[Macros]

Fuck trump and the GOP

Take note and report me

[Maark Abbott]

I do wonder how folk can defend Trump's aggression towards and invasion of states he happens to dislike.

If he was ruling somewhere in the Middle East then no doubt he'd have been CIA'd already.

[Garak]

Well all the right wing talking I've seen is about how the insane left are violent, all the shooting recently is by them, they cheer for death etc so Trump needs to crack down and dismantle ANTIFA because of the violent left lunatic. So ... Idk what is going on in that country.

[QuickTidal]

Maark Abbott, on 07 October 2025 - 08:38 AM, said:

I do wonder how folk can defend Trump's aggression towards and invasion of states he happens to dislike.

They should not be able to...if a Democratic president did a fucking FRACTION of this stuff, the Republicans would be screeching like caged monkeys about it 24/7 on the news.

[Azath Vitr (D'ivers]

Quote

The direction we're going is either martial law or civil war.

Americans from so-called "red" states, with the backing of their Republican governors and legislatures, are on the brink of using lethal force against Americans in so-called "blue" states, whose Democratic governors and legislatures strongly oppose the moves. [...] Trump has now ordered the deployment of 400 members of the Texas National Guard to several states [...] Late Sunday night, a federal judge in Oregon (appointed by Trump) temporarily blocked the mobilization of any state National Guards to that state. Today, a federal judge in Illinois declined to block the deployment of National Guard units there.

Yesterday Trump said he was considering invoking the Insurrection Act of 1807. That act would allow him to deploy troops despite any court orders stopping him.

[...] Sad to say, I believe Trump and his enablers have worked this out in advance. The first step has been for the Department of Homeland Security to deploy ICE agents to use aggressive tactics in targeted cities. [...] The second step is for such aggressive tactics to provoke demonstrations, and for Trump to exaggerate the scale and severity of them. [...] The third step is for Trump and Hegseth to deploy federalized National Guard troops to control the demonstrators, an act that's already enflaming the public and provoking some actual violence. [...] The fourth step will be for Trump and Hegseth to invoke the Insurrection Act.

Inside Trump's plan to have red attack blue states — using a 200-year-old law - Alternet.org

[Tsundoku]

Project 2025, baby.

[Maark Abbott]

QuickTidal, on 07 October 2025 - 11:22 AM, said:

Maark Abbott, on 07 October 2025 - 08:38 AM, said:

I do wonder how folk can defend Trump's aggression towards and invasion of states he happens to dislike.

They should not be able to...if a Democratic president did a fucking FRACTION of this stuff, the Republicans would be screeching like caged monkeys about it 24/7 on the news.

And then you go over to the 'y peepul haet nartsies' thread in this section of the forum and apparently it's all a-ok. wack.

[Tiste Simeon]

I've literally seen people say something to the tune of "name 1 bad/racist/whatever thing he has done" receive a boatload of evidence and go "I'm not reading all that!"

[Maark Abbott]

Tiste Simeon, on 09 October 2025 - 08:09 AM, said:

I've literally seen people say something to the tune of "name 1 bad/racist/whatever thing he has done" receive a boatload of evidence and go "I'm not reading all that!"

Yeah, it's insane to see happening in real time. I did not expect this to be something I'd see in my life, but here we are.

[Azath Vitr (D'ivers]

Quote

Gov. warns Trump will have military seize ballot boxes so he can 'count the votes himself'

Hours after Trump called for Pritzker's imprisonment in a Wednesday morning Truth Social post, the Illinois governor claimed [...] the president's ultimate goal with sending troops into US cities was to control the outcomes of future elections.

"He wants to militarize major cities across the United States, especially blue cities in blue states, because he wants us to get used to the idea of military on the streets," he said. "2026 elections, I believe he's going to post people outside ballot boxes and polling places, and, if he needs to in order to control those elections, he'll assume control of the ballot boxes and count the votes himself."

Pritzker pointed out that Trump considered ordering the military to seize ballot boxes after he lost the 2020 presidential election, but he was met with resistance from officials in his own administration.

However, Pritzker said that "I believe he would do it in 2026" to help Republicans maintain control of Congress.

Gov. warns Trump will have military seize ballot boxes so he can 'count the votes himself' - Alternet.org

And he will almost certainly be able to find enough people in the military willing to carry out his illegal orders. They are already illegally murdering people as it is.

