Now That Trump's President... (not any more!)

[ambermonk]

What pisses me off is that police EVERYWHERE are hampering BLM protests every step of the way but giving Trump rallies free reign. 

I'm now less hopeful about this election.

[Silent Member]

Yeah, you're stuck with Trump now.

[may be rude]

1 hour ago, chartnok said:

Dude was just protecting himself against people with knives and bats, looters, people who kill 5 year old's if they think it's a Trump supporter

 

 

1 hour ago, chartnok said:

Dude was just protecting himself against people with knives and bats, looters, people who kill 5 year old's if they think it's a Trump supporter

 

 

he doesn't cite the video he describes. i checked some coverage and it seems little is known about the portland homicide victim's story. maybe i'm missing some reporting? tim pool doesn't attribute the sources he references in his program, there. the body was found shortly after the trump convoy left downtown. the leader of the dude's gang was tight-lipped but confirmed the victim was in his rightist gang, and said he was a good friend of the gang.

rightists misrepresenting the blm movement as rioters is grotesque. it concertedly dodges reality. the protests are overwhelmingly peaceful and most crime occuring in proximity to them is attributed to rightist counter-protestors, infiltrators or opportunists. fox insisting on focusing on the miniscule segment of instances that could be described as riotous (literally well below 1% of movement protests) pushes on the audience an alternate reality outlook that coincidentally props up the political party that rightist media strategized their business model around sustaining. 

pool is a particularly energetic creature of the rightist infosphere. he may act serious and wear a beanie but he doesn't check his info and likely doesn't know how to check his info.

Edited August 30, 2020 by very honest

[ignatius]

1 hour ago, chartnok said:

So that makes it ok to execute people on the street for a different political ideology?

did i say that? i was just giving context. these things don't happen in a void. i hope they catch the shooter. 

but your argument doesn't add up. look in the mirror. read back your own posts. the guy in kinosha shouldn't have been there running around w/an assault weapon. 

also, the protests in portland and various scuffles between proud boys and antifa or normie BLM protesters have been back and forth for _years_ here. at some point some of this became personal for some people on both sides. little grudges.. like gangs or soccer hooligans. 

and the police have typically been very one sided.. supporting the proud boy types and even coordinating with them while arresting left protesters. the police also have not bothered to track down the alt right ex military guy who threw fucking pipe bombs a few weeks ago and blew some shit up in the near by park to the down town protests.. not to mention the guy who pulled a gun at that patriot prayer rally and pointed it at counter protesters.. so.. the escalation was inevitable since the cops are absent on so many things. 

that being said.. it sucks someone got killed. it's bad all around. a lot of this is local and unique to portland. 

if/when they catch the shooter we'll know more about his motives and who the fuck he is. i wouldn't be surprised if he's some boogaloo boy since they tend to hate cops. he could just be some asshole. 

[chartnok]

8 minutes ago, ignatius said:

did i say that? i was just giving context. these things don't happen in a void. i hope they catch the shooter. 

but your argument doesn't add up. look in the mirror. read back your own posts. the guy in kinosha shouldn't have been there running around w/an assault weapon. 

also, the protests in portland and various scuffles between proud boys and antifa or normie BLM protesters have been back and forth for _years_ here. at some point some of this became personal for some people on both sides. little grudges.. like gangs or soccer hooligans. 

and the police have typically been very one sided.. supporting the proud boy types and even coordinating with them while arresting left protesters. the police also have not bothered to track down the alt right ex military guy who threw fucking pipe bombs a few weeks ago and blew some shit up in the near by park to the down town protests.. not to mention the guy who pulled a gun at that patriot prayer rally and pointed it at counter protesters.. so.. the escalation was inevitable since the cops are absent on so many things. 

that being said.. it sucks someone got killed. it's bad all around. a lot of this is local and unique to portland. 

if/when they catch the shooter we'll know more about his motives and who the fuck he is. i wouldn't be surprised if he's some boogaloo boy since they tend to hate cops. he could just be some asshole. 

