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  • "invited" is questionable, I know my governor was pressured and put under duress in order to accept Trump's national guard deployment during George Floyd.

    But what about a clearer example: President Eisenhower deployed National Guard troops to Arkansas to enforce the desegregation of schools. The national guard was explicitly not invited by the Governor of Arkansas. Was this a civil war?

  • In the 60s we had everything you just said: extreme state sanctioned violence, mass shootings, national guard being sent in, judges houses being burned, many political assassinations...

    And they all happened in much larger numbers. There were so many bombings and bomb threats, and tons of plane hijackings, and the overall crime rate was so much higher, and there was so much racial violence, and and...

    So do you think the US went through a civil war in the 60s?

    I agree that things are looking bad, and getting worse, and this may end up in some sort of a civil war. But it seems you and I have a much different definition of "civil war".

  • You're totally right, but things get a lot murkier when we get into secondary- and third-order effects.

    Bush's economic policy of bailing out Wall Street while letting Main Street fend for itself lead to 10s or maybe 100s of thousands of excess deaths.

    Bush's defunding of education created an unknowable number of excess deaths, and this undereducation was a major factor in the election of Trump.

  • You're right, saying things like "front lines" is an oversimplification. I have listened to a lot of Robert Evans, and I agree that if a civil war happens it will Balkanize America.

    With that being said, you agree none of this is happening yet? Surely we are backsliding into fascism and violence, but you would agree we are not in a civil war, because we do not yet have multiple different factions, upstart states, militias and insurgencies?

  • I have an honest followup question to this meme (because I lived it): how long do you expect the girlfriend to stay?

    At age 23 I was in a great relationship, we were in love, then I was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis. I stopped being able to do physical things, I dropped out of school, I was bedridden. She went from being my girlfriend to being my nurse. She cared for me for a year, one long miserable year, then she left.

    Is she at fault for leaving?

  • W Bush is responsible for 1-2 million deaths, depending on how you count the bodies.

    They were killed for political reasons, they were killed for profit. They were labeled "terrorists" in order to justify mass extrajudicial killings.

    We can argue which is worse: Trump or W? Trump has done more damage to institutions, W has more blood on his hands, Trump has 3.5 more years to do damage, etc. But let's not whitewash the horrific and unjustifiable crimes of the W administration.

  • If we use the original definition of the word "meme", which is "a unit of cultural transmission" then yes literally everything is a meme.

    It was coined to be analogous to the word "gene". One of the similarities is that the borders of genes and memes are fuzzy: when you split a gene in half, you get two genes. Both genes and memes are nested inside of themselves like a Russian doll.

    The misdefinition of "meme" as "image macro on the internet" was ill informed, and is thankfully going out of style.

  • How can you say "Spain democratized after francos death" as if the entire bloody Spanish Civil War didn't happen?

    By that same logic it seems that Germany also overcame fascism peacefully, because Germany democratized right after Hitlers death.

  • I'm pretty sure more than half of registered US voters have never opened a book since they graduated high school, so this tracks.

    Whenever I bring up Palestine around normies, the most common response is "they have been killing each other for 2000 years" type of ahistorical nonsense.

    These people aren't inherently dumb. When educated, most will adopt the moral, anti-genocide position. 40% is not enough, but it's so much higher than it was a decade ago. We are making (slow, painful) progress.

  • Totally agree that we can't take Trump at his word, but the man has been on camera for decades and there is no footage of him drunk. I don't believe that Trump has the self-control to hide a drinking habit.

    Also I believe Trump's #1 motivator is narcissism. He may not have cared that his brother died, but he did see himself in his brother. He saw the devastating results of lifelong alcohol abuse and committed himself to avoiding it.

  • Is there any evidence Trump is on Adderall? Other than his erratic, occasionally manic behavior, which could be a sign of any upper.

    I always figured he was abusing pseudoephedrine, since he had a drawer full of it in his first term.

    I could also imagine him doing a kind of "Dr. Feelgood" mix of drugs just like Reagan and Hitler. He is following in their footsteps. This idea seems unlikely though, Trump appears to be somewhat of an honest teetotaler due to his family history of drug abuse and early death.