US Politics Mega-thread - Page 4690

On January 12 2025 23:00 micronesia wrote:
Does getting paid while you are in prison matter? Is it just money you can access when you eventually get released?

On January 12 2025 23:52 Gahlo wrote:

Actual firefighting jobs in the area are incredibly competitive and difficult to get into due to how massively underfunded fire services are.

On January 13 2025 02:16 BlackJack wrote:
RIP to the LA fire victims but let’s be honest, if they need to be rescued from a fire they got themselves in the wrong place

https://x.com/EndWokeness/status/1877458240050446339

In all seriousness, imagine smugly blaming a fire victim for being in the wrong place. An experienced firefighter should know that not everyone has the capability to flee a fire. Is she unaware of people with mobility issues and disabilities? The audacity to say something on a prerecorded interview and not edit that out is astounding. Nevermind if you will rescue me from the fire, what’s the gender of the person you sleep with? I’ll feel better dying from smoke inhalation if I know my first responder is LGBTQIA+.

On January 11 2025 13:40 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:
Judge Merchan: Your 34 felony convictions will result in no prison time, no fines, and no other penalties.
Trump: "I was treated very, very unfairly."
The Rest Of The World: Yeah, no shit, you uber-privileged clown. No one else could ever get away with what you did.
https://www.npr.org/2025/01/10/nx-s1-5253927/trump-sentencing-new-york

On January 11 2025 23:42 Sadist wrote:
This all could have been avoided as well had republicans voted to impeach after jan 6th.

Its crazy the amount of them who kissed the ring and allowed the takeover even after he lost in 2020.

On January 13 2025 03:08 oBlade wrote:
If you convict and punish him with jail, obviously he pardons himself in a few days, judge looks like an idiot, and possibly puts himself in trouble for having interfered with the president. If it's not serious enough for jail, then fine him. If it's not serious enough for jail or fine, then it was bullshit from the beginning.

On January 13 2025 03:08 oBlade wrote:

The judge could very easily have given him a fine. He didn't.

HRC got an $8000 FEC fine for not disclosing she ordered the Steele Dossier and had it routed through the FBI. She faced no prosecution.

Why wasn't he fined?

If the judge is admitting punishment now would trespass on the executive and doing this "godspeed" act, why did prosecution not trespass on it in the same way?

If you convict and punish him with jail, obviously he pardons himself in a few days, judge looks like an idiot, and possibly puts himself in trouble for having interfered with the president. If it's not serious enough for jail, then fine him. If it's not serious enough for jail or fine, then it was bullshit from the beginning.

The truth is the trial was already the punishment, the goal was to affect the election, and since that objective is no longer on the table, there is nothing left. If he gets punished, he will 100% appeal. If he doesn't get punished, there is a slightly lower chance that he will appeal. However, just by being convicted he loses his concealed carry permit in NYC. Anyway that's the ulterior motive of the judge's magnanimous sounding bullshit - The label is the other punishment, if he doesn't appeal then that beautiful "convicted felon" phrase many people hoped would turn an election - when it was peanuts compared to the words "sleepy" and "Comrade" - maybe if he doesn't appeal, Democrats can keep that label as a consolation prize.

Put this in HRC terms. She charges what, $250k for a one hour speech to Wall Street? If Blumpf spent, say, 100 hours on this trial, that's $25 million HRC equivalent worth of time right there. Not to mention the chance of losing the election. That potentially jeopardized what - like $1 billion that was spent from his side.

But HRC didn't go through that, she got a slap on the wrist.

The only examples of going after someone for something like this that both went to trial and led to prison were Manafort and Cohen. Nobody else gets off like this because nobody else is prosecuted like this to begin with.


"This" = Democracy? Or the prosecution of Republicans by appointed Democrats? I don't see how Republicans voting to impeach, which some did, would change anything, since Democrats were clearly able to impeach him anyway due to controlling a majority in the House at the time.

Even if more had voted to impeach, when he was impeached anyway, these prosecutions would have popped up after. Supposing he had been convicted in his impeachment trial with a removal and barring from future office, these civil and criminal trials would still have happened. Obviously. Right? Why would they let these "crimes" slide only in the case of him being ineligible to be president - unless the whole point was to try to stop him from being president, and not the "crimes" themselves. Oh you're the most corrupt criminal devil in the world, but since you can't be president anymore, we're not going to try to fine you a billion dollars and throw you in jail also, it's all in the family...? The same people would have brought the same cases and probably others would have been encouraged to bring more.

