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Elliot Temple on May 10, 2019

Messages (474)

Big Deplatforming Day


Anonymous at 10:14 PM on May 10, 2019 | #12325 | reply | quote

#12320 I agree with Elliot. What's your point?


Anonymous at 4:54 AM on May 11, 2019 | #12327 | reply | quote

#12327 I am Elliot. My point was reposting content so it's in a better place.

If someone posts a tweet, link or quote without any comment, I'd generally assume they think it's good.


curi at 10:38 AM on May 11, 2019 | #12329 | reply | quote

Sunny and Doug on political coults

https://youtu.be/XpJBwOSwzcI

You can skip the first 15~20 minutes


Anonymous at 7:56 AM on May 12, 2019 | #12345 | reply | quote

Anonymous at 9:14 AM on May 12, 2019 | #12346 | reply | quote

https://twitter.com/curi42/status/1128057954245079040

Context is she's mad I said (to someone else):

https://twitter.com/curi42/status/1127453335819247616

> Anti-zionism is mostly motivated by anti-semitism. It's full of double standards and lies. See e.g. http://fallibleliving.com/essays/rational-politics/89-a-short-history-of-israel and the writing of @CarolineGlick


curi at 3:04 PM on May 13, 2019 | #12366 | reply | quote

I tweeted:

If gender doesn’t matter, why does it matter which gender you identify as? Trans-activists are sexists who judge people by their gender, contrary to the prior activism that downplayed gender. Also note the parallels to race issues.


curi at 10:51 PM on May 13, 2019 | #12373 | reply | quote

What Is to Be Done?

Re:deplatforming

We need a true decentralized social network.

It is technically possible?


Anonymous at 4:26 AM on May 15, 2019 | #12390 | reply | quote

#12390 It's technically possible if you assume people have free internet access. That doesn't make it realistic to get a lot of people using it, or make it convenient and user friendly, etc.

Also to get started people will need to do something like download the app from a website (which is not decentralized and relies on some webhost and domain registrar, and maybe cloudflare or some other service to deal with DDOSes. Or they could put it on github or some other site, but then that site could remove it).

And who makes the app and decides how it works? Some small, central group. Yes it could be open source and possible to fork, but that doesn't solve the problems well.

Gab made a centralized (their own database server) tool to enable commenting on any webpage. So even if the page doesn't have comments, or censors the comments, you can comment with Gab's tool and then other users of Gab's tool can see your comment and reply (if they go to the same webpage, or if they look at a list of recent comments or do a search for comments). I already thought that was not user friendly and would have a hard time catching on, but then Mozilla and Google won't let Gab distribute the browser extension, so now Gab wants to fork their own browser, which I think is an awful idea and far more user unfriendly.

I think, currently, political improvement may be a more viable way to improve the situation than a technological solution.


curi at 1:08 PM on May 15, 2019 | #12395 | reply | quote

A moderator of the True Objectivism subreddit defended deplatforming! I replied:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Trueobjectivism/comments/bnvnbm/facebook_and_twitter_cant_censor_speech/ennuzzl/

> The government has supported and subsidized these companies, and has used the power of law to harm and prevent competition. It's not anything close to a free market.

> And the companies have claimed to be free speech platforms, so if they aren't that is/was fraud (false advertising). And the are brazenly and actively lying about what their moderation policies are. They wouldn't have gotten as popular as they are without that fraud.


curi at 1:18 PM on May 15, 2019 | #12396 | reply | quote

#12366 Anti-Globalism is the greatest anti-Semitism.


Anonymous at 1:44 AM on May 16, 2019 | #12401 | reply | quote

Anonymous at 11:38 AM on May 17, 2019 | #12417 | reply | quote

https://voat.co/v/politics/3230478

Poles have published the Red Cross report on the Nazi concentration camps that claims 271,301 people were killed, not 6 million.


Anonymous at 2:44 PM on May 21, 2019 | #12467 | reply | quote

Borderless Is Merely OK

i think Borderless is worse than Farmlands. she’s trying hard to be professional and entertaining in ways i don’t like, instead of just giving info. her talking seems more scripted for drama. too much of a staged feel to some scenes. i also don’t like the fake neutrality/objectivity.

i had an impression that Borderless had more makeup on Lauren and that kinda thing. so i just skimmed Farmlands by clicking at random places. first 5 clicks and lauren isn't even on screen. even when she's on screen, she's often at a distance, wearing a hat, and doing some activity *other than* talking straight into the camera. Borderless made way more effort to fit in close shots of Lauren and her face. that's another way it's catering more to the masses.

i’m not the target audience. it’s not meant to be for niche hardcore fans/supporters. it's meant for people with more moderate politics than me, and who are much less informed about the issues. it repeatedly took things i already knew, or at least would have expected if asked, and presented them as very surprising. and Lauren kept telling her audience what to be surprised by, or what is important, like they can't think for themselves and need to be guided. it's a little like having laugh cues for an audience too dumb to know which parts to laugh at.

at first i was thinking: even toned down, it's still too much for YouTube to put up with. they delayed processing of it then took it down. but then i thought: maybe YouTube finds it *more threatening* when it's milder, b/c it can better reach the masses.

btw, yes, i know, she was always an actress who tried to be entertaining in non-intellectual ways. and the vids with Pettibone talking about relationships were pretty awful (Pettibone is just a pretty face afaict, while Southern is actually a smart person when she wants to be). some favs that have intelligent content mixed in with the clickbait:

about normie youtube and the state of the world:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zT2Y78TwCrw

debunking shitty "science":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLUMINLTNLE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zxgW4HfMos4

Also the writing in her book was fine.

---

same problem happens with other stuff like game of thrones fans. the hardcore fans were there first, and were the only reason a TV show happened, but they got screwed over when the TV show was not made for them.

the video game industry in general moved far away from what the best ppl, who were early adopters, want. to cater to bigger audience. the early adopters made it possible but then don’t get stuff made for them.


curi at 10:33 AM on May 25, 2019 | #12505 | reply | quote

https://mises.org/wire/tucker-carlson-and-aoc-are-wrong-about-christianity-and-usury

Tucker Carlson, who says Bernie and AOC are right re max interest caps (very similar to price controls), is not the hero who will save us.

solid article btw. has info about the history of usury. fits with what i read (in more detail, with more quotes and sources) in Rothbard's history of economic thought (which the article quotes).

it's a good point that before there was much commerce, a major type of loan was for desperate poor ppl who need it for food and shelter. in that case, Christianity advocates charity (or if you ask for your money back, at least don't ask for extra). but the christian idea of charity doesn't really have much to do with loans to businessmen.

today, most loans aren't to pay for a meal. even some payday loans are used on luxuries. and what about payday loans to let someone pay rent or eat? payday lenders are kind enough to offer and option to people that *no one* (not the payday lender nor any church nor friends nor relatives nor anyone else*) wanted to give charity to. that's helpful.


Anonymous at 2:53 PM on May 25, 2019 | #12507 | reply | quote

https://twitter.com/thejpc/status/1135560475339632640

ppl r on the other side of this issue are ignorant or willfully blind.


Anonymous at 9:47 PM on June 3, 2019 | #12628 | reply | quote

Long Milo Yiannopoulos article trashing people involved in making and editing Lauren Southern's documentaries. They committed crimes (like fraud and stealing lots of money) and betrayed the right. They previously fucked with Tommy Robinson at length. Milo suggests that Lauren probably knew what was going on and was somehow OK with it, and also that she has been sleeping with a bunch of right wing guys to get career and script help (and that she doesn't make much of her own material) while also lying about tradcon stuff publicly. Suggests Lauren recently retired to try to dodge the backlash. Also talks about Ezra Levant and others handling stuff badly.

Total mess. I would *not* recommend reading the whole article. It's a bit repetitive, kinda disorganized, and very long. But I'd recommend reading/skimming a bit to get the idea if you were interested in some of these ppl.

https://www.dangerous.com/50638/say-farewell-to-the-klepto-queens-of-the-british-far-right/


Anonymous at 10:54 AM on June 10, 2019 | #12715 | reply | quote


Anonymous at 5:00 PM on June 10, 2019 | #12721 | reply | quote

Anonymous at 5:03 PM on June 10, 2019 | #12722 | reply | quote

#12751 Boo hiss.


Anonymous at 12:46 PM on June 12, 2019 | #12752 | reply | quote

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h9AM6N1Zi80

being pro-life motivated the pinterest whistleblower. it helped him do something good


Anonymous at 9:03 PM on June 12, 2019 | #12758 | reply | quote

I like the pinterest whistleblower. I like his attitudes and what he says[1]:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yuX87JFzLFc

I wonder if any of it is coached by Veritas (or by anyone else), or how much he prepped, or whether he got the interview questions in advance.

[1] I don't like his goal of banning abortion, but I understand it some. I dislike the prochoice activists more. People on both sides are awful at science and reason. If you have no clue about science or reason, it makes sense to err on the side of caution.

I know that isn't the reason he'd endorse. He'd claim to know that life really does begin at conception or some religious nonsense along those lines.

But meanwhile the pro-choice activists know nothing about science and are totally sure of themselves, just like they are with everything else. And they shouldn't be. They are irrational fools pretending to be smart. They're dangerous. They are confident about abortion and evolution (where they happen to be right) and also about Marxism, white privilege, affirmative action, minimum wage, socialized medicine, immigration, global warming, paternalistic government, and so on (where they're wrong).


curi at 12:25 PM on June 13, 2019 | #12765 | reply | quote

*The Coming Green Terror* blog post by George Reisman:

http://georgereismansblog.blogspot.com/2019/06/the-coming-green-terror.html


Anonymous at 10:39 PM on June 14, 2019 | #12776 | reply | quote

https://twitter.com/jeffdeist/status/1143177748707516416

> A 4 minute masterclass on how to argue for peace without apology.

By Jeff Deist, Mises Institute President, and RTed by the Mises Twitter account too.

Links to:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d95lN9ACCs4

> Lew Rockwell on RT International 22 06 19

I thought the video was *awful*. He said don't put any sanctions on Iran, sanctions are basically a war act and we're starving people in Iran and elsewhere, which is evil of us. Just have peace talks, but don't use violence *or* sanctions. He assumes everyone will be reasonably if you negotiate? Really nasty stuff IMO, and kinda damns the Mises Institute (some of their work on econ is still good ofc and they do a good job of making ebooks available).

Anyone like the vid?


curi at 2:56 PM on June 24, 2019 | #12854 | reply | quote

https://twitter.com/JamesOKeefeIII/status/1143330626784960512

More deplatforming, just as the video itself reports on.

And they fucked with my newsletter. I just sent out the YT link to that video today and now the link won't work for my readers and the archives are screwed up. Ugh.


curi at 7:28 PM on June 24, 2019 | #12859 | reply | quote

https://vdare.com/posts/a-champion-emerges-sen-hawley-proposes-bill-to-tackle-tech-censorship

the article is about the publisher vs. platform distinction and section 230 law. maybe you've heard about that stuff. if not, check out the article.

that approach is evil. I think this was pointed out in a Mises Institute article or podcast, i forget but wanted to give some kinda credit. i recall them saying something kinda like:

*it should be possible to have a moderated forum (not neutral) without being sued for every single thing anyone posts there*. to make that impossible is huge fucking govt oppression

so i suggest what i’ve suggested before (which i have not see anyone else suggesting): go after Facebook for **fraud**. they keep lying about their products and false advertising to customers

we don’t need new laws and more govt power, we need to enforce the most basic laws that already exist and would exist even under minarchy. start there and see how effective classical liberalism actually is!


curi at 12:47 PM on June 25, 2019 | #12875 | reply | quote

#12875 Oh maybe I heard the publisher vs. platform criticism from Rucka. I definitely watched this video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5VDItPddFYA

Maybe I saw a Mises article previously, but maybe not, can't remember.

I don't think I was paying much attention to the idea before hearing Rucka flame it. I didn't care about it much cuz I liked my fraud point more anyway. And the 230 stuff is just short term political details which I try to avoid; it's awful though.


curi at 12:54 PM on June 25, 2019 | #12876 | reply | quote

more on #12875

Alan Forrester asked me:

> What fraud has Facebook committed?

they have a terms of service. their actual actions do not follow it.

they advertise what to expect on FB, what kinda platform it is. they say it’s basically open, and you won’t be banned, except for extreme cases like drug dealers using it to sell product

they advertised it as offering privacy and working privacy controls. recently their lawyers said basically that no one has any expectation of privacy on FB.

they said they had adequate and reasonable security safeguards so your data would not be stolen. that was a lie.

they said, in various forms, that they don’t sell your data to advertisers, then they did.

overall, they lied that they were a neutral town square. they aren’t. if they had admitted from the start that they were a leftist site which moderates conservatives, then they would have fewer users and more conservative alternatives would exist.

they are still lying today. they don't want anyone to know what their real policies are for censoring stuff and deplatforming people or groups. they are actively relying on tricking (defrauding) their users. they are doing the same kind of shit – and publicly lying about it – that Veritas just exposed Pinterest and Google for.


curi at 2:19 PM on June 25, 2019 | #12879 | reply | quote

BTW I think FB has also committed fraud against their advertisers. I remember reading about an issue, a while ago, where they were counting video views or view duration in an unreasonable way so they could mislead advertisers about how much exposure they got for their money.

Here's an article which mentions an issue:

https://www.vox.com/2015/6/30/11564006/facebook-changes-the-way-it-counts-video-views-for-advertisers

Basically says they were charging advertisers for a video view if a video *autoplayed* (probably muted) for 3 seconds before the user scrolled it off the screen.

They have lots of shady crap regarding how they count ad views and even today, years after they got in bad press over this, I failed to find any good info about how it works (from FB or a third party) after searching a bit. I didn't find like a basic guide to what you need to know to advertise on FB and know what you're actually buying.


curi at 2:32 PM on June 25, 2019 | #12880 | reply | quote

#12897 Apple also blocks some channels on Telegram


Anonymous at 8:36 PM on June 26, 2019 | #12906 | reply | quote

#12879 Here's a good example of the ongoing fraud these companies do:

https://twitter.com/YouTubeInsider/status/1143685228126281728

> We've had a lot of questions today...clarifying, we apply our policies fairly and without political bias. All creators are held to the same standard.

YouTube is lying to the public about their product. Factually, they do not apply their policies fairly and without political bias and whole all creators to the same standard.

I think YT's tweet is about their deplatforming of the Veritas video in which a Google insider exposes Google's bias (including YouTube, which is owned by Google). But they aren't honest enough to state what issue they are commenting on.

A lot of people know YouTube is lying. The ratio on that tweet is 24k replies to 860 RTs. When a tweet is positively received, it gets more RTs than comments. There are no downvotes, so comments are the only way to respond negatively.

I skimmed through a few replies and the main theme I saw was calling YouTube liars. Also there are comments about the bad comments-to-RTs ratio itself. (There's also the comments to likes ratio, which is also awful.) Lots of comments have meme pics and animated GIFs. Also people call YouTube a joke or wonder if it's a parody account. But implying YouTube is lying is the most common.


curi at 1:49 PM on June 27, 2019 | #12913 | reply | quote

The Mises Institute has some awful affiliations.


Anonymous at 5:25 PM on June 27, 2019 | #12918 | reply | quote

I've been reading Noble Vision, which is a novel with heavy Ayn Rand/Objectivist style themes in where the hero is a doctor dealing with a socialist medical bureaucracy in the US.

https://www.amazon.com/Noble-Vision-Gen-LaGreca/dp/0974457949

I came across this xoxo thread.

http://xoxohth.com/thread.php?thread_id=4292125&mc=78&forum_id=2

I think the purpose of the post was more to complain about the guy's personal situation with his wife, but it provides an interesting glimpse into what doctors have to deal with nowadays. Some excerpts:

>Date: June 28th, 2019 12:14 PM

>Author: Thunder Collins

>My wife had a meeting with her boss and the program head to discuss her contract. >She tells the top guy that her boss (an incompetent black woman) is running a disorganized and chaotic program that is so poorly run and breaking so many rules that it is putting her at an unacceptable risk to her medical license and she won’t sign a new contract. She also complains that the black woman is trying to change the terms of their agreement in terms of accounting for her work hours and the number of patients she has to see. The black woman repeatedly chimps out and acts like an angry black woman who is being told that her benefits were being cut off. In a pause in the conversation, the top guy says “It looks like this relationship is over and you have made up you are going to leave.” Today is her last day.

[...]

>Date: June 28th, 2019 12:23 PM

>Author: Thunder Collins

>[The boss] is real bad. The woman has no medical background and she has been trying to dictate what patients get diagnosed and prescribed and breaking a number of laws. Can’t fire her tho, for obvious reasons,


Anonymous at 7:04 AM on June 29, 2019 | #12927 | reply | quote

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/28/opinion/democrats-debate-2020.html

Dems are purely evil radical hard left communists, would destroy America and leave us socialized and starving. Even NYTimes' token conservatives like Bret Stephens are starting to see the extent of the radicalism:

>Eliminating private health insurance, an industry that employs more than 500,000 workers and insures 150 million? Elizabeth Warren, Bill de Blasio, Bernie Sanders and Kamala Harris support it (though the California senator later recanted the position). Since Democrats are already committed to destroying the coal industry and seem inclined to turn Silicon Valley into a regulated utility, it’s worth asking: Just how much of the private economy are they even willing to keep?

>And then there are the costs that Democrats want to impose on the country. Warren, for instance, favors universal child care (estimated cost, $70 billion a year), Medicare-For-All ($2.8 trillion to $3.2 trillion annually), student-debt cancellation and universal free college ($125 billion annually), and a comprehensive climate action plan ($2 trillion, including $100 billion in aid to poor countries), along with a raft of smaller giveaways, like debt relief for Puerto Rico.

>As Everett Dirksen might have said: A trillion here, a trillion there, and pretty soon you’re talking real money. Someone will have to pay for all this, and it won’t just be the very rich making between seven and 10 figures a year. It will be you.


Anonymous at 7:10 AM on June 29, 2019 | #12928 | reply | quote

I didn't know the gun control situation in the US was so awful a few decades ago! Texas and Alaska were NO ISSUE states!?

https://twitter.com/RepThomasMassie/status/1145777240514465793


Anonymous at 1:08 PM on July 2, 2019 | #12952 | reply | quote

Nonsense pretending to be profound?


Anonymous at 10:52 AM on July 3, 2019 | #12955 | reply | quote

https://mises.org/wire/american-policy-pushes-iran-toward-nuclear-weapons

> If the US really wants to decrease the chances of a nuclear-armed Iran, it will have to adopt a less hostile policy.

This Mises article is basically saying the US is *causing* Iran to develop nukes by its harsh behavior. But it doesn't advise Iran to stop its hostile policy towards the US. It doesn't tell Iran that its chants of *death to America* only incentivize the US to impose more sanctions and political pressure. The article seems unbalanced and asymmetrical in a really fucking disturbing way. Fucking libertarians.


Dagny at 11:12 AM on July 3, 2019 | #12956 | reply | quote

I commented on the new House of Sunny podcast ep:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_gYSxRf25-c

> I think the fraud angle is important. We don't need new regulations. We need to enforce the most basic existing laws that would exist even in a minarchy. No force including no fraud. FB, YT, etc, are constantly lying, today (not just fraud to grow big initially, but ongoing right now), in official marketing and even in government hearings. They lie about what their ToS means, what their moderation policies are, under what circumstances then ban accounts, how their appeals processes work, whether their algorithms have certain features (like biased human manual intervention), and whether they are offering a neutral platform. This is false advertising and breach of contract. Start there, start with the stuff ought to be uncontroversially wrong from a classical liberal or libertarian viewpoint. There's no need to try to make it illegal to have a moderated forum, in general, if you don't want to be liable for everything posted there. You should just have to advertise truthfully about what kind of forum it is (e.g. an Objectivist only forum should be allowed to exist without getting sued for what its users say, but should not be allowed to advertise as an open platform, that'd be fraud). It's just like the issue with illegal immigration where we already have plenty of laws, we just need to enforce them.


curi at 4:13 PM on July 4, 2019 | #12962 | reply | quote

https://daringfireball.net/linked/2019/07/07/uswnt-world-cup

Forget equal pay, forget equality, fuck equality, equality is stupid, it was never about equality. Merit pay when women are better, equal pay when men are better, because the point is to favor women as much as possible.

And define merit based not on winning or production but on artistic performance – in an industry where winning or production are the normal goals.

John Gruber is a sexist. And he is, sadly, representative of far too many leftists.


Anonymous at 12:10 PM on July 7, 2019 | #12973 | reply | quote

Anonymous at 3:34 PM on July 7, 2019 | #12974 | reply | quote

Anonymous at 2:03 PM on July 8, 2019 | #12982 | reply | quote

old quote on "Northern conservatism" from 1897

https://www.counter-currents.com/2012/11/robert-lewis-dabney-on-conservatism/

>It may be inferred again that the present movement for women’s rights will certainly prevail from the history of its only opponent: Northern conservatism. This is a party which never conserves anything. Its history has been that it demurs to each aggression of the progressive party, and aims to save its credit by a respectable amount of growling, but always acquiesces at last in the innovation. What was the resisted novelty of yesterday is today one of the accepted principles of conservatism; it is now conservative only in affecting to resist the next innovation, which will tomorrow be forced upon its timidity and will be succeeded by some third revolution; to be denounced and then adopted in its turn. American conservatism is merely the shadow that follows Radicalism as it moves forward towards perdition. It remains behind it, but never retards it, and always advances near its leader. . . . Its impotency is not hard, indeed, to explain. It is worthless because it is the conservatism of expediency only, and not of sturdy principle. It intends to risk nothing serious for the sake of the truth, and has no idea of being guilty of the folly of martyrdom. It always when about to enter a protest very blandly informs the wild beast whose path it essays to stop, that its “bark is worse than its bite,” and that it only means to save its manners by enacting its decent role of resistance: The only practical purpose which it now serves in American politics is to give enough exercise to Radicalism to keep it “in wind,” and to prevent its becoming pursy and lazy, from having nothing to whip. No doubt, after a few years, when women’s suffrage shall have become an accomplished fact, conservatism will tacitly admit it into its creed, and thenceforward plume itself upon its wise firmness in opposing with similar weapons the extreme of baby suffrage; and when that too shall have been won, it will be heard declaring that the integrity of the American Constitution requires at least the refusal of suffrage to asses. There it will assume, with great dignity, its final position.


Anonymous at 3:50 PM on July 12, 2019 | #13067 | reply | quote

>> No doubt, after a few years, when women’s suffrage shall have become an accomplished fact, conservatism will tacitly admit it into its creed, and thenceforward plume itself upon its wise firmness in opposing with similar weapons the extreme of baby suffrage; and when that too shall have been won, it will be heard declaring that the integrity of the American Constitution requires at least the refusal of suffrage to asses. There it will assume, with great dignity, its final position.

Conservatives say that human life begins at conception. A baby has a soul before its even born. What, then, is the *principled* excuse for not letting a baby, even a fetus, vote?


Anonymous at 3:59 PM on July 12, 2019 | #13068 | reply | quote

https://georgereismansblog.blogspot.com/2019/07/the-united-states-individual-rights-and.html

> The United States, Individual Rights, And Slavery

Nice mini article.


Anonymous at 4:55 PM on July 12, 2019 | #13071 | reply | quote

Former ICE Director Thomas Homan stood up to left-wing character attacks

https://twitter.com/calebjhull/status/1149822850834079747?s=21


Anonymous at 7:10 PM on July 12, 2019 | #13074 | reply | quote

https://www.rt.com/news/464051-finnish-study-no-evidence-warming/

> Finnish study finds ‘practically no’ evidence for man-made climate change

> The results of the study were soon corroborated by researchers in Japan.

> In a paper published late last month, entitled ‘No experimental evidence for the significant anthropogenic climate change’, a team of scientists at Turku University in Finland determined that current climate models fail to take into account the effects of cloud coverage on global temperatures, causing them to overestimate the impact of human-generated greenhouse gasses.


Anonymous at 11:21 PM on July 13, 2019 | #13091 | reply | quote

https://twitter.com/Modernicide__

His new YouTube channel current has 11k subs. It's a *gamer* channel, not politics.

Deplatforming is constantly happening to people, and many of them are pretty dependent on a single platform. They lose huge audiences overnight.


Anonymous at 12:36 PM on July 15, 2019 | #13099 | reply | quote

Some Google censorship info (by left-biased wikipedia):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_by_Google


Anonymous at 12:39 PM on July 15, 2019 | #13100 | reply | quote

Some info on censorship by Facebook. The page also has other criticisms of Facebook:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Facebook#Censorship


Anonymous at 12:40 PM on July 15, 2019 | #13101 | reply | quote

http://www.anncoulter.com/columns/2019-07-17.html

Good article. The left is so bad at picking people in jail to defend. They picked a *drug Kingpin* involved with 23+ murders. If you picked prisoners to say "This man should be released" at *random* you'd do a lot better.

> This is the left's famous two-step on criminal punishment:

> 1. Oppose the death penalty on the grounds that "life in prison without possibility of parole" is just as good;

>2. Wait a few years for all the witnesses to die or move away, and then demand the convict's release on the basis of absolutely no information about his crime.

The left likes to talk about nonviolent drug crimes while not giving any info about a person's actual crimes.


Anonymous at 12:44 PM on July 17, 2019 | #13116 | reply | quote

https://reason.com/1981/02/01/love-canal/

Summary: Lovel Canal was a fraud. The chemical company was by far the most responsible and moral actor in what happened. The school board only got the property by threatening to take it with eminent domain, and the chemical company *repeatedly* warned them and tried to stop them from getting people hurt. The school board excavated tons of dirt that the chemicals were buried in, didn't tell their architect about the chemicals, built sewers, and more. Also the city and army dumped waste in the canal and that may not have been handled responsibly, whereas the chemical company sealed their waste. The hurt citizens with a lawsuit didn't do the most basic research to see if the school board might be at fault, e.g. but not bothering to check public records that the reporter accessed.

The chemical company, while highly responsible in how it deals with chemicals, did not have good lawyers. A popular book lied about what happened and turned the public against the chemical company. The reporter talked to the lawyer who advised not to sue for libel. The lawyer's reasoning was not to give the book free publicity. But once it was popular, he was just preventing the company from defending itself to the public. The reporter argued with the lawyer briefly and the lawyer actually conceded that maybe he should reconsider. It's terrible how carelessly some important decisions get made – but (for the chemical company, though not the school board) it was just the ones about publicity and lawyers, not about chemicals.


Dagny at 12:50 PM on July 17, 2019 | #13117 | reply | quote

Cloudflare deplatformed 8chan. Will 4chan be next?

https://new.blog.cloudflare.com/terminating-service-for-8chan/

Cloudflare's post calls the US First Amendment a "libertarian" policy (this is a hint that they disapprove of it) and distances themselves by emphasizing it doesn't apply to private business or to other countries – and they say they are more of a foreign company than US one.

Scary.

And what do they prefer to the "libertarian" US policy of protecting freedom?

> Europe, for example, has taken a lead in this area. As we've seen governments there attempt to address hate and terror content online,


Anonymous at 3:03 PM on August 5, 2019 | #13227 | reply | quote

https://mailchi.mp/ben-evans/benedicts-newsletter-no-299?e=6d10385a84

> London has vastly more security cameras than any other city in a democracy and is exploring face recognition.

The article link is paywalled but the headline says a lot. Scary.


Anonymous at 3:07 PM on August 5, 2019 | #13228 | reply | quote

Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell got suspended from Twitter for sharing a video showing people making violent threats against *him*

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2019/08/07/mitch-mcconnell-campaign-suspended-from-twitter-for-highlighting-violent-threats/


Anonymous at 4:57 PM on August 8, 2019 | #13251 | reply | quote

Owen Benjamin has been getting deplatformed. Here is some blatant fair use that YouTube copyright struck him for:

https://twitter.com/OwenComedy/status/1158710740477456384


Anonymous at 2:58 PM on August 10, 2019 | #13273 | reply | quote

Why gun control is unconstitutional in the USA

I would have liked to send to a website to read, but I didn't find information on a website at this time. If too long, I apologize. I will not do again.

--------------------------------------------------------

What our founding fathers said about guns (2nd Amendment)

------------------------------------------------------------------------------ I would like to see Gun Control Advocates in Washington, D.C. retire from politics and court. They haven't done anything good for this country as far as I am concerned. They need to check out what our founding fathers said and follow it! There is no exceptions in the 2nd amendment for assault weapons! So, as far as I am concerned, this AWB IS UNCONSTITUTIONAL ANYWAY! Even the words "assault weapons" is classic propaganda. Anything used to hurt someone else could be labeled an assault weapon - even your hand! The other thing that ticks me off is the misrepresentation of what our founding fathers said about 2nd amendment in order to sale gun control. TRY SOME OF THESE QUOTES ON FOR SIZE:

"... arms... discourage and keep the invader and plunderer in awe, and preserve order in the world as well as property. ...Horrid mischief would ensue were (the law-abiding) deprived the use of them." -Thomas Paine.

"On every question of construction (of the Constitution) let us carry ourselves back to the time when the Constitution was adopted, recollect the spirit manifested in the debates, and instead of trying what meaning may be squeezed out of the text, or invented against it, conform to the probable one in which it was passed." -Thomas Jefferson, letter to William Johnson, June 12, 1823, The Complete Jefferson, p322.

"Experience hath shewn, that even under the best forms [of government] those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny." -Thomas Jefferson, Bill for the More General diffusion of Knowledge (1778).

"To disarm the people (is) the best and most effectual way to enslave them..." -George Mason, 3 Elliot, Debates at 380.

"The best we can hope for concerning the people at large is that they be properly armed." -Alexander Hamilton, The Federalist Papers at 184-B.

"Guard with jealous attention the public liberty. Suspect everyone who approaches that jewel. Unfortunately, nothing will preserve it but downright force. Whenever you give up that force, you are ruined...The great object is that every man be armed. Everyone who is able might have a gun. : -Patrick Henry.

"Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take, but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!" -Patrick Henry

"To preserve liberty it is essential that the whole body of the people always possess arms and be taught alike, especially when young, how to use them..." -Richard Henry Lee writing in Letters from the Federal Farmer to the Republic (1787-1788).

"The Constitution shall never be construed to authorize Congress to prevent the people of the United States, who are peaceable citizens, from keeping their own arms." -Samuel Adams, debates & Proceedings in the Convention of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, 86-87.

"...the people have a right to keep and bear arms." -Patrick Henry and George Mason, Elliot, Debates at 185.

"The right of the people to keep and bear...arms shall not be infringed. A well-regulated militia, composed of the people, trained to arms, is the best and most natural defense of a free country..." -James Madison, I Annals of Congress 434 (June 8, 1789).

"A militia, when properly formed, are in fact the people themselves... and include all men capable of bearing arms." -Richard Henry Lee, Additional Letters from the Federal Farmer (1788) at 169.

"The militia of the United States consists of all able-bodied males at least 17 years of age..." -Title 10, Section 311 of the U.S. Code. (see http: //www4 . law. cornel 1 . edu/uscode/)

"The people are nor to be disarmed of their weapons. They are left in full possession of them." -Zachariah Johnson, 3 Elliot, Debates at 646.

"No free man shall ever be debarred the use of arms." -Thomas Jefferson, Proposal Virginia Constitution, 1 T. Jefferson Papers, 334 (C.J. Boyd, Ed., 1950).

"If the representatives of the people betray their constituents, there is then no recourse left but in the exertion of that original right of self=defense which is paramount to all positive forms of government,.."- Alexander Hamilton, The Federalist (#28).

"As civil rulers, not having their duty to the people duly before them, may attempt to tyrannize, and as the military forces which must be occasionally raised to defend our country, might pervert their power to the injury of their fellow citizens, the people are confirmed by the article in their right to keep and bear their private arms." -Tench Coxe, Remarks on the First Part of the Amendments to the Federal Constitution, under the pseudonym "A Pennsylvanian" in the Philadelphia Federal Gazette, June 18, 1989 at col. 1.

"The right of the people to keep and bear arms has been recognized by the General Government; but the best security of that right after all is, the military spirit, that taste for martial exercises, which has always distinguished the free citizens of these States... Such men form the best barrier to the liberties of America." -gazette of the United States, October 14, 1789.

"They that can give up liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." -Benjamin Franklin, Historical Review of Pennsylvania.

"The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts(only) as they are injurious)to others." -Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (1781-1785).

"I ask, sir, what is the militia? It is the whole people, except for a few public officials." -George Mason, 3 Elliot, Debates at 425-426.

"The Constitution of most of our states (and of the United States) assert that all power is inherent in the people; that they may exercise it by themselves; that it is their right and duty to be at all times armed." -Thomas Jefferson.

"(The Constitution preserves) the advantage of being armed which Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation...(where) the governments are afraid to trust the people with arms." -James Madison. "Laws that forbid the carrying of arms... disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes... Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants; they serve rather to encourage than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man." -Thomas Jefferson, quoting Cesare Beccaria.

"Arms in the hands of citizens (may) be used at individual discretion... in private self-defense..." -John Adams, A defense of the Constitutions of the Government of the USA, 471 (1788).

“Are we at last brought to such an humiliating and debasing degradation that we cannot be trusted with arms for our own defense? Where is the difference between having our arms under our own possession and under our own direction, and having them under the management of Congress? If our defense be the real object of having those arms, in whose hands can they be trusted with more propriety, or equal safety to us, as in our own hands?”-- Patrick Henry, 3 Elliot, Debates at 386.

“False is the idea of utility that sacrifices a thousand real advantages for one imaginary or trifling inconvenience; that would take fire from men because it burns, and water because one may drown in it; that has no remedy for evils, except destruction. The laws that forbid the carrying of arms are laws of such a nature. They disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes. Can it be supposed that those who have the courage to violate the most sacred laws of humanity, the most important of the code, will respect the less important and arbitrary ones, which can be violated with ease and impunity, and which, if strictly obeyed, would put and end to personal liberty--so dear to men, so dear to the enlightened legislator--and subject innocent persons to all the vexations that the guilty alone ought to suffer? Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants; they serve rather to encourage than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man. They ought to be designated as laws not preventative but fearful of crimes, produced by the tumultuous impression of a few isolated facts, and not by thoughtful consideration of the inconveniences and advantages of a universal decree.” Thomas Jefferson, Commonplace Book, 1774-1776,

quoting 18th century criminologist Cesare Beccaria in On Crimes and Punishment, 1764.

Statements from tapes that Martin Borman made of some of the pleasant dinner conversations he had been privy to:

“The most foolish mistake we could possibly make would be to allow the subject races to possess arms. History shows that all conquerors who have allowed their subject races to carry arms have prepared their own downfall by so doing. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that the supply of arms to the underdogs is a sine qua non for the overthrow of any sovereignty. So let's not have any native militia or native police. German troops alone will bear the sole responsibility for the maintenance of law and order throughout the occupied Russian territories, and a system of military strong-points must be evolved to cover the entire occupied country.” Adolf Hitler, dinner talk on April 11, 1942, quoted in Hitler's Table Talk 1941-44: His Private Conversations, Second Edition (1973), Pg. 425-426.

There are probably 35 or more cases in which a SCOTUS justice mentions the RKBA by quoting the Amendment, and in the vast majority of them they only quote the second, actionable clause. (If anybody wants, I can give you the case cites later) Still, I have never ignored the militia preamble. I believe that when we try to understand it we should accept this advice:

“On every question of construction let us carry ourselves back to the time when the Constitution was adopted, recollect the spirit manifested in the debates, and instead of trying what meaning can be squeezed out of the text, or invented against it, conform to the probable one which was passed.” Thomas Jefferson, The Complete Jefferson, p. 322 (1957) [Letter to William Johnson, June 12, 1823].

“My friends and countrymen, it is not so, for the powers of the sword are in the hands of the yeomanry of America from sixteen to sixty. The militia of these free commonwealths, entitled and accustomed to their arms, when compared with any possible army, must be tremendous and irresistible. Who are the militia? Are they not ourselves? Is it feared, then, that we shall turn our arms each man against his own bosom? Congress shall have no power to disarm the militia. Their swords and every other terrible implement of the soldier, are the birth-right of an American ....[T]he unlimited power of the sword is not in the hands of either the federal or the state governments, but where I trust in God it will ever remain, in the hands of the People.” Tench Coxe, Pennsylvania Gazette, Feb. 20, 1788.

“The supreme power in America cannot enforce unjust laws by the sword; because the whole body of the people are armed, and constitute a force superior to any bands of regular troops that can be, on any pretense, raised in the United States.” Noah Webster, "An Examination into the Leading Principles of the Federal Constitution" (1787) in Pamphlets on the Constitution of the United States (P. Ford, 1888).

“And that the said Constitution be never construed to authorize Congress to infringe the just liberty of the Press, or the rights of Conscience; or to prevent the people of the United States, who are peaceable citizens, from keeping their own arms. . .” Samuel Adams, Debates & Proceedings in the Convention of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, 86-87 (February 6, 1788).

“It has been asserted by the most respectable writers upon government, that a well-regulated militia, composed of the yeomanry of the country, have ever been considered as the bulwark of a free people. Tyrants have never placed any confidence on a militia composed of freemen.” John DeWitt, The Anti-Federalist Papers, p. 75 (M. Borden ed. 1965)

“Whenever, therefore, the profession of arms becomes a distinct order in the state. . .the end of the social compact is defeated. . . .No free government was ever founded, or ever preserved its liberty, without uniting the characters of the citizen and soldier in those destined for defense of the state. . . .Such a well regulated militia, composed of freeholders, citizens and husbandman, who take up arms to preserve their property, as individuals, and their rights as freemen” M. T. Cicero (a pseudonym), Charleston State Gazette, September 8, 1788

Last Monday, a string of amendments were presented to the lower house; these altogether respected personal liberty. . . William Grayson, 3 Patrick Henry, p. 391 (1951) [letter from Grayson to Henry, June 12, 1789]. [remember, it was Henry who complained of the Constitution without a RKBA in this fashion: “My great objection to this Government is, that it does not leave us the means of defending our rights; or, of waging war against tyrants”]

“A militia, when properly formed, are in fact the people themselves, and render regular troops in a great measure unnecessary. . . .the constitution ought to secure a genuine and guard against a select militia. . .and include. . .all men capable of bearing arms. . . . But, say gentlemen, the general militia are for the most part employed at home in their private concerns, cannot well be called out, or be depended upon; that we must have a select militia. . . .[of the select militia] These Corps, not much unlike regular troops, well ever produce an inattention to the general militia. . .whereas, to preserve liberty, it is essential that the whole body of the people always possess arms, and be taught alike, especially when young, how to use them. . . .The mind that aims at a select militia, must be influenced by a truly anti-republican principle; and when we see many men disposed to practice upon it, whenever they can prevail, no wonder true republicans are for carefully guarding against it.” Richard Henry Lee, Additional Letters from the Federal Farmer, p. 169-170 (1788)

The SCOUTS has weighed in on the definition of “the militia” in these cases: “The signification attributed to the term Militia appears from the debates in the Convention, the history and legislation of the Colonies and the States, and the writings of approved commentators. These show plainly enough that the militia comprised all males physically capable of acting in concert for the common defense.

"A body of citizens enrolled for military discipline." And further, that ordinarily when called for service these men were expected to appear bearing arms supplied by themselves and of a kind in common use at the time” U.S. v. Miller, 307 U.S. 174, 179 (1939).

“It is undoubtedly true that all citizens capable of bearing arms constitute the reserved military force or reserve militia of the United States as well as the States, and, in view of this prerogative of the general government. . .the States cannot, even laying the constitutional provision in question out of view, prohibit the people from keeping and bearing arms. . .[B]ut, as already stated, we think it clear that the sections under consideration [prohibiting mass marches by armed men without obtaining a permit] do not have this effect.” Presser v. Illinois, 116 U.S. 252, 267 (1886).

“Mr. Madison has introduced his long expected amendments. . . .It contains a bill of rights [including] . . . .the right to keep and bear arms.” Fisher Ames, 1 Works of Fisher Ames, pp. 52-53 (1854) [Letter to Thomas Dwight, June 11, 1789].

“The rights of conscience, of bearing arms, of changing the government, are declared to be inherent in the people.” Fisher Ames, 1 Works of Fisher Ames, pp. 53-54 (1854) [Letter to F. I. Minoe, June 12, 1789].

How was the RKBA sold to the public? Consider Madison’s good friend, Tench Coxe, who wrote a widely distributed pamphlet explaining the liberties in the Bill of Rights to aid Madison’s push for endorsement of them: “As civil rulers, not having their duty to the people duly before them, may attempt to tyrannize, and as the military forces which must be occasionally raised to defend our country, might pervert their power to the injury of their fellow citizens, the people are confirmed by the article in their right to keep and bear private arms.” Tench Coxe, Remarks on the First Part of the Amendments to the Federal Constitution. Published under the pseudonym, "A Pennsylvanian" in the Philadelphia Federal Gazette, June 18, 1789 at 2 Col. 1.

The militia clause is not a limitation, but a preamble which states the universally held principle that "standing armies, in time of peace, should be avoided, as dangerous to liberty." (from the Constitution of the Commonwealth of Virginia)

Therefore, here is how I (not me, the poster, but another's comment) read the Second Amendment: (I left it in because of the quotes.) 1. Whereas maintaining a standing army is dangerous to liberty, a well-regulated militia, composed of all citizens capable of bearing their private arms, is the best method to provide for the security of a FREE state (ie. A state in which the people need not fear the ambitions of their own government); AND 2. That every citizen has the right to keep and bear private arms; for this right provides the citizen with the ability to defend his life, his liberty, and his property from the "tyranny of irritated ministers" as well as providing him with the means to "discourage and keep the invader and the plunderer in awe." (citing The Declaration of the Causes and Necessity of Taking up Arms and Thomas Paine, respectively)

The right of the people to keep and bear...arms shall not be infringed. A well-regulated militia, composed of the people, trained to arms, is the best and most natural defense of a free country..." -James Madison, I Annals of Congress 434 (June 8, 1789). "A militia, when properly formed, are in fact the people themselves... and include all men capable of bearing arms." -Richard Henry Lee, Additional Letters from the Federal Farmer (1788) at 169.

Here are some statements from the Enemies of Liberty: "Governments begins at the end of the gun barrel." -Chairman Mao

"One man with a gun can control 100 without one. ...Make mass searches and hold executions for found arms." - V.I.Lenin

"If the opposition disarms, well and good. If it refuses to disarm, we shall do it ourselves." - Joseph Stalin

We are taking the law and bending it as far as we can to capture a whole new class of guns." - Jose Carada, (White House official who specializes in gun control policy), The Los Angeles Times

"We can't be so fixated on our desire to preserve the rights of ordinary Americans..." Bill Clinton (USA Today, 11 March 1993, page 2A)

"This year will go down in history. For the first time, a civilized nation has FULL GUN REGISTRATION! Our streets will be safer, our police more efficient, and the world will follow our lead into the future!" by Hitler,1935 WHO WAS A SOCIALIST HIMSELF!

