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

[WestPhillyPunisher]

‘Slow-motion insurrection’: How GOP seizes election power

It’s no secret the GQP has absolutely no platform or policies to offer their constituents, no solutions to the many problems plaguing the country, headed by the virus which they also don’t give a shit about. All they want is to grab power by any means necessary, nothing else matters, not the Constitution, not anything.

[4saken1]

Democrats will claim that independent redistricting commissions will solve all problems of gerrymandering, and then some of them will try to trick the redistricting commission to get their preferred outcomes.

https://www.propublica.org/article/h...ing-commission

I'm sure people here can point to times they'll say the right did not honor the spirit of an agreement.

I don't know what the solution is.

Hot damn, there's that liberal media bias again! Honestly, I am glad ProPublica called California Democrats out on this. I doubt that there are many right wing media sources that would do the same to Republicans. I do not, however, think that just because somebody is trying to (and occasionally succeeds in) gaming the system that this is any reason to not attempt to fix a broken system. There needs to be some litmus test that determines whether redistricting will lead , in most cases, to representation which accurately represents the demographics of a given State's constituency and measures that the minority Party can take to combat abuses of the systems in place by the majority Party.

[Mister Mets]

Hot damn, there's that liberal media bias again! Honestly, I am glad ProPublica called California Democrats out on this. I doubt that there are many right wing media sources that would do the same to Republicans. I do not, however, think that just because somebody is trying to (and occasionally succeeds in) gaming the system that this is any reason to not attempt to fix a broken system. There needs to be some litmus test that determines whether redistricting will lead , in most cases, to representation which accurately represents the demographics of a given State's constituency and measures that the minority Party can take to combat abuses of the systems in place by the majority Party.

Many media sources will have a bias, but still be willing to report on times when their preferred side is clearly in the wrong. I know sports metaphors are imperfect as these are more serious matters, but biased referees aren't going to put the finger on the scale for their preferred side all the time; a tenth of the time is often enough.

I am aware of many right wing sources thatare willing to call out Republicans when wrong, as evident by the National Review affiliated podcasts, or conservative substacks I read. It is a bit telling that you consider right wing media sources counterbalances to something like Pro Publica, when my understanding is that Pro Publica is not supposed to be a left wing media source. It's not Mother Jones or the documentaries of Michael Moore. It should be the mainstream media.

Someone gaming the system doesn't mean the initial effort is meaningless. When it comes to gerrymandering, it does mean there's a legitimate concern that so called independent redistricting commissions are basically an excuse to get preferred outcomes, with a veneer of respectability, along with less scrutiny and oversight in mechanisms where Democrats have more power, because Republicans otherwise win too many local and gubernatorial elections. This is why I'm really suspicious of any independent commission that is not given clear guidelines in advance, so that we have a measure that they're doing what they're supposed to be doing. I'll note that Democrats could have responded aggressively to this effort to game the system by publicly blacklisting everyone involved. They chose not to, which makes sense if what matters if power politics.

[Mister Mets]

I share your skepticism and solution.

I was reminded of this talk about what individuals can do when reading some comments by Nick Gillespie, the Editor in Chief of Reason magazine, who is invested in that question as a libertarian.

https://twitter.com/nickgillespie/st...63092637573127

Proposition: What we are facing in America is not a pandemic, or economic malaise, or resurgence of inequality, racism, xenophobia, homophobia, or lack of options, food, shelter, you name it. What we are facing is a crisis of meaning or, if not quite a crisis of meaning, than a prolonged period in which old institutions, mindsets, temperaments, and habits are just delivering what many or most of us need or want to live positive, meaningful, happy lives. God is dead (and not coming back), there is no national narrative that commands a clear majority ore even working consensus, as past narratives, however mythic or incomplete, once did.

We could be the Land of the Free or a Nation of Immigrants, even if those were often wishful thinking. Yet what all of us face is a constantly proliferating set of choices--of where to live, what to consume, who to love, and on and on. Despite many terrible aspects of contemporary life, virtually all the worst--absolute poverty, de jure race and gender segregation, draconian law enforcement mass violence, etc.--have been effectively eradicated or vitiated near unto death. The vast majority of us, even low-income us, have something approaching terrible, terrible freedom. We are effectively post-scarcity and an existential crisis of meaning has been democratized.

