Mega-Thread: Trump Focused Discussion

[Benggaul]

Okay, so, it's been a really shitty 24 hours during which we discovered our apartment came very close to getting blown up by a gas leak because the landlord "hires" people from the bar downstairs to do repair work on the apartments she rents out--possibly paying them in booze but almost definitely in untraceable, untaxable cash.

Anyway, point being I can't stay awake for the final reports to come in (Mississippi and Nebraska haven't reported yet--but generally don't have much to report) so I'm going with the numbers I see now--and frankly those aren't great.

116,029 deaths, 899 on the 11th (GMT). These are decent numbers compared to the past couple months, but it's still nearly a thousand people dead, so, you know, perspective. Unfortunately it seems that California, Texas, Florida and Arizona are all hitting new highs for new cases or are continuing a string of days in which the average is far higher than previous weeks. North Carolina, Georgia and Alabama are also posting high numbers--but I have no numbers from their past few weeks to compare. Given they're all currently in the top 10 nationwide in terms of new cases, though, that can't be good.

Also, proving that Texas' governor isn't the only legislative dipshit, Arizona's Ducey says Arizona will keep reopening despite surge in COVID-19 cases. His take being that the increase in cases is purely do to increased testing (press "F" to doubt). I could swear I read an article stating that hospital occupancy was up again recently but I've lost the link/tab somewhere and frankly I'm going a bit cross-eyed from fatigue, so I'll leave that citation to someone else for now.

It's been mentioned several times now that people signing up to participate in Trump's propaganda rallies are being asked to sign a disclaimer for undoubtedly being exposed to COVID-19 in some measure, but I don't think anyone here is surprised to hear it in this TRUMP SHITSHOW.

Stay safe, folks.

[Breccia]

OAN bragged about a positive poll for Trump.

Gravis Marketing doesn't have a ton of good news for Trump anyhow. And apparently, they're not stellar. It's an old article, but in 2014, they were contenders for the Worst Poll In America.

Them, and Rasmussen, are having troubles keeping Trump above water. Though I have no idea if Gravis is intentionally biased as Rasmussen is. In theory, they're nonpartisan.

[DarkTZeratul]

Did you ignore when I said witnesses.

We know that there are additional surgeries that he never recorded.

Tell me "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence"

I mean, literally, right there, the claim that there were additional surgeries that he never recorded.

What the fuck is extraordinary about saying a slaver owner who worked on slaves against the slaves will also did risky experiments?

There are several answers I could give to this. I could point out that slaves are valuable property and most people wouldn't want to risk them on a whim. I could point that there seems to be an inherently biased assumption that anyone who ever owned a slave was evil as fuck and acted like it. Or I could simply point out that there's nothing about owning slaves that implies everyone would experiment on them if they could, especially in the absence of evidence that it was happening.

In his own records he has having once done a surgery because the slavers asked not because he thought surgery would actually help.

Which is certainly bad, but a far cry from Unit 732 or Mengele comparisons. We have doctors today who are coerced into doing potentially questionable medical procedures on patients who aren't properly able to give consent. I'll also note that despite his misgivings, the surgery did appear to be a success (and though I'm having trouble finding exact dates, was likely not the first time he tried such a surgery).

At a time in history when using slaves for experiments was extremely rampant and almost every doctor of the time used slaves to learn you want to give "benefit of doubt" because a slaver didn't write down his failures?

I'm gonna say this is probably another one of those extraordinary claims that require extraordinary evidence. I'm not saying it never happened, but to suggest it was rampant and "almost every doctor" did it?

[Breccia]

Stay safe, folks.

Damn, you first! That's some scary stuff.

[Felya]

I'm shopping for sailboats and thinking about just sailing the Pacific for a looooong loooong time while the extremists go nuts. If you are smart, you also might want to consider it.

Yes, if people are smart they will sail off into the pacific... when Hurricane season started in April... good luck...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_P...rricane_season

[Edge-]

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/12/nort...rump-ties.html

And Kim appears to be abandoning his great relationship with Trump.

Man, it sure seems like everything is falling apart around him as he flails about helplessly.

Almost like he's a man completely unprepared and incapable of performing the job of POTUS, and has surrounded himself with sycophants who are equally unprepared and incapable of making up for his incompetence.

YOU KNOW, ALMOST LIKE EVERYONE FUCKING SAID WOULD HAPPEN IN 2016

[Kaleredar]

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/12/nort...rump-ties.html

And Kim appears to be abandoning his great relationship with Trump.

Man, it sure seems like everything is falling apart around him as he flails about helplessly.

