Then go back to the majority and leave us, the sane minority, alone with each other. You’re neither wanted nor needed here, you discount store Discordian.
Given there are very few voters of a class that goes further right than the most-right-wing republicans, the idea that the majority is on the right is flat out incorrect.
I’d say a majority of anti-vaxxers—slim though it may be—are conservative, even if they don’t identify as Republican. By and large, liberals/progressives and even jackasses like libertarians aren’t coming out en masse against the vaccines. (Libertarians might not like the mandates, but who gives a fuck.)
you’d wait till they finally managed to strike the US with a rocket and then kill millions of innocents in a retaliatory strike
That’s cute, that you think I’d believe that. But you’re WROOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOONG.
No, what I’d like our government to do is continue sanctioning North Korea and put pressure on China to make North Korea clean up its act. China is one of the few countries still willing to ally itself with North Korea; anything that NK does (including military strikes against its neighbors or the United States) will reflect poorly on China, and I don’t think the Chinese government would want that.
Talks with the USSR kept everyone alive.
And what did Trump treating North Korea with kid gloves get us? Nothing.
I KNOW she’s a genocidal maniac.
No, you think she is.
Her ignoring the problems of ethnic Rus and Dvol in southern Ukraine while members of her family and her associates profiting from contracts in the country, many of them government-associated level, proves that.
You act like nobody in the Trump administration profited from international military activities. Hell, did Trump do anything significant about Russia encroaching on Ukraine during his time in office? If you want to claim Hillary Clinton is personally responsible for a genocide in Ukraine only because she didn’t intervene in stopping it, you can’t ignore anything Trump and his administration did (or didn’t do) about that same situation. He was president, not her. (And she will never be president, so you can stop worrying about your personal Antichrist ever being able to sit in the Oval Office.)
Her willingness to support China while they massacre Turk, Mongol, and Uyghur populations?
See my previous paragraph, but substitute the particulars for your question above where necessary.
[YouTube video of Kamala Harris comments about the vaccine]
Maybe you should pay closer attention to what she said. She outright said she would take the vaccine if doctors and public health professionals said to take it, but she wouldn’t take it if Donald Trump said to take it. That isn’t being anti-vax—it’s being smart enough to know that you shouldn’t trust Donald “I looked directly at a solar eclipse without any glasses” Trump (or any other Republican) when it comes to matters of science.
The First Amendment protects your rights to speak freely and associate with whomever you want. It doesn’t give you the right to make others listen. It doesn’t give you the right to make others give you access to an audience. And it doesn’t give you the right to make a personal soapbox out of private property you don’t own. Nobody is entitled to a platform or an audience at the expense of someone else.
Now that some relevant copypasta has been served, here are some facts:
Facebook and Twitter have no legal obligation to host any link to any third-party website.
Neither Facebook nor Twitter censored the New York Post by blocking the sharing of the link to the “Hunter Biden’s laptop” story—after all, the original story is still available to read on the Post website.
Nobody, including you, has proven that any conspiracy between two or more tech companies to “censor” the Post took place.
Parler is still alive, even if nobody outside of its devoted userbase gives a shit about it.
Questions about infrastructure-level moderation aside: Amazon had no legal obligation to keep hosting Parler after Parler refused to play by Amazon’s rules, and no app store had a legal obligation to distribute the Parler app.
Nobody, including you, has proven that a conspiracy between two or more tech companies to “destroy” Parler took place.
And to make sure you fully understand my point, I have one more copypasta to finish this off:
Moderation is a platform/service owner or operator saying “we don’t do that here”. Personal discretion is an individual telling themselves “I won’t do that here”. Editorial discretion is an editor saying “we won’t print that here”, either to themselves or to a writer. Censorship is someone saying “you won’t do that anywhere” alongside threats or actions meant to suppress speech.
To be fair, 4chan and 8chan/8kun started out as largely unmoderated cesspools, so they were already examples of the “Worst People” Problem well before they entered the mainstream consciousness.
He’s a goddamned dictator who didn’t deserve to be treated as a credible world leader by a global superpower.
Feel free to keep posting McConspiracy’s list.
