61

Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: Trump

« on: March 25, 2025, 05:33:50 PM »

Something to keep in mind about Signal; it isn’t officially approved by the government for secure communication

Neither is CNN, NBC, or FOX News, but we can find plenty of government and military leaders who have talked about about the commencement of operations, areas of focus, and about active wars in general. Trump had already announced operations against the Houthis so it is not a surprise, and officials normally talk about the generalities of the operations freely.

We are supposed to assume that something specific was said, which for some reason put the American military forces in the "broader Middle East"in danger. Considering the history of this journalist and his outlet, this is incredibly doubtful.

Okay, I'll play along. Suppose you're right and Goldberg made up the parts of the exchange where a CIA official was supposedly mentioned by name and where Hegseth supposedly said something that would have hurt American military and intelligence operations if an enemy had read it. Taking that for granted, do you know what difference it makes to how reckless having this conversation on an unsecured platform was? Very little to none. Because, as I keep trying to explain to you, the whole conversation is the problem. This wasn't an interview or an authorized release of information to the media. It was high-level officials in the administration discussing and coordinating an active military operation. That kind of discussion involves classified information, and cannot be discussed on unsecure platforms. Whether or not you can point to any tangible harm caused by the disclosure doesn't matter. It's still a major security breach, and something that the government takes very, very seriously, even if you don't (unless it involves Hillary, of course ). Like I said, careers have been ended over this kind of thing. Careers have been ended over far less than this.

62

Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: Trump

« on: March 25, 2025, 11:54:08 AM »

"I don't think any tangible harm was caused by this specific breach in security, so it's no big deal" is not how information security works. Divulging classified information in an unsecure channel - and with at least one confirmed unauthorized person being present for it - is a serious offense. People have lost their jobs and security clearances over this kind of thing in the past. Some people have even faced criminal penalties for it. This also raises the obvious question of how often senior administration officials have been casually discussing military policy over unsecured group chats. There's no reason to assume that this was just a one-time thing.

And yeah, Hegseth is apparently denying the whole incident even after the White House confirmed that it was real. Ordinarily I'd say that he's making himself look like an idiot, but it won't resonate with the MAGA fanbase, because, as I've said before, Trumpism is inherently contradictory. Trump is both a cool bad boy who scores with women all the time and a pious, respectable family man. The Jan. 6th protesters were both innocent concerned citizens unfairly oppressed by the government and Deep State plants trying to make Trump supporters look bad by staging an outrageous insurrection. Elon Musk is both a high-ranking official whom everyone in the government has to obey and a private citizen who doesn't answer to Congress or the courts. And this latest incident both didn't happen and wasn't a big deal, depending on the discussion you're having at the time.

63

Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: Trump

« on: March 25, 2025, 05:33:05 AM »

Let's see if I can be more clear. The entire discussion is what should have been kept secret here. The whole thing. Every single part of it that we're reading about in this article, not just the one or two bits that the author is keeping vague. Those are all secret war plans that should not have been discussed on an unsecure platform, let alone with a journalist present for it.

64

Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: Trump

« on: March 25, 2025, 01:38:20 AM »

The entire discussion was secret war plans, being carried out on an unsecure platform which nobody noticed that a journalist had been invited to. No, this is not comparable to a soldier telling his loved ones he's being deployed to war.

65

Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: Trump

« on: March 25, 2025, 12:12:35 AM »

https://web.archive.org/web/20250324194236/https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/03/trump-administration-accidentally-texted-me-its-war-plans/682151/

66

Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: Trump

« on: March 19, 2025, 03:24:35 AM »

It's not that simple. The capitol police were welcoming the protestors into the building. From this, the average person may believe that they are allowed to enter. There were grandmothers caught up in the arrests, who say that they were just following the crowd and touring the building under the apparent approval and oversight of the capitol police.

Uh huh. So these harmless tourists just happened to be in Washington. They just happened to be near the Capitol. They just happened to be devoted Trump fans, like everyone else who had entered the Capitol. This just happened to be on the day that Congress was set to certify Trump's loss to Biden, the same day that Trump himself had focused on and asked his supporters to be in Washington for. This just happened to be directly following a speech from Trump in which he urged his supporters to march on the Capitol to protest Congress certifying his loss. Our luckless heroes had the bad fortune to have never checked the news or apparently even spoken to anyone who had checked the news all day. And when they entered the Capitol, they simply didn't notice the obvious signs of damage and disarray surrounding them, the fact that they were accompanied by an angry mob of Trump fans screaming about how they wanted to kill anyone standing in Trump's way, or the fact that there were no staff on this supposed tour collecting tickets, checking IDs, or guiding people through the building.