“Are we at last brought to such an humiliating and debasing degradation that we cannot be trusted with arms for our own defense? Where is the difference between having our arms under our own possession and under our own direction, and having them under the management of Congress? If our defense be the real object of having those arms, in whose hands can they be trusted with more propriety, or equal safety to us, as in our own hands?”-- Patrick Henry, 3 Elliot, Debates at 386.

“False is the idea of utility that sacrifices a thousand real advantages for one imaginary or trifling inconvenience; that would take fire from men because it burns, and water because one may drown in it; that has no remedy for evils, except destruction. The laws that forbid the carrying of arms are laws of such a nature. They disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes. Can it be supposed that those who have the courage to violate the most sacred laws of humanity, the most important of the code, will respect the less important and arbitrary ones, which can be violated with ease and impunity, and which, if strictly obeyed, would put and end to personal liberty--so dear to men, so dear to the enlightened legislator--and subject innocent persons to all the vexations that the guilty alone ought to suffer? Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants; they serve rather to encourage than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man. They ought to be designated as laws not preventative but fearful of crimes, produced by the tumultuous impression of a few isolated facts, and not by thoughtful consideration of the inconveniences and advantages of a universal decree.” Thomas Jefferson, Commonplace Book, 1774-1776, quoting 18th century criminologist Cesare Beccaria in On Crimes and Punishment, 1764.

Statements from tapes that Martin Borman made of some of the pleasant dinner conversations he had been privy to:

“The most foolish mistake we could possibly make would be to allow the subject races to possess arms. History shows that all conquerors who have allowed their subject races to carry arms have prepared their own downfall by so doing. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that the supply of arms to the underdogs is a sine qua non for the overthrow of any sovereignty. So let's not have any native militia or native police. German troops alone will bear the sole responsibility for the maintenance of law and order throughout the occupied Russian territories, and a system of military strong-points must be evolved to cover the entire occupied country.” Adolf Hitler, dinner talk on April 11, 1942, quoted in Hitler's Table Talk 1941-44: His Private Conversations, Second Edition (1973), Pg. 425-426.

There are probably 35 or more cases in which a SCOTUS justice mentions the RKBA by quoting the Amendment, and in the vast majority of them they only quote the second, actionable clause. (If anybody wants, I can give you the case cites later) Still, I have never ignored the militia preamble. I believe that when we try to understand it we should accept this advice:

“On every question of construction let us carry ourselves back to the time when the Constitution was adopted, recollect the spirit manifested in the debates, and instead of trying what meaning can be squeezed out of the text, or invented against it, conform to the probable one which was passed.” Thomas Jefferson, The Complete Jefferson, p. 322 (1957) [Letter to William Johnson, June 12, 1823].

“My friends and countrymen, it is not so, for the powers of the sword are in the hands of the yeomanry of America from sixteen to sixty. The militia of these free commonwealths, entitled and accustomed to their arms, when compared with any possible army, must be tremendous and irresistible. Who are the militia? Are they not ourselves? Is it feared, then, that we shall turn our arms each man against his own bosom? Congress shall have no power to disarm the militia. Their swords and every other terrible implement of the soldier, are the birth-right of an American ....[T]he unlimited power of the sword is not in the hands of either the federal or the state governments, but where I trust in God it will ever remain, in the hands of the People.” Tench Coxe, Pennsylvania Gazette, Feb. 20, 1788.

“The supreme power in America cannot enforce unjust laws by the sword; because the whole body of the people are armed, and constitute a force superior to any bands of regular troops that can be, on any pretense, raised in the United States.” Noah Webster, "An Examination into the Leading Principles of the Federal Constitution" (1787) in Pamphlets on the Constitution of the United States (P. Ford, 1888).

“And that the said Constitution be never construed to authorize Congress to infringe the just liberty of the Press, or the rights of Conscience; or to prevent the people of the United States, who are peaceable citizens, from keeping their own arms. . .” Samuel Adams, Debates & Proceedings in the Convention of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, 86-87 (February 6, 1788).

“It has been asserted by the most respectable writers upon government, that a well-regulated militia, composed of the yeomanry of the country, have ever been considered as the bulwark of a free people. Tyrants have never placed any confidence on a militia composed of freemen.” John DeWitt, The Anti-Federalist Papers, p. 75 (M. Borden ed. 1965)

“Whenever, therefore, the profession of arms becomes a distinct order in the state. . .the end of the social compact is defeated. . . .No free government was ever founded, or ever preserved its liberty, without uniting the characters of the citizen and soldier in those destined for defense of the state. . . .Such a well- regulated militia, composed of freeholders, citizens and husbandman, who take up arms to preserve their property, as individuals, and their rights as freemen” M. T. Cicero (a pseudonym), Charleston State Gazette, September 8, 1788

“A militia, when properly formed, are in fact the people themselves, and render regular troops in a great measure unnecessary. . . .the constitution ought to secure a genuine and guard against a select militia. . .and include. . .all men capable of bearing arms. . . . But, say gentlemen, the general militia are for the most part employed at home in their private concerns, cannot well be called out, or be depended upon; that we must have a select militia. . . .[of the select militia] These Corps, not much unlike regular troops, well ever produce an inattention to the general militia. . .whereas, to preserve liberty, it is essential that the whole body of the people always possess arms, and be taught alike, especially when young, how to use them. . . .The mind that aims at a select militia, must be influenced by a truly anti-republican principle; and when we see many men disposed to practice upon it, whenever they can prevail, no wonder true republicans are for carefully guarding against it.” Richard Henry Lee, Additional Letters from the Federal Farmer, p. 169-170 (1788)

The SCOUTS has weighed in on the definition of “the militia” in these cases: “The signification attributed to the term Militia appears from the debates in the Convention, the history and legislation of the Colonies and the States, and the writings of approved commentators. These show plainly enough that the militia comprised all males physically capable of acting in concert for the common defense. "A body of citizens enrolled for military discipline." And further, that ordinarily when called for service these men were expected to appear bearing arms supplied by themselves and of a kind in common use at the time” U.S. v. Miller, 307 U.S. 174, 179 (1939).

“It is undoubtedly true that all citizens capable of bearing arms constitute the reserved military force or reserve militia of the United States as well as the States, and, in view of this prerogative of the general government. . .the States cannot, even laying the constitutional provision in question out of view, prohibit the people from keeping and bearing arms. . .[B]ut, as already stated, we think it clear that the sections under consideration [prohibiting mass marches by armed men without obtaining a permit] do not have this effect.” Presser v. Illinois, 116 U.S. 252, 267 (1886).

Regarding the Second Amendment, does the spirit of the debates indicates whether the RKBA was intended to be an individual or a collective state’s right? “Mr. Madison has introduced his long expected amendments. . . .It contains a bill of rights [including] . . . the right to keep and bear arms.” Fisher Ames, 1 Works of Fisher Ames, pp. 52-53 (1854) [Letter to Thomas Dwight, June 11, 1789].

“The rights of conscience, of bearing arms, of changing the government, are declared to be inherent in the people.” Fisher Ames, 1 Works of Fisher Ames, pp. 53-54 (1854) [Letter to F. I. Minoe, June 12, 1789].

Last Monday, a string of amendments were presented to the lower house; these altogether respected personal liberty. . . William Grayson, 3 Patrick Henry, p. 391 (1951) [letter from Grayson to Henry, June 12, 1789].[remember, it was Henry who complained of the Constitution without a RKBA in this fashion: “My great objection to this Government is, that it does not leave us the means of defending our rights; or, of waging war against tyrants”] How was the RKBA sold to the public? Consider Madison’s good friend, Tench Coxe, who wrote a widely distributed pamphlet explaining the liberties in the Bill of Rights to aid Madison’s push for endorsement of them: “As civil rulers, not having their duty to the people duly before them, may attempt to tyrannize, and as the military forces which must be occasionally raised to defend our country, might pervert their power to the injury of their fellow citizens, the people are confirmed by the article in their right to keep and bear private arms.” Tench Coxe, Remarks on the First Part of the Amendments to the Federal Constitution. Published under the pseudonym, "A Pennsylvanian" in the Philadelphia Federal Gazette, June 18, 1789 at 2

Col. 1.

Therefore, here is how I (not me, the poster, but another's comment) read the Second Amendment: (I left it in because of the quotes.) 1. Whereas maintaining a standing army is dangerous to liberty, a well-regulated militia, composed of all citizens capable of bearing their private arms, is the best method to provide for the security of a FREE state (ie. A state in which the people need not fear the ambitions of their own government); AND 2. That every citizen has the right to keep and bear private arms; for this right provides the citizen with the ability to defend his life, his liberty, and his property from the "tyranny of irritated ministers" as well as providing him with the means to "discourage and keep the invader and the plunderer in awe." (citing The Declaration of the Causes and Necessity of Taking up Arms and Thomas Paine, respectively) The militia clause is not a limitation, but a preamble which states the universally held principle that "standing armies, in time of peace, should be avoided, as dangerous to liberty." (from the Constitution of the Commonwealth of Virginia)

What your founding fathers said about guns (2nd Amendment)

"... arms... discourage and keep the invader and plunderer in awe, and preserve order in the world as well as property. ...Horrid mischief would ensue were (the law abiding) deprived the use of them." Thomas Paine.

"On every question of construction (of the Constitution) let us carry ourselves back to the time when the Constitution was adopted, recollect the spirit manifested in the debates, and instead of trying what meaning may be squeezed out of the text, or invented against it, conform to the probable one in which it was passed." Thomas Jefferson, letter to William Johnson, June 12, 1823, The Complete Jefferson, p. 322.

"Experience hath shewn, that even under the best forms [of government] those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny." Thomas Jefferson, Bill for the More General diffusion of Knowledge (1778).

"To disarm the people (is) the best and most effectual way to enslave them..." George Mason, 3 Elliot, Debates at 380.

"The best we can hope for concerning the people at large is that they be properly armed." Alexander Hamilton, The Federalist Papers at 184 B.

"Guard with jealous attention the public liberty. Suspect everyone who approaches that jewel. Unfortunately, nothing will preserve it but downright force. Whenever you give up that force, you are ruined...The great object is that every man be armed. Everyone who is able might have a gun.: Patrick Henry.

"Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take, but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!" Patrick Henry

"To preserve liberty it is essential that the whole body of the people always possess arms and be taught alike, especially when young, how to use them..." Richard Henry Lee writing in Letters from the Federal Farmer to the Republic (1787 1788).

"The Constitution shall never be construed to authorize Congress to prevent the people of the United States, who are peaceable citizens, from keeping their own arms." Samuel Adams, debates & Proceedings in the Convention of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, 86 87.

"...the people have a right to keep and bear arms." Patrick Henry and George Mason, Elliot, Debates at 185.

"The right of the people to keep and bear...arms shall not be infringed. A well-regulated militia, composed of the people, trained to arms, is the best and most natural defense of a free country..." James Madison, I Annals of Congress 434 (June 8, 1789).

"A militia, when properly formed, are in fact the people themselves... and include all men capable of bearing arms." Richard Henry Lee, Additional Letters from the Federal Farmer (1788) at 169.

"The militia of the United States consists of all able bodied males at least 17 years of age..." Title 10, Section 311 of the U.S. Code. (see http: //www4.law.cornel 1.edu/uscode/)

"The people are nor to be disarmed of their weapons. They are left in full possession of them." Zachariah Johnson, 3 Elliot, Debates at 646.

"No free man shall ever be debarred the use of arms." Thomas Jefferson, Proposal Virginia Constitution, 1 T. Jefferson Papers, 334 (C.J. Boyd, Ed., 1950).

"If the representatives of the people betray their constituents, there is then no recourse left but in the exertion of that original right of self-defense which is paramount to all positive forms of government,.." Alexander Hamilton, The Federalist (#28) .

"As civil rulers, not having their duty to the people duly before them, may attempt to tyrannize, and as the military forces which must be occasionally raised to defend our country, might pervert their power to the injury of their fellow citizens, the people are confirmed by the article in their right to keep and bear their private arms." Tench Coxe, Remarks on the First Part of the Amendments to the Federal Constitution, under the pseudonym "A Pennsylvanian" in the Philadelphia Federal Gazette, June 18, 1989 at col. 1.

"The right of the people to keep and bear arms has been recognized by the General Government; but the best security of that right after all is, the military spirit, that taste for martial exercises, which has always distinguished the free citizens of these States... Such men form the best barrier to the liberties of America." gazette of the United States, October 14, 1789.

"Before a standing army can rule, the people must be disarmed; as they are in almost every kingdom of Europe, the supreme power in America cannot be enforce unjust laws by the sword; because the whole body of the people are armed, and constitute a force superior to any band of regular troops that can be, on any pretense, raised in the United States. A military force at the command of Congress, can execute no laws, but such as the people perceive to be just and Constitutional; for they will possess the power, and jealousy will instantly inspire the inclination, to resist the execution of a law which appears to them unjust and oppressive. Noah Webster, “An Experiment of the Leading Principles of the Federal Constitution” (Philadelphia 1787)

"They that can give up liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." Benjamin Franklin, Historical Review of Pennsylvania.

"The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts (only) as they are injurious to others." Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (1781 1785).

"I ask, sir, what is the militia? It is the whole people, except for a few public officials." George Mason, 3 Elliot, Debates at 425 426.

"The Constitution of most of our states (and of the United States) assert that all power is inherent in the people; that they may exercise it by themselves; that it is their right and duty to be at all times armed." Thomas Jefferson.

"(The Constitution preserves) the advantage of being armed which Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation... where the governments are afraid to trust the people with arms." James Madison.

"Laws that forbid the carrying of arms... disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes... Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants; they serve rather to encourage than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man." Thomas Jefferson, quoting Cesare Beccaria.

"Arms in the hands of citizens (may) be used at individual

discretion... in private self-defense..." John Adams, A defense of the

Constitutions of the Government of the USA, 471 (1788).

"This year will go down in history. For the first time, a civilized nation has FULL GUN REGISTRATION! Our streets will be safer, our police more efficient, and the world will follow our lead into the future!" by Hitler, 1935 WHO WAS A SOCIALIST HIMSELF!

"On every question of construction (of the Constitution) let us carry ourselves back to the time when the Constitution was adopted, recollect the spirit manifested in the debates, and instead of trying what meaning may be squeezed out of the text, or invented against it, conform to the probable one in which it was passed." Thomas Jefferson, letter to William Johnson, June 12, 1823, The Complete Jefferson, p. 322.

"Experience hath shewn, that even under the best forms [of government] those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny." Thomas Jefferson, Bill for the More General diffusion of Knowledge (1778).

"The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts (only) as they are injurious to others." Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (1781 1785).

"The Constitution of most of our states (and of the United States) assert that all power is inherent in the people; that they may exercise it by themselves; that it is their right and duty to be at all times armed." Thomas Jefferson.

"Laws that forbid the carrying of arms... disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes... Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants; they serve rather to encourage than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man." Thomas Jefferson, quoting Cesare Beccaria.

"The Aim of an Argument ... should not be victory, but progress." Joseph Joubert (1754 1824)

"Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful." Seneca the Younger

"It is often argued that religion is valuable because it makes men good, but even if this were true it would not be a proof that religion is true. That would be an extension of pragmatism beyond endurance. Santa Claus makes children good in precisely the same way, and yet no one would argue seriously that the fact proves his existence. The defense of religion is full of such logical imbecilities." H. L. Mencken

Dictionary definition of NAZI:

Have you looked up NAZI in a dictionary?

1. A member or the National Socialist Germany Workers' Party, which in 1933, UNDER Adolph Hitler, SEIZED political CONTROL of Germany. 2. A person who holds similar views elsewhere.

Have you looked up SOCIALISM in a dictionary?

1 A theory or system of social organization that advocates the ownership and CONTROL of industry, capital, land, etc., by the community as a whole. 2. Procedure or practice in accordance with this theory. 3. (In Marxist theory) the stage following capitalism in the transition of a society to communism.

“Are we at last brought to such a humiliating and debasing degradation that we cannot be trusted with arms for our own defense? Where is the difference between having our arms under our own possession and under our own direction, and having them under the management of Congress? If our defense be the real object of having those arms, in whose hands can they be trusted with more propriety, or equal safety to us, as in our own hands?” Patrick Henry, 3 Elliot, Debates at 386.

“On every question of construction let us carry ourselves back to the time when the Constitution was adopted, recollect the spirit manifested in the debates, and instead of trying what meaning can be squeezed out of the text, or invented against it, conform to the probable one which was passed.” Thomas Jefferson, The Complete Jefferson, p. 322 (1957) [Letter to William Johnson, June 12, 1823].

“False is the idea of utility that sacrifices a thousand real advantages for one imaginary or trifling inconvenience; that would take fire from men because it burns, and water because one may drown in it; that has no remedy for evils, except destruction. The laws that forbid the carrying of arms are laws of such a nature. They disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes. Can it be supposed that those who have the courage to violate the most sacred laws of humanity, the most important of the code, will respect the less important and arbitrary ones, which can be violated with ease and impunity, and which, if strictly obeyed, would put an end to personal liberty so dear to men, so dear to the enlightened legislator and subject innocent persons to all the vexations that the guilty alone ought to suffer? Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants; they serve rather to encourage than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man. They ought to be designated as laws not preventative but fearful of crimes, produced by the tumultuous impression of a few isolated facts, and not by thoughtful consideration of the inconveniences and advantages of a universal decree.” Thomas Jefferson, Commonplace Book, 1774 1776, quoting 18th century criminologist Cesare Beccaria in On Crimes and Punishment, 1764.

Statements from tapes that Martin Borman made of some of the pleasant dinner conversations he had been privy to:

“The most foolish mistake we could possibly make would be to allow the subject races to possess arms. History shows that all conquerors who have allowed their subject races to carry arms have prepared their own downfall by so doing. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that the supply of arms to the underdogs is a sine qua non for the overthrow of any sovereignty. So let's not have any native militia or native police. German troops alone will bear the sole responsibility for the maintenance of law and order throughout the occupied Russian territories, and a system of military strong points must be evolved to cover the entire occupied country.” Adolf Hitler, dinner talk on April 11, 1942, quoted in Hitler's Table Talk 1941 44: His Private Conversations, Second Edition (1973), Pg. 425 426.

There are probably 35 or more cases in which a SCOTUS justice mentions the RKBA by quoting the Amendment, and in the vast majority of them they only quote the second, actionable clause. (If anybody wants, I can give you the case cites later) Still, I have never ignored the militia preamble. I believe that when we try to understand it we should accept this advice:

“My friends and countrymen, it is not so, for the powers of the sword are in the hands of the yeomanry of America from sixteen to sixty. The militia of these free commonwealths, entitled and accustomed to their arms, when compared with any possible army, must be tremendous and irresistible. Who are the militia? Are they not ourselves? Is it feared, then, that we shall turn our arms each man against his own bosom? Congress shall have no power to disarm the militia. Their swords and every other terrible implement of the soldier, are the birth right of an American ....[T]he unlimited power of the sword is not in the hands of either the federal or the state governments, but where I trust in God it will ever remain, in the hands of the People.” Tench Coxe, Pennsylvania Gazette, Feb. 20, 1788.

“The supreme power in America cannot enforce unjust laws by the sword; because the whole body of the people are armed, and constitute a force superior to any bands of regular troops that can be, on any pretense, raised in the United States.” Noah Webster, "An Examination into the Leading Principles of the Federal Constitution" (1787) in Pamphlets on the Constitution of the United States (P. Ford, 1888) .

“And that the said Constitution be never construed to authorize Congress to infringe the just liberty of the Press, or the rights of Conscience; or to prevent the people of the United States, who are peaceable citizens, from keeping their own arms. . .” Samuel Adams, Debates & Proceedings in the Convention of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, 86 87 (February 6, 1788).

“It has been asserted by the most respectable writers upon government, that a well regulated militia, composed of the yeomanry of the country, have ever been considered as the bulwark of a free people. Tyrants have never placed any confidence on a militia composed of freemen.” John DeWitt, The Anti Federalist Papers, p. 75 (M. Borden ed. 1965)

“Whenever, therefore, the profession of arms becomes a distinct order in the state. . .the end of the social compact is defeated. . . .No free government was ever founded, or ever preserved its liberty, without uniting the characters of the citizen and soldier in those destined for defense of the state. . . .Such a well-regulated militia, composed of freeholders, citizens and husbandman, who take up arms to preserve their property, as individuals, and their rights as freemen” M. T. Cicero (a pseudonym), Charleston State Gazette, September 8, 1788

“A militia, when properly formed, are in fact the people themselves, and render regular troops in a great measure unnecessary. . . the constitution ought to secure a genuine and guard against a select militia. . .and include. . .all men capable of bearing arms. . . . But, say gentlemen, the general militia are for the most part employed at home in their private concerns, cannot well be called out, or be depended upon; that we must have a select militia. . . .[ of the select militia] These Corps, not much unlike regular troops, well ever produce an inattention to the general militia. . .whereas, to preserve liberty, it is essential that the whole body of the people always possess arms, and be taught alike, especially when young, how to use them. . . .The mind that aims at a select militia, must be influenced by a truly anti republican principle; and when we see many men disposed to practice upon it, whenever they can prevail, no wonder true republicans are for carefully guarding against it.” Richard Henry Lee, Additional Letters from the Federal Farmer, p. 169 170 (1788)

Last Monday, a string of amendments were presented to the lower house; these altogether respected personal liberty. . . William Grayson, 3 Patrick Henry, p. 391 (1951) [letter from Grayson to Henry, June 12, 1789]. [remember, it was Henry who complained of the Constitution without a RKBA in this fashion: “My great objection to this Government is, that it does not leave us the means of defending our rights; or, of waging war against tyrants”]

The SCOUTS has weighed in on the definition of “the militia” in these cases:

“The signification attributed to the term Militia appears from the debates in the Convention, the history and legislation of the Colonies and the States, and the writings of approved commentators. These show plainly enough that the militia comprised all males physically capable of acting in concert for the common defense. "A body of citizens enrolled for military discipline." And further, that ordinarily when called for service these men were expected to appear bearing arms supplied by themselves and of a kind in common use at the time” U.S. v. Miller, 307 U.S. 174, 179 (1939).

“It is undoubtedly true that all citizens capable of bearing arms constitute the reserved military force or reserve militia of the United States as well as the States, and, in view of this prerogative of the general government. . .the States cannot, even laying the constitutional provision in question out of view, prohibit the people from keeping and bearing arms. . .[B]ut, as already stated, we think it clear that the sections under consideration [prohibiting mass marches by armed men without obtaining a permit] do not have this effect.” Presser v. Illinois, 116 U.S. 252, 267 (1886).

Regarding the Second Amendment, does the spirit of the debates indicates whether the RKBA was intended to be an individual or a collective state’s right?

“Mr. Madison has introduced his long expected amendments. . . .It contains a bill of rights [including] . . . .the right to keep and bear arms.” Fisher Ames, 1 Works of Fisher Ames, pp. 52 53 (1854) [Letter to Thomas Dwight, June 11, 1789].

“The rights of conscience, of bearing arms, of changing the government, are declared to be inherent in the people.” Fisher Ames, 1 Works of Fisher Ames, pp. 53 54 (1854) [Letter to F. I. Minoe, June 12, 1789].

How was the RKBA sold to the public? Consider Madison’s good friend, Tench Coxe, who wrote a widely distributed pamphlet explaining the liberties in the Bill of Rights to aid Madison’s push for endorsement of them:

“As civil rulers, not having their duty to the people duly before them, may attempt to tyrannize, and as the military forces which must be occasionally raised to defend our country, might pervert their power to the injury of their fellow citizens, the people are confirmed by the article in their right to keep and bear private arms.” Tench Coxe, Remarks on the First Part of the Amendments to the Federal Constitution. Published under the pseudonym, "A Pennsylvanian" in the Philadelphia Federal Gazette, June 18, 1789 at 2 Col. 1.

Therefore, here is how I (not me, the poster, but another's comment) read the Second Amendment: (I left it in because of the quotes.)

1. Whereas maintaining a standing army is dangerous to liberty, a well-regulated militia, composed of all citizens capable of bearing their private arms, is the best method to provide for the security of a FREE state (i.e. A state in which the people need not fear the ambitions of their own government); AND

2. That every citizen has the right to keep and bear private arms; for this right provides the citizen with the ability to defend his life, his liberty, and his property from the "tyranny of irritated ministers" as well as providing him with the means to "discourage and keep the invader and the plunderer in awe." (citing The Declaration of the Causes and Necessity of Taking up Arms and Thomas Paine, respectively)

The militia clause is not a limitation, but a preamble which states the universally held principle that "standing armies, in time of peace, should be avoided, as dangerous to liberty." (from the Constitution of the Commonwealth of Virginia)

Notable Quotes

1.

The following quotes are taken from several sources. They provide some

guidance for interpretation of the Constitution.

"It is every Americans' right and obligation to read and interpret the

Constitution for himself."

Thomas Jefferson

"On every question of construction, let us carry ourselves back to the

time when the Constitution was adopted, recollect the spirit manifested

in the debates, and instead of trying what meaning may be squeezed out

of the text, or invented against it, conform to the probable one in

which it was passed."

Thomas Jefferson, letter to William Johnson, June 12, 1823, The

Complete Jefferson, p. 322.

"Our peculiar security is in the possession of a written Constitution.

Let us not make it a blank paper by construction."

Thomas Jefferson to W, Nicholas, 1803.

"The true key for the construction of everything doubtful in a law, is

the intention of the law givers. This is most safely gathered from the

words, but may be sought also in extraneous circumstances, provided they

do not contradict the express words of the law."

Thomas Jefferson to A. Gallatin, 1808.

"I had rather ask an enlargement of power from the nation, where it is

found necessary, than to assume it by a construction which would make

our powers boundless."

Thomas Jefferson to W. Nicholas, 1803.

"The particular phraseology of the Constitution of the United States

confirms and strengthens the principle, supposed to be essential to all

written constitutions, that a law repugnant to the Constitution is void;

and that courts, as well as other departments, are bound by that

instrument."

John Marshall: Opinion as Chief Justice in Marbury vs. Madison, 1802

"[E]very act of a delegated authority, contrary to the tenor of the

commission under which it is exercised, is void. No legislative act,

therefore, contrary to the Constitution, can be valid. To deny this,

would be to affirm, that the deputy is greater than his principal; that

the servant is above his master; that the representatives of the people

are superior to the people themselves; that men acting by virtue of

powers, may do not only what their powers do not authorize, but what

they forbid."

Alexander Hamilton

"... God forbid we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion.

The people cannot be all, and always, well informed. The part which is

wrong will be discontented, in proportion to the importance of the facts

they misconceive. If they remain quiet under such misconceptions, it is

lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty. ... And what

country can preserve its liberties, if it's rulers are not warned from

time to time, that this people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let

them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to the facts, pardon

and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The

tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time, with the blood of

patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure."

Richard Henry Lee, Senator, First Congress, Additional Letters

from the Federal Farmer (1788) at 169.

"Whenever governments mean to invade the rights and liberties of the

people, they always attempt to destroy the militia, in order to raise an

army upon their ruins."

Rep. Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts, spoken during floor debate

over the Second Amendment, I Annals of Congress at 750, August 17,

1789.

"... the people are confirmed by the article in their right to keep and

bear their private arms."

Tench Coxe in "Remarks on the First Part of the Amendments to the

Federal Constitution." Under the pseudonym "A Pennsylvanian" in the

Philadelphia Federal Gazette, June 18, 1789 at 2 col. 1.

"To preserve liberty, it is essential that the whole body of people

always possess arms..."

Richard Henry Lee, 1788, Member of the First U.S. Senate.

"That the said Constitution shall never be construed to authorize

Congress to infringe the just liberty of the press or the rights of

conscience; or to prevent the people of the United States who are

peaceable citizens from keeping their own arms..."

Samuel Adams, Debates and Proceedings in the Convention of the

Commonwealth of Massachusetts, at 86-87 (Peirce & Hale, eds.,

Boston, 1850. 2, col. 2.

"It does not require a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless

minority keen to set brush fires in people's minds."

Samuel Adams

"Germans who wish to use firearms should join the SS or the SA

ordinary citizens don't need guns, as their having guns doesn't serve

the state."

Heinrich Himmler.

"The battle, Sir, is not to the strong alone; it is to the vigilant, the

active, the brave. Besides, Sir, we have no election. If we were base

enough to desire it, it is now too late to retire from the contest.

There is no retreat but in submission and slavery! Our chains are

forged! Their clanking may be heard on the plains of Boston! The war is

inevitable; and let it come! I repeat, Sir, let it come!"

Patrick Henry, in his famous "The War Inevitable" speech, March,

1775.

"It is in vain, Sir, to extenuate the matter. Gentlemen may cry, Peace,

Peace! But there is no peace. The war is actually begun! The next gale

that sweeps from the North will bring to our ears the clash of

resounding arms! Our brethren are already in the field! Why stand we

here idle? What is it that Gentlemen want? What would they have? Is life

so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains

and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may

take, but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!"

Patrick Henry, in his famous "The War Inevitable" speech, March,

1775.

"A strong body makes the mind strong. As to the species of exercise, I

advise the gun. While this gives moderate exercise to the body, it gives

boldness, enterprise, and independence Games played with the ball, and

others of that nature, are too violent for the body and stamp no

character on the mind. Let your gun therefore be the constant companion

of your walk."

Encyclopedia of Thomas Jefferson, 318 (Foley, Ed., reissued 1967)

"That the Constitution shall never be construed to authorize Congress to

infringe the just liberty of the press or the rights of conscience; or

to prevent "the people" of the United States who are peaceable citizens

from keeping their own arms..."

"Never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never in nothing,

great or small, large or petty never give in except to convictions of

honor and good sense."

Winston Spencer Churchill, address at Harrow School, October 29, 1941.

"Never turn your back on a threatened danger and try to run away from

it. If you do that, you will double the danger. But if you meet it

promptly and without flinching, you will reduce the danger by half.

Never run away from anything. Never!"

Winston Churchill

"The rank and file are usually much more primitive than we imagine.

Propaganda must therefore always be essentially simple and repetitious."

Joseph Goebbels, Nazi Minister of Propaganda

"The most brilliant propagandist technique will yield no success unless

one fundamental principle is borne in mind constantly ... it must

confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over."

Joseph Goebbels, Nazi Minister of Propaganda

"God grants liberty only to those who love it, and are always ready to

guard and defend it."

Daniel Webster

"Hold on, my friends, to the Constitution and to the Republic for which

it stands. Miracles do not cluster, and what has happened once in 6000

years, may not happen again. Hold on to the Constitution, for if the

American Constitution should fail, there will be anarchy throughout the

world."

Daniel Webster

"All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do

nothing."

Edmund Burke

"Those who have long enjoyed such privileges as we enjoy forget in time

that men have died to win them."

Franklin D. Roosevelt

"You have sat too long here for any good you have been doing. Depart, I

say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!"

Oliver Cromwell, "Lord Protector of the English Commonwealth",

upon dissolving Parliament

"Whenever people ... entrust the defense of their country to a regular,

standing army, composed of mercenaries, the power of that country will

remain under the direction of the most wealthy citizens..."

"A Framer", in the Independent Gazetteer, 1791

"We, the people are the rightful masters of both Congress and the courts

not to overthrow the Constitution, but to overthrow men who pervert

the Constitution."

Abraham Lincoln

"If cowardly and dishonorable men sometimes shoot unarmed men with army

pistols or guns, the evil must be prevented by the penitentiary and

gallows, and not by a general deprivation of a constitutional

privilege."

Arkansas Supreme Court, 1878

"The right of citizens to bear arms is just one guarantee against

arbitrary government, one more safeguard against the tyranny which now

appears remote in America, but which historically has proved to be

always possible."

Senator Hubert H. Humphrey (D-Minnesota)

"Among the many misdeeds of the British rule in India, history will look

upon the act of depriving a whole nation of arms, as the blackest."

Mahatma Gandhi

"The one weapon every man, soldier, sailor, or airman should be able to

use effectively is the rifle. It is always his weapon of personal safety

in an emergency, and for many it is the primary weapon of offense and

defense. Expertness in its use cannot be overemphasized."

General Dwight D. Eisenhower

"Before God I swear this is my creed: my rifle and myself are the

defenders of our country. We are the masters of our enemy. We are the

saviors of my life. So be it until victory is America's and there is no

enemy, but peace!!

From "My Rifle", by Major General W.H. Rupertus, USMC.

"The American Revolution was a beginning, not a consummation."

Woodrow Wilson, 28th President of the United 'States (1856-1924).

"With reasonable men I will reason; with humane men I will plead; but

with tyrants, I will give no quarter, nor waste arguments where they

will certainly be lost."

William Lloyd Garrison

"...to disarm the people is the best and most effective way to enslave

them..."

George Mason, 3 Elliot, Debates at 380.

"Before a standing army can rule, the people must be disarmed; as they

are in almost every kingdom in Europe. The supreme power in America

cannot enforce unjust laws by the sword; because the whole of the people

are armed, and constitute a force superior to any bands of regular

troops that can be, on any pretense, raised in the United States."

Noah Webster, "An Examination into the leading Principles of the

Federal Constitution." in Paul Ford, ed., Pamphlets on the

Constitution of the United States , at 56 (New York, 1888).

"... if raised, whether they could subdue a Nation of freemen, who know

how to prize liberty, and who have arms in their hands?"

Delegate Sedgewick, during the Massachusetts Convention,

rhetorically asking if an oppressive standing army could prevail

... Johnathon Elliot, ed., Debates in the Several State Conventions

on the Adoption of the Federal Constitution, Vol. 2 at 97 (2d ed.,

1888).

"Besides the advantage of being armed, which the Americans possess over

the people of almost every other nation ... notwithstanding the

military establishments in the several kingdoms of Europe, which are

carried as far as the public resources will bear, the governments are

afraid to trust the people with arms."

James Madison, author of the Bill of Rights, in Federalist Paper

No. 46, at 243-244.

"As civil rulers, not having their duty to the people duly before them,

may attempt to tyrannize, and as the military forces which must be

occasionally raised to defend our country, might pervert their power to

the injury of their fellow citizens, the people are confirmed by the

article in their right to keep and bear private arms."

Tench Coxe, in "Remarks on the First Part of the Amendments to

the Federal Constitution." under the pseudonym, "A Pennsylvanian"

in the Philadelphia Federal Gazette, June 18, 1789 at 2 Col. 1.

"The supposed quietude of a good man allures the ruffian; while on the

other hand, arms, like laws, discourage and keep the invader and the

plunderer in awe, and preserve order in the world as well as property.

The same balance would be preserved were all the world destitute of

arms, for all the world would be alike; but since some will not, others

dare not lay them aside...Horrid mischief would ensue were one half the

world deprived the use of them..."

Thomas Paine, I Writings of Thomas Paine at 56 (1894).

"Are we at last brought to such humiliating and debasing degradation

that we cannot be trusted with arms for our defense? Where is the

difference between having our arms in possession and under our

direction, and having them under the management of Congress? If our

defense be the real object of having those arms, in whose hands can they

be trusted with more propriety, or equal safety to us, as in our own

hands?"

Patrick Henry, 3 J. Elliot, Debates in the Several State

Conventions 45, 2d Ed. Philadelphia, 1836.

"The ultimate authority ... resides in the people alone."

James Madison, author of the Bill of Rights, in Federalist Paper

No. 46.

"The whole of the Bill [of Rights] is a declaration of the right of the

people at large or considered as individuals ... It establishes some

rights of the individual as unalienable and which consequently, no

majority has the right to deprive them of."

Albert Gallatin of the New York Historical Society, October 7,

1789.

"All military type firearms are to be handed in immediately ... The SS,

SA and Stahlhelm give every responsible opportunity of campaigning with

them. Therefore anyone who does not belong to one of the above-named

organizations and who unjustifiably nevertheless keeps his weapon ...

must be regarded as an enemy of the national government."

SA Oberfuhrer of Bad Tolz, March, 1933.

"There are going to be situations where people are going to go without

assistance. That's just the facts of life."

LA Police Chief Darryl Gates

"The Constitution of most of our states (and of the United States)

assert that all power is inherent in the people; that they may exercise

it by themselves; that it is their right and duty to be at all times

armed and that they are entitled to freedom of person, freedom of

religion, freedom of property, and freedom of press."

Thomas Jefferson

"Enlighten people generally, and tyranny and oppressions of body and

mind will vanish like evil spirits at the dawn of day."

Thomas Jefferson

Apocryphal Quotes

The following are often quoted but dubious:

"This Year Will Go Down In History. For The First Time, A Civilized

Nation Has Full Gun Registration! Our Streets Will Be Safer, Our Police

More Efficient, And The World Will Follow Our Lead Into The Future!"

Adolph Hitler 1935 'Berlin Daily' (Loose English Translation)

April 15th, 1935 Page 3 Article 2 by Einleitung Von Eberhard

Beckmann "Abschied vom Hessenland!"

Refuted at http://www.guncite.com/gcbogus.html

"The strongest reason for people to retain the right to keep and bear

arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in

government."

Thomas Jefferson Papers, 334 (C.J. Boyd, Ed., 1950)

"The very atmosphere of firearms anywhere and everywhere restrains evil

interference they deserve a place of honor with all that is good."

George Washington

"Government is not reason. It is not eloquence. It is a force, like

fire: a dangerous servant and a terrible master".

George Washington

Refuted at http://www.guncite.com/gc2ndbog.html

Ancient Quotes

The following are from ancient philosophers who can inspire our times:

"We can have justice whenever those who have not been injured by injustice are as outraged by it as those who have been.".

â” Solon, author of the Constitution of Athens, 594 B.C.

"More law, less justice."

â” Cicero, De Officiis, 44 B.C.

"So far as the Civil Law is concerned, slaves are not considered persons, but this is not the case according to natural law, because natural law regards all men as equal."

"The precepts of the law are the following: to live honorably, to injure no one, to give to every one his due."

â” Ulpian, Roman jurist, ~222 CE

Quotable Quotes on Gun Control

- A system of licensing and registration is the perfect device to deny gun ownership to the bourgeoisie. -- Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

- All we ask for is registration, just like we do for cars.--Charles Schumer

- I stand in support of this common sense legislation to license everyone who wishes to purchase a gun...I also believe that every new handgun sale or transfer should be registered in a national registry --Hillary Clinton

- If someone has a gun and is trying to kill you, it would be reasonable to shoot back with your own gun. -- The Dalai Lama

- The Constitution of the United States of America clearly affirms the right of every American citizen to bear arms. And as Americans, we will not give up a single right guaranteed under the Constitution. -- Malcolm X

- If the opposition disarms, well and good. If it refuses to disarm, we shall disarm it ourselves. — Stalin

- After a shooting spree, they always want to take the guns away from the people who didn't do it. I sure as hell wouldn't want to live in a society where the only people allowed guns are the police and the military. -- William Burroughs

- On the morrow of each conflict I gave the categorical order to confiscate the largest possible number of weapons of every sort and kind. — Mussolini

- US Senator, If I could have banned them all -'Mr. and Mrs. America turn in your guns'- I would have!-Diane Feinstein

- Among the many misdeeds of the British rule in India, history will look upon the Act depriving a whole nation of arms as the blackest.—Ghandi

- I don't know about you, but if you hear that Williams' guns have been taken, you'll know Williams is dead. -- Walter Williams

- I believe in keeping guns out of our inner cities, and that our leaders must say so in the face of the gun manufacturer's lobby.--Barrack Obama

- Gun control has not worked in D.C. The only people who have guns are criminals. We have the strictest gun laws in the nation and one of the highest murder rates.-- Lieutenant Lowell Duckett, Special Assistant to DC Police Chief; President, Black Police Caucus

- You cannot invade mainland United States. There would be a rifle behind each blade of grass.--Japanese WWII Admiral Yamamoto

- All political power comes from the barrel of a gun. The communist party must command all the guns, that way, no guns can ever be used to command the party.--Mao Tse Tung

- The first step is to take weapons off the streets and to put more police on them.--Hillary Clinton

- By calling attention to 'a well-regulated militia, ''the security of the nation,' and the right of each citizen 'to keep and bear arms,' our founding fathers recognized the essentially civilian nature of our economy...--JFK

Famous quote:

"I ask, sir, what is the militia? It is the whole people, except for a few public officials."

— George Mason, in Debates in Virginia Convention on Ratification of the Constitution, Elliot, Vol. 3, June 16, 1788

But that's not quite enough. Let's go for a few more:

"The militia, when properly formed, are in fact the people themselves,... all men capable of bearing arms;..."

— "Letters from the Federal Farmer to the Republic", 1788 (either Richard Henry Lee or Melancton Smith).

"Who are the militia? Are they not ourselves? Is it feared, then, that we shall turn our arms each man against his own bosom? Congress shall have no power to disarm the militia. Their swords, and every other terrible implement of the soldier, are the birth-right of an American ... The unlimited power of the sword is not in the hands of either the federal or state governments, but where I trust in God it will ever remain, in the hands of the People."

— Tench Coxe, 1788.

If we are ready to violate the Constitution, will the people submit to our unauthorized acts? Sir, they ought not to submit; they would deserve the chains that our measures are forging for them, if they did not resist.

— Edward Livingston

How about this from a former SOVIET prisoner in a gulag:

"How we burned in the prison camps later thinking: What would things have been like if every police operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive? If during periods of mass arrests people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever was at hand? The organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt."

— Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Nobel Prize winner and author of The Gulag Archipelago, who spent 11 years in Soviet concentration camps.

“...For, in principle, there is no difference between a law prohibiting the wearing of concealed arms, and a law forbidding the wearing such as are exposed; and if the former be unconstitutional, the latter must be so likewise. But it should not be forgotten, that it is not only a part of the right that is secured by the constitution; it is the right entire and complete, as it existed at the adoption of the constitution; and if any portion of that right be impaired, immaterial how small the part may be, and immaterial the order of time at which it be done, it is equally forbidden by the constitution....”--Bliss vs. Commonwealth,[12 Ky.(2 Litt.) 90, at 92, and 93, 13 Am. Dec. 251 (1822)]

"Whereas civil rulers, not having their duty to the people duly before them, may attempt to tyrannize, and as military forces, which must be occasionally raised to defend our country, might pervert their power to the injury of their fellow citizens, the people are confirmed by the article in their right to keep and bear their private arms."-- Tench Coxe, Federal Gazette, June 18, 1789.

"The congress of the United States possesses no power to regulate, or interfere with the domestic concerns, or police of any state: it belongs not to them to establish any rules respecting the rights of property; nor will the constitution permit any prohibition of arms to the people; or of peaceable assemblies by them, for any purposes whatsoever, and in any number, whenever they may see occasion."

- ST. GEORGE TUCKER'S BLACKSTONE,(Mr. Tucker was AT the Constitutional Convention).

"In countries under arbitrary government, the people oppressed and dispirited neither possess arms nor know how to use them. Tyrants never feel secure until they have disarmed the people. They can rely upon nothing but standing armies of mercenary troops for the support of their power. But the people of this country have arms in their hands; they are not destitute of military knowledge; every citizen is required by law to be a soldier; we are marshaled into companies, regiments, and brigades for the defence of our country. This is a circumstance which increases the power and consequence of the people; and enables them to defend their rights and privileges against every invader."-- "the Republican", Jan. 7, 1788, Connecticut Courant (Hartford Newspaper).

