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

[Tami]

I've mostly been watching it all fall apart on social media, so a lot of it is still rumors I guess, but I did find one thread with sources. I don't know how reliable the sources are, everything is moving so fast.
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/202...d-This-is-huge
https://cybernews.com/news/70tb-of-p...y-researchers/

I'm into tech and found it fascinating how the site screwed up their security so badly. Thanks for the links.

[Joker]

McKinley, Harrison, Chester Arthur, and Rutherford Hayes were mediocrities. Taft and Coolidge were decent.


The GOP is not the only party that's changed in the last century. The Democratic Party went from being the Party of Ku Klux Klan to being the Party of the Civil Rights Movement. They had Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. Unfortunately they also had bad presidents Andrew Jackson, Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan and Andrew Johnson. Woodrow Wilson is both good and bad POTUS. He helped France and UK end the World War I but he implemented the policy of racial segregation in the federal government.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presid...rnment_offices

This is why I said you shouldn’t compare Lincoln’s Republican Party with what we have today, because it’s literally not the same.

[Revolutionary_Jack]

Woodrow Wilson is both good and bad POTUS. He helped France and UK end the World War I but he implemented the policy of racial segregation in the federal government.

Woodrow Wilson is a complete and utter fraud.

This video channel puts it well:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hm0Gzz53YJo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3hRd8B_vZiA

Wilson's intervention in World War 1 was unnecessary and while people overpraise him as "the voice of reason" and other such nosh, it was also incidental to the end of the war (which would likely have ended with or without American intervention), not to mention a blatant violation of his campaign promise at the start of his 2nd Term that America would not enter World War 1 which was incredibly polarizing and unpopular. At the same time, Wilson was involved in a military intervention in Mexico to suppress a revolution there.

His supposed statesmanship at Versailles and others largely amounted to encouraging ethnic nationalism in Eastern Europe, whose long term consequences include everything from post-war irredentism all the way to the Balkan crisis of the '90s. I am not saying Wilson caused fascism, but I am saying that his actions did the opposite of cooling the flames. Likewise we can't forget that at the same time he sicced American troops and bankrolled the Whites in the Russian Civil War, which included by the way a battle fought against the Red Army during Armistice Day which the Soviets called "the Battle of Armistice Day".

The worst thing Wilson did by far was after Versailles, where he basically did nothing as the 1918 Pandemic ravaged America, and then he suffered a stroke and basically left the government to essentially be run by his wife, Edith. This included Red Summer, with post-war lynchings of African-Americans, the disgraceful Palmer Raids and the First Red Scare. The ghost of Woodrow Wilson will look fondly on Trump and approve of him more than any President that followed him certainly.

Woodrow Wilson is like Reagan (down to the alliterative name), a great fraud, i.e. both were Presidents who were popular in their day and got this sense of halo around them for their preening on the world stage when their actual policies were bad news, and of course their final days was stage managed by underlings to disguise the infirmity of their boss.

[JCAll]

I'm into tech and found it fascinating how the site screwed up their security so badly. Thanks for the links.

Here's a reddit link I just checked that got updated a few minutes ago, a lot of what I had been reading earlier today wasn't completely accurate, but web archivists still got basically the entire site and are uploading it to the Internet Archive.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ParlerWatch...of_the_parler/

[Tami]

Here's a reddit link I just checked that got updated a few minutes ago, a lot of what I had been reading earlier today wasn't completely accurate, but web archivists still got basically the entire site and are uploading it to the Internet Archive.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ParlerWatch...of_the_parler/

Hmmm.....interesting. Still, I'll keep my eyes out for a more comprehensive account once the dust settles. But yeah, I can see Internet Archivists going after it real fast.

