Just because they were stupid enough to get suckered in doesn't mean they weren't complicit.

Christian pastors are being murdered for preaching on controversial social issues: "We're not going to be able to preach much longer because they'll shoot us in the pulpits. They will kill us in our pulpits. You don't believe me? They're already doing it."

(April 21, 2022 at 11:47 pm)Fake Messiah Wrote: Christian pastors are being murdered for preaching on controversial social issues: "We're not going to be able to preach much longer because they'll shoot us in the pulpits. They will kill us in our pulpits. You don't believe me? They're already doing it."

How can I help?

(April 21, 2022 at 3:06 pm)HappySkeptic Wrote:

(April 21, 2022 at 12:46 am)Irreligious Atheist Wrote: Whether it's legal or not, is it moral? And I know I can't for sure know why these things happen, but my hunch is that there are ulterior motives, because I look at who benefits in these things. Big news comes on the telly that a lone wolf jihadist terrorist attack was just foiled. The normies at home are thinking "thank god for our intelligence community". The intelligence community gets to jerk themselves off and basically say, "see, it's a good thing we have the Patriot Act and took a bunch of your civil liberties away, because that sacrifice by you is what's keeping you safe." And, the MIC potentially gets a bump in approval ratings for their disastrous wars on Muslim countries. Am I crazy for thinking about who benefits in these situations? Maybe, but it makes a hell of a lot of sense to me.

Who benefits thanks to the Whitmer plot? Whitmer for one, who was going way overboard with lockdowns compared to other leaders. This plot turned Whitmer into a hero/ almost martyr of sorts, and was a blot on the name of people who didn't support that crazy level of lockdown. You could say it helped Democrats in general. Also, the Whitmer plot could be used as further justification for the new, upgraded Patriot Act that President Biden has talked about. Again, maybe I'm crazy, and maybe it's just a coincidence that all of these people benefit from the plot and maybe the FBI was just winging it and these are all just bonuses thrown in that they weren't even thinking about. I think powerful people have goals. Many people here seem to just think that all of these powerful people are just winging it as they go along. We'll just have to agree to disagree on that front.

You are off the deep end.

The only thing I agree with is that law enforcement has an incentive to entrap people.  Judges and juries can throw out cases, but it helps law-enforcement careers and funding if more people are charged.  The citizens are generally okay with this, as most people are pro-law-enforcement.  A bad guy got entrapped?  Who cares - he still did something that proved he was a bad guy.

I actually do care about the idea that someone who wouldn't otherwise have done a crime, was actively enticed to do so.  I haven't seen such evidence here.  Just having the FBI involved isn't entrapment.  The right-wing wants this to be a Left-wing plot, when at worst it is a law-enforcement gray area that has existed for as long as I've been alive.

What I was saying about the FBI and them setting up and foiling Muslim terrorist plots is actually a very common view among progressives. Every progressive alternative media outlet I watch, has basically said the exact thing I posted, so I'm not exactly going into 9/11 truther territory here. The war machine and intelligence community will do what it must to justify it's own existence and the erasure of people's rights in the name of safety. Very common view.

It says in the buzzfeed article I posted that undercover people working for the FBI urged violent actions against public officials.

And to Nudge, I never claimed that Whitmer was involved in creating the plot.

-and there was your hook.... "this is a common progressive view". How often do you find yourself at the end of a nutter spiral that began at some point you could credibly believe was a common progressive view?

Let's consider where we are. It's your contention that the fbi, long known and well documented to have a strong rightwing bias like every other law enforcement agency in this country large and small..is just "helping" those damned dirty dems, apparently without being told to do so by those dems, specifically. A conspiracy without any conspirators, between ideologically opposed groups of people....towards either no end, or an end that needs no such non-spiracy to be accomplished.

Not even the fbi could work with that, and you see how they roll. That said, I'm sure the the dems would love it if they had the fbi in their pocket or their corner..and if the magats won't let up on the full on white separatist thing...that's not an entirely impossible state of some future affairs. The political arm of terrorist organizations end up under a hell of alot of scrutiny. That's one of those rare instances where law enforcement is doing something right. Sure as shit beats gunning down civilians for waving a foil wrapped gyro at a traffic stop. As things stand, however, it;s a non starter. Cops don't need to be in on a dem plot to behave badly, and this probably isn't a great example of them behaving badly..nor is it something that you're fully comfortable with..as even you realize and it shows in your posts that you're encroaching on 9/11 truther territory. That might be the last peep you hear from that particular canary.

How many other offramps have you blown passed in a similar manner? There's no plot against the magats, the magats literally are a plot against america. It's not even coincidental that the fbi is all over that shit.

The FBI's ordinary bias doesn't matter. President Trump was a special case and the establishment and intelligence community did not want Donald Trump to be in office. Trump openly shit on the intelligence community all of the time and continuously publicly questioned their findings and credibility.

And like Trump, the pandemic and some of these super strict lockdowns are also a special case. When people don't like that their civil liberties are being taken away, and what Whitmer did was an abuse of power, it helps the governments' case to demonize all of these people.

Yeah, the FBI raids Rudy Giuliani's office and investigates Trump's cronies, and all of the sudden IA claims that it's the FBI who is the bad guy.

Trump fucks up with Covid (like when Jared Kushner abandoned a national testing plan early on in the pandemic because he thought COVID was only affecting blue states) and in IA's world, it's all Fauci's fault.

That's an interesting alternative version of history you've got there IA, one where the fbi wasn't in the tank for the trumpenfuhrer. You can't seem to decide whether they're the tools of authoritarian shitheels, doing what tools of authoritarian shitheels do... or not, can you?

Let's run with it though. If the fbi really were, in this alternate universe, all over trumps criminal administration and cockblocking it behind the scenes at every point, that would..again..be the fbi doing something right for a change.

As for quarantines and lockdowns being some sort of tyranny...that's becoming an article of wignut faith. Why, just a day or two ago a wingnut judge ruled that the centers for disease control can't do anything to control disease. So that tracks.

(April 22, 2022 at 6:51 am)Irreligious Atheist Wrote: The FBI's ordinary bias doesn't matter. President Trump was a special case and the establishment and intelligence community did not want Donald Trump to be in office. Trump openly shit on the intelligence community all of the time and continuously publicly questioned their findings and credibility.

And like Trump, the pandemic and some of these super strict lockdowns are also a special case. When people don't like that their civil liberties are being taken away, and what Whitmer did was an abuse of power, it helps the governments' case to demonize all of these people.

#1 No decent person on the planet, ever, and still, wants Trump to be anything else than someone to point at and tell your kids "whatever you become, dont be like him".
#2 Trump shit on the intelligence community who warned him of Putin, and, oh boy were they wrong! Right?
#3 Trump openly shit on about everything else too, for that matter, like fallen heroes of the US army and their parents, or every US citizen by openly admitting to have downplayed the risk of the upcoming COVID pandemic
#4 Super strict lockdowns? In the US? Try to google "fucking Shanghai"

When the wingnuts tell their grandkids about the bad old days with covid..it'll come off like we were under martial law. They're already myth-building in real time. They were there...they know better, and yet.....