Rottcodd @ Rottcodd @lemmy.world

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Joined

2 yr. ago

Curiously enough, I didn't delete it. I was just scanning back through my posts when I saw "deleted by creator" on one of them, and since I know I haven't deleted anything, I came to see what that was all about.

There's an option to undelete, so I did that, though unfortunately that means that yours is now the post without context. Sorry. 😅

I would agree that Americans need to make "informed decisions" in the upcoming election - for instance, they need to be "informed" of the fact that one of the candidates is a convicted felon.

And on another note, here's that "politically motivated" thing again.

Just as I noted the other day, when Alito trotted it out, how is there even a notion that it matters?

Let's just run with the assumption that the prosecution was "politically motivated." So what? The trial worked exactly the way a trial is meant to work - the jury heard the evidence and rendered a verdict based on the evidence.

What on earth does the supposed motivation of the prosecutor have to do with anything?

I'm pretty sure that if he took his shirt off, we'd just see how much he looks like Baron Harkonnen.

Of course he wants immunity for cops - he dreams of the day when he'll have his own murder squads and be able to simply have anyone who might dare to oppose him killed.

And so do his supporters.

And so do cops.

The whole "politically motivated" complaint is such a brazenly dishonest diversion that it just astonishes me that people use it, much less get away with it.

Alito told a filmmaker posing as a conservative activist that ProPublica “gets a lot of money” to dig up “any little thing they can find,” suggesting the reporting was politically motivated.

How does that even matter?

The simple fact of the matter is that, whatever their motivations might be, people either are or are not going to find evidence of corruption, and the one and only thing that determines that is whether or not such evidence exists.

Alito, were he so inclined, could've very easily have made it so that nobody, no matter how determined or for what reason, could've uncovered evidence of his corruption. All he had to do was not be corrupt.

If there was no corruption there could be no evidence of corruption, and then even the most sinister and underhanded attempt to make him look bad would fail.

On the other hand, if there is evidence there to be found, then the motivations of the people who uncover it are entirely irrelevant - the ONLY thing that matters is what they uncovered.

Seriously, how does the assertion that something like this is "politically motivated" even have the illusion of credence? How is it met with anything other than a blank look and a "So what?"

The system as a whole.

No - it's actually not like that at all.

Google didn't pay that money just to bypass the formalities along the way to paying a fixed fine - they paid it in order to head off the possibility that they were going to face a jury trial instead of a bench trial, since juries are far more likely to vote in favor of much bigger fines than judges are.

Mm... no. It's really not.

The specific point of all of this was that Google wanted to avoid a jury trial, and the specific reason that they wanted to avoid a jury trial is because a jury trial is much more likely to end up with a much bigger judgment against them. A judge in a bench trial will follow established precedent to arrive at a reasonable penalty, while a jury can and often will essentially arbitrarily decide that they should be fined eleventy bajillion dollars for being assholes.

So their goal with this payment was pretty much exactly the same as the goal of the motorist who slips a traffic cop a bribe to get out of a ticket - to entice someone with immediate cash in order to avoid potentially having to pay much more somewhere down the line.

So basically the corporate equivalent of slipping a traffic cop a $100, then him conveniently deciding that you're free to go.

Ah yes - the man who still has to have the vote rigged even after arranging for the murders of his opposition speaks on democracy...

Israel has rather obviously been using the attention on Gaza as cover for stepping up their efforts in the West Bank, even going so far as distributing automatic weapons to the illegal settlers, with which the settlers then entirely unsurprisingly went on a murderous rampage.

Just another aspect of the profound evil of Zionism.

Seriously - how can any person be so brazenly and thoroughly warped?

I can only assume that, like so many of the fabulously wealthy, she's profoundly mentally ill, such that she really can't grasp the enormous human cost that fulfilling her petty, selfish and ultimately pointless desires would entail. It can only be the case that she genuinely can't grasp the fact that the millions of people who would be made to suffer or die for this are actual people - actual beings with lives and loved ones who are every bit as important to them as hers are to her.

It's either that or she's genuinely evil, in the purest sense of the word, and on a scale the world has rarely seen.

So which is it Ms. Adelson? Are you insane or simply evil? There's absolutely no doubt - none at all - that it's one or the other.

I don't think we can say, since it's possible (likely?) that his premises aren't even true.

Israel has already trotted out all of the same "mistakes were made" rhetoric, and certainly if they haven't already, they will state that they'll try to learn from it to make changes. So there's really no difference as far as that goes

The biggest difference I see between the incidents is only relevant to Americans - then it was our government controlling the narrative at home, and now it's a foreign government, failing to control the narrative abroad.

I have little doubt that the narrative about Gaza that Israelis are being fed now is roughly the same as the narrative Americans were being fed about Iraq and Afghanistan, which at least leaves the possibility that the actual underlying realities were and are also roughly the same. And if so, what Kirby is actually doing is not comparing the incidents and responses in and of themselves, but essentially just playing off of the differences between the version the people at home get and the version outsiders get - depending on Americans actually believing the American rhetoric then, even as they don't believe the Israeli rhetoric now. That's really the only way you end up with the notion that America sincerely did regret it and admit to it and set about making changes, rather than just, as Israel is doing now (from an outside perspective) paying lip service to all of that.

So what he's actually possibly demonstrating, certainly inadvertently, is that the US was just as full of shit then as Israel is now.

So basically the US government is a gigantic Trump - rising up in self-righteous fury at the very idea that anyone might dare to charge them for the crimes they've brazenly committed.

I can't imagine what it must be like to be so morally bankrupt.

Clearly, they know that what they're doing in Gaza is evil, and they know that the only hope they have of evading the entirely justified condemnation of the rest of the world is to hide it.

History will not judge them kindly. No matter what they do, they're not going to be able to hide the evidence of their evil forever.

No surprise there.

Israel's actions in Gaza are morally indefensible.

So its defenders cannot, and for the most part don't even bother to try to, sincerely engage with criticism.

Instead, they rely on diversions, misrepresentations, character assassination, censorship, intimidation, harassment and violence, simply because that's all they have.

Naturally.

There are two main ways in which people can try to further a political position they've taken - they can either argue for the position or they can attempt to discredit those who argue against it.

If the position they're trying to further is so illogical or immoral that they can't frame any arguments in its favor, then attempting to discredit its opponents is the only thing they have left.

On brand.

No surprise there - she's a crass opportunist with no principles and no empathy; what else is she going to do?

It's likely that she isn't even dissembling - that she's sincerely defending her actions because she's so psychologically crippled that she genuinely can't see how anyone could legitimately take exception to them.

Exactly, and that's bizarre.

We actually live in a world in which politicians are expected to be dishonest, amoral and corrupt fuckwads and the few in Washington who aren't are outcasts even in their own party. And we just accept that. It's insane.