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Re: The American Abyss
On Tue, Jan 12, 2021 at 08:07 AM, Sal Sunshine wrote:
Brazil is now the latest guess as to where he’s likely to flee to.I don't think he's leaving the country. He isn't going anywhere. Any country where he would even consider running to would extradite him. He certainly might try and sell state secrets to foreign powers for money or privilege though. The best place for him is safe in a coffin but I would rather imagine him living a long, miserable life. |
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Re: The American Abyss
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On Jan 12, 2021, at 8:31 AM, awb via groups.io <abater@...> wrote:
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Re: The American Abyss
Good article. Once the voices are confined to a padded room and the megaphone removed things will calm down. People are herd animals and as such, they tend to allow themselves to get riled up when their neighbors starts yelling and freaking out. Once you remove the hysterics in the group things will revert to a semblance of "normal". trump is a pariah and? his power is already greatly diminished. He will be relegated to chat rooms and the addled minds of his zombie followers in the months to come. Already the vultures are coming for him in the form of banks, the Fed, the State prosecutors and even Congress. The guy won't be able to run fast enough or find a hiding place big enough to save himself. He doesn't have the tools to deal with all of this. He is, first and foremost, a con man. He simply doesn't have what it takes, now, to deal with the fallout from his dismally failed presidency. The people invested him with the power of the office, without the office he is nothing.
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Re: 1984 - Coming to your neighborhood soon!
On Mon, Jan 11, 2021 at 09:17 AM, Bhairitu wrote:
I wouldn't count on this group here to have much political depth and nuance.? They just think they do.? Neither do the bunch over on the Corner.? Barry has this hair-brained idea that all conspiracy theorists are depressed.? That's good for a laugh.? If anything Barry is depressed and has been showing it over the past few months so he is projecting.The old classic "I know you are but what am I?". The fun thing to do is post actual publicized agendas from organizations and watch them say it is a "conspiracy theory".? Then of course there are also "cover ups" which frequently occur with governments and business and look like a conspiracy.Define the difference between cover up and conspiracy. Of course conspiracy theories have been of interest just for entertainment value for years.? Otherwise there would have been no "X-Files" or "Fringe" TV series.? Those were very popular and people took them as entertainment not real.? For some reason some people including Barry have a problem with that.You can have a conspiracy without it involving hair-brained out-to-lunch idiotically wild ideas. Conspiracies are a real thing. "Conspiracy" has gotten a bad rap and is used nowadays to imply a hair-brained out-to-lunch idiotically wild idea but that hasn't always been the case. Sometimes they are just a plan conceived of and implemented by more than one person. LOL That said, even liberal political pundits have been warning the public we will need to keep the Biden administration's feet to the fire because Biden is indeed a war hawk and has a history of being so.After trump, I'm pretty sure I'm not going to worry about anything with Biden.? |
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Re: 1984 - Coming to your neighborhood soon!
开云体育On 1/11/21 10:18 AM, Sal Sunshine
wrote:
Barry is a drunk and you and Tex are idiots… enough said. ?Bye.Gee, such a cogent response! ?
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The American Abyss
If you haven't read it, this is an excellent piece by Timothy Snyder and definitely worth the read.? Below are excerpts.? Also, there are some good photos—one showing the scope of the crowd outside the capitol.??
