Trump Supporters are Imbeciles

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Re: Trump Supporters are Imbeciles

Post by Scot Dutchy » Tue May 05, 2020 10:26 pm

:ftfl:rn:
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Re: Trump Supporters are Imbeciles

Post by JimC » Tue May 05, 2020 10:57 pm

Exactly, Scot. :tea:
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Re: Trump Supporters are Imbeciles

Post by laklak » Tue May 05, 2020 11:02 pm

Here's a Commie traitor Bernie Bro publicly advocating burning down an American City and murdering conservatives!!!!! (Don't let that "reeducation" thing fool you, gulags are EXTERMINATION CAMPS).

This is why I keep assault weapons. ALL Progressives are murdering Stalinists.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video ... _nazi.html
Yeah well that's just, like, your opinion, man.

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Re: Trump Supporters are Imbeciles

Post by Seabass » Tue May 05, 2020 11:35 pm

laklak wrote:
Tue May 05, 2020 11:02 pm
Here's a Commie traitor Bernie Bro publicly advocating burning down an American City and murdering conservatives!!!!! (Don't let that "reeducation" thing fool you, gulags are EXTERMINATION CAMPS).

This is why I keep assault weapons. ALL Progressives are murdering Stalinists.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video ... _nazi.html
Here are the problems with this analogy.

James O'Keefe shyster and I've seen no evidence that this Kyle Jurek person is actually affiliated in some way with Bernie's campaign. And even if he is, it's only one guy. Hardly comparable to the millions of Trump supporters who continue to support him even as he continues to have an actual white supremacist (not hyperbole*) run our immigration policy.


* https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/201 ... ked-emails
https://www.splcenter.org/stephen-mille ... art-emails
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Re: Trump Supporters are Imbeciles

Post by Hermit » Wed May 06, 2020 12:02 am

Seabass wrote:
Tue May 05, 2020 11:35 pm
laklak wrote:
Tue May 05, 2020 11:02 pm
Here's a Commie traitor Bernie Bro publicly advocating burning down an American City and murdering conservatives!!!!! (Don't let that "reeducation" thing fool you, gulags are EXTERMINATION CAMPS).

This is why I keep assault weapons. ALL Progressives are murdering Stalinists.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video ... _nazi.html
Here are the problems with this analogy.

James O'Keefe shyster and I've seen no evidence that this Kyle Jurek person is actually affiliated in some way with Bernie's campaign. And even if he is, it's only one guy.
Kyle Jurek is (or was) an Iowa field organizer for the Sanders campaign, and he named seven other likeminded individuals that worked for Sanders's election campaign.

Whatever. Laklak made a valid point: Extrapolating from the few to the many is bad practice. I am with you in this regard:
Seabass wrote:
Sat May 02, 2020 8:09 pm
The Nazi party existed for two decades before it liquidated its first Jew. Today, we tend to see the Nazis as machine gun toting, swastika wearing movie stereotypes, but the fact is, they were just moms and dads, and brothers and sisters, students, co-workers, joggers, bird-watchers, stamp collectors, and violinists, just like everyone else. They were otherwise normal people who got swept up in an ugly political movement that scapegoated minorities and immigrants, a political movement that would eventually end up killing 70 million.
Seabass wrote:
Sat May 02, 2020 10:08 pm
Do you think 100% of Germans who voted for the NSDAP were chest thumping white nationalists who wanted an all white state? They weren't. They were patriots, nationalists, good Christians, salt of the earth, and all that sort of thing.
Seabass wrote:
Tue May 05, 2020 9:49 pm
My point in bringing up parallels between Trumpmerica and Nazi Germany is to point out that we Americans aren't better than them. We aren't unique. There isn't something special about us that makes us immune to fascism. We aren't above it. We aren't too civilized. It CAN happen here. And indeed it appears to be happening here, at least to a degree. Will we see the Republicans gassing Muslims and Mexicans ten, twenty years from now? Probably not. Well, I hope not, anyway. But it is disturbing to see the not only indifference, but the support of the cruelty of this administration. And every time I think things can't get uglier, things get uglier. So I really don't know how bad things can get.
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Re: Trump Supporters are Imbeciles

Post by pErvinalia » Wed May 06, 2020 12:19 am

Brian Peacock wrote:
Tue May 05, 2020 9:11 pm
I'm challenging you about falling back on this Nazi narrative, because it's too simplistic. It implies that each one of them have made a considered, immoral choice to be malign, hate-filled bigot and that, by implication, you naturally have an elevated moral position because you're able to point this out.
He's not implying any such thing, and in fact he's explicitly countered this. Both him and Hermit* have pointed out that most Nazi supporters were 'ordinary' people who got swept up in a movement.

