Also not sure what's more pathetic - Trump's begging or watching a sniveling lapdog like NOS pretend like this is fine. Probably the latter. At least Trump's a fuckin loser on his own terms. NOS is a fucking loser on someone else's. — StreetlightX

I mean, Trump made hundreds of millions in donations just from crying fraud and getting his base who somehow still think he's a supreme macho alpha man to fall in line. He's doing just fine for himself. As for people like NOS...

Perfect Trumpian phone call. I love it. Though I cannot see how the gutter-press and their base are making a big deal of it, it’s not unusual that the palace intrigue and deep-state gossip has them in a huff. More of the same. — NOS4A2

...yeah. Gotta wonder how much money he gave away to Trump's election stealing fundraiser.

I don't see much evidence for "widespread voter fraud", a phrase commonly uttered in the gutter-press. But I understand Trump's paranoia. Entire institutions, even within his own government, have been weaponized against him. So I wouldn't mind seeing an audit of some sort.

What illegal activity are you suggesting? — NOS4A2

Fraud against the American people.

The list is quite long.

Don't read @NOS4A2 at all anymore. I just presume watching his way of coping with his master's downfall would be the equivalent of staring at fresh roadkill.

So I wouldn't mind seeing an audit of some sort. — NOS4A2

We'll be seeing a few of those, Trump and his entire gang of associates' tax returns and other expenditures.

... Fuckwits even entertaining the idea of election fraud being an element in Biden's win, which is at best a figment of Trump's deranged imagination and at worst a deliberate web of lies aimed at subverting democracy (and probably some combination of both) should be treated with the contempt they deserve. I mean imagine the utter debasement of turning deluded just to satisfy someone else's sense of delusion or trying to destroy your own democracy just to feed someone else's ego. Turn your nose away from the stink. Don't even reply.

:up: To take it seriously - to even argue against it - is already to concede that one is speaking to someone with any standing whatsoever. These fuckwits deserve to be ridiculed and trodden on - that's all.

I don't see much evidence for "widespread voter fraud", a phrase commonly uttered in the gutter-press. But I understand Trump's paranoia. Entire institutions, even within his own government, have been weaponized against him. So I wouldn't mind seeing an audit of some sort. — NOS4A2

There’ll be insignificant instances of fraud in any election, just like there is petty theft, despite it being illegal. Only “widespread voter fraud” is significant enough to shift an election and I assume that’s the reason for the phrasing.

So you love Trumps paranoia? If it is paranoia then it is incurable. We both know that any audit that didn’t go his way would be defamed as fraudulent.

And it’s not his government, it’s our government. Many Americans love democracy because we understand its potential benefits. You seem to love something else, like autocracy I guess.

Trump accidentally spawns a new religion. It's already present now in the UK and Germany.

Yes, it's OK to piss on pond scum but not to swim in it. :vomit:

No, I said I understand Trump’s paranoia. He’s their folk devil, and they exhibit the religious fervor of a moral panic. He cannot trust anyone.

And something he pretty much prepared for in 2016. And then totally against his own reasoning and expectations, he actually won the election back then.

Now he's playing the tune he was so ready and eager to play in 2016, then with that TV program/channel in mind.

Yes. Hope Not Hate put out a report last year about its spread to the UK.

Thanks! From that article:

"This development has enabled the theory to gain
supporters from across the political spectrum
and of diverse backgrounds.
As it stands today it is a decentralised, grand and
multifaceted phenomenon, at once a conspiracy
theory, a political movement and a quasi-religion,
with variants tailored to chime with different
subcultures and national contexts."

That's close to a description of early Christianity. It has the same revelatory character as other new religions of the last century, but instead of being isolationist, it's absorbing conspiracy theories from all over, providing a sense of community, structure, and destination. It's a baby religion. That's so cool!

Trump not allowed into Scotland to escape Biden inauguration, Sturgeon warns

Hilarious. Especially if he tries to do it anyway. Trump, the illegal alien.

