drthunder

I want to see some Nazis get hadoken'd

Not having to tear things down would be great, but how do we do that at this point? The president is above the law, and has Congress, the courts, cops, a newly-freed legion of brownshirts, and an actual cult on his side. His party's been getting away with ratfucking elections for at least 25 years.

I certainly think we can tear things down nonviolently, but we're out of ways to do this politely. I don't know how we get past the right-wing propaganda machine or government not being very democratic in the first place. We need to hugely expand the House, get rid of the Senate, and limit federal judge terms at the very least, and none of those are going to happen as long as the federal government is stacked in fascists' favor. The last meaningful amendment was passed in 1971.

Why are the eggs being broken always regular people's paychecks and food stamps? Why not rich people's third vacation homes or yachts?

Yep, and austerity kills people. If you want to force the Pentagon to pass an audit before giving them another penny, be my guest, but "the government" isn't wasteful.

Also even if everything ends up being funded again, this put a whole ton of needless stress on people wondering if they're gonna get paid.

I wonder what the mildest thing a true AI could tell the oligarchs to do that would make them shut it down. Giving 10% of their wealth away and not in a tax dodge way? Stop funding fascists?

I appreciate your period-appropriate example with TJ Ford.

Every time I come across forum posts from the 2000s I lose a little bit of nostalgia for that period of time. The casual bigotry was fucking everywhere.

Not to be confused with Times Square

On top of what everyone else has said, I'm gonna be that person and bring up capitalism, which I'm defining as private ownership of business (as opposed to state ownership, or ownership by the workers, etc). Capitalism concentrates money, and by extension power, which is never good for people without it. I'll admit I'm biased as a socialist, but at this point the biggest indictment of capitalism for me is that most of what we're seeing these days isn't new: rampant wealth inequality which leads to institutions decaying, followed by liberal and conservative elites being either unable or unwilling to fix problems that are plain for everyone to see, followed by people being radicalized.

The new thing is global warming, which can't be attributed solely to capitalism but is being exacerbated by it. A handful of people who get their money and power from fossil fuels would rather burn the world to ashes than give up that money and power (yes, they're probably investing in renewables, but if they treated global warming like the existential threat it is, they wouldn't be bankrolling climate deniers.

(this should not be interpreted as an endorsement of the Soviet Union or the current Chinese government, they are/were both also results of capitalism failing but neither of those is relevant to democracy failing in the West™ also I'm not a tankie, authoritarianism of every stripe is bad)

I don't think this will make the AI bubble pop but I'm hoping against hope that it does. I would love to see these fuckers crash and burn.

I also really love the choice of thumbnail

Having an idea of the government we want to have before shit goes down is a great idea. I've thought about writing down my thoughts for what a better government would look like and maybe I should do that. I'm sure none of us randos on Lemmy would be the people in the room where it's happening, but if we talk about it maybe we can influence it.

I saw a take a few months ago that voting third party isn't voting your conscience, voting your conscience is going against what you really want to do, to do what will actually result in the least harm happening. Our system of government is absolute trash but until it changes (and we should all be pushing for it to change) this is what we've got.