No, but I have to say I’m surprised by the non-family members writing letters of character after he had been convicted of forcible rape. It’s one thing if it’s family I guess, or if the accused had been in the throes of addiction or similar at the time and had changed. But these are people who were working with him at the time he committed these crimes and they’re all testifying about him being such a good example of sobre living and a positive influence. Do they not feel betrayed by him? Do they not believe he did it? It’s strange.
I have to imagine it’s a very difficult thing to cope with; learning something like that about a very close friend. It has to really mess with you. And I can understand the human instinct to want to defend them regardless of your moral standards.
I personally don’t think this goes to show any moral failing on their part. Or at worst, whatever moral failing may be present is mostly due in part to a natural human reaction to complex emotions better dealt with in therapy. As such, I think these two should be afforded a bit of leeway.
Yeah, you just don’t stay friends with someone if you found that out about them. People that say you should have your friends backs no matter what are just insane.
"The Constitution does not provide any basis for executive branch involvement w/State election&post-election procedures."
This is exactly what I've been saying. The Constitution explicitly gives the operation of elections for federal offices to the States. Any action taken by a federal official to insert themselves into a State election is necessarily not part of their duty as a federal official.
I’m as left leaning as they come and this old bitch should retire. This is one of the many many many differences between us. All you care about is winning, like this is some type of fucking football game, and I care about is what’s best for our country.
It’s suspicious that this has gone on for years, but the story is only being published now. Seems to have been common knowledge in Hollywood. Is it contract negotiation time? Did Fallon finally piss of the wrong person? Does NBC have someone already in mind to replace him?
Just for curiosity’s sake, what did he do to deserve 25 1/2 years before he can be eligible for parole that convicted rapist Brock Allen Turner didn’t do when he raped an unconscious woman behind a dumpster? They were both convicted in California. Why did Turner, who has been going by Allen Turner and was last seen in the Dayton, OH area, do differently such that his custodial sentence was for 6 months, roughly 2% of the custodial time that Masterson will serve?
Let me be clear that my issue here isn’t that Masterson was penalized too much. He took two women’s lives and he should spend the rest of his in prison for it. It’s just that I see two rapists, one was righteously destroyed by the justice system and the other whose court proceedings essentially made it seem like no one wanted to punish him at all but they very reluctantly felt like they had to.
If we look at it from a pragmatic point of view, the answer is time I believe, the Brock turner case was quite a few years ago, when the laws and public opinion were still in quite a mysogynistic place, the Danny Masterson case was settled today and I believe opened after the metoo movements, where public opinion was shifting more favourably towards the victims. Its wild to see this amount of progress this quickly but I think were starting to see a change for the better overall, same as to how we saw better changes to views of homophobia in the early 2000’s from the 90’s, where it was “fashionable” to call everything gay in a derogatory way. Also if I recall, brocks dad was involved heavily in the trial if that counts for anything
I think it was the fear that got put into other judges by the recall of the judge that oversaw the Turner debacle. He was removed from the bench by outraged voters, as is right and good.
I have no idea about this case, but there’s a big difference between restorative (which is tentatively being trialed in many places) and a more traditional retributive justice system.
The first seeks the victims input and attempts to compensate the community effected. Retributive justice uses a more nebusous sense of what’s right/deserved and what’s wrong/unjust.
Pros and cons to both approaches. It’s still debatable which one is better at rehabilitation. But our current system doesn’t seem to place a high priority on that anyways.
This isn’t a case where a different theory of justice was being experimented with. In this case, the rich white man going to the prestigious, expensive ivy league school was given 6 months for raping an unconscious woman behind a dumpster because, among other reasons, a stiffer sentence would have negatively impacted his career as a competitive swimmer. The judge who sentenced Turner to only 6 months for raping an unconscious woman behind a dumpster had also presided over a case where an underage girl was gang-raped, also while unconscious. He allowed to be entered into evidence photos of her at a party a year after she was raped as evidence that she did not suffer from PTSD after being gang raped by a baseball team. It’s hard to imagine anything other than that this judge was a proponent of rape and did his best to protect rapists from any sort of punishment at all, but when absolutely forced to render some sort of sentence he punished rapists as little as possible.
