#even the women of the cultivation world see the raging red flags and run as far away as possible from this guy

[lavender-phoenix-flames]

Jc stans love to make a million of excuses about jc being hated and blacklisted by women or about his preferences for marriage saying "he wouldn't want a girl like that I know ofc"

These people actually think they know jc better than mxtx, funny they can't even tell he is the definition of asshole and is abusive lol just accept he is a misogynist and women ofc hate him for every right reason cuz who in thier right mind would want to marry this rabid rancid racoon.

Sometimes I do get angry that people are so dumb but most times it's just funny how much these people clown themselves lol.

[politicaltheatre]

Depraved Indifference

"I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn't lose any voters, OK? It's, like, incredible."

- Donald Trump, at a campaign stop at Dordt College, Sioux Center, Iowa, January 23, 2016

This quote didn’t find its way into the second impeachment trial of the now-former President, but it should have. In a better world it would have, but in that better world a man such Donald Trump would not ever have been elected to any office, let alone one as powerful as president. And yet, somehow he was.

Donald Trump is no longer president, something his defenders, standing before the Senate and sitting among the trial’s jury, have taken great pains to try to focus our attention on.

Note how they talk about the importance of “moving on” and getting over it, thereby distancing us and, far more importantly, themselves from what was done.

Note how they try to frame the charge against Trump - “inciting violence against the government of the United States” - as merely “partisan” and “political”, something devoid of any legal justification or standing, as if the crimes were not witnessed by billions around the world in real time.

Note how, when faced with having to face the morally depraved actions they either encouraged or enabled in Trump and those who followed him, and having to defend their own complicity in the indefensible result, they turn to not even a little bit thinly veiled threats against those daring to accuse. Any retribution, they do declare, any continuation of violence against Trump’s declared enemies, that will be on you.

This has all the subtlety and predictability of a trial in the Jim Crow South, and, given the number of Confederate flags waving inside the Capitol on January 6th, that really isn’t too strong a comparison.

Trump, as anyone anywhere in the world even casually paying attention should know, is entirely guilty of inciting that riot. He spent years cultivating doubt in the electoral system, months casting doubt on the 2020 mail-in voting results, and, finally, weeks spreading blatant lies about voting fraud, ones that he continues to tell to this day.

He did all of this while encouraging and enabling exactly the kind of violence done on his behalf that we all saw on the 6th and, as the House impeachment managers have helpfully shown at length, in the days, weeks, months, and years leading up to it.

“Stand back and stand by”, right? The Proud Boys stuck that on t-shirts.

If the videos the House managers have played have failed to persuade, we tell ourselves, perhaps the evidence of Trump’s Defense and Justice departments undermining the Capitol police and National Guard’s response will. How about a timeline of Trump’s fiddling while the Capitol burned and his own Vice President quite literally ran for his life? No? Really?

You don’t need a lot of time to prepare a case when the defendant has been caught, figuratively, thousands of times in the middle of Fifth Avenue with a smoking gun. Trump’s thumbs offered up hundreds of smoking guns to choose from. Videos of his post-election rallies do, too. The ones he posted that day, hours after the breach, calling the men and women hunting “traitors” of both parties and battering Capitol police with American flags “patriots”, well, that’s a prosecutor’s dream. Or should be.

So, yes, he is guilty. Very, very, very guilty.

Ah, but so are at least three of his jury members: Josh Hawley, James Lankford, and Ted Cruz. They all gave credence to Trump’s lies, they all gave weight to those lies by demanding that the Senate investigate them once more and yet again before confirming the election, and that day they all cynically and repeatedly called for the rejection of President-elect Joe Biden’s victory.  Well, Hawley and Cruz did; Lankford was trying to when he was evacuated.

They were no less guilty of trying to profit from the misplaced and misguided rage of those storming the Senate chamber than Trump, and, if the rioters’ own social media accounts are to be believed, Hawley and Cruz at the very least were no less accountable for them being there. Lankford, it seems, needs to up his social media game.

Those three senators, of course, are not on trial. They are merely jurors charged with deciding the guilt or innocence of Donald Trump for doing what they did themselves. They will be joined in their guaranteed “No” votes by at least 41 other Republican senators who, like them, once again voted to claim that, despite over 200 years of clear legal precedent, this impeachment trial is “unconstitutional”.

