Joun_Lord wrote:It worth bringing up to understand WHY Trump is able to get away with pissing all over the Constitution likes its a Moscow hotel bed. Why its people are willing to condemn people to die for their own lives, even just for their own comfort, why calling it madness seems to play it off as some act of complete bonkers lunacy when its a completely understood and in their minds justified reaction to what they believe to be threats to their own life and the lives of their own.
We all know. Seriously, we know. If you meet anyone who expresses actual confusion about why this is happening, go ahead and tell them. But that's not what's going on in this conversation.
You see, I understand. I just don't
sympathize, because it's a contemptible worldview that is leading to contemptible results. I refuse to admit that this is what America stands for, I refuse to acknowledge that this is 'normal' in any meaningful sense of the word. I refuse to give up the aspiration that we are capable of being, as a nation,
better than this, or at least dramatically less bad than this.
And in that context... there really does come a point where you just plain have to stop bringing up why people do it in sympathetic terms. If a bunch of thugs are beating up old ladies in the street, and I'm discussing how to stop them... while I can acknowledge that maybe the people doing the beatings are doing it because they had a tough childhood,
that is not the point. That can be discussed at a later time, when there is not an imminent crisis.
So repeating, over and over, how 'understandable' it is that people with a tough childhood and an inadequate moral upbringing could stoop to beating up little old ladies in the streets... after a while, it gets old, it becomes
in effect disruptive. Even if it is well-intentioned by someone whose ultimate goal is to stop the beatings.
You want to stop this madness? You need to understand the cause of it, you need to understand the mindset of those who allow it to happen. Not even by sympathetic but aware of the reasons.
Because this act of bullshit happened because thousands, possibly millions of people were perfectly fine with doing it. The way to stop this crap is to get people to stop believing in the bullshit that lead to it, stop people believing they are damned to car bombs and suicide vests should they let in the refugees.
Well yes, but we also need to, y'know,
actually do something. Something about the specific abuses occurring immediately right this minute, not just the long term and the hypothetical and the nebulous.
Millions of people aren't going to change their minds overnight. It's just not going to happen. If we wait patiently for millions of people to change their minds, while holding discussion groups repeating what we already know about
how people come to support fascism...
We will emerge from our discussion groups and find that the fascists have already taken over.
Simon_Jester wrote:A gesture that causes no physical harm to anyone is not 'similar to' an act that imprisons thousands and consigns millions more to be brutalized by terrorists.
It's like comparing a beating that knocks someone's teeth out, to a kiss. Why even bother doing that? Why bring it up, except in an attempt to pretend that the beating is something other than a crime?
If you are not trying to defend this act, there is little point in defending the mindset that gave rise to this act, or trying to compare it to relatively mild things that are part of American "politics as usual." To do so is to lull yourself into a false sense of security.
Again, not implying they are exactly the same, that their scale or results are the same, I'm comparing the reasons for happening as being the same. I'm comparing why Trump might want to ban all Muslims from some countries to protect us from terrorism when he ain't even banning Muslims from countries where alot of terrorist attacks actually came from to why some politician might want to ban an AR-15 and extended "clips" after a shooting using handguns and normal capacity magazines. I'm comparing the fact the reason in both cases is exactly not for protecting anyone because in both they kinda do don't shit to prevent the thing its supposed to prevent.
Understand now? Not a direct comparison, comparing reasons.
Well, I kind of understood that the first time you said it. What I'm asking you is,
why? Why is it so important to say over and over what we already know?
I'm not disapproving of your disapproving of this act (whether its constitutional or not I'm not going to say for certain without doing more research) because I'm disapproving this act quite a bit.
Except that you are not really
talking about your disapproval of the act. You're talking about, well, stuff everyone already knows about how terrified people come to support fascism and vote into office people who will ignore their rights.
We get it, we just don't have any sympathy for it, because it's endangering and hurting our country.
My point is that Trump is not some new and shiny threat just in time for the year of 2017 (which I had to stop myself from writing 2016 goddammit), that Trump doing this is some unheard of thing that we should be above doing these days because we evolved past it, that this moronic bit of shit dripping from Trump gaping Putin plunged porkhole is more of the same.
You are acting like this is some unique event, something that is pretty darn close to being the worst thing that ever happened in America when the only thing on its level is the Trail of Tears, slavery, and Japanese American internment camps. I mean thats kinda the worst of the worst.
No, I am acting like
this is us turning around and heading back to the bad old days.
Again, do you actually think I am so pig-ignorant that I do not know the bad old days existed? Do you really believe I don't know that more and worse things happened in the past?
