At 1.79, I'm not too dark except for that spike toward Machiavellianism. Very interesting.
I imagine my score would be very different in times of great stress (eg: war, famine, zombie apocalypse).
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The Lawbreakers Trump Loves | New York Times
"Even as President Trump accepted the Republican presidential nomination on the White House lawn, lawbreakers rampaged through the capital.
Would our law-and-order president leap off the podium and tackle them? He once said he would race unarmed into a building to tackle a school shooter. But sadly he ignored these blatant lawbreakers, presidential aides violating Hatch Act restrictions on political manipulation of government.
It’s one law he doesn’t want to uphold. Asked about the Hatch Act, the White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, scoffed, “Nobody outside of the beltway really cares.”
Inside the beltway, Trump and other speakers at the Republican National Convention conjure grave national threats from raging anarchists.
“Your vote will decide whether we protect law-abiding Americans, or whether we give free rein to violent anarchists, and agitators, and criminals,” Trump warned in his acceptance speech.
The Republican convention included video glimpses of “Biden’s America,” with a scary scene of fire raging in the streets. But those streets turned out to be in Barcelona, Spain; it wasn’t “Biden’s America” or even America at all, just another in a stream of lies. (By the count of The Washington Post, Trump has uttered more than 20,000 false and misleading statements since taking office.)
Of course, even if it had been filmed in America this year, it wouldn’t have been Biden’s America, but Trump’s America. The real Biden’s America, the period when he was vice president, was a time of comparative calm, growing prosperity and improving health care.
Yet Trump is determined to terrify Americans. “If you want a vision of your life under a Biden presidency, think of the smoldering ruins of Minneapolis, the violent anarchy of Portland, the bloodstained sidewalks of Chicago,” Trump warned earlier.
It’s true that there has been violence and looting in some American cities, and this is a genuine challenge to order and economic recovery. But by any objective measure the bigger risk comes from right-wing extremists.
“Right-wing attacks and plots account for the majority of all terrorist incidents in the United States since 1994, and the total number of right-wing attacks and plots has grown significantly during the past six years,” the Center for Strategic & International Studies concluded after examining terror plots in the United States from 1994 to May of this year. “Right-wing extremists perpetrated two-thirds of the attacks and plots in the United States in 2019 and over 90 percent between January 1 and May 8, 2020.”
The anti-fascist protesters known as antifa have committed violent acts but aren’t known to have ever killed anyone, while right-wing extremists have killed hundreds. Just a few days ago, a Trump supporter, Kyle H. Rittenhouse, allegedly shot two protesters dead in Kenosha, Wis. One can’t help wondering if Rittenhouse, an impressionable 17-year-old living in Illinois, was galvanized to take a gun and drive to Kenosha because of panic promoted by Trump and Fox News.
After fulminating about threats from Black Lives Matter protesters, Tucker Carlson of Fox News seemed to defend the Kenosha killings, saying, “How shocked are we that 17-year-olds with rifles decided they had to maintain order when no one else would?”"
It's a bit hidden in the article but there is an online test linked: http://qst.darkfactor.org/
1.29 for me. I guess that's why I'm still working on my first million.
I don't wade in to politics discussions on the internet often, but this claim in the article drew the foul; in my hometown of Dayton, Ohio, a recent mass-shooting, which was largely overshadowed in the news media by a shooting in El Paso occurring the same weekend, appears to have been ideologically motivated by an antifa-sympathizer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Dayton_shooting
I suppose the writer's claims hinge on who counts as having lost his/her life, and on who counts as an actual member of a diffuse, leader-less body with no criteria for membership.
And, I'm paywalled from reading the full article, but I just cut and pasted this headline and its decks from the NYT: not definitely antifa, but a rightwinger murdered by (apparently) a left winger.
Deadly Shooting in Portland After Pro-Trump Ralliers Clash With Protesters
-A caravan of Trump supporters drove through Portland, Ore., which has seen nightly protests against police violence and racial injustice.
-The man who was fatally shot was wearing a hat with the insignia of a far-right group based in Portland that has clashed with protesters in the past.
Point is, while what exactly transpired isn't apparent, and while I have a policy of not defending the indefensible (plus, I am allergic to angry mobs, left, right, or center) many claims of a peaceful protest or that the left is peaceful while the right alone is bloodthirsty, just can't be demonstrated.
