Sigh. With the Republican party cozying up to Victor Orban, a fascist who seized power through soft power bureaucratic machinations I should think the Dems would see the republicans as an actual threat and not just as opposition, but even with this I don't have any faith they're taking that threat seriously. Even if they arrest Trump they'll probably just pin everything on him and try to pretend everything's fine. Give me some god damn mass arrests already.

**** you are asking for way too much lol

I am sitting here not wanting to take the bait into actually believing they might actually indict Trump.... I mean we have sat here and watched attempt after attempt to pin something on him only to fail again and again... But an FBI raid feels more real than anything else thus far

Bitch we have a party that is clearly trying to subvert democracy by using the state legislatures and electoral college to make it impossible for the democrats to win anything meaningful while also at best hedging their bets on maybe supporting a coup if it worked out, and the Dems are still acting like **** is chill but just a bit hectic? Now I don't expect them to do a damn thing meaning ful but if they had a lick of sense they'd recognize the obvious and coup them right back cause time is of the essence.

Coup them back how?

They have the presidency and the DOJ and evidence that plenty of the opposition were in league with the coup. Arrest them. Try them. Put them in jail. And if that sounds authoritarian well then **** it they're reacting to actual creeping authoritarianism they might just have the last chance to do something about.

I mean I get the impulse but that could also easily lead to like a civil war or something close to that. It's a high risk move if you did it effectively enough to cripple the Republican party. Almost certainly what the Dems are going to do instead is try to maintain the leverage it currently grants them and not squander that by overreaching. They're ironically very conservative in how they seem to approach political power.

I'm curious cause I haven't followed Jan 6 very close... What other members of the GOP do you think they have a credible enough criminal case against?

I mean I don't remember all the **** but multiple people had some dodgy connection or kept voting for the election being fake. I mean the supporting the fake election **** was clearly an attempt to subvert democracy so that should be a basis all by itself for arrests and on some level that would cover a lot of ****ing Republicans. Like I'm not saying we should only arrest people implicated in provable crimes. This was an explicit attempt to subvert an election by a party looking to subvert even more elections. Extreme prejudice is warranted.

Yeah that was what I was asking. Cause you might just get away with punishing all your political enemies if they had actual crimes but to do so on some sorta half assed RICO type logic is going to be transparently political and would almost certainly end badly

Also it doesn't make any sense to frame that sorta thing as protecting democracy... You can't possibly be so naive as to expect them to somehow revert back to having democracy after breaking with basic due process norms in the service of taking out their only real political rivals/obstacles.

What are you some kinda dumb bitch? These libs ain't gonna do any of that ****. But...

1. You seem to think people will unite to fight against authoritarianism even though your entire political beliefs are about the opposite.

2. The gubment is the gubment. They'll fight the left no matter what, I'd just like for them to fight the right

I know they won't. My point though it's that move honestly doesn't really work in my mind for anyone other than a genuine autocrat. It's not just a problem of the Dems being too sheepish in this case... I think the method you are describing basically presumes giving up on democracy and seizing control.

I don't assume people will unite no. I think they will continue to polarize and entrench in their respective sides, and if the tensions get high enough then the chance for violence and destabilization becomes higher. I don't know exactly how far this specific scenario would go but to me it seems very likely to lead to something like this or at least to run a significant risk to. I think the fact that people were willing to coup over some rumors about the election being faked gives us a pretty clear indication of how provocative it would be to blatantly arrest the opposition on trumped up charges.

They wouldn't actually need to. The Republican party is currently working on the assumption that the Dems won't call them on their attempted coup but it was clearly a coup. If the Dems just took them seriously it would be ridiculous to push back on them arresting all of these people clearly trying to overthrow the government. If you're trying to require proof it was a coup then I'm sorry but eat a dick.

Yup I guess we'd see what happens and who's willing to get shot, but better now than when the coup party has gone even farther.

You can't on the one hand say we should arrest people who aren't implicated in provable crimes and then on the other hand act like anyone who might object to the arrests would be ridiculous. It's completely predictable and it's what should be expected in any even remotely functional liberal democracy.



