2020 US Election

[EdamAnchorman]

12 hours ago, Walter Ostanek said:

I am half expecting the US to attain Somali levels of violent dysfunction if not have an actual civil war in the next few years. Which is a bummer because I live like an hours' drive from the US. I find it nuts how few people in Canada are taking that possibility seriously or thinking about what it would mean for us. Though honestly a serious chunk of this country is itching to throw in its lot with one or other yanqui faction, if they don't already think that we're part of the US

I totally see where you're coming from but I think that the chances of that happening are very low because, in my perhaps naive view, that kind of extreme violent dysfunction is much more likely to happen in places where citizens' basic needs (food, housing, jobs, etc.) are severely lacking, hence the motivation for large numbers of people resorting to extreme measures.

I look at the majority of the most vocal Trump supporters and they look like they would get winded walking a quarter mile or "intellectually winded" trying to organize anything remotely complicated so yeah they'll bitch and moan at rallies but I think they lack the motivation to really organize anything more than like what happened on Jan 6th (which was bad but could've been much worse with more organization).

There are tons of wildcards here like if Trump wins and his cronies are in power then yeah consolidating power at those levels could change the whole thing but I'm just talking about citizen-initiated action.

[ignatius]

i know it's petty but this shit is just funny

still hoping he has a stroke on stage at one of his rallies. 

[ignatius]

[decibal cooper]

On 10/15/2024 at 5:54 PM, may be rude said:

you say feds... technically that includes trump and his executive branch crew including various conspirators in his set of conspiracies. so yes feds were involved in jan 6 if you mean trump and his posse.

trump shut down investigations into himself and his people. he pushed for fbi to investigate political enemies of his. there are a lot of employees but to imagine an extensive conspiracy acting against their boss is far-fetched.

you ask why he wouldn't use fbi and cia to stage a real insurrection, he did abuse power and we don't know the full extent of that. we don't know that he didn't misuse FBI or CIA as part of his efforts to do a coup. there are limits to what people can get away with and to what people will go along with.

lots of good and fair points in your response, but I am still not swayed and suspect the possibility that federal officers (or their confidential informants) were there and that they were pushing for things to become violent, not only to make Trump look bad but (and I am pushing things pretty far into Dale Gribble style nutter conspiracy here), but to make all of his supporters come across to the other half of the country as backwoods, violent, fascist idiots, all for the purposes of continuing to sow division in the overall electorate, keep the people divided against themselves, and give democrats the opportunity to campaign on the so-called coup. I do not view it as a coup. Five Trump supporters got killed, there was some rough rioting that did not escalate into wide-spread violence or people getting killed en masse, and a bunch of misguided idiots were taking selfies in the senate chamber. What do you think their plan was after that? Were they going to occupy the building and start executing politicians, and then mobilize a military force against citizens who are registered as democrats and then fight the US military all so that Trump could take his place as dictator of America?

But to get back to the issue with the feds. The FBI has like 35,000 people, granted a lot of those are probably desk jockeys. They have lots of registered informants, and they probably have other private contractors given that it is an American capitalistic bureaucracy and they always end up dipping into the private sector. To believe that all of these people were Trump loyalists is naive imo. There would have been a lot of feds who did not get purged after Trump was initially elected who had plenty reason to resent Trump. A lot of the theories surrounding the JFK assassination, including the one from Don DeLillo in his fictional novel of Oswald's life (titled Libra), a lot of people suspect it was a small band of rogue CIA agents who put things together, without the knowledge of agency leadership. Whether or not this is true for JFK, shit like this happens all the time. In terms of foreign policy, the CIA has done some incredibly reckless, destabilizing things without the president's knowledge, both for reasons of plausible deniability for the president and also because there were powerful members in the institution who disagreed with the president at the time and were able to hide behind top-secret classification and other obfuscations if journalists or anyone else started asking questions. CIA involvement in 1948 Italian general election is an example of this where president did not know.

To be honest, I think that Trump's recorded phone call to the Georgia secretary of state asking for him to produce votes out of thin air is more incriminating than anything that happened on January 6th. I do not buy the standard narrative that no funny stuff from the feds was going on, and same with the pipe bomb until I see conclusive proof to the contrary (and I will not hold my breath, as no one cares about it any more and FBI and DOJ have all but closed the case on that one).

