No, you lunatic:  nutildah is a drug pusher, who overtly evangelizes the use of hallucinogens such as LSD and psilocybin.

I am sure that you know this, because you saw fit to abuse your source merit privileges to reward nutildah’s LSD evangelism—including his statement to me that “nothing can prepare you for or educate you like the first-hand experience of trying a drug out for yourself.”  Quote-unquote.  That’s how to earn 4 merits from suchmoon!

Evidence is below.


This is just like when TECSHARE attacked you when you were defending him against me.  

It’s too bad that Quickseller wrote a nullius-sized wall of text, which is beyond your capability to read.  —Oh, wait.  Quickseller’s post was quite short.  It was, however, longer than 140 characters.  Are you literally unable to read anything longer than a tweet?

It is the only way that you could have failed to notice that Quickseller was making a principled defence of nutildah’s freedom of speech.  Not that such a “liberal” as you would understand the a concept; you love deplatforming!  Whereas Quickseller is so noble as to defend even vicious, despicable trolls from what he seems to view as a manifestation of one of cancel culture’s favourite strategies:  Getting people fired from their jobs.

For that, you lobbed a bunch of off-topic personal attacks at him.  You owe Quickseller an apology!


What, you mean nutildah’s long-term obsessive campaign of harassment against another forum member, based on an unsubstantiated conspiracy theory?  Wait a minute:  I thought that the suchmoon-nutildah narrative was that multiple different people independently noticed astounding evidence of The Truth...  But this discussion is off-topic.  Never mind.

OP, I am very sorry that some “people” are incapable of understanding the concept of “off-topic”.  It seems like the concept of off topic isn’t clicking with suchmoon, or she disagrees with the concept.  nutildah and suchmoon both need to learn to stop following around two particular forum members with these off-topic personal attacks!  Please don’t let off-topic personal attacks derail this thread from its topic about nutildah.

---

OP, for my part, I suggest that instead of attacking nutildah’s income, you should show more generally that nutildah is untrustworthy and has untrustworthy judgment.  Given that nutildah essentially acts like the lovechild of Timothy Leary and Saul Alinsky, that should be like shooting fish in a barrel.

---

Because I think that drug abuse accusations should be made with evidence, I will show evidence:

Quote from: nutildah on October 19, 2020, 07:58:33 AM

Quote from: nullius on October 19, 2020, 06:53:44 AM

They can turn you into a superstitious nitwit

No more superstitious than somebody who has never experienced psychedelics for themselves but label them as "bad" without fully understanding them.

Psychedelic drugs aren't addictive and can be quite educational if you let them work their magic.

Don't knock it until you've tried it.

Quote from: nutildah on October 19, 2020, 08:26:14 AM

nullius, all you are doing is highlighting your ignorance of the subject. have a fantastic morning.

Merited by suchmoon (4), strawbs (2), vapourminer (1), 600watt (1), sirazimuth (1), P_Shep (1), soullyG (1), OutOfMemory (1)

Quote from: nutildah on October 19, 2020, 01:16:28 PM

warning: nullius-sized post follows; I tried my best to keep it engaging

[...]

You've never tripped on LSD or mushrooms, you've never been to France, so there's no possible way you could know what its about more than someone who has. All the books in the world - all your personal assessments of friends who have visited France - are no substitute for first-hand, real life experience.

[...]

But nothing can prepare you for or educate you like the first-hand experience of trying a drug out for yourself.

[...]

Quote from: nullius on October 19, 2020, 08:19:43 AM

And there is a pretty good historical hypothesis that much religiosity has been caused by “naturally occurring” drugs—much more Amanita muscaria than psilocybin.  Hmmm.

Funny, I've done both and I'm still not religious. If anything they've opened my mind to the possibility that maybe I don't know everything and I don't have it all figured out.

[...long, long drug-abuse evangelism rant snipped for brevity...]

Newsflash:  As of 20 January 2021, Rasmussen Reports has Trump at 51% approval.  Although their index of his approval is still negative, they measure him as having the approval of a majority of Americans, with approval now (barely) exceeding disapproval by a statistically significant amount.

I observe that as the Biden inauguration has approached, Trump’s numbers have slowly increased by a statistically significant amount.

Liberals who believe they have incited universal hatred of Trump are living in a psychotic fantasy.


PrimeNumber7, I suggest that the GOP will shoot itself in the foot if they are seen throwing under the bus a President who has somehow managed to gain the approval of a majority of likely American voters, even when the mass-media lie-machine has been in overdrive against him, and he is banned from social media.

And it is critical to support the Senators and Congressional Representatives who raised objections to various Electoral College votes.

I began to write a long essay in reply to you.  I will try to finish it later.  Now, the above information must be posted timely—while Trump is technically still President.

Meanwhile, PN7, my condolences on your plight in a banana republic where Biden somehow managed put the Capitol in a de facto state of undeclared martial law, before even taking office (!).  Hey, wasn’t Trump supposed to be the one who would rule by brute force?

---

Yeah, gee, thanks.  I had no idea how the 25th Amendment works.  I needed to be informed by the same ignoramous whom I previously had to school on the history of liberals’ attempts to pack the SCOTUS so that they could ram through blatantly unconstitutional legislation.  Which the “liberals” are now talking about doing under Biden!

Just because something is done under colour of law, does not make it legal; and just because something is done under the colour of a constitution, does not make it constitutional.  The bad-faith abuse of a constitutional provision based on a transparent pretext by people who just want to overthrow the President would indeed be a coup, under a thin façade of constitutional procedure.


Ladies and gentleman of the forum, refer hereby to what I said previously about liberals’ attempts to rationalize me away.

In fact, as a perspicacious observer with no political party attachments, I myself independently reached my above-quoted conclusion.  I actually have not seen anyone else saying what I said; I am the first and only, to the best of my knowledge.  If anyone else said the same thing, I must have missed it.  But no—that cannot be!—it is impossible!  I must be regurgitating agitprop from some mysterious dark force, vaguely identified as “right-wing media”.

Just remember that I am the same nullius whose cultural and political forum oeuvre more usually consists of neoclassical nude statues of Phryne, Nietzschean condemnations of Christianity, rage against American world-police invasions of countries that are not America, and anti-feminist tirades that squarely blame men for inventing feminism.  (Because I know history.  Feminism is men’s fault, and men need to take responsibility for that.)  Surely, I am one to parrot whatever the “right-wing media” (!) brainwashed me to say.  

---

I was obviously sarcastic.  And if you thought that I “made it sound like Ivanka is the nickname of Donald Trump”, then either you have a serious problem with reading comprehension, or you are so ill-informed about U.S. politics that you should not be commenting on the matter.

Trump is frequently criticized by his own supporters for the position that he gave his daughter despite her utter lack of qualifications, and her contradictions to the promised Trump platform.  “President Ivanka” is not a term that I invented—whoops, there I go, being brainwashed by “right-wing media”!


I’m sure that you apply the same argument, whenever a Republican and/or a male politician is accused of anything corrupt.  


