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29·3 days agoMostly, empires get soft from the middle. The military and economy is still so strong that as the people get soft after generations of cushy living, they’re still protected by the hard exterior, until finally some internal calamity brings the rottenness of the whole edifice into view, and adversaries start picking off the loose pieces from the edges as they gradually fade away over time after the collapse.
You could say that’s what’s happening here, but definitely Russia’s espionage and propaganda operation that put Trump in charge is a huge coup while the US is still pretty strong at the edges. They found a way through the barricades to strike at the rotten spot, and they’re nowhere near done twisting the knife to maximize the damage.
313·3 days agoOh, I think you know where the narrative of the right turn is coming from.
Ah yes, picking a massive fight with the person who’s actually in charge of foreign policy right now, failing to produce any meaningful change in policy because she’s not yet in charge, putting the whole Gaza issue heavily in the news during the campaign, and framed in a particular way which would have been guaranteed to crater support from both the pro-Israel people and the pro-Palestine people, because of the type of infighting that would have developed as various Democrats and supporters felt the need to try to placate supporters of one side or another.
It’s genius. That would have been a perfect campaign strategy for Kamala Harris. I only can’t understand how I didn’t see it until you just now brought it up.
I never implied that you were either Russian or a bot. I definitely implied that there are some of those on Lemmy, elsewhere in my comments, I don’t think that’s in doubt though.
Now that I looked in your history, though, you did want to talk about Ukrainian war crimes, and you measured distance to your bus stop in kilometers. I wonder what percentage of American voters like you on Lemmy do both of those things.
https://lemm.ee/comment/15053777
https://lemm.ee/comment/15030623
That’s from looking at 2 pages of history, maybe there’s more further back.
The truth was never part of the issue. They often had contradictory messaging depending on the audience.
- Kamala betrayed Israel because she’s sympathetic to Palestinian terrorists / Kamala loves genocide
- Kamala’s a communist / all the Democrats are corrupt and in bed with the corporations
- Kamala is for open borders and evil immigrants / Kamala is crueler than Trump on immigration
Most of it was actually engineered for Biden and based on what he did in office, to the extent that it was even based on anything, and then they just did a search-and-replace to change it to Kamala. It makes no sense, but the effectiveness is not really based on it making sense, just on insistent constant repetition and on it lining up with the reader’s general vulnerabilities in terms of what tends to resonate with them. Lemmy gets the second half of each of my examples, but the first half also got plenty of play and had plenty of effectiveness with other audiences.
No. The point of the meme is to tar specifically the people who came up with a particular backwards way of looking at the genocide issue into a reason to enable turbo-genocide, which is now on its way.
If you’re not one of them, then it’s not aimed at you, but you seem pretty triggered by it.
Oh so now you know what the second third and fourth words are, and are upset that I missed them lol.
I’m done now, I just wanted to point out what a horrifying catastrophe is going to happen for the Palestinians now. Yes, even worse than the genocide which Biden wasn’t doing enough to fight back against for your liking. Not that I am in any way happy about it.
Yeah. If Biden had been doing perfect on Palestine, they’d have been consistently freaking out about some other thing he did to supposedly betray the left, fellow leftists.
Talking about the genocide sounds great. Pretty much everyone on Lemmy who’s into world politics has been doing that for a while.
What are the second, third and fourth words of this particular meme you’re responding to, please?
Punching “left” at Trump voters sounds fine to me.
I notice that some of them have pivoted to “this was completely the fault of the Democrats, the voters are blameless” messaging, which this would fall under.
Messages of urgent concern about what we need to do for the Palestinians have completely evaporated though, yes. It turns out that it began and ended with not voting for the Democrats, and now there’s nothing particular they want to say about Palestine. Good thing that was all we needed to do, huh? We really squeaked one out there, I guess, with our victory.
I was eagerly looking forward to people coming into the comments saying how all of us don’t understand, Kamala was an unprecedented villain because she was adjacent to a whole different person who was all squeamish about putting the brakes on the genocide he didn’t want, refusing to vote for her made PERFECT sense even now in the grisly light of hindsight, and installing someone instead who wants more genocide and a whole lot more is totally exactly what the Palestinians would have wanted.
Come on guys, there’s only one so far. Surely we can muster up more than that.
6·3 days agohttps://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-co-emissions-by-region
Pointing fingers isn’t helpful in getting us a solution. But it’s also not helpful to say “no sign” without qualifying it to say that the EU and US have been showing small signs, and their small steady reductions in emissions are being counterbalanced by big increases elsewhere.
I thought the headline was metaphorical. No. She scooped it out of the toilet and brought it in like show and tell, and they still denied her care.
It’s also relevant that 100% of the troops that are permitted to operate inside the US are under the control of the individual states. You could say that Trump can just install loyalists and deploy the real federal army inside the US, but I cannot possibly imagine that they would obey orders to fight domestically against the National Guard.
The founders of the US did some things wrong, but they also had some pretty solid foresight about some things.
Edit: I can’t type
Well, we need to do both.
We need to act now, like the graph with a sudden unprecedented downturn, and also to prepare for things to get worse than we’ve ever seen them get.
I don’t think we’ll do those things. But we could. It’s the current political and business leaders who aren’t willing to. Think about how everything changed during Covid. A lot of people even at the current level of realization would be willing to make serious changes if it put us off the doom-course.
“There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.”
That’s absolutely what he’s trying to do. My point is that the US military doesn’t operate like Toys-R-Us or Twitter or whatever. You can’t just fire the boss of the division, bring in a new guy who says we’re going to go shoot some protestors now, and have all the battalion commanders under them say, “Oh, okay, that’s weird but w/e.”
At least, I hope not. I’m pretty sure though. It’s not simple like Trump is thinking, and he doesn’t have the level of understanding to pull it off and make it work.
Remember this? Listen to them cheering:
Please create beef with the military.
If Trump were smart, he’d play the long game at this point. He’s won. Install friendly sycophants in charge of all the elections, keep stuffing the Supreme Court, and depend on the lock on power created by that and the current electoral trifecta to consolidate all his power. Keep the Democrats around as a puppet opposition to siphon off any energy from a genuine resistance, and live out the rest of his days as a king without creating any massive upset that can go sideways on him.
Trump isn’t smart. He wants to create massive disruptions in civil society, for reasons of his own, and now he wants to commit the classic bloodless-coup-er’s mistake of firing a bunch of military people so they’re left wandering loose in civil society, still with all their connections and skills and respect in place, available to be slotted into a resistance against him if it goes beyond a certain point, in which role they can transform it from a laughable potshot-bunch into a modern fighting military. And, ensuring loyalty by randomly punishing people who are judged to be disloyal makes everyone disloyal. They just won’t be disloyal to your face.
I’m not saying this definitely won’t work. But tangling with the military at this stage introduces what they call a critical success factor into his plan. Again, for no reason. The military isn’t going to get involved if he only usurps society on the civilian side.
Edit: Typo
If anyone’s curious, it takes GM 2.6 minutes to make $500k of gross income.