A policeman walks to the corner of the building and, distracted by his phone, clashes into an italian coming from the other side. Both fall on their asses confused. Then, out of nowhere, a hooded person appears and starts to attack an italian. A policeman stands up and pulls them apart, asks a hooded man what this is about. Looking geniunely frustrated, they answer: ‘I saw you and him, and I thought that it’s finally happening.’
There are a lot of variations of this anecdote* that, for me, puts it pretty great. A dire and exaggerated social situation creates a minority group of short-fused people who are just one inch from acting on their frustration and biases or\and even dreams, they just need a call to action or\and a guarantee they won’t be persecuted. And their orange monarch just mumbled something in his rant, accidentially this time unlike the Jan 6 coup attempt, and it enabled them to act. In spite of the nurturing the MAGA cult does to this group, they aren’t enough to cause a snowballing effect just yet, but the ripple effect of his another random bullshit rant shows they are listening and can do covert, sneaky shit to other humans after just a whistle. It’d take a long time for the US to recover from trumpism.
I believe the original one was about the nationalistic Black Hundreds and how they, enabled by tsarist police and the wealthy, started a string of chaotic pogroms, torching houses and hurting\killing hundreds of thousands.
I don’t live in the US and am not an expert on any of this State vs Fed stuff but it seems to be the case that the government at the State level CAN restrict speech and descriminate against you based on your sexual orientation? Because they’re targeting books/speech that are relavant to people, partly at least, due to them being in the LGBTQIA+ community. And it’s up to YOU to defend your right to access that speech by taking legal action? So a kind of ‘guilty until proven innocent’ adjacent scenario. I’m so confused and maybe I’m missing something but it sure FEELS like the 1st amendment is optional?
I assume they could also therefore remove books based on the race of the characters in the books or because of the subject matter being of particular relavance to people of colour? But I assume that’s happened before and been tested legally and that’s the process that’s happening now with the LGBTQIA+ book bans? Is it simply that the LGBTQIA+ community isn’t yet as robust in their advocacy, lobbying & litigation as they need to be? That they don’t have the equivalent of the NAACP on their side? Should they have to? Isn’t the 1st ammendment and anti-descrimination law pretty clear?
As someone living outside the USA, I have struggled to understand what’s going on there and why it’s allowed to happen when the 1st ammendment exists expressly to stop the government from suppressing speech, the restriction of which can be damaging to vulnerable communites. Take the story of Roy and Silo, about a same sex couple (of penguins for goodness sake?!) raising a child together. This being banned sends a message to children of same sex parents that there is something wrong with their parents / family unit. I find that disturbing enough, but to the child, it could be traumatizing. How would parents explain to their child that their favourite book has been removed from their library purely because the subject of the story is a family just like theirs?!
Probably only shows up that way on lemmy.ml, which has a blocker for various things they consider slurs, which can become silly when you’re dealing with words/phrase like “fire retardants.” Looks normal to me over on blahaj, and the same over on lemmy.world
Business interests, evangelicals, and cops/white supremacists.
Oh yeah, and that 50+ year campaign of gerrymandering, voter suppression (e.g. vote on tuesday, in person, during business hours, no time off work), abstracting the election process away from the ballot, and designing the court system to favor conservative calls in disputed elections.
America has a rather anti-democratic voting system…
But by the time a suitable digging machine arrives on scene and digs a big enough hole for a semi it’d probably be faster to flood it with water. Not to mention what might be underneath the ground, so they’d also have to spend time determining if there’s any gas lines or whatever before they dig so they don’t make a much bigger problem
how do you smother a semi fire on the highway, a) with a water tanker or b) with a sand tanker, how many municipalities have a sand tanker on hand, how do those sand tanker hoses work again, lots of sand tanker slingers round your parts cowpoke?
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