Um, what does he think Antifa means? You notice how they almost exclusively use the abbreviation and hardly ever the full name? For those who might actually be unaware, it means Anti-Fascist.
Scott Adams is a fucking moron. He apparently thinks anti-fascists are actually pro-fascist. Dumbass.
Or who conveniently forget about the Southern Strategy and the great party switch. Massive, massive mental gymnastics to put themselves on the 'right' side of history every time
Except Antifa isn't a formal organization, it's a descriptor for an ideology. An organization can call itself anything, even if it isn't a proper descriptor, but an ideology is by necessity defined by its name.
A lot of conservatives have problems understanding words, especially words that apply to political beliefs. It's party ignorance and partly a result of years of indoctrination. One example, thinking that anyone who isn't hard-right is a 'socialist' or a 'commie' and not understanding that those aren't the same thing. Then, fascist... many people seem to think fascist means an authoritarian government, independent of any other qualities or beliefs.
Fascism : a way of organizing a society in which a government ruled by a dictator controls the lives of the people and in which people are not allowed to disagree with the government.
I mean, that's what most people imagine, when they think fascist and I think it's good enough.
Is every fascist government identical? No. But as near as makes no difference they are all the same type of asshole.
The rest of your points stand, however. People do not understand communism, socialism, nor Marxism.
You actually just proved their point by defining authoritarianism and calling it fascism. Fascist governments are authoritarian but that's just one aspect of it.
I literally just pulled the first result on google...
And like I said for general conversations this definition is absolutely adequate.
It's like talking about American Democracy and someone goes "well, technically we're a Republic!"... Ok great...
The difference between fascism and communism is that people have generally a good idea of what a fascist government looks like, while they really don't understand the other terms.
I disagree that people generally have a good idea what a fascist government looks like, or else there wouldn't be this level of confusion. I think most people at best, know what countrys had a problem with fascism in the past, without any certainty of what parts of of those governments were where the fascism was, just guesses.
Thats why comparisons to nazis and such are so common I would say. People find it a lot easier to point out similarities to known fascism than to try and concisely point out the exact point where an action became "fascist"
It's not good enough because fascism is specifically a form of right wing authoritarianism which includes hyper-capitalism, close relationship between the state and corporations, sexism, racism, and xenophobia. Otherwise we're back to the idea that a fascist dictatorship and a communist dictatorship are the same thing, which clearly they're not.
Most of the time, yeah. We take these mental shortcuts to avoid a lot of unnecessary headache and talking.
Problem is, these shortcuts get hijacked by asshole grifters to push their own agenda in todays climate of tiktok and youtube shorts. And this is especially potent when the usual everyday use of the word is not good enough. Want another example: "What is a woman?" Same mental shortcut. Same method to exploit the shortcut. Same bullshit. Nuanced discussion not happening.
Sometimes, we just need to be precise in discourse. These people are intentionally not being precise. They hijack our mental shortcuts.
Yeah but get into a debate with Scott Adams and like-minded morons and inevitably they'll try and pretend that Nazis were actually socialists because it was in their name. Never mind that was a throwback to some early party mergers and everything they said and did was ultra right nationalism. Strictly not fascism (that is the Italian variant) but aligned to it so closely that it broadly makes no odds.
Is there really 2 hours and 18 minutes worth of content devoted to Scott Adams losing his goddamn mind? I don't know if I have that kind of time to invest in that douche canoe.
I really enjoyed it. But I was also playing rocket league or driving when I listened to it. Behind the bastards is moderately funny so it’s an easy listen.
Having listened to some other Behind the Bastards I'd say it's really an entertainment show that uses their topics as a basis to joke around than a serious biography wherein explaining the subject is the primary goal.
They're usually fun and you'll tend to learn something new but it's not really ever going ot be a serious deep dive.
Sounds a bit like Drunk History! Though I think I'd have to take that one with a bit more salt
I keep hearing about the podcast and it sounds great. Could you recommend any outstanding episodes to check out? My interests are wide so anything is on the table
I've not long listened to it so probably can't make great recommendations of classic episodes but I enjoyed their series of episodes about Vince McMahon titled: "Histories Greatest Bastard!" (partly because it features Seanbaby.) I've really just dipped in an out of a couple of random episodes otherwise.
I really don't understand successful people attaching their wagon to Conservatives... The entire human history is just a parade of religious Conservatives resisting change, trying to subjugate others and looking like absolute assholes in hindsight.
There is ZERO examples in history of "hey we were going to expand freedoms, but good thing we didn't, thanks to the religious opposition!"....
Conservatives are wrong and have been wrong on every single social issue since the dawn of time.
I'm sure they had their victories when it comes to economic issues, but they haven't had one of those in over half a century either, since the only idea they seem to have is tax cuts.
Hah yeah... It also wasn't until this post that I made that connection. For the past few years I've heard of "the Dilbert Guy going off the deep end" and seen random posts (like this) with this Scott character being an absolute moron
I know at least 4 (I wanna say 6 but 4 confirmed confidently) righty leaning lads who are anti trans for what they will say are varied, diverse, weighty reasons - who all collectively tell the same story word for word any and everytime trans issues come up....
"I hit it off with a girl on Tinder, then two days in before we met or got serious or even talked all that much (just enough for me to be smitten) they told me they were trans, and I'm not a bigot, BUT IF THEY DON'T PUT THAT SHIT IN THEIR BIO THEY DESERVE WHATEVER HAPPENS TO THEM"
Nobody understands when I explain that their violent response to a trans woman on tinder is why trans women don't put it in their bio.
Jesus. Just had a moment of empathy. I don't think I have ever had a first date with someone (yes I am a het cis male) where violence was a real possibility. The very worse I worried about was some sorta scam. Be safe everyone.
Yea it's a fkd up world, and many people are wild animals, or even worse. Im a cis male too, and the most i ever had to deal with was a girl..[or two] who beat the shit out of me. Some days I have more hope for humanity (myself included) than others yknow.
I completely agree with the commenter above. Self censoring swear words is absolutely ridiculous. Either swear or don’t - that’s your choice.
@Owlchemist Comments that insult other community members (directly or indirectly) without adding anything interesting to the conversation are not welcome here.
No, it’s not a community rule, just a pet peeve. I honestly hate it but I think making it a rule would be too authoritarian. I don’t want to be that mod.
My reminder of the lemmy rule against insulting others was directed at Owlchemist. I’ll edit my comment to make that more clear.
If you feel it’s “insulting” to find judgmental comments that add zero to the discuss except being negative to another community member pedantic, I don’t know what to tell you.
In all honestly, ya’ll’s comments are the same kind of negative as mine. Who cares how someone else chooses to write? How is bemoaning someone’s choice of spelling or self-censor “adding anything interesting to the conversation.” It certainly makes that commenter feel like shit. So who’s rule breaking here?
People can talk however they want. Adding an asterisk honestly adds some flavor to it. It's like, making the curse word taboo again, in a sense. It's kind of an interesting phenomenon.
Either way, "either swear or don't" (in the lots of replies here) is one of the stupidest hills to die on that I've ever seen. And there are many corpses of me on top of hills.
Every word uttered by a conservative is either a lie or profoundly incorrect. Every communication is an attempt to manipulate. This is who conservatives are.
I used to read ToiletPaperUSA on reedit and yeah, fuckin Charlie Kirk. EVERYTHING he posts online contains fallacies and conflations attempting to manipulate people, like he knows his ideas can't stand on their own without dishonesty.
I've been putting off seeing family for so long, but I've been begged to come to the reunion this year as my Grandma is not doing so great. Every single one of them were once proud Trump supporters who grew silent after j6. Now all they do is scream about Phil Murphy and...bears? Windmills causing whales to beach? This weekend is going to be dreadful.
I had an old family friend meltdown, unfriend me from facebook, and avoid me like the plague ever since I told him he was wrong when he claimed it takes more electricity to make a single windmill than a windmill can ever produce in it's usuable lifetime...
Pure culture wars. Renewable energy is an amazing boon for decentralization, which means rural communities and those who want to go off-grid. It's a no brainer. But because they've tied themselves to social conservatism and their thought leaders in that sphere have major financial ties to gas & oil, they have to morally oppose windmills.
Meanwhile, drive through Kansas sometime....thousands of windmills along I-70, sometimes stretching as far as the eye can see. Maybe 10s of thousands. The discrepancy between that fact and the opposition is astounding. Look what states have the most power generation by windmills.
Actually that is really really interesting what you said, "morally opposed to windmills." They obviously are against them from a "moral" perspective, but I've never seen even an attempt at a moral argument against windmills, its all crazy conspiracy theory stuff. I would almost respect it more if one of them just said something like "I don't like windmills because I think it is morally wrong to harvest wind".
Hey now, I know the average Bush voter in the late 90s wasn’t like this. Blind hate for half the country just destroys the country. This is a new problem.
Whatever this new thing is, the small group doing this - not the ever growing group being exposed and converted by it - deserves everything you’re saying. But don’t give up on your conservative family members. We’ll figure out how to stop the flow of hateful brain junk food eventually. We can go back to just politically disagreeing with them, instead of being irrationally hated by them. And vice versa.
They weren't quite like this but there was still shitty conservatives in much the same way... The extremists weren't the core yet though. They were absolutely still there and voting for Bush, they just weren't allowed to be the face of the party... Yet.
Respectfully disagree. Since Reagan the right has been completely fine with utter hypocrisy in the service of - well, ultimately nothing though for awhile they would say it was in the service of national security, or Christianity or something like that. Reagan republicans actively worked to fool the working class into giving them more and more power by lying, using "morning in America" commercials, and otherwise laying the groundwork for what became the fox news nation we now know and love so well.
The fact that otherwise good people who would help others and meant for everyone to get a fair chance etc. would steadfastly give their votes to them every election became more of a house of mirrors and lots of analysis as to how that could possibly be when their policies are so obviously cruel / stupid / nonexistent.
TL;DR - Propaganda works. "The average person" is criminally under-informed in many ways.
I hope this is ok to say, but I don’t think there was any part of what I said that you disagreed with.
I completely agree on all points. Those people have a dishonest agenda and they’ve figured out how to manipulate human nature to get what they need from part of an otherwise-good populace.
That's not correct; you're taking a black and white, absolutist view to the question, and that just doesn't work.
For instance, take economics; many traditional conservative positions square pretty well with economic theories and practices. Social conservatism also has a place, given the tension that exists between concepts of community and society. I do not agree with many conservative interpretations, but it's not accurate to say that all conservatives are intellectually dishonest.
OTOH, modern "conservatives" aren't conservatives in any meaningful way. It's now more like regressive populism.
take economics; many traditional conservative positions square pretty well with economic theories and practices
Like trickle down theory, corporate personhood, that tax breaks will result in tax revenue, and that government austerity is preferable to stimulus to move an economy from recession to expansion? They're zero for four in the most popular 20th century conservative economic theories. I'm not sure that economics is the best lens to view conservative theory in a positive light.
