What’s really fucked is how we expect more composure and grace under pressure from retail employees than we do from police officers. Hell, we expect more composure and grace of people who have a gun pointed at them than we do from the cop who is pointing that gun. And lawmakers are leaning into that notion by writing bills like this one to protect thin-skinned assholes with a badge, a gun, and no business being a police officer.
Anyone who doesn’t think we need police reform is either a cop or a bootlicker.
I see you have no response to the comment above your reply, so I will consider you to be out of your depth in this and any other argument. I will thus avoid trying to metaphorically drown you from now on. Have a nice life, dipshit.
And finding codes that don’t exist is the art of conspiracy
“For in order to survive, those of us for whom oppression is as American as apple pie have always had to be watchers, to become familiar with the language and manners of the oppressor, even sometimes adopting them for some illusion of protection.” — Audre Lorde
The whole thing with “coded” language is that the way it’s used by conservatives gives it a meaning it may not have to others. They can talk about race without actually talking about race; those who know what to listen for will hear it in the usage of the words. (To wit: The usage of “thug”. Whereas it is racially neutral in its dictionary meaning, conservatives often use it as a dogwhistle for “violent Black people” regardless of whether the Black person being called a thug was actually violent.)
The codes exist. You need only know them, and it’s not hard to find those codes if you know where to look. (And that’s only one example.)
America belongs to America.
In Trump’s world, America belongs to “real Americans”. The question would lie in how he defines “real Americans”—and the truth of the matter is that he would likely say “people who support me”, a group that is overwhelmingly white. Calling America “our country” in front of an overwhelmingly white group of conservative voters is more coded language: “You own this country, not the [racial slur]s.” He knows what to say to feed the fragile egos of his supporters—of people who feel like they’re losing “their country” to people of color, be they legal citizens or undocumented immigrants, and want to take it back.
I don’t know about largely.
Then shut the fuck up and educate yourself. Or shut the fuck up and don’t. Either way, shut the fuck up about shit you know nothing about—your opinion will be irrelevant and you’ll be diving into a conversation in which you’ll be out of your depth.
even you say largely. Meaning not all.
I never said “all the pro-Confederacy protestors were white supremacists”—as in, they were specifically part of white supremacist groups. I said that by marching to protect Confederate statues, they were marching for the cause of white supremacy. That some of those protestors may not have been part of white supremacist groups doesn’t change the fact that they aligned themselves with those groups on that day.
We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence, on many sides
See the key words there? They’re “on many sides”. Rather than condemning the white supremacists alone for their violence and their hatred, he equivocates the counter-protestors—the anti-racists and antifascists—with the white supremacists. It’s him going “see, everyone sucks, so no need to condemn any one ideology or the other”. It’s a subtle message to his white supremacist supporters: “I’m not gonna call y’all out directly without shitting on the people you hate.” (I know you can’t understand subtext and coded language, so I guess I’ll need to spell that out for you every time.)
Combined with his “very fine people on both sides” bullshit, it’s proof enough that Trump was never willing to condemn white supremacists separately from any other group and white supremacy separately from any other ideology. He wanted to keep courting their votes without seeming like he was doing that. The whole “I condemn all violence on all sides” bullshit was his way of doing that.
Ask the people breaking them if that’s acceptable?
I’m sure it would be, except in many cases, nobody wanted to move them out of public view—especially conservative politicians who wanted to court the votes of those who support monuments to seditionist losers. That’s why the statues got torn down: People didn’t want them in public view any more, and direct action was the only way to make that happen.
I’m not sad that those statues got broken. If anything, I say all monuments to the Confederacy need to be taken out of public view and put in a museum—preferably one that accurately tells the history of the Confederacy and its defense of slavery.
Among other things
Every Confederate leader—all of them—cited slavery as the primary and most important reason for the creation of the Confederacy. Any other issue was either tangential or incidental to slavery—and that includes the economy.
Remembering
We can remember the Confederacy without putting up statues in public places to memorialize the people who fought for a literaly white supremacist nation-state. Those monuments aren’t for rememberance—they’re for celebration, for glorification, for literally putting the Confederacy on a pedastal.
Sure, you believe the Bible code exists too right?
I have no fucking clue what you’re talking about, but it’s clear you don’t understand the concept of coded language vis-á-vis political rhetoric and subtext.
Majority isn’t 100%
Never said it was, so stop trying to shove words in my mouth. Again.
Covid is a minimal threat to anyone who is vaccinated.
But it is still a threat, and refusing to treat it like one makes you an asshole. After all, contracting COVID-19 even while vaccinated means you can still spread the disease to others—including the unvaccinated.
Supporting choice doesn’t make me choose a side.
Refusing to support a measure that would help prevent further public health backslides does, though.
You should use a proper mask.
How do you know I don’t? How do you know if I can afford one, or even find one where I live? How do you know if anyone living near me can do the same? The whole point of wearing any kind of mask that isn’t a sheet of notebook paper or a paper towel is to lessen the possibility of spreading COVID. Even N95 masks don’t decrease that possibility to zero, and just like with condoms and sex, any protection is better than no protection at all.
Too bad nobody puts it that way.
Neither do you, for the most part. All you do is whine like a child about how everyone isn’t wearing the right mask.
I’m not going to stand there and yell like a fuck at every person who doesn’t use one.
Neither am I. There’s no point. I mean, I don’t want to get killed by one of those anti-masker fucks—either by COVID or by them pulling out a gun and shooting me in the fucking face.
[Franklin quote]
That quote doesn’t scare me. What liberty, what freedom, what inalienable right is being lost to mask mandates—I mean, other than the “freedom” to become a disease vector and infect anyone within literally spitting distance?
Like I said: You keep sounding like an anti-masker, regardless of whether you agree with them. You’re putting up their arguments, regardless of whether you realize it. Get some fucking self-awareness, you ignorant trashpile of a person.
No, you see exactly what you want to see and ignore everything else.
feel free to point out his failures that I didn’t mention
You know, I was gonna go ahead with shitting on the rest of your comment. I really could, too. (You deserve it, believe me.) But I’mma forgo that to spend some real time on this specific point. You need to be made to understand exactly how shitty Donald Trump—the man you voted for twice, the man you thought was worthy of running the most powerful nation in the world, the man you believed was a good and decent man instead of an elderly fascist sociopath—really was.
Hell, just to make sure I don’t break the comment system or whatever, I won’t even go beyond the first three months of 2017.
All of the text that follows is from the McSweeney’s list of Trump atrocities, which you can easily find through Google and has sources for every one of these list items. To make this as fair as possible, I picked out only actions and rhetoric that could be attributed specifically to Trump himself during his time in office, and I generally avoided anything having to do with investigations into his businesses and the like. That said, here is a partial list of the failings of Old 45, the single worst president in my lifetime:
January 11, 2017 – Donald Trump refused to divest from his real estate companies or place his assets in a blind trust, as encouraged by the U.S. Office of Government Ethics. The United States Government designates a “Qualified Blind Trust:” for executive branch employees as one where the trustee has no relation whatsoever to the government official. Contrary to this, President Trump opted to entrust business operations of his companies to his sons, Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. According to the Director of the U.S. Office of Government Ethics, Trump’s arrangement “doesn’t meet the standards that the best of his nominees are meeting and that every President in the past four decades has met.” By continuing to maintain a direct connection with his businesses, Trump may have violated the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution. This clause forbids government officials from accepting “any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.”
January 20, 2017 – Before his election, Donald Trump had promised to entrust management of his companies to his children. But on the day Trump took office as president, state officials still had not received paperwork demonstrating that Trump had relinquished ownership in his companies. In order to transfer his ownership stake, Trump would have needed to file documents with state offices in Florida, Delaware, and New York—the states where his holdings reside. State officials from all three states confirmed with ProPublica that they had not received the necessary documentation when Trump took office.
January 22, 2017 – Donald Trump refused to release his tax returns to the public, both during the campaign and after his election. He is the first president in over 40 years to withhold his financial information from the American public. Upon Trump’s election, senior counselor Kellyanne Conway explained his refusal, saying, “The White House response is that he’s not going to release his tax returns… we litigated this all through the election. People didn’t care. They voted for him.” Donald Trump and his administration have justified his decision to break with historic precedent and keep his financial information from public scrutiny by saying that Trump is under a “routine audit” from the Internal Revenue Service. Officials from the IRS have clarified that an audit does not restrict a citizen from revealing their tax information.
January 24, 2017 – Donald Trump barred all employees of the Environmental Protection Agency from posting on social media or speaking with reporters about their work.
January 27, 2017 – Donald Trump signed what would become known as the ”travel ban,” an executive order which imposed a 90-day ban on citizens from seven Muslim-majority countries from entering the United States, while also indefinitely halting incoming refugees from Syria. Trump’s travel ban still allowed travelers from other Muslim-majority countries where he held extensive business interests, such as Saudi Arabia and Turkey.
January 29, 2017 – Amid vehement backlash, Donald Trump aggressively defended his travel ban. Trump claimed that limiting immigration and refugees would protect the country from terrorists. He argued, “This is not about religion—this is about terror.” In the fifteen years since 9/11, jihadists have killed a total of 94 people on American soil; none of these jihadists came from the countries banned by Trump.
January 29, 2017 – Donald Trump ordered a raid in Yemen during which one Navy SEAL was killed, five American soldiers were wounded, and nearly 30 civilians died. The U.S. Central Command acknowledged that the civilian casualties “may include children.” A month later, U.S. officials announced the raid had yielded no new intelligence.
January 30, 2017 – Donald Trump fired acting Attorney General Sally Yates for refusing to defend the travel ban. In a repudiation of the president, Yates had instructed Justice Department lawyers not to defend the executive order from any legal challenges.
February 1, 2017 – In a rollback of an Obama-era protection, Donald Trump’s White House withdrew the Mercury Effluent Rule, which regulated the safe use and disposal of mercury in American dental offices. The Natural Resource Defense Council estimated the repeal would discharge five tons of the neurotoxic substance into water supplies each year. Even trace amounts of mercury can harm brain function and damage the human nervous system, particularly in pregnant women and infants.
February 2, 2017 – Donald Trump vowed to dismantle the Johnson Amendment, a law which restricted churches and other religious institutions from taking a public political stance while retaining tax-exempt status. When following through on his promised repeal proved legislatively difficult, Trump signed an executive order encouraging leniency on enforcement of the amendment.
February 4, 2017 – Donald Trump questioned the legitimacy of the federal judge who had blocked his travel ban, calling Judge James Robart a “so-called judge” whose dissenting opinion had taken “law-enforcement away from our country.” Justice Robart had received a unanimous endorsement of “well-qualified” from the American Bar Association before his appointment to the bench by George W. Bush.
February 7, 2017 – Donald Trump told a sheriff in Rockwell County, Texas, to “destroy” the career of a state senator who had opposed civil asset forfeiture. This controversial law enforcement practice allows police officers to seize cash and assets they believe may be related to a crime, even if the property owners were never arrested or convicted of that crime.
February 12, 2017 – After receiving news that North Korea had fired a ballistic missile (the first during Donald Trump’s presidency), Trump and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe strategized during dinner in the main dining room at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort, in full view of other diners.
February 16, 2017 – Donald Trump asked April Ryan, an African American reporter and White House correspondent, if she would arrange a meeting with the Congressional Black Caucus. After Ryan asked a question about Trump meeting with the Caucus, he said, “Do you want to set up the meeting? Are they friends of yours?”
February 16, 2017 – Using the Congressional Review Act, Donald Trump repealed the so-called “stream protection rule,” which kept coal companies from dumping mining debris into rivers. Barack Obama first implemented the regulation after a growing body of evidence suggested the debris could contain toxic materials, such as selenium, mercury, and arsenic. Trump’s repeal has been on the wish list for the coal industry since the rule’s publication in December of 2016.
