When you're a sheltered suburbanite nerd (yeah, even the "rural" ones) who will never have to truly worry about being in this situation, this is just an exciting news story to squabble over and smugly flounder about on your keyboard.
Deplorable.
Deplorable.
If deporting U.S. CITIZEN CHILDREN does not send you to the streets with fire and fury, you are well and truly lost. So much damn talk over the decades I've been alive about patriotism and liberty from America, but when a moment unquestionably calls for action, it turns out Americans were just unserious cosplayers the whole damn time.
MLK said it best: "the moderate who is more devoted to order than to justice, who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice"
And even now you have people that think showing up with clever signs around the downtown parks / public areas on the weekend when all the government offices are closed are somehow going to get their message across. It's not enough. It was never enough. It wasn't enough for Vietnam or Iraq. It's definitely not going to be enough now. Americans are going to have to choose to do some uncomfortable and maybe even risky things to demonstrate our disapproval.
Or we have to admit that for many of us, this is who we actually are as a country. It certainly is a good bit of the voting public. I don't think it's a mistake that in basically one generation we lied to the world about Iraq then elected a fascist twice. And at that point I don't think stern dissent is an effective or even morally correct course of action.
Here’s my hands-on experience: at least half the people you meet are defective, to a scary extent, functionally in terms of empathy. Probably two thirds have serious executive functioning deficits. That means they can neither understand the plight of their fellows; and, even if they could, they could not generalize their own situation into a policy to help everyone in the same situation.
EDIT: most people don’t vote. A disproportionate number that do are both empathetic, and high have high levels of executive functioning skills. The flip side of the coin are activated people who are missing one-or-the-other skills, but are voting out of some other errant ideology. I want to be clear that the distribution of voters is “both sides”: there are disgusting and enlightened voters on both sides of the spectrum. We’re all trapped in the box, together.
It does. Constantly making bad decisions makes them bad. What it doesn’t do is make them any less entitled to all of their rights. Something their badness has paved way for robbing others of.
Are you a moderate who has a better plan? I ask that sincerely, if I've given up its not because I prefer peace but because I know a losing battle when I see one. We don't have a charismatic leader like MLK. The democratic party is in shambles. They're afraid of fighting the tariffs and alienating the working class. There is no one in the party who is broadly likeable, who has any chance of bringing the voting public together. Voters on the left still cling to their own personal pet peeves and insist they will never vote for anyone who doesn't specifically address whatever they think is the _real_ problem.
The sad reality is that Trump's policies are still really popular and if people are unhappy they are only unhappy with the execution. You see that in this thread. People see the this news story and see it as an unfortunate side effect of a basically good policy. They think illegal immigration is hurting our economy, they think 'anchor babies' are people taking advantage of a loophole that should be closed.
They think this country suffers because of tariffs and maybe they think Trump got carried away but they still support the idea. They are sick of Ukraine and think it's time we walked away. They think DEI means a black women will be hired over a white man under any circumstances. They think DEI in schools means our kids are being taught that the US is full of horrible backwards racists and sexists who need liberal saviors to make it better. They think that government agencies are overpaid and over bloated and full of people who don't do anything but get a fat paycheck.
These beliefs cut across people of all genders, of all colors, of all ages, of all states and cities. We can't even blame the boomers anymore and insist the younger generations will save us. No one will save us.
I wouldn't say I'm a moderate, but I do have a better plan: https://runforsomething.net/
stop supporting moderate politicians that appeal to no damn person. find someone with charisma like obama. there is no magical moderate voter that the dems keep hoping to appeal to. they already have been the center right party for decades now.
2) Moderates do, in fact, have stronger appeal than leftists. It's empirically true. As evidence, see: literally just about every election where a leftist is on the ballot, with the possible exception of AOC who has Obama-tier charisma factor and also not-coincidentally has moderated her image a bit the past few years to the point where the most lefty leftists think she's a sellout.
People like Tester and Manchin overperformed in their deep-red states for a long, long time. People like Collins and Don Bacon on the other side overperform for the same reason.
The point of moderation for a Democrat is not picking up Republican votes, it's picking up votes from the 30% of the country that doesn't identify with either party, most of which are moderates.
Also, the black community is the core of the Democratic coalition, and they are pretty moderate politically, especially on social issues. Latinos are the same and that's part of the reason we've been losing them.
Obama was a moderate politician with massive charisma
I think you are right but I think half of democratic voters think the party has gone too left ( abortion, gender politics ) while half thinks it has gone too far right. The democratic party is trying to have it both ways and utterly failing, but in their defense I don't think fully embracing either side will be enough for them to win. The problem is largely the voters who absolutely refuse to compromise on their personal hill to die on. Republican voters will unite on anyone as long as they piss of the left.
> find someone with charisma like Obama
That person does not exist, or if they do they are too smart to support the shambling mess that is the democratic party.
I think the party is gambling that Trump makes such a hopeless mess of things that voters will have no choice but vote blue. I'm not sure they will win that gamble.
Theoretically, abortion in the US used to be extremely liberal (in the original meaning of the word liberal).
Materially? No one wait week 22 for an abortion unless it's an emergency, considering the damage it does.
The percentage of childbirth death plus late stage abortion in the US is barely superior to the one in my country where abortions after weeks 18 needs to be argued by two doctors and a social worker in front of a judge. And that percentage is only superior because US have a very, very high childbirth death for a developed country.
Materially, Usians do less late stage abortion than other developed countries where those are way more restrictive. Because people love to talk about 'theorically' when they talk about other people body and choices, never about what really happens, and that bothers me greatly.
Jack shit probably but that doesn't mean right-leaning Democrats are going to vote for Bernie Sanders and cross their fingers that none of his proposals get enacted.
