All purpose news and politics thread part VI: This Is Not The Time For Posing

[Wildling]

I’d worry less about the random nobody if it weren’t for the sense that several people agree with him here, which suggests significant support elsewhere.

Yeah nobody likes the hidden deplorable army either. Unless you directly, materially benefit from their ugliness.

[Jack Dracula]

Except for the part where the 1967 Detroit Riots, the 1965 Watts Riots, the Rodney King Beating, the Floyd George Murder and the Tulsa Race Massacre weren't in the South. Wisconsin, Indiana, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Ohio that helped elect Trump aren't in the South. Arkansas and even Mississippi don't have armed rednecks storming their Statehouses the way Michigan does. Tennessee doesn't have the kind of Militia presence you find in Montana, Colorado, or Idaho.

Thinking that racism, small mindedness and fascistic nationalism are purely Southern defects is a bigotry of its own kind.

I was kidding.

[DrNewGod]

I was kidding.

That being the case, I apologise for any insult to you. It's too hard to read tone and intent in text. I've been misread myself (on those occasions I wasn't being a jerk that deserved a kick in the teeth).

Still, I'm going to let the post stand, rather than delete it. I've lived in enough places around the US and the world to have learned that a dim view of the US South is all too common, sometimes deservedly, but without regard for whether the distain is hypocritical.

[Jack Dracula]

That being the case, I apologise for any insult to you. It's too hard to read tone and intent in text. I've been misread myself (on those occasions I wasn't being a jerk that deserved a kick in the teeth).

Still, I'm going to let the post stand, rather than delete it. I've lived in enough places around the US and the world to have learned that a dim view of the US South is all too common, sometimes deservedly, but without regard for whether the distain is hypocritical.

Lol, not a problem. You're one of my favorite posters.

[DrNewGod]

Lol, not a problem. You're one of my favorite posters.

...and now I'm blushing. many thanks.

[Jack Dracula]

AI are very flawed systems, they have the same drawbacks as we do. They can be racist and misogynist, that's because of the people coding them code in their own values. An AI became a Nazi when it was introduced to the internet within a short time frame, for example. I forgot what it was called but it was very high profile years ago. AI's aren't going to save us, there is no "autopilot" for governing. It's not like computers can't be corrupted or have glitches, you can't hack a human being but you can with a computer system.

My friend, our representatives are hacked every day. A large campaign contribution is all it takes. If your job status was dependant on you raising a certain amount of money every quarter don't you think you'd feel obligated to keep happy the people who gave you big checks?
Every system is vulnerable if you know the weaknesses. Every lobbyist on K Street is basically a hacker.

[Mister Mets]

And while a discussion about an aggrieved cheerleader who can't get into college because she used hate speech at a schools with, by all accounts, a huge problem with systematic racism might have been a nice distraction...

Can we talk about how Trump is calling on protests in DC (like the "protests" from the Proud Boys attacking historic black churches in DC recently) when the electoral votes are tallied on Jan. 6th? He's literally starting to foment an uprising telling them to "be wild"?

Because this s*** is scary. He's not "both sides"ing Charlottesville now, he's sending them e-vites.

What should we do about this? And what are you doing to encourage that?

[Revolutionary_Jack]

In actual real world news. A real bombshell

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/...i_EaFT-leWf0jw

Russia on Monday said its coronavirus death toll was more than three times higher than it had previously reported, making it the country with the third-largest number of fatalities in the world.

For months President Vladimir Putin has boasted about Russia’s low death rate from the virus, saying earlier this month that it had done a “better” job at managing the pandemic than western countries.

Experts, including medical professionals and data scientists, have questioned the official statistics for months, accusing the government of playing down the country’s outbreak.

On Monday, Russian officials admitted that was true.

The Rosstat statistics agency said that the number of deaths from all causes recorded between January and November had risen by 229,700 compared with the previous year.

“More than 81 percent of this increase in mortality over this period is due to COVID,” said Deputy Prime Minister Tatyana Golikova, meaning that some 186,000 Russians have died from COVID-19 during 2020.

The data also showed that more people died in Russia in November 2020 than in any other single month since such data began being collected 16 years ago, the Moscow News newspaper reported.

Excess deaths – the difference between all registered deaths in 2020 and previous years – are seen as one of the most reliable indicators of the number of people who have died as a result of the pandemic.

While Russia has confirmed more than three million coronavirus cases since the start of the pandemic – the fourth-highest caseload in the world – it has reported only 55,265 deaths and has been criticised for only listing COVID-19 deaths where an autopsy has confirmed the virus as the main cause.