You would have to be extremely gullible to buy this story. But for the sake of argument, fine, let's accept that some of these protesters were hapless bystanders. You're still arguing from the perspective of trying to prove exceptions to the rule, rather than trying to overturn the principal facts of what we all saw that day. I don't need to thoroughly demonize each and every protester. What people are correctly focusing on as the worst elements of that day are the protesters battering down doors and smashing windows, forcing their way into the building, and screaming to kill politicians, all in an attempt to overturn an election and keep the president they liked in office. That's not going away no matter how many "exceptions" you can find about this one particular cop looking the other way or this one protester not really doing anything bad. Trump fed his supporters lies about how he had been cheated and was illegally being forced out of office. They believed him. He encouraged them to protest at the Capitol on the day of the certification of his loss. They did so, things got violent, and Trump's complacent reaction strongly indicates that he hoped that would happen. That's all that happened here. The only person who tricked or manipulated the protesters into doing what they did was Trump himself.

See: https://www.businessinsider.com/capitol-police-officers-suspended-after-pro-trump-riots-2021-1

This supports the idea that those cops who did look the other way or even helped the protesters out did so of their volition, not because of any conspiracy coming from the top to make Trump supporters look bad. If these cops had been following orders when they did what they did, do you think they'd be quietly accepting being made scapegoats like this? They'd go right to the media and blow the whistle on the whole thing. In fact, we'd definitely be seeing cops coming forward with the truth even if they weren't being blamed for what they did. If you were a cop and you realized that your higher-ups just used you as a prop in a dangerous, partisan political stunt and an elaborate hoax on the American people, wouldn't you want to blow the whistle? I certainly would.

67

Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: Trump

« on: March 18, 2025, 02:18:54 AM »

A reasonable person wouldn't think that the presence of a gallows in front of the Capitol meant that it was permissible to storm the building as part of an angry mob and to smash windows and break down doors while screaming for the blood of the politicians you hate in an attempt to stop the certification of an election, just like a reasonable person wouldn't think that a couple of cops not actively fighting dozens of angry protesters or even opening one or two doors for them meant that it was permissible to storm the building as part of an angry mob and to smash windows and break down doors while screaming for the blood of the politicians you hate in an attempt to stop the certification of an election. Even if I agreed that any of this was indicative of complicity on the part of the authorities (which apparently doesn't include Trump), all that would mean is that further blame should be extended towards the authorities. The protesters' actions would in no way be justified or excused by this. They violently tried to stop the certification of an election in an attempt to keep their preferred president in power. Nobody tricked, forced, or coerced them into doing that. The most you could argue is that someone "let" them do it. If a cop puts a loaded gun on a table in front of you, you are still 100% morally and legally guilty of murder if you then grab that gun and use it to kill someone. The cop will face their own consequences for what they've done, but that will have no bearing on your own culpability. That's all this setup argument comes out to. You're insisting that someone put a gun on the table in front of the protesters and therefore it's not the protesters' fault that they then grabbed the gun and shot someone with it.

68

Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: Trump

« on: March 17, 2025, 03:41:00 PM »

...yeah? You're acting like those two points contradict each other. They don't. Hanging virtually never happens nowadays in this country. And any reasonable person would interpret an angry mob screaming that someone should be hanged as a threat.

69

Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: Trump

« on: March 17, 2025, 01:38:04 PM »

As barbaric as the US system is in still having the death penalty - something which most advanced civilizations have now moved on from - I didn't think you actually hanged people these days.

We don't, and I think any reasonable person would agree that "Hang Mike Pence" is a threat. Of course they didn't need to explicitly spell out "I am going to hang you" any more than a mugger pointing a gun at someone needs to say "I am going to shoot you" for it to be a threat.

70

Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: Trump

« on: March 17, 2025, 01:45:18 AM »

The VIPs were not secured.

I did say fairly quicky. For all I know, these cherry-picked moments of cops not actively fighting dozens of angry protesters came after the evacuations. And even if they didn't, I can still easily see cops making the snap decision to not start fights they couldn't possibly win. I can't say whether or not that was a sound tactical decision, but there's a world of difference between outnumbered cops not trying to fight protesters at a few given moments and the whole thing being a setup to make Trump supporters look bad.

