Trump seeks to pardon SEAL and others accused of war crimes

[gal39]

Trump seeks to pardon SEAL and others accused of war crimes

https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/new...war-crimes

[pbrower2a]

Inexcusable -- both the initial crime and the (upcoming?) Presidential pardon.

The President has shown his contempt for legal niceties, and with such a pardon he excuses literal war crimes. War crimes debase a military effort and render victories in the field hollow.

[David Horn]

So far, this is conjecture meant to capture the lead in the current news cycle. Credit where it's due; Trump never comes up short on blazing distractions.

[Normateen]

If Nazis scream Commies support illegal aliens because Commies want votes, why don't Fascists embrace illegal immigrants?

If Commies say Nazis support gun rights because Fascists want votes, why don't Commies reject gun control?

What if voting doesn't matter because the Uniparty has been bought off by elites?

What if Americans are going to have abortion, homosexuality, immorality, debt, wars, illegal immigrants, welfare, tyranny, and regulations no matter who wins?

[pbrower2a]

(06-08-2019, 08:20 AM)David Horn Wrote: So far, this is conjecture meant to capture the lead in the current news cycle.  Credit where it's due; Trump never comes up short on blazing distractions.

The memory is the nemesis of the would-be tyrant. I think of 1984, where much of the intellectual activity is the rewriting of history to serve the regime... of course modeled upon such totalitarian states as the Third Reich and Stalin's Soviet Union.

Broadcast television is perfect for allowing the sort of historical manipulation that tyrants like Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and Saddam did...and Putin does now with much success and that Trump bumbles at. It needs no archive of the past except to be edited at will, and keeping everything au-courant ensures that nothing matters but the current reality of power.

Trump's biggest enemy is more the educated conservative than the left-wing populist. As a liberal I find it far easier to hit Donald Trump from the traditionalist Right than from the Left. A great store of wisdom existed before Donald Trump and it will long survive him because it remains useful. The rules of logic that the Greeks of antiquity knew are valid today. Even the most advanced technology more likely defends old truth than promotes falsehood. The computer has gone from a laboratory curiosity useful to scientists and engineers to something useful to those who majored in English and history. The problem is that any moron or crank can use a computer for his own purposes, as with the pests who peddle their conspiracy theories, likely second-hand.

Some of us are learning old truths -- most importantly that objective reality exists and that reliable means of discerning it from nonsense are within the range of learning. Maybe we have gone as far as we can with technology improving our material lives, except perhaps for medical miracles (cure cancer? undo dementia?). 600 channels of cable TV mean less than 15 channels of watchable television. No miracle cure yet exists for pompous ignorance and deceit except the costly consequences of personal failure and social stigma.

[Warren Dew]

Turns out Gallagher didn't need a pardon because he was acquitted anyway - someone else admitted to killing the prisoner, but only after the incompetent prosecutors gave that someone else immunity. Maybe the early posters shouldn't be jumping to a presumption of guilt.

[David Horn]

(08-15-2019, 08:18 PM)march Wrote: This feels like Obama's 3rd term.

If you see anything similar to Trump's presidency and Obama's, you're more than a little delusional.

[David Horn]

(08-16-2019, 12:18 AM)march Wrote: Taking somebody's money without permission is stealing, unless you work for the IRS; then it's taxation. Killing people en masse is homicidal mania, unless you work for the Army; then it's National Defense. Spying on your neighbors is invasion of privacy, unless you work for the FBI; then it's National Security. Running a whorehouse makes you a pimp and poisoning people makes you a murderer, unless you work for the CIA; then it's counter-intelligence.

https://www.godlikeproductions.com

Please feel free to emigrate to a nation more aligned with your fantasies.  This one will never be it.

[msel]

How can Americans sleep at night while the USA is collapsing?

Soros, Obama, Clinton, and Trump all support endless wars, debt, and tyranny. What's the difference?

