News: How to Topple an Authoritarian Regime

I bet that if you stopped coming in here and calling us pu$$ies, we’d forget about you in a day. Just like we did the last time and the time before that.

 

Remember Unforgiven? The town has a "no guns in town" policy that Gene Hackman's marshal/sheriff enforced, brutally and violently.

That was what the actual West was like.

 

For the record, all of this news (including Canada's new trade deal with China that's going to let in 49k Chinese EV's in at a 6 percent tariff rate!) has been on Pre-finalized Larry Ellison Tik Tok. So it still has been getting through. Lots of German and South Korean reporting on America has been in my feed. We will see with the sale being finalized and fully taken over within the next week as to whether that type of content is allowed to be pushed. It all depends on how much they want to censor.

Think of tik tok as having a series of levers that eventually reach human eyes. You clear certain levels with enough likes, engagement, and watch time. If they lower the threshold and/or have human eyeballs monitoring certain accounts things could get pretty censored pretty fast. It just depends did they buy it to make money or to censor the news? If it's a combination then there will probably still be an ability for certain things to slip through but at much lower levels than before. People are pretty savvy at getting around workarounds. Last summer for example when they were suppressing protests people starting substituting music festivals and content was allowed to be pushed.

I watch Fox News at the Gym and it's complete Propaganda. CBS seems to be following the same route, ratings be damned. I'm surprised at some of the coverage that has gone through at CNN, but with PBS losing its funding the options stateside are pretty grim.

 

I don’t need anyone’s permission to call you a prick or surmise the reason why you’re getting the reaction you’re getting in this thread is due to you acting like a prick.

 

You might consider the same approach is being taken with the US population. We're not all just sitting on our asses, even if it might look that way from where you are.

 

No, it's a symptom of a mental illness, being paranoi, installed by the founding fathers experience in Cromwell's England.

 

No, most of the west's towns had few handguns and fewer people familiar with their use. There were long guns, but half of them were for getting birds and small animals for the table.

And as for the cattle drives as one old geezer veteran of many said to my father's oral history project "Hell no, we didn't have guns-- wasn't nothing to shoot. Couldn't have hit it if they was... cook he had an old shotgun to kill rattlesnakes with."

Dodge City and Tombstone were anything but typical. The whole state of Idaho had one street gunfight; two guys got in an argument in a bar, went home and got their pistols, and stood in the street 550 yards apart whanging away at each other for two or three hours before one of them got a hit; took off his opponents earlobe and went through the clapboard building behind him and killed the laundryman therein. IIRC the pistols involved were a civil war era cap and ball naval revolver, and an elderly muzzle loading dueling pistol; so reloading took up most of the afternoon...

 

But my point is that mostly they didn't. They didn't need to--guns were rare and misuse of them rarer.

It was Wyatt Earp and Bat Masterson who had such rules, and that was for their own protection, not the towns. The Earps and Clantons were closer to the Sharks and the Jets than they were to good and evil.

The Lincoln County War was real enough, but the sides more like Malone and Capone than Cowboys and whatevers. Pat Garrett was an ex con hired by the Pinkertons to dispose of an embarrassment to their clients as a way to stop him from resuming his career as an embarrassment to their clients. But these were outliers, not typical of the time at all. They were the subject of "man bites dog" type stories...

 

Yes! Yes! Yes!

Canadians are saying the same thing, big time. Actually two things.

1. Where the ******** are the ongoing, constant and massive protests over this obvious BS? Even from a purely selfish perspective, the man is getting filthy ********ing rich at every opportunity grifting directly off the backs of Americans. And people aren't protesting?

