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The "nothing important ever happens/nothing matters" sentiment that pervades a lot of American politics seems like it's that way because people can't afford it not to be (including me). If, for instance, you believe that Trump organized an insurrection whose goal was the overturning of an election and the declaration that he was, in fact, president, than it follows you believe he committed treason, that he tried to overturn American democracy (such as it is) and that he was performing a sort of coup. In turn, this means there is really nothing more dangerous to the continuation of American democracy than Trump and his co-conspirators. If you believe this, it stands to reason you need to be organizing, protesting, sending angry letters and verging on riot every day these people go free. I'm not doing this, I believe a lot of people aren't doing this. So you can rationalize why you're not doing it. I'm not doing it because I don't have the time or energy; and I'm sure a lot of people rationalize it by saying it wasn't that big of a deal or that nothing they do has an impact. I feel immense guilt that I don't have the freedom to stage a walkout or a march on the capital or whatever other extreme action this scenario justified. "I didn't matter that much" is (I believe) a defense against that feeling of guilt.
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Apr 30, 2023 21:55
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Alkydere posted:Yup, they were all looking for blood, but they were also waiting for someone else to start it because they're all cowards. I think it's more that they didn't have the opportunity, less everyone was waiting for someone else to start the carnage.
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Apr 30, 2023 22:12
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Gyges posted:I think it's more that they didn't have the opportunity, less everyone was waiting for someone else to start the carnage. Well, I think the momentum was halted because a woman got shot in the head and died and big strong daddy trump didn't swoop in with his shadow military to enact The Plan
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Apr 30, 2023 22:39
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Professor Beetus posted:Well, I think the momentum was halted because a woman got shot in the head and died and big strong daddy trump didn't swoop in with his shadow military to enact The Plan She was shot long before people were roaming the halls, yelling for Pelosi to come out.
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Apr 30, 2023 22:53
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https://twitter.com/ohshidt/status/1652753881137397760 this is a deeply, deeply sick country. I just cannot begin to imagine the mindset that would lead you to taking shots at someone fishing hundreds of feet away And bullshit " we've had things go missing " even if that was true you're going to deprive someone of their life for that? Honestly I'm not even anti-gun, but I have no idea how you deal with the insanely psychotic mindset of conservatives that every second of real life is kill or be killed
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Apr 30, 2023 22:55
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I think he was just shooting into the air for warning shots. Still psychotic as all gently caress, but slightly less than everyone being lucky that Gary is a bad shot. Still, his good friend Ron is right there, everyone is holding fishing poles, and everyone seems to know who he is. Maybe Gary has some vision issues to go along with his mental issues.
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Apr 30, 2023 23:06
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Americans have kind of proven not to be responsible enough to be allowed to own guns. That goes double for cops.
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Apr 30, 2023 23:08
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Gyges posted:She was shot long before people were roaming the halls, yelling for Pelosi to come out. Oh that's right. Sorry, I had the events out of order in my mind. I still think the lack of support they were likely expecting still had an impact. Once everyone was evacuated and they were just trashing sit and taking selfies, it was apparent that they were the dog that caught the car. They had no further ideas once they realized they weren't going to get their hands on any congress critters.
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Apr 30, 2023 23:09
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Don't forget that Trump tried to go to the Capitol to back the riot but the Secret Service refused to take him.
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Apr 30, 2023 23:25
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A big flaming stink posted:https://twitter.com/ohshidt/status/1652753881137397760 in my personal experience, if you're in a rural area and folks are getting trigger happy like this more often than not there's a drug habit and/or illicit stuff happening on their property. that's just my neck of the woods though. america offers a vast array of delusional paranoia which can immediately leap to deadly gun violence
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Apr 30, 2023 23:25
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BiggerBoat posted:If anyone thinks that someone wouldn't have executed Nancy Pelosi or any other Democrat they got their hands on over a live stream that day, if given the chance, they're delusional and don't truly understand the true, hardened mindset of these maniacs. On the other hand, even if they'd caught and summarily executed Nancy Pelosi and AOC, that wouldn't be the end of American democracy. It'd just be a couple more political murders. In order to be an outright catastrophe, it would have needed to be part of a larger scheme requiring the cooperation and assistance of a significant amount of the existing political or military leadership. It would have to be more than just Trump himself showing up to rally them. Regardless of the intentions of the actual Jan 6 rioters, it seems that the GOP wasn't quite able to pull together the planning or determination to actually exploit the events and turn them into a coup.