[zinderel]

An Op-Ed on NYT about Hawley's religion-tinged worldview that's basically a kind of theocracy:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/11/o...gtype=Homepage

Capitol Police Chief Sund gave an exit interview so to speak about basically being fired after the Capitol debacle. He puts the blame on the Sergeant at Arms. He does offer this tidbit:

"Just before noon Wednesday, Sund was monitoring Trump’s speech to the crowd on the Ellipse when he was called away. There were reports of two pipe bombs near the Capitol grounds. So Sund didn’t hear the president call on protesters to “fight” against lawmakers preparing to confirm Biden’s victory. Nor did he hear Trump’s personal attorney, Rudolph W. Giuliani, urging the crowd to engage in “trial by combat,” an eerie reference to battles to the death in the series, “Game of Thrones.” Sund said he now suspects that the pipe bombs were an intentional effort to draw officers away from the Capitol perimeter."
https://www.washingtonpost.com/polit...6d6_story.html

I have to say, as someone who has been speaking out against this dominionist garbage for literal decades, it's good to see that finally, major media are tentatively making the connection between dominionism and fundamentalist Islam. The next step is openly acknowledging that particular brand of 'Christianity' as toxic at it's core and is no better than a death cult which should be treated as such, not as a legitimate faith.

But that's down the road. For now, I'll take the incremental gain of recognition of the problem being stated openly...if not completely.

[JCAll]

Hmmm.....interesting. Still, I'll keep my eyes out for a more comprehensive account once the dust settles. But yeah, I can see Internet Archivists going after it real fast.

It might be some of the only fun news coming out of the last few days, I'm excited to see how it all turns out.

[Korath]

Let's not forget that the Crusades ultimately led the Catholic Army to sack the Orthodox Worshipping Byzantine Empire when they sacked Constantinople (a less well known, and far more damaging sack than the more proverbial one that happened centuries later at the hands of the Turks). In fact most of the deaths in the Crusades happened in Europe and not in the Middle East, whether it's the People's Crusade (which led to the first major anti-semitic pogroms of Europe), the Albigensian Crusade (against a heresy that resulted in a massacre that some have called the earliest example of a genocide), the crusades against pagans in the Baltic countries, and of course the 4th Crusade which I mentioned. The Wars of Religion between Catholics and Protestants killed far more people than the Crusades did.

"it can have"?! It's already had that impact. Right wing evangelical preachers in Brazil, in Africa and other parts of the world have preached anti-Darwinian anti-science and other lies. Let's not forget that the War on Terror, the Iraq War and the never-ceasing ulcer of Afghanistan is all founded in the same Christian neo-conservative mentality voiced by W. and others downwards.

Donald J. Trump's steadiest voters and backers come from evangelicals who saw this man entirely without faith in anything other than himself as their agent against the forces of "secularism" all for the sake of a Christian hegemony in the government institutions.

The war in Iraq and its aftershocks spirals ever wider, and the fact that Iraq vets number among the insurrectionists and in casualties, that's no accident or coincidence. The Iraq war was a major self-inflicted wound, a quagmire for which there was no political or military justification, where the drive to prevent Saddam from getting WMD led to North Korea to build WMD in response to what happened to Saddam.

Yeah, it has already started to greatly impact Africa, and the Middle East has been turned into a festering wound since decades now. And I don't just mean since 9/11 and the War on Terror, it started even before that. As for the Albigensian Crusade - and the rest - I live in the region it happened. In fact, my hometown as the dubious honor to be the place where the first Inquisition was created... It's not exactly glamorous, right ? And yeah, the Crusades were terrible in many ways. Incredibly epic at times, but mostly horribles. Of course, can't discount the brutality of the Seldjukids' conquests or how the Ottomans subjugated South-Eastern Europe for centuries (which helps explains in aprt why anti-Muslim sentiments are so strong over there, at elast from what I can tell living in Western Europe and not speaking the local languages).

But Trump and his cronies are clearly an acceleration of something extremely frightening.

[Revolutionary_Jack]

Really cool article from The New Republic:
https://newrepublic.com/article/1608...ughing-capitol

IT addresses the motley nature of the Trump Putsch, the mix of something horrifying and ridiculous.