February 20, 2017 – Donald Trump signed an executive order that instructed the Bureau of Land Management to lift a moratorium on new coal mining leases for federal land. A full 40 percent of the coal mined in America comes from federal property. In one such state-owned region, the Powder River Basin of Wyoming and Montana, private companies produced coal that accounts for 10 percent of all U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. The Obama administration introduced the original moratorium on new mining leases to curb the environmental consequences of coal. Without renewal, the current leases would have allowed mining to continue as is for another 20 years; now, with Trump’s decision to permit renewed leases, that timeframe may extend much further into the future.
Feburary 22, 2017 – Donald Trump signed an executive order halting an Obama-era directive that allowed transgender students to use the school bathroom corresponding to their gender identity. Civil rights groups said the executive order would reinforce a culture of discrimination and could further endanger transgender students.
February 27, 2017 – In his first budget proposal, Donald Trump boosted defense and security spending by $54 billion. He proposed slashing the budget for non-defense spending in areas like education, science, poverty programs, and environmental protection by almost the same amount.
March 3, 2017 – The White House hired three former lobbyists to internal staff positions in agencies they had lobbied against, an act that violated ethical rules Donald Trump himself had but in place. Rather than banning recent lobbyists from official office entirely, as Obama had done, Trump issued an ethics pledge, which allowed lobbyists to join the federal government on the precondition that they promise not to influence any “particular matter” they had lobbied for in the past. Among the three lobbyists hired was George Burr, who Trump named to chief of staff for the Department of Labor. During his career, Burr had lobbied on behalf of the Associated Builders and Contractors Inc., opposing wage standards set by the Department of Labor and fighting Labor protections that would limit worker exposure to potentially deadly Silica dust.
March 3, 2017 – Trump eliminated an ethics course for incoming White House staff. The training would have instructed new staffers on ethical methods of interaction with Congress, private companies, and officials from the previous administration.
March 4, 2017 – Without evidence, Donald Trump falsely accused Barack Obama of wiretapping Trump Tower before the election. Trump levied the accusation in a Twitter storm that began at 6:30am. President Trump’s own Department of Justice released a statement in September in 2017 rebuking Trump’s claim and confirming the Obama administration had not wiretapped the Trump campaign.
March 7, 2017 – Donald Trump supported the House’s repeal-and-replace healthcare bill, in a potential violation of Trump’s campaign promise to provide “insurance for everybody” without raising insurance premiums or cutting Medicaid. A review by the Congressional Budget Office found the new bill would slash Medicaid, increase insurance premiums, and leave 21 million Americans uninsured by 2021.
March 10, 2017 – Donald Trump abruptly ordered 46 Obama-era prosecutors to tender their resignations. Among the dismissed prosecutors was Preet Bharara, an attorney renowned for his work uprooting government corruption. Bharara served as the U.S. attorney in New York City and, at the time of his removal, had jurisdiction over Trump Tower in New York. When he was fired, Bharara was reportedly building a case against Rupert Murdoch and Fox News executives for a variety of indiscretions related to violations of privacy.
March 13, 2017 – Donald Trump expanded the CIA’s power to allow the agency to conduct drone strikes on suspected terrorists. Under Obama, the CIA’s directive was to gather intelligence on locations of potential terrorists and then allow the military to call the drone strike. With the new powers endowed by Trump, the CIA has expanded military abilities, further opening the door to unreviewed military action abroad. According to figures released in December 2017 by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, drone strikes in numerous middle-eastern countries nearly doubled from 2016 to 2017.
March 15, 2017 – After a Hawaiian federal judge blocked Donald Trump’s second travel ban, Donald Trump lashed out at the U.S. courts in a speech at a rally, calling the decision, “unprecedented judicial overreach.” U.S. District Judge Derek ruled that Trump’s Executive Order derived from “religious animus,” concluding, “a reasonable, objective observer—enlightened to the specific historical context, contemporaneous public statements, and specific sequence of events leading to its issuance—would conclude the Executive Order was issued with a purpose to disfavor a particular religion.” In the State of Hawaii’s argument against implementation of the ban, eleven instances wherein Trump publicly announced his intent to ban Muslims from entering America were cited as evidence supporting the ruling.
March 16, 2017 – Donald Trump’s budget proposal presented a 20 percent budget cut to the National Institutes of Health, the agency responsible for funding around one quarter of medical research in the United States. The dean of Baylor’s biomedical research school said the proposed budget, “would bring American biomedical science to a halt.”
March 28, 2017 – Donald Trump sought to slash $18 billion of federal funding from support for mental health, foreign aid, public housing, and other categories of discretionary funding. Among the many eliminated programs would be the McGovern-Dole International Food program, which provides meals to 40 million impoverished school children abroad. Trump planned to funnel the funding toward military spending and his proposed border wall.
March 28, 2017 – Donald Trump signed a bill that killed the Fair Pay and Safe Workplaces regulation. Signed by Barack Obama, the legislation protected workers against serious safety hazards and labor law violations in any government contract above $500,000.
Remember, this is merely a partial list of the failings of former President Donald Trump during his time in office. Feel free to make one as comprehensive as the full list from McSweeney’s for Obama or Biden; I’m sure I’ll agree with at least a few of the events that you would consider to be failings or “atrocities” from those administrations.
But I doubt they’d be as long as the list for Old 45.
People who find nonsense where it isn’t are their own issue.
Subtext and dogwhistles are about understanding language—both how it’s used and how it can be coded to mean more than it says. Let’s look at a quote from Donald Trump on the 6th of January to see what I mean:
Our country has had enough. We will not take it anymore and that's what this is all about. And to use a favorite term that all of you people really came up with: We will stop the steal.
“Our country”: Not “the country”, but “our country”—a country in which he and his supporters are the rightful ruling class, the people that “own” the right to govern. To American conservatives, Republican rule is the default under which we should all live and Democratic governance is the outlier, the exception, the fuck-up.
“We will not take it anymore”: “It” can mean whatever he wants that pronoun to mean, but in this case, he is referring to, essentially, “Democrat fuckery”; in that context, he is saying that conservatives will no longer accept Democrat fuckery (i.e., Democrats winning elections).
“We will stop the steal”: Well, what the hell else could he and his followers do to “stop the steal” when the election results were already in the process of being certified?
Rhetoric like Trump’s doesn’t need to explicitly call for violence when subtext and dogwhistles can do the job for him. He doesn’t need to say “kill Mike Pence”; he needs only to say “if Pence doesn’t do the right thing, we’re all that’s left to stop the steal” and let his followers come to a conclusion that was suggested by his own rhetoric. Like I keep saying, it’s a mob boss tactic that keeps him away from direct liability for the actions of those he (knows he and his fellow speakers) incited.
“Do you really believe he wouldn’t have used the presence of the American military in American cities to quell [violent protests and riots] of [problematic but rare] police brutality”
ha-ha-ha-ha-haaah, fuck you
The vast majority of protests in the wake of George Floyd’s death were peaceful, and those that turned violent did so—far more often than not, mind you—after either police provocation or the work of outside provocateurs. I condemn the riots, but let’s not act like things were totally violent before the MRAPs and SWAT teams showed up.
Included a parallel protest
No, it didn’t. The group protesting the removal of Confederate statues in Charlottesville was filled largely with out-of-town white supremacist groups who were testing the waters to see if out-in-the-open white supremacist marches and outwardly visible racism was going to be acceptable in the age of Trump.
After Trump failed to condemn the white supremacists in the strongest possible terms (and don’t tell me he did or you’ll be a fucking liar), they figured out that yes, they were going to be okay so long as they didn’t preach (or commit) violence.
Or, maybe they just respect our history should be preserved.
That’s why we have museums. Statues that glorify the seditionists who left the Union to preserve slavery shouldn’t be in public spaces where they can been seen as an almost masturbatory celebration of men who fought for the defining ideal of the Confederacy (i.e., the state’s right to treat Black people as property).
What history is being preserved by celebrating the Confederacy, anyway? It was a failed nation-state that was falling apart at the seams even before Sherman began his Pyromania tour. It dedicated itself to treating Black people as beasts of burden. Nothing about the Confederacy is worth celebrating in a way that we need to keep statues of men like “Stonewall” Jackson erected in places with significant Black populations.
Maybe if you ignorantly lump preservation of art, monuments, with supporting white supremacy.
Preservation is why we have museums; celebration is why we have statues in public places. It’s one thing to have a bust of a Klan leader in a museum; it’s quite another to have that same bust in the halls of Congress. (Until its recent removal, anyway.)
And preserving the placement of statues dedicated to Confederacy “heroes” and Klan leaders (some of whom could fall into both categories) is supporting white supremacy. The Confederacy was founded on the ideals of white supremacy, after all.
stupid people couldn’t figure out that he was sorting the groups
No, he was eqivocating them. When he said there were “very fine people on both sides”, he was saying that the white supremacists were equally as good as the anti-racists/antifascists. That’s why people called him out on that phrasing: He was saying that there was no difference between white supremacists protesting the removal of monuments to white supremacy and people protesting the white supremacist bullshit.
(That’s also why he offered that limp-dicked “white supremacy is bad, mm’kay” response a few days later that sounded like he was reading it at gunpoint, which he always sounds like when he’s reading something he doesn’t want to read.)
Much like you do when you say rioters aren’t representing BLM.
Can you definitively prove that all of the rioters were absolutely 100% supporters of the Movement for Black Lives or that their actions were done in support of that movement? Because from where I sit, you can’t. And from where I sit, the majority of people protesting in favor of keeping the statues in Charlottesville were out-of-town white supremacists—including the murderer who killed Heather Heyer.
Without that uniform issue it would have been multiple states fighting the north and each other.
Nice to see you finally admit that the Confederacy was formed to preserve slavery and uphold white supremacy.
I simply don’t exaggerate.
You do, but not in the way you think—you understate to the point of ridiculousness, to the point where you sound as callous and sociopathic towards COVID-19 victims as Old 45 did.
I’ve always supported the vaccinations.
And yet, every time you understate the threat of COVID, you sound like an anti-vaxxer who thinks “why bother when it kills so few people” a week before they’re on a ventilator.
I supported use of a correct proper filtering mask.
Again: When you understate the threat of COVID, you sound like an anti-masker. And in case you forgot, Trump was himself an anti-masker—and largely remains one even after catching the disease.
every time I say don’t mandate it’s in line with a comment that you should use one by choice and you should use one that has proper filtration.
You do realize what “public health” means, right? The whole point of mask mandates isn’t to punish people for some perceived slight against politicians or God or whatever—it’s to make sure everyone is doing their part in trying to stop the spread of a deadly virus. Too often do people like you focus on the freedoms offered by society and ignore the responsibilities we have towards that same society—responsibilities like trying your hardest to avoid being a disease vector for a deadly contagion like COVID-19.
It’s far less a threat if you get the vax.
Of dying? Sure. Of getting “long-COVID”? Not so much with the certainty there. As I said before: Your chances of dying from COVID-19 after being vaccinated are low, sure. But they’re never zero.
Now if only you had that conviction when the progressives want to throw humanity under the stone for the Earth of next century.
Well, again neither Trump nor his son called for violence anywhere in that speech.
They didn’t have to. Again, I ask you: Look at the language used—the verbs and verbal phrases that hint at violence—and think about how that speech would be received by a crowd that’s been told they’re the only ones who can “stop the steal” and “save America”. That crowd was ginned up on the idea of political violence as a solution to the “problem” of the 2020 election results. Trump and his fellow speakers did nothing to quell the latent bloodlust; if anything, they made it worse with rhetoric that played to the crowd’s shared idea of “we’re patriots and we’re here to save the country.” A mob boss doesn’t need to explicitly say “have this guy killed” to his goons for his goons to get the idea and kill the intended victim anyway. You once again prove that you’re unable to grasp the concepts of subtext and political dogwhistles.
