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One might easily prefer Kim Jong Un over Trump too.
Those floating paint chips are worth thousands of dollars! Or rather, that’s what the administration paid for them.
Also 50, 70, and 100 year sentences for people who were protesting against ICE in Texas
What are the chances that these people will get pardoned, etc, when(if) normality returns?
Also what’s the chances that the judge who handed down these long and unfair sentences will get any repercussions for being so obviously corrupt?
Honestly 50/50
You can’t really bounce back from the bullshit that has just ensued immediately, it’s also kinda apparent to your average leftist that the democratic party is kind spineless as fuck when it comes to the right, so to have judges IN TEXAS MIND YOU bounce back from their previous decisions? Not gonna be too easy
I feel like the guy who got 30 years for picking up a box of zines is a much better example here.
Explain plz?
We’ve had plenty of examples of what happens when you let autocrats take power. It’s not like Trump didn’t tell us who he was. For that matter, it’s not like the Republican Party hasn’t been obvious about who they are since Reagan.
And yet we keep electing them.
Maybe we do so because it’s macho, and voting for anyone else is effeminate. Or we do so to punish the Democrats when they’re wishy-washy. Or we do so to own the libs (and in 2026, to return non-whites and women to non-citizen status.)
It’s a fine mess we’ve gotten ourselves into, and I’m unsure we can’t get ourselves out without a whole lot of people suffering and dying.
People are gling to suffer and die no matter what at this point, so we’d might as well go down swinging.
I’m gonna see what happens in November, but history tells us that violent dictatorships are rarely brought down by peaceful means.
Oh, there are peaceful movements that work. But then the autocrats can sometimes be eager to fire the first shots. Take January 6th, 2021 for example.
As Nelson Mandela put it, A freedom fighter learns the hard way that it is the oppressor who defines the nature of the struggle,and the oppressed is often left no recourse but to use methods that mirror those of the oppressor. At a point, one can only fight fire with fire.
This is a good take. America owns all of this shitshow.
Nobody likes warm beer.
Here in Australia our racist nutbag pollie is pretending a poster that was dropped behind her could have been a bomb… and now wants police protection
And people keep listening to her as if she’s a champion for the working class. Fuck off Pauline you vapid cunt, people with more than 2 brain cells can see through your facade.
You haven’t heard? She’s absolutely interested in uniting the nation into one.
Which is why she openly hates woke people, greenies, lefties, first nation ceremonies (and therefore traditional first nations), people who don’t speak english (also some of our first nations), trans people and migrants. She definitely tries to unite suspected war criminals too.
In her defence, she does spend 1 day a year trying to unite everyone… Australia day. Everyone MUST unite on that day, including first nations who were invaded that day at one time.
And, she at least waited until the day after Australia day to release her “anti-woke” video and song which started openly attacking Aussies she deems are “unacceptable”
In the defense of the North Korea outrage, they lobotomised the kid and sent the dying body back to US.
Give the Americans some time.
IIRC some experts said that most likely his state was causes by reaction to medicine or something. North Korea prefers to exchange American prisoners for something rather than simply kill them.
only difference here is that the body will already be on us soil
It’s bizarre to see somebody believe that not only will a former Olympic athlete be sentenced for touching paint but to honestly believe he could be beaten into brain damage and die from it.
Chances are the guy walks away scot free and then sues the US Government.
Wait until you find out what the current regime and its supporters thinks about being able to sue for violating the constitution.
Frankly, I don’t care what the buffoon thinks.
We took his name off the Kennedy building, we’re suing comanies for AI racial bias, we blocked his DOJ from collecting trans medical records, and we just told his ICE to fuck off from immigration hearing locations.
The courts aren’t completely corrupted yet and they are still in charge.
More things that you wouldn’t have thought possible in polite society have been happening in recent years.
Since US was a colony.
Yeah because he’s white.
How is this fake news getting such high upvote ratio
He wasn’t literally surgically lobotomized no - but he did have extremely severe neurological damage from an unknown source which put him in a vegetative state that he never regained consciousness from. If it was done by DPRK intentionally or not isn’t known, but he did suffer those injuries during his time imprisoned under their supervision, and generally it’s held that harm to a prisoner is the fault of the captor.
