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His intellectual defenders make their case that the danger is overblown.

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[-] anon6789@lemmy.world 169 points 9 months ago

Call me overly cautious, but I don't really want a president that jokes about becoming a dictator either...

[-] pearsaltchocolatebar@discuss.online 122 points 9 months ago

He literally said he was going to be. I'm not sure why this is even a question.

[-] ceenote@lemmy.world 60 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

He literally already tried to be.

"Does he want to?" is not up for debate. "Can he?" is the question. People downplaying the danger he poses are pushing the needle towards "Yes, he can."

[-] xor@infosec.pub 24 points 9 months ago

i don't see how there's any other topic in the discussion at this point
"well moving on from the plan of a brutal, unending dictatorship, what's your position on corn subsidies?"

[-] Zorque@kbin.social 5 points 9 months ago

Gotta feed the news goblins.

[-] OpenStars@startrek.website 16 points 9 months ago

It is not. Conservatives are gaslighting you, and the media is trying to sell their clickbait. Possibly unpopular thought: at some point it becomes our own fault for choosing to engage? Like the big bad wolf asks "are you home right now?", where even if you answer "no!" then you have still fallen for the trick? (i.e., of COURSE he would be a dictator, that's not even a point, but why allow them to control the conversation to switch to the talking points that they choose, rather than driving our own points that we would rather be discussed, like what to do about school shootings or climate change and such?)

Innuendo Studios has a fascinating whole entire video series called "The Alt-Right Playbook" if anyone wants to learn more about their limited variety of tactics, that are nonetheless extremely effective for those who do not recognize them.

[-] SoupBrick@yiffit.net 6 points 9 months ago

I really enjoyed that series. Very informative.

[-] OpenStars@startrek.website 8 points 9 months ago

IRK? It totally changed my method of responding to the world... I used to painstakingly attempt to respond unless it was extremely obvious that someone was 110% a troll, but now I know that even halfway reasonable people simply cannot be "reasoned" with, if they have an entirely different worldview than me. i.e., don't give someone a list of 100 reasons to not allow Trump to win - they don't care (after the 1st impeachment, and the 2nd impeachment, and January 6, and everything else), nor are they looking for facts and willing to change their minds. I would change my mind in a heartbeat if the facts pointed in a different direction, but they will not, b/c it is not "facts" that are causing them to support him, even if for some people that once was true.

Ofc I still fall for the tricks, but like 90% less often now:-).

[-] linearchaos@lemmy.world 4 points 9 months ago

And he's currently fighting in court to receive dictator benefits for breaking laws.

[-] antidote101@lemmy.world 56 points 9 months ago

Project 2025 is a plan to reshape the executive branch of the U.S. federal government in the event of a Republican victory in the 2024 U.S. presidential election.[2][3] Established in 2022, the project seeks to recruit tens of thousands of conservatives to Washington, D.C., to replace existing federal civil service workers it characterizes as the "deep state", to further the objectives of the next Republican president.[4] Although participants in the project cannot promote a specific presidential candidate, many have close ties to Donald Trump and the Trump 2024 presidential campaign.[5] The plan would perform a swift takeover of the entire executive branch under a maximalist version of the unitary executive theory — a theory proposing the president of the United States has absolute power over the executive branch — upon inauguration.[6]

[-] xor@infosec.pub 22 points 9 months ago

"yeah sure, but biden is really bad too...
basically the same thing..."

  • pseudo-leftists on hexbear
[-] squiblet@kbin.social 10 points 9 months ago

They tend to act like democrats are actually worse.

[-] xor@infosec.pub 2 points 9 months ago

i never understood one...

[-] OpenStars@startrek.website 4 points 9 months ago

I gave up on hexbear entirely, and lemmygrad too. The sheer tone of voice finally was enough to convince me. Plus, responding to my comment like an entire week later after everyone and their brother (& sister, & mother & father too) has already jumped all over it and I long since stopped responding - they obviously are simply looking for an excuse to work in a "dig", not even realizing what self-pwns they were dishing out the entire time. Consent should matter to people... but sadly it does not always do so.:-(

It is such a truism - actual scientists are all like "well I am not 100% certain of this, but I think what might be going on is...", while it is the literal, actual children that come back with "nuh uh, I know you are but what am I? your [sic] stupid!"

