Denial, Revisited

dorankj
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Re: Denial, Revisited

Post by dorankj »

Funny, you guys never say a peep about Steve Scalise, or Rand Paul’s attacks and you minimize and dismiss Brett Kavanagh’s attempted killing. Methinks doth protest too much, hypocrites!
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Re: Denial, Revisited

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By Glenn Thrush, Kellen Browning and Luke Vander Ploeg~The New York Times
Oct. 31, 2022
Updated 6:43 p.m. ET
Federal prosecutors charged the man accused of breaking into the San Francisco home of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi with attempting to kidnap Ms. Pelosi and with assaulting a relative of a federal official, according to charging documents filed on Monday.
The suspect, David DePape, 42, was apprehended by the police at the Pelosi home in the early morning hours on Friday. The police said he forcibly entered through the back door of the house, encountered Ms. Pelosi’s husband, Paul Pelosi, 82, and, following a struggle over a hammer, struck him with it.
Mr. DePape was looking for Ms. Pelosi, who was in Washington at the time, to interrogate the speaker on an unspecified political matter, according to the federal complaint. If she told the “truth,” he would let her go; if she “lied,” he intended to break her kneecaps because he saw her as “the ‘leader of the pack’ of lies told by the Democratic Party” and wanted her to be wheeled into Congress as a lesson to other Democrats, Mr. DePape told police officers in an interview.
He had “a roll of tape, white rope, a second hammer, a pair of rubber and cloth gloves, and zip ties” according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of California, which filed the charges.
The swift action by the Justice Department in bringing federal charges — on the same day the San Francisco District Attorney’s Office filed its own charges against Mr. DePape — reflects the department’s urgency in addressing what it sees as a politically motivated crime shortly before the 2022 midterm elections. There has been a surge in threats and attacks against figures of both political parties in recent years, and Ms. Pelosi, in particular, has long been the subject of vilification and threats.
Later on Monday, Brooke Jenkins, the San Francisco district attorney, announced additional state charges. Mr. DePape was charged with six felonies: attempted murder, residential burglary, elder abuse, assault with a deadly weapon, false imprisonment of an elder and threatening family members of public officials. Mr. DePape was expected to be arraigned in superior court on Tuesday.
Mr. Pelosi, who alerted the police, underwent surgery on Friday after sustaining a fractured skull and serious injuries to his hands and right arm, according to a spokesman for Ms. Pelosi. Mr. Pelosi remains in the intensive care unit of a San Francisco hospital, surrounded by his family, according to a person familiar with the situation.
Law enforcement officials said that Mr. DePape sustained “minor injuries” and was treated at a hospital.
The affidavit from an F.B.I. agent that accompanied the charges provided the most complete, and chilling, narrative of the break-in to date. It detailed a groggy early-morning home invasion that culminated with a single, sudden hammer blow, delivered in the presence of shocked police officers.
Mr. DePape broke a glass door and entered the residence, awakening Mr. Pelosi, who confronted him and then ducked into a bathroom to call 911 at 2:23 a.m. Officers with the San Francisco Police Department arrived eight minutes later to find the two men struggling over a hammer.
When they asked what was going on, Mr. DePape “responded that everything was good,” the agent wrote. At that moment, Mr. DePape yanked the hammer from Mr. Pelosi’s grip and struck him once in the head, rendering him unconscious on the floor.
The officers quickly restrained Mr. DePape, who told them he had left his backpack near the smashed door window on the rear porch. When they examined its contents, they found another hammer, tape, rope, two pairs of gloves — rubber and cloth — and a journal.
The police recovered the zip ties in the bedroom. Mr. DePape later told officers he had intended to tie up Mr. Pelosi until the speaker arrived home.
Kidnapping and assault are usually charged under state laws by local authorities, but in extreme circumstances, such as cases involving federal officials or judges, they can become federal crimes.
If convicted, Mr. DePape would face a maximum of 20 years in prison for the attempted kidnapping of a federal official in the performance of official duties, and up to 30 years for assaulting an immediate member of a federal official’s family and inflicting a serious injury with a dangerous weapon.
Ms. Pelosi’s spokesman had no comment on the charges.
It was not immediately clear who was representing Mr. DePape in the case.
Federal law makes such an assault a federal crime when it is done “with the intent to impede, intimidate, or interfere with” the work of an official or “with intent to retaliate against” that person — a charge that stems from Mr. DePape’s attempts to find the speaker.
The attack on the Pelosi home in San Francisco contained echoes of the Jan. 6, 2021, mob attack on the Capitol. When rioters broke into the halls of Congress on that day, some of them carried zip ties and shouted, “Nancy, Nancy, where are you, Nancy?” When he was apprehended on Friday, Mr. DePape also was carrying zip ties; a person who had been briefed on the attack said Mr. DePape had been loudly demanding to know where Ms. Pelosi was.
Law enforcement officials have not specified the exact motivation for the attack, and much remains unknown about Mr. DePape. But the authorities have been examining what appeared to be Mr. DePape’s copious online presence, which included angry rants and extremist views.
The domain of a blog written by a user who called himself “daviddepape” was registered to an address in Richmond, Calif., in August, and a resident close to that location said that Mr. DePape lived at that address. From August until the day before the attack on Mr. Pelosi, the blog featured many antisemitic sentiments as well as concerns about pedophilia, anti-white racism and “elite” control of the internet.
One of the blog posts suggested that there had been no mass gassing of prisoners at Auschwitz, and others were accompanied by malicious and stereotypical images. Another reposted a video lecture defending Adolf Hitler.
Luke Broadwater and Adam Goldman contributed reporting.
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mister_coffee
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Re: Denial, Revisited

