What scares me the most is how many Americans just cannot imagine their #democracy can collapse.
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Madeleine Morrisreplied to Madeleine Morris last edited by
There is a lot wrong with the American system. In my life I have been a fierce critic of it. It's swamped with self-interest and big money. It accommodates and whitewashes staggering amounts of racism and prejudice of all kinds. Its foreign policies have often been monstrous.
But it still contains the mechanisms by which it can be made better.
Authoritarian systems do not have that capacity. That's their feature, not their bug.
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Madeleine Morrisreplied to Madeleine Morris last edited by
And the irony that I encounter among people who disdain voting for the 'least worst option' is that they are captured by a kind of consumerist fantasy that democracies ever offer perfect options. They never do. Often all they offer is the possibility of voting for someone better next time.
With Trump, there will be no next time without incredible levels of violence.
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Madeleine Morrisreplied to Madeleine Morris last edited by
I know that sounds hyperbolic to many people. But I simply cannot see how, once the people around Trump invade and corrode the judiciary, the military, the quotidian arms of bureaucracies and public services that you engage with on a daily basis, it is almost impossible to claw them back without a dramatic conflagration that requires everything to be rebuilt from the ground up.
And history bears me out on this, over and over. You don't get your democracy back without tremendous upheaval.
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Madeleine Morrisreplied to Madeleine Morris last edited by
That slow clawing back of some semblance of representation and fairness takes a long, long time.
And the authors of this fascism... the Trumps, the Musks, the Tech Bros, the Wall Street parasites.... they don't ever suffer the consequences of what they've wrought. They all get on a plane and wait it out somewhere else.
It is the vulnerable who pay for the wars of ideology: they pay with their misery and their lives.
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Mastodon Migration VOTEDreplied to Madeleine Morris last edited by
Great thread. Thank you.
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Madeleine Morrisreplied to Mastodon Migration VOTED last edited by
@mastodonmigration You are tremendously kind to say so. Thank you for bothering to read it.
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Alexander Knochelreplied to Madeleine Morris last edited by
@Remittancegirl Decades of Nazi documentaries on the Discovery and History channel, but the most important lesson wasn't learned.
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Mastodon Migration VOTEDreplied to Madeleine Morris last edited by
Feel like we are seeing a huge failure of imagination. Living in a Trumpian fascist hellscape will not be like some fun action movie. People are sleepwalking into disaster.
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Madeleine Morrisreplied to Alexander Knochel last edited by
@quantensalat You make a good point. I suspect it is because no one bothered to film the quiet takeover of town halls and legal associations. It isn't very visually entertaining.
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Madeleine Morrisreplied to Mastodon Migration VOTED last edited by
@mastodonmigration A failure of imagination is a perfect way to put it.
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Human after allreplied to Madeleine Morris last edited by
@Remittancegirl @mastodonmigration I have lived under the Chinese, the Russians and now fucking Orban. I cannot stress enough how little Americans are prepared for the shittiness of these regimes
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@pineywoozle (s) for HARRISreplied to Human after all last edited by
@humanhorseshoes I just visiyed Spain when Franco was in power and even that was horrific. @Remittancegirl @mastodonmigration
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Madeleine Morrisreplied to Human after all last edited by
@humanhorseshoes @mastodonmigration I grew up in Spain under Franco, and then lived for 20 years in Vietnam.
I know what it is like to have friends disappear in the middle of the night. To pay a bribe for a common childhood vaccine. To have drunk police show up at 2 am, make themselves comfortable in your living room and demand to see non-existent paperwork for a laugh.
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Madeleine Morrisreplied to @pineywoozle (s) for HARRIS last edited by
Part of me is still stuck in Madrid at the age of seven, watching a woman bleed out from a backstreet abortion while successive parsimonious doctors refused to touch her because she was just a "slut" who'd broken the law and was getting what she deserved. It scarred me for life.
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@pineywoozle (s) for HARRISreplied to Madeleine Morris last edited by
@Remittancegirl People just have no idea. Even with all the extra deaths (mother and child) in Texas since the ban. @humanhorseshoes @mastodonmigration
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Madeleine Morrisreplied to Madeleine Morris last edited by
However, it was a Black American doctor from the US airbase who my mother finally persuaded to come to our apartment who saved that woman's life.
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Human after allreplied to Madeleine Morris last edited by
@Remittancegirl @Pineywoozle @mastodonmigration I am from Ireland and we had this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ann_Lovett#:~:text=Ann%20Rose%20Lovett%20(6%20April,grotto%20on%2031%20January%201984 and this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Savita_Halappanavar and this https://www.irishexaminer.com/news/arid-20108061.html
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@Remittancegirl @Npars01 As of late I find myself continually haunted by that Leonard Cohen quote, “You’re not going to like what comes after America.”
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Human after allreplied to Human after all last edited by
@Remittancegirl @Pineywoozle @mastodonmigration We also had the nuns incinerate girls to prevent them being seen in their night clothes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cavan_Orphanage_fire
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Mastodon Migration VOTEDreplied to Madeleine Morris last edited by
@Remittancegirl @Pineywoozle @humanhorseshoes
Think a lot of these MAGA bro types envision some kind of pick-up truck vigilantism where they are unleashed to go around enforcing arbitrary purity anti-wokeness, which will really just be whatever they want to do to whomever they want target. The reality will be hate and civil unrest at a scale we have never seen.
