Prelude to the Apocalypse

[BulletMagnet]

Using tax-payer dollars to influence foreign entities and politically motivated investigations are normal, for better or worse. Dems have zero self awareness. Zero.

You really want to laser-focus on this one item (because if there's not a whataboutism angle, to the modern right it might as well not exist), fine, I'll bite again: whether or not Trump himself pays any real price for this, if there's one thing I hope does suffer a grievous wound at the end of the process is the - again, blatantly nihilist - "everything sucks, everything's corrupt, everyone is terrible, to get ahead all you can do is line up behind the most terrible of the bunch and strive to be as terrible as they are" mindset that Trump embodies and his followers revel in. Which, as I've said since the beginning, reveals a great deal about why they're here at all.

Whatever the outcome, at some point somebody concluded "okay, I have to say something" and did so in the manner the law, imperfect as it is, directs, and despite blatant efforts to drown the complaint out (including - and proving that the universe has a sense of humor - shifting the incriminating evidence to a less-accessible server ) it still made its way into the open - yes, it was late in coming, no, it won't address every flaw in the system (funny how that always seems to suddenly pop up as a non-negotiable requirement whenever incremental change for the better seems possible), no, it might not amount to much in terms of concrete action (again, thanks to those willing to suck the devil's dick for the resulting libtard lulz...and/or "populist" upper-end tax cuts), but there are people out there trying to, if nothing else, stop things from getting any worse.

Nitpick whatever you want about their timing or their methods, and god knows nothing on his Earth will stop you from screaming about (((who's really calling the shots))), but at the very least I can hope that, not too far down the line, a lot more people will be willing to tell Our Friend's Son and his ilk in no uncertain terms to keep their obnoxious self-serving Mad Max fetishism to themselves.

[Mischief Maker]

52 U.S. Code § 30121. Contributions and donations by foreign nationals

(a) ProhibitionIt shall be unlawful for—
(1) a foreign national, directly or indirectly, to make—

(A) a contribution or donation of money or other thing of value, or to make an express or implied promise to make a contribution or donation, in connection with a Federal, State, or local election;
(B) a contribution or donation to a committee of a political party; or
(C) an expenditure, independent expenditure, or disbursement for an electioneering communication (within the meaning of section 30104(f)(3) of this title); or

(2) a person to solicit, accept, or receive a contribution or donation described in subparagraph (A) or (B) of paragraph (1) from a foreign national.

This is a prima facie case.

[Rob]

global warming is a global problem.

...And no part of that global solution is transferring millions of people from low per capita emissions areas to the highest areas.

Hiding behind a wall with the stated intention of keeping modern technology out of the hands of brown people to "reduce carbon footprints" kinda falls apart when Brazilian agribusiness under the fascist Bolsonaro government are using the primitive fertilization technique of burning the Amazon Rainforest down.

Where to even begin.

Don't worry. if immigration causes them such ache and worry, here's the solution for those True American Patriots(TM):

Can you follow the A to B and back again? Why more immigration? Economic growth. What comes after economic growth? A demand for more economic growth. How do we achieve more economic growth? More immigration.

There is no amount of jobs Americans can do to limit the desire of our hostile ruling class for more people to rule and exploit. America's population mid-20th century was about half of what it is now. It did not suddenly become essential for our survival to double that figure. The only potential limiter to the amount of imported labor is the tolerance of the masses for the consequences of that endless importation.

[BulletMagnet]

Dems have zero self awareness. Zero.

Oh, and Kellyanne Conway just accused Pelosi of opening the inquiry because she was overly deferential to male colleagues.

Fucking delicious.

[Mischief Maker]

Hiding behind a wall with the stated intention of keeping modern technology out of the hands of brown people to "reduce carbon footprints" kinda falls apart when Brazilian agribusiness under the fascist Bolsonaro government are using the primitive fertilization technique of burning the Amazon Rainforest down.

Where to even begin.

Where indeed?

[Specineff]

Can you follow the A to B and back again?

Can you change your tune already? All I'm saying is that I'd like to see all those True And Honest(TM) Patriots getting their hands dirty with the soil they claim to love so much.

There's no English-illiterate, non-skilled, raised-in-a-pigsty (like you eloquently say, given it's much easier for you to fling shit instead of arguments), drug-dealing rapist coming to get your comfortable job and yearly 3000-dollar stipend to finance his big-ass truck and welfare claim, so please relax already. The Klan and Trump lied to you, in case you haven't noticed yet.

