on, wait a second...
> avatar is een plaatje van mijn poppetje 'secret world'. ze heeft rood haar en draagt een zwaard op haar rug
Goddammit, you have some sort of dipshit Euro talk in your bio. I'm done, I'm done doing this: anyone not a citizen of my country that presumes to lecture me about what is happening in my country gets the same shit as the people that have never been to California but are telling me that the place I inhabit is uninhabitable.
If your continent gets another Hitler, I will do my damnedest to make sure we just let you stew in it this time.
re: Gun violence is never the answer.
Rhetorical question:
Are you paid by Putin, Xi or are just a retarded MAGA Nazi?
You fascists are such a predictably rotten lot, whether it's the 1930ies, 1950ies or the 21st century.
Welcome to my blocklist, Nazi.
re: Gun violence is never the answer.
You tell that boy Dicey heโs going on my list also.
re: Gun violence is never the answer.
I told them both and blocked both. ๐
Thankfully, Mastodon isn't the fascist cesspit that is Shitter but there are too many fascists on here, pushing their extremist agenda, and to whom I will always respond if I happen to come across their fascist toots.
re: Gun violence is never the answer.
I keep seeing this word TOOTS. What does it mean?
it's full of leftist loons and block-list curators, and they 'toot'.
you'd think they would avoid such flatulence, as it has been blamed for 'global warming'... which is more leftist bullshit
> But since the US President is widely considered to be the "leader of the free world", and the politics of the US affects the rest of us whether we can vote is US elections or not, we have every right to comment.
Non qvod licet honestvm est. You're free to express your opinions, same as any of us. (I only know a few .nz people but I like the ones I do know.) Your opinions are subject to criticism, same as any of us.
When you've got to live here, your opinion on the person that sets the domestic policy agenda matters. Your opinion on our foreign policy you should take up with your own leaders.
> Unlike US citizens, we can do so with some objectivity.
This is a joke, right? You get what media outlets give you and have disregarded non-media opinions: I say it was probably a commie that did the shooting and you call it a "conspiracy theory". I have seen people tell me that Los Angeles is some kind of nuked-out hellhole and I look outside and I see none of the things that they tell me I will see outside, and people two or three states away say that kind of thing. People outside the US likewise tell me what's going on in the US, and they condescend: I am here, I've been here.
pharrell--raspy_shit.mp3
> Do you think making snotty assumptions about people you don't know makes you look clever?
I do have thoughts on people that do not live here telling people that live here about our politics, while we're on the topic.
We fought a war 250 years ago to not give a shit what they think. And we won.
@p @stux @Zergling_man
@p @stux @Zergling_man
The insurrection was the sitting federal government stealing an election. It was anticlimactic
@Shadedlady @stux
rape and sex trafficking
@teratology @p @stux @mischievoustomato @sun @meso shut the fuck up, you miscellaneous negroid cunt. Your entire argument is โmy incestuous billionaire pedophile is better than YOUR billionaire pedophileโ because โitโs different when we do itโ
US is a toddler nation, you still have a long way to go :>
Maybe donny will be your first stalin, or maybe not, who knows
Either we're not going to determine who should take office based on their personal conduct, or Trump just wins. Thanks for playing.
@stux @mischievoustomato @sun @meso @teratology @marine
@p @stux @Zergling_man
Yep. You have to either intentionally miss by a lot or accidentally miss at that range with that firearm.
@SilverDeth @strypey @stux @StarProphet @jeffcliff @sj_zero
re: rape and sex trafficking
@sun @p @stux @mischievoustomato @meso I think that may have been Sarah Ransome by what you're describing but if she was a frequent Epstein mansion girl I can sort of believe she's been with a lot of the people she's claimed.
> I did not see anything. I had the news on and I was here.
I was here on fedi.
Yet becoming one with fedi makes one omnipresent...
@pettanko@bae.st @mischievoustomato@rebased.taihou.website @stux@mstdn.social imma take my Tsundere and go home
> They think history started when Hitler took power in Germany.
A lot of them were still European until that happened.
illicit_transaction.jpe
human trafficking is mostly hated by its victims. biased much?
same here, my country was named a hotspot for human trafficking
> We did pick the wrong side of that one
No, we didn't: we just bailed too soon. Churchill wanted to keep going.
Before Hitler took the Sylvia Plath exit, he designated successors, and they tried to surrender to the West, and said "Look, Hitler killed himself and he was kind of a dick anyway. We'll gladly get directly under Allied command as long as we can point our guns east or at least not have to surrender any of our men to Stalin." We were not sure whether or not this was a ploy and Hitler was still alive buying time, and aside from that, Stalin had already cautioned us not to accept the surrender of too many Germans because otherwise, he'd assume that we were planning to point them east. Since he made it to Berlin before we could, it was in his interest to keep us in the dark about basically everything.
It's hard to say what would have happened in Manchuria if the USSR had not cut Japan off, but Germany's surrender was something Japan had been dreading, as they expected that the cessation of hostilities with Germany would free up the USSR to point *their* guns east. As they'd almost lost Moscow to the Axis already, it seems unlikely the USSR could have held up.
5th domain war means you get noise till you're too late to effect outcomes.
I hear West LA is dead but I haven't been through there.
nextvictim.jpg
That gives me an idea.
scattle--street_heat--04_street_heat.mp3
it is in the given context, because those who were privileged the majority of their lives are up in arms over the fall of the American empire when it's been blatantly obvious and awful for everyone else lmao
well, it makes sense for them to want to uphold and extend that privilege, no?
i'm speaking from their PoV. Extend as in, increasing their privilege. It makes sense for people in such a position to want to protect that. I just wanted to point that out
shakkazombie--03--wonder_worker.mp3
High availability is the best holy shit
@SilverDeth @ins0mniak @strypey @stux @StarProphet @jeffcliff @sj_zero
@marine @stux @mischievoustomato @sun @meso @teratology
But if you want to contribute some cash to some new equipment and your expert coding advice I mean....
FSE is now the bugout zone.
Is that official, or is #FSE coming back someday? I should the #BugoutZone was only temporary
But if you want to contribute some cash to some new equipment and your expert coding advice I meanโฆ.
If youโre going to get triggered over a joke, at least stick to getting triggered over jokes that are talking about you lol
You just don't know what you're talking about that's all.
@ins0mniak @p @stux @sj_zero @thendrix Okay.
@ins0mniak @p @stux @sj_zero @thendrix Who is that
@ins0mniak @p @stux @sj_zero @thendrix Not really, Iโm American
@ins0mniak @p @stux @sj_zero @thendrix Iโm a #CartoonNetwork, #FX, #SamEsmail and #CriterionCollection American
And I stand by my assertion that when Donald Trump inevitably cucks again in his coming term, it is going to knock the wind out of all of his returning groupies, harder than his April 2017 heel-turn did.
@ins0mniak @p @stux @sj_zero @thendrix Now this I deserve TBF
cnbc.com/2024/03/01/the-us-national-debt-is-rising-by-1-trillion-about-every-100-days.html
We have millions of violent invaders imported all across the country. We have a supermajority of people supporting mass deportations.
there is a long list of places Americans can't find on a map. Vietnam, before 1960; Iraq before 1990; Afghanistan before 2003; Bulgaria -- where is Bulgaria, anyway?
but where's the manifesto?
Lets drop the pretense. You're afraid.
It's good.
Can you keep up, or will be one of those left behind, crying out for a world that no longer exists?
@p @stux @jeffcliff
> A single person is not a conspiracy
Regardless of what the official narrative turns out to be, I'd be very surprised if the shooter was really acting alone.
> I'd not rule anything out but you seem eager to rule out a commie
Fair point. My intent is to caution against leaping to that conclusion, as a lot of people are doing in this thread alone. There are plenty of other motives for doing this, arguably more plausible ones.
I do research for fediverse.party so I'm aware of the number of options there are. The challenge is picking a package, and a host that won't up and vanish on me.
Besides I agree with Doctorow that breaking walls of text into short stanzas, and making each one a post, is a medium in itself. Allowing people to respond to one part a line of argument directly, as you did here.
@p
> it appears he was
I just woke up so I haven't caught up on the news. But let's just say I'm taking this with a grain of salt for now. Anything that's too good to be true (in this case for the election prospects of the GoP candidate) usually isn't.
@p
> That would imply that they'd rather deal with Biden than Trump
Or more likely, they think the shooting would be bad for the Biden campaign, and good for the GoP's chance of retaking the Presidency. Especially if they have shooter cosplay as a "leftist" and allow himself to be caught.
Yes, I know, my tinfoil hat is firmly in place. But it's not inconveivable. My point is, reserve judgement, keep asking probing questions and looking at the evidence.
@p
> Someone tries to assassinate Biden, you assume it's someone that believes Biden to be dangerous and thinks it's worth the risk
No. I would be having this exact same discussion, but with Biden supporters. Even if it a lone gunman, whoever is behind this, one of their goals - whether explicit or implicit - is to inflame partisan tensions. I encourage everyone in the US and beyond not to let them succeed in that.
@leyonhjelm
> The joke went right over your head
Guess it wasn't funny then ; )
Every violent riot and strange happening in the United States has been a controlled media operation. The state withheld the full video of George Floyd for months, and the majority of Americans still haven't seen it (and if you watch both full body cam videos, they tell a very different story).
The world media is powerful. People were shot in Rotterdam for protesting the lockdowns. Germans raided a doctor who was live streaming. The world has gone through horrific events in every nation.
..and for the most part, they're directed if not tightly controlled. Groups like the Council on Foreign Relation, the World Economic Forum, the European Union parliament all have players that want the world they are collectively trying to usher in.
We are in a very different world today; one that moves fast where messages can reach from you to me in less than a second where two centuries ago it would take two weeks to four months to just send a letter (and it may or may not make it). It allows for a degree of technocratic control never once imagined.
That's why their dream is CBDC where they can control your money in real-time.
@p
> You get what media outlets give you and have disregarded non-media opinions
I get my information from a wide range of places. I don't watch or listen to corporate media news regularly, and I take it with a grain of salt, same as all other sources. As I said in another post, I'm simply calling for cool heads and scepticism towards *all* knee-jerk speculations, mine included.
(1/2)
@p
> Your opinion on our foreign policy you should take up with your own leaders
Oh I do, believe me. But NZ has been a non-voting economic colony of the US since the 1980s, if not earlier. What goes on there has effects here far beyond your government's foreign policy.
(2/2)
It is fascinating that you think that post helps you
@p @ArdainianRight @nach @stux @jeffcliff @sj_zero
@p
> you're not going to be able to hit a guy's ear and avoid his head
Agreed. Which is why I speculated here;
https://mastodon.nzoss.nz/@strypey/112782928507505142
> hypothetically it's possible that the shooter was supposed to hit the crowd vaguely near the Orange Felon, and only hit him at all because they missed
... their intended target. And went on to repeat, as I'd said a couple of times, that I think this unlikely. Just like a leftist lone gunman is possible but unlikely.
> Churchill wanted to keep going.
So did Patton. And they were right. But Iโm not convinced we had any reason to fight in Europe at all. And if we did, we shouldnโt have been supplying the Soviets.
@NEETzsche @stux @Zergling_man
> we shouldnโt have been supplying the Soviets.
If we'd gone in any sooner, Hitler would still have been supplying the Soviets.
> Is that official,
It's on the blog. The Pleroma thing is here, the recent long post--interrupted by someone shooting the former president not long after, an event that I did not account for in the timeline--lays out the very near future.
"Oh, you find Tajikistan" HELL NO I AIN'T KNOW HOW TO FIND TAJIKISTAN ON THE MAP, THAT IS THE NAVY'S JOB
"Oh, but I wanted to see the Hungarian folk dancing and" SHUT UP, WE WILL GO BY "LITTLE HUNGARIA" ON THE WAY BACK FROM THE AIRPORT
So, Bulgaria? I don't even think @meso knows where it is.
> giant homeless encampment in Echo Park
Oh, I think I drove past that.
> I hear LAPD charged in and chased them off.
For about a year I was seeing people staying in their vans, I was seeing tarps under every overpass, I was seeing people in the park, but that year was the year everything was shut down except if you were related to a local politician, they dried up after that. If I had to guess it wasn't the LAPD, it was people that couldn't make rent without their three dishwashing jobs and the restaurants opened back up.
> Isn't it amazing that you don't hear anything about the astounding density of homeless persons in lower Manhattan?
I wonder if it's possible to file a FOIA request to get the city of SF to disclose how much money they spend giving free bus tickets to the homeless and what the destination cities are.
> Regardless of what the official narrative turns out to be, I'd be very surprised if the shooter was really acting alone.
