domain:youtube.com
Well that is a pretty uncharitable way to put things. I'm to the right of most of my social circle but I'm to the left of whatever this place is turning into. People just get sick of getting downvoted and unable to post in real time, eventually they say something rude and get banned or they say "fuck it" and leave.
When the conversation turns to being worried about trump picking his VP based on possible assassination, putting guns in holes as a generational family gun stash in your back yard, "powers that be" conspiring to eliminate people like you, heavily downvoting someone pointing out having sex with blackout drunk people is probably wrong, being afraid to leave your red state for fear of being locked up for defending yourself, practicing religion harder being the only answer to societal ills, women only being truly happy barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen....I mean the parody starts to write itself at some point.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
4d ago
cover sheets
Hot damn. If the FBI managed to screw up the investigation of what should be obvious misconduct, I’m going to be so disappointed. Let’s see what exactly they did…
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/05/03/mar-a-lago-trump-classified-documents-00156124
Looks like they added placeholders and cover sheets when they initially sorted the fifteen boxes. And then possibly failed to remove them? Assuming every cover sheet was left in the count, and there are really only half as many documents as stated in the warrant, that could mean Trump’s 15 boxes held fewer than 100! Witch hunt!
This is stupid. It’s also not the cause of the delay, which stems from the complaint that those searched boxes are now out of order. How much did they change? No idea. How did they notice the change? Because the contents were exhaustively documented after the seizure.
It’s not a great look for the prosecution. But it also has no bearing on the facts of the case. If Trump’s team could point to any version of the boxes as favorable, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. I don’t mind a delay of the trial, but I’m not going to treat this as exculpatory.
you-get-an-upvote
Hyperbole is bad
6d ago
You’ve blocked me, so I don’t expect a response, but how is not wanting underaged girls depicted sexually in video games a “feminist” thing?
Think back 10, 20, and 30 years and recall that this has a never been a partisan issue, let alone a predominantly leftist demand.
Skibboleth
2d ago
the powers-that-be
There should be a requirement that if you're going to use vague and allusive terms that you define those terms so people can know who you're talking about. Don't just say 'elites' or 'the powers-that-be'. What specific people/organizations/institutions do you mean?
Recursive_Enlightenment
3d ago
Conservative Mike Cernovich (1.2M followers) Tweeted "Trump needs a VP that will make him assassination proof. Anyone saying otherwise has no understanding of the time we are in. Tim Scott as VP? Trump's survivability will drop to zero. It's incredible to me that more don't understand this."
How seriously should Trump take such a threat, and how seriously does Trump take such a threat? Yes, the powers-that-be truly hate Trump and if he became president and had Scott as VP many would rejoice at Trump's death. But by what mechanism might they kill him? Obviously, it creates horrible incentives if Trump believes the threat and it causes him to consider someone such as Kari Lake, Marjorie Taylor Greene, or Sarah Palin for his VP nominee. In sort-of support of Cernovich, part of the reason that Biden might be sticking with Harris as VP is to reduce the chances he gets removed from office for senility.
Great post. The simple truth is that unless…
- Trump wins
- The GOP get a trifecta with a very comfortable senate majority
- They abolish the filibuster
- Trump is suddenly hugely more competent at wrangling Congress
…there will be no better deal than this one. That is to say that even if Trump wins, the chance of a better border control bill is minimal at best. If this hill had passed under Trump, he would have signed it. Of course it wouldn’t, because there’s no way Democrats would vote for it in that case.
There is no way this isn’t a mega black pill. But the ultimate black pill is that it’s really all about Trump. There is no ‘national conservative’ movement. There is no ‘Trumpist’ party with a coherent, European-style nationalist policy platform. There’s a Trump personality cult with very little genuine infrastructure behind it, sitting on top of the carcass of the post-Tea Party GOP, which itself is a hollowed-out shell of what it once was even ten years ago. The fact that Trump was personally able to kill this bill is testament to the extent to which service to his personal whims and (perceived) self-interest are now the sole metric by which congressional Republicans are and wish to be judged.
There is no plan, and if there is, Trump doesn’t even seem committed to following it. Sure, I’ll still vote for him, that’s the reality of a two-party system. But no Trump voter should be under any illusions that his second term won’t be him attempting some (likely unsuccessful) crusade against those he believes have wronged him (personally) while behind the scenes very little changes.
