Empire in Decline

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It looks like USA has proof that Russia and Iran was trying to disturb the elections?

Putin likely directed 2020 U.S. election meddling, U.S. intelligence finds

Russian President Vladimir Putin likely directed efforts to try to swing the 2020 U.S. presidential election to Donald Trump, according to an American intelligence report released on Tuesday that sources said would likely trigger U.S. sanctions on Moscow.

www.reuters.com

 

[jtr1962]

In other news, one of the rare times Trump does something that I actually find praiseworthy:

Trump tells Republican supporters to get vaccinated

Many pro-Trump Republicans have expressed reluctance to take up the offer of a Covid-19 jab.

www.bbc.com

 

[DrunkenBastard]

It's way too early in his Presidency for his policies to have any far-reaching effects like that. The future is electric cars anyway, so by 2030 gas prices will be moot for the majority of people

I beg to differ. He has taken aggressive action against fossil fuels starting with the cancellation of the permit for the Keystone XL pipeline on his first day in office, swiftly followed by rejoining of the Paris accord with additional aggressive cuts in carbon, and then executive action to suspend new oil and gas leases on Federal public lands.

Biden's rapid adoption of climate policies has stunned the oil and gas industry

“They are more direct, more fierce and quicker than what folks expected," one executive said.

fortune.com

Already seeing crazy activity in certain areas of the country where you can no longer use natural gas to heat new buildings. Then there's talk of getting rid of natural gas for power generation by 2035. Not sure where that capacity is going to come from afterwards. Batteries are great for handling peaks in demand and maintaining system stability as they can respond much faster than a gas peaker plant but are of little use for baseload generation. You need baseload generation when the sun isn't shining and wind output is low.

All of Bidens actions create significant risk to supply and demand, and therefore that risk is priced in.

 

[DrunkenBastard]

Two, the social media banning/silencing wasn't done in a vacuum. As if one day Twitter, etc flipped a switch off. No, there are real consequences to these people's actions regarding their big lie that the election was stolen or to promote violence and now that they lose this platform it's somehow infringing on their 1st amendment rights and/or they're being cancelled as a party. These are important details in the discussions of accounts being suspended. Private companies have terms of service. They agreed to them and broke them

I would agree insofar as private companies being free to restrict speech as they see fit. But certainly what we saw with Parler and being shutdown by AWS shows the risk in putting your infrastructure in the hands of a company that can "turn off the lights" if it finds your content to be objectionable. Theres clearly still a space and need for private datacenters that arent swayed by political winds.

 

[Handruin]

I agree it is a risk and this isn't a new problem when using private companies to host communications. People are free to say what they want. It doesn't mean there won't be consequences. This isn't a free speech issue in regards to the law though but this is how GoP is representing it to their base as is fox news. Amazon/AWS made a business decision that very well may be politically motivated but I have no doubt it's fundamentally profit-motivated due to risk of fallout from hosting a controversial platform known as Parler especially with ties to the capitol riots. That and somewhere in the details a EULA may have been broken? I haven't done a deep dive into their case or reasoning for dropping them.

Parler didn't seem committed to continuing their anti-trust case it seems:

Parler drops federal lawsuit against Amazon — but files another in state court

After a month offline, the fight to restore Parler is over

www.theverge.com

In a response filing, Amazon revealed more than 100 violent threats the company had flagged to Parler in the weeks leading up to its takedown, including one that told Jack Dorsey, "you will die a bloody death." Parler had refused to moderate the content, citing its free speech policy.

 

[DrunkenBastard]

So apparently the reason used was failing to moderate. But what about Twitter and Facebook groups which arguable had more use for planning of the capitol riots?

Opinion: Big Tech’s Parler trick — Pretend content moderation matters

Eviscerating Parler for inadequate content moderation is nothing more than textbook rock throwing in Big Tech’s collective glass house, Hoekstra says

www.detroitnews.com

My understanding is that during negotiations with AWS to resume services Parler offered to use some kind of Amazon owned content moderation tool, but AWS said that wasn't good enough....

