There’s a lot of that going around the Dope lately.
A month ago I would have scoffed at someone who claimed that Trump was locking up infants to punish mothers for crossing the border. But here we are…
I’ve made my thoughts on the border policy clear here before: I am totally against it. There is nothing you can do to a child, short of outright physical abuse, that will traumatize them more than separation from its parents. When I was 8 years old I was developed a severe case of separation anxiety which would be the beginning of struggles with panic disorder and obsessive-compulsive disorder which lasted for the next two decades (on and off) and which I have only recently recovered from with the help of a very good therapist and the right medication. And this wasn’t even separation from my parents that was enforced by law or anything, it was just simple geography, and it wasn’t even that long of a time. It’s fucked up and I hate the idea of subjecting these kids to it, and this border policy is BULLSHIT and people need to continue fighting to end it.
But it’s possible to do all that, without invoking Nazis and Hitler!!!
Why is that so hard for people to grasp?! There’s a middle ground between “good” and “Hitler”.
The implications of the constant Nazi-calling, from a strategic political standpoint, are bad for the Democrats. Call Trump and his supporters Nazis -> more and more Trump supporters get energized and motivated to re-elect him -> people who are on the fence (and there are lots of them) start thinking “these Nazi comparisons are getting ridiculous, maybe Trump isn’t so bad after all” -> crucial Rust Belt voters are alienated -> second term of Trump.
You claim this but quite frankly I don’t believe it.
The only thing he is delivering is rasium and bigotry. But I would agree that that is a large part of why his base supports him.
You mean the economy is STILL doing very well. The cut backs on regulations will only hurt the environment and ultimately, us.
Yes they this may make them to turn out and vote. But I encourage the media to point out every stupid decision, every criminal move, every hypocritical stance, every act of cronyism, every idiotic bureaucratic appointment, every level of graft. This is a herculean task, as there are only 24 hours in a day.
I claimed it in 2016 too! And nobody believed me. Not one of my friends or family thought that Trump could pull it off. I told them that the more people criticize him and the more hyperbolic those criticisms become, the more he will push back (because he is a purely reactive individual, which means that negative attention only fuels his ego and gives him more ammunition to do what he does best, which is promote himself), and his supporters will get more and more energized and turn out to vote for him. And it happened.
I get your thinking but I disagree. Donald’s cult will turn out to vote for him. What elected him was Democrats not turning out. That isn’t going to be the case in 2020. As far as The Cult Of Donald goes- it doesn’t matter. You can kick them in the ass or kiss their ass, they will still vote the same. Those votes are essentially already in. Nothing we can say or do is going to change them.
We can disagree on whether Hitler comparisons drive people to him. I happen to think not, those who are upset by such comparisons are already in his cult. I think when you put infants in concentration camps, comparisons to Nazis are entirely appropriate and entirely accurate.
Rightfully so, given that’s not why he was elected.
If there’s any situation in America that’s comparable to concentration camps, it’s the ongoing incarceration of nonviolent offenders in a private prison industry which treats humans like cattle and warehouses thousands of people (separating them from their families) in a gigantic complex of prisons that is the most extensive one on earth, as far as I know, entangling them in years of legal hell, disenfranchising them from participating in the democratic process, taking away years of their lives which they will never get back, and destroying the cohesion of minority communities. This issue has outraged me for years and I have always and will always speak out against it.
But in doing so, I have never and will never compare it to the Holocaust.
The Holocaust happened because people didn’t speak out about the stuff that happened prior to the Holocaust happening. Some of those children who Trump locked up are dead, raped, abused, traumatized, etc. It’ll get worse if people sit around with their thumbs up their asses saying “gosh, it’s not as bad as the Holocaust yet.”
I guess what I’m trying to say is, it’s possible to speak up against that stuff without comparing it to the Holocaust! Just criticize it for the evil that it is - call it evil, call it sadistic, call it un-American. Compare it to its historical analogues like the Japanese internment.