As a strict rationalist, I don’t believe in “God”—except for the god of Bitcoin, and the apotheosis of the Catbat Witch.  —Whoops, there I go, being brainwashed by “right-wing media”—um—wait a minute...

That is the worst type of liberal identity politics, here weaponized ad hominem to deny the existence of the many of millions of Americans who loved Trump—who found him inspiring!  (I thought that they overestimated him.  They certainly existed, and some of them called me nasty names.)

Liberals always do this.  They don’t want to believe that anybody out there actually disagrees with their goodthinkful opinions.  I get liberals trying to rationalize me away quite frequently.

Anyway, I will have you know, there were American right-wingers who voted for Hillary in 2008.  They voted for her in the Democrats’ primaries, in states with open primaries.  Indeed, as I recall, there were whole websites devoted to urging American right-wingers to vote for Hillary in the primaries.  When she didn’t win the (D) nomination, they turned around and voted for Sarah Palin in the general election—they wanted so much to vote for a woman!  They were very disappointed and aggrieved that the country just was not yet ready to elect a woman.

(Nobody gave a hoot about McCain, except for those who are more loyal to the GOP than to anything else.  McCain was just another corrupt party political jobber.  Like it or not, Palin was wildly popular.)

And in 2016, they inadvertently elected President Ivanka.  So there.  Stick that in your feminist pipe and smoke it.

---

Because she’s a woman, or because she is another corrupt, uninspiring political jobber?

—By the way, how did you fail to notice that the incoming fraudulently selected Vice President is a woman, whom many people expect will probably replace the frail and demented President due to natural causes?  Oh, apropos this thread’s topic:

---

Indeed, it is—except that it could have been more strongly worded, e.g., “This is an attempted coup under the rubric of Soviet-style pathologization of dissent, based on armchair diagnoses that amount to, ‘I don’t like him; therefore, he is deranged and mentally incapacitated.’”

I will be the one to say it:


DEFUND THE RACIST POLICE!

Let us all now take the knee to protest the racist white supremacist police murder of Ashli Babbitt, who was killed for peacefully protesting.

—Or what would have been peacefully protesting, by the standards of the liberal media, if but only she had indulged in looting and arson, in addition to breaking some windowglass.  Amateur!

Right-wingers suck at rioting.  Protip:  To avoid being accused of “insurrection”, you need to declare a Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone where the government has no authority.  Also, you need to be black and/or Communist.  If you meet these criteria, then Twit-@jack will look the other way while you tweet overtly violent rhetoric!

---

That would be the rhetoric of the morally and politically bankrupt GOP leadership.  —The leadership of the same GOP that numerous right-leaning Americans have despised for decades.  Trump had presented himself as a political reformer; is a reformer ever welcomed by the establishment that he promises to reform?

Now, according to Rasmussen Reports for 18 January 2021 (archive of what I am seeing), “48% of Likely U.S. Voters approve of President Trump’s job performance.  Fifty-one percent (51%) disapprove.”  35% “Strongly Approve”, and 42% “Strongly Disapprove”.

Those are excellent numbers for a President who has been smeared in the mass-media, deplatformed by Big Tech, unbanked by the banks, and declared a “domestic terrorist” by a corrupt Goldman Sachs alum and subsequent White House employee whom Trump had FIRED!  (Loser.)

Just imagine if the media were to report on Trump at least semi-honestly.  Or at least, imagine if they were to stop hurling at him a 24/7 nonstop barrage of easily-debunked total lies.  He would now have one of the highest approval ratings of any president in American history!

---

The foregoing began an essay that I don’t have time to finish now.  Something about why I depicted Trump as Coca-Cola because he had turned out to be just another GOP politician.  —Contrary to his promises, and exactly as I had predicted in 2015–16.  I only like him now because, frankly, it is impossible for me not to sympathize with someone who is being censored, lied about, and targeted for personal destruction by tyrants who demand the repeal of the freedom of speech.

Food for thought:  Look back to what I mentioned earlier, the 1994 Republican Revolution.  After the stunning midterm victory of the GOP in 1994, Bill Clinton was reëlected by a minority of voters in 1996.  Because people hated the cowardly Republicans for breaking their promises.  Many of the voters who swept the GOP into power in 1994 either voted for Perot in 1996, or just stayed home in disgust.

The GOP needs to stop blaming Trump for the failure of a corrupt party whose only consistent behaviour is the betrayal of their hapless votaries voters.


My perspective:  I have made a detailed study of modern American political history, but I rarely keep up with current events in American politics.  When I do, from where I sit, the voices of people in Idaho, Wisconsin, Oklahoma, or West Virginia come through to me just as loudly as the voices of people in New York or California.  I definitely have no attachment whatsoever to any American political party.

The historical perspective:  Trump himself is definitely not radical.  As recently as 50–60 years ago (never mind longer!), mainstream American Conservatives would have considered today’s Trump to be at best a pale hue of pink, if not a Red.  American “conservatives” are spectacularly incompetent at conserving their own positions, let alone conserving their country.  The whole country has moved left—and “conservatives” have moved with it.  Trump’s stated agenda is to return America to what was a semi-moderate American liberal’s position, immediately before the cultural cataclysm of the 1960s and the concomitant collapse of American Conservatism.

Note:  I am not a conservative, let alone an American conservative.  I see modern “conservatism” as a tangle of self-contradictions, for modernity itself is inherently liberal; and in principle, I am altogether strongly opposed to democracy, i.e. the notion that wolves must obey sheep because sheep are many, and wolves are few.  But at least, unlike liberals, conservatives tend not to be hate-crazed maniacs hellbent on remodelling the universe according to childish fantasies.  I appreciate that.

---

To whom.  —I need to point that out, because reality-inverting liberals enjoy pretending that they are “educated”, and Trump supporters are all just a bunch of illiterate rubes.  No, really.  To whom, you knuckle-dragging troglodyte!

It is funny how my post reasonably pointing out what can be readily seen by anyone with two eyes and a brain—i.e. that the U.S. is behaving as stereotypical corrupt régime that rams through sham elections by brute force and massive censorship—was promptly followed by readily identifiable disinformation about the City of London.


I have a better theory for restoring lawful government in America.  It doesn’t even involve any made-up non-facts.

Strictly as a legal matter, the 1783 Treaty of Paris, which ended the American Revolutionary War and recognized the sovereignty of the several colonies as states, is totally invalid.  Null and void!  Void ab initio!  My theory is too complicated to explain in the margin of this forum post; but I assure you, it is absolutely correct as a matter of law.

Therefore, the U.S. government does not exist.  The American colonies are in a state of insurrection, which must be stopped to restore law and order.  For as we all know, political violence is always wrong.  We need to stop an attempted overthrow of lawful government by domestic terrorists in these colonies!

I am grateful to the leftists for symbolically starting this process, with their attacks on the statutes of violent domestic terrorists and insurrectionists such as Thomas Jefferson.  Although their intents were wrong, they accidentally got this one right.  Jefferson was an insurrectionist!  Insurgent!  Terrrrrrorrrrist!  Do you hear me!?  A domestic terrorist insurrectionist violently overthrowing the government!!!11

I mean, a real one.  Not a hopeless little rioter who achieved nothing and/or promptly wound up in jail.

