The Democratic Party in Trump's Fascist 2nd Term. Commentary, Ideas & Strategy (+ non Woketicism)

That's putting it mildly.

Liberalism is the focus of my writing class this semester. We start Patrick Deneen's Why Liberalism Failed one week from today. After that, we read a defense of Liberalism against lefty attacks, then the students are on their own.

 

What the hell are you talking about?

Ohio = 44,825 square miles
France = 248,573 square miles

France is roughly 5.5 times bigger than Ohio. (edit: France is only a little smaller than Texas, the second biggest US state)

 

The 'Russians' is perhaps not the correct term, since large parts (can't remember the % but it's pretty high) of the Red army were composed of Ukrainians and other nationalities of the Soviet Union.

Anyway, my grandfather was a POW during the war. He was captured in northern France in may 1940 by Rommel's panzer division. He spent the 5 following years in Silesia in a prisonner camp.
From 1941 to 1945, he saw an increasing number of Soviet prisoners arrive at his camp. They were held in a separate section of the camp, separated by a simple barrier from the French, Belgians, Yugoslavs, and later the British and Americans. He always told me that the most harrowing thing was seeing the Soviet soldiers—unlike the others, not protected by the Geneva Conventions—starve to death. I later read that 15,000 Soviet soldiers had died in that camp. Not a concentration camp, just a regular prisoner-of-war camp. At the end he was liberated by the Soviets.

I don't know if we can say that the USSR defeated the Nazis. That's probably an exaggeration. But it's undoubtedly true that the sacrifice of their soldiers has been somewhat forgotten.

 

Wait, what? The oldest of Gen Z during the GFC would be 15 years old at the time. Millennials were the one who got shafted by the GFC (ask how I know). Pandemic? Sure but thing is the economy post pandemic was in much better shape compared to the GFC.

 

Ehh. Again, the process by which the FBI operates is completely different than the process by which ICE operates. I doubt we would see what ICE is doing if it were being conducted by FBI. Because the bar for ICE is so low, it allows them to operate in the manner that they are conducting themselves. Put them under the DoJ and the bar they need to conduct raids changes completely and there actually is a focus on criminal undocumented rather the door to door operations like there currently is in Minnesota.

ICE is separate from USCIS. USCIS is responsible for managing the why people are coming into the US and the mechanism by which they can enter and stay in the us (Visas, green cards, citizenship).

 

Don't worry, the making and sending of letterbombs is beyond the scope of this class.

 

It's essentially Fight Club. The issue Fight Club didn't cover is kind of like the joke about the dog chasing the moving car - what is it going to do when it actually bites it?

Because while the causes then and now are the similar, the movement isn't the same. What we have now isn't even a movement - only a tiny percent of the population are filled with revolutionary zeal and capacity to act. Without revolutionary zeal, are they going to keep up the memey, jokey transgressiveness that passes for a movement these days when they finally get what they voted for?

The world after Fight Club doesn't have ennui and Ikea-induced despair because you don't have time for such things when you are barely surviving. Constant struggle is romanticized by those that don't have to do it.

 

What ICE is doing across the country is a completely different beast than the structural issues within the US justice system...

I don't think it particularly matters why they chose to leave their home country. The US has a worker shortage and our birthrate has been below replacement rate since the 70s. The only reason why the US's population has been growing is because of immigration and if we want to keep it growing, the only option is to attract people from other countries.

 

do you think any of the shit that's raining down on less fortunate mother ********ers than yourself would be happening if Kamala had won? Whatever you see going on that you don't think you'd see under a Harris administration is where she differs from Trump.

 

One of the places that needs a complete overhaul is FLETC

 

Damn. In my head I mix things up sometimes. I think I knew Texas was the right answer. When I'm wrong; I'm wrong. Thanks for the correction.

 

Historians attribute the explosive growth of Christianity in the second century AD to a number of things, one of which is that Christians took care of their own in a way that impressed non Christians.

Which brings me to a point I’ve made before, and can tie in to our present crisis.

If one looked at the Roman Empire in say 90 AD, it wasn’t clear that Christianity would boom and eventually dwarf Judaism. At the time their numbers and geographic spread were similar enough that it could have gone either way. Various actors made individual and collective decisions that tilted things completely to the side of Christianity dominating Judaism in terms of numbers. (If anyone wants to argue big numbers inevitably leads to weak adherence, to large numbers of unserious practitioners of a religion, I will co sign.)

It’s the same with whether and how America will or won’t recover from Trump. The future is unwritten. Pessimism and optimism are each poor alternatives to clear mindedness.

 

War nerds are like libertarians and evangelicals. There’s no topic they can’t make about themselves.

 

Of course, there were military reasons. But there was also the ideological aspect: for the Nazis, the war in the East was a racial war. This led to a gradual radicalization, a "barbarization" (Omer Bartov) of the German army, which was not systematically observed in the West (although there were tragic examples: the massacres at Villeneuve d'Ascq, Tulle, and Oradour-sur-Glane in 1944, where SS units brought to the West the practices they had learned in the East). Naturally, the radicalization of the German army (not just the SS, by the way) led, in turn, to a similar radicalization of the Red Army.