A thread for Democrats Only by THGRRI

REAL WORLD EVENT DISCUSSIONS

A thread for Democrats Only

POSTED BY: THGRRI
UPDATED: Wednesday, March 13, 2024 08:08
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Saturday, December 9, 2023 7:54 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Even Michael Rappaport said he's going to vote for Trump. And that dude is a Lefty psychopath.

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Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.

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Monday, December 11, 2023 8:03 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Book Review: Mount's 'Caesars' Examines How Wannabe Dictators Rise and Fall

A new book looks at how Julius Caesar’s legacy informs the strongmen of today.

By Daniel W. Drezner | December 10, 2023

https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/12/10/mount-big-little-casears-book-rev
iew-wannabe-dictators-johnson-trump/

We appear to be living in an age of aspiring Caesars.

Consider Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, Russian President Vladimir Putin, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, and, of course, former U.S. President Donald Trump. All were democratically elected in political systems with varying degrees of freedom and fairness. All weaponized their newfound state control in attempts to preserve their respective grips on power. Though some were more successful than others at doing so, all of these leaders weakened the democratic regimes that facilitated their rise.

This plague of wannabe strongmen is the topic of Ferdinand Mount’s Big Caesars and Little Caesars. To use a Britishism, Mount is a classic “wet Tory” who mixes establishment values with more liberal politics. He was educated at Eton and Christ Church college at the University of Oxford. He holds a family baronetcy; that family includes his first cousin once removed, former U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron. Mount headed up then-Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s Policy Unit in the 1980s before losing faith in Thatcherite ideological zeal. He subsequently edited the Times Literary Supplement in the 1990s and has taken to writing for the Daily Telegraph and the London Review of Books in this century.

The first words of his text are these: “Caesars are back, big Caesars and little Caesars, in big countries and little countries, in advanced nations and backward nations.”

From that Seussian opening, Mount’s book explores the concept of Caesarism and Caesars in politics: what causes their rise, and what causes their downfall. In Mount’s telling, a Caesar is an aspiring dictator intent on destroying existing institutions and establishing themselves as the maker and breaker of laws. Big Caesars differ from little Caesars in their ambition and their success. For Mount, where big Caesars distinguish themselves is that “their violence, their law-breaking, their lying, are on a huge, often limitless scale,” whereas little Caesars “go only as far as they need to” in rigging the system to suit their ambitions.

The subtitle of Mount’s book is “How they rise and how they fall—from Julius Caesar to Boris Johnson.” This captures one possible problem with the book before it even begins: The text mixes analysis of dictators such as Napoleon Bonaparte and Adolf Hitler with the likes of Johnson, the erstwhile British prime minister. The former are most definitely big Caesars, while it is hard to view Johnson as anything but a little Caesar. Fortunately, the book tackles this disparity well: As Mount explains, “the tricks and techniques [are] common to all Caesars, big and little. … They all operate along the same spectrum.”

Chapters exploring episodes such as the 1820 Cato Street Conspiracy—when a small group of radical activists plotted (and failed) to behead the entire British cabinet—or the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch in Munich—in which Hitler’s fledgling Nazi Party attempted to forcibly overthrow the Weimar Republic—demonstrate how close tin-pot dictators can become to the real thing. Caesarism that might be viewed as “little” in the West, such as Indira Gandhi’s state of emergency that lasted from 1975 to 1977, had serious repercussions. Gandhi’s moves had costs in the short term in the form of mass arrests and forced sterilizations designed by Gandhi’s son Sanjay to limit population growth. According to Mount, in the long-term, Gandhi’s actions provided an illiberal precedent for Modi to exploit.

In the case of Hitler, history repeats itself, first as farce and then as tragedy. His failed, illegal putsch paved the way for a trial that captured the public’s attention. After being pardoned from a prison sentence, Hitler pursued multiple tracks to power, combining electoral successes with street violence that intimidated opposing parties.

That history can rhyme this jarringly is worth remembering as Trump, the current front-runner for the 2024 Republican Party presidential nomination, seeks to return to the White House.

All wannabe Caesars rely heavily on the ability of propaganda to crowd out more factual history, Mount shows. Caesars conjure convenient narratives to sell to both their loyalists and to the key elites who they need to co-opt to acquire power. As Mount puts it, “time and propaganda sandpaper the rough edges, and the brutal and ruthless methods by which they seized power [are] explained away as unavoidable necessities.”

Sometimes the Caesars can do this with their own writing, as Napoleon did in his dispatches from the front, or as Hitler did with Mein Kampf. Even Caesars who lack wordsmithing capabilities can outsource the narrative to supportive publicists. Beside every aspiring Caesar is a malignant toady eager to write their “Flight 93 Election” essay, arguing that a political situation is so dire that extreme tactics, emergency measures, and unholy alliances are a justified route to acquiring power.

The best attribute of Big Caesars and Little Caesars is that more than half of the book focuses on Caesars’ downfalls. Mount posits that a combination of law enforcement, intelligence, eloquence, legality, and diligence by public officials will lead wannabe Caesars to their inevitable ruin. It is precisely because of the power of propaganda that an examination of Caesars’ decline and fall is necessary—otherwise, ordinary citizens might exaggerate these leaders’ political potency.

For example, Trump and his supporters like to present the so-called Make America Great Again movement as an unstoppable force. This spin elides some inconvenient facts. Trump lost the popular vote in 2016 by nearly 3 million votes; he lost the 2020 popular vote by more than double that number. The two midterm elections that have occurred since Trump stormed the national stage led to serious setbacks for the Republican Party. Trump currently faces four criminal indictments, and many of his followers and subordinates are being prosecuted as well. Pointing out how aspiring Caesars exit the political stage is crucial to puncturing the fear that their enduring victory is inevitable.

Mount’s efforts at persuasion are hampered by several flaws in his book’s presentation. The most obvious is his barely concealed desire to intellectually murder Johnson just to watch him die. Johnson’s role in campaigning for and then completing Brexit is a source of considerable ire for Mount, as are Johnson’s myriad other official peccadilloes.

It could be argued that Johnson won both the United Kingdom’s 2016 Brexit referendum and 2019 general election, democratically earning the right to make catastrophic policy mistakes. Mount will have none of this. He argues that the pro-Brexit campaign was an unholy mix of nationalism and what he calls “cakeism”—Johnson promising Britons that they could have their cake and eat it, too. As for Johnson’s 2019 electoral win, Mount asks derisively but fairly: “Had it really been such a brilliant triumph to wallop a Labour Party led by Jeremy Corbyn?”

Despite some valid points, the book suffers from its excessive focus on the little Caesar with the bad hair. Mount goes to far as to claim that “[t]here has been no more humiliating exit in British political history” than when Johnson exited No. 10 Downing St. in September 2022, mired in scandal.

Johnson’s exit was far from graceful, but that claim is risible. Johnson was replaced by Liz Truss, a policy and political trainwreck whose time as prime minister was limited to 49 chaotic days, the shortest premiership in British history. (Mount acknowledges this fact just one page after claiming Johnson’s exit was the most humiliating, raising questions about his—or his editor’s—short-term memory.)

