No platform can fully support “free speech”. The issue of illegal speech (e.g., CSAM) aside, platforms will almost always moderate spam off the platform, and spam is protected speech. A platform that truly supports “free speech” would never moderate spam…even if it cost said platform a significant chunk of its userbase.
I suspect that police know more about some of the high profile smash and grabs, possibly even some involvement, than their investigations reveal. And I think it is for a similar purpose, to essentially generate demand for themselves, and reverse the paltry reforms and accountability measures. If people get hurt, have their business destroyed, face losing the few remaining employers in the area, they will want to pay lots for police, buy then anything they say they need, and will be so grateful that they will happily go back to turning a blind eye to brutality.
That sounds an awful lot like the cops are running a protection racket.
Koby is an intentionally obtuse right-wing troll who definitely understands Section 230 and the First Amendment (even when he acts like he doesn’t), but he isn’t stupid. He knows the answer to that one question; he won’t say it out loud because that would be giving away the game…and tying himself to an answer he doesn’t want to own.
To wit: Look at how Republicans are trying to ban “critical race theory”¹ in schools across the country.
¹ — And by “critical race theory”, I mean “the teaching of American history in a way that points out the reality of how the dominant racial group enslaved and oppressed minority racial groups”. The actual Critical Race Theory isn’t taught in any school outside of a university setting.
I’m about to take a long Internet break partially because replying to you has been one of the most mentally exhausting things I do on any given day as of late, so I sincerely hope you take some sort of delight/satisfaction/sick sexual gratification in knowing how detrimental you’ve been to my mental health, you unfeeling son of a bitch.
I didn’t say you personally said he was the great saviour.
You said, and I quote, “maybe you’re just pissed off Biden didn’t turn out to be God”. The implication there is that you believe I thought Biden would turn out to be God. I have never—not once in my goddamned life—said or thought anything of the sort about any politician. And I’ve sure as shit never thought that about a middling centrist needledick whose only purpose in 2020 was to get Trump out of office before he and the GOP really did turn America into a fascist nation-state. Go ahead and keep insulting Biden, jackass—I’ll be glad to join you.
a good many medical and viral scientists had contemplated that c19 would taper off
Trump said it would disappear completely. He is not a doctor, virologist, or any other kind of medical scientist—nor was he when he repeatedly made that claim.
Drugs shown to have preliminary benefits.
And further studies said they didn’t, but that fact didn’t stop Trump and his acolytes from continuing to push the drug as if it did.
Exactly. A rational response.
Except it wasn’t, because we have actual safety measures in place to help both prevent car accidents and lessen possible injuries from said accidents. We have stop signs and seat belts and traffic lights and air bags and all of that stuff. Trump wanted to do the pandemic equivalent of sending people out on road trips without all of those safety measures in place, because he didn’t want a goddamn thing to ruin the election he was only going to accept as a legitimate election if he won.
It had shown considerably promise in helping recovery and minimising symptoms, and may have some affect on the actual virus.
And then it didn’t. You keep leaving that out.
Let that number sink in.
Let this fact sink in: He didn’t want to test even the smallest fraction of the full American population because that would mean admitting that COVID-19 was much more widespread than he wanted his idiot followers to believe.
The only person who suggested ingestion was a far left political activist writer.
I’m not going to get into this entire bullshit argument with you again because if I do, I’m probably going to have suicidal thoughts before I finish this long-ass comment, so I will leave you with this: Trump suggested that scientists should look into using household disinfectants as a potential treatment for COVID-19 in people, and if anyone—regardless of how they felt about Trump—came away with the idea that he was suggesting the injection of bleach into living human beings as a possible treatment for COVID-19, I can absolutely understand how they came away with that idea. That you can’t is your fucking Trumpist malfunction and I’m not here to fix it.
The hoax was the fud the democrats rolled out.
Yeah, that COVID-19 thing was only a mild flu that happened to kill a couple dozen people or so~. Totally nothing to worry about~.
The vast majority of the country didn’t know what Juneteenth was before trump was president.
And other than his decision to intentionally antagonize Black voters/“own the libs” by holding one of his superspreader even—I mean, political rallies on Juneteenth, what specifically did Donald Trump himself do to promote the existence of Juneteenth?
Jobs lost to the closing of businesses by liberal city and state governments.
Gee, it’s almost as if a viral pandemic was raging at the time and the shutdowns were meant to help protect the public health at large so more people didn’t die~. Imagine that, lawmakers caring about others outside of themselves~. Makes you want to mock their compassion, doesn’t it~?
Which would completely guarantee the government had access to all cases.
It also meant they could fudge the numbers to make the pandemic look like it was slowing down/ending when it wasn’t. Remember, Trump didn’t give a single good god’s damn whether people died from COVID-19—he only cared about winning the 2020 election at all costs.
Trump reposted a video of doctors who disagreed with the WHO and CDC.
And they were a handful of doctors out of…what, hundreds? Thousands? A small group of professionals disagreeing in bad faith with a much larger group of professionals acting in good faith means nothing to me. It’s like people who think finding the one scientific article out of a thousand that disagrees with the other 999 articles have found The One Truth Above All (Fuck The Haters).
Neither are you. So what.
Typically, if I want advice about medicines and health, I turn to a doctor, not a pillow salesman or an elderly game show host.
Funny how fast the rollout came AFTER the election?
If Trump had won the election, would you still be questioning the speed of the vaccines as if it’s a fucking conspiracy theory, or would you be celebrating it as a massive fucking achievement for Trump to taunt everyone with for the rest of his life? You don’t need to respond; I already know the answer.
There’s a difference in need for a mask in a city of millions and a country of a few thousand. One size steps on many.
Again: If your Trumpist brethren would’ve listened to the advice of the same experts that Trump spent months denigrating as brainless dolts (something you keep doing by slandering Dr. Fauci as a bought-off Chinese double-agent), there wouldn’t be a need for mask mandates.
SSA? They had a job to do.
They’re also people, you heartless monster. If they get sick, they can’t be there to protect the president. And it’s one thing if they get sick by outside sources. But in this case, the president was the one who could’ve infected them with COVID-19—could’ve killed them by proxy—and all because he wanted a fucking photo-op.
We will just ignore the Obama and Clinton and Biden events I guess.
They mandated masks and other measures to help curb possible COVID-19 cases. They did their best to protect attendees from making each other sick. How many of those events were confirmed superspreaders compared to the largely mask-less, often crammed-as-hell, “fuck the guidelines” Trump rallies where Trump himself decried those same guidelines?
I disagree with any mandate.
And the Trumpists who agree with you but refused to wear a mask voluntarily are the reason mandates became a thing. It’s funny how voluntarily doing all the things that would’ve helped stave off mask/vaccine mandates and prevent the spread of the virus would’ve also helped things get back to normal much sooner…if only the jackass Trumpists would’ve actually done them.
Hospitals with higher infection, and death, rates receive more C19 funding.
Trump was essentially asserting that hospitals were knowingly and intentionally overreporting those numbers to receive more funding. Nobody has proven that such a thing has ever taken place. If anything, the numbers are likely still underreported for a variety of reasons.
the election results were in question.
Only from the same people who keep insisting, even now, that the election was stolen from Donald Trump. Nobody had presented any tangible evidence of widescale voter fraud in one city, let alone one state, and never mind all four of the battleground states where Trump sought to invalidate the election results. (Trumpists like you never seem to be able to explain why the presidential election was supposedly rigged but the downballot races in which Republicans won were left alone.)
more people have died under Biden
There’s a reason or two for that…
trump … handed him multiple vaccinations to hand out to the public
…and one of them is Trump never actually pushing his supporters to get the vaccine even after it was available. He refused to participate in any campaigns to promote vaccination. He never strongly urged his followers to get vaccinated. And he did nothing to help push back against the anti-vax/anti-science propaganda from Trumpists—propaganda he helped to generate by continually denigrating the same scientists who say the vaccines are safe.
