“A nazi walks into a bar, and is welcomed at a table by his nine friends. How many Nazis are at the table?” Anyone who sides with fascists, even tentatively or for differing reasons, is themselves still a fascist.
The German Nazis didn’t gain power purely from support of other nazis; they gained power largely from various other parties, business leaders, and wealthy elite, who thought the Nazis would be a useful tool they could use and control to their own ends. The “why” of their support is far less important than the fact of the support itself, and the fact those people were responsible for helping the Nazis commit their crimes.
A lot of Rep voters approve of Project 2025. His approval isn’t that low. Approval of certain policies, like tarriffs are low, but overall approval isn’t. What’s scary is his most evil policies (the immigration policies) have some of the highest approval.
Maybe now (for whatever reason) republicans are more in favor of Project 2025 but during the campaign Project 2025 was quickly swept under the rug, because GOP probably knew it was so unpopular it might cost them the election.
They felt they needed the “undecided” or “centrist” vote to win, so Trump denying he didn’t know what it was, was helpful. Trump never condemned it either, he just said some of it was a little extreme, IIRC. The “undecided” or “centrist” vote is very marginal.
It was also unpopular within the republican party. Even within MAGA it had only 30% support. It wasn’t pushed out of the media to pull undecided or centrists. It was pushed out to not drive away the non-MAGA republicans. You can also compare the October poll to one of the first poll as it shows a clear trend where the more people found out about Project 2025 the less they liked it.
I’m sure the millions and millions of conservatives who use Lemmy are going to read this and really rethink their positions.
Do you not realize EVERY helpful message is important, and often shared across all platforms, and can be good talking points with Conservative friends?
Honestly, I don’t think it’s that important or helpful.
If you have conservative friends and feel the desire to try to engage and debate with them, you would be served a lot better by making an actual effort, understanding their positions and giving them all the rope they need. From there, addressing their specific worries and concerns and asking a lot of questions about why they have the concerns and fears they have… and it’s all fears, all the way down. They don’t care about facts, they have strong emotions that they can’t regulate and their brains latch onto any story to explain their feelings. Engage with the feelings and you can change them.
I have changed more hearts and minds than I can remember doing this, it’s not easy but you can change these simple people if you have the patience and energy. Human beings as a group are like locusts, a scourge upon the earth, a fluid that moves to the lowest places. But as individuals? Individual people are largely easy to influence and change, especially conservatives who only hold their positions because of fear of something.
Not saying that it’s not enjoyable and effective to make fun of the chuds with memes, but let’s all be honest that these memes and jokes are here for us to laugh over and feel catharsis from. If we all actually wanted a better world we would be marching in-mass on washington, arms locked with conservatives whom we have talked to and appealed to their emotions enough that they realized that they can be a part of a better group with a better identity. These people are dumber than dirt, you will get further with them with pity than you will with scorn. I know most people aren’t equipped for this, and I was because I was a self-defense teacher, a public speaker and used to debate right-wing people daily. If you’re anxious and/or non-social, don’t get yourself stressed even trying this until you get more experience.
while i don’t ardently agree with all your rhetoric it makes me feel such a sense of solace to see some of these ideas expressed in the wild.
it’s absolutely confounding how even seemingly rational people begin to emotionally seethe when presented with the fact that shitposting and generally bullying people isn’t activism. seems to be a very human thing.
i think a big part of the issue generally is that people think of their intelligence as some sort of absolute and continuous character trait rather than a discrete aspect of your personality; i.e, the idea someone is a “stupid” or “intelligent” person is of itself, a stupid idea lol. sometimes you’re the biggest brain in the room, sometimes you’re an idiot.
i appreciate your focus on the emotional aspect of it because that is certainly the more pertinent part. imo all humans average around the same intellectual capability, sans extreme outliers. it’s more about how people choose to use what is available to them than an actual lacking of mental capabilities. these people are just as rational as anyone else, it just happens that the vast landscape of knowledge itself is full of many pangs and holes that lead to nowhere; they seem stupid because there exists a seemingly logical perspective that causes them to infinitesimally and continually spin around these holes, like a coin in a make-a-wish donation thing. not sure if i’m conveying my rationale very well but i have found that the stuff in the cracks between ideas like this is often where the calculus of the universe hides in life.
. these people are just as rational as anyone else
I really appreciate your comment and writing here, but this is where I differ a bit, but it makes for a great segue into an equally important, adjacent point I’ve been mulling.
