03-25-2017, 11:21 PM
(03-12-2017, 03:32 PM)Kinser79 Wrote:(03-12-2017, 01:56 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: The anti-Trump resistance must be bigger than the Tea Party, and for good reasons.
Do you have any numbers for this? From what I've seen its mostly wing nuts screeching in the streets. I've been to Tea Party events and Occupy events. I'm not seeing anything similar to Trump. Or is this just wishful thinking?
Which demonstrates what you want to see.
Quote:Quote:First, Donald Trump has the majority of an authoritarian Establishment on its side
And yet it is the Democrats and their darlings in Tech who want to censor the internet, even censor the President himself. Are you sure it is the GOP that has an Authoritarian Establishment? I mean there are authoritarians in the GOP but they are in the DEMs too. But whose calling for censorship and who isn't?
That's a rhetorical question.
To protect patents and copyrights. I can easily end up in a position in which such becomes a very good thing for me.
Quote:Quote:-- people who hold that people whose beliefs are contrary to theirs deserves to be rendered permanently irrelevant.
Strange, I don't recall any Tea Partiers or hell even all 5 of the Klansmen in the country calling for punching communists, yet "it's no crime to punch a nazi" (never mind that while there are nazis around they clearly are not the likes of Milo Yiannopolos a gay jew who won't shut up about black cock).
Anybody who doesn't hate Nazis and their ilk is either grossly ignorant or perverse. Heck, I have a love-hate relationship with the German part of my ancestry solely because of Nazis. Fascists often have weird obsessions about sexuality.
Quote:Quote: Second, Donald Trump is a dictator, and he has the legislative branch under control. The only questions about the Trump dictatorship are of its competence and ruthlessness. Third, an American dictatorship would be difficult to escape and could get away from much.
Obama had the legislative branch under his control from 09-11. I notice you didn't call him a dictator then. Sure the GOP hacks on the board certainly did, but you didn't.
At least President Obama tried to get Republicans on his side on legislative issues. He did not try to make them permanently irrelevant.
Quote:So then if Obama can have Congress in the control of his party, and be president and not be a dictator then how come Trump is a dictator under the same conditions? Because he's not on your particular team?
Partisan hack detected. Don't feel bad--it isn't news to anyone.
I admit to being partisan.
Quote:Quote:Quote:So we have no heritage of executive despotism? Neither did the Germans going into 1933.
Are you sure about that? Kaiser Willhelm II ran a pretty tight ship, as did Bismark before him. Or is that Fake History?
Neither set up extermination camps. Both Bismarck's Prussia and (until 1914) Imperial Germany had active, divided legislatures with political competition and responsibility for the national budget. (I have no intention of letting Wilhelm II off for the genocide against the Herero). There was some modicum of competition for seats in the legislature. Hitler culled the Reichstag until it was nothing more than an echo chamber for his agenda.
Maybe we are now seeing how incompetent a leader "Daddy" is. His style has been utterly despotic.
Quote:Quote:Except for those Americans who have first-hand experience under a dictatorial regime we don't fully understand what we are dealing with. (OK, blacks of a certain age in the Jim Crow South... but that would now be people over age 60 who might know the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission as a KGB-like organization in the service of segregation).
I know lots of people who have first hand experience with dictatorships--primarily Latin Americans but my Neighbor Lady survived the Holocaust (yeah she's pretty old but we check up on her...nice lady). Both types of such persons have detected no dictatorships.
Heck, I had a near-neighbor who was born in the Russian Empire -- in Lithuania. She lived to be over 100. I never thought to ask her about the politics that she knew as a child or a young adult... mercifully her family got out of Lithuania when the leaving was good.
I've known people from Chile, Argentina, Iran, and Vietnam.Tyranny is awful. I'm in the wrong part of the country to know many Cubans.
Quote:I'm sorry PBR but to put it quite simply mature democracies have no history of reverting to autocracies. No matter how much anyone may wish for that to happen.
We Americans are no longer a people mature politically, culturally, or morally. Enough of us fell for a crass demagogue, a symptom of impatience and political immaturity.
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.