"America Is a Tinderbox"

And that is precisely the paradigmn with today’s political norms.
While this neo fascist descent appears dangerous, it has been deranged, like the cure to the pandemic consisting of injected sanitised viruses.

With everyone knowing that the conflated grey is an impossibly high bar from which to dive, but metaphores bar a neat form, yet it has to be done.

That is why only drugs and drink can alleviate the impermeable and shameful disappointment, looking like fear.

The fear is the untested depth, upon landing. Everyone on board with the program. Divide and conquer is one of those fossil-like metaphors.

Cui bono?

Who stands to gain from this?

We can black box how much people are feeding the problem, were there agent provacateurs, what the right responses are and so on.

Let’s just black box that.

Cui bono?

Well, by design or opportunististic response, the people who see Corona as a call to bring in panopticon control state-like societies, also see street unrest, vandalsim and violence as a call for what they have been dreaming of setting up for a long, long time.

If this appeals to you, if you’d like to contribute to making it easier to justify such state, this would lead to certain actions and telling a specific set of stories.

If you don’t want that kind of state, then it would be good to not buy, repeat, accept and help create the justifications of the control mad. (oops, my neutrality might have slipped a bit at the end there)

I do think blacks, for example, get the shit end of the law enforcement stick, but the guys who are loving Corona and now civil unrest since they get to do what they have always wanted to do, hate everyone and if they get their way, skin color is not going to matter because we are just meat and slaves (at best) to them.

I have to leave for work in about 5 minutes but before I go,
I must point out that while cities burn and the virus has killed
thousands and the economy is DOA… what is the President doing?

He is hiding in his bunker below the White house……

such tremendous and outstanding show of leadership
that Herr Trump is showing us and the world……

I just can’t quite imagine the great leaders of yesteryear,
say a Lincoln or an FDR or a Washington, hiding in their
bunker when the going gets tough…

but hay, Herr Trump has proven himself to be a coward
of epic proportions……

Her Trump has abdicated his job, his responsibilities and his duties
to the American people to hide in the White house bunker…

so, are you feeling like he has made American great again?

just asking for a friend………

Kropotkin

POLITICS NEWS

Trump says he will deploy military if state officials can’t contain protest violence

To do so, the president would need to invoke the Insurrection Act that allows U.S. troops to be deployed domestically.

June 1, 2020, 4:27 PM

WASHINGTON — As the sound of sirens wailed and flash bangs popped across the street, President Donald Trump announced from the Rose Garden that he would use the U.S. military to stop the riots across the county that have been sparked by the death of George Floyd.

“I am mobilizing all federal and local resources, civilian and military, to protect the rights of law abiding Americans,” Trump said in the extraordinary address, which was delivered as police fired tear gas outside to push protesters back from the White House.

“If a city or state refuses to take the actions necessary to defend the life and property of their residents, then I will deploy the United States military and quickly solve the problem for them,” Trump said, referring to himself as "your president of law and order and an ally of all peaceful protesters.”

To activate the military to operate in the U.S., Trump would have to invoke the 213-year-old Insurrection Act, which four people familiar with the decision had told NBC News he planned to do.

The military police forces would come from Fort Bragg in North Carolina and possibly Fort Belvoir in Virginia and could arrive in Washington within hours, these people said.

Trump’s decision to invoke the act, adopted in 1807, to deploy troops comes as his frustrations mount over the protests that have followed the death of Floyd, a black man who was killed in police custody last week in Minneapolis. The people familiar with his decision said Trump was angry Sunday night at the destruction protestors caused in Washington, particularly the vandalization of national monuments.

Some of the president’s aides have been encouraging him for days to invoke the act, as he weighs options for exercising executive powers to address the crisis. The act was last invoked during the 1992 Rodney King riots in Los Angeles.

Trump’s remarks came hours after he urged the nation’s governors to get “tough” with unruly demonstrators. “Most of you are weak,” he told them, according to audio of the call obtained by NBC News. "You have to dominate. If you don’t dominate, you’re wasting your time, they’re gonna run over you, you’re gonna look like a bunch of jerks,” the president said.

The White House did not respond to a request for comment on the president’s plans but at a briefing with reporters Monday, White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany left open the possibility that the president could invoke the act.