Biden is doing no better.
Gee, can’t imagine why he isn’t doing a better job of “saving” a country where at least a third of said country wants to undo democracy~.
How quick was Biden to implement a travel ban on Africa? Where’s the backlash? It’s racist right?
Pretty damn quick, and it was a ban on travel from South Africa. Africa is a continent, not a country, you asshole.
Your bullshit rhetorical gimmick aside: No, it isn’t racist. He’s also either banning or limiting travel to/from other non-African countries, and he’s doing so to prevent the potential (or further) spread of the Omicron variant—not to keep certain people out of the country based on, say, their skin color or their religion.
Notice the republicans and right News aren’t calling for lawsuits to bar the travel ban?
Yeah, because they’re actually racist enough to approve of those bans—whereas Democrats fought the travel bans from the early part of the Trump administration because said bans targeted certain people based on skin color and/or religious creed (i.e., Middle Eastern Muslims).
But let’s just all hail president double death as he leads us into the toilet.
I’m under no illusions that Biden sucks. But do you really believe, in that ice-cold heart of yours, that Trump would’ve led us all to the Promised Land of No COVID-19? Do you genuinely believe Trump would’ve prevented the hundreds of thousands of deaths that’ve happened so far this year? Do you sincerely motherfucking believe Trump could’ve convinced the cult of personality he created to stop shitting on the scientists for once and get the vaccine—or that he would’ve even tried?
Donald Trump downplayed the threat of COVID-19 from the get-go. He didn’t do it to prevent a “panic” in the sense that he cared about the general well-being of the American population—he did it to prevent a “panic” that would’ve fucked around with the 2020 election. He constantly pushed to re-open the economy in full not because he cared about getting the American people back to work in as safe an environment as possible, but because he wanted to run his campaign on the back of a strong economy instead of focusing on the pandemic. He didn’t give a fuck how many people died of COVID-19, so long as he won the election.
And he didn’t even do that.
I’ve spent so much time ripping into you and your Trumpist bullshit that my mental health has suffered for it. You keep acting as if Trump’s narcissism and sociopathy is something to be admired—as if his lack of giving a fuck about people outside of himself is something everyone should be doing—and it’s frankly disturbing that you can keep commenting here and continually lack the self-reflection necessary to see just how much of a sociopath your support of Trump has made you. For God’s sake, you openly and knowingly advocated for torturing convicted rapists after they’ve been imprisoned.
You mock me for my compassion. But if I were to ever become the kind of unfeeling psycho that you come off as in your comments, I wouldn’t be able to live with myself.
I’ll be back around these parts in a month, and I won’t be replying to you again once I return. So please take this last bit of advice from me to heart (or what’s left of yours, at any rate) as I flip you off and walk backwards into a mental health break:
Maybe, just maybe, this is one hell of a virus and Biden is no special saviour?
I’ve never said he was, and I never will. Since I know you have issues with understanding the concept of consent, I’ll make this request clear enough that even you can grasp it: Stop shoving words in my mouth that didn’t first come from it.
January 22, 2020 – As cases of a new viral pneumonia were breaking out in China and beyond, Trump was asked by a reporter if he was worried about a pandemic. “No. Not at all,” he said. “And — we’re — we have it totally under control. It’s one person coming in from China, and we have it under control. It’s — going to be just fine.” On the same day, however, the World Health Organization convened an emergency meeting to discuss the virus. The following day, China imposed a lockdown for millions of people in Wuhan and other cities.
February 10, 2020 – A week after the United States declared a public health emergency due to the coronavirus outbreak, Trump said, “Now, the virus that we’re talking about having to do — you know, a lot of people think that goes away in April with the heat — as the heat comes in. Typically, that will go away in April.” He added, “We’re in great shape, though. We have 12 cases — 11 cases, and many of them are in good shape now.” At a rally in New Hampshire that night, Trump said, “And by the way, the virus.…It looks like by April, you know in theory, when it gets a little warmer, it miraculously goes away.” There was no evidence, then or ever, that the virus weakened in warm weather.
February 24, 2020 – “The Coronavirus is very much under control in the USA,” Trump tweeted as the virus spread at an alarming rate. “We are in contact with everyone and all relevant countries. CDC & World Health have been working hard and very smart. Stock Market starting to look very good to me!” Within a few days, the stock market suffered its worst week since the 2008 financial crisis.
February 25, 2020 – At a news conference in New Delhi, Trump downplayed the threat posed by the coronavirus, saying that the virus was “under control” in the United States and that it was a “problem that’s going to go away.” He added, “We have very few people with it,” and patients who did have it “are getting better, they’re all getting better.” His remarks came on the same day that the CDC warned that the coronavirus was headed toward pandemic status.
February 26, 2020 – Even though Mike Pence had come under fire for health policy that worsened Indiana’s HIV outbreak during his time as the state’s governor, Trump appointed Pence to lead the United States’ response to the coronavirus outbreak. Pence has no medical background. Trump added that the United States had “a total of 15 cases” of the coronavirus. “And the 15 within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero, that’s a pretty good job we’ve done.” Despite Trump’s assertion, there was no evidence to suggest that the number would drop, as Italy and Iran overtook China as the new epicenters of the disease.
February 27, 2020 – Trump said that the coronavirus is “going to disappear.” One day — it’s like a miracle — it will disappear. And from our shores, we — you know, it could get worse before it gets better. It could maybe go away. We’ll see what happens. Nobody really knows.” The CDC, however, issued a warning saying that it was inevitable that the virus would spread throughout the United States.
March 10, 2020 – Trump repeated his claim that the U.S. was “doing a great job” with the coronavirus. “Just stay calm,” he told reporters. “It will go away… And a lot of good things are going to happen.” Crude oil prices plunged 25 percent, however, as thousands around the world died of the virus.
March 13, 2020 – Trump said an Obama-era rule was to blame for the Trump administration not being able to provide coronavirus tests more expediently. However, no such rule exists.
(Big shock, a Republican blaming a Black man for something he didn’t even do.)
March 21, 2020 – Trump endorsed the combination of two drugs, hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin, to treat coronavirus—despite a lack of testing or backing by the FDA. In fact, respected medical professionals warned that taking the drugs together could be dangerous.
March 23, 2020 – Trump vowed that “America will again and soon be open for business — very soon.” At his daily press conference on the crisis, Trump equated the alarming increase in coronavirus deaths to automobile fatalities. “You look at automobile accidents, which are far greater than any numbers we’re talking about,” he said. “That doesn’t mean we’re going to tell everybody no more driving of cars.”
March 24, 2020 – Trump told Fox News that he “would love to have the country opened up and just raring to go by Easter.” On Twitter, he wrote, “THE CURE CANNOT BE WORSE (by far) THAN THE PROBLEM!” In February, Trump said the number of coronavirus cases would soon be “down to close to zero.” By Easter, the number exceeded half a million.
March 26, 2020 – Although health experts around the world have been warning about a pandemic for years, Trump claimed that the coronavirus crisis caught the U.S. by surprise. “This was something that nobody has ever thought could happen to this country,” he said. “Nobody would have ever thought a thing like this could have happened.”
March 27, 2020 – Trump singled out the governors of Michigan and Washington for not being sufficiently grateful for federal government aid during the pandemic. “I want them to be appreciative,” he said. “If they don’t treat you right, I don’t call.”
March 29, 2020 – Trump said that as many as 2.2 million Americans could have died “if we didn’t do what we’re doing.” He added that if the U.S. was able to limit COVID-19 deaths to between 100,000 and 200,000 people, “we altogether have done a very good job.”
