by hkhn on 3/23/24, 1:56 AM with 10 comments
by roenxi on 3/23/24, 4:04 AM
This has terrible results in politics - usually the target is wrong because our information about what is happening society-wide is so poor, and the club usually hangs around for someone corrupt to wield. Pretty consistently the correct response is dialog, tolerance and decentralising power. Good luck getting anyone to listen to "time for dialog, tolerance and decentralising power!" when they think there is a crisis. They want to club something, with a bigger club than got used the last time.
The big lessons out of the communists is that there is a level of power concentration where once it occurs there will be a lot of unnecessary deaths and suffering. Don't let that happen. In particular, let farmers run their farms to produce as much food as they like. There have been too many examples of people bringing the big club down on the farmers business then mass starvation (I'm thinking Sri Lanka, Zimbabwe, Communist Russia and Communist China when I say that, but I'm sure there are countless other examples).
by arp242 on 3/23/24, 4:21 AM
This post is clearly aimed at the US, which of course means Trump. Strongmen rule is not just a black/white type of thing; Trump will never have Stalin-like power. Putin today doesn't have that either, and even though some individuals inconvenient to Putin brutally accidentally stabbed themselves in the chest while shaving, this is nothing compared to Stalin's purges and the NKVD activities. Stalinist and Putin Russia are not really comparable. This post paints with far too broad of a brush.
Trump is not going to open death pits, put people in torture camps, or any of that. He's not going to close down public spaces or monitor "everything you say" either. He's just obsessed with showing the world he has very big genitalia. And to be fair, he really is quite good at this because much of the world does think he's a gigantic dick. That pretty much explains 95% of what he does – there is no real plan, ideology, or anything. Just trying be the "tough guy" (or what he perceives that to be anyway). It's almost shockingly simple: just a cunt acting like a cunt on account of being a cunt.
I'm not sating Trump isn't a strongman or potentially dangerous, but I don't think this post really says anything meaningful about Trump. All off this matters because if your understanding of Trump is flawed then your solution is likely to be flawed too.
Trump somehow seems to have more or less accidentally formed a cult of personality around him. I don't quite understand how that happened because I don't think it was a conscious effort on Trump's part. I think the exact reasons for this are the important bit to understand, because Trump is only a player because of the votes, and those votes could easily transfer to another strongman – there have been "Proto-Trump" figures like Sarah Palin, and some of the Trumpdroids in congress now seem to be in a contest to out-Trump Trump. Marjorie Taylor Greene for president 2028? Who knows...