“The Insurrection Act, it’s one of the tools available, whether the president decides to pursue that, that’s his prerogative,“ McEnany said.

Governors can ask that the federal government send active duty troops to help in cases of civil unrest like the widespread protests plaguing U.S. cities over the last several days. But, so far, no governor has requested active duty troops to assist and instead they have relied on local law enforcement and National Guard soldiers and airmen on state active duty.

Governors often prefer the National Guard forces in these cases because they can legally perform law enforcement duties in the U.S., whereas troops on active duty cannot without violating the Posse Comitatus Act, a 1878 law that prohibits the government from using military forces to act as a police force within U.S. borders.

But the president could invoke the Insurrection Act to deploy active-duty troops without a request from a governor. Those troops would be allowed to conduct law enforcement missions. To invoke the act, Trump would first have to issue a proclamation to “immediately order the insurgents to disperse and retire peaceably to their abodes within a limited time,” according to the law.

In the past the Justice Department has drafted such proclamations. And according to the Congressional Research Service, the act has been invoked many times throughout U.S. history, although rarely since the 1960s civil rights era. When it was invoked in 1992 during the Los Angeles riots, the move was requested by then-California Gov. Pete Wilson, not invoked solely by President George H.W. Bush.

The Defense Department declined to comment on the possibility that the president could invoke the act.

One of Trump’s allies outside the White House, Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., urged Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act “if necessary” so U.S. troops can “support our local law enforcement and ensure that this violence ends tonight.”

Courtney Kube

Courtney Kube is a correspondent covering national security and the military for the NBC News Investigative Unit.

© 2020 NBC UNIVERSAL

Massachusetts GOP governor rips Trump’s ‘bitterness, combativeness and self-interest’

By Paul LeBlanc, CNN

Updated 7:57 PM EDT, Mon June 01, 2020

(CNN)Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker on Monday excoriated President Donald Trump’s “bitterness, combativeness and self-interest” as nationwide protests have intensified over the death of George Floyd.

The Republican governor made the comments at a press conference when asked about Trump’s video teleconference call, in which the President urged state leaders to aggressively target violent protesters. The call came after nearly a week of protests across the country that at times have turned violent over the death of Floyd, a 46-year-old African American man who died at the hands of a police officer in Minneapolis.

“I heard what the President said today about dominating and fighting. I know I should be surprised when I hear incendiary words like this from him, but I’m not,” Baker told reporters. “At so many times during these past several weeks when the country needed compassion and leadership the most, it was simply nowhere to be found.”

Instead, he continued, “we got bitterness, combativeness and self-interest. That’s not what we need in Boston, it’s not what we need right now in Massachusetts and it’s definitely not what we need across this great country of ours either.”

The President’s hardline message to governors comes as he and his advisers continue to debate the wisdom of a national address following the protests, one of which took place outside the White House and led him and his family to retreat to an underground bunker on Friday night.

“You have to dominate or you’ll look like a bunch of jerks, you have to arrest and try people,” the President told the governors in a call from the basement White House Situation Room, according to an audio recording of the call obtained by CNN.

Baker, a frequent critic of the President, struck a different tone earlier Monday in a statement praising “the powerful statement” that peaceful protestors made in Boston.

“The murder of George Floyd at the hands of police was a horrible tragedy – one of countless tragedies to befall people of color across the United States. The vast majority of protesters today did so peacefully, toward a common goal of promoting justice and equality,” he said.

“I am deeply thankful for their voices and their positive, forceful message. I also want to express my gratitude to all the police officers and other first responders working to protect the people of Boston from the individuals whose violent actions, looting and property destruction was criminal and cowardly – and distracted from the powerful statement made today by thousands of Massachusetts residents.”

© 2020 Cable News Network. Turner Broadcasting System, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

There’s no reason to believe the murder of George Floyd was racially motivated.

Nonetheless it’s being used to further divide and destroy America.

Christine Blasey Ford was bullshit, the migrant caravans were bullshit, Russian Collusion was bullshit, Covid-19 was bullshit and this…while the police brutality appears to be genuine, the way it’s being interpreted and exploited by the liberal elite (I say liberal elite because not all liberals are on board with what they’re doing) and their pawns (much of Antifa and BLM) to promote violence and anti-white, anti-right and anti-police sentiment in the middle of a supposed pandemic, is bullshit.