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May 1, 2023 00:05
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Main Paineframe posted:On the other hand, even if they'd caught and summarily executed Nancy Pelosi and AOC, that wouldn't be the end of American democracy. It'd just be a couple more political murders. Not so sure about that. Multiple people appear to have had a plan of passing the decision on the election to a republican friendly committee or scotus after delegitimizing the process in one way or another. Then have them hand the presidency to trump outside control of the electoral process. Basically, they appeared to be more expansive and flagrant attempts to pull a Florida presidential election recount deal on a federal level then claim it wasn't a coup because it was "legitimate" and use their propaganda outlets and supporters to do an end run around democracy by suppressing dissent and muddying the waters. It didn't work because they didn't manage to get a representative killed in the case of J6 and people like MTG and Cruz couldn't weasel their way into decertifying the election through official means. But if someone had died at J6, even Pence, they definitely would have been treasonous enough to pull a stunt like that.
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May 1, 2023 00:11
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DarkCrawler posted:Nothing that came before is any different from what any leftist group that succeeded in the past. Stop acting like American leftists are historically shat upon any more than the leftists anywhere else. Leftists somewhere else have it easier? That is built upon leftists that didn't engage in pretending the fascists are potential allies for one. Or pretending that fascism is not evil. your definition of fascist seems unworkably broad
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May 1, 2023 00:26
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A big flaming stink posted:https://twitter.com/ohshidt/status/1652753881137397760 This happened to my friend several years ago. She was at the beach and some dude taking pot shots grazed her head.
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May 1, 2023 00:44
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Kalit posted:Seriously. It also blows my mind that some people ITT already forgot that they did kill someone that day. no one seems to care about ashli babbitt sadly
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May 1, 2023 00:51
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Gyges posted:I think he was just shooting into the air for warning shots. Still psychotic as all gently caress, but slightly less than everyone being lucky that Gary is a bad shot. "warning shots" in and of themselves are profoundly unsafe and proof of a complete lack of familiarity with firearm safety
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May 1, 2023 01:08
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Jarmak posted:The "mostly" here is doing a lot of heavy lifting. There were armed, organized militia groups intentionally stoking that riot, and coordinating attacks on any security that was holding the mob back. They did this with the full intent of making use of the cover caused by the chaos. This FBI Informant testified that the Proud Boys were not organized. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/mar/29/fbi-informant-proud-boys-testimony-trial-enrique-tarrio quote:An FBI informant who marched to the US Capitol with fellow Proud Boys on January 6 testified on Wednesday that he did not know of any plans for the far-right extremist group to invade the building and didn’t think they inspired violence that day. Do you have any evidence that he was lying under oath?
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May 1, 2023 01:20
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A big flaming stink posted:"warning shots" in and of themselves are profoundly unsafe and proof of a complete lack of familiarity with firearm safety but in bideo games bullets just vanish after X feet.
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May 1, 2023 01:38
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I meant this to be clear, but I was talking about unstable situations that rise to level of an existential crisis for the reigning political-economic system.Fell Fire posted:Churchill would like a word with you. quote:Less tritely, what you are claiming is seriously disproven by the actual history. Frequently, capitalists aligned with communists (or at least some kind of further left liberal democracy) whenever they felt a larger threat from fascism. quote:There are a lot of stories from the Manhattan Project, Hollywood, and elsewhere of left-leaning intellectuals working within a capitalist system and only suffering for it much later, when fascism was defeated as a global threat and, rhetorically at least, replaced by communism. Edit: cut off sentence cat botherer fucked around with this message at 03:00 on May 1, 2023 |
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May 1, 2023 01:44
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Cool NIN Shirt posted:This FBI Informant testified that the Proud Boys were not organized. Yeah, he's a far-right militia associate testifying for the defense in a seditious conspiracy trial of the proud boys leaders. He doesn't have poo poo for credibility to begin with, isn't someone established to know poo poo, and if that isn't adequate there's the the entire case the feds have put on to prove otherwise.
