"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 happened in American society, particularly the silence, confusion and cowering now of anyone who should oppose a hostile takeover and dismantling of our democracy and our laws, are striking. It should have been required reading in American schools, when there was still time to educate people against these dangers.
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 work. they will always be taken advantage of, scammed, etc. social media and tech just made this 10x more effective.
it's how you have populations repeatedly making the same damn mistakes century after century just in a different form. it's baked into our DNA i suppose.
maybe i'm just cynical have given up. it's a really jarring thing to encounter people who refuse to even spend the min effort to attempt to question their own beliefs.
> social media and tech just made this 10x more effective.
Social media took away the hesitation of crowing about stupid things. If many people are saying it, maybe I am not stupid after all. The legitimisation and amplification of dumbness is a big contributor to the current state. Among other things of course.
When there started to be money made, and even better real power to be gained by herding such crowds then its not anymore just about self-organization over time, the push becomes very proactive
> 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 traditional anti-intellectualism; it seems to be almost an active view that it is better that people in authority do not know how to do their job.)
Fwiw, my experience from growing up in deep red America was that anti-intellectualism was staggeringly strong there. People would actually define their beliefs in opposition to those of people they perceived to be 'smart'.
The way that I always understood this was that if they had a disagreement with someone 'smarter' than them, and they operated in good faith, they would lose ~98% of the time. This doesn't feel good. It makes smart people threatening -- it breeds resentment toward them.
However, if you have a roomful of people who define their position in opposition to the 'smart' person, your beliefs are the ones that matter, regardless of what the truth is, so you get to feel like you've won the argument. Most arguments are not consequential, so this practice doesn't really cause meaningful short-term harm so there's no negative feedback.
Over the long-term, this herd mentality is how people learn to navigate the world, and you end up with a giant mess.
I think the current thing is a little bit different, though. It has gone from "academics are bad" to "anyone who knows how to do a thing is unsuitable to do that thing", which is a far more extreme viewpoint.
I got a little carried away with this response and it's a little off-topic, but I figured it might be worth posting anyway.
I think this has to do with the nonlinear growth in the human-facing complexity of the world over the past 30 years.
Humans aren't getting more intelligent (they may not be getting dumber either, but at the very least, the hardware is the same), but the complexity of the world that we have to engage with has undergone accelerating growth for most of my lifetime. The fraction of this complexity that is exposed to 'normal' people has also grown significantly over that period of time with the 24-hour news cycle, social media, mobile internet, etc.
It's obvious that at some point in this trend any given person will start running into issues with the world that are above their complexity ceiling. If this event is rare, we shrug it off and move on with our day. If this becomes commonplace, we start to drown in that complexity and desperately cling to sources of perceived clarity, because it's fucking terrifying to be surrounded by a world that you don't understand.
The thing that the right has done really well and that the left has generally failed to do in my lifetime is to identify sources of complexity and provide appealing clarity around them. This clarity is necessarily an approximation of the truth, but we NEED simple answers that make the world less scary. People also, as a general rule, don't like to be lectured or told that they are part of the problem -- the right never foists any blame upon the people it's targeting.
In my lifetime, the left has pretty consistently fought amongst ourselves over which inaccuracies are allowable or just when we attempt to create simplifying approximations. Instead of providing a unified, simplifying vision for any given topic, the messaging gives several conflicting accounts that make it easy to see the cracks in each argument, and often serve to make the problem worse. If you're competing with another source of information that is simple, clear, and makes people feel good (or at least like they are good), you will always lose if you do not also achieve those three things.
In the vacuum created by a lack of simple, blameless, intuitive messaging from an (arguably) well-meaning left-leaning establishment, the intuitive (though generally wrong and often cruel) explanations offered by the right have found huge support and adoption by people who need someone to help them understand the world. Because both messages are approximations of the truth (and thus sources of verifiable inaccuracies) people just choose the one that makes them feel better.
tldr I think we've hit a point where:
- The world is too complex for many people to independently navigate
- People need rely on simplifying approximations of the world
- Media provides these approximations, often in bad faith
- Sources of credibility or expertise often provide these approximation in good faith, but can't agree on which approximations are the 'right' ones
- Good faith messaging often either fails to simplify or makes people feel bad/guilty
- People are sick of feeling bad or guilty
- People associate expertise with being scolded over things that don't feel fair or fully accurate to them
Thus people often reject expertise out of principle, and just believe whatever Fox News tells them because it feels better.
ALSO: People who believe the 'right' things are often pretty shitty to people who don't (it goes both ways, but the other direction doesn't matter for this post). I've been guilty of this. This just further galvanizes the association between expertise or the 'right' ideas/people and feelings of resentment/guilt/shame for these folks. They may not understand what you said, but the do understand that you were talking down to them, and they hate you for that.
Gove was right. The problem is that experts no longer have to explain or justify themselves or explain the level of evidence behind their opinions.
Expertise has also been politicised. Experts are picked who give the prior decided opinions, and those who have the wrong opinion are got rid of (e.g. Professor David Nutt).
Finally Gove was speaking in the context of Brexit, and arguing that it ultimately a question of national identity. DO people identify as British or European? I agree - it is more like whether people in Northern Ireland want to be part of the UK or the Irish Republic, or maybe Scottish independence, than anything else in British politics. lots of parallels around the rest of the world.
Covid policy had multiple examples of this, and of not consulting experts on a sufficiently wide range of subjects.
Not to politicise this discussion, but the country is called 'The Republic of Ireland'. The phrase 'the Irish Republic' references the 1916 Easter proclamation, and has specific political and even colonial implications in Ireland. It's frequently used on BBC news, but never in Ireland where it would have a similar connotation to 'the free state' or other radical republican delegitimisations of the Irish state.
And that framing is where the trick is hidden. People are perfectly capable of accepting and having multiple identities. They can be a mom of their kids, a receptionist of company X, a neighbour of street Y, a citizen of city Z, a member of the flower gardening society, a supporter of football club Q, citizens of the UK and Europeans too.
In fact you don't have to choose between these identities. But when you frame the question like that it make sense that people would choose what is closer to them.
A huge part of that is the lack of any effective communications education at all for the general population. Few realize that effective communications training is also ordered and logical thinking training. People with no communications training have disorganized emotional reasoning, unless something else formal comes along such as philosophy, mathematics or software, but then you get a technical specialist that cannot explain themselves nor their work to anyone other than a same education peer - exactly our current situation.
Expertise can be of great value, but no-one is an expert on every matter and the rest. And expertise don’t make anyone free of committing errors, or to be drawn in a corruption schemes.
We can have a thorough and deep expertise on some technical domain, and yet lake the sagacity and humility to judge where it won’t put us in better position than someone else dealing with an issue on the topic in a context the other person is already deeply acquainted with, while we are completely unaware of its many specificity.
On the other hand of course someone tightly coupled with a particular situation might easily miss some bigger picture that a relevant expertise could unlock.
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 which I mean republics). And critically, many of the core symptoms—militarization of police, violent suppression of protests, demonization of outgroups (muslims, immigrants), worship of the military, disenfranchisement of voting rights—long predate Trump's political rise. Hell, we were an apartheid state in living memory, and the anticommunist propaganda here truly does rival that of fascist countries (albeit mostly an aspect of the past at thus point in terms of overt propaganda). To many Americans, fascism might seem natural and might feel like home, so an expert saying "this is fascism now" is going to get a very very wide range of reactions.
And even to educated, well-meaning americans, we have a really nasty habit of sweeping our evil deeds under the rug and forgetting what we are capable of. If Trump were to move forward with mass deportations, it wouldn't be the first time, or the second time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Wetback is one particularly nastily named example. Many "experts" on tv don't read history and are oblivious to how close to fascism we already are.
It's also worth remembering that Hitler was a huge fan of America. Liebensraum was inspired by manifest destiny. We built this country on extreme violence, arguably to a unique degree (along with other anglo colonies). That muscle doesn't just go away. We've really only been a "liberal democracy" for about sixty years now.
So yea, I don't think you can write this off as anti-intellectualism or anti-expert, this is just who we are as a people.
Societal engineering is not mutually exclusive with either confusion over what fascism is nor the many fascist traits that have always been in this country.
But yes, I think I would probably just call the societal engineering "for-profit media". Manufacturing Consent should be read by every adult in this country.
>there's a deep strain of anti-expert feeling throughout
Probably because the experts are telling them that if they want a future, everyone is going to have to compromise their current lifestyle. Not a popular message. People will always be sceptical and hostile towards people who say "you can't have X". People are always happy to believe people who say "Vote for me and you have as much X as you want!"
Tbh, the Matrix wasn't far off with the portrayal of Cypher. They just didn't expect half of the population to prefer the comfortable lie over the inconvenient truth.
More like 'you can't have X anymore' or 'only rich can have X' that brings another level of resentment and emotional kneejerk reactions.
The problem is, if 'less smart' need to be baby-sitted through every single unpopular but necessary decision, this is a failure of democracy. Sure normal democracy self-corrects over time, but not when its pushed into some form of dictatorship where the only correction mechanism is death of those in power.
That's why all researchers into immortality should be all locked up permanently in prison or to be sure shot in the head right now, however terrible and drastic it sounds. The tyranny that this will bring on mankind will make any absolutely terrible period from the past look like a paradise, and have 0 doubts all dictators ever would gladly scorch whole Earth just to achieve it.
The magical thinking of those two are the seeds of US society today and all the fruits (good and bad) can probably be linked to the ideas of one of the two.
> There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that “my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge”.
See also book by Tom Nichols (a now-retired professor from U.S. Naval War College):
It's the combination of a desire for student obedience and the intellectual damaging power of religion. Far too often a young student is told their youthful and essentially unsocialized behavior is sinful, including their own thoughts, and that coupled with an Orwellian level of obedience socialization with religion and you create crippled intellects that are afraid of their own thoughts and are perfectly obedient church members and employees. They are minions in the most literal sense and the United States is filled with them, obedient and terribly dangerous.
>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.
That’s not what the pointed text is about though. It specifically mention the concern is about those that should be considered of higher education in the context, as opposed for example to a baker¹.
¹ This is the example given in text, not some condescendence of bakers from my part here.
In particular this excerpt is frustrating though. As said directly in the text, it's hard to see the beginnings. Yes, many things are changing right now, but to be fair, if you went to any random trump supporter and showed them this text they would immediately recognize it and tell you all the things the prior admins have done that matches these "sudden" decisions "made in secret" that nobody should disagree with.
It discusses tactics, which are easy to recognize in expansion of power, but also in illiberal thinking anywhere, but I don't see in this excerpt (or remember in the original book) discussion of root causes. One thing that really stuck with me though was that many of the interviewees were quite happy with what the party had done for the country, on an individual level. This was rebuilding, providing party benefits, etc. And many joined up because they had to to advance socially or in their career. Again, things that become a Rorschach blot even in hindsight because, I guess, they are always using these tactics to push their agenda over ours until it spirals out of control, regardless of who "we" / "they" are.
I read this book years ago and it had a huge impact on my thought.
I agree with your statements here, and I've been trying to figure out how to have some of these conversations with my Trump-supporter friends.
"He's planning to put migrants in Gitmo." But Gitmo has already existed through red and blue administrations. It's not like it's a brand new concentration camp.
"Look at the laundry list of executive orders." But Biden did a bunch of EOs early on too.
Both sides have done tariffs. Anwar al-Awlaki was an American citizen killed in a drone strike under Obama.
The Patriot Act and the 100 Mile Border Zone undermined the Fourth Amendment years ago.
We've permitted corruption and insider trading for congresspeople for years.
The fact is, we've had bipartisan "fascism" creeping up on us for decades. I don't even know where to start with root causes, and everything is so damn historically muddy that it's hard to persuade someone who genuinely believes that "Trump & Elon just want less government spending" that they're not using their exceptional powers for good.
Thought I should expand to explain the group gets larger as the economy suffers and people are too poor busy and hopeless for anything other than a hopeful narrative.
And the group gets dumber when skipping school is glorified, education gets funding cuts, and people mass consume media.
> 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 work.
Yet extremists always want to dismantle education to control the population. For instance, in the US, Trump got the votes from the uneducated. He has no interest in an educated country.
> 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 have absolutely no evidence to support this (but I would welcome any for or against it), but I have a loose theory that there is pretty much always a subset of people who are physiologically predisposed to be driven by a fear response more than the average person, and over time they congregate, possibly as a safety mechanism.
I can only recommend Dietrich Bonhoeffer's essay "Von der Dummheit" (On Stupidity), which he wrote while being imprisoned by Nazi Germany. It's a short read and a terribly accurate description of what's happening.
I don't believe in this "natural stupidity" theory, many well-educated people voted red. Fascism is not a natural state of mind, it is carefully and relentlessly cultivated over years by a giant propaganda machine, at the hands of the capital class who stands to benefit the most from the current situation.
This is no coincidence that Trump's cabinet is the most billionaire-friendly ever. Total deregulation of businesses is the point, fascism is the mean. Eventually, fascism becomes the point and even billionaires become losers. I don't think we're quite there yet, but close.
I think, then, there's a difference between "well-educated" and "intelligent" or even "critical thinker". I would go on to argue that most "well-educated" people are perhaps well-educated in generalities only, other than perhaps a narrow special-interest field.
I think you are terribly mistaken and, if I may, you are the one who seems to refuse to be educated (I don't say this as an insult). It is very easy to say "they are brutes" instead of looking at what exactly is going on and why democrats lost the elections.
As a non-US, I see very little difference between democrats and republicans, except maybe Trump. Democrats are the typical neoliberals: free markets, global capitalism, corporate rule, worldwide patents, etc. There is the famous chart that shows that since around the 80s the productivity went up while wages stagnate. Workers in the US right now are not in a much better position than 20 years ago.
Did the democrats campaign for improvements, raising the wages, improving healthcare, education? No, it was business as usual, "please don't vote Trump so we can keep things like now". Thus, many people said "fine, I'll vote for the other, he says things will be like before, literally".
So it's the Democratic Party who has baked into its DNA that things should not change, no matter what. I would say they could've won easily with some concessions, but those concessions go against their core beliefs.
Unfortunately, and because of this, Trump, a liar and conman, won. If they wanted to win they should've lied better, like Trump did.
On one hand, you're partially right: It's a pretty sad state of affairs that our only choices in the previous election were "maybe let's not elect a fascist" and a fascist. I can totally agree with you that I would have loved an option that was "let's make life better".
On the other hand, what does it say about our society that given those two options, we picked the Fascist? It's not like the messaging from the Republicans was unclear: they ran on a platform of attacking the rights of women, LGBTQ+ people, and immigrants. And more than 30% of the citizens of our country said "sounds good. Count me in". Another 30-odd% decided it didn't really matter to them one way or the other. Only 30-something-percent of Americans said "wow, that's kinda fucked up. Let's not do that".
I don't think people who voted for Harris thought "yeah, let's keep healthcare pro corporate and screw the poor", they voted for other stuff. And I think people who voted for Trump didn't vote specifically against LGBTQ+ policies necessarily.
Of course, media and social media had a heavy influence, but on everybody.
The coworkers I felt comfortable asking why they voted for Trump came out of the gate with some variation on "no pretend girls in girls sports and locker rooms". To some of them being gay is apparently "just something pedos do". Plenty of people voted against lgbtq+ rights explicitly. But beyond that we are all stupid on the issues, and to some extent that is unavoidable. We can't all be experts in economics. So we can't vote on issues, we need to vote on character. When faced with a wolf in sheep's clothing and a wolf, pick the one still pretending. At least pretending to feel shame about corruption sends the message that it is wrong.
yeah i concede i don't know everything, but honestly if you're not from or living in the US i would also re-examine your view of things. you have a different objective view but miss a lot of the context. it's easy to intellectualize the whole situation and come up with these solutions. this kind of reasoning is what i've gone through already trying to make excuses for people and it sounds nice on paper but it doesn't hold.
i'll tell you from personal experience there exists huge swaths of people in my community that voted for trump not because of any of his policies or a feeling that dems didn't bring change, but because they worship him like a religious figure. or they demonize anything that isn't conservative and treat it like team sports. it really doesn't seem to be much more complicated than that for some people no matter what angle you try to come in with (lack of education, not tending to their needs, etc.)
This idolisation can also happen for the left (not democrats, I mean real left), but I think it's the minority. Unfortunately, people choose something new and potentially bad vs the same as usual. Not because of education, but because of limited choices.
Hmm, if somebody idolizes a serial liar, cheat, fraud, convicted felon, horrible personality, sleazy conman etc. who is also a billionaire who laughs at poor then problem lies deeper.
Failed upbringing, failed education, failed by society. If I substract those people who we can call unfortunate from pool, the only stuff that remains is really not anyhow pretty, in contrary.
Those people in your community that voted for him - are they happy with his steps now and firm direction he is taking? If yes, then it confirms the line above.
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.
> Trump got a majority because eggs are too expensive.
I think this trivializes the outcome in a dangerous way.
From my view as an outside observer, these were all big factors:
- Bad handling of the candidate selection for the democrats (switching to Harris too late)
- Having an impossible platform for a lot of single issue voters (mainly: people that want immigration reduced, but also firearm availability)
- Thoroughly uninspiring middle-east policy (not a personal opinion, but I think that cost a bunch of votes that would have been democrat)
Personally, I also think that some sexism was also a significant factor and that Harris would've had an easier time had she been male. I also believe that the media smear campaign depicting Biden as completely senile was really effective (and a bit ridiculous considering the age of his replacement). Another very effective strategy in riling up their base was the "democrats want to transgenderize all the children" (exaggerated).
If the democrats main takeaway is that they just need to campaign for lower egg prices next election they might well lose again IMO.
> I also believe that the media smear campaign depicting Biden as completely senile was really effective (and a bit ridiculous considering the age of his replacement). Another very effective strategy in riling up their base was the "democrats want to transgenderize all the children" (exaggerated).
I'm not sure what they could actually do about these; if the media (or their owners) want to lean heavily on the scale, this is always going to be a problem. We see the same thing in the UK. You can't fight a thing that people have made up in their heads with facts.
(I note that there is a platform split on H1-B between Trump and Musk, but that doesn't seem to have been a problem for them)
> Bad handling of the candidate selection for the democrats (switching to Harris too late)
Many of the democrats are simply too old. Nancy Pelosi, world's greatest stock trader, is 84. Feinstein died in office at 90. There's an entire missing generation, the party should be averaging 50-65. People are supporting them because there's no alternative, which is .. not durable.
> if the media (or their owners) want to lean heavily on the scale, this is always going to be a problem
100% agree. But I think you don't even need heavy bias on media ownership to get the whole political landscape distorted; I think the whole attention/outrage-driven ad-economy systematically pushes all reporting on both sides toward the fringes, and this is inherently more helpful for the right side of the political spectrum.
> Nancy Pelosi, world's greatest stock trader, is 84
Is this tongue-in-cheek? Because IMO the whole insider-trading exemptions for congress are deeply unethical (and unlikely to get fixed). To be fair, though, it barely even registers on the scale compared to the whole "You get to design and lead a government agency after donating 250M$ to my campaign"-thing... Whole situation just feels a bit like the gilded age is making a comeback right now, just strictly worse :/
> I note that there is a platform split on H1-B between Trump and Musk, but that doesn't seem to have been a problem for them
I think this is a really big lesson and something Trump is excellent at: His non-stop BS (annex Greenland, rename the Gulf, take over Canada) keeps media busy and many of his voters from realizing that the whole platform is neither self-consistent (see H1B) nor in the voters interest.
It is a really bitter lesson though, because after seeing how "effective messaging" looks like in our current media landscape, I'm absolutely certain that I don't want more of that not even from parties that would perfectly represent my interests :(
Propaganda was a problem in this election, and many of the points you make touch on this.
For instance, if you're concerned about the price of eggs, you would not elect a president who campaigned heavily on tariffs and clearing out illegal immigrants, both policies which will tend to make things more expensive. But that was not the propaganda.
If you are concerned about Palestine, you would not elect the president whose inner circle was floating around ethnic cleansing fantasies about Gaza well before Trump made the current remarks yesterday. But that was not the propaganda.
Many issues (like immigration, firearms, and transgender topics) are difficult to talk about these days in America because propaganda (in any direction you choose) has turned them into absolutist binary views. Binary views that happen to be tied to identity. It is difficult to try to reason with identity-tied views.
Social media has only made such worse. Everyone huddles in their silos, cheers when their identity issues go one way, and rages when their identity issues go another. Contrarian viewpoints to the silo get downvoted en masse. It is pretty clear that there are nefarious sorts out there that know this and try to manipulate the crowd. And this isn't even an American only problem these days. America's just one of the places where the democratic backsliding is the most visible, due to our former position.
My main worry in fact goes beyond mere politics, and more to the anti-intellectualism, anti-expertise wave that is also part of the above. How can progress move forward when the propaganda turns vaccines into a boogeyman, when the propaganda politicizes climate change and also ties such to identity, and when (at its worst) the propaganda attacks science itself? To me, such is far stronger concerns to worry about compared to who wins the next American election.
> but Trump got a majority because eggs are too expensive.
You guys need to stop being so disingenuous (and get some new material). EVERYTHING got a lot more expensive under the previous administration. Whether it’s Biden’s fault or not is irrelevant. A poor economy motivates people to vote for the other party, ESPECIALLY when the average person felt they had better economic prospects when “the other team” was in power (again, whether that was Trump’s doing or not is irrelevant).
> again, whether that was Trump’s doing or not is irrelevant
For democracy to work, you need voters with a good enough civics education to understand how the different parts of government interact, and a trustworthy media providing factual news so voters can understand the dilemmas their politicians are facing.
If what you're saying is right, and American voters are unable or unwilling to understand how their vote and current events combine to cause certain outcomes, doesn't that mean democracy in the US cannot possibly work?
What you're describing sounds closer to a popularity contest or a sports competition than politics.
________________________
Personally, I believe a major part of this issue is caused by the political system and media landscape of the US.
In a two-party system as in the US, the legislative only represents half the population (as bipartisan efforts are rare), leading to resentment among the other half.
In a mixed-member proportional system[1], as in Germany, New Zealand and many Scandinavian countries, you end up with many more different parties in parliament (Germany currently has 8 [2]). For any law to pass, you need multiple parties to work together, which allows more voters to be represented.
Similarly, while in Germany newspapers and public broadcasters still provide high-quality news (less than 20% of the population distrust the public broadcasters and major newspapers as of June 2024 [3]), in the US the media tried to improve their ratings by replacing factual reporting and analysis with ever more emotional content.
The level of polarization in the US as it is today will lead to a new civil war, or worse, if it continues. How can a democracy continue if the majority of voters cannot even agree on basic facts?
________________________
The perfect example for this is the discussion around the re-categorization of Pluto. Which has no real-world impact on anyone, yet everyone had an immutable opinion on.
The arguments for categorizing Pluto as a dwarf planet were relatively simple: We've found many other objects like Pluto. They're more similar to one another than to the other planets. Some of them are larger and heavier than Pluto. Either our solar system has 17 planets, or it has 8.
But the arguments against re-categorizing Pluto were of a very different nature. People had spent a lot of effort memorizing the planets in school, and didn't want all that effort to be wasted. People were emotionally attached to the way things had been. People preferred the emotional comfort of something that wasn't real, over the inconvenient truth.
One argument is based on logic and scientific fact, the other on emotional attachment to a middle-school understanding of the world.
The Enlightenment once replaced the emotional, religious order of the world with scientific fact and logic. This is the basis the US and modern democracies are based upon.
How did we end up in a situation where half of the political spectrum wants to tear down the very foundation of democracy and replace it with emotion, religion and tradition, medieval concepts we had long left behind?
Trump got a majority because the prior majority political party was literally participating in genocide, which was on display for the entire world to see.
EDIT: I think you have the right to deny genocide and I have the right to insist that it is in fact genocide.
Its not helpful to decide it was "only" mass murder, and that the ethnic cleansing is "only" relocating survivors to less-destroyed regions.
More to the point, the USA committed its genocide on the natives of the land that was stolen by framing their arguments that they were fighting a war with terrorists, too. That excuse is as old as the hills.
genocide | ˈdʒɛnəsʌɪd |
noun [mass noun]
the deliberate killing of a large number of people from a particular nation or ethnic group with the aim of destroying that nation or group: a campaign of genocide | [count noun] : news of genocides went unreported.
That definition definitely fits the Palestinian people. Gaza is destroyed, the Palestinians are destroyed, there is only rubble and death where once there was life.
> Trump got a majority because the prior majority political party was literally participating in genocide, which was on display for the entire world to see.
Is the argument here that people vote based on what the prior party was up to, while completely ignoring whether the new party will do less or more of the same action?
Most votes are cast against something, not for something. That's why negative ads work, no matter how annoying and insulting they are.