I agree that the Dayton shooting was horrific. But to classify that kid as antifa is a reach, maybe even a foul.
One unifying thread to mass murders and violence in our country is white supremacy, and that is clearly represented by the alt-right agitators at these protests. Since that white supremacist right-wing psychopath killed a protestor with his car in Charlottesville, there have been more than 60 similar incidents nationwide.
To try and apply some kind of left-right balance around a mythical center to this issue is misleading.
And the ideology was of the looney-tunes incel variety, not anything driven by leftist rhetoric. A better example of "antifa" violence, if one wants to claim that's a pervasive thing, is the Congressional baseball practice shooting.
Right wing terror groups are real and creating havoc at a level not seen by any counterparts on the left. Hell, antifa exists entirely as a reaction to extreme right wing groups. The Oathkeepers, the Bugaloos, the Proud Boys, all these people are being fed a specific version of white identity politics that is under attack from The Other, and supplied with a fuck ton of guns given our fucked up view of the Second Amendment. Violence -- and an increasing reaction to their violence -- in inevitable.
Yes, I forgot about the baseball shooter, thank you. My interest, as stated, was merely in pointing out the undemonstrable claim in the article.
To an outsider it just seems like America keeps saying “Hold my beer...”
Donald Trump is the president | Vox
"Speaking from the convention stage in Cleveland in 2016, Donald Trump made a solemn promise to the American people: that “the crime and violence that today afflicts our nation will soon come to an end. Beginning on January 20, 2017, safety will be restored.”
It was, at the time, a striking promise. Starting in 1994, the US murder rate had fallen consistently for 20 years. Violent crime had fallen so much that nobody talked about it anymore as a political issue, and the “tough on crime” politics of the 1980s and 1990s was widely viewed as embarrassing.
After Michael Brown’s death at the hands of police in Ferguson, Missouri, the mainstream conversation in the United States was about criminal justice reform, not reducing crime. But crime went up a bit in 2015 and then up by a larger amount in 2016. Progressives didn’t really want to talk about it, but Trump — a man who seems unafraid to be seen as an embarrassing throwback to the 1980s — did.
It’s not entirely clear how many voters found this particular gambit persuasive and appealing, but obviously Trump thinks it works because he’s saying the same stuff again. And if Trump were just some guy on Twitter, that would make sense: Murder is on the rise again after ticking down for a few years, and acts of looting and vandalism are occurring in cities across the country.
But Donald Trump is the president of the United States.
He promised four years ago to restore safety and bring law and order to our streets. He never bothered to articulate a message about how he would do that, but it didn’t matter. He was the “law and order” candidate. But today he’s a candidate with a record. A record of rising crime and urban disorder, and a record that makes it clear he has no idea how to make any of it better — and is intervening in several ways to make it worse.
Trump is defunding the police
One of the greatest oddities of the 2020 election season is that while it offers many examples of Republicans accusing Democrats of wanting to “defund” the police, the exact opposite is happening on a policymaking level.
Trump has been very critical of the 1994 crime bill and the 2009 economic recovery act, both of which increased federal support for local police. He’s also submitted four budget proposals to Congress, each of which proposed cuts in police spending. More to the point, right now politicians are debating what to do about the expiration of bonus unemployment insurance money that was provided by the CARES Act.
Democrats and Republicans are arguing, in part, about the structure of UI benefits. But they are also arguing about Democrats’ desire to provide state and local government with a massive injection of emergency aid money to plug giant budget holes created by the Covid-19 pandemic. With no aid forthcoming due to GOP opposition, cities are cutting budgets.
And while the abstract defunding debate plays out among intellectuals, real cities are cutting. Not just liberal enclaves, either. Oklahoma City, one of the most conservative cities in America, is cutting its police budget because it’s cutting spending across the board.
If you believe in the empirical evidence that more cops equals less crime — which Trump seems to pretend to — then this trend would appear to make America less safe. And that’s only more so the case, given that the cutbacks in policing will be paired with cuts to mental health and other social services and occur at a time of high unemployment. But while Trump undermines public safety, he also undermines citizens’ efforts to demand accountability for the actions of law enforcement officers. "
I did nazi that coming.