I’ve called out Trump for the few cases where I see issues.
That’s sort of my point: Instead of continually criticising him for his myriad failures as a leader, a politician, and a human being, you stick to a handful of things you can weakly call out and say “see, even I don’t think he’s perfect”.
There’s plenty of significant shit I can call out Obama and his administration on: the ramping up of drone strikes, the refusal to completely close Guantanamo Bay, and the refusal to withdraw completely from Afghanistan are but a taste of the issues with his time in office, and if I had time to research, I’m sure I’d find more. I voted for him twice, and even I don’t think he was as great a president as you think Trump was.
But we have a different opinion on what is a “failure” or cause for criticism.
Mainly because your ideology is so closely aligned with Trumpism and modern American conservatism that you likely see anything going against that ideology as a “criticism” to be dismissed instead of used as a data point in retriangulating your ideology.
He could have pushed the wall faster and harder by overturning environmental concerns.
“Oh sure, he could’ve gotten the wall faster if he had said ‘fuck the planet’; that he didn’t is a failure.” That’s you. That’s you right now.
But there’s lots of good he accomplished as well.
No, there really isn’t. The best thing he did in his time as president was sign off on the COVID relief checks to boost the economy (the one thing he had going for him until the pandemic), and he had his name attached to the first two so he could assuage his gigantic ego.
You don’t have to look far to see me bitch about Republican stupidity.
Yes. Yes, I do.
And trump had his share of face palm moments.
You’ll never admit that any of the obvious ones (e.g., injecting disinfectants, “very fine people on both sides”) are on that list, though.
But Biden hasn’t been any Better.
He hasn’t completely ignored scientists and experts—if anything, he’s gotten out of the way of people who know what the fuck they’re doing, as opposed to Donald “I alone can fix this” Trump.
I agree that Biden is a chump—hell, I knew he would be a chump even as I voted for him. But after four years of nepotism and insults and disinformation and outright fucking ignorance (willful or not) on the part of the Trump administration, Biden being a mere “meh” of a president is more than acceptable to me.
He’s negotiating with Iran
I don’t see the issue here if it results in fewer nuclear weapons and whatnot on the part of Iran.
rejoined the pointless Paris agreement
Yes yes, you think climate change is a giant hoax created by Big Solar and Big Wind to smear the name of Big Oil and Big Coal and create clean energy to ruin the global economy from the inside out. We get it.
stopped, then restarted, then stopped the border wall
Yes yes, you think the wall—and not fucking around with Central and South America to destabilize governments for the sake of installing America-friendly dictators and autocrats (for starters)—is the only real solution to our immigration woes. We get it.
(Honestly, I’m surprised you haven’t called for the summary executions of undocumented immigrants yet.)
He shut down the building of the fuel line that could have brought us energy independence.
Yes yes, you think energy independence is more important than the potential for an oil spill that could devastate ecosystems upon which both humans and animals rely. We get it.
He’s bussing and flying covid infected border jumpers all over the country in the dead of night.
And here I thought you said you didn’t listen to right-wing media outlets like Fox News. Why must you turn this comments section into a house of lies?
A direct call? No. But as I’ve mentioned before, nobody needs to make a direct call when they can use dogwhistles and subtext to fire up a crowd full of people drunk on performative patriotism and prone to violent outbursts. To wit (and emphasis is mine):
Over the next 10 days, we get to see the machines that are crooked, the ballots that are fraudulent, and if we’re wrong, we will be made fools of. But if we’re right, a lot of them will go to jail. Let’s have trial by combat. [Rudy Giuliani]
This has been a year in which they have invaded our freedom of speech, our freedom of religion, our freedom to move, our freedom to live. I’ll be darned if they’re going to take away our free and fair vote. And we’re going to fight to the very end to make sure that doesn’t happen. [Rudy Giuliani]
These guys better fight for Trump. Because if they’re not, guess what? I’m going to be in your backyard in a couple of months! [Donald Trump Jr.]
But let’s be clear, regardless of today’s outcome, the 2022 and 2024 elections are right around the corner, and America does not need and cannot stand, cannot tolerate any more weakling, cowering, wimpy Republican congressmen and senators who covet the power and the prestige the swamp has to offer, while groveling at the feet and the knees of the special interest group masters. As such, today is important in another way, today is the day American patriots start taking down names and kicking ass. [Rep. Mo Brooks (R-AL)]
Americans will stand up for themselves and protect their rights, and they will demand that the politicians that we elect will uphold those rights, or we will go after them. [Katrina Pierson]
He has more fight in him than every other one combined, and they need to stand up and we need to march on the Capitol today. And we need to stand up for this country and stand up for what’s right. [Eric Trump]
There is a significant portion of our party that says we should just sit idly by and sit on our hands. They have no backbone. [Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-NC)]
I emphasized those bits because they’re important in understanding the language being used that day. Look at the verbs and verbal phrases used in those quotes, especially in the bolded parts. They’re all in line with the idea of ginning up a crowd already prepared to “fight” (literally and metaphorically) for Donald Trump. And speaking of Old 45…
Trump said peaceful more than once.
…I’m going to break out the copypasta one more time. In the context of the quotes above and the entire insurrection, I hope this will be the last time I need to break this out for you.
[ahem]
The following are quotes from Donald Trump himself; they come from his speech on the 6th of January, just before the insurrection:
Our country has had enough. We will not take it anymore and that's what this is all about. And to use a favorite term that all of you people really came up with: We will stop the steal.
We will not let them silence your voices. We're not going to let it happen, I'm not going to let it happen.
We're gathered together in the heart of our nation's capital for one very, very basic and simple reason: To save our democracy.
You're stronger, you're smarter, you've got more going than anybody. And they try and demean everybody having to do with us. And you're the real people, you're the people that built this nation. You're not the people that tore down our nation.
Republicans are, Republicans are constantly fighting like a boxer with his hands tied behind his back. It's like a boxer. And we want to be so nice. We want to be so respectful of everybody, including bad people. And we're going to have to fight much harder.
[Y]ou'll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength and you have to be strong. We have come to demand that Congress do the right thing and only count the electors who have been lawfully slated, lawfully slated.
We will not be intimidated into accepting the hoaxes and the lies that we've been forced to believe.
You will have an illegitimate president. That's what you'll have. And we can't let that happen.
The radical left knows exactly what they're doing. They're ruthless and it's time that somebody did something about it.
The Republicans have to get tougher. You're not going to have a Republican Party if you don't get tougher. They want to play so straight. They want to play so, sir, yes, the United States. The Constitution doesn't allow me to send them back to the States. Well, I say, yes it does, because the Constitution says you have to protect our country and you have to protect our Constitution, and you can't vote on fraud. And fraud breaks up everything, doesn't it? When you catch somebody in a fraud, you're allowed to go by very different rules.
We must stop the steal and then we must ensure that such outrageous election fraud never happens again, can never be allowed to happen again.
The Democrats are hopeless — they never vote for anything. Not even one vote. But we're going to try and give our Republicans, the weak ones because the strong ones don't need any of our help. We're going to try and give them the kind of pride and boldness that they need to take back our country.
Now, I’m sure you want to mention all the times he brought up marching peacefully and whatnot. Don’t bother; I’ve skimmed enough of the transcript to know those parts exist. Instead, I want you to read each of those quotes, and notice some of the verbs/verbal phrases he uses: “stop”, “save”, “fight”, “take back”, “get tougher”, “show strength”, “protect”. Then look at the overall gist of those quotes: “we’re fighting to stop the steal”, “we have to get tougher on the fraudsters”, “we’re here to save democracy”, “we need to do something about this”.
He isn’t explicitly calling for violence, no. But between his planting the idea that his “patriots” must stop the steal by showing strength and doing “something” about the Democrats/“weak Republicans” to save the country, his talking for months about how the election would be fraudulent only if he lost, and his continual(ly rebuked) efforts to overturn an election he lost both electorally and popularly, those quotes—his words—become a form of his mob boss–esque stochastic terrorism. He didn’t need to directly call for violence; all he needed to do is make his wishes known and let his followers do the rest.
Take a bunch of people who have already been manipulated by right-wing media and Donald Trump into believing the election would be/was stolen. Tell them that the literal last line of defense against the stolen election is a Vice President who has already sworn himself to the duty of his office (i.e., to confirm Joe Biden as the President-elect). Gin them up further by referring to them as true patriots, telling them to toughen up and show strength, and implying that they alone can save American democracy itself. What do you get as a result of all that?
…and I was gonna stop there, and let that be the end of it, but I’ve been thinking some shit over and I think this would be the ideal time to say this to you, Lostcause.
You are a Trumpist. I don’t mean that in the on-the-surface meaning of “you voted for Trump”. No, you’re a Trumpist on a much deeper level: Like all other full-throated Trumpists, you refuse to criticise Dear Leader for anything (of any significance, anyway).
I regularly rip on Democrats—the same people I vote for, the same party of the Big Two with which my political ideology most closely aligns—because I recognize their failures. The DNC, by and large, is filled with cowards who are too afraid to aim for the stars in re: political policy because they don’t want to alienate (read: piss off) conservative voters. They’re the party of upholding the status quo until it’s way past time to do something about it—I mean, how many of them are actually fighting right now for a liveable wage for the working class. Hell, for all the fawning I do over AOC (and not without merit!), I recognize that she might not have the best approach to winning over more moderate Democrats who are afraid to step an inch outside of the middle of the Overton Window even as it’s being dragged to the right.
But you? You don’t level nearly the same amount of criticism at Donald Trump—even though he definitely deserves it. You’ve defended him with the fervor of a religious zealout; every time someone even remotely rips on Old 45, you’re right there to tell that critic how they’re completely wrong about everything and should shut the hell up about Dear Leader. You’re trapped in a cult of personality and you’re too goddamned ignorant to realize it.
You need more self-awareness. Hell, I’m well aware that I’m wasting my time and energy on you, but at least I’m willing to admit that. When are you going to admit that you’re unwilling or unable to criticize Trump for his myriad failures as a president and his attempt to subvert American democracy—or even ask yourself why you’re doing everything short of literally kissing the ass of a man who would sooner have you killed than give a shit about how you’re metaphorically kissing his ass?
What is it with people looking for things not there?
Your inability to grasp subtext and hear the same dogwhistles that your Trumpist brethren can hear isn’t my problem.
Or, restore order to ou[t] o[f] control looting and vandalism.
Do you really think he would’ve stopped there? Do you really believe he wouldn’t have used the presence of the American military in American cities to quell peaceful protests of police brutality and the corruption of the Trump administration? If you do, you’re a bigger dope than I thought you were—because you’re far, far, far, far, far too trusting of Donald “I alone can fix this” Trump.
if you have a problem with the White House security dogs and armed police…?
I don’t, and I never said I did. Stop shoving words in my mouth that didn’t first come from it, asshole.
He condemned the racists yet acknowledged there were good protesters in both sides too.
Again: One of those sides was full of white supremacists and defenders of the white supremacist nation-state known as the Confederacy. By calling them “very fine people” and eqivocating them with the people marching against racists, racism, and the monuments to slavery-upholding seditionists, Donald Trump implicitly defended white supremacists and their ideology. It wasn’t until days after his “very fine people” comment that he offered a limp-dicked forced-sounding condemnation of white supremacists and their ideology. (And it sounded like that because he knew damn well that he needed their votes in the midterms and 2020.)
none of the other issues that caused the war matter to you … Slavery was one of many reasons.