Has Trump opposed trade wars, wars with Iraq, Syria, Niger, Yemen, Somalia, Afghanistan, Venezuela, Iran, Mexico, China, Russia, and North Korea, driving up the debt, abortion, homosexuality, ending minimum wages, opening concentration camps, banning free speech, religious freedom, freedom from warrantless searches, freedom from torture, security cameras, license plate readers, checkpoints, redlight cameras, speed cameras, FBI facial and voice recognition, curfews, gun bans, NSA wiretapping, the end to the right to silence, searches without warrants, private prisons, mandatory minimums, 3 strikes laws, DNA databases, CISPA, SOPA, IMBRA, private prison quotas, no knock raids, take down notices, no fly lists, terror watch lists, Constitution free zones, stop and frisk, 3 strikes laws, kill switches, National Security Letters, DNA databases, kill lists, FBAR, FATCA, Operation Chokepoint, TSA groping, civil forfeiture, CIA torture, NDAA indefinite detention, secret FISA courts, FEMA camps, laws requiring passports for domestic travel, IRS laws denying passports for tax debts, gun and ammo stockpiles, laws outlawing protesting, police militarization, and Jade Helm?

Has Trump arrested the bankers, decreased taxes, kicked out the illegal aliens, ended the Fed, ended the wars, ended welfare, ended Obamacare, and restored the Bill of Rights?

Trump doesn't work for you. He works for the elites.

The time for supporting Trump has ended and the time for buying gold, guns, and food has arrived.

Wake up. Think. Spread the word. Dark times are coming.

[pbrower2a]

(08-16-2019, 09:21 AM)David Horn Wrote:

(08-16-2019, 12:18 AM)march Wrote: Taking somebody's money without permission is stealing, unless you work for the IRS; then it's taxation. Killing people en masse is homicidal mania, unless you work for the Army; then it's National Defense. Spying on your neighbors is invasion of privacy, unless you work for the FBI; then it's National Security. Running a whorehouse makes you a pimp and poisoning people makes you a murderer, unless you work for the CIA; then it's counter-intelligence.

https://www.godlikeproductions.com

Please feel free to emigrate to a nation more aligned with your fantasies.  This one will never be it.

Unless the government owns the productive assets and can rely upon profits (North Korea) or is selling a resource that it can extract cheaply (Saudi Arabia) it will collect taxes. Neither is a good match for many Americans.

[pbrower2a]

(12-11-2019, 07:13 AM)TMN7 Wrote: One wonders how much dirt the NSA has on Trump to make him defend the police state so strongly.

https://finalchan.net/sp/

Trump practically needs a police state to achieve his reactionary dream in which 95% suffer for the gain, indulgence, and power of 2%. Problem is -- the military, the intelligence services, and federal law enforcement won't kill democracy on his behalf. They gave the Democrats the opportunity to impeach a would-be despot, and Democrats did the patriotic and moral thing.

Add the diplomatic corps and you have the so-called Deep State -- the part of the government that defends the System and a world order compatible with international capital. 

If one is a conservative Republican, then consider the 2018 election just what the doctor ordered for preserving our political tradition. Be glad that we have impeachment and not military or political coups. In other countries, someone as erratic as Trump typically goes down in a coup because such types usually first destroy democratic opposition before purging those who supported their rise to power. Trump incompetently purged his supporters first.  

By the way -- I checked your link and found that it leads to a realm of madness. 

Grow up, punk. The Japanese-style anime is interesting -- but note well, that like other greats someone like Hayo Miyazaki succeeds by appealing across lines of age, gender, and ethnicity. I need not be a ten-year-old Japanese girl to appreciate Spirited Away. That makes Miyazaki so wonderful.

[Tina89]

If 50% of the US is Fascist and 50% is Communist then who will speak up for freedom?

[Anthony '58]

But I'm sure march doesn't think that taking somebody's money without permission is stealing, if it's a regressive sales tax that falls heaviest on the poor.

[pbrower2a]

If Trump is to be busted for involvement with a prostitute, it will be for tax fraud or money laundering for buying her silence with campaign funds. Tax fraud and money laundering are both more blatantly illegal than is paid sex with a prostitute. $135K will keep someone quiet until the money runs out... but once the money runs out, as it does with people not known for frugality (prostitutes are big spenders), the recipient gets noisy. Trump is dumb enough to believe that one can pay off a blackmailer once with a one-time settlement.

Dump Trump, and reverse the trends that got him to the Presidency, and America will begin to less resemble a corrupt society going the wrong way.

[Bob Butler 54]

(12-14-2019, 12:10 AM)Tina89 Wrote: If 50% of the US is Fascist and 50% is Communist then who will speak up for freedom?

Thing is, we are not.  We just slap the labels around freely and pretend.  Oh, there are some real racists out there, and tribal thinkers who think America should be for white male evangelicals.  Not the same thing.