A larger problem is that readers outside of the United Kingdom will feel a bit left out in the sections devoted to Johnson. Between that and a few other chapters devoted to Caesarism elsewhere in the world, half the book is about narrow corners of British history.

Unfortunately, when Mount crosses the pond to train his eye on the United States’ little Caesar, Trump, other flaws emerge. Like many English writers, Mount presents an air of political savvy about U.S. politics—but the moment that Big Caesars and Little Caesars tries to get specific about the United States, his grasp fades.

He writes, “In the United States, voter suppression is widespread and of long standing – sufficiently so to be referred to simply as VS.” I have taught political science for more than a quarter-century, and I have never once heard that acronym used for that purpose; my Americanist friends were also baffled.

Mount also claims that Trump’s first travel ban applied to “immigrants from most Muslim nations.” That executive order, while bigoted and counterproductive, was limited to seven countries; the Organization of Islamic Cooperation counts 57 member states. Mount concludes that what made Trump’s presidency unique was his nonstop campaigning and chaotic governing style, betraying his ignorance of Andrew Jackson’s 19th-century rise to the presidency.

Mount’s saddest error is when he dismisses Trump’s current campaign pledge to fire many executive branch bureaucrats because “no conceivable U.S. Congress would pass such a law.” That may be true, but it is also irrelevant; as president, Trump’s ability to run roughshod over the civil service was viable enough to prompt considerable discussion inside the Beltway about its implications. The threat now is big enough that the Biden administration has taken actions to make it more difficult for presidential successors to do what Trump wants to do.

Mount’s grasp on the global Caesar phenomenon is equally unsteady. He claims that Johnson and Trump were unique Caesars in focusing their ire on immigration, but that elides how Hungary’s Orban and Turkey’s Erdogan exploited fears of refugee flows to consolidate their holds on public office. More generally, Mount claims that “modern Caesarism has remained a strangely neglected subject” by scholars, which betrays an ignorance about recent and not-so-recent turns in political science scholarship. Over the past decade, social scientists have increased their focus on the role of individual leaders in world politics. The surge of research into populist nationalism has similarly exploded since the emergence of Trump and Brexit.

There is no entry for “populism” in Mount’s index, which might explain why he thinks no one has been paying attention to modern Caesars. Mount is interested in the leaders of these movements and how they rise to power; political scientists are more interested in the movements themselves, as well as their underlying causes. They are analyzing the same phenomenon, but from somewhat different angles. Mount writes that “Caesars become popular above all by raising national morale rather than by improving living standards” and that the “incoming Caesar loses no time in setting up an opposition between Us and Them.” These are both Populism 101 lessons.

Still, focusing on the Caesars themselves has some value; there is no denying that populist leaders often display peculiar psychologies. Those interested in how someone such as Boris Johnson could have been responsible for what was possibly the greatest foreign-policy own-goal in Great Britain’s history would do well to read Mount’s book.

Down load the free book Big Caesars and Little Caesars from the mirrors at https://libgen.is//search.php?req=Big+Caesars+and+Little+Caesars

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Monday, December 11, 2023 1:18 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
For example, Trump and his supporters like to present the so-called Make America Great Again movement as an unstoppable force. This spin elides some inconvenient facts. Trump lost the popular vote in 2016 by nearly 3 million votes; he lost the 2020 popular vote by more than double that number.

This is why California keeps breaking our hearts when they promise that they will secede from the Union and they never follow through.

2016 Presidential General Votes by State:

California: 8,753,788 Clinton / 4,483,810 Trump / Surplus Democrat Votes: 4,269,978

New York: 4,556,124 Clinton / 2,819,534 Trump / Surplus Democrat Votes: 1,736,590

Illinois: 3,090,729 Clinton / 2,146,015 Trump / Surplus Democrat Votes: 944,714

2020 Presidential General Votes by State:

California: 11,110,250 Biden / 6,006,429 Trump / Surplus Democrat Votes: 5,103,821

New York: 5,244,886 Biden / 3,251,997 Trump / Surplus Democrat Votes: 1,992,889

Illinois: 3,471,915 Biden / 2,446,891 Trump / Surplus Democrat Votes: 1,025,024

TOTAL 2016 VOTES: 65,853,625 Clinton / 62,985,106 Trump / Surplus Democrat Votes: 2,868,519

TOTAL 2020 VOTES: 81,284,666 Biden / 74,224,319 Trump / Surplus Democrat Votes: 7,060,347

In 2016 if California was not part of the Union, Trump won the popular vote among all 49 other states combined by 1,401,459.

In 2020 if California was not part of the Union, Trump only lost the popular vote among all 49 other states combined by 1,956,526. Remove New York too, and Trump won the popular vote among all 48 other states combined by 36,363.

Neither of these examples even need to remove Illinois from the popular vote totals for Trump to win.

This is why the Electoral College exists. So California and New York don't end up making policy for the entire fucking rest of the country that doesn't agree at all with how California and New York run things.

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Sunday, December 17, 2023 10:51 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Why are Americans getting shorter?

By Andrew Van Dam | December 15, 2023

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/12/15/why-are-americans-g
etting-shorter/

Elementary school children in the 1950s often received full meals, cooked that day, sometimes as part of a government-funded program. (Camerique/Getty Images)

You already know we’re getting heavier. Rising obesity rates are as American as apple pie — a cliché that seems freshly relevant in this context. But did you know we’re also getting shorter?

We didn’t! At least, not until we tried to use the National Health Interview Survey from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to figure out which professions boast the tallest workers.

We split the rankings by gender, so our analysis didn’t simply lead us to the most male-dominated jobs, such as mechanics and engineers. Among women, the tallest are public officials — a category that includes top executives as well as legislators — and a broad category that includes writers, artists, entertainers and athletes. Among men, the tallest are, again, public officials, who share that distinction with sales representatives.

This made us wonder: Heights are self-reported in this survey, and the tallest professions are known for their spin skills. So, could the great American height slump somehow be fueled by Americans growing more honest about their stature?

Well, no. We saw similar results in the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, a separate, gold-standard CDC data set that deputizes trained personnel to measure people’s height, weight and other dimensions according to a 91-page-manual. If anything, that source shows an even sharper decline in America’s height — though we’re still talking about fractions of an inch. Height shifts slowly, especially at the national level.

Similarly, a truly immense analysis of expert measurements in 200 countries and territories found that height had slipped among 19-year-old Americans in the late 1990s and 2000s. Nineteen-year-old American men were the 36th-tallest globally in 1985, but by 2019, they were 47th. Women the same age fell from 38th to 58th, behind China and Lebanon.

Also, we’re not as bad at guessing our measurements as you might think. In a 2020 analysis, American Cancer Society researchers asked more than 2,600 Americans to state their height and weight, and then — without warning — weighed and measured them. Their findings show that a large majority of us know our height within two inches, and our weight within 10-plus pounds. (Though we all tend to err on the svelte side.)

If anything, self-reported heights underestimate our national shortening, according to a separate U.S. comparison of self-reported and expert-measured heights. “Data showed that overreporting of height increased over time in both men and women,” the report’s authors write, “while underreporting of weight increased in men but not women.”