Unfortunately for the same leftists (and for most other so-called “Americans”), each and every resident of the American colonies not descended from a legal British subject is an illegal alien.  As an immigration control measure, all illegal aliens shall be promptly deported from British colonial territory, when lawful government is restored to a sovereign properly established by divine right and ancient traditions.

Now, some may object that no matter how technically correct my legal theory may be, it is outside the realm of practical politics.  To them, I say:  Pffft.  Who cares?  I can still publish videos about it, just to hear myself talk.

---

Having enjoyed a moment of levity, let us now return to the grave issue at hand:

Only a régime running a sham election enforces its results by suppressing scrutiny and censoring objections.

It would be more honest if the U.S. were to dispense with the façade, and simply admit that it is a dictatorship.  Dissidents would then not be encouraged to mark themselves out with false notions of whatever “rights” they may imagine they still have—especially the “freedom of speech”.  The sooner that American dissidents realize the severity of the impending situation, the better for them and for their safety.

nutildah, you are slippery.  Too bad for you that brains permanently addled by LSD have trouble keeping stories straight:

With “they” referring to Quickseller and PrimeNumber7:

So, what do you “retract”?  The allegation that Lauda cut a “deal” (impliedly with some exchange of consideration) to “pretend” something that she impliedly knew to be untrue, based on your alleged secret “sources”?  (Perhaps you were told by the same person who told Quickseller that Lauda had a drug addiction?)  —Or the allegation that Lauda and Quickseller publicly “came to some sort of understanding through forgiveness”?  Please clarify, so that I can understand what to make of your “retraction”.  

---

You removed my inline hyperlink to what I am talking about, so that you can pretend that I am spouting nonsense.  That is deeply dishonest of you.  Here is the proper quote:


The subject of drug abuse promoters in DT is one that I have been intending to raise for months, with appropriate tags and a public call for exclusions.  It needs to be done, and it needs to be done right, and I simply have not had the time for such a thread.

Whereas it is funny that hereby in this thread, your position is being supported by someone who has a history of reporting people to the IRS and the FBI—who knows, maybe the DEA, too.  As an anarchist, of course I do not advocate such a thing—#justsaying.  Anyway, lawman Vod, why do you give such credence to crazy rumours fomented primarily by nutildah, a hallucinogenic drug abuser and advocate, and suchmoon, who uses source merits to reward the blatant advocacy of doing drugs?  You are believing conspiracy theories peddled by the forum’s Timothy Leary, who has told me that I am ignorant about LSD and psilocybin because I have never had the “educational” experience of frying my own brain with the stuff (!).

Stereotypical drug-abuser rationalizations.  Hey, Vod, hasn’t every law-and-order type seen these clichés a thousand times?  


Merited by suchmoon (4), strawbs (2), vapourminer (1), 600watt (1), sirazimuth (1), P_Shep (1), soullyG (1), OutOfMemory (1)

(Don’t bother deleting anything.  I have been keeping evidence all along.)

Frankly, I cannot believe that anyone trusts the judgment of someone so delusional that he thinks that tripping on LSD is in any way whatsoever analogous to taking a trip to France.  —Or that anyone even wants to talk to such a person.

Anyway, Quickseller and PrimeNumber7, I am very sorry that both of your respective reputations have been damaged by nonsense peddled by some addle-brained scum who actively tries to drag others into his acid-dropper lifestyle (see above quotes), and by his playground-clique pals.  Yes, I saw nutildah’s “evidence” last year; the attempt at linguistic analysis was unscientific bunkum, nothing like what tspacepilot did.  (Unfortunately, not many Reputation regulars have the technical expertise to understand what tspacepilot did, and why it was significant.)  As for what hilarious said, well—he is the one who has been sowing rumours that Lauda will return with an alt.  Yes, I recently compared hilarious alt theories to QAnon; I thought that it was funny.  His uncorroborated statements should be taken with a grain of salt.

Overall, especially when you haven’t actually been accused of doing anything wrong (!), all of this is just another smear campaign.

---

cryptohunter, are you transforming into nutty nutildah!?  

I am surprised that you would buy into this, CH.  Objectively, the QS/PN7 alt accusation is a case study on how rumours, gossip, and peer pressure amongst suchmoon’s little lunchroom clique can produce groupthink “facts” that everybody just “knows”.


You know what, CH, I am in the mood to take you up on that.  I won’t debate nutildah, because I don’t like to argue with the self-made crazy of acid-droppers; it is a policy that I have learned by experience, to avoid wasting my time and, frankly, to preserve my own sanity.  But you are more reasonable than nutildah—or at least, you are less unreasonable, relatively speaking.  (Admittedly, that is damning you with faint praise—sorry for comparing you to nutildah!)

---

There was no “deal”.  I spent days arguing the PrimeNumber7 case with Lauda.  I debated her about it intensively—I debated her publicly, and much moreso in private.  She kept trying to convince me that he was Quickseller, and her tag was justified.  I kept trying to convince her that the case was at best weak as hell, and she should untag him.  I am thus reasonably sure that her reason for untagging him was that I won the debate.

We regularly debated a wide range of topics.  Usually, neither of us could persuade the other; usually otherwise, she prevailed.  The PrimeNumber7 case was one of very few instances in which I ever convinced her of anything; I will take that as an indication of the quality of arguments on both sides.

And I was not only debating Lauda!

Let us step back for a moment, for context.  Quickseller, I don’t like to dig this up; but the following litany of quotes needs to be assembled in one place, so that people can see what really happened.

Merited by Vod (2)

CH, how is this for “objective standards”, “being fair to everybody”, and “not having a double standard”:  At a time when I in DT, when I had strong anti-QS biases and an admitted tendency to treat QS alt accusations with a presumption of guilt, I acted against my own biases.  I applied the same standard to PrimeNumber7 as I had applied to my dear friend Lauda.  Compare the above quotation with the following:


Topic subject:  @PrimeNumber7 is an alt account of @Quickseller
Post subject:  I am not Quickseller.


Given the timing of events, I reasonably infer that my above-quoted “I am not Quickseller” speech in PrimeNumber7’s defence must have moved Quickseller to a soul-searching moment.  If he is not PN7, then he has first-hand knowledge that he is not PN7; and he thus had first-hand knowledge that an innocent bystander was being smear-attacked by people with an anti-QS grudge, using exactly the same “he did not deny it!” argument that he himself had used against Lauda.  In retrospect, I can see how that must have left him burning with shame and remorse.

Before now, Quickseller was always unmoved when people attacked his Panthers52 alt.  He either ignored it, or counterattacked in epic flamewars.  The above-quoted discussion evidently got to him in a way that nothing in the Panthers52 case ever did.  I thus weigh his reaction (—what I reasonably infer to have been his reaction—) as evidence that he is not PrimeNumber7:  If he had been PN7, the rational reaction would have been to play it cool while I was accidentally defending his selfish interests using the same arguments that I had previously used to attack him.  His reaction was too altruistic, too laden with guilt—exactly how he would feel if PN7 was an innocent bystander.

