U.S. Politics

No, looks totally legit :grin:

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Another meme dump, cba making sure none have already been posted lol

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While we’re meme-ing:
image

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That wwe page is pure fucking gold :joy::joy::joy::joy::joy:

End of an era :joy:

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Took them long enough :man_facepalming:t3:

No no no no. This whole both sides nonsense has to stop. The whataboutisms have to stop. What the Republican party, Trump, Fox, Mitch McConnell and all those other chucklefucks did was different by an order of magnitude than protestors demonstrating against systemic racial injustice in the United States. This was a coup attempt, not a good one, not a well thought out one, but it was an attempt to disrupt the vote certification and for about six hours it worked. And if you don’t think this is what domestic terrorism looks like, idk what to tell you. This is exactly what it looks like. A bunch of idiots running around trying to plant their flag in the Capitol. What else could it be?

One of the biggest mistakes in recent US history when it comes to corrupt politicians was not investigating the obvious war crimes Bush committed, we just moved on because it felt better than the alternative. You could even look at Ford pardoning Nixon as the ultimate desire to just move on because the alternative would have been painful but I think it was a mistake.

A lot of well meaning white folks in the media and political class are already talking about moving on from this, from Trump and from his awful ideology. But we can’t just move on. It needs to be exposed for what it is — fascism with a heavy streak of racism and a sprinkling of corporate greed — and then stamped out. It’s dangerous. The GOP thought they could ride the tiger but they’re finding out that you always end up in the belly. I have zero sympathy for them. They could have stopped this at any point but they didn’t because they thought it was politically advantageous.

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Not something I know a great deal on so not commenting either way but just interesting that I was listening to a podcast earlier that posited this very point. The commentator ending by saying it was a mistake then (looking back now, with context) and it would be a mistake if anything similar was to ever happen for Trump/his cronies.

Did anyone see the vid of them all standing about in a tent watching the scenes unfold? Fucking pricks the lot of them.

It was a huge mistake. It would have most certainly torn the country apart but would have demonstrated there were actually consequences for what Nixon did. I think the States would have been better off in the long run.

The Majority Report with Sam Seder (highly recommend) yesterday had a guest who made the point that so called “white collar crimes” have a high rate of recidivism precisely because the legal consequences for say financial crimes are so lenient that they don’t serve as a sufficient deterrent.

He also made the point that the Democratic party has far too often shown itself willing to excuse the Republican party for it’s habitual line stepping and instead opted for this fantasy that the “fever will break soon”—as Obama put it.

This sort of sweeping things under the rug has resulted in us continuing to repeat history.

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I don’t consider my point whataboutism because I see the use of mob justice in America as being a trend for the better part of a year. From an outsider perspective it just looks like normal expected behaviour.

If it was it was a very bizarre one, you have footage of police just opening up the doors and ushering them in and they are just wondering about taking selfies. Sure you’ve got racist twats in there with civil war t-shirts and people identified as previously wearing horrific anti-Semitic t-shirts, you’ve also people who are antifa in there, and then randomly a woman gets brutally shot which feels at odds with everything else, and you got Trump watching it and egging it on. I don’t have the first clue what to make of it, except that it probably is best forgotten as it’s a total embarrassment from every conceivable angle.

Some of those involved probably yeah, but the danger of terming it this is that something like 45% of your country voted for Trump and you don’t really want to be labelling that number of people fascist or you’ll end up making things far worse. For me Trump is just a giant man baby that needs to go down feeling like he’s somehow won. That is a big problem but it isn’t in my mind a fascist problem. Like I don’t think for a second he was aiming for dictatorship, he just doesn’t want to look like a loser. I have no idea what to call that.

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I honestly don’t understand this.

When some youngsters protesting racism topple a statue last summer you start having major worries about what this means for democracy and actually go as far as to start worrying about whether their cavalier attitudes to protesting injustice will cause a fucking race war.

But when there’s an outgoing President refusing to accept a democratic result and actually encouraging his supporters to disrupt democracy by occupying government buildings, which of course is done by some of them while armed, all you seem to be doing is minimising it and saying its best we just move on, that its just an “embarrassment” and quickly forget it ever happened. It seems like such a stark contrast to me and without wanting to be unfair, on some level seems to say something to me about your political outlook, cos otherwise I have a hard time understanding the difference in your reactions.

Last summer at times you seemed fairly hysterical to me about a statue being toppled in the UK by people supporting BLM, talking about what it means for democracy and having endless words of criticism for the protestors. Yet here it appears to me that all you want to do is minimise this, when this kind of scene is far more concerning for democracy because its an outgoing president refusing to accept a valid election result and whipping his supporters up into a frenzy and inciting violence, rather than being a movement of the people against racism, even if in both cases you could draw some equivalence between some of the actions committed in each instance.

One of these is evidently far more concerning and deserving of condemnation than the other, we agree on that clearly, but we seem to disagree on which of the two that is.

I find this very puzzling. One causes you to write probably not far off a hundred posts, all with a gravely concerned tone to put it mildly, whereas with the other you seem to want to brush it under the carpet.

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I wouldn’t call a riot in which a woman died embarrassing.

What would have happened if the rioters got hold of few democratic congressmen?
Would it still have been just an ‘embarassment’ if they punched a few representatives?

This was a domestic terrorist act.
Incomparable to BLM protest which was irrational at worst.

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Apparently they were putting up a hang man’s noose and wanted to exectute vice president Mike Pence. Probably why the woman was shot. She got way too close to a politician who had to be protected

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I’m not trying to minimise it or brush it under the carpet. I know that Trump has spurred on something truly idiotic, but I just don’t know what can be done about it without making things far worse. If they try and impeach him or imprison him it’s going to drag on and on, it’s going to polarise the country far more than it already is. I’m now seeing big tech cleansing Twitter and other platforms and this is going to make people feel persecuted and intensify the divide. I’m seeing some of my American friends on Facebook defriending their family because they support Trump. America really needs to start coming together before it’s too late. And when I criticised BLM - and I’ve done it frequently - it’s precisely for this reason. And yes I did say that they shouldn’t be allowed to pull down statues but the point here is that after one year of BLM being able to riot and basically get away with it, if you now go hard-line on the Trump idiots it will look utterly one-sided. It doesn’t really matter which is worse and which is worse is kind of an eye of the beholder thing anyway. I’d honestly like to know what you would do as a response? And then is it more or less likely to see a repeat event. If it happens again I’m sure it result in lots of bloodshed.

This is nothing but a good thing.
Trump is more dangerous with access to these platform than not.

Same happened with Alex Jones. His bullshit was significantly less propogated due to lack of access to popular platforms.

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Doing nothing is going to polorise the country though and will legitimise any reaction at a later date.
For this reason as much as the events of the other day America has an opportunity that it has to take and respond accordingly.
This is and was very far from action you pass off or label idiotic.