We all know what the objectively most ethically and morally righteous course of action would be right now.
We also know that if we DID that, the fascists will kill us, our entire families, anyone we associate with, and then use it as an excuse to murder even more innocent people who have never had anything to do with us.
The right is just ITCHING for a Reichstag Fire Moment which they can point at and say
"OPE, look at that TERRORISM happening right over there! You know what that means: Time to OFFICIALLY (not just casually!) suspend civil liberties and call in the private security shock troops and drone strikes to put down these VIOLENT ANTI-AMERICAN ENEMY COMBATANT DOMESTIC TERRORISTS!!! And for all their sympathizers, time to punch some tickets for the GITMO EXPRESS!"
I thought it would happen by mid-march but now i'm concerned it might happen even SOONER.
look. the law has failed. the law will not protect us. the law will actively attack us and label us as "criminals" for defending ourselves while turning a blind eye to our fascist aggressors. I don't know what anyone else should do, but here's what I'm doing:
- I have a small emergency fund saved up stashed in cash at a secure location.
- I have my identifying documents in order in case I get the 'papers please' treatment.
- I have survival supplies in my bug-out go-bag that i carry on my person everywhere i go
- I have data backups, peripherals, and all my digital devices that I can't live without packed
- I'm HOPING I still have time to legally (for whatever that's worth now) arm myself.
- I'm maintaining the outward appearance of a cis het white dude so I can navigate mostly unnoticed.
- I'm attempting to locate and join an underground railroad as a conductor to help targeted people evacuate via providing transportation, shelter, nutrition, paperwork assistance, communications advocacy, and possibly even the covering of some costs provided the entire financial system doesn't collapse.
- Failing that I'm reaching out to friends across the country to set up a means to locate and offer aid to at-risk individuals directly.
- I'm also asking international friends about their countries' immigration policies, to see if I can get in touch with advocates within other borders to streamline the process for people who want to escape this backwater shithole of a country.
Gods know I won't be able to escape...
but the possibility that I might be able to help others,
and reminding myself that I can't help anyone if i'm dead,
is the single biggest thing (among a fair few others) keeping me going.Liberals are sort of, fundamentally incapable of understanding that the republican voter is more than just like, some stereotypical idiot white southerner, or self-interested multi-millionaire, I think. They're incapable of understanding that republican voters can often be some of the more marginalized in society. The disabled, and migrants, as we've seen. Dumb people, even, right, people with less education. Explicitly, explicitly this is the case, they bring it up all the time! As though that lack of education is some sort of moral failing, or thing to poke fun at. They don't understand that conservatives will rightly point out that sort of mockery and call them cruel elitists. It takes this cruel and apathetic stance towards those groups, this unempathetic stance that has no interest in understanding how we got there, this incurious stance. It's so overly moralized, to the point of incoherence. Well, that disabled person or migrant voted for trump, so, FAFO, they deserve to die, I guess. What am I to do? Well, looks like the palestinian voter in michigan decided not to vote, so, FAFO, guess their family is reserved to being buried under beachfront property. What am I to do?
It's callous, it's a self-callousing kind of reaction. It makes you number, and it makes you dumber. It's cope, basically, I guess is what I'm saying. It's a way to contend with a cruel reality by becoming crueler yourself.
It also has some intersection with two things. This assumption of free will, and thus a kind of innate moral character and disposition, a constant internal moral agency for all your actions, and so there's obviously something it inherently shares there with liberalism philosophically, right.
It also, in the positive rhetoric, has an intersection with this sort of, political armchair jockeying, where everyone theorizes that rhetorical moves are being made by politicians for some theoretical person out there that isn't them, but the fundamental character of the party is still agreeable, and okay. You can't question the party's positioning on Gaza. Even if you can cede that it's immoral, explicitly, then it has to be done because it's electorally advantageous. I don't understand how they can't see how this alienates a ton of people right off the bat, because it shows that you're willing to do things which are actively morally detestable and still not win. It's never the case for policy which itself is a positive end, like healthcare, that they are willing to violate legal and political norms in order to take action on that. Or even, say, violating political norms in order to stop a genocide. It's only that they're willing to keep up a genocide in order to win electorally, and then whatever follows is sort of what you're just supposed to get as a reward for sitting through 200,000+ people dying.
So I dunno, that all just pisses me off. I wish people could argue about actual tangible policy, and then pursue that unabashed as an unqualified good, rather than being tricked into believing that their own sense of good, their own goals, are naive, and they need to settle for more exploitation as the cost of doing business. It's both a cope that makes you callous and it's a nihilism that grinds you down. An apathy, in the face of politics.
I also don't understand why in the political realm we have all been so reduced to viewing things purely in terms of like, whatever is within our black and white moral compass. So team-based. No attempt at nuance, understanding, or empathy. It's insane, I think social media has truly kind of rotted people's brains, in that respect, by shaping the contexts in which these kinds of interactions happen, reducing the means of people's expression into pre-approved categories, into little sequestered realities. We're maybe cooked cause of that, I don't know.
I would argue it is the non-voters in this position.
I don’t know why people didn’t riot when Republicans denied Obama a supreme court nomination because of it being his last year but allowed Trump to nominate one weeks before the elections.
The majority of the supreme court would crack open a barrel of kerosene.
