If men can get pregnant, and if 2+2 can equal 5, then anything Trump does, or doesn't do, is equally proof of his authoritarianism. And if you disagree, you're a science denier. And a white supremacist.
When will someone point out that Trump can't be a white supremacist...he's too orange. Or maybe he just wants to be seen as orange, to get away with being white, the essence of authoritarianism.
Firstly, that Linus video needs a trigger warning. Second, it's about time...Orange folk are perhaps the most disenfranchised minority group of all! Rabble! Rabble!
I'm confused Daniel. I thought we had established, several weeks ago, refusing to believe that "men can get pregnant, or that 2+2 can equal 5", made me a Nazi. Now you claim that I'm a "science denier". And a "white supremacist". Perplexing!
As a non-expert, it seems to me that the essence of authoritarianism is arresting your political opponents for conduct that is not a crime, but calling it a crime and relying on experts to explain that it is a crime and must be punished because allowing your opponents to engage in such conduct would be authoritarian.
Caustic tweeter on the payroll. Pathetic codswallop from a Regime apologist. People, you have to understand that there are very few people in their camp. The issue is institutional control. We aren’t going to wrest control of those institutions from them. We need to form and patronize our own institutions and make them irrelevant. That includes the government btw. What exciting actions has the GOP tajen since they got the house? I’d wait but life is finite. Substack and other alternative sites are doing this and we need to diversify the alternatives in other fields as well. You can’t unsee the propaganda or disconnect all the connected dots. Do you like watching the political messaging on every commercial during a game?
Or the astroturf identitarian stuff woven into everything? “Welcome to Chopped, Jose. Tell us about how sad your life in Guatemala was and how you incorporate Guatemalan recipes into your cooking.” “But I like to make French food.” “ Yeah Jose, but with a Guatemalan homage to remind your diners about your oppression, like tiny land mines mixed into the empanadas.” “ No, I make escargot, tournedos Rossini, that kind of stuff.” “ Make a fucking empanada Jose. Do it. Do it now or get out!” Most people get that it’s all performative BS.
The NeoCommie matrix is losing, but like every cornered animal they are getting more vicious as they sense the end is nigh. The question at this point is mostly how much we all have to suffer before they are gone. And how they go out. If it’s the CCP-Russia-Iran-NK dbag axis, we’re in for big trouble.
I think that Ruth is doing what the entire academic-media-political complex does, but she's clumsy enough that she helps to make it obvious. She's extremely useful as an example of the way something in the culture works, while being merely a dolt as an individual.
Yep, these are what we call useful idiots. Just think if many of these people had families, children, planned community events and went to church,… then they’d not be the pawns that they have become. Really sad to be honest, and quite depressing.
Having taught political science and the history of ideas, it is depressing and nauseating in equal amounts to see quite clearly defined ideas (at their core; the edges of -isms are always fuzzy as ideas when put to practice are more akin to Venn-diagrams than flow-charts) subjected reductio in absurdum. Is she ignorant or is she performing this nivellation of meaning on purpose, and what purpose if so?
A core component of fascism is that the nation-state (not just state, the idea of nation is paramount) should rest on a given known set of values and beliefs, shared by everyone and embodied in every aspect of daily life.
That in itself is not without problems. Using only that definition, the most fascist soceities today are China, Iran, Saudi, USA and Israel. China should be obvious why, Iran and Saudi both have islam at its purest form as the idea permeating all of society and the US post-WW2 have a set on ideas I'll appropriate the term "american exceptionalism" to encompass, while Israel is based on judaism as a racial-cultural identity and zionism [a version of manifest destiny] as a political racially supremacist such.
Ack, such a tangle. What to do? We can't have too vague a definition, we need more.
Another vertebrae of fascism is the joining and melding together of key economical and societal power-players within the nation, with the state istelf and its military/police forces. "Nothing above the state; nothing beyond the state" as the founder of fascism said. Unions will thus act as intermediary between worker and employer and employer and state and worker and state to pick one example. The task being to maintain peace (no strikes, no lock-outs) and order in the workforce and among the owning class each, both satisfied with the security that removing the randomness of the market brings (humans do not like randomness and chaos in their lives). Also, it need not be a union in the 20th century sense, it may well be any other "special interest group" or "community leader" acting as spokeshead and intermediary fufilling the same role. A lobby group fulfills the criteria quite well.
