MerchantsOfMisery

joined 3 years ago
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[–] MerchantsOfMisery@lemmy.ml 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Neither have I, though I do understand if some working class people have no other viable/affordable alternatives.

[–] MerchantsOfMisery@lemmy.ml 1 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

I don't believe I said otherwise. America absolutely has a history of foreign meddling and assassinations. I just wish the discussion went beyond this and people said why they do or don't like him.

[–] MerchantsOfMisery@lemmy.ml 1 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

So you believe PBS isn't verifying their sources and it just airing Israel's narrative?

And again, do you seriously believe any sane news outlet is going to out their sources in this context? Why didn't you answer the first time I asked this? You know what you're doing-- you're pulling the Trump tactic of saying "any anonymous source saying something I don't like is lying"

Edit: Downvotes but no replies, so I'm guessing you rubes genuinely think PBS just aired this story with zero vetting/verification. I'm sure Bibi told them to air and it and said "just trust me bro". I'm all for being critical of Israel, Netanyahu, the IDF but some of you have just gone off the deep end. Downvotes but not a single person willing to answer whether or not they think any sane news outlet would out their sources like this.

[–] MerchantsOfMisery@lemmy.ml 1 points 11 months ago (4 children)

Check my reply below.

https://www.newsobserver.com/ <-- everything I said in my comment is covered on article's in this NC news outlet. They have about 5 articles that cover what I wrote and their journalists do a good job providing sources/citations.

tl;dr Matthew Hoh and the NC Green Party got caught hiring a petitioning firm with a long reputation of election fraud and hundreds of petition signatures were thrown out for being fraudulent. Dems went HAM and called all the people whose names were on the signature list, urging them to vote for Dems instead of Greens. Hoh and the Green Party get disqualified by the NC State Board of Elections (SBoE) for fraudulent signatures, and they appeal it.

Fast forward and now their disqualification was successfully appealed and the NC SBoE now accepts them on the (now expired) ballot. What changed? Well... the criteria for why they were disqualified, apparently. The NC SBoE initially disqualified the Green Party after a sampling of signatures revealed a percentage of fraudulent signatures and irregularities that would meet the threshold for disqualification. In the appeals court, they basically said "okay okay so SOME of the signatures were blatantly fraudulent and yes you just happened to have hired a petitioning firm with a long history of election fraud, BUT none of that matters because excluding the disputed signatures, you still meet the minimum level of signatures required to be on the ballot." The appeal succeeds, Green Party then cites that in order to successfully sue the DSCC, and they claim vindication while saying jack shit about the fraudulent signatures.

Now ask yourself, does that make any fucking sense? To me, it makes no sense whatsoever and it reeks of political fuckery by a party with a long history of trying to siphon votes from Dems so they can be useful idiots for Republicans.

[–] MerchantsOfMisery@lemmy.ml 3 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Matthew Hoh comes to mind. He was a Green Party candidate whose campaign was astroturfed insanely hard. He got booted off the ballot because hundreds of signatures from his party's petition campaign got thrown out for being fraudulent.

Upon discovering the fraudulent signatures, the North Carolina Democratic party and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, Hoh's party recognition was denied by the NC State Board of Elections. The Green Party later sued the NC SBoE. While this was happening, the DSCC started contacting voters who signed the Green Party's petition and urged them to vote for the Democrats.

Some key points:

  • During the initial audit of signatures (standard for all potential candidates), a sample of the entire signature roll is taken and assessed. When the Green Party's signatures were audited, there was a high enough percentage of blatantly fraudulent signatures and other irregularities (i.e. made up addresses) to result in a disqualification.

  • Matthew Hoh and the NC Green Party appealed the NC SBoE's decision, claiming that the amount of disputed signatures wouldn't be enough to reduce their total signatures to a point that didn't meet the minimum threshold

  • Hoh and the Green Party succeeded in court and also sued the DCSS for their lawsuit. This is where I call BS for a number of reasons, the main one being the court's explanation for why Hoh's appeal succeeded. They essentially agreed with the Green Party's assertion that even if you removed the disputed signatures, they would meet the minimum threshold to be on the NC ballot.

