FriendOfDeSoto

Even blue states vote on a working day and can have ridiculously long lines due to the booklet voters are asked to fill in. That’s already bad from my POV. All the other shenanigans are extra, on top of that.

I have stated elsewhere in this thread that I have limited sympathy for the US non-voters. So refer to that if you’re curious. I am trying my best not to condemn everybody equally. A free election, in most democracies, means you’re free not to go. Perhaps we’d all be fine with non-voters if Mrs. Harris had won. Putting blame at their feet is also shutting the barn door when the horse has already bolted. We should motivate the ones willing to stand up and resist. You don’t want to injure their pride and get them to jump on the MAGA bandwagon out of spite.

There are protests taking place. I just saw Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez were in the news leading rallies and protests. American and Canadian protesters gathered on either side of one of the lakes, forgot which one. There are people who are saying something. Even GOP voters are shouting down their elected leaders in town hall meetings because Elon chainsawed a benefit that affected them and theirs. It’s easy to draw parallels to 1930s Germany but this Trump 2.0 administration will plot its own despicable course.

One of the reasons why you don’t see so many mass gatherings like you saw in Serbia recently or Slovakia is also US infrastructure. It’s real hard to get thousands of Americans into one place anywhere when there isn’t sufficient public transport and it would statistically be 1.2 people per car - you’d need a Rhode Island just for parking.

I agree. I didn’t mean to imply all of the remainder would be pro just one of the candidates. My guess is that it’s still enough to make up a silent majority. Which sounds great but no one can prove anyways.

I’m inclined to give American voters a limited raincheck on not bothering to show up. Voting is often a booklet of ballots on various issues and elections for office. It takes forever to fill it in. That explains the long, slow-moving lines outside pulling stations, much rarer occurrences in other democracies. And that’s only the people who are able to come on a workday (and didn’t have the foresight or were unable to get mail-ins). That’s after a registration process that can have Kafkaesque features in many states. So I would forgive the single mother who didn’t have time to do this between working her two low paid jobs. It’s part of a subtle but deliberate disenfranchisement. We’ll add that one to the list of grievances as well.

#4 still applies even if you already looked like a “fucking ass clown” before. Fuckingassclownery is limitless!

I would only add that depending on size it may not be possible to keep an operation secret. D-Day or Gulf War 1.0 come to mind when the world knew it was about to happen, maybe not the exact hour but we still knew. And then it’s a game of obfuscation, i.e. deliberately leading enemies down garden paths so you can surprise them with your real plan. But you wouldn’t want to leak your disinformation campaign in your text group either.

I would say “stupid” is a judgement you should keep between your ears. I think Americans are undereducated before they get released into a mad for-profit higher education system that gives them debts for life (but hitherto also great sciencing at a high level). The strong cultural undercurrent of exceptionalism hardly ever lets them look elsewhere for comparison. And the political system, which is based on who can spend more money, not so much on ideas, is proving to be a system that’s rarely bringing out the best people for top jobs. But it’s a dog and pony show and that favors characters over good policies. The fragmentation of people all watching the same news show at night 3 decades ago, to watching partisan 24h news channels 2 decades ago, to splintering even further on the socials now adds to the problem. There is no largely unified audience with the same facts at their disposal.

It’s also nice that Trump is now dismantling the democratic state because voting in the US always gets filtered through electoral colleges and gerimandered districts, skewing results to favor the two main parties, often only one of them. It was pretend-democratic until now.

Something that gets overlooked easily is the long history of fascist rules that was in place in the south after the civil war. Jim Crow laws masqueraded as democracy for a long time and every time courts tried to put a stop to it, the white people in charge found other ways to be a-holes. That’s part of American culture already.

America has always had a penchant for whacky leaders. Andrew Johnson, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, George W. None of them fit my idea of a virtuous leader. But at least the ones this century adhered to a decorum, an unwritten standard of how to behave as president. Nixon didn’t want to get caught. Trump doesn’t give a sh!t. So the leadership culture has shifted, not for the better.

All this mixes a large chunk, an uncurious population that still sees itself pretty much as a role model for the world, falling for simple populist messages. It should also be said that tarring all Americans with the same brush is unfair. I think it was the votes of less than a third of eligible voters that made Trump 2.0 a reality, roughly another third just behind it, with the remainder not bothering to vote at all. I would say the often fantasized silent majority is actually not pro Trump.