Most of the Americans I've spoken with who acknowledge voting for Trump said they did so either because they were against abortion or because the were against the great replacement. My sample is small though and may not be significant but there is a similar pattern in my country.
Seeing your posts hours after Trump launched a plan to ethnically cleanse Gaza is quite the sight.
You’re like the black knight from Monty python.
Edit: I welcome the pushback on this post. The message I meant to convey is that of two evils. Yelling at the losing candidate does nothing for Gaza. It alienates even people who care (but I’m not perfect). I apologize for the divisive nature of my post.
Or you could switch to a different voting system which allows more than two parties, allowing people to make more nuanced choices?
There are even voting systems which are perfectly representative (as a popular vote would be) and ensure all states get a voice (the goal of the electoral college).
Say, a bicameral system.
One chamber allocating each state a fixed number of voices, ensuring each state has a voice,
and a second chamber with mixed-member-proportional voting (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QT0I-sdoSXU), which allows perfectly proportional majorities in this chamber while giving each district a representative (in the process also fixing gerrymandering).
In fact, it was actually this system, designed by the US, that the allied countries chose for Germany after World War II.
> Seeing your posts hours after Trump launched a plan to ethnically cleanse Gaza is quite the sight.
Biden provided the bombs and the diplomatic cover that allowed Israel to decimate Gaza's population, permanently damaging entire generations, reducing the most densely populated areas on Earth to smoking rubble, and explicitly supported Netanyahu's ethnic cleansing plans. He basically alley-ooped this scenario to Trump.
> You’re like the black knight from Monty python.
Sheer projection.
Democrats lost because they supported genocide [0], [1]. They tried to court Republican women instead of their own base, trotting out people like Dick fucking Cheney [2] (after removing any mention of stopping torturing people from their platform).
When over 30% of Biden 2020 voters told pollsters they felt so strongly about an arms embargo that it could affect their vote, and Harris responded by saying she would keep sending bombs "no matter what", she lost. The win could have been a landslide, and Dems chose to tell their base to eat shit instead.
> It was damned if you do, damned if you don’t. What about all the voters you lose by dropping support for Israel?
Nonsense. As can be plainly seen in the posted links, far fewer Democrat votes would have been lost by support for an arms embargo.
What would have been lost was the support of many Democrat funders - fossil fuel companies, weapons manufacturers, Zionist billionaires, and a vast swathe of complicit corporate media. As in, the people perverting the party against the interests of their base.
> Democrats were powerless to stop the genocide.
Again, utter nonsense. Democrats voted against ceasefire four times at the UN; and made a mockery of domestic and international law by providing billions in arms to a regime that was likely to commit genocide.
And so it needs to be said: lack of money for Harris' campaign was not the issue. She outspent Trump, ffs.
> Gaza voters weakened them further.
That was a choice! Gaza voters would have strengthened them, if they had simply decided to stop arming a genocidal apartheid regime. That's what the polls I posted showed beyond doubt; and Dem elites knew all this months before the election.
> What would have been lost was the support of many Democrat funders - fossil fuel companies, weapons manufacturers, Zionist billionaires, and a vast swathe of complicit corporate media. As in, the people perverting the party against the interests of their base.
This could have cost many seats in congress.
I acknowledge you might be completely right, but they were never gonna get the campaign and all of D congress to that position in the first place in a high stakes election.
>a genocidal apartheid regime
Or democratic state with the rule of law and free speech if we are being factual.
Hamas knew exactly what the IDF response would be after carrying out their obscene, murderous pogrom on October 7. Hamas wanted their own people to die in the thousands, while they themselves cowardly hid in their tunnels built with aid money, because they knew they would get the support of useful idiots in the West like you.
The West should give Israel everything they need to wipe out Hamas. Whether it is in Ukraine or Gaza, when the barbarians are at the gate, the only answer is to kill them.
Shouldn’t have voted for Hamas then. Shouldn’t have kept launching wars decade after decade against Israel because they hate Jews, wars they kept losing and kept whinging about losing even though they kept starting them; once they had lost the power to fight wars, shouldn’t have started throwing stones at the IDF and bombing discos in ridiculous “Intifadas”. These people in Gaza and the West Bank have a single idea in their minds - they want to murder all Jews. They are incurable.
Why didn’t they just accept a state in 1948? The Arabs have conquered land all across the ME and North Africa yet they begrudge Jews a sliver of land on which the only states that have ever existed, in antiquity too, are Jewish states. The Arabs of Gaza and the West Bank have shown themselves to be the most consistently stupid people in history. No wonder they are having to eat cats.
I agree with this, I don’t think it was the only reason but it’s a big one. When people point out what Trump said or plans to do I want to remind people it’s not like we had a real choice this election. It’s right wing or far right wing.
Both parties are completely beholden to AIPAC it’s disgusting.
Except the Israeli/Palestinian conflict started way before the current Gaza event. For years Israel has forced the mass displacement of Palestinian (ask a Lebanese), blockaded Gaza, destroyed many of the civilian infrastructure, continue its colonization of the west bank (and further displacing population without any regard for international laws). The fact that they did not decide to straight up murder the whole population in one go doesn't make this less of a genocide. They have just been committed to it for years.
I haven't followed the conflict closely and I'm not in any way trying to say Israel is blameless.
However your claims here seem very one-sided. For example I've read about how Israel has been trying to provide aid to Gaza but most of the resources have been controlled by Hamas who have been constructing elaborate tunnel systems, militias and weapons rather than improving the lives of civilians.
From my understanding this has culminated into the attack that started the war, and I can understand that Israel can't just sit on their hands while Hamas prepares for another attack.
The civilians of Gaza deserve to be able to live their lives in peace, but I don't see how that can happen if Hamas isn't dealt with.
The requirement for all members of the target group to die in order for it to be called genocide is fallacious and not historically acccurate.
Was it genocide of the Native Americans, since 'they survived'? Was it genocide in Australia when white europeans took the land from the prior caretakers?
The answer: yes of course it was. Genocide doesn't mean total eradication - it means, attempted total eradication. In Gaza today, the lifestyles of the Palestinian peoples have been completely eradicated, and it will be years before they recover.
So what I'm saying is that if Israel had attempted total eradication they would kill more than 2.5% of them.
I also think that if Hamas had the means they would have been happy to totally eradicate Israel, civilians and all, so I can't say I have much sympathy for them. The civilian deaths are tragic but given these numbers I think it's pretty clear that they are collateral damage from fighting Hamas, not a target in themselves.
You seem unaware of the actual meaning of the word genocide, and I would suggest not using it in that case.
What the US did to the native Americans was a genocide. Siding with a foreign country in a conflict with a terrorist force is not a genocide, and throwing verbal atom bombs into an already maximally heated discussion isn’t helpful.
And what Native American tribes sometimes did to each other was genocide. There were lots of actors in the fight for the American land mass - the US , the British Empire, the French Empire, Mexico, the Japanese were even having a look. So I don’t think it is as simple as saying the US committed genocide of the Native Americans, who were actually many different tribes often warring with each other. Their way of life was bound to largely die out once the modern world arrived.
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 not see how what Israel did in Gaza, and has been doing for years with Palestinian, is not genocide: Force displacement of vast amount of population, regularly blockading humanitarian aid, mass destruction of civilian infrastructure, mass imprisonment, often with little to no representation, mass killing of civilian (it is estimated, by many source, that roughly 45000 Palestinian died, of which at least ~80% where civilian) ...
This is the textbook definition of genocide. If you accept the Shoah, the Armenian genocide, the genocide of the tutsis, ... You cannot logically not see this as a Palestinian genocide.
As for the U.S involvement, that's honestly not for me to say. I am not a us citizen.
The Hutus killed 800,000 Tutsis in a few weeks. I agree that is a genocide.
The Arabs of the Western half of the Palestinian mandate refused to accept a state in 1948, and decided instead to repeatedly start wars and latterly Intifadas against Israel. It was their own choice. The result of that choice is the deaths you mention. That is not genocide. It is a result of their own stupid choices. They are obsessed with trying to murder Jews, but thankfully not very good at. Hamas’s constitution explicitly calls for the killing of all Jews in Israel. That would literally be a genocide.
Congratulations on siding with the genocidal maniacs, Jew haters, and murderers. Hamas thanks you.
I'm having a hard time googling the book you mentioned. Is it by any chance called 'They Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1933-45'? That's the closest thing I could find.
In France, I remember we read several classic allegories on that theme at schools. Rhinoceros by Ionesco (even watched it in the theater as a school trip), also The Plague (Albert Camus). I didn't think much of it when I was a teenager, but I'm looking at them on the light of these recent events. Especially Rhinoceros on ideological contagion.
Yes we did, but I think that the people who needed it the most, were the ones who either didn't had to read it (the ones not in a "lycée général") or whent through because it was required but didn't tried to understand the meaning.
More broadly, as teenagers, most of us didn't had the maturity to truely grasp the meaning ; and the ones who did probably already where sensitive enough to don't fall in the same traps.
In the hundreds of people I crossed path with during my school time, I don't remember a single one who was actually enlightened by things in the program.
The only ones who had kind of a shift from their original mindset did that outside of school or because of a teacher who went out of their way (and of the official program) to explain things.
Watching Gaza get razed has pretty much ended any sense I had that liberal society is capable of learning lessons or improving itself. I grew up a good liberal, but as an adult I realize that so much of peoples' attraction to liberalism is simply inability to resolve conflict, center values in society, or establish a shared culture. There are better ideals to structure society around, like material rights.
Fwiw i also believe we should dismantle our government as it is not, actually, very democratic and doesn't actually function well and mostly exists to serve itself and its corporate clients. The current parties are simply the last people on earth I'd trust to do it.
What makes you think I hate liberalism? I was just pointing out it's not sufficient for a functional society, contrary to the tenets of our civic religion. If it was, our country wouldn't be such a dysfunctional shithole our citizens log on to China's instagram to talk about how much of a dysfunctional shithole this country is. Hilarious and hugely embarrassing.
Granted, I do abhor the part of liberalism that makes people think their voice has any inherent value and that political action begins and ends with voting. I'd like to remind readers that Hitler was voted into office, but the civil rights act was legislated out of fear of cities burning down, and it took a literal civil war to end slavery in this country (outside of prisons anyway). Most of the few labor rights we have in part because the labor movement was bombing buildings and shutting down entire cities. We live in an arguably progressive society in spite of liberalism, not because of it.
Am I naive for thinking americans are capable of making a government we can ACTUALLY not be embarrassed by? That can actually prioritize its own citizens over its GDP and bombing places that never did us wrong? Whose flag isn't seen by many groups of people as a hate symbol? With a culture not based on being proudly ignorant? Probably. But we all need hope. Liberalism certainly ain't gonna get us there by itself—at some point we need actual values to orient around aside from greed and the right to be an asshole in public.
I remember I once stumbled upon pictures of the daily life of ordinary nazis.
They looked so normal, having fun, teasing each other, drinking and playing instruments.
There is even a video where hitler is shying away from his love companion.
This was a shock to me as a kid: evil doesn't look like the caricature of "the very bad guy", it emerges in every day people.
I think we failed to communicate that. It was too tempting to have a universal vilain you could use in Hollywood movies and instantly recognize. That you can't identify to. Black and white is so easy to sell.
But what it means is a huge part of our society cannot make the link between what is happening in their own life and the past. Because they have a vision of the past that looks like a kid show, not what really happened.
Worse, on the other side, outraged people abused the term nazi to call out anybody that had a bad behavior. But there is a huge difference between being an asshole and being ready to commit genocide.
Eventually it means the word nazi lost all of its meaning. And all of its usefulness to defend ourselves.
In the last too decades, we surely spent a lot of time playing with words until they could not be useful anymore. But it made us feel good for a moment.
You can find similar images from apartheit South Africa and apartheit southern US states before 1970. And in those cases they believe they are happy because of the protective wall of state violence against other humans.
There was always what you might call a "particle" of fascism throughout the War on Terror (maintained by both parties! because it was popular with the public!) Things like the unaccountable secret prisons in Gunatanamo or Abu Gharib, or the US sniper who amused himself by randomly murdering hundreds of civilians (eventually convicted .. then pardoned). And then in the war on Gaza everyone (bipartisan) was falling over themselves to say that it was children's own fault for being in the same school as Hamas and that the Israeli government was right to bomb them.
Back at home in BLM, everyone stood up for the right of the police to unaccountably murder citizens. Because that power would only be used against bad people, right?
> Worse, on the other side, outraged people abused the term nazi to call out anybody that had a bad behavior. But there is a huge difference between being an asshole and being ready to commit genocide.
> Eventually it means the word nazi lost all of its meaning. And all of its usefulness to defend ourselves.
Do I understand that while the United States is undergoing a radical neonazi revolution lead by the tech industry your take away is that the people who called out the right-wing and tech industry were wrong to do so and bear responsibility for the horrific state of the world?
Well, I think so. Because many didn't understand they were fascists too.
The fascism was always in the vast majority of us, if we wanted to look at it. Just look at the structure of our workplaces, which accounts for half our waking lives. There's no free speech in them. With few exceptions, they're intensely hierarchical, people passing orders downward. Those "unlucky" enough to make it inside one of them, often sleep in the nearby alley.
The bizarreness of this form of organization isn't lost on those on top of the hierarchy. They're used to battalions of people doing what they want, and they seek out philosophers who apply this vision to other aspects of life. It wasn't hard; for example, the US had a 4 year king anyway. Usually a warmonger callous to the vast majority of his population.
One problem is "calling out." Name-calling. The current administration is showing direct action, which impresses many who find their lives increasingly intolerable. Many didn't like him, but rather rationally rolled the dice with the change candidate, even if it was probably going to end up as bad change. Like hitting the computer.
No I'm noting that to fight better we must realize what we did inefficiently and correct course so that we can mobilize more people.
Right now If I discuss the events around me, many are apathetic, because they think I'm exaggerating. Because that's what they have been used to.
And your comment is directing your anger at someone that very likely share a lot of your value system while he was trying to make a self-reflecting point. This is a waste, and it divides us.
When everything is an outrage, the outrage is worth nothing.
And while you are fighting on semantics with potential allies, for virtue signaling no less, the real threat is showing a united front, no doubt, no debate.
No, what you should takeaway is that misoverusing the term Nazi as an insult patently no longer works precisely because noone cares about being called a Nazi anymore due to its misoveruse.
In a different timeline, Trump being called a Nazi or any of the vicinity terms should have been an immediate termination of his campaign chances.
What actually happened is Trump ignored it (as he should) and the American people shrugged "OK" and went to vote for him with complete disregard.
Then Musk got called a Nazi at the inauguration, and the American people shrugged "OK" and went back to facepalming at just how much sheer waste the government has with complete disregard.
The moral you should take away is you should not invoke Godwin's Law. It's probably too late for "Nazi", "racism", "sexism", and a host of other insults the Left have thrown around to see what sticks (none have), but that doesn't mean future originally-valuable-terminology have to face the same fate.
Another moral is that insulting Americans probably doesn't actually work in general. "Deplorables", "Garbage", and others were turned around into rallying cries during the 2016 and 2024 campaigns, not unlike the original meaning behind the term "Yankee" which was originally an insult not unlike "Kraut" or "Jap" but is now one of the fondest nicknames of Americans.
So, Americans were insulted by being called Nazis and in true progressive fashion decided to reclaim the term and, well, embrace it?
Cool - it’s nice that you say this is an American trait. I was almost about to say that this entire setup was manufactured to pit Americans against each other, weaponising victimhood and identity, with the complicity of legacy media and big tech. And out of the three players in this game - the ‘left’/‘libs’, ‘right’/‘conservatives’ and the billionaire fascists up top pulling the strings, only the billionaires stand to win.
The reason why terms like nazi, racist, sexist etc did not affect Trump's chances is because his voting base _does not care_ that he is those things. The right wing in America, magnitudes more than the left, does not care about the personal qualities of their chosen candidate, only about whether he advances their agenda. Why do so many nominal Christians vote for Trump despite him being a cheater, hoarder, and a person who otherwise embodies so many of the qualities the Bible cautions against? It is, again, because they will cook up any number of excuses and denials to justify their support as long as he hurts those they consider the enemy. The only way to make the application of those terms hurt Trump would have been to make the population care about them in the first place (beyond the thinnest veneer of superficial handwringing) which would have required a much stronger education system than America has.
> Another moral is that insulting Americans probably doesn't actually work in general. "Deplorables", "Garbage", and others were turned around into rallying cries during the 2016 and 2024 campaigns...
It depends on the insult; sometimes that doesn't work. One of the purest expressions of joy I've seen in politics was Scott Adams (Dilbert guy) back in 2019 analysing [0] a group of anti-Trumpers trying to rally around being called "human scum". He had a lot of interesting things to say back then about the art and science of persuasion.
Trump is a neonazi, openly aligned with American white supremacist militias, attempted a violent coup in 2021, and "the American people" who shrugged "OK" are neonazis. It is the inescapable reality of our present moment, and it has been visible for a very long time.
Godwin himself openly endorsed calling Trump a Nazi.
My takeaway is exactly the opposite, that not only were people right to call out radical fascist elements and influences in our society, they (we) were wrong to be cowed.
Point to be noted is that Rudolf Hoss wasn't the leader of a random Nazi camp. He was the commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp, where 1.1 million people were murdered, making him one of the biggest mass-murderer of the last century.
> Worse, on the other side, outraged people abused the term nazi to call out anybody that had a bad behavior. But there is a huge difference between being an asshole and being ready to commit genocide.
> Eventually it means the word nazi lost all of its meaning. And all of its usefulness to defend ourselves.
In my experience, most of the people who get accused of being Nazis do turn out to be actual Nazis. Sometimes they are stupid enough to make overt Nazi gestures (e.g. Elon Musk) which is pretty much the only way the average person will accept that someone is a Nazi. Much more frequently they turn out to agree with Nazi ideas such as ethnic cleansing, but do not do the salute, and people will say they're not really a Nazi because they didn't do the salute.
I don't know if there was intent behind it, but during and after WW2 the nazis and ww2-era Germans were depicted as textbook villains, in media, documentaries, school books, etc, but they did so in a dehumanizing fashion, as in, there were only a few named individuals (Hitler, Goebels, Göring, etc), but a generalised and unified "Them". Which made them completely unrelatable to those that weren't "them", which also opened people up for sleepwalking into facism - as long as they don't look too much like "them", and only when "they" got into power did their true colours reveal, including the caricature of Musk doing a nazi salute. I mean he didn't need to do that, and for the facist takeover it would've been better if he didn't because there's now a strong correlation between the two, but he did at the moment it was too late.
I mean it wasn't and isn't too late of course, that's defeatism, people can quickly be removed from power once people get their act together. Jan 6 proved that, and that was a fairly unorganized mob with only a handful actually prepared to arrest / kidnap or do worse to the congresspeople (thinking of the one guy with the tie wraps).
Did you read the article? The section about "alarmists" and "troublemakers" is directly relevant to your take on the use of the word "Nazi". Some people have been calling Musk a Nazi for what, a decade? They sounded like alarmists a decade ago, but now he's literally doing Nazi salutes on TV, acting like it's normal.
> Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that".
So far they are expanding power, firing dissents and trying to reduce spending to humanitarian causes and education, to expand its hegemony, to agitate allies. They even attempt to increase means of incarceration.
I'd also emphasize that a dictator is smaller than a Congress, but not better, and "fewer written rules" can easily conflict with "more freedom for individuals."
Just imagine if the many state laws concerning crimes and misdemeanors were torn up in favor of "don't piss off the police." Sure, it's way shorter, but you've simply replaced the hard-fought written rules (which you have a chance to see, understand, contest, etc.) with hidden unwritten ones that change semi-randomly.
It's probably best to start by not appointing a serial liar, convicted felon and conman to head it.
But if for some insane reason you do, you probably want to keep him and his cronies accountable to the law of the land. The conduct expected from someone with that history should be unimpeachable.
Instead, what we got is the conduct of someone who is unimpeachable. None of the rules apply to him or his friends, and neither do any of the checks and balances.
He literally bragged about it before he was elected the first time.
I know we live in chaotic times and all but "grab them by the pussy" without clear consent is, in fact, sexual assault, no matter how much of a celebrity you are.
And there's a long trail of credible accusations against him ranging from various forms of sexual assault to unequivocal rape:
You never have one except because everyone decides they do. The moment anyone with a modicum of power decides to say it doesn't exist, it doesn't exist.
> In 1942 there were 110,000 Japanese-American citizens, in good standing, law abiding people, who were thrown into internment camps simply because their parents were born in the wrong country. That's all they did wrong. They had no right to a lawyer, no right to a fair trial, no right to a jury of their peers, no right to due process of any kind. The only right they had was...right this way! Into the internment camps.
> Just when these American citizens needed their rights the most...their government took them away. and rights aren't rights if someone can take em away. They're priveledges. That's all we've ever had in this country is a bill of TEMPORARY priviledges; and if you read the news, even badly, you know the list get's shorter, and shorter, and shorter.
From the outside, it continues to surprise me when people bring this up, as if they're either too ignorant to know about the Dixiecrat schism or want to pretend that everyone else is. What's the point? It's so easy to look up.
It's just propaganda, optics, PR. Obviously the Democrat party in 1940 has absolutely no relation to the Democrat party in 2025, except for the name. People use that same name to smear the 2025 party because they can. And it works because propaganda works. That's how Germany got Hitler and it's how the USA got Elon.
Really, in democratic societies there are three levels; those where the offending politician is actually deposed, those where their unconstitutional action is blocked by the courts or by another arm of government (as with Boris), and those where _they never do the thing in the first place because they realise they can't get away with it, and there'll be unpleasant consequences for them_ (this is by far the most common, particularly in parliamentary democracies, where Dear Leader can be fired at a moment's notice). If none of these happen, then typically the democracy ends.
The US is probably unusually vulnerable to this sort of thing; it has an unusually powerful executive, and a highly politicised Supreme Court, in particular. Though, it kind of remains to be seen how far the Supreme Court will be pushed. Some or all of Trump's appointees may take the view that they got into the job to screw over minorities and aid business, but not necessarily to actually end democracy in the US. They are likely not all that beholden to him.
R v Miller was important but ultimately overtaken by events - while Parliament did want to discuss Brexit, they were unable to find a viable solution and we still got no-deal Brexit where vital things like the status of Northern Ireland had to be patched up later. For whatever insane reason, the demand to eject us from the Single Market was just too strong.
R (Miller) v The Prime Minister (not to be confused with R v Miller, or R (Miller) v Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union (the solution here is clearly to just stop naming people 'Miller', to avoid further confusion)) was probably ultimately more important in its precedent than its concrete outcomes, though, yeah.
I think it’s important to clarify that in this case, having a “modicum of power” is in the form of being able to say it doesn’t exist without a riot and a beheading. It’s not in the form of money or command of an army, though those things definitely help.
In a functioning democracy, the guardrails last until the person trying to break them leaves office, and then that person is not elected again; and if they break laws in office, they are convicted of them.
Laws of nature don't care what you believe: if everyone in the country thinks COVID is a myth, that won't stop COVID from killing people.
Human laws -- "What is the law?" or "Who is the king?" aren't like that. Human laws literally are, "What everyone thinks is true". The chiefs at USAID told Musk he couldn't have access. The President told the chiefs they were fired. The chiefs believed themselves to be fired, so they were fired.
What else could they have done? They could have called the police or the FBI, and reported illegal attempted access of classified systems. The police could have then arrested Musk or his people (or at least threatened to do so). But would they have done so? Wouldn't they have reasonably believed that such behavior would lead to their losing their jobs?
Maybe in 2016 they would have believed that allowing access to classified materials would eventually land them in hot water, and that standing up to the president would eventually lead to them being vindicated. But not now -- any reasonable person now would predict that standing up to the president would lead to them being fired (and possibly have other vindictive punishiments applied), with no recourse; while giving in would certainly be overlooked.
The People voted to re-elect a known authoritarian with no respect for the rule of law or democracy. I don't see how any democratic system can withstand that.
It’s not moral panic, it’s because Trump is reducing legitimacy and stability of the government. Killing foreign civilians is normal, locking everyone out of a government job with zero notice is not.
COIN sucks, civilians get killed, the closest thing to a fortress in modern warfare is a city. The US has a better record than most in protecting civilians but it’s impossible to save everyone.
The US could save people by not starting wars. And by quickly finishing wars other people started (that means Ukraine) rather than drawing them out as long as possible to maximize shareholder profits from weapon sales.
You can tell a republican is president because suddenly we care about the constitution and checks in power and other things we didn't care for for 4 years. It's like when Bush invades a country, that's bad, when Obama does it, that's justified or "don't bother me, I'm eating".
Now we get all these articles about evil and resistance and yet, most damaging US politics have continued regardless of red or blue but we have to try and pretend partisan fanatics are anything but.
Sorry but this time around, specially after the insane anti civil rights COVID policies and overreach, the hypocrisy is overflowing so much you'll get more backlash to your partisan narrative.
