Modern day version of a time honored southern tradition.
Everybody would gather round and essentially have a public celebration, a holiday when it was time to add another n[]gg[]r to another tree. Sometimes they’d even hack apart the body to keep bits as souveniers.
This is also a thing done in Starship Troopers. One of the TV/broadcast segments mentions live executions of traitors and deserters on channel blah, check your local station for airing times.
In case you needed any further proof that … MAGA is literally a death cult, well there ya go.
Ravenous, vicious, senseless evil.
If only hell actually existed.
One of the worst things about fascism, even among the many putrid things about it, is the public display of cruelty and dominance over the regime’s named enemies.
Among the cruel, power is measured by the ability to inflict suffering, so the regime must show its strength by increasingly extreme public displays of punishment of anyone who threatens their power, whether in fact or in their imagination.
It breaks my heart that we’ve come to this. This in particular, but everything that’s happened in the last ten years that led up to this, and everything that happened and didn’t happen before Trump and Co. that brought us to the place where someone like them could seize power. It breaks my heart, and it breaks my heart that I am all but numb to it. By right I should be stunned and horrorstruck by my government slaughtering a human being for spectacle. I can feel the feeling, deep and abstractly, but not as I should feel it. I’m used to the horrors, or my capacity to feel horror has been intentionally and methodically overwhelmed. I have to work to feel a fraction of it, and the fact that that numbness is engineered by the Russell Voughts of the world is yet another horror on the pile.
At this point I’m grimly determined to see the end of this horrorshow or die trying, but holy fuck does it suck being in the middle of it. Y’all, if your government is corrupted by the influence of the ultra wealthy and the demonization of the helpless, please do yourselves a favor and nip that shit in the bud. I wish I had practical advice on how, but clearly we in the US were not able to stop this before it metastasized. It keeps getting worse long after you think it can’t get any worse. I don’t think the US has seen the worst of it yet.
There was a time in my life where I thought we had figured this one out. Maybe believing it’s figured out is part of the problem. I really didn’t think it could possibly come to this. If I had, I think I would have been more proactive about it :(
It’ll be painful. But it will end. And then it will happen again, because human beings have been doing this shit to themselves over and over again for the entirety of our existence.
I don’t think it will ever entirely be a thing of the past, because humans are inventive and humans who wish to exercise control over their fellows will continually invent new means to do so, but I think we have a lot of room for improvement in the area of making that as difficult as possible.
One example is in media segmentation. I think one of the things that made Trump able to succeed is the extent to which he and his allies controlled the media diets of his constituency. People outside their control tend to think of American Republicans as ignorant, hateful people beyond reason. That’s not untrue, but it really undersells the massive amount of control Republican leaders have over the lens their constituents have on the world. Outside the see the Fox News histrionics about cities being overrun by drugs, and gangs, and drug-gangs, and we turn to one another and laugh at the idea that anyone could believe such an obviously not true thing. For those deep inside the bubble, they believe it because they never see any contradiction to that narrative, ever. They don’t go into cities that often, and when they do they have been conditioned to be afraid of phantom criminals. They watch the news their parents watched, listen to the AM radio, and read websites they learned about in the church they grew up in, from people they have been taught to trust. They aren’t stupid, at least not all of them. It’s very weird, and very sad, to see up close how decades of uncontested conservative propaganda blasting can warp the fundamental assumptions a person has about the world.
Anyway I think the internet is a pretty handy medium for making inroads into those bubbles. It sounds pollyanna-ish, I think, given the current sickly state of the Internet, but one of the lessons I hope the world pulls from the American trainwreck is one on how to better identify and puncture media bubbles. That shit will kill us if we let it.
Y’all, if your government is corrupted by the influence of the ultra wealthy and the demonization of the helpless, please do yourselves a favor and nip that shit in the bud. I wish I had practical advice on how, but clearly we in the US were not able to stop this before it metastasized.