Almost like he's a man completely unprepared and incapable of performing the job of POTUS, and has surrounded himself with sycophants who are equally unprepared and incapable of making up for his incompetence.

YOU KNOW, ALMOST LIKE EVERYONE FUCKING SAID WOULD HAPPEN IN 2016

"Nobody knew (being president) was so complicated!"

[Themius]

I mean, literally, right there, the claim that there were additional surgeries that he never recorded.

There are several answers I could give to this. I could point out that slaves are valuable property and most people wouldn't want to risk them on a whim. I could point that there seems to be an inherently biased assumption that anyone who ever owned a slave was evil as fuck and acted like it. Or I could simply point out that there's nothing about owning slaves that implies everyone would experiment on them if they could, especially in the absence of evidence that it was happening.

Which is certainly bad, but a far cry from Unit 732 or Mengele comparisons. We have doctors today who are coerced into doing potentially questionable medical procedures on patients who aren't properly able to give consent.

I'm gonna say this is probably another one of those extraordinary claims that require extraordinary evidence. I'm not saying it never happened, but to suggest it was rampant and "almost every doctor" did it?

So let me get this straight, you are simply not very knowledgeable about the issues surrounding doctors experimenting on slaves. And your first thought is "I doubt it was rampant it sounds extraordinary" we have evidence... also:

Between 1809 and 1818, McDowell wrote about having conducted five separate ovariotomies, including Crawford. The remaining four were all performed on enslaved women, making him–like Sims–a link in a chain of gynecological experiments performed without consent.

In the 1800s, the line between surgery intended to heal and experimental surgery wasn’t rigid the way it is today. In slave states like Kentucky, home to approximately 40,000 enslaved laborers around McDowell’s time, many of these experimental surgeries were performed on slaves. An extremely wealthy man and a prominent community member, he would have had many connections to prominent slaveholders. He himself was one. McDowell was also the son of Samuel McDowell, one of the founders of Kentucky, and was married to Sarah Shelby, the daughter of Kentucky’s first governor.

He didn't perform surgeries on white people... well not until after he performed them on several slaves, some of which did indeed die.

Harriet Washington, a medical historian and the author of Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present, says there’s no way to know if Crawford’s surgery was even the first-ever ovariotomy, as so many sources maintain. "It's the first recorded procedure he did,” she says. “That doesn’t mean it was the first procedure.” Wheter he had attempted the procedure before, either on enslaved, black patients or free, white patients, is entirely lost to the historical record.

Black women–like enslaved laborers more generally–were frequently the subjects of medical experiments, because they were “convenient,” she says. Unlike white women such as Crawford, who clearly gave consent to the procedure, to operate on an enslaved woman, all that was needed was the permission of her owner. Whether they also consented to the procedure is “almost beside the point,” Washington says. “That’s because of the nature of enslavement.” The enslaved women weren’t capable of saying a free “yes” or “no,” because, quite simply, they weren’t free.

Source for this by the way is the Smithsonian Institute.

There was even a review done about 5 years ago by medical journals that found it was commonplace to experiment on slaves

Medical journals that no longer exist, such as the Baltimore Medical and Surgical Journal and the Western and Southern Medical Recorder, overflow with reports of surgical experiments to treat injuries, birth defects, and tumors, all pioneered on slaves. Doctors often performed the experiments "apparently without pain relief," according to the study, in an era before anesthesia or sterile surgery.

The study details four surgical experiments in particular, dating from 1833 to 1858, that doctors performed on slaves. One, for example, involved severing "healthy looking brain" from a slave with a head injury, killing him. Another removed a tumor from an unnamed young girl's lymph node, which likely made it swell grotesquely around her head.

The physician and slave owner William Aiken of Winnsboro, North Carolina, reported an 1852 experiment on a slave named Lucinda, who suffered from a bony growth around her right eye. Aiken and other doctors disfigured her by boring holes in her head — without chloroform, a gas that was used at the time for anesthesia — to remove the growth.

At one point there was literally a slave trade for doctors to buy sick slaves which they could then use to either experiment on to see if they could solve the problem and or for other matters.

it is not an extraordinary claim by any stretch...

How one could jump immediately to "saying that during the era of slavery doctors experiment on slaves was commonplace is an "extraordinary claim" to me just means you do not understand or know about about slavery...

This is why his statue is a controversy. People instantly dismissing any issues around it because "but he was a doctor" should perhaps consider the role of doctors in that time period, and how they came to learn how to do their procedures, which often meant experimenting on slaves.

[Thekri]

Did you ignore when I said witnesses.

