Lol.
I wouldn’t put too much credence in the laughing judges of Clown World. There is a wider systemic playing out.
The Supreme Court decided, in the Texas lawsuit, that Texas did not have standing to challenge election results in the blue states Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. These states had implemented changes to voting procedures in response to the covid pandemic.
One might ask, in the context of the SC ruling, how can a Texas voter in the presidential election not be interested in the security measures that these four blue states implemented, given that their votes will impact on who is elected as the one US president? Of course a Texas voter (or any other fair-minded voter anywhere else in the US) will be interested in a fair outcome, and will therefore be interested in proper security measures being implemented in every state throughout America, not just Texas.
The response from the four blue states in reply to the Texas submission was hostile and indignant (hey, they’re democrats), insisting that it’s none of Texas’s business to challenge election procedures in other states. You and I, here in this forum, will agree that logically, that is nonsense. Of course Texan voters, in principle, have standing in the interests of a fair election outcome in every state, because there can only ever be one president elected. Duh.
The SC decision to dismiss the Texas submission was principally, a politically motivated one. And an understandable one - they don’t want trouble. Was their decision justified? Within the heat of a controversial election with many opposing interests, they have their reasons, and there are more than enough angry voices to contend with. Go this route, and there will be legal challenges from the aggrieved, there will be hostility, riots and violence in the streets. I get it.
But in principle, of course every American has standing in the confidence with which an election is administered, across all states. It’s not rocket science. The SC’s dismissal as without standing needs to be placed within the above, broader context.
The Supreme Court, consciously or otherwise, has to factor the splintered, angry, opposing interests into their decision. The system is broken. The courage to stand up for what one believes in no longer matters. America the land of the brave and the free is no more.
It may turn out to Trump’s advantage to be indicted for his alleged role in Jan 6. The right to discovery would provide an astute attorney with the opportunity to revisit all the evidence, and find new evidence, that once and for all proves that this was a stolen election. Let us hope that any new attorney he hires will have the courage, and be to a standard that can get the job done.
@FermentedAgave
There is no way in hell I’m going to watch every crackpot video in my free time every time a crack pot says “you gotta watch this”. It’s a waste of time.
How about you just address my point - that data can be interpreted many different ways. If a phone goes by one location 10 times - is there only one explanation?
Even without watching the video I seem to have hit the crux of the matter - which you have avoided answering. That’s becauyse while it may be your profession, perhaps I know the nature of data better than you do? Data never proves anything. Data can only be interpreted through a specific lens and only arrive at conlusions that are inevitable throug the chosen lens.
You might be thinking that Accuracy is helps your argument. It’s actually the opposite. Cell phone accuracy is down to a few feet to 10 feet. Yes - they know if you are in your kitchen or your bedroom or your roommates bedroom or on the back patio.
It’s basic hypothesis testing:
- Anyone that visits 5 Zuckerbuck/Chan NGOs .AND. then immediately visits at least 4 ballot dropboxes totaling at least 20 ballot dropbox visits is Highly Likely to be Committing Ballot Harvesting.
What you and Corey are arguing is that “it’s not even worth looking into further” because there is a 1 in a Trillion chance it could be someone doing something with, with of course the Leftist condemnation that “if you even mention it, you’re a Qanon racists conspiracy theory”.
I think the Leftists would refer to this as “whataboutism”.
No, no no, lol. That is not how science works, lol.
1st - there is no corntrol group or data on other groups. Why only data on select NGO’s. Are all NGO’s Democrat? What is the comparison data for Democra NGO’s vs Republican NGO’s? What is the data of 2020 compared to 2016 and earlier years?
2nd - There are other legitimate reasons for NGO’s to visit ballot boxes. For example, ride sharing and helping disabled voters. Another is witnessing to see if other organizations are doing anything underhanded like waving Trump Flags at a voting site.
That’s just off the top of my head.
Basically someone showed you some numbers and despite this being your field you lost any objectivity and saw whatever you want to see. If your only tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
No, it’s just basic logic and knowing that NGO’s have many legitimate missions around ballot boxes, including increasing accessibility to disadvantaged populations. You are basically making it a criminal activity to give people rides to voting locations. “Well, there’s only one reason to visit a ballot box and that’s to harvest ballots”. Or you are trying to make it illegal to observe elections to verify no intimidation is taking place. “The only reason to visit a ballot location is to harvest ballots”.