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Any decent person should be disgusted and horrified by the attack on Paul Pelosi.
:arrow: David Bonn :idea:
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Re: Denial, Revisited

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Been having several good conversations over on another site where the conversations have been expanding on the role of denialism, communities of denialism, borrowing from religion's teachings by example as well as the role of fear mongering to incentivize violence. The ripple effect of conspiracies as teachers is an interesting one and apparently addictive as was just borne out by Musk's attraction to a fresh Paul Pelosi conspiracy over the weekend. Though he removed the post almost immediately it was grabbed onto and retweeted some 88,000 times.

In a rush to find a rationalization where there was none, we again end up with violence.

https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/31/politics ... 7243192837
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Re: Denial, Revisited

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More comforting words from George Orwell (1943):
Nazi theory, indeed, specifically denies that such a thing as "the truth" exists. There is, for instance, no such thing as "Science". There is only "German Science", "Jewish Science", etc. The implied objective of this line of thought is a nightmare world in which the Leader, or some ruling clique, controls not only the future, but the past. If the Leader says of such and such an event, "It never happened"—well, it never happened. If he says that "two and two are five"—well, two and two are five. This prospect frightens me much more than bombs—and, after our experiences of the last few years [the Blitz, 1940–41] that is not a frivolous statement.
I will say if you don't find the parallels with our reality today profoundly unsettling you are not paying attention.
:arrow: David Bonn :idea:
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Re: Denial, Revisited

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PAL wrote: Mon Oct 31, 2022 9:49 am And Ken you like to say nothing...
Nothing of value that is...
pasayten
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Re: Denial, Revisited

Post by PAL »

And Ken you like to say nothing. Do you not pay attention to the direction the Republican party has gone?
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dorankj
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Re: Denial, Revisited

Post by dorankj »

So, so little knowledge! But you do like to pontificate.
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Re: Denial, Revisited

Post by mister_coffee »

... says the person who got covid multiple times and lost his job and threw away his career because he refused a safe and effective vaccination.
:arrow: David Bonn :idea:
dorankj
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Re: Denial, Revisited

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Hey pot, meet kettle! You can’t possibly be serious?
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Denial, Revisited

Post by mister_coffee »

About the Republican war on reality.

There is a clear pattern to how the right thinks: denying reality when reality proves inconvenient.

You can easily see this with climate change. Denial of climate change makes sense because the only obvious solutions to climate change involve massive government intervention, anathema to the right.

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, we saw many on the right either downplaying the effects and risks or outright denying that COVID could possibly be a problem. Again this was because any reasonable response involved massive government intervention. COVID also made their leader look bad and therefore could not possibly be actually happening. Many Americans died because of the real consequences of this denial.

When vaccines for COVID were finally available, those vaccines had to be fake as well. Didn’t they already know that COVID was fake? These vaccines were distributed through a government program and they always know that government programs do not work. Again many Americans, mostly supporters of the right, died for this belief.

A similar argument also works with institutional racism. The right can’t even afford to acknowledge its existence because it can’t possibly provide any solution.

With mass shootings, we see many people arguing that these events did not happen, nobody died, and that the witnesses were “crisis actors”. People believe this so passionately that they are willing to dig up graves to prove their point.

As for January 6th, many on the right argue that it was all of the work of “Antifa” or some other mysterious agitators. Because no true patriot would smear feces on the walls of the capitol.

Then we come to “stolen” elections. In their view, the right is perfect and nobody in their right (ahem) mind would vote for anyone else. So their apparent losses must be due to the elections being stolen.

I think the pattern here is pretty obvious. What are the implications?

We need to acknowledge that this behavior is deeply unhealthy and ultimately self-destructive. If you had a friend or family member who was behaving this way in any other context but a political one, you would be moving heaven and earth to arrange an intervention and get them the help they so obviously need.

It is also important to acknowledge that this behavior is working. It allows their movement to both maintain control over their followers and also effectively heal their ideology when any inconsistency or new challenge arises. In our monkey brains behavior that is rewarded is inevitably repeated.

If we look at history, either with the Nazi Party during WWII, the old Soviet Union, or the Chinese under Mao these kinds of stories do not have happy endings. We should expect an ugly denouement and also should expect that our society and political discourse will be scarred by our current situation for generations.

With the recent attack on Paul Pelosi last week, we are seeing a new and frightening development. Within hours of the attack multiple conspiracy theories and narratives of the event were in active circulation, first on right-wing fora, then in the fringes of the right-wing blogosphere, and finally in more or less official organs of the right. What is disturbing is that these narratives were organic and not centrally controlled. What we are seeing here is the mob learning to write its own propaganda. That is a new innovation in the world of authoritarianism and would have been unimaginable to the Soviets or Nazis.

On that comforting note, I leave you all with an even more comforting quote from George Orwell:
In the end, the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality, was tacitly denied by their philosophy. The heresy of heresies was common sense. And what was terrifying was not that they would kill you for thinking otherwise, but that they might be right. For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable—what then?
:arrow: David Bonn :idea:
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