* If I'm not misremembering
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Re: Trump Supporters are Imbeciles

Post by JimC » Wed May 06, 2020 12:24 am

To me, Brian's main point seems to be that a lot of Trump supporters are the working poor whose health, employment and overall welfare have been on the down hill slide in America for a long time, and they gave up believing that business-as-usual politics, progressive or otherwise would improve their lot. Of course they were sold a pup by the powerful and rich backers behind Trump, but their festering anger is a powerful force...
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Re: Trump Supporters are Imbeciles

Post by pErvinalia » Wed May 06, 2020 12:43 am

And I believe that Seabass's point it that notwithstanding this, minorities have to deal with the actions of these people.
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Re: Trump Supporters are Imbeciles

Post by Hermit » Wed May 06, 2020 1:24 am

pErvinalia wrote:
Wed May 06, 2020 12:19 am
Brian Peacock wrote:
Tue May 05, 2020 9:11 pm
I'm challenging you about falling back on this Nazi narrative, because it's too simplistic. It implies that each one of them have made a considered, immoral choice to be malign, hate-filled bigot and that, by implication, you naturally have an elevated moral position because you're able to point this out.
He's not implying any such thing, and in fact he's explicitly countered this. Both him and Hermit* have pointed out that most Nazi supporters were 'ordinary' people who got swept up in a movement.

* If I'm not misremembering
Yes, I have mentioned that a few times.

There are some disturbing parallels between the fall of the Weimar Republic and the current state of the USA. Hitler was going to make Germany great again. His tirades against the fake news media (Lügenpresse) were notable. Big business like Krupp, Merck, BASF, Thiessen etc were firmly on his side. The Sturmabteilung (SA) started off as an eight man group of beer hall bouncers. The men came from the many militias that started off all over Germany after WWI because Germany was not allowed an army with any more than 100,000 soldiers, and that was regarded as insufficient to protect against the communist threat. The people were fed up with democracy because democratic Weimar was plainly incapable of ensuring their welfare. Hitler promised them a better future. The people believed that he could and would do that. And he did - until the Soviet army's counter-offensive late in 1942.

By that time the Shoah had hardly even begun. The "Final Solution", the deliberate and systematic genocide starting across German-occupied Europe was formulated in procedural and geopolitical terms by Nazi leadership in January 1942 at the Wannsee Conference. The first permanent gas ovens were installed in March that year. Before that, ethnic cleansing meant expelling non-Aryans from Germany. In June 1941 Franz Rademacher, head of the Jewish Department of the German Foreign Office, proposed the forcible removal of Germany's Jews to Madagascar. It was genocide by other means. Madascar could not sustain the lives of four million people. The salient point, however, is that Nazi Germany had no plans for genocide until June 1941.

Also, it was not original idea. It was a plan the polish government came up with in 1937. In August 1940 Adolf Eichmann wrote in a memorandum that sending a million Jews a year to that Island for the next four years was doable. It wasn't on account of the British naval blockade. At first it was postponed. After the Battle of Britain was lost it was postponed again. In 1942 it was finally abandoned, replaced by the "Final Solution".

The genocide by the Nazis was not universal, by the way. Unless you were Jewish, Slav or Romani you had nothing to fear.
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Re: Trump Supporters are Imbeciles

Post by JimC » Wed May 06, 2020 2:23 am

pErvinalia wrote:
Wed May 06, 2020 12:43 am
And I believe that Seabass's point it that notwithstanding this, minorities have to deal with the actions of these people.
How many of them really buy into the really racist part?
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Re: Trump Supporters are Imbeciles

Post by Hermit » Wed May 06, 2020 3:15 am

JimC wrote:
Wed May 06, 2020 2:23 am
pErvinalia wrote:
Wed May 06, 2020 12:43 am
And I believe that Seabass's point it that notwithstanding this, minorities have to deal with the actions of these people.
How many of them really buy into the really racist part?
My guess is no more in number than before Trump, but now they feel less inhibited to act on their racism. I mean if their own president thinks it's AOK to tell four congresswomen of colour, three of whom are natural born US citizens and one of whom is a naturalised one, to go back to the countries they came from...

