I’m not one of those people who complains about religious tax exemptions and the like. But if you have an “investment arm” then you are not a church, you are some sort of weird, cultist bank.
And we need to pass as federal law, the moment a church or religious group with any tax exempt status tries to get political they instantly lose tax exempt status and now owe all the back taxes and penalties due to not paying taxes. Make it painful to be stupid
Its landlord, SRI Nine Market Square, in early 2023 filed a suit against X for more than $3 million in unpaid rent. SRI Nine Market sought to extend Twitter’s line of credit to $10 million as an assurance that future rent would be paid. Other vendors also have sued X for failing to pay its bills. But in January of this year, SRI Nine Market dropped the case, Reuters reported. It’s unclear why.
Call me a pessimist, but I’d be willing to bet the Republicans would put up legislation to argue that anyone that dies after the election within X number of days has their vote disqualified.
Democratic Party would never give him the chance after the narrative about age competency; he’s a year older than Biden.
On top of that he’s a “radical socialist anarchist protesting rebel”.
Unfortunately the Dems are convinced they need a candidate close to centre to pull people from the right - I’m hoping the success of Harris proves this strategy is shit.
i genuinely shake my head sometimes at democrats’ strategy. “weird” is not a bad thing to many many people. it’s a term that’s ridiculously easy for someone to say “yea. i’m weird. so?”
I’m one of those people, but fascists are REALLY not.
Seeing themselves as the only “normal” ones and declaring everything outside of the norm scary and evil is how they keep marginally functional in spite of enormous cognitive dissonance.
To a fascist, weird = abnormal = the OTHERS = evil
it’s not cognitive dissonance, it’s doublethink. there is no ‘dissonance.’ it seems insane, but they absolutely believe in 2 or more contradictory things with absolutly no qualms about it. they see no problem with bleating about “family values” while voting for a rapist adulterer with pornstar hush money problems.
It evolved from one to the other. It’s like the brain developed their ability for double think as a response to the constant bombardment of cognitive dissonance. So instead of paying attention to that little ping of “hey, wait a second,” and having to make a semi-consciuos choice to ignore it, their brains straight up skip that part in order to reduce psychic pain.
It’s kind of insane just how on the money Orwell was.
I remember every time I’d read 1984 after the first, I would get to the part where he has that long, dry, treatise on the power of language as a means of control, and I used to dread it (skipped it usually after the first read through). It always seemed boring and just completely far-fetched. Yeah the whole world-building aspect of doublespeak and doublethink was great, but surely humans aren’t that susceptible to being controlled through language…
it’s not just words they’re trying to eliminate, but also everything else that someone can use as a form of expression. ever notice how republicans generally dress the same, act the same, etc-- there’s a strictly defined idealized image of the “true american man (or woman–nothing in between)” they adhere to, and anything that doesn’t look like that is implied to be “other.” one of THEM, not one of US.
republicans push for sameness, another concept used as a core feature of society from another dystopian book (The Giver).
It’s like they’ve been using Eco’s Ur-Fascism as a guidebook and checklist rather than a warning/description.
Btw if anyone hasn’t read the (very short, like 8 page PDF it’s worth it trust me) essay “Ur-Fascism” by Umberto Eco, you really should. Hey look here’s a PDF of it: sites.evergreen.edu/…/Eco-urfascism.pdf
Only takes a few minutes, but just does an amazing job outlining what fascism is (with first hand accounts of growing up in fascist Italy), why it’s a nebulous concept that is hard to pin down, then does the impossible by pinning it down using 14 “defining features” of fascism, and wow are they eye opening…
Things were different min 1995, and Eco believed that it wasn’t possible to form a coherent government around all 14 because they can be at odds with one another at times. According to Eco, only one of said features is needed in order to consider a state (or person, etc.).
Again, as Eco could not have foreseen, turns out you can go for the high score of 14/14. Unfortunately. Then again, I’m not sure I would ever say that the fascism of maga is “coherent”. But that’s just another plus for them. But seriously, go read it
The thing is, normalcy bias prevents people from listening when you call them rapists, fascists, totalitarians, and all those other things they actually are. But “weird”? Weird is obvious, and it cuts into the Republican brand to the bone.
