So I know talking about the election still is, well, a bit obsessive, but if you haven't heard about Verrit, well, it's kind of interesting. It's basically a new platform for Clinton's supports to consolidate facts and make these weird codes so they can shout them at people on Twitter.

https://verrit.com/every-major-media-narrative-about-2016-is-demonstrably-false/

It's kind of interesting to read, it's the brainchild of Peter Daou. Also is predicated on the West Wing myth that you can just spew statistics at a person and convince them of your political views.

"Shareblue / CTR / David Brock, pls GO"

-/pol

https://twitter.com/stingray_real/status/909482405307838466

Trains confirmed as the anti-illuminati

Train enthusiasm is now the best hobby

Speaking of healthcare and trains, didn't Florida Man Rick Scott create the unregulated trainwreck that led to the death of several retirees living in a nursing home in Florida, seeing that his old job was to lobby in favor of for-profit nursing home corporations? Good job America.







https://www.democracynow.org/2017/9/15/deregulated_unaccountable_for_profit_nursing_homes

It's pretty bad when a short Youtube clip is more informative and entertaining than all of the 24/7 corporate news channels. And the perspective is better, too..

I voted for Trump so that he would stop the CIA from inseminating 6 year olds with lizard DNA through our tap water, but that doesn't mean I expect him to follow through.

http://thefederalist.com/2017/09/19/refusal-date-conservatives-one-reason-donald-trump/

There's definitely psychoanalyzing to be done on this title, I won't be the one to make those associations, but you can all imagine why I'm laughing.

I can only imagine how many takes that scene required in order to maintain a straight face. Classic.

All else equal, I imagine women want to date men with high paying jobs, not coal miners.

They want rugged men who work rugged jobs, and who take testosterone pills and have greasy, rippling abs. Not little *****es who are good with a calculator.

Given that it was Kubrick, they probably did 50 takes after he nailed it anyway.

Also in my experience nerds with greasy rippling abs do very well with both sexes and all few hundred genders. You must be a union of opposites to be truly attractive.

They only go for the little *****es who can do math without a calculator.

True.

Coal miners make bank. That's why there's so much anger about the decline of the coal industry. They aren't going to make 70 grand a year on a 10th grade education anywhere else.

https://twitter.com/TheDemocrats/status/845376880056418304

See anything unusual? Probably not, but this image was edited:

https://twitter.com/claritchka/status/845826655872565253

And with that, we have a pretty good metaphor for the overall relationship between the two groups.

Holy **** that's hilarious

tbf, while I do agree that the Democrats are neoliberal monsters who enthralled the American left by being slightly responsive to social progress in order to promote a viciously corporatist and pro-billionaire platform that is literally killing the earth and the human spirit, if they'd left the socialist slogans intact they would have been eviscerated by the media.

If we learned anything from the 2016 election, it's that the media's scorn doesn't matter that much.

Personally if the Democrats fought the media from time to time they might be more respectable.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Service-Members%27_Protection_Act



Huh, lol.

The difference is that the Democrats are trying political regression to the mean, so they don't want to be popularly associated with their base. They need the media's help to do that. In contrast, the Republicans are just trying Nazism. They don't need the lugenpresse / fake news to do that, in fact having their support would be a bad thing as far as they're concerned.

You just heard about this? I remember it being a pretty big deal. The ICC was making hay about American war crimes in the lead up to it.

Yeah. True. In many ways the Democrats are the actually conservative party. In the sense of, they're the biggest force looking to preserve the status quo.

In regards to Republican Nazism, I've been surprised. I was pretty sure at first that the comparisons were overstated. The more I read about the history of Nazism and fascism, the more I'm sure the comparisons are very valid.

Like, Hitler earned the position of Chancellor on the premise that industry leaders could control him. Because they were afraid of moving an inch to the left. And before any racial cleansing, Hitler's first goal was to suppress the communist/left-wing (literal antifa) resistance groups. Of course, the right wingers claimed they needed more protection from the terrorism these left-wing groups were inflicting on Germany. Not in those words, but basically. And with the endless assault they launch on CNN, as you said the lugenpresse.

