MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
No bio...
User ID: 896
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
3d ago
What do you think the post I was responding to meant, if I didn't understand it?
Under normal circumstances, that post would mean that nobody objected to Latin Americans "doing Hispanic activities" (whatever that means, but presumably including singing Spanish-language pop music) in their own countries, which is fine, but has nothing to do with a thread about a Puerto Rican-themed Super Bowl show sung by Americans in America. Either the post I was responding to is off-topic, or it is ignorant (if the poaster was not aware that Puerto Rico is part of the US), or it is racist (if the poaster was aware that Puerto Rico is part of the US, but nevertheless thinks that a Puerto Rican has a "country of origin" elsewhere to return to). Forum rules prohibit me speculating as to which, but my response is on point in all three cases.
Perhaps people who can't say what they mean should shut up. If what aldomilyar meant is "I support Puerto Rican independence because they don't speak English" he is free to say so. For what it's worth, Bad Bunny agrees with him, although a majority of Puerto Ricans don't.
Bad Bunny was representing a defiance towards America
This is clearly false, given what happened on stage. I can absolutely imagine that the NFL intended Bad Bunny to be a celebration of a particular vision of what America should be that is widely held by the Blue Tribe and rejected by the Red Tribe, and which Reds might therefore consider "defiant towards America". But the show Bad Bunny performed was a celebration of Puerto Rican culture with as little politics as possible given the existence of a culture war that Puerto Ricans didn't start.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
3d ago
This. For Trump's new coalition to work, he needs to keep at least a substantial minority of well-assimilated Hispanics onboard. This should be easy - we are talking about a demographic which are default hostile to negrolatry, left-endorsed sexual deviance, and overeducated stick-up-arse-ness; and strongly in favour of big-arse trucks and other symbols of blue-collar affluence.
"Puerto Rico is not America and celebrating Puerto Rican culture is un-American" is the worst possible message for this group.
I agree with @Opt-out that this could have ended up with the NFL and the pro-Hispanic left beclowning themselves, particularly if Trump had shut up and let the MSM brag about how Bad Bunny was successfully shoving Spanish-speaking culture down the NFL-watching normies throats. But MAGA doubled down and beclowned themselves even harder - starting immediately after the announcement with various MAGA accounts including Trump poasting about how Bad Bunny (a natural-born US citizen with US citizen ancestors going back a century) was not American. Bad Bunny and the NFL managed to turn down the politics to the point where Trump and Kid Rock look like the people politicising the Super Bowl, not to mention demonstrating the US right's low culture rating by putting on a mediocre alternative show. It helps that (although Bad Bunny has been outspokenly anti-Trump off the stage) the inherent politics of his act is pro-Puerto Rican independence, which has no partisan valence in mainstream America, rather than being generic-left or pro-immigration. To people who understand the difference, it was very obviously a Puerto Rican show and not a generically Hispanic show.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
3d ago
Nobody at ICE or in MAGA is saying that you can't go do Hispanic activities in your country of origin
Bad Bunny's country of origin is the United States of America. Donald Trump (who I hope we can agree counts as MAGA) certainly seemed to be objecting to him doing Hispanic activities in his country of origin when he endorsed TPUSA's alternative halftime show.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
3d ago
That just returns FALSE. It's IsVacuum = TRUE you need to worry about.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
3d ago
This is related, I think, to something I often observe concerning abortion. Abortion is a young woman's game. The centrality of abortion to the culture wars is, I think, a direct outgrowth of mass media making "youth culture" the dominant culture of America.
I am not American, but my impression is the opposite - that abortion politics (on both sides) is, like almost every other political movement in the west, dominated by boomers fighting the last war. The exception is Very Online Feminism, which is a Gen X thing. (Jessica Valenti was born in 1978 and Amanda Marcotte in 1977). In the UK, the loudest pro-life voice was Nadine Dorries (born 1957) and the women Labour MPs who put full decriminalisation of abortion on the agenda in 2025 were mostly in their fifties.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
3d ago
If there were hordes of military aged males at all, then we wouldn't be here.
