"Trump is the Antichrist" from Antichrist 45--Bible Prophesy with Brother Paul

Now here me out... this is not a religious post, cause I don't buy a bit of his bullshit. But if you end up talking to friends of loved ones who've fallen for the psychosis of "Trump is God's chosen president" then Brother Paul has got the prescription you need to shut them up (or at least drive them to apoplexy).

Brother Paul is deluded too, but does have the horse sense to know a charlatan when he sees one. And so he lays out a scripture-based argument confirming that Donald Trump is the Antichrist. It's not too long (10 minutes, but you can stop at the 9 minute mark). I recommend taking notes so when you toxic brother-in-law with the landscaping business starts going on about Grifty McSquirrelhead being like King David, you can rattle off the Bible verses that show that presumptive nominee is a lot closer to King Saul, if not the Whore of Babylon.

Do you even remember what life was like a quarter century ago?

We're so busy in the bustle of the 21st century, can we even recall the simple pleasures of life a mere 25 years ago, "more than a generation away" from our advanced modern times!

There's gonna be violence in the country on the first Wednesday in November.

Trump probably has enough professional political managers around him that he'll need to be obscure about how he calls for it. But I feel more and more like this won't end on Election Day, even if we win clearly.

After 8 years of self indoctrination, members of Congress are likely to join in on his wink-nudge spurs toward a second insurrection. More and more will be too afraid of their own mob to call for peacefully accepting the vote.

I hope the police are prepared.

If you ain't worried, you ain't paying attention

"Polls don't matter at this point" is a lame deflection.

In Feb 2020, Biden was beating Trump by 5-7 points across several polls and beat him by 4½% in November.
In Feb 2016, Clinton was beating Trump by 10 points, but only beat him by 3%
In Feb 2012, Obama was beating Romney by 8 points (see final paragraph) beat him by 4%
Throughout Feb & Mar 2008, Obama was beating McCain by 3-6 points and beat him by 7% (helped a bit by the Housing Bubble collapse in late September)

Polls at this point in the calendar are actually pretty damn insightful. In 3 of the last 4 elections, Republicans have slightly beat the February matchup polls. With Trump averaging about a 2 point edge across multiple polls and our president heading into a relatively bumpy news cycle due to Robert Hur's antics (I assume he's in line for some big bonus or personal favor in the near future), there's no cause for panic. We've beat history before. But there's plenty cause for concern.

I know we like to point out what a tremendous job Biden's done on the economy. But we don't seem to live in a time when facts matter that much. Messaging and tribalism bring the boys to the yard today. We need to quit yammering so much here and spend more time registering, even in hopeless states like mine, and fund raising and shaming our Trumpy relatives back toward truth... and we need to be emotionally devastating about it. Don't fight on culture wars issues -- that will be counterproductive. Point out how Trump's been hoodwinking them the whole time--the corruption, the profiteering, the facts in the documents and sexual assault cases, the bullying. Don't be nice; they don't respect nice. Wake them up before our Constitution is put to sleep.

Politico: Joe Scarborough trashes special counsel's report

Joe Scarborough trashes special counsel’s report

Scarborough, a former Republican representative who’s now a harsh critic of former President Donald Trump, said that Hur, “from Trump university,” was playing the role of a neurologist and a lawyer in the report. Hur concluded that Biden willfully retained and disclosed classified information but that criminal charges weren’t warranted.

“So bizarre. So many people immediately heard these random conclusions, irrelevant conclusions, politically charged, Trump-like ramblings,” Scarborough said on the program. “Why in the world would he put that in a report? His neurological assessment of Joe Biden and secondly why Merrick Garland would release garbage like that in the Justice Department.”

In the report, Hur stated that Biden couldn’t recall when his son Beau died and said a jury would be sympathetic to Biden, who was described as a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”

Prediction: the Scotus ruling is gonna be bonkers

It sounds like Jackson, of all people, is questioning why the office of president was left off the specifically enumerated offices covered in the Insurrection Clause -- like one of the leading concerns in 1867 was whether some former Johnny Reb was gonna get elected president.

Meanwhile the conservative judges are asking questions to question the wisdom of having different major candidates on only some states' ballots. In other words, they're calling into question the US Constitution's granting to the states the power of administering their own elections. The conservatives, I suspect, are just about do a perfect flip-flop on States' Rights and try to invalidate the original intention of the Framing Fathers.

