Yes, in terms of any official political mechanisms to remove him. Its not pathetic, it’s how our constitution works! He would need to be betrayed by about 1/3 of the hundreds of party members who just worked to install him. These representatives aren’t from locations people want to see massive protests at, those cities are already blue.

My elected representatives are not republicans, am I supposed to move to another state to protest on their behalf? Are we gonna get millions of people waving their picket signs in the potato fields of Idaho? There aren’t even mechanisms to remove their representatives before their term is up. The GOP can just skip the angry town halls and vacation at Mar-a-Lago until the coup is done.

This is the exact type holier than thou bullshit I’m sick of. These are the mechanisms baked into our constitution; the voting population has made their vote. Any removal from office would happen by red state electors acting in good faith to protect the rule of law, and they’ve spent multiple decades proving they want to do the opposite.

You have just as much power to fly to any random red US state and protest somebody who doesn’t represent you and can’t be legally removed from office. What the fuck is your excuse?

Edit: all of that official removal process would only work under the assumption that Trump would concede to them. The SCOTUS ruled last year he could have the traitors locked up or executed for treason, so long as his stack of personally appointed judges approved. (There are no constitutional mechanisms for us to remove these judges BTW, they aren’t even elected)

You have to really drink the kool-aid to believe that shit. If the weapons they allowed us to keep were a threat to anything other than soft targets and school children they wouldn’t let us keep them

“Sorry Russia, you’re going to have to step up and remove your corrupt leaders and I’ll be happy when you do”

Fucking how? Organize? Organize what, a fucking civil war? Sorry you’re a “bit pissed” that 70% of Americans have to live under a captured techno-fascist state they didn’t vote for.

You really don’t understand how America works if you think we can hold some magical snap election or wave our pea-shooter 2nd amendment shotguns in the face of the largest and most advanced military in the world…

This doesn’t get solved without major moves by internal government factions or foreign intervention, no matter how warm and fuzzy videos of a big protest will make you feel.

Think whatever you want but I’m pretty tired of this weird ass foreign political exceptionalism. Why do the residents of Moscow not get shit for weak protests against Putin? Because America is far closer to that situation than other smaller countries facing a weaker central authority. But sure, just keep telling us to go burn the Reichstag…

Pretty easy to say “just get out and protest” when your local police don’t have armored cars and grenade launchers.

Have you been there? Its a police state dystopia

That was after 4 years of unrest. “Could easily get together” sounds like its coming from someone who’s never had a daily 2 hour round-trip driving commute. Let alone the fact that half of America was sub 0°F (-17°C) for multiple days in the past month.

Protest size will grow as the weather warms up and the crackdowns fully begin. But don’t expect to see much on the news. This time around the media and tech moguls have all preemptively bent the knee.

About 35% of Georgia’s population lives in Tbilisi. The second largest population center is is Batumi at around 6%. There are 360km between them.

The Los Angeles metro area is America’s largest population center at around 5% of the population. The DC metro area is the 7th largest at just under 2% of the population. There are 4300km between them.

This is on top of the car centric sprawl of US cities with minimal public transportation. If (even generously) 30% of the population wanted a unified protest, how would they reach each other? Let alone converge to protest at somewhere that matters.

My assumptions were built off your original comment, in which you said it was recent and driven by XHS:

The realization came with TikTok ban. Soon as I heard that TikTok could be banned, I started looking for alternatives […] I stumbled upon XHS […] about a month before everyone else. I was absolutely fucking blown away by China

I don’t know your life story and it didn’t seem like a leap to think “He uses TikTok” and “It doesn’t sound like he’s been to China from his reaction”. I could be wrong about those assumptions, but it wasn’t unreasonable. It’s pretty wild that you’re trying to walk it back even though it’s right there, verbatim.

Again, my intention wasn’t a personal attack, I’m just trying to provide a counterpoint to the sentiment I often see; that China is a bastion of progress and everything I’ve been told is western propaganda. My anecdotal explanation is to show this isn’t coming from what I read on CNN or second hand but my lived experiences in the country.

And if you want to think I’m a douche: go for it, more power to you. I just wanted to voice my thoughts on the matter.

Pretty weird that you were “blown away by China” then… No need to get mad 🤷‍♀️

My anecdotal experience is different than yours, but everything I’ve said is nothing but facts. China is a country of 1.4 billion people and 3.7 million sq mi, so obviously sentiment will vary. But I based my opinion on what I’ve personally seen and people I’ve talked to across half a dozen cities, so I feel pretty confident in my pessimism.

So you’ve been in the last few months since you learned these great things? Or was it before Covid, when people were physically caged into their apartments?

Was it only to the sterilized foreigner hotels on business trips? Or did you ever stay with locals who had to register your passport with the local police?

Were you able to spend physical currency or was everything already hooked up to official biometric identification (payments tied to socials tied to state id)?

I’m not asking to be confrontational, but the shiny foreigner facing China of yesteryear is nothing like the domestic atmosphere of China today. Their international digital presence is as carefully managed as their local platforms.

The locals I’ve met definitely have a positive view of the US, but things have gotten very dark very quickly under Xi. Think about why they could have started their emigration at any time but are choosing now.

Have you uh… actually been to China? Or talked to anyone from China (in real life)? I do both, quite often. Without fail, anyone with the means is actively trying to leave. And not in a “grass is greener” way. Those emigrating to America are fully aware of the political turmoil, they’d just rather be out before it’s not physically possible to leave.

It’s unlike we’ve been told in almost all respects…

Based on testimony from a demonstrably censored platform?

I’m not arguing for American superiority or that the vacuum won’t be easily filled by other countries. But that change isn’t automatically an upgrade.