Now that we have a new thread, in order to ensure that this thread continues to meet TL standards and follows the proper guidelines, we will be enforcing the rules in the OP more strictly. Be sure to give them a complete and thorough read before posting!
NOTE: When providing a source, please provide a very brief summary on what it's about and what purpose it adds to the discussion. The supporting statement should clearly explain why the subject is relevant and needs to be discussed. Please follow this rule especially for tweets.
Your supporting statement should always come BEFORE you provide the source.
The headline of 700 citizens arrested gets reduced to a handful of egregious cases, and people strut around claiming victory. The real story is how many are detained for absurdly long times after showing citizenship, or because the system is overloaded, and what portion are from government officials refusing to correct mistakes. That's a huge story. But that's not this story. It's trying to fool the reader into believing that the arrested persons were innocent victims and proof that illegal immigration enforcement action is being misdirected.
But of course the 700 number is going to contain people that blocked government vehicles from entering government facilities and all the rest of that. So observe the bait and switch. Look at all these citizens unjustly detained by illegal immigrant raids by ICE ... scratch that ... isn't it just so terrible that ICE and DHS can arrest people for non-immigration federal crimes and isn't it so sad that disorderly conduct isn't just a warning.
In 1,082 locations—including Chicago and Minneapolis—at least one of the crimes supposedly committed by the arrestees is “Public Peace,” a category of convictions that includes unlawful assembly and disorderly conduct.
Absurd weasel words.
Total Arrests 2,209
Criminal Charges Assault, Burglary, Commercialized Sexual Offenses, Congress, Damage Property, Dangerous Drugs, Etc., Family Offenses, Flight / Escape, Forgery, Fraudulent Activities, General Crimes, Homicide, Immigration, Invasion of Privacy, Kidnapping, Larceny, Legislature, Liquor, Obscenity, Obstructing Judiciary, Obstructing the Police, Public Peace, Robbery, Sex Offenses (Not Involving Assault or Commercialized Sex), Sexual Assault, Stolen Vehicle, Tax Revenue, Traffic Offenses, Weapon Offenses
The reader is expected to shake his head that Chicago criminal charges include the category of public peace, right before Robbery and Sex Offenses
Real story: The Trump administration once again inflated numbers by including all kinds of arrests, and made up numbers on a website. It published a website with a stupid and offensive joke at its center. It's riddled with errors. But you have to wade through bullshit journalistic malpractice to actually get to the meat of it.
Some incredibly minor news from New Jersey (in a hopefully more-light-hearted-and-humorous-because-it's-so-silly-and-dumb kind of way). Remember that super cringey show called The Jersey Shore, where a bunch of flaky New Yorkers fist-pumped shirtless on the beach for a few years? Well, in an attempt to become relevant again, Mike “The Situation” Sorrentino wants to run for New Jersey governor lmao.
On May 31 2026 23:33 DarkPlasmaBall wrote: Some incredibly minor news from New Jersey (in a hopefully more-light-hearted-and-humorous-because-it's-so-silly-and-dumb kind of way). Remember that super cringey show called The Jersey Shore, where a bunch of flaky New Yorkers fist-pumped shirtless on the beach for a few years? Well, in an attempt to become relevant again, Mike “The Situation” Sorrentino wants to run for New Jersey governor lmao.
On May 29 2026 03:34 Oleo wrote: Lovely how the fascist bootlickers are claiming: A) The budget is mostly impacted by social security and defense spending has very little influence on the budget. B) US military spending has allowed Europe to have social security by reducing their defense spending.
Fuck me, you all sure burned away any remains of brain cells you once might have had. Too bad you live on the same planet as us.
The whole right wing take on Europe is the saddest piece of uninformed retarded nonsense I have read in my lifetime and I read a whole lot of ignorant bullshit. To actually believe 10% of that, you have to have your head up someones asshole sniffing all the good stuff.
They can both be true because the amounts are different. Often vastly.
US GDP > Germany GDP > US entitlements > every country's GDP until Switzerland > US defense > every other country's GDP from Sweden down
For example, if mom and dad's finances are out of balance and losing money, the largest impact is probably from the mortgage, the car payment, medical debt, student loans, other loans, etc.