Quote

Trump's attempt to militarize America's cities is still being tested in court. But he has already issued other orders that are likely illegal. The president has determined—on his own—that he can go to war against "narco-terrorists," and he has furthermore decided that he can order the military to blow up these suspected drug runners at will. Several boats have been destroyed and many people have been killed, but neither American law nor international law (including agreements signed by the United States) allow the president to declare a fugazy drug war and then direct the summary execution of people who are not in actual hostilities with the United States and who pose no imminent threat to American lives.

The Pentagon keeps fulfilling these orders [...]

Trump may be tempted to issue orders to the military that will be aimed at suppressing dissent, or disrupting elections, or detaining political figures [...] [...] especially now that the president has been blessed by the Supreme Court with monarchical immunity. Nothing would prevent Trump from saying: Forget the lawyers. Do it. I'll cover you. (After all, he's
already said that to his faithful rally goers, and he put that promise into action when he pardoned the January 6 insurrectionists.) Even if one officer declines an illegal order, Trump can just keep firing people until he gets to another officer who is enough of a coward, or opportunist, or true MAGA believer, to carry out the order. The officer who finally says yes after the others say no would bring shame upon the U.S. armed forces, endanger U.S. citizens, and undermine the Constitution, but eventually, Trump will find that person.

The Civil-Military Crisis Is Here - The Atlantic

Start with a group of people that most people won't mind him killing illegally. Keep stretching the Overton window towards monarchical fascism.

[QuickTidal]

I think it's hilarious that Trump EVER thought that someone as evil as he is could win the Nobel Peace Prize, let alone be in the running....but the meltdown that it's going to cause that Maria Corina Machado won it for basically protecting democracy in Venezuela while it lay under a dictator just like Trump? Fucking CHEFS KISS.

It seems like she praised him...I'm so lost.

This post has been edited by QuickTidal: 10 October 2025 - 02:35 PM

[Tsundoku]

Calm down dude, she's probably just placating and stroking the ego of the easily swayed insecure toddler with the big sticks.

[QuickTidal]

Tsundoku, on 10 October 2025 - 02:55 PM, said:

Calm down dude, she's probably just placating and stroking the ego of the easily swayed insecure toddler with the big sticks.

I don't think I wasn't calm...?

But maybe. Either way, I'm not sure why he ever thought he would win.

[Tiste Simeon]

She seems interesting... Like she apparently once asked Netanyahu to invade her own country to assist in overthrowing the dude who's in power. I think she's quite tied up in the right wing, western mindset.

They should have given it to Greta.

[Abyss]

QuickTidal, on 07 October 2025 - 11:22 AM, said:

Maark Abbott, on 07 October 2025 - 08:38 AM, said:

I do wonder how folk can defend Trump's aggression towards and invasion of states he happens to dislike.

They should not be able to...if a Democratic president did a fucking FRACTION of this stuff, the Republicans would be screeching like caged monkeys about it 24/7 on the news.

be fair here QT, even if a Democratic pres didn't do a fraction of this stuff they would still be screeching liked caged monkeys about it 24/7 on the news.

[Abyss]

QuickTidal, on 10 October 2025 - 03:16 PM, said:

...I'm not sure why he ever thought he would win.

He solved the entire Israel-Gaza thing 24 hrs after being re-elected, and Ukraine-Russia 24hrs after that, remember?

[Maark Abbott]

Abyss, on 10 October 2025 - 03:41 PM, said:

QuickTidal, on 10 October 2025 - 03:16 PM, said:

...I'm not sure why he ever thought he would win.

He solved the entire Israel-Gaza thing 24 hrs after being re-elected, and Ukraine-Russia 24hrs after that, remember?

He, and I'm saying it's pretty great, you know? Really super great the things we're doing. Terrific. The war, the Armenia-Argentina war that's for, just for so long and the babies. The babies in the war. Sleepy Joe and the hunter emails didn't the war, terrible. RADICAL LEFT war and I stopped it. THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER.

[Tsundoku]

Bye bye ... how many amendments are we up to now?