All part of the liberal elite’s scorched earth strategy they’ve been carrying out for the last 3-4 years.

I’m not surprised, in fact I’m sure the next (fake) crisis isn’t too far off, my only question is, will America, and the rest of the world, be able to survive it?

How much more can we take, a fake epidemic, real lockdown and economic depression, and now race riots martial law, before it all comes tumbling down?

All this is not to say the conservative elite are perfect, very, very far from it, or that they’re not in cahoots with liberals on a lot of this shit, but in my estimation, the liberal elite have gone totally batshit ever since Brexit and quasi-populists like Jair Bolsonaro, Matteo Salvini and you know who were elected worldwide.

Their NWO based on communism and technocracy they’ve been quietly building for the last 70 years out of the old crony capitalist world order lost a little ground, and they absolutely refuse to accept it.

Now they’re doubling and tripling down.

The liberal elite no longer believe in liberty at all and they refuse to meet their opposition halfway (if you’re a civic nationalist, you’re a Nazi, if you don’t want open borders, you’re a xenophobe, if you don’t want more special privileges for blacks and natives, you’re a white supremacist, if you don’t chop your son’s balls off and allow him to be groomed by drag queens, you’re a transphobe, if you don’t believe all women you’re a misogynist (unless it’s Bill Clinton or Joe Biden then it’s okay), if you don’t accept carbon taxes the sky will fall, if you don’t submit to contract tracing, house arrest, relocation, masks, social distancing, testing and vaccinations, you’re a carrier, a spreader and you need to be fined and incarcerated).

They’ve abandoned free speech, the freedom to assemble (unless you’re Antifa or BLM and you’re raiding a supermarket or setting fire to a building, then it’s okay), travel and work, the presumption of innocence, privacy, bodily integrity, everything and unreservedly embraced totalitarianism.

I don’t think the elite has a part or side of the spectrum. Bush was there for 9/11 and the lost trillions.

I see how they use politics (any politics), but they’re not, to me, political. They are wholly mercenary.

Your post follows mine and specifies no one in particular, so I’ll respond just in case. I don’t like Trump. I can’t tell if he is a black sheep family member of the utter insiders or just some renegade authoritarian type who has a few anti-neo con tendencies (not with the program but not an outsider in other senses, obviously) that meant the elites first went ape shit against him, but generally seem to have him in hand now. One really does not have to like bully A to point out the problems with bully B.

When I was a young if you pointed out the foreign policy atrocities - say in Latin America, Vietnam, covert colonialism, corporate crimes - of the US to conservatives they would talk about the USSR’s horrors. If I talked to left liberals about USSR antisemitism, oppression, political use of psychiatry or whatever - the lefties would say I was a Republican - and I was actually generally further left than they were. Have a to find a Murray Bookchin type to have a reasonable conversation.

We are so trained to think in binary terms. This isn’t restricted to politics. The moment someone criticizes arguments in favor of free will, one must be a determinist. I find this shit all over philosophical forms. For some reason there must be two positions and one of those two must be right and the arguments in favor of it must also be right. LOL. The utter marginalization and simplification of possible positions and problems.

My point in my post is REGARDLESS of whether certain events are conspiracies and consciously elicited or merely opportunities that arise more randomly, things like Covid and lockdown + police violence and racial tensions
can be used
and are being used as an oppotunity to set in motion fascistic/Stasi-like powers (people who identify left or right might use these labels) and potentially keep them.

I think the discussion of conspiracies is necessary, but regardless, we should all know that there are people who love chaos because they want to use it to give themselves permanent control.

What is happening now, created, partially created, happenstance is increasing gaps between the rich and the poor (and all those small businesses going out of business create more niches for large businesses), more law enforcement power, less privacy rights, more surveillance and intrusion, more state power, more control.

Even if someone thinks every single change in state power made now during Corona and the riots is good policy and not conspirational, they STILL should be concerned that the government will not give these powers back. The Patriot Act is still in force, the NSA can still do everything it did and the internet of things is coming - did you ask for it? - which will give surveillance capitalism and surveillance communism even more power over us. The drug war powers are still with us along with the militarization of law enforcement. What they take in the last few decades as power, then tend to keep.

