billvon

Dark Brandon is doing that on purpose to fool you! He's pulling all the strings, all over the world. Oh, and he's senile, incompetent, demented and can't put two words together without screwing it up.

Exactly. Under the leadership of evil mastermind Joe Biden, democratic operatives are going to Burkina Faso, Scotland and Kiribati and forcing prices higher! Dark Brandon is screwing up the WORLD not just the US! Also Biden is senile and can't even put two words together. It's elder abuse to keep him in office. To accept these two contradictory beliefs simultaneously, many republicans (such as the OP here) engage in what Orwell called "doublethink" - the process of indoctrination in which conservatives are expected to simultaneously accept two conflicting beliefs as truth, often at odds with their own memory or sense of reality. Some other examples: - Trump is a billionaire several times over, also Trump cannot afford a $355 million bond, and it's unfair to ask him to post that bond. - Conservatives are for freedom, and women can't be allowed to decide for themselves whether to get an abortion or do IVF. - Conservatives support free speech, and also want the National Guard to arrest and detain anti-Israel protesters because they should not be allowed to say that. - Conservatives oppose cancel culture, and also want Disney, Bud Light, Taylor Swift and Colin Kaepernick cancelled. - Conservatives are staunch patriots, and also want to support Putin's goals in Congress.

Public health message - avian flu (H5N1) is now spreading to people via cows. There have only been two cases in humans so far, but so many cows have H5N1 that more spread is pretty much inevitable. A recent test by the FDA found H5N1 markers in 20% of the milk sold in the US. It probably can't spread via pasteurized milk, but it does indicate how widespread the infection is in bovine populations. The next concern is spread from cows to pigs, since pigs are so similar to humans that the virus will have no problem jumping over. And if it can spread pig to pig, it will likely be able to spread person to person. Nothing you can do really at this point but I would advise that people monitor the course of this disease very closely, so that if a new vector is identified (i.e. handling raw bacon) you can quickly take steps to protect yourself.

They are going to do as little as they can do to help Trump win the election. And all they really have to do is delay the trial until after the election, at which point Trump can declare a state of emergency and cancel trials.

Yep. So many similarities. It's also worth noting that Hugenberg, Hitler's Rupert Murdoch, favored a form of media warfare he called Katastrophenpolitik - "catastrophe politics." He welcomed the inflation caused by the sanctions in the Versailles agreement, believing that an economic disaster would awaken the "Teutonic furor" that would let Hitler become their savior. This became their goal, rather than an undesired outcome. A plan that had some international support at the time, the Dawes plan, would have significantly lowered the reparations that Germany had to pay to the rest of Europe, and solved much of their inflation problem. But Hugenberg realized that that would calm the waters, and would run contrary to the goals of Katastrophenpolitik. So Hugenberg worked to torpedo the Dawes plan, in the hopes that a return to the economic chaos of 1923 would end the Weimar Republic and allow a new leader to step into the vacuum. It worked and the plan was rejected. This also worked to make the current president (Hindenburg) look ineffective. Troy Nielhs on the border plan that would have beefed up border security: "Let me tell you, I’m not willing to do too damn much right now to help a Democrat and to help Joe Biden’s approval rating." Their enemy was, of course, the rest of the media, who insisted on reporting (for example) that the Dawes plan was a good deal for Germans. Hugenberg's response was to start launching attacks on the "mainstream" German media, calling them traitors, making accusations about editors having sex with Jews and Poles, calling them biased, and generally filling the media with attacks that the mainstream media was forced to respond to, instead of (for example) reporting on the Dawes plan. Steve Bannon, 2018: "“The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.”

My bad. My pizza chronology was off.

