to be clear, I mean exceptionalism in the sense that it was a one-off circumstance that would be impossible to replicate. of course it was exceptional.

Even if the US starts throwing hispanics into ovens, it won’t be the Holocaust because the Holocaust was a specific different event.


And even if this isn’t as bad as the Holocaust, it doesn’t mean it will never be. The Holocaust also started pretty slowly y’all. What was it someone said? A harsh consequence to deter an act? Yeah, that.

This!

https://twitter.com/zei_nabq/status/1008849270026457088

I love how right-wingers are some of the best comedians around today. No liberal can make jokes this good.

I wouldn't disagree with any of that -- except for maybe a few things around the edges, but they're not worth getting into. Comparisons to the Nazi regime are not completely unwarranted.

Of course, genocide has happened both before and after the Holocaust. But just putting it in those terms betrays a complete lack of ability to maintain perspective to compare what's happening to the Holocaust: clearly, the Trump administration's policy is not genocidal either or intent or effect. Evoking the Holocaust can imply that it is, if one is not careful. And of course, going back to one of my original complaints way back when, many of these views hinge on the assumption that things happening now indicate that we're on some trajectory that will continue uninterrupted into the future. I think we're generally all on the same page, however, in terms of acknowledging what kinds of comparisons are helpful and which are too imprecise.

I think I "get" Jordan Peterson's appeal, but I really don't get Dave Rubin's.

One thing to which there is no correlate in the Trumpian worldview is humiliation and loss that Germans felt after the first World War. Maybe there's some sense that our national ego is wounded from failed the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, but that humiliation doesn't translate into a felt need to conquer and enslave or starve our neighbors to death in land wars, in order to correct a perceived historic injustice (and to secure lebensraum).

The Nazi concentration camps weren’t originally built for exterminating Jewish people, they were built for incarcerating liberals and gay people. Genocide is what the Nazis did with the technological and legal tools Trump is building right now. You don’t need to have a genocide to have an oppressive and cruel fascist state.

The MAGAhideen would disagree.

Edit: Fox News has spent the past ~25 years beating “America is **** now” into peoples heads. It’s true that the US never suffered a defeat as humiliating as WW1 was for the Germans, but facts don’t matter. Feelings do. There’s a reason Trump’s rhetoric resonates with a certain kind of person.

It’s not even that baseless. The US is losing its international stature politically, economically, and even militarily. They’re still a very powerful country but they are distinctively in relative decline (even if what’s actually happening is other countries are catching up). That’s gotta be a big deal to some folks.

I wouldn't disagree with most of this, but when you quoted me, you left out the operative part of what I wrote. There are some profound differences between the ways in which Americans feel wounded and the ways in which Germans did. Germans believed that they had been robbed of their effort to reclaim their rightful role as the world's dominant super power, and wanted to correct that injustice by starting a war of conquest. Humiliated Americans sees America's relative position in the world waning (while still seeing it as the dominant global power), and feel as if they aren't sufficiently compensated for what they do for other countries. Those two things call for profoundly different responses.

Plus, Germans and Americans have profoundly different conceptions of their respective countries' roles in the world. Germany was united under the Junkers, who were exceptionally militaristic. The country's national honor was predicated on its capacity to overtake Britain as the dominant world power and to conquer Europe. On the other hand, America's right wing has for most of its history generally been isolationist and skeptical of imperialism. Trump is very much part of that tradition. His signature policy is building a wall: he wants to turn America into a fortress. He doesn't want to expand the country's borders through conquest.

All of this has pretty significant implications, I think, for where this could be headed, if the worst case scenarios unfold. I'll write about that in another post, though.

lmao!

The appeal is: "Politics is hard! Let's go libertarian"

The reason you don't get it is because you're probably too well educated (i.e., educated at all).

https://thinkprogress.org/tom-homan-jeff-sessions-nazi-comparisons-nuremberg-defense-165249b9eb33-44e3856468c3-3b59877b1758/





There are other differences too, like instead of IBM building the information systems to power them, the US has hired Microsoft.

US is reportedly going to withdraw from the UNHRC today.

So I am hearing that the UNHRC is anti-Israel, and not just from the Trump administration. I don't mean to start a flamewar, of course, since I bet this is a hot-button topic. Or maybe it's not, maybe it's simple.

My imagination tells me that because Israel has a higher degree of economic clout and political influence, any body with equal representation between nations is inherently going to be against it.

The many crimes against humanity might have something to do with that too.

It'd be a different story if Israel was reprimanded in proportion to its human rights abuses. More resolutions have been brought against Israel than the rest of the world combined. Israel isn't responsible for 50% of the world's human rights abuses. It's preposterous to suggest that it is, especially given what happens in just about every other country in the region. The fact that the UNHRC spends so much of its time singling out Israel means that it's not doing its job. Maybe it is a sham.

In principle, I'm opposed to Trump's decision to pull out, but it's clearly not an institution worthy of the UN's name that should be making authoritative moral pronouncements on behalf of the international community.

52% of Republican voters support suspending democracy if Trump wants (56% if the Republican Congress agrees). So at this point I’m just assuming that self-indentified Republicans are a bunch of cucks who want daddy Trump to **** their wives. Sorry not sorry if this describes you.

Woah. Where'd you see that?

