US Presidential Election 2020

[dada]

"Oh, I believe I was quite forward about it."

Not in the post I was referring to. And now insinuiating that everyone including yourself is a troll is another poor attempt at deflection.

[dada]

"The desire to condemn, topple, expropriate, and probably behead (as a matter of human self-defense) members of the billionaire and capitalist-state ruling classes is obviously a near-point of universal consensus around here."

How to go about it, though. If it's like the second labor of Heracles, cutting off a head only makes two more take its place. To slay the monster, we need a comrade with a blowtorch to cauterize each neck as we hack away at it. Otherwise the task gets longer every time we cut one off.

Then we make sure to bury the last, immortal head under a big rock. Far away from any graveyards, since the teeth are rumored to have the power of raising skeletons from the dead. I don't put much stock in rumors, but with a monster like hydra, I think it wise not to take any chances.

And of course it's only the second labor. Best to keep things in perspective. The second labor didn't even count, disqualified on a technicality. So now we have to go steal some golden apples.

[JackRiddler]

Is it still OK to want to fight against our would be totalitarian leaders? Is it OK if I prefer not to empathize with our would be totalitarian leaders as hapless pawns playing their "necessary" role in larger drama beyond their control?

Just wondering ...

Sure, although that's a misrepresentation or misunderstanding of dada's position, I think. I don't see him empathizing or rendering them as pawns. (Like that Black Mirror episode about Zuckerberg-like guy is an example of empathizing and pawn-izing, btw.)

[dada]

Yes, I think maybe my position is misunderstood or misinterpreted when people try to force it into the same old tired binary thinking framework. You know, I don't harbor seething hatred, so therefore I must empathize. I don't think elite controllers manipulating your society and programming your brain are the primary problem on planet earth, so therefore I must think billionaires are hapless pawns and not responsible for the choices the make at every step. It's just so, something. I don't know. Predictable? Tiresome.

Ponderous. But it just never ends, so what can you do. I'm certainly not going to engage the binary thinking on its own terms, though.

edited to change "share a seething hatred" to "harbor seething hatred." Bit of a nautical feel, smell of sea air and wet wood.

[dada]

Like, if I say 'billionaires have no choice but to act the way they do." I'm not saying they have no free will, I'm saying if they didn't act the way they do, then they would lose all their money, no longer be billionaires.

Binary thinking can't grasp this. It's either no choice or free will. Can't be both.

[Belligerent Savant]

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Again, this is a misframing of the position. Or certainly, my position.

In an ideal society, Billionaires wouldn't exist as they'd spread their excess wealth where needed for the greater good. At the same time, I'm not 'anti-capitalist' in a number of respects. Entrepreneurship and enterprising pursuits can be fruitful in a healthy society. Balance -- within range -- helps to offset excess.

I typed the following some years ago:

I shouldnt wonder that the potential for those 85 people to make some serious changes to how they think is truly in the balance just now.

If I was one of them, I might find living with myself a hard thing to do.

Death would probably truly come as a relief to me.

If i felt it ended with death, that is.

If "you" were one of them, you wouldn't be one of the 85 richest people, of course, as to reach such levels of materialism requires personality traits outside your area of 'desire', for lack of a better term. We can only speculate on the extent these individuals experience any measure of self-reflection leading to thoughts of 'ending themselves' due to their lives of excess/greed.
Indeed, it is precisely their solipsism, their lack of self-reflection and/or empathy that in many ways are integral to their material 'achievements'.

Of course, anyone can change. Anyone can experience an 'epiphany' at some point in their lifetime. Though perhaps it's simply their path -- their destiny -- to experience whatever it is they are experiencing (If one subscribes to such a thing), and if that is the case, regardless of outcome, they'll get what's coming to them, no?

Again, however, my focus is not on "billionaires", but on certain select billionaires, and how their choices negatively, and significantly, impact the majority.

And, their choices are but a small component of the myriad movements [conscious, and/or subconscious] involved in our current circumstances -- we are all complicit in measurable degrees, particularly those living within the confines of Empire.

