The Venn Diagram of the people reading this and the people that it helps is two separate circles.
Well lookie here, looks like we've got ourselves a reader.
Is that a Bill Hicks reference in the wild? Nice.
You ever eaten at a Waffle House?
I can't believe this is happening. How can this be happening. We have the biggest threat to democracy in our short existence as a country and we counter it with the least dynamic candidate we could possibly run against him. I dread to think how we're letting power politics destroy this country. We hardly have a country left anymore. It's going to take something more.
It's so frustrating.
The way I think about it is that the country has been on a particular path leading up to this confluence of things that make it possible. The GOP has played the long game in response to nixon by establishing right wing media (am radio, fox news, etc) to ramp up the coordinated brainwashing. The right has also stacked the courts and gerrymandered their asses off to stay in power and gain more. And they have attacked education for decades as well. They've also been stoking nationalism and religion for some time.
Corporate ownership of News Media has consolidated to just a few companies due to the dismantling of antitrust laws over the last several decades.
Protection against money in politics has been eroded making all that possible as well as allowing regulatory capture and the citizens united ruling etc.
And that's some of the reason for the '08 collapse and subsequent wealth transfer from middle and bottom to the top. that plus offshoring of the 90s - 00s and other factors have left a lot of people in rough shape economically.
That sets the stage for desperate people to seek a populist leader and one of em who is a particularly talented grifter stepped up. If it wasn't him it would have been someone eventually.
Meanwhile Democrats have become beholden to corporations and the rich, drifting centrist or center right. Our voting mechanisms ensures a two party system. So the only ones in leadership available to counter fascism are exactly the types that are least affected by fascism and they're more motivated to side with capitalists. And more than a few capitalists tend to side with fascists.
All the cautionary tales about fascism have been useless. Because those tales focus on the end game instead of the lead up.
If we want to prevent fascism rising elsewhere, they need to fight the things that set the stage for fascism to rise decades later. (The various things mentioned above).
The more I think about it the more I suspect de-regulating capitalism might be the main thing that can lead to fascism. Hell maybe it inevitably leads down that path idk.
This guy has been paying attention!
We are denying our way into an extinction event. How men like Hitler come to power isn't exactly a mystery but we just sit back and let it happen.
Rule #1: Believe the autocrat. He means what he says. Whenever you find yourself thinking, or hear others claiming, that he is exaggerating, that is our innate tendency to reach for a rationalization. This will happen often: humans seem to have evolved to practice denial when confronted publicly with the unacceptable. Back in the 1930s, The New York Times assured its readers that Hitler’s anti-Semitism was all posture. More recently, the same newspaper made a telling choice between two statements made by Putin’s press secretary Dmitry Peskov following a police crackdown on protesters in Moscow: “The police acted mildly—I would have liked them to act more harshly” rather than those protesters’ “liver should have been spread all over the pavement.” Perhaps the journalists could not believe their ears. But they should—both in the Russian case, and in the American one.
I don't think it's that people don't believe him.
My sisters don't believe me when I say something smells bad and they're almost always surprised by just how bad it smells.
You're right, they absolutely believe him and believe it won't be that bad.
“Tell people there's an invisible man in the sky who created the universe, and the vast majority will believe you. Tell them the paint is wet, and they have to touch it to be sure.” --George Carlin
I'm not sure - citizens in blue states are rushing to limit their own second amendment rights while those in red states are busy expanding their own. Fascist militias are popping up all over the place, and this theofascist wave carries on.
It's a shitty situation, but the fascists are already armed, and there's no legislation that's going to change that. I'm hopeful of the future, but there may come a time we'll wish we had access to normal capacity magazines and non-nerfed rifles, Jon Stewart isn't going to rescue you with his wit when they have you on your knees in front of a ditch.
Additionally, an armed labor class stands as a last line of defense against a hyper capitalist class chomping at the bit to turn the entirety of the US into a rent seeking company town.
