19
   

Monitoring Biden and other Contemporary Events

 
 
izzythepush
 
  2  
Reply Sun 6 Oct, 2024 10:20 am
@izzythepush,
And I'm not at all surprised about your hostility towards BLM.
hightor
 
  5  
Reply Sun 6 Oct, 2024 10:30 am
Quote:
Are you incapable of addressing Biden?

A rather dumb question. When someone chooses not to make a comment about a specific topic it does not indicate "incapability". Are you incapable of addressing Elon Musk? Ted Cruz? Marjorie Taylor Green? No, I didn't think so. You've simply chosen not to for your own reasons.
0 Replies
 
blatham
 
  4  
Reply Sun 6 Oct, 2024 10:53 am
@izzythepush,
Quote:
@Lash
...You only attack Democrats, never Trump.

Or Republicans. The very, very few instances where she has said anything negative about Trump or the GOP (perhaps one percent of her posts), it is some shallow pro forma comment such as "I don't like Trump either" or "the Dems and Republicans are really one party". Everything else is anti-Dem trolling. It's a pattern of 20 years of her posting here.
0 Replies
 
blatham
 
  5  
Reply Sun 6 Oct, 2024 11:02 am
Quote:
Quote:
Quote:
—while still enacting laws that decimate the black community.


What specific laws are you referring to?

If Lash was operating in good faith, she would try to write a carefully reasoned and evidence-supported argument in response to this obvious and legitimate challenge to her claim. And this won't happen.
0 Replies
 
Lash
 
  -1  
Reply Sun 6 Oct, 2024 11:08 am
@izzythepush,
You often speak to yourself in this manner?
Walter Hinteler
 
  3  
Reply Sun 6 Oct, 2024 11:13 am
@Lash,
Lash wrote:
Don’t you feel silly, constantly bringing up Trump?
Are you incapable of addressing Biden?

I responded to your post
You wrote:
US President Joe Biden took an average of 133 days off per year in office—far more than Donald Trump


From a psychodynamic perspective your response ... never mind.
0 Replies
 
izzythepush
 
  3  
Reply Sun 6 Oct, 2024 11:35 am
@Lash,
Don’t you feel silly, constantly bringing up Biden?
Are you incapable of addressing Trump?
izzythepush
 
  1  
Reply Sun 6 Oct, 2024 12:33 pm
@Lash,
Have you been reading Oscar Wilde?
0 Replies
 
izzythepush
 
  1  
Reply Sun 6 Oct, 2024 12:39 pm
@Lash,
My point being, is that if you had been a genuine, comitted supporter of the Palestinian cause you would have received an email at the same time as me.

They don't send invitations out to Johnny come lately dilettantes.

Btw, one of my very first posts on A2K was removed because I included a link to Palestinian olive oil.

That was how I learned about spamming.
0 Replies
 
izzythepush
 
  1  
Reply Mon 7 Oct, 2024 02:30 am
@Lash,
I have a BLM t shirt too.

To be honest I never intended getting one as it's an American thing and I'm more concerned with things over here.

However Glennn, aka nonono kept going on and on about how terrible they were so I bought one just to piss him off.

I know I was doing the right deed for the wrong reason, but it didn't half feel good.
0 Replies
 
hightor
 
  3  
Reply Mon 7 Oct, 2024 03:02 am
Quote:
This morning began with a CNN headline story by fact checker Daniel Dale, titled “Six days of Trump lies about the Hurricane Helene response.” Dale noted that Republican nominee for president Donald Trump has been one of the chief sources of the disinformation that has badly hampered recovery efforts.

Trump has claimed that the federal government is ignoring the storm’s victims, especially ones in Republican areas, and that the government is handing out only $750 in aid (in fact, the initial emergency payment for food and groceries is $750, but there are multiple grants available for home rebuilding up to a total of $42,500, the upper limit set by Congress). He has also claimed—falsely—that the Federal Emergency Management Agency is out of money to help because the administration spent all its money on Ukraine and undocumented immigrants.

Trump’s lies are not errors. They are part of a well-documented strategy to overturn democracy by using modern media to create a false political world. Voters begin to base their political decisions on that fake image, rather than on reality, and are manipulated into giving up control of their government to an authoritarian.

Russian political theorists who were key to the rise of Russian president Vladimir Putin after the collapse of the Soviet Union called this manipulation “political technology.”