You are either purposely or ignorantly conflating.

[dada]

I wasn't addressing you in my posts there, "conflating your position," or whatever. I was talking about my position, not yours.

But since you bring it up, no, I don't think we are 'all complicit" in empire to some degree. It is a choice to think that way, not an absolute, umavoidable ceratinty.

It isn't easy to think outside of that way, sure. It takes effort, so lazy thinkers need not apply.

[dada]

I mean, if your society is imperial, than perhaps you might conclude that you and all those in your society must participate in empire to some degree, but it isn't my society.

[Belligerent Savant]

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Just gonna drop this here. From an anonymous twitter account. Make of it as you wish.

@bridgietherease

I hate that I have to keep saying this but the "insurrection" is so so so fake and stupid & it's so suspect that Democrats (with the cooperation of many on "the left" who really ought to know better) keep escalating it to give cover to a disgusting expansion of state power
...
it could not possibly be clearer that it is a Load-Bearing Psyop
...
some of it is just the pure power that "trauma discourse" has right now - people don't want to say it's stupid & fake because that would mean they'd have to ask why AOC is doing fifty stupid fake public crying sessions, or worse, actually call her out for exploiting people's good hearts

https://twitter.com/bridgietherease/sta ... 6384049152

[Marionumber1]

Um.....

Biden Justice Department Seeks to Defend Trump in Suit Over Rape Denial
Donald Trump is facing a defamation lawsuit brought by E. Jean Carroll, who has accused Mr. Trump of raping her.

By Alan Feuer and Benjamin Weiser
Published June 7, 2021 Updated June 8, 2021, 11:14 a.m. ET

During the presidential campaign, Joseph R. Biden Jr., then the Democratic candidate, slammed his opponent, Donald J. Trump, for a highly unusual legal move: bringing in the Justice Department to represent him in a defamation lawsuit stemming from a decades-old rape allegation.

At one of their debates, Mr. Biden accused Mr. Trump of treating the Justice Department like his “own law firm” in the suit, filed against him by the writer E. Jean Carroll. “What’s that all about?” he sarcastically asked.

But on Monday night, nearly eight months after Mr. Biden’s attack, his own Justice Department essentially adopted Mr. Trump’s position, arguing that he could not be sued for defamation because he had made the supposedly offending statements as part of his official duties as president.

In a brief filed with a federal appeals court in New York, the Justice Department acknowledged that Mr. Trump’s remarks about Ms. Carroll were “crude and disrespectful,” but the department also claimed that the Trump administration’s arguments were correct — a position that could lead to Ms. Carroll’s lawsuit being dismissed.

Mr. Biden has repeatedly said he wants to restore the Justice Department’s traditional independence from the White House — a stance that has been echoed by several of his top picks for the department’s leadership. Early Tuesday morning, a spokesman said in an emailed statement that the White House “was not consulted by D.O.J. on the decision to file this brief or its contents.”

The White House declined to comment on the lawsuit. But the spokesman, Andrew Bates, added that “President Biden and his team have utterly different standards from their predecessors for what qualify as acceptable statements.”

Even so, the late-night filing caught many, including Ms. Carroll’s lawyers, by surprise and marked another twist in a protracted legal battle.

That dispute began in November 2019 when Ms. Carroll, a longtime columnist for Elle magazine, sued Mr. Trump, claiming he had lied by publicly denying he had ever met her, after she had accused him of rape months earlier. In a book excerpt published in New York magazine that June, Ms. Carroll wrote that Mr. Trump had thrown her up against the wall of a dressing room at Bergdorf Goodman, an upscale department store in Manhattan, in late 1995 or early 1996. Then, she claimed, Mr. Trump pulled down her tights, opened his pants and forced himself on her.

Shortly after the excerpt was published, Mr. Trump said in an Oval Office interview that the assault had never happened and that he could not have raped Ms. Carroll because she was not his “type.” According to the lawsuit, Mr. Trump also issued an official statement accusing Ms. Carroll of lying about the alleged assault.

