When people ask why Russians don't protest---

[kpete]

Since the mass rallies of 2012 against election rigging & against Putin, he’s made sure to crack down on all forms of dissent including street protests. Remember it’s really not easy to be in opposition in Russia today

?width=560
?w=1200

"Russia don't touch Ukraine!" 6 people unfurled banners against invasion in downtown Moscow. Waiting police immediately arrested them

Link to tweet

?s=20&t=SYQV_3BvJ_3GABmfX4tHbw

[JohnSJ]

1. Remember Alexei Anatolievich Navalny

[secondwind]

2. ...

[Mysterian]

3. Exactly the kind of society traitorous republicans want to create in the USA

Republicans would throw away every freedom fought for by generations of Americans to install a dictatorship.

[kpete]

6. Exactly

how I imagine the future

[world wide wally]

29. Only because Trump IS God.

[Mr. Ected]

4. Get off your ass, Merrick Garland

This is the world Trump and the Magats have in store for us, so justice please move swiftly.

[Tetrachloride]

5. I have an online acquaintance in Russia

his posts are innocuous. i presume he’s not in pootie crowd

[EYESORE 9001]

10. I wouldn't expect anything approaching candor from online communication originating in Russia

It could be hazardous to health and well-being.

[greatauntoftriplets]

7. Russian dissidents pay a price.

Alexei Navalny is just one example.

[Grokenstein]

8. And yet arresting truckers to free up a blockaded city after THREE WEEKS

is "tyranny" that requires the US to invade an ally (if you're a rightwank whackjob, anyway).

Link to tweet

STOP talking about Russia! STOP! STAAAAAAHP!

[Busterscruggs]

11. How on earth

That woman is a republican when that whole party was created to preserve slavery is beyond me. Some sort of Stockholm syndrome I guess?

[HUAJIAO]

18. Unless I am mistaken the republican party was founded to fight AGAINST slavery.

In Ripon, Wisconsin, former members of the Whig Party meet to establish a new party to oppose the spread of slavery into the western territories. The Whig Party, which was formed in 1834 to oppose the “tyranny” of President Andrew Jackson, had shown itself incapable of coping with the national crisis over slavery.

With the successful introduction of the Kansas-Nebraska Bill of 1854, an act that dissolved the terms of the Missouri Compromise and allowed slave or free status to be decided in the territories by popular sovereignty, the Whigs disintegrated. By February 1854, anti-slavery Whigs had begun meeting in the upper midwestern states to discuss the formation of a new party. One such meeting, in Wisconsin on March 20, 1854, is generally remembered as the founding meeting of the Republican Party.

The Republicans rapidly gained supporters in the North, and in 1856 their first presidential candidate, John C. Fremont, won 11 of the 16 Northern states. By 1860, the majority of the Southern slave states were publicly threatening secession if the Republicans won the presidency. In November 1860, Republican Abraham Lincoln was elected president over a divided Democratic Party, and six weeks later South Carolina formally seceded from the Union. Within six more weeks, five other Southern states had followed South Carolina’s lead, and in April 1861 the Civil War began when Confederate shore batteries under General P.G.T. Beauregard opened fire on Fort Sumter in South Carolina’s Charleston Harbor.

The Civil War firmly identified the Republican Party as the party of the victorious North, and after the war the Republican-dominated Congress forced a “Radical Reconstruction” policy on the South, which saw the passage of the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments to the Constitution and the granting of equal rights to all Southern citizens. By 1876, the Republican Party had lost control of the South, but it continued to dominate the presidency until the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933.

https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/republican-party-founded

[Farmer-Rick]

20. Yeah, but they have since been bought up

By the filthy rich and people of color voting is their biggest fear.

[certainot]

22. it became the party of limbaugh and now it rots with him. they're all ditto heads

[groundloop]

23. Yes.... look back to Ronnie Raygun and his "states rights" speech in MS

Saint Ronnie held a campaign rally in Mississippi, not far from where three civil rights workers were murdered. This was an obvious nod to racists all across the south, and that start of the GQP march down the sewer of racism.

[TeamProg]

32. I think Reagan was trying to buy votes on the racism that already existed.

Teddy Roosevelt was one of the last liberal Republicans while Hoover was an early conservative Republican.

FDR was one of the first liberal Dems.

Dems were previously the conservative "states' rights" party being pro-slavery.

The long Whig Party post above is accurate but leaves out identifying Dems as the conservative party at that time.

Whigs were split on slavery expansion into the new western territories as told.

Republicans were the anti-slavery, big gov't, pro-federal railroad party until the early 20th century.

Some conservative Dixie-Crats still rep'ed the south into the 1960's though.. weird, huh?

[HUAJIAO]

26. Yes, very true, but--

I was just referring to-- "that whole party was created to preserve slavery is beyond me."

[Farmer-Rick]

27. I get it. It brought us Abraham Lincoln

They were once on the side of good.........

[reACTIONary]

24. +100 nt

[sop]

12. Republicans believe being asked to follow the law is proof we are victims of a tyrannical regime.

.

