Well, for all of his flailing and crying, Trump has accomplished one thing. Biden, who was running to be the next Barack Obama, is starting to run to be the next FDR. It'll be interesting to see who he picks as a VP candidate.

Oh, and Trump's mystery Feds deployed in DC? Bureau of Prisons. No training in dealing with civilians that still have all their civil rights intact, being deployed without insignia of any kind so establishing their identity if they do wrong is all but impossible...how can that go wrong?

Ahahahaha. As if Fox News would let them forget it. They still bash Colin Kaepernick at every opportunity, and all he did was kneel down. Trump is going to lean especially hard into the racism because it's all he has left. I hope you're right that it's already fully tapped out, and at some point white suburban voters are going to have to care about the real world.

I hope that by the time I'm having to seriously contemplate life as a refugee (in the colloquial, not the legal sense), the US will have achieved some modicum of sanity.

Oh, and American authoritarian cosplayers infuriate me. Seriously infuriate me. YOU HAVE RIGHTS AND YOU WANT TO THROW THEM AWAY WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU?????

They're not giving it any thought. They want to take away other people's rights because they feel those people expressing said rights somehow infringes on their own rights. They're not realizing that once those rights are taken away... they're gone. For the other people and for themselves.

By then it'll be too late.

It's 100% selfishness and lack of foresight. They don't realize how good they have it and want to cut off their whole face to spite everyone else's.

I've lived in the rural backwoods of a red state my entire life and people here say some of the worst, most awful things so frequently that I've grown numb to it. I think it's actually damaged me emotionally and mentally. Just listening to people say some of the most casually cruel stuff like it was normal. Like they thought it was right. These people don't understand they've got a good thing going and are so obsessed with tearing down people different from them that they don't realize they've been hurting themselves more than they could possibly foresee. That they've been convinced time and time again to vote against their own interests. To think and act in ways that actively divide the people of the country.

My own dad threatened to kill me because I didn't vote for Romney in 2012, if you want a general idea of what behaviors can be like in red territory.

Bah.

I don't think I added much new information. Mostly it just turned into a little mini rant there.

It's not about rights so much as privilege. The Republicans of flyover country see themselves as having nothing but white privilege to keep them from being fully marginalized, and they're largely correct. That it's their own fault in many ways is besides the point; they will betray anyone and anything, especially themselves, not to be actually treated as equal to non-whites and women in legal, business and social matters. LBJ noted that if you tell these folks that the worst of them is better than the best black man, they'll not only let you pick their pocket but they'll empty it for you; and he's still right. Just ask Trump.

Btw, the military head of the US armed forces (Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff) sent around a memo reminding everyone that their oath is to support and defend the Constitution; unstated but strongly implied is the terminal clause of that sentence 'against all enemies, foreign and domestic'. He then goes on to note that freedom of speech and the right to peaceable assembly are among the things they swore to defend. One suspects his nominal superior is not the best pleased fellow hiding in the bunker right now.

Dude, I am sorry your dad has been such a *bleep* to you, and over Romney of all candidates. I suppose if moving were an option, you would have done it already.

Leaving is definitely a more long term goal than I'd prefer, but I've got a goal I'm working toward that I hope will pan out.

I guess it depends what faction of the portion of the population, that is scared of minority mobs, and supported Trump, because he promised to threaten them into submission, is doubling down on that strategy and what faction goes "supressing them did not work, apease them instead, as long as we can pretend it's not apeasement".

I am not sure if any of the second faction exists. People are either going to be sympathetic towards the protesters, or they're not.

Over here, a lot of people did not condone protest violence but they understood why people resorted to it. But that was because people saw them as trying to protect Hong Kong from a widely perceived threat, and peaceful methods were being ignored.

Not all Americans even believe that police brutality or harassment of minorities is a problem. The average white person never sees it. They assume that if there's a video of a cop beating a black person up, the black person must have done something wrong.

There are also people, who want things go back to calm as soon as possible with the least amount of effort.

Their favorite strategy towards people, who rock the boat, is to first punch them in the face to see if that shuts them up and if this does not work they switch to appeasement, though they make sure to keep up the facade that it is not appeasement, so other people with grievances don't get ideas.

So they will keep up their rhetoric that the protesters are unacceptable but still want a government that makes concessions, preferably some that don't influence their personal lives.

If it goes on long enough maybe, but it still has only been about a week.

We had a few business elites popping up to say to the government "will you please negotiate and compromise with the protesters so we can go back to normal?", but only after several months of disruption.

Okay, that is just nasty.

...how was your dad even going to find out how you voted? Do you not have private voting over there? Or was he just going to ask you and trust that you would tell the truth?

Either way, it seems pretty clear that leaving is very much a goal to work towards.

The Trump Bunker fence has been pushed out a block in all directions. Trump's got his wall, though the Avenue leading to it is labelled Black Lives Matter. And though it's possible that the military will back him in a coup as his losing the election becomes more imminent (the GOP has been corrupting the officer corps for decades), it looks a bit like he's overplayed his hand on that one and will have to stick to the federal equivalent of mall cops to be his goons. The Pentagon has disarmed the red state National Guard troops sent in by their various governors without apparently bothering to ask or inform Trump. Well, we'll have to see how it works out.

And just because it's going to make an interesting campaign ad, it seems that both he and his press secretary dabbled in absentee ballot voter fraud. Under the circumstances I suppose we can take his word for it that there are problems with the system, if not on what those problems are.

It came up in casual conversation some time after the election was over and Obama was reelected. I knew he'd take it poorly but I wasn't expecting him to be that upset about it. If I'd known I wouldn't have said it.

This whole mess has even got into a cartoon strip with a political-parody focus on this end of the world.

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Ah. Okay, I can see how that could happen; I'm going to assume he merely thought about it as conversational hyperbole and didn't make any further attempts to actually follow through on that threat. I'd still be in favour of moving a long way away, but not as a matter of extreme drop-everything urgency.

A bill was just introduced in the House of Representatives to ban the President (or any other Federal official) from nuking hurricanes. Or more succinctly, using nuclear or other strategic weapons on hurricanes or global weather patterns. Sure, why not. It might be fun to watch the Republicans find just the right weasel words to cover opposing this, though.