I will. It’s well-sourced and comprehensive; ain’t my fault if you’re not willing to accept facts about Donald Trump over your simping for the Orange Fascist.
genocidal faux queen
Again: Hillary Clinton is not the Antichrist, a succubus, a demon, or any other supernatural evil. And I’d like to remind you that Donald Trump thought he was essentially a king, what with him repeatedly lying about Article II giving him the power to do anything he wanted as president. You imagine Hillary would’ve been a genocidal fascist? Donald Trump cause nearly a half-million Americans deaths through his negligence and made Christian fascism seem fashionable to Republican lawmakers (and their conservative voting base).
it remains nearly evenly split between dems and Republicans
You’re gonna have to provide at least one solid citation for that assertion. No explicitly right-wing news sources will be accepted.
Trump had very little effect in anti-vax.
No, he had an effect—his administration fast-tracking the vaccine almost certainly helped make people already leaning towards anti-vax beliefs dig their heels in more. Be it for reasons related to religion, stem cells, mRNA, or any other bullshit excuse, the anti-vaxxers held firm to their beliefs in the wake of the COVID vaccine…which Trump didn’t help dissuade at any point while he was president and sure as hell hasn’t pushed back against in any meaningful way after he left office.
He also didn’t help anyone by shittalking measures meant to protect public health (mask mandates, social distancing, lockdowns), recommending drugs and…experimental treatments with no proven significant effects in re: treating COVID, and continually saying “the virus will completely disappear soon” when no such thing was even close to happening. Trump didn’t give a shit about people dying from the virus—he gave a shit about the economy cratering…and how that was hurting his polling numbers. A single death wasn’t a tragedy to him, and thousands of deaths was a statistic he ignored.
The pandemic rages on in the United States because Trump helped anti-vaxxers and plague enthusiasts by not doing a goddamn thing to effectively denounce their bullshit. He fanned the flames of conservative anti-science/anti-expertise propaganda, and that led to the increase of anti-vaxxers/maskholes/“it’s not that bad” plague enthusiasts. If he’d listened to the scientists and coordinated a national response and treated COVID-19 as a public health crisis instead of a campaign crisis, we’d probably have a lot fewer deaths from COVID than three-quarters of a million.
I’m still waiting for you to ACKNOWLEDGE the VP’s statement let alone condemn it.
If I knew what the fuck you were talking about, maybe I’d have an answer for you. Always provide context, Lozenge.
No, what he did was kiss Kim Jong-Un’s ass. His administration did little-to-nothing afterward—before or after the pandemic became a thing—to force any concessions from North Korea on its nuclear programs or its numerous abuses of the human rights of North Koreans. A dictator was given credibility on the global stage at the cost of America’s own. That isn’t “opening a dialogue” by any stretch of the imagination.
Whatever you think he might’ve done continuing as POTUS… is imagined.
It is, at worst, an educated guess based on who he is and what he did while in office.
Before he became president, Donald Trump was known to be a lying grifter who routinely fucked over people under his employ and a poor businessman whose track record was so bad that the mainstream financial sector refused to deal with him because of his being a huge credit risk. He was credibly accused by one of his ex-wives of raping her (the accusation being withdrawn notwithstanding), and he admitted on tape to molesting women because he believed his fame would let him get away with it. He was proven in court to have enacted racist policies with one of his properties, and his bigotry towards women, racial minorities, and immigrants was on full display during his campaign.
While he was in office, Donald Trump used his position to further the divisions caused by the extreme rightward drift of American conservatives in the wake of Obama’s time in office. You can keep making the same defense of his statements all you want, but he referred to a group largely made up of white supremacists and defenders of the Confederacy as “very fine people”. He encouraged his supporters to “own the libs” at any cost—not in those exact words, but certainly through others as well as his own actions. He praised dictators for handling dissent in ways he could only dream of doing. He lied and lied and lied again about everything from the size of his inauguration crowd to the COVID-19 virus “disappearing” even as the first big surge was incubating. That isn’t even anywhere close to being a comprehensive list of his bullshit (but I know where you can find one).
Every worry, every fear, every negative thought about a second term of President Donald Trump is based on who he was before he was president (including his time on the campaign trail) and what he did while he was president. When I talk of the damage he could’ve done (and might still do) with a second term, it’s based on the damage he did with his first. The potential for Trump and his cronies to enact full-blown Christian fascism in the United States isn’t some overblown fantasy—it’s how Texas ended up with that anti-abortion law.