[pbrower2a]

(12-31-2019, 06:47 PM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote:

(12-14-2019, 12:10 AM)Tina89 Wrote: If 50% of the US is Fascist and 50% is Communist then who will speak up for freedom?

Thing is, we are not.  We just slap the labels around freely and pretend.  Oh, there are some real racists out there, and tribal thinkers who think America should be for white male evangelicals.  Not the same thing.

I am definitely on the Left on almost all economic issues because the Right has nothing to offer me but misery -- work and pay, work and pay, and never enjoy either their work and simply get fleeced without a choice. It is nothing more than responsibility toward people who have no responsibility except to themselves, which is suffering. As Lincoln put it, "as I would not be a slave I would not be a master". I would not be a peon, so I do not treat others as peons or excuse others for treating people as such. I am a conservative on educational content, child protection, and law and order. There are basic truths that everyone must learn, my expression of which is redundant, and a full education improves a person to be a solid participant willing to make personal sacrifices to create a better world. Children are precious or else we are a sick society, and law and order is the first civil right without which the others are meaningless. The alternative to sane law and order is lynchings and terror; just think of the bombing of the Eighth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham or the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr -- both lawless deeds. 

It could be that 20% of Americans are totalitarian right-wingers, another 20% are totalitarian left-wingers, 10% on each side are potential fellow travelers of extremists, and those in the middle  are the potential zone of contention. In my case I recognize the validity of tradition, but in a country as diverse as ours I am not going to judge one tradition more valid because it is my own. Even in cuisine, my taste in food does not match my ethnic origins. English and German cuisine are both awful. Many of us fail to recognize the glory that one can get by picking and choosing between different cultures. 

...I am not sure that the GOP has a continuing lock on the evangelical vote. First of all, there are evangelical blacks, and they are still on the political Left despite a very conservative culture. Second, most of the white evangelical Christians are converts who found religious dogma that fit their conservative values on family relationships (male supremacy) and economics along with disdain for modernity in culture and science. (If people don't believe that even the first chapters of Genesis are unqualified truth, then people can justify anything -- to which I say that atheists and agnostics can have well-developed moral values, and people can do horrible things i the Name of God).
The kids of such people grew up with Bible verses informing them of all things, and many can take the Bible seriously enough to recognize that Jesus did not organize a wealth cult; He challenged the wealth cult of the Pharisees and got lynched for that. Furthermore, those kids got contact with the kids who seemed to have more fun but were hardly immoral... the children of the Religious Right may recognize the need for more kindness toward those that a harsh plutocracy exploits and abandons than do their parents. 

In any event, practically all well-educated Americans have read Nineteen Eighty-Four and have learned a few things about the Third Reich and the Soviet Union and hold anything associated with them as suspect until proved innocuous. (OK, there is nothing wrong with expressways and anti-smoking programs, and the Marxists are right about the working class as the measure of economic development. KZ-lager and the Gulag, and propaganda that excludes any chance of challenge? No way! I once told a neo-Nazi who blamed the Jews for everything wrong in the world that if I had to choose between being a Jew and a Nazi, I would be a Jew because such would neither compromise my morals nor my culture. On the other hand, if I believe in a Powerful and Just God, maybe God can decide which theological Truth is His... and he might become identical with those that one abused, exploited, robbed, or killed. The ultimate justice for a KKK terrorist is to find that God is black, and for a Nazi such might be that God is a Jew. Going a bit further, Osama bin Laden may have found that God is an American, and Slobodan Milosevich and Baruch Goldstein [shot up a mosque] found out a bit late that God is Allah and that Muhammad is the Greatest of His Prophets). Because Nazis and mobsters are not people of justice, I do not expect God to judge me harshly for rhetoric against Nazis and other gangsters. 

But Donald Trump has expressed his values well when he said "I love low-information voters" without recognizing a problem in such.

[Bob Butler 54]

(01-01-2020, 09:40 AM)pbrower2a Wrote: ...But Donald Trump has expressed his values well when he said "I love low-information voters" without recognizing a problem in such.

There is a big difference between American and European racism.  We are bad enough.  Preventing Chinese women from immigration, pushing Native Americans onto reservations whenever lands promised forever are discovered to hold valued resources, the traditional slavery and lynching of blacks, or the idea that no Irish need apply gives the US little excuse to call itself a city on a hill.