Population aging (both due to declining birthrate and rising life expectancy) is the fundamental fact about Western (and first-world Asian) societies from which everything else follows.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
3d ago
The OG Tommy Robinson was the leader of the Luton MIGs, who were the football (soccer for Yanks) hooligan firm in Yaxley-Lennon's hometown of Luton. Organised football hooliganism was not explicitly political, but there was (and still is - there have now been two cases where an anti-terrorist have-a-go heroes in London turned out to have learned to fight with the Millwall Bushwhackers, and the traditionally rival Millwall and Charlton firms joined forces to defend businesses on Eltham High Street in the 2011 London riots) a sufficiently large overlap between organised hooliganism and willingness to engage in political violence in defence of your traditional community that both the far right (I'm talking about the BNP and Combat 18 for those who care about details, not UKIP) and the establishment left saw organised football hooliganism as far-right adjacent.
So using "Tommy Robinson" as a nom de guerre is Yaxley-Lemon's attempt to place himself and the EDL in the native British tradition of organised football hooliganism and Combat 18.
The irony in all this is that Luton is now Islamized (37% "Asian", which in practice means South Asian Muslim, and only 33% British) and the MIGs did not in fact fight this, or even try to. The MIGs main rivals were the Hell's Angels and the Millwall Bushwhackers, both of which are also all-white groups of hardmen. If white nationalist political violence was a Thing in the UK (it wasn't and isn't) then those groups would all be allies.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
3d ago
Roma and Irish Travelers in the UK are different ethnic groups with similar lifestyles who would prefer not being lumped together, so there isn't a community-preferred term that covers both groups.
Irish Travelers avoid "Gypsy" - the Traveler families featured on British "My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding" (which featured zero Roma) all referred to themselves as "Travelers" when speaking English on camera. Roma prefer "Roma" but seem perfectly fine with "Gypsy". Thinking "gypsy" is a slur in the UK is pathognomic for Woke Mind Virus.
"Gypsy" is also confusing in the British context because it isn't clear if you are referring to just Roma or Roma plus Irish Travelers - this is a point about accuracy and not political correctness. Given the advantage of short words for things that people want to talk about, having "Gypsy" as a generally acceptable word for Roma+Travelers (and thus a different meaning from "Roma") would be useful, but it isn't standard usage.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
6d ago
If it was a bad shoot only if the shooter had precognition,
It was a legal shoot for the reasons discussed to death on this forum, but as a matter of policing technique it was a bad shoot because
- if the car had been driving at him, it would almost certainly not have stopped it. (Cars don't have dead man's switches, and the shooting did not, in fact, stop the car)
- if the car had not been driving at him, it would have been an unnecessary-in-hindsight shooting of someone the officer would rather not kill. (This happened)
- the shot was fired in an urban setting without time to verify what was behind the target, so the risk of hitting an innocent bystander was high.
There is a reason why real police are trained not to shoot at moving vehicles as a first-line response to dangerous driving.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
6d ago
Discrimination by Ashkenazim against Mizrachim does not line up with any US protected groups, so western SJWs (who are either American or have American-addled brains) don't care about it. (See also widespread blindness to anti-gypsy racism in Europe). But given the demographics of Israeli airports most of the people hit by racial profiling of "people who look like Arabs or Muslims" will be Mizrachi Jews, and Ashkenazi-on-Mizrachi racism certainly used to be a live political issue in Israel.
I do not think that TSA can distinguish Muslims from non-Muslims by sight*, and the people who support racial profiling against "Muslim" flyers are the kind of people who are just fine with generalised government harassment of brown people in the US, which is what it would turn into in practice. There are enough white ethnic Muslims (Chechens, Albanians etc, including Boston bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev), fair-skinned Arabs who could pass with some makeup (including Mohammed Atta), white converts, and ADOS/Black British black converts that an organised jihadi group would have zero difficulty recruiting people who would not be profiled to actually set the bombs off.
* Note that traditional dress of Islamic cultures is not a good tell for "likely jihadi" because jihadis don't wear traditional dress while blowing things up. The 9-11 hijackers wore business suits, and the 7-7 bombers in London wore sportswear. They also shave their beards.
so the 70 year old ladies are not as scrutinized
I support profiling by sex and age. Both German and Australian airport security profiled me when I was a military-age man, and were right to do so.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
6d ago
(Do I actively believe Trump would order ICE agents to threaten people into voting Republican? No, not really.
The point wouldn't be to threaten people into voting Republican. It would be to suppress turnout in blue precincts in purple states. There are a lot of US citizens who care more about not attracting the attention of hostile government authority figures than they do about voting.