Every leader of the Confederacy said upholding the institution of slavery was either the sole reason or one of the primary reasons for the formation of the Confederacy. It stands to reason that the War to Preserve Slavery (i.e, the Civil War) was fought primarily to preserve the “tradition” of treating Black people as lesser beings who were put on this Earth to be enslaved.
Where did I treat the virus like the flu?
You have consistently quoted statistics about the death rates of COVID-19 that make it sound like it’s barely even anything to worry about. You underplay the number of deaths as if this is some “normal” disease that kills on the same level as the flu in an average year. Your cold recitation of such facts make you sound like an anti-vaxxer, an anti-masker, or—worse yet—Old 45 when he was saying that the virus was going to magically “go away” even as COVID-19 death rates rose at rates even he couldn’t ignore forever.
You’re doing a shitty job of looking like you take COVID-19 seriously as a threat to public health. Maybe consider showing some fucking compassion, you property-humping sociopath.
Nowhere did he say go use violence against protesters, even the many protestors who break the law.
Maybe he never explicitly said as much, but he continually implied that violence against protestors and anti-Trumpists was acceptable. Hell, even on the 6th of January, he implied that violence was the only way for “strong” patriots to save the country from “weak” politicians who were doing their duty to American democracy. He never truly condemned violence as a part of Trumpist ideology; all the times he threatened to send in the military to quell protests also have to count for something.
And then there’s this, via the list of Trump’s atrocities from McSweeney’s: “May 30, 2020 – For the second day in a row, Trump condemned people across the country who protested the killing of George Floyd, threatening them with ‘vicious dogs’ and ‘ominous weapons.’ ”
Donald Trump revels in violence. He loves watching it being inflicted upon people he dislikes and disagrees with, especially if he can watch it in person. If anything, Trumpism is a political ideology of violence—physical, psychological, and political. Its namesake proves as much: He doesn’t care who gets hurt so long as the “right people” get hurt by “his people”.
He defended those on both sides.
To be clear: That means he defended white supremacists, since white supremacists were the ones marching in Charlottesville before counterprotestors showed up.
He called out the white shites for what they are.
No, he didn’t. And he never forcefully decried white supremacists with the same fervor with which he decried antifascists. If anything, his low-key “well they’re kinda bad I guess” approach to dealing with white supremacy that often equivocated the long-standing threat of white supremacist terrorism to the vague threat of antifascist violence (which only ever really seems to happen in the presence of fascists…) gave white supremacist groups all the cover they needed to operate basically out in the open.
Not wanting historical statues destroyed doesn’t make a person anything other than someone who doesn’t want historical statues destroyed.
If they’re defending statues dedicated to people who fought (and died) for the Confederacy, they’re defending monuments to slavery, white supremacy, and betrayal of the United States. They should know damn well what they’re defending—and I guarantee that the white supremacists who marched in Charlottesville knew exactly what they were defending when they marched to defend those statues.
More fake news. The call where he demanded the missing votes be found.
Yeah, there’s one question you need to answer here: What missing votes?
Trump’s phone call to Georgia election officials wasn’t a plea to find actual missing votes. (Those “missing votes” would have to come from somewhere, after all.) It was to find votes that didn’t exist, claim them for Trump, and give him the win in a state that he lost. If he or anyone else had compelling and credible evidence of any actual “missing votes” in Georga, they would’ve shared it by now. But they didn’t. So they haven’t.
The phone call was a naked attempt to subvert democracy. I don’t know how anyone can listen to that phone call and think anything other than “Donald Trump actually tried to get Georgia to lie so he could win the election”. Well, other than brainwashed dipshits like you who think Donald Trump is still the best possible choice for leading the United States.
Where you see that in trump is beyond me.
He did everything he could to route his agenda around Congress so he didn’t have to worry about all that pesky opposition from the Democrats. He continually declared that Article II of the Constitution gave him the power to do whatever he wanted. He continuously threatened to use military power to quell both riots and peaceful protests.
He wasn’t a competent fascist, but if you think he wouldn’t accept being an American Emperor in both name and deed, you’re out of your fucking mind. You’re also out of step with your fellow Trumpists, who would love to see Trump become a dictatorial godking who rules the country with an iron fist and hurts those who deserve to be hurt.
Wait, a factual recounting of failed trade that [puts] America last is white supremacy?
No, it isn’t. But ripping on foreign countries (and by implication, their people) for stealing jobs that the U.S. government allowed to leave the country and implying that foreigners are coming to take over the country—to erase its culture and its identity—is throwing red meat to the white supremacist “America First” crowd. It’s Trump telling them “it’s okay to hate foreigners—I hate them, too”. The actual economics of those trade deals is ultimately irrelevant; that he sees them as putting “America last” (as you put it) is enough.
Using your methodology Louis ‘kill the crackers’ Farrakhan is a white suprematist.
…fucking what
And save the far left McFail for someone willing to eat crap and be told it’s gold leaf.
…fucking what
Just like the vaccinations, the benefits of the many outweigh the few.
…what the actual fuck are you even talking about here
Given that I made the choice to get the vaccination, and use a mask to this day…? That’s highly unlikely.
Your chances of dying from COVID-19 after being vaccinated are low, sure. But they’re never zero.
So maybe stop treating the virus like it’s the flu and citing statistics with the kind of calculated and callous disregard for human life that you seem to share with Old 45, hmm?
Companies are not prohibited from boycotting anything, they can boycott all they want. But as a consequence of that decision, others have the right to boycott/divest them.
So long as they’re private entities making the decision of their own free will? Cool beans. Local Florida businesses could stop working with Ben & Jerry’s over its decision and I’d have no issue with that. But if DeSantis or any other government official forces all local businesses to stop working with B&J over this, that’s where I call bullshit. Not only would such a move infringe upon the free association rights of those businesses (and B&J), it would mark a dangerous turn down a road where any American criticizing the Israeli government could face some form of sanctions.
Yes, speech has consequences. But are those consequences worth letting Florida Men piss all over the First Amendment?
they have laws in place that force them to divest from companies that boycott Israel
Since a boycott is a form of political speech and a decision on the choice of association, wouldn’t such laws be wholly unconstitutional?
Say what you will about the BDS movement and all. But unless there’s a proven and direct link between a company taking part in BDS and any actual illegal activity (instead of criticism of and disassociation from the Israeli government), no part of the U.S. government at any level should be stepping in to say “you can either get on board with Israel or you can be legally fucked up the ass”.
Madison Cawtho[r]n, is questionable. But appears to be a bigot
I dunno about that, but he is a lying asshole who has aligned himself with the Trumpist ideology and Trump himself in the hopes of extending his political career.
Marjorie Taylor Greene is just nut[s].
And yet, she holds public office while being a QAnon nutter, a serial harasser of people with whom she disagrees politically (e.g., AOC, David Hogg), and a Trumpist.
Like I said: Even if they are a “blip”, they’re still in office and still representing the GOP. That isn’t meaningless and you know it.
[Liz Cheney c]laimed trump was responsible for the riot despite never calling for violence and reiterating peaceful(ly) multiple times in the previous speech.
Do I really need to post the copypasta with all of Trump’s quotes from that speech and the context in which his followers heard them? Because I’ve done it enough that you should’ve gotten the picture by now.
And the fact that Cheney called out Old 45 on his bullshit is what got her demoted within the party. The GOP is more than willing to cover for a seditionist bastard like Trump even if it means chasing out moderate conservatives who (accurately) believe Trump is a seditionist bastard.
Aside from election questioning, [T]rump did nothing alt right.
He separated immigrant families and kept them in concentration camps. (Call them “internment camps” if it makes you feel better, but they’re evil all the same—regardless of who started them and who currently keeps the policy in place.) He called for violence against those who protested his rallies, protested police brutality, and basically protested anything he was in favor of. He defended the white supremacists who marched on Charlottesville as “very fine people”. He treated antifascists/antifascism as a worse threat to the United States than violent white supremacists—which runs counter to what the FBI says. And he did far more than “question” the election results, judging by that phone call to Georgia election officials.
Donald Trump was, at best, a prototype for an alt-right POTUS. That he was too goddamned incompetent to pull it off doesn’t mean an alt-right populist with dreams of turning the United States into a fascist state and the competency to pull that off can’t win an election. Hell, after four years of Donald Trump, more than 70 million people thought “yeah, we need another four years of that”. With the right candidate, under the right conditions, a more competent version of Trump could absolutely win the presidency.
If that doesn’t scare you, remember this: You were one of the assholes who voted for Trump. Considering how you voted for an incompetent fascist, what’s stopping you from voting for a more competent one?
Where did a National Republican say anything beneficial to recruit:
Whit[e] suprema[c]ists
“We don’t have victories anymore. We used to have victories, but we don’t have them. When was the last time anybody saw us beating, let’s say, China in a trade deal? … When did we beat Japan at anything? They send their cars over by the millions, and what do we do? … When do we beat Mexico at the border? They’re laughing at us, at our stupidity. And now they are beating us economically. They are not our friend, believe me. But they’re killing us economically. … When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”
If Donald Trump didn’t get more than a few “white power” types on his side by insulting the rest of the world on the day he announced his candidacy, there’s plenty more quotes like that one floating around.
And that doesn’t even get into how he continues to act like he’s going to get back into the Oval Office soon with the help of jackasses like Mike Lindell and treats meetings with political allies like he’s trying to run a shadow government.
Multidimensional lizard believers … Flat Earthers
Nobody really needs to say much to get them on the side of conservatives because the kinds of gullible assholes who get lulled into believing those kinds of outlandish conspiracy theories lean to the political right more often than not.
Your far right anarchists, who’s goal is do dismantle government?
Militant right-wing nutjobs don’t want “no government”—they want a stronger government led by a strong conservative who is strong enough to rule everyone with a strong iron fist.
Where and when?
At the Capitol on the 6th of January was a start, or did you not hear the “hang Mike Pence” chants during the “tourist kerfluffle”?
That’s not mocking the virus.
Sounds like it to me.
It’s mocking the stupidity of a state with such low daily death rates being told they should lock down everything.
I guess people getting infected with the virus and suffering potentially long-term (and possibly even life-long) health issues from COVID-19 is just an “eh, we’ll think about this a few years from now” issue to you, huh~.
Deaths and (especially) infections are on a rising trend in Florida, if not the entire country. That you’re being so flippant about this after more than a year’s worth of this bullshit—after millions of infections and hundreds of thousands of deaths—makes me believe you’re mocking the virus. You’re not taking this pandemic as seriously as you should. I hope, if only for your sake, you don’t have to take it as seriously as having a breathing tube shoved down your throat by an overworked underpaid nurse who watched three other people die of COVID before she got to you that day.
Ron DeSantis is seeking to have Florida put B&J and its parent company, Unilever, on a list of companies that should be scrutinized for "boycotting Israel".
He can’t stop them from boycotting the occupied territories; that would overstep I don’t know how many First Amendment boundaries. He can’t stop them from selling their ice cream in the States; that would overstep every bit of the conservative “free market” dogma. He can’t really do anything to them, so other than providing proverbial red meat for his dying-of-COVID base, what the fuck is the endgame here?
seriously trying to say that the vaccine doesn’t kill
Oh.
Oh!
Fuck me sideways, I need to proofread my posts. That was meant to be “virus”, not “vaccine”. I’m not one of those fuckwits, and if you so much as even imply that I am ever again, you’re not going to like what I have to say about you.
