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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Brumar89 who wrote (1154736)	8/5/2019 9:27:33 AM
From: ryanaka	1 Recommendation Recommended By Brumar89 Respond to of 1573943

mindmeld is saying, it is justified to gun down political opponents. White terrorism.

To: Brumar89 who wrote (1154736)	8/6/2019 5:19:37 PM
From: RetiredNow	1 Recommendation Recommended By TideGlider Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1573943

yes, he absolutely did. The left wing extremists do it for psycho political reasons and so do the right wing extremists. We need to be unified as Americans that this kind of violent extremism on the left and right is absolutely unacceptable and we need to figure out what to do about it post-haste. I'd suggest for starters all politicians need to tone down the rhetoric, especially anything that calls for "getting in their faces", "kicking them out of restaurants", "when they go low, we kick them", etc. When politicians call for intimidation against supporters of opponents, then that is green lighting violence and people tend to respond. That needs to stop. ----------- FAR-LEFT PROTESTERS DESCEND ON MITCH MCCONNELL’S HOME, THREATEN TO “STAB THE MOTHERFKER IN THE HEART”** Far-left protesters are at Mitch McConnell's Kentucky home One person says they hope someone uses a “voodoo doll” on McConnell Another says they want someone to “just stabs the mother fcker in the heart” These are the people who want to take your guns pic.twitter.com/3PXx6mnqWo — Ryan Saavedra (@RealSaavedra) August 6, 2019 The Dayton Murderer Is Proof We Need To Take Left-Wing Violence Seriously* forward.com Amidst the disturbing trend of political conflict in the United States escalating into violence, it has been a staple of conventional wisdom that the real danger comes almost entirely from the far right. Thus, after journalist Andy Ngo was beaten up by activists from the militant left-wing “Antifascist” movement at a protest in late June, commentators such as Vox’s Zack Beauchamp cautionedagainst attempts to portray Antifa’s record of violent behavior as even remotely comparable to that of far-right extremists. Beauchamp quoted an Anti-Defamation League primer on Antifa which said, “To date, there have not been any known Antifa-related murders.” But is that still true today? We don’t know if Connor Betts, the 24-year-old Ohio man who killed nine people (including his own sister) and wounded 27 more when he opened fire on a crowded street in Dayton on Sunday, had any involvement with Antifa. But Betts’s Twitter trail makes it clear that he was a hardcore leftist who embraced some fairly extreme ideas—and, in some cases, advocated violence toward political enemies in Antifa-style language. The profile for the now-suspended Twitter account @iamthespookster, confirmed as belonging to Betts, identifies him as a “leftist” (and specifies his personal pronouns, a common left-wing calling card). The posts on the account show that Betts—a registered Democrat—was an Elizabeth Warren supporter and a fan of the progressive “Squad,” but also had far more radical political interests. “I want socialism, and I’ll not wait for the idiots to finally come around to understanding,” said one of his tweets. His retweets included a graphic in which Smokey the Bear, sporting a red face mask with a hammer and sickle, holds up a sign that seems to encourage terrorism against the “capitalists” said to be responsible for killing the planet. “Kill every fascist,” Betts tweeted a year ago, commenting on the anniversary of the Charlottesville far-right rally. He also retweeted “Punch a Nazi”-type tweets that celebrated street violence against white supremacists. And this past May, Betts shared a tweet by a prominent Antifa account, “Antifash Gordon,” identifying people “confirmed or likely to be at the KKK rally in Dayton,” with the comment, “Know your enemies.” While conservative websites and social media users have eagerly spread the news that the Dayton shooter was a leftist Antifa supporter, mainstream coverage has been far more reticent. In a particularly glaring omission, a BuzzFeed piece discussed right-wing hoaxes trying to link the El Paso shooting to Antifa but made only a passing reference to Betts’s politics, mentioning his status as a registered Democrat but not his far-left views. (The site gave far more attention to the revelation that Betts sang in a “death metal” band whose material often used extreme sexual violence toward women as dark satire.) Given the fact that Betts was apparently preoccupied with twisted thoughts of violence for years—as a teenager, he was suspended from school after the discovery