“Buh buh buh this doesn’t deport 10/12/15 million illegals”. Yeah, and neither will anything that Donald Trump can, let alone will, accomplish in office. Moreover, if by some stroke of luck this bill had passed and Trump won and decided to become competent, it would afford him MORE power to reduce inflows and impose ZERO meaningful restrictions on additional actions by the president or congress to increase deportations.
Moreover, 50,000 additional immigration visas a year is nothing compared to the current numbers of legal and illegal immigrants, so focusing on this was especially retarded.
Few things make me seethe more than what happened with this bill. As many on the right acknowledge, immigration is the only thing that matters. It is the central issue upon which every other issue ultimately depends. Even a minor shift in the right direction, even something that delays demographic destiny by a few more years buys the right more time. Every single measure that reduces total inflows must pass. Unless, apparently, it might make it a little harder for Donald Trump to win the presidency and accomplish nothing, again.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
4d ago
The government insists that it wasn’t wrong about what they were. Or even which box they were in. Only that it was an error to say they were “in the original, intact form as seized,” because the order is not the same. Page 8.
Nor do you have a good reason to believe the documents were planted. Only that Trump was informed of some (other?) boxes left in Virginia. His administration has never denied that the boxes belonged to him, has it?
And what’s all this bullshit about mislabeling? A banker’s box in your house is inappropriate for any level of classification.
Recursive_Enlightenment
3d ago
Putting a 77-year-old in prison unjustly (if that is indeed what is being attempted) is on par with assassinating him.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
4d ago
I think that’s plausible, but not because of the revelations here.
Check out page 8. The government concedes that they were inconsistent because the order within boxes changed. Nothing else. They insist that the only other change to contents is the placeholder cards.
But nothing in the indictment, the sealing, the warrant depended on order! It was all about number of documents suspected to remain. Nothing I’ve seen in here casts doubt on that unless we assume that the boxes were made up wholesale. I’m not willing to bite that bullet.
AhhhTheFrench
We will sell no wine before its time
4d ago
The great thing about printing money here in America is that we are the USA USA USA baby! Everyone takes our dollar, they take it for oil, for oranges, for tungsten, for cars, for iphones. We print it up out of thin air and they give us real goods for it every day.
The higher the trade deficit the more they are getting ripped off by exchanging real goods for dollars. Even with all the printing we are still experiencing a strong dollar and less inflation compared to other countries that don't have the backing of the US economy and 11 carrier strike groups.
Look at any currency vs the US dollar over the last 4 years. The dollar is as strong as it has ever been. MMT is a brilliant scheme for extracting real material and goods from the rest of the world in exchange for protection and promises. It is crazy that we get away with it! USA USA USA!
Skibboleth
2d ago
Because I don't really see "not talk about the ruling class" as an acceptable answer to that question
You could just be specific. I'm not suggesting you need a comprehensive list of every single person involved, but you should be able to provide some key identifiable institutions or people. It is extremely relevant who they are because you cannot possibly draw useful conclusions about them otherwise. A nebulous "they" has no interests.
These demands for specificity displace the object level debate into another debate about the true nature of the ruling class, in which dissidents usually disagree with each other, and thus serves the interests of the ruling class by keeping opponents divided. Since that rhetoric serves an interest, I find it suspect.
All rhetoric serves an interest. Vagueness makes it impossible to interrogate claims or simply obfuscate their absurdity. The motives of the "powers that be" to assassinate Trump are not something anyone can examine because there is no clear reference.
Of course, the real answer to all this is that the "ruling class" is a fiction - the people and organizations that wield power are fragmented and frequently at odds.
hanikrummihundursvin
3d ago
I mean, all pathologizing talk about 'vibes' and 'direct self interest' should come with some self reflection. The 'Alt Right' hadn't cheered for Trump on immigration since he caved on the Government shutdown in 2018.
In reality, I’m just someone who actually wants to get immigration under control.
I don't think you want to get immigration under control any more than someone in the 'Alt Right'. What you do want is to appear like a concerned and reasonable person as judged by 'the respectable people' representing the mainstream media morality. The 'Alt Right' is a great strawman to stand next to when making such a case, but boy is it transparent when you step outside the mainstream bubble.
curious_straight_ca
3d ago
The DOJ’s clever wordsmithing, however, did not accurately describe the origin of the cover sheets. In what must be considered not only an act of doctoring evidence but willfully misleading the American people into believing the former president is a criminal and threat to national security, agents involved in the raid attached the cover sheets to at least seven files to stage the photo.
