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 Post subject: Re: Trump.
 Post Posted: Fri Apr 23, 2021 1:41 am 
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Yes, and I am hoping that 'harder' works out to 'impossible'.

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 Post subject: Re: Trump.
 Post Posted: Sat Apr 24, 2021 10:24 pm 
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Weremensh wrote:
Apartheid had the advantage of starting out with the majority already disenfranchised. It's harder when they're not.


Uh. Jim Crow. If you think about it, America has only had universal suffrage for about 50-odd years. The Republicans are trying to revert to the historical norm.

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 Post subject: Re: Trump.
 Post Posted: Sun Apr 25, 2021 9:42 am 
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Jim Crow is disenfranchising a minority, apartheid a majority. It was much easier for the southern white folks to get away with disenfranchising a local and powerless minority than it would be for the GOP to do it to a more powerful and wealthier national majority. At least without a great deal of overt violence and the (currently absolutely refused) consent of the armed forces.

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 Post subject: Re: Trump.
 Post Posted: Mon Apr 26, 2021 4:31 am 
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You're missing the fact that the Republicans don't need to disenfranchise all Democrats. They just need to disproportionately disenfranchise poor, Black and Brown people They're still winning a majority of white people, and if they can restrict the political game to what white people want, they'll manage to hang on to power for a while longer.

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 Post subject: Re: Trump.
 Post Posted: Mon Apr 26, 2021 12:33 pm 
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Functionally (if not literally) that means disenfanchising all of the Democrats, and by and large they get that. Especially as the ongoing and all but endless corruption and dishonesty of the Republicans keeps radicalizing more and more Democrats into blanket and active opposition to the GOP and all its works; they're hardly going to miss that their vote won't matter in New York or California if blacks in Georgia or college students in the plains states can't vote too.

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 Post subject: Re: Trump.
 Post Posted: Wed Apr 28, 2021 2:50 am 
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Unless the Democrats get their act together at the federal level (still waiting here), said Democrats in New York and California can do very little about the blatant poll obstruction and gerrymandering going on in the great flat middle. So the question is, will they act before the Republicans grant themselves the right to throw out any election results they don't like? Because once they do, they're going to be that much harder to dislodge. You'll either be looking at illiberal democracy Bolsonaro style, or a complete collapse of governmental legitimacy followed by a major period of instability.

Complicating this is that any move by the Democrats to change the status quo in a big way could in and of itself trigger major instability - and the Republican nutters are the ones with all the guns.

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 Post subject: Re: Trump.
 Post Posted: Thu Apr 29, 2021 1:56 pm 
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To that last, no: first, a lot of Democrats have guns (just not disposable surpluses of them). But that's kind of besides the point: the military has the significant combat power, not the CSA LARPers.

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 Post subject: Re: Trump.
 Post Posted: Fri Apr 30, 2021 4:38 am 
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A casual survey of world conflicts suggests that one does not need a massive amount of military firepower to wreak considerable havoc. In asymmetrical warfare, rarely is the goal to defeat the government in outright military combat, but to cause enough pain to force political capitulation. Anyway, the risk of illiberal democracy is the greater one, with the stripping of civil liberties, the hollowing out of institutions, and the entrenchment of oligarchic demagoguery. Under this scenario, America will continue to have elections, but they won't mean much of anything.

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 Post subject: Re: Trump.
 Post Posted: Mon May 10, 2021 11:02 pm 
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I'm idly amused that there are Republicans debating if the party can grow without Trump, and they're almost admitting that the real question is can they stop him from killing the party dead if they try...

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 Post subject: Re: Trump.
 Post Posted: Tue May 11, 2021 7:27 am 
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Trump is the cordyceps fungus that's taken over the Republican insect's body. There's not much left except a cult of personality. Their policy platform is "whatever Trump says". Liz Cheney's being booted from leadership in favour of the member from New York whose policy positions are all over the place but who reliably praises Trump. The Arizonans are hunting for traces of literal bamboo in the ballots to "prove" that China stole the election from Trump.

Meanwhile, it looks like the Southern District of New York might have enough to charge Trump with some generic white collar crimes (the type of stuff that usually results in a plea deal and some fines) but it doesn't look like the FBI's seriously investigating him, or any member of Congress, for the insurrection. They'll chuck some of the idiot rank and file in jail. The Republicans are going to coup harder next time.

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 Post subject: Re: Trump.
 Post Posted: Tue May 11, 2021 9:27 am 
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I suspect the nice folks now running the DOJ are well aware what the result of Obama not decimating the GOP top ranks 12 years ago was (in terms of hundreds of thousands of needlessly dead Americans, endless criminality aside); and they may well keep it in mind regarding their handling of 1/6 going forward. Just a suspicion, given that a man with a very good reason not to think of professional Republicans as basically honorable and law abiding people runs that department right now.

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 Post subject: Re: Trump.
 Post Posted: Fri May 14, 2021 12:54 pm 
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Well, they say they've agreed to a 1/6 commission. Half chosen by the Republicans, half the Democrats; with a list of background competencies specified (intelligence, national security, and such like). None of them are supposed to be currently employed by either party, though. It ought to be interesting

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 Post subject: Re: Trump.
 Post Posted: Tue May 25, 2021 3:15 pm 
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Trump is now claiming that any crimes he committed as President are not, in fact, crimes; and that he can't be prosecuted for them. Color me surprised.

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 Post subject: Re: Trump.
 Post Posted: Tue May 25, 2021 5:19 pm 
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"When the President does it, it's not illegal."

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 Post subject: Re: Trump.
 Post Posted: Thu May 27, 2021 12:54 pm 
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If he's been paying attention to Zuma, he might be able to avoid actually going to court for a very long time.

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