Little Susie or Billy's allowance may seem too low or too high, and you could make an argument they're old enough now that they can mow lawns, walk dogs, or get a lemonade stand to get money for themselves, but in any case adjusting their allowance will never be enough to fix mom and dad's finances who desperately need the help of Dave Ramsey or Caleb Hammer. The two are independent problems.
Reducing defense spending can help, in the sense that reducing defense spending can be a part of reducing all spending, but it can't do anything by itself. Alone it's not a road to a balanced budget.
You do realize that no matter how much the US spends on the military in Europe, they don't make Europe any richer. Defence spending isn't giving Europe money, it's just putting troops/equipment/bases there.
At best they would just make Europe ridiculously defensively capable. You can't actually save European countries more money than they were spending on defense to begin with. Eg in the hypothetical scenario, at best you save European countries their entire current military budget.
Even without this actually happening, eg they do still spend on their militaries, the Europeans are still able to have pretty good social security.
So either military budgets do in fact affect their ability to provide decent social security (thus letting them spend less on their militaries indeed allows them to have social security). In which case, there is theoretically an amount reduction in US military spending (it may not be palatable, but the number does exist) that will also allow the US to have social security.
Or military budgets don't affect their ability to have social security, in which case, no matter how much the US spends on defence in Europe, even to the point that European military budgets are now 0 because of this, it still wouldn't allow them to have social security, because no amount of reduction in military budget can allow countries who would otherwise not have decent social security to have it.
The US does not pay Europe's allowance. At best they are paying/subsidizing for the maintenance of the house that Billie and Susie live in so they don't have to pay/pay less rent. If the difference in rent alone is enough to allow Billie and Susie to go to the doctor. Then there is theoretically a reduction in rent for mom and dad to also be able to afford to go to the doctors.Because Billie and Susie have similar types of expenditures and incomes to mom and dad, because Billie and Susie are functional adults. Mom and Dad's finances aren't special.
Europe is full of functioning countries with militaries, governments, social services, infrastructure etc. Aside from the expense of maintaining a pseudo-empire the US isn't special either.
Susie and Billy have grown up fast I see. Casting them as children was not meant as a pejorative towards European countries. There is nothing wrong with being smaller or larger than any other random country.
Making them all adults cannot hide the fact that they are not equal. You and Elon Musk are both functional adults. Your finances are not comparable.
If mom and dad can pay Susie and Billy's rent so they can go to the doctor then Susie and Billy could pay for mom and dad's rent so they could go to the doctor too, or why could not everyone just pay for their own doctor. Turns out dad's doctor is more expensive because dad and his hospital are 30x bigger.
If the entire New World stopped existing tomorrow, the defense needs and spending of Europe would increase. (Barring trolls who would respond to this thinking Europe's entire defense spending is Denmark defending Greenland from invasion by Trump.) That is the money alleged to be being saved. Not the spending that would be saved if the US covered all current spending down to $0. Rather, the money that they would have to spend were there no US. Notice I said no US, and not no NATO/alliance. This is deliberate. Because the same countries would have to spend more without the US AND without an alliance than they would without the US but WITH an alliance. And the geopolitical landscape also protects places like Switzerland and Austria. Even if Russia/Belarus suddenly didn't care for Austria's neutrality, there are external reasons why they can't get to Austria. In fact, in many cases needs and spending are subject to external factors which are no fault of the country's own. South Korea and Taiwan have to spend more on defense. Japan can't go ham on defense even if they wanted. Israel has to spend more due to their position. Norway's entire system works better if you're sitting on oil than if you aren't.
The benefits aren't just budget substitution. Germany doesn't even have 200k soldiers iirc. Then what are their men doing? In the workforce longer because they don't need to be drafted.
