General US Politics

[Lord Raven]

18 minutes ago, Dr. Tarrasque said:

Regardless of your views on military might, you should still consider whether or not the allocation is proper or could use some tweaking to re-allocate funds to other areas such as Science and research which will benefit all aspects of the US can boost our military advantage

We already do this. I hate to beat the dead horse with this but this is literally what half of my physics department uses for funding. Pretty sure grants like these are the only way I could afford college at any rate, but it would be cool to expand the R&D side.

Quite a lot of military money makes its way back to the population of the US in many many forms. The allocation is poor. We need much better staffing and funding for the VA, much better mental healthcare for vets and soldiers alike, and the rest of the country still needs affordable healthcare.

I don't think lowering our military budget will do much in terms of influencing what kind of conflict we engage in and could actually make a lot of things worldwide much worse.

[Dr. Tarrasque]

24 minutes ago, Lord Raven said:

We already do this. I hate to beat the dead horse with this but this is literally what half of my physics department uses for funding. Pretty sure grants like these are the only way I could afford college at any rate, but it would be cool to expand the R&D side.

Clarify, did you interpret "re-allocate funds to other areas such as Science and research" in the military context? Because I meant it in general, not just for military (ie Medicine, Environment, Computer Science, etc) such as putting the money being spent on the surplus of fighter jets into these things instead.

 

Also, PUPPIES!

Edited August 21, 2018 by Dr. Tarrasque

[Lord Raven]

41 minutes ago, Dr. Tarrasque said:

Clarify, did you interpret "re-allocate funds to other areas such as Science and research" in the military context? Because I meant it in general, not just for military (ie Medicine, Environment, Computer Science, etc) such as putting the money being spent on the surplus of fighter jets into these things instead.

 

Also, PUPPIES!

Basically there's a bunch of wasteful spending to either continue old projects and maintaining old equipment, which gets more expensive to maintain as time goes on. Given also that the budget is massive and veterans healthcare is still basically trash and unmaintainable there certainly is waste outside of pet projects of US Senators. Stuff you've mentioned effectively. We could re allocate those kinds of funds within the military and it would functionally serve little difference. Military funded education is much more well defined in terms of long term goals too so it's generally not a bad thing to have military backed education.

The main point I'm making is that insisting we need a smaller military budget seems quite counterproductive considering how large the budget is. You could argue that if we warred less, had more affordable education and better primary education, better healthcare as a nation, then I wouldn't be pointing to these as benefits except that even if we had all these things we would still see a budget just as large towards the military because it means they can throw even more into R&D.

I think defense policy is independent of funding in general, if nothing else they would set their funding based on their defense needs. Even then the military tends to be behind technological innovation and unless blah says otherwise I'm fairly certain war has been a driving force for technology for all of human history.

Edited August 22, 2018 by Lord Raven

[Slumber]

So like. There's no doubt that Trump is guilty as fuck, right?

Even if he does everything he can to stop this investigation and any charges against him and gets off scot free, his hands are redder than a baboon's ass. A baboon's ass that he probably groped.

Edited August 22, 2018 by Slumber

[Time the Crestfallen]

6 hours ago, Lord Raven said:

Basically there's a bunch of wasteful spending to either continue old projects and maintaining old equipment, which gets more expensive to maintain as time goes on.

I suppose this is the main problem; not necessarily the amount of spending (especially relative to GDP%), but the sheer amount of waste that occurs. Makes me remeber in February how there was an audit of the military that revealed somewhere in the region of $800 million had 'gone missing'.

Edited August 22, 2018 by Time the Crestfallen

[Shoblongoo]

10 hours ago, Slumber said:

So like. There's no doubt that Trump is guilty as fuck, right?

Plenty of Its the deep state. Its unelected democrats trying to undo the results of the last election. Its crooked Hillary and a corrupt Justice Department colluding with the Russians to frame Trump because they can't stand him standing up for Real Americans level "doubt."  

