While I generally agree with the right that it's a bit silly to act as if Trump is literally Hitler 2.0, there actually is one goosebump-producing similarity: Lügenpresse.
Hitler began his career as a propagandist, felt it was his primary talent in life (he felt it was an art and a continuation of his painting and such), and eventually coined the slogan "lügenpresse" to undermine newspapers and any rationale against him. It roughly translates to "lying press" or "fake news".
Hitler also didn't believe in elaboration regarding why it was fake or even explaining his other points in great detail. He believed in getting people emotionally charged, terrified of a loosely defined and exaggerated (or even fictional) enemy, and then simply repeating short slogans over and over in a hypnotic fashion while doing whatever he wanted, which didn't even necessarily directly relate to his vocalized points rather than allow him to gain more control. He made the propaganda game what it is today.
Hitler got along splendidly with Jews right up until his ideological attack on them. Completely illogically, as he first blamed Jews for extreme capitalism, Hitler moved on to blaming Jews for communism when he discovered it was the buzzword that the people were fearing at the time. He also made it clear that Jews weren't just political adversaries but highly immoral and fundamentally shitty people, "racial tuberculosis", so as that there should be no felt empathy should they later need to be physically eliminated. In other words, he made Jews the boogeyman that justified his dictatorship and attempt to take over the planet.
Hitler said, "Propaganda must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over," and he started with "fake news".
Trump took fake news directly out of Hitler's literal playbook. Progressing to short, Hitler-like slogans such as "we're gonna build a wall" and "lock her up" paved the way for "stop the steal" and "the storm is coming".
Trump, a former Democrat (he said Democrats clearly handle the economy better), watched over the vilification of Democrats as radicals who want to bring about dangerous communism and who operate sex trafficking rings beneath pizza places. Sounds familiar.
His actions right up until the failed insurrection at the Capitol were eerily similar to the fence-sitting act between law-abiding and dictatorial that Hitler used right up until the first, failed takeover attempt that landed him in prison for a year before later success as a more clearly defiant and crazed human being.
But regardless of what Trump wanted, his revival of lügenpresse, a tool seemingly on par with evidence, hurt not just politics but science. It empowered flat-Earthers and gravity-deniers. Now people who used to look crazy to even Republicans when saying NASA is full of shit suddenly seem reasonable just because they're "sticking it to the man" and the press is lying whenever you want them to be. Suddenly gravity might be bullshit.
These people also claim the neutral fact-checkers are also fake news and biased even though they're demonstrably not. When people make up shit about Trump they can and will check it. For example there was a rumor circulating that Trump's mother said something like, paraphrased, "I love my son to death but God help us all if he ever becomes a politician."
They squashed it. The fact that the right is finding itself checked way more often is simply indicative of that they're currently spewing way more bullshit because they're living in an alternate reality.
I like your write-up on Lügenpresse. Ever since Chicxulub, the comic book of history has marched forward ........ Beavis and Butthead who should be food for carnivorous dinosaurs, are now regarded as model world citizens. Natural selection just isn't working very well anymore.
Now that I think of it, my misperception in the previous paragraph is the same one that may have led Hitler to his psychopathic misinterpretation of Nietzsche's uber man. (In reality, natural selection results in the creation of ecosystems, not in genocide).
I suspect that it's all but impossible to know what Hitler thought about anything, including Nietzsche, other than that he badly wanted to rule the entire world. This is largely due to the fact that he was likely intentionally confusing.
In Mein Kampf he claimed to be a Catholic, said it was foolish to change existing religions, and at times used the death of Christ as fuel for hatred of the Jews. At other times he hinted that he wanted all religion to die before "the advances of science". Completely hypocritically regarding leaving religions as they are, he later proposed altering Christianity to remove Jewish influence and described Christ as an "Aryan warrior". He had crosses replaced with pictures of his face in various churches and even hatched a plan to kidnap the pope. Just when you think he's probably an atheist, he criticises atheism. It seems he hated existing religions but saw Jesus as a valuable tool, but what did this man really think?
