Could have been someone else (not Trump) allowing an attempt on Trump’s life, figuring:

1. If they stop it early, they’re heroes and Trump gets a boost. Could have planned to not let him get shots off and fucked up that part.
2. If Trump actually dies, it’s a tossup election at worst and Trump is more self-interested than ideologically conservative anyway.

Possible, definitely not a sure thing.

Close. The internet was never leftist – as in opposing capitalism. It was at its best the ACLU wing of liberal, and at its worst the age of consent wing of libertarian.

When social media exploded, the internet condensed to just a few aggregator platforms. You now had all this traffic and attention that could be more easily monetized than a million small websites and forums, and that’s what happened. Your few companies that own these aggregator platforms now have an enormous financial interest in (1) keeping content palatable to advertisers and (2) keeping regulation and taxes at bay. They accomplish the second in part by cooperating with the U.S. intelligence community, to the point of becoming one of the many industries with a revolving door between their corporate governance and the parts of the actual government that deal with the industry.

Of course any significant leftist communities on these platforms get snuffed out: big business and the American government hate the left. Your ACLU-type liberals get pushed right or out as the impetus to make money drives every decision, with their free speech language selectively co-opted to protect the right. Then your most right-wing party starts to become openly fascist around the time a fascist buys one of the major platforms and removes even the nominal guardrails against the most egregious fascists.

Now we’re here: with a few small non-fascist corners of the internet populated by a mix of leftists and liberals.

“Purposefully” is debatable, but whether intentional or by happenstance, damn it really is odd that so many descendants of Nazis are all over my imperial core countries that backed tons of fascist coups over thr past 75 years.

There are three types of conspiracy theories:

1. Lizard people live in the hollow earth and mind control world leaders
2. The CIA admitted it on the Congressional record 40 years ago
3. The Enemy of the State zone, where it’s plausible but unconfirmed

“It’s the voters who are wrong, not my genocidal policies”

“Hey why aren’t people voting for me, wait, come back”

I have extreme anxiety talking to people I find attractive and have a very hard time reading people’s body language as to when they’re sexually interested, the only time I’ve ever managed to pick up a random person has been basically when I acted like a pick up artist.

Just ask them, word for word, “do you want to go on a date sometime?” It’s no more anxiety-inducing than anything else, and you don’t have to do any weird pick up artist stuff.

If they are actually interested in you, they’ll say yes.

I’m certainly not getting my hopes up, but this being in LA instead of Kabul might have a significant effect on how willingly the rank-and-file will just open up on a crowd.

There’s a big Navy base in San Diego; some of the Marines are probably coming from there. Some probably grew up in California, more probably visited LA at some point. Going a few hours to a place where people speak your language and there is an In-and-Out Burger down the street is very different from going halfway across the world to a place where you recognize little and understand far less.

According to Defense Minister Israel Katz, the activists refused to continue watching the film after seeing the brutality of the attacks.

So this headline is probably a lie.

It’s simultaneously:

1. The broader U.S. imperial apparatus (e.g., the State Department) understands Israel’s importance for the U.S. and backs it for that reason
2. All sorts of minor U.S. politicians who don’t really influence foreign policy face a major hurdle from AIPAC if they don’t sufficiently support Israel

The U.S. is predominantly running the show, but Israel has agency too, and its state policy involves filtering out U.S. politicians who might oppose its interests as early as possible. This includes a massive amount of pro-Israel propaganda intended for mainstream consumption, harassing professors at colleges, etc.

What about this: give homeless people homes

Increasingly hard to tell if someone is trolling or honestly doesn’t understand what is/isn’t a decent source.

I guess the silver lining is that these sorts of conversations are all for the benefit of people lurking, anyway.

I’m not sure if he’s arguing there are extralegal, “off the books” detainees (his story isn’t very clear). I think he’s arguing these people are accurately counted by China, but that (1) the process for arresting them isn’t fair and (2) something sinister – a genocide with no mass killings, or a “cultural genocide,” or maybe just mass human rights violations while in custody – is being done to them.

His “insufficient due process” claims come solely from China’s (supposedly) high conviction rate, and are a frankly bizarre angle to focus on if one is even flirting with genocide accusations as well.

You’re right. So we’re still pretty far from that, even assuming a high percentage of the arrests resulted in convictions.

Certainly doesn’t support the figure of 2 million detainees they tossed around. The half a million arrests claim is at least in play, assuming the spike in arrests wasn’t one year only.

One of that organization’s source links is dead, the other is here. Haven’t had time to read through it all to see if the claims about conviction rates stand up.

Also ran across this site. Not sure how reliable it is, but it does not appear to be friendly towards the PRC. This part was interesting:

Chinese prosecutors tend to explain low acquittal rates as an indicator of good work. In 2012, a Beijing prosecutor told Legal Daily that a high level of “judicial precision” allowed good prosecutors to “filter out” cases likely to result in acquittal so that the majority of people standing trial were “guilty"…

Local procuratorates followed suit by putting forth “zero acquittals” as the ultimate goal in their annual work reports. Among various performance indicators, the acquittal rate was the most important, legal scholar Yuan Yicheng told Legal Daily in 2012.

Rather than risk acquittal, it is an unspoken rule that prosecutors decide to withdraw indictments.

The approach seems to be to only prosecute cases you’re sure you’ll win. This is largely the approach in the U.S. federal system, and is pretty prevalent among state and local prosecutors, too.

Why do you keep making comments when you know almost nothing about the topic and clearly haven’t thought any of this through?

Then why are you citing (alleging, really, without a citation) conviction rates in China as evidence that their judicial system isn’t fair?

Clicking through a few links eventually leads to this, which does appear to actually cite Chinese authorities. It shows arrests in Xinjiang spiking to around 230K in 2017. The paper is from 2018, so that’s the most recent data it has.

No data on how many arrests resulted in convictions, what kind of sentences were handed down, conditions of confinement, or anything that would take “they arrested a lot of people” to “they are doing a genocide.”

the 99% conviction rate is a very common statistic provided by the supreme people’s court of China

“This is so common, it’s everywhere, everyone knows it, it’s so easy to find, but I’m going to link to fucking Wikipedia instead so I can use it to launder a number from some bullshit NGO”

“Are U.S. federal courts a sham?”

How bad does your conviction rate need to be for you to accept that a judicial system has fair trials? Do you want police and prosecutors pursuing a bunch of cases they can’t adequately prove?

The only source for your propaganda in this entire thread is a podcast from the Economist.