Just wait until the governments start really coming after the people they don't like based on their internet usage. We're already seeing this in the US around social media profiling. States have tried to associate queerness with sex (rather than existence) in ways that will lead to restricting queer content.
WTF troll angle would I have? I'm an anti-Trump positivity troll? huh? Trolling with 'let's beat this trash and rebuild'? That's trolling to people who want to... beat this trash and rebuild?
Nah go read my historical posting, worse than a troll, I was a believer of trying to make things better. I'm just burnt out. To be told by this individual that I need to go re-read and internalize that I'm a racist, uneducated piece of shit and that the USA in inherently irredeemable because I'm anti the negativity, and that that is somehow positive, productive talk in their culture I am misunderstanding because I'm not culturally understanding (cultural sensitivity now covers crappy British style snark/negativity/dryness)?
I'm a racist, uneducated, and troll now I guess, because I challenged the piling on and felt the US was redeemable? Fuck it. This is just coming from everywhere and has worn me down, I came this article for just a little win. I'm out. Hope you all find some perfect alliance of America sucks I hate it but also lets rebuild it people that also require everything to be perfect day one and any incremental work towards better is the same as awful and not worth it and just pyrrhic victories or whatever the logic here is.
the GOP produced him and the Christian xenophobic anti-everyone policies have been a 50 year project that's now coming to fruition. Trump is bad and so is the rest of the Republican party. this problem doesn't go away when he does.
It’s not that simple and we shouldn’t be so eager to blame our neighbours.
Trump has been heavily involved with Russian money ever since US banks refused to loan him more money for his repeated bankruptcies. At that time, Putin was head of the KGB, iirc (could fact check this I’m not 100 percent sure). Also very sus ties through marriage. I’m not sure he is -happily- compliant, but from whatever combination of stick and carrot that may exist, there is little doubt in my mind that the administration is carrying so much water for Russia that europa would blush.
If you want to see the whole story in embarrassingly human terms all you have to do is watch the physical interaction between Trump and Putin when they are in close proximity. The monkey doesn’t lie.
If you pay attention, almost everything the admin does benefits Russia in some way. Eroding soft power. Undermining nato. Crippling us debt. Hamstringing innovation through reckless trade shenanigans. Undermining trust. Abandonment of Ukraine, an erstwhile critical ally. Hand wavey condemnation of Russia but with no teeth whatsoever. Collapsing the straits of Hormuz. The list goes on and on.
Putin didn't elect him. Our neighbors did -- almost 80 million of them, and tens of millions more who decided that either choice was fine with them.
The ones who voted for him are not calling for him to be turned out of office. The elected representatives are supporting this action, and their constituents aren't turning on them, either.
He's doing what Putin wants, but he couldn't do it if it weren't also what tens of millions of Americans want. There are many ways they could do something about it, and they aren't. The overwhelming majority of them will vote to continue it come November.
If you start blaming people rather than processes, the obvious fix is to disenfranchise the people (or worse). If you blame the process and then change it to get a better outcome, everyone wins.
There is a lot of low-hanging bad fruit in how the USA runs it's democracy. You allow gerrymandering, you allow politicians to make it difficult for people to vote. The small voter turnout means the fringe single issue voters get a disproportionate say. You use first past the post, which means candidate the majority think is the "least worst" may not get elected. (No voting system is perfect, but FPP is by far the worst.) Your political donation laws favour corporates, who by definition have no interest in voter welfare.
Certainly gullible people are problematic in a democracy. But he would never have been elected without massive support from the oligarch club. Also look at the statistical analysis of the election-not decisive by itself but substantial.
Also, why do you think the dem ticket was so underwhelming? The USA thinks it’s a two party system, but it’s not. It’s really a one party system. The money party.
If you want your democracy back, get rid of citizens united, make journalism independent of industry, and create some decent framework around campaign finance.
you do realize that this is precisely the agenda that is being pushed on both sides through millions of advertising dollars every month?
If you’re too busy looking sideways to find the blame you never look up. You are living in an intentional society. It’s not nearly as as-hoc as it seems . You don’t have to push water if you can just tilt the land. The circumstances that exist for you , and your neighbours, are precisely the circumstances that were engineered for them to fill. Now, they chose to fill that role, but they didn’t make the role. Look up.
Before him there was the sense that there were [at least] two groups within the GOP. We had something similar in the UK before Brexit, the French had a much broader centre-right movement before Le Pen.
Radical populists have a habit of cuckooing all the moderates out of the party nest. I'm not sure the GOP made Trump, but they sure as hell let him in.
