...that a long time ago, when I was in 4th Grade, I heard my teacher calling a girl classmate (she was actually a very lovely, very pretty, very quiet and reserved girl) by her Full Name: Cynthia Gunther.
Well, FUUUUUCK.
I had never ever heard that last name in my life before, and so for some damn stupid reason I just found it so fucking unbelievably-funny.
And so I LAAAAAUGHED AND LAAAAAUGHED AND LAAAAAAAAAAUGHED so much nonstop.
And Cynthia just looked at me with an expressionless face all that time. Not crying, not anything.
(maybe She thought I was a stupid Dipshit. She Was Right.)
Goddamn, I feel bad about that now. I really wish I could Apologize to Her about that.....
Forum: World Events
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14 Nov 20 2:25 am
+ Life after QAnon: Trump's loss allows some to escape conspiracy cult's grip
Caitlin Dickson
Thu, November 12, 2020, 12:20 PM CST·15 min read
The voter fraud claims first began flooding Justin’s Twitter feed late Tuesday night, as the results of the presidential election were still trickling in.
The 26-year-old, who lives in Austin, Texas, and once wanted to become a journalist, hadn’t even voted, nor did he ever really like Donald Trump. But he quickly found himself falling down a familiar rabbit hole, following one Twitter thread after another in search of proof that the election had been rigged by the Democrats against the president.
“I just became obsessed with figuring out that it was rigged and putting pieces together that it was,” Justin, who asked to be identified only by his first name, told Yahoo News. “I wanted to say that I was on to this before everyone, when everyone else blindly believed the lies of the media.”
As Tuesday night spilled into Wednesday, Justin said, he called off work and he spent the rest of the week “on Twitter trying to convince myself of this election fraud stuff.”
Millions of others were doing the same thing, and some of them undoubtedly still are. How it will end for them is unclear: disillusionment, resignation, anger are all possible outcomes. A worst case would be further radicalization, leading to violence.
But Justin’s failed search for evidence of fraud in the election had a very different effect. It was the key that allowed him to escape his years-long obsession with QAnon, the conspiracy theory that holds millions of people around the world in its cultlike grip.
Like Justin, many American Q devotees were struggling to make sense of the outcome of the presidential election, which seemed to upend the core mythology of their worldview.
After all, QAnon is rooted in the baseless belief, seeded on the internet fringes by an anonymous figure known as “Q,” that Trump has been secretly working to dismantle an alleged satanic cabal of child-eating pedophiles including prominent Democrats like Hillary Clinton, high-ranking government officials and other members of the “global elite,” code on the far right for “Jews.” And though the movement has since evolved to encompass various other beliefs including opposition to vaccines, COVID-19 skepticism and concerns about human trafficking, its central premise remained an apocalyptic faith in the imminence of “the Storm,” a day of reckoning in which Trump’s righteous followers would round up this nonexistent cabal for trial and execution.
Now, not only had Trump lost the election before achieving the highly anticipated demise of the “deep state” cabal, but the individual or group behind the shadowy “Q” persona had conspicuously gone silent since Election Day.....
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14 Nov 20 2:21 am
+ Twitter flags ballot conspiracy theory shared by Trump – after it is shared widely
Kari Paul and Maanvi Singh
Wed, November 11, 2020, 7:40 PM CST
Twitter took more than an hour to flag a highly misleading video shared by Donald Trump, which baselessly pushed claims of ballot fraud and was retweeted more than 70,000 times before the platform took action.
The tweet from Trump – and Twitter’s failure to flag it – led to outrage and concern. It also prompted renewed calls to have the president’s Twitter account suspended or permanently banned. Twitter has said the president will no longer receive the same treatment under its policies for newsworthy individuals when he is out of office.
“It’s going to be really nice to have a President who isn’t an internet troll trafficking already debunked conspiracy theories,” the spokesman for California’s secretary of state tweeted in response to Trump’s sharing of the video.
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12 Nov 20 3:56 am
+ AP News
U.S. Politics
Report: Trump Disparaged US War Dead as ‘Losers,’ ‘Suckers’
A new report details multiple instances of President Donald Trump making disparaging remarks about members of the U.S. military who have been captured or killed.
ASSOCIATED PRESS
PUBLISHED 4 SEPTEMBER 2020
DELRAY BEACH, FLa. (AP) — A new report details multiple instances of President Donald Trump making disparaging remarks about members of the U.S. military who have been captured or killed, including referring to the American war dead at the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery in France in 2018 as “losers” and “suckers.”
