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;
I used ‘legit’ in the colloquial sense, as in “actual”
ok yeah that tracks ._. either way, i would be more surprised if one didn’t happen at this point.
They already own the supreme court.
That’s the joke
Yeah, I get it. It’s just that it’s sad.
I’m sad.
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.
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.
Damn, this comment section is a good reminder that western “anarchists” are just embarrassed liberals.
You’re think everyone is commenting is an anarchist?
No, I think everyone commenting is a liberal.
It probably due to your incurable case of campism
Lol, your comment history is you attacking everyone to the left of Elizabeth Warren, but apparently not licking the boots of right wing neo liberals is “campism”
Are you just making up my history based on what you wish it was? No, you calling everyone who’s not a red fash, “liberal” is campism.
Nah, I’m reading it. And lol at someone who calls leftists “red fash” calling people who think the Democrats are liberal campist. Great “anarchist” com you’ve got here.
Nah, I’m reading it.
You clearly need glasses.
I didn’t call “people who think the Democrats are liberal” campist. I called someone who calls everyone “liberal” indiscriminately campist something which is reinforced by you claiming I support democrats and “criticize anyone left of Warren”.
Great “anarchist” com you’ve got here.
Another campist endlessly surprised that Anarchists don’t believe in the so-called “left unity” delusion…
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.
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.
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.
No what I mean is that everyone who want to stop facism should stop relying on groups and organisations that have a record of being ineffective when it comes to opposing and stopping the fascists.
Check out !inperson@slrpnk.net, !antifa@lemmy.ml and other Lemmy communities to find out about ways to oppose fascism without relying on the DNC.
The US has been pretty good at opposing fascists in the past.
We need the media to stop pussyfooting around and call a spade a spade. They’re working so hard to appear impartial that they’ve decided that reporting objective reality shows a liberal bias.
We were only reluctantly against facism during WW2. That’s why we didn’t join until halfway through and did business both sides before we were drawn in.
And by “opposing” I assume you mean “installing”.
It’s very funny to see people claiming to be anarchists ranting about “convicted felons” and “enemy governments”.
If thats a rant to you I am not quite sure how to actually answer that. And if using language and arguments that that the user person might actually be able to connect to makes one less anarchist, I wonder what kind anarchists you expect on Lemmy
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!
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.
You’re an idiot. Again, the democrats didn’t offer a pony, so dumbasses chose fascism. They chose not to participate in this election, and now there will be no more elections.
They really stuck it to the Democrat leaders though, right? Millions of people will have to suffer and die because people decided to throw a tantrum instead of stopping fascism.
That submissiviness is so deeply engrained that still now you can’t criticize the handful of people at the top of only Party with a chance to defeat Trump who by a gigantic margin had the most power out of everybody in the whole damn country to sway the election and “Stop Trump” (as they demanded from others and their useful idiots parroted) and who refused to move an inch on it, and instead you persist on blaming the plebes with their 1-in-240,000,000 voting “power” who did not suitably grovel and supported your Party’s Royalty whilst they treated them worse than trash.
I’ve seen more realistic and hard nosed takes on the relation between the people and their leaders involving actual Royalty, than that “it’s all the faults of the plebes” propaganda you and your fellow arse-kissers keep repeating.
But, hey, you keep on licking that boot. Yummy yummy.
Did I ever say the democrats weren’t to blame for the situation? Both democrats and idiots who stayed home are to blame.
Stop trying to justify letting fascism happen.
You relentlessly and repeatedly persist in voicing criticism for the choices of the near-powerless whilst staying silent on the choices of the powerful.
This is to the point that when confronted with it you claim that you never dismissed the blame of the powerful, immediatelly followed by once again NOT blaming the powerfull and instead throw even more insults towards the near-powerless that didn’t suitably support those very same powerful people (whom you have so far, already 3 posts down, not criticized) who didn’t even try to appeal to them.
The nicest possible interpretation of your mindless repeating of that mantra even whilst claiming you’re not doing it, is that all that shoe polish you must have ingested has affected your brain.
The voters weren’t near powerless (they are now, though). In fact, they had all of the power. They were literally the last defense we had against fascism, and 1/3 of them chose to not stop it because the democrats ran a bad campaign.
The Democrat leadership was irrelevant at election time. The choice was between the status quo and fascism. There’s no nuance. Because guess what? The Democrat leadership is now completely irrelevant because you can’t vote out fascism.
