The new USA, where people are disappeared every day for their political views. Free speech evaporated overnight when the fascists took power.

They’re disappearing political activists.

Conservative support is strongest among the poorest and least educated. It’s always a bit odd how Conservatives gain support among these groups whom they absolutely have no intention of helping. But I guess they are the ones most likely not to be thinking it through too carefully. Just “taxes bad, immigrants bad, trans people bad.”

We are currently clean on OPSEC.

Except for managing to leak their phone numbers, their friend lists, their passwords and the entire contents of their chat to the whole internet.

What a time, when you can’t tell whether people are being disappeared for their political views by Mossad or by the USA’s Gestapo.

Centuries of despots, despair and drinking.

Trump replaced the top brass with loyalists. I wouldn’t be so sure.

“Unfair left leaning” just means “true”.

White House officials said they were vindicated by the latest reporting, pointing to an earlier characterization of the discussions as “war plans,” language which had now shifted to “attack plans.”

So far these have been their arguments in defense of themselves:

1. Hey, this is the first time we’ve catastrophically fucked up on security in a whole two months so treat us with some respect! (And letting an unelected drug-addled Nazi and some disreputable teenagers roam freely through all government computer systems doesn’t count.)
2. We didn’t leak war plans to a journalist, like you all claimed, we leaked attack plans. Totally different so you’re a bunch of liars.
3. Nothing that was leaked was classified. We totally meant the movements of our bombers to be made public before the mission started.

Hands up who thinks these are not utterly ridiculous responses!

You misspelled 2016.

Your opposition… isn’t.

apparently for the crime of writing op-eds for her university’s newspaper in support of Palestine and pushing back against leadership’s actions.

There is no more free speech in the USA, this thing Americans always claimed to br so proud of. Now you can be kidnapped and disappeared for speaking out against government-sanctioned genocide.

By all accounts, Signal’s encryption is robust, so they’d need spyware on the device to monitor the contents of the chat, or even to see who else was in the chat. Since these people were using their own personal devices and not government devices, there’s a higher chance that Russia or China or some other power could have put spyware on their device. So that is a major lapse in security, and there’s a chance it could have been spied on. But the person being physically in Russia shouldn’t make it any easier for the Russian government to spy on the chat itself.

On the positive side, I knew a Canadian couple where she was an evangelical Christian home-schooling their kids and he was a massive conspiracy theorist. They were both suspicious of vaccines and “mainstream medicine”, and he strongly disbelieved in the moon landings. 15 years ago there was no way to persuade them out of any of this. But over time, with the rise of the far right, QAnon, the antivax movement and MAGA, both of them realized they want nothing to do with those people or their insanity. She correctly identified the church as a bad influence and left it, she stopped preaching at people, they sent their kids to regular schools, they all got their vaccines, and he abandoned his conspiracy theories and now accepts that he was an idiot about the moon landings and laughs at his former self. Now you can have a perfectly normal conversation with them. So it is possible to travel in the other direction.

Buddhists would say that if you look closely, you find no distinction between yourself and everyone else. We are made of each other. Empathy and compassion are our nature because nothing happens to just me or just you. It’s one shared life, and we suffer when we fail to recognize this.

Classing anyone as inhuman is dangerous. A widespread inability to see the most barbaric Nazis as regular human beings like ourselves is one of the reasons Nazism has been able to sneak back up on us. It’s important to recognize that the potential for empathy, and the potential for empathy to wither away, are both human potentials. As humans we have the capacity for great compassion or great cruelty. It won’t help us if we say, “Oh, that cruelty is not us. We’re humans; they’re not.”

Xitler.

Four in five Canadians strongly oppose the idea of joining their neighbours to the south, and a majority, 78 per cent, are concerned with the rhetoric Trump keeps pushing.

So 20% of Canadians are traitors and/or idiots. Probably the FUCK TRUDEAU flags and bumper stickers crowd who complain about their first amendment rights.

If they were using Signal on personal phones, an unofficial channel on unofficial devices, they already weren’t, even before they accidentally included a journalist in the chat.

The redacted messages here have now been published:

https://archive.is/T4RTF