America - The Official Thread

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Getting creepy stalker vibes from the "Love America Act."

51k1mdEDVEL.jpg
 
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(and yeah, I know schools in the US already teach all that stuff in the upper tweet).
 
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@Eunos_Cosmo Not sure how I missed Maize and Blargh content but it reminds me of a story. In the spring of 2015, my first year on the OSU FSAE team, we were invited to the Chrysler Chelsea proving grounds along with several other B1G homies to test our cars before the big event at MIS. Some of us kids (I was 26) in our school van stopped in Ann Arbor for lunch and decided on a Mexican joint. I don't remember exactly where it was but I do remember the street dead-ended into a grassy part of campus and we were aimed the wrong way. Logical choice - we took our massive diesel Econoline, clearly labelled The Ohio State University, and decided to do a 5-point turn right smack in the middle of an intersection during rush-hour traffic. People were honking, heckling, the whole nine yards. We were just smiling and laughing and waving out the window. Then we took up two parallel parking slots and all the dining space inside the place (there were about 12 of us stuffed in that van). Pretty sure we pissed off more than a few people that day but we left satisfied. I do remember we stopped by Blue Front to stock up on beer after that, and drove precisely the speed limit until we crossed the state line.

* Michigan.
 
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UKMikey


(and yeah, I know schools in the US already teach all that stuff in the upper tweet).
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The cynic in me can't help but think that the GOP has realized that they can't significantly change the voting population en masse, so they're trying to corrupt the future of this country by trying to push through a basterdized version of the history of this county.

I'm probably extremely off-base, but this is my general vibe, especially after the push to remove "teaching CRT" from the classroom.
 
NotThePrez
The cynic in me can't help but think that the GOP has realized that they can't significantly change the voting population en masse, so they're trying to corrupt the future of this country by trying to push through a basterdized version of the history of this county.
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How very "1984" of them.
 
NotThePrez
The cynic in me can't help but think that the GOP has realized that they can't significantly change the voting population en masse, so they're trying to corrupt the future of this country by trying to push through a basterdized version of the history of this county.

I'm probably extremely off-base, but this is my general vibe, especially after the push to remove "teaching CRT" from the classroom.
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Doing what they accuse the other side of doing?

Think you're in the middle of the base, there.
 
Keef
How very Daughters of the Confederacy of them.
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I'd never heard of this organisation and thought it was a Handmaid's Tale reference until I looked it up. Talk about supporting a lost cause.
 
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UKMikey
I'd never heard of this organisation and thought it was a Handmaid's Tale reference until I looked it up. Talk about supporting a lost cause.
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The efforts of the Daughters are widespread. There are confederate monuments across the entire US, including one just south of where I live in Franklin, Ohio. Pathetic. Until Trump came along and showed people that it was okay to let their blatantly bigoted value systems shine, it was mostly taboo to publicly support any of this stuff. It wasn't until very recently that we've learned how deeply these seedy propaganda efforts had penetrated society throughout the 20th century. Now it's not rare to see confederate flags flying in Ohio and frankly not enough is being done to stop it. I'm of the opinion that confederate sympathy should be treated similarly as how Nazism is treated in Germany and honestly this has become such a problem that I don't doubt we'll see a crackdown within our lifetimes, maybe in the next decade or two. I can't even describe how appalling the proliferation and public sympathy of confederate ideology has become. And these people will rail on about "But Dixiecrats!" completely oblivious to the fact that as political party affiliations and platforms have ebbed and flowed over time, the core values of the South have never changed. Despicable. It pains me to even drive through these states and contribute to their economies by stopping at a gas station. They don't deserve it.

Likely unrelated but with the college sports news on Friday that University of Texas and University of Oklahoma will be joining the SEC conference I couldn't help but notice that once this happens all of the SEC teams will fit neatly below the Mason-Dixon line and primarily within former confederate territory.

Guess it's time for the B1G to go to war.
 
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Keef
Likely unrelated but with the college sports news on Friday that University of Texas and University of Oklahoma will be joining the SEC conference I couldn't help but notice that once this happens all of the SEC teams will fit neatly below the Mason-Dixon line and primarily within former confederate territory.

Guess it's time for the B1G to go to war.
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Or a few teams from other conferences join and we have ourselves a Super League.
 
