US Erection 12 *AND* 16 *AND* 20 *AND* 22 *AND* 24 *AND* Beyond

[Per]

Yeah, the Orange One is not a big fan of rule of law, due process or human rights.
He is more of a royal decree kind of guy.


Meanwhile, his trade war is starting to affect the US economy:

[Cousin Strawberry]

[5thhorseman]

Yeah, the Orange One is not a big fan of rule of law, due process or human rights.
He is more of a royal decree kind of guy.


Meanwhile, his trade war is starting to affect the US economy:

The stock market is not the economy.

I thought you would know this Per

[5thhorseman]

I'm not sure why they keep referring to this as deportation. He didn't get sent back home to Venezuela.

No, this is incarceration, to a gulag no less, without a conviction, trial, or even a criminal charge! They're just making people disappear. How much more fascist can you get?

But it's okay to Doc and his orange hero, I guess cause they're brownies. " They got the due process they deserved."

[Per]

I'm not sure why they keep referring to this as deportation. He didn't get sent back home to Venezuela.

No, this is incarceration, to a gulag no less, without a conviction, trial, or even a criminal charge! They're just making people disappear. How much more fascist can you get?

But it's okay to Doc and his orange hero, I guess cause they're brownies. " They got the due process they deserved."

Guess ICE is just an American version of of Gestapo.

https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/video/9.6691374

[Topper]

I'm not sure why they keep referring to this as deportation.

Because the Aryan Bimbos say it is.

Nice breeding stock.

[Argay Ham]

Come on newbie, know your audience!

Fair enough Jello, I actually kind of want to move to buttfuck BC anyways. My family is from Buttfuck, BC anyhow.

Me mum actually babysat once for Travis Green and his brother back in the day. She said "that's a good family over there"...

[Argay Ham]

Guess ICE is just an American version of of Gestapo.

https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/video/9.6691374

Bill C-24, formally known as the "Strengthening Canadian Citizenship Act," is a Canadian law that amends the Citizenship Act, making it harder to obtain and easier to lose citizenship, particularly for dual citizens convicted of certain crimes or engaging in activities harmful to Canada.
Here's a more detailed breakdown:
Purpose:
Bill C-24, introduced in February 2014,

WHERE MY SECOND CLASS CITIZENS AT? FETCH ME SOME FUCKING WATER LMAOOOOOOO*

*For the more daft, this has been - sarcasm. Vote however the fuck you want, I'll be OK. I'm just worried about you. Don't get caught fucking jaywalking out there.

[Per]

Guess ICE is just an American version of of Gestapo.

https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/video/9.6691374

Bill C-24, formally known as the "Strengthening Canadian Citizenship Act," is a Canadian law that amends the Citizenship Act, making it harder to obtain and easier to lose citizenship, particularly for dual citizens convicted of certain crimes or engaging in activities harmful to Canada.
Here's a more detailed breakdown:
Purpose:
Bill C-24, introduced in February 2014,

WHERE MY SECOND CLASS CITIZENS AT? FETCH ME SOME FUCKING WATER LMAOOOOOOO*

*For the more daft, this has been - sarcasm. Vote however the fuck you want, I'll be OK. I'm just worried about you. Don't get caught fucking jaywalking out there.

"convicted of" is fine, "engaging in activities" is a red flag.

Something as significant as revoking citizenship should definitely require a trial and a conviction, not just some loosey goosey "engaging in activities". The latter opens up the possibility of just rounding up random people and deporting them without due process.

In Sweden our constitution makes it clear that citizenship is irrevocable. Some parties on the right would like to make a change to this though, and allow it for people with dual citizenship who had used bribes or false information to obtain their citizenship, or if they have committed crimes that were a threat to the state or came under the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court.

We'll see what happens. Changes to the constitution need a two thirds majority in parliament twice, with a general election held between the two parliamentary votes, so it's not a walk in the park.

There is actually one way you can lose your citizenship already. If you were born to Swedish parents abroad and have never lived in Sweden, you lose it automatically when you turn 22. An exception though is that if you have lived for at least seven years in another Nordic country, or if you can prove that you have strong ties to Sweden, you still get to keep it.

