Comedy Central interviews Q-believers
“Do any of you think anything you have heard today is crazy?”
“YES”
laughter…
:)
“The goal is to remove the Constitution.”
From a person who likely supports removing the Constitution and all the Amendments except the 2nd.
National Treasure 3?
No doubt he is a supporter of our extremely constitutionally literate resident of the White House.
&$^@&* doesn’t see trump trying to dismantle the Constitution right in front of him.
Those globalist socialist liberalist communists can’t destroy the Constitution if Trump does it first! And since he’s the President, it can’t be illegal…or something.
The only way to respect the Constitution is through shoddily made statues cranked out in the 1920’s to honor men who betrayed our nation in the 1860’s.
LOL! Posted on crazy uncle’s facebook share ;)
Yes, patriotic statues celebrating the traitors to America, and its constitution.
Hey now, these were honorable men who fought and died for the state right to own human beings like chattel.
Hey, the Confederacy had a constitution, too! In fact, it was nearly identical to the US constitution (except for slavery).
Has it always been this way, a certain % of the general population prone to this nonsense, or is it worse these days? I lean toward the latter due to the internet’s emergency over the last 20+ years.
Tell you what, the years have a way of humbling you. For me it’s been getting things so completely wrong, stuff like:
–Thinking my wife’s OCD would lessen, she would mellow as the years went by. Hah!
–Thinking GWB was the bottom of the barrel, and that his presidency was so bad the base would step back toward the middle and start electing better candidates
–Believing in the mid-90s that the internet was going to be similarly as transformative as the printing press in terms of disseminating knowledge
I guess it’s going underground now. Maybe there is an upside if it teaches all the tinfoil-hat types to actually use Tor or secure dark web browsing :)
This (long) piece might deserve it’s own thread, I don’t know, but it’s a fantastic if sobering cautionary tale.
From Orwell to Koestler, the European writers of the 20th century were obsessed with the idea of the Big Lie. The vast ideological constructs that were Communism and fascism, the posters demanding fealty to the Party or the Leader, the Brownshirts and Blackshirts marching in formation, the torch-lit parades, the terror police—these Big Lies were so absurd and inhuman, they required prolonged violence to impose and the threat of violence to maintain. They required forced education, total control of all culture, the politicization of journalism, sports, literature, and the arts.
By contrast, the polarizing political movements of 21st-century Europe demand much less of their adherents. They don’t require belief in a full-blown ideology, and thus they don’t require violence or terror police. They don’t force people to believe that black is white, war is peace, and state farms have achieved 1,000 percent of their planned production. Most of them don’t deploy propaganda that conflicts with everyday reality. And yet all of them depend, if not on a Big Lie, then on what the historian Timothy Snyder once told me should be called the Medium-Size Lie, or perhaps a clutch of Medium-Size Lies. To put it differently, all of them encourage their followers to engage, at least part of the time, with an alternative reality. Sometimes that alternative reality has developed organically; more often, it’s been carefully formulated, with the help of modern marketing techniques, audience segmentation, and social-media campaigns.
… skepticism about liberal democracy is also normal. And the appeal of authoritarianism is eternal.
Democracy and free markets can produce unsatisfying outcomes, after all, especially when badly regulated, or when nobody trusts the regulators, or when people are entering the contest from very different starting points. Sooner or later, the losers of the competition were always going to challenge the value of the competition itself.
More to the point, the principles of competition, even when they encourage talent and create upward mobility, don’t necessarily answer deeper questions about national identity, or satisfy the human desire to belong to a moral community. The authoritarian state, or even the semi-authoritarian state—the one-party state, the illiberal state—offers that promise: that the nation will be ruled by the best people, the deserving people, the members of the party, the believers in the Medium-Size Lie. It may be that democracy has to be bent or business corrupted or court systems wrecked in order to achieve that state. But if you believe that you are one of those deserving people, you will do it.
Replying to myself, gauche, but this is related.
Opinion piece in the NY Times.
From 1944.
The symptoms of fascist thinking are colored by environment and adapted to immediate circumstances. But always and everywhere they can be identified by their appeal to prejudice and by the desire to play upon the fears and vanities of different groups in order to gain power. It is no coincidence that the growth of modern tyrants has in every case been heralded by the growth of prejudice. It may be shocking to some people in this country to realize that, without meaning to do so, they hold views in common with Hitler when they preach discrimination against other religious, racial or economic groups. Likewise, many people whose patriotism is their proudest boast play Hitler’s game by retailing distrust of our Allies and by giving currency to snide suspicions without foundation in fact.
The American fascists are most easily recognized by their deliberate perversion of truth and fact. Their newspapers and propaganda carefully cultivate every fissure of disunity, every crack in the common front against fascism. They use every opportunity to impugn democracy. They use isolationism as a slogan to conceal their own selfish imperialism. They cultivate hate and distrust of both Britain and Russia. They claim to be super-patriots, but they would destroy every liberty guaranteed by the Constitution. They demand free enterprise, but are the spokesmen for monopoly and vested interest. Their final objective toward which all their deceit is directed is to capture political power so that, using the power of the state and the power of the market simultaneously, they may keep the common man in eternal subjection.
Replace “OCD” with “Bipolar Type 2” and I am starting to suspect you might be me. That’s weird.