Trump’s whole appeal is based on a fiction of him representing the common man; the “blue collar billionaire”. More than that, the Republican party has built their entire brand for decades on a sort of radical normalcy, on being the voice of the “silent majority”, on being the representatives of “real America” against those latte liberal elites from the coasts. “Weird” takes all the wind out of those sails. They don’t actually represent middle America; they’re way too out there for that. And it’s long past time somebody said so.
And I sincerely doubt Austinites are going to flock to Trump because of the “weird” thing. Austinites are the kind of weird that Republicans have been trying to suppress for decades, and they know it.
My guess is Harris’ polling of the younger demographic is showing they’re fed up with the vicious rhetoric that’s been bounced around. So words that don’t cut most people - but would annoy the hell out of Trump - are used … if for no other reason than it becomes this joke that can be laughed at vs. enraging people.
Maybe your annoyance (understandable) is part of the point? There are so many things to attack, so many legitimate concerns, that simply calling him weird could spark a little reflection in his supporters and would-be voters, let alone the obvious shock to Trump’s vanity.
It’s not something you can easily deny as a conspiracy theory or fake news or any other excuse about his words and behavior. The man is weird. And psychologically, I think it’s harder to defend a person described that way, or at least makes a defender get a little self-conscious. Trump being deemed weird is really indefensible, and I think it could work in deflating the cult of personality around him.
Not everyone can identify maniacal dictator rhetoric for what it is, and the power dynamic is clearly alluring to Trump supporters. However, knowing a weird person or even being called weird at some point is something almost everyone has experience with. It’s uncomfortable. It makes you ask yourself what it is about a person that makes them weird. I think they’re on to something here. It might give supporters pause and will most definitely give Trump a complex.
I’m sorry, I just don’t see it. If, 10+ years later you don’t already fucking know this guy is “weird” (to say the least), then hearing (more) Democrats say it won’t change your mind about anything.
Have you met these people? They embraced the term “deplorable” because they thought it was cute/clever.
10 years of telling my parents in various ways that this man is “weird” (among many other, much worse, things), and suddenly they’re gonna give a shit because Kamala Harris said it? Nah.
This is weak shit from the Democrats. Disappointed but not at all surprised.
I get where you’re coming from, and you make a point with “deplorable” being meme-ified into some twisted identity thing. But I also think the collective “basket of deplorables” doesn’t apply here. Harris isn’t calling Trump supporters weird; she’s calling just him weird.
This does a few things: it keeps the focus on Trump, allowing supporters to distance themselves from the statement. The lack of attachment to any particular action, statements, belief, etc. lets a person think about it “nakedly.” Why is he weird?
Yes, we both know why, but this flips the script from the last 10 years from “here are various reasons why Trump is horrifying and could also be considered weird” to “Trump is weird, I’ll let you chew on that.”
It’s all in the delivery. Stating what he is without explaining why.
I think it’s worth returning a bit of agency to people in general to assess how they feel about that statement and come to their own conclusions. Edit: Especially because many of these people have attached themselves to Trump because they feel they have no agency otherwise. Could this be a means to cracking through the brainwashed masses? Something akin to, “wait, why am I idolizing this guy again?” Wishful thinking, yes, but being"plain weird" is such a broadly sweeping generalization that something should organically pop up in trump supporters’ brains, without our prompting.
There are various reasons why Trump is horrifying and could also be considered weird” to “Trump is weird, I’ll let you chew on that.”
I guess we’ll just have to see, but these aren’t people who “chew” on things in that way. If they were capable and willing to think critically and rationally about this, they wouldn’t be there in the first place.
These people aren’t just going to suddenly become rational overnight about their cult-like devotion to a man that they essentially worship as a demigod, because this time you said “weird” instead of “fascist.”
Principled criticisms, accurate names like Fascist, Dictator, joke names like Don Poorleone and Orange man that we’ve used before work with Democrats but cause the Trump cult to turn their brains off.
Weird might be just the word that plants the seedling of doubt in a handful of Trump supporters’ minds.
It does make a little sense, when you consider that one of the goals is to demotivate fascists from voting at all.
Straight facts don’t dissuade fascists. They have every argument and deflection in their back pocket ready to go. Trump is a rapist/racist/traitor? Fake news, fake news, fake news.