[Argay Ham]

"convicted of" is fine, "engaging in activities" is a red flag.

Something as significant as revoking citizenship should definitely require a trial and a conviction, not just some loosey goosey "engaging in activities". The latter opens up the possibility of just rounding up random people and deporting them without due process.

In Sweden our constitution makes it clear that citizenship is irrevokable. Some parties on the right would like to make a change to this though, and allow it for people with dual citizenship who had used bribes or false information to obtain their citizenship, or if they have committed crimes that were a threat to the state or came under the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court.

We'll see what happens. Changes to the constitution need a two thirds majority in parliament twice, with a general election held between the two parliamentary votes, so it's not a walk in the park.

There is actually one way you can lose your citizenship already. If you were born to Swedish parents abroad and have never lived in Sweden, you lose it automatically when you turn 22. An exception though is that if you have lived for at least seven years in another Nordic country, or if you can prove that you have strong ties to Sweden, you still get to keep it.

Holy shit, an actual response without some stupid soundbite from the biased media. THANK YOU. Can't wait to sink my teeth in. Let's see...

Yeah, agreed. The law shouldn't be tied up in vague legalese like the way they worded it. I would like to make citizenship irrevocable, but the requirements to become a citizen were torn down by the neoliberal agenda. Funny word, neoliberal. You tack on the prefix neo, and it soon becomes the opposite of whatever follows it. I guess that makes me a neoconservative, in a sense.

You see the bloodletting of this in just the forcing people who don't *actually* want to be here, on the roads. They just bribe ICBC. I've been a first-hand witness to this going to renew my licence. Far be it for me to speak out and be called a racist, though.

ICBC is among the most corrupt organizations I've been compelled to be a part of. They just straight vibe their way through insurance pay-out, I've been on the winning side and losing side of that. I had a friend who once said Hitler could run on a platform on eliminating ICBC monopoly, and the vote would be pretty split and I don't disagree. It's that bad. Christy Clark and Gordon Campbell treated it like a slush fund for 17 years, and as soon as they lost power....there's some dipshit like Kevin Falcon immediately on the radio saying how bad it is...like YEAH. WE KNOW. WE KNOW WHO DID IT, TOO. And it wasn't the fucking leader of the oppisition. It was the actual gov't, that YOU were a part of for 17 years, lining your own pockets.

I actually love the Yanks clowning on us for not having a Constitution til 1982. That's all well and dandy, but the US Constitution was written before the fucking telegraph was invented, and muskets were the primary means of "arms". Now we have Zoom, and can mow down 50 souls in a matter of seconds thanks to automatic fire. Congrats, retards. Enjoy your country. They can't even get that one straight because the only sitting Pres who has talked about taking guns away from citizens is the orange dumbass they voted in TWICE.

Final point, you can lose your citizenship in many ways. For me, I'd revoke it if I had any priors they decided to out-the-blue decided to put me in jail over. Since I'm whiter than fucking ghost, and my family has been in Canada since the fucking Potato Famine, I'm all good. Hooray for me. I live by a different set of rules than anyone with any shade of skin or different tongue does, thanks to this stupid anti-Canadian bill does.

I don't think how much of you realize how alarmingly close to "mandatory military service or deportation" we are. That's alright with me. I'll die for this country and the lot of you, even if I disagree politically with some of you. I'm just not sure how many with a different shade of skin, or ethnic background would follow me down the rabbit hole of doom that is. That's kind of sad, and are you folks real Canadians or just Americans cosplaying as Canadian? For me, I have Polish friends I'd die for, Japanese friends i'd die for, Arab friends I'd die for, Indian friends I'd die for, etc.

Serious concern. Y'all are getting played for the fiddles you are out there. We've worked way too hard to cultivate a style of life where we all come together to give up on it now. My suggestion to those out there reading this, who are...Chinese-Canadian, Korean-Canadian, Japanese-Canadian, Indo-Canadian, Arab-Canadian, etc. stand with your elbows up or just move to the States to face the prejudice you have rightfully earned by your own idiotic choices.