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.
But what is happening right now is not really the same as to what happened the last four years, is it? If we forget about partisan wars for a second, are there precedents to what Trump is trying to do? Genuine question, I'm not a USA citizen and I can't keep up with everything.
He’d have a long way to go to get down to the number of federal agencies that existed in 1900, let alone the number in 1800, yet the US had its constitution, then, too.
Since 1800 congress has used its constitutional power to establish agencies. It is congress who has the constitutional power to shut them down, not the president. The president executes the laws passed by Congress.
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 iteration where you have hundreds of independent agencies that cannot be fired breathing down your neck with statutory power is fucking insane.
> The president is fascist because he's, checks notes... , relinquishing governmental power by shutting down agencies?
You do know the president is not supposed to have that power, right? His job is to execute the law, which as currently written requires those agencies to exist.
Yes and FDR also skirted around constitutionality and even threatened to pack the courts to ram his reforms in. I don't agree with everything the president is doing, but the rail we are going down is just doomed. What is your proposition to stop interest from eating 100% of the federal budget. We just paid 1T of interest, do you think that is going to decelerate?
>>What is your proposition to stop interest from eating 100% of the federal budget. We just paid 1T of interest, do you think that is going to decelerate?
Because those agencies are funded by the federal budget. We are literally going into a deficit to send money to other countries. Do you realize how insane that is? And don't tell me this is just a small part of the federal budget. Oh its just a couple billion here and there. That's a lot of money that could go towards not being in debt. This level of fiscal irresponsibility is basically taxation without representation on the unborn.
>>We are literally going into a deficit to send money to other countries. Do you realize how insane that is?
You mean the international development fund that's being raided right now? You know that it exists because US realized that it's cheaper(as in - LESS money spent overall) to help countries develop, so that US is less likely to engage militarily with whatever conflict happens in those countries eventually? It's part of being a global hagemony - it's not insane, it's just good business strategy. Out of all people, Musk and his cohort should be able to see this.
>>That's a lot of money that could go towards not being in debt.
The whole idea is that you'd be in more debt if you didn't do this, because you'd spend another trillion dollars on yet another conflict somewhere because people got fed up with having no access to fresh water and food and now there's a war that US just "has to" intervene in. Aid money is meant to explicitly prevent this.
> so that US is less likely to engage militarily with whatever conflict happens in those coutries eventually
Or you know, we can stop getting into wars? Did our adventures in the middle east advance US interests?
> It's part of being a global hagemony
It's called overextension and almost every historical power declined due to internal rot coupled by continuously getting into conflicts, which, wouldn't you know, drained the treasury.
Ah yes, "just stop". I mean, but all means - please do.
>> Did our adventures in the middle east advance US interests?
They made a few american corporations extremely rich and justified balooning the military expenditure. Whether that's in US interests or not - you decide.
>>It's called overextension
It's part of projecting your might as a superpower. The same reason why American taxpayers are paying billions of dollars to station troops in Eastern European countries - not out of charity but because it's explicitly in American interests to do so. International Aid is the same - "we're giving you money now so that we don't have to spend more money fighting with/against you(cross out one) in the future". "stop getting into wars" has the same energy as "just stop tipping" or "just stop spending so much money on the military" - imagine how quickly your entire national debt would be wiped out if you did that!
Hey, if I told you I happened to be an expert in this field, hypothetically, and I said this was a vast oversimplificaiton, would you be willing to listen to an expert?
Nobody is denying that the US budget / finances are in dire need of cleaning up, but the approach taken is a hostile and forced takeover of essentials like foreign aid, education, medicaid, etc. People will die because of this approach and its short sightedness will have a bigger negative impact on the US economy and international relationships than it will gain them from reduced costs.
Many things like childcare, elder care, or healthcare have significantly changed over the last 150 years and now people have much less slack[0] to go back to the old ways.
Anyway I care little about the size of a government as it is the result of many perverse incentives (vetocracy, companies pushing for both deregulations and regulatory capture, late stage capitalism trying to make almost everyone poor and/or unstable) but the latest generation of attacks on the size of the government feel a lot like a Embrace Extend Extinguish on social safety nets so that predatory industries like healtcare insurance can better extract wealth from the lower classes
Do you think inequality has risen or decreased as the size of the government increased? Regulatory capture can only exist with the existence of unchecked regulatory power. I personally work in a space that is insanely difficult to new entrants because of the thousands of regulations you need to comply to (90% are garbage btw). If tmrw, our industry had a regulation reform, the entrenched players would die overnight.
> Do you think inequality has risen or decreased as the size of the government increased?
I would say inequality decreased as the size of the government increased, and inequality increased as the size of the government decreased from its 1967 peak, yes. The New Deal was the single greatest reduction in inequality in national history.
I am not arguing for or against size of the government, nor I am arguing long term strategies, I am saying that ripping out wellfare programs is a rugpull on a lot of people
Inequality has generally gone down as time goes by.
Because regulations cut both ways. They stop bad actors and they stop innovators.
Innovators thrive at the start of an industry, later once its commoditized, its going to be driven by people who want to cut corners. See enshittification.
Regulations put a ceiling on harm by bad actors.
Either we need industries that do not obey such laws of physical reality and entropy, or we need to accomodate for the most probable occurrence efficiently.
You will always have examples of failures of these regulations, the measure of their efficiency is from the counterfactual losses and gains.
As I understand it, this wave of US policy change is inspired by a combination of white supremacy and US exceptionalism. But rest of the world is effected by few different things, for example, xenophobia in the case of EU and UK, expansionism in Russia, zionism in Israel, nationalism in China (and Japan, really) etc. It looked the same if you stand far, but they're all different, so I wouldn't call it "global".
There is a documentary from Deutsche Welle titled "The rise of the ultra-right in the US": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrhREluLdBs. Maybe worth a watch if you want to see an "outside" perspective on this.
The right wing of the US is not driven by white supremacy. It's driven by a belief in a variety of mostly false grievances, about immigration, the economy, the wealth gap, etc. Those bogus beliefs are held by white and non white people.
Consider that Trump won almost 50% of Latino male voters. As a percentage of the vote, Trump did better with racial minorities and women in 2024 than 2020, and much better compared to 2016.
White supremacy is real and it has some effect in US politics, but it's not a driving force anymore. I say this as someone who has lived both in and outside the US. The outside perspective is not always better. Germans may be seeing the US through the lens of their own history.
Yes the US is uniquely fucked, really. At least the previous global hegemon fought two world wars to lose its place. The US is basically committing geopolitical suicide at the top of its powers because of gender neutral toilets and the price of eggs. A rather pathetic country and people, sadly.
Triggered. If we are pathetic, then look forward to our enlightened successors.
I don't know what will happen in American politics, nor what effect it will have on the world or the permanence of those effects, but there are demagogues everywhere, America is not exceptional.
America is exceptional in that it is the global hegemon self destructing before our eyes and for largely nonsensical domestic reasons. That is exceptional.
And I don’t know about triggered, but rather just sad, because I was one of those people who really believed in the US at one time!
My mom was born in late 1930s Germany. She remembers being bombed out of her appartment. She came to US and is not happy with the way things are going here.
1. The USA will likely address climate change directly through technology (geoengineering) vs rapid degrowth (the only two plausible means of stabilizing the climate)
2. The USA will likely avoid war.
3. The USA will likely experience large-scale economic growth due to regulatory change, efficient government services, compounding industrial ecosystems and robotics
4. The American scientific establishment and education system are likely to be transformed to create massive jumps in productivity (in the age of AI)
5. And, of course, the current trajectory of AI seems to support if not promote an unprecedented humanism. Unlike past automation, it doesn’t require humans to act like machines — instead, it lets us leverage our intuition, emotion, and vibes. And this intelligence is available to all, worldwide.
We already have smarter AI than 99% of humans — and this creates certain transformative opportunities. There is little doubt that this will be applied across society at an unbelievable scale and speed.
Why is this desirable, you might ask? In short, China’s economic model (low-corruption communistic capitalism) is working way better than liberal democratic models.
We don’t want war. But we do want the ability to compete effectively with China — and with the European model, it’s not happening.
There are very few ways to compete with China without very strong leadership — and now, it seems, we have that chance.
And, with the global distribution of high-intelligence AI, there is plenty of room for distributed, decentralized local growth that can enable all people around the world to participate in economic development and super-abundant resources.
Things will continue to accelerate. And the biggest wellbeing challenges will come from overabundance of resources rather than their scarcity.
Note: these are hypotheticals for a reason! But I think it is important to identify plausible positive futures so we know where we want to go — we have plenty of negative futures we are trying to avoid.
The USA is currently experiencing an autocoup prosecuted by an unholy alliance of tech industry elites and dominionist christian white supremacists. Its president, who presided over an attempted violent coup in 2021, has called for the annexation of Canada and Greenland, ethnically cleansing Palestine and acquiring it as US territory, military incursions into Mexico, seizing Panama, and suggested the annexation of the United Kingdom.
He is openly aligned with radical white supremacist militias that are entwined with our sheriffs, police, and military. He's installed a white supremacist as Secretary of Defense with the support of congress and numerous others in powerful positions throughout the remnants of the US government.
Because they have zero connection to reality? Can I have a pony in this hypothetical too? How do we get to any of them while having to climb over the additional hurdle of a far right anti-science government?
>The American scientific establishment and education system are likely to be transformed to create massive jumps in productivity (in the age of AI)
And this presidency will ensure that this jump in productivity only benefits the wealthy. Proposed tax cuts by Trump would make middle class people pay more and wealthy people pay less
>There are very few ways to compete with China without very strong leadership — and now, it seems, we have that chance.
Oh yes, the guy that wanted to have a say in what the fed does. The guy who proposed and eventually rolled back tariffs on its neighboring countries, sending a lot of companies (both in usa, Canada, and Mexico) in panic. I could go on for hours
> The USA will likely address climate change directly through technology (geoengineering) vs rapid degrowth (the only two plausible means of stabilizing the climate)
How is "rapid degrowth" a solution to climate change? we have "degrowth" in population in basically every industrialized country already anyway, but more extreme rates like South Korea are already destabilizingly low, and still not even close to enough for keeping CO2 emissions in check: That would probably require us to slash population by at least 60% (and quickly, even if we kept enacting CO2 reducing measures).
There is already a "solution" for climate change on the table-- electrify everything, de-carbonize electricity generation and help roll out this change globally, but all the major players are dragging their feet because this is obviously not free...
> 1. The USA will likely address climate change directly through technology (geoengineering) vs rapid degrowth (the only two plausible means of stabilizing the climate)
That climate change can be addressed through technology is of course true, but equating that with geoengineering is pure insanity. Also, there's _nothing_ that indicates that the US will address this area at all, especially not now, with an administration that doesn't even believe that there's anything to address!
> 2. The USA will likely avoid war.
I do not understand how you can draw that conclusion after seeing the new president threaten even _allies_ with war in just a few weeks in office.
> 3. The USA will likely experience large-scale economic growth due to regulatory change, efficient government services, compounding industrial ecosystems and robotics
Which efficient government services are you talking about? The ones provided by skilled bureaucrats being replaced due to lacking "loyalty"?
> 4. The American scientific establishment and education system are likely to be transformed to create massive jumps in productivity (in the age of AI)
Transformed by having their funding slashed?
> We already have smarter AI than 99% of humans
You seem to be sampling a very strange subset of humans.
> There is little doubt that this will be applied across society at an unbelievable scale and speed.
There's, in fact, lots of doubt.
> In short, China’s economic model (low-corruption communistic capitalism) is working way better than liberal democratic models.
For certain things, sure. For other things (like freedom of speech, personal liberties): very much not.
> There are very few ways to compete with China without very strong leadership — and now, it seems, we have that chance.
So, you want a "strong leader". How does that go down in history again? Anyway – do you think that in addition to being "strong" there are other aspects of a leader that you might want to have in addition? Like, I don't know, intelligence and compassion? Or are you just going for strength to smack everyone over the head?
> And, with the global distribution of high-intelligence AI, there is plenty of room for distributed, decentralized local growth that can enable all people around the world to participate in economic development and super-abundant resources.
Absolute meaningless dribble. It just needs a sprinkle of blockchain or something.
> Things will continue to accelerate. And the biggest wellbeing challenges will come from overabundance of resources rather than their scarcity.
So when can people suffering under these authoritarian strongmen expect this abundance? How much suffering will they have to take before utopia hits? Or, alternatively, before we can laugh you lot off for a few generations again.
I'm curious if what is happening in the US and what has happened in Britain with Brexit actually ends up slowing some of these marches towards illiberalism in other places. Like when people are upset at the direction of a country or current policies, they may take a "throw the bums out" attitude even if the alternative is far worse. But perhaps they're looking at the complete shit show in the US and how unproductive Brexit was and are thinking "OK, maybe not like that..."
I mean, it sounds like Canada is more united than it's been in a long time in its shared opposition to Trump.
Ask Hawaii what happened when a bunch of businessmen wanted more profits and less government oversight! Back then it was Dole (the PERSON) and sugarcane companies, today it is auto manufacturers and probably access to the northern sea route that is rapidly becoming de-iced and relevant for shipping to bypass the Panama Canal. Canada better take this threat seriously and treat the USA, at the very least, like a neighbor who is shooting a rifle at a massive tank of propane.
In the UK, the political party (which is a actually a privately owned company) owned by the guy who drove the initial wave of Brexit is apparently topping the polls now.
The only policy they talk about is getting rid of all the immigrants because that's what caused all the problems, not decades of right wing government culminating in Brexit.
But underdeath that is the usual US-style Turbo capitalism stuff like destroying the NHS and handing it over to American corporations.
> In the UK, the political party (which is a actually a privately owned company) owned by the guy who drove the initial wave of Brexit is apparently topping the polls now.
Oh god. There I was thinking it couldn't get worse and hoping you'd made a mistake, but no, you're right, somehow it is.
I don't think it changes anything on a base level for how humans behave en mass. Unfortunately it looks like we will always be susceptible to populism and propaganda. At best what you're seeing is a temporary inoculation against illibralism.
In France at least, Brexit made the idea of leaving the EU obsolete in political discourse, both on the left and far right.
But at the same time French media just repeated the “it's a clumsy handwave from an autistic dude” narrative after Musk's Nazi salute so I'm not sure it will work this time.
Notice that this benevolence and protection by the media is granted to Musk (and Trump) by their complete subservience to Israel's demands and wants. Trump just proposed ethnic cleansing the Gaza Strip and cleaning up the rubble with American money and work so it can be handed over to Israel in a nice shape.
I suspect a large part of the subtext is that considerable real estate holdings, hotels, casinos, apartments, etc. will mysteriously end up slightly off book on some TrumpCo. spinoff or another.
No, that's missing the point. What hotels, casinos and apartments were promised to the Biden administration to flood Israel with money and weapons to flatten the Gaza strip into rubble and kill and maim hundreds of thousands?
It's not important what leverage Israel has used to make yet another US president do exactly what they want, contrary to any idea of justice, international law, basic humanity and common sense. The point is that Israel has that kind of leverage and nobody is able to resist it.
How is the response to Oct 7 a defensive action? Using block sized bombs to take out one terrorist minutes after shooting a missile and has already left the scene when smaller munitions from drones can do the job is defensive? The military threat of Hama'
s is a few RPGs that have barely injured anyone since the war started.
How does Israel even know the ratio, they're not counting deaths.
All Hamas wanted from the beginning to release hostages was for Israel to do the same. Something they've now done anyway so the entire war and all civilian suffering was unnecessary.
As much as I hate the Nazis at the top of Israel's government and Western complicity in the ethnic cleansing occurring in Gaza (and more recently the West Bank too), I find your statement disturbing.
Not everything is related to Israel, and there's no good reason to believe that this has anything to do with Israel. French media were pretty critical of Joe Bidden being too old for the job, despite Bidden giving Netanyahu all he wanted.
Edit: OK given that other response of yours in this thread[1], it's quite clear now that you're confusing the fight for the freedom of Palestinians and the hatred of Jews.
In addition to being disgusting, Antisemitic talks like these are actually counter productive: they help the Israelis as it gives them an excuse to victimize themselves once again.
> Not everything is related to Israel, and there's no good reason to believe that this has anything to do with Israel
Netanyahu himself tweeted in support of Elon Musk after his nazi-like salute. This is obviously about Israel.
> it's quite clear now that you're confusing the fight for the freedom of Palestinians and the hatred of Jews
I didn't mention Jews, you are the one confusing Jews and Israel. There are many Jews who are vehement opponents of Israel's nazi government and are denouncing it and its influence on American politics anywhere they can.
Honestly, what would these protests do? Serious question.
Let say you manage to achieve the unthinkable and bring a huge amount of people on the street, heck let say you are so successful that you also get a full on national strike going, what then?
Do you think it would affect those in charge right now? He would not care. He is already ruining the US economy and alliances. Why would he care if some people he does not answer to get on the street and complain? In fact, it may even give him the excuse to declare an emergency and enact even worse acts.
And you know half the country support him. He has the army on his side. The court is on his side. And worst of all, the law is beneath him, literally. What would these protests do?
I swear, serious question. Help me understand. What do you hope to achieve?
The point isn't to sway the emperor. (When the facts change, he changes the facts.) But there are many people answering to him who currently don't have the backbone to say no to him. Seeing a million people out there shouting that the emperor has no clothes on may give them that little extra bit of courage necessary to make the right choice in one of the many daily situations where they have the choice between being pandering yes-men and doing the right thing.
A successful protest with a large turnout shows people that they are not alone with these opinions. This instills confidence so that they dare to act "rightfully" later on.
Yes. It's about the threshold to hold an opinion and to act. Different people have different thresholds for how much they dare to break from the status quo. With widespread protests we change the range of standpoints people feel comfortable to take.
Just like, the comparison is relevant, the public display of nazi symbols changes the range of nazi opinions that some people are comfortable expressing..
I mean, technically he controls it, however as a former officer in the military I have to believe (perhaps stupidly) that the majority of officers in the US military will refuse to be deployed illegally to squash protesting, even if it's a bit violent. If not, then I guess the people I served with were extraordinary. I hope they were run of the mill, I really do.
The purpose of a protest in general should not be to affect the people in power, it should be for enpowering and bonding the people to further enact post-protest. A moralle boost, a conversation starter, an ignition to call more people to action.
Having sayd that, a very successfull protest does affect the upper ones, only temprorarily and tactically. A policy maker will still want to make X move, but ever so slightly delay it or figure out a differnt narrative to bring it back some time later.
I see myself in some of these words. I am by no means complicit in what is currently happening in the US as a US citizen, but I genuinely have no idea how to fight any of it. People want to throw words around like "resist" and "disrupt" and any other revolutionary buzz words, but the fact is I still have to get up every morning, pour my coffee and go do my job because that paycheck is what allows me to do anything else at all, in my life. I don't have the luxury of risking termination because I decided to call in sick to go to a march at my state's capitol.
I voted accordingly, I signed the petitions, I followed the rules and keep a strong moral compass to be a good human to other humans, upholding a "do no harm" policy that I take quite seriously. None of this was supposed to happen, and yet it did.
Reading this excerpt makes me feel like the Germans the book is about, the ones that history can look back on with a heavily judgemental 20/20 vision powered by the historical perspectives that came _after_ these people's lifetimes. I am not capable of being so self-righteous that I can look back on German citizens during the Nazi regime and say "well, they should have known better."
We never really know how we will react to circumstances until we are impacted by them. People go around thinking they won't fall for phishing emails and yet it is one of the most successful methods employed by predatory scammers. We might believe all our decisions are our own, while marketing has mastered the art of subtle manipulation and dark patterns that heavily govern our consumer habits. Our minds imagine arguments or stressful situations where we are able to consider multiple paths, choosing the one where we come out on top, but when we are actually in those moments, we fall back on irrational decision making and emotional reactions.
I think we got to now the same way the Germans did back then, pointed out in the article;
> It was all rigmarole, of course, but it consumed all one's energies, coming on top of the work one really wanted to do. You can see how easy it was, then, not to think about the fundamental things. One had no time.
We are busy, distracted, inundated with things that want to control our attentions and have been for years. We were primed for this exact thing to happen to us, and now we are in it. The story of the frog in boiling water comes to mind.
Thanks for sharing. I, and so many others, have much to think about and reconsider about what we want our lives to mean.
"What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could not understand it, it could not be released because of national security."
That has already happened here in the Netherlands. Except it was organised crime. It's so difficult to fight we can't just convict them in court anymore, we need to fight them extrajudicially". So the RIEC was formed "Regional information expertise centrum". And extra judicial actions called "interventions" do happen and they do commit crimes to innocent civilians not related to organised crime in anyway. And they get away with it. And the Dutch population is by and large blissfully unware of what has happened. Most have no idea what that organisation is, but that organisation controls the police, the council, the tax department and about 13 sub-parts of government and gives them orders to carry out as part of their "interventions".
The general population would not even know the name RIEC. All they know are recent advertisements on TV encouraging people to report any suspicious behaviour happening in their neighbourhoods. These people are stupid. They could report something they misinterpreted and unwittingly destroy some innocent persons lives with the extra-judicial interventions that followed.
But yeah, as someone below has said, what's now happening is on a whole other level.
As far as their public website tells (https://www.riec.nl/) the RIEC is about a targeted bundling of knowledge, experience and resources to better deal with the effects of organized crimes, instead of everyone working in their own little silo.
The "interventions" are basically the forming and supporting of work groups / special interest groups around a specific organized crime phenomenon, with the intent of devising an approach to deal with the specific phenomenon. They publish a report of those so-called interventions here: https://www.riec.nl/documenten/publicaties/2024/12/18/interv...
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What I dont understand is what the democrats and constitutionalists are doing? Where are they?
Trump only cares for loyalty and power. Hes also really thin skinned, so what mystifies me is how he's let Musk take all that power from him?
Why aren't the "opposition" hammering the point that Musk is/has effectively usurped Trump?
If I wanted to eject Musk's control over the state, that is where I would start. Trump knows that musk yeets anyone who he sees as weak, so why not exploit that to get some level of constitutional control back?
> What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could not understand it, it could not be released because of national security. And their sense of identification with Hitler, their trust in him, made it easier to widen this gap and reassured those who would otherwise have worried about it.
No, that's a gross simplification, and leaves out all the violence and constant deception. This is a good primer on just how far off the pop culture understanding of the Nazis is: https://archive.org/details/TheOriginsOfTotalitarianism/
"Without subversion or trickery" is flat out wrong. And it's also wrong for the US today.
I really have no clue about history, and what you say sounds very reasonable. I guess it is true.
But I think any person who wants to live in a democracy needs a bare minimum ability to detect trickery. Because there has not yet been invented a system where none of the politicians lie, and you can make good decisions based on taking them all at their word.
Now, maybe the level of subversion and trickery in pre-WW2 Germany and/or in the US now is beyond reasonable. I don't know. But in general, if "people were lied to" is a good reason for people to choose bad politicians, I don't think there is any hope for a good outcome, ever. The world just does not work that way.
Edit: thanks for all of the replies, I’m questioning my framing here now due to some smart people’s thoughts.. I suggest reading the full thread, as there are some interesting comments.
I see the obvious parallels to Trump, and I agree completely (and hate that it is happening). But I feel like I also see a lot of parallels to the democrats. Deciding Kamala would be the candidate without any public vote, for example. They both have aspects that heavily mirror the article.
I normally am not a fan of both-sides’ing an issue, but this seems like a literal case of everyone in the government basically performing that they disagree with the other, while marching down similar paths. They fight on issues that get people excited, while conspiring together to inch towards a “mystery government” which we must just trust.
I believe the path forward is to find things in common with our neighbors rather than politicians. Even if we disagree on some political views with our neighbors, we likely still have a lot more in common with them than any politician.
And, if you disagree, really truly read this with a critical eye, imagining the other side. Listen to their complaints. Because they feel the same way about your side. I’ve literally heard smart people in both political parties call each other authoritarian. So maybe the issues are actually with both sides.
Democrats did not subvert the checks and balances of our system - they faced opposition in all their initiatives in the judiciary, house, and senate.
What Musk is doing now amongst a silent government is unprecedented. His youth group is marching into federal offices walking past security and taking everything because people are afraid. They’re afraid of being fired. They’re afraid of reprisals.
The next step will be for Musk to USE what he’s taken from these IT systems. There’s a reason he beelined for the IT systems.
They have everything they need now to make lists. That is the next step. Lists of names.
Your comment comes off as alarmist, but then I realized the content of the article, and think that you may be right.
I still stand by my point that most of our politicians have done this to us, on all sides of the political spectrum. And that we would be better off empathizing with our neighbors rather than any politician.
But the scale of the jump from previous actions to this one is enormous and shouldn’t be dismissed at all.
