2020 Political Chatter

[ElvisMerckx]

What is your "Dark Core Score"?

At 1.79, I'm not too dark except for that spike toward Machiavellianism. Very interesting.

I imagine my score would be very different in times of great stress (eg: war, famine, zombie apocalypse).

[guido]

The Lawbreakers Trump Loves | New York Times

"Even as President Trump accepted the Republican presidential nomination on the White House lawn, lawbreakers rampaged through the capital.

Would our law-and-order president leap off the podium and tackle them? He once said he would race unarmed into a building to tackle a school shooter. But sadly he ignored these blatant lawbreakers, presidential aides violating Hatch Act restrictions on political manipulation of government.

It’s one law he doesn’t want to uphold. Asked about the Hatch Act, the White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, scoffed, “Nobody outside of the beltway really cares.”

Inside the beltway, Trump and other speakers at the Republican National Convention conjure grave national threats from raging anarchists.

“Your vote will decide whether we protect law-abiding Americans, or whether we give free rein to violent anarchists, and agitators, and criminals,” Trump warned in his acceptance speech.

The Republican convention included video glimpses of “Biden’s America,” with a scary scene of fire raging in the streets. But those streets turned out to be in Barcelona, Spain; it wasn’t “Biden’s America” or even America at all, just another in a stream of lies. (By the count of The Washington Post, Trump has uttered more than 20,000 false and misleading statements since taking office.)


Of course, even if it had been filmed in America this year, it wouldn’t have been Biden’s America, but Trump’s America. The real Biden’s America, the period when he was vice president, was a time of comparative calm, growing prosperity and improving health care.

Yet Trump is determined to terrify Americans. “If you want a vision of your life under a Biden presidency, think of the smoldering ruins of Minneapolis, the violent anarchy of Portland, the bloodstained sidewalks of Chicago,” Trump warned earlier.

It’s true that there has been violence and looting in some American cities, and this is a genuine challenge to order and economic recovery. But by any objective measure the bigger risk comes from right-wing extremists.

“Right-wing attacks and plots account for the majority of all terrorist incidents in the United States since 1994, and the total number of right-wing attacks and plots has grown significantly during the past six years,” the Center for Strategic & International Studies concluded after examining terror plots in the United States from 1994 to May of this year. “Right-wing extremists perpetrated two-thirds of the attacks and plots in the United States in 2019 and over 90 percent between January 1 and May 8, 2020.”

The anti-fascist protesters known as antifa have committed violent acts but aren’t known to have ever killed anyone, while right-wing extremists have killed hundreds. Just a few days ago, a Trump supporter, Kyle H. Rittenhouse, allegedly shot two protesters dead in Kenosha, Wis. One can’t help wondering if Rittenhouse, an impressionable 17-year-old living in Illinois, was galvanized to take a gun and drive to Kenosha because of panic promoted by Trump and Fox News.

After fulminating about threats from Black Lives Matter protesters, Tucker Carlson of Fox News seemed to defend the Kenosha killings, saying, “How shocked are we that 17-year-olds with rifles decided they had to maintain order when no one else would?”"

[choke]

Wondering how, why or who are those individuals abject disregard for others is measured? Well....here is a start. I think we all have a positive dark core score, it would be weird if all of us never had imprudent thoughts. That is the devil and angel in us all right? In our dream states we play with these dilemas, it is not real life. In real life hitting the pause button before you act is probably a signal your dark core score is on the low side of positive....we all have a score. Go for it.

What is your "Dark Core Score"?

It's a bit hidden in the article but there is an online test linked: http://qst.darkfactor.org/

1.29 for me. I guess that's why I'm still working on my first million.

[deano]

The Lawbreakers Trump Loves | New York Times

The anti-fascist protesters known as antifa have committed violent acts but aren’t known to have ever killed anyone, while right-wing extremists have killed hundreds.

I don't wade in to politics discussions on the internet often, but this claim in the article drew the foul; in my hometown of Dayton, Ohio, a recent mass-shooting, which was largely overshadowed in the news media by a shooting in El Paso occurring the same weekend, appears to have been ideologically motivated by an antifa-sympathizer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Dayton_shooting

I suppose the writer's claims hinge on who counts as having lost his/her life, and on who counts as an actual member of a diffuse, leader-less body with no criteria for membership.