Alexei Raksha, a demographer who left Rosstat in July, told the AFP news agency last week that the Russian health ministry and the consumer health ministry had falsified coronavirus numbers.

Rosstat’s new figures mean that Russia now has the world’s third-highest death toll from COVID-19 after the United States, where 334,618 people have died, and Brazil, with deaths of 191,570, according to data from Johns Hopkins University.

On one hand this isn't surprising...on the other hand it's amazing that this got exposed before the year got done. I mean wow.

And if Putin kept this under wraps for so long, what are the death tolls really like in other countries with dodgy data?

And of course if the Russian state officials are admitting this finally, that means the situation is truly worse or is about to get worse.

[Steel Inquisitor]

My friend, our representatives are hacked every day. A large campaign contribution is all it takes. If your job status was dependant on you raising a certain amount of money every quarter don't you think you'd feel obligated to keep happy the people who gave you big checks?
Every system is vulnerable if you know the weaknesses. Every lobbyist on K Street is basically a hacker.

Not like this they aren't. No, large campaign contributions don't make puppets out of politicians like I was describing, lobbying is far more complex than that. Some weaknesses are worse than others. The metaphor is really stretching credibility here. K Street is a problem but this would make them look like amateurs and they don't need to pay any politicians to do anything with an AI. It's not leftists politicians don't participate in getting donors to donate to them, and not having access to money isn't something that helps them otherwise they wouldn't even bother doing that they do that because having money in campaigns is a big advantage to have running for elections.

[4saken1]

That being the case, I apologise for any insult to you. It's too hard to read tone and intent in text. I've been misread myself (on those occasions I wasn't being a jerk that deserved a kick in the teeth).

Still, I'm going to let the post stand, rather than delete it. I've lived in enough places around the US and the world to have learned that a dim view of the US South is all too common, sometimes deservedly, but without regard for whether the distain is hypocritical.

Nimbyism in particular is fairly common within liberal neighborhoods. I've heard the difference between liberal racism and conservative racism described as such: Conservatives tend to not mind how close minorities get, as long as they don't get too high. Liberals tend to not mind how high minorities climb as long as they don't get too close.

[worstblogever]

Suggestive

Thank you ChadH, for handling the obvious. Truly, I wish someone didn't have to do it.

[worstblogever]

On this date in 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, as well as 2019, “Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day posted profiles of Larry Pittman, a member of the North Carolina House of Representatives, a pastor and a Birther who was first appointed to office in 2011, and has barely survived a few re-election scares because his great ideas for making our country better seem to fit the pattern of working towards a theocracy, naming Christianity our state religion, and eliminating all income taxes and using only sales tax to generate revenue for the government. Pittman also was a trendsetter in demonizing Planned Parenthood years prior to the Center for Medical Progress doing so, saying they were a “murder for hire” organization and 75% of their revenue was generated in making money off of abortions, and insists that in 1992, he and his friends found baby parts in a Planned Parenthood dumpster that were, we quote, “the consistency of hamburger”. He’s so pro-life, in fact, that he has called for a return to public hangings, and in the order of who went to the gallows, he listed “abortionists, rapists, and kidnappers”, remarkably forgetting that abortion is legal, and omitting murderers from his list. His other big wacky moment from our first profile was when he reacted to meager gun control suggestions by producing pro-gun legislation after the Sandy Hook massacre, and when asked to defend such an action from the press, warned against the government coming for or the United Nations coming for all our guns, and he also thinks Common Core Standards are “a Marxist attack to destroy us from within”, in but two of his paranoid rants worthy of an episode of Alex Jones’ InfoWars. This should perhaps come as little surprise, but you may have heard about how the North Carolina GOP produced the anti-gay HB 2 Law that allowed for the legal discrimination of LGBTQ citizens in the state… well, it should come as little shock that Larry Pittman was a co-sponsor of the bill. Who would have guessed that a Fundamentalist theocratic lunatic also hates gay people, right?

So, how bugs*** crazy can Larry Pittman get? Well, back in April of 2017, he got on Facebook to talk about his insane effort to try to pass legislation to ignore the Supreme Court’s Obergefell v. Hodges ruling (good luck with that) and decided to wax poetic about the founder of the Republican Party, Abraham Lincoln. And, the Great Emancipator, it seems, in the eyes of Larry Pittman, is just like Hitler:

“And if Hitler had won, should the world just get over it? Lincoln was the same sort (of) tyrant, and personally responsible for the deaths of over 800,000 Americans in a war that was unnecessary and unconstitutional.”

