StrayCatFrump

Definitely what the RICO Act was sold to us as being designed for. /s

Fuck the police. Fuck the state.

It's good...so long as we follow the advice of that last section: "Prosecute Them All". If it's used instead to distract from the ongoing crimes of other parties and other politicians—such as the fascist currently at the helm—then I couldn't care less, and I think we shouldn't allow ourselves to be distracted by it while there are much more important things to focus on.

The worst of Trump's crimes—the ones that did serious, material harm to working-class people—aren't being touched by this, just as they weren't touched by the farcical impeachments the Democrats facilitated. And that's because they, themselves, are happily engaged in the same crimes, as they have been all along.

Sure, bring out your popcorn or whatever when you're relaxing at home and have nothing better to worry about. But during the day, put all the energy you can into what we MUST do to turn things around: put an end to state warfare, ongoing climate destruction, and the state violence and repression that keeps us from making progress on everything else.

Also:

And that brings us to the real double standard here. Trying to overturn an American election is the kind of crime the Justice Department takes seriously. Extrajudicially slaughtering scary Muslims in a foreign country, even ones with US citizenship, is not.

Attacks carried out on marginalized communities—carried out just like the Jan 6 Washington DC attack was, but in cities and towns everywhere else on a monthly basis at least—also are not taken seriously. Jan 6 was one of MANY, but only when the halls of power see a tiny inkling of a (pretty pathetic) threat does it matter to politicians and their liberal fans. Not okay.

EDIT: sigh. Blockquotes broken by some Lemmy update.

They killed over 1000 innocent people in their latest attack, raped a bunch of people, and kidnapped people, including foreign nationals.

Turns out probably not. You should really stop believing Israeli propaganda at face value. A thousand or so people were killed, yes. Many of who were Israeli militants, and many more definitely settlers and not "innocents". Some were definitely killed by Palestinian militants (some of whom were Hamas members) during the prison break. But many were killed by IDF and Israeli police, who didn't care who got caught in the crossfire and literally shot Israeli homes with Israelis sheltering inside using tanks. And also literally did air raids on their own military facilities, where IDF soldiers were defending themselves until being killed by their own friendly (missile) fire. And reports of rape during that particular incident have, so far at least, been debunked.

This might, at least, be a bare start to actually educating yourself (though its clear from the sense of your participation here that that is not a priority for you): A growing number of reports indicate Israeli forces responsible for Israeli civilian and military deaths following October 7 attack

Anyway, Hamas good/bad is a distraction from basically everything. It's irrelevant when there's millions of people who have no choice but to engage in violent struggle against their oppressors or be (with more or less speed) genocided.

Their stated goal is the complete destruction of Israel and the Jews

Destruction of the apartheid state of Israel, yes. Not of Jews. You should pay more attention. And destruction of states is good. Destruction of colonialist states is even better. And destruction of apartheid states is an absolute necessity. That doesn't make other aspects of Hamas good, necessarily, but the destruction of Israel is most definitely not a point against them. Israel must, indeed, be destroyed.

Someone get this Zionist fucker out of here, eh?

He could use that fucking awful AUMF bullshit to send in the U.S. military to attack the IDF, for that matter. "No power" is fucking nonsense.

Yeah, I know that is never going to happen, nor would I particularly want it to. But when you have the power to go that far, you have a fuck ton of options in between that and doing absolutely nothing (or worse than nothing, which is what Biden is doing now: providing them cover by pretending the empire doesn't 100% have the fascists' backs).

I have a hard time understanding what they are “crusading” about. I believe they don’t know either

Pretty sure it's just enhancing and absolutely securing their own power over others. Seems pretty simple, really: whatever vector you can use to legally, extra-legally, or even illegally crush those who don't want to be ruled by you, foment hate and fear against them, take away their resources, and just altogether put them at your absolute mercy, you take.

Oh. I'm also talking about the right in general (liberals), not just the nominally conservative ones. Haven't met a liberal yet with any power who's not threatened by even the chance that leftist ideas will be realized. Those that aren't conservatives just don't seem to feel like it's quite as inevitable (why would it be when they co-opt leftist ideas and movements and funnel them into liberalism, making sure avenues like the Democratic Party are as radical as people can get), so they're more content to use legal and general economic methods to subvert, control, and starve us...at least most of the time (but then, there's always shit like election fraud like they pull against the Green Party, though).

