#Republicans want murder of political opponents to be okay

[scottguy]

According to Trump a president could murder fellow Americans.

Real possible scenario if this had been true...

Trump, under his preposterous theory, could have had a SEAL team assassinate John MCain as the final vote stopping him from ending Obamacare.

Then, because a Republican Senate would have refused to convict Trump after impeachment because they just don't give a damn about justice.

Trump would still be in power and could never could be sent to jail for cold-blooded, politically calculated MURDER.

Americans would have lost healthcare because the president could have LITERALLY gotten away with murder just to enrich health insurance corporations at the expense of the American people.

Murder, JUST to overcome the vote of ONE man who had sufficient conscience to care for the health of Americans in both parties.

In Trump's America, if you have a conscience, you're a legitimate target for murder.

If that's okay then...

Next, as Democrats we'll order ALL Republicans murdered because they're fascist pieces of sh*t who are detached from reality and want to be Nazis. No more voting. All the Republicans would be dead! Democrats win forever! There's a lot of months until November!

Hey, it's the president acting *officially*! So that would make it okay! (According to Trump & his lawless lawyers.)

This is the America you want?

THAT is the world Trump and his have us live in if we lived by his sociopathic and utterly amoral state of mind.

Imagine, right-wingers, any power you wish YOUR party could have will ALSO be legitimate for the OTHER party. 😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱

Sociopathic right-wingers want NO LAWS for themselves but plenty of laws for EVERYONE else. 🙄

That's not justice, it's tyranny.

[thoughtshobbiesdaydreams]

Kamala ran a bad campaign; blame HER

I don't know if trump is gonna win. It doesn't look good, but maybe it's gonna be better as ballots continue to be counted. I hate donald trump. Ever since I learned who he was, I've hated him. He's everything I despise in a human being, he's among the worst human beings in existence; he's evil, selfish, corrupt, arrogant, entitled, immature, racist, bigoted, a rapist, a pedophile, a fascist, a Nazi... in HIS words, he's admitted to all of those things in one place or another. I hate him, he's dangerous, he's unfit, the people who SUPPORT him are unfit... Which is why it was so important that whoever ran against him ran a good campaign. Spoke out in a way to energize people to vote for him or her, spoke out in a way to EARN our votes:

raise minimum wage

vow to go after abuses of power, not after the poor desperately trying to get by

speak out about what "Defund the Police" means, and talk about how you want to fund projects that will help US citizens; talk about how much police leaches tax dollars away from every other service; talk about how dangerous cops are because of how they abuse power, ie qualified immunity (breaking the law due to ignorance, or feigned ignorance) and civil forfeiture (stealing)

speak out against Israel's genocide of Palestinians

just actually show us you care about helping US citizens, not just yourself, that you want to use power to help US citizens, for instance, talk about how you will use your powers to pardon countless people in jail for crimes they obviously didn't commit, or for breaking laws that are unjust

talk about how the Supreme Court is deeply corrupt AND YOU PLAN TO DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT

We all wanted trump to lose, we wanted whoever was trump's opponent to FIGHT to beat him. We gave Kamala the blueprint in how to earn our votes, we BEGGED her to use it. And she didn't. She was lazy, power-hungry, selfish... she wanted power only for herself. She decided she would rather lose than win by promising improvements she had no intention of fighting for. She decided to try to win by trying to steal voters away from trump rather than appealing to the vast majority of the country -

(literally every poll that pits "liberal" policies against "conservative" has liberal policies being overwhelmingly more popular. Kamala decided to back Biden instead; Biden, the "civil trump" who continues to enable Israel's genocide while saying "hey... okay, here's more weapons, but THIS TIME don't murder journalists, children, civilians, THIS TIME don't use human shields, THIS TIME don't use dogs to rape Palestinian prisoners", who continues trump's border policies, who continues to hold up the deeply corrupt Supreme Court as an institute worthy of respect, who tells us that "violence isn't the answer" only when it's peaceful protesters speaking out against genocide, or police violence, or the Supreme Court, but doesn't say a fucking PEEP when the police murder people, or the Supreme Court enacts harmful policies; he, and Kamala, only think it's "violence" when it makes those in power uncomfortable, not when it's harmful and damaging to those not in politics, those who don't have politicians in their pockets.)

then she crowed about how many Republican politicians supported her over trump, pieces of shit like Dick Cheney, as if earning Dick Cheney's vote was something worth celebrating! It's not over yet, maybe there's a path to trump losing, but right now? I'm fucking angry at Kamala for trying to win on vibes, for being lazy and complacent, for not actively trying to win by appealing to the vast majority of Americans, by vowing to be a President for US citizens instead of corporations... but no, she thought continuing to do things as they'd always been done would be enough. And if not... she doesn't fucking care. SHE will be just fine. So I DO NOT want to fucking hear people complaining about how those of us who BEGGED Kamala to adopt popular policies, who BEGGED Kamala to fight for those who need help, who BEGGED Kamala to fight to beat trump, are the problem. We desperately wanted trump to lose, and we were very vocal about how we feared Kamala's approach wouldn't beat him, and we very vocally spoke about how she COULD beat him... she ignored us, and now we're fucking angry. Not happy, not self-satisfied, fucking ANGRY. Because we saw this coming and desperately tried to prevent it. Don't be mad at us for wanting Kamala to win, and being angry at her for ignoring our pleas; it's Kamala's fault. SHE chose not to earn enough votes, SHE decided peeling off a few Republican voters would be enough, SHE decided she didn't need to appeal to the majority of Americans with popular policies. I'm so fucking tired of these "vote Blue no matter who" people for telling us to fuck off while we told her she should try to earn votes, and who are now angry at us because they pretend that we are happy to be proven right. We didn't want her to lose; if we did, then why did we loudly and frequently give her advice about how she could easily earn votes and energize voters? It's not OUR fault that, when we begged her to try to win the election, she ignored us.

Remember how she said she'd put a "Republican" in her cabinet??? Remember how she prioritized having the "Most lethal fighting force in the world"??? Maybe her priorities are absolutely FUCKED and her loss is HER fault???

[somethingusefulfromflorida]

I understand that the solution to political corruption isn't "political corruption, but for our side this time," but I'm surprised that that has never been weaponized by our side before. Their side packs courts and rigs juries to throw political opponents in jail, or they simply send armed goons to mow them down and have the courts decide that it's okay for armed goons to do that, but our side never fights dirty like they do. The Department of Justice has infinite resources at its disposal and could theoretically lock anyone it wants in a dark hole for the rest of their miserable lives "without the right of correspondance," but it never goes after big fish, only easy minnows. If and when Republicans take back power, do you think they're gonna show restraint? People were getting blackbagged into windowless vans in 2020! We are a few years away from "free helicopter rides," and the people with the power to prevent that from happening are afraid to do anything, lest they invite retaliation later. Our side doesn't want to throw its weight around, but their side will not hesitate to crush us like fucking bugs.

It is so easy for the powers that be to destroy the lives of normal people, but they never destroy the lives of the higher ups. The masses live in fear, while the few sit back and relax because they know they're untouchable. They violate and strip away our rights like they're nothing, but they never do that to anyone important. The upper classes are completely insulated, protected from the repercussions of their own actions. Look at today's Supreme Court ruling; they decided that the 4th Amendment doesn't apply within 100 miles of a border or coast. The feds can break into your home to search and seize whatever they want, because 6 rightwing nutjobs decided that living within 100 miles of an entrance into the country counts as probable cause. 60% of the country lives in that strip, including the entire state of Florida, most of California, and a large swathe of Texas, but do you think anyone who deserves to be raided will be, or do you think they'll use it as an excuse to go after more minnows? Feds could raid Mar-a-lago TODAY, but they never will because they ultimately don't want to. And let's not forget Breonna Taylor, where conservatives agreed that cops can just kill anyone they want with no repercussions as long as they claim it was an accident after the fact; "we broke into the wrong house and murdered an innocent woman, but we can't be punished because we totally didn't mean to do it. It was nobody's fault! Shit happens." How many more innocent people are going to have their homes ransacked and get murdered because it's not illegal unless you can prove what the gunman was thinking? How many activists will be gunned down by cops who can hide behind the bulletproof excuse of "whoops, wrong address?" It'll never happen to a guilty person. No cops will ever storm a governor's mansion or a congressman's beach house. No senators will ever have their necks knelt on. No billionaire sex traffickers or their clients will ever have their rights violated (except when it threatens to reveal information on another billionaire; Epstein didn't kill himself).

No white guys have ever been sentenced to death by an all black jury.