It seems alarmist until you consider that Musk is a Nazi. He did the Hitler salute, live on national television. His followers tried to downplay it, but his own answer to the question "Are you a Nazi?" was "I bet you did Nazi that coming!"
People joke that he went from being the Henry Ford of our generation to being the Henry Ford of our generation.
I don't know whether I would say that Trump is a Nazi*, but the fact that he put a Nazi in charge of firing govt employees that don't follow orders does not bode well.
EDIT: * If only because he has never publicly admitted to being a Nazi like Musk has.
Musk is a traitor per US legal definition and his actions highly resemble a hostile foreign national takeover, he deserves nothing less than the maxumim punishment under current US law...
I see your point, however, in this case the democrats and republicans are part of the same entity.
I am suggesting that the politicians’ interests are somewhat aligned, in regard to grabbing power. Their techniques are different, but the outcome is that we become more normalized to the behavior of “being ruled”, bit by bit.
Don’t forget the right-leaning protests in 2020 over democratic governors telling people they had to get vaccinated or fired, and they were not permitted to have their small businesses open or go to the gym. That was also authoritarian, regardless of how necessary some people thought it was at the time. You may not have agreed with them, but they were upset about the same things as you.
An actuall global event that killed hundreds of millions of individuals is a very different thing than what Musk is doing, without any such precipitation...
I do not agree that firing should have been on the table, however this is not an Apples and Oranges situation...
Rather than thinking in terms of "left vs. right", I think in terms of "extreme left vs. moderate left vs. moderate right vs. extreme right". I support moderates over extremists. I support democracy and rule of law. I care about this more than I care about left vs. right.
> Rather than thinking in terms of "left vs. right", I think in terms of "extreme left vs. moderate left vs. moderate right vs. extreme right". I support moderates over extremists. I support democracy and rule of law. I care about this more than I care about left vs. right.
This is a great position. I wish more people adopted it.
The problem I have seen over the past few years is that those who are on the extremes are not aware that they are on the fringe. They believe that their ideology is widely shared and common amongst everyone.
> Protesting [police] brutality is right and necessary. It’s an utterly American response. But burning down communities and needless destruction is not. Violence that endangers lives is not. Violence that guts and shutters businesses that serve the community is not.
We need more of that from our politicians. When Republicans are willing to criticize Trump, I respect them enormously for it; but few Republicans are willing to publicly disagree with Trump.
Agreed - I think we say similar things. I am mostly suggesting that authoritarians currently live in all sides of the aisle in our government right now. And they’ve all been ratcheting up in intensity, getting us used to “their” version of it. This latest jump being by far the most severe and scary.
No laws were broken. But it's very much in line with what the article is talking about:
> What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could not understand it, it could not be released because of national security.
As a purely mechanical point: having a D president with R house and senate and supreme court is a very different situation to having R all across the board, which is why the "checks and balances" have stopped working.
They can be very different, but still both push our governing structures and our thinking in directions that are not good for us individually or collectively.
To risk an analogy, if you're drowning and need assistance, you need some sort of flotation device, or a rope to get out of the water. If one person throws a heavy stone block at you, they're not helping. If a different person tosses you a metal chair, they're also not helping, even if they think they are. The objects are different, and the intent may even be different. But neither helps, and you are still drowning.
Examining that analogy in light of the electoral outcome, would you prefer to be in the timeline in which someone throws you a chair but there is a boat full of others who might throw you something useful, or the one in which someone has thrown you a heavy block, has drilled holes through the hull, and is actively pushing everyone else overboard?
They’re not both the same level of bad currently, I agree.
But they have both been consistently working to normalize their authoritarianism. I mentioned the 2020 protests in another sibling comment, which I think is a good example.
This is just the next step in an ongoing escalation, but yeah it is a big jump.
I see what you're saying, but listening to partisan rhetoric on both sides here does not really get you any closer to the truth here.
If you were you were to look back at the political discourse in 1920s and 1930s Germany, you'd find extremely scathing critiques from the Nazis lobbied against the Social Democratic party. Did this mean that the two were equally bad?
While it's true that Biden's actions during his recent term were frequently called unconstitutional by the right – be it for trying to raise the minimum wage or forgiving student loan debt – it was rarely from a perspective of solidifying his executive power. In the case of the Trump v. United States, he was avowedly against how the ruling implicitly expanded his executive power.
On the flip side, Trump's openly pushing the expansion of his executive power with his firing inspectors general, overruling the senate by freezing funds and appointing his own pseudo-agencies that take control over independent agencies in the executive branch.
These are fundamentally different things, and should be treated very differently, even if people from either side complain about both.
(Since there are posts on economy related factors and the OP was about Nazi Germany)
At a different level is this somewhat reflective of USA today? (USA today is by no means poor, although it is true that the bottom 50% has stagnated for quite long)
> How is this to be avoided, among ordinary men, even highly educated ordinary men? Frankly, I do not know. I do not see, even now. Many, many times since it all happened I have pondered that pair of great maxims, Principiis obsta and Finem respice—‘Resist the beginnings’ and ‘Consider the end.’ But one must foresee the end in order to resist, or even see, the beginnings. One must foresee the end clearly and certainly and how is this to be done, by ordinary men or even by extraordinary men? Things might have. And everyone counts on that might.
This is one of the best books I ever read. I picked it up pretty randomly a few years back. It changed me.
Before reading it, I was firmly of the opinion that good people (like me! and everyone I like!) will (mostly) resist a fascist takeover. At least passively resist. As in not actively collaborate. Mostly. Reading that book obliterated almost all of those beliefs. (What little was left was destroyed by having children, and actually directly experiencing what it means when people say "I'll do anything for them").
I think it's the most upset I've been since I was a child and asked my parents why people suffering in a war on the news didn't just say that they don't wanna be in the game anymore. Because that was the rule that applied in kindergarten.
This all sounds very depressing. But read the book. It's a damn important book. (And it's very short and almost free – just read it).
> "You see," my colleague went on, "one doesn’t see exactly where or how to move. Believe me, this is true. Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join with you in resisting somehow.
I felt this for four years straight last time.
But what scares me far more is if very large, recklessly shocking occasions occur and the resisters are nowhere to be seen. I keep hoping to wake up to footage of mass protests and riots and fires and anger and aggressive intolerance of these shocking occasions.
It is probably good to remember that this talks about the experience of a German, under Hitler's Nazi government.
This isn't a text that refers to current events. It talks about what happened. How things progressed. Why everybody just ambled along. How it was possible that so many just went along.
If you think there are parallels to current times, or if you feel this attacks you or your beliefs, there is value in thinking about "why". What is it about this story that reaches you? What are you willing to learn from it?
I don’t see the call to action. It describes perfectly the feeling of hopelessness I’ve had for years now. The election was the last chance and everyone blew it.
There is still a lot we can do. Every demagogue and authoritarian regime collapses eventually, often quickly- and they haven't even succeeded in seizing total control yet. As long as we are alive, we can resist.
Moreover, even under the worst possible situations, individuals can find meaning and purpose. Viktor Frankl's book "Man's Search for Meaning" on surviving concentration camps as well as James Stockdale's books on surviving as a POW in Vietnam show firsthand that it is possible.
"You have a right to make them hurt you, and they don't like to do it." -James Stockdale
Vladimir Putin first took power in 2000, and never really gave it up. Russians were still holding large-scale pro-democracy protests over 10 years later.
Of course, that didn't go so hot for them. But Russian democratic culture was only 20 years old, and the fall of the Soviet Union had gutted their economy almost on the level of the Great Depression. They weren't really set up to win.
Poland has been doing comparatively better. PiS first took power in 2005 and then again in 2015, and began taking over the media, compromising the courts, and attacking the constitution. But even so, they lost their majority in parliament in 2023.
US democracy is as old as the country, and the US has the strongest economy in the world. You probably have at least one more chance in 2028, which will be shaped by how effectively the authoritarian movement can consolidate and how well opposition manages to mobilize.
Democracies, and countries in general, are big, lumbering, slow-moving things. They take a long time to die, and you never know if there's a surge of vitality that will shoot forth from somewhere hidden inside them.
> You probably have at least one more chance in 2028, which will be shaped by how effectively the authoritarian movement can consolidate and how well opposition manages to mobilize.
The opposition blew their chance in 2024. They are going to have to either back-off on the identity-oppression olympics or accept the loss in 2028.
They need to stop blaming the voters while being out of touch with said voters.
Τhe promise of the NRA+ folks is that guns in the hands of citizens will avert such a situation. Let's see if at least one of the things they claimed is not a lie.
There may be a tipping point, but as we can see by the comments here and elsewhere, and the intent behind writing and reading things like the shared article, being able to see it before it happens is the hard bit, maybe the impossible bit.
Certainly, I've heard the same apocalyptic messages about every big vote in the past 25 years, whether elections or referendums. Usually, not much changes, things happen in increments. Right now there's an incremental change going on in the opposite direction to the one that was happening, but the noise seems (to me) to outdo the reality.
As the dead (currently) sibling comment writes, it's a matter of perspective. Certainly, I hope you begin to feel some hope soon.
Having small parts of the overall government checked and cut is not radical, and current world events and US history show much more radical moments.
Again, perspective.
It'll be radical if a security agency is cut (given their power), or if a constitutional amendment occurs that has minority public support, the US invades a nearby country, a national health service is instituted… there are so many examples I could be here all night listing them all, but fiddling with less than 10% of an enormous budget that has ballooned is not radical. I can remember Bill Clinton's government, that wasn't radical and that's the direction of this government.
Oh, goody. Isn't it great the Democrats prioritized keeping "the groups" and their donors happy? You know, instead of actually reorganizing around countering the existential threat they complained so loudly about?
Genocide is above and beyond 'politics'. So is a bunch of tech bros being given physical access to the US Treasury under the direction of a tech oligarch, in defiance of dozens of laws. Entire federal agencies are being shut down on a whim, again, in defiance of dozens of laws and safeguards.
These things directly impact the tech community in a massive way - just look at Google dropping their pledge not to use AI for military purposes, this week of all weeks.
Fascists always are, that's how they gain enough support to gain power. Hitler had a lot of friends in the capitalist class, and the socialists and communists were the first to go under his rule.
I don’t feel like the comparisons to Hitler are useful, at least when talking about the current US administration.
There are lots more recent examples — Russia in the early 2000s under Putin, Hungary under Orban, South Africa under Apartheid — where democratic norms were gradually eroded, and the international community just sort of sighed and said "oh well, the people have spoken".
I think this mostly comes down to (1) people are more aware of Nazi Germany and thus its easier to use that context than another and (2) the Nazis were extreme even by comparison to their contemporaries and thus have been (presumably) studied the most.
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.
Berlusconi is the architect of the modern oligarchy. Control the media, control the public opinion and narrative. I think that what is happening in America is something new though. The dismantling of the US government is weird on it's own, but the step down from US soft power is what really makes no sense. The previous 80ish years of US world dominance was build on a combination of military might and soft power. Europe was rather ruined after WW2, the reason it's as advanced as it is today, and the reason we are/were such close allies with the USA is because of programs like the Marshall plan. Which was essentially the USA giving Europeans the money to buy American products. Stuff like access to US produced tractors revolutionised European farming as an example. On the US side this meant that the USA investment into Europe made it possible for the American wartime industry to restructure itself. So that instead of producing tanks, factories could produce farm equipment and so on. Total win-win.
Military power is necessary, but political influence is bought with soft power and diplomacy. The reason USA has military bases over most of the world. Places which allows America to have places to "store" all that military might outside the USA is because it has allies. The Russian loss of their Syrian bases is a good example or what happens when you lose that soft power. That same soft power is also the reason American brands can sell their stuff globally. Basically the entire American entertainment industry and all the foreign aid programs are giant advertising ventures, selling the American lifestyle. When that soft power is gone, America will still be capable of getting it's way in many cases through threats. People don't respond well to that though. With USA rivals more than happy to step in, you shouldn't be surprised to see Coca Cola replaced by some Chinese cola brand sometime down the road. This is obviously a semi ridiculous example, but I think it's a good illustration if what could happen. That same thing will affect US tech dominance as well. Here in Denmark companies are now actively looking for exit strategies from the American cloud because of the increased risk. I don't think anyone seriously expects something to happen, but at the same time, there is nothing companies hate more than risk. The reason Google Cloud never made it in Europe is because it has more risk than Azure and AWS, and with European alternatives having caught up... Well...
What is perhaps even worse is that the only reason the USA can function with its current deficit is because of the Dollar. If BRICS succeeds in moving half of the worlds population away from the Dollar, the American "empire" will fall considering it's the only "empire" in the history of mankind which has been capable of maintaining it's world dominance while also increasing its deficit.
Hitler and Nazi Germany might be the example everyone knows, and Musk performing his "gesture" doesn't exactly help matters. There doesn't seem to be a real long term plan behind what the aristocracy in the US is doing right now though. At least not one which will keep them safe from each ohter or society as a whole. Berlusconi and his buddies never went to prison after all, no one fell out of a window and so on.
there are certainly some parallels with what's happening today but analogies are always difficult. i could be wrong but i really don't think of this administration as murderous in the way that Nazi Germany was.
Of course, the biggest asterisk beside the analogy is the lack of warmongering. Like, kind of the most important part, and Trump is acting more like Woodrow Wilson in that respect. Didn't Woodrow Wilson once say that the US isn't a melting pot but a garbage can?
One of the great (and unexpected!) side effects of voting for Trump has been getting all the immature hysterical people off of the AI threads and into these Fascist Nazi threads.
I, for one, appreciate the absence of the European degrowth types
Yes, it's good to be careful to not label as people as fascists unless they do things like, for example, literally do the Nazi salute while publicly addressing a crowd.
We all saw the Nazi salutes with our own eyes, the man and his ex girlfriend both follow and interact with avowed white supremacists and Nazis on his own platform.
The lie is coming from Musk and his cult of supporters.
Confirmation bias. I watch one PBS news program and they cover white people's problems in rural America all the time. They just cover other people's problems as well.
And the reason is "drumroll", people like Musk. How exactly, is it that billionaires have continued to do so well for so long while the working class hasn't experienced a pay increase since the 70s?
You know pays those salaries, right? Big companies and the billionaires who chair them.
Of course, good job f'ing yourself over further, that safety net you might have had? Gone under Musk.
All the world's billionaires own about $20T. Distributing that equally among all the people of the world would provide each a $75 annuity indefinitely.
It would be awesome if liberals had any other references than Hitler, and we wouldn't have to go through this for another 4 years.
The big difference between Germany of the 30s and the US today is that the Germans had suffered. Most of the loudest people in the US are simply mimetically commenting on the endless Trump show, are wealthier than they've ever been because of unbroken policies favoring the wealthy, and haven't seen the slightest inconvenience since the housing crash, when their stocks went down for a second.
edit: the reason libs want Trump to be Hitler is so they can see themselves as heroes instead of absurdly wealthy landlords.
This may come as a shocker to you, but there are people in this country who are driven by morals, not money. It’s true! Real life people, who vote and everything, who genuinely care for the poor and needy.
> The big difference between Germany of the 30s and the US today is that the Germans had suffered.
This is why Fox News etc. exist. To create the perception of suffering and persecution amongst their viewers, by trans athletes, welfare queens, Satanic cults, etc.
It would be awesome if HN stopped looking at every single thing through the lens of US politics. "liberals" doesn't even mean anything in most of the world, and indeed I struggle identifying what kind of group you're talking about. The text is about historical events that have already happened - you can take whatever lesson you want out of them, you can see parallels with your own country or you don't have to. But not everything is about America.
I can’t truly understand how frustrating it must be for everything to be so focused on the US all the time. And I see this sentiment expressed often.
But let’s be real: this piece is almost certainly being circulated precisely because of what’s unfolding in the US.
We shouldn’t confuse what we wish were true (that the US is not the center of gravity for world politics) with what is true (that the US is the center of gravity for world politics).
Some people form a belief and then look for evidence to support it, others look at the evidence and check for inconsistencies before getting attached to a belief. "Nobody" wants Trump to be Hitler, they're observing parallels which you have rejected because of your desired beliefs.
>"Once the war began," my colleague continued, "resistance, protest, criticism, complaint, all carried with them a multiplied likelihood of the greatest punishment. Mere lack of enthusiasm, or failure to show it in public, was ‘defeatism.’ You assumed that there were lists of those who would be ‘dealt with’ later, after the victory. Goebbels was very clever here, too. He continually promised a ‘victory orgy’ to ‘take care of’ those who thought that their ‘treasonable attitude’ had escaped notice. And he meant it; that was not just propaganda. And that was enough to put an end to all uncertainty.
Terrifying. This anti-speech is anathema to all Americans. Let’s remember that. By recalling what all Americans have as a sacred self-belief (myth even), that America is anti-Nazi and anti-dictatorship and pro-freedom and pro-speech, we can effectively strengthen our ties.
What seems to drive Trump at his core is not ideology, but ego. On their path to power, both he and Musk could have been democrats, but they were rejected.
Together, they share the goal of creating the greatest presidency in American history. At some point, this may be a better scenario than the alternative.
The election is past: “winning” and defeating the opposition are less relevant now than creative strategies for generating positive outcomes from the current situation.
Outrage feeds the demons. There may be other, more effective (but less emotionally satisfying) paths to mutual-self-interest. In conflict with the very powerful, redirection often works better than direct opposition.
"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 happened in American society, particularly the silence, confusion and cowering now of anyone who should oppose a hostile takeover and dismantling of our democracy and our laws, are striking. It should have been required reading in American schools, when there was still time to educate people against these dangers.
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 work. they will always be taken advantage of, scammed, etc. social media and tech just made this 10x more effective.
it's how you have populations repeatedly making the same damn mistakes century after century just in a different form. it's baked into our DNA i suppose.
maybe i'm just cynical have given up. it's a really jarring thing to encounter people who refuse to even spend the min effort to attempt to question their own beliefs.
> social media and tech just made this 10x more effective.
Social media took away the hesitation of crowing about stupid things. If many people are saying it, maybe I am not stupid after all. The legitimisation and amplification of dumbness is a big contributor to the current state. Among other things of course.
When there started to be money made, and even better real power to be gained by herding such crowds then its not anymore just about self-organization over time, the push becomes very proactive
> 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 traditional anti-intellectualism; it seems to be almost an active view that it is better that people in authority do not know how to do their job.)
Fwiw, my experience from growing up in deep red America was that anti-intellectualism was staggeringly strong there. People would actually define their beliefs in opposition to those of people they perceived to be 'smart'.
The way that I always understood this was that if they had a disagreement with someone 'smarter' than them, and they operated in good faith, they would lose ~98% of the time. This doesn't feel good. It makes smart people threatening -- it breeds resentment toward them.
However, if you have a roomful of people who define their position in opposition to the 'smart' person, your beliefs are the ones that matter, regardless of what the truth is, so you get to feel like you've won the argument. Most arguments are not consequential, so this practice doesn't really cause meaningful short-term harm so there's no negative feedback.
Over the long-term, this herd mentality is how people learn to navigate the world, and you end up with a giant mess.
I think the current thing is a little bit different, though. It has gone from "academics are bad" to "anyone who knows how to do a thing is unsuitable to do that thing", which is a far more extreme viewpoint.
I got a little carried away with this response and it's a little off-topic, but I figured it might be worth posting anyway.
I think this has to do with the nonlinear growth in the human-facing complexity of the world over the past 30 years.
Humans aren't getting more intelligent (they may not be getting dumber either, but at the very least, the hardware is the same), but the complexity of the world that we have to engage with has undergone accelerating growth for most of my lifetime. The fraction of this complexity that is exposed to 'normal' people has also grown significantly over that period of time with the 24-hour news cycle, social media, mobile internet, etc.
It's obvious that at some point in this trend any given person will start running into issues with the world that are above their complexity ceiling. If this event is rare, we shrug it off and move on with our day. If this becomes commonplace, we start to drown in that complexity and desperately cling to sources of perceived clarity, because it's fucking terrifying to be surrounded by a world that you don't understand.
The thing that the right has done really well and that the left has generally failed to do in my lifetime is to identify sources of complexity and provide appealing clarity around them. This clarity is necessarily an approximation of the truth, but we NEED simple answers that make the world less scary. People also, as a general rule, don't like to be lectured or told that they are part of the problem -- the right never foists any blame upon the people it's targeting.
In my lifetime, the left has pretty consistently fought amongst ourselves over which inaccuracies are allowable or just when we attempt to create simplifying approximations. Instead of providing a unified, simplifying vision for any given topic, the messaging gives several conflicting accounts that make it easy to see the cracks in each argument, and often serve to make the problem worse. If you're competing with another source of information that is simple, clear, and makes people feel good (or at least like they are good), you will always lose if you do not also achieve those three things.
In the vacuum created by a lack of simple, blameless, intuitive messaging from an (arguably) well-meaning left-leaning establishment, the intuitive (though generally wrong and often cruel) explanations offered by the right have found huge support and adoption by people who need someone to help them understand the world. Because both messages are approximations of the truth (and thus sources of verifiable inaccuracies) people just choose the one that makes them feel better.
tldr I think we've hit a point where:
- The world is too complex for many people to independently navigate
- People need rely on simplifying approximations of the world
- Media provides these approximations, often in bad faith
- Sources of credibility or expertise often provide these approximation in good faith, but can't agree on which approximations are the 'right' ones
- Good faith messaging often either fails to simplify or makes people feel bad/guilty
- People are sick of feeling bad or guilty
- People associate expertise with being scolded over things that don't feel fair or fully accurate to them
Thus people often reject expertise out of principle, and just believe whatever Fox News tells them because it feels better.
ALSO: People who believe the 'right' things are often pretty shitty to people who don't (it goes both ways, but the other direction doesn't matter for this post). I've been guilty of this. This just further galvanizes the association between expertise or the 'right' ideas/people and feelings of resentment/guilt/shame for these folks. They may not understand what you said, but the do understand that you were talking down to them, and they hate you for that.
Gove was right. The problem is that experts no longer have to explain or justify themselves or explain the level of evidence behind their opinions.
Expertise has also been politicised. Experts are picked who give the prior decided opinions, and those who have the wrong opinion are got rid of (e.g. Professor David Nutt).
Finally Gove was speaking in the context of Brexit, and arguing that it ultimately a question of national identity. DO people identify as British or European? I agree - it is more like whether people in Northern Ireland want to be part of the UK or the Irish Republic, or maybe Scottish independence, than anything else in British politics. lots of parallels around the rest of the world.
Covid policy had multiple examples of this, and of not consulting experts on a sufficiently wide range of subjects.
A lot of evidence based policy is like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3gMcZic1d4U
Not to politicise this discussion, but the country is called 'The Republic of Ireland'. The phrase 'the Irish Republic' references the 1916 Easter proclamation, and has specific political and even colonial implications in Ireland. It's frequently used on BBC news, but never in Ireland where it would have a similar connotation to 'the free state' or other radical republican delegitimisations of the Irish state.
> DO people identify as British or European?
And that framing is where the trick is hidden. People are perfectly capable of accepting and having multiple identities. They can be a mom of their kids, a receptionist of company X, a neighbour of street Y, a citizen of city Z, a member of the flower gardening society, a supporter of football club Q, citizens of the UK and Europeans too.
In fact you don't have to choose between these identities. But when you frame the question like that it make sense that people would choose what is closer to them.
The anti mask, anti vax, anti chromosomal expression, anti 'tariffs are taxes' are beyond "anti-expert"
These positions are flatly anti-base-reality. If you want to frame them in terms of authority rejection, you could call them anti-first graders
A huge part of that is the lack of any effective communications education at all for the general population. Few realize that effective communications training is also ordered and logical thinking training. People with no communications training have disorganized emotional reasoning, unless something else formal comes along such as philosophy, mathematics or software, but then you get a technical specialist that cannot explain themselves nor their work to anyone other than a same education peer - exactly our current situation.
Expertise can be of great value, but no-one is an expert on every matter and the rest. And expertise don’t make anyone free of committing errors, or to be drawn in a corruption schemes.
We can have a thorough and deep expertise on some technical domain, and yet lake the sagacity and humility to judge where it won’t put us in better position than someone else dealing with an issue on the topic in a context the other person is already deeply acquainted with, while we are completely unaware of its many specificity.
On the other hand of course someone tightly coupled with a particular situation might easily miss some bigger picture that a relevant expertise could unlock.
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 which I mean republics). And critically, many of the core symptoms—militarization of police, violent suppression of protests, demonization of outgroups (muslims, immigrants), worship of the military, disenfranchisement of voting rights—long predate Trump's political rise. Hell, we were an apartheid state in living memory, and the anticommunist propaganda here truly does rival that of fascist countries (albeit mostly an aspect of the past at thus point in terms of overt propaganda). To many Americans, fascism might seem natural and might feel like home, so an expert saying "this is fascism now" is going to get a very very wide range of reactions.
