This kills the human.

It’s a paradox; in order to realize he doesn’t have the brain cell, he needs to have the brain cell.

To which the old man replies: “Man, what the fuck is up with all of you people coming up here to ask me what the meaning of life is? I moved to the top of the tallest mountain I could find to get away from you all!”

I’m going to throw a trigger warning on this next part just in case:

Yes; trust me when I say that the parallels to the 1930s have filled me with anxiety these past few years, and especially so in the past 4 months. Thank you for the link about Petofi; I had not heard of him.

Propaganda doesn’t exist in a vacuum. People must make it, and people must spread it. Like spam, if there’s nobody dumb enough to click on the links, the spammers will soon stop sending spam for want of profitability. The receptivity to propaganda is a necessary component for the propagation of it.

Yeah, man. It’s fucking messy, is what it is. We are sloshy bags of water and hormones feeding a mass of electrified gelatin. There’s no ideal solution because there’s no ideal human. We’re all fucked up in so many different ways.

I understand intimately the sense of loss that violence brings, but I also understand that violence has historically been one of the most successful strategies for resolving conflict. I’m consequently a huge fan of the John Browns and Malcolm X’s of the world, and not so much the MLK Jrs and Gandhis. Gandhi thought he could dissuade Hitler from genociding a people and plunging the entire world into a war by having a polite discussion. Churchill thought it needed to be bombs, tanks, infantry, and warships. Churchill was right.

On the other hand, I am also a huge fan of the Frederick Douglasses of the world. Courage doesn’t only manifest itself on the battlefield. It also looks like petitioning the president for policy changes and reading a speech reminding everybody of why “Independence Day” isn’t a universally beloved tradition.

I don’t claim to have any of the answers. I believe that people are complicated, but also that good and evil are also things that exist. For example, I think that the majority of the people who voted for the Nazi party were doing so out of economic concerns, or anger at the wave of migrants taking German & Austrian jobs, or fear that they were the butt of the rest of the world’s jokes. If you’d asked any of them before they voted whether they would be cool with industrialized murder of German citizens, they’d almost certainly say no. But that’s what it turned out that they voted for. Hitler didn’t pull the wool over anybody’s eyes; he was pretty open about his intentions, even at the outset.

The people who voted for the Nazis had a myriad of different reasons for voting the way they did, but in the end, none of that matters. They contributed to one of the greatest evils the world has ever seen. Many of them even took a more active role in perpetrating that evil. Artists, comedians, writers, mechanics, doctors, scientists, grocers, homemakers, attorneys; people from every walk of life. Just your ordinary, average populace. All of them fucking evil.

The truth of the matter is, evil isn’t some bald guy sitting in his volcanic lair stroking his persian cat while plotting the destruction of the world. Evil is very often banal. And that’s the most insidious thing about it, in my opinion.

Oh, I completely admit that they’re human beings. I vehemently disagree with the “worth talking to” bit of that sentence, though. As for their pain… I don’t give a flying fuck about it. These people are the root cause of an enormous amount of misery. It’s possible that they aren’t all cruel, but every single one of them decided that cruelty wasn’t a deal breaker for them. I have zero faith that the vast majority of them will ever be redeemable.

We saw the exact same thing after the civil war, by the way. Taking the federal boot off of their necks led to Jim Crow laws and the KKK. Talking to them didn’t fix that. Reasoning with them didn’t fix that.

I think that the main point of difference between us is that you believe that all life is sacred, and should be preserved at all cost. I do not believe that.

Yeah, the US took in a bunch of Nazis, too, and we put them to work in research labs and our space program. I guess complicity in the slaughter of millions wasn’t a deal-breaker for our government at the time, so long as they could help get us to the moon.

but for now the MAGAts aren’t actually killing people.

Killing people is not a requirement for being a traitor.

By calling for their deaths, and doubling down on it, you are making yourself worse than them.

Death is the prescribed punishment for treason in this country. I did not invent that punishment, I am simply saying that these people are traitors, and we hang traitors here. Or at least, we should, according to the laws on our books.

advanced democracy like the USA, where a wide political spectrum is meant to be part of the design.

Hey - I’m all for horrible people having horrible political takes and being able to voice their awful opinions in the public marketplace of ideas. But when you storm the capital and attempt to overthrow the government, that is no longer expressing an opinion. That is being a traitor. Anybody who voted for Trump after that is aiding and abetting an enemy of the United States.

The solution is not to murder those voters but for the mainstream parties to take that stuff into consideration and make sure the far right remains “fringe”.

Yeah, well, it’s a bit too late for that. The Republican party has long since embraced the cult of Trump. They’ve been completely hollowed out by Trumpists and there’s no going back without the entire party collapsing. The sane ones in that party know this, and so despite the fact that they’re terrified of Trump and his cultists, they’ll still vote for everything he wants.

