AG Barr, Mueller Investigation and the Future of Politics

Discussion in 'Politics' started by Bowser, May 3, 2019.

  1. iceaura Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    30,994
    Of course not. ICE does not allow that kind of public monitoring of the abuses of the children in its care, by medical folks or anyone else.
    The abusive actions of ICE are documented in police records, journalists's interviews and photographs, various budgetary and infrastructure documents presented as invoices to the US taxpayer, and so forth.
     
  2. Google AdSense Guest Advertisement



    to hide all adverts.
  3. Bowser Namaste Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    8,828
    I'm certain the alternative would have been worse.
     
  4. Google AdSense Guest Advertisement



    to hide all adverts.
  5. Bowser Namaste Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    8,828
    Yet they keep coming?
     
  6. Google AdSense Guest Advertisement



    to hide all adverts.
  7. Tiassa Let us not launch the boat ... Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    37,893
    But that's the problem with being you: Having shown years of slothful wrongness, yes, of course the proud ignoramus is certain of something.

    Ignorance is so woven into the character you play here, nobody is surprised when the uneducated right-winger who announces his ignorance at the outset is certain of a well-known, uneducated, right-wing trope.

    You are an example of what it takes to believe and promote such ignorance.
     
  8. spidergoat pubic diorama Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    54,036
    It's not possible to be worse.

    The future of Republican politics is this, they don't have a clear democratically electable majority any more, so they use propaganda, gerrymandering, obstruction, foreign election interference, and voter suppression to achieve their goals. They have chosen to side with white supremacists over the average American, and against women. They like foreign dictators. They are for making rich people richer, and theocracy.
     
  9. billvon Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    21,646
    Nor did I claim that. I said the child had no health issues when he was detained, nor when he was transferred to the holding facility. Less than a week later he was dead.

    Enough is enough. You don't want to be held responsible for dead kids? Don't tear them away from their parents and put them in freezing cold cages.
     
  10. iceaura Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    30,994
    Yep.
    Any idea why? Think of your mother, and what it would take to get her to do that.
    We know. You are certain about lots of stuff like that - so is the rest of the Republican voting base. The rest of the country is still trying to deal with this situation - many are still in denial, unwilling to admit that you guys really as you present yourselves. We still hear honest pundits proposing that you be granted respect for your views, assumed capable of agreement or persuasion or compromise.
     
  11. RainbowSingularity Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    7,447
    you think he is playing the "i dont really care so my opinion matters more than everyone elses to those who have limited knowledge of how shit really works and what the F is going on..." ?

    i dont read him as being overtly manipulative
    i read him as being somewhat Presbyterian main stream undecided voter exalting moral absolutes that remain superior to power & control authority(don't know if that is true to all aspects but that's how he reads to me)


    if its just a matter of winning or losing then it doesn't matter who gets fire bombed, cluster bombed, gassed or poisoned during the process

    if the means means nothing, then the ends becomes the only moral judge

    why is the water being muddied between familys seeking asylum and gang members making their own children into child soldier community terrorists ?

    surely ignoring the mental welfare of the children is using the ends to justify the means ?
    the same with suggesting that only supreme court rulings on court findings are defined as legitimate factual cause and effect.

    it is a fact that with that much psychological trauma being put on those children, that some will be turned into serial killers, murderers, rapists, infanticidal drug addicts suicidal, eating disorders... on and on the list goes.

    THAT is human reality
    the question should not be "can you prove someone pressed the button saying "kill a child now" that is simply a psychopaths game.

    what happened to those government authoritys who tried to get access to inspect the humanitarian standards of the child internment camps ?
    they seemed to give the american citizen Japaneses looking people a slightly better level of care

    Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!




    you dont solve an incoming tide/wave by telling it not to come in

    Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!


    you build wave breaks
    safe harbors
    early warning systems
    life boats
    diversion flood channels/spill ways
     
    Last edited: May 6, 2019
    sculptor likes this.
  12. Beaconator Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    1,486
    Lets see. Iran gets 500 million UNITED STATES DOLLARS for Russia to get uranium. At the same time Hillary Clinton has an email scandal.

