Has America Imploded?

[Pat Hartman]

Jon,
Some outlets were showing actual video of the shooting of the woman. She was definitely in the wrong place at the wrong time. The officers were inside the building, hiding in doorways. The outer doors which had glass windows on the top half were blockaded by chairs on the inside. There were men beating on the glass. The woman was to the side but we don't have a good view of her. I don't think she had a weapon in her hand and she wasn't banging on the glass. The officer came out of a doorway, aimed, and shot. I don't know if he was aiming at her (our angle is bad) or at the men who were beating on the door. The video is horrifying.

The Wall Street Journal is biased but significantly less so than other newspapers. If you made be have to buy a newspaper, that would be the one I would choose. They are much less likely to go with the lurid headlines the other outlets are so fond of.

Wouldn't it be nice if the "fact" checkers would simply colorize all the purple words in every article. They don't even have to judge them. Just highlight the fact that these words probably don't belong in a "news" article. We could probably come up with an algorithm that's at least as good as the one Face Book used to cancel me because I made a post that included the word "gunpoint" (it was my ONLY FB post ever).

I think what has happened since November is that the conservatives have awoken. We have been abused by the press forever but brutally so since we voted for Trump. This election was stolen. Not just from Trump but from US. Someone stole our ability to choose our president. The coverup is immense and I know that sounds like a conspiracy theory but sometimes conspiracies actually exist. There is lots of hard evidence that counterfeit ballots were counted as well as legal ballots being counted multiple times. There are documented irregularities in voter authorization including the latest one by Stacy Abrams' sister, the judge who offered her opinion that even if the national registration of mailing addresses records you as moving out of the state of Georgia, you should still be allowed to vote there if you want to. That alone more than likely swung the runoff in favor of the Democrat candidates. In some states, not only was the election commission sending mail in ballots unsolicited to everyone on the voter registration list but in some precincts, OTHER organizations were also sending out unsolicited ballots. I seem to remember an affidavit from one person claiming she actually receiving SEVEN ballots. If she were so inclined, she could have sent all of them back and voted seven times. Instead, she did the honest thing and reported the incident.

As some of you have noticed, I am no longer willing to tolerate hypocrisy. If you think the break in of the Capitol building is an insurrection but think that the BLM and Antifa riots are mostly peaceful demonstrations, you are a hypocrite. If you think that Clinton being sued for ra** and having to settle for $850,000 (this was a civil case rather than a criminal one or he would have gone to prison) is the same as Trump paying 2 women ~ $130,000 to not talk publicly about consensual sex, you are a hypocrite. If you think that Kavanaugh is guilty because some woman accused him of a ra** that took place over 30 years ago that other people who were friends of hers and at the same party couldn't corroborate and she never reported but you think that Biden is innocent of a similar charge which was reported to authorities in the SENATE at the time it occurred, you are a hypocrite. I condone NONE of these things but some of you are not at all bothered by half of them because you have different standards for people you like.

"I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore!" (1976 'Network") and I'm pretty sure I am not alone.

 

[Vassago]

And you don't have different standards for Trump and his supporters? It seems pretty straightforward that you do? Sure, he paid for an NDA for those consensual sexual acts, but what about the dozens that have accused him of non-consensual acts? Your double-standard shines brighter than most.

I'm just saying, hold yourself to the same standard and I think you'll find you're as guilty as so many others are you accusing.

 

[Pat Hartman]

Given the comparisons above, how, exactly, are my standards different?

but what about the dozens that have accused him of non-consensual acts?

Is this the United States of America? Do we still have a Bill of Rights (they are rapidly disappearing but I think we still have a few)? You might want to pull out your copy of the Constitution and review the 6th amendment.

You can accuse anyone of anything. Unless you win in a court of law, the accused are innocent. Biden is "innocent" Trump is "innocent", Clinton, not so much. If you don't take your case to court but present it in public, it is slander or libel depending on the circumstances and YOU can be sued. Unfortunately, we have different rules in the US for public figures and it takes more egregious lies to win a defamation lawsuit or Trump would have been able to double his net worth with lawsuits against members of Congress and the deep state as they regularly went on TV to slander him. People like John Brennan who slandered Trump on TV multiple times but when under oath in front of Congress denied having any damaging information against Trump essentially making a lie of what he was saying to the public. Hopefully, Trump will sue him and several of the Democrats once he becomes a private citizen since these people lied and did terrible damage to Trump's public image with these lies.

 

[Vassago]

So you think that all of these women lied? Interesting.

 

[Jon]

Did Bill Clinton's multiple accusers all lie?

