Trump followers invade the capitol

[Virtual ghost]

True

and in third world countries that are decolonized we only have 2 parties with the same person in power for 10+ years... so what the hell is merica now?

My vote still goes to the "first world in deep crisis".


Or if you want it dissected:

First world: 50%
Second world: 15%
Third world: 35%

 

[Jaguar]

I am not pleased seeing so-called police taking selfies with those anti-American parasites from yesterday. I'd fire all of them.

 

[Abcdenfp]

My vote still goes to the "first world in deep crisis".


Or if you want it dissected:

First world: 50%
Second world: 15%
Third world: 35%

I find this a fair analysis

 

[ceecee]

Madness on Capitol Hill | The Nation

“This is not America,” a woman said to a small group, her voice shaking. She was crying, hysterical. “They’re shooting at us. They’re supposed to shoot BLM, but they’re shooting the patriots.”

A man, possibly her husband, comforted her: “Don’t worry, honey. We showed them today. We showed them what we’re all about.”

Nah, they're not bigoted, racist, authoritarian cunts. It's just a difference of political opinion.

 

[Totenkindly]

Madness on Capitol Hill | The Nation

Nah, they're not bigoted, racist, authoritarian cunts. It's just a difference of political opinion.

I just saw that excerpt floating around on FB. FFS. How the living F did this country become full of clueless idiots?

----

and now all of these administration/Cabinet members resigning due to "shock over what happened yesterday."

- They supported him through all the other shit building up to this utterly shitastic culmination of megalomania that we all suspected was coming.

- Mighty convenient, leaving now while feigning moral outrage, after the certification of his loss finally occurred in Congress and only two weeks left in his term -- so it matters not at all.

it's like they hope to just quietly slip back into the crowd as if they had been condemning his actions all along instead of enabling him.

 

[Jaguar]

Mick Mulvaney resigns from Trump administration, expects other departures

"I can't stay here." Really? lol.

 

[ceecee]

I just saw that excerpt floating around on FB. FFS. How the living F did this country become full of clueless idiots?

----

and now all of these administration/Cabinet members resigning due to "shock over what happened yesterday."

- They supported him through all the other shit building up to this utterly shitastic culmination of megalomania that we all suspected was coming.

- Mighty convenient, leaving now while feigning moral outrage, after the certification of his loss finally occurred in Congress and only two weeks left in his term -- so it matters not at all.

it's like they hope to just quietly slip back into the crowd as if they had been condemning his actions all along instead of enabling him.

If I were the Dems, I would start a HUGE M4A campaign and base it around the overwhelming need for mental health care and use these people as examples.

 

[Totenkindly]

The Photos of These Women Saving the Ballot Boxes Belong in History Books

 

[Doctor Cringelord]

The Photos of These Women Saving the Ballot Boxes Belong in History Books

wait, what?

 

[Jaguar]

Prosecutor doesn't rule out charging Trump for inciting Capitol riot

 

[ceecee]

The Photos of These Women Saving the Ballot Boxes Belong in History Books

I was lol'ing at them carrying it around like the Ark of the Covent.

 

[Hellena Handbasket]

Glad to know the electoral ballots are safeguarded by the same technology they used for pirate booty.
😅

 

[The Cat]

Glad to know the electoral ballots are safeguarded by the same technology they used for pirate booty.
😅

The classics never really go out of style...also congress is kind of a bunch of dishonest cutthroat knaves...

 

[Jaguar]

The split-personality grifter just tweeted a video speech:

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump...0?ref_src=twsrc^google|twcamp^serp|twgr^tweet

 

[Firebird 8118]

*sigh*...

Guys... are we asking the right questions here?

1) How could the security forces who were meant to defend the Capitol even allow this situation to happen in the first place? Was there any foresight, or did most of them simply not care?

2) How are we to know for sure that such a scenario won’t happen again in the future, and/or around other major U.S. buildings?

3) How are we letting Trump get away with inciting the rioters, among other things? Is he to face no consequences whatsoever for anything he’s done in the past few days alone? What precedent are we setting here?

4) How are we ever to heal as a nation when we’re so divided amongst ourselves?

 

[Abcdenfp]

They put up a noose. They went into Pelosi's office leaving a "we won't back down" note. They called it the start of a "Revolution". Giulini is out cheering for them. Trump said he "loves them". I am calling it terrorism.

There is a danger is calling it terrorism because a lot of this is rooted in white supremacy , racism and civil unrest and bigotry. To call it terrorism is to put it in a bucket that to me takes away from the fact that this was an extraordinary show of white privilege and entitlement.

 

[Red Memories]

There is a danger is calling it terrorism because a lot of this is rooted in white supremacy , racism and civil unrest and bigotry. To call it terrorism is to put it in a bucket that to me takes away from the fact that this was an extraordinary show of white privilege and entitlement.