Hillary Clinton had her fair share of problems as a candidate, not the least of which is that she wasn’t seen as a great person in general. I won’t deny that, had she gotten into office, I likely would’ve disagreed with a fair amount of what she would’ve done. But for all her flaws and foibles and issues as a politician, she wasn’t the goddamn Antichrist. For that matter, neither was Trump—but he was a hateful, spiteful, violent bastard whose desire to use the Oval Office for his own personal benefit was evident even as a candidate.
The damage you believe Hillary Clinton would’ve done to the United States as president is based on your own (hilariously overblown) biases against her. The damage I believe Donald Trump would’ve done to the United States with a second term as president is based on the damage he already did. For fuck’s sake, we have people openly asking conservative pundits “when do we get to use the guns”. I didn’t see anyone openly asking liberal pundits when they “get to use the guns” against conservatives in the wake of the 2016 election.
Am I exaggerating the threat Donald Trump poses to the United States? Maybe…but not by much.
his administration had overseen a record production of a vaccination for the pandemic
And the rush job for those vaccines, combined with the Trump administration’s long-standing rejection of science and contempt for independent expertise (which only worsened during the pandemic), led to the widespread adoption of anti-vaxxer talking points among conservatives.
To anyone who thinks 230 enables "censorship" of certain kinds of speech on social media: What speech do you believe is being censored? Be as specific as possible.
Says the person who somehow always get[s] back to trump?
Hillary Clinton didn’t win the White House, and she sure as shit didn’t spend four years fracturing the country even worse than it was in 2016. Whatever you think she might’ve done as POTUS is irrelevant—we know exactly what Trump did as POTUS, and that will be relevant to any discussion of contemporary politics far more often than not. Her “damage” to the country is imagined; his damage to the country is real.
Interesting you turn to the DPRK and not China or Iran.
Interesting how you always ignore or downplay how Trump all but played kissyface with dictators and autocrats like Kim Jong-Un, Vladimir Putin, and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.
What do you suggest.
Something other than giving them everything in exchange for nothing—which is exactly what happened when Trump met with Kim Jong-Un. Trump gave North Korea credibility on the international stage; he got no solid promises on anything from North Korea in return. And that happened because Trump likes people who run their countries like a dictatorship—people who hurt their enemies without consequence or shame or remorse and hand down edicts like a king to his subjects.
I kind of figured it wouldn’t be much more than more of the same.
It would’ve been worse, because Trump would’ve had something even more dangerous than an edict to run the country: nothing to lose by doing whatever the fuck he wanted. At worst, he might’ve been impeached again, but no Republican was ever going to vote for his conviction again. No Republicans would’ve ever pushed for his removal from office for anything he did in office. He was bad enough when he got the power of the presidency; another four years—this time with nothing left to lose, a Supreme Court leaning in his favor, and an entire political party almost wholly under his control—would’ve let his worst impulses come to life.
For whatever fuck-ups Biden has committed as POTUS, it’s not nearly as bad as what Trump would’ve done by now—and that’s based on the damage he did in his first term, not some perceived damage he might have done in an alternate timeline.
Insurrection? No. That involves overthrowing the current government.
“Kill Mike Pence”—does that ring a bell? The insurrectionists were seeking to prevent American democracy from being carried out by the then-current federal government. Anyone who says otherwise is a Trumpist, deluded or not.
you can see my characterisation of her as a false god leader. One who would devour the very people she pretends to represent.
Trump allowed nearly a half-million people to die of COVID-19 due to his refusal to properly dealing with the pandemic. Many of those people were people who voted for Trump—and even if they weren’t, Trump still represented them by virtue of being the president of the entire United States. You want to whine about Hillary, but what about the false god you helped put into the Oval Office?
See, that’s the thing that galls me about people like you: You’re more than willing to say you voted for Trump, but when it comes time to take responsibility (however small) for your role in putting that son of a bitch into office, you deflect from that and go “well Hillary would’ve been worse” or “well Biden is worse because reasons”.