My experience on Lemmy has improved 1000% since blocking both instances, after the upgrade to v0.19. I am not here to babysit.

[-] xor@infosec.pub 3 points 9 months ago

it's pretty weird... im pretty sure it's half actually paid trolls, and half mentally ill people...
i've seen it on every leftist group that wasn't heavily modded...
the goal being, of course, make leftists seem like absolute garbage people...
i mean, on hexbear it's been, yes a torrent of people digging on me, intentionally misinterpreting things i say and acting enraged, and extremely repetitive...
it's doesn't seem organic...
...
but if you go to any leftist meetup in person, they're all the nicest, most considerate people ever...

online it's always caricatures of the super unreasonable leftist memes...

[-] OpenStars@startrek.website 2 points 9 months ago

I know what you mean - it sounds like a conspiracy theory, except there's tons of evidence to support it which makes it by definition not. Or I mean, that that stuff happens, not necessarily about any one situation in particular.

And Putin's troll farms have been caught influencing both sides of debates involving popular topics before, it is not hard at all to imagine it happening again.

Also sheeple are fairly mindless - once something like that is first made, it would involve far less effort to just allow it to coast forward from there....

So at this point it actually could be entirely authentic douchy people, just living their best lives by acting that way - it is sad to think that people could be really like that, but I am sure that some at least are.:-(

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[-] K1nsey6@lemmy.world 4 points 9 months ago

P2025 has been in existence for decades amongst the marginalized and it really started to ramp up under Clinton and his DLC.

[-] thefartographer@lemm.ee 11 points 9 months ago

Clinton and his DLC

Fucking microtransaction politics. It was probably just some stupid exclusive sax riff.

[-] TubeTalkerX@kbin.social 5 points 9 months ago

I kept trying to buy the Al Gore personality add-on but I kept getting an error message.

[-] AbidanYre@lemmy.world 7 points 9 months ago

It was established in 2022. What the hell are you on about?

[-] K1nsey6@lemmy.world 3 points 9 months ago

It was given a name then the policies himself have been in effect for a while

[-] Gradually_Adjusting@lemmy.world 5 points 9 months ago

"The marginalized". Load bearing euphemism detected

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[-] pottedmeat7910@lemmy.world 55 points 9 months ago

Let's never ever find out.

[-] superfes@lemmy.world 11 points 9 months ago
[-] gregorum@lemm.ee 31 points 9 months ago

He will certainly try, and that’s bad enough.

[-] lettruthout@lemmy.world 23 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

Yes, but only if he gets elected.

[-] anon6789@lemmy.world 6 points 9 months ago

I dunno, he made a go of it anyway last time he lost...

[-] FlyingSquid@lemmy.world 19 points 9 months ago

Really, truly yes.

[-] Jaysyn@kbin.social 17 points 9 months ago

When people tell you who they are, believe them.

[-] xhieron@lemmy.world 12 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

Maybe not, but you know, just to be on the safe side, better vote against him just in case.

[-] anon6789@lemmy.world 8 points 9 months ago

For all the deniers jumping in, just where is supposed to be the cutoff point where we let "talk" get to before rational people can say enough is enough?

It isn't the first time we've had "talk" of overthrow, and how often do we need to leave it up the chance that they don't get the opportunuty?

The Business Plot (also called the Wall Street Putsch[1] and The White House Putsch) was a political conspiracy in 1933, in the United States, to overthrow the government of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and install Smedley Butler as dictator.[2][3] Retired Marine Corps Major General Smedley Butler testified under oath that wealthy businessmen were plotting to create a fascist veterans' organization with Butler as its leader and use it in a coup d'état to overthrow Roosevelt. In 1934, Butler testified under oath before the United States House of Representatives Special Committee on Un-American Activities (the "McCormack–Dickstein Committee") on these revelations.[4] Although no one was prosecuted, the congressional committee final report said, "there is no question that these attempts were discussed, were planned, and might have been placed in execution when and if the financial backers deemed it expedient."