March 30, 2020 – When questioned by a reporter about why he downplayed the coronavirus, Trump said, "We are doing a great job… Stay calm. It will go away. You know it — you know it is going away, and it will go away. And we’re going to have a great victory.” More than 17,000 cases of the virus were reported in the United States; only a handful had been reported at the beginning of the month.
April 1, 2020 – In an interview on CNN, Mike Pence said Trump had never “belittled” the coronavirus threat. Trump made the same argument at his daily briefing. “I knew how bad it was,” he said. Both statements contradicted what Trump had said in the past, as when he claimed on Jan. 22 that “we’re not at all” worried about the virus. “And we have it totally under control.”
April 4, 2020 – After Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, confirmed there was no evidence that hydroxychloroquine could fight the coronavirus — or that it was safe — Trump said he was considering it for himself. “I may take it, OK? I may take it," he said. “And I’ll have to ask my doctors about that, but I may take it.”
April 5, 2020 – The U.S. stockpiled 29 million hydroxychloroquine pills, even though health experts doubted its efficacy and warned about its dangerous side effects. Trump pushed for hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for COVID-19. “What do I know?” he said at a news briefing. “I’m not a doctor. But I have common sense.”
(At least one Trumpist drank chlorine after Trump mentioned hydroxychloroquine, which was eventually proven to have little-to-no signficant preventative or treatment effect against COVID-19.)
April 7, 2020 – Trump blamed the World Health Organization for what he called its slow response to the pandemic. The WHO, however, warned of a “public health emergency of international concern” weeks before Trump declared a national emergency. “They called it wrong,” he said. “They really, they missed the call.”
April 9, 2020 – Defying health experts, Trump rejected the notion that more people needed to be tested for the coronavirus before the U.S. economy could be restarted. “Do you need it?” he asked about testing. “No. Is it a nice thing to do? Yes.” He added, “We’re talking about 325 million people. And that’s not going to happen, as you can imagine.”
April 23, 2020 – Prompting widespread alarm, Trump speculated about ingesting or injecting disinfectants to fight the coronavirus. “Because you see it gets in the lungs and it does a tremendous number on the lungs, so it would be interesting to check that,” he said at his daily briefing. He also mused about the use of ultraviolet light. “Supposing we hit the body with a tremendous—whether it’s ultraviolet or just very powerful light,” he said. “And I think you said that hasn’t been checked, but we’re going to test it?” Health officials and manufacturers of household cleaners urged Americans not to follow Trump’s proposed remedies. The next day, New York City’s poison control center reported more than twice the calls related to household disinfectants than it received for a comparable timeframe in 2019.
April 25, 2020 – “I never said the pandemic was a Hoax!” Trump tweeted. “Who would say such a thing?” Two months earlier, at a South Carolina rally he said, “Now the Democrats are politicizing the coronavirus,” he told the crowd on February 28. “And this is their new hoax.”
(As with his comments about bleach, even if you want to argue that he didn’t mean “the coronavirus is a hoax”, it’s not hard to see how his…less educated followers would’ve gotten that message.)
April 27, 2020 – Trump ignored at least a dozen classified briefings in January and February which called the coronavirus an imminent threat. Officials said, on the condition of anonymity, that Trump seldom reads or listens to an oral summary of the President’s Daily Brief.
April 30, 2020 – Trump said of the coronavirus, “Nobody’s thinking about it more. Nobody has spent more time, late in the evening, thinking about what’s happened to this country in a short period of time.” The Washington Post noted at least 44 times in March, April and early May in which Trump downplayed the threat of the virus calling it “very well under control” again and again.
May 3, 2020 – The coronavirus death toll could reach 100,000, Trump said during a Fox News town hall broadcast from the Lincoln Memorial. The figure was double the estimate he predicted only two weeks earlier. Nevertheless, he said the country should still reopen its economy. He called his predecessors “foolish” and “stupid” and boasted that he had “done more than any other president in the history of our country.” Pointing to the statue of the 16th president, who was assassinated, Trump said, “They always said nobody got treated worse than Lincoln. I believe I am treated worse.”
May 4, 2020 – The White House issued new guidance that banned members of its pandemic task force from testifying before Congress. The decision was made shortly after infectious disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci, whose views often diverged from Trump’s, was prohibited from testifying before a House committee.
May 12, 2020 – During a pandemic that had killed tens of thousands of Americans, Trump took the time to promote a conspiracy theory that suggested that Joe Scarborough of MSNBC committed murder. “When will they open a Cold Case on the Psycho Joe Scarborough matter in Florida,” Trump wrote on Twitter. “Did he get away with murder? Some people think so.”
May 14, 2020 – Trump spoke of coronavirus testing in contradictory terms while visiting a medical equipment distribution center in Pennsylvania. “We have the best testing in the world,” he boasted, then added, “Could be that testing’s, frankly, overrated. Maybe it is overrated.”
May 18, 2020 – Trump confirmed that he was taking hydroxychloroquine, a drug he had long praised even though medical experts warned that it could be dangerous and was not shown to combat Covid-19. “I started taking it, because I think it’s good,” he said. “I’ve heard a lot of good stories.”
May 21, 2020 – Unlike everyone around him who followed company policy and state law, Trump did not wear a mask when touring a Ford Motor Company factory in Michigan. “I had one on before,” he told reporters. “I wore one in this back area, but I didn’t want to give the press the pleasure of seeing it.” Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel called him a “petulant child who refuses to follow the rules.” Trump responded in a tweet: “Do nothing A.G. of the Great State of Michigan, Dana Nessel, should not be taking her anger and stupidity out on Ford Motor.”
May 22, 2020 – Trump, whose approval ratings dropped during the pandemic, expressed doubt that the nation’s coronavirus death toll was as high as health departments said it was. The official total was almost 95,000, but Trump said it could be “lower than” that. Experts averred that it was certainly higher than the confirmed count.
May 29, 2020 – Trump said he would end the country’s relationship with the World Health Organization. He had warned of the action since the early days of the pandemic. “Countless lives have been taken and profound economic hardship has been inflicted all around the globe,” he said.
June 16, 2020 – Officials in Tulsa urged the Trump campaign to cancel his rally there, warning that it could be a coronavirus “super spreader.” Trump, though, blamed the media for fomenting opposition to his gatherings, “trying to Covid Shame us on our big Rallies.”
June 18, 2020 – Too much testing for the coronavirus “made the US look bad,” Trump said in an interview with the Wall Street Journal. “I personally think testing is overrated, even though I created the greatest testing machine in history,” he said. Trump also said that in moving the date of his Tulsa rally to the day after Juneteenth — because of the uproar it caused — he “did something good: I made Juneteenth very famous.” The president, however, said that he hadn’t known about the holiday, nor had his staff, until a Secret Service agent informed him about it.
(I left the bit about Juneteenth in there to show you just how much of a narcissist Trump is, since you apparently don’t believe me when I tell you that.)
June 20, 2020 – Trump said he ordered his administration to “slow down” coronavirus testing so that fewer cases of COVID-19 would be reported. “When you do testing to that extent, you’re going to find more people, you’re going to find more cases,” he said at his first campaign rally in months, in Tulsa. “So I said to my people, ‘Slow the testing down, please.’ They test and they test.” In his speech, which drew far fewer people than the arena could hold, Trump also referred to the coronavirus as the “kung flu.”
June 23, 2020 – Trump aides said he was joking when he had told his administration to slow down coronavirus testing. But Trump said he was not being sarcastic. “I don’t kid,” he said.
