Unlikely. I'm no lawyer, but minimal investigation showed.....
First they would have to prove damages, then overcome privilege (both absolute and qualified) then prove it wasn't just 1 a statement made in good faith, 2 opinion, 3 mere vulgar abuse, 4 a fair comment on a matter of public interest.
Since Trump has executive absolute privilege, a history of spouting nonsense no one believes, and a history of believing any crazy thing, he's certainly shielded from defamation laws.

Also, except for the "go, then come back" part, everything he said was proper. His administration is the most corrupt, crime infested government we've ever seen, and we need them to show us how to fix it.

But Melania doesn't seem happy, she can leave...in fact, as a person who worked illegally under her visa , then overstayed it by creating an anchor baby, she should be deported and Bannon needs to go in the cage.

"The world would be a better place without religion..."

Maybe. Probably not. We just can't will it into non-existence regardless. My hypothetical concern is, say we do get rid of all religion (by what? Burn all the books? Put them all in an Island? Killing them all once and for all? I'd LOVE to know your methods... but hey, off topic), then what? Human by nature will believe and follow in something/someone... Chinese followed their religion-banning dear leader MZD to their deaths by the millions. Germans got played into Nazis by a charismatic madman that resulted in WWII... my point is, we can't let any harmful idealism fall into the hands of charismatic leaders that cause real harm and be silent. Star Wars (and its mortal religious rival Trekkies) is a registered, legit religion to some but mostly for fun and harmless. Trumpism is arguably a religion itself in America now, and alt-right ideals are spreading all over the world from its aftermath that's 100% harmful IMO.

Religion as a practice can do immense good & evil in equal measure. We should all do our part in not letting people in power weaponize religion.

"Its the biggest sham in human history. " IMO, it's people in (religious/political) power that twists religion into a sham. And continues to. I blame these people, not the religion. Don't let these douchebags have their way!

A lot of people (majority even) fails to put the words of these religious books into historical context. Civilizations and cultures
evolve. Societal practices and knowledge of the physical world too. Look into the intent and context, then it'll do good. Twist religion into self-serving gavel of judgement (to others, NEVER to oneself!) then nothing good will come of it.

"Just goes to show how stupid the sheeple are."

Thing is, people get into (and out of ) religion for all kinds of reasons. Calling them all sheeple and stupid isn't doing anyone good service, merely shows your narrow view of religion (and stereotyping people of faith) more than anything, no? It's as wrong as a priest calling atheists must be lacking of a moral compass.

I'm with you in your disdain for mindlessness.

Are there sheeple? OF COURSE. Are blind followers stupid? Yes to a degree. But IMO these sheeple are stupid not because they're into a faith, but follow the words and commands blindly of their faith leaders without thinking of the intentions and lacking a firm grasp of reality and consequences.

We need to eliminate sheeple mentality, religious absolutism and self-righteousness that disrespect others, that thinks one is better than others because of following a religion.

I'm fine calling out the ridiculous among them, I do so in my church. Just don't call and treat everyone a sheeple. Besides, sheeple is not exclusive to religion, there are Apple sheeple, celebrity sheeple, political sheeple. Do we treat all of these people as sheeple with disdain?

But man... it's extremely disheartening to see the state of religion in the USA. I can see why some people are so against it there. I seriously can't feel defensive about it if I'm a US citizen, because watching videos like these do make sensible people wanting to punch that guy. But how can people NOT see through the idiocy and out right ban/disown that shit? That's the most concerning to me of American Christianity.

...or something that sounds like that in Afrikaans.

I don't care that it's Arnie. I don't care that he got back up and brushed it off like a real life robotic killing machine. That shit is elder abuse.

The only thing I hope is, this is an internet meme concerning the head characters on the Apprentice and the guy merely got the wrong target.

Personally, I prefer to believe she's actually listening to this song, and someone has merely overdubbed a better version.

In more ways than I can list here.

Always look on the bright side of life. No matter fucking what.

Thank you. It means a lot to me.