Evoking his remorse was not my intention—sorry, Quickseller, I didn’t expect that you would be so reasonable, let alone conscionable!  I simply thought that it was the perfect argument to induce some soul-searching by the people attacking PrimeNumber7—sorry, I expected that such characters as suchmoon would be more reasonable (and conscionable) than they turned out to be.  But Quickseller turned out to be the good one.  About 47 hours after I started that line of argument, he suddenly and unexpectedly apologized to Lauda.

I know that Lauda’s reaction to Quickseller’s apology was utter shock, because I was in active discussion with her when Quickseller posted it.  I got her contemporaneous private reaction, before she replied.  She did not see this coming.


Thus after almost two years of keeping silent in the face of a totally baseless false accusation, Lauda finally denied it.

In 2018, I myself had urged her both publicly and privately to keep her silence.  For if people can be made to deny accusations so weak that there is anyway no probable cause to believe the accusation, then it would set a horrible precedent:

• suchmoon, a friend of a friend told me that you torture cute kittens for sadistic pleasure.  Do you deny it?  WHY DON’T YOU DENY IT!?  Very interesting:  suchmoon does not deny being a sadistic kitten-torturer.
  
  (Oh, and if you do deny it, then tomorrow, the question will be if you admit or deny that you are a cannibal who eats babies kidnapped by space aliens.  WHY DON’T YOU DENY IT!?  You see how that works.)
• Quickseller, I saw in a thread somewhere a theory that you are theymos’ alt:
  
  
  Quote from: Timelord2067 on June 19, 2019, 04:35:31 PM
  Quote from: killyou72 on June 13, 2019, 01:59:51 PM

  (That would be fucking nuts if quickseller was an alt of theymos)
  

  
  There's an admin who in a PM to me claimed he is an alt of quickseller... after my posts started getting deleted... [...] I can accept one of quicksellers' alts is an admin.
  
  
  Quickseller/theymos has never denied this!  WHY DON’T YOU DENY IT!?  Very interesting:  Quickseller does not deny that he is administrator of this forum.
• In 2018, Quickseller accused me of being Lauda’s alt:
  
  
  Quote from: Quickseller on February 17, 2018, 03:29:54 PM
  nullius is lauda. That is very clear. Anyone who does not see this is simply closing their eyes.
  
  I have never denied it.  WHY DON’T I DENY IT!?  Very interesting...

---

Thank you for showing your true face.  Usually, you are more skilled at fooling people...


...or at least, you think you are.

---

Edit:  Obviously, this was posted while I was writing—quoted for the record:


Reprehensible.  Beneath reply, except that I must laugh at the Internet wannabe Sherlock Holmes types who find conspiratorial connections everywhere—and yet, who fail to notice that, among other things, Lauda took her final avatar and personal text from things that I made for her.  So much for your pathetic attempt to distance me from her legacy. 😼


CH, why are you transforming into DireWolfM14?  

Accepting the Biden presidency means embracing a tinpot dictatorship in which sham elections are enforced through massive censorship, and by criminalizing anyone who objects as a “domestic terrorist” who is “inciting insurrection”.

Protip:  When examining the legitimacy of an election is declared to be “insurrection”, “sedition”, and otherwise “criminal”, you are living under a thinly-veiled dictatorship, period.  Whereas what Big Tech, the mass-media, and Democrat politicians now declare, they definitely desire to enforce with actual criminal laws if and when they can.

Anyone who cannot see that is foolish, corrupt, and/or blinded by hatred of Trump.

It is so easy for you Americans to see when a corrupt régime in another country rams through a sham election and represses the opposition; indeed, you Americans tend to make a stock accusation of sham elections against any régime that you dislike, even when there is no evidence of that.  Look in the mirror.  The 2020 U.S. presidential election is a farce!

---

For the record:  I have hereto been circumspect in what I think about the legitimacy of the election, for two reasons.

The minor reason was that I had wagered on the election, and I did not want to present any false impression of trying to wiggle out of my obligations.  Since I paid the bet according to its terms as soon as Trump declared his support for a transition to Biden, that is no longer a concern.  Regardless of whether Trump legitimately won the election, I legitimately lost my charity bet with theymos in the exact moment that Trump publicly, unequivocally accepted a Biden presidency (as he did in practice, if not in principle).  And I am pleased to have supported the NCLA.

The major reason was that I lacked sufficient information to form a strong opinion.  It is an open secret that American elections are oftentimes wracked with ballot fraud, and that the Democrats are the ones who do that.  Hereby, there was significant evidence of fraud in several key states.  But that does not automatically equate to a conclusion that Trump really won.  I was particularly skeptical of Trump’s claim that he won a “landslide” victory.

Before the election, my expectation was that the results rested on a knife’s edge.  A small to moderate amount of ballot fraud could simply mean that Trump should have suffered a narrow E.C. loss, instead of a big E.C. loss.  For example, suppose that he really won in Pennsylvania and Georgia, but not in any of the other states that had plausible objections.  That would mean that, barring faithless electors, he would have lost in the E.C. by 270–268, instead of by 306–232.

On the other hand, suppose that he really won in Pennsylvania, Arizona, and Wisconsin, but not in the other contested states.  That would give him a relatively narrow 273–265 victory, not a “landslide” victory (at least insofar as the E.C. is concerned).  And if he had won in Pennsylvania, Arizona, and Nevada (but not the others), then the result would have been a 269–269 E.C. tie with nobody reaching 270, thus invoking the first Twelfth Amendment contingent election since 1825.

(The foregoing examples are picked to give hypothetical close-call numbers, not as a statement about the strength or weakness of the evidence of fraud in any particular state.  —Not by inclusion, and not by omission.)

By its nature, ballot fraud is difficult to quantify reliably—even for someone in an authoritative position to investigate, which I myself am not.  Indeed, in the past few months’ atmosphere, it has been altogether difficult for me to find information that meets my own standards for reliability.  The only conclusion that I could reach was:  This looks bad.  Biden’s legitimacy is weak and questionable, at best.  But I do not know if Trump really should have won.

Whereas now, the Left’s repressive tactics and wild false accusations suffice for me to presume conclusively that the election was stolen, and they know it.  Only corrupt régimes running sham elections use such means to force people to accept the results, against massive opposition and significant evidence that something is really wrong.  They doth protest too much, methinks!

For example, see the aptly-named Fetterman ordering people to shut up and accept their fetters:



^^^ Translation:  “Pennsylvania was stolen, and I need to cover it up by repudiating the whole concept of the freedom of speech.”  Examples of this abound...

Make the Internet Decentralized Again!

---

PrimeNumber7, you seem to be making two separate lines of argument together.  I agree with half of what you say—but as for the other half, I think that you misunderstand what Section 230 actually does.

Of course, I agree that it is reprehensible for Facebook to censor discussion of Rittenhouse, and for all of the Big Tech platforms to ban the President of the United States, etc.

