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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   30208 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 14, 2023

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I can't wait for Republicans in 2025 trying to figure out how they could have possibly lost with their candidate trying to campaign from a prison cell.

Probably they'll decide it was fraud again.

Do you think that being able to create a situation where your political opposition must run their campaign from a prison cell counts as actual power? Is it actual power when Putin does it?

The person who created this situation is Donald Trump.

Would you say the same thing about Navalny?

No.

He broke the law, didn't he?

He may or may not have done. I'm not aware and I don't think it's particularly relevant. Putin controls the Russian system and uses any means at his disposal - legal, illegal, whatever - to crush opposition.

It's not realistically possible to stand for election as an opposition candidate and win in Russia. In America, it is - and it has been done in the last 2 Presidential elections.

You're mistaking what it means to be "opposition". I think everyone else is saying that "opposition" means "opposition to entrenched powers in the bureaucracy". But that mark, only one of the two last presidential elections was won by the opposition. We saw it happen the first time, and then we saw the entrenched powers in the bureaucracy absolutely freak out and go totally mad, we saw them publicly declare that they felt bad about not pulling out all the stops to prevent it, publicly declare that they were going to pull out all the stops to prevent it from happening again, and then we saw them actually pull out all the stops to prevent it from happening again.

It would be as if Putin somehow lost an election, spent a term essentially running the government from afar, saw that Navalny had zero success in wrangling any of the organs of power, and then saw all those organs of power ensure that Navalny lost the following election to Putin and was promptly jailed.

Trump wasn't in opposition to the entrenched powers in the bureaucracy. As you say yourself, he did nothing to weaken them. Nor did he even try.

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