EDIT:

My idea of putting him behind bars is not to punish him. He ultimately will punish himself. He's already doing it but doesn't realize it. He will have to live in the house he built for himself. Putting him behind bars merely keeps the danger from the innocent.

Video Title: Slurring guy on the internet defends alcohol consumption, jesus wept lol.

And let's talk about bias for a minute. Nobody is drinking alcohol for the protective effects for the 3 cancers it apparently protects against.Aaron is clearly trying to make himself feel better about his bad habits.

Moderate alcohol is not protective against 3 types of cancers, it's merely associated with it, because people who drink moderately are in a certain demographic, age, class, social/economical, education etc. and the studies that are shown in the nutritionfacts.org video control for these kinds of things.

I'm not sure if you watched the video , but they show research which says that the alcohol industry use the same tactics as big tobacco do (that Aaron is perpetuating) to keep the public confused.

The tactic Aaron is using, is cherry picking a weak study, debunking their shitty method, and then using it to dismiss all other credible evidence. It's effectively a strawman, because he did nothing to address the hundreds of studies with strong evidence.


TL:DR ALCOHOL IS A GROUP 1 CARCINOGEN - IT CAUSES CANCER:

EVERY MEDICAL BODY RECOMMENDS ZERO CONSUMPTION

Indeed, your ratio is basically the opposite, even with the pills. But perhaps it will improve over time.

(often though these drugs don't fix the root cause, they address the symptoms which means you'll be on some form of pills forever, until you fix the underlying issue, which the doctor should have mentioned, but a lot of doctors are so disheartened these days because their patients rarely listen, or are scared of being called 'fat shamers' so they don't bother with the speech anymore)

Take a look at the success stories on ForksOverKnives.com we aren't exactly miserable.

When you feel for yourself how good life is when you are the master of your health and therefore fate, life becomes far far better. It's powerful, your whole perception of the world will change, and the fleeting pleasure you get from Butter or bacon doesn't compare, and of course we're eating cusine from across the world. We've given up nothing, just changed the ingredients.


I know yall think im a biased vegan, which is why I like to refer people to the success stories on plant based websites. You can see the life and passion return into people's eyes, there lives are transformed. The weight-loss is a mere side effect of being healthy.


https://www.forksoverknives.com/the-10-most-popular-plant-based-success-stories-of-2018/

Maybe not, but humanity has a long, sorted history of risking human lives to do the Awesome.

The mere fact you're correct means no one should be expected to, but that they do anyway is proper badassery.

Ps. You're a cat person, aren't you? Sound like a cat person.

Of course rape can occur at any point leading up to and even during the act. If you have penetrated your partner and they say stop, you stop.

However, I would ask what other evidence could there possibly be? Obviously we can't know, but one would assume that a motivated prosecutor would have gathered all possible evidence. We know from the victim's statements that she can't recall much of the night, is unsure she said yay or nay during the sex, but that she didn't think he should have been prosecuted. Her roommates are the ones that reported the 'rape', but they clearly didn't give any evidence the court saw as worth convicting on. If their statements were what USC went by to expel him, that would be available via the court and I'm sure someone would have posted them.

We simply do not know and can only go by the video and the statement of the 'victim'. She seemed to be walking fine and signed her name correctly, so either she is an extremely functional drunk or she was sober enough to make those choices. She said she didn't think he should have been charged with rape. To me, that should exonerate the defendant. It did in a court of law, but not in a closed off Title IX hearing.

I suspect that what happened is what happens in other colleges. The college determines what is going to look worse publicity wise and litigation wise, then expels based on that. The problem is that in the Title IX process, there is no real fairness. You can have an advisor present, but not a lawyer if the school objects. One person decides your fate. There is no appeal process. The burden of proof is not defined as to who it is upon. I am sure that the lady in charge went by some procedure and not merely off personal opinion/belief, but we can't investigate to find that out.

