US Politics Mega-thread - Page 8764

On September 19 2017 02:38 ZerOCoolSC2 wrote:

There is no "industry" on labeling someone a racist or whatever. There are just people who jump the gun and calls someone the first thing that pops into their heads. Bill Maher used the N-word and was taken to task by a lot of people. He still has a show. Trump is still president despite his shenanigans as a human being. And xDaunt/Danglars still post on TL despite taking forever to condemn Nazis.

If there is an industry based on this, I want no part of it because it doesn't seem to be thriving.

On September 19 2017 02:37 Logo wrote:
A bit off topic, but I think I missed the part of this thread where everyone collectively, led by the staunch free speech supporters, got up in arms over a government official pressuring a private institution to cancel & silence speech by someone that would be critical of them.

Anyone have links to those posts?

On September 19 2017 02:42 ZerOCoolSC2 wrote:

How much time are we talking? Is this accrued or immediate? The ripple effect will undoubtedly produce much worse and those that gain, will ultimately end up losing as well.

Perhaps most interestingly, in the political sense, is the fact that three of the losers from GCHJ are Arizona, Maine, and Alaska.

GOP Sens. John McCain, Susan Collins, and Lisa Murkowski were the three deciding votes on the first GOP healthcare push and hail from those three states. The issue for Collins and Murkowski with the first Senate Obamacare repeal bill was the amount of money the plan took away from their state, which seems to also apply here.

On September 19 2017 02:43 zlefin wrote:

I don't recall such being covered; but without you naming the exact instance it's hard to be sure.

Chelsea Manning, the former US soldier who leaked hundreds of thousands of state secrets and served seven years in military prison, abruptly terminated a phone call with the dean of the Harvard Kennedy school in an expression of her dismay at his decision to revoke her visiting fellowship in the face of severe pressure from the CIA.

When Elmendorf reached Manning on the phone he sounded audibly nervous, the source said. He argued that Harvard had to “weigh” what each visiting fellow “brought to the table”.

On September 19 2017 02:42 RealityIsKing wrote:


Mainly talking about the fake news industrial complex.

And I really DO hope that you are right that it doesn't seem to be thriving, I really do.

On September 19 2017 02:42 RealityIsKing wrote:


Mainly talking about the fake news industrial complex.

And I really DO hope that you are right that it doesn't seem to be thriving, I really do.

On September 19 2017 02:47 Logo wrote:


I kind of figured it'd be big news to those who have shown so much passion for free speech here and wouldn't need more specific naming.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/sep/15/chelsea-manning-fellowship-cia-head-cancels-harvard-speech-over-offer-to-traitor
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/sep/15/chelsea-manning-harvard-kennedy-school

We invited Chelsea Manning to spend a day at the Kennedy School. Specifically, we invited her to meet with students and others who are interested in talking with her, and then to give remarks in the Forum where the audience would have ample opportunity—as with all of our speakers—to ask hard questions and challenge what she has said and done. On that basis, we also named Chelsea Manning a Visiting Fellow. We did not intend to honor her in any way or to endorse any of her words or deeds, as we do not honor or endorse any Fellow.

However, I now think that designating Chelsea Manning as a Visiting Fellow was a mistake, for which I accept responsibility. I still think that having her speak in the Forum and talk with students is consistent with our longstanding approach, which puts great emphasis on the value of hearing from a diverse collection of people. But I see more clearly now that many people view a Visiting Fellow title as an honorific, so we should weigh that consideration when offering invitations.

Earlier in the day, Mike Morell, former deputy director and acting director of the CIA, sent a resignation letter to Elmendorf. Morell told Elmendorf he was resigning immediately over the school's decision to invite Manning be a visiting fellow at the Kennedy School's Institute of Politics.

Morell said he could not be part of an organization that "honors a convicted felon and leaker of classified information."

"Manning was found guilty of 17 serious crimes, including six counts of espionage, for leaking hundreds of thousands of classified documents to WikiLeaks, an entity that CIA Director Mike Pompeo says operates like an adversarial foreign intelligence organization," said Morell, who was a non-resident senior fellow at Harvard.

On September 19 2017 02:26 xDaunt wrote:

Are y'all really going to pretend that you don't understand that the term "racist" has a stigma attached to it? Surely you understand why labeling someone a "white supremacist" has damaging consequences.

On September 19 2017 02:38 ZerOCoolSC2 wrote:

There is no "industry" on labeling someone a racist or whatever. There are just people who jump the gun and calls someone the first thing that pops into their heads. Bill Maher used the N-word and was taken to task by a lot of people. He still has a show. Trump is still president despite his shenanigans as a human being. And xDaunt/Danglars still post on TL despite taking forever to condemn Nazis.

