Harvester on 28/3/2025 at 22:19
I worded it a bit strongly. It’s not that I look down on the average American and I hold no illusions that Dutch people are so superior that this could not happen in the Netherlands. But the awe and wonder land of opportunity type of thing about the US that I always had, where I could never relate when people around me were being overly negative about the US and where I would sometimes jump to its defense, yeah, that’s gone and I don’t know if it’s coming back.
As beauchlein also said and as demagogue warned me about, similar things are happening over here too. We have a very right wing government over here, our prime minister was the liberal (in the classical sense of the word) but mostly sensible and internationally savvy Mark Rutte who is now secretary general of NATO. While the new partyless prime minister is not terrible, the largest party right now is the Party for Freedom, our not quite as terrible but in the same ballpark equivalent as Germany’s Alternative für Deutschland, which you might remember as the party that Elon Musk publicly supports. I do take some small comfort in the fact that party leader and sole decision maker Geert Wilders’ support of Trump, and wishy washy attitude towards Putin and supporting Ukraine is hurting him in the polls.
Starker on 29/3/2025 at 04:43
Another person, legally entering the US, having gone through 17 months of extensive background checks and interviews, having no criminal past or known links to any gangs, has been imprisoned without trial by the US just because he had tattoos:
Quote:
(
https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/immigration/article302464134.html)
E.M. and his girlfriend fled persecution in their native Venezuela in 2021 and dreamed of making a new life in the United States. The young couple spend two years in Colombia before applying for refugee status in 2023 to come to the U.S. Struggling to survive in Colombia, they worked tirelessly in informal jobs, selling food on the streets and making deliveries to make ends meet. On Jan. 8, after they were finally granted the coveted refugee status, E.M., 29, and his girlfriend, Daniela Palma, 30, finally arrived in the United States, flying into Houston. Upon arrival, an immigration officer asked the young man the question that changed his life in moments. “Do you have any tattoos?” He had already been asked that by U.S. authorities in Colombia as part of an extensive background check, and he now gave the same answer. He lifted his shirt and pants and showed the immigration officer tattoos on his chest, legs and arms — a crown, a soccer ball and a palm tree. At that point, it no longer mattered that he had no criminal record, and that he had been granted refugee status, with the full legal right to enter the United States. Immigration officials decided the tattoos were evidence enough to suspect he might be a member of Tren de Aragua, a prison-born Venezuelan gang whose members have earned a reputation in Latin America as fearless and ruthless.
[...]
On March 15, the Trump administration deported him, along with over 200 other Venezuelans, to El Salvador, where they were promptly imprisoned in a maximum-security facility with a troubling history of violating human rights and where men sleep hundreds to a cell on steel beds with no mattresses or pillows.
[...]
The gang in question doesn't require its members to have any identifying tattoos, or, in fact, any tattoos at all.
demagogue on 29/3/2025 at 05:21
I guess the part that's horrifying, like one is trapped in some dystopian scifi horror movie, is this mass of people surrounding you that really don't see what's going on, just a congenial "Trump is doing some great things, huh?!"
And if you try to bring up any of the 100s of things that are horrifying with what's going on, you're first or most often going to get "no, that can't be happening". Lol, just complete blindness to it. But occasionally you'll get "yeah, he's really cleaning up the swamp like he promised, huh?" I mean, sure, if you think funding for childhood cancer and disabled veterans is the "swamp"? ("No, come on. They didn't do that.")
But you can't really push it further than that or you'll get hit with a blanket "you've got some serious TDS there, don't you?" and "cry some more lib", and I really wouldn't want to go any further than that because I honestly don't want to see neighbors I've known since childhood start defending concentration camps, labeling every migrant a violent criminal, and taking Qanon batshit like The Storm at face value.
It's all very alien though. I was reading about Germany in the 1950s, "Year Zero", when it had the whole Heimat (homeland) movement. A third of the German-speaking world (largely in present day Poland) just evaporated, millions of people were displaced, half of it was just put under Soviet occupation, etc. But the part of that that struck me is how fascism completely rips a population from its own historical and cultural roots. It's no longer the town you grew up in and the neighbors you grew up with; it starts becoming unrecognizable, not even German, or here American or Texan anymore.
People don't need to tell me that sounds delusional; I want to believe that too. But then you hear everyday folks talking on the sidewalk or whatever and suddenly you're on another planet. And it feels like it's everyone. And that's before you even read the news. You read the news, and it makes the batshittery around here even sound normal.