    I'm no mathematician but I think we might be getting closer to answers now that the "origin" of the steele docier has come into investigation
     
  13. iceaura Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    30,994
    There was no Hillary email scandal. There were upwards of a dozen investigations into that mirage, and they found nothing not already known about Clinton (banker's buddy, something of a hawk, compromises basic governing principles in advance, generally what used to be known as an Eisenhower Republican).
    Old news. The Steele dossier originated as a chance break in an FBI investigation into the Russian mob, whose corruption of international athletics had become an international scandal - Steele was an FBI informant in that arena. The Trump connection fell out of that, due to his significant and frequent connections with the Russian mob.

    Meanwhile, clandestine financial dealing with Iran while hyping its evil nature to prepare for military action - using US muscle and threat to lever profits for private interests and political advantage for Republicans while ginning up war - has been something of a Republican routine since Reagan.

    That's something we probably won't get from the narrowly focused Mueller report - obstruction of justice in issues of US campaign finance and venal profiteering from US office probably doesn't sweep Trump's (or other Republican entities) Iranian efforts into the net.
     
    Last edited: May 7, 2019
  14. Tiassa Let us not launch the boat ... Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    37,893
    It's not so much that as a will to inflict on others.

    He's been at this for a few years, at least; it's a steeper decline than the pop-conservative two-bitting he was on about before, but we can say the same thing about popular conservatism. Regardless of what he actually thinks he's accomplishing, what he is doing was once actually SEO; the object was to create noise as a baseline for normalization. I saw one, recently, while looking up whether or not the kitten could eat this or that, and I can't even remember the precise word, now, but the Google return led with a handful of blogs using an obscure word, like a rarely-invoked definition of "predicate", to describe cats as requisite carnivores, and the other thing that stands out about these pages is that they really didn't seem to know about cats. I did eventually find the right terms for a useful return, and understanding why the cat should not have hummus, which is elevated risk of feline gout, among other problems, which in turn makes perfect sense given the acidity. Still, though, if cats didn't eat vegetable matter that wasn't psychoactive, I wouldn't be checking on hummus and fried potatoes. And, no, the latter does not require butter; fry a potato with vegetable or peanut oil, he'll still eat it. Still, though, there was a cluster of blogs and familiar managed-content pages that managed to seed and keyword and crosslink its way to the top of the Google result for a not entirely obscure question.

    And if you ever wondered, a couple years back, about YouTube pushing a striking amount of alt-right material, perhaps there was some old-school, manual-slogging SEO involved, but it turned out the site was actively pushing the stuff. The whole point is to normalize the extraordinary.

    Consider the Sciforums experience, by comparison or contrast, as such: Every once in a while, people might refer to LaPlace, or any number of variations on the statement that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Squeaky-wheel normalization is a long superstition; if they make enough noise, then they can have their way regardless of the merits. In the wake of the Jackson wardrobe episode, it emerged that the impetus for FCC action against CBS turned out to be an efficient phone tree and letter-writing campaign, such that something like ninety-five percent of FCC actions against broadcasters over an impressive period came from this cluster of activists perpetually complaining.

    This sort of effort is not necessarily without its effects. We can look at low-key grift like our neighbor pushes and wonder if he is a mark or thinks himself in on the swindle. In any case, the persistence of certain behaviors ought to raise a question akin to Poe's Law, with the question of parody being invested at least partially in being unable to distinguish between a bot, reduced human competence, or some weird pretense of extraordinarily slothful ignorance. Still, in the context of, say, topline pub chatter, you can find among the plastic-capsule politics of being center-left, mostly liberal on social issues but sometimes more fiscally conservative, a certain strange sympathy; we might call it inexplicable if we leave that term to whether or not any given individual can actually explain their sympathies, as such, but it does have behavioral significance reflecting, at the very least, particular priorities. These generally orbit "me and mine" arguments, in which the idyll reflects an individual's desires, and often in lieu of one's interests.

