Yeah, whenever i see someone here saying that we need to resort to violence, my immediate thought is always, “Ok tough guy, where’s your truck bomb?”

I do more IRL resistance work than at least 95% of the people on this site. And I’m not even talking protests. I’m directly, on the ground, working to help some of the people most hurt by the regime’s policies. I’m not into violence, but I’m not above disobeying unjust laws either. So it’s not like I’m some online slactavist that refuses to lift a finger to actually help people. The kind of work I do is the kind of thing I can’t even post about on social media.

But it is an incredible shame how the right has taken over so many online spaces. 10-15 years ago, the left more dominated online spaces. The early internet was a mix of very libertarian and progressive. Hell the internet was built from the ground up on socialist principles. But it’s the right that really learned how to use the net most effectively as a means of mass communication and propaganda. And they did so quite deliberately. There was a deliberate and organized campaign among white supremacists on places like stormfront to subtly move their message to the mainstream.

I think those on the left tend to view things from way too scholarly a perspective. Why repeat the same message if you’ve already written extensively about it before? Or make sure to not post simple understandable messages; instead start with a dozen qualifiers and provisos that end up watering down your whole message. It’s more important to be intellectually rigorous than it is to effectively communicate your values. Or there’s the tendency for purity tests that end up shoving away otherwise eager allies.

The right meanwhile has learned that even bold faced lies can become widely accepted if you simply repeat them loudly and often enough.

Yes, obviously, but these type of comments are self-defeating and unhelpful. It’s more about trying to encourage the circulation of the idea that ICE needs to face criminal accountability. There should be a paragraph on ICE’s potential criminal liability in every article about them. People should mention their susceptibility to prosecution on every discussion about them. We should be including the topic of prosecutions in every casual conversation about ICE.

The right wing learned a long time ago that the public narrative matters. If there’s an idea worth spreading, then spread it. We need to get the idea of accountability in the public consciousness whenever possible. Otherwise, it’s the default instinct of every Democratic politician to try to be magnanimous when they’re elected. Liberals are by their nature non-confrontational; they’re happy to have people walk all over them. Obama and Biden both refused to prosecute the previous administration and tried to be grand peace makers, and look how that turned out. It will take a lot of public pressure if there’s ever going to be any accountability. That’s why we need to be circulating these ideas in the Zeitgeist. Yes, obviously this is just lemmy, but there’s no need to be such an unhelpful cynic.

I don’t think you understand the difference between income and wealth.

Daily reminder to all ICE agents. By signing up for ICE, you have signed yourself up for a lifetime of fear and criminal liability. There are Nazi concentration camp guards that were tried for their crimes in their 90s. There is no statute of limitations on crimes against humanity. Your names are recorded; your deeds are known. And you will face justice for your crimes. And do not count on a blanket pardon saving you. Crimes against humanity are violations of international law that cannot be pardoned.

Daily reminder to all ICE agents. By signing up for ICE, you have signed yourself up for a lifetime of fear and criminal liability. There are Nazi concentration camp guards that were tried for their crimes in their 90s. There is no statute of limitations on crimes against humanity. Your names are recorded; your deeds are known. And you will face justice for your crimes. And do not count on a blanket pardon saving you. Crimes against humanity are violations of international law that cannot be pardoned.

Daily reminder to all ICE agents. By signing up for ICE, you have signed yourself up for a lifetime of fear and criminal liability. There are Nazi concentration camp guards that were tried for their crimes in their 90s. There is no statute of limitations on crimes against humanity. Your names are recorded; your deeds are known. And you will face justice for your crimes. And do not count on a blanket pardon saving you. Crimes against humanity are violations of international law that cannot be pardoned.

Daily reminder to all ICE agents. By signing up for ICE, you have signed yourself up for a lifetime of fear and criminal liability. There are Nazi concentration camp guards that were tried for their crimes in their 90s. There is no statute of limitations on crimes against humanity. Your names are recorded; your deeds are known. And you will face justice for your crimes. And do not count on a blanket pardon saving you. Crimes against humanity are violations of international law that cannot be pardoned.

The problem is that Microsoft doesn’t honor your wishes. There is no button you can click that says, “opt me out of all AI and cloud data features.” You can disable apps, buttons, and tracking today, but there will be new ones out tomorrow. And there may be a period of weeks or months of them sucking your data up before you figure out what they’re tracking and how to shut it down.

Daily reminder to all ICE agents. By signing up for ICE, you have signed yourself up for a lifetime of fear and criminal liability. There are Nazi concentration camp guards that were tried for their crimes in their 90s. There is no statute of limitations on crimes against humanity. Your names are recorded; your deeds are known. And you will face justice for your crimes. And do not count on a blanket pardon saving you. Crimes against humanity are violations of international law that cannot be pardoned.