He’s their folk devil, and they exhibit the religious fervor of a moral panic. — NOS4A2

Have you watched any of the 'stop the steal' protests? The speakers, before indicating where supporters can donate money to the cause, literally do their best to inspire religious fervor in their audience, with countless appeals to God in the fight against evil. Frankly, it's surprising that it's not more effective. I suppose this demonstrates how religious faith is in decline, or rather that it's really about tribalism and not actual faith for many.

The phone conversation between Trump and the Georgia secretary of state is yet more evidence that Trump doesn't need to be demonized. His character and selfish motivations are painfully apparent.

Have you watched any of the 'stop the steal' protests? The speakers, before indicating where supporters can donate money to the cause, literally do their best to inspire religious fervor in their audience, with countless appeals to God in the fight against evil — praxis

That's QAnon. Trump knows about it. He's feeding it.

Have you watched any of the 'stop the steal' protests? The speakers, before indicating where supporters can donate money to the cause, literally do their best to inspire religious fervor in their audience, with countless appeals to God in the fight against evil. Frankly, it's surprising that it's not more effective. I suppose this demonstrates how religious faith is in decline, or rather that it's really about tribalism and not actual faith for many.

The phone conversation between Trump and the Georgia secretary of state is yet more evidence that Trump doesn't need to be demonized. His character and selfish motivations are painfully apparent.

I have seen what you described. A lot of these people are god-fearing people, and the language of good and evil suffices to describe what they’re up against. I do fear that it is only a matter of time until they resort to violence, not just against those disrupting their gatherings, censoring and beating them, but also innocent people.

Religious faith, to me, has not disappeared, but been has recast towards other orthodoxies such as social justice, intersectionality and critical race theory. I also believe that the nascent demand for moral leadership from our politicians is one aspect of that. A transactional president like Trump is virtually foreign to them, and it’s why all this piffle about “healing” and “coming together” worked so well for Biden.

I do fear that it is only a matter of time until they resort to violence, not just against those disrupting their gatherings, censoring and beating them, but also innocent people. — NOS4A2

You mean like the IRA? Or just isolated cases? Also, exacty how anti-semitic are they? Is that just their fringe? Or is it core?

Religious faith, to me, has not disappeared, but been has recast towards other orthodoxies such as social justice, intersectionality and critical race theory. — NOS4A2

Groups with common values can form strong bonds and a sense of identity pursuing meaningful goals, that’s what effective branding is all about. The framework is basically the same as religion but with significant differences. Religion is necessarily hierarchical with an ultimate authority at top who has special access to metaphysics of some kind. In this way Trumpism is more religious in nature than the groups you mention because Trump is the top authority who dictates what the “alternative facts” are. There’s no single authority figure in the groups you mention, and though extremists may exist in any group, these groups may claim to value reason.

I also believe that the nascent demand for moral leadership from our politicians is one aspect of that. — NOS4A2

What kind of fool doesn’t want their leadership to share their values, principles, and interests?

Trump's latest plan is to get Pence to just announce that he won instead of Biden tomorrow. Pretend he can't count. That'll work.

What We Get Wrong About America’s Crisis of Democracy
The interesting question is not what causes authoritarianism but what has ever suspended it.

By Adam Gopnik - New Yorker - January 4 & 11, 2021 Issue

Readers of “Through the Looking-Glass” may recall the plight of the Bread-and-Butterfly, which, as the Gnat explains to Alice, can live only on weak tea with cream in it. “Supposing it couldn’t find any?” Alice asks. “Then it would die, of course,” the Gnat answers. “That must happen very often,” Alice reflects. “It always happens,” the Gnat admits, dolefully.

How the Bread-and-Butterfly survives, given the impossible demands of its diet, is a nice question. Lewis Carroll was in part teasing Darwinian ideas, which depend on a struggle for existence in which, eventually, we all lose—nonexistence being the norm of living things, over time. But the plight of the Bread-and-Butterfly comes to mind, too, when we contemplate what is called, not without reason, America’s crisis of democracy. It always happens. We are told again and again that American democracy is in peril and may even be on its deathbed. Today, after all, a defeated yet deranged President bunkers in the White House contemplating crazy conspiracy theories and perhaps even martial law, with the uneasy consent of his party and the rabid support of his base. We are then told, with equal urgency, that what is wrong, ultimately, is deep, systemic, and Everybody’s Fault. Perhaps there is a crisis of meaning, or of spirit; perhaps it is a crisis caused by the condescension of self-important élites. (In truth, those élites tend to be at least as self-lacerating as they are condescending, as the latest rounds of self-laceration show.)

