Best chance to avoid all this? Either hope DeSantis runs* and not Trump, and accept his victory or find someone with a better chance then Hillary, Biden, Kamala or Warren FFS. How about someone oh…NORMAL. With integrity. An anti-war candidate say…
*Assuming we can get through the coming 2022 Red Tsunami without schnenigans like flat-out refusing to seat winners.
Who? Name the names that you think have an actual chance of not giving the Republicans another electoral landslide?
I got nobody right now, but a ****ing reality show host won five years ago. Run ****ing Kevin Costner on a platform of back-to-normalness and unity and anti-war, anti-pharma and ill go door-to-door myself. I’ll fill 10,000 envelopes myself.
But either start tomorrow or save that bullet for 2028 cause it would be almost impossible for DeSantis to lose right now. (IMHO) Trump??..I can’t get past the idea of how much this country would tear itself apart if he runs again to even get a handle on what it would take to just beat him at the ballot box.
Checks forum… Withdraws comment.
Looks British cause it looks like it was shot on TV and not film.
Sorry. I mean anti-big pharma. Anti-corp…you know…those OLD Democrat talking points.
in a revision of what i stated earlier
im thinking if things go down it will be 90s Bosnia until someone else steps in and just starts pointing guns at both sides in a UN "police action/peacekeeping " deal in which the main goal is to get people buying things again under a 3rd party armed truce
and the only thing that’s going to stop it is a mission impossible style death squad taking out about a dozen or so targets in the next few years
I’m considering the possibility of buying a gun. I’m not as pessimistic as the OP and don’t expect American democracy to roll over without a fight, so I’m thinking in terms of preparing for the civil war. There are a lot of possible scenarios, but I’m thinking it’s fairly unlikely arming myself would be helpful.
I’m on the downhill side of middle age and have no military training. If I bought a gun I might, very optimistically, maybe go to the range often enough to attain and maintain some minimum level of competency. But I’m not going to be fighting the Army in the streets. I would certainly be willing to risk my life for the resistance as a saboteur or whatnot, but any underground that needs to use me in a direct combat role isn’t going anywhere except further underground.
I can see lynch mobs going after known Democrats being a concern in some places, but certainly not in my area. I suppose there’s the scenario where they kick in my door to drag me off to the camps; I would like to have the option of going all Guns of Brixton on their asses. But I have a kid, so it would need to be stored unloaded and disassembled. The gazpacho would really have to call ahead and make an appointment for the gun to be useful, which seems unlikely.
AOC’s 35th birthday is a month before Election Day 2024. Just sayin’.
As I said,
“Name the names that you think have an actual chance of not giving the Republicans another electoral landslide?”
There was a violent, intentional insurrection by the president/cult leader that almost worked. His party, rather than condemning the action, implicitly encourages it by attempting to halt investigation and punishment into it. This party also officially and unofficially has a policy of denying the legitimacy of the last election, and is clearly putting out trial attempts to see how it would go to deny the legitimacy of every future election they lost.
If we’re not fighting now, when is it that you think people will fight? This isn’t just some sort of warning for the future - the attack on democracy is happening now, and the best we’ve done was to more or less say “keep trying until you get it right”
When do you think the time to fight comes, if not now? And why would we be willing to fight it then, if not now?
Avenetti would have a better chance then her, running from his jail cell.
Very good questions. It might partly depend on why you think no action is being taken.
If you mean on the individual level, it’s probably the same reason that you personally aren’t taking extreme action (as far as I know): because you know it has to be collective, and we’re not at the collective tipping point yet, whatever that may be,
If you mean on the governmental level, well, to the common citizen, I suppose the tempting answer is that Democrats in power, to a man/woman, are either completely corrupt, hopelessly stupid, or naive to a childlike level and unable to see they’ll be the first ones murdered should the worst come to pass. I’ve certainly seen all of the above suggested.
Unfortunately, the best way (as I see it) to find a solution is to zero in on the reasons, and it’s probably a pretty complex web of a lot of factors. I sure don’t have those answers.
(Though writing this did make me wonder: in everyone’s opinion, who is the Democrat/leftist with the most political power who’s most strongly talked AND acted like the Republicans are an immediate existential threat to half the country?)