The far right alt right whatever has never been part of the ‘American Right’ political system
You keep telling yourself that as people like Madison Cawthon, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Donald Trump win elections. A comforting lie is more of a security blanket than the discomforting truth, after all.
they’re nothing more than a blip
No, they’re not. They’re slowly becoming the new normal of American conservatism. Liz Cheney called out Trump’s lies and got all but booted out of office for it (and she may lose her next election, assuming she runs for office again). The GOP isn’t a “moderate” party any more—and while it isn’t as extreme as some people would love it to be, the party isn’t exactly shy about courting the kind of people whom you consider “a blip”.
For all your logical choices, FNC, NYP, Etc, nobody is against the vaccinations.
They’re not working hard to tell people to get vaccinated, though. No right-wing outlet is. They’re too afraid of getting the kinds of hate mail and death threats that anti-vaxxers already level at left-wing outlets and “leftist” personalities.
And as far as I can tell the Florida death rate is fake news.
I got my numbers from the New York Times. Do you really want to go on record as saying they lied about those numbers, and if so, can you offer any credible evidence that proves they lied?
Where did I mock the virus?
Ahem:
You mean 2 went up to 3 type of rise?
“Oh, is it just one extra death?” That’s how I read that line. It comes off as you mocking the severity of the virus by implying that a small rise in the number of deaths is nothing to worry about. I believe any number of deaths from COVID-19 is something to worry about. You appear to think otherwise. If I’m wrong, by all means, correct the record.
But given how you’re all “it’s less than a percent of a percent!” when talking about deaths vs. infections, I don’t think you will, you sociopathic son of a bitch.
I’m not sure how a passport that says vaccinated that’s semi-voluntary would make a person not want to get the shot.
Man, for a Trump voter, you really don’t get it. The Trumpist/anti-vax crowd see vaccine passports as a way for the government to track who’s been vaxxed and where they’re going in preparation for the “next Holocaust” or some shit.
Point out where right media sources (not the unrelated q or cult nazi fucks) arguing against vaccination.
InfoWars has regularly railed against the COVID-19 vaccine. Say whatever else you will about that site, but it is part of the right-wing mediasphere.
You mean 2 went up to 3 type of rise?
On the 24th of July, the 7-day average of COVID deaths was 39 deaths. One week later, that number had bumped up to 58 thanks to an additional 409 deaths. In fact, the number of COVID deaths in Florida had been averaging in a downward trend through most of the year, with a sharp downturn in springtime after the vaccine became available to the masses. But after the 4th of July weekend, the averages started going up again thanks to an increase in deaths.
As far as the number of cases go, they follow a similar trend: After spiking in January, the trends generally started sloping downwards. After a bump in March and April, the numbers trended downward again and even levelled out in June. Then the 4th of July weekend came and went, and now the number of cases (and the weekly average) is back to nearly the same levels as in January.
If you want to mock the severity of the virus, you can do so elsewhere. Here, it will be discussed for what it is: a deadly disease that can ruin or take lives.
I don’t know if it’s true or not.
All of the vaccines were partially developed or tested using fetal cell lines, which are cells grown in a laboratory that descend from cells taken from elective abortions in the 1970s and 1980s. Some people will consider that to mean “aborted fetuses were used to make the vaccines” and reject the vaccines for that reasoning. Those people are idiots, and even the fucking Catholic Church—of all organizations!—has said as much without actually saying it by saying “yes, Catholics, you can go get the vaccine”.
On the post: Content Moderation At Scale Is Impossible To Do Well: Series About Antisemitism Removed By Instagram For Being Antisemetic
Bad.
No.
Context is the key to this situation. You should know that.
On the post: NY Legislators Offer Up Bill That Would Allow Cops To Sue People For Not Doing Enough Bootlicking
What’s really fucked is how we expect more composure and grace under pressure from retail employees than we do from police officers. Hell, we expect more composure and grace of people who have a gun pointed at them than we do from the cop who is pointing that gun. And lawmakers are leaning into that notion by writing bills like this one to protect thin-skinned assholes with a badge, a gun, and no business being a police officer.
Anyone who doesn’t think we need police reform is either a cop or a bootlicker.
On the post: Disentangling Disinformation: Not As Easy As It Looks
I see you have no response to the comment above your reply, so I will consider you to be out of your depth in this and any other argument. I will thus avoid trying to metaphorically drown you from now on. Have a nice life, dipshit.
On the post: Disentangling Disinformation: Not As Easy As It Looks
“For in order to survive, those of us for whom oppression is as American as apple pie have always had to be watchers, to become familiar with the language and manners of the oppressor, even sometimes adopting them for some illusion of protection.” — Audre Lorde
The whole thing with “coded” language is that the way it’s used by conservatives gives it a meaning it may not have to others. They can talk about race without actually talking about race; those who know what to listen for will hear it in the usage of the words. (To wit: The usage of “thug”. Whereas it is racially neutral in its dictionary meaning, conservatives often use it as a dogwhistle for “violent Black people” regardless of whether the Black person being called a thug was actually violent.)
The codes exist. You need only know them, and it’s not hard to find those codes if you know where to look. (And that’s only one example.)
In Trump’s world, America belongs to “real Americans”. The question would lie in how he defines “real Americans”—and the truth of the matter is that he would likely say “people who support me”, a group that is overwhelmingly white. Calling America “our country” in front of an overwhelmingly white group of conservative voters is more coded language: “You own this country, not the [racial slur]s.” He knows what to say to feed the fragile egos of his supporters—of people who feel like they’re losing “their country” to people of color, be they legal citizens or undocumented immigrants, and want to take it back.
Then shut the fuck up and educate yourself. Or shut the fuck up and don’t. Either way, shut the fuck up about shit you know nothing about—your opinion will be irrelevant and you’ll be diving into a conversation in which you’ll be out of your depth.
I never said “all the pro-Confederacy protestors were white supremacists”—as in, they were specifically part of white supremacist groups. I said that by marching to protect Confederate statues, they were marching for the cause of white supremacy. That some of those protestors may not have been part of white supremacist groups doesn’t change the fact that they aligned themselves with those groups on that day.
See the key words there? They’re “on many sides”. Rather than condemning the white supremacists alone for their violence and their hatred, he equivocates the counter-protestors—the anti-racists and antifascists—with the white supremacists. It’s him going “see, everyone sucks, so no need to condemn any one ideology or the other”. It’s a subtle message to his white supremacist supporters: “I’m not gonna call y’all out directly without shitting on the people you hate.” (I know you can’t understand subtext and coded language, so I guess I’ll need to spell that out for you every time.)
Combined with his “very fine people on both sides” bullshit, it’s proof enough that Trump was never willing to condemn white supremacists separately from any other group and white supremacy separately from any other ideology. He wanted to keep courting their votes without seeming like he was doing that. The whole “I condemn all violence on all sides” bullshit was his way of doing that.
I’m sure it would be, except in many cases, nobody wanted to move them out of public view—especially conservative politicians who wanted to court the votes of those who support monuments to seditionist losers. That’s why the statues got torn down: People didn’t want them in public view any more, and direct action was the only way to make that happen.
I’m not sad that those statues got broken. If anything, I say all monuments to the Confederacy need to be taken out of public view and put in a museum—preferably one that accurately tells the history of the Confederacy and its defense of slavery.
Every Confederate leader—all of them—cited slavery as the primary and most important reason for the creation of the Confederacy. Any other issue was either tangential or incidental to slavery—and that includes the economy.
We can remember the Confederacy without putting up statues in public places to memorialize the people who fought for a literaly white supremacist nation-state. Those monuments aren’t for rememberance—they’re for celebration, for glorification, for literally putting the Confederacy on a pedastal.
I have no fucking clue what you’re talking about, but it’s clear you don’t understand the concept of coded language vis-á-vis political rhetoric and subtext.
Never said it was, so stop trying to shove words in my mouth. Again.
But it is still a threat, and refusing to treat it like one makes you an asshole. After all, contracting COVID-19 even while vaccinated means you can still spread the disease to others—including the unvaccinated.
Refusing to support a measure that would help prevent further public health backslides does, though.
How do you know I don’t? How do you know if I can afford one, or even find one where I live? How do you know if anyone living near me can do the same? The whole point of wearing any kind of mask that isn’t a sheet of notebook paper or a paper towel is to lessen the possibility of spreading COVID. Even N95 masks don’t decrease that possibility to zero, and just like with condoms and sex, any protection is better than no protection at all.
Neither do you, for the most part. All you do is whine like a child about how everyone isn’t wearing the right mask.
Neither am I. There’s no point. I mean, I don’t want to get killed by one of those anti-masker fucks—either by COVID or by them pulling out a gun and shooting me in the fucking face.
That quote doesn’t scare me. What liberty, what freedom, what inalienable right is being lost to mask mandates—I mean, other than the “freedom” to become a disease vector and infect anyone within literally spitting distance?
Like I said: You keep sounding like an anti-masker, regardless of whether you agree with them. You’re putting up their arguments, regardless of whether you realize it. Get some fucking self-awareness, you ignorant trashpile of a person.
On the post: Disentangling Disinformation: Not As Easy As It Looks
No, you see exactly what you want to see and ignore everything else.
You know, I was gonna go ahead with shitting on the rest of your comment. I really could, too. (You deserve it, believe me.) But I’mma forgo that to spend some real time on this specific point. You need to be made to understand exactly how shitty Donald Trump—the man you voted for twice, the man you thought was worthy of running the most powerful nation in the world, the man you believed was a good and decent man instead of an elderly fascist sociopath—really was.
Hell, just to make sure I don’t break the comment system or whatever, I won’t even go beyond the first three months of 2017.
All of the text that follows is from the McSweeney’s list of Trump atrocities, which you can easily find through Google and has sources for every one of these list items. To make this as fair as possible, I picked out only actions and rhetoric that could be attributed specifically to Trump himself during his time in office, and I generally avoided anything having to do with investigations into his businesses and the like. That said, here is a partial list of the failings of Old 45, the single worst president in my lifetime:
January 11, 2017 – Donald Trump refused to divest from his real estate companies or place his assets in a blind trust, as encouraged by the U.S. Office of Government Ethics. The United States Government designates a “Qualified Blind Trust:” for executive branch employees as one where the trustee has no relation whatsoever to the government official. Contrary to this, President Trump opted to entrust business operations of his companies to his sons, Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. According to the Director of the U.S. Office of Government Ethics, Trump’s arrangement “doesn’t meet the standards that the best of his nominees are meeting and that every President in the past four decades has met.” By continuing to maintain a direct connection with his businesses, Trump may have violated the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution. This clause forbids government officials from accepting “any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.”
January 20, 2017 – Before his election, Donald Trump had promised to entrust management of his companies to his children. But on the day Trump took office as president, state officials still had not received paperwork demonstrating that Trump had relinquished ownership in his companies. In order to transfer his ownership stake, Trump would have needed to file documents with state offices in Florida, Delaware, and New York—the states where his holdings reside. State officials from all three states confirmed with ProPublica that they had not received the necessary documentation when Trump took office.
January 22, 2017 – Donald Trump refused to release his tax returns to the public, both during the campaign and after his election. He is the first president in over 40 years to withhold his financial information from the American public. Upon Trump’s election, senior counselor Kellyanne Conway explained his refusal, saying, “The White House response is that he’s not going to release his tax returns… we litigated this all through the election. People didn’t care. They voted for him.” Donald Trump and his administration have justified his decision to break with historic precedent and keep his financial information from public scrutiny by saying that Trump is under a “routine audit” from the Internal Revenue Service. Officials from the IRS have clarified that an audit does not restrict a citizen from revealing their tax information.
January 24, 2017 – Donald Trump barred all employees of the Environmental Protection Agency from posting on social media or speaking with reporters about their work.