And even to educated, well-meaning americans, we have a really nasty habit of sweeping our evil deeds under the rug and forgetting what we are capable of. If Trump were to move forward with mass deportations, it wouldn't be the first time, or the second time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Wetback is one particularly nastily named example. Many "experts" on tv don't read history and are oblivious to how close to fascism we already are.
It's also worth remembering that Hitler was a huge fan of America. Liebensraum was inspired by manifest destiny. We built this country on extreme violence, arguably to a unique degree (along with other anglo colonies). That muscle doesn't just go away. We've really only been a "liberal democracy" for about sixty years now.
So yea, I don't think you can write this off as anti-intellectualism or anti-expert, this is just who we are as a people.
> this is just who we are as a people.
I do not believe that. I believe this situation is engineered, and we have some very long game playing manipulators being very successful today.
Society engineering is real, and there are many players active in that game.
Societal engineering is not mutually exclusive with either confusion over what fascism is nor the many fascist traits that have always been in this country.
But yes, I think I would probably just call the societal engineering "for-profit media". Manufacturing Consent should be read by every adult in this country.
>there's a deep strain of anti-expert feeling throughout
Probably because the experts are telling them that if they want a future, everyone is going to have to compromise their current lifestyle. Not a popular message. People will always be sceptical and hostile towards people who say "you can't have X". People are always happy to believe people who say "Vote for me and you have as much X as you want!"
Tbh, the Matrix wasn't far off with the portrayal of Cypher. They just didn't expect half of the population to prefer the comfortable lie over the inconvenient truth.
> "you can't have X"
More like 'you can't have X anymore' or 'only rich can have X' that brings another level of resentment and emotional kneejerk reactions.
The problem is, if 'less smart' need to be baby-sitted through every single unpopular but necessary decision, this is a failure of democracy. Sure normal democracy self-corrects over time, but not when its pushed into some form of dictatorship where the only correction mechanism is death of those in power.
That's why all researchers into immortality should be all locked up permanently in prison or to be sure shot in the head right now, however terrible and drastic it sounds. The tyranny that this will bring on mankind will make any absolutely terrible period from the past look like a paradise, and have 0 doubts all dictators ever would gladly scorch whole Earth just to achieve it.
> there's a deep strain of anti-expert feeling throughout, at least, the West at the moment.
Anti-intellectualism in the US goes back decades (if not centuries):
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-intellectualism_in_Americ...
The first two US colonies were Jamestown (looking for El Dorado North; gold; riches) and Plymouth (religious society):
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fantasyland:_How_America_Went_...
* https://www.kurtandersen.com/fantasyland
The magical thinking of those two are the seeds of US society today and all the fruits (good and bad) can probably be linked to the ideas of one of the two.
I’m a huge fan of Asimov. Years ago I bought a back issue of the Newsweek that this was originally published in, framed it, and still have it hanging in my office: https://aphelis.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/ASIMOV_1980_C...
> There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that “my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge”.
See also book by Tom Nichols (a now-retired professor from U.S. Naval War College):
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_of_Expertise
It's the combination of a desire for student obedience and the intellectual damaging power of religion. Far too often a young student is told their youthful and essentially unsocialized behavior is sinful, including their own thoughts, and that coupled with an Orwellian level of obedience socialization with religion and you create crippled intellects that are afraid of their own thoughts and are perfectly obedient church members and employees. They are minions in the most literal sense and the United States is filled with them, obedient and terribly dangerous.
>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.
That’s not what the pointed text is about though. It specifically mention the concern is about those that should be considered of higher education in the context, as opposed for example to a baker¹.
¹ This is the example given in text, not some condescendence of bakers from my part here.
This is a beautiful book.
In particular this excerpt is frustrating though. As said directly in the text, it's hard to see the beginnings. Yes, many things are changing right now, but to be fair, if you went to any random trump supporter and showed them this text they would immediately recognize it and tell you all the things the prior admins have done that matches these "sudden" decisions "made in secret" that nobody should disagree with.
It discusses tactics, which are easy to recognize in expansion of power, but also in illiberal thinking anywhere, but I don't see in this excerpt (or remember in the original book) discussion of root causes. One thing that really stuck with me though was that many of the interviewees were quite happy with what the party had done for the country, on an individual level. This was rebuilding, providing party benefits, etc. And many joined up because they had to to advance socially or in their career. Again, things that become a Rorschach blot even in hindsight because, I guess, they are always using these tactics to push their agenda over ours until it spirals out of control, regardless of who "we" / "they" are.
I read this book years ago and it had a huge impact on my thought.
I agree with your statements here, and I've been trying to figure out how to have some of these conversations with my Trump-supporter friends.
"He's planning to put migrants in Gitmo." But Gitmo has already existed through red and blue administrations. It's not like it's a brand new concentration camp.
"Look at the laundry list of executive orders." But Biden did a bunch of EOs early on too.
Both sides have done tariffs. Anwar al-Awlaki was an American citizen killed in a drone strike under Obama.
The Patriot Act and the 100 Mile Border Zone undermined the Fourth Amendment years ago.
We've permitted corruption and insider trading for congresspeople for years.
The fact is, we've had bipartisan "fascism" creeping up on us for decades. I don't even know where to start with root causes, and everything is so damn historically muddy that it's hard to persuade someone who genuinely believes that "Trump & Elon just want less government spending" that they're not using their exceptional powers for good.
Once you see how stupid and useful this group is, it's hard to unsee the deliberate attempts to make this group larger and dumber.
Thought I should expand to explain the group gets larger as the economy suffers and people are too poor busy and hopeless for anything other than a hopeful narrative.
And the group gets dumber when skipping school is glorified, education gets funding cuts, and people mass consume media.
Reminds me of this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hr5sTGxMUdo
Some people won’t change their mind even with contradicting evidence is shoved in their face.
> 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 work.
Yet extremists always want to dismantle education to control the population. For instance, in the US, Trump got the votes from the uneducated. He has no interest in an educated country.
https://harpers.org/archive/1941/08/who-goes-nazi/
> 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 have absolutely no evidence to support this (but I would welcome any for or against it), but I have a loose theory that there is pretty much always a subset of people who are physiologically predisposed to be driven by a fear response more than the average person, and over time they congregate, possibly as a safety mechanism.
And with the social media of today, they also got a performant platform for wider and broader congregation, with the effects that we see.
I can only recommend Dietrich Bonhoeffer's essay "Von der Dummheit" (On Stupidity), which he wrote while being imprisoned by Nazi Germany. It's a short read and a terribly accurate description of what's happening.
I don't believe in this "natural stupidity" theory, many well-educated people voted red. Fascism is not a natural state of mind, it is carefully and relentlessly cultivated over years by a giant propaganda machine, at the hands of the capital class who stands to benefit the most from the current situation.
This is no coincidence that Trump's cabinet is the most billionaire-friendly ever. Total deregulation of businesses is the point, fascism is the mean. Eventually, fascism becomes the point and even billionaires become losers. I don't think we're quite there yet, but close.
> many well-educated people voted red
I think, then, there's a difference between "well-educated" and "intelligent" or even "critical thinker". I would go on to argue that most "well-educated" people are perhaps well-educated in generalities only, other than perhaps a narrow special-interest field.
I think you are terribly mistaken and, if I may, you are the one who seems to refuse to be educated (I don't say this as an insult). It is very easy to say "they are brutes" instead of looking at what exactly is going on and why democrats lost the elections.
As a non-US, I see very little difference between democrats and republicans, except maybe Trump. Democrats are the typical neoliberals: free markets, global capitalism, corporate rule, worldwide patents, etc. There is the famous chart that shows that since around the 80s the productivity went up while wages stagnate. Workers in the US right now are not in a much better position than 20 years ago.
Did the democrats campaign for improvements, raising the wages, improving healthcare, education? No, it was business as usual, "please don't vote Trump so we can keep things like now". Thus, many people said "fine, I'll vote for the other, he says things will be like before, literally".
So it's the Democratic Party who has baked into its DNA that things should not change, no matter what. I would say they could've won easily with some concessions, but those concessions go against their core beliefs.
Unfortunately, and because of this, Trump, a liar and conman, won. If they wanted to win they should've lied better, like Trump did.
On one hand, you're partially right: It's a pretty sad state of affairs that our only choices in the previous election were "maybe let's not elect a fascist" and a fascist. I can totally agree with you that I would have loved an option that was "let's make life better".
On the other hand, what does it say about our society that given those two options, we picked the Fascist? It's not like the messaging from the Republicans was unclear: they ran on a platform of attacking the rights of women, LGBTQ+ people, and immigrants. And more than 30% of the citizens of our country said "sounds good. Count me in". Another 30-odd% decided it didn't really matter to them one way or the other. Only 30-something-percent of Americans said "wow, that's kinda fucked up. Let's not do that".
I don't think people who voted for Harris thought "yeah, let's keep healthcare pro corporate and screw the poor", they voted for other stuff. And I think people who voted for Trump didn't vote specifically against LGBTQ+ policies necessarily.
Of course, media and social media had a heavy influence, but on everybody.
The coworkers I felt comfortable asking why they voted for Trump came out of the gate with some variation on "no pretend girls in girls sports and locker rooms". To some of them being gay is apparently "just something pedos do". Plenty of people voted against lgbtq+ rights explicitly. But beyond that we are all stupid on the issues, and to some extent that is unavoidable. We can't all be experts in economics. So we can't vote on issues, we need to vote on character. When faced with a wolf in sheep's clothing and a wolf, pick the one still pretending. At least pretending to feel shame about corruption sends the message that it is wrong.
People who voted for Trump voted for "let's keep everything including healthcare pro corporate and screw the poor".
The anti LGBT and especially anti trans messaging was strong and clear from the conservative side. There was no ambiguity or potential for mistake.
Trump voters were not misled, they wanted the things parent comment list.
yeah i concede i don't know everything, but honestly if you're not from or living in the US i would also re-examine your view of things. you have a different objective view but miss a lot of the context. it's easy to intellectualize the whole situation and come up with these solutions. this kind of reasoning is what i've gone through already trying to make excuses for people and it sounds nice on paper but it doesn't hold.
i'll tell you from personal experience there exists huge swaths of people in my community that voted for trump not because of any of his policies or a feeling that dems didn't bring change, but because they worship him like a religious figure. or they demonize anything that isn't conservative and treat it like team sports. it really doesn't seem to be much more complicated than that for some people no matter what angle you try to come in with (lack of education, not tending to their needs, etc.)
This idolisation can also happen for the left (not democrats, I mean real left), but I think it's the minority. Unfortunately, people choose something new and potentially bad vs the same as usual. Not because of education, but because of limited choices.
Hmm, if somebody idolizes a serial liar, cheat, fraud, convicted felon, horrible personality, sleazy conman etc. who is also a billionaire who laughs at poor then problem lies deeper.
Failed upbringing, failed education, failed by society. If I substract those people who we can call unfortunate from pool, the only stuff that remains is really not anyhow pretty, in contrary.
Those people in your community that voted for him - are they happy with his steps now and firm direction he is taking? If yes, then it confirms the line above.
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.
> Trump got a majority because eggs are too expensive.
I think this trivializes the outcome in a dangerous way.
From my view as an outside observer, these were all big factors:
- Bad handling of the candidate selection for the democrats (switching to Harris too late)
- Having an impossible platform for a lot of single issue voters (mainly: people that want immigration reduced, but also firearm availability)
- Thoroughly uninspiring middle-east policy (not a personal opinion, but I think that cost a bunch of votes that would have been democrat)
Personally, I also think that some sexism was also a significant factor and that Harris would've had an easier time had she been male. I also believe that the media smear campaign depicting Biden as completely senile was really effective (and a bit ridiculous considering the age of his replacement). Another very effective strategy in riling up their base was the "democrats want to transgenderize all the children" (exaggerated).
If the democrats main takeaway is that they just need to campaign for lower egg prices next election they might well lose again IMO.
> I also believe that the media smear campaign depicting Biden as completely senile was really effective (and a bit ridiculous considering the age of his replacement). Another very effective strategy in riling up their base was the "democrats want to transgenderize all the children" (exaggerated).
I'm not sure what they could actually do about these; if the media (or their owners) want to lean heavily on the scale, this is always going to be a problem. We see the same thing in the UK. You can't fight a thing that people have made up in their heads with facts.
(I note that there is a platform split on H1-B between Trump and Musk, but that doesn't seem to have been a problem for them)
> Bad handling of the candidate selection for the democrats (switching to Harris too late)
Many of the democrats are simply too old. Nancy Pelosi, world's greatest stock trader, is 84. Feinstein died in office at 90. There's an entire missing generation, the party should be averaging 50-65. People are supporting them because there's no alternative, which is .. not durable.
> if the media (or their owners) want to lean heavily on the scale, this is always going to be a problem
100% agree. But I think you don't even need heavy bias on media ownership to get the whole political landscape distorted; I think the whole attention/outrage-driven ad-economy systematically pushes all reporting on both sides toward the fringes, and this is inherently more helpful for the right side of the political spectrum.
> Nancy Pelosi, world's greatest stock trader, is 84
Is this tongue-in-cheek? Because IMO the whole insider-trading exemptions for congress are deeply unethical (and unlikely to get fixed). To be fair, though, it barely even registers on the scale compared to the whole "You get to design and lead a government agency after donating 250M$ to my campaign"-thing... Whole situation just feels a bit like the gilded age is making a comeback right now, just strictly worse :/
> I note that there is a platform split on H1-B between Trump and Musk, but that doesn't seem to have been a problem for them
I think this is a really big lesson and something Trump is excellent at: His non-stop BS (annex Greenland, rename the Gulf, take over Canada) keeps media busy and many of his voters from realizing that the whole platform is neither self-consistent (see H1B) nor in the voters interest.
It is a really bitter lesson though, because after seeing how "effective messaging" looks like in our current media landscape, I'm absolutely certain that I don't want more of that not even from parties that would perfectly represent my interests :(
Propaganda was a problem in this election, and many of the points you make touch on this.
For instance, if you're concerned about the price of eggs, you would not elect a president who campaigned heavily on tariffs and clearing out illegal immigrants, both policies which will tend to make things more expensive. But that was not the propaganda.
If you are concerned about Palestine, you would not elect the president whose inner circle was floating around ethnic cleansing fantasies about Gaza well before Trump made the current remarks yesterday. But that was not the propaganda.
Many issues (like immigration, firearms, and transgender topics) are difficult to talk about these days in America because propaganda (in any direction you choose) has turned them into absolutist binary views. Binary views that happen to be tied to identity. It is difficult to try to reason with identity-tied views.
Social media has only made such worse. Everyone huddles in their silos, cheers when their identity issues go one way, and rages when their identity issues go another. Contrarian viewpoints to the silo get downvoted en masse. It is pretty clear that there are nefarious sorts out there that know this and try to manipulate the crowd. And this isn't even an American only problem these days. America's just one of the places where the democratic backsliding is the most visible, due to our former position.
My main worry in fact goes beyond mere politics, and more to the anti-intellectualism, anti-expertise wave that is also part of the above. How can progress move forward when the propaganda turns vaccines into a boogeyman, when the propaganda politicizes climate change and also ties such to identity, and when (at its worst) the propaganda attacks science itself? To me, such is far stronger concerns to worry about compared to who wins the next American election.
> but Trump got a majority because eggs are too expensive.
You guys need to stop being so disingenuous (and get some new material). EVERYTHING got a lot more expensive under the previous administration. Whether it’s Biden’s fault or not is irrelevant. A poor economy motivates people to vote for the other party, ESPECIALLY when the average person felt they had better economic prospects when “the other team” was in power (again, whether that was Trump’s doing or not is irrelevant).
(Note: I'm not an american)
> Whether it’s Biden’s fault or not is irrelevant
> again, whether that was Trump’s doing or not is irrelevant
For democracy to work, you need voters with a good enough civics education to understand how the different parts of government interact, and a trustworthy media providing factual news so voters can understand the dilemmas their politicians are facing.
If what you're saying is right, and American voters are unable or unwilling to understand how their vote and current events combine to cause certain outcomes, doesn't that mean democracy in the US cannot possibly work?
What you're describing sounds closer to a popularity contest or a sports competition than politics.
________________________
Personally, I believe a major part of this issue is caused by the political system and media landscape of the US.
In a two-party system as in the US, the legislative only represents half the population (as bipartisan efforts are rare), leading to resentment among the other half.
In a mixed-member proportional system[1], as in Germany, New Zealand and many Scandinavian countries, you end up with many more different parties in parliament (Germany currently has 8 [2]). For any law to pass, you need multiple parties to work together, which allows more voters to be represented.
Similarly, while in Germany newspapers and public broadcasters still provide high-quality news (less than 20% of the population distrust the public broadcasters and major newspapers as of June 2024 [3]), in the US the media tried to improve their ratings by replacing factual reporting and analysis with ever more emotional content.
The level of polarization in the US as it is today will lead to a new civil war, or worse, if it continues. How can a democracy continue if the majority of voters cannot even agree on basic facts?
________________________
The perfect example for this is the discussion around the re-categorization of Pluto. Which has no real-world impact on anyone, yet everyone had an immutable opinion on.
The arguments for categorizing Pluto as a dwarf planet were relatively simple: We've found many other objects like Pluto. They're more similar to one another than to the other planets. Some of them are larger and heavier than Pluto. Either our solar system has 17 planets, or it has 8.
But the arguments against re-categorizing Pluto were of a very different nature. People had spent a lot of effort memorizing the planets in school, and didn't want all that effort to be wasted. People were emotionally attached to the way things had been. People preferred the emotional comfort of something that wasn't real, over the inconvenient truth.
One argument is based on logic and scientific fact, the other on emotional attachment to a middle-school understanding of the world.
The Enlightenment once replaced the emotional, religious order of the world with scientific fact and logic. This is the basis the US and modern democracies are based upon.
How did we end up in a situation where half of the political spectrum wants to tear down the very foundation of democracy and replace it with emotion, religion and tradition, medieval concepts we had long left behind?
________________________
1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QT0I-sdoSXU
2. https://www.bundeswahlleiterin.de/en/bundestagswahlen/2021/e...
3. https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/digital-news-repo...
Trump got a majority because the prior majority political party was literally participating in genocide, which was on display for the entire world to see.
EDIT: I think you have the right to deny genocide and I have the right to insist that it is in fact genocide.
Its not helpful to decide it was "only" mass murder, and that the ethnic cleansing is "only" relocating survivors to less-destroyed regions.
More to the point, the USA committed its genocide on the natives of the land that was stolen by framing their arguments that they were fighting a war with terrorists, too. That excuse is as old as the hills.
genocide | ˈdʒɛnəsʌɪd | noun [mass noun] the deliberate killing of a large number of people from a particular nation or ethnic group with the aim of destroying that nation or group: a campaign of genocide | [count noun] : news of genocides went unreported.
That definition definitely fits the Palestinian people. Gaza is destroyed, the Palestinians are destroyed, there is only rubble and death where once there was life.
> Trump got a majority because the prior majority political party was literally participating in genocide, which was on display for the entire world to see.
Is the argument here that people vote based on what the prior party was up to, while completely ignoring whether the new party will do less or more of the same action?
Because that's really depressing if it's true.
Most votes are cast against something, not for something. That's why negative ads work, no matter how annoying and insulting they are.
Most of the Americans I've spoken with who acknowledge voting for Trump said they did so either because they were against abortion or because the were against the great replacement. My sample is small though and may not be significant but there is a similar pattern in my country.
Even if that's negative at least your examples are voting for the right party.
Seeing your posts hours after Trump launched a plan to ethnically cleanse Gaza is quite the sight.
You’re like the black knight from Monty python.
Edit: I welcome the pushback on this post. The message I meant to convey is that of two evils. Yelling at the losing candidate does nothing for Gaza. It alienates even people who care (but I’m not perfect). I apologize for the divisive nature of my post.
is this mean american must select one from two genocide participant to support?
can this topic be negotiatable? like migrants and abortion, one party supports it, one party againsts it, let people choose which party to vote for
Or you could switch to a different voting system which allows more than two parties, allowing people to make more nuanced choices?
There are even voting systems which are perfectly representative (as a popular vote would be) and ensure all states get a voice (the goal of the electoral college).
Say, a bicameral system.
One chamber allocating each state a fixed number of voices, ensuring each state has a voice,
and a second chamber with mixed-member-proportional voting (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QT0I-sdoSXU), which allows perfectly proportional majorities in this chamber while giving each district a representative (in the process also fixing gerrymandering).
In fact, it was actually this system, designed by the US, that the allied countries chose for Germany after World War II.
> Seeing your posts hours after Trump launched a plan to ethnically cleanse Gaza is quite the sight.
Biden provided the bombs and the diplomatic cover that allowed Israel to decimate Gaza's population, permanently damaging entire generations, reducing the most densely populated areas on Earth to smoking rubble, and explicitly supported Netanyahu's ethnic cleansing plans. He basically alley-ooped this scenario to Trump.
> You’re like the black knight from Monty python.
Sheer projection.
Democrats lost because they supported genocide [0], [1]. They tried to court Republican women instead of their own base, trotting out people like Dick fucking Cheney [2] (after removing any mention of stopping torturing people from their platform).
When over 30% of Biden 2020 voters told pollsters they felt so strongly about an arms embargo that it could affect their vote, and Harris responded by saying she would keep sending bombs "no matter what", she lost. The win could have been a landslide, and Dems chose to tell their base to eat shit instead.
0 - https://www.imeupolicyproject.org/postelection-polling
1 - https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/11/opinion/kamala-harris-you...
2 - https://www.yahoo.com/news/dick-cheney-groundbreaking-endors...
It was damned if you do, damned if you don’t. What about all the voters you lose by dropping support for Israel?
Democrats were powerless to stop the genocide. Gaza voters weakened them further.
> It was damned if you do, damned if you don’t. What about all the voters you lose by dropping support for Israel?
Nonsense. As can be plainly seen in the posted links, far fewer Democrat votes would have been lost by support for an arms embargo.
What would have been lost was the support of many Democrat funders - fossil fuel companies, weapons manufacturers, Zionist billionaires, and a vast swathe of complicit corporate media. As in, the people perverting the party against the interests of their base.
> Democrats were powerless to stop the genocide.
Again, utter nonsense. Democrats voted against ceasefire four times at the UN; and made a mockery of domestic and international law by providing billions in arms to a regime that was likely to commit genocide.
And so it needs to be said: lack of money for Harris' campaign was not the issue. She outspent Trump, ffs.
> Gaza voters weakened them further.
That was a choice! Gaza voters would have strengthened them, if they had simply decided to stop arming a genocidal apartheid regime. That's what the polls I posted showed beyond doubt; and Dem elites knew all this months before the election.
> What would have been lost was the support of many Democrat funders - fossil fuel companies, weapons manufacturers, Zionist billionaires, and a vast swathe of complicit corporate media. As in, the people perverting the party against the interests of their base.
This could have cost many seats in congress.
I acknowledge you might be completely right, but they were never gonna get the campaign and all of D congress to that position in the first place in a high stakes election.
>a genocidal apartheid regime Or democratic state with the rule of law and free speech if we are being factual. Hamas knew exactly what the IDF response would be after carrying out their obscene, murderous pogrom on October 7. Hamas wanted their own people to die in the thousands, while they themselves cowardly hid in their tunnels built with aid money, because they knew they would get the support of useful idiots in the West like you.
The West should give Israel everything they need to wipe out Hamas. Whether it is in Ukraine or Gaza, when the barbarians are at the gate, the only answer is to kill them.
Anyone who had hope that Trump would avert the catastrophe was clearly ignorant of the facts of his subservience to the greater Israel plan.
Meanwhile, while Palestinians are eating cats, we are free to refer to Monty Python all we like.
Just don't mention the war.
Shouldn’t have voted for Hamas then. Shouldn’t have kept launching wars decade after decade against Israel because they hate Jews, wars they kept losing and kept whinging about losing even though they kept starting them; once they had lost the power to fight wars, shouldn’t have started throwing stones at the IDF and bombing discos in ridiculous “Intifadas”. These people in Gaza and the West Bank have a single idea in their minds - they want to murder all Jews. They are incurable.
Why didn’t they just accept a state in 1948? The Arabs have conquered land all across the ME and North Africa yet they begrudge Jews a sliver of land on which the only states that have ever existed, in antiquity too, are Jewish states. The Arabs of Gaza and the West Bank have shown themselves to be the most consistently stupid people in history. No wonder they are having to eat cats.
I'm flagging this because it's two paragraphs of propaganda opposite to base reality.
I agree with this, I don’t think it was the only reason but it’s a big one. When people point out what Trump said or plans to do I want to remind people it’s not like we had a real choice this election. It’s right wing or far right wing.
Both parties are completely beholden to AIPAC it’s disgusting.
Gaza has a population of over 2 million people, and according to Wikipedia the civilian death toll has been under 50,000.