But… Trump is weird? That hits them right in the ego. They’re not a principled policy-based voting base, it’s a cult of personality. Even if they want to say he’s NOT weird, it’s not a fact, it’s an opinion. So all it takes is showing a bunch of really strange gaffes, irrelevant rants, and incoherent ramblings, and you just might get would-be Trump voters to feel too embarrassed to vote for him.
It’s a long shot, but based on what I’ve been seeing, it appears to be effective so far. We’ll have to wait and see.
Using hard language is seen by his supporters as an attack on them all and drives them into the defensive making Trump stronger. Calling him weird sidesteps that reaction and deflates Trump, especially if he launches a weird rambling speech as a response.
No, it’s making fun of him. The trick that always worked on him and nobody has been using lately is simply making fun of him. Do you remember how defensive he got about all the talk about him having “small hands”? That shit drove him nuts. This bruises his ego, and the man is all ego…
It turns out that the schoolyard name-calling tactics are very effective on him, but Democrats mostly feel they’re above that.
The previous approach was to focus on how he’s a dangerous fascist, which his supporters were able to spin as strength. Focusing on how he’s the kind of off-putting creep that you instinctively cover your drink as he walks by can’t be spun that way.
Buddy, they think literally everything is an attack on them.
Or have you not seen the article about Christians getting upset about the Olympics because some drag version of The Last Supper (only it was actually based on a Dutch painting portraying Bacchanalia, but that would take knowing more than 3 famous paintings, so forget it).
It’s time to stop making choices based on how this group of highly irrational people might react.
The hard core will never change their mind and be offended. The people that matter the most are the ones still capable of thinking by themselves, so I can understand not pushing them away.
That is language that Trump detractors like but doesn’t convince anyone new. If someone was supporting Trump, they aren’t going to be convinced by you re-stating that he’s a felon. Everybody knows that. If they support him at this point, they don’t care or they think it is an unfair attack because the arrest was political in whatever way. “Weird” strikes to his character which is at least a value judgement that you can reassess, and also relative to who he is running against.
To be fair, they haven’t stopped using hard language either. They released a statement after his “you won’t have to vote ever again” rambling with very direct warnings about how dangerous he is and has been. “Weird” is just another line of attack, hoping to cut in a way that might resonate with some more than the (imo rightful) high stakes talk.
Why would this be any different than the time he colluded with Russia on live TV, had a phone call recorded asking to change election results, intentionally retained national security documents after leaving office, rallying the mob that tried to stop the election results, or any of the other things we already have on record?
Fun tangential fact: Trump’s collusion was found to be legally okay per the Mueller report because they had no evidence they directly coordinated with each other. This is very similar to how SuperPACS cannot directly coordinate with election campaigns but simply engage in obvious call-and-response as Trump did with Russia. Corrupt as fuck.
Oh I dunno, Chicago has had a active serial rapist and murderer for 20 years with more than 50 victims and more than 50 deaths that no one really talks about.
Look, if you want to get people to talk about your crimes you need to do a better job of taunting the police. Whining about it on Lemmy isn’t going to make it happen.
I’m well aware, I just don’t think it’s particularly funny to joke about when there’s a pretty high likelihood that someone is being chained raped and tortured before dying in an abandoned building while the Chicago police actively avoid investigation that would reveal the pattern.
No, I mean that maybe they’re not investigating because they do already know, they just don’t care (or they don’t want to catch the culprits, or the culprits are not the kind of people laws and police investigations apply to, or they’re the cops themselves).
Sure, don’t suppose malice when incompetence or stupidity suffice… but don’t discard it either.
Meh, we had that in Canada and the guy sold the meat all over for decades. the victims were indigenous prostitutes, so no fucks were given for a long, loooong time.
I thought there was lots of evidence but mueller basically said it wasn’t his place to prosecute and I’m going to leave it up to congress to do their job and prosecute.
Yep it was a cop-out. I will post my copy-pasta on this for anyone’s interest.
In the worst case, it was laziness and passing the buck by Mueller; in the best case it was him trying to dodge Barr from closing the case in the DOJ. Either way the recommended charges brought forward had nothing to do with conspiracy or coordination, but rather perjury and obstruction.
