 About me and Nazis: Back in 1906 my great-grandpa and his family emigrated to the UK from the part of the Russian empire that became Poland in 1918. A bunch of their relatives said "naah, life's good" and stayed home in the old country. In 1939, Nazis invaded and by 1943 they were all dead. It turns out that FAFO is a REALLY BAD way of dealing with Nazis. And Trump and J. D. Vance are playing a medley from Hitler's hymn book, at ever-increasing volume. You know how this ends—if you let it. 154 comments
@cstross At this point, I'm not too worried about the election. I am, however terrified of the aftermath. When #DiaperDumpDon loses, his army of incels and inbreds will make life hard for all the decent folk trapped in here with him. @JeremyGraeme @cstross Oh it'll be a nightmare. The people opposed to him will just shrug and let him fuck over the nation. I'm not worried about that because every indicator I've seen says the support isn't there. I'm worried about after because every indicator I've seen suggest the asshole will foment insurrection again. If Trump wins, world war three will break out within 18 months. I'm not joking. He'll throw Ukraine under the Russian tank tracks, encouraging Putin. Who will roll into Moldova and then Poland and the Baltic Republics and maybe even Finland, because when the only tool you've got is a war machine everything looks like a target. Putin wants to rebuild the old Russian empire: which means NATO will be at war.  @cstross @JeremyGraeme @Longspeak Any reason someone wouldn't finally manage to knock him off the board before that?
@cstross @Longspeak @JeremyGraeme That’s assuming there still is a NATO 18 months after a Trump  @bjn @cstross @Longspeak @JeremyGraeme it will probably still exist, but qithout the US @cstross @Longspeak @JeremyGraeme I do not enjoy the idea of dying on the front line defending Stockholm from a Russian invasion because some idiot believes that Trump will save Palestine. (I consider his core base irredeemable, they would vote for Cthulhu if he promised them unlimited-racism-for-fun.) @Longspeak @JeremyGraeme @cstross Past behavior is a solid predictor of future behavior. Also, he's already pre-couping, so hopefully it'll just be like a bad joke told one too many times when he yells "rigged" for the 6,000th time in a week.  @Longspeak @cstross  @Longspeak @cstross A lot of folk, even on the outside, are concerned about that. One problem at a time, though. Vote, push all your friends/family/acquaintances to vote is actionable. @Longspeak Empathy. It's gonna be a wild ride and hopefully Harris has done enough mitigation for what he'll throw. She has said they have been preparing. @cstross Footnote about Nazis and their targets: You might think you're safe. But … they start with their political rivals, and the trans, then the rest of the LGBT+. Then it's on to "auslanders", folks who aren't the pale patriarchal penis people. Jews, blacks, asians, indians, hispanics, muslims—all of us are at risk. Women get beaten back into the kitchen, kept barefoot, poor, and pregnant to make soldiers for the fatherland. Finally, when they run out of others, they eat their own. NOBODY IS SAFE. @juniper I grew up attending a synagogue where some of the older congregation members had concentration camp tattoos on their wrists. My father was drafted by the Royal Navy during the war. I may have studied the Nazis a bit too closely as a child because it happened during living memory: it's still happening elsewhere around the world today. (Gaza right now; the USA next February if the election breaks bad.) All of my neighbors are immigrants. Our children played together. You know who is NOT going to ethnically cleanse our neighborhood? Kamala Harris. @Phosphenes @cstross @juniper She's helping ethnic cleansing in Gaza RIGHT NOW. Lucky it s not YOUR neiborghood dough. @disisdeguey @cstross @juniper The American genocide of Gaza is horrifying. What do you recommend we do about it? @disisdeguey @Phosphenes @cstross Look, we have two choices here in the US, okay? Trump or Kamala. And I know which one is going to do A LOT LESS HARM. I've never liked her, but I will begrudgingly support her over A FASCIST TYRANT. Please get some perspective and pragmatism, PLEASE. @juniper @disisdeguey @Phosphenes@glasgow.social As someone-or-other said: casting your vote isn't a declaration of undying love, it's a chess move to stop your worst enemy making progress. I already know I'm not safe and have begun to make 'thought experiment' plans for where to go and how to get there. What I want to sell first, what I'd want to bring. How to transport my cats. It's *terrifying*, but I'm not going to repeat the mistakes my lost ancestors did. @JoanGrey @cstross That's so heartbreaking. @5ecurityChemist The full version is the P7: Pale Patriarchal Plutocratic Protestant Penis People of Power. (But that's a bit too long for most toots!) Extremism is not a position, it's a direction. It solves zero problems, so has no halting condition.  Oh, it solves a single problem very well: fulfilling an individual or collective death wish. @cstross I simply don’t understand why there isn’t a year-long mandatory high school course based solely on Shirer’s The Rise And Fall Of The Third Reich. Anyone who’s actually read that book has been just ticking off item after item on the Nazi Playbook Checklist. It’s not subtle. There’s no nuance to it. Evil is boring. It does the exact same shit in the exact same order every single time this happens. @jeffzugale @cstross yeah, we re at chapter six right now: the seizing of power. What comes next is as sudden as it was brutal @stevel @cstross Yep. Although, one difference here is that it’s unclear how much of the military is in Dump’s pocket. The difference between the Weimar German army - a badly beaten humiliated bunch of former aristocracy generals full of arrogant pride, once loyal to the autocratic Kaiser - and the modern US military is like night and day.  I did that checklist back in 2016. Everyone told me I was overreacting. In 2018 I spent six weeks in Ecuador, to see if I could handle living there, if necessary. By 2020 it wasn't necessary and I kind of stood down from that. Lately I've been checking house listings and political news in Ecuador and Uruguay. It's one of my coping mechanisms… @jeffzugale @cstross Stefan Zweigs The World of Yesterday, is also very, very relevant to where we are today. @cstross at this point I’m thankful that these guys are a bunch of yahoo dumbasses compared to Hitler’s crew. May be the only thing that helps us.  @jeffzugale @cstross You're assuming it's axiomatic that nazis are bad. Being a nazi is one of those simple, obvious, and wrong solutions to an insecurity management problem about having lower social value than you can stand having. (Generally speaking, if you have the capacity to fix that problem yourself you don't have the problem in the first place. This awkward fact doesn't help with the general tractability of the entirely real issue.) @jeffzugale @cstross Not in the slightest. You can argue that it _ought_ to be axiomatic that nazis are bad, but this very obviously isn't the case considered across the population. Trump's dad was at the American nazi rally in Madison Square Garden; there's a French far-right party that's hereditarily at least Vichy since Vichy, there's any number of people out there with completely voluntary swastika tattoos, and so on. About a third of the US electorate appears to fall into this category. @jeffzugale @cstross because at least 10% of them would consider it an instruction manual, in the sense of "here's what not to do if you want a Nazi regime", rather than "Nazi regimes are bad and here's how and why".  @jeffzugale @cstross Because it's built into our capitalist system. It's the same every time because there's only been -one time-, it never left. @comradeferret @cstross let me caution you that the communist version of this is even less subtle. They just shoot everyone including any comrades who have misgivings about mass murder. @cstross Honorable mention for disabled people. Even the officially not so fascist governments regularly mess with us. All the more so the fascists.  single women. men and women who "sleep around". single mothers. disabled people. depressed people. impotent men. people who don't want children. men who are too "feminine". the list goes on.  @cstross I've noticed that every ideology based around Us and Them thinking relies on that constant conflict, so the Us has to be forever shrinking as that standards of "purity" are pushed higher and higher, in search of new "weakness" to root out... These things tend to fall apart eventually if left to their own devices as there's just a few lonely bitter people left, but they cause a lot of misery on the way, and death if they get that kind of power. @cstross I'm gathering more terror-driven personal lockup than I am lack of engagement with what's going on. At some point releasing your own sense of impending doom on others simply doesn't help. I'm convinced now is one of those moments. There are still phone banking opportunities that are targeted to undecided voters, with suggested scripts designed to convince rather than drive fear. votesaveamerica.org  To be fair, a lot (over 20million) of these Nazis got their reward for tossing their lot with a psych, racist, drug addict. Them and their families were blown apart and burned in Nazi cities levelled to the ground. MAGATs think they will be doing all the murderin' and killin' and they do not countenance the reciprocity of the world. It's all written in the one book many of them follow but have never read.  When the German Empire formed, one side of my family was in Schleswig or Holstein (dunno which, lost history). If they stayed they would have been complicit. Great grampa didn't like the Kaiser, and it wasn't even the Donald of Kaisers. Great Grampa knew something bad was happening.  @cstross I think it’s abysmally clear that the racists had to wait until ever WW2 veteran had died before they got any traction. Can you imagine Bob Dole, Daniel Inoue, Bush Sr, or even Ronald Reagan putting up with anybody spouting the current Trump xenophobia? I cannot They used racist dog whistles and were happy to get racists' votes. Don't put the WW2 generation on some kind of anti-fascist pedestal. @Seanochicago @cstross George Wallace, Strom Thurmond, all the Dixiecrats, and their follow-on groups sure would. And probably Nixon. This is not new. @Seanochicago @cstross Many of them are just letting their lust for power overrule their knowledge of history. Mitch McConnell is reported to have thought that Trump would fade away after 2020. Newt Gingrich has a doctorate in European history, concentrating on the Belgian Congo, that paradigm of liberal, benevolent colonialism… Elise Stefanik used to be a moderate conservative. And look at where people like Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley got their Lord degrees. They know better; they just don't care. @Seanochicago @cstross Bob Dole supported Trump in 2016 and 2020, so he was willing to accept a lot of racism and xenophobia.  A few weeks ago, I finished remarkable military history of Hitler’s invasion of Poland in 1939. Simply titled “Poland 1939”, by Moorehouse, it is a detailed and grim account of the invasion Poland, rather valiant defense of itself and the abject failure of its allies England and France. Stalin was equally a shit bag @cstross I had a maternal grandfather and uncles variously tortured, shot and sent to concentration camps because they disagreed with Mussolini. Some eventually took up arms as partisans. Fortunately they all made it through the war, even if emotionally and physically scarred. My mother would tell various horror stories from her childhood.  I just moved into a house I really like for once. Life is looking pretty good minus the orange idiot. That said, I made sure everyone has their passports up to date and a way out of the US if Mango Mussolini wins. He wins, we leave. End of story.  @cstross I talked to a member of a family descended from Holocaust survivors during a celebration of remembrance for those who didn't survive. This was really scary: https://circumstances.run/@Szescstopni/113398625941849160  @cstross another lesson is that exiting rather than resisting doesn't work  @cstross you’re totally right. Just a small reminder that Poland was invaded by Germany AND Russia in 1939. @cstross Yeah, there's a very good reason we had "never again" drilled into us in Hebrew school. Sadly way too many people forgot and joined the cult. :( |
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@cstross Yeah.
We moved from the UK to the US because, as a trans woman, we really wanted gender affirming care.
But fucking hell has 2016 onwards made us feel REALLY NERVOUS about being here.