Well. how about THAT for an October Surprise?
I would point out the ironies here but there really aren’t any. It’s basically the opposite of irony: Dude downplays the danger, doesn’t wear a mask and hangs out with other people not wearing masks, all because he thinks he’s a genetically superior human who’s immune to disease. Well, turns out he isn’t.
I have no idea how this is going to play out. This tweet pretty much sums it up:
Yep.
Open thread!
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@ diego
These might interest you. They’re the judgments in the so-called ‘media’ trials at the ICC in relation to Rwanda. Illustrate your point.
https://unictr.irmct.org/sites/unictr.org/files/case-documents/ictr-99-52/indictments/en/000413.pdf
https://www.refworld.org/cgi-bin/texis/vtx/rwmain/opendocpdf.pdf?reldoc=y&docid=4935248c2
@Alan
Interesting. I studied Civil Law so I’m not too familiar with Common Law principles and how they mirror the former. Though I have seen and read far too many times judges interpret guiding principles in such a way which toes the line of what could be considered constitutional.
I do see a case to punish the spread of Nazi propaganda, by applying principles, but it has its limits. What burns me is that the UN did not criminalize Hate Speech there and then, when it had the chance.
@ naglfar
It’s only prohibited where people who didn’t themselves actually commit an offence are penalised. If a population as whole ‘aids, abets, counsels, or procures’ others to commit an offence, they too can be held accountable without breaching the Conventions.
“No general penalty, pecuniary or otherwise, shall be inflicted upon the population on account of the acts of individuals for which they cannot be regarded as jointly and severally responsible.”
@Alan Robertshaw
So, assuming we don’t kill fascists for the reasons Diego mentioned, would it be possible to place some other sanction upon Trump voters?
@ diego
That’s one of the reasons the British team lead the prosecutions and common law rules were applied to the proceedings (in deference to civil law there was a multi-judge bench who determined the facts rather than a jury)
But in common law, offences needn’t actually be written down anywhere. The idea being that the law has always existed and the courts just apply it. For example, over here there’s no actual statute that says murder is an offence. It’s just taken as self evident.
So the tribunals just held that, of course everything Nazis did were crimes; it was bloody obvious they were, and they must have known it.
The main non warcrime case on all that here, is a weird one about a “Ladies Directory”; but it nicely sets out the principles. Summary in link.
http://users.cecs.anu.edu.au/~James.Popple/publications/articles/retroactive/6.shtml
ETA: Oh, I googled for the ladies directory case; but that site actually has about Nuremberg!
http://users.cecs.anu.edu.au/~James.Popple/publications/articles/retroactive/5.shtml
@Alan
I had no idea about that. With civil law being widespread throughout Europe I had always assumed the Nuremberg trials were carried out using civil law. The notion of sanctioning someone despite the crime not being properly laid out anywhere is absolutely wild. I’m no fan of common law precisely because it can be prone to such oversights, but I can certainly see the appeal of its use during circumstances such as these. I will definitely read all of these.
He can’t win with nothing but his base. At a minimum he must convince a bunch of Democrats and Democratic-leaning voters that Biden isn’t worth voting for and they should just stay home.
@Policy of Madness
Or suppress the votes in battleground states, which is what he is going for. The dismantlement of USPS sorting machines has taken mainly taken place in counties, located in battleground states, which Hillary won in 2016. I saw the map published not too long ago. They targeted those areas with surgical precision to ensure democrat votes are suppressed.
Likewise, Rachel Maddow covered the Russian hacking of 2016 and found out that they surgically targeted such counties as well, purposefully causing network delays which resulted in longer lines at the booth.
True, there is that. And they are recruiting for on-site voter intimidation squads as well. But if Trump is down for the count, that hinders his own side. It’s not a guarantee that he won’t win, but it’s not a positive for him either.
So, according to some, my 70 year old Republican father should get Corona and possibly die, because he’s dumb and is mislead by Facebook lies and Limbaugh. Cool.
I’m not surprised Trump has Coronavirus, considering that he’s been pretty active, and only wears a mask when he wants to. What I’m worried about is that Trump will recover from it (and he probably will, his case is already being treated in an aggressive manner that all of us piece of shit peons could only dream of), and his seemingly easy recovery will just reinforce all of the Trumpanzees opinions that Coronavirus is nothing more than a flu that’s been politicized by the media.
