Politics & Stuff

[Vesper 30,090]

It’s time to say goodbye to Elon Musk’s X. Changes to blocking online harassment will endanger users.

As announced to users Wednesday, X is planning to deprive its users of another vital tool for combating ever-escalating online stalking and harassment on the platform, writes Gwen Snyder.

https://www.inquirer.com/opinion/commentary/x-twitter-block-changes-harassment-stalking-endangerment-20241018.html

 

The Nazi troll crew called themselves “The Shed,” and you weren’t supposed to write about them.

To write about them was to attract their attention, and to attract their attention was to experience one of the most vile firehoses of online abuse imaginable. They lived to harass, and they were well-versed in every troll tactic in the book.

Earn their notice, and they’d swarm you. You might see your home address posted, your reputation destroyed through impersonator accounts, or your family held at gunpoint after a “prank” 911 call. It could have been The Shed, or one of the many hornet nests of Nazis who were only too happy to swarm at their prodding. Either way, they’d visit misery on you.

How would they find you to target you? By reading your tweets, of course.

How could you minimize the chances of them reading your tweets? By blocking every Twitter (now X) account associated with them. It’s a necessary defense measure that X’s Elon Musk has decided to neutralize.

As the social media platform’s engineering team announced to users Wednesday, X is planning to deprive its users of another vital tool for combating ever-escalating online stalking and harassment on the platform. Blocking a troll will no longer prevent them from reading your tweets. It’ll suddenly be a lot easier for stalkers, abusers, and harassers to keep tabs on their victims and instantly direct harassment their way.

It’s that instantaneousness that makes this shift so insidiously dangerous. Mass harassment campaigns are like snowballs in the sun. At a slow roll, the snowball melts faster than it can pick up new snow. Allow it to gain momentum, though, and even the afternoon sunshine is no match for that rapid accumulation. The snowball becomes a snow boulder in no time.

Pre-Musk Twitter was far from perfect, but it did allow harassment victims to create at least some meaningful roadblocks that might slow such a snowball before it gained steam. The block button allowed you to keep a troll account from engaging with you or seeing your content. Third party mass block tools allowed you to block that troll account’s followers, too, making it more difficult for them to collectively flood you with harassment. Moderation wasn’t terrific, but generally you could get the site to ban users who directly threatened your life or your family, or posted explicit Nazi content.

A pile of characters removed from a sign on the Twitter headquarters building in July 2023.Godofredo A. Vásquez / AP

Musk has already dismantled X’s hate speech and harassment moderation system and implemented changes that make mass blocking unworkable. His latest step — allowing abusers and stalkers to freely view their targets’ content even when blocked — takes aim at X’s most basic and necessary anti-harassment feature. Trolls needn’t bother to switch to shadow accounts to stalk anymore; their craft will be that much more efficient. That efficiency translates to speed, and that speed aids the snowball’s growth. The less friction a harasser experiences as they stir up hate, the greater their mass harassment campaign’s odds of success.

[Musk] seems determined to turn the website into an ever more welcoming echo chamber for the worst humanity has to offer.

And let’s be clear: “success” here can mean not only psychological torture but endangering offline terror for the targets. I speak from experience. When I was only a few weeks postpartum in 2021, I answered a sharp knock on our door and found armed police officers outside. Nazis had sent them there with a fake 911 call, hoping a SWAT team would shoot first and ask questions later. I was able to safely convince the cops to leave after a brief conversation; others have not been so lucky.

Since that time, Elon Musk has merrily made X an open haven for Nazis and abusers. There’s not much to be done to pressure him into change; the man has majority ownership and has very publicly leveled profanity-laced taunts at his own advertisers. He seems determined to turn the website into an echo chamber for the worst humanity has to offer, in particular violent misogynists, transphobes, and white supremacists.

What we can change is the influence of the platform. Though its reach is slowly dwindling, X remains a default home and broadcast system not only for politicians and journalists, but for government agencies, news services, and elected officials. Every day that these people and organizations choose to communicate through X is a day that vulnerable people are forced to choose between their dignity and their access to their news, political representation, and taxpayer-funded services.

