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Comment by solumunus | Hacker News Reader

What would a meaningful fight look like?

idk man last time France raised the gas price by like 10% people were in the streets every weekend for a year, often blocking highways, warehouses, at its peak ~3 million people were in the streets, they got so close to Macron's castle he had his helicopter prepared to flee the capital

It ended up with 11 deaths, thousands of injured, thousands of people were arrested hundreds went to jail. Look at Serbia, Greece, damn even Turkey seems to put a better fight lol

https://www.ledauphine.com/france-monde/2018/12/13/gilets-ja...

Although the precise numbers are uncertain, the Hands Off protests have definitely crossed 2M in the US already. We'll see if they stop or not.

The current protests are terrible. The loudest mobilized voices are the pro-Palestinian people, who are a wet blanket on a protest as they don’t have wide support.

We need more angrier people.

Comparing these mobilization figures against the countries' populations:

France: 3M/70M ~ 4%

US: 2M/350M ~ .5%

The US needs roughly a tenfold increase in numbers to match France.

Look at Georgia, look at Serbia, look at the Arab Spring. Look at your constitution! There is a part in there about resistance to oppression you seem to only use to defend the wrong things.

Did you look at Georgia and Serbia yourself? Protests have been ongoing for months, government doesn't care.

They don't have armed revolution enshrined in their constitution

If arms are the important component, what wrong things are you saying we exclusively use that part of the constitution to defend? I don't think that part is used for much else

The only time you hear of the second amendment is to justify having guns after a massacre. Yet here we are, literally a textbook case of it, and crickets. I'm against guns and gun violence, but Americans aren't.

The Americans who have the guns tend to also be the ones who support this government.

I don't think being against guns and gun violence is compatible with encouraging armed revolution.

If that's what you need to remove the mental roadblock needed to deal with the actual topic then sure, call me pro-gun. If your constitution gave you the right to bear sharpened spoons, I'd be asking about that, too.

This is the actual topic. You said that it is bad that Americans use the second amendment to justify having guns and good for them to use them in an act of mass political violence to stop tarriffs on filming locations and science budget cuts. The other three positions are coherent: have guns and use them, have guns and don't use them, don't have guns and don't use them. If someone is going to assert that my countrymen should take up arms- putting myself, my family, and my friends at mortal risk- over taxes and budget decisions, they can at least admit that their frame means it's quite good that we kept the guns despite the mass shootings. I'm not going to operate on a hairpin trigger on advice from a self-proclaimed pacifist, you know?

Impeachment. There have been multiple clearly impeachable offences by the current administration. The congress GOP should take responsibility for getting the US out of this.

Let’s be honest, that’s not a realistic solution. The GOP is completely onboard with what he’s doing, so suggesting they take care of it is just admitting defeat.

A key question that I'm not sure can be answered: among Republican reps and senators, what is the ratio of "on board with it all" to "terrified of what will happen to themselves if they don't appear to be on board"?

If the "terrified" camp is sufficiently large, their terror can be overridden with a sufficiently large swing in public opinion. They're potentially movable.

The true believers...not sure if anything can move them. If the "on board" camp is (nearly) all Republican legislators, then there is no path to impeachment.

It will be interesting to see how things evolve as the economic impacts of Trump's policies develop. That's probably the most direct path to the level of public opinion shift needed to make impeachment possible.

He tweeted yesterday that they want to impeach him again, that he wants to remove Democratic congressmen from Congress for "crimes" they committed, and that the GOP should handle it.

For those replying who think this isn't an option - what precisely is the end-game in your mind?

Edit: I'd be interested to hear why the downvotes. I'm genuinely curious about this, because a lot of people seem to think that a) Congress is useless, and b) half the population of America is stupid, and so I'm just curious how you see America moving forward, or even if you do at all?

it appears that MAGA has successfully dismantled the USA. I don't expect any further fair elections, TBH. I'm rather aghast at how much of American corporate money is just either collaborating with an obviously criminal regime or just sort of blindly pretending business as usual can return with an election.

There is no current checks mor balances, a king runs America and Republicans smile because they are wearing the same color jersey and seem to think their longtime agenda is being implemented, when, no, a mafia is riding their agenda and party to absolute power.