The Supreme Court is about to throw gasoline on the fire and ruin its residual reputation

Today's magical discovery

If you carry an avocado in your coat packet for too long, it turns into guacamole on its own
🥑

Good lord, this dumbbutt and his dumbbutt lawyers

In Vox the ever informative Li Zhou (Lee Joe) breaks down the Trump lawyers' surprisingly foolish arguments to the SCOTUS. She's quickly becoming my favorite political reporter, after Rachel Maddow.

Essentially Trump's case for not getting booted off the Colorado ballot it has two arguments. One is substantive, rooted in the Bill of Rights, and the other is positively bonkers. Guess which one Trump's lawyers is going with.

The serious argument is basically a due process argument. Trump hasn't been found guilty of insurrection; he is only been determined to have participated in insurrection on January 6th (and in my opinion earlier in 2020 as part of the planning for the insurrection and the fraudulent elector schemes) as a legal finding a fact. It's not a verdict.

There's also the wacky argument, the "spoiled child trying to wiggle out of punishment using word games" argument that the president of the United States is not an officer of the United States.

And surprisingly half of their brief to the scotus, and most of their formal argument in that brief, is dedicated to the egregiously silly case that the president is not in officer. The due process argument, something that the SCOTUS 6 could at least hang a week finding on, is barely mentioned in the brief

I can't tell if they're really that drunk, or if Trump's lawyers are just going with the one argument he's intellectually capable of grasping--that whatever words mean in reality, they don't have to mean that when Trump is involved. Instead of an argument de juris or an argument de facto, it's basically an argument de testicules, an argument made just flex on how big his balls are. Basically he's telling the four justices who are not Thomas or Alito that they're going to have to vote in his a favor regardless of what the law actually says or how stupid his arguments get.

I need some help with genocide explanation

I'm having a running argument with a colleague.

Part of the discussion has turned to Vladimir Putin's insistence that Ukraine isn't really a separate nationality from Russia, as laid out in his famous On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians essay.

Now I've made all the familiar arguments like (a) if they were the same people, he wouldn't have to invade them, (b) Russia has repeatedly attacked Ukraine from the Holodomor in the 1930s to the Crimea invasion in 2014 to the suppression of the Ukrainian language under the czars, (c) they're actually separate languages, and (d) Russia may have evolved out of Ukraine, but saying they're the same is like saying the UK should be controlled by the US.

But when it turns to the genocidy parts of Russia's treatment of Ukraine, beside the erasure of forced depatriation of Ukrainian civilians and handing Ukrainian children over to being adopted by Russian couples, I also want to point out how denial of the Ukrainian ethnicity from Russian is also a stop in genocide.

The literature I've found so far says that dehumanization, calling an out-group community subhuman, is a step toward genocide. So is the symbolization or otherization, making the unique features of the targeted group seem lesser or hateable. But denying the separateness of the Ukraine people is almost the opposite of that--saying that they're not different from us, so they have to be loyal to us.

I've looked at the 10 stages of genocide and the 8 stages of genocide and seen plenty on denial of citizenship of a targeting minority. Only what Russia is doing at home is forcing Russian citizenship on reluctant Ukrainians, Which feels like erasure, but I don't see it listed among the steps of genocide per se. Isn't it?

So far I haven't found any literature by experts on the topic that defines not the emphasis on their separateness, but rather the denial of their separateness that is genocidal in nature.

Can someone help me find a source on this?

(please don't bother posting non-answers like "don't waste your time on people like that" -- I'm looking for help for me as much as for my interlocutor)

No, seriously, Trump is taking credit for stock market performance under Biden

Trump claims credit for record-high stock market under Biden

Former President Trump, who has predicted economic doom if he’s not elected back to the White House, said Monday he should get credit for the stock market’s recent record highs, more than three years after he left office.

In a post on his Truth Social platform, Trump claimed that polls that show him ahead of President Biden in a hypothetical rematch in November are driving the optimistic outlook on Wall Street.

“THIS IS THE TRUMP STOCK MARKET BECAUSE MY POLLS AGAINST BIDEN ARE SO GOOD THAT INVESTORS ARE PROJECTING THAT I WILL WIN, AND THAT WILL DRIVE THE MARKET UP,” Trump wrote in an all-caps missive on Truth Social.

Biden’s campaign team mocked the post, describing it as Trump “desperately trying to take credit for the stock market hitting record highs under President Biden.”

The Hill/Decision Desk HQ analysis of polls shows Biden and the GOP front-runner, Trump, in a close race in a general election match-up, with Trump ahead by an average of 2.2 percentage points.