[Irish_Dem]

13. They have no concept of what living under a tyrannical regime is like.

[Bernardo de La Paz]

14. Candace Owens "thinks she is Rosa Parks when the right sees her more in the role of Sally Hemmings"

Link to tweet

[ShazzieB]

17. ...

[WhiskeyGrinder]

30. I don't get this metaphor.

[Bernardo de La Paz]

35. Sally Hemmings was a favoured slave of Jefferson who he 'impregnated'. . . . nt

[WhiskeyGrinder]

38. Candace Owens chooses her associations. Hemings could not.

[Bernardo de La Paz]

39. That makes Owens a dimwitted sucker, by her own choice. . . . nt

[WhiskeyGrinder]

40. That's fine. No need to bring a victim of trafficking into it.

[Bernardo de La Paz]

45. Another difference is that I expect Hemings to have had a much more realistic assessment

Another difference is that I expect Hemings to have had a much more realistic assessment of her situation than Owens.

[Bernardo de La Paz]

46. You asked me to explain it. It was not my coinage, but I did the best I could

Like all analogies, it is tortured.

[WhiskeyGrinder]

47. No, I know. Any contempt in my tone is not directed at you.

[paleotn]

9. Yep. Same as it ever was....

Under the Soviets, the Czars, and now the kleptocrats.

[KS Toronado]

15. Surprised Russian Police aren't wearing Brown-Shirts.

[Grokenstein]

16. In the spirit of the Olympics, reposting a classic

Sadly, so very little has changed since, though dim donnie's "dance" seems a little more eerie in light of uncle vlad's...

[Jetheels]

19. Who knows what news Russians are fed.

Many probably believe the Ukraine is invading Russia.
And next week Google and Apple will provide a platform on their app site for tfg.

[uponit7771]

43. +1

[Buckeyeblue]

21. You would think that the populous would refuse to participate

But that's easier said than done. People get hungry. They get cold. Humans have a tremendous ability to adapt to difficult situations, both physically and emotionally. And as they adapt, new normals emerge.

The same thing happens in this country. We essentially allow the corporate community to drive our standard of living. Go to work, do you job, act like you care, and you get rewarded with a decent standard of living. If you're not able or unwilling or unable to play the game, you work jobs that provide you with a lesser standard of living, etc.

Monday through Friday, from 8-5 I'm an academy award winning actor. I'm just not paid like one.

It's all about working around your opprosser. In Russia it's top down. In the US it's spread across.

[DENVERPOPS]

33. Excellent perspective, Bb.......

I quit the corporate world when I was 30. I could no longer stomach what I saw other executives and CEO's doing in the corporations.
They put little or no value in the customers, the quality of products, or especially their employees.

When the Republicans screwed around with the 1980 election and basically and corruptly "installed" Reagan, I became quite vocal and ever since have been yelling about what other people were ignoring.....

The politicians and corporations put it into high gear during the Reagan Period, coming on even stronger during the Bush/Cheney years and doing the crowning blow during the Trump/McConnell years.

I think I remember in one of the dictionaries the simplest description of Fascism is a merging of Government and Corporations.

And all these RW individuals are running around calling US Antifa as if fascism is a good thing......Totally LOL......
A logic equal to that found in Alice In Wonderland !!!!!!!!!!!

[uponit7771]

42. Russia populous is propagandized twice as bad as we were here before Iraq, no doubt.

[gulliver]

25. Also Tucker Carlson Fox News videos probably dismay freedom loving Russians

Fox News supports the Russian regime.

[jgmiller]

28. I think it's part of the Russian psyche too

I may be way off base here but for decades Russian's suffered under soviet rule and before that oppressive Tsarist rule. When the USSR fell they had freedom for the most part even in politics but the political freedom really didn't last that long. Not long enough to shake off what had amounted to hundreds of years of being used to not having any political freedom.

The genius of what Putin has done is that for the average Russian he has maintained their individual freedoms, they can travel, they have full access to the Internet, they can choose their own jobs, they can buy things from anywhere, they can save money. They can even start businesses. For most people in any country that means total freedom and many people just ignore politics and other things and if they aren't criminals they never run afoul of the law.

It's very hard to create a massive uprising against the ruling political class if the masses don't feel overly oppressed.

[WhiskeyGrinder]

31. Yeah, you're way off base. Russian resistance and protest looks different there than it does here,

and it doesn't mean they don't know how to do it or don't know what it feels like to have political "freedom."

[Celerity]

34. Russians do protest

[Bernardo de La Paz]

36. Aren't those pictures 8 or 9 years old?

[Celerity]

37. many are from the last several years nt

[Silent3]

44. A lot of protest has been clamped down upon, but still many came out fairly recently...

...to protest Navalny's arrest. It's gotten harder since then, however.

[uponit7771]

41. Putin's opposition ends up dead a lot, that is enough to

[Hekate]

48. Polonium adds a nice flavor to the tea. A 15 year sentence to the Gulag builds muscles. And...

…. Diving head-first out of a second story window is a cool way to exit a building after bashing your own head in first.

I just don’t understand those people. You’d think they’d be protesting in the streets all the time.