First, some context. The latest from the US justice department saying that they will be focusing on finding "ANTIFA leaders" is incredibly troubling for anyone involved in leftist groups. I foresee a lot of good activists, regardless of how far left they actually are, arrested on trumped up charges in order to squash opposition.

Organizing is essential to resist fascism. This is made more difficult by the pandemic, as in person meetings bring a huge, almost unacceptable risk. As such, many orgs have been turning to platforms like Slack instead. Trouble is, Slack logs are not encrypted and I am certain that as a business based in the US Slack will not put up a fight to keep user data safe if the feds come calling.

I'd like to collect a decent list of alternatives. Important factors include encryption, ownership, open source status, ease of use, federation, scalability, hosting, cross platform, and anything else you can think of.

With all the news about President Trump declaring "antifa" a domestic terror organisation, I heard a few local newsreaders saying this word on television. And their pronunciation of this word surprised me.

I've been mentally pronouncing this word as "AN-ti-fa", with the emphasis on the first syllable and a short vowel sound in the second syllable.

They pronounced it as "an-TEE-fa", with the emphasis on the second syllable, with a long vowel sound in that syllable.

My pronunciation is influenced by knowing that "antifa" is short for "anti-fascist". I don't know of any word with the prefix "anti-" where the second syllable is emphasised and the "i" sound is lengthened. Usually, the emphasis in "anti-" words is placed on the first syllable: "AN-ti-bac-TE-ri-al"; "AN-ti-TE-rro-rism"; "AN-ti-gen"; "AN-ti-bo-dy". So, I naturally emphasised the first syllable in "antifa": "AN-ti-fah".

When I heard the newsreaders saying "an-TEE-fa", it makes the word sound like an imported word/name from Spanish or Portuguese or Italian.

Is there a common pronunciation for this word? How do you pronounce it?

American democracy is doomed ('constitutional hardball' is a great way to describe the 'modus operandi' of the Trump-McConnell GOP.)

This is how the American system of government will die

I found their predictions to be kinda interesting (and clearly minimal)

The best-case scenario is that we wind up with an elective dictator but retain peaceful transitions of power. This is where I'd place my bet. Pure parliamentary systems, especially unicameral ones, give high levels of power to the prime minister and his cabinet, and manage to have peaceful transitions nonetheless. The same is true in Brazil, where the presidency is considerably more powerful than it is in the US.

But parliamentary systems also feature parties that are stronger than their leaders, which serve to prevent single individuals from garnering too much power. America's parties are getting more polarized, but they still aren't as strong as those of most other developed nations.

The worst-case scenario is if the presidency attains these powers and someone elected to the office decides to use them to punish political enemies, interfere with elections, suppress dissent, and so forth. Retaining an independent enough judiciary is a guard against this, but only if norms around obeying its rulings are strong. And, unusually, America allows for true independents, undisciplined by their parties, to become heads of government.

The US political system is not gonna collapse. It's gonna muddle though (A pretty interesting take. There are problems but people won't try to fix them but instead become disengaged and kinda forget about it.)

I think one of the things the authors missed while writing these this is how news became partidarized in the same manner, thus allowing outlets like Fox News to just consume the Republican electorate. They also missed how voting has been targeted too, and underestimated how willing the public was to act and how would the public react to this, which was by electing someone who didn't care about said broken Congress (or any sort of constitutionality), which is what became of Trump.