4mo ago

'This is the crisis moment': Political scientist says Trump crossed a crucial red line

www.rawstory.com 'This is the crisis moment': Political scientist says Trump crossed a crucial red line

Jacob Levy, Tomlinson Professor of Political Theory at McGill University, cautioned in a Blue Sky thread that the case involving a Maryland man the U.S. government acknowledges was "wrongfully deported" has reached a "crisis moment."In March, Kilmar Ábrego García was accused of being an MS-13 gang m...

World News @beehaw.org

www.rawstory.com /trump-deportation-2671767128/

80 21

politics @lemmy.world

'This is the crisis moment': Political scientist says Trump crossed a crucial red line

www.rawstory.com /trump-deportation-2671767128/

384 25

You're viewing a single thread.

95 comments

The American people's passiveness with regard to "red lines" is about on par with Putin's overuse of the term. I expect a bit of whining online for 24-48 hours but no meaningful actions.
- Mass organizing in the US is logistically difficult, and all our media is owned by people who want to see the protests fail so the coverage isn't amazing. But we have millions of people protesting right now and the numbers have been growing fast. Protesters have been under threat of arrest and possible death for ages, and they're opening it up to "get black bagged and sent to tortureville forever". We have so much working against us even getting resistance off the ground and yeah we aren't amazing at it, there's a good chance we can't pull it off, but we're trying
- Would you rather people stop dissenting online?
  
  If dissenting online makes them feel like they are doing enough to not act IRL, yes.
  
  Revolutions don't just spontaneously materialize from nothing, they grow from riots, that grow from peaceful protests, that grow from people complaining to each other in social settings. None of the early steps are sufficient, but they are the type of things that are necessary for the end result. There is no world where less dissenting online leads to more direct action.
  
  revolutions only come from suffering.
  People need to suffer to the point they are willing to potentially lose it all, people have families, they have friends, they have careers and jobs, people need to physically care first.
  For some reason nobody understands this today.
  
  Yes, but an entirely spontaneous movement will end up reproducing the dominant ideology in a given society, because the dominant class has the means at its disposal to propagate and reproduce the dominant ideology.
  So a revolutionary movement must know in advance what its revolutionary theory is; it must be united around a particular vision of society, a particular theory of revolutionary change, or it will simply reproduce the society that it is acting against.
  There is no evidence that this is what is occurring in the United States. Replacing the bad king with a good king will not solve our problems; our problem is that we are ruled by kings in the first place
  
  People dissented online a lot in Russia ten years ago
  
  And that grew into protests and riots, so... what's your point?
  Hey guys, guess what. Authoritarianism isn't trivial to beat. All the other authoritarian states in the world aren't just full of lazy people who didn't use the one simple trick. Turns out both propaganda works and a lot of people are actually scared of being murdered or sent to a gulag.
  But again, you get none of that if you try to skip the first steps.
  
  Yeah that's my point too
  
  If the conclusion is that a revolution is necessary then protests and riots are obviously insufficient. Which means that posting is not the correct path, particularly because it seems to be very lacking in building irl community, though it is effective at convincing posters that their engagement is "doing something". It isn't, aside from enriching tech oligarchs through their attentional engagement
  
  Reread the comment, because you've entirely missed the point.
  
  If the goal is to simply build towards protests and riots then that is a foolish goal because protests and riots are insufficient
  If the goal is to build something larger than that, then different methods are required
  
  This guy has no idea what nuance is.
  The Boxers lead a rebellion in China and failed horribly, accelerating the very thing they were trying to stop. Guess rebellings is bad too.
  What a bad faith argument.
  
  I dissented too and then just left the country for good.
  
  I don't think it means it is bad, it could just do nothing, but dissenting online is the easiest nothing you could do
  
  This is an example of where it didn't do nothing, it actually made things much worse.
  Dissenting online is, believe it or not, how people become aware of issues and know they're not alone in how they feel. It's a precursor to actual events, like we've seen.
  
  putin is still in power, so...
  
  That's my point
  
  I feel like that's unlikely and that a lot of the people dissenting online are the same ones who are protesting, calling their lawmakers, etc.
  Also, it's not like any of the IRL stuff has been effective yet anyway. Online dissent probably gets seen by more eyeballs than any one protest sign or IRL action that doesn't end up with the person doing it being arrested or killed (and thus unable to continue resisting this administration), so if it really is an either/or situation I think online dissent is more effective than IRL peaceful protest or writing yet another letter to my lawmakers.
  That all said, I really don't think it is an either/or situation, so I think we can and should be encouraging all the kinds of dissent.

95 comments