I read a copy of my local, still-Independent newspaper free every morning with digital access to my library.
I vote in every local, State and Federal election.
I vote Progressive in the Primaries and Democrat in the General.
I say ‘Yes’ to any/all referendums that Tax the wealthy.
That’s about all I can do without financially impacting my family or my career. If it was feasible I’d maybe even start attending my Town Hall meetings just to get a barometer reading on my local Council Members.
Crazy thing is I’m 36yo, and sanity checks have required me to act like a 60yo from the 90s… minus the ‘got mine’ Boomer attitude.
Things do seem bad, things do need fixing. My advice is to pick one singular part of the world you want to improve and figure out how to fix it. Something like abolishing prison labor or environmentalism. It needs to be something you can make a noticeable dent in, where you can see your own contribution to the effort.
Don’t change tack every time something new like Isreal-Hamas or the scuffle at the US-Mexico border happens. You picked that one thing to fix, remember? And unless you plan on going down to the border with a gun, how do you plan on making a real difference? If you can’t make a difference, why let it bother you?
Also it’s good to have perspective by comparison but life happens in the moment to moment. If people are reporting feeling worse then that is current state and that is what matters.
I read how most experts agree that there will be some kind of “constitutional crisis” within the next decade. The impeachment 1, impeachment 2, and January 6 attacks already show the rumblings of what is to come.
Personally I find it doubtful that a full civil war would be the means though bc of the disparity b/t military resources at the federal vs. lower levels. Thus, probably something else, perhaps extremely mundane e.g. Trump runs for President, and bc of the Israeli conflict in Gaza and whatever else Russia manufactures between now and then Biden loses, then Trump simply declares himself Emperor.
Or maybe even that much paperwork will not happen and the government will simply never pass another federal budget again, thus ending the federal level by default of obstruction.
So probably not Civil War, at this time and over this event (no matter how much the clickbait media tries to get its clicks), but even so… something is coming indeed, down the road in some form.
Honestly, it’ll probably wind up becoming an American version of The Troubles. Republicans are cowards, and I doubt there are very many who are truly willing to fight and die for their cause. However, there are plenty of people willing to commit terrorist bombings and acts of sabotage if they think they can get away with it, and the US is huge. There are still plenty of places to hide if that’s the case.
And if Trump wins reelection, I can’t imagine many blue states putting up with it, and the same thing will happen from the opposite direction.
I don’t know how liberals will react tbh. Usually they try to work within the system, but if that should ever prove to become impossible… I haven’t studied enough history to get any kind of accurate impression, but it’s worth noting that nothing like it has been needed (within the USA) in the last hundred years or so, so whatever might come seems hard to predict.
I should add that Democrats are also cowards too, as are most individuals - neither side holds a monopoly on that. That’s what makes this all so dangerous: if something could be accomplished behind the scenes, then 99.9999% of Americans will simply go along with the flow. Exactly like within Russia, even the thinnest vernier of respectability would be enough to forestall a large-scale conflict. So the “constitutional crisis” might take the form of a fairly bloodless (in the wider sense) coup.
Or Republicans could just keep turning the ratchet, making steady gains wherever they can, then locking in those gains and turtling, obstructing as best they can whenever they do not hold a majority, as they have been doing for decades now. In one sense that’s even entirely fair - a democracy should reflect the majority will of the people - except Republicans are aware that white people are becoming in the minority now and so have been changing more and more over time who gets to be counted as “people”. e.g. gerrymandering, with the stacked Supreme Court members not opposing it so now it’s “legal”. Though even that is becoming not enough lately thus they are having to adjust the stakes higher, possibly doing away with voting altogether (yes they are literally talking about that, hence all this discussion about Civil War). They have already been allowed to push that far, which leaves fewer options for them to move forward with short of something drastic.
The trick is that to the uninitiated, much of it sounds reasonable at first - e.g. “states rights” means that we all get to choose our own paths, and what is wrong with that, isn’t that “freedom” in the truest sense of the word? The trouble is how the lie is delivered along with the truth: for one, the means by which those gains were achieved has enormous implications, which feeds into two, it was actually always a lie bc they never stop there and always push forward after people accept the first push. i.e., if only appeasement would ever actually work! However, like that famous saying “first they came for…”, where even if you don’t care about those first few that were come for, eventually they will come for YOU too, and if you had been paying attention then there would be no need to be shocked, shocked I tell you, shocked! Leopards eat faces off, and just bc one hasn’t eaten YOUR face off, yet, doesn’t mean that it never will. They tend not to change their spots, only their current targets. Like Brexit, many people in the USA won’t know what’s happening anytime before, during, or somehow even after it has happened.:-(
And some are even joining in with the leopards, neither realizing nor seemingly caring that they are just being saved as future meals for those who are true predators. These “facilitators”, together along with the much more numerous “collaborators”, collectively are bringing literal (neo-)Nazis back into power.
If it does go down, it’ll be rural people driving into cities to shoot them up, plant bombs, or drive people over with their trucks. That’s what it’ll look like.
“Will”? Check the news… it’s been happening for awhile, just not terribly successfully. I think we get something like at least one such event every other month.
Even without the US, the EU combined forces are More than enough to deal with Putin; especially now that it’s become startling clear that the emperor has had no clothes and his own strength was largely fiction.
