Yea that pesky free speech platform is the source of all evil. Full of Hitlers and racists, fascists and bigots. Far right Ghengis Kahn supporters and probably devil worshippers.
Luckily all the paedophiles stay with the BBC and the Jihadists on Channel 4.
So the simple action of replying to a post requires you to manually load the parent.
Thats brilliant. I wonder who thought that up. Must have been a democrat.
This is not my opinion but one I support as being near to how I feel.
“Trump is now the most successful criminal in the history of the United States, and the one who did the most damage to the country.
Trump and the GOP have made a mockery of the Constitution. He has been installed as a king, and nothing can constrain Trump now.
Well, maybe the Twenty-fifth Amendment, if in his current state of derangement, he goes too far even for the likes of Mitch McConnell, Mike Johnson, JD Vance, and other powers behind the throne, including Elon Musk and Peter Thiel.
Either way, the republic is dead.
Congratulations to all those “patriots”, and other supporters across the country, who killed it. Now live with the repercussions of a criminally incompetent president, surrounded by morons, misanthropes, white supremacists and oligarchs drunk on their own power. It is going to be worse than you can possibly imagine.”
I’d add to that that I think the Democrats will be spurred on by their defeat and make life as uncomfortable for Trump for the next four years by whatever legal means are available.
I can’t help wondering if in the future school children will be learning that in the early 21st century democracy was gradually replaced by autocracy as the world’s predominant political system.
A right shift and their preferred strongman leadership concept is taking over the politics inside country after country. The island nation of UK seems hitherto unscathed but best to keep a wary eye on Farage and his swivel eyed supporters.
The days when individual opinions count, and voicing them is even possible, may be numbered.
The optimist in me wants to believe things will be OK, for Ukraine, for Gaza, for desperate migrants… but I can clearly see aggression and hatred of others triumphing, and trumping, all and the voices of empathy and reason being shouted down and ridiculed.
One might argue that autocracy was the norm up to WWII, then we had a brief enlightenment before throwing it all away again.
I see intolerance, selfishness and insensitivity rising every time I hear someone saying “These people…”
We are all ‘these people’.
This is a NYT Interpreter article by Amanda Taub that some here may find interesting:
Is U.S. democracy like a wobbly bridge?
On June 10, 2000, London opened the Millennium Footbridge, a futuristic pedestrian path spanning the River Thames, hanging between suspension cables that was designed to look like a ribbon of steel. But as a steady stream of people began to flow across the new bridge, it began to wobble alarmingly from side to side.
Engineers figured out the problem: The bridge was designed for pedestrians who moved randomly along the bridge, their individual movements canceling each other out. But in crowds, people fall naturally into pace with each other, and as they did, their synchronous steps caused bigger and bigger swings of the bridge. The city shut it down after only two days for an expensive revamp.
I’ve had unstable structures on my mind lately.
My recent Times Magazine story was a deep dive into the game theory of democracy: what keeps the democratic equilibrium in place, and what causes it to wobble off balance, or collapse entirely. As I reported the piece, I began imagining the different democratic systems as suspension bridges, with checks and balances as their cables. What happens when pressure pushes the suspension out of balance, or even into complete collapse?
In Hungary, for example, a quirk of the country’s constitution ended up handing Prime Minister Viktor Orban a supermajority in parliament, and with it the ability to amend the constitution more or less at will. Orban used that authority to insulate himself from electoral challenges and dismantle liberal democracy, turning the courts and media into instruments of his power, rather than checks on it.
And in Venezuela, the democratic equilibrium was catastrophically weakened by a supreme court decision early in the presidency of Hugo Chávez. He had announced a referendum asking citizens to vote on replacing the constitution — a measure that appeared to be illegal, because it violated the existing procedures for constitutional amendments.
But the court went along with Chávez’s referendum, paving the way for him to gain control over Venezuela’s major institutions. He held power for 14 years, until his death. His handpicked successor, Nicolás Maduro, is still in office.
Now let’s take a look at the United States. Vice President Kamala Harris staked her campaign on the idea that democracy was on the ballot, and that a vote for former and future President Donald J. Trump could lead to its demise. I’m sure you’ve seen how that turned out this week.
Former President Donald J. Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris debate in September. Graham Dickie/The New York Times
To be clear, the United States is unlikely to experience a collapse exactly like those of Hungary or Venezuela. For one thing, the U.S. constitution is notoriously difficult to amend.
