US Politics Thread |OT| SAD TRUMP

[agrajag]

I've noticed that and haven't had a duplicate post since 

I've always considered it good etiquette to check if your post went through, I used to do it back on GAF even.

[benjipwns]

Was Trump's accusing Cruz of being the Zodiac Killer part of a cover op?
http://www.newsweek.com/how-murderer-charles-manson-and-donald-trump-used-language-gain-followers-717399

[benjipwns]

President Donald Trump on Tuesday said Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore "totally denies" recent allegations that he years ago pursued inappropriate relationships with younger women and said Republicans "don't need a liberal person" to win the seat.

Trump noted that the allegations involved years-old incidents and said Democrat Doug Jones' record was "terrible on crime. It's terrible on the border. It's terrible on the military."

[Joe Molotov]

Soft on crime unless you're a member of the KKK, but I'm sure Trump just meant black people crime and MS-13 flooding the Alabama border.

[team filler]

*the alabama-mexico border

[benjipwns]

He didn't say soft on crime, he said terrible on crime!

[Boredfrom]

President Donald Trump on Tuesday said Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore "totally denies" recent allegations that he years ago pursued inappropriate relationships with younger women and said Republicans "don't need a liberal person" to win the seat.

Trump noted that the allegations involved years-old incidents and said Democrat Doug Jones' record was "terrible on crime. It's terrible on the border. It's terrible on the military."

Like said before, to Trump there is no problem unless they admit wrong doing.

[Brehvolution]

https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-11-20/gop-surrenders-cherished-irs-scandal-at-last

What’s more, none of the groups actually needed IRS approval to operate. “These organizations didn’t have to wait for the IRS to tell them anything to go into business,” Koskinen said in a telephone interview last week.

Yet the IRS clearly applied extra scrutiny to groups that it thought might be engaged in too much politics to warrant the preferential tax designation. One way IRS personnel did that was to look for key words, such as “Tea Party.” Other words that triggered IRS scrutiny included: “Occupy,” “green energy,” “medical marijuana” and “progressive.”

Contrary to the Republican story, the IRS never targeted conservatives. The IRS targeted politics, which was pretty much what it was supposed to do.

In September, the Trump Justice Department reaffirmed the decision of the Obama Justice Department not to prosecute Lois Lerner, the IRS bureaucrat whom Republicans settled on as a criminal mastermind after they had failed to find an exploitable connection to Obama.



“The great thing about it for the Freedom Caucus and Capitol Hill,” Koskinen said of the GOP’s investigative shtick, “was that it could keep going. You start with the substance of the issue and, when that runs out, you go to the process. And when that runs out, you go after the messenger.”

End of a fake news era.  :'(

[Mandark]

There was some nasty shit done in terms of surveillance/military operations/foreign policy with a sketchy legal basis but that wouldn't really count as a "scandal" since it's largely accepted/ignored.

And, uh, there was the Tom Daschle nomination.

[agrajag]

The Snowden NSA spying stuff I guess?

[thehunter116]

Was there even an actual Obama scandal besides Fast and Furious?

Nothing personal or morally evil beyond reproach.

[Phoenix Dark]

Was there even an actual Obama scandal besides Fast and Furious?

Benghazi.

[benjipwns]

You know what's crazy to me about the Snowden info dump released by The Guardian is not the metadata spying stuff which I can barely muster the energy to care about but the PRISM program which purported that the US and British intelligence agencies had already compromised most of the widely used SSL implementations and thus backdoored themselves in major tech firms across the internet. To me that was a far more damning breach of public trust but I didn't hear much about it in the typical news circles (probably because it's harder to explain).

Because they don't even understand what it means probably. This has happened before too, there was an instance someone got caught submitting revisions to a bunch of linux packages that would have effectively put a bunch of backdoors into them and it got traced back to some intelligence agency. (Not saying it was the US...might have been China.)

