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thrance 14 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Got sources for any of that?

	▲	Amezarak 9 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Constitutional amendments by fiat: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/01/17/biden-dec... Assassinated Americans with drone strikes: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/who-were-the-4-us-citizens-kill... Lied to the courts to imprison Twitter users: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.ca2.967... Used intelligence agencies to spy on Congress: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/12/a-brief... Expanded mass surveillance: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/obama-on-mass-gov... EO declaring that some laws would not be enforced on favored demographics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DACA Ordered social media companies to censor and ban users: https://twitterfiles.substack.com/p/1-thread-the-twitter-fil... https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/mark-zuckerbe... Locked people down unless they were protesting for approved causes: referring to the BLM protests > engaged in politically motivated prosecutions of their enemies. Another reference to the Mackey case and the novel legal theories required prosecute Trump in NY, and the now known to be false constructiion of the Russia narrative. Look, many or all of these things may have been for a good cause, a good end. But the problem we're talking about is the means. Now people are using the same means for different ends. Everyone has to agree authoritarianism is bad even when it’s for really good ends or this will continue to escalate.

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immibis 14 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The "same side" does all of that but also a bunch more bad stuff.

The equlibrium that is always reached in a first-past-the-post voting system is two parties that are mostly the same, and you vote for a party that's only slightly more of what you want (because those are the options) and your vote tells both parties which direction to move in, to chase more votes.

If the party that drone strikes its own citizens and imprisons Twitter users consistently gets more votes than the party that drone strikes its own citizens, imprisons Twitter users, and builds concentration camps, then the latter party will quickly figure out that the only way to win is to drone strike its own citizens, but not imprison Twitter users, or build concentration camps. And then the former party (now losing) figures out that doing none of the above is the way to win, but maybe they still tap all communications. And so on...

We got to the point we're at today step by step, with people voting for one new measure at a time, and parties taking notice of what measures people consistently vote for. The current parties did not spring fully-formed out of Zeus's forehead.