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I don't want to browse at positive but I don't want to see the Spam-y wall of garbage in the top level comments.

Shouldn't be that hard to set the checked value for the input.commentHider for the case of Spam modded top level comments, is it?

If you suffer of

• science-itis
• acute wussness
• selfish syndrome
• chronic dickishness
• pathological ignorance
• severe moron-ness

and can't wear a mask, just stay at home (1'30" in duration)

Something that picked my eye in a The Atlantic story:

Similar to other right-leaning extremist movements, they are the product of an unhappy generation of men who compare their lot in life with that of men in previous decades and see their prospects diminishing. ...
...
As alt-right protests waned, boogaloo boys began to appear on the streets. Armed men in aloha shirts and boogaloo patches made their first widely noticed appearance at a heavily attended pro–Second Amendment rally in Richmond, Virginia, in January. And they came out again for the anti-lockdown protests in March. Later, many attended protests over the killing of George Floyd, some in solidarity, others to oppose the left.

The catalyst was similar to what mobilized so many young people on the left: the notion that the government enriched a privileged few at the expense of the people. In this, the boogaloo boys shared the anti-corporatist left’s belief that the government had betrayed public trust by maintaining a growing police force to perpetuate an unjust status quo.

Some may invoke higher level concepts (mah liberty), but it started to look to me like the Americans (no matter if left or right) are prone to react to the disproportionate distribution of "bread" by making "gladiator style circuses", especially after a longer period of time. And perhaps their "patricians class" likes it that way, at the very least it maintains the status quo and avoids the sun's reflection on the knife of the guillotines. Or even only on yellow vests

A case of a post-truth culture building their own version of reality to agree with what they need to perceive? Maybe not yet, hopefully never.

How Fox Sports will use virtual fans created in Unreal Engine to fill empty stadiums in MLB broadcasts

“We’re not looking to fool anybody, it’s still about the game. But shot-to-shot, when you’re watching a broadcast, it’s not more noticeable that you’re watching what is normally a broadcast with fans in just an empty stadium and having it feel weird — we want to give people a sense of normalcy,” Zager says. “And we felt like going down this path and trying to use a virtual crowd will hopefully make it so that blends in, and you can focus on the game more because you’re not thinking about the emptiness of a Major League Baseball stadium during the game.”

The effect is a combination of technologies you may have seen before. The augmented reality software used to insert the crowds is called Pixotope, which has worked on AR graphics for things like the Super Bowl and The Weather Channel’s terrifying storm warning demonstrations.

List of big corps that "own" police

Oil and gas companies, private utilities, and financial institutions that bankroll fossil fuels are all big backers of police foundations, which privately raise money to buy weapons, equipment, and surveillance technology for police departments, bypassing already outsized public police budgets. These corporate actors – from Chevron and Shell to Wells Fargo and JPMorgan Chase – can be found serving as directors and funders of police foundations nationwide. Furthermore, these companies sponsor events and galas that celebrate the police and remind the public that police power is backed up by corporate power.

Who will those police depts serve, the citizens or the "corporate persons"?

• ... Chevron is a “Corporate Partner of the Police” sponsor of the New Orleans Police & Justice Foundation, as well as a board member of the Houston Police Foundation and sponsor of the Houston Police Department’s mounted patrol. It is also donor to and, as of the end of 2018, a board member of the Salt Lake City Police Foundation.
• ... Marathon’s Security Coordinator sits on the board of the Detroit Public Safety Foundation, the city’s police foundation. Marathon is also listed as a “Commanding Sponsor” of the foundation’s fundraising event “Above & Beyond” and a “Bronze Sponsor” of their “Women in Blue” event.
• ... Shell is a “Featured Partner” of the New Orleans Police & Justice Foundation and a sponsor of the Houston Police Department’s Mounted Patrol.
• ... Valero has a board seat on the Corpus Christi Police Foundation’s board of directors, and it is a sponsor of the Houston Police Department’s Mounted Patrol.
• ... Hilcorp’s billionaire co-founder and Chairman Jeff Hildebrand has a board seat on the Houston Police Foundation and is a notable attendee of their fundraising events.

The list continues.

"You get the Trump stink on you, it’s hard to get it off.”