2. Where the ******** are congress? Seriously?

 

As to #1, my personal view is that there's a fundamental hopelessness. Protests don't do shit. In a world where nearly every political position is gerrymandered for party security, where rightist politicians are completely devoid of shame (and in fact thrive on it), and where every single human is given their own objective truth, what exactly is the point of protesting? I personally find it more powerful if one person is holding a sign, or something like that. I have done that several times, as recently as a couple of weeks ago. But I do it knowing that not even one single mind was changed, I simply reinforced the view of the person who saw me: viz, either I am a brave hero standing up for what is right, or I am a pencil-necked libtard who's getting paid by the shape-shifting lizard people to be a domestic terrorist.

As to #2, we're all asking the same question too.

 

Have to say, Average Britain was even ahead of the Trumpy curve.

Brexit 'major influence' in racism and hate crime rise

https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-wales-48692863

 

But your reason for #1 seems backward. If your election system works, you don't need protests just vote. It is exactly when it does not work, that protest becomes important and necessary. It is not just to put pressure on the government, but also as sign for others that they are not alone in their misgivings/grievances. If everybody just remains in their own closed bubble paralyzed to do anything, then Trump (or any oppressor) wins by default.

 

There were abolitionist activists before there were abolitionist politicians. Same with women’s suffrage. Same with temperance. MLK was an activist not a politician.

Activists activate politicians, not the other way around.

Mamdani and AOC could have been activists but they chose to be politicians. They all have. What happened to Stacey Abrams or Wendy Davis when their electoral prospects were gone?

just throwing out a couple of theories here:

1. The death of private sector unionism has eliminated an important training ground for activists.
2. The internet has eliminated face to face activism and coalition building. Online activists haven’t found a way to convert online coalitions into useful actions like mass protests.

I haven’t pondered either at any depth so one or both might be stupid. So yall have at it but be gentle.

 

Oh, here’s another one.

White males have many advantages in our society, so we punch above our weight in terms of political influence. But for I think obvious reasons, white men aren’t well suited to lead a progressive coalition of activists. Fascists have no problem making Kirk and Fuentes leaders. That wouldn’t work on the left.

Oh, and another…a fascist who wants to create face to face activists can count on rich fascists funding things like Turning Point. That model works well on their side. I wonder if Davis or Abrams or AOC ever tried to find a rich progressive to fund an attempt to astroturf their brands into real grassroots organizing. And if it did, what happened.

 

For about 90% of the population, the system works as intended, kind of... I mean, there are 20ish blue states and 20ish red states, they send mostly people from one party to DC, and they're for the most part majority ruled, so what else are they suppossed to do? If you live in swing state, well, things are more complex but since they're not the most populous states and cities, and we supposedly will have elections in November, they probably don't yet see this as a five alarm fire. And if you live in a red state, chances are that you will be arrested and beaten for protesting, so....

Regarding the second question, most MAGA politicians are hiding and they control both chambers, so little is being done, and since a lot of their voters enjoy liberal tears, there's little motivation to act differently... Dems seem to be more active, but their leadership sucks, so they're busy crafting legislation and trying to stop things by using the regular process (and strong worded letters), failing to grasp that democracy is in its last leges and that there might not be elections (or at least that they will be cancelled/obstructed/deemed invalid/unfair/illegal by the WH).

 

Your thinking is not unsound but you’ve got a category error. Protest just doesn’t work in a world without truth.

 

And the time to have stopped that cancerous growth was back at the time of Tail-gunner Joe. Instead we carried forth the fiction that Communism was anti-democratic in its very conception rather than its current practice, and let the Richard Nixons of the nation carry forward the "end justifies the means" sort of "truth" mindlessly.

The 2020 election broke down the remaining check available-- the voters chose the truthless option, and the last power capable of stopping Bizarro world was lost.

Like fighting a forest fire, Brummie, we have repeatedly cleared our fire breaks too close to the flames and made them too narrow, and it has jumped them time and again, till we really need to make the next one VERY broad and take our time about building it, so that it might not fail this time.

In effect we have to wait until a substantial measure the Bizarros themselves are convinced that their world does not work, and retreat into reality. Waving signs and shouting at the top stone in the pyramid will not bring it down.

We need to pull stones from the bottom to topple it.