I don’t know why people didn’t riot when Republicans denied Obama a supreme court nomination because of it being his last year but allowed Trump to nominate one weeks before the elections.
We all know what the objectively most ethically and morally righteous course of action would be right now.
We also know that if we DID that, the fascists will kill us, our entire families, anyone we associate with, and then use it as an excuse to murder even more innocent people who have never had anything to do with us.
The right is just ITCHING for a Reichstag Fire Moment which they can point at and say
"OPE, look at that TERRORISM happening right over there! You know what that means: Time to OFFICIALLY (not just casually!) suspend civil liberties and call in the private security shock troops and drone strikes to put down these VIOLENT ANTI-AMERICAN ENEMY COMBATANT DOMESTIC TERRORISTS!!! And for all their sympathizers, time to punch some tickets for the GITMO EXPRESS!"
I thought it would happen by mid-march but now i'm concerned it might happen even SOONER.
look. the law has failed. the law will not protect us. the law will actively attack us and label us as "criminals" for defending ourselves while turning a blind eye to our fascist aggressors. I don't know what anyone else should do, but here's what I'm doing:
- I have a small emergency fund saved up stashed in cash at a secure location.
- I have my identifying documents in order in case I get the 'papers please' treatment.
- I have survival supplies in my bug-out go-bag that i carry on my person everywhere i go
- I have data backups, peripherals, and all my digital devices that I can't live without packed
- I'm HOPING I still have time to legally (for whatever that's worth now) arm myself.
- I'm maintaining the outward appearance of a cis het white dude so I can navigate mostly unnoticed.
- I'm attempting to locate and join an underground railroad as a conductor to help targeted people evacuate via providing transportation, shelter, nutrition, paperwork assistance, communications advocacy, and possibly even the covering of some costs provided the entire financial system doesn't collapse.
- Failing that I'm reaching out to friends across the country to set up a means to locate and offer aid to at-risk individuals directly.
- I'm also asking international friends about their countries' immigration policies, to see if I can get in touch with advocates within other borders to streamline the process for people who want to escape this backwater shithole of a country.
Gods know I won't be able to escape...
but the possibility that I might be able to help others,
and reminding myself that I can't help anyone if i'm dead,
is the single biggest thing (among a fair few others) keeping me going.Ye, seeing a legit the Reichstag Fire moment would be terrifying. And the USA wasn't above that shit even 50 years ago.
well, keep in mind, it doesn't even have to be legitimate.
It can be extremely illegitimate >_>
in fact, I am kind of expecting it to be an illegitimate, manufactured, sensationalized false flag spectacle that exists solely to provide them with an excuse to accelerate.
unless those are the factors that define a "legitimate reichstag" x_x;
Actually, it's only like this because people didn't vote. Soap, ballot, jury, ammo: they say to use the boxes in this order...
Do you think that if more people voted they would have voted for Democrats?
Uh, yeah. And it wasn't "for democrats", or even for Harris. Everyone was saying for months that Trump was an imminent threat to our democracy and had fascist ambitions.
Now, ::Pikachu face:: as he does fascist things and is eroding our democracy. MAGAts are wrong and cruel and bad, but at least they bother to vote...
The supreme court was killed off years ago. All we got now is a payola brigade set up to legalize only for the highest bidders
congress has been abnormally silent. just a fucking ghost town.
Democrats have announced that they're going to make a statement at 3:45pm EST today or something. Our government is actively in the middle of a coup, and they're "going to make a statement."
I'm sure it'll be some finger wagging, and that's about it.
Suddenly the democrats are supposed to save you? Y’all told them to eat shit, they are just gonna enjoy their money and take a 4 year vacation and let the American voters and the left that didn’t vote, enjoy the ride they got on.
They are actively managing their insider trading before it all goes tits up.
"John Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it"
-An Actual US President said this
(Andrew Jackson, btw)
Trump's favorite, BTW
Which is funny because Jackson would have beat Trump to death with his bare hands.
If more people voted, this would not happen right now :) but both sides the same and voting doesnt matter.
Acting as if fascists did not nearly successfully couped the last time they lost the election is so much denial.
The people that voted last time got a goverment that could not stop a convicted felon, certified rapist, enemy goverment asset and obvious fascist from running again. They would not have been able to stop a fast nor a slow coup.
Literally the outcome of this election was guaranteed back in August. The second the Harris/Walz started polling at 50/50 was when a contested election became the best possible outcome, and a contested election was always going to be awarded to Trump through the captured Supreme Court.
I get that libs are disappointed that the country just gave him the keys without a fight, but Trump was prepared for that fight. It's why they kept shouting that our election was a sham and already decided; they knew they would steal the election if necessary. Dems were never going to do anything to stop it, same as they did nothing for Gore vs Bush.
