One of the self-owns of all time. Triggering a global supply chain crisis right before midterms is bottom of the barrel strategy. But then again, who expects competency from any recent American administration, most especially this one?
Yes, it sounds crazy right now, but a lot of things sounded similarly crazy 10 years ago, and here we are.
The same guy that told the government of Georgia to add 10,000 votes to his total so he'd win.
The same guy that received 0 punishment for either action.
Why wouldn't he try something for the mid-terms?
Volunteer doing what? Donate to what? Boycott what with what demands? What's the most successful boycott in your estimation? I can only really think of buses in Montgomery and the Swadeshi movement in India, but even that started in like the 1910s and they didn't get independence until 1947 and who knows how much it mattered. If there were a big crank somewhere and you could guarantee me that turning it gives better than 50% odds that the world gets better in the ways I consider better, I'd be turning the crank. We'd all be turning the crank! But what's the crank?
As for a recent successful boycott, see Disney Plus cancellations in response to Jimmy Kimmel being taken off the air.
here are some concrete things I can think of: - don't like that Sam Altman is aligned with the regime? boycott chatgpt, it fell from the top spot in the app store and Sam Altman felt forced to address the controversy to his employees, it wouldn't take much more to turn the tide and other companies take notice and be disinclined to do similar - don't like that your elected representative was mum on the Iran war? write them an email, call their office - think that a candidate is best chance at change? donate to their campaign - show up at the next No Kings protest, politicians take notice of the coverage and what people are mad about
If you are waiting for a guarantee your actions will affect change I can't help you, but I can guarantee doing nothing won't.
Trump is not all powerful, unless everybody gives up their power. Not everybody is as weak as the SV elite, and the failures of Big Law and others that bent the knee were very instructive to everybody else. Bowing down to the king makes you his servant, but it does not protect you in any way.
But there's not enough of them. Even for Minneapolis, a mid-size city. There might be a few targeted attacks, lots of voter intimidation, but the US is a very big place, and the ranks are too small, and their popularity is tiny compared to other authoritarian regimes.
It's going to be ugly, maybe really really ugly with violence and innocent voters hurt, but the forces of democracy will win out. Minneapolis shows that there's a strong backbone to this country still, even if some swing voters were tricked.
Now imagine you're a voter who shows any signal of potentially being Dem-aligned - for example a slightly darker complexion, or maybe dyed hair. On your way to the polling station, masked ICE goons "scan your face" with their AI apps, and the apps tell them you're illegal, so they put you into a van and drive you to a holding facility.
What recourse do you have? Even if they let you go the next day, you've lost your vote. And that's not a given, what if they hold you for weeks or months? How many people have others who depend on them, so they can't risk this?
I don't mean to sound dramatic, but if anything like this happens (and there's basically no way it won't) the fascist takeover is complete, and your only recourse left is civil war.
and
> but the federal government has no direct control over any of the voting processes
Coming soon, to polling booths near you, "random" ICE activity.
The corruption competence of this body of actors is as impressive as it is horrific.
Civil war? Elections. WWII? Elections. Covid? Elections.
If so, why do you think this is not relevant to this particular empire at this particular time?
That doesn't mean all extant empires are currently actively falling, and soon, will have fallen.
The US is less divided now than it was during the Civil War, which it survived. Why would it be more likely to fall now than then?
We have the highest concentration of weapons per capita in the world and a deeply ingrained expectation of voting. In a very dark humor sort of way it would be absolutely hilarious if someone was stupid enough to attempt to intervene in the process.
We might go down in flames but you can be absolutely certain we'll have collectively agreed to light them ourselves.
Sure, but there's mechanism in real life that allows cancelling elections like sending your newly funded ICE goons to polling places. Ideally everyone follows the constitution but in reality (even looking at past administrations) there's nothing stopping the executive from taking an action and saying "oops guess we'll let the courts figure it out!"
I could see Trump trying this, but I also can see dozens of other people or groups, some richer, more powerful, more competent, and more ruthless than Trump, just waiting in the wings for the guardrails to come off to make a play to rule the territory of the former United States. If he tries and succeeds at this it's open-season. It's not a Trump dictatorship, it's a civil war, akin to the Chinese Civil War after the emperor fell or the Syrian civil war after the Arab Spring.
Free elections, on the other hand...
> Why worry about how the midterms, if you can create a situation where elections cannot be held at all...
Lincoln says, "With malice toward none, with charity for all"
Trump is the exact opposite of Lincoln being "With malice towards all, with charity for none"
The irony of the situation is that they are from the same party.
He believed that the greatest danger to America came from within, warning that if the nation faltered, it would be due to self-destruction rather than external forces
Lincoln's famous speech: , "At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide."
Lincoln was ahead of his time and might as well have predicted something like Trump.
Start to worry of the Republicans start talking about expanding the Supreme Court to add their own to it
Can't? They already did.