After the Asley Babbit shooting the massive crowd of people in that wing turned back and left. There is well publicized video of this, taken from people within the crowd, which I am certain you are aware of. Stop LARPing. If there were people still in other distant wings after that, it is irrelevant to this demonstration that firearms worked to deter the crowd.

Okay, I looked up a video of the Babbitt shooting. I wouldn't call this a "massive crowd" of protesters. A few of the protesters do seem to leave after the shot is fired. Plenty of them can clearly be seen still sticking around. Perhaps more importantly, we then see a team of cops with assault rifles bring up the rear, which I imagine played far more of a role in whatever deterrence happened in this scenario than the one lone cop firing his sidearm. In any case, your description of what happened is extremely disingenuous, and it's also extremely disingenuous to compare this one particular moment to the cherry-picked scenes of dozens of angry, screaming protesters marching past one or two isolated cops and say that, gee, all these outnumbered cops had to do was fire off a round and all these protesters would have quietly run home.

But ultimately, none of this matters. We all saw the violence of Jan. 6th. We all saw the angry mobs, we all heard their promises to murder anyone stopping Trump from getting a second term, we all saw them battering at the doors and smashing the windows while screaming for blood. None of these quibbles about whether or not this or that cop was actively fighting the protesters or whether or not this or that door was opened for them changes what we all saw and heard. These people were not at the Capitol to peacefully protest. They knew it, and we know it.

71

Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: Trump

« on: March 15, 2025, 07:54:51 PM »

If a cop is intimidated for his life, he has a weapon to use. The discharge of a weapon did, in fact, turn back the crowd.

The Capitol Police are there to protect the Capitol and allowing a mob into the premise to get at the VIPs is seriously unacceptable. I sincerely doubt that honk or Lord Dave believe what they claim, or would think that it's okay for perimeter police to let a mob into the Harris White House to get at President Kamala Harris. This is an obvious Liberal LARP, in which one attempts to argue the leftist justification position no matter what and makes poor arguments for internet liberal points.

The members of Congress had been evacuated from the Capitol fairly quickly, so at a certain point the police probably figured that it was better to let the protesters in and allow them to damage the building rather than put their own lives at risk by starting a fight that they had no chance of winning. I don't know what you're talking about by claiming that discharging a weapon was what deterred the crowd. There was no one specific thing that stopped the protest. Like I said, the events of the day lasted several hours, long past the shooting of Ashli Babbitt, and the protest wasn't brought to a full end until reinforcements with riot gear who were actually equipped to physically deal with large numbers of unruly people cleared the last of the protesters out. From the perspective of the cops originally on the scene, taking out their guns and shooting the protesters could have very easily gotten themselves killed, and if it hadn't, might have led to them being vilified and/or prosecuted as murderers. I also don't know what your musing about Kamala Harris being the president has to do with any of this.

72

Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: Trump

« on: March 15, 2025, 01:55:42 AM »

I have no problem believing that at a certain point, the police probably just gave up trying to physically stop the participants. The events of the day lasted several hours, remember. To demand that every cop should have been spending every second of that time actively trying to physically stop the participants - which is exactly what's being implied when you present cherry-picked moments of cops not actively trying to physically stop the protestors and insist that it's indicative of a setup - just isn't reasonable.

73

Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: Trump

« on: March 09, 2025, 01:07:52 AM »

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/faa-workers-threatened-firing-spacex-b2709799.html

But remember, guys, it's the federal employees earning median paychecks who are the real problem. Not the oligarchs using their access to usher billions their way.

74

Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: Trump

« on: March 04, 2025, 03:42:41 AM »

Being "tough on Russia" implies that we are defending American interests. With the uncovered involvement of democrat financial interests in that country, ie. the Hunter Biden ordeal, it is hard to argue that Ukraine is in the interest of the average American.

I'm going to call out this lie every time you or anyone else reposts it. Viktor Shokin was fired for failing to investigate corruption, including at Burisma. It was not in Burisma's interests that he be fired. It was also the shared opinion of both parties in this country and the international community at large that Shokin was enormously corrupt and needed to go, not a personal whim of Biden's - and no, the fact that Biden himself was quoted at the time as saying "If the prosecutor is not fired, you're not getting the money" doesn't somehow "prove" that this really was a personal whim of his; it simply proves that it was the position of the Obama administration. There are plenty of sources for this, as I've posted before. It's a very well-documented subject. I don't expect you to concede this point, as you never have in the past, but I'm not going to let this lie stand unchallenged. Again, every time you trot this story out, I'll respond with a rebuttal like this so that nobody reading this thread is left in any doubt that it's a lie.

