I'd tack on Don't Look Up for another real depiction of how we got here. Film was scripted pre-covid and more an allegory on climate change, but it applied just the same.

Doesn't matter to Republicans though -- foreign (Xi, Bibi, Putin) and domestic (Musk, Thiel, etc.) -- that just makes him easier to control.

This is all about every benefactor who contributed to Trump's dodging of prison and reelection getting their payout in one form or another.

And why do blue-collar maga not care, you ask? Well decades of undermining education, increasing their work hours, distracting them with bullshit and sports and identity issues and drugs and the giant propaganda speakers of billions of dollars of money (again foreign and domestic) means it's very... Very hard for these people to unplug themselves from The Matrix and to see reality for what it is. Trump said, "I love the poorly educated" and "Smart people don't like me" for a reason of course.

Always a blind eye to authoritarian genocidists in the East from tankies. How curious.

True colors shown.

Some things to remember:

• Protests, riots are almost never monolithic and desperate people and local organized crime almost always takes advantage of the commotion.
• There are already reports of Police antagonists stirring up commotion in these.
• There is a very long history of far-right agitators trying to hijack and smear justifiable legitimate protests. Many examples from the 2020 BLM protests.
• Foreign adversaries -- notably Russia -- almost always seizes on these and has a hand in stirring up division.

So the fallacy is the assumption that the people committing the looting are the same people who originally set out to protest the following grievances:

• Severe under-funding of schools.
• Overcrowded classrooms and lack of air conditioning in excessively-hot climate.
• Teacher shortages and schedules.

To again reiterate, much of the time legitimate protests are hijacked by outside groups for their own ulterior motives (political optics, theft, etc.)

Carville needs to lay off the whisky. Sad truth is he's long been a Third Way DINO who helped get us to this situation in the first place.

Guy's too lazy to actually persuade or change where people are but instead hides just how actually conservative he is and thinks we should just continuously cater to the blind, as if that has no repercussions.

Anyways, what he's really saying is "Trump isn't so bad." Fucking nuts.

• Whataboutism
• False equivalence

Ah... I see Yandex must be coming back online.

That, or this is China's 50 Cent Party coming to support its genocidal ally lol.

They're not the only ones.

Reddit stole the r/NoKings subreddit and has locked it out. They claim it's up for adoption as of 5-months-ago but will of course never cede it to the organizers of No King's.

ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN etc., have barely mentioned it, and it doesn't remotely come up in Google News save for a sparse few pages of local news stories.

The only good news from representing my area is that while the protest was half the size of past ones, general support from people on the road was much higher with much less dissent.

Just some reminders on polling and prediction models:

• Individual polls from reputable pollsters can be a barometer for a snapshot in time, but they may also be outliers.

• An aggregation of many reputable polls during the same period of time is a more accurate snapshot in time.

• Long-term trends can be very useful and give more extrapolative trajectories (e.g., the long-term downward decline of Biden’s aggregate national approval ratings and his steady decline in swing-states leading to a change in strategy and his stepping down).

• Still, such polls may not accurately represent fringe groups (though many pollsters compensate in a variety of ways).

• We shouldn’t just blindly follow the polls (blind-leading-the-blind mentality)—e.g., if the case is never made for something, then it never gets popular. Bernie Sanders heavily advocated for Universal Healthcare and we of course have seen an adjustment in polling instead of simply reacting to its initial unpopularity—but we also shouldn’t ignore trends.

• Polls don’t dictate what people do in the moment, or say or do later; instead, they’re an imperfect reflection of where they are at in the moment.

• Models and Projections like Silver's with good odds doesn't mean you still can't lose, and it doesn't prove his model is a failure. Just because there's a 95% chance you don't roll a critical failure doesn't mean it doesn't happen. That's only proven if on hindsight of many cycles of elections, where his accuracy holds up fairly well when including all races including congressional.

• Every advocate should have the mindset of trying to change polls to their advantage; this by active campaigning (canvassing, phone-banking, fundraising, etc.), change of messaging, etc. In this respect, again, the trend is more important.

• Context should always be considered when discussing polling. (e.g., in isolation, Biden’s debate could be considered, “just one bad night, and we can swing polls back,” without considering the long-term concern that was already present over his immutable vice — age/cognitive-decline.)

No matter what the polls say, winning, tying, or losing… Always and I mean always Register and VOTE. Not just this, but drag 3-5 other people to register and vote with you.

Meh. Propaganda doesn't necessarily have to be false; especially when it's the righteous side that doesn't have a war criminal at the helm charged by the ICC (much like Bibi).

But anyway this is all tangential to the original out-of-the-blue weirdness of your knee-jerk response to my original comment full of whataboutism and false equivalence, "You think Russia agitates more than Israel or America, LOL?" Indeed, very weird. Audience take note!

Only his second term!?

(this is the goal).

To sabotage every aspect of USA.

Trump enriches himself and dodges prison; foreign adversaries get a leg-up.

I immediately recognized as Hasan, The Dog Shocker of course; not Mehdi Hasan.

Yeah they've laughed at him since 2018 at least, at a UN General Assembly -- but here's the thing: I think that's the entire point of Trump. To make the world laugh. Long-term US Allies know Trump is a kompromised asset, and they keep hoping to get through this and bury this time under the rug and get back to normalcy. But well, normalcy never comes and these leaders are starting to be pressured into acting out of self-preservation.

Unfortunately, this is a win for autocrats like Putin and Xi.

https://united24media.com/war-in-ukraine/russian-bot-activity-collapses-by-84-after-strikes-on-yandex-data-centers-23546

Yes lol (more recent source, btw)

Even that bbc article isn't conclusive. They are (a) mostly isolating the cloudflare citations, which even that company in your own very article freely admits they cannot fully isolate but also not particularly rule-out precisely the bot activity taking place; (b) only isolate "known russian propaganda networks" and (c) take the word of Yandex itself (silly lol).

I say, Ukraine should very well strike them all, and let's confirm it! :)

Slava Ukraini!

As far as I understand, Smith's hands were tied because the case of the classified documents was in Florida and thus her district.

For the J6 case, the crooked SCOTUS delayed that one as well given the Immunity ruling.

It wasn't so simple.

The courts were already stacked.

Why do people forget how Aileen Cannon and the SCOTUS stalled all these trials?

And if it was that obvious, even if you got past the legal hurdles of stacked judges, why do people think that a jury of 12 would be convinced if even after seeing J6 with our own eyes and all his crimes and lies that he wins the popular vote in 2024? The case and corroborating evidence to be built had to be overwhelming.

Morrowind for sure.

I wonder if Trump (and all Republicans) went to Putin, begging for help for the election and Putin said, "sure but you need to cripple Ukraine further. Throttle interceptors."

Then Trump/Republicans (we should never separate the two) really blew his gasket when Zelenskyy hit the botfarms who were working overtime for Trump.

For once, we kind of got a pleasant October Surprise.

I feel this in my soul, friend. Plus it was my first experience of a true open-world and RPG game. I'll never forget the feeling I had when first booting the game up and hearing that main menu music.

That reminded me of Halo CE's vibe, too, which had a lasting impact on me.

As an American, I'm rooting for Canada.

But this all feels very by design of Putin to fracture US alliances.