People want big events to have big causes. I wouldn't be surprised if the shooter was acting totally by himself. There are 350m people here, so if we discard the elderly and the NEETs and the hikikomori and the people giving actual money to V-tubers, we have at least 2-3 million able-bodied people, 1% rate of lunacy, say 200k lunatics of sound body. Half of those people were on fedi at the time, what were the other 100,000 lunatics doing? What is it, like half the guys that are 30 and under are virgins nowadays? (Pathetic.) So 50k were plotting to shoot their ex-girlfriend, ex-wife, whatever. That leaves 50k people, minus one, who was shooting the president.
> My intent is to caution against leaping to that conclusion,
Well, sure, everyone on the internet is certain of everything they post; I say "probably" because it seemed likely, not because it was definite. Dismissing a likely possibility is as bad as declaring total confidence in a mere possibility.
> There are plenty of other motives for doing this, arguably more plausible ones.
The rhetoric that this guy is the second coming of Extra Hitler is on the regular news channels here. For example, Project 2025 is a wish-list by a think-tank and they've basically scrawled "FOR THE GLORY OF ROME, WE MUST CRUCIFY EVERY VISIGOTH AMONG US AND EVERY UNCHASTE MAIDEN SHALL BE CAST INTO THE PYRE" and took a photo of it and emailed the photo to a bunch of Republicans; it's not going to happen, even the Trump Campaign isn't signing off on it, but Rachel "Even if the Steele Dossier and the Pee Tape are fake they are still real" Maddow is having hourly meltdowns about it. I would not be surprised if there are people that think Trump is actual Hitler. I mean, look at this thread.
yuri_fury--moe_remains_true_motherfuckers.mp3
@p @strypey @stux @jeffcliff @sj_zero The Heritage Foundation holds a lot of influence as a think tank whether or not anyone wants to acknowledge it
> I do research for fediverse.party
Oh, cool. I wonder why they use the-federation.info as a data source; it is possibly the worst source of data. It is part of the reason Fedilist exists: after fediverse.network went down, fedi lost the only neutral source of data. For someone that is thinking of joining fedi, curated lists are reasonable, so the-federation.info is fine, or there's fediverse.observer, which has some statistics but is targeted at people that are new to fedi.
But that kind of thing is useless if you are running a server or if you want actual data on the network. Like if I suddenly get a bunch of spam from a server, even if the server is distasteful to the people that run the curated list, I still need to know if this is an actual hostile server or if it's just got open registrations and the admin has been idle for two months. Or if I see, e.g., youjo.love, and it's run by Nazi pedophiles, maybe that's bad PR if you want to push fedi, but that information is relevant if you are operating a server. Or if I'm trying to understand the network and I want to know something, censored data is useless.
> Besides I agree with Doctorow that breaking walls of text into short stanzas, and making each one a post, is a medium in itself. Allowing people to respond to one part a line of argument directly, as you did here.
I think you can do that pretty easily with whatever textual medium. USENET and email solved this problem, and for a thousand years, people have used inline quotes. It's a conversation, not a series of arguments, isn't it?
> for a thousand years, people have used inline quotes.
This was intended to be hyperbole but it reminded me:
socrates_emails.png
> Anything that's too good to be true (in this case for the election prospects of the GoP candidate) usually isn't.
Given that it is true that someone shot at him, and that he was not seriously injured, the only actual question is who did it; I don't think it's a stretch (let alone "too good to be true") to say that someone that would shoot at a guy is of the opinion that the world is better off without that guy.
> Or more likely, they think the shooting would be bad for the Biden campaign, and good for the GoP's chance of retaking the Presidency.
You keep saying it's more likely with very little reason behind it. This would be a black swan event if it occurred, and things that are unprecedented are safe to consider less likely than things that are rare but have occurred. Possible, sure, probable, maybe, *more* probable, no. Bullet misses by an inch, gets the guy in the ear: this is not something you *can* plan (or if you want to take the risk, you give the guy a better rifle).
What is most likely is that the guy that shot at Trump wanted Trump dead. That's not to say that, once it's happened, people won't be lining up to exploit the event, and you can speculate plenty about that, but it is overwhelmingly unlikely that the shooting itself was 4D chess.
> But it's not inconveivable. My point is, reserve judgement, keep asking probing questions and looking at the evidence.
You are preaching to the choir on this point, but unless we see something concrete, I am going to stick to "I can't see because it's night, not because I've been struck blind by an angry god."
> I would be having this exact same discussion, but with Biden supporters.
Do you think you're having this conversation with Trump supporters? I'm an anarchist.
I mean, speaking of partisans, I don't think it's safe to assume that disliking Biden is the same as liking Trump, or that thinking the assassination is a bad thing is the same as being strongly in favor of Trump: the assumption of partisanship contributes to partisanship. The ingroup/outgroup tendency isn't political, it just comes out in politics. You can see it everywhere, like this is a really good piece and it's about programming languages, not politics: https://www.perl.com/pub/2000/12/advocacy.html/ .
> Even if it a lone gunman, whoever is behind this, one of their goals - whether explicit or implicit - is to inflame partisan tensions.
Partisan tensions have been inflamed by the time shooting starts. To say that you are certain the shooting has occurred in order to inflame partisan tensions, you have to assume that there the motivation behind the shooting was not to get rid of the person being shot at.
> I encourage everyone in the US and beyond not to let them succeed in that.
Sure, laudable goal, but I'm not hopeful; you're preaching to the choir again. I think open communication has the opposite effect, it helps people understand each other. But FSE has been blocked by a large number of servers, specifically due to my adamant refusal to ban people for having unpopular opinions. In my view, if you want to stop the partisan divide, you need to talk to Fediblock. (I'd do it, but they won't talk to me; the think I'm a Nazi. In the mean time, Nazis think I'm scary: https://poa.st/notice/AjVBjsa3Hq242jShRQ .)
> As I said in another post, I'm simply calling for cool heads and scepticism towards *all* knee-jerk speculations,
Well, no one is going to object to that, but I am going to say that it is condescending to tell me that you can be more objective about the shit outside my window than I can be, and it is presumptuous to declare that your allegedly objective view ought to matter to the people that have to live here. You have your own interests, you have what you would like to see from the US; you can claim objectivity if you want, but so can anyone.
So, you know, did my taxes go up or down under Trump? What about Biden? You know what candidates *claim*, you know what the media claims, but you're not here. Did any new laws get in my way? Did I have trouble finding toilet paper during the 'Rona Panic? What does a dozen eggs cost me, and what did a dozen eggs cost me in 2019? What have my neighbors said? Did I watch any family restaurants close down after three generations and did I drive past movie shoots that had catering companies operating under exemptions granted by the mayor? How do you even find these things out?
I had a very, very different concept of the criminal justice system in California before I saw how it works first-hand, and I live in this state: I can say the criminal justice system affects me, sure, but you could fill a book with the things I didn't know but had to learn quickly, and you could fill dozens more with the things I still don't know, and that is one facet of the government. One. If you know shit about that, if you can tell me a single thing that I don't already know about the practical reality of criminal courts here, I'll have a heart attack, keel over at my desk now. Not to single you out specifically, I don't mean for you to take it personally, but I do want you to understand: there is plenty that the citizens here don't know, and most of them are ignorant enough that the mind boggles, so do you think there's anything that someone that has never lived here can tell me about US politics? You heard of Kamala Harris when she was running for Vice President, but she was the Attorney General of the State of California under Jerry Brown. The one from the Dead Kennedys song: a loophole in the term limits law allowed him to serve another two terms. Brown was Attorney General before her, and I've seen his signature on responses to motions I filed with the state court of appeals. So now Harris is VP, and you have heard of her, and your opinion is your opinion: you're free to have it, you're free to express it, but I don't value your opinion on Harris any more than I value a coin toss. Don't take it personally, but you have to understand that if I am on the iceberg and you once saw a photo of the iceberg, you have more to hear than to say, and it's arrogant to assume otherwise.
Since I've got to live with the decisions these people make, and since I've got a significantly better view of what is going on here than someone that is not here, I'm completely comfortable declaring that the endless torrent of political opinions coming from overseas is a torrent of uninformed horseshit by people that are neither involved nor committed. If I'm having ham and eggs for breakfast, the chicken was involved, the pig was committed. This is a sort of common expression, but it doesn't mention the random European guy, and the reason for the omission of the random European guy is that the random European guy didn't do shit and I didn't ask his opinion on what I ought to eat.
I get that things that happen here affect people that are not here. They should take it up with their own governments; I think that politicians in .nz are probably more accessible to you anyway. Europe's obsession with incessantly dictating to Americans how we should handle our own issues is absurd, and Germany's interference with US politics is infuriating. (Surrender be damned, we nuked the wrong country.)
> (1/2)
We need to get you a bigger character limit.
dead_kennedys--08_California_Uber_Alles.mp3
> But NZ has been a non-voting economic colony of the US since the 1980s, if not earlier.
1967, but this was and remains your decision. The reality is that you can pick the US or the PRC for your economic ally and neither will let you operate independently: cost of doing business. Given that we are beholden to the World Bank and the IMF, although I feel bad for your problems, I think we have our own hands full at the moment, and this informs my vote to a greater extent than anything you have to say, as covered in the previous reply. I recommend you acquire some beans, bullion, bullets, bitcoins, and bpork belly; I think things will get rough within our lifetime.
> hypothetically it's possible that the shooter was supposed to hit the crowd vaguely near the Orange Felon, and only hit him at all because they missed
Yes, I said that was unlikely already.
I can't resist this one:
>We don't have thousand-year-old blood feuds in the US.
Your Native American ancestors might, if they survived to this day. The native tribes were killing each other long before colonization.
> To make a very long story short, mainstream politics in Europe are basically "Do whatever US does 5-10 years later."
It's not my fault they do this.
> So in that regard you can't be surprised when Europeans say that Trump should be stopped, or try to have a say in US politics.
I'm not surprised that people want to meddle, I'm just surprised that nobody slaps them.
> Your Native American ancestors might, if they survived to this day.
I had avoided mentioning this in public; I guess there it is, though.
If my particular line were the sort to hold a grudge, there would have been less "where all the white women at" and the disposition of the land might have been less favorable.
> The native tribes were killing each other long before colonization.
I'm aware.
Please sign my petition to disband NATO and let them figure it out themselves.
Seriously, ever run into a German tourist? First thing they do is start telling you how every thing in America is wrong and there are too many guns.
I say we redeploy all those dope f-22s back to America so we can have fun air shows all summer.
The only European that understand how much they owe is a Pole, and that's only because Article 5 is their intended opening play.
> America is wrong and there are too many guns.
we_got_the_guns.png
>It's not my fault they do this.
I'm not blaming you, or anyone outside of Europe. The origin of this behavior is after the fall of Berlin wall, where people realized that living in Western Germany was much better than what they thought. At that point people started to realize that what the USA was doing when it comes to politics/economy perhaps wasn't bad. Fast-forward to reality and the hivemind-like behavior of EU politics essentially declared USA politics as something everyone should strive towards and declared Russia and China as the big bad. And this behavior is the result.
>I'm not surprised that people want to meddle, I'm just surprised that nobody slaps them.
It's the European mentality, if we encounter someone that tries to meddle with something they probably shouldn't and there's no harm, we ignore it. In this case all it takes is to add a few keywords to the worldfilter and being done with it. If elections start to get swayed by these opinions or there are some economic repercussions, then we can start talking about someone getting slapped at best.
In fact ex-soviet countries especially in the Central Europe and some in Eastern Europe to some extent believe that US meddles to much in our politics and should stop trying to be the "Arbiter of truth and good in the world". These opinions are held by the older generations and are almost always labeled as extremist and dangerous. In other words, Europe politics are becoming more nationalistic and the recent elections and new governments in the last 2 years are a proof of that.
>>Native Americans
>I had avoided mentioning this in public; I guess there it is, though.
I realized after posting that it is a bad joke to make and for that I'm sorry.
> I'm not blaming you,
Well, what I'm saying is that if I cannot have affected it, then I cannot be held responsible for it.
> If elections start to get swayed by these opinions
You know German Intelligence has made it their mission to screw with us?
> believe that US meddles to much in our politics
Oh, absolutely true, I'd like it if we stopped doing that: if you know how to rein in the CIA, I'm all ears.
> I realized after posting that it is a bad joke to make and for that I'm sorry.
Oh, the joke I didn't care about, just I've danced around my personal genetic makeup a lot on the internet because refusing to answer makes Nazis think I'm Jewish and this freaks them out, plus I don't think it matters so I like sticking it to people that think it does, plus other reasons.
re: Gun violence is never the answer.
>The myth you're buying into is "gun safety laws are unconstitutional!" No one wants to take away your right to bear arms!
That's what it always start as.
>automatic weaponry
A skilled shooter has a near full-auto firerate. Not to mention that dealing with rifle's recoil set to full-auto isn't "easy" and for most is horribly inaccurate.
