Not letting torture stop the US from forcing them out.

State terrorism, plain and simple

To torture people, of course.

Can we not relitigate this. I remember this from like 18 years ago. It was not a good time.

Yes. A lot of the Trump stuff is building on existing violations of international law that started with Bush II and were continued by each subsequent administration.

They are being forced to bring prisoners/ witnesses back to the US. They need to have their ducks in a row.

People really don’t want to believe that there is no electoral solution anymore. People really don’t want to believe that it’s too late to save the illusion of peace any longer. This is a late af wake up call to how incredibly fucked we are, and many people will still hit snooze.

For what it’s worth, speech doesn’t mean as much anymore, as we now live in a time where violence is the dominant form of power. For this reason, peaceful protests will do little, and mass riots can easily help the oppressors escalate even further. Fighting the incredibly militarized federal and local governments is practically untenable. Over half a century of cowardly libs empowering anti-riot forces has made this a nightmare scenario for resistance.

There is so little recourse at this point that the best thing we can do is prioritize not dying so we can outlive Trump’s reign. We’ll need luck and cooperation to survive the infectious diseases, natural disasters, and economic devastation that the state will do less than nothing to mitigate. It’s up to us to support each other, because there is no social contract left.

Reiteration that the US system is set up to quell citizen action by design. Also, relatively, what has happened in LA so far pales in comparison to riots in the past, it is mostly just protests with occasional flare-ups by agents provocateur or the random crazy. Media then takes the sound/video bites of that handful of events, and make it look like the whole thing is like that.

Notes:

• The country is massive. There’s no real rail system to speak of. Air travel is falling apart. Not everyone has a car in shape enough to handle a 3000 mile road trip to go to DC and egg an orange turd.
• Those who aren’t already buying food on BNPL plans and credit cards probably still have medical expenses, never-ending medical expenses. Those who are, are living negative-paycheck-to-paycheck. This limits any kind of movement.
• Those aforementioned medical expenses are tied to employment, lose your job, lose your insurance (for you and your family), go into medical debt, lose medications, die.
• Employment often has little-to-no time off available, and many employers require planning weeks or months in advance to take time off.
• Arbitrary time off means: losing your job, your medications, your home, your car, your food, your life.
• Companies are already raising prices because of “tariffs” regardless if the products in question are actually affected by it, same game they play any time they have an excuse to milk people for more money. There will be no regulating to stop this. People will have even less money for basics.

It isn’t like what was seen in Germany or South Korea a while back where the country is small, travel is easy, and everyone can go protest without fear of losing their job/health/life just by acting upon their legal right to protest. If you’ve never driven on the ground across the USA, you have absolutely no scale of scope on how massive it is.

However the US ends up playing out, it will be vastly different from first-world nations. Speculating that things will have to get much worse before people have to start risking their lives to then risk their lives just to protest. By then, it might very well be fight time.

First-world nations should probably (and they are) just prep for the US not being available, or an ally, and probably leaning in on the US being an antagonist for the foreseeable future. This cancer is going to continue to be a rough ride for the entire planet. Don’t blame the US citizens though. Citizens are a pawn in this oligarchy. Even the ones that were deceived into voting for a senile potted plant. That delusion they teach kids that, “even you can be President some day!” are just words to make people think they have control in the current system, so they don’t try to find out they actually don’t.

Other tidbits:

• People are keeping it local, but local protests don’t tend to make national/international news. You have to check local socials like city subreddits, and even then, it will have little effective impact, because those in the know locally already know, and the information will only make it to Mango Mussolini and his compatriots if it affects one of his billionaire buddies in real or perceived ways.
• Attacking your local government and businesses which may already be in support of keeping America free isn’t really going to help anything other than damage local infrastructure that will probably have a funding gap to ever fix it, given how the Federal government is canceling everything they can.
• US corpo national news seems to have a supreme bias towards the big coastal cities, LA, NYC, DC. The thousands of cities and states spread across the country fall off the radar unless some large sustained traumatic event is taking place.
• Subdivision and censoring of social media has made it difficult to keep messaging clear and available, but people are trying.
• Let’s not even factor in that climate change is already kicking off a hell of a summer, and with FEMA now nonexistent, the welfare states that will be hit hardest are going to have more and more people made homeless and starving as the states realize they have no money to fix anything.

As an American, I have no faith in any of us either.

Wouldn’t you rather use something more reliable? What if it rains?

I was thinking feeding him McDonald hamburgers, Matilda style.

I would suggest a Swasty-truck, but they keep breaking down

If only the US citizens weren’t fascists themselves.

Shit. That is going to work. The SCOTUS will want to suck Trumps balls a little after telling him “no” 5-6 times … to make it up to him. I bet they are going to pass this.

WHYYYYYYYYUUHHHHH

Now I will tell you the answer to my question. It is this. The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from the oligarchies of the past in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just around the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now you begin to understand me.

George Orwell, 1984