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The question is what do you do to prevent it? Complaining on social media is fine, but that won't solve the problem. As a European, I'm shocked at how complac

The question is what do you do to prevent it? Complaining on social media is fine, but that won't solve the problem. As a European, I'm shocked at how complacent the public has been. I've lived in France and people do global strikes and widespread civil unrest for a change of retirement law. Yet in the US a dictatorship emerges and you have small demonstrations here and there and spicy comments on social media. That won't change things.

rcpt 1y ago
Change of retirement law directly impacts the population in a way they understand.
sandworm101 1y ago
Because a very large number of Americans are pro-dictatorship. This is not an a Manchurian-candidate scenario. This is a legitimately-elected leader doing exactly what he was elected to do.
- kzrdude 1y ago
  A lot of them seem to be cheering him on as if they elected a king. The problem being of course that legally there is no person who can just issue edicts and have them become law, there is no legal way to elect a king.
  - AlecSchueler 1y ago
    It doesn't have to be legal anymore, that's the whole point.
  - tim333 1y ago
    His approval rating is not doing very well.
    - kzrdude 1y ago
      For what they are doing, it should be much lower than what it is
- mandeepj 1y ago
  > This is a legitimately-elected leader doing exactly what he was elected to do. He was elected to bring prices and inflation down; that’s what he campaigned on! He lied at that time and people trusted in his lies. He have no idea what he can do to bring prices and inflation down! Marketing could be his expertise, but when it comes to performing duties of the President, he’s super dumb.
  - pjc50 1y ago
    It's going to be "fun" when the tariffs really hit and prices and inflation go up. Then people will have to fall back on "no, we elected him for the unlawful mass deportations".
    - krapp 1y ago
      It's always going to be something. It's like the entire span of history and politics from 2016 to six months before the election never happened, and Trump was always a reasonable, respectable, honest politician who never said or did anything out of the ordinary. Why would anyone have any reason not to trust his intentions? Why would anyone associate him with these extremist beliefs? "I voted for the Party because I supported their infrastructure plan, I had no idea where all of those trains would be going" kind of feel. And the sad thing is, it will work because our entire framework of subjective truth and reality is built on the very technologies they already use to reprogram us and revise history. Trump was always an honest man. We were always at war with Canada. It was always about egg prices.
  - tim333 1y ago
    He was also going to stop the Ukraine war on day one, which seems to be delayed.
- JohnFen 1y ago
  > This is a legitimately-elected leader doing exactly what he was elected to do. He put a fair bit of effort in telling people he wasn't going to do most of this stuff. It was always clear that he was lying, but lots of people believed him and are now very surprised.
pjc50 1y ago
Too much of the US population is still in favor of this sort of thing. After all, it's happening to an immigrant.
- ndsipa_pomu 1y ago
  In that case, they deserve what's likely to happen to them too. People that only care about themselves or their racial group are a curse upon society.
  - BriggyDwiggs42 1y ago
    Yeah but they fuck it up for the rest of us on the way down
    - ndsipa_pomu 1y ago
      That's the price you pay for tolerating and enabling their behaviour. It constantly astonishes me how blatantly racist some of the people in the U.S. are. How do they not get punched in the face?
      - pjc50 1y ago
        > How do they not get punched in the face? Guns and pre-segregating their social circle.
      - JohnFen 1y ago
        > That's the price you pay for tolerating and enabling their behaviour. Be careful about assuming that we are all tolerating and enabling their behavior. That's not true as a blanket statement.
        ndsipa_pomu 1y ago
        Sorry - I didn't mean to sound like I was accusing everyone, but there's certainly U.S. communities where racist attitudes/behaviour are allowed to fester unchecked. I find it quite shocking.
sph 1y ago
As long as their have Tiktok, Netflix and their burger and fries, people don’t really care. They write an angry comment, scroll to the next post about cute cats and forget all about it.
- Gigachad 1y ago
  There’s going to be riots when it comes time to buy the Switch 2 and iPhone 17 which will cost double what the rest of the world pays.
- pjmlp 1y ago
  Ah the Roman way, however they also had their ways to change goverments when the ruler went too far off the track.
hayst4ck 1y ago