It's not looking good for my cherry-picked sample nations does it?
What else?
Militarism, and worship of martial ideals. Weeeellll, about that... Don't really need to say anything more about the nations chosen, do I?
Near-constant war-mongering against a designated enemy - abstract or concrete. See above.
Finally, control over communication and media. Classically overt due to the technology of the time, nowadays it can be almost fully automated and the media/comtech companies' fulfill the role as intermediary and gatekeeper/sheepdog as described for unions above.
Oh dear, I just gone and called the US of post WW2 fascist, have I? Not to mention that Israel would represent the offspring of fascism using the defintions and cut-offs above. Oh dear me what a mess I've made.
Just goes to show how dangerous it is to try and use ideological terms and labels as arguments, without really knowing what they stand for
Edited because excuses reasons rationalisations for mistakes.
I am sort of a middle-aged church lady with a rebellious streak from studying journalism back in the day whose view of the US has completely changed.
It started out innocently enough by reading Chaos (which dismantled the Mason murders narrative while suggesting a possible CIA connection.)
Then I listened to the audiobook of The Devil’s Chessboard. The most striking thing to me is that the intelligence state viewed Kennedy as “a moral degenerate AND a national security threat.” Hmmm, sounded like the description given a more recent politician, thought I.
Then I started reading Whitney Webb regarding Epstein’s “suicide” and his decades-long criminality linked to all the same bi-partisan “leaders.” All this, with the Covid-tide tyranny raging. So now I think I grew up in a fascist country (that promotes permanent war and enriches an international elite.) Digital currency will be the final stroke.
I'm really struggling to find interest in all of these goings ons. Normally I'd probably be pretty angry at what they are doing. But it almost feels like it's a performance on all sides. Anyone else getting that feeling? Don't get me wrong, we've probably crossed the rubicon and it will be up to a remnant of us to rebuild this nation in the next 50-100 years, but this week it just all seems so theatrical.
The academy was running on fumes by the mid-1970s, having forsaken beauty, truth and “what is the good life” in the humanities [see Jacques Barzen’s critique] so it was totally ripe for creeping neo-Marxism and deconstruction. I suspect sciences became ethnically unmoored in pursuit of funding — leading us to the present moment.
Also an academic refugee - I think their main issue is focusing too much on diversity and doing/saying anything to get a grant. I knew a professor that got grants just so he’d have the money to boss grad students around. They become mini dictators and they can virtue signal at the same time with their diverse set of grad students
As a fellow refugee from the asylum, I am compelled to point out that many, (but not all), of the full profs with whom I shared the hallowed halls expected, no, demanded to be treated as gods by their grad students.
If men can get pregnant, and if 2+2 can equal 5, then anything Trump does, or doesn't do, is equally proof of his authoritarianism. And if you disagree, you're a science denier. And a white supremacist.
OBVIOUSLY
When will someone point out that Trump can't be a white supremacist...he's too orange. Or maybe he just wants to be seen as orange, to get away with being white, the essence of authoritarianism.
https://youtu.be/H2H0TfvNU3w
We need a new Critical Orange Studies discipline to make sense of it all.
Firstly, that Linus video needs a trigger warning. Second, it's about time...Orange folk are perhaps the most disenfranchised minority group of all! Rabble! Rabble!
🗨 they're obviously separated by denominational differences
😂 Charlie Brown is the ultimate philosopher!
🗨 there are three things they have they're never to discuss with people: religion, politics, and the Great Pumpkin
IF !!??!! To the gallows with you!
I'm confused Daniel. I thought we had established, several weeks ago, refusing to believe that "men can get pregnant, or that 2+2 can equal 5", made me a Nazi. Now you claim that I'm a "science denier". And a "white supremacist". Perplexing!
And it goes without saying: in the CurrentYear if you disagree with someone whose ancestors came from the Pale of Settlement, you're an anti-dentite.