It’s like, if I was to say “the Yankees got raped last night”, a lot of people would get on me for trivializing the word “rape”, appropriating a horrific and traumatic concept to talk about a baseball game. And they’d be correct.
This is the same thing, as far as I’m concerned. But hey, if you don’t see it that way, there’s nothing I can do about that. I’m not trying to turn you into a different person - I’m just making my position known.
But, sadly, it is accurate to compare it to the actions of the Nazis. Not the Holocaust, yet, but that’s why we speak up; people who don’t pay attention need to know just how bad things are getting.
The Nazi’s declared entire populations, citizens and non, extra-judicial based upon physical and religious similarities and began concentrating these populations into camps starting in 1933.
The gassing and killing happened later, turning their concentration camps into death camps.
Even Harry Turtledove agrees, and who would I consider the more expert at this: some rando Trump supporters on a message board or a man who has explored for over 20 years, via fiction, the ways America could have turned into a fascist state at certain times in her history?
Oh, and what do we have here?
I think fiction writers have, almost by definition, over-active imaginations.
Nazis are the type of people who gas 6 million people to death. So therefore if you didn’t gas 6 million people to death you are not a nazi. How about 5 million? 1?
Nazis did more than gas 6 million. You can talk about all kinds of aspects and behaviors that aren’t “holocaust.”
Donald reads Mein Kampf at bedtime. And he doesn’t read. What does that tell you?
He is using the nazi playbook and, oh the humanity!, he is getting called out for the brazen naziness of it, but some people want to hide this comparison, because they are snowflakes and they understand the trajectory but think they are on the prevailing side, the authoritarian side.
Dinesh D’Souza just retweeted a #BurnTheJews hashtag.
https://twitter.com/smoobydog/status/1012903608839557121?s=19
Again, I am quite comfortable calling them concentration camps.
After many years of seeing science or historical fiction I concluded that in reality the best ones are really about criticism of the status quo that should not ignore clear warnings about the use of new ideas or technology. Thus, failing to get the future right (in this case, the people eventually dropping Trump as the disaster of a human being he is as even reasonable guys on the right warned us early on) is actually the result writers like Turtledove are going for.
Fiction that turns into reality is actually one that failed to influence people into avoiding danger.
I posted this at the very start of the Trump maladministration:
I remember that in the classic documentary of WWII “The World at War” One very telling part of the general mentality of the Germans back then was shown when a German woman testified to the documentary makers. She reported that she began to hate Hitler only when the war came to them in German proper.
But it was not hatred against the regime. It was like the hatred one has among gangsters when they cross each other. Because Hitler promised them that they would win half of the world so he asked them to help him by supporting him; and now they had nothing, just their clothes.
Of course, the Germans that were like that in WWII were the “sage” ones.
I don’t expect any army to invade us, but I do think that other bone headed things that autocrats and dictators typically do will undermine the American economy. Just as it took place in Nazi Germany. Germany was recovering economically right when the Nazis were taking power and some got the wrong lesson from that that the fascist state was good and efficient. (Not really)
One big lesson from those days is that science is an even more international effort than it was in those days, and the ethnic cleansing that was attempted by Hitler ended sending the best and brightest to other nations that eventually did eat the lunch of the axis powers. That can happen here even if no war takes place.
Fascists are not here, but we need to confront the wannabe ones to prevent more serious ones from coming.
I won’t compare Trump to Hitler. No point in it. Hitler was much, much smarter. Yes there are the similaritities of overt racisum and bigoty, and things my play out the same way, o a degee.
It’s a similar but different game. Trump isn’t leading his supporters. His supporters are egging him on to do more and more. As long as they cheer in his MAGA hats, he will push. To where? No one knows. Least of all, and certainly not Trump. He is only after some more money and the adulation of his fans. He doesn’t give a shit about the US.
The problem with this kind of ‘leadership’ is that it is the same as chasing a blind dog through a mine field. It rarely works out well.
That isn’t how it started. Want to wait until you’re really really sure?