Cyncicsm is the belief that you don't think there is anything worth fighting for. Cynicism is an admission that you prefer to submit than fight. Most of the world looked at Ukraine and cynically said that Zelenskyy would flee and Ukrainians would not fight because they themselves would not be willing to fight. Few people have values they would consider dying for. Few people would put themselves at risk for another person. Few people would be willing to die building a better world that they won't get to experience. Yet Ukrainians are fighting for western values right now. They are fighting for a government in which they are a person and not a thing. They are fighting for a government that does not treat them arbitrarily. They are fighting for them and their children to have a future. On the Maidan revolution of Ukraine: The Maidan was a revolt against произвол (pronounced: preez-vol), an idea of arbitrariness tinged with tyranny, helplessness in the face of power, the feeling that the powers that be can do whatever they want to you, and you are helpless, that you are being treated as a plaything, as a thing and not as a human being, as an object and not as a subject, and the Maidan became a revolt against произвол, it became an insistence on being treated as a person and not as a thing, as a subject not as an object, and they began to call themselves on the Maidan the revolution of dignity. The Making of Modern Ukraine: Maidan and Self-Understanding, Guest Lecturer: Marci Shore -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gg_CLI3xY58&list=PLh9mgdi4rNewfxO7LhBoz_1Mx1MaO6sw_&index=21 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gg_CLI3xY58&list=PLh9mgdi4rN... In November 2013 Ukraine was expected to sign a long-anticipated association agreement with the European Union. At the eleventh hour, on 21 November 2013, Yanukovych refused. The disappointment was especially crushing for students, who felt as if their future had vanished; Europe would be closed to them. That evening a thirty-two-year-old Ukrainian journalist from Kabul named Mustafa Nayyem wrote in Russian on his Facebook page: Come on, let’s get serious. Who is ready to go out to the Maidan by midnight tonight? ‘Likes’ don’t count. That night Ukrainians—overwhelming students—came to the Maidan—and stayed. They held hands and shouted, “Ukraine is Europe!” At 4 am on 30 November 2013 Yanukovych sent his riot police to the Maidan to beat the students. The violence against peaceful protestors was a shock. Yanukovych, it seems, was counting on the shock to shake parents into pulling their kids off the streets. That was when something remarkable happened: instead of pulling their kids off the streets, the parents joined them there. It was a historic Aufhebung of Oedipal rebellion. Now there were close to a million people on the streets of Kyiv, and they were shouting, “We will not permit you to beat our children!” Ukraine's Maidan Revolution --https://snyder.substack.com/p/ukraines-maidan-revolution https://snyder.substack.com/p/ukraines-maidan-revolution I showed up to the first protest of my entire life on April 5th. This Saturday, April 19th, everyone here should show up, too. Upvotes don't count.
bongodongobob 1y ago
[flagged]
- hayst4ck 1y ago
  No. No this is completely wrong framing. Law needs to be enforced. It's not enough to be against, that's what the Iranians did and it created a power vacuum filled by people worse than what they had. You must be for something. There are still oaths to the constitution, but these people need mandate (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandate_(politics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandate_(politics)) to act.
raincom 1y ago
If you bracket away Trump, political dissent in US is co-opted by one of the two parties(tea-parties, for instances), or muted(Occupy Wall Street) or criminalized. In other words, political dissent doesn't lead to the emergence of new parties, as is the case in Europe.
dragonwriter 1y ago
> As a European, I'm shocked at how complacent the public has been. There have been large, growing, and recurring protests. > Yet in the US a dictatorship emerges and you have small demonstrations here and there They aren't small. (They aren't well covered by the media, but the media is actively part of the problem.) > that won't change things. The social infrastructure and culture around which things like general strikes and more significant actions occur does not exist in the United States. The current and growing protest movement (and the networking and community building go on around and behind it) is how that infrastructure gets built. So, I disagree, the things you are saying won't change it are absolutely indispensable to building the capacity for the kind of things that can change it, assuming that it continues to develop in a way that cannot be constrained effectively by more regular political means such as the 2026 midterm and 2028 presidential elections.