Alright, I hope things works itself out in America. Peace

[caze]

1 hour ago, very honest said:

the protests are overwhelmingly peaceful and most crime occuring in proximity to them is attributed to rightist counter-protestors, infiltrators or opportunists.

this is nonsense. yes there are large numbers of people peacefully protesting, mostly during the daytime, but it's clear there's also a committed core of shit heads on both sides stirring things up and wrecking shit, mostly at night.

this isn't being done solely by infiltrators, looting is mostly just done by locals who want to get some free shit; property damage, smashing windows, starting fires, etc. has been a regular tactic of black bloc antifa ppl for decades, mostly non-locals - who travel around from city to city, followed by/following the opposite shower of cunts on the right, they're just stepping up the intensity in recent months. you're incredibly naive if you think the far right are the only ones causing all this damage, or even that they're the primary cause. it's obvious this is happening to anyone paying proper attention, many people aren't even denying it, and morons like this are even justifying it:

https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2020/08/27/906642178/one-authors-argument-in-defense-of-looting

 

 

Edited August 30, 2020 by caze

[caze]

nothing good will come from any of this, Trump isn't going do anything they want, and it's likely if they keep it up they'll just ensure another Trump victory - which they probably want, because they're mostly white privileged larping assholes and they won't be the ones effected by another 4 years of Trump, they hate the democrats as much as the republicans anyway. luckily Biden isn't on the side of the defund the police/acab wing of the democrats (which is barely a wing, more of a rump - it's mostly the far left outside of the party driving this), and he's been relatively vocal about taking a sensible approach to police/criminal justice reform rather than the dumb shit most activists are pushing, so with any luck he can get this message across and reassure the majority of middle america which is getting increasingly freaked out about all this. Biden's core message on this needs to be a return to normality, Trump will just see this chaos continue. 

[Rubin Farr]

[caze]

 

 

[joshuatxuk]

3 hours ago, ignatius said:

the trump cruise type thing has happened several times over the last 4 or 5 years. they get all hyped up to wave their flags from their trucks and come drive around portland. most of them are from washington. don’t even live here. usually it’s just posturing and stupidity but they have attacked people in the past. one year some gay kid got beat up on the sidewalk.  it’s really thug bully type shit. a way to puff out their chests and them go home and drink a beer and talk about themselves like they're tough people or something. 

it's like you're at a BBQ w/a bunch of friends who have kids and the kids are slap fighting and not listening and so the BBQ gets ruined for the adults. 

portland is well known for being a very open tolerant livable city where people can be themselves and that's that.. so it's a target for intolerant racists who want bully people. it's trolling plain and simple. 

It seems to be way more overt and aggressive in blue states: Cali, Pacific NW, the NYC "regatta." Like this stuff is here in Texas too but I've noticed it's only in organized conveys to specifically provoke or upset. 

For example the one trip I took this summer was to Bolivar Penisula, it's a fairly rural and remote section of Texas coastline, almost all beach home rentals and docks. Hung out there with my father and brother in law. It's always been prone to Confederate flag shit-kickers, rednecks, and oil & gas CHUDs but this year it was MAGA, blue lives matter, and "come and take" 2A shit all over. Even teen kids, the kind who listen to late 90s butt rock while drive their 4x4 Polaris toys. As my wife quipped "lol, and they think liberals are the weird ones"

The day I saw the most? Fucking Juneteenth. That was no coincidence. Bush era sucked but I'll say this, I didn't have to deal with people driving in trucks with flags saying FUCK YOUR FEELINGS and staring me down hoping I'd react. In front of my kids too. I just completely ignored them while drinking a beer. When they are old enough to read it'll be impossible to not have to explain to them that some people are godawful. It was funny my kid likes flags a lot and wanted to get one but besides a Jimmy Buffet Margarittaville flag all of the flags for sale were right-wing jingoistic horseshit. I was like "nah, these are all kind of bad flags, expect the parrot one" Next day he was like "let's get a nice flag later, like an American flag or something." 

Edited August 30, 2020 by joshuatxuk

[goDel]

32 minutes ago, caze said:

nothing good will come from any of this, Trump isn't going do anything they want, and it's likely if they keep it up they'll just ensure another Trump victory - which they probably want, because they're mostly white privileged larping assholes and they won't be the ones effected by another 4 years of Trump, they hate the democrats as much as the republicans anyway. luckily Biden isn't on the side of the defund the police/acab wing of the democrats (which is barely a wing, more of a rump - it's mostly the far left outside of the party driving this), and he's been relatively vocal about taking a sensible approach to police/criminal justice reform rather than the dumb shit most activists are pushing, so with any luck he can get this message across and reassure the majority of middle america which is getting increasingly freaked out about all this. Biden's core message on this needs to be a return to normality, Trump will just see this chaos continue. 

