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Trump's Second Term

Department of State
@StateDept
SECRETARY RUBIO: The U.S. is constantly asked to help in wars and we have. But when we had a need, it didn’t get positive responses from NATO. A couple leaders said that Iran was not Europe’s war. Well, Ukraine isn’t our war, yet we’ve contributed more to that fight than anyone.

https://twitter.com/x/status/2037241186503582186
 
Resume said:
◊◊◊◊ you. You're vote is no more important than any other voter's. I'd say even less, because you are a demented, deluded, diaper- ◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊, smelly old goat. You should be 25th-ed, then prosecuted, then jailed.

Again, ◊◊◊◊ you.
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If he survives long enough, I could see him ending up like Jimmy "Superfly" Snuka. Arrested and charged with crimes, but found unfit to stand trial due to severe dementia.
 
Andy_Ross said:
Blanche: If you look at what happened to the men and women convicted because of January 6th, by 5PM on January 20th, every one of them was either pardoned or had their sentence commuted. When folks say we’ve done nothing, I say you have a very short memory.
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And how many of those pardoned or commuted men and women have been arrested again since then for new crimes?
I'll make it easier. How many of them have specifically been arrested for assaulting children? It's a smaller number, but it isn't zero.
 
Andy_Ross said:
Department of State
@StateDept
SECRETARY RUBIO: The U.S. is constantly asked to help in wars and we have. But when we had a need, it didn’t get positive responses from NATO. A couple leaders said that Iran was not Europe’s war. Well, Ukraine isn’t our war, yet we’ve contributed more to that fight than anyone.
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a) You haven't asked NATO for jack ◊◊◊◊ because you know perfectly well NATO is not for helping its members prosecute their own wars of choice.
b) No, you have not contributed most to Ukraine. That lie died so long ago you think everyone forgot.
 
LiteBright said:
I'm not sure how to respond to this because you seem to be disagreeing with my opinion but I'm hard pressed to see how exactly.
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Yes and no. I'm both supporting and disagreeing with different parts of what you said. You were correct about some things of significance, but other parts were distinctly off in ways that have been... encouraged by the Republican Party. This isn't intended as a strike against you, incidentally, but many misleading Republican narratives have long shown themselves to be effective at reframing reality in ways that are easy to fall for.

LiteBright said:
Although I am no fan of a highly biased publication such as the daily kos, I can't disagree with the article you linked
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For what it's worth, Daily Kos is a bit of a mixed bag. It certainly is partisan and thus needs a measure of wariness on that basis, but the staff articles are generally quite factual and reasonable. When it comes to the community, it gets a bit more varied and one needs to be much more wary. In this case, though, the author is a fairly reputable one and the case is made reasonably.

LiteBright said:
and the behaviour of the GOP over the past few decades as well as the failure of america's people and institutions to hold them to account is a big part of how we got here. While the problem has been emerging for decades, events over the past 10-15 years have accelerated its decline in a way that I never thought possible.
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I think that what you say here is entirely reasonable and understandable. Also, 15 years ago, the Republican Party was nowhere close to as overtly horrible as it has become. The signs of where they were trying to push us were very much there, of course, but they were nowhere close to as overt.

LiteBright said:
When I referred to america as it was founded, I was not nodding to originalism in the general sense. I can see how maybe you read that into my statement but that was not the intent.
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For what it's worth, I didn't think that you were directly doing so. Rather, as noted, I thought that you simply missed the mark entirely, misled by the same misleading narratives and propaganda that underlies Originalism that distract and divert attention from what's going on.

LiteBright said:
America is supposedly founded on democratic principles and has beaten the rest of us over the head about what a shining example it is to the world for longer than I've been alive and for a long time it was largely true.
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For what it's worth, feeling the need to loudly boast about how amazing one is at something is often a sign that one is substituting bluster for substance and that one wants to control the narrative and keep it away from the contradictory facts. America has had significant issues with our democracy in a number of ways all along and a lot of the virtue signaling on that front was, well, virtue signaling. That's not to denigrate the reality, of course. There truly has been a lot that's worth praising the US and its improvements for on that front, it's just that trying to trick people into thinking that things are better than they are is a rather common strategy for those who don't want things to change further in that direction and that that also serves as nice propaganda to direct at outsiders.

LiteBright said:
But that requires a population that is engaged in the process, understands at least in a basic way how it operates and is willing to do what is best for their nation instead of their own short-term self interest. We have long past the point where that is no longer the case. A majority of the country doesn't even come close to fitting this description. Most of the population is either hyper-partisan, unwilling to hold their tribe to account regardless of its actions or they are so disengaged from the process they don't even participate. A significant minority has even emerged that is willing to burn the country and its institutions to the ground in order to see their vision of it realized.
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All things that can primarily be laid at the feet of the many long and short term right-wing "sabotage the country for political gain" efforts.

LiteBright said:
In short, america's greatest strength, its functioning democracy, has failed and I, for one, do not believe it is going to recover from this.
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Your opinion is entirely understandable. Personally, I'm withholding judgement. I have long thought that it was always going to require the US experiencing significant pain before the ever increasing right-wing irresponsibility could reasonably be hoped to lose sway, though. I had a little hope that the mass deaths and suffering of Republicans during COVID that happened specifically because of Republican corruption and lies would sway things more than they did, though.

LiteBright said:
You can elect a democrat in 2028 and they can apologize to the world and try to undo the damage that has been done but it will hardly matter.
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Unfortunately. That's been rather evident from the moment that Trump was re-elected, though, and from the moment that Trump was re-elected, any efforts to undo the damage will be severely hindered until we don't have an effective tossup between a reasonable party and a circus of openly corrupt insanity running the country or worse, as the circus of openly corrupt insanity has made clear is what they desire.

LiteBright said:
The rest of the world now knows that the US is never more than a few years away from turning back into a pariah state and it will be a generation at least before that trust can be rebuilt, even in a basic way. The coutry's ability to use soft power is being systematically dismantled by the current administration in a way that ensures it will not be easily reconstructed. In the meantime, the rest of us are moving on. The US is on its way to becoming Russia, a oligarchy and semi-failed state that needs to be contained and tolerated by the world rather than engaged with.

Believe me, I take no pleasure in this. My own country has long made the mistake of entangling its interests so deeply with america that we are going to go down with the ship. Its not just you that faces dark times ahead.
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Of course, and I take no pleasure in it, either.

LiteBright said:
As for proving me wrong, the central point of my post is an opinion about the future. Of course it is non-specific and really can't be falsified in the present so I'm not sure how you would prove it wrong anyway. Feel free to try and change my opinion by showing some evidence that the country is not currently failing in spectacular fashion but I won't hold my breath.
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I suppose that there's a couple points of note to make here about what I said and why. Primarily, though, you were originally far too non-specific about what would qualify as proving you wrong, especially given that the concept that you attached to your entirely true observation. The disengagement and partisanship in the country has far, far more to do with current events than "America as it was founded," after all. "America as it was founded" was also deeply, deeply flawed in many ways, many of which have been changed for the better, though often with great pain and suffering used as stepping stones to get us there. More generally, though, feel free to consider my poke at the "prove me wrong" phrase to be more out of mild annoyance at a challenge created utilizing fallacy, rather than a fundamental disagreement with your overall stance.
 
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