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pietillidie wrote:
Hopefully, this turns out to be that rare balance you need in government between the social (stability; optimism; access; productivity; safety; fairness) and the economic (growth; efficiency; technology; specialisation; adaptation; contribution). That's the sort of balance that the Hawke-Keating government had from right to left wing within the same party.
Government might always let you down in the end, but it's about moving the ball forward 10% and get things going in the right direction. That 10% is all that's needed for people to start participating and producing with a hopeful mindset. That in turn can act as somewhat of a damper on far right (and left) lunacy.
That's the optimistic spin, which I'll take for now given the misery heaped on us all over the past year. The US has a long way to go to arrest the flailing and flakiness, but you have to stay hopeful. Fundamentally, if they can't deal with the wealth gap, the instability it causes will keep dragging us all down.
A really insightful post pietillidie, that got me pondering at length.
I wonder why a "balanced" democratic government is so rare. Is it because for a short moment in time, indivuals and factions can put aside their power plays for the greater good of the nation? And does this happen because individuals in that government get to use their particular skills and feel accordingly rewarded and momentarily satisfied? Perhaps the most important factor is the skills and vision of the leader - Bob was after all a great negotiator.
It's all very interesting and I appreciate your offering of optimism
He isn't proposing "panicking" - he's proposing taking the threat of extreme right-wing violence seriously. I take his point to be that the US has been - even in recent times - patting Klansmen and other extremists on the head and letting them go about their ordinary activities as "law enforcers", even though their view of the "law" and that which should be "enforced" is dangerous, anti-democratic and - in many cases - actually criminal.
The nub of it is that when the neo-fascists have done something 6 times in 12 months, it's time to stop pretending they're not actually going to do that thing. Seems straight-forward to me.
David, I think that the problem is that the prosecutorial process is so highly politicized and localized that it is probably thought to be necessary to create a Federal crime - for fear that the local neo-Nazis will continue to allow right-wing extremism to continue without penalty. It would be possible to prosecute most of the underlying wrongful conduct under existing laws but there is an obvious difficulty in getting neo-Nazis to regulate their own.
I guess that makes sense, but I do worry that, even if the immediate intent is limited, this is only going to lead to more War on Terror-style domestic policing down the track. New laws in that area should always be treated with caution, considering the grotesque expansion of agency powers and the national security state that has already occurred over the past twenty years.
Tannin wrote:David can't understand what is wrong with violently taking over the seat of government.
I can't understand what is wrong with David.
I guess the point is that nobody took over anything or was ever going to be in a position to be able to. Physically being in a building temporarily until reinforcements arrive to kick you out is not quite the same thing as "violently taking over the seat of government".
"Every time we witness an injustice and do not act, we train our character to be passive in its presence." – Julian Assange
It was exactly taking over the seat of government.
Pretending that " nobody took over anything" is utterly stupid. We all SAW them takeover the parliament - on TV, on a million social media feeds, in the newspapers.
They took the place over with the open and explicit aim of overthrowing the result of a free and democratic election, and they were supported in that aim by a majority of the Fascist Party ... er ... sorry, I mean "Republican Party". Most of those neo-fascists are STILL denying the result of the election and STILL protecting the Traitor-in-Chief.
The fact that the attempted putsch eventually failed is irrelevant to their guilt. EVERY attempted putsch ever, in the whole of history, failed. Every single one.
(History contains other examples, of course, of successful putsches, which are the only ones generally not punished by the full weight of the law.)
Tannin wrote:It was exactly taking over the seat of government.
Pretending that " nobody took over anything" is utterly stupid. We all SAW them takeover the parliament - on TV, on a million social media feeds, in the newspapers.
They took the place over with the open and explicit aim of overthrowing the result of a free and democratic election, and they were supported in that aim by a majority of the Fascist Party ... er ... sorry, I mean "Republican Party". Most of those neo-fascists are STILL denying the result of the election and STILL protecting the Traitor-in-Chief.
The fact that the attempted putsch eventually failed is irrelevant to their guilt. EVERY attempted putsch ever, in the whole of history, failed. Every single one.
(History contains other examples, of course, of successful putsches, which are the only ones generally not punished by the full weight of the law.)
But it wasn't anything of the kind. I think this article explains why pretty well:
Even if the QAnon-ers at the Capitol thought they could overthrow the government and ensure Trump remained in power, a deranged action that had no chance of succeeding cannot reasonably be called a coup. Otherwise, any bizarre event, from Charles Manson’s attempt to foment a race war that would transform the United States, to the bombings carried out by the many tiny organizations in the 1970s that considered themselves to be carrying out a revolutionary war against the government, could be classified as a “coup.”
This becomes especially clear when one compares what happened on January 6 to genuine coups, like the United States’ overthrow of Mohammad Mossadegh in Iran in 1953 or Jacobo Árbenz in Guatemala in 1954, or what happened in Venezuela in 2002, when military generals tried and failed to remove the elected government.
What happened in Washington, DC, last week was a violent spasm of impotent rage by a mob mostly made up of civilians and a president who egged them on and talked out of both sides of his mouth about whether he supported what they were doing, but who also made no real attempt to mobilize the power of the state to back them up.
To point this out is not to minimize the horrors of an attempted mob action designed to intimidate Congress. But the good news is we don’t need to choose between taking these events seriously and being accurate and careful about what kind of danger the mob represented.
The whole thing is well worth reading.
"Every time we witness an injustice and do not act, we train our character to be passive in its presence." – Julian Assange