This is a tendentious presentation imo. Politico presents this as:
Smith’s team revealed in the filing that FBI agents carried printed “classified cover sheets” during the Aug. 8, 2022, search of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate and used them to replace any classified documents they discovered in cardboard Bankers Boxes that littered the former president’s residence.
“The investigative team used classified cover sheets for that purpose, until the FBI ran out because there were so many classified documents, at which point the team began using blank sheets with handwritten notes indicating the classification level of the document(s) seized,” the prosecutors wrote.
“Any handwritten sheets that currently remain in the boxes do not represent additional classified documents — they were just not removed when the classified cover sheets with the index code were added,” Smith’s team wrote. “In many but not all instances, the FBI was able to determine which document with classification markings corresponded to a particular placeholder sheet.”
I think it's reasonable to put cover sheets on the classified documents, given they are classified. The documents would have already had classification markings, so I don't see how this is "willfully misleading" the public "into believing the former president is a criminal and threat to national security".
It turns out that when the government alleged that Trump had classified documents he was not supposed to have, the government itself did not accurately know which documents Trump had, or which documents Trump was even supposed to have. Actually, worse than that, it turns out they fabricated some or all of the accusations
"Some or all", here, seems unjustified - I don't think anyone (other than perhaps Trump on Twitter) is claiming the accusations are all fake - that's a much stronger claim than "the documents aren't in the same order that they were when we scanned them". Your sources imply this is like "tampering" with evidence, and it may (not sure) be a procedural issue, but things like "adding cover sheets" and "reordering documents" don't undermine the claim that Trump committed a crime.
Well it is make believe to start. How would you react to being asked why the 3 little pigs were a not solution to societal ills?
Also the countries that have tried that are all total shitholes. Been to a theocracy lately? Not great.
AhhhTheFrench
We will sell no wine before its time
2d ago
I don't want left leaning posts. I want rational posts!!!! I want hot takes on current events from a reasonable and objective body of smart people. Not this partisan shit. It just makes me upset and mad at what it could have been, and what it has been when in full form. I occasionally have been able to come on here and the former sub for some of the smartest and most informative information available anywhere on the planet.
Maybe the news is too slow now and it is impacting the quality of the posts, maybe it is ideological drift or capture, all I know is I'm not getting the discourse I would expect from a forum that perhaps I saw as a more august body than it was.
curious_straight_ca
3d ago
Remember how many times progressives on social media were wrong about Russia, and about Trump's legal woes in general? I think you're doing the same thing in reverse here. What the government's alleged to have done is very minor, but a lot of the words look like the words you'd use in a major situation, so it's blown up into a big deal.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
4d ago
You are not being honest when you say Trump tanked the bill.
If you're going to accuse me of lying, please don't strawman me. I never claimed there was no opposition to the bill before Trump came out against it. But whatever prospects the bill had, died when he did.
It’s far better to expose the immigration issue and pass a clean bill after the election.
This is just the double-or-nothing idea I mentioned in my post. Throwing away the biggest win on immigration in a generation, and instead banking on winning the Presidency AND the Senate AND the House AND hoping Trump actually cares about the issue enough to pass actual legislation instead of just trying EOs. Surely the last time he had a trifecta and passed no major legislation on immigration was just a fluke, right? Surely he won't be distracted by settling scores and getting revenge on his perceived enemies, right? And even if all that happens, hoping that Trump is tactful enough to actually do a (supposedly) extreme immigration bill without the Democrats freaking out and repealing it the minute they come into power.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
4d ago
The provisions that Republicans want are temporary. The provisions that Democrats want are forever.
All of the provisions that the Democrats received were minor, and they were (as far as I can tell) all temporary, either because they directly expired like the 50K more legal immigrants for 5 years, or because they were minor carveouts in the things Republicans wanted which would expire themselves.
The bill hands Democrats exactly what they want, and enshrines a permanent increase in "legal" unrestricted immigration forever.
Blatantly false. The increase in legal immigration had an expiration date of 5 years. Check the bill summary or even the full text if you think I'm wrong.
Democrats have been calling for years to have an asylum "express lane" where even if the conditions are stricter on paper, anyone coached to tell the right lies will breeze right through the process to a "legal" path to permanent residency and citizenship.