Reasonable doubt???

No--I don' think so.

But the outstanding question remains: when if ever does Trump get held accountable for it?

[Tryhard]

18 hours ago, XRay said:

That is a tragedy and there are a lot of similar cases with civilian casualty, but I think our contribution to the world far outweighs our mistakes.

I'm just going to say that's debatable. The world consistently responds that the United States is the biggest threat to world peace, not Russia or China, and by a large margin too.

https://brilliantmaps.com/threat-to-peace/

The world pretty much hates the US. There might be a legitimate reason behind it (perpetual war in the Middle East is one). Not that I can't criticise my own country as well, since the United Kingdom was all too happy to follow along in modern times.

Edited August 22, 2018 by Edgelord

[Dr. Tarrasque]

5 hours ago, Shoblongoo said:

Plenty of Its the deep state. Its unelected democrats trying to undo the results of the last election. Its crooked Hillary and a corrupt Justice Department colluding with the Russians to frame Trump because they can't stand him standing up for Real Americans level "doubt."  

Reasonable doubt???

No--I don' think so.

But the outstanding question remains: when if ever does Trump get held accountable for it?

Trump is arguing that the Karen McDugal and Stormy Daniels payments are technically not campaign contribution violations since he basically paid for it with his own money.

If that's a lie, he's guilty.

If that's the truth, he's guilty of another crime/offense related to not disclosing that payment last year and doing it this year instead.

Either way, Trump won't be held accountable until the "blue wave" occurs or the report from Mueller is so destructive to Trump that even those corrupt Republicans in power have no choice but to impeach him and hold him accountable... the latter being kind of far'fetched given the scumbags we're talking about here.

Cohen's been subpoena'd by the New York AG on the charity fraud case. There's just too many attacks on Trump that there's no way he isn't going to go down. 

I wonder what Trump supporters' response will be to this?

A. FAKE NEWS

B. 1,400 DEAD ILLEGALS IF FINE BY ME

C. POPULATION CONTROL, WE'RE OVERPOPULATED.

EDIT: Fox News just got their Mollie bubble popped, they spent so much time talking about how she was killed by an illegal immigrant to push their narrative and now it has flopped.

Edited August 22, 2018 by Dr. Tarrasque

[Etrurian emperor]

So I'm wondering why the two recent Trump cronies caving or getting sentenced is such a big deal. It shows Trump was being naughty and that he lied but....that's not new. We already know he does that. And if his cultists haven't been swayed now then its likely they never will no matter how many cronies get jailed. 

[Dr. Tarrasque]

5 hours ago, Etrurian emperor said:

So I'm wondering why the two recent Trump cronies caving or getting sentenced is such a big deal. It shows Trump was being naughty and that he lied but....that's not new. We already know he does that. And if his cultists haven't been swayed now then its likely they never will no matter how many cronies get jailed. 

You're right. It's all just over-hyped because of how much one side is trying to defend Trump from being impeached when he's at a point where the Republicans would've pushed for Obama's impeachment. It's mostly a case of holding these corrupt politicians to their damn word and exposing their hypocrisy in protecting such a corrupt piece of filth like Trump and choosing party over country by trying to obstruct the Mueller Probe. His cronies and associates being convicted and that being set in stone in a way vindicates people who want Trump out.

Personally, when it came to the Cohen guilty plead, I felt like one of those people who have read the Game of Thrones books being asked about something huge having just happened in the show: not surprised.

 

EDIT: Details on the Manafort Jury

Edited August 23, 2018 by Dr. Tarrasque

[Slumber]

11 hours ago, Etrurian emperor said:

So I'm wondering why the two recent Trump cronies caving or getting sentenced is such a big deal. It shows Trump was being naughty and that he lied but....that's not new. We already know he does that. And if his cultists haven't been swayed now then its likely they never will no matter how many cronies get jailed. 