January 27, 2017 – Donald Trump signed what would become known as the ”travel ban,” an executive order which imposed a 90-day ban on citizens from seven Muslim-majority countries from entering the United States, while also indefinitely halting incoming refugees from Syria. Trump’s travel ban still allowed travelers from other Muslim-majority countries where he held extensive business interests, such as Saudi Arabia and Turkey.
January 29, 2017 – Amid vehement backlash, Donald Trump aggressively defended his travel ban. Trump claimed that limiting immigration and refugees would protect the country from terrorists. He argued, “This is not about religion—this is about terror.” In the fifteen years since 9/11, jihadists have killed a total of 94 people on American soil; none of these jihadists came from the countries banned by Trump.
January 29, 2017 – Donald Trump ordered a raid in Yemen during which one Navy SEAL was killed, five American soldiers were wounded, and nearly 30 civilians died. The U.S. Central Command acknowledged that the civilian casualties “may include children.” A month later, U.S. officials announced the raid had yielded no new intelligence.
January 30, 2017 – Donald Trump fired acting Attorney General Sally Yates for refusing to defend the travel ban. In a repudiation of the president, Yates had instructed Justice Department lawyers not to defend the executive order from any legal challenges.
February 1, 2017 – In a rollback of an Obama-era protection, Donald Trump’s White House withdrew the Mercury Effluent Rule, which regulated the safe use and disposal of mercury in American dental offices. The Natural Resource Defense Council estimated the repeal would discharge five tons of the neurotoxic substance into water supplies each year. Even trace amounts of mercury can harm brain function and damage the human nervous system, particularly in pregnant women and infants.
February 2, 2017 – Donald Trump vowed to dismantle the Johnson Amendment, a law which restricted churches and other religious institutions from taking a public political stance while retaining tax-exempt status. When following through on his promised repeal proved legislatively difficult, Trump signed an executive order encouraging leniency on enforcement of the amendment.
February 4, 2017 – Donald Trump questioned the legitimacy of the federal judge who had blocked his travel ban, calling Judge James Robart a “so-called judge” whose dissenting opinion had taken “law-enforcement away from our country.” Justice Robart had received a unanimous endorsement of “well-qualified” from the American Bar Association before his appointment to the bench by George W. Bush.
February 7, 2017 – Donald Trump told a sheriff in Rockwell County, Texas, to “destroy” the career of a state senator who had opposed civil asset forfeiture. This controversial law enforcement practice allows police officers to seize cash and assets they believe may be related to a crime, even if the property owners were never arrested or convicted of that crime.
February 12, 2017 – After receiving news that North Korea had fired a ballistic missile (the first during Donald Trump’s presidency), Trump and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe strategized during dinner in the main dining room at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort, in full view of other diners.
February 16, 2017 – Donald Trump asked April Ryan, an African American reporter and White House correspondent, if she would arrange a meeting with the Congressional Black Caucus. After Ryan asked a question about Trump meeting with the Caucus, he said, “Do you want to set up the meeting? Are they friends of yours?”
February 16, 2017 – Using the Congressional Review Act, Donald Trump repealed the so-called “stream protection rule,” which kept coal companies from dumping mining debris into rivers. Barack Obama first implemented the regulation after a growing body of evidence suggested the debris could contain toxic materials, such as selenium, mercury, and arsenic. Trump’s repeal has been on the wish list for the coal industry since the rule’s publication in December of 2016.
February 20, 2017 – Donald Trump signed an executive order that instructed the Bureau of Land Management to lift a moratorium on new coal mining leases for federal land. A full 40 percent of the coal mined in America comes from federal property. In one such state-owned region, the Powder River Basin of Wyoming and Montana, private companies produced coal that accounts for 10 percent of all U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. The Obama administration introduced the original moratorium on new mining leases to curb the environmental consequences of coal. Without renewal, the current leases would have allowed mining to continue as is for another 20 years; now, with Trump’s decision to permit renewed leases, that timeframe may extend much further into the future.
Feburary 22, 2017 – Donald Trump signed an executive order halting an Obama-era directive that allowed transgender students to use the school bathroom corresponding to their gender identity. Civil rights groups said the executive order would reinforce a culture of discrimination and could further endanger transgender students.
February 27, 2017 – In his first budget proposal, Donald Trump boosted defense and security spending by $54 billion. He proposed slashing the budget for non-defense spending in areas like education, science, poverty programs, and environmental protection by almost the same amount.
March 3, 2017 – The White House hired three former lobbyists to internal staff positions in agencies they had lobbied against, an act that violated ethical rules Donald Trump himself had but in place. Rather than banning recent lobbyists from official office entirely, as Obama had done, Trump issued an ethics pledge, which allowed lobbyists to join the federal government on the precondition that they promise not to influence any “particular matter” they had lobbied for in the past. Among the three lobbyists hired was George Burr, who Trump named to chief of staff for the Department of Labor. During his career, Burr had lobbied on behalf of the Associated Builders and Contractors Inc., opposing wage standards set by the Department of Labor and fighting Labor protections that would limit worker exposure to potentially deadly Silica dust.
March 3, 2017 – Trump eliminated an ethics course for incoming White House staff. The training would have instructed new staffers on ethical methods of interaction with Congress, private companies, and officials from the previous administration.
March 4, 2017 – Without evidence, Donald Trump falsely accused Barack Obama of wiretapping Trump Tower before the election. Trump levied the accusation in a Twitter storm that began at 6:30am. President Trump’s own Department of Justice released a statement in September in 2017 rebuking Trump’s claim and confirming the Obama administration had not wiretapped the Trump campaign.
March 7, 2017 – Donald Trump supported the House’s repeal-and-replace healthcare bill, in a potential violation of Trump’s campaign promise to provide “insurance for everybody” without raising insurance premiums or cutting Medicaid. A review by the Congressional Budget Office found the new bill would slash Medicaid, increase insurance premiums, and leave 21 million Americans uninsured by 2021.
March 10, 2017 – Donald Trump abruptly ordered 46 Obama-era prosecutors to tender their resignations. Among the dismissed prosecutors was Preet Bharara, an attorney renowned for his work uprooting government corruption. Bharara served as the U.S. attorney in New York City and, at the time of his removal, had jurisdiction over Trump Tower in New York. When he was fired, Bharara was reportedly building a case against Rupert Murdoch and Fox News executives for a variety of indiscretions related to violations of privacy.
March 13, 2017 – Donald Trump expanded the CIA’s power to allow the agency to conduct drone strikes on suspected terrorists. Under Obama, the CIA’s directive was to gather intelligence on locations of potential terrorists and then allow the military to call the drone strike. With the new powers endowed by Trump, the CIA has expanded military abilities, further opening the door to unreviewed military action abroad. According to figures released in December 2017 by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, drone strikes in numerous middle-eastern countries nearly doubled from 2016 to 2017.
March 15, 2017 – After a Hawaiian federal judge blocked Donald Trump’s second travel ban, Donald Trump lashed out at the U.S. courts in a speech at a rally, calling the decision, “unprecedented judicial overreach.” U.S. District Judge Derek ruled that Trump’s Executive Order derived from “religious animus,” concluding, “a reasonable, objective observer—enlightened to the specific historical context, contemporaneous public statements, and specific sequence of events leading to its issuance—would conclude the Executive Order was issued with a purpose to disfavor a particular religion.” In the State of Hawaii’s argument against implementation of the ban, eleven instances wherein Trump publicly announced his intent to ban Muslims from entering America were cited as evidence supporting the ruling.
March 16, 2017 – Donald Trump’s budget proposal presented a 20 percent budget cut to the National Institutes of Health, the agency responsible for funding around one quarter of medical research in the United States. The dean of Baylor’s biomedical research school said the proposed budget, “would bring American biomedical science to a halt.”
March 28, 2017 – Donald Trump sought to slash $18 billion of federal funding from support for mental health, foreign aid, public housing, and other categories of discretionary funding. Among the many eliminated programs would be the McGovern-Dole International Food program, which provides meals to 40 million impoverished school children abroad. Trump planned to funnel the funding toward military spending and his proposed border wall.
Remember, this is merely a partial list of the failings of former President Donald Trump during his time in office. Feel free to make one as comprehensive as the full list from McSweeney’s for Obama or Biden; I’m sure I’ll agree with at least a few of the events that you would consider to be failings or “atrocities” from those administrations.
But I doubt they’d be as long as the list for Old 45.
On the post: Disentangling Disinformation: Not As Easy As It Looks
Subtext and dogwhistles are about understanding language—both how it’s used and how it can be coded to mean more than it says. Let’s look at a quote from Donald Trump on the 6th of January to see what I mean:
“Our country”: Not “the country”, but “our country”—a country in which he and his supporters are the rightful ruling class, the people that “own” the right to govern. To American conservatives, Republican rule is the default under which we should all live and Democratic governance is the outlier, the exception, the fuck-up.
“We will not take it anymore”: “It” can mean whatever he wants that pronoun to mean, but in this case, he is referring to, essentially, “Democrat fuckery”; in that context, he is saying that conservatives will no longer accept Democrat fuckery (i.e., Democrats winning elections).
Rhetoric like Trump’s doesn’t need to explicitly call for violence when subtext and dogwhistles can do the job for him. He doesn’t need to say “kill Mike Pence”; he needs only to say “if Pence doesn’t do the right thing, we’re all that’s left to stop the steal” and let his followers come to a conclusion that was suggested by his own rhetoric. Like I keep saying, it’s a mob boss tactic that keeps him away from direct liability for the actions of those he (knows he and his fellow speakers) incited.
ha-ha-ha-ha-haaah, fuck you
The vast majority of protests in the wake of George Floyd’s death were peaceful, and those that turned violent did so—far more often than not, mind you—after either police provocation or the work of outside provocateurs. I condemn the riots, but let’s not act like things were totally violent before the MRAPs and SWAT teams showed up.
No, it didn’t. The group protesting the removal of Confederate statues in Charlottesville was filled largely with out-of-town white supremacist groups who were testing the waters to see if out-in-the-open white supremacist marches and outwardly visible racism was going to be acceptable in the age of Trump.
After Trump failed to condemn the white supremacists in the strongest possible terms (and don’t tell me he did or you’ll be a fucking liar), they figured out that yes, they were going to be okay so long as they didn’t preach (or commit) violence.
That’s why we have museums. Statues that glorify the seditionists who left the Union to preserve slavery shouldn’t be in public spaces where they can been seen as an almost masturbatory celebration of men who fought for the defining ideal of the Confederacy (i.e., the state’s right to treat Black people as property).
What history is being preserved by celebrating the Confederacy, anyway? It was a failed nation-state that was falling apart at the seams even before Sherman began his Pyromania tour. It dedicated itself to treating Black people as beasts of burden. Nothing about the Confederacy is worth celebrating in a way that we need to keep statues of men like “Stonewall” Jackson erected in places with significant Black populations.
Preservation is why we have museums; celebration is why we have statues in public places. It’s one thing to have a bust of a Klan leader in a museum; it’s quite another to have that same bust in the halls of Congress. (Until its recent removal, anyway.)
And preserving the placement of statues dedicated to Confederacy “heroes” and Klan leaders (some of whom could fall into both categories) is supporting white supremacy. The Confederacy was founded on the ideals of white supremacy, after all.
No, he was eqivocating them. When he said there were “very fine people on both sides”, he was saying that the white supremacists were equally as good as the anti-racists/antifascists. That’s why people called him out on that phrasing: He was saying that there was no difference between white supremacists protesting the removal of monuments to white supremacy and people protesting the white supremacist bullshit.
(That’s also why he offered that limp-dicked “white supremacy is bad, mm’kay” response a few days later that sounded like he was reading it at gunpoint, which he always sounds like when he’s reading something he doesn’t want to read.)