75

Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: Trump

« on: March 02, 2025, 12:24:09 AM »

Short, Jewish comedy actors need to be kept off of the world stage. Especially short, Jewish, Nazi comedy actors.

I wonder if he will go back and open up elections in his democracy.

Pretty sure you've got a contradiction in there.

While accusing Zelenskyy of being a Nazi is ludicrous and a transparent attempt to try to rationalize Trump's support of Putin as actually being a sensible and strategic position rather than a shallow and entirely personal caprice, it's entirely possible for someone to express support for or claim to believe in a philosophy or movement that wants them dead or subjugated, or even to join organizations that want them dead or subjugated. Racist organizations often benefit from having a token non-white member they can whip out as a defense to racism, like the Proud Boys with Enrique Tarrio.

76

Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: Trump

« on: March 01, 2025, 03:01:18 PM »

It's also worth repeating once again that Trump's sympathy towards Russia rather than Ukraine is not a political, ideological, or even financial calculation. Trump is a layman with no real knowledge of or interest in international politics. This is entirely because he likes Putin on a personal level and wants to impress him. Whatever pleasure he gets out of trying to please Putin is not something that benefits anybody but himself. A good leader would set their own personal feelings aside when making these kinds of important decisions.

77

Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: Trump

« on: March 01, 2025, 02:35:04 AM »

https://apnews.com/article/romania-andrew-tate-us-04749679b90fad821c2b945955f5b145

Again, it needs to be stressed that this is not a coincidence. The Trump administration lobbied and pressured the Romanian government into releasing the Tates.

The article you posted doesn't say that though.

And yet it's true. Of course Romania isn't going to go on the record and say "The Trump administration pressured us to let the Tates go and we folded." Seeing through obvious attempts at saving face is an important part of interpreting political news, and we already know from previous reports that Trump officials were lobbying on behalf of the Tates. Romania doesn't need to publicly acknowledge this as true for it to be true.

I won't waste time discussing the details of the case against the Tates, especially not with someone who's just going to reflexively argue every single point. It's been extensively documented online, and needless to say, goes well beyond simply operating a camgirl service. And even if I believed that Tate was entirely innocent, he's still such an openly vile person that the Trump administration going out of its way (it's not like it's the president's "job" to secure the release of every American citizen facing prosecution in other countries, after all) so early in its term to lobby on his behalf is a very ugly look - as it was undoubtedly meant to be.

78

Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: Trump

« on: February 28, 2025, 02:54:53 AM »

https://apnews.com/article/romania-andrew-tate-us-04749679b90fad821c2b945955f5b145

Again, it needs to be stressed that this is not a coincidence. The Trump administration lobbied and pressured the Romanian government into releasing the Tates. I'll avoid talking about the brother for now because I don't know enough about his involvement to fairly judge him, but Andrew Tate is a vile piece of shit who has openly bragged about the women he's abused, exploited, and yes, raped, even though he's denied the specific crimes he's been charged with. Does he deserve his day in court, and until that time, to be treated by the government as innocent until proved guilty? Of course. Does he deserve to have the President of the United States, within his first six weeks of office, directly intervene in his case on his behalf and get him out of the country that's prosecuting him? Absolutely fucking not.

79

Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: Trump

« on: February 26, 2025, 04:45:22 AM »

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c7435pnle0go

Pathetic. Absolutely pathetic. Trump is desperate to impress Putin. No, don't even start with talking about how this has anything to do with strategy or the budget (the latter claim is especially unbelievable given how Trump and Republicans have now passed their enormous tax cuts for the rich). This is entirely personal and comes down to nothing more than Trump's fawning crush on Putin. That's literally all it is. Your big strong macho president is Putin's little bitch.

80

Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: Trump

« on: February 23, 2025, 04:09:44 PM »

Only a resignation is a resignation. You can't just say "I'm taking this as a resignation." As for taxes, I haven't seen anything about Musk paying billions since 2021, when he claimed he'd be paying $11 billion from selling stock. It's worth noting that every article that covered that subject seems to be taking Musk's word for it. It's extremely likely that he was lying or exaggerating. Like I posted a while back, Trump is planning trillions in tax cuts. Those tax cuts aren't for you or me. They're for the enormously wealthy. Trump has you so convinced that you're being taken advantage of a bunch of bureaucrats earning median paychecks that you're entirely blind to the oligarchs who really are taking advantage of you, to a degree many times worse than the federal workforce (even assuming all the FUD about them being a bunch of lazy freeloaders is true - which it isn't).