Through 2018, Pittman remained bonkers. After the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, Pittman posted on Facebook that the entire shooting was staged, and part of a conspiracy created by “Communist Democrats” to “push for gun control so they can take over the country”. The outrage over his comment made Pittman pause from sponsoring a bill he had planned to try and arm teachers… until March of 2019, when Pittman filed legislation to allow teachers to carry guns in the classroom. Towards the end of that month, he voted against a bill to ban corporal punishment in schools, commenting that he is grateful for every “whipping my daddy gave me”.

In September of 2019, Pittman filed HB 65, also known as the “Marriage Reaffirmation Amendment Act”, which would supposedly ban marriage equality in North Carolina and order state officials to ignore the Supreme Court’s Obergefell v. Hodges ruling. (Pretty safe to say that’s some unconstitutional “state’s rights” lunacy). But, after a constituent wrote a letter to Pittman telling him that pandering to intolerant old people who think the Bible should be the law of the land, Pittman responded calmly and politely explaining his position. NAH, we’re just kidding, Pittman wrote back to his own constituent and told them that he wouldn’t “change with the times” and told them that “if you have a complaint about that, tell it to Satan when you see him.”

Larry Pittman twice made headlines in June of 2020, first by calling for the police to just gun down BlackLivesMatter protesters, calling the protesters, “vermin”, and falsely creating an anti-Semitic narrative that they were funded by George Soros:

”This is war. Our people have a right to expect our leaders to be on our side, not surrender to the lawless, godless mob. 'These vermin don't care about George Floyd or any other individual, except maybe their financial sponsor, George Soros. They are bent on destroying our country and our way of life, and they will use any tragedy, any slogan, any excuse to convince clueless people that their radical injustice is justice.Whatever stolen goods or money you recover from them will go to help the business owners whose places of business have been invaded … If they resist and attack you, shoot them.”

Only days later, he was on to spreading Covidiot propaganda, sharing an online conspiracy theory from Michael Speciale (who we have profiled for a few years). Pittman pushed the narrative that wearing masks during the pandemic was more of a health risk than going without them.

We reiterate, Pittman is insane. He survived a primary challenge in 2020 with 60% of the vote, and in November, narrowly won re-election with 51% of the vote against his Democratic challenger, Gail Young (hanging on by less than 1400 votes). He thus will continue raving about conspiracy theories for at least another two years and being one of the worst legislators in the United States.

[WestPhillyPunisher]

This Year Was A Disaster For The Planet

From record-breaking wildfires to devastating hurricanes, human-driven climate change keeps killing us.

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Joe Biden Alleges Trump Administration Obstructing National Security Transition

“It’s nothing short of irresponsible,” the president-elect said Monday. Show of hands if you're surprised at what happened here.

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Trump’s Ego Could Cost Millions Of Unemployed Americans A Week Of Aid

The president’s delay in signing COVID-19 relief legislation could have major consequences. Let's call a spade a spade: at this point, Trump no longer gives a damn, provided he ever did.

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GOP Congressman Sues Mike Pence In Long-Shot Effort To Overturn Biden’s Victory

Rep. Louie Gohmert teamed up with Arizona’s would-be Republican electors in an attempt to give Pence sole power over counting electoral votes in Congress. This would be hilarious if it wasn't so damn pathetic. Speaking of pathetic....

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Trump Mocked For Posting Campaign Ad 7 Weeks After Losing Election

The tagline is “Trump: He’s What’s For America,” a riff on the beef industry’s “Beef: It’s What’s For Dinner” slogan. That slogan should be, "Trump: He's What's For Trump".

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Nashville Bombing Suspect Told Neighbor: The World Will Never Forget Me

Anthony Quinn Werner reportedly made the chilling comment after the neighbor asked if Santa was going to bring him anything good for Christmas.

[PaulBullion]

Sounds like a huge misunderstanding and that even the police were unsure what they should do.

I take your point that his ethnicity is what caused him to not be given the benefit of the doubt.

What I am curious about - and you have every right not to answer that - is where you had gotten your previours information that made the boy's family look so unfavorable. Was it news sources? People in your life? Who tried to manipulate you that way?

[PaulBullion]

If the reaction was excessive, that seems to be the important thing.

Sometimes the need of the many outweigh the need of one privileged girl who ... checks note ... had to get her degree at a different college than she had originally planned.