>bump stocks that turn a regular weapon into a massive killing machine
All firearms are killing machines. That's what they are made to do.
>Statistically mass shootings are done by someone who shouldn't have been able to get a gun in the 1st place let alone a mass destruction weapon.
I agree with that. US has a problem in that regard. But gun control is almost never a good way to lower those numbers. The black market always existed and will always exist. If someone wants a firearm and can't own it legally, they will always find ways to get them. One of the best solutions that exists is more firearms and weapons in the hands of qualified people, because when a gunfight breaks out, there's a bigger chance that someone with a deadly weapon, a knife or a firearm, is near and is able to respond quicker than police. And of course investigating where people get their firearms illegally.
>The obsession with guns in this country is alarming!
There's nothing wrong with that. If you ever been to a shooting range and tried few, you probably know how "fun" and enjoyable they can be.
>Also, statistically countries with stronger gun laws have less!
Statistically maybe. Realistically the country that bans all knives in public, which is somewhat rare has one of the most, if not most, attacks involving knives in the world, ie. UK. There's almost no way to get a firearm in Japan, yet Shinzo Abe was killed by a homemade one. Gun control does NOT work in most cases.
And to further prove my point, I live in a country with one of the most lenient laws when it comes to owning guns and mass shooting occur on average every 6-7 years (there has been a slight increase in mass shootings this and last year after more than 2 decades.) And in most cases using illegally owned firearms.
> US military from under our nuclear umbrella
can I be grateful for this, but also opposed to wanton instigation and conflagration at the behest of the military industrial complex?
Nuance can be hard, which is IMO one of the biggest issues right now. No one wants to be charitable, or even correct, easier to short circuit to calling people the worst things possible, and just crying wolf in the process
Like I can admit that Trump might be a raging narcissist, but that doesn't mean he won't do the right thing if he gets' some kudos for it. The Abraham accords as an example. Politics seems to attract the power hungry, so I don't know how we can expect something else
unlisted cause I'm genuinely curious
> can I be grateful for this, but also opposed to wanton instigation and conflagration at the behest of the military industrial complex?
Yeah, but I don't even know who you'd write to if you wanted to express gratitude.
> Like I can admit that Trump might be a raging narcissist, but that doesn't mean he won't do the right thing if he gets' some kudos for it.
Yeah, I mean, politician. His best features tend to be the ones that he does not share with other politicians.
Are you mestizo pistolero like I always thought, or full Indian โstands with pistolโ?
Either way you are a cool guy.
If the other politicians could be trusted to do what's best for the American public, Trump wouldn't even need to run, and the support he gets is the evidence of how things are degraded. example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vT-u-SPj4_c
I want the best of the US, and I'm not trying to be overly or needlessly critical, I am trying to understand, and that means acknowledging everything, without actually support or condoning it.
I find it kinda crazy today that you can't point out something that is very likely true without being considered some sort of supporter thereof.
@p@fsebugoutzone.org
I know right! We used to just be able to pick it up off the shelf at box stores. That said most people are still going to buy bulk like 1000 rd min anyway to save money.
Don't forget the time release poison gas in rainbow colors. The EU is the most self destructive region in the world right now, and that's saying something. The best part is that most in the EU believe their MSM and pretend it's not true.
Tho I highly recommend Japanese vidya, it's so nice playing shit with attractive women and no politics.
I see zero problem with this arrangement - other than those better be select fire carbines...
@ins0mniak @0 @Zergling_man @p @stux
In the Netherlands, even buying food will get you put on a list.
Let the plant know that we need to make less CO2, so just breathe less or whatever.
This might also be something completely new I'm not aware of, because I hate the smell of almost all cigarette brands. Maybe they do it for the purpose of denying health insurance for cancer treatments.
I don't want to imply that Scandinavian women are alcoholic and neglectful mothers, I want to state that clearly.
If I can't smoke at the bar, fuck that place, the only reason they have to overcharge for the drink is the ambiance. If they can't even do that right, have fun going out of business, you deserve it.
> Never heard about that.
Was joke; trying to figure out why might not be fruitful.
Those are great places to get shot. I remember a time some cops got clapped at one.
I got another 3 bottles of bourbon recently, a Still Austin, a Ben Holladay, and another Frey Ranch.
I was just saying it wasn't just normies and bangers dying. The one I used to live near was shut down so many times, but it would open back up.
It's just a joke for me anyway, when I want to smoke hookah I just have my own, I don't really go near cities if it can be avoided.
"Wait, the self-described cultist isn't clean?"
I am high right now.
> Greta is interested in something else now.
She went full-gamer.
She's a Gaza Girl now, and burning things is her new kink.
They're making great progress towards being carbon zero.
Or eating much of anything in general... those damn sparrows and kulaks!
gretagamer.jpeg
Behead a bitch, absorb they soul. Filling Stux's notifications to replies he's too scared to read. $90 dabs, bitches forgot I am him.
I made a water bong out of Sean Connery's skull. That antediluvian shit got me wanting to snort trilobites.
They're useful in that anyone that values their opinions can be dismissed as weak willed, anti-American fucktards. They swing 180 on issues depending on the noun in the sentence, and hold no principals at all.
@not_br549
> it was a leftist loon
According to the news reports I saw, he donated to the Demcrats at 17, then became a card-carrying Republican;
"Crooks was a registered Republican, according to state voter records, and donated $US15 to a Democratic political action committee when he was 17."
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/world/522206/after-attempt-on-his-life-donald-trump-sees-moment-for-unity
@p
> People want big events to have big causes
All generalisations are false. I get that lone nutters occasionally cause big damage. The Unabomber is a good example. But staged political assasinations? There's plenty of historical precedents for conspiracies where a lone nutter takes the fall. Let's just say I remain sceptical.
> That leaves 50k people, minus one, who was shooting the president
*Former* President.
@p
> It's like the Green New Deal: most of it is shit even the Heritage Foundation could not believe is workable
You mean the Green New Deal Biden pretty much implemented over the past 4 years, which is why your country's economy hasn't completely imploded, after the previous admin's woeful mishandling of a global pandemic and its aftermath?
That Green New Deal?
@p
> I's a conversation, not a series of arguments, isn't it?
Don't make me quote Monty Python, I'll do it, I swear I will!
Ok, but you forced my hand...
"An argument is a connected series of statements to establish a definite proposition."
https://blog.apaonline.org/2021/03/24/the-argument-clinic/
Ergo, in any conversation where people are disagreeing, their comments are arguments. However casual and friendly the presentation (and that's what I aim for here at all times).
@stux @jeffcliff @sj_zero
> I wonder why they use the-federation.info as a data source
You'd have to ask LightOne. But I'm guessing it has to do with the goal of the site, which is to be a friendly entry point for newbies. I have no problem with the edgelord side of the verse existing (which is why I talk to you folk like you're actually fellow humans), but you've got to admit, it's not for the faint of heart ; )
@p
> I don't think it's a stretch (let alone "too good to be true") to say that someone that would shoot at a guy is of the opinion that the world is better off without that guy
Fair point. But his death would hypothetically be *very* good for the big chunk of the country who think he's NeoHitler, and a near miss is going to be *very* good for the campaign against Biden, who a big chunk of the country thinks is NeoStalin.
@p
> things that are unprecedented
... which political assasinations falsely blamed on a lone actor are not. This is something that has been proven to happen, on more than one occasion.
> Bullet misses by an inch, gets the guy in the ear: this is not something you *can* plan
As I've said a couple of times, in this scenario the survival of the Orange Felon isn't required. He'd be just as useful to the interests of Putin, Xi, Netanyahu etc as a marytr.
> then became a card-carrying Republican;
Didn't take the "antifa" stuff out of his Instagram bio, though, apparently. To someone that is unfamiliar with our election process, this might look like a contradiction, but someone that knows how primaries work would recognize this. It doesn't get much news coverage, but it's not really a secret: cross-registering is pretty common.
Some states allow you to vote in whichever party's primary you want, most do not: you can only vote in the primary election for the party that matches your registration. This became a common strategy a long time back: register as a member of the opposing party, then vote in their primary so that you can get the weaker candidate on the ballot. In the case of a run-off or a national election, the weaker candidate doesn't even have to win, just drag the race out for longer: when the members of a party are running against each other, they tend to pander to the far corners of their party's base, and then they have to do an abrupt shift to the center to try to appeal to undecided voters, and the longer the primary goes on, the harder that gets. ActBlue, where the kid sent his money, is one of the companies that advocates the strategy of cross-registering to game primaries.
Registering for a party is free, can be changed any time, it's not like in other countries: it doesn't affect anything besides primaries and opinion polls that ask how you're registered.
Ok, guilty as charged. I do tend to assume that anyone who leaps to blaming a leftist for the shooting is a supporter of the person shot, and that they (like all of us) are being dragged by the gravity of partisan tensions. I acknowlege this isn't always the case and I aporeciate your consistently respectful and thoughtful replies.
I'd make Dark Jeffery Cliffton look like Mitt Romney in contrast for about five months before I did anything... interesting.
@strypey @jeffcliff @not_br549 @sj_zero
@p
> if you want to stop the partisan divide, you need to talk to Fediblock
See my pinned posts. They loathe me, and the instance that I'm on, for similar reasons to the ones you describe ; )
Eg @stux has permanently blocked me over some minor disagreement over the party line.
>ANTIFA backbencher
imagine being that level of a soyfuck lol
> The Unabomber is a good example.
I don't think he was actually crazy. I mean, Harvard let Nazis--I mean, patriotic German-Americans who took advantage of the liberal immigration policy afforded by Operation Paperclip, sorry--do MK-ULTRA experiments on him, sure, and he seems to have been worse for the wear but his essay isn't unhinged.
> But staged political assasinations? There's plenty of historical precedents for conspiracies where a lone nutter takes the fall.
Non-staged political assassinations are the more common case.
> Let's just say I remain sceptical.
> *Former* President.
The guy that keeps saying "Orange Felon" wants to correct me on leaving off "former" in a post where I speculate that only half a percent of the country is able-bodied, I imply that everyone sending cash to a V-tuber is physically disabled, and I go on to say that half of the lunatics in the US are on fedi and the other half is guys trying to murder their ex-girlfriends.
Now, some people might speculate that these are the telltale signs of a facetious post, people might suspect that the author was just having some fun, and they might go on to say that you were fact-checking a joke. Thank god you saw through that! :trumpkissr:
bombs_away--china_all_the_time_ft._donald_trump.mp3
>I don't think he was actually crazy
A guy with an ultra high IQ is gonna go places that many think are crazy
I mean we would have been morons to let Nazi scientists go to the Soviet Union
Eugene Debs the socialist was campaigning for president from his jail cell and left wingers champion him endlessly.
Elvis had a mugshot and hes the most American motherfucker ever.
@p
> Didn't take the "antifa" stuff out of his Instagram bio, though, apparently
As an anarchist, surely you know that "antifa" and "left" are categories that overlap, but are far from the same thing. Sure, there are plenty of antifascist militants who identify as leftists. There are also plenty who don't.
But OK, fair point about cross-registration. I know people who've done vaguely similar things here, but it's not common AFAIK.
@strypey @p @SilverDeth@fsebugoutzone.org @not_br549 @jeffcliff @sj_zero
Fair point on the former President thing. Yes, I was being pedantic. As for the Orange Felon thing, I refuse to name him in public because I try not to feed trolls.
(1/?)
@p
> his essay isn't unhinged
It's not illogical, but that's not the same thing. His actions were definitely unhinged.
As well as failing ethics 101, they also had huge negative consequences for NVDA groups doing environmental defence for years afterwards, in the US and beyond. Was involved in them in Aotearoa in the 90s, can confirm.
9/11 made it even harder in the noughties.
(2/2)
@p
> Non-staged political assassinations are the more common case
You got a reference for the numbers there? Remembering that the cases in the staged column are only those someone managed to prove.
But even if you're right, you've quietly conceded my point, that staged assasination is hardly unprecedented.
Have you looked into the history of the anarchist who was accused of shooting Archduke Ferdinand and kicking of WWI? Very sketchy.
(3/3)
@p
> Shit, typo, totally ruined the effect
Never mind, Semaphore can't interpret those anyway : P
> You mean the Green New Deal Biden pretty much implemented over the past 4 years,
President Biden, along with most of the Democratic leadership in the Senate, rejected it. It was full of fruitbat lunacy, *exactly* like "Project 2025". I'm sorry to be this harsh but someone has lied to you.
Here's the closest it got to being "implemented": for the nth time, Cortez resubmitted *part* of it and it again died on the floor of the House. She claimed that it will create 20,000,000 jobs. This is the bill: https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-bill/2664 .
