As somebody who'd rather fight the fascists now, I don't think it's super likely.
Enjoy some wild speculation, if that's your jam:
My bet is that DJT will kick off from a stroke in the next 2 years, the GOP will get beat, and things will "go back to normal". But the Dems will elect some jerk like Newsome and not do the important work of imposing consequences, so this fascist power will return after two presidential terms of delicious brunch (which will fail to make progress on the environment, mass incarceration, immigration, student loan debt, housing, the economy, or anything, really).
AI and small drones will be -even- better at that point, along with an ever tighter network of flock cameras.
The propaganda will be even more solid and the aging/retired gen-xers whose grand kids won't talk to them will largely be interacting with AI-based pals who are making the same kind of pronouncements that Nome and Vance are currently making but in the voice of their first girlfriend from 1987.
Personally, I'd rather see some very extreme change now instead of fighting that fight in 15 years (or, rather, supporting the 30 year olds fighting, because I will be pretty old then).
It's not a very realistic picture of the future though; it could be the case that all this comes to a head soon. It could be the case that soon folks have some real come-to-jeebus moment about Epstein-types and capitalism (hey, it's not Capitalism, it's just croney internationalist capitalism that is the problem bro, we can just implement this anarcho-Reaganist platform, these aren't limitations on capitalists, just "normal Christian Democrat" reforms).
It might be the case that the real limits of 3-5K soldiers operating against an armed and organized city of 100k midwesterners makes it obvious what the outcomes will be if they don't stop pushing their hands.
For instance, when they start busting, say, signal chat groups of suburban soccer moms that have taken up sniping tires and cutting the power to facilities, folks might no longer have the stomach for the kinds of applications of power necessary to prevent the actions of "the people" who have their hands on all the little levers.
It could be the case that the global ecosystem really is as bad as it appears and giant storms break all the just-in-time delivery systems in the so-called advanced but fault-intolerant countries about the same time Ebola Plus (tm) hits, and we all go back to living in the beautiful caves in the pinion forests of my back yard (that's my preferred outcome even though it'll probably kill me).
Hell monkeys could fly out of my butt (that would probably kill me too, but I die in most scenarios I can imagine).
To answer your question, all things equal if you're gonna flee, flee. I'm not, but that's because I don't think there is anywhere to go.
Damn I wish the waning of US soft power felt like a positive thing to me; the CIA, along with the DEA, has been one of the more powerful criminal networks on the planet since its inception in the mid 20th C.
It doesn't feel like the US gov is moving away from the soft-power/understated action stuff because the US gov is somehow committed to being less evil.
It feels to me like they don't feel like it's as useful as the application simple hard power.
> It feels to me like they don't feel like it's as useful as the application simple hard power.
They do feel that way, but I think they're wrong. Pervasive soft power is a lot better for building stable systems of oppression than more overt shows of force. They're either really bad at, or not interested in (probably both) building anything. I don't think this period of brutal oppression they're gearing up for is going to last very long. People in the US react very poorly to roving bands of State goons.
You're talking about that effective soft power, yes. There are some smarter authoritarians still maintaining it, but when things get overt it loses a lot of efficacy. We've swung from 1/2 to 1/3 support for Republicans, despite most people going about their lives more-or-less normally outside of one small city. So that swing is attributed to a failure of soft power. Check out opinions in Minneapolis to see what application of hard power looks like.
> it's why Larry Ellison desperately wants to buy CBS.
I think this specific take is wrong. For example, Netflix doesn't want CNN/cable in the WB deal, so that's still up for grabs if Netflix acquires WB but Ellison still wants the whole thing (studio and cable). Extrapolating to CBS, it was Paramount the studio that Ellison was after, the network piece is just a dying artifact of a bygone era with a handy mouthpiece that has the veneer of credibility.
How much do we believe the current administration values "intelligence"? For the most part, the truth is trump's enemy. as far as he can control it, it's better for his to be the only authoritative voice. If he says Australia is full of muslims and bad hombres, he doesn't need the CIA contradicting him.
