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06-04-2016, 01:30 PM
(This post was last modified: 06-04-2016, 08:08 PM by pbrower2a.)
(05-31-2016, 09:46 PM)X_4AD_84 Wrote: Here is an article from nearly two years ago. It was prophetic. These same forces have since infiltrated the GOP and are the behind-the-scenes sponsors of Trump. Trump is essentially The Manchurian Candidate. However, unlike that story, he's of the Red-Brown alliance. A new more dangerous Fascism that brings to bear the sodden histories of both Russian and Western European Fascism, in one ugly package:
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/38...ert-zubrin
I wonder who would be interested in becoming the boss of the Oblast of Alaska. First, secede. Second, ask for assistance in establishing order.
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.
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06-06-2016, 02:51 PM
(This post was last modified: 06-06-2016, 02:52 PM by Anthony '58.)
Quote:17. Nationalist China
When I saw this on the list at all, and Castro's Cuba with its "drawer cells" not ranked at least in the top 10, I stopped reading.
"These, and many other matters which might be noticed, add a volume of unofficial declarations to the mass of organic utterances that this is a Christian nation" - Justice David Brewer, Church of the Holy Trinity v. United States, 1892
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(06-06-2016, 02:51 PM)Anthony Wrote: Quote:17. Nationalist China
When I saw this on the list at all, and Castro's Cuba with its "drawer cells" not ranked at least in the top 10, I stopped reading.
...for sheer number. Warlords connected to Chiang Kai-Shek get some of the blame.
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.
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Quote:...for sheer number. Warlords connected to Chiang Kai-Shek get some of the blame.
Because they killed Communists who were trying to kill them first?
Self-defense is not genocide.
"These, and many other matters which might be noticed, add a volume of unofficial declarations to the mass of organic utterances that this is a Christian nation" - Justice David Brewer, Church of the Holy Trinity v. United States, 1892
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Donald Trump’s Fascism and His Appeasers
Quote:“It can’t happen here? My friends, it is happening here.” So says New York Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia near the end of the “The Plot Against America,” the Philip Roth novel from 12 years ago that re-imagines American history if the isolationist, Hitler-sympathizing anti-Semite Charles Lindbergh had become president instead of Franklin Roosevelt. And so “the right-wing saboteurs of democracy–the so-called patriots and the so-called Christians” of the Republican right, Roth writes, make their march “under the sign of the cross and the flag.”
“It Can’t Happen Here” was the title of Sinclair Lewis’s 1935 novel that imagined a fascist senator who beats Roosevelt to the presidency on a promise to, you guessed it, make America great again: “To you and you only I look for help to make America a proud, rich land again,” the imaginary Buzz Windrip tells a crowd that includes his paramilitary “Minute Men,” who beat up dissenters and open fire on them. (The paramilitary vigilantes who still “patrol” the Mexican-American border on this side of paradise also call themselves the Minutemen.)
The two books are somewhat fictional. Only somewhat, because they draw on a strain of either violent or repressive impulses that, like the roils of magma under a volcano, have always been present in America’s political culture, at times more overtly than others. The years of the Alien and Sedition Acts in the early republic, the KKK, the Red Scare, Roosevelt’s internment of Japanese-Americans in World War II, the John Birch Society—whose founder thought Eisenhower was a “dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy”—McCarthyism, the more muddled racism of the tea party movement and now Trumpism, its more fascist mutant, are all part of that toxic lineage.
If the poison has always been around, it’s never been enough to poison the entire country. Sinclair Lewis himself thought America too strong a democracy to allow a fascist take-over. He’s right, for now. Donald Trump isn’t going to win in November. By then the hordes of Bernie Sanders supporters who are making Hillary Clinton’s negative numbers look almost as bad as Trump’s will have fallen in line.