This is what's basically happened in the status quo with Catch and Release, something that the bill would have ended.
ControlsFreak
6d ago
Compliance is a huge industry.
Weird. I hear about that from my friends in literally every other industry ever. They still seem capable of operating.
What isn't seen is how much harder it is or will be to get funding for a startup that designs novel appliances because the costs to enter the market are now higher.
I'm always sympathetic to concerns of regulatory capture putting barriers to entry in front of small businesses. Totally agree that this is the single strongest argument against these types of requirements. I just doubt that these particular requirements are that onerous. Plenty of smaller shops that actually care about not being a security clusterfuck already do these kinds of things, and you can do most of them without too much difficulty as a hobbyist. In any event, if you're a start up that can't figure out how to not have a default password on all your devices, I actually kind of don't want you selling stuff, anyway.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
2d ago
“Have you stopped beating your wife?”
I’d say the Stormy Daniels prosecution is probably unjust in that it wouldn’t be happening but for Trump’s political status. Low confidence.
The classified documents, on the other hand? Nothing I’ve seen suggests that Trump was innocent, or that a random citizen could get away with doing the same thing. While I was surprised that it escalated to a trial, I don’t think it’s unjust.
Recursive_Enlightenment
3d ago
What they are openly trying to do to Trump is as bad as an assassination attempt, is my point.
2rafa
3d ago
One, illegally allow in tens of millions of people into the United States; two, trick the (hopefully) absolute morons in the GOP to pass a "compromise bill" which allows a hostile administration to staff a army of bureaucrats which can more quickly adjudicate asylum claims under a "more strict" standard (it's really not) than one which could be adopted by executive fiat and then quickly stamp "approved" on large percentages of the illegally released people who now get automatic work permits. And it would have worked if it wasn't for that stupid Trump who is just so bad, doesn't care about immigration or the country, and opposes it because he just doesn't want Biden to get a win. And thank God for that
Literally none of this matters.
-
Almost all illegals are eventually released or make it into the interior. That was true even with Trump’s remain-in-Mexico policy because there is no wall and Trump is no closer to getting Congress to build one than he was this time in 2016. That is to say even migrants turned back eventually make it into the interior, where they’re never deported unless they commit serious violent crime and ICE arrests and deports them which of course only happens to a tiny minority of illegals migrants, and even in those cases most return illegally.
-
Because of 1 (a fundamental issue which, again, Trump has zero realistic plan to fix), the only difference between handing every migrant a green card (or, hell a passport) and not doing so is one generation. Every child of every single illegal migrant in the US born on US soil is a full citizen of the United States. That’s the trick with ‘amnesty’; it means nothing, because the demographic impact is guaranteed in any case. Birthright citizenship is the ultimate incentive for illegal immigration. Talk about “work permits” is hilarious; their sons and daughters have the same rights and privileges as you.
So, yeah. The only two things that would do “more” than this bill would be a meaningful end to most illegal inflows (impossible without transnational coast to coast impenetrable wall, and even then asylum seekers could just come legally and overstay visas if they could get them) and an end to birthright citizenship (almost certainly impossible without constitutional amendment). So this magic alternative to this bill (which again, would allow a GOP administration to take minor incremental steps to somewhat reduce inflows) does not exist. There is no plan, there never was, and Trump killed it because he didn’t want to give Biden what he felt was some kind of ‘win’, whatever the cost.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
3d ago
I agree that the reordering reflects badly on both the FBI and the prosecution. I agree that it should reduce their credibility, and that we should be skeptical of anything they say, checking it against actual evidence. Fortunately, we have actual evidence reviewed by a third party—the scans which revealed this inconsistency.
The change between those scans (taken in late ‘22) and today does not affect the substance of the case. A change before those scans could, but I haven’t seen anyone with actual skin in the game make that allegation.
Who have you seen propose this “chronological order” defense? Perhaps Trump’s counsel? Because I don’t think they’re disputing the authenticity of the special master scans.
Calling a specific subsection of women unrapeable is a pretty clear implication that you consider other subsections acceptable to rape. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exception_that_proves_the_rule#Proving_the_existence_of_the_rule
It's not rocket science. Sure, it would't hold up in a decent court, but "acktchyually I said I wouldn't even rape her, why are you upset" isn't fooling anyone.
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