Nearly a quarter of the US population is functionally illiterate, meaning they can read individual words maybe, assemble the gist of a text message if it’s simple enough and makes liberal use of emojis, but they have no higher-compiling ability than that, they can’t read a post like this, they can’t read a book or even an instruction manual. And this is just the lowest end of the spectrum, there are vastly more who can kinda read okay if they really try, but have to struggle at it, and certainly can’t use language in their minds to form complex ideas or synthesize new information from reading or listening to words.
I think this is not getting nearly the attention it deserves, this should be a air-raid-siren alarm of urgency, everyone should be shutting down the entire country while we fix this. This is because the ability to use language, externally and internally, to “abstractify” complex ideas, to form new perspectives, to review the perspectives of others, this is what is separating a large swath of our population right now, because we just look at it as “stupid” when the real problem is deliberately seeded and far more insidious.
See, this isn’t a “fixable” problem in the traditional sense, we’re already cooked on this generation, it’s been proven that as a child develops they need to hit key milestones in development or they may never have things like full language capacity. Children raised by wolves or apes have been brought in and rehabilitated but they are never capable of learning more than the most basic language abilities.
This is what I believe corporate America is deliberately trying to do to our entire population by embracing anti-intellectualism, anti-education politics. By courting the religious right, by feeding all of us apps and games and videos and products designed to turn off conscious thought. Pushing things like AI that can “do the reading for you” or “do the art for you” and depriving billions from the exercise of forming a brain that can view ideas in multiple ways. I feel like I’m screaming into a void on this, but as people get more numb, they care less that they’re getting more numb.
I’m not convinced most conservatives can read.
The situation with literacy in the USA does more to reveal exactly where and what we are far better than any other arguments about our wealth and society. We have a really big fucking problem here.
21% of adults in this country are FUNCTIONALLY ILLITERATE. This is mind-melting for the “richest nation on Earth.” We have nearly a quarter of our population who know how read words as necessary to survive but cannot string together text to form coherent narratives or even pictures in their heads. They can text with emojis and monosyllables but are deeply insecure about not being able to comprehend longer paragraphs and as a result rage against notions of logic and reason and fact-checking. This is what functional illiteracy means and we’ve all encountered it, and this is where much of our science-denial and irrational beliefs are coming from.
https://www.thenationalliteracyinstitute.com/post/literacy-statistics-2024-2025-where-we-are-now
they can; they just don’t.
Is that better… or worse?
i think it’s on par with liberals reading and refusing to learn from it.
Or they do, but it’s more harmful than anything because their reading comprehension is bad and they’re a magical thinking type human. So their take away is going to be outright wrong and they’re proud to be. Your truth has no value compared to how they feel, and they presuppose they’re correct and on equal footing as you despite having nothing to back up their claims.
The amount of times I’ve had people like this link to a source when badgered for one, and the link argues against their position is enough to cause dismay lol.
I was gonna say not here on lemmy, maybe facebook, instagram and now Reddit is your targeted audience, but we understand the sentiment due to the fact that you will get censored and permanently banned/shadow banned.
As someone who has had over seven 12+ year-old accounts permanently banned and shadowbanned by reddit for dubious reasons or no reason at all, yeah they don’t want humans engaging there, they want their bot-army to simulate a human community but then can be adjusted with a dial to change the narrative to fit whatever the oligarchs want to push.
Tbt I just deactivate my account yesterday. I had an older account that I deactivated during 2020 madness. So I popped in a year back and this permanently banning people for “hate speech” or whatever that goes against the narrative is absolutely insane! It’s basically 1984 or Fahrenheit451.
And the protest-non-voters who voted for this!
explicitly, they did not.
arguably, they didn’t not not
this syntax is too hard for me to hold in my head
👍
after WW2 and the horrors of the Nazis came fully to light…people kept asking…how did the German people let this happen? how did they let it continue until disaster fell? how could they have allowed such cruelty and degradation to occur?
THIS was how. by not paying attention. by ignoring the growing inequities and terror going on in their midst. BY PRETENDING EVERYTHING WAS OK.
and now WE are doing the same. it’s easy to ignore right now…it isn’t TOO bad…not TOO many people are being affected…yet.
we need to stop ignoring and start paying attention to exactly what they are doing.
For real. And yet some ppl still thinks he’s 4d chessing even after all this sht.
What about the idiots who chose to stay home and not vote at all. They may not have voted for it, but they weren’t voting against it either, and ambivalence in the face of fascism is tacit support.
They are every bit as responsible as Trump voters.
only the people who voted for a candidate are responsible for electing that candidate.
If you saw someone about to get raped on your sidewalk, and you just went inside without defending them or calling 911, don’t you realized you helped FACILITATE the rape? Not voting is facilitating the other votes to matter more.
so by not voting, they made the Democrats votes worth more, too.