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May 1, 2023 01:45
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Fell Fire posted:Churchill would like a word with you. With Germany in the 1930's being a rather significant exception. Hitler's millionaire backers: how Germany's elite facilitated the rise of the Nazis
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May 1, 2023 02:14
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A big flaming stink posted:"warning shots" in and of themselves are profoundly unsafe and proof of a complete lack of familiarity with firearm safety Absolutely, but firing into the air away from the people he saw is less dangerous for the fishing guys than him just being a bad shot when trying to shoot them. There's no scenario where Gary isn't an unhinged lunatic, but dumbass warning shots are the less terrible option here. Still real bad for anyone down range of where he actually shot at, which thankfully appears to be no one.
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May 1, 2023 02:17
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Cool NIN Shirt posted:Do you have any evidence that he was lying under oath? NYT has a very good, 40-minute video on how things went down. The crowd by and large was not a huge army of Oath Keepers and Proud Boys, but there were key members of those groups who riled up and guided the mob towards weak points in the perimeter. Proud Boys members worked as a group to lead the Jan 6 mob to do what it did. They were able to work as a group because they were members of the Proud Boys. That seems like solid evidence to me.
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May 1, 2023 02:20
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Cool NIN Shirt posted:This FBI Informant testified that the Proud Boys were not organized. You don't have to be super organized to kill people. If you have a gun, and that gun has bullets, and you take that gun with you to a place with another person that's the only preplanning you need to cause a murder.
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May 1, 2023 02:26
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Fell Fire posted:Churchill would like a word with you. You might investigate the US relationship with Francoist Spain or the Estado Novo regime in Portugal, or the history of US intervention in democracies in South America during the second half of the twentieth century. Capitalists are definitely very friendly with fascists when doing so protects profits. You’ll only see them fighting fascists when the fascists threaten production.
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May 1, 2023 02:46
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Main Paineframe posted:On the other hand, even if they'd caught and summarily executed Nancy Pelosi and AOC, that wouldn't be the end of American democracy. It'd just be a couple more political murders. Wasn't the larger scheme in place and one of the key players just... walked away and refused to do what Trump had told him to do? Unfortunately I don't remember much in the way of details, some sort of security head Trump wanted there and he just said hell no?
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May 1, 2023 02:58
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GlyphGryph posted:Wasn't the larger scheme in place and one of the key players just... walked away and refused to do what Trump had told him to do? Unfortunately I don't remember much in the way of details, some sort of security head Trump wanted there and he just said hell no?
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May 1, 2023 03:09
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cat botherer posted:There was some other people, but at no point was it a serious threat to where it could have toppled our political system. The US is too stable, with too many power bases happy enough with the status quo. This is different from, say, Weimar Germany. The Weimar Republic was stable as well, but enough elements saw the Nazis as preferable to the status quo so that Mr. Hitler was able to transition the country into authoritarianism legally. The President attempting to invalidate the election is a serious threat to the system and if it had been successful it would have been a toppling of the system and a transition into authoritarianism.
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May 1, 2023 03:24
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Bar Ran Dun posted:The President attempting to invalidate the election is a serious threat to the system and if it had been successful it would have been a toppling of the system and a transition into authoritarianism. cat botherer fucked around with this message at 04:01 on May 1, 2023 |
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May 1, 2023 03:58
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cat botherer posted:However, he is still dumb as poo poo as was never anywhere close to planning or executing a successful coup. These guys would never be able to come up with a plan to successfully steal an election.  Definitely too dumb to do that successfully.
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May 1, 2023 04:05
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Bar Ran Dun posted:These guys would never be able to come up with a plan to successfully steal an election.
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May 1, 2023 04:12
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Archonex posted:Not so sure about that. Multiple people appear to have had a plan of passing the decision on the election to a republican friendly committee or scotus after delegitimizing the process in one way or another. Then have them hand the presidency to trump outside control of the electoral process. There may have been some thoughts along those lines, but it's not really clear to me how the storming of the Capitol would have helped them achieve that. A few dead Representatives aren't gonna cause Congress to chuck out the entire Electoral College Act and invent some new body to hand the election to Trump. Especially considering that neither Pence, the Senate, nor SCOTUS seemed interested in the increasingly desperate Trumpist attempts to overturn or seize control of the counting process. To pull a full-on coup, you need two things:
Although an angry mob can provide item #1, it's usually in the form of allowing the would-be authoritarian an excuse to request emergency powers and/or military involvement in order to restore order and suppress the civil unrest. Then the aspiring dictator could use that mandate to mercilessly suppress any opposition to their political movement. For example, how Hitler claimed that the Reichstag Fire was the opening shot of a Communist revolution, and convinced the legislature to allow him emergency powers to crush the left in order to undermine that supposed uprising.