Dude. What you consider "the left" IS CONSERVATIVISM. The USA is soooooo far afield, people are sooooo brainwashed, they can't hold a liberal thought in their heads if they fucking tried.
US liberals are more centrists in a European sense, no argument there. I'm just pointing out that offering up US conservative economic theory as a shining star of success is not the boast they think it is.
No, Reaganomics was a bad-faith move by social regressives. Corporate personhood has been a reality since Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Co. in 1886, so I guess that's conservative, but also not exactly. The idea of laissez-faire economics--that the market will mostly sort itself out with minimal gov't intervention--is generally upheld by prevailing economic theories, and is a fundamentally conservative view. I happen to disagree with the economists though, because they're only looking at it as an economic issue, rather than economics being a manifestation of the social realities.
"conservative" is starting to feel like a meaningless label that assholes throughout history have tried to use to describe themselves because they didn't like the other words people were using to describe them.
And don't get me wrong, I'm sure there are "real" conservatives out there and in history, but it sure feels like they are outnumbered by the people that use the word as a mask, and that is weird.
Conservatism took a weird turn with Reagan. Reagan was socially regressive, and not an orthodox fiscal conservative. George HW Bush (Dubya's dad) was in many ways more of a traditional conservative. Eisenhower was a particularly notable conservative, and is generally regarded as a successful president. Nixon was likewise extremely successful, and managed to significantly dampen inflation, despite being generally bad on racial issues (although he did enforce desegregation orders, but he was also working to pull the teeth of the civil rights act to appease white southerners), and generally being a thief and liar. His re-election was a complete blow-out, winning every single state except Delaware.
We've also got this weird idea that being 'liberal' is some kind of magic, that libs are going to do wonderful, magical things as soon as they have majorities in the house and senate, and have the presidency. We've seen that NYS, CA, and IL can't address shit in their own borders--e.g., housing/homelessness, and Obama did very, very little to advance a significant progressive agenda aside from the very weak and watered down ACA. Biden is just going to policies that existed prior to the Trump toxic clownshow.
That is kinda my point, the meaning of "conservative" changes a lot through the centuries it has been used, and the only consistent part seems to be the assholes using it as a "friendly" sounding mask.
And your perspective of the public opinion of liberals is entirely too informed by mainstream media. Many leftists dislike liberals for not being leftist enough, and moderates seem to only expect maintenance of the status quo, not magic
Many leftists dislike liberals for not being leftist enough,
That would be me, right there. The older I get, the farther left I go, and the more disillusioned I get with what I thought Dems had been promising for the 45+ years of my life. Not that Republicans have made my life better in any meaningful way; NAFTA might have improved the bottom line of businesses, but it killed my career in it's infancy when GM/Ford/Chrysler all moved manufacturing south of the border to take advantage of cheap labor. Meanwhile Biden doesn't seem to be doing a lot to help labor either, esp. since he killed the railroad strike before it happened.
Wow, had to check this one was real, and jokes on me it's still up on his Twitter, complete with him stubbornly defending himself against everyone telling him he's nuts. How did the Dilbert guy lose his mind so completely?
I would like to direct your attention to the Behind the Bastards podcast episode entitled "Part One: How The Dilbert Guy Lost His Mind" from July 11th, 2023.
He's always been a little like this but pretty quiet and subtle about it. However once he started losing his ability to speak he lost a lot of social interaction and kinda went nuts.
It absolutely is worth a listen though (as is the rest of the podcast).
He lost his voice starting in like 2005 or 2006, then got surgery to fix it in 2008. Real Time was running starting in '03, but that was way before Trump was politically relevant so I'm betting you saw him after he'd lost his voice, alienated everyone in his life and gone nutty, then gotten it back.
The Behind the Bastards feature on him posited he was always obsessed with predestiny and being some kind of fountain of wisdom. His fame and seclusion just tipped him over the edge from mere asshole into raging lunatic.
He's been racist for a long time. Behind the Bastard covered him recently. He dropped hints over the years. But a health crisis caused him to go into seclusion for a period of time and when it was resolved he was a bit zanier than before.
I am grateful for not having a social media presence and not being important enough to be noticed. If I ever lose my grip on sanity I would rather it just stay small and quiet. Instead of tweeting something racist that haunts me for years.
And on the other side, NOT anonymous they screw up too
There's a big difference between a website knowing that Jim Smith at 123 Blubber Terrace Boise, Idaho visited and looked at dildos vs GA ID 1374738.2188432 did
I don't think that is so surprising. Scott Adams spent most of his career as a manager, not a developer. He probably prided himself in not being the ignorant manager, but at this point I have to question if he was just deluding himself.
Behind the Bastards just recently did a two part story about how The Dilbert Guy lost his mind. It's a great podcast and goes through the whole history of him falling hard for Trump in recent years. Part of it seems to come from a very traumatic health issue where he almost lost his ability to speak. It certainly doesn't absolve him but it kind of explains what pushed him over the edge.
Oh, I know this shit. It's like when Trump made a deal with Satan to convince Eve to eat the apple, because then Trump could try to date or just grab Eve when she got sent to Earth.
Since you've already volunteered yourself to venture into the den of awfulness formerly know as Twitter on our behalf; perhaps you could dig around to see if perhaps there's a recently trending, uh, txeet(?) That says something sensible using the same structure but different groups that this Scott idiot is attempting to parody?
Something like:
"I wonder if (some group this Scott guy would relate to?) know that (scumbag group who actually supported Hitler and the previously named group have recently shown support for) was allied with Hitler and helped him come to power..."
That's my most generous interpretation of what he's saying about someone critizing his original post just not understanding "what's going on here."
Like Peterson, Scott Adams was at least interesting to read in 2016, even if you don't agree with him. His analysis on why Trump eventually won was actually a pretty good read.
But it seems that going deep into the conservative echo chamber turns everyone in it completely insane and paranoid, until they are nothing but a parody of their former self.
So I think the main idea of conservatism is ironically being self destructive.
The beginnings of his exposure as being batshit crazy were there in Dilbert if you went back after he exposed himself. But the undeniable evidence that he's batshit crazy comes from his early books, long before he fell down into his "I'm a hypnotist so I know everything about persuasion" rabbit hole. He genuinely believed in affirmations as a hack code for the universe where writing down something and wishing for it hard enough will make the entire universe change to get it to you. His novels were so bad that he accomplished the impossible: he made me wish Ayn Rand had given him some writing tips. This is years before he fell down into the right wing grifter space he now occupies.
He was fucking crazy from his YOUTH. (Source: his own stories on his blog!)
People, by default, assume because he made stuff people liked that he was a sane, rational person. No matter how much talent or money someone has they're still as prone to having batshit insane takes as anyone else you may encounter.
This is a common problem. "I like this singer's music ... wait ... he said WHAT about black people!? But ... dude is BLACK!!!" "I like this painter's portraits. Wait, what did he do with children!?"
I love that I have seen comments responding to comments about him being crazy with something like. So everyone you disagree with is crazy. Its not a disagreement when someone says a relatively new, modern age group, was behind a historical group. Im not going to even get into its the opposite of what their group is about. Its like no. People are called crazy for saying crazy shit. Like slavery was beneficial to slaves. Thats not about disagreement its just patently wrong. Its like saying when you murder people it can sometimes be good for their health.
Adams is "crazy" because he seems to disagree with himself. Donald Trump impresses Adams, yet he voted for Hillary Clinton to protect himself. White people should "stay the hell away from black people," yet in a tweet after his tirade he explained he is not bothered by black people, but instead bothered by white advocates for black people (which... may include himself, I mean he identified as black for solidarity or something, which is kind of meaningless, but he did used to support black cartoonist Robb Armstrong's comic Jump Start quite a bit, and even wrote the foreward to his book). Yeah, his views can be upsetting, but the following day they will likely be upsetting yet completely contrawise to his previous views. That's why he's "crazy," and while I dislike the connotation of the word it seems apt. He has a constant paranoid mania in his videos, blog posts, and tweets. I really only have a layman's knowledge of mental disorders, coupled with my own experience, but Adams really needs an evaluation. PTSD, any bipolar disorder, any schizophrenia, or maybe something else I don't know about could likely be in the cards.
But also like... In an entirely self-contained way the person who wrote the original post is crazy because they are claiming a group was part of events that ended decades before that group formed.
Yeah when stuff first came out I watched like half a dozen episodes of his coffee talks. I kept on trying to go with that hes joking or being sarcastic in some way but eventually its like nope. there is no way to spin this. biden turning into a werewolf. sort a joke or something. don't really get it. does not fit in as funny. come on bring this around to some sort of sarcasm. crap hes just lost it.
He was a big inspiration to me too for a while. I started reading Dilbert when I was first learning how to read. Then I started making my own comics for a bit. My mom and a lot of her colleagues loved him and his comic too, since they worked for Nynex, later Bell Atlantic, while he was working for Pacific Bell. I have this fantasy that maybe my mom or her colleagues might've even spoken/written to him once while they worked in purchasing. Maybe she or someone else got a phone call saying "Hey, this is Scott. The Seattle office needs more paper. Please order some." Though that probably isn't too likely since Nynex only dealt with New York and New England, and Bell Atlantic with the East Coast. Still, everything seemed somewhat interconnected in the Baby Bell days of the phone companies that I feel like he could have crossed their paths. Anyway, I hope he reexamines his views and has a support network in getting better. He deserves his punishment but the funnies aren't the same without Dilbert.
Yeah. Its so strange as I feel this is happening with a lot of people. From well known public figures to even my own family memebers. I sometimes wonder if its a result of modern things that are unfixable for the individual. Climate change and such. I sometimes wonder if some folks brains can't handle not having a solution so has to go into all sorts of strange beliefs or directions in search of a fix. Like back when musk was a bit more normal there was talk around his various endeavours trying to push technological development to sorta fix things (getting off fossil fuels, moving industry to space, etc) and I sorta wonder if it just became clear that the math did not add up and his mind went to a social issues fantasy to fix the world.
Antifa isn't all that new though. While the American antifa isn't actually a branch of the original 1930s German one, it likes to think it is, and it's the German one that Scott's claiming helped Hitler gain power.
No. No it isn't. Scott is just a moron who happens to also be able to draw (badly) characters that corporate office drones relate to. He's absolutely trying to attack the current Anti-facist movement in the USA.
I mean yeah, he is, but saying it's new isn't why he's talking bollocks. There was an Antifa that the modern antifa claims ideological descent from, and that is what he is claiming supported Hitler.
The issue is that what Antifa actually is and how the public perceives it are two different things. This is why certain people will believe this as much as NSDAP being socialists because it is in the name which makes them leftists unless you really give a history lesson. And from experience that will end up in that they either say that's just your opinion, look at you with glassed eyes or never even listened to you into the end.
Yes, both are historically really incorrect and at the level of a glance funny in inaccuracy. But on more deeper level this (insert the right fallacy or tactic as it escapes me) is a lot more insidiously dangerous. How do you efficiently encounter it in a way that most people will come out of the discussion with the most accurate knowledge?
I imagine hes is misquoting the United Front here?
