It’s late/early, and I need to deal with some shit, so this is my last reply to you on this comments section. Reply or don’t; I don’t give a fuck.

But your comments are saying just that.

No, they’re not. Voter/electoral fraud can happen with or without happening in such large numbers that it requires throwing out an entire election. It’s not a case of “either massive fraud happened or no fraud happened”; it’s a matter of “if fraud happened, we need to see how much fraud happened before we toss an election”.

now there’s no evidence of voter fraud? Which is it?

I said there was no credible evidence of voter fraud. But even if we accept what the Trump legal beagles call “evidence” as credible evidence, nothing that they’ve offered proves voter/electoral fraud at a level that would change the results of even one state, let alone multiple states. (And since the results would obviously be tainted on the presidential race, every downballot race would need to be thrown out as well, since presidential ballots aren’t printed separately from the downballot races and one part of the ballot being fraudulent calls the entire ballot into question.)

Entire tweets had been removed, accounts deleted, and not just on Twitter either. There was censorship on a massive scale. Also placing those warnings is a form of censorship.

Moderation is not censorship. Kicking people off private property is not censorship. Adding speech to existing speech is not censorship. If you can explain exactly how they are censorship, feel free — but keep in mind that I wrote two articles for this site about exactly this notion, so you won’t be able to easily convince me that I’m wrong.

After the AP did.

So what?

And you do know news stations do NOT call the election right?

That rhetorical gimmick will not work on me.

Trump has not tried to take over the election like your precious dems said he would.

Only because even GOP leaders would tell him (and likely already have told him) that they won’t support him doing that shit. But if he thought he could do it and get away with it, he would. He’d consider it Putin-like, and we all know how hard Trump kisses Putin’s ass.

Has he announced he refuses to leave?

No, but he hasn’t announced that he will leave, either.

And what is your solution? Socialism?

Democratic socialism (i.e., taxing the fuck out of obscenely wealthy capitalists to pay for public works and institutions such as infrastructure and nationalized healthcare).

When you break everyone into their own separate groups that is how you get the mess we are in now.

No, trying to act like people who say their lives matter because they’re part of a group that has historically been told “your lives don’t matter” are also saying “people who aren’t like us don’t matter, and we’re going to fucking get revenge on them” is how we get to that mess.

let’s keep everyone locked up till the big scary virus is gone

If you can think of a better way to stop the virus that isn’t “let millions of people die and millions more suffer long-term damage from a debilitating viral disease so we can all get herd immunity”, feel free to offer that solution.

I am not normally like this but, I have so much time on my hands after being laid off in February that I stay up late arguing with words on a screen.

Not as fun as you’d hoped, is it? (Trust me, I’m not having a ball over here, either.)

I want the economy to open up so I can get back to work and not kill myself

So do a lot of other people. But until you can guarantee that we can somehow open the economy back up in full and not cause millions of COVID deaths (and fuck the economy up the ass all over again) as a result, we’re all shit out of luck.

Effects that will outlive the pandemic.

COVID will do the same thing. How many people must suffer for the sake of the economy?

They should also be charged with murder if the baby has a heartbeat.

Does that apply to miscarriages and stillbirths that happen after the fetus has a detectable heartbeat? Does that apply to abortions done to save the life of the mother even if the fetus has a detectable heartbeat? Who gets charged and sent to jail, and for how long should they be imprisoned in what I assume will be a maximum security state penitentiary?

Where do you draw the line? At conception? At birth? 6 weeks? 9 weeks?

I like the Swedish model.

I also think there should be huge criminal consequences for women that can’t keep their legs closed.

If a woman is impregnated by rape, should she suffer legal consequences because she couldn’t “keep her legs closed”? Because it sounds less like you want to punish women for having an abortion (or more than one abortion) and more like you want to punish women for having any kind of sex/being impregnated via rape. And while I disagree with the notion of “using abortion as birth control”, I’m not about to call for a woman to face “huge criminal consequences” (which reads like “life in prison” to me) for doing that.

How the hell do you expect to have reform if there isn’t money for training?

So we don’t take money away from training. We take money away from other aspects of the police — then put it towards the kinds of social programs that can help people before they become desperate and turn to crime. We currently ask the police to do too much; easing their burden is a good first step to reform, and we can ease that burden if we defund the police and transition those funds to institutions that will help ease that burden.

Less training is why our police are the way they are.

No, our police are the way they are because of bad training — be it unconsciously biased towards people of color, biased towards a “war zone”/“everyone is your enemy” mindset, or some other bullshit. Cops don’t need more overall training; they need better training from the get-go.

I would also add removing qualified immunity across the board. I don’t think anyone should be "immune" just because of the position they hold.

Look at that, we can agree on something. (Fuck qualified immunity.) ????

The military surplus is due to the lower funding and the increase in heavily armed criminals.

In larger cities, I can understand the need for this kind of hardware (even though I don’t agree with the idea that the police need all of it). But PDs in smaller cities get their hands on MRAPs and shit, and they don’t need those things. And the militarization of the police goes hand-in-hand with the “war zone” training I mentioned to make the average officer think they have to treat everyone who isn’t a cop as an “enemy combatant” — only without the military rules of engagement coming into play.

Gun laws don’t work either so more gun laws won’t work.

Gun laws can work if they’re the right gun laws. Just look at Japan, where gun violence is so rare because of the country’s strict gun ownership laws that such violence tends to make the news outside of Japan. I’m not sure what could work here, but making legal gun ownership contingent on passing an exhaustive safety and responsibility course could be a good start.