That being said, they would have to be much more careful regarding China supporting Putin.
But also, as someone already mentioned, Trump is a bloviating idiot. The US isn’t going to give up the convenience of having strategic military bases around the world; there’s no way the pentagon and cia would never allow it. They’d outright Kennedy the idiot if it came to that.
So, the USA has been trying to pull out of Europe for a while from a military standpoint. The EU is large and rich enough that it should be able to protect its own frontier without American involvement. It just happens to be that Europe would rather have the USA pay for its security rather than do it itself. So the EU is going to have to figure out creating a military and all that comes with it; effectively making the EU a nation.
If the USA leaves Europe, it will likely leave the Middle East as well. Oil isn’t worth controlling any more and the USA doesn’t have any interests there besides Israel. I expect more wars in the region as nations realign to more stable borders. This will likely include a lot of genocide.
I expect the USA to focus on the Americas, maintaining an anti-Chinese coalition, and trying to slow dedollarization. Asian allies will likely tolerate a fascist America more than Europe would.
Well in which case you probably won’t believe me but I’ve been using Kagi for a while and am extremely happy with it… no link with the company at all other than a very satisfied user 🤷🏻♂️
You can improve Google a bit using ublacklist but it still wasn’t anywhere as good as Kagi.
I will say Kagi isn’t as good when it comes to looking for local businesses or services… I still use Google for that but you can do that within Kagi with a !g and it anonymises the search
It’s putin’s wet dream, to break the “Atlanticist” alliance and with it, NATO; to reverse the outcome of the Cold War. I think the ramifications would be too complex to game out with any confidence, other than stating the obvious: the world order would become multipolar (as putin prefers), with power centers in the USA, Europe, China, probably India, probably Russia. I could see US foreign policy shifting from its focus in Europe to the Pacific and intensified efforts to thwart China (which faces a demographic calamity that threatens any long-term potential for hegemony).
In reality, the ties that bind Europe to America (& Canada, Australia, etc.) are more resilient than the damage caused by your trumps, orbans, farages, etc. Rational actors will prevail when the stakes are so high.
Russia should use its special services within the borders of the United States and Canada to fuel instability and separatism against neoliberal globalist Western hegemony, such as, for instance, provoke “Afro-American racists” to create severe backlash against the rotten political state of affairs in the current present day system of the United States and Canada. Russia should “introduce geopolitical disorder into internal American activity, encouraging all kinds of separatism and ethnic, social and racial conflicts, actively supporting all dissident movements – extremist, racist, and sectarian groups, thus destabilizing internal political processes in the U.S. It would also make sense simultaneously to support isolationist tendencies in American politics”.[9]
Matrix will never replace discord, because implementing gifs took them like 10 years so far and it’s still not even a concept. And imagine discord like experience without gifs. Impossible.
Which is sad, because Matrix is otherwise absolutely great! It’s just not focused on casual users at all.
Well, majority of people discord is focused on do use them. That is how it is. When Matrix offer something meaningless (for them) like e2ee or federation in exchange for not having gifs and being “too complicated to set up”, you’ll never get this people to use it. It just makes no sense for them.
This would unquestionably be a good thing for both parties. Only problem is that Europe is past the PONR for ever being a military superpower again, in my opinion. They simply don’t have the young population to staff such a force and the population they do have would be so opposed to anything but the US-subsidized defense partnership they enjoy already, that I don’t think it would happen
European nations will need to increase the sizes and capabilities of their militaries because the US is no longer a reliable partner, whether or not Trump gets elected again. As Trumpism has come to define the Republican Party, the US is no longer a reliable partner.
Because it is the process of years and decades, European nations need to start building capabilities now, even if Trump loses the election. The US has demonstrated that they can move to a Russian-aligned power as the outcome of a single election, which was unthinkable ten years ago.
I’m still having trouble wrapping my head around that, but every “adults in the room will prevent this” has proven very flimsy, and there’s no reason that a post-Trump Republican Party wouldn’t be subjected to the same kind of politics.
The only saving grace is that, as far as I can tell, there’s no post-Trump plan and the republicans might split into two parties once he’s no longer among the living. If that does happen, they’re going to have trouble winning national elections. Trump is such a narcissistic egomaniac that he will not have a successor designated, so it will turn into an open field.
I agree that, from a European perspective, the USA has unfortunately turned out to be an unreliable partner, mainly because of the Trumpist’s strange closeness to Russia. But I don’t see why Europe needs to massively rearm its military because of this. Europe has nuclear weapons, which makes open conflict pretty unlikely in the first place. What’s more, I don’t believe that Europe could build a competitive conventional army even with massive investment. For this reason, the path that Switzerland (not part of the EU) is taking, i.e. far-reaching neutrality with simultaneous economic cooperation with more or less all players, seems to me to make more sense. I just think that instead of spending billions on armaments, it would be much better to invest in futureproof infrastructure. There is a massive lack of this in Germany, for example - in terms of telecommunications, transport and in the energy sector. I am simply not convinced by the arguments of military deterrence, especially as I think that Europe has little prospect of ever reaching a corresponding level in conventional warfare capacity anyway - all the more so in the very unlikely worstcase scenario that is that the USA under Trump turns into an autocracy with Russia as a partner.
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