The United Front (Einheitsfront) was the strategy of the German communist party KPD to counter both fascism and social democrats (whom the KPD and the Third International called social fascists ("Sozialfaschisten")). As you can probably guess, this wasn't very successful in uniting the left and center against fascism, so Parties of the Comintern ended up changing strategies to the United Front, a broad coalition of left and center against fascism. This had some limited success (France had a Popular front government of communists/socdems/left leaning liberals for two years that enacted a fairly large amount of very progressive labour laws and banned a number of fascist and monarchist organisations like the Croix de Feu, Spain had a similar Popular front which ended with the military loss in the civil war against Franco)
The SocDems SPD had a similar strategy btw., the iron front, which intended to counter fascism, monarchism, and communism and was opposed to the KPD.
edit: When summarizing, it's fairly elementary, if not outright essential, to include salient points from the source in question. For instance, the "summary" below completely omits the section (wherein the host blasts this nazi clown for his islamophobia) that, apparently, went on for several minutes. Downvote all you want, former Redditors. Go touch some grass. 🤗
You’re being unnecessarily antagonistic and just plain unpleasant. Neither is acceptable here. If you can’t follow the rules of this community, instance and lemmy, please refrain from participating.
Yes, and I'm starting that if you attempt to summarize, do be sure to touch on key points rather than boiling it down to such a degree that it's indistinguishable from mud. Pretty basic stuff, friend. Thanks for trying, though.
No. No it wasn't. Antifaschistische Aktion was a paramilitary wing of the communists, fighting both the social democratic Iron Front and the Nazi Sturmabteilung.
The only way in which it could be said to be allied with the Nazis is that both of them opposed the social democrats, but the enemy of your enemy is not in fact your friend. The KPD saw both the SPD and the NSDAP as fascists, rather than in any way allying with the NSDAP against the SPD.
Every now and then you run into a confident claim that is so unbelievably detached from reality that there's nowhere to even start debunking it lol. Can't believe this guy went from Dilbert to... whatever this is in just a handful of years.
It wasn't high art or anything, but it was almost aggressively non-offensive. Just an engineer complaining about silly work things. Can you imagine how disastrous things would go if he attempted to draw Dilbert with his current views? Although, from googling, it looks like that's actually what he's planning to do lol. Jesus.
As someone who occasionally read Dilbert back in the day, I do have to say that the "author self-insert character is always right and always complaining, and everyone else is always an idiot" tropes are well-tilled soil for right-wing outrage culture.
Add in there that he already had an "perpetually angry woman" character and "Indian office worker stereotype" character, and it becomes even easier to see how he got there.
For anyone not aware and to spare you from giving him traffic, one recent comic of his had the first black guy ever in a dilbert comic. That man then gave the punchline "I identify as white".
Scott is way off his rocker and has apparently decided to go all in on conspiracy nonsense.
1: The United States Bourgeoisie bankrolled the rise of fascism in Europe.
2: The bourgeois leaders of England, France, Poland, Finland and other Western European nations either ignored, enabled, or appeased Hitler's worst behavior in the buildup to WW2.
3: The bourgeois leaders of these countries, England in particular, pushed for disastrous bilateral security arrangements which created a domino effect leading to war, while ignoring the USSR's suggestion of collective, anti-fascist security arrangements.
4: The bourgeois leaders of these countries pursued a policy not of containing fascist aggression, but of diplomatically isolating the USSR, in the hopes that Hitler would go East and carry out an anti-communist genocide on their behalf.
5: The bourgeois leaders of these countries, having ignored or stalled collective security proposals from the USSR, actively made bilateral non-aggression pacts with Hitler before Molotov-Ribbentrop was signed, making the USSR the last in a long line of nations to sign non-aggression pacts with Hitler, after the USSR's collective security proposals fell through.
6: The USSR only signed Molotov-Ribbentrop to buy time. The USSR only invaded East Poland to prevent a German front from forming right at the Soviet border. This is because attempts to make mutual security arrangements with Poland fell through. The Soviets only moved into the region after the existing government had literally fled the country, leaving it ungoverned. 2 million jews in eastern poland were saved from the nazis by this action.
7: The USSR tried to purchase a strategic corridor of land from Finland that the nazis could easily use to invade the USSR. The USSR not only wanted to legally purchase this land from Finland, but to trade Finland more acres of land in exchange. i.e. an asymmetrical trade that would have ultimately benefited Finland. Finland refused because the fascist leadership of Finland wanted to see Germany invade the USSR through this strategic corridor. This led directly to the Winter War. The Finnish lost the winter war but used their intelligence that they gathered during it to collaborate with the nazis.
8: When the North Atlantic allies finally teamed up with USSR after their strategy of appeasing Hitler backfired, they immediately attempted to make asymmetrical security arrangements that would have obligated the USSR to commit far more troops and resources to the war than any other ally, essentially using the USSR as a shield against the very fascist powers they had spent the better part of a decade appeasing. The British in particular kept stalling on arrangements and pretending to be confused.
9: When the war was over the North Atlantic allies, led by the USA, who came out of the war richer than any other country on Earth, immediately committed to rehabilitating nazis, blaming the USSR, who was decimated by the war, for causing the war, and created NATO to begin encircling the USSR, 6 years before the creation of the Warsaw pact.
10: The North Atlantic allies immediately set to using the Marshall plan to rebuild the fascist German, Italian, and Japanese economies, indebting them to the United States, and orienting them towards anti-communist policy.
11: The North Atlantic allies to tried to use the Marshall plan as a proto-IMF to privatize and deregulate the economy of the war-torn USSR, and open it up to foreign capital. That the USSR rejected this was framed as aggression and used as a justification for beginning the cold war.
But hey, don't just take my word for it, or this rough outline of what is contained in well regarded books (I implore you to read some). How about we read Albert Einstein's words spoken at the time these events actually occurred?
A lot to unpack in this speech but the basics of what Einstein says are:
The USSR made all efforts to stop the war happening.
The western powers(UK, France, US, etc) shut the USSR out of European discussions and betrayed Czechoslovakia.
Molotov-Ribbentrop was an unhappy last resort that they were driven to, that the western powers were attempting to drive the nazis into attacking the USSR and that's why they would not help the USSR stop them.
The USSR supported everyone while the other powers (UK, France, US, etc) strengthened the nazis and Japanese.
The appointment of Hitler as Germany’s chancellor general, as well as the rising threat from Japan, led to important changes in Soviet foreign policy. Oriented toward Germany since the treaty of Locarno (1925) and the treaty of Special Relations with Berlin (1926), the Kremlin now moved in the opposite direction by trying to establish closer ties with France and Britain to isolate the growing Nazi threat. This policy became known as “collective security” and was associated with Maxim Litvinov, the Soviet foreign minister at the time. The pursuit of collective security lasted approximately as long as he held that position. Japan’s war with China took some pressure off of Russia by allowing it to focus its diplomatic efforts on relations with Europe.
Moscow, seeing that the Red Referendum manoeuvre had failed, threw all pretence aside and came openly out for letting Hitler in.
On October 14, 1931, Remmele, one of the three official leaders of the Communist Party, with Stalinist effrontery announced the policy in the Reichstag.
“Herr Bruening has put it very plainly; once they (the Fascists) are in power, then the united front of the proletariat will be established and it will make a clean sweep of everything. (Violent applause from the Communists)…We are the victors of the coming day; and the question is no longer one of who shall vanquish whom. This question is already answered. (Applause from the Communists). The question now reads only, ‘At what moment shall we overthrow the bourgeoisie?’…We are not afraid of the Fascist gentlemen. They will shoot their bolt quicker than any other Government. (Right you are! from the Communists) …”
The Fascists, so ran the argument, would introduce inflation, there would be financial chaos, and then the proletarian victory would follow. The speech was printed with a form asking for membership of the party attached and distributed in great numbers all over Germany.
Stalinist parties are led from above. Their leaders get the line and impose it. Disobedience is labelled Trotskyism, Right deviation, and what not, and the dissidents expelled. But the situation in Germany was too tense, and violent protests from the Left Wing caused the policy to be withdrawn. But from that moment it was certain that the Communist Party leadership would never fight, and the “After Hitler, our turn” [25] was the line on which they led the party. The German leadership did not follow blindly. Some of them carried on a ceaseless struggle to the very end. But built on Moscow they faced isolation if they broke with Moscow, and the organisational vice silenced or expelled them. [26]
It's amusing how contemporary Stalinists put so much effort into justifying a pact that Stalin himself tried to keep from public knowledge and Russians rarely want to acknowledge.
That ought to tell you that the USSR wasn't proud of Molotov-Ribbentrop.
What's even more amusing is a bunch of history revisionists come here to defend the argument that the communists and not the fascists were the main partners of the Nazis, lol. Seriously. They were literally part of the same military coalition.
Communists and Nazis were literally part of the same military coalition. Stalin made sure of that. He even made a toast for Hitler's continued good health.
Moscow, seeing that the Red Referendum manoeuvre had failed, threw all pretence aside and came openly out for letting Hitler in.
On October 14, 1931, Remmele, one of the three official leaders of the Communist Party, with Stalinist effrontery announced the policy in the Reichstag.
“Herr Bruening has put it very plainly; once they (the Fascists) are in power, then the united front of the proletariat will be established and it will make a clean sweep of everything. (Violent applause from the Communists)....We are the victors of the coming day; and the question is no longer one of who shall vanquish whom. This question is already answered. (Applause from the Communists). The question now reads only, ‘At what moment shall we overthrow the bourgeoisie?’...We are not afraid of the Fascist gentlemen. They will shoot their bolt quicker than any other Government. (Right you are! from the Communists) ...”
The Fascists, so ran the argument, would introduce inflation, there would be financial chaos, and then the proletarian victory would follow. The speech was printed with a form asking for membership of the party attached and distributed in great numbers all over Germany.
Stalinist parties are led from above. Their leaders get the line and impose it. Disobedience is labelled Trotskyism, Right deviation, and what not, and the dissidents expelled. But the situation in Germany was too tense, and violent protests from the Left Wing caused the policy to be withdrawn. But from that moment it was certain that the Communist Party leadership would never fight, and the “After Hitler, our turn” [25] was the line on which they led the party. The German leadership did not follow blindly. Some of them carried on a ceaseless struggle to the very end. But built on Moscow they faced isolation if they broke with Moscow, and the organisational vice silenced or expelled them. [26]
The Soviets wouldn’t have been able to fight without American Lend-Lease.
Not a single piece of american lend-lease arrived until after the battle of Moscow. The war had already turned. That's not to say it wasn't useful, more germans would have escaped encirclements and pace would have been slower as a result, it would have taken 12-18 months longer. But every academic historian agrees that the germans had lost the war as of the battle of moscow. Trying to present this as the war having been won by the american aid is absurd and there are no academic historians that agree with it, at best you'll get them to hedge and say they don't know the impact.
old Stalinist propaganda, and barely worth refuting.
Einstein, barely worth refuting. Your brain must be MASSIVE mate.