New job advertisement reveals controversial new US plan
A US agency has put out a job ad looking for new recruits – but the details have left many people horrified.

https://www.news.com...083a39e392f5036

Jamie Seidel

October 11, 2025 - 4:49PM

Agents with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) shot a Presbyterian minister in the head with a pepper ball while he was...
more
What do mobile libraries, parked ambulances and heavily armed, mask-wearing men have in common?

Intimate knowledge of US protesters’ social media activities and their locations.

The White House campaign to “clean up America’s streets” is getting personal.

US President Donald Trump’s favourite federal agency is prowling city streets, on the hunt for illegal immigrants and their supporters.

But he wants it to get better at its job.

The White House has set a quota of at least 3000 migrant arrests per day.

To achieve this goal, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency is spending big.

Trump’s One Big Beautiful Budget Bill is pumping $115 billion into the agency’s budget.

Most of this money will be sunk into a dramatic expansion of ICE, with up to 10,000 extra masked, body-armoured agents soon to be walking the beat.

But ICE has also advertised for up to 30 skilled personnel to form specialist, unsworn, investigation and intelligence teams.

These contractors will be tasked with using artificial intelligence to filter social media, selfies and SMS messages for plausible suspects.

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) include compiling a comprehensive dossier on a designated high-interest individual within 30 minutes. They’ll get 24 hours to profile a generic protester.

And they’ll be expected to detail where the suspect is, and is likely to go.

ICE says this data will be used by their combat-capable field agents to plan and execute arrests.

But controversy is swirling about the one US federal government agency not subject to the Trump Administration’s brutal DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency) cuts or wide-ranging leadership culls.

Democrat Representative John Larson has labelled it a reincarnation of Nazi Germany’s SS secret police. Governor Tim Walks has called it a “modern-day Gestapo”.

And a federal judge appointed by President Ronald Regan has ruled: “ICE goes masked for a single reason, to terrorise Americans into quiescence”. Such comparisons are evocative. But some of ICE’s powers are cause for concern.

Warrantless arrests and searches. Deferred legal rights. Habeas corpus (due process) suspensions. Foreign detention centres. Restricted government oversight.

It gives ICE unprecedented, arbitrary powers and minimal accountability.

Now procurement records reveal ICE is seeking to build a powerful surveillance system capable of sifting social media in real time to identify those expressing “negative sentiment” toward the agency itself.

Surveillance Dragnet
Surveillance technology can cut both ways.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) can attest to this.

A killing last month in Chicago was caught on bodycams carried by its agents, and on onlookers’ phones.

ICE insisted one of its agents had been “seriously injured” when dragged by the victim’s car.

But bodycam footage shows the officer saying “nothing major” had been done to him.

And ICE profiling of the alleged assailant appears erroneous.

DHS officials say its agents had shot and killed “a criminal illegal alien with a history of reckless driving”.

But local media investigations revealed the victim had no criminal history. And he had recorded no traffic violation notices since 2013. This information and footage was publicly available.

And the incident occurred in public.

But the DHS was outraged: “Viral social media videos and activists encouraging illegal aliens to resist law enforcement not only undermine public safety, but also the safety of our officers and those illegal aliens being apprehended,” a statement reads.

But it also finds potential in the public domain.

One draft new ICE contract expresses a desire to exploit “open source intelligence” to the full.

Historically, this would include public newspaper clippings, high school yearbooks and court records. But little else.

Now, this includes photos and messages on the likes of Facebook and X, YouTube and TikTok, Reddit and Quora. And, depending on who you ask, any leaked or poorly secured dataset — such as those from Optus, Qantas, and the MediSecure system — can be considered fair game.

Much of this has already been collected, sifted and packaged for sale.

Commercial projects, including LexisNexis Accurint, Thomson Reuters CLEAR, CrimeTracer, Lynx Sentinel, and CommandCentral Analytics, build and maintain vast, searchable datasets linking phone bills, property records, vehicle registrations, essential services bills, family trees, and much more.

This is on-sold to the likes of banks, insurance companies and hiring agencies to assess risk.

But it is also proving to be a quick, convenient—and unaccountable—service for government agencies.

But ICE wants more.

It has specified that its new surveillance contractors must help design artificial intelligence systems to automatically sniff out and track suspects through zettabytes of data. Some of it in realtime.

In the meantime, draft ICE planning documents reveal that they want teams of civilian contractors to provide an around-the-clock, on-call, profiling, and tracking service.