that he kept “rape” and “kill” lists of classmates—it’s very likely that his horrific act of evil was influenced by complicated factors that had nothing to do with politics. Yet whether left-wing extremism could have been part of his motive seems a very relevant question. In 2019—after Charlottesville, after the Tree of Life synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh last fall, and now the El Paso massacre—one would have to be either deluded or dishonest to deny the danger of violent far-right extremism in America. One may quibble about the exact body count (for instance, the ADL’s tally of at least 50 murders by right-wing extremists in 2018 includes non-political killings motivated by family/personal conflicts, financial gain, or mental illness in which the perpetrator had some connection to far-right extremism). But it’s clear that the threat is real and serious. It should be equally obvious that some far-right obsessions, notably the “replacement” of white people in the West by black and brown “invaders,” have spread into mainstream conservative discourse to an alarming degree, particularly with the Trumpification of the Republican Party. Trump’s own rhetoric has repeatedly appealed to those fears, as well. But it is also naïve, and in many cases self-serving, to ignore the potential for political violence on the left. The most dramatic such incident was the 2017 congressional baseball practice shooting Republicans and was out to kill GOP lawmakers. But there is also an extensive record of lower-level violence linked to the left and specifically to Antifa, long before the attack on Ngo. Protests have turned to riots and physical assaults on Trump supporters. Innocent bystanders, too, have become victims. Last year, two Marines visiting Philadelphia for a Marine Corps ball were punched and kicked by an Antifa mob that mistook them for participants in a far-right rally. (In a grimly ironic twist, the Marines were Hispanic and were reportedly pelted with racist slurs by the alleged assailants, who include prominent Washington, D.C. Antifa activist Joseph Alcoff.) Antifa violence has also targeted conservative college speakers such as Charles Murray, a scholar some consider a promoter of “scientific racism”; in 2017, a protest against Murray’s appearance at Middlebury College in Vermont spilled over into a melee in which a female professor escorting Murray out of the building was knocked down and injured. There have been other, lesser-known troubling incidents with violent overtones. Last November, an Antifa-affiliated news site celebrated the apparent suicide of Richard Morrisett, a University of Texas-Austin professor subjected to a harassment campaign (including threatening graffiti) by a “revolutionary” student group after the exposure of a past domestic violence conviction. Of course, even if the Dayton shooting is eventually confirmed as an act of far-left terrorism, the far right still has the far higher body count—for now. But that could easily change. As we know from 20th Century history, including the history of terrorism in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s, there is nothing about the far left that makes it inherently more peaceful. The biggest loss of American civilian life to political violence before September 11, 2001 was the 1978 murder-suicide spree in the “People’s Temple” of the Rev. Jim Jones, a communist cult leader who enjoyed the support of quite a few notables on the left, from California Governor Jerry Brown to academic and activist Angela Davis. (The “socialist paradise” left a total of 918 people dead, a third of them children.) While left-wing violence is dangerous in itself, it also contributes (as the ADL notes in its Antifa primer) to a vicious cycle of right vs. left warfare. The Proud Boys, a right-wing extremist group, thrives on brawling with Antifa. Another far-right group, the West-coast based Patriot Prayer—which also frequently engages in such brawls—was formed in response to Antifa and sees its mission as conservative self-defense. The cycle seems to be escalating. A little over a month ago, after the Portland street clashes in which Ngo was hurt, Vox published an article by freelance journalist Kim Kelly, a self-identified Antifa activist and anarchist, as “another tool in our struggle for collective liberation.” Did Betts see himself as a gun-wielding warrior and avenger for the left? We may never know. But it should be clear that we ignore the violent left at our own peril. Cathy Young is a contributing editor at Reason magazine and is the author of “Ceasefire: Why Women and Men Must Join Forces to Achieve True Equality.” Follow her on Twitter, @CathyYoung63.

