I believe that in the past some of them had morals, but that now none of them do.

So Ben Shapiro knows that Trump is a crook, a pedophile, … But he’s more concerned with keeping those scandals covered up than with seeking justice. Keeping their guy in power is more important than any morality, which demonstrates how amoral the entire usa right wing has become.

As I understand it, the public perception of Trump was distorted by how he was portrayed on The Apprentice: https://www.psypost.org/new-research-sheds-light-on-the-influence-of-the-apprentice-on-donald-trumps-political-rise/

The producers at NBC had to jump through a lot of hoops to make Trump appear competent. Their chief marketing officer from that time is very sorry for what he did: https://www.usnews.com/opinion/articles/2024-10-16/we-created-a-tv-illusion-for-the-apprentice-but-the-real-trump-threatens-america

Once Trump became the republican candidate, the right-wing media took up the responsibility of filtering and distorting what their audience got to see and hear about Trump.

Republicans really have something against the cybersecurity and infrastructure security agency, it seems to get targeted at every opportunity.

Edit: as it turns out, republicans really do have a grudge against the agency, they’ve been targeting it since before Trump got reelected: https://www.politico.com/news/2023/10/22/conservatives-cyber-cisa-politics-00122794 Countering misinformation campaigns was a bridge too far for republicans.

It’s real. From the yahoo news article that someone else linked: The defense secretary wrote “Cool story, General” in response to a tweet from retired Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges about Adolf Hitler gathering Nazi generals in 1935 and them being “required to swear a personal oath to the Führer.”

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deportation_of_Kilmar_Abrego_Garcia

Tldr:
Fled from gang violence in San Salvador as a teenager, married to an American, has american kids, was living and working legally in the USA, was still illegally deported to a prison in San Salvador, had to be brought back under court order, is then falsely accused of crimes in Tennessee and now they want to deport him to a country that he has no connection to whatsoever.

Ironically, to get the Tennessee accusations, the usa government struck cooperation deals with convicted criminals, one of which was going to be deported after his sentence, but now not anymore.

The cost for the USA government to persecute this 1 single person has to be already in the millions by now.

Nationalism? You’re really stretching there. I don’t really get how that comes into here either. More ad hominem arguments, this time against me, won’t convince me either.

Ultimately it’s really simple to convince me. There is data. You want this data to not be true and you want to convince me that this data is not true. To convince me that this data is not true, your options are:
A) showing that the institution has on other occasions fabricated data. B) or showing that that report has been shown to contain fabricated data or used a flawed methodology.

You can do neither. All your arguments against it are purely ad hominem, against aspi, against the entirety of Australia, against the evil west with their freedom of expression, with also some whataboutism about Israel thrown in. But you have no actual arguments or any kind of proof whatsoever that that data is not real. You may not want it to be real, but it apparently is. Your unwillingness to accept facts that do not align with your beliefs is a you problem.

Whataboutism? I’m not going there. All your arguments against the data that you don’t like were ad hominem. You have no objective basis for your narrative other than your personal beliefs.

The report is 4 years old and as far as I can find, since then there have been no retractions of anything in it, nor has anyone shown that their were flaws with their methodology. You may not want to acknowledge it, but that data is real. This is something that has really happened.

It’s a report that has been widely reported on in the media at the time. They could not just “craft data” and get away with it. Forging verifiable data is the stupidest thing that a think tank could do if they want their future reports to also be picked up by mainstream media. They can be creative with their conclusions or accusations, but claiming that official government data says X, while it doesn’t, that’s not going to fly and they know it.

I assume that when they claim that the official Chinese county data is showing certain things, that that county data is indeed showing those things. Otherwise they would have no credibility and their propaganda efforts would be wasted.

There was also per county data available, showing a correlation between the size of the decline and the ethnic makeup of the county: “The largest declines have been in counties where Uyghurs and other indigenous communities are concentrated. Across counties that are majority-indigenous the birth-rate fell, on average, by 43.7 percent in a single year between 2017 and 2018. The birth-rate in counties with a 90 percent or greater indigenous population declined by 56.5 percent, on average, in that same year.” https://www.aspi.org.au/report/family-deplanning-birthrates-xinjiang/

The meme checks out: https://www.ceicdata.com/en/china/population-birth-rate-by-region/cn-population-birth-rate-xinjiang . Birth rate was 1.588 in 2017 and at a similar level in the years before that, 1.069 in 2018, 0.814 in 2019 and so on.

