He's lying about having to be there. He's also lying about it distracting from the campaign. Him being at the trial is part of the campaign. Him saying it's distracting from the campaign, is also part of the campaign.
It is interesting to see what he’s really like, is his outward personality part of being the perfect candidate or is it an act that he has spent a career practicing
Where does Trump the god of the inbreds end and where does Trump the pathetic begin
Drafts should be considered a war crime against your own people. If you can’t defend your country without a draft, it doesn’t deserve to be defended because there are obviously not enough people willing to fight for it. Turning your citizens into slaves and sending them into the meat grinder makes you a monster.
I have the opposite view. A country at war should have the draft, and there should be no exceptions, so that the politicians who send other people’s children off to fight also have to send their own.
Most soldiers in a “professional” army are there because their families are poor and they have few other options to make a living.
Make declaration of war a mandatory vote for every citizen. Anyone who votes “yes” (or illegally abstains) gets registered for the draft. Anyone who votes “no” is unregistered.
I know it’s not really feasible because governments need to be able to react swiftly in times of war. But these days with computers and cell phones, there’s very little reason that the government couldn’t push a “go download our secure voting app/visit this link to cast your vote” notification via the emergency alert broadcasting system.
How do you reckon it would work when it comes to age? Is the vote limited just to people of military age? Does this mean that whether or not to declare war effectively falls in the hands of ~18 - 30 year olds?
Or is it open to everyone and even some old warhawk could be drafted? Are handicapped people not allowed to vote? Women that don’t meet combat standards?
There is always the option to draft them into some sort of non-combat role. But if you knew you were only going for a non-combat role, it could be a lot easier to vote “yes”.
There will always be exceptions, for example for disabilities or medical conditions. Most of those exceptions will be more accessible to wealthy or influential families that can afford to pay off doctors than poorer families.
Trump and Biden both avoided the draft with “1-Y” (medical) exemption. Keep in mind that more than half the 27 million eligible males were exempted or disqualified for some reason, so it’s not as if this was something only politicians did.
Lack of a draft is almost directly and solely responsible for the current quagmire of the US military - when we had a draft, normal people were pulled and had to serve with other normal people. They had real lives to go back to. They had family and friends who would listen to them and write their representatives to complain if the use of those human resources was inappropriate. Seeing body bags flying home and a televised razing of a foreign jungle turned a lot of people off from war. And they made their voices heard.
Now, the only people being asked to pay attention are career military professionals. They often do not have a job or life outside of the military to tie them to normal life. They've also gotten smarter about where they fly corpses in, so the news can't provide a solid day-by-day count of the wasted lives. These folks aren't pushing back against the worst excesses of the military, because their college benefit or their pension require them to shut up and just do what they're told.
There's a great documentary called Sir! No, Sir! about the vibrant protest movement from within the military, driven mostly by draftees during Vietnam.
I don't disagree with your initial reasoning, but there's a different take that says that what we have allowed is for the worst of us to control the policy for all of us, with nearly no external oversight.
This is a difficult problem to solve for a society though. The army is needed, because it’s what allows your country to exist. In time of peace, draft is really not optimal, because people are taken a year of their life for absolutely nothing. But the army need to keep its structure alive and functioning, or there’ll be nothing when it’s needed.
The army of professionals is a good solution, and they do a hard job to keep an important piece of the state alive when no one cares about it.
Ultimately I think it’s better if poor people make the core of the army because it means ultimately the safety of the nation is in their hands. Still, culture of the military men should be better taken care of, and elitism of the command structure should be fought.
Making education so expensive that the only way for some to pursue education is to die for their country is a crime. If majority of your citizen view being part of army is only for poor people, your country does not deserve to be protected because obviously not enough people willing to fight for it. Turning your citizens into slaves and sending them into the meat grinder makes you a monster.
The problem is that it isn’t a separate issue, it’s the same body (Congress, with WH support) that imposes these problems and then offers “solutions” to the impacted population in exchange for acting as a jackbooted thug overseas.
I would be more likely to go the other way starship troopers style only those with the character to defend their country should have the right to vote in that country. Those leeching off the system and letting others doing the difficult things shouldn’t be rewarded
First thing was that no draft is stupid and even something like starship troopers needing to serve the country in some way to be worth of a vote isn’t the worst idea in the world so it’s better than that. You don’t think there is anything at all in having some means of people that are willing to do more for their country be it military or otherwise should have more of a vote than those that do nothing and would leave it the second it isn’t doing enough for them? Some people want to make their country and the world a better place, why should they get less than someone that does nothing.
I’m not arguing that Turing should have been on the front line or that the Bevin Boys weren’t serving their country and willing to do everything possible to help their country and should have equality. Just those trying to escape when things go bad shouldn’t have the same rights when things go well off the backs of others.
