I don’t think a decent % of ppl on this board even suspected that some of their friends and relatives could be so down bad for supporting a death cult and an insurrection. There have always been far more terrible ppl in America than the main stream wanted to believe, but social media has exacerbated this beyond most people’s worst fears.
My favorite response to bringing up Trump's anti-Christian-value antics to evangelicals is that they don't care because they didn't vote for a pastor, they voted for a businessman to run the country as such.
We're fucked #1,853,184 Even federal judges are referencing far-right conspiracy theories to overturn our laws Government by the loudest and most gullible among us keeps producing the expected results. It should be noted, yet again, that being an actual, bonafide judge in the United States of America requires no qualifications whatsoever. You either are appointed as a judge or win an election to become one, and the rest is filler to be worked out by whoever's been tasked with updating the webpages. They say anybody in America can grow up to be president, but that is obviously a lie. But anyone can grow up to be a judge in America. Louie Gohmert was a judge. Being a judge is in fact one of the few occupations in America that does not require you to even have a head. Unfortunate roller coaster accident? Got too close to Dick Cheney during a hunting trip? No problem. You can still write opinions. Years before his untimely death, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia outsourced all his important opinions to a family of grumpy squirrels that had taken up residence in his attic and nobody noticed or said a damn thing about it. In a Friday night news dump, a California judge issued a ruling announcing that the state's assault weapon ban, in place since 1989, was unconstitutional because reasons. It caused a stir primarily for using language that sounded conspicuously like what the National Rifle Association and American militia groups have long been spouting in their newsletters and pamphlets, and mostly for Judge Roger Benitez's comparison of weapons designed explicitly for mass murder to a "Swiss Army Knife." An AR-15 rifle "is a perfect combination of home defense weapon and homeland defense equipment," Benitez said in his ruling. Whether he had his pants on while writing that sentence is unknown; whether he cribbed it exactly from a gun manufacturer's ad is ... probably worth exploring. That is not, however, the only bit of bizarre editorializing in the ruling. Judge HasAHead also took it upon himself to opine that assault weapons actually are far less dangerous than ... the COVID-19 vaccine. "The evidence described so far proves that the 'harm' of an assault rifle being used in a mass shooting is an infinitesimally rare event. More people have died from the Covid-19 vaccine than mass shootings in California." Spoiler If I were head dictator of judgeships this one would be off the bench in five seconds flat for putting the "harm" of assault-rifle-assisted mass shootings in scare quotes, but I ain't and he's not. The part that's getting more heat is that U.S. District Judge Roger Benitez appears to be flat-out lying in that second sentence, and that’s us saying it nicely. The Washington Post fact-checks Benitez on this one, but to anyone who does not live entirely inside Tucker Carlson's inflamed colon the problem here should be obvious. The number of people who are believed to have died from the COVID-19 vaccine is, at this time, approximately zero. There has been some very public speculation as to whether some of the vaccines might cause an extremely rare form of blood clot, one that may have killed three people in this country after millions and millions of doses, but the data is not conclusive and the clots seem to appear in the unvaccinated general population at roughly similar rates. Meanwhile, mass shootings continue to be a regular occurrence in California, just as they are elsewhere. Even if you presume all three deaths suspected of being vaccine linked were indeed caused by a vaccine, it's not even close. All we can assume here is that this particular judge is referring to far-right conspiracy theories about the vaccine from the dark nether regions of the American political psyche. It's possible we can attribute the blatant factual error to Fox News and to Tucker Carlson's white nationalist conspiracy show, but the suggestion that lifesaving, normality-saving vaccines are killing people in greater numbers than AR-15s does feels more like something plucked more directly from the Q crowd, from frothing far-right militias, or both. Unfortunately, there's no particular recourse for this sort of judicial conspiracy peddling. For particularly grotesque behavior on the bench, the House and Senate can remove a federal judge via impeachment, but that is reserved for only the most egregious of cases and "is factually wrong when issuing weirdly premised opinions" isn't it. This is why, in fact, the Republican-held Senate was so obsessive in filling as many judicial vacancies as possible with hard-right ideologues while blocking nominees from a Democratic administration: stuff the benches with hard-right conspiracy theorists, hard-right conspiracy theories become the stuff that governs us. The judge's ruling is absolutely certain to be appealed, but the Supreme Court is itching to undo a century of laws itself and will probably not let the unending goofiness of this written opinion stop it from writing a more dignified goofy version that scrubs out the most embarrassing parts. So far, though, there's been no ruling from hard-right judges declaring that making fun of bad judicial opinions kills more people each year than AR-15 "freedom bringers" do, so we can at least point and shake our heads here. Maybe it's cathartic. Maybe it's whistling past the graveyard.
It has made me sad. It was stunning to me to see people I thought had more intelligence than that falling for Trump's bullshit. The common denominators were some level of bigotry and watching Fox News.
