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Rottcodd

@ Rottcodd @lemmy.world

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105
Joined
3 yr. ago

  • DNC email archive has been removed from Wikileaks

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  • I've never bought this spin.

    Certainly Russia had a hand in getting the leaks to Wikileaks, and certainly because they had an obvious vested interest in the US electing Putin's sycophant Trump.

    But I've never seen or heard of any specific evidence that any of it was "disinformation" - just the repeated unsubstantiated claim that it was. It appears to be exactly what it looks like - a detailed record of the DNC's overtly fraudulent maneuvering to torpedo the Sanders campaign in order to ensure the nomination of Clinton, or more precisely, to torpedo the campaign of a sincere progressive who would likely threaten the ongoing flow of big donor soft money in order to ensure the nomination of a transparently corrupt neo-lib who could be counted upon to serve establishment interests and keep the soft money flowing. And notably, early on that was how the DNC treated it themselves, even going so far as to issue a public apology to the Sanders campaign "for the inexcusable remarks made over email" that did not reflect the DNC's "steadfast commitment to neutrality during the nominating process."

    So what it actually all boils down to was that the DNC really was acting in a manner contrary to the public good, driven by their own greed and corruption, and the fact that Russia had a hand in exposing that in order to serve their own interests doesn't alter that fact.

    No matter how one slices it, the bulk of the blame for the whole thing rests squarely on the DNC. Yes - it served Russian interests to reveal the information, but had the DNC simply been operating in a legitimate, honest and neutral way, instead of self-servingly and dishonestly, there would've been nothing to reveal.

  • GOP resolution calls on SCOTUS to ‘intervene’ in Trump’s hush money case

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  • 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?

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    Google avoids jury trial by sending $2.3 million check to US government

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  • 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.

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    Google avoids jury trial by sending $2.3 million check to US government

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  • 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.

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    Google avoids jury trial by sending $2.3 million check to US government

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

  • Putin says Trump conviction ‘burns’ idea of US as leading democracy

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

  • More than 500 Palestinians killed in occupied West Bank: UN rights chief

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  • 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.

  • One of the world's richest women will support Trump if he promises to back Israel annexation of the West Bank

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  • 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.

  • John Kirby likens Israeli airstrike that killed civilians to US bombings in Iraq, Afghanistan: ‘We did the same thing’

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  • 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.

  • US threatens ICC, warning 'If they [prosecute] Israel, we're next!'

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  • 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.

  • Israeli officials take down AP live shot of Gaza, US urges them to reverse block

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  • 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.

  • University Professors Are Losing Their Jobs Over “New McCarthyism” on Gaza

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  • 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.

  • Name and shame: Pro-Israel website ramps up attacks on pro-Palestinian student protesters

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  • 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.

  • Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts Says That Some Parts of Project 2025 Are Secret

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  • Of course parts of it are secret.

    It's a plan for controlling and in some cases dismantling the agencies that stand in the way of a relative few hard right, fake Christian, authoritarian shitstains being able to do whatever they want to whoever they want whenever they want.

    We can be certain that the agencies they intend to use to impose and enforce what they fully intend to be effectively a dictatorship will remain entirely intact, and likely be expanded.

    The swamp isn't going to be drained - it's simply going to be repositioned in a way that better serves the interests of those hard right, fake Christian, authoritarian shitstains.

    Of course they want to keep the details of that secret. If the details of which agencies they intend to control or dismantle became known, then not only would more ideological opponents rouse themselves to active opposition, but it's even possible that, emotionally compromised and deliberately misinformed as they are, some significant number of right-wing voters could come to recognize the hard, cold fact that in the long run, they're going to suffer right alongside everyone else.

  • 'Horrific' violence at UCLA after counter-protesters attack pro-Palestinian camp

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  • On brand.

  • Kristi Noem defends killing her own puppy

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  • 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.

  • Killing the Middlemen in the Rideshare Industry

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  • Best of luck to them.

    It's true in essentially all industries, but it's especially obvious in rideshare that there's a layer of parasites who get paid far too much money for nothing beyond the fact that they won the fight for the position of "parasite who gets paid far too much money for doing nothing."

    Anything that might even just decrease the number of overpaid parasites would be a benefit not just to the concerned industry, but to society as a whole.

  • Secret Russian foreign policy document urges action to weaken the U.S.

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  • Russia is seeking to subvert Western support for Ukraine and disrupt the domestic politics of the United States and European countries, through propaganda campaigns supporting isolationist and extremist policies...

    And it's certainly not a coincidence that those isolationist and extremist policies are being actively promoted by the MAGA Republicans.

  • The White Cat - Franz Marc (1912)

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  • A white cat to go with the blue horses...

    I'd never seen this before - thanks.

  • At least half of Gaza's buildings damaged or destroyed, new analysis shows

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  • The survivors, after the ones that Israel has already killed and the many, MANY more the deaths of whom by malnutrition and disease they're currently very deliberately engineering.