In other unsurprising news, Alex Jones is being well… Alex Jones.
Alex Jones: White House staffer may have poisoned Trump’s Diet Coke and then told him he has COVID-19
@Moogue
Yeah, you’re right, we should be nicer to your father as he continues to support a Nazi administration after four years of incremental policies deliberately designed to disenfranchise and exterminate people of color; including illegal detainment, torture and actual fucking genocide.
No, we should totally be cool with that and expect for him to realize he’s wrong, despite Trump and his supporters pushing the boundaries of what is legal every single day, for the past four years; whilst they continue to pursue policies that have actually killed and continue to disproportionately kill people of color.
I have been saying for a long time (and I know others have too) illness has no moral dimension. I reckon saying (e.g.) a person with lung cancer who has been a smoker ‘deserves it’ is a slippery slope to ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ like the Victorian ‘deserving poor’. It doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do everything in our power to help people stop smoking, but in the interests of treating everyone like humans, I just don’t think we can go there. My views are very coloured by my own status as ‘morbidly obese’ (according to BMI, but I have no obesity related illnesses). I want not to be blamed by others for anything that happens to me and I don’t want others to be blamed for their illnesses either. I think that’s a massive cause of structural bias including racism in health care. So, as much as it hurts, I do not wish him ill. Do I secretly hope he might suffer serious illness and finally understand what he’s done to others? Yup. Do I think he’s capable of such insights? Nope. I am going to be making myself a serious bore over the next wee while reminding people this is why we’re complying with the law and following health recommendations. This might be the first time in his life that his wealth and power has not insulated him from the consequences of rule-breaking and so I do very much appreciate that.
No-one said you should be nice to him, he’s a piece of shit. (Generally,
extreme splitting/black and white thinking isn’t very healthy either). Just maybe not wish probable physical harm on other living beings.
@Moogue
Regarding Alex Jones and his saying
Nah. I know the guy. If Mattis had been trying that – it’d have happened. He’s … kinda impressive.
@Mogue
No. Though that is an extreme position to take, I do reserve the capacity to wish ill upon individuals in extreme circumstances. Extreme circumstances such as the abject and repeated cruelty with which Trump supporters treat anyone not considered within their in-group, but especially vulnerable people.
And where emotional and mental health is concerned, it is very hard for a victim of abuse to get closure without receiving justice. “Moving on” does little other than ensure ongoing trauma, which is why Black people suffer from mental trauma at higher rates than White people. If mental health is a concern, then the focus should be on administering justice and making sure these monsters never gain access to the levers of power ever again.
@Diego
Not to come at you too hard, as I understand your anger, but the reason why you don’t wish ill on living beings is because it’s basically a veiled & passive aggressive threat. And I don’t believe in making threats, especially if you have no intention of following through and PERSONALLY harming the people/beings involved.
So the reason I haven’t been around lately is that I’ve recently said No to ex-abuser over something to do with the kids, and the ex has been finding such new and exciting ways to emotionally abuse me and create new, financially draining litigation.
Let me tell you that while anger and outrage are VERY useful in the short term, in the long-term they will burn you out and leave you drained and traumatized. It’s important to learn how to feel ok, without something external like “justice” happening. You need to focus on what you can directly control, do what you can to fight for justice, but do your best to not get emotionally caught up in external things that are out of your direct control.
@Ohlmann
Yes, enslaving other human beings absolutely and automatically justifies being hanged at the first opportunity by any decent person. You know fuckall about the history of the US Civil War and Reconstruction, and are thus unaware of how former slaveholders did things like found the KKK to terrorize Black people who dared to act like they were free, and establish Jim Crow laws throughout the South, and use the great wealth they had extracted from the blood and suffering of their fellow human beings to ensure that history classes to this day are filled with Confederate apologia. If they’d all been hanged and their wealth distributed among their victims, none of those things would have happened. We wouldn’t even have had Diego’s caution to worry about, since slaveholders were never a very large segment of the population. And the fact that you appear to see no moral difference between shoplifting and enslaving people is really fucked up, and also shows that your grasp on sociology and criminology is worse than your grasp on US history.