Extra surveillance and repression reportedly started in 2014, mass incarceration in 2017.

It probably has to be pedophilic instead of pedophile to be correct.

Your omissions and alterations are interesting.

The article doesn’t just mention “a wreck”, it says “In September 2022, Tyler flipped his father’s SUV while driving, leaving his passenger with multiple concussions and sever lacerations, according to reports.” If Tyler was driving recklessly (and he was), then the passenger was the victim and the driver the perpetrator. If you’re interested in hearing the story of the passenger: https://www.rawstory.com/lauren-boebert-car-crash/ The tldr: “If I did what he did, I’d still be in jail.”

The “theft ring involving drug use” doesn’t mention drugs in the article. And it being theft, means that there were victims of theft. Including apparently a broke woman with a brain tumor.

And also in the case of child abuse there was a victim (the child in case it isn’t obvious).

I don’t get how you can’t recognize the victims in these stories.

In your example the daughter has committed no crimes and made no victims, and she could even be considered a victim herself. Tyler Boubert has already made many victims and will continue to make new victims because his mother’s political clout is protecting him.

The morally right thing to do, would be to protect the victim(s) and bring the perpetrator(s) to justice. In the example of the daughter, the daughter is a victim and she and her family should get the time and space needed to heal. In Tyler Boebert’s cases, Tyler was never the victim, but always a/the perpetrator, with his mother enabling him. With the Boebert family, the morally right thing to do, is to decrease the odds of Tyler making new victims, which gives journalists a moral imperative to consider every new crime of Tyler, to be news worthy.

If an adult family member of a significant political figure commits a crime, then there’s 2 big reasons why that case deserves extra scrutiny: 1) to check whether or not the family member is treated in a fair manner by the persecution and justice system (which could go both ways, they could escape justice because of their family connections, but they could also be extra persecuted for political reasons). 2) To keep track of whether or not the political figure their integrity remains intact.

If Tyler Boebert’s mother wasn’t a prominent republican politician, would he have escaped a prison sentence for his litany of crimes? Personally, I doubt it. And because he keeps escaping consequences, he keeps doing stupid things.

Compare it to western Europe or Canada and people will be shocked as well.

Compare it to Stalin’s gulags or call it stalinesque and I am appalled. Stalin’s gulags were so much worse that the comparison is either made out of historical revisionism or out of ignorance. And since this meme first appeared in a period when Putin was working on historical revisionism, it wouldn’t surprise me one bit if it was deliberate misinformation.

Yet it still wants to draw the impression that the then USA prison system is somehow comparable or worse to Stalin’s gulags. That’s the thing about implying something: even if it’s not explicitly stated, it’s still part of the message.

Omissions of key facts, misrepresentation, just asking questions, dog whistles, unspoken implications, … None of those are explicitly stating what they are implying, so should I just accept stinking memes like those because whatever falsehood they are implying is not spelled out word for word? Well I’m not, I’m going to continue calling them out as misinformation.

I’ve made 2 other comments in the oldest comment chain of why I find this particular meme so awful, but I’m not going to give the same replies in each new chain.

This is an old meme, it’s easy to look up a fact check, here’s one: https://www.truthorfiction.com/under-stalin-repression-was-so-severe-that-soviet-gulags-held-22-of-the-worlds-prison-population/

But the meme was not about that percentage, Stalin’s ussr had a much higher % of the population incarcerated and consequently also very likely a much higher percentage of the world prison population than the USA has now. This is not checked in the fact check and I doubt enough numbers are even available, it’s just deduction from population numbers. The meme doesn’t care about it either, it’s just doing Godwin’s law to draw a comparison of USA prisons to something like this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazino_tragedy It might as well have been a meme comparing Nazi concentration camps with USA prisons (not the new republican ones that are being opened now, but the ones at the time the meme was made). It’s a completely misappropriate comparison to make.