Very true. And this doesn't even mention rape and other sexual abuse/violence. If all we focus on is them murdering people, we're already ignoring forms of violence and harm that are heavily weighted toward non-cis-male demographics, are commonly ignored and erased, and cause enormous amounts of pain and suffering.

While murder is obviously the worst of acute instances of violence in that it is the act which can never be healed from or undone, police do orders of magnitude more violent harm every day if you take a broader look, and we must resist attempts to ignore that.

I do take exception to this being said by someone in the exchange:

And I think that loss is exacerbated by the fact that these are women who are killed by the same institutions that are designed to protect them.

These institutions—especially the police, but the legal system more generally as well—were absolutely never designed to protect women. Or any other people other than capitalists and politicians, for that matter. Any other nominal protection they do is incidental, and should also be scrutinized carefully with a skeptical eye as likely mythological. We really, really, really need to stop saying shit like this. Yesterday. In having a conversation about improving matters, do not propagate the very propaganda that serves directly to make it worse. And push back on it every time you do hear/see it.

Biden has enacted FAR more fascist policy in his political career than Trump. Fascism embodies reactionary state violence used to consolidate the power of state and capital. From mass incarceration (which Biden is one of the chief architects of)—including literal concentration camps—to torture programs, mass surveillance, militarized policing, the violent repression of liberation movements, militarized borders, and support of fascists all over the place globally (including Saudi Arabia, India, Ukraine, Israel, and many others), to the ongoing American genocide, you've honestly been struck fucking blind by liberal propaganda if you don't see the fascism Biden embodies. Heck, he's been best buddies with outright segregationists for his entire political career, and was more or less of a closeted one himself (not wanting his "children [to] grow up in a [racial] jungle").

I never claimed both sides are the same. It's just that between the two brands of status quo U.S. politics, there's literally only one side. You're in a socialist community, for crying out loud. Time to start figuring that out. The other side is the left; the other side is labor; the other side exists only within social movements in the U.S., because hundreds of years of that fascism (of the kind Hitler explicitly recognized, admired, and modeled his pogroms on) have stripped that side from the electoral landscape.

Serious question, would Jan 6 be allowed to happen anywhere else?

Yes, except on a level which actually has some non-laughable chance of succeeding—and which often even does succeed. Often facilitated by the U.S. itself. 2014 in Ukraine, for example, and all over Latin America, and...well, pay attention to West Africa right now, because most if not all of the coups taking place are being carried out by military forces that were trained by the U.S. If you think the clown show of Jan 6 was actually some kind of "threat to democracy" then you REALLY need to start paying attention to what the U.S. has been doing at home in smaller communities, and big-time abroad, for a very, very, very long time.

Yep. Let's keep pushing for it.

Judges protect the state like any other part of the fascist system. Doubtful they'll find a reason to be "sane" or otherwise reasonable to people acting to protect us against the state's own goons.

I guess it's a hope. Just don't count on it. The only people who are really here to protect us is us.

Still pretty weak, TBH. Language calling Hamas' actions "attacks on random Israeli civilians" while giving at least some credence to the phrase "Israel's right to defend itself." That's a lot of giveaway to imperialist and Zionist propaganda while allegedly trying to clear the air on who holds what opinions.

This is an anti-colonial struggle. Colonized people have a right to defend themselves. Nation-states absolutely fucking do not, nor do colonizers while they violently expand their colonies, uphold apartheid, and continue to commit genocide. Upholding one's oppression is not coherent with self-defense, sorry.

Where the heck is the notion that the U.S. government’s hands are tied coming from?

At least part of the claim is that the president himself has little power. It's the stupid finger-pointing game. "Biden needs Congress' permission to do anything at all, ever." 🙄

A useful excuse when the president doesn't want to do anything. Falls flat on its face when he actually wants to bomb, shoot, or cage the shit out of any brown people, foreign or domestic.

Are you actually denying/apologizing for fascists in Ukraine? Fuckin' yikes.

Sure, there are fascists in Russia too. The difference is that the country I have some influence over as a resident and citizen isn't supporting those fascists. Nor is it supporting fascists in North Korea. But ones in Urkaine? Yep. Ones in Saudi Arabia? Yep. Ones in Israel? Yep. What fascists are your country and its rulers supporting? You should really focus on that, bud.

What’s clear is that each decision — whether to fund a treatment facility or buy a squad car — is a trade-off.

No. Not at all, really. When "sparks debate" is the best you can do. God, I hate the mainstream news so fucking much.

