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[hector13]

I mean, that'd be pretty great, so we can always hope... But no, I kinda doubt it.

As for other Trump stuff, I guess it's a matter of opinion whether moving the embassy to Jerusalem was evil or just dumb.

That was dumb.

Reducing aid to Palestine was probably evil.

[delphonso]

And holy shit am I sick of this. I sort of yearn for the older days of straight, brutal political discourse rather than this sneering game of one-upsmanship. The way discourse works today reminds me more and more of early forum posting for me in the 2000s, where I'd waste hours and hours pointlessly and sometimes disingenuously debating people simply to score points against a random stranger whose mind I wasn't going to change.

Same, my friend. I know too many people who have watched Info Wars "ironically" and have slowly taken stuff to heart.

[Frumple]

Obama strikes killed hundreds of children in those strike, by the by. I'm sure Trump is more careful and honest about the brown kids he accidentally murders. He's good like that.

Didn't strikes like notably accelerate in terms of use since the shitgibbon got in office?

I don’t think Carson ever said anything about destroying the HUD department. Moving it in another direction, sure, but not destructively. At the very least, he hasn’t been embroiled in constant scandals and missteps like Betsy DeVos has.

Carson's been fairly quiet news wise, but I could swear I'm forgetting a handful of cases of shitbaggery that had his finger prints on it that's fell out from HUD since he was appointed. Perry's been relatively inoffensive as trump appointees go, but iirc there's some GOP nonsense on his front, too. Just not as actively hostile since his bits where he went, "well shit, this stuff's actually kinda' important"

... honestly, your list is going to be shorter if you look for things actually worth a damn his administration has done. Most of what they've been doing(/trying to get done) is either baseline GOP stuff (which is to say fuck the country and the majority of its citizenship, in practice) or bigot pleasing campaign promises. _{Also no, appointing judges that are going to cheerfully assault civil and worker protections don't count.}

[The Ensorceler]

About irony. I've come to the opinion that it doesn't exist as a rule. That is to say, if it happens as an exception it can be ironic, but there is no such thing as consistent irony.

I've moved towards this point of view after realizing two things: 1) If something is repeated it becomes "true". True defined as the correct response to a situation. 2) If something is repeated it becomes meaningless. This happens when "truth" is so pervasive that it no longer depends on context. When the meaning of a word or phrase comes from how it is used, being universally true is the same as not having a rule for how to use it. It has 0 symbolic meaning left.

Notably, these don't happen at the same rate, and your brain tries not to let the second happen if it can help it. Boredom usually works well enough. The tricky thing is when they operate at different levels. If all the humor you are exposed to is racist, but you "aren't racist", you can try to avoid letting racism become true to you but still have it be so ubiquitous that it becomes meaningless. And a person who sees racism as meaningless will perpetuate racist social structures with nary a conscious action taken. Be careful what you say more than once, and how you'd change if the person saying the same things as you meant them.

This isn't to say humor or fiction don't exist, just the opposite. Humor is never "just a joke", it exists. Outright lies exist. And everything that exists can be learned from. I might just be advocating for more critical thinking, but I think its a bit more complicated than that. The ability to deradicalize ideas you say you don't believe in your heart out of yourself is not one I've seen taught anywhere.

tl;dr Make sure you become the person you claim you are or you'll become the person you imply you are.

[smjjames]

A better fitting proverb would be ‘practice what you preach’, or rather, ‘if you don’t practice what you preach, you become your own hypocrite’. The message isn’t quite the same as the tl;dr, but the sentiment is the same.

Speaking of my earlier mention of Rick Perry, he’s planning his departure from the energy department, not anytime soon though. The original Bloomberg article seems unsure whether he’ll actually leave the administration entirely, but either way, Trump will have YET ANOTHER acting official at some point in the near future while he seems content on not confirming any of the acting officials.

[Folly]

Well, the Agbarr press conference went down pretty much exactly as expected.

Barr immediately and explicitly stated that the Mueller report proved Trump 100% clean of all wrongdoing. Then he praised Trump for not invoking executive privilege over the report, even though he had every right to do so. Lastly he did say that a minimally redacted version of the report would be made available to a limited group of Congressional leaders.

Then Barr took about 2 questions before someone asked about him holding his press conference before releasing the report, at which point he just walked off the stage without a word.

[Rolan7]

NPR pointed out that he was very specific about "No illegal collusion".  Despite being Attorney General, he still used Trump's term which has no legal meaning...  Not that he was being at all political (he said he wasn't!).

If there was collusion, the definition of which can be argued forever, we can rest assured that it didn't occur illegally.  Particularly as there's no law forbidding it, whatever it is exactly.

Unrelated, apparently it's fine to publicly encourage a foreign power to interfere.  It's okay though, Trump denied knowing anything about Wikileaks.  I suppose when he was singing their praises during the election, he was just guessing about them.

Well sarcasm aside, nobody's really denying that he lied and ordered others to lie, while "fully cooperating" with the investigation.  But isn't that justified?  Being president is hard, you know, and Trump supposedly could have done much more than just fire the FBI Director.  But that's just Barr's nonpolitical opinion of the person who appointed him.

[smjjames]

It sounded more like a recap of the Barr report and Rolan7, you're still doing sarcasm even after the sarcasm aside, heh.

[smjjames]

IT"S HERE: BOOM: https://www.justice.gov/storage/report.pdf

[Rolan7]

It sounded more like a recap of the Barr report and Rolan7, you're still doing sarcasm even after the sarcasm aside, heh.

Oh am I? 

[smjjames]

'barr's nonpolitical position on the person who hired him'? That's definetly sarcasm.

Anyways, reading the release now, https://www.justice.gov/storage/report.pdf

[smjjames]

He seriously DID go and color code the redactions, well, not quite color code as it says the reason and has a color for the text.

Heh, despite the redactions, on occasion you can tell just what the redaction is just from the surrounding context.

[EnigmaticHat]

"volume 1 of 2" huh?

Edit: Lol, look at 188-191... the bit discussing the prospects for prosecuting Trump on campaign finance issues is a "harm to ongoing matter" apparently.  Sure Jan, sure

Double edit: volume 2 of 2 begins on PDF page 208, with its own table of contents

Triple edit: There also seem to be heavy redactions about what the Russian election interference was, and about the Trump tower meeting.  So... the fuck is this supposed to prove?

Quadruple edit: The fuck does redacting something because "grand jury" mean?

[smjjames]

Volume II is probably the disclosed evidence that Congress would normally see. edit: nvm, didn't see your edit.

edit: Isn't the SDNY looking at campaign finance matters? That might be it.

[EnigmaticHat]

It looks like over half of the Russian interference in the election is blotted out.  Interesting this doesn't seem to be to protect Trump but rather the egos of his supporters... since it looks like the Russians ran every aspect of Trump's campaign.  Including "recruiting for political rallies in the US" apparently lol.

They also blotted out most of the content about Russian botnets... which I personally was super interested about

Edit: But they left unredacted the bits about the Russians creating BLM facebook groups and other liberal causes which we already knew about.  So glad you chose to include that.  Barr really is trying to prevent Trump supporters from having buyers remorse; considering how much the Russians have been accused of doing, I'm deeply curious about what could be behind all of those redactions