No. 97570Anonymous 21st March 2023 Tuesday 3:52 pm97570American Civil War II: The Squeakquel
With the amount of airtime ol' Leatherface is still getting on both sides of the pond and the number of Republicans that still think he should run for the big chair in 2024 (over half, last I looked) it feels the implosion of the States are closer now than ever before.
It could just be a continuation of the smouldering anti-ultraliberalism and leftist infighting we've seen since Trump first rallied the alt-right from relative obscurity though. A big "nothingburger" as the, well, burgers like to say. His arrest could also be the closure that the whole thing needs so that we can go back our regular coverage of Windsor drama and knife crime.
I reckon it's all a big pantomime to keep the sheeple entertained while the Senate and Federal Reserve carry on the exact same neo-conservative foreign policy, and neo-liberal domestic policy they have enacted for the last 40 odd years regardless wether red or blue is in the whitehouse. That's what I reckon.
American politics is a joke, on the national scale. Their local politics is far more meaningful and interesting because the state and city/town governments actually make a difference, whereas the federal government is just a big autocracy really.
It'll be funny when Trump gets sent to jail but jesus christ. There is no American left. Bernie Sanders is the fucking Che Guevara over there and he's barely to the left of Kier Starmer.
>>97573 Innit. They can't stop fighting over identity politics long enough to come together over tough but widespread issues that actually matter.
Also Bernie is a hardcore Zionist and anybody that supports that sort of thing should think about the sort of things they're sanctioning for better or worse in the politicians they back.
There's nothing new under the sun, it's a periodic occurrence in presidential systems and the US has survived times that have been a lot worse. If anything Trump has already been on the way out with DeSantis and co. eviscerating him and his faction, including by winning Republican elections.
The real problem is something we're already living in with the anti-populist backlash that firmly benefits the establishment aristocracy.
>It could just be a continuation of the smouldering anti-ultraliberalism and leftist infighting we've seen since Trump first rallied the alt-right from relative obscurity though
None of that was new even back when Trump was a property tycoon.
Also:
>Stollen our presidential election
Sign me up!
>>97571 >>97572 Why am I suddenly seeing AI generated images of Trump everywhere? I actually remember back when Deepfake was getting started that anything involving a politician was immediately taken down.
>>97575 > Why am I suddenly seeing AI generated images of Trump everywhere?
The short answer is it's very available to produce images someone whose public image output was in the training corpus of the AI used.
Because AI generation for both images and text have come leaps an bounds in only a few scant months, which is new. A couple of decades ago AI was basically programmed intelligence, simulated annealing and some other fancy ideas. Neural nets have been around for a while, but they had a few dozen nodes. To say that "modern" AI is just neural nets is a massive oversimplification of both the research work and the actuality of it, but it's a good approximation. Suddenly, the compute power that would've cost hundreds if not millions of thousands could be borrowed dozens if not hunreds. Singular. Spend some time in the AI porn places an you'll see wonders you never want to see again and will require brain soap an brush, but man did that someone have the collection and money.
Long story short, at this point a determined person or comparitively small team of people with very affordable funding, can train "an AI" to help generate images to look vaguely believable. If you've seen a DT arrest image, it likely involved a generated base image plus some enehacements to scrub out the imediate give-aways people know for now, like hands, limbs, ears, twins appearing in odd situtions and probably more. Just look at the thing and once one small thing is there the rest falls into place.
>>97577 No, we've had this for awhile. And even video.
I vividly remember when deep fake started. Porn of celebrities became it's own industry but nothing with politicians would stay up and it just didn't become a thing despite the obvious room for shenanigans. And the porn is still shit. Complete waste of time.
>>97578 It's like mobile phones. They've been around a lot longer than they've ubiquitus, but there was a flipping point when it was just expected that everyone had one.
Two years ago, you needed to be very technically competent and have a powerful rendering rig to make a half-convincing deepfake. 99% of people would never have figured it out and it was still a massive ballache for the remaining 1%. Today, you can just download an app and get started with a couple of taps. Techies tend to massively underestimate the importance of ease-of-use.
Maybe I'm mental, but I think Trump running for election again and winning has the potential to be the catalyst for the Balkanisation of the US.
We're already seeing states take more and more control back over their own laws. I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing either, per se, for Americans, but the world will absolutely erupt in war if they do which is bad.