It's not so much that Cohen pleading guilty and incriminating Trump, and Manafort getting convicted reveal anything, but it removes virtually ANY wiggle room the Trump Humpers have when discussing the topic of whether Trump actually committed crimes. There's no reasonable doubt now. 

They'll either have to admit that Trump did commit crimes, or that Trump didn't actually hire the best people like he said. 

And since it's harder to convince them that Trump is fallible and can make wrong decisions, we now will get tons of "Well so what if he committed a crime?" 

Which is terrible for a lot of reasons, but also really funny. 

Edited August 23, 2018 by Slumber

[expshare]

On 8/19/2018 at 2:14 PM, Life said:

Assuming that you agree with the Supreme Court here, you should also be in favour of "white only universities" under the same logic that it is acceptable to for a university to take race into consideration (as Affirmative Action does). Which is a TERRIBLE idea but if you care about being coherent, you would support it.

You all should stop looking at people as part of a monolith and rather as individuals with individual desires, wants and most importantly, flaws. Otherwise, you will back yourself into a corner where you have to justify oppressing one group of people to "correct injustices".

Saying that someone who supports affirmative action must also support white-only universities is a serious error in logic. It shows that you're dismissing alternative sets of principles in which the former is good and the latter is bad. Affirmative action helps to ensure that underprivileged communities receive a better share of doctors, scientists, teachers, social workers, etc. 

[Dr. Tarrasque]

A couple of weeks ago I posted the following

On 8/10/2018 at 8:41 PM, Dr. Tarrasque said:

There's also a claim that CNN planted an anti-trump on a panel of "Trump voters" to chime in on how they feel about him. Do note that this source is alt-right and it is rather questionable but this particular story actually seems like it could be legit.

There's a follow-up to this, at least from the "planted" individual. The plant story linked earlier was referenced by Breitbart and InfoWars and if parents of the Sandy Hook victims are anything to go by, the damage is done.

Edited August 23, 2018 by Dr. Tarrasque

[Shoblongoo]

19 hours ago, Etrurian emperor said:

So I'm wondering why the two recent Trump cronies caving or getting sentenced is such a big deal. It shows Trump was being naughty and that he lied but....that's not new. We already know he does that. And if his cultists haven't been swayed now then its likely they never will no matter how many cronies get jailed. 

Manafort

Big deal, because its the first concrete showing that the Mueller Team is fully prepared to take the cases they are indicting to trial + meet their evidintiary burdens and get felony convictions.

There was some doubt about this floating around in Trump circles. It was said that the prosecution was running sloppy; that you could get a special prosecutor to indict a ham sandwich; that the cases they were building weren't really that strong and would be picked apart in front of a jury by a skilled defense attorney. It was specifically suggested that the Flynn's and the the Cohen's and the like getting caught in the orbit of Trump's legal troubles were better off denying any wrongdoing and fighting their charges at trial than copping a plea deal and cooperating with the special prosecutor. Because the risk of going to trial was low--no way prosecutors would actually be able to get a unanimous jury to convict on [proof beyond a reasonable doubt] against the argument that whatever manner of "evidence" of guilt was presented in Court--the evidence should be viewed as unreliable and inherently suspect because the Mueller investigation at its core is just a partisan witch-hunt run by biased, agenda-driven democrats. 

Beyond the usual punditry and predictions of so-called "experts" in the media; this was the first real boots-on-the-ground test run to see how those arguments would play out at trial + what manner of case Mueller's prosecutors were actually capable of presenting.

What we saw then was the prosecution put on a professional and meticulously detailed 10 day presentation of state's witnesses and exhibits. A defense that gassed out and rested its case in less then a day. The out-of-court arguments against the Mueller "witch-hunt" pale in comparison to the mountains of persuasive, admissible presented to the jury. 

...and everyone who is potentially either a witness or a target of the ongoing investigation has to be taking note of that right now...