Like this batshit that Vance just said: "We have no other option. We need to take a significant position in Greenland to keep the people here safe and to keep our country safe." Who... what... How does that thought even pass through a person's brain without their synapses throwing a fit like: Do you even realize what words are about to come out of your mouth right now, bro? Why not Bhutan while we're at it? Throw a dart at the map and pretend that that's the US's gravest threat where we need to take serious action right away, that's how arbitrary this batshit sounds.
Fuck's sake. I swear.
Pyrian on 29/3/2025 at 07:18
We have always been at war with dumbfuckistan.
Silentor on 29/3/2025 at 15:41
I'm laughing at you!
You yourself got to the point where you wanted to imprison those who drifted according to "rainbow" markings (what's with them now, by the way?).
And this (classical in fact) metamorphosis into one's own authoritarianism swung the pendulum in the other direction. Towards traditionalism. But of course, what about without it, with the indispensable idiocy on the other hand. I still didn't understand about Greenland, was it not a joke? There's also a Tula base there, and it's very large. What more yet need?
The situation is aggravated by the fact that you sectarianly deny your fascism - you are liberals, which means (drooling finger): all the good words in the encyclopedia are ours. So, who can be against these good words, only the bad ones. Not ours.
Nicker on 29/3/2025 at 20:12
Thanks for taking the time from your busy job proof-reading DJT tweets for clarity.
I am still curious about your planetisity-shaplianity answeroid; spherianical or platernal?
demagogue on 29/3/2025 at 20:32
Quote Posted by Pyrian
We have always been at war with dumbfuckistan.
Yeah, they've always been there. I remember the kids in my class whose dads were in the "militias", and you didn't want to mention anything that might hint of Jews or bankers or Hollywood around them or you knew they'd go off.
But I think the difference is at that time they were still mostly kept away from, you know, respectable society, those orcishly obese men that had the keypad gates for their driveways and threw parties on their boats. It's that group that's changed, I think. The militia types always had confederate flags lying around their squalid yards alongside the broken down car and miscellaneous trash. The boat party types still don't, but they all have maga hats & Trump flags now.
That's a longwinded way of saying it's been mainstreamed and taken up by the people with money, and of course it creates an info bubble that wasn't there in the same way before. Well that's my ground's eye view of what's changed.
-----
Edit: Ah, Hannah Arendt said it better than I.
Quote Posted by "Ned Resnikoff's blog"
Living With a MurdererOn personal responsibility under the second Trump administration
Ned Resnikoff
March 28, 2025
One of the most disorienting things about the past couple of months has been the speed with which so many non-governmental institutions have bent the knee to a resurgent and newly unconstrained Trump administration. Columbia University has essentially surrendered any claim to academic independence; the billionaire owners of The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times have announced their intention to convert the opinion pages of both into regime organs; ABC settled an obviously frivolous lawsuit from Trump, in effect paying him a $16 million bribe; numerous corporations have abandoned their half-hearted DEI efforts; and white shoe law firms, most recently Skadden Arps, are cutting side deals to avoid getting frozen out of government contracts.
Even some prominent Democrats are stumbling over themselves to prove they are not part of the “resistance.” Gavin Newsom seemed to be running for Resistance President during parts of the first Trump administration; now, bafflingly, he is hosting clubby little tête-à-têtes on his new podcast with open fascists like Charlie Kirk and Steve Bannon. Ruben Gallego has made clear he's not totally opposed to the administration's policy of renditioning immigrants off to Salvadoran prisons. John Fetterman is, well, doing god knows what.
The confusion produced by these wild swerves would feel familiar to Hannah Arendt. A Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany, Arendt would later spend much of her career reflecting on the profound transformation in German society that forced her to flee. What unsettled her most about this transformation, “was the behavior not of our enemies but of our friends, who had done nothing to bring this situation about,” she would later say. “They were not responsible for the Nazis, they were only impressed by the Nazis success and unable to pit their own judgment against the verdict of History, as they read it.”
That line is taken from “Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship,” a lecture that Arendt delivered in 1964. She was one of our great theorists of personal responsibility and the human faculty for judgment, and I have found myself repeatedly coming back to this lecture in particular in the months since Trump's second inauguration. Along with Dorothy Thompson's immortal “Who Goes Nazi?”, I believe “Personal Responsibility” is one of the great prophetic essays that everyone should read to understand this moment.
In part, I recommend this essay because of how it helps us understand the politics of respectability. Part of what makes it so disturbing when institutions like Columbia University or The Washington Post capitulate to Trump is that these places are the traditional strongholds of mainstream respectability. And while Trump may be powerful, he is not respectable; even as he crashes through the political and legal norms that hold the republic together, one might expect a bit more resistance from the longtime guardians of those norms.