But the Europeans would build gas chambers, or ruffle an area’s entire population off to Siberia in order to make room for more approved populations.  We go retail.  They wait until a war can be declared then step in with government scale efficiency.  This makes calling a Democrat a communist or a Republican a Communist inappropriate.

Trump may have coined the phrase Fake News.  He did not originate the concept of the political lie, of vastly exaggerating what people want to believe in order to achieve a political end.  The mislabeling of the red and blue ideas is far older than Trump’s interest in politics.

But he seems to be a fast learner.  He uses falsehood to demonize the other culture.  He makes active use of one culture’s readiness tp hate the other rather than understand how and why the differences exist.  We used to have to do that, to demonize the enemy, to justify the organized murder of other peoples.

That is what we have to grow beyond.  That is one of the memes that we have to build up, a respect for the truth, a readiness to understand.  In the Industrial Age, wars were necessary to transform the culture.  Nukes and trust in democracy has begun to make the crisis war obsolete.  But for the trust in democracy to work we have to learn to respect other cultures and people, to cease the temptation to try to export our cultures by force.  There are reasons cultures exist.  It is expected that they will be stubborn, that they will not change.  We have to have less reason to hate, less need to cling to the past, less need to force unnecessary cultural change, and a great deal more listening and respect.

[pbrower2a]

(01-01-2020, 12:02 PM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote:

(01-01-2020, 09:40 AM)pbrower2a Wrote: ...But Donald Trump has expressed his values well when he said "I love low-information voters" without recognizing a problem in such.

There is a big difference between American and European racism.  We are bad enough.  Preventing Chinese women from immigration, pushing Native Americans onto reservations whenever lands promised forever are discovered to hold valued resources, the traditional slavery and lynching of blacks, or the idea that no Irish need apply gives the US little excuse to call itself a city on a hill.

But the Europeans would build gas chambers, or ruffle an area’s entire population off to Siberia in order to make room for more approved populations.  We go retail.  They wait until a war can be declared then step in with government scale efficiency.  This makes calling a Democrat a communist or a Republican a Communist inappropriate.

The difference between us and the Germans in the last Crisis is that the 1915 Klan never took national power. The hatreds of the Klan and the Nazis were much the same, and I can easily imagine a Klan-dominated America setting up concentration camps complete with gas chambers. It is telling that some Germans established their own KKK.... and they disbanded it. All of the members became Nazis. 

After the Second World War, many of the KKK were WWII veterans, and they wanted nothing to do with Germany. They still hated blacks and Jews, but they had no tolerance for anything exotic -- even German. Once the WWII veterans started to die off, some Klansmen started adopting Nazi stuff, including swastikas and Nazi racial theories. There is a group called "Aryan Knights of the Ku Klux Klan". Malign intentions get evil results. We are just lucky that the Klan imploded before the Great Depression began. 
Trump may have coined the phrase Fake News.  He did not originate the concept of the political lie, of vastly exaggerating what people want to believe in order to achieve a political end.  The mislabeling of the red and blue ideas is far older than Trump’s interest in politics.

Quote:But he seems to be a fast learner.  He uses falsehood to demonize the other culture.  He makes active use of one culture’s readiness to hate the other rather than understand how and why the differences exist.  We used to have to do that, to demonize the enemy, to justify the organized murder of other peoples.

Fast learner? Trump is a pathological liar on other things, and for a habitual liar like Trump (the real estate business is full of the hard-sell type whose truthfulness is always in question) who believes in nothing but himself, his image, his economic gain, and his personal indulgence, a convenient lie is preferable to an uncomfortable or counter-intuitive truth. Trump is no deep thinker; he never has been. People do not need to do careful analysis to see fault in other classes, ethnic groups, and religions. Indeed, the more intellectually cautious one is the less likely one is to become a bigot or even to think that bigotry has a desirable result. 

Quote: 
That is what we have to grow beyond.  That is one of the memes that we have to build up, a respect for the truth, a readiness to understand.  In the Industrial Age, wars were necessary to transform the culture.  Nukes and trust in democracy has begun to make the crisis war obsolete.  But for the trust in democracy to work we have to learn to respect other cultures and people, to cease the temptation to try to export our cultures by force.  There are reasons cultures exist.  It is expected that they will be stubborn, that they will not change.  We have to have less reason to hate, less need to cling to the past, less need to force unnecessary cultural change, and a great deal more listening and respect.