I like your citation of Marsh v. Alabama.  Without referring to that case, I have been intending to write a P&S essay using the “company town” argument; it definitely applies, and I am curious to see the response of “ancaps” who obviously dislike antitrust law.  Is it not the apex of anarcho-capitalism for billions of people to live in a town owned by Mark Zuckerberg, where they are perpetually under his surveillance and subject to his rules—even in “their” home lives and familial communications?

If Marsh can be applied to enforce the First Amendment directly on corporations that have obtained quasi-governmental, super-governmental powers over billions of people all over the world, then that will be an important step—but in my opinion, it is not enough.

I think that the Big Tech oligopoly should be smashed—no, must be smashed to bits.  Amongst the legal tools available, a textbook application of antitrust law is the best fit.  And I am not just saying this because of current U.S. politics.  In particular, I’ve been wanting for years to see Google, Facebook, and Amazon burnt to the ground; they are destroying the world in ways that most people never even think about.  Their whole business model is based on mass-surveillance and mass-brainwashing.  Their latest actions manifest a worsening of the symptoms, but are not the disease itself.  And locked-down devices under the peremptory control of Steve Jobs or Tim Cook have always been a big problem.  (Don’t get me started about what Twitter has done to society.)

But you are wrong about Section 230:


That is not what Section 230 does.

Without Section 230, a site effectually has two choices:  Either don’t do any moderation at all, not even of spam—or risk being held liable as a publisher with editorial responsibility for each post by every user.  Including anonymous, untraceable parties who registered using Tor—including people who may be trying to set you up for trouble.  If you run the site, then among other things, you need to fact-check everything that every user says—just in case someone said something legally defamatory; and that is only the beginning of your liability.  —Or else, let the spammers take over and drown out all conversation.

Both choices are obviously untenable.  As Gyfts said:


It is Section 230 that enables theymos to do some moderation, and yet to have this policy protecting the freedom of speech here (boldface and italics are in the original):


Without Section 230, for example, theymos would need to delete all of the posts in the argument between OgNasty and Vod.  I mean all posts, on both sides.  Otherwise, the forum would be legally liable for the factual accuracy of all of their mutual accusations and recriminations.

And that is only the beginning of the problem:  Defamation liability is only one of the potential problems that Section 230 guards against.

---

Who should have Section 230 protection?  Answer:  Everyone who is allowed to be on the Internet!

From one side, consider small leftist media platforms that heavily censor their users.  Unlike liberals, I don’t live in an echo chamber.  I often look at sites that I disagree with; and I have seen, for instance, small Mastodon instances run by ultra-leftists who complain that Twitter doesn’t censor enough (!).  Their platforms are basically little “safe spaces” where users obsess over pronouns, give each other a perpetual stream of affirmations of mutual empathy, and complain endlessly about their victimization by this-ism and that-ism.  Not much else is allowed, anyway.

Much though I yearn for a totally authoritarian régime in which robots round up all of the insapient talking monkeys whom I dislike for orderly disposal, we still seem to have principles of free speech and private property.  Alas, I am not yet recognized as the Dictator of the Universe!  So, consistently with those principles, let those crazy leftists have Section 230 protection for their freely chosen dens of insanity.

Re-applying in this context what you said about Facebook:


I don’t think it is relevant if they censor posts about Rittenhouse, or if they permaban anyone who says that there are only and exactly two biological sexes, or if they positively require their users to chant “Trump evil! Trump evil!” in unison hundreds of times per day, or whatever.  The sites that I describe exist because their pathetic, insane users want pathetic, insane policies.

Contrast the situation with Facebook, Twitter, et al., where many of the users complain about censorship.  They only stay there because, through network effects and sharp practices, the platforms have effectually locked them in; and if they try to leave, the Big Tech oligopoly acts as a unified cartel to shut down their intended destination, as with Parler!

Now, from the other direction, consider the example of what would happen if I were to set up my own site.  For the sake of argument, pretend that I am subject to American jurisdiction—and pretend that I am amenable to legal process of any kind.  ;-)

If I run a site, I will categorically ban anyone who glorifies and rationalizes the use of marijuana and LSD.  I mean that I will ban them personally, not only censor their posts.  They tend to post insane nonsense.  It is a waste of time to debate with self-made nutcases.  They behave in ways that are poisonous to communities—and also, I just don’t like them!  Indeed, more generally, “I dislike you” will be a gloriously subjective TOS reason for permabans.  Muahahaha!  My site, my rules—bye!  So-called “people” whom I ban on the basis of my personal whims are free to go post on Gab.com, which allows any legal expression except for pornography.  Of course, I support Gab’s right to exist, despite their lack of enforcement of pure Nullianism.

Leave aside for the moment the problem that I dislike so many “people”, my site may be in danger of allowing only nobody and a nonexistent cat.

Does this mean, in your opinion, that I am a “publisher” taking editorial responsibility, and I should thus be liable for the content posted by users on my site?  That would be the effect of repealing Section 230.

---

I appreciate the suggestion, but it is not really the topic of this thread.

The technology for people to have discussions independently of Big Tech existed before Bitcoin did.  For example, consider what would happen, if only every person just had an independent blog at an independent domain, with the comments and the interblog syndication features that made the independent “blogosphere” so big 15–20 years ago—with each and every of them enjoying Section 230 protection against legal liability for reader comments.  That is decentralized (except for the domain name system—another problem...).  If only!

Unfortunately, as things stand, that is unrealistic to expect.  At least, it will not be happening overnight.  And similarly as to your suggestion, masses of people will not all suddenly just up and move to new decentralized platforms with blockchain sprinkled on.

Of course, I encourage the development of new technologies for new platforms—for the day after tomorrow.  But what do we do right now?  —And what do we do in a situation in which Big Tech uses sharp practices to inhibit any innovation that does not suit their agenda?  What will you do if you develop a great new platform, and Google deranks you, and Google and Apple ban you from their app stores, etc.?  (I hope that no project will be foolish enough to use Amazon AWS ever again!)

Answer:  The quasi-governmental, super-governmental Big Tech oligopoly must be smashed; and antitrust law is an appropriate tool for the job.  Make the Internet Decentralized Again!

Amplifying what I have said elsewhere, the bad-faith abuse of the 25th to remove the President would be an insurrectionary act, a transparent sham covering a coup d’État.  Trump is clearly not suffering any personal incapacity; such claims are, um, trumped-up based on the armchair diagnoses of people who dislike him.  And the political weaponization of the 25th would set a horrible precedent—not that the U.S. Constitution has meant anything for a long time, but this abuse of Constitutional provisions would be a new low.

---

I must quote hereby the following, because Big Tech’s censorship is inhibiting Trump from directly reaching his supporters with his anti-rioting message—at just the moment when the liar-media are endlessly repeating the absolute lie that he incited the Capitol riot.  More people need to see this.  Please spread it.

(I quote Fox News because it’s the primary source.  I typically despise Fox News as the American GOP/neocon warmonger propaganda outlet.  Boldface added.)

---

According to Rasmussen (2021-01-14) [edit: archive], Trump currently has 46% approval (34% “Strongly Approve”) versus 53% disapproval (43% “Strongly Disapprove”).