 

[DrunkenBastard]

Amazon/AWS made a business decision that very well may be politically motivated but I have no doubt it's fundamentally profit-motivated due to risk of fallout from hosting a controversial platform known as Parler especially with ties to the capitol riots.

The Washington Post, another Bezos owned entity is very much left leaning. And just recently issued a correction for making up complete shit in regards to Trumps call with Georgia elections investigator Frances Watson:

Washington Post issues correction to report on Trump call

The Post issued a lengthy correction on Monday after audio of the December call between the then president and Frances Watson was released.

www.dailymail.co.uk

"'Trump did not tell the investigator to "find the fraud" or say she would be "a national hero" if she did so. Instead, Trump urged the investigator to scrutinize ballots in Fulton County, Ga., asserting she would find "dishonesty" there. He also told her that she had "the most important job in the country right now."

...

It linked to a new story about the recording, adding: 'The headline and text of this story have been corrected to remove quotes misattributed to Trump.'

The Post was slammed for the mistake, with journalist Mary Katharine Ham writing on Twitter: 'So, they made up quotes. What in the actual F.'

Twitter user Glen Hilts added: 'Great. And, 90% of folks will never see the “correction”.'

Another added: 'This is disgraceful. People on the left believed this garbage, and won’t even read this “correction”.'

Independent journalist Kyle Becker added: 'The ironic thing is that intelligent people knew this was made-up BS from the get-go.'

 

[Handruin]

So apparently the reason used was failing to moderate. But what about Twitter and Facebook groups which arguable had more use for planning of the capitol riots?

Opinion: Big Tech’s Parler trick — Pretend content moderation matters

Eviscerating Parler for inadequate content moderation is nothing more than textbook rock throwing in Big Tech’s collective glass house, Hoekstra says

www.detroitnews.com

My understanding is that during negotiations with AWS to resume services Parler offered to use some kind of Amazon owned content moderation tool, but AWS said that wasn't good enough....

Twitter and Facebook are more complicated. They host their own content last I've read so that wouldn't be up to AWS to ban, etc. I would hope that any groups or postings advocating any violence such as the capitol riots would be banned and reported to authorities.

What amount of Parler would you say was used as a conservative forum versus any other topics? It could just be unfortunate that a few bad users ruined it for the rest and no amount of moderation would suffice for AWS to take the risk to be associated with them.

I don't follow what side of the political alignment Bezos supports, I don't really care for him much regardless.

The majority of press news I'll listen to these days is either Associated Press or Reuters. I don't follow the Washington Post at all. That's shitty if they misquoted him and confused people. Sounds like they're making a play like fox news.

 

[Handruin]

What are your thoughts on Sidney Powell and her defense strategy for being sued? Is she saying her claims of election fraud are not fact and reasonable people wouldn't accept her claims as such? She seemed pretty adamant every time she was on television about her claims.

Ex-Trump lawyer Powell asks judge to toss voting machine company's $1.3 billion lawsuit

Sidney Powell, a lawyer who advised President Donald Trump's campaign, asked a judge on Monday to throw out a $1.3 billion lawsuit accusing her of spreading false conspiracy theories about the November presidential election.

www.reuters.com

reasonable people would not accept such statements as fact but view them only as claims that await testing by the courts through the adversary process.

 

[sedrosken]

So, uh... Pennsylvania, am I right? Necroing and semi-hijacking this thread to be the Politics dumpsterfire.

I will be the first to say I don't like Trump. I think we all know this. I think we are, for the most part, on the same page. But I don't think he deserved to get the JFK treatment on live television, and I am -- begrudgingly -- relieved that he's mostly okay. I don't think it's okay for people to make cracks like "three inches away from being a national hero." I think it's in remarkably poor taste and it's very much stooping to the level of those we try so hard to say we're better (for the country) than.

There are apparently some discrepancies that make some folks think this was staged to try to get him more support. I don't think Trump would have let himself be shot at for clout, and especially I don't think he'd let himself actually come to any (albeit relatively mild) harm for it, either. So if it was staged, I think it can definitely be ruled out that he was involved or even knew about it. It certainly won't stop him from benefitting from it, however.