Yes, that’s not “North Korea lobotomising him”. Hence fake news. A lobotomy cuts off the front of the brain
It would be the first time North Korea has harmed an American in this context and it’s pretty likely to be unintentional if they wanted to trade prisoners
You seem to have experience with lobotomy.
Appreciate your kind words
What a tedious semantic argument. An inaccurate use of a term in an informal setting that nonetheless quite accurately describes the symptoms he experienced, is not fake news - it’s not even news, it’s an internet comment. It’s been corrected now.
it’s pretty likely to be unintentional
It’s generally unintentional to beat someone and have them wind up in a vegetative state.
See the other comment from someone else, they were not beaten at all and the one anonymous report that he was appears to be fabricated
Not what the other comment says.
“Didn’t they beat the guy so badly he had brain damage and died?”
Is that not what this person is saying?
Actually shut the fuck up. Please.
That’s demonstrably false.
Which part?
Edit: apparently the lobotomized part.
Getting hit with the biggest “um, actually” energy from the tankie battalion 🙄
land of the free, home of the brave
Didn’t they beat the guy so badly he had brain damage and died?
Much worse.
He was vegetative. Kept alive by life support.
No, but we’ve given Antifa protestors fifty years plus for conspiring to shoot ICE. Give us time.
No.
You don’t know that, though. Nobody (except maybe the DPRK) knows what the cause of his brain damage was, but injuries from torture could easily have healed in the 16 (maybe) months after he suffered the injury. It does not have to be a severe beating to cause severe brain injury, unfortunately, just an unlucky strike.
Did you read the article here?
Yes? I fail to see how it’s relevant to your argument, it agrees with exactly what I just said.
a kid got years in North Korean prison for stealing a poster
The full story of this kid was far crazier than the post implies. (https://archive.is/kyR8h)
Firstly, he wasn’t in jail for years. He was in jail for 17 months, largely due to the chill relations between the Obama government and North Korea during that time. It is common for US expats to receive special release with a bit of glad handing and brown nosing from a US diplomat, and the fact that Bill Richardson wasn’t able to secure Otto’s release was the exception rather than the rule.
But secondly, and much more curiously, the story spun up after his release looked more and more like a fabrication the deeper journalists probed.
The previously unreported detail of when Otto was admitted to the Friendship Hospital changes the narrative of what could have happened to him. If Otto was “repeatedly beaten,” as the intel reports suggested, it would logically have been during the two to six weeks between his sentencing, when videos of him showed no signs of physical damage, and “April,” as the North Korean brain scan was dated. But Otto was apparently unconscious by the next morning. The coroner found no evidence of bludgeoning on Otto’s body. And when one takes into account that the entire sourced public case that Otto was beaten derives from that single anonymous official who spoke to The New York Times, the theory begins to crack.
It is for this paucity of evidence that, though the public discourse about Otto’s death has long been dominated by talk of beatings, there have been doubts among North Korea experts that the intelligence reports were correct. Of the dozen experts I spoke to, only a single one thought there was even a remote likelihood that he had been beaten. “I don’t believe Otto was physically tortured,” Andrei Lankov said in his office in Seoul. “The campaign to make Otto a symbol of North Korea’s cruelty was psychological preparation to justify military operations.”
Many experts pointed out that though North Korea is often portrayed as irrational, the Kim family had to be “both brutal and smart,” as Lankov said, to maintain its relative power on the world stage, especially for such a small, impoverished country. What incentive would they have to lose a valuable bargaining chip, especially when they had never been so thoughtless before? To these experts, it made much more sense that Otto was treated like all other detained Americans and that an unexpected catastrophe occurred. But despite the experts’ doubts, none of them could disprove the intelligence reports indicating that Otto had been beaten. However, a senior-level American official who reviewed the reports told me, “In general, the intel reports were wrong, as the medical examinations have shown. They were apparently not even correct about where Otto was or when he was beaten, for God’s sake. Likely, the reports were just hearsay. Someone heard third- or fourth-hand that Otto was sick, and that person decided he was beaten. The North Koreans have never tortured a white guy physically. Never.” The official said he did not know of the Trump administration having other sources of information about Otto being beaten.
So you had a US expat detained for an extended period, only to be released into US custody as an attempt by the NK government to curry favor with Trump. But in the process of being released, Otto falls into a vegetative state with no evidence of physical violence perpetrated against him. The poor state of his health is conveyed to the Trump administration and immediately poisons relations with the new administration.