Cohen

This is a game changer because what Cohen's saying now is not just an "accusation" or talking point or attack of the kind that Trump likes to put out from day-to-day. It isn't an extraneous out-of-court statement, made under no enforceable obligation to tell the truth and subject to no penalty for falsehood.

Its witness testimony on-the-record in a criminal proceeding. Cohen was in Court and under oath when he testified that he was directed to commit criminal acts by Donald Trump . (Directing someone to commit a crime is solicitation. Solicitation is a crime. What we have now, at this stage in the investigation, is an in-court witness testifying publicly and under threat-of-perjury that Donald Trump committed crimes in the scope and course of his 2016 presidential campaign) 

That's a solid legal foundation for taking the case Mueller has been building to the next level--this was the evidence he needed. 
______

Note that for all the denials and posturing floating around right now (i.e. extraneous out-of-court statements) nobody from Trump on down ATM is actually willing to testify under oath that Cohen is lying and Trump really didn't know about ANY of the criminal conduct swirling around his campaign (the illegal hush money. the hacking of political opponents. the meetings between campaign staff and Russian intelligence officers. Hes pleading ignorance as to all of it.) 

So until someone actually sits down at a deposition or in front of a judge and gives testimony on-the-record that contradict's Cohen's testimony, Cohen's testimony is de-facto more credible than any of the noise Team Trump is making in response. (the law always presumes that in-court statements under threat-of-perjury are more credible and reliable than out-of-court statements subject to no penalty for lying)

 

[XRay]

27 minutes ago, Shoblongoo said:

nobody from Trump on down ATM is actually willing to testify under oath

If their strategy is to stall the investigation until after the midterm, should not they all just testify under oath and lie anyways, so the amount of evidence has to be even bigget or more significant in order to to convince the jury? Even if they are caught lying under oath, they could just have Trump pardon them later, although that does depend on Republicans keeping the House so it might be too risky.

[Shoblongoo]

40 minutes ago, XRay said:

If their strategy is to stall the investigation until after the midterm, should not they all just testify under oath and lie anyways, so the amount of evidence has to be even bigget or more significant in order to to convince the jury? Even if they are caught lying under oath, they could just have Trump pardon them later, although that does depend on Republicans keeping the House so it might be too risky.

Ummmm. Imma have to go out on a limb here and say know--purposefully giving yourself criminal exposure is never a sound legal strategy.

@Slumber One thing this does not do is take "wiggle room" away from the diehard Trump supporters.

Hillary is the real criminal, the Justice Department is full of deep state democrats, and corrupt FBI agents are framing all the president's men + falsely inducing them to testify against their boss with drummed-upcriminal charges in a conspiracy to try and bring down the Trump Presidency.

That's their story and they're sticking to it.



 

Edited August 23, 2018 by Shoblongoo

[XRay]

11 minutes ago, Shoblongoo said:

One thing this does not do is take "wiggle room" away from the diehard Trump supporters.

Is that even possible?

This is not a small fanatic cult where exposing a member to larger society will slowly help them reacclimate. When 40%+ of the population is for Trump, it is much easier to maintain their echo chamber.

[Shoblongoo]

34 minutes ago, XRay said:

Is that even possible?

I dunno. Its hard to actually imagine what evidence of criminal wrongdoing would actually change their mind at this point. 
_____

I'd distinguish though that 40% of the country is not actually for Trump. 40% of the country is for his policies.

And within that 40% you have some people who legitimately idolize the guy.  And some people who know he's a scumbag and a liar and a crook, but maintain that the most important thing is policy and that they will continue to support him because even if they don't like the man himself, they like what hes doing with tax cuts and deregulation and immigration.  

(the reverse was true under Obama. Obama himself was always significantly more popular than his policies--with Trump those numbers flipped)

 

Edited August 23, 2018 by Shoblongoo

[Dr. Tarrasque]

Illegal Immigrants and Taxes, material for Trump supporters who are willing to read.

