If the Russians were funding the Greens it would be because they wanted to push for shutting down coal and nuclear power plants which would increase Germany's reliance on natural gas as a way to fill the gap when the baseload becomes more unreliable.
The weird thing is I thought there was a thing about the German secret service infiltrating the Green party due to Russian ties. The problem is I don't know when this happened. In my head this must have happened after the collapse of the Soviet Union because of my age but also in my head my thoughts were 'I hate the Greens. I hate the Communists. But you really shouldn't be doing this in a democracy'. [weirdly enough the USA did the same thing to the Republican party 16 year later]. Also, if I search for the terms 'scandal over germany secret service green party' in Google I can't find it so maybe I'm hallucintating. I asked chat gpt and apparently it happened in 2000 which make sense to me but maybe this is chat gpt hallucinating as well. Chat GPT wouldn't supply me with links and I can't find anything on google in the front page.
this is the closest i could find to what i remember: https://www.greenleft.org.au/content/german-spies-target-left-wing-party but that doesn't mention Russia or the Green party. i could have misremembered and thought it was the green party when it was a leftist party.
benmmurphy
3mo ago
I was also banned from going to the US but no one would wrote up my sob story, but I also didn't break the law by entering the US so no real story to write up.
benmmurphy
8mo ago
"The Hunter Biden laptop is a Russian disinformation campaign" was actually "The Hunter Biden laptop has the hallmarks of a Russian disinformation campaign". Often they are not straight up lying but saying something that is technically true but designed in a way to mislead their audience into believing something that is false. I think if you consciously do this it is not any different from lying. It's like these people running scams on Amazon where they sell you the box but not the thing inside the box but then claim its not fraud because they sent you what was in the picture.
benmmurphy
9mo ago
It would be crazy if this is just some long term strategy by the FBI to make themselves look good. Each year they publish juiced figures that the media can gush over then later on they retract the juiced figures. Retracting the juiced figures is necessary because otherwise each year the FBI would have to make progressively larger adjustments until juicing was no longer feasible.
how does the federal government ban abortion? that seems beyond their power. i presume the FDA can ban / regulate abortion drugs but the FDA doesn't have the power to regulate surgical procedures. but it looks like commerce clause strikes again. just mention the magic words 'affecting interstate commerce' and the federal government can regulate anything. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gonzales_v._Carhart
(a) Any physician who, in or affecting interstate or foreign commerce, knowingly performs a partial-birth abortion and thereby kills a human fetus shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 2 years, or both. This subsection does not apply to a partial-birth abortion that is necessary to save the life of a mother whose life is endangered by a physical disorder, physical illness, or physical injury, including a life-endangering physical condition caused by or arising from the pregnancy itself. This subsection takes effect 1 day after the enactment.
the other hilarious thing is if they argued against the federal government having the power to regulate abortion they would have been probably more likely to succeed given the make up of the court.
benmmurphy
10mo ago
but the whole thing is insane. if you apply this algorithm to any other politician then you will find matches. what about hilllary and the uranium one stuff or anyone that was part of the hillary campaign. the trump-russia thing was the IC community fucking over the president. if you check all the fucking idiots that have interacted with your target then you will find some of them are doing dodgy shit with foreign actors. there is literally no way you can prevent this because people are fucktards and you need to interact with people in order to have a presidential campaign. but it is even more insane because if you look beyond manifort who was a fucktard you are left with carter page who is basically an idiot. it wasn't enough for the IC community to bring attention to the fact that manifort was a fucktard they also needed to take advantage of the fact that page was an idiot then exploit him to make more noise. but don't worry spygate was a conspiracy according to wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spygate_(conspiracy_theory))
I first thought he meant don't own a single 'stock award'. It's standard financial advice to not correlate your investments with your work.
benmmurphy
5mo ago
Prevent may actually be a scam that is meant to look like its doing something in order to appease voters but is not very effective in practice. I think even in the UK with some of our crazy laws its very difficult to punish pre-crime and stop people from committing crimes before they carry out the crimes.
benmmurphy
6mo ago
It's also kind of insane that the Rotherham crimes were able to occur because there is a lot of red-tape you have to deal with if you have contact with children in the UK. Apparently, some of the men involved had criminal convictions which should have automatically barred them from having regular contact with children who are not their own. So not only were the police ignoring accusations of sexual assault but they were also ignoring crimes where the prosecution should be very straight forward. Also, people in positions of authority who deal with children are meant to be trained to notice signs of abuse and I believe there also mandatory reporting requirements. So the people who covered this up or ignored it not only fucked up their jobs but it is likely they committed some kind of criminal act as well.
benmmurphy
6mo ago
I think its crazy to think at the olympic tier men and women are not putting in the same hours training. They are going to have same coaches and if a coach sees an edge they can push at this level they will force their athletes to do it. Possibly some of the prevalence of drugs is even due to pressure from coaches.
benmmurphy
7mo ago
Does the bribe actually work or does the Judge just take the money and then claim the other family paid more so you will need pony up some more?
benmmurphy
8mo ago
this is a game where there are two players not just the Republicans. the Republicans might be cracking down on Democratic vote tech this year but that doesn't mean the Democratic party haven't made improvements to their vote tech that might compensate for whatever measures the Republicans have introduced.
benmmurphy
8mo ago
538 also has an article about some kind of shenanigans with a Democratic primary poll in 2020 which Selzer was involved with. https://fivethirtyeight.com/live-blog/iowa-caucus-2020-election-live/#254963
two reasonable interpretations: a mistake was made in the poll and they withheld the results because they would always dump a poll in a situation like this and this is consistent with their strong ethical practices. another interpretation: the poll was damaging to a certain candidate so they either took advantage of a situation or created a situation in order to hide the poll results.
