Trump is encouraging (armed) voter intimidation.

nittany ram wrote:

Yeah, it’s obvious he’s doing it to intimidate minorities.

Guns aren’t allowed in Federal buildings. They shouldn’t be allowed at the polls during Federal elections.

Agreed, Nittany.

But this is pretty much the only way Trump gets elected: massive voter suppression. And he knows this, and the leaders of the GOP know it too.

If every eligible voter gets to cast their vote unimpeded, Trump loses by a ton.

On a side note (probably deserves a separate thread): You should listen to this Science Friday episode from yesterday, if you missed it. Right up your alley:

October 14, 2016 How subpoenas, lawsuits, and even Freedom of Information Act requests can look and feel like harassment to scientists. Plus, why do digital assistants like Siri often seem so unintelligent?

excerpt:

After furor erupted over a video seeming to imply that Planned Parenthood was selling fetal tissue to research institutions, the House of Representatives Committee on Energy and Commerce convened a select investigative panel to examine practices involving fetal tissue in late 2015. Since then, the panel, chaired by Tennessee Republican Marsha Blackburn, has issued subpoenas to more than 80 individual researchers, institutions, and companies involved in research on fetal tissue or its procurement.

The scientific community has said these subpoenas threaten researchers’ time, energy, and reputations, and that other activities by the committee—such as making public the names and addresses of researchers who use fetal tissue—could endanger those researchers’ lives. In May, an editorial in Nature Biotechnology called this panel “a witchhunt” by the anti-abortion lobby.

(Science Friday offered Representative Blackburn’s office a chance to respond to these criticisms. As of this article’s publication, we have not received a statement.)

University of Pittsburgh virologist Carolyn Coyne talks about the danger the new frenzy over fetal tissue research could have, and why this research is vital. As one example, it could help us better understand and prevent the spread of Zika virus. And Eugene Gu, whose company Ganogen has been subject to one of these subpoenas, describes the burden that congressional attention can put on scientists. In his post as a surgical resident, for instance, his research has been on hold for more than a year.

Then, we take a look at other fields that have come into the crosshairs, particularly climate science, with a scientist who knows the problem well.

As a postgraduate researcher in 1999, climate scientist Michael Mann was a co-author on the paper that produced the now-infamous “hockey stick” graph. It indicated that global warming is happening faster than previously in history. That publication has given him attention and notoriety, not all of it good: He’s been compared to convicted child molester Jerry Sandusky and been subjected to lawsuits, and the state of Virginia tried to obtain his academic correspondence through a large Freedom of Information Act request. He was also one of the scientists whose e-mails were hacked and released in the 2009 “Climategate.” What’s more, he’s received numerous e-mails and other communications that he considers harassment.

Man is also the co-author of a new book that discusses the challenges facing those who talk openly about climate research, and he says that lawsuits, subpoenas, and other scrutiny serve only to intimidate and exhaust scientists, such as the NOAA researchers who received subpoenas from House Science Committee Chair Lamar Smith (R-Texas) in late 2015. Mann and Climate Science Legal Defense Fund executive director Lauren Kurtz share their experiences in the legal world of science and discuss how researchers can protect themselves from burdensome attention.

These are some tweets we received from scientists on Twitter about other kinds of harassment they’ve experienced.

PA Ram wrote:

And after all that–if he loses, these people will not accept it. They will want a revolution.

And the guy who should be calming them? I don’t know he has it in him.

Pence calls for restraint will be whispers in the wind.

I would hope that Trump comes to his senses and tries to back some of this down–but I just can’t see it.

He gets his brownshirts frothing mad with calls of “lock her up!” and so on. This is the first election in my lifetime where one of the candidates says he will jail the other if he wins. Prior to that, he’s all but called for her assassination by “second amendment people,” and he and his campaign team have egged on the Russians to launch cyberattacks, which may well mean screwing with vote totals.

All the while, he’s pushing this absurd persecution (complex) meme that everyone is supposedly out to get him, and his fanboys eat that up. It syncs up with their own sense of persecution and victimization as supposedly besieged white Christian males.

A toxic brew of racism, xenophobia, persecution complexes, misogyny and nationalism that is self-evidently reminiscent of Hitler’s Germany. The parallels are unmistakable, in my view.