Comparing political figures to Hitler has a long and ignominious history in the US, and has been overused so much that there's actually an Internet law about it; Godwin's Law states that if an online discussion goes on long enough, sooner or later someone will make a comparison to Hitler. Earlier, the philospher Leo Strauss had spoken of a very similar logical fallacy: reductio ad Hitlerum. The problem, of course, is that that means that if there IS a politician that proposes (for example) to exterminate a race of people, and people compare them validly to Hitler, no one takes any note of that. Just another Godwin attack. Comparisons of Trump to Hitler initially fell afoul of Godwin's law, because there really wasn't much similarity between a mealy-mouthed reality TV star and Hitler. Just another Godwin violation! Trump was something of a joke anyway. But lately the parallels have been getting scarier, and none other than Mike Godwin has written editorials stating "this time the comparison is valid." I just listened to an interview with Timothy Ryback, author of "Takeover: Hitler's Final Rise to Power." Ryback is an historian, and he wrote this book not by going through historical records, but by reading contemporary accounts of the time (newspapers, meeting minutes, pamphlets) so he could get a better sense of how this happened from the perspective of the people living through that time. He never mentions Trump in the book. But the parallels are astounding. While Hitler was building his power, he regularly used Polish immigrants (who were pouring across the border due to unrest in Poland) as a scare tactic. During this time, two Germans brutally tortured and murdered a few Polish immigrants; the Germans were sentenced to death for their crimes. Hitler decried that, and stated that if he were elected "never would a foreign life be put above a German" again. He made up bizarre stories to enrage and infuriate his party. He claimed that German children were being sold as sex slaves to foreign countries, and claimed that this was required by the Treaty of Versailles. (Pizza had not been invented yet, so no pizza places were involved.) His stated goal with this sort of disinformation was to "hollow out the middle" - remove the moderates and drive them to one of the two camps, so that he could frame his quest for power as a choice between only two options. Hitler regularly vowed to destroy democracy through democracy; he promised to use the mechanisms of democracy to destroy the right of the people to govern. He planned to give himself more power if he was appointed chancellor. He was very open about this, but the German people assumed he was just making speeches. "The soup is hotter during the cooking than during the eating" was a popular German phrase, indicating they thought that Hitler would calm down once he was in power. It is noteworthy that he almost didn't make it to the Chancellorship. Due to his profligate spending and his lack of respect for the law, he was often in court in the years leading up to his chancellorship. He didn't mind this; he used the courtroom as a pulpit, and one of his fellow Nazis once said that every time Hitler went to court he got another 1000 votes. The justice system was closing in on him, for his crimes, his unpaid debts and for his refusal to pay taxes. His only chance to avoid jail was to do what he did - become chancellor and suspend civil rights and the justice system. His campaign was based largely on vengeance - against the Treaty of Versailles, against the Communists, against Hindenberg and his other perceived enemies. Even his own people became enemies once they crossed him, or told him that maybe perhaps he was being a little racist. "Once I'm in power, heads will roll," he told several of his supporters. And roll they did. Hitler could not get any support with just the Nationalist party behind him, so he allied with the Socialists (and specifically with socialist leader Gregor Strasser) to get a larger percentage of the electorate. Even with that, the best he ever did was 37% of the vote. He publicly supported the Socialists but privately detested them. Strasser was a big socialist - an anti-capitalist polemic of his caused Hitler to repudiate him at the 1926 Bamberg Conference. He was briefly elected to the vice-chancellor position while Hitler was rising to power, but retired when he could no longer stomach the changing Nazi goals. Then, in 1934, Hitler had Strasser arrested and executed for being a socialist. He could not do this alone, of course. Maintaining his bizarre claims of sex slavery and victimhood required a media apparatus. And that came in the form of Alfred Hugenberg, a media mogul who had his sights on world domination as well. At first Hugenberg and Hitler couldn't stand each other, but once Hugenberg realized that Hitler was rising in power, he allied himself with him. At that point Hugenberg owned the Scherl publishing house, the news agency Telegraphen-Union, several newspapers and the Universum-Film-AG (Ufa), a major film producer. This let him churn out not only news about the evil Polish immigrants and the child sex slavery thing, but also publish glowing articles about "Hitler at home" "Hitler with children" and most importantly "Hitler as a victim of the evil Europeans." This went a long way towards steering public perception about Hitler. Hitler took every opportunity to "gum up the works" of government when he could through his position as one of the leaders of the Nazi party. The worst provisions of the Versailles Treaty were due to end in two years, and there was a movement to delay the passage of new laws until that time, so that they would be passed in a less reactionary environment. Hitler did everything he could to push as many new laws through as possible, often with conflicting goals that he could then use them to show how dysfunctional government was. The Nazi party, according to Ryback, thrived on political chaos and economic despair, and worked hard to provide that environment. The president at the time - Otto Hindenberg - was elderly, and Hitler's media apparatus spent quite a bit of time attacking him for being senile, doddering, and sleepy. Hitler could not attack him directly since he still needed his support. A month after he was appointed Chancellor, there was a fire at the Reichstag, the seat of government for Germany at the time. When police arrived, they found Marinus van der Lubbe, a Dutch council communist, leaving the building. The fire chief, however, saw Nazis fleeing the fire, and found evidence that they had in fact started the fire. The fire chief was then arrested and assassinated by the Gestapo. Hitler used this "attack by the Communists" to issue the Fire Decree which suspended civil liberties in Germany and allowed Hitler to start eliminating his political opposition. And of course there are the growing similarities in their speeches. Trump speaks of "poisoning the blood" of America with immigrants; Hitler spoke of "The rats that poison our body-politic gnaw from the hearts and memories of the broad masses" and that "this poison was allowed to enter the national bloodstream and infect public life without the Government taking any effectual measures to master the course of the disease." Trump talks about how "we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country" - and Hitler said he "the right to eliminate millions of an inferior race that multiplies like vermin." Trump: "The threat from outside forces is far less sinister, dangerous and grave than the threat from within. Our threat is from within." Hitler: "Never in our history have we been conquered by the strength of our outside enemies but only through our own failings and the enemy in our own camp." Finally, in a speech in 1940, Hitler said that the various German political factions could be "blended into one strong new idea to carry new strength which would make Germany great again." It's not funny any more.

I can't believe Al Capone didn't use that one! "You can't jail me, Your Honor. I have to keep running this crime syndicate just to afford my legal bills!"

And it changes rapidly. 200 years ago, interracial marriages were immoral. It was immoral for women to have sex before marriage, but not men, since men needed sex to remain healthy. Homosexuality was punishable by jail time. Rape of colored women was not. The mutability of morality is further proof that it's just a transient construct that will change again and again.

ODOR IN THE COURT!

Imagine if someone came up to you and offered to give you all the things Christians loved - self-rejection, guilt and condemning homosexuality - if you'd just talk to him in good faith. Would that work for you?

Or . . . . not.

Not that I've heard of. Some incidents of the sort you'd expect, but nothing deadly.

Perhaps read his reply again, and see if you can figure out what rhetorical device he was using there.

But influencers get free tacos I hear . . . .