It’s no shock that the House managers’ detailed legal history lesson fell on deaf ears, nor is it that those three and other Trump Republicans were caught “reading” during the presentation of evidence. Rand Paul, whose own ridiculous claims about the election and trial have been followed by threats of retaliation, was caught doodling like teen stuck in detention.

This, not anything said by Trump’s crack legal team, is the argument for the defense: they know what Trump did, they know it was wrong, they know what they’re doing, and they know that’s wrong, too. And they do not care. They do not care.

These aren’t stupid people, they’re just dishonest. More specifically, they’re corrupt. What they believe, what they take as a matter of faith, is that they’ll face no real consequences for anything they’re doing or anything they’ve done.

And who’s to tell them they’re wrong? What’s the worse Hawley or Cruz will face? Censure? You can’t shame the shameless. They’ll wear their censures the same way Trump would, as a badge of courage on which they can raise campaign money and, they hope, draw out votes from Trump’s millions of rabidly loyal supporters.

For Hawley, Cruz, and others already campaigning for 2024, that’s all that matters. For them, this is just an opportunity, a means to an end, as they pursue their highly profitable careers in politics. It’s just business. For them, Trump, and every other one in Congress, on TV, and on social media who chose to ignore what people might do if they lied to them and wound them up, and for all of those choosing to ignore the consequences of it now, that’s all this is: just business.

And that’s the problem.

Politics shouldn’t be a business. We know that without even having to be told. When we talk about it, we do so in terms of “service” and “doing one’s duty”, words and phrases that romanticize the selfless nature we want to see in our politics and our politicians. We don’t just do that because that’s how we’ve always heard it spoken of, we do that because we know that the ones who embody that ideal are rare. There’s just too much evidence to deny it.

Go back far as you want, there have been men and women seeking power for the purpose of defending themselves and their friends from accountability. Back in the day, they sought appointments through connections or simply joined the clergy. These days, they run for office.

The political party in this country that currently stands against accountability is the Republican Party. Sure, the Democratic Party has its own sizable share of complicity for allowing the country’s drift into right-wing aggressive selfishness, but, lucky for us, it hasn’t been able to rid itself of its accountable members the way the Republican Party has. Of course, that’s only natural, given the importance of accountability to the political Left.

The last two Republican presidents were elected in no small part because they had a background in business. Yes, they each ran their businesses into the ground, but they ran them.

George W. Bush came into office as a “corporate” president, one who would, we were assured, delegate to those more experienced and skilled in areas where he was…lacking. We waved away his inadequacies and were somehow shocked when he failed in exactly every one of those areas. Still, he and his friends made money hand over fist, so the corporate presidency was good for business, big business, in particular, which got a big bailout.

Donald Trump should have inspired even less confidence, but confidence man that he is, he played enough suckers to get him in the White House. As much pain, suffering, and death as he has caused in four excruciatingly long years, he and his cronies have made out like gangbusters, too. The government they were hired to manage, not so much.

From the start, he and his cabinet secretaries lived by the old rule, “it’s easier to ask for forgiveness than it is to get permission”. Not that they asked for forgiveness. That’s for losers. They broke laws, fleeced taxpayers, and resigned knowing that whatever penalty they might face would pale compared to the profits they took with them.

This is the mentality that drives corporate decision making around the world. For them, the adage is a bit more like, “better to settle a lawsuit than risk profits”. They, too, avoid apologies whenever possible. That keeps the damages paid to to victims and their families lower.

Currently, there are companies selling cars, drugs, baby food, and other products that they know are defective and a threat to the people using them. They know this. They know there’s a high risk that people will die, and they do it anyway. Instead of recognizing the threat and stopping, they do cost-benefit analyses to determine the number of deaths from their products they can afford.

This, it’s worth stating, is not capitalism. We may tell ourselves that it is, but that’s just us looking for an easy answer, a scapegoat for our own failures. In fact, this pattern was just as common under communism, too; just ask anybody who used to live near Chernobyl. Mistakes are hidden, a given number of deaths are accepted, and the perception of success and prestige is maintained.