I suppose I should add to this, “and do not count on a blanket pardon saving you. Crimes against humanity are violations of international law that cannot be pardoned.”

Me: “if your policy isn’t understandable by someone with an 8th grade education, you’re doing it wrong.”

You: “Here’s my slide deck.”

Honestly, if you build or work at a place like this, you deserve to die. If you’re a guard at a concentration camp, I hope you die quickly. You don’t deserve to live.

Daily reminder to all ICE agents. By signing up for ICE, you have signed yourself up for a lifetime of fear and criminal liability. There are Nazi concentration camp guards that were tried for their crimes in their 90s. There is no statute of limitations on crimes against humanity. Your names are recorded; your deeds are known. And you will face justice for your crimes.

I want every Democratic politician to be repeating this every chance they get, a modern day “Carthage must be destroyed.” My greatest fear is that when this is done, and Democrats are eventually back in power, that they will fall back on the same suicidal tendencies that got us here in the first place. Obama came into power on the back of the criminal Bush administration, and his first act of office was to declare “it’s time to move on,” and to announce that no members of the prior regime would be prosecuted. And Biden did the same after the first Trump term. We need to be willing to hold people accountable. And we need to be talking about this now. We need to fully embrace the idea of prosecuting ICE agents for their crimes against humanity. We cannot declare it’s time to move on and to let them get away with what they have done.

And no, “I’m just following orders” is not an excuse. Anyone who says that deserves to hang.

Honestly, I just don’t give a fuck. Democrats have committed national suicide by endlessly trying to appeal and pander to these conservative fuckwits. Ultimately MAGA are sick rotten people who don’t want to change, don’t want to improve themselves, and are just looking for someone to hurt. The entire core philosophy of MAGA is that other people are responsible for your shitty life, and that your life will be better if we just destroy enough minorities.

The lesson from history is that these people cannot be saved. Hell, the actual historical Nazis? Ten years after the war ended, Nazi popularity was still around where it was when Hitler came to power. The generation that brought Hitler to power never really change their views. They still viewed Germany as the innocent victim, and they still blamed the Jews for their problems. Germany was leveled, divided, and occupied, and these fuckers learned nothing. Politics only improved in Germany when the next generation came up in the shadow of the war. It took generations dying off for attitudes to really change. Hitler’s generation took their hate to their graves.

If even losing WW2 won’t change the mind of a fascist, what will? We call MAGA fascist, but we refuse to actually look at historical fascism and put MAGA in its proper context. If you think you can appeal to MAGA based on compassion or reason, then you really haven’t internalized the concept that MAGA is a fascist movement.

These people are beyond redemption. If there is a literal Hell, every last one of them is going there. They cannot be saved.

You’re suffering from what I might call liberal disease or the wonkish fallacy. If you’re going to propose some policy that would radically transform society, you need to KISS. Keep it Simple Stupid. Forget the Everything Bagel Liberalism. Don’t try to solve every social ill with one policy. Don’t try to make it perfect. Don’t add a bunch of provisos and loopholes, even if those loopholes are made with good intentions. People lose track of your goals, and they become understandably suspect that you’re trying to pull a con on them with all this fine print.

That’s why I propose a 1000x median household income cap. It’s simple, clear, and understandable by anyone. If the basic outline of your policy cannot be understood by someone with an 8th grade education, then you are failing at writing policy.

Something like that might actually work. There’s a reason the oldest nations on Earth tend to be smaller geographically. Very large countries with vast regional differences in politics, needs, and desires tend to not be stable long term. Countries as big as the US tend to either break up or only maintain their integrity by collapsing into authoritarianism. You can force a dysfunctional union together with enough violence. But government is meant to serve the needs of the people, not the people the needs of the government. The federal government was created by human beings to serve our needs. Remember of the people, by the people, for the people? If our existing nation is no longer serving our needs, it’s OK to let it go. We don’t have to keep propping up this corpse of a nation just for the sake of tradition. Americans, as a people, aren’t going anywhere. We’ll still be Americans whether we share one state or many.

This is a myth. Different states still have their own unique political cultures. Some of those differences are explained by rural/urban divide, but only in the most general of sense. It is the norm in most nations for the rural areas to be more conservative than the urban areas. But it would be reductive and oversimplistic to say that the US and Mexico share the same politics simply because both have more conservative people in the rural areas.

The idea that red state blue states don’t exist is just a product of American exceptionalism, a blindness that prevents us from comparing ourselves to other nations.

It’s the cold sober realism that comes with looking at where we have been, where we are, and where we’re headed. You’re just in denial.

Their response to your plea for compassion and understanding:

“You talk like a fag.”

If your mortgage payments are fixed, but your pay increases with inflation, your real monthly mortgage payment goes down over time.

That if is doing so much heavy lifting it just qualified for the Olympics. The problem with inflation is that your wages don’t keep up with it.