Are you ruling out the prospect that it might actually end up for the worse, or do you just like to gamble?

Do you believe that the Republican Party would have rubber stamped Trump's coup if it had worked? Or if it had been smarter that more would have actively supported it? Do you believe they are currently trying to subvert the Democratic process through beaurpcratic ****ery?

If the answer to any of those is "yes" then why the **** are we even having this conversation?

The walls may be closing in on former President Donald Trump

Not going to happen. We live in a nation of double standards. The Republicans are accusing the Democrats of doing the same exact thing they did during Trump's reign.

This reminds me of the three Spiderman meme.

The more things change
The more they stay the same
All we need's a miracle to take us all away from the pain
-Cinderella

because none of what you said sounds like it amounts to **** as far as justifying arrests of people you yourself said might not have sufficient evidence against them

It's fine to larp about seizing power in such a fashion but doing so while clinging to the banner of saving democracy is just ****in lame.

Lame? Saying we should just outvote the people trying to make voting irrelevant is as cucked as it gets.

As a famous judge once said
https://waitwhatpodcast.com/wp-conte...1-1024x809.jpg

the part that I was calling lame wasn't the idea of giving up on voting and instead using violence or whatever. It's this delusional sort of attitude you have that you are doing so because we have to do so to save democracy. If you are going to rely on talking points like that the Republicans are trying to destroy democracy anyway and so we can't just vote them out of power then you have already given up on democracy. The idea that we're just going to destroy the opposition through mass arrests and then go back to the form of government we had before is about as fanciful as it gets. It seems like you refuse to even consider any of this because it detracts from your point or something, but that's what I think is lame not the fact that you are fantasy plotting a counter coup.

Dip****. If you can look at the past few years of Stop the Steal, Jan 6, voter suppression, extreme gerrymandering, packing the courts to circumvent the democratic process, the Republican base drifting further and further from electability, and holding a CPAC event in Victor Orban's Hungary where a soft coup has already taken place and conclude that the Republican Party is not actively engaging in the annihilation of what already passes for democracy in this country then you are a rube.

If you're just gonna ignore every point I make and instead respond with boiler plate MSNBC talking points about the dangers of the Republican party then this convo really isn't worth having.

The point you seem to be missing is if I agree with you that the GOP represents such a threat then democracy is already effectively dead and not even worth fighting for at this point. I can easily bite both of those bullets but I'm not sure it actually takes you where you want because you refuse to even try to second guess your instinct to always try to go harder than the other side out of pure spite.

Ah faux revolutionary LARP of MSNBC. I'm sorry if you think the Dems going a bit hard in the paint is the same thing as a fascist party who wants to ram through a Christian nationalist theocracy and edge themselves closer and closer to killing minorities then you've watched one too many movies where the love interest tells the hero not to kill the villain cause then they'll be just like them.

If you're worried about the fabric of society being destroyed then you might want to rip the bandaid off sooner rather than later before the problem gets worse. Arresting the Republicans in Congress who backed Stop the Steal and charging them with sedition is a hell of a step but it'll be a lot shorter a step than whatever will be necessary 5, 10, or 20 years from now.

Personally I think you guys should just give up pretending you're living in a democracy any more, and choose which dictatorship you'd rather live under.

I was going to say plutocracy, not that we're any better. I don't know what we have, but I'm not convinced it's democracy at the moment.

We have an idiocracy, but at least we accept what we are, a bunch of know-nothing drunks trying to run a country while taking all the kickbacks we can get our greasy little hands on.

Speaking of, has anyone seen the movie Idiocracy? That's pretty much where the US is right now and believe me, it's not as funny as the movie.

Go away. Bate'n.

Yeah well tbh my problem isn't even that you're suggesting the Dems go too hard it's that you won't even engage with the hypothetical surrounding your proposed solution. You just sorta shrug any suggestions of what the implications are off and resort back to waxing poetic about how dangerous the GOP is as if that justifies any and everything in response.