Anyhoo, I am very suspicious when it comes to the us government, especially at the federal level. You have not convinced me may be rude. Far from it! I do not think you know who you are dealing with. I am paranoid weirdo who post animal pictures on idm forum, and don't forget it! This is basically who you are dealing with:

Edited Wednesday at 11:59 PM by decibal cooper
pic formant

[may be rude]

On 10/16/2024 at 7:56 PM, decibal cooper said:

I am still not swayed and suspect the possibility that federal officers (or their confidential informants) were there and that they were pushing for things to become violent, not only to make Trump look bad but (and I am pushing things pretty far into Dale Gribble style nutter conspiracy here), but to make all of his supporters come across to the other half of the country as backwoods, violent, fascist idiots, all for the purposes of continuing to sow division in the overall electorate, keep the people divided against themselves, and give democrats the opportunity to campaign on the so-called coup

does that really sound believable to you? sorry but that's just really bad fiction. it sounds like you admit that this is your imagination.

On 10/16/2024 at 7:56 PM, decibal cooper said:

I do not view it as a coup. Five Trump supporters got killed, there was some rough rioting that did not escalate into wide-spread violence or people getting killed en masse, and a bunch of misguided idiots were taking selfies in the senate chamber. What do you think their plan was after that? Were they going to occupy the building and start executing politicians, and then mobilize a military force against citizens who are registered as democrats and then fight the US military all so that Trump could take his place as dictator of America?

glad you asked. jan 6 was one component of trump's coup attempt. it had 6 major components. the jan 6 component was him sending the mob to the capitol, having reason to anticipate a violent storming of the capitol during the joint session of congress. he then refused to call them off for 3 hours though he did tweet that pence did the wrong thing while pence was hiding with his secret service in the capitol. Trump tweeted at 2:24 p.m.: “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done.” objectives included:

• pressuring congress members to vote against certifying the votes of some states. that's what congress was doing that afternoon, voting to certify each state, and some trumpists in each house of congress tried to act like some states shouldn't be certified but not as many as trump wanted for his plan. trump was calling congress members while the capitol was being stormed, lobbying them to vote against certifying some states.  
• cause the capitol to be evacuated and the certification to be delayed, with 14 days left until inauguration day, and trump contesting the election with some congress members backing him up.
• pressure pence to do what trump was asking of him, to not count slates of electors from some states, throwing the decision to the house of representatives, for a vote by delegation, by which trump would be expected to win.
• delay the certification by some other effect of the storming, such as the slates of electors being stolen or something else. 

so, the pence pressure part was another component of the plan. trump had devised a plan along with attorney john eastman, to pressure pence to refuse to certify the slates of electors from some states on january 6th. check out the eastman memos. trump was continually pressuring pence about this very emphatically, as reported by many people who witnessed trump putting extreme pressure on pence to go along with the plan. pence actually published a public letter to trump early in the morning of january 6th laying out his reasoning for why he would refuse to go along with trump's plan

another component was trump spreading the lies, which he knew were junk. the special counsel documents linked below describe extensive evidence of this.

another component was trump threatening georgia secretary of state with prosecution by doj if he didn't find him 11,000 votes. here's the link to that phone call

another component was trying to use doj to send letters to states saying their election results were tainted, encouraging them to have their legislatures reconsider how they cast their slates of electors. see the jeff clark letter

another component was orchestrating fake slates of electors being sent to congress, which falsely said trump won the states. multiple states also considered this activity to be crimes and have pressed charges. giuliani was orchestrating it. several of these false slates of electors looked the same because they were based on the same document template. giuliani was orchestrating that across seven states

those are the 6 big pieces of trump's coup attempt. 

you may be interested to review the special counsel filing recently unsealed by judge chutkan, in trump's federal criminal trial for the coup. it's a long and detailed filing resulting from the supreme court's immunity ruling, and ordered by the judge. pages 3-85 describe the parts of the coup charged in the indictment. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/read-jack-smiths-unsealed-court-filing-that-says-trump-resorted-to-crimes-after-2020-election

here's the indictment itself. it's a good read offering a succinct overview of the crimes. this is the superceding indictment, slightly revised after the supreme court's immunity ruling: https://www.politico.com/f/?id=00000191-9582-d690-a9f3-dfff52f50000

the same judge ordered that the appendices of the recent filing also be unsealed. should be coming out soon. 

