Trump 2025 - Resuming The National Nightmare Of Peace And Prosperity (Part 1)

Off Topic Politics & World Issues
5817

Strange, it’s that SAME playbook popping up all over the place!

It is Pride month here in Maine and everyone’s got their Gay Race Communist flags flying proudly. This kind of political symbolism of radical ideology being pushed everywhere - in government offices, government schools, and private businesses - seems to be another common characteristic the people calling everyone fascist have with Nazi Germany.

Here’s a guy who has been calling local gyms to ask for clarification on their locker room policy. In Maine it is now my HUMAN RIGHT to get naked in front of women and girls while leering at their bodies. The manager at any Maine Planet Fitness will be happy to explain this to you, if you want to call them up yourself.

5818

This is a good point. It just gradually happened, silently, and at first you’re like ‘‘Huh!’’. Then, after a while you ask yourself ‘‘More? Why?’’, but every expert assures that it’s needed, and a plus for your society.
‘‘Employers need workers’’, they say. ''Our services need their contribution, lest they collapse, they say.
When you finally can’t ignore anymore that violent crime is up, mosques are built with tax payer money, public institutions are overwhelmed, and those workers get more than they give, there’s nothing you can’t do or say, you racist piece of shit.

1 Like
5819

I was asking for specifics because the people profiting/gaining control are not the social media platforms. Not meant as an argument for or against anything.

Do you think the climate is a big one?

These issues are pushed for the “culture wars” but the arguing and media coverage is meant to be the distraction. Those in power do not care about trans people or climate activism.

5820

Maybe in Portugal, but we’re all still armed to the teeth here in the USA, if push comes to shove with government oppression. We also have actual free speech, which doesn’t exist in places like the U.K., where I’d be imprisoned in His Majesty’s salt mines for what I post publicly under my own name on local social media.

I don’t see a hot civil war as being a likely event, but I didn’t see the collapse of our public institutions as likely 20 years ago, either.

5821

No, at least in Europe.

In US the climate/enviromental discussion in politics seem less about enviroment, more about identity politics.

Ps. I also personally think ”culture wars” circle mostly around softer (cultural) areas. Stuff like economics, climate or defence are separate political topics.

Might be. But at least for my anectodal experience from where I live, the culture wars are mostly an internet phenomenom.

5822

The thing with government oppression, though, is that half the population agrees with such opression and doesn’t see it as such.

Fighting an oppressive regime is easier when the population as a whole fghts as one. I don’t see that kind of unity, not in the USA, not anywhere really in the West.

Could a united American people overthrow their government with their guns? I have my doubts, but who knows. That would never happen cause you’d be fighting half your countrymen also.
Oppression is more subtle now, often enforced socially rather than through the government. You even get to vote.

5823

On a long enough timescale, absolutely. There’s no way to predict how something like that would actually play out, but there are a LARGE number of civilians with the know-how and the resources to organize combat-effective fighting units unlike anything seen at a typical leftwing riot.

A lot of lefties are arming up too, but I don’t think their political ideology will allow them to form very effective fighting units. I mean, they can’t even organize an effective meeting to agree on their party platform.

There’s also the question of what the US military, various agencies, and national guard units would do or not do in such a situation. Their oath is to the Constitution, not a political party.

5824

Where you live, what are the main “culture war” issues argued, even if mostly online?

5825

Finland. And same as everywhere else: same sex marriage, gender related topics etc.

I think the questions and topics are similar IRL and online, but the discussion is much more polarized and over the top examples/haystacks make it worse.

Honestly, how many ”woke” liberals hate men and think everyone should be asexual cats or whatever? And how many conservatives are lonely women hating wankers?

I disagree. Social media platforms have tremendous amount of influence. Do I think they’re purposefully behind the situation? No. But they surely benefit from it.

5826

Lol this is completely cuckoo.
I don’t see how this is good business policy. I would think most women would quit if guys just started to use their locker room.
I had a friend when I was a teenager that used to pull down his pants and jerk it in front of girls. This perv would have been delighted with this policy and the opportunity to show his cock to soccer moms.

5827

It is not a business policy, it is State of Maine law. If a business wants to run a gym with locker rooms in Maine, the locker rooms must allow people to choose which one they use.

If your friend came here to engage in a bizarre form of dick-flashing tourism, the State of Maine considers it his human right to do so in formerly sex-segregated spaces like locker rooms or showers.

He could also easily cast a vote that would be counted if he were here on election day. He’s not supposed to do that because it is against the law, but there is absolutely no way he could ever be caught unless he is a terrible liar.

5828

I need to add that economics is an interesting field of study. It’s completely unobjective. I’ve studied the topic a bit, and rarely different ”schools” have so profoundly different views on how things work.

Every field of study has it’s camps, but usually they’re relatively minor debates. If you ask historians for reasons of WWII, you get mostly similar answers, maybe with different emphasis on some things etc. Same with physicists etc.

But when you can ask about reasons for inflation, you’ll get totally different answers depending if you’re asking from monetarist, neoliberal, keynesian or a socialist. Hahah.

5829

Economics is like history in that regard. There is no shortage of Marxist history professors who don’t know how to process the book I mentioned in the history thread, Hitler’s National Socialism by Zitelman. It is relatively new scholarship, and it upends a lot of the narratives that were fairly entrenched in the postwar decades. “Not real socialism”, “far-right”, “opposite of communism”, that sort of stuff. Nobody wants to see Hitler when they look in the mirror, after all.