June 26, 2020 – With an hour to spare before a midnight deadline, the Trump administration asked the Supreme Court to overturn the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare. The brief was submitted at a time when millions of Americans had lost their jobs and health care during the pandemic.
(Do you think he had a replacement plan ready if the Supreme Court “repealed” the ACA, or did that not matter so long as he kept saying “repeal and replace”?)
July 4, 2020 – COVID-19 killed nearly 130,000 Americans, but Trump, speaking at the White House, “maintained that 99 percent of coronavirus cases were totally harmless.”
July 7, 2020 – Trump demanded that schools open in the fall, even as the number of coronavirus cases soared across the country. “We’re very much going to put pressure on governors and everybody else to open the schools,” he said at a White House meeting with teachers. A day earlier, he tweeted, “SCHOOLS MUST OPEN IN THE FALL!!!”
July 14, 2020 – All data about patients with the coronavirus must be sent by hospitals to a central database in Washington, D.C., the Trump administration said. The order bypassed the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and meant that information might not be accessible to the public.
July 18, 2020 – The Trump administration reportedly fought to keep states from getting billions of dollars of coronavirus relief money to conduct testing and contact tracing. Republican senators also wanted to have billions go to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, but the administration tried to block that funding as well.
July 28, 2020 – Trump and his son Donald Trump Jr. shared a video of a group of people in white medical coats dismissing the importance of masks and touting the benefits of hydroxychloroquine, the drug that the president had touted as a coronavirus treatment but that medical experts discredited. The video of the self-proclaimed “America’s Frontline Doctors” was viewed tens of millions of times on Facebook, YouTube and Twitter before the websites were able to remove it. “For some reason the internet wanted to take them down and took them off,” Trump said. “I think they are very respected doctors.”
August 3, 2020 – Dr. Deborah Birx, the White House coronavirus response coordinator, said that the pandemic was “extraordinarily widespread.” Trump replied that she was “pathetic.”
August 4, 2020 – Jonathan Swan of Axios asked Trump how the coronavirus was “under control” when 1,000 Americans were dying of it every day. “They are dying. That’s true. It is what it is,” Trump replied. …
August 10, 2020 – Trump said he would not have called for Obama’s resignation if 160,000 Americans had died on his watch. Trump, though, had said in 2014 that Obama should resign for his response to the Ebola outbreak, during which two people died in the United States. “I think it’s been amazing what we’ve been able to do,” Trump said about his administration’s response to the pandemic. “We understand the disease. Nobody understood it because nobody’s ever seen anything like this. The closest thing is in 1917, they say, right? The great pandemic. Certainly was a terrible thing where they lost anywhere from 50 to 100 million people. Probably ended the Second World War, all the soldiers were sick.” The pandemic that Trump spoke of actually began in 1918 and lasted until 1919. World War II ended 26 years later, in 1945.
August 13, 2020 – Trump said he opposed $25 billion in emergency aid for the U.S. Postal Service. He made the unfounded claim that the coronavirus relief funding would help the service process “fraudulent” mail ballots for the November election.
(Because nothing mattered more to Trump in 2020 than winning the election—and that includes American lives.)
August 16, 2020 – Trump said that the Food and Drug Administration “should be approving” an extract from the oleander plant as a coronavirus cure, even though there is no evidence that it is beneficial. Oleandrin had been touted by MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, a major Trump donor who has invested in the company that makes the extract. Lindell is not a doctor.
August 23, 2020 – Without providing any proof, Trump alleged that the Food and Drug Administration was intentionally delaying coronavirus vaccine trials. “The deep state, or whoever, over at the FDA is making it very difficult for drug companies to get people in order to test the vaccines and therapeutics,” he tweeted. “Obviously, they are hoping to delay the answer until after November 3rd. Must focus on speed, and saving lives!”
August 25, 2020 – The Trump administration announced that if hospitals did not report coronavirus data to the Department of Health and Human Services — until now a voluntary program — they would have their Medicare and Medicaid funding revoked. The loss of the money could force hospitals to close.
August 26, 2020 – Without making an announcement, the White House’s coronavirus task force changed the advice on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention website. Whereas the wording had said anyone in contact with an infected person should be tested, it now said people without coronavirus symptoms “do not necessarily need a test.” The new guidelines followed months of Trump saying that he was opposed to more testing because it revealed more cases.
August 31, 2020 – Trump retweeted a conspiracy theory claiming that the coronavirus killed only 9,000 people in the country. Asked if Trump was trying to downplay the number of deaths, White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany said, “No, he was highlighting new CDC information that came out that was worth noting. He was just pointing to those numbers.”
(Narrator: But he was actually lying.)
September 3, 2020 – Trump belittled his rival, Joe Biden, for wearing a mask during the pandemic, telling rally-goers in Pennsylvania, “Did you ever see a man who likes a mask as much as him?” The president added, “It gives him a feeling of security. If I were a psychiatrist, right, you know I’d say: ‘This guy’s got some big issues.’ ” Most who attended the rally did not wear masks.
(Trump loved to mock people who wore facemasks, and his sycophantic followers in and out of office took that message to heart when they started attacking mask mandates and the concept of wearing facemasks in general.)
September 7, 2020 – Bob Woodward revealed in his new book, Rage, that Trump knew about the dangers of the coronavirus but downplayed them for the public. “This is deadly stuff,” Trump said in a Feb. 7 call with Woodward. On Feb. 26, by contrast, Trump told a press conference: “You know, in many cases, when you catch this, it’s very light; you don’t even know there’s a problem. Sometimes they just get the sniffles.”
September 14, 2020 – Violating Nevada’s regulations, Trump held an indoor rally near Las Vegas. “We are not shutting the country again. A shutdown would destroy the lives and dreams of millions of Americans,” he said. “We will very easily defeat the China virus.” Most in the crowd shunned masks.
September 15, 2020 – During an ABC News town hall, Trump maintained that the coronavirus would “disappear.” Apparently referring to “herd immunity,” the president said, “You’ll develop, you’ll develop herd — like a herd mentality. It’s going to be, it’s going to be herd-developed, and that’s going to happen.” Trump also faulted Biden for not instituting a national mandate on masks. Biden, however, does not hold public office.
(And it’s not like Trump had any interest in calling for that mandate, since he didn’t actually call for one himself.)
September 22, 2020 – As the nation’s death toll from the coronavirus reached 200,000 people, Trump declared at a rally in Ohio that the virus “affects virtually nobody.”
October 2, 2020 – In a tweet he sent at nearly 1 a.m. — just 32 days before the election — Trump said that he and the first lady had tested positive for the coronavirus. The president’s announcement followed months of his downplaying a disease that has killed more than 207,000 Americans and plunged the nation into an economic crisis. Dr. Sean Conley, the White House physician, wrote in a memo that Trump was doing “very well.” Aides, however, said that Trump was coughing and had a fever, and he was flown by helicopter to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center. Over the coming days, more than a dozen people who had attended events at the White House or on the campaign trail contracted the virus. They included Trump advisers Hope Hicks and Stephen Miller, U.S. Senators Thom Tillis and Mike Lee, White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany, former White House counselor Kellyanne Conway, Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel, former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, and University of Notre Dame President John Jenkins.
October 3, 2020 – Even though he was infected with a deadly virus, Trump defied public health guidelines and left Walter Reed National Military Medical Center to greet supporters from a slow-moving SUV — he said he was bored of being in the hospital. In the vehicle with Trump were several Secret Service agents. Health professionals said the agents were at risk of contracting the virus while in such a closed environment. Speaking anonymously for fear of retribution, one agent said about Trump: “He’s not even pretending to care now.”