Would Trump order ICE to run a major publicity campaign before the elections to say that they would be carrying out random immigration checks outside polling stations in Atlanta, Philadelphia etc? (State Republican parties have pulled this kind of stunt in the past) Actually carry out the checks? (probably not, although if it was Stephen Miller's call he would).
courts,
This is an interesting one. The key policy point here is that ICE should not be picking up illegal immigrants who came to their attention because they were victims or witnesses in criminal trials - otherwise you create bad incentives which undermine justice for US citizens and legal immigrants. But not arresting at courthouses is both over and underinclusive here - you do want to be able to arrest e.g. acquitted defendants, and you want a credible commitment not to arrest witnesses and victims outside the courthouse as well as inside it.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
6d ago
It sounds like most of the problem here is even dumber than that. There is no law requiring cops to press charges every time they catch someone with contraband - but apparently some police forces have policies that cops should do so.
If police forces have dumb policies that have only survived because beat cops ignore them, then those policies should and can be changed without involving the legislature. In most municipal police forces it wouldn't need to involve elected officials at all.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
7d ago
@aldomilyar is the person who brought up the third term, not me. I explicitly said I think Trump is too old to run for a third term.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
7d ago
Which is also what you would do if you really were planning to run for a third term and trying to normalise the idea.
If anyone who wasn't Trump was selling official merch with "Candidate Year" on it, you would say they were running.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
7d ago
I just said I think he won't, because he is too old.
But the thread isn't about betting odds - it is about why people who worry about MAGA authoritarianism are behaving rationally or not. A 10% chance that Trump is Hitler is a good reason for Americans who don't want to live under Nazi rule (or foreigners who might have to fight a future Nazi America - the main reason why Hitler is the worst is the aggressive war) to be worrying, but I still wouldn't want to bet on it.
"Trump probably won't do the bad things he says he is going to do" is not very reassuring to someone who saw Jan 6th, and is currently watching him do much more of the bad things he said he was going to do than he did in his first term. Even if true, "The President probably won't send troops to interfere with the certification process if his party loses the election" (which Trump has said he should have done in 2020) is a very, very low bar.
The OP claimed not to understand why people were worried. I think it is very obvious why people are worried, even if you disagree with their judgement about the odds. The idea that Trump is so clearly trolling that only a fool or a lunatic could take him seriously, even though his supporters say they take him seriously (but not literally), doesn't seem tenable to me after January 6th, and even less so after the Fulton County raid.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
7d ago
And I just don't see some losers in plastic Viking helmets running into the Capitol as being comparable to the Night of the Long Knives
The Night of the Long Knives happened after Hitler had already mostly consolidated the dictatorship - by that point the only limit to his power was that Hindenberg was still alive. The question is how Jan 6th compares to the stuff the SA were doing around 1930 - i.e. before Hitler seized power. My knowledge of Weimar history isn't detailed enough to give a straight answer. But "We aren't in 1934 Germany" isn't reassuring to someone who is worried about being in 1932 Germany.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
7d ago
He's selling Trump 2028 merchandise in the official White House gift shop. Administration staffers don't feel able to say "Of course Trump won't run in 2028 - the constitution limits presidents to two terms" on the record, because Trump wouldn't like it.
Trump is deliberately maintaining strategic ambiguity about whether he will run for a third term. (Even if he wants to, he won't, because age is catching up with him). That is a good reason for people who care about the survival of American democracy to be worried.
In addition, Vance running the show doesn't fix the problem if Vance is also committed to using false allegations of voter fraud to undermine American democracy. And Vance was chosen because he is, indeed, committed to using false allegations of voter fraud to undermine American democracy.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
7d ago
Another example of Starmers self-destructive loyalty to zionism can also be observed in the saga around Peter Mandelson. Starmer and his cronies were so eager to reward the foremost zionist operative in the labour party they were willing to overlook all the shady Epstein business. This one might actually lead to Starmers downfall as a PM.