Even when he won, in 2016, he??— that millions of false votes were cast for his opponent. In 2020, in the knowledge that he was trailing Joseph R. Biden in the polls,??that the presidential election would be rigged and signaling that he would not accept the results if they did not favor him. He wrongly claimed on Election Day that he had won and then steadily hardened his rhetoric: With time, his victory became a historic landslide and the various conspiracies that denied it ever more sophisticated and implausible. In this sense, the responsibility for Trump’s push to overturn an election must be shared by a very large number of Republican members of Congress. Rather than contradict Trump from the beginning, they allowed his electoral fiction to flourish. They had different reasons for doing so. One group of Republicans is concerned above all with gaming the system to maintain power, taking full advantage of constitutional obscurities, gerrymandering and dark money to win elections with a minority of motivated voters. They have no interest in the collapse of the peculiar form of representation that allows their minority party disproportionate control of government. The most important among them, Mitch McConnell, indulged Trump’s lie while making no comment on its consequences. Yet for Congress to traduce its basic functions had a price. An elected institution that opposes elections is inviting its own overthrow. Like historical fascist leaders, Trump has presented himself as the single source of truth. His use of the term “fake news” echoed the Nazi smear?尝ü驳别苍辫谤别蝉蝉别?(“lying press”); like the Nazis, he referred to reporters as “enemies of the people.” Like Adolf Hitler, he came to power at a moment when the conventional press had taken a beating; the financial crisis of 2008 did to American newspapers what the Great Depression did to German ones. The Nazis thought that they could use radio to replace the old pluralism of the newspaper; Trump tried to do the same with Twitter. ? ? ? On the surface, a conspiracy theory makes its victim look strong: It sees Trump as resisting the Democrats, the Republicans, the Deep State, the pedophiles, the Satanists. More profoundly, however, it inverts the position of the strong and the weak. Trump’s focus on alleged “irregularities” and “contested states” comes down to cities where Black people live and vote. At bottom, the fantasy of fraud is that of a crime committed by Black people against white people. It’s not just that electoral fraud by African-Americans against Donald Trump never happened. It is that it is the very opposite of what happened, in 2020 and in every American election. As always, Black people??than others to vote and were more likely to have their votes challenged. They were more likely to be??and less likely to be able to take time away from work. The historical protection of their right to vote has been removed by the??and states have rushed to pass measures of a kind that historically reduce voting by the poor and communities of color. The claim that Trump was denied a win by fraud is a big lie not just because it mauls logic, misdescribes the present and demands belief in a conspiracy. It is a big lie, fundamentally, because it reverses the moral field of American politics and the basic structure of American history. At first, Trump seemed like a threat to this balance. His lack of experience in politics and his open racism made him a very uncomfortable figure for the party; his habit of continually telling lies was initially found by prominent Republicans to be uncouth. Yet after he won the presidency, his particular skills as a breaker seemed to create a tremendous opportunity for the gamers. Led by the gamer in chief, McConnell, they secured hundreds of federal judges and tax cuts for the rich. Trump was unlike other breakers in that he seemed to have no ideology. His objection to institutions was that they might constrain him personally. He intended to break the system to serve himself — and this is partly why he has failed.? In this respect his pre-fascism fell short of fascism: His vision never went further than a mirror.?
The breakers and the gamers then saw a different world ahead, where the big lie was either a treasure to be had or a danger to be avoided. The breakers had no choice but to rush to be first to claim to believe in it. Because the breakers Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz must compete to claim the brimstone and bile, the gamers were forced to reveal their own hand, and the division within the Republican coalition became visible on Jan. 6. Trump is, for now, the martyr in chief, the high priest of the big lie. He is the leader of the breakers, at least in the minds of his supporters. By now, the gamers do not want Trump around. Discredited in his last weeks, he is useless; shorn of the obligations of the presidency, he will become embarrassing again, much as he was in 2015. Unable to provide cover for their gamesmanship, he will be irrelevant to their daily purposes. But the breakers have an even stronger reason to see Trump disappear: It is impossible to inherit from someone who is still around. Seizing Trump’s big lie might appear to be a gesture of support. In fact it expresses a wish for his political death. Transforming the myth from one about Trump to one about the nation will be easier when he is out of the way. As Cruz and Hawley may learn, to tell the big lie is to be owned by it. Just because you have sold your soul does not mean that you have driven a hard bargain. Hawley shies from no level of hypocrisy; the son of a banker, educated at Stanford University and Yale Law School, he denounces elites. Insofar as Cruz was thought to have a principle, it was that of states’ rights, which Trump’s calls to action brazenly violated. A joint statement Cruz issued about the senators’ challenge to the vote nicely captured the post-truth aspect of the whole: It never alleged that there was fraud, only that there were allegations of fraud. Allegations of allegations, allegations all the way down. The big lie requires commitment. When Republican gamers do not exhibit enough of that, Republican breakers call them “RINOs”: Republicans in name only. This term once suggested a lack of ideological commitment. It now