This is just another of a dozen things you have wanted me and Corey to “look at” because it was the smoking gun, when it’s not even necessary. Just because you have been hoodwinked by the movie does not mean it is legitimate.
Ironic for the guy who insisted he was going to watch the Jan 6 hearings, and then suddenly decided it would be better not to watch at all. Must! Maintain! Plausible! Deniability!
On the second day of its public hearings, the House Jan. 6 select committee released an interview of former Attorney General Bill Barr, who spoke about “2000 Mules,” calling it unimpressive and based on a faulty premise. “My opinion then and my opinion now is that the election was not stolen by fraud,” Barr said. “And I haven’t seen anything since the election that changes my mind on that, including the ‘2000 Mules’ movie.” Barr then let out a long laugh.
Asked for his assessment of the movie, Barr continued, “Well, I mean, just in a nutshell, you know, I just think the GBI [Georgia Bureau of Investigations] was unimpressed with it, and I was similarly unimpressed with it. … [T]he cellphone data is singularly unimpressive. I mean, it basically, if you take 2 million cell phones and figure out where they are physically in a big city like Atlanta, or wherever, just by definition you’re going to find many hundreds of them have passed by and spent time in the vicinity of these boxes. And the premise that if you go by five boxes, or whatever it was, you know, that that’s a mule is just indefensible. …
“But then, when the movie came out, I think the photographic evidence in it was completely lack … I mean there was a little bit of it, but it was lacking. It didn’t establish widespread illegal harvesting,” Barr said. “The other thing is people don’t understand is that it’s not clear that even if you can show harvesting, that that changes the results of the election. The courts are not going to throw out votes and then figure out what votes were harvested. It’s still the burden on the challenging party to show that illegal votes were cast, votes were the result of undue influence or bribes or the person was non compos mentis [not of sound mind]. But absent that evidence, I just didn’t see courts throwing out votes anyway.”
Are you trying to insult me by calling me a woman? Weird.
I didn’t even need Barr to tell me this one. It’s just plain logic.
Yes, the whole premise of ballot harvesting is saying that no one can drop off your ballot for you - which is completely stupid in the first place. It should be completely legal for an invalid who is bedridden to be able to give thier ballot for someone to drop off.
Sorry @FermentedAgave there is just not “there” there.
Also I can post a funnier troll pic than you as well.
@corey-devos, the left is seeing the world from within the silo that wants to catch out Team Trump at every opportunity. They will therefore only look at the evidence that proves what they want to prove. The more dirt, the better. It makes them feel all warm and fuzzy inside.
I’m occupying the silo that is placing all of this into a systemic perspective that properly factors in cause and effect across all players and perspectives.
GETTING CAUSE AND EFFECT RIGHT
Ok, let’s now get down to the cause-and-effect that is best understood from a systemic perspective.
It is said that Trump was a divisive president. Was he, really? What was the beginning of the divisiveness to which his presidency was an inevitable response?
It all began with the hippy era of the 60s, the contraceptive pill, the sexual revolution and feminism. The Beatles, Peace, Make love not war, and all that. We watched MASH and Happy Days. We learned to challenge authority, get in their faces, give them the finger. Conservative authority, of course.
Women were oppressed, men were their oppressors. The Patriarchy and all that. Selfish, greedy capitalists took advantage of their employees and the disadvantaged, and they raped the environment. The victim-oppressor narrative took root. The contraceptive pill provided women with the liberation that freed them up to enter the workforce and have multiple random partners without fear of pregnancy. And so on. No need to elaborate further, we all know how it goes. The movements of the 60s came together and became a cult, a groupthink, a form of religion.
But were women really oppressed? Or were they making choices from a culture that granted them the right to be provided for, while requiring men to be providers? Do women, as primary nurturers, really bear no responsibility for the gender roles that evolve in culture… the gender roles that play out in markets, business and politics, and… The Patriarchy? Were capitalists really at liberty to do whatever they wanted, independently of the markets that consume their products and the culture that defines their values?
