Would you agree that lockdowns were suppressing votes, then?

I don’t.

Why alter election laws in the first place?

Changes to election laws—laws that were not there before are now in effect. There were hundreds of them a cross numerous states. I don’t know how to make it more clear.

Yeah, I figured that one would irritate you. Must be frustrating times for the Trump cult.

Sorry for piling on. But it’s just so hilarious.

I welcome it. The more emojis I get from you the better. It's all on record.

How is it a fundamental change? I've been voting by mail for years. It's claimed that Trump votes by mail.

Changes, plural.

It just so happened to favor one candidate, one party, some people, some states, at the expense of the rest.

Well, the hyperbole of "countless" efforts aside, it appears that his efforts were designed to suppress the votes of Democrats. He votes by mail himself, btw.

How does one suppress votes by attempting to block fundamental changes to election laws?

Exactly.

We already know you can't write, but you sure can pad it with other people's ideas.

that sounds less like someone cares about election integrity and more like someone is upset they lost. All that happened AFTER he lost, right? Not before?

It was before, as well. They were trying to block the efforts to make fundamental changes to how elections were run, all of which was occurring under the noses of everyday Americans.

His countless efforts to root out fraud and hold the shadow campaign to account are by now public record.

Administrators at the state and local level are responsible for running elections. The president isn't.

I am sitting down, frank. You might want to give your imagination a rest for a while because your projections are becoming commonplace.

"NOBODY HAS EVER FOUGHT FOR ELECTION INTEGRITY LIKE PRESIDENT DONALD J. TRUMP. FOR DOING SO, I WILL PROUDLY BE ARRESTED TOMORROW AFTERNOON IN GEORGIA. GOD BLESS THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA!!!"

https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/

I can't wait to see his mugshot and perp-walk. It's the end result of their conspiracy theories, their propensity to stretch the plain meaning of language to form a narrative so ridiculous, but so believable to the same people who fell for the Russia hoax, that it will expose why they ought not to have power ever again. The authoritarians are shooting themselves in their jackboot and it's glorious.

That’s the problem. Capitalism is present in all systems, and any system without it is inconceivable. The only difference between the present system and any so-called socialist one is that socialists would transfer the ownership and management of capital from private hands to the hands of some coterie of beneficent managers, usually a state. But that system is as purely capitalist as the next, and always will be.

This is apparent in your own system. You need to take other people’s money to invest in what you deem best for society, a task which I fear no one has quite yet figured out. Sure, they aren’t money-making ventures, but that’s because you don’t need to make money when you’re taking other people’s money.

Sharing might do well to describe the distribution, but stealing, plundering, or pilfering describes the acquisition. Sharing is good and all but if you’re distributing stolen goods I’m not sure it’s any less evil for the simple reason it is not theirs to share.

There are two means by which a man can acquire the resources to sustain himself: through work or robbery. He can apply his own effort towards nature and maybe do so in voluntary effort with others, or he can sit back and take from those who do. One is just, the other is unjust. One is moral the other is immoral. One is social, the other is anti-social. If we are to have a society it needs to be premised on the first rather than the latter.

Funds do not have to be expropriated from one source to another. They can also be exchanged voluntarily. As a self-described democratic socialist, which method would fund your projects?

We can quibble about my experiences, if you wish. No doubt geography is not my strong suit. I explicitly said I could care less about it. The utilitarian benefits to taking the fruits of another’s labor is not worth it, in my opinion. The pyramids probably benefited the beneficiaries but that doesn’t change the fact they were built with slave labor. I’m more interested in the moral arguments, which seem to be lacking.

What does it indicate?

Cherry-picking, I guess.

So why not Switzerland or the Netherlands or the Ivory Coast or Singapore?

How come you only bolded those three countries? What’s the argument?

Right, one has to go and prostrate oneself before those in power and practically beg in order to have any input. But you'll note that the state moves swiftly towards any project that accrues to its own benefit, like war for instance, while it moves slowly and only under great pressure towards anything that accrues towards the people's benefit.

Political scientist RJ Rummel estimated that around 212 million people were killed by governments during the 20th century alone, spawning his notion of "democide". The world wars, the various genocides, the instances of mass slave labor, were largely conceived in the civilized minds of those with state power. I'm much more comfortable with the homicide rates of hunter gatherer societes than I am with the murder on an industrial scale produced by those in authority. No hunter-gatherer has ever dropped a nuke on people, as far as I know.