There is no crisis that would create a situation where elections "cannot be held".
That is to say, if the current admin attempts to suspend elections, the legality of that and the magnitude of the reaction will be the same, crisis or no.
That's not precedent for the federal government declining to hold elections in any way.
The GOP won't even kill the fillibuster in the senate because they know change is coming.
They keep making the same mistake: underestimating that your adversary gets a vote, whether it's Iran, trade partners, colleges, Colbert, the Kennedy Center's audience, or Minneapolis.
But they claimed "flawless victory".
Both things cannot be true at the same time.
Their concept of truth lasts only as long as a single news cycle (sometimes even less).
The mainstream media is incredibly generous to him, they parse out the non-crazy from his word salad and report on that.
> but he would have to be pretty bad off to come to that belief.
Well, did you hear that the dead are walking around with no arms and no legs because they were blown off? Trump said that, a few days ago.
If the goal was to hurt China / BRICS and kneecap Iran it seems on point.
It's always hard to predict how the USA will vote when "war" is happening.
While also hurting Europe, South Korea, Japan, the Philippines, and many more. Very on point...
It will hurt everyone, Americans included, oil is a global market, fertilisers are a global market, those are basic inputs for probably every single thing produced in the world.
So now all of us around the globe have to pay the price for American Imperialism, compounded by the complete shattering of the USA's soft power as an ally, this will only create more animosity against the USA from all sides. Very on point.
But the USA oil industry can make a buck until everything buckles, or perhaps the USA admin will introduce price controls like in the 1970s, that worked very well too.
Only because those countries choose for that to be the case. For example, Saudi Arabia and Russia don't do that. Local prices and export prices are different.
But the US, Canada, the Netherlands, and long list of other countries could make this crisis have zero effect on local prices. They choose to take every excuse to raise prices (in fact the Netherlands goes further: if sales tax on gas raises because prices raise, the amount of tax paid is kept constant if prices drop. So they artificially raise local gas prices. So if gas prices are low, tax on gas has at one point reached 72%), but it is fundamentally a government choice.
The US Government cannot force US companies to sell at a lower domestic price if they can get a higher price exporting. I know that God-Emperor Trump pretends that he can command the oil sector to make less money, but he can't.
>For example, Saudi Arabia and Russia don't do that
2 countries famous for being beacons of free-market capitalism.
That's not a mechanism that anyone is proposing. The US government can, however, apply an export tariff that's used to subsidize local prices.
USA, Europe, and many other countries depend on China for manufacturing. I doubt that this is going to solve inflation.
But it will fill the pockets of a few people in oil rich countries that can still export.
And it will go higher now. And given the President's hatered for high interest rates and the next fed chairman being a garden-variety lick-spittle, things are not looking up.
This 'Venezuelan oil' is a pipe dream for the moment. It will take a significant amount of years to get anywhere near completed.
I think this has been the crux of many allegations against China. They don't operate fairly in global markets.
You are mistaken to assume there was a goal. Trump has admitted he did this because he was told that Iran were about to attack the U.S. not because of any strategic goal.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=GaazFYTrQ_A&pp=ygUYaXQncyBjb21...
I expect more competency from US Presidential administrations, and also expect more competency and indpendence from the various parts of the executive branch, which should execute their missions without micro-management from the President, and I further expect far more competence from Congress and the US Supreme Court in setting law and enforcing law. It's bad enough that we have an incompetent Presidential administration, but that damage should be limited by the independence of the other parts of the government. The blast radius should be far smaller, we shouldn't have a King.
We wouldn't be having a discussion about the US having a king if Biden's administration was actually competent at doing its job.
Nonetheless, I wouldn't call Biden incompetent on any of that.
Biden did not lose, Kamala Harris lost. Biden was not incompetent, but he was successfully portrayed as incompetent by applying a very different standard to Biden than to Trump 45.
Maybe if they were actually competent they wouldn't have made the mistake then?
> Biden did not lose, Kamala Harris lost.
Harris had no choice but to carry the Biden administration's poor approval on her back. Furthermore if Biden knew he would be unelectable in 2024 earlier he could have dropped out earlier and allow Harris (or other Democrats) more time to campaign. But he chose to stay until a disastrous televised debate forced him out, out of… what, exactly?
> but he was successfully portrayed as incompetent by applying a very different standard to Biden than to Trump 45.
Biden defenders always bring up how we shouldn't criticize him because Trump is worse. Ok. But you realize that's an absurdly low bar to clear, no? We are not upset that Biden is worse than Trump, we are upset that Biden is worse than what we expect from a someone with a letter D next to his name.
Is that so?
"Vice President Kamala Harris was asked by the co-hosts of The View on Tuesday whether she would have done anything differently than President Biden, responding 'not a thing comes to mind,' before coming back to the question and adding that she plans to appoint a Republican to her Cabinet if she is elected in November."
Someone really hopes you forgot about them...