Great so when do his numerous felonies and massive crimes against the country actually amount to something? Because I’ve been holding my breath for a fucking decade now.
this post was submitted on 02 Sep 2025
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I'll believe that anything is stopping him when he's behind bars. This does not mean stop trying, it means try harder.
okay what laws has he actually been held accountable to?
Gravity?
fuck, you're right. if anything, gravity's thrown the book at him. poor laws of physics they're trying so hard.
Entropy is doing some good work too. Just not as fast as I'd like.
that's the problem with entropy, it's extremely effective but it never speeds up or slows down
democracy is saved ✊😌
he's only deploying the national guard where he's invited. so far.
He was not, and will never be invited to California. He has deployed his goons anyways.
I CAN DREAM
edit: also, gooners
I think people expect "stopping them" to mean actually stopping them from regressing our society.
When any other citizen illegally does something they are held accountable. Any one of us would have been executed for something like this, because he's a rich pedo Russian asset with the majority of power supporting him he doesn't even go in a cell.
Where are the punishments? Where are the blocks that will prevent action instead of just reacting?
Can't we be a little more nuanced than this? I agree that despair shouldn't drive inaction but to consider them bad-faith actors is a bit much imo.
I am pessimistic (but not hopeless) about America's present and future looking from the outside, north of the 49th parallel, mainly due to the current government's strategy to stop measuring problems while making them worse instead of fixing them. I think it's normal to express disappointment that so many of the institutions, groups and individuals who proudly displayed their independence from govt years or months ago are now bowing down to their dictator.
There's been mixed success in the courts, and the OOP has a point that giving up in the face of this is a win to the fascists. I do sense public resistance, and if it can manifest itself in a co-ordinated way like ICE reporting mutual aid groups, running out the clock is a way to win it back. I say this because the administration's actions look increasingly like they are flailing, and the smarter people that know how to govern in the executive branch have all already been kicked out for reality TV yes-people.
The question, to me is: can Americans put their cultural self-serving helplessness aside for a bit to counteract this administration's attempts to dictate reality? I am holding out hope.
Merely stopping his actions is a miscarriage of justice. Do you stop the bank robber and let him walk free?
I feel this way but I'm not trying to convince people to give up. I'm trying to convince people not to assume "things will just work out". My boomer parents keep asking me why I'm not jumping into the housing market or making other major financial decisions. They act like the structure I'd need to be in place to mitigate possible risks will definitely be there. "You'll have social security, your pension, etc because there's no way they can get rid of those things." I say bullshit. I'm in a holding pattern until we find the end of how much the GOP is able to burn down.
Horizontal Hostility: When Oppressed Groups Turn Against Each Other
Let's try not to discredit each others tactics. We are on the same side.
This article is as lazy and uninspired as the AI art plastered all over the site.
The article correctly identifies some of the structural and material causes, but completely ignores actual politics, the challenges of grassroot organizing, existing circumstances that create disagreement, such as differing priorities, experiences, and analysis, etc. There is such a thing as someone being "on our side" and being completely wrong and taking actions that damage the movement. There's also united vs popular front dynamics, the popular front being when the largest and most powerful political force taking over smaller tendencies, which more often than not ends up neutralizing any real opposition, while the more powerful party finds common ground and compromise with the forces of oppression themselves, i.e., becoming a kind of oppressor. A united front allows for struggle and debate among organically emergent factions and sharpens the whole movement in the process. This article practically muddies the water for any principled disagreement by lumping it together with unprincipled disagreement, leading to the conclusion that all disagreement is a form of sectarianism. This disastrous rationalization has been the justification for generations of bloody purges and mass immiseration.
There is an actual unification of left resistance happening as we speak. Its coming because of different perspectives working together, not from total agreement across the board. This unification often appears throughout history as a result of increasing repression, when the stakes become more real and less intellectualized. So really what we should be fighting for is how to educate people in dealing with material and political facts rather than ideals and ideologies.
Uncritical acceptance of bad tactics and strategy is in fact the surest sign of sectarianism and cooptation, the actual most devastating tendencies of resistance movements. Progress only occurs through principled struggle, when our principle are in line with the lived experiences of people and the objective circumstances that define the struggle.