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May 1, 2023 04:17
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Yeah, any talk of these specific legal procedures or committees or whatever is just on the same level of sovereign citizen legal spells. They don’t have power on their own, and can never be the critical factor in a coup. Coups always have enough support in the right places. It’s abut actual power, not legal maneuvers. Legal maneuvers can be used as a fig leaf, but coups happen because of the junk that fig leaf is covering up.
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May 1, 2023 04:27
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cat botherer posted:aside from the White House. The White House not a “serious power base”.
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May 1, 2023 04:55
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Fell Fire posted:Churchill would like a word with you. India and many other nations once under the boot of the British empire would like a word with you over how much of a fascist Churchill was. Other than WW2, when have capitalists ever allied with communists for anything? You're going to need to provide some evidence for that claim. Meanwhile, I can point to the entire Cold War and all of the little proxy wars that were part of it as examples of capitalists propping up fascist regimes to crush the communists. Salvador Allende would also like a word with you. And yes, many leftists work within a capitalist system. This is because they have no other choice. Fister Roboto fucked around with this message at 05:19 on May 1, 2023 |
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May 1, 2023 05:17
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cat botherer posted:I meant this to be clear, but I was talking about unstable situations that rise to level of an existential crisis for the reigning political-economic system. It wasn't clear, you stated as an absolute that capital sides with fascism, now you're moving that statement to a different standard. Fascism also arises in part from socialist and nationalist elements. This happened in both Italy and Germany, it's just that the more reactionary parts of the party won out. Your claim that capitalism always sides with fascism is not only untrue, but it paints an incomplete picture. There are examples of left leaning capitalist forces choosing to expand government services. There are other factors in play. I'm not sure what your last paragraph is supposed to mean? That's literally my point, that instead of allying with fascism, capitalism instead decided to partner with communism to defeat it. I AM GRANDO posted:You might investigate the US relationship with Francoist Spain or the Estado Novo regime in Portugal, or the history of US intervention in democracies in South America during the second half of the twentieth century. Capitalists are definitely very friendly with fascists when doing so protects profits. You’ll only see them fighting fascists when the fascists threaten production. I'm pretty well aware of some of those things, in particular the history of U.S. intervention. I can't tell if you're agreeing or disagreeing with me? Because your sentence about how capitalists will fight fascism agrees with what I said, but the rest sounds like you disagree.
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May 1, 2023 05:17
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Fister Roboto posted:Other than WW2, when have capitalists ever allied with communists for anything? You're going to need to provide some evidence for that claim. Meanwhile, I can point to the entire Cold War and all of the little proxy wars that were part of it as examples of capitalists propping up fascist regimes to crush the communists. Salvador Allende would also like a word with you. It would help if you would define what it means for capitalists to ally with communists before asking for examples, but the main US partner in Syria is an anarchist movement.
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May 1, 2023 05:50
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Fell Fire posted:It wasn't clear, you stated as an absolute that capital sides with fascism, now you're moving that statement to a different standard. It’s very rare for fascism to be less desirable to capitalists than communism because fascists will leave capitalism in place while communists won’t. Communism represents an existential threat to the bourgeoisie.
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May 1, 2023 06:46
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I AM GRANDO posted:It’s very rare for fascism to be less desirable to capitalists than communism because fascists will leave capitalism in place while communists won’t. Communism represents an existential threat to the bourgeoisie. Yep. Fascism is essentially the capitalist response to socialism.
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May 1, 2023 07:12
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A big flaming stink posted:"warning shots" in and of themselves are profoundly unsafe and proof of a complete lack of familiarity with firearm safety What makes you say this? I believe this is an American dogma. Official policy in many countries, including Turkey, is to fire warning shots. Turkish police kill far fewer people than American ones (roughly 400 from 2007 through 2020, compare to over 1000 in the USA in the last 12 months).
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May 1, 2023 07:34
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