"17th. That the people have a right to keep and bear arms; that a well-regulated militia, INCLUDING the body of the people capable of bearing arms, is the proper, natural, and safe defence of a free state; that the militia shall not be subject to martial law, except in time of war, rebellion, or insurrection; that standing armies, in time of peace, are dangerous to liberty, and ought not to be kept up, except in eases of necessity; and that at all times, the military should be under strict subordination to the civil power....18th. That any person religiously scrupulous of bearing arms ought to be exempted..."

- Page 160 - Journal of The Senate, Ratification of the constitution by the convention of the state of Rhode-Island and Providence Plantations.(Rhode-Island,Newport, June 9, 1790).

Famous quote:

"I ask, sir, what is the militia? It is the whole people, except for a few public officials."

— George Mason, in Debates in Virginia Convention on

Ratification of the Constitution, Elliot, Vol. 3, June 16, 1788

But that's not quite enough. Let's go for a few more:

"The militia, when properly formed, are in fact the people themselves,... all men capable of bearing arms;..."

— "Letters from the Federal Farmer to the Republic", 1788 (either Richard Henry Lee or Melancton Smith).

"Who are the militia? Are they not ourselves? Is it feared, then, that we shall turn our arms each man against his own bosom? Congress shall have no power to disarm the militia. Their swords, and every other terrible implement of the soldier, are the birth-right of an American ... The unlimited power of the sword is not in the hands of either the federal or state governments, but where I trust in God it will ever remain, in the hands of the People."

— Tench Coxe, 1788.

If we are ready to violate the Constitution, will the people submit to our unauthorized acts? Sir, they ought not to submit; they would deserve the chains that our measures are forging for them, if they did not resist.

— Edward Livingston

How about this from a former SOVIET prisoner in a gulag:

"How we burned in the prison camps later thinking: What would things have been like if every police operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive? If during periods of mass arrests people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever was at hand? The organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt."

— Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Nobel Prize winner and author of The Gulag Archipelago, who spent 11 years in Soviet concentration camps.

"To preserve liberty, it is essential that the WHOLE BODY of PEOPLE always POSSESS ARMS, and be taught alike especially when young, how to use them." (Richard Henry Lee, Walter Bennett, ed., Letters from the Federal Farmer to the Republican, at 21,22,124 [Univ. of Alabama Press,1975])

"The people cannot be all, & always, well informed. The part which is wrong will be discontented in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive. If they remain quiet under such misconceptions it is a lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty. We have had 13. states independent 11. years. There has been one rebellion. That comes to one rebellion in a century & a half for each state. What country before ever existed a century & half without a rebellion? & what country can preserve it's liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon & pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots & tyrants. It is it's natural manure. Our Convention has been too much impressed by the insurrection of Massachusetts: and in the spur of the moment they are setting up a kite to keep the hen-yard in order. I hope in God this article will be rectified before the new constitution is accepted."-- Thomas Jefferson, Nov. 13, 1787 letter to William S. Smith.

"The prohibition is general. No clause in the Constitution could by ANY rule of construction be conceived to give to Congress a power to disarm the people. Such a flagitious attempt could only be made under some general pretense by a state legislature. But if in any blind pursuit of inordinate power, either should attempt it, this amendment may be appealed to as a restraint on both." - William Rawle, A View of the Constitution, 125-6 (2nd ed. 1829).(Appointed by President George Washington as U.S. District Attorney for Pennsylvania in 1791).

"Those rights, then, which God and nature have established, and are therefore called natural rights, such as are life and liberty, need not the aid of human laws to be more effectually invested in every man than they are; neither do they receive any additional strength when declared by the municipal [or state] laws to be inviolable. On the contrary, no human legislation has power to abridge or destroy them...."- William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England, 1765–1769.

"The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed, and this without any qualification as to their condition or degree, as is the case in the British government...."

"....This may be considered as the true palladium of liberty....The right of self-defense is the first law of nature; in most governments it has been the study of rulers to confine this right within the narrowest limits possible. Whenever standing armies are kept up, and the right of the people to keep and bear arms is, under any color or pretext whatsoever, prohibited, liberty, if not already annihilated, is on the brink of destruction."

"...In America we may reasonably hope that the people will never cease to regard the right of keeping and bearing arms as the surest pledge of their liberty..."

- St. George Tucker, Blackstone's Commentaries,(1803).

"Also, the conditions and circumstances of the period require a finding that while the stated purpose of the right to arms was to secure a well-regulated militia, the right to self-defense was assumed by the Framers."-- Chief Justice John Marshall, U.S. Supreme Court.[As quoted in Nunn v. State, 1 Ga. 243, 251 (1846); State v. Dawson, 272 N.C. 535, 159 S.E.2d 1, 9 (1968).]

"From among the rights retained by our policy, we have selected those of self defence or bearing arms, of conscience, and of free inquiry, for two purposes; one, to shew the vast superiority of our policy, in being able to keep natural rights necessary for liberty and happiness, out of the hands of governments; the other, to shew that this ability is the effect of its principles, and beyond the reach of Mr. Adams’s system, or of any other, unable to reserve to the people, and to withhold from governments, a variety of rights."-- John Taylor, Revolutionary Soldier and U.S. Senator,(1792 – 94, 1803, 1822 – 24).[An Inquiry into the Principles and Policy of the Government of the United States: Section the Sixth; THE GOOD MORAL PRINCIPLES OF THE GOVERNMENT OF THE UNITED STATES,(1814).]

"The right of self-defence never ceases. It is among the most sacred, and alike necessary to nations and to individuals."-- President James Monroe, Nov. 16, 1818 message to the U.S. House and Senate.[Journal of the Senate of the United States of America, November 17th, 1818.]

"No, surely, No! they meant to drive us into what they termed rebellion, that they might be furnished with a pretext to disarm and then strip us of the rights and privileges of Englishmen and Citizens."--George Washington, March 1, 1778 letter to Bryan Fairfax, Valley forge.

“To take from the people the right of bearing arms, and put their weapons of defence in the hands of a standing army, would be scarcely more dangerous to their liberties, than to permit the Government to accumulate immense amounts of treasure beyond the supplies necessary to its legitimate wants. Such a treasure would doubtless be employed at some time, as it has been in other countries, when opportunity tempted ambition.”-- President Andrew Jackson, Message to U.S. House and Senate of Dec. 5, 1836.[Journal of the Senate of the United States of America, 1789-1873. TUESDAY, December 6, 1836.]

"That no man should scruple, or hesitate a moment to use arms in defense of so valuable a blessing [as liberty], on which all the good and evil of life depends; is clearly my opinion; yet Arms...should be the last resort."-- George Washington, 1789 letter to George Mason.[The True George Washington, 10th Ed. By Paul Leicester Ford.]

"If the representatives of the people betray their constituents, there is then no resource left but in the exertion of that original right of self-defense which is paramount to all positive forms of government ... The citizens must rush tumultuously to arms..."-- Alexander Hamilton, Federalist #28.

""The right of the people to bear arms shall not be infringed." The right of the whole people, old and young, men, women and boys, and not militia only, to keep and bear arms of every description, not such merely as are used by the militia, shall not be infringed, curtailed, or broken in upon, in the smallest degree; and all this for the important end to be attained: the rearing up and qualifying a well-regulated militia, so vitally necessary to the security of a free State. Our opinion is, that any law, State or Federal, is repugnant to the Constitution, and void, which contravenes this right, originally belonging to our forefathers, trampled under foot by Charles I. and his two wicked sons and successors, reestablished by the revolution of 1688, conveyed to this land of liberty by the colonists, and finally incorporated conspicuously in our own Magna Charta! And Lexington, Concord, Camden, River Raisin, Sandusky, and the laurel-crowned field of New Orleans, plead eloquently for this interpretation!"--Chief Justice Collier, Nunn v. State, 1 Ga.(1 Kel.) 243 (1846).

Have you seen this information I found? What do you think of it?

U.S. Federal Gun Control Legislation, 1968 - present

All Federal gun control legislation in the United States has been written, introduced, and sponsored or co-sponsored by Jewish Congressmen and Jewish Senators.

Emanuel Celler, Democratic Representative from New York(1923 - 1973)

Howard Metzenbaum, Democratic Senator from Ohio(1974, 1976 - 1995)

Herb Kohl, Democratic Senator from Wisconsin(1989 - present)

Chuck Schumer, Democratic Senator from New York(1999 - present), Democratic Represenative from New York(1981-1999)

Dianne Feinstein, Democratic Senator from California(1992 - present)

Arlen Specter, Republican Senator from Pennsylvania(1981 - present)

Frank Lautenberg, Democratic Senator from New Jersey(1982 - 2001, 2003 - present)

Barbara Boxer, Democratic Senator from California(1993 - present), Democratic Representative from California(1983 - 1993)

Carl Levin, Democratic Senator from Michigan(1979 - present)

1968: The Gun Control Act of 1968 comes from Representative Emanuel Celler’s House bill H.R. 17735. It expands legislation already attempted by the non-Jewish Sen. Thomas Dodd. America’s biggest and most far-reaching gun law came from a Jew.

1988: Senate bill S. 1523 is sponsored by Senator Howard Metzenbaum. It proposes legislation turning every violation of the Gun Control Act of 1968 into a RICO predicate offense, allowing a gun owner to be charged with federal racketeering offenses.

1988: Senator Metzenbaum co-sponsors a bill — S. 2180 — to ban, or limit/restrict, so-called “plastic guns.”

1990: Senator Herbert Kohl introduces bill S.2070, the Gun-Free School Zones Act of 1990, which bans gun possession in a school zone. The law will later be struck down in court as unconstitutional.

1993: Senate bill S.653 is sponsored by Senator Howard Metzenbaum. It bans specific semiautomatic rifles, but also gives the Secretary of the Treasury the power to add any semiautomatic firearm to the list at a later date.

February, 1994: The Brady Law, which requires waiting periods to buy handguns, becomes effective. Senator Metzenbaum wrote the Brady Bill. Metzenbaum sponsored the bill in the Senate. The sponsor of the bill in the House was Rep. Charles Schumer.

1994: Senator Metzenbaum introduces S.1878, the Gun Violence Prevention Act of 1994, aka “Brady II.” Representative Schumer sponsored “Brady II” sister legislation [H.R. 1321] in the U.S. House of Representatives.

September, 1994: The Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 goes into effect, including a provision that bans the manufacture and possession of semiautomatic rifles described as “assault weapons.” [Note: true assault weapons are fully automatic, not semiautomatic]. That gun-ban provision was authored in the Senate by Senator Dianne Feinstein and authored in the House by Congressman Schumer.

1995: Senators Kohl, Specter, Feinstein, Lautenberg and others introduce the Gun-Free School Zones Act of 1995, an amended version of the 1990 school-zone law which was struck down in court as being unconstitutional.

September, 1996: The Lautenberg Domestic Confiscation provision becomes law. It is part of a larger omnibus appropriations bill. It was sponsored by Senator Frank Lautenberg. It bans people convicted of misdemeanor domestic violence from ever owning a gun.

1997: Senate bill S. 54, the Federal Gang Violence Act of 1997, proposes much harsher sentences for people violating minor gun laws, including mandatory prison sentences and forfeiture of property. It was introduced by Senator Dianne Feinstein and Senator Hatch, among others. It returns the idea of turning every violation of the Gun Control Act of 1968 into a RICO predicate offense.

January, 1999: Senator Barbara Boxer introduces bill S.193, the American Handgun Standards Act of 1999.

January, 1999: Senator Kohl introduces bill S.149, the Child Safety Lock Act of 1999. It would require a child safety lock in connection with transfer of a handgun.

February,1999: Senator Frank Lautenberg introduces bill S.407, the Stop Gun Trafficking Act of 1999.

February, 1999: Senator Lautenberg introduces S.443, the Gun Show Accountability Act of 1999.

March, 1999: Senator Lautenberg introduces bill S.560, the Gun Industry Accountability Act of 1999.

March, 1999: Senator Feinstein introduces bill S.594, the Large Capacity Ammunition Magazine Import Ban Act of 1999.

May, 2000: Senate bill S. 2515, Firearm Licensing and Record of Sale Act of 2000, is submitted by Senators Feinstein, Boxer, Lautenberg, and Schumer. It is a plan for a national firearms licensing system.

January, 2001: Senate bill S.25, Firearm Licensing and Record of Sale Act of 2001, is sponsored by Senators Feinstein, Schumer, and Boxer. It is a nation-wide gun registration plan [apparently there were two versions of that Firearm Licensing and Record of Sale Act bill].

May, 2003: Senators Feinstein, Schumer, Boxer and others introduce legislation that would reauthorize the 1994 federal assault weapons ban, and, close a loophole in the law that allows large-capacity ammunition magazines to be imported into the U.S. The ban expired in September, 2004.

October, 2003: Senators Feinstein, Lautenberg, Levin, and Schumer co-sponsor bill S.1774, designed to stop the sunset [ending] of the Undetectable Firearms Act of 1988.

March, 2005: Senator Lautenberg introduces bill S.645, “to reinstate the Public Safety and Recreational Firearms Use Protection Act,” in other words, to reinstate the 1994 assault-rifle ban [also known as the “Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994”] which expired in late 2004.

March, 2005: Senator Feinstein introduces bill S.620, “to reinstate the Public Safety and Recreational Firearms Use Protection Act,” in other words, to reinstate the 1994 assault-rifle ban [also known as the “Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994”] which expired in late 2004.

July, 2005: Senator Feinstein introduces bill SA1621 - Fifty-Caliber Sniper Weapons. This amendment would convert all .50 BMG firearms to NFA weapons.

July, 2005: Senator Feinstein introduces bill SA1622 - Fifty-Caliber Exclusion to S.397. This amendment would modify SB397 to allow suits when the firearm involved was a .50 caliber weapon.

July, 2005: Senator Boxer introduces bill SA1633 - BATFE Safety Standards SA1633 - BATFE Safety Standards. This amendment allows law suits to continue/be brought if the product did not meet the safety standards as defined by the BATFE.

July, 2005: Senator Boxer introduces bill SA1634 - ‘Sporting Use’ on Domestic Handguns. Applying ’sporting use’ clause requirements to domestic handguns could, almost completely, dry up the handgun


Our founding fathers, past tyrants, etc. at 8:56 AM on September 4, 2019 | #13440 | reply | quote

#13440 Do you have any summary, conclusions, arguments or explanations? It's like a big pile of data. What do you make of it? Have you analyzed it?


Anonymous at 10:51 AM on September 4, 2019 | #13442 | reply | quote

The Nintendo Switch subreddit did a bunch of speech suppression re Blizzard's Hong Kong crap after Blizzard cancelled a Switch-related event:

https://www.reddit.com/r/NintendoSwitch/comments/dieq3a/statement_from_the_rnintendoswitch_mod_team/

They admit they screwed up but no moderators will be removed from the mod team. And read this excuse:

> Since most of our moderators are located in the US, we have very little moderator coverage overnight, and so we were overwhelmed with trying to moderate the discussion and keep it from getting out of control.

If only we had more moderators to block stuff, we wouldn't have blocked too much stuff. (They mean it's too hard to block only the bad stuff, so they just blocked indiscriminately to save time, due to lack of manpower. Still a pretty sad excuse. Wouldn't a poorly moderated discussion be better than nothing? How is no content better than wild or chaotic content?)


Anonymous at 7:27 PM on October 17, 2019 | #13825 | reply | quote

#12320 LuL curi beleives in IQ


Anonymous at 8:24 AM on October 22, 2019 | #13887 | reply | quote

#13886

Why not give a brief summary of the argument contained in almost hour long video you are linking?


Anonymous at 8:25 AM on October 22, 2019 | #13888 | reply | quote

#13888 Use speed control addons and that way you can see it in less than 30 mins.


Different anon at 8:43 AM on October 22, 2019 | #13889 | reply | quote

#13889

Sure but the ability to speed up videos doesn't address #13888's question


Anonymous at 8:46 AM on October 22, 2019 | #13890 | reply | quote

#13890 There's a summary in the description of the video.


Anonymous at 8:56 AM on October 22, 2019 | #13891 | reply | quote

#13886 #13891 Based on the video title, description and style, and quick skimming, I see no indication that it addresses Mises' arguments.

Let us know when you have a source which refutes the economic theory FI believes, rather than one which reaches a different conclusion based on applying different and mostly unstated/unargued economic principles.

Also when skimming the first thing I heard was *shut up Grandpa you're such a drag sometimes* in a voice tone designed for social meaning.


Dagny at 10:31 AM on October 22, 2019 | #13893 | reply | quote

> Based on the video title, description and style, and quick skimming,

That is no way to evaluate an argument or data.


Anonymous at 10:38 AM on October 22, 2019 | #13894 | reply | quote

> Let us know when you have a source which refutes the economic theory FI believes, rather than one which reaches a different conclusion based on applying different and mostly unstated/unargued economic principles.

In other words, I can't refute the facts.


Anonymous at 11:30 AM on October 22, 2019 | #13896 | reply | quote

#13896 Why are you trolling my blog?


curi at 11:32 AM on October 22, 2019 | #13897 | reply | quote

#13897 Calling people out on their bull shit, anti-rational, anti- fact attitudes is not trolling. Why do you think this is trolling?

You accused another user of trolling a while back for criticizing your methods. I don't think you understand what trolling means.


Anonymous at 11:41 AM on October 22, 2019 | #13898 | reply | quote

#13898

> #13897 Calling people out on their bull shit, anti-rational, anti- fact attitudes is not trolling. Why do you think this is trolling?

> You accused another user of trolling a while back for criticizing your methods. I don't think you understand what trolling means.

you haven't provided Elliot any criticisms. a criticism is an explanation of a flaw in an idea. you have not provided any explanations of any flaws in any ideas. if you think you have done that, that means we have a disagreement. so consider escalating things by using Elliot's path forward policy. http://curi.us/2068-my-paths-forward-policy

if you want to persuade Elliot that he's wrong about this, then you should respect Elliot enough to follow his path's forward policy. if you're not interested in following his paths forward policy, while continuing to tell Elliot that he's wrong on his blog, then you are trolling.


Anon2224 at 12:39 PM on October 22, 2019 | #13899 | reply | quote

I am not reading a random TOS for some blogger. He can either explain himself and be rational or continue to be irrational and ignore all criticism, and consider it trolling. Contra-Popper.


Anonymous at 12:43 PM on October 22, 2019 | #13900 | reply | quote

#13900 Posts here a ton but won't read an article by ET. But demands other people watch an hour video...


Anonymous at 12:45 PM on October 22, 2019 | #13901 | reply | quote

#13901 I don't think you know what the word "demands" means.


Different Anon at 1:15 PM on October 22, 2019 | #13902 | reply | quote

> ... He can either explain himself and be rational...

curi did explain himself. You quoted his explanations and you trolled him (#13894 and #13896). Then curi called you out for trolling. Then you denied that what you did was trolling (#13898). Then I contradicted you on that and explained what you could do instead to make progress with curi on your disagreement (paths forward) (#13899). That's when you implied that curi didn't explain himself (see quoted text from #13900).


Anonymous at 5:28 PM on October 22, 2019 | #13908 | reply | quote

#13908 FYI, you're mixing me up with not-me.


curi at 5:42 PM on October 22, 2019 | #13909 | reply | quote

Lying NYT stealth-edits Hillary Tulsi-Gabbard-Russia smear, changing Russia to Republicans.

https://twitter.com/Timcast/status/1187036978463891456


Anonymous at 2:46 PM on October 23, 2019 | #13922 | reply | quote

Anonymous at 5:55 PM on October 23, 2019 | #13924 | reply | quote

https://kotaku.com/as-games-done-quick-gets-bigger-so-do-its-controversie-1791393815

The no deadnaming stuff is nasty. I personally spent many hours watching Cosmo speedruns. I thought of him as Cosmo. I stopped watching Cosmo *before* he transitioned to Narcissa (because he played smash 4 casually instead of speedrunning). So while I've heard about the change a little, I've barely seen it, it's not something I've given much thought to. It's never gotten the attention to become habitual for me. So I still associated those streams by Cosmo with Cosmo.


Anonymous at 6:00 PM on October 23, 2019 | #13925 | reply | quote

#13925 so what?


Anonymous at 8:03 PM on October 23, 2019 | #13927 | reply | quote

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X_Z4Jd0AtfI

> Return the power to the workers and separate your boss from their teeth.

Quote from the video description and also he says something similar at the end of the video and explains an anecdote about it in the middle.

The whole thing is delivered in the tone of a good-willed reformer, but he's a a mean-spirited bastard who wants men to be harmed.


Anonymous at 5:17 PM on October 24, 2019 | #13952 | reply | quote

27th Amendment

The most recent amendment to the U.S. Constitution to be adopted was also one of the first proposed. Wikipedia says:

> [The 27th Amendment] was submitted by the 1st Congress to the states for ratification on September 25, 1789, along with eleven other proposed amendments.

> [...]

> The proposed congressional pay amendment was largely forgotten until 1982, when Gregory Watson, a 19-year-old sophomore at the University of Texas at Austin, wrote a paper for a government class in which he claimed that the amendment could still be ratified. A teaching assistant graded the paper a "C" and an appeal to the professor, Sharon Waite, failed, motivating Watson to launch a nationwide campaign to complete its ratification. The amendment eventually became part of the United States Constitution, effective May 5, 1992, completing a record-setting ratification period of 202 years, 7 months, and 10 days.


Alisa at 9:59 AM on October 25, 2019 | #13956 | reply | quote

https://twitter.com/curi42/status/1189696543802064896

Twitter's CEO Jack Dorsey writes:

> We’ve made the decision to stop all political advertising on Twitter globally. We believe political message reach should be earned, not bought. Why? A few reasons…🧵

Wow. Evil. This creates a system of social status, favors, pull, reputation, caste, etc. It entrenches people in place and reduces upward mobility. It prevents people putting their money where their mouth is and makes them rely on friends in high places. Read *Atlas Shrugged*.


curi at 5:14 PM on October 30, 2019 | #14022 | reply | quote

I love the idea of money not buying influence. I have to disagree with you and agree with Jack.


A at 1:52 PM on October 31, 2019 | #14048 | reply | quote

#14048 You haven't given reasons nor any way for me to learn that you're right and change my mind. You also haven't requested a debate. What's the point?


curi at 2:02 PM on October 31, 2019 | #14049 | reply | quote

I have no interest in debating this topic. Twitter is going to do what its going to do. Whether you and I disagree or come to an agreement will affect neither Twitter nor my life.

Also debates are not interesting to me, winning an argument means nothing to you or me (well at least it shouldn't) learning from each other is what matters.

That is assuming you agree with the best philosopher of all time, Karl Popper.


A at 2:12 PM on October 31, 2019 | #14050 | reply | quote

For what purpose did you make an assertion contradicting me about it?


curi at 2:15 PM on October 31, 2019 | #14051 | reply | quote

I was not aware opinions were not allowed here.


A at 2:22 PM on October 31, 2019 | #14053 | reply | quote

Went on Blizzcon OWWC twitch chat and that's the first stuff I saw. What it means is moderators are trying to stop people from saying Free Hong Kong. So people are saying variations.


Anonymous at 2:05 PM on November 1, 2019 | #14092 | reply | quote

#14092 A dissenting view:

> zs47: China is free, Hongkong is free, stop blindly supporting those youths, they have no idea what politics is and are utilized by some other people.

China is free, eh? Free to read about the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre on their computers?


Anonymous at 2:09 PM on November 1, 2019 | #14093 | reply | quote

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQwOZw-lVpo

I'm not a fan of the Veritas videos where they harass people on the street for comment in person. I think they're trying to concretize for their audience what "no comment" means more with footage of people actually refusing to answer questions. But I don't like non-consensual IRL interaction aspect.


Anonymous at 6:37 PM on November 1, 2019 | #14102 | reply | quote

https://twitter.com/curi42/status/1190734691562713088

>> Had Golden Rice "been allowed to grow in ... [poor] nations, millions of lives would not have been lost to malnutrition, and millions of children would not have gone blind.”

>> https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/oct/26/gm-golden-rice-delay-cost-millions-of-lives-child-blindness

> Fuck I didn't know golden rice was being suppressed. wtf. They are blinding people by force. They use guns to get their way and make people obey ... and their way is to deprive people of vitamins so that they can't see.


curi at 2:00 PM on November 2, 2019 | #14119 | reply | quote

#14119 Yup it is awful. Millions of lives being harmed by so called enviromentalists.


A at 2:37 PM on November 2, 2019 | #14120 | reply | quote

Trump probably objectively one of the worst presidents of all time. Up there with LBJ


Anonymous at 8:29 PM on November 2, 2019 | #14139 | reply | quote

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2019/10/anatomy-lynching-david-horowitz/

> According to the *Washington Post*, for example, police shootings make up 12% of all white and Hispanic homicide deaths, which is three times the proportion of black deaths resulting from police shootings. According to FBI data, over the last 10 years 40% of cop killers have been black, while police officers are killed by blacks at a rate 2.5 times higher than the rate at which blacks are killed by police.

I liked the whole article, which provides little known info about lynchings, and I was unaware of those stats.


Anonymous at 12:16 PM on November 5, 2019 | #14169 | reply | quote

https://mises.org/power-market/police-have-no-duty-protect-you-federal-court-affirms-yet-again

> Police Have No Duty To Protect You, Federal Court Affirms Yet Again


curi at 4:39 PM on January 23, 2020 | #15223 | reply | quote

https://nypost.com/2020/02/14/team-trump-just-called-a-halt-to-the-obama-era-war-on-american-suburbs/

> Team Trump just called a halt to the Obama-era war on American suburbs

> During the Obama administration, the Department of Housing and Urban Development tried to install Washington bureaucrats as the decision makers for how communities across all 50 states should grow. Using an obscure rule called Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing, HUD sought to remake America’s cities, towns and villages by forcing any community that was getting federal funds to meet racial quotas.

> Single-family homes on quarter-acre lots were deemed potentially “racist” — supposedly because minority members might not be able to afford them.

The NYT smeared people as racist (all the crying wolf makes it hard to criticize real racism, btw). Things are better now with Trump.


Anonymous at 12:21 PM on February 18, 2020 | #15492 | reply | quote


Anonymous at 12:22 PM on February 18, 2020 | #15493 | reply | quote

https://mises.org/library/13-illustrations-benevolence-capitalism

> 13 Illustrations of the Benevolence of Capitalism


Anonymous at 12:31 PM on February 18, 2020 | #15495 | reply | quote

Anonymous at 12:44 PM on February 18, 2020 | #15499 | reply | quote

https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1158664006669758464

> On the morning of 9/11, I thought, "The overreaction to this will be ten times worse than the original disaster." 10x was a comic underestimate. The "overreactionaries" (Caplan's term) are a vast threat in both political parties. Count me among those who think this must be said.

Yudkowsky sux.


Anonymous at 1:29 PM on February 18, 2020 | #15504 | reply | quote

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21246750

> This should be a fairly simple calculation: coal kills a lot more people than nuclear. It has also, over the course of the last 100 years, produced far more nuclear waste exposed to the environment than nuclear power has (including if you normalize for power contribution, etc; the numbers aren't close).

says patio11


Anonymous at 1:38 PM on February 18, 2020 | #15507 | reply | quote

https://www.statnews.com/2018/01/11/vaccines-drug-makers/

> Who will answer the call in the next outbreak? Drug makers feel burned by string of vaccine pleas


Anonymous at 1:55 PM on February 18, 2020 | #15511 | reply | quote

https://mises.org/wire/my-first-time-east-berlin

> My First Time to East Berlin

Pretty short article. Most people really haven't read enough about this kinda thing to get a concrete grasp of what communism was like. Sample:

> Hendrika and I visited the ghoul-like, cavernous main library in East Berlin. It was necessary to purchase a pass to enter, and only East Berlin students and visitors from non-communist nations were permitted inside. Every room had a guard, and we had to sign a registry and show our passes before entering it. There were vast empty spaces inside, perhaps symbolizing the vast Yukon Territory of knowledge beyond the pale. The local folks using that library didn’t seem to be emitting any mental sparks — maybe intellectual curiosity was considered a thought crime, too? The East Germans toiling with books and papers probably knew that anyone who raced across No Man’s Land to some forbidden idea might be terminated with extreme prejudice. Why have libraries where thinking was a crime? Any government terrified of ideas must be doing something wrong.

Some people will dismiss this as biased political opinions. Part of it is commentary but facts like a guard in every room in the library are not opinions/commentary.

> Exiting Berlin, I caught a ride to Frankfurt with a friendly young leftist German university student. He said that there was not much difference between “freedom” in West and East Berlin because some workers in West Berlin lived in an area on the edge of city with no subway station and only one supermarket. He lamented that it took them half an hour via a bus line to get to the center of the city. Hence, they had no freedom — just like the people in East Berlin. He stressed that East Germany had many advantages over West Germany, such as free health care and zero unemployment. Maybe he wasn’t aware that the D.D.R. government dictated the occupation each young person must follow? Did this guy not notice the food in the East German markets was utterly grim — almost zero fresh fruits aside from apples? I was puzzled why someone who seemed quite intelligent was utterly oblivious to the catastrophic consequences of destroying economic freedom.

The example of how someone thought is worthwhile, IMO.

> The East German regime insisted that the Berlin Wall was to keep fascists out from their workers’ paradise.

I think this was well known and not controversial at the time, but people today could find it hard to believe anyone would ever have even made such a claim or been taken seriously.


curi at 1:59 PM on February 18, 2020 | #15512 | reply | quote

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2019/11/escalating-violence-hong-kong-protests/601804/

> The Hong Kong Protesters Aren’t Driven by Hope

> “We might as well go down fighting.”

> This is our last chance, they said very matter-of-factly. If we stand down, nothing will stand between us and mainland China, they said. They talked about Xinjiang, and what China had done to the Uighur minority. I’ve heard about the fate of the Uighurs from so many protesters over the months. China may have wanted to make an example out of the region, but the lesson Hong Kongers took was in the other direction—resist with all your might, because if you lose once, there will be a catastrophe for your people, and the world will ignore it.


Anonymous at 2:01 PM on February 18, 2020 | #15513 | reply | quote

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hdC-1xqmx4M

> Stop K-12 Speech at Bloomfield Republican Women's Club

The first 8min has some disturbing stuff schools are doing. You don't have to watch the whole vid to get value.


Anonymous at 2:23 PM on February 18, 2020 | #15516 | reply | quote

> https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1158664006669758464

>> On the morning of 9/11, I thought, "The overreaction to this will be ten times worse than the original disaster." 10x was a comic underestimate. The "overreactionaries" (Caplan's term) are a vast threat in both political parties. Count me among those who think this must be said.

> Yudkowsky sux.

Indeed. What overreaction? We didn't eg shut down the border. In fact, we've admitted tons of Muslims since 9/11. Open borders has even gotten more popular, and open borders would lead to even more deaths caused by terrorists.

I guess he means the Iraq and Afghanistan wars but those weren't overreactions per se so much as misconceived in some ways and badly executed in practice. Maybe if we'd vaporized Afghanistan with nukes you could have called that an overreaction.

Re: admitting Muslims see:

https://www.conservativereview.com/news/1-6-million-immigrants-predominantly-muslim-countries-since-9-11/


Anonymous at 3:45 PM on February 18, 2020 | #15519 | reply | quote

Pretty good Mike Huckabee speech on David Horowitz's 80th birthday, plus transcript. Has some humor and talks about present political situation. Even has some philosophy comments defending objective truth.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2019/08/video-mike-huckabee-pays-tribute-david-horowitz-frontpagemagcom/


Anonymous at 8:43 PM on February 18, 2020 | #15522 | reply | quote

Soviet commies destroyed half of the Aral sea, destroyed the livelihoods of fishermen and created a desolate wasteland around the sea:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xEIt4OojA3Y


oh my god it's turpentine at 11:59 PM on February 18, 2020 | #15529 | reply | quote

#15529 Vid is OK but at 15:55 he says it blows around deadly quantities of DDT. But I understand DDT to be safe in large quantities.


curi at 12:53 AM on February 19, 2020 | #15530 | reply | quote

God damn those are some high taxes Bernie wants. Earn $7.2 million from your startup sale, keep $2.2 million (30%).


Anonymous at 10:43 PM on February 19, 2020 | #15545 | reply | quote

Anonymous at 10:44 PM on February 19, 2020 | #15546 | reply | quote

I broadly don't recommend following parochial, short-term politics much but this vid is pretty good and is watchable while being mostly out of the loop.

Nevada Debate: The Fall Of Bloomberg


curi at 12:05 PM on February 20, 2020 | #15556 | reply | quote

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TFKka0zZQJ4

Jeff Deist from the Mises Institute is repeatedly counter-productive.


Anonymous at 9:33 PM on February 21, 2020 | #15582 | reply | quote

the left basically wants you imprisoned if you use the "wrong" pronoun but then they write stuff like:

> the far-right, anti-Muslim activist Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, also known as Tommy Robinson.

the left are unreasonable people who demand immediate conformity to non-standard, contrary-to-established-practice gender pronoun stuff, but then refuse to respect standard things like professional names. they are hypocrites


Anonymous at 4:41 PM on February 23, 2020 | #15599 | reply | quote

Ann Coulter PBS Interview (Jan 13, 2020)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mbn9DSr-ynI

Good hour-long interview with Ann Coulter on PBS, published on Jan 13, 2020.


Alisa at 11:04 PM on February 23, 2020 | #15604 | reply | quote

Anonymous at 1:25 PM on February 25, 2020 | #15615 | reply | quote

https://vimeo.com/145740894

About the Muslim "refugees" invading Europe. Four years old.

This is a huge threat to Western (Greek) civilization.


curi at 3:42 PM on February 27, 2020 | #15656 | reply | quote

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/02/gray-matter-deficient-americans/

> Of course, there is also an element of fear, even apprehension, in such demonic generalization, a result of segregation from and ignorance about the physical world. Barack Obama, who once complained about the price of arugula and either had never heard or never spoken the word “corpsman,” knew that he knew nothing about farming or guns or clinging working people. Did he realize that his food, his safety, the maintenance of his home and car depended on others who could do things to keep his world viable that he not only could not do but also could not even imagine? Ask Obama and his class to replace a 30-amp breaker, or prune a peach tree, or drive a semi, and one could see that he assumes others who are supposedly less gifted provide his power, food, and consumer goods, using skills he lacks.

> Ditto Hillary Clinton and Michael Bloomberg. Bloomberg claims he could teach anyone on an Oxford stage how to be a farmer. But he knows that he has no knowledge of farming, ancient or modern, and has no detailed notion of where or how his fruits, vegetables, grains, and choice cuts arrive at his various estates and hence his table. He may even sense that while the world could do without Bloomberg News, it could not survive without skilled farmers. So he is a bit edgy when he thinks about the physical world of muscle that allows him to be Mike Bloomberg, multibillionaire Socratic dunce.

> We need to move beyond the idea that the elite caricature the deplorables because they are insensitive and arrogant. True, they are, but they also do it because they are insecure — and terribly afraid of those they don’t like, but also sense they desperately need.


Anonymous at 10:44 AM on February 28, 2020 | #15668 | reply | quote

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/journal-plague-year-180965222/

> How the Horrific 1918 Flu Spread Across America

Hopefully the coronavirus stuff won't be nearly so bad but maybe worth a read to see what has happened in the past and maybe could happen.

And note the government lying in ways that killed hundreds of people. E.g. amongst lots of lying to downplay the problem, this happened:

> Philadelphia had scheduled a big Liberty Loan parade for September 28. Doctors urged Krusen to cancel it, fearful that hundreds of thousands jamming the route, crushing against each other for a better view, would spread disease. They convinced reporters to write stories about the danger. But editors refused to run them, and refused to print letters from doctors. The largest parade in Philadelphia’s history proceeded on schedule.

The parade did spread the disease and hundreds or thousands died unnecessarily due to the lying leaders. People would have died anyway but the lying, including the parade (which proceeded for the purpose of pretending everything was fine and safe, when it wasn't), made it much worse and killed a lot of additional people.


curi at 1:56 PM on February 28, 2020 | #15675 | reply | quote

https://twitter.com/MichaelCoudrey/status/1233928266764828672

> EXPLICIT WARNING Warning sign:

> Look at the homeless epidemic in Los Angeles due to failed liberal policies, high taxes, and high crime.

> Police are now demanding citizens allow homeless people to camp on their private property, threatening this man with arrest if he moves them.

The tweet includes a video about some homeless people trespassing in a guy's front yard, past a tall gate. They had a tent and a bunch of crap, and made noise all night. He called the cops who did nothing about the trespassing and warned him that they'd put him (the home owner) in jail if he moved their stuff out of his yard.


curi at 1:50 PM on March 1, 2020 | #15698 | reply | quote

#15698 UPDATE: Apparently fake.


curi at 1:35 AM on March 2, 2020 | #15705 | reply | quote

anti-advertising sentiment

people think e.g. that ads make people buy stuff they don't need

the basic purpose of advertising is to inform/educate consumers about products

people ignore this and act like advertising is unnecessary or inherently evil

they think it's creating fake demand and that tons of products don't improve people's lives and people just buy stuff cuz they are gullible

the reason some ads are low on facts is because many consumers don't care about facts. this is not a fault of the people who make ads, who broadly do not dictate taste or fight with their customers, they try to pander to consumers.

if some people are low brow – as reality TV also demonstrates – this is not a fault of advertising (or of reality TV)


curi at 10:58 PM on March 2, 2020 | #15714 | reply | quote

#15714 Most people have been educated by the state, which has apparently done such a poor job that people are super gullible according to critics of advertising. But these critics insist that the state should be allowed to restrict what adverts people are allowed to make or view.


oh my god it's turpentine at 12:32 AM on March 3, 2020 | #15715 | reply | quote

Mises on another fallacy about advertising

#15714 Here's a tangentially-related quote by Mises on another fallacy about advertising.

Mises, *Human Action*, Part Four: Chapter XV: The Market: 13. Business Propaganda:

> It is a widespread fallacy that skillful advertising can talk the consumers into buying everything that the advertiser wants them to buy. The consumer is, according to this legend, simply defenseless against "high-pressure" advertising. If this were true, success or failure in business would on the mode of advertising only. However, nobody believes that any kind of advertising would have succeeded in making the candlemakers hold the field against the electric bulb, the horsedrivers against the motorcars, the goose quill against the steel pen and later against the fountain pen. But whoever admits this implies that the quality of the commodity advertised is instrumental in bringing about the success of an advertising campaign. Then there is no reason to maintain that advertising is a method of cheating the gullible public.


Alisa at 6:35 PM on March 3, 2020 | #15728 | reply | quote

> success or failure in business would [depend] on the mode of advertising only

Typo in quote in original :/


curi at 7:28 PM on March 3, 2020 | #15729 | reply | quote

Defense of Trump against media criticism of how he acted on coronavirus

https://townhall.com/columnists/johnrlottjr/2020/03/12/quantifying-how-well-the-trump-administration-is-doing-on-coronavirus-n2564867

> Only Israel and Australia imposed travel moratoriums as soon as the U.S. did. No European countries acted as quickly to suspend travel, and Canada still doesn’t have a travel ban in place.

> It isn’t clear how much of the lower U.S. [death] rate [due to coronavirus] can be attributed to the Trump administration’s quick actions and bucking of WHO recommendations regarding travel, but our overall policy seems to be working relatively well. Our infection and death rates seem to be much lower than those of most other large, similar countries.


GISTE at 4:43 PM on March 13, 2020 | #15916 | reply | quote

https://pridelegal.com/california-hiv-laws/

California legalized having sex with people without first disclosing that you have HIV.

The article, to give you a taste, complains that prostitutes are still required to disclose HIV before having paid sex.

The article is *really, really awful* in many ways. It'd be a good target for close reading and detailed analysis.


curi at 2:54 PM on March 14, 2020 | #15944 | reply | quote

What is the role of government in situations like we have now with covid-19 and why?


Anonymous at 2:02 AM on March 15, 2020 | #15959 | reply | quote

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2018/10/03/book-publishers-part-ways-springer-nature-over-concerns-about-censorship-china

> Editors of book series stop publishing with Springer Nature to protest its acquiescence to Chinese government censorship demands.

> The Financial Times first reported last year that Springer Nature had blocked access in China to more than 1,000 articles in two political science journals dealing with sensitive subjects in China such as Taiwan, Tibet and the Cultural Revolution.


curi at 10:51 PM on March 20, 2020 | #16069 | reply | quote

> What is the role of government in situations like we have now with covid-19 and why?

Protect people. Defend people's lives and rights.

That means things like closing borders and, yes, locking lots of stuff down. Going about life as usual will kill many millions worldwide. People trying to do that are killing others and must be stopped.


curi at 12:23 AM on March 24, 2020 | #16112 | reply | quote

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qPiZSF1Pi0M

> Tucker: What will higher education look like after coronavirus?

People may realize unis are a rip off and online education is way more cheap/efficient.


curi at 8:46 PM on March 24, 2020 | #16126 | reply | quote

> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qPiZSF1Pi0M

>> Tucker: What will higher education look like after coronavirus?

> People may realize unis are a rip off and online education is way more cheap/efficient.

https://nyulocal.com/an-open-letter-to-tisch-dean-allyson-green-please-stop-72785d5a86c1

Thought this article was interesting. Basically art students think remote learning can't work for their art stuff and want a partial refund, and the university said nah and communicated in a very poor manner. Sharing most of article below:

> Over the past week or so, the student body of Tisch (particularly the Drama students) has engaged in a back and forth with the administration regarding tuition and Zoom classes. Aggrieved students argue that remote classes cannot possibly serve as an adequate replacement for classes that necessitate a physical presence in the room (like acting classes, or dance classes, or film projects, or etcetera), and there have been various calls for a partial refund of tuition, including a Change.org petition that at publication had approximately 1,700 signatures, and calls to strike by sitting out of virtual classes.

> In turn, Tisch administration has responded with a number of emails stating categorically that no tuition will be refunded, and explanations of varying degrees of empathy and detail as to why that is. In the most recent email, in addition to doubling down on the message “we are not refunding your tuition,” Dean Allyson Green included a Vimeo link to a two minute and 16 second video in which the self-described choreographer and visual artist awkwardly dances and lip-syncs to R.E.M.’s “Losing My Religion.”

> We here at NYU Local would just like to say: what the fuck is this.

> I mean,

> Allyson.

> What the fuck.

> We get it. You’re stressed. It’s a stressful time. People are mad, a lot of them at you. But what the fuck are you doing???

> We get that the financials of a private university are complicated. We get that you can’t just wave a wand and give people their tuition. It might even be the case that those students are in the wrong. Let’s talk about it! But even if they are, how could you possibly think this would do anything but piss everyone off. Like, did you think about this for even a second?

> The video is not cute. It’s uncomfortable to watch, it goes on for too long, you end it by staring at the camera for a good eight seconds, none of it is working in the way you think it’s working. Maybe you’re a dancer, and the way you work through stress is by dancing, but the number of steps between that and filming and uploading this video to the internet is SIMPLY TOO MANY. WHAT WERE YOU THINKING?!