As unappealing as Clinton can seem, especially if you tune in to the hysterics of reactionary propaganda—the same machine that managed to turn John Kerry’s war heroics into treachery and Ronald Reagan’s administration, the most corrupt since Ulysses Grant’s, into a paragon of conservative values—she’s in a league of her own. Comparing her in any way to Trump isn’t apples and oranges, two quite evolved fruits. It’s more like comparing a human being to a single-cell organism to, with Trump’s single cell defined by one thing: his vengeful racism.
Two things struck me about the Republican reaction to Trump declaring Judge Gonzalo Curiel unfit to preside over his case for being “Mexican.” The first is that even as people like House Speaker Paul Ryan call it “the textbook definition of a racist comment,” they are standing by Trump. As Bill Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard, tweeted, “Official position of the Republican Party: Trump is an inexcusable bigot, and Trump must be our next president.” (Kristol is leading a campaign to dump Trump and draft Mitt Romney again.)
Appeals to bigotry have never been far from national campaigns: Al Smith was demolished for his Catholicism in 1928, John Kennedy almost was in 1960, Nixon and the first Bush couldn’t have been elected without coded appeals to prejudices against blacks, McCain and Romney couldn’t anymore do the same with Obama and get away with it so they did the next-best thing, calling him a terrorist sympathizer, a foreigner, a Muslim. But the appeals were more tactical than central to campaigns, rather like paying tribute to a base of barnacle Republicans whose bigotry is as encrusted as their dependable votes. In Trump’s case, racism is the overriding allure, the buxom gravity center of his says-it-like-it-is charisma. His supporters deny it. They have to, like drunks who haven’t yet owned up to 12-stepping. But take away the racism, the Mexican-bashing, the dehumanizing of immigrants, the insults to a world of Muslims, the ultra-nationalism, and there’s not much left beside the Mussolini-like jabbing jaw and that hair, the only thing on Trump’s body that defies gravity, his imagination included.
The second thing that struck me was that even as a few Republicans denounced Trump over his Curiel insult, it was only then that Trump was assailed for exhibiting textbook racism. But he’s been exhibiting it in worse ways since the day he announced his candidacy, when he compared Mexicans to rapists and criminals, and since went on to propose closing the borders to all Muslims. I don’t know how that’s not the textbook definition not just of racism, but of fascism. As Robert Paxton, author of “The Anatomy of Fascism” put it in an interview about Trump in February, “the use of ethnic stereotypes and exploitation of fear of foreigners is directly out of a fascist’s recipe book.”
But even the media has betrayed a double-standard in its treatment of Trump in its handling the Curiel attacks as opposed to slurs on immigrants and Muslims. The difference is that Curiel is American. Trump’s attacks on Mexicans and Muslims were directed at people either beyond the borders or beneath American citizenship. The racism, in other words, is not Trump’s alone, or his supporters’. Even the media is playing into the caste of narratives, which shows to what extent the culture has become either inured to the unacceptable or willing to make its accommodations with it. Ryan did: he calls Trump’s racism “unacceptable,” yet he accepts it.
That’s ultimately the danger of Trump’s candidacy—not that he will win, but that even in losing, he is corroding that buffer against the unacceptable. He is making what Roth in “The Plot Against America” called “the unfolding of the unforeseen” possible.
Trump will fade. Trumpism may not. And the longer the Republican establishment is willing to appease him—to make its Munich with him—as a better alternative to Clinton, the more it legitimizes his racism as an acceptable American value at the very moment when white America is fading to minority status.
It can’t happen here? My friends, Trump or no Trump, it is happening here.
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"That’s ultimately the danger of Trump’s candidacy—not that he will win, but that even in losing, he is corroding that buffer against the unacceptable."
Good article.
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(06-13-2016, 08:08 PM)X_4AD_84 Wrote: The Trump Campaign has revoked the Washington Post's press credentials. Smooth move Exlax ... cutting off access to a major media outlet.
He does have an unusual approach of bullying people who say things he doesn't like. It sort of worked during the primary season. He convinced the Republican establishment not to gang up on him long enough for him to get over the top. He seems to enjoy making up rules on the fly for how campaigns ought to be run. It seems awful that Obama is planning to campaign for Hillary? He shouldn't do so as Trump said so?
