this post was submitted on 10 Nov 2024
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Sanders got fucked in 2016 and the Democrats who get nominated aren’t great and yes it’s partially the Democrats’ fault they got so few votes in 2024. I strongly disagree that it’s chiefly their fault, but that horse is out of the barn now, and also the barn is on fire now and connected to the house with the children inside.
There will be some incredible shit going down in the next few years. It’ll be a challenge to have any sort of elections in 2028 that have anything non-Republican in any position to win anything. I don’t think it will happen.
If you want to have a conversation about how we get left-wing values to win in future elections, start with how we fight to preserve basic freedoms like elections that don’t have Trump’s election integrity squad in charge of them, and free speech online, and the military not being used against American protestors.
I hope I’m wrong but I think some real shit is going to go down real soon. I don’t think we should assume elections are going to be normal and then plan from that assumption.
If left-wing values can't win in 2028 it will be because the Democratic candidate runs as a knock-off Republican again, which isn't going to win either.
Give it a rest. I can argue back my point of view to you, and we can go back and forth a little, and it's pointless.
I can guarantee you that people in large numbers will get their doors kicked in by the police and hauled away, and laws will get passed that make it a crime to be anti-Republican. How wide a scale and how bad that all will get isn't certain, but I think it will be pretty bad.
Your days of pointing at the Democrats as the problem need to stop, and their days of pointing at the Bernie Sanders crowd and the Palestine protestors as the problem need to stop, because even if we (edit: ~~don't~~) do put all that bullshit aside and start fighting together against the real enemy for real, we might not win. I really don't care who's right anymore. Before the election, I did. That stuff is over.
The more people who are still convinced that their own side needs to be made into the enemy in any respect, the harder that fight will get, and it'll already be hard, and bad.
If you can better define and quantify your expectations, I might be willing to take the other side of that bet.
Sure. 100,000 people hauled away by the cops when they haven’t done anything or committed what we would now consider a crime. Mass deportations of currently legal immigrants, or serious charges for people who participated in a protest but nothing else, is the obvious possibility.
That and laws or federally enforced law-facsimiles of some kind that mean you get punished just for a certain viewpoint that would be fine now. It could be a crime for a social media company or a private citizen to debunk election fraud claims from 2020, or something similar to that.
So, 100,000 people arrested or otherwise taken from their homes under a new or previously unimplemented legal pretext? I think we need to add a narrow timeframe over which these detentions would occur, like a single week. Is this number separate or inclusive of people who get deported on some immigration basis?
1.1 million people were officially "returned" to Mexico in one year of Operation Wetback. So, let's say Trump suddenly revokes the legal status of and deports at least that many people, times some factor to account for population increase, in the first year of his term.
A lot of people have been arrested at peaceful protests under Biden, so it seems like we're already at a grim baseline condition. Not sure what the bet is here.
Maybe there are some bills or amendment text floating around you can point to that if passed and successfully enforced would meet this expectation? That includes beating first amendment challenges, right?
Are you guaranteeing all of these scenarios or just any of them? Or should each one be a separate bet?
Is there a betting community on Lemmy where we could post our bet?
Yes.
Why? 100,000 people over the course of a few months isn't enough of a problem for you?
Separate. I'm excluding people who already don't have a legal right to stay in the US. I think the number of people who are technically already vulnerable to deportation, who will be deported, will be much greater than 100,000. As you pointed out, that's already going on. It's hard to measure in a number how much additional cruelty Trump will add to that by doing a "better" job at rooting out and deporting those people, so I'm not including that. The 100,000 is only people who would have been able to stay in the US, or out of prison or extralegal punishment, who now will not.
I phrased it as "serious charges" on purpose. Lots of people get arrested at protests and then released, either without charges or with some kind of misdemeanor. Biden didn't invent that, and usually it's being done by local cops who often don't even like Biden, and definitely don't care what he thinks about what they should be doing to the protestors.
I said "serious charges." We can quantify it as a year or more in prison, or something similar or worse that's extralegal. That happens on a very occasional basis here, to a handful of people like the cop city protestors, or to that handful of climate protestors in the UK. I expect that under Trump, the scale of serious charges and prison time or worse for these protestors or some other type of "enemy" will dramatically increase. That's why I quoted the 100,000 people number as a total for all of this extralegal action, deportation and imprisonment and all.
Just to give you a sense of "or worse," what he did last time was issue an order for the National Guard to start shooting them. They didn't, last time, and I expect that they probably still won't in a lot of cases. I think he may create new federal law enforcement agencies which will obey that type of order.
It sounds, to me, like you're saying that Biden is causing BLM protestors to get arrested and held for a couple of days in the local jail, and that's already happening so what's the difference if Trump is creating a new federal law enforcement agency to give them felonies or just shoot them. If I'm hearing you right about that, then I think that indicates a lack of understanding of the grave differences between a Biden presidency and a Trump presidency. That's what I'm trying to impress on you.
I think a lot of this will be extralegal. We can quantify it by saying that if people start getting criminal charges because of what they said on social media, or what they allow to be posted on their social media site, because it was anti-Republican in some sense, the bet is passed. I don't know exactly what the legal structure if any will be surrounding it, so I don't want to involve that into the equation. Whether or not the physical people start going to the physical courtrooms or prisons is the relevant factor. Trust me, if it starts happening, we won't need to quibble. You'll know it when you see it.
It's two scenarios. One is 100,000 people getting deportation or prison time for things that are currently absolutely clearly legal, such as being Hispanic or attending a protest. The other is people receiving charges for expressing, or amplifying or not, a political viewpoint. We can limit that second one to social media, as a way of making it more concrete. We can make those two things as two separate bets, I guess.
How much were you thinking? I don't really want to bet, to be honest. I'm happy to give you some amount of money if it doesn't happen. I'll be so happy that I won't give a fuck. If I win, we can set it up that you have to give that amount of money to some kind of charity or operation that's trying to resist. I don't want the money. It's not a fun thing for me to talk about.
I did a quick search and the most recent statistic I found was that at least 7.36 million people were arrested for all offenses in the US in 2022. That is about half of the peak annual rate in the nineties. The sad reality is that 100,000 more arrests spread out over a year just isn't that much. If you are clarifying the scenario as "100,000 people getting deportation or prison time for things that are currently absolutely clearly legal, such as being Hispanic or attending a protest", then that is specific enough for me to agree to a six month window.
I agree on the terms for the second scenario, that there's new legislation or policy under Trump that leads to social media users or operators getting criminally charged merely for social media posts that are critical of the Republican party.
I'll bet $50 against each scenario. I'm fine with not paying each other. The loser can pay that much to the organization of the winner's choice. If I am successful I will probably choose a smaller group that provides legal assistance to immigrants and asylum seekers or maybe a strike fund. I don't know. The point is I won't expect you to give money to something bad.
I said 100,000 who receive at least a year of imprisonment, or deportation, or something similarly severe like getting shot. Someone just getting arrested, I don’t really care about. They already do that, and the damage isn’t always nothing, but I was talking about life-altering punishments.
There were 64,142 felony or class A misdemeanor sentences pronounced in 2022. A year is about the bottom end of prison time for a felony, so that’s probably an okay estimate for the number of people who received that punishment level in 2022.
https://www.ussc.gov/about/annual-report-2022
I’m fine with the six-month timeframe you said. If it goes from 32,000 cases to 132,000 cases then you’ll agree that’s a problem.
You know what? Sure. I’ll shake on it if you will. If we’re still around and on Lemmy at the end, hit me up and we’ll see how it happened.
🤝