I don't like that it happened for a few reasons, and while basic human decency that he does his best not to deserve is chief among them, I also think that it's made him a stronger candidate among swing voters and is the last thing Biden needed after that awful, awful debate performance. It's really quite jarring how much more demoralized we are as a base after the last couple months -- I was cautiously optimistic back in May that we might be able to hold the line. Now, I think we'll just be lucky if Trump doesn't immediately send the country careening off the rails on his first day back in office. I of course am going to vote but we'll just have to see if this is our Germany 1933 moment or not.

I also think that, if he weren't a few inches away, and they were burying a candidate, I very much wonder if that wouldn't backfire as well. I'm almost certain that Trump is not going to be the end of it. I think whoever comes after him -- now, I suppose, likely to be Vance -- is going to be even worse because he's coherent and presumably smarter than Trump. I wonder if he isn't who we should really be worried about.

 

[jtr1962]

The whole Trump near assassination looks like it was lifted straight out of The Manchurian Candidate. Ironic Trump used that moniker for Biden. The thing is let's assume this was planned. Dying as a martyr isn't Trump's speed. After all, once he's out of the picture there's nothing in it for him. So suppose the plan was to do exactly what happened, namely a near miss. That would take a very skilled sniper, and he would have to be allowed a window to do this by the Secret Service. The latter might happen if Trump finds people open to payment for their "services". The former would be a lot harder. Certainly you wouldn't use a 20 year old with limited shooting experience. You would get a skilled marksman with a bunch of confirmed kills at many hundreds of yards. By comparison shooting Trump's ear at 120 yards would be trivial. Given this, I'm dubious the goal was what actually happened. Most of the really skilled snipers bleed red, white, and blue. They're not going to throw a Presidential election for money, even a lot of money.

This doesn't rule out that someone else in the GOP with higher aspirations decided it was a good time to make Trump a martyr, then rise to power on his coattails. Fortunately for the country they failed. I say fortunately because Trump is his own worst enemy. But someone smart who wants the same things? That's a real danger. Also, I think a Trump assassination would have plunged us into civil war.

I hope this isn't our 1933 moment. There's still a chance Trump will be true to form and snatch defeat out of the jaws of victory. Or maybe those swing voters will see him for what he really is.

 

[Newtun]

Within a day of the assassination attempt, "Republicans accuse Biden of inciting Trump shooting"; from NBC News:

Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio (and vice-president candidate): “The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs. That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.”​

What a vile accusation, just pure political scapegoating. He doesn't seem to know the meaning of the word "directly".

As if all of their rhetoric hasn't been inciteful, a prime instance being the January 6 2021 right-wing thugs' massive mob attack on congress, after Trump's speech to them lying about the election results and telling them directly to "Fight like hell."

Others repugnicans joining the blame Biden bandwagon were Georgia Rep. Mike Collins, Colorado Rep. Lauren Boebert, Florida Sen. Rick Scott, Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, and South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott.

 

[Mercutio]

I try not to spend time around conservative people, but something that needs to be understood is that those people do not as a rule get news from any non-conservative source. All mainstream media is rejected as false, so reality is only what Fox News, OANN and the Daily Wire if not the Daily Stormer say that it is. So ANTIFA false flags account for everything that makes conservatives look bad, elementary-age kids are identifying as cats and demanding a litter box in classrooms (this is often rolled out in state legislatures as a reason to ban "woke" teaching materials), discussions of gender must be reduced to binary.

We no longer even have a basis for rational discussion with these people. Their sky really is a different color.

 

[sedrosken]

Well son of a bitch. I don't think we had much chance with him at this point, but now, less than four months before the election, we have to decide on and rally behind another candidate? Christ. Why don't we just skip the election and hand Trump a crown already.