Justice is a myth.

I'm so tired.

[anexplanationofunfortunateevents]

supreme dysfunction

A lot of the politics around the Supreme Court has a kind of soft-focus, sepia-toned Before Times deceptiveness about it. The obfuscation is as thick and persistent as it is because the situation is extremely simple. Several decades ago, Republicans realized they could not win fair and square, so they put a lot of institutional focus and an obscene amount of money into rigging the courts. Cheating is the secret sauce. I realize that’s not a satisfying explanation for years of political dysfunction, but it is what it is.

And yet here we are, six weeks from Election Day, facing the prospect of a Trump-brand replacement for the irreplaceable Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

What you need to do is keep your head for the next few weeks. If that means putting this out of your mind as soon as possible, fine. All you need to know is that anyone this criminal would nominate to the court will be a disaster and anyone who would accept a nomination under these circumstances is wildly unfit to judge a dog and pony show. Republicans really did tell loud and insulting lies all throughout 2016 about why they wouldn’t confirm the replacement for a Supreme Court justice who passed away nearly a year before an election, and they really are out here now mocking the idea that anyone might have had to pretend to believe them then. They will probably succeed in pushing through a sentient garbage fire before the election, but we have to try to make it hurt. All you need to do is call your senators and tell them to honor Justice Ginsburg’s wish by refusing to confirm anyone Trump nominates. Either you’ll hear that they’re trying to do the right thing, which might make you feel better, or you’ll get an opportunity to call a Republican a fascist pig, which always makes me feel better.

If you are going to be following this farce, out of interest or because you can’t block it out, let me help you prepare for some of the bullshit that’s coming at you.

One of the foundational assumptions commentators make is that Democrats don’t “care” about the courts in the way Republicans do. Whenever you hit that assumption, think of this article:

Hillary Clinton Just Delivered the Strongest Speech of Her Campaign—and the Media Barely Noticed

Madison, Wisconsin—Hillary Clinton delivered the strongest speech of her 2016 campaign in Wisconsin this week, and the media barely noticed.

At the time (March 31, 2016) this article was just one of the many passive-aggressive subtweets from responsible commentators that their colleagues were ignoring policy for spectacle. After 2016, when Clinton’s supposed failure to go to Wisconsin has been waved like a talisman against any retrospective concern about whether the presidential election was even free (questionable) and fair (definitely not), it’s the fact that the press ignored a campaign event in Wisconsin which gives it that twist of dramatic irony. But it is also relevant because Clinton’s speech was about why anyone who truly cares about a progressive agenda must prioritize the federal courts as an issue. Since then, the press – who were called out AT THE TIME for ignoring substance generally and this speech specifically – have settled on “Republicans have seized the federal courts because Democrats don’t talk about the courts” as their new just-so rationalization for Moscow Mitch’s latest crime against democracy.

It’s bad enough that influential commentators ignore the substance of Democratic campaigns in favor of airing Trump’s empty podium and then use their own failures as an excuse to lie about whether or not Democratic politicians talk about the courts or any other issue. But the reality is even worse: in 2016 the Democratic candidate gave a brutally prescient speech about the courts, and our blue-check betters collectively decided to lie about WHETHER SHE WAS EVEN PRESENT AT HER OWN SPEECH. Then they used that lie to derail any chance of accountability for the MULTIPLE CRIMINAL CONSPIRACIES her opponent’s campaign committed, or even the slightest hint that they probably shouldn’t have allowed an autocratic regime that regularly murders actual journalists to be their assignment editor at the most important moment of their careers. “I wouldn’t have spent four months helping Russian intelligence dox Clinton campaign employees if only they’d gone to Wisconsin!” is a thing you can say without losing an ounce of standing in the pundit-industrial complex; of course lying about Democratic campaign messaging on the justice system carries even less of a penalty.

I’m ranting a little because RBG deserved to live three hundred years and these gaslighting bootlickers deserved to be flayed alive, boiled in oil, and fed to rabid vampire squirrels. But I also think people should absorb my point about just how rotten the information environment is. There is every political incentive for Democrats not to bother talking about they courts. They do it anyway because they know it’s important.

That terrible information environment has the predictable consequence of misinforming people. Even if you are trying to encourage people to act on this issue because you sincerely care about it, you end up saying ridiculous things sometimes.

Senate Democrats could have stopped Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation by sacrificing a virgin basilisk under a harvest moon to summon the wrath of the Old Ones, but they didn’t even try!

This is, to put it kindly, rewriting history. Senate Democrats made a herculean effort against Kavanaugh. Even before Christine Blasey Ford’s and Deborah Ramirez’s stories came out, Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee made the best case possible for the Senate to reject his confirmation.* After Dr. Ford was outed against her wishes, Democrats used every tool they had to force as much of an investigation as they could get, which drew maximum blood from Republicans, who were always going to do the wrong thing no matter what. Because Democrats did the work, voters got the point in the 2018 midterms. The Kavanaugh spectacle kept Republicans from gaining too much ground in the Senate in a year they should have cleaned up, and it radicalized the educated suburban voters who gave Democrats an unprecedented victory in the House.

None of this worked because Senate Democrats are in the minority, but they did try everything they could possibly have done. It’s true that they did not invent time travel and go back to re-run the 2014 midterms or rewrite the laws of mathematics to make 48 more than 52, because those things are impossible.

When people do the thing you supposedly want them to do, and you respond by stubbornly insisting they never did it, you’re not motivating them to do a better job. You’re telling them they should ignore you because you don’t actually care what they do.

I’m using this tweet as an example of a problem I see a lot, but my point isn’t to dunk too hard on this rando. We’re all a little emotional right now and who amongst us has never responded to stress by being Wrong Online; more importantly, it’s not entirely this person’s fault that they’re misinformed. You’re not supposed to have to be a huge nerd that actually watches Senate committee hearings! You’re supposed to be able to rely on the news to give you a reliable idea of what’s happening!! That’s literally their job!!!

AAAArgh. Okay. I’m back.

So. Okay. There are pervasive failings in news coverage of the politics around the federal courts, which leads to a lot of silly misunderstandings in the public more generally. Even if you work your way through all that nonsense and get to a reasonable understanding, you will find a fairly persistent asymmetry. The Republican establishment really does put a wildly disproportionate amount of effort into building conservative movement infrastructure for right wing lawyers and judges, and until recently, Republican voters really were much more likely than Democratic voters to tell pollsters that they were highly motivated by judicial nominations. Taking these things on face value and saying “oh, well, Republicans care more about the courts” obscures some really important, though disturbing, underlying dynamics.

The professional and intellectual ecosystem behind the conservative legal establishment is one of those situations where you really have to apply the Trunchbull principle. There really are millions and millions of dollars pumped into think tanks which invent bizarre excuses for radical right-wing subversion of the public interest by judicial fiat, extravagant “retreats” where sitting judges are alternatively pampered and bombarded with the resulting propaganda, and clubs which indoctrinate young conservative law students and vet them for career advancement based on their fealty to right-wing dogma. Describing what the Republican establishment is doing sounds fevered, conspiratorial hyperbole. I wish it were! If you don’t want to take my word for it – and I really wouldn’t blame you – you can get a lot of gory details from Vox.com’s courts and justice editor Ian Millhiser and Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI).

Senator Whitehouse’s main thesis is that these radical right-wing interests understand that a hostile takeover of the federal judiciary is in their financial interests, and that’s definitely sufficient to explain it. My personal sense is that there’s a second, even more unsettling, dimension to this. Article III of the Constitution deliberately insulates the federal judiciary from political pressure as much as possible. Another way of saying that, of course, is that the federal judiciary is removed from democratic accountability. I don’t think it’s just that the economic policies they want are unpopular. I think the investment in this judicial takeover project is motivated in part by the American right wing’s dark authoritarian streak. They value the judiciary because it’s the most leverage they can get against the electorate. “Judges!” is anti-democratic and that’s why they like it. It’s not just that they want things the voters don’t want so they have to get creative; it’s that they resent the voters for even having the ability to get in their way.

It’s not just the dedication to getting judges they agree with on the courts. It’s also the degree to which they expect those judges to humiliate themselves. They’ve had ten years and roughly the GDP of a small country at their disposal to come up with a challenge to the Affordable Care Act which did not sound like unhinged gibberish. Instead, they came up with the legal equivalent of a drunk guy trying to write a sonnet in Dothraki with a yellow crayon. (Actually that might be an improvement, so NOBODY TELL THEM ABOUT DRUNK DOTHRAKI CRAYON SONNET GUY.) It’s such a stinker that you hav to wonder if it isn’t the same phenomenon as what drives Trump and other autocrats to tell such blatant and ridiculous lies: it’s a power trip that shows off how they don’t even have to care about what “is true” or “makes sense,” because fuck you, that’s why. So what if an overwhelming majority of the American people have successfully convinced their elected representatives that health care costs were too much of a driver of economic inequality and limits on that are a good thing? We can still wreck it, because [*long fart noise*].