Anonymous at 4:12 AM on March 27, 2020 | #16160 | reply | quote

Here are some quotes that I liked from Victor Davis Hanson’s *The Case for Trump*, which I recently listened to. They may have some extra quote marks cuz of where I pasted them from. If you like these quotes, try reading the book!

Overall I liked the book. I have a couple of criticisms. One is that VDH’s language is unnecessarily fancy. The book’s subject matter seems to be for a general conservative audience — the sort who might read books by Ann Coulter or Mark Levin or other people like that. And while (for example) I happen to know what a *cursus honorum* is (partly due to reading some Roman historical fiction not too long ago), I had to look up what a “sybarite” is. Many examples of word/terminology choice issues like that.

Another criticism I have is that VDH seems to take the favorable reputation of certain people like Nikki Haley and others of that ilk as merited. I, OTOH, view them with some suspicion as (at least partially) members of the “swamp.” This doesn’t come up much so it’s not a big deal.

Onto the quotes:

Trump’s language:

> After a year or so of public exposure, all politicians become repetitive (how many times did Barack Obama refer to that stale bending “arc of history” or yet again scold the nation with his boilerplate “that’s not who we are”?). Yet Trump’s unprecedented tedium was not so much tired ideas and phrases, but focused on a stock campaign vocabulary of about five hundred words. A few (mostly superlative) adjectives sufficed: “awesome,” “beautiful,” “fantastic,” “great,” “huge,” “incredible,” “sad,” “stupid,” “terrible,” “big-league,” and “zero,” along with stock adverbs such as “tremendously.” There were familiar nouns and emphatics: “believe me,” “millions and billions,” or “moron.” “Winning” and “winners” were to be emulated; “losing” and “losers” signaled a “disgrace.”

> Everything and everyone Trump fought was a “disaster.” Was Trump then monotonous? Of course. Did it matter? Perhaps not, at least in the short term.

> Repetition reemphasized basic messages delivered in a few syllables. Moreover, Trump could offer strange riffs of endearment. What other politician, in his sober and judicious mind, would ever think up the provocative “beautiful clean coal” or a “beautiful wall” on the southern border?

> Trump had never read Demosthenes or Cicero. But either by ear or instinct he employed oxymorons, consonance, alliteration, ellipsis, and anaphora. Of course, he certainly was not the prepared speaker of the caliber of John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, or polished teleprompter reader Barack Obama—but perhaps more entertaining in ad hoc repartee than Obama, and as good as JFK, Bill Clinton, or Reagan.”

> “Critics understandably have seen Trump as analogous to classical demagogues, perhaps like the Athenian rabble-rouser Cleon, the bête noire of the aristocrat Thucydides’s masterful history. He might also be compared by his enemies to the thuggish Roman populist Catiline in Sallust’s monograph that chronicles Catiline’s attempted coup and uprising. But to ancient historians, the speeches of both Cleon and Catiline are nonetheless models of rhetorical power and directness. Those who cannot speak to a crowd cannot become demagogues.

Hillary’s ads:

> In 2016, Hillary Clinton spent a record $250 million in negative advertising against Donald Trump to paint him as a sexual predator, a colluder with Vladimir Putin, a tax cheat, a dishonest developer, a bigot, an alt-right racist, a xenophobe, a dark populist, a neofascist, a Machiavellian manipulator, a nut who might blow up the world—or alternatively a buffoon, a joke, a mess, and a slob. Hillary’s main message was “I am not the ogre Trump!”

> Yet running just against a presidential candidate’s person, rather than his ideas, his agendas, and his party, has not usually worked in recent American history. Walter Mondale was a charismatic, progressive, well-informed former senator and vice president when he ran in 1984 against incumbent Ronald Reagan. Yet Mondale offered only a vague liberal agenda. Instead, he defined his campaign mostly as against Reagan, the supposedly heartless rich man’s lackey and ill-informed bumbler abroad.

> When the economy grew at over an annualized rate of 7 percent from November 1983 to November 1984, the trope of Reagan as dunce or corporate shill evaporated. Mondale had little alternative vision. He lost in the seventh-greatest landslide in American history.

Trump on his own wealth:

> Yet almost immediately, Donald Trump even at sixty-nine years of age proved somehow more energetic and politically savvy than his sixteen Republican rivals, all younger and with more political experience. Again, given his television past, Trump was better at repartee. He proved as good or better a formal speaker. He went from low farce to high comedy with ease. And rather than hedge about his riches in Romney style, Trump exaggerated his net worth. Trump gambled that Republicans might prefer blowhard billionaires to diffident or guilt-ridden multimillionaires.

> Of his campaign Trump had earlier on promised, “I’m going to pull up in my 757 and we’re going to have the most expensive cars.” If others frowned, Trump scoffed, “Do you want someone who gets to be president and that’s literally the highest-paying job he’s ever had?” Rarely before had any wealthy Republican candidate bragged about his financial success (“I represent traditional conservative values. I get up every morning and go to work. I work hard. I’ve been honest and I’m very successful. The billions I have? I earned every penny.”). Trump reasoned that their reluctance to self-promote was “weakness,” or betrayed guilt rather than pride. And to Trump’s deterrent mind, such timidity only encouraged cheap criticism.

On the subversion of the institutions:

> Again, now not so much. In the last decade, on questions of diversity, gender, gay rights, political correctness, and social activism, the unchecked and unaccountable powers of the deep state were envisioned as more an ally than a threat. Few cared much when Barack Obama’s Justice Department investigated the communications of Associated Press reporters. Weaponizing the Obama IRS at least was seen as going after the right people. Court packing was once again discussed as a legitimate alternative to Trump’s increasingly conservative Supreme Court. After all, the powers of government could often enact needed cultural, political, and social change by fiat rather than see it stall amid messy legislative compromise, shutdowns, and filibusters.

> On matters far transcending the euphemisms used in the war on terror, antidemocratic means were seen as a useful way of implementing what were felt to be radically democratic (though ironically often unpopular) agendas. The US military by fiat could allow women in combat units and the transgendered in the military. And the Department of Justice might sue banks for alleged discrimination or mortgage abuse, then force the targeted banks to settle the cases by donating to politically correct, third-party nonvictims, almost always progressive social justice organizations.

> In the 1970s, the military officer corps and the top ranks of the CIA, DOJ, and FBI were, in the eyes of the Left, synonymous with Seven Days in May—and Manchurian Candidate–like conspiracies. Yet in 2016, these same institutions had been recalibrated by progressives as protectors of social justice against interlopers and bomb throwers like Donald Trump. Whether it was scary or needed to have a secretive, unelected cabal inside the White House subverting presidential agendas depended on who was president.

On relationships/marriages within the power structure:

> Trump had no real appreciation of the tentacles of the deep-state octopus. They were many. Consider a few of the most prominent examples.

> [Obama advisor Ben] Rhodes himself was the brother of CBS News president David Rhodes. He was married to Ann Norris, a chief foreign policy advisor to former US senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA) and a principal deputy assistant secretary in the State Department under Secretary John Kerry. What Rhodes had failed to note in his brag about the “echo chamber” was that some of the reporters whom he found obsequious and compliant worked for his own brother and covered his wife.

> The former president of ABC News Ben Sherwood was the brother of Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall. She had served in various offices as one of the top national energy and security advisors to President Obama.

> Note the incestuousness: two-thirds of the major nightly network newscasts were overseen by siblings of close advisors of the president of the United States. Had Donald Trump’s closest advisors had siblings who were the respective presidents of ABC and CBS news networks, his coverage might not have been 90 percent negative.

> Obama’s second White House press secretary, Jay Carney, was married to Claire Shipman. She was a veteran reporter for ABC. The deputy Washington bureau chief of CNN, Virginia Moseley, was married to Tom Nides. He had served as the deputy secretary of state for management and resources under Hillary Clinton. Former ABC News executive producer Ian Cameron was married to Susan Rice, who—pre-Benghazi—was a regular on the Sunday talk shows.

> NPR’s White House correspondent, Ari Shapiro, is married to a lawyer, Michael Gottlieb, formerly of the Obama White House counsel’s office. The Washington Post’s Justice Department reporter, Sari Horwitz, is married to William B. Schultz. He was the Obama general counsel of the Department of Health and Human Services. Vice President Joe Biden’s former communications director, Shailagh Murray (also a former Post congressional reporter), is married to Neil King Jr., formerly one of the Wall Street Journal’s top political reporters. King worked for Fusion GPS, which had hired the anti-Trump Christopher Steele to compile a dossier to thwart Trump’s election.

> Power couples and siblings are a Washington staple. Infamous Clinton aide Huma Abedin had married the more infamous deviate, and later felon, former congressman Anthony Weiner. CNN’s Christiane Amanpour was the spouse of former State Department spokesman Jamie Rubin. Both former reporter and Harvard professor Samantha Power and her husband, Cass Sunstein, served in the Obama White House. Andrea Mitchell reported on administration news that sometimes her husband, economist Alan Greenspan, had made. The daughter of Univision anchor Jorge Ramos, who loathed Trump, had worked for Hillary.

On tech companies:

> Disagree with Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, or Google, and you will learn that it’s hard to find commensurate alternative services. If a particular historical video does not meet Silicon Valley’s correct narratives, YouTube will stifle it through “restrictive mode filtering,” as it has with many offered by nonprofit conservative Praeger University.

> None of these tech giants are held to the same oversight that monitors transportation, drug, oil, or power companies.

Dems go to Silicon Valley:

> Often Silicon Valley proved the receptacle for the revolving-door careerists of progressive Washington. When Obama EPA director Lisa Jackson stepped down after being caught using a pseudonymous email account, she was quickly hired as Apple’s environmental director. When Jay Carney, Obama’s press secretary, left the administration, after a short stint at CNN he became Amazon’s senior vice president of worldwide corporate affairs. Obama’s campaign advisor David Plouffe was hired by Uber. Gene Sperling, an Obama administration economic advisor, joined the board of directors of Ripple Labs, an American high-tech financial services corporation. And on and on.

Trump vs. Hillary:

> Trump certainly campaigned on issues. We have seen that he embraced existential themes and concrete wedge issues. And he had a divided and volatile electorate to leverage further. But Trump also had the controversial opponent Hillary Clinton, or rather the “explicit argument that whatever Trump was, he certainly was not Hillary Clinton. The two were certainly a pair of contradictions in almost every aspect.

> Physically, Trump’s bulk fueled a monstrous energy; Hillary’s girth sapped her strength. The reckless Trump did not drink; the careful Hillary freely did so. Hillary’s “good-taste” carefully tailored suits and tastefully coiffed hair did not seem natural. Trump’s “bad-taste” mile-long tie, orange tan, and combed-over yellow mane appeared paradoxically authentic.

> Clinton was a creature of government, he often at war with it. Her misdeeds were far worse than her reputation; his reputation far worse than his misdeeds. He could be authentically gross, she inauthentically prim. And his low cunning was usually prescient, her sober assessments usually erroneous. Trump could certainly be cruel to individuals, but he was kind to the public. Clinton was kind to her particular friends, but cruel to people.

Hillary’s blame list/weaknesses:

> Still, for the first two years following her November 2016 defeat, Hillary Clinton gave numerous interviews, public speeches, and book signings for her new memoir, What Happened. The common theme of her book and appearances was an ever-expanding array of excuses as to why she had lost the election—all of them omitting any mention that half the country over the past eight years had become alienated from progressives, or at least in November 2016 saw Clinton as more of the same problem rather than an innovative solution.

> Indeed, the list of Clinton’s culprits for her defeat kept growing in the months after her loss. She variously blamed (1) the Russians, (2) James Comey, (3) the cash-poor Democratic National Committee, (4) red-state racists and sexists, (5) the Electoral College, (6) the WikiLeaks email revelations, (7) right-wing media, (8) the mainstream media in general, (9) Republican efforts at voter suppression, (10) right-wing donors, (11) Stephen Bannon and Breitbart News, (12) Facebook, (13) Bernie Sanders, (14) Barack Obama, (15) Netflix, (16) fake news accounts, (17) the Republican National Committee, (18) her own campaign staff, (19) Jill Stein, a third-party left-wing 2016 presidential candidate, “(20) Anthony Weiner, (21) socialist Democrats, and an array of more scapegoats.

> Rarely did Clinton admit that she had proven a weak candidate: a poor speaker on the stump, reckless in her ad hoc quips, physically frail and secretive about her health, and a candidate without a message who relied on overwhelming cash advantages to foolishly seek to roll up a mandate by campaigning in solidly red states while neglecting purple states that would alone decide the election. Added to all that, she had neglected the most seasoned advisor in her circle: husband Bill Clinton. He had warned her young and inexperienced circle of tech and data “experts” that they needed to camp out in the Midwest swing states and craft messages for the middle class.

> It was easy post factum to see why Hillary had tarnished her brand from a speech she gave in early March 2018 in Mumbai, India, explaining yet again why she had lost the 2016 election:

>> If you look at the map of the United States, there is all that red in the middle, places where Trump won. What that map doesn’t show you is that I won the places that own two-thirds of America’s Gross Domestic product. I won the places that are optimistic, diverse, dynamic, moving forward. And his whole campaign, Make America Great Again, was looking backwards. You don’t like black people getting rights, you don’t like women getting jobs, you don’t want to see that Indian American succeeding more than you are, whatever that problem is, I am going to solve it.

> Here Clinton was reminding the public back home that her insulting “deplorables” and “irredeemables” rant of 2016 had been no accident. In her own narcissistic logic, a vote against Hillary, for any reason whatsoever, was a vote for racism or sexism or for purported economic losers in the red states.


Anonymous at 7:47 PM on April 16, 2020 | #16375 | reply | quote

You know who's really racist, particularly against Africans with black skin? Not Trump voters. China or at least the Chinese Communist Party.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bsnHUrpD__E


curi at 3:05 PM on April 19, 2020 | #16392 | reply | quote

TikTok is really nasty, stay away

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bz4aGPN9hTg

Mostly because it's controlled by the Chinese Communist Party and biased the information shared how they want and gathers data on users. The video points out some other issues too.


curi at 3:08 PM on April 19, 2020 | #16393 | reply | quote

https://twitter.com/horowitz39/status/1259554649608077313

:(

Seems like a reasonable view to me. Looks rather bad but not for the first time, so not all hopeless.

Broadly I see Western Europe as having similar problems as the US, but they started earlier and are much further down the road of self-destruction.


curi at 12:13 PM on May 10, 2020 | #16507 | reply | quote

Bails for rioters should be set the same way you'd set bails for drug cartel members or rich people. When funds available are high you increase bail a ton. Bail amounts have to be a meaningful incentive to show up in court.

Idiotic, evil celebs/others are donating piles of cash to pay bails for rioters. So the bail amounts shouldn't be set based on the personal circumstances/finances of the rioter.

The celebs are exploiting a flaw in our legal system to thwart justice. They are abusing their wealth not being taken into account when setting bail amounts.

They are causing a lot of trouble. What if you set bail high and then they don't pay it? Then the bail is too high for the individual to afford. So the proper results of their meddling should be a lot fewer people out on bail. They ought to be hurting the rioters and everyone ought to know it (unless the courts figure out a solution so the rioters can get more standard treatment without anything bad happening – e.g. maybe they could figure out how to prohibit the use of charity money for bail and then go back to normal bail amounts).


curi at 11:40 AM on June 1, 2020 | #16596 | reply | quote

Asmongold (gamer streamer who does lots of YT vid commentary and talks with his tens of thousands of live viewers) has pretty reasonable, moderate takes on lots of issues. And he thinks and expresses them in reasonably simple terms without some fancy, overreaching philosophy bullshit.

Here are his decent opinions on the recent riots and George Floyd stuff:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rr806kQ9aO8


curi at 1:01 PM on June 1, 2020 | #16597 | reply | quote

Some info about how racist China is:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h2Knd_5rVfY

> China is Using George Floyd Protests for Propaganda


curi at 2:11 PM on June 8, 2020 | #16644 | reply | quote

https://www.theblaze.com/news/chaz-murder-shooting-autonomous-zone

After getting rid of cops in "CHAZ" (6 blocks of Seattle now controlled by antifa and BLM) they had a shooting: one dead (age 19) and one seriously injured in the hospital.

> Person shot dead in autonomous zone days after Seattle's Democratic mayor said CHAZ is 'peaceful'

Some people in CHAZ called the cops, but then others blocked the cops from responding to the call about the shooting and CHAZ people are being largely uncooperative about catching the murderer.

> Seattle's police chief revealed that rapes and robberies are happening in the CHOP, but cops can't respond to them.

> "Our calls for service have more than tripled," Seattle Police Chief Carmen Best said. "These are responses to emergency calls — rapes, robberies, and all sorts of violent acts that have been occurring in the area that we're not able to get to."

...


Anonymous at 5:06 PM on June 20, 2020 | #16755 | reply | quote

https://twitter.com/SteveMillerOC/status/1275892961360805888

> The California legislature has now voted to strike these words from our state

constitution:

> “The state shall not discriminate against, or grant preferential treatment to, any individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin.”

> I’m speechless.


curi at 6:42 PM on June 25, 2020 | #16782 | reply | quote

#16782

> The legislature has now endorsed this constitutional amendment by the required two thirds vote of both houses, and so it goes to the people in November where a simple majority is needed to ratify it.


curi at 6:43 PM on June 25, 2020 | #16783 | reply | quote

https://www.city-journal.org/san-francisco-hotel-motel-plan-for-homeless

according to this article, San Francisco is:

1) housing homeless in fancy hotels

2) lying that the homeless are "front line workers" to do this

3) spending taxpayer money to buy them pot and alcohol

4) lying about where the money for the pot and alcohol is coming from (or they were, at least initially)

5) making city workers and hotel workers sign NDAs that prevent them from discussing what they're seeing


Anonymous at 11:09 AM on June 28, 2020 | #16801 | reply | quote

#16801 with IRL policies like these, who needs the Babylon Bee?


Anonymous at 11:10 AM on June 28, 2020 | #16802 | reply | quote

Lots of MeToo type accusations have been happening in gamer scenes recently.

Leffen's response to the general issue (he's not accused nor accuser): Regarding the recent allegations within the Smash/FGC Community.

I took some notes on what he said while I watched it

1) be rly biased in favor of believing victims

2) leffen has been physically abused as a minor in smash scene, and lots of adults were there and did nothing. like being slapped in face in public multiple times. (not sexual). so this gives him more sympathy and perspective that there are victims, esp young ppl

3) leffen has been a jerk verbally and he thinks that’s related to bad culture and he needs to do better. (that’s mostly old stuff. he got banned from smash in sweden for like a year for flaming ppl. that was 2013)

4) stop e.g. drinking alcohol in front of minors, lots of little things contribute to atmosphere that encourages sexual harassment

5) this isn’t a bad week where things went wrong. it’s a good week to get these villains out of community. this is progress to deal with problem that already existed for years.

6) ppl with audiences need to speak out

7) most ppl are good ppl. the problem is a few creeps + a lot of passivity.


curi at 12:28 PM on July 2, 2020 | #16828 | reply | quote

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KmflC8Yc1ls

Tucker criticized Senator Duckworth for being open to the idea of tearing statues of George Washington down. He said that Dems hate America. Duckworth brought up her military injuries on twitter to try to deflect criticism. Tucker didn't back down though.


Anonymous at 7:49 PM on July 7, 2020 | #16856 | reply | quote

I think this quote from *The Fountainhead* partially explains what happened to American society re: corruption by the left.

> So you were a possessive man, Mr. Wynand, and you loved your sense of property? Did you ever stop to think what it rested upon? Did you stop to secure the foundations? No, because you were a practical man. Practical men deal in bank accounts, real estate, advertising contracts and gilt-edged securities. They leave to the impractical intellectuals, like me, the amusements of putting the gilt edges through a chemical analysis to learn a few things about the nature and the source of gold. They hang on to Kream-O Pudding, and leave us such trivia as the theater, the movies, the radio, the schools, the book reviews and the criticism of architecture. Just a sop to keep us quiet if we care to waste our time playing with the inconsequentials of life, while you’re making money.


Anonymous at 8:28 AM on July 8, 2020 | #16858 | reply | quote

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tYy77iX5JFs

> Kanye West Just NUKED Democrats From Orbit, Confirms he Is Running In 2020, Praises Trump

Interesting events. Kanye looks kinda OK tho dumb on some things like coronavirus and God. But a fighter who speaks his mind and had some good points that others won't say.

Looks like Kanye's going to help Trump win and try again in 2024.


curi at 12:25 AM on July 9, 2020 | #16861 | reply | quote

Anonymous at 4:52 PM on July 10, 2020 | #16868 | reply | quote

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S7Qc44V-Kks

> 13 Tons of Human Hair Shipped From China | Uyghur Persecution with Nury Turkel

The hair is taken by force and sold. Uyghur women are also raped.


curi at 12:44 PM on July 13, 2020 | #16887 | reply | quote

I read Tucker Carlson's book *Ship of Fools*. It was pretty good. Mostly stuff I already knew.


curi at 4:46 PM on July 15, 2020 | #16891 | reply | quote

Tim Pool video on potential war with China and new Trump anti-China laws related to China's treatment of Hong Kong.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nAUU1WJQiQg


curi at 1:45 PM on July 16, 2020 | #16897 | reply | quote

Epstein didn't kill himself.


curi at 9:03 PM on July 17, 2020 | #16901 | reply | quote

curi at 12:18 PM on July 20, 2020 | #16908 | reply | quote

https://vdare.com/articles/ann-coulter-dems-are-the-party-of-antifa

Ann talks about violence going on in our cities and why Trump is sending - and should be sending - federal agents in


Anonymous at 6:44 PM on July 22, 2020 | #16916 | reply | quote

https://vdare.com/articles/michelle-malkin-one-nation-under-anarcho-tyranny

> It was rank-and-file cops in Denver who watched as my patriotic friends and I tried to hold a Law Enforcement Appreciation Day this past Sunday and were besieged by Black Lives Matter and antifa thugs who had declared that their sole intent in invading our permitted celebration was to "shut us down." I livestreamed the chaos as pro-police attendees were beaten, including the organizer Ron MacLachlan, who was bloodied in the face and head just a few feet from me by black-masked animals. One antifa actor wielded her collapsible baton just inches from me.

> The cop-haters had obstructed traffic on their five-minute march from their unpermitted event at the Colorado State Capitol to our permitted space.

> No cops intervened.

> Unprovoked, the cop-haters blared airhorns, sprayed our faces (mine included), burned an American flag, punched, shoved and menaced and took over our stage.

> No cops intervened.

> The Denver police chief, Black Lives Matter champion Paul Pazen, has repeatedly and publicly blamed us—the law-abiding—for not having enough private security in place, even as he admitted that 76 officers have been injured by the "peaceful" agitators who have turned our capitol into a heathen hellhole (and perpetrated more than $1 million in property damage so far).


Anonymous at 7:48 PM on July 22, 2020 | #16917 | reply | quote

VDH article on why current left wing political stuff is more dangerous than 1960s https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/anarchists-todays-revolution-differ-60s-protesters-victor-davis-hanson


Anonymous at 9:12 AM on July 25, 2020 | #16923 | reply | quote

https://kaus.substack.com/p/poor-mr-trump-just-president-nothing

Analysis of John Roberts opinion in DACA case

> Kausfiles Insaner — John Roberts’ Roach Motel: I've been struggling for a quick, weed-avoiding way to explain how awful Chief Justice Roberts' ruling in the "DACA" case was. How's this:

> 1. There were two parts to Obama's 2012 "Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals."

> A. One part let about 800,000 illegal immigrants who crossed the border when they were young know they wouldn't be deported.

> B. A second part gave them benefits, like work permits and Social Security numbers.

> Trump pledged as a candidate he'd rescind both parts, which he finally did after almost a year in office. He was sued. The case made it to the Supeme Court.

> Chief Justice Roberts says part B, the benefits part, required a formal rulemaking under the Administrative Procedures Act. That's bad for Obama because he didn't go through a formal rulemaking. (Part A, Roberts suggests, was simply the traditional ability of an agency to decide not to prosecute. No rulemaking required.)

> Trump did go through a formal rulemaking for rescinding part B.

> Looks good for Trump, right? Not so fast!

> 2. Remember, judges are allowed to overturn rules if they are "arbitrary and capricious,” a seemingly deferential standard that lets creative judges basically do whatever they want while pretending to be deferential.

> Roberts says the Trump action was "arbitrary and capricious" because — well, apparently, it repealed Part A and part B together. It didn't "consider,” on the record, the possibility that it could repeal part B while retaining part A -- the part Trump could repeal without going through any rulemaking at all because it was within his discretion. The argument is that Trump took away the benefits (B), which he could do, but he didn't think hard enough about the possibility of not withdrawing deportation protection (A) — even though he could have withdrawn that protection without Roberts’ second-guessing if he’d just done it in a separate proceeding, and even though Trump obviously didn’t want to retain the ‘no-deportation’ protections, for obvious reasons, whether he wrote a boilerplate paragraph dismissing the possibility or not.

> In short: Part B was illegal (no rulemaking proceeding). Part A was within Trump's discretion. But he wasn't allowed to repeal the illegal part because he also exercised his discretion in Part A without discussing it in the Part B rulemaking (even though it wasn't subject to rulemaking).**

> Got it?

> The upshot is that the program Obama unilaterally created was almost certainly illegal but the most obviously illegal part could not be ended unilaterally by Obama's elected successor — at least not without a lengthy, multi-year process (the process that Obama himself hadn’t bothered to go through).

> You can start it up but you can't shut it down. The Roach Motel theory of regulation.

> Like the Supreme Court’s decision in Bush v. Gore, it's hard to take Roberts’ opinion seriously as a statement of law. It's more like a statement in which Roberts says he doesn’t want the DACAns to lose anything before the election.

> _____

> ** — Also, according to Roberts, the Trump administration didn't adequately consider protecting the DACAns “reliance” interest (in their jobs, pursuit of degrees, whatever) if the program was cancelled. Roberts suggests various solutions he thinks could have been considered-- even though a) the Trump administration did protect the reliance interest of those whose DACA status was going to expire within 6 months (but not for the right reasons, Roberts says!) 2) Trump’s agency also did explicitly consider the reliance interest (too late, Roberts says!). Obviously, the weight Roberts gives to “reliance” is another ratchet: A president can issue an illegal order — and it’s illegal, oh yes! —but that creates “reliance” interests which then can’t be overturned easily, certainly not as easily as they were created. So the illegal order gets carried out anyway, zombie style.


Anonymous at 5:35 PM on July 26, 2020 | #16926 | reply | quote

wtf @ using cali prisoners for forced labor


curi at 3:21 PM on August 20, 2020 | #17517 | reply | quote

#17517 the goal of imprisoning people should be to protect society. we're trying to defend people by stopping further crimes.

debatably there's also a deterrence goal. if you want that, do stuff optimized for it instead of this firefighting stuff or failing to protect prisoners against ongoing violence within the prison.

why is covid spreading in prisons? everyone could stay in their cells besides some exercise periods which are optional and always the same groups of inmates. guards could wear masks and bring everyone their meals. i imagine the government is to blame for a lot of the prison covid infections.

how did covid get into any prisons anyway? failure to screen new prisoners. unsafe visitations? guards bringing it in? the government has blame in all those cases.

anyway in short (most) prisoners should be allowed to have some property while in jail, to have internet access, to work online, to *optionally* work for companies that compete to offer them jobs and drive up the price of their labor to rates that aren't ridiculous (which prima facie indicates the government is doing something to cause those very low wages), etc.


curi at 3:29 PM on August 20, 2020 | #17518 | reply | quote

Upper Echelon Gamers takes on BLM and Marxism:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pm7T1HbMwX4

He usually avoids stuff that'll definitely get the video demonetized.


curi at 6:53 PM on August 21, 2020 | #17538 | reply | quote

A short twitter thread about how much the media lies, with a few horrible examples:

https://twitter.com/Austen/status/1298117911555403776


curi at 11:23 AM on August 25, 2020 | #17615 | reply | quote

https://twitter.com/Chrismartin76/status/1301910522334531584

> To my knowledge, no white person in Apartheid South Africa or the Jim Crow South pretended to be Black. The fact that there are sectors where people now pretend to be Black suggests a very different racial order.


Anonymous at 12:51 PM on September 4, 2020 | #17816 | reply | quote

#17816 While I think there's a real point here, that tweeter is dumb. "To my knowledge" he says, without attempting to get any knowledge.


curi at 1:06 PM on September 4, 2020 | #17817 | reply | quote

The War on America

Kevin Portteus' The War on America (*The American Mind*, 2020-09-02) is the best political article I've read in the last few years. Here are the main points that were new to me:

- America is "in the midst of an open, avowed neo-Marxist revolution."

- The left's purpose in forcing mass immigration on America is to destroy American communities and to turn red states blue.

- Non-woke whites are "America's kulaks".

- If Biden wins, the left will "move to consolidate their victory immediately... It will be the final end of free self-government in America."

- These revolutionaries "cannot be conciliated or reasoned with. They will accept nothing short of total victory, and therefore neither can we."

Below are some excerpts from the article, along with my comments:

> Democratic mayors and governors seem to have little interest in protecting the safety and property of the law-abiding, and in some cases seem to be actively encouraging and abetting the lawless.

There is also a phenomenon that Sam Francis referred to as "criminalization of ... law-abiding and innocent" people who have un-approved beliefs. Michelle Malkin wrote an article about this: One Nation Under Anarcho-Tyranny (*American Renaissance*, July 22, 2020).

> The instigators of mob violence are motivated by a revolutionary ideology, which is shared by many more than just the rioters. It is an ideology and a project which despises the American way of life and which, if successful, will bring about the end of free self-government in America. The American Left is trying to revolutionize the United States along the lines of Marxist ideology, and they are presently seeking to force the issue.

The "American way of life" phrase above links to a good article by Thomas D. Klingenstein called Preserving the American Way of Life (*The American Mind*, 2020-06-03). It argues that:

- The American way of life is important.

- Republicans' purpose should be to preserve the American way of life.

- Multiculturalism is opposed to the American way of life.

- Republicans must therefore oppose multiculturalism.

The article goes on to make a very good point about "American kulaks" (emphasis mine):

> While the Left has seen success in some quarters, particularly in urban, coastal, and university enclaves, they have basically failed in their quest to revolutionize the American middle class. Even though their families, churches, businesses and communities have been under constant assault from the Left, they have mostly tried to live their lives normally, in the way Americans have lived them for generations.

> As a result the American middle class, in the eyes of the modern Left, are to their revolutionary aspirations what the kulaks were to the revolution in Russia. “Kulak” was a term used to describe Russian peasant farmers, who had acquired enough wealth to purchase their own land and even hire labor for their farms. After the Russian Revolution and particularly during the reign of Stalin, “kulak” became a pejorative term: landowning peasants were class enemies who profited from the misery of their neighbors, who refused grain requisitions and resisted the collectivization of their farms. In short, they refused to be part of the revolution, and for their trouble they were mercilessly liquidated by Stalin.

> The contemporary Left has largely abandoned its efforts to revolutionize ordinary Americans, and as a result their contempt for such people is now open and undisguised. The Left disdains them precisely because they are trying to retain elements of traditional American culture like faith and self-reliance. *They are deplorable because they have refused to join the revolution. They are America’s kulaks.*

> The Left’s attitude toward “white America” has been reversed. Instead of seeing ordinary Americans as sublimated proletarians in need of education, the Left now sees them as part of the oppressor class.

Great analogy. It was new to me. Non-woke whites are *America's kulaks*.

> To ensure the success of their project, the contemporary Left has abandoned all pretense of concern for American sovereignty and the integrity of America’s international borders, and has embraced a policy of unlimited mass migration, combined with the demand that America accept countless refugee migrants from the undeveloped and developing world. Concerns about drug trafficking, human trafficking, infectious diseases, gang violence, and terrorism are swept aside with arguments that any attempt to limit entry into the United States is racist and un-American.

> This being the case, any non-Western migrants will serve the purpose equally well, be they from Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, Syria, or Somalia. As Thomas Jefferson predicted in Notes on the State of Virginia, importing foreigners at random and without any effort to assimilate them results in a massive underclass, almost none of whom has any understanding of, or affinity for, our way of life. Instead they try their level best to establish replicas of the countries they left in their local enclaves in America. They funnel money back to their home countries. They show no interest in integrating into American culture. Many of them come pre-loaded with Marxist ideologies such as postcolonialism or liberation theology, which are widespread in the undeveloped and developing worlds.

> This realization clarifies several aspects of the modern Left which might otherwise appear nonsensical. First, the Left is adamant about placing these masses, not in friendly sanctuary cities around the nation, but in states like Minnesota, Ohio, Arizona, and Texas. Depositing them in Los Angeles, San Francisco, or Portland has little prospective political benefit for the Left.

California is 31% Mexican, according to Wikipedia. I think a lot of Mexican migrants end up in Los Angeles, at least according to Victor Davis Hanson.

> Nothing triggered leftists so much as Trump’s tweeted plan to fly migrants to liberal sanctuary cities in Democrat-controlled states.

A lot of things "trigger" leftists. Not sure the superlative is warranted here.

> Once these states have been flooded with migrants and refugees, they can register to vote and turn red states blue.

Very true.

> It explains why the Left and their media allies work so hard to whitewash the bad behavior of their new revolutionary class. When someone like Ilhan Omar makes one of her many indefensible comments, her party rushes to her defense. The leftist media earnestly works to bury unflattering news about migrants and refugees: the Philadelphia police shooter, the American Airlines mechanic who sabotaged an airliner, or the fact that Somali refugees have made large parts of Minneapolis unsafe for ordinary people and MS-13 has undertaken a violent crime spree in Montgomery County, Maryland.

> It explains why the Left is unconcerned about the threat of radical Islam to the country at large, but also to the other elements of their own constituency, such as feminists and the LGBT community. Whatever their differences, these groups share a common goal: the deconstruction of American culture and institutions.

> Hordes of migrants and refugees are, they believe, allies in their revolutionary project, which is nothing less than the complete destruction and reconstitution of American civilization, in their own words, “by any means necessary.” This has always been the goal, and mass immigration is simply the newest attempt to achieve that goal.

Well stated.

> ## The Impending Crisis

> In 2016, the Left was asleep at the switch... They aren’t going to be caught napping this time. The electoral fraud machine is already gearing up in states across the country. The Biden campaign has already hired 600 attorneys for the election. They’re trying to stretch the lockdowns out until after the election.

Another section of the article covered the left's universal vote-by-mail and ballot harvesting initiatives.

> In 2020, the cold civil war has become hot. Rioting, looting, organized campaigns of hate and intimidation, open subversion of law, rule by arbitrary and extemporaneous decree, open warfare against every aspect of the American way of life. Make no mistake—we are in the midst of an open, avowed neo-Marxist revolution.

I like how he states this so clearly.

> They have adopted the raised fist salute, which has been identified with the radical Left since the Spanish Civil War, when it was the salute of the “Popular Front,” an alliance of socialists, communists, anarchists, and syndicalists. Today’s fist-raisers define everyone who opposes them as “fascist.” Though race may be the issue du jour, they are open Marxists and have made that plain for us all to see.

Good point about the fist-raisers defining everyone who opposes them as "fascist".

> Conservatives and Republicans have for too long labored under the delusion that winning an election meant that they had won the war. The Gingrich Republicans thought they had won the war after 1994. Defenders of traditional marriage won election after election in the states; even California voted to limit marriage to one man and one woman. We know how that turned out.

Yes. In Obergefell v. Hodges (2015), The Supreme Court compelled states to recognize gay marriage.

Similarly, in 1994, California voters passed Proposition 187, which made illegal aliens ineligible for public benefits. It was ruled unconstitutional by a judge. This is related to "judicial tyranny", an issue Daniel Horowitz frequently brings up and wrote a book about. The article doesn't go into it.

> Re-electing Trump, of itself, will only kick the can down the road another four years. A Trump victory is a necessary condition of ultimate victory, but far more will be necessary.

Yes. A Trump victory is necessary but not sufficient.

> We can begin by accepting that what is happening to our country is a violent neo-Marxist revolution, and that victory by the Left will mean what Marxist takeovers have always meant: unending misery and oppression. Once we understand that, then we can begin to understand what to do, and how to do it.

Very clearly put.

> If these are Marxist revolutionaries, then they must be utterly defeated. We cannot temporize, compromise, or negotiate with them. They cannot be conciliated or reasoned with. They will accept nothing short of total victory, and therefore neither can we. They must be smashed. Their control over our institutions and culture must be wrecked beyond repair. Their ability to use threats and intimidation to cancel their opponents must be broken.

> Their violence must meet with overwhelming power. Their subversion of American civilization must be ruined and reversed. We need a coalition of the sane, which sees the radical Left for what it is and is willing to act accordingly. Only then can reasonable and decent people from both parties disagree and deliberate, and do all the things that free, self-governing people do.

> We’re at war. The neo-Marxist Left knows it, and it’s high time the rest of us accepted it, too. At stake is nothing less than liberty, self-government, reason, faith, and our way of life. “The struggle of today,” Lincoln told Congress in 1861, “is not altogether for today. It is for a vast future also.”

I agree.


Khaaan at 5:54 PM on September 4, 2020 | #17826 | reply | quote

#17826 What have you done to objectively test:

- your ability to understand, learn from or judge articles like that?

- the ability of articles like that to improve your life?

- the ability of articles like that to accomplish some useful political purpose?


curi at 5:59 PM on September 4, 2020 | #17827 | reply | quote

#17827 Nothing.


Khaaan at 6:12 PM on September 4, 2020 | #17828 | reply | quote

#17828 Then why read that article? And why make a claim like "the best political article I've read in the last few years"?


curi at 6:13 PM on September 4, 2020 | #17829 | reply | quote

#17829 I don't know why I should have read the article. I mentioned my high evaluation of it because I thought readers might appreciate the information. I share a lot of political stuff on Twitter, and if there are any people who, out of the stuff I share, want to read only the thing or things I think are the best, knowing my evaluation should make that easier.


Khaaan at 6:20 PM on September 4, 2020 | #17830 | reply | quote

#17830 Why don't you stick to doing things that you have some explicit ability to judge as good or bad ideas?


curi at 6:23 PM on September 4, 2020 | #17831 | reply | quote

right wing ppl are idiots too:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UK2FBEpmlUo

All Gas No Brakes goes to Sturgis Motorcycle Rally and lets people talk into his mic.


curi at 6:26 PM on September 4, 2020 | #17832 | reply | quote

#17831 Here are some rough thoughts:

I don't understand what it means to have some explicit ability to judge things as good or bad ideas. I don't even know what an inexplicit ability would be. I don't know what objective tests would look like. I'm not sure if I could give you any examples of things I do that fall into the category of things I would stick to if I followed your proposed criterion. And maybe this question doesn't make sense, but: could I be getting OK results in some areas even without having that explicit ability?

Given that I don't understand it well, using your proposed criterion to change what I do now doesn't seem like a good idea.


Khaaan at 6:37 PM on September 4, 2020 | #17833 | reply | quote

#17833 If you have no idea how to think, learn, evaluate things, make decisions, run your life, etc., shouldn't you focus on figuring that out instead of reading political articles?


curi at 7:15 PM on September 4, 2020 | #17835 | reply | quote

#17835 The amount of time I spend on philosophy is currently pretty limited. I have an ongoing project to spend more time on learning philosophy. I have not yet succeeded at that project. For privacy reasons, I don't want to say more about that project here.

Even if I succeed at spending more time on learning philosophy, I don't know yet which activity the additional time would come from. It might not come from reading about and thinking about politics (at least not until I learn enough to judge for myself that I should spend less time on that stuff). It might come from reading fiction or from playing sudoku-like puzzle games or from other stuff.


Khaaan at 7:27 PM on September 4, 2020 | #17836 | reply | quote

> It might not come from reading about and thinking about politics (at least not until I learn enough to judge for myself that I should spend less time on that stuff).

I was just telling you why doing politics now doesn't make sense. You apparently don't agree but haven't said what part of it you don't understand or what is in the way of you judging that for yourself.

Or if you can't judge for yourself whether it's ok to spend time on politics cuz thinking is too hard, then you should prioritize changing that over politics.


curi at 7:38 PM on September 4, 2020 | #17838 | reply | quote

>> It might not come from reading about and thinking about politics (at least not until I learn enough to judge for myself that I should spend less time on that stuff).

> I was just telling you why doing politics now doesn't make sense. You apparently don't agree but haven't said what part of it you don't understand or what is in the way of you judging that for yourself.

I thought I said some stuff about this in #17833. For example, I thought your reasoning involved explicit abilities and I don't know what an inexplicit ability would be. Overall, what you wrote in #17827 and #17831 sounds advanced to me, not like stuff that I am relatively close to grasping and acting on.

> Or if you can't judge for yourself whether it's ok to spend time on politics cuz thinking is too hard, then you should prioritize changing that over politics.

I think that line of thinking would apply to a lot of things I do, not just politics. And I'm not prepared to stop doing a lot of things I do and redirect all that time to learning philosophy. What I am prepared to do, which is in accordance with my current level of understanding, is to gradually try to spend more time on philosophy.


Khaaan at 7:53 PM on September 4, 2020 | #17840 | reply | quote

> I thought I said some stuff about this in #17833. For example, I thought your reasoning involved explicit abilities and I don't know what an inexplicit ability would be. Overall, what you wrote in #17827 and #17831 sounds advanced to me, not like stuff that I am relatively close to grasping and acting on.

I don't understand why your response is ignoring #17835

> And I'm not prepared to stop doing a lot of things I do

why?


curi at 8:02 PM on September 4, 2020 | #17841 | reply | quote

#17841

> I don't understand why your response is ignoring #17835

Which response? My #17836 was meant to be a reply to your #17835, which I took as a suggestion that my time would be better spent time on learning philosophy instead of reading political articles.

>> And I'm not prepared to stop doing a lot of things I do

> why?

Here are a few reasons:

1. I think I enjoy the things I do.

2. Stopping doing a lot of things seems like a big change, whereas spending more time on philosophy is a gradual change. In general, I prefer to avoid big changes.


Anonymous at 12:04 PM on September 5, 2020 | #17862 | reply | quote

#17862 was by me (Khaaan)


Khaaan at 12:04 PM on September 5, 2020 | #17863 | reply | quote

> Which response?

I don't understand. I used a quote to indicate which.


curi at 1:41 PM on September 5, 2020 | #17865 | reply | quote

#17865 Ok, I think I see what you mean. Here's the history:

- You posted #17835

- I replied in #17386

- You wrote more in #17838

- I replied in #17840

- You replied in #17841, asking why my #17840 was "ignoring" your #17835

I don't remember what I was thinking exactly, but maybe the answer is that, when I wrote #17840, I didn't think I had anything to say in response to your #17835 that I hadn't already said in #17386.


Khaaan at 2:35 PM on September 5, 2020 | #17867 | reply | quote

Peter Brimelow, Trump Strongest In Rasmussen Poll—But His White Share Is Disgracefully Low (VDARE, 2020-09-22) :

> Steve Sailer has calculated that, without any patriotic immigration reform at all, the GOP/GAP (Generic American Party) could still win nationally as late as 2050 simply by driving its white share up to 70%—which it already achieves in several Southern states.