 

[Mercutio]

I'm not a fan of cops or cop-affiliated people, but I do kind of like running a former prosecutor, a person of color, and a woman against the personification of the seven deadly sins, a convicted felon, well known racist, misogynist and rapist. On the other hand. I fully expect he'll break out some loaded words at some point to describe her and it'll be interesting to see how that plays with people who don't follow politics.

 

[Handruin]

I assumed all they would do is pull out their 2020 playbook of attacks since they already have them and then also try to bring into question the whole stupid birther issue like Obama.

 

[Mercutio]

I assumed all they would do is pull out their 2020 playbook of attacks since they already have them and then also try to bring into question the whole stupid birther issue like Obama.

They already started. Her parents were not born in the USA but Harris was born in the blasted hellscape of Oakland, California. They're also going to challenge her name on state ballots even though no candidate has been nominated yet.

 

[Handruin]

Sounds on par with what I would expect from the GOP. I assume if they press the issue about challenging her name on ballots, Biden can just resign before next election and force her to become the president and skip past that noise.

 

[Mercutio]

He won't do that because the Senate is tied at the moment and hate monkey Joe Manchin is technically an independent but functionally a Republican in everything but name. No one else would get approved to replace her and that would cloud the matter of presidential succession.

 

[jtr1962]

Project 2025 should be enough to stop Trump if the Dems don't bungle the messaging, which sadly they do all the time.

I'm honestly at a loss for what I might do if all this comes to pass. Leaving the country would be a huge hassle, plus where to go? I still have cyanide pills from a while back, so that's always an option. I really hope the electorate is better than this. I know about 1/3 of the electorate are hard-core Trump supporters who would follow him off a cliff. I just hope the swing voters can see through all this nonsense.

 

[Mercutio]

Democrats non stop fail at messaging. Unfortunately, it doesn't help that they're the party that tries to communicate ideas more complicated than will fit on a bumper sticker. The good news is that Trump hasn't seen any increase in support. It's just a question of whether or not more people turn out and cast enough ballots that the AGs in states like Georgia and Arizona can't send their own slate of electors, which is something ELSE they've been telegraphing they're going to do again.

 

[sdbardwick]

Democrats non stop fail at messaging. Unfortunately, it doesn't help that they're the party that tries to communicate ideas more complicated than will fit on a bumper sticker. The good news is that Trump hasn't seen any increase in support. It's just a question of whether or not more people turn out and cast enough ballots that the AGs in states like Georgia and Arizona can't send their own slate of electors, which is something ELSE they've been telegraphing they're going to do again.

They can try old tricks again, but remember their SCOTUS has given the POTUS magical royal powers to just become super-sheriff and order law enforcement to just round up those who would defy the Constitution and given the obligation the Oath the Constitution imposes on the President he could make a justifiable claim that such a roundup would be an official act.

Actually, Biden as POTUS has a lot of wiggle room to interfere with the election in the name of defending the constitution which is an open ended affirmative obligation of the Office of the President (especially as he is now a lame-duck President).

 

[jtr1962]

Actually, Biden as POTUS has a lot of wiggle room to interfere with the election in the name of defending the constitution which is an open ended affirmative obligation of the Office of the President (especially as he is now a lame-duck President).

Fake some sort of national emergency affecting red states, and declare martial law in these states on election day. Since most voters there tend to not use early voting, they'll miss the chance to vote.

Hey, if the GOP can do stuff like January 6, we can surely pull some tricks out of our sleeves. Maybe some people from blue states can go to swing states long enough to get registered to vote there, then return to their home states after the election. Won't matter if they didn't vote at home if it's safely blue regardless.

Even without anything this extreme, it would be poetic justice if those extra Presidential powers came back to bite them in the behind.

 

[sedrosken]

The trouble with your thinking jtr is that we have a little integrity. It'll probably get us killed, but we won't stoop to the same levels that they're willing to precisely because we know it opens the door to them being used against us later on, and we're not terribly interested in establishing a dictatorship to prevent that eventuality.

 

[Mercutio]

It's fair to say that the current republican party engages in a great deal of projection about issues that they will happily exploit.