Most of our activity is performed at the symbolic level and we have the ability to change who we are, what we think, what we believe with an ease that was unthinkable 30 years ago, much less 50 or 100. Yet we are terrified by this freedom especially how others might use it. In the absence of a compelling and forward-looking, inclusive national narrative, too many of us are resorting to the worst form of political tribalism to solve our need for meaning and intellectual, psychological, and personal identity But you can't solve a crisis of meaning through politics because politics is as much about controlling others as it is liberating us.

We have effectively gained escape velocity from the worst parts of the past and yet we are looking longingly back at the past with nostalgia (build back better! make America great again!) for a past that was nowhere as good today. The right has its version of this and the left has its own. What they share in common is a need to regiment society according to their unified field theories of what's good that comes right at the time we've slipped the surly bonds of material necessity and intolerance in profound ways. We needs a national narrative--a national operating system--that allows as many experiments in living to be running simultaneously as possible, not as few.

I have no idea how my immigrant grandparents, all of whom were born in the 1890s, came to America in the 1910s, and died by the 1980s, made sense of the changes during their lifetimes. The changes of past 20 or 30 years are almost as intense and yet we are sour about the future rather than excited, optimistic, and energized. Large-scale war is over (if you want it). Drug war, racism/homophobia/sexism, extreme poverty, all over. When will we start living in *this* world, rather than the smoldering ruins of the past? The minute we want to.

[Tami]

California man driving to White House to kill leaders on 'hit list' arrested in Iowa, officials say

A heavily armed California man was arrested in Iowa after he told law enforcement officers that he would "do whatever it takes" to kill government leaders on his "hit list," including President Joe Biden and his chief medical adviser, Dr. Anthony Fauci, authorities said in court papers.

The man, Kuachua Brillion Xiong, 25, has been held in the Pottawattamie County Jail in Council Bluffs since Thursday, according to sheriff's records.

Xiong was pulled over Dec. 21 in Cass County and found to have an AR-15 rifle, ammunition, loaded magazines, body armor and medical kits, Secret Service Agent Justin Larson wrote in a criminal complaint.

An attorney for Xiong had no comment Wednesday.

[Tami]

Don't forget to declare income from stolen goods and illegal activities, IRS says

According to IRS publication 17, the Internal Revenue Service wants taxpayers to include on their forms “income from illegal activities, such as money from dealing illegal drugs.” Make sure you put that on “Schedule 1 (Form 1040), line 8z, or on Schedule C (Form 1040) if from your self-employment activity,” the IRS wrote.

The agency also requests that “if you steal property, you must report its fair market value,” but only if you don’t “return it to its rightful owner in the same year.”

The somewhat obscure provisions went viral this week after a popular finance-meme social media account and daily newsletter author pointed them out.

The IRS didn’t immediately return an NBC News request for comment.

Humorous as they appear on their face, the statutes are law and have been on the books for years. Prohibition-era gangster Al Capone was indicted on tax evasion after prosecutors alleged that his stated income didn’t match his lavish lifestyle.

[Johnathan]

Don't forget to declare income from stolen goods and illegal activities, IRS says

I wonder if that could be used in a court case OR since it is a government requirement it would violate the 5th amendment and be inadmissible as it is a compulsion rather than a voluntary act.

"...nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself..."

[4saken1]

It is a bit telling that you consider right wing media sources counterbalances to something like Pro Publica, when my understanding is that Pro Publica is not supposed to be a left wing media source. It's not Mother Jones or the documentaries of Michael Moore. It should be the mainstream media.

This is not my position at all. I'm openly mocking the fact that the vast majority of conservatives seem to think that anything which isn't right wing propaganda must therefore fall into the category of 'liberal' media, yet will eagerly use said sources to 'prove' a point and thus illustrating that said bias isn't as profound as they would have everyone believe. If said bias was so prevalent, such stories would either have a significant spin to them or would not be reported on at all.