The GOP is completely mask off and is fine with Trump turning the country into Mussolini Italy if it means they get a seat at the table. They are traitors and I hope every one of them has their day in The Hague.

The United States is not a state party to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court so there is exactly zero percent chance of anyone from the GOP appearing at The Hague.

They are not, yet.

Assuming there will be a free and fair election in which the Democrats win, it would be a sensible move to repeal the Hague Invasion Act, ratify the Rome Statute and refer all of the 47th's admin's key figures there - that avoids any possible issues with the Supreme Court.

Additionally, it would restore a bit of global confidence in the ICC and America's credibility on the global stage as well... something sorely needed after not even a few months of this administration.

1.Hague Invasion act was 71-22 in the Senate and 280-138 in the House, with 84 Yes and 116 Nos(edited because I flipped the numbers) from Democrats. Its more or less a consensus US position, not partisan.

2.Even if it did pass, retroactively referring 47 there doesn't scream "law and order" to me, especially when there are actual laws being broken.

> Its more or less a consensus US position, not partisan.

That was the case in 2002, back when the Supreme Court still worked and was reasonably respected, and Congress at least did lip service to follow its duties.

Now, the circumstances have shifted - the Supreme Court is seen as compromised as a result of the Trump appointments plus the corruption scandals surrounding Roberts. Therefore I'm not so sure that the Hague Invasion Act would remain if it were pushed to a vote in a future Democrat-controlled Congress.

> Even if it did pass, retroactively referring 47 there doesn't scream "law and order" to me, especially when there are actual laws being broken.

I agree, the normal course of action should be to put 47th and his goon(er)s through the regular American court system - but I am afraid that the legal system has degraded way too much over the last years from all the political appointments. That's why in Croatia and Serbia we had the ICTY established, there was no trust of fair trials.

The constitution prohibits ex post facto prosecution.

Assuming that we continue to elect presidents, you need one to appoint an effective Attorney General (ie not Garland) and use these new king like powers of the executive to smash. The president was convicted of dozens of crimes, but nobody had the balls to throw him in jail.

You have to think about 2025 solutions. The die is cast, it isn’t 1995 anymore. Nobody is clutching their pearls because POTUS made a mess on an intern anymore. It’s a different environment and you’re going to have to have fistfights on the Senate floor if the congress is functioning.

> The constitution prohibits ex post facto prosecution.

A lot of what the 47th and people in his administration did are already punishable by law - alone the Signal affair or other violations of the Public Records Act.

It would not be a ex post facto prosecution, it would simply be a prosecution by a court of law that is reasonably free from corruption.

The United States has courts. I don’t think we have a law that allows you to create another jurisdiction above that of the US Courts. That’s a change in the law.

It’s all fantasy anyway.

> I don’t think we have a law that allows you to create another jurisdiction above that of the US Courts. That’s a change in the law.

Well, whoever succeeds Trump will have to go for drastic measures to restore global trust in the US. No way around that, the system is fundamentally broken and needs a complete and utter overhaul. If the Democrats have an ounce of interest in self-preservation, they have no alternative than to bring down all the hammers they can on the MAGA part of the GOP.

Courts don't have balls to do anything. They could introduce sanctions or deputize anyway to arrest people in the Trump for violating court orders and refuse to do so.

The ICC in The Hague does not deal with internal conflicts, it mostly handles war crimes. The summary deportation of citizens to Salvadorian work camps is the only thing that might show up on the ICC's radar, for the rest of the crimes of Trump c.s. the judicial chain stops at your own Supreme Court.

If this happened here in Canada, I would go to weekly protests against this administration. When I was younger I went to dozens of daily protest for something insignificant in comparison [1] and it did lead to a change of gouvernement.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_Quebec_student_protests

Look at Spain right now. Not sure I agree with the anti tourism cause but man they know how to cause a fuss.

General strike, for example.

HN employees of X, Tesla, SpaceX (etc), Meta, Alphabet and other tech businesses supporting Trump could also strike or threaten to strike to pressure their owners/boards.

Those are incredibly hard to organize.

It's going to be a long slow process of firstly making sure that all Democrats are actually anti-Trump through primary challenges, then trying to ensure a D sweep in the mid-term elections. I don't think there's much chance of anything before then.

So the second amendment is only for mass shootings then? How is this not exactly what it's for?

Something like OWS - but outside the Whitehouse?

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