And there may be a perfectly reasonable explanation why public officials and sales representatives are so tall: bias. We prefer towering politicians — we last picked a president of below-average height for his era, William McKinley, in 1896 — and studies of people such as hiring managers often find that they believe a taller salesman, for example, will impress customers.

The most diminutive occupations hold another clue. The shortest men work on farms, while the shortest women clean. Both professions hire the highest share of immigrant workers for their respective genders. And Americans who were born outside the country tend to be much shorter than folks who were born here — it’s one of the biggest height gaps we saw.

The immigrant share of the U.S. workforce has almost doubled since 1994, from 11 percent to 20 percent, according to our analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics data. Could immigration explain American shrinkage?

It’s certainly a major factor. But it’s not the only one. Even among native-born Americans, heights have slipped. That inspired us to look at the other subtle-but-seismic shift in the American workforce: aging.

As we hit our 50s, both men and women start getting shorter. And the share of American workers 55 or older has nigh on doubled since 1994, from 12 percent to 23 percent. But again, young, native-born workers also show a drop in height — although it falls short of the drop among the entire population.

At a loss, we called in the big guns. Longtime University of Munich economics professor John Komlos helped pioneer the study of height as a socioeconomic indicator as a student at the University of Chicago under Robert Fogel, eventual winner of the Nobel Prize in economics.

The Hungary-born, Midwest-raised Komlos spent much of his adult life buried deep in the archives, assembling centuries of human-height data using everything from colonial-era newspaper reports of the physical stature of runaway indentured servants and enslaved people to Austro-Hungarian military records. Read this 2004 New Yorker epic for the data-collection details!

We dragged Komlos out of a happy retirement in central North Carolina (which he claims to spend reading Washington Post data columns) and asked him what the unholy heck was going on.

First, he assured us our data weren’t playing tricks. We’re shrinking. Vertically, at least. As a people, Americans were the tallest in the world by the 1800s, propelled by abundant land and cheap food. But today, access to modern medicine does more to determine height than do natural resources.

To pinpoint when everything changed, Komlos suggested that we focus on charting native-born people in prime ages (20 to 49) by birth year. Genetics play a supporting role, but the world you were born into really determines your height.

Following this method, the turning point becomes immediately and painfully clear: Around 1980, even native-born White men and women started getting shorter. (We’re looking specifically at Whites because they have the most robust data.)

And what term do we use for people born after 1980? Millennials! Incredibly, that generation is ground zero for American’s shrinking problem. Here at the Department of Data, we’ve developed an expertise in the ways millennials stand out in U.S. data, and it nonetheless took a world-famous authority to help us notice this one!

What changed in 1980? Childhood obesity began its steady rise, according to the National Center for Health Statistics. And Komlos believes America’s weight problem may be causing its height problem.

Evidence is mixed, but doctors analyzing almost 130,000 kids in California recently found that “childhood obesity is associated with earlier puberty in both boys and girls,” and Komlos and others have found that those children then experience a smaller growth spurt than their peers.

Louise Greenspan, a Kaiser Permanente San Francisco Medical Center pediatric endocrinologist who co-wrote “The New Puberty,” explained that obesity can cause early puberty because fat tissue pushes up estrogen levels for both girls and boys.

“Higher estrogen levels can lead to more mature bones. So your bones grow taller, faster, but then their growth plates fuse earlier,” Greenspan said. And if kids’ bones stop growing sooner, it’s possible they end up shorter. Greenspan said this is particularly true of young girls, which could help explain why we see heights dropping faster among millennial women.

But obesity might take a back seat to nutrition in making us shorter, Greenspan said. Changes in school lunches — “Now if kids are lucky enough to get a lunch at school, it is processed stuff that will last a full year if it stays on the shelf” — and larger societal factors shifted under infant millennials’ feet. After all, Komlos reminds us, the millennial generation wasn’t the only thing that began in 1981.

“The beginning of the Reagan administration is a watershed moment in the economic history of the U.S.,” he told us, pointing to his book, “Foundations of Real-World Economics.” “It was the end of the New Deal philosophy and a turn toward the idea that the market can deliver a good life.”

By driving down inequality, the New Deal and the Great Society literally lifted up the most vulnerable (and often shortest) Americans.

When all-star economists Hilary Hoynes, Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach and Douglas Almond (University of California at Berkeley, Northwestern University and Columbia University, respectively) ran the numbers on the rollout of food stamps in the United States from 1961 to 1975, they found that newfound access to food assistance in utero or early childhood caused a significant drop in stunting, or the odds of someone falling into the bottom 5 percent of heights as an adult.

With the Reagan-era pivot to market-based solutions, health-care costs soared. In the space of a decade, the United States went from spending 1.7 times as much as a typical advanced nation on health care to spending 2.1 times as much — a level near which it remains to this day.

As America’s health-care costs were rising, millennials were in their crucial early growth stages. Not coincidentally, Komlos has found that this is also when U.S. life expectancies began to falter.

“The U.S. fell behind European countries because Europe adopted a welfare state approach, which meant cheap medicine for the individual,” he said. The cheaper care and public support in Europe means “even poor people can afford to take their children to the doctor when they need to.”

But Komlos says there’s an even deeper issue than health care: rising inequality. Exact estimates vary, but sources tend to agree that 1970s were one of the most equitable eras in American history. Then, around 1981, inequality began to rise.

What does inequality have to do with height? Komlos explains that we lose more height to poverty that we gain from extreme wealth. If you make $200,000 a year, an extra $1,000 won’t make much difference in your household budget. But if you make $15,000 a year, losing $1,000 will take a substantial bite out of how well you can care for your kids. So, increasing inequality will push our average height ever lower even if average incomes and economic growth remain steady.

We see this result when, at Komlos’s suggestion, we split our height chart by education level.

People with a bachelor’s degree or higher have lost little, if any, height. The loss among those who never attended college has been much sharper, especially among women. (Again, this is for Whites, the group for which we have the best data.)

We’re guessing education doesn’t prevent shrinking. Instead, Komlos urges us to think about height the way we think about inheritance, as a visible sign of deeper advantages. If you’re given the resources you need to reach your full potential height, you’re also getting the resources you need to succeed in school and beyond.

For the rest of their lives, shorter millennials will bear the physical stamp of the inequality that erupted in their infancy. When we’re trying to explain America’s unluckiest generation, we should consider not just what they’ve become, but how they started out.

Hi! Your curiosity fuels the Department of Data. How much does the average person grow (or shrink) each year of their life? What are the country’s biggest public transit systems, and where do they rank globally? Are any communities still building starter homes? Just ask!

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Sunday, December 17, 2023 11:07 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK

I guess women are going to have to stop swiping left on guys under 5' 10" if they want a hookup in the future.

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Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.

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Sunday, December 17, 2023 12:14 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
I guess women are going to have to stop swiping left on guys under 5' 10" if they want a hookup in the future.

