Um, what does he think Antifa means? You notice how they almost exclusively use the abbreviation and hardly ever the full name? For those who might actually be unaware, it means Anti-Fascist.
Scott Adams is a fucking moron. He apparently thinks anti-fascists are actually pro-fascist. Dumbass.
Or who conveniently forget about the Southern Strategy and the great party switch. Massive, massive mental gymnastics to put themselves on the 'right' side of history every time
A lot of conservatives have problems understanding words, especially words that apply to political beliefs. It's party ignorance and partly a result of years of indoctrination. One example, thinking that anyone who isn't hard-right is a 'socialist' or a 'commie' and not understanding that those aren't the same thing. Then, fascist... many people seem to think fascist means an authoritarian government, independent of any other qualities or beliefs.
Fascism : a way of organizing a society in which a government ruled by a dictator controls the lives of the people and in which people are not allowed to disagree with the government.
I mean, that's what most people imagine, when they think fascist and I think it's good enough.
Is every fascist government identical? No. But as near as makes no difference they are all the same type of asshole.
The rest of your points stand, however. People do not understand communism, socialism, nor Marxism.
Yeah but get into a debate with Scott Adams and like-minded morons and inevitably they'll try and pretend that Nazis were actually socialists because it was in their name. Never mind that was a throwback to some early party mergers and everything they said and did was ultra right nationalism. Strictly not fascism (that is the Italian variant) but aligned to it so closely that it broadly makes no odds.
Hah yeah... It also wasn't until this post that I made that connection. For the past few years I've heard of "the Dilbert Guy going off the deep end" and seen random posts (like this) with this Scott character being an absolute moron
I know at least 4 (I wanna say 6 but 4 confirmed confidently) righty leaning lads who are anti trans for what they will say are varied, diverse, weighty reasons - who all collectively tell the same story word for word any and everytime trans issues come up....
"I hit it off with a girl on Tinder, then two days in before we met or got serious or even talked all that much (just enough for me to be smitten) they told me they were trans, and I'm not a bigot, BUT IF THEY DON'T PUT THAT SHIT IN THEIR BIO THEY DESERVE WHATEVER HAPPENS TO THEM"
Nobody understands when I explain that their violent response to a trans woman on tinder is why trans women don't put it in their bio.
Jesus. Just had a moment of empathy. I don't think I have ever had a first date with someone (yes I am a het cis male) where violence was a real possibility. The very worse I worried about was some sorta scam. Be safe everyone.
Every word uttered by a conservative is either a lie or profoundly incorrect. Every communication is an attempt to manipulate. This is who conservatives are.
I used to read ToiletPaperUSA on reedit and yeah, fuckin Charlie Kirk. EVERYTHING he posts online contains fallacies and conflations attempting to manipulate people, like he knows his ideas can't stand on their own without dishonesty.
I've been putting off seeing family for so long, but I've been begged to come to the reunion this year as my Grandma is not doing so great. Every single one of them were once proud Trump supporters who grew silent after j6. Now all they do is scream about Phil Murphy and...bears? Windmills causing whales to beach? This weekend is going to be dreadful.
I had an old family friend meltdown, unfriend me from facebook, and avoid me like the plague ever since I told him he was wrong when he claimed it takes more electricity to make a single windmill than a windmill can ever produce in it's usuable lifetime...
Hey now, I know the average Bush voter in the late 90s wasn’t like this. Blind hate for half the country just destroys the country. This is a new problem.
Whatever this new thing is, the small group doing this - not the ever growing group being exposed and converted by it - deserves everything you’re saying. But don’t give up on your conservative family members. We’ll figure out how to stop the flow of hateful brain junk food eventually. We can go back to just politically disagreeing with them, instead of being irrationally hated by them. And vice versa.
They weren't quite like this but there was still shitty conservatives in much the same way... The extremists weren't the core yet though. They were absolutely still there and voting for Bush, they just weren't allowed to be the face of the party... Yet.
