FriendOfDeSoto

You don't get to vote or if you do it doesn't matter. There is little to no separation between the three pillars executive, legislative, and judicature. So there is little to no oversight, which leads to a breakdown of the rule of law. People can and will be disappeared. 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.

I'm neither in the US nor a US citizen and this requires boots on the ground. But if you want some ideas: organize protest marches, many and often, a general strike would be good, bombard relentlessly elected officials with phone calls and emails, campaign for impeachments especially after the midterms, get people to vote in the midterms for anything that weakens the incumbents' power. Call out the media that downplays the international rights violations in this Venezuela shitshow. Nationalists go gungho over this stuff, patriots are brave enough to call out mistakes. Protest the Orwellian press accreditation rules at minipax. Start a campaign with empathy at its core, empathy towards the economically sidelined and destitute, the migrants who keep your economy afloat, the people who die senseless deaths (due to gun violence, just as one example). Cost of living, health insurance, social security to tackle homelessness in particular. Lack of empathy is what's driving this neo-fascist bus and I believe you can be better than that as a people. It'd be great if it didn't just end up as a hashtag. It may be time to start a new political movement that refuses to follow in bipartisan trodden paths. Start investing the time you do something like doomscrolling now. Get off the free platforms whose billionaire owners sat at 47's table, checkbook in hand, for anything other than organizing protests.

My contribution will be to reduce the amount of money I end up giving to American companies, not plan any trips to the US (probably ever again considering the ridiculous list of information I need to provide to get my visa waiver), and to lobby my government to reduce their reliance on the US. The mealymouthed reactions to the US breach of international law among its allies and the velvet gloved treatment we give the orange toddler are my concern. Fixing the US is for the Americans. If you have ideas on how to support you from the sidelines, pipe up. We'll all have you live in this neo-fascist, neo-imperial hellhole.

Keep reading this thread.

I understand that shit is hard. My projection for the future is just: it isn't getting better. Much the opposite. So what are you surviving for? To watch your country spiral down the toilet? To be branded a playground bully and unreliable partner internationally? Economies don't thrive on that, either. And economists are dot com bust Lehman crash level concerned about the single minded bet on so-called AI that represents pretty much the only GDP growth today.

Meanwhile the great dealmaker hasn't brought down cost of living because he thinks the word tariff is beautiful. He didn't want another war, was so thirsty for the peace prize, and yet ordered the illegal invasion into Venezuela and the abduction of its leader on trumped up charges. Late night show hosts are your free speech canaries in the coalmine. Oh, and he's a convicted SA felon and very much connected to that late pedophile who shall remain nameless here.

If you don't find a way to resist and oppose now, I think you will be sleepwalking into an even worse future. This will have been the good ol days.

The country with the biggest military force on this planet can do many things. But it shouldn't. Ability and legal justification are two different things. It isn't done doesn't mean they're not capable. Abu Ghraib happened and shouldn't have either.

It's not a perfect comparison but you could take your kitchen knife and stab a rando on the street. You can do that but you shouldn't. Because we have rules. And we have rules because without them soon everybody be stabbing everybody else. And if you stabbed a rando on the street in Caracas you don't exactly have the moral high ground when you want you tell your pals Vlad or Jinping not to stab randos in Kyiv or Taipei.

Because you cannot just go into a country and kidnap the leader. With no declaration of war, no jurisdiction at all, not even a hint of a justification through the UN. That's why it isn't done. Americans ought to be on the streets protesting in force. Their children at the latest will rue this day. 47 just sealed the end of the rules-based international order. He didn't start that fire but he dropped 50 gazillion barrels of Venezuelan crude onto it. This is not good bad very, very bad.

Then you'd think wrong.

That's at best a piece of circumstantial evidence but not enough to diagnose homophobia. People are weird. People say the wrong thing because they are overthinking it. There could be any number of reasons why they reacted the way they reacted and only one of them is homophobia. More data is needed.

I don't disagree with those ideas. Corey has been beating this drum for a while. I'm just afraid this is putting the cart before the horse. Europe and in particular the governments need to get off of the US clouds or they will quickly find themselves up shit cloud (creek) without a parachute (paddle). And I fear building up viable domestic competition will be harder if you reshape the market that drastically next week. But I'm onboard with it in general.

Constitutions are just documents. The US one isn't bad, save for a few amendments. A constitution only works well if the people in the three branches act within the spirit of it. Once you get people in who DGAF you see all the breaking points in the system that are normally papered over by decorum and moral standards. And those are things you cannot necessarily write into laws. The exception to that is the way political parties and campaigns are funded; that's definitely something that should be addressed.

It doesn't really matter who will be the next US president. They won't be the leader of the free world any more. They will be increasingly isolated on the world stage and dealing with a domestic landscape somewhere between unbelievably fractured and civil war.

At UN level, it will be pretty much impossible to sanction the US. They'll just veto everything away. Either by procedure or behind the scenes diplomacy.

It is also debatable if UN level sanctions are that effective in 2026. North Korea kept finding creative ways to get around them.

And these days, WGAF about international law anyways? International law, shminternational law. Sorry, I'm busy. I'm off to abduct another dictator on trumped up charges and then run his country.

The EU resorted to counter-tariff the US where it hurts the financial contributors to 47 and his bootlickers the most. Harleys, jeans, and whisky were the first package, I think. I believe this is the only viable way to exert pressure. In 2026 that means playing hardball around the hardware for all this so-called AI stuff, somehow weening people off of US controled internet services, and not buying weapons from the US - just a few examples.

I've recently read it on a hotel key card in the instructions: insert key card and depress lever.