I'm not saying that's not terrible, of course it is. But I'm pretty sure that if Israel wanted to commit genocide there would be a lot more.
Except the Israeli/Palestinian conflict started way before the current Gaza event. For years Israel has forced the mass displacement of Palestinian (ask a Lebanese), blockaded Gaza, destroyed many of the civilian infrastructure, continue its colonization of the west bank (and further displacing population without any regard for international laws). The fact that they did not decide to straight up murder the whole population in one go doesn't make this less of a genocide. They have just been committed to it for years.
I haven't followed the conflict closely and I'm not in any way trying to say Israel is blameless.
However your claims here seem very one-sided. For example I've read about how Israel has been trying to provide aid to Gaza but most of the resources have been controlled by Hamas who have been constructing elaborate tunnel systems, militias and weapons rather than improving the lives of civilians.
From my understanding this has culminated into the attack that started the war, and I can understand that Israel can't just sit on their hands while Hamas prepares for another attack.
The civilians of Gaza deserve to be able to live their lives in peace, but I don't see how that can happen if Hamas isn't dealt with.
The Hamas only exists since the first intifada in 1987. The Nakba, which displaced many Palestinian goes way back to 1948.
It's likely a lot more as nobody's been counting for almost a year. Their genocide has been a slow burn since 48.
I find that hard to believe, but I don't really know anything so I can't dispute you.
The only numbers Israel used were from Hamas government health ministry, which ceased to operate about a year ago.
> if Israel wanted to commit genocide
thank you, israel
The requirement for all members of the target group to die in order for it to be called genocide is fallacious and not historically acccurate.
Was it genocide of the Native Americans, since 'they survived'? Was it genocide in Australia when white europeans took the land from the prior caretakers?
The answer: yes of course it was. Genocide doesn't mean total eradication - it means, attempted total eradication. In Gaza today, the lifestyles of the Palestinian peoples have been completely eradicated, and it will be years before they recover.
So what I'm saying is that if Israel had attempted total eradication they would kill more than 2.5% of them.
I also think that if Hamas had the means they would have been happy to totally eradicate Israel, civilians and all, so I can't say I have much sympathy for them. The civilian deaths are tragic but given these numbers I think it's pretty clear that they are collateral damage from fighting Hamas, not a target in themselves.
You seem unaware of the actual meaning of the word genocide, and I would suggest not using it in that case.
What the US did to the native Americans was a genocide. Siding with a foreign country in a conflict with a terrorist force is not a genocide, and throwing verbal atom bombs into an already maximally heated discussion isn’t helpful.
And what Native American tribes sometimes did to each other was genocide. There were lots of actors in the fight for the American land mass - the US , the British Empire, the French Empire, Mexico, the Japanese were even having a look. So I don’t think it is as simple as saying the US committed genocide of the Native Americans, who were actually many different tribes often warring with each other. Their way of life was bound to largely die out once the modern world arrived.
It was a genocide long before October 7th.
So the Palestinians all died a long time ago? Or are you exaggerating perchance?
It can be a genocide before they're all dead you know. If we go by your definition the holocaust wasn't one either.
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 not see how what Israel did in Gaza, and has been doing for years with Palestinian, is not genocide: Force displacement of vast amount of population, regularly blockading humanitarian aid, mass destruction of civilian infrastructure, mass imprisonment, often with little to no representation, mass killing of civilian (it is estimated, by many source, that roughly 45000 Palestinian died, of which at least ~80% where civilian) ... This is the textbook definition of genocide. If you accept the Shoah, the Armenian genocide, the genocide of the tutsis, ... You cannot logically not see this as a Palestinian genocide.
As for the U.S involvement, that's honestly not for me to say. I am not a us citizen.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestinian_genocide_accusatio...
The Hutus killed 800,000 Tutsis in a few weeks. I agree that is a genocide.
The Arabs of the Western half of the Palestinian mandate refused to accept a state in 1948, and decided instead to repeatedly start wars and latterly Intifadas against Israel. It was their own choice. The result of that choice is the deaths you mention. That is not genocide. It is a result of their own stupid choices. They are obsessed with trying to murder Jews, but thankfully not very good at. Hamas’s constitution explicitly calls for the killing of all Jews in Israel. That would literally be a genocide.
Congratulations on siding with the genocidal maniacs, Jew haters, and murderers. Hamas thanks you.
Genocide denial is a really, really bad look.
If you care to educate yourself on this, here are some resources:
https://www.academia.edu/112967602/Bearing_Witness_to_the_Is... (paper by an Israeli academic with over a thousand sources)
https://x.com/AgnesCallamard/status/1871157783069929592 (A long list of links to declarations by human rights orgs, UN sources, ICJ submissions etc)
https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20240516-israel-committing... (from a coalition of prestigious universities)
I'm having a hard time googling the book you mentioned. Is it by any chance called 'They Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1933-45'? That's the closest thing I could find.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/They_Thought_They_Were_Free
Yes. "They thought they were free" is the main title. "The Germans 1933-1945" is the subtitle.
In France, I remember we read several classic allegories on that theme at schools. Rhinoceros by Ionesco (even watched it in the theater as a school trip), also The Plague (Albert Camus). I didn't think much of it when I was a teenager, but I'm looking at them on the light of these recent events. Especially Rhinoceros on ideological contagion.
Yes we did, but I think that the people who needed it the most, were the ones who either didn't had to read it (the ones not in a "lycée général") or whent through because it was required but didn't tried to understand the meaning.
More broadly, as teenagers, most of us didn't had the maturity to truely grasp the meaning ; and the ones who did probably already where sensitive enough to don't fall in the same traps.
In the hundreds of people I crossed path with during my school time, I don't remember a single one who was actually enlightened by things in the program. The only ones who had kind of a shift from their original mindset did that outside of school or because of a teacher who went out of their way (and of the official program) to explain things.
Watching Gaza get razed has pretty much ended any sense I had that liberal society is capable of learning lessons or improving itself. I grew up a good liberal, but as an adult I realize that so much of peoples' attraction to liberalism is simply inability to resolve conflict, center values in society, or establish a shared culture. There are better ideals to structure society around, like material rights.
Fwiw i also believe we should dismantle our government as it is not, actually, very democratic and doesn't actually function well and mostly exists to serve itself and its corporate clients. The current parties are simply the last people on earth I'd trust to do it.
If you hate liberalism, wait until you find out about illiberalism.
What makes you think I hate liberalism? I was just pointing out it's not sufficient for a functional society, contrary to the tenets of our civic religion. If it was, our country wouldn't be such a dysfunctional shithole our citizens log on to China's instagram to talk about how much of a dysfunctional shithole this country is. Hilarious and hugely embarrassing.
Granted, I do abhor the part of liberalism that makes people think their voice has any inherent value and that political action begins and ends with voting. I'd like to remind readers that Hitler was voted into office, but the civil rights act was legislated out of fear of cities burning down, and it took a literal civil war to end slavery in this country (outside of prisons anyway). Most of the few labor rights we have in part because the labor movement was bombing buildings and shutting down entire cities. We live in an arguably progressive society in spite of liberalism, not because of it.
Am I naive for thinking americans are capable of making a government we can ACTUALLY not be embarrassed by? That can actually prioritize its own citizens over its GDP and bombing places that never did us wrong? Whose flag isn't seen by many groups of people as a hate symbol? With a culture not based on being proudly ignorant? Probably. But we all need hope. Liberalism certainly ain't gonna get us there by itself—at some point we need actual values to orient around aside from greed and the right to be an asshole in public.
I remember I once stumbled upon pictures of the daily life of ordinary nazis.
They looked so normal, having fun, teasing each other, drinking and playing instruments.
There is even a video where hitler is shying away from his love companion.
This was a shock to me as a kid: evil doesn't look like the caricature of "the very bad guy", it emerges in every day people.
I think we failed to communicate that. It was too tempting to have a universal vilain you could use in Hollywood movies and instantly recognize. That you can't identify to. Black and white is so easy to sell.
But what it means is a huge part of our society cannot make the link between what is happening in their own life and the past. Because they have a vision of the past that looks like a kid show, not what really happened.
Worse, on the other side, outraged people abused the term nazi to call out anybody that had a bad behavior. But there is a huge difference between being an asshole and being ready to commit genocide.
Eventually it means the word nazi lost all of its meaning. And all of its usefulness to defend ourselves.
In the last too decades, we surely spent a lot of time playing with words until they could not be useful anymore. But it made us feel good for a moment.
You can find similar images from apartheit South Africa and apartheit southern US states before 1970. And in those cases they believe they are happy because of the protective wall of state violence against other humans.
There was always what you might call a "particle" of fascism throughout the War on Terror (maintained by both parties! because it was popular with the public!) Things like the unaccountable secret prisons in Gunatanamo or Abu Gharib, or the US sniper who amused himself by randomly murdering hundreds of civilians (eventually convicted .. then pardoned). And then in the war on Gaza everyone (bipartisan) was falling over themselves to say that it was children's own fault for being in the same school as Hamas and that the Israeli government was right to bomb them.
Back at home in BLM, everyone stood up for the right of the police to unaccountably murder citizens. Because that power would only be used against bad people, right?
> They looked so normal, having fun, teasing each other, drinking and playing instruments.
You may wish to watch this movie on the banality of the life of those who ran the concentration camps and who lived next to them:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Zone_of_Interest_(film)
> They looked so normal, having fun, teasing each other, drinking and playing instruments.
the reason for this contradiction is that, in their view, some people are not considered human
that's how nazis see jews, how colonizers see natives, how slaveholders see black slaves, how zionists see palestinians
> Worse, on the other side, outraged people abused the term nazi to call out anybody that had a bad behavior. But there is a huge difference between being an asshole and being ready to commit genocide.
> Eventually it means the word nazi lost all of its meaning. And all of its usefulness to defend ourselves.
Do I understand that while the United States is undergoing a radical neonazi revolution lead by the tech industry your take away is that the people who called out the right-wing and tech industry were wrong to do so and bear responsibility for the horrific state of the world?
Well, I think so. Because many didn't understand they were fascists too.
The fascism was always in the vast majority of us, if we wanted to look at it. Just look at the structure of our workplaces, which accounts for half our waking lives. There's no free speech in them. With few exceptions, they're intensely hierarchical, people passing orders downward. Those "unlucky" enough to make it inside one of them, often sleep in the nearby alley.
The bizarreness of this form of organization isn't lost on those on top of the hierarchy. They're used to battalions of people doing what they want, and they seek out philosophers who apply this vision to other aspects of life. It wasn't hard; for example, the US had a 4 year king anyway. Usually a warmonger callous to the vast majority of his population.
One problem is "calling out." Name-calling. The current administration is showing direct action, which impresses many who find their lives increasingly intolerable. Many didn't like him, but rather rationally rolled the dice with the change candidate, even if it was probably going to end up as bad change. Like hitting the computer.
No I'm noting that to fight better we must realize what we did inefficiently and correct course so that we can mobilize more people.
Right now If I discuss the events around me, many are apathetic, because they think I'm exaggerating. Because that's what they have been used to.
And your comment is directing your anger at someone that very likely share a lot of your value system while he was trying to make a self-reflecting point. This is a waste, and it divides us.
When everything is an outrage, the outrage is worth nothing.
And while you are fighting on semantics with potential allies, for virtue signaling no less, the real threat is showing a united front, no doubt, no debate.
No, what you should takeaway is that misoverusing the term Nazi as an insult patently no longer works precisely because noone cares about being called a Nazi anymore due to its misoveruse.
In a different timeline, Trump being called a Nazi or any of the vicinity terms should have been an immediate termination of his campaign chances.
What actually happened is Trump ignored it (as he should) and the American people shrugged "OK" and went to vote for him with complete disregard.
Then Musk got called a Nazi at the inauguration, and the American people shrugged "OK" and went back to facepalming at just how much sheer waste the government has with complete disregard.
The moral you should take away is you should not invoke Godwin's Law. It's probably too late for "Nazi", "racism", "sexism", and a host of other insults the Left have thrown around to see what sticks (none have), but that doesn't mean future originally-valuable-terminology have to face the same fate.
Another moral is that insulting Americans probably doesn't actually work in general. "Deplorables", "Garbage", and others were turned around into rallying cries during the 2016 and 2024 campaigns, not unlike the original meaning behind the term "Yankee" which was originally an insult not unlike "Kraut" or "Jap" but is now one of the fondest nicknames of Americans.
So, Americans were insulted by being called Nazis and in true progressive fashion decided to reclaim the term and, well, embrace it?
Cool - it’s nice that you say this is an American trait. I was almost about to say that this entire setup was manufactured to pit Americans against each other, weaponising victimhood and identity, with the complicity of legacy media and big tech. And out of the three players in this game - the ‘left’/‘libs’, ‘right’/‘conservatives’ and the billionaire fascists up top pulling the strings, only the billionaires stand to win.
The reason why terms like nazi, racist, sexist etc did not affect Trump's chances is because his voting base _does not care_ that he is those things. The right wing in America, magnitudes more than the left, does not care about the personal qualities of their chosen candidate, only about whether he advances their agenda. Why do so many nominal Christians vote for Trump despite him being a cheater, hoarder, and a person who otherwise embodies so many of the qualities the Bible cautions against? It is, again, because they will cook up any number of excuses and denials to justify their support as long as he hurts those they consider the enemy. The only way to make the application of those terms hurt Trump would have been to make the population care about them in the first place (beyond the thinnest veneer of superficial handwringing) which would have required a much stronger education system than America has.
Indeed. The allegation of "racist" has lost its power because people feel free to be openly in favor of racism again.
> Another moral is that insulting Americans probably doesn't actually work in general. "Deplorables", "Garbage", and others were turned around into rallying cries during the 2016 and 2024 campaigns...
It depends on the insult; sometimes that doesn't work. One of the purest expressions of joy I've seen in politics was Scott Adams (Dilbert guy) back in 2019 analysing [0] a group of anti-Trumpers trying to rally around being called "human scum". He had a lot of interesting things to say back then about the art and science of persuasion.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1_3HGjAVv0M 1:30 to 7:30
Direct link to segment: <https://www.youtube.com/embed/1_3HGjAVv0M?start=90&end=450>
Trump is a neonazi, openly aligned with American white supremacist militias, attempted a violent coup in 2021, and "the American people" who shrugged "OK" are neonazis. It is the inescapable reality of our present moment, and it has been visible for a very long time.
Godwin himself openly endorsed calling Trump a Nazi.
My takeaway is exactly the opposite, that not only were people right to call out radical fascist elements and influences in our society, they (we) were wrong to be cowed.
I’ve not watched it yet, but a recent film called the Zone Of Interest sounds like it aligns to this.
It’s about the Hoss family that lived next to one of the Nazi concentration camps, the father/husband ran the camp.
Also, I recently watched The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas and it again aligns to that point of view a bit.
Point to be noted is that Rudolf Hoss wasn't the leader of a random Nazi camp. He was the commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp, where 1.1 million people were murdered, making him one of the biggest mass-murderer of the last century.
> Worse, on the other side, outraged people abused the term nazi to call out anybody that had a bad behavior. But there is a huge difference between being an asshole and being ready to commit genocide.
> Eventually it means the word nazi lost all of its meaning. And all of its usefulness to defend ourselves.
In my experience, most of the people who get accused of being Nazis do turn out to be actual Nazis. Sometimes they are stupid enough to make overt Nazi gestures (e.g. Elon Musk) which is pretty much the only way the average person will accept that someone is a Nazi. Much more frequently they turn out to agree with Nazi ideas such as ethnic cleansing, but do not do the salute, and people will say they're not really a Nazi because they didn't do the salute.
I don't know if there was intent behind it, but during and after WW2 the nazis and ww2-era Germans were depicted as textbook villains, in media, documentaries, school books, etc, but they did so in a dehumanizing fashion, as in, there were only a few named individuals (Hitler, Goebels, Göring, etc), but a generalised and unified "Them". Which made them completely unrelatable to those that weren't "them", which also opened people up for sleepwalking into facism - as long as they don't look too much like "them", and only when "they" got into power did their true colours reveal, including the caricature of Musk doing a nazi salute. I mean he didn't need to do that, and for the facist takeover it would've been better if he didn't because there's now a strong correlation between the two, but he did at the moment it was too late.
I mean it wasn't and isn't too late of course, that's defeatism, people can quickly be removed from power once people get their act together. Jan 6 proved that, and that was a fairly unorganized mob with only a handful actually prepared to arrest / kidnap or do worse to the congresspeople (thinking of the one guy with the tie wraps).
Did you read the article? The section about "alarmists" and "troublemakers" is directly relevant to your take on the use of the word "Nazi". Some people have been calling Musk a Nazi for what, a decade? They sounded like alarmists a decade ago, but now he's literally doing Nazi salutes on TV, acting like it's normal.
> Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that".
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
>cowering now of anyone who should oppose a hostile takeover and dismantling of our democracy and our laws, are striking.
That's the least of your concerns.
What you should be opposing is the US' government participation in genocide.
The American publics' scale of tolerance of evil needs serious and earnest re-callibrating.
This can only happen with war crimes prosecutions.
sure, making the government smaller is basically the same as putting the government in control of everything.
Is this admin making the government smaller?
So far they are expanding power, firing dissents and trying to reduce spending to humanitarian causes and education, to expand its hegemony, to agitate allies. They even attempt to increase means of incarceration.
But there’s no attempt to decentralize power.
> government smaller
I'd also emphasize that a dictator is smaller than a Congress, but not better, and "fewer written rules" can easily conflict with "more freedom for individuals."
Just imagine if the many state laws concerning crimes and misdemeanors were torn up in favor of "don't piss off the police." Sure, it's way shorter, but you've simply replaced the hard-fought written rules (which you have a chance to see, understand, contest, etc.) with hidden unwritten ones that change semi-randomly.
> sure, making the government smaller is basically the same as putting the government in control of everything.
Come on. A "hostile takeover and dismantling of our democracy" is completely orthogonal to the size of government, before or after the takeover.
How do you clean up a corrupt organization?
By making it more transparent
Bernie Sanders has been trying to tell you this since I can count.
Corruption is fought by cutting off external, financial influence and lobbying and by putting the voters front and center.
It is however _not_ fought by firing and going after dissents, pardoning violent extremists, stepping over the separation of power.
It's probably best to start by not appointing a serial liar, convicted felon and conman to head it.
But if for some insane reason you do, you probably want to keep him and his cronies accountable to the law of the land. The conduct expected from someone with that history should be unimpeachable.
Instead, what we got is the conduct of someone who is unimpeachable. None of the rules apply to him or his friends, and neither do any of the checks and balances.
He's a rapist too, isn't he?
He literally bragged about it before he was elected the first time.
I know we live in chaotic times and all but "grab them by the pussy" without clear consent is, in fact, sexual assault, no matter how much of a celebrity you are.
And there's a long trail of credible accusations against him ranging from various forms of sexual assault to unequivocal rape:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump_sexual_misconduct...
Surely not by appointing other oligarch and cronies at high position of said organization.
President is unilaterally shutting down federal agencies. If this goes on there really isn't a constitution anymore, not in practice anyway.
You never have one except because everyone decides they do. The moment anyone with a modicum of power decides to say it doesn't exist, it doesn't exist.
> In 1942 there were 110,000 Japanese-American citizens, in good standing, law abiding people, who were thrown into internment camps simply because their parents were born in the wrong country. That's all they did wrong. They had no right to a lawyer, no right to a fair trial, no right to a jury of their peers, no right to due process of any kind. The only right they had was...right this way! Into the internment camps.
> Just when these American citizens needed their rights the most...their government took them away. and rights aren't rights if someone can take em away. They're priveledges. That's all we've ever had in this country is a bill of TEMPORARY priviledges; and if you read the news, even badly, you know the list get's shorter, and shorter, and shorter.
George Carlin, years ago. https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/1242679-boy-everyone-in-thi...
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From the outside, it continues to surprise me when people bring this up, as if they're either too ignorant to know about the Dixiecrat schism or want to pretend that everyone else is. What's the point? It's so easy to look up.
It's just propaganda, optics, PR. Obviously the Democrat party in 1940 has absolutely no relation to the Democrat party in 2025, except for the name. People use that same name to smear the 2025 party because they can. And it works because propaganda works. That's how Germany got Hitler and it's how the USA got Elon.
I mean, see, say, South Korea. Or, for a less spectacular example, see Boris Johnson's defeat in his attempts at a bit of tinpot dictatorship of his own: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R_(Miller)_v_The_Prime_Ministe...
Really, in democratic societies there are three levels; those where the offending politician is actually deposed, those where their unconstitutional action is blocked by the courts or by another arm of government (as with Boris), and those where _they never do the thing in the first place because they realise they can't get away with it, and there'll be unpleasant consequences for them_ (this is by far the most common, particularly in parliamentary democracies, where Dear Leader can be fired at a moment's notice). If none of these happen, then typically the democracy ends.
The US is probably unusually vulnerable to this sort of thing; it has an unusually powerful executive, and a highly politicised Supreme Court, in particular. Though, it kind of remains to be seen how far the Supreme Court will be pushed. Some or all of Trump's appointees may take the view that they got into the job to screw over minorities and aid business, but not necessarily to actually end democracy in the US. They are likely not all that beholden to him.
R v Miller was important but ultimately overtaken by events - while Parliament did want to discuss Brexit, they were unable to find a viable solution and we still got no-deal Brexit where vital things like the status of Northern Ireland had to be patched up later. For whatever insane reason, the demand to eject us from the Single Market was just too strong.
To be clear, there wasn't a no-deal Brexit in the end. There was what was originally called a hard Brexit (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brexit_withdrawal_agreement), but a no-deal Brexit would have been far worse.
R (Miller) v The Prime Minister (not to be confused with R v Miller, or R (Miller) v Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union (the solution here is clearly to just stop naming people 'Miller', to avoid further confusion)) was probably ultimately more important in its precedent than its concrete outcomes, though, yeah.
I think it’s important to clarify that in this case, having a “modicum of power” is in the form of being able to say it doesn’t exist without a riot and a beheading. It’s not in the form of money or command of an army, though those things definitely help.
The President has unitary power over the executive, within the bounds set by congress.
trump really doesn't care about the bounds set by congress or anyone else
In a functioning government, it shouldn’t matter if the president cares or not. The limits on each branch should be enforceable and enforced.
In a functioning democracy, the guardrails last until the person trying to break them leaves office, and then that person is not elected again; and if they break laws in office, they are convicted of them.
Laws of nature don't care what you believe: if everyone in the country thinks COVID is a myth, that won't stop COVID from killing people.
Human laws -- "What is the law?" or "Who is the king?" aren't like that. Human laws literally are, "What everyone thinks is true". The chiefs at USAID told Musk he couldn't have access. The President told the chiefs they were fired. The chiefs believed themselves to be fired, so they were fired.
What else could they have done? They could have called the police or the FBI, and reported illegal attempted access of classified systems. The police could have then arrested Musk or his people (or at least threatened to do so). But would they have done so? Wouldn't they have reasonably believed that such behavior would lead to their losing their jobs?
Maybe in 2016 they would have believed that allowing access to classified materials would eventually land them in hot water, and that standing up to the president would eventually lead to them being vindicated. But not now -- any reasonable person now would predict that standing up to the president would lead to them being fired (and possibly have other vindictive punishiments applied), with no recourse; while giving in would certainly be overlooked.
The People voted to re-elect a known authoritarian with no respect for the rule of law or democracy. I don't see how any democratic system can withstand that.
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It’s not moral panic, it’s because Trump is reducing legitimacy and stability of the government. Killing foreign civilians is normal, locking everyone out of a government job with zero notice is not.
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Bro you’ve already been flagkilled above for personal attacks, and you’re still at it
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deeply ironic
COIN sucks, civilians get killed, the closest thing to a fortress in modern warfare is a city. The US has a better record than most in protecting civilians but it’s impossible to save everyone.
The US could save people by not starting wars. And by quickly finishing wars other people started (that means Ukraine) rather than drawing them out as long as possible to maximize shareholder profits from weapon sales.
You can tell a republican is president because suddenly we care about the constitution and checks in power and other things we didn't care for for 4 years. It's like when Bush invades a country, that's bad, when Obama does it, that's justified or "don't bother me, I'm eating".
Now we get all these articles about evil and resistance and yet, most damaging US politics have continued regardless of red or blue but we have to try and pretend partisan fanatics are anything but.
Sorry but this time around, specially after the insane anti civil rights COVID policies and overreach, the hypocrisy is overflowing so much you'll get more backlash to your partisan narrative.
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.
But what is happening right now is not really the same as to what happened the last four years, is it? If we forget about partisan wars for a second, are there precedents to what Trump is trying to do? Genuine question, I'm not a USA citizen and I can't keep up with everything.
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Google the word “aww”.
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He’d have a long way to go to get down to the number of federal agencies that existed in 1900, let alone the number in 1800, yet the US had its constitution, then, too.
