Fascism describes the rhetoric used to prop up autocracy. It’s the propaganda portion, and leads to genocide campaigns and wars.

Mussolini might have developed fascism so it was admired by industrialists who wanted to control the masses, but it wasn’t his alone.

Yeah, I prefer fascist autocrat to make sure people know I’m not fucking around. But nazi (lower case) is a fine shorthand. Neo-nazi almost suggests we’re talking about a non-mainstream movement. MAGA if I want to be specific.

I refer to NSDAP when talking about the German Worker’s Socialist Party that wasn’t really all that socialist and got a lot of funding from Benz and Bavarian Motor Works, and had no small thing for Wagner’s version of the Wotanic mythos.

Naziism is just an ideology that appeals to some common instincts, which becomes an issue when enough of them are in precarity that they warm up to making the ideas policy.

It doesn’t make for a very good state. Incompetence and nepotism rises to the top. Data driven science is tossed aside for ideology-driven rhetoric. Officials govern on vibes resulting in famine, plague and war. Also the country turns into the very kind of shithole it accuses other nations of being.

Eventually, you have bombers from rival countries blocking the the sun over the capitol. International tribunals exercise judgement and enforce their law, since the nazis failed to provide rule of law to their own. Children pick up pieces of the trainwreck.

And we learn (or fail to learn) once again why we don’t let the fascist autocrats take over, even when they are very, very rich.

We in the US have a choice: clean up the mess early, or let China clean it up for us. And China will make us jolly sorry if we make them clean it up. We’ll be their buggery bitch for a century or two at least.

Now, with the country, it’s interesting. Because I’m the one that makes the decision, right? And, you know, that decision would have to go across my desk. And it’s awfully strange to make a decision where I’m paying myself. [Turns to look over his shoulder]. Did you have one of those cases where you have to decide how much you’re paying yourself in damages?
– DJT

Nazi chat is the norm at 4chan/p and /b. Since these are the fonts from which GOP staffers come, it only makes sense the same lingo would manifest in gov/p forums as well.

The significant ways our nation is deeply divided are pretty hostile, for instance the religious ministries against irreligious movements (e.g. new atheism or nones ) or against each other (the SBC vs. the RCC, for example).

Personally, I’d bling out in full conservative regailia as the trillion-dollar-plus far right propaganda machine that we still don’t know how to counter in future elections.

Though I might be tempted to go as the Federalist Society and its six SCOTUS shills.

Avolition Toast

Not a good racer.

And how!

The point of the ballroom is to remind us whoever lives there is the first estate.

And the rest of us (over 98% now) are the third estate and don’t get a say in political affairs, even as we starve and die to plagues.

That’s when the story starts getting familiar. 🪟🔪🫅⚜️

Well in the case of Bruce Wayne, as an allegedly ethical billionaire, he’d pay his fair share of taxes wouldn’t he? Or he’d spend that money dressing as a bat and punching poor people.

I think the Batman fiction depends on the notion of ethically rich. Heck, even the bible challenges the notion over fifteen centuries ago. 🐪🪡💰

ETA: TBF variations of Robin Hood are aristocracy, as was the Scarlet Pimpernel, and I think Zorro was as well. So Bats is not the first rich superhero by far.

Yes, though they aren’t usually available at the concession booth in that format. Trader Joe’s has a nice basket of DC cups.

Communism could never exist in practice. You need to be able to distribute political power so that any given person has exactly the same sociopolitical power as any other given person. And while we can absolutely level the playing field more than we do we can’t ever get it that level without some magitech we haven’t yet conceived.

…and then the technicians who understand the system will still have an advantage we can only hope they don’t utilize.

Maybe in a participatory democracy run by supercomputer that has some super-amazing indexing so that everyone can set up default voting positions easily and then customize them as they go forward. It presumes they’ll also get informed about the customizations they make so they consistently vote in their own best interests.

Until you can distribute power that evenly, you can’t have communism. You can have command economics, but not communism.

Steel-manning the argument, there is the notion that we could create a functional well-regulated capitalist society that is robust against capture by companies and elites. The problems we haven’t solved are twofold:

One, company officials will do what they want rather than what maximizes profit, usually because the shareholders and watchdogs don’t always know what maximizes profit in the long term, so they can’t demand upper management to do that.

This is why we still have crunching in media development. This it’s why we have poor treatment of employees generally. (It’s established by data now that crunching doesn’t speed the way to meeting deadlines, and well-treated workers produce more value at a rate that exceeds the cost of treating them well in contrast to treating them poorly. Companies treat them like shit anyway.) This is also why we have a lot of bullshit jobs which are office clerks being used and treated more as courtiers and garden hermits than office staff.

And two is that once government is partially captured, it always moves towards getting more captured and serving companies over the public. This is the fundamental failure in the system that Marx defines in Das Kapital.

So far we’ve not figured out a way to counter these properties of capitalism as practiced worldwide. Should we ever, then regulated capitalism will be a viable economic model, but not yet. This isn’t to say a solution doesn’t exist, only we haven’t found it yet.

The struggle is not with the intent to successfully achieve post-scarcity communism, but to get as close as we possibly can, and once we get past efforts by the elite to sabotage those efforts, we can get pretty far (and have done so).

Think similarly to the objective to eliminate all petty crime in a society. You may never succeed, but you can reduce crime so that the rates are the lowest ever, and then go lower, and so on.

It’s not all that hard. We already have (or had – we’re in regime change now) socialist programs that target low-income demographics (e.g. SNAP) and we have socialist programs that provide for everyone (e.g. CDC) and socialist programs that provide for general use (e.g. the NHTSA). We have libraries, the post office, the space program, and so on.

Communism happens by extending this communal infrastructure as far and wide as possible without privatizing it (the way George W. Bush did with Social Security pharma coverage), up to and including things like food and home production, mass transit and so on.

We’ve seen the Soviet Union fail to make communism work before corruption (and sabotage by the elites) overran their infrastructure. Similar we’ve seen the US fail to make democracy work before corruption (and sabotage by elites) overran the elections.

We try, try, again until we get over that damn hill.

It’s okay. I prefer dark chocolate with peanut butter rather than milk, but Reese’s gonna reese.

There are two …fetish personality types I’ve seen that fit Ghislaine Maxwell.

One is the manipulative reverse cuckold, who tries to seduce lesbian or bi women and then coax them into letting their man conquer them, and this type gets off on the successful manipulation and vicarious conquest, especially if the victim / participant is not that into him.

The other is the woman pedophile by proxy, who enjoys underaged victims specifically because they’re verboten, and enjoys the pursuit and conquest. While I don’t know of Maxwell partaking of the victims herself, vicarious victimization would still be a viable end goal of this fetish.

I blame executive dysfunction.

Mom needed to start me with a comprehensive checklist of specific tasks. Clean the kitchen isn’t sufficient. Wipe down the counter, being sure to get under all the counter-top appliances is better.

Otherwise, my missed spots are due to insufficient instruction and insufficient training.

Without the writers, Batman wouldn’t exist. And my premise is that Batman can be written better. It’s not an entirely lost paradigm. It’s just they don’t, because it’s easier, but in doing so, Batman is bad art.

So I stand by my position.

I’m not at all clear where you got that from what I was saying, which was not that we shouldn’t have heroes, but we can have better heroes, ones whose flaws are acknowledged by the narrative.

Consider me thwarted.

It’s allegedly a documentary, not fiction. It should make sense from beginning to end.

Sounds like you feel the need to defend Kurzgesagt for sentimental reasons, and since they’re presenting themselves as a source for accurate information, that just won’t do.