We know that there are additional surgeries that he never recorded.

Tell me "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence"

What the fuck is extraordinary about saying a slaver owner who worked on slaves against the slaves will also did risky experiments? In his own records he has having once done a surgery because the slavers asked not because he thought surgery would actually help.

At a time in history when using slaves for experiments was extremely rampant and almost every doctor of the time used slaves to learn you want to give "benefit of doubt" because a slaver didn't write down his failures?

How about we go with what was common for the time which erases the claim that it is an extraordinary claim. It is a common claim. it was a common practice.

This is like saying to claim that a man responsible for pulling a lever gassing jews, gassed jews. is an "extraordinary claim" because he never recorded each time he pulled the lever. Therefore we can't just say he gassed jews... though some other people did note he did pull the lever.

Ok, well I am not going out of my way to defend a slaveowner, but such claims could really use some citations. Because all I could find is that he was treating major ovarian cancers at a time when nobody else could. Yes, providing medical care to slaves is a proposition where consent is never relevant, which speaks to the inherent immorality of slavery, however I haven't seen any evidence he did any surgeries that were not in the best interest of the patient.

If you have any evidence for your claims, I would be happy to read them, but given the obvious wrongs of slavery in the first place, I don't see anything he did that is particularly worse then any other slaveowner. Which sort of leads into the bigger problem is the acceptability of any slaveholder as a statue, which I can see both sides of that discussion.

In the whole, I recommend looking at the full picture, and ask yourself which acts that given statue is memorializing. For instance, I am totally fine with a statue of Robert E. Lee on a battlefield, but I am not fine with it in some random city in the south. I think it is fine to acknowledge Nathan Forrest as a fine Cavalryman, but any statues of him are mostly memorializing his Slave Trading/KKK/Terrorist activities, and as such need to be removed. I am fine with statues of Washington and Jefferson, and also fine with slapping a placard that says they were also slaveholding sons of bitches.

In this case, the man clearly contributed significantly to medicine, and deserves recognition for that. He also deserves to have the full story of the enslaved women to be told, and acknowledge the wrongs that he did there.

[Breccia]

And Kim appears to be abandoning his great relationship with Trump.

And of course, Trump is still playing the battered wife asking for one more chance.

On Thursday, a State Department spokesperson told South Korea’s Yonhap news agency the United States remains committed to dialogue with North Korea, and is open to a “flexible approach to reach a balanced agreement.”

Ah yes, Trump is running LFR on North Korea. That's going to get results.

EDIT: Oh, and also, "Nobel Prize"

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Oh, I should have said more.

Man, it sure seems like everything is falling apart around him as he flails about helplessly.

Many of us have said that, when things get past the point of no return, they'll fall apart in a hurry.

I'm starting to think we've hit that point. China's been kicking Trump when he's down, but behind the ref's back. North Korea doesn't care and is going for the red card out of spite. Next up, Iran's going for spearing.

[Themius]

Ok, well I am not going out of my way to defend a slaveowner, but such claims could really use some citations. Because all I could find is that he was treating major ovarian cancers at a time when nobody else could. Yes, providing medical care to slaves is a proposition where consent is never relevant, which speaks to the inherent immorality of slavery, however I haven't seen any evidence he did any surgeries that were not in the best interest of the patient.

If you have any evidence for your claims, I would be happy to read them, but given the obvious wrongs of slavery in the first place, I don't see anything he did that is particularly worse then any other slaveowner. Which sort of leads into the bigger problem is the acceptability of any slaveholder as a statue, which I can see both sides of that discussion.

In the whole, I recommend looking at the full picture, and ask yourself which acts that given statue is memorializing. For instance, I am totally fine with a statue of Robert E. Lee on a battlefield, but I am not fine with it in some random city in the south. I think it is fine to acknowledge Nathan Forrest as a fine Cavalryman, but any statues of him are mostly memorializing his Slave Trading/KKK/Terrorist activities, and as such need to be removed. I am fine with statues of Washington and Jefferson, and also fine with slapping a placard that says they were also slaveholding sons of bitches.

In this case, the man clearly contributed significantly to medicine, and deserves recognition for that. He also deserves to have the full story of the enslaved women to be told, and acknowledge the wrongs that he did there.

Should there be statues of nazi generals? If not, why do you think there should be statues of confederate generals? "oh but he was a good calvary man" So?

The notion that consent isn't relevant because it was slavery gets rid of the reason why there is controversy to begin with.

If your stance to a black American is "Well... consent doesn't matter because they were slaves anyway" how far do you think that gets you? "it was bad okay, but think of the advancement!"