With no judgment on it's "fair" or "unfair" or somebody owes more or should be more grateful, again if you Atlantis-ified the American continent, European defense spending would go up. Now for budgetmaxxers like me, if your spending is unnecessary, you should reduce it, regardless of whatever you will or won't spend the money on instead (better yet, spend existing money as efficiently as possible). With the fog of war that line of how much is necessary and unnecessary is hard to know exactly. But for example whereas Italy's defense spending was 1% of GDP 10 years ago under the US/NATO umbrella, there is no analogous big brother to cover the US's needs. The big one can pay for the small one. But no matter how carefully you point out "Hey, if the big one didn't spend money on this, they could use the same money on that instead," there is nobody bigger to pay for the thing in their stead to make that possible. Besides which the US has social nets so robust that people defraud them to the tune of hundreds of millions to billions of dollars.
I think you are missing the point, my example does not at all need Susie and Billy to pay for mom & dads rent for them to go to the doctor. It merely requires that mom and dad's rent to go down significantly. Nor does it matter even if mom and dad's budget is 30 times greater than Susie and Billy's.
Welfare is spent on a per capita basis (if anything having a larger population and economy makes this cheaper).
The original contention was that you can't simultaneously say that the military budget is too small to allow/disallow European levels of welfare, and also say that US military expenditure is paying for European welfare.
Because all US military expenditure does, to European budgets, is allow lower military expenditure.
While I personally agree, that military expenditure won't in fact be the line in the sand for being able to have decent welfare or not (since but the US and Europe spend about 10 times more on welfare than the military). Saying that the US is paying for European welfare is laughable. Europe wasn't going to spend 10% or even 5% of it's gdp on the military, irrespective of circumstance (unless they were literally in an ongoing conventional war with Russia, or they decided to get frisky with imperialism/colonialism again).
Russia just isn't the conventional military threat that the USSR was, they are, debatably, barely winning against a Ukraine that has much less than the full support of NATO.
And Europe isn't exactly gearing up to fight the US or China.
The US and the European Union on average already spend pretty similar portions of their GDP on social services (by some measures the US spends more).
It's just that in the US welfare is also corporate welfare (as well as seperately dedicated corporate welfare). European welfare is something you should already be able to achieve with current expenditure if you had similar efficiency.
I don't get this whole "people don't want taxes so I will abolish them" approach. Like, presumably people also want clean water in their water taps and roads that aren't full of potholes. What is it about the idea that is so attractive? It's always a trade off, either you pay more tax and you get nicer things, or you pay less tax and then you gotta figure out how you dispose of your own poo on your own account.
On June 01 2026 14:06 EnDeR_ wrote: I don't get this whole "people don't want taxes so I will abolish them" approach. Like, presumably people also want clean water in their water taps and roads that aren't full of potholes. What is it about the idea that is so attractive? It's always a trade off, either you pay more tax and you get nicer things, or you pay less tax and then you gotta figure out how you dispose of your own poo on your own account.
They just don't like the idea of their money going to people who are 'underserving'.
Also they like to imagine they weren't the beneficiaries of other people's taxes, it destroys their ego around being 'self-made' and 'no-one ever having given them anything'.
To be fair, their government, and especially the corporations that actually influence the government are really corrupt, so the efficiency of their taxes are overall... quite low.
No one likes to pay taxes. It's just like any other bill or purchase, it's just that you don't immediatly see what you get from it and issue arise when you, even as a person that isn't "anti-tax" in general, feel ripped off.
As an example. I just googled the total tax rate of someone living in Los Angeles making 100k, it's about 30%. Assuming this is true, thats certainly enough to expect something more than "there are roads and basic infrastructure connecting things". If I pay that much, I wouldn't expect to see homeless camps all over the city. I mean wtf am I paying these 30% actually for at this point? Where is the money going?
On June 01 2026 17:21 Velr wrote: No one likes to pay taxes. It's just like any other bill or purchase, it's just that you don't immediatly see what you get from it and issue arise when you, even as a person that isn't "anti-tax" in general, feel ripped off.
As an example. I just googled the total tax rate of someone living in Los Angeles making 100k, it's about 30%. Assuming this is true, thats certainly enough to expect something more than "there are roads and basic infrastructure connecting things". If I pay that much, I wouldn't expect to see homeless camps all over the city. I mean wtf am I paying these 30% actually for at this point? Where is the money going?