[Topper]

I found it interesting during the campaign that Trump kept on about Venezuelan immigrants without once mentioning Chavez/Madura dictatorships.

Now I see Trump threatening to replace the Judiciary with his supporters as any good dictator does at the earliest opportunity. You would't want your actions to be deemed illegal would you?

You'd almost think he was Justin Trudeau.

[Blob Mckenzie]

The hilarious part of this eyesore of a thread is the three biggest Trump dink suckers are Canadians who likely don't cross the border or do any commerce with the Excited States. Are their businesses or their way of life impacted by who rules down south? Very doubtful. It's really fascinating watching Canadians tell Americans how to run their country.

[Per]

Interesting article in The Atlantic:

EUROPE’S ELON MUSK PROBLEM

He and other tech oligarchs are making it impossible to conduct free and fair elections anywhere.
By Anne Applebaum

During an american election, a rich man can hand out $1 million checks to prospective voters. Companies and people can use secretly funded “dark money” nonprofits to donate unlimited money, anonymously, to super PACs, which can then spend it on advertising campaigns. Pod­casters, partisans, or anyone, really, can tell outrageous, incendiary lies about a candidate. They can boost those falsehoods through targeted online advertising. No special courts or election rules can stop the disinformation from spreading before voters see it. The court of public opinion, which over the past decade has seen and heard everything, no longer cares. U.S. elections are now a political Las Vegas: Anything goes.

But that’s not the way elections are run in other countries. In Britain, political parties are, at least during the run-up to an election, limited to spending no more than £54,010 per candidate. In Germany, as in many other European countries, the state funds political parties, proportionate to their number of elected parliamentarians, so that politicians do not have to depend on, and become corrupted by, wealthy donors. In Poland, courts fast-track election-related libel cases in the weeks before a vote in order to discourage people from lying.

Nor is this unique to Europe. Many democracies have state or public media that are obligated, at least in principle, to give equal time to all sides. Many require political donations to be transparent, with the names of donors listed in an online registry. Many have limits on political advertising. Some countries also have rules about hate speech and indict people who break them.

Countries apply these laws to create conditions for fair debate, to build trust in the system, and to inspire confidence in the winning candidates. Some democracies believe that transparency matters—­that voters should know who is funding their candidates, as well as who is paying for political messages on social media or anywhere else. In some places, these rules have a loftier goal: to prevent the rise of anti­democratic extremism of the kind that has engulfed democracies—­and especially European democracies—­­in the past.

But for how much longer can democracies pursue these goals? We live in a world in which algorithms controlled by American and Chinese oligarchs choose the messages and images seen by millions of people; in which money can move through secret bank accounts with the help of crypto schemes; and in which this dark money can then boost anonymous social-media accounts with the aim of shaping public opinion. In such a world, how can any election rules be enforced? If you are Albania, or even the United Kingdom, do you still get to set the parameters of your public debate? Or are you now forced to be Las Vegas too?

Although it’s easy to get distracted by the schoolyard nicknames and irresponsible pedophilia accusations that Elon Musk flings around, these are the real questions posed by his open, aggressive use of X to spread false information and promote extremist and anti-European politicians in the U.K., Germany, and elsewhere. The integrity of elections—and the possibility of debate untainted by misinformation injected from abroad—is equally challenged by TikTok, the Chinese platform, and by Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta, whose subsidiaries include Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Threads. TikTok says the company does not accept any paid political advertising. Meta, which announced in January that it is abandoning fact-checking on its sites in the U.S., also says it will continue to comply with European laws. But even before Zucker­berg’s radical policy change, these promises were empty. Meta’s vaunted content curation and moderation have never been transparent. Nobody knew, and nobody knows, what exactly Facebook’s algorithm was promoting and why. Even an occasional user of these platforms encounters spammers, scammers, and opaque accounts running foreign influence operations. No guide to the algorithm, and no real choices about it, are available on Meta products, X, or TikTok.

