Earlier quoted context omitted.
What power has he gained.
He's apparently gained the power to arbitrarily shut down federal agencies, for one.
That's circular reasoning.
They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45 (1955)
361–370 of 536 posts
Re: They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45 (1955)
#362Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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If voters had more than few days memory of latest tiktok trends, they would recall how Trump agreed to make Jerusalem fully Israeli. That was a moment of absolute devastation and losing any real hope for whole Palestine. Maybe it wasn't visible in US, or you guys simply didn't care, but elsewhere it was shocking.
This was IMHO the main reason 7.10. attacks happened as they happened, when they happened. But it requires watching the news continuously, understanding the world and cultures a bit and connecting those (very) few dots. In nation trained hard on short dopamine kicks from junk fun of reality shows and outcries.
This is but 1 of hundreds of threads happening out there, daily. Sure, democrats f*cked up badly with all stuff mentioned all over here, no point saying it wasn't the case. But concept of long term complex consequences and the tenacity to keep that mental model in one's head is what most of his supporters simply lack. Those who have it and still voted for him... not sure what to say there, I guess he aligns with their core values and keeps delivering on spot and beyond.
What goes around, comes around, just that whole world suffers and few well connected aholes profit. I can't foresee a situation where US won't be in worse position in 4 years, if he even benevolently decides to step down, which is unlikely. China is profiting massively from his chaotic actions long term, that's for sure.
Personally, as European, clearly we're not friends anymore. Just as I wasn't buying any US products during his first tenure, my family won't be buying any US products for foreseeable future just like I don't buy puttin's gas.
Re: They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45 (1955)
#363"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 don't even want to give people that benefit at this point. used to think that it was education, circumstances, outside forces, culture, etc. like "if only" we had XYZ then we can prevent this. at this point i just want to call it "stupidity". not even a left vs right thing. 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 wo…
> it's baked into our DNA i suppose.
In the unlikely event it genuinely was then this would be solveable with subsidized genetic engineering for the masses.
I also think there's a lot to improve in education. While making everyone a rationalist is unrealistic, most of the ideas such as sampling bias and messy word meanings can be taught to almost all.
Re: They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45 (1955)
#364Earlier quoted context omitted.
The president is fascist because he's, checks notes... , relinquishing governmental power by shutting down agencies? I think the only thing people have been habituated to is the enormity of the government; go back to any other point in history, was the government this big in terms of independent agencies, employee/contractor count, budget/debt as percentage of gdp? Sure the spoils system was bad, but the current iter…
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> It is a weird concept for the libertarian mind
"Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes."
"When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names."
"Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community."
Re: They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45 (1955)
#365President is unilaterally shutting down federal agencies. If this goes on there really isn't a constitution anymore, not in practice anyway.
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Musk and even Trump cannot just step in and cut spending, programs and agencies. That's congresses job. Even a president cannot say “oh, we aren’t funding USAID/DoEd/EV tax credits”. Those things are law.
Allowing that to happen basically makes the president king. It allows them to have veto power over all spending laws both current and previous and a veto that’s unable to be overruled.
“Oh, you passed social security? No, you didn’t. I’m not giving that out”. Not only this but it gives the president extreme leverage over Congress. “I’m holding funding for this specific program ransom until you do thing X”.
Interestingly enough, that’s what Trump got impeached for during his first impeachment. Withholding funding in an attempt to extort someone. If this is allowed to happen then our constitution and government fundamentally will change.
Re: They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45 (1955)
#366Earlier quoted context omitted.
The US has transcended “both sides are bad” sorry mate. Elon is evil, full stop.
Yes. That is a common narrative from democrat leaning people. The same ones who called me a terrorist sympathesizer for not wanting to invade libya. The same ones that now think Trump/Musk are more evil than Bush who illegally invaded Iraq because that's what the narrative tells them. Forgive me if I laugh at your "full stops" and other absolutist statements. Cried wolf/nazi/evil too many times.
The article is exactly this sentiment: the experience of how how evil takes over isn’t sudden, it’s insidious and slow and happens by inches. Those around you are not crying wolf, they understand history.
Re: They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45 (1955)
#367Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, but it breaks down because Trump also knows that history, and knows that people want to compare him to Hitler, so he does a bunch of things that make the comparison harder.
Can you elaborate on those things?
