8 ms·

So I'm sitting here as a Canadian wondering what the American people are going to do? I understand a lot of what the President of The United States says - I eve

• Frost1x 9mo ago
  Complain to our representatives who will do absolutely nothing because the system is ripe for abuse and we’ve put people who actively want to abuse and exploit it into office. I keep telling everyone and have been for a year, it’s not just our problem, due to global US positioning it’s now a world problem. Just ask Venezuela. Regardless of what you think about the end result the ends did not justify the means. I for one will be collecting my (completely legal) hunting rifles and weapons I’ve had in storage since I was a kid, have them professionally serviced and grab some ammunition, on the terrible case I need to defend myself which I thought I’d never ever have to consider and I’d just sell them some day. But alas we have a lot of really really stupid as well as downright toxic voters in this country.
  • jiggawatts 9mo ago
    You’re all tooling up to defend against your neighbours instead of the people causing the political instability. The outcome of this is all too predictable.
• renegade-otter 9mo ago
  America has enough power to help someone else. No one has the power to save America from itself. The cavalry is not coming, and this fire is going to take its course. One day, maybe we will rebuild from scratch.
  • mandeepj 9mo ago
    > No one has the power to save America from itself. Wrong!! Please don’t say that! We all have power inside the US. Congress had the opportunity in 2021 to correct the wrong, but Republicans kowtowed and they are still doing so. That was the easy way. Now for the hard way, American people will have to do something about it. Edit: Grammar
    • renegade-otter 9mo ago
      We don't disagree. It is going to be us and only us.
  • Aurornis 9mo ago
    > One day, maybe we will rebuild from scratch The current situation is bad, but this is just doomerism. The current administration will end. Trump can't live forever. His approval rating is already low and falling. We're in for a bumpy ride, but then it's going to start reverting toward the mean. Not necessarily back to the way things were, but periods of extreme like this are followed by a reversion to the mean more often than not.
    • potsandpans 9mo ago
      Always amusing. So sure. I like to imagine the conversations at the begining of the late bronze age collapse, or perhaps aristocrats of the western roman empire living in Gaul. "To say anything that challenges the current trajectory is doomerism. We're in for a bumpy ride for sure, but this will all correct itself. _it has to_."
    • wat10000 9mo ago
      Trump is not the problem, he’s a symptom. The problem is the roughly one third of Americans who think he’s great, and to a lesser extent the roughly one third who don’t care. After all that’s happened, his approval rating is still above 40%. Those people aren’t going away or changing their minds any time soon.
      • 9mo ago
• tersers 9mo ago
  Time to get your PAL buddy
• tptacek 9mo ago
  Nothing? Trump is playing freeway chicken with Powell, he's driving a Pontiac Fiero and Powell is driving a bulldozer. The Supreme Court has already signaled that they're not on board fucking with the Fed. This will potentially cost Trump his next Fed nomination for awhile, because GOP Senators are putting a hold on his nominations until the legal stuff resolves.
  • jacquesm 9mo ago
    It's nothing. In a sane country Trump would have been impeached many months (or even years) ago and would have never managed to get a second chance at this. If the continuation of the USA hinges on Powell the man should be given a spot on mt. Rushmore, but I don't think that it is going to happen. Congress and the senate are for the most part filled with people that are too afraid to act. And in the meantime a lot of other crazy stuff will happen (just look at the last 30 days) to push this out of the public eye.
    • kasey_junk 9mo ago
      He was impeached years ago…
      • TimorousBestie 9mo ago
        When a sentence has two clauses connected by “and” both of them must be true for the whole sentence to be true.