In order to bring people together, it's necessary to acknowledge the harms that have been caused. That is part of repair and trust building. Germany had war crimes trials. South Africa had truth & reconciliation. The US can't paper over the ways in which marginalized populations have been harmed, especially since large parts of the country either don't believe harm has been caused or activity endeavor to perpetuate that harm.
> Instead, they resist the idea that those things are relevant to contemporary political disputes involving the descendants of the people who directly caused the harm and who were directly harmed.
There's such a thing as generational wealth — financial, cultural — that seems to pay compound interest to successive generations. When prior generations are deprived due to racism, classism, etc., it's not unlike someone who doesn't save for retirement because s/he was repeatedly robbed at gunpoint in earlier years and so was deprived of both those savings and of the compounding effect.
Your argument shifts between two frames--from talking about "successive generations" to events in a specific individual's life--without explaining why we should treat those frames as equivalent.
I think few people dispute that people's circumstances are path-dependent. But it doesn't logically follow that this path dependency makes a difference morally or politically. Say you have two people who are equally poor, a white guy in Appalachia and a black guy in Baltimore. It's undoubtedly true that historical events contributed to each one's circumstances. The Appalachian's grandfather went a crappy school because he grew up in a coal mining town, while the Baltimorean's grandfather went to a crappy school because it was segregated. But the people who perpetrated those harms are dead. And our two individuals in the present were not victimized--neither of them were "robbed at gunpoint." They were simply born into particular circumstances by random chance, just like everyone else in the world. And both got really lucky on that dice roll--they were still born in the U.S. instead of Afghanistan. So what's the logical basis for treating the one person's poverty differently than the other's? What's the logical basis for treating the one person's poverty as carrying greater moral and political weight than the other's?
My daughter's grandfather was worse off than either example above. The mortality rate for U.S. black infants in 1950 during Jim Crow was about 51 per 1,000. For infants born in 1950 in Bangladesh, like my dad, it was 228 per 1,000. Worse odds than Russian Roulette. And nearly any segregated school in America would have been an upgrade from the one in my dad's village, which had no walls and required people to take a boat there during monsoon season. That sucked for my dad, but that's irrelevant to the moral or political evaluation of my daughter's circumstances. She's a spoiled private school kid, just like her friend whose grandfather was a partner at Simpson Thacher in New York. And if she had been poor instead, like my wife's cousins in Oregon, there would be no logical basis for treating her poverty any differently than any of the multitude of poor people in Oregon.
> Your argument shifts between two frames--from talking about "successive generations" to events in a specific individual's life--without explaining why we should treat those frames as equivalent.
It's an analogy: If the relationship isn't self-evident, then I chose a poor analogy.
> They were simply born into particular circumstances by random chance, just like everyone else in the world. ...
Would it be unfair to summarize this position as — ultimately — "yeah, it sucks to be you, but that's a problem for you and your family, not for me and mine"? (Perhaps we even leave out families, so that in life it's sauve qui peut, every man for himself?) The societal group-selection disadvantages of that position are obvious, I'd think — most military organizations recognize that sauve qui peut is a hallmark of defeat by others who have better unit cohesion, which comes in part by putting your shipmate's welfare on at least an equal footing with your own.
The short YouTube video I linked to is worth the time. TL;DR (paraphrasing Barry Switzer): Some people like to think that they hit a triple in life but conveniently forget that they were born and raised on second base, while some other people's antecedents were forced to bat with balsa wood yardsticks and to run with 50-pound weight vests — that is, if they were allowed to step up to the plate at all.
Have you been paying attention to who the US elected and the people who elected him? They definitely deny systemic racism and are here for ICE targeting non-white people.
Otherwise similarly situation people in the present are already being grouped together into categories and treated differently...undoing that is the work that needs doing.
If people were being treated differently in the present in large numbers, progressive efforts would be focused on enforcing anti-discrimination law rather than on remedial measures such as affirmative action.
so why are they almost exclusively focused on brown immigrants vs European ones? why aren't they going after wealthy white business owners who employ undocumented immigrants? why are they going after immigrants who are here legally or are following the legal procedures? why have citizens been pulled into their unconstitutional dragnet? why aren't they providing decent food or health care to people in custody? why are there reports of sexual assault by employees in detention centers?
you are being extremely naive if you think white supremacy isn't motivating these actions.
transgenderism is not a thing. transgender people are real, however.
trans people are at greater risk of violence and sexual assault (sometimes because sex work is the only way for them to survive). being arrested as a trans woman could mean being placed in a jail/prison with cis men, again, putting them at greater risk of violence and sexual assault.
reply