But it may be very vulnerable to a different type of destabilization, one that comes from the political equivalent of the crowds walking in lock step on the wobbling Millennium Bridge.
The U.S. political system is designed to work a bit like the out-of-sync pedestrians the bridge’s engineers anticipated: many independent institutions and constituencies pushing in different directions, their opposing forces canceling each other out to keep the overall system stable. Power is divided not just among the three branches of government at the federal level, but among 50 state governments as well.
“Ambition must be made to counteract ambition,” James Madison wrote in the Federalist papers, explaining why checks and balances were a necessary bulwark against tyranny.
For much of the country’s history, U.S. institutions were distinctly out of lock step. In addition to the formal separation of powers, state-level parties, media outlets, and other institutions created crosscutting pressures, forcing presidents to put together broad coalitions in order to govern.
That began to change with the 1965 Voting Rights Act and other civil rights laws, which triggered a long-term realignment in American politics, write Paul Pierson and Eric Schickler in their new book “Partisan Nation.” Over the next few decades, politics became more nationalized, as Republicans and Democrats began to polarize around sharply different ideological identities and compete for control over the increasingly powerful federal government.
Those same forces began to bring political institutions that were designed as counterbalances into lock step. Partisan pressures, like the crowds on the bridge, grew stronger as they become more synchronous.
State political parties now function more like chapters of national parties than like separate organizations with their own agendas, Pierson and Schickler write. Issue groups have become part of partisan coalitions rather than sources of crosscutting outside pressures. The media environment has polarized as well, with right-wing partisan media developing into an ecosystem that is largely separate from mainstream outlets like The Times, The Washington Post, or CNN.
The Millennium Bridge in London. Niklas Halle’N/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
That partisan “teamsmanship,” they write, has undermined the different branches’ incentives to check each other. Politicians now face strong pressures to support members of their own party and oppose the other side. That undermines the effectiveness of tools like impeachment: If legislators will only impeach politicians from the opposing side, it becomes just another means of increasing partisan pressure rather than a restraint on excessive power grabs.
Over the same period, courts have become more overtly politicized, making them an additional vector of partisan pressure rather than a check against it. American courts still uphold the rule of law, but when judges are selected and promoted based on their political beliefs and loyalties, that inevitably brings a partisan slant to their decisions as well. That has ratcheted up the stakes of politics even further, because winning the presidency and Senate now carries the additional benefit of controlling a politicized judicial nomination process.
The United States is not Hungary or Venezuela. The American democratic equilibrium has thus far withstood the forces of polarization. But Trump will come back into the presidency into a system that is, in effect, already beginning to rock back and forth.
Something new to concern us regarding world balance now Trump will be in power
Not quite. It was particular to the bridge.
The natural sway motion of people walking caused small sideways oscillations in the bridge, which in turn caused people on the bridge to sway in step, increasing the size of the bridge oscillations and continually reinforcing the effect.
"Trump’s vow to deport millions of undocumented immigrants has no price tag”
To where does one deport an undocumented person?
If they have no documents, their country of origin is unknown.
Ah! You do a deal with another country (say Rwanda) to accept them. OK, that’ll work. Won’t it?
I’m not sure that really matters. What matters is the profit to be made in detaining them in privately run detention centres while figuring out where to send them.
You mean privately run detention centres like Dachau?
In Trump’s case he’ll probably just march them all to the Mexican border. Critical thinking is not his strong suite.
There are worse solutions, of course and Gaza has proved the world is quite happy to look the other way if they are used.
Surely Mexico would just refuse to accept them.
It has the potential to get messy, I agree.
Though undocumented in US != does not have passport, I imagine that would indicate to where they should be sent.
But I reckon they will simply start with internement internally in the US. After that…
Sorry, I haven’t read the whole thread, (maybe a new one could started now that we know the bampot has won) so don’t know what you are replying to, BUT, would the order of succession not depend on Trump being inaugurated, since at the moment, he isn’t actually POTUS?
I know very little about the process and am merely curious.
Yes. He cannot do anything until he is President and even then how would he find the officials and the money to deport vast numbers of people. I’ve read the figure is likely to be more in the region of 100,000 deportees.
As I’ve already said: Don’t listen to what he says, watch what he does. I suspect (hope) it will be a lot less than people fear.
Thank you Brian but no thank you.
A view that doesn’t come from the MSM.