Yeah, I'm afraid these protests getting out of hand work in Trumps favor. 

BTW, even Michael Moore is warning Trump might get re-elected again. Getting annoyed with people protesting their way into another Trump term, tbh. Looks to me the US has lost its mind.

Quote

“Sorry to have to provide the reality check again,” he said.

Moore, one of few political observers to predict Trump’s victory over Hillary Clinton in 2016, said that “enthusiasm for Trump is off the charts” in key areas compared with the Democratic party nominee, Joe Biden.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/aug/29/michael-moore-donald-trump-repeat-2016-warning

[may be rude]

49 minutes ago, caze said:

2 hours ago, very honest said:

the protests are overwhelmingly peaceful and most crime occuring in proximity to them is attributed to rightist counter-protestors, infiltrators or opportunists.

this is nonsense. yes there are large numbers of people peacefully protesting, mostly during the daytime, but it's clear there's also a committed core of shit heads on both sides stirring things up and wrecking shit, mostly at night.

there have been protests in hundreds of cities and towns in the US for months. right after george floyd was murdered, tempers were high and a number of protests got out of hand in the first week, mostly the first weekend. after jacob blake was killed, again passions are high, people are furious before they cool down.

i don't think any scientific study has been done, analyzing statistics of peaceful versus nonviolent events, but i suspect one would show organic violence at less than 1 percent.

the right embraced their blm-demonization narrative because it was an escape from news cycles about covid, which were damaging them on a daily basis.

kenosha certainly was a flair-up. my comment was directed at tim pool acting like rioting has been a huge problem for months. that's what is nonsense.

[ignatius]

some portland thoughts twitter thread. 

 

[ignatius]

aye aye aye.. 

this is from a while ago.. the essay.. worth checking out if you haven't 

 

Edited August 30, 2020 by ignatius

[joshuatxuk]

Have you listened to any of Robert Evan's podcasts, he's done an excellent series on cops in his "Behind The Bastards" series

[ignatius]

18 minutes ago, joshuatxuk said:

Have you listened to any of Robert Evan's podcasts, he's done an excellent series on cops in his "Behind The Bastards" series

i've had it bookmarked for a while but haven't dug in yet. 

[joshuatxuk]

Just now, ignatius said:

i've had it bookmarked for a while but haven't dug in yet. 

their excellent, his opening and closing episodes to "it could happen here" are extremely relevant too

[caze]

15 hours ago, very honest said:

i don't think any scientific study has been done, analyzing statistics of peaceful versus nonviolent events, but i suspect one would show organic violence at less than 1 percent.

It doesn't matter what % of protestors are violent vs non-violent, all that matters is how much damage is being done, how many businesses destroyed, lives ruined, whole communities fucked up... and ultimately, what the perception of all this is with voters in the midwest/rust belt.

[may be rude]

32 minutes ago, caze said:

It doesn't matter what % of protestors are violent vs non-violent, all that matters is how much damage is being done, how many businesses destroyed, lives ruined, whole communities fucked up... and ultimately, what the perception of all this is with voters in the midwest/rust belt.

i think it matters that the only part of blm the right pays attention to is the less than 1% in which some riot.

[goDel]

45 minutes ago, very honest said:

i think it matters that the only part of blm the right pays attention to is the less than 1% in which some riot.

it matters this is politics: everyone has their own idea of what they think matters and how much. it's subjective. you could use polling data to see what most would think. as opposed to inventing your own theories on what people think. that's usually not a very productive way.

here's some data about BLM. nothing about these recent events. but obviously, it takes time to measure that objectively. And by the time you could measure it, it's probably 4 news-cycles in the past. (in other words, you're better off ignoring the hype of the current news-cycle)

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/support-for-black-lives-matter-surged-during-protests-but-is-waning-among-white-americans/

Quote

This decline in public opinion is consistent with a long line of political science research that tells us that the effects of events on public opinion tend to last only for as long as they are at the forefront of the country’s — or, in this case, one group’s — collective consciousness. That also means that without prolonged activism and sustained media attention, the impact of this year’s protests on white public opinion could evaporate entirely.