I know that Obama and Biden fucked up (and in Biden’s case, will continue to fuck up) while in the Oval Office. I’m aware that I helped put them into the presidency, and whatever their administrations did(/will do) to hurt innocent people—Americans or otherwise—is, in the tiniest of ways, partially my fault. I’m more than willing to take what little responsibility I must for those decisions.
You’ve seen the damage Trump did as president. You know how much he hurt the country. You admit to having that knowledge. But when you’re asked to own your responsibility for putting a lying, philandering, bigoted elderly game show host with no history of public service into the highest seat of power in the country and watching him burn every sense of sociopolitical decorum to the ground, you punt by saying shit like “well Hillary would’ve been worse”.
Own your responsibility, however small, for the damage you helped inflict upon this country (and others) by putting Trump into office. If you can’t do that, fuck all the way off to Gab or Parler or Truth Social (when it opens). I don’t want to hear your pissant excuses any more.
Here’s the thing about that: Republicans still have to win elections.
Say the Democrats schedule a vote for a bill that polls well across the political aisle (let’s say “paid parental leave” for the sake of argument). Without the filibuster, the Republicans would have to vote for or against that bill, to own their position on it. I would have to assume that (under more normal circumstances), you might see a few Republicans vote in favor of the bill just to save face with constituents back home. And if paid parental leave proves popular with voters once it’s passed and implemented, Republicans will have a harder time defending a vote to dismantle it when they eventually regain power in the Senate.
The point of nuking the filibuster, then, would be to prevent Republicans from hiding behind the filibuster and claims of “communism” or “socialism” or whatever boogeyman scare word they’re using these days. That will prove useful in future elections for both the Senate and the presidency. Sad thing is, the Democrats aren’t willing to play hardball on this—I mean, Joe Manchin had his “I can find ten good Republicans to support this” voting rights bill nixed by every Republican in the Senate, and he still refuses to nuke the filibuster. (Then again, he’s also a conservative posing as a Democrat, so there’s that.)
The filibuster needs to die, and Democrats need to kill it. Whatever the consequences, it can’t be that much worse than letting Republicans bring Congress to a grinding halt for the sake of protecting a procedural trick.
Understanding it and condoning it are two different things. You’re out here condoning what was literally a protest(-turned-riot) against American democracy itself.
Actually can’t understand why they won’t support a national ID though.
Same reason they don’t generally support voter ID laws: They don’t want to shut out people who may not have the documents required to obtain such an ID.
No, but
Then you are okay with it.
You nuke it now, and come 22 there’s nothing to stop that from happening.
You nuke it now, and in 2022, Democrats can pass laws that strengthen queer rights—including trans rights—without Republicans being able to do a goddamn thing about it. If anything, that’s exactly what the Dems should do: Nuke the filibuster, pass everything they want to pass (including stuff that will help people who didn’t vote for the Democrats!), then dare the GOP to undo it when they get power again. The GOP wants to have the worst positions possible on everything without actually owning those positions via Congressional votes—so I say the Dems should absolutely make them own those positions on the record.
Besides, if Republicans get control of the Senate in 2022, they’re going to keep filibustering and obstructing anyway—just with a majority this time, as they did in the Obama years. Are you okay with Biden routing around Congress via executive action as Obama (and Trump!) had to do?
Think about all the things you hate about Trump policy. Being passed with no debate at all.
Without a veto-proof majority, none of that will matter unless the Republicans can hold onto control of the Senate until the next Republican president takes office.
And as I said, Republicans used the filibuster just last week to stifle debate on a voting rights bill. Whatever you think the filibuster was meant to protect, it isn’t being used that way any more. I’m willing to risk the consequences of nuking the filibuster if doing that means Mitch McConnell loses the power to stop bills from even being brought to the Senate floor.
On the post: Lessons From The First Internet Ages
Then go back to the majority and leave us, the sane minority, alone with each other. You’re neither wanted nor needed here, you discount store Discordian.
On the post: Lessons From The First Internet Ages
are you high or just stupid
On the post: Lessons From The First Internet Ages
Being edgy for the sake of being a contrarian isn’t a substitute for a personality, and it sure as hell isn’t funny.
On the post: Because Of Course: Trump's SPAC Deal May Have Broken The Law
I’m sure someone will soon arrive to defend Trump’s bullshit with full-throated sincerity…assuming he doesn’t get lost, that is.
