vvilld

Peaceful demonstrations have ALWAYS played a part in every successful social movement. They shouldn't be the ONLY thing people are doing. They should be paired with more radical strategic actions. But solely relying on violence is also a losing strategy. We should embrace a diversity of tactics, not shout down people who are out there trying to do something.

Van Hollen on his own going down there was enough to cajole them into giving him a face-to-face meeting with Abrego Garcia. Two days ago half the people on the internet were convinced Abrego Garcia was already dead, but just 1 Senator was able to disprove that. The government of El Salvador was so afraid of the optics of denying just a single Senator that they backed down from their initial refusal and completely capitulated.

And you think it's fantasy that a larger number could accomplish more? You are clearly not paying the slightest bit of attention.

The Republicans control the Senate and they want this to happen. There are not 60 Senators, let alone a majority, who are opposed to sending people to concentration camps.

Playing by the normal rules of politics is how we got here. Staying in their offices and just voting in the Senate is what they've been doing for the past decade to oppose Trump, and the fascists have only gotten stronger. What the fuck do you think that's going to accomplish?

Van Hollen on his own went down there and was able to cajole them into giving him a face-to-face meeting with Abrego Garcia. They were so afraid of the optics of just a single Senator getting denied an face-to-face meeting that they went back on their previous denial and granted it. I'd love to see what a whole crowd could accomplish.

I don't think you have a very strong grasp on international politics.

Looks like I was right. He's still alive.

Fear is not an excuse for complicity. They all have the option to resign in protest if they're really that principled about it. But they're not. They care more about keeping a position of power.

Nah. They like what Trump is doing. They are all 100% complicit in it.

Yeah, it all built out of WW2. After WW2 pretty much all of Europe was in shambles. Most major cities had been bombed at least once, many far more than that. Infrastructure all across the continent was destroyed. The industrial capacity was destroyed. Armies had marched, pillaged, and destroyed first out of Germany across Europe, then back across Europe into Germany. The US was uniquely positioned as the only world power that didn't suffer massive economic devastation from the war. In fact, due to stuff like the lend-lease act and massive industrial mobilization for the war effort, the US was experiencing a massive economic boom while Europe and east Asia were in a depression.

But in the aftermath of the war the Cold War set in. The USSR and Allied powers (led by the US) drew lines in the sand and established their areas of influence. The US instituted the Marshall Plan in Europe which essentially just shotgunned money at western Europe to rebuild as much as possible as quickly as possible. This had a massive positive economic impact on western Europe, but it also ensured that so much of Europe would be dependent on American products and companies. If your rebuilt power grid was made with American parts, then anything new would have to be compatible with that, ensuring your country is a long-term customer of American products. At the same time, the US and western Europe created NATO as a military pact against the Soviet Union, which further strengthened the western alliance. Again, with the US as the only major western power with a larger and more powerful army after the war than before, the US took the leading role in NATO.

Another major factor that most people tend to overlook was the Bretton Woods Agreement in 1944. This was an effort to stabilize the global economy and monetary system after WW2. It said that the US would readopt the gold standard (we had abandoned it during the war, and would later permanently abandon it in the early 70s), then every other western-aligned country would use the US dollar as the basis for their currency. Think of it like a gold-standard, but instead of gold, they used US dollars. This gave the US enormous economic influence because everybody needed US dollars to maintain their economies, and the only way to get them was to do business with the US.

This created the conditions that the US expanded and exploited over the second half of the 20th century to cement ourselves as the dominant western world power. Through colonialism and Cold War dynamics, the US and USSR forced most of the global south to pick a side, and often forced regime change when they didn't like the choice countries made.

Then the Soviet Union fell and the US was the only global superpower left remaining. Over the 90s and early 00s a lot of formerly Soviet-aligned countries hitched their wagons to the US since it was the only game left in town.

So, yes, much of the rest of the world put their eggs in the America basket, but it wasn't recently, it didn't happen all at once, and, at the time at least, there were other factors that went into those decisions.

Oh, I don't think a single Republican would join in on this, and I wouldn't want those fascists to take part anyways.

That's not really a concern at all. They haven't been using Congress to pass anything thus far. They've just been doing it all through Executive Orders, so it doesn't really matter what Congress can or can't pass.

Plus, that's not how Congress works, either. Republicans hold a majority in both houses. In the House, if all Republicans vote together there's literally nothing Democrats can do (within the normal rules of how Congress functions) to stop them. It doesn't matter if every single Democrat is there or none of them are. They have the same power. And the only difference in the Senate is the existence of the filibuster, but they don't need any Democrats there to use it. They just threaten to filibuster any given piece of legislation and it requires 60 votes to pass (technically, for cloture, then 50+1 to pass, but the effect is 60 to pass). Again, it doesn't matter if all Democrats are present or none are. Their power is exactly the same.

Don't get all condescending about something you're clueless on if you don't like being called out on it.

I'm talking about what the headline of the article here says.