I think that it’s likely that he is picking up almost as much new support as he is losing.  Hate-crazed liberals are making a martyr of him.

But anyway...


That is an extreme understatement.

---

In 2016, Trump was supposed to be the challenger for Americans who distrusted the GOP after decades of being betrayed by them.  He has always been disliked by the corrupt career-politician GOP leadership, and especially by the neocons.  It was as much an upset for him to win the party nomination as it was for him to win the general election; but the GOP leadership had no choice but to go along, because Trump was overwhelmingly popular.

Trump was the anti-GOP candidate for Americans who wish for a viable new political party—a practical impossibility in American politics.

The only thing that has changed is that many Trump voters have recently felt as many Republicans did in the mid-90s, after Gingrich’s “Contract with America” turned out to be a pack of glib false promises.  But that does not bode well for GOP leadership:  Rather, it just means that Trump voters came to see Trump as same-old, same-old corrupt GOP.  I believe that this is why he lost the election (or perhaps better said: why he could not muster enough legitimate votes to overwhelm any ballot fraud on the other side).  And I am not just thinking this now; I predicted it in 2019.  I basically agree with Ann Coulter’s analysis of this (though I disagree with her about some other things, she is often a quite astute political observer).

(Some context on my perspective:  In 2015–16, I got called nasty names for warning Trump supporters of my prediction that he was a big talker who would break his promises.  I basically said in 2015–16 a much stronger version of what Ann Coulter started to say in 2019; and at the time, I used similar rhetoric about Trump v. Hillary as I more recently did about Trump v. Biden.)

Now, I expect that the liberal establishment making a martyr of Trump will bring back many of those disillusioned Trump supporters, in addition to gaining him many new supporters.  Whether he likes it or not, Trump is a generalized symbol of being against everything that is horribly wrong in America.  To some degree, he has always been that—it was how he upset the GOP in the first place!—but now, it is even moreso by an order of magnitude.  Perpend the fact that he is the first American president ever to be massively censored, shut down, deplatformed, and even unbanked.  How could he avoid being a symbol to those who are disgusted by the whole system?

---

Edit:  Added archival link for current Rasmussen poll numbers.

I reiterate that unless otherwise noted, the memes that I posted on this thread are fresh and original, by me.

---

This is an indirect meme about Biden.  It is about a known associate of Biden, one who should be wary of calling for criminal-law restraints on what people can say in public:

reserved

The following message is for people who condemn Big Tech censorship.  Negativity against Trump is off-topic.  So is rationalization of Big Tech’s actions.  There are plenty of threads where you can discuss these things.  Not here; this thread will be strictly moderated to prevent derailing.  Other local rules apply.

Although the first part of this message is addressed specifically to the American right, the remainder thereof is for anyone who recognizes the grave threat by Big Tech to freedom of speech, to privacy, and also to any genuine innovation that doesn’t suit their their intrinsically corrupt business model of surveillance capitalism and mass thought-control.

This is the abbreviated version.  I don’t have time to write the mini-book I wanted to produce on this subject; and I need to catch up on other threads.

---

Weakening Section 230 would be a grievous error.  Its protection is most needed by small sites who can’t afford hotshot legal teams—by the upstart startups that we need to compete with Big Tech.

I predict that if well-meaning but misguided people on the American right push to weaken Section 230, the Big Tech companies will offer token resistance—and then, let it happen.  Thereafter, hate-crazed “liberals” will use vexatious litigation to harass free-speech sites, thus destroying them by economic attrition.

The ultimate result will be anticompetitive.  The entrenched incumbents can absorb the increased legal costs, as their competitors get put out of business.

Please, do not attack Section 230.  To the contrary:  If you want to tinker with it, then you should strengthen it!

---

Insofar as I can see, the best existing legal means of dealing with Big Tech is via antitrust law.

theymos, I know that the very mention of antitrust law will be anathema to you.  But imagine if a competing forum colluded with Cloudflare and your backend provider to remove this forum from the Internet at a critical moment—suddenly, with negligible warning, without even giving you time to seek alternate arrangements if you didn’t have them in place already.

That is exactly what Twitter, Google, Apple, and Amazon did to Parler.^*  If there was ever a case for antitrust law, this is it!

There is a Silicon Valley cartel of vertically- and horizontally-integrated companies that prevent competition via every possible anticompetitive sharp practice short of mafia hits.  They each do this—and they do this together, according to a mutual agenda.  Antitrust laws were invented for exactly this reason.

(* I presume collusion, on the face of it.  At the exact moment when Twitter’s own actions were making many of their “customers” unhappy, two app stores and an infrastructure provider suddenly shut down Twitter’s primary competitor.  It is indisputable that Google, Apple, and Amazon acted to prevent competition against Twitter.)

---

That said, as a philosophical matter, I don’t think that antitrust laws are the theoretically ideal way of approaching this problem.  Perhaps some new legal theories should be developed:  The Big Tech oligopolies are quasi-governmental tyrants, who have used new technology as a force multiplier exponentiator to attain a new type of power that never before existed in history.

Has any empire in all of history ever attained direct, fine-grained control over the daily communications of billions of people?  Of course not—until Big Tech arose.  And as recently seen, they can apply that power to meddle in the political process.  They who control communications can effectually control governments!  And they are unaccountable.

But the development of new theories takes time, if it happens at all.

Antitrust laws are on the books.  As a legal matter, this is a textbook application thereof.  I urge the American right to push for rigorous antitrust law enforcement—while leaving Section 230 intact, so that Big Tech’s competitors can fairly benefit from Section 230 protections just as the Big Tech companies themselves have.

With some necessary context restored to the internal quotation:

When my whole point is to stop the off-topic attacks on a person who is not involved in this thread, I will not be drawn into rehashing the details of the PrimeNumber7 accusation by the fantastical mischaracterizations of an overt promoter of LSD use.

Quote from: nutildah on January 15, 2021, 02:07:17 AM

I don't care what kind of deal Lauda had with Quickseller to pretend they're not the same person.

Your such accusation against Lauda is false, malicious, and defamatory.  I will tag accordingly.

There was no “deal”, and Lauda did not “pretend” anything.  I have direct knowledge whereof I speak, because I had extensive private discussions with Lauda about both Quickseller and PrimeNumber7 at the pertinent time last January–February.  At the time, she concluded exactly what she said publicly:

Quote from: Lauda on February 03, 2020, 10:26:09 AM

I've given this a great deal of thought, considered the possibilities and their related probabilities:

• Case 1: They are alts, and he's trying to correct his ways - I will not damage his attempt.
• Case 2: They are not alts - I do not want to damage PN7.

Which case is the correct one, I do not know. I think he is not proved innocent and not proved guilty. I believe this does not require a long explanation, and will not give one publicly either. Therefore, hereby, I retract my rating.

If you indeed aren't alts, I am sorry PN7.

Signed,
Queen of Cats.

I hereby said, for my own part, that I have concluded, to a high probability, that PrimeNumber7 is not Quickseller’s alt.  Because you are a drug-addled liar, you conflated what I said to Quickseller about how Lauda would react to his apology with what I said for my own part about PrimeNumber7.