There was a NeoGAF.com thread I remember where it felt like me and Stump were the only ones arguing against letting the government be given a backdoor into some technology or something because it would violate basic security design, not even because it was the government doing it.

[benjipwns]

Was there even an actual Obama scandal besides Fast and Furious?

[benjipwns]

I always forget normal people didn't care about this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_chip
Or the government's whole desire to indict the guy who created PGP.

Or probably confuse it with the V-Chip which was THE REAL CONTROVERSY at the same time:

[President Clinton] said, "If every parent uses this chip wisely, it can become a powerful voice against teen violence, teen pregnancy, teen drug use, and for both learning and entertainment," as he signed the law on February 8, 1996. "We're handing the TV remote control back to America's parents so that they can pass on their values and protect their children."

[benjipwns]

In 2004-2005, several participants on the ANSI X9 tools committee pointed out the potential danger of this backdoor. One of them even went so far as to file a patent on using the idea to implement key escrow for SSL/TLS connections. (It doesn’t get more passive aggressive than that.)

In response to the discovery of such an obvious flaw, the ANSI X9 committee immediately stopped recommending the NSA’s points — and relegated them to be simply an option, one to be used by the niche set of government users who required them.

I’m only kidding! Actually the committee did no such thing.

Instead, at the NSA’s urging, the ANSI committee retained the original NSA points as the recommended parameters for the standard. It then added an optional procedure for generating alternative points. When NIST later adopted the generator in its SP800-90A standard, it mirrored the ANSI decision. But even worse, NIST didn’t even bother to publish the alternative point generation algorithm. To actually implement it, you’d need to go buy the (expensive) non-public-domain ANSI standard and figure it out to implement it yourself

To the best of our knowledge, nobody has ever used ANSI’s alternative generation procedure in a single one of the many implementations of Dual EC DRBG in commercial software.  It’s not even clear how you could have used that procedure in a FIPS-certified product, since the FIPS evaluation process (conducted by CMVP) still requires you to test against the NSA-generated points.

I'm not seeing the problem.

[benjipwns]

Oh, that FBI-Apple dust up was a stupid clusterfuck that was like this. Not even just NeoGAF.com that I think had the argument, but on other sites that I thought were more tech saavy and/or libertarian had plenty of people like "this is a terrorists phone, just tell them how to unlock it already."

Maybe it was just anti-Apple people.

edit: remember another instance like that, even though i wasn't one of the people who worship/ed him, when Aaron Swartz was indicted and facing up to 35 years plus for downloading too many JSTOR articles, even though nobody else but the government wanted to press charges...and people thought this wasn't crazy

[Coax]

RIP Swartz

[chronovore]

Oh, that FBI-Apple dust up was a stupid clusterfuck that was like this. Not even just NeoGAF.com that I think had the argument, but on other sites that I thought were more tech saavy and/or libertarian had plenty of people like "this is a terrorists phone, just tell them how to unlock it already."

Maybe it was just anti-Apple people.

edit: remember another instance like that, even though i wasn't one of the people who worship/ed him, when Aaron Swartz was indicted and facing up to 35 years plus for downloading too many JSTOR articles, even though nobody else but the government wanted to press charges...and people thought this wasn't crazy

Yeah, that Swartz thing is pretty clearly a case of systematic harassment by those in power, providing a cooling effect on anyone else who really wants to upset the status quo. 

[bluemax]

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/11/the-nationalists-delusion/546356/?utm_source=fbb

tl;dr: Trump isn't the result of economic disenfranchisement, he's the result of racists and racists of all economic levels.

[Human Snorenado]

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/11/the-nationalists-delusion/546356/?utm_source=fbb

tl;dr: Trump isn't the result of economic disenfranchisement, he's the result of racists and racists of all economic levels.

I'm sorry, can you give that tl;dr to me in etoilet speak?

[benjipwns]

During the final few weeks of the campaign, I asked dozens of Trump supporters about their candidate’s remarks regarding Muslims and people of color. I wanted to understand how these average Republicans—those who would never read the neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer or go to a Klan rally at a Confederate statue—had nevertheless embraced someone who demonized religious and ethnic minorities.

