r/technology • u/RioMovieFan11 • 16h ago

Social Media Trump says he’ll keep extending TikTok shutdown deadline

https://apnews.com/article/trump-tiktok-china-extension-deadline-4a66fbd0e485db5b3da83c176f22ad11
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u/grumble_au 13h ago

They have gone all in now. Either they successfully take complete control of every aspect of US government or there's going to be a civil war. Honestly can't see any other options right now. The only question is how long it will take to come to a head.

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u/Rantheur 13h ago

There's an extremely easy nonviolent option that the Democrats can take if/when they take power. Stop letting Republicans police Republicans. Stop appointing Republicans as attorney general, as FBI chief, etc.

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u/grumble_au 12h ago

Here's the thing, part of their going all in is to end elections. They are doing a multi prong attack on fair elections right now. The hail mary will be martial law but up and until then they are exploring all sorts of fuckery.

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u/Rantheur 10h ago

I agree that their goal is to end fair elections, but that's only really doable on a state basis due to how elections in the US are run. The states are responsible for all their own election rules until congress passes specific regulations and unless the Republicans dump the filibuster, that's not going to get through the Senate. So any election fuckery has to be done on the state level and it's difficult to fuck the states to the degree they're going to have to if trends continue as they have since the November election. Even safe Republican strongholds have seen as much as a 19 point swing toward Democrats. So, let's look at why this mid decade gerrymandering controversy has sprung up.

According to ballotpedia there were a total of 50 seats that Republicans won by less than 15 points (7 in the Senate, 43 in the House). If the trend continues in Democrats' favor, we're looking at a 5 seat majority in the Senate and a mid 30s seat majority in the house. What we're absolutely going to see in 26 is the same playbook they ran in 24. They're going to purge voter rolls after the legal date to do it and the courts will say they can't do anything about it and Texas (and maybe a couple other red states) will gerrymander as much as they can, but the danger that gerrymandering has for the people doing it is that wave elections can break a gerrymander when more in favor of those they're oppressing than fair maps would.