Kimstu
July 27, 2022, 6:47am
24
iiandyiiii:
@Sam_Stone hasn’t come clean about how massively, colossally wrong he was about Trump’s ridiculous tweets about declassifying info. He hasn’t come clean about how massively, colossally wrong he was to take the Hunter Biden laptop stuff as anything other than right-wing tabloid nonsense. He hasn’t come clean about how massively, colossally wrong he was to take the Durham investigation as anything other than a right-wing sideshow.
And while I wouldn’t put the following in the category of “not coming clean”, because AFAIK nobody’s ever specifically asked him to revisit it in light of more recent developments, I don’t think Sam ’s voluntarily addressed the massive, colossal wrongness of his sneering minimization and “bothsidesing” the deliberate malevolence of the January 6 insurrection attempt. According to Sam , just a big fuss about nothing to create “theater” so that Democrats can maintain deployed troops (which Sam persistently miscalled a “standing army”) and other Deep State nefariousness in DC, a whole three or four months after January 6:
Sam_Stone:
Just pointing out that they weren’t some right-wing militia rabble being caught up in an ‘insurrection’. They were just normal people hit hard by the times, angry and frustrated. You know, like pretty much any other protest-turned-riot.
Given that there is still a standing army in Washington over two minths later with no known threats, I believe this is all just theater to smear Republicans in general to justify more surveillance, IRS shenanigans, ‘Operation Chokepoint’ style nonsense, etc. […]
I think this is political. The Democrats are preparing their ‘domestic extremism’ and gun control bills, and surrounding themselves with soldiers helps them make the case for increased surveillance and disarming of their political enemies.
If I’m right, the ‘threat’ will ease and the soldiers will go home after the bills pass, and the fact of their leaving will be spun as proof that the bill was the right thing to do and now Washington can breathe a sigh of relief and send the soldiers home.
Once the National Guard troops had left the Capitol in May without any Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act or gun control measures having been implemented, Sam eventually shut his pie hole about the menace of the Democrat “standing army”. But he was still maintaining that the Jan. 6 events were way less concerning than the 2017 attack by a lone-loon leftist on the Congressional Republican baseball team.
Sam_Stone:
The only person who had any chance of changing the makeup of Congress was the Bernie Bro who shot up a Republican baseball game. We came within a hairs’ breadth of having a whole bunch of Republican politicians assassinated. […]
Those yahoos in the Capital had no plan. They weren’t trying to start an insurrection - they were just a bunch of angry people trying to ‘have their voices heard’. Once they broke into the actual Senate chambers they basically just milled around acting like tourists, taking selfies, sitting in the speaker’s chair, etc. None of them were armed with firearms. […]
The idea that you came close to having government toppled is absolutely ridiculous. […]
(And of course ANTIFA!!! )
Sam_Stone:
Jan 6 was a typical situation of a mob that got out of control, just as the riots of the last year sometimes broke out into violence. […]
A much better case for ‘insurrection’ could be made of the Antifa folks who repeatedly attempt to burn down police stations and courthouses. Those are actual planned attacks, and not just spontaneous outbresks of violence when a mob gets out of control.
In short, coming back to the present:
Sam_Stone:
The notion of ‘winning’ debate by abusing/shutting down one side with insults and unpleasantness, or declaring people to be so beyond the pale that their arguments aren’t worth addressing, to be antithetical to free expression and debate. […] A free society cannot survive if information is kept from the actors within it. […]
I think the Pit is terrible for this board […]
A free society cannot survive if malevolent manipulators and gullible dumbasses keep deliberately drowning out information with misinformation and lies, either. It seems reasonable to have at least one SDMB forum where posters don’t have to maintain a polite demeanor towards misinformation and lies masquerading as “free expression and debate”.