Its a nice thought, but completely misidentified and disastrously impractical if trying to mount an opposition. To your point, tactics are downstream of strategy, and strategy is downstream from principles. "Don't criticize tactics" is so wrongheaded, I urge you to rethink this. It doesn't make any sense and betrays a total lack of understanding of not only political struggle but of social change itself. If we want to defeat the forces of death, which can endlessly defend itself rationally, then we need to do better than reason. we need to fight ideals with practice, discussion and education on how to engage with what is real, not ideal.
EDIT: looking at the references I would love to see the justification for including Pedagogy of the Oppressed. There is nothing in that book that supports this argument. This article is AI slop just like the shitty art
You make many good points. I didn't write this and was looking more for a definition of the phrase "Horizontal Hostility" which dispite your criticism I believe is still something that prevents our efforts.
I've been guilty of it myself. I've criticized more militant strategies of resistance in the past because it went against my personal principals. And looking back, I wish I hadn't.
After doing more research and reading, I disagree with the idea that "There is such a thing as someone being 'on our side' and being completely wrong and taking actions that damage the movement." I think that diversity is our greatest strength. And a diversity of tactics, strategy, and principles is important in a resistance.
In my view, the cause of these hostilities is a failure to center the human experience in an analysis of objective conditions, failing to recognize that human experience is in fact itself an objective condition.
We inherited a world where the liberal/bourgeois movement defeated the church and the grip it held over the masses, with rationalism, logic, and science. Since then we've been able to make great scientific advancement, but the way we wield "facts" against our opponents is inherently flawed in a number of ways. This flawed methodology is what most often triggers social divisions, though capitalism performs socially to divide every movement into separate, dualist categorizations rationally opposed to one another, rather than education that leads to people understanding the connections that exist between social movements, and even classes. Social movements are often defined by their antagonisms, rather than post hoc rationalizing or inherent traits.
I guess I would ask you to define the sides whose constituent parts, in your opinion, could not be in material contradiction. There are many such examples. In our current situation, you only have to look at the genocide of Palestinians at the hand of the Israelis to see how a regime could intentionally engineer the sides to be in constant and steep contradiction. I have no doubt that the colonist Zionists who founded the state by death, fear, and mass imprisonment have unjustly appropriated the Jewish tradition, BUT ALSO done many good and supportive things for Jewish communities and doing so in the name of an ethnostate. while also acknowledging that real on-the-ground anti semitism is actually increasing, in no small part because neo Nazi antisemites are intentionally coopting the Palestine liberation movement to spread their own insidious propaganda. Which "side" I'm on is incredibly contingent on pre-existing material conditions. There are def bad people in this narrative, people on the "side" of death and hate. But there are a lot in the middle who are pulled in different directions. That's what keeps us weak and unorganized.
Or a situation like the Khmer Rouge, where Cambodian "communists" were backed by imperialist capitalists in the US, and Denghist communist China, to destabilize the new communist government in Viet Nam, in order to spite the post Stalin USSR. Deeply contradictory and destructive set of circumstances carried out because it was in the best interests of every party, and the rest of us could be easily tricked with nationalism, acting under the guise of patriotism. How do you parse out whose side people are on?
Circumstances emerge and develop through time. There are causes and effects that link everything together. But this does not mean that the world is inherently rational, self consistent, and free of contradiction. There is a kind of rationale going on, but it does not follow the contradiction-free rules of categorical, dualist rationalism. This is what I mean when I say that we must stop being idealists and deal directly with material fact and reality.
For instance, based on my experience, you and I are on the same side against oppression, but there's some disagreement between us on some issues. This can bring us together, forcing us to improve our own perspectives, or it can drive us apart. IMO its brought us together! But this does not eliminate all disagreements, its just that disagreement on one or both of our parts are more intellectual than material. But once those circumstances become material, or reified through fear, then differences appear much more stark where we won't ever agree. We will begin to be defined in different or reflective ways, and both become more idealist and detached from the actual struggle for liberation.
In order to break this cycle we need to think differently. And yes this definitely includes me too, because I've known many people who could correctly identify the problems, but could not escape the consequences. Paolo Friere is imo one of the all time masters of this new humanistic way of accurately defining our roles within this immense and complicated struggle, through education. which is why it kind of irks me it was included in the article, which you did not write.
