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Cake day: July 28th, 2023

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  • Well yeah, but that’s only one part of fascism. You could say pretty much the same of any war, lots of non-fascist goverments, and hell, you could say we already do that, just look at how the campus protests were treated, the BLM protests, the civil rights protests, the sufferagettes, a personal favorite of mine would be the horrid history of our oppression of labor by siding with companies and enabling the use of pinkertons to gun down crowds, yadda yadda.

    No, if america was to be fascist, it would be fascist for historical reasons which already existed, which have been around for a while already. I don’t know whether or not america suddenly having a dictator, would really have too much of an effect on it suddenly becoming fascist, despite the popular consensus that fascism just requires a really racist guy to suddenly be a dictator. I actually don’t think that would factor too much into the definition at all, I think you could pretty easily have a fascist democracy, and you could definitely have a fascist oligarchy.

    I’m pretty sure imperial japan was mostly run by a military cabinet which internally needed a certain number of votes, and the emperor was more like a figurehead and religious figure that had a certain amount of sway over the cabinet’s decisions as he was like, a big deal, more than him being a figure of political power. From what I remember, anyways. Me personally, I’d be pretty comfortable calling imperial japan a fascist state, even if it maybe conforms to that definition less well than, say, italy or germany.


  • Not so much, it would more be along the lines of a standard military coup, which doesn’t necessarily have to originate from a fascist. Those can and do come from all sides of the political spectrum.

    I don’t think biden would ever do that, and probably if he did, he’d be the worst president dictator of all time with only the mild upside that he could maybe only do so for the rest of his probably not long lifespan, or for the next couple months as they run another election, which he would probably do since he seems like kind of a sap.

    But, if he were replaced by a person I actually liked, or there was someone who’s policy I agreed with in that position, I’d pretty much be fine with it, and I get the feeling that most people would be fine with it too, as in, a majority of the population. The levers of power might freak out though, and that might put a damper on things.


  • So, obviously he could just [redacted] the supreme court justices he doesn’t like, appoint new ones, and then the only thing congress could do would be to expand the court or whatever, right? but then why couldn’t he also just keep killing people in official acts until he gets a bunch of people that are like “yup, that was official and you don’t need to do anything about it”? I know that’s probably a slippery slope, right and would probably get him a shit ton of public pushback, especially after a certain point, from both conservatives, who predominantly make up the military, and economic power structures, to liberals who would prize decorum and “fair play” above all else (but I repeat myself), and so maybe that leads to a dissolution of society, which maybe leads to an even worse society as the people who control the levers of power are already the most horrible people, but, yadda yadda.

    But, I dunno, how many congress people does he have to make go away, before the rest of them start to get the picture and then start to behave in their own self-interest, as they’ve always behaved? How many people do you really have to threaten in a system where the people who climb to the top are only going to be there out of their own extreme self-interest?



  • I mean we did okay-ish with japan, and that was in the immediate post-ww2 period. There was a bunch of gaishas for a while that were complaining (iirc) about sexual assault from american troops, the nation immediately in the postwar period was fomented with a ton of nationalism and we didn’t really do a great job of undoing that. Though, their trajectory nowadays is pretty good, and it’s not like you can really blame all of that on the american occupation, really.

    South korea, though, even though I don’t know as much, I’m pretty sure we fucked up that one, since that war basically never ended and nowadays the country is a late stage hypercapitalist hellscape where plastic surgery to make you look more western is incredibly common along with the prevalence of cults and a wealth disparity that’s pretty US-adjacent.

    So I dunno if we did super well on those. Probably better than, say, Iraq, but I think our trajectory overall has been on a pretty consistent downwards trend since ww2.


  • I agree with your entire comment except the end.

    I’m not sure the US has the greatest track record when it comes to those sorts of occupational wars, realistically. I think the only times we’ve ever really seen it turn out well is maybe in vietnam, where we actively just like, lost the entire war and got sent packing, and they’re still having to deal with the ongoing problem of their country being contaminated by chemical incendiary weapons that produce larger percentages of birth defects. So, even given that Saudi Arabia is kind of a theocratic monarchic shithole, I dunno if us overthrowing it would realistically do any good, you know? I dunno. I’d probably need to see more on the numbers of dissent amount the saudi population. I think probably capitalizing on a popular movement for regime change, much like the arab spring, would probably be the best route if that was possible, and it would probably have to be more grassroots than something that the US might intentionally attempt to foment in the population, I’d imagine.

    In totality though I’m not really sure to what extent it’s in the US’s best interest to destabilize saudi arabia. I think the US would probably prefer predictable fascists compared to, say, if they decided to rapidly nationalize and democratize their oil supply. Another, relatively understated, good reason to move away from petroleum, I would say.



  • You know this kinda makes me think that it would’ve been funnier if they connected two cities that hate each other more than just like, dublin and new york, which I can’t really think of as ever having had beef. Maybe NYC and chicago, or something. You can’t really put something like this in texas or LA because nobody fuckin walks anywhere, unless maybe you put it in like long beach or like some random part of Austin or something. Seattle? Does Seattle have beef with anywhere? On the other side, could we connect Dublin with like, London or something? Maybe some city in northern Ireland?




  • That doesn’t really seem very equivalent. The closest equivalence I can think of is either the terrorism of the founding fathers, which is too far back to really strike the same chord, or maybe like, american drone strikes or something. Or, maybe if I was feeling particularly cheeky, I might compare it to the violence enacted by the civil rights movement, since that was also a domestic american liberation movement maybe comparable to the IRA, but, I dunno. not really any american style equivalence there.







  • daltotron@lemmy.worldtoFediverse@lemmy.world...
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    5 months ago

    All of em, really. I don’t see much of a reason why the vast majority of platforms wouldn’t benefit from it, except for maybe an argument around it allowing the creation of larger and larger echo chambers, but that’s probably fine as long as it’s managed to only be to a certain degree.