On the post: Because Of Course: Trump's SPAC Deal May Have Broken The Law
We now go to Philip J. Fry for his comments on the matter.
On the post: Chicago Court Gets Its Prior Restraint On, Tells Police Union Head To STFU About City's Vaccine Mandate
I’d say a majority of anti-vaxxers—slim though it may be—are conservative, even if they don’t identify as Republican. By and large, liberals/progressives and even jackasses like libertarians aren’t coming out en masse against the vaccines. (Libertarians might not like the mandates, but who gives a fuck.)
On the post: Chicago Court Gets Its Prior Restraint On, Tells Police Union Head To STFU About City's Vaccine Mandate
That’s cute, that you think I’d believe that. But you’re WROOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOONG.
No, what I’d like our government to do is continue sanctioning North Korea and put pressure on China to make North Korea clean up its act. China is one of the few countries still willing to ally itself with North Korea; anything that NK does (including military strikes against its neighbors or the United States) will reflect poorly on China, and I don’t think the Chinese government would want that.
And what did Trump treating North Korea with kid gloves get us? Nothing.
No, you think she is.
You act like nobody in the Trump administration profited from international military activities. Hell, did Trump do anything significant about Russia encroaching on Ukraine during his time in office? If you want to claim Hillary Clinton is personally responsible for a genocide in Ukraine only because she didn’t intervene in stopping it, you can’t ignore anything Trump and his administration did (or didn’t do) about that same situation. He was president, not her. (And she will never be president, so you can stop worrying about your personal Antichrist ever being able to sit in the Oval Office.)
See my previous paragraph, but substitute the particulars for your question above where necessary.
Maybe you should pay closer attention to what she said. She outright said she would take the vaccine if doctors and public health professionals said to take it, but she wouldn’t take it if Donald Trump said to take it. That isn’t being anti-vax—it’s being smart enough to know that you shouldn’t trust Donald “I looked directly at a solar eclipse without any glasses” Trump (or any other Republican) when it comes to matters of science.
On the post: Everything You Know About Section 230 Is Wrong (But Why?)
47 U.S.C. § 230 can’t be “reformed” without wreaking havoc upon the protections it grants to interactive web services.
On the post: Everything You Know About Section 230 Is Wrong (But Why?)
The First Amendment protects your rights to speak freely and associate with whomever you want. It doesn’t give you the right to make others listen. It doesn’t give you the right to make others give you access to an audience. And it doesn’t give you the right to make a personal soapbox out of private property you don’t own. Nobody is entitled to a platform or an audience at the expense of someone else.
Now that some relevant copypasta has been served, here are some facts:
Facebook and Twitter have no legal obligation to host any link to any third-party website.
Neither Facebook nor Twitter censored the New York Post by blocking the sharing of the link to the “Hunter Biden’s laptop” story—after all, the original story is still available to read on the Post website.
Nobody, including you, has proven that any conspiracy between two or more tech companies to “censor” the Post took place.
Parler is still alive, even if nobody outside of its devoted userbase gives a shit about it.
Questions about infrastructure-level moderation aside: Amazon had no legal obligation to keep hosting Parler after Parler refused to play by Amazon’s rules, and no app store had a legal obligation to distribute the Parler app.
And to make sure you fully understand my point, I have one more copypasta to finish this off:
Moderation is a platform/service owner or operator saying “we don’t do that here”. Personal discretion is an individual telling themselves “I won’t do that here”. Editorial discretion is an editor saying “we won’t print that here”, either to themselves or to a writer. Censorship is someone saying “you won’t do that anywhere” alongside threats or actions meant to suppress speech.
On the post: Everything You Know About Section 230 Is Wrong (But Why?)
To be fair, 4chan and 8chan/8kun started out as largely unmoderated cesspools, so they were already examples of the “Worst People” Problem well before they entered the mainstream consciousness.
On the post: Chicago Court Gets Its Prior Restraint On, Tells Police Union Head To STFU About City's Vaccine Mandate
He’s a goddamned dictator who didn’t deserve to be treated as a credible world leader by a global superpower.
I will. It’s well-sourced and comprehensive; ain’t my fault if you’re not willing to accept facts about Donald Trump over your simping for the Orange Fascist.