Lurking behind all of this is a faulty premise—that the descent into authoritarianism is what needs to be explained, when the reality is that . . . it always happens. The default condition of humankind is not to thrive in broadly egalitarian and stable democratic arrangements that get unsettled only when something happens to unsettle them. The default condition of humankind, traced across thousands of years of history, is some sort of autocracy.

America itself has never had a particularly settled commitment to democratic, rational government. At a high point of national prosperity, long before manufacturing fell away or economic anxiety gripped the Middle West—in an era when “silos” referred only to grain or missiles and information came from three sober networks, and when fewer flew over flyover country—a similar set of paranoid beliefs filled American minds and came perilously close to taking power. As this magazine’s political writer Richard Rovere documented in a beautifully sardonic 1965 collection, “The Goldwater Caper,” a sizable group of people believed things as fully fantastical as the Trumpite belief in voting machines rerouted by dead Venezuelan socialists. The intellectual forces behind Goldwater’s sudden rise thought that Eisenhower and J.F.K. were agents, wittingly or otherwise, of the Communist conspiracy, and that American democracy was in a death match with enemies within as much as without. (Goldwater was, political genealogists will note, a ferocious admirer and defender of Joe McCarthy, whose counsel in all things conspiratorial was Roy Cohn, Donald Trump’s mentor.)

Goldwater was a less personally malevolent figure than Trump, and, yes, he lost his 1964 Presidential bid. But, in sweeping the Deep South, he set a victorious neo-Confederate pattern for the next four decades of American politics, including the so-called Reagan revolution. Nor were his forces naïvely libertarian. At the time, Goldwater’s ghostwriter Brent Bozell spoke approvingly of Franco’s post-Fascist Spain as spiritually far superior to decadent America, much as the highbrow Trumpites talk of the Christian regimes of Putin and Orbán.

The interesting question is not what causes autocracy (not to mention the conspiratorial thinking that feeds it) but what has ever suspended it. We constantly create post-hoc explanations for the ascent of the irrational. The Weimar inflation caused the rise of Hitler, we say; the impoverishment of Tsarism caused the Bolshevik Revolution. In fact, the inflation was over in Germany long before Hitler rose, and Lenin came to power not in anything that resembled a revolution—which had happened already under the leadership of far more pluralistic politicians—but in a coup d’état by a militant minority. Force of personality, opportunity, sheer accident: these were much more decisive than some neat formula of suffering in, autocracy out.

Donald Trump came to power not because of an overwhelming wave of popular sentiment—he lost his two elections by a cumulative ten million votes—but because of an orphaned electoral system left on our doorstep by an exhausted Constitutional Convention. It’s true that our diagnoses, however dubious as explanations, still point to real maladies. Certainly there are all sorts of reasons for reducing economic inequality. But Trump’s power was not rooted in economic interests, and his approval rating among his followers was the same when things were going well as it is now, when they’re going badly. Then, too, some of the blandest occupants of the Oval Office were lofted there during previous peaks of inequality.

The way to shore up American democracy is to shore up American democracy—that is, to strengthen liberal institutions, in ways that are unglamorously specific and discouragingly minute. The task here is not so much to peer into our souls as to reduce the enormous democratic deficits under which the country labors, most notably an electoral landscape in which farmland tilts to power while city blocks are flattened. This means remedying manipulative redistricting while reforming the Electoral College and the Senate. Some of these things won’t be achievable, but all are worth pursuing—with the knowledge that, even if every box on our wonkish wish list were checked, no set-it-and-forget-it solution to democratic fragility would stand revealed. The only way to stave off another Trump is to recognize that it always happens. The temptation of anti-democratic cult politics is forever with us, and so is the work of fending it off.

