Yeah, my thoughts on this are “well they still overwhelmingly voted for him. And they’ll overwhelmingly vote for whoever the next republican is once Trump croaks.” Trump wasn’t keeping his ICE plans secret. He was saying it with his whole chest, and conservative talking heads were screaming it from the rooftops. If they didn’t get the hint, it’s their own fucking fault.
I mean, they also blatantly want to use the n-word so I wouldn’t put too much faith in their reasoning skills.
Edit: Odd, the username is showing as the same in my app, but different when I follow the link in my browser:
Maybe a weird federation thing, since the original comment was removed by a mod (and apparently they were banned from the community entirely).
They’ll get a golden parachute job as a highly paid lobbyist, and be right back in the rotunda, schmoozing with all their old buddies by the end of the month.
Yeah, the primary reason people end up exposing things to the internet is because of friends and family. I can call my tech-illiterate “anything more difficult than logging into Facebook has her throwing up her hands in defeat, saying it is too hard, and tech is just too complicated these days” mother-in-law and walk her through setting up Plex… But that only works because Plex is exposed to the internet. If I had to walk her through setting up Tailscale on her living room TV before she could connect, it would be a non-starter.
That’s just DDNS. There are different ways to do it, and some routers come with a DDNS service ready to go. DuckDNS is commonly recommended. There are even images like Cloudflare-DDNS, which allow you to run it in a container.
Yup, good notes are really the difference between beginner and expert self-hosters. Write the notes as if they’re documentation to be read by someone who has never seen them before. Don’t tell yourself that you’ll remember things; that is the devil talking. You will forget in 6 months when you’re looking at it again.
This is actually exactly why Musk did it. It’s not a good faith attempt at transparency… It’s straight up “cover your ass” liability shifting. X has been accused of unfettered propaganda in recent election cycles, and this is just an attempt to go “hey, it’s the user’s fault if they fall for the propaganda. All of the info was there for them to find.”
Here’s a reminder that there are nearly 14,000,000 vacant houses in America, and less than 650,000 homeless people. The math comes out to ~22 vacant houses for every single homeless person. I’ll give you one guess which income bracket owns the vast majority of those vacant houses…
I mean, this is a textbook example of statutory rape. He paid an underage girl $400 to show up to a party with the implication of sex, gave her cocaine and ecstasy, and then had sex with her. The state recognizes that rape can occur even if the victim was otherwise willing. The “statutory” part of statutory rape means the prosecutor is required by statute to assume a rape occurred, even if the victim does not agree with the prosecution.
The state acknowledges that there are circumstances where a reasonable person would determine that a victim wasn’t capable of consenting. To be able to prosecute these cases, the state passes statutes to assign a penalty on the assaulter for statutory rape. This statute allows the prosecution to charge for rape, even if the victim was enthusiastically consenting and/or does not feel like they have been assaulted.
For example, if a cop detains someone, then has sex with them in the back of their cruiser. A reasonable state would recognize the unfair power dynamic in this situation, and a reasonable jury member would acknowledge that the detainee was under duress when the sex occurred. Even if the detainee was enthusiastic and willing, they were legally unable to consent because of the power dynamic that was present during the sex. There’s no way of factually proving if the detainee was/is actually willing, or just playing along because the cop held an inordinate amount of power over them. And thus a reasonable state would assume the latter, and statutorily assign a penalty to the person who held the power (the cop, in this example). And this statutory penalty would be enforced by prosecuting the cop for statutory rape.
And “being too young” is one of the biggest and most (in)famous reasons that someone can’t consent. The state sets an age limit on when children can begin consenting to sex with adults. Otherwise willing children below that age are assumed to be groomed (like a 30 year old “dating” a 15 year old) or under some other kind of unfair power dynamic.
