If this happens I hope this is the straw that broke the camel’s back

Absolutely not, this camel can take a lot more of these.

I mean it’s better than nothing?

Nope. It’s a do-nothing release valve, kind of like taking a painkiller and pretending your arm hasn’t been chopped off.

Sure it could always be more but I feel like pushing for more resistance and better protests is better than just making fun of it.

Probably, but this is c/leftymemes, not r/howtoeducateliberalsmemes. Also Americans tend to be very resistant to the idea that they should do more.

Think of the list of political rights you take for granted. The right to voting, free speech, association, peaceful assembly, etc. Those don’t exist or are severely curtailed, meaning that political activity and discourse that anger the ruling class can and will be punished. How much is tolerated and what kind of punishments are doled out varies depending on the strength and heavy handedness of the ruling regime.

People live in fear and try to adapt, self-censor. Authoritarian leaders need a bogie man, somebody they can blame for all their failures. So an ethnic group, minority, or another country will constantly be blamed for everything from the economy to ingrown toe nails. The elite will get richer, everybody else pretty much won’t.

Not necessarily. Authoritarians are usually corrupt/incompetent, which tends to lead to these things, but competent dictators with legitimate public support exist, China being the best-known example.

*Basic political rights. You can have a perfectly liberal democracy where the average person is one missed paycheck away from starving to death. Education for example has nothing to do with authoritarianism, except that authoritarians tend to benefit from lack of education.

They’re not evil because they want to be evil; they’re evil because they fundamentally don’t care. Ibn Khaldun famously (???) said “the morals of oppressed peoples decline.” Scarcity makes people desperate and causes them to make questionable or even evil decisions that they believe they need to make to survive. These decisions are then rationalized and justified to avoid cognitive dissonance (i.e. we didn’t do it and they deserved it). Combine that with this economic oppression and it’s not hard to see why the far right gets so much support; if you accept the underlying assumptions and feel desperate enough it’s not hard to sell “your suffering is their fault, it’s either you or them” to enough people to do some pretty evil shit, and they won’t feel guilty about it because they’ve already done the math.

Counterpoint: All of 20th and 21st American history outside of WWI and WWII. The US never declared war on Iraq or Afghanistan.

“They’d kill you if you lived in Gaza” is commonly cited, though usually to LGBT people.

Congress can try the rule of law since they’re useless anyway, but your average person really has much better uses of their time than hoping it’ll work, because it won’t.

Hell, they gave it to Henry fucking Kissinger.

Nah, this is what I hear when they say it was self defense.

And my point is that your point doesn’t make sense. People can, in fact, disagree with you (and be assholes about it) without being Russian/Chinese/whatever trolls. The sentiment they’re expressing is common enough that it’s not at all grounds for accusing them of being a paid troll.

That is some serious drip. Also yeah someone should try that again.

Someone just discovered civil religion.

Yeah God forbid people write six comments a day. It’s not like politics internet arguments drag on forever, no it has to be them evil Russians.

We call people, who worked for the Nazi Party, in the Nazi government, Nazis.

I mean, do we? I’m don’t think I’m convinced that every public school teacher in Germany from 1933 to 1945 was a Nazi.

I mean in principle sure, but this has been happening for almost a year now and barely any escalation has happened. At this point protests are acting as release valves more than anything else.

The generation of Gazan children that lived through the war will likely be the most traumatized, both physically and mentally, in the world. I don’t want to even think about the generational trauma that will result from this.

K.

I agree with you, but you should only comment once so you don’t flood the thread.