My cousin is extremely high IQ with a masters degree in statistics and probability and he is a big fan of Robert Reich, which is what informs his support for Democrats in 2025. He’s a subscriber to the Economist, a publication that has been socialist-adjacent for a really, really long time. When he asks me “how are things in Lewiston?”, and I answer honestly, he has no way of explaining why on Earth anyone who isn’t a direct beneficiary of Democrat policy would ever vote for more. His parents, who are also high IQ, flat-out don’t believe me. They think I’m making all of this stuff I’ve documented up, heavily embellishing, or completely misunderstanding the facts.

With all of this brewing around us, part of me is beginning to believe that the study of Hitler and the Nazis was discouraged because its economics were basically Keynesian ideas run amok, which a lot of people really like.

5830

I think Hitler was not Keynesian. He was a socialist. You guys were Keynesians from 1930 to 1970ish(?)

Then you guys had the neoliberal revolution (Friedman was a big character here), which kinda ended up in 2008. Now I’m not sure? Trump seems to increase the state control a bit? (Which is not necessarily only a bad thing).

5831

Seems awfully intrusive.
If the goal is to protect or allow trans people to change in the locker room that fits their chosen sex/gender, I would imagine one extra mixed locker room for those types would suffice, while still leaving the traditional ones intact.
I would totally expect a guy changing in the women’s locker to have his nose punched in by fathers or husbands here, law or no law.

1 Like
5832

The Nazis weren’t proper Keynesians because of the timing, but a lot of the ideas surrounding state intervention are the same. I’d have to go dig up the reference, but I believe there is some significant intellectual overlap between various Reich finance ministers and Keynes. They were all intellectual and academic contemporaries.

Ya think?

Again, we had the same pattern of denial over the years as we’ve had with the true scale of immigration in Maine. Even today they still do their best to obscure as many facts about the situation as possible.

With transgenderism, it basically went like this. “It is about acceptance and tolerance”. “No, it isn’t taught in schools.” “No, a student cannot transition without parental approval.” “No, there won’t be transgender men crushing women in sport.”

They kept the lies up and still try to, even though hard evidence is now in-hand proving their deception on this issue.

It isn’t happening, and it is a good thing if it actually is.

5833

I’m not surprised, since Keynes kinda mixed the idea of a free market and socialist ideas. He basically thought that free market is a must, but state should guide it.

So the ”socialist” part of Keynes probably sounded similar to Nazi ideas. Heck, I’m sure nazis sounded like Adam Smith at times.

Neoliberals (Friedman, Keynes etc.) were profoundly against state inteference. I think Reagan was the most neoliberal president in US? Trump on the other hand does not seem neoliberal, he would disagree in most things with Friedman for example.

5834

I recently finished Hitler’s Beneficiaries and to hear Aly describe it, the various finance ministers weren’t guiding the economy on any sort of fixed principles per se, and many were more or less academics and professionals and not necessarily Nazi party members.

It was guided by Hitler’s worldview of ethnic German supremacy, political goals in other words, where they’d be handed a broad state goal of, say, improving material conditions for German workers or funding rearmament and then they would do their best to figure out how it could be achieved using whatever tools they had. That’s how an idea like MEFO bills came about.

In this way it is simlar to “Equity” in the USA. Just because parents can’t guarantee “equitable” outcomes for their own children doesn’t stop the state from trying whatever kind of redistributionist and interventionist ideas it can come up with under the broad notion of “equity”.

5835

Yeah. Nationalist socialist Germany was an interesting experiment at least. It worked well in some areas. Kinda.

Something that was not seen before that’s flr sure. Hope we won’t see it again.

5836

I don’t think we’ll ever get an ethnic German supremacy movement anywhere except maybe Germany again, but we are definitely getting a heavy dose of Democratic Socialism across the west, although it has a lot of different names and iterations. Here in Maine they call themselves Democrats, but not all Democrats are Democratic Socialists.

It is definitely another Socialist philosophy whose entire justification rests on delivering “equity” for “marginalized people”. It is very much like National Socialism in its insistence on dividing people up by race and then treating them differently in public policy based on their understanding of both history and present, which was cultivated by propaganda. It is also internationalist, not nationalist, as we see in Maine with the idea that anyone who can make their way to the geography deserves to vote, aka “we’re all citizens of the world, dude”.

It also adopts the state belief system of transgenderism, which the Nazis were against. All in all, it seems like the same basic idea but with the in and out groups inverted or otherwise mixed up.

Hitler didn’t come to power by campaigning on the Holocaust or declaring war on the USA 10 years into the future.

There’s definitely growing anti-Jewish sentiment growing everywhere I can see on all sides. Whether that somehow coalesces into a true racist political movement remains to be seen, but I don’t see us just getting DEI racism reversed to jump ship to a different type of race-based public policy.

We might tell Israel to go fuck itself at some point in the future, but we can do that without persecuting Jewish Americans.

I cannot overstate how important the first amendment is in slicing through propaganda, no matter who is putting it out. Musk buying X was truly historic, along with platforms like facebook giving up on their heavy-handed censorship in the wake of that.

A free and open internet allows for a form of political discussion with “receipts” in-hand and an army of people trying to point out why you are wrong or lying. People are learning how to look for the receipts across all kinds of ideas.

AI is sure going to be a wild ride. Who knows where that’s going to go with regards to politics?