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/arti...ne-people.html
Donald Trump’s Incitements to Violence Have Crossed an Alarming Threshold | The New Yorker
"In December, 2016, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, two political scientists at Harvard, published an opinion piece in the Times that posed the question “Is Donald Trump a Threat to Democracy?” Relying on a set of criteria for anti-democratic leaders created by Juan José Linz, a Spanish expert on totalitarianism, which includes the incitement of violence for political purposes, the two scholars determined that Trump “tests positive.” During that year’s Presidential campaign, they reminded readers, Trump had incited violence by encouraging his supporters to rough up protesters at his rallies.
In their Times piece, and at greater length in their book, “How Democracies Die,” from 2018, Levitsky and Ziblatt developed the theme that Trump had authoritarian inclinations—and they also emphasized the fact that he took over the Presidency during a period of intense political polarization, when other right-wing extremists were already questioning the legitimacy of their political opponents. While American democracy wasn’t in imminent danger of collapsing, they wrote, “We must be vigilant. The warning signs are real.”
Right now, those signs couldn’t be flashing any brighter. Over the weekend, Trump cheered on a caravan of his supporters that confronted groups of Black Lives Matters demonstrators in Portland, Oregon, the site of months of ongoing protests, some of which have turned violent. In the clashes that ensued, one person—Aaron (Jay) Danielson, a supporter of the far-right group Patriot Prayer—was shot and killed. Not content with fanning the flames in Portland, Trump retweeted a message that was supportive of Kyle Rittenhouse, the seventeen-year-old Illinois teen-ager who shot three protesters in Kenosha, Wisconsin, last week, killing two of them. Then, at a press conference on Monday, Trump defended Rittenhouse, suggesting that he had acted in self-defense.
“I find it, frankly, terrifying,” Levitsky told me on Monday, when I called to ask him about Trump’s latest rhetorical escalations. Although the language that the President has adopted over the past few days is entirely consistent with his 2016 campaign, the inflammatory statements he issued at rallies then were “on a micro scale” compared with what he is doing now on a national stage, Levitsky said. And the political environment, following months of protests against police racism and brutality, is even more incendiary. “We now have the potential in towns and cities across the country for pretty significant violence, with a large number of deaths,” he said. “Trump is either unaware of this or he doesn’t care. I don’t normally like to make these comparisons, but this sort of encouragement of violence for political purposes is worryingly similar to what the Fascist movement did in Europe during the nineteen-twenties and nineteen-thirties.”
In these hyper-polarized, hyper-online times, the word “fascist” gets bandied around a great deal. For this reason, among others, I have avoided using it when writing about the Trump Administration. But Levitsky isn’t the only expert on democratic erosion who sees some alarming parallels between interwar Europe and what is happening in the United States today. Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a historian at New York University, is the author of a forthcoming book on authoritarian leaders, “Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present.” In a telephone conversation, she reminded me that the Fascist Italian dictator, before he ascended to power, in October, 1922, exploited violent clashes between groups of his armed supporters, known as the Blackshirts, and their left-wing opponents. “He used the violence to destabilize Italian society, so he could position himself as the person to stop this violence,” Ben-Ghiat said. That’s what Trump is doing now, she added."
It did not end well for Mussolini:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T8GxWeLTfaM
"History has shown us that things seldom turn out as poorly as the losers fear. For example, when Mussolini was elected prime minister of Italy, those who voted against him feared he would become a ruthless, pompous tyrant, loot the treasury, get really fat and bring the country into a suicidal alliance with the darkest forces of mankind. Well, it turns out he stayed pretty trim, as can be seen by those photos of him hanging upside down in the street as people danced and sang."
-- Gene Weingarten
https://www.axios.com/bloomberg-grou...e478d42bb.html
Scroll down a little bit and watch the map of the US change based on predictions from 538. This is when Trump has to call out the patriots to prevent the Democrats from stealing the election.
Because he already won right?
https://www.cnn.com/2020/09/01/opini...sur/index.html
I thought this CNN opinion piece comparing approaches for Biden to what Roosevelt did in 1932 was well represented.
Is it? White people in authority kill black people. People of all colours and stripes protest killings and some protests get out of hand and there is property damage. White people with guns get jittery and parade around with said guns to prevent damage. Government sends unmarked government agents to nab people off the street. Rather that attempt to heal the divide the (so-called) leader hides behind social media and makes things worse.
If a (so-called) lefty or a black person, or in fact any person, guns Trump down, your country will burn.