He originally entered the rightist party that he later transformed into the Nazis as a part of a mission to infiltrate it that was assigned by a leftist group he was in. They figured his verbosity would help him fit in, but when the group not only accepted him but started looking to him as a leader, he essentially ditched his assigned mission and just sought to create his own thing. Was he a leftist or a rightist? Did he even care? It seems he was never on either side, merely working his way up.
The confusion is all in line with his leadership style. He discouraged his men from speaking privately with one another and often gave them completely conflicting orders to foster competition and hatred between them. As long as they were only unified in the sense that they served Hitler, there could never be an uprising against him.
As for the Jews, it's surprisingly not difficult to make the argument that he didn't even have a problem with them as he purportedly got along fantastically with many of them during his days in WWI, and as for what he claimed was the problem, it was all over the place. How the fuck do you simultaneously claim that Jews want out-of-control, iron-fist capitalism and also communism?
He was admittedly in love with deceit. I suspect that all we can say for sure is that he was a psychopath and that he possessed above average intelligence. Putting arrogance above that intelligence was his downfall as he attempted to maintain 100% control over all military operations even as his war experts insisted he should split the workload up and let them do their thing on various fronts.
At any rate, regardless of all that, I fully agree that natural selection results in the creation of ecosystems.
Wow man. I can see you have a serious liberal arts background going here. I value conversation with guys like you. I would have loved to become a generalist, but chose instead to spend four years with multivariate calculus, computer science, finance, and a couple of graduate classes in Electrical Engineering.
Anyway as you have said, falling in love with your own deceitfulness is usually a sign of impending doom. Too bad we can't meet for lunch sometime. If you can talk to the level of that previous comment, I could reciprocate with whatever $300/hour IT consulting advice you could ever want.
It's definitely too bad that we can't have lunch sometime.
Also, I would say that's still fairly generalist of you; in my experience people who study finance or computer science tend to find the other field uninteresting. I'm sure they're valuable skills to have in conjunction.
Is it normal to be scared of getting the new vaccine for covid?
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While I generally agree with the right that it's a bit silly to act as if Trump is literally Hitler 2.0, there actually is one goosebump-producing similarity: Lügenpresse.
Hitler began his career as a propagandist, felt it was his primary talent in life (he felt it was an art and a continuation of his painting and such), and eventually coined the slogan "lügenpresse" to undermine newspapers and any rationale against him. It roughly translates to "lying press" or "fake news".
Hitler also didn't believe in elaboration regarding why it was fake or even explaining his other points in great detail. He believed in getting people emotionally charged, terrified of a loosely defined and exaggerated (or even fictional) enemy, and then simply repeating short slogans over and over in a hypnotic fashion while doing whatever he wanted, which didn't even necessarily directly relate to his vocalized points rather than allow him to gain more control. He made the propaganda game what it is today.
Hitler got along splendidly with Jews right up until his ideological attack on them. Completely illogically, as he first blamed Jews for extreme capitalism, Hitler moved on to blaming Jews for communism when he discovered it was the buzzword that the people were fearing at the time. He also made it clear that Jews weren't just political adversaries but highly immoral and fundamentally shitty people, "racial tuberculosis", so as that there should be no felt empathy should they later need to be physically eliminated. In other words, he made Jews the boogeyman that justified his dictatorship and attempt to take over the planet.
Hitler said, "Propaganda must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over," and he started with "fake news".
Trump took fake news directly out of Hitler's literal playbook. Progressing to short, Hitler-like slogans such as "we're gonna build a wall" and "lock her up" paved the way for "stop the steal" and "the storm is coming".
Trump, a former Democrat (he said Democrats clearly handle the economy better), watched over the vilification of Democrats as radicals who want to bring about dangerous communism and who operate sex trafficking rings beneath pizza places. Sounds familiar.
His actions right up until the failed insurrection at the Capitol were eerily similar to the fence-sitting act between law-abiding and dictatorial that Hitler used right up until the first, failed takeover attempt that landed him in prison for a year before later success as a more clearly defiant and crazed human being.