Edit: My original write-up on Mueller Report:
There are several parts to the Mueller report: obstruction, coordination/collusion, and Russian interference being the main three. When reading the Mueller report in terms of “collusion”, keep in mind that there is the finest of lines with what Trump and Putin did that really let’s him off on technicality than the spirit of the law itself. I’ll dive in more on this below.
Remember how people made fun of SuperPACs coordination loophole? To my understanding, this is basically that. It may not be grounds for legal charges, but it is 10000% an ethics violation worthy of impeachment.
I want to go over some info in the Mueller report, because I’m already seeing a concerted effort by Trump trolls to deny reality, and this not helping when Barr is saying blatant lies revolving around collusion. For many, this will probably be a refresher, but it’s important to keep some of this info fresh. Feel free to add/clarify/correct.
On obstruction, Mueller reported:
Fourth, if we had confidence after a thorough investigation of the facts that the President clearly did not commit obstruction of justice, we would so state. Based on the facts and the applicable legal standards, however, we are unable to reach that judgement. The evidence we obtained about the President’s actions and intent presents difficult issues that prevent us from conclusively determining that no criminal conduct occurred. Accordingly, while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.
Mueller is essentially saying that there is a smell that reeks of obstruction, there’s evidence of obstruction (12 highlighted instances), and he cannot adequately rule it out; but there are obstacles for him from further investigating. So he shined a light, saw some suspicious things, but not enough to prove anything, and had to turn the light off before adequately clearing the room—so to speak, hence “not exonerating” the President. It’s important to note that Mueller explicitly wrote that Trump was spared from obstruction charges because people in his cabinet refused to follow his orders. It’s widely understood that his report is passing the the buck to Congress, presumably knowing the AG position going back to Whitaker was compromised. Remember that the U.S. Attorney General is the People’s Attorney, not Trump’s personal defense lawyer.
It would be unfair to potentially accuse somebody of a crime when there can be no court resolution of the actual charge.
This makes clear that Trump was not charged with a crime strictly because a “sitting president” is essentially above the law, and thus he made no determination in lieu of the inability to follow through with proceedings.
Otherwise, “If we had confidence the President did not commit a crime, we would have said so,” could be construed as saying, “We cannot rule out that trump committed a crime, but the bar to charge was not met” whereas with the latter additional quote, that turns the meaning to, “We would have prosecuted him, had our hands not been tied by the protections of a sitting President.”
Granted, this info was also in the report, but in less laymen terms.
A thousand former Federal Prosectors agree the evidence before Trump warrants indictment. There is enough evidence to charge Trump of crimes, but because of the position he holds he is protected.
Next on Collusion vs Conspiracy vs Coordinated: (I will mark via [#] and bold key follow-up points)
Let’s try to unpack what Mueller’s report means when they write:
In evaluating whether evidence about collective action of multiple individuals constituted a crime, we applied the framework of conspiracy law, not the concept of "collusion.[1] In so doing, the Office recognized that the word “collud[ e ]” was used in communications with the Acting Attorney General confirming certain aspects of the investigation’s scope and that the term has frequently been invoked in public reporting about the investigation. But collusion is not a specific offense or theory of liability found in the United States Code, nor is it a term of art in federal criminal law. For those reasons , [2] the Office’s focus in analyzing questions of joint criminal liability was on conspiracy as defined in federal law. In connection with that analysis, [3] we addressed the factual question whether members of the Trump Campaign “coordinat[ ed]”-a term that appears in the appointment order-with Russian election interference activities. Like collusion, “coordination” does not have a settled definition in federal criminal law.
[4]We understood coordination to require an agreement-tacit or express - between the Trump Campaign and the Russian government on election interference. That requires more than the two parties taking actions that were informed by or responsive to the other’s actions or interests. We applied the term coordination in that sense when stating in the report that the investigation did not establish that the Trump Campaign coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.
[1] - Mueller is noting that Collusion is not a Federal statute and is highlighting its blatant use in the media (as well as from Trump).
