If someone claims something happened on the fediverse without providing a link, they're lying.
Evidence or GTFO.
This is why I keep telling people that Trump is not an anomaly and is not new. I think a lot of people on here must be too young to remember the Bush era.
The line from the Star Wars prequels of, "So this is how liberty dies: with thunderous applause" captures how it felt and was clearly about Bush's policies. If Trump is worse than Bush, it's only because he's standing on the shoulders of fascist giants. And tbh I still regard Bush as the more dangerous of the two because he was able to command such overwhelming support, there was zero opposition in government anywhere, at all. He could ride his bike with no handlebars.
The war powers act gives the president the authority to invade any country on earth, he only needs congressional approval for operations lasting longer than 30 days. Congress also gave the president blanket authorization to invade any country he thinks might be harboring terrorists, following 9/11, with this absurd, fascist decision to grant the executive dictatatorial powers passing the Senate 98-0 and the House 420-1 (and with nearly 90% of Americans supporting Bush at this time). Trump's actions in Venezuela therefore, while a brazen violation of international law, are fully within US law. It's virtually impossible for a president to actually violate US law through military actions abroad.
Any attempts to rein in these ridiculous laws should be fully supported and are badly needed. Even if Trump ignores them, it can then be used to discredit him and prove that he is acting against the will of the people.
Having more guns.
Might want to ask the indigenous people how effective pieces of paper are at holding back the US military.
In the US you get two options and both are completely uninterested in "firming up the laws" and reining in the power of the executive. Trump can do basically whatever he wants, because after 9/11, Democrats fully supported measures like the Patriot Act that vastly expanded executive power, and when Obama came in after Bush he did nothing to hold him accountable for war crimes and torture, while continuing to use the same tools for largely the same purposes. No president wants to prosecute a former president for illegal activity because that would open the door for being prosecuted for their own illegal activities, which they all perform.
It doesn't really matter if the average American cares about guns or about something else. We've never been given an opportunity to vote on the power of the executive just like we've never been given an opportunity to vote on Venezuela or Palestine or Iraq or Afghanistan or Yemen. The powers that be decide these things, all the voters do is choose which face they want doing it, which aesthetics and justifications will be used for decisions that have already been made.
In my experience, and maybe some churches are different, you're just supposed to pretend to take it seriously, if you actually take it seriously you'll find yourself very unwelcome.
If I went around saying, "I'm a Christian, so obviously that means I oppose the Iraq War," or, "Christian teachings clearly call for opposing the war and anyone supporting it is living in sin," I would get a lot of strange looks. Swap out the war for abortion or gay marriage and it would be perfectly normal. Between those subjects, Jesus was constantly talking about nonviolence and said nothing at all about abortion or homosexuality.
If you base you beliefs around a good faith attempt to understand Jesus' teachings, you won't be accepted in those circles. Heck, even if I based my beliefs around the Catholic Church's teachings, for example, going around insisting that being "pro-life" requires you to oppose the death penalty, I would be out of place in most Catholic circles, considered annoying at best.
I still don't really understand what I would've had to have done to fit in there. Somehow, a lot of people seem to see morality as something that is almost exclusively related to sex, and the idea of applying morality to things like war or executions is a completely foreign concept. I'm not sure how you're supposed to arrive at that point but it clearly wasn't from a good faith reading of the gospels.
I think you have to have the same emotional impulses somehow, like, to really fit in you need to have a drive to tear down people with more exciting sex lives than your own, and that was something I had no interest in. So it was either keep calling myself a Christian and try to reclaim that label, which would just confuse everyone, Christian and non-Christian alike, or find a better label. So, now I just tell people I'm a communist.
My dumb ass thought people actually believed Jesus' teachings.
9/11 happened and 10 year old me was running around going, "Well, now obviously is the perfect time to turn the other cheek, be good to those who hurt us, and forgive not just seven times, but seven times seven times."
Strangely, all the people who had taught me those things didn't hear the words I spoke but apparently heard something along the lines of, "Allahu akbar, America deserved 9/11, death to America, Bin Laden did nothing wrong, and I'm happy about dead firefighters." They extremely did not like me trying to apply what they had taught me in that context.
I think I must be autistic or something because it seems like everybody else picked up on some sort of subtle understanding that none of that stuff was meant to be taken seriously or applied to real life, and I'm just over here like an absolute dupe who didn't pick up on the joke.
Clinton and Kamala both tried to appeal to that "near right" and failed. Social pressure isn't going to magically disappear, I can agree with the point about guns but that just ties into what I'm saying. If anyone on the right can be appealed to, it's the isolationist, pro-gun libertarian types. You will never win the nationalists, they already have a party that is giving them exactly what they want.
I heard a lot of younger people saying Trump was the peaceful, anti-war President.
This is such a big factor, imo.
The democrats refuse to budge from this neocon position of "benevolent interventionism." and Trump has been able to attack them over both parts of it, which allows him to appeal both to libertarian types who want to stay out of conflicts because "the government doing stuff is bad," and to nationalist types who want to just overtly plunder everywhere (with his actual policy being the latter). Meanwhile the democrats just cast anyone who disagrees with them on foreign policy as a Russian bot. They're stuck in the early 2000's where there was overwhelming bipartisan support for "bringing democracy" to the Middle East, and they seem think if they can just pick up the "moderate Republican" neocon voters who definitely exist and still believe in that project, then they're sure to win.