Can you definitively prove that all of the rioters were absolutely 100% supporters of the Movement for Black Lives or that their actions were done in support of that movement? Because from where I sit, you can’t. And from where I sit, the majority of people protesting in favor of keeping the statues in Charlottesville were out-of-town white supremacists—including the murderer who killed Heather Heyer.
Nice to see you finally admit that the Confederacy was formed to preserve slavery and uphold white supremacy.
You do, but not in the way you think—you understate to the point of ridiculousness, to the point where you sound as callous and sociopathic towards COVID-19 victims as Old 45 did.
And yet, every time you understate the threat of COVID, you sound like an anti-vaxxer who thinks “why bother when it kills so few people” a week before they’re on a ventilator.
Again: When you understate the threat of COVID, you sound like an anti-masker. And in case you forgot, Trump was himself an anti-masker—and largely remains one even after catching the disease.
You do realize what “public health” means, right? The whole point of mask mandates isn’t to punish people for some perceived slight against politicians or God or whatever—it’s to make sure everyone is doing their part in trying to stop the spread of a deadly virus. Too often do people like you focus on the freedoms offered by society and ignore the responsibilities we have towards that same society—responsibilities like trying your hardest to avoid being a disease vector for a deadly contagion like COVID-19.
Of dying? Sure. Of getting “long-COVID”? Not so much with the certainty there. As I said before: Your chances of dying from COVID-19 after being vaccinated are low, sure. But they’re never zero.
…fucking what
make some fucking sense when you talk, dipshit
context is a thing, look into using it
On the post: Disentangling Disinformation: Not As Easy As It Looks
They didn’t have to. Again, I ask you: Look at the language used—the verbs and verbal phrases that hint at violence—and think about how that speech would be received by a crowd that’s been told they’re the only ones who can “stop the steal” and “save America”. That crowd was ginned up on the idea of political violence as a solution to the “problem” of the 2020 election results. Trump and his fellow speakers did nothing to quell the latent bloodlust; if anything, they made it worse with rhetoric that played to the crowd’s shared idea of “we’re patriots and we’re here to save the country.” A mob boss doesn’t need to explicitly say “have this guy killed” to his goons for his goons to get the idea and kill the intended victim anyway. You once again prove that you’re unable to grasp the concepts of subtext and political dogwhistles.
That’s sort of my point: Instead of continually criticising him for his myriad failures as a leader, a politician, and a human being, you stick to a handful of things you can weakly call out and say “see, even I don’t think he’s perfect”.
There’s plenty of significant shit I can call out Obama and his administration on: the ramping up of drone strikes, the refusal to completely close Guantanamo Bay, and the refusal to withdraw completely from Afghanistan are but a taste of the issues with his time in office, and if I had time to research, I’m sure I’d find more. I voted for him twice, and even I don’t think he was as great a president as you think Trump was.
Mainly because your ideology is so closely aligned with Trumpism and modern American conservatism that you likely see anything going against that ideology as a “criticism” to be dismissed instead of used as a data point in retriangulating your ideology.
“Oh sure, he could’ve gotten the wall faster if he had said ‘fuck the planet’; that he didn’t is a failure.” That’s you. That’s you right now.
No, there really isn’t. The best thing he did in his time as president was sign off on the COVID relief checks to boost the economy (the one thing he had going for him until the pandemic), and he had his name attached to the first two so he could assuage his gigantic ego.
Yes. Yes, I do.
You’ll never admit that any of the obvious ones (e.g., injecting disinfectants, “very fine people on both sides”) are on that list, though.
He hasn’t completely ignored scientists and experts—if anything, he’s gotten out of the way of people who know what the fuck they’re doing, as opposed to Donald “I alone can fix this” Trump.
I agree that Biden is a chump—hell, I knew he would be a chump even as I voted for him. But after four years of nepotism and insults and disinformation and outright fucking ignorance (willful or not) on the part of the Trump administration, Biden being a mere “meh” of a president is more than acceptable to me.
I don’t see the issue here if it results in fewer nuclear weapons and whatnot on the part of Iran.
Yes yes, you think climate change is a giant hoax created by Big Solar and Big Wind to smear the name of Big Oil and Big Coal and create clean energy to ruin the global economy from the inside out. We get it.
Yes yes, you think the wall—and not fucking around with Central and South America to destabilize governments for the sake of installing America-friendly dictators and autocrats (for starters)—is the only real solution to our immigration woes. We get it.
(Honestly, I’m surprised you haven’t called for the summary executions of undocumented immigrants yet.)
Yes yes, you think energy independence is more important than the potential for an oil spill that could devastate ecosystems upon which both humans and animals rely. We get it.
And here I thought you said you didn’t listen to right-wing media outlets like Fox News. Why must you turn this comments section into a house of lies?
On the post: Disentangling Disinformation: Not As Easy As It Looks
Exhibit A: You.
On the post: Disentangling Disinformation: Not As Easy As It Looks
A direct call? No. But as I’ve mentioned before, nobody needs to make a direct call when they can use dogwhistles and subtext to fire up a crowd full of people drunk on performative patriotism and prone to violent outbursts. To wit (and emphasis is mine):
I emphasized those bits because they’re important in understanding the language being used that day. Look at the verbs and verbal phrases used in those quotes, especially in the bolded parts. They’re all in line with the idea of ginning up a crowd already prepared to “fight” (literally and metaphorically) for Donald Trump. And speaking of Old 45…
…I’m going to break out the copypasta one more time. In the context of the quotes above and the entire insurrection, I hope this will be the last time I need to break this out for you.
[ahem]
The following are quotes from Donald Trump himself; they come from his speech on the 6th of January, just before the insurrection:
Now, I’m sure you want to mention all the times he brought up marching peacefully and whatnot. Don’t bother; I’ve skimmed enough of the transcript to know those parts exist. Instead, I want you to read each of those quotes, and notice some of the verbs/verbal phrases he uses: “stop”, “save”, “fight”, “take back”, “get tougher”, “show strength”, “protect”. Then look at the overall gist of those quotes: “we’re fighting to stop the steal”, “we have to get tougher on the fraudsters”, “we’re here to save democracy”, “we need to do something about this”.
He isn’t explicitly calling for violence, no. But between his planting the idea that his “patriots” must stop the steal by showing strength and doing “something” about the Democrats/“weak Republicans” to save the country, his talking for months about how the election would be fraudulent only if he lost, and his continual(ly rebuked) efforts to overturn an election he lost both electorally and popularly, those quotes—his words—become a form of his mob boss–esque stochastic terrorism. He didn’t need to directly call for violence; all he needed to do is make his wishes known and let his followers do the rest.
Take a bunch of people who have already been manipulated by right-wing media and Donald Trump into believing the election would be/was stolen. Tell them that the literal last line of defense against the stolen election is a Vice President who has already sworn himself to the duty of his office (i.e., to confirm Joe Biden as the President-elect). Gin them up further by referring to them as true patriots, telling them to toughen up and show strength, and implying that they alone can save American democracy itself. What do you get as a result of all that?
You get an insurrection.
…
…and I was gonna stop there, and let that be the end of it, but I’ve been thinking some shit over and I think this would be the ideal time to say this to you, Lostcause.
You are a Trumpist. I don’t mean that in the on-the-surface meaning of “you voted for Trump”. No, you’re a Trumpist on a much deeper level: Like all other full-throated Trumpists, you refuse to criticise Dear Leader for anything (of any significance, anyway).
I regularly rip on Democrats—the same people I vote for, the same party of the Big Two with which my political ideology most closely aligns—because I recognize their failures. The DNC, by and large, is filled with cowards who are too afraid to aim for the stars in re: political policy because they don’t want to alienate (read: piss off) conservative voters. They’re the party of upholding the status quo until it’s way past time to do something about it—I mean, how many of them are actually fighting right now for a liveable wage for the working class. Hell, for all the fawning I do over AOC (and not without merit!), I recognize that she might not have the best approach to winning over more moderate Democrats who are afraid to step an inch outside of the middle of the Overton Window even as it’s being dragged to the right.
But you? You don’t level nearly the same amount of criticism at Donald Trump—even though he definitely deserves it. You’ve defended him with the fervor of a religious zealout; every time someone even remotely rips on Old 45, you’re right there to tell that critic how they’re completely wrong about everything and should shut the hell up about Dear Leader. You’re trapped in a cult of personality and you’re too goddamned ignorant to realize it.
You need more self-awareness. Hell, I’m well aware that I’m wasting my time and energy on you, but at least I’m willing to admit that. When are you going to admit that you’re unwilling or unable to criticize Trump for his myriad failures as a president and his attempt to subvert American democracy—or even ask yourself why you’re doing everything short of literally kissing the ass of a man who would sooner have you killed than give a shit about how you’re metaphorically kissing his ass?
On the post: Disentangling Disinformation: Not As Easy As It Looks
Your inability to grasp subtext and hear the same dogwhistles that your Trumpist brethren can hear isn’t my problem.
Do you really think he would’ve stopped there? Do you really believe he wouldn’t have used the presence of the American military in American cities to quell peaceful protests of police brutality and the corruption of the Trump administration? If you do, you’re a bigger dope than I thought you were—because you’re far, far, far, far, far too trusting of Donald “I alone can fix this” Trump.
I don’t, and I never said I did. Stop shoving words in my mouth that didn’t first come from it, asshole.
Again: One of those sides was full of white supremacists and defenders of the white supremacist nation-state known as the Confederacy. By calling them “very fine people” and eqivocating them with the people marching against racists, racism, and the monuments to slavery-upholding seditionists, Donald Trump implicitly defended white supremacists and their ideology. It wasn’t until days after his “very fine people” comment that he offered a limp-dicked forced-sounding condemnation of white supremacists and their ideology. (And it sounded like that because he knew damn well that he needed their votes in the midterms and 2020.)
Every leader of the Confederacy said upholding the institution of slavery was either the sole reason or one of the primary reasons for the formation of the Confederacy. It stands to reason that the War to Preserve Slavery (i.e, the Civil War) was fought primarily to preserve the “tradition” of treating Black people as lesser beings who were put on this Earth to be enslaved.
You have consistently quoted statistics about the death rates of COVID-19 that make it sound like it’s barely even anything to worry about. You underplay the number of deaths as if this is some “normal” disease that kills on the same level as the flu in an average year. Your cold recitation of such facts make you sound like an anti-vaxxer, an anti-masker, or—worse yet—Old 45 when he was saying that the virus was going to magically “go away” even as COVID-19 death rates rose at rates even he couldn’t ignore forever.
You’re doing a shitty job of looking like you take COVID-19 seriously as a threat to public health. Maybe consider showing some fucking compassion, you property-humping sociopath.
On the post: Biden's Infrastructure Bill Shouldn't Undermine Cryptocurrency Infrastructure In The Process
They’d probably do a better job of that than they would in handling all the sexual abuse going on at ActBlizz.
On the post: Disentangling Disinformation: Not As Easy As It Looks
Maybe he never explicitly said as much, but he continually implied that violence against protestors and anti-Trumpists was acceptable. Hell, even on the 6th of January, he implied that violence was the only way for “strong” patriots to save the country from “weak” politicians who were doing their duty to American democracy. He never truly condemned violence as a part of Trumpist ideology; all the times he threatened to send in the military to quell protests also have to count for something.
And then there’s this, via the list of Trump’s atrocities from McSweeney’s: “May 30, 2020 – For the second day in a row, Trump condemned people across the country who protested the killing of George Floyd, threatening them with ‘vicious dogs’ and ‘ominous weapons.’ ”
Donald Trump revels in violence. He loves watching it being inflicted upon people he dislikes and disagrees with, especially if he can watch it in person. If anything, Trumpism is a political ideology of violence—physical, psychological, and political. Its namesake proves as much: He doesn’t care who gets hurt so long as the “right people” get hurt by “his people”.
