The nation’s third shutdown in 12 years is once again raising anxiety levels among service members and their families because those in uniform are working without pay. While they would receive back pay once the impasse ends, many military families live paycheck to paycheck.
During previous shutdowns, Congress passed legislation to ensure that troops kept earning their salaries, but time is running out before they miss their first paycheck in less than a week.
I really hope this drives a solid wedge between the authoritarian regime and the military.
Active duty and younger vets seem more capable of seeing the bullshit than old vets.
I see a lot of vets against fascism springing up all over protest posts, and they seem to generally be somewhere between mid-20s to 40s.
Older ones, however, seem more rare, or generally just super MAGA.
Just my own anecdotal observations of what algorithms put on my feed
It won’t. Not long term anyways. Most military members voted for the GOP despite the open disrespect trump showed them in his first term.
The GOP is truly incapable of doing what they want without punching themselves in the dick.
“We’re gonna give tax cuts to billionaires and millionaires! And take away the poor’s healthcare to get it! And we’re gonna send ICE to come kidnap your brown people! Balance this tarriff situation in our favor! The military is coming to kill you left wing protestors!”
“Uh, sir. The first thing caused the govt to shutdown, which means all our ghouls are off payroll… Also the untrained ICE thugs are pissing off police unions. Also the farmers have no more employees. Also they can’t sell their crop because no one’s buying due to those tariffs. Also we have a supermajority and absolutely no one to blame but ourselves for fucking up royally a layup of an economic situation. Also everyone hates us and our own generals don’t respect us and have indicated the military will be there to protect the protestors.”
Nice.
They will just blame someone else anyway and their well-indoctrinated morons will believe it…
Lemmy.ml users also believe this but it’s actually because they’re the same
Great example of this is Oklahoma. Republican dominated for decades and where has it gotten the state? Last in almost every category. Why? Religion and “I’ll never vote for a Democrat!” Attitude. This is the future of America
An infuriating and depressing portion of our electorate treats our politics like (American) football teams - the players and coaches may change, but they’re always gonna vote for “their guys”. Nothing but the dogma matters to them.
I recently started noticing the hyper competitive bullshit that is everywhere. This shitty belief that the only way you can win is if the opposition loses is really hurting everybody.
Zero-sum mentalities are going to kill us all :(
A counter example is Kansas. GOP Sam Brownback, elected in 2011, destroyed the state’s economy following harsh right-wing philosophies turning the state into what many called “Brownbackistan” referencing his authoritarian approach. Brownback resigned at the lowest point after all his damage was done. The GOP lieutenant governor finished out the remaining 1 year of the term. At the next election in 2019 Democrat Laura Kelly won the office. She’s still governor to this day having been re-elected in 2022.
Much better example is Mississippi, the worst of all states and also the most conservative state.
I don’t know where you get the idea that Oklahoma is last in almost everything, because the two last places in anything positive (and the two first ones in anything bad) almost invariably belong to Mississippi and Alabama.
Not saying that Oklahoma isn’t a hellhole, mind you, but compared to Mississippi, it’s almost tolerable.
Check out latest rankings. Oklahoma has dropped to dead last in education and Healthcare. Mississippi does lead Oklahoma in crime and fiscal stability.
We can agree Republicans have destroyed both states and they are both great examples of that leadership
Except their well-indoctrinated morons are only about 30% of the population, and every poll I’ve seen shows more people blaming the Republicans for the current situation (tbf, a few of them show over 50% blaming Dems as well, but even in those the numbers of people blaming Republicans is even higher).
Also, even with that 30%, I think they’re going to start struggling soon. Like, even if you accept that this is all the fault of dastardly Dems, what’s the Republicans’ plan to stop them here? They don’t actually have the totalitarian powers to beat all of their political opponents into submission as much as they try to convince us otherwise with a few spectacles (e.g. James Comey, Letitia James, every anti-ICE protester who gets brutalized on camera, etc.). They can keep hollering their lies and blaming everyone else, but then the government is just going to stay shutdown, and then what? The only realistic path out of this if the Dems hold their line is for the GOP to take a big ol’ L on this, which is going to make that 30% lose their minds and will just seal the deal with independents that Republicans caused this to begin with.
e; I’m bad at spelking
Let’s hope this is true. But realistically speaking 30% before gerrymandering, election interference and a voting system really bad at creating proportional results can easily create a comfortable majority, too.
I so wish that that was more of a joke than it is these days
I’m not sure the team-sports-like-cult still holds as much power when the paychecks stop coming.
I always hope the same. But the sheer amount of Leopards-ate-my-face reports by people crying about their whole financial (or otherwise) existence being destroyed yet firmly assuring that they of course still support their orange god-emperor and only need just a bit of help please are not a good sign.
Not American, but what’s this about the military saying they’ll protect protestors? That’s pretty big, thats what toppled Egypt in 2011, the military sided with protestors.
The general headed to Portland said this in an interview in the last 48 hrs. News cycle is insane right now; tough to find.
It was a subdued but a clear statement. Said they’ll follow lawful orders, and they’ll protect Oregonians, which he in a word clarified, the protestors.
I’ll edit this if I find it. I saw it from a content creator who does a good job gathering these clips by being more terminally online than I can manage.
Content creator was Parkrose Permaculture.
Found it
Clip of general’s statement is at 2:58.
3:40: “[Those deployed] will be protecting any protestors at the ICE facility.”
I hate how hard it is to find “old news”.
I feel it’s deliberate.
Just because I was curious, here is the article that YT video is covering. From The Oregonian
Oregon general’s testimony that National Guard troops ‘will be protecting any protesters’ gains traction online
The article is from October 8th, the video clip is “A nine-day-old snippet of testimony in front of Oregon lawmakers.” My curiosity did not extend to digging up the source recording of the full testimony.
You misunderstand them entirely. They think punching themselves in the dick is a good thing, it’s part of the plan. They are far to fucking stupid to realize the damage until after they’ve done it, and then they’re so embarrassed that they punched themselves in their own dick, they double down and start doing it more, telling people that punching themselves in the dick is cool now and they always meant for it to hurt.
The real fucking crazy part is some people start punching themselves in the dick just to be part of the club.
“Oft evil will shall evil mar” ~King Theoden
That’s the thing, though, we have a whole lot of useful idiots among leftists/liberals and of course “centrists” that keep giving an assist to the Confederate Party by trying to claim the economy last fall was not good and was not heading in the right direction.
So you have The Annoying Orange and his apparatchiks saying things like “we have to dig out from the economic disaster the Biden administration left us in” - and a whole lot of people, not just Republicans, believe that load of horseshit.
There are always minorities to blame!!
The divide already exists. It just tends to show up in splits between officers and enlisted men as well as between Army/Navy and Marines/Air Force.
There are plenty of Wesley Clarks and Joe Sestaks and Richard Ojedas and Jim Webbs and Mikie Sherrills and Elissa Slotkins in the Democratic Party. The problem is that these people generally kinda suck (except Sestak, he was honestly pretty cool). They tend to be foreign policy hawks, economic conservatives, and generally more friendly with big business than labor. They run on platforms that emphasize our need to expand an already bloated national security state, to consolidate more power in the Executive Branch, and to further integrate ourselves with our allies (like Israel and Argentina and The Philippines and South Korea) regardless of how fucked up their governments happen to be.
These are the Democrats who look at the Halcyon Liberal Era and think America was at its best when it was fighting multi-front global war against Evil Foreigners.
In lieu of pay, raping and piliging will be over looked.