Please get over yourself; this is not a pissing contest and there are no “winners,” especially not with half the fucking country in chaos and flames right now.
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Right? It’s insane to me that some people are treating discussions over what’s happening across our country as some sort of fucking intellectual exercise or debating game or philosophical quandary…
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Privilege is a helluva fucking drug, I hear.
Me, on the other hand?
I have no choice but to treat this shit as the ‘make it or break it,’ life and death moment in history that it genuinely is… because it could easily be me or mine next.
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From what I can see, many of them are treating it as a prime trolling opportunity. It shouldn’t be surprising, but those on the right are unquestioningly accepting the (as far as I can tell, utterly baseless) story that it’s ANTIFA doing all this, while utterly ignoring the distinction between peaceful protesters and rioters, turning a blind eye to white supremacist infiltrators deliberately making things worse, and ignoring unprovoked police violence and outright illegal acts. The level of authoritarian bootlicking is absolutely revolting- page after page of “you’re protesting in a way that people have to actually pay attention to, so you don’t deserve to live” type comments. These fuckers want to live in a dictatorship.
They see the act of protest itself as criminal because they’re in a position of such privilege that they could never, ever imagine themselves having to use it, they’re gleefully and unabashedly racist and bloodthirsty and don’t see black people or liberals as human beings, and for all their tut-tutting about how those awful protesters are doing such terrible things, they are loving seeing the nation burn and suffer. The United States is a nation of Nazis, full stop. We have been utterly tainted and rotted from within and it’s going to get much worse before it gets better- if it gets better. It’s time to start thinking about what we’re going to do if there isn’t another election- or if Trump simply decides he doesn’t like the results.
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We were talking about a comment someone made about winning an argument… not about the assholes who think they are trolling. They are not, of course. They are doing the work of fascists and as such they are. You know the Maya Angelou quote.
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Should be interesting to say the least.
The US military has shown over the decades to be super effective against guerrilla tactics from oppressed populations…
What I don’t get is why tRump and all the conservative wankstains can’t stop beating it to some dream of a race war or a civil war. It’s almost like they don’t understand that that’s the sort of situation that nobody wins…
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Probably because none of them have gone to war, and they all believe in the lost cause mythology about the civil war. They are just the kind of people who find war to be a romantic endeavor, not a destructive one, because it helps to construct the nation in their view. They want to be the guy in history who made history, preferable by being like Churchill or whatever asshole they think is cool.
That’s the point. They don’t.
This is what happens when you only study politics and war history. You get a skewed perspective on such things.
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Someone should tell them that Theodosius I, Julius Nepos and Constantine XI also made history.
I’m also remembering part of Art of War where it says that an army should always allow their enemy to retreat. The Republicans and their fascist militia allies have made it very obvious that there is nowhere for marginalised people to retreat to, all they can do now is fight.
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Surely you mean an invisible front half, because I can see the horse’s ass real fucking clear.
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Tell that to the Confederates. They lost big in the last American Civil War.
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Cult45’s galloping through Umberto Eco’s Ur-Fascism checklist.
How inexpressibly alarming that it’s apparently being used as an instruction manual, surely something the author never would have wanted.
The cult of tradition. “One has only to look at the syllabus of every fascist movement to find the major traditionalist thinkers. The Nazi gnosis was nourished by traditionalist, syncretistic, occult elements.”
The rejection of modernism. “The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity. In this sense Ur-Fascism can be defined as irrationalism.”
The cult of action for action’s sake. “Action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without, any previous reflection. Thinking is a form of emasculation.”
Disagreement is treason. “The critical spirit makes distinctions, and to distinguish is a sign of modernism. In modern culture the scientific community praises disagreement as a way to improve knowledge.”
Fear of difference. “The first appeal of a fascist or prematurely fascist movement is an appeal against the intruders. Thus Ur-Fascism is racist by definition.”
Appeal to social frustration. “One of the most typical features of the historical fascism was the appeal to a frustrated middle class, a class suffering from an economic crisis or feelings of political humiliation, and frightened by the pressure of lower social groups.”
The obsession with a plot. “The followers must feel besieged. The easiest way to solve the plot is the appeal to xenophobia.”
The humiliation by the wealth and force of their enemies. “By a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak.”
Pacifism is trafficking with the enemy. “For Ur-Fascism there is no struggle for life but, rather, life is lived for struggle.”
Contempt for the weak. “Elitism is a typical aspect of any reactionary ideology.”