  • This was NOT the damn reason they were disqualified in the first place. The NC SBoE initially disqualified them because the percentage of signatures deemed to be fraudulent met the threshold for disqualification. Part of why the DCSS called out the Green Party so hard was that there were too many coincidences. The repeat signatures that were "accidents" (how? how does that "accidentally" happen?), the missing addresses that were filled out by staffers... So the appellate court decision didn't even contradict the initial NC SBoE disqualification reasoning and instead, a completely new, irrelevant argument was made and accepted.

  • The petitioning firm chosen by the Green Party was owned and operated by a man with a documented history of fraud-- Shawn Wilmoth. Wilmoth pled guilty to election fraud in 2011 in Virginia, and in 2022 he was being investigated for election fraud in Michigan. There's ignorance and then there's wilful ignorance with malicious intent, and I'm convinced this is the latter.

Source: NC Local news-- check The News & Observer. I'm exhausted today but everything I wrote above has been covered in detail by News Observer, with sources/citations. I don't normally waste my time going down rabbit holes like this but there were way too many weirdo red flags to ignore when that election was gearing up. The astroturfing on reddit and YouTube was so shameless.

edit: Another thing. The signatures for these petitions are often publicly accessible. If you check Green Party signatures, you'll notice a pattern of fraudulent signatures. The documents are usually available as PDFs.

Edit: Is there a way to disable replies? I am interested in discussing this further but just not today and I don't want to be bothered with notifications about this. It was so damn exhausting when it initially happened because I had to deal with so many gullible people rabidly defending the Green Party and completely ignoring the fraud.

Edit 2: I'll give an example:

  • Let's say my local election says I need 1000 signatures to qualify on the ballot, and that if 10% of my signatures are deemed fraudulent, I will be disqualified. If I get 5000 signatures and it turns out 1500 of them are fraudulent, the local election rules would result in my disqualification because more than 10% of my votes were fraudulent. This was essentially the NC State Board of Elections' reasoning for Matthew Hoh's initial disqualification.

  • The appeal that Hoh and the Green Party won, was based on reasoning that effectively excludes any consideration with respect to a high volume of fraudulent signatures being an indicator of an illegitimate candidate. Instead, the appellate court basically said "Forget the 1500 fraudulent signatures-- those are gone, we don't care about that. What we care about are the remaining 3500 signatures-- 3500 is 2500 more than the minimum threshold, so you actually DID qualify". It makes absolutely no sense and every time Matthew Hoh parades around this trash-tier appellate court decision, he conveniently omits any discussion regarding the stupidly blatant signatures that were forged, or the fact that the petitioning firm his party chose just happens to be pretty well-versed in election fraud.

Last point before I go to sleep:

https://www.michigan.gov/ag/news/press-releases/2024/06/13/signature-collection-campaign-fraud-defendants-to-face-trial

Signature Collection Campaign Fraud Defendants to Face Trial

^ This is the same guy that Matthew Hoh and the North Carolina Green Party went with when they chose a petitioning firm. They knew what they were doing and this isn't his first rodeo with election fraud. Wilmoth isn't being charged in relation to any Green Party candidates in the USA despite the Green Party spending loads of money on his petitioning firm. Why wouldn't they want their money back? Because they know the moment they're told to hand over their communications/records/etc., the fraud will become even more apparent. Their constituents should be fuming about their Green Party donations being pissed away on a company that lead to the party being accused of fraud, and yet... crickets. Why?

[–] MerchantsOfMisery@lemmy.ml 4 points 11 months ago (9 children)

Green Party candidates got caught forging signatures of constituents to have their candidates added on local ballots. I actually reported several instances of this happening last election and it resulted in several of their candidates being investigated and disqualified. These idiots were paying their low level staffers minimum wage to knock on doors for signatures and when they didn't meet their quota, they just straight up forged signatures of constituents.