And if you listen to what Republicans say about the Supreme Court with that in mind, it starts to make a lot more sense. Under cover of mainstream apathy or even approval, the court gives conservatives unearned victory after unearned victory. If you’re a conservative, you’ll want to avoid killing that golden goose by making the court’s bias toward you completely undeniable. But if you’re a fascist, your priority is getting the court to commit. Any concession to truth or democracy, even if it’s just lip service, seems like a crack in the wall that your enemies can exploit, because it is.** As funny as it is to watch their little Pravda knockoff cry about John Roberts, Leftist Judas, this is what they mean: sometimes he tries to preserve the fiction that he hasn’t turned the Supreme Court into an arm of the radical right, which means they don’t win 100% of what they want immediately. Even Neil Gorsuch – hack, sadist, full-time Mayor Wilkins impersonator – can actually be cajoled into doing the right thing occasionally by lawyers who can craft an argument that fits into his crimped, cherry-picked definition of logic.

Like I said. Dark. I don’t want to overwhelm and discourage you. I think their absolutism and desperation is because even they know the victories they’ve won can slip away fast. But deluding ourselves hasn’t been constructive.

For their part, rank-and-file Republicans say they care about the courts. Fine. Republicans say a lot of things. They don’t think saying true things is important; if they did, they wouldn’t be Trump voters. Years before Trump, Republican voters learned how to give reporters and pollsters certain buzzwords to make their worst views sound more palatable. People are starting to grasp this with the “pro-life” white evangelicals who say they care about abortion on religious grounds. They support Trump as strongly as ever, despite the babies in cages, forced hysterectomies, and hundreds of thousands of COVID-19 deaths proving that neither he nor his party are in any way “pro-life.” It’s because “abortion” is the way they can get away with saying they support white patriarchy. Trump isn’t their guy despite his sleaziness, it’s because “grab ‘em by the pussy” has always been their actual preferred policy. “Law and order” is their dogwhistle for anti-Black racism. “Immigration” is the world they use when they mean they want more racism generally; pre-Obama, the preferred code phrase was “national security” but we’ve all seen how much of a shit they give about that.

As code words go, “judges” is less direct. Some commentators who try to parse it say it’s really about Roe v. Wade, but as we just went over, they don’t actually give a shit about that either. For some of them, “judges” is a sufficiently abstract rationalization for supporting Republicans when they know it is morally indefensible. This was probably a more pronounced issue than usual in 2016, both because it was so much harder to defend a vote for Trump and because of his inconvenient habit of giving the game away on the usual shibboleths. For others, “judges” represents the same thing it does for Republican elites.

I don’t know how conscious any of this is. I’m sure plenty of them have convinced themselves of whatever rationalization they give. Because we’re pretty good at fooling ourselves, what people say in opinion polls doesn’t necessarily tell us more than what they do when they’re not being prompted by pollsters. When Justice Scalia died four years ago, you didn’t thousands of people coming out to grieve for days on end. Little kids don’t dress up on Halloween as Chief Justice Roberts. RBG didn’t inspire that devotion by being a warm and gracious soul, although by all accounts she was. Liberals and progressives developed our sincere admiration of her because of her work on the bench. That is to say, Democratic voters care a great deal about the court. We just have to get our act together and do something about it.

The bad news is that winning in November is going to be the easy part. The good news is, we are getting organized behind some reforms that have been needed for many years. It’s not just Extremely Online progressives who are pushing for this. Even cool-headed institutionalist Democrats are openly advocating radical action. Democratic leadership are unlikely to get too specific right now – and they probably shouldn’t – but if voters do our job in November, some big and important changes are on the table.

*Footnoted because it isn’t really relevant, but Senate Democrats flawlessly executed a precise and coordinated strategy against Kavanaugh. The first few members to question Kavanaugh each focused on a specific issue tailor-made to give one or two of their Republican colleagues a reason to do the right thing. Then, boom, sucker-punch, Cory Booker started releasing the embarrassing emails Republicans were abusing committee rules to hide. Then, bam, left hook, Kamala Harris tripped him up by making him try to deny having been asked for assurances on the Mueller investigation. They did a great job, which everyone forgot about when someone threw Dr. Ford to the wolves.

**This is also a big part of why conservatives feel so instinctively victimized by the existence of a “liberal media” no matter how hard the political press bends over backwards to pound both thumbs on the scale for them. A free press actually is necessary for the functioning of the whole post-Enlightenment idea that people should have some say in how they are governed. If you’re an authoritarian who genuinely does feel that might makes right, then a somewhat functioning news media does at least pose a hypothetical threat to your power and even your worldview.

[kob131]

https://dudeblade.tumblr.com/post/614400525499252736/what-if-trump-decides-to-save-republicans-but-not

It is shocking to see just how low the Trump Administration has brought American democracy in a few short years. Holding aid to an ally to invent dirt on a Democratic opponent was alarming enough to force the hand of Democratic leaders to impeach the president, even though it was clear they didn’t actually want to. And conservative policy has always been generally hostile to the lives, health, and voting rights of people it doesn’t consider part of the Republican coalition.

You know, because it’s okay to have a politician get away with something the other guy is supposedly getting IMPEACHED for (and I say supposed because Russia was cited a fuck ton during the impeachment. You know, the country the UKRAINE OPPOSES) because he has a D next to his name.

And you wanna try selling that ‘conservative policy is hostile to non conservatives’ horseshit when you aren’t surrounded by people who are hostile to conservatives and anyone NOT far left while the conservatives are the only ones with STANDARDS?

But the prospect of an American president using vital resources in a pandemic to curry political favor, keep his supporters alive and let his opponents die in the thousands is something unprecedented in all of American history.

You know, except for MOST PRESIDENTS. Aand is also unproven since there are NO SOURCES in the article to back this shit up.

With all due respect to the reporters who worked hard on this story-

All 0 of them because the only sources in the entire article cite THE FUCKING SAME SITE, something no reporter would do out of fear of being laughed out of the field.

the phrase “they do not appear to follow discernible political or geographic lines” seems comically wrong. Massachusetts, Maine, and Colorado are blue states getting severely shafted. Florida is a swing state that leans red, and it is getting everything it asks for and more. If these figures are part of a larger pattern, it looks very much like political favor currying for some, and vindictive neglect for others

Yeah yeah Nixon, keep telling us about all that proof on that blank sheet of paper of yours.

It looks especially bad in light of the days-long campaign of not-so-subtle extortion of Democratic governors to praise Trump more and take more of the blame themselves if they want their citizens to receive direly needed medical supplies from the same federal government that is outbidding them. 

Ah yes, like all those nasty republicians....not taking their vacations to draft a bill to help the American people...and then Nancy Pelosi stopped it....held the aid hostage...until she could extort unpopular bills in exchange for the lives of the people she is suppose to represent....

... Ah shit, reality got in the way. Better gouge out them eyeballs and fall deeper down the rabbit hole huh?

The president’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani even went on Fox News to tell infuriated governors that they should “Take the blame when you have to … when you play with your boss, sometimes it’s better when you don’t win the golf game. He’s the boss, he’s got all the resources.”

You know, citing a NOTHING TWITTER ACCOUNT CITING AN OUT OF CONTEXT CLIP WITH NO SOURCE.

We don’t even know what was said BEFORE HAND.

Right now, Republicans are less concerned about coronavirus than Democrats because the virus is mostly impacting urban areas so far. Many Democrats have been expecting that once red states and rural areas start feeling the heat of the pandemic, the conservative movement and the White House will start to take matters more seriously and the ground will shift.

Sorry, we don’t listen to people without eyeballs.

Because the Republicans didn’t stop a bill from helping the US citizens, the Democrats did. The Republicians didn’t hold us hostage to get unwanted bills passed, the Democrats did. The Republicians didn’t risk lives, YOUR FUCKING PARTY DID.

Go eat shit.

So what did Dudeblade say?

Easy! We start corralling republicans into the camps that they praised, and gun them down with the same guns that they were willing to let the children die to protect.

Ah yes, because when someone lies through their teeth: we kill the victims right?

