The Many Faces of US Politics...

[Gmac]

Can't believe Kim didn't roll over for the man with the biggest brain.

Trump really stood up for Otto Warmbier's family
MAGA

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/feb/28/trump-i-took-kim-at-his-word-over-otto-warmbiers-torture

if u are negotiating with Kim it's probably better not to lambaste him during said negotiation
Try get what u want and have a private word with ottos family after.

[Gmac]

Update: he is free to lambaste him as talks have collapsed

[Dolph1]

Update: he is free to lambaste him as talks have collapsed

Democrats would rather find an excuse to start a nuclear war than be out of power.
That's the short of it.

[seafoid]

America has got the blues

https://youtu.be/-VTetYDhBNc

[Dolph1]

Walls are immoral
Infanticide is moral

Democrats in a nutshell.

[Puckoon]

Walls are immoral
Infanticide is moral

Democrats in a nutshell.

Unfortunately for you, only the dumbest folks actually think that either topic can exist in a nutshell.

[Dolph1]

Walls are immoral
Infanticide is moral

Democrats in a nutshell.

Unfortunately for you, only the dumbest folks actually think that either topic can exist in a nutshell.

I don't think that all democrats are dumb. Just a lot of misguided people who feel the need to belong to a group that claims to be morally superior. This makes them feel validated. A cult mentlity if you will. God forbid you point out where they are wrong and they lose the plot.

[lynchbhoy]

Walls are immoral
Infanticide is moral

Democrats in a nutshell.

Unfortunately for you, only the dumbest folks actually think that either topic can exist in a nutshell.

I don't think that all democrats are dumb. Just a lot of misguided people who feel the need to belong to a group that claims to be morally superior. This makes them feel validated. A cult mentlity if you will. God forbid you point out where they are wrong and they lose the plot.

Are you talking about the gaaboard clique or democrats?

[Dolph1]

Walls are immoral
Infanticide is moral

Democrats in a nutshell.

Unfortunately for you, only the dumbest folks actually think that either topic can exist in a nutshell.

I don't think that all democrats are dumb. Just a lot of misguided people who feel the need to belong to a group that claims to be morally superior. This makes them feel validated. A cult mentlity if you will. God forbid you point out where they are wrong and they lose the plot.

Are you talking about the gaaboard clique or democrats?

  Zing!! 

Well observed Lynchbhoy

[Eamonnca1]

The "master negotiator" made a right fool of himself again, didn't he?

[Eamonnca1]

[Eamonnca1]

Not content with polluting their sick minds with lies about global warming, lies about Obama, and lies about just about bloody everything, and not content with sticking up for the second-amendment rights of terrorists and other assorted shooters, American conservatives have pumped the environment so full of their delusions that they're hounding the victims of mass shootings. Your poisonous ideology needs to die like its Nazi predecessor. Take a bow, Alex Jones-watching conservative creeps:

Trapped in a hoax: survivors of conspiracy theories speak out

What happens to those caught up in the toxic lies of conspiracy theorists? The Guardian spoke to five victims whose lives were wrecked by falsehoods

by Ed Pilkington

Conspiracy theories used to be seen as bizarre expressions of harmless eccentrics. Not any more. Gone are the days of outlandish theories about Roswell's UFOs, the "hoax" moon landings or grassy knolls. Instead, today's iterations have morphed into political weapons. Turbocharged by social media, they spread with astonishing speed, using death threats as currency.

Together with their first cousins, fake news, they are challenging society's trust in facts. At its most toxic, this contagion poses a profound threat to democracy by damaging its bedrock: a shared commitment to truth.

Their growing reach and scale is astonishing. A University of Chicago study estimated in 2014 that half of the American public consistently endorses at least one conspiracy theory. When they repeated the survey last November, the proportion had risen to 61%. The startling finding was echoed by a recent study from the University of Cambridge that found 60% of Britons are wedded to a false narrative.

The trend began on obscure online forums such as the alt-right playground 4chan. Soon, media entrepreneurs realized there was money to be made – most notoriously Alex Jones, whose site Infowars feeds its millions of readers a potent diet of lurid lies (9/11 was a government hit job; the feds manipulate the weather.)

Now the conspiracy theorist-in-chief sits in the White House. Donald Trump cut his political teeth on the "birther" lie that Barack Obama was born in Kenya, and went on to embrace climate change denial, rampant voter fraud and the discredited belief that childhood vaccines may cause autism.

Amid this explosive growth, one aspect has been underappreciated: the human cost. What is the toll paid by those caught up in these falsehoods? And how are they fighting back?

The Guardian talked to five people who can speak from bitter personal experience. We begin in a town we will not identify in Massachusetts where a young man, who tells his story here for the first time, was asleep in his bed.

