Trumpism in perspective.
For those who didn't see his show - That comment was in front of a backdrop of a Nazi Rally -
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- in Madison Square Garden in 1934 and 1939. As if bad couldn't happen here to our democracy.
Think of all the Trumpenkreigers at all of his rallies across the US.
I guess that must be the only difference. Right, Dim?
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movement back then.
But his political strategy is the same, his demonization of enemies and press is the same, and his scapegoating is the same. His rhetorical style is the same. His militarism and nationalism are the same.
And his utter contempt for democracy and the truth is the same.
The alacrity with which so many of our fellow citizens have gone along with him and his poisonous, mendacious agenda is the most depressing political story of my lifetime.
I thought we were better than this. I was wrong.
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Then they came for the G-men and I said nothing. Then they came for the infotainment TV hosts and I said nothing. Then they came for the SNL cast and I said nothing. Then they came for the broads with giant, plastic vaginas on their heads and I said nothing. Then they came the kneeling NFL players and I said nothing. Then they came for all the white people who pretend to be 1/4 Cherokee and I said nothing. Finally, they came for the illegal immigrants and I said nothing.
And all there was left was me and the Jews.
This is probably neither here nor there, but it bears repeating every now and then when Chris lapses into these hyperbolic, hormonal rages about Orange that Chris is a political science professor.
May I assume you will be amending your "Things just keep getting better and better!" thesis?
I’d recommend a dozen books on this from the last two years, if I thought you’d read.
I guess Timothy Snyder and Madeleine Albright are just “hormonal” and “hyperbolic” too.
And if you understood statistics, you’d also understand that the world indeed in aggregate IS getting better.
But you don’t.
As I've remarked many times, you're a deep guy.Thoughtful.
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Would you care to share us the data from your Trump-Hitler Calculus, friend?
There is, of course, plenty of data that contradicts your case. With each passing year, people grow unhappier. Suicide rates climb. Medicating our children grows. New types of addictions replace the ones folks like you cherry-pick to support your thesis. Illegitimacy rates climb. Fewer people marry and loneliness climbs. Child abuse and human trafficking rates continue to get worse.
On the other side, we have misleading data like fewer wars or higher literacy rates. Does "warfare" mean the same thing or like look it did a century ago? Or 50 years ago? Are more people actually reading versus having the ability to read? The implication with communicable diseases we've eradicated is that people are healthier. How do weigh the eradication of these diseases against the rates of mental illnesses in making statements about the health of human beings in general?
And I mean that in a literal sense. You’re ignorant.
All kinds of warfare is declining, by any definition. It is not controversial, among non-ignoramous types.
Poverty, warfare, crime, violence are down. And much more. Longevity is up.
Suicide rates are up too. Not everything is great.
Everything else you wrote - every single thing - is wrong. Empirically. “Emoting” about facts, I guess.
Ignoramous.
Is that like "bogeyman?"
Yes, claiming health is better while leaving out psychological conditions is misleading. Yes, using the same criteria to define what war entails in 2018 to what it entailed in 1942 is misleading. Yes, implying that because more people have the ability to read that more people are actually reading is misleading.
Yes, fewer people are in material poverty. The "data points" are clear that spiritual poverty is increasing, by some of the measurements I mentioned. Hopelessness, despair, loneliness. You apparently start with a premise that if crime overall is dropping, the negative effects of crime are necessarily less upon society. What if murder, rape, armed robbery, assault, and property crime rates are dropping but human trafficking and child abuse is increasing? Does that mean that society is better now than when the former were higher? You may be correct, but it doesn't necessarily follow that if the total quantity of crimes drops, society must thus be in better shape than it was before.
You may have caught onto the fact at some point that there are a bunch of folks here who present much more of a challenge in these sorts of arguments. That's because they have some ability to fashion logical arguments. The thing that's always surprised me about folks in your area is how many of them sincerely struggle with making logical arguments. Many are terrific at finding data that appears to support their claims. The problem is that you often don't have to dig very deep to find fallacies and obvious contradictions.
You got me on the spelling. It was halftime. Many beers. But no excuse.
But I am also much, much more familiar with the stats on war and poverty here. Much much.
You are wrong.
Link: https://www.amazon.com/Enlightenment-Now-Science-Humanism-Progress/dp/0525427570
The point to which you and Pinker and all secular humanists will always be oblivious is that the non-material factors are even more important than the material ones you or he may cite. A society in which suicide rates are spiking isn't "progressing" or "improving," regardless if lifespans are increasing overall. A society in which an epidemic of loneliness is now a major healthcare concern isn't "improving," regardless if we've eradicated polio or scarlet fever.
And I'd be remiss if I didn't point an underlying premise to all this that deserves questioning. That premise is that the reason we have fewer wars or more rights for women or whatever you wish to cite in that realm is due to moral improvement, which drove these changes. Kind of like how implicit bias folks get it backwards when they argue that we must change how people think and then they will act differently, when, in fact, it's other way around. Did segregation laws fall because there was a broad consensus that blacks were equal to whites? No, of course not. Laws changed and over time that shifted the way most people thought about race. Did an abomination like WWI a century ago happen because people were less morally advanced? No, of course not. It's much more complicated than that.
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— Anthony Romero, ACLU
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