You can always check out the e-book version even if you go find a physical copy to read instead. I saw a librarian asking people to do stuff like that since the active use of library services let’s them argue for better funding and services.
Also, see if they have a physical copy at another branch. My local library is part of a network that spans across multiple towns, and they can often get books sent to them from other branches if they don’t have a copy themswlves.
I wrote that incorrectly, it wasn’t a few days after he met Putin, but a marked spike over the months after. He requested classified documents related to CIA operations like 3 days before the meeting with Putin. It’s also a series of events over a couple of years because it wasn’t until at least a year later that the FBI raided Mar a Lago and found more classified documents related to intelligence operations. There’s no real way to know for sure unless Trump or Putin admit it, but the correlation was and is suspect by even the intelligence operations of the government and is partially why the inquiry into Trump was called for in the first place.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/26/us/politics/trump-affidavit-intelligence-spies.html
Not “tyrannic” yet, but Project 2025 is 3 months away.
The best a resistance group can hope for is being damaging enough to choke their enemy little by little while also being hard to root out without causing collateral damage. Because what are AR-15s or whatever else you can get your hands on going to do against the army’s helicopter drones armed with sniper rifles and 360 degree cameras that can detect a target within milliseconds in a kilometer radius just through the reflection on their eye.
As George Washington once said, “A bunch of farmers armed with guns will never win against a trained army.”
Trump made masks political, so wearing one is a political statement to these people.
They have made their political beliefs their entire personality to compensate for their low self confidence and so have to aggressively display their beliefs like a peacock anytime they think somebody is challenging those beliefs, regardless of how benign or irrelevant it is.
Flowery words coming from someone who now lives in a tyrannic monarchy.
Ignorance ultimately doesn’t excuse or justify their actions. Your beliefs aren’t as important as your actions. Not to say that they should be dragged behind the shed and shot, but that actions have consequences and they need to be held accountable for theirs. If somebody votes for a fascist leader and supports a fascist political party, they’re at least collaborators in fascism.
You have to treat these people like they’re in a cult, because that’s what’s happening here. Trump’s rhetoric this past year has been eerily similar to Jim Jones near the time that they all drank the Flavor-Aid (almost identical, even). And when dealing with cultists, it’s important to remember that not all of them can be saved. After a certain point, even if they recognize that they’re in the wrong, most cultists will double down rather than admit that they were wrong - because they’re in too deep and to admit that they were fooled would be to admit that their entire life has been wrong and that what they did wasn’t justified.
Hope that you can make them realize why they’re in the wrong, but be prepared to grab the knife that they might pull on you. Because that’s probably the more likely scenario.
4 years? Try 6 months from now.
If Europe gets into a war, the US will side with Russia. Trump has been a Russian asset since the 80s, and it’s clear that he gave Putin classified documents relating to American spies and informants during his last presidency when they suddenly started dying a few days after he met with Putin. And even more classified documents relating to American espionage against Russia than the ones he requested before that meeting were found in Mar a la Go.
Yep. See also: sea-lioning, the gish gallop, and a myriad of other tactics used by the far-right.
Also, another of my favorite quotes:
I’m not doing homework for you. I’ve known you for 30 seconds and enjoyed exactly none of them.
Self-curating my social media experience is self-care.
Optimism, realism, and pessimism.
I’m reminded of a quote that goes something like this:
I’ve been thinking about the free exchange of ideas recently and come to the conclusion that it isn’t an open market - it’s a potluck.
Everybody brings something to the table and you’re free to pick and choose the things that you want to try, but you’re not obligated to try everything. Just because Karen put a piece of shit on the table and calls it a sandwich doesn’t mean that you have to take a bite to know that it’s shit. Similarly, we are not obligated to take white supremacists and other extremists’ ideas and seriously debate their value. They’re shit and can and should be treated as such.
The beauty of a self-curated experience is that you’re free to engage with the things that you want and can ignore the things that you don’t want to deal with. The risk of people isolating themselves is simply a part of having the freedom to choose your own experiences, the same as the real world.
Personally, one of the reasons that I’m here is because I have no choice but to deal with right-wing extremism in my daily life, and I don’t want to deal with it online as well. Reading news articles? That’s fine, but I don’t want to see chuds screaming about DEI or woke or whatever in the comments.
There’s a nuance here that you’re missing - self-curating your social media experience is vastly different from the algorithm hellhole that is the modern corporate social media landscape. You can filter out any dissenting opinions or facts, but you can in real life, too. And like in real life, it takes a lot of active effort to get to that point. Whereas the algorithm will do that for you without you even knowing it.
I’d say that self-curated social media is like going off to college or moving to a new city while the algorithm is like living in the town you grew up in. I grew up in a very liberal state, but there were about 3 non-white kids in my entire high school the year I graduated, and it wasn’t until I was introduced to Tumblr in college in the late 2000s that I first heard words like “transgender.” And Tumblr is the most self-curated social media that I’ve ever seen. Back then, you couldn’t even follow hashtags - just people. So your front page was exclusively people that you followed and the posts that they reblogged from people that they followed.
Nah, the elephant gun bullet would stop because a horse isn’t an elephant.
True. I even added the “probably” after writing it for that reason, but that’s still giving them too much benefit of the doubt.
I’m sure the IDF soldiers feel very bad about all the women and children that they’ve driven bulldozers over.
And yet, that still doesn’t justify killing civilians randomly.
And Israel has been running a military campaign to exterminate Palestine since the 1950s. It’s hard to claim their hands are clean in any of these conflicts.
I still remember when they were offering Israeli citizenship with the purchase of former Palestinian homes to American Jews in the 2000s.
If he’s bringing politics into the workplace, that’s unprofessional behavior, and he should be reported to HR.
And just because you work together doesn’t mean you have to be friends. Only talk to him when it’s strictly necessary and ignore him otherwise, and he’ll probably eventually get the hint that you don’t like him.
I didn’t realize that HAMAS was as large an organization as the Israeli government and armed forces.
We’re also talking about a completely different country from Palestine that had nothing to do with any part of any of these conflicts, and even then, an indiscriminate terrorist attack on Palestinian civilians wouldn’t be justified by HAMAS’s terrorism. That’s like saying that the US bombings on Iraqi civilians are justified by Al Qaeda’s attack on the WTC on 9/11.
Aye, as an American, I have only a limited view of the big picture, but my understanding of it is that while it was definitely a politicized issue across the globe, a lot of the far right extremists were emboldened to make it such a big issue by the actions of Trump and the Republican party in the US.
Like that convoy of Canadian Trump rioters who can’t even vote for him if they wanted to because they live in Canada. Trump’s been a poster-boy for crazies all across the globe.