[Johnathan]

I was reminded of this talk about what individuals can do when reading some comments by Nick Gillespie, the Editor in Chief of Reason magazine, who is invested in that question as a libertarian.

https://twitter.com/nickgillespie/st...63092637573127

I used to point that out as well, but the problem turned out that humans are not rational on the whole and pointing out how much better it is now than it was a hundred years ago doesn't really connect as people live now and didn't live one hundred years ago. Besides the people 100 years ago also thought the same thing just about different particular things.

It becomes the equivalent of telling people to "cheer up, it could be worse." True, but it could be better, too.

At heart, it's necessary to find the emotional connection to people's real and present experiences, and you have to know the audience. Talking about white privilege and institutional racism to massive numbers of homogenously white, poor and jobless working class people in West Virginia isn't going to play when the problems there are lack of education, economic development, poverty and meth or opioid abuse. Talking about how much easier and more convenient technology has made our lives isn't going over well when homeless camps and nomadic itinerant workers are becoming permanent fixtures in our cities like it was the 1930's dust bowl all over except with 5G access.

A lot of the libertarian position is really derived from a poor reading of people like Rudolph Steiner and especially the dubious idea of rational egoism that often gets traced back to the Russian writer Nikolay Chernyshevsky. Rational egoism is, ironically, one of the fundamental ideas of both Marxist-Leninism and Ayn Rand's Objectivism, but even in his time, Cherneshevsky's assertions were soundly criticized - especially by Dostoevsky - and both the Fall of the Soviet Union and the 2008 Housing and Financial Crash (all financial crashes, actually) are real world proofs against the ideal of the practicality of a reason-based political structure.

The problem on the low end is that any action or choice can be portrayed as reasonable - even two completely contradictory choices can each be reason based. FDR was known for giving different people the exact opposite directions because he "reasoned" that since they couldn't know which one would work, the wrong one would fail fairly quickly and they'd already have the right one in the works. So he'd institute policies to help business owners lower wages and at the same time to do exactly the opposite to help labor unions raise wages and see what happens.

On the high end, no amount of reason will predict the future. Scientists believe based on the present evidence that eliminating greenhouse gas emissions and reducing the actual amount of greenhouse gases has a good chance of stopping global warming or maybe even reversing it. However, you don't to be a scientist to realize that that is an extremely simple expression of a much too simplistic solution involving several extremely complex and chaotic processes. When someone says "greenhouse gas emissions," they are referring to the entire world's energy production, industrial processes and economic activity. When we say "global warming" or "climate change," we're referring to pretty much every natural activity in the world from oceans to volcanoes. All these are extremely chaotic, complex processes where a single change has multiple and multiplied effects that are inherently unpredictable. No one really knows what will happen if we stop producing greenhouse gases either to our economies or to our environment. Reason would dictate that if you do not know what your actions will do, then it is better to do nothing, BUT I still support action against climate change mainly because of my emotional and irrational connection with it.

For me, the major problem is that I don't really see those leaders outside government that were able to accomplish a great deal for workers and minorities. Martin Luther King Jr. was not elected to political office, Jimmy Hoffa was not elected to political office (though he was elected to Teamsters' presidency). Where are our non-governmental activists whose influence actually scares the government? Well, I have to say most of them are Republican and Conservative today, while the liberal and progressive leaders are all in office. Even with ex-Presidents, obviously Donald Trump has a much more direct influence on the United States culturally and politically than Barack Obama, for example. Hell, I think Jimmy Carter actually has more cultural cred than Obama today.

Those are the people we need to make progress - people outside the government - outside the system - that have the emotional appeal to the country to scare the government into doing things for the people. Unfortunately, I only see that with conservatives and especially ultra-conservatives today.

[Mister Mets]

I wonder if that could be used in a court case OR since it is a government requirement it would violate the 5th amendment and be inadmissible as it is a compulsion rather than a voluntary act.

"...nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself..."

This has obviously come up.