Their loss wasn't nearly so catastrophic as to make it clear they're in the minority. The issue with democratic legitimacy is that it's mostly about impression of consensus rather than pure numbers because humans suck at processing numbers. Sure, neither government might have the actual endorsement of the constituency, but it doesn't matter if the voting portion of it is split closely enough that it seems like they do.
If, say, the Reps hat lost 30:70, they possibly wouldn't have been quite so bold, and on the other hand, the Dem leadership might have felt more confident in opposing them. Moreover, reducing Rep significance to a footnote could create space for progressive movements to be more than a spoiler, which could give them more weight in the internal party politics.
Note, however, the abundance of "could" and "possibly" and "might". The difficulty with counter-factuals is that you can't really compare them to facts. It's just as possible that nothing would have been different at all. Much of predicting politics and public opinion is guesswork based on incomplete information, and putting it to a representative test would probably be impossible and possibly dangerous.
As it stands, you're unfortunately right.
But the people who stayed home because the democrats didn't offer them a pony are noble and should be regarded with the utmost respect!
But you haven't thought of how clean their hands are.
Oh, the extreme submissiveness of those who chose to blame for an electoral loss the millions who did not vote for the Leaders who refused to move an inch towards the interests of those voters rather than blaming the handful of Leaders for not moving an inch towards the interests of millions of otherwise natural voters (in fact, they even moved away).
It takes quite a "the boss is always right" butt-kissing boot-liking mindset to blame millions for not following an asshole rather than blaming "the boss" for being an asshole.
One of the most eye-openning discoveries here on Lemmy during this whole Electoral Process in the US is just how many of the "centrists" in America have interiorized a quite extreme level of unchallenging subservience to those they believe are their leaders.
The majority of the supreme court would crack open a barrel of kerosene.
Here in the EU I'm having trouble keeping up, what are talking about here?
Elon Musk is actively taking over various government agencies and installing his own sycophants into them. 18 year old kids are now in charge of the 6 trillion dollars that the government spends annually and were appointed to that position directly from their internships at SpaceX or Tesla. But at least they were camp counselor the year before!
Medical and scientific research is being scrubbed for any mentions of gender (and probably sexuality as well) and COVID while the CDC has been gagged and told they can't report data on ANY active diseases - including the current bird flu that may or may not be turning into another pandemic.
The tariffs are going to cripple the economy on basically all fronts. I heard somebody claim that US auto makers have said that they'll have to stop production after a week because nobody can afford to make cars with those prices.
Trump released thousands of gallons, if not hundreds of thousands, of water from a lake reservoir in California, flooding farmers' fields and almost flooding over levies "because it will help with the fires in LA" despite them being hundreds of miles away, which will hurt the farmers this summer as they won't be able to use that water to keep their crops alive, which will further add to food supply issues and hurt California's economy - which will hurt the rest of the nation by extension because their economy is one of the largest contributors to tax revenue in the country.
The list goes on and on.
I would argue it is the non-voters in this position.
Liberals are sort of, fundamentally incapable of understanding that the republican voter is more than just like, some stereotypical idiot white southerner, or self-interested multi-millionaire, I think. They're incapable of understanding that republican voters can often be some of the more marginalized in society. The disabled, and migrants, as we've seen. Dumb people, even, right, people with less education. Explicitly, explicitly this is the case, they bring it up all the time! As though that lack of education is some sort of moral failing, or thing to poke fun at. They don't understand that conservatives will rightly point out that sort of mockery and call them cruel elitists. It takes this cruel and apathetic stance towards those groups, this unempathetic stance that has no interest in understanding how we got there, this incurious stance. It's so overly moralized, to the point of incoherence. Well, that disabled person or migrant voted for trump, so, FAFO, they deserve to die, I guess. What am I to do? Well, looks like the palestinian voter in michigan decided not to vote, so, FAFO, guess their family is reserved to being buried under beachfront property. What am I to do?
It's callous, it's a self-callousing kind of reaction. It makes you number, and it makes you dumber. It's cope, basically, I guess is what I'm saying. It's a way to contend with a cruel reality by becoming crueler yourself.
It also has some intersection with two things. This assumption of free will, and thus a kind of innate moral character and disposition, a constant internal moral agency for all your actions, and so there's obviously something it inherently shares there with liberalism philosophically, right.