Respectfully disagree. Since Reagan the right has been completely fine with utter hypocrisy in the service of - well, ultimately nothing though for awhile they would say it was in the service of national security, or Christianity or something like that. Reagan republicans actively worked to fool the working class into giving them more and more power by lying, using "morning in America" commercials, and otherwise laying the groundwork for what became the fox news nation we now know and love so well.
The fact that otherwise good people who would help others and meant for everyone to get a fair chance etc. would steadfastly give their votes to them every election became more of a house of mirrors and lots of analysis as to how that could possibly be when their policies are so obviously cruel / stupid / nonexistent.
TL;DR - Propaganda works. "The average person" is criminally under-informed in many ways.
That's not correct; you're taking a black and white, absolutist view to the question, and that just doesn't work.
For instance, take economics; many traditional conservative positions square pretty well with economic theories and practices. Social conservatism also has a place, given the tension that exists between concepts of community and society. I do not agree with many conservative interpretations, but it's not accurate to say that all conservatives are intellectually dishonest.
OTOH, modern "conservatives" aren't conservatives in any meaningful way. It's now more like regressive populism.
take economics; many traditional conservative positions square pretty well with economic theories and practices
Like trickle down theory, corporate personhood, that tax breaks will result in tax revenue, and that government austerity is preferable to stimulus to move an economy from recession to expansion? They're zero for four in the most popular 20th century conservative economic theories. I'm not sure that economics is the best lens to view conservative theory in a positive light.
"conservative" is starting to feel like a meaningless label that assholes throughout history have tried to use to describe themselves because they didn't like the other words people were using to describe them.
And don't get me wrong, I'm sure there are "real" conservatives out there and in history, but it sure feels like they are outnumbered by the people that use the word as a mask, and that is weird.
Wow, had to check this one was real, and jokes on me it's still up on his Twitter, complete with him stubbornly defending himself against everyone telling him he's nuts. How did the Dilbert guy lose his mind so completely?
I would like to direct your attention to the Behind the Bastards podcast episode entitled "Part One: How The Dilbert Guy Lost His Mind" from July 11th, 2023.
I don't think that is so surprising. Scott Adams spent most of his career as a manager, not a developer. He probably prided himself in not being the ignorant manager, but at this point I have to question if he was just deluding himself.
Oh, I know this shit. It's like when Trump made a deal with Satan to convince Eve to eat the apple, because then Trump could try to date or just grab Eve when she got sent to Earth.
Since you've already volunteered yourself to venture into the den of awfulness formerly know as Twitter on our behalf; perhaps you could dig around to see if perhaps there's a recently trending, uh, txeet(?) That says something sensible using the same structure but different groups that this Scott idiot is attempting to parody?
Something like:
"I wonder if (some group this Scott guy would relate to?) know that (scumbag group who actually supported Hitler and the previously named group have recently shown support for) was allied with Hitler and helped him come to power..."
That's my most generous interpretation of what he's saying about someone critizing his original post just not understanding "what's going on here."
Like Peterson, Scott Adams was at least interesting to read in 2016, even if you don't agree with him. His analysis on why Trump eventually won was actually a pretty good read.
But it seems that going deep into the conservative echo chamber turns everyone in it completely insane and paranoid, until they are nothing but a parody of their former self.
So I think the main idea of conservatism is ironically being self destructive.
The beginnings of his exposure as being batshit crazy were there in Dilbert if you went back after he exposed himself. But the undeniable evidence that he's batshit crazy comes from his early books, long before he fell down into his "I'm a hypnotist so I know everything about persuasion" rabbit hole. He genuinely believed in affirmations as a hack code for the universe where writing down something and wishing for it hard enough will make the entire universe change to get it to you. His novels were so bad that he accomplished the impossible: he made me wish Ayn Rand had given him some writing tips. This is years before he fell down into the right wing grifter space he now occupies.
He was fucking crazy from his YOUTH. (Source: his own stories on his blog!)