The evidence was so damning, too. Their candidates were specifically focused on areas where they could siphon off a Democrat win, but not areas where they could siphon off a Republican win. The signatures were analyzed by pros who determined that they were fraudulent and all exhibited the same slant/pattern, and this happened for several candidates. Not to mention Jill Stein's sketchy ass relationship with Vladimir Putin and senior level Trump staffers like Michael Flynn. But yeah, let's downplay why Jill Stein inexplicably was invited to a gala in Moscow by Putin...

Going back to my initial rant... Yeah, the Green Party is sketchy as fuck and have been caught red-handed trying to fuck up local elections. Even their candidates' YouTube channels sometimes use the same staffers posing as regular people, it's like the most embarrassing attempt at looking serious. On reddit and YouTube, they've got like 3 staffers who monitor posts/video comments like hawks and they astroturf like cra-zy when a Green candidate is getting shit on.

[–] MerchantsOfMisery@lemmy.ml 1 points 11 months ago (3 children)

Sources close to the investigation said the captives had been shot in the head in the southern city of Rafah.

Do you expect a media outlet to name its sources in a situation like this?

Also you're more than welcome to search up the many news articles reporting in on this instead of being a smarmy little weirdo. Israel's ministry of health also confirmed that they were shot in the head, as confirmed in their autopsy. Given the fact that these people have families who will want to see their bodies, I highly doubt Israel is lying about how they were killed.

But yeah, what's with the BS snark? So sick and tired of this Mean Girls garbage on Lemmy, it's so cringy.

[–] MerchantsOfMisery@lemmy.ml 1 points 11 months ago (2 children)

I feel like I don't know enough about Maduro to judge him one way or the other, and I think it's too simple-minded to just settle on "America doesn't like him so he must be a man of the people" because that's an easy way to accidentally overlook all kinds of heinous shit.

Also Maduro got ripped off. $13M for a used Dassault 900EX that's hot? Wack.

[–] MerchantsOfMisery@lemmy.ml 0 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (5 children)

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2024/09/01/bodies-discovered-underground-gaza-claims-israel/

I don't have any official report but most media outlets' sources all claim the hostages were shot in the head.

Edit: Here since you guys are fucking babies and can't be bothered to look up news articles but somehow can be bothered to cry when someone posts a source you don't like, have a PBS link

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/netanyahu-pushes-back-against-massive-protests-over-gaza-and-hostages-no-one-will-preach-to-me

Now I'll wait for someone to cry about that link too because it's "funded by the Biden administration" or some garbage. I swear you people are like the online equivalent of a grown ass man who can't cook but is also a picky eater.

[–] MerchantsOfMisery@lemmy.ml 4 points 11 months ago (7 children)

I read earlier this morning that the autopsy revealed multiple headshot wounds that were obviously fatal. I agree with you on the last part-- I saw an interview last night with the brother of one of the victims and he was quite critical of Netanyahu, pretty much saying it's entirely his fault.

[–] MerchantsOfMisery@lemmy.ml 3 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (9 children)

Weren't the bodies found with multiple gunshots to the head, according to the autopsy?

The Israeli Health Ministry said autopsies determined the hostages were shot at close range and died on Thursday or Friday.

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/netanyahu-pushes-back-against-massive-protests-over-gaza-and-hostages-no-one-will-preach-to-me

In other articles, the ministry says the autopsy revealed gunshot wounds to the head.

[–] MerchantsOfMisery@lemmy.ml 3 points 11 months ago (2 children)

I started smoking when I was 13 because it was the only way one could take their shift break without being interrupted/called back into work. Before I smoked, my breaks would constantly get interrupted and I'd be called to do work but after I started smoking? No one dared to break the sacred rule of "don't fuck with someone's smoke break".

20+ years later and I'm still smoking 😎 and hopelessly addicted. I hate it.

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