You're linking to a book written in 1937. That predates the molotov-ribbentrop pact by 2 years lmao. It has zero relevance here other than being "stalin bad grrr stalin was mean to trotsky!" which is true but completely irrelevant to the nazis. I will say that the idea that stalin had anything to do with the failure of the german revolution is absurd. The german revolution failed the day Rosa was murdered and if there is any event in history I would change with a time machine it would be her death. It occurred at an utterly pivotal moment that guaranteed the following rise of fascism.
If lend-lease didn't contribute to Soviet success against Germany, then by the same reasoning Western military aid didn't contribute to Ukrainian success against Russia. After all, nearly all of it arrived after the Battle of Kyiv.
I didn't say it did not contribute. I said that it was fundamentally too late for american lend-lease to change the outcome of the war, it had already been won. The nazis had one chance to win and once they were repelled they were never going to catch up with the speed of Soviet manufacturing.
Some British lend-lease had arrived shortly before that battle. So they do not lose some credit, only the american lend-lease loses credit.
then by the same reasoning Western military aid didn’t contribute to Ukrainian success against Russia. After all, nearly all of it arrived after the Battle of Kyiv.
When ukraine actually breaks through russia's defensive lines we can start talking about its effect on their success against russia. As you rightfully point out all of their gains at the start of this war occurred before any aid, and the lines of been more or less stagnant ever since. Their counter offensives this spring (became a summer offensive) have yet to break a single line, let alone all 3 lines. I think we should be expecting at least antoher 18 months of this assuming negotiations continue to be refused and that it is even undecided as of this point in time.
It's just engagement bait; the consequence of Elon paying influencers. All these guys are just saying sillier and sillier statements to pump up their view counts in an attempt to score some Muskbux. Just roll your eyes and stop using Twitter.
The scariest thing about this sort of descent into madness through joining a cult, is that I wonder what keeps this from happening to me? Would I recognize the signs in myself and just know, "Whoa there, maybe this isn't such a hot idea, this is obviously crazy talk." Is it a slow decline where you sort of make small concessions and give up on reality bit by bit, until you turn around one day and you've just lost touch completely (or in your mind everyone else is taking crazy pills)?
I feel like we've been watching the GOP start to slip away from at least "acceptable" political discourse for awhile now, they've just been slowly but surely pushing the bounds of insanity little by little each year, until we've ended up with whatever the fuck the GOP is now, like this weird parody of its former self. Not that the Democrats are that much better, but for the most part they're still active participants in trying to maintain a shared reality.
There's obviously people on the fringe on either wing of the mainstream American political spectrum, but the lunatics have basically taken over the asylum in the GOP and their current "fringe" is just sensible, independent conservatives who I'm sure must exist somewhere, people relatively untouched by Trump's cult of personality. Decades of FoxNews though I'm sure have whittled that number down to near-extinction.
“One side wants a fascist autocratic regime and the other wants universal healthcare but has some moderate members backed by corporations. Both sides, am I right?”
In my mind, the Democrats don't go far enough to the Left (just look at the recent Railworker's strike), granted they are head and shoulders above anything the Republicans are doing and about the only choice we have at the polls anymore, but pretending like they're perfect is just as bad as pretending like there's no difference between Democrats and Republicans ("both sides").
go tell the Trans community that the republicans and democrats are the same, the only people who can say shit like this are those with an ungodly level of privilege
If the democrats actually use any of their power to protect trans people federally from the ongoing attack in red states causing an internal refugee crisis then sure.
They're doing an ok job of protecting trans people in blue states though sure, but they are sitting on their laurels when it comes to trans people outside of the states they control and allowing a "states rights" mindset to trans discrimination to normalise.
first, nice whataboutism, secondly, yes they do, they can live their lives openly, sure there is risk of becoming collateral damage, but a trans person in the USA will get beaten and attacked, and if they are really unlucky, like the middle easterner, you seem to care about so much, will die for it, just they have to deal with all the other shit beforehand.
Given that you're already both-sidesing in a thread about a dude saying Antifa was buddies with Hitler, you may already be in a cult. I see your fellow members in most Fediverse politics threads; really it's just a hop, skip, and jump to shaving your heads and handing out coloring books and flowers at the airport
No. No it wasn’t. Antifaschistische Aktion was a paramilitary wing of the communists, fighting both the social democratic Iron Front and the Nazi Sturmabteilung.
The only way in which it could be said to be allied with the Nazis is that both of them opposed the social democrats, but the enemy of your enemy is not in fact your friend. The KPD saw both the SPD and the NSDAP as fascists, rather than in any way allying with the NSDAP against the SPD.
That organization, that is not really an organization, but rather a specifically American movement, which did not exist in the 30's nor in Germany, probably did not help Hitler come to power.
Hey I probably wouldn't know this if I wasn't heavily left leaning with an interest in learning about anarchism/communism along with having a pretty radical community that I've participated in. Mainstream politics, no matter how balanced they are, give no nuance at ALL. I searched for "antifa origins" and it took 3 pages of the search for me to even start scraping past US propaganda about the movement. In order to even find this source, I had to search for "antifa origins it's going down" because "it's going down" is a very radical leftist publication that I figure would have a countering narrative...All that to find a Smithsonian article lol.
You can also find it in places like Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook (which as much as modern antifascism details the history in the 20s and 30s) and Everything Is Possible: Antifascism and the Left in the Age of Fascism (which claims about antifascism creating left is IMO dubious, does a pretty good job in detailing the history of it).
But then again I am also one heavily left-leaning in a heavily left-leaning multicultural friend group who are largely human rights activists which is why these books were on my radar. If you have demonstrated and organized under the umbrella of Antifa you pretty quickly understand a lot of what people tell you about it even here in Finland does not match reality. And if you are like me, that means history and books.
While I agree with you, maybe edit would make some sense. There is a huge amount of propaganda and misconceptions about antifa which is why it is so easy to take your original comment as truth.
I figured it was like BLM, where it's not really a "group", just a call to activism, making the right wingers who want to "sue the CEO of Antifa for property damage" comical. (Yes these exist)
It is both descriptive of groups who work against fascists and part of the name of some groups who currently and historically work against fascists. This doesn't make suing the CEO of Antifa any less insane.
That organization, that is not really an organization, but rather a specifically American movement, which did not exist in the 30's nor in Germany, probably did not help Hitler come to power.
And you did it in the confidently incorrect community. Have you no shame?
No. No it wasn’t. Antifaschistische Aktion was a paramilitary wing of the communists, fighting both the social democratic Iron Front and the Nazi Sturmabteilung.
The only way in which it could be said to be allied with the Nazis is that both of them opposed the social democrats, but the enemy of your enemy is not in fact your friend. The KPD saw both the SPD and the NSDAP as fascists, rather than in any way allying with the NSDAP against the SPD.
edit: shit, sorry, idk how that happened, this was meant to be a response to a different comment!
Eh now that I think about it, Hitler was one of the best Anti Fascist advocates whoever lived. I mean he did end his career by killing the Fuhrer of Nazi Germany....
The reason Adolf Hitler shot himself in a bunker, is because everyone has some good in their heart.... Actually it's because he was losing the war and he was afraid of what the allies were going to do to him, but It's fun to be snarky.
I don't think anyone, no historian anywhere would accept such a bologna. I bet that it's just a huge mental acrobatics and misrepresentation of cherry picked facts.
Except on one action, a strike of train workers of the Berlin transportation department, the KPD (party of the historical Antifaschistische Aktion) and NSDAP have never cooperated and fought each other viciously on the street.
Please elaborate the point or event you're referencing.
Your "opinion" exposes you don't understand what antifascists are. Antifa is not a group. It literally is just an abbreviated form of the word antifascist. "Antifa" doesn't do anything. It has no form or organization. It's just an idea. It's like saying socialist or conservative.
Pretty crazy, but even this crazy voice appears to regard the Dilbert guy as totally deranged. So that's a good measure of how far Dilbert dude has dipped into the crazy pool.
Um, what does he think Antifa means? You notice how they almost exclusively use the abbreviation and hardly ever the full name? For those who might actually be unaware, it means Anti-Fascist.
Scott Adams is a fucking moron. He apparently thinks anti-fascists are actually pro-fascist. Dumbass.
He’s probably one of those people who think the nazis were socialists because nazi is short for “national socialist”.
Probably, despite the fact that Hitler himself said they weren't socialists.
The socialists of the party were killed in Night of the Long Knives
I mean but c'mon are we going to believe a word he said? /S
He wouldn't even need to say it - just look what the Nazis were which was basically fascism + racial science + antisemitism
Or who conveniently forget about the Southern Strategy and the great party switch. Massive, massive mental gymnastics to put themselves on the 'right' side of history every time
While I agree with both of you, these two points kinda contradict each other.
Just like North Korea is called DPRK: Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. The fascist use whatever words are in fashion to name themselves.
Many do think antifa is just a different word for socialist, so it’s not necessarily a contradiction.
It is a contradiction, though.
"Antifa are ANTI fascist - it's in the name!!"
"The Nazis weren't socialist - you could name yourself whatever you want!!"
Except Antifa isn't a formal organization, it's a descriptor for an ideology. An organization can call itself anything, even if it isn't a proper descriptor, but an ideology is by necessity defined by its name.
I thought it was "I did Nazi that coming"
/S
A lot of conservatives have problems understanding words, especially words that apply to political beliefs. It's party ignorance and partly a result of years of indoctrination. One example, thinking that anyone who isn't hard-right is a 'socialist' or a 'commie' and not understanding that those aren't the same thing. Then, fascist... many people seem to think fascist means an authoritarian government, independent of any other qualities or beliefs.
Fascism : a way of organizing a society in which a government ruled by a dictator controls the lives of the people and in which people are not allowed to disagree with the government.
I mean, that's what most people imagine, when they think fascist and I think it's good enough.
Is every fascist government identical? No. But as near as makes no difference they are all the same type of asshole.
The rest of your points stand, however. People do not understand communism, socialism, nor Marxism.
You actually just proved their point by defining authoritarianism and calling it fascism. Fascist governments are authoritarian but that's just one aspect of it.
I literally just pulled the first result on google...
And like I said for general conversations this definition is absolutely adequate.
It's like talking about American Democracy and someone goes "well, technically we're a Republic!"... Ok great...
The difference between fascism and communism is that people have generally a good idea of what a fascist government looks like, while they really don't understand the other terms.
I disagree that people generally have a good idea what a fascist government looks like, or else there wouldn't be this level of confusion. I think most people at best, know what countrys had a problem with fascism in the past, without any certainty of what parts of of those governments were where the fascism was, just guesses.
Thats why comparisons to nazis and such are so common I would say. People find it a lot easier to point out similarities to known fascism than to try and concisely point out the exact point where an action became "fascist"
Don't believe everything you read on the internet.
It's not good enough because fascism is specifically a form of right wing authoritarianism which includes hyper-capitalism, close relationship between the state and corporations, sexism, racism, and xenophobia. Otherwise we're back to the idea that a fascist dictatorship and a communist dictatorship are the same thing, which clearly they're not.