My sister informed me today that the media is eating crow because there is now "proof" that the virus leaked from the lab and was engineered by the Chinese. I asked her where she saw this because I haven't seen any media discuss this. She says "it' all over the place!" I'm going to guess this is Fox News stuff.
My hunch is that China isn’t going to let anyone in to poke around to find out. So we get to do this dance for the rest of our goddamn lives.
some dude published an article in the bulletin of atomic scientists saying that we may have had a hand in developing the virus (assuming it escaped from that lab) because we were allegedly funding caronavirus research there in other words, yes, if it turns out the virus did escape from that lab it does change things, but not like lindsey thinks https://www.currentaffairs.org/2021/05/the-stakes-of-finding-covid-19s-origins
Here’s my tin foil hat idea on the origin of the virus: the intelligence could have been there early on that it was a lab leak, but the media, Dems, and more establishment Rs suppressed the hypothesis of the lab leak to protect our PPE/pharm supply chain. the Rs you really saw indulge in the lab theory early on are the hawks of the hawks on the CCP. Cotton, Pompeo, Pottinger. As well of course RW media who saw it as red meat and not a legitimate geopolitical/trade crisis
It really shouldn't change anything, this would be a catastrophe level accident, but accidents do happen. Unless there is a reason to believe there was any malicious intent, this was not some CCP operation to stop Trump from getting re-elected. Trump still would have acted like it was no big deal, and a lot of people would have still died. As Fauci said you go where the things are happening, you don't bring them home.
i think the united states funding the biggest disaster in human history would change things, particularly if this guy is correct
Yeah the issue is whether Fauci himself, who as a bureaucrat has been unprecedented in his influence over public policy IMO, had knowledge that the lab was conducting risky research while also being fed subgrants with federal money. It would be the mother of all conflicts of interest, and calls into question every decision he has made in public health guidance since the outbreak I don’t think it makes anyone a RWNJ to recognize the exposure Fauci and the public health establishment has as it plays out. I’m less inclined to think Biden or the Dems have to answer for it, but the average Joe might think they do because the aligned themselves behind the public health community during the campaign
as a regular citizen, i would kind of want to know why they were making jurassic park and then acted like it was crazy that the dinosaurs eating everyone came from jurassic park
Uh I still favor the point that we should have never stopped viewing monitoring the lab efforts (and public health concerns more broadly) in far away places as a "waste of money" but, you know, whatever.
Let's pump the breaks because the genocide/pandemic of native Americans was the greatest disaster in human history (at least off the top of my head) Secondly, it would matter yes, but again Trump would have still turned this from normal disaster to full blown catastrophe. Third, wouldn't all of this research have occurred under the watchful eye of the orange dear leader and his goons (in the broader sense of republicans not making any noise about this for the better part of a decade), guess god didn't let him on on this tid bit
“Proud Boys Did Nothing Wrong” “Trump won. Take Back America” These signs are not compatible with each other.
Obviously I'm talking about disasters in the sense of industrial accidents and the like, not conquests or genocides, but reading the thing would have made that clear
CYA Conflict between his own personal accountablility for his funding of EcoHealth Alliance and the public guidance he was providing Americans Also I’m not a scientist but going from “we’ve ruled out a lab leak” to “we can no longer rule out a lab leak” seems like the opposite of what I understand the scientific method to be. Doesn’t mean he’s been lying but it’s not good for his credibility as this plays out
Regardless of where the virus came from the response from trump is what created the mess we found ourselves in. Don’t know what Faucci did that can be questioned nor do I know how much influence he had over actual public policy. I think this controversy muddies the waters and distracts from the harm the gop has done during this pandemic.
Who gives a fuck? Whether it came from a pig, a lab, an aardvark or a transgender hooker, it was still mismanaged on an epic scale once it hit our shores. That's the issue.
But the public guidance he was providing Americans was independent of the origins of the threat. It doesn’t matter where the virus came from when it comes time to mount a response to its spread. That isn’t a conflict.
Besides RWNJs being able to say “see trump was right.” What does knowing where it came from change? I think we probably should know where it came from but it won’t change my opinion about the republicans and all the harm they caused.
I don't really care about the Fauci angle here. The U.S. potentially funding the creation of the virus would be a pretty big story but it seems like you guys are intentionally ignoring that for some reason
I mean what else should I call it? You're making a comment about something no one said (mismanagement isn't an issue) and followed it up with some shittyass joke (transgender hookers, lol!). Are you people really not curious about the origin of the virus? I find that hard to believe
Nobody said this. People only said it’s irrelevant when discussing Fauci and the US’s response to the outbreak.
no one is ignoring that. and iirc in an interview Faucci has said this happens but he doesn’t believe that is what happened here. It’s not a huge bombshell.
Seemed like "who gives a fuck" and "regardless of where the virus came from" after I have multiple posts on this page re: the origin of the virus were talking about that