Muahahaha!

Can I legally drop someone else’s baby off at the fire station?

You wouldn’t even need to organize some mass campaign to get people to pull money out. This thing will trigger a bank run all on its own. Do you think the banks have enough reserves to immediately cash out the accounts of every non-citizen? Sometimes a bank decides it doesn’t want to do business with someone anymore and will close their account. If that happens to you, they send you a check with your account balance on it. But we’re talking tens of millions of people here, many with substantial amounts in US accounts. This order, if implemented, would cause every bank in the country to collapse. They just don’t maintain the reserves to cash out that many accounts all at once.

It is perfectly moral to burn down an ICE detention center before it’s occupied. It’s like burning down Auschwitz before they moved anyone in.

Again, I don’t care. You vote to throw me and my people on the pyre, you can all go to Hell as far as I’m concerned. We can all burn together.

Private businesses have regulations on their ads all the time. Cities across the country regulate how large shop ads can be.

If he’s the candidate, I’m sitting the election out. Look, my community is under an attempted genocide right now. And as we’ve seen from the Starmer government in the UK, a nominally liberal government can be just as bad for trans rights as any Republican government. When Newsom says “be more culturally normal,” that is a dogwhistle for “take away the human rights of trans people.”

If the party isn’t willing to fight for my civil rights, sorry, I don’t owe you shit. You chose to do nothing after they first came for me, so I will laugh when they come for you.

Seriously. And if Denmark did anything to intercept it, he could use that as casus belli to start a war. Remember the USS Maine? Of To Hell with Spain, Remember the Maine? Seizing or sinking a hospital ship is still an attack against a US Navy vessel, and it would be played in the media as an act of utter barbarity.

On the other hand, the ship could be used as a tool for war even if Denmark lets it dock. How hard do you think it would be for the CIA to arrange some false-flag or instigated terrorist attack against the hospital ship? Imagine if the hospital ship is docked and stormed by a bunch of armed gunmen, dubbed in the media as “radical Danish nationalists.” The US could then use that as justification to start “anti-terrorism activities,” which gradually grow into an outright occupation of the island. No clean formal start to war that would serve as as source of international outrage and could fracture NATO like a gunshot. The US already has large military presence in Greenland, but this would represent a massive expansion of that. And, over time, an ever-increasing US military presence and control over civilian areas. Think less Spanish American War and more of how Russia slowly occupied vast areas of Eastern Ukraine in the years before the breakout of the major overt war.

If North Korea could do it, so can Taiwan.

North Korea did it, and it had the United States, the nation with the most powerful surveillance capabilities in the world looking right over its shoulder. And keep in mind, we’re still technically at war with North Korea. And North Korea might as well be an island. But really, the island part is irrelevant here, as Taiwan already possesses all the nuclear material it would need. It has a well developed nuclear power sector. The island gets half its electricity from nuclear power. And they have several research reactors. It already has all the fissile material it needs to build a bomb.

Taiwan doesn’t need thousands of nuclear weapons to be a credible threat to China. A dozen bombs with delivery systems would be more than enough to make a credible deterrent. The goal isn’t to be able to wipe out the entire population of mainland China. The goal would simply be to make any invasion so costly that the cost would vastly outweigh any potential gains. I don’t know what all Xi hopes to gain by conquering Taiwan, but whatever it is, it’s not worth losing the dozen largest Chinese cities in a series of mushroom clouds. To the Chinese leadership, the conquest of Taiwan is not worth getting Beijing nuked. Maybe Mao would have made that trade, back when China was a rural peasant nation. But now? China is the workshop of the world. The entire economy and China’s place in the world are utterly dependent on its megacities.

And yet, plenty of other countries have managed to do it…

A peaceful and realistic solution? Taiwan develops a strategic nuclear deterrent. They’re already a near-nuclear country and an industrial and technological powerhouse. A nuclear bomb is fully within their capability, and they already have abundant supplies of all the precursor materials in their possession. The most realistic solution to the Taiwan crisis is that Taiwan obtains nuclear weapons, and China is never able to threaten them with invasion again.

Except that attitude pretends that the election in front of you is the only election that will ever happen ever again. It’s a short-sighted view that leads us to exactly where we are now. We’ve had 30 years of Democrats telling everyone “don’t boycott this election. This is the most important one in history. If you don’t vote for us, democracy is dead forever. I know we’re not really going to do anything to change things, but what choice do you have?”

In retrospect, we would have been a lot better off today if in 2016 the entire left wing of the Democratic party just boycotted the election entirely. The fact that Hillary came close to winning is the only reason the neoliberal wing was able to retain any credibility.

People come to Lemmy precisely because they’re tired of big algorithmic corporate platforms. They come here precisely to get away from AI slop on platforms like Facebook. Hell, half the people here have been banned from reddit based on comically flawed algorithmic AI moderation tools. This platform is heavily selected for people who dislike AI and AI content.

Exactly. Could one of the blue MAGA folks let me know when Newsom publicly announces he supports completely dismantling DHS and rolling back the post-9/11 surveillance state? You cannot seriously pretend to want to fight fascism if dismantling the tools of the fascists isn’t the first thing you intend to do when in power.

It has some serious Lord of the Rings vibes. The surveillance state and the unconstitutional powers created after 9/11 are this immensely powerful tool created for evil ends. But after the evil is defeated, the nominally good guys choose to not to dismantle the evil tools, but to keep them, telling themselves that they will be used for good. Except they cannot be used for good, as they are fundamentally evil. Meanwhile I’m over here shouting, “cast it into the fire!” But they decide to keep it every time.

Nah, you’re arguing in bad faith.

YOU have chosen to ignore history. And how typically in authoritarian takeovers, the first step to fighting the takeover is to abandon the captured opposition party and to start fresh with something new. A popular front is usually needed to defeat them. Authoritarians often let toothless opposition parties continue to operate. And there are always blind fools like yourself who insist that they must be supported, though they are just another tool of the autocrat.

The only way you’ll get any change under the current system is to elect a Dem super majority in every election for the next fifty years.

This shows you are not a serious person. If that is your solution, then I can only conclude that you actually support Trump and the Fascist party.

Of course not. We have only two choices of party:

1. The Fascist party.

2. The party that tells you to vote for them lest the Fascists win, but when elected, does nothing to fight the Fascists, reverse their worst atrocities, or prevent them from coming back to power.

I mean, the data centers themselves are flammable. And you would do more damage if you waited til they were built…