Yeah let’s just allow roving gangs of brownshirts to run around attacking and terrorizing minorities

Well that’s blatantly not the argument at all. The question isn’t whether to react, but what do you do about it?

The vast majority of fascist movements are destroyed through nonviolence rather than violence, which itself is typically inseparable from fascism. To refer to the post below, what ended Jim Crow? Was it a bunch of black people going around punching suspected Klan members? On the contrary it was the reverse. The Klan “lynching people and getting away with it” included key rallying points like the murders of Emmett Till, or the Mississippi Burning murders, along with state violence like the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Sure, maybe the fascists themselves got away with it, but fascism didn’t. The things the Klan and other segregationists fought for were dismantled, in large part thanks to their own violent efforts.

Nazis don’t need a justification for their violence, but their enablers - Von Papen, or the would-be modern equivalent Mike Pence - do. And these enablers need to tell themselves, their family, and their neighbors, that they have good reasons for their decisions. Exposing fascism as the senseless violence it is robs them of that justification, while giving the fascists a threat to refer to provides it.

I’m just gonna focus entirely on the common misunderstanding of the use of violence against Nazis in WWII because that’s such a common argument for punching nazis and it’s really quite wrong on so many levels.

“But Nazis were stopped by violence in WWII.” That’s a meaningless statement without the missing last word. Violence stopped Nazis militarily, after they had already seized power in Germany and were invading other countries. Today we’re not in a military battle with Nazis, we’re in an ideological battle.

So why did the Nazis seize power in Germany? Because they weren’t punched enough? Well the exact mechanism behind how the nazis seized power is a complex web of illegal political maneuvers, political violence, and yes, some degree of ideological success by the nazis. But a key part of that ideological success was the fear of political violence by their opponents - most notably the Reichstag fire - to justify the power that they were illegally taking. It was basically “desperate times require desperate measures”. So in the ideological battle, the perceived* use of violence by Nazi opponents was actually a key part of their victory within Germany.

Meanwhile, over in the US, the contrast between the violence employed by the German American Bund (the US version of the Nazi party) and largely Jewish peaceful protesters ended up being a massive embarrassment to the Bund from which they never recovered. Again, ideologically, non-violence proved quite effective.

Point being, and this should be obvious - violence is a really bad option for succeeding in an ideological battle. Yes, in a military battle, it’s the only rational option. But in an ideological battle, it’s actually counterproductive.

*Obligatory caveat that whether the Reichstag fire was actually set by nazi opponents remains debated, but suffice to say the political atmosphere at the time made it plausible.

“Another ‘debunked’ story that turned out to have merit.”

This is the most infuriating thing they do. They assume that any developing story is actually the most extreme version that favors their side. Then they ignore all evidence to the contrary and fish for any evidence that they can claim as confirmation, even if it doesn’t pass the laugh test. But they assert “It was confirmed!” with such confidence and shamelessness that it becomes easier for people to believe them, and eventually the media stops trying to debunk them.

Definitely not the first time this happened. If you wanna find other examples, look at anything where experts on the topic believe one thing but a majority of the American people believe the other. It’s pretty much guaranteed that the thing the American people believe originated as GOP propaganda.

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TNT used to be a non-stop Shawshank Redemption loop.

Every keyboard must have a home and end key that doesn’t require pressing additional keys like fn, and home must go to the start of the line, while end goes to the end of the line.

I can certainly see why people point to dementia, and given how dumb Trump is there’s little difference for practical purposes. But I have to lean on the explanation of general stupidity plus poor reading skills simply because his weirdest statements seem to occur when reading from a teleprompter, as opposed to media interviews and debates.

Look at the video you linked - almost every example is from him giving a teleprompter speech. Trump clearly doesn’t know big words like “rebuttal” “Venezuela” and “anonymous”. So when he sees it on a teleprompter he kinda has to sound it out in real time. Seriously, watch the video again but instead of Trump imagine the dumb kid from your second grade reading class doing a reading assignment. The Hannibal Lecter thing has been pretty well explained by Trump not understanding the difference between “asylum” in the immigration context and an “insane asylum” like the one Hannibal Lecter is in. Again, he’s just very, very unknowledgeable.

Yeah there’s some other stuff like the weird lean but that’s probably just explained by his weird obsession with height and some sort of lifts. Remember, when Trump got that terrible hair transplant, he was much younger. He’s never been functioning properly at a mental level.

