TrickstaPriest

15 minutes ago, Tom said:

My favorite part of US politics.

 

The two primary parties spend so much time and energy trying to control some aspect of somebody else's life, mostly, it seems, as a means of ensuring their own positions.

 

 

pretty sure abortion is still fully illegal in AZ right now.  I pity all the women who have to use period tracker apps or go to the doctors for... any reason, and might have their conditions reported on to the government 😕

4 minutes ago, Lord Liaden said:

I've read that it's common practice for political parties to concentrate their campaigning resources on regions/races they think they have a shot at winning. In the case of Florida I believe that's short-sighted. DeSantis has very dangerous long-term plans. Even if he wins in Florida, his opponent making a strong showing would undercut those plans.

Yeah, my thought as well.  This isn't a situation where 'business as usual' tactics apply...

2 hours ago, Pariah said:

 

Because of course she did: "Congratulations to Giorgio Meloni and to the people of Italy," [Marjorie Taylor] Greene wrote on Twitter, misspelling the right-wing leader's first name.

 

And the reason they're celebrating is because their team won. Or maybe because the other team lost. Remember that bit in The Rise of Skywalker when General Hux says "I don't care if you win. I just need Kylo Ren to lose"? The GQP is a lot like that these days. As long as someone is beating The Woke Left™, they don't care how awful that someone may be. In fact, they'll embrace that someone as a comrade in arms and a blood brother and then viciously scream "INTOLERANCE!" at anyone who dares point out that they're openly allying themselves with actual Fascists.

Literally the 'pebble in your shoe'.  I run into this so much that it's distressing - the 'reaching out to disaffected young men' to create an abusive anti-woman political community is brutally effective on them.   It's the one thing they have in common with extreme religious groups.  It's how they seized 'the gamer' vote, building that bridge.  And it's why the GOP was so tolerant of Trump's misogyny.  It's literally their political rally point.

Yeah.  But there's still no political interest in doing anything about it.

Japan is being hit by a typhoon as well, the fourth biggest in a hundred and seventy years.  It may run the entire length of the island chain.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qmEpa_4gb88

warning: Distressing themes and tucker carlson

Just now, Sociotard said:

Wow. I thought Arizona was a bit more purple.

The legislature doesn't care

Arizona just set forth a total and complete ban on abortion with a vague 'health of mother' exception.  Still waiting to hear how this affects contraception.

NARA apparently is a radical leftist group now that's hiding documents being sent there.

1 hour ago, Starlord said:

Kind of wild, isn't it.

The money changing hands in the Trump family is something like 100 fold of what Biden/Hunter is accused of.  Even cutting out the genuine fake news about Trump, the amount of actual things he's confirmed to have done is easily 10 fold the possible harm of what Biden is being accused of doing.

The only way people can get away with this is under-valuing the possible damage of a mob attempting to seize the capitol building (or stealing government secrets) and equivocating BLM rioting (and there was at least some rioting) to it.  That equivocation seems easy if you just evaluate damage across an entire country over months to a single event at a defended stone building that can't burn.  

Except the stated goal of the protests wouldn't, you know, completely seize control of the entire country.  The stated goal of stealing government secrets or of getting a 2 BILLION dollar Saudi deal is on another scale compared to trying to sell government influence for your dad (edit: for less than 1% of that saudi deal).

It's actually nuts when you look at the point of doing any of those things.  The George Floyd protest was incomparable because it was a half-year long, country-wide (nearly world-wide) protest with the stated goal of stopping police violence on ethnic groups.

What was the goal of seizing the capitol building again?

Oh, right.

When we talk about 'good' and 'evil', we actually care about motives and goals in this country.  Or at least we thought we did.

edit:  And to be clear, we also look at scale and degree of harm caused in deciding how dangerous that 'evil' is.

