This guy will have 6 months to reflect and learn that nuance.

I suspect he’ll turn this into another spectacle. I’m more disgusted with social media platforms that continue to monetize his behavior

If you believe in democracy, personal rights, and capitalism

🎼 One of these things 🎶 Is not like the other 🎶

🎼 One of these things 🎶 Is not like its brother 🎶

given how much modern ‘conservatives’ hate democracy and personal rights

“This far and no further” politics is a pox on conservatives and liberals alike. This is one of the reasons you see Gavin Newsom fucking around with TERFs in the name of fairness in college athletics. Its one of the reasons why so many people soured on Barack Obama inside his first term.

“Personal Rights” always seem to terminate at the edge of popular consensus.

teaches you to take pride in shit you’ve never done

The better outcome.

I’m more disgusted by the fuckers who go out and do the war crimes, then come home and demand everyone else say “Thank You For Your Service”.

Western corruption is starting a company to produce y and when a government orders x of them, x are delivered

Well… not always.

The initial contract award called for the combat-ready tankers to arrive in August 2017; the first arrived in January 2019. In the years that followed, the KC-46 program was beset by further delays, including production line problems that regularly stalled deliveries and an underperforming vision system. That system is years behind schedule and expected to come in October 2025.

and

Broken Boeing airplanes are going to the military thanks to corruption and bad decisions

Increasingly, the US model for contracting is to take money, outsource the work to a bunch of bargain basement contractors, pocket the profits, and then fail to deliver the end product.

Also R&D is priced in because it’s all done for the sake of making profit and must be recovered through the unit sales.

Again, this is something of an open question. The engineering of a given retailed unit is priced in as part of the unit rate. But the bluesky R&D is, as often as not, performed at the university level and then arbitraged through the private sector or simply stolen from rival militaries / companies / individuals through espionage and laundered through the private sector.

The Octopus Murders, on Netflix, tackles the anatomy of this kind of government-backed swindle with regard to the development of early iteration database technology.

The real difference between more Socialist/Communist models of corruption and the Western Capitalist style tends to be in the legal canonization of the corrupt practices. You really got to see this in the post-Soviet liberalization of Eastern European economies, as mafia cartels were supercharged by western financialization and eventually subsumed the entire federal apparatus of ex-Soviet states. What was considered a criminal black market prior to 1991 became the standard for managing the economy a decade later.

I’m speaking less about the Catholics in the pews and more about their Bishops.

The Bishop of Rome seems broadly critical of the entire US political establishment.

There is a whole Wikipedia page on politicians who have been denied communion over pro-abortion stances

Recent popes have presided over Masses at which pro-abortion rights politicians have been given communion on many occasions.

So this does not seem to be a universal doctrine, just a habit among certain priests and bishops looking to make a stir.

On January 21, 2021, one day after his inauguration as president, Biden received communion from the hands of the archbishop of Washington, DC, Cardinal Wilton Daniel Gregory. The event was condemned by conservative activist Austin Ruse, in Crisis magazine. In October of the same year, Biden stated that during a meeting with pope Francis, “We just talked about the fact he was happy that I was a good Catholic and I should keep receiving Communion”.

But Democrats are probably more likely to be pro-Choice, and the American Catholic Church has made the abortion issue a litmus test for support.

YMMV. Plenty of Catholic Democrats have campaigned as Pro-Choice. The odd secular Ayn Rand loving Republican always finds a way to be Pro-Life. Rank and file Catholics routinely advocate for abortion rights, breaking 60/40 in favor as of just last year. Abortion prohibition hasn’t been a winning issue with Catholics in my lifetime.

Really, the Catholic Church has brought this onto itself.

Totally ahistorical. Catholics (in America) are practically synonymous with liberalism going back to the 1930s. They’ve been in the tank for the Democratic Party since Kennedy.

If anyone has shifted over the last few decades, it’s Republicans who have become more Catholic, not Catholics who have become more Republican. TradCath influencing and political leanings come from historically Protestant regions that are seeing the local evangelical churches dry up from lack of attendance or go bankrupt due to corrupt and incompetent leadership. Increasingly, the Catholic Church is the last church left standing in Rust Belt and Sun Belt states that have seen poverty wipe out the traditional middle class religious centers.

Might as well just get rid of the first amendment at this point.

You’re super late to the party. 1A has been a running joke in legal circles since checks notes the Alien and Sedition Acts.

It’s always been a paper promise. Even when the state isn’t explicitly cracking down on anti-government speech and opposition groups, they’re constantly surveilling and censoring it. Without a meaningful political coalition surrounding the speaker, cops always find an excuse to arrest you for something. And if you can’t lock someone up, well… don’t look to hard into who shot MLK.

People unironically believe Trump is cool and suave.

Trump’s been a notorious petty bitch since the 1970s.

Fantastic movie.

Like, can anyone explain how they thought this got in a police report if all cops supported this shit?

Very possible that they just filed it all on reflex because nobody really thought hard about what they were putting in the record. Cops are both evil and stupid. Sometimes they just do stupid shit, thinking they’ll never get caught.

That said, maybe someone actually did the right thing here. And maybe that’s why it is a news article getting passed around the back alleys of social media, rather than a conspiracy theory whispered at DSA meet ups.

If they ommitted any of it to protect a cop, they’re not fit to be cops.

Cops have their own Omertà. Sort of the reverse, in practice. If you rat out your fellow officers, you’re the one who isn’t going to be on the force for much longer.

SOP. If you’re at a protest and you see some guy in a <Local Sports Team> fitted cap, underarmor, and steel toed boots, you better fucking believe your event is being surveilled and infiltrated.

It’s a feature, not a bug.

Gutting non-English speaker access to the courts is intended functionality

Obviously, the next step is looting the Canadian Treasury.

Enshitification barely allowed these tools to function as advertised for more than a few years.

They’re already getting siloed behind paywalls, tranched into “unusable trash $TooMuch/mo” and “barely working as intended $WayTooMuch/year”, and porked up with useless ephemeral. The cutting edge stuff - Sora, for instance - gets trashed almost as soon as it is released. The OpenClaw shit just fucks your shit up if you’re not babysitting it constantly. Mythos isn’t even for public consumption. Grok is entirely for CSAM. A bunch of these models are just being turned over to the military, because Pentagon officials know to keep eating that bullshit and never complain.

What’s the draw anymore? Come use this garbage application that is going to render your job obsolete largely by tanking the overall economy.

From what to what? It’s always been about sports gambling, with war profiteering as a side-hustle.

Data isn’t very valuable if you can’t transmit it.

At some point you need to trust someone

Hehe. Of course not.