No one is going to get near DT with a gun.
Just not happening.
I watched the debates last time waiting for this to happen:
http://www.goombastomp.com/wp-conten...6/10/fury1.jpg
The very last scene from Brian de Palma's film, The Fury, when Amy Irving tells John Cassavettes to go to hell, and he explodes.
Here's a gif:
https://gifer.com/en/3ryq
I'm not suggesting Trump will get shot.
Rather, I'm suggesting that such an event would be a catalyst for violence. The flag waving gun totting government building storming ning nongs would be out in force.
It is truly a sad and sorry situation for your country in the year 2020, in the middle of a pandemic in which 184,000 people have died, to be on a knife edge over the response to white people killing black people. Your country is crying out for sensible stable leadership and it would seem from the cheap seats that it has precisely none of that.
well...here's an idea...not politically correct....but maybe put out a message to folks to not resist arrest...put up a public service thing...with a jingle say like: "continue to exist:don't resist"...that might help some...of course that won't happen as whites are afraid of being seen as racists...that and many white folks treat Black adults like children...which I find incredibly racist to be honest...now, does that statement mean there isn't a problem with cops sometimes? not at all...but a large part of this thing via police shootings might actually be helped via not resisting...it's pretty much the common denominator via these recent cases...
I could not agree less than with the previous comment... Jesus that shit doesn’t sit right with me.
Come on.. victim blaming. Fuck that
I think it is just a terribly sad state what gets categorized as "resisting" these days. I think everyone has a right to question what the charge is, why X is suspected, etc. I can't imagine the fear that must be present in many of those subjected to arrest/interrogation given the continued frequency of police-related shootings or beatings.
I've only had one bad experience with police, but it was instructive to me. When I was 16, I wrecked my car, and an officer arrived AFTER THE FACT and tried to cite me for speeding and reckless driving--because he felt I HAD to be doing both to cause the damage. I argued, and he got angry and loud and got out handcuffs. Luckily for me my passenger and several bystanders (who were actually there) supported me. He then backed down, but for the next 3 months, he or one of his cop buddies followed me after every home game, or any time I happened to be out going to pizza hut or whatever. I had to check my tail lights regularly, never could speed, complete stops (usually i tried never to drive alone, because i was cited for a "rolling stop", despite stopping, and it helped to have a witness) etc etc. What a petty power trip. I was just a 130 lb white teenager who dared talk back.
Police really don't have the right to pre-judge, intimidate, and get physical, but these brutal incidents show they do, far too often. To me the answer isn't to let them do it, but instead to make them stop.
Penalty for resisting arrest is not death and the sentence is not adjudicated curbside.
Tamir Rice was not resisting, he was a 12-year-old boy playing with a toy gun. And Black. Killed by police.
Breonna Taylor was not resisting, she was shot while sleeping in her apartment. Also Black, and killed by police. She was asleep in her apartment when they entered with a no-knock warrant.
Walter Wright was running away from a police officer who had pulled him over for a broken taillight, was that an example of resisting? He was shot in the back five times. He was a Black man.
Philando Castille was shot by police in his car, after he told them he had a gun and was reaching for his license. His killing was live-streamed by his girlfriend. He was a Black man, killed by police, for something that in no way resembled resisting arrest.
The common denominator is that they were Black. I’m not seeing what you’re saying, Cash. What am I missing?
To be fair to Cash and to Todd, I think you are probably closer in agreement then you realize. Cash acknowledges there are problem cops, and Todd you are pointing out the real enraging police incidents are the ones where people are not resisting and still get killed.
The issue is training. If I am a hammer, everything is a nail. As training centers more on warrior mentality , that has driven up these incidents. The key is changing training and the way problem police are dealt with. It is unfortunate, the call to retrain was hi-jacked and became defund the police. In typical fashion, the extremists on both sides, are diverting from the real issue and preventing a solution.
All you need to do is look at how 'civil forfeiture' consultants went around to police departments showing how to maximize the claim, and guess what, civil forfeitures went up. I bet if you examined the incidents, it all comes down to the same police training around a warrior mentality. Rarely does there appear to be training in de-escalation but only in suppression.
Unfortunately, the President thinks he can get elected by scaring people and is spending billions on broadcasting the message the 'left' want to defund the police and bring a mob to your town. This only goes one way under him.