To sum up, are we at the point where we should not have intimate relations if either person has imbibed any type of substance? Should we request that a video camera or audio recorder be present at any sexual liaison? Do we need witnesses like they used to have at the consummation of royal weddings? Perhaps a written contract? It just seems pretty ludicrous to me to have a video and the statement of the person that was supposed to have been raped, yet somehow we still had a punishment given to the individual accused of the raping.

Upvoting that feels dirty, at least in the direct sense.

I suppose this is inevitable, merely part of a process that has included turning points like ET's Reeses Pieces. But isn't there some point at which people (*enough* people, not just rabid anti-advertising nutters like me) get turned off by this and tune out in numbers high enough to affect the bottom line? Parasites (successful ones) generally avoid killing their hosts, but I suppose there are some mishaps along the evolutionary trail...

The simple point is that as soon as we realized the capability of the Zero we easily and quickly designed a plane(s) capable of combating it.

The Yak-3 didn't enter the war until 1944, at which point the war had massively turned in Western Theatre. For the bulk of the conflict, they were using the Yak-1.

The Mig 25 and Mig 31 are both interceptors, they are designed to fire from distance and evade. The Su 35 is designed for Air Superiority. We have held the edge in our capabilities for years compared to them.

Every expert I know of is skeptical of China's claimed Railgun weapon. As to why they would bother mounting it and making claims, why not? It is brinkmanship, making us think they have more capabilities than they do.

The laser rifle is a crowd deterrent weapon. It would serve almost no purpose in infantry combat because it cannot kill. Yes, it can burn things and cause pain, but that is all. Again, this was claimed to be far more effective than experts think during our diplomatic arguments over China's use of blinding lasers on aircraft. We have no hard evidence of it's capability.

Yes, Russia could sell such a missile to our enemies versus using it directly against us. The problem is that as soon as they do so, the genie is out of the bottle. It will be reverse engineered quickly and could be USED AGAINST THEM. No country gives or sells away it's absolute top level weaponry except to it's most trusted allies. Allies which, for all intents and purposes, know that using such a weapon against another nation state risks full out retaliation against not only them but the country that sold it to them.

Our carriers are excellent mobile platforms, but they are not our only way of mounting air strikes. If we were somehow in a conventional war situation, we could easily fly over and base our aircraft in allied countries for combat. Most of our nuclear capable aircraft are not carrier launched anyway. Even if somehow all of our carriers were taken out and somehow our SAC bombers were destroyed as well, we would still have more than enough land launched and submarine launched nuclear warheads to easily blanket our enemies.

My points remain:

1. It is in the greatest interest of our enemies to boast about weapon capabilities even if they are not effective yet.

2. Most well regarded experts consider many of these weapons to either be still in the research stage, early production stage (IE not available for years), or they are wildly over hyped.

3. There is no logical reason for our enemies to use these weapons or proliferate them to their closest allies unless the weapons can prevent a nuclear response. Merely mentioning a weapon that would have such a capability creates a situation that could lead to nuclear war, like SDI did. I don't know if you recall, but I do clearly, how massively freaked out the Soviets got over our SDI claims. For two years they started threatening nuclear war as being inevitable if we continued on the path we were, all the while aggressively trying to destabilize our relations with our allies. 1983 to 1985 was pretty fucking tense, not Cuban missile crisis level maybe, but damn scary. Putin has acted similarly over our attempts to set up a missile barrier in former satellite states of Russia, although we still haven't got to the SHTF level of the early 80's.

@ChaosEngine:
"The first 3 levels of sexual violence ALL involve no physical contact and are entirely verbal. "
100% fine with this. You can be a creepy sleazebag without touching someone and it's still not ok.

Perhaps you misunderstand. I also oppose verbal harassment and discrimination. I disagree with calling sexist and racist comments acts of violence. I agree with condemning them and acting to stop them.

Real world example, a Canadian student TA at Wilfred Laurier University played a short clip of a publicly broadcast debate over trans pronoun usage between 2 U of T professors in a class. She was brought into a meeting with 3 WLU staff who told her she was horribly wrong for doing so because playing that clip was "an act of violence" against any trans students in the room.

This abuse of language is manipulative and wrong.