Vote 1 Zaphod Beeblebrox (DEM- BGE)
As someone who can talk easily (I am at the other side of the Atlantic) please don’t spend too much time training how to shoot.
1 guy with a gun, without training in groups, without artillery and air (drone) support isn’t going to make a difference in a shooting civil war.
Your goals should be preventing said war. Get active in supporting “normal” candidates.
Nope, the scene is from a famous non-British movie.
It’s popular to be cynical about how “They aren’t doing anything about the coup”, but really, that’s not true. The coup did lose. The cops on the scene did what they could to stop it. The members of Congress did vote to certify the election. There is a committee investigating it, and now holding public hearings about it.
Sure, maybe it will turn out that this is not enough to prevent the next attack, but are you really willing to start shooting first because of that?
It’s easy for an asshole who just wants to tear things down to decide to start shooting first, but for those who hope to preserve the society we have, it’s a bit harder to make that choice. Because the one thing I’m sure of is, if the bullets start flying over this, all bets are off. No one has any real idea what US (and the rest of the world) society will look like after the war.
So, when to start fighting? Once we’re convinced that the consequences of not fighting will be worse than the consequences of fighting. And we’re not at that point yet, no matter how cynical you might want to be. Polling suggests that the Congressional hearings are having an effect on Americans’ beliefs about Trump and the coup, so maybe let’s let that play out before we go all Rambo on the GOP?
Will we screw this up? Maybe, screwing things up is always a possibility. But maybe not, too.
Vote. Fight ignorance. Research backup plans for expatriating myself, and since I am really still too young to retire, preferably to somewhere where I might actually find a job legally. In fact I have had an application for Canadian citizenship by descent pending since November 2020 (damn pandemic!), and would have applied years ago if I’d realized I didn’t actually have to talk Dad into applying first. (I tried many times, but he didn’t see the point. After I had a very blunt conversation with him in November 2020, he finally saw the point, or at least understood why I wanted to pursue it. He’s 81 and not moving anywhere.)
False dichotomy, those aren’t the only two options. The democrats are still more or less pretending that everything is okay, that what happened was bad but within the range of normal, and they’re basically aiding people in putting their head in the sand and believing that what’s obviously happening isn’t really happening, and that it can’t happen here.
They need to be screaming from the rooftops when the GOP captures a state legislature and sets it up to reject election results they don’t like. They need force/pressure the justice department to go after everyone involved hard, not just slaps on the wrists for the people who actually stormed the capital. Trump needs to be criminally prosecuted. The people who gave the inside info to the insurrectionists need to be prosecuted. They need to fire anyone in the justice department that won’t make this their #1 priority. They need to set the nation’s agenda to be the security/sanctity/functioning of our instutitons above all else.
The actual response that we’ve seen to the coup attempt is about 1/100th as much as is necessary to prevent the next coup. We are nowhere near on track for it. And we know that the republicans have no shred of decency in them, that they’d burn every institution in this country down to win. They’ve doubled down on this. They’ve made election denial the official party line, and anyone in touch with reality will get excommunicated. They are actively getting their people in place and changing the rules so that the next time it won’t come down to capitol police being savvy enough to fight off a coup, it will happen simply because the republicans will do exactly what they’re setting up to do right now, which is to simply refuse to recognize the results of elections and put their people in power. And what are we going to do about it then? Jack shit, because we don’t even 10% of the spirit and willingness to fight we need to keep our country. People would rather pretend this is all not happening and just assume that historical norms will keep us safe through magic.
This, here, is our window to fight. It may already be too late. What we’re doing is not even close to working. We are completely on course for the next election or two to complete the coup, which is still ongoing and actively supported by one of the major parties in the United States, which holds a significant fraction of both federal and state governments.
Here’s how some are preparing for the coming fascist authoritarian regime,
“that doddering, senile, yelling, pants-shitting potato {Biden} in office.”
Yup, let’s do what the American left always does and form some circular firing squads, that’ll show 'em!
Because who gives a fuck if he is a doddering, senile, yelling, pants-shitting potato, he’s not a Republican and that is all that matters right now.