Dude “You should have to provide service to the abstract idea that is ‘the nation’ in order to get your human rights” is just fascism, no matter how you try to spin it.
starship troopers the movie was a literal send-up of fascism and you are sitting here arguing that we should do fascism so absurd it is the realm of actual parody
or you’re advocating for the book’s straight up fascism. either way, you should eat a bullet, nazi.
Heinlein was a fascist, full stop. Verhoeven didn’t even finish the book before he directed the movie because he hated the fascist ideology in it and tried to satirize it in the movie but both the actors involved and a lot of audience members missed the satire.
Absolute state of the world that the view that people should defend their country is facism. I’m sure the allies didn’t see themselves as fascist in WW2
You don’t think the allies out people in jail for not helping with the war effort?
Right tell me how every example of “you need to do something for your country to get citizenship” is fascism? Plenty have people have argued that you need to be educated to vote or to have land to vote or whatever. They are shit systems yes but they aren’t fascism.
You’re just using an over used internet buzzword. It’s going to lose all meaning eventually.
Obviously not read starship troopers thet make it very clear that anyone can serve and will be accommodated. And they make it very clear that being in the military isn’t the only way to serve.
It’s just above providing for your country and earning the right to vote.
draft is precisly because of that necessary , its put a general price on “Imperial adventure” while proffessional army will recruit itself from the lower classes and can be spend easly (they choose soo ) , its a bad as its forces the underprivledge to die for an empire whos fruits the privledge eat , while avoiding the blood…
The elites will just dodge the draft anyway. At least without a draft, a sufficiently unpopular war is more likely to be shut down by people refusing to enlist. Also, you can’t advocate for slavery by arguing that it solves some other problem.
Volunteer service means wars are waged outside of public consciousness now. The Afghanistan war went on for 20 years and was essentially invisible to most people in the US. The Fed openly trying to increase unemployment is at least partially motivated by the military recruitment issues going on right now. Volunteer wars are fueled by the lives of desperate poor people.
I’m not sure there are no situations in which draft’s are permissible. If we were in a socialist society and a fascist government invades and I were Commissar of War you bet your ass the ex-bourgeois are getting drafted.
100% agree. Me presenting it as a choice by a single Commissar for War is more tongue-in-cheek. The answer whether or we should do it is contextual but my point is that there are clear cases which I can imagine in which drafting would be clearly justified, even if of only certain groups.
But responding to a question of whether or not we should do something by saying it would be decided democratically is evading the actual question of what you would put forward or support as appropriate policy in such a scenario. If everyone one responded that way then nothing would be decided.
In this hypothetical wouldn’t the boogies and Kulacks would be in Gulags already? A bunch would be willing to sign on if it meant they might get an early release after the war. No draft necessary.
I’m really not convinced that they would normally prefer to fight fascists on the front lines than to stay in a gulag, uncomfortable as the latter might be.
Zoom was disruptive in the market because the other options SUCKED - Skype, GotomyPC, WebEx, etc all did a lot of rapid maturing during the pandemic to catch up to Zoom, and this ‘bundling’ of Teams with Office has built user lock-in via Office 365.
Well played Microsoft, once again ducking a well deserved anti-trust suit. ‘Historic injury’ should count equally as ‘current injury’ for prosecution, arguably especially so if that historic injury is what created your current market share
“The president cannot function, and the presidency itself cannot retain its vital independence, if the president faces criminal prosecution for official acts once he leaves office,” the filing said.
The presidents from 1789 to 2016 did seem to manage, one way or another.
It also presumes that the independent presidency is of any value to the republic, pretty consistently it has actually been a source of conflicts both over the authority it holds and over the authority it is not supposed to but does anyways because an independent executive will inherently form a parasitic relationship against any legislative body it is unaccountable to.
I get that they can argue they didn’t deliberately do it, but there must be some kind of law that can be used to sue the execs and shareholders for doing that (if proven), right?
I love your optimism. Truly. But no law says a company can’t drain the bank account on salaries and bonuses and then be “shocked” when there isn’t enough money to keep the lights on.
In the beginning he was a whistle blower. In the end he was a Russian marionette. They used him (like Snowden) to leak US documents. His first interview on cameras was for russia today and given the chance to drop damaging information on the Republican Party, he always choosed to drop the dirt of the democratic party. He got played by the FSB hard and is still in denial about this. He is either a bad faith actor or a useful idiot for russias desinformation campaign.
Published only the secrets that hurt the people he wanted specifically to hurt, while hiding the secrets that made his benefactors look bad. I wouldn’t call that a journalist, I call that an information terrorist
He doesn’t advertise himself as a journalist who filters things.
But if you want him to be held responsible for filtering what he releases, why didn’t he filter the list of gay people in countries where being gay is a death sentence?