If there’s an organizing theme to Pence’s vice presidency, it’s that he must never offend a man whose emotional antennae quiver at any slight. That means he’s perennially validating a president who insists the pandemic is under control when reality screams that it’s not.
...
In public, Pence takes pains to ensure that he and the president are aligned. On June 26, at the task force’s first public briefing in two months, he delivered the Trumpian message that “truly remarkable progress” had been made fighting the coronavirus, despite a worrisome rise in cases in dozens of states.

I asked the task-force member why, at times, Pence hasn’t worn a mask in public to model responsible behavior. Is it because he doesn’t want Trump to see and take umbrage? “That’s the only reason,” this person said. “He’ll wear it in a microsecond. He doesn’t want to egregiously look like he’s opposing the president.” (Asked about Pence’s mask-wearing message, John Fea, a historian and the author of Believe Me: The Evangelical Road to Donald Trump, referenced Pence’s Christian identity: “You can’t apply these scriptural ideas about loving your neighbor until you first understand that actually wearing a mask is to protect your neighbor.”)

James Mattis: Trump's former defence secretary denounces president

Former US Defence Secretary James Mattis has denounced President Donald Trump, accusing him of stoking division and abusing his authority.

In rare public comments, Mr Mattis said the president had sought to "divide" the American people and had failed to provide "mature leadership".

He said he was "angry and appalled" by Mr Trump's handling of recent unrest.

In response, the president described Mr Mattis as an "overrated general" and said he was glad he had left the post.

Pentagon chief [Mark Esper] opposes Trump threat to deploy military at protests

Trump has threatened to invoke the 1807 Insurrection Act that would allow him to deploy troops on city streets, against the wishes of state and city authorities. The president said he would use the law if local authorities failed “to defend the life and property of their residents”.

Esper categorically opposed using the act on Wednesday.

“I say this not only as secretary of defence, but also as a former soldier, and a former member of the national guard, the option to use active-duty forces in a law enforcement role should only be used as a matter of last resort, and only in the most urgent and dire of situations,” the defence secretary said. “We are not in one of those situations now. I do not support invoking the Insurrection Act.”

Esper has been supportive of Trump and has avoided contradicting him until now. But there is reported to be mounting unease about senior officers about the politicisation of the armed forces, and concern over Esper’s own actions.

“Esper has directly challenged Trump,” Thomas Wright, director of the centre on the United States and Europe on the Brookings Institution, said on Twitter. “Trump hates being boxed in. If he fires Esper, it could set in motion a crisis that may lead to a wider revolt within the GOP.”

(most of the dictators were goners once not even the military would support them. Trump may consider himself lucky to not managing yet to evolve into a dictator)

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(edit: June 4, 2020)

Trump’s Bible photo op splits white evangelical loyalists into two camps

On Monday when Donald Trump raised overhead a Bible – the Sword of the Spirit, to believers – he unwittingly cleaved his loyal Christian supporters into two camps.
...
The Rev Johnnie Moore, president of the Congress of Christian Leaders, described Trump in shepherd-like terms on Twitter:

“I will never forget seeing @POTUS @realDonaldTrump slowly & in-total-command walk from the @WhiteHouse across Lafayette Square to St. John’s Church defying those who aim to derail our national healing by spreading fear, hate & anarchy. After just saying, ‘I will keep you safe.’”
...
“Pelting people with rubber bullets and spraying them with teargas for peacefully protesting is morally wrong,” said Russell Moore, president of the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention. “What we need right now is moral leadership – from all of us, in the churches, in the police departments, in the courts, and in the White House. The Bible tells us so. So do our own consciences.”
...
The staunchest of evangelicals, 90-year-old televangelist Pat Robertson, split from Trump on Tuesday.

He told his television viewers of the president: “He said, ‘I’m ready to send in military troops if the nation’s governors don’t act to quell the violence that has rocked American cities.’ A matter of fact, he spoke of them as being jerks. You just don’t do that, Mr President. It isn’t cool!”

Right. Crackpot sheeple who need authority to feel safe and pastors that play for cool. And... that's the social segment that might determine the political faith of USoA? Because...

Trump can’t afford to lose evangelicals, even by the handful. A record 81% of white evangelicals voted for him in 2016, and he only narrowly won the presidency, sometimes by just a few thousand votes in crucial areas. His gesture with the Bible outside St John’s was meant to shore up that support, reminding his base of a tacit agreement.
...
So while evangelicals lifted Trump to power by voting together, they may prove his undoing if a contingent breaks away. In which case his campaign might shudder to hear of evangelical believers like Anthony Kidd in Daphne, Alabama.

