Fairy Tales

Not by voting, but tomorrow I will hold up a sign near a road for 2 hours. Trump will have no choice but to step down after that.
- Protests are for building public solidarity. You know, organizing.. the only way for the masses to accomplish anything in the face of fascism. It's not for convincing Trump of anything.
  
  I think OP might have been talking about that pesky amendment that comes after the free-speech one

The american government was designed to serve exactly the people it’s still serving (rich merchants and landowners). It’s working extremely well, they just lied to you about what it was designed to do.

Another fairy tale is thinking that Vooting Bloo No Matter Hoo can defeat fascism.
- Im vooting! I'm vooting!

Or peaceful protests with arts and crafts.
- Managed opposition.
  
  This made me so mad I actually looked up my representative and wrote her how impotent this stunt was. Of course, "writing your representative" is just as pathetic, but SOMEONE had to hear about my anger. Kudos to Al Greene though. The old geezer stood up for all of us, literally.
  
  Thoughts and prayers
- You mean knitting a pink hat doesn’t work?

Oh ho ho you just wait till midterms! That's only two years. It's not like it's taken them two months to make half of Project 2025 a reality.
- Good thing I don't live in the US
  
  Me neither but it's not a good thing no matter where you live. The world is very small these days.

I'm starting to believe that the saying "All roads lead to Rome" might've been a warning.

True… but you can sure enable one by not voting.
- Repeat after me …. The democratic party is funded by the same wall street military and prison industry profiteers that fund the republican party and they are fundamentally opposed to shifting policy to the left and adopting economic democracy to any extent in their platform to the point they would rather ensure a right wing candidate wins by sabotagingrg any popular pro workers rights candidate rather than nominate anyone left of their platform which makes american western neo liberal democracy a defacto class dictatorship!
  
  Whew! I followed you though. There are other factors as well I'm sure, but yeah, those are some of them, and big ones too. Greed sure does become complicated over time. Institutions are built on it. It was a bit hard to get past the arrogant-sounding "Repeat after me" but I'm glad I kept going.
  
  I noticed you conveniently left out " Christian nationalists" from your list of people funding political parties. Why is that?
  
  Ok yeah. But not voting still enables the fascist. You can still vote for harm reduction, then protest/riot for progress.

"I can change them."

Can the Chinese even discuss politics like we do here? Haven't seen anything on rednote beside "political studies" and some Marx praises.
Must admit it's a bit more difficult with all of it being in mandarin, but god damn, are they under surveillance.
- Yes they can. They don't do it in English. They also don't share it on international social media. There is not much of a difference between the day to day life of someone in the US and China and everything they know about each other is propaganda.
  
  Le chat mistral told me differently. I'll have to talk openly about politics with a Chinese citizen before I change my mind.
  It's not fucking normal that a country with such an economy doesn't have people on the global scene.
  You have us, Europeans, you Americans, Aussies, Japanese, Indonesians (VPN), Singaporeans, ... All here talking to eachother.
  Chinese? Nope. Great firewall of china. I couldn't even speak to my wife when she was in Shanghai unless it was on WeChat. Her emails were blocked. WhatsApp was blocked. The other phone she tried to use VPN on became completely useless.
  China controls their population. Until enough Chinese citizens are able to tell me otherwise.
  Brilliant economy, brilliant growth, but god damn, allow them to come out of their hole.

Police state? XD
- The NYPD budget would make it something like the third largest military if compared to countries' military budgets. The NYPD's main purpose is to protect capital which, per "stop and frisk" and similarly racist policies, are intended to harass minority groups. If there is a safety issue where minutes matter, they are only hours away. If a shop window gets broken they'll be there immediately.
  
  Apparently the NYPD has a budget of $5.4 billion, with is a lot, but would be about place 40 compared to military budgets

Oh, come on. About 90 million people listened to everyone and their (non-conservative) mother say how this might be the most important election, Trump won't give up his power, they're going to enact Project 2025, it'll be nothing but a revenge tour, they're fascists, a second Trump administration is an existential threat to this country, Trump is compromised, this administration will end American democracy, the people who stood in his way last time aren't around any more, etc... 90 million people heard this... then still chose to stay home and let this happen. I'm sorry Biden/Harris didn't sweep us off our feet, but we deserve this. Don't you dare say we "tried" voting against it.
If Did Not Vote had been a candidate:
https://i.redd.it/ne5nmguwlqzd1.png
- Sheldon S. Wolin talked about the fact that the US system was a "managed democracy" and a form of "inverted totalitarianism" in his book Democracy Inc about twenty years ago. In a managed democracy the pretense of democratic voting is maintained, but the system is so heavily managed as to render voting ineffective and largely irrelevant. The US voting system is so heavily gamed that to expect the average US citizen to have any power through the ballot box is laughable.
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guided_democracy
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
  