It’s time for these leaders to actually lead, clearing a path that leads beyond X and towards social media environments like Bluesky (pictured) and Mastodon, writes Gwen Snyder.Monique Woo / Monique Woo/TWP

It’s time for these leaders to actually lead, clearing a path that leads beyond X and towards social media environments like Bluesky and Mastodon — platforms that at least gesture in the direction of user safety and protection of the vulnerable.

Without that leadership and exodus, marginalized people will find themselves forced to make an impossible choice: to endure harassment, or abandon meaningful access to the communications of the government they fund and the officials sworn to represent them.

There’s no way around it anymore. Twitter is dead, replaced by the cesspool that is Elon Musk’s X.

There’s a path out; it’s time to take it. It’s time to say goodbye.

[Vesper 30,090]

Donald Trump’s other mental health problem that we’re not talking about

Trump calls anyone who opposes him mentally ill, reflecting his warped approach to a major issue. How much is projection?

https://www.inquirer.com/opinion/donald-trump-mental-health-crisis-20241017.html

Republican presidential nominee former President Donald Trump watches as South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem dances to the song "YMCA" at a campaign town hall at the Greater Philadelphia Expo Center & Fairgrounds, Monday, Oct. 14, 2024, in Oaks.Read moreAlex Brandon / AP

 

by Will Bunch | Columnist

Donald Trump may be running again for the presidency, but some days on the campaign trail it feels like he’s minoring in psychology. At a rally Monday night in Atlanta, the GOP nominee added Black and Latino voters who don’t support him (which would be a majority of them) to his growing list of Americans in need of mental health therapy, or more aggressive meds.

“Any African American or Hispanic, if you know how well I’m doing, that votes for Kamala [Harris], you’ve got to have your head examined,” Trump proclaimed. It’s the same language he’s used to describe others who aren’t voting this time for POTUS 45, including anti-Trump Jews, Catholics, and seniors, whom he warned in September that “we’re gonna have to send you to a psychiatrist to have your head examined.”

The frequency of this claim — that the millions backing Democrat Harris might not just have different ideas about issues like climate change or tariffs, but must suffer from a mental illness — is disturbing. But Team Trump’s impromptu diagnoses can be even more wildly inappropriate when an individual crosses the increasingly authoritarian candidate.

In one of the worst cases, a U.S. Army employee who tried to block Trump and his aides from breaking the rules about filming campaign material in a restricted area of Arlington National Cemetery, and was physically confronted by the ex-president’s men, was described without evidence by Trump spokesman Steven Cheung as “clearly suffering from a mental health episode.” (Team Trump insisted it had a video to back this claim, but never released it.) When legendary journalist Bob Woodward published a new book with damaging information about Trump’s ties to Russian strongman Vladimir Putin, Cheung was back to claim the Watergate scribe “has lost it mentally.” Most disturbingly, Trump in his rallies has taken to describing rival Harris as “mentally impaired” and — when speaking to his wealthy donors behind closed doors, according to the New York Times — “retarded.”

Just on its face, Trump’s growing tendency to brand any opponents as mentally ill is deeply offensive in two ways. It highlights his increasingly unhinged and dictatorial rhetoric toward his perceived enemies, yet also suggests a callous and grossly insensitive attitude toward those who are actually struggling with mental health, in a nation where problems such as rising rates of teenage depression and a high suicide rate ought to be on the front burner. Experts on mental health say Trump’s language is stigmatizing and dangerous.

“People with mental health conditions have been campaigning for years against the social stigma directed against them — and in recent years have made a lot of progress,” Rob Waters, a veteran mental health journalist who founded the website MindSite News, told me this week. “Donald Trump seems to be on a one-man campaign to bring back that kind of stigma.” Waters noted a key element of Trump’s crusade to demonize immigrants is a totally unfounded charge that Latin American nations are emptying their mental institutions and sending these patients north.

In this Feb. 15, 2018, file photo, President Donald Trump speaks in the Diplomatic Room at the White House about the shooting in Parkland, Fla. Trump has repeatedly tied mental illness to mass shootings.Carolyn Kaster / AP

Trump’s re-stigmatizing of mental illness is unconscionable — and it also matters in a couple of other profound ways in the election less than three weeks away. Most important is the way that Trump’s harmful and retrograde attitude toward mental illness could warp U.S. policies if he’s elected the 47th president. But that’s not the first thing on most voters’ minds these days when they see a headline about “Trump and mental health.”