[deano]

I don't wade in to politics discussions on the internet often, but this claim in the article drew the foul; in my hometown of Dayton, Ohio, a recent mass-shooting, which was largely overshadowed in the news media by a shooting in El Paso occurring the same weekend, appears to have been ideologically motivated by an antifa-sympathizer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Dayton_shooting

I suppose the writer's claims hinge on who counts as having lost his/her life, and on who counts as an actual member of a diffuse, leader-less body with no criteria for membership.

And, I'm paywalled from reading the full article, but I just cut and pasted this headline and its decks from the NYT: not definitely antifa, but a rightwinger murdered by (apparently) a left winger.

Deadly Shooting in Portland After Pro-Trump Ralliers Clash With Protesters
-A caravan of Trump supporters drove through Portland, Ore., which has seen nightly protests against police violence and racial injustice.
-The man who was fatally shot was wearing a hat with the insignia of a far-right group based in Portland that has clashed with protesters in the past.

Point is, while what exactly transpired isn't apparent, and while I have a policy of not defending the indefensible (plus, I am allergic to angry mobs, left, right, or center) many claims of a peaceful protest or that the left is peaceful while the right alone is bloodthirsty, just can't be demonstrated.

[thollandpe]

I don't wade in to politics discussions on the internet often, but this claim in the article drew the foul; in my hometown of Dayton, Ohio, a recent mass-shooting, which was largely overshadowed in the news media by a shooting in El Paso occurring the same weekend, appears to have been ideologically motivated by an antifa-sympathizer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Dayton_shooting

I suppose the writer's claims hinge on who counts as having lost his/her life, and on who counts as an actual member of a diffuse, leader-less body with no criteria for membership.

I agree that the Dayton shooting was horrific. But to classify that kid as antifa is a reach, maybe even a foul.

One unifying thread to mass murders and violence in our country is white supremacy, and that is clearly represented by the alt-right agitators at these protests. Since that white supremacist right-wing psychopath killed a protestor with his car in Charlottesville, there have been more than 60 similar incidents nationwide.

To try and apply some kind of left-right balance around a mythical center to this issue is misleading.

[deano]

I agree that the Dayton shooting was horrific. But to classify that kid as antifa is a reach, maybe even a foul.

One unifying thread to mass murders and violence in our country is white supremacy, and that is clearly represented by the alt-right agitators at these protests. Since that white supremacist right-wing psychopath killed a protestor with his car in Charlottesville, there have been more than 60 similar incidents nationwide.

To try and apply some kind of left-right balance around a mythical center to this issue is misleading.

I believe investigators discovered antifa sympathies in his online history. And applying a left right balance is exactly what that article does.

[theflashunc]

I don't wade in to politics discussions on the internet often, but this claim in the article drew the foul; in my hometown of Dayton, Ohio, a recent mass-shooting, which was largely overshadowed in the news media by a shooting in El Paso occurring the same weekend, appears to have been ideologically motivated by an antifa-sympathizer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Dayton_shooting

I suppose the writer's claims hinge on who counts as having lost his/her life, and on who counts as an actual member of a diffuse, leader-less body with no criteria for membership.

And the ideology was of the looney-tunes incel variety, not anything driven by leftist rhetoric. A better example of "antifa" violence, if one wants to claim that's a pervasive thing, is the Congressional baseball practice shooting.

Right wing terror groups are real and creating havoc at a level not seen by any counterparts on the left. Hell, antifa exists entirely as a reaction to extreme right wing groups. The Oathkeepers, the Bugaloos, the Proud Boys, all these people are being fed a specific version of white identity politics that is under attack from The Other, and supplied with a fuck ton of guns given our fucked up view of the Second Amendment. Violence -- and an increasing reaction to their violence -- in inevitable.

[deano]

Yes, I forgot about the baseball shooter, thank you. My interest, as stated, was merely in pointing out the undemonstrable claim in the article.

[Colinmclelland]

To an outsider it just seems like America keeps saying “Hold my beer...”

[guido]

Donald Trump is the president | Vox

"Speaking from the convention stage in Cleveland in 2016, Donald Trump made a solemn promise to the American people: that “the crime and violence that today afflicts our nation will soon come to an end. Beginning on January 20, 2017, safety will be restored.”

