311–320 of 536 posts
(Since there are posts on economy related factors and the OP was about Nazi Germany)
At a different level is this somewhat reflective of USA today? (USA today is by no means poor, although it is true that the bottom 50% has stagnated for quite long)
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> there exists a subset of the population that cannot and will not be educated or have the ability to reason on a certain level to make things work I'm sceptical of that. I tend to suspect that Michael Gove's "the people have had enough of experts" thing was _kind_ of correct; there's a deep strain of anti-expert feeling throughout, at least, the West at the moment. (I don't think this is quite the same as traditiona…
Fwiw, my experience from growing up in deep red America was that anti-intellectualism was staggeringly strong there. People would actually define their beliefs in opposition to those of people they perceived to be 'smart'. The way that I always understood this was that if they had a disagreement with someone 'smarter' than them, and they operated in good faith, they would lose ~98% of the time. This doesn't feel good…
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It's probably best to start by not appointing a serial liar, convicted felon and conman to head it. But if for some insane reason you do, you probably want to keep him and his cronies accountable to the law of the land. The conduct expected from someone with that history should be unimpeachable . Instead, what we got is the conduct of someone who is unimpeachable. None of the rules apply to him or his friends, and ne…
He's a rapist too, isn't he?
I know we live in chaotic times and all but "grab them by the pussy" without clear consent is, in fact, sexual assault, no matter how much of a celebrity you are.
And there's a long trail of credible accusations against him ranging from various forms of sexual assault to unequivocal rape:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump_sexual_misconduct...
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> Trump got a majority because eggs are too expensive. I think this trivializes the outcome in a dangerous way. From my view as an outside observer, these were all big factors: - Bad handling of the candidate selection for the democrats (switching to Harris too late) - Having an impossible platform for a lot of single issue voters (mainly: people that want immigration reduced, but also firearm availability) - Thoroug…
> I also believe that the media smear campaign depicting Biden as completely senile was really effective (and a bit ridiculous considering the age of his replacement). Another very effective strategy in riling up their base was the "democrats want to transgenderize all the children" (exaggerated). I'm not sure what they could actually do about these; if the media (or their owners) want to lean heavily on the scale, t…
100% agree. But I think you don't even need heavy bias on media ownership to get the whole political landscape distorted; I think the whole attention/outrage-driven ad-economy systematically pushes all reporting on both sides toward the fringes, and this is inherently more helpful for the right side of the political spectrum.
> Nancy Pelosi, world's greatest stock trader, is 84
Is this tongue-in-cheek? Because IMO the whole insider-trading exemptions for congress are deeply unethical (and unlikely to get fixed). To be fair, though, it barely even registers on the scale compared to the whole "You get to design and lead a government agency after donating 250M$ to my campaign"-thing... Whole situation just feels a bit like the gilded age is making a comeback right now, just strictly worse :/
> I note that there is a platform split on H1-B between Trump and Musk, but that doesn't seem to have been a problem for them
I think this is a really big lesson and something Trump is excellent at: His non-stop BS (annex Greenland, rename the Gulf, take over Canada) keeps media busy and many of his voters from realizing that the whole platform is neither self-consistent (see H1B) nor in the voters interest.
It is a really bitter lesson though, because after seeing how "effective messaging" looks like in our current media landscape, I'm absolutely certain that I don't want more of that not even from parties that would perfectly represent my interests :(
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> there exists a subset of the population that cannot and will not be educated or have the ability to reason on a certain level to make things work I'm sceptical of that. I tend to suspect that Michael Gove's "the people have had enough of experts" thing was _kind_ of correct; there's a deep strain of anti-expert feeling throughout, at least, the West at the moment. (I don't think this is quite the same as traditiona…
>there's a deep strain of anti-expert feeling throughout Probably because the experts are telling them that if they want a future, everyone is going to have to compromise their current lifestyle. Not a popular message. People will always be sceptical and hostile towards people who say "you can't have X". People are always happy to believe people who say "Vote for me and you have as much X as you want!"
More like 'you can't have X anymore' or 'only rich can have X' that brings another level of resentment and emotional kneejerk reactions.
The problem is, if 'less smart' need to be baby-sitted through every single unpopular but necessary decision, this is a failure of democracy. Sure normal democracy self-corrects over time, but not when its pushed into some form of dictatorship where the only correction mechanism is death of those in power.
That's why all researchers into immortality should be all locked up permanently in prison or to be sure shot in the head right now, however terrible and drastic it sounds. The tyranny that this will bring on mankind will make any absolutely terrible period from the past look like a paradise, and have 0 doubts all dictators ever would gladly scorch whole Earth just to achieve it.
