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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 21, 2024

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Damn I so much wish that your fears turn out right. A properly ruthless administration could spill into Europe so we can deport everyone that came illegally in the last 15 years.

You might want to double-check where you personally are in the "first they came for..." sequence. You seem to be prone enough to thoughtcrime that while living in a liberal European society you're responding to a post saying "Trump is fine with massacring people" with "I hope you're right." Are you going to turn into a perfectly credible conformist if your country goes fascist? If not, that's a lower bound on where you are in the priority queue.

So what is your vision? After my country turns to fascism someone someday knocks on my door and take me in? Poof gone? Don't forget that there are also people knocking on doors and people directing other people on which doors to knock. Someone will have to fine tune the LLMs that will be doing the selection.

And yes it will be fun to watch America slide into fascism - I would love to see the reaction in the eyes of currently very online activists when there is suddenly skin in the game.

But there is zero chance of this happening over Trump. People just need justification to keep freaking out for stupid shit and larping the resistance.

Don't forget that there are also people knocking on doors and people directing other people on which doors to knock.

In fascism, you can be on the one side of the door one day and on the other side the next day.

Take the fate of the SA leadership. They were Nazi through and though. They were the muscle of the NSDAP and instrumental in their rise to power. They ran the first 'wild' concentration camps and murdered political opponents. None of this saved them. The moment Hitler was in power, he threw them under the bus.

So if your plan for the fourth Reich is to be spared because you are helpful enough in their purges, I have every hope that you will join the rest of us after the first tiny internal power struggle hickup.

Frankly if the only choice is between a bullet in the back of the head from a friend vs an enemy, I'll choose a friend every time.

Ah, so you're the target audience for Don't Be A Sucker (1946). A fascist state operates for the benefit of the state, not its nominally model citizens/disposable cannon fodder.

I think that your model of how totalitarian states work (I do noticed that kids these days do think that national socialism, fascism, authoritarianism, dictatorship, and totalitarianism are interchangeable words that have the benefit of meaning nothing specifically but sounding scary for the mentally hoi poloi and the intellectuals yet idiots) is wrong - even if they sometimes have issues with the true believers, they usually leave the pragmatic people with no empathy alone or employ them.