Again: Hillary Clinton is not the Antichrist, a succubus, a demon, or any other supernatural evil. And I’d like to remind you that Donald Trump thought he was essentially a king, what with him repeatedly lying about Article II giving him the power to do anything he wanted as president. You imagine Hillary would’ve been a genocidal fascist? Donald Trump cause nearly a half-million Americans deaths through his negligence and made Christian fascism seem fashionable to Republican lawmakers (and their conservative voting base).
You’re gonna have to provide at least one solid citation for that assertion. No explicitly right-wing news sources will be accepted.
No, he had an effect—his administration fast-tracking the vaccine almost certainly helped make people already leaning towards anti-vax beliefs dig their heels in more. Be it for reasons related to religion, stem cells, mRNA, or any other bullshit excuse, the anti-vaxxers held firm to their beliefs in the wake of the COVID vaccine…which Trump didn’t help dissuade at any point while he was president and sure as hell hasn’t pushed back against in any meaningful way after he left office.
He also didn’t help anyone by shittalking measures meant to protect public health (mask mandates, social distancing, lockdowns), recommending drugs and…experimental treatments with no proven significant effects in re: treating COVID, and continually saying “the virus will completely disappear soon” when no such thing was even close to happening. Trump didn’t give a shit about people dying from the virus—he gave a shit about the economy cratering…and how that was hurting his polling numbers. A single death wasn’t a tragedy to him, and thousands of deaths was a statistic he ignored.
The pandemic rages on in the United States because Trump helped anti-vaxxers and plague enthusiasts by not doing a goddamn thing to effectively denounce their bullshit. He fanned the flames of conservative anti-science/anti-expertise propaganda, and that led to the increase of anti-vaxxers/maskholes/“it’s not that bad” plague enthusiasts. If he’d listened to the scientists and coordinated a national response and treated COVID-19 as a public health crisis instead of a campaign crisis, we’d probably have a lot fewer deaths from COVID than three-quarters of a million.
If I knew what the fuck you were talking about, maybe I’d have an answer for you. Always provide context, Lozenge.
On the post: Disbarment Proceedings Show How A Maryland Prosecutor Covered Up An FBI Agent's Lies For More Than Twenty Years
I doubt we’ll likely ever know for sure, not without a deep-dive investigation into every case he tried.
But I’m willing to bet this wasn’t the only case he rigged in his favor.
On the post: Disbarment Proceedings Show How A Maryland Prosecutor Covered Up An FBI Agent's Lies For More Than Twenty Years
Sometimes the simplest statements are the best.
Dear Joseph Cassilly,
Fuck you.
Respectfully,
every person with a shred of moral decency
On the post: Chicago Court Gets Its Prior Restraint On, Tells Police Union Head To STFU About City's Vaccine Mandate
No, what he did was kiss Kim Jong-Un’s ass. His administration did little-to-nothing afterward—before or after the pandemic became a thing—to force any concessions from North Korea on its nuclear programs or its numerous abuses of the human rights of North Koreans. A dictator was given credibility on the global stage at the cost of America’s own. That isn’t “opening a dialogue” by any stretch of the imagination.
It is, at worst, an educated guess based on who he is and what he did while in office.
Before he became president, Donald Trump was known to be a lying grifter who routinely fucked over people under his employ and a poor businessman whose track record was so bad that the mainstream financial sector refused to deal with him because of his being a huge credit risk. He was credibly accused by one of his ex-wives of raping her (the accusation being withdrawn notwithstanding), and he admitted on tape to molesting women because he believed his fame would let him get away with it. He was proven in court to have enacted racist policies with one of his properties, and his bigotry towards women, racial minorities, and immigrants was on full display during his campaign.
While he was in office, Donald Trump used his position to further the divisions caused by the extreme rightward drift of American conservatives in the wake of Obama’s time in office. You can keep making the same defense of his statements all you want, but he referred to a group largely made up of white supremacists and defenders of the Confederacy as “very fine people”. He encouraged his supporters to “own the libs” at any cost—not in those exact words, but certainly through others as well as his own actions. He praised dictators for handling dissent in ways he could only dream of doing. He lied and lied and lied again about everything from the size of his inauguration crowd to the COVID-19 virus “disappearing” even as the first big surge was incubating. That isn’t even anywhere close to being a comprehensive list of his bullshit (but I know where you can find one).
