This is Lemmy. You can say pedophile. You can swear. You can call spades a spade without doing wrongspeak that censors you from the algorithm.

I didn’t realize right wingers actively thought of San Francisco as a hellhole. I’ve heard it of Portland and Los Angeles, but never of the Bay area. I thought people imagined that all the coastal elites were from there.

Maybe if you were white and rich. All the good shit in America from the progressive labor reforms to the civil rights act were the result of things being so terrible that people risked their lives to change things. The government, private goons, and community bigots have done some the most heinous, genocidal shit in history.

Company towns where people were killed for trying to unionize. FDR deporting hundreds of thousands of Hispanic American citizens. Black neighborhoods that saw success getting annihilated for daring to try to carve out a good life. Supporting authoritarian governments and their death squads. Horrific experimenting on poor people and minorities. Persistent cultural genocide, mass displacement, and ethnic cleansing of Native Americans that puts Israeli efforts in Palestine to shame. Creating our current policing system to enforce fucking chattel slavery!

The US has not been “somewhat better than autocratic dissent genocides.” The Soviet Union did horrible things, China does horrible things, yet America can match every single fucking atrocity they’ve ever committed. We inspired Nazi Germany, helped any authoritarian regime that opposed communism, and created an inescapable system of global neoliberal capitalism that rapes weaker nations and calls it fair.

You’re right, it’s usually not a fascist state that will burn anything for fuel; it’s usually something far more insidious. It’s a imperial republic that people like you think is some shining city on a hill. It uses your faith in it to turn you into a good little patriot for a country that is recognized worldwide as THE evil empire.

The fact that he doesn’t work for ICE probably means he’s such a major fuckup that not even the Gestapo want him

Nobility of the 21st century. Things never really changed.

Good thing (not really) we’re barreling towards economic catastrophe and potential rising geopolitical danger. I’m not gonna pretend it will make things better, but I think people consistently lack imagination for how things can actually suck. People can imagine extinction or the status quo, but actually conceptualizing a middle ground is far more difficult.

A lot of these seem like very different lies, and some of them aren’t lies at all. Americans’ perception of other countries is slanted towards US imperial interests, but that doesn’t mean shit can’t legitimately suck in those countries. Of course, even when things are bad, intervention that isn’t popular and requested won’t make things better.

Even with Iranians in revolt, even if a large number genuinely want US involvement, I doubt a contribution by this administration would make the country better in the long run. I doubt Israel getting to eliminate their biggest regional enemy for a bargain bin price will do anything good for Palestinians. I doubt the US once again demonstrating the geopolitical necessity of having nukes will make the world a safer place.

Putting tankie BS about North Korea being based or Ukraine being a puppet aside, the US only ever does anything good out of self interest, and right now the government isn’t even acting on its own, but that of Trump. He’ll attack if he thinks Iran is weak enough; not for any strategic interest, but so he can brag. Taking out Maduro did nothing for the US. Taking Greenland would do nothing for the US. They were just easy targets for him to bully, and a weakened Iran might be another.

I always knew Trump could win and I immediately knew why. I still haven’t mentally recovered and I still don’t know how I’m gonna survive the hell the Democrats’ decades of failures have brought upon us.

As someone who has voted in every election I could, I wouldn’t bother. I’d vote up and down ballot for every local race and ballot measure, but there would be no point for the presidency if it is a free and fair election. Newsom winning would be all but guaranteed.

The fascists will be thrown under the bus for a few years after Trump is gone. We haven’t seen the worst of what he has to offer, and anyone trying to emulate him after he dies is guaranteed to lose any fair election. Corpos will want stability, so they’ll use their propaganda machines to bury the unpopular and leaderless Republicans so they can elect a neo feudalist. Most of the corruption will not be rolled back and regulations on the rich will stay non-existent, allowing the exact same shit or worse to happen again.

Any alternative to Republicans will win, so if Newsom is on the ticket then America has already lost. The only way to rebuild immediately after Trump is through radical reforms that will not happen under Newsom. We are looking at a post fall of Rome or a Century of Humiliation type future.

You think Trump won’t literally invade and occupy Canada to stroke his ego? You think even American liberals of the future, invested in cold war anti communist narratives, wouldn’t take over a China aligned neighbor?

America is a bully and always has been. It is still the most dangerous empire on earth. Canada and Mexico will better serve their people by opening stroking Trump’s ego while quietly preparing for war. They don’t need to capitulate; they only need to avoid being an easy target.

Maybe a bit of Harris’s fault for not sitting down and personally explaining what the choice is.

Yes, it was. It was on the entire party establishment for not being alarmist enough, and on the entire party NOW for not being alarmist enough. We are in 3rd Reich level fascism and they still act like we live in a stable liberal democracy. They refuse to rock the boat and admit how dire things are because their narrative cannot perceive the rules being different. By not rejecting the status quo they legitimize it. By treating this blatantly corrupt dictatorship as normal, they make it the baseline for all future governments.

What they should be doing is literally risking their lives. Filibustering, running desperate campaigns, calling the immigration facilities concentration camps and ICE Trump’s personal thugs who are above the law. They should be honest about Trump making the constitution meaningless, about the entire system of liberal democracy being dismantled completely. If that makes Trump become more heavy handed with lawmakers, that would be good. If it causes him to suspend Congress, that’ll make the resistance to him even more popular. Make him destroy the illusion of civility, as nothing they’ve been doing within the system has slowed him down.

