I’ve seen this meme and the pop wisdom idea behind it a lot, that if Democrats just manned up like the South Koreans they could stop Trump. SO! its now my job to explain BASIC FUCKING facts to people because they’re talking nonsense about easily googlable information.
This is South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol of the center-right, conservative, People Power Party. He was elected President in 2022. Like in the United States, South Korea has mid-term elections, where South Korea’s Congress, the National Assembly is up for elections while the President isn’t. Unlike America South Korea’s National Assembly has only one House. Any ways they had their midterm in 2024:
The opposition center-left, liberal Democratic Party won, overwhelmingly. The election was April 10th, they took office May 30th. Soon the opposition was doing what an opposition given power does, it was fighting President Yoon about his disastrous budget plans and trying to hold the First Lady Kim Keon-hee to account for alleged corruption. If this all sounds a bit like Trump, good job Yoon has been called “South Korea’s Trump”.
any ways 6 months into having an opposition run National Assembly Yoon declared martial law and sent soldiers to try to shut down the National Assembly. Everyone watched Democratic Assembly Members bravely climb fences and barricade the chamber doors to vote to end martial law. Here’s what you have to understand about that vote
190 National Assembly members voted, 172 of them? We’re Democrats and their allies. The President’s People Power Party mostly stood by him. They keep standing by him in the days that followed. Four Days after President Yoon tried to use the Military to throw out the elected National Assembly and make himself dictator, the first try to impeach him, failed
105 out of the 108 the President’s PPP party in the Assembly stood by him, after he tried to coup the country. Only 7 days later after overwhelming public pressure and the arrest of many key Presidential aids did an impeachment vote pass (he still hasn’t been convicted)
only 12 PPP members broke with their Party and its President, 12 was enough, but the overwhelming majority? voted to protect the President who just tried to overthrow the country.
SO! Much like Donald Trump President Yoon didn’t need to overthrow the country for the first 2 years of his term because he had a puppet Congress willing to go along with his corruption. With-in 6 months of dealing with a National Assembly that stood up to him the wheels came off and he imploded. But even after the most spectacular implosion on the International stage I’ve ever seen his party stood by him. If the Democratic Party didn’t have a majority? and most important a BIG majority, a majority where even a small number of PPP defections was enough to get the 2/3rds they needed Yoon would still be President right now, if Democrats had a 2-3 seat majority in the National Assembly? they would have never gotten the votes to impeach.
We can see overlap in the American experience. In Trump’s first term his own party in Congress never challenged him and largely stayed united behind him. In 2018 he lost the midterm elections which meant he was held to account and in fairly short order impeached, it took 8 months from Democrats taking office to an impeachment inquire to get underway. Like President Yoon Trump was not able to function under any kind of pushback. But unlike the South Korean Democrats the American Democrats didn’t have an overwhelming majority in the Senate (Koreans don’t even have a Senate) so Trump was not convicted. And the second time he was impeached after like Yoon trying to overthrow the Congress and become dictator, there were like in South Korea a handful of defectors from his own party, but unlike Korea The Democratic majority in the 2021 Senate wasn’t large enough to have those Republican votes matter
So brave displays are good and important, but they don’t mean much without the power, the votes to back it up. Elect Democrats in 2026 and they will, in less than a year of taking office, impeach Trump. Trump can’t function with an opposition, he can’t do it, he’ll do something and they will HAVE TO vote to remove him. But the key is they need to votes to do it, because most Republicans? will go down with the ship, there’s no red lines for them, if Democrats don’t have big majorities, Trump hanging onto 90% of his party in the Senate will save his ass, again.