The all-seeing eye
ICE is worried about the privacy and security of its agents.

That’s why it encourages its officers to wear masks and remove identifying badges and service numbers.

But it wants more.

“In order to prevent adversaries from successfully targeting ICE Senior leaders, personnel and facilities, ICE requires realtime threat mitigation and monitoring services, vulnerability assessments, and proactive threat monitoring services,” reads a procurement document issued earlier this year.

This includes: “Previous social media activity which would indicate any additional threats to ICE”, and “information which would indicate the individual(s) and/or the organisation(s) making threats have a proclivity for violence”.

But it’s not just about threats.

The contractors must “provide monitoring and analysis of behavioural and social media sentiment (i.e. positive, neutral, and negative)”.

Among ICE’s chief concerns is “doxxing”: revealing information about an agent, such as home address, phone number, and social media accounts.

ICE itself uses far more advanced information tactics, but for deportations rather than doxxing.

The Investigative Case Management (ICM) system is a $214m AI-based illegal-immigrant hunter supplied by Palantir Technologies (ironically named after the all-seeing, but corrupting, stone eyes of Lord of the Rings fame).

This is on top of a $7m yearly subscription to a database of commercial records and public data compiled by LexisNexis.

But ongoing commercial tenders reveal ICE’s desire to capture live social media and open source data inputs.

This, when combined with active phone records and facial recognition technology, could be used to automate the process of pinpointing the position of a designated target.

ICE recently bought access to PenLink’s Tangles and Webloc predictive algorithms that access “billions of pieces of location data from hundreds of millions of mobile phones”

It also pairs mobile phone tower “handshakes” to correlate phone user data to anonymous social media posts.

Another $1.5m has been spent on mobile cellphone tower interceptor systems designed to capture live phonecall and data package transmissions. Contractor TechOps Specialty Vehicles offers these in disguises ranging from “bookmobiles” (mobile libraries) to ambulances and fire trucks.

But intercepting signals is one thing. Then you have to read them.

ICE has reactivated a $3 million contract for Israeli Graphite spyware that had been suspended under the Biden Administration.

Created by Paragon, it can access messaging apps such as Signal, WhatsApp and Telegram.

And ICE has a $4 million contract to access Magnet Forensics’ hacking technology to break phone encryption systems.

So, exactly which person in that crowd should an agent arrest?

Last month, the federal agency sealed a $3 million deal with Clearview AI. This database has scraped billions of photos from social media services and the internet to build comprehensive facial recognition algorithms.

Knowledge, weaponised
A 30-year-old Chicago woman was shot five times by a Border Patrol agent last weekend. She had been among drivers trailing a Department of Homeland Security vehicle through suburban streets.

The DHS says the woman attempted to run over its agents.

But the woman’s lawyer says body camera footage appears to show the federal officers ramming her vehicle, with one officer yelling “Do something, bitch” as he leapt out of the car and opened fire.

Another officer asks: “Hey, what happened?” He is warned off by the first officer, who points to his camera, saying: “Hey, don’t speak. You’re good”.

Such violent encounters are becoming increasingly common.

One federal judge, appointed by US President Ronald Reagan, has compared the behaviour of masked ICE agents to the Ku Klux Klan.

“To us, masks are associated with cowardly desperados and the despised Ku Klux Klan. In all our history, we have never tolerated an armed masked secret police,” Massachusetts District Judge William Young stated in his 161-page deposition condemning the arrests of immigrant students who had protested against the war in Gaza.

A handful of House Democrats have brought their surveillance concerns to Capitol Hill.

In particular, they’re worried about the warrantless use of Paragon Solutions’ social-media monitoring tools.

“Given the Trump Administration’s disregard for constitutional rights and civil liberties in pursuit of rapid mass deportation, we are seriously concerned that ICE will abuse Graphite software to target immigrants, people of colour, and individuals who express opposition to ICE’s repeated attacks on the rule of law,” the House Oversight committee members wrote.

“Allowing ICE to utilise spyware raises serious questions about whether ICE will respect Fourth Amendment protections against warrantless search and seizure for people residing in the US.”

But that horse may have long since bolted.

A research review by Inderscience Publishers has found “social media surveillance is ubiquitous”.

“Social media surveillance operates on a global scale,” Inderscience warned.

