Did this really just happen?

[_EAllusion]

Matt Gaetz is calling for death squads to hunt down Antifa. Tom Cotton is advocating using the military to commit war crimes against the citizenry.

It's frustrating that if you respond to these comments by elected Republicans in Congress with the appropriate amount of alarm, very serious types will attempt to portray you as acting crazy and hyper-partisan because that's what makes them feel like they're being reasonable.

[_Doctor CamNC4Me]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions ... r-country/

How Western media would cover Minneapolis if it happened in another country

In recent years, the international community has sounded the alarm on the deteriorating political and human rights situation in the United States under the regime of Donald Trump. Now, as the country marks 100,000 deaths from the coronavirus pandemic, the former British colony finds itself in a downward spiral of ethnic violence. The fatigue and paralysis of the international community are evident in its silence, America experts say.

The country has been rocked by several viral videos depicting extrajudicial executions of black ethnic minorities by state security forces. Uprisings erupted in the northern city of Minneapolis after a video circulated online of the killing of a black man, George Floyd, after being attacked by a security force agent. Trump took to Twitter, calling black protesters “THUGS”’ and threatening to send in military force. “When the looting starts, the shooting starts!” he declared.

“Sure, we get it that black people are angry about decades of abuse and impunity,” said G. Scott Fitz, a Minnesotan and member of the white ethnic majority. “But going after a Target crosses the line. Can’t they find a more peaceful way, like kneeling in silence?”

Ethnic violence has plagued the country for generations, and decades ago it captured the attention of the world, but recently the news coverage and concern are waning as there seems to be no end in sight to the oppression. “These are ancient, inexplicable hatreds fueling these ethnic conflicts and inequality," said Andreja Dulic, a foreign correspondent whose knowledge of American English consists of a semester course in college and the occasional session on the Duolingo app. When told the United States is only several hundred years old, he shrugged and said, “In my country, we have structures still from the Roman empire. In their culture, Americans think that a 150-year-old building is ancient history.”

Britain usually takes an acute interest in the affairs of its former colony, but it has also been affected by the novel coronavirus. “We’ve seen some setbacks with the virus, but some Brits see the rising disease, staggering unemployment and violence in the States and feel as if America was never ready to govern itself properly, that it would resort to tribal politics,” said Andrew Darcy Morthington, a London-based America expert. During the interview, a news alert informed that out of the nearly 40,000 coronavirus deaths in the United Kingdom, 61 percent of the health-care workers who have died were black and or have Middle Eastern backgrounds. Morthington didn’t seem to notice. “Like I was saying, we don’t have those American racism issues here.”

Trump, a former reality-TV host, beauty pageant organizer and businessman, once called African nations “shithole countries." But he is now taking a page from African dictators who spread bogus health remedies, like Yahya Jammeh of Gambia, who claimed he could cure AIDS with bananas and herbal potions and pushed his treatments onto the population, resulting in deaths. Trump appeared to suggest injecting bleach and using sunlight to kill the coronavirus. He has also said he has taken hydroxycholoroquine, a drug derived from quinine, a long-known jungle remedy for malaria. Doctors have advised against using the treatment to prevent or treat the coronavirus.

Meanwhile, Americans desperate to flee will face steep challenges to cross borders, as mismanagement of the coronavirus and ethnic tensions in the country have made them undesirable visitors. But some struggling American retailers, like Neiman Marcus, are hoping to lure shoppers with traditional 19th-century colonial travel fantasies through neutral khakis and cargo shorts as part of a “Modern Safari” collection. “Utilitarian details & muted tones meet classic femininity,” reads a caption under the photograph of a white woman. Pith helmets were not included in the accessory lineup.

Africa could be an ideal asylum destination, as several African countries have managed to contain the coronavirus outbreak through aggressive early measures and innovations in testing kits. Senegal, a nation of 16 million, has only seen 41 deaths. “Everyone predicted Africa would fall into chaos,” Okango said. “It is proof that being a black person in this world doesn’t kill you, but being a black person in America clearly can.” The African Union did not respond to requests for comment, but it released a statement that said “we believe in American solutions for American problems.”

Around the world, grass-roots organizations, celebrities, human rights activists and even students are doing what they can to raise money and awareness about the dire situation in America.