[2] - Mueller is noting that the closest match based on the directive of the Special Counsel in the first is Conspiracy, which is a possible Federal crime
[3] - Mueller is highlighting that the initial order to form the Special Counsel emphasized investigating “coordination” between the Russian Government and Donald Trump
[4] - Coordination under the purview of conspiracy required an explicit agreement to coordinate, as opposed to both reading what the others were doing, reacting to in a means to mutually benefit each other. This is the kind of nonsense SuperPACs run under by funneling unlimited amounts of money to support a candidate without direct coordination, but obviously with an implicit intent to (a) further the agendas of the SuperPAC, and (b) advance the campaign of the candidate (nudge, nudge, wink, wink).
Some questions going forward:
Would/Should Trump Supporters care that both Russia and Trump indirectly coordinated? Especially given Trump said, “Russia, if you’re listening…”? That is, even if there was no legal crime committed, is it not questionable and/or ethical to have this relationship with a foreign power with a poor record? Should it not raise alarm-bells that such a President “trusts” merely the “word” of an adversary in a cold-war mindset over his own intelligence agencies & allies?
What aspect of “collusion” or related charges may have been handed off in the sealed 12 other investigations?
Is it lawful and (more importantly) ethical that Trump didn’t get charged with a crime because his attempt failed? In other words I’ve heard it framed, is a person spared charges because the hitman refuses to carry out a murder?
How can ignorance be a defense for those of the Trump campaign?
On obstruction, why explicitly could Mueller’s team not “reach that judgement” on obstruction, and what “difficult issues” are you referring to which prevent ruling out the occurrence of any criminal conduct?
And here’s the kicker: Mueller’s report on obstruction is irrelevant to the fact, which Mueller pointed out, that Russia hacked our election system with the expressed intent of supporting Trump. Now put on your critical-thinking cap and ask yourself three questions:
Why would Trump trust Putin’s word over the unprecedented joint-report consensus of his own intelligence agencies (CIA, FBI, NSA, and DHS + more), Dutch ally intelligence, and private cybersecurity firms? I mean if those same people came to a conclusion that Al Qaeda was about to launch an attack, wouldn’t you expect the President to trust them?
Why would Putin want Trump to win over Hillary Clinton?
If (hypothetically) Barack Obama had done exactly the same thing with Angela Merkel or someone from Kenya, would the Right-wing media, conservative base, Tea Party, and Republican officials not be going berserk? Why the double-standard…?
Different collusion. And they didn’t say it was okay - just that they didn’t have any evidence that Trump himself had been involved.
Then the report went on to say as clearly as the justice department is allowed to say that Trump absolutely engaged in obstruction of justice. They couldn’t indict a sitting President, and you can’t make a public accusation against someone you aren’t going to indict.
Mueller said that if Trump were innocent of obstruction, he’d say he was, but that he would not say that. He laid out specific criteria for what constitutes obstruction, cited many specific occasions in which he met all those criteria, testified before Congress that if he weren’t the sitting President he would have brought charges against him, and said directly that it was Congress’s duty to impeach him.
But somehow the GOP convinced everyone that the Mueller report was an exonneration.
How would that happen? It’s obvious he was shot at. Others in the crowd got killed/injured as a result of the gunfire. This just seems like standard procedure.
How would that [Trump going down for making some false statements to law enforcement] happen?
What follows is wild unfounded speculation that 99.9% didn't happen, but is technically a barely plausible hypothetical answer to your question.___ If the ear injury wasn’t caused by a bullet, then the miss wasn’t as near as we thought it was. If it missed by a lot despite being at [relatively] short range [for the type of gun used], then maybe it was on purpose. If the shooter missed on purpose, maybe it was because he was hired by Trump for a false-flag operation in order to allow Trump to claim martyrdom, or even a casus belli to purge his enemies. If this sort of absurd conspiracy were what actually happened, maybe Trump would lie to the FBI to try to cover it up, get caught, and get charged with more crimes.
You need to understand that MAGA people are beyond lost. Nothing, absolutely nothing will change their minds. This is why they’re dangerous, because they are so fucking stupid
I don’t know if Brooke was fucking the black guy’s son. I mean, I don’t have double standards. I mean, I am a racist, to a point, fucking n****s. But then when it comes to nice people and shit, and whatever. I guess we’re all a little racist. Fucking n*****.