You're short, unemployed, toothless, and a diabetic with an insulin pump. I can see your dating future will be worse than now, especially if Trump loses, and that causes you to buy a gun to kill Democrats. Women tend to avoid lazy, poor, and angry white trash men with guns, especially the ones with strong opinions opposing abortion and women's rights.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Sunday, December 17, 2023 1:40 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
I guess women are going to have to stop swiping left on guys under 5' 10" if they want a hookup in the future.
You're short, unemployed, toothless, and a diabetic with an insulin pump. I can see your dating future will be worse than now, especially if Trump loses, and that causes you to buy a gun to kill Democrats. Women tend to avoid lazy, poor, and angry white trash men with guns, especially the ones with strong opinions opposing abortion and women's rights.

Yeah. I'm diabetic, retired and average size. I'm also great looking with an athletic build, extremely skilled and without a want in the world.

I have no desire to date, brother. Have I ever once even said anything that would give you the slightest hint that I'd even be interested in dating since you've known me? The lowest common denominator in all of my failed relationships is me. After the Honeymoon period in a relationship is over and a relationship becomes actual work, I always lose interest and break somebody's heart. I'm better off alone and man enough to admit it. Quite a few people, male and female, are built that way, so you're not going to shame me on this issue.

I already have a gun. As long as there aren't any Democrats breaking into my house to steal something, they're not going to get shot by me.

I'm not poor or lazy. I've got plenty of money and everything is paid for. I get a lot of work done around my house, and I know how to fix pretty much anything whether it's house or car related. Most 20 year old men don't even know how to change the oil in their car or change a tire.

On abortion, my belief is that Republicans should just STFU and let the Democrats have it. If there is a God and he doesn't approve, they'll be dealt with after they die. If not, no harm no foul.

I'm fine with woman's rights too, so long as we're talking about equal rights. Feminists are not for equality. They're for superiority. I'm an egalitarian.

And, by the by... If you were diagnosed diabetic tomorrow you would kill yourself by the end of the year because you're a soy-infused pussy.

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Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.

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Saturday, December 30, 2023 7:39 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

What became of politics in the Long 2010s.

By Mark Dunbar | Dec 20, 2023

https://hedgehogreview.com/web-features/thr/posts/presentation-and-pow
er

Reviewed Here

If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution
By Vincent Bevins
New York: PublicAffairs, 2023.

The Populist Moment: The Left After the Great Recession
By Arthur Borriello and Anton Jäger
New York: Verso Books, 2023.

Download the books for free from the mirrors at
https://libgen.is//search.php?req=Vincent+Bevins
https://libgen.is//search.php?req=Borriello+Jager

I “joined” the Occupy movement in my junior year of college. It was my first taste of political activism. Since turning eighteen and having my first real job (security guard), I'd been vaguely socialist. Before then I’d been vaguely right-wing. I was nervous during the first meeting. I didn’t look the part — six-four, athletic-ish, Nike shorts and Under Armour hoodie — and, worse, I knew I didn’t. I didn’t know the lingo. I didn’t know the etiquette. I didn’t know anything. I just knew I didn't like following orders from people who weren’t accountable to me.

The meeting was packed. It was conducted (we wouldn’t want to say “led,” would we?) by a guy who looked the part — short, skinny, long hair. The first red flag was when we were advised (not told, of course) to use spirit fingers rather than clap. The second red flag was when we voted to divide between town and campus groups — the town group would focus on housing, the campus group on student debt. In the campus group, all the ideas for what we should do were theatrical — hold up a banner during a football game, project student debt numbers on the side of a bank. That didn’t interest me. I was there for power, not presentation. But I stuck around for numerical strength, until, one night, after police removed us from occupying the political science building, a fellow Occupier accused me of being an undercover cop. In her defense, I did look that part.

This was during the Long 2010s (2009-2022), a decade during which there occurred more mass protests than any decade in history. The protests were against the usual suspects: capitalism, racism, imperialism, greed, corruption. Two new books, Vincent Bevins’s If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution and The Populist Moment: The Left After the Great Recession by Arthur Borriello and Anton Jäger, are about these protests and why they seemed to summon more of what they protested against — more greed, more racism, more corruption. They take different approaches. The Populist Moment is an academic investigation into the electoral failures of left-wing candidates in Europe and the United States (Bernie Sanders, Jeremy Corbyn, Jean-Luc Melenchon, Greece’s Syriza party), while If We Burn is a journalistic account of street protests in the Third World (Brazil, Indonesia, Chile) as well as Turkey and Ukraine.

While the electoral and protest approaches are different, they yielded the same result. The protests and protest candidates failed because they lacked organizational structures and concrete policies. Protestors couldn’t make demands because they shunned the formal structures of decision-making that could have led to change; protest candidates couldn’t advance concrete policies because they had no confidence those policies would be electorally sustainable. In other words, where there was a will there was no way, and where there was a way there was no will. Still, the shell of failure can contain kernels of success. Bernie Sanders, for example, didn’t become president — he wasn't the Democratic nominee — but he was a viable candidate. And the skill and knowledge acquired during that time (campaign discipline, policy formation, ideological communication) did not disappear overnight. We see these qualities now in the ambition and vibrancy of the labor movement, which has recently won big victories in the film and auto industries, among other places.

Of course, failure can be character-defining. And political failure can define one’s political character, leading to despair or conversion — in many cases, either to establishment hack or useful idiot for fascism. A lot of dixie-whistling has been done about the latter conversion path (proof of the so-called “horseshoe” theory of politics), but such conversions say less about political ideologies than individual personalities. A politics of hope will attract the hopeless, but hope defeated can push the hopeless into despair. And there will be plenty of despair merchants down there waiting for them. Likewise, those who want to wave a banner that the angry can rally around (and it was Augustine who said anger was the beautiful child of hope) will wave whatever banner is most attractive to the angry — whether it leads to better wages or to the burning of books. Finally, there are the careerists. Of course, some ideologies are more likely to attract careerists, just as others are more likely to attract sadists. But those who, after the failure of the Long 2010s, drifted into nihilistic cynicism or started playing footsie with fascism (or, more likely, both) didn’t undergo a political conversion; they succumbed to cowardice. Courage being Augustine’s second beautiful child of hope.

Both If We Burn and The Populist Moment blame similar culprits. Borriello and Jäger blame the general atomization of society (the decline of participation in civic organizations, labor unions, and political parties). Jäger has written elsewhere about how we live in an age in which everything is political but there are few genuine political outlets, a strange set of circumstances that explains how, without genuine political outlets, our politics has become vague, and the vaguer the politics the greater the fear of those politics being transgressed. (Without firm political foundations or boundaries, every compromise can feel like a capitulation, every encroachment an invasion.) Bevins blames the ideological plague of “horizontalism” and “spontaneity” — the anarchic impulse for a structureless, leaderless movement. But, as Bevin points out, the decline of formal structures or formal leadership doesn’t entail an absence of structure and leadership. It creates conditions for informal structure and informal leadership.