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12 Nov 20 3:43 am
+ The CDC chief lost his way during COVID-19. Now his agency is in the balance.
Brett Murphy and Letitia Stein, USA TODAY
Wed, November 11, 2020, 1:50 PM CST·26 min read
Dr. Robert Redfield, eyes closed and searching for words, explained to Congress why the health agency he leads had softened coronavirus protections for slaughterhouse workers.
The White House, meatpacking industry and other federal agencies were not involved, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention insisted during the September hearing.
None of that was true.
Redfield was sitting in the White House when he instructed his staff to change a series of safety recommendations to suggestions, adding dozens of qualifiers such as “if feasible” and “not required.” He turned to a West Wing aide and told her the edits came directly from Vice President Mike Pence’s chief of staff.
Smithfield Foods, the South Dakota meatpacking plant under scrutiny, had seen the tougher recommendations, one of the first documents outlining COVID-19 protections for the industry. The CDC emailed it the day before the edits were made. Federal agriculture and labor officials also weighed in.
Redfield’s actions in overruling the CDC scientists who had spent a week investigating and writing the original guidance fit a pattern defining his leadership during the COVID-19 crisis. He has repeatedly allowed politics to undermine scientific best practices — and then publicly denied it.
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09 Nov 20 1:44 pm
+ Arkansas police chief resigns after appearing to call for violence over election
Tim Stelloh
Sun, November 8, 2020, 6:09 PM CST·2 min read
An Arkansas police chief has resigned after he posted messages on a right-wing social media site that appeared to urge people to assault "Marxist" Democrats over the presidential election, the mayor said.
Kevin Elliot, the mayor of Marshall, a city of roughly 1,200 people about 100 miles north of Little Rock, said in a statement Saturday that he "condemned" the comments by Police Chief Lang Holland.
"The Marshall community does not in any way support or condone bullying or threats of violence to anyone of any political persuasion," he said. "We are a welcoming community that is humbly working to build a bright future for ALL our citizens."
Elliot said that after he consulted with lawyers about Holland's posts, which appeared on the site Parler, he met with Holland, who resigned effective immediately.
The posts were no longer visible Sunday, but NBC affiliate KARK of Little Rock published screenshots of some of them.
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07 Nov 20 5:59 am
+ Twitter permanently suspends Steve Bannon account after talk of beheading
By Curt Devine, Donie O'Sullivan and Kara Scannell, CNN
Updated 4:38 PM EST, Fri November 06, 2020
(CNN Business)Twitter permanently suspended an account belonging to former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon after he suggested Thursday morning that Dr. Anthony Fauci and FBI Director Christopher Wray should be beheaded. His comments were made in a video posted to his Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter accounts.
Bannon falsely claimed President Trump had won reelection, despite several key states still being too close to call, and said that he should fire both Fauci and Wray.
He then said he would go further: "I'd put the heads on pikes. Right. I'd put them at the two corners of the White House as a warning to federal bureaucrats. You either get with the program or you are gone."
On Friday, a high-powered attorney representing Bannon in a criminal fraud case, moved to withdraw from representing him and asked that hearing scheduled for Monday in the case be postponed while Bannon looks for a new lawyer.
The lawyer, William Burck, a highly-regarded Republican attorney who served in the George W Bush administration, had represented Bannon during former Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into Russia's interference into the 2016 presidential election.
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06 Nov 20 6:37 pm
+ Report on disgraced ex U.S. cardinal McCarrick out Nov. 10: Vatican
Philip Pullella
Fri, November 6, 2020, 9:06 AM CST·1 min read
Pope Francis expelled McCarrick from the Roman Catholic priesthood last year after a Vatican investigation found him guilty of sexual crimes against minors and adults and abuse of power.
The report, which is several hundred pages long, is expected to show how McCarrick managed to rise through the ranks even though his history of sexual misconduct with adult male seminarians was an open secret.
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06 Nov 20 5:12 am
+ Kanye West Gets 60,000 Votes For U.S. President Across 12 States – Update
By Tom Tapp
November 4, 2020 10:00am
After a night of ballot counting, Kanye West passed 60,000 votes in the race for the presidency of the United States. West was on the ballot in 12 states. His exact count, as of 10:30 a.m. PT Wednesday, was 60,761.
Most of the states in question were above 90% counted, with the notable exceptions of Colorado, Utah, Mississippi and Vermont. Those were all above 70% counted.