ADAM SERWER is a senior editor at The Atlantic, covering politics.

[benjipwns]

This is really poorly written. I'm not being benji-contrarian about the argument or anything as I don't even have much of one to start with it just for discussion sake, it's just...bad. (Maybe it's me anyway.)

When did this trend of writing an article where sections stop. An effectively new article begins with an entirely unrelated premise starts. And repeat. Then don't even bother to tie it together in the end. When did that come back into vogue? I thought that had died off during the 1990s.

spoiler (click to show/hide)

Actually, I'm probably just butthurt he doesn't cite my Bore posts about immigration and related ethnic "tensions" (black lives matter's war on cops came too late for my first version of this thesis( deciding the entire GOP Primary from like 2014, nor my later noting that the weird cycle of the Wallace/Reagan/Perot voter was coming into play again. And he calls himself senior editor of The Atlantic yet he isn't reading the premier place for vile analysis and L distribution, the Bore political thread.

[close]

[Mandark]

Wasn't your take that the south switching was more about religion than race?

[Trent Dole]

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/11/the-nationalists-delusion/546356/?utm_source=fbb

tl;dr: Drumpf isn't the result of economic disenfranchisement, he's the result of racists and racists of all economic levels.

I'm sorry, can you give that tl;dr to me in etoilet speak?

This, basically.

[benjipwns]

I don't think so? I've argued that part of what Republicans exploited to gain Southern power was also the culture wars to add an additional wedge against the national Democratic Party in the 1980s...I have no problem with the Nixon Southern Strategy being characterized as about race as I'm not sure how else to characterize it, I just think that the Republicans broadened the wedge they were driving by embracing the Evangelical movement and strength of groups like the Moral Majority in the South, especially since the South was not a hotbed of "Reaganomics" interest at the time or really since.

I'll cop to that being validly described as downplaying the factor of race. But I can't see it being a strong enough factor to begin flipping local races when the Democratic Party in the Southern states did not greatly shift on racial issues until the Republicans became enough of a threat that they needed black votes. Southern Democrats were opposed to the rise of the religious groups that the Republicans welcomed with open arms. But not because they were any less socially conservative generally, it was a developing opposing power structure to the old Southern machines. The escape hatch turned out to be jumping over to the Republicans like Helms and Thurmond and so many others.

[Mandark]

http://www.thebore.com/forum/index.php?topic=39503.msg2154425#msg2154425

[benjipwns]

What I am posting is calm, grown-up shit. You need to reassess.

If you want to be a good person, then I can help you.

[Phoenix Dark]

Didn't read the article but I will say the obsession with the alt right/Nazis has led some to overlook the fact that conservatives don't have to be alt right in order to be assholes driven by resentment and racial/sexual/etc bias. Ben Shapiro isn't alt right and has largely stood against Bannon since leaving the site, nor is he a Trump guy last I checked...but he's a typical far right conservative on many issues. No he's not a Nazi but he believes white supremacy is largely a myth, Obama was basically a racist, gay/trans people are largely deviant behaviorists demanding rights that don't apply to them etc.

So Trump isn't far off from where many of these people land on the political spectrum. In fact you could say they're well within the same ballpark. Hence republican views on immigration, black shit, gay shit, etc largely mirroring Trump. A lot of these people held all types of ugly beliefs and if anything, 8 years of Obama drove them off a fucking cliff.

This is also why I disliked the attempt by democrats to seperate Trump from the GOP. This IS your father's Republican Party, socially at least.

[Trent Dole]

Yeah, that's why it's kind of funny to see some like Rick Wilson turn against him. While it's nice to see a few go 'guys, no' to him Don's platform is generally...the gop platform.