It gives me hope that Trump will replace the top generals and a few layers down with yes-men who will spend the military budget on coke and then the US will be less of a threat to the rest of the world. Another Russia is not a good thing, but it's better than a mad man at the top of the most powerful military in history.
> It gives me hope that Trump will replace the top generals and a few layers down with yes-men who will spend the military budget on coke and then the US will be less of a threat to the rest of the world.
I realize this is kind of a joke, but...
The US will continue to be the most powerful military in history for a very long time even with a highly incompetent top-layer. It will just have less people with the wisdom and power to push back on the president's worst impulses.
Unfortunately(?) there's not enough coke in the world to put much of a dent in our current military spending (which they hope to increase even further to 1.5 trillion dollars in 2027). And if the price of coke ever did become a problem, well the US now believes it reserves the right to the entire western hemisphere which includes Columbia...
On a more serious note there is also likely to be a rapid burst of nuclear proliferation across the globe as everyone else adjusts to this new reality sans the traditional post-WW II world order.
On the current Trump path the world is going to get far more dangerous and chaotic, not less.
What's really fun is that conventional weapons can protect you from a crazy aggressor if you're strong enough, but nuclear weapons may not. They only act as a deterrent, so they require your enemy to believe you'll use them, believe that they can't destroy all of them before you use them, and understand the horrible consequences of retaliation.
I get the impression that Trump is pretty negative on nuclear weapons and I don't think he'd do something that could provoke nuclear retaliation. But I doubt he'll be our last mad king. I think the odds are pretty high of at least a small nuclear war within my lifetime. Even if the US keeps it together, proliferation means much higher odds of some idiot leader somewhere pressing the Button.
> How much do we believe the current administration values "intelligence"?
Broadly? A lot. Donald Trump is wickedly smart. So is Stephen Miller. Susie Wiles. Hegseth is an idiot, but he's Chip 'n' Dale to Marco Rubio. (Our planes aren't falling off our carriers any more. And the raid on Caracas was executed flawlessly. That isn't something numpties can pull off.)
What makes you think h is smart instead of a blubbering idiot that Mr Magoo his way through life? All the reports from people who knew him personally had very low regard for his intellegence, and that is even before taking into account his repeated public blunders.
> What makes you think h is smart instead of a blubbering idiot that Mr Magoo his way through life?
The fact that he's President. Twice. He maneouvred himself into the most powerful seat in the world. Twice. I'm tremendously sceptical that someone stupid can wind up there like that. (Again, not necessarily intelligent. You don't need to be intelligent to clear the Republican field in 2016. You do need to be crafty.)
That's certainly closer to my understanding of the guy. He really doesn't feel "smart" in any of the usual sense of the term.
It's entirely possible that you can be on the stupid side of Chesterton's fence (to abuse the metaphor) and take it down, causing all the expected havok, and then claim you're excelling at your goals because you just have a sociopathic approach to the world.
Sure, picking up Maduro was well executed... and then he has been replaced with (checks notes... ) "the Maduro Regime".
I'll grant that he has achieved success via some amount of cunning (often via threats), but "smart" is decidedly not a term I would ever apply to him, and I'm not sure how anyone could reasonably think this given the myriad facts otherwise.
No, it's not. He's smart. His political instincts are well honed. And he's good at surrounding himself with strategists.
I'm not sure he's wickedly intelligent. And he's getting old, which cuts into his cleverness and memory. But his wit is quick (recall the Republican debates), retention used to be spectacular and has achieved things which you simply cannot do by being the bumbling dope he's sometimes characterised as.
The bumbling dope is the default go-to characterization by the left, they always target intelligence first no matter what.
Bush 1 was a dope. Dan Quayle was a dope. Bush 2 was a dope (until they decided they liked him). Sarah Palin was a dope. Trump is a dope. Vance is a dope.
The left views intelligence as a top tier prize, so they start by first trying to dismantle someone's standing on that.
How likely is it that all of those people are actually stupid compared to the typical voter? Zero chance. They're more likely to be considerably smarter than the typical voter, above average intelligence across the board. Are Bill Clinton and Obama smarter than Trump? Yes imo. But you can't play at nuance in the propaganda game though, so the left always settles on: my opponent is stupid; and they push hard in that direction.