But maybe respectability is the mortal vice leading some of these institutions astray. Because where the first Trump administration broke the rules of the old order, the second Trump administration is working to create a new one before our very eyes. What “respectability” means under this new order is very different from what it meant under the previous one. Arendt tells us “it was precisely the members of respectable society, who had not been touched by the intellectual and moral upheaval in the early stages of the Nazi period, who were the first to yield. They simply exchanged one system of values for another.”
Respectability is, in fact, why they were so fluidly able to swap out the old system of values. To be respectable is to be known for your adherence to the prevailing rules; any attempt to exercise independent judgment in evaluating those rules is only to risk your respectability, and much more besides. And if that is the cost, then who can do otherwise than collaborate?
In “Personal Responsibility,” Arendt denigrates the “widespread conviction that it is impossible to withstand temptation of any kind, the none of us could be trusted or even expected to be trustworthy when the chips are down, that to be tempted and to be forced are almost the same.” But that is the precisely the conviction that Brad Karp, chair of the law firm Paul Weiss, appealed to in his defense of the firm's deal with the Trump administration. “It is very easy for commentators to judge our actions from the sidelines,” he wrote in an email to “the PW community.” “But no one in the wider world can appreciate how stressful it is to confront an executive order like this until one is directed at you.”
Perhaps so, but the wider world still knows there are worse things than the stress of losing one's government contracts. In the most moving section of “Personal Responsibility,” Arendt turns to consider the rare Germans who refused to participate in the Nazi war machine. Here is how she describes them:
Quote Posted by "Hannah Arendt"
I therefore would suggest that the nonparticipants were those whose consciences did not function in this, as it were, automatic way—as though we dispose of a set of learned or innate rules which we then apply to the particular case as it arises, so that every new experience or situation is already prejudged and we need only act out whatever we learned or possessed beforehand. Their criterion, I think, was a different one: they asked themselves to what extent they would still be able to live in peace with themselves after having committed certain deeds; and they decided that it would be better to do nothing, not because the world would then be changed for the better, but simply because only on this condition could they go on living with themselves at all. Hence, they also chose to die when they were forced to participate. To put it crudely, they refused to murder, not so much because they still held fast to the command "Thou shalt not kill," but because they were unwilling to live together with a murderer—themselves.
The precondition for this kind of judging is not a highly developed intelligence or sophistication in moral matters, but rather the disposition to live together explicitly with oneself, to have intercourse with oneself, that is, to be engaged in that silent dialogue between me and myself which, since Socrates and Plato, we usually call thinking.
What we now see laid bare is what ensues when the higher echelons of our elite professional castes—the most sophisticated and most respectable among us—avoid that kind of thinking, and are in fact discouraged from it. I've occupied some halls of privilege in my time, and I've seen this thoughtlessness up close. But it's only now—when, as Arendt said, the chips are down—that we get to see how just how deep it goes.
Starker on 30/3/2025 at 11:51
Apparently, buying pardons is just the cost of doing fraud business now:
[video=youtube;xUBCX7AV5PY]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xUBCX7AV5PY[/video]
Wouldn't be surprised at all if Sam Bankman-Fraud was next on the list.
Silentor on 30/3/2025 at 13:52
Quote Posted by Nicker
Thanks for taking the time from your busy job proof-reading DJT tweets for clarity.
I am still curious about your planetisity-shaplianity answeroid; spherianical or platernal?
I wrote in the next topic that:
Quote:
Flat-earners, as far as I understand, originated at the end of the 19th century in the USA.
At some point, this nonsense started to escalate in the Russian segment of YouTube. And Have Americans ever been on the Moon? Both are nonsense that is not even worthy of discussion.
IMHO, I gave the answer. With my spherical tech brain, it seems to me that there is a conspiracy in this in the form of forcing all sorts of nonsense to clog up space. The scale is not comparable to those who could really believe (fuck, I'm writing this) in a flat Earth or that there were no Moon landings.
The theory of Global Warming is also nonsense. But it's already progressing in a serious way.
And when activists put those who destroy 5G towers and Global Warm deniers on the same rack, this is blasphemous demagoguery. IMHO, this juxtaposition is, in fact, exactly the conspiracy.
Yes, about such cancellation of "cancellation culture")))))
That in most cases there has been no understanding of the underlying processes in the last quarter of a century. When it would be possible to find a compromise balance. It was just making money-money-money. And real loonies came out (all over the world, especially in my Russia).
Which will mess up both liberal and conservative ideas.
I read the lamentations of the Occupy Wall Street activist. He said that their movement was leaked by some lesbian activists under the auspices of corporations.