Most of the time, yeah. We take these mental shortcuts to avoid a lot of unnecessary headache and talking.
Problem is, these shortcuts get hijacked by asshole grifters to push their own agenda in todays climate of tiktok and youtube shorts. And this is especially potent when the usual everyday use of the word is not good enough. Want another example: "What is a woman?" Same mental shortcut. Same method to exploit the shortcut. Same bullshit. Nuanced discussion not happening.
Sometimes, we just need to be precise in discourse. These people are intentionally not being precise. They hijack our mental shortcuts.
Another example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4F6GVLBVcQ
But yeah, in everyday use it's good enough. Of course it is.
Yeah but get into a debate with Scott Adams and like-minded morons and inevitably they'll try and pretend that Nazis were actually socialists because it was in their name. Never mind that was a throwback to some early party mergers and everything they said and did was ultra right nationalism. Strictly not fascism (that is the Italian variant) but aligned to it so closely that it broadly makes no odds.
I though Antifa were just radical cola purists.
Anti-fizz
That's a step too far!
Moreover, anti-fascist action: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antifaschistische_Aktion
It's not enough to just have an oppositional stance or something, it's the action that makes antifa.
I've heard more than one person on Fox News or other Right Wing stations call them Fascist Antifa.
The Dilbert guy really went off the deep end, didn't he?
He went far enough, that there's a Behind the Bastards episode about him.
Behind the Bastards - RSS
Is there really 2 hours and 18 minutes worth of content devoted to Scott Adams losing his goddamn mind? I don't know if I have that kind of time to invest in that douche canoe.
I really enjoyed it. But I was also playing rocket league or driving when I listened to it. Behind the bastards is moderately funny so it’s an easy listen.
Having listened to some other Behind the Bastards I'd say it's really an entertainment show that uses their topics as a basis to joke around than a serious biography wherein explaining the subject is the primary goal.
They're usually fun and you'll tend to learn something new but it's not really ever going ot be a serious deep dive.
Sounds a bit like Drunk History! Though I think I'd have to take that one with a bit more salt
I keep hearing about the podcast and it sounds great. Could you recommend any outstanding episodes to check out? My interests are wide so anything is on the table
I've not long listened to it so probably can't make great recommendations of classic episodes but I enjoyed their series of episodes about Vince McMahon titled: "Histories Greatest Bastard!" (partly because it features Seanbaby.) I've really just dipped in an out of a couple of random episodes otherwise.
Really good episodes too
Wait, I thought that was just a random idiot, are you telling me that's the author of Dilbert?
Yep, he's completely lost it and was dropped by pretty much every newspaper after describing black people as a "hate group" (among other crazy stuff).
I really don't understand successful people attaching their wagon to Conservatives... The entire human history is just a parade of religious Conservatives resisting change, trying to subjugate others and looking like absolute assholes in hindsight.
There is ZERO examples in history of "hey we were going to expand freedoms, but good thing we didn't, thanks to the religious opposition!"....
Conservatives are wrong and have been wrong on every single social issue since the dawn of time.
I'm sure they had their victories when it comes to economic issues, but they haven't had one of those in over half a century either, since the only idea they seem to have is tax cuts.
Actually, economically, conservatives have mostly failed as well.
Hah yeah... It also wasn't until this post that I made that connection. For the past few years I've heard of "the Dilbert Guy going off the deep end" and seen random posts (like this) with this Scott character being an absolute moron
mind blown meme
He certainly did
Along with Chachi, Hercules, and the Wheel of Fortune guy. Conservatism (read: Fox News) will rot your fucking brain.
Be fair to Conservativism, Kevin Sorbo's (Hercules's) brain was already damaged by the time he fell into its warm dark embrace.
What’s this about Wheel of Fortune?
It's almost as if Fox News rots your brain! Or maybe boomers just licked a lot of lead paint as kids...
Antifa literally means "anti-fascist." Anyone who fought against the Nazis in WWII was "antifa."
And Scott Adams lost his f*cking mind years ago.
I know at least 4 (I wanna say 6 but 4 confirmed confidently) righty leaning lads who are anti trans for what they will say are varied, diverse, weighty reasons - who all collectively tell the same story word for word any and everytime trans issues come up....
"I hit it off with a girl on Tinder, then two days in before we met or got serious or even talked all that much (just enough for me to be smitten) they told me they were trans, and I'm not a bigot, BUT IF THEY DON'T PUT THAT SHIT IN THEIR BIO THEY DESERVE WHATEVER HAPPENS TO THEM"
Nobody understands when I explain that their violent response to a trans woman on tinder is why trans women don't put it in their bio.
Shocker.
Jesus. Just had a moment of empathy. I don't think I have ever had a first date with someone (yes I am a het cis male) where violence was a real possibility. The very worse I worried about was some sorta scam. Be safe everyone.
Yea it's a fkd up world, and many people are wild animals, or even worse. Im a cis male too, and the most i ever had to deal with was a girl..[or two] who beat the shit out of me. Some days I have more hope for humanity (myself included) than others yknow.
It's more dangerous to put it in your profile than saying it to someone in person?
You can swear on the internet fyi
Maybe she didn't want to though
Saying f*ck instead of fuck is just as much swearing. Potentially even more so, since you actively want to avoid word filters.
It is also kind of like saying "f*cking a**hole" isn't an insult.
I love how much effort you put into pedantry. It’s like you use the most words possible to make the least amount of point lmao
I completely agree with the commenter above. Self censoring swear words is absolutely ridiculous. Either swear or don’t - that’s your choice.
@Owlchemist Comments that insult other community members (directly or indirectly) without adding anything interesting to the conversation are not welcome here.
Are you saying, as a mod, commenters should not be ridiculous and replace vowels with asterisks if they like doing that?
I prefer not to self censor so I don't have a stake in this. Just curious so I know what to report.
No, it’s not a community rule, just a pet peeve. I honestly hate it but I think making it a rule would be too authoritarian. I don’t want to be that mod.
My reminder of the lemmy rule against insulting others was directed at Owlchemist. I’ll edit my comment to make that more clear.
I completely disagree with you both.
If you feel it’s “insulting” to find judgmental comments that add zero to the discuss except being negative to another community member pedantic, I don’t know what to tell you.
In all honestly, ya’ll’s comments are the same kind of negative as mine. Who cares how someone else chooses to write? How is bemoaning someone’s choice of spelling or self-censor “adding anything interesting to the conversation.” It certainly makes that commenter feel like shit. So who’s rule breaking here?
Why are you being such a ************ about this?
People can talk however they want. Adding an asterisk honestly adds some flavor to it. It's like, making the curse word taboo again, in a sense. It's kind of an interesting phenomenon.
Either way, "either swear or don't" (in the lots of replies here) is one of the stupidest hills to die on that I've ever seen. And there are many corpses of me on top of hills.
You need to have had something in the first place to lose it.
Every word uttered by a conservative is either a lie or profoundly incorrect. Every communication is an attempt to manipulate. This is who conservatives are.
Never trust the word of a conservative. Never.
I was about to advise you to chill a bit, then saw your username and now am sort of impressed by such staunch commitment to being pissed off.
I used to read ToiletPaperUSA on reedit and yeah, fuckin Charlie Kirk. EVERYTHING he posts online contains fallacies and conflations attempting to manipulate people, like he knows his ideas can't stand on their own without dishonesty.
Or projection, so much projection.
I've been putting off seeing family for so long, but I've been begged to come to the reunion this year as my Grandma is not doing so great. Every single one of them were once proud Trump supporters who grew silent after j6. Now all they do is scream about Phil Murphy and...bears? Windmills causing whales to beach? This weekend is going to be dreadful.
Why do they all hate windmills so much?
I had an old family friend meltdown, unfriend me from facebook, and avoid me like the plague ever since I told him he was wrong when he claimed it takes more electricity to make a single windmill than a windmill can ever produce in it's usuable lifetime...
Pure culture wars. Renewable energy is an amazing boon for decentralization, which means rural communities and those who want to go off-grid. It's a no brainer. But because they've tied themselves to social conservatism and their thought leaders in that sphere have major financial ties to gas & oil, they have to morally oppose windmills.
Meanwhile, drive through Kansas sometime....thousands of windmills along I-70, sometimes stretching as far as the eye can see. Maybe 10s of thousands. The discrepancy between that fact and the opposition is astounding. Look what states have the most power generation by windmills.
Actually that is really really interesting what you said, "morally opposed to windmills." They obviously are against them from a "moral" perspective, but I've never seen even an attempt at a moral argument against windmills, its all crazy conspiracy theory stuff. I would almost respect it more if one of them just said something like "I don't like windmills because I think it is morally wrong to harvest wind".
You forgot my favorite: every accusation is a confession.
Hey now, I know the average Bush voter in the late 90s wasn’t like this. Blind hate for half the country just destroys the country. This is a new problem.
Whatever this new thing is, the small group doing this - not the ever growing group being exposed and converted by it - deserves everything you’re saying. But don’t give up on your conservative family members. We’ll figure out how to stop the flow of hateful brain junk food eventually. We can go back to just politically disagreeing with them, instead of being irrationally hated by them. And vice versa.
They weren't quite like this but there was still shitty conservatives in much the same way... The extremists weren't the core yet though. They were absolutely still there and voting for Bush, they just weren't allowed to be the face of the party... Yet.
Respectfully disagree. Since Reagan the right has been completely fine with utter hypocrisy in the service of - well, ultimately nothing though for awhile they would say it was in the service of national security, or Christianity or something like that. Reagan republicans actively worked to fool the working class into giving them more and more power by lying, using "morning in America" commercials, and otherwise laying the groundwork for what became the fox news nation we now know and love so well.
The fact that otherwise good people who would help others and meant for everyone to get a fair chance etc. would steadfastly give their votes to them every election became more of a house of mirrors and lots of analysis as to how that could possibly be when their policies are so obviously cruel / stupid / nonexistent.
TL;DR - Propaganda works. "The average person" is criminally under-informed in many ways.
I hope this is ok to say, but I don’t think there was any part of what I said that you disagreed with.
I completely agree on all points. Those people have a dishonest agenda and they’ve figured out how to manipulate human nature to get what they need from part of an otherwise-good populace.
^ how you radicalize yourself
That's not correct; you're taking a black and white, absolutist view to the question, and that just doesn't work.
For instance, take economics; many traditional conservative positions square pretty well with economic theories and practices. Social conservatism also has a place, given the tension that exists between concepts of community and society. I do not agree with many conservative interpretations, but it's not accurate to say that all conservatives are intellectually dishonest.
OTOH, modern "conservatives" aren't conservatives in any meaningful way. It's now more like regressive populism.
Like trickle down theory, corporate personhood, that tax breaks will result in tax revenue, and that government austerity is preferable to stimulus to move an economy from recession to expansion? They're zero for four in the most popular 20th century conservative economic theories. I'm not sure that economics is the best lens to view conservative theory in a positive light.
Dude. What you consider "the left" IS CONSERVATIVISM. The USA is soooooo far afield, people are sooooo brainwashed, they can't hold a liberal thought in their heads if they fucking tried.