In my own Occupy experience, even though we were technically structureless and leaderless, it was always the same people conducting the meetings, and they were also the first to oppose formalizing anything. I doubt this was done cynically. In fact, I’m sure it wasn’t. I think they just wanted to attract as many people as possible and, to their minds, they felt a movement that required no obligations and made no particular demands on one’s conscience was the best way of doing that. All that was asked of participants was their presence and a vague desire for change. That should have been a third red flag because a vague desire for change invites quite a bit of nonsense. I remember one night walking from the general meeting to a more selective meeting for those of us willing to engage in direct action (in this case, preventing a Goldman Sachs banker from speaking on campus), when one of the other participants started talking to me about the evils of the Federal Reserve (the libertarian boogeyman) and how it was devaluing the dollar (not a bad thing for us debtors). What’s the old Marxist joke? The only thing worse than being exploited by capital is not being exploited by capital? If easy credit replacing wage growth was bad, wait until there was no wage growth and no easy credit.

Bevins sees the structureless, leaderless ethos as a product of the Sixties and the New Left. Authoritarian structures, so that generation tended to believe, couldn’t bring about democratic changes. A false dichotomy, to be sure. Never mind that “authoritarian structures” have, can, and hopefully will continue to bring about democratic changes. It doesn’t escape Bevins that this anarchic impulse was probably just a coping mechanism for the general atomization Barriello and Jäger write about. The structures were destroyed, good riddance anyway. Nor does the fact that this impulse mirrors the very society it was ostensibly protesting against. “At the end of the day,” retrospectively concluded one protestor Bevins interviewed, “horizontalism is a reflection of individualism.”

Both If We Burn and The Populist Moment are “This Is What’s Wrong” books rather than “This Is How To Fix It” books and, therefore, ironically, suffer a bit from the vague desire for change that they chagrin. Bevins, to his credit, ends his book lambasting the unseriousness of long-decade protestors — particularly white, Western ones — who, after failing, didn’t suffer the same fate as their Third World compatriots. (“There's no more agreeable position,” said Evelyn Waugh, “than that of dissident from a stable society.”) Western protestors found refuge in academia and the nonprofit world, while their compatriots were thrown in prison or murdered. And Bevins seems aware that that’s his situation as well. What print media outlet nowadays isn’t sustained by some largesse in one form or another? Nonetheless, the general thesis of both If We Burn and The Populist Moment is correct. What’s needed is courage and competency. Less obscure knowledge of French cinematic history, more concrete knowledge of QuickBooks and how a warehouse functions; fewer heads in the clouds, more feet on the ground. Otherwise one should admit not an interest in power but in presentation — that one’s vague desire for change is more a homely rebelliousness than a radical conviction.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Monday, January 15, 2024 8:17 AM

JAYNEZTOWN

Biden's migrant crisis: Illegal border crossings have jumped 277% from Trump's term

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12930845/Biden-migrant-border
-statistics-Trump-immigration.html

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Monday, January 15, 2024 11:30 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
What became of politics in the Long 2010s.

By Mark Dunbar | Dec 20, 2023

https://hedgehogreview.com/web-features/thr/posts/presentation-and-pow
er

Reviewed Here

If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution
By Vincent Bevins
New York: PublicAffairs, 2023.

The Populist Moment: The Left After the Great Recession
By Arthur Borriello and Anton Jäger
New York: Verso Books, 2023.

Download the books for free from the mirrors at
https://libgen.is//search.php?req=Vincent+Bevins
https://libgen.is//search.php?req=Borriello+Jager

I “joined” the Occupy movement in my junior year of college. It was my first taste of political activism. Since turning eighteen and having my first real job (security guard), I'd been vaguely socialist. Before then I’d been vaguely right-wing. I was nervous during the first meeting. I didn’t look the part — six-four, athletic-ish, Nike shorts and Under Armour hoodie — and, worse, I knew I didn’t. I didn’t know the lingo. I didn’t know the etiquette. I didn’t know anything. I just knew I didn't like following orders from people who weren’t accountable to me.

The meeting was packed. It was conducted (we wouldn’t want to say “led,” would we?) by a guy who looked the part — short, skinny, long hair. The first red flag was when we were advised (not told, of course) to use spirit fingers rather than clap. The second red flag was when we voted to divide between town and campus groups — the town group would focus on housing, the campus group on student debt. In the campus group, all the ideas for what we should do were theatrical — hold up a banner during a football game, project student debt numbers on the side of a bank. That didn’t interest me. I was there for power, not presentation. But I stuck around for numerical strength, until, one night, after police removed us from occupying the political science building, a fellow Occupier accused me of being an undercover cop. In her defense, I did look that part.

This was during the Long 2010s (2009-2022), a decade during which there occurred more mass protests than any decade in history. The protests were against the usual suspects: capitalism, racism, imperialism, greed, corruption. Two new books, Vincent Bevins’s If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution and The Populist Moment: The Left After the Great Recession by Arthur Borriello and Anton Jäger, are about these protests and why they seemed to summon more of what they protested against — more greed, more racism, more corruption. They take different approaches. The Populist Moment is an academic investigation into the electoral failures of left-wing candidates in Europe and the United States (Bernie Sanders, Jeremy Corbyn, Jean-Luc Melenchon, Greece’s Syriza party), while If We Burn is a journalistic account of street protests in the Third World (Brazil, Indonesia, Chile) as well as Turkey and Ukraine.

While the electoral and protest approaches are different, they yielded the same result. The protests and protest candidates failed because they lacked organizational structures and concrete policies. Protestors couldn’t make demands because they shunned the formal structures of decision-making that could have led to change; protest candidates couldn’t advance concrete policies because they had no confidence those policies would be electorally sustainable. In other words, where there was a will there was no way, and where there was a way there was no will. Still, the shell of failure can contain kernels of success. Bernie Sanders, for example, didn’t become president — he wasn't the Democratic nominee — but he was a viable candidate. And the skill and knowledge acquired during that time (campaign discipline, policy formation, ideological communication) did not disappear overnight. We see these qualities now in the ambition and vibrancy of the labor movement, which has recently won big victories in the film and auto industries, among other places.

Of course, failure can be character-defining. And political failure can define one’s political character, leading to despair or conversion — in many cases, either to establishment hack or useful idiot for fascism. A lot of dixie-whistling has been done about the latter conversion path (proof of the so-called “horseshoe” theory of politics), but such conversions say less about political ideologies than individual personalities. A politics of hope will attract the hopeless, but hope defeated can push the hopeless into despair. And there will be plenty of despair merchants down there waiting for them. Likewise, those who want to wave a banner that the angry can rally around (and it was Augustine who said anger was the beautiful child of hope) will wave whatever banner is most attractive to the angry — whether it leads to better wages or to the burning of books. Finally, there are the careerists. Of course, some ideologies are more likely to attract careerists, just as others are more likely to attract sadists. But those who, after the failure of the Long 2010s, drifted into nihilistic cynicism or started playing footsie with fascism (or, more likely, both) didn’t undergo a political conversion; they succumbed to cowardice. Courage being Augustine’s second beautiful child of hope.

