Jacob Levy, Tomlinson Professor of Political Theory at McGill University, cautioned in a Blue Sky thread that the case involving a Maryland man the U.S. government acknowledges was "wrongfully deported" has reached a "crisis moment."In March, Kilmar Ábrego García was accused of being an MS-13 gang m...
  • MyOpinion@lemm.ee
    0·
    20 days ago

    LOL the Orange Turd crossed the line a long time ago when he tried to overthrow the government with his MAGAt army.

      • barneypiccolo@lemm.eeEnglish
        0·
        20 days ago

        The media in this country is so infuriating. They asked if we were going to do anything about it, and Bondi says its up to El Salvador. So they asked the El Salvador Hitler, and he says “What am I supposed to do? Its not up to me to make decisions for another country, its a preposterous question!”

        Literally EVERY person in the world who could negotiate such a thing was sitting right there in that room, and none of the “journalists” suggested they work it out right now, with the whole world watching.

        Yesterday, Peter Navarro was on Meet The Press, and the host never asked him a single question about his primary source for his tariff expertise being a phony expert whose name is an anagram of his own. Its all I would have talked about, but she never alluded to it at all, even at the end when he was blathering on with weird insincere flattery of the host (I got the idea that that’s how he addresses HitlerPig). The guy is a total fraud, and yet he is in charge of our disastrous tariff strategy, and she can’t ask him a single question about his obvious fraudulent qualifications on the subject.

        The journalists in the White House Press Corps, and hosting shows like Meet The Press, are supposed to be the top journalists in their proffession, but they treat their jobs as if their only responsibility is to provide a platform for the worst people to present their propaganda as Truth, without any questions.

    • AreaSIX @lemm.ee
      0·
      20 days ago

      “If that’s not the crisis, nothing is,” he closed.

      The writer’s almost there: nothing is.

    • you_are_it@lemmy.sdf.org
      0·
      20 days ago

      He was openly threathening US people, or “dissidents”. So he is basically saying in between lines, that if you rise against him, he’ll do very crazy things. This makes me hope for a Quick removal of the rot.

      • RippleEffect@lemm.eeEnglish
        0·
        20 days ago

        Everyone’s waiting for someone to do something about this problem but no one seems to know what to do about it or are openly cheering it on.

    • PurpleSkull@lemm.eeEnglish
      0·
      20 days ago

      Societies change, as often for the worse as they do for the better. It also depends what you consider “normal”. For many boomers growing up in the 50’s and 60’s this is fairly normal. We’ve used to shoot students protesting an actual invasion against Vietnam.

      And then there are still a lot of immigrants here who fled really bad dictatorial shit holes. They look at headlines going “ICE deported 300 people this week” and go “It’s not even a thousand and they were not gunned down in the streets and their families exterminated, what are you complaining about?”. Perspective.

      Fight it however you can, or don’t.

    • ameancow@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      20 days ago

      No.

      I’m speaking as a fairly moderate, average American who’s been around almost a half century.

      I am telling you and anyone who reads this, that this is NOT going back to normal. This is going to get worse. I promise you, you all need to understand this thing I’m about to shout here:

      NOBODY IS COMING.

      If we want to fix this, we have to do it ourselves. And I have very little allusion that liberal, comfy America and the military is going to dream of upsetting their careful balance and privilege, and they will keep their head down and keep working even as their rights are stripped away and nobody can afford food or water anymore without realizing they’re boiled toads.

      Buy beans and rice. Save money. Quit expensive habits and get healthy. Update your passport and put some cash and gold aside in case you need to leave and the banks won’t give you money. Maintain contact with people outside the USA in case you need contacts somewhere. I am dead-fucking-serious.

    • WhiskyTangoFoxtrot@lemmy.world
      0·
      20 days ago

      No. “Normal” for the US was the result of you being the only major industrial power that wasn’t flattened during World War II. You maintained your power since then by using the leverage you’d acquired during the postwar years. Now that that leverage is gone, it’s staying gone, since the rest of the world has rebuilt itself.

    • valtia@lemmy.world
      0·
      20 days ago

      No. Even if he’s gone, the world is irrevocably changed. We’re all going together on this dark ride. The sooner people realize that, the better. Then maybe something can be done.