It was, at the time, a striking promise. Starting in 1994, the US murder rate had fallen consistently for 20 years. Violent crime had fallen so much that nobody talked about it anymore as a political issue, and the “tough on crime” politics of the 1980s and 1990s was widely viewed as embarrassing.

After Michael Brown’s death at the hands of police in Ferguson, Missouri, the mainstream conversation in the United States was about criminal justice reform, not reducing crime. But crime went up a bit in 2015 and then up by a larger amount in 2016. Progressives didn’t really want to talk about it, but Trump — a man who seems unafraid to be seen as an embarrassing throwback to the 1980s — did.

It’s not entirely clear how many voters found this particular gambit persuasive and appealing, but obviously Trump thinks it works because he’s saying the same stuff again. And if Trump were just some guy on Twitter, that would make sense: Murder is on the rise again after ticking down for a few years, and acts of looting and vandalism are occurring in cities across the country.

But Donald Trump is the president of the United States.

He promised four years ago to restore safety and bring law and order to our streets. He never bothered to articulate a message about how he would do that, but it didn’t matter. He was the “law and order” candidate. But today he’s a candidate with a record. A record of rising crime and urban disorder, and a record that makes it clear he has no idea how to make any of it better — and is intervening in several ways to make it worse.
Trump is defunding the police

One of the greatest oddities of the 2020 election season is that while it offers many examples of Republicans accusing Democrats of wanting to “defund” the police, the exact opposite is happening on a policymaking level.

Trump has been very critical of the 1994 crime bill and the 2009 economic recovery act, both of which increased federal support for local police. He’s also submitted four budget proposals to Congress, each of which proposed cuts in police spending. More to the point, right now politicians are debating what to do about the expiration of bonus unemployment insurance money that was provided by the CARES Act.

Democrats and Republicans are arguing, in part, about the structure of UI benefits. But they are also arguing about Democrats’ desire to provide state and local government with a massive injection of emergency aid money to plug giant budget holes created by the Covid-19 pandemic. With no aid forthcoming due to GOP opposition, cities are cutting budgets.

And while the abstract defunding debate plays out among intellectuals, real cities are cutting. Not just liberal enclaves, either. Oklahoma City, one of the most conservative cities in America, is cutting its police budget because it’s cutting spending across the board.

If you believe in the empirical evidence that more cops equals less crime — which Trump seems to pretend to — then this trend would appear to make America less safe. And that’s only more so the case, given that the cutbacks in policing will be paired with cuts to mental health and other social services and occur at a time of high unemployment. But while Trump undermines public safety, he also undermines citizens’ efforts to demand accountability for the actions of law enforcement officers. "

[Sbti]

I did nazi that coming.

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/arti...ne-people.html

[guido]

Donald Trump’s Incitements to Violence Have Crossed an Alarming Threshold | The New Yorker

"In December, 2016, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, two political scientists at Harvard, published an opinion piece in the Times that posed the question “Is Donald Trump a Threat to Democracy?” Relying on a set of criteria for anti-democratic leaders created by Juan José Linz, a Spanish expert on totalitarianism, which includes the incitement of violence for political purposes, the two scholars determined that Trump “tests positive.” During that year’s Presidential campaign, they reminded readers, Trump had incited violence by encouraging his supporters to rough up protesters at his rallies.

In their Times piece, and at greater length in their book, “How Democracies Die,” from 2018, Levitsky and Ziblatt developed the theme that Trump had authoritarian inclinations—and they also emphasized the fact that he took over the Presidency during a period of intense political polarization, when other right-wing extremists were already questioning the legitimacy of their political opponents. While American democracy wasn’t in imminent danger of collapsing, they wrote, “We must be vigilant. The warning signs are real.”

Right now, those signs couldn’t be flashing any brighter. Over the weekend, Trump cheered on a caravan of his supporters that confronted groups of Black Lives Matters demonstrators in Portland, Oregon, the site of months of ongoing protests, some of which have turned violent. In the clashes that ensued, one person—Aaron (Jay) Danielson, a supporter of the far-right group Patriot Prayer—was shot and killed. Not content with fanning the flames in Portland, Trump retweeted a message that was supportive of Kyle Rittenhouse, the seventeen-year-old Illinois teen-ager who shot three protesters in Kenosha, Wisconsin, last week, killing two of them. Then, at a press conference on Monday, Trump defended Rittenhouse, suggesting that he had acted in self-defense.