Sounds inspired from Warhammer 40k or Warhammer 40k was inspired by this mess. "Imperium" of man, 9 loyal legions and the Warp corresponding to the 'acausal realm'. Maybe the 1980s D&D moral panic was onto something.
benmmurphy
3mo ago
allegedly the hacker has some kind of anime meme account on twitter: https://x.com/jeremykauffman/status/1903559150023344354
The NYU hacker working to save western civilization appears to be a young gentleman called @bestniggy who follows me For most of my life that sentence would have surprised me but now it seems almost normal
benmmurphy
4mo ago
the UK are now organising a coalition of the willing so maybe there are countries that want to do more than virtue signalling. also, maybe Trump is a genius and is capable of getting other people to do his bidding because they consider him an evil oracle and they believe they can do good by doing the opposite of Trump. similar to the inverse cramer index. but i guess similar to smart is not the opposite of stupid, good is not the opposite of evil.
benmmurphy
4mo ago
theory 2 might hold weight if they believe any kind of storming of a building is now an insurrection
benmmurphy
5mo ago
My theory for why Hitler is seen as a unique evil compared to Stalin and Mao was because the western powers were allied with Stalin and Mao and made war against Hitler. Then it would follow that the way we see Stalin, Mao and Hitler today is poisoned by the propaganda of the past. But I guess that would not explain why Pol Pot is not seen as uniquely evil because the west fought against Cambodia.
benmmurphy
5mo ago
are you sure foreign aid helps the US perception in the world? i wonder if it suffers from this copenhagen ethics problem where because you help out you are now blamed for anything that is not perfect. not the best example but the US helped the afghans militarily then when 9/11 happened apparently the US 'deserved' it partly because they helped the Afghans militarily.
benmmurphy
5mo ago
its crazy that Amazon is getting the blame. i think the primary agent responsible here is Alex. but if there is a third party to blame I think the schools should bear a little. the tax payer shells out good money to fund the school system and i feel like they are not doing a good job in instilling proper values into young children. the state has a lot of control over kids. they should really be propagandising them to not do this kind of shit. it could even be the state is doing the opposite and propagandising them into hating society which i don't think is very productive.
benmmurphy
8mo ago
I thought the steelman would be something like the message was in related to FEMA media shots and they wanted to avoid political signage in the media they produced and for some reason they mistakenly said 'Trump signs' instead of 'political signage'.
how is this legal? it seems like the legal theory is just add 'in minecraft' after the illegal act and then its ok. the people involved are very clearly receiving consideration for their vote as long as the 'in minecraft' clause was not added.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/597
Whoever makes or offers to make an expenditure to any person, either to vote or withhold his vote, or to vote for or against any candidate; and Whoever solicits, accepts, or receives any such expenditure in consideration of his vote or the withholding of his vote—
https://www.thefederalcriminalattorneys.com/expenditures-to-influence-voting
In simpler terms, this means it is illegal for anyone to use money or anything of value to influence someone's vote.
i'm going to solicit people to kill other people but make them check a box that says 'in minecraft' or 'this does not really create a legal agreement' and everything is ok.
ah: i missed the link that explains the courts have decided no money involved no problem:
https://cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2007/08/06/0655517.pdf
Whatever the wisdom of using vote-swapping agreements to communicate these positions, such agreements plainly differ from conventional (and illegal) vote buying, which conveys no message other than the parties’ willingness to exchange votes for money (or some other form of private profit). The Supreme Court held in Brown v. Hartlage, 456 U.S. 45, 55 (1982), that vote buying may be banned “without trenching on any right of association protected by the First Amendment.” Vote swapping, however, is more akin to the candidate’s pledge in Brown to take a pay cut if elected, which the Court concluded was constitutionally protected, than to unprotected vote buying. Like the candidate’s pledge, vote swapping involves a “promise to confer some ultimate benefit on the voter, qua . . . citizen[ ] or member of the general public” — i.e., another person’s agreement to vote for particular candidate. Id. at 58-59. And unlike vote buying, vote swapping is not an “illegal exchange for private profit” since the only benefit a vote swapper can receive is a marginally higher probability that his preferred electoral outcome will come to pass. Id. at 55 (emphasis added); cf. Marc John
benmmurphy
9mo ago
hasn't Trump built a bridge across the aisle. he is campaigning with Tulsi Gabbard and RFK. similarly, the Democrats have support from anti-Trump Republicans.
benmmurphy
11mo ago
Maybe the idea behind the choice of answers or presentation was to suppress housing as a factor or push some other factor as more important. First past the post survey manipulation. He is probably an expert in presenting data in order to convince people to form a preferred opinion. 'Strategic Research' at Barclays may even be a pseudo sales role where they just generate research to convince their customers to buy products that Barclay's is selling.
i feel like rotherham is just the same shit as the catholic church but no-one actually learned the lesson of the catholic church. if people are doing bad stuff then you need to stop them from doing bad stuff. preserving the 'institution' or some other higher value is just some scam the bad people are using to convince you to continue letting them to do the bad stuff.
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