Hell, reddit hates on reddit all the time. Spez in particular is hated across the board.
Agree that they largely don't change behavior. Although I will say, I've not logged into my account since the API shenanigans and don't regularly visit the site anymore. I'm mostly just on here and fark.
In the UK we have many people on the left with these perspectives. It comes from the second-wave feminist tradition.
But generally speaking, online age verification is one of those issues where the left-right ideological divide doesn't map neatly. People support and oppose it for various different reasons. Much like the assisted suicide issue.
Age verification efforts in the US have been privacy-attacking (demanding government ID) whereas the system being proposed in europe is privacy-preserving (zero-knowledge proof).
How are they downplaying it? Trump can try all he wants, but there is no mechanism in the constitution that allows him to do that. He wasn't successful in 2020 and he won't be successful this time.
The GOP won't even kill the fillibuster in the senate because they know change is coming.
Of course Trump will try something outrageous that would result in prison time for any other person. But I think that the states are also still independent, mostly ruled by law rather than man, and there's limited troop power to interfere.
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.
This time he has his own brown shirts, even fast tracking to to service without any training. DoJ had been getting their hands on voter rolls from swing states. Bondi and other trump top advisors and relocated to living on military bases. Idk where it's going but it's really not looking good.
Yes, it's going to look bad, and Jan 6 was just a trial run. Now all those criminals that have been freed are in the ranks of a supposed "police" force that self-equips from US Patriot Tactical.
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.
There's more than enough of them to materially affect election outcomes. The number of votes you'd have to change to flip the outcome of the last few elections was very small, and the parties have a very good idea of which locations they'd have to disturb to achieve the greatest effect.
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.
Not recommending first point 3 letter agencies! but if we all did something, volunteer, protest, donate, boycott, we would win tomorrow. Boycotting seems particularly effective, would start there.
Win what tomorrow? An election? There's no election tomorrow. A coup? Intriguing! Probably take a while though.
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?
these choices are really up to the individual and what is important to them. as for win what, I am specifically talking about opposition to the current admin and political gravity, to which they are not immune. If say a protest of 30 million people happened tomorrow, the Republican's would see the writing on the wall and things like impeachment which previously seemed impossible now become required if you have any hope of maintaining a political future.
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.
Yes, and Georgia refused. American elections are a lot more complicated than you seem to believe. There’s plenty to worry about in specific locations, but the federal government has no direct control over any of the voting processes or policies.
More than half the SCOTUS is corrupt and bought off, and the Republican Party in congress is just rubber-stamping what Trump wants. I don't have a lot of faith in the word "unconstitutional" anymore.
Well he and his people are far too stupid and incompetent to have come close to succeeding. While it's not great that there was no punishment, we should at least be thankful that they act on emotion and can only loosely follow playbooks for corruption from the past rather than write new ones for modern times.
What's the basis for this war in Iran? Did that stop this administration? This is akin to pointing out that it's actually illegal to drive 30 mph over the speed limit.
Certainly it's possible that could happen to us. If it does I fully expect to have elections throughout the process.
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.
> no mechanism in the constitution for canceling elections
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 agree. Stability of a system is not so much about whether there is some mechanism or force that wants to push it away from equilibrium (because there probably is some such perturber outside of a perfectly controlled environment), but stability is more about whether there exists a stabilizing mechanism to bring the system back toward equilibrium after it starts to deviate.
Yes, of course they are different. We're not embroiled in an active Civil War with tens of thousands dead and a third of the country having seceded. Most things are different from that.
They may be, but if there are no elections, there is no United States. Constitutionally, its government is predicated on having elected representatives.
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.
Yeah... because Lincoln wasn't a wanna-be tyrant like Trump. The leaders in charge of the elections are diametrically different people. Lincoln fought to keep the Union together; Trump tried to cause a coup to stay in charge in Jan 2020. My god.
The name of Lincoln and Trump cannot and shouldn't be used within the same sentence. Lincoln's story is inspiring and you can see him worried about his country and he grew up learning law books being poor and rose up to power.
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.
If I try to rob a bank with a plastic toy gun, the charge which I would be arrested for would not be "bad behavior that had no chance of accomplishing anything", it would be "bank robbery". Just "bank robbery", full stop. The abject failure of my attempt would have no bearing at all on that charge.
The argument that "he had no chance of accomplishing anything" has no bearing at all on intent.
"He didn't try" is not in any sense the same thing as "he was nowhere close to succeeding". The goalposts have moved between those 2 statements.
In the current laws you mean, dictatorships usually start by throwing current laws out of the window. Not that I believe Trump would do that, but it is not unheard of in other parts of the world
They can and they did. What the tariff decision shows is simply that, on very specific topics (in this case, big business), their base is significantly split: on one side the populist masses, on the other the wealthy elites. When the chips are down, the current USSC is connected the latter more than to the former, and will vote accordingly.
Agree that they largely don't change behavior. Although I will say, I've not logged into my account since the API shenanigans and don't regularly visit the site anymore. I'm mostly just on here and fark.
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