Of course political speech is illegal. Always has been. It just isn't nominally legal on paper. People have been indicted, prosecuted, and imprisoned for it constantly. A famous example is Eugene Debs, who was prosecuted under the Espionage Act and imprisoned for an anti-war speech he made in 1918.

Please don't be taken in by the veneer of moronic constitutionalist liberalism. The state punishes people when it feels like punishing people, and does so especially for political speech and dissent...for being an anarchist; for being a leftist. The propaganda it puts down on paper has never changed that.

What, they didn't trot out Joe the Plumber again? SMH.

Yeah, pretty much. The president has enormous power, and that power is even greater outside the country's borders. Especially because of things like the "Authorization to Use Military Force" which gives him pretty much carte blanche to "fight terrorism" anytime and anywhere he likes.

There's also this general process by which the president historically just does what he wants, and the rest of the government shrugs its shoulders and rolls over, and thus his office essentially just has that de facto power, no matter what the constitution or other laws say: Renegade Cut: No More Presidents.

The U.S. president is more powerful than any empire in the world has ever been, is pretty much a king, and basically does what he wants. Liberals often make excuses about how his hands are tied. It would be great if that were the case, but it's really, really not.

Somewhere between anarcho-communism and anarcho-syndicalism, with a strong dose of social ecology. Small communities—however sparsely (rural) or closely (urban) packed—governed horizontally through consensus models, and federating with one another for larger projects and to form responsive and resilient decentralized networks of distribution. (I'm not limiting "community" here to the strictly geographical interpretation of a communal neighborhood, though that's certainly one form; others would be worker-owned-and-self-managed cooperative enterprises, recreational clubs of various kinds, etc.)

Find ways to build successful but non-growth/non-profit-centered industries with modern technology but without the expectations of rampant consumerism, and with governance models strongly influenced by more horizontal and matrilineal societies, past and present. If we can't do it and keep smart phones, then sorry: ditch the smart phones. If we can't do it and keep modern medicine, then prioritize refining the model so we can.

Freedom of speech and assembly clearly in action, here. Wow. Imagine a court figuring it could tell a union not to decide its stance on something. Fascist state.

Nah, dude. There's plenty to disagree with in the parts of this message and your other reply down below where you try to imply modern nuclear weapons are clean and pose little to no risk beyond that of conventional weapons. Gaslight all you like, but your words are right there for all to see (unless suddenly they gain an edit timestamp after that of this comment, of course...).

This is a terrible take by someone who has heard plenty of propaganda by the arms industry but knows absolutely nothing about physics. Many of the products of the primary and even secondary nuclear reactions from a nuclear warhead are themselves radioactive and have long enough half-lives to do tons of damage in both the short and long terms. Whether or not there is radioactive material spread around is not simply a question of whether some of the original fuel remains unspent.

If all you're doing is spreading war propaganda, log off and go rethink your life.

EDIT: Folks, start here and read other materials by the Union of Concerned Scientists. Don't let this bullshit whitewashing of the dangers of nuclear weapons, their use, and their testing go unaddressed. And speak up against this kind of propaganda showing up in our communities—especially leftist ones.

As for environment, the US nuked themselves over a thousand times, mostly on the Nevada desert. People in the 1950s used to go to Las Vegas to watch the explosions, nowadays they still go for the casinos, and that’s after many of the old dirtier bombs got exploded above ground....

The US honed that skill by turning nukes into a tourist attraction for its own citizens over 60 years ago.

Here you go, you revisionist, gaslighting piece of shit:

The partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty

The fallout from atmospheric tests created a global health crisis. A 1961 study revealed that strontium-90, a radioactive isotope, was building up in the teeth of children living in the St. Louis, Missouri area, hundreds of miles away from the nearest nuclear test site in the Nevada desert. Efforts by thousands of scientists and the international public raised the alarm about contamination from atmospheric nuclear tests and urged global leaders to act.

By 1963, the international community had negotiated the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, which prohibits carrying out nuclear tests in any environment that would allow radioactive material to spread across a country’s borders, including atmospheric tests, underwater tests, and tests in outer space.

The Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty dramatically reduced and eventually ended atmospheric nuclear testing. But nuclear testing did not slow down. Instead, countries with nuclear weapons shifted to underground test sites.

Just because a particular city nearby didn't suffer the effects of fallout doesn't mean it was under control and didn't have horrific effects on people literally hundreds of miles away. You are literally just spewing "clean nukes" propaganda straight out of the playbook of the U.S. arms industry. Go fuck yourself.