The thing is, when it comes to politics, it seems that people will stoop to all sorts of levels. They believe the means justify the ends. Then it gets more difficult sorting out the real cases from the lies. Look at Brett Kavanaugh. The accusers friends had no recollection of the alleged party where he supposedly did all sorts of things. She had no recollection of where the party was, what date (even what year at first), how she got home and so on. But she did remember that she only had one beer. Really? Does anyone honestly believe she forgot all the important information but remembered something so incidental? Or was it that she wanted to avoid any possibility of being accused of perhaps intoxication and therefore impared judgement? Lawyer coaching comes to mind.

Even her lawyer admitted in a lecture to students that part of her motivation was because of Wade vs Roe and if Brett became a justice, I presume that puts that particular law under threat. In other words, she had political motives toward bringing the case against Brett, 35 years after the alleged case with zero corroborating witnesses. More credible was the case against Biden because there were witnesses of discussions about it back when it happened. Yet all the Democratic party believed the case against Kavanaugh, but not against Biden. I wonder why.

Brett did have multiple other accusers afterwards. One said he was lacing the drinks of women at the party. Later, she admitted she just saw him standing near the punch bowl and just assumed he was lacing the drinks. And if there were gang bang rapes going on all the time at the party, why did she keep going there for weeks? The accusers evidence has more holes than a string vest. People have no shame over what they are prepared to say to further their own agenda.

 

[AccessBlaster]

Trumps enemies like George Soros would have paid to break those NDA by now.

In practice, when somebody breaks a non-disclosure agreement, they face the threat of being sued and could be required to pay financial damages and related costs. But legal experts say there's limited case law on whether contracts like NDAs to settle sexual harassment claims can be enforced. Mar 2, 2018

 

[moke123]

Some outlets were showing actual video of the shooting of the woman. She was definitely in the wrong place at the wrong time. The officers were inside the building, hiding in doorways. The outer doors which had glass windows on the top half were blockaded by chairs on the inside. There were men beating on the glass. The woman was to the side but we don't have a good view of her. I don't think she had a weapon in her hand and she wasn't banging on the glass. The officer came out of a doorway, aimed, and shot. I don't know if he was aiming at her (our angle is bad) or at the men who were beating on the door. The video is horrifying.

He was aiming at her Pat. She breached the doorway trying to go through the broken window. There were members of Congress in that hallway. She's a pretty good example of whats wrong these days. Heres some info about her which exemplifies how the mis-information and conspiracy theories caused this mess. She was radicalized.

edit: Something that is often overlooked about this is that # 1,2, and 3 in succesion of the presidency were in that building.

Babbitt had served in the military for 14 years, Witthoeft said. “If you feel like you gave the majority of your life to your country and you’re not being listened to, that is a hard pill to swallow. That’s why she was upset.”

the incoming vice-president, Kamala Harris, tweeted about her plans for the first hundred days of the Biden administration. She promised “to ensure Americans mask up, distribute 100M shots, and get students safely back to school”.

“No the fuck you will not!” Ashli Babbitt replied to Harris. “No masks, no you, no Biden the kid raper, no vaccines...sit your fraudulent ass down…we the ppl bitch!”

She had a plan to fly to Washington DC the very next week to take part in a major public demonstration demanding that Donald Trump, not Joe Biden, be sworn in as president.

Babbitt’s Twitter account shows a woman deeply engaged for months with a conspiracy theory that painted Democratic lawmakers as evil pedophiles, and then persuaded, and infuriated, by Trump and his allies’ lies about election fraud.
For weeks before she joined the mob in Washington, Babbitt had been retweeting false claims from Trump himself, as well as the pro-Trump lawyers Lin Wood and Sidney Powell, alleging massive voter fraud and asserting that Trump had won the 2020 election.

a believer in QAnon, a conspiracy theory that claims Donald Trump has been trying to save the world from a cabal of satanic pedophiles, including Democratic politicians like Biden and Hollywood celebrities, and that he will soon bring his enemies to justice.

she had tweeted regularly about the conspiracy theory since February 2020, and she had posted a lot on Twitter in general, about 50 posts a day, he said. On election day, she had posted 77 times.

Her social media also showed posts skeptical of masks and public health measures. She had responded with fury to an alert in early December that California public health officials were reinstating a stay-at-home order to prevent the spread of coronavirus, which was surging in southern California: “This is that commie bullshit.”

The QAnon conspiracy theory, although lurid in its claims about the torture of children, is very much a political movement, not just a personal delusion, experts say.

“The people that went to the Capitol weren’t just trying to save Trump, they were trying to stop the coming multiracial democracy” which they believed would institute “a radical leftist globalist agenda”, Joan Donovan, the research director at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, said.

On Twitter, Babbitt had been sharing messages urging people like herself to take action, with messages like: “Your government doesn’t fear you anymore. That needs to change. ASAP.”