From the groupthink of progressivism evolved the cult of Woke. From political correctness evolved the virtue-signaling by which those pretending higher virtue could masquerade their moral high-ground.
People eventually get tired of the scolds, the bigots masquerading as anti-bigots, the sexists masquerading as anti-sexists, the fascists masquerading as anti-fascists. People begin to see through their facades.
The funk-you that leftists doled out at conservatives was the inevitable funk-you that would surely come back to haunt them later.
The divisiveness did not start with Trump. It started with the progressives, the politically correct and their masquerade of moral superiority. They don’t like being given the finger. They don’t like being on the receiving end of criticism. And they will do whatever they can to re-establish their hegemony. That’s what we are up against.
And as a reformed progressive, I know how this works. I know what’s going on in their heads.
The left don’t care about cause-and-effect, they don’t care about Truth. That’s very STEM, very conservative… not cool. They care about spin, and conforming to the anti-establishment rhetoric that began in the sixties. That’s Cool, that’s how they like it. Trouble is, though, it is now their tribe that is The Establishment, a corrupt and broken Establishment that relies on an authoritarian mindset to assert spent narratives. Trump has given them the finger, and for that they hate him, they want him out, whatever it takes. Unconditionally, without mercy. No evidence required. Sam Harris, that authoritarian, pompous, TDS-afflicted git who defames Trump relentlessly without shame, has shown us exactly how this works (I would love to see Trump sue him to broke).
Trump is not divisive. He’s the antidote.
The system is broken, and there will be no return from the brink in the foreseeable future. An unprecedented hell-hole of a Dark Age is looming on the horizon, and it will persist for a long time into the future after it has consolidated. We are in The Unravelling.
With the hunter-gatherers, Roman Empire, Hunnic invasions and European Renaissance behind us, we assume we’ve crossed a threshold from barbarity into civility, and there’s no going back. We think it can’t happen again. What we are witnessing is, in fact, the going back. We are on the precipice of an unprecedented iteration of the Dark Ages.
No, the reason he’s pleading the fifth is because he knows that the system is broken, and that the most corrupt administration that the US has ever seen is out to get him. Pleading the fifth is survival, and his his way of saying “funk you, I know what you’re doing, and I’m not playing your stupid, fraudulent game.”
Outside of Media/DNC PR gaslighting publications, does the Left have any scientifically rigorous findings on why Leftists are SO frustrated particularly when they are winning and control the entire government?
“The portrait of conservatives that emerges is different from the view that conservatives are generally fearful, low in self-esteem, and rationalize away social inequality. Conservatives are more satisfied with their lives, in general… report better mental health and fewer mental and emotional problems (all after controlling for age, sex, income, and education), and view social justice in ways that are consistent with binding moral foundations, such as by emphasizing personal agency and equity. Liberals have become less happy over the last several decades, but this decline is associated with increasingly secular attitudes and actions.”
Conspiracy Theories in Colorado
“What we can expect from the extreme Republicans running across this country is to undermine free and fair elections for the American people, strip Americans of the right to vote, refuse to address security breaches and, unfortunately, be more beholden to Mar-a-Lago than the American people,” Griswold, 37, said in an interview with the Guardian.
She added: “For us, we are trying to save democracy.”
A little something to lift our spirits in these trying times:
Yeah, man - whou could possibly be against war and against napalming babies? Stupid liberals ruined a good thing. Negroes should be segregated, right? That was a good thing. Keep the black man down, right? Stupid Liberals started their protests and stuff. Women belong pregnant chained in the chitchen to the stove. And if a woman wants a job then she should understand a little bit of grab ass is part of the job description. Equal rights? Phffft! Me too? pfft! They are women, am I right or am I right? Some women like being grabbed. Why make it illeagal. Liberals and their contraceptive pill messed that up. Started giving women ideas, n stuff. And the Beatles and their songs about Yellow Submarines! SUBVERSION!!! HOW DARE THEY sing about a world of peace and imagining living life in peace with nothing to kill or die for! Before the Beatles people were perfectly willing to kill each other for no reason and Damn John Lenon put these ideas in people heads about imaging a peaceful world.
Liberals ruined a good thing, right? They started it.
Anyway - sarcasm over.