[Rob]

Democratic accusations that America is endemically racist are becoming ever more frequent and strident. At the last presidential debate, Pete Buttigieg announced that “systemic racism” will “be with us” regardless of who wins the presidency; Beto O’Rourke claimed that racism in America is “foundational” and that people of color were under “mortal threat” from the “white supremacist in the White House”; Julián Castro denounced the growing threat of “white supremacy”; and Cory Booker called for “attacking systemic racism,” especially in the “racially biased” criminal-justice system.
...
Yet key parts of the intersectional narrative are not born out by data. It is now a standard trope, implanted in freshmen summer reading lists through the works of Ta-Nehesi Coates and others, that whites pose a severe, if not mortal, threat to blacks. That may have once been true, but it is no longer so today. Just this month, the Bureau of Justice Statistics released its 2018 survey of criminal victimization. According to the study, there were 593,598 interracial violent victimizations (excluding homicide) between blacks and whites last year, including white-on-black and black-on-white attacks. Blacks committed 537,204 of those interracial felonies, or 90 percent, and whites committed 56,394 of them, or less than 10 percent. That ratio is becoming more skewed, despite the Democratic claim of Trump-inspired white violence. In 2012-13, blacks committed 85 percent of all interracial victimizations between blacks and whites; whites committed 15 percent. From 2015 to 2018, the total number of white victims and the incidence of white victimization have grown as well.

Remarkable disparity, and interesting in contrast to the anti-white narratives the candidates and the media have been repeating all year.

[Mischief Maker]

(excluding homicide)

But if there's one thing conservatives love more than an out-of-context quote, it's massaging the numbers in statistics.

[Rob]

LOL. You might find that the survey responses from homicide victims are few, perhaps zero.

It's easier to find hard data on murder, since there is typically a missing person for every murder. If you look you'll find that the data is similarly skewed and not representative of the narratives put forward by the 1619 Project-parroting Betos of our sick political system. The reality is closer to the opposite - one that sweeps violence against white victims under the rug and permits or even celebrates anti-white hatred. Nowhere in America will you find a publicly funded venue serving up something like the following about any other group (and rightly so - this should be totally unacceptable, but it shows you where our culture is at).

[Mischief Maker]

How frightened of Black People do you have to be to see a picture of this Urkel-looking nerd and your response is to hide under the bed with a shotgun?

[Specineff]

As part of our Public Square program, we presented the short film Why Don’t We Murder More White People? (WDWMMWP?) by Jonathan Garcia on June 1, 2019. Through interwoven personal interviews, WDWMMWP? presents a critical lens and provokes nuanced questions regarding structural racism. These are not questions that we can afford to shy away from, as white supremacist ideologies and race-related violence continue to flourish in America. This artistic provocation is not intended to target one group or to incite violence; rather, the work is about questioning what and who is worth protecting. That question — what and who is worth protecting — is ultimately about reducing harm and violence. While the title — when removed from its context — may read as controversial, the nuanced inquiry throughout WDWMMWP? intends to interrogate the systemic ways that “whiteness” is protected. The film essentially asks: “As we continue to watch the death of black and brown people become normalized in parallel with the rise of white supremacy, why isn’t the inverse true?”

Funny how much knowledge one can gather in seconds with a simple Google search, huh?

[BryanM]

Amy packing the house.



The polling right now isn't terribly predicative of what the election will be like, normies are paying far more attention to the new Football Season after all. Of course, the historical performance of 2016 leads more than enough credence that they'll nominate Biden or Warren and we might as well ignore politics for another ~20 years.

What does give me a little sliver of hope is the complete absence of Public Policy Polling polls in any of these releases. This is one of those Actually Decent outfits with crosstabs, nonloaded questions, etc. In 2016, they didn't release a primary poll for the later half od 2015. No. They started releasing them in 2012, literally the week after Obama beat Romney. "+60 Clinton" released every three months like clockwork.

But not a single, little peep from them this time around. These guys are contracted for polling by the Democrats, they've polled this race. None of their clients wanted to release the numbers.

Warren

It is at least a little bit nice that leftist media is finally being honest about how... not good for policy or power she is toward our goals.

[Specineff]

You may want to remove that ":small" from the pic address, Bryan. It's not letting it display.

[Rob]

Funny how much knowledge one can gather in seconds with a simple Google search, huh?

...

This, the doubling down from the YBCA CEO after receiving a flood of complaints, is something I had already read and nearly mentioned to reinforce my point. See, white people have enough power to systemically oppress all other groups in America, to be "protected" as the deaths of others become "normalized", but not enough power to get a response to objections to Why Don't We Murder More White People more thoughtful than a poorly disguised "yeah, and what the fuck are you going to do about it?"