Everybody is educated to become a hero. “In Ur-Fascist ideology, heroism is the norm. This cult of heroism is strictly linked with the cult of death.”
Machismo and weaponry. “Machismo implies both disdain for women and intolerance and condemnation of nonstandard sexual habits, from chastity to homosexuality.”
Selective populism. “There is in our future a TV or Internet populism, in which the emotional response of a selected group of citizens can be presented and accepted as the Voice of the People.”
Ur-Fascism speaks Newspeak. “All the Nazi or Fascist schoolbooks made use of an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax, in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning.”
They must be getting pretty desperate since their Ultimate Gravy Train is at risk in November.
sources:
tl;dr very condensed summary:
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I’m sure most here know this,
Basically Trump can only call in the military if the states request it.
Yes, yes, I know. . . the law doesn’t necessarily stop Trump, ever. But there it is. I guess in theory there is a loophole where he could call in the Coast Guard or the “Space Force.”
The question is: if Trump tries to do this, what will actually happen, and how will it impact the GOP?
I can see blue states refusing to allow the military to do it, a standoff. I can see red states welcoming it and we have a bloodbath on national TV, followed by another impeachment. And this is an election year.
It’s obvious Trump wants to be a dictator. What’s not so obvious is how far the GOP will go in allowing that.
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They will go as far as it takes, as long as Trump’s rising tide lifts their boats and drowns everybody else. There are no good conservatives. They have shown us who they are, we should believe them.
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Pretty far. Farther than I would have guessed. Farther than their policies would seem to indicate.
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That’s the thing-- they hitched their boats to Trump long before he was even running for president, they glommed onto the whole “southern strategy” and all the horrible Fox News variations of it that followed. So they’re kind of stuck with it.
But.
We still have elections. And it’s an election year.
Bad economy. Shitty COVID response, more cases in rural areas too.
Is violent bloodshed going to help them in the voting booth? I can’t tell.
The GOP base will go wherever Trump goes, but if it gets distilled down to just the base then it’s no longer a viable national party.
[ETA: wishful thinking on my part.]
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A lifetime ago on April 20, some of the Senior Democrats warned the GOP that they would regret allowing Trump to flout Congressional oversight. In the WaPo, Senator Bob Menendez is quoted as saying, " “So all of these things, you know, I don’t believe in unilateral disarmament. If this is the way you’re going to operate things in your own majority, then don’t expect that somehow comity is going to return." I think Menendez is misreading the plot. The GOP believes the fix is in; they aren’t worried about what happens once they are out of power because they don’t believe they will ever be out of power.
If it was a normal time, I’d say that a bungled pandemic response, thousands of preventable American deaths, and a nation convulsing in flames would equate with electoral disaster for the party in the White House. This year though, I just hope we have an election at all.
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Yeah. Goes back to Karl Rove’s “permanent majority” comment.
The next six months are going to be a very long time.
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One way or another they will be; this bullshit isn’t sustainable, and those who don’t learn from history…
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Is that what people tend to end up with? I mean, you know so much more than me. But while I’m ashamed to admit how long my reading of history was only politics and war, I promise you can still get some idea that war sucks for everyone involved. Starting at least as far back as Thucydides who writes basically nothing but.
Maybe they aren’t really studying it or are reading it very selectively? But I think there’s also the possibility that they know, and it’s what they want, to burn out in what they imagine will be some meaningful way. I come back a lot to George Orwell on Mein Kampf:
Hitler, because in his own joyless mind he feels it with exceptional strength, knows that human beings *don’t* only want comfort, safety, short working-hours, hygiene, birth-control and, in general, common sense; they also, at least intermittently, want struggle and self-sacrifice, not to mention drums, flags and loyalty-parades. However they may be as economic theories, Fascism and Nazism are psychologically far sounder than any hedonistic conception of life. The same is probably true of Stalin’s militarised version of Socialism. All three of the great dictators have enhanced their power by imposing intolerable burdens on their peoples. Whereas Socialism, and even capitalism in a more grudging way, have said to people ‘I offer you a good time,’ Hitler has said to them ‘I offer you struggle, danger and death,’ and as a result a whole nation flings itself at his feet.
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Reminded of the Arrogant Worms:
Scott became famous for freezing to death in Antarctica
Columbus made history thinking some island was India
General Custer’s a national hero for not knowing when to run
All of these men are famous
And they’re also very dumb
History is made by stupid people
Clever people wouldn’t even try
If you want a place in the history books
Then do something dumb before you die
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