I'm mostly in agreement. However I think the issue that started this discussion is this idea of a united front and that we should follow a shared strategy. Personally, I saw the comments just trying to dunk on eachother when discussing what each feels is a good way yo move forward. I just simply don't believe it's possible achieve that unified movement when it is truly grassroots. We are not a hivemind, we all have our own opinions even if they are based on incomplete or factually wrong information. Ideally, we would not need to spend the required time trying to make everyone in the movement think the same or even agree on the same strategies. The time that we have to plan or engage in a fight against oppression would be better used actually planning or fighting oppressors.
Again, I think our strength is our diversity of opinion, philosophy, strategy, and tactics. Perhaps rather than trying to control which strategies are used, we should add each as a tool in a wide arsonal of resistance strategy. We shouldn't be belittling strategies that we benefit from. We should try to keep goal in mind.
I am going to prioritize reading Paolo Friere.
Its really interesting to come back to the united vs popular front part of the discussion, because like I got my political education (partially, but in large measure) from a group that was formed in opposition to Stalinism, and who was the victims of purges carried out by popular fronts, so we are very pro united front, and very anti popular front. I could argue with you all day, I am well equipped to address certain positions.
But in no way is it a historically settled issue. I see it play out in my organizing work, where I am part of a partyist trend; whereas a sizeable minority, though only recently and quite conditionally, are more in favor of mass politics. But if we wanna get shit done, the mass movement people have to work with the partyist people, and vice versa; and if the partyist fuck up then the mass movement tendency will be able to tip the balance back the other way.
I think you are absolutely correct to value diversity of opinion and democracy. To me, as long as actual democracy, not just votes but people being able to voice their opinions and make meaningful contributions, then we are on a good path. We shouldn't focus too much on intellectual difference, but engage in practical work to determine the actual conditions of oppression. I like your framing of "a wide arsenal of resistance strategies". History will sort out our wrong headedness, as long as we engage in actual struggle, actual resistance. Because the win condition is to get the masses on the side of revolutionary change. But the masses aren't dumb. Maybe some people are backward in this way or that, more true for intellectuals than actual exploited workers but its def a global condition.
But the people who experience oppression firsthand are the experts, not the intellectuals who analyze it from the outside. We need to get better at listening and interpreting people rather than retreating to whatever camp our rationalism leads us.
oh right, laws stopped him. which is why he never spoke during his lawsuit because of several gag orders. he went to jail for not complying with court orders several times. he also went to prison for numerous counts of fraud, jan6, and openly defying several amendments. I doubt he'll ever see the light of day again. great checks and balances bro.
The argument here seems to be largely the same as saying that a wage slave should be satisfied with his salary because he is getting a salary at all.
I don't think that in an obviously corrupt legal system, the focus should be on how to use this dysfunctional system against those who have shaped it over decades in such a way that their crimes become possible in the first place. There's a term for that: window dressing.
However, it becomes very difficult when someone tries to dismiss legitimate criticism of rampant corruption as counterproductive. This amounts to a refusal to acknowledge that far-reaching reforms are necessary—in other words, to a defense of the status quo with the argument that the system is fine and that there is no problem at all.
I think US citizens would be well advised to realize that their legal system has not only permitted organized crime at the highest levels, but has actually made it possible in the first place. Otherwise, Trump would not be president, but would have been in prison for decades.
Smell that? That's what copium smells like.
The king has gotten away with everything he wanted.
But lawsuit a bro. But the files bro. Lmao
I mean, he's not wrong, but at the same time it, seems to be mostly ineffective. And I personally can't do anything that will have a major impact on the outcome. Except wait for the law to fail.
How do you define when law has failed and what will you do when we reach that point? If you asked me that question ten years ago you'd get an answer that has already played out in our government. Where does that leave us?
because it couldn't possibly be that people recognize this as an attempt to make things seem less fucked than they are..
the law isn't doing shit. if you're having fingers cut off and someone convinces the torturer to only cut off the fingertip on 2 fingers, you're not going to be grateful, you're going to fucking consider them complicit because they didn't tackle the torturer to the fucking ground and start punching them in the face.
Yeah this annoys me. Im fighting for the constituion and the whole idea of a democratic society based around rights. Man recently got this whole since the constitution is not working so it was no good to begin with. Its not perfect but it has the capacity to be improved and I will take it over 99% of government basises out there.