SSCReader
2mo ago
If I could Thanos snap every privately owned gun away in the US (and future proof so it any other gun or firearm disintegrates as soon as it is made or brought within the border) I probably would, I think it would indeed make the country safer. However given that I can't do that, and that regardless of the laws, there are so many guns, and so many ways to import guns or make them, I think banning them would be overall counter-productive for the average citizen as it stands. Which I guess makes me a theoretical gun grabber and a practical 2A supporter, give or take.
SSCReader
2mo ago
There are Republicans who hate Trump (see Rick Wilson for a start), so I don't think we can say a Republican never would.
Indeed quotes from his school mates also paint him as conservative:
According to The Philadelphia Inquirer, former classmates remember 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks as a mild-mannered right-winger. “He was definitely a conservative,” said Max R. Smith, one of his ex-classmates.
When remembering Crooks, a classmate described a debate in American history class. “The majority of the class were on the liberal side, but Tom, no matter what, always stood his ground on the conservative side,” Smith said. “That’s still the picture I have of him. Just standing alone on one side while the rest of the class was on the other.”
So he registered as a Republican, his classmates say he was conservative, and he donated to a Blue PAC and presumably watched GunTube. At the very least he clearly wasn't a standard Democrat.
SSCReader
2mo ago
He is now, but in his book and tweets from 4 years ago he said he voted for Trump in 2016 and deeply regretted it afterwards.
SSCReader
2mo ago
His self-published book also said he voted for Trump, and there isn't a lot of reason to disbelieve that. He clearly turned sharply away from Trump and did indeed donate to ActBlue etc. So i am not saying he is a Trump supporter now, but it appears he once was.
A person who feels betrayed by their own candidate or side can often become more vicious than a standard believer. Converts and dissidents are famously more zealous. See also Rick Wilson who also clearly hates Trump.
SSCReader
2mo ago
Just pointing out Rick Wilson is an anti-Trump Republican though, he is certainly not a Democrat, given his positions on anything except Trump. And the attempted shooter at the golf course had also voted for Trump before sharply turning away from him. How much of this is about dissident Republicans or supporters who feel very strongly about Trump?
This is not to minimise it, I really do not want Trump to be assassinated. But sometimes those who hate the most are those who feel betrayed by their own side/choice. Splits or schisms within religions or ideologies are often more vicious than between opposing ideologies. We expect the side we don't like to suck, but when its your own side it hits deeper. See Protestant vs Catholic, Night of Long Knives, Stalin vs Lenin/Trotsky etc. Both Wilson and Routh clearly hate Trump, but neither are examples of standard Democrats.
SSCReader
2mo ago
I mean the last guy voted for Trump in 2016, though turned against him pretty sharply. So I am not sure that really supports your thesis here as to who is producing what.
SSCReader
2mo ago
Yes, I am from Northern Ireland so quite aware of the etymology. But booby trapping brief cases and sabotaging pagers so cleverly at an industrial scale that you can have them running for 5 months undetected are very different things. The IRA did not have that capability. This is industrialised booby trapping, which is so far beyond IRA bombs it reaches deliberate manufacturing standards. But thats beside the point.
I never said there weren't issues with the practice. But those issues are clearly less than killing a whole city. You're also assuming the Israelis could not track them or disarm them remotely.
Bombing people is a terrible precedent. But so is shooting people and nuking them and firebombing them, and firing rockets at them, and kidnapping and decapitating them. It's not clear sneaky microbombs are a worse precedent than any of those. Indeed in death terms they clearly aren't.
I think the point you are missing is that in war, you do bad things. So if you think this is uniquely bad, you have to compare to other actions in war conditions. It's killed fewer extraneous people than a single drone strike for example. Killed fewer civilians than IRA bombs. Much fewer than nukes or air raids.
It seems to me, that it is not clearly worse than other weapons of war. Its unusual but that doesn't mean worse.
You're also running into a reputational issue here. Your feelings about Jews and Israel are well known. So anything you say about how bad they are is suspect. I am not even much of an Israel supporter (even if my brethren back home fly Israeli flags) compared to the average American and think Israel have done a lot of things which i condemn and I think your biases are blinding you here. A relatively targeted strike against Hezbollah operatives is simply not that bad in the grand scheme of war.
SSCReader
2mo ago
If it is an actual explosive, and they deliberately manufactured the devices they are no more improvised than a tank shell.
They are bombs of a sort, and bombs can be more or less targeted. It can be put on a street, it can be put under a soldiers car, or fired into an army barracks from a mortar.
Tactics used by terrorists are the same tactics used by states. The US dropped a nuclear bomb on civilians with the intent to intimidate Japan into surrender. But that isn't regarded as a terrorist attack, even though it fits most of the criteria to a tee. States plant mines and other explosive devices that are hidden, and if they can will drone strike someone, killing them and people around them. But none of that is terrorism. So it can't be that hidden bombs or collateral damage or targeting civilians that mean it's terrorism.
Taboo the term terrorism and IED for the moment. They don't add anything concrete to the discussion.
