The thought process seems to be:
Everything I don’t feel like doing = Nazis
Everything I want to do = Freedom
The nuance seems to end there.
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It’s a shame that I’m old enough to remember when the Republicans had a policy beyond racism, hate, and opposition.
A one party system isn’t the answer, but I really hope these fringe-become-mainstream thoughts go away in my lifetime.
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If i could sir,
Id give you two harts
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No, they’re suggesting we should force people who DO wear masks …
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And yet, Trump keeps on being “sarcastic” about the virus death toll.
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Yeah, seems like it. But I’d really like to hold their feet to the fire (metaphorically and/or literally) until they’re forced to think it through… which I suppose ultimately ends in them admitting it’s just a bunch of meaningless nonsense, rather than an actual chain of thought.
And as people have pointed out, their idea of “freedom” turns out to be “no responsibility.” Kind of ironic for the party of “personal responsibility.”
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Mandatory motorcycle helmets = Nazis was a big thing in my area about a decade ago.
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The real war, the one that’s already being fought, isn’t a war between countries, or “liberal” vs “conservative.”
No, that stuff is a way to keep us from seeing the forest and the trees, as they are burning down all around us.
The real war is between wealth and accountability, and it’s been going on since civilization began.
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And hopefully I wouldn’t need to be a Time Lord, with those two hearts, to live long enough to see it change.
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3… 2… 1… “We are sorry if anyone was offended, it was not or intention… Blah blah blah.”
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I had someone suggest wearing masks was “mob mentality”. Not a decision based on science and mutual respect.
When people reject the stated motivation for doing something as untrue, they are free to make up whatever they like. Logic need not play a part.
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i kind of get the sense that right wing america really doesnt get it that the swastika, the goose stepping, the uniforms- everything that symbolizes Nazis, those are not the actual things that reasonable people object to, its their deeds we despise. So they use “nazi” the way grocers put quotation marks around “fresh”- assuming its some kind of emphasis that will get people’s attention. While utterly failing to notice that behavior they practice and approve of, is what got the real nazis in trouble in the first place.
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3… 2… 1… “We are sorry if anyone was offended, it was not or intention… Blah blah blah.”
“We are sorry if anyone felt offended when they misunderstood our intentions”
There, fixed that for you
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Like showing up in sexy grey unmarked uniforms and taking people away in unmarked vehicles. Which was in fact exactly what the Gestapo did.
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Yes. If you support the Confederacy, you’re the party of John Wilkes Booth, not the party of Lincoln.
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Fixing our propaganda problems will help in that effort.
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Nazis = nothing to see here, just some good ole boys
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As I wrote recently: make hate speech laws, change the future.
Frozen peaches absolutists are selling strange fruits.
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It does feel like the more the republicans secure victory by including ever-more fringy elements of conservatism, from the fundamentalist christians to the anti vaxxers to the ammosexuals to the, why not? anti-usa guerillas looking to advance the overthrow of the government in order to install a white supremacist fantasyland, all the way down to the satanically pregnant and the 5G conspiracy-discoverers; the deeper they’re dug in.
And at a very core level, I am concerned that all these people who used to not vote and now are part of the party’s base, actually represent ‘greater democracy’. Is democracy itself incompatible with equality?* Are The People actually always mostly useless to the ends of a more perfect nation? I try to console myself saying that if the vote were just mandatory for all adults in the usa, that this technique of the republicans of bringing the once ignored fringe in to roost would go out in the wash and we’d be better off. But what if the opposite happened?
*in the sense that democracy implies majorities getting their way cost what it may to minorities
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Yeah, it’s so true. And as Rogers likes to say, “The singular purpose of democracy is to protect the rest of us from the whims of insane rich people, be they king or oligarch. Everything else is wainscoting.”
Our democracy’s not doing so well.
Yeah, because they’re not even making an argument that the stated reason is disingenuous because of [evidence X]. They just reject it because they feel like it (likely because of projection on their part), and replace it with something arbitrary.
What the Trump election finally made me realize is that my belief that the US has been successful at convincing people that it’s bad to a be a Nazi, a fascist, and a racist wasn’t quite true. There’s certainly a lot of stigma around those terms, it’s true. The problem is, the culture failed at education and defining those terms, so the end result has actually been that it’s seen as bad to be called a fascist, Nazi or racist, not actually being one.
So we have this perverse situation where far right-wingers, including literal neo-Nazis, are going through contortions to convince the public that the Nazis and other fascists came out of the political left, while also normalizing and propagandizing actual fascist beliefs.
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