It also, in the positive rhetoric, has an intersection with this sort of, political armchair jockeying, where everyone theorizes that rhetorical moves are being made by politicians for some theoretical person out there that isn't them, but the fundamental character of the party is still agreeable, and okay. You can't question the party's positioning on Gaza. Even if you can cede that it's immoral, explicitly, then it has to be done because it's electorally advantageous. I don't understand how they can't see how this alienates a ton of people right off the bat, because it shows that you're willing to do things which are actively morally detestable and still not win. It's never the case for policy which itself is a positive end, like healthcare, that they are willing to violate legal and political norms in order to take action on that. Or even, say, violating political norms in order to stop a genocide. It's only that they're willing to keep up a genocide in order to win electorally, and then whatever follows is sort of what you're just supposed to get as a reward for sitting through 200,000+ people dying.
So I dunno, that all just pisses me off. I wish people could argue about actual tangible policy, and then pursue that unabashed as an unqualified good, rather than being tricked into believing that their own sense of good, their own goals, are naive, and they need to settle for more exploitation as the cost of doing business. It's both a cope that makes you callous and it's a nihilism that grinds you down. An apathy, in the face of politics.
I also don't understand why in the political realm we have all been so reduced to viewing things purely in terms of like, whatever is within our black and white moral compass. So team-based. No attempt at nuance, understanding, or empathy. It's insane, I think social media has truly kind of rotted people's brains, in that respect, by shaping the contexts in which these kinds of interactions happen, reducing the means of people's expression into pre-approved categories, into little sequestered realities. We're maybe cooked cause of that, I don't know.
There are plenty of people who are marginalized or lacking in education who don't vote Republican because it doesn't take a college degree to see that Trump tried to overthrow the government. Just because guys who are mad about not getting laid become neo-Nazis doesn't mean the rest of us who are dealing with hardship do. Black people have been getting shit on since well before this country was even a country and they're the most reliable Democratic demographic there is. Pretty much everyone has access to the internet and if they cared to learn about they world they could.
I mean, you can understand why black people have and have had historically a very unique position in this country as a kind of uniquely ostracized population, right? That's not a 1 to 1 comparison we'd make in like, any other circumstance, I dunno why we'd start now. Effectively, what I'm saying is something that goes back quite a ways, you could come up with a lot of historical examples of this, it's not new. Italian immigrants after ww2, eastern european immigrants, irish immigrants, even jewish immigrants to a certain extent, they were all able to be subsumed by the larger umbrella of whiteness precisely as they voted in accordance with more conservative interests which explicitly do not like them. The same thing that would have happened in this election with latinos, except we've run up on the rails of that process because things are materially different. What I'm saying is that it doesn't really make sense to get mad at that voterbase for voting in that particular way.
The broader point I'm making is that there's a difference between thinking about these things critically, and getting mad at the wind, and I see a lot of people getting mad at the wind. Except, unlike getting mad at the wind, their anger is actually harmful, actually creates a constant feedback loop in how it's directed. Some people get mad at a dog for biting them. Certainly, it makes sense to get mad in general, since you've been bit, that's painful, and the dog is the most directly at fault object for that. Some people get mad at the owner, since they can't control their dog, you know, maybe that's a step removed, maybe that's even actually effective at preventing future bites, I dunno. Some people just start to move towards the medicine cabinet as soon as possible, so they can clean their bite. I would rather be the third person, in that example.
So team-based. No attempt at nuance, understanding, or empathy.
team-based???
In the sense that one team is fine dismantling our government and sending key demographics to camps or worse, and that's not a team I'm willing to be on, yes I guess that makes me "team-based."
I'm not going to have the Gaza argument here again other than to say I see where you are coming from, and although I disagree with it, I also understand why "Trump won't be any better for Gaza" wasn't enough of a reason for some to pull the lever for the Biden/Harris admin.
Maga has trampled all over anything resembling empathic discourse for oh, about 8-9 years, and the US right in general for years before that. The time for reconciliation was before they installed the dictator. Now that we're all just descending into hell together atop the smoldering wreckage of our government, the folks I'm going to hug on the way down aren't the ones who voted us here.
i think the criticism isn't over people like us who oppose this shit. the criticism is the people who picked the "wrong team" so to speak. areas of the country that would never vote democrat no matter what. people that allowed this shit to happen because they couldnt see past "the team" at these fucking oligarchs tearing apart our country.
honestly if trump ran as a democrat he would have fucking lost in 2020 and 2024. he never would have made it past primary in 2016. that's the "team based" mentality at work.
Empathy and nuance aren't something that you do because you're guaranteed to get something in return from the other person as a kind of, reciprocal action. They're tools that you use to analyze your opposition, understand them better, and plan accordingly. They're internally rewarding methods, rather than being something you just do to get a reward.
