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

    • xor@infosec.pub
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      8 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?”

    • OpenStars@startrek.website
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      8 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.

        • OpenStars@startrek.website
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          8 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:-).

    • Anemia@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      Exceedingly unlikely given the fact that he’s already that old and also that he only has one term left. He would have to be really industrious to turn america into shit(tier?) in that limited time.

      But I don’t disagree that he’ll give it a go.

  • Xhieron@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

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

  • Bytemeister@lemmy.world
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    8 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.

  • rustyfish@lemmy.world
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    8 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.

  • anon6789@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

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

  • Paragone@lemmy.world
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    8 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
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      8 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
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      8 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.

  • GodlessCommie@lemmy.world
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    8 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.

    • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

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

      • GodlessCommie@lemmy.world
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        8 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.