Interesting. However, according to Steve Sailer (first link in the paragraph above), getting 70% of the white vote isn't enough — white voter turnout would also have to return "to the level seen in 1992 (during Ross Perot's insurgent run)". 67% of eligible non-Hispanic whites voted in 1992, compared with 64% in 2016 (source).

Getting 70% of the white vote does seem like a bigger challenge than getting white voter turnout to 67%. Only 54% of whites voted for Trump in 2016, and Trump's 2016 campaign emphasized immigration much more than his 2020 campaign.


Anonymous at 4:44 PM on September 25, 2020 | #18128 | reply | quote

#18128 I think focusing on race so much is bad. (BLM and the "anti-racists" who preach about "white privilege" and want "affirmative action" do it too. The idea of reparations from slavery today – from whites to blacks – based on skin color matching to people who lived long ago – is racist too.)

What does it mean to try to persuade whites? What ideas will persuade whites but won't persuade blacks or asians?


curi at 4:50 PM on September 25, 2020 | #18129 | reply | quote

#18129

> What does it mean to try to persuade whites?

Sailer refers to getting X% of the white vote. Are you asking what it means to "persuade whites" to vote for some candidate?

> What ideas will persuade whites but won't persuade blacks or asians?

According to Pew:

> Roughly a third of white adults (34%) say the U.S. has not gone far enough when it comes to giving black people equal rights... By comparison, 80% of black adults say the country hasn’t gone far enough to ensure equal rights.

Consider an argument that uses the idea that "the U.S. has not gone far enough when it comes to giving black people equal rights" as a premise. Such an argument will more easily persuade people who already agree with that premise than it will people who disagree with it. In America today, to a much larger percentage of blacks than whites agree with that premise. So, all other things being equal, it should be easier to persuade blacks than whites with such arguments.


Anonymous at 5:14 PM on September 25, 2020 | #18130 | reply | quote

#18130 Do you believe that melanin causes different reactions to arguments? Or, contrary to FI and BoI, that explanationless correlation arguments are great and there's no need to understand causal reality? (And that skin color correlations are particularly good things to focus on in general, or in today's political climate?)


curi at 5:22 PM on September 25, 2020 | #18131 | reply | quote

#18131

> Do you believe that melanin causes different reactions to arguments?

No.

> Or, contrary to FI and BoI, that explanationless correlation arguments are great and there's no need to understand causal reality?

No.

> And that skin color correlations are particularly good things to focus on in general, or in today's political climate?

Race is more than "skin color", but I think I get what you mean by that term.

However, I don't know what you mean by "focus on". Does my comment #18128 count as "focus[ing] on" race? Does citing FBI crime statistics count? Or are you referring more to what organizations like VDARE or Amren do? Or something else?


Anonymous at 5:31 PM on September 25, 2020 | #18132 | reply | quote

House of Sunny podcast mentioned Tim Pool is a leftist. I've seen some of his recent vids and found that claim surprising. I googled and saw he has an entry on what I understand to be a leftist hate site:

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Tim_Pool

My emphasis:

> Tim Pool (1986–) is a *right-wing conservative* American YouTube commentator and former *Vice News* reporter who describes himself as a *"social liberal" and "left-libertarian" who "support(ed) Bernie Sanders, Andrew Yang, and Tulsi Gabbard"*.[3] Despite this, his content is composed almost exclusively of rebuttal-free alt-right talking points. He is basically one of those "centrists" who somehow always agree with the American Right on most if not all issues. Pool first gained notoriety reporting from the front lines of the Occupy Wall Street protests.

Since when does Vice hire right wing conservatives? Since when are left-libertarian Bernie fans "conservative"?

Sunny was saying that some leftists are having conversations with the right and the hard left wants to censor that too... Examples were Joe Rogan, the Weinsteins, and Tim Pool. Maybe some other IDW type person was mentioned.


curi at 12:25 PM on September 26, 2020 | #18140 | reply | quote

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MV7oDl8yDZk

Project Veritas has important new videos about large scale voter fraud and vote buying connected with Ilhan Omar.


curi at 7:45 PM on September 28, 2020 | #18169 | reply | quote

Sunny vs. dumb "Objectivists" voting for Biden:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ev_If2HCuaQ


curi at 3:38 PM on October 1, 2020 | #18183 | reply | quote

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AGjZkJpgFKU

Rucka does Objectivist criticism of Ted Cruz. Some decent points.


curi at 10:15 PM on October 1, 2020 | #18210 | reply | quote

Ann Coulter article: “ Is Chris Wallace a White Supremacist?”

https://anncoulter.com/2020/09/30/is-chris-wallace-a-white-supremacistxx/ :

> After four months of looting, arson, window breaking, vandalism, intimidation, physical assaults, stabbings and shootings by Black Lives Matter and antifa, the first thing on the media’s mind is … getting Trump to condemn “white supremacists”!

> It would be as if, on the morning after Pearl Harbor, the League of Nations demanded that FDR condemn American aggression in the Pacific.


Anonymous at 8:33 AM on October 2, 2020 | #18212 | reply | quote

In January 2017, Dominic Cummings, the campaign director of Britain's *Vote Leave* campaign, wrote:

> Most people in politics are, whether they know it or not, much more comfortable with failing conventionally than risking the social stigma of behaving unconventionally. They [most of the Members of Parliament that *Vote Leave* dealt with] did not mind losing so much as being embarrassed, as standing out from the crowd.


Anonymous at 7:56 PM on October 3, 2020 | #18228 | reply | quote

https://www.wired.com/story/silicon-valley-opens-wallet-joe-biden/ (2020-10-06):

> A WIRED analysis finds roughly 95 percent of contributions by employees of six big tech firms have gone to [Biden/Harris].


Anonymous at 10:59 AM on October 9, 2020 | #18263 | reply | quote

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WbozDBM67lY

> I was voting for Biden but this changed my mind to Trump

It's a black guy talking primarily about racial issues. 12min


curi at 1:54 PM on October 18, 2020 | #18353 | reply | quote

Wayne Allensworth, "The End of Politics", *Chronicles*, May 2019 (requires free membership to read the entire thing, but I mainly recommend the first four paragraphs, which are quoted below):

> Politics are over in America. Political maneuvering will go on, of course, but the old civics-class view of American political life was based on a set of assumptions that are no longer operative.

> America was once far more homogenous than she is today. But the passing of the 1965 Immigration Act and the political and social revolution of the New Left changed the country demographically and culturally. The old America of regional cultures was about as diverse a polity as could be while remaining stable. America, with her Anglo-Saxon political heritage, was a country with a considerable reserve of “social capital” and public trust. It was understood that a loss at election time was not an existential crisis (the election of 1860 notwithstanding). Politics were not zero sum.

> That is no longer true. And this means the old politics, which had been hollowed out over a period of decades, are largely a thing of the past.

> Politics no longer are concerned with mere policy—which can be bargained over within a procedural framework that once included shared cultural assumptions. Now politicians debate the most fundamental moral and social issues of society and culture, including the legitimacy of the American polity as such, the value of human life, even the definitions of gender, sex, and marriage. Tax policy and healthcare policy are the sorts of things that can conceivably be worked out in committee. Fundamental disagreements over the foundational elements of civilization cannot.

I like his point about the necessity of shared cultural assumptions for a well-functioning political system.


Anonymous at 5:35 PM on October 19, 2020 | #18363 | reply | quote

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y5ih7nqEoc4

> Timcast IRL - James O'Keefe In Studio With BREAKING Expose On Google Election Interference

Tim Pool and James O'Keefe (of Project Veritas) talk for over 2 hours on Oct 19, 2020.


curi at 9:46 PM on October 21, 2020 | #18382 | reply | quote

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBY4ig7SPm8

A business partner has come out and exposed the Biden corruption.


curi at 12:55 PM on October 22, 2020 | #18383 | reply | quote

> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBY4ig7SPm8

> A business partner has come out and exposed the Biden corruption.

Trump is bringing the biz partner to the debate tonight :)


Anonymous at 1:08 PM on October 22, 2020 | #18384 | reply | quote

https://twitter.com/RokoMijicUK/status/1319722604291346432

> progressive diversity and inclusion seminar (separate but equal, of course!) from King County library in Washington State (October 2020)


curi at 12:51 PM on October 23, 2020 | #18442 | reply | quote

Votes cost around $6 each in Texas.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mgPJyEfG0C0


curi at 1:48 PM on October 28, 2020 | #18519 | reply | quote

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4SOuZhc22r0

> Democrats Massive Failure Shocks MSNBC, Calling Biden a "One-Off" As Dems Get CRUSHED Nationwide

I like watching some of Tim Pool's election coverage. I've noticed I tend to like people who used to be further left and moved more to the right (more than people who were always right wing). Partly it's because they tend not to be very religious. Trump is actually another example who used to be further left than he is now. David Horowitz and Upper Echelon Gaming are more examples.


curi at 2:55 PM on November 7, 2020 | #18575 | reply | quote

Biden video from a few years ago where he talks about wanting "an unrelenting stream of immigration. Nonstop. Nonstop." and of relatively fewer whites in America being a good thing https://www.bitchute.com/video/u8zTYvZCGtJp/


Anonymous at 10:08 AM on November 15, 2020 | #18672 | reply | quote

Suspiciously low rejection rate for PA mail-in ballots in 2020 general election

https://twitter.com/Wizard_Predicts/status/1328181471186739200?s=20 (thread links to sources; those links are omitted here):

> In 2016, PA rejected slightly less than 1% of absentee ballots. There were about 266k absentees cast that year.

> In the 2018 midterm, PA rejected about 4.7% of absentee ballots.

> In 2020, a whopping 2.6 million ballots were cast by mail in PA. That’s tens times as compared to 2016.

> The latest data shows about 1,000 mail-ins have been rejected by the commonwealth.

> That means PA’s current rejection rate is a mere .03%.

> Why is it so low this year???

> Perhaps it’s because PA loosen[ed] the regulations on mail-in ballots and the PA Supreme Court ruled mail ballots couldn’t be rejected for mismatched signatures.

> Still, with 2.6 million mail-in ballots cast, it seems quite improbable that only 1,000 people made a mistake.

> Are Pennsylvanians that good at complying with bureaucratic processes?


Anonymous at 8:11 PM on November 15, 2020 | #18687 | reply | quote

Bellwether Counties Went Overwhelmingly for Trump in 2020, *The Epoch Times* (2020-11-15):

> Over the past nearly 40 years, presidential elections have observed an intriguing phenomenon: 19 counties in the nation have always voted for the winner, be it Republican or Democrat. They’ve been dubbed “bellwether counties” and until this year, no president since at least Ronald Reagan has missed even one.

> In 2020, all but one of the bellwethers picked President Donald Trump by a margin of some 16 points on average. Only one, Clallam County in Washington, went for former Vice President Joe Biden and only by about a 3 point margin.

> Bellwethers aren’t a crystal ball—their streak was expected to end sooner or later. But what would be striking is for it to end so radically.


Anonymous at 8:42 AM on November 16, 2020 | #18689 | reply | quote

Ted Cruz vs Jack Dorsey on Twitter censorship & voter fraud

https://twitter.com/ColumbiaBugle/status/1328753692066029568?s=20 (thread has citations for quotes brought up by Ted Cruz):

Ted Cruz: Let me shift to a different topic. Mr. Dorsey, does voter fraud exist?

Jack Dorsey: I don't know for certain.

Cruz: Are you an expert in voter fraud?

Dorsey: No, I'm not.

Cruz: Well, why then is Twitter right now putting purported warnings on virtually any statement about voter fraud?

Dorsey: We're simply linking to a broader conversation so that people have more information.

Cruz: No, you're not. You put up a page that says, "Voter fraud of any kind is exceedingly rare in the United States." That's not linking to a broader conversation, that's taking a disputed policy position, and you're a publisher when you're doing that. You're entitled to take a policy position, but you don't get to pretend you're not a publisher and get a special benefit under Section 230 as a result.

Dorsey: That link is pointing to a broader conversation with tweets from publishers and people all around the country.

Cruz: Mr. Dorsey, would the following statement violate Twitter's policies: "Absentee ballots remain the largest source of potential voter fraud."

Dorsey: I imagine that we would label it so that people can have more context

Cruz: Ok. How about this: "Voter fraud is particularly possible where third-party organizations, candidates, and political party activists are involved in handling absentee ballots." Would you flag that as potentially misleading?

Dorsey: I don't know the specifics of how we might enforce that, but I imagine that a lot of these would have a label pointing people to a bigger conversation.

Cruz: Well, you're right, you would label them because you've taken the political position right now that voter fraud doesn't exist. I would note, both of those quotes come from the Carter-Baker Commission on Federal Election Reform, that is, Democratic President Jimmy Carter and former Secretary of State James Baker. And Twitter's position is, essentially, voter fraud does not exist. Are you aware that just two weeks ago in the state of Texas, a woman was charged with 134 counts of election fraud? Are you aware of that?

Dorsey: I'm not aware of that.

Cruz: If I tweeted that statement with a link to the indictment, would you put a warning on it that says, well, the Democratic Party position right now is that voter fraud doesn't exist?

Dorsey: I don't think it's useful to get into hypotheticals, but I don't believe so.

Cruz: You don't believe so? Well, we're going to test that because I'm going to tweet that and we'll see what you put on it.


Alisa at 5:20 PM on November 17, 2020 | #18704 | reply | quote

Twitter user @drummergirl68 put together a doc with some graphs of election data (with sources at the end). The doc contrasts what happened in Georgia with some supposedly fair elections. I didn't check out out too carefully, but, at first glance, it does kinda look like the Georgia election results were made to fit a linear trend that ends with Biden barely ahead.


jordancurve at 6:44 PM on November 17, 2020 | #18705 | reply | quote

#18705 i fear the left is never going to give rational rebuttals to this stuff. they will call it conspiracy theories instead of actually doing counter arguments that could convince someone. this makes it harder to tell if reasonable rebuttals are possible or not. if a bunch of right wing ppl say "we tried to come up with rebuttals but there aren't any" it could be bias instead of a clear case for fraud. it'd be better if some Biden supporters either provided rebuttals or agreed that fraud happened.

i read majority of the article. like the Benford's Law stuff, it's more than adequate to require a rebuttal from a reasonable person on the other side of the debate.


curi at 6:47 PM on November 17, 2020 | #18706 | reply | quote

#18705 #18706 This is the sort of non-rebuttal we're gonna get:

https://www.cisa.gov/news/2020/11/12/joint-statement-elections-infrastructure-government-coordinating-council-election

4 paragraphs of assertions which then get turned into MSM articles which are used as wikipedia sources to say that doubting Dominion voting security is a "hoax"


curi at 7:36 PM on November 17, 2020 | #18707 | reply | quote

https://fsociety.substack.com/p/2020-election-could-trumps-claims-have-merit

Interesting analysis of suspicious vote-counting activity in GA, PA, MI, and WI. Contrasts with MN and FL as non-suspicious examples. Unlike a lot of things I've read on election fraud in the 2020 general election, this one is relatively clearly written, explains its graphs clearly, and cites its sources.

The doc says:

> The odds of all four states exhibiting similar strange behaviors and shifts in how many votes were counted for Biden over time seem improbable if this was not somehow coordinated.


Alisa at 4:00 PM on November 19, 2020 | #18735 | reply | quote

https://americanmind.org/features/get-ready-for-a-fight/are-we-sure-about-all-those-mail-in-ballots/ (2020-11-10):

Says mail-in ballot rejection rates are implausibly low this election compared to past elections. Asks:

> Are we completely certain that “all” of these mail-in ballots across the battleground states, which have disproportionately gone to Biden due to the very simple fact that the Democrats heavily campaigned on a mass mail-in voting platform, are legitimate? Are we completely sure that each and every mail-in ballot that has been cast for Biden has, in fact, been in legal compliance with the relevant rules and regulations of that specific voting jurisdiction?

> There may well be innocent explanations for all of this. But it would be far too easy to imagine one-party Democratic machine jurisdictions padding the vote tally for their candidate by mass non-disqualification of mail-in ballots that would otherwise merit closer scrutiny. Why is no one on the Right bringing up this exceedingly straightforward point?


Alisa at 5:19 PM on November 19, 2020 | #18737 | reply | quote

Voter Fraud a Myth? That’s Not What New York Investigators Found (*Wall Street Journal*, 2017-02-07):

> In 2013… [New York City] investigators posed as 63 ineligible individuals still on the city voter rolls. Each ineligible voter had died, moved out of the jurisdiction, or been convicted of a felony at least two years earlier.

> The investigators didn’t go to great lengths to hide their attempted fraudulent votes. In five instances investigators in their 20s or 30s posed as voters age 82 to 94. In some cases the investigators were of different ethnic backgrounds from the voters they were impersonating. Yet each was given a ballot and allowed to cast a vote without question.


Alisa at 5:25 PM on November 19, 2020 | #18738 | reply | quote

https://twitter.com/oliverdarcy/status/1329595108078063619?s=20 (tweet has embedded video of a clip from the 2020-11-19 episode of *Tucker Carlson Tonight*)

On *Tucker Carlson Tonight*, Tucker Carlson says Trump campaign lawyer Sidney Powell was invited to come on the show and discuss her claims about massive voting machine fraud. (She made these claims in a press conference today as well as earlier.) He says he would have allowed her to talk every night for a week on his show without interruption, but she declined and asked his show to stop contacting her. He said he reached out to other people in contact with the Trump campaign's legal team, and they also said she hadn't given them any evidence.

In today's press conference, Jenna Ellis, another Trump campaign lawyer, said that they were simply laying out their case and not trying to offer evidence for everything up front.


Alisa at 5:32 PM on November 19, 2020 | #18739 | reply | quote

#18739 An article in The Gateway Pundit says Powell responded this morning to Tucker’s comments about her from last night:

> Maria Bartiromo: How did you respond to Tucker Carlson? Did you get angry with the show because they texted you and asked you to provide evidence of what you’re alleging?

> Sidney Powell: No, I didn’t get angry with the request to provide evidence in fact I sent an affidavit to Tucker that I had not even attached to a pleading yet to help him understand the situation and I offered him another witness who could explain the mathematics of the statistical evidence far better than I can. I’m not really a numbers person. But he was very insulting, demanding and rude and I told him not to contact me again in those terms.

It’s kinda hard for me to know which of them (Tucker or Powell) to believe. I guess I believe Tucker that Powell didn’t give him any evidence and that people around her said that they haven’t seen any either. I also believe Tucker that she declined to come on his show. She didn’t mention his invitation in her statement this morning.


Alisa at 8:43 AM on November 20, 2020 | #18752 | reply | quote

#18752 https://twitter.com/rooshv/status/1329812530970169344?s=21 :

> As long as Tucker Carlson works for Fox News, he can't be fully trusted. Be suspicious of anyone who is getting rich from the establishment.


Anonymous at 6:14 PM on November 20, 2020 | #18765 | reply | quote

#18765 Someone tweeted:

> Tucker could have brought on Ann Coulter over past few years, but refused. Why?

Anntensity, an Ann Coulter fan account which Coulter herself often retweets, replied:

> BOOM 💥


Anonymous at 6:18 PM on November 20, 2020 | #18766 | reply | quote

https://wqth.wordpress.com/2020/11/21/how-pdjt-will-win-a-second-term/

I liked this article explaining Trump’s strategy for winning a second term. It goes into detail on a theory put forth by Alan Dershowitz.


Alisa at 11:10 PM on November 20, 2020 | #18769 | reply | quote

New Data From Rigorous Statistical Analysis Points to Voter Fraud in Montgomery County, PA

This the most careful statistical analysis I've seen of potential election fraud in the 2020 general election.

Explosive: New Data From Rigorous Statistical Analysis Points to Voter Fraud in Montgomery County, PA (*revolver*, November 21, 2020):

> On Thursday November 5th at 9:09am a large batch of 90,022 mail/absentee votes get added that has over 95% support for Biden, but total votes to go up by only 9,534, implying that in-person votes actually went down by 80,488. On its own, this is a very strange irregularity, as ballots cannot disappear, and in-person ballots cannot become mail ballots. Something is wrong in the reported data, the only question is what.

> ⦁ It has a level of support for Biden (over 95%) that is statistically impossible to have come from the same distribution of mail ballots counted up to that point (74.9% for Biden)

Let's quantify how "statistically impossible" this is. Say you have a biased coin that comes up heads 75% of the time. If you flip it 90000 times, what's the probability of getting 0.95 * 90000 = 85500 or more heads? By any criterion, the normal approximation to the binomial distribution will give reasonable ballpark results in this scenario. On average, we'd expect to see 0.75 * 90000 = 67508.25 heads. One standard deviation is Sqrt[0.75 * 0.25 * 90000] ≈ 130, so 85500 heads is about (85500-67508.25)/130 ≈ 138 standard deviations from the mean.

> ... we consider throughout the possibility that the errors are the result of innocent mistakes being made, either by Edison or the New York Times in collecting or publishing their data, or by the County themselves in their early vote counts. Counting processes have all sorts of innocent errors, and weirdness in data is well understood by anyone who has ever worked with it. Machines can break. Data can get transcribed wrong. Code updating websites, both for governments and data vendors, can be faulty. Genuine ballots may be incorrectly classified as one type or another during the counting process. Corrections of earlier errors, even if well-intentioned, may be incorrectly assumed to be additional errors. We have to consider whether these explanations could explain the same set of facts, both individually, and in combination. We will not shirk this task.

Good.

> All mail ballots in Montgomery County were instructed to be mailed to the same postal address. This strengthens the reasons for believing that mail ballots should be drawn from roughly the same distribution.

Good point.

I found the chart under Fact 7 confusing at first. I didn't know what the "Abnormal Biden 2Pty Vote Share in Batch" axis label meant. The axis ranges from -0.2 to 0.2. Turns out, they explained it much further down. It means:

> How different is the two-party vote share for Biden in the new batch of mail votes relative to mail ballots counted so far?

The chart under Fact 9 is interesting. I think it works like this. For each precinct in Montgomery County, PA, they put a point on the chart. To get the coordinates of each precinct, they looked at the mail-in ballots in that precinct that were counted on or before Nov 10 ("previous ballots") and the mail-in ballots in that precinct that were counted after Nov 10 ("new ballots"). For each precinct, the X coordinate is the fraction of previous ballots that went to Biden, and the Y coordinate is the fraction of new ballots that went to Biden. Looking at all the points (precincts), the Y coordinates or somewhat evenly distributed from 0 to 1. The X coordinates are all in the range of about 0.6 to 1, apparently averaging around 0.8. This means that the new ballots are more evenly distributed in their support for Biden than the previous ballots.

> Under absolutely any interpretation, the change in votes between 7:43pm on 11/4 and 9:09am on 11/5 is completely inconsistent with the fair and orderly reporting of ballot counts.

Good statement.

> Even without further elaboration, these bare facts alone represent a glaring irregularity. Existing votes cannot simply disappear, and in-person ballots cannot transform into mail ballots.

Yes.

> It is absolutely statistically impossible that these two ballots represent draws from the same underlying distribution. Ignoring the libertarian vote for the time being, if you had a coin that had a 75.4% chance of landing on heads each time (Biden’s two party vote up to that point), the chances you would flip it 89,188 times and get 85,857 heads is so small that Excel doesn’t have enough zeroes to represent just how improbable it is. It just rounds it to “zero”.

Ah, they also use a comparison with coin flipping to show how unlikely the scenario they are talking about is. However, instead of using the normal approximation to the binomial, they use Excel's BINOMDIST function (I would guess).

> Interpretation:. Not only

Typo: ":."

> If the new batch of mail votes is genuine, then the part of Montgomery County they are coming from is unlike almost anywhere else in America in terms of the ratio of support for Libertarian candidates relative to Republican ones. The Libertarian candidate Jorgensen enjoys 20.02% as much support (834 votes) as the Republican (3,331).

> At the last update of our data, on Sunday night, in Pennsylvania as a whole, Jorgensen’s support was 2.3% as large as Trump’s, roughly 1/9 as large. But even this understates how bizarre this ratio is. Let us suppose that this new batch of mail ballots, with its 20.02% Libertarian / Republican ratio, were a separate county – with 90,022 votes, it’s certainly large enough to warrant it in most of the country. Out of the 3,156 counties where we have election data as of Sunday night, this new batch, if it were a county, would be the second highest in America in its Libertarian to Republican ratio, behind only Ogalala Lakota in South Dakota. The 99th percentile of the distribution is only 6.81%.

Also, with a population of 830,915, Montgomery County, PA has over 55 times the population of Ogalala Lakota in SD, which has only 14,309 people. Other things being equal, it's more interesting for a large population to be an outlier than a small population.

> Ideally, we could have gone back in time and started scraping the County data since the start of the election, to observe the actual anomalous update directly but that ship had already sailed.

Grammar nit: There should be an error before "but" because it's a separate clause with a coordinating conjunction.


jordancurve at 7:25 PM on November 21, 2020 | #18774 | reply | quote

> At the last update of our data, on Sunday night, in Pennsylvania as a whole, Jorgensen’s support was 2.3% as large as Trump’s, roughly 1/9 as large.

Typo..? 2.3% is not roughly 1/9


curi at 8:23 PM on November 21, 2020 | #18775 | reply | quote

#18775 The article says:

> If the new batch of mail votes is genuine, then the part of Montgomery County they are coming from is unlike almost anywhere else in America in terms of the ratio of support for Libertarian candidates relative to Republican ones. The Libertarian candidate Jorgensen enjoys 20.02% as much support (834 votes) as the Republican (3,331).

> At the last update of our data, on Sunday night, in Pennsylvania as a whole, Jorgensen’s support was 2.3% as large as Trump’s, roughly 1/9 as large.

2.3% is roughly 1/9 of 20.02%.


jordancurve at 8:53 PM on November 21, 2020 | #18776 | reply | quote

Read the sentence again. It said 2.3% as large as Trump’s vote, not 2.3% as large as the total vote. It also presents the second as a restatement of the first.


curi at 9:00 PM on November 21, 2020 | #18777 | reply | quote

#18777

Ok, I read it again. It means the same thing to me as it did when I wrote #18776. Here’s my interpretation, with implied words added at the end:

> At the last update of our data, on Sunday night, in Pennsylvania as a whole, Jorgensen’s support was 2.3% as large as Trump’s, roughly 1/9 as large [as the comparable figure from the previous sentence].

They are looking at the ratio J/(J+T), where J is the number of votes for Jorgensen and T is the number of votes for Trump. They are calculating that ratio for groups of ballots:

- the “new batch” of mail votes, where it’s 20.02% (834/(834+3331))

- PA as a whole, where it’s 2.3%

The latter is roughly 1/9 of the former.


jordancurve at 9:27 PM on November 21, 2020 | #18779 | reply | quote

> Jorgensen’s support was 2.3% as large as Trump’s

I don't understand what is going wrong for you. You know what a percentage is. This says if Trump got 100 votes, Jorgensen got 2.3 votes.


curi at 9:31 PM on November 21, 2020 | #18780 | reply | quote

https://twitter.com/shylockh/status/1330345773419159552

good thread on election fraud and what would it take for ppl to change their minds


curi at 9:38 PM on November 21, 2020 | #18781 | reply | quote

> The Libertarian candidate Jorgensen enjoys 20.02% as much support (834 votes) as the Republican (3,331).

834 is not around 20% of 3331. It's around 25% as much as 3331 is.

Their gross incompetence at arithmetic (as well as the previous error I pointed out) casts doubt on the quality of their statistical analysis of the election. And I haven't even read the article, just a couple little excerpts, to find these errors.

This doesn't mean their conclusion or main point is wrong, but with "experts" like these being promoted as doing some of the best analysis to find fraud ... jfc what a sad world :(


curi at 9:56 PM on November 21, 2020 | #18782 | reply | quote

If you fight the establishment they will stop you and laugh in your face.

Bit of a rant related to #18774

> Let's quantify how "statistically impossible" this is.

> ... standard deviations from the mean.

I've had evidence like this ignored at a tribunal before -- to do with membership to a political party. As described by a University of Melbourne publication:

> In her Order, made on 23 October 2018, Justice Hampel, Vice President of VCAT, refuted every one of Mr Millington’s arguments.

> In oral testimony, it became apparent that the Flux Party could not be certain that its membership database satisfied the requirements of the Act; in particular, it could not ensure that its members were not members of another political party.

- University of Melbourne - Electoral Regulation Research Network - Section: Millington v Victorian Electoral Commission (VCAT Reference Z601/2018)

The "oral testimony" was mine, btw, where I talked about our membership signup process and typical problem-rate for members (about 2% are problematic, only some of which are members of other parties). We also ask whether our members are part of another party, too (some ppl weren't shown this option at registration due to differing signup forms, though).

We submitted approx 150% of the required number of names, but there was only a 50% response rate to the physical letters the Electoral Commission sent out to verify ppl were legit members, so about 75% of the "required" number of members.

I argued that the probability we had a *significant* issue with members in this state (Victoria / VIC) was vanishingly low. We'd need to have a full 33% of our submitted members be ineligible to fall short of the criteria (as it is written in law; this electoral commission has a lot of leeway).

The magistrate dismissed this argument. I think this was in part b/c I don't work as a statistician; her first question in response to my 'vanishingly low' claim was "are you a statistician?", not did I study it or what was I basing my claim on. I also wasn't allowed to explain anything at this point, and the magistrate moved on with her questioning (witnesses can't interject).

> 73. Mr Millington also submitted that, as a matter of probability, I should be satisfied it was likely no more than 2% of members of the applicant party were also members of other parties. He relied on the evidence of Mr Kaye that the number of members of the federal and WA, NSW, ACT and Queensland branches of the Flux Party who were also members of other parties was a consistent 2%. This submission is equally flawed. An argument based on probabilities is unsound.

An actual fucking magistrate said **"An argument based on probabilities is unsound."** I wonder what she thinks "beyond reasonable doubt means"? Or are arguments based on probability okay for murder trials, just not for bureaucratic processes?

> 72. This submission is flawed. Not only is the Victorian data demonstrably unreliable, an argument based on probabilities, where the party had no mechanisms in place to protect against people being joined up without their knowledge, or people joining up in false, or multiple names, is unsound.

- [Millington v Victorian Electoral Commission (Review and Regulation) [2018] VCAT 1661](https://www.austlii.edu.au/cgi-bin/viewdoc/au/cases/vic/VCAT/2018/1661.html?context=1;query=Millington%20v%20Victorian%20Electoral%20Commission;mask_path=)

The magistrate also conveniently ignores the fact we validate ppl's details against the electoral roll, which is the entire principle behind KYC/AML laws applying to e.g. opening a bank account.

Oh and that of the ~375 responses the VEC got (the names and addresses had already been confirmed as accurate), they refused to tell us how many were 'no' responses and didn't provide it at tribunal. If there were like ~100 'no' responses I would have thought the barrister they hired would be savvy enough to mention that (since it is actual evidence of what the judge asserted).

I went and found a binomial prob calculator, and even taking a 0.04 success rate (double our 0.02), given 750 trials, the chance of 100 successes or more:

P(X >= x) < 0.000001

Even just 50 successes has

P(X >= x) ~= 0.000391

But an argument based on probability is unsound.

The transcripts for the tribunal were/are technically available, but cost $1500+ (there are a small number of approved companies to do the transcription, and even though you get the audio at the end of that process, the audio isn't available otherwise).

If you fight the establishment they will stop you and laugh in your face.

---

While finding links for the above, I also found an example of a "support = confirmation" error:

> On 23 October 2018 the VCAT dismissed Mr Millington’s application for review and affirmed the VEC’s decision to refuse to register The Flux Party–Victoria’s application as a political party, validating the VEC’s approach to determining whether a political party may be registered under the Act.

- https://www.parliament.vic.gov.au/images/stories/committees/emc/2018_Election/Submissions/92._Victorian_Electoral_Commission_Revised.pdf

Aside from the fact it was a tribunal (not a court), dismissing an application for review doesn't validate the thing being challenged.


Max at 10:00 PM on November 21, 2020 | #18783 | reply | quote

> They are looking at the ratio J/(J+T),

Why would one look at that? And that isn't what they say they're looking at.


curi at 10:00 PM on November 21, 2020 | #18784 | reply | quote

#18783 horrifying :(

I have a theory about why tech companies are doing so well. A standard one is low capital requirements to run a website and make an app and stuff. And that's true. But another big factor, IMO, is low amount of physical presence means less interaction with the govt which makes it more possible to live, exist, and do anything.


curi at 10:06 PM on November 21, 2020 | #18785 | reply | quote

#18780 I agree they worded it incorrectly. I didn't notice that until you quoted the first part of the sentence alone (without the 1/9 part).


jordancurve at 10:06 PM on November 21, 2020 | #18786 | reply | quote

#18785 That sounds reasonable. Another factor that comes up sometimes is mobility.

I know a number of tech companies that have relocated their "office" to other countries b/c of favourable regulations or to limit personal liability. (And doing that when you start in Australia is harder than elsewhere esp if you need to physically visit the other country; not all the companies I know that did this were Aussie tho.)


Max at 10:21 PM on November 21, 2020 | #18787 | reply | quote

#18784

When they refer to "support" throughout the paper, I think they mean the fraction of votes under consideration that went to a particular candidate, e.g.:

> a large batch of 90,022 mail/absentee votes get added that has over 95% support for Biden

> The Libertarian candidate Jorgensen enjoys 20.02% as much support (834 votes) as the Republican (3,331).

Here, the only simple way to get 20.02% is 834/(834+3331).

> it has a ratio of support for Jorgenson relative to Trump (20%) that is higher than virtually every county in America

Earlier, I wrote:

>> They are looking at the ratio J/(J+T),

curi asked:

> Why would one look at that?

Because unusual values for it can be a sign of fraud. In their terms, J/(J+T) refers to Jorgensen's "support" in a hypothetical two-way race between Jorgensen and Trump. They have calculated it for lots of areas across the country, and they think that the value of 20% for it in Montgomery County, PA, is unusual.

> And that isn't what they say they're looking at.

I agree. At least two sentences are worded as if they are looking at J/T.


jordancurve at 10:24 PM on November 21, 2020 | #18788 | reply | quote

#18781

> https://twitter.com/shylockh/status/1330345773419159552

> good thread on election fraud and what would it take for ppl to change their minds

This thread has some good stuff. I've pulled out the bits I particularly like:

> Do better! If you think this is wrong, say what _specifically_ you think is going on, and how it fits the facts.

https://twitter.com/shylockh/status/1330346293886144514

I notice something v. different about the electoral fraud issue compared to some other public investigations I know of.

Example: rocket failures. No body in rocketry is happy with concluding things are fine b/c there's insufficient data. *ANY* issue that happens is *investigated to conclusion*, with super high standards for both 'for' and 'against' cases regarding conjectured scenarios. It's not enough to know that something *didn't* happen; if an event was unexpected then you need to know *exactly* what *did* happen -- it's not safe to fly until you do.

Why are there such big differences in the way ppl view these sorta issues? One reason is that ppl don't learn critical thinking in general when they do learn critical thinking techniques; they learn it specific to some domain. The *bigger* reason, I think, is that the rocket scientists are *truthseeking*. They don't care what the answer is, they just want a *high quality* answer so they can get on with making rockets.

In this electoral fraud issue, lots of ppl want *their chosen answer* to be the right one, and they're okay with compromising their standards to avoid dealing with the consequences.

> Finally, this whole analysis shows the difficulty of the entire task. Suppose you read it, and find it unconvincing. Here’s an important question – is there any conceivable analysis that could be done using only public data that would convince you something dubious is up? (10/N)

Good q. Related to PF and 'how would you know you were mistaken?'

> Name me a plausibly available dataset for the US, Syria, and Venezuela, and statistical tests you could run, which you’re confident would prove to your own standards that the latter two are fraudulent, and the first one is entirely clean for every county nationwide.

The only issue I see here is that Syria and Venezuela might have much worse data quality (and that wouldn't be surprising), but shylockh is asking for *plausibly* available data. However, the point still stands w/ other countries like Australia or EU nations, etc. There are known instances of fraud in other democracies you can use as a partial basis for comparison.

The point is good though: if you don't have a complete explanation of a method where you could claim detection of true-positives, you can't hope to judge something like this (esp on intuition!) without having a high rate of false-positives and false-negatives.

> At which point the honest answer isn't “there’s no evidence of fraud in US elections”. Rather it’s “we don’t really know how much fraud there is in US elections, because detecting fraud other than egregiously making up vote totals out of whole cloth is a very difficult task”./fin

Last tweet: https://twitter.com/shylockh/status/1330347275453935616 (I don't think it's necessary to link them all)


Anonymous at 10:44 PM on November 21, 2020 | #18789 | reply | quote

> Here, the only simple way to get 20.02% is 834/(834+3331).

You're trying to make the numbers work out right instead of thinking about concepts.

I can do that too. I already knew where 20% came from. *But it's dead wrong* in relation to the words written.

And that method is terrible for understanding stuff.

>> Why would one look at that?

> Because unusual values for it can be a sign of fraud.

You're making a positive argument. Convert it to a negative argument and see how it works.


curi at 11:08 PM on November 21, 2020 | #18791 | reply | quote

> Example: rocket failures. No body in rocketry is happy with concluding things are fine b/c there's insufficient data. *ANY* issue that happens is *investigated to conclusion*, with super high standards for both 'for' and 'against' cases regarding conjectured scenarios. It's not enough to know that something *didn't* happen; if an event was unexpected then you need to know *exactly* what *did* happen -- it's not safe to fly until you do.

Sadly I don't think that's true. It's a nice ideal that some people pay lip service to, but I don't think it's what many people actually do. See e.g. Feynman's experience in a rocketry related investigation (o-ring story).


curi at 11:13 PM on November 21, 2020 | #18793 | reply | quote

> Sadly I don't think that's true. It's a nice ideal that some people pay lip service to, but I don't think it's what many people actually do. See e.g. Feynman's experience in a rocketry related investigation (o-ring story).

Yeah okay, I can see how I would have made that mistake, esp b/c I was thinking about some of SpaceX's recent failures where I paid attention to the community discussion during the investigation. On one hand I think private companies have less inventive to lie like the NASA guy, and OTOH I'm probs biased b/c of how I paid attention to it at the time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=raMmRKGkGD4 - Richard Feynman debunks NASA

Feynman really was a great thinker. IMO he was quite a bit more polite in that clip than he needed to be, too.


Max at 11:20 PM on November 21, 2020 | #18794 | reply | quote

#18794 SpaceX should not be thought of as purely private company b/c of its heavy involvement with the government. And it has a really bad CEO/founder (with a track record of being involved with govts, in addition to a track record of irrationality) so it'd be pretty amazing if SpaceX somehow worked really well anyway.


curi at 11:24 PM on November 21, 2020 | #18795 | reply | quote

#18795 I've dialed back my view of SpaceX and Musk over the past few years, in large part b/c of things you've said I don't know how to answer. ATM taking a 'need to learn more, there are some issues' approach.

I changed my mind about SpaceX vs Blue Origin last year when this happened https://spacenews.com/blue-origin-unveils-lunar-lander/

SpaceX and BO had conferences around the same time, and Musk was talking about starship and mars, and bezos was talking about the moon and *space habitats*. I think Bezos has much better ideas about this than Musk, but Musk has captured ppls imaginations w/ mars. Ppl don't seem to care that big planetary colonies don't make sense (they'll eventually get big, but most ppl will live between/around planets, not on them).


Max at 11:33 PM on November 21, 2020 | #18796 | reply | quote

#18796 Bezos is the leader of the Washington Post which heavily discredits him. Also the various major leadership failings at Twitch since Amazon bought them must be partly blamed on Bezos. Also he could do much more about the ongoing, fairly extensive fraud on Amazon (fake reviews, false advertised products), but he doesn't, because apparently there's something really wrong with him. His relationship choices also seem awful.


curi at 11:36 PM on November 21, 2020 | #18797 | reply | quote

> I paid attention to the community discussion during the investigation

Do you have an example of discussion you think is particularly good and fits your description about thorough investigation? Source? Link?


Anonymous at 11:37 PM on November 21, 2020 | #18798 | reply | quote

#18791 The reason I gave for J/(J+T) also applies to alternative formulas such as J/T, J/(J+T+1), J/(J+T+B). The reason explains why one might want to use one of many such formulas but not why one would choose this specific formula.

So, here are some reasons to prefer J/(J+T) over J/T (which I think is the only alternative formula that’s been mentioned in this thread):

- J/(J+T) generalizes to 3+-way or greater races, e.g., J/(J+T+B).

- the values for all candidates sum to 100%, which makes it matter of addition and subtraction to calculate, given the support for one candidate, the support received by all other candidates, and vice versa.


jordancurve at 11:40 PM on November 21, 2020 | #18799 | reply | quote

#18799 Correction: My second reason to prefer J/(J+T) over J/T doesn’t stand on its own. It should have been part of the first reason (if it were even listed at all). This is because, when there are only two candidates, it’s trivial to calculate the value for one candidate given the value for the other using either of the two alternatives, so the fact that the values of the first alternative add to 100% provides no benefit in that case. And since J/T doesn’t generalize to races with 3 or more candidates, the second reason doesn’t apply to it.


jordancurve at 11:52 PM on November 21, 2020 | #18800 | reply | quote

> The reason I gave for J/(J+T) also applies to alternative formulas such as J/T,

yes

> - J/(J+T) generalizes to 3+-way or greater races, e.g., J/(J+T+B).

Doesn't J/T also work when B is in the race?

> - the values for all candidates sum to 100%, which makes it matter of addition and subtraction to calculate, given the support for one candidate, the support received by all other candidates, and vice versa.

doesn't seem important in general, let alone in our particular context


curi at 11:56 PM on November 21, 2020 | #18801 | reply | quote

#18798

> Do you have an example of discussion you think is particularly good and fits your description about thorough investigation? Source? Link?

No, definitely in the FI sense of 'good discussion', and maybe not in a lay sense either. I had a bit of a look.

I think this is what happened leading up to me saying the example:

- I had some positive beliefs about ppl in the rocket industry.

- The COPV thing happened and there was a lot of speculation.

- Ppl talked about procedures and fault-trees and all kinds of things.

- There was a narrative akin to what I put in #18789

- A highly technical explanation came out (Jan 2nd 2017) which confirmed the narrative

- I didn't question it or realise that it wasn't a good argument / evidence / etc.

Here's an extract from the Jan 2 statement (linked) showing what I mean about the narrative:

> The accident investigation team worked systematically through an extensive fault tree analysis and concluded that one of the three composite overwrapped pressure vessels (COPVs) inside the second stage liquid oxygen (LOX) tank failed.

I still think there are qualitative differences between rocketry postmortems and electoral fraud stuff, but I overstated it in the example.


Max at 12:14 AM on November 22, 2020 | #18802 | reply | quote

#18801 You're right, J/T works for comparing J & T even when B is in the race. I didn't think of that.

Now that you mention it, I guess J/T actually generalizes to multiple candidates, in the way that I was thinking of it, as well as J/(J+T) does. For example, if you're looking at J/T, and you want to add B into the mix, you could just look at J/(T+B), and say that J gets X% as many votes as T & B combined. So I retract that reason for preferring J/(T+B).