People, by default, assume because he made stuff people liked that he was a sane, rational person. No matter how much talent or money someone has they're still as prone to having batshit insane takes as anyone else you may encounter.
This is a common problem. "I like this singer's music ... wait ... he said WHAT about black people!? But ... dude is BLACK!!!" "I like this painter's portraits. Wait, what did he do with children!?"
I love that I have seen comments responding to comments about him being crazy with something like. So everyone you disagree with is crazy. Its not a disagreement when someone says a relatively new, modern age group, was behind a historical group. Im not going to even get into its the opposite of what their group is about. Its like no. People are called crazy for saying crazy shit. Like slavery was beneficial to slaves. Thats not about disagreement its just patently wrong. Its like saying when you murder people it can sometimes be good for their health.
Adams is "crazy" because he seems to disagree with himself. Donald Trump impresses Adams, yet he voted for Hillary Clinton to protect himself. White people should "stay the hell away from black people," yet in a tweet after his tirade he explained he is not bothered by black people, but instead bothered by white advocates for black people (which... may include himself, I mean he identified as black for solidarity or something, which is kind of meaningless, but he did used to support black cartoonist Robb Armstrong's comic Jump Start quite a bit, and even wrote the foreward to his book). Yeah, his views can be upsetting, but the following day they will likely be upsetting yet completely contrawise to his previous views. That's why he's "crazy," and while I dislike the connotation of the word it seems apt. He has a constant paranoid mania in his videos, blog posts, and tweets. I really only have a layman's knowledge of mental disorders, coupled with my own experience, but Adams really needs an evaluation. PTSD, any bipolar disorder, any schizophrenia, or maybe something else I don't know about could likely be in the cards.
But also like... In an entirely self-contained way the person who wrote the original post is crazy because they are claiming a group was part of events that ended decades before that group formed.
Yeah when stuff first came out I watched like half a dozen episodes of his coffee talks. I kept on trying to go with that hes joking or being sarcastic in some way but eventually its like nope. there is no way to spin this. biden turning into a werewolf. sort a joke or something. don't really get it. does not fit in as funny. come on bring this around to some sort of sarcasm. crap hes just lost it.
Antifa isn't all that new though. While the American antifa isn't actually a branch of the original 1930s German one, it likes to think it is, and it's the German one that Scott's claiming helped Hitler gain power.
No. No it isn't. Scott is just a moron who happens to also be able to draw (badly) characters that corporate office drones relate to. He's absolutely trying to attack the current Anti-facist movement in the USA.
I imagine hes is misquoting the United Front here?
The United Front (Einheitsfront) was the strategy of the German communist party KPD to counter both fascism and social democrats (whom the KPD and the Third International called social fascists ("Sozialfaschisten")). As you can probably guess, this wasn't very successful in uniting the left and center against fascism, so Parties of the Comintern ended up changing strategies to the United Front, a broad coalition of left and center against fascism. This had some limited success (France had a Popular front government of communists/socdems/left leaning liberals for two years that enacted a fairly large amount of very progressive labour laws and banned a number of fascist and monarchist organisations like the Croix de Feu, Spain had a similar Popular front which ended with the military loss in the civil war against Franco)
The SocDems SPD had a similar strategy btw., the iron front, which intended to counter fascism, monarchism, and communism and was opposed to the KPD.
No. No it wasn't. Antifaschistische Aktion was a paramilitary wing of the communists, fighting both the social democratic Iron Front and the Nazi Sturmabteilung.
The only way in which it could be said to be allied with the Nazis is that both of them opposed the social democrats, but the enemy of your enemy is not in fact your friend. The KPD saw both the SPD and the NSDAP as fascists, rather than in any way allying with the NSDAP against the SPD.
1: The United States Bourgeoisie bankrolled the rise of fascism in Europe.
2: The bourgeois leaders of England, France, Poland, Finland and other Western European nations either ignored, enabled, or appeased Hitler's worst behavior in the buildup to WW2.
