hot cocoa on the couch posted:

calling trump hitler always reminds me of rightists here that call trudeau mao or stalin or a commie or whatever. as an actual socialist, when i hear trudeau called that, i scoff heartily. its just a bludgeon for the leftists to use i think. trump is nothing like hitler (aside from his odd charisma maybe) and jan 6 was nothing like bavaria in november 1923

Prettz posted:

trump... telling the truth? I'm about to short circuit, I need a drink

Disco Pope posted:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/apr/26/trump-kristi-noem-shot-dog-and-goat-book

Just a fantastic read. Lol upon lol. Kristi Noem leading a succession of animals to a construction site next to a school bus stop to fill them with lead.

Dapper_Swindler posted:

i mean i get why people do it, partly because most people dont know poo poo about history because shits long and books are hard, but like trumps his own thing.

Data Graham posted:

But also after however many years of people shouting BUSH = HITLER it's all gotten very boy-who-cried-wolf.

Data Graham posted:

But also after however many years of people shouting BUSH = HITLER it's all gotten very boy-who-cried-wolf.

pop fly to McGillicutty posted:

She says "cricket (her dog) was the picture of pure joy...I HATED HIM"

That's conservatives for ya, "you're happy I want you dead".

hot cocoa on the couch posted:

calling trump hitler always reminds me of rightists here that call trudeau mao or stalin or a commie or whatever. as an actual socialist, when i hear trudeau called that, i scoff heartily. its just a bludgeon for the leftists to use i think. trump is nothing like hitler (aside from his odd charisma maybe) and jan 6 was nothing like bavaria in november 1923

kazil posted:

quote:

Alabama House voted April 25 to make school and public library staff criminally liable for distributing “sexual or gender oriented material” to minors without parental consent. HB385 places libraries in the same category as “adult-only” stores, movies and entertainment.

It would force school and public librarians to remove a book that someone finds obscene or harmful to minors within seven days of written notice to the library director or principal. If they don’t they could face a misdemeanor. A copy of the notice will go to the district attorney.

The legislation is sponsored by Rep. Arnold Mooney (R-Shelby County. It’s unclear who will determine if the book is obscen

Mr Ice Cream Glove posted:

loving insane

Dapper_Swindler posted:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fqGKZ3fzN1M
again this song fits them to a T

I am drowning
There is no sign of land
You are coming down with me
Hand in unlovable hand
And I hope you die
I hope we both die

RoboChrist 9000 posted:

The Weimar Republic reacted more strongly to the Beer Hall Putsch than we did to Jan 6. Hitler was in jail within days.
I agree the SCOTUS wont come in Trump's favor here, most likely, but they also don't need to. My point is just that there is no reason to believe the Democrats are able or willing to ever mount a meaningful defense against assaults on American democracy, such as it is, and plenty of reasons to believe they can't and wont.

For the fascist, violence is the ends, not the means. For the Democrat, the Process is the ends, not the means. For both sides of the political spectrum in America, the map has become the territory and the means have become the ends.

pixaal posted:

I think soup nazi and nazi becoming a synonym for gatekeeper did more to erode the sting of calling someone Hitler or Nazi than anything like that.

Mr Ice Cream Glove posted:

loving insane

hot cocoa on the couch posted:

calling trump hitler always reminds me of rightists here that call trudeau mao or stalin or a commie or whatever. as an actual socialist, when i hear trudeau called that, i scoff heartily. its just a bludgeon for the leftists to use i think. trump is nothing like hitler (aside from his odd charisma maybe) and jan 6 was nothing like bavaria in november 1923

Data Graham posted:

But also after however many years of people shouting BUSH = HITLER it's all gotten very boy-who-cried-wolf.

Disco Pope posted:

I've been playing that recently, but I always saw it more about the abject self-loathing that creeps in when you're too much of a coward to end a relationship that you're miserable in. But yeah, conservatives are absolutely consumed with loathing and bitterness.

