TOM THE DANCING BUG: The Trump Monster on the Loose

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Has anybody ever inserted Trump into Apple’s 1984 ad?

Seems like a worthy use of a few minutes of somebody’s skilled time…

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Well, there’s this.

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Eh, Obama supporters already did it with Hillary eight years ago. That’s the problem with pointed political satire: it’s so timeless that it stops having meaning.

Similar case: Trump is a fascist. But people start saying “But we’ve been calling Obama a fascist for years, and have been painting little Hitler mustaches on him, and you called us loonies! No fair!”

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Just because somebody else diluted the meaning of a term doesn’t mean I need to let go of its actual meaning.

Fascism is still fascism, not just whoever the republicans don’t like.

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After yesterday, it looks like Bernie is toast. Y’all got your Hillary yard signs yet?

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Mr. Trump, or how I learned to stop worrying and love fascism

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To add a non-joke comment, it’s obvious at this point that fascism is a pejorative term for any government that the speaker doesn’t like, but going back to actual fascism (something people advertised themselves as before 1945), I think we could make the argument that America is already a fascist-like state. My family economic historian says that fascism is really the merging of corporations with the state. In the early 20th century that was envisioned as politicians running industry, but in the early 21st century it instead takes the form of corporations having politicians on their payroll and writing the laws that lawmakers dutifully pass.

I feel like what Trump is doing (sometimes, when he isn’t musing about walls and tracking Muslims) is pointing out that fascism-like elements of US government. “Insurance companies control politicians” is a quotation from him. He complains about laws that give unfair advantages to big business. But in his case, the remedy is to replace it with actual fascism; he’s just saying let’s turn it on it’s head and have the government tell corporations what to do instead of the other way around.

Ultimately the difference between a few large corporations controlling the government and the government controlling and giving advantages to a few large corporations is pretty small. And the difference between that and a just having a king and aristocracy with the rest of people being serfs is maybe not that large either.

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In a sketch, one of my favourite comedians’ character says “…and that’s why America is such a great company.” before ‘correcting’ himself.

I’ve never forgotten that little jab, the show continuing without requesting a laugh. It’s just right, now more than ever.

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Aren’t all governments fascist? Pretty much every politician I see uses the “Its us or them argument”, or, as Ben Franklin put it, “We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately.”

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In the pejorative sense all governments are thought to be fascist by someone. I was talking about what actual fascists thought was a good idea, which was having the government control industry. It came out of the way the government was able to mobilize the population during the first world war - “why not put everyone to work like that all time?” they thought. Snopes says Mussolini didn’t really make the trains run on time, but the idea that he did or could is the appeal of fascism.

I don’t think ‘It’s us or them’ is all that universal if you look at other nations (it’s on the rise right now, though), but that’s not why I would describe America as a fascist-like society. The Nazis were fascist but not all fascists were especially bent on eliminating some religious or ethnic group (this is obscured by the fact that the whole world was pretty racist and anti-semitic when fascism was on the rise so it’s a difference in goals but not necessarily in action). I say America is fascist-like because of the merger of the government and the large corporations.

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Nope. I’m writing Bernie in.

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Precisely. This is how we tell the difference between fascism and communism.
But the US is not fascist because there is not one unique centre of power.

I haven’t read Snopes but as I recall Mussolini did actually (a) sack ministers who didn’t do their jobs and (b) try and reduce corruption to corruption that he approved of. These were actually positive achievements. A friend married to an Italian says that his wife’s family still get into furious rows at family gatherings over Mussolini.

Yeah, the more I tried to explain why I would say the US is fascist the more I realized that I couldn’t actually defend the idea. To really make the case I’d have to put forward two ideas that go too far:

  1. Government power is completely usurped by corporate money
  2. Large, influential corporations essentially work together as a group

I’ll step off of “fascist” and settle back into “plutocracy”. :smile: (:cry:)

Well, the Snopes thing was really about how most of the repairs to the Italian railway after WWI happened before Mussolini took power and he just sort of took credit for them after the fact. But I don’t doubt he got some things done that benefited the country. I think the big problem with fascism is that it’s all about being efficient and increasing production, but production of what? It’s not going to be production of well-being-for-the-citizens because the citizens aren’t being consulted. That wasn’t the way people thought in the first half of the 20th century, when leaders tended to use “science” to treat people like cattle.

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Bolling says it doesn’t touch on the horrific racism angle, but note that the strip is in black and white. Get it? Like the commonly used terms to refer to folks of different races in America? “Black” here represents African-Americans; and “white” represents Caucasians and others of European origins. Get it, you guys? Look deeper. Join me on this adventure!

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Ummm no. Please stop repeating $hillary propaganda.

https://pivotamerica.com/real-primary-begins-today-bernie-still/

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Wow, still a chance? I guess I’ll keep my eyes on June 7.

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