Yes, if we focus on actions, the action of causing public disorder is a glaring example of things we do not want in civil society. We also do not want tanks in our streets. Both seem like bad things, honestly, so I'm wondering how we got here.
It's fine if you personally don't support more extreme actions. Time has shown again and again the most important thing civilians can do is to refuse to condemn other civilians who are acting in the same goals as you. We must focus on why everyone is acting in those goals: we have armed, masked men invading communities, who have made attempts at trafficking children, stolen away elderly women, detained citizens accused of no crime, and are being incredibly disruptive throughout the country.
That article says is that one kid has been trafficked, since the 1980s. That's the most you can use it to demonstrate. It certainly does not support KittenInABox's claim.
These events are not the opposites you're implying. Both are being directly caused by the same person! Trump is needlessly escalating the situation, to create a divisive crisis, for which he will force his "solution" of even more chaos and destruction. This guy turns everything he touches to shit, which should have been strongly apparent to everyone based on his first administration. Too many people were unwilling to put aside their gripes with the government and listen to their fellow citizens telling them this is exactly what would happen.
"dunno" what? There are many causes for why people wrote off their country and turned to Trump. I understand, sympathize, and even agree with many of the frustrations! But the fact remains that people listened to the siren song of a hollow con man instead of their fellow citizens telling them what a disaster his first term was, and his second term would surely be. There are root causes for that too, and they are endlessly debated in threads about social media polarization and the like. But in the context of this topic where American troops are now pointing guns at Americans, it is important to keep the focus on Trump and the need for him to be deposed.
What alternative do you see to the current events? The only one I see is remaining quiet and tacitly supporting fascism.
This guy is not going to stop on his own. He's attuned to operating in a business context where there is some other singular entity who might back down when the damage from the chaos gets too high (or he backs down when the pain is too high for him, like with tariffs). But in a society based on individual liberty, backing down is not on the table until the whole society has been subjugated.
Longer term, if we actually manage to get through this to meaningful elections, one would hope that the abject failure of Trumpism would make enough of the electorate wary of more "strong" man fascists promising easy answers. This should have happened after his first term, but Trump's main skill is deflecting blame and Covid was one heck of an excuse.
And as far as underlying issues driving polarization and disconnect from reality, those are going to be there regardless of my statements.
The top level comment was me wondering how we got here. This has nothing to do with what we should do now. You decide that for yourself, but I see wisdom in looking at how we got here and trying to not do more of that.
There are many directions to come at that from, discussing most of them will end up insanely political and polarized, and they have been discussed quite often in other threads. So it's a bit weird to be throwing that open-ended question out in the discussion of a specific alarming escalation - as if we have just been missing some simple answers that could have been done to pull up from this, or avoid it in the future.
I'd say we are at the point where the people who enabled the fascists just have to accept they were wrong and take their licks for the damage they've caused to our country. Similar to the bits of soul-searching that are going on amongst Democrats about the overbearing DEI groupthink. Will some small reconciliation grow into a trend and create a lasting deescalation, or do we have to continue working to actively reject the extremism? Let's worry about that when the mad king no longer has the reigns of power, lest good-faith attempts hold us back from getting to that state where any of this might matter.
This is a well-understood and popular problem.
I've tried the five-whys on this, and always end up at unnecessary escalation and righteous idealism (not by any particular party or person, just kind of by everyone). But the book Righteous Mind does a better job on this issue than I ever will.
> Clearly if these people torching the cars are waving foreign flags, they are a foreign enemy and thus the military is appropriate, no?
No. Torching cars is already a crime and the city and state were already restoring order. The kind of flag waved while a car is torched does not change the calculus. Critically, a US citizen does not cease to be a US citizen because they waved a foreign flag; we have free speech in the United States, and flag-waving is protected by the first amendment.
Also worth noting that none of this would have happened if the regime didn't deliberately provoke it in the first place.
Honest question: how does this calculus change when the person waiving a foreign flag on a burned out vehicle is actually not a citizen and armed with a weapon.
Liberty or death. If sometimes in this country a non-citizen gets away with burning a car, and the only way to prevent is is drag-net mass gestapo enforcement actions by federal police, then, I choose the country with no gestapo enforcement actions and occasionally burnt cars.
Apparently LA agrees with this fundamentally American idea.