During the week Kidd works at a salvage yard, and on weekends he does audio work during church services. He’s conservative.

“The past few years he has done things that are good for Christians, I’ll grant that,” he said. But when he saw Trump lift the Bible outside St John’s, he said, “It made me want to throw up a little bit.”

Visceral reaction, Kidd, also known as "feeling of guts". Good to see propaganda didn't wash common-sense away.

@realDonaldTrump tweets: NYC, CALL UP THE NATIONAL GUARD. The lowlifes and losers are ripping you apart. Act fast! Don’t make the same horrible and deadly mistake you made with the Nursing Homes!!!

1:10 AM · Jun 3, 2020·Twitter for iPhone

Do the Americans like being pissed on by their politiheads?
Enough to follow their example and piss one onto the other?

Trump has reached the 'mad emperor' stage, and it's terrifying to behold

He incites violence from the safety of a bunker, then orders peaceful people tear-gassed for the sake of a surreal photo op

Writing from a Birmingham jail, Martin Luther King Jr famously told his anxious fellow clergymen that his non-violent protests would force those in power to negotiate for racial justice. “The time is always ripe to do right,” he wrote.

On an early summer evening, two generations later, Donald Trump walked out of the White House, where he’d been hiding in a bunker. Military police had just fired teargas and flash grenades at peaceful protesters to clear his path, so that he could wave a bible in front of a boarded church.

For Trump, the time is always ripe to throw kerosene on his own dumpster fire.

'Nixon on steroids': Trump's military move is a high-risk election bid

Washington: St John's Episcopal Church - just a block from the White House - is known as the "church of presidents". Since its first service in 1816, every US president has worshipped there. But never has this sacred place been the site of a presidential visit as shocking and surreal as Donald Trump's on Monday (Tuesday AEST).

At 6.45pm on a balmy evening in Washington, Trump appeared in the Rose Garden of the White House to give his first major statement since angry protests broke out across the country following the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis. As Trump spoke, military police used tear gas and rubber bullets to forcibly clear hundreds of protesters from nearby Lafayette Square.

It was unclear why the officers took such speedy and confrontational action: the afternoon protests had been peaceful and a curfew ordered by Washington's mayor had not yet come into effect. Then the President strolled out from the White House, crossed the square and stood in front of the church, which had suffered fire damage during the previous night's protests. Posing for cameras, Trump brandished a bible like a victorious sportsman clutching a championship trophy. Then he headed straight back to the White House.

People struggled to believe it. Had the President of the United States really forcibly dispersed a peaceful protest so he could stage a photo op? Yes, he had.

When Police View Citizens as Enemies

The thin blue line looks like it’s ready to invade a foreign nation.
...
Militarization can escalate already tense situations. Protests in Ferguson, Missouri, after the 2014 killing of Michael Brown escalated dramatically on their second day, when police showed up in Humvees, wearing camouflage, and carrying M4s.
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The state of Minnesota’s “urban warfare” rhetoric is the inevitable consequence of this decades-long militarization of American police departments, Arthur Rizer, a policing expert at the center-right R Street Institute, told me late Saturday.

“You create this world where you’re not just militarizing the police—you equip the police like soldiers, you train the police like soldiers. Why are you surprised when they act like soldiers?” Rizer, a former police officer and soldier, said. “The mission of the police is to protect and serve. But the premise of the soldier is to engage the enemy in close combat and destroy them. When you blur those lines together with statements like that … It’s an absolute breakdown of civil society.”
...
But yesterday, as police pepper-sprayed a congresswoman, drove into a crowd, and fired rubber bullets and tear gas at protesters and journalists alike, it was clear that some police officers were approaching these situations like soldiers, and treating citizens as enemies.

Trump threatens to use military to end riots and lawlessness

'Words of a dictator': Trump's threat to deploy military raises spectre of fascism

“When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross,” goes an oft-quoted line of uncertain origin.

On Monday evening, Donald Trump, with four US flags behind him, threatened to send in the military against the American people, then crossed the road to pose for a photo outside a historic church while clutching an upside-down Bible.