Early in the committee's gathering of testimony most major news media dismissed the plot, with a New York Times editorial characterizing it as a "gigantic hoax".[5] When the committee's final report was released, the Times said the committee "purported to report that a two-month investigation had convinced it that General Butler's story of a Fascist march on Washington was alarmingly true" and "... also alleged that definite proof had been found that the much publicized Fascist march on Washington, which was to have been led by Major Gen. Smedley D. Butler, retired, according to testimony at a hearing, was actually contemplated".[6] The individuals involved all denied the existence of a plot.

While historians have questioned whether a coup was actually close to execution, most agree that some sort of "wild scheme" was contemplated and discussed.

And if you want a political crime family....

In July 2007, a BBC investigation reported that Prescott Bush, father of U.S. President George H. W. Bush and grandfather of then-president George W. Bush, was to have been a "key liaison" between the 1933 Business Plotters and the newly emerged Nazi regime in Germany,[51] although this has been disputed by Jonathan Katz as a misconception caused by a clerical research error.[52] According to Katz, "Prescott Bush was too involved with the actual Nazis to be involved with something that was so home grown as the business plot."

So it seems if one would want to say that an overthrow of the United States has been in progress by politically connected individuals for over 100 years, both actively and "just talk", they would have a whole bunch of things they could talk about.

[-] WastedJobe@feddit.de 8 points 9 months ago

Trump doesn't have intellectual defenders.

[-] Bytemeister@lemmy.world 8 points 9 months ago

He said he would, and he literally tried to. Were it not for a handful of DC police and Secret Service personnel, he probably would have.

Anyone who doubts this should probably abstain from voting, or really making any critical decisions until their brain damage can be evaluated.

[-] K1nsey6@lemmy.world 6 points 9 months ago

How is it liberals claim Biden is powerless to do anything and everything requires small, slow, incremental baby steps, but think Republicans get everything they want on day one? That's not the best argument for electing democrats as liberals think it is.

[-] FlyingSquid@lemmy.world 13 points 9 months ago

It's almost like Trump doesn't care about obeying the nation's laws or honoring his oath of office or something...

[-] K1nsey6@lemmy.world 2 points 9 months ago

Then the 2 other branches of checks and balances will keep him in check. He says this random weird ass shit because he knows that people will talk about it. That's what narcissists do they want their name to always be front and center. The easiest way to make a narcissist go away is to stop talking about him.

[-] StinkyOnions@lemmy.world 10 points 9 months ago

Then the 2 other branches of checks and balances will keep him in check.

Who? The captured judiciary or the captured Legislature?

[-] K1nsey6@lemmy.world 3 points 9 months ago

Judiciary wasn't captured, It was given away by Democrats.

[-] StinkyOnions@lemmy.world 9 points 9 months ago

So how would those 2 branches keep trump in check? You just contradicted yourself.

[-] AbidanYre@lemmy.world 4 points 9 months ago

Well, that seems to have shut him up.

[-] rustyfish@lemmy.world 4 points 9 months ago

First, I reached out to Roger Kimball, editor of The New Criterion, a highbrow journal of arts and ideas. Its most recent issue included a defense of Henry Kissinger, a lament comparing brutalist architecture to the increased acceptance of tattoos (which digressed into a complaint about the popularity of women’s soccer in Europe), and a review of a new translation of Plato‘s dialogues. Kimball himself has written several books and essays that warn against what he says are declining cultural standards. He seemed like the perfect person to place Trump in a historical context and show that our fears are overblown and that he is simply the latest iteration of the hurly-burly of American politics — rough around the edges, perhaps, but not much different from what we have faced before.

Oh, this truly sounds like someone anyone should listen to. Let’s see how grounded in reality these intellectuals defending Trump are. This will be good.

„What Trump said on January 6 was that you should proceed down and patriotically make your voice known. That is called petitioning Congress. There is a constitutional right to do that, and the more you look at what happened on January 6, the weirder it looks. There were clearly scores of federal agents in the crowd abetting people.”