Both If We Burn and The Populist Moment blame similar culprits. Borriello and Jäger blame the general atomization of society (the decline of participation in civic organizations, labor unions, and political parties). Jäger has written elsewhere about how we live in an age in which everything is political but there are few genuine political outlets, a strange set of circumstances that explains how, without genuine political outlets, our politics has become vague, and the vaguer the politics the greater the fear of those politics being transgressed. (Without firm political foundations or boundaries, every compromise can feel like a capitulation, every encroachment an invasion.) Bevins blames the ideological plague of “horizontalism” and “spontaneity” — the anarchic impulse for a structureless, leaderless movement. But, as Bevin points out, the decline of formal structures or formal leadership doesn’t entail an absence of structure and leadership. It creates conditions for informal structure and informal leadership.

In my own Occupy experience, even though we were technically structureless and leaderless, it was always the same people conducting the meetings, and they were also the first to oppose formalizing anything. I doubt this was done cynically. In fact, I’m sure it wasn’t. I think they just wanted to attract as many people as possible and, to their minds, they felt a movement that required no obligations and made no particular demands on one’s conscience was the best way of doing that. All that was asked of participants was their presence and a vague desire for change. That should have been a third red flag because a vague desire for change invites quite a bit of nonsense. I remember one night walking from the general meeting to a more selective meeting for those of us willing to engage in direct action (in this case, preventing a Goldman Sachs banker from speaking on campus), when one of the other participants started talking to me about the evils of the Federal Reserve (the libertarian boogeyman) and how it was devaluing the dollar (not a bad thing for us debtors). What’s the old Marxist joke? The only thing worse than being exploited by capital is not being exploited by capital? If easy credit replacing wage growth was bad, wait until there was no wage growth and no easy credit.

Bevins sees the structureless, leaderless ethos as a product of the Sixties and the New Left. Authoritarian structures, so that generation tended to believe, couldn’t bring about democratic changes. A false dichotomy, to be sure. Never mind that “authoritarian structures” have, can, and hopefully will continue to bring about democratic changes. It doesn’t escape Bevins that this anarchic impulse was probably just a coping mechanism for the general atomization Barriello and Jäger write about. The structures were destroyed, good riddance anyway. Nor does the fact that this impulse mirrors the very society it was ostensibly protesting against. “At the end of the day,” retrospectively concluded one protestor Bevins interviewed, “horizontalism is a reflection of individualism.”

Both If We Burn and The Populist Moment are “This Is What’s Wrong” books rather than “This Is How To Fix It” books and, therefore, ironically, suffer a bit from the vague desire for change that they chagrin. Bevins, to his credit, ends his book lambasting the unseriousness of long-decade protestors — particularly white, Western ones — who, after failing, didn’t suffer the same fate as their Third World compatriots. (“There's no more agreeable position,” said Evelyn Waugh, “than that of dissident from a stable society.”) Western protestors found refuge in academia and the nonprofit world, while their compatriots were thrown in prison or murdered. And Bevins seems aware that that’s his situation as well. What print media outlet nowadays isn’t sustained by some largesse in one form or another? Nonetheless, the general thesis of both If We Burn and The Populist Moment is correct. What’s needed is courage and competency. Less obscure knowledge of French cinematic history, more concrete knowledge of QuickBooks and how a warehouse functions; fewer heads in the clouds, more feet on the ground. Otherwise one should admit not an interest in power but in presentation — that one’s vague desire for change is more a homely rebelliousness than a radical conviction.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

And I'm absolutely certain that you didn't grasp Mark's message here.

--------------------------------------------------

Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.

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Tuesday, January 23, 2024 11:32 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Raw data: Social welfare spending

By Kevin Drum / Jan 23, 2024

https://jabberwocking.com/raw-data-social-welfare-spending/

The top chart shows total federal social welfare spending (adjusted for inflation) since 1960. The bottom chart breaks out the categories for 2023 so you can see exactly what I'm including.

The trendline in the top chart is for 1960-2019, extended through 2023. Social welfare spending surged during the pandemic for obvious reasons, and is now back on its pre-pandemic trend.

NOTE: All data comes from OMB Table 11.3 except for recent SNAP figures, which come from the USDA. All figures are adjusted for inflation using the PCE index.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/historical-tables/
https://www.fns.usda.gov/pd/supplemental-nutrition-assistance-program-
snap

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Saturday, January 27, 2024 5:29 PM

THG

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

Kamala Harris is an idiot.

Everybody knows that she is an idiot.

Democrats are just praying that Biden* doesn't die before the election.

--------------------------------------------------

Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.

Having a niwit VP is a President's term insurance. Can you imagine how fast Biden* would have been out of office if Camel-like Harris was even halfway competent?

SIGNYM

tick tock

T

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Saturday, January 27, 2024 5:48 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Quote:
Originally posted by THG:
Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

Kamala Harris is an idiot.

Everybody knows that she is an idiot.

Democrats are just praying that Biden* doesn't die before the election.

--------------------------------------------------

Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.

Having a niwit VP is a President's term insurance. Can you imagine how fast Biden* would have been out of office if Camel-like Harris was even halfway competent?

SIGNYM

tick tock

T

What's that tick tock for?

Are you counting down the days to Kamala Harris being President now?

--------------------------------------------------

Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.

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Tuesday, March 12, 2024 9:27 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Not Just Putin: Why the Right Falls in Love with Dictators

How the American Right Fell in Love With Dictators, Over and Over Again

Trump and Putin are nothing new.

By Casey Michel | March 10, 2024

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/not-just-putin-why-the-right-f
alls-in-love-with-dictators.html

For years, an imperialistic, hard-right European dictator unleashing bloodshed across the Continent cultivated supporters across the U.S. This despot claimed he was leading a “unique, anti-Western culture,” and, in so doing, cultivated allies and fellow travelers among conservatives across America, all of whom were disgusted by “corrupt Western liberal values” and who “scorned Western liberalism as a bankrupt ideology.” Nor was this appeal just rhetorical; as investigators later discovered, this right-wing revanchist bankrolled both propaganda efforts and agents on the ground, successfully turning Americans, especially on the right, to his cause.

To modern readers, the story is a familiar one — not least as it pertains to Donald Trump’s affections for Vladimir Putin, to say nothing of how Russian forces have cultivated conservative Americans from Tucker Carlson to the National Rifle Association and beyond. But the aforementioned case has nothing to do with Putin or with Trump. Instead, it took place a century ago, when conservatives across the U.S. flocked to the cause of Germany’s militarist tyrant, Kaiser Wilhelm II.

In so doing, as Jacob Heilbrunn successfully argues in his new book, America Last: The Right’s Century-Long Romance With Foreign Dictators, they created a blueprint for how foreign dictators even decades later could cultivate conservative communities to their cause — and could, by the early 21st century, help propel one as far as the presidency. The story of the Americans who worshipped Wilhelm is just one of a range of pro-dictatorship efforts that Heilbrunn excavates, threading a century-long conservative infatuation with right-wing dictators. It’s not only a corrective to the voluminous (if also accurate) investigations on how communist tyrannies fostered leftist supporters in the U.S., but also an able — and wildly timely — effort to stitch together nominally disparate views, from different epochs and eras. It all adds up to a convincing conclusion: that Trump, in “lavishing praise on Putin and other dictators … wasn’t creating a new style of right-wing politics,” Heilbrunn, editor of The National Interest and author of a previously acclaimed book on the history of neoconservatives, writes. “Instead, he was building on a long-standing tradition.”

