1) you're wrong. None have said they personally heard Trump explicitly tie the aid to his demands, but many have said he himself tied the white house meeting to his demand for a political gift, which is a crime, and just as many have said it was clear the funding was tied too, and never did anyone at the Whitehouse contradict that in any way, even when asked directly, until they knew they were under investigation.
2) trump himself released the summary transcript in which he ties the funding to the investigations of political rivals and nothing else. Even your stage 5 cranial rectosis can't shield you from that inconvenient truth.

A majority still say he should not only be impeached, but removed from office.

*facepalm. The lack of direct witnesses is because of Trump's obstruction, telling subordinates to ignore subpoenas. That alone is impeachable.
You probably mean they can call unrelated red herrings like Biden who has zero bearing on the charges.
1/2 the republican question time was wasted by them giving whining speeches about how they can't ask questions, and 1/4 spent whining that they can't use this time to investigate Biden....who has never been accused of anything illegal you might note. Edit: ....and the whistleblower, because clearly it's important to know who they are in order to destroy their lives, but not for any other possible reason.
Using impeachment to investigate political rivals and harass whistleblowers instead of investigating the president isn't going to help win independents, the only voters in play. Lose the Senate, which is likely, and Trump will be the first president to be impeached twice if he remains in office.

Oh Bobby, who cried the last two election nights? Not Democrats. I wasn't even surprised Trump won. I called that in spring 2016 when the DNC was caught helping Clinton and screwing Sanders.

You are right on one point, when the Turtle gets the case, he's going to tank it and Trump won't even get a slap on the wrist, but only because party loyalty is far more important to Republicans than national loyalty or rule of law, not because he didn't commit more crimes. In that sense, Democrats have lost. We all have.

But I don't write to you, it's for others who maybe wouldn't watch Trump rape and murder young boys then defend him. There is literally nothing he could do to make you stop riding his dick. Absolutely nothing. I'm not trying to convince you. You're a lost cause....and likely a Russian troll.

MAGA=Making Attorneys Get Attorneys

snuff?

3. Please do not post pornography or "snuff" films (which we define as the explicit depiction of loss of human life displayed for entertainment).
*return

(edit) Not that it matters regarding this being snuff, but the only thing i could find regarding the dogs health was this..

"But a spokesman for the Royal Spanish Hunting Federation said the dogs had been treated at the scene before being taken to nearby vets."

This is the paradox of modern politics.

These people are fucking morons of the highest order. They're poorly educated idiots spouting complete nonsense that has zero basis in reality.

In a sane world, we'd ignore them as lunatic outliers. They're not new; they've been here forever, they just change the nonsense.

The problem is that we now live in a world where the most powerful man in the world actively encourages these people, if not explicitly, then at least implicitly with his own brand of deranged paranoia.

The fundamental issue is that internet is great at connecting people, and it doesn't discriminate between connecting Bronies, small-town homosexuals, fans of William Shatner's music, political dissidents in oppressed countries or people who indulge in insane conspiracy theories.

There's no putting that technological genie back in the bottle (and even if we could, the cost would be too great IMO).

So what to do about that?

If we ignore them, they thrive underground and if we give them "airtime" their ranks are bolstered.

I really don't have an answer for this.

So you didn't watch the video then?
Because that is explicitly addressed at 18:30.

Gunn tweeted almost a decade ago, apologised for it and everyone moved on years ago.

Roseanne.... didn't.
*related=https://videosift.com/video/Rosanne-Rationally-Explains-Her-Racist-Tweet

I have a few French friends, and as I see it there's quite a fundamental cultural difference at play here. I'll do my best to explain it, although I don't fully understand it myself.

There's a very fundamental French principle of equality that's considered as sacred as American freedom of speech. It means that when you're French, you're French, and explicitly not a member of a sub-culture. I heard about this when they banned wearing a hijab (I think) in schools: the children are French first, and must comply by French norms above others.

The French government have fought very hard to fight the foundation of religious and ethnic sub-cultures within France. This is obviously very different to the American approach of embracing your heritage and, just as Freedom of Speech has unwanted side-effects, so does this. The players are French, not African. Their cultural past was indeed wiped when they became French (at birth or otherwise). Yes, they're of African descent, but that's considered very different to being African.

Now, it's fair enough to argue the the American approach is better, but I think it's important to understand that this is not the French approach. There is a fundamental cultural difference there, and without understanding that, you're going to miss the point of their argument.

Right, well these are all pretty easy, and the point was exaggeration for comedic effect...

It's not funny, but if one wanted to actually be instructional, the fine line now would be something like: can I ask a woman out a third time after she turned me down twice, the difference between telling a woman "You look great" and "that dress looks great on you" + looking her up and down, should you ever tell a woman you work with you're attracted to her, can I proposition a woman a second time if she's still at my place after a date and said no once? If not, can I ask her to leave then? Can I play that song Baby its cold Outside or Blurred Lines at the office party? Can I tell a joke about sex and should I stop when a woman enters the room, or does that make it worse?