Correct, but you can make the “better side” votes count more than the “worse side” votes by participating. Sitting on your couch and not absolutely includes you in fault of the worse side winning, just like the rape scenario you didn’t comment on.
I am not responsible for the bad behavior of others.
no, you’re just responsible for not standing against the worse side, or can you still not tell which side is worse?
As a citizen, hopefully of good conscience and morals, you ARE responsible for NOT doing good when you can. We all are, no matter how many downvotes you collect by arguing against this common sense fact.
you don’t know that the nonvoters aren’t doing something, possibly something even more effective than voting. at least you seem to be acknowledging that they’re likely good people, anyway.
They should at least give us a sign, that they are doing something, by now, I mean, would appreciate that, hope is needed now, more than ever, not?
given the vitriol I’ve seen here, I don’t know why they would want to talk to Democrats at all
those damn democrats, yelling about how tmurp’s going to destroy the country, then telling everyone who voted for them they voted for a guy who’s destroying the country. Damn their eyes, don’t they see that our symbolic gesture made us feel like we were above it, all the way until inauguration day?
I and many others have tried to explain this to you people so many times that I don’t have the patience for it anymore, so I’m not going to take the bait.
But you’re wrong.
I and many others have tried to explain this
And you all fail every time because you’re just wrong
Tell me, the millions of people who didn’t vote in California, who did they “vote” for by being silent, given the fact the electoral votes of that state went Dem, as everyone knew would happen?
If non-voters are equally as responsible as voters (a stupid notion to begin with but let’s roll) then you have to take into account where those voters were or you’re obviously just looking to blame people
Did you miss the part where I said I’m not taking the bait?
saying doesn’t make it true.
Cool! And denying it doesn’t make it not true.
it’s tautological that votes for a candidate are what elect the candidate.
Don’t worry, you can take the path of the president you didn’t vote for, yet helped elect and deny responsibility for your own actions. Like at work when they ask you if you’d rather work all weekend without pay or with pay, and you don’t want to work the weekend at all so you just let everyone else decide for you. It may not be the best move, but it’s the best move you can bring yourself to commit to.
Denying it doesn’t make it untrue.
245 millions could’ve voted, 90 millions didnt vote, 77 millions voted for trump.
68% of people either didn’t care about fascism or wanted it.
Dear americans, wtf happened. Where were you.
They were programmed through the magic of Designer Outrage™ that unless there is zero genocide happening in Palestine¹, they and everyone else should abstain from voting.
¹ Ukraine was not mentioned because they couldn’t give a shit about the atrocities committed elsewhere as long as they could disrupt the election in America.
That was a very small percentage of voters. Most Americans didn’t care about Palestine and just believed Trump’s promises to fix the economy.
here’s another useful one
Lol. The Paradox of Tolerance is on par with the Libertarian Non-aggression Principle. Purely academic, purely subjective and, ironically, a moral imposition.
the paradox of tolerance is […] Purely academic
Yes? That’s kinda the point of a thought experiment ? Do you think the trolley problem is less than “purely academic”? Or that Schrodinger actually put a cat in a box?
It was never a paradox.
You just need to acknowledge that there is a limit to how tolerant the world can be. Maybe it is at 100% but there is a limit.
Then you just need to show that tolerance towards e.g. Nazism result in less tolerance than being intolerant to it.
Not only did they vote for this.
A lot a lot of them only voted for trump on the ballot and no downticket names or state questions.
They literally voted for specifically this.
A lot a lot of them only voted for trump on the ballot and no downticket names or state questions.
Very typical voting pattern, nothing out of the ordinary there…
Yeah there’s a very specific district in Nevada that had like 30% drop off on down ticket. Oh weird swing district.
Republicans supplied MAGAs with a trojan horse by being complacent to who represents their team whether they want to admit it or not.
No one read it. There were plenty of more obvious warnings.
Im having a grand time pointing it out as often as possible. Oh you had to skip on lunchables because they went up this month? glad your vote is working out. Gas still the same price? wonder who is doing that now. Oh you didnt get your bonus check, due to increased business costs? I wonder why.
Yes, but don’t let your self righteousness turn a budding class war back into a culture war.
If Republican voters are suddenly waking up and thinking “this isn’t right” smacking them down with “this is what you voted for” is not going to help your cause.
“Yes, you’re right, this shouldn’t be happening and we should work together to stop it.”
“But he promised (lied again) about not knowing a thing about it!”
TBH I’m okay with folks admitting they were lied to. Just help us fix this now.
“Trump’s all talk. He’s not going to do that.”
“Oh shit. He’s doing all that stupid shit.”