Saying that something is a socially responsible and nuanced conversation does not make it so. Saying that something doesn't target any group or incite violence, despite a "provocative" title specifically doing that and while interviewees unironically answer the title's question, doesn't make it so. Or, I guess the lesson for "white supremacists" is to dress up their violent rhetoric in scarcely euphemistic language and call it a provocative, interrogative art piece.

“As we continue to watch the death of black and brown people become normalized in parallel with the rise of white supremacy, why isn’t the inverse true?”

"Why isn't the inverse true?"

Scroll back up to the Bureau of Justice Statistics figures. If the normalization of the deaths of "black and brown people" is an issue, it is an issue independent of white people, "whiteness" and "white supremacy", and does not call for a thought experiment about an inverse situation.

[Specineff]

Considering all your hateful rhetoric in this thread against anyone who happens to be brown, black, or jewish, you're the last person who should be complaining about that movie's "target", Rob.

[Rob]

Choose your fighter.

[BryanM]

The Haiti protests not getting airtime is pretty typical as well.

It's always heart warming to know the people responsible for continuing to lower the minimum wage here (through the slow cowardly method of inflation), thought even ~50 cents an hour over there was way too high and actively lowered it. Mask comes off and all that.

You may want to remove that ":small" from the pic address, Bryan. It's not letting it display.

It parses two browsers on my side. You on mobile?

Her popularity with laborers after the real candidates finished speaking is a thing to see.

[Mischief Maker]

Augustus Caesar had thoughts on Global Warming more than 1,800 years before the invention of coal-fired power plants?

Or are you juxtaposing quotes wildly out of context again to give yourself an edge in the victimhood olympics, Rob?

Amy packing the house.

At least she's crashing and burning in the most synthwave way possible. Maybe after that speech she was inspired by the movie Drive to menace her staffers with a hammer.

Warren

It is at least a little bit nice that leftist media is finally being honest about how... not good for policy or power she is toward our goals.

I agree that Warren is being pushed way too hard by the media as "the same" as Bernie, which she clearly is not, especially in terms of foreign policy. And the whole Working Families party vote situation is skeezy as hell.

But the first priority is knocking Biden out of the race. Not only is he the most likely of the frontrunners to lose to Trump, but even if he does manage to eke out a razor thin victory margin he'd be a zillion times less responsive to Sanders' movement than Warren.

I'm 100% behind Bernie, but he's doing an entirely experimental type of campaign and the experiment could fail. Bernie would be the first person to tell you the good of the movement is higher priority than the candidacy of himself. "Not me, us."

[BryanM]

he'd be a zillion times less responsive to Sanders' movement than Warren

I still don't know any examples of this happening, ever. Obama releasing Chealsea Manning from the gulag at the last minute, maybe? (His poor support of our "let's nuke Iran" plan was definitely intrinsic to the man and not from being pushed.)

There won't be any permanent gains under a Warren administration. You get what you buy.

[ED-057]

I guess dems might as well just cancel their debates, and their primary, and just give up. Nobody is going to get a chance to say anything intelligent again for some time, now that the TDS-fueled hysteria is flaring up again. The previous fabricated scandal, similarly born of collusion between dems and intelligence operatives, lasted for three full years. So it's reasonable to assume that this one could have equivalent staying power, given the resources invested into it.

The NYT identified the "whistleblower" as being CIA. And I didn't even realize this before, but it turns out that this person is actually the one who originally concocted the absurd notion that Ukraine's internal investigations would "interfere" in the US "election." Apparently the dems are doubling down on this idea that exposing their wrongdoing is, like, totally unfair! Just as with the DNC emails. How are we supposed to have a proper election if voters keep finding out that we are corrupt before we even win? How dare Trump raise the idea of shady goings-on being investigated?

When the CIA/dem Scandal Fabrication Team (SFT) were brainstorming this narrative, must be nobody told them that the US and Ukraine are parties to a treaty specifying "[t]he Contracting States shall provide mutual assistance, in accordance with the provisions of this Treaty, in connection with the investigation, prosecution, and prevention of offenses, and in proceedings related to criminal matters."

Reality Winner thought she was revealing classified info that was in the public interest (although IMO she was just a sucker). She was prosecuted for this and dems mostly couldn't be bothered to go to bat for her. What additional levels of hypocritical and short-term-memory-loss-inducing spin will they have to employ to argue that Trump shouldn't have the latest leaker prosecuted for actions that amount to an obvious political maneuver?

