Minneapolis

[AnelkasBeard]

Ffs something has happened related to one of your bogey men and you go myopic and lose your shit. I haven't defended a fuckin soul just pointed out the extremeties of the accounts. It's another tragic loss of life of a fellow human. Some of you paragons of virtue have been mocking the deaths of some and wishing for others to be dead ffs. Hypobastardcrites

Now you're just lying. Again, fuck off.

[Baggiejacko]

Ffs something has happened related to one of your bogey men and you go myopic and lose your shit. I haven't defended a fuckin soul just pointed out the extremeties of the accounts. It's another tragic loss of life of a fellow human. Some of you paragons of virtue have been mocking the deaths of some and wishing for others to be dead ffs. Hypobastardcrites

Now you're just lying. Again, fuck off.

Now you're just being a myopic twat again. Fuck off yerself

---

There are 2 totally opposite versions of events there as usual. One virtually saying it was all peaceful and others saying he'd gone there armed to carry out maximum killings of agents and was refusing to surrender his weapon.

The clearest footage released so far shows the bloke recording the federal agents, on his phone, being generally twattish as they tend to be before he is pepper sprayed in the face, knocked to the ground and then laid into by a group of them. He is entirely in their power at this point. An agent disarms him of his legally concealed weapon, which he had made no attempt to go for at any point, and he is then shot multiple times. It’s as clear as the nose on Donald Trump’s face would be if he was afflicted with the same condition as Pinocchio.

Then there's no question about what happened then. I was just stating the difference in reports at the moment. Not implying any blame on anyone

You love defending the bad guys.

Not a good look.

Knowing who the bad guys are with limited information is a good look?

---

The Mathew Hopkins fan club are alive and well in 2026

[Squid]

This is lengthy, but I think it's an excellent summation of where the US is now, by Andrew Sullivan who is a fairly centrist writer:

I really don’t know what to write.

The first month of 2026 has provided a series of events that have simply broken my heart as well as my brain. Sure, I knew this was possible; I predicted it ten years ago. The word I came up with in the week before the 2016 election to describe a Trump presidency, when I saw it coming, was “abyss.”

Why that word?

To paraphrase Benjamin Franklin, we live in a republic, if we can keep it. And yet, more than two centuries later, we are openly contemplating throwing it up in the air and seeing where it might land.

An abyss is being in mid-air in this rupture in our civilization.

It is where lies and truth are entirely interchangeable; where the rule of law has already been replaced by the rule of one man; where the Congress has abdicated its core responsibilities and become a Greek chorus; where national policy is merely the sum of the whims and delusions of one man; and where every constitutional check on arbitrary power, especially the Supreme Court, is AWOL. In that abyss, even an attempt to explain events through the usual rubric of covering a liberal democracy is absurd. Because that rubric is irrelevant.

And so the wheels spin.

The only honest way to describe what is in front of our noses is that we now live in an elected monarchy with a manic king whose mental faculties are slipping fast. After 250 years, we appear to have elected the modern equivalent of King George III, and are busy dismantling the constitution Americans built to constrain him.



The situation is not irrecoverable — the forms of democracy remain even if they are functionally dead. We have centuries of democratic practice to fall back on. But every moment the logic of the abyss holds, the possibility of returning to democracy attenuates. Tyranny corrupts everything and everyone — fast. David Brooks returns to the ancients today to understand where we are:

As the disease of tyranny progresses, citizens may eventually lose the habits of democracy — the art of persuasion and compromise, interpersonal trust, an intolerance for corruption, the spirit of freedom, the ethic of moderation. “It is easier to crush men’s spirits and their enthusiasm than to revive them,” Tacitus wrote. “Indeed, there comes over us an attachment to the very enforced inactivity, and the idleness hated at first is finally loved.”

Forty percent of the country still backs the tyrant. Forty percent watch this and cheer.