So maybe I missed the conversation but has anybody else put together all the populist pieces from about 2016 and realized how many of them seemed to benefit China? You guys might remember them better than I do. One in particular that I just remembered while watching material about the Pacific situation is Phillipine president Duterte. I'd honestly forgotten about him - I had assumed that the Phillipines were an ally of the US and could be relied on to help counter China but apparently not. Despite the Phillipines previously being friendly to the US, they took a 180 when Duterte was elected in 2016 and become considerably more pro-China. This obviously coincided with Trump's election and despite vocally criticizing China he virtually condoned their various expansion efforts and offensive hacking efforts, doing nothing practical to counter them. Meanwhile for all those years China was expanding unchallenged, confident that the US and the Phillipines - right on their frontline - would allow it to happen. I'm not very familiar with Theresa May's politics but obviously Boris Johnson is a moron and offered basically no assistance to Hong Kong during its debacle, and now it's a lost cause. Havana Syndrome preventing the US from realigning with Cuba so secure our security over there. I don't know, seems like a whole lot of things happened around that time that played right into China's hands and because the White House was comprised the US was dead in the water to prevent any of it.

I'm still convinced that we escaped something terrible by the skin of our teeth. Not sure exactly what it would've been but there was some global-level funny business going on and most of it pointed in the same direction.
 
Language warning for the Law & Crime article linked to in the tweet (and this post) below. The article is also transcribed in full (sans embedded links and screenshots) below, subject to the site's profanity filter, but be warned that the article is still quite graphic in its use of words unlikely to be censored. I've also fully censored homosexual and anti-Semitic slurs that may or may not have been censored by forum software but appear partially censored in the article's text, preventing forum software doing its thing.


lawandcrime.com

'A Bullet in Your Compromised Satanic Skull': Maryland Man Charged with Sending Twisted Death Threats to Dr. Anthony Fauci

A just-unsealed FBI affidavit contains screenshots of twisted messages prosecutors claim Connally sent Fauci and Dr. Francis Collins, the current Director of the National Institutes of Health.
lawandcrime.com lawandcrime.com
Three days after this past Christmas, global coronavirus infections rose above 81 million and the U.S. tally rose above 19 million. Dr. Anthony Fauci warned the country of a post-holiday surge. Not everyone appreciated the words of caution and Fauci’s persistent efforts to protect the nation from the deadly pandemic.

That day, on Dec. 28, 2020, a user associated with the email account naturtheateralhena@protonmail.com sent a missive to Fauci with the subject line: “Hope you get a bullet in your compromised satanic skull today.”

Though Fauci had spoken publicly before about receiving death threats, the details of the ghastly communications the top infectious disease expert found in his inbox became public for the first time on Tuesday.

Federal prosecutors identified the sender as 56-year-old Maryland man Thomas Patrick Connally, Jr., who was charged under seal on Monday.

Arrested on Tuesday, a just-unsealed FBI affidavit contains screenshots of twisted messages prosecutors claim Connally sent Fauci and Dr. Francis Collins, the current Director of the National Institutes of Health.

“Every time I see your sickening elf visage I literally get sick,” the Dec. 28th message to Fauci declared. “You are a lying sack of ****, all the way back to your ******** HIV scam. You are a sickening, compromised, satanic freemason criminal, and I hope you get a rope around your vile elf neck, and a bullet in your disgusting elf face tonight. Hope someone takes a baseball bat to your dirty lying elf skull and puts your [sic] out of your misery, you sickening vile piece of criminal DOG ****.”

Proton Mail is a Swiss-based encrypted email service that only sends messages securely if both the sender and recipient have accounts on its system.

On April 24, 2021, the same email account fired off the first of seven threats that night, starting at 10:09 p.m., according to the FBI.

“You and your disgusting wife and daughters are getting 6 mandatory shots to their disgusting pig snouts while you watch,” another message said. “You and your entire family will be dragged into the street, beaten to death, and set on fire.”

Half a dozen messages like it allegedly followed, taunting Fauci as an “elf,” telling him that he and his family would be “lynched,” and flinging homophobic and antisemitic slurs at him like “” and “**,” according to court papers.

A Catholic-raised humanist, Fauci is the Brooklyn-born grandson of Italian immigrants, who has been married to nurse and bioethicist Christine Grady. The ill-suited slurs hurled at him are uncensored in the FBI’s affidavit. The messages twice call Fauci a “freemason.”

Prosecutors claim that Connally sent similar messages to Collins, whose received emails are also embedded in the affidavit.

On Dec. 12, Collins was interviewed by the Washington Post on a number of topics, including resistance to the vaccine by white evangelicals.

Months later, on April 24, Connally sent Collins a message bearing the subject line: “‘white evangelicals’ are going to smash your wife’s teeth out with baseball bats.”

“You sickening dirty piece of anti-White racist **** DOG ****,” the message said, with the antisemitic slur unredacted in the original.

Throughout the tirades to Fauci and Collins, the sender appeared to obsess over the idea of “mandatory” vaccines, even though the federal government never proposed such a policy.

The FBI says that authorities connected Connally to the emails by tying it to an Instagram account of the same name: “Naturtheater Alhena.” That social media account was created from an IP address associated with a property Connolly owned last year, authorities say.

