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Who Goes Nazi? (1941)

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Re: Who Goes Nazi? (1941)

#41

Post by wildmusings »

pjc50 wrote: post #34
wildmusings wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The myth is easier to identify: that there's campaign of murder by police officers targeting blacks. It's part of the broader myth that minorities in the US are being kept down by the powers that be. When you see it as just part of the broader identity politics movement, it's easier to identify the resources: moral vindication and reassigned blame for their troubles, handouts from other people's pockets, and discrimi…

The myth is easier to identify: that there's campaign of murder by police officers targeting blacks. It's part of the broader myth that minorities in the US are being kept down by the powers that be There's substantial evidence for both of these though, which you're not going to address. And minorities were kept down by force of law until at least the 1960s; have the systems put in place to do so been fully dismantle…

> There's substantial evidence for both of these though, which you're not going to address.

You seem very sure about what I will and won't address. Why don't we find out? What is this evidence?

> And minorities were kept down by force of law until at least the 1960s; have the systems put in place to do so been fully dismantled?

I'd say yes. The right to vote is firmly protected (as for voter ID laws, I think they're very reasonable). Racial-based government policy making is prohibited. This prohibition is enforced except for in cases where the discrimination helps minorities. Private discrimination is a serious legal issue, sometimes pursued to the point of absurdity. The current shakedown of the car loan industry over racial discrimination is a good example, and many other cases pursued under the doctrine of "disparate impact". We don't hose down peaceful protesters anymore either, and even in the 60s that was appalling to people outside of the South. The contrast between Birmingham in 1963 and Ferguson in 2014 is instructive.

The War on Drugs is disproportionately hurting minorities, and I think it's a terrible policy on many counts, but I don't think you can frame it as the machinery of minority oppression.

The welfare state is definitely hurting minorities, but again, I think it's just bad policy-making, not intentional subjugation.

EDIT: Responding to fnovd here, because Hacker News is throttling me:

I happen to think that people should be free to put whatever they want into their bodies. This philosophical debate is not a racial issue. So let's assume that we decide to ban drugs, like we've banned stealing cars. If minorities are more likely to steal cars, and more likely to end up in jail because they were stealing cars, or more likely to be poor because their dad was in jail for stealing cars, or more likely to sucked into stealing cars because it's an easy source of profit in a poor neighborhood, that doesn't make banning stealing cars a racist policy.

Re: Who Goes Nazi? (1941)

#42

Post by batz »

cstross wrote: post #8
batz wrote: post #5

The essence of any totalitarian strategy is to seize some resources, invent a necessarily preposterous myth, then in exchange for demonstrating belief in the myth, re-distribute the resources arbitrarily among a minority of people who are easily replaceable and know it. The secret is to then reward people from the majority for denouncing and replacing members of the minority for not being zealous enough, so that they…

how feminism annexed academia ... why Occupy failed but why BLM could grow exponentially No axes to grind here, hmm? (Hint: there's a huge difference between civil rights movements -- those demanding equal respect -- and the fulminations of the privileged who think life's a zero-sum game and anyone else making up ground means that they're losing out. Alas, you don't seem to get it.)

Actually, I make an effort to be sufficiently even handed that only a committed partisan could take offense.

Re: Who Goes Nazi? (1941)

#43

Post by rrggrr »

hodwik wrote: post #32

Written by Dorothy Thompson, first journalist kicked out of Nazi Germany. She also said: "No people ever recognize their dictator in advance. He never stands for election on the platform of dictatorship. He always represents himself as the instrument [of] the Incorporated National Will. ... When our dictator turns up you can depend on it that he will be one of the boys, and he will stand for everything traditionally…

American probably not. The US Constitution has provisions that make a dictator unlikely, though not impossible, as compared to the Weimar Constitution. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weimar_Constitution

One hopes the primary convention delegates, elector college electors, Congress, Courts, State governments and free press would offset the election and reign of a dictatorially inclined President.

At the same time Lincoln did successfully suspend habeas corpus, Roosevelt did intern Japanese Americans.

Re: Who Goes Nazi? (1941)

#44

Post by danjayh »

sandworm101 wrote: post #36
hodwik wrote: post #32

Written by Dorothy Thompson, first journalist kicked out of Nazi Germany. She also said: "No people ever recognize their dictator in advance. He never stands for election on the platform of dictatorship. He always represents himself as the instrument [of] the Incorporated National Will. ... When our dictator turns up you can depend on it that he will be one of the boys, and he will stand for everything traditionally…

>> No people ever recognize their dictator in advance. He never stands for election on the platform of dictatorship. She obviously never imagined the state of American politics today. A good chunk of them now openly want a "strongman" in the high office. The degree to which they want to be bullied by those they elect boarders on socio-political masochism. So I disagree with Thompson. To say that people don't see the…

Totally agree. The current congress welcomes Obama's use of (likely illegal) executive orders to accomplish things, because it means they can avoid responsibility and accountability. They don't fight to retain their constitutionally granted powers, because all they really want it somebody else to do the dirty work -- end result is they allow unprecedented levels of executive control to go basically unchecked ... and whether or not you agree with what's being done with it now, it's a slippery slope, because each president is different, but they'll all have this precedent to point back to as justification.

Re: Who Goes Nazi? (1941)

#45

Post by ptaipale »

Animats wrote: post #21
arethuza wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder what would have happened if Hitler (who apparently didn't give the matter much thought) hadn't declared war on the US? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_declaration_of_war_agai...