Let us briefly review what they are cheering. For the first time since the Second World War, the president of the United States declared last week that we no longer support the notion of national sovereignty or collective security, and reserve the right to invade and occupy other sovereign countries — even close allies — to extract their resources. Quite a Rubicon. His chief adviser declared international law a dead letter:

[W]e live in a world, in the real world … that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.

To put it bluntly, this was the argument of King George III. It was the justification for the British Empire, and, more hideously, for the Nazi and Soviet occupations of Europe. It’s a rejection of the principle that literally created the United States.

And yet this mad king threw this founding principle away because he believes a) we deserve Greenland as reparations for World War II, b) because Russia and China would invade otherwise, c) because rare earths are there — even though they are buried under a mile of ice — and d) because he didn’t win the Nobel Prize. Insane.

This staggering concession to evil — which cannot be withdrawn — robs us of any case against Russia’s invasion of Ukraine or China’s threat to Taiwan. It legitimizes war by major powers for conquest everywhere. It endangers the entire system of collective security that has kept the peace for nearly 80 years. Why? And for what? Because the king was on a high.

That’s where we are.

This rhetorical red line was crossed just after the king ordered another illegal armed attack on yet another country, Venezuela, and kidnapped its president, Nicolas Maduro, on the grounds that he was trafficking drugs into America. This came only a month after the king pardoned the former president of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernández, who had been convicted a year earlier of trafficking 400 tons of cocaine into the United States, and had been sentenced to 45 years in prison. How is this possible?

The king said he pardoned Hernandez solely because he had been convicted through a “Biden administration set-up” — offering no evidence to back that up — and the White House repeated this “lawfare” bullshit. But the truth is: we still don’t really know why we invaded Venezuela — because there simply isn’t a serious reason except one man’s whim and will to power.

In Minneapolis, meanwhile, the king has sent in a private army of masked anonymous men — five times the size of the police force — to terrorize the populace and round up illegal immigrants. The Fourth Amendment, we now discover, has been effectively suspended. ICE claims the right to break into anyone’s home at any time if they suspect an illegal alien with final deportation orders is inside. A judge’s warrant is superfluous. What could go wrong?

Well, this is how a 56-year-old American citizen with no criminal record was grabbed from his home by masked armed men in St. Paul last week. The anonymous men broke down his door, guns drawn, handcuffed him, took him out into the freezing cold in his boxer shorts (wind chills in the double digits below zero), and whisked him away to “the middle of nowhere” for interrogation ... before being subsequently released.

Not Siberia. Minnesota.



The one thing you could always say about a free society is that the cops do not have a right to break down your doors, grab you and detain you in the middle of the night, on mere suspicions of illegality. You could feel safe here. That simply isn’t true about America anymore.

You also knew you could express any opinion here and be safe from government persecution. Also no longer true — as foreign students have been seized, detained, and deported solely for things they have written or said. In Trump’s America, you are not safe in your home and you have to watch what you say. The two core guarantees of freedom are no longer fully operable here.

And the blithering old king at the center of all this? He went to Europe this week and poured contempt and bile on allies who sent young men and women to die in Afghanistan and Iraq after NATO’s Article V was invoked for the first and last time after 9/11:

We’ve never needed them. We have never really asked anything of them. You know, they’ll say they sent some troops to Afghanistan, or this and that. And they did, they stayed a little back, a little off the front lines.

How does one even respond to such an obscenity? As a proudly pro-American European by birth, maybe I feel this more acutely. But for this draft-dodging pig to erase the sacrifice of 1,160 men and women from America’s allies in the post-9/11 war on terror is a disgrace. And for what? NATO is all but destroyed for just the momentary, sick pleasure of mockery.