 

[may be rude]

these people who claim to collect guns so they can topple an authoritarian have been tricked into supporting police militarization and brutality and an autocrat himself. that's fox/rightist brainwashing, in the states.

we have an unmoored political party attached to a disingenuous media ecosystem. their platform drifts like an iceberg, pilotted by ratings and maybe some strange, deceptive political strategizing.

we end up with people thinking it matters that the fbi suspected flynn would lie before they interviewed him, but don't think it matters that flynn lied to the fbi about his discussions with kislyak about sanctions. they think it matters that strzok texted page about not liking trump, but not that manafort's close associate was a russian spy, working closely on trump campaign matters during manafort's time as campaign manger.

i don't shirk to public opinion. public opinion in the united states is kind of schizophrenic, right now. there is brainwashing going on, and people need to hear honest, informed takes. people kind of need for others to engage them on what actually matters, regarding political issues.

i take the point on being data-centric, @goDel, but appealling to the masses on what matters? it's not that simple. the US is in a perilous position of brainwashing, right now. it's a horror movie to be in touch with the facts and to behold red states in which everyone is a fox-head, thoroughly stewed in a mythos that deflects facts of gravity.

white supremacists fantasize about coming race wars. timothy mcveigh actually thought that his attack on the feds would encourage others to destabilize society so that, eventually, there could be a race war and i guess that issue could get settled or something. it's this weird, pent-up, subconscious energy derived from being descended from oppressors and feeling insecure about unpaid retribution. 

there have been many cases of white supremacists capitalizing on blm protests and taking actions to escalate confrontation and unrest. fox and the president are feeding this. trump wants unrest to worsen and has only worked to provoke that. he wants to not address the legitimate grievance of the demonstrators but to forcefully quash their movement. 

these are really dangerous times. we're entering flu season with 1,000 dying of covid/day. we're entering a depression. trump has been abusing power and carrying out plots to interfere with american democratic elections.

biden spoke up about kenosha and said all violence is wrong and he's right. i'm not pro-riotting, i just am seeing a massive misrepresentation going on and i just can't stand by, to be seen as tacitly verifying it. the right is harping on a theme of there being an unrest problem, but what i'm seeing from the right is that they are provoking unrest. they needed an other, they found one, and they seem rather bent on keeping it.

Edited September 1, 2020 by very honest

[dingformung]

14 minutes ago, very honest said:

the US is in a perilous position of brainwashing, right now

Genuine non-rhetoric question: Was there ever a time when it wasn't ?

[chenGOD]

It's the same tactic media used for reporting on Portland - they made it look like a warzone, when in reality, there was a small area (6 blocks or so?) that was impacted, the violence happened only at night, and it was the same hundred or so "protestors" who came out every night. During the day there were protests every day with thousands of people that were peaceful and without issue.

@goDel and @very honest you guys are arguing the same point from slightly different angles. Public perception absolutely matters: and the news cycle is a real beast. More importantly is what the media reports - and they report on what sells. Which is not people demonstrating peacefully. Ultimately though, sustained peaceful demonstration along with voting en masse for more progressive candidates or even just candidates who will return some sense of stability to US politics is the only way out of this mess. Once you get to that stage, you can start working on the other issues, but you need that base of an ability to have mature dialogue, with goals that will prioritize people over corporations.

[may be rude]

 

1 hour ago, dingformung said:

1 hour ago, very honest said:

the US is in a perilous position of brainwashing, right now

Genuine non-rhetoric question: Was there ever a time when it wasn't ?