I’d rather not phrase it this way because it’s true. The point of this structure is that it was always bullshit.
It’s not straight up murder. I might have some (limited) sympathy for Elon in this case. But he should be able to see past the first action in that series of events. I believe he was dumb enough to not think of more than the surface (more on that later). If he’s not that dumb, then he truly is evil. Those submarines are not defensive.
I think he’s managed to surround himself with alt-right grifters* who have him truly believing most of the absolute bullshit they spout. This doesn’t excuse him for what he’s doing to the world on their behalf.
*These grifters don’t necessarily go after money directly. They also grift to direct his influence and money to their causes.
The right isn’t stupid. They use a stupid message to maintain control of the conversation as a diversion tactic that is very effective. The whole point of this is to ensure no legitimate reforms and legislation are put in place. We fall for it every time we get enraged by the bullshit. That is the joke, we are the joke, and there is no way around the fact we will spend the next 2 weeks pushing back before the next prescribed side show drops into the circus. The outcome is fixed and calculated well in advance. This entire thing is planned out. I doubt they expected this one to have quite this big of an impact, but it will disappear just like all the rest. If a supreme court justices can be openly corrupt, there is no question the oligarchic prince will walk away completely free. We have entire states like Georgia fighting against justice for the biggest coup attempt in this country’s history. The perpetrator at the center is still free years later. King Musk is invincible because of Republican Russian Red team and their oligarchy.
Some of them absolutely are. Just like the Russians used r/the_donald to attract real, grassroots Americans to their cause. The ones who are using the stupidity as a strategy attract the true believers. I can’t tell you how many, but I guarantee the was at least one or two true believers in Congress. (Maybe they’ve been set straight by now.)
Marjorie Taylor Greene is probably the craziest of the bunch. She is following the Russian/Putin playbook to mobilize convenient idiots just like Trump. Lauren Boebert was a call girl, and is still turning tricks just for a higher end client. All of these people are acting their prescribed roles. They are all just actors playing roles. It has been reported that they all act completely different behind closed doors. Mobilization of convenient idiots is how Putin gained so much power. This is exactly what Republicans are doing. Most are being advised directly by Russia.
I suspect at least one, if not both, started out as true believers. And then this stuff became their job while they were being briefed on classified intelligence. Because, you know, the “deep state” does in fact try to give the legislature the information they need in order to do their jobs well.
r/the_donald I believe started as a psyop, but the strategy they used of getting people in on a joke and then making it real kind of applies here too. I think at the start they were true believers, spouting the idiotic bullshit while fully believing it. They found they were rewarded by that behavior and intentionally escalated it and kept it up. At some point they believe most of it, but still use all of it. Now, even if they no longer believe because they’ve spent the last several years getting educated for the first time in their lives, they absolutely have to keep the act up.
They’re following the playbook because they were recruited by the playbook. Every time they touched the MAGA button they got a treat. Now they’re millionaires. A fucking rat can do that.
As an aside, I don’t think Trump’s much different in many ways in playing to a crowd. One difference is that I do think he was directed by Putin early. But he’s not a political rally savant. He just goes to these rallies and likes when people cheer for him. So he pushes the “cheer for me” button. Evidence of that is when he got booed for promoting the vaccine. He’s not a genius at controlling the narrative. He just uses the narrative that works (even if much of that narrative was handed to him). He’s not the first person who can identify what people want to hear. And he has help. He, like any politician, has advisors doing polls and telling him what his people want to hear.
There exist smart Republicans who have been acting the entire time for grift and were never true believers. Ted Cruz, Lindsey Graham, Mitch McConnell, Michael Flynn, Michael Cohen, Jim Jordan. The problem with acting in bad faith and using stupid bullshit is that you do attract those true believers, and those true believers eventually advance. I bet a good chunk of the Republican caucus actually believes in trickle down economics. Because the people they see are the ones that benefit from it, and they’re heavily incentivized to rationalize their bullshit however they can.