There's more but I'm too tired to type up more. Yeah broad strokes we are in a fascist era, and it only looks like it's getting worse. With war probably being the likely outcome. Who wants to move to Germany?



I had not, I knew the U.S. was basically a rogue state but I had no idea it told everyone it has the legal right to go to war against anyone who tries to tell them they can't commit war crimes.

Ironically, that law means the only safe way to punish a US war criminal is a speedy execution.

I mean, Obama didn't seem to have a problem with summary executions and closed door trials in absentia. :shrug:

By what possible measure are we fascist? The Republican base is almost defined by their hatred of government control and regulation. Heck, a lot of the most radical Trump supporters are still running around waving the flag of a literal rebellion movement. Yeah, Trump plays up nationalism and xenophobia, but that's an old and generic tactic, and not nearly enough to draw comparisons with fascism. I'd say that Trump has probably even less in common with fascism than the German communist antifascist groups had with Hitler. It's just a completely different thing and needs to be understood on it's own terms. Drawing comparisons to 1930's era European political movements is just melodramatic wankery. It's not helpful.

Uncritically pro-bourgeoisie with no cogent economic policy beyond propping up the business elites. Selective enforcement of laws based on political ties, wealth, and race. Selective persecution and imprisonment on the basis of race. Persecution of political dissidents. Selective disenfranchisement on the basis of race and political opinion. Militarized police force which acts without meaningful oversight or accountability. Massive expansion of military spending as national pride, in lieu of real fiscal policies. Authoritarian, paternalistic, isolationist, anti-immigrant sentiments. Preference for small but powerful government. Obsessed with Rome. Eagles on everything.

By asking this question, I am under the impression that you think Fascism was an actual set of policies that can be clearly categorized and identified. It wasn't. Fascism was just a mess, it was nothing more concrete than a reactionary movement against socialism and communism, and it boils down to nothing more than a bunch of racist *******s doing favours for their billionaire friends. And boy oh boy does the US ever check that box.

National Socialism was a far right movement that campaigned against the "big government" Weimar Republic and its stifling bureaucracy. They wanted a small, powerful government with less red tape. And they got it, the bureaucracy was replaced with a system of direct patronage where the only way you could communicate with government was through personal connections.

That should sound familiar to you.

They're waving the Nazi flag, too. Both flags mean the same thing to them dude.

Agreed! There are too many other reasons.



Care to justify this?

Alllllright, so I'm glad you decided to debate this point.


True or not about whether they believe in government control and regulation (or rather, whether they believe that they believe that), this is a ****ty definition. In fact, hard evidence, actual statistics says that people vote Republican because they are social reactionaries. The first of those two links reaffirms that Republicans basically have no single, coherent economic belief, despite all the wankery and talk people on the right give to it. You can identify a Republican voter more by what they want to do about illegal immigrants than by what they believe economically. That's verifiable, statistical data.



Interesting that you'd suppose fascist governments would not consecrate symbols of rebellion, given one of the most sacred Nazi relics was the flag of a literal rebellion movement. Reactionary forces love rebellion, as long as it's their rebellion.


Nationalism and xenophobia is not "old and generic", in fact, nationalism and xenophobia as a platform is literally what Nazism was. Hitler had no economic vision, he had no vision for society, he had no grand political plan. You can summarize everything Hitler believed with "Germans good, Jews bad". Which is not far off from Trump's rhetoric, if you replace Germans with Americans (meaning white Americans) and Jews with Mexicans. Trump is less genocidal, I guess, but he's tapped the exact same resentful emotions. And the end result is the same, such esoteric and meaningless constructs don't actually lead to a coherent policy.