Good luck in your struggle @FermentedAgave. Keep drinking the cool aide. Maybe go out and buy several guns and charge your local FBI office. Start your own local violent revolution.
The more you and conservatives go down this path, the more people are going to realize the left is far less dangerous than you. The right was able to hoodwink the “independents” for about a decade. Now since 2020 more and more are starting to see what all that was about and are saying “no”.
So yeah, keep sleeping in the Trump bed and see whare it gets you.
But he’s stymying NY AG Letitia James political rise. This likely has blunted Tish James rise to Democratic Party stardom. Obama and Hillary are both excellent “clear the path” Democratic candidates. See attached.
We see Democrats do the same thing here in Arizona with essentially their single candidate primaries - zero debate, candidates are chosen and “presented”. Meanwhile the Republicans are publicly debating issues.
Forgive me, but what I see here is a narrative, a mythology, one that is cherry-picking reality in order to confirm a pre-existing anti-left bias (which we might call “LDS”). It’s a narrative that says everything and everyone everywhere is broken, and only Donald Trump has the intellectual, moral, and ethical compass to fix it.
You do understand that this is exactly how a narcissistic personality disorder would describe the world? And also how a cult of personality would describe their leader? And that the center of every personality cult in history is a narcissist? Everyone else is wrong, only Trump is right. Sorry man, that emperor wears no clothes.
It is also a blatantly self-serving myth, because there is a nasty circular reasoning baked right in — anyone who questions Trump or tries to hold him accountable for any corruption is automatically labeled “deep state”, and can then be totally disregarded. Whether it’s the left, the media, the FBI, the DOJ, the SC, or even other Republicans. Trump is always right, and anyone who criticizes him is always wrong. This is some North Korea level shit right here.
Meanwhile, objective reality shows that Trump has a history of defrauding people, of cheating on his wife with a porn star right after his child was born, of putting his own children in positions of power (and allowing them to make billions in profit from their positions), of attempting to overthrow a democratic election and conspiring to send fake electors to DC with zero court evidence. He has surrounded himself with criminals and con men from the very beginning, from Manafort to Stone to Flynn.
The reality is, social media is making extremists of us all. We are all subject to the cultural ripples being generated by algorithms that only bring people down into any number of rabbit holes, rather than pulling them up the developmental conveyor belt toward increasing wholeness. Our news feeds are dominated by reactionaries reacting to reactionaries, which only makes the extremes louder and more prone to violence. Trump represents one of those extremes. I am anti-Trump, because I am anti-extremism.
I do think many of your complaints about the left have merit, and I have echoed many of those complaints myself. But as I say, just because the left is sometimes wrong, it doesn’t mean the right is always right. In my mind, it’s a case of “out of the frying pan and into the fire.” The right now sees themselves the same way Boomers in the 1960s saw themselves, with all the same hackneyed, short-sighted, and ultimately self-defeating “anti-establishment” sentiments.
Your comments about women’s oppression do have some important truths though. Of course, women were in fact “oppressed” as they made a transition into the public sphere in the late 19th/early 20th century. Winning the right to vote was a big deal. Not having to have a man sign off on loans and credit cards is a big deal (which was true until the 1970s.) Gaining sexual agency and autonomy is a big deal. All of these are genuine accomplishments of feminism, reducing the restrictive inertias in the public sphere from previous eras.
However, that is just the public sphere. Now I think we have a new problem, which is the dilapidation of the private sphere, which was previously institutionalized as women’s role. Because we placed so much emphasis on equality in the public sphere, we’ve ignored equality in the private sphere, and I think many men (and women!) are acutely feeling that pain.
My theory is, just as the industrial revolution shifted women into the public sphere for the first time, which solved old problems and created new problems, the information/automation revolution will do something similar for men, expanding their identity and roles enough to allow them to share the caretaking of the private sphere.
As Warren Farrell often points out, traditionally men have been forced to show love for their family by staying away from their family, working themselves to the bone in order to support their loved ones. Which, to me, feels like oppression (and is fortunately an oppression I have not had to endure, as I am able to work from home and raise my daughter alongside my wife every day, because my surrounding techno-economic base in the LR now allows for that. And I appreciate the fact that I am likely only a fraction of a percent of all men who have ever lived who are able to do so.)