These stories about how much of a piece of shit Musk is have been piling up for years now. I think people driving around in Teslas are going to get some damage done to their cars soon.
If say the Proud Boys opened up a car manufacturing plant and started producing cars, would it also be wrong to do “violence” (lmao) against people driving their cars? Where do you draw the line? Musk is much more damaging to society with his mainstreaming of fascist, machismo, white supremacist takes than the Proud Boys are, but I bet you’d have no problem with that.
And do you really think making people second guess buying a Tesla wouldn’t hurt Musk whatsoever?
I think it would behoove you to stop with this kind of negative thinking. Yes, Musk is bad. Yes, he owns Tesla. But promoting acts of violence like that will not make the world a better place, nor will it discourage people from buying Teslas
You just keep saying violence, no matter what, is bad, which I know you and no one else believes. You’re lying to defend Musk and people supporting Musk. What reasoning do you have that acts of violence against Tesla and Tesla owners won’t make the world a better place? You seem to be relying heavily on the childish idea that violence is bad no matter what, which again you don’t believe. And of course if violence is directed to people who drive Tesla’s or their cars, people would absolutely be discouraged from buying Tesla and in return hurting Musk. We all know this, but here you are lying again.
You’re arguing in bad faith because you have nothing to counter anything I’m saying.
A lot of Teslas are old enough that some of the people driving them probably bought them used. Also while id be perfectly fine with people for example smashing the screens on tesla charging stations cause I find it funny, it is rather counter productive to attack car owners. I drive a Jeep, Jeep is owned by GM and GM is a shit company would you damage my car even though its old enough to drink and GM saw none of the money from me buying it.
Irregardless if you wanted to damage Tesla park a faulty model S near their factory, its libel to explode and that would be a PR fuckfest.
Honestly there are enough non-critical thinking reactionaries these days that would rush out to buy Teslas the moment they heard they could upset someone on the other side for doing it that the impact to sapes might not be as high as you would hope and the increase to service requests for Teslas would probably generate a lot of revenue as paint and tire replacements tend to be way higher on lrofit margins than you think
There aren’t even close to enough of them. They’re not going to trade in their Ford F-900 for a “wimpy, girly” Tesla no matter what Musk does. They’d much rather be seen as manly and tough than backing Musk. He doesn’t have the cult leader following like Trump does.
Mmmm maybe… I know that honestly his right wing pushes in policy have impacted sales but I wonder if it would be enough to actually tip any scale or just be a rounding error that gets people fired and jobs compressed to save more money
a long time ago, the government paid farmers to keep fields fallow, to keep down production and keep prices up. you know… price fixing, like jesus intended when he invented capitalism. these subsidies are still around, because the only thing republicans hate worse then government spending is farmers not voting for them, so you can apply for, and get, subsidies on the land in now subdivisions, and the government will give you a check for not growing cotton on your lawn.
🎶 Oh baby, don’t it feel like the walls are closin’ in?
Don’t it feel like somethin’ from a dream?
Yeah, I’ve never known nothing quite like this
Don’t it feel like tonight might never be again?
Baby, we know better than to try and pretend
Honey, no one could have ever told me 'bout this
I said, yeah, yeah (yeah, yeah)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah
Finding Out is the hardest part
Knowing you were wrong, from the bottom of your heart
You take it on faith, you take it to the heart
The Finding Out is the hardest part
What about The Pimps who push the weak to do the dirty work for them
your military industrial complex has never had it this good, proxy wars without local push backs, no western blood shed so even the antiwar crowd has gone silent in the west.
Peace at all costs has a price that should not be paid
The sane part of the anti war crowd knows that there have been peace settlements with Russia but that they don’t last. Settling with Russia is just giving them time to re-arm
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