It's one thing to behave this way as a candidate. I for one wouldn't want to see a president with an instinct to silence the opposition. I saw enough of that with Nixon. Trump seems to have much more ambitions along that line. He seems very ready to be open about it, to use open in your face stuff rather than Nixon's tricky covert approach.
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06-13-2016, 11:25 PM
(This post was last modified: 06-14-2016, 10:00 AM by Eric the Green.)
(06-13-2016, 08:08 PM)X_4AD_84 Wrote: The Trump Campaign has revoked the Washington Post's press credentials. Smooth move Exlax ... cutting off access to a major media outlet.
So if their reporter sneaks in, I guess Trump can call his goons to "get him out" and if they rough him up too much, Trump can say "don't worry, I'll pay your legal fees."
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06-14-2016, 03:38 AM
(This post was last modified: 06-14-2016, 08:56 AM by pbrower2a.)
(06-13-2016, 09:40 PM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote: (06-13-2016, 08:08 PM)X_4AD_84 Wrote: The Trump Campaign has revoked the Washington Post's press credentials. Smooth move Exlax ... cutting off access to a major media outlet.
He does have an unusual approach of bullying people who say things he doesn't like. It sort of worked during the primary season. He convinced the Republican establishment not to gang up on him long enough for him to get over the top. He seems to enjoy making up rules on the fly for how campaigns ought to be run. It seems awful that Obama is planning to campaign for Hillary? He shouldn't do so as Trump said so?
It's one thing to behave this way as a candidate. I for one wouldn't want to see a president with an instinct to silence the opposition. I saw enough of that with Nixon. Trump seems to have much more ambitions along that line. He seems very ready to be open about it, to use open in your face stuff rather than Nixon's tricky covert approach.
But some Americans like tha bullying. Authoritarians love to show others what they claim to know -- if necessary, with beatings. Does anyone want to suggest that such a view of the world is easier to achieve if one has much childhood experience with corporal punishment? So beat people enough times and they will never show disrespect toward their superiors, show unorthodox views on religion or politics, or mock such a virtue as patriotism.
Corporal punishment teaches something else -- that force overpowers all else, including reasoning and conscience. The only reality in a world of force is power, and they have learned that from childhood.
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.
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Sounds like the Reign of Terror or Communist Cuba. Watch lists.
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...and if your co-worker is using the word "union", make sure to squeal on him to your boss.
Reading the Koran? Tsk, tsk, tsk.
Surveillance takes a life of its own wherever it exists.
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.
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Trump's appeal is to attack scapegoats. Now he wants to ban immigrants from any country "with ties to terrorism." Mateen was not an immigrant, but he was a Muslim. Therefore, ban all Muslim immigrants. Maybe he'll hone his target. I would think his next call would be to ban all Muslims and ban Islam in America, since Mateen was a Muslim and an American citizen.
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(06-14-2016, 04:47 PM)X_4AD_84 Wrote: (06-14-2016, 12:54 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: Trump's appeal is to attack scapegoats. Now he wants to ban immigrants from any country "with ties to terrorism." Mateen was not an immigrant, but he was a Muslim. Therefore, ban all Muslim immigrants. Maybe he'll hone his target. I would think his next call would be to ban all Muslims and ban Islam in America, since Mateen was a Muslim and an American citizen.
If he becomes President then Fuhrer, the military might be sent into places like California to come and overturn a number of things.
This is why we have the 2nd Amendment.
With my current legally allowed armaments I will be a mere nuisance in the eyes of forces with actual military grade arms. I do not ask for much. I don't even need full auto like the military have. All I need is typical civilian grade semi-auto, but with no silly restrictions on magazine capacity, etc. I'm a good enough shot I don't need full auto, plus it wastes ammo.
True. I read the Second Amendment to read as a protection of States' rights. The state militias were the Continental armies, and the states needed those militias as defenses against piracy, Indian attacks, invasions, and any possible usurpation of federal power.
