IMO this is why it’s super important that the Republicans, especially Trump, don’t win the next election (even more so than usual.) There are already literal nazis outside Disney Land, the absolute last thing anyone needs is some dickhead pardoning the Proud Boys and emboldening the far right even further.
How do you see the dems stopping the rise of fascism? Not asking in bad faith, it’s just that the things you describe are happening under a democratic president.
The sentencing of these proud boys truly is a good thing, don’t get me wrong (but we must also add that their convictions only came after threatening the state, not the threatening of marginalized people). The rise of fascism however isn’t stopped with this ruling. The conditions that foster it aren’t adressed.
What do you think the democrats should do after an electoral victory in 2024 to achieve this?
I’m not going to lecture anybody on voting for dems but the bar is so low that “what are they gonna do to stop the rise of fascism” they aren’t going to pardon all of them and embolden them. I don’t think they’ll ever do anything to really meaningfully oppose them but not pardoning them and showing people there’s literally no consequences from it is the least most bad option.
Yea I’m basically at the point where I don’t think things will get better under a democrat but a lot of people far more vulnerable to fascists then me have talked about preferring to not have the president using them as a scapegoat everyday.
Although as somebody who lives in the boonies all the chuds around me get way more fired up and antagonistic when there’s a dem president. There’s a shitload of flags telling me to go fuck myself on the way to work and the numbers increased in the last couple years.
Although it has been interesting to take the temperature of your average chud by checking to see if the one trump/ DeSantis flag is still up.
I am encouraging you to be honest, not to sacrifice yourself, though if you think my complaint with the dems is “ideological purity” then you clearly don’t understand why liberals are so terrible to begin with.
Out of curiosity, what do you mean by “dems are in power now”? Are you saying they have complete and unfettered control over the entire government to do as they wish?
As best they can. Are you saying they can take unilateral action without the full support of the House of Representatives? What do you think they could be doing that they’re not?
you should read how the republicans plan to avoid congress in order to accomplish their aims the next time they seize the white house. and also how fast the dems are moving right on trans issues.
I am fully aware of how Republicans have abandoned democracy in order to accomplish their goals. And I have no doubt that Democrats are being spineless about trans issues. But I asked a very specific question that, given your complaints, you ought to be able to answer easily. Without control of both houses of Congress as well as the Oval Office, what could the Democrats be doing that they aren’t?
I mean honestly I think the dems being in power is kind of like sticking a band-aid on a gunshot wound at this point, but the Republicans in power is like treating it with… more gunshots or something lol. I think the US needs pretty fundamental change to actually fix anything substantial, but I don’t think that’s realistically going to happen anytime soon. Not trying to “lesser of two evils” it or anything, I just meant that the first step is to probably to shut the nazis down.
And are the dems taking meaningful action to do this? From where I’m sitting, I’d say they are not as the fash is only gaining steam under the current administration.
But the Nazis aren’t getting shut down, and we have a Dem president already. Clearly something other than red/blue elections are needed to shut Nazis down, as history hopefully helps demonstrate.
Right but all those other things get shit down immediately, its just the harm reduction argument again.
If the options are do nothing, elect the fascists who want to murder Trans people, or elect useless libs who aren’t actively calling for the execution of trams people seems like one of those options is preferable even if still shitty.
So I guess I’d turn the question around, what are the better alternatives to shut this shit down at this point.
Again not arguing that anybody should feel like voting for libs is gonna solve anything but if it means the people literally explicitly calling for violence against minorities have slightly less direct access to governmental power that seems like the least worst option available at this point.
The u.s also has a problem with narcissism. There are cleaning ladies and ditch diggers who think that they’re smarter and knows more than doctors, teachers, scientists, researchers, etc. People think they know better than anyone, and that everyone else is stupid.
Isn't it great that somebody is telling us that "everybody has gotten stupider" and at the same time implying that "you are not one of the people that got stupider, of course, dear reader".