I actually have travelled the world in my time during my youth and have seen the shit roads, and I would argue that this was because their governments are shit, not because they have any higher degree of freedom. I've also been to the low-tax countries such as Monaco, the Bahamas, and Dubai, and can report that their infrastructure is far superior to the ones I see here. Countries that are higher in degrees of freedom, at least according to the Human Freedom Index, tend to have better infrastructure than the ones who employ more coercive measures on their own people. But I don't care about any of that. I'm not a utilitarian.

The state not only has the monopoly on violence, but also the monopoly on crime. It can get away with levels of murder, theft, fraud, that if any of us were to commit we'd be sentenced to death and rightfully so. There is not a single line in their own constitutions and charters that they have not violated. So I'm unconvinced that they are any sort of legitimate authority or that they deserve any power in the first place, and I certainly wouldn't push all that aside because I enjoy a comfier drive on my way to Alaska.

Believe it or not neighbors can deliberate with one another without the need of any state authority and men can design and build infrastructure without being a state employee. In fact, the state more often than not contracts out these duties to private entities.

But by now we’re so inured to state power that it is always assumed they have to be involved, I guess as the sole arbiter of right and wrong, while anyone who is not a state employee must have too smooth of a brain to function in such a manner. For some reason it has become a truism, rather a myth, that only man in his official form can lay asphalt or protect others from bandits, as if state officials are a different species. The problem is no one can ever answer why these duties can only be accomplished by state employees.

As for collective action, there is nothing collective about state activity. I’ve never once been consulted about roads or bandits. Have you? These sorts of decisions are never collective, but are invariably decided by a cabal of politicians, officials, and their bagmen.

And no wonder people cannot band together to fix a simple road; they have been taught their whole lives that people cannot, nor should not do so. No wonder people cannot band together to help the poor in their community, or fix potholes, because they’ve been taught their whole lives that they do not need to bother, that we can let some politicians and officials take our money and they will handle it for us.

I do not believe that any significant proportion of human beings will turn into bandits and murderers as soon as they find themselves free to do so. I’ve met enough people to conclude otherwise. But the state has long captured and monopolized so many of the simple duties and responsibilities that we have to one another that we no longer even need to care for others in our community. The state will do it for us. That’s not freedom and independence. That’s dependency and slavery. That’s how you raise a race of irresponsible human beings and I fear we’re long past that point.

Not only eminent domain, but civil forfeiture, taxation, tariffs, subsidies, minimum wages, welfare, regulation, and so on. Wherever the state takes from some persons what belongs to them and gives it to other persons to whom it does not belong, there you have plunder, and that is the nature of the business of your lord.

That a law like the 5th amendment and courts make the process of theft more difficult for the state, none of that, nor your authority on project management, negate the intents and efforts to take what isn't theirs and give to whom it does not belong. The courts are still beholden to the same laws as devised by the state, and eminent domain or some version thereof is present in every liberal democracy. In Canada it is "expropriation". In Australia it is "compulsory acquisition". These words do not mean nothing.

At any rate, one only needs to look at who has jurisdiction over the land and who is sovereign over it. As per the Supreme Court, eminent domain "requires no constitutional recognition; it is an attribute of sovereignty." In all cases wherever property is concerned, the sovereign entities are invariably states. They can and have walked into people's homes and they can and have taken people's things.

Look at what the sovereign entities do in order to protect their jurisdiction from the invasion of another. They defend it with force wherever required. Why do men in power deserve to be sovereign over their land and get to do whatever they want with the serfs that live on it, but others do not?

And a belief is merely a name for a kind of articulated feeling. I feel this sort of way and when I express myself about it this is my belief. I believe this because I feel believe-y about it. It is the same with certainty and knowledge, which are all biological acts of one sort or another, vaguely described.

Good thinking. For so long we've disparaged the worldly in favor of the spiritual, and this has likely led to the upsetting and devastating fear you've expressed. Perhaps it has led to the destruction of the worldly. When it is discovered that the worldly is all we have, the task of philosophers should be the opposite, to disparage the spiritual in favor of the worldly, so that past wrongs can be corrected.

Far from it. There is no anarchy. From the largest trade routes to the smallest transactions, from the global to the local level, pretty much any move we make is regulated by a litany of state policy. Vast legal systems, treaties, trade agreements, jurisdictions, global financial institutions—these are the fetters of state and statist intervention, and their combined reach is global in scale.

I would also say that the claim that there is private ownership is a myth, used as it is to disguise the reality that we have hardly left the state of serfdom. To purchase some means of production, like land for instance, one cannot just go out and stake an area for private use and claim jurisdiction. It's only "private" if the state allows it to be, which isn't saying much because they can come and take it any time they want. Rather, we are obliged to live on their land, more like a fief, over which they have supreme jurisdiction, rights, and control. And through various schemes of taxation they take a share of our labor in exchange for a paltry series of protections, from military to welfare. This is modern feudalism.