Sending healing thoughts and condolences to beloved entertainment legend Dolly Parton following the loss of her husband Carl Dean, who passed away on March 3rd, 2025 at the age of 82. Dolly and Carl met outside of the Wishy Washy Laundromat the day she moved to Nashville at age 18 in 1964 and they married two years later on May 30th, 1966. Dolly wrote her iconic song Jolene in 1973 about a bank teller who fancied Carl and flirted with him every time he went to the bank. “She got this terrible crush on my husband,” Parton stated during an interview on NPR in 2008, “and he just loved going to the bank because she paid him so much attention. It was kinda like a running joke between us โ when I was saying, ‘Hell, you’re spending a lot of time at the bank. I don’t believe we’ve got that kind of money!’ So it’s really an innocent song all around.” Though Carl preferred to remain out of the limelight, he supported Dolly’s career in every way possible and was incredibly proud of her success on the international stage. Often traveling incognito on camping trips with their truck and trailer, Dolly once explained that when she takes off her wig and makeup nobody knows who she is which allowed them to have some wonderful down to earth private time together just being “Mr. and Mrs. Dean from Nashville, Tennessee”.
May Carl rest in peace.๐ฆ๐
In 2023,Dolly stated that her song My Blue Tears,ย which she wrote during her years on The Porter Wagoner Showย in the late 1960s and early 1970s, is “one of my husband’s favorite songs that I ever wrote.” Listening to it today after Carl’s passing is a poignant experience.
what do you mean you havent found a job? have you crawled on your knees and prostrated yourself before them? have you hung from the branches of the world tree for eight days and eight nights? have you climbed atop the roodwood cross and begged for them to impale you until your red blood overflow’d their cups? dude. you completely forgot to mention their cups. you HAVE to mention their cups
Casual cruelty has become so ingrained in a lot of people because we live in a society that is structured in a cruel way. To be quite honest you are obligated to consider the harm of your words and actions no matter your personal hardships.
crazy that in the 1970s they were like, “fine, women can play sports. but because they’re innately less athletic than men, only in a special ghettoized League For The Frail And Delicate where they get paid less ๐”. And not only is that still the system in 2023, but viciously lashing out at the smallest challenges to that system gets framed as Feminist Praxis
even setting aside the fact that gendered bodytype averages aren’t universals, and plenty of individual (cis) women and (cis) men could easily go to toe to toe. have we considered that the fact that all the most prominent and well-paid sports are ones that require things like Being Tall and Having Muscle Mass, as opposed to, ex, gymnastics…is itself an artifact of sexism
Also consider the existence of sports where women would have an advantage, and yet, somehow, the most famous and well paid ones are not women.
I’m thinking of jockeys. Jockeys get an advantage from being smaller and lighter, and while obviously you need sufficient strength to stay on the horse, a well-trained horse does enough of the work that you don’t need upper body strength to do the job. Given this and that the majority of children obsessed with horses are female, you’d think most jockeys would be women. Yet somehow they are not.
NASCAR at one point threatened to handicap Danica Patrick by putting extra weight in her car to compensate for the fact that she is smaller and lighter than other racecar drivers. If she gets an advantage as a driver, why is she like practically the only female racecar driver, or at least the only one anyone knows about?
Women, apparently, have an advantage in long distance swimming. Higher body fat percentage and higher endurance means that women can go greater distances in the water. Is long distance swimming even a competitive sport?
Women have actually been excluded from competitive Olympic skiing on the grounds that the jumps required could damage their uterus. The people who actually have unsupported reproductive organs hanging outside their body are considered to have better support than the people whose reproductive organs are nestled in alongside unisex organs like the small intestine and stomach. How does this make any goddamn sense at all? If a uterus could dislodge from the force of a skiing jump, so could intestines and the sport wouldn’t be safe for anyone.
Theoretically, any sport where you get an advantage from low center of gravity, better balance, higher flexibility, or being closer to the ground, women should have an advantage. This should include soccer (football in non-US places), and might include hockey if the hockey players hadn’t introduced unnecessary viciousness to the sport.
So in any sport where women would excel over men, they’re either excluded, unfairly penalized, the sport doesn’t exist, or the sport is considered unimportant and no one makes money on it. Hmm. I am thinking the problems here are not actually what the TERFs and transphobes make them out to be.
For those of you wondering “Why did OP say the 70’s?” It’s because that’s when Title IX was passed in the US, prohibiting gender-based discrimination in federally funded education, e.g. public schools & universities. So anti-feminists couldn’t just straight up say “no girls allowed” but instead resorted to what’s been described above.
It’s as if intolerance can’t be magically be solved with pieces of paper alone.
amhrancas 