[benjipwns]

Possibly more embarrassing from that post than quibbling over "much" (I formally retract "if not more") :

And the South's status as a GOP stronghold has been oversold by focus on the Presidency and may be running out of steam.

what a dummy thinking Georgia or North Carolina or Missouri might be in play

[benjipwns]

http://www.thecollegefix.com/post/39207/

A UC Riverside student who stole a peer’s Make America Great Again hat off his head and refused to give it back now faces steep legal consequences.

A criminal complaint provided to The College Fix by the Riverside County District Attorney’s Office states that Edith Macias has been charged with one misdemeanor count of grand theft for the September 27 incident.

The next court date on the matter is slated for March, and the maximum penalty Macias faces if convicted as currently charged is one year in county jail, a spokesman for the DA’s office told The Fix.

The charge was filed after UC Riverside student Matthew Vitale, the student who had his Make America Great Again hat stolen from off his head, decided to press criminal theft charges against Macias.

...

In a statement to The College Fix on Monday, Vitale said he is gratified by the developments.

“I’m very pleased that the DA decided to charge her, especially because I am skeptical that UCR student conduct did anything. I will be following up with the student conduct office to determine if anything was done,” Vitale said.

“In the meantime, I can’t thank UCPD enough for actually taking this matter seriously. The detective and officers involved with this case were the epitome of professionalism,” he added. “If, as I suspect, UCR decided not to discipline her in some way this decision by the DA’s office shows two things: First, that UCR does not protect and shows no respect for speech that does not conform to their ideology. Second, that in this case UCR chose not to discipline a person who committed a crime on campus against another student.”

...

After Vitale had requested charges be brought against Macias, he explained his motives to The College Fix: “I do want to send a message. I am not vindictive, I am not vengeful, but people especially in my generation need to realize you can’t do things like this because you don’t like what someone is saying or wearing.”

[Mupepe]

Was the guy being a douche or anything about it to warrant having his hat taken?  If he was just wearing it and some dude decided he didn't like it and wanted to take it then I have no problem him being charged.  He's an adult and that really is unacceptable.  It's not the 3rd grade.  Still funny to see Trump fans whine about shit though.

[Mupepe]

Yeah... then funny and thanks for the entertainment but I have no issues with there being consequences. 

[agrajag]

That's just the kind of criminal element that Donald Trump warned us about

[seagrams hotsauce]

Was the guy being a douche or anything about it to warrant having his hat taken?  If he was just wearing it and some dude decided he didn't like it and wanted to take it then I have no problem him being charged.  He's an adult and that really is unacceptable.  It's not the 3rd grade.  Still funny to see Trump fans whine about shit though.

this is some pussy shit for real. In no world should any cop have to deal with legitimately pursuing someone who stole a fuckin hat

[ToxicAdam]

I'll cop to that being validly described as downplaying the factor of race. But I can't see it being a strong enough factor to begin flipping local races when the Democratic Party in the Southern states did not greatly shift on racial issues until the Republicans became enough of a threat that they needed black votes. Southern Democrats were opposed to the rise of the religious groups that the Republicans welcomed with open arms. But not because they were any less socially conservative generally, it was a developing opposing power structure to the old Southern machines. The escape hatch turned out to be jumping over to the Republicans like Helms and Thurmond and so many others.

The thing that gets lost in the discussion about white, southern enclaves "flipping" to Republican is that for decades these were controlled by Democrats. At the national, state and local levels. Yet, despite their policies and near dominant control at the national level, very little progress was made in those southern states for most of the 20th century. They were still at the bottom of barrel in all the major metrics.

So, you had multiple generations of people that grew up in a world where Democrats controlled everything and represented the status quo. A world where the south wasn't much better off than it was pre-Depression, by the 70's and 80's.

[Mupepe]

Was the guy being a douche or anything about it to warrant having his hat taken?  If he was just wearing it and some dude decided he didn't like it and wanted to take it then I have no problem him being charged.  He's an adult and that really is unacceptable.  It's not the 3rd grade.  Still funny to see Trump fans whine about shit though.

this is some pussy shit for real. In no world should any cop have to deal with legitimately pursuing someone who stole a fuckin hat

And your solution to someone crossing boundaries like that?  wait wait, you're a tough guy I bet. 