Kanye’s updated state-by-state breakdown is as follows, according to the AP:
While the TV networks were laser-focused on the race between Donald Trump and Joe Biden, a good number of social media users were focused on another candidate: Kanye West.
West’s name was trending on Twitter after the hip-hop superstar made a series of posts to his account chronicling what he said was the first time he had ever voted in his life. Kanye being Kanye, he cast his ballot for himself, of course.
It’s safe to say at least 60,000 Americans voted for West, who ran as an Independent. While a few states were still under 80% reported as of this writing, our count puts him at 59,781 total votes. Thus, it’s a pretty good guess he’ll go over 60,000 by the time all states are fully counted.
West’s biggest haul was in Tennessee, where he garnered 10,188 votes. While the rap mogul did rank 4th in some state races, his percentage of the vote was never more than .04%.
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06 Nov 20 2:58 am
+ I Can’t Befriend or Date Trump Supporters
Vena Moore
Jan 6
It’s a matter of life and death for me.
I will say off the bat that I have no Trump supporters in my social circle or on any of my social media platforms. I have become more vocal over the last few years about my political and social stances. I am pro-choice, Black Lives Matter, pro LGBTQIA and an intersectional feminist. I stand with anti racist and anti oppressive movements. Me and Trump supporters do not mix.
However, I inadvertently was talking to a white guy around this time last year who turned out to be a Trump supporter. After all this time, the thought still has me shaken.
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06 Nov 20 2:51 am
+ Eric Trump Busted For Fake Video Of Someone ‘Burning 80 Trump Ballots’
The City of Virginia Beach debunked the footage shared by Donald Trump’s son.
By Lee Moran
11/05/2020 02:42 AM ET
Updated 13 hours ago
Eric Trump was busted on Wednesday for tweeting a fake viral video of what he claimed was someone burning dozens of ballots cast in favor of his father, President Donald Trump.
As the final result of the 2020 election remained undecided, the president’s son retweeted a video that purported to show a man torching 80 ballots for Trump in Virginia Beach, Virginia.
The city of Virginia Beach, however, debunked Eric Trump’s post.
“Those were sample ballots,” the city responded to Trump on Twitter.
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05 Nov 20 5:49 am
+ [Updated] Is the American Experiment Over?
Nov 04, 2020 10:57am Central Standard Time by Dan K
Back in 1787, as the Constitutional Convention ended, a woman came up to Ben Franklin and asked him what we got. He replied, "A republic, madam, if you can keep it.” After this election, it looks like we can’t.
It doesn’t matter whether Biden wins (as is looking more likely, Trump’s threats to sue notwithstanding). It doesn’t matter if we get the Senate (looking less likely, though still possible). What matters is that Trump and the Republicans, who ran a profoundly anti-democratic campaign, lied repeatedly, and openly cheated everywhere they could, were not severely punished for it.
What matters is that the lies worked.
A functioning democracy (Franklin’s republic) depends on an educated citizenry who understand reality and work within it. What we saw last night is that close to half of the votes were cast by people who denied reality. The reality of the pandemic and Trump’s totally incompetent handling of it. The reality of climate change. The reality of GOP corruption and authoritarianism.
Too many people believed the lies. Too many people voted for what they were deliberately misled into believing was their own self-interest. Too many people wanted an authoritarian ruler who would bring back their fantasy world where N---— knew their place, where Jews faced quotas, where women were obedient to the men in their life, where gays and lesbians hid for shame, where the Bible was the moral and legal rule.
This was an election where a determined minority tried and largely succeeded in imposing its will on a majority that sees the world as it really is. It was an election where fantasy beat out reality, where greed defeated compassion, where patriotism was defined by religion and skin color, and by loyalty to a man, not to an idea.
Reactionary forces from Republicans to the oil interests to fundamentalists have been working hard for the last half-century to kill public education in this country. Education teaches people how to think rationally, how to examine issues critically, how to appreciate facts and to apply reason, how to debate properly, how to respect diversity of opinion, of culture, of belief. In short, how to deal with reality. Education is the means by which the less fortunate in life can achieve equal standing in the world. It is the guarantor of a true democratic republic.
A true democratic republic depends on rational debate, on acknowledging facts, on respecting other points of view, on following conventions that have the majesty though not the force of law, on sharing power and on the peaceful transfer of power. All of that was on the ballot last night, and lost. Regardless of the outcome in the next few days, the fact that it was even close means that far too many citizens have not been educated, and will not be educated, in their responsibilities as custodians of the American experiment.
You are welcome to talk me out of this. I hope you succeed.
