Only pedophiles defend pedophiles.And I fucking HATE pedophiles.
Woody Allen is still a pedophile who raped one of his own young step-daughters and married another.
People who defend that shit are SICK.
Oh there are SO many more, but this article listed only the Class Two Senate seats for South Carolina. If they'd included both classes you'd just have almost the full list of South Carolina senators.
I noticed because I missed the presence of Andrew Butler, another South Carolina senator of the same Butler family named in the article, who was responsible for the caning of Charles Sumner in the Senate.
For any history buffs like me, I am including the story, because it actually mirrors a lot of what is happening right now. For anyone else, now you know that the vast majority of South Carolina senators were and are racist sacks of shit (there are a few exceptions, fortunately).
In 1856, roughly four years before the start of the Civil War, westward expansion was hotly debated, and not just with words, because abolitionists wanted banning of slavery in any territory to be a requirement of entry into the Union and statehood, while slave-owning states of course did not.
This wasn't just about slavery; like MAGA today it was about power and who got to control the country, as the pro-slavery states sought to ensure that territories admitted to statehood did not dilute their own federal influence, power and control. So how newly-admitted states were represented and got to vote was a huge deal, especially if that admission might upset various cheats like the Three-Fifths Compromise and others like it that gave slave-owning states an unnatural advantage not directly conferred by actual population.
The Kansas-Nebraska Act was one of these cheats, a short-lived compromise co-authored by Andrew Butler of South Carolina, which allowed newly admitted states in the west to enter the union while permitting slave ownership by leaving it up to the new state to decide for themselves, where slavery was already just as hotly argued over as it was anywhere else.
States rights, in other words. This should be sounding familiar by now.
So when the Kansas-Nebraska Act went through the Senate, an abolitionist named Charles Sumner from Massachusetts gave an impassioned speech against it, while also being sure to personally insult Butler as many ways as he could throughout, with liberal use of sexual innuendo (probably not misplaced, according to Wikipedia).
By way of response, Butler's first cousin once-removed, Preston Brooks, who was a representative for South Carolina at the time, came onto the Senate floor with a couple of other southern congressmen two days later and caned Sumner nearly to death. Brave men as they were, they waited for the chamber to be almost empty before they did so, claiming that this was so that no ladies present in the galleries could see, and Brooks attacked Sumner as he was sitting at his desk writing a letter while his associates held off those attracted by the commotion so no one could help Sumner, one using a pistol. Sumner had already passed out and was being held up by the lapels by Brooks as he continued to whip him with the cane before others were able to get to him, and suffered severe injuries.
Afterward, the South closed ranks around its own and re-elected those involved, making heroes out of them, but Preston Brooks died of a respiratory infection shortly after re-election anyway. Sumner survived and lived another twenty years, but he
suffered head trauma that would cause him chronic pain and symptoms consistent with what would now be called traumatic brain injury and post-traumatic stress disorder, and spent three years convalescing before returning to his Senate seat. He suffered chronic pain and debilitation for the rest of his life.
Funny thing, the caning of Charles Sumner ended up being one of the biggest own-goals of the pro-slavery South: when these racist slave owners brought their violence into the Senate itself it angered a number of abolitionist Kansas settlers, one of whom was John Brown, and the Pottawatomie Massacre in response, and in the long run only strengthened the newly-formed anti-slavery Republican party and helped put Abraham Lincoln into office four years later.
Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
In a city of billionaires, Mamdani is not owned, which is why they're all so scared of him: the powers that be can't control him, and they can't even predict him.
Which is exactly what makes this so based. Mamdani IS the mayor of NYC. He could make Bibi's arrival in his city a little slice of hell in all manner of ways, many of which would break no law at all, and many New Yorkers would be thrilled to do their part.
But will he? No one knows. And that's the beauty of it. We all know he's thinking about it now.
So whether this pans out in reality or not, it's always good policy to make a motherfucker watch his own back. Mamdani just turned Bibi into a motherfucker with a back that needs watching in NYC.