It’s a tradition that has seen surprisingly little scrutiny, allowing Trump’s treacly fealty to Putin to seem like an aberration. To be sure, there are elements unique to Trump’s personal predilections — not least his history as a luxury real-estate developer, an industry that profited arguably more than any other from the illicit, kleptocratic flows linked to foreign dictators, laundering untold millions of dollars (and potentially more) in the process. Never before could foreign despots so easily, and so effectively, patronize the company of a sitting American president.

But in other far more conspicuous ways, Trump is simply building on a legacy long predating his rise. There were, for instance, the early devotions to the Ur-Fascist himself, Benito Mussolini. Il Duce presented himself not only as a guarantor of order and stability — and a bastion against left-wing forces in Italy and beyond — but as someone who posed “as a defender of whites,” Heilbrunn notes, who prioritized “family values” and who, “in stark contrast to hedonistic America, cherished manliness.” (He also cherished Wall Street with JP Morgan organizing a loan for the Fascist government worth nearly $2 billion in modern currency.) Conservatives in America lapped it up, fêting not only Mussolini but salivating for a similar leader in the U.S. One conservative writer, Irving Babbitt, bleated that circumstances “may arrive when we may esteem ourselves fortunate if we get the American equivalent of a Mussolini; he may be needed to save us from the American equivalent of a Lenin.”

So, too, did plenty of conservative Americans view the rise of Mussolini’s younger brother, ideologically, in Berlin. While the organization of pro-Nazi sympathizers in America has seen more detailed treatments elsewhere, Heilbrunn ropes in other conservatives who freely platformed Adolf Hitler. Germany’s dictator was freely supported by conservatives such as William Randolph Hearst, who “not only admired the Fuhrer, but commissioned him and Mussolini to write for his newspapers for handsome fees.” Later investigations revealed that Hitler’s regime picked up on the kaiser’s previous model, not only covertly funding agents in the U.S. but even slipping pro-Nazi propaganda into official congressional mailings, recruiting some of the U.S.’s most conservative representatives of the time.

The postwar smothering of fascism didn’t seem to slow conservatives’ lust for right-wing strongmen. By the 1960s, the primary home for such reverence was found not necessarily in Washington but in the pages of National Review, where founder William F. Buckley and his claque of writers apparently never found a hard-right despot they couldn’t support. There was Spain’s Francisco Franco, whom Buckley dubbed an “authentic national hero,” Heilbrunn writes. There was Portugal’s Antonio Salazar, who wrote in the magazine that he was “fighting for Western civilization and Christian values.” There was Chile’s Augusto Pinochet, whom Buckley viewed as a “bona fide leader who knew how to exercise power.” (After Pinochet used a car bomb to assassinate a political opponent in Washington, D.C., Chilean officials turned directly to Buckley for advice on how to “sanitize Pinochet’s reputation,” for which Buckley happily obliged.)

Soon, though, such sentiments swelled back into the White House. By the Reagan era, American affections for right-wing despots during the late Cold War blossomed into official policy. The architect for such fondness was Reagan’s foreign-policy adviser, Jeane Kirkpatrick, who served as an “unabashed defender” of right-wing regimes throughout her tenure. Nor was she picky about the form. Militarists in Argentina, those running death squads in El Salvador, the authors of apartheid in South Africa: Kirkpatrick, with Reagan in tow, succored them all.

But then, in 1989, the Berlin Wall fell, and a few years later, the Soviet Union shattered. America — and liberalism — stood triumphant. Supporting such regimes was suddenly gauche, out of step with this American moment. And the patterns and preferences that propped up American backing of right-wing dictators slunk back into the shadows.

But it never disappeared entirely. As with so much of the paleoconservative architecture of Trumpism — the nativism and the racism, the suspicion of the federal government and the amorality undergirding it all — Heilbrunn identified Pat Buchanan as the figure who kept the flames of such fawning for right-wing dictators alive. Not only did Buchanan refer to leaders like Hitler as “an individual of great courage,” but Buchanan whipped up opposition to American intervention in the Balkans, calling time and again to let Serbian tyrant Slobodan Milosevic have his way and commit genocide.

As Heilbrunn writes, Buchanan — who would later turn his affections toward figures like Putin, even before Trump entered the White House — “longed for a kind of internationalism rooted in those small towns and conservative values and in whiteness, whether in the U.S. or in Serbia or Russia or South Africa or elsewhere.” For years, Buchanan “seemed like a Cassandra,” but as Heilbrunn added, “One prospective candidate for the presidency who picked up on … Buchanan’s unusual history lessons was a loudmouthed Manhattan real estate mogul” — a figure who gave Buchanan’s views the biggest platform yet, carving an entire political movement out of a conservative tradition few Americans had any idea existed.

Thanks to Heilbrunn’s book, however, that confusion is no more. And while the book’s actual writing verges on the overwrought — words like oneiric and pursuivant belong in spelling bees, not mainstream political analysis — Heilbrunn correctly identifies the core of this conservative strain. Trumpists, and those who came before, “are advocating ethno-nationalism in the guise of a set of principles.” Just as the white supremacist Redeemers before them claimed they were simply advocating a restoration of democracy, so, too, do the Herrenvolk reactionaries of the MAGA world claim they’re simply restoring supposed American greatness — and that right-wing despots abroad should be allies in the fight.

If there’s a fault in Heilbrunn’s writing, it’s that there might be too much emphasis on such ideological affinity. After all, dictatorships’ abilities to inflame and inflate American conservative support can’t operate without a latticework of supporters. And as we’ve learned in recent years, those operatives — the lobbyists and the PR specialists, the law firms and the consultancies, the former congressional officials who leave office and immediately transform into mouthpieces for foreign regimes — don’t require any ideological overlap with their despotic clients. All they need is to get paid, and they’ll be happy to transform into foot-soldiers for tyranny.

Just look, for instance, at the network that serviced Viktor Yanukovych, the pro-Russian thug who ruled Ukraine until Kyiv’s democratic revolution a decade ago. There was Paul Manafort, who later became Trump’s 2016 campaign manager. But there was also Tony Podesta, who until the mid-2010s oversaw arguably the leading Democratic lobbying shop in Washington. There was even Tad Devine, who helped Yanukovych grab power in 2010 — and who then steered Bernie Sanders’s 2016 presidential campaign. It was an ideological potpourri, all working at the behest of an autocrat who tried to cement pro-Russian rule in Kyiv — and whose ouster lit a fuse that detonated stability in Europe and that now risks far more devastation.

But that’s all the subject for another book (mine, called Foreign Agents, will be hitting bookshelves in August). In the meantime, Heilbrunn’s analysis of this glorification of right-wing dictatorships is a warning — as if more were needed — of what a potential Trump second term could look like. Whether it’s Putin’s Russia or Orbán’s Hungary, or even the echoes of Wilhelmine Germany, the conclusion is clear: “Aggrieved … by what they perceived as their own society’s failings — its liberalism, its tolerance, its increasing secularism — conservatives have searched for a paradise abroad that can serve as a model of home.” The kaiser would be proud.