It can’t be a coincidence that Trump’s increasingly bombastic and insensitive charges about the mental health of other people come right as the electorate is questioning what’s happening inside the cerebral cortex of the oldest major-party nominee for president in U.S. history. Ever since the candidate descended the Trump Tower escalator in 2015, Trump’s public displays of narcissism and penchant for telling lies have prompted controversial warnings from some psychiatrists. But the Republican’s increasingly erratic behavior on the 2024 campaign trail — slurring words, confusing names, rambling far off-topic — has voters asking who really “needs to have their head examined”: some 75-year-old voter worried about Medicare cuts, or Donald John Trump?

It all came to a head Tuesday night right here in the Philadelphia suburbs, when Trump — after interruptions from two medical emergencies in an overheated convention hall — abruptly cut short a promised town hall on women’s issues and declared an impromptu dance party. He swayed on stage for 39 gobsmacking minutes, in front of a crowd speckled with confused faces and people leaving. The candidate looked lost in his own world during the bombast of “Ave Maria” or Sinead O’Connor’s “Nothing Compares 2U,” before gyrating to the Village People’s “YMCA.”

“Hope he’s OK,” Harris tweeted from her personal account over video highlights from arguably the strangest and, to some, most disturbing moment in the 235-year history of American presidential politics. Matt Drudge of the popular Drudge Report headlined the moment with a lack of political correctness that rivaled Trump’s own: “American Psycho.”

We need to acknowledge that political pundits shouldn’t be making long-distance mental health diagnoses of presidential candidates — something even America’s top psychiatrists and psychologists have been arguing about for the last 60 years. Here’s what is clear: Trump, with his recent run of bizarre behavior, owes it to the American people to offer a full medical report — something Harris did recently while Trump has balked. Voters have a right to demand to know the physical, mental, and cognitive health of the person trailed by a briefcase with codes to blow up the planet.

But there’s another story about Trump and his twisted ideas about mental health, involving how it might affect his policies.

It probably won’t surprise you that — despite his tendency to link mental health to everything from mass shootings to undocumented immigration — the Republican’s actual policies, such as they are, around the issue are either weak or a massive step backward. As the 45th president, Trump would have set mental health care back decades if he’d succeeded in his promise to repeal Obamacare. As a 2024 candidate, Trump has proposed nothing as comprehensive as the regulations rolled out just last month by the Biden-Harris administration to require insurers and providers to expand coverage.

But experts say the worst Trump idea around mental health is his recurring proposal to bring back large-scale mental institutions — the kind that were phased out beginning in the 1970s amid widespread patient abuse scandals, most famously at the Willowbrook State School in Trump’s hometown of New York City — as part of sweeps of the urban homeless, and possibly for involuntary commitment of other people whom an authoritarian Trump finds undesirable.

“We’re going to have to start talking about mental institutions …” the then-president told a governor’s confab after a 2018 school shooting. “You know, in the old days, we had mental institutions. We had a lot of them. And you could nab somebody like this because they … knew something was off.”

As a candidate in 2023, Trump fine-tuned this into a major part of his plan for dealing with the unhoused, declaring that “for those who are severely mentally ill and deeply disturbed, we will bring them back to mental institutions, where they belong, with the goal of reintegrating them back into society once they are well enough to manage.”

Waters, whose three-year-old site dealing with America’s mental health crisis is currently reporting on how Trump’s mass deportation scheme is affecting the psyche of the U.S. immigrant community, said Trump’s plan is “essentially, to have police be the lead figures to address mental health on the streets. Lock them up.” This, he noted, would reverse the last five years of innovative policies to send out more trained mental health responders, especially since police responses to 911 mental health calls have led to a rash of shootings.

There are even more troubling implications. Trump’s open calls for a revenge-minded presidency and to wage war on “the enemy within,” combined with his insistence on policing mental health with involuntary commitment, creates an enormous potential for abuse. His default position of locking people up, from the homeless to undocumented immigrants — in a country already weighed down by the world’s highest rate of mass incarceration — echoes history’s worst strongmen.