Aren't those answers actually available to everyone though? I receive annual information in the mail about where my taxes are going, but more importantly: I can also look up that information online at any time thanks to articles and municipal / township websites. It just took me about 2 minutes to do so for my own area, starting at Googling "where do my property taxes go". It's easy to find percentage allocations toward local services such as public schools, police department, fire department, emergency medical services, road maintenance, trash collection, snow removal, libraries, and parks, as well as county-level costs.
Yes, you can. But thats just how they are allocated, that doesn't do much for you if your feeling you don't get enough for the taxes you pay and it's even worse when something is (seemingly) getting a lot of money and stuff is still bad.
On June 01 2026 18:04 Velr wrote: Yes, you can. But thats just how they are allocated, that doesn't do much for you if your feeling you don't get enough for the taxes you pay and it's even worse when something is (seemingly) getting a lot of money and stuff is still bad.
You're right, which is why the next step is to get involved! Do more research, go to the public meetings, ask questions, voice your opinions, speak to the decision-makers, vote for new leaders if need be, etc.
On June 01 2026 18:04 Velr wrote: Yes, you can. But thats just how they are allocated, that doesn't do much for you if your feeling you don't get enough for the taxes you pay and it's even worse when something is (seemingly) getting a lot of money and stuff is still bad.
If you’re dissatisfied with how much you’re taxed, and how the money is mismanaged or spent without effect, what on earth are you going to do? Vote for the candidate of a party of fascists? Fight the politicians within an entrenched party apparatus that have their own corrupt reasons to keep the gravy train rollling?
I suggest that you’d just be expressing your dissatisfaction through poll responses. And you might be a little pissed if people told you that you just have to spend a little more money and things will start turning around in the next two years, the same story you’ve heard for a decade. They’re doing the best they can with problems too big and/or outside their control, you see…
Supposedly I become a libertarian (= Republican) and will try to destroy/enshittificate everything the state/city does and then complain about taxes some more.
I'm ok with the taxes I pay here. Sadly i'm in one of the worst brackets income wise, I get no subsidies, freebies or anything but my income is all paycheck based so gets taxed with the full might of the system . But streets and cities are clean, public transport is awesome, homelesness is near non-existant (or at least invisible), safety is no concern, schools are decent... everything "just works".
How do MAGAs and other Republicans deal with the constant double talk and straight up fabrications when it comes to Iran.
Trump has said repeatedly that he destroyed Irans military (and heard it parroted here), but now he says “their military, we’ve sort of left it alone, because we think that their military is somewhat, somewhat moderate… we’ve actually left their military alone. People would be surprised to hear that.”
This is on top of the constant changing of goals. I find it very frustrating to hear a deal is done for the 13th time only to have bombs dropping the next day. But MAGA and Republicans must have whip lash from trusting each proclamation, only to have to pivot to a new reality sometimes as soon as minutes later.
On June 01 2026 23:40 Billyboy wrote: How do MAGAs and other Republicans deal with the constant double talk and straight up fabrications when it comes to Iran.
Trump has said repeatedly that he destroyed Irans military (and heard it parroted here), but now he says “their military, we’ve sort of left it alone, because we think that their military is somewhat, somewhat moderate… we’ve actually left their military alone. People would be surprised to hear that.”
This is on top of the constant changing of goals. I find it very frustrating to hear a deal is done for the 13th time only to have bombs dropping the next day. But MAGA and Republicans must have whip lash from trusting each proclamation, only to have to pivot to a new reality sometimes as soon as minutes later.
If you never believed in a position to begin with then it doesn't bother you when the position changes on a dime.
On June 01 2026 23:40 Billyboy wrote: How do MAGAs and other Republicans deal with the constant double talk and straight up fabrications when it comes to Iran.
Trump has said repeatedly that he destroyed Irans military (and heard it parroted here), but now he says “their military, we’ve sort of left it alone, because we think that their military is somewhat, somewhat moderate… we’ve actually left their military alone. People would be surprised to hear that.”
