“Kids do stupid things,” he continued. “Especially young boys. They tell edgy, offensive jokes. That’s what kids do.”

I was a young, stupid, conservative boy. Most of my jokes were Strong Bad related. I didn’t at any time glorify Hitler.

These kids need an intervention, not apologia.

Yes. If it is built using public money, it belongs to the public.

Just stop with this. It’s a form of obeying in advance: buying into the despair of nothing being possible, and everything being broken.

Their plan is to make it seem like there’s no point in fighting so nobody does, but if we give up the fight three years out we’re just conceding that ground to them.

Yes, they’re going to cheat. So we have to make it impossible for them to manipulate. Yes, they might try to make it look like a landslide anyway. So we have to be ready to take every single possible thing all the way through the courts.

Yes, the Supreme Court is a captured entity as well. So we have to overwhelm and clog up the apparatus they’re using to make it do horrible things and force everyone from the poll worker all the way up to the SCOTUS justice to publicly go on record and say “voter fraud is ok.” Then, when fascism falls (and it always does, don’t kid yourself) we know who to throw in jail first.

Don’t give up in advance. They want you to love Big Orange Brother or fear Big Orange Brother with every fiber of your being; either way, you’ll never stand up to him.

We assume there’s an election until there isn’t. We assume it’s fair (or fair-ish) until we have proof it isn’t. Anything less is saying “eh, you can have this one.”

Ok, last 20 years. So that’s Obama v. McCain, Obama v. Romney, Clinton v. Trump, Biden v. Trump, and Harris v. Trump. Five elections: two featured probably the most attractive (or at least youngest) president in recent history winning, and the other three featured maybe the ugliest S. O. B. on God’s green earth, who won twice. I feel like it’s generally a tossup.

I don’t mean voter fraud is the theory. Yes, obviously it definitely happened and will happen again. I mean the commonly-repeated theory that there “won’t be an election” next year. That is a great way to just capitulate the election in advance.

Honestly I might have replied to the wrong comment. I’m sorry.

Except when you realize that the last five Republican presidents have looked like: Annoying Orange with a cobweb toupee and a perfectly cylindrical body; the guy who bullied literally everyone in high school; an unholy combination of Jeff Daniels, age 70 on the right side and Jeff Daniels, age 40 on the left side; a washed up movie star with too many hours under the warming lamp; and the villain in a teen movie about having a bake sale to save the local dance hall.

Cool theory. Not helpful.

We have to assume there’ll be an election until there isn’t.

He didn’t deserve it, but I can still choose to be better than him and offer it anyway.

Disagree. The old Republicans are ruining a world they won’t have to live in, and the old Democrats are legitimizing the gerontocracy.

I take it back. I refreshed the thread and I stand corrected.

every time I’ve seen anyone on Lemmy mention Sanders, it’s always “someone like” or “if only he were a few decades younger” or “, but he’s too old.”

Absolutely not. But he was alive for a lot of those folks’ time on the world stage; the names probably managed to filter their way into even his depleted-uranium skull.

How long before his “senior moment” involves demanding that they bring Slobodan Milošević or Yasser Arafat to the White House, or ordering the 101st Airborne into the Spanish Sahara, or sending a nuclear strike on Leningrad to retaliate against the Soviets for the invasion of Czechoslovakia?

I’ve got a kitsune gunslinger in a homebrew campaign who kind of talks and acts like Captain Picard and a dwarf barbarian in Abomination Vaults who is basically “what if Gimli’s laugh after Legolas asks him if he wants a box was a character?”

Plus I GM a game for my kids and their friends. That one’s super fun.

I bet we can figure out what it really is if he releases the Epstein files.

The only thing that solves fascism is incredible violence.

That’s not exactly true.

• The deposition of the Greek junta in 1974 resulted in the deaths of 24 protestors (estimated) at the hands of a fascist tank, but no large-scale violence broke out. Infighting within the junta and the junta’s invasion of Cyprus caused far more death than the revolution did.

• The Carnation Revolution in Portugal that same year only resulted in 4-6 deaths, total, all caused by the reaction of the regime being overthrown; no one was killed by the revolutionaries.

• In Spain, just a year later, Francisco Franco died of natural causes; and while I wouldn’t call what happened over the next few years “peaceful,” it wasn’t quite two years from the death of Franco to the new government’s first successful election, and that time wasn’t marked by anything I would call “incredible violence.”

• Uruguay transitioned from a dictatorship to a democracy in the mid-1980s. It was a little over a year between the first General Strike and the inauguration of the first democratically-elected president of the new government (though some elements of democracy had been filtering back into the government for the previous few years). No one was killed by the anti-fascists.

• Pinochet’s incredibly violent rule in Chile ended with an election and a peaceful (albeit extended) transfer of power between 1988-1990.

Today, all of these countries have a score of 85 or higher on the Freedom House index.

There are other similar examples: Argentina in 1982, the Philippines and the People Power Revolution in 1986, South Africa defeating apartheid in 1994, even South Korea last December. Not all of those are great examples, whether because they didn’t stand the test of time or because they weren’t “quite as bad” to start off with, but it certainly seems that in the modern era, defeating fascism can be done nonviolently.

Will it be done nonviolently in the US? I don’t know. All I know is, every fascist regime in history has either fallen or is in the process of falling. It’s just a matter of time, and how many people die along the way.

theres going to be a lot of suffering and misery inflicted on us all

Definitely true. One way or the other, this isn’t going to be a fun time.

And your counter suggestion is what, rolling over?

The wrong way, though. This will get the rest of his base big mad.

I mean…they were 19, at the oldest, when the first Trump term began. Now they’re between 13 and 28. So I understand being ignorant of what came before.

But seriously…if you don’t know what came before, don’t vote.

I personally haven’t seen that change

I really hope you do soon. Hey, look at it this way, you’ve met one now!