“I find it, frankly, terrifying,” Levitsky told me on Monday, when I called to ask him about Trump’s latest rhetorical escalations. Although the language that the President has adopted over the past few days is entirely consistent with his 2016 campaign, the inflammatory statements he issued at rallies then were “on a micro scale” compared with what he is doing now on a national stage, Levitsky said. And the political environment, following months of protests against police racism and brutality, is even more incendiary. “We now have the potential in towns and cities across the country for pretty significant violence, with a large number of deaths,” he said. “Trump is either unaware of this or he doesn’t care. I don’t normally like to make these comparisons, but this sort of encouragement of violence for political purposes is worryingly similar to what the Fascist movement did in Europe during the nineteen-twenties and nineteen-thirties.”

In these hyper-polarized, hyper-online times, the word “fascist” gets bandied around a great deal. For this reason, among others, I have avoided using it when writing about the Trump Administration. But Levitsky isn’t the only expert on democratic erosion who sees some alarming parallels between interwar Europe and what is happening in the United States today. Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a historian at New York University, is the author of a forthcoming book on authoritarian leaders, “Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present.” In a telephone conversation, she reminded me that the Fascist Italian dictator, before he ascended to power, in October, 1922, exploited violent clashes between groups of his armed supporters, known as the Blackshirts, and their left-wing opponents. “He used the violence to destabilize Italian society, so he could position himself as the person to stop this violence,” Ben-Ghiat said. That’s what Trump is doing now, she added."

[ides1056]

It did not end well for Mussolini:

[thollandpe]

It did not end well for Mussolini:

"History has shown us that things seldom turn out as poorly as the losers fear. For example, when Mussolini was elected prime minister of Italy, those who voted against him feared he would become a ruthless, pompous tyrant, loot the treasury, get really fat and bring the country into a suicidal alliance with the darkest forces of mankind. Well, it turns out he stayed pretty trim, as can be seen by those photos of him hanging upside down in the street as people danced and sang."

-- Gene Weingarten

[vertical_doug]

https://www.axios.com/bloomberg-grou...e478d42bb.html

Scroll down a little bit and watch the map of the US change based on predictions from 538. This is when Trump has to call out the patriots to prevent the Democrats from stealing the election.
Because he already won right?

[sine]

edited

"In December, 2016, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, two political scientists at Harvard, published an opinion piece in the Times that posed the question “Is Donald Trump a Threat to Democracy?” Relying on a set of criteria for anti-democratic leaders created by Juan José Linz, a Spanish expert on totalitarianism, which includes the incitement of violence for political purposes, the two scholars determined that Trump “tests positive.” During that year’s Presidential campaign, they reminded readers, Trump had incited violence by encouraging his supporters to rough up protesters at his rallies.

their book, “How Democracies Die,” from 2018, Levitsky and Ziblatt developed the theme that Trump had authoritarian inclinations—

That Trump has authoritarian inclinations......should not come as a shock to anyone who has followed the bloke for the last 15+ years.

Most importantly, the US is foundationally a strong country....and Trump is not smart enough to be a tyrant.

[Todd Amunrud]

https://www.cnn.com/2020/09/01/opini...sur/index.html

I thought this CNN opinion piece comparing approaches for Biden to what Roosevelt did in 1932 was well represented.

[BBB]

edited



That Trump has authoritarian inclinations......should not come as a shock to anyone who has followed the bloke for the last 15+ years.

Most importantly, the US is foundationally a strong country....and Trump is not smart enough to be a tyrant.

Is it? White people in authority kill black people. People of all colours and stripes protest killings and some protests get out of hand and there is property damage. White people with guns get jittery and parade around with said guns to prevent damage. Government sends unmarked government agents to nab people off the street. Rather that attempt to heal the divide the (so-called) leader hides behind social media and makes things worse.

If a (so-called) lefty or a black person, or in fact any person, guns Trump down, your country will burn.

[guido]

Is it? White people in authority kill black people. People of all colours and stripes protest killings and some protests get out of hand and there is property damage. White people with guns get jittery and parade around with said guns to prevent damage. Government sends unmarked government agents to nab people off the street. Rather that attempt to heal the divide the (so-called) leader hides behind social media and makes things worse.

If a (so-called) lefty or a black person, or in fact any person, guns Trump down, your country will burn.

Amen Brother!