US Election 2020

[Joe]

I'm trying to picture Rudy running.

[Cunt]

I'm trying to picture Rudy running.

I would run with him. One of the most satisfying ways to ensure 'LISS' is to run with someone slow enough to ensure your 'LISS' pace.

All the while pretending I'm doing Rudy a favour lol

I'd run with you, too Joe. It's been pretty goddamn good for me. Made me more right-wing, which was very helpful in increasing my friends circle.

[Tero]

Old man pretending to run country for 4 years confused anout its laws.

[Joe]

I'm trying to picture Rudy running.

I would run with him. One of the most satisfying ways to ensure 'LISS' is to run with someone slow enough to ensure your 'LISS' pace.

All the while pretending I'm doing Rudy a favour lol

I'd run with you, too Joe. It's been pretty goddamn good for me. Made me more right-wing, which was very helpful in increasing my friends circle.

I'd love to run again, but I'd need a knee replacement. Since I can still ride a bike, I'm not too concerned about it.

[Cunt]

Hmmm...would you consider a knee-mounted leg-blade, like that fighter chick in the Kingsman II ?

[Joe]

Since my knee is the problem, no. Besides, that's CGI. In real life, the people I see running with a blade prosthetic have an uneven gait.

[Tero]

If they get one senator into the scheme, senate has to debate 2 hrs. Leader can then just call for a voice vote of yay or nay. Gavel comes down, then it's over in min.
https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/531 ... ollege?amp

[Cunt]

No source posted, since no-one trusts each others' sources, but quick question...

John Poulos or Mellissa Carone?

There does seem a fairly clear difference between their versions.

[Animavore]

Has he not fucked off yet? The time between election and transfer is ridiculous in the US.

[Brian Peacock]

Steady on Ani. They have to give the Pony Express time to deliver the parchments to Washington at a time when Elkhead Pass is fair treacherous man.

[JimC]

For a modern nation, they are more mired in the past than many...

[Scot Dutchy]

A third world country in more ways than one.

[Seabass]

Is Trump’s Coup a ‘Dress Rehearsal?’


The United States has survived the 2020 election and its seemingly never-ending and increasingly bizarre aftermath. Efforts by Donald Trump to overturn Joe Biden’s victory in the courts met abject failure at almost every turn even as a number of Republican elected officials and Republican voters embraced them. The most apocalyptic scenarios that some scholars worried about before the election did not come to pass. But nothing that happened after November 3 can be considered normal — not the threats to election officials, not the concerted legal effort to invalidate millions of votes, and certainly not Four Seasons Total Landscaping.

Some prominent academic figures who study how countries fall into dictatorships are deeply concerned about what would come next.

Daniel Ziblatt, a political science professor at Harvard and the co-author of How Democracies Die, told Intelligencer, “I think it’s pretty clear that there was a somewhat serious effort to steal this election. It’s not going to succeed. In that sense, the acute normative crisis has passed. It doesn’t mean our checks and balances have worked.” He pointed to what he described as “a chronic slow burning problem” within the American electorate, the “radicalization” within the Republican Party. “One can’t have a democracy [in a two party system] where one of the two parties is not fully committed to democratic norms.” Ziblatt described the current situation as an escalation of constitutional hardball, where political actors “sniff out weakness in constitutional structure,” violating long-standing norms if not technically the law. He pointed to the Trump-led effort in 2020 to have Republican-controlled state legislatures pick their own electors to throw victory to the president, regardless of how their states voted.

The possibility of a step like this was always embedded within the constitutional structure, but no one, until now, had been willing to explicitly overturn the results of a presidential election that already had a clear and decisive winner.

“I worry that this whole post-election process has been the dress rehearsal,” said Harvard political scientist Steven Levitsky, the other co-author of How Democracies Die, citing Vladimir Lenin’s quote that the Russian Revolution of 1905 was the “dress rehearsal” for the October Revolution of 1917, which put the Bolsheviks in power. Levitsky noted that not only have Republicans found that “their base won’t punish this sort of behavior, they’ll likely applaud it.” He added, “none of this stuff can be unlearned.”

Experts weren’t comforted by the slapstick nature of Trump campaign’s efforts to overturn the election, ranging from farcical conspiratorial claims to the hair dye dripping down Rudy Giuliani’s cheeks. “I think we do make a mistake that authoritarians are always as competent at the time as they appear in retrospect,” said Ziblatt. “Mussolini was a clown. Hitler was very lazy. It’s not as if they are always paragons of self-discipline and organization.”

These two scholars both expressed real concerns about what they see as structural flaws in our current system — flaws that allow a political party, in this case, the Republican Party, to consistently win power despite failing to win a plurality of the vote (as Trump did in 2016). This undercuts the idea of a self-correcting two-party system where, as Ziblatt put it, “If one party goes off the rails, it will be punished at the ballot box.”

continued:
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/12 ... arsal.html

[L'Emmerdeur]

I think the most significant part of this is that it appears to show the tangible result of decades of right wing media demonizing the Democratic Party (in more extreme examples, literally claiming that the Democratic Party is controlled and inhabited by Satanists). The relevant quote: '[The Republican] base won't punish this sort of behavior [attempting to overturn an election], they'll likely applaud it.'

People living in a nation with a centuries-long tradition of democracy don't just decide one day to support autocracy. They have to have what they consider good reasons to come to that position. A large percentage of Republicans view the Democratic Party as 'socialist,' 'anti-American,' 'anti-Christian,' 'for open borders,' etc., in other words, a political party intent on destroying the nation. When somebody believes that sort of thing then 'saving the country' can a legitimate reason in their mind for discarding democracy.

[JimC]

I think the most significant part of this is that it appears to show the tangible result of decades of right wing media demonizing the Democratic Party (in more extreme examples, literally claiming that the Democratic Party is controlled and inhabited by Satanists). The relevant quote: '[The Republican] base won't punish this sort of behavior [attempting to overturn an election], they'll likely applaud it.'

People living in a nation with a centuries-long tradition of democracy don't just decide one day to support autocracy. They have to have what they consider good reasons to come to that position. A large percentage of Republicans view the Democratic Party as 'socialist,' 'anti-American,' 'anti-Christian,' 'for open borders,' etc., in other words, a political party intent on destroying the nation. When somebody believes that sort of thing then 'saving the country' can a legitimate reason in their mind for discarding democracy.

A classic example of the dangers of believing that the means (discarding democratic norms) justify the ends (saving God's Own Country from evil atheistic marxists)...