 

[Handruin]

The Republic party continues to test and reset the bar where shame applies. The bar is so far below the ground now it's difficult to know how far they're willing to push things to a point where there are actual consequences causing them to pull back.

 

[Mercutio]

I realized that when Dick Cheney told a journalist that reality is whatever the administration defines it to be. I've never liked the GOP, but here we are at the intersection of Brave New World and 1984 and these guys seem like they're racing past The Handmaid's Tale toward I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream.

 

[jtr1962]

The Republic party continues to test and reset the bar where shame applies. The bar is so far below the ground now it's difficult to know how far they're willing to push things to a point where there are actual consequences causing them to pull back.

They won't stop until the bar reaches the 9th level of hell. Even then, they'll push it lower if it's at all possible.

I just can't figure out how ~1/3 of the electorate supports these clowns to the point they'll follow them off a cliff. Amazing how you can get people to vote against their own self-interests.

 

[Mercutio]

I just can't figure out how ~1/3 of the electorate supports these clowns to the point they'll follow them off a cliff.

I watched this happen to my brother, who eventually got better, and one of my uncles, who went from host a campaign event for Illinois state senator Obama to building a bunker under his house for a six digit amount of money because of all the gangs in Chicago (which is two hours away; and the nearest house to his is probably two miles away). My uncle has always been a gun hobbyist; after he retired, he started spending more time at the range and started seeing Fox News as the only trustworthy network. These days he thinks OANN isn't right wing enough.

The narrative across right-wing media is that it has a monopoly on truth. There's no reason to listen to mainstream news. They're just lying to further the agenda of (((globalists))). The parentheses here are used to indicate the shadowy cabal of international billionaires and powerful Jewish interests and yes antisemitism is still extremely baked in to the narratives these people respond to. You'll see this notation in places like Twitter and web sites that have at least some right-wing discourse, albeit rarely in discussions where the normies can see them. Anyway, these people firmly see Fox News as the most cuddly and centrist of news sources, and everything to the left of that is only lying or towing the line of The People Who Run the World.. There are different strains of conspiratorial thinking these days, with Q nutters, Ethnostatism, Evangelical Christian and crypto-fascists being prominent among them. These groups all have some or other think tank or policy organization to act as a mouthpiece and most of them are ultimately funded by some or other nutty billionaire, such as the Kochs and the Heritage Foundation, Cato institute or the Project for a New American Century as the palatable mainstream mouthpieces that can be visible in media and provide justification for whatever talking points these guys are attempting to advance. These groups have found gains in embracing increasingly racist and theocratic lines of thinking in large part because these people are willing to vote in service of their beliefs, often because they believe so strongly in either the principles of the 2nd Amendment (Guns, guns, guns!) or that the first amendment means that their religion can be held above the rule of law. The guys at the top don't really LIKE these people, but they're useful idiots for the policies they really DO want, and the things the idiots want aren't really going to hurt the guys at the top.

I suppose it isn't that different for me to believe that a few billionaires dictating policies that get articulated by AM radio hosts, right wing podcasters (or "apolitical" hosts who allow talking heads to come on and discuss their ideas) and conservative think tanks are just the left's version of (((globalists))) but on the other hand, the way that right-wing discourse seems to spring unbidden nowhere and across the spectrum of conservative media does suggest centralized sources for talking points. Left-of-center discourse is always fractious and chaotic in comparison.

Innuendo Studios on Youtube has some wonderful examinations of how right-wing thought can infest internet forums.
Behind the Bastards has had long-format discussions of how rich people sort of took over Evangelical Christianity and the surprisingly long history of antisemitism and how tied it is to right-wing thinking.
Knowledge Fight is specifically examines and rebuts the entire career of Alex Jones, but listening to Dan and Jordan dissect Infowars from day to day also exposes the connections between luminaries in conservative media.

 

[jtr1962]

Yeah, my brother is a rabid Trump supporter who drank the Kool-Aid. He's accusing the left of doing everything the right is doing, along with calling CNN fake news. At least I can still talk politics with him without getting into an argument. He'll honestly admit some of Trump's more glaring faults. That's a bridge too far for most of his supporters.

