61
Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: Trump
« on: March 27, 2025, 02:59:00 PM »
I could have dismissed virtually every criticism of Biden by saying "The people who matter don't care about this." It's a blatant appeal to authority.
Show Posts
This section allows you to view all posts made by this member. Note that you can only see posts made in areas you currently have access to.
62
Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: Trump
« on: March 27, 2025, 01:31:03 PM »
This wasn't an interview or an authorized release to the media. It was a mistake. A clumsy, reckless mistake by incompetent people.
63
Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: Trump
« on: March 26, 2025, 06:49:42 PM »Despite contaminating these hallowed pages with my presence for the last few years, I'm not really very social-media-savvy; I only participate in one other forum (it's profession-related) and I don't text much. I only say this in the hope that you'll forgive my naivity if this is already circulating.
Apparently there's a thing called sane-washing. It's when acolytes and disciples of a Guru or "Influencer" feel obliged to excuse His actions, behaviour and messaging, by explaining and rationalising to the wider public, either in press releases or by use of social media. The more odd the Principal's behaviour, the more bizarre the rationalisation.
Of course to be on-message and before beginning the apologist behaviour (whether they consciously acknowledge the fact or not) the acolytes have to understand what is happening, what is being said, and come to terms with the fact that the Guru is actually behaving and acting like a complete fuck-wit.
I would expect nothing less from an acolyte or disciple than to try and excuse their hero's words and actions. The real culprits when it comes to sanewashing Trump are the media, because they're lying down on their job. There's of course no way to know for sure, but I think it's very likely that many of the swing voters who went for Trump this time around because of a very superficial, surface-level appreciation of Trump being a straight-talking businessman who doesn't seem to be like other politicians might have changed their minds if the media had honestly presented the many occasions of Trump spewing deranged bullshit as just that, rather than dressing it up with "Trump expresses concerns about..." headlines. The media has a big problem with both-sides false equivalencies, and they seem to be deeply uncomfortable with the fact that one side of the political aisle is normal (not ideal, or even necessarily good, just normal) while the other is off-the-wall out of their minds, so they're trying to "normalize" the discrepancy in their reporting.
64
Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: Trump
« on: March 26, 2025, 01:26:59 PM »
Tom's wish has been granted - we now no longer need to take Goldberg's word for it that some of the information shared would have been dangerous in the wrong hands. Regardless of whether or not the Secretary of Defense has the legal right to make these disclosures on a whim, it clearly isn't what happened here. This wasn't an interview or an official media release. The people in this chat were simply being lazy and reckless.
65
Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: Trump
« on: March 25, 2025, 11:00:20 PM »No, the Secretary of Defense does not have carte blanche to reveal military secrets at his pleasure. Only the president has that privilege
Actually, the Secretary of Defense has original classification authority, just like the President.
https://www.cdse.edu/Portals/124/Documents/jobaids/information/oca-desktop-reference.pdf
"OCAs, also called original classifiers, include the President, Vice President, Secretary of Defense, the Secretaries of the Military Departments, and other officials within the Department of Defense (DoD) who have been specifically delegated this authority in writing."
By this logic, all these people, including "other officials within the Department of Defense," also have carte blanche to reveal military secrets at their pleasure. We know that can't be true. Beyond the fact that this document is talking about classification and not declassification, you're conflating having the power to classify or declassify information as a job and a duty with the privilege of being able to reveal anything you want to anyone you want and answer to no one over it. Of course the Secretary of Defense and other high-ranking officials in the DoD have jobs that will involve classifying or declassifying information from time to time, but that doesn't mean that there are no rules and they can just go with their gut and unilaterally decide that something that's very clearly supposed to be classified should actually be declassified after all. Only the president has that privilege.
66
Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: Trump
« on: March 25, 2025, 08:47:46 PM »
No, the Secretary of Defense does not have carte blanche to reveal military secrets at his pleasure. Only the president has that privilege, and for once in his scandal-ridden career, Trump genuinely seems to have had nothing to do with this latest debacle. Besides, even if Hegseth did have that power legally, this was clearly not a deliberate disclosure on his part. This was a mistake - a stupid, clumsy mistake. He can't just retroactively say "Yeah, I meant to do that!" Especially not given his insincere denial of the entire story.
Bait used to be believable.
Quote
Your imagined rules for discretion mean nothing
Bait used to be believable.
67
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.
68
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.
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.
69
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.
70
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.
72
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.
Quote
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.
73
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.
74
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.
75
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.
76
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.
Quote
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.
77
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.
78
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.
79
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.
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.
80
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.