George Takei lived during the Japanese Internment during WWII, so I believe him when he says that he’s been through worse and that the fight isn’t over, but I’m not convinced we haven’t fought a single skirmish yet. We’ve been on the back foot fighting the rise of fascism for 8 years. This is trench warfare and the enemy is perfectly happy to advance inch by inch. The election win for them was a massive defeat for us. Regaining the ground we’ve lost to xenophobes and racists will probably take the rest of my lifetime advocating for and voting for progressive candidates just to reach a point where things are kinda okay-ish again. It sucks and it feels bad to be in this situation.
I wish all of you the best, but I can’t care enough about this country to want to fight for it. One reason being it’s a shitty place that put George Takei in a camp, among many myriad other crimes. I don’t want to save it. I want to leave and not be bothered by the bunch of racists, idiots, and racist idiots who run this country and who elect them.
There is no chance to save this. Help everybody who wants to leave as much as it’s possible for you and let every idiot who wants to stay to die. Nobody can force you to dedicate your life to an unfair fight against people and their idiotic supporters with so much more power and money than you could ever have. If everybody would act like this they would run out of people very quickly and there would be no civilians in war zones. If they don’t let you leave then it’s time to go to war.
A big part of the fight is asking yourself one simple question. How much of this defeatism is real? The bot/troll/fraud problem is massive and leading to the dead internet theory becoming reality. Anywhere there’s comments, there’s fake bullshit. Figuring out how to stop that is a huge priority.
So sick of inspirational posts from rich celebrities. As if any of this is going to affect them in any meaningful way aside from shifting more of the tax burden onto us.
If I recall correctly, he was put in a Japanese-American detention camp when a child. So I’d tend to believe him on this.
I know what he experienced, but he’s insulated from whatever happens in the next few years, by virtue of being wealthy.
The very same people whose Election Campaign Strategy was “Not voting for us is the same as voting for a guy who will round up Transexuals and put them in concentration camps whilst turning America into the Fourth Reich” rather than, you know, actually having a list of measures to make life better for most people, have continued with the hyperbolic alarmism so as to keep their supporters enraged against the “other” lest they stop, think, and figure out that the Democrat Leaders could have done way more than they did to appeal to voters and hence have a large slice, maybe even most, of the blame for Trump getting elected again.
The reality is that people mostly have to wait and see, since there are a lot of ways to stop or at least undermine the most autocratic Republican tendencies, plus the most intelligent Republicans (i.e. the sociopaths at the top of the party doing it for their own personal upside maximization rather than the “true believer” useful idiots) are well aware that the system only works as well as it does (i.e. from their point of view, only produces maximum wealth for their wealthy patrons and hence they themselves) if people in general think they live in a Democracy and their vote counts.
Also keep in mind that the factions of the real power in American - the Wealthy - will carry on fighting for themselves as they’ve always been doing, no matter what the façade which is the Theatre of Politics looks like (they’re apolitical and buy, bully or swindle people on both sides of the aisle).
America is an experiment in seeing how far the squeezing machine can be made to squeeze the masses without breaking, but none of the real power of the land is interested in it actually breaking and stopping delivering them maximum wealth increases, and as a country which doesn’t have enough natural resources for the wealthy to extract maximum wealth without most of the population going along with it, they too are not interested in letting it get to the same kind of situation as for example Russia. Absolutelly, their process doesn’t deal well with systemic problems of the Tragedy Of The Commons kind - hence things like Housing Inflation starting to asphixiate the rest of the Economy - but it does work for stopping direct singular actions that would mess with the interests of Wealth, such as the kind of legislation required to establish an Autocratic Regime in the US.
I’m not saying that the Wealthy will save the rest because they care, but as it so happens it’s in the best interest of the real power of the land - Money - that the machinery that keeps the rest producing wealth to enrich them does not break, so their interests are aligned which those of common people who don’t want Autocracy.