Besides being a douche for supporting Trump and seemingly petty I don't see what the guy did wrong.

[Nola]

....So Net Neutrality is gone tomorrow, kinda big news I think. 

[agrajag]

I thought the repeal is on December 14?

[Nola]

I thought the repeal is on December 14?

Could be wrong on the date tbh. Wouldn’t be the first time.

EDIT: you are correct, plans set in motion for a vote on dec 14 that I assume right now is expected to pass.

[Joe Molotov]

....So Net Neutrality is gone tomorrow, kinda big news I think. 

I haven't heard anything about it on my Verizon-approved news sites. 

[FStop7]

Because they don't even understand what it means probably. This has happened before too, there was an instance someone got caught submitting revisions to a bunch of linux packages that would have effectively put a bunch of backdoors into them and it got traced back to some intelligence agency. (Not saying it was the US...might have been China.)

There was a NeoGAF.com thread I remember where it felt like me and Stump were the only ones arguing against letting the government be given a backdoor into some technology or something because it would violate basic security design, not even because it was the government doing it.

Yup, sounds like a NeoGAF thread. I think my favorite example of this Three Stooges style plotting has to be when the NSA purposefully submitted a faulty encryption algorithm with a backdoor for standardization and then pretended it was an accident. Actually now that I'm looking it up again it turns out it was a Snowden leak, too. This is the kind of shit that turns people into libertarians.

It's GAF/ERA, where there is a cult of corporatism and authority worship. GAF's entire shtick was built on that.  People jerking off over Bish and every other mod exerting themselves over discussions and banning people for wrongthink while figuratively strutting around and grandstanding for adulation from an audience of dopes.  Of course they believe in government monitoring of our private lives: those sites literally condition people into wanting it.

[Trent Dole]

WE INVENTED IT IT'S OURS TO RUIN

https://twitter.com/hello__caitlin/status/933403188161495040

https://twitter.com/LLW902/status/933404864448667648

[seagrams hotsauce]

Was the guy being a douche or anything about it to warrant having his hat taken?  If he was just wearing it and some dude decided he didn't like it and wanted to take it then I have no problem him being charged.  He's an adult and that really is unacceptable.  It's not the 3rd grade.  Still funny to see Trump fans whine about shit though.

this is some pussy shit for real. In no world should any cop have to deal with legitimately pursuing someone who stole a fuckin hat

And your solution to someone crossing boundaries like that?  wait wait, you're a tough guy I bet. 

Besides being a douche for supporting Trump and seemingly petty I don't see what the guy did wrong.

I'm not gonna call the cops if someone snatches my hat lol if that makes me a tough guy then standards are pretty fuckin low

[Mupepe]

But you will just let people come up and take your stuff?  Good to know.

[seagrams hotsauce]

 

[MIMIC]

It really stuns me how "shocked" people get when they see how reluctant Trump is to completely condemn Moore for his behavior. The country rewarded his fuckery by giving him the U.S. Presidency for Christ's sake!  He's not going to turn the corner now, or ever. Trump's moral bankruptcy was sanctioned by the American people (technically by the Electoral College, but whatever). Why would he now start doing what's right? If I were him, I certainly wouldn't.

[Steve Contra]

Trump's support now entirely consists of profoundly stupid white people, which has it's spiritual center in Alabama. Of course he's not going to abandon Moore.

[I'm a Puppy!]

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/22/us/politics/joe-barton-explicit-photo-twitter.html

[etiolate]

the crusty dong

[Nola]

FCC Chairman Ajit Pai's proposed order finds that state and local laws must be preempted if they conflict with the US government's policy of deregulating broadband Internet service, FCC officials said.