This video surface from the upstate New York recently from a March incident. Clearly, this is so wrong on so many fronts but I would say they are doing exactly what they were trained to do. That is the real problem. Not a rogue cop.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_c...ature=emb_logo
"Lick the boots, they might not shoots?"
How bout the bastards just be held accountable?
Novel idea, that - applying law n' order universally.
https://www.opb.org/article/2020/09/...rtland-police/
And the PPB Chief even after viewing video evidence is still defending the goon-squad and blaming the victims.
Of course this is the same PPB that had no problem letting a y'all-kaida parade of trucks with blacked-out plates come in to Portland, bear-mace protestors in the face, shoot protestors with paintball guns filled with ball-bearings and frozen paint, and maul protestors in the street with their trucks while running red-lights right in front of them without so much as a wag of the finger - in fact multiple photos and videos show them smiling and laughing as it happened.
This is tRump's Amerik(^3)a.
tRump isn't smart enough to identify a fire-hydrant but he sure as hell has the backing to be a tyrant. Without a complicit republican party and a base of white-supremacists (hiding behind their bibles and stonks), he would be nothing. Unfortunately the so-called conservative agenda for the past fifty years has been to grow a nation of mushroom heads - feeding them sh!t and keeping them in the dark, manipulation at every turn. This is the end-game that started with Nixon, ramped up with Reagan, and bled across the map under the Bushes. They are reaping the tyranny they have sown - and tRump is exactly the leader they wanted. The Republican party could end this today. They could have ended it years ago. But they haven't, and they won't. They have, at last, no decency. And neither does any citizen who is not actively speaking out against them and campaigning among friends and family for the tide to turn at the local, state, and federal level in November.
This only strengthens the argument to defund police departments, in my mind. If the issue is not rogue cops but the fundamental nature of the job, then it is unrealistic to expect existing departments and power structures to wholly reinvent themselves.
Yes, the police have had jobs foisted upon them that they shouldn't, but given the budgets for many of these departments it's a travesty they're not employing more social workers, homeless advocates and others who can better deal with the kinds of crises they're called in to solve.
Policing in this country is increasingly militarized and treating where we all live, to quote the Secretary of Defense about handling peaceful protests, as the battle space.
Either it's rogue cops that many "good" cops aren't getting a handle on or forcefully speaking out against, or it's a system rotten to the core.
Both options lead me to believe a reckoning of dramatic resource reallocation and consideration for how we police our society, ie:defund, is necessary.
Attachment 116565
When you're stonks are up, nothing else matters.
That's actually not what I said. I said the conservative agenda pushed by republican leaders dating back to Nixon (including the Bush's) is responsible for tRumpism and indeed the tyranny gripping this country. That is different than saying that the Bush's wanted tRump to be prez.
If you disregard history, or the history that applies to this doesn't apply to you, this sounds sensible. But when you acknowledge that resisting arrest is not a universal factor in police brutality cases, and there are many examples of no safety for a black person who follows police orders, you realize that the burden of correct behavior is first and foremost on the police officers.
ignorance much? have you been arrested or pulled over for being black? im not balck, but i drove a car that was often profiled as a black guys car, a 66 chevy caprice. i was pulled over 6 times as a teenager for being black, then the cops roll up to the car, see a white boy, put the gun back in the holster, and tell me to watch out because the motor is big and speed or soemthing. alas, i wasnt speeding, just driving a "snoop dog music video car" in southern california, go thorugh as a white person, imagine actually being a black person.so i was profiled as black. its shocking to go through as a white person, imagine actually being black and having the followup on that shit. like they dont remove their hand fomr their gun or re hoslser it, they just shoot you.
so doris, i can imagine your stupid situation of simply not resisting arrest and still getting screwed for it. please do try again with another thought... this one wasnt up to par. or read some, Solitary by albert woodfox would be a good place to start. if its not too lefty for old ladies in grants pass in my wifes book club, perhaps you could try to learn something about the other.
jesus, this kind of ignorance is simply getting old and dangerous. i didnt know people could be so ignorant given social media obviousness. im tired. peoples' ignorance makes that fatigue worse.
That's right re Italy and Germany. But, for a country that is modern, democratic etc etc, things are not going particularly well. Trump has been a hopeless leader and giving the right signals to white gun totting lunatics is a genie that may be hard to put back in the bottle.