      • scruffy@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
        0·
        20 days ago

        Your comment reads as “no, but yes if we fix it” to me. It’s that what you were trying to convey? If not, could you explain a bit please?

        • valtia@lemmy.world
          0·
          20 days ago

          By “maybe something can be done,” I just mean something to stabilize us. Something to give us a new normal. But, there’s no going back to where we were at in 2024. The US as a whole is finished and something else will take its place

    • djsoren19@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
      0·
      20 days ago

      What normal? The only thing that’s really changed is that the U.S. isn’t masking their crimes in flowery language. It wasn’t that long ago that we were shooting student protestors in campus and segregating our population based on race. We have plenty of experience in illegally removing migrants and have already used concentration camps.

      The U.S. might put the mask back on someday, but they’ve been an evil empire for basically their entire existence. It’s unlikely it will change in our lifetimes.

  • cygnus@lemmy.ca
    0·
    20 days ago

    The American people’s passiveness with regard to “red lines” is about on par with Putin’s overuse of the term. I expect a bit of whining online for 24-48 hours but no meaningful actions.

    • Ms. ArmoredThirteen@lemmy.zipEnglish
      0·
      20 days ago

      Mass organizing in the US is logistically difficult, and all our media is owned by people who want to see the protests fail so the coverage isn’t amazing. But we have millions of people protesting right now and the numbers have been growing fast. Protesters have been under threat of arrest and possible death for ages, and they’re opening it up to “get black bagged and sent to tortureville forever”. We have so much working against us even getting resistance off the ground and yeah we aren’t amazing at it, there’s a good chance we can’t pull it off, but we’re trying

      • cygnus@lemmy.ca
        0·
        20 days ago

        If dissenting online makes them feel like they are doing enough to not act IRL, yes.

        • Zaktor@sopuli.xyzEnglish
          0·
          20 days ago

          Revolutions don’t just spontaneously materialize from nothing, they grow from riots, that grow from peaceful protests, that grow from people complaining to each other in social settings. None of the early steps are sufficient, but they are the type of things that are necessary for the end result. There is no world where less dissenting online leads to more direct action.

            • Lightor@lemmy.world
              0·
              20 days ago

              This guy has no idea what nuance is.

              The Boxers lead a rebellion in China and failed horribly, accelerating the very thing they were trying to stop. Guess rebellings is bad too.

              What a bad faith argument.

              • outerspace@lemmy.zip
                0·
                20 days ago

                I don’t think it means it is bad, it could just do nothing, but dissenting online is the easiest nothing you could do

                • Lightor@lemmy.world
                  0·
                  20 days ago

                  This is an example of where it didn’t do nothing, it actually made things much worse.

                  Dissenting online is, believe it or not, how people become aware of issues and know they’re not alone in how they feel. It’s a precursor to actual events, like we’ve seen.

            • Zaktor@sopuli.xyzEnglish
              0·
              20 days ago

              And that grew into protests and riots, so… what’s your point?

              Hey guys, guess what. Authoritarianism isn’t trivial to beat. All the other authoritarian states in the world aren’t just full of lazy people who didn’t use the one simple trick. Turns out both propaganda works and a lot of people are actually scared of being murdered or sent to a gulag.

              But again, you get none of that if you try to skip the first steps.

              • newfie@lemmy.mlEnglish
                0·
                20 days ago

                If the conclusion is that a revolution is necessary then protests and riots are obviously insufficient. Which means that posting is not the correct path, particularly because it seems to be very lacking in building irl community, though it is effective at convincing posters that their engagement is “doing something”. It isn’t, aside from enriching tech oligarchs through their attentional engagement

          • Perhapsjustsniffit@lemmy.ca
            0·
            20 days ago

            How many years does online complaining need to take place before we get to uprising? I’m just curious if we should prepare for war yesterday in Canada or next week cause complaining from Americans and not acting has been going on for multiple presidential terms now. I think Cheeto did the uprising in around 4 years if I remember correctly. It was a few groups of Nazis that led the entire thing. Nazis don’t tend to be very smart.

          • KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
            0·
            20 days ago

            revolutions only come from suffering.