Do not sink to Trump’s level and suggest that anyone voting for him on or before Nov. 5 needs to visit a psychiatrist’s couch. What is needed is for Americans to use the critical thinking portion of their brains and decide whether we really want to be a nation ringed by a Trumpian gulag archipelago of new Willowbrooks, bringing back the horrific abuses of 50 years ago. Whatever drama is playing out right now in Trump’s 78-year-old mind to the strains of Luciano Pavarotti or James Brown, we can’t allow this to become America’s problem.

Edited October 19, 2024 by Vesper

[Vesper 30,090]

Trump Wanders Stage for 18 Minutes in Silence After Mic Fails

starts around 11:40 in

 

[Vesper 30,090]

History of Violence

Trump’s Closing Pitch to Voters: I Will Let You Die If You Don’t Bow to My Demands

If the former president's first term is any indication, he's not bluffing when he threatens drastic action against Americans who oppose him

 

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/trump-threatens-let-americans-die-1235137748/

 

 

During the final full month of Donald Trump’s first and potentially only term in the White House — as the coronavirus pandemic still raged and as the outgoing president worked to overturn an election that he clearly lost — he was also hosting a series of meetings and phone calls to decide whether or not a man should be put to death before Christmas.

The U.S. government had executed just three federal prisoners in the 60 years prior to 2020. In a six-month span during Trump’s final year in office, he and Attorney General Bill Barr’s Justice Department put to death 13 inmates, in what defense attorneys and criminal justice activists described as a “bloodbath” and historic “killing spree.”

One of those inmates was a man named Brandon Bernard, who at a young age had been involved in a grisly double murder. In the years since his incarceration, Bernard had become an international cause célèbre of anti-death-penalty advocates — including major celebrities like Kim Kardashian — many of whom felt he was an exemplar of remorse and deserved clemency.

But as Trump sat in the White House, holding Bernard’s fate in the palm of his hand, he had a pressing question for his staff, according to a former Trump administration official and another source intimately familiar with the matter: Trump wanted to know if one of the murder victim’s parents, who were urging him to allow the scheduled execution to go forward, had voted for him. At the same time, he was refusing to hear pleas from Kardashian on Bernard’s behalf — all because he saw her social-media post celebrating Joe Biden’s victory over Trump.

Bernard was executed on Dec. 10, at a federal facility in Terre Haute, Indiana.

Bernard’s death came at a time when the nation was consumed with the chaos of Trump’s final few months in office following the election, making it especially easy for Bernard’s story to get buried under an avalanche of other news. It was also just one of many examples of how Trump allowed raw partisanship — and self-obsessed considerations about who did or didn’t vote for him — to influence his decision-making in life-or-death situations while in office.

Trump’s decision wasn’t an isolated incident of personal grievance or cruel preference. The former president using whether Americans support him or not to make life-or-death decisions is an actual, serious prescription for federal policies that reaches far beyond just one inmate and one execution.

In recent weeks, Trump has been explicitly campaigning on a platform of turbo-charging that attitude in regard to how a second Trump administration would help or not help his fellow Americans — including in dire emergency scenarios.

The former president has on multiple occasions down the stretch of the 2024 campaign threatened to withhold federal disaster relief from California — putting the lives of its citizens at risk — unless the state’s Democratic governor, Gavin Newsom, gives in to his demands. He made the threat as recently as last weekend during a rally in California’s Coachella Valley, telling supporters that if Newsom doesn’t get on board with Trump’s water policy, “we’re not giving any of that fire money that we send you all the time for all the fire, forest fires that you have. It’s not hard to do.”

“We’ll force it down his throat,” Trump said.

Trump made the same threat while speaking from his golf course in Rancho Palos Verdes in September. “If he doesn’t sign those papers, we won’t give him money to put out all his fires,” Trump said. “And if we don’t give him all the money to put out the fires, he’s got problems.”

Newsom warned on X that Trump would apply the same quid-pro-quo to the rest of the nation. Trump “just admitted he will block emergency disaster funds to settle political vendettas,” the governor wrote. “Today it’s California’s wildfires. Tomorrow it could be hurricane funding for North Carolina or flooding assistance for homeowners in Pennsylvania. Donald Trump doesn’t care about America — he only cares about himself.”