Oh wait, this is coming from the same guy who says minorities who vote for Trump are brainwashed and thus can’t possibly have free will and must be wrong while being a horrendous shit,

Tell me Dudeblade, how many of those children were shot in gun free zones because a mediated murderer won’t give a fuck about gun laws and no one could stop the shooter?

How many of those camps were under Obama, the man you defend as Jesus even as it’s proven HE started most of the shit Trump gets berated for?

How much would you give a shit if those kids were from Covington Catholic, even though those kids were victims of racial attacks themselves?

How much would you actually care if those kids liked Trump?

How much would you care if the virus WAS affecting rural areas or would you clap for joy because you revel in the pain and misery of people who disagree with you?

I’ve said it once and I’ll say it again, you are a FAR worse person than I am. And considering how deeply disturbed I am: that is saying a fucking lot huh?

You disgust me Dudeblade. And the fact that you hate me so much pretty much informs me that I have some kind of redeemable quality. Because being hated by someone who barely even ACTS HUMAN ANYMORE is a compliment.

Oh by the way, I see that new tag. “Conservatives shouldn’t be allowed to live in peace.” Can't wait for a time machine to appear so I can dumb your ass in Nazi Germany and FORCE you to get some damn perspective.

[musingsofmaniacs]

The Battle for Our Souls

The biggest casualty of strongmen getting elected that not a lot of people talk or think about, because as Trevor Noah puts ‘Ain’t Nobody Has Time for That’, is the social and personal psyche. There are always two ways to win over, rule or lead people. One is to unite them. To appeal to the similarity, to remind them that there are far more things that unite us than divide us. This is difficult, because humans are evolutionarily primed to focus on the contrasts. Woody Allen once said that if only two people remain on earth after rest of humanity has destroyed itself, the left-handed guy will take on the right handed one. Uniting people is slow painful task where success comes in excruciating increments, where for every one step forward, one risks sliding two back.

Or you could just divide people into tribes that hate each other's guts and make sure your tribe votes harder than theirs. This divide-and-rule strategy is as old as humanity itself, though the motto (divide et impera) is attributed to Philip II of Macedonia. Machiavelli called it an effective strategy to weaken enemies. ��British used it in India and advanced into the subcontinent at an astounding pace. And Donald Trump used it to propel himself from a joke candidate to a joke President, only it’s not so funny this time.

Trump has succeeded so well in doing this, that his statement about shooting someone at 5th Avenue in New York and getting away with it seems horrifyingly accurate. In Trump’s tribe, The Man can do no wrong, and any evidence against him make people question the facts themselves. As Trump progresses in office, he keeps alienating his opponents more and more, while his base gets consolidated and strengthened by the day. At this rate 2020 will be less of a battle of ideals and issues and more of a ‘Might-is-Right’ contest between two group.

There was an article in The Economist on how moderates have become an extinct species. Moderate voices will always become a casualty when the discourse takes sharp turn towards ideological extremes. The Republican Party has effectively cannibalised voices with veneer of sanity, and replaced them with gun-toting-Bible-thumping-sons-of-soil; where they would rather vote in a peadophile with tribe loyalty than a moderate critical thinking maverick.

Technology was once a great uniter. It helped the cause of democracy with Arab Spring, India’s Anti-Corruption movement, Net Neutrality and so much more. We elevated the Techpreneurs to messianic figures proclaiming the gospel of hyper-connectedness and outreach. Today, we have to an extent confronted the damage these glorified advertising corporations and their tools can inflict on the state of the nation. The Cambridge Analytica scandal has cast Mark as the villian. The fact remains though that it is foolish of us to feign shock over what we always suspected, and in fact knew, these Ad-holes were up to, and that we would gladly give up privacy for the convenience of sharing a selfie of us with our breakfasts.

The mechanism employed to delegitimise the opponent is straight out of Joseph Goebbels playbook. By constantly referring to your opponents with an unkind adjective, like ‘Crooked Hillary’, ‘Low-Energy Jeb’, ‘Lying Ted’, he is making sure these people are dehumanised and reviled by his support base. Constantly badgering people with lies like election fraud, wiretapping, ‘witch hunt’ and crowd size makes the fan base buy into the idea of widespread conspiracy. Hell, Trump has even thrown FBI into jeopardy to increase his support among his base.

The ruling party in India has adopted a similar strategy to delegitimise opposition, with its highly effective social media machinery belting out catchphrases and blurbs like ‘Pappu’ and aggressively sharing memes about how great their Exalted Highness is. The discourse has descended into primitive tribalism so badly, that the supporters are finding it difficult to see any wrong in the rape of an eight year old girl. Systematic, some subtle and some not so subtle, efforts to equate loyalty and blind Nationalism to patriotism is underway. Party spokespersons ask us to be grateful that people are not jailed for speaking out against the government. Leaders bayed for arrest of the family after a man was lynched for alleged possession of beef, conveniently ignoring the brutal mob justice part or even describing the mob as innocent! That the most populous state in the country is now ruled by a fanatic whose government does not regard Taj Mahal as a monument worthy of endorsement. School textbooks are being tweaked to suit the ideology of the ruling party, extolling the virtues of debatable schemes rolled out by the government and disregarding achievements of previous governments.

That’s all OK, but what’s it got to do with you and me?

Image Courtesy: FunEcho, YouTube

Valid question. That takes us to where we started. Let’s begin with Trump. Everytime the POTUS tweets, that becomes the news. Trump is keenly aware of this. And he was a reality TV star. So he keeps peppering them with generous doses of outrageous statements. Martin Scorsese used a similar trick to get Taxi Driver approved with R rating with its bloody scenes. MPAA wanted to give the film an X, but by submitting the film uncut again and again, he desensitised the censors and got them to give an R. We now accept that the leader of the free world will bully anybody who opposes him using unkind words absolutely unbecoming of a man of his stature. We accept that a president can just support Nazis and not expect impeachment at all. As the administration turns the government into a cemetery, the public is letting smaller skeletons slide. In India, the fringe has come out of hiding. We are finding it okay, and even legitimate that there be a sound logic to murder of a senior journalist for her strong views against The Party. Demonising minority community and dissing them openly is becoming more and more mainstream. Leaders who have called for violence against the minorities, who have engineered riots, who have made fake exodus claims, are now finding themselves elected and popular, because they work ‘18 hours’ a day and ‘transfer non-performing bureaucrats��. That when a violent opposition towards a mediocre period drama resulted in a school bus with kids getting stones pelted, the social media devotees defended by commenting at least nobody was injured.  That when pointed about States violating freedom of speech, one gets responses such as ‘Do you have guts to make a movie on the other religion’.

There is a decline in the political and moral discourse. The emphasis is less on merits and demerits of ideas and more on the person or the party behind it. When this happens, debates gets infused with sentimentality. When you have an opposing political stand to a coworker or a friend or family, things get taken personally and suddenly, you are an enemy. You are to them, trying to undermine the effort of a man working 20 hour days trying to save the country from decay that everybody else had wrought upon for 60 years. Imagine the arrogance we allow when we idolise people that were once considered fringe and vilify everybody else who have had an important role to play in the country’s history. Nehru may have made mistakes, but he did what he thought was best for the country. So did Gandhi..

When we mainstreamise the fringe, where do we go from there? When we shut our eyes to rationality and reason and have unquestioning and blind faith in a party or a man, it undoes the centuries worth of works of soldiers and writers and philosophers and saints and statesmen who fought for ideals that ask us to rise above the petty tribalism. The very idea that the ideals, the morals, the rights, the institutions are greater than a person, a party, a caste, a religion or a group might be at stake here. The great war today is not between right and left, between Trump and Dems, between One Man and the 19 odd parties; it is between the works of centuries that has woven a fragile fabric of our socio-economico-politico-moral existence with enough checks and balances and our primitive instincts that threaten to tear it all apart, testing these checks to the limit.

In other words, it's a battle for our collective souls.

References:

1. Taxi Driver: https://books.google.com/books?id=40UTI-uUHpwC&pg=PA108&dq=%22We+got+congratulated+on+changes+that+we+never+made%22&hl=en&sa=X&ei=iU1mUqH7HYeTrgf6kYCQDA&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=%22We%20got%20congratulated%20on%20changes%20that%20we%20never%20made%22&f=false

2. The Economist Article: https://www.economist.com/united-states/2016/01/14/the-centre-cannot-hold?fsrc=scn/fb/te/pe/ed/thecentrecannothold

3. The war on textbooks: https://washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2018/06/01/indias-new-textbooks-are-promoting-the-prime-ministers-favorite-policies-critics-allege/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.0cfb5af3c8e4

4. Beef over beef: https://firstpost.com/india/dadri-lynching-take-action-against-akhlaqs-kin-for-eating-beef-says-adityanath-2811776.html

[jtem]

Gun Control

Listen to me, I’m going to spell out the truth to you. You may not like it. Good. You shouldn’t. You may hate it. You may even wish above all else for it to not be true. But it is true, and you are never-ever going to have an impact on this world, much less change it, unless you start accepting AND WORKING WITHIN reality, the truth...