US liberals are more centrists in a European sense, no argument there. I'm just pointing out that offering up US conservative economic theory as a shining star of success is not the boast they think it is.
neoliberalism is conservative ideology and it has been doing very well the last 40 years, to our vast detriment
No, Reaganomics was a bad-faith move by social regressives. Corporate personhood has been a reality since Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Co. in 1886, so I guess that's conservative, but also not exactly. The idea of laissez-faire economics--that the market will mostly sort itself out with minimal gov't intervention--is generally upheld by prevailing economic theories, and is a fundamentally conservative view. I happen to disagree with the economists though, because they're only looking at it as an economic issue, rather than economics being a manifestation of the social realities.
"conservative" is starting to feel like a meaningless label that assholes throughout history have tried to use to describe themselves because they didn't like the other words people were using to describe them.
And don't get me wrong, I'm sure there are "real" conservatives out there and in history, but it sure feels like they are outnumbered by the people that use the word as a mask, and that is weird.
Conservatism took a weird turn with Reagan. Reagan was socially regressive, and not an orthodox fiscal conservative. George HW Bush (Dubya's dad) was in many ways more of a traditional conservative. Eisenhower was a particularly notable conservative, and is generally regarded as a successful president. Nixon was likewise extremely successful, and managed to significantly dampen inflation, despite being generally bad on racial issues (although he did enforce desegregation orders, but he was also working to pull the teeth of the civil rights act to appease white southerners), and generally being a thief and liar. His re-election was a complete blow-out, winning every single state except Delaware.
We've also got this weird idea that being 'liberal' is some kind of magic, that libs are going to do wonderful, magical things as soon as they have majorities in the house and senate, and have the presidency. We've seen that NYS, CA, and IL can't address shit in their own borders--e.g., housing/homelessness, and Obama did very, very little to advance a significant progressive agenda aside from the very weak and watered down ACA. Biden is just going to policies that existed prior to the Trump toxic clownshow.
That is kinda my point, the meaning of "conservative" changes a lot through the centuries it has been used, and the only consistent part seems to be the assholes using it as a "friendly" sounding mask.
And your perspective of the public opinion of liberals is entirely too informed by mainstream media. Many leftists dislike liberals for not being leftist enough, and moderates seem to only expect maintenance of the status quo, not magic
That would be me, right there. The older I get, the farther left I go, and the more disillusioned I get with what I thought Dems had been promising for the 45+ years of my life. Not that Republicans have made my life better in any meaningful way; NAFTA might have improved the bottom line of businesses, but it killed my career in it's infancy when GM/Ford/Chrysler all moved manufacturing south of the border to take advantage of cheap labor. Meanwhile Biden doesn't seem to be doing a lot to help labor either, esp. since he killed the railroad strike before it happened.
I don't want a status quo.
I don't want a status quo either, I'm also a leftist.
I'm just trying to describe things as I see them.
No true Scotsman much?
So Manchin and Sinema are libs, right? Because they claim to be.
Nobody on planet earth thinks they are liberals. No one.
When two random assholes claim a label and all the other pressure who claim it disagree, they're just two random assholes.
When 99% of the people claiming a label are a certain kind of asshole, that label describes what kind of asshole they are.
Wow, had to check this one was real, and jokes on me it's still up on his Twitter, complete with him stubbornly defending himself against everyone telling him he's nuts. How did the Dilbert guy lose his mind so completely?
I would like to direct your attention to the Behind the Bastards podcast episode entitled "Part One: How The Dilbert Guy Lost His Mind" from July 11th, 2023.
Your wording was perfect.
Summary? I'm technically at work right now, so pulling out the headphones I left at home anyways isn't quite an option.
He's always been a little like this but pretty quiet and subtle about it. However once he started losing his ability to speak he lost a lot of social interaction and kinda went nuts.
It absolutely is worth a listen though (as is the rest of the podcast).
I remember him being on TV (want to say it was Real Time) and talking up Trump. He definitely was on the right before he lost his voice.
He lost his voice starting in like 2005 or 2006, then got surgery to fix it in 2008. Real Time was running starting in '03, but that was way before Trump was politically relevant so I'm betting you saw him after he'd lost his voice, alienated everyone in his life and gone nutty, then gotten it back.
That about sums it up. Love the podcast as well.
Fantastic! Didn't know they did an episode on him, I'll definitely check it out. Thanks for the recommendation!
The Behind the Bastards feature on him posited he was always obsessed with predestiny and being some kind of fountain of wisdom. His fame and seclusion just tipped him over the edge from mere asshole into raging lunatic.
He needs to go from a shut-in to a shut-up.
He never had much of it in the first place.
He's been racist for a long time. Behind the Bastard covered him recently. He dropped hints over the years. But a health crisis caused him to go into seclusion for a period of time and when it was resolved he was a bit zanier than before.
I am grateful for not having a social media presence and not being important enough to be noticed. If I ever lose my grip on sanity I would rather it just stay small and quiet. Instead of tweeting something racist that haunts me for years.
Hurt people hurt people
Crab people crab people
Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo
GUY ON A BUFFALO!
look like crab, talk like people
God damned crab people!
clicks claws and scurries away quickly
Parshendi?
Listeners.
It's just so sad that they think that antifa is some organization, like "vegetarianism" would be one as well
Not unlike how some media is working on presenting the fediverse as a singular organization.
It's as if some can't conceive of humans organizing without a corporate overseer.
"Who is this four chan?"
They really can't. Anonymous was something that corporate media simply couldn't explain.
And on the other side, NOT anonymous they screw up too
There's a big difference between a website knowing that Jim Smith at 123 Blubber Terrace Boise, Idaho visited and looked at dildos vs GA ID 1374738.2188432 did
Oh they'd have been able to explain it if it benefitted the rich for people to understand it...
I'm so happy I stopped paying attention to mainstream media.
How will the masses be good lil subordinates once they realise they hold the true power?
LOL, Scott Adams can't cope with reality so he has to make up history to make himself feel better.
The fact that he's rich is the only reason he hasn't been Baker acted.
Dude has really went off the deep end.
He's become the ignorant "manager" he got famous making fun of.
I don't think that is so surprising. Scott Adams spent most of his career as a manager, not a developer. He probably prided himself in not being the ignorant manager, but at this point I have to question if he was just deluding himself.
Can someone confirm that this is genuine? I mean, I know he has problems, but this just seems too f'd up to be a real screenshot 😬
It’s genuine. I took this screenshot just now.
Wow...I knew He was right wing but this here is already starting to sound psychotic.
Behind the Bastards just recently did a two part story about how The Dilbert Guy lost his mind. It's a great podcast and goes through the whole history of him falling hard for Trump in recent years. Part of it seems to come from a very traumatic health issue where he almost lost his ability to speak. It certainly doesn't absolve him but it kind of explains what pushed him over the edge.
Here's the first part if anyone is interested:
https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-behind-the-bastards-29236323/episode/part-one-how-the-dilbert-guy-118786164/
Sounds like a case of "the guy formerly known as The Dilbert Guy". Doesn't sound like the same guy [with a working brain] anymore.
Oh, I know this shit. It's like when Trump made a deal with Satan to convince Eve to eat the apple, because then Trump could try to date or just grab Eve when she got sent to Earth.
Since you've already volunteered yourself to venture into the den of awfulness formerly know as Twitter on our behalf; perhaps you could dig around to see if perhaps there's a recently trending, uh, txeet(?) That says something sensible using the same structure but different groups that this Scott idiot is attempting to parody?
Something like:
"I wonder if (some group this Scott guy would relate to?) know that (scumbag group who actually supported Hitler and the previously named group have recently shown support for) was allied with Hitler and helped him come to power..."
That's my most generous interpretation of what he's saying about someone critizing his original post just not understanding "what's going on here."
Like Peterson, Scott Adams was at least interesting to read in 2016, even if you don't agree with him. His analysis on why Trump eventually won was actually a pretty good read.
But it seems that going deep into the conservative echo chamber turns everyone in it completely insane and paranoid, until they are nothing but a parody of their former self.
So I think the main idea of conservatism is ironically being self destructive.
Scott Adams did not lose his fucking mind.
He never had one.
It just took a long time for people to see this.
I don't think it is unreasonable to assume people are sane until proven otherwise.
The problem is some people get comfortable with their opinion of someone and won't change it when presented with new information.
The beginnings of his exposure as being batshit crazy were there in Dilbert if you went back after he exposed himself. But the undeniable evidence that he's batshit crazy comes from his early books, long before he fell down into his "I'm a hypnotist so I know everything about persuasion" rabbit hole. He genuinely believed in affirmations as a hack code for the universe where writing down something and wishing for it hard enough will make the entire universe change to get it to you. His novels were so bad that he accomplished the impossible: he made me wish Ayn Rand had given him some writing tips. This is years before he fell down into the right wing grifter space he now occupies.
He was fucking crazy from his YOUTH. (Source: his own stories on his blog!)
People, by default, assume because he made stuff people liked that he was a sane, rational person. No matter how much talent or money someone has they're still as prone to having batshit insane takes as anyone else you may encounter.
This is a common problem. "I like this singer's music ... wait ... he said WHAT about black people!? But ... dude is BLACK!!!" "I like this painter's portraits. Wait, what did he do with children!?"
Always neat to see Tweets of people who are about to be blocked by Scott Adams
I think you mean "Xeet".
I presume that's pronounced "skeet"?
Tenet
The antifa movement was literally birthed as a response to the rise of fascism in Europe.
This dude is basically just writing historical fanfiction at this point. Add vampires or zombies and maybe he could sell a book.
Unfortunately, he's sold LOTS of books.
I love that I have seen comments responding to comments about him being crazy with something like. So everyone you disagree with is crazy. Its not a disagreement when someone says a relatively new, modern age group, was behind a historical group. Im not going to even get into its the opposite of what their group is about. Its like no. People are called crazy for saying crazy shit. Like slavery was beneficial to slaves. Thats not about disagreement its just patently wrong. Its like saying when you murder people it can sometimes be good for their health.
Adams is "crazy" because he seems to disagree with himself. Donald Trump impresses Adams, yet he voted for Hillary Clinton to protect himself. White people should "stay the hell away from black people," yet in a tweet after his tirade he explained he is not bothered by black people, but instead bothered by white advocates for black people (which... may include himself, I mean he identified as black for solidarity or something, which is kind of meaningless, but he did used to support black cartoonist Robb Armstrong's comic Jump Start quite a bit, and even wrote the foreward to his book). Yeah, his views can be upsetting, but the following day they will likely be upsetting yet completely contrawise to his previous views. That's why he's "crazy," and while I dislike the connotation of the word it seems apt. He has a constant paranoid mania in his videos, blog posts, and tweets. I really only have a layman's knowledge of mental disorders, coupled with my own experience, but Adams really needs an evaluation. PTSD, any bipolar disorder, any schizophrenia, or maybe something else I don't know about could likely be in the cards.