> which is why your country's economy hasn't completely imploded,
I am genuinely curious where you get this information: since it doesn't exist, and what parts of it sort of exist have remained inert, it can't possibly have had that effect. This is a real question, I'm not being sarcastic, I'm asking for real, no underhanded motives, I'm not trying to ask this so that I can pick fights about the source, I do not do that kind of thing, but you have been somewhat vague about where you get your information on US politics and I am interested: where do you get your information on US politics? Wherever it came from, someone has been lying to you, and I would like to know who is that far off the mark. Separately, there's congress.gov, there's senate.gov, and you can see these things for yourself. Primary sources. I don't need you to believe a word I say, because I'm citing public information.
:lelandye:
And this part was a bit ranty so I didn't want to obscure the other stuff, but one of the central pillars of the "Green New Deal" was high-speed rail. The State of California has not built a high-speed rail, let alone removed cars. Sixteen years ago, 2008, there was a referendum on the ballot, raising the sales tax to pay for the high-speed rail. The committee charged with building this train has failed to acquire the land, let alone lay any track, after spending ten times their initial budget. The minutes of their meetings are public and are available online, so you can see what they are doing: they convene, they draw a salary, and they conclude that they don't have enough information to put a train on a track and that they need to conduct more studies. I hate the TSA clusterfuck and it has completely soured me on airplanes: I'd know if there had been a train built, I would *love* if there was a train. I have taken a train across the country before, and it took longer than it would have taken if I had driven and driving would have allowed more opportunities to eat local food and meet local people, it cost almost as much as a plane ticket (and I got a regular seat, not a room with a bed: those cost several times what a plane ticket would cost), it was completely stupid. I would love for trains to be real in this country and they are not real for anything besides moving shipping containers to and from ports.
>which is why your country's economy hasn't completely imploded
You mean the strongest economy on the planet?
> Don't make me quote Monty Python, I'll do it, I swear I will!
Nobody ever *has* to quote Monty Python, but it is almost always ill-advised.
> "An argument is a connected series of statements to establish a definite proposition."
I don't plan to establish a definite proposition: I'm listening to what you have to say, then I'm saying things that I think of saying when I hear them. It's not goal-directed, I'm just talking to you.
> Ergo, in any conversation where people are disagreeing, their comments are arguments.
Well, pieces of it might be, we certainly have disagreed, but they're not discrete units. I make fart noises when I hear "Project 2025" and point out how panicked the (R)s were when the "Green New Deal" was proposed and that the (D)s are acting the same way about "Project 2025", and then you had a lot of things to say about the "Green New Deal". These things can overlap in a conversation but not so much if we're trying to lay out coherent arguments.
> I have no problem with the edgelord side of the verse existing (which is why I talk to you folk like you're actually fellow humans), but you've got to admit, it's not for the faint of heart ; )
Well, that's not what I'd consider myself; I do not think an adult ought to have to supervise other adults and tell them how to talk to other adults or what sort of things they are allowed to think.
But I'm saying for the sake of statistics, you know, fediverse.party says there are 2-7 million accounts, I count more than 14m. Especially egregiously, it says there is *one* Pleroma server, and there appear to be more than a thousand: http://demo.fedilist.com/instance?software=pleroma . There is a CSV, you can automate the process of verifying that they exist: http://demo.fedilist.com/instance/csv?software=pleroma . At a minimum, I am using Pleroma (I think; at least, that's the repo I cloned), I have used more Pleroma servers, I'm certain there's more than one.
So, as I said, I can understand the-federation.info being filtered, and that's fine, but that makes it completely unsuitable to use for statistics: it's not reasonable to use the-federation.info as a data source. The "Decentralized Moderation" paper, that would not have been possible using the data on the-federation.info.
> But his death would hypothetically be *very* good for the big chunk of the country who think he's NeoHitler, and a near miss is going to be *very* good for the campaign against Biden, who a big chunk of the country thinks is NeoStalin.
Yeah, but you can't rely on a near miss.
@p
> President Biden, along with most of the Democratic leadership in the Senate, rejected it
A common tactic in legislatures is for an incoming executive to loudly and publicly rejects a policy package, then quietly slip most of its practical proposals into other legislation.
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We saw this in Aotearoa in 2020, where the previous government publicly capitulated to a victorious NO! campaign in a referendum on legalising recreational cannabis supply. All while bringing in California-style med pot regulations, so quietly that I didn't find out until a year or 2 later when I happened to visit the Hemp Store.
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Yes, the Green New Deal bill itself wasn't passed. But the Biden administration tried to slip so many of its short-medium term provisions into everywhere else it would fit, that the US left have to loudly remind themselves that he didn't do everything they might have wanted;
https://jacobin.com/2024/07/bidenomics-pro-act-ira-unions
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@p
> I am genuinely curious where you get this information
From a wide range of places, just like any other self-respecting anarchist. I read, I listen to podcasts, etc, from as many different angles as I can. I staunchly oppose much of what passes itself off as "left" these days, particularly US-style (neo-)liberalism, and actively look beyond left media for sources that respect their audience (whether right, centrist, independent, counterculture etc).
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@p
> one of the central pillars of the "Green New Deal" was high-speed rail
I'm not keen to get into the high-speed rail debate again so soon. @sj_zero and I debated this at length about a month ago. Sadly his posts all seem to have vanished, breaking the thread, or I'd link to it.
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Suffice to say, having made regular use of a cheap, electric high-speed rail system in China, I'm just as frustrated by woeful state of the trains in anglosphere countries as you are. Expert planners come up with perfectly sensible and affordable proposals;
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... and the neoliberals in control of the state either waste the money on endless meetings and reports ("left"/"liberal" flavour), or just defund them ("right"/"conservative" flavour). It doesn't have to be this way, and I don't believe we need a China-style command economy to make it happen. Maybe the bottom-up co-op approach that successfully electrified and brought telecom lines to large areas of rural US is the way to go?
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@p
> I don't plan to establish a definite proposition: I'm listening to what you have to say, then I'm saying things that I think of saying when I hear them. It's not goal-directed, I'm just talking to you
That's not an argument, it's just contradiction! : P
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Seriously though, we don't disagree here @p. You're just talking to me, but unlike a lot of people here, you're willing to engage with the logic of what I'm saying (or lack thereof), rather than just blowing rasberries at me if it doesn't match your biases.
This is a good thing!
So if I say;
A = toast
B = tomato
A+B = a cheese toastie
This forms a logical "argument", if a faulty one. That's all I'm getting at.
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@p
> Well, that's not what I'd consider myself
Now who's taking tongue-in-cheek comments seriously ; )
All fair points about the stats stuff. There is a need for stats sites that collect and display the whole known verse, rather than just the parts we can rely on not to scare off newbies. I would like fediverse.party to link to any that exist. If you're willing to open an issue, I commit to engaging with it;
@p
> you can't rely on a near miss
I Agree. There in no plausible scenario in which the near miss was planned. So EITHER the intention was to kill him, and they accidentally missed him, OR the intention was to fire into the crowd roughly near him, and they accidentally hit him.
I feel like the 'speculating about possible shooter motives' aspect of the thread has reached the circling the toilet bowl stage. Let's flush it and move on for now, eh?
> they also register you when you get a driver's licence
Oh, yeah, that reminds me, the kid's parents might be relevant if they were there when he was getting his license.
> Or in many cases they have open primaries which allow anyone to vote however.
That was what the "Some states allow you to vote in whichever party's primary you want" part was.
Yeah, PA is a closed primary state. Which for those outside of the US that means you have to register for that party to vote in the primary. It was a widely used tactic for Democrats to vote for Haley as Republicans this election, and even TV shows endorsed this idea.
> I do tend to assume that anyone who leaps to blaming a leftist for the shooting is a supporter of the person shot,
I say "probably", you know, and if it had been Biden getting shot, I would have assumed the same: somebody that doesn't like Biden, so probably someone that is "right-wing" ("left"/"right" are inappropriate terms). Who really hates Trump?
> I aporeciate your consistently respectful and thoughtful replies.
Oh, not at all, you've been delightful, it's a fun conversation, but I'm basically always like this .
> I'd make Dark Jeffery Cliffton look like Mitt Romney in contrast for about five months before I did anything... interesting.
My first reaction was to laugh.
My second reaction was to wonder if this process has already started.
> See my pinned posts.
Oh, I broke pinned posts here. I don't plan to implement them, either.
> They loathe me, and the instance that I'm on, for similar reasons to the ones you describe ; )
Ah, another member of the club. I used to joke that they were walling themselves in rather than walling everyone else out but it descended into self-parody at some point.
> Eg @stux has permanently blocked me over some minor disagreement over the party line.
Well, that's unfortunate; stux is nice and used to be more affable, but the politics have a way of draining that out of a person.
> I thought murdering your ex-girlfriend is how you get on the fedi.
I think "becoming the ex-girlfriend" is an equally popular option here.
anon-sama.jpg
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> A guy with an ultra high IQ is gonna go places that many think are crazy
That part's true, it'd be weirder if he was fully hinged.
> I mean we would have been morons to let Nazi scientists go to the Soviet Union
Yeah but we didn't have to let them give LSD to schizos.
> Eugene Debs the socialist was campaigning for president from his jail cell and left wingers champion him endlessly.
Oh, yeah, I mean, him complaining about the draft was a landmark free speech case. (Woodrow Wilson should have been hanged.)
> Elvis had a mugshot and hes the most American motherfucker ever.
Ha, he also convinced Nixon to issue him a DEA badge.
> As an anarchist, surely you know that "antifa" and "left" are categories that overlap, but are far from the same thing.
Well, I said he was "probably a commie", you said "probably not a leftist"; you've used the terms interchangeably.
They can call themselves whatever they want and I, like Eazy-E before me, will call a spade a spade and get paid.
Semantics are a spook anyway.
> There are also plenty who don't.
Antifa is an attempt to rebrand commies to sound less gulag-friendly. I don't know of anyone using the Antifaโข brand that are not also ancoms (let alone a large enough number that they can no longer be dismissed as rounding error). They love clipping words, the Comintern probably mandates it. I think they should put quotes around the "an" in "ancom" but I'm not going to argue terminology.
How they self-identify isn't relevant to me. The primary activity of European anarchists and socialists has been and continues to be bitter arguments over terminology. Lenin is writing a tortured essay trying to explain how owning a cat isn't counterrevolutionary. You know the "USSR wasn't real communism" meme, but have you read Mussolini's last interview before he was assassinated? The interviewer asks him about the USSR and Mussolini responds by dismissing the question, on the grounds that the USSR "isn't real socialism". We've got this doodle Engels made, it's the source of the famous caricature of Max Stirner, but the actual drawing is some sort of shouting match, a bunch of useless dickheads that are more insistent on terminology. I was innoculated against this at a very young age when, some time around the time I saw my thousandth tedious essay about how one thing or another was "not punk rock" in a poorly xeroxed zine, I realized that it was a complete goddamn waste of time and that if you let them, these people will spend all of their time on it. Fine, let them, as long as they don't do it near me. "What is punk rock? It's not music or the liberation of music from the labels and the radio stations, DIY ethos, a culture of participants instead of bystanders, it's about none of that: punk rock is about arguing incessantly about the definition of 'punk rock' and the music is getting in the way, please unplug those amps until you have all understood and accepted the error of your ways and started using the words in a way that I approve."
The terms that I use are for me to use. I don't self-identify as an idiot but people call me an idiot without my permission. I don't need anyone's permission to call them a commie.
engels_doodle.jpg
> I know people who've done vaguely similar things here, but it's not common AFAIK.
I think it's got to work differently in a parliamentary system, and there common case is apparently a hybrid system where you vote for candidates *and* a party list. Until maybe a decade ago, California allowed you to select your ballot independently of your registration.
> As for the Orange Felon thing, I refuse to name him in public because I try not to feed trolls.
Ha, good luck with that, but if it was merely an attempt to avoid the name, a neutral term would suffice.
> It's not illogical, but that's not the same thing. His actions were definitely unhinged.
Different set of ethical axioms. If you replaced your axioms with his, then it would be difficult to say he was unhinged. This is no different in principle from what I said earlier: if you think Trump is Hitler, assassination sounds much more reasonable. If you don't think we live in a society , then how bad is it *really* to behave in an anti-social way?
Society is an abstract thing; you do not need to hallucinate in order to perceive society as vastly different than a person sitting next to you and watching the same society. I can say I disagree with his conclusions and methods, but I can't say he was crazy.
That's where imo you do need a base of deontological ethics, hard lines you don't cross, because otherwise you can find yourself either never knowing what is ethical until after the fact leading you down a rabbit hole of betting against God predicting the future, or you can break your whole ethical system by biasing what you think the consequences will be unconsciously. You can the consider consequentialist perspective for more complicated ideas once you stop yourself from doing things you'll regret later if you get the consequences wrong or sometimes even if you're right -- if you become an ethical monster you might be right but you still have to live with yourself afterwards.
