(07-18-2020, 09:07 AM)David Horn Wrote:(07-17-2020, 07:28 PM)Classic-Xer Wrote: Dude, I don't care if the liberals running Berkeley and the liberals who live there decide to cut their armed police force budget in half and use the other half to fund unarmed social workers/ peacekeepers who aren't nearly as well trained in self defense or the use of firearms and end up regretting doing it or going along with it down the road. I assume they're about as wise and as sharp as the liberals that I see in congress and the ones seen on TV and the ones on the internet these days. I don't live there and I don't have to pay for their mistakes. Dude, we are going to functioning as separate countries within a decade or so anyway. So, who gives a fuck about what the liberals are doing and messing with in their areas at this point.
By that measure, you don't support the armed Federal vigilantes Trump is using in Portland Oregon, because Lefties in Lefty places should be allowed to rot in place -- except not in this case.
I have my concern in that this is a laboratory exercise for doing either on a rotating basis (today Portland, then Berkeley, then Ann Arbor, then Austin... maybe Chicago and New York) with a brutal secret police.
When fascism comes to America it will have the US flag wrapped around a crucifix... what did anyone expect -- some strange new symbol or an old one from elsewhere? It will need a secret police, and "Department of Homeland Security" looks about as good as "Ministerium fuer Staatsicherheit" (the official name of the Stasi of the former East Germany). We have Departments and not Ministries.
The only good thing about the old German Democratic Republic (which according to the old joke was neither German, democratic, nor a Republic, was a beautiful national anthem. This spoof gets the reality of the "red fascist" regime as objectively as I can imagine.
A dictatorial America would probably better resemble the old East Germany than any other dictatorship, with the usual adjustments for national culture and being plutocratic instead of Marxist. We would of course have the worst characteristics of capitalist plutocracy and Soviet bureaucracy together, as is commonplace for fascist regimes.
OK, J S Bach was a sort of national hero in the DDR, and he would be suspect in America -- too intellectual -- and the government would be promoting fundamentalist-evangelical Protestantism as an ethos instead of Marxism.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.