means an unwillingness to throw away an election. The gamers, in response, close ranks around the Constitution and speak of principles and traditions. The breakers must all know (with the possible exception of the Alabama senator Tommy Tuberville) that they are participating in a sham, but they will have an audience of tens of millions who do not. ? Trump’s coup attempt of 2020-21, like other failed coup attempts, is a warning for those who care about the rule of law and a lesson for those who do not. His pre-fascism revealed a possibility for American politics. For a coup to work in 2024, the breakers will require something that Trump never quite had: an angry minority, organized for nationwide violence, ready to add intimidation to an election. Four years of amplifying a big lie just might get them this. To claim that the other side stole an election is to promise to steal one yourself. It is also to claim that the other side deserves to be punished. Informed observers inside and outside government agree that right-wing white supremacism is the greatest terrorist threat to the United States. Gun sales in 2020 hit an astonishing high. History shows that political violence follows when prominent leaders of major political parties openly embrace paranoia. Our big lie is typically American, wrapped in our odd electoral system, depending upon our particular traditions of racism. Yet our big lie is also structurally fascist, with its extreme mendacity, its conspiratorial thinking, its reversal of perpetrators and victims and its implication that the world is divided into us and them. To keep it going for four years courts terrorism and assassination. When that violence comes, the breakers will have to react. If they embrace it, they become the fascist faction. The Republican Party will be divided, at least for a time. One can of course imagine a dismal reunification: A breaker candidate loses a narrow presidential election in November 2024 and cries fraud, the Republicans win both houses of Congress and rioters in the street, educated by four years of the big lie, demand what they see as justice. Would the gamers stand on principle if those were the circumstances of Jan. 6, 2025? To be sure, this moment is also a chance. It is possible that a divided Republican Party might better serve American democracy; that the gamers, separated from the breakers, might start to think of policy as a way to win elections. It is very likely that the Biden-Harris administration will have an easier first few months than expected; perhaps obstructionism will give way, at least among a few Republicans and for a short time, to a moment of self-questioning. Politicians who want Trumpism to end have a simple way forward: Tell the truth about the election. ? America will not survive the big lie just because a liar is separated from power. It will need a thoughtful repluralization of media and a commitment to facts as a public good. The racism structured into every aspect of the coup attempt is a call to heed our own history. Serious attention to the past helps us to see risks but also suggests future possibility. We cannot be a democratic republic if we tell lies about race, big or small. Democracy is not about minimizing the vote nor ignoring it, neither a matter of gaming nor of breaking a system, but of accepting the equality of others, heeding their voices and counting their votes. Em |
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Re: 1984 - Coming to your neighborhood soon!
开云体育Barry is a drunk and you and Tex are idiots… enough said. ?Bye.Sal? On Jan 11, 2021, at 11:17 AM, Bhairitu <noozgurugm@...> wrote:
?wouldn't count on this group here to have much political depth and nuance.? They just?think?they do.? Neither do the bunch over on the Corner.? Barry has this hair-brained idea that all conspiracy theorists are depressed.? That's good for a laugh.? If anything Barry is depressed and has been showing it over the past few months so he is projecting. |
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Re: 1984 - Coming to your neighborhood soon!
开云体育On 1/11/21 8:03 AM, WillyTex via
groups.io wrote:
On Sun, Jan 10, 2021 at 08:11 PM, Emily Mae wrote: I wouldn't count on this group here to have much political depth and nuance.? They just think they do.? Neither do the bunch over on the Corner.? Barry has this hair-brained idea that all conspiracy theorists are depressed.? That's good for a laugh.? If anything Barry is depressed and has been showing it over the past few months so he is projecting. The fun thing to do is post actual publicized agendas from organizations and watch them say it is a "conspiracy theory".? Then of course there are also "cover ups" which frequently occur with governments and business and look like a conspiracy. Of course conspiracy theories have been of interest just for entertainment value for years.? Otherwise there would have been no "X-Files" or "Fringe" TV series.? Those were very popular and people took them as entertainment not real.? For some reason some people including Barry have a problem with that. That said, even liberal political pundits have been warning the public we will need to keep the Biden administration's feet to the fire because Biden is indeed a war hawk and has a history of being so. |
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Re: 1984 - Coming to your neighborhood soon!
On Mon, Jan 11, 2021 at 08:04 AM, WillyTex wrote:
:Democrats moving to ban MAGA rallies as domestic terrorism."Do you really believe this nonsense?? You think Congress cares about MAGA rallies right now?? Have you no ability to call a duck a duck?? A spade a spade?? Do you just post stuff to what....get off on it?? Do you support insurrection?? Do you wish you could have seen Pence dangling?? What in the world is Fox News telling you?? That this is a 1st Amendment thing?? Really?? Armed attack on Congress is a 1st Amendment thing?? You think you're a patriot?? Do you have any idea what that means?? If you think overturning our government and installing a raging dictator is a good idea, there are many countries you can move to. Here's a list of 50.? I'll stop replying to you—your posts are making me nauseas.??
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awb
Sal Sunshine
Bhairitu
Emily Mae