It's bullshit. We're not stupider. It's somebody else right? There's obviously got to be some giant group of stupid people out there and what it is is it's the fucking prisoners dilemma and we don't even realize we're in it.
Telling us that we are smart and educated of course and there's some invisible group of stupid people out there fucking everything up so there's nothing we can really do about it?
it's fucking mind control.
And you know, I personally hate being mind controlled by weird deceptive language.
Look past the article, find what they're actually reporting on and think for yourself okay?
somebody is telling us that "everybody has gotten stupider"
I agree that Reagan started turning everything into crap. But it is not that simple. How come 50 years ago there was a lot more smoking and people believed in things like Extrasensory Perception? How come literacy and high school graduation rates were lower? How come half of Western Europe countries had large Communist parties and all of Eastern Europe had Communist dictatorships? How come conservatives were calling Eisenhower and Kennedy communists?
George Carlin knew exactly why decades ago. No one noticed. No one cared.
“There’s a reason education sucks, and it’s the same reason that it will never, ever, ever be fixed. It’s never gonna get any better. Don’t look for it. Be happy with what you got. Because the owners of this country don’t want that. I’m talking about the real owners now, the real owners, the big wealthy business interests that control things and make all the important decisions.
Forget the politicians. The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don’t. You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land. They own and control the corporations. They’ve long since bought and paid for the senate, the congress, the state houses, the city halls, they got the judges in their back pockets and they own all the big media companies so they control just about all of the news and information you get to hear. They got you by the balls. They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying, lobbying, to get what they want.
Well, we know what they want. They want more for themselves and less for everybody else, but I’ll tell you what they don’t want: They don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don’t want well informed, well educated people capable of critical thinking. They’re not interested in that. That doesn’t help them. Thats against their interests. Thats right. They don’t want people who are smart enough to sit around a kitchen table to figure out how badly they’re getting fucked by a system that threw them overboard 30 fucking years ago. They don’t want that.
You know what they want? They want obedient workers. Obedient workers. People who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork, and just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shittier jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, the reduced benefits, the end of overtime and the vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it, and now they’re coming for your Social Security money. They want your retirement money. They want it back so they can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street, and you know something? They’ll get it. They’ll get it all from you, sooner or later, 'cause they own this fucking place. It’s a big club, and you ain’t in it.”
-George Carlin
good bit. everybody laugh. roll on snare drum. curtains
What’s worse is Carlin was so correct that it helped create an entire disaffected generation, known as Generation X, that basically stopped caring about politics and became increasingly cynical because Carlin was right: it was never going to get better.
So why even bother trying to fight it? And they didn’t.
To be fair, I don’t blame them one bit, their numbers were dwarfed by the boomers, and they never, not once, had political relevancy.
Fortunately, I also believe he was correct about the natural world, that’s been through far worse than us, ramping up to retaliate against us and shake us off like a bad case of fleas, so maybe it’ll all get set back to zero and nature can start again once it corrects our little evolutionary cul-de-sac.
There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.’ -Isaac Asimov
I kind of agree with Asimov here, I think the cult of ignorance has been with us a long time, I think it springs from the puritans who emigrated here to escape the “persecution” of living in Europe during the Enlightenment. I mean, we’re talking about dumbing things down for a country that historically had witch burnings and more recently a Satanic Panic? The cult of ignorance has always been here, it’s just grown cancerous due to proliferation of misinformation and disinformation.
"You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can't fool all of the people all of the time" -Abraham Lincoln
And my corollary to that is that you can hire all of the people that you can't fool all of the time and get them to help you fool all of the people that you can fool all of the time.
Rudy ran for Mayor based on his conviction of a local NYC politician named Donald Manes. Rudy was handed the case by a reporter named Jimmy Breslin, who did all the digging. Rudy got in by riding someone else’s hard work. He was never the great attorney he’s been pretending to be.
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