Mandelson wasn't brought back as a reward for his Zionism (and he is far from the most outspoken Zionist in Blair's inner circle - Blair raised a lot of money in the north London Jewish community). Mandelson was brought back because Starmer thought he was a Trump whisperer. From a cynical perspective, Mandelson's personal corruption and Epstein connections were key qualifications for the role - an honest man couldn't have done what Starmer hired Mandelson to do. Being gay should have protected Mandelson from Epstein-related fallout - I don't think anyone had twigged quite how blatant the bribery could get in a fundamentally criminal elite social network.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
7d ago
"Antifa is retarded" isn't exactly a rare position among the pro-establishment left. You can't say it in those words because it is ableist, but "Antifa are underemployed young men who are more interested in having an excuse to fight than actually preventing modern fascists taking over America" is something you could print in the NYT.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
7d ago
The worst crime against memetics caused by the British English-US English divide is that the Waffle House Wendy story is not called "Chavatar - The Last Chairbender"
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
7d ago
Juries don't have to give reasons, but this is almost certainly a straightforward jury nullification case. Enough left-wing Britons* believe that arms sales to countries with bad human rights records are per se illegitimate and therefore that vandalising an arms factory is legitimate to hang a jury - particularly in a place like Bristol. The other famous recent jury nullifications in vandalism cases are are the 2020 case where rioters in Bristol dumped a statue of a slave trader into the sea, and the 2021 case where climate protestors graffitied Shell UK HQ. There were also some older cases involving vandalism of British Aerospace factories making warplanes.
* Yes, Britons. This particular facet of left-wing culture is whiter than the census.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
7d ago
I don't think @Nerd's question is "Why did a left that believed it had won try to cancel its political opponents?" - a question to which the answer is as obvious as @Amadan thinks it is. I think it is "Why did a left that believed it had won put so much more effort into cancelling IQ realists, biological sex realists etc. for threatening their social orthodoxy than it put into cancelling the Koch brothers or the US debt clock guy for threatening their economic orthodoxy"
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
7d ago
It's totally beyond me how this much panic has set in.
You are being deliberately obtuse here. A man who tried to stay in office after losing the 2020 election including (definitely) by sending goons to the Capitol to intimidate Mike Pence into refusing to certify the results and (probably) by meeting with generals to discuss the possibility of a military autogolpe was re-elected in 2024, as the candidate of a party which has sought to eject the people who allowed Biden to assume office. The goons sent to the Capitol got out of hand and the resulting riot meant that 2020 was only the 2nd election since the Founding when the votes of the electors could not be counted on the appointed day*. He has just ordered federal law enforcement to seize Georgia's voting records based on (if you take his public statements literally) an obviously false theory that Italian satellites were used to alter the results or (if you take his public statements seriously but not literally) a gish gallop of fraud allegations that were adjudicated false at the time. His supporters online are currently boasting about how he is going to get a kidnapped foreign head of state to falsely confess to rigging the 2020 election.
People think Trump is uniquely dangerous to American democracy because Trump speaks and acts like a man who is uniquely dangerous to American democracy.
A liberal candidate will win
For the usual thermostatic reasons, I think a mainstream Democrat will be on the ballot in 2028 and will probably get more valid votes than the Republican in states representing a majority of the electoral college. But to shut down the "this is 1933" memeplex they would have to be allowed to assume office without a 2020-style attempt to prevent certification of the result. Given that Trump has, with the co-operation of the MAGA movement in the country, successfully turned "2020 was rigged and Democrats routinely rig elections" into a loyalty test for Republicans, the chance of this happening is minimal.
* The other case being Hayes-Tilden in 1876. The 1800 election didn't elect a President in a timely fashion, but the delay was in the House after the electoral college vote was tied.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
8d ago
3 of those diners are Waffle House.
Is Waffle House safe for dinergoths to hang out in? As a somewhat-too-online Brit I have mostly heard of the chain in two contexts:
- FEMA won't risk going into a disaster area until Waffle House reopen
- It's a good place to watch late-night brawls
Only if you think America owning Puerto Rico is good for America, which people who want an all-English speaking America presumably don't.
We are in the slightly odd position that Bad Bunny and the people objecting to him agree that Puerto Rico is not America, while the people who booked him, most normie Americans who have thought about the issue, and most normie Puerto Ricans think it is. "Puerto Rico is not America and celebrating Puerto Rican culture is un-American" is a vote-losing message to send, and the NFL and MSM covering the Super Bowl could easily have ended up embarrassing themselves by endorsing it, but MAGA shouted louder and ended up owning said losing message.
More options
Context Copy link