I don't remember people thinking HW Bush was dumb. Or McCain, or Romney, or Ryan, or McConnell, or even someone like Gingrich. Quayle, Palin, W Bush (very incorrectly, dude was wrong and/or lying about a lot of stuff but he wasn't dumb), and Trump, sure.
The thing those people have in common is that they have unorthodox public speaking styles. Especially Trump. It's kind of a pro wrestling adjacent style -- lots of performative bombast, specific tropes referencing cultural touchstones, I'm not trying to change anyone's mind on any substantive issue. I'm just trying to put myself into a particular box in the viewer's mind. It can be effective, but when it's not, it comes off as buffoonish.
A willingness to break norms could be genius, or it could be a sign that the person doing that simply doesn't understand why those norms are in place.
I think you're both correct to note that attacking the intelligence of a person is both meaningless and a pretty normal liberal tactic.
At the same time, one way of understanding the shift from hard to soft power is the same as understanding Trumps "intelligence":
he's funny and knows how to work a crowd, but it doesn't functionally matter how smart he is because he has so much organized power and thus resources that he doesn't -have- to be smart. Being rich and sociopathic is probably way more effective than worrying about the long games, and everything in sir hoss's life probably makes that fact obvious.
In that same way, my horrors about this shift in power could also be stated as a worry that the folks running the US gov don't feel like they need to have any subtlety or mask on their power because they are more comfortable using dumb, brute force.
And they might be correct in that assessment- they might not need to be intelligent if they can be brutal enough.
Good luck to them and "game on" I guess; 3k troops versus 150k activated but as yet non-violent folks in Minneapolis will be an interesting bit of data for sure.
I frequently see people saying that Trump is great, but he's let down by those around him. As if he didn't put them all there.
In any case, all you have to do is listen to the man talk. If you can hit stop before your brains start leaking onto the floor, the conclusion is inescapable.
For most of his life he did nothing that would require any sort of smarts. Becoming POTUS was quite an accomplishment, but he lucked into it. He happened to have a style and set of opinions that appealed to a large group of voters. He's charismatic in an empty sort of way that still works on a lot of people. He had a pretty pathetic set of opponents both in the primaries and the general. And he just barely won. Nothing in his campaign was shrewdly designed, he was just doing what he does, and it happened to work.
Birth him into an ordinary family instead of a rich one and he's going to be a used car salesman griping about getting bumped into the next tax bracket when he makes too many sales.
People—especially the squares in this business—tend to mistake his unfamiliar blue-collar New Yorker manner of speech at face value and don't bother to look deeper.
Or they look deeper and note that the folksy bragging about pretty basic and irrelevant misunderstandings continues into the minutes of meetings his base that laps that stuff up doesn't bother paying attention to, where there isn't any strategic value to dissembling or being mildly irritating to the apolitical CEOs he's supposed to be giving bland assurances to, and conclude the emperor actually doesn't have any clothes. There are, of course, smart and well connected people that want someone whose extraordinary talent is being the centre of attention occupying the centre of attention.
We're definitely going in the direction of "might is right". The "palantirization" of data stores (not just those for surveillance) is going to be an enabler of the "hard power" you're alluding to. This whole platform is probably a dragnet for identifying intelligent people with dissident views. Expect things to get uglier and stranger as well.
I mean, my hope is that the kids at the CIA read all my dumb postings here, report them to their old-men quattos, and try and flip me :D
But I'd think that the folks with their hands on the big levers probably care less and less about that kind of thing; I'd imagine it's harder and harder to find the Foucault readers who might even care to collect and monitor dissident views because the newer folks figure all us stupid nerds will show up on flock and get nabbed once they've run out of brown folks to kidnap.
They will have machines do that for them, curating collections of dissident files that are categorized by various propensities, then proposing among a range of soft to hard interventions. This is why we're seeing an uptick in the construction of AI data centers (e.g. STARGATE); it's going to get ugly very soon. And before you know it, your social mobility will be dictated by how well you adapt to the narratives they endorse. The fact that they (i.e., the elites) have gotten away with so much depravity, and are now revealing it publicly, emboldens them further to commit the type of oppression that I foresee happening. What we're experiencing now is ritual humiliation at scale.