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.
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(06-14-2016, 04:47 PM)X_4AD_84 Wrote: (06-14-2016, 12:54 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: Trump's appeal is to attack scapegoats. Now he wants to ban immigrants from any country "with ties to terrorism." Mateen was not an immigrant, but he was a Muslim. Therefore, ban all Muslim immigrants. Maybe he'll hone his target. I would think his next call would be to ban all Muslims and ban Islam in America, since Mateen was a Muslim and an American citizen.
If he becomes President then Fuhrer, the military might be sent into places like California to come and overturn a number of things.
This is why we have the 2nd Amendment.
With my current legally allowed armaments I will be a mere nuisance in the eyes of forces with actual military grade arms. I do not ask for much. I don't even need full auto like the military have. All I need is typical civilian grade semi-auto, but with no silly restrictions on magazine capacity, etc. I'm a good enough shot I don't need full auto, plus it wastes ammo.
You are armed and ready for war. But a civilian government in the jurisdiction that you live, it seems to me, has a right to control who is at war, when, and why.
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(06-14-2016, 07:15 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: You are armed and ready for war. But a civilian government in the jurisdiction that you live, it seems to me, has a right to control who is at war, when, and why.
Not to invoke argument from authority, but Mr. Jefferson just said it so well...
Quote:We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness—That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed, that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it, and to institute a new Government, laying its Foundation on such Principles, and organizing its Powers in such Form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient Causes; and accordingly all Experience hath shewn, that Mankind are more disposed to suffer, while Evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the Forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long Train of Abuses and Usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object, evinces a Design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their Right, it is their Duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future Security.
What values one holds dear enough to fight for is of course a values question. Some would fight for this, others for that, and you aren't apt to find agreement in times of crisis on what is the just enforcement of the law and what is tyranny. Sill, Jefferson definitely has a point. If one's life style and values are sufficiently trampled upon by government, humans are apt to respond with violence and arguably ought to respond with violence.
Me, I don't think we're there yet, but I'm watching the spirals of rhetoric and violence with interest and hopefully some objectivity. We might get there yet. To date, though, more of those who resort to violence are being called 'terrorists' or 'lone nuts' rather than men of principle. While this is perceived of as true and right, the spiral of violence isn't apt to spiral out of control.
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(06-14-2016, 04:47 PM)X_4AD_84 Wrote: (06-14-2016, 12:54 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: Trump's appeal is to attack scapegoats. Now he wants to ban immigrants from any country "with ties to terrorism." Mateen was not an immigrant, but he was a Muslim. Therefore, ban all Muslim immigrants. Maybe he'll hone his target. I would think his next call would be to ban all Muslims and ban Islam in America, since Mateen was a Muslim and an American citizen.
If he becomes President then Fuhrer, the military might be sent into places like California to come and overturn a number of things.
This is why we have the 2nd Amendment.
With my current legally allowed armaments I will be a mere nuisance in the eyes of forces with actual military grade arms. I do not ask for much. I don't even need full auto like the military have. All I need is typical civilian grade semi-auto, but with no silly restrictions on magazine capacity, etc. I'm a good enough shot I don't need full auto, plus it wastes ammo.
We've been down this path before, but ...
Yeah, a mere nuisance. Being a "good shot" and being all by yourself, you'd last a few minutes.
Being a "good shot" and being grouped together with a few thousand well organized, well supplied, well led individuals having some kind of rational strategy to perform asymmetric warfare over a long, long period of time ... more than a mere nuisance.
The devil is always in the details. Unfortunately, there are too many of us gun owners that like to sit around fondling our firearms and imagining heroic events taking place with us at the forefront. The beer guts and gray hair aren't going to carry us very far down the revolution road.
[font=Arial Black]... a man of notoriously vicious and intemperate disposition.[/font]
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(06-20-2016, 02:08 PM)TnT Wrote: The devil is always in the details. Unfortunately, there are too many of us gun owners that like to sit around fondling our firearms and imagining heroic events taking place with us at the forefront. The beer guts and gray hair aren't going to carry us very far down the revolution road.