Now you may be thinking, "so what if the dems have an army of lying scumbags on every telescreen and every square of corporate toilet paper, peddling incredible BS that is insulting to everyone's intelligence? Repubs lie too?!" But try to remember that Boehner has been out of congress for a while now, and McCain is dead. The only one the repubs have left at this point that can compete with the likes of Adam Schiff would be Lindsey Graham, and he's only interested in advancing the neocon agenda. The field is wildly unbalanced.

"everything sucks, everything's corrupt, everyone is terrible, to get ahead all you can do is line up behind the most terrible of the bunch and strive to be as terrible as they are"

I'm not sure why this was mentioned but it might as well be the new US national anthem. It describes foreign policy, domestic politics, and the economic system fairly well.

[ED-057]

Choose your fighter.

Does this person think that "breeders" are predominately wealthy? Or is this a parody?

[BryanM]

Actual whistle-blowers go to gulag, yes.

Nobody is going to get a chance to say anything intelligent again for some time

I did go on record of Biden having more mojo than Hillary (prior to getting an update to his mental health). But then his launch video came out and was the exact same crap as 2016 all over again: Republicans are good people. Trump is a singularly special kind of evil. All the problems in the world would be fixed if only the face of capitalism would stop saying mean things.

Same winning message, same winning strategy. Should have been expected because it's the same strategists telling him what to say. A really great example of how individuals don't matter, it's the systems they serve that do.

[Specineff]

You may want to remove that ":small" from the pic address, Bryan. It's not letting it display.

It parses two browsers on my side. You on mobile?

Nope, desktop Firefox. It's working now. And boy, that image is sad.

[BryanM]

You may want to remove that ":small" from the pic address, Bryan. It's not letting it display.

It parses two browsers on my side. You on mobile?

Nope, desktop Firefox. It's working now. And boy, that image is sad.

Billl Maher's #1 top pick : D

[quash]

http://www.unz.com/anepigone/confidence ... ns-by-age/

I never thought I'd ever see just how domesticated my peers are laid out in front of me so clearly, but here we are. Thankfully zoomers are far more woke than 80s and 90s kids and we'll see the gamer uprising in our lifetimes.

[Rob]

Slightly baffled by the results there. I suppose that the second one down might be interpreted as "who watched The X-Files", but who in their right mind has confidence in the CIA? Am I forgetting a film/TV series?

Anyways, some additional data on a slightly different kind of trust.





Ignore, or laugh at, the WaPo journalist's creative writing.

[quash]

Perhaps you're overlooking how the CIA managed to clean up its image by comparison after the Snowden leaks. Makes you wonder why he didn't blow any whistles when he was working for the CIA before becoming a contractor for the NSA.

[BryanM]

I really have no idea what dafuq this "confidence index" on these bargraphs is supposed to represent, exactly.

Here is the relevant data from the poll, that he links:

Code: Select all

Confidence in the CIA
                      18-29          30-44            45-64       65+
A Great Deal           11              17                8          7
Quite a Lot            16              16               23         25
Some                   29              31               31         34
Very little            18              12               18         20
None at all            11               9               10          9
Don't know             15              16               10          5

Now, to me, that doesn't look like any group trusts the CIA 20 times as much as any other.

(Also note the explicit worldview pushed by the question itself - there is no "CIA: Good or bad" choice here because of course there isn't any argument they might be harmful, right? Just "confidence" in how good they are.)

Guys like Nate Bronze absolutely love this kind of numbers fucksteining in their terrible punditry. Disinformation models love lying or reframing numbers. (You might remember that one I always like to bring up about how the aggregate polls said Trump had a coin flip chance, and the media lying about what they said.) Mr.unz isn't close to the same level as Sir Bronze tho - numbers pulled from nowhere that mean absolutely nothing with all the solid foundation of an 11 year old making shit up. That's when you've made it all the way.

Here's my hot take on this question: Normal people don't think about the executive arm of the government very much since they don't have any immediate impact on their day to day lives. What did have an impact upon the lives of the poll takers is massive regret in agreeing to take an internet poll, after being bombarded by questions about things they don't really give a shit about with a sea of bubble hell attached to them. Those aged 30-44 have a 15% lower tolerance to boredom and are more likely to mindlessly click the higher up bubbles to escape such misery a little faster.

But I don't have a fancy website or a fat paycheck for my punditry, just a forum thread that serves the same purpose as when your uncle yells at the TV. Doesn't seem fair.

[quash]

https://www.marines.mil/News/Messages/M ... nt-marines

Are things getting interesting or what

[Mischief Maker]

"Bernie Sanders makes my skin crawl!"