Now we are all trapped in highly personalized crazy houses, halls of mirrors, where nothing is real and our very views of reality are too warped for us to assemble into coherent organized political movements. The exception, perhaps, being capital itself, able to whip masses of people into hysteria or discombobulated confusion while rich vampires suck the life out of this country and leave us a schizo husk muttering to ourselves about free speech, the constitution, and cancel culture.
So excuse me if I roll my eyes anyone tries to compare anyone in this country to "left" movements around the world. We are too insane and don't have the spine to move that way.
Part of the problem is that some part of the country has been calling (perhaps accurately) people fascist for years—hell, just last week people were hysterically chanting that Trump is Hitler at a dinner, which is ridiculous in the particulars (even if there are obvious similarities in mass dehumanization and use of indiscriminate state violence) while simultaneously making it harder for the rest of us to convince others to see those real similarities—while other parts look around and just see the same old country they always did, just with more insane people. If we cannot overcome the massive cultural differences that characterize our broad society and communicate well with each other, we have little hope to fix the underlying problems enabling these people to perpetrate evil.
But, I don't have much hope for this coming decade, frankly. We are all too addicted to finding comfort in our little cultural bubbles to collectively find the will to pull our heads out of the media machines that surround us and reassemble around some sense of the very real shared values that should bind us together: feeding ourselves and our families and finding healthy lives pursuing happiness.
I agree about not getting too hand-wavy, but it's tough... the trajectory is pretty bad even if we're not all the way down it so far. Maybe it "only" ends up being like Turkey or Hungary or Russia rather than countries in 1930ies era Europe. Still pretty bad though.
And yes, this does require we adjust our understanding of politics to disengage with many or most media sources. On the upside I suspect that one person making a concerted effort to reach out to those who see the world differently can have enormous impact. I myself have many friends who have voted differently than me, and effectively communicating my specific concerns with them is not as difficult as e.g. social media interactions might have you believe. It does, however, require meeting them where they are today.
Sounds like a good progress in only half a year. He'll get to troika's and stazi a bit later.
If you criticize the current government, you’re an agitator.
If you think something that is in opposition to the current administration, your a socialist commie
This time around its this weird micro nation with 300K people that has got it into its head, it can exert global influence by throwing oil money around. But this is not the football world cup. Historically there are really no examples of such small countries exerting so much influence before it is all shut down by larger powers.
Expect ofcourse with the Vatican. But that is centralized religion with "citizenship" across borders. Qatar meanwhile barely has enough people to defend a town, and already experienced a backlash in 2017 with a blockade. This is the second round. Watch them retreat back to sports by the end of the decade.
Small countries and Geopolitical Power are not compatible.
Who said superpowers aren't influencing American discourse today - such as DRAGONBRIDGE [0][1][2] which has made Reddit borderline unusable.
[0] - https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/threat-intelligence/prc...
[1] - https://www.isdglobal.org/digital_dispatches/pro-ccp-spamouf...
[2] - https://blog.google/threat-analysis-group/google-disrupted-d...
This (the power to audit): https://rpp.wtgrantfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/09...
Plus this (the audit itself): https://www.ed.gov/about/news/press-release/us-department-of...
Well, it’s quite simple. If a Democratic president does happen to get elected again (hard to imagine happening in my lifetime), SCOTUS will clam up and reverse most of these little executive power loopholes. Recall how Biden didn’t have the authority to order the Department of Education to forgive student loans? But now Posse Comitatus is just, like, a suggestion.
Trump is more or less doing what he campaigned on and has a history of doing. At a minimum, don't vote for anyone involved worth supporting his admin. Don't vote for anyone with the same major donors (you can look up donors on open secrets), or the same project 2025/federalist background. Pay attention to your primary elections.
The simplest way to keep subsequent admins from doing this is to not vote R.
In other words the worth is not "what a future hypothetical democrat" might do, but rather what the "current republican is doing.
To answer your point though, the only real thing you can do is vote. That is your lever of power.
Make no mistake, Americans voted for this behavior. All of it was explicitly telegraphed in the campaign. He is doing exactly what people voted him to do.
Yes congress is weak. Yes the Supreme Court is bought and paid for. That doesn't help. But this isn't some accident. It was done openly, and voters rewarded it.
I get that lots of people didn't vote for him. But more people did. If you're not in love with the outcomes, make sure you turn out when the chance comes along. Encourage others to turn out. Because one side is not like the other, and making a choice matters.
And if you're in the "it doesn't matter who wins, they're all the same" camp, well, I'd respectfully suggest you're wrong. It does matter.
This is not the only thing you can do, and this kind of engagement leads to a worse set of options each election cycle. No social movement has ever won rights simply by voting. There are many important ways to apply pressure between elections.
During the Red Scare.
The way to fix it is to change the constitution (for example [1], although bigger changes are probably needed, IMHO anyway, but this is a good start) but the constitution is so hard to change that this is not really feasible in the short to medium term. And making it easier to change the constitution is a catch-22.
And while the Democratic party is obviously tons better than the Republican party, that's only because the Republican party is so awful. The Dems seem to have only tepid interest to fix this at best.
[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/21/opinion/trump-constitutio...
Thanks for this link. I wonder how the USA would have fared with that one change in the sentence.
The voters decided to vote democrats out of office. They are the ones with the power here.
Democracy is about majority rule. Blaming the minority for not fixing the problem is to miss the whole point of voting.
The public decided that this guy, this party, should win the last election. The public will decide who wins the next one.
The really ugly truth is that a significant slice of the public think this is going well. Another significant slice thinks this is OK, let's do more of this. You might not like it. I might not like it. Welcome to the minority. (And Democracy does not treat minorities well.)
Isn’t this ignoring the elephant in power right now ?
Why project this current reality into the future? It’s right here
"future administrations" is a pipedream, the USA-ians are gonna have to try pretty hard to protect themselves right now...
Now the question applied to USA would be - can citizens of USA elect an alternative politician or party? They can't, due to medieval first past the post system. And this is really your answer - until you keep the election system as is, you will get the same politicians or worse. Because they are not afraid anymore.
You can’t lol. This type of shit is the will of the people, Half of whom, remind you, have below average IQ.
Wait till they find out Google will also happily hand over your information when the government or law enforcement demands it.
It's a big deal when it's targeted. It basically means that "you may be in the next 0.3%":
> One campus graduate student, who received the message and was provided anonymity due to fears of retaliation, claimed the release targeted Muslim and Arab individuals who had previously expressed support for Palestine.
If the situation looks ambiguous for the Trump admin then we're allowed to discuss it because then the discussion is nice and calm and centrist and technocratic.
That's the vibe I'm getting these days.
osnium123•4mo ago
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