And over the next several months, Trump begins to ratchet tensions with North Korea as a potential prelude to war.
How did this happen? Who did it benefit?
So a guy got imprisoned by the most brutal government in the world. And then he fell into vegetative state. But said government has nothing to do with the vegetative state?
Do people just do that? Do people just go “eh, I’ve had enough, maybe I’ll just turn my brain off for a while”.
Regardless of whether any beatings occurred, when someone is imprisoned in your country, they are under your care, and you are responsible for them. It doesn’t matter whether it’s malnutrition, beatings, or if he just smacked his head against the wall on his own accord really hard: it is the responsibility of the custodian to ensure the good and proper health of those in their custody. That is the position of international human rights law. It doesn’t even matter if a prisoner decides to kill themselves, a death in custody is always the responsibility of the custodian and in that case it’d still be the custodian’s fault for allowing the creation of circumstances that allows prisoners to kill themselves.
It is not usual for a person to suddenly become comatose while in custody. And even if that did happen, it was North Korea’s positive responsibility to notify consular officials and the family of that, and deliver proper medical care to them.
I have a friend who work at the time for a company that offer tour in weird places, the story running between this type of travel agencies at the time was that the guy refused to listen security instructions, got way more drunk and tried to go, multiple times, in place clearly mark « don’t go there ». After a wile the hotel staff had to call the police
the story running between this type of travel agencies at the time was that the guy refused to listen security instructions, got way more drunk and tried to go, multiple times, in place clearly mark « don’t go there ».
Yeah, that doesn’t surprise me. Not unusual for someone to come into the country on a tourist visa and commit a nasty taboo.
It helps to remember that this is a country we are still functionally at war with. Imagine a Ukrainian taking a vacation in Moscow. Or a Palestinian touring Tel Aviv. That’s what these Americans are undertaking.
As a safety measure the agency of my friends now refuse American when going in North Korea
Or a Palestinian touring Tel Aviv.
21% of the population of Israel is Palestinian. There’s tens of thousands of Palestinians living in the Jaffa neighbourhood of Tel Aviv.
21% of the population of Israel is Palestinian.
Not for long
Who is facing years for touching floating paint chips? Link to article?
https://abcnews.com/Politics/olympian-arrested-reflecting-pool-damage/story?id=134078925
Three-time U.S. Olympian David Hearn told ABC News that police arrested him on Friday after he touched a piece of blue coating that was partially detached from the bottom of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool.
According to this, the charge is vandalism in DC Superior Court. That would be a misdemeanor, carrying less than 1 year in prison.
I wasn’t able to find a case entry in DC Superior Court’s docket system.
Unlike what most people seem to think, the US criminal court system is not broken in such a manner that would allow someone to go to prison for years for this. Trump prosecutors have a reputation for poor performance in court. All the competent prosecutors have quit or were pushed out for failing to prosecute obviously loser cases or sign legally unsound court filings. All that are left are the idiot Trump loyalists whose only experience in criminal law is being arrested for drink driving.
Grand juries refuse to indict these defendants for obviously trivial crimes, and trial juries will acquit.
They tried to charge someone with assaulting a federal agent for lobbing a sandwich at a Border Patrol goon during a protest. The Trump-appointed chief prosecutor in Washington made a TikTok about how they were coming down hard on protestors. It went to trial. The jury acquitted.
I remind that juries have to be drawn from the local area (i.e. Washington, DC) and the city hates Trump’s guts. He lost by over 80 percentage points in the last election there.
Wasn’t WarmBeer a spy?
deleted by creator
Didn’t the people arrested for the paint chips turn out to be fake?
WH claims six people have been arrested, last I checked we only have evidence of two being arrested (both misdemeanors)
Sure they are.
You probably don’t realize, but being put through the legal system, even if you’re found innocent, is life destroying in many cases.
Walk me through your thoughts process. Are you denying reality because it is just so crushing that we live in a fascist dictatorship, or are you denying reality because you think fascism will help you and you’re one of the good ones?
Just learned that we live in a fascist dictatorship.
Do you live under a rock? It’s imperative that you learn more about the regime. Nobody is safe. There are concentration camps. People have been murdered with no due process and the murderers still walk free.
You’ve been called out already for your bs so I won’t bother.
You’re either ignorant or ragebaiting. Either way… Stop. You’re not the joker from dark knight.