    Shortly after the 2016 election, for instance, I encountered two strangely related Poe-range provocateurisms. One was a known misogynist trying to convince people he was progressive while arguing against ending disparity in order to prescribe a broader populist idea that would, at the very least, as he perceives it, help him. The other was a straight-up argument coinciding strangely with that one argument's underlying pretense, that people normalize the extraordinary by refusing to normalize the extraordinary. And if the argument becomes, as it did in that particular case, that a failure to give sufficient sympathy to supremacism is to blame for Donald Trump's election, well, now my generally centrist, allegedly slightly left of center associate who is socially liberal and a little more conservative fiscally, is arguing on behalf of supremacism.

    And the connection between these overlapping jokers, to the one, and the Poe/SEO behavior, to the other, is how much of what the jokers want us to believe is the same sort of pretentiously uninformed drivel spewed by bots, lulzies, content farm hands, and basket cases.

    It's true, though, if you look back far enough in the archives, you can find our neighbor at least putting up a pretense of argument. In recent years, though, his habit is lazy propagation of right-wing tropes, and generally according to the pretense of being an incompetent ignoramus. Pretending ignorance while just accidentally propagating right-wing tropes, such as he does in the topic post↑, is a condensed, easier version of a earlier routine↗, which is to ask a question according to a pretense that he is somehow unable to find any actual source material, and thus must rely on metacommentary from oppositional populists. It doesn't actually matter what people responding in good faith tell him, if it's not what he wants to hear. Actually, that's a pretty good hook, right there: In confessing ignorance, he lands on absurd, unsustainable, rightist tropes; we ought not be surprised.

    Of course, it is also true that along the way, during those years, he and his side lost a political argument they were really dedicated to, but if that's the sort of thing that unhinges a person, or is a threshold for dropping out, then the problem is worse than I am describing. Y'know, like the difference between, "Oh, for phuckall sake", and, "Oh. Holy shit."

    †​

    There was a time when someone was pushing the word, "bitch", in such a manner as to make the point about what is wrong with using it like that; it occurred to ask what men thought the masculine equivalent was. For instance, I'm sure we can find times when the use of the word "honky" went with immediate danger, but, generally speaking, hearing white people complain about the word only reinforces the point of those advocates' supremacism. I recall someone else went so far as to try the word, "jerk", but couldn't explain why, which, in turn, was about as much as we might expect of such a suggestion. But nobody said, "dick", as I recall, and maybe we all knew it was ridiculous; indeed, I would have gone with "dick" before "jerk", but, right, the day ends in -y. And the problem with words like, "cocksucker", or "faggot", is that they have an inherent misogyny about them, or else, like men calling one another, "pussy", they transform something they allegedly want into an insult. I never, even in passing, asked a woman if I could kiss her insult. As receiving fellatio and performing the penetrating role in anal copulation are traditionally considered desirable, the problem with being a cocksucker, according to the insult, is not actually in performing oral sex on a man, but, rather, not being a woman while doing so.

    But, yeah, when the dude said, "jerk", it was a phucakll moment.

    †​

    The Hispanic, from a conservative town in a conservative state, who was a local Republican hand, and thought of Mexican migrant labor as an invading army might well disdain being viewed as pandering to white supremacism; indeed, he might resent the lack of diversity demonstrated by the failure of liberal bigotry to correctly recognize brown on brown ethnic prejudice, because apparently if liberals could only just see that, they would understand just how right he is.

    I honestly do have that experience. Nor should that be hard to believe.