Please answer, "yes," or "no," with a minimum of patronizing me about how important it is to place an act of tyranny in its historical context of 50 or 100 or 200 years ago when acts of tyranny were more common.
Acting like this is the baseball bat with nails is going to make it harder for people to recognize when Trump actually does inevitably go up to bat. Acting like the bat hasn't been swung before makes it seem like Trump is somehow unique and we should overreact, should let fear control us the same as those morons not wanting to let people literally dying get away from a place that is actually literally as bad as stupid shits force fed media bullshit thinks America and Europe are.
There needs to be a measure REASONED response, one like the ACLU using laws to tell Trump to eat a dick, like the New York judge making Trump a negative Charlie Sheen, not more irrational fear based flying off the handle sky is falling this is the worst thing that has ever happened crap.
What is actually happening here is not what you think is happening. Reread the parts of the discussion that don't involve you directly.
What is happening here is that people are debating
what next. The courts will try to stop Trump using laws. Will Trump obey? Will he attempt to punish federal officials who
do obey the courts? Will he try to jump the chain of command and issue direct orders to groups who might enforce his orders? Will they listen?
If all of that (IMO improbable) worst-case scenario happens, then we really are into "swinging the baseball bat" territory.
If it doesn't happen, then in the grand scheme of things there is no big deal.
But what people are
actually saying, in the context of "the baseball bat swings," is speculative. People are not saying "this is literally Nazi Germany," and I don't understand why you think they are. Or why you aren't clearly differentiating between the people who seem worried and are saying "this just now was the swing of the baseball bat."
People are saying "this is the kind of road that leads either to a president getting his ass impeached,
or to fascism." Which, bluntly, is true, that is an accurate measure of how bad it's gotten, that it really does look like if we keep walking down this road we end up at one destination or the other.
I'm sorry dude for harping on you all major like but its just all this fear and irrationality is getting to me something cereal. Its making me think Trump might get away with doing so goddamn much damage because people are too busy fighting the strawman they've constructed of him while letting the real horrible piece of shit doing real horrible crap. That is my fear right there. That and people with stubby fingers, they creep me the fuck out.
Trump needs stopped like me anytime I try singing but the real Trump, the real asshole who is willing to bend or break laws like he just did and not the fanciful monster we've constructed in our heads. He's not a dragon to be slain, he's an asshole to be stopped. Or closed.
The flip side is that your category of argument can create a problem, despite your intention.
Specifically, it can become a very real distraction to the stopping of assholes.* Because you get people milling around confusedly saying "Uh, is this bad enough to react? Is this bad enough?"
Have you heard the story of the
boiling frog? Granted it's an urban legend, but it's a really useful one. What it illustrates is that if you're on a road heading to a bad outcome, a bad place, at some point you have to leave the road sooner or later. Preferably sooner. If that requires you to
flip the fuck out and start doing things you wouldn't do if you were OK with the destination of your journey, so be it.
Every successful attempt at preventing tyranny began when someone
flipped the fuck out in response to a specific act of the would-be tyrant. When they reacted by saying "look, whatever, I know other people have done bad stuff in the past, and that other people have done stuff almost this bad not too long ago, but this is too much, I will do what it takes to stop you."
And the flip side of that is that nearly every time someone succeeds in imposing tyranny, they do it by accumulating more and more power, with the support of some people and the quiet compliance of the rest... Until one day, it is too late to do anything. The power to change the situation is gone, the frog has started to cook alive and can no longer escape the pot.
There is very little to lose, from recognizing the
first tyrannical act as an act of tyranny, and trying to stop it
before the tyrant amasses great power.
...
No one on this website is actually going to go grab their gerns and start the revolution over this. You really ought to know that by now. But the actions of Trumpo and the Republicans willing to support him have made it very, very clear where this is going. That he is
not going to stop unless stopped, and have given people every reason to think that he will just keep going in a straight line until he does things that are horrible and totally impossible to consider acceptable by the standards of
anyone who isn't willing to let him be dictator.
But frankly, people here are talking about how that
first of tyranny, the little one. The act of the small dictatorship that hasn't had a chance to get big yet. Trying to step in and interrupt with "but this isn't big dictatorship, you have to have historical perspective, this is bad but it's not THAT bad!" is not helping.
What happens when people really listen to that argument, of deciding that meh, this particular act
isn't that bad, because it's not the worst thing that ever happened, no point getting upset...?
Well, then you get the frogs milling about in confusion wondering if it's time to jump out of the pot as the water gets hotter. And when the water is
this hot, that is never going to be a good thing. At best it's harmless, but at worst it kills.
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*Note that 'to stop' used to be used as a word for 'to close,' so one is as good as the other in this context.