I mean, they mostly are just picking folks up off the streets cause the folks are brown or have an accent.
I am not sure that even if they could minority report their way into killing off all the future Fred Hamptons, they have either the man power to do it or the mental ability to define an ontology for their little scrye to even tell them who they -should- target.
It is easy to confuse these folks with the mostly competent neoliberal technocrats they replaced, but that's the whole point of this thread, no? Patel and Bongino were more interested in how to win twitter points after Kirk was killed than, like, going and playing g-man, after all.
Also, one of the nice things about living in a panopticon is that it gives the folks running it the idea that they actually know what's going on. I'll take the long bet on the over-confidence and under-competence of these WWF wrestlers.
Power also needs to be justified. Hitler is an example of "unjustifiable might." And all fools who want to promote Darwinism need to know that causing one's own extinction is far easier than causing one's own evolution. Evolution is merely a survivor bias, and Darwin's On the Origin of Species didn't analyze the patterns of extinction.The evolutionary pattern should be that only when you yourself are perfectly rational can you eliminate the irrational enemy. Some people are inherently irrational, yet they try to use Darwinian "survival of the fittest" as their belief to eliminate rational beings, ultimately leading only to their own extinction. This is what happened, is happening, and will happen.Might makes right is not an Rights; Rights are Rights. Might is might, and Right is Right. The statement "might makes right" is rife with literary folly.
> It feels to me like they don't feel like it's as useful as the application simple hard power.
Soft power is a hard power amplifier though. I don't think it's incompetence and ignorance about how to maintain and use power, I think it's intentional deconstruction of power so that others can fill the vacuum.
But in some ways publishing your opinions on other countries might be the equivalent of sharing your hand at the poker table, right? So this arguably strengthens the soft-power method as well. (OTOH, to your point: how you describe other countries is itself an exercise in soft power, so your point is well taken in that respect.)
Shouldn't the DEA be the weakest agency? Now that the drug problem requires the involvement of the Department of Homeland Security, the War Department, and the U.S. military, shouldn't the DEA be shut down?
It’s the incompetence and low-intelligence of our leaders that scares me most. We need actual clever people in office coming up with decentralized systems that work rather than the mentally deficient demagogues and liars coasting along collecting rent. Californian independence is the best way forward for us.
Yeah, but there is quite a gulf between possible and even likely.
I can think of very few time seen the state give up extra powers it gives itself in emergencies, and the few places where I see it give up powers are at the behest of industries demanding "de-regulation".
Even, say, cannabis decriminalization can be understood (from the stand point of the legislators) as pro-business.
So serious question: when has the US given up powers? It'd do my brain a lot of good to have a picture of how this has happened in the past so I can be less cynical in the present.
You might site the Church commission, maybe, but that seems to be exactly the kind of thing that is both likely and wholly ineffective beyond a the 5-10 year timescale.
Damn, you just sound ignorant about a lot of things. Like, it's a litany of things that you almost-kind-of-understand, but because the details require just a little more historical knowledge than you have, everything comes out all fucked up.
We can just read what you write and see that's true, my guy.
As a person who lived in the back of my pickup long enough that my son used tease me and call me diogenes, lemme say... you're not doing very much credit to the moniker....
"Flooded minds don’t ask about incentives, second-order effects, or long-term consequences. They ask a single question: how do we stop this feeling right now? That’s when urgency and moral absolutism enter. Action must be immediate. Hesitation becomes cruelty. Nuance becomes complicity. Disagreement is reframed as a character defect: if you don’t agree, you lack empathy. Deliberation is replaced by moral pressure."
Read the article I linked. You are exactly what it's talking about.
Reasonable question but at least in my location the answer is obvious:
while there are legal barriers to my local PD/SD working with ice, LEO and local judicial folks fundamentally think of themselves on the same side as these folks.
That feels pretty trivially true: if you work in gov, especially at the violent tip of its local spear, you're going to go with that hierarchy over the folks you're ostensibly "serving".
