Freedom maybe never completely dies, but there are no guarantees it won't take decades or centuries before the next renaissance comes.
I am a big believer in the Breitbart idea "politics is downstream of the culture" so one huge part here might be the stories we tell. Or are told to. Don't concentrate on only the politics, no matter how this one fight goes. Keep fighting no matter what happens. And tell, and support people who tell, the right kind of stories. One reason why we have ended up in this swamp is probably due to our entertainment. Especially what children consume growing up can have a big effect on what they believe and how they see the world when they are grown, and that will directly affect their political outlooks.
Yep.
But she sure hasn't improved after either. What I remember too well are the photos of her in the hideous yellow gown - which looked like a damn dressing gown - and glitter thigh high boots which just didn't go with that yellow at all which were splashed everywhere after she wore them on, I think it was Ellen DeGeneres show. One of the pictures of her you could use as an example for some "how not to dress" or "lots of money but no fashion sense" -articles. No damn class to be seen there.
Either she still uses the same "fashion experts" who still hate her - or despise her - or she herself has no idea whatsoever of how to dress. Possibly a combination of those two...
Those fashion experts probably hated her. Only thing that makes sense, considering how unflattering most of her clothes were. Of course dressing somebody like her, with her thick thighs and hips and flat everything else (btw, one reason why I am somewhat unwilling to buy the idea that she is trans - those are pretty wide hips, especially when seen from behind) well is somewhat (okay, that is an understatement) harder than dressing well is for Melania with her model's body, but it IS possible. Michelle mostly looked like somebody's servant or the cleaning lady trying to blend in with the fashionable crowd, with clothes which might as well have been bought from a Walmart sale.
From what one American writer says - she was a poll watcher during the 2012 election in Colorado, and knows others - pretty obvious cheating has been going on for decades, at least. This year, due to Trump's overwhelming votes, is just the first time it is clearly visible to everybody, and what's more, Trump is the first who is both willing to say it out loud, and to fight it.
She wrote that she and a few other of the poll watchers tried to raise alarm back then, but GOP refused to act. Sarah A. Hoyt, a writer who used to be one of the Baen Books writers and now is indie. Check out her blog. An immigrant from Portugal, married an American, and like a lot of immigrants from socialist or communist countries, a firebrand when it comes to defending the American Constitution and the freedom it provides because she has seen what kind of hell socialism/communism creates in reality first hand.
Or what your Constitution used to provide, back when it was actually followed by your government.
You fucking really need to take your country back. If you fall completely, and you seem to be almost there now, there will be nothing left the rest of the world could look at, and see what they should be aspiring to if they want to have any kind of good lives.
Fight, you American pedes. You are not fighting just for yourselves, you are fighting for the whole of humanity.
From what I understand Pool is a recovering former liberal. I'd cut him quite a bit of slack, it can be hard to walk away from that if it was what one was raised as, or brainwashed into during his school education. Not everybody has what it takes to get away from that, and the ones who manage it, even if they haven't yet gone all the way, should probably be treated kindly. No sense to risk scaring them back to the reservation, and Pool probably has followers who are even less advanced than he is, and may still scare quite easily.
I studied geology when they first started to talk about global warming (never graduated, due to a family catastrophe, I was an only child and my mother got badly sick and then died, and dad went kind of off the rails for a few years, and I dropped out of university because I had not time, or energy, to study for a while).
My first thought when I saw the first articles was "YES! Maybe we'll get back to what things were like during the Holocene Optimum, or at least the Medieval Warm Period"... then was puzzled when it seemed to be treated as a bad thing.
If the claim that she is actually a paid actress is true then perhaps that could be a rare moment when she says something without a script. Maybe her handler hadn't told her what to say and she was irritated enough that she said something she actually thought, without thinking whether it would fit the narrative she is paid to push.
Just pondering. Sometimes it seems that the ones who most strongly stand against the left are people who managed to get away from socialist or communist countries, or who, like Törni, had lived where they could fully see what that means. Lost votes for your side if you would not let them vote.
But yes, there is a problem too. I know one immigrant who has birthright citizenship because her American mother still had hers when she was born, and who moved to USA in her thirties. But she is, from what I know about her, about as blue as you can get, at least she seemed quite happy about the idea of a Biden presidency on social media.
Maybe getting the right to vote and full citizenship should just be rather more demanding, and take longer, not something that is just given if you decide to stay and keep your nose clean for a few years. Demand something like what voting requires in Starship Troopers (Heinlein's book, not that stupid movie), military or other service to the country.
Hm. You wouldn't take somebody like Lauri Törni/Larry Thorne either?
There may have been personal threats too, I rather assume there have been. Of the Republican justices Roberts may be suspectible to blackmail, Barret has seven children, both Gorsuch and Kavanaugh have what seems like happy marriages and both have two, and the game has lately started to look even more serious than it seemed before. And there is plenty of evidence of dem supporters quite willing to go to extreme lenghts to get a win to their team. Considering that those people aren't necessarily ones with previous criminal behavior one of them might well be anybody walking past on the street, or somebody who seems quite reliable like a kid's teacher. It is hard to protect people against somebody like that, no matter how tight the protection, especially if the threat is given as something that may persist for years (like "do as we want or one of your children will die no matter how long it takes for us to get to her"...).
