Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is plastered across both traditional media and social media. Many have immediately taken sides in the war with the far right backing Russia to the mainstream right wing backing Ukraine. The war is being memed in real time, events are being spun for political advantage, and discussion of the war is quickly leaving the realm of rational discourse.
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In the wake of Donald Trump being finally banned by Twitter and Facebook, people seem to be filing into two camps: either the two social media giants are violating Donald Trump’s first amendment rights or the companies are private companies and thus can ban whomever they want. Our stances on what may or may not be done is driven mainly by our opinion of Donald Trump and will likely flip if our opinion flips of whomever else is banned. However, both of these views share one thing in common: they are overly simplistic.
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As discussed before, his followers had waged war on the United States by attacking the Capitol to overthrow the United States government and install Trump as a dictator rather than Joe Biden as president, being the constitutionally established winner of the election, taking power on January 20. I didn’t vote for Joe Biden; I’ve never once voted for the winner of the presidential election in my life after having voted in each election since 2000. However, Joe Biden won the general election without any evidence of malfeasance on his part, but rather clear evidence of malfeasance on the part of Trump. This is treason – they became enemies of the United States; and enemies of the United States must be either a state we have declared war upon, who have declared upon us, or who are involved in an insurrection attacking the United States.
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The day started out as Trumpers, at the urging of the President, gathered in front of the Capitol. Around 1 pm EST, the crowd started bumrushing toward the doors, scaling the walls, etc to get into the Capitol and some succeeded around 90 minutes later. Once this started, the “protest” ceased to be lawful or constitutionally protected as it ceased to have any pretext of being peaceful. Police treated the Trump supporters with relative kid gloves, whereas a left wing protest would have seen random violence from the police much earlier and it was only in June that Donald Trump, himself, ordered peaceful protesters be assaulted with tear gas and rubber bullets so that he could walk across the street to take an inappropriate photo op. Senators and Representatives were rushed out of the chambers to shelter in place in their offices while threats of pipe bombs started to show up. Tear gas filled the Senate side of the lobby, a Trump supporter named Ashli Babbit was shot and later died – we do not yet know for sure whether she was shot by another Trump supporter or Capitol police – Trumpers ransacked the chambers and offices while one man declared Donald Trump to have been reelected and Jake Angeli, AKA “The QAnon Shaman,” rambled through notably wearing a fur headdress with bull’s horns.
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On Black Friday, former CIA director under the Obama Administration and early on in the Trump Administration, John Brennan expressed his disgust with the extralegal murder of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, a top nuclear scientist for Iran across three tweets on Twitter. The attack is believed to have been orchestrated by Israel and suspected to have been given a green light by
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The electoral college is a unique institution to the United States now and when it was created – though it had been subsequently adopted and abandoned for being undemocratic elsewhere – and has been long considered problematic. Richard Nixon and Hubert Humphrey led a bipartisan effort to replace the electoral college in 1969 in favor of a direct vote. The
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As we come out of the first wave of the coronavirus pandemic, ignoring the murder hornets, venomous sea slugs, and bioterrorist mugger monkeys, we are engrossed in protests and riots erupting across the country. The ultimate cause of this unrest is an American story that is integral to our history – the murder of racial minorities by those with authority.
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We are not in the murder stage of the Holocaust, but rather in the dehumanization stage. By treating these asylees as less than human – unworthy of seeking safety and security they are making the American public dehumanize them. Those incarcerating them by and large have already partially dehumanized them which allows them to justify, to themselves, the abuse they heap on them. However, such a culture allows them to dehumanize them further. By engaging in bullying and harassment in groups, by reinforcing that they don’t deserve beds or real blankets, by witnessing worse acts being done by their peers in front of them, the immigrant asylees become less and less human.
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Words have meaning, they are imbued with it, but Western society certainly has been extremely lax in this in recent decades. In the 1980s there were liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats and this was not seen as oxymoronic, but rather just something that was. A person held an ideology and was a member of a political party, and these were
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Whether he realizes it or not, the civil service is threatened by the recent push by Donald Trump to strip federal workers of their protections. The neutrality of federal workers comes from the fact that they cannot be arbitrarily removed from office – they are there so long as they do their job properly. If your manager has a personal problem with you, tough shit, they can make life hard, they can keep you away from opportunities to move up, but they can’t just let you go if you’re still doing your job. Protections are in place to ensure that if a federal employee does what is right in the face of adversity, they aren’t going to lose their job if they were justified in that.
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