I've never expected it to be otherwise, though as I get older I'm more comfortable understanding that they are complicit in making themselves less legitimate. At more and more points I feel more and more comfortable just thinking that the government doesn't have legitimate authority to do what they are trying to do.
I worked really hard on my brain to get it to not do that, but here we are.
I have about as much faith in the courts ability to actually walk any of this back as I do in their ability to return the families they have kidnapped from my community.
You might not be aware of it. It was there though. I had friends going to support families in detention in San Antonio in 2010/11.
Consider that it might be possible you're the one who is actually ignoring stuff based on a political position? And that rather than ignoring it on a Dem/GOP line, the line is between "normal, real adult electoral politics" and all the folks actually doing work to oppose these evil things directly.
A lot of my Democrat-voting friend easily forget Standing Rock or Furguson, but I doubt the people who were there do. By the same token, those same things have oft been forgotten or dismissed by the GOP-identifying friends of mine.
The problem is once you start opening a history book (that's not, say, published for teaching children in Texas) it gets really hard to thing to say "the law is static and started 15 years ago" or even "it's a law so it has ethical weight", and those things are hard to track for most folks and the implications are almost traumatic.
I get that your question is real and a struggle, because that's how it is for many folks in my life, well-intentioned and smart folks who were raised in a system that didn't seem like a problem to them because it fit them well enough, or they were so circumcised by it at an early age that they don't even notice what they've been cut away from.
But for a lot of us, the fact that a bunch of yall got together and decided to vote on who to kick out of the places where we live doesn't hae a lot of moral ethical weight.
Consider that one reason half the folks in the us don't vote is because we know that neither side is going to do anything resembling a good outcome and signing our names to things we don't agree with isn't just a lie but makes us complicit in our own expolitation.
And as yall have gotten ever more violent in practicng yalls "democratically produced" decision, those of us who have, like, an actual moral position are moving ever close to emulating John Brown.
At the same time it's neat to live in a separated reality from the people thinking that "In my opinion the ICE unrest is a smoke screen."
The federal gov disarmed a protestor and executed them on the street.
That doesn't seem like a "distraction"... that seems like -the literal thing that you're worrying about- happening in a highly obvious and direct way.
As a left-wing gun owner, a pretty common conversation is about how limited the right wing gun owners understandings are, because this is, like, literally the thing they have been fantasizing about all along.
Wild times for sure.
I hope the world many of us live in never actually enters yours and you can keep enjoying your fantasy of government oppression while some of us are out here being physically assaulted by the state.
> The federal gov disarmed a protestor and executed them on the street.
He was shot after disobeying lawful orders and the man who disarmed him possibly negligently discharged the victim's firearm while the other officers were wrestling him and the other officers didn't have the information that he was disarmed. This wasn't intentional, this was an accident. There is also another angle showing him kicking an ICE vehicle and breaking its tail light the week before. This is no bystander. It is delusional to believe that it is possible to deport millions of convicted criminal illegal aliens without an incident while thousands interfere with police operations as they deport criminals. The bills being passed are far more relevant to Americans' civil liberties because they make the average American who is NOT currently a criminal into one for possession and manufacture of plastic and metal parts. This is an untenable position.
> some of us are out here being physically assaulted by the state
Yeah, I'm not belligerently protesting the deportation of illegal aliens.
He was shot while being dog piled by 6 officers dude. There was no way for him to defend himself when they already had taken his weapon. It was murder. Was he intentionally out there protesting? Yeah, he probably was. Was he filming ICE and giving them verbal hell? Absolutely he was. Was he interfering? He absolutely wasn’t. They just let him get under their skin because they aren’t professional. They murdered him because they got scared that he had a gun. One of the officers was on video saying “I got the gun…” sighing as he stood up.
So yeah, tensions are high. Minnesotans feel violated. ICE sees a battleground, not a state. That’s an issue.
”There's a reason you separate military and the police. One fights the enemies of the state, the other serves and protects the people. When the military becomes both, then the enemies of the state tend to become the people” - Admiral Adama
Same video, two movies. Presentation, pace, timing, narrative all designed to reinforce your existing biases, even if you aren't aware of them. You look and think you've seen. You're nudged and put into a bubble with people offering up comments that validate and verify what you think, and what you know, and what you believe.