Quote from: nutildah on January 15, 2021, 02:07:17 AM

You should have just let Lauda's words on the subject speak for themselves instead of trying to re-interpret their legacy.

To uphold the honour of Lauda’s legacy, I must note that Lauda was very strongly opposed to drug abuse.  It is what made the “pills” false accusation so funny, in a twisted way; that became a running joke between us, until Quickseller ruined it by apologizing to her.  Thereafter, I had to satisfy myself with poking fun at her witchcraft.  Lauda never did drugs, but she definitely did witchcraft!

---

Quickseller, I am very sorry for these ugly off-topic flamewars on your thread here.

I wish that I had seen this last year.

Quickseller, thank you for affirmatively dispelling my remaining doubts about you.  I think it’s big of you finally to come clean on the Panthers52 affair—especially when, sadly but inevitably, it could not but be expected that you would be met with a barrage of hostility from people who are more interested in humiliating you than in the truth.  It is just the way that things work on this forum.

If it makes you feel any better, my first thought on seeing this was:  Wow, I wish that Lauda were here.  I’m sure that it would have been a big moment for her to see this.

---

A message to all of the people who have been attacking PrimeNumber7 on this thread:

I am >90% sure that Quickseller and PrimeNumber7 are different individuals, and the alt account accusation is totally false.  I cannot be 100% sure, without first-hand knowledge—or without at least knowing them both much better than I do.  But after having studied the question over a long period of time, I am almost sure of it.

You should consider that you are catching an innocent bystander in the crossfire of your animus toward Quickseller.  And for what?  Even assuming that the accusations presented on the flimsiest of evidence were correct, there is here no accusation of alt accounts being used to facilitate a scam.  You are risking damage to an innocent party if you are wrong about PrimeNumber7, for no reason but a grudge against Quickseller.

That is unconscionable and indefensible.  Stop it.

---

By happenstance, I found this thread a few days ago.  I wanted to compose a proper response; but I have not had time to keep up properly with the forum and with other threads, so it kept being pushed down my list of things to do.  I should have made earlier such a simple response as the foregoing.

For the record, I note that last month, before Quickseller posted this thread, I intended to remove my ~ on him.  I decided to wait and watch for a full year since he removed trust feedback that I had found objectionable.  Now, I wish that I had done it before.  Anyway, I have done it now, thus resetting him to the default state.  I don’t have any negative feedback on him to review.  I have opposed the flag on him.  I am debating whether I should pull a TMAN, or keep waiting and watching.  :-)

Happy New Year, Quickseller—and good luck.

Cross-reference:  Active discussion of what this could mean for Bitcoin.  This thread is about Trump himself.  There are two sides to this coin.

---

franky1, I didn’t say that Trump was poor:  I said that I am.  Nonetheless, I would like to be able to say that I gave something to support this high-profile victim of censorship.  A little donation would be largely symbolic from his perspective, even if it’s a significant amount to me.

Obviously, I mean Bitcoin only.  I don’t do American dollars—I am not inclined to try to get any—and Trump currently seems to have no good means of receiving them, anyway!  (I didn’t mention here, Stripe.com deplatformed his campaign right before DB cut ties with his business, and Signature unbanked him personally.)

Even better, as I said, would be if I could help him get his own private wallet set up—preferably, his own full node.  Sending new Bitcoiners some starter coin is an old tradition, which fell into desuetude after Bitcoin gained significant market value; I think that it would be warranted here.

As I said, I don’t realistically expect for that to happen.  But I mean it sincerely.  I want to get Trump up and running with Bitcoin!


Incomprehensibly vague accusations—this isn’t going very well...  Anyway, I didn’t say that they seized his money.  I said that they unbanked him.  Given the way that society is set up to make everyone dependent on banks, losing one’s personal bank accounts can be dreadfully burdensome—and for a business to lose its banking can be fatal.


Say what!?  Although I don’t know Trump’s private finances, the news article that I linked says that Signature has been his family’s bank for a long time, and implies the same about DB and his business.  I also recall having heard much about Trump and DB in the past, but I don’t feel like digging up the information just to make the point.

I think that you are making this up as you go along.


Now, you are way off in liar FUD territory—and off-topic.

Trump is an American.  The United States is one of only two countries in the world so tyrannical as to charge its citizens income tax regardless of residency.  Expats who have lived and worked outside the U.S. for decades are still expected to pay taxes to the IRS every year, lest they be guilty of a “crime” that is prosecuted with lethal seriousness.  The tax savings scheme that you describe will not work for Americans.  And Trump has obviously been residing in America for the past four years as its President; to my understanding, he has consistently resided there for decades, probably for his whole life.

---

That’s a straight-up lie, and a facial absurdity only believed by people so blinded by hatred of Trump that they will lap up any swill dished out by the liar-media.

So, I guess you approve of banks subverting and usurping the U.S. government by applying coercive economic pressure to the President of the United States, with explicit demands that he resign.  That’s not a “conspiracy theory”:  They just did it, in broad daylight and in the headlines.

I smell a troll, and maybe a spectacularly inept manipulation attempt to scare people into dumping Bitcoin.  If someone were to dump >50k BTC all at once, the market would feel it; it wouldn’t be a catastrophe, not nearly, but it could cause quite the bumpy ride for a bit.

I am surprised that by the third page of this thread, nobody called that!

Here, let me try my version:  I just remembered that I have a few billion dollars in cash sitting in the back of my closet, beneath my collection of vintage Monopoly gameboards.  It seems I forgot about it, because it looks so similar to the Monopoly money—I got confused.  Anyway, is it possible to dump it all at once for real money, i.e., Bitcoin?  Or should I use a bot to make tens of thousands of small, quiet exchange transactions—as MicroStrategy did, shearing the daytrader sheep bit by bit, so that they could make a huge move without driving up the Bitcoin price prematurely?

---

LOL.  I think that that is the right answer to this one.

20kevin20:  Well said.  I have nothing to add, but that I tried to keep this thread focused on Bitcoin and financial freedom—rather than about Trump himself.  If financial freedom needs a political litmus test, then it isn’t “freedom” in any meaningful sense!

---

There, I agree.  If Trump had a spine, he could have reformed the system in America as he had promised to.

Whereas now, besides all else, I think that he has nothing to lose by embracing Bitcoin.  Nothing to lose, and everything to gain.  Think about that for a long moment!

---

My obvious point is that the bankers are directly interfering in the political process.  When bankers wield power over high-ranking political officials, the net effect is government by the banks.  Is that your definition of “democracy”?

Set aside for the moment that I myself condemn democracy in principle.  My personal opinion on that point is hereby irrelevant:  Rule by the banks is not what most people think of as “democracy”, and rule by the banks is what this is.


Setting aside the fact that it is an absolute lie that Trump incited those riots:  Since when are the banks and social media companies the unilateral enforcers of the law?  Do you want for giant corporations to appoint themselves as police, judges, juries, and executioners against you?  The net effect is:  To act on their whims against you, with you having no recourse.

