I'm growing tired of the bad analogies. This isn't some sinking ship in the ocean. It's a democratically elected republic. To re-abuse your analogy, every soul onboard is not dead weight, it is potent buoyancy.
Back in 1930s Germany, there were other boats afloat to escape to.
Here in 2025, you live in a globalized world. The rats are soon to be out of ships to flee to. There's no free society in the Sol system that survives rampant and unchecked authoritarianism in the triad of the US, China, and Russia. Europe is a military vassal of the first, an economic vassal of the second, and an energy vassal of the third (though increasingly of the first two). By all means, I'm happy for Europe to wake up and prove me wrong, but looking at their tepid reaction to being invaded by Russia three years ago I'm not holding my breath.
> Europe is a military vassal of the first, an economic vassal of the second, and an energy vassal of the third.
The UK may be something close to a military vassal, what with its "independent" nuclear deterrant relying on US missiles, but the French deterrant is not and France is not.
Economically, we're all interdependent right now: China depends on the US and Europe, Europe depends on the US and China, the US depends on China and nad Europe. Current US policy is pushing everyone everywhere to disconnect from the US, ironically without even doing the one thing tariffs are supposed to be a tool for which is protrcting strategic domestic industry.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine has pushed the EU away from Russian energy much faster than it would otherwise have done from decarbonisation efforts. Given who the world's factory is, I'd expect a lot of our PV and wind turbine components to come from China, and even if they don't directly for the Chinese supply to substantially impact the price.
If you think Europe is a military vassal of the US, I'd suggest a read of the latest US National Security Doctrine.
China, agree.
Russia? Not so much, now the war is 1385 days in - and the US is currently dilly-dally-ing on their stance(s).
> the triad of the US, China, and Russia. Europe is a military vassal of the first, an economic vassal of the second, and an energy vassal of the third.
What an hyperbole.
There are also other places in the world besides Europe, the US and China.
The billionaires seem to have settled on New Zealand as the right combo of “stable-enough liberal democracy that they probably won’t seize my treasure hoard” and “hard enough to reach that climate and political-instability refugee waves cannot get there”.
Silly argument. Empires rise and fall. USA isn’t the end of history. If USA sinks it won’t be great for the rest of the world but no not everything else will fall.
So, “people who committed three violent crimes” are the protected class you’re worried might come to harm? You’re right, this government risks seriously harming the triple felon community.
> President Donald Trump on Thursday accused several Democratic lawmakers of “seditious behavior,” calling for them to “be arrested and put on trial” for behavior that, he said, could be “punishable by death.”
I suspect this is largely driven by a subset of liberals who have equated words they don't like with violence. So when someone like Kirk commits a misgendering or some other verbal assault against their beliefs, this is essentially the same as exacting physical violence. Which by that logic can be responded to with actual physical violence.
It's very twisted, and fortunately not all liberals have this perspective. Some are actually liberal in their beliefs.
> On the other hand, a liberal did kill Charlie Kirk in cold blood because the killer had a trans girlfriend and was mad about Kirk‘a opinions. So, maybe some people should be afraid of violence.
My friend, this is a clownshoes-ass take. First, the motives of this dude are still unknown. His entire family are Trump-supporters. Dude grew up shooting guns and being a good ol' boy (hence the reason he, y'know, had access to, and knowledge of how to shoot and kill someone from such a distance at the age of 22). Second, literally on the same day Kirk was killed, there was a school shooting by a literal Neo-Nazi. And a couple months prior to Kirk's killing, a Trump-voting, anti-abortion nutcase literally assassinated the leader of the Minnesota State House and her husband, shot and nearly killed a member of the State Senate and his wife, and had a list of 70 other, all democratic politicians, he'd apparently intended to assassinate. And here you are still focused on the one time you could shoehorn some cherry-pickin' ass example of an alleged "leftist" being violent into this conversation. For 30 years, right-wing extremist political violence has been far more common and far more deadly than their left-wing extremist counterparts. https://ccjls.scholasticahq.com/article/26973-far-left-versu...