What specifically is the issue? Risk of collateral damage/deaths? Being sneaky and underhanded? Being unfair? Lack of targeting? Something else?
SSCReader
2mo ago
I'd say so because those votes have to be counted and reported on. Though again, are you an RFK supporter or protesting against Harris/ Trump/ the system. How could someone tell the difference?
Something like the Monster Raving Loony party perhaps is a bit more clear cut.
SSCReader
2mo ago
Actually... Ford had two almost successful attempts against him 17 days apart in 1975. One missed, the other forgot to chamber a round. Both women, which is doubly unusual. And in the former case it wasn't even the Secret Service who pushed the gun away so it missed, a bystander had to intervene!
Its unusual, but its not unheard of. And Ford was President then, not just a candidate. Unfortunately high profile attempts can spawn further attempts and perfectly securing spaces like golf courses and rallies is hard.
Both actually, I started out in local government then transitioned into the Civil Service and then into working as a political operative directly for parties as a contractor.
As campaign staff the information might be useful. But they are not the ones paying for the counts. The government departments (depending on locale) that runs elections doesn't care why people spoiled ballots and diagnosing each one would cost additional time and money (was the person who scrawled "Wilson across their ballot, trying to vote for someone called Wilson, or are they referencing a Tom Hanks movie?) a resource starved area. So it generally does not get done. Its simply not valuable to the election machinery itself. Generally we didn't even announce how many spoiled ballots there were. Just how many actual votes for each candidate.
As campaign staff if you want to find why x is not voting y you'll commission internal polls or focus groups, or contact community groups in the relevant community. But on its own a non vote communicates very little information.
SSCReader
2mo ago
Less flippantly, if no leaders on offer will implement policies or styles/frameworks that you'd prefer, then participation at all indicates a mandate, and refusing participation expresses protest.
As someone who has run elections I can tell you not voting is not seen as expression of protest. How could it be? We can't tell if you don't vote because you are protesting politicians being terrible, or just too lazy, or dead in a ditch just before election day, or were on a drunken bender in Vegas. And frankly, we don't really care. A spoiled vote, we at least have to record although generally, we don't count up why it was spoiled. So if you write "None of the Above" in general it just gets recorded as spoiled, and goes in with those who were spoiled by accident. So your dad is also wrong here I think, though at least we in theory we could count those spoiled on purpose if it were written clearly, and anyone cared enough to do it, so he is perhaps slightly less wrong than you here.
SSCReader
2mo ago
The entire system is starting to collapse and as such nearly catastrophic systems failures are normal.
You've had assassination attempts on Presidents and much worse violence than this before back in the 60's and 70s and it did not lead to the system collapsing. And the economy was worse then as well. Maybe it is different now, but it's certainly something the US has been through before.
SSCReader
2mo ago
To be fair Trump's own leaflets I got through my door, have a whole section attempting to distance Trump from Project 2025. That indicates they do have some worries that it is getting traction and sticking and feel they have to actually work to counter it. That in itself means they are having to spend time and effort on defence.
So tying them together on live TV, is probably smart. Plenty of people believe it whether it is true or not. I think you overestimate how easy it is to rebut, and how many people will seek out or see that rebuttal at all in the first place or believe it if they see it.
SSCReader
2mo ago
If your infant is extremely fussy, there typically really is something wrong. Get to know your kid and trust them by default. You'll get to learn what a real cry at night is vs a "bad dream". Go through the checklist: diaper, hungry, comfort, boredom, and only then give it more time to see if they'll cry it out. (But then, when you move them into a crib, definitely let them cry it out. Please.).
If I can add a tip, teaching your baby some very basic signs is really, really helpful. At 4-6 months you can begin to teach simple signs for Hungry, Drink, Done, Play, Sleep etc, for my youngest two it helped in finding out what is wrong, and anecdotally they seemed to be more content once they were able to communicate even very basic information. Very useful in the time before verbal communication is possible. And the babies I have seen (my own kids and others) seem to pick it up reasonably quickly.
When teething, my youngest was able to sign "Tooth Medicine" when teething which was a godsend when he woke up screaming.
SSCReader
2mo ago
No idea, but it is what the mayor seems to think. Who is hardly happy about the situation, so it seems unlikely he is too pro-open borders.
Until or unless the city publishes the report of the investigation, we just have the fairly vague public statements. But they presumably have access to more information than we do.
Its possible property is cheap given the town shrank so much, so companies were able to buy up commercially useful space cheaply and just need a greater workforce. But i wouldn't have that on its own would get you 10,000 plus specifically Haitians moving in. Maybe the companies are owned by a Haitian or something. Its unclear.
SSCReader
2mo ago
Sure, not arguing he was right necessarily, just that everything that we see is going to have an "interesting" bias, so we can't tell from that what the chances of something going wrong are overall. They are going to look much more exciting than they are overall.
SSCReader
2mo ago
No idea, but the government may not have been involved at all. Other than to put them on the refugee scheme in the first place. They aren't living in camps or anything as far as it appears.
We just don't have enough info to know how these busineses did whatever it is the mayor is accusing them of. Some kind of contract agency? Reaching out to pro immigrant organizations? Direct approaches to Haitian community groups? The Feds as you suggest? No idea.