I am trying to cope with anti-democratic social collapse during a pandemic by reading local news stories about the people who stormed the Capitol. There was the remorseful CEO from the Chicago suburbs—“In a moment of extremely poor judgment … I followed hundreds of others through an open set of doors to the Capitol building”—and the son of a Brooklyn Supreme Court judge, wrapped in fur and a bullet proof vest, seen in photos carrying a police riot shield because he “found it on the floor.”

Then there were the real estate agents: the woman who flew to D.C. on a private jet in a bachelorette-style outing with some girlfriends—“This is a prelude to war,” she exclaimed—and the one who celebrated with a glass of champagne after making it onto the east steps of Congress. There was a marketing employee from Baltimore who wore his work badge during the riot and an aging adjunct professor from Pennsylvania who used to be a member of the state legislature.

Current and former agents of the state were well represented in the crowd: the ex-cop from the Bay Area who was told by the reporter interviewing him that, “to put it plainly, you may be in some legal jeopardy” and the West Virginia state delegate who livestreamed himself breaking into the Capitol—“We’re in! We’re in!” he shouted in a now-deleted video. “Derrick Evans is in the Capitol!”—and has since succumbed to public pressure to resign.

Taken together, you have this soupy thing going on: The storm on the Capitol was extremely goofy and extremely frightening. The people who, once inside the building, stayed within the rope lines like your standard D.C. tourists were part of the same chaotic swirl as the zip-tie guys wearing tactical gear. This is what tends to happen when a lot of people show up somewhere. It can look very stupid even as something important is happening.
...
The heavy career-day vibe at the Capitol was also another reminder that coverage of the Trump coalition and anti-democratic movements in this country is often lazy class caricature. A recent analysis of turnout in the 2016 election revealed that “support for Trump was strongest among the locally rich—that is, white voters with incomes that are high for their area, though not necessarily for the country as a whole.” About two-thirds of his voters that year had incomes above the national average, and he picked up more of them in 2020. This doesn’t mean that every guy who rushed a police barricade was a small business owner, but the presence of working class people in D.C. on Wednesday doesn’t make this a working class movement.

Violent reactionaries are often mischaracterized this way. “Contemporary critics belittled the KKK as an organization of uneducated rural hicks, but they were wrong,” the historian Linda Gordon noted in a 2018 interview with Verso that I was reminded of again last week. Perceptions about place were off—in the 1960s, “50 percent of active Klanspeople were urbanites, and 32 percent lived in the country’s larger cities”—as were ideas about relative wealth—“recent studies of local Klans show that members were mainly middle class and upper working class.”
...
The events in D.C. last week, then, were familiar even as they were strange. The presence of soft boy middle managers in an emergent coalition of MAGA types and more practiced fascists didn’t make any of it unserious—or at least not exclusively that. These associations are a preview of what’s to come that will require mass organizing, direct confrontation, and political courage from our elected officials to root out and defeat. At work here are the guy who was falsely reported to have died after accidentally tasing his own balls and the person who built the pipe bombs police say they discovered at the Democratic and Republican National Committee offices.* This is to be expected: these events are inept playacting and deadly seriousness.

An off-duty police officer from Pennsylvania, who identified himself only as Jeff, told The New York Times that he went to the Capitol last week without a clear sense of what would happen or what he would do when he got there. He intended to be adaptable. “There’s a lot of people here willing to take orders,” he said. “If the orders are given, the people will rise up.”


Later in the same piece we were introduced to Kevin Haag, a 67-year-old retired landscaper from North Carolina who found himself on the steps of the Capitol but refused to go inside. He didn’t like that other people did. Still, he relished the sensation of being on the threshold. “It felt so good, he said, to show people: ‘We are here. See us! Notice us! Pay attention!’”

[BeastieRunner]

Impeachment looming, Democrats urge Pence to help oust Trump.

Get your popcorn, folks!

[worstblogever]

There's word that before Parler went down, that a hacker managed to log in as an administrator on an account from an "admin" who was in charge of account verification but saw the writing on the wall and was abandoning ship on the site.

