P.s. III: There’s a time for American optimism; this ain’t the time. It’s a time to be realistic and understand what’s happening. “Get out and vote” isn’t going to be enough. We’re going to have to get out and be nasty.
Get out there, defend your values, and be fucking nasty if you have to be.
You don’t have to go there. You don’t have to compare Trump to Hitler – for the record, I don’t think Trump is anything like Hitler. I don’t expect to see brown people or Jews in concentration camps. That’s not the point. It doesn’t have to be a holocaust to be bad.
Take a look at some of the other authoritarians and you’ll see a little bit of Trump in each of them, from Hugo Chavez, to Recep Erdogan, to Viktor Orban, to Vladimir Putin. They all have similar tendencies - tendencies to destroy truth, tendencies to claim to be a kind of national superhero.
The also have something else in common: criminal behavior. The Trump administration is clearly a white house full of criminals. What would Al Capone do if he were president? He would change the government so that it protected criminal enterprise, rather than enforcing the rule of law. That’s what we have now. Hitler is moot; just imagine what America would look like of El Chapo were president, or if Al Capone or John Gatti were president. That’s the America we’re heading toward.
Well of course I mean grab your ankles and take it up the ass like you have been all along. And tell yourself and everyone else that everything can change in the next election cycle, and that we just have to have better outreach with bigoted, homophobic shit shovelers.
I’m waiting for him to suggest that I grab my pickup truck full of fertilizer and blow up my statehouse. The joke would be on him, though, because I don’t have fertilizer, a pickup, or any clue how to get to my statehouse.
Come on, Asahi, I like you political posts. Lately you’ve been sounding like a fatalist. It’s happening. Forget it. We’re done. No. It is not done. Define it. Say it’s America. Whatever. Just don’t be so end-is-near, or you sound like the guy on the corner with a sign on front and back.
That isn’t helping either.
AND… you usually have good political knowledge, historical too, but now it just seems you’re letting go of your good stuff too.
Okay. I’ll submit that I’m worried about America and Democracy, and I would love to do something about it.
You say “Get out there, defend your values, and be fucking nasty if you have to be.”
Okay, I’m ready to “get nasty.” Really, I am.
So what’s your suggestion? How shall I “get nasty”?
What’s step #1? Step #2? Step #3? etc.
Be specific. Are you talking about civil war? How do I get that started?
He needs to be a military populist with center-left values. We need someone who has the respect of the military to keep the traitors in line, to make them fear the reformers. When his 8 years are up, he can give back the country to the civilians, like George Washington, and Ike Eisenhower.
[From the Dark Web]
Zadrota! You missed the memo comrade! That was a post for Twitter’s extreme left feeds, not the SDMB! Get with the program…
[/FtDW)
You’ve bottomed out, asahi. Once you reached the level of “I want all my enemies killed”, you’ve left yourself nowhere to go, and variations on “I want all my enemies killed” grow rapidly tiresome. Frankly, I’m not expecting you to contribute anything positive or productive or even insightful until you grow up or Trump leaves office.
Reich also offers a lot of solid advice on reaching Americans with bread-and-butter issues, that current Dem candidates would benefit from following. Lots of good specific stuff.
You’re seeing this from a Canadian perspective. You don’t seem to understand that the Left is impotent here, and that we can only fetishize having such power. Americans won’t even begin to think of handing over the country to anyone but a right wing kleptocrat until there is like 35% unemployment and more than half of households are in financial distress.
You just don’t understand how dumb the neighbors to your southern border are, and there’s no saving us. Christ, didn’t this last trade war scare teach you all anything about how fucking insane we are?