1 hour ago, unclevlad said:

--the bigger problem is a concerted effort to distort the voting process at its very source...the polling places.  By bringing in poll workers.  Training them to challenge voters *extensively*, to create the perception that widespread voter fraud *is* happening...when the fraud is being performed by the poll workers.  And this is targetable...election results are tallied at the precinct level, so you challenge in heavily Democratic precincts.  There's never been evidence of widespread fraud...so, well, heck, we can't have that, so let's CREATE THE EVIDENCE.  Oh, and of course, it's in all these Democratic districts.  

Yeah, which is going to create more unrest like Jan 6th even if they fail to accomplish their goal 😕

Exactly.  The PAC system is a huge issue.  A huge, billion-dollar problem now...

I can't really weigh in on the gun debate, other than that other countries do indeed function better in that regard.

I do know that any solution has to take into account the current context of guns and violence (and poverty) in our society, and how things are looking in the near future.

It's pretty scary to me that just about every thing I was going to yell at my local friends about Trump effectively came true.  I was well fed up after the coronavirus, but held back for the sake of friends.

I had a whole litany of rants from "Trump has his claws into his base and there's no way in hell he's letting go" to "just the crapshow of him spreading conspiracy -before- the 2020 election was going to make every election in the future become a stupid mess".  We'll just have to see how bad it gets...

I was so not surprised when it pivoted to lizard people

"I may get blocked for this" is pretty typical primer from bots and other weird crap to self-justify

Warning for language.

On 8/15/2022 at 4:33 AM, Tom said:

That bridge is burned. It’s long past time to put up or shut up. 

On 8/13/2022 at 6:45 AM, MrWolf said:

However, what I was trying to say was more along the lines of "A former President or his employees taking TS/SCI documents and storing them at his house in a locked room instead of in a SCIF" is a really really big deal.

My concern with ignoring this event, or pardoning it, is that Trump was holding this information at the same time as Kushner got a 2 billion investment from Saudi Arabia... and then Trump was paid 100 million to host that golfing tournament.

May be a coincidence.  May be cover for transference of documents.  Take your pick.

There's genuine concern that this isn't justified... or poorly 'marketed'.  The Dem party has been nothing if not terrible at messaging sometimes.

So all I can do is wait and see.

26 minutes ago, Iuz the Evil said:

Good. I am very hopeful this will be something devastating and worthy of the FBI searching the residence of a former POTUS for the first time in American history. It needs to be, for a lot of reasons.

One of the interpretations has been that the Fed has been requesting a return of the documents he took to Mar-a-Lago for months... and he just straight-up refused to return them.

https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2022/08/the-rights-rising-authoritarian-ally-viktor-orban/671059/

Just now, Cygnia said:

Maybe Unicorn Riot will do it...

There's a lot of potentially valuable resources out there.  A place where people can go through that, for example the open resources on Alex Jones' case, is super helpful.

You don't have to present the resources unchallenged, but having the originals there, plus additional commentary, all in a place where people can visit and find compiled information on?  Much of it doesn't have to be hosted directly, just linking external resources with local backups if needed.

7 minutes ago, Simon said:

So far (from what I understand) J6C, DOJ, and Jones' ex-wife are all seeking to attain the phone records....and I don't think there's anything keeping the parents' lawyers from delivering.

So much of what's been happening makes me want to host any of these records that go public.  But man, I don't need that legal fracas.

Ted Cruz, et al, have been going after gay rights as well.  So not only have their intent/policies have been disastrous for the survival of our species, but they've been politically winning the will of the people despite this and while continuing to target vast swaths of the population with explicitly harmful laws?

:/

9 minutes ago, Lawnmower Boy said:

https://www.aol.com/news/flooding-central-appalachia-kills-least-032600943-133954575.html

 

I increasingly don't get it: "We are the party that supports minimising this stuff and not doing anything about it as it keeps happening and gets worse and worse." How is this a viable political position going forward?

That would be a betrayal of the hate that Fox and Hannity and so on have been putting in them, even though many people will still feel 'they are nice enough'.  But the best thing we can do is be kind and helpful to the people who are being devastated by this stuff.  We can't be 'higher than thou' - we could have been fooled in the right circumstances ourselves.