@Moogue
Nobody made your dad choose to spend his time marinating in fascist propaganda, he did that all by himself. As such, he falls into the same category as any other fascist in my book: they dug the grave, they can fucking lie in it.
@Flybykiwi
Fascists deserve every bad thing that happens to them. That’s not attaching moral value to an illness, it’s just a statement of fact. Anything that puts more fascists in the ground is a positive, or in this case a silver lining: at least some of the sick are people who really, really, deserve to suffer.
@Moogue
Fair enough, but that is territory that I simply can’t go into because then I’d really run afoul of the comments policy. I do understand and share that position because if life’s taught me anything is to never make threats you don’t intend on following through.
As for abuse, you have my condolences. Very much like Trump, my father was a malignant narcissist who enjoyed abusing my mother and my siblings. His little reign of terror eventually crumbled once I became stronger than him and beat him to shit in a parking lot. He wasn’t the last abuser or bully I ever dealt with either, and they all (every. last. one. of. them) eventually required me to beat them bloody to get them to stop. Abusers are all about control, and they will use anything and everything at their disposal to instill a sense of hopelessness. Which is pretty much why I hate Trump and his supporters: they are a party of organized abusers.
I also agree that anger and outrage can burn you out in the long term, and can even manifest in cardiovascular and immunodeficient diseases. However, you should know as well as I do that, outside closure through justice, getting rid of that anger is only achievable through years of therapy. And even then you are never rid of it entirely, it is always there, boiling underneath the surface awaiting for a trigger. Unfortunately, Trump and his ilk are very adept at being triggering.
There’s a lot of worrying about the legal basis of locking up the Trumpists. I don’t think it’s going to be a problem. This administration has committed so many crimes that any honest investigation will leave them locked away for life.
So, the real question is whether we’re going to get an honest investigation.
Naglfar:
Now, Vietnam level success would be an ambitious goal indeed. It seems that white people countries often get praised as “Covid-19 success stories” if their death toll is below 100 per million people. (USA is currently slightly above 600, Finland is slightly above 60, Canada and most EU countries somewhere in between.)
Diego:
I’ve seen claims that Trump’s germaphobia has been actually greatly exaggerated. Generally, there’s conflicting accounts on how much he seemed to worry about his own safety in these past months. Obviously he was politically in a bind, forced to at least play careless in public. It’s unclear why exactly he originally chose to to refuse a national mitigation effort, but once he did that, Covid reality became a partisan issue. Now, his best political option is pandering to the covidiots, and in the process he’s been increasingly training his base to be covidiots. He couldn’t back down Covid denialism if he wanted.
As for his death risk being still somewhat low – considering his age and general health, it’s actually more likely he’ll die from something else over the next four years. I think his fans are quite optimistic on how much more mileage they’ll get out of him.
@Lumipuna
I remember after Trump was first spotted in public with a mask, a bunch of liberal papers like the Washington Post had op-eds about how he’s changed. No, he hasn’t changed, he’s just playing optics. This is why the president needs to be held to a standard and shouldn’t be congratulated for doing a basic thing once.
As for his health, they don’t need him much longer. Just long enough to win again and create a dictatorship. Then he can die and pass power to Don Jr or Ivanka.
@Lumipuna
Trump’s flip-flopped before and gotten away with it, mostly because his single greatest talent is being able to put positive spin on dogshit and sell it. He could turn wearing masks into “tha most patriotic thing eva”, but he won’t. Encouraging aggressive mask wearing would mean agreeing with Democrats, and deep down Trump’s still that 18 month old baby that runs into the street when Mommy’s back is turned because hahaha doesn’t that just get mommy sooooo upset? Hahahahaha!
@Dali
Slavers were simply the most noxious cogs of a rotten society that upheld the belief that some people were inherently worth less. Killing only the slavers would have changed nothing in the long run, as to kill a cancer you need to destroy it at the root, not the outcropping.
White abolitionists in the North pretty much were 100% complicit in the formation of the KKK, Jim Crow laws, and Confederate apologia, so for things to have truly changed we would have to kill every last White person in the US, and quite frankly, in the world. (Remember, immigration is a thing, and chattel slavery/racism were imported along with the Whites coming from outside the US). And well then, Hispanics also had issues with chattel slavery and racism as well, so if we want to abolish racism we should have killed all of them worldwide. (Again, immigration being a thing). And then there’s Asians, who also were tainted by chattel slavery in general, and being complicit in supporting the form specific to Blacks, so them too. And so on.