If there is an industry based on this, I want no part of it because it doesn't seem to be thriving.

On September 19 2017 02:47 Logo wrote:


I kind of figured it'd be big news to those who have shown so much passion for free speech here and wouldn't need more specific naming.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/sep/15/chelsea-manning-fellowship-cia-head-cancels-harvard-speech-over-offer-to-traitor
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/sep/15/chelsea-manning-harvard-kennedy-school

On September 19 2017 03:04 Danglars wrote:

It's not just suspected Nazi sympathizers, but it's a stopwatch counting until they condemn Nazis.

Sure, they condemned Nazis. But it took forever for them to condemn them. And they're still allowed to post, egads!

1. Accuse the opponent of being the worst ever fringe thing
2. Ignore incredulity that you'd actually suspect the person of supporting Nazi ideology.
3. ...
4. The tardiness counts as "taking forever to condemn Nazis."

Pretty much the diagnosis of bad faith arguers.

On September 19 2017 03:16 GreenHorizons wrote:


1. No one think's your're a Nazi
2. xDaunt was literally defending the 14 words as not racist, if not supporting, that's certainly defending (Neo)Nazi ideology
3. ...
4. Look at your posts about Jefferson being shrouded vs Nazis and sympathizers having armed rallies and shooting at people/running them over, it's clear which one you think is more dangerous.

People look at how you characterize a shrouding as a slippery slope that's very dangerous, and then see how you label the massive violations of PoC's constitutional rights (up to and including murdering them) as a more marginal issue than statue shrouding.

The jig is up.

On September 19 2017 03:16 GreenHorizons wrote:


1. No one think's your're a Nazi
2. xDaunt was literally defending the 14 words as not racist, if not supporting, that's certainly defending (Neo)Nazi ideology
3. ...
4. Look at your posts about Jefferson being shrouded vs Nazis and sympathizers having armed rallies and shooting at people/running them over, it's clear which one you think is more dangerous.

People look at how you characterize a shrouding as a slippery slope that's very dangerous, and then see how you label the massive violations of PoC's constitutional rights (up to and including murdering them) or these white supremacist rallies as a more marginal issue than statue shrouding.

The jig is up.

Democrats have said that they think there was Russian interference in the election, but that they're not challenging the results of the election. As more and more information comes out about the depth of Russia's interference in the election, do you think, at some point, that it would be legitimate to challenge the legitimacy of the election?

I don't know if there's any legal constitutional way to do that. I think you can raise questions. In fact, I think part of the reason Trump behaves the way he behaves is that he is a walking example of projection. Whatever he's doing and whatever he thinks is happening he will accuse somebody else of. And there are examples during the campaign when he did just that, like when he called publicly on Russia to hack my personal emails.

He knew they were trying to do whatever they could to discredit me with emails, so there's obviously a trail there, but I don't know that in our system we have any means of doing that, but I just wanted to add to the point you made. There's no doubt they influenced the election: We now know more about how they did that.

Let me just put it this way, if I had lost the popular vote but won the electoral college and in my first day as president the intelligence community came to me and said, "The Russians influenced the election," I would've never stood for it. Even though it might've advantaged me, I would've said, "We've got to get to the bottom of this." I would've set up an independent commission with subpoena power and everything else.

I want to get back to the question, would you completely rule out questioning the legitimacy of this election if we learn that the Russian interference in the election is even deeper than we know now?

No. I would not. I would say —

You're not going to rule it out.

No, I wouldn't rule it out.

So what are the means, like, this is totally unprecedented in every way —

What would be the means to challenge it, if you thought it should be challenged?

Basically I don't believe there are. There are scholars, academics, who have arguments that it would be, but I don't think they're on strong ground. But people are making those arguments. I just don't think we have a mechanism. You know, the Kenya election was just overturned and really what's interesting about that — and I hope somebody writes about it, Terry — the Kenyan election was also a project of Cambridge Analytica, the data company owned by the Mercer family that was instrumental in the Brexit vote.

There's now an investigation going on in the U.K., because of the use of data and the weaponization of information. They were involved in the Trump campaign after he got the nomination, and I think that part of what happened is Mercer said to Trump, We'll help you, but you have to take Bannon as your campaign chief. You've got to take Kellyanne Conway and these other people who are basically Mercer protégées.

And so we know that there was this connection. So what happened in Kenya, which I'm only beginning to delve into, is that the Supreme Court there said there are so many really unanswered and problematic questions, we're going to throw the election out and re-do it. We have no such provision in our country. And usually we don't need it.

Now, I do believe we should abolish the Electoral College, because I was sitting listening to a report on the French election and the French political analyst said, "You know in our country the person with the most votes wins, unlike in yours." And I think that's an anachronism. I've said that since 2000.