Since 1800 congress has used its constitutional power to establish agencies. It is congress who has the constitutional power to shut them down, not the president. The president executes the laws passed by Congress.
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 iteration where you have hundreds of independent agencies that cannot be fired breathing down your neck with statutory power is fucking insane.
> The president is fascist because he's, checks notes... , relinquishing governmental power by shutting down agencies?
You do know the president is not supposed to have that power, right? His job is to execute the law, which as currently written requires those agencies to exist.
Yes and FDR also skirted around constitutionality and even threatened to pack the courts to ram his reforms in. I don't agree with everything the president is doing, but the rail we are going down is just doomed. What is your proposition to stop interest from eating 100% of the federal budget. We just paid 1T of interest, do you think that is going to decelerate?
>>What is your proposition to stop interest from eating 100% of the federal budget. We just paid 1T of interest, do you think that is going to decelerate?
How is that related to shutting down agencies?
Because those agencies are funded by the federal budget. We are literally going into a deficit to send money to other countries. Do you realize how insane that is? And don't tell me this is just a small part of the federal budget. Oh its just a couple billion here and there. That's a lot of money that could go towards not being in debt. This level of fiscal irresponsibility is basically taxation without representation on the unborn.
>>We are literally going into a deficit to send money to other countries. Do you realize how insane that is?
You mean the international development fund that's being raided right now? You know that it exists because US realized that it's cheaper(as in - LESS money spent overall) to help countries develop, so that US is less likely to engage militarily with whatever conflict happens in those countries eventually? It's part of being a global hagemony - it's not insane, it's just good business strategy. Out of all people, Musk and his cohort should be able to see this.
>>That's a lot of money that could go towards not being in debt.
The whole idea is that you'd be in more debt if you didn't do this, because you'd spend another trillion dollars on yet another conflict somewhere because people got fed up with having no access to fresh water and food and now there's a war that US just "has to" intervene in. Aid money is meant to explicitly prevent this.
> so that US is less likely to engage militarily with whatever conflict happens in those coutries eventually
Or you know, we can stop getting into wars? Did our adventures in the middle east advance US interests?
> It's part of being a global hagemony
It's called overextension and almost every historical power declined due to internal rot coupled by continuously getting into conflicts, which, wouldn't you know, drained the treasury.
>>Or you know, we can stop getting into wars?
Ah yes, "just stop". I mean, but all means - please do.
>> Did our adventures in the middle east advance US interests?
They made a few american corporations extremely rich and justified balooning the military expenditure. Whether that's in US interests or not - you decide.
>>It's called overextension
It's part of projecting your might as a superpower. The same reason why American taxpayers are paying billions of dollars to station troops in Eastern European countries - not out of charity but because it's explicitly in American interests to do so. International Aid is the same - "we're giving you money now so that we don't have to spend more money fighting with/against you(cross out one) in the future". "stop getting into wars" has the same energy as "just stop tipping" or "just stop spending so much money on the military" - imagine how quickly your entire national debt would be wiped out if you did that!
Hey, if I told you I happened to be an expert in this field, hypothetically, and I said this was a vast oversimplificaiton, would you be willing to listen to an expert?
Or do you not trust experts at this point time?
Nobody is denying that the US budget / finances are in dire need of cleaning up, but the approach taken is a hostile and forced takeover of essentials like foreign aid, education, medicaid, etc. People will die because of this approach and its short sightedness will have a bigger negative impact on the US economy and international relationships than it will gain them from reduced costs.
He's not shutting down agencies to relinquish governmental power.
He's shutting them down to strengthen his own power.
What power has he gained.
He's apparently gained the power to arbitrarily shut down federal agencies, for one.
It is a weird concept for the libertarian mind, but sometimes the goverment power is used to protect people freedoms and rights.
Yes and we managed to do that for 150 years with a fraction of the current government size.
You think we protected everyone's rights in 1874?
Many things like childcare, elder care, or healthcare have significantly changed over the last 150 years and now people have much less slack[0] to go back to the old ways.
Anyway I care little about the size of a government as it is the result of many perverse incentives (vetocracy, companies pushing for both deregulations and regulatory capture, late stage capitalism trying to make almost everyone poor and/or unstable) but the latest generation of attacks on the size of the government feel a lot like a Embrace Extend Extinguish on social safety nets so that predatory industries like healtcare insurance can better extract wealth from the lower classes
[0] https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/05/12/studies-on-slack/
Do you think inequality has risen or decreased as the size of the government increased? Regulatory capture can only exist with the existence of unchecked regulatory power. I personally work in a space that is insanely difficult to new entrants because of the thousands of regulations you need to comply to (90% are garbage btw). If tmrw, our industry had a regulation reform, the entrenched players would die overnight.
> Do you think inequality has risen or decreased as the size of the government increased?
I would say inequality decreased as the size of the government increased, and inequality increased as the size of the government decreased from its 1967 peak, yes. The New Deal was the single greatest reduction in inequality in national history.
I am not arguing for or against size of the government, nor I am arguing long term strategies, I am saying that ripping out wellfare programs is a rugpull on a lot of people
Inequality has generally gone down as time goes by.
Because regulations cut both ways. They stop bad actors and they stop innovators.
Innovators thrive at the start of an industry, later once its commoditized, its going to be driven by people who want to cut corners. See enshittification.
Regulations put a ceiling on harm by bad actors.
Either we need industries that do not obey such laws of physical reality and entropy, or we need to accomodate for the most probable occurrence efficiently.
You will always have examples of failures of these regulations, the measure of their efficiency is from the counterfactual losses and gains.
... there's a lot of people who aren't landing-owning white men who would disagree with you.
So you are saying if the founding fathers had 100 agencies then slavery wouldve been abolished?
I'm saying your premise is so hilariously ahistorical it deserves mocking.
To make matters worse, this is not only "rehappening" in the US. It's global
As I understand it, this wave of US policy change is inspired by a combination of white supremacy and US exceptionalism. But rest of the world is effected by few different things, for example, xenophobia in the case of EU and UK, expansionism in Russia, zionism in Israel, nationalism in China (and Japan, really) etc. It looked the same if you stand far, but they're all different, so I wouldn't call it "global".
There is a documentary from Deutsche Welle titled "The rise of the ultra-right in the US": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrhREluLdBs. Maybe worth a watch if you want to see an "outside" perspective on this.
The fear of foreigners or racial "others" is the common element. And some of the propaganda is common, too.
The right wing of the US is not driven by white supremacy. It's driven by a belief in a variety of mostly false grievances, about immigration, the economy, the wealth gap, etc. Those bogus beliefs are held by white and non white people.
Consider that Trump won almost 50% of Latino male voters. As a percentage of the vote, Trump did better with racial minorities and women in 2024 than 2020, and much better compared to 2016.
White supremacy is real and it has some effect in US politics, but it's not a driving force anymore. I say this as someone who has lived both in and outside the US. The outside perspective is not always better. Germans may be seeing the US through the lens of their own history.
What's happening in the US is in a whole other league of fucked
Yes the US is uniquely fucked, really. At least the previous global hegemon fought two world wars to lose its place. The US is basically committing geopolitical suicide at the top of its powers because of gender neutral toilets and the price of eggs. A rather pathetic country and people, sadly.
We’re getting fascism installed because a bunch of chuds want to be able to say “retard” again.
Triggered. If we are pathetic, then look forward to our enlightened successors.
I don't know what will happen in American politics, nor what effect it will have on the world or the permanence of those effects, but there are demagogues everywhere, America is not exceptional.
I look forward our new Chinese overlords.
America is exceptional in that it is the global hegemon self destructing before our eyes and for largely nonsensical domestic reasons. That is exceptional.
And I don’t know about triggered, but rather just sad, because I was one of those people who really believed in the US at one time!
What a way to utterly waste the likely last few generations of "civilized" humanity on Earth... :(
Nobody really remembers, hence, the same mistakes will be made.
Some people remember. I have a neighbor who was a child living in Berlin in ‘45. Looks like the story of her life will have literary bookends.
My mom was born in late 1930s Germany. She remembers being bombed out of her appartment. She came to US and is not happy with the way things are going here.
Here are some hypotheses for optimism.
1. The USA will likely address climate change directly through technology (geoengineering) vs rapid degrowth (the only two plausible means of stabilizing the climate)
2. The USA will likely avoid war.
3. The USA will likely experience large-scale economic growth due to regulatory change, efficient government services, compounding industrial ecosystems and robotics
4. The American scientific establishment and education system are likely to be transformed to create massive jumps in productivity (in the age of AI)
5. And, of course, the current trajectory of AI seems to support if not promote an unprecedented humanism. Unlike past automation, it doesn’t require humans to act like machines — instead, it lets us leverage our intuition, emotion, and vibes. And this intelligence is available to all, worldwide.
We already have smarter AI than 99% of humans — and this creates certain transformative opportunities. There is little doubt that this will be applied across society at an unbelievable scale and speed.
Why is this desirable, you might ask? In short, China’s economic model (low-corruption communistic capitalism) is working way better than liberal democratic models.
We don’t want war. But we do want the ability to compete effectively with China — and with the European model, it’s not happening.
There are very few ways to compete with China without very strong leadership — and now, it seems, we have that chance.
And, with the global distribution of high-intelligence AI, there is plenty of room for distributed, decentralized local growth that can enable all people around the world to participate in economic development and super-abundant resources.
Things will continue to accelerate. And the biggest wellbeing challenges will come from overabundance of resources rather than their scarcity.
Note: these are hypotheticals for a reason! But I think it is important to identify plausible positive futures so we know where we want to go — we have plenty of negative futures we are trying to avoid.
>2. The USA will likely avoid war.
The USA is currently experiencing an autocoup prosecuted by an unholy alliance of tech industry elites and dominionist christian white supremacists. Its president, who presided over an attempted violent coup in 2021, has called for the annexation of Canada and Greenland, ethnically cleansing Palestine and acquiring it as US territory, military incursions into Mexico, seizing Panama, and suggested the annexation of the United Kingdom.
He is openly aligned with radical white supremacist militias that are entwined with our sheriffs, police, and military. He's installed a white supremacist as Secretary of Defense with the support of congress and numerous others in powerful positions throughout the remnants of the US government.
We are on the precipice, staring into the abyss.
> these are hypotheticals for a reason!
Because they have zero connection to reality? Can I have a pony in this hypothetical too? How do we get to any of them while having to climb over the additional hurdle of a far right anti-science government?
>The American scientific establishment and education system are likely to be transformed to create massive jumps in productivity (in the age of AI)
And this presidency will ensure that this jump in productivity only benefits the wealthy. Proposed tax cuts by Trump would make middle class people pay more and wealthy people pay less
>There are very few ways to compete with China without very strong leadership — and now, it seems, we have that chance.
Oh yes, the guy that wanted to have a say in what the fed does. The guy who proposed and eventually rolled back tariffs on its neighboring countries, sending a lot of companies (both in usa, Canada, and Mexico) in panic. I could go on for hours
> The USA will likely address climate change directly through technology (geoengineering) vs rapid degrowth (the only two plausible means of stabilizing the climate)
How is "rapid degrowth" a solution to climate change? we have "degrowth" in population in basically every industrialized country already anyway, but more extreme rates like South Korea are already destabilizingly low, and still not even close to enough for keeping CO2 emissions in check: That would probably require us to slash population by at least 60% (and quickly, even if we kept enacting CO2 reducing measures).
There is already a "solution" for climate change on the table-- electrify everything, de-carbonize electricity generation and help roll out this change globally, but all the major players are dragging their feet because this is obviously not free...
> 1. The USA will likely address climate change directly through technology (geoengineering) vs rapid degrowth (the only two plausible means of stabilizing the climate)
That climate change can be addressed through technology is of course true, but equating that with geoengineering is pure insanity. Also, there's _nothing_ that indicates that the US will address this area at all, especially not now, with an administration that doesn't even believe that there's anything to address!
> 2. The USA will likely avoid war.
I do not understand how you can draw that conclusion after seeing the new president threaten even _allies_ with war in just a few weeks in office.
> 3. The USA will likely experience large-scale economic growth due to regulatory change, efficient government services, compounding industrial ecosystems and robotics
Which efficient government services are you talking about? The ones provided by skilled bureaucrats being replaced due to lacking "loyalty"?
> 4. The American scientific establishment and education system are likely to be transformed to create massive jumps in productivity (in the age of AI)
Transformed by having their funding slashed?
> We already have smarter AI than 99% of humans
You seem to be sampling a very strange subset of humans.
> There is little doubt that this will be applied across society at an unbelievable scale and speed.
There's, in fact, lots of doubt.
> In short, China’s economic model (low-corruption communistic capitalism) is working way better than liberal democratic models.
For certain things, sure. For other things (like freedom of speech, personal liberties): very much not.
> There are very few ways to compete with China without very strong leadership — and now, it seems, we have that chance.
So, you want a "strong leader". How does that go down in history again? Anyway – do you think that in addition to being "strong" there are other aspects of a leader that you might want to have in addition? Like, I don't know, intelligence and compassion? Or are you just going for strength to smack everyone over the head?
> And, with the global distribution of high-intelligence AI, there is plenty of room for distributed, decentralized local growth that can enable all people around the world to participate in economic development and super-abundant resources.
Absolute meaningless dribble. It just needs a sprinkle of blockchain or something.
> Things will continue to accelerate. And the biggest wellbeing challenges will come from overabundance of resources rather than their scarcity.
So when can people suffering under these authoritarian strongmen expect this abundance? How much suffering will they have to take before utopia hits? Or, alternatively, before we can laugh you lot off for a few generations again.
I'm curious if what is happening in the US and what has happened in Britain with Brexit actually ends up slowing some of these marches towards illiberalism in other places. Like when people are upset at the direction of a country or current policies, they may take a "throw the bums out" attitude even if the alternative is far worse. But perhaps they're looking at the complete shit show in the US and how unproductive Brexit was and are thinking "OK, maybe not like that..."
I mean, it sounds like Canada is more united than it's been in a long time in its shared opposition to Trump.
Unfortunately, one key difference is that Britain didn't have a leader who wanted to expand their territory.
Europe is already weak, economically and militarily. I don't know how long our votes will matter when we have a belligerent and powerful neighbour.
Ask Hawaii what happened when a bunch of businessmen wanted more profits and less government oversight! Back then it was Dole (the PERSON) and sugarcane companies, today it is auto manufacturers and probably access to the northern sea route that is rapidly becoming de-iced and relevant for shipping to bypass the Panama Canal. Canada better take this threat seriously and treat the USA, at the very least, like a neighbor who is shooting a rifle at a massive tank of propane.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1887_Constitution_of_the_Hawai...
Oh I know, I think Elon wants nothing less than to be emperor of the world.
In the UK, the political party (which is a actually a privately owned company) owned by the guy who drove the initial wave of Brexit is apparently topping the polls now.
The only policy they talk about is getting rid of all the immigrants because that's what caused all the problems, not decades of right wing government culminating in Brexit.
But underdeath that is the usual US-style Turbo capitalism stuff like destroying the NHS and handing it over to American corporations.
> In the UK, the political party (which is a actually a privately owned company) owned by the guy who drove the initial wave of Brexit is apparently topping the polls now.
Oh god. There I was thinking it couldn't get worse and hoping you'd made a mistake, but no, you're right, somehow it is.
Reform is such a corporate op. It's so obviously astroturf .. but the media are also astroturfing it, because the hate for immigrants is universal.
Also not surprisingly immigration increased after Brexit. It has always been a wedge issue and a red herring for those in power.
The right wing party will take power in Australia shortly too, for similar idiotic reasons.
I don't think it changes anything on a base level for how humans behave en mass. Unfortunately it looks like we will always be susceptible to populism and propaganda. At best what you're seeing is a temporary inoculation against illibralism.
In France at least, Brexit made the idea of leaving the EU obsolete in political discourse, both on the left and far right.
But at the same time French media just repeated the “it's a clumsy handwave from an autistic dude” narrative after Musk's Nazi salute so I'm not sure it will work this time.
Notice that this benevolence and protection by the media is granted to Musk (and Trump) by their complete subservience to Israel's demands and wants. Trump just proposed ethnic cleansing the Gaza Strip and cleaning up the rubble with American money and work so it can be handed over to Israel in a nice shape.
I suspect a large part of the subtext is that considerable real estate holdings, hotels, casinos, apartments, etc. will mysteriously end up slightly off book on some TrumpCo. spinoff or another.
It's the new Riviera after all . . .
No, that's missing the point. What hotels, casinos and apartments were promised to the Biden administration to flood Israel with money and weapons to flatten the Gaza strip into rubble and kill and maim hundreds of thousands?
It's not important what leverage Israel has used to make yet another US president do exactly what they want, contrary to any idea of justice, international law, basic humanity and common sense. The point is that Israel has that kind of leverage and nobody is able to resist it.
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How is the response to Oct 7 a defensive action? Using block sized bombs to take out one terrorist minutes after shooting a missile and has already left the scene when smaller munitions from drones can do the job is defensive? The military threat of Hama' s is a few RPGs that have barely injured anyone since the war started.
How does Israel even know the ratio, they're not counting deaths.
All Hamas wanted from the beginning to release hostages was for Israel to do the same. Something they've now done anyway so the entire war and all civilian suffering was unnecessary.
>There is clearly no specific leverage that one of the world's smallest ethnic groups has over the world's most powerful nation
This is not so clear as you think. Israel is a nuclear-armed state that is not a participant in the non-proliferation treaties.
Everything that the world fears of Iran, is already the case with Israel.
Forward-deployed nukes are a hell of a blackmail.
As much as I hate the Nazis at the top of Israel's government and Western complicity in the ethnic cleansing occurring in Gaza (and more recently the West Bank too), I find your statement disturbing.
Not everything is related to Israel, and there's no good reason to believe that this has anything to do with Israel. French media were pretty critical of Joe Bidden being too old for the job, despite Bidden giving Netanyahu all he wanted.
Edit: OK given that other response of yours in this thread[1], it's quite clear now that you're confusing the fight for the freedom of Palestinians and the hatred of Jews.
In addition to being disgusting, Antisemitic talks like these are actually counter productive: they help the Israelis as it gives them an excuse to victimize themselves once again.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42945588
> Not everything is related to Israel, and there's no good reason to believe that this has anything to do with Israel
Netanyahu himself tweeted in support of Elon Musk after his nazi-like salute. This is obviously about Israel.
> it's quite clear now that you're confusing the fight for the freedom of Palestinians and the hatred of Jews
I didn't mention Jews, you are the one confusing Jews and Israel. There are many Jews who are vehement opponents of Israel's nazi government and are denouncing it and its influence on American politics anywhere they can.
Wait until you have the Liz Truss budget. That's going to be economic chaos.
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For those who want to do something, what is the 2025 version of Indivisible?
Indivisible still exists, and is still active: https://indivisible.org/
There are protests planned for today (Wednesday) across the US
Honestly, what would these protests do? Serious question.
Let say you manage to achieve the unthinkable and bring a huge amount of people on the street, heck let say you are so successful that you also get a full on national strike going, what then?
Do you think it would affect those in charge right now? He would not care. He is already ruining the US economy and alliances. Why would he care if some people he does not answer to get on the street and complain? In fact, it may even give him the excuse to declare an emergency and enact even worse acts.
And you know half the country support him. He has the army on his side. The court is on his side. And worst of all, the law is beneath him, literally. What would these protests do?
I swear, serious question. Help me understand. What do you hope to achieve?
The point isn't to sway the emperor. (When the facts change, he changes the facts.) But there are many people answering to him who currently don't have the backbone to say no to him. Seeing a million people out there shouting that the emperor has no clothes on may give them that little extra bit of courage necessary to make the right choice in one of the many daily situations where they have the choice between being pandering yes-men and doing the right thing.
A successful protest with a large turnout shows people that they are not alone with these opinions. This instills confidence so that they dare to act "rightfully" later on.
Yes. It's about the threshold to hold an opinion and to act. Different people have different thresholds for how much they dare to break from the status quo. With widespread protests we change the range of standpoints people feel comfortable to take.
Just like, the comparison is relevant, the public display of nazi symbols changes the range of nazi opinions that some people are comfortable expressing..
> He has the army on his side
I mean, technically he controls it, however as a former officer in the military I have to believe (perhaps stupidly) that the majority of officers in the US military will refuse to be deployed illegally to squash protesting, even if it's a bit violent. If not, then I guess the people I served with were extraordinary. I hope they were run of the mill, I really do.
is your argument that protests do nothing, therefore people should stay home?
Frankly, you are both right. We have to protest, because sitting silently is nothing but complicity.
But protests alone almost certainly won't solve this.
There is a 'progression' of boxes in resisting tyranny, and protests are the soap box.
This is a scam to get dollars
The purpose of a protest in general should not be to affect the people in power, it should be for enpowering and bonding the people to further enact post-protest. A moralle boost, a conversation starter, an ignition to call more people to action. Having sayd that, a very successfull protest does affect the upper ones, only temprorarily and tactically. A policy maker will still want to make X move, but ever so slightly delay it or figure out a differnt narrative to bring it back some time later.
Protest outside your senator's residence. Every day. Until Trump is impeached (again!) and removed.
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50501 - https://50501.carrd.co/
It's today.
Though I'm abroad...
This is hard to read.
I see myself in some of these words. I am by no means complicit in what is currently happening in the US as a US citizen, but I genuinely have no idea how to fight any of it. People want to throw words around like "resist" and "disrupt" and any other revolutionary buzz words, but the fact is I still have to get up every morning, pour my coffee and go do my job because that paycheck is what allows me to do anything else at all, in my life. I don't have the luxury of risking termination because I decided to call in sick to go to a march at my state's capitol.
I voted accordingly, I signed the petitions, I followed the rules and keep a strong moral compass to be a good human to other humans, upholding a "do no harm" policy that I take quite seriously. None of this was supposed to happen, and yet it did.
Reading this excerpt makes me feel like the Germans the book is about, the ones that history can look back on with a heavily judgemental 20/20 vision powered by the historical perspectives that came _after_ these people's lifetimes. I am not capable of being so self-righteous that I can look back on German citizens during the Nazi regime and say "well, they should have known better."
We never really know how we will react to circumstances until we are impacted by them. People go around thinking they won't fall for phishing emails and yet it is one of the most successful methods employed by predatory scammers. We might believe all our decisions are our own, while marketing has mastered the art of subtle manipulation and dark patterns that heavily govern our consumer habits. Our minds imagine arguments or stressful situations where we are able to consider multiple paths, choosing the one where we come out on top, but when we are actually in those moments, we fall back on irrational decision making and emotional reactions.
I think we got to now the same way the Germans did back then, pointed out in the article;
> It was all rigmarole, of course, but it consumed all one's energies, coming on top of the work one really wanted to do. You can see how easy it was, then, not to think about the fundamental things. One had no time.
We are busy, distracted, inundated with things that want to control our attentions and have been for years. We were primed for this exact thing to happen to us, and now we are in it. The story of the frog in boiling water comes to mind.
Thanks for sharing. I, and so many others, have much to think about and reconsider about what we want our lives to mean.
This part is interesting:
"What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could not understand it, it could not be released because of national security."
That has already happened here in the Netherlands. Except it was organised crime. It's so difficult to fight we can't just convict them in court anymore, we need to fight them extrajudicially". So the RIEC was formed "Regional information expertise centrum". And extra judicial actions called "interventions" do happen and they do commit crimes to innocent civilians not related to organised crime in anyway. And they get away with it. And the Dutch population is by and large blissfully unware of what has happened. Most have no idea what that organisation is, but that organisation controls the police, the council, the tax department and about 13 sub-parts of government and gives them orders to carry out as part of their "interventions".
The general population would not even know the name RIEC. All they know are recent advertisements on TV encouraging people to report any suspicious behaviour happening in their neighbourhoods. These people are stupid. They could report something they misinterpreted and unwittingly destroy some innocent persons lives with the extra-judicial interventions that followed.
But yeah, as someone below has said, what's now happening is on a whole other level.
As far as their public website tells (https://www.riec.nl/) the RIEC is about a targeted bundling of knowledge, experience and resources to better deal with the effects of organized crimes, instead of everyone working in their own little silo.
The "interventions" are basically the forming and supporting of work groups / special interest groups around a specific organized crime phenomenon, with the intent of devising an approach to deal with the specific phenomenon. They publish a report of those so-called interventions here: https://www.riec.nl/documenten/publicaties/2024/12/18/interv...
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The "oh we need to educate" stage is well passed.
What I dont understand is what the democrats and constitutionalists are doing? Where are they?
Trump only cares for loyalty and power. Hes also really thin skinned, so what mystifies me is how he's let Musk take all that power from him?
Why aren't the "opposition" hammering the point that Musk is/has effectively usurped Trump?
If I wanted to eject Musk's control over the state, that is where I would start. Trump knows that musk yeets anyone who he sees as weak, so why not exploit that to get some level of constitutional control back?
they are. search for it.