@Shoblongoo I get what you're saying but at the end of the day it still seems like those who do not support Trump already figured that the investigation should go on until it's finished while the Trump nuts won't really budge. Having said that, it was good to see Paula Duncan's honesty that she is a Trump supporter and "wanted Manafort to be innocent" but still had the objectivity to agree with the rest of the jurors (unlike the ONE) on the unanimous 18/18 counts.

Now where's that Don Jr. Indictment...

EDIT: Lol, Duncan Hunter

Edited August 23, 2018 by Dr. Tarrasque

[Lord Raven]

Also, here's a trump distraction: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/trump-renews-attacks-nfl-calls-espn-air-national-anthem-n903196

It's pretty fucked up how he's out and out attacking an entire demographic. The NFL and the executive branch have colossally failed to address this.

[Dr. Tarrasque]

Question to the folks that read this thread:

Is it inappropriate to have political discussion following a school shooting or tragedy reported and talked in the media/current events?

To expound and give context, I'm referring to how some people often say "Now's not the time to talk about this political issue" or "Don't politicize this". Mollie Tibbets' case shows the hypocrisy of those who use such talking points as they sure as hell didn't hesitate to politicize this particular issue because the suspect is initially said to be illegal.

 

I personally hate when people say shit like that because of the aforementioned hypocrisy and when you have people telling younger folks or certain groups of people to "focus on more serious issues", they do just that and it's usually followed up with condescending responses like "You're just college kids, you don't know what you're talking about" or "You don't even live here, it's none of your business.". Situations like this to me just seem like people using the latter responses should just be ignored in the discussion.

What are your thoughts?

[Johann]

16 minutes ago, Dr. Tarrasque said:

Is it inappropriate to have political discussion following a school shooting or tragedy reported and talked in the media/current events?

No, the "too soon" argument when talking about shootings is a means of deflecting the issue and nothing more. Of course it's disregarded when it suits and agenda like "gotta stop those illegals" because they're not even sincere with their "thoughts and prayers" in the first place. Those people aren't actually interested in a discussion or debate (largely because they don't really have a case), they're not worth engaging and can fuck off

[Lord Raven]

There's definitely value to waiting to have the discussion. The issue is that nobody does. Every single incident leads to really shitty reactionary rhetoric from most people and nothing gets done.

It's clearly a suppression technique to stonewall legislation. All we can really do is be persistent.

Edited August 24, 2018 by Lord Raven

[eclipse]

Depends on what you're discussing.  I'd rather wait a bit, to make sure the facts are straight.  Responses led by emotion rarely lead to productive things.

[expshare]

Most of the facts are ignored by most people. There are politicians who believe that kids of age 5 with guns will help thwart mass shootings, and in the same brain they believe that banning anyone who is mentally ill from owning a gun is a sensible prevention policy. The blatant disregard for evidence, logic, and truth in American society makes it hard to have a serious conversation publicly.

"A number of studies suggest that laws and policies that enable firearm access during emotionally charged moments also seem to correlate with gun violence more strongly than does mental illness alone. Belying Lott’s argument that “more guns” lead to “less crime,”52 Miller et al. found that homicide was more common in areas where household firearms ownership was higher.53 Siegel et al. found that states with high rates of gun ownership had disproportionately high numbers of deaths from firearm-related homicides.54 Webster’s analysis uncovered that the repeal of Missouri’s background check law led to an additional 49 to 68 murders per year,55 and the rate of interpersonal conflicts resolved by fatal shootings jumped by 200% after Florida passed “stand your ground” in 2005.56 Availability of guns is also considered a more predictive factor than is psychiatric diagnosis in many of the 19 000 US completed gun suicides each year.11,57,58 (By comparison, gun-related homicides and suicides fell precipitously, and mass-shootings dropped to zero, when the Australian government passed a series of gun-access restrictions in 1996.59)"

from: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4318286/

Edited August 24, 2018 by expshare