I don't anticipate anything like a real revolution, enough citizens with guns shooting at people in uniform to cause anything like attrition. However, violent incidents hitting the press do cause significant noise in the press and politicians do alter policy. After Waco, Ruby Ridge and OKC, the FBI, BATF and similar federal agencies were given new rules of engagement by Clinton 42, intended to reduce the number of incidents that made the government look bad. The population is in a different mood now, more fearful of terrorists, carless of privacy rights, ready to let the government use violence and paramilitary tactics. Still, I don't think it in the government's interest to provoke a spiral of violence.
The big thing for me is that spree shooters with political motivations are still being reported and pigeon holed as 'lone nuts' rather than people of courage and strong conviction. We've been free enough in turning parts of the Near East into free fire zones. Those who wish to return the favor aren't entirely unjustified and irrational. Americans, with their self centered views on their having a unique place in the world, have been and will be very slow to acknowledge this. As we demonized the Germans and Japanese during World War II, we're all too ready to demonize now those who want to treat us as we've treated them. Bush 43 wanted troops near the oil and American oil companies with the primary contracts. He was willing to kill the locals, take their wealth and totally discredit Western values and motivation. What was done then isn't going to be forgotten.
At least it won't be forgotten by 'radical Islam', you know, the folks where were there and have been shot at. Americans? We are quite capable of forgetting inconvenient history. The victims are apt to remain the bad guys in our eyes.
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06-22-2016, 04:30 PM
(This post was last modified: 06-22-2016, 04:32 PM by Odin.)
Neo-Nazi Trump supporters can't seem to help themselves.
Quote:Outside a Donald Trump rally in Phoenix, Arizona, last week, Trump protestors behind police barricades were confronted by several Trump supporters, including one shirtless man who screamed at one protestor in particular, “Go fucking cook my burrito, bitch!” It's unclear from the video what, if anything, led up to the direct confrontation, or why the Trump supporter seemed to be focused on one man, who appears might be of Hispanic descent.
"Get the fuck out of here! Our country, motherfucker, our country!," the Trump supporter screams, almost uncontrollably. "Proud fucking American! Made in USA bitch, made in fucking USA!," he yells.
"Go fucking make my tortilla, motherfucker!," he continues to scream. He and his companions are holding and waving, almost as weapons, Trump signs.
"And build that fucking wall, for me!," he adds.
"Trump! I love Trump!"
"Fuck you. I love my country," he says.
The unnamed Trump supporter then offers to perform other acts.
The video was shot and sent to Gawker by photographer Eric Rosenwald.
Electoral College added subtitles to the video, below.
Caution, this may be hard to watch. It certainly should be, it's disgusting.
Video of this scumbag at the link.
Quote:In 15 hours it's been viewed nearly 1.5 million times on Facebook.
Gawker notes under the arm of the Trump supporter is "a tattoo of the number 43, commonly received by members of the white supremacist hate group Supreme White Alliance."
It's no secret that among Trump's most vocal supporters are white supremacists, who believe Trump will actually enact the policies he say he will, which are designed to divert power back to white males.
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When this vile racism gets respect from mainstream politicians, then mainstream politics has big trouble. Gutter racism has been on the fringe of American political life since George Wallace admitted that he was wrong about it.
People need to recognize that there is a large Hispanic middle class in America and that there is much intermarriage between white people and Latinos. In my experience, gutter racists who use the N-word typically also have trouble refraining from using the F-bomb. Today gutter racism, like heavy use of the F-bomb, indicates problems of impulse control. This is very different from the prudish types who endorsed white supremacy with Theodore Bilbo, Strom Thurmond, Lester Maddox, and George Wallace.
Yes, this group is awful -- notice all the raised-right-arm gestures of one of the potty-mouthed bigots. Coincidence?
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.
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