How about a seminar on tariffs though.

I guess I forgot some people knew what to expect from a second Trump term and would plan accordingly. It would have been nice if this guy had sat these people down and had this talk before the election.

Wow, the turn around time on that was fast.

Cuba has the right idea with socialism. Cuba’s elections are a good sign they are moving in the right direction, but they still have a ways to go. For starters, they need more than one candidate per office and citizens need to be able to run without having to be nominated by the Communist Party controlled committees.

The purpose of a system is what it does

The electoral college and our first-past-the-post system is a huge part of the problem. With ranked choice voting we would have more choices for candidates and progressives and socialists would have a better shot.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7tWHJfhiyo

and America has never done Democracy.

We have been a democracy since the founding of our country. Consider reading a US history book to learn more. Our democracy is flawed. Fascists leveraged the flaws in our democracy to take it away. That’s why Republican voters had to actually vote to take our democracy away, but of course the capture of our democracy has been happening slowly before that. Hopefully fascist incompetence means this isn’t the end for democracy, but we can’t count on that.

Our government is designed to limit choice to only those candidates that the owners of this country find acceptable, and this system is not threatened by the electoral failure of the Democrats, or even the loss of an entire major party, so long as the capitalists own any new party that rises to replace it.

Since Citizens United v. FEC corporations have had an outsized influence in our elections with unrestricted independent expenditures. But even before that, since Regan we’ve collectively adopted neoliberalism as a country. We’ve prioritized markets being free over people being free and all but the rich are worse off because of it. Late-stage capitalism has led us straight to an oligarchy of billionaires pledging fealty to a dictator.

It didn’t have to be this way. We could have chosen socialism, changed to worker ownership of corporations, and levied wealth taxes on the rich. The issue was that we failed to get neoliberalism out of the minds of the population. People say something along of the lines of ‘socialism doesn’t work’ and maybe even ‘the soviet union collapsed’ reflexively when they hear the word socialism.

Part of what we need to do is teach people that neoliberalism is scam and that socialism is the answer to their problems. In the coming years we are going to have a lot evidence that we can show people. But there is no sense in waiting. We can start on that now.

Electoralism is a trap. Voting won’t save us. We have to save us, and we aren’t all going to make it unless we can start working together outside of the existing political establishment.

Democracy is the best system we have for inclusive political institutions. If you know a better one that is more inclusive please share it. We of course need to organize between elections, now more than ever. But if you never vote when you get the chance, and we will be lucky if we ever do, all that organization goes to waste.

To the Caribbean right?

https://cdn.statcdn.com/Infographic/images/normal/25159.jpeg

So that would leave Cuba. Better than nothing.

That assumes Canada will be safe after their 2025 election. For now Canada is probably going to be a safer place to be than the US once the fascists take power here. The issue is then being stuck in Canada if you don’t have a passport book in the event the far-right takes over there as well.

We are seeing the global rise of fascism right now, so the places that are safe will probably continue to dwindle. People should do what they feel they need to be safe. But its important to point out that the problem is not as simple as getting out of the United States. If a person finds they are in a position where they can only get this card and move to Canada they should totally do it if that’s how they can be safe. Don’t let me or anyone else stop you.

What incentive would they have to tamper with passport cards? They’re pretty popular in the border regions as an inexpensive way to get an international travel document.

The cruelty is the point. If the fascists see people using those to flee they might get it in their head to restrict access to them or refuse to recognize them as valid. I’m not saying people shouldn’t take advantage of them now, but if people can get the full passport book it might be better anyway. Canada has their own far-right that is on the verge of taking over. And Trump has threatened to fire missiles at Mexico.

They are also mentioned in several international treaties, particularly with Canada and Mexico. The president doesn’t have the power to unilaterally abrogate those treaties.

Trump has threatened to be a dictator on day one and is planning to staff the government with loyalists who will do what he says. There’s a chance he won’t respect treaties while in office and instruct border patrol to deny people with those cards access to border crossings. What are Canada and Mexico going to do about it?