It's easy to underscore the differences while ignoring the similarities: you have a massive group of resentful, majority-demographic bougeoise-class people who have massive xenophobia (again, this is a better definition of Republicans than yours by any verifiable, hard statistical metric) against a "foreign invader" that they view implicitly as subhumans, who hate the arts and view them as a subversive left-wing infiltration, hate academia (remember how Hitler purged professors from universities who he feared would be leaders against Nazism?), love law and order and the police, hate degeneracy? Of course literally every single Republican is going to deny these words, no one openly admits to having racist beliefs, to hating degeneracy, then you look at how they actually view Mexicans and transpeople and you see wow, no, they actually do have those beliefs. Maybe you personally aren't an *******. Cool, but being one is pretty damn representative of Republican voters.

I should add, the Nazis had a penchant for stealing the affects and symbolisms of the past, and for trying to affect that they were a direct continuation of ages past, which is pretty much exactly how Republicans are with founding fathers and constitution BS they make up.

One last bit: people on the right love to mention Nazi control over industry as proof that Nazism is totally incompatible with their views. Try looking at things through less of a pinhole. Look at how Nazism affected all Germans - industrialists couldn't do whatever they wanted [:(((( poor guys] but they still became vastly more wealthy than they were before. Meanwhile, quality of life, working hours, and many other quality of life metrics were considerably worse for average Germans. Overall, Nazism was pretty nice for factory owners, and sucked for common people. Yet, the right-wing response only ever considers that one thing - that industrialists didn't have total freedom.

Really makes you think.

The nationalization of industries and regulations of pre-war Nazi Germany weren't uniformly enforced, either. The wealthiest people and most powerful corporations were given a hard pass. Regulations were only enforced to drive the weak out of business, while the "strong" were showered with monopolies and subsidies. Basically a kind of economic eugenics, based on the presumption that incumbents are better than upstarts.

Which... should also sound familiar.

I don't know if you're seeing a pattern yet, Obi-Kwiet.


Edit: The post-war Nazi economy is, of course, a different discussion. The Nazis were completely unequipped to handle the bees nest they stirred up and they had to convert their entire economy into producing war materiels just to mount a defense. It's not the way Hitler would have continued to run things had he not been fighting literally the entire industrialized world at once.

That's unfair, I think. I'll give you that mainstream Republicans make stuff about the founding fathers in order to support modern day policy prescriptions that have nothing to do with the views of the founding fathers. The founding fathers, for example, are invoked by Republicans in order to make the case for interpretations of the first and second amendments that have no connection to what the founding fathers' thought about free speech or access to fire arms. But that has very little to do with the Nazis' invention (other extremist far-right nationalisms in the first half of the 20th century did it too) of a primordial, mythical warrior class from ancient times who in the Nazi imagination was a symbol that justified military conquest and national solidarity through blood and soil nationalism. For most Republican politicians, I'd wager, the founding fathers are tied up with values having to do with individual liberty, and are invoked for that reason, rather than because of white supremacy.

I think a more reasonable argument can be made that confederate heroes play a similar role in far-right American thinking to the thing that you're describing. But I suspect that celebrating confederate heroes because they fought and died for white supremacy is rarer among Republicans than I'm sure you do.

For the most part, celebrating the white supremacy of the confederacy is far too divisive for most Republican politicians of any consequence (i.e., congressmen and women). Even the Trump administration hasn't lionized confederate leaders -- the administration has been much more equivocal. And despite all the ways that dog whistling, irony and coded language does suggest support for certain morally repugnant ideas, the fact that veiled language is used to express support for such ideas indicates that the cost of a full throttled endorsement would be too costly, even amongst his base.

Yes they do.

I haven't read the other responses you've gotten, but from what I gather from the usual consensus on this board:

• it's not much use listening to what conservatives say about themselves literally since they don't take responsibility for the broad consequences of their ideology
• Americans in general don't really pay attention to world history (to say nothing of writings of Marxists) and it's probably more useful to look elsewhere than to propagate conservative mythology. Comparisons to 1930's Germany don't have to assume conservatives are literal Nazi's.

literally everyone here did already by admitting they are white males

tl;dr: the people here who seem to care about these issues don't have the time not to make this a leftist board

DON'T BE QUIET OBI KWIET!

President Dumbass is working hard to start a war somewhere.