Gun control, as we liberals want it, can’t happen. It can’t happen and it won’t happen. Gun ownership is a constitutional right.

Period.

We can’t get a constitutional amendment passed. We can’t. The gun lobby is too strong, gun owners won’t budge and the amendment process favors the opposition. It’s designed that way. Otherwise everyone would be just 51 votes out of every hundred away from becoming a slave.

It doesn’t take a majority to amend the constitution, it takes a SUPER MAJORITY.

That’s never going to happen. Not in the case of gun ownership. That is, unless we called a Constitutional Convention, and that’s the last thing anyone in their right mind could ever want.

    ...the last time such a convention was called resulted in the elimination of the government and its replacement with the government we have now. You can pretty much expect the 1% -- the people with all the money & power, the people who would control a constitutional convention -- to use the opportunity of a convention to do the same; remake the United States into their play thing... more so than it already is.

If we want changes, we have to accept what we can and can not do, we have to accept the only parameters which we have. Anything else is not activism it’s stupidity.

Let’s start with strategy

#1.  Stop targeting the feds.

Operate at the state level, one state at a time. Work within their political realities. With this strategy you don’t need to win *Everywhere* in order to bring about change. Maybe you can’t change some states, maybe some states will grow even more gun-happy over time but, the beauty of this strategy is that it won’t matter. You can improve the world, just not everywhere.

Alternatively, if you want to change things at a federal level that means you are giving the representatives from the gun-happy states a voice within the states which are open to change. So, skip the federal government completely and operate at the state level.

#2.  Abandon “All or Nothing” demands.

Always support the lesser of any two pro gun candidates.

The fact is that the pro life lobby took this strategy way back when, and after a very short time they had a 100% pro life slate of candidates in the Republican party, PLUS a pro life national party platform, PLUS a pro life state party platform pretty much everywhere. And, most impressive of all, they did this at a time when some 70% of Republicans described themselves as PRO CHOICE to at least some extant.

How? Why?

You’re a candidate for office, you need a lot of support and the pro life lobby offers you that support. You’re not pro life but that’s okay, because you don’t have to adopt their position, you just have to be slightly more pro life than your opponent. So while he’s 100% pro choice no matter what, you come out against, I dunno, you come out against stripping parents of their right to make medical decisions for their minor children, in the case of abortion. Or you come out against partial-birth abortions. There. That’s it. You only had to budge the tiniest bit and now you’ve got this powerful lobby telling all their members to vote for you, and donating money to your campaign.

This was the very strategy of the Pro Life crowd and it worked. Do this with pro gun candidates. They don’t have to be pro gun control, they just have to be slightly more pro gun control than the next guy. And, so, this brings me to my third & final piece of advice:

#3.  Aim for evolutionary instead of revolutionary change.

Revolutionary change (swift, dramatic changes) face the most resistance. Evolutionary change, where changes are only ever small, are much easier. The result is that you are most likely to see the most & fastest change through evolutionary increments.

What if, say, instead of trying to ban guns or even a type of weapon, we only demanded that the legal gun-ownership age be raised to 21?

Think about it.

If the minimum age to own a gun had been 21, the Florida shooter would have had to wait years before he could own a gun, and maybe the added age/maturity would have prevented the tragedy.

NOTE:  Robyn Anderson, a senior at the Columbine high school, purchased a number of guns for the shooters at that school. If a 21-and-over law were in place she would have been prevented from arming the murderers.

So instead of telling people that they don’t have a right to own a gun, and instead of telling them that they don’t have a right to own a particular gun, tell them that LIKE DRIVING, VOTING & DRINKING there needs to  be a reasonable age restriction, and 21 is reasonable.

Not an easy sell, but a much easier one... and an extremely reasonable one.

[fapangel]

Tell me, anon, how do you feel about going to Mars - to stay?// You do know that NASA got a half a million applications to do just that? Look, I think that anon attempted to point out that the Left is so far gone, that yes, they would allow a Carrier to go down just to take a swing at Trump. After the shooting that the baseball game, I just can't put it past them.

… okay, bruh, I get where you’re coming from, but I’m going to tell you the same thing I tell every fuckhead who says “Obama is a Muslim:” that doesn’t give you free license to sling the same breathtaking, demonizing slanders the Left does. And that includes not slandering everyone on The Other Side by the actions and words of their most violent and insane members.

Listen, Obama was a shitshow. He was a narcissistic asshole who had his dick sucked so much from Day One that he came to believe he really was infallible, a narcissist that indulged his own whims to the detriment of long-standing alliances from day one, when one of his first acts in office was to exile the Winston Churchill bust from his office in favor of an MLK one. If you think that’s not important, I’ll let you read between the lines of this CNN shill piece trying to defend it and decide for yourself, given the British reaction and the history of the gesture, what the message that sent was. Also consider this:

 Winston S. Churchill is the only U.S. Navy vessel to have a Royal Navy Officer permanently assigned to the ship’s company (usually a Navigation Officer).[3] The U.S. Navy had a permanent U.S. Navy Officer on the Royal Navy ship, HMS Marlborough, until its decommission on 8 July 2005.

Moving that bust out of the Oval Office mattered. And while the impact of that at the beginning of Obama’s reign was minor, what he did at the end of it was not - the man with essentially anti-colonialist views ended up lecturing Duterte, the democratically-elected President of a sovereign nation, as if the Philippines was still our fucking colonial lapdog. He managed to damage one of our most important regional alliances and open the door to a China eager to capitalize on it at the worst possible goddamned time. He’s a prick, who’s full of himself: 

This is precisely why his Big Legacy, Obamacare, is a fucking dumpster fire - because it was forced through the Senate without a proper vote, using the Slaughter Rule, without fuck one being given for the fact that the people who’s co-operation they’d need to make Obamacare work - i.e., state governments - were the same ones they completely blew off when crafting it. Even if you think that Obamacare was totally fine and only those evil conservative states refusing to “pay their fair share” sabotaged it, you can’t deny that the Democrats - led by Obama - are the ones that rammed it down their throats while screaming “EAT IT, BITCH!” Politically, it was built to fail. 

But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. What about Obama politicizing the executive branch to an unheard of degree? Examples? Using the IRS against his political opponents, for one. Or the time when twenty-six states sued to stop (another) of Obama’s executive actions on immigration policy, and his Justice Department responded by willful and active obstruction of the legal process so severe that the Federal Judge called it out as deliberate deception, and ordered every single one of the government lawyers to take remedial ethics classes. This is also the same Justice Department, under that fuck Eric Holder, that presided over the “Fast and Furious” gun-walking “sting” op that deliberately let American guns get smuggled to Mexico - ignoring multiple tips and reports from other gun dealers/FFL holders who knew who the smugglers were and how shady they were. Not only did the “sting” operation utterly fucking fail, but a US Border Patrol agent was killed by one of the weapons. And he wasn’t the only one - check out this NBC report that didn’t age so well, full of horror and so aghast at how American guns are fueling that awful Mexican drug war. Fuckin NRA, amirite? This is what Obama did for brown people - he killed a lot of them. Oh, he also killed two fucking pipelines - Keystone XL and in his last days in office put a pause on the Dakota Access - because fuck energy independence, oil is evil, Elon Musk is building those nifty electric cars, just pony up $100,000 like all the rich Sillicon Valley cunts do! Oh, he also killed Yucca Mountain, because FUCK nuclear power! And fuck the tons, literally TONS of already generated nuclear waste sitting in aging, cracking containment pools at shut-down decommissioned power plants across America - nuclear power is bad, and he cares about the environment, just not all the environments near those shut-down plants. 

Are you getting the picture? I could keep going all fucking night. I hate Obama. I hate the motherfucker. They have literally written BOOKS about all the horrible, stupid, and downright criminal shit the son of a bitch did - oh, how about the deliberate spreading and down-classifying of information and the “unmasking” of people in domestic intelligence reports for political purposes? See, I’m still going! 