Hurricane Helene rocked the Southeast a few weeks later. Trump responded by pushing conspiracy theories about the federal response, including an absurd accusation that the Biden administration was deliberately withholding aid from Republican areas. There was no basis whatsoever for the claim, but it isn’t hard to understand why this is where Trump’s mind went. 

Politico later reported that while president in 2018, Trump initially refused to approve federal aid for California to fight wildfires because he felt some of the affected regions didn’t support him. It was only after Trump was shown data about the regions voting for him that he approved the relief. “We went as far as looking up how many votes he got in those impacted areas … to show him these are people who voted for you,” Mark Harvey, then Trump’s senior director for resilience policy on the National Security Council staff, told Politico.

A year earlier, Trump blocked congressionally approved aid to Puerto Rico, an American territory populated by American citizens, in the wake of Hurricane Maria — during which Trump was publicly attacking Carmen Yulín Cruz, then the mayor of San Juan, for not being more grateful to him — and then tried to obstruct an investigation into what happened to the money.

Trump also notably tried to intimidate Democratic governors during the Covid-19 pandemic, when states were desperate for federal aid. “It’s a two-way street,” Trump said of giving New York and other states federal help as the crisis continued to claim American lives. “They have to treat us well, too.”

If Trump secures a second term next month, there are a number of reasons why the twice-impeached former president and convicted felon and his lieutenants aren’t entirely worried about this kind of strong-amring and preferential treatment passing constitutional muster.

Beyond the comfort of enjoying a federal judiciary and Supreme Court that Trump and the Republican Party stacked with Trump allies and staunch conservatives during his first term in office, multiple lawyers and political advisers close to Trump who have examined the issue and discussed it with the ex-president tell Rolling Stone that they can argue in court that such actions are akin to other administrations conditioning federal funds on state governments behaving a certain way. They have cited the highly controversial 1994 crime bill — which dangled financial incentives to states that, for instance, erected or expanded their prisons — as an example.

Beyond threatening to withhold disaster relief, Trump has repeatedly fantasized about taking revenge against his political opponents, should he retake the White House. He’s spoken of doing so in terms of federal investigations, but his rhetoric has intensified as Election Day has neared. Last weekend on Fox News, the morning after he told Californians that he will let the state burn unless Newsom cows to his demands, Trump said the military should be used on “radical left,” which he described as the “enemy within.” He doubled down on the comments a few days later, citing California Rep. Adam Schiff and Nancy Pelosi as examples of the nation’s enemies, calling them “evil.”

Republicans have tried to spin Trump’s comments as no big deal, but there’s plenty of evidence that he doesn’t view Americans who don’t support him as worthy of the same rights as those who do — not the right to the pursuit of happiness, not to liberty, and, in some cases, not even to life. 

[Vesper 30,090]

https://www.thedailybeast.com/exhausted-trump-cant-make-it-through-dan-bongino-interview-in-his-own-home/

Donald Trump didn’t even have to leave his building for an interview that streamed live on his friend and loyal supporter Dan Bongino’s video podcast Friday morning. But he still had trouble making it to the end of what may have been planned as a longer sit-down.

After vamping for more than 30 minutes in Trump Tower as he waited for the ex-president to show up, Bongino began by boasting to the president about the “super, extra MAGA” crowd that tunes into his show. “We’re like the darkest MAGA of all,” Bongino said in an attempt to out-do Elon Musk.

At one point in the low-energy interview, Trump offered up insights such as how “amazed” he was that “king of woke” Harvey Weinstein got “schlonged.” But it was his final moment with Bongino that caught the eye of Kamala Harris’ social media team.

“Trump abruptly ends his live interview after it is reported that he is canceling interviews because he is ‘exhausted,’” @KamalaHQ tweeted, referring to a new report from Politico that the Republican candidate is “exhausted and refusing interviews” with less than three weeks to go until Election Day.

 

After about half an hour, as Bongino tried to ask another question, Trump said, “Hey, Dan, off the record, I gotta get going,” seeming not to realize the interview was airing live.

Bongino apologized to both Trump and his viewers for the abrupt end to the interview and let his guest go, but not before making him sign a baseball that he said he planned to auction off for charity.

“Pretty good, just like the old days,” Trump said from his chair as Bongino stood up and admired the signature.