But also like... In an entirely self-contained way the person who wrote the original post is crazy because they are claiming a group was part of events that ended decades before that group formed.
Yeah when stuff first came out I watched like half a dozen episodes of his coffee talks. I kept on trying to go with that hes joking or being sarcastic in some way but eventually its like nope. there is no way to spin this. biden turning into a werewolf. sort a joke or something. don't really get it. does not fit in as funny. come on bring this around to some sort of sarcasm. crap hes just lost it.
He was a big inspiration to me too for a while. I started reading Dilbert when I was first learning how to read. Then I started making my own comics for a bit. My mom and a lot of her colleagues loved him and his comic too, since they worked for Nynex, later Bell Atlantic, while he was working for Pacific Bell. I have this fantasy that maybe my mom or her colleagues might've even spoken/written to him once while they worked in purchasing. Maybe she or someone else got a phone call saying "Hey, this is Scott. The Seattle office needs more paper. Please order some." Though that probably isn't too likely since Nynex only dealt with New York and New England, and Bell Atlantic with the East Coast. Still, everything seemed somewhat interconnected in the Baby Bell days of the phone companies that I feel like he could have crossed their paths. Anyway, I hope he reexamines his views and has a support network in getting better. He deserves his punishment but the funnies aren't the same without Dilbert.
Yeah. Its so strange as I feel this is happening with a lot of people. From well known public figures to even my own family memebers. I sometimes wonder if its a result of modern things that are unfixable for the individual. Climate change and such. I sometimes wonder if some folks brains can't handle not having a solution so has to go into all sorts of strange beliefs or directions in search of a fix. Like back when musk was a bit more normal there was talk around his various endeavours trying to push technological development to sorta fix things (getting off fossil fuels, moving industry to space, etc) and I sorta wonder if it just became clear that the math did not add up and his mind went to a social issues fantasy to fix the world.
Antifa isn't all that new though. While the American antifa isn't actually a branch of the original 1930s German one, it likes to think it is, and it's the German one that Scott's claiming helped Hitler gain power.
No. No it isn't. Scott is just a moron who happens to also be able to draw (badly) characters that corporate office drones relate to. He's absolutely trying to attack the current Anti-facist movement in the USA.
I mean yeah, he is, but saying it's new isn't why he's talking bollocks. There was an Antifa that the modern antifa claims ideological descent from, and that is what he is claiming supported Hitler.
The issue is that what Antifa actually is and how the public perceives it are two different things. This is why certain people will believe this as much as NSDAP being socialists because it is in the name which makes them leftists unless you really give a history lesson. And from experience that will end up in that they either say that's just your opinion, look at you with glassed eyes or never even listened to you into the end.
Yes, both are historically really incorrect and at the level of a glance funny in inaccuracy. But on more deeper level this (insert the right fallacy or tactic as it escapes me) is a lot more insidiously dangerous. How do you efficiently encounter it in a way that most people will come out of the discussion with the most accurate knowledge?
I imagine hes is misquoting the United Front here?
The United Front (Einheitsfront) was the strategy of the German communist party KPD to counter both fascism and social democrats (whom the KPD and the Third International called social fascists ("Sozialfaschisten")). As you can probably guess, this wasn't very successful in uniting the left and center against fascism, so Parties of the Comintern ended up changing strategies to the United Front, a broad coalition of left and center against fascism. This had some limited success (France had a Popular front government of communists/socdems/left leaning liberals for two years that enacted a fairly large amount of very progressive labour laws and banned a number of fascist and monarchist organisations like the Croix de Feu, Spain had a similar Popular front which ended with the military loss in the civil war against Franco)
The SocDems SPD had a similar strategy btw., the iron front, which intended to counter fascism, monarchism, and communism and was opposed to the KPD.
Anyone listen to the Behind the Bastards pod on Adams? It was a two-parter that was awesome. Google it Lemmies.
Care to synopsize?
He was a very special boy who thought he was smarter than everyone else.
Now he's a dipshit racist alt-righter (redundant, I know) who thinks he's smarter than everyone else.
That took a two-part podcast to regale? Hunh.
edit: When summarizing, it's fairly elementary, if not outright essential, to include salient points from the source in question. For instance, the "summary" below completely omits the section (wherein the host blasts this nazi clown for his islamophobia) that, apparently, went on for several minutes. Downvote all you want, former Redditors. Go touch some grass. 🤗
You’re being unnecessarily antagonistic and just plain unpleasant. Neither is acceptable here. If you can’t follow the rules of this community, instance and lemmy, please refrain from participating.
One can sum up The Odyssey as "a bunch of dudes try to get home from war," but it's more about the journey than the destination.
Are you equating the nuance of a timeless literary classic to a sheltered white guy's childhood? For real?
No, I'm saying that if you ask someone to summarize a lengthy piece then it's a bit ridiculous to complain about the lack of details.
Yes, and I'm starting that if you attempt to summarize, do be sure to touch on key points rather than boiling it down to such a degree that it's indistinguishable from mud. Pretty basic stuff, friend. Thanks for trying, though.
Because summaries are supposed to leave things out.
No. No it wasn't. Antifaschistische Aktion was a paramilitary wing of the communists, fighting both the social democratic Iron Front and the Nazi Sturmabteilung.
The only way in which it could be said to be allied with the Nazis is that both of them opposed the social democrats, but the enemy of your enemy is not in fact your friend. The KPD saw both the SPD and the NSDAP as fascists, rather than in any way allying with the NSDAP against the SPD.
Every now and then you run into a confident claim that is so unbelievably detached from reality that there's nowhere to even start debunking it lol. Can't believe this guy went from Dilbert to... whatever this is in just a handful of years.
I mean…Dilbert was pretty low on the ladder. So the fall from grace wasn’t too far.
It wasn't high art or anything, but it was almost aggressively non-offensive. Just an engineer complaining about silly work things. Can you imagine how disastrous things would go if he attempted to draw Dilbert with his current views? Although, from googling, it looks like that's actually what he's planning to do lol. Jesus.
As someone who occasionally read Dilbert back in the day, I do have to say that the "author self-insert character is always right and always complaining, and everyone else is always an idiot" tropes are well-tilled soil for right-wing outrage culture.
Add in there that he already had an "perpetually angry woman" character and "Indian office worker stereotype" character, and it becomes even easier to see how he got there.
For anyone not aware and to spare you from giving him traffic, one recent comic of his had the first black guy ever in a dilbert comic. That man then gave the punchline "I identify as white".
Scott is way off his rocker and has apparently decided to go all in on conspiracy nonsense.
That's when Pauli has your back:
"That is not only not right; it is not even wrong"
I have to think about more and more at the moment.
Alexa, what does the "fa" on "antifa" stands for? and also totally unrelated question, who were the main allies of the Nazis?
Trick question. Nazis didn't have allies, they had axis. It's why the war happened between allies and axis.
The Soviets, as per the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.
Siri, what does the words "main" and "allies" mean
Fucking funny to say this in the "confidently incorrect" community. It is historical revisionism.
The soviets did absolutely everything they could to try and convince France and the UK to take action against Hitler but they were hoping Hitler would attack the USSR.
The ACTUAL historic timeline is like this:
1: The United States Bourgeoisie bankrolled the rise of fascism in Europe.
2: The bourgeois leaders of England, France, Poland, Finland and other Western European nations either ignored, enabled, or appeased Hitler's worst behavior in the buildup to WW2.
3: The bourgeois leaders of these countries, England in particular, pushed for disastrous bilateral security arrangements which created a domino effect leading to war, while ignoring the USSR's suggestion of collective, anti-fascist security arrangements.
4: The bourgeois leaders of these countries pursued a policy not of containing fascist aggression, but of diplomatically isolating the USSR, in the hopes that Hitler would go East and carry out an anti-communist genocide on their behalf.
5: The bourgeois leaders of these countries, having ignored or stalled collective security proposals from the USSR, actively made bilateral non-aggression pacts with Hitler before Molotov-Ribbentrop was signed, making the USSR the last in a long line of nations to sign non-aggression pacts with Hitler, after the USSR's collective security proposals fell through.
6: The USSR only signed Molotov-Ribbentrop to buy time. The USSR only invaded East Poland to prevent a German front from forming right at the Soviet border. This is because attempts to make mutual security arrangements with Poland fell through. The Soviets only moved into the region after the existing government had literally fled the country, leaving it ungoverned. 2 million jews in eastern poland were saved from the nazis by this action.
7: The USSR tried to purchase a strategic corridor of land from Finland that the nazis could easily use to invade the USSR. The USSR not only wanted to legally purchase this land from Finland, but to trade Finland more acres of land in exchange. i.e. an asymmetrical trade that would have ultimately benefited Finland. Finland refused because the fascist leadership of Finland wanted to see Germany invade the USSR through this strategic corridor. This led directly to the Winter War. The Finnish lost the winter war but used their intelligence that they gathered during it to collaborate with the nazis.
8: When the North Atlantic allies finally teamed up with USSR after their strategy of appeasing Hitler backfired, they immediately attempted to make asymmetrical security arrangements that would have obligated the USSR to commit far more troops and resources to the war than any other ally, essentially using the USSR as a shield against the very fascist powers they had spent the better part of a decade appeasing. The British in particular kept stalling on arrangements and pretending to be confused.
9: When the war was over the North Atlantic allies, led by the USA, who came out of the war richer than any other country on Earth, immediately committed to rehabilitating nazis, blaming the USSR, who was decimated by the war, for causing the war, and created NATO to begin encircling the USSR, 6 years before the creation of the Warsaw pact.
10: The North Atlantic allies immediately set to using the Marshall plan to rebuild the fascist German, Italian, and Japanese economies, indebting them to the United States, and orienting them towards anti-communist policy.
11: The North Atlantic allies to tried to use the Marshall plan as a proto-IMF to privatize and deregulate the economy of the war-torn USSR, and open it up to foreign capital. That the USSR rejected this was framed as aggression and used as a justification for beginning the cold war.
But hey, don't just take my word for it, or this rough outline of what is contained in well regarded books (I implore you to read some). How about we read Albert Einstein's words spoken at the time these events actually occurred?
A lot to unpack in this speech but the basics of what Einstein says are:
The USSR made all efforts to stop the war happening.
The western powers(UK, France, US, etc) shut the USSR out of European discussions and betrayed Czechoslovakia.
Molotov-Ribbentrop was an unhappy last resort that they were driven to, that the western powers were attempting to drive the nazis into attacking the USSR and that's why they would not help the USSR stop them.
The USSR supported everyone while the other powers (UK, France, US, etc) strengthened the nazis and Japanese.
I also thought it was funny for the guy to say this in !confidently_incorrect. Thank you for the history class.
They're just repeating old Stalinist propaganda.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/james-clr/works/world/ch12.htm
It's amusing how contemporary Stalinists put so much effort into justifying a pact that Stalin himself tried to keep from public knowledge and Russians rarely want to acknowledge.
That ought to tell you that the USSR wasn't proud of Molotov-Ribbentrop.