rcpt 1y ago

Change of retirement law directly impacts the population in a way they understand.

sandworm101 1y ago

Because a very large number of Americans are pro-dictatorship. This is not an a Manchurian-candidate scenario. This is a legitimately-elected leader doing exactly what he was elected to do.

kzrdude 1y ago
A lot of them seem to be cheering him on as if they elected a king. The problem being of course that legally there is no person who can just issue edicts and have them become law, there is no legal way to elect a king.
- AlecSchueler 1y ago
  It doesn't have to be legal anymore, that's the whole point.
- tim333 1y ago
  His approval rating is not doing very well.
  - kzrdude 1y ago
    For what they are doing, it should be much lower than what it is
mandeepj 1y ago
> This is a legitimately-elected leader doing exactly what he was elected to do. He was elected to bring prices and inflation down; that’s what he campaigned on! He lied at that time and people trusted in his lies. He have no idea what he can do to bring prices and inflation down! Marketing could be his expertise, but when it comes to performing duties of the President, he’s super dumb.
- pjc50 1y ago
  It's going to be "fun" when the tariffs really hit and prices and inflation go up. Then people will have to fall back on "no, we elected him for the unlawful mass deportations".
  - krapp 1y ago
    It's always going to be something. It's like the entire span of history and politics from 2016 to six months before the election never happened, and Trump was always a reasonable, respectable, honest politician who never said or did anything out of the ordinary. Why would anyone have any reason not to trust his intentions? Why would anyone associate him with these extremist beliefs? "I voted for the Party because I supported their infrastructure plan, I had no idea where all of those trains would be going" kind of feel. And the sad thing is, it will work because our entire framework of subjective truth and reality is built on the very technologies they already use to reprogram us and revise history. Trump was always an honest man. We were always at war with Canada. It was always about egg prices.
- tim333 1y ago
  He was also going to stop the Ukraine war on day one, which seems to be delayed.
JohnFen 1y ago
> This is a legitimately-elected leader doing exactly what he was elected to do. He put a fair bit of effort in telling people he wasn't going to do most of this stuff. It was always clear that he was lying, but lots of people believed him and are now very surprised.

pjc50 1y ago

Too much of the US population is still in favor of this sort of thing. After all, it's happening to an immigrant.

ndsipa_pomu 1y ago
In that case, they deserve what's likely to happen to them too. People that only care about themselves or their racial group are a curse upon society.
- BriggyDwiggs42 1y ago
  Yeah but they fuck it up for the rest of us on the way down
  - ndsipa_pomu 1y ago
    That's the price you pay for tolerating and enabling their behaviour. It constantly astonishes me how blatantly racist some of the people in the U.S. are. How do they not get punched in the face?
    - pjc50 1y ago
      > How do they not get punched in the face? Guns and pre-segregating their social circle.
    - JohnFen 1y ago
      > That's the price you pay for tolerating and enabling their behaviour. Be careful about assuming that we are all tolerating and enabling their behavior. That's not true as a blanket statement.
      - ndsipa_pomu 1y ago
        Sorry - I didn't mean to sound like I was accusing everyone, but there's certainly U.S. communities where racist attitudes/behaviour are allowed to fester unchecked. I find it quite shocking.

sph 1y ago

As long as their have Tiktok, Netflix and their burger and fries, people don’t really care. They write an angry comment, scroll to the next post about cute cats and forget all about it.

