Comment by sarchertech
6 hours ago
> Rather final ultimate authority needs to be distributed amongst the states. The unrest in Minnesota would be solved in a week if the governor could simply use the National Guard to restore law and order without worrying that the out of control federal executive would just take control of them
We tried that with the Articles of Confederation. Then half the country tried it again 70 years later. It didn’t work out either time.
Trump’s not even close to the worse President we’ve had. He’s just the craziest since television became widespread. FDR who is widely considered one of our best Presidents put nearly 100k US citizens of Japanese descent in interment camps.
Andrew Jackson committed literal genocide.
> Trump’s not even close to the worse President we’ve had. He’s just the craziest since television became widespread. FDR who is widely considered one of our best Presidents put nearly 100k US citizens of Japanese descent in interment camps.
They are putting people in interment camps right now, people are dying in them. You can find stories on a daily basis about discovered deaths in camps in texas being determined to be homicides, and those are just the ones we know about.
> Andrew Jackson committed literal genocide.
Give Trump time. Also the deaths as a result of just the destruction of USAID, millions of children will and are dying; it's comparable and beyond to the worst things any president has done in the history of the country
One failing of framing it as "just ... since television became widespread" is that it ignores the actual power "television" (really, mass media, and now individually-tailored mass media) has to exert effective population control. The worrying thing here isn't so much the specific draconian actions themselves, but how much of the population is actively and gleefully cheering for them. And as it's obvious that none of these policies are going to make our country materially better (eg economically or social cohesion), this performative vice signalling stands to get worse and worse as this goes on.
I'm certainly not a slavery apologist, but the Civil War was a terrible precedent that we are now paying the price for. Like always, power always gets agglomerated because the hero (Lincoln) desires to to good. But once it's been agglomerated, it tends to attract evil.
One of the clear underlying pillars of support for Trumpism is China/Russia trying to break up the United States so that it is less able to project power over the world. In this sense, supporting the paradigm of a weakened federal government is helping fulfill that goal. But it would be one way to stop the hemorrhaging and at least get us some breathing room in the short term. The current opposition party has trouble even mustering the will to avoid voting to fund the out of control executive, so whatever reforms we push for have to be simple and leverage existing centers of power. We can't let the national Democrats simply do another stint of business-as-usual phoning it in as the less-bad option, or we'll be right back here just like we are now from last time.