Hacker Neue

Preferences
sjsdaiuasgdia parent
Call your elected representatives. Attend a protest. Make noise. Above all else, protect your family, friends, and neighbors.

We do not have to sit back and let this happen.

jbm
> Call your elected representatives

I have never seen this work for something this politicized.

matthewdgreen
Elected representatives are going to be intransigent until a point in the very near future, when they realize they're about to be voted out en masse and their voters don't like them as much as they like another guy -- who isn't going to be on the ballot with them. So keep reminding them.
immibis
That happened - it was 2024. It's really seeming like Democrat politicians don't actually care about winning elections. They did terribly and they're still doing terribly and not acknowledging they're doing terribly, when they should have the easiest job in the world running against Trump.
sjsdaiuasgdia OP
Doesn't mean I'm going to stop trying.
nemomarx
they did just shoot two elected representatives so I think we're a little beyond protests working
haswell
The scale of the protests means the protests are already working. They’re as much about spreading awareness and mobilizing the voting public as they are about current events.

I don’t see a connection between their efficacy and what happened in Minnesota, which was an event that is arguably all the more reason to protest.

nemomarx
Good strategy if voting is still allowed in 2028, not super useful if political violence bubbles over into a coup or such.

The scale of the protests is encouraging, but I remember the mass protests under Bush were about as large, and the war continued and he stayed in power. Organization needs to do something with the mass of people who are out in the streets to direct them.

miki123211
Voting is always allowed. No matter how corrupt the country, no matter if it's ruled by a dictator, even in a "Free Democratic Union of Independent People's Republics", there's always going to be an election sooner or later.

Whether the elections are fair and the opposition is even allowed to field a candidate... now that's a different story.

bobthepanda
The real bellwether will be what happens in House elections in 2026.

Trump was already divisive enough that the Republican majority in the House shrank in 2024.

Tadpole9181
And yet they hold every single branch of government.
14 More Comments →
NemoNobody
Why did you pick Marx?

Rhetoric doesn't match. Marx literally said that the only for the working class to overthrow their oppressors (business owners) was to make them not a live.

He was very radical.

nemomarx
I find Capital to be a fairly moderate look at the situation - a lot of it is essentially an economics textbook. Marx was almost an optimist compared to the power capital has today, if you look at his predictions.
abeppu
Working to accomplish what goal for whom?

I think largely they have not yet been effective at protecting immigrants.

> They’re as much about spreading awareness and mobilizing the voting public as they are about current events.

Right, so to some degree they "work" as tools for existing political groups in attracting attention, resources and possibly votes. But does it better enable those groups to actually help immigrants? Or does it just give political organizations a powerful talking point in the midterms?

pjc50
The latter is probably the strongest route to actually doing something, because there's no accountability within the system until both Senate and House have flipped D.
jkestner
Sustained protests are merely a part of what's necessary.

Sure would help if the media would cover them to the extent that they did for George Floyd/Women's March/etc.

NemoNobody
People power - that was an excellent display of it this last weekend. BLM, Civil Rights Movement, and Vietnam are the only ones comparable. All of those built up - Vietnam was bc it was the first time people could see war like that, and we were sending lottery drafted 18 year olds - those very big deals.

This is solely in response to what has happened since January 21st of this year.

That's incredible actually. Concerning for sure if you planned on people being sheep.

edm0nd
technically he shot 4 elected representatives. 2 died 2 are in hospital still iirc.
edoceo
Nit: 2 officials, 2 spouses.
thaumasiotes
You don't think Jill Biden was the duly elected First Lady?
apparent
She was the First Lady, but she was not elected in any way. Do you remember seeing her name on a ballot? I don't.

That's why the voting public were shocked to find out she was helping lead cabinet meetings. The good doctor was not elected.

snypher
Well neither was the electric car guy, but he still had his fingers in my PII
Simulacra
They?
edoceo (dead)
garciasn
When someone attempted to assassinate Trump would you have lumped all of those against Trump into "they"?

I don't support what the current administration is doing; not by a long shot. But to say, "they did just shoot two elected representatives," is disingenuous at best.

sculper
The current administration explicitly condones violence against political rivals. "They" seems fair.
HideousKojima
>The current administration explicitly condones violence against political rivals.

Citation needed

spit2wind
Does pardoning convicted January 6th insurrectionists count?
HideousKojima
Does Carter, Clinton, and Obama pardoning and commuting the sentences of the Puerto Rican terrorists that shot up congress count?
orwin
I have lumped every people with roughly the same ideology as the Trump shooter in a 'they'.

I don't remember the exact sentence but it was something like that: "That's the issue with pandering to violent conspiracy theorists, if they feel betrayed they will aim that violence at you".

Do you disagree with this characterization?

potato3732842
Publicly they'll wring their hands and tell us a bunch of BS about how violence outside of the state is bad and whatnot but behind the scenes they'll go back to their research people and their focus groups and try and get to the bottom of whether it was just one crazy or an outlier who's of an existing trend in opinion they ought to care about. Same as they did when that CEO got shot.
Avshalom
They haven't even done the usual hand wringing this time.

Publicly they've been claiming that he's some left wing extremist despite all available evidence.

apparent
Only one person shot two elected representatives, and AFAIK, his pronouns are not "they". There is zero evidence that he is part of some larger plan, and I have seen zero evidence of anyone cheering on his heinous acts (unlike with a recent left-wing murderer, who was lauded as upstanding and handsome).
matthewdgreen
I watched large portions of the right wing immediately denounce the killings as a left-wing assassination. I don't think any of these people truly believed that left-wing assassins conducted a targeted execution of two Democrats in a tightly-divided R/D state legislature: I think it was a very deliberate effort to confuse the news reporting and minimize the damage of their divisive rhetoric, until something else (a war) pushed it out of the spotlight.
bigyabai
My elected representative gets (credible) death threats if they resist executive monarchy.
sjsdaiuasgdia OP
TBH, I want such reps to be loud about that. We need to stop pretending that the right is not leveraging stochastic terrorism. The problem doesn't go away by ignoring it.

Yes, that's risky. Some people might get hurt. A lot of people are being hurt, and will continue to be hurt, by the current situation. We all have to make our own choices about when principles and long-term outcomes outweigh our instinct for self preservation.

Avshalom
Gas station clerks get credible death threats for not selling people alcohol before noon on Sunday and manage to show a hell of a lot more spine.
bigyabai
Gas station clerks typically don't face off against paramilitary organizations with the intent to kidnap them if they refuse their demands.
crises-luff-6b (dead)
deadbabe (dead)

This item has no comments currently.