heywood on 7/2/2024 at 20:11

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Now that he's not employed by a major media company, he can show his true colors, just like Glenn Greenwald. All Putin had to do to woo American conservatives was to shake hands with the church and make socially conservative values part of his rhetoric.

demagogue on 7/2/2024 at 20:48

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I remember my friend from Zimbabwe in the same fellowship I was explaining Mugabe and African politics to me, and his entire thesis for that program rooted everything in gender politics, that men have to hold the line on masculinity, mostly to legitimate their right to be the final authority (first to themselves; you can see the insecurity in it if you pay attention), and the first way to do that is all this rhetoric of the strong man that isn't held back by the nitpicking yipping rules of weak and girlish men that don't have the balls to do what needs to be done. Then his thesis was showing how all of these themes were played out in Mugabe's speeches all over the place.

This was like 10 years ago, and I remember wondering how universal this phenomenon was. I knew there were times in other countries' history where strong man rhetoric turned into a mania, like Hitler and Mussolini and Stalin and Tito and Castro and Imperial Japan, etc., but I wondered if there was something special about the US that it had largely been immune. I mean there was a cult around Reagan, but it wasn't like an irrational mania.

Anyway, Trump to me is really proof that it really is a universal mania that societies of any stripe will fall into if it's left unchecked. And when you think about it in those terms, the Right's admiration with Putin makes sense, since Putin is the one world leader that's really branding himself on it, you know, we have to ride horses with our shirts off and imprison yipping journalists and trans people or the Muslims are going to overrun us and even deserve to, except in the US it's yipping prosecutors and Latin Americans that will overrun us in this "the border crisis" he's actively trying to inflame just to stoke that response.

lowenz on 7/2/2024 at 23:22

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But if the strong man is 1) non-freemarketer (society=market) 2) want to eliminate freemarketers in a very drastic way.....they can't call him "man", they call him "monster that must be stopped".....just like women will do :p

Redpilled people and all those self glorified jerks quoting Aurelius (the roman emperor) and following guru like Peterson are so feminine, they admire power but only when it can't hurt them directly. If that happens it must be an infernal conspiracy......they really can't realise and accept they can't control real "total" power just because they long for it in the form of the state (mainly the police) and market dominance (and this is the main common aspect of all fascists of every country and every time, arrogant children believing to be rightly untouchable playing their social game)

Just think of the nazis: they kill the jews at last because they can't kill their own "bad batches" to "purify the society" (Aktion T4 stopped from the start). I call this cowardice masked by brutality towards other targets.
There's nothing strong (stoic) about this strategy, just a convenient ruse to hide incompentence and irresponsability of who can't even properly apply his system of believes to himself first.....and that's what freedom is about today.

demagogue on 8/2/2024 at 01:15

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Tucker who? You mean that unemployed blogger?

Tocky on 8/2/2024 at 02:25

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Well if anything about him was quite something it would be a hallucination.