Image
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Re: Trump Supporters are Imbeciles

Post by Sean Hayden » Wed May 06, 2020 6:31 am

I've never had a president that hasn't promised to restore/maintain a great America.

...

Image

...
Gallup first measured trust in the mass media in a 1972 survey when 68% of Americans said they trusted it. Similar levels were recorded in 1974 (69%) and 1976 (72%), but two decades later, when Gallup next asked the question, trust had fallen to 53%.

Although overall trust was at the majority level until 2004, no more than 21% of Americans dating back to 1972 ever said they had the greatest level of trust. Currently, 13% have a great deal of trust, 28% a fair amount, 30% not very much and 28% none at all.
...
FBI arrests leader of private militia accused of detaining migrants on US border
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics ... -us-border
INFORMANT REVEALS FBI’S ALREADY VAST POWERS TO INVESTIGATE RIGHT-WING EXTREMISTS
https://theintercept.com/2019/10/20/fbi ... terrorism/

Any textbook for a course on terrorism will have more details about how seriously the feds take countering any unruly militias.

...

Support for democracy comes and goes, and there is disagreement about whether it has really waned all that much in the US.

...

Sorry for the lazy approach.

--//--

When I was thinking about it earlier I realized that I've been told the US was on the verge of becoming the next Nazi Germany since I was a kid. Interestingly, it hasn't always been from the same political groups. I guess everybody wants a bit of that action!
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Re: Trump Supporters are Imbeciles

Post by Brian Peacock » Wed May 06, 2020 7:02 am

pErvinalia wrote:
Tue May 05, 2020 7:54 am
Regardless of who's in charge of the nation nothing really changes for these people as far as their opinions go, their fears, hopes, their attitudes or values.
That's simply not true, as we can see repeatedly in the success of the politics of fear.

More broadly, it kind of doesn't matter that these people (and all of us) are a product of their history and socio-political influences. The outcome of all that conditioning is still a frightfully stupid and dangerous collection of people. Sure, we can accept that they have been moulded by specific groups and their interests, but in the end they are still just as dangerous and need dealing with.
I guess this is where we disagree. How exactly are we to deal with 'these people'? I mean, we can shout at them all day long but what are we actually achieving by that? Aren't we just giving them cause to entrench their views, to feel pressured and threatened and under attack, to feel a greater sense of solidarity with those with possibly even more extreme views who are all too ready to exploit their fears and insecurities?
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Re: Trump Supporters are Imbeciles

Post by pErvinalia » Wed May 06, 2020 7:10 am

Well we need to deal with them with the legal system and potentially with physical confrontation if the legal system loses its independence and/or the legislative system enshrines bigotry.

You seem to be advocating dialogue with these people. Not sure that's really possible. What we really need is our political leaders to start acting in a way that instils confidence and respect for the whole of society, not just the top few percent and their mates.
Last edited by pErvinalia on Wed May 06, 2020 7:13 am, edited 2 times in total.
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Re: Trump Supporters are Imbeciles

Post by Hermit » Wed May 06, 2020 7:12 am

Sean, you've never had a president who turned "MAGA" and "fake news" into keystones of his campaign, and yes, big business supports the neoliberals as well as the conservatives. Well, duh. You never had a President who could boast that he could shoot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue without losing any of his supporters. You never had a president who told congresswomen of colour, three of whom were natural born US citizens and one of whom was a naturalised US citizen, to go back to the countries they came from. You never had a president who suggested that a naturalised US citizen had a conflict of interest on account of his Mexican ancestry while presiding over a court case brought against Trump University. As for the militia, it's early days. The SA started with a membership of eight in November 1919. By January 1933, when Hitler was about to be appointed chancellor, and almost two months before he became dictator, it had grown to 2 million. That was 20 times the size of the German army. No FBI could contain, let alone control a militia like that.

But yeah, don't worry about a thing. ...cannot possibly happen...
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