The crux of this: The hacker could see all the posts that were "deleted". But the site doesn't "delete" anything. When posts are "deleted" even by the people who post them, they are just "invisible" to everyone except admins. So by logging in as an admin, the hacker could see ALL the posts. As in the incriminating ones in regards to 1/6 that Parler was trying to scrap to cover up crimes for users, and said users trying to cover their tracks. The hacker then made multiple new "admin" accounts and got some crowdsourcing help in capturing 99.9% worth of Parler's total data nearly 56TB of it... which they have proxies forwarding to the FBI.

Anti-Fascist of the Year nominee, right there.

[SquirrelMan]

There's word that before Parler went down, that a hacker managed to log in as an administrator on an account from an "admin" who was in charge of account verification but saw the writing on the wall and was abandoning ship on the site.

The crux of this: The hacker could see all the posts that were "deleted". But the site doesn't "delete" anything. When posts are "deleted" even by the people who post them, they are just "invisible" to everyone except admins. So by logging in as an admin, the hacker could see ALL the posts. As in the incriminating ones in regards to 1/6 that Parler was trying to scrap to cover up crimes for users, and said users trying to cover their tracks. The hacker then made multiple new "admin" accounts and got some crowdsourcing help in capturing 99.9% worth of Parler's total data nearly 56TB of it... which they have proxies forwarding to the FBI.

Anti-Fascist of the Year nominee, right there.

We were looking for more official confirmation on that, and I guess this Gizmodo article is that:

https://gizmodo.com/every-deleted-pa...izmodo_twitter

[Robotman]

There's word that before Parler went down, that a hacker managed to log in as an administrator on an account from an "admin" who was in charge of account verification but saw the writing on the wall and was abandoning ship on the site.

The crux of this: The hacker could see all the posts that were "deleted". But the site doesn't "delete" anything. When posts are "deleted" even by the people who post them, they are just "invisible" to everyone except admins. So by logging in as an admin, the hacker could see ALL the posts. As in the incriminating ones in regards to 1/6 that Parler was trying to scrap to cover up crimes for users, and said users trying to cover their tracks. The hacker then made multiple new "admin" accounts and got some crowdsourcing help in capturing 99.9% worth of Parler's total data nearly 56TB of it... which they have proxies forwarding to the FBI.

Anti-Fascist of the Year nominee, right there.

Damn, that's some amazing work.

Make these assholes afraid again to come out from under their rocks.

[Revolutionary_Jack]

There's word that before Parler went down, that a hacker managed to log in as an administrator on an account from an "admin" who was in charge of account verification but saw the writing on the wall and was abandoning ship on the site.

The crux of this: The hacker could see all the posts that were "deleted". But the site doesn't "delete" anything. When posts are "deleted" even by the people who post them, they are just "invisible" to everyone except admins. So by logging in as an admin, the hacker could see ALL the posts. As in the incriminating ones in regards to 1/6 that Parler was trying to scrap to cover up crimes for users, and said users trying to cover their tracks. The hacker then made multiple new "admin" accounts and got some crowdsourcing help in capturing 99.9% worth of Parler's total data nearly 56TB of it... which they have proxies forwarding to the FBI.

Anti-Fascist of the Year nominee, right there.

Through the looking-glass.

Finally we have the hero hacker that Hollywood keep dreaming but in practice hardly ever go after the truly powerful, and mostly seem to be on Putin's dime.

I wonder how anyone in the FBI can justify a promotion for a case like this. Sure they nipped the Whitmer kidnapping/assassination plot in the bud, and kudos on that, but they dropped the ball big-time on the Trump Putsch. And now their hard work is being done by unpaid independent citizens.

[worstblogever]

We were looking for more official confirmation on that, and I guess this Gizmodo article is that:

https://gizmodo.com/every-deleted-pa...izmodo_twitter

Parler's in a special category of "dead" now. It's not just that you can't find a platform to host it, it's that it also allowed user's info to get hacked. It was s***ty in terms of both who was running it, who was using it, and what it was in terms of security. This is "Stormfront" levels of web moderation to point and laugh at.