If you didn’t vote against fascism, you are complicit in it happening.
And I am blaming the powerful. The reason I didn’t focus on that is because you already blame the powerful, but you’re trying to excuse the voters who absolutely share culpability, which is why I focused on them.
“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.
I’m getting so tired of liberals who spend all their time complaining about people not supporting their preferred genocidaire instead of demanding candidates that aren’t aspiring genocidaires.
It is the candidate’s job to win the election, not the electorate’s. If the anti-genocide voting bloc was enough to swing the election (it wasn’t) then maybe your candidate shouldn’t have supported a fucking genocide in spite of that.
The US style “Liberals” seem to be incredibly subservient, prefering to blame millions of people for not chosing their “boss” rather than the “boss” for not even trying to appeal to those people.
All the talk of the supposedly Go Getter and Independent spirit in America and yet around here we are faced with an overwhelming amount of American arse-kissers who are seemingly unable to even conceive that maybe, just maybe, “the boss” was the one who did things the wrong way, causing millions to refuse to chose them and hence has most of the blame for the outcome.
On the upside, watching this is a wonderful opportunity to learn a lot about the evils of people being mindless unchallenging followers of “Leaders” in Politics.
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.
Your “leaders” created this situation in the first place by refusing to even acknowledge the concerns of those voters, much less address them.
It would be far more reasonable for a handful of Democrat Party leaders to move their position in a handful of subjects to address grave moral concerns of millions of their natural voters than for them to expect than they could get the votes of all the millions for whom those things were important without conceding an inch on those subjects.
Want to see who gave the election to Trump on a platter: look inside the Democrat Party.
You are entitled to hate whoever you like, but hate doesn’t make you right. In fact it might be altering your judgement just a little.
I think its a little dishonest to collapse everything down to this one moment, that decides the moral standing of a person, whether they are for or against the movement to defeat trump and the criminal right wing. Its important to take into considerations what came before, at least, not to mention that the country is a big diverse place largely controlled by private interests. If you aren’t out here trying to educate people and wanna sit on the sidelines and judge others I won’t stop you, but IMO you really have very little right to judge when the time comes.
It’s not dishonest. This election was a vote between the status quo and outright fascism. If you didn’t vote against fascism, you supported it.
There’s no nuance here. Your reasons don’t matter. If you didn’t vote against the guy who straight up said he would be a dictator, you’re culpable for the situation we’re in now.
You people treat this like it’s some zero sum game. The democrats did screw the pooch, but so did the people who didn’t vote to stop fascism. Both can be true.
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
I don’t frame questions in terms of lesser/greater evil. I actually don’t need religious concepts at all to understand this situation, all I have to do is listen to people and remember what came before.
You’re so divorced from reality that there are no actual people who you are condemning, you’re just mad at some strawman constructed by the party that humiliated itself, for it was the democrats failures that lost. You’re buying into a ridiculous narrative that deflects all crit away from the democrats and puts it in some strawmen. It’s like conservatives with their woke washing of all politics, or bad faith liberals and “tankie”.
And to be clear, I don’t agree with people who abstained to vote, I did not abstain to vote. and I didn’t encourage anyone to abstain. I am very politically active and fundamentally agree with your logic. However…
What I despise is the scapegoating and strawmanning that is just endlessly regurgitated on this site.
I actually don’t need religious concepts at all to understand this situation
You think good and evil are religious concepts? That’s a new one. And I’m the one divorced from reality lol. People who abstained choose to do nothing about the rise of fascism. I do not blame them as much as someone actively supporting it but they absolutely share the blame for doing nothing to stop it and it’s absurd to give them a pass as we suffer the consequences of their decision
Hitler was appointed as the lesser evil according to the liberal government that appointed him.
Lesser evilism is the most evil option in all scenarios.
And Trump is the lesser evil according to maga. Your point is we should just do the opposite of what liberals think? That’s the entire philosophy of Republicans so that adds up
Greater evilism is as dumb as it sounds
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.
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.
“John Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it”
-An Actual US President said this
(Andrew Jackson, btw)
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.
And just like the horrors of last week, these too will be supplanted by next week’s horrors and forgotten, because there’s just too fucking much going on to keep track
I had actually hoped this wouldn’t be as bad as we feared after seeing their rank incompetence still on display, but it turns out it’s even worse than that
“[…] my city is falling apart. and here I am… vibing.”
I would argue it is the non-voters in this position.