The Nazis are known for not respecting documents so they could kill people.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/new-research-reveals-how-the-nazis-targeted-transgender-people-180982931/

There was also confusion caused by a few cases that, by chance, came to light first. In these cases, police acted less violently. For example, there is a well-known case from Berlin where police renewed a trans man’s “transvestite certificate” after he spent some months in a concentration camp. Historians initially took this case to be representative. Now that we have a lot more cases, we can see that it is an outlier. Police normally revoked the certificates.

Again, it’s fine to take advantage of this now. And people should definitely be told about this, because for some people it might be their only feasible option. There’s a reason people are worried, that’s all. edit: typos

We knew who the Democrats and Republicans are. The Democrats are neoliberals. The Republicans are fascists. We have a democracy as long as we can keep it. If we lose our democracy we have no one to blame but ourselves. We elected Biden last cycle. We could have elected Harris this cycle. We failed to do so.

The Democrats were never going to spontaneously become populist this cycle. Harris’ campaign was at least progressive leaning before DNC consultants ran into the ground. Our job was to spread the word to vote for Harris and how it would be useful for advancing progressive and socialist causes over time.

Instead accelerations spread the propaganda that Harris and Trump were the same on Israel’s genocide and that people needed to protest vote. Not enough people voted this election in part because of that. We failed to use our tool, the Democratic Party, to prevent fascism.

It’s not lazy to think voting was sufficient. The only way to win was to get enough votes. That’s how democracy works. People spread pro-democracy messages as best we could. We lost the election to fascism. Now we need to organize, because there isn’t necessarily going to be a next election. Hopefully there will, but we may need mass protests if we even want a shot at another election.

Also, Trump threatened to arrest top Democrats. It seems like the Democratic Party could be dead by the next presidential election.

Accelerationists suppressing the vote with their rhetoric is part of how we got here. They are the ones who intentionally went out of their way to fail and make other people fail as well. If laziness bothers you, then this should drive you up the wall.

It was not the Democrats who were going to save us. It was we the people who would save our democracy with our votes.

Thank you!

A burning building doesn’t get put out by watching it burn. And the fire can in fact spread to the next building. Things can always get worse because there is no bottom. Things will only get better by making them better.

The accelerationists got what they wanted. And everyone, including them, are worse off for it. We’ve gone from not utilizing the limited time window, to avert the worst of climate change, to choosing to use that time to pollute as much as possible. We may in fact succeed in reaching 5°C before 2100.

It’s hard to understate how fucking awful the accelerationism was this last year.

There’s no sense in lashing out at nonvoters. We need to organize in order to make a difference.

The fascists are the ones to want to kill everyone. So those are the people who we must organize against and defend ourselves from. Lashing out at nonvoters isn’t useful.

But not everyone votes. 340 million people live in the US. 70 million, and counting, voted for Trump. So not a majority of the country by any stretch of the imagination.

It’s important to remember there are 340 million people in the US. Only 70 million, counted so far, voted for Trump. Of those 70 million people, many of them will also be targeted by the fascists, who make up a minority of that group. We outnumber the fascists. We do a disservice to ourselves and others by making it seem otherwise.

The number one polled issue for Republican voters was the economy. They got duped by Fox fucking News. Jokes on them when the Republicans inevitably tank the economy.

The real question is will the mass deportations or the tariffs do it first. Hopefully the tariffs. If we’re going to be dysfunctional as a country, we might as well do it before making camps.

It’s a combination of the right-wing infosphere brainwashing people and systemic flaws in our democracy that allow for minority rule. A minority of the population in key states needed to fed Republican propaganda for decades and that’s what happened.

Unfortunately, this will have global implications. Trump’s foreign policy will allow dictators to do whatever they want. If anyone reading this knows a place they can go where they can be safe, don’t let me stop you. But, this is going to allow dictatorships to carve the world into spheres of influence.

The way we push back against this is by organizing.

The Republican’s strategy is for there to be as much chaos on and after election day as possible to make claims that the election was fraudulent more plausible. Imagine waking up tomorrow and seeing planes falling out of the sky. The panic could be the wedge Trump needs, if not to win, to at least plausibly claim victory.

eunt domus

Spoilers for Life of Brian, which I still need to see. But seems pretty funny.