3: The bourgeois leaders of these countries, England in particular, pushed for disastrous bilateral security arrangements which created a domino effect leading to war, while ignoring the USSR's suggestion of collective, anti-fascist security arrangements.
4: The bourgeois leaders of these countries pursued a policy not of containing fascist aggression, but of diplomatically isolating the USSR, in the hopes that Hitler would go East and carry out an anti-communist genocide on their behalf.
5: The bourgeois leaders of these countries, having ignored or stalled collective security proposals from the USSR, actively made bilateral non-aggression pacts with Hitler before Molotov-Ribbentrop was signed, making the USSR the last in a long line of nations to sign non-aggression pacts with Hitler, after the USSR's collective security proposals fell through.
6: The USSR only signed Molotov-Ribbentrop to buy time. The USSR only invaded East Poland to prevent a German front from forming right at the Soviet border. This is because attempts to make mutual security arrangements with Poland fell through. The Soviets only moved into the region after the existing government had literally fled the country, leaving it ungoverned. 2 million jews in eastern poland were saved from the nazis by this action.
7: The USSR tried to purchase a strategic corridor of land from Finland that the nazis could easily use to invade the USSR. The USSR not only wanted to legally purchase this land from Finland, but to trade Finland more acres of land in exchange. i.e. an asymmetrical trade that would have ultimately benefited Finland. Finland refused because the fascist leadership of Finland wanted to see Germany invade the USSR through this strategic corridor. This led directly to the Winter War. The Finnish lost the winter war but used their intelligence that they gathered during it to collaborate with the nazis.
8: When the North Atlantic allies finally teamed up with USSR after their strategy of appeasing Hitler backfired, they immediately attempted to make asymmetrical security arrangements that would have obligated the USSR to commit far more troops and resources to the war than any other ally, essentially using the USSR as a shield against the very fascist powers they had spent the better part of a decade appeasing. The British in particular kept stalling on arrangements and pretending to be confused.
9: When the war was over the North Atlantic allies, led by the USA, who came out of the war richer than any other country on Earth, immediately committed to rehabilitating nazis, blaming the USSR, who was decimated by the war, for causing the war, and created NATO to begin encircling the USSR, 6 years before the creation of the Warsaw pact.
10: The North Atlantic allies immediately set to using the Marshall plan to rebuild the fascist German, Italian, and Japanese economies, indebting them to the United States, and orienting them towards anti-communist policy.
11: The North Atlantic allies to tried to use the Marshall plan as a proto-IMF to privatize and deregulate the economy of the war-torn USSR, and open it up to foreign capital. That the USSR rejected this was framed as aggression and used as a justification for beginning the cold war.
But hey, don't just take my word for it, or this rough outline of what is contained in well regarded books (I implore you to read some). How about we read Albert Einstein's words spoken at the time these events actually occurred?
A lot to unpack in this speech but the basics of what Einstein says are:
The USSR made all efforts to stop the war happening.
The western powers(UK, France, US, etc) shut the USSR out of European discussions and betrayed Czechoslovakia.
Molotov-Ribbentrop was an unhappy last resort that they were driven to, that the western powers were attempting to drive the nazis into attacking the USSR and that's why they would not help the USSR stop them.
The USSR supported everyone while the other powers (UK, France, US, etc) strengthened the nazis and Japanese.
The appointment of Hitler as Germany’s chancellor general, as well as the rising threat from Japan, led to important changes in Soviet foreign policy. Oriented toward Germany since the treaty of Locarno (1925) and the treaty of Special Relations with Berlin (1926), the Kremlin now moved in the opposite direction by trying to establish closer ties with France and Britain to isolate the growing Nazi threat. This policy became known as “collective security” and was associated with Maxim Litvinov, the Soviet foreign minister at the time. The pursuit of collective security lasted approximately as long as he held that position. Japan’s war with China took some pressure off of Russia by allowing it to focus its diplomatic efforts on relations with Europe.