            People need to suffer to the point they are willing to potentially lose it all, people have families, they have friends, they have careers and jobs, people need to physically care first.

            For some reason nobody understands this today.

            • newfie@lemmy.mlEnglish
              0·
              20 days ago

              Yes, but an entirely spontaneous movement will end up reproducing the dominant ideology in a given society, because the dominant class has the means at its disposal to propagate and reproduce the dominant ideology.

              So a revolutionary movement must know in advance what its revolutionary theory is; it must be united around a particular vision of society, a particular theory of revolutionary change, or it will simply reproduce the society that it is acting against.

              There is no evidence that this is what is occurring in the United States. Replacing the bad king with a good king will not solve our problems; our problem is that we are ruled by kings in the first place

        • gAlienLifeform@lemmy.world
          0·
          20 days ago

          I feel like that’s unlikely and that a lot of the people dissenting online are the same ones who are protesting, calling their lawmakers, etc.

          Also, it’s not like any of the IRL stuff has been effective yet anyway. Online dissent probably gets seen by more eyeballs than any one protest sign or IRL action that doesn’t end up with the person doing it being arrested or killed (and thus unable to continue resisting this administration), so if it really is an either/or situation I think online dissent is more effective than IRL peaceful protest or writing yet another letter to my lawmakers.

          That all said, I really don’t think it is an either/or situation, so I think we can and should be encouraging all the kinds of dissent.

  • InverseParallax@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    20 days ago

    No.

    When he deports a citizen who is immediately killed in prison, that’s a red line.

    And even then only if he’s white, and Christian enough.

    • floofloof@lemmy.caOP
      0·
      20 days ago

      These are red lines of unacceptable behavior and policy, not the lines marking when Americans will actually pay attention. And even if what you describe were to happen, all the Trump supporters would just come up with excuses, while others would protest through the usual channels and be ignored.

      • InverseParallax@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        20 days ago

        These are red lines of unacceptable behavior and policy

        Oh man, you almost had me there, good one!

        Sounds like something the Onion would have put out in their heyday, you know, before the utter collapse of reality.

    • Buffalox@lemmy.world
      0·
      20 days ago

      I don’t think that would do mit either. Not even if it’s a pregnant woman.
      It will be deflected, as the prisons fault, and Trump will continue to send pregnant women without a second thought.

      • Zaktor@sopuli.xyzEnglish
        0·
        20 days ago

        It’s all boiling a frog. If he did that day one it would be over the line and cause response. Each step along the way that is eventually accepted makes the next step easier, which enables the one after that and so forth. They deported “criminals” not legally in the country with little protest, they faced little pushback when it turned out they weren’t criminals, so they then moved on to those who are here legally. And as this is becoming mundane they’re laying the groundwork for it to be citizens.

        The only line they have is what the people will tolerate, and they’re expanding that day by day.

  • Buffalox@lemmy.world
    0·
    20 days ago

    In a true democracy that would be way beyond the red line, but in USA today, this is just another Monday.

  • SereneSadie@lemmy.myserv.one
    0·
    20 days ago

    When ‘Yes, Prime Minister’ had a scene about salami tactics, it was referring to the Russians invading West Berlin.

    It feels far more relevant to Nazi America today than the actual Russian invasion of Ukraine.

    What parody are we living in?

    • aeshna_cyanea@lemm.ee
      0·
      20 days ago

      And also, the American people don’t actually have a button to protect themselves from the government

  • ZMoney@lemmy.world
    0·
    19 days ago

    McGill professors love warning about red lines from their safe space in a city that’s “just more European”. It’s a gradient, and the US is in between cherry and crimson right now.

    • dryfter@lemm.eeEnglish
      0·
      19 days ago

      Man I miss old Looney Tunes.

      I went and saw the new movie with Porky Pig and Daffy Duck: The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie and it was pretty darn good.

      And listen, I know now isn’t really a good time to watch a movie and get distracted, but it did a pretty good job of distracting me and made my mental health a tiny bit better not having to think about what we’re going through and will be going through.

      • Pennomi@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        19 days ago

        There’s nothing wrong with taking a little break from reality. You’ve got to let your mind a soul rest for a bit or you’ll just get depressed!