This is why combining violence with splitting/all or nothing thinking is so dangerous. Using violence outside of direct personal self-defense in some misguided attempt to solve societal problems is almost always ineffective at best, ghoulish at worst. EVERYONE thinks that THEIR violence against society is righteous and justified. But humans are fools.
All right internet tough girl, I explained the error of making a statement like this, I gave you an out, but you dug down, so here we are.
Maybe you have never seen a human being die, but I have, and it was the single most traumatic thing I have seen in my life, more so than all the abuse and injustice in my life, more so than even being raped. And it wasn’t even a death resulting from murder.
If you truly think that you could look into a human being’s eyes and watch them die from murder, then you are truly lost. And there’s nothing more to be said, other than goddamn, if we’re not all already on some FBI watchlist, we all deserve to be.
@Diego
Sorry to hear about your abusive dad and others, and I’m glad that you were able to act to stop their abuse. That’s amazing, but not everyone has that option though. Justice can be impossible to find in this world.
I 100% agree with you that abuse completely high jacks the limbic system, although for me, my anger usually came out more as panic rather than anger, so I ended up diagnosed with agoraphobia and panic disorder, among other things. Emotionally, psychologically, I was torn up. I learned from therapy that you can teach yourself to use the higher levels of the brain to act as a counterweight to the emotional system, regardless of what’s going on in the outside world. Develop new pathways in the brain. That sort of thing.
I think I’ve mentioned that DBT has helped me in the past, and it has, although admittedly I’m still far from considering myself proficient, and it does take time and work. DBT was developed for BPD, so it was developed for dealing with intense emotions. And if it can help folks with BPD, it can help anyone learn to accept and dispell strong emotions, including anger.
@Mogue
I hate to keep on bang on this drum, given that it has a lot of trauma attached to it, but I find it necessary given the circumstances. I’m sorry you had to deal with so much trauma and abuse, no one deserves that. That being said I don’t think it’s right for you to judge what people’s reaction to trauma might be.
There is a number of abuse victims out there that feel relief after their abuser dies. I’ve personally seen people die, whether from an accident or natural causes, and my reaction was not the same because circumstances and context greatly influence how we feel.
I don’t think reacting with apathy to the death of your abuser, even if it happens to be murder, means you’re “lost”. I’ve seen that reaction before (granted, not in the case of murder) and I wouldn’t shame that victim for feeling relief and even elation. But nor do I want to invalidate your feelings because abuse can be a complicated thing. It can foster helplessness and paralyzing sadness in some, and profound fury in others. Both of these are valid. Feelings are a personal thing and no victim of abuse deserves to be dehumanized for something that is beyond their control.
As a Latino I can confirm that we did have issues with chattel slavery and we still have a significant amount of racism, however never to the degree that is experienced in the United States. Slavery was abolished in most Latin American countries with their wars of independence, and then it wasn’t replaced by institutions like the KKK or Jim Crow. Then again there are a few experiences (Chile and Argentina) were genocide of indigenous populations was carried out.
But, though racism survives in our countries, it is nowhere near as institutionalized as it is in America. I think a lot of it stems from the fact that Latinos are mostly people of color, with very few white people (safe for a couple of exceptions). Though if I’m being honest, there is a lot of internalized racism and no short amount of misogyny. For example, my country has the greatest percentage of Trump supporters among all of Latin America. And it’s wild because you read the comments section of our media on facebook and it’s all these brown skinned people cheering for Trump and parroting Nazi propaganda.
And doubtless, these people would rightfully complain if they were called a racial slur. Honestly, I don’t know what to make of it. I think it’s mostly misogyny (which is internalized as well, because plenty of these comments come from Latinas too). I’ve even met someone who had their US citizenship stripped away in one of these strange proceedings ICE and the DHS had, but he was still supporting Trump.
Uh, huh. I’m sure if you were indigenous you’d have a different story to tell about the institutionalized racism of Latin American countries. Every group is capable of racism. Every group punches down when they can. Let’s not pretend that white people have a monopoly on racism or institutionalized racism, and Hispanic people are completely, or even largely, free and clear. Nobody is free and clear of racism.