Disco Pope posted:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/apr/26/trump-kristi-noem-shot-dog-and-goat-book

ElectricSheep posted:

loving horrendous. And yet, it's not the first time I've heard/read about putting down a dog that isn't learning hunting commands and behavior.

My boss mentioned his father having done it when he was a kid and out on a hunt with him where the dog spooked whatever it was they were going after for the nth time. Dog came trotting back pleased with itself, boss' dad shot the dog dead. The matter-of-fact delivery he gave was just barely covering up what a horrible memory that had clearly been for him.

This is not justification at all, gently caress Kristi Noem. It's just that reading the story drove home that there's a segment of the population that doesn't think twice about that poo poo and it utterly confounds and angers me.

Dogs are amazing and we don't deserve them.

Failed Imagineer posted:

Trump is much more like Mussolini, but also he's not very much like either of those guys

Prettz posted:

You're gonna blame people from two decades ago for confusing the crypto-fascists with the fascists? What's the point? Everyone who mattered correctly pointed out at the time that they were crypto-fascists. And they were paving the way. Wannabe-Hitler enabled the rise of Stupid-Hitler.

Dapper_Swindler posted:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fqGKZ3fzN1M
again this song fits them to a T

I am drowning
There is no sign of land
You are coming down with me
Hand in unlovable hand
And I hope you die
I hope we both die

Disco Pope posted:

This will backfire when the gamers see it and come out hard for Trump.

Vampire Panties posted:

what the gently caress is with chud psychopaths killing/torturing dogs

Dapper_Swindler posted:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fqGKZ3fzN1M
again this song fits them to a T

I am drowning
There is no sign of land
You are coming down with me
Hand in unlovable hand
And I hope you die
I hope we both die

Prettz posted:

You're gonna blame people from two decades ago for confusing the crypto-fascists with the fascists? What's the point? Everyone who mattered correctly pointed out at the time that they were crypto-fascists. And they were paving the way. Wannabe-Hitler enabled the rise of Stupid-Hitler.

kazil posted:

DJT over $40 again lol

Dapper_Swindler posted:

oh its aboslutly about a dying relationship that wont die. but yeah i always see it about the chud brains too. death of the artist or whatever.

Nocheez posted:

Gamers watching the NFL draft?

Mr Ice Cream Glove posted:

loving insane

loving Moron posted:

Don't.gently caress.with.libraries!

Seriously I can't understand why they hate libraries. They provide services that help everyone and are one of the best places in our society.

Funky See Funky Do posted:

Are.. Are you guys posting "say what you like about national socialism but at least it's an ethos" but seriously?

kazil posted:

DJT over $40 again lol

Humans posted:

Look, I know what you're thinking. Putting Hitler in a book about the terrible mistakes we've made as a species isn't exactly the boldest move ever. "Oh wow, never heard of him, what a fascinating historical nugget" is something you're probably not saying right now.


But beyond him being (obviously) a genocidal maniac, there's an aspect to Hitler's rule that kind of gets missed in our standard view of him. Even if popular culture has long enjoyed turning him into an object of mockery, we still tend to believe that the Nazi machine was ruthlessly efficient, and that the great dictator spent most of his time…well, dictating things.


So it's worth remembering that Hitler was actually an incompetent, lazy egomaniac and his government was an absolute clown show.


In fact, this may even have helped his rise to power, as he was consistently underestimated by the German elite. Before he became chancellor, many of his opponents had dismissed him as a joke for his crude speeches and tacky rallies. Even after elections had made the Nazis the largest party in the Reichstag, people still kept thinking that Hitler was an easy mark, a blustering idiot who could easily be controlled by smart people.


Why did the elites of Germany so consistently underestimate Hitler? Possibly because they weren't actually wrong in their assessment of his competency—they just failed to realise that this wasn't enough to stand in the way of his ambition. As it would turn out, Hitler was really bad at running a government. As his own press chief Otto Dietrich later wrote in his memoir The Hitler I Knew, "In the twelve years of his rule in Germany Hitler produced the biggest confusion in government that has ever existed in a civilized state."