On January 13 2025 02:16 BlackJack wrote:
RIP to the LA fire victims but let’s be honest, if they need to be rescued from a fire they got themselves in the wrong place

https://x.com/EndWokeness/status/1877458240050446339

In all seriousness, imagine smugly blaming a fire victim for being in the wrong place. An experienced firefighter should know that not everyone has the capability to flee a fire. Is she unaware of people with mobility issues and disabilities? The audacity to say something on a prerecorded interview and not edit that out is astounding. Nevermind if you will rescue me from the fire, what’s the gender of the person you sleep with? I’ll feel better dying from smoke inhalation if I know my first responder is LGBTQIA+.

On January 13 2025 05:57 ChristianS wrote:

I think the right-wing media ecosystem crawling through public statements and messaging to find any way to blame the tragedies on DEI is fucking vile, and frankly dude, I’m pretty disappointed to see you trading in it.

Wrt the specific quote, I imagine the person’s point is something like “carrying fire victims out of burning buildings is a very small percentage of a firefighter’s job, we strive to keep people out of situations where that would be necessary in the first place,” and meanwhile, presumably, “in the extreme circumstance a victim needed to be carried to safety and was too heavy for me (as could also happen to a male firefighter), I would get another firefighter to help me do it.” Probably stupidly phrased, definitely defensive because the person is responding to an imagined sexist who says they’re not biologically qualified to do their job, but whatever, you anti-woke activists think everybody needs to chill out and stop getting offended so easily anyway.

The only reason we’re talking about this is because right-wing influencers saw a bunch of death and destruction in LA as a result of a natural disaster and thought “saying this is their fault because DEI will probably get a bunch of clicks.” And they were right! I think they’re fucking ghouls, though, and I’d hoped you’d have more decency than that. Instead you thought a flippant “RIP to the victims but…” prefix was sufficient.

Sorry to everyone for coming out of months of silence to scold someone’s tone before probably disappearing again but, well, here we are.

On January 13 2025 07:03 BlackJack wrote:


I think if you want to get on the high horse and scold the DEI critics then at a bare minimum you shouldn’t have the person who heads DEI for the department blaming people that die in a fire for finding themselves in that situation.

Rescuing people from fires is a pretty core competency to being a firefighter.

If you want to smugly scoff at people that need rescuing like they are personally inconveniencing you then you shouldn’t be immune to criticism.

On January 13 2025 07:50 ChristianS wrote:

I don’t “have the person who heads DEI for the department” doing anything, I know you know I’m not in charge of that. I also don’t know where that clip is even from, because accounts like @EndWokeness generally won’t cite sources, because they are, fundamentally, propagandists. But I assume it’s from some video or commercial the FD put together for recruitment or something, presumably *not* to be put out in the midst of a massive humanitarian disaster. If you tell me your motivation here is that you just feel strongly that fire departments need to be more sensitive to the feelings of victims in their public messaging, I won’t believe you.Stated as broadly as that, sure, that’s the mission statement. In the context of wildfires, though, you’re mostly talking about tracking fires, evacuating people in the path of danger, and containing the fire when you can. For someone to be inside a burning building they’d probably have to have ignored an evacuation warning, which is stubborn but, of course, I still hope the fire department will be able to save them. Again, I don’t think it’s a very good response to a sexist saying “women shouldn’t be firefighters because they won’t be able to carry a 250-lb man out of a burning building” to say “well he shouldn’t be in that burning building anyway” but fundamentally, the sexist is still wrong. It’s pretty rare for that to be what the job demands, and there’s no reason every member of the department needs to be able to do it (and indeed, many white men also can’t).
Not insisting anyone be immune to criticism, but I think a post like the tweet you linked is exploiting news about a humanitarian disaster to grind an axe about DEI, despite there being absolutely no reason to think it has any relevance to the ongoing disaster. I think that’s ghoulish and vile. I’m half-inclined to pull “I know people in LA I’m worried about” for rhetorical weight but honestly I shouldn’t have to. Last I’ve heard my LA friends are fine (thank God) but you don’t need to know I have a personal connection to know the people losing their homes are human beings and this is probably not a great time to make what I think you’re thinking of as “jokes” about it.

The “jokes” are bad, the political point they’re making is bad, and the motivation behind it is fundamentally craven. I know you’re inclined to follow those kinds of accounts but I thought you might have a little more common sense and decency than they do. This shit sucks, dude.