I haven´t read the article yet bit I´d wager it´s because they´re a bunch of pampered, ignorant half-wits and not very creative either.
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Stalin could also claim that he saved peoples lives, because the red army liberated some of the death camps. I don’t think Hitler could make any similar claim.
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I don’t know about the relationships of the swedish social democrats and large corporations, but social welfare isn’t socialist in itself, look at Winston Churchill and Otto von Bismarck.
Also eugenics was a widely held view which had opposition across the political spectrum. Again it’s not socialist in itself, I’d personally argue it isn’t socialist at all.
When I used to spend a lot of time at the Huffington Post, I always said you could approximate the age of the person posting anti-Obama rhetoric by the bogey man they conjured up. The oldest used Hitler. Those from the '50s and '60s thought he was a Commie. Those from the '70s and '80s claimed he was a socialist.
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I think it’s even simpler than that–Nazis and Hitler have become caricatures of pure evil in our popular culture, not real historical people who did real things. It is easy to equate something you don’t like as being “naziesque”, because most of us don’t read histories of the Nazis and Germany during that period–at least not real histories that delve into the complexity of what was actually happening. We get our history of Nazi Germany from Goldhagen and Schindler’s List, not from Christopher Browning and Primo Levy. Our image of the Nazis is Ralph Fiennes, nazi zombies, nazis as cats to Jewish mice, or nazis on the moon–not human beings actively slaughtering people or supporting a regime that slaughtered people, that took their neighbors away and left their wealth, that awarded people for their “pure genetic lineage”, not a system of rule over a modern state, etc. We’ve utterly disconnected it from its historical context in our culture, and from any sense of why this happen anyway and the debates about why this happened. As long as the nazis are not real historical actors, but a short hand for “evil” (and we can say the same about Stalin and the Soviet Union, too), we’ll keep getting lazy comparisions like this in part because it has such a powerful emotional punch.
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And for the younger crowd, there’s Tarantino’s “Inglorious Bastards.” When members of the Royal Family go to parties dressed like Nazis, there’s definitely a disconnect between the generations on this subject.
Of course, it Repubs are truly believing liberals are the ultimate evil, that in my mind is worse than some contrive political posturing. And trust me, it won’t end well.
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Agreed. I wonder how many people came out of that movie thinking that it actually happened? No, actually, Hitler did not die in a movie theater in france. It would be a bit better if they saw Der Untergang… not the remixes of Hitler being pissed about Burning Man, but the whole actual movie…
To be fair, you get a fair amount of liberals/democrats doing some of the same. The rhetoric might be stronger on the hard right, but the assumption that everyone on the right is a gun-toting, gay-hating, racist, anti-woman, bible thumping neo-liberal is pretty strong and just as much based on certain assumptions. As long as we see “the other guy” as being evil, we’re not going to get anywhere in fixing these issues. Unfortunately, the level of disinformation on the world is rather strong.
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Some of the Royal Family WERE Nazis. Some probably still are…
Tom Perkins is a innocent victim too… or maybe not.
Like every other sick megalomaniac, he and his buddies got obscenely wealthy by profitably thrusting the externalizes they create onto the rest of society. If these people paid for just a fraction of the externalities they profit from, they’d be upper-middle class (if that). They are bums.
Too many people celebrate these megalomaniac parasites and need this shoved in their faces:
• Perkins partnered with Eugene Kleiner who started Fairchild Semiconductor which has created massive amounts of pollution issues that they thrust upon the rest of society.
Fairchild Semiconductor has leaked tens of thousands of gallons of toxic solvents into the ground which residents and even state officials strongly suspect caused a high rate of birth defects in the area.
Let me know when Perkins and his good buddy Eugene Kleiner are going to dip into their vast wealth to take care of all those people growing up with birth defects. Nah, just let the rest of society deal with it. Also, why put in pollution controls and cut into vast profits to do that when you can just be a bum who has others suffer the consequences?
Oh, and they’ve got a superfund pollution site:
Guess who mostly pays for superfund sites? For the most part, everyone except the billionaires. Yep, society does in many more ways than one. The vast wealthy sure as hell never live anywhere near superfund sites, that’s for sure. That’s for the “others” to do.
Just pay some fines down the road and keep being a megalomaniac, right?
• Perkins seeded Genentech. Once again, they sure don’t want to cut into those profits they “earned” by not cutting corners.
Genentech overlooked 80,000 adverse reaction complaints including 15,000 tied to deaths.
Reuters:
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/06/21/us-roche-europe-idUSBRE85K1NH20120621?
There’s many more examples for Perkins if people bother to look…
These wealthy parasites want us to thank them for greedily pushing their externalities onto the rest of society. The can and should go to hell.
Average American taxpayers and the poor (dearly) pay for externalities:
Fast food, poverty wages: The public cost of low-wage jobs in the fast-food industry:
http://laborcenter.berkeley.edu/publiccosts/fastfoodpovertywages.shtml
Airlines get $2.7 billion in taxpayer-backed loans while using poorly paid workers:
http://thechart.blogs.cnn.com/2010/06/22/epa-renew-polluters-pay-tax-to-fund-cleanups/?
Taxpayers foot bill for cleanup of polluted site in south St. Louis:
Disparities in the Impact of Pollution on the Poor:
Pollution disproportionately affects the poor:
http://www.wave3.com/story/11135969/enviromentalists-pollution-disproportionately-affects-the-poor
Low-Income, Minority Communities Disproportionately Exposed To Toxic Air Pollutants, Study Finds:
http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/releases/148257.php
(This all just barely scratches the surface, by the way)
The poor (especially the poor) pay for externalities not just with their limited money, but with their time, suffering and even with their very own lives. For those that celebrate these megalomaniacs, let me know when the billionaires start living next to the superfund sites they create (and start paying for them in earnest along with all the damage to the poor that live there).
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An even better question is, ‘Why do most people compare and assume Obama is like Bush when he isn’t, and is mostly trying to clean up the mess left by Bush?’
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