His government was constantly in chaos, with officials having no idea what he wanted them to do, and nobody was entirely clear who was actually in charge of what. He procrastinated wildly when asked to make difficult decisions, and would often end up relying on gut feeling, leaving even close allies in the dark about his plans. His "unreliability had those who worked with him pulling out their hair," as his confidant Ernst Hanfstaengl later wrote in his memoir Zwischen Weißem und Braunem Haus. This meant that rather than carrying out the duties of state, they spent most of their time in-fighting and back-stabbing each other in an attempt to either win his approval or avoid his attention altogether, depending on what mood he was in that day.


There's a bit of an argument among historians about whether this was a deliberate ploy on Hitler's part to get his own way, or whether he was just really, really bad at being in charge of stuff. Dietrich himself came down on the side of it being a cunning tactic to sow division and chaos—and it's undeniable that he was very effective at that. But when you look at Hitler's personal habits, it's hard to shake the feeling that it was just a natural result of putting a workshy narcissist in charge of a country.


Hitler was incredibly lazy. According to his aide Fritz Wiedemann, even when he was in Berlin he wouldn't get out of bed until after 11 a.m., and wouldn't do much before lunch other than read what the newspapers had to say about him, the press cuttings being dutifully delivered to him by Dietrich.


He was obsessed with the media and celebrity, and often seems to have viewed himself through that lens. He once described himself as "the greatest actor in Europe," and wrote to a friend, "I believe my life is the greatest novel in world history." In many of his personal habits he came across as strange or even childish—he would have regular naps during the day, he would bite his fingernails at the dinner table, and he had a remarkably sweet tooth that led him to eat "prodigious amounts of cake" and "put so many lumps of sugar in his cup that there was hardly any room for the tea."


He was deeply insecure about his own lack of knowledge, preferring to either ignore information that contradicted his preconceptions, or to lash out at the expertise of others. He hated being laughed at, but enjoyed it when other people were the butt of the joke (he would perform mocking impressions of people he disliked). But he also craved the approval of those he disdained, and his mood would quickly improve if a newspaper wrote something complimentary about him.


Little of this was especially secret or unknown at the time. It's why so many people failed to take Hitler seriously until it was too late, dismissing him as merely a "half-mad rascal" or a "man with a beery vocal organ." In a sense, they weren't wrong. In another, much more important sense, they were as wrong as it's possible to get.


Hitler's personal failings didn't stop him having an uncanny instinct for political rhetoric that would gain mass appeal, and it turns out you don't actually need to have a particularly competent or functional government to do terrible things.


We tend to assume that when something awful happens there must have been some great controlling intelligence behind it. It's understandable: how could things have gone so wrong, we think, if there wasn't an evil genius pulling the strings? The downside of this is that we tend to assume that if we can't immediately spot an evil genius, then we can all chill out a bit because everything will be fine.


But history suggests that's a mistake, and it's one that we make over and over again. Many of the worst man-made events that ever occurred were not the product of evil geniuses. Instead they were the product of a parade of idiots and lunatics, incoherently flailing their way through events, helped along the way by overconfident people who thought they could control them.

Data Graham posted:

That's true, and I know it does no good to instead be like "BUSH = a dangerous first step down a slippery slope at the end of which lies" because come on, the whole point of a slogan is to get attention and stick in the mind.

It's just that it leaves us without any kind of vocabulary to talk about what kind of existential threat Trump actually is. With Reagan you could paint pictures of mushroom clouds. With Bush if you were judicious you could try to establish the idea of the mercantilist global oil empire which kind of worked. Trump? Someone asks what the big deal with Trump is, why we hate him so much? I don't even know where to start. I always feel like "AM I THE ONLY ONE WHO SEES..." etc



LOOK WHAT HE IS DOING WHY CAN YOU NOT SEE THIS

madmatt112 posted:

Firing up the options account again, I guess