Babbitt wrote that she believed the 6 January protest she was joining would be a pivotal moment for the country, and a fulfillment of some of the key events that QAnon believers had been expecting: “Nothing will stop us....they can try and try and try but the storm is here and it is descending upon DC in less than 24 hours....dark to light!” she tweeted the day before the rally, referencing key QAnon slogans.

Since 2018, QAnon has been identified as a potential domestic terror threat and linked to a series of violent and criminal acts.
Travis View, the host of the QAnon Anonymous podcast, said posts showed that Babbitt was “100% a dedicated QAnon follower. She was not casual about it. She was deep into it.”

At that 6 January rally, Babbitt would listen as Trump urged his supporters to march over to the Capitol building as lawmakers were in the process of officially certifying the 2020 election results, and confirming Biden’s victory.

“You’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength, and you have to be strong,” Trump told them.

“It was amazing to get to see the president talk,” Babbitt said afterwards, in a Facebook video obtained by TMZ. “We are walking to the Capitol in a mob. There is a sea of nothing but red, white and blue patriots.” She was grinning.

Babbitt was at the front of a crowd stopped at a door to the Speaker’s Lobby, which has been shut and barricaded. On the other side of the door were members of Congress and Capitol police protecting them, according to news reports.

Lawmakers from both parties who were present at the moment when Babbitt was shot have spoken out about the dangerous behavior of the crowd.
“The mob was going to come through the door; there was a lot of members and staff that were in danger at the time,” the Oklahoma Republican congressman Markwayne Mullin said, according to Fox News.

The Wall Street Journal is biased but significantly less so than other newspapers. If you made be have to buy a newspaper, that would be the one I would choose. They are much less likely to go with the lurid headlines the other outlets are so fond of.

They have called on him to resign.

 

[Steve R.]

ACLU raises concerns amid Twitter's ban of Trump
Too little too late. The supression of free speech avalanche won't be stopped as it smothering everything.

Google suspends Parler from its Google Play Store
Now "big" tech companies are even abolishing the ability of alternatives to Twitter to even exist.
Free speech has been and is increasingly in jeopardy.
The "big" tech companies have now established themselves as Orwell's "Ministry of Truth".

 

[moke123]

ACLU raises concerns amid Twitter's ban of Trump
Too little too late. The supression of free speech avalanche won't be stopped as it smothering everything.

Google suspends Parler from its Google Play Store
Now "big" tech companies are even abolishing the ability of alternatives to Twitter to even exist.
Free speech has been and is increasingly in jeopardy.
The "big" tech companies have now established themselves as Orwell's "Ministry of Truth".

Both Apple and Google are free to decide what Apps they sell or give away in their stores.
You can still access the site using a browser.

I take it you dont have a problem with trumps executive order to ban the WeChat app.

 

[Jon]

I think it is entirely possible that this censorship could spawn the emergence of a legitimate Twitter competitor, which Republicans will flood to. Then you will have Twitter for Democrates, and the alternative for Republicans.

 

[moke123]

I think it is entirely possible that this censorship could spawn the emergence of a legitimate Twitter competitor, which Republicans will flood to. Then you will have Twitter for Democrates, and the alternative for Republicans.

Thats what parler is. They are unmoderated. Thats where much of the planning took place for the mess at the capitol.

The Capitol mob began organizing weeks ago for the violence that occurred on January 6, planning inside conspiracy theory and far-right online communities on platforms like Parler and Gab. Groups that typically live in the darker corners of the internet stepped into the spotlight when they took the Capitol and broadcast the breach around the web.

How Trump’s internet built and broadcast the Capitol insurrection

Online extremists started planning the chaos of January 6 months ago.

www.vox.com

Meanwhile, a host of pro-Trump websites, including trumpmarch.com, wildprotest.com, and stopthesteal.us, boosted interest in the event. There’s also evidence that specific instructions for taking the Capitol appeared on sites like Parler, 4chan, and Gab.

“These are unmoderated closed spaces where only people with fringe and extremist ideologies spend their time,” said Jonathon Morgan, the CEO of Yonder, an AI firm that tracks misinformation. “That means the information diet that they’re consuming is completely homogenous, and it kind of accelerates the process.”

These were the spaces where people who planned to attend the rally openly discussed potential violence at Trump’s “Save America” rally on January 6. In one Facebook group called Red-State Secession, which was eventually taken down, people posted about the weapons they planned to carry with them to the event, according to the New York Times. Telegram, Parler, Reddit, and sites like thedonald.win, a forum that’s an offshoot of a banned Donald Trump subreddit, also hosted discussion about sneaking guns into the event.