But regardless of what Trump wanted, his revival of lügenpresse, a tool seemingly on par with evidence, hurt not just politics but science. It empowered flat-Earthers and gravity-deniers. Now people who used to look crazy to even Republicans when saying NASA is full of shit suddenly seem reasonable just because they're "sticking it to the man" and the press is lying whenever you want them to be. Suddenly gravity might be bullshit.
These people also claim the neutral fact-checkers are also fake news and biased even though they're demonstrably not. When people make up shit about Trump they can and will check it. For example there was a rumor circulating that Trump's mother said something like, paraphrased, "I love my son to death but God help us all if he ever becomes a politician."
They squashed it. The fact that the right is finding itself checked way more often is simply indicative of that they're currently spewing way more bullshit because they're living in an alternate reality.
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dude_Jones
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I like your write-up on Lügenpresse. Ever since Chicxulub, the comic book of history has marched forward ........ Beavis and Butthead who should be food for carnivorous dinosaurs, are now regarded as model world citizens. Natural selection just isn't working very well anymore.
Now that I think of it, my misperception in the previous paragraph is the same one that may have led Hitler to his psychopathic misinterpretation of Nietzsche's uber man. (In reality, natural selection results in the creation of ecosystems, not in genocide).
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S0UNDS_WEIRD
2 years ago
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I suspect that it's all but impossible to know what Hitler thought about anything, including Nietzsche, other than that he badly wanted to rule the entire world. This is largely due to the fact that he was likely intentionally confusing.
In Mein Kampf he claimed to be a Catholic, said it was foolish to change existing religions, and at times used the death of Christ as fuel for hatred of the Jews. At other times he hinted that he wanted all religion to die before "the advances of science". Completely hypocritically regarding leaving religions as they are, he later proposed altering Christianity to remove Jewish influence and described Christ as an "Aryan warrior". He had crosses replaced with pictures of his face in various churches and even hatched a plan to kidnap the pope. Just when you think he's probably an atheist, he criticises atheism. It seems he hated existing religions but saw Jesus as a valuable tool, but what did this man really think?
He originally entered the rightist party that he later transformed into the Nazis as a part of a mission to infiltrate it that was assigned by a leftist group he was in. They figured his verbosity would help him fit in, but when the group not only accepted him but started looking to him as a leader, he essentially ditched his assigned mission and just sought to create his own thing. Was he a leftist or a rightist? Did he even care? It seems he was never on either side, merely working his way up.
The confusion is all in line with his leadership style. He discouraged his men from speaking privately with one another and often gave them completely conflicting orders to foster competition and hatred between them. As long as they were only unified in the sense that they served Hitler, there could never be an uprising against him.
As for the Jews, it's surprisingly not difficult to make the argument that he didn't even have a problem with them as he purportedly got along fantastically with many of them during his days in WWI, and as for what he claimed was the problem, it was all over the place. How the fuck do you simultaneously claim that Jews want out-of-control, iron-fist capitalism and also communism?
He was admittedly in love with deceit. I suspect that all we can say for sure is that he was a psychopath and that he possessed above average intelligence. Putting arrogance above that intelligence was his downfall as he attempted to maintain 100% control over all military operations even as his war experts insisted he should split the workload up and let them do their thing on various fronts.
At any rate, regardless of all that, I fully agree that natural selection results in the creation of ecosystems.
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dude_Jones
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Wow man. I can see you have a serious liberal arts background going here. I value conversation with guys like you. I would have loved to become a generalist, but chose instead to spend four years with multivariate calculus, computer science, finance, and a couple of graduate classes in Electrical Engineering.
Anyway as you have said, falling in love with your own deceitfulness is usually a sign of impending doom. Too bad we can't meet for lunch sometime. If you can talk to the level of that previous comment, I could reciprocate with whatever $300/hour IT consulting advice you could ever want.
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S0UNDS_WEIRD
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It's definitely too bad that we can't have lunch sometime.
Also, I would say that's still fairly generalist of you; in my experience people who study finance or computer science tend to find the other field uninteresting. I'm sure they're valuable skills to have in conjunction.