Also he tried to kill his own vice president when he didn’t do what Trump wanted, committed multiple rapes, and said he is above the law.
I feel like that kind of thing should get mentioned more often whenever someone starts comparing candidates. It’s like that Batman comic where they elected The Joker mayor.
Whataboutism is shifting focus away from something person A did, by bringing some action by person B into it when it doesn’t belong.
Asking how a legal theory would apply in some other context, to highlight the absurdity of what the lawyer is saying because the answer would be absurd, is a very different thing.
I can see maybe saying it without the word “Biden” but focusing it on Trump would be better, yeah. E.g. asking if some other president would be allowed to murder his political rivals (specifically including Trump), without opening to door to complications. Obviously the answer is that Trump thinks he should have a special set of rules that don’t apply to anyone else, but the closer you can get to forcing his lawyer to explain out loud that that’s what they’re asking for seems like it’d be a good thing.
How on EARTH did the judge miss his chance to ask the obvious follow-up.
“Does this apply to Biden also? Can he murder his political rivals under your legal theory? Can he murder your client?”
“Why not?”
Show the video, not this voiceover bollocks
Ah, yes, the well-known legal doctrine of “basically that is like.”
I could be wrong, but I don’t think it’s a bridge – I think this is just what happens when someone on Mastodon tags a Lemmy community. ActivityPub has wonderful results in terms of making a decentralized web possible, but honestly it seems to me like it’s not real well designed.
I think it’s even more severe than that. I think in the American version, each of them places their own individual selves on top of their own little hierarchy (whether white or not or whatever), and everyone else is in the “no rights” group. That’s why they booed Trump when he talked about the vaccine instead of suddenly falling into line 1984-style behind the new idea. That’s why they were genuinely confused by the capitol police fighting back against them – you hear over and over again in videos people saying things like “We’re on your side” to the cops, like they genuinely expected the cops in the capitol building to suddenly turn around and become part of the mob that was in their mind “the good guys.”
IDK, maybe it was always that way. But I feel like with classical fascism there was some kind of genuine awareness of the reality of what they were asking for. Say whatever you want about Hitler; he was in the infantry, he saw quite a lot of combat, he wasn’t scared of physical confrontation. Trump talks a big game but he mostly pussies out if it comes to any kind of real confrontation, and his followers are inspired likewise. Look at the tiny size of the post-January-6th rallies in support of Trump; his movement is still dangerous because a lot of them have appetite for doing anonymous violent things, but for the most part they don’t seem like they’re down for street fighting or going to prison or things that might come right back at them.
This is clearly concerning as hell. It’s extremely dangerous. But that said, I think it’s hilarious how this same grouping that wants violence to be okay in their politics still gets extremely bent out of shape when any violence happens towards them.
“HANG MIKE PENCE (if he doesn’t do exactly what we want under threat of violence)!”
(Ashli Babbit)
“HOW DARE THEY! THEY HAVE BLOOD ON THEIR HANDS!”
Like, my guy, if Biden had some agents show up at your door and point guns at you and asked “Oh okay, so we can kill politically inconvenient people if we feel like now?” you’d feel a completely different way.
I have no idea. But it’s a little weird that the article seems to take it for granted that the officials were actually corrupt, instead of just unpopular with Xi or some other powerful person. To me, either one is possible.
Want to know what “also in a tricky spot” means?
As Republicans struggle, Democrats say the problem is taking positions that are deeply unpopular with the American public.
That same night Andy Beshear, the Democratic Kentucky governor, won re-election after his campaign ran a powerful ad featuring a woman who was raped by her stepfather as a child. In the video, she criticized Daniel Cameron, Beshear’s Republican opponent, for supporting Kentucky’s near-total abortion ban, which does not include exceptions in cases involving rape or incest.
And in beet-red Ohio, 56.6% of voters chose to enshrine abortion rights in the state constitution.
“In every election since the overturning of Roe, voters have sent a resounding message: they want more freedom, not less – and come 2024, Republicans will once again face the repercussions of their unrelenting crusade to strip away our rights,” Sarafina Chitika, a spokesperson for the Democratic National Committee, said in a statement.
“In a tricky spot” means, they’ve been winning on the issue, but The Guardian thinks that maybe that might not continue, for reasons that are not fully articulated.