Based on the 2A discussions there are a lot of people who do not believe him, or hold an overly optimistic view of what kind of America conservatives want to live in and what they're willing to do to get there.
This is something I've been thinking about a lot. I think we need better gun control, but I also think we should only be talking about it and not trying to implement it. I don't think the US is stable enough to actually be able to implement stricter gun control and not have fascists trying to take advantage of an unarmed/less armed population. We're in real danger of our country going full Nazi within the next couple years.
Like, are you seriously telling me that if the US goes full Nazi, I should just lie down and die for the greater good? 'Cause that's exactly what's gonna happen when guns are only in the hands of fascists. But that's okay because at least there was a decreased risk of a hormone-addled teen stealing their parents gun and shooting a school right? At least they got to live long enough for a fascist to do that for them.
Again, I think we need better ways of deciding who can own a gun; but damn guys, this really isn't a good time to actually implement it. Maybe wait until we don't have several wannabe Hitlers lined up and competing for the presidency.
Ironically, I also think gun control should open up an avenue for people to own machine guns again, because right now only rich people can afford one. Additionally, our current system regulating machine guns is based on arbitrary dates and the assumption that the ATF will do their due diligence when it comes to evaluating someone's eligibility for owning one. I know it's possible to have a society that allows people an opportunity to legally own machine guns because there is at least one European country which allows you to do so (Finland), but you gotta be serious about your gun control to make sure one doesn't fall into the wrong hands.
Uh, anyway, since you kinda touched on this, I find it mildly amusing that it seems like every political view has a motive to allowing gun ownership except for liberalism and authoritarianism.
Libertarians: "I have the money and I want one, I should be able to buy one."
Socialists: "How else am I supposed to seize the means of production? Ask nicely LOL?"
Communists: "the people only have power if they can assert their power against a government who no longer rules in favor of the people"
Anarchists: a mix of libertarian, socialist and communist logic
(Traditional) Conservatives: basically libertarian-lite
Meanwhile you have fascists and authoritarians in general being like, "only the people who I like should have guns" while liberals are like, "trust the government, they have your best interests at heart so you don't need guns".
Was it really necessary to write all that out?
Preach it! I'll say it 1,000 more times; This liberal is well armed, practices every weekend, and isn't going down without a fight.
I get the complacency. I'm 52 and not until maybe a year ago I figured there was no way in hell America could see a fascist dictatorship with trains and camps. Now I'm not sure it isn't inevitable.
OTOH, I have a great deal of faith in the professionalism of our military leaders. Hell, they preemptively told Trump he could get stuffed if he thought they would aid him in the election.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Many proponents of Jim Crow-era voting regulations — a nakedly racist attempt to ensure white political dominance — described them as a restoration of Southern democracy after the alleged Northern tyranny of Reconstruction.
Trump and his team have a series of proposals to crack down on dissent, including by remaking the Justice Department into a tool for jailing his enemies and sending troops to suppress protests.
They have extensive plans to replace as many as 50,000 career civil servants with ideologues and toadies, putting people ready and willing to undermine the rule of law in key positions to act on Trump’s dubious orders.
While a second Trump term is vanishingly unlikely to produce an openly fascist state — that’s not really how authoritarian takeovers of democracy work today — it’s quite plausible that they could do extensive, even fatal, damage to the American system by pulling the right policy levers.
The second is to argue that the end of American democracy is unthinkable: The United States government has so many veto points that even a competent and determined authoritarian would find themselves hampered by Congress, federalism, and the courts.
And though the United States is very different from both Hungary and Israel, we also have a long history of anti-democratic politics — one that the Republican Party has, in word and in deed, grown increasingly comfortable aping in recent years.
The original article contains 1,405 words, the summary contains 230 words. Saved 84%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
Or try and execute him in accordance with the law.
I already do. I wish my party saw him for the threat he is and behaved accordingly.
But he lies…
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