Musk’s personal X account has more than 212 million followers, giving him enormous power to set the news agenda around the world.
In truth, no one knows if any platforms really comply with political-funding rules either, because nobody outside the companies can fully monitor what happens online during an intense election campaign—and after the voting has ended, it’s too late. According to declassified Romanian-intelligence documents, someone allegedly spent more than $1 million on TikTok content in the 18 months before an election in support of a Romanian presidential candidate who declared that he himself had spent nothing at all. In a belated attempt to address this and other alleged discrepancies, a Romanian court canceled the first round of that election, a decision that itself damaged Romanian democracy.

Not all of this is new. Surreptitious political-party funding was a feature of the Cold War, and the Russian government has continued this practice, sometimes by offering deals to foreign business­people close to pro-Russian politicians. Press moguls with international political ambitions are hardly a novelty. Rupert Murdoch, an Australian who has U.S. citizenship, has long played an outsize role in U.K. politics through his media companies. John Major, the former British prime minister and Conservative Party leader, has said that in 1997, Murdoch threatened to pull his newspapers’ support unless the prime minister pursued a more anti-European policy. Major refused. Murdoch has said, “I have never asked a prime minister for anything,” but one of his Conservative-­leaning tabloids, The Sun, did endorse the Labour Party in the next election. Major lost.

That incident now seems almost quaint. Even at the height of its influence, the print edition of The Sun sold 4 million copies a day. More to the point, it operated, and still does, within the constraints of U.K. rules and regulations, as do all broadcast and print media. Murdoch’s newspapers take British libel and hate-speech laws into consideration when they run stories. His business strategy is necessarily shaped by rules limiting what a single company can own. After his journalists were accused of hacking phones and bribing police in the early 2000s, Murdoch himself had to testify before an investigative commission, and he closed down one of his tabloids for good.

Social media not only has far greater reach—Musk’s personal X account has more than 212 million followers, giving him enormous power to set the news agenda around the world—it also exists outside the legal system. Under the American law known as Section 230, passed nearly three decades ago, internet platforms are not treated as publishers in the U.S. In practice, neither Facebook nor X has the same legal responsibility for what appears on their platforms as do, say, The Wall Street Journal and CNN. And this, too, has consequences: Americans have created the information climate that other countries must accept, and this allows deceptive election practices to thrive. If countries don’t have their own laws, and until recently most did not, Section 230 effectively requires them to treat social-media companies as if they exist outside their legal systems too.

Brazil broke with this pattern last year, when a judge demanded that Musk comply with Brazilian laws against spreading misinformation and political extremism, and forced X offline until he did. Several European countries, including the U.K., Germany, and France, have also passed laws designed to bring the platforms into compliance with their own legal systems, mandating fines for companies that violate hate-speech laws or host other illegal content. But these laws are controversial and hard to enforce. Besides, “illegal speech” is not necessarily the central problem. No laws prevented Musk from interviewing Alice Weidel, a leader of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, on X, thereby providing her with a huge platform, available to no other political candidate, in the month before a national election. The interview, which included several glaringly false statements (among others, that Weidel was the “leading” candidate), was viewed 45 million times in 24 hours, a number far beyond the reach of any German public or private media.

Only one institution on the planet is large enough and powerful enough to write and enforce laws that could make the tech companies change their policies. Partly for that reason, the European Union may soon become one of the Trump administration’s most prominent targets. In theory, the EU’s Digital Services Act, which took full effect last year, can be used to regulate, fine, and, in extreme circumstances, ban internet companies whose practices clash with European laws. Yet a primary intent of the act is not punitive, but rather to open up the platforms: to allow vetted researchers access to platform data, and to give citizens more transparency about what they hear and see. Freedom of speech also means the right to receive information, and at the moment social-media companies operate behind a curtain. We don’t know if they are promoting or suppressing certain points of view, curbing or encouraging orchestrated political campaigns, discouraging or provoking violent riots. Above all, we don’t know who is paying for misinformation to be spread online.

In the past, the EU has not hesitated to try to apply European law to tech companies. Over the past decade, for example, Google has faced three fines totaling more than $8 billion for breaking antitrust law (though one of these fines was overturned by the EU’s General Court in 2024).