So calling all Americans stupid is not right. There are a lot of people hurting right now as they watch their country develop in a bad way. We need those people to stand up and fight and calling them names doesn’t help.

(Other countries have gone down similar routes, have had whacky leaders, have done questionable things. The US is not alone on this path.)

No. The label horror story, sadly, applies to all. I suppose I could have worded it differently, had I expected the least generous interpretation being applied to what I wrote.

If you want to know where it is going in the short-term, have a look at Orban’s Hungary. Rightwing populist voted in and then got to work at dismantling the state. Control judges appointments, curb the power of the judicial branch, silence critical media, pick a group to scapegoat, buddy of Putin. The list goes on. Democracy only works if people defend it and from my outside POV there aren’t enough people doing that just yet. It’s worse in Trump 2.0 because this time he came prepared.

There are already horror stories about people being caught up wrongly in the deportation efforts. That’s using very mild language for very traumatic events here. It’s come to a point where erstwhile allies of the US are advising their citizens not to travel to the US. Because they have lost faith in the rule of law there. Take a minute to let that sink in.

If you’re a US citizen, resist. The free state is under threat. If you’re an immigrant, be careful.

Not being asked a version of this question every other day or so.

Inflammable

I think we only differ in optimism here. You think good leaders can still turn it around. And I doubt it. Either way, I wasn’t foretelling the UN’s demise.

I appreciate your sentiments in italics and bold text concerning war. I understand that tone is hard to decipher here. If you have taken from my text that I’m pro-war then allow me point out that I am not. I’ve merely pointed out historical precedence and extrapolated from there. I thought it obvious that the scenario I drew is undesirable. I guess I was wrong, wasn’t I.

You could make an argument that its usefulness has decreased the way it is set up right now. Reform seems unlikely as some of the big guys would have to give up on their vetoes. The fact that France and Britain continue to sit permanently in the Security Council yet no one permanently from Africa or South America says everything.

So it’s not impossible that some countries will leave frustrated but I think this will be a rare occurrence. Most sober heads will still value diplomatic channels even if they are imperfect.

These international organizations kind of need a world war to reform themselves. WW2 was sort of the end of the League of Nations and the UN took its place. So what we need now is WW3 to get the UN to adapt better to our world today. That sounds great, doesn’t it.

If you don’t know what you’re doing I suggest you don’t buy a jukebox online but at a local store. That way you’re probably on the safe side. The link one looks like the German version and your post pic is France/Belgium. They’re not (edit: always) compatible. Plugs are a non-EU-standardized mess.

Being asked anyway.

Remind me never to cross you.

Not being asked a version of this question every other day or so.

I believe you should fart excessively around it and indeed encourage fellow commuters to join in, as it will provide terrible air quality results here. Which will in turn improve ventilation measures in this area, which would not have happened otherwise. Checkmate! The act of observing alters the results!

I don’t think speaking the language immediately condones the horrible acts of the people who spoke it in the past. German should’ve creased to exist 80 years ago.

There are certainly situations where use of English could be considered offensive, say, at a memorial of an atrocity. Carve those situations out and have a plan B - there is no necessity to all speak the same language all the time. It’s enough if a good number of people in the right positions do. And consider that there already are English speakers in France, Iran, and North Korea (3 random examples that don’t all love English-speaking countries).

English is already the lingua franca of the world and has displaced French as the language of diplomacy. In Europe before that were the Frankish tongue, Latin, Greek. Other places had other languages. It’s no shoe-in that English will remain at the top but in our lifetimes I don’t think it will change.

My review came with an asterisk. I mainly wanted to point out how to get it free so you can make up your own mind.

The short answer is no but the long answer is yes. You can fight like the old guy from Up! but in the end you’ll probably lose (YMMV because of location).

Municipal planning though often involves spaces allocated for roads and stuff. So the plots of land don’t all border each other but imaginary roadways have already been drawn up if not built already.

It might be helpful to know where this is.

The easiest answer regardless is become active in local politics, try to get into the municipal government, and allocate funds to building up infrastructure in your area.