IMO, it's not helpful to pretend it should be obvious and everyone who doesn't get it is a laughable idiot or creep. Or to insist that there's a definite line and you're either a "decent person" or a "complete wanker"... most of us are somewhere in between and vary day to day. Or to say "if it feels wrong it IS wrong"... obviously some men have their feels calibrated differently and would benefit from the rules to being more explicit.

Either that, or the answer to all of these is "depends on the woman..." you just need to get to know them, and even then you probably will make a mistake.

@newtboy
@ChaosEngine

It seems I'm an outlier in my opinion then. I don't agree that one second after I said "no" that constitutes rape anymore than my wife grinding into me a few more times when I tell her something similar because I'm seeing cracks in the damn that are going to cause a tidal wave.

To be clearer, I'm laying out a definition argument. I don't feel rape should be defined that way. You can't interlock two sweaty bodies and reasonably expect to constantly have a hand hovering over an ejector seat button.

I'm uncertain about what exactly rape should be defined as, but, in spite of me feeling that what happened to me was an outcome I explicitly didn't want; at some point during the initial physical union of the male and female genitalia, permissions about what is suddenly okay or not okay with that intimate contact becomes EXTREMELY difficult to define. When two people seem to be working in tandem at that point, I assert that permission is intertwined and, as a result, confusing. (hence our debate)

It's because of that confusion that I'm so hesitant to assign blame for a miscalculation of affection/passion.
@newtboy I think this is where the question of intent plays a role.

Maybe you should actually read the article before commenting on this?

Warning: it's a terribly written article that spends a lot of time on completely irrelevant details, also very NSFW, but to summarise (quoting from article):

When Ansari told her he was going to grab a condom within minutes of their first kiss, Grace voiced her hesitation explicitly. “I said something like, ‘Whoa, let’s relax for a sec, let’s chill.’”
...
She says Ansari began making a move on her that he repeated during their encounter. “The move he kept doing was taking his two fingers in a V-shape and putting them in my mouth, in my throat to wet his fingers, because the moment he’d stick his fingers in my throat he’d go straight for my vagina and try to finger me.” Grace called the move “the claw.”

Ansari also physically pulled her hand towards his penis multiple times throughout the night, from the time he first kissed her on the countertop onward. “He probably moved my hand to his dick five to seven times,” she said. “He really kept doing it after I moved it away.”

But the main thing was that he wouldn’t let her move away from him. She compared the path they cut across his apartment to a football play. “It was 30 minutes of me getting up and moving and him following and sticking his fingers down my throat again. It was really repetitive. It felt like a fucking game.”

Ansari wanted to have sex. She said she remembers him asking again and again, “Where do you want me to fuck you?” while she was still seated on the countertop. She says she found the question tough to answer because she says she didn’t want to fuck him at all.

End quoting.

I find it difficult to believe Ansari is "inexperienced". He's 34, famous, good-looking and funny. Hell, he wrote a damn book on the subject.

Now, even though I've lost count of the number of times I've said this, to be perfectly clear: I DO NOT THINK ANSARI IS GUILTY OF A CRIME.

But I also don't think that behaviour is acceptable. He acted like a total asshole.

But since we're talking about degrees of harm, you can still be an asshole and do actual harm without committing a crime.

Should his accuser have just left? Probably. Does that excuse his behaviour? Nope.

I've seen this game countless times. Make iniquitous , but non specific accusations of nefarious activities, claim to have excoriating soon to be released but currently inaccessible evidence, rant about upcoming mass prosecution of political enemies, move on to the next charge.

No email needed to see the obvious, and I go to sleep at 3am anyway.
Republicans and Faux News (the original fake news) are the boys who cried wolf to the extreme, all credibility long gone. Remember, you gave them explicit permission to lie to you, don't be surprised that they are.

@Payback, @newtboy you're missing the point.

It doesn't matter if rape is worse than groping... we need to start drilling into people that neither is acceptable.

The sentence for these crimes is different and that's correct. (So no, a shoplifter isn't Bernie Madoff)

But as far as I know, none of the accused has been sentenced to anything.

But public shaming as a minimum? I'm fine with that.

And Aziz Ansari doesn't deny what happened, he's just "sorry she feels that way".

"Does this go both ways? If a man has a bad date, or bad sex..."
There's a difference between bad sex and being pressured into sex. Even if it's not rape, it's still not cool.

"I hope that girl you had a bad date with in high school doesn't come back to show you the error of your position by adding your name to the "me too" list, destroying your career, family life, and future with no recourse to prove your innocence...all because she didn't orgasm.....but I do hope you see the error."