October 7, 2020 – The coronavirus outbreak at the White House infected 34 people, making the executive mansion a super-spreader location and one of the densest concentrations of COVID-19 in the Washington, D.C. area. Trump did not wear a mask after his return from the hospital, nor did several aides who were seen working closely together at the White House.
October 8, 2020 – Speaking publicly at length for the first time since testing positive for the coronavirus, Trump … said that he might have contracted it when meeting with relatives of fallen service members — even though a veterans’ group maintained that none of those people got sick after visiting the White House. “I went through like 35 people,” he said. “They come within an inch of my face sometimes. They want to hug me and they want to kiss me. And they do. And frankly, I’m not telling them to back up. I’m not doing it. But I did say it’s obviously dangerous. It’s a dangerous thing, if you go by the Covid thing.”
October 9, 2020 – The Trump administration blocked the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from requiring masks on public transportation throughout the country. The mandate had the backing of Alex Azar, the secretary of health and human services, but Vice President Mike Pence, who heads the White House Coronavirus Task Force, refused to even address it.
(See? No interest in a mask mandate of any kind.)
October 13, 2020 – During the coronavirus outbreak at the White House, the Trump administration backed a petition that defends the concept of herd immunity. Most medical experts say the controversial strategy of boosting immunity through widespread infection would kill millions of Americans.
(It would also have allowed the virus to continue mutating into new, possibly deadlier variants, but it’s not like Trump was listening to people saying that. They knew what they were talking about, which was enough reason for him and his cronies to dismiss them.)
October 18, 2020 – At a rally in Carson City, Nevada, Trump ridiculed Joe Biden for relying on scientists for advice during the pandemic. “He’ll listen to the scientists,” he said in a mocking tone, adding, “he will surrender your future to the virus.”
(Republican politicians love to mock and belittle outside expertise. Their voters follow that up by openly distrusting experts in their fields, especially science. Trump further endorsed that behavior to the nth degree by participating in it.)
October 19, 2020 – Trump called Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, “a disaster.” In a call with his campaign staff, the president said, “People are tired of hearing Fauci and all these idiots.” He implied that hundreds of thousands more people would have died if they relied on Fauci’s advice. At a rally in Arizona, Trump accused the media of focusing too much on the pandemic. “You turn on CNN. That’s all they cover. Covid, covid, pandemic. Covid, covid, covid. … They’re trying to talk people out of voting. People aren’t buying it, CNN, you dumb bastards.” To date, the pandemic has killed more than 219,000 Americans.
October 24, 2020 – Speaking about the coronavirus at a campaign rally in North Carolina, Trump declared, “We’re doing great, we’re rounding the turn, our numbers are incredible.” The day before, more than 85,000 new cases of the coronavirus were reported in the United States — the highest number on any single day since the pandemic began.
October 24, 2020 – At a rally in Wisconsin, Trump put forth a conspiracy theory that “doctors get more money and hospitals get more money” if they classify any deaths as coronavirus deaths. Medical experts, however, say that the actual number of Covid-19 deaths has been underreported, not overreported.
October 25, 2020 – “We’re not going to control the pandemic,” Trump’s chief of staff Mark Meadows told CNN — suggesting that the Trump administration had given up on any attempt to stem the spread of the virus.
October 26, 2020 – “We’re rounding the turn,” Trump said once again, this time at a rally in Allentown, Pennsylvania. “You know, all they want to talk about is Covid. By the way, on November 4, you won’t be hearing so much about it. ‘Covid Covid Covid Covid.’” Over the two past weeks, the average of new daily Covid cases in the country grew by 32 percent. The disease has killed more than 225,000 people in the United States, including over 1,000 in the two days prior.
October 29, 2020 – Two people who were at a Trump rally in North Carolina tested positive for the coronavirus. Thousands attended the outdoor gathering at Gastonia Municipal Airport on October 21. Rallygoers stood shoulder to shoulder, and few wore masks. “This is one hell of a big crowd,” Trump said, praising his supporters. On October 28, North Carolina broke its record for new COVID-19 cases: 2,885 in one day.
November 2, 2020 – On his final day of campaigning, Trump held five rallies in four states, drawing thousands of supporters — most of whom neither wore masks nor social-distanced despite a dramatic increase in coronavirus cases across the country. The president mocked his rival, Joe Biden, for holding smaller events at which people stayed in their cars to remain safe.
November 14, 2020 – A second wave of coronavirus cases struck the United States, but Trump continued a five-month streak of not attending a task force meeting on the virus. The president’s team of doctors also stopped briefing him on the pandemic despite exponential increases across much of the country and a national death toll approaching a quarter-million people.
November 19, 2020 – Trump officials refused to brief President-elect Joe Biden’s transition team about its plans to distribute a coronavirus vaccine — despite projections showing that the virus death toll could reach 400,000 by February.
(But suuuuuuuuuuuuuuure, everything is Biden’s fault~.)
December 7, 2020 – The Trump administration, led by a man who for decades has boasted of his skills as a dealmaker, turned down a chance to secure more doses of Pfizer’s coronavirus vaccine. The failure to make a deal with the pharmaceutical giant gave other countries the chance to get in line ahead of the United States, acquiring doses from the American company before the United States could.
December 27, 2020 – Trump signed a $900 billion pandemic relief package, but the fact that he stalled on the bill for several days — threatening a government shutdown — meant that unemployment benefits for millions of Americans would be delayed.
And remember, Lozenge: You wanted four more years of all that bullshit.
The feds could’ve called the reporter over the phone to either ask those questions or arrange a proper face-to-face meeting with him. Agents showing up at his home without warning feels like they’re saying “we’re watching you now, so you better not piss us off” without actually saying it.
Siding with the guy who just got murdered by corrupt racist cops does not necessarily mean that you absolve the victim of all wrongdoing. It just means that people would prefer that they were afforded due process and full access to rights rather than being subjected to a roided up bully's Judge Dredd fantasies.
As I’ve said before: If the people who were out after curfew were violating the law, they should’ve been ticketed or arrested, not assaulted by a bunch of assholes with badges whose violence is government-approved. Non-violent offenses shouldn’t be met with violence, no matter how “tough on crime” someone wants the cops to act.
I take the best of the worst for ME and my concerns in each election. Nothing less and nothing more.
Yes, yes, you support torture and don’t give a shit if the people you put in office hurt the marginalized. We get it, you don’t care about people outside of yourself—you can stop showing off your conservative bona fides now.
(And yes, I said “unyielding”. I said that because you looked at four years of Trump shitting all over America and still said “hell fucking yes, I want another four years of that” at the voting booth.)
Biden wouldn’t have to deal with the mess Trump left behind if Trump hadn’t left the mess in the first place—first by ignoring COVID-19, then by pushing his supporters into celebrating ignorance and holding anti-science stances that they now proudly champion when they’re not dead or in the ICU.
If Trump had been a leader instead of a self-absorbed narcissist whose only real concern in 2020 was winning the presidential election, he could’ve prevented many, many thousands of the deaths COVID-19 caused on his watch. But he wasn’t. So he didn’t. The number of people who’ve died of COVID-19 in Biden’s term is at least partially the fault of the nearly year-long campaign from Donald Trump and his Republican asskissers to fight against every possible means of containing the spread of the disease. They don’t give a shit about people outside of themselves—and neither does your personal orange Jesus.
newspapers seem to have a weird blindspot for the very laws and constitutional rights that protect themselves when there are attacks on those rights on internet companies
It’s not a blind spot, so much as it’s a desire to go back to the days before the Internet wrecked the business model for newspapers.
Can you be certain that everyone ever executed by the United States government was guilty of the crime for which they were convicted? If the answer is “no”, that means the death penalty system is open to making a mistake it can’t undo.