The irony here is, you're simultaneously claiming it's ridiculous to suggest Trump wants to "round-up" liberals, while using the same bullshit guilt-by-extremely-stretched-association rhetoric about Kirk's assassination to paint "liberals" as violent that he's currently using to justify treating his critics as "terrorists". Read through this bad-boy, and with a straight face tell anyone Trump's not interested in "rounding up" his dissidents https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/09/coun... Would he be successful in trying this? Probably not. But I sure as hell don't feel one bit certain that people like you would move a muscle to stop it, being so easily convinced of such contemptible nonsense.
The difference honestly is that mainstream liberals — otherwise normal people from all walks of life were, publicly and unabashedly giddy with delight about the Kirk shooting, whereas I haven’t seen any normal people glorify the right-wing psychopaths who committed the heinous acts you spoke of, besides probably some cowardly anon 4chan trolls.
What worries me is how much the political “team” you seem to identify with considers it justifiable to kill. Be honest, how many people in your personal bubble expressed annoyance that the Trump shooter missed?
The party system has devolved from theory and ideas into absolute tribal barbarism, but I can’t believe it’s the Democrats, who I used to count myself among, and saw as the peaceful and mature ones, leading that charge. There’s a rot in the Democratic Party, and it’s in the morality department.
Ohhhh please. Donald Trump, the most influential and significant member of the Republican Party (and tons of other v important folks downstream from him) were giddy with joy when Nancy Pelosi’s husband was nearly killed by a lunatic with a hammer. They joked about this repeatedly. Charlie Kirk, himself, also joked about this incident, and even suggested “some amazing patriot” bail the attacker out of prison. This is categorically different from random YouTube dipshits saying unkind things about a reprehensible bigot being killed.
You could also trivially compare the responses from Democratic politicians to, e.g., Trump’s assassination attempt, the Charlie Cook killing to Republican politicians’ responses to the Minnesota political assassin, the shooting of Gabby Gifford, and the attack on Nancy Pelosi’s husband. There is a shocking contrast that is well evident to anyone not stewing their brains in RW propaganda.
Trump literally pardoned every Jan 6th participant, including those who assaulted police officers. I struggle to think of a more obvious example of demonstrating support for political violence.
You also apparently missed the countless conservative influencers calling for outright civil war after Kirk’s killing. I cannot fathom how you’ve drawn this conclusion. Certainly not from observing reality.
If things aren't close they don't need to be counted.
It's a fact of voting that most folks can vote in every election they can for their entire lives and never make any difference whatsoever, as in, change zero outcomes.
We have social pressure and propaganda otherwise to get people to do it, because if too many people rationally stay home then the system works poorly (in aggregate, that does change outcomes). It'd be much better to just mandate voting, because it is individually irrational and it's not great to base a system on tricking everyone into behaving irrationally.
This feels different because they're not bothering to even count them, but it's not materially different from any voting.
(barring the "sometimes not even counted then" part, of course)
I do understand that, in principle. But having a mathematical reason to let some 'difficult' votes go uncounted gives ammunition to those who would put political pressure on vote counting for their advantage, while also making people in general feel disenfranchised. (We have a huge problem with turnout in the US in general, and the message you're presenting only adds fuel to that!) This is why I wrote "sometimes not even counted then", because we do have a kind of apathy towards these small and easily disenfranchisable groups, and once you open it a crack, it becomes easier for some partisan to drive a wedge into it (see Bush v Gore 2000).
Also, it's a mistake to think that the only result of voting is to produce the winner of the election. The margin matters also. A politician winning by a large margin (or even a majority) can claim a 'mandate'; one who only wins by a plurality will have more spirited opposition.
We've seen this in the most recent US election; imagine if small percentage of those who didn't vote in the solid blue states because their vote didn't matter (a refrain I've heard from many people) actually voted, and Trump swept the swing states but lost the popular vote. The entire political landscape would be different, and we might even have momentum in the coming years to abolish the Electoral College.
So if we are fans of liberal democracy, we should be doing everything in our power to structure the system to make people feel as though their voice and vote matters.