And white supremacy is not a form of terrorism? I would consider the KKK and all their friends terrorists too.

 

[The Cat]

- - - Updated - - -

And white supremacy is not a form of terrorism? I would consider the KKK and all their friends terrorists too.

A thing can indeed be more than one thing.

 

[Doctor Cringelord]

The brotherhood of steel should be providing security for DC federal government buildings. They’d have automated laser turrets and shiet mounted on the roof to turn those raider bubbas into puddles of goo

 

[Kephalos]

From the safe distance of another country the events in the USA affect me only indirectly, but all the same I've been trying to figure out what was that happened in Washington DC yesterday. I think yesterday was a rerun of the Charlottesville rally in 2017. I don't know if anyone has seen The Alt-Right Playbook: How to Radicalize a Normie by the Youtuber Innuendo Studios (Ian Danskin), but it says at some point that the decentralized way the alt-right is organized allows its leaders to escape the responsibility for the actions of their followers at the expense of losing control of what they do and when they do it:

What you need to know before we begin is: around 2013, the Nazis went online.

Hate groups in the US, as tracked by the Southern Poverty Law Center, had been growing in number since the noughts, but, between 2012 and 2014, they dropped by almost a quarter. Patriot groups dropped by over a third. However, hate crimes stayed about the same. Radical conservatism was not shrinking, but decentralizing. Still radical, still often violent, but now full of white nationalist nomads unlikely to join a formal organization.

This didn’t make them harmless. What it did was protect their asses from the typical hate group cycle: getting the public’s attention, making allies in conservative media, swelling their numbers, and then eventually disgracing themselves with failures, infighting, and, often enough, members committing horrific acts of violence, which come with social and sometimes legal consequences for all the other members.

So the Alt-Right and their fellow travelers these days don’t so much have members. They have hashtags, followers, viewers, and subscribers. This insulates them from their own audience. If Gabe, as a member of that audience, were to go out and commit a crime on their behalf, there’d be little doubt they had a hand in radicalizing him, but it’d be very hard to claim they told him to do it. On some of these sites, where Gabe spends hours and hours of his day, he’s never created an account or left a comment; the people radicalizing him don’t even know he’s there.

This distributed nature is what makes the Alt-Right, and the movements connected to it, unique. (You may remember a notable proof-of-concept for this strategy.) Doing almost everything online has, as compared with traditional hate movements, dramatically increased their reach and inoculated them from consequence. The trade-off, as we will see, is a lack of control.

However, he claims that Charlottesville was an attempt to make the online movement an AFK movement:

The final step in a traditional extremist group would be getting a mission. But that is one thing the Alt-Right can’t do. Once you start giving clear directives, you can’t play yourselves off as a bunch of unaffiliated hashtags and think tanks; you are now a formalized movement accountable to its followers, and can be judged and policed as such.

To my mind, Charlottesville was an attempt to become such a movement, taking things offline and getting all the different groups working collectively. And, as so often happens when these people get in the same space - especially with no official leaders or means of control over their members - it backfired. Their true colors came out before they were ready and a counter-protester lost her life.

This would be the point where, historically, an extremist group starts to disintegrate. Their veneer of respectability gone, they’re now hated by the public, the media wants nothing more to do with them, and everyone not in jail turns on each other or goes underground. This is also the point where the liberal establishment says, “My job here is done,” and utterly fails to retake control of the narrative, allowing the next batch of radicals to pick up more or less where the last one left off.

But to an already-decentralized group like the Alt-Right, Charlottesville was bad but eminently survivable. People retreated back to the internet, with its code words and anonymous forums, but that’s where much of the work was already done anyway. The platforms where they organized kept tolerating them, the authorities still didn’t classify them as terrorists, and any disgraced figureheads were replaced with up-and-comers.

The major change in strategy is that it doesn’t seem anyone has tried to formalize the Alt-Right since.

I think this is what happened yesterday: Trump was about to lose both the presidency and the Democrats were going to win their razor-thin majority in the Senate, so being a set of online decentralized groups wasn't enough to deal with the desperate situation, as they perceived it, so they tried to organize a foots-on-the-ground action like Charlottesville. There was a lot of talk about accountability following Charlottesville, including the role the police played in downplaying and enabling the mess, but I'm not more hopeful unfortunately that people will not simply make an example out of someone and rush to ignore and forget what happened.

I highly recommend Innuendo Studios and The Alt-Right Playbook, especiallty the videos There's Always Bigger Fish and The Origins of Conservatism: speaking for myself, these video essays changed my outlook and put into words concerns that I had on conservative/libertarian politics that I kind of followed and have been uncomfortable with since the 2008 Financial Crisis.