Tell me, when did your democracy exist?

So… Trump has promised to carry out a coup if he doesn’t win. A good coup would be indistinguishable from him just winning… Yet, people keep saying “vote harder.” Like, yeah, this is all super important stuff and the more people vote the harder it will be for Trump to carry out the coup… But a lot of people have put in a lot of money to make this happen so he’s going to have another coup attempt. This time it won’t be a bunch of idiots, it will be Eric Prince and the Academi soliders who got deployed in Portland.

If you are in the US, you need to prepare to fight. If he wins, democracy is over. If he doesn’t win, democracy is probably over too since he’s already rigged the supreme court so he can steal the election and make it look legal. Police all over the country have already pledged allegiance to him. When you come out to protest they will run you over with SUVs and just open fire on you. They’ll shoot at reporters to make sure no one can see what’s happening, just like they did during the George Floyd rebellion. But this time they’ll just kill people and claim they were violent.

You all need to be ready for the absolute worst. You also need to vote to make it harder, but voting will absolutely not be enough. You need to prepare.

Exactly. His relationship with the US is just as cynical as it is with Russia, and as it is with any country or people (including his own). He will do or say anything that gets him more power. That means he’ll be a solid US ally as long as the US is completely stable and functional, and he will take advantage of any weakness (like he did with Trump letting him murder Kurds in Syria).

I think we’re in violent agreement about the overall with perhaps subtle difference in the details.

Erdogan has been close to Putin for a long time. He’s one of the most extreme authoritarians in the NATO alliance. The US has armed it’s enemies in the past, and I don’t think it’s short sightedness has changed.

I don’t believe that Erdogan will help Palestinians, but he very well may materially support Hamas as long as he doesn’t do it openly enough to cause problems. I mean, Netanyahu propped up Hamas for years in order to forward his interests. No one would care if Erdogan helped justify continuing the genocide by making Hamas more dangerous to Israelis, as long as he didn’t send any American weapons to them.

But perhaps I’m just extremely cynical.

It would have been more accurate for me to say that he’s not really aligned with anyone. He works with Israel and the US when it benefits him, he works with Russia and Hamas when it benefits him. He does whatever will get him more regional power.

Erdogan is a fascist who’s responsible for genocide in Northern Syria. He doesn’t give a fuck about Palestinians or the genocide Israel is carrying out against them. He is aligned with Hamas and terrorism because disrupts regional power and gives him opportunities. This is an opportunity for him, and nothing more. His government backed Isis before. This is the same.

It has nothing to do with the very real need to end the genocide of Palestinians or the legitimate desire of Palestinians to resist their oppression. He aligns himself with horrible people because he is himself horrible.

Capitalism is a pyramid scheme.

But this is really more a product of capitalism than anything else. Under capitalism you just have to keep moving even if you’re just making garbage and debt. There’s no reason to stop and think, because that is seen as a cost (even though it costs more to move without thinking).

Even the best companies that do factor in planning (at least in concept if not actually in practice most of the time) end up with the other problem of “resume driven development” where things that are totally fine and actually working get replaced with things that don’t work because someone needs a new project to get their promotion.

Capitalism produces garbage and puts the people who are least qualified in decision making roles. This still happens in natural systems, but much less. In (healthy) anticapitalist organizing, the people who know the most are generally asked to lead and when they don’t know what to do they stop and figure it out before moving forward.

Aimless wondering can still be a problem, but it’s not forced by the system to continue it’s just people who are learning.

Not directly, but they have an indirect effect. The more one aligns with the state, especially in a fascist state like Israel, the less likely they are to experience violence. The less trauma they have. The more access they have to good and stable jobs.

So oppositional groups tend to be more fragmented (so more subcultures) and have less money. So, no, not directly but there’s definitely an indirect relationship.

Governments and their people rarely agree. Those that do agree are a vocal minority that’s always amplified. While I don’t believe Israel should exist, a county isn’t it’s government and its dominant group.

There are Israelis risking prison and possibly their lives trying to stop what their government is doing.

A lot of people grew up being used to a safe county. The idea that the government didn’t actually keep people safe, and that leaders could be so insanely incompetent, was so shocking it was easier to believe in crazy conspiracy theories.

It’s pretty easy to believe in an incompetent government after 9/11, but W came after Clinton and Bush Sr. The first Bush was the head of the CIA. He was evil, but highly competent. Clinton was clearly a world leader, also highly competent. Before that you had Reagan, who was Machiavellian as fuck running secret wars around the world. You had decades of these people looking like they were playing geopolitical 4d chess, then you had this clown who was playing checkers with pidgins. Then you had this incredible shock of the biggest attack on the US since Perl Harbor. It broke a lot of people’s brains.

Oskar Barnack ∞ Oscar Grant -Blue Scholars

Bonus in Dutch - Bent Je Bang - Hang Youth

Agreed! What we find down there could save humanity, and, honestly, no one else is really brave enough or smart enough to do it.

We need to send at least two. You can’t just trust the words of one billionaire. We should probably send at least 3 just to be on the safe side.

The two classes are the workers and the propertied class. The first supports it’s by working, the second supports itself by the work or the first. Capitalism came from feudalism, with a propertied class and those that serve them.

Those who serve have always been divided internally against each other, with some form of warrior class acting as class traiters.

No, they’re doing it now. This is what it looks like to carry out a war by stochastic terrorism. They just keep saying the conspiracy theory shit and doing these stunts and saying, “Our people just need to take matters in to their own hands!” And people carry out random attacks against things with playable deniability that they’re leading it.

No one is drone striking Tucker Carlson, and they won’t, no matter how many people he kills, how many synagogue or mosque attacks he’s responsible for, because he can always just say, “oh, free speech. I didn’t plan that. It’s just a coincidence that every time there’s a mass shootings the person follows my Twitter.”

Read up on the Rwandan genocide. This is what they did. They ramped up dehumanizing rehetoric until people hacked their neighbors apart with machetes and locked buildings full of people and set them on fire. It was normal people carrying out the atrocities, but there was enough of a direct connection to end up in the international criminal court. We’re in the early stages of the same type of conflict, except we have more guns here.

There’s no one to drone strike because every time this happens it’s “another lone wolf.”

There are no leaders. It’s just a campaign of stochastic terrorism until everything collapses.

The US civil war isn’t what civil wars look like in the modern context. There was a boarder and most of the North was safe. That’s not what modern civil wars look like. They look like Serbia.

You have to go to work and on your way to work there’s someone who’s been sniping people for months. The cops won’t do anything because “let’s go Brandon” or some shit, the mayor no longer has control over the police, and you still have to go to work because you still have to pay for food. So you duck and weave between cars with rotting drivers to get in to your office and you hope you don’t get killed today.

Modern civil wars have no borders. They look like mass shootings, car attacks, snipers, bombings, and other random terrorism. Or they look like the Syrian civil war, with 30 different groups all fighting each other aligning with each other sometimes and fighting others, for decades, sometimes aligned with the government and sometimes against it.

The key thing about Texas is that they have a ton of oil. Even assuming a normal war, the US military lives off oil. If it was quick they could probably do it without dipping in to strategic reserves, but what would happen to the oil infrastructure at the start of the war? Damaging that supply could impact the US ability to wage war, so that’s not a risk they’re going to take.

If anything comes of this beyond Republicans using it to pump up their base, I’ll be surprised.

This is basically what happened at the beginning of the civil war except the south had much better terms, and the confederates decided to attack a US army base because they’re assholes and that’s what assholes do. They would absolutely do the same again.

It’s like how cops shoot people with their hands up. Guess where those cops get their training.