It’s clearly very, very important to you to sell the (false) idea that I made a hard prediction that we’d all be in a gulag by February 19.
The question is: why? Why is it so important to you to sell this idea? (You and your couple of supporters in the thread, too.)
Why?
My guess is that you are operating on the magical thinking that:
a poster (you claim) predicted we’d all be jailed by such-and-such a date
that date arrives and we aren’t all jailed
THEREFORE there is and can never be any danger of any kind of censorship or suppression of dissent under the Trump regime!!!1!!!
That truly would require magic.
(I mean, I wish you all the luck. I hope your magical thinking does shape reality.)
Meanwhile in the real world, I notice you and your co-magical-thinking-clingees are studiously pretending to ignore the recent news about the Trump/Musk regime working to suppress criticism (because Donald doesn’t like it—nor does Elon!):
??? Nothing to see here? No attempt by the Trump regime to silence critics?? All just made up by a poster at the SDMB, who MUST be wrong so that “Trump got elected” CANNOT have any negative consequences…right?
No, that’s not the ‘therefore’. There is, as far as I can tell, no “therefore’. You stated that anyone betting that we’d still be able to post our true opinions of Trump — here or anywhere else — is quite the optimist; I figured that, well, no; anyone betting that way can just be quite the realist. I’m not extrapolating to some other ‘therefore’: I’m not figuring that “there can never be any danger of any kind of censorship or suppression of dissent”.
I’m merely (a) noting that, as far as I can tell, we’re still able to post our true opinions of Trump; and, when you added that you thought that ‘would end this week, but it does look as though it may be some small period of time later than this week’ — well, I felt like (b) asking: what do you think constitutes “some small period of time”, there?
No; if you’d said, a month ago, that one would have to be quite the optimist to bet against the Trump regime making any effort to silence any critics, this would be relevant to that. I don’t know why you didn’t; I sure do wish you had. But, for some reason, you instead — focused on whether it was optimism rather than realism to figure we’d be able to now do what we can now do?
Maybe you’re not getting this. Try something different: imagine a poster decides — for some reason — to now declare that one would sure have to be quite the optimist to bet that the next Supreme Court Justice will have a law degree. My response would be to shrug and point out the obvious if the unremarkable realistically comes to pass as expected: not because I’m saying it’s impossible for a president to ever make a bad choice, and not because I’m out to extrapolate some other point entirely, but because it’s the point that’s, y’know, right there, is all.
I feel kind of annoyed that I’m continuing to pay for my housing in the real world when I clearly have a home inside your head. Seems wasteful.
On the topic of Donald not liking criticism–and being willing to have his minions do something about that: this is so unremarkably self-evident a theory, that it’s mentioned purely in passing during a discussion between former GOP-Rep Adam Kinzinger and Tim Miller. Kinzinger is speaking here (my bolding inside):
It’s not controversial, that Trump is having his goons do stuff to stop criticism. In the Garcia case it was about Musk, but “Operation Whirlwind” is about intimidating people into refraining from criticizing Trump as well (or primarily). Gift link to a WaPo article about this–it reproduces several of the STOP SAYING MEAN STUFF ABOUT ME threat-letters:
Whatever you two-or-three are going through emotionally, I hope it works out for you. In the meantime, the actual issue continues to unfold in the real world. Donald doesn’t like being criticized, and he’s doing something about that.
I mean, if you’d prefer that people NOT respond to your OPs, you could always try standing on a street corner and shouting at pedestrians while ringing a bell and wearing a sandwich board that reads “THE END IS NEAR”.
If Trump wants to stop being criticized, he could always admit that he is Secret Agent Krasnov and has been a Russian Asset being run by Putin for the last 30 years.
Then he could surrender himself to the rule of law in the US…
Of course he’s doing something about it. If, right now, a brand-new poster were to say that Trump is going to do something about it over the course of the next month — and that anyone betting otherwise would have to be quite the optimist — then that’d be unremarkable, and no eyebrows would be raised.
But imagine if, today, some brand-new poster made a bizarrely specific claim: about how anyone betting that a month from now we will be able to post our true opinions of Trump — here or anywhere else — is, well, quite the optimist. What do you figure would be an appropriate reaction, a month from today, when we’re of course still able to post our true opinions of Trump right here? Would it be appropriate to note that, while other things happened, the one in question didn’t? Or to quickly mention that it was a matter not of wacky optimism, but of mere realism?
Or do you think the appropriate response to such a poster would be to shrug and figure, well, something in general happened, so, hey, what difference does it make that the particular thing didn’t?
This is being talked about all over the internet; whether it’s well-researched or not, I don’t think has yet been determined. But there’s nothing about it that’s hard to believe.
On the “Trump versus criticism” front: MSNBC got rid of two non-white critics of Himself, though it’s possible that the changes had something to do with their ratings (rather than being attempts to please Dear Leader). In any case, Donald is CROWING about it:
Here’s the Troot or whatever Donald is calling them these days:
What with the ALL CAPS etc., it seems a safe bet that Donald tapped out this one himself (rather than having aide Dan Scavino or other flunky do it).
