mozz

Some Republican Secretaries of State, Mike Pence, military leaders, conservatives in the Justice Department, and similar not-real-inspiring-politically people were some of the most important ones who put the brakes on Trump's previous attempt at a for-real fascist takeover. Without them, I think there is an excellent chance that it would have worked, and we'd be currently living in a society which doesn't have functioning elections or protections for political speech in media or on the internet.

I do understand that our elections and our media right now are not fully free. But that doesn't mean every point on that spectrum is the same. People on the left sometimes like to say Reagan or Bush or Trump 1 or Obama or Biden are so oppressive that it all might as well be fascism, but people who lived through real totalitarian rule further down on the spectrum would tell you that no, no it is certainly not.

The heroic SPD, who shoveled two million conscripts to their deaths in the pointless meat grinder of WWI (which killed 20 million, all told)

Yep, 100% accurate (and, a roughly-accurate analogy I think with modern Democrats doing insane things like supporting Israel)

and violently suppressed opposition to it

Er... which suppression are you talking about? I'm a little out of my depth on it but the only suppression I'm aware of came after the KPD started a violent rebellion against them. But like I say I'm not that well aware of it, can you tell me?

By the way, the 1932 German Presidential election had three candidates: the nefarious communist candidate Ernst Thälmann, Adolf Hitler, and Paul von Hindenburg. The winner was not Hitler, it was Hindenburg, who then proceeded to appoint Hitler as chancellor.

Once he won his 1932 term Hindenburg had Brüning as chancellor, then Papen, then Schleicher, amid a massive amount of infighting, and then after all that was Hitler. The vague picture I have is that infighting including but not limited to KPD vs. everyone else, strikes, street battles, and general chaos was a big part of what was making German politics nonfunctional and created the conditions where Hindenburg eventually had to work with Hitler.

Certainly the moderates in the Reichstag had to work with either the KPD or the Nazis, numerically, in order to get anything done, since none of those three factions had a majority. I'm out of my depth to say exactly how it played out or whose fault it all was. But I'm pretty confident in saying that "Hindenburg was secretly Hitler-friendly and got behind him instantly as soon as he was in office" is oversimplified, if that's what you're saying. For one thing, he'd been in office already for 7 years before that, and he had to die before the Nazis actually took over -- it doesn't seem to me like him in office was the key to Nazi takeover.

Would it have turned out different if it was 64% Hindenburg, instead of 51% Hindenburg and 13% Thälmann? And likewise with loyalties in the Reichstag? I'm sort of implying that it might have, but honestly I have no idea. And I likewise have no idea whose "fault" it was between the SPD and KPD that they were both pretty consistently at each other's throats. I just know that part of the way it played out was rabid opposition to Hindenburg and the SPD from the left, rather than unification from them as the only alternative to Hitler, and that against that backdrop Hitler was able to make it work.

Obviously, the lesson to take away from this is that the people who tried to stop both world wars were on the wrong side of history, and the people who supported the guy who appointed Hitler chancellor in order to stop him from coming to power were right about everything and worthy of emulation.

I didn't say they were on the wrong side of history, and I don't think they were. I do think that their treatment of the SPD as "the real enemy", and pursuit of "what we want in a perfect world" with no attention to "what's the best outcome we can actually achieve" or "what will be the actual real outcome of chasing our perfect vision" is, in my opinion, part of what let Hitler come to power and got most of them killed a couple years later.

You're not exactly wrong, but from the POV of the people making the videos it is earned. When you see your friends getting killed on purpose, or whole cities of your home being destroyed, you have to develop some coldness and a sick sense of humor if you want to survive mentally and keep getting up for the fight day after day.

Like I say, you're actually sort of right I think from the POV of most of the people in this sub, but that's not the people who are making these videos.

For anyone watching: I suspect that Linkerbaan is one of the don't-vote-for-Biden shills, and this whole thing is a sort of cosplay of being a pro-Palestinian person. I talked with them at length in another topic, and their responses are just kind of... off.

There are other interpretations. But I noticed yesterday that they were making arguments that didn't make much sense, and didn't even seem to be coming from a place of them believing them themselves, or expecting anyone else to believe them. This comment and this stuff about "heavily target military bases" is a pretty good example. It's just... it's just off. It's weird. I mean, it's obviously not true, but it's also just kind of random in this very particular low-effort way that looks more and more unusual the longer you hold it up to the light and carefully examine it.

Anyway, so then I looked at their user history and I found all sorts of "Trump isn't that bad" "both parties are the same" "blue MAGA" stuff (that's honestly the only real consistent through-line I saw other than "yay Hamas") and it all clicked into place.

I somewhat suspect that the shill accounts tend to pick left-looking causes to rally behind to give themselves some cover, so their history doesn't wind up as just all no-Biden all the time. A month or two ago a lot of them were doing economic issues, and I think now they've shifted to largely pro-Palestinian issues.

Like I say: All speculation. The truth is I have no idea. But, that's my take on it.