According to court papers, the rental extension associated with that property listed Connolly’s phone number and separate Mail.com account, which in turn was used to communicate with the Proton Mail account.

A search for the Proton Mail address suggests the threats from it may have been prolific.

On Aug. 7, 2019, Iranian-American scholar Reza Aslan shared threats from that account with similar anti-Jewish abuse.

Judaism is the only of the three Abrahamic faiths Aslan did not espouse. Aslan, who converted to evangelical Christianity from Shia Islam in his youth, became a Muslim again as an adult.

Connally faces two counts of threats against a federal official and sending an interstate communication containing a threat to harm. He will have his initial appearance in federal court on Wednesday, prosecutors say.
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TexRex
Language warning for the Law & Crime article linked to in the tweet (and this post) below. The article is also transcribed in full (sans embedded links and screenshots) below, subject to the site's profanity filter, but be warned that the article is still quite graphic in its use of words unlikely to be censored. I've also fully censored homosexual and anti-Semitic slurs that may or may not have been censored by forum software but appear partially censored in the article's text, preventing forum software doing its thing.


lawandcrime.com

'A Bullet in Your Compromised Satanic Skull': Maryland Man Charged with Sending Twisted Death Threats to Dr. Anthony Fauci

A just-unsealed FBI affidavit contains screenshots of twisted messages prosecutors claim Connally sent Fauci and Dr. Francis Collins, the current Director of the National Institutes of Health.
lawandcrime.com lawandcrime.com
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Not all heroes wear capes. [non-sarcastic]
 
thetriad.thebulwark.com

What "Back the Blue" Really Means

It's about the violence.
thetriad.thebulwark.com thetriad.thebulwark.com
If you’ve been reading this newsletter for a while, you know how cop-skeptical I am. Individually, police officers often act unprofessionally and collectively police officers often turn a blind eye to the misconduct of their colleagues. And generally speaking, it’s the cover up that reveals the rot.

Anyone can make a bad decision in a snap-second situation. Corruption is when an institution covers up its wrong decisions instead of bringing them to light.

But as I’ve been saying since January 8, by and large the performance of the Capitol police officers on the ground during the insurrection was exemplary. (The performance of the higher-ups is a different matter.) It was everything we want from law enforcement: They deescalated violent situations when they could. They placed themselves in harm’s way in order to protect the members of Congress. It is a miracle—a damn miracle—that only one of the insurrectionists was killed.

Because if the Capitol Police had acted like the Buffalo PD, then the death toll would have been unthinkably high.

Here is something I want you to consider when we talk about the ways in which both conservatism and the Republican party are trending toward actual, no-fooling authoritarianism:

Many Republicans and conservatives are quick to defend the police any time they act unprofessionally. Shoot a black kid? They had a reasonable suspicion he might be armed. Choke black guy to death? He was resisting arrest. Black Lives Matter? Blue Lives Matter, bitches.

But when it comes to the Capitol Police doing their jobs professionally, suddenly these same people are quite anti-cop:





The situational nature of their support for law enforcement is revealing. When these people talk about “backing the Blue” what they really mean is that they support violence against their enemies.

Never forget this.

Authoritarianism is real. The door to political violence has been opened in America for the first time in 50 years. It’s time to stand up.
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TexRex
thetriad.thebulwark.com

What "Back the Blue" Really Means

It's about the violence.
thetriad.thebulwark.com thetriad.thebulwark.com
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Saw these words posted to Reddit earlier and I agree wholeheartedly: Conservatives don't actually like cops, they like what cops do to the people they hate.

They're two separate entities. It's sort of like "the enemy of my enemy is my friend". Because conservatives' and cops' distaste for "undesirables" is historically consistent and often visible, it appears that they're working together and support each other. On an individual level that may occur but largely they don't. And that's why when the cops start defending the people the conservatives hate, conservatives begin to hate the cops.
 
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Why multinational corporations require stricter regulation, in a nutshell. Please watch the entirety of the video before jumping to conclusions.

 
slate.com

The Courts Now Say a Teacher Who Puts a First Grader in a Chokehold Has Qualified Immunity

slate.com slate.com
The judge-made doctrine of qualified immunity has received significant attention over the past 14 months as the nation has grappled yet again with the persistent abuse of Black people at the hands of law enforcement.

The focus has centered on how qualified immunity protects law enforcement officers who abuse civilians, including children, on the streets and in neighborhoods. But as the debate over reform continues, it is important to keep in mind that qualified immunity extends beyond just police-civilian interactions. As two recent decisions by the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals—the federal appeals court that covers Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi—lay bare, the doctrine is also wreaking havoc on children in school.