Regardless of how much one trusts MSM, regardless of how much one entertains potential conspiracies to be in fact the case, one should be concerned about more of what we already know is true. There is a trend to hanging onto powers in the last few decades and powers that go against democracy and indvidual rights to all sorts of things.

Or we can all hate each other in binary team divisions which also helps those with power grab more and justify grabbing more.

Was your stomach ulcer caused by the Heliobakter pylori or was it caused by stress and poor diet and then the HP moved in?

In one sense it really doesn’t matter. The elite powers sure as shit see a parasitical opportunity and none of us, regardless of political and epistemological differences, should pretend that, at the very least, can’t be happening, right now.

I think it does and it doesn’t.
I think the vast majority of both liberals and conservatives, especially in the last 60 years, have been completely corrupt.
Most of the decent liberals and conservatives are on the fringes, like a Tulsi Gabbard or a Rand Paul.
However recently mainline conservatives have become a bit more antiestablishment than mainline liberals, like you have Trump Standing up to the WHO, big tech and the pharmaceutical industry, a bit.
Don’t get me wrong tho, Trump is still very, very corrupt.
Of course I could be wrong tho, perhaps they’re all equally corrupt.

You’re all still actually reading your news outlets and gobbling it all up, while at the same time pretending to say you’re against corruption and conspiracy.

Odd, but it has gotten to be a bit amusing somehow recently.

How desperately do you need to be fucked in the ass?

This from an uncritical Trump supporter.

Next up: ILP is a tinderbox!

If posts could kill? :wink:

Paul Krugman

[b]'I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that America as we know it is on the brink.

How did we get here? The core story of U.S. politics over the past four decades is that wealthy elites weaponized white racism to gain political power, which they used to pursue policies that enriched the already wealthy at workers’ expense.'[/b]

nytimes.com/2020/06/01/opin … e=Homepage

As existential contraptions rooted in dasein go, I think he nailed it.

Though, sure, there are other existential contraptions out there as well. :open_mouth:

I don’t think African Americans are particularly hard done by.

Take a look at this:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/816699/local-jail-inmates-in-the-united-states-by-race/

Hispanics are incarcerated a little less than whites and Asians about 6 times less than whites.

Does that sound like racism to you?

So if a population group is incarcerated 6 times less than whites, it’s happenstance or because Asians are culturally or genetically superior, but if a population group is incarcerated 3 times more than whites, it’s because white privilege/racism?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ethnic_groups_in_the_United_States_by_household_income

Indian Americans for example make significantly more money than Japanese Americans who make significantly more money than English, German and Irish Americans.
Is that because whites are more racist against Japanese Americans than they are against Indian Americans?
Indian Americans make a lot more than whites who make a lot more than Indian Americans cousins Bangladeshis.
That can’t be because whites hate Bangladeshis more than they do Indians because they’re indistinguishable to whites.
However, more Bangladeshis are Muslim than Indians, could that be the reason?
But wait, Iranians are Muslims and they too do better than whites, Bangladeshis and Iraqis.

Take a look at this:

https://www.citylab.com/equity/2019/08/police-officer-shootings-gun-violence-racial-bias-crime-data/595528/

So African Americans are 2.5 times more likely to be killed by police than whites, but whites are about 2.5 times more likely to be killed by police than Asians, and Pacific Islanders too.

And women are a hell of a lot less likely to be incaracerated or killed by police, does that mean they’re actually committing crimes as often as men, but they’re getting a free pass because they’re cute and sexy?

Because of the stereotype that women are sugar, spice and everything nice, and men are brutes?

So what would a racist society look like?

It would look like whites way on top by almost any measure of success and the other races way on the bottom, which’s not at all like what we see, instead we see Asians usually on top, Pacific Islanders, whites and Hispanics usually somewhere in the middle and African Americans usually on the bottom, but not always (see Nigerian Americans).

And what would sexism look like?

I’ll tell you what it wouldn’t look like, it wouldn’t look like women doing better than men in a lot of ways (better health and longevity, more child custody and socioeconomic support, less incarceration and suicide).

Does racism exist?

Of course it does, but it goes both ways and it’s the exception, not the rule.