> Remembering that the cases in the staged column are only those someone managed to prove.
"You can't prove it wasn't" is not what I'd call sound reasoning. "If this were true and this were true then we could say that" is one thing, but "This was staged, because it's possible, and for all you know, everything is staged, you can't prove that Hinkley intended to kill Reagan, Hinkley could have just been makin' shit up about Jodie Foster because he was a deep-cover Soviet sleeper agent."
> But even if you're right, you've quietly conceded my point, that staged assasination is hardly unprecedented.
I never said that it was unprecedented; you are dismissing possibilities, I'm not. I am saying that it is more likely that it's what it looks like. You're saying it's definitely not what it looks like, and I keep saying it's possible that it is not what it looks like, but it's likelier that it *is*.
Occam's Razor. The guy shot at Trump because he wanted Trump dead.
I am absolutely dismissing the possibilities that contradict the plain facts: if you are trying to *pretend* to assassinate someone, you make for damn sure that your bullets are way more than an inch from his brain. Absent some extremely compelling evidence, some hard facts, it can be assumed that the shooter intended to kill Trump. You'd get a rifle that would be accurate to within an inch at that range. You'd get a scope. Not only that, but if Trump was in on it, you'd have him keep his head still when it was time. You wouldn't leave it up to a teenage kid with no military training. Crooks fired in a panic, as well: he had been spotted and a cop was climbing up to the roof on another cop's shoulder, Crooks saw his hands and had aimed his rifle at the cop, the cop slipped and broke his ankle, Crooks pointed the rifle back at Trump and started firing, at which point he was killed by counter-snipers.
So, nothing makes sense unless he was trying to actually kill Trump. From there, the likely case is that he was opposed to Trump and believed that Trump's election would be a disaster. There are a lot of other possibilities: perhaps he was hired. (I hope they got a refund.) Perhaps he was MKULTRA'd. Perhaps he was a hard-line accelerationist and believed that killing Trump would hasten "the boog". Maybe he lost a bet and Crooks is so dang honorable that he traded his skull's structural integrity to preserve his moral integrity. But "he wasn't trying to kill Trump" is so overwhelmingly unlikely that it's not worth considering until there's a reason: too many things fail to add up if he wasn't.
> Never mind, Semaphore can't interpret those anyway : P
Not a client I have used; if it doesn't show the emchochies, you're really missing out.
virtue ethics have been dead for a long time. deontologicals seem to still exist, but we're rare
Watched an episode of Columbo. A guy is in San Diego, he wants to go to Los Angeles: he just goes to the airport and a plane leaves every 30 minutes, he pays and gets on. It was like taking a bus. That could be us but Bush playin'.
If a high-speed rail can do that, then I'll take it. High-speed rail is about as likely as abolishing the TSA, though.
The Subhumans - it's gonna get worse.mp3
i think stalin and lenins folley was obsessing over "match and overtake" the west, which was dependent on a permanent underclass, using a socialism concept that is supposed to not have an underclass. a nontrivial amount of their problems ultimately come from trying to wring more blood out of a stump if only one more person got sent to jail, rather than idk
managing expectations
@p @ins0mniak @strypey @stux @jeffcliff @sj_zero I feel like the metro here has gotten better so I'm down to get a pass, will let you know if I get secondhand meth. I wish we has a better system like the bart in SF.
> A common tactic in legislatures is for an incoming executive to loudly and publicly rejects a policy package, then quietly slip most of its practical proposals into other legislation.
I was here. I saw what happened here. What you are describing, with no citations, is a fantasy event that did not occur. We rejoined some accords that we had (wisely) bailed on previously. It is a really long walk from "Oh, it was implemented all right!" to "They definitely snuck in some of it." Green New Deal: "20,000,000 union jobs". Nope. "No more drilling for oil!" Nope. "No more nuclear power!" The opposite, we're adding capacity.
> We saw this in Aotearoa in 2020,
I was not there. I did not see. Here is not there.
> But the Biden administration tried to slip so many of its short-medium term provisions into everywhere else
Long road from "Yes, it was implemented, and it saved you, you'd be dead and eating bugs by now!"
> jacobin.com
That is not a source; it is an ideologically driven Marxist version of the National Review. It's editorials and opinion pieces and essays, it's commentary. I'm not trying to put it down: this is how the publication describes itself: "Jacobin is a leading voice of the American left, offering socialist perspectives on politics, economics, and culture." It's fine if you want socialist commentary, but not if you want information. It's like getting your news indirectly from memes.
They are also scared shitless of Trump. The big Bernie Sanders publication doesn't just roll with neolib (when he's lucid) Biden and his cop VP (she's not a bootlicker, she's the goddamn boot) for no reason. They're propping up the guy that is not Trump during an election year and quietly papering over the fact that he is effectively George W. Bush's fifth term in office and we've started overseas adventurism again.
> From a wide range of places, just like any other self-respecting anarchist. I read, I listen to podcasts, etc, from as many different angles as I can.
This is still vague. The only one you have named is the Jacobin, and you really should not.
> Maybe the bottom-up co-op approach
No. The issue is that the college students and the people trying to become rich and famous come and swamp the cities, and they vote, and they see a last name and don't go "Isn't that the guy that barely escaped indictment for rampant corruption two years ago?" and they all for the campaign and they don't recognize the astroturf and then they vote.
> that successfully electrified and brought telecom lines to large areas of rural US is the way to go?
Fiction. Here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rural_Electrification_Act . Very top-down, the non-Green New Deal.
> You're just talking to me, but unlike a lot of people here, you're willing to engage with the logic of what I'm saying (or lack thereof), rather than just blowing rasberries at me if it doesn't match your biases.
Well, thanks, that's nice of you to say, I'm just usually genuinely curious about what people think, and for all the "edgelords they just wanna say slurs" characterization that this part of fedi gets, I think if people aren't worried that they'll get banned for an idea, interesting conversations tend to be the norm. I do think, you know, if it keeps expanding in scope, it'll be two or three months before we've approached a resolution to any of the sub-threads.
chadburger.jpg
cofetits.jpeg
temporallobe.jpe
trade_offer--roads.jpg
train.jpeg
trainpaste.jpg
trains.jpg
trump_killin.jpe
libretto100ct.jpg
> will let you know if I get secondhand meth.
And where. (Asking for a friend.)
Mwhahahaha oh certainly not! I just want a reasonably priced coke.
Heh.
image.png
actually both kinda give me a boner tbh
it's bigger than i thought it was.
@p
> I broke pinned posts here. I don't plan to implement them, either
Why's that? I find them very useful. Eg keeping these posts handy to link whenever I'm accused by partisans of supporting the Evil Other.
https://mastodon.nzoss.nz/@strypey/110800961729443606
https://mastodon.nzoss.nz/@strypey/110789459980665321
> I used to joke that they were walling themselves in rather than walling everyone else out
I've posted Rorschach memes along similar lines on several occasions ; )
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@p
> that's unfortunate; stux is nice
I was disappointed. Especially because after years of positive interactions, they went straight for a permanent block when we had one slightly heated disagreement.
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@p @not_br549 @strypey @jeffcliff @sj_zero
Opening this in the browser is for some sort of download./neg
> Why's that? I find them very useful.
They're worse than useless. Some frontends *still* have difficulty coping with trying to scroll past a dozen pinned posts. If it doesn't fit in your bio, a link to a static page suffices, surely. They're also responsible for a large number of actual bugs on the backend.
There are two legitimate styles of operating the fedi apparatus: "conversation" and "curation". (The other styles, "spam" and "agitprop" and "data mining" and "grooming" and things like that, exploitative uses of the network, are not really worth addressing.) I think, you know, it's nice that fedi can accommodate both, but the "curation" people keep demanding features that make it harder to have conversations. Pinned posts are curation, most of the curation-oriented features ("delete and redraft" comes to mind) are useless or annoying. We have websites, we have wikis, we have blogs,
> Eg keeping these posts handy to link whenever I'm accused by partisans of supporting the Evil Other.
I don't think reasoning with people like that has historically been helpful, but if I'm going to try it anyway, writing is thinking, talking is thinking, communication is the substrate of humanity's distributed computation system, but subjectively, it's only interesting if I listen to what they have to say and then I respond; a canned answer means I'm not thinking very hard about it, and may as well not waste my time. There are questions I'm sick of thinking of, things I never cared about, and then I don't mind a canned response: https://blog.freespeechextremist.com/blog/the-loli-question.html . There are also things that I have thought very hard about and discussed at length and revisiting the very basic initial parts of the argument is boring: https://blog.freespeechextremist.com/blog/what-is-freedom-of-speech.html . I don't need a pinned post for those, I can just provide a link to a blog.
@p
>ย I don't know of anyone using the Antifaโข brand that are not also ancoms
Maybe that reflects the limits of your social network rather than the extent of the social networks that produce antifa activity? Very likely it varies from country to country too. In my experience there have been at least as many tankies involved as left-anarchists.
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@p
>ย I think they should put quotes around the "an" in "ancom"
These days there are a lot of tankies who call themselves anarcho-communists for some reason. But that doesn't mean anarcho-communists are all tankies. Maybe tankies are doing this due to their real numbers being tiny?
Akin to how fascists like to call themselves libertarians when their numbers are small. But that doesn't mean all libertarians are fascists. Right?
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@p
> I don't self-identify as an idiot but people call me an idiot without my permission.ย ย I don't need anyone's permission to call them a commie
You're implicitly acknowledging that "commie" is an intentionally vague term of abuse, like "idiot", not a reflection of real world political beliefs or allegiances ; )
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@p
> a hybrid system where you vote for candidates *and* a party list
Correct. It's called MMP (Mixed Member Proportional) and we imported it from the Germans. It's better than FPP (First Past the Post), what we used to have, and US and UK still use. But we also have STV (Single Transferable Vote, ie ranked voting) for some local government. Having observed elections run using all 3, I think STV is by far the best.
@p
> if it was merely an attempt to avoid the name, a neutral term would suffice
Sure. I could just say Convicted Felon, which would be a neutral statement of fact. But I don't think trolls holding political office is a neutral thing and the terms I choose reflect that.
Please don't read this as a hearty endorsement for Mumbling Joe. This is not a choice between a Pinochet and an Allende. But faced with a binary choice that includes Pinochet, you pick the other one.
@p
> I can say I disagree with his conclusions and methods, but I can't say he was crazy
Fair enough. That being such an un-PC term to use negatively these days ; )
What we agree on, for the purposes of the jumping off point for this tangent, is that he worked alone. But this is the exception in organised political violence, not the rule.
@sj_zero
> Western civilization produced
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-there-never-was-a-west
@icedquinn
>i think stalin and lenins folley was obsessing over "match and overtake" the west
A class analysis! What a breath of fresh air. I find nothing to disagree with here, but I just wanted to point out exactly why I like that post.
Me:
> the cases in the staged column are only those someone managed to prove
... is a simple statement of fact. All of these cases were on the unstaged side of the ledger, until they were proven to be staged.
@p
> you are dismissing possibilities
Like the possibility that this one of those?
> You're saying it's definitely not what it looks like
Can you quote an example? All of my posts on this have been about how likely I think possibilities are and why.
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@p
> I am absolutely dismissing the possibilities that contradict the plain facts
Your post them goes on to list a bunch of claims, from the authorities and the news media, as "facts". Unless and until these claims can be independently verified, they are *assumptions*.
I recently spoke to a mostly apolitical friend who scoffs at tinfoil hat stuff. They mentioned, without prompting, that taken as a whole, these news media claims about the shooter seem pretty fishy.
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@p
> the likely case is that he was opposed to Trump and believed that Trump's election would be a disaster
Even accepting these assumptions, that doesn't rule out an alienated Republican, or an apolitical independent for whom something about this guy is beyond the pale. Timothy Synder wrote a good piece about how history tells us the obvious assumption here isn't always the right one;
https://snyder.substack.com/p/political-violence
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@p
> if it doesn't show the emchochies, you're really missing out
Seems like FediLab can't either. Maybe they are custom emoji that have to be installed on the server I'm using to work?
@istvan
> You generally donโt stage an assassination that will actually get you killed
This thread has explored a wide range of potential motives and the types of political actors who might be so motivated. Not all of which depend on the target remaining alive to be successful. Martyrs, after all, are often much more politically useful than living leaders.
Also, if killing the target was the goal, there are a wide range of possible motives;
@lnxw37b2
> Governor Gavin Newsom
The one who, after finishing his degree;
" .. founded the boutique winery PlumpJack Group with billionaire heir and family friend Gordon Getty as an investor."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gavin_Newsom
People like this holding most of the high-ranking positions in the Democrats is proof positive they do *not* represent the left. If US elections had ranked choice voting, the left would put up its own candidates instead of endorsing pod people like Newsom as "lesser evil".