Didn't matter. Pearl Harbor brought the US into the war. If Hitler hadn't attacked Russia, things could have been very different. Hitler thought Russia would be a fast, easy conquest. It wasn't, and Germany found itself in a two-front war. It cost the USSR 20 million dead to beat Germany, and cost Germany 5 million dead, 80% of German casualties. Germany was an ally of Russia until 45 minutes before the attack. Much…

> Germany was an ally of Russia until 45 minutes before the attack. Much of Russian paranoia comes from this.

Germany was an ally of RUssia, and learned from Soviets much of how to run an extermination camp, and Russian provided Germany with space to practice armor warfare.

However, there is considerable debate speculating that Germany's initial success in Barbarossa was simply because the Soviet army was planning to attack Germany on July 6, and therefore its formation was totally arranged for offense, and failed miserably when attacked.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_offensive_plans_controv...

Anyway, the Russian paranoia didn't really need a German betrayal to develop. The Russian military had been internally wiped out in the paranoid purges of 1930's.

Re: Who Goes Nazi? (1941)

#46

Post by Umn44 »

wildmusings wrote: post #15
seiji wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

seize some resources, invent a necessarily preposterous myth, then in exchange for demonstrating belief in the myth, re-distribute the resources arbitrarily among a minority of people who are easily replaceable and know it. Startups? how these assholes seize power. It's through charismatic promises of future rewards Startups.

Yes, but the difference is that a business's success requires continual voluntary mutually-beneficial exchanges (aka sales). And before they make a profit, they're only risking money that's theirs to risk. None of these things are true about politics, which is fundamentally about control of coercive power.

"ut the difference is that a business's success requires continual voluntary mutually-beneficial exchanges (aka sales)."

Sorry but this is the biggest bullshit lie ever, the vast majority of people do not have a choice but to buy from where they can afford to. There choices are forced by the institutional structures of society. aka political. The very nature of money is political.

Re: Who Goes Nazi? (1941)

#47

Post by danjayh »

batz wrote: post #5

The essence of any totalitarian strategy is to seize some resources, invent a necessarily preposterous myth, then in exchange for demonstrating belief in the myth, re-distribute the resources arbitrarily among a minority of people who are easily replaceable and know it. The secret is to then reward people from the majority for denouncing and replacing members of the minority for not being zealous enough, so that they…

This is why the founders of the US intentionally tried to design the country to severely restrict the power of the federal government / allow the states to handle many issues that aren't explicitly national matters. I'm not talking about things like education or marriage, which you might [i]think[/i] should be national issues, but rather things like interstate roads and national defense, which are interstate issues by their very nature.

The federal power creep that we've been experiencing for the last several decades has done a lot to create a system that is ripe for abuse.

Re: Who Goes Nazi? (1941)

#48

Post by Stratoscope »

danjayh wrote: post #47
batz wrote: post #5

The essence of any totalitarian strategy is to seize some resources, invent a necessarily preposterous myth, then in exchange for demonstrating belief in the myth, re-distribute the resources arbitrarily among a minority of people who are easily replaceable and know it. The secret is to then reward people from the majority for denouncing and replacing members of the minority for not being zealous enough, so that they…

This is why the founders of the US intentionally tried to design the country to severely restrict the power of the federal government / allow the states to handle many issues that aren't explicitly national matters. I'm not talking about things like education or marriage, which you might [i]think[/i] should be national issues, but rather things like interstate roads and national defense, which are interstate issues b…

Quite a few decades, in fact. From the article:

> [The German emigre] believes that America is the country of Creative Evolution once it shakes off its middle-class complacency, its bureaucratized industry, its tentacle-like and spreading government, and sets itself innerly free.

Re: Who Goes Nazi? (1941)

#49

Post by danjayh »

mc32 wrote: post #39
cstross wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

how feminism annexed academia ... why Occupy failed but why BLM could grow exponentially No axes to grind here, hmm? (Hint: there's a huge difference between civil rights movements -- those demanding equal respect -- and the fulminations of the privileged who think life's a zero-sum game and anyone else making up ground means that they're losing out. Alas, you don't seem to get it.)

More people than just the right believe things to be a zero-sum game, else you would not see the kinds of things expressed in the Github diversity slide-show you saw in this article [1]. This is the main slide [2]. And, one could argue it is, for every man hired, that's potentially one fewer woman hired and for every one white woman hired that's one fewer minority woman or man hired, if you look at things from an ind…

I just cannot believe what's on some of those slides. Here are some snippets -- imagine if you were to swap the races around, and replace every 'white' with 'people of color', every 'asian' with 'white', and every 'people of color' with 'asian'. If you do these mental gymnastics, some of these slides will seem incredibly offensive -- so how is it that they're acceptable at all, regardless of what the races are. Here are some juicy quotes:

"This is not work for white folks to lead"

"We need solidarity with our asian friends and colleagues"

"Some of the biggest barriers to progress are white women"

(...)

Re: Who Goes Nazi? (1941)

#50

Post by Spooky23 »

danjayh wrote: post #47
batz wrote: post #5

The essence of any totalitarian strategy is to seize some resources, invent a necessarily preposterous myth, then in exchange for demonstrating belief in the myth, re-distribute the resources arbitrarily among a minority of people who are easily replaceable and know it. The secret is to then reward people from the majority for denouncing and replacing members of the minority for not being zealous enough, so that they…

This is why the founders of the US intentionally tried to design the country to severely restrict the power of the federal government / allow the states to handle many issues that aren't explicitly national matters. I'm not talking about things like education or marriage, which you might [i]think[/i] should be national issues, but rather things like interstate roads and national defense, which are interstate issues b…

Maybe. I think they had to punt on it because of things like slavery in the south and feudal style Dutch patroons in NY.

The federal power creep is mostly about the difference between living in a place like say Pennsylvaia and South Carolina. The states refused to deal with key, important problems of the day.

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