Freedom of the press is an important part of a democratic society. It’s perfectly fine to not like what they’re publishing (and I certainly don’t like a lot of things that are published), but if you start prosecuting journalists based on what you like and what you don’t like, others will do so as well.
He’s an information and data terrorist. He has everyone’s secrets but only releases the ones that are convenient to him or his handlers. There’s nothing noble about him.
When the DNC and RNC got hacked, the info came out for both. But what the DNC did pissed off the highly politically engaged - democrats who voted in the primary.
I’m not really in the loop on this but can someone ELI5 why Alex Jones is the only one that’s being forced to pay money for the shit that comes out of his mouth? It seems like everyone else is doing whatever they want with no repercussions.
I hear ya. There are at least some other recent examples. The settlement between Fox News and Dominion. Giuliani is being held to account for libeling the Georgia poll workers. And of course all the Trump cases. But yeah, feels like a drop in the ocean.
He made very specific defamatory statements accusing fellow citizens / parents of murdered children of participating in a government conspiracy and those people were able to prove they experienced harm as a consequence of his words.
The plaintiffs also had enough financial backing from (understandably horrified) strangers, and a high enough chance of winning for lawyers to want to represent them. Those factors allowed the plaintiffs to survive the legal system long enough to get a ruling, and the severity of the situation maintained their motivation to keep pushing for it instead of accepting settlement so they could somewhat move on with their lives.
Sometimes, the planets align to create the trifecta of enough energy, money, and evidence to force the justice system into enforcing justice. And I am grateful that can sometimes still happen, as rare as it feels.
I’m not holding my breath. Rich people do not play under the same rules as normal people. Bankrupt me and I’m on the street. Bankrupt rich dudes and somehow they still have lawyers, nice clothes and roofs over their heads that they own.
Depends on which chapter of bankruptcy, which all entail wildly different things. There’s bankruptcy that effectively eliminates debt and others which force you and your debtors to come to the bargaining table to restructure your payment plan or they get nothing since you could just file for actual bankruptcy
The difference is if you can afford to pay for the lawyers necessary to create that restructuring or if there’s any trust at all that you can pay it off eventually without getting yourself deeper in debt
Alex Jones and/or his lawyers were too stupid to show up to court and defend themselves, so Jones automatically lost a defamation lawsuit without anyone even proving that Jones lied.
Wow, you might be thinking, that’s great for these plaintiffs but surely nobody else would be dumb enough to ignore a defamation lawsuit and thus instantly lose! Well, let me introduce you to a certain Donald J Trump.
After listening to all of the Knowledge Fight podcast’s 70+ hours worth of coverage of both cases (including multiple interviews with the plaintiffs lawyers)… I don’t believe for a minute that Alex Jones’ lawyers are competent enough to attempt a devious strategy.
Fun fact: they actually just fined Alex $1 for each time he said “I don’t remember” or “I don’t recall that” during the depositions and that’s how it got up to over a billion.
Minor correction, Dan didn’t testify. He was present for some of the depositions of Alex in the TX case, being there to help guide Mark Bankston’s questioning. Mostly mentioning cause Dan was pretty clear he didn’t want to actually testify
Attorneys for the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones “messed up” and sent to his legal adversaries “every text message” he had written in the past two years – contradicting claims Jones had nothing on his phone pertaining to the deadly Sandy Hook school shooting, which he long maintained was a hoax, it was revealed at his defamation trial on Wednesday.
It went even further than just sending the messages. Jones’ attorneys sending those could maybe have been a mistake. Had opposing counsel just gone and used them it could have bogged the whole process down horrifically. They’d likely appeal and fight that hard. So opposing counsel did the ethical thing and informed Jones’ attorneys multiple times seeking clarification and basically covering their own ass a bit. Jones’ attorneys didn’t respond. They could have said “that was a mistake and privileged so you can’t use them”, but they didn’t. Jones first found out in court while being cross examined. It was hilarious.
There’s a proto-fascist idea out there that authoritarians can find all the best people and put them in positions to do their best work. What actually happens is that they select people for personal loyalty first and competence a distant second. This is why Trump and Jones have such shit people on their legal teams.
Alex Jones got himself into this position via a trifecta of pure stupid.
First of all, he made claims that the Sandy Hook shooting was a hoax. This turned public opinion against him severely, because Sandy Hook was a lines-crossed kind of event. Although school shootings are common in America, these tended to happen in colleges and high schools. Sandy Hook was an elementary school, meaning the victims were much younger
Secondly, he called the victims of the aforementioned shooting 'crisis actors', people who are paid to portray victims during emergency drills. These lies by Jones directly led to harassment campaigns against families that were already grieving the loss and extremely violent deaths of their very young children. This also got national attention, and many people pitched into the responding lawsuits raised by the grieving families against Jones's media company.