And, yes, all of this is now infused with a triumphant, delusional, and hyperactive mania that will only get worse. Trump’s hubris extends to his speeches, where the mood is essentially sing-songy boredom — as if to say: “Why do I even have to explain myself to these morons when my glories are so self-evident?” And so there is no preparation, no coherence — just a stream of addled, entitled, demented consciousness:

The insurance companies are petrified, so they say, “Just give them the boat. We’ll give them money instead.” And I don’t do that. We blow them right the hell out of the water. We see them going out. We blow them out of the water. We don’t have any pirates so much anymore. If we do, they won’t be there long. We’ve cut down with the hitting of the boats that are loaded up with drugs, including submarines. Can you believe they actually buy small… they’re called mini subs, very fast. They’re meant for drugs. We’ve knocked out two of them. The Democrats say, ‘They were fishing. You have ruined somebody’s fishing.’ I would say a submarine is not a fishing boat. You don’t fish. But we’ve knocked down drugs by water, the oceans, the sea by 97.2%, think of that.

And the following passages are from the beginning of the “speech” he gave this week declaring his first year the greatest in the history of the solar system:

I don’t know what the Supreme Court is going to do. I think, to me, it reads so plainly. It couldn’t be plainer. You’re allowed to do a license. Tariff is probably less severe than what a license could be. But think of it. You’re allowed to do a license. And then they have a clause at the end, something to the effect, or what is necessary, something to that effect. And what is necessary was tariffs. I don’t know where there’s a case even there …

[ICE agents are] taking rough — they’re taking rough people like this. Like all of them. We have — so we have 10,000 at least. I could have done 10,000 of them. You’re lucky I only did, like, 100. And this is just — this isn’t even the worst of the group. They have murderers. … All allowed in here by an open-border policy of the worst president in the history of our country. A man that didn’t win the election, by the way, got — it was a rigged election. Everybody knows that now. And by the way, numbers are coming out that show it even more plainly. We caught him. We caught him.

The world sees this. They cannot look away. Countries that have been our allies and friends for decades and centuries are witnessing this display of mindless malice from a crazy person, and drawing their own conclusions. The selfless achievement of generations are being discarded by a senile, distracted, cowardly thug.

All of this is devastating enough. More devastating is how Americans are responding. They aren’t. They don’t really care. The president can violate two of the most cherished and basic tenets of Western civilization — that might does not mean right, and that citizens have inalienable rights the government cannot infringe upon — and most Americans just shrug. Almost every person who was outraged by the senile blather of Biden hails Trump’s senile blather as greatness, four-dimensional chess, the art of the deal, etc. The honesty required for any real democratic deliberation is completely absent. We live in a totalitarian culture of lies everywhere — but primarily from the very top. The White House doctors photos to humiliate American citizens. The lies are the point.

The world sees this too. The menace and malaise can longer be attributed merely to Trump, but to America as a whole. A critical mass of the people of this country want to tear up the Constitution in order to seek revenge and retribution on their domestic opponents and end our alliances for the shits and giggles of pissing on the entire world. Their hatred and resentment of others eclipses anything that might remotely called love of country. They want this president and they want his madness and they want the destruction he will bring. And they will, I fear, experience that destruction soon enough — good and hard, as Mencken might have said. Because God knows what’s coming next.

All we can do now — as this abyss engulfs us — is to tell the truth about it.

[Tokyo Baggie]

This is lengthy, but I think it's an excellent summation of where the US is now, by Andrew Sullivan who is a fairly centrist writer:

Thanks for sharing. Sums it all up pretty well.

[Baggiejacko]

Stupid Americans voted in Chump then wised up to their mistake and voted him out for Biden. How fuckin bad were Biden and Harris to get Chump voted back in? Apply this to Britain now and our alternatives.

[BilstonBaggie]

Stupid Americans voted in Chump then wised up to their mistake and voted him out for Biden. How fuckin bad were Biden and Harris to get Chump voted back in? Apply this to Britain now and our alternatives.