If she came back said I was crap in bed, I would probably shrug and say "hey I was a teenage boy, they're all crap at sex". If she said, I pressured her into sex, I would deny it vigorously.

"Being weird is the same as being a rapist?!? Jesus fucking Christ, I always thought you were rational. "
Come on, newt, you know that's not what I said. I said "stop being weird, gropey or rapey". If I said "stop eating bacon, doughnuts or sugar", would you think I meant that bacon, doughnuts and sugar are the same?

First, I like weird people on a day to day basis. Second, there's nothing wrong with consensual weirdness.

But in context, it's pretty clear what I was talking about. But if you must have it spelt out, don't
- force people to watch you masturbate
- meet people (especially younger members of the opposite sex that work for you) in a dressing gown in your hotel room
- make sexually explicit remarks to strangers

But to reiterate, yes, there are degrees of violation. Rape is worse than groping and groping is worse than exposure. There, happy now?

Now that we're all agreed on that, can we focus on stopping the problem instead of this pointless grading of offences?

This really isn't difficult. If you can't tell whether another person is enthusiastic about sexual activity with you... maybe relationships aren't for you.

I get the consent argument, but a lot of porn is about fantasy

Is it OK to think of some hot actress while you're having sex with your wife?

I guess you could take care of the consent thing by getting someone that looks remarkably like the hot actress and then pinning her face into a porn video where the actress from that video says it's OK; but I think we all know that's not going to happen; and it's possibly still libel unless it was explicitly marked as not being the actress

Earlier today, I was sent a link to an article in Bloomberg titled Why Workers Are Losing to Capitalists. Marx in Bloomberg? Impossibru!

But nevermind Marx. That opinion piece is 800 words, give or take, on labour's share of income. Yet it doesn't mention policy once. Not a single time. It's automation, it's globalisation, it's Gremlins. But not a single peep on policy.

Nothing on union busting. Nothing on taxes on capital vs taxes on labour. Nothing on minimum wages. Nothing on welfare. Nothing on the public sector.

If you read about inequality and related issues in these papers, there's rarely any agency. It's always something abstract like market forces, globalisation, innovation, etc. Nothing on decisions made by people in power, parliament first and foremost, that often had the explicit aim of reducing wages to "increase competitiveness".

Let me disabuse you of some of your assumptions...

I didn't do gamergate and I don't really give a fuck about feminism/anti-feminism as it pertains to how I treat women in the real world (that being egalitarian, everyone should be equal).

Now that that's out of the way, yeah, I am for fucking real. Whether it was a stunt or just a bunch of people turning up to a talk which they paid their money to get in to, it doesn't really matter. Sarkessian was the aggressor (unless you truly believe that threaten = criticise someone's ideas online then show up in person to let them have their say), using a position of power, backed up by a bunch of like minded people to abuse paying attendees who's only crime was sitting up the front and listening quietly, which they are entitled to do.

/shockfuckinghorror, never mind free speech, you can't even listen to people anymore without them wetting their pants in terror.

There is plenty of video footage of said event and you are more than welcome to point out to me exactly where in that footage any of the so called aggressors did anything actually aggressive. Aka, the point where my opinion of what went on is different to the reality. I don't need to convince people of the reality of the situation, I can just roll the footage.

She broke the code of conduct, and while other YT'ers were being ejected for being in public areas (a breach of the CoC), she was given an explicit pass by the Greens. Sargon and the rest of the so called aggressors were not ejected or banned from Vidcon which indicates to me that they did nothing wrong in the eyes of the organisers. The aggressors seemed to get along fine with other people they met that they ideologically disagree with, with no other incidents being recorded. Sark, on the other hand, also verbally abused Boogie2988, one of the nicest and most considerate people I've seen on YT, and someone who had gone out of his way not to offend her.

All this is a matter of record, not my opinion. So now comes the question of your integrity. Are you going to actually back up your claims with a little actual evidence, or are you just going to go back to calling names... ; P

retroactive revocation of consent is not a thing. If you think it is, you've probably been brainwashed by a feminist and need to start thinking for yourself. Unless you specifically have an agreement that you are only sleeping with someone because they have $x money in their bank account or some other explicit fact, you've just got regret.

Well you missed out the following highlights:

Awful optics of white guys standing around with tiki torches.
Proper breakdown of attendee groups
Short bit on the tiny ideological difference between antifa (communists) and white nationalists (nazis).
Commentary on Trump
More discussion on the rise of white hate which is creating new racists.
Left grading people by their skin colour (including lighter skinned people of colour)
etc

The entire point of the Daryl Davis sift was to show the importance of listening and hearing, to get to know the opinions of others. If you can't even spend 30 minutes listening to alternate opinions (and Sargon isn't even right wing/a supporter of the alt right...) that don't explicitly conform to everything you expect to hear, how do you ever learn?

It's the same confirmation bias that keeps the kkk on life support long after it should have died out.