They developed a series of techniques to pervert democracy through this virtual political reality. They blackmailed opponents, abused state power to help favored candidates, sponsored “double” candidates with names similar to those of opponents in order to split the opposition vote and thus open the way for their own candidates, created false parties to further splinter the opposition, and, finally, created a false narrative around an election or other event that enabled them to control public debate.

Essentially, they perverted democracy, turning it from the concept of voters choosing their leaders into the concept of voters rubber-stamping the leaders they had been manipulated into backing.

This system made sense in former Soviet republics, where it enabled leaders to avoid the censorship that voters would recoil from by instead creating a firehose of news until people became overwhelmed by the task of trying to figure out what was real and simply tuned out.

But it has also worked in the United States, where right-wing leaders have used it to divide the American people and spread disinformation. While “misinformation” is simply false information—which we all spread innocently and correct with accurate information—“disinformation” is a deliberate lie to convince people of things that are not true.

Before the 2016 presidential election, Russian operatives working for Putin set out to tear the U.S. apart and thus undermine the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) they see as stopping the resurrection of Imperial Russia. They called for provoking “instability and separatism within the borders of the United States... encouraging all kinds of separatism and ethnic, social and racial conflicts,... [and] support[ing] isolationist tendencies in American politics.”

But they were not the only ones operating in this disinformation sphere. In 2014, then–Breitbart chief executive Steve Bannon explained to a right-wing Catholic group meeting at the Vatican that he believed traditional western civilization was fighting a war for survival. To win, current western-style civilizations must be completely reconfigured to put a few wealthy white Christian male leaders in charge to direct and protect subordinates.

In that year, Bannon set out to dismantle the administrative state that was leveling the playing field among Americans and push Christian nationalism. With the help of funding from Republican megadonors Robert and Rebecca Mercer, he launched Cambridge Analytica, a company designed to develop profiles of individuals that would enable advertisers to group them for targeted advertising. Before the 2016 election, the company captured information from the Facebook profiles of more than 50 million users without their permission or knowledge, enabling it to flood the platform with targeted disinformation.

Bannon became the chief executive officer of Trump’s 2016 campaign. He then served as chief strategist and senior counselor for the first eight months of Trump’s term, during which he worked to put MAGAs in power across the administration and across the country.

“The Democrats don’t matter,” Bannon told a reporter in 2018. “The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with sh*t.” Keeping listeners constantly trying to defend what is real from what is not destroys their ability to make sense of the world. Many people turn to a strongman who promises to create order. Others will get so exhausted they simply give up. As scholar of totalitarianism Hannah Arendt noted, authoritarians use this technique to destabilize a population.

Trump’s administration began with a foundational lie about the size of the crowd at his inauguration. Recent challenges to that assertion from Vice President Kamala Harris and former president Barack Obama rankled as badly as they did for Trump because that lie allowed Trump to define the public conversation. Forcing his supporters to commit to a lie that was demonstrably untrue locked them into accepting others throughout his presidency, for backing away would become harder and harder with each lie they accepted.

Challenging that lie, as Harris and Obama did, challenged all those that came afterward, including the lie that Trump had been the true winner of the 2020 presidential election. Thanks to the October 2 filing by special counsel Jack Smith, we know that Trump was in almost daily communication with Bannon as he pushed that lie.

Scholars of authoritarianism call a lie of such magnitude a “Big Lie,” a key propaganda tool associated with Nazi Germany. It is a lie so huge that no one can believe it is false. If leaders repeat it enough times, refusing to admit that it is a lie, people come to think it is the truth because surely no one would make up anything so outrageous.

In his autobiography Mein Kampf, or “My Struggle,” Adolf Hitler wrote that people were more likely to believe a giant lie than a little one because they were willing to tell small lies in their own lives but “would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods.” Since they could not conceive of telling “colossal untruths…they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.” He went on: “Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think that there may be some other explanation.”

The U.S. Office of Strategic Services had picked up on Hitler’s manipulation of his followers when it described Hitler’s psychological profile. It said, “His primary rules were: never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it.”

The MAGA movement is now based in the Big Lie. Its leaders refuse to admit that Trump lost the 2020 election. Trump’s running mate, Ohio senator J.D. Vance, two days ago actually said Trump won, and as media figures more frequently ask the question of MAGA lawmakers, they continue to dodge it, as Arkansas senator Tom Cotton did today on NBC’s Meet the Press, and as House speaker Mike Johnson did on ABC News’s “This Week.”