In June, the 5th Circuit published two opinions that allow public school employees to physically abuse students without fear of liability under federal civil rights law. The 5th Circuit is uniquely restrictive of students’ rights, and because of the doctrine of qualified immunity, there is little reason to believe that the court will change its jurisprudence on the issue anytime soon.

In T.O. v. Fort Bend Independent School District, the 5th Circuit dismissed a complaint brought on behalf of a first grader who claimed that a teacher seized him by the neck, threw him to the floor, and held him in a chokehold for several minutes. Six days later, in J.W. v. Paley, the court tossed a lawsuit filed on behalf of a special education student who was tased by a school resource officer multiple times, including after the student was lying face down on the ground and not struggling.

Both students brought claims under the Fourth Amendment, which protects civilians from unreasonable seizures, including excessive force at the hands of government actors. Typically, Fourth Amendment excessive force claims arise in the law enforcement context—where police beat or kill a person in the course of detaining them, for instance. The amendment applies to state actors writ large, not just the police, and therefore should presumably apply to public school employees. But the 5th Circuit has been unwilling to say that students have a Fourth Amendment right to be free from excessive force in school.

The driving doctrinal force behind T.O. and J.W. losing their Fourth Amendment claims was qualified immunity, which requires that a constitutional right be clearly established before a state actor can be held liable for violating the right. Because the court’s prior cases did not clarify whether students are protected against physical abuse under the Fourth Amendment, the teacher who choked T.O. and the school resource officer who tased J.W. could not be held liable, regardless of how unreasonably they acted.

Qualified immunity’s implications do not end at T.O. and J.W. losing their cases. Under qualified immunity, the court is allowed to conclude that a right is not clearly established and dismiss the case on that basis, without addressing the substance of the underlying right. The practical effect is that it is still unclear whether students have a Fourth Amendment right to be free from excessive force in school and the court can therefore continue to dismiss these types of cases on qualified immunity grounds, without clarifying the right, in perpetuity.

The upshot of these cases is that students in Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi do not have an enforceable constitutional right to be free from physical violence at the hands of school employees.

The legal landscape is indefensible and leaves children vulnerable to significant abuse. Texas and Mississippi account for a nationally disproportionate number of incidents of corporal punishment. Black boys are twice as likely as white boys to be corporally punished, while Black girls are three times as likely as white girls.

It’s also nonsensical given the significant police presence in schools—and especially in schools with high Black and Latinx populations. In fact, the employee who tased J.W. was a school resource officer, which is just an allusive title given to police officers assigned to work in schools.

The crisis of police brutality against Black people is a national emergency that requires reform on many levels, including ending qualified immunity. Abolishing the doctrine will also help deliver on the promise of school as a safe space for learning and thriving.
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Keef
Saw these words posted to Reddit earlier and I agree wholeheartedly: Conservatives don't actually like cops, they like what cops do to the people they hate.

They're two separate entities. It's sort of like "the enemy of my enemy is my friend". Because conservatives' and cops' distaste for "undesirables" is historically consistent and often visible, it appears that they're working together and support each other. On an individual level that may occur but largely they don't. And that's why when the cops start defending the people the conservatives hate, conservatives begin to hate the cops.
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Substitute "Cops" for "Israelis" and its exactly the same. I'm sure this is far from the only analogue. The entire modern American conservative ethos is based on punishing anything and anyone they consider undesirable. I'd argue it's not even about hate...it's about the desperate desire to feel superior to anyone....itself probably a manifestation of personal disappointment or feelings of uselessness/inferiority - I mean, we aren't talking about high achievers here.

"There has to be a reason I haven't achieved the American dream! It must be the [insert brown people here] who have ruined [insert cultural touchstone here]! They must be destroyed!"
 
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Eunos_Cosmo
Substitute "Cops" for "Israelis" and its exactly the same. I'm sure this is far from the only analogue. The entire modern American conservative ethos is based on punishing anything and anyone they consider undesirable. I'd argue it's not even about hate...it's about the desperate desire to feel superior to anyone....itself probably a manifestation of personal disappointment or feelings of uselessness/inferiority - I mean, we aren't talking about high achievers here.

"There has to be a reason I haven't achieved the American dream! It must be the [insert brown people here] who have ruined [insert cultural touchstone here]! They must be destroyed!"
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To a certain extent, that's Trump. Every time Trump "owns the libs", they score a personal superiority point because Trump is their representative. What he's doing is not as important as who he's doing it to.

Tangentially me of my Trump/Putin ramblings. The aspiration is authoritarian control, and so the role model is an authoritarian.

www.gtplanet.net

America - The Official Thread

South Carolina doesn't have enough drugs to kill people so they'll shoot them instead.
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