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I hadnât actually asked this question before - my old standby was âWhy do you think my husband deserves to die?â We used to buy our insurance on the ACA and he has pre-existing conditions.
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That oneâs been gone over before too.
âYouâre exaggerating, no-oneâs going to die, Americans have lived with this kind of health care for a long time, their standard of care is much better than here, thatâs why itâs so expensive, and besides, the economy!â Or else, mock-resignedly, âso I guess itâs communism thenâ as if the only choices are either fascism or communism.
Understand well none of this I agree with. One of them I got thinking, at least a little, when all those senior members of the State Department resigned en masse, because career and ambition is something they can understand. But theyâve reverted to form since.
Come to think of it, they were the ones who assured me it wouldnât come to marches and deaths, and I asked them how bad it would have to get before they would consider changing their minds. I hate to say it, but one person run over, 19 injured, 2 cops dead from a copter crash probably isnât enough casualties for them to do a rethink. Itâs going to take at least one city on fire before they even consider maybe Trump isnât so good for the economy after all.
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âI disavow anything that led to folks getting hurt,â Kessler continued.
Um, yeah, thatâs not how it works.
âSure, I pushed over the first of the huge, person-crushing dominoes while knowing exactly where it would lead. But I disavow anything that led to folks getting hurt, so I canât be held responsible, right?â
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Bloom told the Associated Press on Saturday that she didnât talk to him about his political views. Heâd told her he was going to a rally, but Bloom said they hadnât discussed the details.
âI didnât know it was white supremacists,â she said. âI thought it had something to do with Trump. Trumpâs not a supremacist.â
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That wasnât an accident, it was deliberately manufactured misinformation.
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When we consider all the psychological/emotional manipulations that go into modern election strategy, itâs no surprise that Trump voters/supporters are reluctant to change their position.
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Heâs aware of the potential to use Congressional action as a propaganda device, yes. It is only one of many options for that purpose, however.
Most of Trumpâs percieved incompetence only exists if you judge him within the frame of conventional politics.
Trump is making no effort to expand his popularity or avoid motivating his opposition. Normally, that would be electorally suicidal. But, in this case, itâs irrelevant: Trump has no intention of facing a legitimate election.
Trump is making no real effort to hide his criminality. Again, normally bad, but in this case trivial. He holds the pardon power, and is completely willing to abuse it. He has already fired one insufficiently-loyal FBI director and openly threatened the AG. He has no intention of ever facing a courtroom.
He is genuinely incompetent on the international front, but he isnât calling the shots there: Putin and Bannon are. And a lunatic charge into catastrophic war is exactly what those two are looking for. They arenât doing it by mistake.
The âstrong approvalâ numbers slipped slightly a month or two after the election, and have been trending stable ever since. And those âstrong approveâ people just shifted to âapproveâ; they didnât actually oppose him.
The idea that Trumpâs support within the GOP is significantly fading is a fantasy. The movement in his numbers is exactly what youâd expect as the post-election honeymoon wears off, nothing more.
The Pence/Ryan/RNC faction would topple Trump in a heartbeat if they thought they could get away with it. But they wonât; the base would slaughter them. Over half of the GOP base âstrongly supportâ, ninety percent total support, a tenth or less oppose.
In about a year, most of the disloyal GOP legislators will disappear, removing this possibility. And even if the RNC folk miraculously pulled off a coup, all that gets you is a permanent fascist government with less chaos and more theocracy.
What opponents?
The only semi-real democratic contest left in America is within the party primaries. The red-governed states are no longer under two-party rule; fascists are counting the votes.
Trump doesnât need money to buy ads. He has Twitter, Brietbart, CNN, Fox and the Daily Stormer to get his message out. He barely spent any money during the last election; most of his fundraising went straight into his own pockets.
The centre of American political opinion is slightly to the left of the Democrats.
There are no moderate Republicans. It has been a white supremacist party for decades. Now it is a fascist party.
While you are âgiving them that opportunityâ, millions of Koreans and Iranians are going to die.
Then you have the difficult and messy task of building a new country in the aftermath. Itâs a shitty job, but if you wanted to avoid that you needed to deal with your fascists before they seized control.
The Constitution is dead. Its purpose was to prevent a situation like this; it failed.
âIf we do this, the fascists might do it tooâ is an empty argument. The fascists are going to do it anyway, no matter how you respond. Attempting to uphold Marquis of Queensbury rules in a cage fight gets you nothing except beaten.
If decorum and a respect for obsolete norms is more important to you than defeating fascism, then I think that your priorities are somewhat misaligned.
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i think i read a cross-cultural study once â no citation provided, i know â that this isnât people. itâs americans.
other groups of people do not share this strong tendency of doubling down on mistakes.
iâve always attributed it to the religious streak americans have. the belief that there is one set of facts, provided by an eminently contradictory book: the bible. ( youâd be hard pressed to get most christians to notice there are two completely contradictory creation stories in genesis. )
itâs nice to think that itâs a learned behavior. and could therefore be unlearned.
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âitâs americansâ
Drunk irish, lazy mexicans, stern germans, and americans without humility
ditto
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pretty much tells you everything you need about the police in this country
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I just posted this in Wanderthread, but I think itâs also relevant here:
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Yeah, no. Youâre essentially arguing that anything short of overthrowing the government and rebuilding society from its ashes amounts to misguided respect for decorum and obsolete norms because you canât envision any scenario in which our system can survive having ingested a pathogen.
The Constitution is not some Victorian etiquette manual, itâs the sacred text that binds our society together, and the fact that someone like Trump has been allowed to take office is a testament to its strength, not its weakness. Once we declare it âdeadâ the country breaks up because thereâs nothing that can rival its legitimacyâand our nukes will not be any better off in the hands of some newly-declared Republic of Gilead.
The only way we put the lid on fascism is by restoring the Constitution, and we canât do that if weâre the ones burning the Reichstag. Disobedience can and should play a part in this (e.g., states refusing to hand over voter rolls), but the endgame, for now, has to be a democratic election. Tahrir Square is only a viable means to restoring the Constitution once there is already widespread recognition that free elections are not being heldâotherwise it achieves the opposite effect.
And thatâs granting, of course, that such an uprising is not a fairy tale scenarioâwhich, at the moment, it is.
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A photographer caught this as it happened - horrifying, people in mid air, shoes everywhere - shoes always fly off when people are hitâŚ
Wow. Photographer from @DailyProgress https://t.co/tpTflF9CkC via @samstein pic.twitter.com/5tVjxq2ULK
â Joshua Hersh (@joshuahersh) August 12, 2017
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All of the Constitution or just parts of it? Because I hear a lot of people screaming how they support the Constitution, but itâs the parts they want like guns for everyone and free speech only applies to me. All the other bits of it seem to be missing.
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