I'm a man, and I'm not scared of being accused of sexual assault. None of my male friends are scared either.

With burden of proof I'm thinking beyond merely sexual assault. This already practice in forms in Canada. Ontario has an entire system of Social Justice Tribunals that run parallel to the criminal court system. It's been a gradual transformation of the civil court system, so civil and family courts are lumped in as tribunals now there. The specific one relevant in this case is the human rights tribunal. If the WLU faculty, or a student from the classroom, wanted to file a human rights complaint for the 'violence' they faced, the burden of proof would be a preponderance of the evidence rather than innocent until proven guilty. Which I can even understand in some cases, but lets not say that doesn't make people nervous about being falsely accused. That is not what scares people the most though in Ontario. The social justice tribunals have paid for legal representation for the accusers, and so the government foots the financial costs for the accuser. The accused however is on their own. The erosion of burden of proof and fear of financial damages from malicious or vengeful complaints is a very, very real thing in Canada. Accusations of sexual harassment being just one of many kinds of accusations that you can be damaged by while entirely innocent.

I'm an atheist and will always be one of the first in line to suggest that religions should be subject to criticism and the rule of law just like any other organization.

That being said, I'm not entirely comfortable with the idea that congregations are complicit in the misdeeds of the institution itself, whether or not they are aware of verified instances of misdeeds. ...Pretty slippery slope.

Expand that to, say, nations. In the history of the US, the government has committed some pretty indefensible atrocities. Genocide, mass relocation, and other offenses against Native Americans in the name of "manifest destiny". Enslavement of a race of people based on skin color, with disenfranchisement and continued abuse well after slavery was abolished, with elements that certainly persist to this day. Funding and supplying extremist organizations because they happen to have a short-term enemy that coincides with ours, which frequently comes back to bite us in the ass later. Using underhanded tricks including false-flag operations to justify wars and other offensive actions. Attempting to assassinate democratically elected leaders of foreign governments. And on and on.

Are all US citizens complicit in those misdeeds, merely by an accident of birth? But those things were in the past, you might argue. Given the depth of dirt you can find on our past with a little digging, I'd say it is reasonable to expect that there's things that the government is doing now that we may or may not be aware of that would be similarly difficult to defend.

Many/most Catholics can either remain intentionally blissfully ignorant about these problems, or will be able to go to great lengths to rationalize their way around them. Just like most US citizens don't lose much sleep over our government's past and present misdeeds. In either case, indoctrination puts the blinders on -- and can be incredibly difficult to escape.

For the religious, "love the sinner, hate the sin" is an oft-repeated phrase. As an atheist outraged by these scandals and the decades/centuries of intentional cover-ups by the Church itself, I might be tempted to turn that on its head. "Accept the religious, hate the religion." By all means, be outraged towards the institution itself. By all means, fight to end the protections that have allowed this kind of abuse to go unchecked. But perhaps try to keep some (Christian?) empathy for the average Catholic congregation members who have been brainwashedindoctrinated their whole lives and are likely in too deep to escape. Reserve that hatred for the clergy that abused their positions of power and control to commit these crimes, and the organizational system that systematically allowed it to happen while covering it up. They deserve every bit of hate you throw their way.

it behooves us to give a leg up to those trying hard to do it for themselves....no?

I vehemently agree on this. I merely argue that giving the leg up shouldn't be based upon race but upon lack of opportunity. The two fellow black students you mentioned, who were nearly as advantaged as you would have similarly destroyed other black students from crappy inner city schools, but a race based system would give no quarter to the inner city kids in that insistence, still favouring privileged kids over the unprivileged, just so happens these privileged kids would be black.

I agree fully with helping out the disadvantaged. If a race is grossly over represented among the poor, then policies to help the poor will also grossly provide more assistance to that race. I don't consider that discriminatory though, it's just a historical consequence.

In the Canadian model, direct assistance or compensation for past harm is also something I can get behind. Of course, proving and carefully adjudicating what that should mean is a tough nut, but our courts are expressly for that kind of dispute.