Then, shortly after this article was published, Bongino sent the Daily Beast what he described as “receipts” showing Trump did not end the interview early (along with the charming note, “Does your mother tell her friends she has no living children out of embarrassment for having spawned such an embarrassing piece of s--t?”)

But in the screenshot of an email in which Trump’s team confirmed the interview, it clearly shows it was meant to be an hour long. Instead of staying for the full time he agreed to be live with Bongino and pushing back his next event, Trump ended the sit-down after a little more than 30 minutes.

 

Bongino is a former NYPD officer and Secret Service agent with three failed congressional bids under his belt. He rose to prominence as a conservative pundit on Fox News during Trump’s first term as president. He very briefly had his own show on the network before “parting ways” with the company in 2023. (His 2018 departure from NRATV prompted a failed defamation suit against the Daily Beast.)

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Bongino became one of the loudest voices against mask and vaccine mandates, which ultimately led to a permanent ban from YouTube in 2022. He currently hosts The Dan Bongino Show on the conservative platform Rumble.

 

Edited October 19, 2024 by Vesper

[Vesper 30,090]

We are at the stage of Trump's madness where he is talking about the dead golfer Arnold Palmer's cock at a campaign rally.

🤪

 

Edited October 19, 2024 by Vesper

[cosmicway 1,333]

This election oughta have been a landslide like LBJ versus Barry in 1964.
Barry Goldwater was n't even half as crazy as Trump.
Trump is really crazy.
In Greece there is that old lady mrs Kanellopoulos who is Greek American and she is rooting for the reps ever since we remember.
They invite her to the tv panels whenever there are alections in America and she has been rooting for Ford, Reagan, the Bushes, Mc Cain, Romney !
From 2016 she 's turned dem !
It's the antics of the absurd neo-marxist lefties who gave him life.

[Sir Mikel OBE 4,920]

Damn......If she were running against anybody else than Trump I might have gone third party.

[cosmicway 1,333]

52 minutes ago, Sir Mikel OBE said:

Damn......If she were running against anybody else than Trump I might have gone third party.

That's why October 7 happened, to aid and abet Trump.
About the situation in the field, Gaza, Hamash never cared - before or after. They and their Iranian friends just want the war to go on and on.

Edited October 20, 2024 by cosmicway

[Fulham Broadway 17,300]

The Evangelical Christians in the US Military (CRU) driving the Zionist project. They have a US base in Israel since 2017.

They want Armageddon, they want Iran to fire a nuclear missile - because the end of the World means Christ will appear. 🤐

Funny if it wasnt so serious. Like an army of suicide bombers

[cosmicway 1,333]

2 hours ago, Fulham Broadway said:

The Evangelical Christians in the US Military (CRU) driving the Zionist project. They have a US base in Israel since 2017.

They want Armageddon, they want Iran to fire a nuclear missile - because the end of the World means Christ will appear. 🤐

Funny if it wasnt so serious. Like an army of suicide bombers

There are two evangelical churches near my house.
They are not known as weird folks.
They have the heretic "filioque" in their symbol of faith but other than that I have n't heard of them doing wild things.
How come they have a ... military base ?

[Vesper 30,090]

11 minutes ago, cosmicway said:

There are two evangelical churches near my house.
They are not known as weird folks.

 

 

 

[Vesper 30,090]

Trump: These lights are so bright in my eyes I can't see people... I can only see the Black ones. I can't see any white ones. That's how far I've come. That's a long way isn't it?

 

 

[Vesper 30,090]

Tapper: Is the closing message you really want voters to hear from Donald Trump stories about Arnold Palmer's genitals?

Johnson: Let's put the rhetoric aside

Tapper: People have concerns about his fitness and stability. Why is he talking about Arnold Palmer's genitals in front of Pennsylvania voters?

Johnson: Don't say it again we don't have to say it

 

 

[cosmicway 1,333]

Meanwhile amidst the gloom and doom Greece's top model Julia Alxandratos has decided to make herself available to the people and became member of an escort site.

The price only 400 euros for one hour.

I 'm pimping for her.
 

... but the prices go up to 2000 euros for a weekend.

What am I going to do with her for a whole weekent ?

Ask her to boil me eggs ?