    †​

    It sounds like an easy refrain to say you're overcomplicating things. Part of the problem is that it's one thing to have a sincere commitment to something facing the kind of blowback certain behavior has encountered, but few among that contingent are sincere about anything but their insincerity. This isn't so much mattering more than others, as, "I don't really care, so my opinion matters more than everyone else's", might, in its neurotic autoconstriction manage to suggest, and in the moment we can simply note the hint toward neurotic conflict is in expressing a lack of interest, like not caring, right before making the point that they do; that part of the projection isn't inaccurate.

    The latter part, regardless of the self-superior part of the expression—the part about how shit really works and what the phuck is going on is kind of important. Something has fallen out of their pretense of moral authority. In the movie, some haughty asshole finally has the comeuppance of recognizing he really was a racist, or some such; cheaper plots simply face up to the point that the reckless rival really is the better pilot. People do not, in living reality, adjust so well as the asshole characters in literature for whom we seek redemption at the end.

    This is more like, "If I can't have it, then nobody can."

    The behavior is antisocial, seeks satisfaction, is slothful about even that, and finds itself even more alienated every time it stakes anything of significance to itself and is wrong; in such circumstances deeper entrenchment is likely the result of least effort.
     
  15. Bowser Namaste Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    8,828
    Yep. The Trump-Russia collusion farce appears to be coming to a head. Politics is a wicked game, bringing the worst out of everyone. I will be watching as the next election approaches. As ugly as it might be, it's still fascinating to watch.
     
  16. spidergoat pubic diorama Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    54,036
    The Russians did interfere with our election, that is clear from Mueller. Trump still denies it and is doing nothing himself to stop it. Does that worry you?
     
  17. iceaura Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    30,994
    You won't. You will watch TV, instead.

    You completely missed the last one, after all, even the gerrymandering and electoral fraud and Russian meddling - anyone who missed that is probably incapable of "watching" anything in real life.
     
  18. Beaconator Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    1,486
    Even Comey says part of it was an Austrailian with ties to Hillary Clinton.#OOPS

    But the main point is that it should be illegal for the FBI to spy or hire coffee boys in order to sway an election.

    Or for one person "she who will not be named" to use thier political power in order to undermine an electoral candidate. Which we can't prove because the FBI helped her erase all the emails.
     
    Last edited: May 11, 2019
  19. iceaura Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    30,994
    So?
    Comey was part of the bs scandalmongering, a major player - and even he and his FBI buddies couldn't find an actual scandal.

    Contrast that with the findings of the Mueller report, some of which were known to Comey in 2016 when he was trashing Clinton:

    If he had decided to go public with the FBI investigation of Trump during the campaign, he would have had some actual scandal to report instead of the embarrassingly empty folder on Clinton - but for some reason Trump got a pass during the campaign. No FBI leaks and speculations about Trump, even with the mess the FBI was turning up. Trump was protected by the FBI right up to the vote.
     
  20. Beaconator Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    1,486
    So the FBI was chasing its own ass.

    Must have taken lessons from the CIA.

    Its our justice system that's failed
     
  21. iceaura Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    30,994
    No.
    It was dogging the Clintons, as it had been for many years, instead of doing its job and seeing the Trump familia stood up in court to answer for its criminal operations.

    The FBI has always leaned toward being an enforcement arm of the American rightwing corporate authoritarians, and as the worst of them gathered into the Republican Party the FBI has increasingly become an enforcement arm of the Republican Party.
    The Republican Party has been trying to cripple the Justice system for decades - with no small success.
    It didn't "fail" on its own. It was and is being deliberately crippled, by bad people with a bad agenda - and your support.
     
  22. Bowser Namaste Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    8,828
    I haven't watched television in months. It's a dead medium. Evidence of your evidence, ice?
     
  23. Bowser Namaste Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    8,828
    Do you believe the Russians are responsible for the outcome of the 2016 election? If so, would that make every previous election suspect? I mean, was Obama Russia's choice for two terms?
     

Share This Page