So if you’re a conservative, and you know all this shit, why are you standing there comparing him to leftists? Because this is how the real radical leftists see him:

I could write you a book just about how badly Obama fucked up everything he did on the War on Terror, but you cannot deny that he did fight the War on Terror. For fucks sake, he even used the troop surge in Afghanistan that McCain said he wouldn’t - even if his pulling troops out of Iraq, despite all indications that they weren’t ready for it, created the power vacuum that allowed ISIS to rise. He’s a squeamish little bitch constantly trying to pick up a turd by the clean end, and that cost him time and time again (like the time he tried to be all taciturn and circumspect over having Osama killed, then bragged about killing Osama during his midterm election campaign.) But he’s not a radical leftist, because he killed brown people, and they just ain’t down with that, bro. He also deported more immigrants than any other US President in history. If you think leftists didn’t scream about that, just look at the WaPo trying their damndest to soften the blow. Or hell, just look at what the actual radical insane leftists say themselves: “The idea of white countries having borders is inherently racist.” Yes. Borders. Inherently racist. But only for whites. Brown people can kick us the fuck out - or murder Otto Warmbier - because of our fucking privilege, man. They need their safe spaces, even if that’s an entire country, so just deal, man, just deal!

You, as an alleged conservative, know all these things. You know the length and breadth of Obama’s fuckups and outright crimes. So why the hell do you start hurling demented slanders like a lunatic leftist, instead of making actual arguments, like a rational human being? Obama is many things, mostly bad, but he is not bug-fuck insane. He’s not calling for violence, the suppression of free speech with violence, or characterizing American sovereignty as inherently racist. So when someone stands there and says Obama would “murder an entire battle fleet just to fuck Trump,” it is exactly, exactly, the same kind of gibbering fucking lunacy exhibited by the left wing, like Phil Montag screaming that he wished Scalice had died in the shooting because those fuckin Republicans are takin our healthcare, man, so he deserves to be murdered. 

Listen to the video. LISTEN to the end of it, where another Democratic Party official tells him, to his face, that he recorded the whole thing and that he’s going to release it. There are still liberals and sane people in the Democratic Party who have not surrendered to the militant Left, and they do not approve or condone the lunatics calling for violence and murder.

But if they cross the aisle and all they meet are people screaming that Obama is a fucking nigger, Obama is a fucking Muslim, Obama wants to murder American soldiers and sailors and rape your daughter and burn your house down and turn America into a caliphate, they’re going to step back and decide that their own side is the lesser evil. Do you understand what I’m saying? The way the Left is right now - a bunch of screaming fucking lunatics powered by blind hate, driven by their conviction that everyone that doesn’t agree with them is an evil, racist Nazi bigot - that’s exactly what you look like to the sane liberals across the aisle when you conflate every Democrat with the insane, violent leftists. And a lot of the people in the Republican party who do this, do it because they’re not much better than leftists themselves - dogmatic assholes, idiots, the usual wastes of carbon that’d probably be screaming FUCK TRUMP #RESIST right now if they’d grown up with parents that voted Democrat instead of Republican. 

We are better than the Left for three reasons: one, we are actually in touch with reality, rather than basing our worldview on blind, fervent and zealous hatred of anyone espousing doctrine that goes against our Holy Writ. Two, we make arguments, and judge by arguments, because we give a fuck about the truth, instead of claiming that our feelz and idealz and burning Brooklyn Rage give us the right to have it all our way, and Three - and this is the big one - we are not dogmatic, tribal fucks who will tolerate any lying, thieving, raping monster in our midst just because he’s on “our side.” 

We police our own. 

Consider this policing. 

[blogquantumreality]

On Trump and “Legality”

Rudy Giuliani made a very telling admission, and it’s one that I think has ringing historical parallels.

Let’s travel back to the 1930s, to the nascent beginnings of the Third Reich.

One of the great pains that Hitler and his underlings took was to ensure the veneer of legality over everything they did. They passed laws that changed the civil service eligibility requirements, making it perfectly legal to fire Jews and anyone else they considered unreliable elements of society, so they couldn’t keep their government jobs.

Then the Reichstag Fire came, and it became perfectly legal for the Gestapo to run roughshod over anyone they didn’t like, because the government passed the Enabling Act.

Then they passed the Nuremberg Laws, which made it perfectly legal to invalidate marriages involving Jewish people.

And on and on it went, until it became utterly, perfectly legal to enact a program of mass murder because Hitler said he wanted it to happen, and by that time the Fuehrer’s word was law in all of Germany and Occupied Europe. (of course nobody was dumb enough to write it down, but the fact remains that Himmler, who oversaw the program - Aktion Reinhard - did so with the full authority of Hitler at his back.)

Let’s now travel to the 1970s and meet Richard Nixon. After he resigned, he attempted to justify his actions taken when he was President.

“Well, when the president does it that means that it is not illegal.”

As well, many other things he did as President skirted, if not outright contravened, the bounds of acceptable behavior within Constitutional limits. (And I think I need not enumerate all of them, but the fact that he authorized a secret team of robbers to conduct covert black-bag operations against his political opponents is one of the more well-known ones)

As an example of this tendency manifesting even before Nixon became President, according to The Trial of Henry Kissinger, a very strong case can be made for the likelihood that Kissinger, with Nixon’s active approval and connivance, sought to undermine the 1968 negotiations authorized by LBJ that would have ended the war that year or next.

Let’s read that again, okay???

Nixon thought it appropriate to engage in acts which could be considered as highly diplomatically inappropriate at best and treasonous at worst, solely for his own political gain, as he could then take over the Vietnam negotiations and trumpet his successful end to the war (As we now know, the resulting turn of events produced, in 1972, an end that was essentially on the same terms as those tentatively set out in 1968). Richard Nixon prolonged a war for four years just so he could satisfy his own ego. And we all know, today, who in the Oval Office has a very large, very easily bruised, ego.

There is a considerable body of literature on the behavior and actions of Nixon, so I will conclude by pointing out that as moderate by today’s standards as Richard Nixon may seem, the fact is that by the standards of the time, and even by objective application of criminal law in the 1970s or the 2010s, Nixon represented a dangerous Imperial tendency within the US Presidency which, if left unchecked, could create the conditions for the usurpation of Congressional power into the hands of the Executive Branch.

We now have that, today, in Donald Trump and a Republican House + Senate. For all their high-flown statements made in times past (e.g. Decrying blocking immigration on the basis of religion), the fact is that Republican politicians cravenly worship power and money, and Trump represents the epitome of both.

The Republicans will shadow-box to pretend at great internal dissent, but the fact is that they believe in the following essential principles (and will happily fall in line behind Trump):

Money and wealth should go to those who already have a lot of it because they “deserve” it.

Nonwhite people are prone to criminality and laziness and need to be “punished” therefore.

If it satisfies the needs of sustaining the primacy of the military and/or the desires of law enforcement, especially as pertains to reinforcing existing social and cultural divisions on the basis of race and gender, anything can be made as “legal” as desired regardless of the logic employed to make it so.

The bottom line is that regimes in the past have sought to create a thin veneer of acceptable legality to justify in some cases monstrous actions against millions of innocent people. Even lesser actions such as siccing the FBI or IRS on political opponents was considered acceptable by Nixon under his “President sez OK” doctrine.

Do not be fooled: Just because something is “legal” doesn’t make it morally or ethically right.

[omegasupremeconservative]

Fake News Watch: CNN Says Trump Is Leading A Hate Movement Against The Media

CNN never ceases to amaze me at just how dedicated they are to putting out fake news. Sure you may find some truth “somewhere” in their reporting but they have such a blatant disregard for the principles of journalism and reporting it should be clear to everyone their agenda isn’t for the betterment of the American public.

It’s time we properly categorized what CNN largely is which is Opinion Journalism. As Wikipedia states this is the type of journalism that “makes no claim of objectivity”. “Unlike advocacy journalism, opinion journalism has a reduced focus on facts or research and its perspective is often of a more personalized variety. Its product may be only one component of a generally objective news outlet, rather than the dominant feature of an entire publication or broadcast network.”

At the same time most of the media in my analysis engages in Advocacy Journalism or a combination of advocacy journalism and opinion journalism.

“Advocacy journalism is a genre of journalism that intentionally and transparently adopts a non-objective viewpoint, usually for some social or political purpose. Because it is intended to be factual, it is distinguished from propaganda. It is also distinct from instances of media bias and failures of objectivity in media outlets, since the bias is intended. ”

I’m not sure there are any journalistic standards that CNN follows but the Canadian Association of Journalists offered some advice for advocacy journalists to follow:

Acknowledge your perspective up front.