It has been ruled that a filer can affirmatively claim fifth amendment privileges on their returns.

https://scholarship.law.wm.edu/cgi/v...2&context=wmlr

It's an interesting rabbit hole.

https://scholarship.law.wm.edu/cgi/v...2&context=wmlr

This is not my position at all. I'm openly mocking the fact that the vast majority of conservatives seem to think that anything which isn't right wing propaganda must therefore fall into the category of 'liberal' media, yet will eagerly use said sources to 'prove' a point and thus illustrating that said bias isn't as profound as they would have everyone believe. If said bias was so prevalent, such stories would either have a significant spin to them or would not be reported on at all.

This depends on the degree to which a given conservative claims the mainstream media is liberal.

If you want to respond to someone who has more extreme views, by all means post something they wrote and rebut it. But that's not the standard when measuring whether media bias exists. The argument that there is media bias isn't that every mainstream reporter will be the equivalent of Bagdad Bob, or that they will ignore every piece of bad news against Democrats. It's simply that there is appreciable bias.

As for why any conservative would refer to an outlet like Pro Publica, part of it is that on a message board thread where the typical poster is left of center in the context of American politics, I recognize that you guys will consider a source like Pro Publica to be reliable. In some cases, left-wing media sources can be used because it shows the egregiousness of an action if even the left-wing media will point it out (I'll note I made no such claim when mentioning the Pro-Publica article.)

I am curious about your feelings on the question. I gave my thoughts on it a few days back.

If we look at institutions that purport to be neutral (CNN, broadcast evening news, The New York Times, The Washington Post, NPR) the median reporter, cultural tastemaker and decision maker (I would distinguish an assistant producer from the electrician) is going to be the left of the median American voter. They're more likely to come from and live in left-wing milieus. The subjects that are considered taboo and result in anyone getting pushed out will tend to be those that piss off people on the left. They're going to treat fringe Democrats with more respect than they will fringe Republicans, and fringe left-wing positions with more respect than fringe right-wing positions.

Do you disagree with this? What's your viewpoint?

[babyblob]

Don't forget to declare income from stolen goods and illegal activities, IRS says

This reminds me of a story here in Ciny from the start of the year. A guy tried to get food stamps, rent assistance, and other government assistance programs because Covid hurt his business so bad.

What was his business? He was selling drugs. And he went into Job and family services with several notebooks of records on his drug sales and how they were down a large amount because people just did not have money to spend as much on drugs and he was hurting money wise because of it.

[Jack Dracula]

‘Slow-motion insurrection’: How GOP seizes election power

This article reminded me of another I'd read earlier this week.

Trumps Next Coup Has Already Begun

Technically, the next attempt to overthrow a national election may not qualify as a coup. It will rely on subversion more than violence, although each will have its place. If the plot succeeds, the ballots cast by American voters will not decide the presidency in 2024. Thousands of votes will be thrown away, or millions, to produce the required effect. The winner will be declared the loser. The loser will be certified, president-elect.
The prospect of this democratic collapse is not remote. People with the motive to make it happen are manufacturing the means. Given the opportunity, they will act. They are acting already.
Who or what will safeguard our constitutional order is not apparent today. It is not even apparent who will try. Democrats, big and small D, are not behaving as if they believe the threat is real. Some of them, including President Joe Biden, have taken passing rhetorical notice, but their attention wanders. They are making a grievous mistake.

[Johnathan]

At the same time, the real effect of this will be that it is setting up a situation where the people who defended the legitimacy of the 2020 election will feel justified attacking the legitimacy of the outcomes of future elections.

[JackDaw]

As more details emerge of Virginia Giuffre/ Prince Andrew case I begin to suspect that the Prince is lucky that he’s facing a civil case, and the only reason he may avoid a heavy financial settlement may be some legal technicality.

[WestPhillyPunisher]

This article reminded me of another I'd read earlier this week.

Trumps Next Coup Has Already Begun

It’s unbelievable Democrats aren’t taking this seriously, especially after what happened back on 1/6. Someone needs to drive home the point, forcefully if need be to Biden and Dems that Qpublicans are hellbent on destroying democracy in order to take back the presidency, and never let it go.