For several months, the defamation suit wound its way through a state court in New York. But then last September, one month after a state judge issued a ruling that potentially opened the door to Mr. Trump sitting for a deposition before the election, the attorney general, William P. Barr, stepped into the case. In a highly unusual move, Mr. Barr transferred the case to federal court and substituted the federal government for Mr. Trump as the defendant.

Federal law forbids government employees from being sued for defamation, meaning that if the move was successful, Ms. Carroll’s claim would be dismissed.

Mr. Barr’s move raised the question of whether Mr. Trump had in fact made his comments about Ms. Carroll as a government employee — a position that Ms. Carroll’s lawyers roundly rejected. “There is not a single person in the United States — not the president and not anyone else — whose job description includes slandering women they sexually assaulted,” the lawyers said in a filing last year.

In October, the first federal judge to consider the case, Lewis A. Kaplan of Federal District Court in Manhattan, agreed with Ms. Carroll, blocking Mr. Barr’s move and deciding that the suit could continue against Mr. Trump in his private capacity. Mr. Trump’s comments concerned events that had occurred “several decades before he took office,” Judge Kaplan ruled, and had “no relationship to the official business of the United States.”

Before Mr. Trump left office, the Justice Department appealed Judge Kaplan’s ruling, and many legal observers predicted that a new attorney general, under Mr. Biden, would drop the Trump-era claims.

The brief filed on Monday night was the first time the Biden administration’s Justice Department, now led by Attorney General Merrick B. Garland, weighed in on the issue. In the brief, department lawyers said that when Mr. Trump had denied raping Ms. Carroll, through the White House press office or in statements to reporters in the Oval Office and on the White House lawn, he was acting within the scope of his office.

“Elected public officials can — and often must — address allegations regarding personal wrongdoing that inspire doubt about their suitability for office,” the department lawyers argued, adding, “Officials do not step outside the bounds of their office simply because they are addressing questions regarding allegations about their personal lives.”

Ms. Carroll’s lead lawyer, Roberta A. Kaplan, reacting to the new filing, said that as “horrific” as the alleged rape was, it was “truly shocking that the current Department of Justice would allow Donald Trump to get away with lying about it.”

Ms. Carroll, in her own statement, said she was angry and offended.

“As women across the country are standing up and holding men accountable for assault,” she said, “the D.O.J. is trying to stop me from having that same right.”

In case one needed more signs that our political system is a sham, with no intention of holding any of its puppets (Trump included) accountable for anything meaningful.

[Harvey]

In case one needed more signs that our political system is a sham, with no intention of holding any of its puppets (Trump included) accountable for anything meaningful.

^ None needed. We've argued about every variation of bullshit every single election cycle since I've been at RI and it'll happen again in four years if elections are still a thing. You're fucking mad if you think you can vote your way out of this nightmare.

[JackRiddler]

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Is there a way we can find our way out of this nightmare?

Anyway, here's Alex Jones saying that the White House contacted him three days before 6 January to ask that he "lead the march" on the Capitol, and that the "Secret Service" would "take him out of the front row" and guide him to the place where the march was supposed to start after Trump's speech.

I don't know the substantiation for the claim in the tweet that Alex Jones "paid $500,000 to organize the insurrection on January 6th," although he does say he got "his marching orders from Donald Trump."

https://twitter.com/davenewworld_2/stat ... 7263227904

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[Grizzly]

We've argued about every variation of bullshit every single election cycle since I've been at RI and it'll happen again in four years if elections are still a thing. You're fucking mad if you think you can vote your way out of this nightmare.

Comment of the fucking year.... Can't be stated enough!

[Belligerent Savant]

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Alex fucking Jones. He can no longer even be considered limited hangout. For some time now, he's been a straight-up game show host for the conspiratard crowd.

Going back to Harvey's astute observation. An homage in image form:

[Grizzly]

And it's not over the ptb are still in motion sucking us dry...