TL;DR she said “erection”
“It did not occur to me then — and remains surprising to me now — that Mr. Schwartz would drop the cases into his submission wholesale without even confirming that they existed,” Cohen said. “Accordingly, when I saw the citations and descriptions I had sent Mr. Schwartz quoted at length in the draft filing, I assumed that Mr. Schwartz had reviewed and verified that information and deemed it appropriate to submit to the court.”
Bro:
Even if this is true, don’t throw your goddamned lawyer under the bus. Just say we’re very sorry, we fucked up, I was the one that researched it initially, we won’t do it again. Finger-pointing about it to the judge does 0% good and a whole lot of bad.
I like Cohen because he manned up and admitted he was wrong but this was a little reminder to me that POS is still in his DNA.
They tried to prosecute him. In MAGA world, that demands an escalation in kind to attack (“defend”) against the prosecution; the truth or falsehood of the accusation doesn’t matter. They also think Biden stole the election, although as before, they don’t really care in an objective sense whether that’s actually factually true. They believe it wholeheartedly and that’s all they care about.
There’s also a fiction that “they” are trying to put kitty litter in your classrooms and tell your kids to pretend to be cats and pee in the litterbox, or allow transgender people into women’s bathrooms because someone “became transgender” for that exact purpose, or other weird and outlandish things, but I don’t think those are really getting traction as much as they’d like them to. I think it’s mainly a standard sociopath pattern of “I did an illegal thing” -> “You’re reacting as if it’s illegal” -> “My god how could you make that wild accusation and be an enemy to me” -> “I attack you”.
On Tyranny represents a pretty good guidebook for concrete specific things you can do, well informed by historical research. This interview has a slight introduction to a couple of the main recommendations and the reasons for them.
And, the overwhelmingly dominant reaction the German civilians had in the destruction that was the aftermath of the war, was self-pity and resentment towards their enemies (“how could the allies be so cruel to us, we didn’t do anything”). In fairness, their conditions were very hard (starvation, disease, prostitution, desperation) but there was effectively no recognition at all of any responsibility on the German side for what was “happening to them”. Germany 1945 goes into a lot of the harrowing details and the German people’s reaction to them.
TL;DR get ready for the Trump rank-and-file to never acknowledge responsibility for anything, no matter how badly it plays out.
What in the deliberate propaganda
“I have a distinct memory of when Carter was in office and we had to wait in line for gas," Schoettle told NPR, in reference to the gas shortages that impacted the U.S. under Democratic President Jimmy Carter. “I feel the liberals just have always done this sort of thing and they love to word things as socially responsible and things like that, but they’re fiscally very irresponsible.”
To me it’s more telling that they have to go back 50 years, to a time most of today’s people weren’t yet born. But sure.
Source with data links and a lot more metrics
Also remember a couple years back when we had an R guy and like half a million people died? Yeah those gas lines two generations ago were pretty rough.
(Edit: “Fascists don’t care” part is 100% accurate. That’s more than anything what defines fascists, the in-group and the winning being more important than any particular set of laws or norms. “The only way to stop them” is what I think is inaccurate.)
I don’t think this is accurate. Trump’s a fascist, and he came to power already in the first place, and we survived (so far).
How Democracies Die goes into this in quite a bit of detail with historical examples. Basically my takeaway from it is that the key factors are:
Point #2 is why I say this is a bad idea.
Yeah. They won’t at all understand that it’s legit to keep him off the ballot. They already think the election was stolen in plain sight; they’ll just assume this is the next undemocratic authoritarian trick.
Of course putting him in prison will also radicalize his base and give him something to play victim about, but oh well. It’s more effective by a lot, and more clearly within democratic norms we’re trying to preserve by a lot.
I’m not saying there’s any ambiguity about their legal right to kick him off the ballot. I’m saying it’s a very bad idea for them to do so.
Pop quiz by way of example: Does Biden have the legal right to expand the Supreme Court to 100 justices?
Well then, why doesn’t he? It’d sure make issues like abortion rights way easier.
If she disagrees with the plan, she better get the fuck off the Trump Train.
If you’re on a boat where there’s a mutiny, you can’t really be halfway in the mutiny but also hedging your bets saying you don’t agree with everything the mutineers are doing. The outcome is going to be one or the other.