My explanation is:

1. He gives a lot of speeches
2. He has almost zero knowledge of government and policy. He likely thinks the US Treasury is responsible for protecting the treasure that’s mapped on the declaration of independence.
3. He can’t read very well, and given his inability to sound the words out mid-speech he needs to fill in the parts of the teleprompter that has long words with whatever he can come up with on the spot.

So related topic, what’s a good anti-Trump group to give money to? Of course there’s the Kamala campaign and Republican Voters Against Trump, but I feel like both of these are repeating attacks that are already out there and common in the media. Corruption is a bipartisan issue, and despite epic levels of corruption in his administration somehow many voters seem to view Trump as some sort of incorruptible guy.

If there was a group that would point out his alleged selling of pardons (which is quite apparent given who he has pardoned), hiring of lobbyists to run just about everything, politicizing the justice department (e.g. killing an investigation into an alleged bribe he got from egypt), and use of taxpayer-funded resources to reward allies and donors, they’d get an admittedly small chunk of money from me. Any group doing that?

The problem is no one has really made an effort to take over in the news/politics space. Meta basically decided Threads wouldn’t be for that. Mastodon exists, but given it’s nerd-based nature it’s way more tech focused. Then there’s Substack’s half-assed effort, but they seem happy to focus on newsletter subscriptions for now. So there’s competitors in microblogging generally, but there’s still zero competition in news/politics.

I mean I plead guilty to posting while intoxicated, but it seems to me the fossil fuel industry does spend a lot of money on elections and basically has a whole caucus representing it in Congress. What do modern protests like BLM, Occupy, etc. have to show? Is there a single meaningful legislative change they can point to? The article seems to suggest quite the opposite. To be fair though, they did inspire a bunch of dismissive lemmy users to feel smug.

Kinda goes to show the failure of modern protest movements. What did BLM accomplish exactly? They didn’t convict Chauvin, it was the people filming him that did that. A lot of realistic ideas were floated to fix policing, but they were drowned out by edgelord calls to “defund the police” and “ACAB”. 4 years later nothing has been fixed.

People need to find a better way to make change happen. Raising your fist and marching around doesn’t change a thing. Maybe instead of that, people should pool their money together and spend it removing bad politicians/sheriffs/judges etc from office. That’s how oil does it.

I tried to create a blog on substack once, I got literally zero views across a few posts. I feel like the only blogs there that get recommended are by people who are already semi-famous, suggesting the usual problem of recommendation algorithms killing entry for new creators. It also strongly encourages a paid model, you also usually have to subscribe to comment on others’ posts which makes it hard to get your blog out there. I’d say it’s more a publishing platform for people who are already well known than for ordinary people.

Have no social life, it’s much cheaper.

But in all seriousness, if you have to have a social life, limit your spending on that stuff. Restaurant and bar tabs can add up quickly. Budget, limit your drinking, and if you don’t wanna limit your drinking, at least do some cheap drinking at home first.

A few names that may need translation:

• ARK - Cathie Wood’s fund, no surprises there
• Kingdom Holdings - Saudi royals (along with Alwaleed Bin Talal)
• Pershing Square - Bill Ackman’s fund (guy who made headlines recently for getting university presidents fired for not shutting down Palestinian protesters
• Q-Tetris Holding - Qatari fund, not sure how connected to royals it is
• VYC25 - UAE fund, not sure how connected to royals it is
• Scott Nolan - founders fund (Peter Thiel) guy
• X holdings - Elon Musk’s LLC for limiting his losses in this whole charade

Not an exhaustive list, didn’t look up all the names.

The illusion of electoral choice is choking the life out of any actual democracy in this country.

Ok so what’s your plan to fix it? Because I have one: vote for people that want to improve the electoral system and against those that want to prevent it from improving. As much as Democrats are “part of the problem”, they’ve also been open to runoff voting, switching to a national popular vote, easier voting mechanisms, and other changes that would allow for third parties and better representation. Republicans, meanwhile, have been trying to prevent those changes, as they’ve done in 5 states now where they banned ranked choice voting.

To be fair though, Trump is more open to changing the electoral process. The only problem is, he wants to get rid of voting entirely and remove any option we have to prevent rule by wealthy oligarchs like himself.

No, I’m gonna sit back and laugh as a bunch of guys who couldn’t schedule a meeting at the four seasons try to overthrow the world’s oldest democracy.