Here's a different reason to prefer J/(J+T) over J/T. When people talk about elections, the concept of *fraction of votes under consideration*, which J/(J+T) represents, is more common than the *ratio of one candidate's votes to another*. People already say things like *J got X% of the vote in some precinct*, or *B got 52% of the national vote*, but I haven't seen many people say things like *B got 1.1 times as many votes as T*. Consistently using *fraction of votes under consideration* lets you re-use a single concept, which is already common, instead of introducing a new one for some comparisons.

Now here's a reason to prefer J/T to J/(J+T), which hadn't occurred to me before I started writing this reply. J/T is simpler to talk about: you just say that J got X% as many votes as T. To put J/(J+T) into words, you have to say something like: J got X% of the votes given to J or T, which is a bit more complicated.

One final note: the difference between J/T and J/(J+T) reminds me of the difference between odds and probabilities.


jordancurve at 11:10 AM on November 22, 2020 | #18812 | reply | quote

#18812 When we compare Trump's votes to Biden's we commonly do it in a different way: Trump won that state by +5

Direct ratios between two things are common. When we say Trump got 51% of the vote, we're directly comparing T to V (V = total vote).

If we compared Trump to a minor candidate, saying he won but +49 would tell us it's not close, but maybe not be that useful or specific. Did the minor candidate get 0% or 10% or something in between? idk.

A common comparison would be Trump got 15x more votes than J did. That's good for some purposes.

But we don't say Trump got 1.2x as many votes as Biden. We got with +5 instead.


curi at 12:36 PM on November 22, 2020 | #18818 | reply | quote

#18818 I agree that T +5 is a common way to compare votes. I've seen that a lot.

curi wrote:

> Direct ratios between two things are common. When we say Trump got 51% of the vote, we're directly comparing T to V (V = total vote).

I think the point that's relevant to this thread is whether the quantity in the numerator is contained in the quantity in the denominator. For example, if I say I ate 1/2 the cake, the part I ate is also included in the denominator, since the denominator is supposed to account for the entire cake. For the case of Trump getting 51% of the vote, the votes for Trump are also being counted in the denominator. However, when we use a formula like J/T and say that Jorgensen got X% as many votes as Trump, then Jorgensen's votes are *not* included in the denominator.

curi wrote:

> A common comparison would be Trump got 15x more votes than J did.

Why do you say this kind of comparison is common? It doesn't strike me as common. I searched Bing for [trump jorgensen votes] and skimmed the top results to see how they compared the votes for the candidates. Not one of the articles used the 15x kind of comparison, as far as I could tell. Below are some examples of the kinds of comparisons I found.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2020/11/05/jo-jorgensen-libertarian-presidential-candidate-gets-votes-in-wisconsin/6173100002 :

> she's on pace to get 1.1% of the national vote

> Jorgensen performed the best in rural, Western states. She secured 2.7% of the vote in Alaska and North Dakota and 2.6% of the vote in South Dakota, according to the AP.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/nov/08/libertarian-jo-jorgensen-donald-trump-joe-biden :

> With 90% of the vote counted, Biden holds 1,626,943 votes to Trump’s 1,606,370 – a 49.6 to 48.9% divide. Jorgensen has landed 49,182 votes, or 1.5%.

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/libertarian-jo-jorgensen-difference-for-joe-biden-key-swing-states :

> In Arizona, Biden is projected to win by a margin of 0.44 percent, while Jorgensen so far has cinched 1.5 percent of the vote.

I'm happy to follow up on suggestions of other keywords to search for.


jordancurve at 10:02 AM on November 23, 2020 | #18825 | reply | quote

>> A common comparison would be Trump got 15x more votes than J did.

> Why do you say this kind of comparison is common?

I didn't. You dropped the "If" statement that qualified it, as well as the qualifier after it.


curi at 12:24 PM on November 23, 2020 | #18827 | reply | quote

#18827

Here is a contiguous section of curi's post #18818:

> If we compared Trump to a minor candidate, saying he won but +49 would tell us it's not close, but maybe not be that useful or specific. Did the minor candidate get 0% or 10% or something in between? idk.

> A common comparison would be Trump got 15x more votes than J did.

> That's good for some purposes.

Now here's the question I asked about [2] in #18825:

> Why do you say this kind of comparison is common?

And here's curi's reply from #18827:

> I didn't. You dropped the "If" statement that qualified it, as well as the qualifier after it.

The text below is a version I made of the section from #18818 quoted above. I created it in order to check my understanding by putting all the qualifiers into one sentence. Is it an accurate restatement of the relevant parts of the original?

*When comparing Trump to a minor candidate for some purposes, a common comparison would be Trump got 15x more votes than J did.*

I agree with that sentence, and wouldn't have asked the question I asked if I'd understood what curi wrote that way.


jordancurve at 9:14 PM on November 23, 2020 | #18833 | reply | quote

Minor correction: I wrote:

> Now here's the question I asked about [2] in #18825:

The text "about [2]" shouldn't be there.

Here's how the mistake happened. I originally put some numbers in the text I quoted from #18818 to make it easier to refer to individual statements. Later, I realized I didn't need the statement numbers, but I forgot to take that one out.


jordancurve at 9:19 PM on November 23, 2020 | #18834 | reply | quote

#18834 Another correction for my comment #18833: I misquoted curi. In the text I quoted from his comment #18818, the paragraph break between the last two sentences was inadvertently added by me. I don’t remember how that happened.


jordancurve at 1:27 AM on November 25, 2020 | #18847 | reply | quote

https://thefederalist.com/2020/11/23/5-more-ways-joe-biden-magically-outperformed-election-norms/ (Nov 23, 2020)

Article points out some things about Biden’s supposed victory that the establishment media has been incurious about. It mentions some points I wasn’t aware of, including:

> Donald Trump was pretty much the only incumbent president in U.S. history to lose his re-election while his own party gained seats in the House of Representatives.

> First, no incumbent who has received 75 percent of the total primary vote has lost re-election. Second, President Trump received 94 percent of the primary vote, which is the fourth highest of all time (higher than Dwight Eisenhower, Nixon, Clinton, or Obama).

The article summarizes with:

> Joe Biden achieved the impossible. It’s interesting that many more journalists aren’t pointing that out.


Anonymous at 10:08 PM on November 26, 2020 | #18872 | reply | quote

#18872 I read it. Some good points. Sigh.

> Baris noted a statistical oddity from 2020’s election returns: “Biden underperformed Hillary Clinton in every major metro area around the country, save for Milwaukee, Detroit, Atlanta and Philadelphia.”


curi at 1:15 AM on November 27, 2020 | #18874 | reply | quote

Back in 2006, CNN was home to Lou Dobbs Tonight, a conservative news show that has aired on Fox Business since 2009. In one episode (YouTube video: https://youtu.be/RvYSuJwXp9Q ), Dobbs covered voting machine fraud:

> Lou Dobbs: "A firm owned by Venezuela could be allowed to take over one of this country's top voting machine firms. Critics of the deal say our nation's very democracy is now for sale without anyone doing a thing about it.... The U.S. company that makes the [voting] machines, Sequoia, was bought in 2005 by Smartmatic, a private company primarily owned by Venezuelan businessmen."

Here's evidence that the video isn't entirely a forgery (since the only copy I could find was uploaded to YouTube recently) https://www.eastbaytimes.com/2006/06/19/sequoias-ownership-raises-new-concerns/ :

> Politicians in the Windy City and CNN newsman Lou Dobbs suggested recently that the federal government was derelict in not having investigated Sequoia and its acquisition last year by Smartmatic, a Boca Raton, Fla., firm largely owned by Venezuelan businessmen.


Khaaan at 9:46 PM on November 27, 2020 | #18878 | reply | quote

#18874 On Nov 20, 2020, USA Today published an article denying that Biden underperformed in all major metro areas except four. I didn't read it in detail.

I found the tweet where Barris (@Peoples_Pundit) apparently made the claim originally. I also searched Twitter for [usa today from:peoples_pundit], but it doesn't look like Barris has responded.


Anonymous at 10:14 PM on November 27, 2020 | #18879 | reply | quote

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1328908377959714817.html :

> Three of the Democrat justices on the Pennsylvania Supreme Court that ruled against Trump were elected in 2015 on the back of record campaign spending that led directly back to Democracy Alliance, a group founded by George Soros.

Twitter thread claims, among other things, that 3 of the 5-2 progressive majority on the PA State Supreme Court were elected† with the help of significant funding from Democracy Alliance, a group founded by George Soros. If true, this is discoverthenetworks-level research, but I didn't see it mentioned on DTN's Democracy Alliance page.

† PA judges are elected, not appointed.


Alisa at 7:57 PM on November 28, 2020 | #18892 | reply | quote

https://votepatternanalysis.substack.com/p/voting-anomalies-2020

> Anomalies in Vote Counts and Their Effects on Election 2020


curi at 1:58 PM on November 29, 2020 | #18897 | reply | quote

Daniel Horowitz, New analysis shows Biden winning nearly impossible margins on mail-in ballots in Pennsylvania, *The Blaze* (Nov 30, 2020):

> Yes, mail-ins overwhelmingly skewed Democrat, like Election Day votes skewed Republican, but they were not all from Democrats. We know that 64.7% of those votes were from registered Democrats, 23.7% from Republicans, and 11.6% from nonpartisan or other party voters.

> What does this mean in simple arithmetic? … had Biden won 95% of returned Democrat mail-in votes, 21% of returned Republican votes, and 80% of returned independent votes, he would still have come up short of his margin of victory reported in the unofficial tally.

In the final paragraph, Horowitz writes:

> The suggestion that we should somehow move on from this is a greater threat to democracy than anything in our history.


Anonymous at 11:34 AM on November 30, 2020 | #18902 | reply | quote

https://www.amren.com/news/2020/11/pitt-med-students-add-vow-against-systemic-racism-to-hippocratic-oath/ :

> In the days before its Aug. 16 white coat ceremony, the class of 2024 presented its new oath to Pitt Medicine administrators. The oath included references to George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery, as well as the COVID-19 pandemic, “systemic racism,” and LGBTQ+ identity.


Anonymous at 7:42 AM on December 1, 2020 | #18913 | reply | quote

https://rairfoundation.com/germany-syrian-migrant-stabs-afd-politician-prosecutor-immediately-sets-him-free-video/ (Germany, Nov 26, 2020):

> As with many criminal migrant, the Syrian is already known to the police. Instead of authorities holding the dangerous migrant, the Karlsruhe Prosecutor’s Office set him free. The migrant was released from police custody around the same time that Arpaschi awoke from anesthesia after his emergency surgery.


Anonymous at 8:10 AM on December 1, 2020 | #18914 | reply | quote

Video of USPS whistleblower talking about election fraud:

https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/1333873500931690499?s=21

Description of his testimony from https://got-freedom.org/2020/12/01/press-release-amistad-project-announces-major-new-election-whistleblowers/ :

> Mr. Pease related that he … was a USPS subcontractor and that on November 4 and November 5, two separate postal workers informed him that the USPS on November 4 was gathering tens of thousands of ballots and backdating the postmarks to November 3 so that they may be counted despite the November 3 deadline for receipt of the ballots.

> Mr. Pease’s sworn statement coincides in time with a dramatic ballot dump on the morning of November 5 which heavily favored Mr. Biden and which has caused significant controversy within the expert community regarding the statistical probability of the late insertion of tens of thousands of ballots in favor of a single candidate on the morning after the election.


Alisa at 6:26 PM on December 1, 2020 | #18918 | reply | quote

Video of Jess Morgan, a truck driver who is a USPS subcontractor, talking about a truck full of ballots disappearing in PA: https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1333875814585282567

Summary of Morgan's testimony from the Washington Examiner :

> In the most extraordinary report, a U.S. Postal Service contractor said his trailer full of 144,000-288,000 completed mail-in ballots, which he drove between New York and Pennsylvania, disappeared after he delivered it to a Lancaster, Pennsylvania, depot.


Alisa at 6:30 PM on December 1, 2020 | #18919 | reply | quote

Trump: This may be the most important speech I've ever made.... (Dec 2, 2020) †:

> I don’t mind if I lose an election, but I want to lose an election fair and square. What I don’t want to do is have it stolen from the American people. That’s what we’re fighting for.

In this video from earlier today, Trump talks about evidence of election fraud, the kind of vote audit we need now (e.g., signature verification is a must), and how to ensure voter integrity in the future. He has some catchy ways of explaining what happened, e.g. "You could sign your name as Santa Claus" in Nevada and it would be accepted, because they had their signature verification machines set at the lowest level.

unofficial transcript (I didn't check it)


Alisa at 8:56 PM on December 2, 2020 | #18939 | reply | quote

2020-12-02 MI election fraud hearing

Some really damning testimony in today's election fraud hearings in Michigan. Multiple witnesses saying the people operating the vote tabulating machines would scan the same batch of ballots multiple times, e.g., the witness starting at 7:36 pm ET and the pair of witnesses (they testified together) starting at 8:08 pm ET.

Some other highlights:

- 8:14 pm ET: Indian woman says she was a watcher in Detroit during the tabulation. She was trained both by the GOP and by some "voter integrity center" (?, not an exact quote). When she wore her GOP badge the other workers immediately started agitating, telling her to step 6 feet away, and threatening her with removal. She came back later with her non-partisan badge from the voter integrity center and everyone was very nice no matter how close she got, because they thought she was a Dem (due to being Indian and woman).

- 8:18 pm ET: Guy witnessed multiple occasions of theft of duplicate ballots at the TCS center where ballots were being processed.

- 8:21 pm ET: There was nothing done about challenged ballots, and no recording made. He witnessed people filling in Democrat straight ticket when it wasn't. He witnessed them making duplicates of duplicates and feeding them through the machines (apparently). He asked why, and was told "unknown reason". This witness also says the rescanned the same ballots multiple times.

- 8:23 pm ET: He left and wasn't allowed back in because of "covid capacity". He says, "Mind you, the entire room was slammed. It looked like the NY stock exchange on its busiest day. It was ... pure discrimination."

- 8:24 pm ET: Lady says mail-in ballots were in sequence. "2222 cannot have 2223 after it" because they were mailed in (which should randomize things). She asked supervisor, and there was not even a date on the envelopes. It said Nov-0-2020 (yes, zero). She asked about it and they said, you're not letting us do our job, you're disturbing us. The sequenced ballots were all from the same area, signature were all alike. None of the voters on those sequenced mail-in ballots matched anyone in the poll book or in the electronic system. They had to be entered manually.

- 8:32 pm ET: Guy talks about problems with challenging: "I challenge you for filling in the Democrat straight ticket. Can I challenge that?" "No, that's not a challenge [and they push it straight through]"

- 8:39 pm ET: "I was responsible for standing in the middle of the room by the duplicate table. An employee would come up to the table and need a duplicate ballot, say there was a coffee stain on the ballot. They would grab a ballot, and my responsibility was to follow them to their table, to be their challenger, to observe over it. The duplicate theft started at the beginning of the night, roughly 10 pm. They would grab 3-4. The number I saw in the first shift, over half a dozen. Second shift, roughly the same. But you also have to consider that the third shift from 6am to 2pm the next day, and also the 1am shift, the table was guarded less, and we have less people [watching], so there's more opportunity for theft."

- 8:50 pm ET: Colonel says there were 6 MI precincts with over 120% turnout.

- 8:56 pm ET: 17,327 MI voters also had a corresponding obituary.

- 9:18 pm ET: SGO/Smartmatic/Dominion share a physical address at a small building in Barbados. "[Dominion] is designed to be inaccurate.... If an individual or a team of individual had a malign purpose, this would be the tool that I would want to use."

- 9:34 pm ET: Chair of Wayne County Board of Canvassers says when they were "canvassing" ballots, the total number of votes wasn't matching up with the voter rolls. She says someone dropped off a huge container of new voter rolls right before certification, which made most of them match. She says, "We did not get a corrected statement of voters until 13 days after the election." That seems sketchy.


Alisa at 9:36 PM on December 2, 2020 | #18941 | reply | quote

Veritas has been recording at CNN and releasing a bunch of tapes which show CNN leaders choose a narrative and tell people what to cover and not cover, and what political positions to take. CNN isn't objective. They aren't trying to figure out what the facts are. They are trying to figure out what to say to accomplish their political goals. Internally, they are openly, explicitly run this way, though they lie to the public about what they are (which IMO is false advertising, fraud, and lawsuit worthy). CNN is a propaganda org.

Here's discussion of this on Hannity:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l0TK87kIWRM


curi at 12:14 PM on December 3, 2020 | #18948 | reply | quote

https://twitter.com/TeamTrump/status/1334569329334083586?s=20

> WATCH: Video footage from Georgia shows suitcases filled with ballots pulled from under a table AFTER supervisors told poll workers to leave room and 4 people stayed behind to keep counting votes


Alisa at 8:36 PM on December 3, 2020 | #18951 | reply | quote

#18951 Longer video of GA suitcases full of ballots, makes it look even worse. JustinCEO writes:

> you see that they did a fake wind-down while the election observers were still there and waited till the coast was clear before doing their suitcases-full-of ballots shenanigans


Alisa at 8:38 PM on December 3, 2020 | #18952 | reply | quote

Pallets Full of Ballots (song)

Pallets Full Of Ballots”: Voter’s Song About Democrats Stealing Election Goes Viral (Nov 8, 2020):

> A catchy song about the Democrats’ election fraud by concerned voter Austin Forman has gone viral as votes continue to be counted in several battleground states.

> The song, called “Pallets Full Of Ballots”, has amassed nearly a quarter million views on Twitter and over 150,000 on YouTube in just a few days.

Pretty catchy song. The article gives the lyrics.


Alisa at 8:42 PM on December 3, 2020 | #18953 | reply | quote

#18952 Careful with that GA video. May not be how it appears:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gVD3W5QimD4

The video is a good example of how evidence can be consistent with an idea (fraud) and also consistent with a contradictory idea (normal procedure).


Anonymous at 1:12 PM on December 4, 2020 | #18957 | reply | quote

#18957 Can you provide a short summary which explains how the video of pulling ballots out from under a table after getting rid of the Republican observers and media is consistent with normal procedure? I don't want to watch an hour video to find out what the main idea is.


curi at 3:21 PM on December 4, 2020 | #18958 | reply | quote

> Can you provide a short summary which explains how the video of pulling ballots out from under a table after getting rid of the Republican observers and media is consistent with normal procedure?

Summary: It never happened that Republican observers and media were told to go home. The people told to go home were the envelope cutters ... they had done their job. The witness misinterpreted what they heard when people were told to go home. Can you tell who was told to go home from the video? The suitcases were standard issue wheelie containers for ballots. They were stored under the table because where else are you going to store them in that kind of situation? In an ailse? When would you take them out? When you need them.

See more on the video from about 4:15 mins to about 16:00 mins.


Anonymous at 3:56 PM on December 4, 2020 | #18959 | reply | quote

> Every time another small business goes under, Scott gets richer from her Amazon shares.

From: https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/12/woke-housewives-silicon-valley-daniel-greenfield/

That's kind of in the same vein as "Pharmaceutical companies profit from people getting sick." Pharma companies don't actually make money from people getting sick but from providing people medicine that helps alleviate the sickness.

Likewise, Amazon makes money (and makes Amazon's shareholders money) by providing customers value, not by ruining small businesses. Small businesses that can't compete with Amazon may get pushed out. OTOH, lots of small businesses rely on and use Amazon for their business.

I don't like the woke people Greenfield is criticizing in the article. That said, the bit I quoted seemed like a nasty bit of anti-capitalism worthy of some criticism.


Anonymous at 6:26 PM on December 4, 2020 | #18961 | reply | quote

#18959

> It never happened that Republican observers and media were told to go home. The people told to go home were the envelope cutters ... they had done their job. The witness misinterpreted what they heard when people were told to go home.

On Nov 3, 2020, at 11:34 PM Eastern, ABC News Politics (@ABCPolitics, a verified account with almost 1 million followers) tweeted:

> NEW: The election department sent the ballot counters at the State Farm Arena in Atlanta home at 10:30 p.m., Regina Waller, the Fulton County public affairs manager for elections, tells ABC News.


Anonymous at 9:16 PM on December 4, 2020 | #18962 | reply | quote

#18962

On the other hand:

"Fulton County Elections Director Richard Barron refuted those claims on Friday, saying in a public meeting that no observers were ever told to leave the facility."

https://ca.news.yahoo.com/surveillance-tape-breeds-false-fraud-231314467.html


Anonymous at 11:56 PM on December 4, 2020 | #18963 | reply | quote

#18963 An article like that is basically an appeal to authority. Some people said everything is fine. It doesn't present evidence and it doesn't go through and address specific claims. E.g. my understanding is there are *sworn affidavits* relating to this which claim some problems. The article ignores[1] their existence rather than quoting what they say and providing a convincing rebuttal along with a full explanation of what happened.

More broadly, you haven't requested a serious debate to a conclusion and aren't visibly putting in much effort. I don't think hit-and-running a few left-wing links is going to convince any of the people here who are paying attention to the news or otherwise be productive.

You haven't stated any goals for your comments here, haven't picked even a single-thread persistent identity, haven't talked about any background knowledge or expertise you have, haven't shared what perspective or skillset you're coming from, and are not taking steps to give people talking with you some sort of reasonable expectation that you will provide value to them.

This is common. So far you're failing to differentiate yourself from all the other anonymous people who can link a few mainstream media sources and don't have anything useful to contribute.

I'm telling you the problems, from my pov, so that you have the opportunity to approach the conversation differently and solve them, if you want to and are able to. Another option is you could also potentially ask for help dealing with them instead of trying to correct people.

What you're doing so far is inadequate to interest me much or change my mind. This is me reaching out and explaining what's going on from my pov instead of just ignoring you as many other people would do, because I think this kind of response is important to rationality. (Another thing people commonly do is continue to some extent while trying to ignore all the methodological problems from their pov, until they run out of patience and abruptly either end the conversation or lash out. Such actions are bad for error correction regardless of who is making the errors! Whereas my approach potentially allows progress regardless of who is and isn't in error.)

[1] I think based on skimming and key word search.


curi at 12:13 AM on December 5, 2020 | #18964 | reply | quote

#18964

So there is no misunderstanding, I am not arguing that voter fraud did not occur. I don't know if it did or didn't. I don't think the evidence, as it has been presented, is clear either way. My goal was to warn about jumping to conclusions from the video.


Anonymous at 12:43 AM on December 5, 2020 | #18965 | reply | quote

#18965 The conclusions I reached (previously for other reasons as well) are that thorough investigation is desperately needed and the people who certified the votes are dishonest.

It's unclear if anyone needed your warning and if they were tribalist enough they did need the warning there is basically zero chance that linking two left wing sources would change their mind. You cannot convince people who have already read plenty of MSM/leftist stuff to change their mind by showing them a couple more similar things. You aren't providing new info. They already know that certain groups disagree with them and communicate about it.


curi at 12:47 AM on December 5, 2020 | #18966 | reply | quote

#18966 Agree about a thorough investigation and that people who certified the votes are dishonest.

The comment I initially responded to (#18952) was:

> Longer video of GA suitcases full of ballots, makes it look even worse. JustinCEO writes:

>> you see that they did a fake wind-down while the election observers were still there and waited till the coast was clear before doing their suitcases-full-of ballots shenanigans

At face value, it seemed to me this required a warning. If I was wrong about that, OK.

I didn't know Scott Adams is a left-wing source. He is a Trump supporter yes?


Anonymous at 2:37 AM on December 5, 2020 | #18967 | reply | quote

Scott Adams agrees that election fraud happened but not in the GA video instance. He is followed by many people on the right, is a Trump supporter, but says he is to the left of Bernie Sanders. Has written some books on thinking and philosophy. Don't know if these are any good.


Anonymous at 3:35 AM on December 5, 2020 | #18968 | reply | quote

I'm not very familiar with Scott Adams but him saying some sorta pro Trump thing in the past does ring a bell. I watched a little of the video before commenting and got a leftist tribalist impression. I went back and watched a few seconds and he's saying what sounds to me like idiotic leftist talking points that totally ignore/deny reality and don't attempt to truth seek, and are so low quality it's hard to imagine someone unbiased finding them persuasive. Or he's really ignorant – which would also explain believing that stuff – and dishonestly presenting himself as a knowledgeable, informed person.

He says no one was told to leave and it's just a misunderstanding. His answer to sworn testimony is basically "the Republicans were probably just confused". Maybe. That's not impossible. But why would you think that? How is that a debunking? Why is that the right conclusion to draw? You can throw maybes at anything if you want to make excuses for it but using a highly condescending tone (in what strikes me as a typical leftist cultural style) and saying "maybe" is not an argument to reach a particular conclusion.

He goes on to say (around 13m) that keeping ballots under the table is normal. No it's not. That is not a secure place. Ballots are supposed to have chain of custody and not just be left lying around where anyone could grab them or tamper with them. And the other ballots were not being stored under the other tables. He doesn't address this at all.

Did he actually listen to some of the hearings? I get the impression that he has less information than I do, but is presenting himself as knowing what he's talking about.

I watched some hearings so I heard about things like procedures for keeping ballots safe that were supposed to be used. You don't just leave them lying around undersupervised. That is not ok. Similarly if you watched the hearing related to this video people were asking about where other ballots were coming from and why these particular ones were treated differently. SA doesn't try to address that. My impression is he hasn't actually watched the hearing with the presentation of the video, he just watched some clip of the video posted elsewhere and then is acting like an expert thought leader without warning people he isn't even paying attention to the available info.

Around 20min he says he's pro Trump/fraud biased, is very condescending to his audience more, and also says when he first saw the video he laughed out loud and assumed fake. He also admits the video could easily be bad and he hasn't refuted it – but then says the video is fake in his YT title and says he debunked it in his YT description.

He's vague about why his first reaction was to disbelieve the video but he seems to suggest it's because he doesn't expect smoking gun evidence to exist. So his reaction is all about his general calibration to reality and sense of life. I think he's a leftist who managed to use conscious thought to override his leftism in some places, but he still has a lot of leftist intuitions.

I Binged to try to check his history to see if he's from the left (if not I'm wrong in some way) and saw this:

https://www.bizpacreview.com/2020/10/02/scott-adams-disavows-trump-in-emotional-rant-quickly-reverses-course-after-tsunami-of-dem-hate-979658/

> Scott Adams disavows Trump in emotional rant, quickly reverses course after tsunami of Dem hate

Oct 2, 2020

That fits someone with leftist intuitions just below the surface.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Adams#Politics

> Adams has often commented on political matters, although in 2016 he wrote on his blog "I don't vote and I am not a member of a political party."[36] In 2007, he suggested that Michael Bloomberg would make a good presidential candidate.[37] Before the 2008 presidential election he said, "On social issues, I lean Libertarian, minus the crazy stuff",[38] but said in December 2011 that, if he were president, he would do whatever Bill Clinton advised him to do because that "would lead to policies that are a sensible middle ground".[39] On October 17, 2012, he wrote "while I don't agree with Romney's positions on most topics, I'm endorsing him for president".[40] In a blog post from September 2017, Adams described himself as being "left of Bernie, but with a preference for plans that can work".[41]

Bloomberg, Bill Clinton, left of Bernie in spirit (but wants something practical), some sort of partial libertarian but also thinks some libertarianism is crazy. Yeah this guy is a socialist sympathizer with leftist intuitions, and apparently he sometimes he uses conscious reason to get some things right, and that's great, but making excuses for the GA fraud video is not one of those times. His vibe and style, combined with the bad content in this case, are not going to change the minds of any right tribalists. I do appreciate that he's apparently trying to think for himself some, with mixed results, instead of just being a total puppet.


curi at 11:46 AM on December 5, 2020 | #18969 | reply | quote

> He also admits the video could easily be bad

I mean show genuine bad, fraudulent events. Not be bad like a shitty video.


curi at 11:48 AM on December 5, 2020 | #18970 | reply | quote

Thanks for that review of Scott Adams. I see that Trump has retweeted him on a number of occasions and they have met in person. So seems to carry a bit of influence with the president.

As of today, he has done 1208 daily podcasts of about 1 hour on politics etc. I'm kinda impressed he has done so many. I see that he often responds to questions live on air. That seems good.

Just listening to his latest where he talks more about the GA fraud video.


Anonymous at 12:33 PM on December 5, 2020 | #18971 | reply | quote

I currently like and recommend David Horowitz and Tim Pool (who are both from the left but more thoroughly converted than Adams, especially Horowitz who converted long ago). That's quite a bit of material from Adams but Pool actually does way more and so do a lot of Twitch streamers. I've just been watching stuff from https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCG749Dj4V2fKa143f8sE60Q but Pools has other channels too. The stuff I watch is more of highlight/summary type videos rather than e.g. his podcast which is less information dense and has other people on it.

Other than that I'm finding actual hearings interesting to watch and more useful than general news coverage stuff. I also watch some Veritas stuff. You can find hearings at https://www.youtube.com/c/RightSideBroadcastingNetwork/videos (sometimes some ppl from that network give some commentary before or after, and it's not great, but the actual hearings are just raw footage). The three hearings I watched so far at linked at http://curi.us/2379-curis-microblogging#18940 and the next comment

the GA hearing presents the ballots from table video first. and then the lady at 2h 59m stood out to me, esp towards the end when she's talking about chain of custody and the supervisor who wanted to skip using locks. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e35f4pUIYOg a lot of the witnesses before that are really notable IMO too. some of the later ones are not. i think maybe the Trump lawyers picked the earlier witnesses and later they let in some other ppl who wanted to talk.


curi at 12:56 PM on December 5, 2020 | #18972 | reply | quote

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1srnyUIZR74

Wow I just skimmed a bit of Adams #1208 and he says his base expectation, in advance, was that 95% of the fraud claims would be false.

I do not agree.

There's massive pressure not to come forward. People get harassed by antifa for speaking up. People get fired. Witnesses in hearings have talked about having to move to a new home, get a new phone number, etc., due to major harassment. And how they can no longer get work. And how they lost some of their not only friends but family. One lady talked about that a bunch. Most don't get that off topic but it's a problem for others. Another one who had some sort of official Republican position mentioned substantial harassment from antifa.

Anyway in that kinda context, where reporting problems is so suppressed, I would not expect 95% of people reporting problems to be lying in order to try to help Trump but at such personal risk/cost.

Also I don't think 5% truth rate makes any sense with sworn affidavits where you can get in serious trouble for lying. And you aren't going to be protected b/c the ppl deciding whether to prosecute are a bunch of deep state leftists (and some deep state establishment republicans mixed in). Even if Trump wins you very well might still get prosecuted if you lied and maybe even if you told the truth. If Biden wins your chances of prosecution go up even more.

Even with leftists saying anti-trump stuff and expecting the govt to have their back a fair amount, i still wouldn't expect even close to 95% lying in sworn affidavits (Adams didn't specify these though and I think had in mind just general stuff that ppl tweet or claim anywhere, so yeah if you go find news on facebook instead of from hearings then i guess you'll run into a MUCH higher fake news rate – hard for me to say how high since i don't use FB. otoh if u look at stuff from actual news sources, even biased right wing ones, i don't think they are gonna be wrong 95% of the time or even report stuff as maybes and 95% of those turn out wrong).

again i see here a major sense of life, pov and calibration difference about what kinda world we think we live in. or to some extent what kinda news sources we use and how much bullshit they include.

i think the suppression is so strong that tons of true claims are being suppressed, and that same suppression also works on a ton of false claims and keeps the false rate a lot lower than Adams thinks.

Adams presents it like maybe a few major claims will turn out true, and that's a huge deal and enough to change the election, but most will be false. it sounds kinda like he doesn't think fraud was rampant. some fraud happened and it mattered, but he doesn't think there were tons of small frauds all over the place to report. whereas i think there was ABSOLUTELY TONS of small cheating, in addition to a few big cases, which makes it so that tons of ppl can report problems and be right.


curi at 1:09 PM on December 5, 2020 | #18973 | reply | quote

> Adams presents it like maybe a few major claims will turn out true, and that's a huge deal and enough to change the election, but most will be false. it sounds kinda like he doesn't think fraud was rampant. some fraud happened and it mattered, but he doesn't think there were tons of small frauds all over the place to report. whereas i think there was ABSOLUTELY TONS of small cheating, in addition to a few big cases, which makes it so that tons of ppl can report problems and be right.

That's not his position. Eg,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gqQtL3pYYRQ

See from 10:25mins on. He thinks fraud was rampant and that there were lots of small packet size instances of fraud. According to him, this was key.


Anonymous at 2:02 PM on December 5, 2020 | #18974 | reply | quote

#18974 Did you watch the part of the video I'm talking about and think I misunderstood what he said/meant about the 95% of fraud/problem claims will turn out to be false? Or are you just saying he said other things elsewhere?

I didn't watch the whole video. I missed context before and after. So I could have gotten something wrong. But him saying something different in another video is a different kinda issue.


curi at 2:28 PM on December 5, 2020 | #18975 | reply | quote

#18975

Yes, I watched the part of the video you mentioned. I don't think you misunderstood the part that 95% of fraud/problem claims will turn out to be false. Like you, I think he was talking generally and not about sworn affidavits in particular. But I don't think he was saying that fraud was not rampant and that is clarified in the other video from a few days ago I linked. He thinks Dems had motive and many opportunities to commit fraud. They needed to stop "orange-Hitler" and were prepared to use any means necessary. So it would be very strange if large numbers people with that impression of Trump did not try to commit fraud and for there not to be lots of it. He thinks that the strategy was many small "packet" frauds and for professional disinformation specialists hired by Dems to inject a lot of disinformation, including fake news about frauds. The fake news serves the purpose of making people disbelieve real fraud claims and the small size of each fraud makes people think the fraud was not significant enough to affect the election should it be detected.

Does disinformation/fake-news and "confirmation bias" mean that 95% of fraud/problem claims will turn out to be false even though fraud is rampant? I don't know. I think your point that people are really putting it out there when they make a fraud claim is a good one.


Anonymous at 8:09 PM on December 5, 2020 | #18976 | reply | quote

Oh - Adams thinks people preoccupied with fraud allegations are getting misdirected. He says the real problem is that bullies chased out witnesses in the key cities and that is enough to invalidate the election, fraud or no fraud. Good point I think.


Anonymous at 8:50 PM on December 5, 2020 | #18977 | reply | quote

#18977 Chasing out witnesses (or making them sit in the corner where they can't see much) is a type of fraud because 1) it's against the rules and 2) they aren't openly admitting they did it and broke the election rules.

There are more people who are fraud-enablers than fraudsters. A lot of people hate Republicans and did whatever tribalist stuff they could to hassle Republican observers, limit their access, mistreat them, etc., but did not do any vote fraud themselves. But this created tons of opportunities for other people to do vote fraud. Creating vote fraud opportunities by mistreating observers is being an accomplice to fraud.

I agree that the enablers and their actions alone should be enough to delegitimize the election results. If you set things up to allow fraud, it's not a valid election whether or not the fraud actually happens because 1) you've broken the rules and 2) you can't be adequately confident the results are accurate.


curi at 9:04 PM on December 5, 2020 | #18978 | reply | quote

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_72rtHyIehM

Trump speech starts around 3h52m. I watched some:

he says the wall is great and almost done. i think i would have heard if he actually built it

he gave us the biggest tax cut in history of country. i'm very doubtful


curi at 1:06 AM on December 6, 2020 | #18979 | reply | quote

Kiwi Farms to shut down if Section 230 is repealed

Excerpts from a well-reasoned post by the owner/operator of Kiwi Farms about how he will shut down the site if Section 230 of the CDA is repealed:

> President Donald Trump has announced he will not renew a crucial spending bill without a total repeal of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. This gesture is receiving some bipartisan support and I now believe that he will succeed in his endeavor. President-Elect Joe Biden has stated identical intentions. I do not expect he will meet opposition from within the Government on this issue.

> I have explained in the past that if Section 230 of the CDA were repealed in full I would time the closure of the site with it being signed into law. This was not a joke.

[snip]

> Some of you have called my rhetoric regarding Section 230 hyperbolic. It is not. I am currently being sued in two federal districts. I have been quoted by attorneys at $7500 to file three motions and have just one of them dealt with. That is with a Section 230 defense, a completely spurious lawsuit by a known vexatious litigant, and the assumption all filings are ruled on favorably. It will be thousands more to deal with the other. Without Section 230, I would be forced to fall back on more conventional (and time consuming, and therefore expensive) legal crafting, which argues the merits of each claim instead of just relying on the absolute defense that Section 230 has provided all of the Internet for almost 25 years: that this website is a platform, and claims which are not my words are not my problem.

> The site is very hard to run. It is very expensive to run. Without the incredible, sustained generosity of its users, it would be impossible to run. However, without Section 230, mere generosity is not enough. The site would necessarily be profitable to deal with lawsuits over user generated content (and, without 230, there would be a lot of them). To make this site profitable, I would need to run ads and otherwise make it acceptable for third-parties to associate with. This would require robbing the site of everything that currently makes it a unique place. I refuse to do this.

:(

> Q. Why not just host in [this foreign country]?

> A. I am American. The process of naturalizing and renouncing, to become truly judgement proof, is years long and expensive. Even if the server / company is in Judgementproofistan, I will not be, and even if I was, I am American. I cannot be expected to live my life like Andrew Anglin for a gossip website.


Anonymous at 1:36 AM on December 6, 2020 | #18980 | reply | quote

InfoWars is pretty right-wing. They routinely get called white supremacists. They have used authorize.net plus some merchant processor (I don't know which) to process credit cards in their online store since at least 2018.

If someone wants to run a site with content that groups with power in the U.S. disapprove of, as long as the site's content isn't edgier than InfoWars, a workable solution may exist. For now, at least.


Anonymous at 1:45 AM on December 6, 2020 | #18981 | reply | quote

#18969 Scott Adams initially called the Covington kids "assholes". Later, he tweeted an apology, saying that he got fooled by CNN. When I replied saying that wasn't good enough and he should explain what he'd do differently in the future (meaning: to not get fooled by CNN), he blocked me. Here's how the discussion went.

Adams tweeted :

> Turns out that the Covington Catholic kids were the good guys in the story. Consider this my public apology for assuming otherwise in my Periscope yesterday. I got fooled by @CNN fake news. That's 100% on me.

"danfromdc" replied:

> Surprised your instincts are so bad this was obvious from get go

Adams replied to danfromdc:

> Sounds like confirmation bias on your side if X looked like Y to you from the jump.

danfromdc replied to Adams:

> That’s fine but anytime a narrative fits exactly what the msm is looking for ie “white kids mob noble Indian” 98% of the time it’s bogus.. @Steve_Sailer often writes about the “hunt for the great white defendant” pulled from Tom Wolfe of course. It’s a very interesting read.

I replied to danfromdc:

> [See-no-evil monkey emoji] @scottadamssays trusted the fake news media‘s “reporting” on a controversial subject without doing his due diligence. That was a serious error. Good for him for acknowledging it, but I think it would be better if he’d explain what he plans to do differently in the future.

One thing that's kinda strange is that I can't find my tweet via a Twitter search for some of its main keywords: controversial mistake future good explain. Being shadowbanned might explain that, but I'm not yet shadowbanned on Twitter according to shadowban.eu.

Anyway, Adams replied to me:

> I plan to block everyone who complains about my apology.

Then he blocked me.


Khaaan at 2:22 AM on December 6, 2020 | #18982 | reply | quote

#18982 Speaking of people who initially aligned themselves with the leftstream media's lies about the Covington kids, Ben Shapiro retweeted someone who wrote: "I stand with #NathanPhillips, Elder of the Omaha Nation" (retyped from an image of the now-deleted tweet).


Khaaan at 2:28 AM on December 6, 2020 | #18983 | reply | quote

#18979 I listened to all of Trump's 2020-12-05 rally in GA and watched some as well. Some parts I found notable:

8:02 PM ET: Another short, memorable description by Trump: "95% of the media, you could have [Hunter Biden] be Jesse James, and walk into the bank, hold 'em up, give me all your money, and they won't talk about it". Trump praises Hannity, Ingraham, and Tucker. The crowd cheers briefly. Trump then praises Newsmax and OAN, and the crowd cheers significantly louder and longer.

8:03 PM ET: Trump refers to two people, who are his great friends, who suggest that people should boycott the election, which isn't exactly what they said. What actually happened was, a few days ago, Lin Wood (and maybe Sidney Powell?) told GA voters that Loeffler and Perdue should earn their support by demanding that Governor Brian Kemp call for for a recount with signatures. The next day, Kemp did just that. (Now it's just up to GA's RINO Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to order it.)

8:26 PM ET: Loeffler praises Trump, but all in the past tense, as if he isn't currently doing the good things she talks about and won't be doing them in the future:

> President Trump, you have made America great again because you put America first. Thank you! President Trump created the strongest economy because he put the American worker first. He stood up. That's right. He stood up to the cancel culture, China, big tech, the fake news. We are standing strong for President Trump because he fought for us every single day. Every day. Georgia. We need you to vote January 5. If you're our voice on January 5, we'll be your voice for years. We have to make sure that we keep America strong.

If this was supposed to generate massive applause, it fell pretty flat. It flat-out ignores the main concern of the audience, which is to have Trump inaugurated in 2021.

As Loeffler hands the mic to Perdue, the crowd starts loudly chanting "Fight for Trump!" Perdue starts his sentence three different times, trying to speak over the chant, before finally giving up and just saying it. He ends by telling Trump, "We're going to fight to win those two seats and make sure you get a fair and square deal in the state of Georgia". This last part of that sentence elicits a loud cheer from the crowd.

8:35 PM ET: Great video about fraud in the 2020 election. Starts with a clip from *Stinchfield* on Newsmax talking about the suitcase video (original Stinchfield clip):

- Fulton County Elections Chief Richard Barron gives disjointed, apparently confused, factually incorrect responses to questions about the suitcase video, then admits that he never even watched it! The video of Barron is apparently from a Fulton County GA meeting on 2020-12-04 to re-certify the election results.

- Suitcase video shows a woman appearing to scan a batch of ballots multiple times through the machine.

- Transitions to an OAN video with mostly older news about other states.

8:21 PM ET: Scary video portraying what will happen to the country if the Left takes over all three branches of government.

(can't find timestamp): Trump, almost in passing, says he doesn't want to have to run in 2024.


Alisa at 4:04 AM on December 6, 2020 | #18984 | reply | quote

#1898

> (can't find timestamp): Trump, almost in passing, says he doesn't want to have to run in 2024.

Found it with the help of Breitbart:

> 8:50 PM: Trump asks supporters to vote in the runoff to show the radical left that they don’t surrender. Trump talks about winning back the White House in 2024 and says hopefully he won’t have to be a candidate again.

Here's my transcript of what Trump said about 2024, plus a bit leading up to it. It starts at 8:49 PM ET:

>> And right now we have to get out to vote for David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler, to show the Radical Left that we will never surrender. We will only win. We're going to win. We always win. Somehow, we find a way to win.* Now is not the time to retreat. Now is the time to fight harder than ever before.

>> So don't listen to my friends! Just go out. And you know what they're saying, they're saying, "We want you to fix the system." We're going to fix the system. But the system will be fixed when these people get in. They'll get in, and we'll fix the system. Because we're all victims. Everybody here, all these thousands of people here tonight. They're all victims, every one of you.

