Welcome to 2022 TPM. Hope you are restored and rested from the Holidays.
Anyway. “A third of Americans think”
I see where your argument went south. More likely that third lets someone else think for them.
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You looked backward. He has already done so. That’s cheating.
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Nonsense. Everyone knows it was a soundstage in New Mexico.
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Note that the loudest drumbeat for violence is coming from right wing churches. Go to rightwingwatch.com and look at the video clips especially from right wing preachers calling for overthrowing the government and reinstating Poopy Pants on the throne.
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Hey, give me a break, it’s Monday morning! 
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“Earky days”?
Did you do that?
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Well, it’s not exactly blind optimism to think that modern Americans are too fat and lazy to get into a shooting war with each other over politics. They’re real good at yelling at each other across social media though.
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Far too many variables to be able to predict other than trump will whine and stamp his feet continually and the virus will rage with some new variant after omicron. Also about one third of Americans will continue to be idiots.
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I appreciate your point, it is true that Metastasisdata surely has plenty of blame. Deeper “social connections” that leverage knee-jerk misinformation and propaganda at the speed of electrons surely amplifies my overall outline above like global warming seems to spin up category 5 hurricanes.
And, on that note I put a bookmark here on Myanmar and ask, what happens here given the GQP?
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Meanwhile in Canada…
“By 2025, American democracy could collapse, causing extreme domestic political instability, including widespread civil violence,” writes Homer-Dixon, author of the book “Commanding Hope: The Power We Have to Renew a World in Peril” and founder of Royal Roads’ Cascade Institute. “By 2030, if not sooner, the country could be governed by a right-wing dictatorship. We mustn’t dismiss these possibilities just because they seem ludicrous or too horrible to imagine.”
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The coup failed the same way the beer hall putch failed. The leaders have so far been coddled. They have been given pin and paper to write their own version of Mein Kampt, this time with an entire broadcast industry blarring it out to the angry masses. American society is paying the price for shipping all of its industry to the far east. People who aren’t upper middle class, at least, have been abandoned by leaders who are happy to divert attention from the plight of people in the middle class. The big shots who have failed the working / middle class, are actively using their power to loudly blame those who have always been on the bottom rung. When it isn’t bread and circuses, it is why don’t you and him fight. It is a potent brew that is bound to end in irrational violence sometime soon.
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Can we say “charge the MFFG with sedition pleeeeze?”
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Yes. Frequently. Working from phone. Corrected.
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And undoubtedly at least a part of that third are people like me who don’t believe in violence as a political tool, but would fight back in some form against an authoritarian takeover by someone like Trump.
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I think that we will stop just short of a civil war level of violence. The United States will break up into six to eight regional entities, ranging from “Jesusland” to the “People’s Socialist Democratic Egalitarian Republic.” And all will be irrelevant. “Not with a bang, but with a whimper.”
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If you read the poll, it’s also clear that some of the ‘justified’ would be under extreme conditions. Let’s put this fully in-context, shall we?
And we have no idea how extreme the ‘violates or takes away rights or freedoms / Oppresses people’ or ‘abuses power / Tyranny’ cases would need to be. Hell, 3% were apparently just saying they though the American Revolution was justified. Another 3% said that violence was (or could be) justified if the President cancels elections or refuses to accept the results (which presumably doesn’t mean a scenario like Trump, where he’s not President, but still refuses to accept them, but rather where he refuses to leave power and manages to avoid being dragged from the building because the levers of power are on his side, ie: a coup).
Frankly, if the government does become a dictatorship, or suspends elections (Which is the same thing, in effect), and essentially strips away the non-violent avenues for change, wouldn’t you want people to be willing to take up arms to defend democracy?
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Pretty much, yeah.
The Former Guy excelled at creating gilded shit-holes. Now he has a whole political dysfunctional apparatus to help him.
When did he get the upgrade?
This is sometimes true, but not always true. You can certainly write poll questions in ways that lead respondents, but it doesn’t always happen that way. The bigger weakness of polls is that they take complex issues and reduce them to a binary answer. (Maybe trinary, if “Fuck off, this is a stupid question” is a possible response.)
As @castor_troy noted above, radicals on the far left and the far right agree that violence against the government is (sometimes) necessary, they would utterly disagree about the circumstances where rebellion (or insurrection if you prefer) is necessary.
One of the things I told my students back in the day when I was teaching statistics was that you can’t understand a poll until you’ve looked at the survey questions and you’ve looked at how the respondents map onto the target population.
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That’s a depressingly low figure.
The one response that should have every patriot lining up to serve, and it gets 15%???
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Actually that sounds about right. It’s probably been that way since the 60’s or longer.
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Here is the full survey
And 1/3 of respondents are crazy in most answers.
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