The upside to being an anti-dentite is that it transcends any requirement to scroll down to "Early Life".
As a non-expert, it seems to me that the essence of authoritarianism is arresting your political opponents for conduct that is not a crime, but calling it a crime and relying on experts to explain that it is a crime and must be punished because allowing your opponents to engage in such conduct would be authoritarian.
I guess it is easy to be an expert in authoritarianism when you are one.
Takes one to know one...
TDS really affects cognition just like long Covid.
Long TDS needs to be a thing.
Charlie Hurts opinion in WT really covers the disease. More like rabies than Covid.
Loaded dice: the essence of authoritarianism.
Exactly.
Caustic tweeter on the payroll. Pathetic codswallop from a Regime apologist. People, you have to understand that there are very few people in their camp. The issue is institutional control. We aren’t going to wrest control of those institutions from them. We need to form and patronize our own institutions and make them irrelevant. That includes the government btw. What exciting actions has the GOP tajen since they got the house? I’d wait but life is finite. Substack and other alternative sites are doing this and we need to diversify the alternatives in other fields as well. You can’t unsee the propaganda or disconnect all the connected dots. Do you like watching the political messaging on every commercial during a game?
Or the astroturf identitarian stuff woven into everything? “Welcome to Chopped, Jose. Tell us about how sad your life in Guatemala was and how you incorporate Guatemalan recipes into your cooking.” “But I like to make French food.” “ Yeah Jose, but with a Guatemalan homage to remind your diners about your oppression, like tiny land mines mixed into the empanadas.” “ No, I make escargot, tournedos Rossini, that kind of stuff.” “ Make a fucking empanada Jose. Do it. Do it now or get out!” Most people get that it’s all performative BS.
The NeoCommie matrix is losing, but like every cornered animal they are getting more vicious as they sense the end is nigh. The question at this point is mostly how much we all have to suffer before they are gone. And how they go out. If it’s the CCP-Russia-Iran-NK dbag axis, we’re in for big trouble.
A lot. We have to suffer a lot before they're gone.
When we have nothing left to lose the fighting will start for some of us
Bingo
She"s special.
…”she”…. ?
Logic? What logic? A new brand of pumpkin latte in town? Mayhaps I should try it asap, gonna hurry up.
Ruth is an low IQ individual. Don’t even bother with her.
I think that Ruth is doing what the entire academic-media-political complex does, but she's clumsy enough that she helps to make it obvious. She's extremely useful as an example of the way something in the culture works, while being merely a dolt as an individual.
Yep, these are what we call useful idiots. Just think if many of these people had families, children, planned community events and went to church,… then they’d not be the pawns that they have become. Really sad to be honest, and quite depressing.
Indeed. Like Lt. Aldo Raine of "Inglorious Basterds", I prefer my Nazis in-uniform.
Having taught political science and the history of ideas, it is depressing and nauseating in equal amounts to see quite clearly defined ideas (at their core; the edges of -isms are always fuzzy as ideas when put to practice are more akin to Venn-diagrams than flow-charts) subjected reductio in absurdum. Is she ignorant or is she performing this nivellation of meaning on purpose, and what purpose if so?
A core component of fascism is that the nation-state (not just state, the idea of nation is paramount) should rest on a given known set of values and beliefs, shared by everyone and embodied in every aspect of daily life.
That in itself is not without problems. Using only that definition, the most fascist soceities today are China, Iran, Saudi, USA and Israel. China should be obvious why, Iran and Saudi both have islam at its purest form as the idea permeating all of society and the US post-WW2 have a set on ideas I'll appropriate the term "american exceptionalism" to encompass, while Israel is based on judaism as a racial-cultural identity and zionism [a version of manifest destiny] as a political racially supremacist such.
Ack, such a tangle. What to do? We can't have too vague a definition, we need more.