If their response isnt strong enough, I highly reccomend forumlating your own, and add to the voices pushing against it.
> What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could not understand it, it could not be released because of national security. And their sense of identification with Hitler, their trust in him, made it easier to widen this gap and reassured those who would otherwise have worried about it.
Welp.
Fascism took over Germany not by foreign attack, not by domestic civil war, not by subversion or trickery.
Fascism came with a whoop and a holler.
It was what most Germans wanted, or came to want under pressure from both reality and illusion.
They wanted it, they got it, and they liked it.
I recommend reading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_and_Fall_of_the_Third...
No, that's a gross simplification, and leaves out all the violence and constant deception. This is a good primer on just how far off the pop culture understanding of the Nazis is: https://archive.org/details/TheOriginsOfTotalitarianism/
"Without subversion or trickery" is flat out wrong. And it's also wrong for the US today.
I really have no clue about history, and what you say sounds very reasonable. I guess it is true.
But I think any person who wants to live in a democracy needs a bare minimum ability to detect trickery. Because there has not yet been invented a system where none of the politicians lie, and you can make good decisions based on taking them all at their word.
Now, maybe the level of subversion and trickery in pre-WW2 Germany and/or in the US now is beyond reasonable. I don't know. But in general, if "people were lied to" is a good reason for people to choose bad politicians, I don't think there is any hope for a good outcome, ever. The world just does not work that way.
You don’t even need a sophisticated defense against trickery and propaganda.
The thing that works almost automatically, with exceptions, is decentralized power:
- direct voting on issues by all citizens
- compartmentalization of government into specialized units
- bottom up federalism
- appointment of representatives on a per project basis, not for general power
With decentralized power, people make pragmatic decisions, because they are focused on solving problems and not on maintaining power.
If you don't want to read all of Arendt's book, https://www.bbc.co.uk/history/worldwars/genocide/nazi_genoci... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturmabteilung#Rise provides some details of the violence before and during Hitler's rise to power.
This line in particular is frightening:
> They thought that the Nazis were just another right-wing, nationalist party and that Hitler would be 'tamed' by power.
Edit: thanks for all of the replies, I’m questioning my framing here now due to some smart people’s thoughts.. I suggest reading the full thread, as there are some interesting comments.
I see the obvious parallels to Trump, and I agree completely (and hate that it is happening). But I feel like I also see a lot of parallels to the democrats. Deciding Kamala would be the candidate without any public vote, for example. They both have aspects that heavily mirror the article.
I normally am not a fan of both-sides’ing an issue, but this seems like a literal case of everyone in the government basically performing that they disagree with the other, while marching down similar paths. They fight on issues that get people excited, while conspiring together to inch towards a “mystery government” which we must just trust.
I believe the path forward is to find things in common with our neighbors rather than politicians. Even if we disagree on some political views with our neighbors, we likely still have a lot more in common with them than any politician.
And, if you disagree, really truly read this with a critical eye, imagining the other side. Listen to their complaints. Because they feel the same way about your side. I’ve literally heard smart people in both political parties call each other authoritarian. So maybe the issues are actually with both sides.
You’re being gaslit.
Democrats did not subvert the checks and balances of our system - they faced opposition in all their initiatives in the judiciary, house, and senate.
What Musk is doing now amongst a silent government is unprecedented. His youth group is marching into federal offices walking past security and taking everything because people are afraid. They’re afraid of being fired. They’re afraid of reprisals.
The next step will be for Musk to USE what he’s taken from these IT systems. There’s a reason he beelined for the IT systems.
They have everything they need now to make lists. That is the next step. Lists of names.
Your comment comes off as alarmist, but then I realized the content of the article, and think that you may be right.
I still stand by my point that most of our politicians have done this to us, on all sides of the political spectrum. And that we would be better off empathizing with our neighbors rather than any politician.
But the scale of the jump from previous actions to this one is enormous and shouldn’t be dismissed at all.
Most of the democrats are bought. All of the republicans are.
It seems alarmist until you consider that Musk is a Nazi. He did the Hitler salute, live on national television. His followers tried to downplay it, but his own answer to the question "Are you a Nazi?" was "I bet you did Nazi that coming!"
People joke that he went from being the Henry Ford of our generation to being the Henry Ford of our generation.
I don't know whether I would say that Trump is a Nazi*, but the fact that he put a Nazi in charge of firing govt employees that don't follow orders does not bode well.
EDIT: * If only because he has never publicly admitted to being a Nazi like Musk has.
Musk is a traitor per US legal definition and his actions highly resemble a hostile foreign national takeover, he deserves nothing less than the maxumim punishment under current US law...
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> Because they feel the same way about your side.
Yes, this is surely true.
> So maybe the issues are actually with both sides.
Not necessarily.
Is Russian resentment of Ukraine equivalent to Ukrainian resentment of Russia merely because both citizenries feel their own resentments passionately?
I see your point, however, in this case the democrats and republicans are part of the same entity.
I am suggesting that the politicians’ interests are somewhat aligned, in regard to grabbing power. Their techniques are different, but the outcome is that we become more normalized to the behavior of “being ruled”, bit by bit.
Don’t forget the right-leaning protests in 2020 over democratic governors telling people they had to get vaccinated or fired, and they were not permitted to have their small businesses open or go to the gym. That was also authoritarian, regardless of how necessary some people thought it was at the time. You may not have agreed with them, but they were upset about the same things as you.
An actuall global event that killed hundreds of millions of individuals is a very different thing than what Musk is doing, without any such precipitation...
I do not agree that firing should have been on the table, however this is not an Apples and Oranges situation...
I completely agree with your point, but it’s hundreds of millions of cases and ~10 million deaths I thought
Rather than thinking in terms of "left vs. right", I think in terms of "extreme left vs. moderate left vs. moderate right vs. extreme right". I support moderates over extremists. I support democracy and rule of law. I care about this more than I care about left vs. right.
> Rather than thinking in terms of "left vs. right", I think in terms of "extreme left vs. moderate left vs. moderate right vs. extreme right". I support moderates over extremists. I support democracy and rule of law. I care about this more than I care about left vs. right.
This is a great position. I wish more people adopted it.
The problem I have seen over the past few years is that those who are on the extremes are not aware that they are on the fringe. They believe that their ideology is widely shared and common amongst everyone.
> the extremes are not aware that they are on the fringe. They believe that their ideology is widely shared and common amongst everyone.
Yeah. I think the way to counteract this is for moderates to speak up against the extremists, including the extremists on their own side.
For example, Biden criticized the extreme left in the summer 2020 protests: https://medium.com/@JoeBiden/we-are-a-nation-furious-at-inju...
> Protesting [police] brutality is right and necessary. It’s an utterly American response. But burning down communities and needless destruction is not. Violence that endangers lives is not. Violence that guts and shutters businesses that serve the community is not.
We need more of that from our politicians. When Republicans are willing to criticize Trump, I respect them enormously for it; but few Republicans are willing to publicly disagree with Trump.
Agreed - I think we say similar things. I am mostly suggesting that authoritarians currently live in all sides of the aisle in our government right now. And they’ve all been ratcheting up in intensity, getting us used to “their” version of it. This latest jump being by far the most severe and scary.
I actually think Biden/Harris are moderates, and tried to de-escalate things. Whereas Trump is anti-democracy and anti-rule-of-law.
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> Deciding Kamala would be the candidate without any public vote, for example.
I have never really understood this parallel. What laws got broken, there?
No laws were broken. But it's very much in line with what the article is talking about:
> What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could not understand it, it could not be released because of national security.
Don't confuse legality with morality.
As a purely mechanical point: having a D president with R house and senate and supreme court is a very different situation to having R all across the board, which is why the "checks and balances" have stopped working.
I think you are correct precisely because both US major parties are on the same side, the side of capital.
But they are not the same. One party is weaponizing racism and ignorance to illegally destroy institutions that have taken decades to build.
They can be very different, but still both push our governing structures and our thinking in directions that are not good for us individually or collectively.
To risk an analogy, if you're drowning and need assistance, you need some sort of flotation device, or a rope to get out of the water. If one person throws a heavy stone block at you, they're not helping. If a different person tosses you a metal chair, they're also not helping, even if they think they are. The objects are different, and the intent may even be different. But neither helps, and you are still drowning.
Examining that analogy in light of the electoral outcome, would you prefer to be in the timeline in which someone throws you a chair but there is a boat full of others who might throw you something useful, or the one in which someone has thrown you a heavy block, has drilled holes through the hull, and is actively pushing everyone else overboard?
In this timeline we’re all gonna be drowning.
They’re not both the same level of bad currently, I agree.
But they have both been consistently working to normalize their authoritarianism. I mentioned the 2020 protests in another sibling comment, which I think is a good example.
This is just the next step in an ongoing escalation, but yeah it is a big jump.
Scary times.
and the side of israel? which happen to be the solidest evidence to prove someone is a nazi
no matter who you voted for, no matter if you voted or don't vote, you can not change this, you have no power to change it
...why this got downvoted :(
which part of this is wrong?
The part where participating in collective cowardice overwhelms the individual will to seek truth.
I see what you're saying, but listening to partisan rhetoric on both sides here does not really get you any closer to the truth here.
If you were you were to look back at the political discourse in 1920s and 1930s Germany, you'd find extremely scathing critiques from the Nazis lobbied against the Social Democratic party. Did this mean that the two were equally bad?
While it's true that Biden's actions during his recent term were frequently called unconstitutional by the right – be it for trying to raise the minimum wage or forgiving student loan debt – it was rarely from a perspective of solidifying his executive power. In the case of the Trump v. United States, he was avowedly against how the ruling implicitly expanded his executive power.
On the flip side, Trump's openly pushing the expansion of his executive power with his firing inspectors general, overruling the senate by freezing funds and appointing his own pseudo-agencies that take control over independent agencies in the executive branch.
These are fundamentally different things, and should be treated very differently, even if people from either side complain about both.
And of course January 6, a literal coup attempt, was perpetrated by the Rs. Nothing remotely like that on the D side.
https://www.theholocaustexplained.org/the-nazi-rise-to-power...
(Since there are posts on economy related factors and the OP was about Nazi Germany)
At a different level is this somewhat reflective of USA today? (USA today is by no means poor, although it is true that the bottom 50% has stagnated for quite long)
> How is this to be avoided, among ordinary men, even highly educated ordinary men? Frankly, I do not know. I do not see, even now. Many, many times since it all happened I have pondered that pair of great maxims, Principiis obsta and Finem respice—‘Resist the beginnings’ and ‘Consider the end.’ But one must foresee the end in order to resist, or even see, the beginnings. One must foresee the end clearly and certainly and how is this to be done, by ordinary men or even by extraordinary men? Things might have. And everyone counts on that might.
The rest of this excerpt is harrowing.
This is one of the best books I ever read. I picked it up pretty randomly a few years back. It changed me.
Before reading it, I was firmly of the opinion that good people (like me! and everyone I like!) will (mostly) resist a fascist takeover. At least passively resist. As in not actively collaborate. Mostly. Reading that book obliterated almost all of those beliefs. (What little was left was destroyed by having children, and actually directly experiencing what it means when people say "I'll do anything for them").
I think it's the most upset I've been since I was a child and asked my parents why people suffering in a war on the news didn't just say that they don't wanna be in the game anymore. Because that was the rule that applied in kindergarten.
This all sounds very depressing. But read the book. It's a damn important book. (And it's very short and almost free – just read it).
More than half of you nerds voted for this shit and you're supposed to be the intelligent ones. I lost all hope.
I was recommended this book a few months ago, by a friend's partner.
Reading it was difficult, and impossible not to see the parallels of what we were approaching.
This excerpt is phenomenal on its own, but the full book is worth your time.
> "You see," my colleague went on, "one doesn’t see exactly where or how to move. Believe me, this is true. Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join with you in resisting somehow.
I felt this for four years straight last time.
But what scares me far more is if very large, recklessly shocking occasions occur and the resisters are nowhere to be seen. I keep hoping to wake up to footage of mass protests and riots and fires and anger and aggressive intolerance of these shocking occasions.
When he was first in office there were protests all over. I attended multiple.
Where are they now?
It is probably good to remember that this talks about the experience of a German, under Hitler's Nazi government.
This isn't a text that refers to current events. It talks about what happened. How things progressed. Why everybody just ambled along. How it was possible that so many just went along.
If you think there are parallels to current times, or if you feel this attacks you or your beliefs, there is value in thinking about "why". What is it about this story that reaches you? What are you willing to learn from it?
I don’t see the call to action. It describes perfectly the feeling of hopelessness I’ve had for years now. The election was the last chance and everyone blew it.
There is still a lot we can do. Every demagogue and authoritarian regime collapses eventually, often quickly- and they haven't even succeeded in seizing total control yet. As long as we are alive, we can resist.
Moreover, even under the worst possible situations, individuals can find meaning and purpose. Viktor Frankl's book "Man's Search for Meaning" on surviving concentration camps as well as James Stockdale's books on surviving as a POW in Vietnam show firsthand that it is possible.
"You have a right to make them hurt you, and they don't like to do it." -James Stockdale
It is ironic that the most useful thing Musk and Trump will do is wake people up to the fact their house is on fire...
I very much doubt they'll wake up anti-woke people.
Vladimir Putin first took power in 2000, and never really gave it up. Russians were still holding large-scale pro-democracy protests over 10 years later.
Of course, that didn't go so hot for them. But Russian democratic culture was only 20 years old, and the fall of the Soviet Union had gutted their economy almost on the level of the Great Depression. They weren't really set up to win.
Poland has been doing comparatively better. PiS first took power in 2005 and then again in 2015, and began taking over the media, compromising the courts, and attacking the constitution. But even so, they lost their majority in parliament in 2023.
US democracy is as old as the country, and the US has the strongest economy in the world. You probably have at least one more chance in 2028, which will be shaped by how effectively the authoritarian movement can consolidate and how well opposition manages to mobilize.
Democracies, and countries in general, are big, lumbering, slow-moving things. They take a long time to die, and you never know if there's a surge of vitality that will shoot forth from somewhere hidden inside them.
> You probably have at least one more chance in 2028, which will be shaped by how effectively the authoritarian movement can consolidate and how well opposition manages to mobilize.
The opposition blew their chance in 2024. They are going to have to either back-off on the identity-oppression olympics or accept the loss in 2028.
They need to stop blaming the voters while being out of touch with said voters.
Τhe promise of the NRA+ folks is that guns in the hands of citizens will avert such a situation. Let's see if at least one of the things they claimed is not a lie.
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There may be a tipping point, but as we can see by the comments here and elsewhere, and the intent behind writing and reading things like the shared article, being able to see it before it happens is the hard bit, maybe the impossible bit.
Certainly, I've heard the same apocalyptic messages about every big vote in the past 25 years, whether elections or referendums. Usually, not much changes, things happen in increments. Right now there's an incremental change going on in the opposite direction to the one that was happening, but the noise seems (to me) to outdo the reality.
As the dead (currently) sibling comment writes, it's a matter of perspective. Certainly, I hope you begin to feel some hope soon.
I don't know what you would consider radical if you think what is happening now is incremental.
Having small parts of the overall government checked and cut is not radical, and current world events and US history show much more radical moments.
Again, perspective.
It'll be radical if a security agency is cut (given their power), or if a constitutional amendment occurs that has minority public support, the US invades a nearby country, a national health service is instituted… there are so many examples I could be here all night listing them all, but fiddling with less than 10% of an enormous budget that has ballooned is not radical. I can remember Bill Clinton's government, that wasn't radical and that's the direction of this government.
It us
Oh, goody. Isn't it great the Democrats prioritized keeping "the groups" and their donors happy? You know, instead of actually reorganizing around countering the existential threat they complained so loudly about?
Well they've tried absolutely nothing and they're all out of ideas
Don't let hacker news become habituated with politics.
Genocide is above and beyond 'politics'. So is a bunch of tech bros being given physical access to the US Treasury under the direction of a tech oligarch, in defiance of dozens of laws. Entire federal agencies are being shut down on a whim, again, in defiance of dozens of laws and safeguards.
These things directly impact the tech community in a massive way - just look at Google dropping their pledge not to use AI for military purposes, this week of all weeks.
HackerNews is suddenly getting political content at the very top, right after PG slams the "woke" agenda.
Is the HN crowd finally waking up to what a danger to the US the "most successful startup entrepreneur of all time" is?
…and the YC CEO defending the hostile takeover of government agencies by (smart, I give you that, but still) teenagers.
I hadn't seen that, and am not finding it.. Have you got a link?
Trumpists may be against democracy but they seem pro capital or at least pro big tech capital.
Fascists always are, that's how they gain enough support to gain power. Hitler had a lot of friends in the capitalist class, and the socialists and communists were the first to go under his rule.
I don’t feel like the comparisons to Hitler are useful, at least when talking about the current US administration.
There are lots more recent examples — Russia in the early 2000s under Putin, Hungary under Orban, South Africa under Apartheid — where democratic norms were gradually eroded, and the international community just sort of sighed and said "oh well, the people have spoken".
I think this mostly comes down to (1) people are more aware of Nazi Germany and thus its easier to use that context than another and (2) the Nazis were extreme even by comparison to their contemporaries and thus have been (presumably) studied the most.
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?
Berlusconi is the architect of the modern oligarchy. Control the media, control the public opinion and narrative. I think that what is happening in America is something new though. The dismantling of the US government is weird on it's own, but the step down from US soft power is what really makes no sense. The previous 80ish years of US world dominance was build on a combination of military might and soft power. Europe was rather ruined after WW2, the reason it's as advanced as it is today, and the reason we are/were such close allies with the USA is because of programs like the Marshall plan. Which was essentially the USA giving Europeans the money to buy American products. Stuff like access to US produced tractors revolutionised European farming as an example. On the US side this meant that the USA investment into Europe made it possible for the American wartime industry to restructure itself. So that instead of producing tanks, factories could produce farm equipment and so on. Total win-win.
Military power is necessary, but political influence is bought with soft power and diplomacy. The reason USA has military bases over most of the world. Places which allows America to have places to "store" all that military might outside the USA is because it has allies. The Russian loss of their Syrian bases is a good example or what happens when you lose that soft power. That same soft power is also the reason American brands can sell their stuff globally. Basically the entire American entertainment industry and all the foreign aid programs are giant advertising ventures, selling the American lifestyle. When that soft power is gone, America will still be capable of getting it's way in many cases through threats. People don't respond well to that though. With USA rivals more than happy to step in, you shouldn't be surprised to see Coca Cola replaced by some Chinese cola brand sometime down the road. This is obviously a semi ridiculous example, but I think it's a good illustration if what could happen. That same thing will affect US tech dominance as well. Here in Denmark companies are now actively looking for exit strategies from the American cloud because of the increased risk. I don't think anyone seriously expects something to happen, but at the same time, there is nothing companies hate more than risk. The reason Google Cloud never made it in Europe is because it has more risk than Azure and AWS, and with European alternatives having caught up... Well...
What is perhaps even worse is that the only reason the USA can function with its current deficit is because of the Dollar. If BRICS succeeds in moving half of the worlds population away from the Dollar, the American "empire" will fall considering it's the only "empire" in the history of mankind which has been capable of maintaining it's world dominance while also increasing its deficit.
Hitler and Nazi Germany might be the example everyone knows, and Musk performing his "gesture" doesn't exactly help matters. There doesn't seem to be a real long term plan behind what the aristocracy in the US is doing right now though. At least not one which will keep them safe from each ohter or society as a whole. Berlusconi and his buddies never went to prison after all, no one fell out of a window and so on.
ΕU is currently handed over to China. There is absolutely no reason to stick with the US. Same as Latin America (bar maybe Mexico).
there are certainly some parallels with what's happening today but analogies are always difficult. i could be wrong but i really don't think of this administration as murderous in the way that Nazi Germany was.
Of course, the biggest asterisk beside the analogy is the lack of warmongering. Like, kind of the most important part, and Trump is acting more like Woodrow Wilson in that respect. Didn't Woodrow Wilson once say that the US isn't a melting pot but a garbage can?
Annexing Gaza is likely to be a murderous undertaking, if it develops beyond yesterday’s public fever dream.
One of the great (and unexpected!) side effects of voting for Trump has been getting all the immature hysterical people off of the AI threads and into these Fascist Nazi threads.
I, for one, appreciate the absence of the European degrowth types
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Yes, it's good to be careful to not label as people as fascists unless they do things like, for example, literally do the Nazi salute while publicly addressing a crowd.
Or try to rule by executive power while ignoring the Constitution, Congress, checks and balances...
Of course it's not only fascists who can be totalitarian, but totalitarianism is a bad smell in any form of government and should be avoided.
This German comedy sketch sums up this situation incredibly well IMO https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zvgZtdmyKlI
You know, repeating a lie doesn't make it true.
https://thedecisionlab.com/biases/illusory-truth-effect
We all saw the Nazi salutes with our own eyes, the man and his ex girlfriend both follow and interact with avowed white supremacists and Nazis on his own platform.
The lie is coming from Musk and his cult of supporters.
https://acoup.blog/2024/10/25/new-acquisitions-1933-and-the-...
You have some known historians who openly say that Trump fits the criteria for fascism. Republican party? Not really. Trump? Yes.
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Confirmation bias. I watch one PBS news program and they cover white people's problems in rural America all the time. They just cover other people's problems as well.
I hear you.
And the reason is "drumroll", people like Musk. How exactly, is it that billionaires have continued to do so well for so long while the working class hasn't experienced a pay increase since the 70s?
You know pays those salaries, right? Big companies and the billionaires who chair them.
Of course, good job f'ing yourself over further, that safety net you might have had? Gone under Musk.
All the world's billionaires own about $20T. Distributing that equally among all the people of the world would provide each a $75 annuity indefinitely.
It would be awesome if liberals had any other references than Hitler, and we wouldn't have to go through this for another 4 years.
The big difference between Germany of the 30s and the US today is that the Germans had suffered. Most of the loudest people in the US are simply mimetically commenting on the endless Trump show, are wealthier than they've ever been because of unbroken policies favoring the wealthy, and haven't seen the slightest inconvenience since the housing crash, when their stocks went down for a second.
edit: the reason libs want Trump to be Hitler is so they can see themselves as heroes instead of absurdly wealthy landlords.
This may come as a shocker to you, but there are people in this country who are driven by morals, not money. It’s true! Real life people, who vote and everything, who genuinely care for the poor and needy.
> The big difference between Germany of the 30s and the US today is that the Germans had suffered.
This is why Fox News etc. exist. To create the perception of suffering and persecution amongst their viewers, by trans athletes, welfare queens, Satanic cults, etc.
It would be awesome if HN stopped looking at every single thing through the lens of US politics. "liberals" doesn't even mean anything in most of the world, and indeed I struggle identifying what kind of group you're talking about. The text is about historical events that have already happened - you can take whatever lesson you want out of them, you can see parallels with your own country or you don't have to. But not everything is about America.
> But not everything is about America.
I can’t truly understand how frustrating it must be for everything to be so focused on the US all the time. And I see this sentiment expressed often.
But let’s be real: this piece is almost certainly being circulated precisely because of what’s unfolding in the US.
We shouldn’t confuse what we wish were true (that the US is not the center of gravity for world politics) with what is true (that the US is the center of gravity for world politics).
Some people form a belief and then look for evidence to support it, others look at the evidence and check for inconsistencies before getting attached to a belief. "Nobody" wants Trump to be Hitler, they're observing parallels which you have rejected because of your desired beliefs.
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Okay let's take another reference. You're applauding an emperor that has no clothes.
>"Once the war began," my colleague continued, "resistance, protest, criticism, complaint, all carried with them a multiplied likelihood of the greatest punishment. Mere lack of enthusiasm, or failure to show it in public, was ‘defeatism.’ You assumed that there were lists of those who would be ‘dealt with’ later, after the victory. Goebbels was very clever here, too. He continually promised a ‘victory orgy’ to ‘take care of’ those who thought that their ‘treasonable attitude’ had escaped notice. And he meant it; that was not just propaganda. And that was enough to put an end to all uncertainty.
Terrifying. This anti-speech is anathema to all Americans. Let’s remember that. By recalling what all Americans have as a sacred self-belief (myth even), that America is anti-Nazi and anti-dictatorship and pro-freedom and pro-speech, we can effectively strengthen our ties.
What seems to drive Trump at his core is not ideology, but ego. On their path to power, both he and Musk could have been democrats, but they were rejected.
Together, they share the goal of creating the greatest presidency in American history. At some point, this may be a better scenario than the alternative.
The election is past: “winning” and defeating the opposition are less relevant now than creative strategies for generating positive outcomes from the current situation.
Outrage feeds the demons. There may be other, more effective (but less emotionally satisfying) paths to mutual-self-interest. In conflict with the very powerful, redirection often works better than direct opposition.
Duplicate: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25083315