I can't tell if you're joking or not, but in reality you're probably right. This kind of overt, arrogant, conscienceless disregard for the humanity of others is always just the tip of the evil shitberg they're made of under the skin.
Or to put it another way, a man who does not care about the abuse, torture, and murder of thousands is not going to give two shits about the right of a child to live unharmed. And just as he feels entitled to do what he will to the living bodies of immigrants, he will feel entitled to do the body of anyone else that lacks the power to stop him.
It never fucking ends with these kinds of gleefully evil people: whatever horrendous amorality you see in front of you, there's ALWAYS more where that came from.
So protesting and calling out their crimes and sharing video and making a racket must not be as pointless as some would have us all believe, because Tom Homan himself is desperate to shut it down.
The LAST fucking thing any sentient human being should do is shut their mouth against these murders and crimes against humanity.
Anyone who cares enough to yell, KEEP UP THE GOOD WORK!
Thanks for adding the gift link, much appreciated.
Definitely. This raises more questions than it answers.
I don't know about other folks, but speaking for myself I am getting absolutely firehosed with incessant disturbing news on a daily, sometimes hourly basis as my country faces becoming the world's largest authoritarian sweatshop.
I literally don't remember seeing this at all.
But if I did, it's not surprising to me that I forgot about it. The orange chancre driving across his own freshly painted narcissist's folly was probably the least harmful/obscene/amoral/anti-human thing that putrescent fuck did with my tax dollars that day.
There is an interesting problem with human moderators though. Once the entire population of Earth is posting on social media, are there enough humans to ever moderate it?
Yes, because the community itself can be the largest part of its own moderation. As Reddit has proven, they do not all have to be paid, and people who run their own groups would be happy to take more of that moderation work on just to ensure their own viability on the site. There can also be local moderation as well as top-down moderation: it does not all have to be sweat shop workers in the third world. Meta could do far more than they are now to limit sockpuppet and astroturfing accounts, and accounts that are not actually tied to a human being, all of which would have an oversized effect on cleaning up the filth, but they don't.
Rather, time after time, year after year, people tell whoever is looking into [whatever the current scandal is now] that they reported this content and Meta came back with "Nope, we have looked into this and this content does not violate community standards." What if Meta just took action on the community reports they already receive? Meta will rapidly and without recourse take down content that involves, for example, classic art that involves nudity, but double down on ignoring actual CSAM, as in this case.
Compare and contrast that with Meta's vigorous policing of content that does NOT promote their agenda. Put those together and it paints a picture of a corporation that is very much involved with its ability to manufacture and sway public opinion, but has no interest otherwise in cutting off anything that makes it a dollar.
There are all kinds of helps and fixes to what has become an extreme moderation problem, every single one of which Meta has refused to engage despite having profits in the billions. Billions. You could hire an entire country of moderators with a fraction of that, but they don't simply because they are not interested in any of that.
No one is on a Meta site to be served as a customer; they are there to have their data collected and analyzed for better efficacy of the propaganda and advertising Meta pushes their way and then sold on to other data aggregators or even the government, and to be used in any way that Meta likes without recourse to the user. And if a kid gets trafficked, or killed, or kills themself because of Meta, well that need not force any real change either. Meta's gotten really good at making concerned noises about that kind of thing without ever changing their own part in how it happened, and continues to happen.
Or to put it another way, in today's model, Meta sees itself as entirely separate from its userbase, and unable/unwilling to distribute any of its power among its users to make it better for everyone. But look at Lemmy, where there is little separation between instance admins and the general userbase: everyone can help moderate from the ground up. There is no money in moderation here at all, yet we have not descended into 4chan. How is it that Lemmy can do adequate online moderation (and Reddit before it) for free without a single dollar, much less without the billions of dollars available to Meta? Its because on Lemmy the community itself is the primary moderation tool, and while they talk otherwise, in reality Meta refuses that community paradigm almost entirely.
There's another factor as well: it is far easier to moderate an online community that has always kept its standards high from the start than it is to come around and clean house when it all starts feeling a bit Voat and 4chan. Had Meta been adequately moderating all along, it would never have gotten this bad to start with.
