congress has been abnormally silent. just a fucking ghost town.
Flippanarchy
Flippant Anarchism. A lighter take on social criticism with the aim of agitation.
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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.
What do you want the Democrats to do?
Stage a coup of their own?
The Republicans won democratically and they're doing what they said they would and the American population gave Trump his first popular vote win because of it.
The Republicans won democratically
Did they? Trump was bragging about Musk messing with the computers, which given Trump's penchant for lying and Musk's penchant for being terrible with technology, seems unlikely, but it should have still merited an investigation.
Also, the Dems rolled over in 2000 when the Supreme Court gave the election to Bush, so even if they found evidence of wrongdoing, I doubt they would do anything.
Yeah I mean, I love how people keep piling on the Dems for it. It's the voters and Republicans to blame really...
Democrats still hold lots of power and they should use it to resist the fascist coup. They are the most influential and privileged part of the opposition and they should fucking act like it.
Stage a coup of their own?
Unironically, yes.
Well, I dunno if I'd have faith in the democrats to really do that well, considering they implicitly agree with a good majority of the shit trump's doing and don't really seem to give much of a shit either way. Especially looking at how they haven't fought back against narratives around illegal migrants being criminal superpredators, even though that's all completely made up. There are other examples of democrats being totally incompetent but I do pretty much fully believe at this point that they're controlled opposition.
More broadly, no, I don't think I hold that the democratic legitimacy of the obviously dumb as shit system is more valid than the lives of migrants, trans people, the elderly and disabled dependent on public medical care, or really anyone else under threat right now. I don't think they should have to suffer just because like, 20% of the population of the country are kind of politically unengaged dumbasses or psychotic small business owners who've been radicalized by facebook. I don't even particularly think that said 20% of the population should be made to suffer just because they're dumbasses or because they voted wrong, since we're all products of our circumstance, and suffering doesn't really make you a better person, so much as it just makes you suffer.
The FAFO attitude people are taking this time around is kind of concerning to me. Strikes me as very blatantly cruel, apathetic, and maybe naive. I can't blame people for being disengaged, but I can blame people for taking their frustrations out on people. I've even seen those freaks that want to report people to ICE for both being migrants and voting for the wrong guy. It's insane.
Yes, that's what I want them to do. And I'm still convinced that the Republicans didn't win democratically.
They spent 4 years screaming about election fraud, and every accusation is a confession.
Being elected didn't give blanket permission to destroy the state itself.
I'd settle for secession tbh
Oh, that's not all they'll do. There will also be some strongly worded letters.
They are actively managing their insider trading before it all goes tits up.
If more people voted, this would not happen right now :) but both sides the same and voting doesnt matter.
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!
"Didn't offer them a pony" doesn't equate to "stop funding a genocide in Israel". This level of callousness is exactly why people stayed home
If they thought genocide in Israel was bad, why did they make it worse and global?
If they cared about human rights, they'd be defending human rights. People who make matters worse out of spite are not the good guys. I wish they at least owned their awfulness instead of crying all over social media how people blame them for the things they actually did, when they themselves happily boasted about it just a month ago.
People didn't abstain from spite, they abstained from a correct belief that the system doesn't work for them, or they couldn't vote against their conscience. Your own framing of lesser evilism and weighting voting more than other kinds of political activity inevitably creates the situation where people can't just cast a vote strategically. You dismiss 3/4 of the picture in order to make a point based on only 1/4 of the information, in other words, you are distorting the truth to fit your narrative.
Politics often comes down to a struggle between two views, but your attempt to shunt anyone who didn't vote the way you did into some enemy category is, predictably, no strategy at all. Unless your strategy is to divide the electorate, which sort of defeats your entire premise.
Actually try to understand other people as having minds and wills of their own, rather than narcissistically making your own view the objective one (like a religion might) and then condemning others (like a religion might) for their sins.
Their not voting created this situation in the first place. They wanted this situation. People who are hurt by this situation are rather justified in hating the people who put them into it. You say it's because these people choose to do this on their own, because of their own free will. I agree with you on this. But THEIR justification in creating this situation does not fucking matter to others. It does not matter if somebody stabs you in the back because they hate you or because they are trying to make a point or out of boredom or out of some philosophical whatnot, what matters to you is that you have a knife sticking out of your back and bleeding to death. And when you turn around, what you see is your attacker crying a river about their right to stab you and why are you blaming them? It's not like THEY hate you like THOSE other guys!
Fact is that if they voted for the other side, they would have a perfectly stable democracy (lol, not really) where they could then campaign for stuff they want without the world being on fire around them. Which btw, they aren't doing with the word being on fire around them either, but if they did it now, they'd be wiped off it by the powers they put into place.
You dismiss 3/4 of the picture in order to make a point based on only 1/4 of the information
That's exactly what you're doing. Ignoring how much worse the situation is if you abstain from voting because you're focused on the lesser evil. Even on Gaza Trump said he wants to "clean it all out". Even on this issue the greater evil is worse. Stop pretending there was anything noble about letting that monster have power again. The system doesn't work so they let an even worse one take over and people who abstained or protest voted bear some of that responsibility for the consequences
But you haven't thought of how clean their hands are.
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.
You're right.
Why slow down the coup when you can just give up and let them announce a concentration camp for undesirable immigrants without any pushback?
Step 1: should have voted to stop the coup Step 2: should have voted for a slow coup Step 3: should have voted for a less fascist coup
We recreate the structures we seek to dismantle...
Don't @ me I voted but the Democratic playbook has been to cede ground and take only clout back my whole life.
Like corporations and consumers the fault isn't with the voter when the system is stacked against them and the options are two evils with one the lesser.
"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.
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;
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.
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.
For fucking real. Are these pleas for nuance ever aimed at the people voting for real actual neo-Nazis, instead of the people the neo-Nazis are going after?
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.
I live in the Midwest and I have not met a Republican that wasn't a moron.
Sure there obviously are Republicans that aren't morons. But they still voted with the MAGAts.
Republicans = moron or bigot
Either way you shouldn't trust them.
Both of y'all are aggressively missing the point.
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.
Ok so I actually knew all of those aside from the water thing. For a second I thought he'd done something even more outrageous.
Well, the week has just begun anyway.
That was just the stuff off the top of my head from over the weekend. As you say, the week yet young; there's plenty of time for new horrors to be born.
I would argue it is the non-voters in this position.
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.