      • SideburnsOfDoom 9mo ago
        > He was impeached years ago… "was impeached" means different things in context. Sometimes it means "articles of impeachment were brought against an official". (1) i.e. that the process starts. Sometimes it means a later stage in the process, such as those article not being voted down, and a trial proceeding. In the strictest sense, it means that the process completes - "the official is found guilty, removed from office, and may never hold office again". Parent comment seems to be using the strictest sense, due to "and would have never managed to get a second chance". You're not helping by using a confusing different meaning. https://www.usa.gov/impeachment https://www.usa.gov/impeachment
• mapontosevenths 9mo ago
  > I wonder where you guys are headed. You need to know only two facts about America to guess that: * Fifty three percent of Americans now read below the sixth grade level. * As (ostensibly) a representative Democracy America's fate is dictated by the majority of it's citizens. Our future is to become a broken nation governed by middle-school student level thinking. The only way to build a better America is to build a better populace, and that would be contrary to the interests of the angry, spoiled, children who seem to hold all the power now.
  • datsci_est_2015 9mo ago
    I think it’s also important to talk about what it means to “read at a 6th grade level” when this is mentioned, because a lot of people (myself included) might assume that just means they could finish and understand a book intended for 6th graders. But there’s actually meaningful criteria that sheds some light on the critical thinking capabilities of people who can or can’t read at certain levels, especially as it pertains to propaganda. Below a certain level, people are not well-educated enough to critically assess a text against the motivations of its authors (somewhere around 9th grade). Americans are prone to conspiratorial thinking so you might think that that’s alright because they’re often skeptical of any text, but it just seems like it causes them to dig even deeper into the propaganda that’s targeted to them. It’s kind of like learning that some people don’t have an inner monologue, or that they aren’t capable of imagining shapes or objects abstractly in their mind. Except it’s a lot more serious as it deals with critical thinking directly: these people don’t understand that what they’re reading was written for a purpose.
    • paulryanrogers 9mo ago
      This isn't accidental. Religious indoctrination literally teaches generations to make special loopholes in critical thinking and healthy skepticism to maintain their faith. And it has paid off in easy to manipulate masses for centuries.
      • arrowleaf 9mo ago
• voidfunc 9mo ago
  Not doing much. Playing PC games and watching the world burn. Not much I can do. Just bought a new 5080 this week. Hoping I can hunker down in my cave for the next couple years and see what's left of the world in 2030. Oh yea, beer, lots of beer.
• fooey 9mo ago
  There's basically nothing the American people can do short term. The US government is entirely non-responsive and only nominally representative. Barring a wave of Republican retirements in the House, the absolute soonest there are any guardrails are after the 2026 midterms when a new congress is seated in 2027.
  • burnt-resistor 9mo ago
    Gerrymandering, infinite lobbying corruption, and manufactured consent are supposed to keep the populace doing and thinking what the 1% want, and cheating to help them. They can't even do those properly anymore with vast resources. Perhaps billionaires and failed celebrity reality stars don't make the best public administrators.
  • mrtksn 9mo ago
    Of course there’s, it’s just that anti-Trump people don’t care as much and are not as brave as the pro-Trump people. MAGA people stormed the capitol, anti-Trump people just write well thought concerns on the internet. MAGA people for years endured deplatforming and being outcasts but developed methods to deal with it, the anti-Trump people are scared to lose what they have and are too concerned about their differences within and they are unable to build anything. It’s people with nothing to lose and everything to gain vs people with everything to lose and nothing to gain from having a fight. Those who stormed the Capitol did it because they were against the current course of affairs. Are the anti-Trump people ever going to do something like that if they are against the current course of events? I don’t think so. Consequently, Trump will win. That’s why people who control the capital are aligned with MAGA.
    • Tanoc 9mo ago
      The pro-Trump group don't think about consequences is the thing. The anti-Trump group do, and that's a big reason why they're slow to respond. Performing a siege on the Capitol was a stupid, angry, and impulsive reaction with no thought of the consequences afterwards. That's the way the entire pro-Trump group tends to act. Meanwhile the anti-Trump group think about knock-on effects and long term consequences because they understand that nothing is an island and that everything is connected to everything else, even through degrees of separation. It makes them hesitant to do anything right away because they first have to consider what the ripples are going to affect outside of the area of their immediate focus. One group is reactive and the other is proactive, and being proactive is always going to be slower.