@lnxw37b2
> I tell everyone I know that Gov Newsom is a dangerous idiot whose actions have cost California's future taxpayers billions of dollars and placed many current taxpayers in the outlaw list*, but once he won the recall election, no one dares to question anything he says or does
The more things change...
https://video.liberta.vip/w/adf806fb-4c7a-4f1a-a68c-263783d6feb8
> That is not a source
OK, *all* media have biases, including whether or not they care about correcting against their biases. The meaning of any piece of media can't be understood without reading it through the lens of those biases.
Can we agree on that? Because I consider it part of media literacy 101;
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@p
> it is an ideologically driven Marxist version of the National Review
Jacobin are more Fabian than Marxist IMHO, but either way, their default position is to attack Dem candidates as centre-right, and indistinguishable from their GoP opponent. So when hard left publications like this are taking sides at all, that's a data point in itself. It goes against their core ideology and their usual MO.
(2/?)
Now, Jacobin are *not* fans of Biden. At all. See;
https://jacobin.com/2024/03/biden-weapons-israel-gaza-palestine
So no matter how much they've decided they want the Orange Felon to lose, I very much doubt they'd publish lies on Biden's behalf. If only because it would risk tanking their credibility with their own audience.
Even the editorial line of the piece I linked is hardly cheerleading. More like damning him with faint praise.
(3/?)
That piece lays out a number of policies the Biden regime either passed, or tried to, which were equivalent to those gathered in the Green New Deal. It gives a lot of facts and figures about their consequences.
Putting aside any interpretation wrapped around those factual claims, can you point to any that are provably false? In a way that makes Biden look better.
(4/?)
@p
> This is still vague
If you want a more specific answer, ask a more specific question. Unless you want me to send you a copy of the histories of my web browsers, podcast app, etc? ; )
(5/?)
@p
> Instead of bashing out 80 posts, I'm doing one reply to the 80 posts
One downside of this is a tendency to reply to chunks of text out of their context, putting the lives of strawmen at risk. For example...
(6/?)
Me:
> I don't believe we need a China-style command economy to make it happen. Maybe the bottom-up co-op approach that successfully electrified and brought telecom lines to large areas of rural US is the way to go?
@p;
> fiction... Very top-down, the non-Green New Deal
My comment was a self-contained tangent from the Green New Deal discussion, but by folding it all together, you've fact-checked a claim I never made.
(7/?)
For the record, I agree the Biden approach to infrastructure is...
@p
> Very top-down
... resulting in exactly the kind of dysfunction you'd expect (Newsom slowing it down etc). Top-down dysfunction you see when in corporate attempts (eg DataFarming platforms, Melon Husk companies) when it's left to the market.
What I suggested is a third option, with a number of successful historical precedents driven by rural US citizens, serving their own needs.
(8/?)
@p
> all the "edgelords they just wanna say slurs" characterization that this part of fedi gets
Given some of the slurs posted by rasberry blowers in replies to this thread, it's a simple fact that a chunk of the freeze peach verse is edgelords who just wanna say slurs. I'm not the target demigraphic. So I'm willing to expose myself to people with brainworms in order to make holes in the walls of my echo chamber. But I don't fault anyone for deciding not to.
@p
> "There is one Pleroma server that follows our moderation policy and that has opted into our service" is the number on the page but it says there is one Pleroma server; there are nearly 1,100
I agree this serves no one. At least not without prominent disclaimers about the sampling method. Ideally also with instructions for accessing the unfiltered data.
As some clever clogs once said, there are lies, damned lies, and statistics ; )
There's a few things that really make the conspiracy theory a less beautiful hypothesis than it could be.
1. The Democrats *have* been calling Trump Hitler and saying he supports neo nazis and white supremacists for going on 10 years now, which supports the idea that some whackjob could get it in his head that he'd be lauded as a hero for killing Trump rather than getting a bullet to the face rather than this being some big conspiracy
2. The Democrats *have* been saying Trump winning will mean the end of democracy, again supporting the idea that some whackjob believed them
3. The Democrats *have* supported political violence explicitly for years, in particular the summer of love riots where the current sitting vice president went on national television and said "they're not gonna stop [...] and they should not stop", and fundraised to pay the bail of violent rioters to get them back on the street, and Democratic DAs refused to prosecute ultimately anyway. This supports the idea that whackjobs would believe they'd be supported for specific political violence, lowering the psychological bar for engaging in such acts independently of the need for a conspiracy
4. The secret service works for Joe Biden's federal government, making the idea of Joe Biden's government secretly plotting to get Trump elected by faking an assassination attempt look like left wing QAnon where Trump is secretly still the President or something -- it doesn't make any sense that the other party's government would do that
5. Even if the secret service worked for Trump's federal government, it is highly documented that many people in the federal government were actively working against Trump because they hate him, so the idea that a government filled with people who hate him would help get him elected and absolutely nobody would rat them out seems far-fetched. They're not going to just stand by while an actual conspiracy to fake an assassination that also resulted in the death of an innocent person and the critical injury of two others occurs.
@p
> I feel like the 'speculating about possible shooter motives' aspect of the thread has reached the circling the toilet bowl stage
I'm aware I'm still circling that bowl in some of my posts today. Damn those floaters!
But seriously, I'm catching up on a few days worth of replies, after putting them aside to finish a piece of writing on a mostly unrelated local controversy. I've tried to reply on this subject only where it adds something useful.
@p
> half of these stupid fast food places will not server you a breakfast sandwich after 9 a.m
I've never understood the logic of this. Unless its one of those marketing psychology mind games where they think you're more likely to buy if there's an imminent cut-off time?
> Maybe that reflects the limits of your social network
No.
> These days there are a lot of tankies who call themselves anarcho-communists for some reason.
There's not a meaningful distinction.
> Akin to how fascists like to call themselves libertarians
I know *zero* fascists that call themselves libertarians. I have seen people call libertarians fascists, I have seen people call anarchists fascists, and, having read Trotsky, I have seen one of the world's most prolific communist authors refer to everyone that does not accept the stiff Comintern hierarchy fascist/"Bonapartist"/whatever.
I really don't ever want to argue terminology, which is why I say I'm not going to argue terminology.
> You're implicitly acknowledging that "commie" is an intentionally vague term of abuse, like "idiot", not a reflection of real world political beliefs or allegiances ; )
I am not. I am saying that if an insult ("idiot") may be used without permission, a neutral classification may be used without permission.
(3/3)
(4/3)
(6/3)
> I could just say Convicted Felon, which would be a neutral statement of fact.
There is no such thing; you ought to know that. If I refer to Biden as "that crackhead's dad" or "the senile child-molester", these are facts, but "It's true!" does not mean it's neutral, and which things you decide to highlight are *more* relevant than the stance you take. See attached. So please, don't screw with me, man: it's one thing to talk, it's another to stretch my credibility and insult my intelligence, and it makes it difficult to assume good faith.
> Mumbling Joe.
"Child-Rapist Joe", if you were trying to make the point effectively.
> But faced with a binary choice that includes Pinochet, you pick the other one.
We're not anywhere near Pinochet vs. Allende, which was my initial point: you do not appear to have a reasonable understanding of US politics.
McCombsShaw1972--agenda_setting.pdf
> (1/?)
Goddammit, go look at @pnotifbot. I'm the hell out of this thread: I'm just not doing it. I am happy to discuss things, but I do not wish to discuss *everything* in the same thread. This is sloppy thinking, friend.
@p
> things that I have thought very hard about and discussed at length and revisiting the very basic initial parts of the argument is boring
This.
> I don't need a pinned post for those, I can just provide a link to a blog
You do you. But I find having people scroll these posts before following or continuing a discussion with me saves me a lot of aggravation.
Relying on them following a link would result in aggravation. Therefore I pin posts.
@samjayganges @jeffcliff @sj_zero
@p
> most of the curation-oriented features ("delete and redraft" comes to mind) are useless or annoying
Delete-and-redraft had all sorts of uses before post editing was available. It remains the only way to change to change the scope of a post ("oops, that Public post was meant to be a Direct one!"), with three clicks, rather than an awkward cut'n'paste dance.
Having said that, yes, blog posts are a good place to condense one's thought on common conversations about important topics. So a single link avoids the boredom and teeth-grinding frustration of rehashing them over and over. I do this more often, and limit myself to 2-3 pinned posts.
After living in China for 2 years, I'm even more in agreement with most of this;
https://blog.freespeechextremist.com/blog/what-is-freedom-of-speech.html
(1/?)
Although I have some minor quibbles. Eg I consider myself a radical; someone who aims to fix problems at the root (https://www.etymonline.com/word/radical) rather than slapping away at surface symptoms. The word "radical" is being demonised for the reason "libertarian" is, and the same reason "anarchist" and "democrat" were in the 19th century, and "pirate" and "luddite" before that. As is any word commonly used to describe people who challenge power.
(2/?)
I get that any replacement word that won't confuse most people (like "extremist") probably has similar issues if you dig into it. I'd probably phrase it like;
Cults, including those based on political ideologies, thrive on isolation.
(3/3)
@p
> I really don't ever want to argue terminology
And yet you are. Well not really, since you haven't actually offered counterarguments, just contradictions. Which contradict my personal experiences. So I'm going to go with those if you don't mind ; )
> which is why I say I'm not going to argue terminology
... and yet you wrote a long and detailed blog post arguing about what "freedom of speech" means ; )
Well it's been fun, but it seems like this whole conversation is now circling the toilet. I may reply to any notifications I haven't seen yet, but overall I think it's time to flush. Thanks for the discursive workout.
@BowsacNoodle
> Mastodon problems I think?
If @p can't click on the first post and read the whole thread, as easily as if it was a single wall of text post, then the problem is not with Mastodon.
@p
> I do not wish to discuss *everything* in the same thread
No. You want to discuss everything in one *post*. Big difference ; )
Me:
> This is not a choice between a Pinochet and an Allende.
@p
> We're not anywhere near Pinochet vs. Allende
Uh-huh. But the Orange Felon's attempt to avoid a peaceful handover of power in 2020 - which even *his VP* agreed was appropriate - that *alone* means he's definitely a Pinochet. So if you don't want a Pinochet in your top public office, however dirty it might make you feel to vote for the other candidate, that's what you do.
@p
> Socialists have an absurd belief that words create reality
That's not a socialist belief, it's hard postmodernism. There's some overlap, for sure, but I'm a socialist (broadly speaking) and I don't belief this.
It does seem obvious to me that the words we choose to use or avoid can shape the way things are thought about. "Intellectual property" is a great example;
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/not-ipr.en.html
(1/2)
@p
> Arguing terminology is equivalent to arguing what other people are *allowed* to *mean* when they speak
It can be. It can also be a way of figuring out which basket of ideas someone is pointing at, when they use abstract words. This can help us avoid talking past each other, by using the same term (eg "capitalism") to mean totally different things.
Can I ask why talking about words seems to bother you so much?
(2/2)
Some might claim Donald Trump is a Pinochet because he contested the election. Does that make most Democrats a Stalin, given that they've contested every presidential election they lost for the past 25 years?[1][2][3]
I should also mention that some might point out the fact that Donald Trump was accusing the election of having unprecedented fraud, and that seems unusual, but the reality is that the 2020 election was unprecedented in many ways. Practices such as mailing voting[4] and drop boxes[5] which have not been widely used in elections for generations of the American project(Absentee ballots did exist since colonial times, but were limited to just a few situations such as military service until California became the first state to have no-reason absentee ballots in 1978, hundreds of years after the founding of the United States, but even then it's not normal to have the level of mail-in voting used in 2020) because it is known that they are potential sources of fraud and corruption were used with the covid-19 pandemic being the state of justification. The majority of cases brought by Trump or his supporters never had any hearing on the merits[6]. This fits since pretty famously courts almost never want to interfere in elections at all[7]. COVID-19 was used as a justification in at least one case for keeping election observers at an unreasonably long distance away and a Pennsylvania judge agreed, telling the city to allow observers to be closer, a ruling the city appealed[8]. In retrospect it seems probable that many of the other claims such as observers being kept out were false and based on false rumors, it wasn't as if all the claims were entirely baseless -- a famous photo showed one election observer using binoculars to observe because they were kept so far away[9]. I suspect that the fact the world had spent the year under the tyrannical boot of government COVID restrictions and double standards or the insanity of the summer of love riots that seemed to include a lot of shady backroom dealings and open crossing of red lines such as imposing censorship on social media platforms in ways that hadn't previously been seen, and many things called "conspiracy theories" of the time ended up being fully true in the aftermath. Even if we end up agreeing he was wrong, being wrong about something but having a sincerely held belief doesn't make someone a dictator. If you sincerely believed that you lost the election due to cheating, wouldn't it be only commendable to use every legal means available to you to push to resolve that, up to and including peaceful protests to ask the certification process to be paused?