At least when wrongful convictions are overturned and people are exonerated of crimes they didn’t commit, there’s a chance they can eventually lead something resembling a life outside of prison. Put them to death and they’re not coming back even if the evidence says the person is innocent.
Yes, I oppose the death penalty—in all instances. What are you going to do about that, mock me for having enough compassion for the innocent who’ve been put to death by the state that I don’t want to see it happen again?
before you come back with another right wing platform qu[o]te
You share more in common with American conservatives than you do American liberals, and your “BuT i’M a LiBeRtArIaN!!1!” bullshit is a smokescreen at best. I’ll keep calling you an American conservative because you keep fitting that description. Or would you prefer I call you a fascist based on your unyielding and unquestioning support for your personal orange Jesus?
If you think the men that brutalised those scofflaws in the parking lot absolutely should not face the same which they devised?
Violence for violence is the rule of beasts. Those cops deserve to be held accountable for their actions, but not with unnecessary violence.
Anyone who committed such an act with undeniable evidence and with full wilful thought should be forced to suffer.
They deserve to be held accountable via time in prison and a life-long sex offender label. They don’t deserve to be tortured—and since I know you’re thinking it, they sure as shit don’t deserve to be raped themselves.
the vast majority [of rape survivors] would have zero reluctance in knowing the rapist was tied up and chopped into little pieces
And if one of them did it to their rapist, you might have an extreme emotional disturbance defense for a murder trial.
Rapists are reprehensible people who have committed a heinous act. They still don’t deserve the torture and cruelty you would have the state visit upon them to assauge the “eye for an eye” mentality you so clearly hold dear.
But apparently I’m the asshole here for not condoning the state-sanctioned torture/murder of someone convicted of rape. I mean, it’s not like people have been falsely imprisoned or executed for a crime they didn’t commit…right?
If someone breaks the law and violence isn’t a required response, they don’t deserve violence—they deserve to be arrested and given the proper punishment for their violation of the law. When the cops meet non-violence with violence, yes, they are worse. I’m sorry that you think people are deserving of having violence visited upon them only for breaking the law, but your belief in cruelty as the only response to illegal acts is not my problem.
the victims, they’re still criminals… doesn’t lessen the situation or the crimes of the cops
It kinda does, though. It’s blaming the non-violent criminals—you know, non-violent people committing non-violent offenses—for the violent actions of the cops by implying that any violation of the law is deserving of police violence, even if you think that violence went a smidgen too far in only this one specific instance. You’re trying to defend the cops by saying “they’re just criminals”, but the cops shouldn’t be brutalizing criminals (especially non-violent ones) only for the sake of doing so.
Keep calling me a bleeding heart. All that does is prove you think compassion is a weakness. The cruelty, dear Lozenge, is your point.
I have not justified the illegal act. I will not seek to justify such an act.
And yet…
I shed no tear for the idiot who created a situation themselves
…you’re all but saying “the idiot who created a situation” where it was possible for them to be raped doesn’t deserve pity or sympathy. This isn’t about martyrdom, you sociopathic Trumpist—this is about saying “rape is wrong”, and you can’t even fucking do that without trying to pin at least partial responsibility for some rapes on the fucking victim.
The cruelty really is the fucking point with you, isn’t it?
proven rapists should be tortured.
…yep, it really is. You are totally an American conservative.
And before you ask: I want rapists jailed and put on sex offender registries, but I also want to see them given at least a chance at rehabilitation. And torture is bullshit regardless of the reason for (or the identity of the victim of) an act of torture. But since you’re seemingly okay with the idea of being “tough on crime” no matter what, even if it means arresting pre-teen kids in schools, I’m not the least bit surprised you’re on board with torture as a justifiable punishment for the guilty.
You also don’t seem to care that the cops overreacted to a non-violent offense, given how hard you’re pushing the “they brought that response on themselves by being a bunch of fucking criminals” bullshit. If the people who were assaulted by the cops weren’t being violent, they didn’t deserve to be assaulted by the cops—full fucking stop, I don’t give a shit what crimes they may or may not have committed. But hey, keep telling me that you’re not a bleeding heart when it comes to police brutality—all you’re doing is proving that one Atlantic headline right: The cruelty is the point.
On the post: Weeks After Blasting Twitter For 'Strangling Free Expression' GETTR Bans The Term 'Groyper' In Effort To Stop White Nationalist Spam
No platform can fully support “free speech”. The issue of illegal speech (e.g., CSAM) aside, platforms will almost always moderate spam off the platform, and spam is protected speech. A platform that truly supports “free speech” would never moderate spam…even if it cost said platform a significant chunk of its userbase.
On the post: Chinese Gov't Inflicts Its Selective Amnesia On Hong Kong, Forcing The Removal Of Tiananmen Square Massacre Monuments
…fucking what
On the post: Retailers Are Blaming The Internet For A Retail Theft Surge That Might Not Be Happening; Media Is Helping Them Out
That sounds an awful lot like the cops are running a protection racket.
On the post: Retailers Are Blaming The Internet For A Retail Theft Surge That Might Not Be Happening; Media Is Helping Them Out
Yeah, everyone knows 87% of all statistics are made up on the spot.
On the post: Weeks After Blasting Twitter For 'Strangling Free Expression' GETTR Bans The Term 'Groyper' In Effort To Stop White Nationalist Spam
Koby is an intentionally obtuse right-wing troll who definitely understands Section 230 and the First Amendment (even when he acts like he doesn’t), but he isn’t stupid. He knows the answer to that one question; he won’t say it out loud because that would be giving away the game…and tying himself to an answer he doesn’t want to own.
On the post: Weeks After Blasting Twitter For 'Strangling Free Expression' GETTR Bans The Term 'Groyper' In Effort To Stop White Nationalist Spam
There’s a name for that, by the by: the “Worst People” Problem.
On the post: Chinese Gov't Inflicts Its Selective Amnesia On Hong Kong, Forcing The Removal Of Tiananmen Square Massacre Monuments
To wit: Look at how Republicans are trying to ban “critical race theory”¹ in schools across the country.
¹ — And by “critical race theory”, I mean “the teaching of American history in a way that points out the reality of how the dominant racial group enslaved and oppressed minority racial groups”. The actual Critical Race Theory isn’t taught in any school outside of a university setting.
On the post: Minneapolis Man Acquitted Of Charges After Mistakenly Shooting At Cops Sues Officers For Violating His Rights
I’m about to take a long Internet break partially because replying to you has been one of the most mentally exhausting things I do on any given day as of late, so I sincerely hope you take some sort of delight/satisfaction/sick sexual gratification in knowing how detrimental you’ve been to my mental health, you unfeeling son of a bitch.
You said, and I quote, “maybe you’re just pissed off Biden didn’t turn out to be God”. The implication there is that you believe I thought Biden would turn out to be God. I have never—not once in my goddamned life—said or thought anything of the sort about any politician. And I’ve sure as shit never thought that about a middling centrist needledick whose only purpose in 2020 was to get Trump out of office before he and the GOP really did turn America into a fascist nation-state. Go ahead and keep insulting Biden, jackass—I’ll be glad to join you.
Trump said it would disappear completely. He is not a doctor, virologist, or any other kind of medical scientist—nor was he when he repeatedly made that claim.
And further studies said they didn’t, but that fact didn’t stop Trump and his acolytes from continuing to push the drug as if it did.
Except it wasn’t, because we have actual safety measures in place to help both prevent car accidents and lessen possible injuries from said accidents. We have stop signs and seat belts and traffic lights and air bags and all of that stuff. Trump wanted to do the pandemic equivalent of sending people out on road trips without all of those safety measures in place, because he didn’t want a goddamn thing to ruin the election he was only going to accept as a legitimate election if he won.
And then it didn’t. You keep leaving that out.