>> The next great victory for our movement begins right here on January 5. And then we are going to win back the White House. We're going to win it back. And we're going to take back the House in 2022. And then in 2024 – and hopefully, I won't have to be a candidate – we're going to win back the White House again. A friend of mine said, "Oh, don't worry about it, sir, you're way up in the polls. You'll win in 2024." I said, "I don't want to wait 'til 2024, I want to go back 3 weeks."


Alisa at 5:16 AM on December 6, 2020 | #18985 | reply | quote

#18985

> Somehow, we find a way to win.*

The asterisk was a typo.

To put something interesting in here to go along with the typo correction, here's something curi said on discord a few days ago:

> sounds like if sweeping election security changes are made, republicans might . > start winning by 5 points compared to status quo ante

> it turns out the country isn't split 50/50

I replied by linking a related tweet by @IsraelAnderson:

> America has been gaslit by the Democrats.

> What we will discover once we clean up the election fraud, is that America is a hell of a lot redder than voting suggests.

> In fair elections, Democrats will lose their power over the country.


Alisa at 5:46 AM on December 6, 2020 | #18986 | reply | quote

#18982 Ugh re the Twitter behavior. Reminds me of Taleb. And ugh re the leftist intuitions re Covington Catholic event.

#18983 Shapiro is awful. I don't know how more people don't see it. He previously tweeted against Roseanne (and, in a comparable case, in favor of a leftist) and did something to alienate or betray David Horowitz (Shapiro used to run Truth Revolt for Horowitz).


curi at 11:15 AM on December 6, 2020 | #18987 | reply | quote

https://thepostmillennial.com/patrick-gaspard-george-soros-open-society-foundations-joe-biden

"Soros' right-hand Patrick Gaspard may join Biden administration after stepping down as president of George Soros' Open Society Foundations"


Anonymous at 12:35 PM on December 6, 2020 | #18988 | reply | quote

There will be no "Biden administration" Americans of principle will not and cannot allow that to happen.


Anonymous at 11:07 PM on December 6, 2020 | #19012 | reply | quote

Yes, it is war. And what happens in the next month will determine whether it becomes a hot war or not.


Anonymous at 10:38 AM on December 7, 2020 | #19021 | reply | quote

People here should be gaming out what is going to happen come January and prepare accordingly. This is deadly serious and if you are not treating current events with utmost importance you will be caught out.


Anonymous at 3:37 PM on December 7, 2020 | #19041 | reply | quote

#19041 What sorta stuff do you have in mind? Getting out of the big cities? Food prep? Guns/defense?


Anonymous at 3:39 PM on December 7, 2020 | #19042 | reply | quote

#18963

https://twitter.com/kanekoathegreat/status/1336092490718310400?s=21 :

> "I talked with a spokeswoman from Fulton County & she told me absentee vote processing has been paused for tonight. At 1030, workers at State Farm Arena... were sent home for the evening." [tweet has embedded news video from the night of Nov. 3]


Anonymous at 8:11 PM on December 7, 2020 | #19050 | reply | quote

Fox News’ Murdochs Backed Clinton Foundation, Hillary Clinton

> Soros, apparently, is not the only topic of discussion barred from Fox’s airwaves. Long-time Fox contributor Dick Morris stated that “Fox always tried to tell [him] never to criticize China when you’re on our air. [He couldn’t] believe the censorship that goes on [there].”


curi at 8:48 PM on December 7, 2020 | #19051 | reply | quote

#19041 What's insidious is "gaming out what is going to happen" is what the left is counting on. Especially the system (courts + electors + relatively obscure constitutional processes for selecting the president).

- If the system declares Biden the winner, Republicans will insist the election was stolen. They'll engage in some actually peaceful protests in cities around the swearing in. Demand hearings and investigations and reforms which will mostly not happen and mostly be ignored. Maybe some isolated standoffs with the Federal Gov't in rural areas or domestic terror incidents over the duration of Biden's term. But really, no major violence happens for the vast majority of Americans (for now) because Republicans haven't been emotionally preparing to disown the system for decades like Democrats have. Life goes on approximately as it is (for now). If the left initiates something major (new states, court packing) that could change but *just* inaugurating Joe Biden isn't going to touch off major violence.

- If the system declares Trump the winner, Democrats will insist the election was stolen, Trump is Hitler and must be stopped outside the system because the system has failed. Mobs will mobilize in the cities to loot or burn property and assault, rape, or kill people perceived as opposition or Trump supporters. This will be relatively widespread and go on for long enough to disrupt supplies and the lives of people not caught up directly. Depending on the response (both official and unofficial) it could escalate to the level of a running small arms conflict. Really quite bad and expect it to start when and if it looks reasonably likely the system will declare Trump the winner - it won't wait for inauguration day in January.

This puts pressure on people within the system to find a way to declare Biden the winner, because the easily predictable outcome of Trump being declared the winner is lots of violence and disruption.

Leaving the country is still hard and generally ill-advised due to COVID. Keep your supplies topped up - be able to go at least a month with nothing delivered or picked up. If you live in a city and you're not in a house that is hardened against rioters and arsonists you should consider moving or up-armoring, but why didn't you do that after the first round of riots made it clear the kind of threat that existed? Likewise you should have guns and ammo already - if not why not?

If the system declares Trump the winner and things get bad where you are and stay bad for longer than you can hold out, you'll need a bug-out plan. Friends or family in rural areas are your best bet. Lacking those, hopefully you have money to become a "tourist" someplace out of the way for a while. Procuring supplies could be a problem in any case. Personally if things get bad enough for long enough I will leave the country, but I've prepared to do that in ways most people haven't.


Andy Dufresne at 7:10 AM on December 8, 2020 | #19056 | reply | quote

#19041 Another factor to consider is weather. It's harder to get people to do stuff outside when it's cold, and that includes riots. Most of the country is cold now and will be for the next few months. That is a near term bright spot if the system declares Trump the winner.

So another possibility if Trump wins is relatively contained demonstrations and violence in the near term, followed by some perfunctory system-oriented actions like court cases or legislative initiatives by the Democrats. The nominal purpose of these will be to give the system one last chance to reverse the election and enact the "will of the people". The actual purpose will be to run out the clock until the weather gets warm again and more conducive to widespread riots. At that time, an excuse will be found to touch them off again.


Andy Dufresne at 8:25 AM on December 8, 2020 | #19058 | reply | quote

dictionary.com redefines 'court-packing' to fit Left's narrative

On 2020-12-09, @jd_graham_ tweeted:

> @Dictionarycom redefined the word sometime between Nov. 1 and Dec. 1, according to @waybackmachine.

Here's the old definition (archived on 2020-11-01):

> an unsuccessful attempt by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1937 to appoint up to six additional justices to the Supreme Court, which had invalidated a number of his New Deal laws.

And here's the new definition that was added (captured on 2020-12-01):

> the practice of changing the number or composition of judges on a court, making it more favorable to particular goals or ideologies, and typically involving an increase in the number of seats on the court:

> *Court packing can tip the balance of the Supreme Court toward the right or left*.

The old definition is still there, but it now has a tag of "U.S. History" in front.


Alisa at 7:48 AM on December 9, 2020 | #19109 | reply | quote

#19109 Article from December, 2020, showing how the Left promoted the new definition of 'court-packing', even before dictionary.com added it: https://legalinsurrection.com/2020/10/dems-and-media-redefine-court-packing-to-mean-opposite-of-what-it-really-means-to-help-biden-out-of-jam/


Alisa at 8:15 AM on December 9, 2020 | #19113 | reply | quote

The horrendous Dem rep from the recent Michigan election fraud hearing posted a Facebook Live video on Tuesday, December 12, 2020, threatening people who support President Trump.

https://dailycaller.com/2020/12/09/make-them-pay-michigan-democrat-state-rep-threatens-trump-supporters-cynthia-johnson/ :

> Michigan Democratic State Rep. Cynthia Johnson threatened President Donald Trump’s supporters in a Facebook live video Tuesday, saying it is a warning message to those who support the president.

> In the Facebook live video, Johnson said Trump supporters better be careful, calling on “soldiers” to “make them (Trump supporters) pay.”

> “So this is just a warning to you Trumpers. Be careful, walk lightly, we ain’t playing with you. Enough of the shenanigans. Enough is enough. And for those of you who are soldiers, you know how to do it. Do it right, be in order, make them pay,” Johnson says in the video.

> “I wish I could be talking to y’all in a private room, because, uh, I just wish I could, but we’re public so…,” Johnson also said in the video.


Anonymous at 9:52 AM on December 9, 2020 | #19115 | reply | quote

#19115 Reclaim the Net tweeted:

> This threat from Michigan Democratic State Representative Cynthia Johnson on Facebook Live is far worse than anything others have been banned from social media platforms for saying.

Reclaim the Net also says that Rep. Johnson has not been banned.


Anonymous at 10:21 AM on December 9, 2020 | #19116 | reply | quote

Anonymous at 3:05 PM on December 10, 2020 | #19124 | reply | quote

Hey curi, how about some thoughts on the current situation in America now that the Ellsworth Tooheys of this world have got us by the short and curlies? You're smart and should be helping give some direction in this.


Anonymous at 6:01 PM on December 11, 2020 | #19128 | reply | quote

#19128 yeah it sucks. SCOTUS just told Texas and ~18 other states to fuck off. https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2020/12/11/supreme-court-dismisses-texas-2020-election-challenge-alito-and-thomas-disagree/

did you see my latest newsletters? they had some election news. there's also active discussion in #fi-2 on discord. plus ppl post here.

i don't have a call to action for this. i hope someone with authority does something effective. i hope Trump still wins the election. there is space to write articles, make videos and stuff. but that is already being done by David Horowitz, Tim Pool, Veritas and others. i don't want to focus on political coverage. but if you have specific questions feel free to ask.

you may want to consider some prepper stuff and not living in the middle of a riot zone. stay home a lot, don't get covid, hopefully things will turn out OK.

i'm pretty busy and probably won't stream until next month.


curi at 6:11 PM on December 11, 2020 | #19129 | reply | quote

If Biden becomes Pres.

#19129 If the globalists/communists/hard left can steal this election, what's to stop them from implementing their agenda ASAP once Biden takes office? I'm concerned that once this group gets power, they will take steps that will make it very difficult to ever get America back to a "land of the free", e.g.:

- amnesty for ~30 million illegal aliens, affording a permanent (?) Dem majority in state and federal elections

- open borders and mass refugee migration here

- institutionalize election fraud even more than it is now

- two new Dem states, assuring a permanent (?) Dem majority in the Senate

- pack Supreme Court if necessary

Would it be wise to leave the country if Biden is elected? Is there anywhere else to go that won't fall in short order once the U.S. falls?

Maybe it'd make sense to try to live in a place with good, armed, patriotic Christian Americans. And make friends with them as best one can. Even if the institutions and elected officials are shit, maybe somehow something good can happen.


Prepper at 10:14 PM on December 11, 2020 | #19133 | reply | quote

#19133 This isn't a new problem. Obama was an anti-American disciple of Alinsky. David Horowitz says this is basically the long march through the institutions, as a strategy of getting power (rather than e.g. actions on the street), that started when the 60's radical joined the Democratic party. I don't think things are going to get abruptly much worse. It's been a major danger for a long time. There's a real possibility of a huge red wave after 4 years of Biden. The majority of Americans don't want him and Republicans did very well this election other than Trump (who did great in reality but was the victim of far more fraud than any other Republicans).

Sometimes some events happen fast but a lot of stuff is a gradual, slow process. There are probably still over 100 million Americans who would be on our side if they finally got around to getting some real news instead of being lied to by CNN/NYT/FB/Twitter/YT/Wikipedia/etc. More people are waking up. Some poll said enough people wouldn't have voted for Biden to change the election if they'd actually seen the scandal about Hunter Biden laptop. I don't think I'm following politics really closely atm but most people are such SUPER low info voters. But the worse things get the more they will notice. That's already happening and will keep happening.

> Would it be wise to leave the country if Biden is elected? Is there anywhere else to go that won't fall in short order once the U.S. falls?

My broad, general opinion is that if the U.S. falls civilization is fucked anyway. (Not permanently fucked, but I don't think the US is gonna fall and meanwhile, around the same time, some other good country will excel. Both because the US is a target and any other country doing really well can also be targeted, and also b/c if any other country was able to do great they would help the US instead of excelling alone.) If you have a good option (e.g. maybe japan, israel, australia, new zealand, canada – the UK is looking pretty bad atm but I'm not carefully following any of these) it might help for a few decades. Or not idk. There's also moving to a redder state and, if things get really bad, Alaska might still hold out a while.


curi at 10:27 PM on December 11, 2020 | #19134 | reply | quote

#19134 A major problem or opportunity (depending on how you look at it) is that leftist / authoritarian policy in the US is commonly obfuscated compared to what it is elsewhere. Straightforward leftism is usually a loser with the American public, so the left achieves its goals by hiding them here to a large degree.

I saw this repeatedly in comparing US to NZ. In actual practice the amount of leftist policy is not very different between the two countries. But the leftist policy in NZ is far more open and notorious than in the US.

The problem with the US left's subterfuge is it makes the impact of leftism even worse for most people. It makes the government harder to understand and deal with. A good example is health care. I would prefer an actually free, capitalist health care system. Neither the US or NZ has that.

The US has a byzantine mess of insurance companies, plans, subsidies, rules, government provision, billing and reimbursement, income thresholds, price controls, tax credits and deductions, workarounds, special programs, etc. to maintain the fiction of a largely free system of private actors with just some government "help" when the reality is the government controls almost everything - either because they are the ultimate payor or because they exercise substantial control by way of policy carrots and sticks.

In NZ they just outright say everybody gets a basic level of health care from the government for free. If you want more/better than the government's health care you can pay for health care privately, either as you need it or with a private insurance plan (both are widely available and far cheaper than in the US). If you can't afford it or don't want to pay it too bad, just use the government system.

If I can't have freedom, then in practice the NZ system is far more consumer friendly for all but a tiny minority of people with rare and severe health conditions. It's easy to navigate a system like NZ's, know what your costs will be, there's little paperwork, and your choices are not tied to ex: your age, if you make too much or too little income, and whether you're self-employed or subject to an employer's choice of insurance company golf partners.

IMO covert leftist meddling has made US health care worse for most people than (a particular type of) outright socialized medicine, while convincing them that the pain is caused by the market.

The opportunity in this situation is persuasion. The US public is still far more persuadable that ex: health care is a personal choice not a right, and government intervention makes it worse not better. NZ culture (and most other places AFAIK) has thoroughly internalized the left's idea of health care as a human right and government as its guarantor.


Andy Dufresne at 7:30 AM on December 12, 2020 | #19141 | reply | quote

Hewlett Packard is leaving California due to the business environment. Who's moving in?

https://www.kqed.org/news/11847782/thousands-of-homeless-people-were-placed-in-hotels-due-to-covid-19-now-many-are-homeless-again

> For those who have moved from Project Roomkey to more permanent housing, the program has been a lifeline.

> Jessica Ellis and her 8-year-old son, King, lost their apartment in June. They were living in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and the landlord raised their rent, she said. The apartment had bug infestations, the air conditioning stopped working for seven days during a heat spell, and the heat had stopped working during the previous winter.

> Jessica Ellis and her son King pose for a portrait on the back stairs of their apartment building on Nov. 15, 2020. (Photo by Beth LaBerge/KQED) (Beth LaBerge/KQED)

> Rather than fight the landlord over the rent increase, Ellis decided to leave. She wanted a fresh start.

> “I just didn’t feel like trying to get water out of a rock,” she said. “That’s why we had to go.”

> Her son is autistic, and she heard about programs in the Bay Area that might help him. So, they put all their belongings in storage and packed up their car and hit the road.

> “When I saw the ‘Welcome to California’ sign,” Ellis said, “I started crying. It was such a relief.”

> King was enrolled at a summer camp in San Francisco for the first week after they arrived. But soon, the money they budgeted for a hotel ran out. Ellis relied on friends to pitch in money for an Airbnb for a couple nights, but they also found themselves sleeping in their car, too.

> After 10 days without knowing where she would be able to find a place to live, Ellis got in touch with an intake worker at Catholic Charities who placed her and King at one of the Project Roomkey hotels.

> “It was like, ‘Praise God,’” Ellis said. “For a single mom to know there were three meals a day I could come get, that was wonderful.”

> Ellis and her son got keys to their new apartment in San Francisco's North Beach neighborhood in September, which she pays for with a Section 8 subsidy.

> “We are in a little diamond in the rough,” she said. “It doesn’t have much of the things on my list ... no garden, no bathtub, no parking spot ... But, it’s secure.”

> After moving every year for the past seven years, Ellis said they finally have a place where they know they can stay for good.

> “It’s a place where hopefully, King can be longer than a year,” she said, “and grow into this wonderful little boy he’s growing into.”

a 1BR in North Beach seems to start around $2500 looking quickly at craigslist.


Anonymous at 12:40 PM on December 12, 2020 | #19146 | reply | quote

Insurers balk at covering Portland businesses; brokers say downtown upheaval has made carriers wary, *The Oregonian* (2020-12-12):

> …brokers say insurance companies have become particularly wary about covering Portland businesses, especially those downtown, as ongoing protests have given the city a reputation for upheaval and led to a spike in vandalism and destruction…

> Insurers’ apparent reluctance to cover Portland businesses is another indication of how severely this year’s turbulence has affected the city and its image.

> Jessica Getman, president of Brown & Brown Insurance Northwest, said that some insurance carriers have placed moratoriums on issuing new commercial insurance policies or increasing coverage for existing customers in downtown Portland, creating a barrier for anyone trying to open a new business.

> Barb Schimmel, a senior sales executive at WSC Insurance, … recently received a notice from an insurance carrier saying they would not offer a new policy to a business they did not already insure or offer increased coverage to a business they currently insure if it operated “within 5 miles of active riots/looting.”


Anonymous at 7:50 PM on December 13, 2020 | #19154 | reply | quote

Quotes about the election by attorney Robert Barnes on Nov 4, 2020

Robert Barnes (November 04, 2020):

> My take: see the pattern & how it matches what we previewed on the show -- holding votes late until you know exactly how many you need, then adding them suddenly to the vote totals. Happened in Michigan, Wisconsin & potentially Pennsylvania & Nevada, in the usual places -- Democratic controlled big cities. In Michigan, they magically found over 100K ballots that went 100% for Biden. It is sad to see such open attempts to steal an election, and knowing it may work.

Robert Barnes (November 04, 2020):

> As many have asked, what is my current thoughts & feelings about all this? Deeply disappointed. I went to sleep early last night in a kind of fevered prayer that what I knew was coming, would not come. Then I woke up, and it did. Much bigger than Trump, this is about the credibility of a country, the legacy of the ideals that formed it, and the principle that ordinary people hold real power in the ballot. All of that is now at risk, and may be lost forever.


Anonymous at 5:37 PM on December 14, 2020 | #19168 | reply | quote

#19154 “War Zone”: Investors Avoiding Minneapolis For Some Reason, *Hot Air* (2020-12-17):

> The looting in the summer was bad enough to scare off investors, especially those who wanted to open or maintain family-owned businesses in the Twin Cities. The ongoing explosion of violence is more than enough to have larger capital stakeholders looking for better places to put their money. Perhaps that vote-by-feet outcome will be enough to convince Twin Cities residents to start looking for new leadership.


Anonymous at 10:23 PM on December 20, 2020 | #19210 | reply | quote

#19219 This is the entire bill:

https://rules.house.gov/sites/democrats.rules.house.gov/files/BILLS-116HR133SA-RCP-116-68.pdf

From page 1599:

> (5) The 14th Dalai Lama said in his statement that the person who reincarnates has sole legitimate authority over where and how he or she takes rebirth and how that reincarnation is to be recognized and if there is a need for a 15th Dalai Lama to be recognized, then the responsibility shall primarily rest with the officers of the Dalai Lama’s Gaden Phodrang Trust, who will be informed by the written instructions of the 14th Dalai Lama.


Alan at 3:52 PM on December 22, 2020 | #19221 | reply | quote

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2020/12/mathematician-bobby-piton-finds-500000-unique-last-names-pennsylvania-sophisticated-state-actor-able-optimize-desired-outcome/

> Mathematician Bobby Piton Finds More Than 500,000 Unique Last Names in Pennsylvania: ‘Sophisticated State Actor Was Able to Optimize Desired Outcome’

In Penn, common last names like "Smith" or "Johnson" were voted tens of thousands of times fewer than they statistically should be based on the total number of votes.

Half of all last names that voted in Penn only had one single vote for that last name (no one else in the family voted). That sounds too high and suggests a bunch of fake names. Some comparison with other states and other elections would be needed though. This article doesn't have enough info to make the full case.


curi at 1:33 PM on December 27, 2020 | #19264 | reply | quote

https://trumptrainnews.com/2020/12/23/new-poll-tells-biden-supporters-how-country-really-feels/

> A new poll from Rasmussen showed that roughly half the country thinks the election was stolen from Trump in some way.


curi at 1:35 PM on December 27, 2020 | #19265 | reply | quote

Ukraine press conference saying Biden is corrupt and took a lot of money from their country:

https://twitter.com/BernardKerik/status/1343669283973427201


curi at 6:21 PM on December 28, 2020 | #19276 | reply | quote

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2020/12/breaking-pennsylvania-certified-results-president-found-error-error-twice-size-difference-candidates/

> BREAKING: Pennsylvania Certified Results for President Are Found in Error – The Error Is Twice the Size of the Difference Between Candidates

> More ballots were cast than people voted by more than 200,000 votes.


curi at 6:23 PM on December 28, 2020 | #19277 | reply | quote

A different take on election fraud:

https://graymirror.substack.com/p/vae-victis

Roughly: Election fraud is normal and expected in the US, and if you lose at the election fraud game it show your team was weak.

It also has some good links to background info. E.g. Did Liberal Justices Invent the Standing Doctrine? An Empirical Study of the Evolution of Standing, 1921-2006*

I don't agree that might makes right, but I did agree with a fair amount of his comments. His view of *the current state of reality* has similarities with mine.

The brief, unusual comments on Popper are unconvincing and under-explained.

Here's an exaggeration with perhaps a good point to it:

> Actually he [Trump was orders of magnitude from mattering. 99.9% of “his” employees in the “executive branch” did exactly what they would have done “under” Mrs. Clinton. All he had done by winning the election was to come one step closer to mattering.

> But that was one step too close. How could power keep Trump from coming another step closer? By convincing him that he was already there, and already mattered. Since this was what they wanted to hear, this wasn't hard. Psychological warfare is a brutal art [...]


curi at 2:01 PM on December 29, 2020 | #19304 | reply | quote

> A different take on election fraud:

> https://graymirror.substack.com/p/vae-victis

Note, this guy is Curtis Yarvin, aka Mencius Moldbug, an advocate of the Dark Enlightenment:

https://www.thedarkenlightenment.com/the-dark-enlightenment-by-nick-land/

The essay you linked to is informed by this worldview. Just mentioning so your readers are aware.


Anonymous at 5:09 PM on December 29, 2020 | #19306 | reply | quote

I'm totally against all this talk that the Democrats stole the election. Biden is such a great candidate that even George Washington and Abraham Lincoln voted for him.


oh my god it's turpentine at 2:05 AM on December 30, 2020 | #19311 | reply | quote

Trump's speech on election fraud:

https://youtu.be/d399gk-73J8?t=88

It's from a week ago. Apparently every major TV network refused to show this short speech.


curi at 2:46 AM on December 30, 2020 | #19312 | reply | quote

https://rairfoundation.com/today-marks-10-months-that-whistleblower-phil-haney-was-found-dead-of-a-gunshot-wound-to-the-chest-still-no-answers/ :

> Ten months ago today, whistleblower Phil Haney was found dead after being shot in the chest on February 21, 2020 on a remote stretch of road in Northern California. Mr. Haney was a founding member of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

> The Amador County Sheriff’s office referred the case to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) immediately. The highly-politicized FBI appears to have been sitting on this ever since, but not before they impounded his belongings, including his computer, mobile phone and even his trailer, which was at an RV park three miles from where he was found dead.

The FBI sux.


Anonymous at 8:28 AM on December 30, 2020 | #19315 | reply | quote

curi at 12:52 PM on December 30, 2020 | #19317 | reply | quote

https://twitter.com/tracybeanz/status/1344350454218686464

> Breaking GA: @JovanHPulitzer just announced that as we speak machines have been compromised in GA - they are connected to the internet and shouldn’t be.


curi at 3:35 PM on December 30, 2020 | #19318 | reply | quote

> A different take on election fraud:

> https://graymirror.substack.com/p/vae-victis

[snip]

> The brief, unusual comments on Popper are unconvincing and under-explained.

For what it's worth, Yarvin's got more on Popper here:

https://graymirror.substack.com/p/4-principles-of-any-next-regime

And here:

https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2009/01/gentle-introduction-to-unqualified_22/

There's also other stuff. Doesn't look that great.

He's got an article by David Stove in his archives:

https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/archive/stove/

He seems to like it even though it badly misrepresents Popper.

He's also ok with induction but not with Bayesianism:

https://unqualifiedreservations.wordpress.com/2007/08/28/a-reservationist-epistemology/

> A reservationist [eg, Yarvin] has no objection to formal deductive and inductive reasoning, ...

He's been involved with the overcoming-bias/lesswrong community. EY doesn't like him:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6qPextf9KyWLFJ53j/why-is-mencius-moldbug-so-popular-on-less-wrong-answer-he-s


Anonymous at 5:38 PM on December 30, 2020 | #19319 | reply | quote

#19319

> [Moldbug has] been involved with the overcoming-bias/lesswrong community. EY doesn't like him:

I think EY (and most of his community) is too left and too mainstream/establishment/bluepill to like Moldbug. (EY and his community is not especially left or establishment, but too much for Moldbug compatibility. EY individually I regard as left of center overall, with some right of center ideas mixed in, and the general community mix is similar.) This is a general impression based on significant familiarity with EY and LW but little familiarity with Moldbug.


curi at 5:45 PM on December 30, 2020 | #19321 | reply | quote

> #19319

> I think EY (and most of his community) is too left and too mainstream/establishment/bluepill to like Moldbug.

Ya and fyi Moldbug claims to have first popularized the redpill/bluepill metaphor, having taken it from the Wachowskis.


Anonymous at 10:23 PM on December 31, 2020 | #19325 | reply | quote

Trump's odds of being the next president (rather than Biden) are now over 6% on https://electionbettingodds.com/day.html . Still a long shot, but it's going up. It was under 5% a week or so ago. Maybe it's going up because some senators said they would object to the electoral college votes from certain battleground states, or something like that.


Anonymous at 8:55 PM on January 2, 2021 | #19337 | reply | quote

https://twitter.com/horowitz39/status/1345768908477722626

> The Big Lie - and a Republican is spreading it. These allegations were never adjudicated. The corrupt courts just refused to hear them. Shame on Toomey and whomever this sucker is.

Horowitz is right. This is a key piece of info: the courts didn't rule against Trump, they refused to consider his evidence or arguments in the first place (for reasons like standing or the lawsuit being too early or too late).


curi at 1:34 PM on January 3, 2021 | #19348 | reply | quote

https://www.theepochtimes.com/georgia-election-data-shows-17650-votes-switched-from-trump-to-biden-data-scientists_3640670.html

> Georgia Data Shows Over 30,000 of Trump’s Votes Removed, Another 12,173 Switched to Biden: Data Scientists


curi at 1:35 PM on January 3, 2021 | #19349 | reply | quote

https://twitter.com/horowitz39/status/1345758405416243200

> Voice of the criminals. No answer to the massive evidence of voter fraud, the greatest political crime ever committed against our country - just lay down your arms and surrender to the totalitarian racists who are in control.

The CritRats have no answer to the massive evidence of Andy B's cyberstalking and harassment. Kinda similar.


curi at 1:38 PM on January 3, 2021 | #19350 | reply | quote

http://xoxohth.com/thread.php?thread_id=4726117&mc=68&forum_id=2#41660558

Various interesting comments on how government housing programs, particularly in NYC, trap black people in poverty for generations. There are interesting replies mixed in if you scroll down.


Anonymous at 3:40 PM on January 3, 2021 | #19357 | reply | quote

What are people's opinions of this article?

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/01/2020-project-daniel-greenfield/

I thought it didn't have enough details/evidence re modern slave labor and I'd be interested in more info.


curi at 11:04 AM on January 5, 2021 | #19374 | reply | quote

Tim Pool video: Trump Supporters HAVE TAKEN OVER THE CAPITOL, Shots Fired INSIDE, Electoral Count Session ENDED

~100k of the maddest Trump supporters went to DC. It's a big mess.


curi at 2:13 PM on January 6, 2021 | #19384 | reply | quote

Trump tweeted:

> These are the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously & viciously stripped away from great patriots who have been badly & unfairly treated for so long. Go home with love & in peace. Remember this day forever!

Twitter deleted it.

Trump told his supporters to "Go home ... in peace" and, in the midst of violence in DC, Twitter is suppressing that message.

(Trump isn't doing enough here and acted irresponsibly. DD, by contrast, is doing considerably less. DD's refused to tell his fans to go home in peace and stop DDoSing, stalking, harassing, etc., me and other FIers.)


curi at 3:38 PM on January 6, 2021 | #19386 | reply | quote

Mark Levin video: A Constitutional Crisis

Main point: the constitution says the state legislators decide how their state runs presidential elections, but people (e.g. governors and courts) just plain decided to do other stuff, contrary to what the legislators decided. These are public facts that aren't under dispute.


curi at 7:49 PM on January 6, 2021 | #19387 | reply | quote

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_storming_of_the_United_States_Capitol :

> As rally attendees arrived at the Capitol to meet other protestors already gathered there, at about 2:15 p.m. the barricades around the perimeter of the Capitol grounds manned by the District of Columbia police were breached

The tweets below might help explain why a pro-Trump crowd decided to take the specific action of storming the Capitol yesterday, though the timeline doesn’t quite fit. Bill White’s tweet seems to have been posted a bit late (2:22 pm) to have inspired a bunch of people to do something at 2:15 pm.

At 2:22 pm Eastern, Bill White tweeted (3.3k likes, 9.3k RTs):

> TO OUR GREAT AMERICAN PATRIOTS

> PEACEFULLY

> ENTER THE US CAPITOL BUILDING

> ENTER BOTH HOUSES

> SIT IN THE PEOPLES SEATS

> (YOUR SEATS)

> BE HEARD!!

> FIGHT FOR US

> FIGHT FOR TRUMP

> FIGHT FOR US

About 20 minutes later, Attorney Lin Wood retweeted Bill White’s tweet above, adding:

> Bill White @BillWhiteNY is an American Patriot. Listen to his advice carefully.

Woods RT had 5.8k likes and 18k RTs.

Ashli Babbitt, who was shot to death inside the Capitol yesterday, apparently by Capitol police, followed Lin Wood on Twitter and retweeted him (though not the tweet above): https://archive.is/MxfB1


Anonymous at 9:41 AM on January 7, 2021 | #19393 | reply | quote

https://twitter.com/WokeCapital/status/1347164526110789634

> Trump put out a video telling the protesters to go home. Gets a comms cut, Twitter and Facebook timeout.

> Did any prominent democrat tell the BLM rioters to stop burning shit down, or did they pour gas on it.

> There was a coup alright, it's just not the one being reported.

Response https://twitter.com/rorufufufu/status/1347164856013750275


curi at 10:20 AM on January 7, 2021 | #19394 | reply | quote

Prager article: I Now Better Understand the 'Good German'. Says people are both intimidated and brainwashed in USA without a secret police, and he sympathizes more with people who quietly don't participate in evil but don't do anything.

Greenfield article Democrats Were For Riots Before They Were Against Them Says Dems are dishonest hypocrites.


curi at 12:06 PM on January 7, 2021 | #19397 | reply | quote

#19397 Greenfield wrote:

> One photo showed Nick Fuentes, the alt-right Groyper leader whose antisemitic group had previously shut down a Turning Point USA event by booing Donald Trump Jr. off the stage, and Tim ‘Baked Alaska’ Gionet, a former Black Lives Matter supporter and BuzzFeed employee, who has a history of going back and forth between the alt-right and the Left.

Fuentes tweeted (RT’d by Michelle Malkin) that he never entered the capitol:

> Many journalists are falsely claiming that I was photographed in Nancy Pelosi’s office with Baked Alaska— this is fake news! I did not enter the Capitol building. I was outside on the lawn wearing a completely different outfit. DEFAMATION!


Anonymous at 12:21 PM on January 7, 2021 | #19398 | reply | quote

Antifa did some of the destruction blamed on Trump supporters. How much is unknown.

https://headlineusa.com/evidence-antifa-infiltrate-capitol/


curi at 5:41 PM on January 7, 2021 | #19402 | reply | quote

#19402

> Conservative lawyer Lin Wood was among those who noticed and retweeted a post showing a familiar face at a June BLM rally in Arizona.

This guy is known as the "QAnon Shaman". He denies he is antifa. https://www.newsweek.com/qshaman-washington-antifa-protest-qanon-1559599

(Also, the photo that Lin Wood RT'd cuts off the guy's sign which features Q.)

> The day’s biggest confirmation came from a Washington Times report that facial-recognition firm XRVision had verified the presence of two Philadelphia Antifa members at the scene.

> In addition to the Viking-clad man, an accomplice notably had a tattoo of a hammer and sickle, the Times reported.

I don't believe those two are Antifa. The photo of them that was shared said "phillyantifa.org" but that was because it was phillyantifa.org's photo, and phillyantifa.org was accusing the two of being white supremacists. https://twitter.com/stillgray/status/1346981505982074883?s=20


Anonymous at 6:21 PM on January 7, 2021 | #19404 | reply | quote

#19404 Related, though it doesn't contradict the idea that Antifa did some of the destruction blamed on Trump supporters: Expert Andy Ngo: It wasn’t antifa at the Capitol riots *Washington Examiner* (2021-01-06).


Anonymous at 6:23 PM on January 7, 2021 | #19405 | reply | quote

#19404

> it was phillyantifa.org's photo

Or rather, a photo obtained by phillyantifa.org.


Anonymous at 6:25 PM on January 7, 2021 | #19406 | reply | quote

Alexander Macris, Repressive Tolerance in Action (2020-01-08):

> - Tolerance is only to be extended to truth.

> - Leftism is objectively true, and anything other than leftism is not.

> - Therefore tolerance is only to be extended to leftism.


Anonymous at 11:25 AM on January 8, 2021 | #19412 | reply | quote

First Inventory of Damage to U.S. Capitol Building Released, *NYT* (2021-01-08):

> The damage was largely limited to broken glass, busted doors and graffiti, the report said.


Anonymous at 9:05 PM on January 8, 2021 | #19440 | reply | quote

#19453

[10:38 AM] curi: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j2TUNlvJpo0

[10:53 AM] JustinCEO: ya going to the military was outrageous. nancy isn't the commander in chief

[10:53 AM] curi: also bringing up nuclear strike is ridiculous. it's just a slander to act like trump might

[10:54 AM] JustinCEO: yeah

[10:54 AM] JustinCEO: trump has been one of the most restrained presidents re: military action

[10:54 AM] JustinCEO: in general

[10:54 AM] JustinCEO: forget about the left's nuclear fantasies

[10:54 AM] curi: also acting like the military would need to be told to use their brains b4 carrying out that order is a slander on the generals

[10:54 AM] curi: as if they are just pawns and only politicians make decisions

[10:54 AM] JustinCEO: yeah

[10:54 AM] JustinCEO: trump would have trouble finding someone will to execute an arbitrary nuclear strike or whatever

[10:56 AM] JustinCEO: even if someone in the chain of command ultimately would execute such an order, it would take time to find them and to actually execute, and he'd probably get removed by 25th amdt before it happened, even in this absurd fantasy

[10:56 AM] JustinCEO: nixon tried to fire special prosecutor during watergate

[10:57 AM] JustinCEO: ordered AG to do it

[10:57 AM] JustinCEO: AG refused and resigned

[10:57 AM] JustinCEO: ordered deputy AG to do it

[10:57 AM] JustinCEO: Deputy AG refused and resigned

[10:57 AM] JustinCEO: third guy finally did it

[10:57 AM] JustinCEO: whole thing looked rly bad for nixon

[10:57 AM] JustinCEO: this was about *firing a special prosecutor*

[10:58 AM] JustinCEO: imagine the pushback on a guy with a week and a half left ordering a nuclear strike or other arbitrary military attack


curi at 11:03 AM on January 9, 2021 | #19454 | reply | quote

https://twitter.com/navalny/status/1347970317302591490

> 9. If you replace "Trump" with "Navalny" in today's discussion, you will get an 80% accurate Kremlin's answer as to why my name can't be mentioned on Russian TV and I shouldn't be allowed to participate in any elections.

More above and below at the link.

Navalny was nominated for the nobel peace prize in 2020 and has been praised by Western mainstream media for standing up to Putin. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexei_Navalny He has been poisoned, apparently by the Russian govt.


curi at 12:49 PM on January 9, 2021 | #19457 | reply | quote

We track the race of company employees for affirmative action but not the race of people committing crimes (and their victims).


Anonymous at 8:25 PM on January 9, 2021 | #19472 | reply | quote

Paramilitary types at the storming of the Capitol

https://twitter.com/jsrailton/status/1348115530654347266?s=20

> NEW FOOTAGE: a long, disciplined line of men in body armor moves as a unit up the #CapitolBuilding steps.

There were a fair number of people in paramilitary gear with helmets and body armor at the forefront of storming the Capitol. Most of the people who were fighting the police, scaling walls, etc. looked like normal Trump rally participants, but there were also these paramilitary types who stand out. More examples: https://twitter.com/WienerNeeda/status/1348139407426031617 https://twitter.com/FordFischer/status/1346972919503724547

A few replies from the thread below.

https://twitter.com/j_nanma/status/1348147031982956544 :

> "Normal" protesters do not arrive with full equipment, like zip ties, body armor, scaling gear etc., these people were ready and trained

https://twitter.com/OutragedAtTrump/status/1348117822187081728 :

> It's like out of all the people there 90% were National Lampoon's cousin Eddie, and 10% were some kind of trained armed group of paramilitary terrorists.


Anonymous at 11:22 PM on January 9, 2021 | #19473 | reply | quote

https://twitter.com/_evelynrae/status/1348157046768586754 :

> The dismissal of objectivity and debate is the language of the oppressor.

Good quote.


Anonymous at 11:29 PM on January 9, 2021 | #19474 | reply | quote

#19482 Some Twitter replies claim real factual details are slightly different but overall impression is about right. I have not researched.


curi at 3:50 PM on January 10, 2021 | #19483 | reply | quote

https://twitter.com/rmconservative/status/1348434358630289410 :

> The Left brilliantly institutionalizes violence to such a point that it is no longer news when they act violently every single day, which enables them to get away with it.


Anonymous at 5:14 PM on January 10, 2021 | #19485 | reply | quote

From just a few months ago:

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/secret-service-took-trump-to-underground-bunker-amid-george-floyd-protests

> Secret Service agents wounded outside White House, car bombs feared; official says Trump was taken to bunker


Anonymous at 6:24 PM on January 10, 2021 | #19488 | reply | quote

#19488 I don't recall any prominent Democrats – or anyone at all – being cancelled for that...


curi at 6:25 PM on January 10, 2021 | #19489 | reply | quote

Prosecutors weigh ‘heavy hammer’ — felony murder — for rioters in Capitol officer’s death, *wtopnews* (2021-01-11):

> While most murder investigations focus on the person or persons who caused the fatal injury, former federal prosecutor Tim Heaphy said prosecutors could charge many rioters with felony murder, even if they were nowhere near Sicknick.


Anonymous at 9:49 AM on January 11, 2021 | #19506 | reply | quote

John Ziegler, Trump’s Ban from Social Media is Further Evidence America is Destined to Split Up, *Mediaite* (Jan 11th, 2021, 11:28 am):

> But the most concerning element of Trump’s social media ban may be what it says about where we are evolving as a society, and as a nation. In short, we are very rapidly headed towards a situation where we are no longer even remotely living in one unified nation, but rather literally different universes based upon our political beliefs (or, even more absurdly, our view of Donald Trump).

> Twitter and other social media giants have now made it exceedingly clear that they view Republicans, at best, as second-class citizens and many of them, either by choice or because they have been banned, are going elsewhere.... Now... their alternative destination, Parler, has been essentially kicked off the Internet by yet another super-woke “Big Tech” giant, Amazon.

> While Donald Trump clearly lost the election, he had more Americans vote for him to be reelected than any incumbent president in our history. He is obviously not some fringe character we can pretend is only supported by overtly crazy people.

> When at least 46% of our nation just voted for a president who is now no longer even allowed to fully participate in the public dialogue, and they understandably feel that they need to even further isolate themselves from what currently passes for the “national dialogue,” we are no longer even a marginally “united” nation. Forget about ever being on the same page, we are no longer even reading from the same book, and are living in at least two different realities that have almost nothing in common with one another.

> The foundation of our union will very soon be eroded to the point where circumstances could cause it to finally crumble in ways we never thought imaginable. After what has happened over the last week, and looks like could easily occur in the next one, all within a pandemic which has greatly divided the way we are governed, it is unfortunately no longer a question of if this will happen, but when.


Anonymous at 10:08 AM on January 11, 2021 | #19508 | reply | quote

Today, Tim Pool shared a thought about Trump’s remaining supporters.

@Cernovich wrote:

> My take on Trump is that you let him leave ignobly. Don't make him a martyr. Keep him on a leash and dog walk him out. He'll keep the truly low tier element of society, but he's lost his smart and competent supporters. He's neither Hitler nor Caesar. He's a Karshasian.

Pool replied:

> What he has left is mostly made up of the most fringe conspiracy Q bunch


Anonymous at 12:00 PM on January 11, 2021 | #19510 | reply | quote

https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=405676577355023

Canary Mission exposing both left and right wing anti-semites.


curi at 1:14 PM on January 11, 2021 | #19512 | reply | quote

Some headlines from the left's recent advocacy of riots and violence: https://twitter.com/johncardillo/status/1348973421057732610


curi at 2:34 PM on January 12, 2021 | #19540 | reply | quote

Peter Navarro has released volume 3 (pdf) of his investigation into fraud and irregularities in the 2020 general election. Titled "Yes, President Trump Won", it argues that there were over 3 million possibly illegal votes across the 6 battleground states where Biden's total "victory" margin was less than 313,000, a factor of about 10x.


Anonymous at 11:30 AM on January 14, 2021 | #19564 | reply | quote

https://twitter.com/Cernovich/status/1350510476568846337

lol

they have a lot of convenient bugs


curi at 7:42 PM on January 16, 2021 | #19605 | reply | quote

https://www.mediamatters.org/january-6-insurrection/newsmax-guest-says-troops-being-deployed-dc-early-stages-establishment

> DAVID HOROWITZ (GUEST): Well, look, where were those troops last summer when there were 633 violent attacks, arsons, killings, in 220 American cities. And Democrats were cheering on the rioters and bailing them out of jail. We are in the early stages of the establishment of a fascist state in America. People are sort of intimidated from saying that.