  This is a pretty decent overview of the ideas in that book for anyone who is interested.
- About 90 million people listened to everyone and their (non-conservative) mother say how this might be the most important election
  We get told this every election, but then democrats cooperate with republicans every step of the way. Most recently, democrats had an opportunity to force a government shutdown and use that as leverage against the republicans, but instead they instantly folded like they always do. I recognized this pattern when Obama promised hope and change but then mostly continued Bush's policies when he got elected (e.g. corporate bail-outs, deportations, and warmongering). Democrats follow republicans as they journey further and further to the right.
- The voting in the US is literally predetermined during redistricting and as real as the outcome of Wrestlemania so not sure what you're talking about
  
  Trump won the popular vote, all excuses are off this time.
  
  You can't redistrict the electoral college.
- Im copying a response i left to another comment in this thread because it is relevant and people need to wake up and figure out what’s really going on instead of believing our government is still democratic when the writing has been on the wall for decades
  We can agree that our entire political system has been corrupted by money? Right?
  What makes people naively believe that our electoral processes have not been corrupted in the same exact way? Some delusional belief in American democratic exceptionalism?
  In germany their highest court decided that electronic voting is unconstitutional because it is impossible to differentiate between fraudulent results and legitimate ones for laypeople/anyone who isnt a cybersecurity or IT expert.
  Both parties are fascist albeit to differing degrees but both parties blatantly exhibit 13 of 14 traits of fascist regimes. The one trait they can claim plausible deniability in regards to is fraudulent elections. But if our corporate owned leaders have allowed our society to disintegrate to fascism 93% of the way then its pretty illogical to believe they would stop short and work diligently to prevent the last 7% from reaching that point.
  There is the Princeton study done within the lasy 2 decades that concluded the amount of influence one has on our political system and any legislated policy is directly proportional to the amount of wealth you have with regular working class people having a statistically near zero irrelevant amount of influence on any policy regardless of how popular or unpopular it may be. Since lewis f powell’s pro corporate supreme court decisions paved the way for citizens united and the erosion of our constitutional republic and its comprising democratic elements it has now become apparent for anyone paying attention that every aspect of our political system is for sale to the highest bidder and most likely the reality is that our presidential elections are rigged and have been since at least reagan. But even before then there was likely corruption involved since it is pretty much a historical fact that jfk won the presidency in no small part due to a backroom deal his father made with the mafia because of the connections he had made during his time establishing a bootleging empire during prohibition.
- I'm sorry Biden/Harris didn't sweep us off our feet,
  My sister in Satan...they enabled a genocide.
  but we deserve this.
  You do. I don't.
- So you think it's right to blame people who did what they could? Just because others voted against them? Prick.
  
  Wow, personal insults, classy. And "people who did what they could"...? Are we reading the same words?? I'm calling out my fellow Americans who decided not to do all they could. Those who literally didn't do the absolute minimum to prevent all of this: gestures broadly at the everything by voting. And I'm not acting above it or anything. Maybe I should have done more outreach? Apparently we didn't hammer home the dire consequences clearly enough...?
  Still, what in my rant makes you think I'm targeting anyone who made any effort at all?? I'm saying to people who did nothing: they and we need to do better. We literally won't have a country anymore otherwise...
- Well, you can't vote fascists out, but historically speaking they've always been voted IN. Authoritarianism is always a degeneration of liberalism. When people get fat and lazy, shit like this happens. Weak men creating hard times ect.
  
  Actually it's strong men not getting cut down. The problem is concentration of power. "They were too weak and lazy to stop hitler2" This idea is a memetic weapon to make it appears it's the people who are being stepped on that are at fault, rather than the plainly obvious empowered elites just letting go of any restraints, buying "democracy" outright and then blaming the oppressed for their oppression.
- You're still under the illusion that Biden/Harris and the Americans history of voting for their fascist enabling policies isn't what lead us to where we are now.
- you're making it really fun to own you. thanks for siding with the fascists.
  
  What kind of inferiority complex makes people claim they "own" others that they disagree with?

So what’s Portugal? Narnia?
- Any chance having specific source about it ? Not for me it's for a friend, thx
  
  I'm not very familiar with Portuguese history but my understanding is that authoritarianism in Portugal was ended by the carnation revolution, which was a military coup. I'm curious what this person means as well. You can't vote out authoritarianism, at best you get a dictator kind enough to decide to step down when asked.
- Yeah who cares about the Carnation Revolution?