“Data flows routinely across borders, and monitoring practices often involve cooperation between states and multinational corporations.”

[Azath Vitr (D'ivers]

The latest fishing boat Trump ordered blown up (with people onboard) off the coast of Venezuala apparently was most likely not trafficking drugs to the United States:

Quote

equipment analysis rebuts [Trump's] claim, because the small fishing boats could not have reached the US mainland due to distance and fuel limitations of the vessels' small size.

[...] "International law does not allow governments to simply murder alleged drug traffickers." [And members of the US military are bound, by US law, to abide by established international law, which they are flagrantly violating. ...]

Extrajudicial killings are also forbidden under the US Uniform Code of Military Justice.

Excessive force against Americans

Instead of careful introspection in the wake of what appears to be murder on the high seas, Trump's Secretary of "War" published snuff videos bragging about the violence [...]

[...] Trump's unconstitutional war of brutality against Democratic-run cities [...] is just beginning. In last week's middle-of-the-night ICE raid on a Chicago apartment building, sleeping families were jolted awake by masked strangers suddenly in their bedrooms. Children ripped from their beds were zip-tied and thrown outside, naked and screaming. Armed federal agents in military fatigues busted down doors, pulling men, women and children from nearly every apartment in the five-story building, most of them U.S. citizens. Federal agents used flashbang grenades to burst through doors, deployed drones and helicopters, and left the building trashed.

Trump is champing at the bit to do the same and worse in Portland, Oregon, where he promised this week to send troops to attack "domestic terrorists," authorizing the use of "Full Force, if necessary."

Trump just revealed what he has planned for us - Alternet.org

[Azath Vitr (D'ivers]

Quote

Americans Are Getting Much Dumber

At the start of the century, American students registered steady improvement in math and reading. Around 2013, this progress began to stall out, and then to backslide dramatically. [...] The decline began well before the pandemic, so COVID-era disruptions alone cannot explain it. [...]

These learning losses are not distributed equally. Across grades and subjects, the NAEP results show that the top tenth of students are doing roughly as well as they always have [...]

The experience of a few outlier states gives reason for optimism. [...] The "Mississippi miracle" should force a reckoning in less successful states and, ideally, a good deal of imitation. But for Democrats, who pride themselves on belonging to the party of education, these results may be awkward to process. Not only are the southern states that are registering the greatest improvements in learning run by Republicans, but also their teachers are among the least unionized in the country. And these red states are leaning into phonics-based, "science of reading" approaches to teaching literacy, while Democratic-run states such as New York, New Jersey, and Illinois have been painfully slow to adopt them, in some cases hanging on to other pedagogical approaches with little evidentiary basis. "The same people who are absolutely outraged about what" Robert F. Kennedy Jr. "is doing on vaccines are untroubled by just ignoring science when it comes to literacy," [...] Some promising educational reforms, moreover, seem to brush up uncomfortably against liberal political priors.

[...] One optimistic theory is that artificial-intelligence tools, which will only grow more powerful over the coming decades, will correct for this economic catastrophe by letting everyone externalize their thinking to superintelligent computer programs. The once-ironclad relationship between schooling quality and earnings might break down just in time, a somewhat literal deus ex machina.

America Is Sliding Toward Illiteracy - The Atlantic

Hmm, since the top 10% are unaffected I'm tempted to think it's not going to have all that much of an impact on the vanguard of scientific, technological, or intellectual progress (granted, there are outliers who do very badly in some subjects or blow off schooling and still make major contributions, but I'd guess they're rare enough not to have much of an impact on education statistics). The much bigger issue will probably be the Trump administration scaring off the smartest and most creative, capable, and ambitious immigrants from around the world.

I'm also a little skeptical about the exclusive focus on pre-highschool grade levels in the statistics cited.

Obviously near future AI could simultaneously largely solve the economic problem (heavily assisting or outright replacing white collar work for the bottom 90%) while exacerbating the educational problem... some sort of brain-computer interface may be the longer-term answer; and if young people already have their internal brains hollowed out by dependency on AI, they may be more willing to volunteer for such interfaces (hopefully surgical implants will eventually not be necessary... something electromagnetic and wireless, or at least a portable helmet or armor... AI AR bullet-hail-and-other-climate-catastrophe-proof space suit...).