Lord Liaden Posted July 31 Report Share Posted July 31 It's become very difficult to trust any official statements coming out of that patch of Earth right now. Everyone has a vested interest in spinning the facts to their advantage. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
unclevlad Posted July 31 Report Share Posted July 31 59 minutes ago, Lord Liaden said: It's become very difficult to trust any official statements coming out of that patch of Earth right now. Everyone has a vested interest in spinning the facts to their advantage. You mean there was some point in my lifetime when this wasn't the case? Pariah 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lord Liaden Posted July 31 Report Share Posted July 31 (edited) Yes. There was enough freedom of opinion, enough respected institutions there who would fact-check, that they feared backlash from outright lying to their people. Now many in those regimes just don't seem to care any more. Obviously that change has not been confined to Israel and its region. Edited July 31 by Lord Liaden Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tkdguy Posted July 31 Report Share Posted July 31 https://redwine.blue/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/project_2025_toolkit.pdf Old Man and Pariah 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lord Liaden Posted August 1 Report Share Posted August 1 It's a very mixed blessing that the world has gone through the fascist nightmare before. We can recognize the warning signs being repeated, we can point to exactly what they're doing and why, and how it turned out last time. "The people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger." -- Hermann Goering Tom Cowan 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Hugh Neilson Posted August 1 Report Share Posted August 1 5 hours ago, Lord Liaden said: It's a very mixed blessing that the world has gone through the fascist nightmare before. We can recognize the warning signs being repeated, we can point to exactly what they're doing and why, and how it turned out last time. "The people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger." -- Hermann Goering Why is it Santayana's quote that rings frighteningly in my ears? Especially when we see so many working hard to remove references to unpleasant aspects of our past... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cygnia Posted August 1 Report Share Posted August 1 'Weird' isn't the point. 'Weird' is the path Quote What's going on here is actually pretty simple. Authoritarianism is about power. And mockery is about removing power. In order for authoritarianism to take hold, the authoritarians must be seen as serious thinkers who in fact might have the answers to whatever national problems they are promoting as supposedly existential. This is true of politics in general, but it becomes more true the more you work your way up towards the pinnacle of authoritarianism, were making fun of the ruling party is invariably criminalized—or will simply get you executed outright. Nobody is going to pledge to upend a nation's government to instead install a man wearing a duck costume and tooting a kazoo, at least nobody other than people who are also wearing duck costumes and tooting kazoos. A movement loses power when the public finds it mockable, rather than revolutionary. Most importantly, the members of a nation's public most attracted to authoritarian movements tend to be the faux-hypermasculine, self-imagined Great Men who cannot stand being mocked for their own unusual beliefs and who see, in Dear Leader and his associates, validation that those beliefs are not weird, and not out of the mainstream, and not worthy of scorn. That is the whole premise of their support: They don't want to be mocked. They want to be treated as Important. The more gravitas The Movement can be designed to have, the more important and influential its public backers can imagine themselves to be. But the opposite is also true; if The Movement is instead broadly made fun of as a collection of clowns and crackpots, suddenly it becomes a much more uncomfortable experience for these would-be movement members to publicly declare themselves fans. It becomes not a way to project gravitas, but just another declaration that makes those around them either laugh at them or look at them with scorn. Think of flamboyantly masculine showmen like former pro wrestler Hulk Hogan, one of the celebrities that graced Trump's Republican renomination for the presidency during a convention that attempted to exude an aura of strength and inevitability. You can either think of Hulk Hogan as an avatar of masculinity, a hard-fighting crazy-eyed warrior against whichever manufactured enemy the broader kayfabe has most recently installed, or you can think of him as a greased-up man in his underpants shrieking performatively at similarly greased-up co-workers for the sake of gawking and possibly drunk crowds. Which of those two baskets does Donald Trump himself fit into? It depends on who you ask. Movement cartoonists like Ben Garrison draw him as the first, and apparently non-satirically. The people who know Trump best seem to lump him in the second category. But it's been the press that's most enforced public perceptions of supposed masculinity, power, and authority in Trump, and it's done so with at-least-borderline-unethically aggressive rewrites of Trump's actual statements and outbursts to portray him as the statesman they imagine a sitting and former president ought to be rather than the relentlessly ignorant stream-of-consciousness ranter that video continually shows him to be. The danger to Trump and his acolytes has always been the risk of exposure, Wizard of Oz-style, in which the figures being propped up as the historic Great Men ready to lead the nation into a new time of rebirth and renewal are instead revealed to be a collection of rapists, tax cheats, foreign agents, white supremacists, odious misogynists, greasy flim-flammers, cocaine fiends, and the sort of antisocial if not sociopathic freaks who believe that human society was perfected back when women weren't allowed to taunt men by showing ankles or having their own bank accounts. And those things are, of course, all broadly true. Half of them describe Dear Leader himself, and you can tick off all of them off during any Mar-a-Lago-hosted brunch. Yes, these people are weird. But weird is not the actual attack. Weird is fine, and broadly celebrated. But the danger of the weird narrative to our new would-be authoritarians is that it suggests, quite reasonably, that the emperor might not have clothes. That Trump and his acolytes are not, in fact, Great Men capable of leading the nation into greatness but instead are just a bunch of grown men and women prancing around in duck costumes blowing cheap kazoos. I will never understand why Democratic lawmakers have followed the press lead in insisting that the profoundly goofy, ignorant, and unserious Republicans now dominating the House and Senate be treated with dignity. It's possible that they presumed that treating clowns as clowns would do them little good inside the Capitol, where the clowns