If there’s one thing Milton Mayer keeps coming back to, it’s how it was all the fault of the establishment German political parties of the early 1930s for not being more motivating of people to vote for them, and no one on an individual level needs to do anything until they do first. He keeps harping on that central point: If a dangerous political movement arises in your country, it’s okay to hang out and wait and not resist it until the alternative is sufficiently awesome for your tastes. It’s pretty much the central theme of his whole book.
(I mean, honestly, I don’t disagree with you that the general crappiness of most of the Democrats from about 1992 up to and including 2016 laid some abundant groundwork for the rise of Trump. That doesn’t mean it is safe for anyone in the world to let Trump come to power again this year.)
And we have a hell of a lot better system for fighting back than the Germans did. And a lot better precedent to shed light on why to resist it. And, the Nazis were famously sort of clownish and incompetent especially in the early days but compared with Rudy Giuliani and Mike Lindell they were fuckin Seal Team 6.
If the MAGA folks bring fascism for real to the US, it will be the Americans’ fault that they let it happen.
Because he held a political office, and the law enforcement and judicial systems were trying to prosecute someone he was friends with, and he openly tried to use his office to stop them from doing it and cancel the investigation.
And bingo bingo that’s three years in the pen, for “aiding a felon” among some other charges. The judge said “The people of Rio Arriba County elected you to be sheriff. They put their trust in you to uphold the law and you let them down.”
I want to know why this is different. I mean, I kind of know; it’s different because Lujan had no powerful friends. But!
People aren’t as afraid as she wants them to be. Some of them are, and some are just amped up for violence because something is wrong with them, but for the real horror shows to begin next year if Trump wins, ordinary people (like millions of them) have to be frightened enough, maybe not to take part in anything highly irregular, but enough that it won’t bother them that they know it’s going on. Because after all, these are desperate times.
On some level she knows this, she can feel that the tenor of the times just isn’t matching how she needs it to be, just as birds know when it is time to fly to a new place for the winter. I doubt she understands all the reasons and implications any more than the birds do.
But she can feel that it’s wrong, and so she’s trying to just tell people: Be scared. Be more scared. I command it.
She is not undangerous as she is, but she would be a lot more dangerous if she were more cunning.
I don’t think anyone is saying they shouldn’t be allowed to do it; just that they think it’s going to go poorly
Also I would add that it’s a moderately dire sign as far as the state of Russia’s manpower levels. Every country at war desperately wants more soldiers at all times but some desperates are more desperate than other desperates.
military has repeatedly said it is not deliberately targeting the media
“ There is no policy of targeting media personnel,”
These are actually two different statements, with a very small, very subtle, but profoundly important difference between them.
some within the IDF appear to have viewed journalists working in Gaza for outlets controlled by or affiliated with Hamas to be legitimate military targets
This comes right after Israel sending a delegation to the US to “talk about” the war in Lebanon and the so called war in Gaza, too. Presumably to talk about hey you’re gonna bankroll those into the fall, like always, right?
DON’T explain the context, beyond “synagogue” and “antisemitism” and some vague language about how violence “evolved” into existence. Thus, anyone who isn’t pro Palestinian sees the story in a very particular way that will reinforce a particular wrong perception of the protestors.
But DO bring Biden’s name into it for literally no reason at all, so that the people who support the protestors and are able to realize that there’s probably more to the story, will have their particular wrong perception, that quite a lot of them probably have, that he’s anti protestor, reinforced.
It’s a rare and cunning story that can simultaneously communicate “look at these scumbag anti semitic protestors” and “look at Biden thinking these protestors are anti semitic scumbags” simultaneously, with each population receiving the message which is exactly appropriate to misleading them and them specifically.
Yep. It’s a pretty reasonable system, with both sides doing their aggressive best to win and justice as the result, all the way up until the prosecution gets basically unlimited resources and the defendant whether guilty or innocent gets a public defender who read their case and 4 others on the bus on the way to the courthouse. At that point it becomes pretty much not reasonable any more.
Yeah, there’s a certain type of person that will try the world’s most obvious ruse, assuming it’s just something the court has never encountered before and they could never see through this whole mastermind ploy, or if they do, you can just yell and they’ll probably get scared and they’ll let you do it anyway. And then they seem sort of confused and hurt and offended if it doesn’t work out that way.
There are a lot of things that are fucked as pertains to the court system, especially the way it treats poor defendants and the systems of neo-segregation it routes them into when they do get in trouble, but the concept and a not insignificant amount of the application is actually pretty fuckin on point.