What's even more amusing is a bunch of history revisionists come here to defend the argument that the communists and not the fascists were the main partners of the Nazis, lol. Seriously. They were literally part of the same military coalition.
Communists and Nazis were literally part of the same military coalition. Stalin made sure of that. He even made a toast for Hitler's continued good health.
The Soviets wouldn't have been able to fight without American Lend-Lease. They took Berlin in American tanks.
https://www.loc.gov/item/today-in-history/october-23/
The rest of your maundering is old Stalinist propaganda, and barely worth refuting.
I will, however, link to this:
https://www.marxists.org/archive/james-clr/works/world/ch12.htm
Not a single piece of american lend-lease arrived until after the battle of Moscow. The war had already turned. That's not to say it wasn't useful, more germans would have escaped encirclements and pace would have been slower as a result, it would have taken 12-18 months longer. But every academic historian agrees that the germans had lost the war as of the battle of moscow. Trying to present this as the war having been won by the american aid is absurd and there are no academic historians that agree with it, at best you'll get them to hedge and say they don't know the impact.
Einstein, barely worth refuting. Your brain must be MASSIVE mate.
You're linking to a book written in 1937. That predates the molotov-ribbentrop pact by 2 years lmao. It has zero relevance here other than being "stalin bad grrr stalin was mean to trotsky!" which is true but completely irrelevant to the nazis. I will say that the idea that stalin had anything to do with the failure of the german revolution is absurd. The german revolution failed the day Rosa was murdered and if there is any event in history I would change with a time machine it would be her death. It occurred at an utterly pivotal moment that guaranteed the following rise of fascism.
If lend-lease didn't contribute to Soviet success against Germany, then by the same reasoning Western military aid didn't contribute to Ukrainian success against Russia. After all, nearly all of it arrived after the Battle of Kyiv.
I didn't say it did not contribute. I said that it was fundamentally too late for american lend-lease to change the outcome of the war, it had already been won. The nazis had one chance to win and once they were repelled they were never going to catch up with the speed of Soviet manufacturing.
Some British lend-lease had arrived shortly before that battle. So they do not lose some credit, only the american lend-lease loses credit.
When ukraine actually breaks through russia's defensive lines we can start talking about its effect on their success against russia. As you rightfully point out all of their gains at the start of this war occurred before any aid, and the lines of been more or less stagnant ever since. Their counter offensives this spring (became a summer offensive) have yet to break a single line, let alone all 3 lines. I think we should be expecting at least antoher 18 months of this assuming negotiations continue to be refused and that it is even undecided as of this point in time.
It's just engagement bait; the consequence of Elon paying influencers. All these guys are just saying sillier and sillier statements to pump up their view counts in an attempt to score some Muskbux. Just roll your eyes and stop using Twitter.
It’s from September 2020. We can’t blame Elon for this one.
I guess not, but I'm gonna stand by my suggestion of not using Twitter anymore regardless.
Agreed. I stopped using it a while ago. I had to search for my login details just to double check it for you!
Dilbert is one of those things from the 1990s that you don't really miss, like Zima.
I feel like Zima doesn't deserve that comparison. :(
Zima catching strays!
Zima made a comeback 6-7 years ago; I will attest that it was not good. Gimme White Claw or gimme death
The scariest thing about this sort of descent into madness through joining a cult, is that I wonder what keeps this from happening to me? Would I recognize the signs in myself and just know, "Whoa there, maybe this isn't such a hot idea, this is obviously crazy talk." Is it a slow decline where you sort of make small concessions and give up on reality bit by bit, until you turn around one day and you've just lost touch completely (or in your mind everyone else is taking crazy pills)?
I feel like we've been watching the GOP start to slip away from at least "acceptable" political discourse for awhile now, they've just been slowly but surely pushing the bounds of insanity little by little each year, until we've ended up with whatever the fuck the GOP is now, like this weird parody of its former self. Not that the Democrats are that much better, but for the most part they're still active participants in trying to maintain a shared reality.
There's obviously people on the fringe on either wing of the mainstream American political spectrum, but the lunatics have basically taken over the asylum in the GOP and their current "fringe" is just sensible, independent conservatives who I'm sure must exist somewhere, people relatively untouched by Trump's cult of personality. Decades of FoxNews though I'm sure have whittled that number down to near-extinction.
I would say that alone makes them much better. Stop with this "both sides" bullshit, that ship has sailed.
“One side wants a fascist autocratic regime and the other wants universal healthcare but has some moderate members backed by corporations. Both sides, am I right?”
In my mind, the Democrats don't go far enough to the Left (just look at the recent Railworker's strike), granted they are head and shoulders above anything the Republicans are doing and about the only choice we have at the polls anymore, but pretending like they're perfect is just as bad as pretending like there's no difference between Democrats and Republicans ("both sides").
But there's a huge range between "both sides are almost the same" and "democrats are perfect"
go tell the Trans community that the republicans and democrats are the same, the only people who can say shit like this are those with an ungodly level of privilege
If the democrats actually use any of their power to protect trans people federally from the ongoing attack in red states causing an internal refugee crisis then sure.
They're doing an ok job of protecting trans people in blue states though sure, but they are sitting on their laurels when it comes to trans people outside of the states they control and allowing a "states rights" mindset to trans discrimination to normalise.
Case in point the democrats are actively working to pass bills that they know their opposition is going to use against lgbt people.
Ah yes, the Middle Easterners getting bombed clearly have so much privilege over transgenders
first, nice whataboutism, secondly, yes they do, they can live their lives openly, sure there is risk of becoming collateral damage, but a trans person in the USA will get beaten and attacked, and if they are really unlucky, like the middle easterner, you seem to care about so much, will die for it, just they have to deal with all the other shit beforehand.
Given that you're already both-sidesing in a thread about a dude saying Antifa was buddies with Hitler, you may already be in a cult. I see your fellow members in most Fediverse politics threads; really it's just a hop, skip, and jump to shaving your heads and handing out coloring books and flowers at the airport
No one sees the bad side of the Democrats because the crazy on the GOP side drowns it out.
I'm surprised you used the word Democrat in any sort of negative way and still have any upvotes. We don't do that around here.
It's because there's something cult-like about many Democrats as much as many Republicans. And yes, I do mean as much as as in equal amounts.
One of my most downvoted Lemmy comments was me saying I would never vote for the Dems again because the Dems aren't actually leftist
4k retweets and 8k likes. I'd say twitter is a shithole, but those morons are people, and they will just go sonewhere else when twitter dies.
They are probably already on Truth Social.
I'm so disappointed in Adams. That idiot chugged so much Kool-Aid that the cavities have rotted up to into his brain
Wasn’t he also middle management when he was working?
So, Y’know, he was the pointy haired one?
Squeegee his taint.That is new. Thank you
Unfortunately, claiming the anti fascists are the real fascists is not a new sentence at all :(
I don’t think us Brits are to blame for this one!
Lol what?
Well actually the KPD and the NSDAP did work together as they saw the SPD as their combined enemy.
https://etheses.lse.ac.uk/4102/3/Daycock__KPD-NSDAP-Weimar-Germany.pdf
Here is a PhD thesis to the topic.
Edit: I did not mean literally all the time, one single time before the NSDAP rose to power.
See @[email protected]'s comment below
Bro I literally linked a PHd thesis
I'm not sure what to do with that information.
That organization, that is not really an organization, but rather a specifically American movement, which did not exist in the 30's nor in Germany, probably did not help Hitler come to power.
Antifa did not originate in the United States and has been a decentralized movement for a century, with roots in Italy, Germany and Spain
I guess what they say about learning something new everyday is true.
Hey I probably wouldn't know this if I wasn't heavily left leaning with an interest in learning about anarchism/communism along with having a pretty radical community that I've participated in. Mainstream politics, no matter how balanced they are, give no nuance at ALL. I searched for "antifa origins" and it took 3 pages of the search for me to even start scraping past US propaganda about the movement. In order to even find this source, I had to search for "antifa origins it's going down" because "it's going down" is a very radical leftist publication that I figure would have a countering narrative...All that to find a Smithsonian article lol.
You can also find it in places like Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook (which as much as modern antifascism details the history in the 20s and 30s) and Everything Is Possible: Antifascism and the Left in the Age of Fascism (which claims about antifascism creating left is IMO dubious, does a pretty good job in detailing the history of it).
But then again I am also one heavily left-leaning in a heavily left-leaning multicultural friend group who are largely human rights activists which is why these books were on my radar. If you have demonstrated and organized under the umbrella of Antifa you pretty quickly understand a lot of what people tell you about it even here in Finland does not match reality. And if you are like me, that means history and books.
Probably shouldn't be in this thread or sharing opinions if you know this little about the subject.
On the contrary, by interacting, I learned something new and now know more about the subject
While I agree with you, maybe edit would make some sense. There is a huge amount of propaganda and misconceptions about antifa which is why it is so easy to take your original comment as truth.
I figured it was like BLM, where it's not really a "group", just a call to activism, making the right wingers who want to "sue the CEO of Antifa for property damage" comical. (Yes these exist)
It is both descriptive of groups who work against fascists and part of the name of some groups who currently and historically work against fascists. This doesn't make suing the CEO of Antifa any less insane.
After first being confidently incorrect:
And you did it in the confidently incorrect community. Have you no shame?
See @[email protected]'s comment below
edit: shit, sorry, idk how that happened, this was meant to be a response to a different comment!
Eh now that I think about it, Hitler was one of the best Anti Fascist advocates whoever lived. I mean he did end his career by killing the Fuhrer of Nazi Germany....
Yeah! Surely the guy who killed Hitler should be regarded as a hero
The reason Adolf Hitler shot himself in a bunker, is because everyone has some good in their heart.... Actually it's because he was losing the war and he was afraid of what the allies were going to do to him, but It's fun to be snarky.
There's a grain of truth to this, but I don't think most people here would accept it.
I don't think anyone, no historian anywhere would accept such a bologna. I bet that it's just a huge mental acrobatics and misrepresentation of cherry picked facts.
Except on one action, a strike of train workers of the Berlin transportation department, the KPD (party of the historical Antifaschistische Aktion) and NSDAP have never cooperated and fought each other viciously on the street. Please elaborate the point or event you're referencing.
Your "opinion" exposes you don't understand what antifascists are. Antifa is not a group. It literally is just an abbreviated form of the word antifascist. "Antifa" doesn't do anything. It has no form or organization. It's just an idea. It's like saying socialist or conservative.
They pretty much posted themself in ![email protected] , that's ironic
Yeah, but socialists nor conservatives act as a unified body.
You understand that, right? That it's just a philosophy?
Sad troll
Genuine or not, it's still up there with "Antifa supported Hitler" in terms of sheer awfulness.
And deliberate ignorance.
Pretty crazy, but even this crazy voice appears to regard the Dilbert guy as totally deranged. So that's a good measure of how far Dilbert dude has dipped into the crazy pool.
Even sadder, tbh
It is kind of funny that you don't know what Antifa is and yet you're so confident about it.
We might say...
Confidently IncorrectThat's even sadder than trolling.
Tell me more.