Take a step back, take a deep breath, think rationally instead of emotionally, and take a cold look at what you just said.  You are calling on banks and other BigCorps to enforce (your mistaken idea of) the law unilaterally, unaccountably, with no legal “due process” and no appeal!

In your view, banks and Big Tech companies are the law.

Your argument is especially absurd because to my knowledge, nobody has accused Trump of using his bank accounts to incite a riot (!).  The topic of this thread is about the banks, and Trump’s need for Bitcoin.  How is the (false) accusation that he incited a riot on Twitter relevant to his bank accounts?

—Or do you propose that the banks should appoint themselves to do something a few short steps from the USG’s nasty habit of freezing people’s assets, whenever someone is accused by the mass-media of a crime?  Taking your train of thought to its logical conclusion, if Trump embraces Bitcoin to evade the bankers’ ban, then Bitcoin will be “facilitating unlawful behaviour” per Trump’s 2019 tweet on the subject.  

I am most grateful to Satoshi for making Bitcoin permissionless, with no central authority.

---

You know, Trump could have cracked down with extreme force on the BLM riots—right at the time when Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase made a public display of support for BLM.  #justsaying


True.


True.


From the overall circumstance, I doubt that.  DB and Signature probably would not have taken such an extreme action unless there was some level of consensus amongst bankers about this—just as there is clearly a consensus (dare I say, a definitional conspiracy) amongst the Big Tech companies.

If Trump can get a bank account at all, it will probably be for extortionate fees at an undercapitalized third-rate bank.  —That is, if he can get a bank account at all.  —And then, he would always have the threat of this hanging over his head.

As I said:  Trump needs Bitcoin!

---

Oh, really?  I have long said that one of America’s worst problems is the abuse of the tax system as a political weapon...


Who said anything about storing coins on an exchange?  Not your keys, not your coins.  Trump needs his own full node!

Be your own bank, Mr. President!

New slogan:  Bitcoin can make Trump great again!

---

Excellent points.  Everyone should read that twice.

Whereas to the people doing this, “everyone should be terrified” is a feature, not a bug.  It is mass-intimidation:  Do what we say, or else—if we could do this to Trump, imagine what we can do to you!  There is a word for intentionally terrifying people as a political tactic; but it is overused and abused, so I won’t mention it.

---

I think he is certainly capable.  It’s not rocket science; and if the President of the United States were incapable of learning Bitcoin, what hope do we have for mass adoption?  Anyway, I offered to teach him!  Imagine how fast he could learn Bitcoin with lessons from nullius.  😼

---

You know, in 2013, Michael Saylor also trashed Bitcoin on Twitter:


Trump is not a one-dimensional cartoon.  He is a human being—all too human.  And the context of his personal experiences is that he is a New York money-man—much like Saylor, from the same American money-man mindset as Saylor, although I think that their politics probably differ.

If Saylor could suddenly turn around and have his company buy >$1.1 billion worth of Bitcoin within a few months, purely on the basis of market economics, then what change could Trump make when, as I said, he doesn’t have any other good choice?  How is he supposed to run his businesses without banking?  Even if he finds another bank willing to take him, how can he operate under the perpetual threat that they could cancel him again?  It is no exaggeration to say that Bitcoin could be a survival move for Trump—and in the long term, a foundation for his future prosperity.

---

Ah, but that is the beauty of it!  Excepting my suspicion of institutional money (which, in sufficiently large amounts, could be a move to co-opt Bitcoin altogether), I love it when my enemies use Bitcoin.  It means that their self-interest compels them to protect my financial freedom—just as I must protect their financial freedom.

This could be Trump’s great revenge on Twit-@jack!  Think about it:  If Trump runs to Bitcoin, what will the twit-man do?  Dump his coins?  LOL, no.  He will keep promoting Bitcoin—to Trump’s benefit, to my benefit, and to your benefit, too.  Meanwhile, Trump will have the satisfaction of using a platform from which neither Twit-@jack nor anyone else can ban him.

Same with Scaramucci—actually, moreso.  Scaramucci has bet his business strategy on Bitcoin!  He needs Bitcoin.  SkyBridge Capital was in some trouble before Scaramucci turned to Bitcoin; now, it has good prospects.  He is invested—not only in money:  His reputation is now invested in Bitcoin.

If Trump were to become a Bitcoiner, then he could laugh as Twit-@jack and the Mooch rage-tweet about it.  Though I guess the latter two are probably not exactly best friends.

---

Hey, that’s no way to promote freedom!  Rather, to the contrary; cr1776 was spot-on here:

And I think that the latest events are strong evidence that Trump isn’t such an “elite” as you imply—or as he probably thought he was.

To my shame, I admit that much as I have sometimes fought the banks IRL, I have never (yet?) had a bank account closed as personal retribution.  I am impressed at Trump!


That’s more like it.  Yes, if Trump were actually to go for Bitcoin, I would cordially gloat a bit.  :-)

---

True.  And I appreciate your consistency of principles.  On a broader level, not about the banks, I think you may appreciate the excellent piece by Glenn Greenwald—one of the few people on the left to stand up for free speech in the cases of Trump, and of Parler.


It is a point that can’t be repeated often enough.  Whenever the liar-media trot out some smear-story about Bitcoin, remember:  Little criminals sometimes try to get away with things using Bitcoin, but corrupt officials and master crimelords have banks “launder” their money for them.


Welcome, indeed.  Whereas the great thing about Bitcoin town is, he doesn’t need anyone’s permission!

reserved

In Politics & Society, I publicly offered to tutor Trump in proper Bitcoin use, and send him some coin to get started.  Now, I must ask:  What does this mean for Bitcoin?

Bitcoin was made for this:  It is the antidote to financial censorship.

Will Trump come to Bitcoin, now that the banks have targeted him for financial destruction by closing both his business accounts and his personal bank accounts?  Will millions of his supporters come to Bitcoin?  Will this hard lesson on the value of censorship-resistant money have constructive results?



I think that this is potentially the single most important moment for Bitcoin advocacy in the past eleven years.  The head of state of one of one of the most powerful countries now finds himself facing exactly the type of tyranny as from which Satoshi designed Bitcoin to free us.  If he and his supporters can be brought to Bitcoin, that will be an historic moment for Bitcoin—and for the concept of money itself.

No matter what your political opinions—whether you love Trump, or hate him—you must be horrified that unaccountable bankers can unilaterally punish a high-ranking political official, according to their own whims.  Otherwise, you unavoidably endorse the tyranny of the banks, and you are an enemy of all free people.  There is no middle ground.

Bitcoin is the most political form of money ever invented—and yet, it is politically neutral.  Implicitly in its technical design, Bitcoin has only one ideology:  Financial freedom.  It absolutely does not discriminate about who can have that freedom.  And those who need that freedom would be wise to embrace it immediately!

Trump himself has always been a plutocrat, beholden to the banks, a part of their system—and I have depicted him accordingly.  Now that the bankers have summarily unbanked him, he has only one rational choice.

Go, Bitcoin!  —President Trump, go to Bitcoin!

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