Thirdly, and perhaps a big reason why the punishment is so severe, Jones treated court hearings and depositions as optional, and skipped a huge amount of them. He didn't even seriously attempt to defend himself in a court of law, and when he did try, his lawyers were either idiots or actively working against him, leaking text messages (EDIT: and emails) that contradicted his own testimony. This led to a lot of default and highly punitive judgements against him.
To the third point, if they had done the minimum, they were more or less fine. The burden lied with the plaintiffs. He handed them a default judgement dream.
He also platformed several “journalists” who were actively harassing the Sandy Hook families, repeatedly claimed one of the parents was autistic, and during the trial shared a photoshop of the judge as a demon or something. He was bragging the entire time that he was “bankrupt” and they wouldn’t see a dime, while his series of weird shell corporations (lots of money hidden with his parents) was unfolded before the court.
He was in Hawaii like two months ago on vacation/looking for Zuckerberg’s secret hideout lol.
On top of everything else, his idiot lawyer accidentally emailed ALL of the discovery evidence that they had claimed didn’t exist TO THE PLAINTIFF’S ATTORNEY. As well as no showing and getting a summary judgement.
There is so much stupid in that trial, you really should go find a legal YouTuber who documented the various levels of idiocy and just watch in amazement.
Don’t pretend Jones was just an innocent victim in all of this. He wasn’t used. He knew what he was doing. That’s why he’s made so much money off of it.
Because most public figures leave themselves some wiggle room.
Like “just asking questions” or being careful to qualify their statements.
“Some people are saying that Sandy Hook was a fabrication, and I think they make a pretty convincing case. Are the parents hiding something?” vs “these parents of so called victims are lying, they’re actors hired by the government to take away our guns”
Plus I think Alex Jones included some calls to action that led to harassment of these grieving families - he didn’t leave himself any way to wiggle out of it. Especially since his exposed communications made it obvious he had no valid basis to assert he believed it , and he showed contempt for the legal process
I guarantee the crime rate of maga is greater than the undocumented immigrant population. We already know undocumented immigrants commit less crime than native-born Americans as a whole.
They’ve also interrupted public life with threats of violence related to their religion and politics. They have been past the line for awhile and any vet who dealt with the reality of terror campaigns over seas can recognize this trajectory. If we don’t start enforcing this stuff soon we’re going to have our own version of Al Qaida policing our lives.
I tell people as often as I can, especially my trans and bipoc friends; now is the time. Get a couple guns (a long one and a short one) and learn how to use them. Learn some basic first aid, you really just need to know how to stabilize someone. Start networking with like-minded people in your communities.
The police will not protect you, they’ve proven they’ll happily club senior citizens to the ground and shoot any protesters in the face with rubber bullets while escorting a rightwing murderer to safety.
Iran was a secular, liberal monarchy until almost 1980 when they (mostly) elected an Islamist theocracy; it could happen here.
It’s hard for me to recommend that because what most people don’t know is the political violence in Iraq reached levels that would have been a civil war if not for the coalition’s presence. And having watched that level of violence once in my life I’m really hoping we can elect someone that puts the government to work stopping this violent far right theocracy movement. On the other hand I can’t in good faith deny anyone the basic tools I had to defend myself in that situation. I just know that every gun in the mix makes violence more likely and violence only begets more violence. If this kicks off we’ll need a real focus on deprogramming and welcoming people back into the normal population. The zero tolerance approach just doesn’t work, you can’t shoot an idea. Only defend yourself from the person who believes it.
Spoken like a person with absolutely no skin in the game. Talking it out is great but what happens when that doesn’t work? What happens when the next one successfully takes power and the congress and judiciary side with them?
That’s a deep question. But I’m in a mood tonight so fuck it. I got there because I was young and well indoctrinated. I stayed there and went back because Saddam and AQ were massive assholes the locals didn’t deserve. I left because my body couldn’t handle the physicality of the job anymore. At no point was I looking at that stuff going, “you know the one thing we don’t have at home is religious zealots planting bombs, we need more of that!”
Yeah I know. We knew when they announced Bremer’s orders. Then we got home and found out just how much lying went into starting the war and it became obvious they wanted a forever war. If they had won the election in 2008 they would have found some way to destabilize Iraq again, not knowing ISIS was just around the corner.
I sincerely hope that this time the “line that we refuse to cross with you” is an actual line and not just words because that makes this actually good news. A new open war in the Middle East isn’t good for anything except keeping Netanyahu in power via a constant state of conflict and plowing even more money into the arms sector. That last bit is why I have to stop at hopeful, because we’ve seen bad wars for profit happen before.
reuters.com
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