That is correct. Your righteous anger is misplaced and you are at fault, yes.
History will record you as complicit and cooperative to the groups you claim to demonstrate against and protest about. They will refer to you as a "useful idiot" and you will disagree and think it has value.
@mentallyalex
I'm going to try to ignore the drummed up scandals they're using to attack Democrats, especially Joe Biden better than I have been I think.
I'm going to assume that the fear I've got that it might help the GOP this fall may be more from my social media bubble view of the zeitgeist. Actual elections are still looking great towards protecting democracy it sure seems.
@GreenFire I am hopeful offline is filled with more cool heads and the lack of media cameras means people will worry less about their brand and more about the literal Nazis trying to murder them.
@mentallyalex@GreenFire I’ll tell you that in least in my experience, most actual reliable Democratic voters are on a different page. They understand what’s going on and that issues like our rights, the environment, and literal democracy are at stake. So I can ignore some of the weird rhetoric to a certain extent.
The antisemitic stuff is a lot harder to ignore. It’s creating real life problems that can easily spill over into something worse and already have. It’s really odd to me…1/2
@mentallyalex@GreenFire because some of the exact same people who’ve (rightly) called out right wingers for violent rhetoric and its ability to lead to real violence suddenly seem to think speech calling for violence is okay or even protected speech. It isn’t.
Makes you think they’re just looking for excuses to commit their own violence. 2/2
@TonyStark right?
I just saw an openly gay man expressing a desire to demonstrate against democracy on election day. He is not the kind of person who could sit in a room of Nazis without them actively yelling and abusing him.
He is going to throw his voice away in November. If Trump wins, I am sure he will be arrested and incarcerated. He has been very vocal about his displeasure with Trump which means his social media has been marked.
If the police come for us, they will come for him. He will not be able to stop them. They won't care that he didn't mean for the Republicans to win and he just wanted other liberals to think he was edgy because protesting is cool.
They don't seem to believe us when we tell them that useful idiots are long recorded. We know how they are treated. @GreenFire
@mentallyalex@GreenFire Sigh. I get that it’s a difficult time, but the pile of consequences that would arise from a second Trump administration are beyond dire. Just the SCOTUS alone should be enough. And nothing about that is going to speed a revolution or whatever the common claim is. Aside from the extreme death and destruction that would come out of an actual revolution.
Voting Democrats in is so much easier. And if we would all unite and get real majorities, so much more would be done.
@TonyStark
I know we all know, but for anyone reading.
It's all survivors bias. They believe they won't suffer because they aren't currently really suffering. Yes it's dark, yes it's scary. No they are not systemically going door to door and shooting us in the streets.
Democracy is a safe space for ideas and differences. We need to accelerate that
@TonyStark@mentallyalex@GreenFire I think I know what the response of the “me me me” generations would be if they even bothered to read that plea …. It would start with a Lol or something like that or just “Go f…… “ and “yourself”….
@marc_w@TonyStark@mentallyalex@GreenFire ok so generations with a “z” at the end…. It seemed to end with the millennials…but it certainly was under way during the Reagan era….to avoid giving kids any “complexes” telling them “no” was out…. giving them “choices” in everything was in…
I taught eighth-grade algebra from August, 1986 through June, 2021. The kids were all just kids, no better or worse that I was in 1972, and their parents were pretty much the same as well.
All the "kids these days" complaining is and always has been bullshit.
@marc_w@JeanPDeliet@mentallyalex@GreenFire There’s a good reason, though, that certain things can and should have an age restriction. Immaturity can make you make stupid decisions and I’m about your age, maybe a couple of years younger, judging by your post.
I agree that “kids these days” is something everyone says and not accurate, but I see a lot of “everything young people do is unquestionable” which seems nuts.
This is something I have been trying to say for a long time. When you kick off a revolution, you can no longer control that power vacuum. Whatever is the strongest force will fill it. That force will either be the US military or right wing militias that have been training and salivating for decades for this kind of thing.
Calling for revolution is like thinking that a redeal in a poker game will guarantee you a royal flush. That ain't how it works hoss.
@TonyStark@kilroy_was_here@mentallyalex
Sometimes I regret how relatively easily our revolution went and how stable the constitutional republic has proven to be because it seems that a lot of people think that everything is going to turn out better if they just start tearing everything down in order to start over.
@TonyStark@kilroy_was_here@mentallyalex
As Crane Brinton noted in his book on the subject, while "we must not expect our revolutions to be identical", three of the four (the English, French and Russian) began "in hope and moderation", reached "a crisis in a reign of terror", and ended "in something like dictatorship—Cromwell, Bonaparte, Stalin". The exception is the American Revolution, which "does not quite follow this pattern".
Talk to anyone on earth who has seen war in their own land, killing their own families, seeing their own children die, and not because the children are in the military. Or read that book or many others. War isn’t the answer.
It’s absurdist fantasy for anyone to think a war in this country is going to solve a single problem we have. Ironically, it’s the “stop supporting any military action” people who seem to glom onto that idea.
Nobody wins in a war
Not us, not them, not humanity
Not the dead, not the living
Not the yet to be born
Not the land, water, air, our natural resources
Not the roads, buildings, pipes, utility lines, the infrastructure
Not love or peace or morality
Not human nature
Not Right
Not Justice
Not God
Not the battlegrounds or the cemeteries, or the unhealable wounds in our souls
Whatever we may hope to accomplish with war,
There are better ways.
A civil war in America would be devastating. There would be no winner, and you can bet the farm that the rich would not suffer and would probably watch from the comfort of their homes abroad.
War is not a game!
@TonyStark@GreenFire@maddad@mentallyalex@kilroy_was_here Not to mention how many Black people are at the bottom rung when military action happens and are killed and injured disproportionately. It’s sure funny to see white people advocate for some war for us to fight in for them with Black Lives hashtags in their account bios.
It'd be just like most wars. The rich kids get off, the poor kids die. Now think of which group these kids calling for revolution tend to come from. It's not the group that would die.
It's damn easy to write checks with your mouth that other people gotta pay for.
Society tolerates whatever we allow. If the wealthy want war but no one will bring arms against them there is no war. They understand how to motivate the general population and the general population is unwilling to experience minor inconvenience so vulnerable groups are assaulted.
It didn't go that easily though, it was relatively standard with regard to how difficult it was. They were literally fighting against the largest and most powerful military the world had ever known at that time.
However, education has been gutted so much and the textbooks have been tinkered with so much that the material around the Revolutionary War has been reduced to a series of footnotes. So people think it was as simple as buying a can of Coke.
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