Let this fact sink in: He didn’t want to test even the smallest fraction of the full American population because that would mean admitting that COVID-19 was much more widespread than he wanted his idiot followers to believe.
I’m not going to get into this entire bullshit argument with you again because if I do, I’m probably going to have suicidal thoughts before I finish this long-ass comment, so I will leave you with this: Trump suggested that scientists should look into using household disinfectants as a potential treatment for COVID-19 in people, and if anyone—regardless of how they felt about Trump—came away with the idea that he was suggesting the injection of bleach into living human beings as a possible treatment for COVID-19, I can absolutely understand how they came away with that idea. That you can’t is your fucking Trumpist malfunction and I’m not here to fix it.
Yeah, that COVID-19 thing was only a mild flu that happened to kill a couple dozen people or so~. Totally nothing to worry about~.
And other than his decision to intentionally antagonize Black voters/“own the libs” by holding one of his superspreader even—I mean, political rallies on Juneteenth, what specifically did Donald Trump himself do to promote the existence of Juneteenth?
Gee, it’s almost as if a viral pandemic was raging at the time and the shutdowns were meant to help protect the public health at large so more people didn’t die~. Imagine that, lawmakers caring about others outside of themselves~. Makes you want to mock their compassion, doesn’t it~?
It also meant they could fudge the numbers to make the pandemic look like it was slowing down/ending when it wasn’t. Remember, Trump didn’t give a single good god’s damn whether people died from COVID-19—he only cared about winning the 2020 election at all costs.
And they were a handful of doctors out of…what, hundreds? Thousands? A small group of professionals disagreeing in bad faith with a much larger group of professionals acting in good faith means nothing to me. It’s like people who think finding the one scientific article out of a thousand that disagrees with the other 999 articles have found The One Truth Above All (Fuck The Haters).
Typically, if I want advice about medicines and health, I turn to a doctor, not a pillow salesman or an elderly game show host.
If Trump had won the election, would you still be questioning the speed of the vaccines as if it’s a fucking conspiracy theory, or would you be celebrating it as a massive fucking achievement for Trump to taunt everyone with for the rest of his life? You don’t need to respond; I already know the answer.
Again: If your Trumpist brethren would’ve listened to the advice of the same experts that Trump spent months denigrating as brainless dolts (something you keep doing by slandering Dr. Fauci as a bought-off Chinese double-agent), there wouldn’t be a need for mask mandates.
They’re also people, you heartless monster. If they get sick, they can’t be there to protect the president. And it’s one thing if they get sick by outside sources. But in this case, the president was the one who could’ve infected them with COVID-19—could’ve killed them by proxy—and all because he wanted a fucking photo-op.
They mandated masks and other measures to help curb possible COVID-19 cases. They did their best to protect attendees from making each other sick. How many of those events were confirmed superspreaders compared to the largely mask-less, often crammed-as-hell, “fuck the guidelines” Trump rallies where Trump himself decried those same guidelines?
And the Trumpists who agree with you but refused to wear a mask voluntarily are the reason mandates became a thing. It’s funny how voluntarily doing all the things that would’ve helped stave off mask/vaccine mandates and prevent the spread of the virus would’ve also helped things get back to normal much sooner…if only the jackass Trumpists would’ve actually done them.
Trump was essentially asserting that hospitals were knowingly and intentionally overreporting those numbers to receive more funding. Nobody has proven that such a thing has ever taken place. If anything, the numbers are likely still underreported for a variety of reasons.
Only from the same people who keep insisting, even now, that the election was stolen from Donald Trump. Nobody had presented any tangible evidence of widescale voter fraud in one city, let alone one state, and never mind all four of the battleground states where Trump sought to invalidate the election results. (Trumpists like you never seem to be able to explain why the presidential election was supposedly rigged but the downballot races in which Republicans won were left alone.)
There’s a reason or two for that…
…and one of them is Trump never actually pushing his supporters to get the vaccine even after it was available. He refused to participate in any campaigns to promote vaccination. He never strongly urged his followers to get vaccinated. And he did nothing to help push back against the anti-vax/anti-science propaganda from Trumpists—propaganda he helped to generate by continually denigrating the same scientists who say the vaccines are safe.
Gee, can’t imagine why he isn’t doing a better job of “saving” a country where at least a third of said country wants to undo democracy~.
Three things:
That “right” rhetorical gimmick will not work on me.
Pretty damn quick, and it was a ban on travel from South Africa. Africa is a continent, not a country, you asshole.
Yeah, because they’re actually racist enough to approve of those bans—whereas Democrats fought the travel bans from the early part of the Trump administration because said bans targeted certain people based on skin color and/or religious creed (i.e., Middle Eastern Muslims).
I’m under no illusions that Biden sucks. But do you really believe, in that ice-cold heart of yours, that Trump would’ve led us all to the Promised Land of No COVID-19? Do you genuinely believe Trump would’ve prevented the hundreds of thousands of deaths that’ve happened so far this year? Do you sincerely motherfucking believe Trump could’ve convinced the cult of personality he created to stop shitting on the scientists for once and get the vaccine—or that he would’ve even tried?
Donald Trump downplayed the threat of COVID-19 from the get-go. He didn’t do it to prevent a “panic” in the sense that he cared about the general well-being of the American population—he did it to prevent a “panic” that would’ve fucked around with the 2020 election. He constantly pushed to re-open the economy in full not because he cared about getting the American people back to work in as safe an environment as possible, but because he wanted to run his campaign on the back of a strong economy instead of focusing on the pandemic. He didn’t give a fuck how many people died of COVID-19, so long as he won the election.
And he didn’t even do that.
I’ve spent so much time ripping into you and your Trumpist bullshit that my mental health has suffered for it. You keep acting as if Trump’s narcissism and sociopathy is something to be admired—as if his lack of giving a fuck about people outside of himself is something everyone should be doing—and it’s frankly disturbing that you can keep commenting here and continually lack the self-reflection necessary to see just how much of a sociopath your support of Trump has made you. For God’s sake, you openly and knowingly advocated for torturing convicted rapists after they’ve been imprisoned.
You mock me for my compassion. But if I were to ever become the kind of unfeeling psycho that you come off as in your comments, I wouldn’t be able to live with myself.
I’ll be back around these parts in a month, and I won’t be replying to you again once I return. So please take this last bit of advice from me to heart (or what’s left of yours, at any rate) as I flip you off and walk backwards into a mental health break:
FUCK OFF FOREVER, YOU TRUMPIST SHITHEAD.
On the post: Minneapolis Man Acquitted Of Charges After Mistakenly Shooting At Cops Sues Officers For Violating His Rights
I’ve never said he was, and I never will. Since I know you have issues with understanding the concept of consent, I’ll make this request clear enough that even you can grasp it: Stop shoving words in my mouth that didn’t first come from it.
But he was.
(Big shock, a Republican blaming a Black man for something he didn’t even do.)
(At least one Trumpist drank chlorine after Trump mentioned hydroxychloroquine, which was eventually proven to have little-to-no signficant preventative or treatment effect against COVID-19.)
(As with his comments about bleach, even if you want to argue that he didn’t mean “the coronavirus is a hoax”, it’s not hard to see how his…less educated followers would’ve gotten that message.)
(I left the bit about Juneteenth in there to show you just how much of a narcissist Trump is, since you apparently don’t believe me when I tell you that.)
(Do you think he had a replacement plan ready if the Supreme Court “repealed” the ACA, or did that not matter so long as he kept saying “repeal and replace”?)
(Because nothing mattered more to Trump in 2020 than winning the election—and that includes American lives.)
(Narrator: But he was actually lying.)