But if you are seriously trying to do a sober “cause and effect” analysis, you can’t do what you accuse your perceived political opponents of doing: “only look at the evidence that proves what they want to prove. The more dirt, the better. It makes them feel all warm and fuzzy inside.” If you want to know how we got here, you can’t ignore Gingrich’s success at radicalizing the GOP in the 90s and leading a hypocritical moral crusade against Clinton (while cheating on his own dying wife), and instructing conservatives to stop maintaining friendships with Democrats altogether. You can’t ignore the lies from the Bush administration that led to countless dead civilians and the longest war in US history. You can’t ignore the fact that the last two Republican presidents have left the economy in tatters when they left office. You can’t ignore that conservatives have fought every expansion of human rights in modern history, including recent things like gay marriage or eliminating pre-existing conditions and lifetime caps from our insurance systems. You can’t ignore that Trump directly expanded the “swamp” by putting industry leaders in charge of regulating their own industries, known as regulatory capture. You can’t ignore that there is simply no analog on the left to something like Qanon, which is a uniquely conservative phenomenon.
And on the other side, you can’t ignore the real successes of the Biden administration. Medicaid can now negotiate medicine costs. Injured veterans can now get the medical support they need after being injured by burn pits. We are now placing critical investments in clean energy. We finally have real investment in our crumbling infrastructure, something Trump could never accomplish.
Does that mean the left is all good and the right is all bad? Of course not. There are extremists on both sides, and there are times when the left’s extremists bother me even more than the right’s — but I’m also not blind that these extremists are creating each other. And yes, saying that Biden is “the most corrupt administration the US has ever seen” — after Trump tried to burn the Constitutiom based on his own unsubstantiated “beliefs” — is a product of extremism.
As I said before, Trump tried to undermine the election, and this resulted in the first non-peaceful transfer of power in modern history. That is a fact. He also stole confidential documents and hid them at Maralago (which even he admits, you can’t say the FBI and DOJ are making this up) — after getting his crowds to shout “lock her up” for Hillary’s mishandling of an email server. This is the textbook definition of extremism.
Which means you have two choices: either believe he was justified in his assault on constitutional law, or he wasn’t and he is a criminal. So people who simply don’t want to admit that Trump is a criminal, have to find some way to justify his actions. “He BELIEVED the election was stolen, so he’s allowed to seize control for himself!” “It’s not the Trump administration that was obviously and blatantly corrupt, don’t look at that, instead look at Biden, it’s THE MOST CORRUPT IN ALL HISTORY! I’m rubber and you’re glue!”
These are Trump’s own defenses, and are the sorts of defenses and projections we’d expect from a 10 year old — which in my view, pretty accurately describes Trump’s emotional intelligence 
Also, here’s my own beluga chaser 
I try to make it a practice not to let political views dominate my relationships with people. I often reflect on how politics are an area of our lives we have the absolute least control over, individually, yet where we often place the majority of our focus, frustration, passions, and projections — and when we start enacting each other through those filters, it creates more resentment, more ill will, and more fragmentation. There are billions of moving data points to account for, and we are all going to see different patterns and constellations when we look at it, according to our conditions, informational terrains, and Kosmic address. So I try to hold my own opinions seriously, but lightly at the same time. It’s all too easy to get swept away, put each other in a box, and write each other off, after all
So I try to approach these conversations like a sand mandala. I will try to construct the most reasonable and deliberate and hopefully artful arguments as I can, in order to best reflect my own personal views and sense-making — and then I have to be ready to wipe it away as soon as it becomes necessary, and focus on other things in order to create new shared realities.
So, aside from our political disagreements above, how are you? What is turning you on these days? Any shows or music you are really feeling recently? We can bring this into a private message if it’s too off-topic for this thread — but at this point, I don’t think anything is really off topic in this particular discussion LMAO
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Will follow up tomorrow. It’s nightime here in budapest and am about to get back to bed. Will definitely put something together tomorrow, though. Cheers 
Hey @corey-devos
Any chance I could get your understanding of a couple things?
- Unitary Executive
- Executive Privilege
- Who is responsible for setting Federal elections laws?
Thanks!