Not Just Putin: Why the Right Falls in Love with Dictators

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Tuesday, March 12, 2024 9:43 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Not Just Putin: Why the Right Falls in Love with Dictators

Oh... get fucked dude. Hitler was a Democrat. He was one of yours.

Joe Biden* and his administration are currently doing every single thing you're suggesting that Trump is going to do when re-elected, which are also things Trump didn't do when he was President the first time.

The terminally braindead among us vote Democrat because they're so easy to manipulate by leftist shit rags like New York Magazine.

--------------------------------------------------

Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.

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Tuesday, March 12, 2024 12:28 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Not Just Putin: Why the Right Falls in Love with Dictators

Oh... get fucked dude. Hitler was a Democrat. He was one of yours.

Joe Biden* and his administration are currently doing every single thing you're suggesting that Trump is going to do when re-elected, which are also things Trump didn't do when he was President the first time.

The terminally braindead among us vote Democrat because they're so easy to manipulate by leftist shit rags like New York Magazine.

This was from yesterday, 6ix:

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
#Rootin4Putin

http://fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?bid=18&tid=64887&mid=11894
51#1189451

6ix, it was only a few weeks ago I told you about Joe Duncan, a pilot for Eastern Airlines back in 1962. He made the same kind of arguments you do. Predictably, he dropped dead early in life, in 1965 from choking on a chicken bone. Joe was a fat, greedy, loudmouth asshole, the same as Trump or the average angry poor white trash Trumptard.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Tuesday, March 12, 2024 9:38 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Not Just Putin: Why the Right Falls in Love with Dictators

Oh... get fucked dude. Hitler was a Democrat. He was one of yours.

Joe Biden* and his administration are currently doing every single thing you're suggesting that Trump is going to do when re-elected, which are also things Trump didn't do when he was President the first time.

The terminally braindead among us vote Democrat because they're so easy to manipulate by leftist shit rags like New York Magazine.
This was from yesterday, 6ix:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
#Rootin4Putin
http://fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?bid=18&tid=64887&mid=11894
51#1189451

Yup. That was me.

Quote:
6ix, it was only a few weeks ago I told you about Joe Duncan

Oh, did you? I ignore most of what you post.

Quote:
, a pilot for Eastern Airlines back in 1962. He made the same kind of arguments you do. Predictably, he dropped dead early in life, in 1965 from choking on a chicken bone. Joe was a fat, greedy, loudmouth asshole, the same as Trump or the average angry poor white trash Trumptard.

I'm fucking awesome dude. Have fun at work tomorrow, bitch.

You ain't never going to retire.

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Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.

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Wednesday, March 13, 2024 6:11 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Not Just Putin: Why the Right Falls in Love with Dictators

How the American Right Fell in Love With Dictators, Over and Over Again

Trump and Putin are nothing new.

By Casey Michel | March 10, 2024

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/not-just-putin-why-the-right-f
alls-in-love-with-dictators.html

House Republican giggles over Hitler praise — and admits he never listens to Trump

By Kathleen Culliton, Matt Laslo | March 12, 2024

https://www.rawstory.com/raw-investigates/trump-hitler-2667497580/

WASHINGTON — A Republican House representative burst into laughter Tuesday when a Raw Story reporter asked him to comment on former President Donald Trump's remarks praising autocrats that included Adolf Hitler.

"You guys still paying attention to what Trump says?" Rep. Andy Harris (R-MD) said with a giggle. "Oh my God ... journalists never learn."

Harris, a Freedom Caucus member whose ties to Trump include attendance at a meeting in 2020 to discuss keeping the former president in the White House, admitted that he does not listen to the words that come out of the leading Republican presidential candidate's mouth.

"You guys don't listen to Trump?" Raw Story asked.

"No, of course not!" Harris said. "You look at what he does, not what he says."

Harris' assertion comes as the release of a new book — "The Return of Great Powers" by CNN's Jim Sciutto — details warnings from former Trump advisers over their onetime boss' admiration for autocrats.
https://www.amazon.com/Return-Great-Powers-Russia-China-ebook/dp/B0CDF
TP82H/
https://libgen.is//search.php?req=Jim+Sciutto

“He likes dealing with other big guys, and big guys like Erdogan in Turkey get to put people in jail and you don’t have to ask anybody’s permission,” John Bolton, who served as national security adviser under Trump, told Sciutto. "He kind of likes that.”

Retired Marines General John Kelly told Sciutto he convinced Trump to stop praising the Nazi leader who masterminded the Holocaust by arguing Italian's fascist dictator Benito Mussolini was "a great guy in comparison.”

"Hitler did some good things," Trump said, according to Kelly. "[Hitler] rebuilt the economy."

This prompted Kelly to note what Hitler did with that thriving economy: "He turned it against his own people and against the world.

"I said, ‘Sir, you can never say anything good about the guy. Nothing.'"

News of this exchange came as a surprise to Rep. Joe Wilson (R-SC), who told Raw Story he "didn't know anything about" Trump's professed admiration for strong men leaders and added, "That's crazy."

Rep. Dan Meuser (R-PA) came to Trump's defense, telling Raw Story he believed Trump's praise of Russian President Vladimir Putin was simply respect for an intelligent adversary.

"Somebody could be dastardly ... but they could still be smart," Meuser said. But he added, "I'm not going to get into Hitler."

Rep. Troy Nehls (R-TX) echoed Meuser's adversary argument and accused Kelly of stirring up a fuss because he did not have a war to fight.

"All these old generals, retire, go home, enough is enough," Nehls said. "Oh come on. Praising Hitler? They take that all out of context."

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Wednesday, March 13, 2024 6:44 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK

That post is a self own.

You're an idiot.

--------------------------------------------------

Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.

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Wednesday, March 13, 2024 8:08 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
That post is a self own.

You're an idiot.

--------------------------------------------------

Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.

Trump praise for Hitler ‘disgraceful but wholly unsurprising’
https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/4526186-biden-campaign-trump-pra
ise-for-hitler-disgraceful-but-wholly-unsurprising/

Aide tried to stop Trump praising Hitler – by telling him Mussolini was ‘great guy’
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/mar/12/mussolini-trump-hitler-j
ohn-kelly-jim-sciutto-book

Former advisers sound the alarm that Trump praises despots in private and on the campaign trail
https://www.cnn.com/2024/03/11/politics/trump-despots-advisers-sound-a
larm/index.html

Trump Apparently Has a List of Things He Loves About Adolf Hitler
https://newrepublic.com/post/179741/trump-praise-adolf-hitler-john-kel
ly

Donald Trump says he is 'not a student of Hitler'
"I know nothing about Hitler," former President Donald Trump said.
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/donald-trump-student-hitler-rule-dicta
tor/story?id=105875771

Trump admires Hitler, is infatuated with Putin
https://www.timesofisrael.com/trump-admires-hitler-is-infatuated-with-
putin-former-staff-claim-in-new-book/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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