I’d be interested in opinions of people living in the USA about the PERCEIVED climate with regards to the ICE-shooting/killing.
NOT interested in a discussion of the case at hand (there are prob. already threads, donno)
NOT so interested in what-is-right-what-is-wrong
INTERESTED in a “reading of the room”, where I can see 3 scenarios:
the slowly boiling frog scenario (more-and-more unacceptable actions will be accepted, b/c people will get hardened-off)
will there be an event that might be a turnaround and an overwhealming % of people says “that’s just wrong/un-american” and stand up against the administration
will people keep their heads down (avoiding backlash/career consecuences), and rather “speak loud and clearly in the mid-terms”
any other scenario?
Again, hopefully we can stay on the macro-level of society and not debate specifics of the Minnesota killings, hopefully a competent judge will do what is right.
I’m not sure what this would look like It seems to me we’re there, but what can we do to “Stand up to the administration?”
I think we’ll continue to get some of this. Not necessarily to avoid consequences, but out of powerlessness., Or perceived powerlessness.
Maybe millions will take to the streets. We certainly have justification. If there is leadership or organization of such a movement, I haven’t seen it.
That’s what you can do. Put enough people in the streets around every ICE* facility, so that it’s essentially impossible for them to do their work. Sure, they’ll arrest as many as they can, but how many is that? We’ve seen them floundering just trying to arrest a few thousand a day, nation-wide. Make them face the prospect of arresting a few thousand every hour, at every facility they own. There isn’t the manpower, there isn’t the jail space to pull that off.
And how long will they last, penned up in their jails with thousands of prisoners, and no resupply?
Accept the risks, and lay siege to ICE.
*Really, every federal facility, but you’ve got to start somewhere, so start with ICE, and show the rest of the MAGA elite what you can do.
I don’t think there is a line, or if there is, it’s at the point where people are actually being beaten or imprisoned by ICE personally.
It’s not just complacency, sadly, it’s that whatever happens now people go to their favorite ideologue to tell them what really happened and how it actually reinforces their worldview, rather than challenges it.
I’m not just being reflexively pessimistic; there might be ways to get out of this mess. I’m just very skeptical of a critical mass of people acknowledging / accepting reality being that mechanism.
I think it’s clear we’re not going to do anything, we’re well past that point. I think 45% of Americans are fascists and of the remainder, about half of them “just doesn’t talk politics;” oddly these craven allies of the fascists think they’re taking the high road.
You seem to be saying that it would take a significant portion of right-wing voters to change their minds and stop being pro-Trump before there could be any huge-scale acts of protest. Am I reading that correctly?
I think most Americans appalled by the actions of this administration are placing all of their hopes on the mid-terms. If the results don’t improve the situation, it will be time to consider taking to the streets, abandoning the country, or just adjusting their lives to the new normal.
…I think that it’s hard to conceptualise that we are living in the present. And that the “boiling frog” isn’t something that may or may not be a future scenario. But we are living in it and we have been for a very long time.
For starters: just read this.
“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”
This isn’t exactly the 1984 scenario. Because we are in the middle of living in what will be regarded in the future as history. But millions of people will believe this. Millions of people are locked into an ecosystem that is feeding them propaganda all-of-the-time. They have ownership of most of the mainstream media. Of all of the social media outlets. Of the Federal government.
Look how slick the Jan 6th website is. Its all part of the executive order “improving our nation through better design.”
Isn’t that terrifying? Isn’t that “enough?”
No it isn’t, apparently.
CBS News is now effectively government propaganda. Universities are now subservient to the administration. America and its allies completely disregard international law. The Federal government has been decimated. Trans genocide is on the cards.
And even if the Democrats start winning again, they aren’t coming to save you. Because the benchmarks have already been shifted. Much of this happened on the Democrats watch. I can’t imagine USAID will ever get its funding back no matter who the administration is. The Federal government won’t ever go back to the way it was. This is a reset of the way things will get done. What the government withdrew from here? That will likely be permanent.