They are not superheroes, not even trained for that kind of threats like somebody with police or military background. Might not be that hard to scare the shit out of at least some of them.
Yes.
But you - and everybody everywhere, as I have said it's rather much worse here in EU - are where you are because you, and the previous generations, slacked off. This is a fight that has been going on for a long time, and will go on into the future regardless of what happens now.
Even if you lose this, keep fighting.
And if you win - keep fighting. The saying "Give an inch and they take a mile" is quite true (in my country the saying is "give the devil your little finger and he takes your whole hand"). The left got where they are because they kept chipping. A little bit there, a little bit here, a little bit every time they could get it, no matter how little. They preferred their own, and asked for things which maybe didn't seem to matter all that much, and kept advancing. And I can't see that stopping.
Your fight now matters hell of a lot, but it is not going to end with "And then they lived happily ever after" even if you win this hill.
Depends on the situation. Carthage was pretty thoroughly changed, and there have been plenty enough people and civilizations which have disappeared partly by melding with a conquering one which first ran over them with swords.
Best to use both.
I know there is a black market, but I don't have any contacts. Everything you can get legally is behind a lot of hoops, and very closely monitored. In my country you can't now even buy actual guns before you have spent some time shooting airguns and belong to one of the clubs for either recreational shooting or for hunting.
What is available without permits are airguns, but I don't yet know if any of the ones which are powerful enough to count as actual weapons are sold here.
What about ammunition? From my friends over there (I'm in EU, and seriously considering moving to either Poland or Hungary, if they are still willing to take immigrants when it would be possible for me, which will take a couple of years - also, with the stupid gun laws where I live, I'm a complete noob), mostly seen on MeWe now, I keep seeing these comments complaining that there is hardly anything to be found anywhere right now. I know about reloading, but would it be possible to make it from scratch if everything becomes hard to buy?
And you can't stop "hate speech" by banning words anyway. See what keeps happening to terms describing all kinds of disabilities: one word starts getting used as an insult and is dropped from polite speech and medical jargon while a new term for the same thing gets invented, but after a short while it too starts to be used as an insult at times and then becomes banned and a new term for polite speech is invented, and the whole thing repeats.
You can use almost anything as an insult if you want to, it has more to do with the situation, the way something is said, body language, and tone of voice than the actual word. Banning words doesn't help at all with that. It just makes it easier to create discord and to attack individuals who may not be quite up to speed with the latest "acceptable" vs "hate speech" usage. And as the left now seems to try to keep that speed closing on light speed - maybe the whole point is to use it as a weapon against people they don't like. At least it rather looks like that often enough.
I wanted to get a metallic plaque of both your flag and the Gadsden flag for my wall. Because I live in Europe I first looked at what is being sold on the German branch of Amazon and yes, several of both.
All seemed to be made in China.
After quite a lot of searching finally Amazon.com had a few which at least claimed to be actually American, so in the end I bought those.
Yes, check everything. Of course the origins are not always so easy to find out, but at least try. Hell of a lot of everything seems to originate from China now.
I'm new here, and I'm not even an American, I live in northern Europe, but I am praying that your country can survive this and that fraud will be fully exposed and DJT win confirmed.
But mostly I wanted to say something about that unwillingness to see what is going on because I see it hell of a lot here: I think they - the ones who are decent people, of course there probably are a lot who aren't decent, and can see but prefer it anyway because they think they are, or will be, among the ones who profit - are mostly scared. If they admit that something is wrong they have to face the possibility that maybe it can't be fixed. The cocoon of assuming that everything is all right and that the people in power are good is so much more comfortable. No anxiety, no fear, everything is all right, there are no monsters and things are going to continue the way they have been their whole life and nothing needs to be done. And besides, actually looking and maybe seeing what really is - they can see well enough how Trump supporters are being treated. Voluntarily going there requires guts. It's much easier to continue cosplaying being the good guys on the other side.
They prefer what seems safe, and they also prefer to think the people they support are good, admitting that they have maybe been playing on the side of the actual fascists is not easy either. And getting past that can be next to impossible.
How long did it take back then, your revolution, from talking and planning before real action started? I suppose then also there might have been a lot who complained that nobody is actually doing something, they all just talk. Waiting is hard.
And this time waiting is scary, especially since for us older folks it has been nearly a lifetime of seeing most of the political classes getting away with things that seemed like they were most likely crimes most normal folks would probably gone to jail for. Again and again. I guess many of us kind of expect it to happen this time too.
But this... I don't remember it ever before having been this blatant though, as the discrepancies during your election vote counting were big enough that pretty much anybody who bothered to look at the actual numbers should have seen that there were problems. So yes, gathering and preparing the proof for a court case or similar takes time, more than weeks, maybe several months, but still... Something really should start to happen before the 20th of January, something obvious to everybody and more than just talk by people who tell us they are doing something.