Be truthful, accurate, and credible. Don’t spread propaganda, don’t take quotes or facts out of context, “don’t fabricate or falsify”, and “don’t judge or suppress vital facts or present half-truths”

Don’t give your opponents equal time, but don’t ignore them, either.

Explore arguments that challenge your perspective, and report embarrassing facts that support the opposition. Ask critical questions of people who agree with you.

Avoid slogans, ranting, and polemics. Instead, “articulate complex issues clearly and carefully.”

Be fair and thorough.

Make use of neutral sources to establish facts.

Let’s look at the latest claims from Brian Stetler a news anchor on CNN.

Stelter makes the connection that a Trump Tweet at 3:14am instigated and encouraged someone to stick a pipe bomb in the mail and send it to CNN.

Funny how lowly rated CNN, and others, can criticize me at will, even blaming me for the current spate of Bombs and ridiculously comparing this to September 11th and the Oklahoma City bombing, yet when I criticize them they go wild and scream, “it’s just not Presidential!”

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 26, 2018

Then we see Brian Stelter attempt to research more into Trump and his rallies by asking the question WHAT IS TRUMP ACCOMPLISHING WITH HIS RALLIES?

Notable quotes from his commentary:

“when your in that pen you really do feel like a zoo animal” he is referring to the area the press uses to record, shoot video and report on the event at the Trump rally.

“before the rally people are gawking at you, saying your fake news, enemy of the people”.

“parts of the crowd are primed to chant CNN sucks, but then after they did that one of the men walked over and said hey nothing personal”.

“Trump is leading a hate movement against the media” he does acknowledge that “not everyone in his crowd believes it but some do and that is dangerous”.

What is a hate movement? There is no common definition for a hate movement but Wikipedia defines a hate group as this “A hate group is a social group that advocates and practices hatred, hostility, or violence towards members of a race, ethnicity, nation, religion, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation or any other designated sector of society. According to the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), a hate group’s “primary purpose is to promote animosity, hostility, and malice against persons belonging to a race, religion, disability, sexual orientation, or ethnicity/national origin which differs from that of the members of the organization.”

If you analyze the MAGA Make America Great Again movement you would find out that MAGA people love their country, they are very patriotic, they could be religious but not always, they believe in helping America First but they don’t hate or dislike our friends around the globe. Conservatives have been treated very unfairly in the media and yes many conservatives and Republicans HATE the media but in a way that someone would hate their in-laws or hate rush our traffic or hate their boss, or hate it when their taxes go up.

There is anger and resentment towards the mainstream media and cable news outlets like CNN and rightly so. CNN tries to be slick and suggest that Trumps creating a hate movement and the result is what we saw last week with various pipe bombs mailed to prominent critics of Donald Trump which CNN called TRUMPS TARGETS.

CNN needs to frame Trump and his supporters as a hate movement to subjugate MAGA. To remove any credibility of it being a peaceful movement. This is why CNN and other media outlets will be quick to highlight and use anything they can to point out that Trump is riling up his followers and making people hate the media.

The Real Problem The Media Has

More and more people everyday are beginning to distrust the media and Donald Trump has been very effective at challenging the ruling class in the press who aren’t used to being challenged. CNN can write a fake story and within an instance one of Trump’s tweets can vaporize the impact of it. Trump has shown that he is light years ahead of the mainstream media in terms of persuading and attracting loyal followers. PERSUATION IS THE KEY WORD.

Scott Adams does an amazing job of outling and explaining the difference between Trump’s persuasion skills and Hillary’s. Note Scott Adams is a trained hypnotist and persuasion expert along with being the creator of the cartoon Dilbert.

CNN Wants True Leadership

It is an important skill to look at someone whom you want to believe, someone who looks good or talks good, someone personable and likeable and be able to determine when they are telling you the truth or not.

Let’s analyze and summarize what social narrative engineer aka news anchor Anderson Cooper is trying to do here:

He tells us suspicious packages have been sent to very prominent opponents of Donald Trump.

Whoever sent them is still on the loose (not as of the date of writing this blog)

He tells us we are learning far more about the “pieces of this plot” (in other words who is responsible DONALD TRUMP)

He’s “keeping them honest” by focusing on what those “pieces add up to”. Insert the word circumstance for pieces.

He tells us that the President of the United States can’t seem to see what these “pieces add up to”. In other words why can’t Trump see HE is the problem.

He proceeds to engage his scare tactic by telling us to remember IF those devices had exploded the country would be making funeral arrangements right now for 2 MURDERED ex presidents, a former vice president, a former secretary of state, a sitting Congresswomen, a former head of the CIA, a renowned actor and the people we work alongside of everyday. Not to mention potentially postal workers, and police or any number of bystanders. The phrase 2 murdered ex presidents was included in his prewritten monologue to heighten the emotional response that the viewers would have.

Cooper then introduces an authority figure into his routine “as Presidential Historian Douglass Brinkley pointed out earlier today the sheer number of targets and devices is unprecendented and given who was being targeted this is the kind of event when Presidents traditionally might become aware of the awesome responsibility they have to all Americans of all political stripes. It is a moment that traditionally inspires deep humility, its a moment of leadership. I am reminded that Donald Trump is not a traditional President, nor right now is he acting like a traditional leader.

This is a play on words, Anderson Cooper suggests that in moments of crisis or events a leader is supposed to have deep humility. What he really means is this event happened to your critics why don’t you stop attacking them politically because something bad almost happened to them.

Watch the rest of the video and play it extra slow so you can begin to see he is artfully using language as a weapon to influence you in a calm sympathetic tone. CNN spends very little time discussing the actual culprit who has now been caught, the culprit in their eyes is Donald Trump.

Mark Levin Goes Postal On Left-Wing Caller

This is another instructive video, just listen to this short 7 minute video or you can read the transcript below. The liberal caller believes that the influence of the President is much greater than any senators, congress person, or anyone else in our society as such his rhetoric has triggered someone to commit acts of violence against his enemies. His example is when Donald Trump talked about punching someone in the face at one of his rallies. Yes it’s true. Barack Obama also talked about bringing a gun to a knife fight. Neither of these comments disturb me by the way.

Audio Transcript Courtesy of Trump Fan Network YouTube Channel

Robert Garland Texas the great WBA PA liberal GO.

Hello Marc I listen to your show often I don’t agree with you almost ever but I have up until now respected you greatly because I think that everything you said is sincere.

Okay right sir now don’t psychoanalyze me go ahead and make your point you don’t know me you know nothing about me I don’t know you just make your point.

My point is that you are trying to say that others in America whether they’re senators or whatever have the same amount of weight in what they say as the President of the United States.

I absolutely didn’t say that but I will say that the president of the United States has said nothing nothing that would trigger somebody to do something like this nothing.

At his rallies he has literally called and said I wish it was the time where we could just punch people in the face.

Yeah he mentioned once punching but let me ask you a question sir do you know who Oscar Lopez Rivera is?

Let me ask you question I want to have a discussion with you if you will allow it, do you know who Oscare Lopez Rivera is?

I’m gonna ask you one more time do you know who Oscar Lopez Rivera is it’s not a trick yes or no?

Yes but that is not what we are talking about.

Who is he who is he? Get him off the air he’s a liar.

He was the head of the FALN bombers in this country that resulted in the death of a police officer two police officers and several bombings and Barak Obama commuted his sentence and all the rest of them that were involved in that gang Bill Clinton pardoned them.

Now you want to talk about presidential responsibility let’s talk about presidential responsibility.

Barack Obama best buddies with Ayers another bomber Bernardine Dohrn another bomber commutes the sentence of Oscar Lopez Rivera who never recant who never backed off what he did even Clinton wouldn’t commute his sentence while commuting all the others.

I don’t need lectures from you people on the left and neither does the President of the United States you are full of it.

“The Presidents said punch somebody in the mouth” these guys were bombing the country! Civilians police officers and you elected Obama president and you reelected Clinton president shocking.

Absolutely shocking and I have to listen to the moral outrage of the left the moral outrage of the media it’s preposterous it’s disgusting it’s like this khashoggi matter you’ve this Iran that slaughters journalists left and right slaughters gay people left and right slaughters Christians left and right the second highest execution rate in the world behind China Obama facilitates a deal in which he gives them a hundred and fifty billion dollars and one and a half billion dollars in the cover of darkness what foreign currency they killed American soldiers and suddenly the left is upset with Trump’s rhetoric.

