At what point do people who didn’t answer the clarion call become enablers, who deserve to put up against the wall when the Revolution comes? Conversely, at what point do people have a legitimate right to refuse to subscribe to perpetual outrage?
I hate to say “it depends,” but it depends on how bad it is. There’s degrees to it. But yes, at a certain point, IF it’s clear it’s like 1930s Germany, then there is complicity.
On top of that, it’s not just “perpetual outrage” but that there have been many instances of crying wolf in the past. There were many people calling George W. Bush a fascist. He was a terribly misguided and foolish president, but not a fascist or nazi. Even Mitt Romney got slammed. So while Trump/MAGA is different, you can’t blame some voters for being jaded or cynical.
I get what the first sentence is referring to but I can’t read the second one as anything other than ‘Hey, Trump’s not that bad.’
Maybe you’d like to unpack that second sentence?
Well, lets look at a very recent example:
No reported attempt was made to interdict and detain the boatload of people. The video accompanying Trump’s statement suggests that the boat was simply blown up. When asked why the boat wasn’t stopped and its occupants arrested, Trump ducked the question and suggested that the killings would force traffickers to think twice before trying to move drugs to the United States.
Under international standards for law enforcement, lethal force can be used solely as a last resort to meet an imminent threat of death or serious bodily injury. That rule makes sense because law-enforcement officials should ordinarily seek to arrest and prosecute criminal suspects. That is the best way to ensure they have committed the offense in question. It also respects the fact that for most crimes, the penalty upon conviction is a prison sentence, not the death penalty – let alone summary killing without trial.
Trump has sought to evade those standards by in effect declaring war against Venezuelan drug cartels. Beginning with Richard Nixon in 1971, US presidents have repeatedly referred to a “war on drugs”, but that was a metaphoric war, a rhetorical claim that the effort was important, not a literal war. The distinction is important, because in genuine armed conflicts, opposing combatants can be summarily shot unless they are surrendering or in custody. There is ordinarily no duty to try to capture or arrest them.
There was nothing in the encounter in the Caribbean Sea that is indicative of a war. There has been no suggestion that the alleged drug traffickers were firing at US forces or otherwise engaged in what could fairly be described as combat. The US military simply blew them out the water. It wrongly applied wartime rules in what should have been a law-enforcement situation.
That Trump calls drug-trafficking suspects “terrorists” doesn’t change the rules for law enforcement. Terrorists are criminals, not combatants. Absent an imminent threat of death or serious bodily injury, they must be arrested, not shot.
That illicit drugs such as fentanyl cause enormous harm also does not alter the rules governing law-enforcement operations. Much criminal activity causes serious harm, but unless that harm constitutes an imminent threat of death or serious bodily injury and cannot be stopped by other means, law-enforcement standards require arrest and prosecution, not the use of lethal force.
Nor does it matter that the people killed may have been hardened criminals. Even despicable individuals are entitled to arrest and prosecution rather than summary killing.
If war rules could be applied to suspected terrorists or drug traffickers by a mere declaration of “war”, the risks would be enormous. Law-enforcement officers could shoot anyone anywhere on the mere assertion, never proved in court, that they were part of the group against which a “war” had been declared. What just happened at sea in the Caribbean could be replicated on the streets of New York, London or Paris.
I do agree. Besides the likelihood of invading Venezuela, now it will be open season to kill anyone around the Mexican drug dealers. And then anyone that protests that state of affairs.
People does have a legitimate right to refuse to subscribe to perpetual outrage… until it is clear that there is no reason to do so when Trump is setting a machine to cause the outrages.
Given the second half of that sentence, never. But if they’re enablers who kinda suck, obv.
Curious what “answering the clarion call” means to you.
I’m very aware of the bad consequences of rumination - despair often leads to a lack of action. It’s possible the amount of time someone spends outraged negatively correlates to the amount of action someone takes, but even if we can’t demonstrate that, it’s pretty clear they aren’t a positive correlation.
I have to deal with the consequences of this administration every day at my job (grants manager.) That has been demoralizing and basically resulted in me avoiding work at every opportunity. It took me a while to get out of that. So I’m not going to choose to think about it every hour of the day outside of work. Thinking is not doing, anyhow.
While granted that GWB wasn’t fascist by even the loosest definition, he was far worse than just a “terribly misguided and foolish president”. Despite all of the whitewashing of his legacy by focusing on his dog painting hobby and his unlikely friendship with Michelle Obama, he engaged the United States in the two most costly and longest military engagements (massively adding to the national debt), one on a completely manufactured premise and the other ostensibly to make a show of fighting regimes that support terrorists (even though the Taliban was at best neutral with regard to Al-Qaeda operating training camps within Afghanistan and willing to hand over Bin Laden with certain guarantees) but realistically to pincer Iran by occupying its neighbors to its immediate East and West, as well as allowing the military to engage in various war crimes without little accountability, facilitating the Afghanistan illegal opium trade, massively expanding the ‘extraordinary rendition’ program to be standard operation and establishing an extrajudicial ‘detention camp’ which engaged in torture, denial of basic human rights, and indefinite imprisonment without habeas corpus or transparent judicial review for detainees with little or no evidence of wrongdoing in many cases, expansion of the ‘surveillance state’, et cetera.
And no, Bush doesn’t get a pass for just being ‘mislead’; he’s a Yale-educated adult human being who has been in a politically-engaged family for his entire life with first hand access to a former CIA director and US President.
Fuck that guy.
Stranger
I find this irrelevant? It’s incumbent on every person to evaluate the President’s actions and, “well, some people said other guys are bad” is no excuse for enabling a fucking lunatic.
Thankfully there are no equivalent examples of many people calling Obama a socialist or Harris a communist.
Not that I ever noticed; calling people fascists was still taboo, especially if they were fascists. People only started daring to use the word post-Trump.
Well, I can think of someone who was calling right wingers fascists back then too:
They were fascists, or in the very least friendly to fascism. They just didn’t think they could get away with it back then. Trump has demonstrated that they can.
At the time I opposed calling GW a fascist even though everyone in my college seemed to think so. He wasn’t behaving like a fascist, but I understand now that Republican fascism was latent the same way racism was latent for a time, people had their views but held their tongue because it wasn’t polite to say so. But it was always there, inherent to their belief system, a little seed waiting to be planted, and now we are seeing its flourishing.
Also, let’s not forget GW was all too happy to suspend habeas corpus for those poor suckers who got sent to torture prison for life.
What is your definition of “the clarion call”? Has there been one nationally since Pearl Harbor? Is not voting Democratic a sufficient answer? Somewhere in the middle? Who is labeling who for what when and where? Can you give anything to grapple with?
Oh. Apparently not.
The now 40+ year-old bumper sticker had a point::
If you’re not outraged you’re not paying attention.
But if your personal response is to engage in slacktivism here and/or elsewhere on the WWW, well, you’re just along for the ride.
That’s my personal response, so I’m not holding me out as any paragon of Resistance zeal.
Another strangely worded, vague, and totally oblique OP question. Is the obfuscation of meaning intentional? I think if Wittgenstein were alive, he’d say, “Whereof one cannot formulate an intelligible question, thereof one must be silent.”
Whereof one can only formulate a gotcha, one ought remain silent or be adjudged of ill faith?
Another saying from the 60s was “If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.”
Nothing changed, except that slogans have devolved.
“Either you’re part of the problem or you’re part of the solution or you’re just part of the landscape.” — ‘Sam’, Ronin
Stranger
And people constantly yelled at me over it, condemned usage of the term, and denied it was possible. You only support my point.
Some things never change!