Ah! I see. Intellectuals.

[-] Hyperreality@kbin.social 4 points 9 months ago

People thought Hitler was a bit of a joke and the danger was overblown in the 1920s.

[-] Paragone@lemmy.world 3 points 9 months ago

See his trajectory.

See how having power & being threatened both alter his trajectory in the same direction, towards totalitarianism.

The economic rug-pull that is going to hand the Repubs lots of backlash vote, is likely to enable them to make him GEOTUS, which is their wet-dream

( go on www.wikipedia.org and search for GEOTUS and it'll land you on Donald Trump's page.

GEOTUS stands for "God Emperor Of The United States", and wikipedia altered their search-engine logic to hide that they have Trump as GEOTUS: the search-page-result-statistics don't include any GEOTUS page, but the search works )

Combined with the GenZ nonvoting, the total Muslim not voting for Biden, and the economic pain's backlash vote, I think Biden has little chance in 2024.

IOW, I believe that the reverse-takeover of the kkKonfederates is going to happen, and the beginning of US Civil War Part2 is certain, beginning within 3y of Jan1 2025.


the root-cause isn't political-left or political-right, the root-cause is Kahneman System-1 fighting-off considered-reasoning, aka Kahneman System-2.

It's the same world-wide.

"Putin Country" is a book on how rural Russia is the same as MAGA territory, just with different labels.

Rural Israel, rural Syria, the shitty education that condescended to the "lower class" students, and the "lower class" students were taught just how much contempt the "intellectuals" had for them, and they have equivalent contempt for the "intellectuals"...

that is part of it.

Bluntly, humankind is fighting-off considered-reasoning, reverting to imprinted-reaction, just as herdbeasts live in imprinted-reaction.

No moral-anxiety, when only-imprinted-reaction ( Kahneman System-1 ) is running, see?

Read "Thinking Fast & Slow" by Daniel Kahneman, & then see that all the politics is just "makeup" on this System-1 going "alpha" and obliterating System-2/considered-reasoning's having any say.

Globally.

Boosting petrol-consumption breaks the threat of loss-of-authority/alphaness ( never mind that it makes the planet more likely to drown in wildfires, megadroughts, extra-hurricanes, berzerk flooding, temporary deep-freezes, lethally-roasting regional temperatures, trashed ports due to sea-level-rise, etc, that "isn't real", right?

Not to imprinted-reaction mind, aka limbic-mind's "reasoning". )

so .. it is an animal-"need", right?

All the different variants of "supremacism" are all just animal herdbeast "alpha" bulling.

Corporate, oligarchic, class, legalism, etc.

Just variants on the underlying herdbeast politics.

The Great Filter is going to be pruning-down this species rather horribly, later this century.

Nothing infuriates a tantruming toddler with guns the way implacable-accountability does.

And that is all that humankind's unconscious-mind is: toddler-with-guns.

Trump's a symptom, not a cause.

So's Putin.

So's both Hamas & the Israeli gov't.

every continent has its own version.

Human nature.

It hasn't changed, and either Universe succeeds in force-changing it, this century, or our epitaph is going to be that we wouldn't grow-up, and we .. force-extinguished ourself.

_ /\ _

[-] krashmo@lemmy.world 9 points 9 months ago

You have some good points in there but your sentence structure and formatting makes this read more like the diary of someone battling a mental illness than a nuanced political opinion. If you want people to take you seriously I'd suggest you streamline things a bit. Just a suggestion.

[-] MotoAsh@lemmy.world 3 points 9 months ago

Spoilers: Humanity let too many children remain children as they aged. A bunch of petulant toddlers ofc aren't going to solve their own catastrophies. Rampant, institutionalized greed allows far too many to attempt power fantasy in the real world.

We're fucked, and it's because the good will not prune the evil for the short-sighted fear that they will be the baddies. We have completely failed the Paradox of Tolerance for the simple fact that humanity is too stupid to think past face-value.

[-] angelsomething@lemmy.one 2 points 9 months ago

When someone tells you who they are, believe them.

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this post was submitted on 23 Jan 2024
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