“It’s sad that the Americans don’t have a government that can get them coronavirus tests or even monthly checks to be able to feed their families,” said Charlotte Johnson, a 18-year-old Liberian student activist, who survived the Ebola pandemic. “100,000 people are dead, cities are burning, and the country hasn’t had a day of mourning? Lives don’t matter, especially not black lives. It’s like they’re living in a failing state.”

[_EAllusion]

The mayor of Louisville recently announced that every single police officer's body camera in the vicinity where David McAtee was killed was not activated. Every single one.

The police say they responded by being fired upon by a group of protestors leading to McAtee (accidentally) being shot and killed. Witnesses who are not police claim they weren't protesting - it was a weekly BBQ gathering - and the shot was fired by someone outside the group that drove off.

What a totally unfortunate happenstance that all body cameras were off.

[_Jersey Girl]

Houston Police Chief...

'Keep your mouth shut,' police chief responds to Trump

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dZBZ_hwUobw

[_honorentheos]

Matt Gaetz is calling for death squads to hunt down Antifa. Tom Cotton is advocating using the military to commit war crimes against the citizenry.

It's frustrating that if you respond to these comments by elected Republicans in Congress with the appropriate amount of alarm, very serious types will attempt to portray you as acting crazy and hyper-partisan because that's what makes them feel like they're being reasonable.

Assuming I'm the very serious type here, I'll bite.

Gaetz put out a tweet advocating the hunting down of Antifa like they were Al Queda or ISIS. Twitter flags it for glorifying violence. So he doubles down and retweets a tweet from Trump from last week calling for repealing internet protections of private companies rights to self manage in response. That's horrific. Is saying Gaetz called for death squads hyperbole? I'd say so. I don't see why it's needed or helps make a point given how horrific what he actually said is on its own face. It seems that this kind of hyperbole only undermines attempts to point out the terrible things they are actually saying.

[_honorentheos]

https://mobile.Twitter.com/mattgaetz?re ... r%5Eauthor

[_Doctor CamNC4Me]

You know that slow, incremental slide into fascism so many were telling us was happening, and that we were skeptical at best of those claims and openly scoffing at it at worst? Yeah, we just crossed the line into it. Between Trump’s earlier tweets about using the “unlimited powers” of the military to kill Americans to this jerk off agitating for the government to extrajudicially kill citizens... well, here we are. It happened. The GOP is literally a fascistic political party unless they can somehow turn this thing around. I didn’t think civil war was in the realm of possibility, but it looks like the Russians are getting what they wanted through the tacit and active support of the GOP.

- Doc

[_EAllusion]

Assuming I'm the very serious type here, I'll bite.

Gaetz put out a tweet advocating the hunting down of Antifa like they were Al Queda or ISIS. Twitter flags it for glorifying violence. So he doubles down and retweets a tweet from Trump from last week calling for repealing internet protections of private companies rights to self manage in response. That's horrific. Is saying Gaetz called for death squads hyperbole? I'd say so. I don't see why it's needed or helps make a point given how horrific what he actually said is on its own face. It seems that this kind of hyperbole only undermines attempts to point out the terrible things they are actually saying.

Perfect. Maybe you should be handled like we handled Osama bin Laden And by that, I mean, of course, issue stern disapproval.

(The reason it was widely interpreted as advocating for killing Americans is because what we did to "hunt down" Al Queda was to find and kill them in a systematic fashion. Translated domestically, "death squad" is a term that's been used for such behavior.)

[_honorentheos]

Again, hyperbole isn't helping. Yeah, he's advocating taking military action against US citizens over politics. It's horrific and should be vilified for what it is. You aren't helping by pushing his statement even further into advocating for death squads which is an invention. Why do that? It's crazy. Death squads are associated with dictators, so of course there is branding and messaging involved in making that choice. But it's one that starts to misrepresent his actual statement enough to then lose people who should be concerned.

You're proving my point about you with this.

[_EAllusion]

It's not hyperbole honortheos. You're doing exactly what I preemptively mocked. What we did to "hunt down" Al Queda was form death squads. It's a term imported from a Latin American context, but it's conceptually the same. You don't reference ISIS to make a generic reference to military intelligence gathering. You're taking the dubious plausible deniability interpretation of his comments, deciding for no reason in particular with overweening confidence that's what he meant, and attacking the most plausible reading as crazy. It's exactly as I foretold when I read the entrails of animals.