They’re not upset with their own rhetoric I never get a caller here from the left complaining about Antifa it is a violent left-wing militia group a Marxist militia group and we had individuals on CNN like Don Lemon people on MSNBC who downplayed their violence.

They train they come armed, excuses are made for them but Trump’s rhetoric you see is what’s pushing the country over the edge.

One of the biggest animals in human history is Adolf Hitler they call him Hitler they call American citizens who voted for him Nazis racists.

But it’s Trump you see if the left and the Democrats and the media had accepted the results of this last election in 2016 criticized a president of course but try to destroy him come up with Russian conspiracy theories.

Act like they’re the National Enquirer with every allegation try and force him from office talk about his mental illness and on and on and on.

If they accepted his legitimacy as president and criticized his policies or what he was saying that’s one thing but that’s not what’s going on in this country that’s not what’s going on in this country and we all know it.

So don’t call your little whiny ass to me and sayyes but Trump said you had no idea who Oscar Lopez Rivera was none and you don’t give a damn you didn’t care about Bill Ayers you didn’t care about Bernardine Dohrn Khalidi another one you don’t care about any of them.

Incredible really incredible really and what exactly has Trump said that would cause somebody to try and blow up 12 other people or threatened 12 other people.

What does he say? He says punch somebody in the face?

So when Obama said get in the face when holder said kick them when they’re down and I go on and on and on did that spark some Republican? No.

When Bernie Sanders goes on and on about how horrible America how about how unjust it is how people are discriminated against how racist we are on and on and on what kind of support does that build for a society or does it cause some nut to go to a baseball field in Alexandria Virginia with a sniper rifle and start shooting Republicans with a list in his pocket. We don’t need any lectures from you leftist that’s for sure or you clowns in the media I’ll be right back.

Not many people can go off like Mark Levin. CNN is going to lose this information battle. This battle for the minds of good Patriotic people. They will lose because the truth will always prevail.

The post Fake News Watch: CNN Says Trump Is Leading A Hate Movement Against The Media appeared first on Alternative News Source, Research and Analysis.

source http://ugetinformed.com/politics/fake-news-watch-cnn-says-trump-is-leading-a-hate-movement-against-the-media

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Social issues

When it comes to politics, I find myself the most interested in issues that pertain to the rights of what people “can and can’t do”

This meaning, immigration, gun laws

and yes, abortion.

So when it comes to certain rights, and my being in my early twenties, I hate it when people tell me what I can’t and can do, or what I am allowed to do.

I think people should mind there own business

But I do understand that there are people in charge, e.i. your parents and the government and they are in charge for a reason

But I also think there is a difference between rules and prohibition. One guides you and one completely takes away any freedom you thought you had. Prohibition with no leeway to circumstance or personal freedom can be detrimental. And I think we as Americans, as individuals, all want, and feel we deserve, the right to choose how we do things.

And then my other issue is with blanketed statements

Guns should be illegal.

Abortion should be illegal.

No more immigration.

And while I’m not saying that either side runs on these platforms, that is how it can be perceived by opponents and as a result defenses start to go up.

We need compromise

So for example, abortion

Republicans think that it should be illegal, and I really haven’t seen much give on this issue and I think it’s important because in their minds, abortion is murder

And when you think about it, it is

Women who get abortions are terminating a life inside their bodies. And many think that women don’t have the right to commit such an act

And I get it

Personally I think abortion is horrible and I hope I never would be put in the situation where I would have to consider getting one, but still, I am pro-choice.

And let me tell you why

People believe that abortion is murder because you are taking a life. In black and white terms this is a fact

But like I’ve said before, nothing is black and white.

And the issue that the two sides really need to be concerned with is, what do you consider a life?

Scientist will say that at the time of conception, a life I created and this life has potential to grow into a fully conscience and capable being. So let’s stick with this and base the discussion around this definition.

I agree, a life is created a conception. But I disagree, in that, this life or potential for life has more value than the person that is holding it. And I know, people will say, how do you hold one human being’s value higher than another. But that life inside the women at the moment of conception is not a human being. It has the potential to be, and at a certain point in the pregnancy it will become a human being, but until then, I don’t think it is. And I think that up until the point that it does becomes a human being, abortion is acceptable.

So listen

I’m not a scientist so I can’t say when that life becomes a human being, but I think that if we can establish this point, the lines can be drawn of when an abortion is acceptable and when it is not

So let’s backtrack

I’ve said that upon conception, a life is created, but that life is not a human being. So what is defined as a human being? Theoretically speaking only.

A human being is a person with existence, who has consciousness and cognitive feelings and thoughts.

So until a certain point, a life in a women does not have these characteristics

It is still murder to kill it, sure.

But this “murder” is no greater than the “murder” of an insect or any other animal that human beings choose to “murder”

And while that comparison could seem extreme, it’s not. 

“But how can you compare killing a baby to killing an animal?”

Because it’s not a baby yet. A baby is a human being and as I’ve stated, it’s not a human being until a certain point in development. It has no consciousness, no cognitive feelings. It only has the potential for these things. And what’s worse, is that animals, it has been proven, do have consciousness, but it’s still okay to kill them

Not buying it?

Let’s take it to a very dry cut comparison

Let’s say you’re walking through a park and suddenly step in something. You look down and realize you’re standing on top of 3 duck eggs and they’re crushed. Did you murder those eggs? Yes. Did you kill the potential of life? Yes. Do you feel horrible about? Of course. But is the act that you just committed illegal? No. And while this act is an accident and abortions are a choice, the fact of the matter is, that the value of the life of those duck eggs and the life inside a women are the same. There is only potential.

“Yes but abortions are a choice”

Alright so let’s say you’re in a similar scenario where you have a choice. You can step on the eggs willingly or you’ll lose your job. Step on the eggs or you’ll lose your education. Step on the eggs or your life gets uprooted and completely changed. What decision would you make? And no ones saying it’s not a tough choice that doesn’t takes a lot thinking. But is this thing that could be something worth what you have?

“What a selfish thought”

Yes abortion is selfish, but it’s a decision that only the person standing over the eggs, the person with this life inside, them can make.

Do you get that?

Yes killing a life is horrible, but what value does that life hold, is it greater than that of a fully capable person?

Now this is to say that I think abortion is only “okay” up until a certain point. Now this point can be decided by certified doctors, but for my argument and also personally, I think after the two month mark it’s okay to say that abortion is illegal. Because I think that at this point, the life is more than a potential, it’s becoming a human being or is now a human being.

This is compromise

To put my thoughts in order, I think that abortion should not be illegal. I do, however, think it should have some rules. Abortions should only be allowed in women before the end of the first trimester (doctors can dispute a more distinct time) and after that only in extreme cases should it be allowed e.i. rape or potential health risks for the mother.

Now the push back is that, with this, other things need to be adjusted

Sexual education needs to be reformed and required to a fuller extent in all schools (more importantly, public schools)

A lot of mistaken pregnancies can happen because of ignorance

Conceptions need to be cheaper and way more attainable and even potentially able to be attained under certain healthcare providers

And I’m not talking about condoms.

Birth control such as pills and IUDs are way more effective types of contraception that young women are often too ashamed to or can’t afford to get/use. And it is only these types of contraceptive that allow that women to be in control, because let’s not forget, it is their body and it is the body a baby will ultimately come out of.

And how about insuring that the father of the child is held accountable and made to take responsibility?

And what about adoption or foster care?

In the case the mothers really can not take care of the child, adoption and foster care systems need to be reformed. And this is so big because abortion rates all together would go down if a mother didn’t have to worry about whether their child would go to a safe family or foster home. One that will allow the child to grow with potential and not be devastatingly disadvantaged in the future.

Compromise

And I think that its important to point out, that abortions are going to happen whether they are outlawed or not. If a women needs one, she will find a way to do it. In the past, that meant women were reduced to illegal and unsafe operations, or taking matters into their own hands and potentially risking their own lives. Now with modern medicine, women will more than likely seek out illegal medication that would do the jobs. Which is also unsafe for the fetus and the women. 

So keep that in mind. And also let’s get rid of this idea, that women are going around have unprotected sex willy nilly and are getting abortions just because they can. If women are having unprotected sex its because they are uneducated. And women that do accidentally end up pregnant, its because a condom broke or birth control failed. E.i its not their fault. And maybe if IUDs were more known about and made available, this wouldn’t have happened. Let’s not turn this abortion debate into slut shaming and let’s also not forget it takes two to tangle.

Yeah

So I don’t know about you but think even some of these ideas were taken and really thought about, a middle ground could be found

Just think about it

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