Trump Trial -Stormy Daniels testimony:
OK, so the alleged sex act took place in 2006, that’s 18 years ago. I’ll bet that as a porn star, Ms Daniels had lots of sex, so The Donald must have been particularly memorable. Born in 1947, he would have been nearly 60 years old, so I kind of doubt that, all things considered. But she appears to have picture-perfect recall of the event. I don’t buy this, it seems like she tried to blackmail him and failed, and then made up a story and shopped it around, ending up with $137K for it…. As a porn star, like all actors she can read and follow a script, and I’ll bet she’s doing exactly that, in court. Not that I like Trump all that much, but it seems like this is a pretty shady affair, with an attorney general pledging as a campaign promise to go after Trump and put him in jail, and then hitting him up with this in the middle of a presidential campaign. It’s an example of “make him deny it” on a major scale, another well-known dirty campaign tactic. And the other cases have fallen apart. It wastes the candidate’s time and money, and it’s just shady as hell. My prediction is that the DNC, with their woefully weak candidate, will try to tie up Trump in court up until Election Day if they can get away with it. If they succeed with this tactic, it sets a dangerous precedent, so I hope the voters don’t let them.
The “Pro-Palestinian” Protests:
Common points I’ve observed -
The tents in the encampments are surprisingly alike, lots of the same green and white tent - it looks like someone went out and bought lots of the same tents - and this is nationwide, from New York to California. Same case for all of the Palestinian flags - there are tons of them. Palestinian flags aren’t common in the US, but all of a sudden, they are… How does that come about?
The same phrases and talking points, very short - and verbatim equivalent across the US, almost as if they’re scripted, like texts written for call center employees. And none of the many interviewees really ever goes off script. These are supposedly intelligent college students with opinions - how is it they sound like members of Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church (a/k/a Moonies)?
The same confrontational aggressive tactics - set up in front of a commonly used resource on campus, such as the library, especially during finals week, and selectively allowing people to go in or not. Same case for public sidewalks which normally have heavy traffic.
The same chants, repeated over and over, with a rather hypnotic quality, always accompanied by drumming, the leader of the chants always a female with a high-pitched piercing voice.
All of the events seem scripted and fake - and the actions and speech of the participants as well. This seems rather odd, like a University version of the Stepford Wives… Check this -
And the really weird thing is this - the students at USC and UCLA are up in arms about people 6000 miles away, while there’s no concern for people within a couple of miles:
“There, he wrote The Open Society, where the famous passage appears in a footnote:
Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. — In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant.
This last sentence has “been printed on thousands of bumper stickers and fridge magnets,” writes Will Harvie at Stuff. The quote might become almost as ubiquitous as Voltaire’s line about “defending to the death” the right of free speech (words actually penned by English writer Beatrice Evelyn Hall). Popper saw how fascism cynically exploited liberal toleration to gain a foothold and incite persecution, violent attacks, and eventually genocide. As he writes in his autobiography, he had seen how “competing parties of the Right were outbidding each other in their hostility towards the Jews.”
Popper’s formulation has been been used across the political spectrum, and sometimes applied in arguments against civil protections for some religious sects who hold intolerant views—a category that includes practitioners of nearly every major faith. But this is misleading. The line for Popper is not the mere existence of exclusionary or intolerant beliefs or philosophies, however reactionary or contemptible, but the open incitement to persecution and violence against others, which should be treated as criminal, he argued, and suppressed, “if necessary,” he continues in the footnote, “even by force” if public disapproval is not enough.
By this line of reasoning, vigorous resistance to those who call for and enact racial violence and ethnic cleansing is a necessary defense of a tolerant society. Ignoring or allowing such acts to continue in the name of tolerance leads to the nightmare events Popper escaped in Europe, or to the horrific mass killings at two mosques in Christchurch this month that deliberately echoed Nazi atrocities. There are too many such echoes, from mass murders at synagogues to concentration camps for kidnapped children, all surrounded by an echo chamber of wildly unchecked incitement by state and non-state actors alike.
Popper recognized the inevitability and healthy necessity of social conflict, but he also affirmed the values of cooperation and mutual recognition, without which a liberal democracy cannot survive.” https://www.openculture.com/2019/03/does-democracy-demand-the-tolerance-of-the-intolerant-karl-poppers-paradox.html
“In his 1945 book The Open Society and Its Enemies, political philosopher Karl Popper asserted that tolerance need not be extended to those who are intolerant.
Less well known is the paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law, and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal.” https://kottke.org/17/08/the-paradox-of-tolerance
https://antilogicalism.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/open-society-2.pdf
And the grass needs mowing, and the temperature/pressure relief valve on the water heater needs replacing, good thing I have a spare on hand…
I don't think the Trump trial about Stormy Daniels is about sex; it's about payments made to her to keep her quiet and the fact that it was done to prevent publicity as part of a Presidential political campaign. Stormy is on the stand because Trump has been denying that he boinked her. He had something to hide and he paid to hide it. That's the essence of the trial, and yes, they are out to get him and deliciously he's a big target with a lot to hide.
As the campus protests, they do not seem to be spontaneous. I have noticed lately that when interviewed the climate change activists have a script and the first thing that they do is to attack, putting their adversary on the defensive. I believe these are the same tactics as the so-called campus protesters. Are you a climate denier? The first words out of their mouths. They then control the narrative, part of our new gottcha journalism and activist culture.
Well, I have been working on my response. No, I am not a climate hysteric.
Are you a colonizer? No, but my ancestors were part of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, so they were colonizers and I am proud of them for being part of establishing America.