You may well be correct. However, I do think there will be an appetite for justice after all this is over, and I don’t think it’s a foregone conclusion that a future administration would go back and look at people from the current administration.
It’ll all come down to who’s making the decisions at that time, and whether the political calculus works out one way or another. I think it’s too early to speculate as to what an administration that is 3+ years in the future would do.
It’s definitely possible that this will continue across multiple generations. However, far more tyrannical governments have completely fallen apart after a couple of years, and it rarely goes well for those who had power in that time.
Regarding North Korea, yes they’ve had over 75 years of tyrannical autocracy, but that wasn’t in a vacuum. They have been largely dependent on first the Soviet Union, and now China; without those countries backing them up, they would have collapsed long ago. And Kim Il Sung specifically worked to create deification for his bloodline to consolidate power within his family; Trump so far has not been successful in doing the same, and so far nobody else has been able to match his cult of personality. As with many dictatorships throughout history, when the figurehead is gone, the regime starts to crumble.
I do take issue with your implication that hoping the regime will end is delusional. If we accept that we’ve already lost, what’s the point of fighting back? I do genuinely believe that this will end sooner rather than later, not out of delusion, but because so many people are fighting back against the administration and its goals without giving up. Even where I live, in one of the most conservative states in the country, there are tens of thousands of people who have turned out for protests and rallies. There have been ongoing daily protests, and even the conservatives I work with are upset about what’s happening.
We’ve been in such incredibly dark places before as a country, and we’ve made it out because people refused to give up. I refuse to assume this is inevitable, and I refuse to give up on working towards something better.
You’re probably right, but that should give everyone around Trump who wants or needs a pardon pause. Because if Trump can overturn Biden’s pardons, a future President can overturn Trump’s.
And it’s not wise for them to assume that a friendly President will be in power for the entire lifetime of everyone in the current administration. Even if they solidify power for a while, we’ve seen time and time again across history that it will eventually end.
I have no idea what he’s doing with it. He’s certainly not improving or resolving work situations with it. We suspect he’s trying to build a paper trail so he can punish people who don’t agree with him.
Whatever his intention, it’s resulted in most of the team quietly agreeing to bypass him in favor of going to his boss if there are urgent or important concerns that arise.
If I want to share with you, I will. Usually this will happen naturally if we’ve worked together for a while and I like you. I’ll start mentioning some of my interests, and depending on how you respond I’ll mention other interests or experiences.
I have been invited to events like this before, and I have managed to avoid them through rescheduling calls with vendors so I have an excuse not to attend, coming up with critical things that could not wait so I’d be able to skip, and by just flat-out taking a sick day. I do not want to be forced to share my personal life with my coworkers.
If you make me share in front of a group, I will spend the entire allotted time talking about something incredibly trivial that applies to everyone.
For an example of how this works when I can’t avoid it, my manager recently started asking how we’re all feeling on a scale of 1-10 during some team meetings. If you give a low response, he’ll start quizzing you in front of the entire team as to why you’re not feeling better. If you answer too high, he’ll ask about why you’re feeling so happy. My response in all of the meetings has been 8, no matter how I’m feeling, because that’s average and there’s no follow up. It’s none of his business how I’m feeling; if I want to share with him and the others, I will choose to do that on my own and not in a group situation.
I am friendly with my coworkers, but I am not friends with them (with a couple exceptions for people I’ve been working with for almost a decade, and even then they’re not in my inner circle).
I played a Protector Aasimar Barbarian named Krill who was a fairly average scholar who had decided studying wasn’t for him. He heard somebody talking about “Power Word Krill,” and decided that he wanted to learn how to do it. He would basically go along with the party on everything (sometimes a little too quickly, he was hard to kill and often forgot others were squishier), but was absolutely obsessed with finding Power Word Krill.
He was asked multiple times if he was instead looking for “Power Word Kill,” but he really wanted to summon a lot of small crustaceans on demand. Or maybe it would just summon a big one, he didn’t know and was fine with either situation.