– Hulk Hogan, who was taken out of the Wrestling Hall of Fame for three whole years after he was recorded saying that.
And then Peter Thiel, pissed that Gawker outed him, bankrolled Hogan’s lawsuit which took them down. I remember lots of people on Reddit regarded it as a victory because Gawker sucked, which it did. They didn’t care that a billionaire found a way to destroy a media outlet that told people something about him that he didn’t want them to know.
Peter Thiel is, of course, also a big Republican supporter.
Hogan was already a piece of shit for being a racist. He didn’t need to make me dislike him even more by getting into politics, even if his racism made clear which side he was on. Fuck him with a ten foot dick.
I’ve hated Hogan since the 90s, when I found out what a cancer he was backstage at WCW. Didn’t help when I found out he’s the reason wrestlers don’t have a union.
For a lot of us fans, Hogan has been the devil way before we knew he was a racist POS.
I believe Hogan has been known to be a massive piece of shit among wrestling fans for decades now. Some of the stories I’ve read about the dude… Not great.
They released the secret recording of him saying the racist thing above without anyone’s permission. Which is an absolutely shitty thing to do. But Thiel saw it as an in and paid for the best lawyers he could find and took them down.
Should they have been taken down for it anyway? Maybe. But not because of Peter Thiel.
Maybe, but Thiel didn’t sue them for outing him. He bankrolled someone else’s suit because he knew it would be much more damaging. And that is not how the system should work.
Corporate mass media does make it possible. There’s still plenty of blame on their part for lacking the interest or critical thinking skills to understand why other people are upset. But it is a thing that can exist. That doesn’t make it acceptable.
But short of returning the media to a pre 1980 state. Which was still wildly imperfect and heavily propagandized. There isn’t a peaceful or obvious solution to this.
After giving due remarks, could Biden sign an executive order for sweeping gun control and name it after Trump and present this incident as the impetus?
I’m willing to bet that even if the two judges were removed tomorrow, the Democrats wouldn’t add any judges because they’d want to “play fair” and not assign someone right before an election.
You also want that juicy carrot at the end of that stick during an election year. Ensure your voters are going to vote for you or else risking losing your whole democracy.
They would. But Democrats don’t have a majority in the Senate, so confirmation won’t happen. Manchin and Sinema are the necessary independents likely to refuse to confirm.
They did in 2020 when they let Trump nominate a justice a month before the election. Obama was denied his appointment because the election was nearly a year away
That is true, but you also have to remember the Democrats BARELY put up a fight against their nonsense because they were SO certain they were going to win in 2016.
This “Put all our eggs in one basket, the people are too smart to fall for this” crap ALWAYS undoes the Democrats. Every single time.
Meanwhile, most sex shops: selling jelly which just straight up melts with time, TPE/TPR which are porous and might melt when boiled and therefore pretty much impossible to keep clean, PVC which they promise doesn’t contain phthalates this time, and silicone that has about a 50% chance of actually being platinum cured. DIYers can’t be much worse, as far as I know, they either outright state what methods and materials they use or will provide them upon request.
Nothing, I think the issue is that the other 50% will be peroxide cured because it’s cheaper, though more likely to have fillers and potentially cause skin irritation or allergies.
Platinum cured silicone is, afaik, the only silicone that is food safe, thus safe to put inside any of your holes. It’s significantly more expensive than other silicones, mostly due to the catalyst (platinum).
There’s plenty of other good reliable makers that aren’t scummy to their employees and customers. nobd.info If you’re in the US, twin tail creations, all night toys, fantasy drove and square peg toys are all absolutely fantastic. 3 out of 5 of my top favorites are from all night toys, the couple who run it are cammers who are extreme size people and couldn’t get toys large enough so they decided to make their own and goddamn it really shows that it’s a great thing to have people so involved in using toys being the ones to design them, they know exactly what goes into a good toy.
Exotic erotics is good too, but their website is really bad. Just hard to use. Topped toys is really good, but they’re canadian so ordering from them directly you have to worry about international shipping. You can get them through some retailers like mr s leather.
That’s fair, etsy also sells a lot of adult toys that aren’t meant to go inside. They have plenty of bdsm gear made by small creators, I’ve bought a couple from specific people who I follow and they’ve been great.
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