I understand that you see an extreme position like mine, and find it anathema to your sensitivities as someone who doesn’t have to live among these people, but let me assure you: the US is a full on fascist country now. The only way to claw back any semblance of a normal country is through extreme measures. Talking it out is not going to cut it anymore.

You can’t just kill the traitors just like you can’t just imprison all the murderers and political dissidents.

I agree that it’s impractical. If I could Thanos-snap them out of existence, I’d do it in a heartbeat. Unfortunately, such easy solutions are not possible. So if we ever do have any hope of recovering the ideal of a country based on the rule of law, we’ll have to figure out what punitive or rehabilitative measure to take against a fifth of our population. Rehabilitation would be extremely difficult, though, as anybody with a Trumper for a family member will attest.

calling people with positions you don’t agree with traitors is the most boringly unimaginative way to describe people you don’t like to those you think you do.

I’m not calling them traitors because I disagree with them. I’m calling them traitors because they’re god damned traitors. Do you not remember when Trump encouraged a bunch of his idiot followers to attempt to overthrow the sitting government on Jan 6th, 2021? It wasn’t that long ago. That’s treason. He is a traitor. Anybody who voted for a traitor is aiding and abetting the enemy, and is therefore also a traitor. The fact that we didn’t string him up immediately following that stunt is straight up appalling. The fact that we then allowed him the ability to run for president again is unconscionable.

The othering isn’t wrong, innately, but if your answer to the question ‘why are Americans becoming Nazis?’ is Russia, then you’ll never be able to fix the real reasons and stop the flow of fucking Nazis.

I think if you re-read what I wrote, you’ll see that I’m not just blaming Russia. I specifically mentioned home-grown racism as one of the driving factors. The nazis didn’t create American racism; American racism created the nazis. Hitler took great inspiration from our treatment of our indigenous population, our blatant antisemitism, and our oppression of black citizens. He modeled a lot of his policies on our behavior.

That being said, Russia is definitely to blame for quite a lot of the disinformation sphere in this country. It is a very well documented, and well financed operation designed to destabilize the country, and it has been wildly successful. I mean, hell, it’s partially responsible for 70+ million Americans becoming full-on traitors.

I doubt that. I don’t know the exact number, but it’s a lot. Like a lot a lot. Hell, we even couped Australia, for fuck’s sake. I’m not sure how many governments in the world the US has fucked with, but I’d reckon it’s probably in the triple digits.

Probably. Fuck 'em. Plenty of space on the galley.

Oh I’m not looking to exonerate ANY of these motherfuckers. If I had my druthers, they’d all fucking hang. Whether they’re home-grown, or Russian sponsored, every single one of them is a fucking traitor.

Edit: honestly, the current situation in America gives me a whole new appreciation for why the French decided they needed to industrialize murder during their revolution, and invented the guillotine to do so.

Edit 2 (Treasonous Boogaloo): I truly mean ALL. Your sweet aunt, who voted for Trump because she was concerned about Fox’s reporting about the migrant caravans at the border? Fucking traitor. I sincerely hope she dies. Your uncle, who’s a bit of a conspiracy nut, who is an avid Alex Jones listener? I pray he gets trapped in a raging inferno. Your parents, who you cut out of your life because they kept ranting about immigrants taking American jobs at every social event? I pray they find themselves trapped in a Cybertruck that’s in the middle of a battery-overload event. Everybody who voted for Trump, regardless of how many times they voted for him, deserves a traitor’s death. 100% of them, zero exceptions, no backsies.

You know: when I was a much younger man, I heard of the concept of the 5th column. For those who don’t know, the 5th column is a clandestine group of people, financed by a particular country’s adversary, who is dedicated to destroying that country from the inside. Think the human version of the Trojan Horse.

I’d always pictured this to be a relatively small movement, like a terror cell. A very insular group operating on foreign financing who leveraged an advanced guerilla war skillset to undermine the security apparatus of the country. To my embarrassment, I only realized recently (maybe 5 years ago) that that is not always the case. In America’s case, for example, the 5th column comprises some 70+ million people who are fed on a diet of Russian propaganda and home-grown racist rhetoric. Most of these people have no skillset to speak of, but all of them are willing participants in the utter destruction of a country based on the rule of law and constitutional government.

It seems very odd to me that 1 out of every 5 Americans is a full-on traitor. But, we do live in odd times. 20% of our country seems giddy to return to a monarchy, complete with the whole Louis XIV Sun King “Appointed By God” thing. And what’s strangest of all is that the guy they picked to be their holy sovereign… is a fucking moron. A complete god damned imbecile of the highest order.

If this is a simulation, I’d very much like it to stop.

Edit: I would like to hear from the people who downvoted this; what about what I said is disagreeable to you?

I deleted my Reddit account back when they fucked over the 3rd party apps, but I still do browse their site. Much as I think that Lemmy is the superior platform, Reddit still has a huge numbers advantage, and so the amount of content over there is much greater than here.

Any time I go into the comments section, though, I am reminded that Reddit is a shithole. So I try to stay out of those and just read the linked articles.

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