TL;DR: Effective online moderation only looks like an impossible task when it suits a company to not even try.
That's exactly what happened. She was in her early teens and he was in college when both their parents died, within like a year or two of each other. He became her guardian and then later, when he was in the military, he officially adopted her so that she would receive his military benefits.
They've both talked about it, especially for that five minutes in 2016 when he was making a run at the Republican nomination for president himself. Of all the nefarious shit Lindsey Graham has done, this is not it.
Someone posted what they claim is an original on X but it's a poolside pic, not a hospital pic.
Yeah, I agree with you. In the age of moving pictures when almost everyone has a video camera and mic in their pocket, why are we being forced to rely on a single posed photograph that can't talk?
This is the best one I've seen yet. It has the correct players.
No idea, and you're right: more questions are raised than answered, IMO. The photo was released along with a written statement via McConnell's Senate web page.
Or, you know, McConnell himself could readily put all the whispers to rest.
It's not like reporters have never interviewed someone in a hospital before, and if he really did talk with all those Republicans that swear he did in the last few days, twenty minutes at a time apparently, then he should have enough stamina to issue a few words to the public personally. If he can sit in a chair, he can sit in a wheelchair.
This is not live. It is a still, posed photograph issued by McConnell's office along with a written press release, which would have been fine in say 1876, but technology has moved forward. Why the leap backward?
When a sitting Senator who is facing the possibility of a special election because everyone, including his own state's governor, thinks his seat is probably vacant, I don't think it's too much to ask that he say a few words to his constituents, LIVE, in a publicly verifiable manner.
Inasmuch as this is only a single still, posed photo that was released along with a written statement via McConnell's Senate web page I wouldn't put too much stock in it.
Beyond the word of a handful of Republicans that say they have talked "with" him, McConnell still has not verifiably actually spoken to or with anyone since his hospitalization in mid-June.
This still, posed photograph was released along with a written statement via McConnell's Senate web page. Keep in mind that beyond the word of a handful of Republicans that say they talked "with" him, Mitch still has not verifiably actually spoken to or with anyone since his hospitalization.
Yes, and McConnell's not the only one. Thomas Kean, a Republican representative for NJ, just came back after four months of total silence about where he was or why he was gone, for example.
We're only hearing from McConnell now because if he had not done something to end the speculation about whether he was even alive, Gov. Beshear would have called a special election to fill his seat out from under him.
What REALLY grinds my gears, though, is that the ones doing it are Republicans, the ones repeatedly voting against those same protections for any one of us that might also have cause to be absent from work: they vote against universal healthcare, they vote against minimum paid leave, they vote against the entire social safety net at every chance they get.
The bastard smiling in that bed might as well be holding a piece of paper in his hand that says fuck you I got mine because that's exactly what it's a picture of.
I think that's a very fair question, not least because of all the Republicans swearing they had twenty minute conversations with him by phone in the last few days.
If he can talk on the phone that long, then how is it that we only have one posed still photograph?
I do too. My history teachers tried, but most of what I learned about history I learned as an adult, mainly because I really like historical biographies. There was a time when I'd have multiple books going at once, but that was decades ago now.
What has really fired me up in the last few years has been listening to Heather Cox Richardson and Joanne Freeman, who are both essentially historians/history teachers/historical authors turned contemporary political commentators.
Until them I avoided almost all modern political commentary because it all sounds like fantasy football to me, with participants hotly arguing conjecture. But when I first heard Richardson, she was talking about how some particular thing with Trump had a clear parallel in something that had happened in Reconstruction, I could see it for myself, and suddenly history had relevance again.
I was hooked. She does a Saturday morning thing with Dr. Freeman, whose specialty seems to be Alexander Hamilton, and they both just talk history in the modern context and laugh. I haven't read their books, but I might, and Richardson also has a Substack I catch occasionally.
Somehow those two have got me interested again, and it's no longer strategists arguing fantasy politics. (I still don't listen to anyone else, lol.)
Never too late to learn.