You’re so close to getting it that it’s fucking depressing.

Fine. Vote for young radicals in the primaries because the past has shown that anything but boldness won’t move the needle. Vote DSA, even if you’re uncomfortable with them. The controlled opposition establishment should make any Democrat more uncomfortable at this point.

If you’re not doing something different to what you’ve done in the past, there is no hope for making sure fascism stays dead. A failure to enact change will not keep things the same or return them to normal, but ensure that things get continually worse.

They have a lot more to lose from provoking the US

I doubt this will meaningfully change things for Taiwan. It probably has more to do with preventing military officials from leveraging the newly expanded military to seize power in the future. Taiwan is still doomed.

And the people who ARE irresponsibly delaying it and softening it and dragging their feet about it, I think, maybe actually want it to succeed.

Like you said, don’t say it in a milquetoast way. The corporate owned media aren’t maybe doing interference for fascism, they are. They don’t want to cause panic because that will hurt shareholder interests and make it harder for the rich to avoid the public’s wrath for backing fascism.

The liberal establishment is also not being honest about how fucked things are because they don’t want to admit they have no power anymore. Liberalism is dead and can only be rebuilt, not saved. They don’t want to admit that it’s dead because that might actually cause people to want to fix the problems that let this happen in the first place. At a fundamental level, they don’t want to recognize that the myth of the American dream is what led to Trump. They don’t want to admit that an ideology of privatization and free markets was the deathcult all the commies and anarchists told them it was.

America will never move forward until it is humbled; until the myths of American exceptionalism are dead and buried. The post Trump era will not be recovery unless people reject the desire to return to the past.

What a joke. The economy has been on a several decade long systemic decline and the Democrats have consistently affirmed that they will do nothing to change that. They don’t run on what voters want, so they lose. The people calling for reform who try to work with the establishment are not listened to, so they lose.

On the other hand, do you know why Republicans won with Trump? It was not because of the single issue voters who have stuck with them for decades, as all they did was get every Republican on their side. Trump won because he appealed to grievance, pointing out the obvious fact that the system didn’t work and offering fake solutions that only made everything worse. Neoliberalism rotted this country’s foundations, and Trump only took a sledgehammer to the rotten wood.

What truly bends the will of voters is economics, and Democrats had the weaker message. This might seem wrong from a rational perspective, but voters were never rational beings who understand how the world works. All these voters can recognize is that things are bad, not why they are bad. They know that Trump offered more change, socialism for fools, and that sounded far more appealing than a Clinton or a coastal elite.

Live in delusion that non-voters are to blame all you want, but it only weakens the Democrats to not blame themselves for their failure.

They’re not gonna fuck up immediate elections. Republicans have nothing going in their favor electorally and will try to circumvent elections. If Trump doesn’t manage to cancel or outright rig this year’s elections, he’ll sideline Congress instead. There will not be an election in 2028 unless Trump is dead and Vance’s handlers want stability back.

The Democrats are gonna fuck up elections down the road by not properly reforming the country. They will need to abolish ICE, overhaul the Supreme Court, and pass constitutional amendments at a bare minimum. There needs to be a new era of popular progressivism like existed in the early 20th century, or the country might genuinely descend into civil war as the capitalists side with external empires to keep America from being a global power.

Americans need to get over their own exceptionalism and realize that it will never be the same. I suspect the Democrats will feed these delusions and not fix the fundamental problems, all but guaranteeing that America will plunge into decades of instability and corruption.

edit: I’m too tired for this shit

With a corprocrat in charge, the republic will be pushed towards collapse and the same violent thugs working for ICE will be cracking skulls before long. They will doom America to fascism or civil war, and the only way you will ever get stability lasting more than a few years is by taking control from them.

Trump will never leave office alive, so give up on an election against him. When there is a choice, you’ll be voting for a JD Vance style Republican who is actually the puppet people seem to think Trump is, or you’ll be voting for a Democrat. If that Democrat is a coastal elite who was only rejected by the fascists because Trump didn’t like him, you’ve already lost. The Democrat will have a better chance in the general regardless, so it’s primary or bust.

Oh yeah, you also need progressives to dominate in 2022 and 2024 down ballot, while the rich only need a king loyal to their corruption.

You’re definitely correct about a lot of this, but your biggest mistake lies in underestimating Trump. He will leave in a body bag, no matter how much the general populace or even the wealthy elites dislike him. The violent thugs and Christian nationalists fully buy into the strength he projects, and they will not dispose him for the elites. No election will unseat him, as he plans on rigging the elections fully by 2028 whether he lives that long or not.

A period of elites trying to establish regional divisions and a breakup of the union will come, but not until Trump is dead. This is especially true when you consider how interwoven the military is at a national level. There are no regional divisions, and so there will be no breakup until the military is more thoroughly weakened and corrupted at an interpersonal level. A sudden power vacuum and disillusionment with Trump’s administration by everyone sets the best stage for them to take control.

I don’t have high hopes that this will be anything more than a blip for him. Trump’s platitudes will be more than enough to reign in most of his base, and only a few that actually wake up.

At the same time, it’s not that this doesn’t help. The majority will turn against Trump eventually and the sooner the better. The question is whether they’ll do anything about it before he’s gone, and whether they won’t just follow the next king loyally.