When the entire intelligence community, the 5 eyes, the crooked press, and the corrupt and incompetent state bureaucracy are running election interference and disrupting your administration, you have to hire the people you trust.

What he shouldn’t do is fly his crackhead son around in Air Force 2 and make lucrative deals with communists and oligarchs. But that’s me.

Either malice or incompetence. Neither are good, and it let’s me know the level of expertise we’re working with here.

Are these the same indictments published before the grand jury got a chance to decide whether to indict him or not? Yes, yes they are. Another farce, almost like everyone is infected with the same disease, rendering their sense of justice impotent.

By all means, investigate the Bidens. If they're guilty of any crimes, let the evidence come out. Unlike many Trump supporters, I'm not going to deny Joe Biden is guilty of any wrongdoing without even looking at the evidence or reading the indictments. But the irony right now is that Republicans seems so concerned about family grift and Hunter allegedly making 5 million without a peep about Jared and Ivanka making 2 billion. Oh, grift and nepotism bothers you? Now, it bothers you a lot, but in 2016-2020 not so much.

Kushner’s investment firm got that 2 billion from the Saudis in 2021, after stepping away from politics and after Trump left office. I guess you got the dates wrong. Such a minor but illuminating detail.

According to Affinity Partners, Kushner’s company, the money is going to be invested in Isreali startups in a bid to normalize business relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel. I’m going to assume you know how investment works. The Saudis are likely aiming for a return on their investment, meaning they will get the money back and then some. Unlike Biden, there is no indication this money is going into Kushner’s pocket or to fund hookers and cocaine, or to curry favor from daddy, maybe by getting the government to fire prosecutors investigating the company. There is no indication Trump is involved at all.

My guess is they will investigate Kushner, just like they said they would back in 2022, and will do again in 2024. At any rate, the media sure made a big deal out of it, unlike the reticence towards their preferred candidate. But this isn’t because there is evidence of any impropriety on Kushner’s part. It’s to distract from Biden’s corruption.

How much of a crime would it seem like if Biden loses the election and does all the same shit Trump did though?

Like the Russia hoax. It embroiled the world in a fake scandal for many years and deceived the American people, even the world, so much so that it reached the highest echelons of the government.

I said it didn’t seem like much of a crime and gave reasons why.

You want a puff?

You can't make this stuff up.

Disgraced FBI official who probed Trump-Russia ties set to plead guilty to illegally working for Russian oligarch

Disgraced FBI agent Charles McGonigal — who investigated the Trump campaign’s alleged ties to Moscow in 2016 — is slated to take a guilty plea in the case accusing him of illegally working for a Russian oligarch.

“The court has been informed that defendant Charles McGonigal may wish to enter a change of plea,” Manhattan federal Judge Jennifer Rearden wrote in a brief order filed Monday, scheduling a hearing for Aug. 15.

McGonigal, 54, — a former top FBI counterintelligence agent based in New York — was indicted in January on charges including money laundering and violating US sanctions by working for Russian billionaire and business magnate Oleg Deripaska, including trying to get him taken off of the US sanctions list.

McGonigal was legally required to report to the FBI his contact with foreign officials, but instead allegedly hid the ties, pursing business and overseas travel that conflicted with his job.

https://nypost.com/2023/08/07/ex-fbi-official-slated-to-plead-guilty-in-corruption-case/

blah blah. Just another red herring. The question is whether Trump committed a crime, which is a legal question, not whether what he did was a crime. I'm not appealing to the law. I'm explaining it to you so your tiny reptilian brain can reason it's way to a sensible position instead of verbally tossing Trump's salad all the time.

I get it. It's illegal because it's illegal. It's a crime because it's a crime. Fascinating stuff. Thanks for your input.

New Trump indictment coming down the pipe any day now.

https://oversight.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/Third-Bank-Records-Memorandum_Redacted.pdf

Euthanasia is legal where I live.

Yeah, I am aware they are illegal according to law and will be prosecuted by lawyers. According to law it was once legal to own human beings. That's why its a fallacy to appeal to law, and you're consistently guilty of it.

He didn't say something others wanted him to say. That appears to be the extent of his crimes in the minds of his detractors.

A victimless crime lacking any overt criminal act or criminal intent doesn't seem like much of a crime. It sounds like a conspiracy theory, to me.