SSCReader
2mo ago
But isn't the sample on Youtube also biased? Presumably no-one is watching 8 hours of body cam footage where nothing happens on either side? Its going to be biased towards something interesting, or exciting or violent happening.
Which is why number of videos showing x isn't a good measure of how many times x actually happens?
SSCReader
2mo ago
Well that's the rub isn't it? What orders are lawful? And which SHOULD be lawful. If an officer lacks probable cause for a traffic stop for example, then none of his orders may be lawful at all. If the orders are "not reasonably designed" to meet the officers lawful goal, then they may not be lawful. If their goal is unlawful then their orders too are unlawful.
An officer does not have the authority to make their orders lawful, that can only be determined by the laws of the location, and many officers are simply incorrect. Like the one who arrested a nurse who would not hand over a vial of a suspects blood without a warrant. He insisted he was giving her a lawful order and arrested her for failing to obey, yet he was not. In the case of Sandra Bland, the officer ordered her to put her cigarette out, and arrested her when she did not. Had she not killed herself in jail we might have an answer as to whether that is an unlawful order, even though it was nothing to do with the reason for the stop.
Simply put a police officer's authority has limits, and many things they may tell you to do may not actually be lawful orders.
https://goldsteinmehta.com/blog/pa-superior-court-ordering-driver-to-roll-window-down-is-a-stop
Here, because the police did not have probable cause, their order to roll down the window was held to be unlawful. And since that led to them discovering the driver was drunk, all that evidence was attained unlawfully and thus thrown out. In order to get past that, police tried to claim it was merely a consensual encounter, where the citizen can terminate it at any point, and thus he consented to rolling the window down, but this was held not to be the case. Here had the driver refused to roll down the window, he would have been refusing an unlawful order, and thus not committing a crime. Of course he couldn't know that until afterwards.
Now that is an entirely different question as to whether it is smart to be as minimally cooperative as the law requires you to be. Almost certainly it is not given the power disparities involved. It's unlikely the cops would have been willing to walk away had the driver refused in the above case after all.
SSCReader
2mo ago
As noted the mayor seems to believe, after investigation it was a group of businesses that coordinated somehow, in order to bring workers to the city. It seems unlikely (though not impossible) they would be doing it out of spite as their businesses are presumably trying to make a profit there.
SSCReader
2mo ago
Did the Federal government have anything to do with it? (Other than the refugee scheme itself of course). With free movement inside the US, anyone can drop migrants on you, right? See the various governors bussing/flying migrants to New York or whatever. And in this case assuming businesses organized it, all you need is money or the offer of employment.
SSCReader
2mo ago
Fully agreed. Their job is to protect and serve and that includes the people they suspect of crimes. They aren't dictators, and people going about their business are allowed to be rude and uncooperative within the boundaries of the law. It is not their job to be nice and compliant to the cops. It is the cops job to manage those interactions while understanding the authority they are exercising is not their own but is gifted to them, and that putting themselves at risk on behalf of the people is their job and that those people not acting maximally deferential is not an excuse to exercise that authority.
SSCReader
2mo ago
If I lived in a town of 60k and 20k people almost exactly like me, moved here from across the country without my town's consent in a matter of years, I would still consider it extremely destructive to my town's character.
Arguably the town's character had already been degraded though. It's a Rust Belt town, that lost 30% of its population and had one of the worst drops in median income in the US (almost 30%) and a crime rate that was increasing, along with drug problems. It's like so many Rust belt towns hollowed out and dying, you either let it die (bad for the people there) or you inject fresh blood (arguably also bad for the people there). There is no non-destructive outcome at this point most likely. It's just picking your poison.
Notably the local government believes it was a network of local companies that coordinated to attract the influx as they wanted to take advantage of very cheap real estate but there were not enough workers in the city.
"Springfield officials were in the dark about the possibility of a large immigrant relocation to the area, Mayor Rob Rue said at the recent Springfield City Commission meeting, but a “network of businesses knew what was coming.”
Investigation by the city’s Immigrant Accountability Response Team formed in October of 2023 has revealed the possibility “there were companies that knew they were going to make an effort to bring in individuals who were crossing the border based on federal regulations that they could do that,” Rue said. "
Saying that Trump was your choice, is not likely to get you clout as a Democrat in the current era. He tweeted at Trump that he was his choice in 2016 but was disappointed with him. Even if we allow that we don't have a record of him voting, that doesn't mean he was lying about being a Trump supporter back then. After all he also said he supported Gabbard, Vivek, Halley and Sanders at various points. He doesn't tend to stick with one party it seems, but he does seem to like outsider candidates.
He clearly had shifted towards Democrat's at the very least (though he believed Covid was a bio attack by the Chinese, so he was somewhat heterodox for a Democrat), but his statements that he supported Trump are indeed weak evidence that he did. People can change their affiliations and Trump did pick up many places Obama had won prior. Statistically there will indeed be many people today who voted for Trump in 2016 who are now Democrats. And indeed many people who voted for Obama who then became Republicans.
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