If you have ever read Eric Hoffer's The True Believer , then you will have seen that extremist ideologies compete for the same character, one extant in all cultures: someone intellectually and morally empty, rich in grievances but unlikely to show solidarity with the victims, utterly ruthless yet desperately in search of a cause. The more vicious the cause the more attractive it is. ISIS attracted recent members of the thuggish cause of secular, totalitarian Ba'athism of Saddam Hussein... and neo-Nazis. 

Nukes may have made the Crisis war obsolete. Another factor is the absolute monarch who could start a war over a personal affront (as long as Wilhelm II faced a system with enough democracy to keep him from doing something really stupid, there would be no war, but once he eliminated such constraints, World War I was possible, and it began because of monarchs waging war out of personal anger); that is largely over. 

...There is no single American culture, and anyone who proclaims the supremacy of his culture against another finds himself with strong opposition. There is more gain to be had by marketing a culture, most likely in cuisine or music, and that mandates some respect for the cultures of others. We have much assimilation, and not all of it goes toward the once-dominant WASP culture of any region of American. Note well: Mexican-Americans can assimilate WASPs. Most of us end up picking and choosing, but we also drop things that are difficult and absurd.

Trump did badly among every non-Anglo ethnic group except perhaps for Cuban-Americans of the flight from Castro and their progeny. Economic assimilation did not help Trump win votes among any non-white or Hispanic group other than aforesaid Cuban-Americans. It may be that Trump better fits one ethnic pattern over all others... but that that was not enough to achieve even a plurality of the popular vote.

Trump is a cruel man, and cruelty is the purest fount of evil that has ever existed. Greed at least encourages people to invest, to develop rare skills, to work horrible jobs that simply pay a little more, and to work second jobs. The sex drive creates profits for the floral and jewelry businesses which would disintegrate without the romantic element in life. Envy drives the acquisitive impulse that makes a consumer society possible, and I would rather have a consumer society than any feudal or socialist alternative. Take away narcissism and both elective politics and the entertainment industry would all but vanish. Gluttony is not so much eating too many potatoes as it is eating overpriced stuff these days. Wrath was an appropriate response to the Pear Harbor attack and 9/11. When cruelty and opportunity meet, Hell breaks loose of its usual constraints, including our assumptions of civilized decency. 

Americans need to grow up some in their politics... but Donald Trump has appealed more to the worst in human nature. Getting away with bad deeds is not competence; it is luck. Luck is not a tangible quality to be earned, bought, or sold.

[Einzige]

(03-31-2021, 02:32 AM)DetroitDonna Wrote: Some say that the elites oppose regulations, Socialism, and immorality, but why do the globalists support minimum wages, Obamacare, and homosexuality?

If the media is biased then how do you know that Biden and Trump are corrupt?

Quote: The Socialistic bourgeois want all the advantages of modern social conditions without the struggles and dangers necessarily resulting therefrom. They desire the existing state of society, minus its revolutionary and disintegrating elements. They wish for a bourgeoisie without a proletariat. The bourgeoisie naturally conceives the world in which it is supreme to be the best; and bourgeois Socialism develops this comfortable conception into various more or less complete systems. In requiring the proletariat to carry out such a system, and thereby to march straightway into the social New Jerusalem, it but requires in reality, that the proletariat should remain within the bounds of existing society, but should cast away all its hateful ideas concerning the bourgeoisie.

A second, and more practical, but less systematic, form of this Socialism sought to depreciate every revolutionary movement in the eyes of the working class by showing that no mere political reform, but only a change in the material conditions of existence, in economical relations, could be of any advantage to them. By changes in the material conditions of existence, this form of Socialism, however, by no means understands abolition of the bourgeois relations of production, an abolition that can be affected only by a revolution, but administrative reforms, based on the continued existence of these relations; reforms, therefore, that in no respect affect the relations between capital and labour, but, at the best, lessen the cost, and simplify the administrative work, of bourgeois government.

Bourgeois Socialism attains adequate expression when, and only when, it becomes a mere figure of speech.

Free trade: for the benefit of the working class. Protective duties: for the benefit of the working class. Prison Reform: for the benefit of the working class. This is the last word and the only seriously meant word of bourgeois socialism.

It is summed up in the phrase: the bourgeois is a bourgeois — for the benefit of the working class.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch03.htm

[Einzige]

(06-12-2019, 09:37 AM)Normateen Wrote: If Commies say Nazis support gun rights because Fascists want votes, why don't Commies reject gun control?

Commies do reject gun control