This is corruption, and deaths and suffering caused by a lack of accountability are what corruption does. A death is a symptom, a great, big red flag, something to tell you that something is very, very, very wrong, but how many of those red flags do we see and ignore before we finally stop to ask what it is we’ve been seeing?

How many smaller red flags, such as poverty, racism, anti-semitism, police brutality, injustice, and sexual abuse, do we pass because we’ve just become so used to seeing them? Do we tell ourselves that there is nothing we can do? Do we even ask if there is anything we can do? Or do we, as so many senators are now preparing to do, instead embrace corruption as a virtue.

This is the real threat, a system that accepts this and holds no one accountable, and a culture that pushes back against demands for accountability, embracing the very worst of who we are and what we can do to others just to prove that we can. The result is a flood of childish acting out and a loss of trust in products and services that we must be able to trust because they are supposed to keep us safe.

Is this as great a threat to our society as the January 6th attack on the Capitol? This is that attack. The product failures that led to the attack were political. We have watched as our political and government institutions have failed. We have watched as those entrusted to deliver a product that works and keeps us safe have, again and again, deliberately or not, betrayed that trust. As with any other product sold, each breach of trust carries over into the next, accumulating and compounding, eroding not just our ability to trust those products but all products like them.

Think of the doubts Americans have about the safety of vaccines? Sure, we can chalk that down to internet conspiracy theories and echo chambers if we like, but would they have gained the traction they have in a world in which we weren’t inundated with ads featuring paid-non-attorney-spokespersons asking us if we or a loved one took this drug or that and had experienced one or more life threatening side effects? How many of us heard about the Covid-19 vaccines and asked, How long before we see the ads for that?

For decades, we have allowed ourselves to become a nation of beta-testers, taking on the cost and burden of quality control that the companies releasing and profiting from these products, and these class action lawsuits have become big business as a result. Every new pharmaceutical product that hits the shelves, part of us is just waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Time and the success of these vaccines should put an end to that, at least for this pandemic, but that we have to do so should tell us about the work we have to do to repair our society, or to build one that can exist without absolving us from being accountable to each other.

Until then, we have other kinds of corruption to face, including one that may be more destructive than anything we’re seeing in the Senate this week.

The Reddit-GameStop insurrection might have been fun to watch from the sidelines, a bit of schadenfreude for those of us on the outside of Wall Street, looking in, but the truth is the hedge fund villains still made their money, and the systemic fault lines this episode exposed should have us all scared and paying attention.

Our economy is overly concentrated in Wall Street’s product and therefore overly dependent on its success and stability. A loss of faith in its product has been underway for years. That’s how you get to day traders trying to take on hedge funds the way they did. This wasn’t David vs Goliath, this was guerrilla warfare over who gets to make the quick and easy profits.

The upside of that is that some of the “little guys” seem to win something; the downside of that is that it does nothing to fix the problems we have with Wall Street. Rather, it only makes them worse, by highlighting how easy it is to manipulate stocks and commodities and how few get to do it and get away with it.

What happens, then, when no one has any faith left in Wall Street? What happens when everyone believes it is nothing more than a casino designed to take money rather than make it?

Well, we’re almost there. We have a massive, growing online gambling industry, and with it an online gambling problem. Sports leagues, some with their own recent histories of cheaters (and worse) getting away with it, have turned their own fans onto gambling as part of the sport. How many of these people, blowing their money on bad beats, think of it as no different than investing on Wall Street stocks?

A better question: What happens to all of those stock prices when everyone, including the crooks on Wall Street, lose faith in that system, take their profits, and leave? An even better question: What happens if they do that all at once?

The answer is: Lost jobs, pensions, food and housing security, and hope.

In other words, 2020 on steroids. That’s what you get with corruption, an environment in which politicians like Donald Trump, companies willing to harm consumers, and right wing domestic terrorists thrive. As long as they aren’t held accountable, they will.

“Bad for the country”, indeed.

- Daniel Ward

[lavender-phoenix-flames]

So even the women of cultivation world can see how much of a raging giant red flag jiang cheng is and run away as far and as fast as possible but jc stans can't? Lol