It's just engagement bait; the consequence of Elon paying influencers. All these guys are just saying sillier and sillier statements to pump up their view counts in an attempt to score some Muskbux. Just roll your eyes and stop using Twitter.
The scariest thing about this sort of descent into madness through joining a cult, is that I wonder what keeps this from happening to me? Would I recognize the signs in myself and just know, "Whoa there, maybe this isn't such a hot idea, this is obviously crazy talk." Is it a slow decline where you sort of make small concessions and give up on reality bit by bit, until you turn around one day and you've just lost touch completely (or in your mind everyone else is taking crazy pills)?
I feel like we've been watching the GOP start to slip away from at least "acceptable" political discourse for awhile now, they've just been slowly but surely pushing the bounds of insanity little by little each year, until we've ended up with whatever the fuck the GOP is now, like this weird parody of its former self. Not that the Democrats are that much better, but for the most part they're still active participants in trying to maintain a shared reality.
There's obviously people on the fringe on either wing of the mainstream American political spectrum, but the lunatics have basically taken over the asylum in the GOP and their current "fringe" is just sensible, independent conservatives who I'm sure must exist somewhere, people relatively untouched by Trump's cult of personality. Decades of FoxNews though I'm sure have whittled that number down to near-extinction.
“One side wants a fascist autocratic regime and the other wants universal healthcare but has some moderate members backed by corporations. Both sides, am I right?”
In my mind, the Democrats don't go far enough to the Left (just look at the recent Railworker's strike), granted they are head and shoulders above anything the Republicans are doing and about the only choice we have at the polls anymore, but pretending like they're perfect is just as bad as pretending like there's no difference between Democrats and Republicans ("both sides").
go tell the Trans community that the republicans and democrats are the same, the only people who can say shit like this are those with an ungodly level of privilege
If the democrats actually use any of their power to protect trans people federally from the ongoing attack in red states causing an internal refugee crisis then sure.
They're doing an ok job of protecting trans people in blue states though sure, but they are sitting on their laurels when it comes to trans people outside of the states they control and allowing a "states rights" mindset to trans discrimination to normalise.
Given that you're already both-sidesing in a thread about a dude saying Antifa was buddies with Hitler, you may already be in a cult. I see your fellow members in most Fediverse politics threads; really it's just a hop, skip, and jump to shaving your heads and handing out coloring books and flowers at the airport
No. No it wasn’t. Antifaschistische Aktion was a paramilitary wing of the communists, fighting both the social democratic Iron Front and the Nazi Sturmabteilung.
The only way in which it could be said to be allied with the Nazis is that both of them opposed the social democrats, but the enemy of your enemy is not in fact your friend. The KPD saw both the SPD and the NSDAP as fascists, rather than in any way allying with the NSDAP against the SPD.
That organization, that is not really an organization, but rather a specifically American movement, which did not exist in the 30's nor in Germany, probably did not help Hitler come to power.
No. No it wasn’t. Antifaschistische Aktion was a paramilitary wing of the communists, fighting both the social democratic Iron Front and the Nazi Sturmabteilung.
The only way in which it could be said to be allied with the Nazis is that both of them opposed the social democrats, but the enemy of your enemy is not in fact your friend. The KPD saw both the SPD and the NSDAP as fascists, rather than in any way allying with the NSDAP against the SPD.
edit: shit, sorry, idk how that happened, this was meant to be a response to a different comment!
Eh now that I think about it, Hitler was one of the best Anti Fascist advocates whoever lived. I mean he did end his career by killing the Fuhrer of Nazi Germany....
I don't think anyone, no historian anywhere would accept such a bologna. I bet that it's just a huge mental acrobatics and misrepresentation of cherry picked facts.
Except on one action, a strike of train workers of the Berlin transportation department, the KPD (party of the historical Antifaschistische Aktion) and NSDAP have never cooperated and fought each other viciously on the street.
Please elaborate the point or event you're referencing.