> But we had an election, so-called, where there were 1.4 million questionable votes that were questionable legally. There were illegal votes. And Biden won -- and this is in the battleground states -- and Biden won those states by a total of 158,000 votes. Yet if you suggest that this might be a rigged election, and you're a United States senator like Josh Hawley or Ted Cruz, the Democrats want to remove you from Congress, put you on no-fly lists. We're in a situation where the Democratic Party - which has been doing this for decades - is intent on suppressing the free speech of anybody who opposes them, you know, under the guise of the accusation that everything that Republicans say that Democrats find uncomfortable has to be a lie. And we need to ban lies, we need to ban them from Twitter, from Facebook.


curi at 12:58 PM on January 18, 2021 | #19628 | reply | quote

#19628

> ... the Democratic Party - which has been doing this for decades - is intent on suppressing the free speech of anybody who opposes them, you know, under the guise of the accusation that everything that Republicans say that Democrats find uncomfortable has to be a lie. And we need to ban lies, we need to ban them from Twitter, from Facebook.

Dems ban 1A-protected speech under the guise that it incites violence.


Anonymous at 3:08 PM on January 18, 2021 | #19642 | reply | quote

Angelo Codevilla, Clarity in Trump’s Wake, *American Greatness* (January 19, 2021)

I thought this was an excellent essay. Some quotes from it are below.

On a failing of Trump's:

> “Dogs That Bark Do Not Bite”

> Applying this observation to candidate Trump’s hyperbole suggested that President Trump might suffer from what Theodore Roosevelt called the most self-destructive of habits, combining “the unbridled tongue with the unready hand.” And, in fact, President Trump neither fired and referred for prosecution James Comey or the other intelligence officials who had run the surveillance of his campaign. He praised them, and let himself be persuaded to fire General Michael Flynn, his national security advisor, who stood in the way of the intelligence agencies’ plans against him. Nor did he declassify and make public all the documents associated with their illegalities. 

> Four years later, he left office with those documents still under seal. He criticized officials over whom he had absolute power, notably CIA’s Gina Haspel who likely committed a crime spying on his candidacy, but left them in office. Days after his own inauguration, he suffered the CIA’s removal of clearances from one of his appointees because he was a critic of the Agency. Any president worthy of his office would have fired the entire chain of officials who had made that decision. Instead, he appointed to these agencies people loyal to them and hostile to himself.

> Disdain for the “deplorables” united and energized parts of American society that, apart from their profitable material connections to government, have nothing in common and often have diverging interests. That hate, that determination to feel superior to the “deplorables” by treading upon them, is the “intersectionality,” the glue that binds, say, Wall Street coupon-clippers, folks in the media, officials of public service unions, gender studies professors, all manner of administrators, radical feminists, race and ethnic activists, and so on. #TheResistance grew by awakening these groups to the powers and privileges to which they imagine their superior worth entitles them, to their hate for anyone who does not submit preemptively.

I like how he calls hate the "intersectionality" that binds the left together.

> Because each and every part of the ruling coalition’s sense of what may assuage its grievances evolves without natural limit, this logic is as insatiable as it is powerful. It is also inherently destructive of oligarchy.

> It is more important to keep in mind that, in America prior to 2020, sworn affidavits that crimes have been committed had invariably been probable cause for judicial, prosecutorial, or legislative investigations. But for the first time in America, the ruling class dismissed them with: “You have no proof!” A judge (the sister of Georgia’s Stacey Abrams) ruled that even when someone tells the U.S. Postal Service they have moved, their old address is still a lawful basis for them to cast a ballot. Certainly, proof of crime is impossible with such judges and without testimony under oath, or powers of subpoena.

> Just as important, Republicans in general and the Trump White House in particular bear heavy responsibility for failing to challenge the patent illegality of the executive actions and consent decrees that enabled inherently insecure mail-in procedures in real-time, as they were being perpetrated in key states. No facts were at issue. Only law. The constitutional violations were undeniable.

> Pennsylvania et. al. answered Texas’s late lawsuit by arguing it demanded the invalidation of votes that had been cast in good faith. True. But Texas argued that letting stand the results of an election carried out contrary to the Constitution devalued the votes cast in states such as Texas that had held the election in a constitutional manner. Also true. Without comment, the Supreme Court chose to privilege the set of voters on the oligarchy’s side over those of their opponents. Had the lawsuit come well before the election, no such choice would have existed. Typically, the Trump Administration substituted bluster for action.

——

> The logic of hate and disdain of ordinary Americans is not only what binds the oligarchy together. It is the only substitute it has for any moral-ethical-intellectual point of reference. Donald Trump’s impotent, inglorious reaction to his defeat offered irresistible temptations to the oligarchy’s several sectors to celebrate victory by vying to hurt whoever had supported the president. But permanent war against some 74 million fellow citizens is a foredoomed approach to governing.

> The Democratic Party had promised a return to some kind of “normalcy.” Instead, its victory enabled the oligarchy’s several parts to redefine the people who do not show them due deference as “white supremacists,” “insurrectionists,” and Nazis—in short, as some kind of criminals—to exclude them from common platforms of communication, from the banking system, and perhaps even from air travel; and to set law enforcement to surveil them in order to find bases for prosecuting them. Neither Congress nor any state’s legislature legislated any of this. Rather, the several parts of America’s economic, cultural, and political establishment are waging this war, uncoordinated but well-nigh unanimously.


Anonymous at 9:37 PM on January 22, 2021 | #19715 | reply | quote

Newsweek is a branch of the Ministry of Truth (from the book *1984*):

https://twitter.com/EVKontorovich/status/1354071813056311298

> This is staggering. @Newsweek went back and rewrote a 2015 story that had described grads of Ranger School as “Rangers” - to match its present-day story accusing @TomCottonAR, who graduate the school, of not being a Ranger.

> I knew it was bad but didnt know it was this bad.

There is a picture of a National Review article with info about the edit.


curi at 7:53 PM on January 26, 2021 | #19767 | reply | quote

Daniel Horowitz on a two-state solution for America

Daniel Horowitz (host), Episode 804 | Pressure the Hell Out of Your GOP State Legislatures, *The Conservative Review with Daniel Horowitz* (2021-01-29):

> It's the end of the week, and it is also the end of the world. (sings) It's the end of the world, as we know it. [...]

> Folks, it really is the end of the world as we know it. There is a Great Reset, as the left is talking about. There's no question about it. It's not necessarily a bad thing. It's more of a crossroads, a pivotal moment. The question is, what will the new world be? In other words, the way the world has existed until now is over. It's ending. And we see that in every facet of culture, of society, the economy, politics. I will tell you, and I say this with certitude: it's not even close. The people who want to waste time gaming out an election year in 4 years from now – we will not have a normal election like we've always had, meaning, one of two things will happen. Either we will have a real oligarch, we will be like North Korea, with a nuance, an American version of it, in other words, you'll have candidates, but they'll have to be approved by the government, you know, maybe you'll be able to have, I don't know, Kamala Harris vs Bloomberg or something. Or we will have something along the lines of a two-state solution. Our job is to push for the latter, so we don't get the former. But the notion that we're going to be able to fix this current system, that's gone. That is just the reality.


Anonymous at 8:39 PM on January 30, 2021 | #19812 | reply | quote

Bezos-Owned Amazon Opposes Mail-In Voting For Union Election, *Daily Caller* (2021-01-23) :

> Online retail giant Amazon opposed mail-in voting for a union election, according to a filing with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB).

> Amazon’s position on mail-in voting conflicts with that of the Washington Post editorial board’s position on mail-in voting. Both companies are owned by Jeff Bezos...

> In a petition filed with the NLRB on Jan. 21, Amazon argued that mail-in voting would decrease turnout and create security concerns in a unionization election at the company’s Bessemer, Alabama warehouse.

> Amazon argued in the petition, uploaded by The Verge, that “concerns about election security run particularly high” due to the use of “an unreliable electronic signature platform.”

In the TMS Live Stream with Matt Bracken - 3PM EST SUNDAY January 24th 2020, Matt Bracken said:

> It's so ironic because Amazon, which did everything they could to stop Trump and elect Biden, they want to have only in-person voting. They said if it's mail-in voting, it's too susceptible to fraud. Where were you last year?

> I think they should send a ballot to every address of everybody that ever worked for Amazon in the history of Amazon. And if they lived two or three houses, send a ballot to all of them.


Anonymous at 8:32 PM on January 31, 2021 | #19813 | reply | quote

Robert Barnes, "An Answer to Joe Rogan on Election" (Video, viewable only by subscribers, January 26, 2021) (partial transcript by me & otter.ai):

> ... the President was well aware that on election night, that there was substantial mail in ballots yet to be counted in a range of states that would potentially be able to overcome his advantage. At least when going into Election Day. [...]

> On election day, Biden's own campaign people put out what numbers Trump needed to hit on election day that conformed to what Trump's campaign people understood to what election observers understood to what a political betters understood, which was the Trump needed to hit certain numbers in all of these key contested states on the Election Day vote in order to win. Well, what Trump knew as it got late into the evening, is that Trump had exceeded those numbers in every single state. Trump wasn't saying that they are going to steal the election because of mail-in votes being counted later, it was because he'd already exceeded the numbers that Biden's own campaign acknowledged would be sufficient for him to win every single one of those states, including Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Georgia, and that he had enough to come back in Arizona, and potentially in Nevada. But particularly Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, it was recognized by almost all observers, and you can see there were live Twitter feeds during the night, including local reporters, Democratic leaning election analysts, all of them at various points, The New York Times' little measurement, continually pointed towards Trump and all of these key states, and Georgia, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, especially.

> Indeed, others have been sort of taken in with this notion that the election fraud allegations never had evidentiary merit. When in fact, you look into detail, the question was whether this was an unconstitutional election, which did not require proof of fraud. All that it required was that votes were cast by people who were not legally qualified, that votes were cast in a manner that were not legally qualified, and that votes were counted in a manner that were not legally qualified. And all three were present here with the overarching question is raised by Senator Hawley, that you had unconstitutionally conducted rules of the election in multiple states that were material to the outcome, especially Pennsylvania, but not limited to it.

> So this is where the fundamental misunderstanding and misapprehension is. The President's concern didn't come from the existence of mail in ballots. The President's concern came from them not announcing how many mail-in ballots they had them changing the number of ballots that they had, them shutting down counting and restarting counting at selective times, them waiting for Democratic counties to report after Republican counties had reported, and then anomalies such as excluding party observers from the signature match process, excluding party observers from the canvassing process, excluding party observers from the counting process, all of which occurred in Georgia, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. So it was not merely the idea that because they were going to count mail in ballots late that the President expressed concern...


Anonymous at 7:43 PM on February 4, 2021 | #19853 | reply | quote

https://www.vice.com/en/article/y3gk3w/amazon-is-forcing-its-warehouse-workers-into-brutal-megacycle-shifts

> On January 25, hundreds of workers at an Amazon warehouse in Chicago were presented with a baffling choice: sign up for a ten-and-a-half-hour graveyard shift, or lose your job.

>

> Management informed workers that their warehouse, known as DCH1, would be shut down, and they were being offered a shift that runs from 1:20am to 11:50am, which is known as "megacycle," at a new Chicago warehouse.

...

> "There’s been a trend since the 70s of warehouse employers consolidating to longer shifts with few workers," said Jamie McCallum, a professor of sociology at Middlebury College and the author of Worked Over: How Round-the-Clock Work is Killing the American Dream. "In recent decades, the fixed cost per worker has gone up significantly, particularly healthcare, so it makes sense to hire fewer employees."


oh my god it's turpentine at 1:45 AM on February 5, 2021 | #19856 | reply | quote

#19853 Actually, the video, although posted to Robert Barnes’ locals.com site, is available to non-subscribers as well. Anyone can watch it.


Anonymous at 2:45 AM on February 5, 2021 | #19858 | reply | quote

#19853 thx for sharing the quote


curi at 11:02 AM on February 5, 2021 | #19861 | reply | quote

Tim Pool video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0BEHO08r67U

> TIME Magazine Claims An Elite Cabal Conspired To Stop Trump From Winning, Manipulating Laws And News

TIME article:

https://time.com/5936036/secret-2020-election-campaign/

> The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election

TIME article archive/mirror:

https://archive.is/tLtB7


curi at 3:31 PM on February 5, 2021 | #19864 | reply | quote

Bank of America spying on Americans, secretly turning over customer data to FBI:

Tucker Carlson video


curi at 3:43 PM on February 5, 2021 | #19865 | reply | quote

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanmac/trump-parler-ownership

> Documents seen by BuzzFeed News show that Parler offered Trump 40% of the company if he posted exclusively to the platform. The deal was never finalized.


curi at 2:17 PM on February 7, 2021 | #19884 | reply | quote

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/02/reichstag-fire-democrats-daniel-greenfield/

Good article. Worrying situation. The dems literally have thousands of troops occupying DC.


curi at 8:55 PM on February 8, 2021 | #19904 | reply | quote

https://www.theepochtimes.com/trump-offered-to-deploy-10000-national-guard-troops-in-dc-ahead-of-jan-6-mark-meadows_3690294.html

> Trump Offered to Deploy 10,000 National Guard Troops in DC Ahead of Jan. 6: Mark Meadows

he was turned down, then blamed for the results and accused of trying to incite violence. he wanted to have plenty of troops there to make sure that what happened on jan 6 *didn't happen*. so not it wasn't his goal.

Trump was set up by other ppl who intentionally prevented there being adequate security so they could have an excuse to clamp down. they have a bunch of soldiers in DC *now* to protect against nothing and intimidate people.


curi at 12:39 PM on February 9, 2021 | #19913 | reply | quote

#19864 FPM is now covering the story:

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/02/anti-trump-election-conspiracy-goes-public-matthew-vadum/

> The Anti-Trump Election Conspiracy Goes Public

> Time magazine provides a full confession.


curi at 12:40 PM on February 9, 2021 | #19914 | reply | quote

David Horowitz tweets:

> Here's how stupid Republicans are. https://dailycaller.com/2021/02/10/kevin-cramer-donald-trump-stephanie-ruhle-hallie-jackson-impeachment-trial/

> The actual reason Democrats are lynching Trump again is they are afraid no Democrat could beat him in 2024. In other words, this is the Democrats' war to rig an election they can win only by stealing.

The Daily Caller article title is:

> Republican Senator Says Democrats Should Hope Trump Can Run Again To ‘Better’ Their Chances


curi at 12:12 PM on February 10, 2021 | #19930 | reply | quote

Nevada Judge Hears Voter Fraud Evidence (Dec 3, 2020)

I listened to "Nevada Judge Hears Voter Fraud Evidence" (Dec 3, 2020) and took notes about everything I found interesting.

46:04: The USB disks would be signed out overnight with one vote total and checked back in the next morning with a different vote total.

47:32: The manufacturer of the [voting or vote-counting] machine rests on claims of intellectual property to prevent people from auditing the code, but that's a problem with software that processes votes in an election, because we need to know if there is a bug in the code (either intentional or unintentional).

52:03: The same campaign that was encouraging people to vote illegally by paying them, in violation of state law, was also encouraging people to vote for Biden/Harris.

1:02:56: The number of voters that fell into different illegal categories. 8111 voted from fake addresses. 15,681 voted from vacant addresses and commercial addresses. It is supposed to be where you live because that is where you are represented. 1506 from dead voters. 19,218 from non-Nevadans. 42,284 votes from double voters. That last number alone is more than the apparent gulf between Biden and Trump.

2:13:59: The Trump attorney kind of shoots down one of the defendant's arguments. They were saying, 'cause Trump attorneys contend that 40,000 people voted twice, and he's saying the best the defense can come up with is, "40,000, that's a huge number!", but he points out that this was a really unusual election with universal mail-in ballots, initiated in a hurry, lots of people would have been sent two ballots because they changed their name or something else, and particularly because passions were so high during this election, they might have voted twice, or just by mistake. Also, the defense said, why didn't you show individual voters and prove who they voted for? And the Trump attorney said, well, they objected to 14 depositions, I can't imagine how they would have reacted to 130 or 13,000 depositions. Also, there's something about how they're reading a particular statute about whether signature matching machines should be allowed. Trump attorneys read it as them not being allowed, and Biden attorneys read it as them being allowed, and I don't actually know which it is. The Trump attorney also points out that all that the defense is doing is impugning the expertise and background of the expert witness who found the 40,000 duplicate voters and things like that. But he says, we gave them our exact dataset and told them exactly how we generated it, and they haven't pointed out a single problem with it. He didn't say this, but they could have brought their own expert to dispute it or something like that, but they didn't. All they're doing is attacking him and saying that he didn't know some error rate, but that shouldn't matter, I think, because they can easily look at it themselves and see if they find any problems with it.

2:16:35: The Trump attorney demolishes another one of the defense's arguments which is that the guy who testified that the votes changed on the USB drives when they were disconnected from the machines in the middle of the night, didn't actually *see* anyone change the votes, he was like, he admitted that! The Trump attorney is like, this is circumstantial evidence, this would be a textbook case. Of course he didn't see it, but he saw some things that looked pretty bad.

2:18:59: Apparently, the Agila (sp?) signature matching machine would automatically match 70% and kick 30% out for manual verification. The Trump attorney is saying that the other Does testified that there was a lot of pressure to accept signatures, even if they didn't match. He gave one example where the guy is like, this is a star, not a signature, and his supervisor was like, push it through. Horrible.


RobertBarnesFan at 6:06 PM on February 10, 2021 | #19936 | reply | quote

Georgia Senate Election Fraud Hearing (Dec 3, 2020)

I listened to "Trump Legal Team Presents CLEAR Evidence of Fraud Before Georgia Senate Committee 12/3/20" and took notes on everything I found interesting.

00:02:17: Georgia hearing opens up with a Christian prayer. Pretty cool.

00:10:45: Trump attorney starts listing the number of people who voted in different illegal categories.

00:13:56: Jackie Apic (sp?) starts presenting video evidence of the suitcases full of ballots. First she's talking about how you can see that the GOP observers weren't actually allowed to observe.

00:56:09: The witness says that Biden over-performed (compared to what?) by 5% or something in counties that used Dominion voting machines compared to counties that used other machines. But I think that could be partly explained by the fact that Democrats love Dominion, and conservative states like Texas won't use it. So yes, it's shitty that Democrats use Dominion, but that might not be evidence that there's a causative relation between using Dominion and over-performance by Biden. It could be a third factor that's causing that correlation.

00:58:07: He gives specific figures for the rejection rate and vast numbers of absentee ballots. He's basically going to calculate what effect it would have on the election if the true rejection rate were applied.

00:59:06: Basically, I think like 200,000 mail-in ballots never had a date recorded when they were returned, and yet votes were recorded for those ballots, even though they were never returned from the voter to the vote counters. And 96,000 of those remain. And prior to this timestamp he talks about votes being illegally altered.

00:59:45: The witness says it's very easy in the Dominion system to assign a voter to a mail-in ballot. So whether or not this person actually filled in that ballot, you can just sort of link them in. I wonder if they went through the polls, found people who hadn't voted, and assigned them to mail-in ballots.

01:33:57: The colonel says we have voice recordings of orders being placed for ballots for other states to be printed in China. He says there are indications that there were fake ballots printed up and pre-positioned for injection into the voting systems.

01:47:22: The lady talks about the pristine ballots. Some of them weren't aligned correctly, like the printer printed it diagonally or something, but they were all pristine. She says there were 110 ballots in one box instead of the usual 100.

01:50:14: The Georgia lady came back the next day, I'm guessing she reported an issue with the ballots the previous day. She and the rest of the people at her table were given only 60 ballots all day, while the tables around them had like thousands of ballots to process. They were told to go home at 10:00am. I guess they came in at 7am.

01:51:33: She says, we were there the night before, there were pallets of ballots to be counted, and when we got there the next day, they were non-existent.

01:51:44: She points out how extraordinary it is that they were asked to sign up for a 5-day consecutive period from like 7am to 7pm, some huge block, and then to be told to go home early on the second day.

01:53:28: She says why would 98 ballots have this identical filling in of that first little eclipse, all for Biden?

01:55:22: We already went through 6 boxes of ballots, these were totally different and not explainable by any normal duplication process. This is a lady with 20 years of experience in, I guess, counting votes in elections.

02:02:03: I guess dominion connects over the internet to fix issues with ipads being used as poll books. A legislator asks about this, saing, I thought the Dominion machines weren't connected to the internet? But this wasn't a voting machine, it looks like. It wasn't anything that counts votes. Then she says that they fixed the ballot marking devices at the same time. So *those* are connected to the internet.

02:06:27: She got a batch of 110 ballots that were 2 for Trump, 1 for Jorgensen, and the rest were for Joe Biden. She says that the source of those messed-up ballots was State Farm Arena.

02:07:43: She's been a *poll manager* for over 20 years.

02:18:14: Bridget Thorne was a contractor for Dominion, printing test ballots from 8am-5pm, and apparently she was the only one who was spoiling the ballots if they weren't used. These are real ballots, and no one else had any training about how it was supposed to work or anything. [She was fired on Dec 16]

02:19:15: She raised the issue [of unspoiled test ballots], and they were told, hey, you know, it's fine, they don't need to be spoiling anything. And she said, maybe they were Dominion workers, who were replacing the Fulton County workers, who had a COVID outbreak.

02:20:33: There were all of these suitcases full of ballots in the Dominion area where they were printing test ballots. And as far as she knows, she was the only one spoiling them. So they were unspoiled, and there was like no security. Anyone could have just driven in and taken them. And she said one woman even did just drive in and got kicked out later. Absolutely horrific.

02:24:38: There was no real chain of custody for the sample ballots, no way to show that they were returned or spoiled. Anyone could have done anything with them. There could be a lot of bad paper ballots around. This may warrant listening to again.

02:25:39: She attended a Board of Elections meeting to report the issue, having tried to report it up the chain numerous other times and heard nothing back, and she was *muted* 15 seconds into her presentation.

02:26:06: In Fulton County, they had ACLU clerks to process absentee ballots in every location. She says those clerks weren't trained well. Her clerk wasn't trained to take a deposition for an absentee ballot.

02:35:02: She was working with Dominion in this warehouse to print test ballots and test scanners. And she would always leave, thinking there was nothing to be done, but there would always be people staying, doing more, until like 2am. And these people just had complete access to print actual ballots with no meaningful chain of custody.

02:37:00: The ACLU clerks weren't trained to take an affidavit before they cleared the absentee ballot, which is kind of a huge SNAFU in her opinion.

02:41:21: One vote counting station reported 10,707 votes for Biden, and, I think, 13 for Trump.

02:43:36: The actual amount for Biden was like 1,081 not 10-thousand-something as they originally put in.

03:02:18: Lady goes to work as a poll worker/watcher (I forget which). It's freezing cold. Someone turned off the natural gas to the building overnight. The machines were not kept in a climate controlled environment. There's no chain of custody for those machines. Anyone could have come in and done something to them, or they might have been messed up by the cold. What a clown show.

03:04:26: One of the workers was walking around taking coffee orders on the special paper that's only supposed to be used for printing ballots. JFC. Anyone could just go grab that paper and print off whatever ballots they want to print.

03:13:59: Basically, her precinct had to send the ballots that were scanned, they get put into a bag, they were supposed to in a locked ballot bag with chain of custody forms, but they didn't have the right stuff to do that. She waited, forced them to bring the locks, but they still didn't have the chain of custody forms. The other worker just took the ballots away anyway. And when they went to do the recount, they were in boxes, not in the special bags, so she has no idea what happened to those ballots in between.

[missed timestamp] If you have a urine sample with no chain of custody, it gets thrown out. Some of the votes had less chain of custody than a urine sample.

03:58:19: Some Zuckerberg foundation dumped a bunch of money into Georgia unevenly. They really pumped it into the places that ended up having the most Democrat boost for Biden. It's the type of foundation that's actually helping run the *election infrastructure*, and of course the owners of that nonprofit are hard left.

04:13:42: Good point: If we just updated the NCOA change of address form that people file with the post office to have a checkbox of whether it's a temporary or permanent move, that would solve a lot of problems. There's an MVMA (motor voter) law (federal?) that somehow prevents Secretaries of States from cleaning up their voter roles enough. The only time he's ever seen someone removed is when they swear in front of a judge that they moved and that the move was permanent.

04:15:52: There's a 14th Amendment (equal protection) issue around these people who move within state. If you follow the law and odn't vote, you don't get counted, but if you break it and do vote, your vote is counted. So we're enabling the cheaters to vote.

04:16:47: The NCOA database is publicly available. So people could have moved away from Georgia, but since it's public, other people can track them down and get them to say that their move was only temporary, and then they can still vote in Georgia.

04:40:49: Constitutional lawyer absolutely destroys a Democrat legislator who's trying to argue with him.


RobertBarnesFan at 6:49 PM on February 10, 2021 | #19937 | reply | quote

My idea to improve U.S. election integrity

IMO, the military should run the elections in our country. We should use paper ballots and they should be overseen by the military with secure ID. Election materials should be treated as critical US government infrastructure. Have armed military guards by every ballot box. Deploy the National Guard for every election. No more bullshit. Have cameras on everything. Get the elections done *securely*. Involve the military. I know some of the top generals are a bit squishy, but I don't think that's as much of an issue with the rank and file. They do it safely in countries like Afghanistan. Let them do it for us.


RobertBarnesFan at 6:50 PM on February 10, 2021 | #19938 | reply | quote

#19938 using the military in civilian life more and involving them with transfer of democratic power is extremely dangerous and rationalist. look into some military dictatorships and coups, and problems other countries have had.


Anonymous at 6:54 PM on February 10, 2021 | #19939 | reply | quote

RobertBarnesFan at 6:54 PM on February 10, 2021 | #19940 | reply | quote

https://jacobian.org/2021/feb/10/interview-questions-dei/

How to ask a job interview question about “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” and some tips for grading the candidate’s answer. Awful.


Anonymous at 4:58 AM on February 13, 2021 | #19976 | reply | quote

#19962 The NYT has partially retracted the Sicknick story that I claimed involved NYT lying:

https://amgreatness.com/2021/02/14/the-new-york-times-retracts-the-sicknick-story/

The NYT posted this update, essentially admitting they may have been wrong and are not in a position to confidently make the claims that they had published:

> UPDATE: New information has emerged regarding the death of the Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick that questions the initial cause of his death provided by officials close to the Capitol Police.

I put some thought into it before posting that piece of MSM skepticism (in my #19962 ) and I decided I was confident enough to share it even though I hadn't researched the topic. I'm glad to see I was not tricked by fake news (sometimes right wing MSM skepticism is itself fake news). I try not to be fooled and I try not to share misinformation, even in the (many) cases where I just read a couple things instead of actually studying the topic in depth.

BTW, Media Matters had accused Sicknick narrative skepticism of being a right-wing conspiracy theory. This is another example showing they are tribalist liars.


curi at 2:08 PM on February 15, 2021 | #19990 | reply | quote

Chrissy Clark, Oregon Dept. of Education: Asking Students To ‘Show Their Work’ In Math Class Is A Form Of White Supremacy, DailyWire.com (Feb 15, 2021 ):

> In an email sent out by the Oregon Department of Education, teachers were encouraged to enroll in a course called “A Pathway to Equitable Math Instruction.” The course came with an 82-page instructional guide that lists the ways in which white supremacy is perpetuated in math class.

> Examples of classroom actions that allegedly perpetuate white supremacy include asking students to show their work, focusing on getting the right answer, tracking student success, and grading students.


Anonymous at 6:14 PM on February 17, 2021 | #19999 | reply | quote

In today's "Forward Observer" (non-free email list), Samuel Culper writes:

> Through institutional soft power, white supremacy is becoming synonymous with capitalism, Christianity, and all the other traditional aspects of American society declared as opposition to the Cultural Revolution and the enemy of mankind.

I thought that was well put.


Anonymous at 11:58 AM on February 19, 2021 | #20003 | reply | quote

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/oakland-chinatown-shop-owner-arrested-after-firing-shots-thwart-robbery

> Only in a liberal-run state like California will a store owner get jailed for intervening in a robbery outside his shop. It's backasswards but true, according to local television station KTVU.

> In Oakland's Chinatown, a store owner was arrested Monday when he fired his handgun in the air to chase off a criminal who was mugging a woman outside his shop. No one was injured at the time of the incident, but the 36-year-old man was arrested and faces one felony assault with a firearm.

> Oakland's Chinatown has been hit with a recent wave of assaults and robberies. Members in the community have pooled together funds and hired private security guards to patrol the streets.

> Oakland's new police chief commented on Monday's incident at a press conference on Tuesday.

> "We don't want people to fire weapons into our community. There could be unintended victims," Chief LeRonne Armstrong said.


curi at 12:04 PM on February 19, 2021 | #20004 | reply | quote

#20004 Deliberately firing a gun into the air is dumb and criminal. That bullet will come down somewhere, possibly killing or injuring someone innocent.

However, assault is probably not the right charge for such an act. Reckless endangerment (possibly with aggravating circumstance "with a firearm") should be available anywhere. Many localities also have a specific law against firing into the air or firing without an intended target or a broad definition of negligent discharge which can be charged. It's possible the store owner was purposely overcharged in hopes of getting him to agree to a plea deal on a lesser charge.

If the store owner wanted to intervene, drawing on an assault in progress and shouting "stop or I'll shoot" that might have been OK. The key consideration for whether it's OK would be if the mugging was violent enough to threaten death or serious injury to the muggee. If the mugger was using a gun or a knife or a blunt force weapon, was choking the victim or something similar, drawing on him would have been OK. If the mugger was a lot bigger than the muggee and the mugger was hitting/kicking, drawing was also probably OK. If the mugger and muggee were approximately the same size and no physical violence was actually occurring (only threatened), drawing on the mugger would be legally questionable and not advised. In that case simply shouting "stop" would have been the right course of action, and only draw if the situation escalates to where someone is in imminent danger of death or serious injury.

Alternately, if risk of death or serious injury to the muggee was readily apparent and imminent, the store owner could have simply shot the mugger. That's risky of course: Maybe the store owner misinterpreted the situation, or maybe the store owner would miss the mugger and hit the muggee or a bystander, etc. But if a shot was warranted at all, the only reasonable aim for the shot was at the mugger. If the store owner wasn't ready (or justified) in shooting the mugger, he should not have fired at all.


Andy Dufresne at 4:41 PM on February 19, 2021 | #20005 | reply | quote

#19990 More about the Jan 6 mob beating a police officer to death with a fire extinguisher *being a media lie*:

https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-false-and-exaggerated-claims


curi at 5:47 PM on February 21, 2021 | #20012 | reply | quote

https://yournews.com/2021/02/19/2033550/joe-bidens-dept-of-energy-blocked-texas-from-increasing-power/

The US government's department of energy stopped the government of Texas from taking measures to prevent power cuts, because allowing people enough energy to stay alive isn't environmentally friendly.


oh my god it's turpentine at 10:35 AM on February 22, 2021 | #20014 | reply | quote

https://opensourcedefense.substack.com/p/osd-105-the-atf-is-giving-out-machine

The ATF has just retroactively made people who bought a T36 gun, which it approved for sale two years ago, into criminals.


oh my god it's turpentine at 11:42 PM on February 22, 2021 | #20020 | reply | quote

#20020 :((((((


curi at 12:57 AM on February 23, 2021 | #20021 | reply | quote

*National Students for Justice in Palestine* now openly hates the US and Canada too:

https://canarymission.org/campaign/NSJP2019

> National SJP now holds three key positions:

> 1. Israel must be destroyed.

> 2. The U.S. & Canada should not exist.

> 3. Terrorism against the Jewish population of Israel is legitimate.


curi at 10:20 AM on February 25, 2021 | #20035 | reply | quote

China Uncensored:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qqqj_zHJQZo

> Trudeau Won’t Admit China Is Committing Genocide


curi at 2:32 PM on February 25, 2021 | #20041 | reply | quote

Lauren Southern criticizes fact-checkers https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K59IcC2lWho&feature=youtu.be


Anonymous at 5:25 PM on February 26, 2021 | #20054 | reply | quote

https://twitter.com/webdevMason/status/1365426190035550210

A man has threatened to murder, torture and rape a woman and has spied on her. The government claims he's mentally ill so they won't lock him up.


oh my god it's turpentine at 11:41 PM on February 26, 2021 | #20059 | reply | quote

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NMDZcbkgpJA

A video about a bitcoin scam called Quadriga CX.


oh my god it's turpentine at 5:54 AM on February 28, 2021 | #20062 | reply | quote

article on parents dealing with SJW/CRT indoctrination in "elite" schools https://www.city-journal.org/the-miseducation-of-americas-elites

the author quit the NYT a while ago: https://www.bariweiss.com/resignation-letter


Anonymous at 1:11 PM on March 10, 2021 | #20137 | reply | quote

NYC is becoming a police state

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/de-blasio-nypd-hateful-noncriminal-conduct

> "I also think even if something is not a criminal case, a perpetrator being confronted by the city, whether it's NYPD or another agency, and being told that what they've done was very hurtful to another person and could have ever repeated lead to criminal charges, that's another important piece of the puzzle," de Blasio suggested.

> A reporter asked how the NYPD would become involved in noncriminal cases.

> "It's NYPD or could be other agencies as well. But NYPD is a great example. One of the things officers are trained to do is to give warnings. If someone has done something wrong, but not rising to a criminal level, it's perfectly appropriate for an NYPD officer to talk to them, to say that was not appropriate," de Blasio said. "And if you did that on a higher level, that would be a crime."

> "And I think that has an educating impact on people. I think it has a sobering impact that we need. … By the way, if something might be a crime, if it's not 100 percent clear, the NYPD is going to investigate, I assure you, if an NYPD officer who calls you or shows up at your door to ask about something you did that makes people think twice," he continued.


Anonymous at 12:20 PM on March 20, 2021 | #20225 | reply | quote

the US Special Operations Command has hired its first "Chief of Diversity & Inclusion" and the person appears to be a left-wing partisan

https://twitchy.com/brettt-3136/2021/03/27/us-special-operations-command-welcomes-aboard-its-new-chief-of-diversity-and-inclusion-who-compared-trump-to-hitler/


Anonymous at 5:51 PM on March 28, 2021 | #20284 | reply | quote

#19813 Annie Palmer, Amazon loses effort to install camera to watch counting of ballots in pivotal union vote, *CNBC* (2021-03-30):

> Amazon had sought to place a video camera in the [National Labor Relations Board]’s Birmingham office, where votes will be tabulated, to keep an eye on the ballot boxes in the off hours between counting.... The camera feed would have been accessible by both Amazon and the [Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union].


Anonymous at 9:39 AM on March 30, 2021 | #20306 | reply | quote

https://twitter.com/united/status/1379426304857141250 :

> Our flight deck should reflect the diverse group of people on board our planes every day. That’s why we plan for 50% of the 5,000 pilots we train in the next decade to be women or people of color. Learn more and apply now: https://unitedaviate.com/aviate-program-career-paths/united-aviate-academy/


Anonymous at 10:02 PM on April 6, 2021 | #20350 | reply | quote

Biden has said racist stuff. He keeps saying it recently too.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZfzJATDmXs


Anonymous at 11:18 PM on April 8, 2021 | #20362 | reply | quote

https://twitter.com/ip_guy_/status/1381651461428244480

says NYT Iran reporter regularly whitewashes Iranian regime with misinformation. she also uses a bot on Twitter to block anyone who mentions her name using the Persian language (doesn't matter at all what you say, just name and language) cuz she got complaints from actual Iranians pointing out her lies and she doesn't want to listen to or engage with the people of the country she reports on.


Anonymous at 8:01 PM on April 12, 2021 | #20376 | reply | quote

http://xoxohth.com/thread.php?thread_id=4811045&mc=144&forum_id=2

> name a random thing and i'll link you an article about it being racist

he followed through and provided many article links


Anonymous at 1:21 PM on April 15, 2021 | #20386 | reply | quote

#20386 I sent this to a friend and they replied with this: https://twitter.com/TitaniaMcGrath/status/1281023987242487808?s=19

> IMPORTANT THREAD 🧵👇

>

> Brave social justice activists such as myself are working tirelessly to expose *all* the racist elements within our society.

>

> Sometimes it is difficult to keep up, so I thought it would be helpful to curate a comprehensive list...


Anonymous at 9:25 PM on April 15, 2021 | #20390 | reply | quote

https://www.thecollegefix.com/ive-lived-in-minneapolis-my-entire-life-im-leaving-friday-i-no-longer-recognize-my-hometown/

one person's perspective on how their hometown has changed. excerpt:

OPINION: I no longer recognize Minneapolis. I no longer want to live here.

MINNEAPOLIS, Minn. — Minneapolis is my home. My happiest memories are here. It’s where I learned to ride a bike, had my first date, received my high school diploma.

But today, I’m too afraid to even walk in my neighborhood by myself.

The ACE Hardware down the street? The one that I used to bike to in the summer? Robbed twice in the past five days.

The Walgreens next to my elementary school? Molotov cocktail thrown into it.

The Lake Harriet Bandshell, where we spent countless Mother’s Days? Homeless encampment popped up next door.

These are the things you don’t read about in the news.

Ten minutes from my house, at 38th and Chicago, there is still an autonomous zone. Police are not allowed to enter. Residents have died because medical authorities couldn’t get through, and carjackers (of which there are MANY) will speed into the zone to escape officer pursuit.

My favorite dinner theater canceled its production of Cinderella because it was “too white.”

My church — my beloved, tiny, Lutheran church — organized social justice marches for our congregation while refusing to reinstate in-person services (they’re still virtual, by the way).

And how about the week of the 2020 riots?

We lived under a curfew for days while looters seemingly roamed freely. Friends fled their home at 3:30 a.m. because the auto parts store behind them was on fire. And then we watched in horror as our City Council members demanded that the city defund the police — as they hired armed security for themselves.

I no longer recognize Minneapolis. I no longer want to live here. We are done, and I am leaving.


Anonymous at 1:19 PM on April 22, 2021 | #20427 | reply | quote

A left-wing guy who likes civilization writes about horrible things going on in Portland:

https://unherd.com/2021/04/how-anarchists-captured-portland/


Anonymous at 5:35 PM on April 22, 2021 | #20428 | reply | quote

Basecamp announced a new policy today: "No more societal and political discussions on our company Basecamp account". Wesley Yang commented about this on Twitter:

> Basecamp was reputed to be the most aggressively woke company in SV; really curious what it must have been like to induce this reversal -- no more political convos, no more committees: "Back to basics, back to individual responsibility, back to work" https://world.hey.com/jason/changes-at-basecamp-7f32afc5 [screenshot of text below]

>> 1. No more societal and political discussions on our company Basecamp account. Today's social and political waters are especially choppy. Sensitivities are at 11, and every discussion remotely related to politics, advocacy, or society at large quickly spins away from pleasant. You shouldn't have to wonder if staying out of it means you're complicit, or wading into it means you're a target. These are difficult enough waters to navigate in life, but significantly more so at work. It's become too much. It's a major distraction. It saps our energy, and redirects our dialog towards dark places. It's not healthy, it hasn't served us well. And we're done with it on our company Basecamp account where the work happens. People can take the conversations with willing co-workers to Signal, Whatsapp, or even a personal Basecamp account, but it can't happen where the work happens anymore. Update: David has shared some more details and more of the internal announcement on his HEY World blog.

>>

>> 2. No more paternalistic benefits. For years we've offered a fitness benefit, a wellness allowance, a farmer's market share, and continuing education allowances. They felt good at the time, but we've had a change of heart. It's none of our business what you do outside of work, and it's not Basecamp's place to encourage certain behaviors — regardless of good intention. By providing funds for certain things, we're getting too deep into nudging people's personal, individual choices. So we've ended these benefits, and, as compensation, paid every employee the full cash value of the benefits for this year. In addition, we recently introduced a 10% profit sharing plan to provide direct compensation that people can spend on whatever they'd like, privately, without company involvement or judgement.

>>

>> 3. No more committees. For nearly all of our 21 year existence, we were proudly committee-free. No big working groups making big decisions, or putting forward formalized, groupthink recommendations. No bureaucracy. But recently, a few sprung up. No longer. We're turning things back over to the person (or people) who were distinctly hired to make those decisions. The responsibility for DEI work returns to Andrea, our head of People Ops. The responsibility for negotiating use restrictions and moral quandaries returns to me and David. A long-standing group of managers called "Small Council" will disband — when we need advice or counsel we'll ask individuals with direct relevant experience rather than a pre-defined group at large. Back to basics, back to individual responsibility, back to work.


Anonymous at 8:13 PM on April 26, 2021 | #20459 | reply | quote

#20459 Note: Contrary to Yang's statement, Basecamp is a fully remote company, not a "company in SV". They were formerly based in Chicago.


Anonymous at 8:15 PM on April 26, 2021 | #20461 | reply | quote

Anonymous at 12:29 PM on April 27, 2021 | #20467 | reply | quote

Victor Davis Hanson, The New Antiracism Is the Old Racism, *American Greatness* (April 25, 2021):

> So Elie Mystal writing in the Nation lectures the country that “White people haven’t improved; I’ve just been able to limit my exposure to them.”[...]

> Damon Young, a senior editor of The Root and an occasional New York Times contributor, adds, “Whiteness is a public health crisis. It shortens life expediencies, it pollutes air, it constricts equilibrium, it devastates forests, it melts ice caps, it sparks (and funds) wars, it flattens dialects, it infests consciousnesses, and it kills people”

> Note the telltale verb “infests.”

> Substitute “Jewishness” for “whiteness,” and it would not be inflammatory to say that Young’s piece would have been normal fare for Der Stürmer circa 1935. Obviously, if whiteness is destroying all aspects of natural and human life, then what should be done about such an infestation—other than destroying the existential toxin’s source?

> Almost daily we read that requiring an ID to vote, in the manner of cashing a check, getting a vaccination, or boarding a flight, is white-perpetuated Jim Crow racism. The new farm bill will not allow strapped white farmers to apply for help. The city of Oakland will not extend aid to poor whites in a new pilot program. Note in the latter case there is no pretense of “white privilege” other than in minority-majority Oakland the absurd assumption that impoverished whites there are more privileged than poor nonwhites.


Anonymous at 6:48 PM on April 30, 2021 | #20496 | reply | quote

#20459

> Basecamp announced a new policy today: "No more societal and political discussions on our company Basecamp account".

looks like they are having major internal strife and people quitting over this

https://www.theverge.com/2021/5/3/22418208/basecamp-all-hands-meeting-employee-resignations-buyouts-implosion


Anonymous at 7:59 PM on May 3, 2021 | #20504 | reply | quote

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2021/05/does-ocean-acidification-alter-fish-behavior-fraud-allegations-create-sea-doubt

Studies saying that ocean acidification affects fish behaviour were fraudulent.


oh my god it's turpentine at 11:37 PM on May 8, 2021 | #20537 | reply | quote

Statement from President Trump re: Israel

https://www.donaldjtrump.com/desk/desk-3e6evycucx/


Anonymous at 1:06 PM on May 11, 2021 | #20552 | reply | quote

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