But I do think there's a pragmatic choice to make when considering whether you actually want to protect democracy (at least to the extent it currently exists). If such is your goal, then that goal does in some sense limit what you can do. If, on the other hand, you just want to destroy the GOP and take the reigns in a sort of one party state then that's a different approach where more authoritarian measures don't necessarily detract from or contradict with your broader goals.

Another thing to remember is it's really not just a few bad apples in Congress, it's like a sizable portion of the country that supported Jan 6 outright and an even larger portion that would've probably have gotten on board if it was successful. Clearly this divide which is growing poses a serious threat to the stability of the country but it's not at all clear to me what the best course of action is or even whether any goal to save the country should include this idea of saving the current system of democracy.

The idea that half the country are basically Nazis that can't be negotiated with means that giving these people rights and the ability to vote only poses a threat with no benefit.

But yeah, I do think it's obvious the Dems can potentially gain a lot of political leverage from this current situation if they play their cards right and that should include trying to nail at least Trump to the wall and anyone else they can get on actual charges. But to say they arrest anyone who is even perceived as being sympathetic or in support of Jan 6 is definitely drifting into a much more authoritarian direction that would very likely change the country in an unalterable manner.

The Republicans are the ones who put us in this place where the party either needs to be gutted or we just roll the dice and hope they never get enough power to push us over the brink, so if arresting a significant percentage of Rs in Congress requires extralegal action that couldn't be justified under normal circumstances then that's a decision the Republicans forced upon the rest of us. If this needs to end in Reconstruction 2.0 for swaths of the entire country then I say we should've done it right the first time.

Side note, but.

A big problem which is universal, but that I guess the US was particularly vulnerable to, is ofc the problem that a lot of people don't know what's real. Like in the discussions about selfishness, that itself creates an environment where people like Trump can weaponize lies in order to gain power. If more people had integrated some critical thinking skills in the way they use their brains daily, that might not have happened. His win wasn't huge, it might've tipped the votes. We'd all be less vulnerable to other nations' manipulations, like how Russia pumps out disinformation from their lies-factories. A usual pathology of these lies is to separate people into uses and thems and so destabilize and undermine nations and people's well-being.

So I don't know much about short term solutions in the US (though I do hope you get Trump for the dangerous criminal he is), but I do feel that if we want functional democracies in the future, then it is necessary that more people learn to separate fact from fiction. It'll promote policies and legislation based on reality and not how much adrenochrome the other politicians suck out of babies. Living in the same reality will help people unite instead of seeing eachother as problems or enemies.

So more / better quality schooling, teaching critical thinking philosophy and skills, anything that would help to counter the influence of religious / conspiracy thinking like regulating what social media companies are allowed to. Disinformation spreading on the internet also needs to be tamed.

Ah, God, Ireland really gets your goat, doesn't it? :laughing:

Nice to see that although they haven't abolished the animal cruelty part of the fair, they're at least making some effort into minimizing it. Very charming.

Perhaps time to consider getting a stuffed goat instead?

Ireland is the GOAT! :)

Ja minorities don't matter.

^ I saw that. I was thinking for some reason that Satanic Verses came out in the late '90s. Turns out, after checking, it was late '80s.

There's not many great metrics for quality writing, but I'd say if what you write ends up earning you assassination attempts, then you've definitely found success, at least in some way.

Hope Rushdie pulls though.

I dearly hope Salman Rushdie pulls through.

The fatwa has had other victims too. The translated words of Ayatollah Khomeini:

I inform all zealous Muslims of the world that the author of the book entitled The Satanic Verses — which has been compiled, printed and published in opposition to Islam, the Prophet, and the Qur'an — and all those involved in its publication who were aware of its content, are sentenced to death. I call on all zealous Muslims to execute them quickly, wherever they may be found, so that no one else will dare to insult the Muslim sanctities. God Willing, whoever is killed on this path is a martyr.

Here in Norway, this led to chief of the Satanic verses' publishing house getting shot three times outside his home in 1993. He fortunately pulled through.

I assume there may have been victims in other countries too.