Lenny Pozner Targeted after he lost his child at Sandy Hook

Lenny Pozner, 51, is preparing to pack his bags, again. A few weeks ago, "hoaxers" – as he calls conspiracy theorists – reproduced a map of his Florida neighborhood with a dropped pin marking the precise location of his apartment. It will be the eighth time in five years he will have been forced to move home as he strives to keep one step ahead of the fanatics who relentlessly hound him.

Pozner's crime, in the eyes of conspiracy theorists, is being the father of one of the 20 children who were gunned down in the mass shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, in December 2012. Noah was the youngest of all victims. He had just turned six.

Within months, conspiracy theorists, egged on by Alex Jones and Infowars, went to work. They generated thousands of web posts and a 426-page book called "Nobody Died at Sandy Hook".

Their thesis: the shooting at the elementary school never happened. The 20 kids who died were "crisis actors". The tragedy was a con. Noah had never even existed, he was a construct of Photoshop.

Within a year, it had reached such a pitch that Pozner knew he had to do something. "I agonized about the situation for several weeks. But ultimately I felt I owed it to my son to protect his memory." He posted on his Google+ page his son's birth and death certificates and kindergarten report card.

"I was extremely naive. I believed that people were simply misinformed and that if I released proof that my child had existed, thrived, loved and was loved, and was ultimately murdered, they would understand our grief, stop harassing us, and more importantly, stop defacing photos of Noah and defaming him online."

Instead, he watched his deceased son buried a second time, under hundreds of pages of hateful web content. "I don't think there's any one word that fits the horror of it," Pozner says. "It's a phenomenon of the age which we're in, modern day witch-hunts. It's a form of mass delusion."

Pozner is extraordinarily controlled. His voice is flat and preternaturally calm, as though all emotion has been pummeled out of him. His apartment has the same pared-down, antiseptic quality. "I've gotten good at moving, I've adapted to it," he says.

He left Newtown for Florida in 2013 with Noah's mother, his now former wife Veronique De La Rosa, and their two daughters in the hope of rebuilding their lives. (He asked the Guardian not to identify the town he now lives in.) He has deliveries sent to a separate address and has rented multiple postal boxes as decoys.

The most serious of death threats came from Lucy Richards, a Florida resident who was so fervent in her belief that the Sandy Hook massacre was fake that she left messages on Pozner's cellphone saying: "You're going to die. Death is coming to you real soon, and there's nothing you can do about it." In June 2017, Richards was sentenced to five months in prison, followed by a further five months under house arrest.

Pozner sees this outpouring of hatred as a product of digital technology running ahead of society's ability to contain it. "Social media hasn't matured. We lack a segment of law enforcement specializing in it. There really is no one to help."

But he reserves his staunchest criticism for Alex Jones, who he blames for amplifying conspiracies in the pursuit of profit. In a lawsuit suing Jones for defamation for more than $1m, lawyers for Pozner and De La Rosa chronicle how Infowars baited them over many years: the shooting was "staged", a "giant hoax". The school was an elaborate film set. It was all a "soap opera".

But in targeting Pozner, Jones picked on the wrong guy. Since 2014 Pozner has made it his life's work to confront the conspiracy theorists. Through his organization the Honr Network, Pozner has systematically challenged those who he believes cross that line, forcing moderators to delete posts. In 2018 alone, he reported 2,568 videos to YouTube and had 1,555 of those expunged.

Pozner's lawsuit against Jones, which mirrors a similar legal case brought by Fontaine, is making its way through a federal court in Austin, Texas. Earlier this month they received a legal boost when the judge granted them access to Jones's financial and marketing documents under discovery.

Jones denies defaming anyone, though he has so far failed in having the suits dismissed on free speech grounds.

Regarding the free speech argument, Pozner says: "You have the right to express yourself and your opinions, no matter how offensive they may be, until your chosen form of expression impedes my rights to be free from defamation and harassment."

What shocks Pozner most, he says, was how alone he was when he began this fight. "I was the only one standing up to the hoaxers, and other than the loss of my son that was my biggest disappointment at the time."

At least he has brought his son's memory back to life. If you search Noah Pozner on Google you will find hundreds of articles about the boy's life and death, and virtually none of the bile from those who questioned his existence.

By Pozner's reckoning, one in five people around the world are suggestible to conspiracy theories, and their obsessions are amplified by the crude logic of digital algorithms. "There is just no more truth, there is just what's trending on Twitter," he says. "Used to be, you had to burn books to keep people from finding out the truth, now you just have to push it to page 20 of a Google search."

Full story

[Eamonnca1]

Are conservatives ever going to reach the bottom?

Poster linking Rep. Ilhan Omar to 9/11 sparks outrage, injuries in W.Va. state Capitol

https://wapo.st/2Tq6hc7

[Oraisteach]

Eamonn, they've already reached rock bottom. The problem is that they've started to dig!

[Eamonnca1]

Indeed. They'll keep digging until they're in China. Because they're thick enough.