Israel gets singled out a lot, sure, but if you have a problem with it then maybe the correct answer is to take the HRC seriously and work to improve it and our own countries rather than excuse our abuses with whataboutism.

I agree, whataboutisms would be bad. But pointing out that Israel isn't responsible for half the world's human rights abuses isn't a whataboutism. It points to the institution's failure to provide a clear-eyed moral vision to the rest of the world, despite its prominence as a UN organization dedicated to addressing the most pressing human rights issues. It should be a moral compass for the world. Instead it's an institution that's been hijacked and uses its prominence and veneer of moral legitimacy to serve a specific political agenda of marginalizing Israel -- in *half* of its activity. That being said, reform would be preferable, which is why, as I said before, I'm opposed to Trump's decision to pull out.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2017/08/10/in-a-new-poll-half-of-republicans-say-they-would-support-postponing-the-2020-election-if-trump-proposed-it/



“But HRC isn’t punishing worse people” is whataboutism. And the blame for the HRC’s leadership failure doesn’t lie with the Israel-hating countries who use it as a political weapon, it lies with the western countries that don’t take it seriously in the first place.

Pointing out that Israel -- a tiny country of 8 million people -- is not responsible for *half* the human's rights abuses in the world is not a whataboutism. It's to point out a dereliction of duty of a human rights organization that claims singles it out as if it were.

Yes it is: Other countries are doing worse things, so why isn’t the HRC spending time on them? It’s textbook whataboutism.

You seem to think I disagree that it’s silly the HRC spends a disproportionate amount of its time on Israel. I don’t. It is silly, but there are a lot of reasons it’s this way.

Some of it is because humans rights abusers want to use it to point out western hypocrisy, but the general assembly is also empowered to remove countries that abuse the process or humans and they aren’t doing it. Where is Israel and the United States on getting SA and other slave labor countries suspended? Nowhere. They don’t care. We don’t care.

But also the main thing the HRC goes on is reports from civilians and independent organizations. The HRC doesn’t exactly have boots on the ground looking for the mass graves, they work from complaints submitted by... well, people like you and me. So of course Israel would have more reported violations, because concerned Israeli citizens are free to speak about such things. Same as Canada and its HRC ‘feedback’ about the reservation system.

probably has something to do with the "human rights" part

Maybe they get more **** because they're a fully developed, first world nation which we hold to a standard of conduct.

Damn, the descent into full on fascist sympathy was quick.

Is it really the United States and Israel itself that are primarily responsible for influencing the HRC to scrutinize Israel? Or other nations in the region which we hold to a lower standard and are blatantly hostile to Israel?

Honest question, since I don't even know what the HRC really does.

BTW, according to Reddit, the deed is done.

nm I just remembered: HRC stored servers on a private Benghazi email.

We hold other countries to less of a standard, yeah. We probably shouldn't but we do. But the U.S. and Israel aren't responsible.

I suppose we could start by refraining from literally backing human rights abusers and instigating coups against democracies. :downs:

Bravo

Good stuff on /pol today

This had been happening before Trump. Yascha Mounk made his name as a public intellectual writing about this stuff as early as 2014. It's not only Republicans who're increasing developing anti-democratic impulses. Actually, the NYT ran a piece just a few weeks ago about how it's most common among centrists.

And speaking of anti-democratic impulses in the center, I seem to remember one of Jon's posts earlier in this thread where he broke down the crude left-right spectrum into something more meaningful for American politics. I think he had the center-left / liberal professionals pegged as people happiest with the present system of government and corporate structure, whereas it is such a far cry from actual leftist thought to be happy in any way with it.

From 2015: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/15/opinion/across-the-globe-a-growing-disillusionment-with-democracy.html?rref=collection%2Fbyline%2Fyascha-mounk&action=click&contentCollection=undefined®ion=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=6&pgtype=collection

Very interesting.

Does the law of large numbers explain it? If you're a centrist you don't need to vote because you know they'll average out.

The most bizarre thing to me is that so-called centrists are also least likely to support liberal institutions. Before I saw this, I would've guessed that centrists are liberal anti-democrats, if they harbor anti-status quo tendencies.

Right? Like, we've heard a lot about illiberal democrats in the past few years: people who want to use democratic sovereignty in order to infringe upon the liberties of certain elements within society (e.g., cracking down on immigration rates, curtailing protections of Muslims, etc).

But the flip side of that phenomenon is liberal anti-democracy. I would've guessed that centrists are anti-democratic (to the extent that they are anti-democratic) because they'd prefer to hand over governance to technocratic elites, and because they think the democratic process is a nuisance that only empowers candidates who pander to poorly educated people, rather than experts who "know things," and who are therefore best equipped to rule. At the same time, though, I would've expected that (so-called) centrists want to curtail democracy, precisely because they don't want certain liberal values to be contested through the political process. In general, liberals don't think that things like human rights should be up for debate. So democracies shouldn't have the power to infringe on them. That's what makes them human rights in the first place: they're inviolable.

But the fact that they're opposed to liberal values, too, is difficult to square with their anti-democratic views. So I'm left asking: what does it even mean to call these people centrists. Who are these people who are identifying with the center (i.e., the establishment) who are apparently the most anti-establishment elements within society? What does their so-called "centrism" even entail at that point?