The effect is that they fail to capitalize on the ideological divisions that exist on the right. The actual Republican voters that there would be a chance of peeling off are the libertarian anti-war types, but that would require actually trying to appeal to anti-war voters instead of treating them with contempt.
There's a slight issue with this way of thinking.
Problem: The two party system is preventing us from enacting reforms
Solution: Use the two party system to enact reforms getting rid of the two party system, so we can start enact reforms.
Problem: My car won't start.
Solution: Drive down to the mechanic and he'll fix it so you can start driving places
Problem: Asking the king nicely hasn't been an effective method of stopping him from taking all our grain.
Solution: Ask the king nicely to institute democracy so that you won't have to rely on asking the king nicely to make things happen.
Y'all always remind me of the fable about the mice who all decide that it'd be much better if the cat had a bell around its neck so they could hear it coming, but then one mouse asks, "How are we gonna get the bell there? Who's gonna tie it?" and nobody has an answer.
I don’t think you can compare trump to either Bush or any president in recent history.
Hard disagree. Bush was absolutely terrible, and the only reason he gets whitewashed like this is because he's no longer the current thing. If anything, Bush was much more capable of enacting his fascist agenda because he was able to get bipartisan support for it. It Trump is worse, it's only because he's standing on the shoulders of demons. Bush introduced the surveillance state, extrajudicial detention, and started multiple wars of aggression.
you might not get free elections that far into the future by allowing trump back in.
We don't have free elections now. We will always have some form of elections though, virtually every country does. Elections are very useful to any aspiring dictator. Give the people a way to feel like they can work within the system and they'll be much less troublesome, and less prone to engaging in other mechanisms of influencing things that could actually be disruptive.
On top of that, American elections are extraordinary for controlling the people, you get two groups of people who are both adamantly defending different ruling class candidates, hating each other's guts, and trying to push anyone with a different perspective into that paradigm. It's one of the most ingenious mechanisms of population control ever designed. Imagine, if we didn't have elections, you'd not longer have any sort of beef with me at all, and we could be discussing the most effective ways of disrupting the state.
Also, Trump's nearly 80. Octogenarians are not known for overthrowing governments and establishing dictatorships, on account of how they'll die soon anyway, even if they had the energy and mental acuity for it. It's much more likely that someone after Trump will.
Just as the far-right did not originate with Trump, it won't end with him either. As soon as he's out of the picture, then you'll be talking about how uniquely terrifying the next person is, and how you can't compare him to Trump who wasn't really that bad and just had a different vision for how to improve the country, or whatever bullshit you say about Bush. Or if you personally don't, then people will, perhaps young people who weren't really aware of how awful Trump/Bush was. And you will be right, about the threat being awful and terrifying. But as long as you insist on just treading water, the threat is only going to get worse and worse forever. That path is 100% certain to lead to fascism.
- JumpDeleted
Permanently Deleted
Good luck on rooting out the secret Reds lurking behind every corner, trying to corrupt an impurify your precious bodily fluids.
- JumpDeleted
Permanently Deleted
- JumpDeleted
Permanently Deleted
sh.itjust.works user posts on .world
"Is this a .ml thing?"
How would anybody know who to rally around because they aren’t allowed to participate in debates or even really participate as a first class candidate?
It looks a lot more possible if one election like 20% of people vote third party, but it hasn’t ever happened.
All the more reason to support them, then. You even spell out the logic yourself, even if they can't win, if they reached a certain threshold then they'd have to be taken seriously.
Elections are about more than who wins and loses, they're also about setting precedent. If a third party gets enough votes, if a faction within a party demonstrates a credible threat of defection, then a major party has to start making concessions if they want to bring them into the fold. The Democrats, however, did nothing but spit in our faces, because they made the incorrect calculation that the left's opposition was just blowing hot air and that we'd come around to the lesser evil (which is generally what has happened in the past and how we got here in the first place).
I see three possibilities, one where the democrats remain stubborn, and a third party eventually emerges and supplants them (as has happened before in history), a second where the democrats start taking the left seriously and start responding to our demands, and a third, by far the worst, where the left gets cold feet and gives up, desperately rallying around the "lesser evil," thereby ensuring that nothing ever gets fixed, that conditions will continue to decline, and that fascism becomes inevitable.
It’s an objectively raw deal. For the presidential race there are functionally only two choices.
That being the case, everything you said falls apart. Voters are not "the only ones we can criticize," we can instead focus our criticism on the people deciding what our two choices are.
I could just as easily say that it's the fault of Democratic voters for splitting the vote instead of rallying around PSL or the Green party. The only real counterargument to that is that there are a lot more of them than there are of us. But there are also a lot more of us compared to the singular individual of Kamala Harris. So why does it make sense to say we should be the ones to change instead of her? It's nonsense. The only reason I can see is that we're regular people and she's ruling class.
If you want to make the argument that I’m the long run trump is a cold shower that we deserve to shock the whole system
I don't want to make that argument, no. My position has never been that it would be better for Trump to get elected than Harris, and I have never argued for voting for Trump.
"Not getting a Nazi isn't an option. But what we can control is whether we get a Strasserist Nazi or a Hitlerite Nazi. Clearly, you have a moral responsibility to support the Strasserist."
(It's getting harder and harder to do parodies because a lot of people would unironically agree with that.)
They already did Dick Cheney, it doesn't get much lower than that.
When it breaks. I don't remember how long I've had this one but it was made in 2019.