Gigachad 1y ago
There’s going to be riots when it comes time to buy the Switch 2 and iPhone 17 which will cost double what the rest of the world pays.
pjmlp 1y ago
Ah the Roman way, however they also had their ways to change goverments when the ruler went too far off the track.

hayst4ck 1y ago

Cyncicsm is the belief that you don't think there is anything worth fighting for. Cynicism is an admission that you prefer to submit than fight. Most of the world looked at Ukraine and cynically said that Zelenskyy would flee and Ukrainians would not fight because they themselves would not be willing to fight. Few people have values they would consider dying for. Few people would put themselves at risk for another person. Few people would be willing to die building a better world that they won't get to experience. Yet Ukrainians are fighting for western values right now. They are fighting for a government in which they are a person and not a thing. They are fighting for a government that does not treat them arbitrarily. They are fighting for them and their children to have a future. On the Maidan revolution of Ukraine: The Maidan was a revolt against произвол (pronounced: preez-vol), an idea of arbitrariness tinged with tyranny, helplessness in the face of power, the feeling that the powers that be can do whatever they want to you, and you are helpless, that you are being treated as a plaything, as a thing and not as a human being, as an object and not as a subject, and the Maidan became a revolt against произвол, it became an insistence on being treated as a person and not as a thing, as a subject not as an object, and they began to call themselves on the Maidan the revolution of dignity. The Making of Modern Ukraine: Maidan and Self-Understanding, Guest Lecturer: Marci Shore -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gg_CLI3xY58&list=PLh9mgdi4rNewfxO7LhBoz_1Mx1MaO6sw_&index=21 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gg_CLI3xY58&list=PLh9mgdi4rN... In November 2013 Ukraine was expected to sign a long-anticipated association agreement with the European Union. At the eleventh hour, on 21 November 2013, Yanukovych refused. The disappointment was especially crushing for students, who felt as if their future had vanished; Europe would be closed to them. That evening a thirty-two-year-old Ukrainian journalist from Kabul named Mustafa Nayyem wrote in Russian on his Facebook page: Come on, let’s get serious. Who is ready to go out to the Maidan by midnight tonight? ‘Likes’ don’t count. That night Ukrainians—overwhelming students—came to the Maidan—and stayed. They held hands and shouted, “Ukraine is Europe!” At 4 am on 30 November 2013 Yanukovych sent his riot police to the Maidan to beat the students. The violence against peaceful protestors was a shock. Yanukovych, it seems, was counting on the shock to shake parents into pulling their kids off the streets. That was when something remarkable happened: instead of pulling their kids off the streets, the parents joined them there. It was a historic Aufhebung of Oedipal rebellion. Now there were close to a million people on the streets of Kyiv, and they were shouting, “We will not permit you to beat our children!” Ukraine's Maidan Revolution --https://snyder.substack.com/p/ukraines-maidan-revolution https://snyder.substack.com/p/ukraines-maidan-revolution I showed up to the first protest of my entire life on April 5th. This Saturday, April 19th, everyone here should show up, too. Upvotes don't count.

bongodongobob 1y ago

[flagged]

hayst4ck 1y ago
No. No this is completely wrong framing. Law needs to be enforced. It's not enough to be against, that's what the Iranians did and it created a power vacuum filled by people worse than what they had. You must be for something. There are still oaths to the constitution, but these people need mandate (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandate_(politics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandate_(politics)) to act.

raincom 1y ago

If you bracket away Trump, political dissent in US is co-opted by one of the two parties(tea-parties, for instances), or muted(Occupy Wall Street) or criminalized. In other words, political dissent doesn't lead to the emergence of new parties, as is the case in Europe.

dragonwriter 1y ago

> As a European, I'm shocked at how complacent the public has been. There have been large, growing, and recurring protests. > Yet in the US a dictatorship emerges and you have small demonstrations here and there They aren't small. (They aren't well covered by the media, but the media is actively part of the problem.) > that won't change things. The social infrastructure and culture around which things like general strikes and more significant actions occur does not exist in the United States. The current and growing protest movement (and the networking and community building go on around and behind it) is how that infrastructure gets built. So, I disagree, the things you are saying won't change it are absolutely indispensable to building the capacity for the kind of things that can change it, assuming that it continues to develop in a way that cannot be constrained effectively by more regular political means such as the 2026 midterm and 2028 presidential elections.