A group of American oligarchs want to undermine European institutions because they don’t want to be regulated.

In November, the European Commission fined Meta more than $800 million for unfair trade practices. But for how much longer will the EU have this authority? In the fall, J. D. Vance issued an extraordinarily unsubtle threat, one that is frequently repeated in Europe. “If NATO wants us to continue supporting them and NATO wants us to continue to be a good participant in this military alliance,” Vance told an interviewer, “why don’t you respect American values and respect free speech?” Mark Zuckerberg, echoing Vance’s misuse of the expression free speech to mean “freedom to conceal company practices from the public,” put it even more crudely. In a conversation with Joe Rogan in January, Zuckerberg said he feels “optimistic” that President Donald Trump will intervene to stop the EU from enforcing its own antitrust laws: “I think he just wants America to win.”


Does America “winning” mean that European democracies, and maybe other democracies, lose? Some European politicians think it might. Robert Habeck, the German vice chancellor and a leader of that country’s Green Party, believes that Musk’s frenzies of political activity on X aren’t the random blurts of an addled mind, but rather are “logical and systematic.” In his New Year’s address, Habeck said that Musk is deliberately “strengthening those who are weakening Europe,” including the explicitly anti-European AfD. This, he believes, is because “a weak Europe is in the interest of those for whom regulation is an inappropriate limitation of their power.”

Until recently, Russia was the most important state seeking to undermine European institutions. Vladimir Putin has long disliked the EU because it restricts Russian companies’ ability to intimidate and bribe European political leaders and companies, and because the EU is larger and more powerful than Russia, whereas European countries on their own are not. Now a group of American oligarchs also want to undermine European institutions, because they don’t want to be regulated—and they may have the American president on their side. Quite soon, the European Union, along with Great Britain and other democracies around the world, might find that they have to choose between their alliance with the United States and their ability to run their own elections and select their own leaders without the pressure of aggressive outside manipulation. Ironically, countries, such as Brazil, that don’t have the same deep military, economic, and cultural ties to the U.S. may find it easier to maintain the sovereignty of their political systems and the transparency of their information ecosystems than Europeans.

A crunch point is imminent, when the European Commission finally concludes a year-long investigation into X. Tellingly, two people who have advised the commission on this investigation would talk with me only off the record, because the potential for reprisals against them and their organizations—­whether it be online trolling and harassment or lawsuits—­is too great. Still, both advisers said that the commission has the power to protect Europe’s sovereignty, and to force the platforms to be more transparent. “The commission should look at the raft of laws and rules it has available and see how they can be applied,” one of them told me, “always remembering that this is not about taking action against a person’s voice. This is the commission saying that everyone’s voice should be equal.”

At least in theory, no country is obligated to become an electoral Las Vegas, as America has. Global democracies could demand greater transparency around the use of algorithms, both on social media and in the online-advertising market more broadly. They could offer consumers more control over what they see, and more information about what they don’t see. They could enforce their own campaign-funding laws. These changes could make the internet more open and fair, and therefore a better, safer place for the exercise of free speech. If the chances of success seem narrow, it’s not because of the lack of a viable legal framework—­rather it’s because, at the moment, cowardice is as viral as one of Musk’s tweets.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/ar ... 0373061077

[Argay Ham]

^

Meanwhile, like 70% of N. America be like

"Poor Elon, I don't see why no one likes him. Anyways, let's get a brain chip from him so I don't have to think so hard."

Seriously, boomers when I was a child like to clown on those fat fucks from Wall-E and every step they take moves them closer to those smoothie-drinking retards. It's half-hilarious if it wasn't so tragic.

From speaking out against the Vietnam war, to licking boots at the end. A generation of fucking henchmen.

IDK, Y'all begged for Reagan so hard, he gave us NAFTA and then 40 years later you want to tear it to shreds with Donnie the Orange sadsack. If y'all can 180 that hard, why can't I...

[Megaterio Llamas]

https://youtube.com/shorts/sXfyrAzcfjM? ... 6oCf4aRTRy