Every worry, every fear, every negative thought about a second term of President Donald Trump is based on who he was before he was president (including his time on the campaign trail) and what he did while he was president. When I talk of the damage he could’ve done (and might still do) with a second term, it’s based on the damage he did with his first. The potential for Trump and his cronies to enact full-blown Christian fascism in the United States isn’t some overblown fantasy—it’s how Texas ended up with that anti-abortion law.
Hillary Clinton had her fair share of problems as a candidate, not the least of which is that she wasn’t seen as a great person in general. I won’t deny that, had she gotten into office, I likely would’ve disagreed with a fair amount of what she would’ve done. But for all her flaws and foibles and issues as a politician, she wasn’t the goddamn Antichrist. For that matter, neither was Trump—but he was a hateful, spiteful, violent bastard whose desire to use the Oval Office for his own personal benefit was evident even as a candidate.
The damage you believe Hillary Clinton would’ve done to the United States as president is based on your own (hilariously overblown) biases against her. The damage I believe Donald Trump would’ve done to the United States with a second term as president is based on the damage he already did. For fuck’s sake, we have people openly asking conservative pundits “when do we get to use the guns”. I didn’t see anyone openly asking liberal pundits when they “get to use the guns” against conservatives in the wake of the 2016 election.
Am I exaggerating the threat Donald Trump poses to the United States? Maybe…but not by much.
And the rush job for those vaccines, combined with the Trump administration’s long-standing rejection of science and contempt for independent expertise (which only worsened during the pandemic), led to the widespread adoption of anti-vaxxer talking points among conservatives.
Hell of a “win” there, huh?
On the post: Everything You Know About Section 230 Is Wrong (But Why?)
To anyone who thinks 230 enables "censorship" of certain kinds of speech on social media: What speech do you believe is being censored? Be as specific as possible.
On the post: Chicago Court Gets Its Prior Restraint On, Tells Police Union Head To STFU About City's Vaccine Mandate
That’s why we have both the courts and midterm elections.
This, I would be okay with.
But I still say nuking the filibuster is the correct way to go.
On the post: Chicago Court Gets Its Prior Restraint On, Tells Police Union Head To STFU About City's Vaccine Mandate
Hillary Clinton didn’t win the White House, and she sure as shit didn’t spend four years fracturing the country even worse than it was in 2016. Whatever you think she might’ve done as POTUS is irrelevant—we know exactly what Trump did as POTUS, and that will be relevant to any discussion of contemporary politics far more often than not. Her “damage” to the country is imagined; his damage to the country is real.
Interesting how you always ignore or downplay how Trump all but played kissyface with dictators and autocrats like Kim Jong-Un, Vladimir Putin, and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.
Something other than giving them everything in exchange for nothing—which is exactly what happened when Trump met with Kim Jong-Un. Trump gave North Korea credibility on the international stage; he got no solid promises on anything from North Korea in return. And that happened because Trump likes people who run their countries like a dictatorship—people who hurt their enemies without consequence or shame or remorse and hand down edicts like a king to his subjects.
It would’ve been worse, because Trump would’ve had something even more dangerous than an edict to run the country: nothing to lose by doing whatever the fuck he wanted. At worst, he might’ve been impeached again, but no Republican was ever going to vote for his conviction again. No Republicans would’ve ever pushed for his removal from office for anything he did in office. He was bad enough when he got the power of the presidency; another four years—this time with nothing left to lose, a Supreme Court leaning in his favor, and an entire political party almost wholly under his control—would’ve let his worst impulses come to life.
For whatever fuck-ups Biden has committed as POTUS, it’s not nearly as bad as what Trump would’ve done by now—and that’s based on the damage he did in his first term, not some perceived damage he might have done in an alternate timeline.
“Kill Mike Pence”—does that ring a bell? The insurrectionists were seeking to prevent American democracy from being carried out by the then-current federal government. Anyone who says otherwise is a Trumpist, deluded or not.