Anything outside your bubble is framed as a conspiracy theory or the ramblings of deluded, even evil people on "the other side".
The media streams you watch end up being a rorschach test - carefully crafted and deployed to different bubbles, A/B tested, cynically manipulative and deliberately framed and intended to evoke specific reactions. The language is carefully used so two people can watch the exact same clip or newscast or soundbite and hear what sounds like a reasonable reinforcement of what they already believe. Sometimes things will even technically be 100% factual, but it'll be just as manipulative and as much of a "lie" as if they'd made it up entirely.
I don't think bubbles is the right paradigm, anymore - these are deep, deep pits, and every piece of media that reinforces your model, where that model is the one intended for you to have by some of the big influences, brings you another shovelful deeper, and you've got to put that much more effort in to dig your way out.
Trying to talk to anyone who hasn't worked their own way out of digging out of a media pit ends up being a team sport or a tribalistic conflict - the facts and the stories don't mesh, and if you're 100% certain of your facts, and your "opposition" concedes to the facts, then you're going to think your story is the right one. The cognitive dissonance and the effort required to update your model to match reality - to recognize the manipulative, malignant influences deploying these conflicting storylines, and to figure out how to identify what actual reality is - is too much for most people, and way too much for any casual online interactions.
Not sure how you fix that without forbidding some actors from doing what they do at a legislative level, and that gets into hairy freedom of speech territory.
You saw a video that might have been murder. It might have been an accident. We know the gun he carried was notorious for unintended discharge. It might have been dropped and gone off, it might have fired accidentally in the agent's hand after being taken away, prompting the trained, legitimate response of law enforcement. It could have been a cold, deliberate execution if one of the CBP agents knew Pretti from previous conflicts and was antagonistic towards him. It could have been a heated, spur of the moment killing way outside the bounds of the law.
You certainly don't know - none of us have all the facts, and the investigation into it will reveal it. It's that both sides present the same facts, the same video, and tell two starkly different narratives, either of which are reasonable conclusions based on the facts that can be proven from the available evidence. What doesn't get talked about is that even with multiple videos, from multiple angles, nobody has sufficient evidence to definitively prove what actually happened.
What I do know is that it's extraordinarily stupid to get into a heated conflict with any sort of law enforcement, especially when armed, because any sort of accident or exceptional circumstance or misinterpretation of events is not going to go your way, legally and sometimes with regards to you losing your life. Pretti was in the wrong - you cannot physically interfere with and antagonize federal law enforcement. We have legal remedies to hold officers to account for overstepping or violations. He was well within his rights to record and then report the mistreatment of the woman he was stepping in to "protect", and the proper place and time to remedy that wrong is in court. If the officer was in the wrong, he'd have been held to account. Getting physical and up in the officers face and space was either stupid and ignorant, or a deliberate act intended to elicit additional violence. There's protest "training" out there that teaches people to do that sort of thing, with the intent of escalating violence deliberately, specifically for agitprop and convenient political narrative purposes.
The government has the sole and absolute monopoly on violence, for better or worse, and if you intrude on that in the slightest, you will lose.
They want the nebulous, uncertain, rorschach test incidents where they can spin an event to tell the story they want to tell, regardless of whether that story is actually true. That doesn't mean the CBP agents were in the right, nor that Pretti was responsible or did it on purpose, or that anyone involved in the whole series of events had ulterior motives. The only thing we know, until an investigation is finalized, and due process is enacted, is that we lack critical information that explains the full context and nuance of the incident. There are a metric shit ton of ways the actual story might have gone, ranging from schizophrenic break (by an agent, or Pretti) to suicide by cop, to tragic accident caused by a notoriously flawed weapon, to some other asshat, currently unknown, throwing a firecracker after the officer announced "gun", and so on. We don't even have enough information to know what's a "likely" outcome and make some reasonable Bayesian projections.
The videos we saw aren't proof of anything. They're evidence of dozens of different possible scenarios, with a wide range of likely possibilities, and dozens more we don't even know to consider without having the information that investigation will bring to bear.