So I'm anti-balkanisation, but I also think it might be inevitable. Tangentially speaking, I have been keeping some shelf stable food around to test its longevity and whenever my friends and family find an old tin that is in good nick I take it. I'm a couple months away from trying some tinned potatoes that went out of date almost 5 years ago, and I'm hopeful because the Chilli-con carne I eat yesterday was similarly aged and didn't make me ill.
>>97581 The only people of note who've talked about breaking up the USA are mental right-wingers and it's only a tiny minority of them. Marjorie Taylor Greene has talked about a "national divorce", but no one else seems interested and the only states with massive Republican majorities are rather spread out and most of them are not nearly big enough to be anything other than a sad little backwater if they went it alone. Despite what it can seem like even a lot of the very red "Red States" have millions of Democrat voters, it's just that they all live in a couple of the big cities. All that's to say, combined with the legal and social challanges that would arise from trying to split up the USA I think it's almost impossible. The American right still loves the red, white and blue, it's only a few of the nutty-Nazi types who truly want to end it, and those freakshows melt on contact with any good old boy Texan or paranoiac suburban mother.
If there were to be persistant political violence in the USA it would probably look more like The Troubles than the breaking up of Yugoslavia (RIP). But I think that there are too many non-fatally violent outlets for the US right for them to start carrying out car bombings and (regular, organised) political assassinations. And good luck getting Peter the Patriot to shoot US service personel, his cousin's in the Marines and his daddy fought in Gulf War 1, he's not shooting a troop because Joe Biden cancelled student debt.
Both California and Texas have substantial secession movements, with support of >20% of the electorate. They're large, wealthy states with populations and economies comparable to many European countries. It's plausible (though not especially likely) that those states could peacefully and democratically move towards independence at some point.
>>97583 Show me any kind of organised and determined effort to take either state out of the Union. I don't see how a small minority of grumblers translates into a serious movement with a political culture as conservative and patriotic as the US. Completely different context and culture I know, but if we look at Scotland they've been governed by a nationalist party for over a decade, had an independence referendum and still not managed to wrench themselves free of the perfidious English.
>>97583 Those secession movements will have to find some way to deal with secession being unconstitutional.
There are arguments that secession may be possible by consent, though while it is clear that would have to be by the states rather than the feds, it's not clear how many states would have to ratify a secession for it to be valid, assuming they would even approve of the secession of one of the largest subnational economies in the country. Except Florida. The other 49 would probably ratify Flexit without Florida even asking for it if they could.
Nah, that cunt's bound to worm out of it somehow. The last living things remaining in our universe will be Donald Trump and Boris Johnson, taking it in turns to be in charge of the endless void.
>>97596 I haven't been following this too closely because I don't expect anything to come of it and frankly I still don't, but one interesting point that I've heard mentioned is that even when Donald Trump is surrounded by police and perp-walked into the station, he will be accompanied by his Secret Service security detail that all former presidents get. That must be very awkward, having bodyguards who help the police arrest you.
What complications. If he's found guilty, he'll go in just like all the other common criminals. I'm sure they've got security protocols for high-profile inmates, but in the end, a sentence is a sentence.
With all the hot air around Trump on social media you'd think he was the Antichrist but in the end they got him on... paying a porn star to do porn star things? What?
Elizabeth Holmes was indicted June 2018 and sentenced to over a decade in November 2022. She's still not seen prison.
Maybe that case was more complex, but Trump only has to buy time for a year and a half.
The US does sometimes sentence people to house arrest. I feel like putting him in an open prison would present something of a security risk, not from inmates, but his supporters, so maybe house arrest is the way they go.
>>97605 From what I get, he paid hush money to a porn star because they had a shag while he was married. Morally reprehensible, sure (no surprise from an amoral populist grifter) but I wouldn't think it was illegal.
>Elizabeth Holmes was indicted June 2018 and sentenced to over a decade in November 2022. She's still not seen prison.
Part of the reason for that was that she was pregnant at the time of sentencing. It's at a judge's discretion to postpone the beginning of a person's sentence in cases like that.
In Victorian Britain, there was a turn of phrase called Pleading the Belly, where women could hope for leniency if they were pregnant during a trial. It didn't normally end up reducing their sentence, but they could be allowed to give birth to their child prior to starting their prison term.
In Elizabeth Holmes' case, on the other hand, it's increasingly looking like she and her lawyers are using it to stall the judiciary system and buy her lawyers time to get the sentence overturned after all.
