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Trump administration 2024-2028

My reaction when people start using words like Hitler,Nazi,Communist etc willy nilly is to ignore the person and their position saying it. Probably due to the fact that after having spent many years among Americans who tend to throw the word communist around as a lazy and incorrect catch all label for anybody and anything even 1 millimeter to the left of Atilla…..I consider it mental laziness and a dishonest attempt to denigrate the subject under discussion.
 
When Nazism is a legitimate comparable to something, the solution is not to stifle speech nor to deny the legitimate comparisons. The solution is for that something to stop behaving in ways that are legitimately comparable to nazism.
"Conservatives are fascists."

"Progressives are communists."

Those are both equally ridiculous statements, and neither is helpful to public discourse and the general political mood.

Who decides what the threshold is for "legitimately comparable"? I find that fascism and communism (as it turns out when attempted, not as it is idealized) have a lot of overlaps. Why aren't glimmerings of a police state evidence of incipient Stalinism? Ditto the idea of a government run by a favoured ethnicity (eg. Russian)? Is a military parade automatically redolent of Hitler, or of May Day?

What I see is this: people stretching comparisons to vilify people with whom they disagree. Period.
 
My reaction when people start using words like Hitler,Nazi,Communist etc willy nilly is to ignore the person and their position saying it. Probably due to the fact that after having spent many years among Americans who tend to throw the word communist around as a lazy and incorrect catch all label for anybody and anything even 1 millimeter to the left of Atilla…..I consider it mental laziness and a dishonest attempt to denigrate the subject under discussion.
Except the people on here aren't doing it willy nilly. We're not throwing out the words Genocide or Nazi due to any one specific case, we're looking at the whole picture and basing it on a sum of numerous examples. In fact, very few times has anyone on here actually said "Trump/MAGA is/are Nazis", rather we've said they are fascists, and compared specific individuals to specific Nazis.
 
Except the people on here aren't doing it willy nilly. We're not throwing out the words Genocide or Nazi due to any one specific case, we're looking at the whole picture and basing it on a sum of numerous examples. In fact, very few times has anyone on here actually said "Trump/MAGA is/are Nazis", rather we've said they are fascists, and compared specific individuals to specific Nazis.
Sorry…I wasn’t trying to imply that. I was using myself as an example to illustrate that over-use of such words, often incorrectly or inaccurately can desensitize people to what they actually mean and/or represent or cause the listener to minimize or ignore the possible validity of the point the speaker is trying to make.
 
Except the people on here aren't doing it willy nilly. We're not throwing out the words Genocide or Nazi due to any one specific case, we're looking at the whole picture and basing it on a sum of numerous examples. In fact, very few times has anyone on here actually said "Trump/MAGA is/are Nazis", rather we've said they are fascists, and compared specific individuals to specific Nazis.
So what is the percentage likelihood that in the next three-and-a-bit years the administration is going to designate one or more classes of individuals as undesirables, confiscate their property, round them up and put them into camps (for indefinite detention), and start executing them? I claim zero, even without the executions.

Keep in mind all the horrors of deportation policies are a consequence of setting the (impractical) goal of deporting more than a few thousand people of the people in the country illegally, which is a consequence of enforcement failures (or negligence) by prior administrations. I expected it to be messy, and it is. That doesn't nullify the legitimate goal of enforcing immigration law. Cushy "Club Fed" type detention centres aren't going to be constructed to serve a temporary need. It isn't even a little bit "approximately" like concentration camps.

With respect to mere fascism, what is the percentage likelihood that in the next three-and-a-bit years any of the following will happen: the Democratic party will be outlawed; Antifa and No Kings and other anti-government protestors will be attacked without restraint in the streets by police and army and disappear by the dozens or more into detention; the judiciary from top to bottom will be completely obedient to administration dictates; the military leadership will exhibit unquestioning obedience to manifestly unconstitutional or otherwise illegal orders; corporations will essentially cease to compete in meaningful terms and become state-guided; media and entertainment luminaries will essentially cease to criticize government; Congress will cease to pass any legislation but what the president requests?

Pretty much none of that is going to happen - because people are already on the lookout for it, and because no-one with the power and appetite and motivation to pursue it is actually in government.

If you want to worry about fascism, worry about progressives. They're the ones with plans to pack courts and force-retire inconvenient judges, who want social media to comply with their "information management" requests, who have talked about imprisoning people for absurd things like "climate denial" and who set the tone for whatever "cancel culture" is, who are comfortable nationalizing anything that isn't doing what they would prefer it to.
 
Why do you do that?

You are clearly an intelligent person with critical thinking skills and a good grasp of the English language, and you routinely post cogent and well thought out posts.

And yet in this post you ignore the original post and rely on blah blah blah and other dismissive phrases.

That kind of thing makes it difficult to winnow the grain.

So, why do you do that?
Noted. I occasionally don’t take a post seriously and respond in kind. I’ll make an effort to do better.
 
Pretty much none of that is going to happen - because people are already on the lookout for it, and because no-one with the power and appetite and motivation to pursue it is actually in government.
Exactly!

You're welcome!
 
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