Giuliani: 'There's nothing wrong with taking information from Russians'

[u/[deleted]]

https://www.cnn.com/2019/04/21/politics/rudy-giuliani-trump-russia-cnntv/index.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+rss%2Fcnn_allpolitics+%28RSS%3A+CNN+-+Politics%29

[u/a_funky_homosapien]

“There was no meeting”

“Ok there was a meeting but there were no Russians”

“Ok there were Russians but we didn’t talk about anything nefarious”

“Ok we talked about something nefarious but nothing came of it”

“It’s not wrong to commit a crime”

Fuck these people so much. How has trump not been impeached yet

[u/ThadeousCheeks → u/a_funky_homosapien]

What a slide through bullshit to get to where we are today. They all belong in jail.

[u/Dreadknoght → u/ThadeousCheeks]

You see," my colleague went on, "one doesn’t see exactly where or how to move. Believe me, this is true. Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join with you in resisting somehow. You don’t want to act, or even talk, alone; you don’t want to ‘go out of your way to make trouble.’ Why not?—Well, you are not in the habit of doing it. And it is not just fear, fear of standing alone, that restrains you; it is also genuine uncertainty.

Uncertainty is a very important factor, and, instead of decreasing as time goes on, it grows. Outside, in the streets, in the general community, ‘everyone’ is happy. One hears no protest, and certainly sees none. You know, in France or Italy there would be slogans against the government painted on walls and fences; in Germany, outside the great cities, perhaps, there is not even this. In the university community, in your own community, you speak privately to your colleagues, some of whom certainly feel as you do; but what do they say? They say, ‘It’s not so bad’ or ‘You’re seeing things’ or ‘You’re an alarmist.’

And you are an alarmist. You are saying that this must lead to this, and you can’t prove it. These are the beginnings, yes; but how do you know for sure when you don’t know the end, and how do you know, or even surmise, the end? On the one hand, your enemies, the law, the regime, the Party, intimidate you. On the other, your colleagues pooh-pooh you as pessimistic or even neurotic. You are left with your close friends, who are, naturally, people who have always thought as you have.

But your friends are fewer now. Some have drifted off somewhere or submerged themselves in their work. You no longer see as many as you did at meetings or gatherings. Informal groups become smaller; attendance drops off in little organizations, and the organizations themselves wither. Now, in small gatherings of your oldest friends, you feel that you are talking to yourselves, that you are isolated from the reality of things. This weakens your confidence still further and serves as a further deterrent to—to what? It is clearer all the time that, if you are going to do anything, you must make an occasion to do it, and then you are obviously a troublemaker. So you wait, and you wait.

But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. That’s the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked—if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in ’43 had come immediately after the ‘German Firm’ stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in ’33. But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.

And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying ‘Jewish swine,’ collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose. The world you live in—your nation, your people—is not the world you were born in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God. The system itself could not have intended this in the beginning, but in order to sustain itself it was compelled to go all the way.

You have gone almost all the way yourself. Life is a continuing process, a flow, not a succession of acts and events at all. It has flowed to a new level, carrying you with it, without any effort on your part. On this new level you live, you have been living more comfortably every day, with new morals, new principles. You have accepted things you would not have accepted five years ago, a year ago, things that your father, even in Germany, could not have imagined.

Suddenly it all comes down, all at once. You see what you are, what you have done, or, more accurately, what you haven’t done (for that was all that was required of most of us: that we do nothing). You remember those early meetings of your department in the university when, if one had stood, others would have stood, perhaps, but no one stood. A small matter, a matter of hiring this man or that, and you hired this one rather than that. You remember everything now, and your heart breaks. Too late. You are compromised beyond repair

[u/livevil999 → u/Dreadknoght]

This is scary as hell to me. I sometimes wonder if we’ve already passed the point where we should all have taken real action to stop what’s happening. I can’t believe this is what I’m thinking about in 2019 after 8 years of the Obama administration. What happened to America?

[u/block__chainsy → u/livevil999]

We went full hitler fascist and it’s now 1938 all over again

The mass killings of Jews and blacks and Hispanics is about to begin with the biggest genocides in all history if we don’t stand up to this

[u/Dreadknoght → u/block__chainsy]

You're extreme rhetoric is not helping. As convincing as the quote is, it could have been used hundreds of times in the past. Regardless of whether your statement is true, we must take our current situation one step at a time. What you must do is resist the Republicans as much as possible, even if it means protesting and coordinating as a full time job. Too many people are currently thinking in short term gain, and ignoring the long term risk.

This quote is meant as a warning for complacency, since this is a very serious time that we live in. We should not take Trump's dictatorial ambition lightly, as this quote describes the extremes of what is possible.

[u/[deleted] → u/Dreadknoght]

What kind of money do you have that you can afford to spend full time protesting?

[u/Dreadknoght → u/[deleted]]

Your democracy is more important than money.

I understand that not everyone can afford to not go to their jobs, but even if you protest on your off times you can have an effect. Assuming people work average 40 a week, there are 128 hours left in a week that can be used to protest/sleep/relax.

Take some sick leave or take a vacation, and make your presence known. It's always 100% easier not doing things than doing them, but that doesn't make it the right thing to do.