Good point, I think of the change in court composition as a very recent thing but time flies. It has been a few years at this point.
I hope you’re right that the lower courts will make more similar rulings but I suspect the Supreme Court might overturn it if they went too far. We’re just lucky Fort Collins ran out of money here.
Unfortunately, the court’s composition could take decades to change. It’s a big problem with no easy solution.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/u-supreme-court-refuses-free-144949699.html
Unfortunately, though the problem has gotten much worse in recent years, the theocratic leanings of the Supreme Court has been an issue for decades now.
The argument that this is gender discrimination seems obviously true to me so it’s shocking to me that we’re still living in a society where this type of government violence is still widely accepted. I just have to hope that we’ll eventually evolve beyond this type of Puritanism.
The right may not have good ideas, organizational skills, charm, ethics, understanding of economics, history, or politics, or strength in numbers, but they do have the one thing more important than all of these.
Money!
My time to shine! Most have already been posted but here are a few more niche ones.
Ok thanks!
So you tested that link? It’s safe?
Not sure what guns have to do with the ineffectiveness of punching Nazis but OK.
Feel free to punch your way out. You’ll find it equally effective.
I disagree. Fascists want to simplify every conflict this way—“They’re coming to kill you, so we need to kill then first”. By accepting the conflict on those terms, you’ve already conceded a rhetorical battle.
Leftists have rarely excelled at martial conflict. It’s not typically our strength. Our strength instead is that we fundamentally want to help people and make the world more free and just. We win by making sure people understand that. Getting into fist fights with Nazis undermines this strategy and doesn’t do anything to fundamentally undermine their power.
This is a false dichotomy. There are effective ways to defeat Nazis beyond punching them or reasoned debate.
Violence is justified in life or death struggles where other options have become unrealistic. That’s not the situation we’re in in the West 99% of the time. Deplatforming, doxxing, civil resistance, and various other forms of nonviolent struggle all have a better track record than street brawls which have done nothing but empower fascists. In fact, the sense of fear and chaos that these events creates is exactly the environment in which fascism will thrive. Street brawls between fascists and leftists were prominent in the Weimar Republic and did nothing to stop Nazi power—if anything it made it easier for the right to unite and paint leftists as unreasonable extremists. We see similar patterns happening today.
Politics is not the same as armed struggle. We are not engaged in armed struggle against fascism in the west. Perhaps we will be but right now one of our goals should be to avoid that becoming necessary. In the current moment public relations and persuasion matter immensely. Punching Nazis achieves little other than making people lose sight of the dangers of fascism and focus instead on “extremism” from “both sides”.
And OP has done nothing to suggest they are sympathetic to fascism so your threats against them are extremely rude and unjustified.
Edit: I also should have stressed that the most important thing is to organize. People power is the real power. Collaborate with and help everyone, not just your Maoist book club or whatever. One of the ways the Fascists won in the past is by dividing people and going after minorities one at a time. If things do devolve into armed struggle, you’ll be much better prepared if you’ve got deep roots in the community.
Weak. To really say you’ve climbed Everest, you need to start from the Challenger Deep.
Unfortunately I don’t see any of the proposed reforms measurably improving things while the right has an equal or greater grip on power. Any reforms that are easily implemented are easily neutralized or turned against the left when republicans return to power. Which, in the current political system, is an inevitability.
More radical reforms could solve the problem but would require much greater political power. In my opinion this can only be achieved by forming a mass movement that completely overpowers the right’s institutional advantages. Whether this can or will happen remains to be seen but it won’t be easy.