In the run-up to the 1932 German elections, the left-wing party was still calling the establishment-left party the "main" enemy, and fighting them in the streets and siphoning support away from them by running their own candidates in three-way elections that also included Hitler. A few years later, most of them were dead, since they were the very first of his targets, long before the Jews.

I have no particular love for either of the Clintons but I'm still sad about Gore. Between the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, real action on climate change before it was too late, and the underregulation that led to the 2008 financial crash, the whole fuckin world would be different if he'd been allowed into office after he won the election.

Well said sir

Left wing people walked away from the Democrats after 1968, and they had every righteous reason to. Did the Democrats suddenly start embracing actual leftism as a winning strategy as a result? Did a viable third party emerge? Did non electoral activism (much more powerful at the time, like a massive nationwide movement) finally take hold and upend the system to bring about real, sustained change?

Not exactly. We went, in that time, from "great society" and 1-income families who owned their home and sent kids to college, and the civil rights act and all that stuff, to Reagan -> Clinton -> Bush and the fuckin apocalypse that's brought us the current corporate hellscape. The reality of working life in today's America would be unrecognizable to most (white) people in the 1960s. The Democrats, after 24 years of losing elections (ironically enough, losing them by fielding leftist candidates like McGovern, McCarthy, and Carter), finally tacked hard to the right and started being contenders again, but we lost a lot of ground and we're only just now even starting to undo the damage. The party of JFK and Carter became the party of Clinton and Obama.

I actually think modern left wing people are aware of how terrifying Trump is, and would vote for Biden even if he wasn't a significant step up from the low bar that is the modern Democrats. But yes, the drumbeat of MAGA imposters and the occasional confused leftist saying that if we just stop voting then everything will find a way to work itself out is certainly a thing that exists.

wanted the murdering to stop

How'd that work out

If they were killing Israelis in some way that would lead to better outcomes for the Palestinian people, I'd say that'd be pretty well justified at this point, for more or less exactly the reasons you said. That's pretty fuckin far from what they did though.

Nice to know that if you work for a company that can afford to pay the fine, you can literally just straight up kill people(*) and pay the money and it's all good

(*) certain types of people at least

Israel is a lot more malicious in their sabotage of the peace process than Hamas is, yes. Like I said, I'm not suggesting an equivalence between the two; Israel is clearly worse. I'm just saying that Hamas also has some of the same twisted incentives in place.

They didn't suddenly murder hundreds of innocent people back in October because they wanted to inflame a sudden spasm of peace and good will. Just because Israel is worse, doesn't mean Hamas is not bad.

I worked for a while at a place that had a big immigrant employee contingent. It was palpable how much better the work ethic was among the non Americans, and how after a few years of being there they would get "Americanized" and start to become lazy like the rest of us.

I love America; this isn't a dig at American people. I think becoming lazy and not putting your heart into your working day is more a reaction to the level of exploitation of workers that exists in America, than some kind of personal failing on anybody's part. But that being said, the idea that immigrants are lazy could only come from someone who has not the slightest fuckin clue what they're talking about, academic analysis wise or personal experience wise or both.

So there are three urgent problems with immigration in this country, two of which root back to a sudden wild spike upwards in the number of people coming into the country which wasn't matched by a corresponding increase in resources for the agencies that deal with them:

1. The agency which runs the border patrol and immigration is made of oppressive and racist people
2. There's a huge backlog of asylum / deportation cases which means people stay in custody in racist and oppressive overcrowded prisons (see point #1)
3. We're rate limiting the people coming into the country (see point #2), which means a lot of asylum seekers who are trying to do it legally wind up waiting for months (maybe years now, IDK) on the other side of the Mexican border, basically just living in a big, dangerous, squalid, crime-ridden open-air field with no facilities for life, and no job, no medical care for anyone no matter how young or old, it's fuckin dangerous

Biden is unable to fix #1 without an act of God (basically firing all existing ICE and CBP agents and then finding 45,000 people who really want to work as immigration police but who aren't racist or oppressive). He's unable to fix #2 or #3, although those ones do have legislative solutions, because the Republicans block anything he does, even when he tried promising to do some cruel or racist things as a compromise in order to get them to also agree to some badly needed things (mostly, increasing ICE funding so they can at least house the people they have in better conditions, and increasing the number of judges to process cases so people don't wait for a year before their case is heard).

And, any time he tries to do anything about it (e.g. this thing you cited), everyone on the left yells at him, because US immigration policy is cruelty and interacting with it involves interacting with a cruel system.

I would ask you the same thing I asked ozma about marijuana policy: What exactly should Biden do to fix the situation? Without resorting to magical solutions like "make ICE not racist" or "just make the backlog go away" or just making wild assertions like that he could fix it if he wanted to, he just doesn't want to?

I'm open to almost anything; I'm happy to talk about details or exact things or policies, as long as it's grounded in "X and Y are policies he could realistically do and here is how it would help."