- You only need a few dozen state reps in a few swing states to override the popular vote and choose their own electors.
- 51 senators to reject the election results.
- A rigged Supreme Court that could choose a case from a lower court related to elections and rule whatever they want.
We think we have a robust and stable democracy, but we're already halfway there in most of these events.
Not that it ended up helping any.
Not to me, and not to a lot of others. We'd been expecting it for quite some time. If anything was shocking to me, it's that there wasn't more of it, and worse.
Fortunately, most of the loudest and most paranoid people are also lazy. It's easy and risk-free to spread conspiracy theories on the Internet. Only the .0001% of them with the most free time and least sense showed up that day -- and then only because it was incompetently organized.
There will be better organizers and less stupid leaders coming. That's not even close to over. So don't be shocked next time.
What words do you have left for events where numerous people are intentionally killed (shot, beheaded, blown up, tortured, etc) when you use brutal for this one?
There's video of people being beaten, crushed in doors, etc. That's brutal. That there's more brutal stuff out there doesn't mean it's not brutal.
We're in a thread about Nazi Germany. I think it really degrades our ability to communicate effectively when you use the same words to talk about that and 1/6.
Was the holocaust just "more brutal" than 1/6? Of course not. They're in completely different universes, and one of those things pretty much set the standard for brutal.
It's a trend that jumps out at me. People reach for the strongest adjectives by default. It seems like peoples scales just aren't calibrated.
I think the sibling comment might be onto something, maybe there was a missing word there.
People get brutally attacked on a daily basis. Genocide is a bit less common.
It's as if we have a scale from 0 to 10, where each number maps to an adjective. To me, brutal is towards the end of that scale. Everyone seems to have forgotten how to use the words on the 3 to 7 range.
I have the same reaction when I see people describe something as "extremely x". I don't often see things described as "extremely" whatever and think, "yep this person has a decent grasp on reality". This may just be something I'm sensitive to for whatever reason.
A shock in the sense of a systemic shock, sure.
In the sense of a surprise to observers, no. Not really. Certainly should not have been a shock at all to anyone paying any sort of attention from around the 20th of December.
So this was really a long-observed trajectory.
Personally I think it is not over, because I'm not convinced the GOP is ready to accept it is destined for minority status, and because since that day an enormous amount of groundwork has been done to practically guarantee the next election is undermined.
As a German I am not in the position to tell this is a fault in the American people, but saying the US institutions and habits right now are strong enough is to survive a Hitler is just wrong.
You need to fight for democracy every day!
In the end, democracy won... for now. But it was close. I dare say that if Mike Pence had done differently on that day, or if state legislatures had submitted "alternate" slates, or if more Republicans had objected to the results, or, or, or... American democracy would be finished.
The conclusion is not that American institutions are strong, it's that they are too weak, and that they survived this attack by chance. Next time we won't be as lucky.
People keep reiterating there was a planned attack on our nation, when the FBI found there was no such thing — and at least one of the 500+ arrested for Jan 6th was released because the police waved him in.
I think we can’t have that discussion in good faith because people refuse to admit they were tricked by Reichstag Fire 2.0 — or even entertain the idea they might have been.
That’s too bad:
I think the only way we prevent the rise of Nazism in the US is to admit the Jan 6th people are political prisoners and you were tricked (like the Germans).
HN is particularly susceptible because we're all in one silo and when we can't agree on a shared reality, we have to assume under the HN guidelines that the alternate reality is truly what our interlocutor believes.
The endgame looks like the Russian people accepting Putin's nonsense because they can't believe anything.
Trump didn't think the 6th insurgents would succeed. He had clearly been advised that the reaction to it might allow him to institute marshal law, and there was a draft executive order floating around that would have seen him use that situation to try to delay things further.
I think a lot of people fail to understand how many different ways there are to make order out of chaos, and how in extreme chaos a lot of people will accept any kind of order.
It was not gradual. It was gradual only if you was apolitical or supporter.
I am not saying America is perfect or can't be destroyed as democracy, but it would be significantly harder.
"What do you do when the majority of people no longer believe in/support Democracy?"
We'll see how it unfolds, but I don't have faith.
Unfortunately, America's cultural worship of the founding fathers and gun culture has never led it to seriously consider other approaches, as the armed militia was widely considered to be the only necessary bulwark against tyranny, and the only solution that could be trusted. Then it turned out that militia was more than happy to welcome tyranny under certain terms.
So I guess we're just fucked now. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