This is on top of the constant changing of goals. I find it very frustrating to hear a deal is done for the 13th time only to have bombs dropping the next day. But MAGA and Republicans must have whip lash from trusting each proclamation, only to have to pivot to a new reality sometimes as soon as minutes later.
Arent you surprised, hearing it from orange man himself? . Seems like he was right again.
On June 01 2026 18:04 Velr wrote: Yes, you can. But thats just how they are allocated, that doesn't do much for you if your feeling you don't get enough for the taxes you pay and it's even worse when something is (seemingly) getting a lot of money and stuff is still bad.
You're right, which is why the next step is to get involved! Do more research, go to the public meetings, ask questions, voice your opinions, speak to the decision-makers, vote for new leaders if need be, etc.
I believe Turbovolver established that no one around here or otherwise is doing or going to do that kind of stuff. Bitching into the void/mock and gawking right-wingers and periodically voting is about the best that can pragmatically be done.
On June 01 2026 23:40 Billyboy wrote: How do MAGAs and other Republicans deal with the constant double talk and straight up fabrications when it comes to Iran.
Trump has said repeatedly that he destroyed Irans military (and heard it parroted here), but now he says “their military, we’ve sort of left it alone, because we think that their military is somewhat, somewhat moderate… we’ve actually left their military alone. People would be surprised to hear that.”
This is on top of the constant changing of goals. I find it very frustrating to hear a deal is done for the 13th time only to have bombs dropping the next day. But MAGA and Republicans must have whip lash from trusting each proclamation, only to have to pivot to a new reality sometimes as soon as minutes later.
You know you're a smarter guy than the president, what's your idea for what "sort of" and "moderate" are supposed to mean?
The meaning of the President's words will be revealed at a later date to those who believe in him. Critics and doubters may not understand what he means but the Word was never meant for them. Trying to interpret the Word is folly, it cannot be nailed down, and the people who try always betray their bad intentions. They'll pretend to be innocent and say "I just want to know what he meant by X" but they'll write down the answer and the next day it'll be all "you say today that he means Y but yesterday you said X, that's a contradiction, the Word is contradictory". Be very suspicious of anyone trying to force an interpretation of the Word, they seek only to attack the Source.
Spicer shows us the way. "I think the President and a small group of people know exactly what he meant."
On June 01 2026 23:40 Billyboy wrote: How do MAGAs and other Republicans deal with the constant double talk and straight up fabrications when it comes to Iran.
Trump has said repeatedly that he destroyed Irans military (and heard it parroted here), but now he says “their military, we’ve sort of left it alone, because we think that their military is somewhat, somewhat moderate… we’ve actually left their military alone. People would be surprised to hear that.”
This is on top of the constant changing of goals. I find it very frustrating to hear a deal is done for the 13th time only to have bombs dropping the next day. But MAGA and Republicans must have whip lash from trusting each proclamation, only to have to pivot to a new reality sometimes as soon as minutes later.
You know you're a smarter guy than the president, what's your idea for what "sort of" and "moderate" are supposed to mean?
On June 01 2026 23:40 Billyboy wrote: How do MAGAs and other Republicans deal with the constant double talk and straight up fabrications when it comes to Iran.
Trump has said repeatedly that he destroyed Irans military (and heard it parroted here), but now he says “their military, we’ve sort of left it alone, because we think that their military is somewhat, somewhat moderate… we’ve actually left their military alone. People would be surprised to hear that.”
This is on top of the constant changing of goals. I find it very frustrating to hear a deal is done for the 13th time only to have bombs dropping the next day. But MAGA and Republicans must have whip lash from trusting each proclamation, only to have to pivot to a new reality sometimes as soon as minutes later.
You know you're a smarter guy than the president, what's your idea for what "sort of" and "moderate" are supposed to mean?
I’m not the Trump whisperer. Why don’t you say what you believe he means and whether it’s good or not. Plant your flag. Then in a hour, day or week when it’s something else, you can explain how what you thought was wrong and how this is so much better.
EPT
.
. Seems like he was right again.