Now, though, their lies about the federal response to Hurricane Helene show that they are completely committed to disinformation. As Will Bunch noted today in the Philadelphia Inquirer, when Vance lied again at the vice presidential debate about the legal status of the Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, and complained when moderator Margaret Brennan corrected him, he gave up the whole game. “Margaret,” Vance said, “the rules were that you guys weren’t going to fact-check.” He continued to argue until the moderators cut his microphone.

Bunch points out that MAGA Republicans insist on the right to lie, considering any fact-checking “censorship,” a position to which Vance pivoted when Minnesota governor Tim Walz asked him if Trump won the 2020 election.

Just as Russian political theorists advocated to overturn democracy, MAGA Republicans have created an alternative political reality, aided in large part by the disinformation spread on social media by X owner and Trump supporter Elon Musk.

They continue to be aided by foreign operatives, as well. This morning, on CBS’s Face the Nation, Senate Intelligence Committee member Mark Kelly (D-AZ) warned, on the basis of information he has heard from the FBI, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and the National Security Agency, that Russia, Iran, and China are generating about 20% to 30% of the political content and comments on social media.

But the largest purveyors of disinformation are homegrown.

Perhaps, though, the very real, immediate damage MAGA’s disinformation about Hurricane Helene is causing might finally be a step too far. In what is at least a muted rebuke to Trump, Republican governors across the damaged area have stepped up to praise President Joe Biden and the federal response to the disaster.

hcr
0 Replies
 
izzythepush
 
  1  
Reply Mon 7 Oct, 2024 05:02 am
After the atrocities of a year ago the hostages are still no closer to being returned.

Many of the families of the hostages are boycotting today's commemorations and some have forbidden Netanyahu from mentioning their loved one's names.

Netanyahu is a war criminal with a vested interest in a forever war.

He is facing corruption charges at home as well, and the only thing keeping him out of the courts is this ******* war.
Walter Hinteler
 
  3  
Reply Mon 7 Oct, 2024 05:49 am
The released Russian arms dealer But is apparently back in the arms business.
He is known as the ‘dealer of death’ and was released in a prisoner exchange with US basketball player Brittney Griner: according to a media report, Viktor But is once again dealing in weapons.
His buyers: the Houthis.

Putin’s ‘Merchant of Death’ Is Back in the Arms Business. This Time Selling to the Houthis.

The Russian government rejected the accusations levelled against But in the report. Moscow tends to categorise the ‘Wall Street Journal’ story as ‘fake’, said Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov.

But himself also commented on the report in the Russian daily newspaper ‘RBC’. In it, he surmised that the ‘Wall Street Journal’ article had been published on the occasion of Russian President Vladimir Putin's birthday. He also praised the Houthis for their military successes in the fight against the USA.
(With -translated- material from SPIEGEL)
0 Replies
 
Walter Hinteler
 
  3  
Reply Mon 7 Oct, 2024 06:33 am
The serial entrepreneurs behind Donald J. Trump’s new cryptocurrency project have left a trail of lawsuits, unpaid debt and tax liens.

The ‘Crypto Punks’ Behind Trump’s Murky New Business Venture (paywall removed)
Region Philbis
 
  2  
Reply Mon 7 Oct, 2024 06:39 am
@Walter Hinteler,
Quote:
a trail of lawsuits, unpaid debt and tax liens.
i would expect nothing less from the MAGA scum...
0 Replies
 
izzythepush
 
  1  
Reply Mon 7 Oct, 2024 09:33 am
One problem with cynically faking sincerity is that one can no longer see it in others.
0 Replies
 
Region Philbis
 
  3  
Reply Mon 7 Oct, 2024 10:12 am

here's a free NYT article, courtesy Jeff Teidrich...

Trump’s Speeches, Increasingly Angry and Rambling, Reignite the Question of Age
(nyt)
0 Replies
 
izzythepush
 
  1  
Reply Mon 7 Oct, 2024 12:24 pm
Btw, if anybody else is interested in buying genuine Palestinian goods from the West Bank pm me and I'll give you a link.

(I don't want to be accused of spamming.)
0 Replies
 
Lash
 
  -1  
Reply Mon 7 Oct, 2024 01:00 pm
@izzythepush,
Check the name of the thread.
Also, a sitting (or sleeping) president is more relevant than the preceding one.

You’re struggling today.
Lash
 
  -1  
Reply Mon 7 Oct, 2024 01:04 pm
@izzythepush,
They killed the Nova attendees because they adhere to the Hannibal directive—making them impervious to hostage threats.

The ruling party doesn’t want the hostages.
0 Replies
 
 

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