You can’t honestly expect the average American to be able to remember things that only happened 4 years previously. Trump’s first term may as well have not even taken place in the minds of a significant chunk of his voter base. How can they possibly be expected to remember all of the lying and the insanity and the denial of a clear electoral defeat leading to insurrection attempt? All of that stuff just gets forced out of the brain by the constant flow of useful information flooding in from right wing trolls and Russians using Google Translate. You know the kind of stuff. Good solid believable facts like Biden allowing in hundreds of millions of illegal immigrants that have magically disappeared now daddy Trump is back in town. Or how Democrats are more interested in making sure there’s a litter tray in every classroom for students that identify as cats than they are in ensuring Christians aren’t murdered on sight by violent trans activists. People have to be told about that one time when Hunter Biden once borrowed $50 from his dad so he could hire a Mexican, Muslim, dwarf prostitute for a fetish party he was attending and then reimburse his dad for the loan thus proving doddery old senile master criminal Biden’s shadiness. I could go on but I think I’ve made my point already. How could anybody remember anything about the previous 4 Trump years after making room for all of the above plus a near infinite amount more.

Trump won the last election not because his opponent was bad, which isn’t even a position I would assert anyway, she wouldn’t have been my choice and I found her weak as a candidate and hard to warm to. He won because a large chunk of the electorate were too fucking lazy to get off their fat arses to vote, an even larger chunk of the electorate are clearly as thick as pig shit and, probably most crucial of all, a large chunk of the electorate are irredeemably racist or sexist or both. Hate to have to say it but I don’t think any white male Democratic candidate would have lost that election and that includes Biden.

[AlsoKeithCurlesToePoke]

The racist electorate that voted for a black president, twice?

Americans consistently vote for whoever is running on an anti-war platform. The fact that this never happens once they get in suggests that all is not quite as it seems in a democracy.

There is only continuity of agenda for the monied ruling class, whoever gets in, everything else is just noise.

[Jacko]

Admin, send this to politics. No need for it on the main bored. Some disgusting posts (from both sides) on here tonight but we're all Albion.

The racist electorate that voted for a black president, twice?

Americans consistently vote for whoever is running on an anti-war platform. The fact that this never happens once they get in suggests that all is not quite as it seems in a democracy.

There is only continuity of agenda for the monied ruling class, whoever gets in, everything else is just noise.

This.

FAO Bilston. Worry about things you can control. You only get one go at this, decisions made 3 and a half thousand miles away, well outside your remit? Fuck 'em. Life is too short.

[B68Baggie]

The racist electorate that voted for a black president, twice?

Americans consistently vote for whoever is running on an anti-war platform. The fact that this never happens once they get in suggests that all is not quite as it seems in a democracy.

There is only continuity of agenda for the monied ruling class, whoever gets in, everything else is just noise.

A "large chunk" didn't vote for Obama.  45% and 47% respectively.  This time round Trump got in with 49% of the popular vote.

Have a look at the voting map and that's a lot of big state country rednecks.   I imagine a large proportion voting in those states are uncomfortably and closely related.

No doubt that race, gender and a sense of entitlement and betrayal fuel voting habits as well. No uneducated white, male rust belt worker wants to see immigrants moving past him in the social pecking order. Trump is feeding on that.

MAGA isn't about making the whole of America great again!! It's more about making hate and prejudice acceptable in the public sphere again. There are people alive in some of those states that saw unpunished lynchings, just a generation ago.

He knew that if he could mobilise that demographic it would push him over the line in enough states to take the election.

[Borin' Baggie]

I've seen 2 videos of the skirmish. Neither one shows what happened leading up to it. Both the agents or the victim could be at fault. The body worn footage will show what went on I guess. In a country of gun wielding swivel eyed lunatics I will never understand why people don't comply with them or even go near them with a firearm. Personally I'd keep my distance especially when others are winding them up. That country is wild

Totally irrelevant you fucking cunt.

He was restrained by 4/5 men, on the ground. He had been pepper sprayed so couldn't see. They disarmed him of his legal weapon.

He is entirely under their control and posing no threat whatsoever. He wasnt posing a threat in the first place.

There is no justification to fire ten fucking shots into him, most of which when he is already clearly dead. None.

This was an execution and its utterly abhorrent that there are stupid twats like you attempting to defend it. Now fuck off.

We now know what "lead up to it" was he picked up a woman that an ICE thug pushed over onto the floor and recorded ICE. Be careful helping someone get off the floor in the US, you might be murdered in broad daylight by the US government.