Trump allowed nearly a half-million people to die of COVID-19 due to his refusal to properly dealing with the pandemic. Many of those people were people who voted for Trump—and even if they weren’t, Trump still represented them by virtue of being the president of the entire United States. You want to whine about Hillary, but what about the false god you helped put into the Oval Office?
See, that’s the thing that galls me about people like you: You’re more than willing to say you voted for Trump, but when it comes time to take responsibility (however small) for your role in putting that son of a bitch into office, you deflect from that and go “well Hillary would’ve been worse” or “well Biden is worse because reasons”.
I know that Obama and Biden fucked up (and in Biden’s case, will continue to fuck up) while in the Oval Office. I’m aware that I helped put them into the presidency, and whatever their administrations did(/will do) to hurt innocent people—Americans or otherwise—is, in the tiniest of ways, partially my fault. I’m more than willing to take what little responsibility I must for those decisions.
You’ve seen the damage Trump did as president. You know how much he hurt the country. You admit to having that knowledge. But when you’re asked to own your responsibility for putting a lying, philandering, bigoted elderly game show host with no history of public service into the highest seat of power in the country and watching him burn every sense of sociopolitical decorum to the ground, you punt by saying shit like “well Hillary would’ve been worse”.
Own your responsibility, however small, for the damage you helped inflict upon this country (and others) by putting Trump into office. If you can’t do that, fuck all the way off to Gab or Parler or Truth Social (when it opens). I don’t want to hear your pissant excuses any more.
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Here’s the thing about that: Republicans still have to win elections.
Say the Democrats schedule a vote for a bill that polls well across the political aisle (let’s say “paid parental leave” for the sake of argument). Without the filibuster, the Republicans would have to vote for or against that bill, to own their position on it. I would have to assume that (under more normal circumstances), you might see a few Republicans vote in favor of the bill just to save face with constituents back home. And if paid parental leave proves popular with voters once it’s passed and implemented, Republicans will have a harder time defending a vote to dismantle it when they eventually regain power in the Senate.
The point of nuking the filibuster, then, would be to prevent Republicans from hiding behind the filibuster and claims of “communism” or “socialism” or whatever boogeyman scare word they’re using these days. That will prove useful in future elections for both the Senate and the presidency. Sad thing is, the Democrats aren’t willing to play hardball on this—I mean, Joe Manchin had his “I can find ten good Republicans to support this” voting rights bill nixed by every Republican in the Senate, and he still refuses to nuke the filibuster. (Then again, he’s also a conservative posing as a Democrat, so there’s that.)
The filibuster needs to die, and Democrats need to kill it. Whatever the consequences, it can’t be that much worse than letting Republicans bring Congress to a grinding halt for the sake of protecting a procedural trick.
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To wit: the “Worst People” Problem.
On the post: Chicago Court Gets Its Prior Restraint On, Tells Police Union Head To STFU About City's Vaccine Mandate
Understanding it and condoning it are two different things. You’re out here condoning what was literally a protest(-turned-riot) against American democracy itself.
Same reason they don’t generally support voter ID laws: They don’t want to shut out people who may not have the documents required to obtain such an ID.
Then you are okay with it.
You nuke it now, and in 2022, Democrats can pass laws that strengthen queer rights—including trans rights—without Republicans being able to do a goddamn thing about it. If anything, that’s exactly what the Dems should do: Nuke the filibuster, pass everything they want to pass (including stuff that will help people who didn’t vote for the Democrats!), then dare the GOP to undo it when they get power again. The GOP wants to have the worst positions possible on everything without actually owning those positions via Congressional votes—so I say the Dems should absolutely make them own those positions on the record.
Besides, if Republicans get control of the Senate in 2022, they’re going to keep filibustering and obstructing anyway—just with a majority this time, as they did in the Obama years. Are you okay with Biden routing around Congress via executive action as Obama (and Trump!) had to do?
Without a veto-proof majority, none of that will matter unless the Republicans can hold onto control of the Senate until the next Republican president takes office.
And as I said, Republicans used the filibuster just last week to stifle debate on a voting rights bill. Whatever you think the filibuster was meant to protect, it isn’t being used that way any more. I’m willing to risk the consequences of nuking the filibuster if doing that means Mitch McConnell loses the power to stop bills from even being brought to the Senate floor.
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