Unfortunately, anyone under 70 had no way of even trying to help, given that the cancer that metastisized in the US was spread by Fox News back in the 70s. By the time I was relatively politically aware (early/mid 00s), it was already very entrenched as the “alternative to mainstream news” despite being the most popular, and thereby the most mainstream news source.
If someone could have stopped Fox News, I think we could have avoided this fate. But shitheads like Murdoch succeeded in their plan of making sure no republican would ever be nixon’d again.
The roots are older than any of us. For the US, the line “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal” has been a hypocritical fiction since the day Jefferson put pen to paper. When I was a kid I was taught that it was more of an ideal that we were slowly but inexorably marching toward, and I just don’t think “maybe, someday” is an acceptable timeframe for something as critical as equality under law.
I think Jeffs was on the right track, and that holding some variant of “all persons are equal under law” as axiomatic is necessary for democratic government, but in 250 years we have never satisfactorily held ourselves to the standard we claim to hold, and the consequences of that hypocrisy have waxed and waned over the decades as the Rupert Murdochs of the world have sought to exploit it to their own ends, but it’s never not been present in some fashion.
To extend the cancer metaphor, I don’t know that a cure can be trusted to stick, even if we can get the current wave into remission. Countries of a certain age need routine screenings and effective early-stage interventions, and the US has done neither consistently. I don’t really know what working versions of those would look like. I think the origins of fascism have a mutagenic quality that make any one treatment a mere stop-gap until some selfish one finds a way to circumvent it, so maybe it’s more a game of constant vigilance and treating outbreaks as they occur, decisively, than coming up with one all-encompassing solution.
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I have no words for this my friends. Not even “what the fuck” can fully encapsulate my level of disbelief.
Tonight on the violence network!
It’s like we ended up with some sort of horrid crossover between 1984 and Idiocracy.
If there is a big audience, think of the advertising rights and the money to be made. I imagine a run on death row to cash in. What a barbaric bunch of clowns.
I hope they advertise the show “Ow, my balls”
Wait until they make it pay TV…
My first response is to do it to show how brutal and terrible it is to wake people up. Then, I remember how many people who tie their identities to not waking up and how this would normalize murder for them.
I remember watching this interview with a journalist who bore witness to an execution by firing squad, and it felt a lot like he was using that interview to finally talk about what he saw and maybe come to terms with it. He was clearly very shaken by everything. Then I read the comments under the video and lost some faith in humanity.
What streaming platform has a TOS that allows this?
Does Twitter/X support streaming? Musk would definitely allow this.
Poob has it for you
Zero chance they could actually swing the kind of infra required to put on a live stream of that magnitude.
Video streaming is hard, actually
It’s going to crash before the execution, I guarantee it.
I know you mean the website, but can we pretend you mean the government?
The big corporations and this administration are so deeply in bed with each other it would not surprise me if they made an exception in their TOS for this
I have the bad habit of more and more just believing these headlines
Then I notice that behavior, and go looking for the source. often when I think “surely that has to have some context”
Just to again and again realize “no, they literally just said/did that”
I mean… I am a little surprised, somehow USA keeps crossing the line and I never expect it.
at least he mostly just killed people that signed up for it
So we’re just pulling ideas directly from dystopias now?
More like if 14th century had twitch.
This is so antithetical. This is exactly what the shooter wants. Its only going to make him a martyr.
The guy was paralyzed from the waist down. They are going to shot up a guy in a wheelchair. The optics alone. Jfc.
They’ll truss him up so it looks like he’s standing, guaranteed.
I guess the administration is at least listening to someone with a couple braincells (despite those cells being defective). When the people are poor and hungry, you must give them a circus. Public executions are one of the original forms of pacifying entertainment for the masses. This will majorly backfire tho
Circus worked in Rome, the Circus Maximus and the Colosseum were barbaric and pacifiers at the same time.
Are they going to invite North Korea’s leader for the after-party?
For some stupid reason I keep thinking there’s a bottom to hit with these people…
I miss two hours ago, when I thought this was a joke.