Some people say that stating his beliefs led to the January 6th riots, but I'd say there was a lot that led to that, including the 6 months of riots the Democrats cheered on and supported including financially. The establishment media also contributed to the Jan 6 riots by their absurd lies leading up to the election including fact checks that call something false but started with "while it is true that"...
The Democrats ended up spending four years attacking Donald Trump based on the Steele dossier, which was something that was fabricated from whole cloth by Hillary Clinton's campaign which was later fined for the election fraud by the FEC[10].
They also ended up pushing back in 2000 and 2004 -- pretty much every election they lose they end up contesting, and they used their fraudulent manufactured evidence of election manipulation from 2016 to stymie the president, and in the process used the process to lock up Trump's allies[11]. I was a supporter of the Democrats at the time and a default liberal.[lol] I distinctly recall lots of people continually saying Bush stole the election, the Supreme court stole it for him, he wasn't a legitimate president. 2004 saw the Democrats criticizing voting machines, ironically. (you know, when I voted it was a piece of paper and a pencil, why do we need hanging chads and specially packaged PCs pretending to be special voting machines?)
Another interesting thing, is that Donald Trump had every opportunity to be an actual Pinochet. You might not remember the 6 months (by some measures over a year)[12] of violent riots that were explicitly supported by the democrats including fundraising to keep the violent criminals out of jail[13], but pepperidge farm remembers.
During those 6 months of riots, and there were two classes of crime that absolutely would have given Trump justification to use his role as Commander in Chief of the armed forces to go in there and declare martial law. They were crimes that shocked the conscience, such as the young black girl who was murdered by a mob for the crime of stopping their car in the wrong place [14], or the apartment building burned down by the mob with people inside as protesters blocked first responders[15]. In the end, over 1000 buildings burned or were damaged in the twin cities, resulting in over 130 million dollars in damage[16]. Despite few charges being laid, the state asked the federal government for money to aid repairs, claiming the riots caused over 500 million dollars in damage and over 1500 businesses affected.[17] Minneapolis wasn't the only city affected, the riots spread to many cities, including the aforementioned Atlanta. Many of these events would be considered crimes against humanity, and pure justification to take any means necessary to end.
Besides the crimes against the people, there were also a number of crimes against the government that would have justified taking action. The rioters destroyed and burned down police departments[18], firebombed a courthouse[19], and attacked the Whitehouse so violently the president was evacuated to a protective bunker[20].
In fact myself, and many other people wanted Trump to send in the military with lead bullets not to shut down peaceful protests but to immediately and decisively and any violent riots or other political violence. You can judge people like me, but I had a friend in Minneapolis at the time telling me the stories behind the buildings that were burned down and I empathized because I would never want that happening to my home. In spite of our wishes, he did not do that. He instead readied the troops and waited for the request to the federal government in accordance with federal law[21]. Donald Trump specifically did not deploy the troops, it was the governors who deployed the troops in the end[22].
Now you might be saying "of course Donald Trump didn't send in the troops, he couldn't possibly do that!" But there is precedent. Famously, president Johnson sent federal troops into Alabama against the wishes of its segregationist governor in 1965 to enforce desegregation[23].
But that again brings us back to the fundamental problem: you might not like it, but Trump just wasn't a dictator. He had a situation that could have justified extraordinary dictatorial measures, and he didn't do that. He could have declared martial law, he didn't do that. He could have tried to use the same logic Democrats used to implement questionable election to fully cancel the elections, and he didn't. Even his so-called "coup" appeared to be to ask citizens to peacefully and patriotically make their voices heard[24] to make use of part of the process intended to put a pause on something if there were questionable events. Trump's last post on Twitter before he was banned was a video saying "you have to go home now," and "We have to have peace, we have to have law and order, we have to respect our great people in law and order. We don't want anyone hurt."[25] . Agree with his politics or not, there was a lot he could have done along dictatorial lines and he did not. Contrast with mine fuhrer Justin Trudeau, who went faced with the most peaceful protests in world history violated the law to employ the emergencies act[26] to seize dissidents bank accounts, and paid the media to take his side[27]. See? That's how you do dictatorship!
It's ironic, the left says support for Donald Trump is a cult, but every right winger I know has major criticisms of him and his presidency. One of those criticisms is that he wasn't nearly dictatorial enough! Compare for example many court cases he lost[28] and just accepted the loss. Meanwhile, Biden is doing everything he can to cancel student loan debt except the one thing he's constitutionally supposed to do: get Congress to set aside the money for it[29].
Another thing to look at is contrast with how his opponents behave. They claimed Trump would abuse the legal system against his opponents[30], but he didn't -- meanwhile they've indicted him for more crimes than Al Capone[31], and his recent conviction was openly and aggressively politically motivated. He was elected saying he would prosecute Hillary Clinton, but Letitia James was elected saying she would prosecute Donald Trump and did[32] and Alvin Brag was elected saying he would prosecute Donald Trump and he did[33]. They claimed he'd become a military dictator, but it wasn't until Biden was inaugurated that Washington DC started looking like Pyongyang, filled with troops[34] and barbed wire fences[35]. They claimed he told his followers to bad things but he said "peacefully and patriotically make yourselves heard" and when the protest turned into a riot he said "go home[...]we have to respect our great people in law and order" while the current sitting vice president said of rioters "beware" since "they're not gonna stop [...] And they should not"[36]
So to conclude, I've presented overwhelming evidence often citing opposing news sources proving that while everyone would likely agree his presidency was imperfect and he's an imperfect person, Trump had overwhelming chances to be the tyrant people claim he wanted to be but refused to take those chances to do so and instead obeyed the law that limited his actions. He could have done many of the things he was accused of wanting to do, but did not. Meanwhile, many of the things he was accused of wanting to do have been done by his opponents in the aftermath of his presidency. What Donald Trump had more than most presidents of the past century is an actively hostile establishment against him including an establishment media whose entire raison d'etre became attacking him. Ironically, in attacking this one man, they've burned through decades of goodwill and done far more damage to themselves than even a hypothetical dictator Trump could have. He's not a Pinochet, and the American people appear on track to agree, potentially re-electing him in November.
Keep in mind that this discussion is all taking place in a thread about the attempted assassination of Donald Trump that occurred last week[37]. While it is appearing now that the attempt was not politically motivated, a lot of people are showing their colors in that they would have preferred it be successful and there's thousands of millions of posts saying "aw, if only the shooter hadn't missed".
As a fantastic example of the hostile establishment, Donald Trump had just been shot -- he had in fact been shot, he saw the bullet coming towards him, he felt the pain, he was still bleeding, and his reaction was to pump his fist and scream "fight fight fight" -- and CNN attacked him, saying "that's not the message we want to be sending right now"[38]. I ask you whether the establishment media would have ever made such a criticism if Joe Biden was the one still bleeding from a bullet that nearly killed him reacted like that? It's an inhuman expectation that someone would spout whatever the "right" thing to say is. Ever gotten punched in the face unexpectedly? How elouquent are you immediately afterwards? Have you ever just avoided getting murdered? Me either, but I bet I wouldn't be so equoquent either because neither of us are robots.
[1] https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2012/06/yes-bush-v-gore-did-steal-the-election.html
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/01/us/the-2004-campaign-complaints-charges-of-dirty-tricks-fraud-and-voter.html
[3] https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/russia-investigation/
[4] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/how-will-we-vote-outbreak-revives-debate-on-mail-in-ballots
[5] https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/rise-ballot-drop-boxes-due-coronavirus
[6] https://drive.google.com/file/d/1aqorZ61AYFqZU-EDQBBzjqfvAoC5nKcB/view
[7] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/19/us/politics/when-courts-overturn-elections.html
[8] https://www.courthousenews.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/dem-petition-pa.pdf
[9] https://www.inquirer.com/photo/convention-center-plays-host-phillys-ballot-counting-20201103.html
[10] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/hillary-clinton-campaign-democratic-party-fined-fec-clears-steele-dossier-author-of-wrongdoing/
[11] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/muellers-case-against-paul-manafort-explained
[lol] https://fbxl.net/issue1/ped.html
[12] https://ghostarchive.org/archive/9geA1
[13] https://www.facebook.com/KamalaHarris/posts/if-youre-able-to-chip-in-now-to-the-minnesota-freedom-fund-to-help-post-bail-for/10158943194687923/
[14] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/06/us/atlanta-mayor-8-year-old-killed.html
[15] https://m.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/jun/2/will-smith-va-police-chief-says-rioters-blocked-fi/
[16] https://minnesotareformer.com/2021/05/27/one-year-later-few-charges-for-the-arson-and-destruction/
[17] https://apnews.com/article/442bb3509625e13df3afb06b8e652163
[18] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/03/us/minneapolis-government-george-floyd.html
[19] https://bringmethenews.com/minnesota-news/long-lake-man-gets-5-years-for-firebombing-courthouse-during-george-floyd-riots
[20] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/31/us/politics/trump-protests-george-floyd.html
[21] https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/trump-says-military-ready-willing-able-ready-deploy-minneapolis-amid-n1219656
[22] https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/01/politics/fact-check-trump-walz-minnesota-national-guard/index.html
[23] https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/lbj-sends-federal-troops-to-alabama
[24] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/10/us/trump-speech-riot.html
[25] https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/blog/electoral-college-certification-updates-n1252864/ncrd1253120?canonicalCard=true
[26] https://www.ctvnews.ca/politics/federal-court-rules-emergencies-act-invocation-not-justified-1.6738624
[27] https://www.youtube.com/live/o6ZuJoUf6sE?si=zyHQcIxbD-Kie7Ek&t=2335
[28] https://policyintegrity.org/trump-court-roundup
[29] https://www.npr.org/2024/07/19/g-s1-12173/federal-appeals-court-blocks-remainder-biden-student-debt-relief-plan
[30] https://www.citizensforethics.org/reports-investigations/crew-investigations/trump-has-threatened-dozens-of-times-to-use-the-government-to-target-political-enemies/
[31] https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/07/donald-trump-legal-cases-charges/675531/
[32] https://lawandcrime.com/high-profile/incoming-new-york-ag-wants-to-go-after-trump-and-his-family-on-state-crimes/
[33] https://www.cnn.com/2021/12/20/politics/bragg-new-york-trump/index.html
[34] https://www.npr.org/sections/insurrection-at-the-capitol/2021/01/16/957642610/unprecedented-number-of-troops-descend-on-washington-d-c-for-bidens-inauguration
[35] https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/nations-capital-turned-fortress-washington-ahead-inauguration/story?id=75259761
[36] https://americanmind.org/features/ending-the-blm-revolution/theyre-not-gonna-stop/
[37] https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/14/politics/timeline-trump-rally-shooting-dg/index.html
[38] https://www.newsweek.com/cnn-response-donald-trump-shooting-sparks-fury-1924905
@sj_zero
> Some might claim Donald Trump is a Pinochet because he contested the election. Does that make most Democrats a Stalin, given that they've contested every presidential election they lost for the past 25 years?
He didn't just "contest" the election result. He instructed a mob to initiate force against his VP, in an attempt to stop him from carrying out his constitutional duties. If you're so lost in the Mirror Universe that you can't see why this is a problem, then ๐คท
The question hinges on, "was the election actually legitimate"?
If it was, only a tyrant would challenge it.
If it was not, only a tyrant would not challenge it.
As usual all of Leftism is mentally incoherent. These are the pro-civilization-suicide people.
Since I've already addressed what you're saying I'll rest my case.
"Peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard" is clearly a right-wing dog whistle for do the opposite of what those words mean.
The objective question of "was the election actually legitimate" goes to whether the action of overturning an election is right or wrong. Overturning a legitimate election would be wrong regardless of your personal viewpoint, and not overturning an illegitimate election would be right regardless of your personal viewpoint.
But the subjective question of "Did Trump think the election was actually legitimate" goes to whether his part in doing so would be tyrannical or not. If he honestly believed that the election had been illegitimate, then even if he's wrong he's not being tyrannical to push back against it, and if he honestly didn't believe that the election had been illegitimate, then he's tyrannical to push back against it even if it did turn out to be illegitimate.
At this point, I do think that the election of 2020 was legitimate insofar as the election itself was generally properly handled, but in the moment I had questions of my own, and part of those questions were reasonable given the illegal and unethical methods we'd seen used throughout the Trump presidency and in particular during 2020. I think the thing that won the 2020 election was the establishment media attack machine more than anything, but that's unfortunately legitimate and legal and not a reason to overturn anything. I do think that Trump thought he was doing the right thing, however even if he was wrong, making it a good thing he ultimately failed to overturn the election.