In the weeks and days leading up to January 6, a slew of hashtags implied that violence could occur at the rally. Many posted #Jan6 encouraging excitement about the date, but others implied even further disruption, including #wildprotest (presumably referencing Trump’s “wild” tweet), #fightback, and #midnightride, according to research from First Draft, a misinformation and disinformation research firm.

“They’re storming the Capitol,” one user wrote to Gionet. Another wrote: “TRUMP GAVE YOU AN ORDER STORM THE CAPITOL NOW.” Soon after, Gionet followed another group of Trump supporters closer to the building. That feed eventually ended, but Gionet then posted a new video from inside the building. In it, he attempted to call President Trump on a congressional phone while commenters demanded more violence. “SMASH THE WINDOW,” wrote one. “HANG ALL THE CONGRESSMAN,” wrote another. (Gionet eventually streamed himself being kicked out of the Capitol building by law enforcement.)

 

[AccessBlaster]

Not to mention Trump is looking into creating his own platform.

 

[moke123]

Not to mention Trump is looking into creating his own platform.

Will it last longer than Trump Steaks or Trump University?

 

[Jon]

Parler...I knew there was an app that was an alternative but couldn't remember the name.

You can make the argument that the internet is responsible for things being arranged. Or smartphones. Or email. And therefore they are sinister in some way. But the medium is just tech and communications. No one polices your phone calls or WhatsApp messages.

It seems to come down to the free speech thing again. Those on the left don't want it, unless it goes towards their political goals such as BLM protests being arranged on Twitter, which I am sure Twitter did not censor.

 

[moke123]

It seems to come down to the free speech thing again.

There are limits to free speech, the most well known being yelling "Fire" in a crowded theater or inciting a riot or sedition.

 

[Steve R.]

There are limits to free speech, the most well known being yelling "Fire" in a crowded theater or inciting a riot or sedition.

The Democrats are throwing flammable accelerants onto the fire in the crowed theater and their irresponsible hateful speech is not being moderated. Furthermore, the "left" likes to proclaim that silence implies consent. Base on this logic Tweeter and the rest of the ilk are advocating insurrection an illegal action that they unjustly accuse Republicans of committing. They are not being responsible. It is the Democrats promoting divisiveness and inciting insurrection. Starting on January 21st, they will move onto establishing enemies lists and using the power of government to "cleanse" society of anyone who does not abide by Democratic party mantra.

 

[AccessBlaster]

Will it last longer than Trump Steaks or Trump University?

Failures are learning opportunities, so are victories here are just a few :

• NATO allies are spending $69 billion more on defense since 2016.
• Confirmed more circuit court judges than any other new administration.
• Confirmed Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch, Judge Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett
• Moved U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem.
• The Space Force is the first new military service since the US Air Force was created in 1947.
• After a five-year effort led by the US, ISIS's caliphate was finally defeated in March 2019.

 

[Jon]

There are limits to free speech, the most well known being yelling "Fire" in a crowded theater or inciting a riot or sedition.

China agrees with you. So does North Korea.

The thing is Twitter doesn't seem to care if BLM protests, with their accompanying violence, get arranged on their platform. Double-standards are applied. The big tech companies with Democrat leaning owners and employees are all slanting what is acceptable according to their own political biases.

If you try to suppress what people want to say, you just push it underground. Look at prohibition laws and also the previous marijuana laws.

Republicans are not saying they want to yell Fire in a crowded theatre. You are misrepresenting the argument.

 

[moke123]

China agrees with you. So does North Korea.

So does the UK !

The UK provides for freedom of expression as a qualified right that may be restricted in certain circumstances as prescribed by law.

 

[Jon]

I agree that we should not be allowed to go up to the face of someone with a different ethnicity and shout utterly offensive things in their face about their race. The argument as I see it is about where do you draw the line? Who decides? Currently, it is the Democrat owned tech platforms, and this disenfranchises the Republicans.

Recently, there was a case regarding Cavanni, a footballer from South America who used the term Negrito. He was thanking a friend of his on social media for his kind words after scoring a goal, Saying, "Gracias Negrito". It was Spanish. The UK Football Association said it was racist and he was fined £100K and has a 3 match ban. But the Uruguayan football association is claiming that the FA is being discriminatory about the culture and way of life of those from Uruguay.

Read their statement here: https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2021/01/04/13/37580140-9111137-image-a-12_1609767930502.jpg

So here we have it, one country (Uruguay) is saying it is discrimination against their culture, while the other (UK) is saying it is potentially racially offensive.

The word N*gro is used for black in the Spanish language. Are you going to prevent the Spanish from using their word for black because in another language it means something else?

The term negrito is often used as the equivalent of saying "mate", although "mate" might be a UK term. Not sure if that is used in America.