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It was damned if you do, damned if you don’t. What about all the voters you lose by dropping support for Israel? Democrats were powerless to stop the genocide. Gaza voters weakened them further.
> It was damned if you do, damned if you don’t. What about all the voters you lose by dropping support for Israel? Nonsense. As can be plainly seen in the posted links, far fewer Democrat votes would have been lost by support for an arms embargo. What would have been lost was the support of many Democrat funders - fossil fuel companies, weapons manufacturers, Zionist billionaires, and a vast swathe of complicit corpo…
This could have cost many seats in congress.
I acknowledge you might be completely right, but they were never gonna get the campaign and all of D congress to that position in the first place in a high stakes election.
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> there's a deep strain of anti-expert feeling throughout, at least, the West at the moment. Anti-intellectualism in the US goes back decades (if not centuries): * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-intellectualism_in_Americ... The first two US colonies were Jamestown (looking for El Dorado North; gold; riches) and Plymouth (religious society): * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fantasyland:_How_America_Went_... * https…
I’m a huge fan of Asimov. Years ago I bought a back issue of the Newsweek that this was originally published in, framed it, and still have it hanging in my office: https://aphelis.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/ASIMOV_1980_C...
See also book by Tom Nichols (a now-retired professor from U.S. Naval War College):
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It was damned if you do, damned if you don’t. What about all the voters you lose by dropping support for Israel? Democrats were powerless to stop the genocide. Gaza voters weakened them further.
> It was damned if you do, damned if you don’t. What about all the voters you lose by dropping support for Israel? Nonsense. As can be plainly seen in the posted links, far fewer Democrat votes would have been lost by support for an arms embargo. What would have been lost was the support of many Democrat funders - fossil fuel companies, weapons manufacturers, Zionist billionaires, and a vast swathe of complicit corpo…
"The Germans" is an absolutely jaw dropping read, a series of interviews with average German citizens and low-level nazi party members, conducted a decade or so after the war, by an American Jewish journalist. It shows, in first hand accounts, the banality of evil and how easily it can prevail if people do nothing. It is an account of modern tyranny and everyday collaboration. The parallels in the feeling of what's h…
I remember I once stumbled upon pictures of the daily life of ordinary nazis. They looked so normal, having fun, teasing each other, drinking and playing instruments. There is even a video where hitler is shying away from his love companion. This was a shock to me as a kid: evil doesn't look like the caricature of "the very bad guy", it emerges in every day people. I think we failed to communicate that. It was too te…
the reason for this contradiction is that, in their view, some people are not considered human
that's how nazis see jews, how colonizers see natives, how slaveholders see black slaves, how zionists see palestinians
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Nah, cynicism is the only rational reaction now. Lots of people died from covid and our poor government response, but Trump got a majority because eggs are too expensive.
> Trump got a majority because eggs are too expensive. I think this trivializes the outcome in a dangerous way. From my view as an outside observer, these were all big factors: - Bad handling of the candidate selection for the democrats (switching to Harris too late) - Having an impossible platform for a lot of single issue voters (mainly: people that want immigration reduced, but also firearm availability) - Thoroug…
For instance, if you're concerned about the price of eggs, you would not elect a president who campaigned heavily on tariffs and clearing out illegal immigrants, both policies which will tend to make things more expensive. But that was not the propaganda.
If you are concerned about Palestine, you would not elect the president whose inner circle was floating around ethnic cleansing fantasies about Gaza well before Trump made the current remarks yesterday. But that was not the propaganda.
Many issues (like immigration, firearms, and transgender topics) are difficult to talk about these days in America because propaganda (in any direction you choose) has turned them into absolutist binary views. Binary views that happen to be tied to identity. It is difficult to try to reason with identity-tied views.
Social media has only made such worse. Everyone huddles in their silos, cheers when their identity issues go one way, and rages when their identity issues go another. Contrarian viewpoints to the silo get downvoted en masse. It is pretty clear that there are nefarious sorts out there that know this and try to manipulate the crowd. And this isn't even an American only problem these days. America's just one of the places where the democratic backsliding is the most visible, due to our former position.
My main worry in fact goes beyond mere politics, and more to the anti-intellectualism, anti-expertise wave that is also part of the above. How can progress move forward when the propaganda turns vaccines into a boogeyman, when the propaganda politicizes climate change and also ties such to identity, and when (at its worst) the propaganda attacks science itself? To me, such is far stronger concerns to worry about compared to who wins the next American election.