Edited 3 hours ago by may be rude

[cern]

 

[may be rude]

kamala did a great job. here's the full interview i think

 

someone was posting about wanting an adversarial interview. there's an adversarial interview. brett's best points were weak and kamala's points were much stronger

Edited yesterday at 03:21 AM by may be rude

[Rubin Farr]

 

[ARPA]

Q: Given the amount of the mounting evidence of climate change, do you still believe it's a hoax?

Trump: I get awards environmental awards for the way I build it for the water, the way I use the water, the sand, the mixing of the sand and the water, I mean, many different, but I've had many awards over the years for environmental, the way I've built because you know about building, that's what you do. It's very important to me… The real global warming that we have to worry about is nuclear. The water is coming up an eighth of an inch over 300 years, the ocean is gonna rise and, you know, nobody knows if that's true or not, but they're worried about the ocean rising an eighth of an inch or a quarter of an inch in 300 years

Spoiler

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/live/2024/oct/17/donald-trump-january-6-riot-kamala-harris-us-election-politics-news?page=with:block-6711317d8f084087b63c05c0#block-6711317d8f084087b63c05c0

[ignatius]

32 minutes ago, ARPA said:

Q: Given the amount of the mounting evidence of climate change, do you still believe it's a hoax?

Trump: I get awards environmental awards for the way I build it for the water, the way I use the water, the sand, the mixing of the sand and the water, I mean, many different, but I've had many awards over the years for environmental, the way I've built because you know about building, that's what you do. It's very important to me… The real global warming that we have to worry about is nuclear. The water is coming up an eighth of an inch over 300 years, the ocean is gonna rise and, you know, nobody knows if that's true or not, but they're worried about the ocean rising an eighth of an inch or a quarter of an inch in 300 years

  Hide contents

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/live/2024/oct/17/donald-trump-january-6-riot-kamala-harris-us-election-politics-news?page=with:block-6711317d8f084087b63c05c0#block-6711317d8f084087b63c05c0

[ignatius]

20 hours ago, may be rude said:

kamala did a great job. here's the full interview i think

 

someone was posting about wanting an adversarial interview. there's an adversarial interview. brett's best points were weak and kamala's points were much stronger

[arti]

43 minutes ago, ignatius said:

Why so many views?  Because she doesn't do interviews.  Means little, just the way everything she said was by the line teleprompter fed.  She will lose voters because of her general unlikeableness.   Don't like her or Trump but ask yourself who is going to drag you down in endless warfare and deep state  politics.  She's been in charge for 3/4 years, fuck all has happened to make things better for anybody.

Edited 3 hours ago by arti

[auxien]

this was pretty good, you can tell clearly when she's got a little pep in her step (& when she's caught on her back foot as well, for better or worse...)

[may be rude]

1 hour ago, arti said:

Why so many views?  Because she doesn't do interviews. 

she's starting to do a lot of interviews now

1 hour ago, arti said:

Means little, just the way everything she said was by the line teleprompter fed. 

what? she wasn't using a teleprompter in the fox interview

1 hour ago, arti said:

Don't like her or Trump but ask yourself who is going to drag you down in endless warfare and deep state  politics

trump continued the war in afghanistan, and tried to start a civil war in the US. 

1 hour ago, arti said:

She's been in charge for 3/4 years, fuck all has happened to make things better for anybody.

the biden harris administration recovered the country from covid, recovered the economy from recession, recovered inflation back to the normal rate, left afghanistan, passed the biggest climate change legislation in history. jobs are booming, the economy is very strong.

that all stands in stark contrast to the dystopia that was the trump administration. quite bizarre how dark that got and how fast. dude spread covid to set the stage for his coup because he's compromised by putin. he was stoking unrest while trying to use the military to deal with unrest.

 

come on man you're not helping. trump's compromised by putin, he tried a coup, and he caused covid to be way worse than it needed to be

Edited 1 hour ago by may be rude