If you’re trying to say that it’s unfair that Gaetz was tricked into sex with a minor, that’s a separate discussion. He took that risk when he knowingly paid a homeless person for sex. He knew there was an inherent power imbalance. If he wanted to avoid the power imbalance, he could have used a legal brothel that has a hiring and vetting process designed to preclude underage children from being hired. Hell, he could have worked as a lawmaker to decriminalize sex work and make brothels legal in his area. He could have ensured that people (including himself) didn’t feel the need to pay streetwalkers for sex, because legal brothels were accessible.
But he didn’t do that. He sought out a sex worker who looked young, fully knowing and accepting that there were no systems in place to stop her from lying about her age, and he was willing to take on the risk of statutory rape by choosing to sleep with her.
This was the very first thing I thought of when I saw the headline. I literally thought to myself “oh so she sounds like a pedophile.”
Yup, by step-dad is in the second group. It’s honestly wild what kinds of mental gymnastics he has gone through to justify his vote. We had a surprisingly calm discussion about it the other day, and he genuinely doesn’t believe Trump was involved in any of it.
He thinks Trump was, at worst, just running in some tangential social circles. He believes a lot of the revelatory stuff (like in this post) has been faked from other heads of state to try and discredit him. Like all of the “yeah the DOJ confirmed this is real. The FBI has been sitting on this for literal years or even decades now, as part of their international child trafficking investigations. Multiple news sources have also independently confirmed the validity of the sources” stuff doesn’t matter to him, because he simply chooses not to believe any of it.
God Himself could descend from the heavens with a choir of angels, bust through my parents’ living room window, and slap my step-dad around while screaming that Trump is a pedophile who raped children on Epstein’s island. And my step-dad would defiantly look God in the eyes and tell Him that He’s wrong. There is no threshold that will make the proof believable for him. The goalposts will always be moved to require some new criteria before proof can be valid. And anything that does manage to meet the strict criteria for proof is too perfect, and obviously had to be manufactured in some grand worldwide conspiracy to discredit Trump. As Orwell wrote, “The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”
Yeah, this article was really poorly timed. They posted this just before it was announced that those 8 would vote to end the shutdown.
No, those are the eight scapegoats who have a full four years before they have to run for re-election, meaning they can wait for this to blow over. The party leadership wanted this, but they didn’t want to be seen voting for it because they know it’s wildly unpopular. There’s a reason those 8 were the ones who voted yes; None of them are up for reelection any time soon. They had a back room meeting and were promised some future concession in return for taking the fall for this. No more, no less.
My bet is that he was an active supplier. We already know that Virginia Giuffre landed in Epstein’s clutches via Trump; She was “recruited” by Maxwell for a “massage” gig while working on one of Trump’s properties. My bet is that Trump and Epstein had a running deal where Trump would use his properties to give girls a taste of how the wealthy lived, then call Maxwell in to snag them.
That’s the problem with the separation of powers… The executive branch is supposed to be the one that enforces the laws… The judicial branch has very little power to actually enforce their rulings. And Trump is the head of the executive branch.
We actually know that documents were photocopied, because many of the documents he had were obviously photocopied. Classified documents have a colored border that goes all the way to the edge of the paper:
But the vast majority of photocopiers can’t print to the edge of the paper, (it requires specialized printers which aren’t commercially viable except in specialized print shops), which means photocopies of classified documents don’t have that solid colored edge. Photocopies have a thin white edge where the non-printable area is. And many of his documents had that white edge, which meant they were photocopies and the originals were missing.
Even worse, one of those two votes is often enough to kill the entire thing, because they have unilateral “it has to be unanimous” or “this one specific country can overrule everyone else” rules on the important shit.
She does seem to genuinely believe in protecting kids… But she has an extremely warped idea of what that entails. The Epstein thing has been an obvious wedge between her and Trump, because it’s one thing she has dug her heels in and refused to drop. Because (again) she does at least seem to care about protecting kids. And she sees the Epstein stuff as an obvious “if you protect the files, you’re protecting pedos” signal flare. Broken clocks, I suppose. At least she has shown that she hasn’t been willing to budge on this one specific issue.