Another vertebrae of fascism is the joining and melding together of key economical and societal power-players within the nation, with the state istelf and its military/police forces. "Nothing above the state; nothing beyond the state" as the founder of fascism said. Unions will thus act as intermediary between worker and employer and employer and state and worker and state to pick one example. The task being to maintain peace (no strikes, no lock-outs) and order in the workforce and among the owning class each, both satisfied with the security that removing the randomness of the market brings (humans do not like randomness and chaos in their lives). Also, it need not be a union in the 20th century sense, it may well be any other "special interest group" or "community leader" acting as spokeshead and intermediary fufilling the same role. A lobby group fulfills the criteria quite well.
It's not looking good for my cherry-picked sample nations does it?
What else?
Militarism, and worship of martial ideals. Weeeellll, about that... Don't really need to say anything more about the nations chosen, do I?
Near-constant war-mongering against a designated enemy - abstract or concrete. See above.
Finally, control over communication and media. Classically overt due to the technology of the time, nowadays it can be almost fully automated and the media/comtech companies' fulfill the role as intermediary and gatekeeper/sheepdog as described for unions above.
Oh dear, I just gone and called the US of post WW2 fascist, have I? Not to mention that Israel would represent the offspring of fascism using the defintions and cut-offs above. Oh dear me what a mess I've made.
Just goes to show how dangerous it is to try and use ideological terms and labels as arguments, without really knowing what they stand for
Edited because excuses reasons rationalisations for mistakes.
One of your better rants Sir! Thank you.
Thank you right back!
Carl Eric Scott pointed out up-thread that she is of all things a professor.
If I get more angry at her, I'll need to don my purple pants.
But, but, but ... purple is not your colour. [pause] Is it?
I am sort of a middle-aged church lady with a rebellious streak from studying journalism back in the day whose view of the US has completely changed.
It started out innocently enough by reading Chaos (which dismantled the Mason murders narrative while suggesting a possible CIA connection.)
Then I listened to the audiobook of The Devil’s Chessboard. The most striking thing to me is that the intelligence state viewed Kennedy as “a moral degenerate AND a national security threat.” Hmmm, sounded like the description given a more recent politician, thought I.
Then I started reading Whitney Webb regarding Epstein’s “suicide” and his decades-long criminality linked to all the same bi-partisan “leaders.” All this, with the Covid-tide tyranny raging. So now I think I grew up in a fascist country (that promotes permanent war and enriches an international elite.) Digital currency will be the final stroke.
Being authoritarian is forcing everybody to do what you want. Your word and whim is law. One does not have to be criminal.
Next-to-last paragraph made me laugh out loud “Did he take a walk on Monday...?” all of it - so good 🙌🏼😂
her brain must be tied in knots
I'm really struggling to find interest in all of these goings ons. Normally I'd probably be pretty angry at what they are doing. But it almost feels like it's a performance on all sides. Anyone else getting that feeling? Don't get me wrong, we've probably crossed the rubicon and it will be up to a remnant of us to rebuild this nation in the next 50-100 years, but this week it just all seems so theatrical.
There's fodder here for a disquisition on "binary" and "identity."
Probably, but do I have enough whiskey to face it?
"...enough whiskey..."
Oxymoron detected.
LOLOLOL
If you keep focusing on Ruth you're going to end up cross-eyed.
I keep unfollowing her, but she lures me back in by being....that. I swear I'll stop at some point.
Thank you for this take down of this fraud.
Do you have a theory that explains why the American academy produces such lame scholars? I wonder what you think.
I just sighed so heavily you may have heard it. I'm a refugee from academia, and I can barely bring myself to discuss it. Maybe at some point.
The academy was running on fumes by the mid-1970s, having forsaken beauty, truth and “what is the good life” in the humanities [see Jacques Barzen’s critique] so it was totally ripe for creeping neo-Marxism and deconstruction. I suspect sciences became ethnically unmoored in pursuit of funding — leading us to the present moment.
Also an academic refugee - I think their main issue is focusing too much on diversity and doing/saying anything to get a grant. I knew a professor that got grants just so he’d have the money to boss grad students around. They become mini dictators and they can virtue signal at the same time with their diverse set of grad students
As a fellow refugee from the asylum, I am compelled to point out that many, (but not all), of the full profs with whom I shared the hallowed halls expected, no, demanded to be treated as gods by their grad students.
Does the concept of a Hot House Orchid mean anything to you in this context?