outnumber them and are seated across from them during every committee hearing, and would only have resulted in the bitter conservative whining we're now seeing, generating plenty of heat but accomplishing nothing. But there's really no downside in the public pointing out that, for example, throwing away 300 years worth of American and colonial laws to instead prioritize rules laid out by misogynistic witch hunters back in 16th or 17th century Europe is a damn weird position to take, and that by weird in this instance we mean "sounds a lot like something you'd read in a school shooter's online manifesto." The same goes for Project 2025 insistences that the federal government discourage working on "the Sabbath." It goes for new laws looking to police children's genitals, and laws designed to monitor American women to ensure they are not "traveling for the purposes of abortion," and moves to restrict or ban birth control, and to abolish the Department of Education, and to imprison librarians, and to deport millions, and all the rest of it. It's not just "weird." It is clown-staring-at-you-from-a-grove-of-trees weird. It is an uncanny level of creepiness that is difficult to put into words, and for the first time since these people became politically ascendent, public talk has finally turned to the question of whether these supposed bold thinkers are, in fact, just emotionally stunted freaks whose entire "ideology" consists of lashing out at whoever parts of society have done the most damage to their egos. That is the danger fascists face. The danger that people will begin to look at the extreme and wildly illogical premises that the fascists have so proudly written down and think: Wait a minute. These people are just nuts. And the more the public narrative becomes not this is bold, but this is odd, the more such opinions snowball. L. Marcus, Ternaugh, Old Man and 1 other 1 3 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Starlord Posted August 1 Report Share Posted August 1 Been seeing way too many articles on the whole 'weird' thing. The problem is that writing article upon article about turning the use of weird into a political strategy/tactic just deflates the grassroots clever and dismissive power it could achieve. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lord Liaden Posted August 1 Report Share Posted August 1 Would the Republican grass roots even read these articles? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Starlord Posted August 1 Report Share Posted August 1 At this point both sides are only fighting for undecideds and/or independents anyway. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cygnia Posted August 1 Report Share Posted August 1 14 Arrested, 10 Potential Victims Found In Sex Trafficking Sting At San Diego Comic-Con Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lord Liaden Posted August 1 Report Share Posted August 1 Horrible, but is it political? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cygnia Posted August 1 Report Share Posted August 1 I wanted to err on the side of caution, given the nature of the crime. assault 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Old Man Posted August 2 Report Share Posted August 2 11 hours ago, Cygnia said: 14 Arrested, 10 Potential Victims Found In Sex Trafficking Sting At San Diego Comic-Con God, what is the matter with people Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lord Liaden Posted August 2 Report Share Posted August 2 It's understandable that many people want to believe in the Devil, or your evil entity of choice. It's less disturbing than believing such corruption comes from within ourselves. Pariah 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Old Man Posted August 2 Report Share Posted August 2 6 hours ago, Lord Liaden said: It's understandable that many people want to believe in the Devil, or your evil entity of choice. It's less disturbing than believing such corruption comes from within ourselves. There's lots of people that make me want to believe in Hell, that's for sure. Pariah 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DShomshak Posted August 2 Report Share Posted August 2 20 hours ago, Cygnia said: 14 Arrested, 10 Potential Victims Found In Sex Trafficking Sting At San Diego Comic-Con Our tax dollars at work. And this time, working well. Dean Shomshak Lord Liaden 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tkdguy Posted August 2 Report Share Posted August 2 Old Man 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tkdguy Posted August 2 Report Share Posted August 2 The part from about 1:00 to 3:15 is the highlight. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DShomshak Posted August 3 Report Share Posted August 3 Lagos, Nigeria sees massive protests over massive inflation; government blamed. Just a reminder that many other people have things much worse. I don't like current grocery prices, but I don't fear I'll starve because of them. https://www.npr.org/2024/08/01/nx-s1-5060164/enough-is-enough-nigerians-take-to-street-in-protest-over-cost-of-living-crisis Dean Shomshak Cygnia 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DShomshak Posted August 3 Report Share Posted August 3 The far right is doing especially well in the former East Germany, but some old ladies are opposing it. Not an in=depth report, but with points of interest. https://www.npr.org/2024/08/02/nx-s1-5049786/grandmas-against-the-far-right-hope-to-change-afd-supporters-minds-in-germany Dean Shomshak Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lord Liaden Posted August 4 Report Share Posted August 4 12 hours ago, DShomshak said: Lagos, Nigeria sees massive protests over massive inflation; government blamed. Just a reminder that many other people have things much worse. I don't like current grocery prices, but I don't fear I'll starve because of them. https://www.npr.org/2024/08/01/nx-s1-5060164/enough-is-enough-nigerians-take-to-street-in-protest-over-cost-of-living-crisis Dean Shomshak The often petty things we squabble over highlight how good most of us in the developed world have it compared to the rest, if that's what we come up with to argue about. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ranxerox Posted August 4 Report Share Posted August 4 DShomshak and Old Man 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Clonus Posted August 5 Report Share Posted August 5 At this point I would just like to say "Who among us hasn't dumped a dead bear cub in a public park? Clearly RFK Jr's actions were perfectly reasonable and not the product of being drunk. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lectryk Posted August 5 Report Share Posted August 5 1 hour ago, Clonus said: At this point I would just like to say "Who among us hasn't dumped a dead bear cub in a public park? Clearly RFK Jr's actions were perfectly reasonable and not the product of being drunk. You know.... that admission doesn't even break into my top ten list of 'Things I never thought I'd hear or see happen during an election cycle' these days. Pariah 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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