• Mistletoe 9mo ago
  We vote. That’s all we can do. 50.5% of the people voted for this insanity in 2024. We can only hope they see how this is going and vote differently in 2026 and beyond.
  • CalRobert 9mo ago
    Was it not 49.9%?
    • dionian 9mo ago
      It was a larger majority of electoral votes though, which is how we elect presidents
      • CalRobert 9mo ago
        The comment was clearly about popularity, not electoral college votes.
    • Mistletoe 9mo ago
      You know what you are right. I think I was basing my numbers on old data during the election. The world, science, and reason was destroyed due to 49.8% vs. 48.3% in the popular vote.
• mrtksn 9mo ago
  They are headed for complete fascist take over. Going through a phase that Europeans went through a century ago, end up destroying themselves. It’s very concerning that they have nukes. JD Vance said something about the risks UK and France owning nukes, I think he just wanted to start the conversation because I think he believes that it’s actually US that is the risk. We know that the guy is not actually a Trump ideology zealot from his pre-Trump alignment.
  • nullocator 9mo ago
    I think it'd be a mistake to assume that JD Vance is not exactly what he portrays himself as at this point. He certainly seems onboard with everything thats happening and is happy to defend it and push the boundaries for more lawlessness.
    • mrtksn 9mo ago
      I agree but IMHO he is not in for the ideology of it, therefore he might prefer not to destroy the world for ideological gains.
    • AnimalMuppet 9mo ago
      I'm not sure... My read is that Vance may be a pure opportunist. He may be doing what he has to in order to stay in Trump's good graces, because that's where power is right now. But I've seen him put out very quiet "yeah, that's the administration's position, but I don't actually agree with it" messages once or twice. I don't think he's someone who is under sway of the Trump cult of personality. I suspect that Vance's agenda is Vance.
  • jacquesm 9mo ago
    > Going through a phase that Europeans went through a century ago, end up destroying themselves. That's not history as I've been taught it since grade school.
• threatofrain 9mo ago
  I fear we are headed towards world war, something bigger than America.
• oliwarner 9mo ago
  39% of the country still approves of him and his fractal waterfall of disaster. So many people, and so many now gifted power and immunity to swing it at dissenting voices. That's a lot of inertia. In the "First They Came" poem, we're already at white Christian mothers, and it's not moving the needle. I'm not sure why there isn't more talk of succession on the coasts but at this pace, it feels inevitable.
• neogodless 9mo ago
  How many people have sat down and "war gamed" this out? e.g. Let's say that opposition to... Trump's unilateral rule, disregard for the constitution, interference with free and fair elections, building a private army and using it increasingly against immigrants and citizens alike, as long as they are "opposition" to Trump, etc... decides to get as organized and impactful as possible? What does that look like? Some kind of public, open communication portal? A closed sign-up portal where you have to put in your information? Some kind of plan to put a lot of bodies in one place? Peaceful protest? Armed and violent protest? (Literally insurrection against the authoritarian regime.) Even the peaceful protest option which is scattered across 50 states, hundreds of cities, has resulted in some violent reaction by Trump's army, National Guard, even local law enforcement. What are next steps for the American people? I think those that are protesting by trying to keep it peaceful are holding onto hope that power is still somewhat distributed, and that elections still function enough to displace Trump loyalists (MAGA / Republicans) with Democrats that have at least paid lip service to being opposed to Trump. And maybe given a majority in Congress, they could at least enact impeachment. But what else are the American people meant to do?
• jb3689 9mo ago
  The problem is that a lot of what is happening is within the executive branch's power and/or democratic. A nontrivial number of Americans support everything that has been happening. The expectation at a time like this would be that you have checks and balances working, but all other branches have yielded their power. I find that jaw dropping personally, but it's where we are. Midterms are happening soon and are the right place to disrupt congress.