The bottom line is we don’t live in an essentially racist society and we’re not in danger of living in one either, unless we let the liberal elite transform it into one.

The so called antiracists, antisexists and antifascists, are just plain racists, sexists and fascists (or communists rather).

Statistical contraptions too. We have ours, they have theirs.

Rich criminals looting struggling middle class businesses in the name of “racial justice”
disrn.com/news/nyc-looters-pull … sack-store

Trump begs governors of democratic states to protect their people.
Yet he is framed by the soros-owned media as “making things worse”…

Meanwhile we get a glimpse of how absurdly rich America is - all those videos being shot from all those brand new cars - Trump did really well restoring the economy.
Yet terrorists are never happy. They do not know gratitude. They think like Stalin: “Gratitude is for dogs”.

Trump is a better man than the US deserves. But then he is here not just for the US, but to fight off fascism in the name of all of the human race.

HONOUR AND PRAISE BE TO DONALD J TRUMP
no matter what mr President, you have done what you could for these people.

That can be cultural. IOW people think that Asians are rule followers and their cultures also have tendencies that are less individualistic and more based on following authority, so both perception and cultural reality lead to less crime. I’m surprised that Hispanics do as well or better in court than whites.

But, me, I’d rather be white than black if I found myself accused of a crime. And not a little.

I would call it culturally mixed. It keeps them within the law, but that is not always good and then following authority and reduced invidualism, which are associated with their rule following has its negative side also

Look here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hispanic_paradox#Comparison_with_Other_Ethnicities

Hispanic Americans make less money than white Americans, but does that mean they’re worse off?
On the contrary, Hispanic Americans are healthier, live longer, eat better and have stronger families and communities.
Hispanics are also healthier and live longer in the US than they do in their homelands.
The Hispanic American life expectancy is 82 years, the Mexican life expectancy for example is 75 years.
Do documented Hispanics make less money than whites because of racial discrimination, or because of other factors, like better work/life balance?

In North America we think of success materially, but success is multifaceted.
When you think of success holistically, Hispanics, and women for that matter, do significantly better than whites and men.
And as we’ve seen Hispanics are less likely to be incarcerated than whites.
Polynesians are less likely to be killed by police officers.
South and East Asians tend to be more successful by many metrics.

What it boils down to is, it’s better to be an Asian or Hispanic American in many ways than a white American.
When other races do better, there’s all sorts of explanations, but when they do worse, there can be only 1: white privilege/racism.
The dialogue, or monologue rather we have about race in North America, is rigged.

K: ok, so much lies… do I have time to get all of them?

for example, George Soros, doesn’t actually own any media… he once donated
1.8 million to NPR, which is far less then the Kock brothers have donated to PBS…

wealthy people looting? owning Rolls? delusional much… fear of putting
your car into harms way is enough to dissuade someone from even going near
a protest march or near looting…

IQ45 did nothing of the sort to restore the economy… it was incredibly strong
during the Obama years…and the only part of the economy that did well during
the IQ45 years was the stock market and that has nothing to do with the
strength of the economy… the stock market has been for years, dissociated
from the reality of the economy…the market is suppose to reflect the
strength of the economy and it hasn’t done that in years………

and nice touch calling people who want to protest a man’s death
as “terrorist”

in case you haven’t notice, we are in the midst of
a once in a lifetime pandemic, the economy is as bad as it was
during the great depression and, AND we are having
riots like it is 1968…….

IQ45 is the worst president in American history… and it is not even close…

the events of our time tell you the picture…

I find it interesting that you somehow leave IQ45 out of the picture
when you see current events, as if he had absolutely nothing to do with them…
when the facts are quite clear…… his response to the virus has been
a downright debacle… a fiasco of epic proportions… books will be written
on how not to oversee a pandemic using IQ45 response as being the worst possible
decisions for a pandemic…

and you are wrong… IQ45 as a president AND as a human being is
far below what the American people need and deserve……

he is a disaster of biblical proportions…

like the Pharaoh during the plagues of Egypt,
the ten plagues of water turning into blood
and frogs and lice and flies and livestock pestilence,
and boils and darkness locusts and hail and finally
the killing of the firstborn…

all I can say is thank god I am not the first born in my family…

if I was, I would be seriously worried about now…

Kropotkin