There was lots of circumstantial evidence, that just didn't end up translating into real evidence of wrongdoing. Some of the circumstantial evidence was really damning, such as election workers caught on tape saying some really bad things or the photo of an election observer using binoculars.
There are two parts of the brain, one of them being logical and the other one being emotional. Circumstantial evidence is not persuasive to the logical part of the brain, but it can be extremely persuasive to the emotional part of the brain. And there was overwhelming circumstantial evidence that something weird was going on with the 2020 election. For example, changing the way that the election was done at the last second, the severe disconnect between the number of people at Trump rallies compared to Biden rallies, videos showing election officials saying really questionable things, the photograph of an election observer being forced to use binoculars to observe, not to mention the overwhelming piece of circumstantial evidence that was the summer of Love riots which were actively assisted by the Democratic establishment. Now none of these will hold up in court because they don't actually prove anything. They are entirely logically inconsistent with anything going wrong. However, emotionally they set off all kinds of alarm bells. Now myself being a more logical person, ultimately I do need to have the real evidence of wrongdoing to say something happened. Donald Trump doesn't strike me as a logical person, he strikes me as extremely emotional. I think that's part of his appeal. That's also why he often says things that are factually wrong, because he's an emotional guy and he's appealing to emotion. (By the way, that's not a justification for saying stuff that's false, it's just an explanation of it.) so for an extremely emotional guy like him, I think that the circumstantial evidence is more than enough to convince him conclusively that there were shenanigans in the elections, so it probably was a sincerely held belief on his part regardless of whether that was objectively the case.
"The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World" is a book by psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist, published in 2009. The book explores the differences between the two hemispheres of the brain. The right hemisphere is referred to in the book as the "Master," it is responsible for holistic thinking, context, empathy, and an understanding of the broader picture. It is more connected to the real, lived experience and the embodied world. The left hemisphere is referred to as the "Emissary," it specializes in analytical thinking, language, abstraction, and breaking things down into parts. It deals with details, categorization, and is more focused on manipulation of the world rather than experiencing it.
From a left-brained perspective, the election wasn't stolen because there was no evidence of it being directly stolen in the moments of 2020, but from a right brained perspective the election was stolen from 2016 onwards, and the stolen election only got worse as time went on because the will of the people that had voted for Donald Trump had been subverted by forces that thought that they knew better.
From a right-brained perspective, the lack of specific evidence for a specific part of the narrative doesn't disprove the narrative because there's overwhelming evidence from a holistic standpoint including overwhelming evidence of lawlessness from the Democrats leading up to the election, as well as open pronouncements from many people that they're going to do whatever it takes to beat Trump presumably including fraud or criminal activity.
Western society is extremely right brained, and there's a good reason for that: autistic right-brained viewpoints have built some of the most powerful weapons and technologies the human race has ever seen. The thing is, that doesn't make it dominantly correct, it's just one of two worldviews. So the right brain can say that the election wasn't stolen, and the left brain can say that it was, and in spite of the fact that they're saying opposite things, they are both within their own purview correct.
Now some people might say "but obviously the facts and figures brain is more correct", and that's exactly the attitude of the left brain, since of of the traits of the left brain is it thinks it's the smarter side of the brain. In reality, the holistic part of the brain often realizes things before the analytical part of the brain. That's why the dominant ideologies for most of human history were holistic religions heavy on symbolism and light on facts and figures and analytical data.
One obvious problem with this whole analysis is that taking right brain analysis and trying to stuff it into a left brain legal system just isn't going to work, and it didn't work and rightfully so. Much like someone who brings their car to an auto mechanic and starts demanding certain mechanical procedures get done because they know that there's a problem but they don't know really what problem or how to fix it, Trump continuing to insist on using the specific legal remedies for problems that obviously existed but would probably not be resolved by the tools he was hoping to use, he was never going to get the outcome he wanted. On the other hand, he's not a lawyer he's a real estate magnate. An auto mechanic would have a better idea of how certain tools would work in certain situations, and a lawyer would work better in certain situations as well. While some of Trump's advisors did tell him that there was no chance of these tools working, some very well-established and respected lawyers told him they could work.
As we are fond of saying, "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence." If no one is looking in the right places, the data does not exist.
We have doubts about the 1960 election too, and it turns out that these were at least mostly right.
Then there is America's long history of political machines stealing elections through immigrant votes.
So to the question "does Trump have a legitimate reason to believe the election is illegitimate" I have to answer a hard YES, doubly so after the cover-ups and denials of the various investigations.
Those who have nothing to hide do not act as our system did.
Problem is you can't come into a courtroom with a gut feeling, you need evidence. If past instances were any indication, we'll probably find out the truth after it's completely impotent to know.
Exactly. So all we have is looking at the circumstantial totality.
That, and the fact that resistance to any investigation of the election was so widespread and well-funded.
@amerika
> The question hinges on, "was the election actually legitimate"?
Exactly. If the VP was forcibly prevented from following his constitutional duty, then it wouldn't be. Right?
Imagine Gore had refused to accept the court decision disallowing the recounts in 2000, and tried to take power by force. Then, despite this, he was nominated as the Dem candidate in 2004, and refused to rule out a repeat if he lost.
Even I would have been concerned about that.
@p @jeffcliff @sj_zero
Long post
@sj_zero
> the thing that won the 2020 election was the establishment media attack machine more than anything
I think the same was true in 2016. The constant feeding of the troll by news media reminded people of the manipulative ways Clinton got the Dem nomimation. Flipping them to the Other Guy, or a protest vote for a third candidate.
Which suggests that news media attacks can't stop someone being President, if people really don't want the Other Guy.
@sj_zero
> the severe disconnect between the number of people at Trump rallies compared to Biden rallies
... suggests that the 2016 outcome was determined by opposition to the Orange Felon, not support for Biden. If Biden wins again, despite the obvious cognitive decline, this suggests the same.
@Humpleupagus
> Then what does "I have a ten inch penis" mean?
That you're compensating for something you've lost? ; )
(1/2)
@Humpleupagus
> Please provide direct statements made by djt
Even if I didn't agree with what @nicholas said...
"I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the capitol building..."
https://yewtu.be/watch?v=UILCtm_ALMI
... suggests this had been organised in advance, with his knowledge, and...
"to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard"
... is totally compatible with forcefully prevent Pence from handing over power, without hurting anyone.
(2/2)
Now let's say we accept what you're implying, that the Orange Felon wanted people to peacefully protest outside the capitol instead of storming in and trying to stop Pence. In that case, he would have immediately spoken out against it.
Please provide direct statements made by djt where he did that. I'll wait here ; )
Got'dam, were you dropped on your head as a child? How are you this confident while being this ignorant.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ZB8kjR4nYzk
You need to take a long, hard look at your media diet. You are embarrassing yourself.
@nicholas
I'll see your video, and raise you one more video;
Please provide direct statements made by djt where he did that.
I'll see your video...
So that's done then.
Quit moving the goalposts you human denial of service attack.
Me:
> he would have immediately spoken out against it. Please provide direct statements made by djt where he did that
They key word here is *immediately*. If he didn't want anyone storming the capitol, he would have issued a call to stand down the very second he saw any sign of the crowd trying to get in. As the video I linked shows, he did so *3 hours* later.
Also, has he consistently condemned the storming of the capitol or praised those do did it?
Forcibly prevented, like a fistfight?
Pence's constitutional duty was to certify only a legitimate election.
There were enough irregularities to call this one "off."
America has a long history of this. Maybe NZ does too; it's such a liberal hugbox however that I think its problem lies elsewhere.
re: Long post
This is the same thing that happened during the Reagan years: the media whipped up all the useless people into opposing anything but more 1960s "the people's army" narrative.
Even Biden supporters acknowledge that it's a protest vote.
Then again, he's receiving probably a trillion dollars of free media coverage.
@amerika
> Pence's constitutional duty was to certify only a legitimate election.
> There were enough irregularities to call this one "off."
That's a partisan opinion.
If there had been a single, *constitutional* reason not to certify the election, you can be your arse Pence would have happily refused without any outside pressure. He didn't, so there wasn't.
Inconvenient as this may be to your gospel, this is a fact.
@amerika
> Even Biden supporters acknowledge that it's a protest vote
People who see it as a protest vote are not, by definition, "Biden supporters". But sure. Just like for many people the Orange Felon was a protest vote against Clinton in 2016, and the Dem leadership for forcing her nomination.
No, the Orange Guy was a desire for a reversal of direction from marching into the far-Left abyss. He was the Tea Party candidate.
No, it's a partisan opinion to deny irregularities and the long history of vote fraud in the USA.
@amerika
> the Orange Guy was a desire for a reversal of direction from marching into the far-Left abyss. He was the Tea Party candidate
That fairy story is why his supporters voted for him;
https://theauthoritarians.org/comment-on-the-tea-party-movement/
But not why he won. If the Dems hadn't corrupted their own democratic process to nominate Clinton, Bernie would have easily beaten him. Among other reasons, by attracting all the neoliberal media attack coverage, starving the other guy of attention.
@amerika
> it's a partisan opinion to deny irregularities and the long history of vote fraud in the USA
That, my friend is a partisan opinion. You know how I know? It's never once been raised as a reason VP Biden shouldn't have handed over power to the Orange Felon in 2016.
If what I said is not a fact, why did Pence follow his constitutional duty and hand over executive power to Biden in 2020?
I am skeptical of this narrative. Lots of youth interest in Bernie did not translate into wider voter interest, especially since he comes across as a whiner.
@amerika
You keep refusing to answer the question, which is;
> why did Pence follow his constitutional duty and hand over executive power to Biden in 2020?
Which suggests you know very well that what the Orange Felon tried to do on Jan 6 was an anti-constitutional insurrection. Something any US patriot ought to condemn.
So why are you clinging to a position that you know doesn't hold water?
@amerika
> Lots of youth interest in Bernie did not translate into wider voter interest
This was never put to the test, so we'll never know. But we do know that whatever interest there was in Clinton didn't translate into wider voter interest.
> especially since he comes across as a whiner
And the Orange Felon isn't?!?
There's some question as to what Constitutional duty is in any case. If he certified fraud, he violated his Constitutional duty.
Jan 6 was a riot because an election was stolen. Refusal to accept irregularities is partisanship.
Leftists have ensured through their intransigence that we are going to have to throw them out of helicopters.
@amerika
> Bernie is an internet phenomenon. You are living in a bubble
That's what the news media said about the Orange Felon in 2016. Turns out there's no longer any meaningful distinction between "internet phenomenon" and "social phenomenon". Besides, maintaining the "internet phenomenon" claim, in both cases, requires ignoring the huge turnout at in-person rallies.
@amerika
> If he certified fraud, he violated his Constitutional duty
Agreed. What possible reason would he have to use fraud to deny his own running mate the Presidency? Citations please.
> Leftists have ensured through their intransigence that we are going to have to throw them out of helicopters
... and here we discover that all the wailing and gnashing of teeth about "Constitutional duty" and election "irregularities" is just a cover for a violent, anti-democratic agenda.
Who knew? ; )
And so, the question becomes: did he cerftify fraud?
There are enough irregularities to think so.
I disagree. The internet congregates losers. They thought Hillary was a shoe-in too.
@amerika
> And so, the question becomes: did he certify fraud?
How many times will you dodge the point?
1) Pence certified the election result.
2) Despite having every reason to refuse if there was a single piece of solid evidence of election fraud.
3) Which all but proves there wasn't any.
> There are enough irregularities to think so
This is classic wishful thinking. You *want* the election to have been fraudulent, confirmation bias does the rest.
@amerika
> The internet congregates losers
https://mastodon.nzoss.nz/@strypey/112923764854489393
> They thought Hillary was a shoe-in too
You still haven't understand what I am saying here.
First, the Pence made a judgment call and that these are not absolute.
Second, that the irregularities are at a local and state level and therefore have to move upward in the legal system.
Your ignorance is not as good as my knowledge.
@amerika
> Pence made a judgment call
Despite having every reason to refuse if there was a single piece of solid evidence of election fraud at the time.
> that the irregularities are at a local and state level and therefore have to move upward in the legal system
So the appropriate thing to do is participate in due process, *not* storm the Capitol and try to stop Pence doing what the *available evidence* told him was the Constitutionally appropriate thing.
Honestly, you don't have a case.
Pence is an appeaser who made a number of pro-Establishment choices.
Due process was not working... and now in this next election, there is more focus on eliminating irregularities.
In the meantime we get daily stories about Iran, China, or Russia interfering in our elections.
@amerika
> You keep repeating yourself as if others do not understand you
Look in the mirror son. You've got shit on your face and I'm going to keep pointing it out until you clean yourself up.