The “boiling frog” isn’t some future scenario. We are the boiling frog.
And its easy to just point to Trump and say “MAGA is the problem” and its just a matter of waiting Trump out and then its all back to normal. But I don’t think It’s going to work that way.
As to what happens next: there isn’t a scenario that is off the table. But what do I, personally, think will happen?
The thing about the Minnesota ICE incident is that it doesn’t seem that extraordinary to me. There have already been multiple ICE shootings this year of people that perhaps wouldn’t be regarded as “sympathetically” by many as they do here in Minnesota. And it certainly isn’t on the level to make a difference. Armed law enforcement in America overreacting and killing an innocent person isn’t some abnormal event. That’s just another Tuesday.
It’s on the same scale as Charlie Kirk. That dominated the conversation for weeks. The alt-right got outraged. People were fired. And now outside of the bubble most of us don’t even think about it. Except for the “firings” part the same will happen here.
Lets look to recent history. Ferguson. Floyd. The recent Campus protests. What happened to the momentum around those movements and protests?
They got smashed. Literally. You aren’t going to see protests of that scale any time in the near future because of how absolutely fucked up they got both in terms of what they did to the protestors on the ground, what they did to leadership after the protests, and how comprehensively the whole things was recontextualised afterwards. “Defund the police” became a poison pill years after anyone in the movement effectively last said it.
The unions have been smashed. The protest movements have been smashed. Many of the formerly loudest voices from the left have been “gentrified.”
And if this were only happening in America, that would be one thing. But this is happening globally. AI. The surveillance state. Lies and gaslighting from governments. Media takeovers. In New Zealand a Canadian billionaire with alt-right views now has a substantial share in our largest newspaper and is attempting to shift its (already) rightward stance even righter.
So when will enough be enough?
When the revolution starts.
I’ve said this before. But nothing short of revolution will be enough to stop this. I’m not going to predict what “revolution” will look like. Because as I said, we are living in the present, and there isn’t a scenario that is off the cards.
But if I had to pick one…I would see a global realignment of who represents “freedom and liberty” and that will be led by the global south, not the global north. America will continue to decline. The disparity between rich and poor will become stark. US styled “capitalism” will get more absurd than it is now. As in Max Headroom absurd. Did you know that there are prediction markets now? Where there is already evidence that global events have been manipulated in order to make people millions? How fucked up is that?
If America has a chance it won’t be tomorrow. Between 5 and 7 years from now you might see the start of small scale revolutionary actions. Many on this board will denounce it as “the actions of terrorists.” If the government doesn’t stomp it out, then it all kicks off maybe ten years from now.
But as I said: all scenarios are on the table. Perhaps America can prove me wrong. I hope that you can.
Protests in themselves aren’t anything – in fact, Trump and Miller probably want to see protests, so they can declare a state of emergency and remove what few restrictions remain on their personal army.
Change here needs a significant number of Trump voters to come on board such that there’s pressure on republicans to get out of lockstep with Trump. And I don’t see that happening.
They were quick to give the MAGA faithful “alternative facts” and I bet 99% will swallow it.
That will never happen. I think the best outcome is some kind of managed dissolution so that there are lest Trump voters in the voting pool in the developed parts of America, but I don’t think that is possible.
I don’t think it’s quite that high. But I do think that about a third of Americans, maybe a little less, like 30%, love trump because of everything he’s doing and saying, not in spite of it. They are absolutely gleeful about everything he does and says. The rest of trump’s support, such as it is, are people who voted for him somewhat reluctantly, deciding he was better than the alternative. Those people look the other way from trump’s most egregious words and actions, or do mental gymnastics to rationalize them as somehow being ‘for the best’.