1. They don't know what they can do that will be effective.
2. They don't want to be targeted as dissidents or non-loyalists to the regime.
3. They're drained by their individual economic situations and worries.
4. They're drained by severe disappointment in large swaths of the electorate, and in the failure of checks and balances.
5. Events are so upsetting that they're in denial or consciously avoiding it.
It might be reassuring to see huge protests, but I wouldn't encourage individuals to do that anymore, because most of those people will be identified by the various surveillance technologies that we've built. (Half of the surveillance built by techbros, incidentally.) The identified can then be further suppressed with automation, and the barriers to doing that are much lower than mass physical roundups and concentration camps.
I understand the basic idea of how you fight an oppressive regime everyone hates. I have no idea how you go about fighting one that half the country supports. Protests aren’t going to fix that.
Last time around, I could at least soothe myself with the idea that he only won because our electoral system is idiotic, and a lot of voters didn’t understand what they were voting for. This time? He won the most votes, and everyone had every opportunity to see what they were getting. I can only conclude that my countrymen are fucked in the head.
If everyone hates it, you only need to fight it if has external support. A regime needs considerable active support and even wider at least tacit support to operate; if everyone locally hates it, it cannot function as a regime (but, if it has sufficient external support, can perhaps function as an occupation, that you do have to fight.)
> I have no idea how you go about fighting one that half the country supports.
You fight it by actively seeking to make it one that has much less support, by means such as revealing to the people who would oppose various acts the things that it is doing that have been effectively concealed or misrepresented to them that they would oppose if they understood.
In reality, around 22% of the US populace (not just voters, but everyone) voted for Trump. Similar voted for Harris.
The rest didn't vote. I refuse to attribute justifications, since they are too numerous.
But that is correct, peaceful protests like 50501 aren't going to do much. Their value is more networking and mutual aid creation/management.
What does work, especially historically, is violence. As a historian, when you look at pivotal points in history, changes were only won after a LOT of violence was applied.
The trick is that groups like 50501 are absolutely needed for a different reason. The governments cannot negotiate with 'terrorists', but can save face by negotiating with 'peaceful groups'. We see this recently with MLK and Malcolm X, Sinn Fein and IRA, Ghandi and dozens of separatist factions.
I'm not publically advocating violence, but the more fascist they become, well, that will be inevitable. Different people and groups have different lines in the sand.
We're already talking about breaching medical records for 'defectives' (autism) list, turning trans folk into non-humans, kidnapping/disappearing people off the street, tattle-tale emails and phone#s to report people, lebensraum (Canada, Greenland, etc), off-country concentration camps (CECOT), and more. And we're only 3 months in of 4 years.
If I had the ability to get out, I would have. But I'm guessing that even the better off here also don't have the ability.
I don’t give a lot of credit to those who stayed home. They also knew who Trump was and decided to let others make the choice on their behalf.
I’m not confident that even violent action would change things when so many people are in favor of or at least ok with what’s going on. You’re not going to win a fight, so is the idea to win hearts and minds? I don’t see that working.
Oh, I absolutely am counting every human in the US, and not registered voters. Total counts are like 45% of the whole population voted.
I chose total counts to get a better idea of density vs political affiliation since we have those at the district level.
> I don’t give a lot of credit to those who stayed home. They also knew who Trump was and decided to let others make the choice on their behalf.
Perhaps. Perhaps not. Usually, the back and forth between statist democrat and statist republican weren't that much diverging, although campaigns would portray the other side as baby-eaters.
This is different. And even just 3 months, I'm seeing apolitical people come out of the woodwork and actually start being political. And even though I do vote, I get the idea of 'as long as politicians do decent, I don't care'.
> I’m not confident that even violent action would change things when so many people are in favor of or at least ok with what’s going on. You’re not going to win a fight, so is the idea to win hearts and minds? I don’t see that working.
I'm not seeing a fight ala lines of militia lining up firing in lines. I'm thinking what we're headed towards is much much more like Luigi. Or more historically, what we saw in France during WW2 - sabotage and hit-n-runs.
And the battle lines are also pretty defined as well. Its going to be a fight between rural and cities.
Like I said, if I had the ability to leave until the situation here comes to some semblance of sanity and stability (along with respect for human decency), I would leave. But at the moment, that is not an option for me. So instead, its a "what can I do to safeguard me and mine, for the foreseeable future?"
(So far, my answer is: grow my own food, get to know local farmers and pay/trade, connect with local mutual aid orgs, become more self-sufficient, canning and food preservation. That sort of stuff. Goal is to just blend in, and help non-violently where I can.)
This ended up being fake news. Who would gain from enraging Americans with divisive fake news?
Justice Department attorneys argued that it was in the child's best interest to remain in her mother's legal custody and suggested the child could return, writing, "V.M.L. is not prohibited from entering the United States."
Trump administration officials told the court that the mother had informed ICE agents that she wanted to bring V.M.L. with her to Honduras, providing a handwritten note in Spanish that they said confirmed her wishes.
Each side is so encumbered with baggage that I don't want to support them.
One is breaking law and processes in egregious ways. The other thinks that law should not apply to illegal immigrants and even legal deportations are a due process violation.
Where? Who? You're just making this up.
What do you think? Should all illegal immigrants be deported?
As Reagan was good for Amnesty, the right can find it in their ideals go support it.
It worked for Regan because there was bipartisan support to enforce the law moving forward. I don't see that today so we get a yoyo effect
And there was a bipartisanship solution under Biden that got nixed when Trump, then an unelected citizen, cried to congressional leadership about it hurting his chances for reelection. Like so many other things this weak autocrat cries about, he made things worse.