stopdropandprole
noone actually wants the police and especially the army to ever have to use violence.
maybe no one on Lemmy wants this...
when I look around the world and it's pretty clear that right wing political movements are ascendant and in our mainstream discourse. empathy is being redefined by fascists as 'weakness'. police and military operations are ramping up across the planet, and certainly some of it is being cheered for by a non trivial number of people.
IDK what your experience has been but "restoring law and order" and "securing the borders against immigrants" and "maybe they deserve to die" rhetoric is more common nowadays than any time in my life.
but yeah I agree, no one - with functional values and ethics - wants this.
.... there's some limitations but nobody enforces penalties and the consequences are pathetically small:
Members of Congress are allowed to buy and sell stocks, but lawmakers, their spouses and dependents must publicly disclose any transactions over $1,000 within 30 days or within 45 days of receiving notice of the transaction if it has been made on their behalf, under the 2012 STOCK Act (Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge Act), which also banned insider trading. Members do not need to report the value of their transactions but must provide a broad numerical range in the periodic transaction reports (PTRs).
If a Congress member discloses their trade after the deadline, they must pay a fine of at least $200 or apply for a waiver to appeal the penalty. Repeat offenders can face increasingly higher fines. The House and Senate ethics committees enforce these fines.
"The fact that lawmakers routinely violate the STOCK Act without consequence is a clear demonstration of why stronger legislation is needed to curb congressional stock trading,"
be warned this guy does almost nothing whatsoever on Lemmy except scream at Americans (on Lemmy, of all places, where virtually no one voted for or supports Trump and is actively engaged with resistance politics)
to him , it's always the fault of Americans specifically for oligarchs capturing domestic and global politics and empowering dictators. meanwhile in his country, Canada, the exact same shit is happening, right wing radicals and corps taking over. but he blames Americans, regardless. it's an easy excuse for him to think this is a uniquely US problem.
punching sideways is at least half the basis of why he has an account.
people keep using this 'interrupting your enemy' phrase incorrectly and it's really tiresome.
it's like, "hey, your enemy is destroying your country, do something!" and braindead meme junkies are like "well actually, don't interrupt your enemy..." smh
ig it gives them permission to do nothing... it grants validation for passivity.
for the past 40+ years, the Legislative branch has been completely ineffectual at passing any kind of laws which would help the majority of Americans. in the maelstrom of culture war, partisan gridlock became normalized and the only way to do anything was to begin shifting power to the Executive branch. so over time the President became a King. the majority of people accepted that, as long as it was their king giving out decrees and concentrating power. so Presidents used their power (no one was stopping them) to take control of the Judicial branch, and they normalized the use of executive orders, promoting agendas and making policy by decree for things that should be debated in congress and held up for judicial review.
today we inherit this legacy. the idea that a single man, a monarch, can alter the lives of billions with a wave of a hand is not just expected, it is increasingly demanded by discontented citizens desperate for change.
this is America. we are no longer a nation of people, we have been transformed into merely a collection of presidential decrees and executive tweets, carried out by an army of obedient morons.
the king is dead, long live the king of the morons.
agreed. but also consider, which names appear on the ballot at all is largely the result of actions outside the election cycle (publicity events, fundraisers, grassroots door to door organizing, messaging, courting groups for endorsements).
in other words, voting is necessary but not sufficient.
not recognizing this is why so many movements lose momentum and fail to get their ideas in front of voters.
me missing your point doesn't make your arguments correct. you are factually mistaken in your framing.
Life doesn't give an F about balance
you speak with the confident wrongness of someone who has no scientific understanding of natural cycles, equilibriiums, self-limiting reproductive rates, ecology, or biology. have you heard of chemistry? equilibriums?
you are confusing a linguistic object , the word "balance" (like from an Oxford dictionary) with empirically observable, falsifiable hypotheses which are well established in environmental science. humans are late arrivals to the millennia of life systems on earth, and the first thing they did was begin destroying balanced ecosystems to grow surplus foods, exert population pressures on other species, reshape rivers and lakes, clearcut forests, and general terraform the shit out of everything, other creatures be damned.
your comment suggests a stunningly anthropocentric hubris and a total ignorance to eons of geological time preceding homo sapiens which humans came along and completely fucked by rapidly terra forming the planet. go tell a black rhino or a dodo that only humans care about balance.
humans cause imbalance in nature, it's literally our whole thing we do. transform the environment by whatever means possible, dominate other life forms to extinction if we feel like it, overcome natural limits or push others to extreme boundaries.
this will be really useful when the government needs to flush out refugees, dissidents and resistance members. no more using darkness to hide from the automated kill bots and private security patrols, purging the countryside will be so much easier without having to fiddle with pesky night vision optics!
this is actually a very good sign.
the rich are finally starting to realize that if the distribution of wealth (inequality) is not addressed voluntarily, then the poor will begin taking it by force.
on the present, unmitigated trajectory, we are looking at sporadic looting at best, fomenting into widespread violence, crackdowns, and civil unrest the likes of which this nation hasn't seen in over a century.
I hope it's not too late to reign in the ultra wealthy using taxes. it's the only legal method we have to claw back everything the oligarchs have taken from us.