 

that's a good question. i could talk about the recent history of propaganda, and how the internet turned the information landscape upside down, and mutated it. for example, the 90s were more quaint, and the arrival of the internet meant that "mainstream media" became just one player, forced to compete with blogs and click-bait. any sense of responsibility that news executives may have felt for shepharding public opinion was removed, because people became able to browse information themselves, rather than just tuning in at 7pm to channel 7. the "mainstream media" transformed from more-or-less the only game in town into just another competitor. the forces that worked to corrupt the mainstream media now had a broader ecosystem to corrupt. the mainstream media became biased toward click-bait, because they were struggling to survive. people were disenfranchised by mainstream media and migrated toward internet information, and, in many cases, individuals ended up with much more deceptive information, depending on what they ended up looking at. so, it is different now, and more chaotic, and more complex. there was always some corruption and some deception, but mainstream media was also an old institution handed down from antiquity, which did include a certain conscience for wanting to guide the public to the extent it was able, and it had evolved and refined some good practices. now i encounter people who don't know the blogs they think superior to "MSM" are feeding them russian military intelligence disinformation designed to destabilize american society.

but the part of your question i think is actually more interesting is the word brainwashing. it seems like a cartoonish idea, but it's actually something that comes to us from history. the 3rd reich has examples. the ww2 japanese army was pretty fanatical and kind of believed the emperor was a god. the north koreans are forced to believe a very sad and false set of information. i think the term "brainwashing" serves a purpose, as distinct from more regular mis-and-disinformation. there is a qualitative difference, when enough of a population believes fervently enough a set of information that is divorced enough from reality, and an environment is cultivated to maintain it. you enter a red state and it's very surreal and unsettling and everyone seems like a zombie. 

wikipedia is an interesting case, when it comes to epistemology. the most-used resource is the open-source one, where anyone can write to it (kind of). the wikipedia people designed some systems to enforce accuracy, and have been largely successful. one of their guiding principles is to gravitate toward information that is verifiable. they do not think in terms of truth. to the designers of wikipedia, there is no truth, there is only verifiability. they seek to favor the information that is the most verifiable. 

what's my point? you can hack verification. you put the same narratives in the facebook ads that are the narratives coming out of the mouths of the GOP politicians, which are the same narratives coming out of fox news, which are the same narratives coming from the president, which are the same narratives coming from rightist media, which are the same narratives being posted by inauthentic twitter accounts en masse.

fox news, which showed up on the scene in 1996, strategized to be the PR arm of the republican party. by succeeding in this, they made themselves indispensable to the party, and now they actually are the spearhead. the other entities have learned that fox knows how to nose out the narratives that will fly with their audience, and those other entities have learned to pile onto those narratives. because these different actors in the ecosystem (congresspeople, fox, online content) parrot the party line, the consumer thinks they are verifying their info. this is brainwashing.

it's spooky. it's hard to shake them out of it. they are pre-conditioned with defenses against the truth, like is done in cults! they're told not to trust the nyt, cnn, wapo, etc. they're told the democrats are lying about all their stuff, even when they're not. and these people in that bubble believe it, even though the sources they are told to distrust are more accurate, and the information they believe is false.

i've been arguing about politics for a long time and i never had a sense of brainwashing like i do, these days, and i don't think it's me. i see how maybe it's difficult to know where to draw the line between brainwashing and non-brainwashing, but if you go hang out in north korea, you'll not miss the distinct quality.

i've noticed waves of the effects of disinfo campaigns. all of a sudden, a lot of online posters are pushing a certain narrative or set of narratives that you know to be spin. to those who follow fact reporting, a big influx of spin narrative posting stands out. afterward, i learn about the disinfo campaigns that drove (or constituted) the posters. this is a new ingredient in society. twitter has reported that very significant portions of twitter content they believe to be inauthentic. there's no historical analogue to being inundated with impostors, pretending artificial identities, and calculatedly endeavoring to impart manipulative beliefs. i think that's another significant factor in the current state of information.

we must evolve a social norm to value the skillset of being able to check information. that is the necessary adaptation to the change in the environment.

Edited August 31, 2020 by very honest

[zero]

21 hours ago, joshuatxuk said:

It was funny my kid likes flags a lot and wanted to get one but besides a Jimmy Buffet Margarittaville flag all of the flags for sale were right-wing jingoistic horseshit. I was like "nah, these are all kind of bad flags, expect the parrot one" Next day he was like "let's get a nice flag later, like an American flag or something." 

the most ridiculous (but it did make me laugh) one is the "Trump 2020: no more bullshit" flag. I mean c'mon...