(Trump loved to mock people who wore facemasks, and his sycophantic followers in and out of office took that message to heart when they started attacking mask mandates and the concept of wearing facemasks in general.)
(And it’s not like Trump had any interest in calling for that mandate, since he didn’t actually call for one himself.)
(See? No interest in a mask mandate of any kind.)
(It would also have allowed the virus to continue mutating into new, possibly deadlier variants, but it’s not like Trump was listening to people saying that. They knew what they were talking about, which was enough reason for him and his cronies to dismiss them.)
(Republican politicians love to mock and belittle outside expertise. Their voters follow that up by openly distrusting experts in their fields, especially science. Trump further endorsed that behavior to the nth degree by participating in it.)
(But suuuuuuuuuuuuuuure, everything is Biden’s fault~.)
And remember, Lozenge: You wanted four more years of all that bullshit.
On the post: When The FBI Shows Up At Your Door About Your Reporting, That's Intimidation
The feds could’ve called the reporter over the phone to either ask those questions or arrange a proper face-to-face meeting with him. Agents showing up at his home without warning feels like they’re saying “we’re watching you now, so you better not piss us off” without actually saying it.
On the post: Minneapolis Man Acquitted Of Charges After Mistakenly Shooting At Cops Sues Officers For Violating His Rights
As I’ve said before: If the people who were out after curfew were violating the law, they should’ve been ticketed or arrested, not assaulted by a bunch of assholes with badges whose violence is government-approved. Non-violent offenses shouldn’t be met with violence, no matter how “tough on crime” someone wants the cops to act.
On the post: Minneapolis Man Acquitted Of Charges After Mistakenly Shooting At Cops Sues Officers For Violating His Rights
Yes, yes, you support torture and don’t give a shit if the people you put in office hurt the marginalized. We get it, you don’t care about people outside of yourself—you can stop showing off your conservative bona fides now.
(And yes, I said “unyielding”. I said that because you looked at four years of Trump shitting all over America and still said “hell fucking yes, I want another four years of that” at the voting booth.)
On the post: Minneapolis Man Acquitted Of Charges After Mistakenly Shooting At Cops Sues Officers For Violating His Rights
Biden wouldn’t have to deal with the mess Trump left behind if Trump hadn’t left the mess in the first place—first by ignoring COVID-19, then by pushing his supporters into celebrating ignorance and holding anti-science stances that they now proudly champion when they’re not dead or in the ICU.
If Trump had been a leader instead of a self-absorbed narcissist whose only real concern in 2020 was winning the presidential election, he could’ve prevented many, many thousands of the deaths COVID-19 caused on his watch. But he wasn’t. So he didn’t. The number of people who’ve died of COVID-19 in Biden’s term is at least partially the fault of the nearly year-long campaign from Donald Trump and his Republican asskissers to fight against every possible means of containing the spread of the disease. They don’t give a shit about people outside of themselves—and neither does your personal orange Jesus.
On the post: Cable Giant Spectrum Endangered Its Employees And Screwed Its Technicians During COVID
Off-topic side note: That is likely the big reason why WWE classifies all of its performers as “independent contractors” instead of “employees”.
On the post: Washington Post Forgets It Fought (And Won) Legal Battle Against Mandatory Transparency; Now Demands Internet Co's Face The Same
It’s not a blind spot, so much as it’s a desire to go back to the days before the Internet wrecked the business model for newspapers.
On the post: Minneapolis Man Acquitted Of Charges After Mistakenly Shooting At Cops Sues Officers For Violating His Rights
Can you be certain that everyone ever executed by the United States government was guilty of the crime for which they were convicted? If the answer is “no”, that means the death penalty system is open to making a mistake it can’t undo.
At least when wrongful convictions are overturned and people are exonerated of crimes they didn’t commit, there’s a chance they can eventually lead something resembling a life outside of prison. Put them to death and they’re not coming back even if the evidence says the person is innocent.
Yes, I oppose the death penalty—in all instances. What are you going to do about that, mock me for having enough compassion for the innocent who’ve been put to death by the state that I don’t want to see it happen again?
You share more in common with American conservatives than you do American liberals, and your “BuT i’M a LiBeRtArIaN!!1!” bullshit is a smokescreen at best. I’ll keep calling you an American conservative because you keep fitting that description. Or would you prefer I call you a fascist based on your unyielding and unquestioning support for your personal orange Jesus?
On the post: Minneapolis Man Acquitted Of Charges After Mistakenly Shooting At Cops Sues Officers For Violating His Rights
Violence for violence is the rule of beasts. Those cops deserve to be held accountable for their actions, but not with unnecessary violence.
They deserve to be held accountable via time in prison and a life-long sex offender label. They don’t deserve to be tortured—and since I know you’re thinking it, they sure as shit don’t deserve to be raped themselves.
And if one of them did it to their rapist, you might have an extreme emotional disturbance defense for a murder trial.
Rapists are reprehensible people who have committed a heinous act. They still don’t deserve the torture and cruelty you would have the state visit upon them to assauge the “eye for an eye” mentality you so clearly hold dear.
But apparently I’m the asshole here for not condoning the state-sanctioned torture/murder of someone convicted of rape. I mean, it’s not like people have been falsely imprisoned or executed for a crime they didn’t commit…right?
On the post: Minneapolis Man Acquitted Of Charges After Mistakenly Shooting At Cops Sues Officers For Violating His Rights
If someone breaks the law and violence isn’t a required response, they don’t deserve violence—they deserve to be arrested and given the proper punishment for their violation of the law. When the cops meet non-violence with violence, yes, they are worse. I’m sorry that you think people are deserving of having violence visited upon them only for breaking the law, but your belief in cruelty as the only response to illegal acts is not my problem.
It kinda does, though. It’s blaming the non-violent criminals—you know, non-violent people committing non-violent offenses—for the violent actions of the cops by implying that any violation of the law is deserving of police violence, even if you think that violence went a smidgen too far in only this one specific instance. You’re trying to defend the cops by saying “they’re just criminals”, but the cops shouldn’t be brutalizing criminals (especially non-violent ones) only for the sake of doing so.
Keep calling me a bleeding heart. All that does is prove you think compassion is a weakness. The cruelty, dear Lozenge, is your point.
On the post: Minneapolis Man Acquitted Of Charges After Mistakenly Shooting At Cops Sues Officers For Violating His Rights
And yet…
…you’re all but saying “the idiot who created a situation” where it was possible for them to be raped doesn’t deserve pity or sympathy. This isn’t about martyrdom, you sociopathic Trumpist—this is about saying “rape is wrong”, and you can’t even fucking do that without trying to pin at least partial responsibility for some rapes on the fucking victim.
The cruelty really is the fucking point with you, isn’t it?
…yep, it really is. You are totally an American conservative.
And before you ask: I want rapists jailed and put on sex offender registries, but I also want to see them given at least a chance at rehabilitation. And torture is bullshit regardless of the reason for (or the identity of the victim of) an act of torture. But since you’re seemingly okay with the idea of being “tough on crime” no matter what, even if it means arresting pre-teen kids in schools, I’m not the least bit surprised you’re on board with torture as a justifiable punishment for the guilty.
On the post: Minneapolis Man Acquitted Of Charges After Mistakenly Shooting At Cops Sues Officers For Violating His Rights
You also don’t seem to care that the cops overreacted to a non-violent offense, given how hard you’re pushing the “they brought that response on themselves by being a bunch of fucking criminals” bullshit. If the people who were assaulted by the cops weren’t being violent, they didn’t deserve to be assaulted by the cops—full fucking stop, I don’t give a shit what crimes they may or may not have committed. But hey, keep telling me that you’re not a bleeding heart when it comes to police brutality—all you’re doing is proving that one Atlantic headline right: The cruelty is the point.
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