To: Brumar89 who wrote (1154736)	8/6/2019 7:36:09 PM
From: longnshort	1 Recommendation Recommended By FJB Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1573943

like the bernie supporter who shot republicas on a baseball field do you think the lefty media calling all trump supporters white supremists leads to violence

To: Brumar89 who wrote (1154736)	8/9/2019 9:48:41 PM
From: RetiredNow	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1573943

yep, it's a documented fact based on his own posts that he was aligned with the left. But of course, you will deny the facts, as you always do, because you have deluded yourself into thinking you can't possibly be wrong about anything. ----------- Social Media Civil War Authored by Raul Ilargi Meijer via The Automatic Earth blog, The US government has to come up with very very strong legislation for social media, and it has to do that very soon. Because if it doesn’t, it risks those same social media inciting a civil war (that’s no hyperbole, that is real) on American soil. And beyond as well, but as Donald Trump said about European efforts to curtail Twitter, Facebook et al’s activities, they’re American companies and hence America’s responsibility. Well, cool, but that means you have to do your job, and you ain’t doing it. Those EU efforts by the way were all about financial issues, tax paying etc., not inciting civil wars or being undemocratic. In short, Brussels doesn’t get it yet either. Now, the Automatic Earth was kicked off Facebook years ago and never received an explanation for why an account with 1000s of followers was just choked in the bud, so I can’t be expected to celebrate its great achievements for mankind. We still have a Twitter account, but how much longer after I post this essay? There’s no telling, and that is the heart of the entire issue. If I, or you, say anything that anyone at these companies don’t like, they can ban us. Facebook and Twitter continue to operate on the notion that they are private companies who are entitled to ban anyone they don’t like. In the case of Facebook, that covers half the world population. It’s like running the UN as a private enterprise. And it’s not even the owners or the board, they don’t have time to check who they like or not. Instead, they have hired 10s of 1000s of young -because cheap- kids to do the (shadow-) banning for them. The companies are all based in Silicon Valley, i.e. California, i.e. NOT Trump territory, and the cheap young kids hired to decide what people can and cannot say on their so-called private platforms reflect that territory and its ideas. But Washington can no longer tolerate that. It must act now. The question is: will it? Why wouldn’t it? Because Facebook, Twitter, Instagram et al have become the US Intelligence’s dream tools to spy on their own people as well as those abroad. The CIA couldn’t even ever have dreamt of a platform that encompasses 3.5 billion people. But Mark Zuckerberg handed it to them on a platter. My idea is Trump would love to go against them, because they go against him and his voters, but US Intelligence, CIA, FBI, may be holding him back from it. Bad, bad idea. Picked up Charles Nenner on his war cycles at Greg Hunter’s USA Watchdog site, and I wasn’t terribly convinced at first sight, but that was before I read about Mitch McConnell being threatened at his own house. Civil War Cycle Heating up in America “Years ago when we talked about my war cycles, I said I am more worried about internal social war in the United States than outside wars. I think there is a bigger chance in the United States than in Europe. They say it’s Trump’s fault . . . . I say it’s the other way around. If the Democrats would just get things organized and people would not get that angry. . . . The media will always take the other side, so they will never solve it. I think it is the Democrats whose fault it is that all these killings are there and not the Republicans. . . . So, there is a cycle of social unrest in the United States, which is 60 years old. So, you go back to what happened in the 1960’s. It could explode, and I think it is going to explode, and there is going to be a major problem. . . . I don’t know how bad it is going to be, but based on cycles, it has to be worse than the 1960’s. Each cycle always is worse. . . . WWII was worse than WWI, so every cycle becomes worse than the first cycle. . . . I don’t feel comfortable living in the United States anymore because people are so aggressive on everything. Nenner also talks in that piece about how he visited Putin, who is interested in the war cycles idea, so maybe I should read up on those war cycles. But that Mitch McConnell story interferes and disperses into the whole tale. There apparently were groups of people outside his home, caught on video, who were calling for him to be violently attacked. And when his campaign posted a video of these people on Twitter, the campaign’s account was shut down. *“Just Stab The Motherfuker”: Twitter Suspends McConnell Campaign For Posting Video Of Violent Threats “I just want him to have a stroke, that is all,” the woman added. “One of those heart attacks where they can’t breathe, and they’re holding their chest and they fall backwards” “He’s in there nursing his broken arm. He should have broken his raggedy, wrinkled-ass neck,” she said at one point in the video. “Everybody needs to show up wherever this ho is at and make him just regret his fucking life, period,” she added. At one point in the protest, a male protester commenting on McConnell’s recent injury said that he may have been the victim of a “voodoo doll” curse. -Daily Caller Kevin Golden, McConnell’s 2020 campaign manager noted that “Twitter will allow the words of ‘Massacre Mitch’ to trend nationally on their platform, but locks our account for posting actual threats against us.” Golden says that they appealed to Twitter, which stood by their decision, saying that the account will remain locked until they delete the video. Daily Wire reporter Ryan Saavedra was similarly locked out of his Twitter account for posting the video. “Twitter asked me yesterday to delete this tweet,” Saavedra recounted in a massive tweetstorm. “It showed a person allegedly calling for violence against Mitch McConnell. The person appears to be a BLM activist who has met with Elizabeth Warren.” And I know, people are going to react to this saying: Oh, it’s Daily Caller, Mitch McConnell, Ryan Saveedra, it’s right wing, but that is so far beyond the point it disqualifies you from any conversation at all. Mitch McConnell, aka MoscowMitch or MassacreMitch, is very far removed from being my favorite person on the planet, but he’s the Senate Majority Leader, and as such an important part of the American political system. If you don’t like that, there’s a mechanism to express that: the ballot box. Calling for him to be physically attacked right outside the place where he and his family live is not done. Unless perhaps you want the same to happen to you at your residence. But you don’t, do you? This has nothing to do with left vs right anymore. This is about people who have convinced themselves they are so right in their ideas that anything at all is justified to get their views and their points across, including violence. Well, there’s the seeds of your civil war then. Now, note that this started well over 3 years ago with the invention out of thin air of Russiagate. Now that that ‘theory’ has been debunked, where are the inventors, i.e. losers, going to hide? Apparently in front of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s home. And what’s next? Right-wing protesters setting up camp outside Mark Zuckerberg’s home, or Adam Schiff’s, Jerry Nadler’s, Elijah Cummings’? We may not be that far removed from that happening. And if it does, Facebook and Twitter will be crucial in organizing it. Which is why Trump and AG Bill Barr must come up with very strong rules, very soon, defining what social media are allowed to do and what not. And barring Mitch McConnell’s campaign from posting direct threats to the man uttered mere feet away from where he lives doesn’t seem to be the way forward. The Age of -corporate- Innocence that Zuck and @jack keep trying to hide behind while counting their billions has long gone. They have become bigger political players than the New York Times, CNN and Jeff Bezos. Stop them now or you risk the 2020 elections leading to outright warfare. Mr. Trump, sir, this is your responsibility more than anyone else’s. You have no choice. But you do have the power. Not many Americans, far as I can see, take the threat of a civil war seriously, including you, Mr. Trump. But you really should. Take on the social media, and you’re halfway there to preventing it.** * * * Support The Automatic Earth on Patreon