Yesterday I went to the Fox News site and clicked on an article about the shooting to read the comments, as I often do at times like these, to gauge the reaction in the MAGA-verse. The most charitable comments were along the line of “it’s too bad it happened, but she should have paid attention to the LEOs and exited her vehicle”. The worst were “Democommie ticket punched” (actual quote). That latter is the 30% fascist fan club. Those are trump’s people.
This could be a watershed event that changes minds because it is wrong on so many levels. At its core a woman was wrongly killed. Whether you call it outright murder or reckless endangerment, whether she was actively protesting or just a victim of circumstance, that should never have happened. Then there’s the MAGA spin machine that immediately starts demonizing her as a domestic terrorist without any facts. The Vice President was calling her an instrument of the lunatic left and saying it was clear she was trying to ram the agent. Then there’s the larger picture of the entirely trumped-up, unnecessary reason why a poorly trained squad of pseudo-military thugs were deployed to Minneapolis in the first place. This could be the kind of event that cuts through the MAGA spin, pulls peoples’ heads out of the sand, and makes it clear to the ‘eh, I don’t like trump, but he’s good for the country’ contingent to finally realize we are living through a fascist thuggocracy.
But then, I’ve been expecting a ‘Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?’ watershed moment to happen since trump 1.0, so what do I know.
This is where we disagree, I think both groups are fascists, albeit the second group is more enthusiastic. Fascism survives because a significant portion of society gives them the benefit of the doubt, looks the other way or insists it’s an outlier event. Those people form the foundation of fascism.
All this bizarre questioning of the minutiae of the shooting, asking why she was there, etc. is in support of fascism, while maintaining a thin veneer of respectability for show.
I get it, you consider the enablers of fascists to also be fascists, whether they fully and wholeheartedly support trump’s words and deeds, or whether they reluctantly go along, kidding themselves that the situation is somehow for the best. I understand, and I don’t necessarily disagree.
I just make a distinction between the 30% or so who love trump because of everything he’s doing and saying, and those who ignore or rationalize the worst of it and convince themselves that somehow it’s not as bad as it seems. There’s no redeeming the former, but I think there’s some possibility to change minds with the latter.
I just don’t see a difference between the two groups, the result is the same: fascism. Looking at Germany, Hitler didn’t win the popular vote and his support, on paper, looked soft, but it didn’t matter. I think that looking for redeemables among Trumpists isn’t just pointless, it’s actually harmful. I think part of the reason we are where we are is because people just keep hoping that enough of them will come to their senses. They won’t. Look how far we’ve gone in a very short period; look what they ignore, or try to explain away. Imagine what they’ll be tacitly supporting a year from now.
I’m no historian of the sociopolitics of Nazi Germany, but I think there was probably a similar situation among the rank and file German citizens-- those who knew or suspected things were not good but kept their head in the sand and went along with it, and a rabid minority who embraced the excesses of the Nazi regime. After the war, the ones in denial had to face the hard realities of what they had ignored and live with the shame of it, the remaining rabid fascist minority went quiet or underground, and Germany returned to being a Democratic nation in good standing in the European community.
Granted, it took a Holocaust and a World War before that happened. Hopefully the United States does not sink quite that far before the political pendulum swings back, and more sanity prevails.
I’m sure it was as you describe and we are seeing it play out now. If you were one of Germany’s victims, it really didn’t matter if your persecutors were whole hearted in your oppression, or not. In a way, I judge those who are soft on Trump but stay with him more harshly than his core base because they clearly know better on some level.
The real difference is, once we’ve dealt with the actively engaged fascists, we can expect the wishy-washy types to also just go along for the ride when we start fixing things. They’ll be the type who, in 1946, said, “Oh, we never knew about the camps, that wasn’t us…”
What we need to do is to remember to never rely on them ever again to stand up for civilization.
Maybe, that’s pretty grim that we have to wait for collapse, but I don’t disagree. Which is why I don’t think there is any point at which a critical mass say enough is enough. Our culture just doesn’t produce people of that quality in large enough quantities and a lot of the best of us are scraping to get by working themselves to death for the oligarchs.