Trump says things like "there's no greater friend to Israel than me" and "I'm the best president for black people". One of his most viscerally anti-immigrant lackeys (Stephen Miller) is Jewish.
Trump’s choice of "illegals" as the cause of America's woes is smart, because (1) they can’t vote and (2) even American-born children of undocumented immigrants hear that and think "oh but he's not talking about us". He was careful to not say "Latino immigrants", even though that's what a lot of his white supporters heard.
Re: They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45 (1955)
#368Earlier quoted context omitted.
Eh. Pretty much everyone called what happened in Gaza an attempt at genocide, including many Israeli scholar. The wiki page [1] list some source from the U.N, various NGO, ... Amos Goldberg ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amos_Goldberg ) called it a genocide, and the ICC launched an investigation (ofc, blocked by Israel). Is Hamas a terrorist group ? Yeah, by many definitions. But if you accept this, you also cannot…
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> The Arabs of the Western half of the Palestinian mandate refused to accept a state in 1948
A state that was imposed on them. And which state are you even talking about ? If it is the U.N proposition for the partition of Palestine, Israel also never accepted it and disregarded it entirely.
> That is not genocide.
Mass displacement of a population, destroying their civil infrastructure, kill civilian on mass is the definition of genocide.
> Hamas’s constitution explicitly calls for the killing of all Jews in Israel.
And that is why Hamas is a terrorist organization.
> Congratulations on siding with the genocidal maniacs, Jew haters, and murderers. Hamas thanks you.
I never sided with Hamas.
You are just spouting hatred. A sad continuation of this conflict.
Re: They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45 (1955)
#369"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 don't even want to give people that benefit at this point. used to think that it was education, circumstances, outside forces, culture, etc. like "if only" we had XYZ then we can prevent this. at this point i just want to call it "stupidity". not even a left vs right thing. 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 wo…
> at this point i just want to call it "stupidity".
At this point people are celebrating cruelty:
> We can hear the spectacle of cruel laughter throughout the Trump era. There were the border patrol agents cracking up at the crying immigrant children separated[1] from their families, and the Trump adviser who delighted white supremacists[2] when he mocked a child with down syndrome[3] who was separated from her mother. There were the police who laughed uproariously when the president encouraged them to abuse[4] suspects, and the Fox News hosts mocking a survivor of the Pulse Nightclub massacre[5] (and in the process inundating him with threats), the survivors of sexual assault protesting Senator Jeff Flake,[6] the women who said the president sexually assaulted them,[7] and the teen survivors of the Parkland school shooting.[8] There was the president mocking Puerto Rican accents[9] shortly after thousands were killed and tens of thousands displaced by Hurricane Maria, the black athletes protesting unjustified killings by police, the women of the #MeToo movement[10] who have come forward with stories of sexual abuse, and the disabled reporter whose crime was reporting on Trump truthfully. It is not just that they enjoy this cruelty, it is that they enjoy it with each other. Their shared laughter at the suffering of others is an adhesive that binds them to each other, and to Trump.
[…]
> This isn’t incoherent. It reflects a clear principle: Only the president and his allies, his supporters, and their anointed are entitled to the rights and protections of the law, and if necessary, immunity from it. The rest of us are entitled only to cruelty, by their whim. This is how the powerful have ever kept the powerless divided and in their place, and enriched themselves in the process.
* https://archive.is/https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive...
* https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/665171/the-cruelty-...
People voted for Trump (the first time) because he promised The Others pain, but when you get /r/LeopardsAteMyFace moments:
> “I voted for him, and he’s the one who’s doing this,” she said of Mr. Trump. “I thought he was going to do good things. He’s not hurting the people he needs to be hurting.”
* https://archive.is/https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/07/us/flo...
Re: They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45 (1955)
#370Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
I see this as very different from "i'm eating ivermectin because bigpharma wants me to buy their vaccines" or whatever it is people say. There are certainly fascism experts out there, but the one thing that I've noticed again and again is that they emphasize how effective fascism is at changing forms and tactics. Today, most of the countries we refer to as authoritarian or fascist are formally liberal democracies (by…
This is the part where liberals are, caught up in their own inherent contradictions, desperately trying to understand whats happening so they reach for things they do understand, meaningless pop psychology.
I didn't really want to experience that particular part of German history repeating itself but here we are. "Wer hat uns verraten?"