The rule of law, the protection of rights, and the procedures of civil governance are not fixed foundations, shaken by events, but practices and habits, constantly threatened, frequently renewable. “A republic if you can keep it,” Benjamin Franklin said. Keeping a republic is a matter not of preserving it like pickles but of working it like dough—which sounds like something you’d serve alongside very weak tea. But it is the essential diet to feed our democracy if we are to make what always happens, for a little while longer, happily unhappen. ♦

Trump's latest plan is to get Pence to just announce that he won instead of Biden tomorrow. Pretend he can't count. That'll work. — Baden

Think so?

Vice President Mike Pence on Tuesday told President Donald Trump that he does not have the authority to block certification of President-elect Joe Biden's win when Congress meets to count electoral votes, sources told CNN.

I think that Pence isn't in the crazy crowd. We'll see soon.

Interesting that ALL living former secretaries of defense issued a joint statement, both democrat and republican ones:

As former secretaries of defense, we hold a common view of the solemn obligations of the U.S. armed forces and the Defense Department. Each of us swore an oath to support and defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic. We did not swear it to an individual or a party.

American elections and the peaceful transfers of power that result are hallmarks of our democracy. With one singular and tragic exception that cost the lives of more Americans than all of our other wars combined, the United States has had an unbroken record of such transitions since 1789, including in times of partisan strife, war, epidemics and economic depression. This year should be no exception.

Our elections have occurred. Recounts and audits have been conducted. Appropriate challenges have been addressed by the courts. Governors have certified the results. And the electoral college has voted. The time for questioning the results has passed; the time for the formal counting of the electoral college votes, as prescribed in the Constitution and statute, has arrived.

As senior Defense Department leaders have noted, “there’s no role for the U.S. military in determining the outcome of a U.S. election.” Efforts to involve the U.S. armed forces in resolving election disputes would take us into dangerous, unlawful and unconstitutional territory. Civilian and military officials who direct or carry out such measures would be accountable, including potentially facing criminal penalties, for the grave consequences of their actions on our republic.

Transitions, which all of us have experienced, are a crucial part of the successful transfer of power. They often occur at times of international uncertainty about U.S. national security policy and posture. They can be a moment when the nation is vulnerable to actions by adversaries seeking to take advantage of the situation.

Given these factors, particularly at a time when U.S. forces are engaged in active operations around the world, it is all the more imperative that the transition at the Defense Department be carried out fully, cooperatively and transparently. Acting defense secretary Christopher C. Miller and his subordinates — political appointees, officers and civil servants — are each bound by oath, law and precedent to facilitate the entry into office of the incoming administration, and to do so wholeheartedly. They must also refrain from any political actions that undermine the results of the election or hinder the success of the new team.

We call upon them, in the strongest terms, to do as so many generations of Americans have done before them. This final action is in keeping with the highest traditions and professionalism of the U.S. armed forces, and the history of democratic transition in our great country.

Think so? — ssu

Oh, no, that was sarcasm. :wink:

Proud Boys (among others) arrested for assaulting police officers outside the White House

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/election-us-2020-55558355

So much for standing by.

Perfect Trumpian phone call. I love it. — NOS4A2

Some years ago property of mine was flooded, and I learned a lesson - something we all know slightly but most give little thought to. The storm that most of us enjoy from a comfortable chair can be for some a catastrophe that can take years to recover from, some never recovering. We comfortable and secure love storms, but storms also hurt people. But this is all natural.

Trump and your love of Trump are unnatural. He hurts people - probably every human being he comes into contact with he hurts, injures in some way, the hurting pathological. It is wrong for you to love it, him, or any part. There is no nobility whatsoever in him; he is anti-noble, yet you admire, compliment, love. You either get it or you do not. You as vile, or not. So far you are and seem to revel in it. Not a good thing to be or do, at all.

Not a good day for the poor Trumpsta’s, with the final nail in the Trump presidency coffin and losing the majority in the senate. Soon their lives will be taken over by the radical left who’ll force them to renounce their religion, remove all windows from their homes, and drink organic tea with soy milk.

You threatening people with a good time again?

losing the majority in the senate — praxis

Is that official? Did it happen?

Not official, the scoundrels are still toying with the election, for shits and giggles I guess.

Big Brother sanctioned good times, of course.