Senior FCC officials also provided some more details on the rollback of federal net neutrality rules. For the most part, all consumer protections in the 2015 net neutrality order are being eliminated. That goes beyond the core net neutrality rules that outlaw blocking, throttling, and paid prioritization.

For example, rules requiring disclosure of hidden fees and data caps will be overturned. The FCC will relinquish its role in evaluating whether ISPs can charge competitors for data cap exemptions and will no longer oversee interconnection disputes that harm Internet service quality.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/11/fcc-will-also-order-states-to-scrap-plans-for-their-own-net-neutrality-laws/
 

[Madrun Badrun]

https://i.imgur.com/81aByLj.gifv

[Nola]

https://i.imgur.com/81aByLj.gifv

Wouldn't it be much more accurate for the GIF to say "It must be the ISP's restricting our hologram streams?"   

[Madrun Badrun]

https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/ywb83y/justin-trudeau-is-very-concerned-with-fcc-plan-to-roll-back-net-neutrality-donald-trump

[I'm a Puppy!]

Now I'm not advocating violence or anything. But you'd better believe if the internet was a thing in the French revolution NO ONE would think about getting rid of net neutrality because they knew they'd be looking down at the guillotine platform.

Just sayin'

[benjipwns]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/11/22/37-of-38-economists-said-the-gop-tax-plans-would-grow-the-debt-the-38th-misread-the-question/

 

[Mandark]

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/11/fcc-will-also-order-states-to-scrap-plans-for-their-own-net-neutrality-laws/

This is going to cause a huge backlash among Republicans, who sincerely care about states' rights.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/11/22/37-of-38-economists-said-the-gop-tax-plans-would-grow-the-debt-the-38th-misread-the-question/

This is going to cause a huge backlash among Republicans, who sincerely care about the budget deficit.

[chronovore]

Does the Washington Post limit everyone's article access count per month, or is it just for viewers outside their advertising region? I've seen both in action, I'm just curious.

[bluemax]

This is really poorly written. I'm not being benji-contrarian about the argument or anything as I don't even have much of one to start with it just for discussion sake, it's just...bad. (Maybe it's me anyway.)

When did this trend of writing an article where sections stop. An effectively new article begins with an entirely unrelated premise starts. And repeat. Then don't even bother to tie it together in the end. When did that come back into vogue? I thought that had died off during the 1990s.

spoiler (click to show/hide)

Actually, I'm probably just butthurt he doesn't cite my Bore posts about immigration and related ethnic "tensions" (black lives matter's war on cops came too late for my first version of this thesis( deciding the entire GOP Primary from like 2014, nor my later noting that the weird cycle of the Wallace/Reagan/Perot voter was coming into play again. And he calls himself senior editor of The Atlantic yet he isn't reading the premier place for vile analysis and L distribution, the Bore political thread.

[close]

I think it started when "longform" became a thing. It is kind of annoying.

Didn't read the article but I will say the obsession with the alt right/Nazis has led some to overlook the fact that conservatives don't have to be alt right in order to be assholes driven by resentment and racial/sexual/etc bias. Ben Shapiro isn't alt right and has largely stood against Bannon since leaving the site, nor is he a Trump guy last I checked...but he's a typical far right conservative on many issues. No he's not a Nazi but he believes white supremacy is largely a myth, Obama was basically a racist, gay/trans people are largely deviant behaviorists demanding rights that don't apply to them etc.

So Trump isn't far off from where many of these people land on the political spectrum. In fact you could say they're well within the same ballpark. Hence republican views on immigration, black shit, gay shit, etc largely mirroring Trump. A lot of these people held all types of ugly beliefs and if anything, 8 years of Obama drove them off a fucking cliff.

This is also why I disliked the attempt by democrats to seperate Trump from the GOP. This IS your father's Republican Party, socially at least.

That's a large part of what the piece was saying. Obama, regardless of what he did, by virtue of his skin color and religious background, scared a lot of people and that brought a lot of ugly stuff about our country further into the light.