Cool, I will certainly keep that in mind. Very new to the platform.

I sure hope you are right about that.

aw thanks :)

thank

I’m happy to explain. I opened a new group in lemmy for the first time yesterday. Thats where the crosspost is from, and at time of writing it is still over there on the trending bar for the homepage. Book, isn’t done yet, and I haven’t felt the need to set up the infrastructure to start taking anyones money, because no one has offered(though when I do it will be a set-your-own-price ebook preorder)(maybe a crowdsourced hardback edition or something if we’re feeling fancy)(tho i was just counting on paying for a paperback one myself then doing the ebook thing). So this is a crosspost of the introductory post for the new !usauthoritarianism@lemmy.world community.

edit: personally, my mind is made up. I have a facial scar from the police. So for me, I’ll be going outside of the united states, and nervously anticipating the very real possibility that I will be in a position to advocate for americans fleeing the US. I also hope thats a hyperbolic fear.

Although I do think I did a fair job of keeping that particular view out of the post. I’m not trying to discourage anyone. I am trying to reassure the people that feel discouraged, that they are not insane. Their experiences are real, and toxic positivity from the democratic establishment will never change that.

i adore john green edit: thank you for the feedback. there is a method to this. 1 ofc ofc, its very simple. im not actually apologizing I am asking people not to yell at me. 2 100% 100% I hate the government. When I see visions of hell it is full of police. Personally, don’t really see the issue. Sure, you gotta double check with other people about some things just to make sure you’re not accidentally making stuff up, but in generally id really just say; yea. I know. people should believe in the arguments they make. 3 ooh wow thats interesting. I didn’t know that about the midwest. Though, I have been to Minneapolis and that city is awful. Im definitely interested in knowing what really happened. Its definitely not made up, that keeps coming up, always good to reaffirm, the US is definitely not totalitarian. I have found what this project is in the spaces around reframing the facts that we do know. So the real big one is: forced labor, and the threat of imprisonment and forced labor have been a virtually constant fact of life for black men, the entire time, to the modern day. <<Theres a lot of elements going on in that assertion but the basic one is the continuity of what that actually looks like to someone on the ground. moment to moment, when the systems were implemented. seriously, you put it on a timeline and its plain as day: the US runs on foundation set by forced labor. Slave codes => Jim Crow, vagrancy laws and prisoner sale => modern mass incarceration and more than a million workers rented for pennies to supplement every industry from agriculture and firefighting to manufacturing and fast food. Its how america works. I really just do not buy into the neoliberal talking point that technology or culture make any of this magically okay, and I fully do not care about the comparably sized but significantly weaker other countries around the world who are basically just grappling with their own versions of this dilemma. Yea, sure, theyll be the ones on the up if and when the US keeps fumbling its lead. That is not what, “being a threat”, means. Just because we changed the name on the tin from department of war to department of defense does not actually mean that the things that it does aren’t acts of war and provocation and instead magically acts of reasonable defense. That’s not how any of this works. It just means you have non native english speakers saying that they hate freedom. I feel like im losing my mind. you can see this in history. states do this all the time. you can’t change reality by changing language you just change the language.

im writing a book, and I started a social media campaign? thing around it over the last year or 2, depending on when we start counting. Its a personal project i have worked on for some time. I picked it up while studying for a history degree. idk man, it kind of feels like you’re just pushing back at like, the concept of powerlessness, can’t help with that. Yea, I write like a lunatic. I’m upset. Ive dedicated a chunk of my life to finding the truth on this and nobody cares. The people who agree with me take it as a basic assertion of reality that everyone grew out of as an indignant child, and most else seem to consider it a spear leveled against the heart of america.

I don’t have the capacity to respond in the full reddit way, but I will note that this project was born out of a desire to separate out what specifically authoritarianism even means in the context of american exceptionalism, its not something tertiary or able to be ignored, the belief that the United States is the best country in the world, is the foundation of what american was and what it is. This belief predicates the evidence used to justify it. It is,… fuck man, its fully and literally what inspired the nazis. the fasci hang on the wall in the chamber of gods sake. I’m not calling the US fascist, I very specifically said its not, yet. What I want to know is why every stoic american I bring this basic ass, 3rd grade history level awareness of a set of moral contractions, assertion to is trying to shout it down or cover it up. yal engage in a constant rhetorical pivot that is visibly the result of propaganda damaging the capacity for logic. The first step to avoiding “inevitability thinking” or whatever tf youre trying to say, is an honest and frank awareness and open assessment of where we are and the trajectory of the historical context as a whole. edit: -4 reading comprehension just out the gate to say im calling the US fascist. frfr i should have checked out then. what part of

Anyway, the US is an authoritarian state. It’s not totalitarian. It’s not fascist,