Your uncle is next level paranoid. Damn, a bunker because of Chicago gang bangers when you're in the middle of nowhere? If I had the money, I might consider a bunker myself, but only on account of the current state of world affairs. If nothing else, being stocked with a few years of food, plus a safe place to stay, will let you ride out major natural disasters like a Cat 5 hitting NYC. To me that's the real value of having a bunker.

I'm trying to square away right-wing antisemitism with Trump's policies. Didn't he say the US no longer considers Jewish West Bank settlements illegal? This is something Israel deserves censure for. They're basically running an apartheid state there. They regularly force Palestinians out of homes they've owned for generations. There seems to be a bit of disconnect from what Trump is doing versus the rabid antisemitism of some of his right-wing followers. I'm just surprised none of his followers have taken him to task for it. I guess they dislike the Palestinians even more than the Jews. Or maybe Israel is giving them a blueprint for how to treat migrants, or even blacks and hispanics who are US citizens.

 

[Mercutio]

It's very difficult to talk about the current situation in the West Bank and Gaza without being accused of antisemitism, Zionism or somehow both at the same time. I've been done with Israel as a state more or less since Rabin's assassination and the Netanyahu's rise to power, even understanding that his voting bloc is extremely similar to the one that keeps Republicans in any kind of power in the USA; it's all based on the say-so of the most extreme of fundamentalist rabbis.

Trump is a master at not completing his thoughts in sentence form. He tends to imply things and then trail off. This allows his followers to hear what they want to hear while providing deniability when his statements come under scrutiny.

 

[Mercutio]

Has anyone watched the panel between Trump and the National Association of Black Journalists from earlier today?

It's 35 minutes long and every minute of is not just painful but actively insulting.

I can't believe we have to go through with another election season with this moron actively threatening the concept of our government.

 

[Handruin]

I've yet to watch it but the number of headlines that have shown up in my feeds about how stupid he's been was enough to ward me away from bothering to listen to him mumble on about nonsense and lies yet again.

 

[jtr1962]

Has anyone watched the panel between Trump and the National Association of Black Journalists from earlier today?

I didn't watch it but I heard a few sound bites. Also read a little about it, like this article:

MSN

This has to be one of the winning quotes of this election cycle:

"He did crap the bed today," Republican political strategist Scott Jennings said of Trump on CNN last night. "The only question is if he's going to roll around in it or get up and change the sheets."

 

[Mercutio]

My favorites are the pinheads who think Trump was 4D Chess-ing the whole deal by refusing to properly address the questions that the uppity [mulltiple slurs] asked him. Apparently, Trump used to tell people he's of Swedish ancestry, according to Omarosa Newman, who somehow jumped from being a contestant on his TV show to being an advisor in the White House. So the concept of changing how one identifies is not unknown to him.

I have to hope the level of discourse on display here would have some impact on his campaign, especially in combination with how stridently his VP pick has been doubling down on his more controversial views, but given that everyone in the entire country knows that he's a slanderous rapist-in-fact AND convicted felon and that isn't moving the needle tells me everything I need to know about this country.

 

[Newtun]

Referring to his Donaldshitp, from https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/31/us/politics/trump-nabj-fact-check.html:

Former President Donald J. Trump, in a combative appearance before the National Association of Black Journalists, repeatedly disparaged Vice President Kamala Harris and the Black women interviewing him as he made the case on Wednesday that Black voters should vote for him in November.​

. . .​

What Was Said​

“I have been the best president for the Black population since Abraham Lincoln.”​

False. Historians would beg to differ. Among modern presidents, the most significant legislative achievements arguably belong to President Lyndon B. Johnson, who shepherded the passage of the Voting Rights Act, the Civil Rights Act and the Fair Housing Act.​

That reminded me of Lenny Bruce's line about LBJ trying to learn how to pronounce "negro": "nigger-ao".

 

[fb]

Rape and incest is apparently "inconvenient"?

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