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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 2nd, 2023

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  • 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.



  • Where I am harleys aren’t so much of an issue as extremely loud uber eats scooters. Everywhere should just ban gas mopeds. The downside is it’ll come off as a tax on underpaid uber eats drivers, but if the same rules apply to everyone it should end up going to the Uber Corporation and the people who use it instead of the drivers. As it is basically all of us are subsidizing uber eats with our ears.











  • 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.




  • 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?