To be clear: That means he defended white supremacists, since white supremacists were the ones marching in Charlottesville before counterprotestors showed up.
No, he didn’t. And he never forcefully decried white supremacists with the same fervor with which he decried antifascists. If anything, his low-key “well they’re kinda bad I guess” approach to dealing with white supremacy that often equivocated the long-standing threat of white supremacist terrorism to the vague threat of antifascist violence (which only ever really seems to happen in the presence of fascists…) gave white supremacist groups all the cover they needed to operate basically out in the open.
If they’re defending statues dedicated to people who fought (and died) for the Confederacy, they’re defending monuments to slavery, white supremacy, and betrayal of the United States. They should know damn well what they’re defending—and I guarantee that the white supremacists who marched in Charlottesville knew exactly what they were defending when they marched to defend those statues.
(FYI: Those statues are no longer on public display in Charlottesville because those fuckers got taken down and driven out of town by the government. And in a lovely little historical “fuck you”, the statue of “Stonewall” Jackson left with its back to the South. Suck it, racists.)
Yeah, there’s one question you need to answer here: What missing votes?
Trump’s phone call to Georgia election officials wasn’t a plea to find actual missing votes. (Those “missing votes” would have to come from somewhere, after all.) It was to find votes that didn’t exist, claim them for Trump, and give him the win in a state that he lost. If he or anyone else had compelling and credible evidence of any actual “missing votes” in Georga, they would’ve shared it by now. But they didn’t. So they haven’t.
The phone call was a naked attempt to subvert democracy. I don’t know how anyone can listen to that phone call and think anything other than “Donald Trump actually tried to get Georgia to lie so he could win the election”. Well, other than brainwashed dipshits like you who think Donald Trump is still the best possible choice for leading the United States.
He did everything he could to route his agenda around Congress so he didn’t have to worry about all that pesky opposition from the Democrats. He continually declared that Article II of the Constitution gave him the power to do whatever he wanted. He continuously threatened to use military power to quell both riots and peaceful protests.
He wasn’t a competent fascist, but if you think he wouldn’t accept being an American Emperor in both name and deed, you’re out of your fucking mind. You’re also out of step with your fellow Trumpists, who would love to see Trump become a dictatorial godking who rules the country with an iron fist and hurts those who deserve to be hurt.
No, it isn’t. But ripping on foreign countries (and by implication, their people) for stealing jobs that the U.S. government allowed to leave the country and implying that foreigners are coming to take over the country—to erase its culture and its identity—is throwing red meat to the white supremacist “America First” crowd. It’s Trump telling them “it’s okay to hate foreigners—I hate them, too”. The actual economics of those trade deals is ultimately irrelevant; that he sees them as putting “America last” (as you put it) is enough.
…fucking what
…fucking what
…what the actual fuck are you even talking about here
Your chances of dying from COVID-19 after being vaccinated are low, sure. But they’re never zero.
So maybe stop treating the virus like it’s the flu and citing statistics with the kind of calculated and callous disregard for human life that you seem to share with Old 45, hmm?
On the post: Israel, Ice Cream, Trademarks: This Year's Dumbest Controversy Results In Trademark Skullduggery
So long as they’re private entities making the decision of their own free will? Cool beans. Local Florida businesses could stop working with Ben & Jerry’s over its decision and I’d have no issue with that. But if DeSantis or any other government official forces all local businesses to stop working with B&J over this, that’s where I call bullshit. Not only would such a move infringe upon the free association rights of those businesses (and B&J), it would mark a dangerous turn down a road where any American criticizing the Israeli government could face some form of sanctions.
Yes, speech has consequences. But are those consequences worth letting Florida Men piss all over the First Amendment?
On the post: Israel, Ice Cream, Trademarks: This Year's Dumbest Controversy Results In Trademark Skullduggery
Since a boycott is a form of political speech and a decision on the choice of association, wouldn’t such laws be wholly unconstitutional?
Say what you will about the BDS movement and all. But unless there’s a proven and direct link between a company taking part in BDS and any actual illegal activity (instead of criticism of and disassociation from the Israeli government), no part of the U.S. government at any level should be stepping in to say “you can either get on board with Israel or you can be legally fucked up the ass”.
On the post: Disentangling Disinformation: Not As Easy As It Looks
I dunno about that, but he is a lying asshole who has aligned himself with the Trumpist ideology and Trump himself in the hopes of extending his political career.
And yet, she holds public office while being a QAnon nutter, a serial harasser of people with whom she disagrees politically (e.g., AOC, David Hogg), and a Trumpist.
Like I said: Even if they are a “blip”, they’re still in office and still representing the GOP. That isn’t meaningless and you know it.
Do I really need to post the copypasta with all of Trump’s quotes from that speech and the context in which his followers heard them? Because I’ve done it enough that you should’ve gotten the picture by now.
And the fact that Cheney called out Old 45 on his bullshit is what got her demoted within the party. The GOP is more than willing to cover for a seditionist bastard like Trump even if it means chasing out moderate conservatives who (accurately) believe Trump is a seditionist bastard.
He separated immigrant families and kept them in concentration camps. (Call them “internment camps” if it makes you feel better, but they’re evil all the same—regardless of who started them and who currently keeps the policy in place.) He called for violence against those who protested his rallies, protested police brutality, and basically protested anything he was in favor of. He defended the white supremacists who marched on Charlottesville as “very fine people”. He treated antifascists/antifascism as a worse threat to the United States than violent white supremacists—which runs counter to what the FBI says. And he did far more than “question” the election results, judging by that phone call to Georgia election officials.
Donald Trump was, at best, a prototype for an alt-right POTUS. That he was too goddamned incompetent to pull it off doesn’t mean an alt-right populist with dreams of turning the United States into a fascist state and the competency to pull that off can’t win an election. Hell, after four years of Donald Trump, more than 70 million people thought “yeah, we need another four years of that”. With the right candidate, under the right conditions, a more competent version of Trump could absolutely win the presidency.
If that doesn’t scare you, remember this: You were one of the assholes who voted for Trump. Considering how you voted for an incompetent fascist, what’s stopping you from voting for a more competent one?
“We don’t have victories anymore. We used to have victories, but we don’t have them. When was the last time anybody saw us beating, let’s say, China in a trade deal? … When did we beat Japan at anything? They send their cars over by the millions, and what do we do? … When do we beat Mexico at the border? They’re laughing at us, at our stupidity. And now they are beating us economically. They are not our friend, believe me. But they’re killing us economically. … When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”
If Donald Trump didn’t get more than a few “white power” types on his side by insulting the rest of the world on the day he announced his candidacy, there’s plenty more quotes like that one floating around.
And that doesn’t even get into how he continues to act like he’s going to get back into the Oval Office soon with the help of jackasses like Mike Lindell and treats meetings with political allies like he’s trying to run a shadow government.
Nobody really needs to say much to get them on the side of conservatives because the kinds of gullible assholes who get lulled into believing those kinds of outlandish conspiracy theories lean to the political right more often than not.
Militant right-wing nutjobs don’t want “no government”—they want a stronger government led by a strong conservative who is strong enough to rule everyone with a strong iron fist.
At the Capitol on the 6th of January was a start, or did you not hear the “hang Mike Pence” chants during the “tourist kerfluffle”?
Sounds like it to me.
I guess people getting infected with the virus and suffering potentially long-term (and possibly even life-long) health issues from COVID-19 is just an “eh, we’ll think about this a few years from now” issue to you, huh~.
Deaths and (especially) infections are on a rising trend in Florida, if not the entire country. That you’re being so flippant about this after more than a year’s worth of this bullshit—after millions of infections and hundreds of thousands of deaths—makes me believe you’re mocking the virus. You’re not taking this pandemic as seriously as you should. I hope, if only for your sake, you don’t have to take it as seriously as having a breathing tube shoved down your throat by an overworked underpaid nurse who watched three other people die of COVID before she got to you that day.
But you do you, dipshit.
On the post: Israel, Ice Cream, Trademarks: This Year's Dumbest Controversy Results In Trademark Skullduggery
He can’t stop them from boycotting the occupied territories; that would overstep I don’t know how many First Amendment boundaries. He can’t stop them from selling their ice cream in the States; that would overstep every bit of the conservative “free market” dogma. He can’t really do anything to them, so other than providing proverbial red meat for his dying-of-COVID base, what the fuck is the endgame here?
On the post: Disentangling Disinformation: Not As Easy As It Looks
Oh.
Oh!
Fuck me sideways, I need to proofread my posts. That was meant to be “virus”, not “vaccine”. I’m not one of those fuckwits, and if you so much as even imply that I am ever again, you’re not going to like what I have to say about you.
On the post: Disentangling Disinformation: Not As Easy As It Looks
You keep telling yourself that as people like Madison Cawthon, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Donald Trump win elections. A comforting lie is more of a security blanket than the discomforting truth, after all.
No, they’re not. They’re slowly becoming the new normal of American conservatism. Liz Cheney called out Trump’s lies and got all but booted out of office for it (and she may lose her next election, assuming she runs for office again). The GOP isn’t a “moderate” party any more—and while it isn’t as extreme as some people would love it to be, the party isn’t exactly shy about courting the kind of people whom you consider “a blip”.
They’re not working hard to tell people to get vaccinated, though. No right-wing outlet is. They’re too afraid of getting the kinds of hate mail and death threats that anti-vaxxers already level at left-wing outlets and “leftist” personalities.
I got my numbers from the New York Times. Do you really want to go on record as saying they lied about those numbers, and if so, can you offer any credible evidence that proves they lied?
Ahem:
“Oh, is it just one extra death?” That’s how I read that line. It comes off as you mocking the severity of the virus by implying that a small rise in the number of deaths is nothing to worry about. I believe any number of deaths from COVID-19 is something to worry about. You appear to think otherwise. If I’m wrong, by all means, correct the record.
But given how you’re all “it’s less than a percent of a percent!” when talking about deaths vs. infections, I don’t think you will, you sociopathic son of a bitch.
On the post: Disentangling Disinformation: Not As Easy As It Looks
…fucking what
On the post: Disentangling Disinformation: Not As Easy As It Looks
Man, for a Trump voter, you really don’t get it. The Trumpist/anti-vax crowd see vaccine passports as a way for the government to track who’s been vaxxed and where they’re going in preparation for the “next Holocaust” or some shit.
InfoWars has regularly railed against the COVID-19 vaccine. Say whatever else you will about that site, but it is part of the right-wing mediasphere.
On the 24th of July, the 7-day average of COVID deaths was 39 deaths. One week later, that number had bumped up to 58 thanks to an additional 409 deaths. In fact, the number of COVID deaths in Florida had been averaging in a downward trend through most of the year, with a sharp downturn in springtime after the vaccine became available to the masses. But after the 4th of July weekend, the averages started going up again thanks to an increase in deaths.
As far as the number of cases go, they follow a similar trend: After spiking in January, the trends generally started sloping downwards. After a bump in March and April, the numbers trended downward again and even levelled out in June. Then the 4th of July weekend came and went, and now the number of cases (and the weekly average) is back to nearly the same levels as in January.
If you want to mock the severity of the virus, you can do so elsewhere. Here, it will be discussed for what it is: a deadly disease that can ruin or take lives.
All of the vaccines were partially developed or tested using fetal cell lines, which are cells grown in a laboratory that descend from cells taken from elective abortions in the 1970s and 1980s. Some people will consider that to mean “aborted fetuses were used to make the vaccines” and reject the vaccines for that reasoning. Those people are idiots, and even the fucking Catholic Church—of all organizations!—has said as much without actually saying it by saying “yes, Catholics, you can go get the vaccine”.
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