Hoss, you can rashomon yourself into any position.
That tactic is almost always an excuse to not realize some hard truth about the world.
Most of us look at your position and understanding you're literally just trying to gaslight yourself.
The kind of radical moral relativism indicated by your position was appealing to me when I was a sophomore philosophy student, in the same way that I found solipsism to be an interesting idea to entertain.
For instance, you know for a fact that "The government has the sole and absolute monopoly on violence" is a) not true, and as the gov becomes ever more violent it's not even "legitimate", which is the word you've gaslighted yourself into forgetting in your thinking here.
But I'm an adult now, and I have spent enough time questioning my beliefs. I have been around enough folks who think they are rational but who haven't done the "work" that I can smell it when I do it, and I can smell it when other folks do it.
I mean, depends- if I steal from my employer I go to jail, if my employer steals my wages they get a fine.
If I murder someone in cold blood on the street, I might not make it off the scene before getting gunned down; if a government agent summarily executes a protester, they might get a couple days vacation and a heft goFundme payout.
Nothing new there, though... if, for instance, in 1955 a random black kid has some white guys think he looked at the wrong woman in the wrong way, he might get violently killed that day; the men who do that killing might never face -any- consequences.
So the answer to your question is highly variable and has been for all of the time that anyone I know has been alive. The application of law in the US is and has always been mostly determined by class and race.
One of the pleasant things, though, is that if that kind of thing is on the table you probably have some kind of moral imperative to start doing something about it.
Previously I felt like a hyperbolic nerd, and now I have a whole lot of new friends all working on the same stuff. Wheee. Go team. I hate it.
Fortunately it feels very much the other direction, lately- more folks seeing the dangers, more willingness to take the long bet. Fewer folks at brunch.
That's a bet some of have been taking for a while, though it's oftent felt dumb, and we haven't needed a great shocking occasion to do it.
Enjoy some wild speculation, if that's your jam:
My bet is that DJT will kick off from a stroke in the next 2 years, the GOP will get beat, and things will "go back to normal". But the Dems will elect some jerk like Newsome and not do the important work of imposing consequences, so this fascist power will return after two presidential terms of delicious brunch (which will fail to make progress on the environment, mass incarceration, immigration, student loan debt, housing, the economy, or anything, really).
AI and small drones will be -even- better at that point, along with an ever tighter network of flock cameras.
The propaganda will be even more solid and the aging/retired gen-xers whose grand kids won't talk to them will largely be interacting with AI-based pals who are making the same kind of pronouncements that Nome and Vance are currently making but in the voice of their first girlfriend from 1987.
Personally, I'd rather see some very extreme change now instead of fighting that fight in 15 years (or, rather, supporting the 30 year olds fighting, because I will be pretty old then).
It's not a very realistic picture of the future though; it could be the case that all this comes to a head soon. It could be the case that soon folks have some real come-to-jeebus moment about Epstein-types and capitalism (hey, it's not Capitalism, it's just croney internationalist capitalism that is the problem bro, we can just implement this anarcho-Reaganist platform, these aren't limitations on capitalists, just "normal Christian Democrat" reforms).
It might be the case that the real limits of 3-5K soldiers operating against an armed and organized city of 100k midwesterners makes it obvious what the outcomes will be if they don't stop pushing their hands.
For instance, when they start busting, say, signal chat groups of suburban soccer moms that have taken up sniping tires and cutting the power to facilities, folks might no longer have the stomach for the kinds of applications of power necessary to prevent the actions of "the people" who have their hands on all the little levers.
It could be the case that the global ecosystem really is as bad as it appears and giant storms break all the just-in-time delivery systems in the so-called advanced but fault-intolerant countries about the same time Ebola Plus (tm) hits, and we all go back to living in the beautiful caves in the pinion forests of my back yard (that's my preferred outcome even though it'll probably kill me).
Hell monkeys could fly out of my butt (that would probably kill me too, but I die in most scenarios I can imagine).
To answer your question, all things equal if you're gonna flee, flee. I'm not, but that's because I don't think there is anywhere to go.
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