I think we've all understood it to be the case for quite a while now that plenty of conservatives, being relatively uninformed blank slate or single issue voters, will actually agree with communism, as long as you don't use the word communism. Liberals, even, will not commonly do this, because they usually have much more pre-established and calcified opinions about the reasons why the world is the way that it is that go beyond just the surface level. That could even be considered a symptom of their higher education. We've understood that to be the case for like the last 20 years.
Why, then, is there still such a significant commitment towards mocking your rural conservative idiot voter, in the rhetoric of the left? I think there's a lot of people who still hold onto some semblance of liberalism in their culture, their rhetoric, their attitudes, even after they become a part of the left. I think there's probably also a significant proportion of actual liberals which, being controlled opposition, seeks exclusively to widen that divide and sort of, function as the pepsi to the coke, even as that strategy actively drives us towards more and more extremism and destroys the country. In any case, beyond the extremely cynical corporate institutional wing that actively desires for the country to be more right wing in service, at least theoretically, of tax breaks and a lack of regulations, or maybe more coherently, in service of short term gains, the regular individual should understand that this rhetoric, this strategy, it isn't really getting them anywhere. It's actively harmful. I think at some point with the individual participation in this behavior, people start to build up their own complexes around it, eerily similar to the complexes that conservatives begin to take, as I've described previously. A belief in a total and logic-defying free will, an innate moral character, meritocracy.
They fall for true liberalism. It shouldn't be any mystery why I might not like that ideology, I should think. Not in my leftists, not in my liberals. We should understand that's failed.
Thanks for your nuanced take. Upvoting before mods delete it
To respond on to why the pol landscape is like so, I understand politics is a mind killer. It's basically war with words. And people love to take jabs at their enemies. Kinda like they also love chocolate cookies
But they forget that not everything that feels pleasurable is good for you or your body
Social media really accelerated that particular kind of violent, hedonistic stupidity, I think. Explicitly monetized it, explicitly selects for it, even on platforms which would otherwise appear to be algorithmically agnostic in their format. I'm not sure how to solve that, or if it's even solvable, in the current system in which the internet exists. I think I still need to watch that one zizek video where he talks about how the function of ideology is to kill hope, and I maybe kind of agree with that statement at face value even if he's probably going to end up saying something much more complicated and nuanced in the actual video.
You don't have to read all this if you don't want to, but it feels as though many things which are otherwise politically agnostic, ideologically agnostic, are kind of, thrust into the political realm with great violence, mostly as a kind of hedonistic rhetorical game rather than through a legitimate desire to improve things. In order to score political points. Things like public transportation, something which is otherwise politically neutral, actually not that related, fundamentally, to any ideology inherently, get politicized, and then they're guaranteed to die in that throes of that. The rights of transgender people is maybe another such example. These are things which, regardless of your ideological or political predisposition, are totally fine to have, right. Public transportation, or, maybe put more literally, regardless of public-private structure, trains, buses, trams, subways, even bikes and pedestrian-friendly development, is just explicitly more efficient than the car centric, overly privatized shit we currently have. That's true in both a privatized context and in a public context, and you could have an orientation towards either method of development regardless of your politics. The elites, presumably, want a better standard of living, not even just long term, but on the scale of, say, the next five or ten years, right, and mass transit projects can achieve that goal, even for them, by virtue of letting them save on the costs spent on their peasantry, their underclass, and increases the level by which private roadways, a private transportation, can be used easily by them. Transgender rights are the same way, decreasing trans healthcare provides a maybe minor, yet still existent, cost, it imposes a cost on society. You hear this explicitly called out whenever some chud talks about the suicide rate. Ideally, you would want to avoid suicide! You would want that healthcare, you should want to prevent that, in an ideologically neutral context, because it's strictly inefficient!
I think, then, maybe the great achievement of the social media superweapon in a post-nuclear, cold war context, is to manipulate these aesthetic ideological dispositions, disconnected from reality, to recreate the appearance of politics without any of the content. I think maybe cynically that it's just a grand kind of illusion used by three letter security agencies and private capital interests to explicitly manipulate the population, not into necessarily being concerned with actual material reality, but into being lost in this kind of hedonistic game world. I dunno. I think even beyond that we're kind of, as we're seeing now, we're now all explicitly lost in that illusion, the illusion that was created by the internet, or, maybe, the illusion that created the internet. Even at the highest levels of government, this is the case. There's no concern with any basis in reality, anymore. So under the guise of that, right, I think maybe we're cooked, is I guess what I mean. Nobody's steering the ship, anymore, even.
That huge walll of text to try to say that those republicans are not all stupid. Have you met them? Do you have to work with them? Shop next to them? I call them the stupid 30% and they are stupid.
Facts facts facts facts facts facts facts all round