He did experiments on slaves, without pain relief when he could give it, to learn how to perform a surgery. Then once he knew went and performed only then on a white woman... he used a slave to experiment and as a learning tool. The idea to then say that it is an extraordinary claim to make that he used slaves for experiments is... misguided.

Being the Smithsonian Institute... you know the group ADMINISTERED BY THE UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT that is an amalgamation of museums and researcher centres claim him to be the link for gynaecological experiments done without consent

So if you have a problem with the claim that he performed experiments on slaves take it up with the government, the museums, and the researchers who said it as well.

It is very bothersome that when a claim like this is made, that your instinct, and of the other poster is the immediately minimise it and claim it can't be true. It is almost like an immediate defensive manoeuvre.

[Belize]

I'm shopping for sailboats and thinking about just sailing the Pacific for a looooong loooong time while the extremists go nuts. If you are smart, you also might want to consider it.

Please make sure you're away from any satellite signals too.

[Felya]

Please make sure you're away from any satellite signals too.

How are they going to win this civil war, if they all boat into the pacific during hurricane season? Is this some sort of... if you don’t love us, we will kill our selfs... shit?

[Breccia]

RNC announces Trump will accept the Party of Trump nomination in Jacksonville, Florida.

Hey @Benggaul how's Florida looking these days? And how do you feel about leading questions?

[Felya]

RNC announces Trump will accept the Party of Trump nomination in Jacksonville, Florida.

Hey @Benggaul how's Florida looking these days? And how do you feel about leading questions?

How is making 100s of Trump voters sick going to hell anything? What the fuck is wrong with this lunatic?

[Breccia]

How is making 100s of Trump voters sick going to hell anything?

The Party of Trump is in full retreat at this point. Florida's been trying to help Trump as much as possible, and Biden still leads. Trump desperately wants a packed crowd of cheering fans, he always does, but he also needs to project the message that the Party of Trump is still alive and well and bigly and yuge.

What happens 5 to 12 days later is not important. Trump needs the message, not the messenger.

Around 336 delegates are scheduled to travel to Charlotte, while Trump will travel to Jacksonville.

[Benggaul]

RNC announces Trump will accept the Party of Trump nomination in Jacksonville, Florida.

Hey @<a href="https://www.mmo-champion.com/member.php?u=642233" target="_blank">Benggaul</a> how's Florida looking these days? And how do you feel about leading questions?

*checks numbers before going to bed*
Florida reports highest single-day total of coronavirus cases

[Belize]

How are they going to win this civil war, if they all boat into the pacific during hurricane season? Is this some sort of... if you don’t love us, we will kill our selfs... shit?

They'll win this civil about as much as they won the last

[Masark]

How is making 100s of Trump voters sick going to hell anything?

I could answer that question, but I won't.

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They'll win this civil about as much as they won the last

Just make sure that anyone offering compromises 12 years later is shot on sight.

[Breccia]

We have more exact quotes from Trump from that meeting in Dallas. The one the African-Americans weren't invited to.

We have so many different elements of strength in this country, we have such potential in this country, we have the greatest potential. But we get off-subject and we start thinking about things that don't matter or don't matter much. The important things, we don't even discuss but we are here to discuss very important things today.

Not since Churchill has a world leader been this eloquent.

On Thursday, Trump repeatedly lauded police forces and described those who used excessive force as "bad apples." And instead of speaking about police violence against black people, Trump decried officers who are targeted in the line of duty. He also suggested his attempts at racial reconciliation would go "quickly and easily."

The President tried to get back to politics as usual amid the coronavirus pandemic and ongoing protests against police brutality, hosting a roundtable to discuss health, economic and justice disparities. He is expected to attend a multimillion dollar reelection fundraiser.

Three key black law enforcement officials in the region -- the region's police chief, sheriff and district attorney -- were not invited to the roundtable, CNN has confirmed. However, the Glenn Heights Police Chief Vernell E. Dooley, who is African American, was invited. Glenn Heights is south of Dallas and has a population of about 16,000 people.

Besides the bolded -- deplorable -- of course Trump wants to get back to "politics as normal". Because everything he touched is falling apart, and he wants to get out of that without any consequences or responsibility. Like when his rich daddy got him out of jams.

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Hmm.

Esper orders a review of the military force used on unarmed civilians in peaceful protest for Trump's photo op.

While this is unlikely to lead to anything -- the report is due July 30th for example -- every public step taken by the military so far has been pretty sour. I think this is Esper gently tapping Trump on the shoulder.