Quote:
Originally Posted by Matata
Who's freer?
|
In theory? No one - there are fewer legal or administrative restrictions on your ability to do things there than anywhere. Practically? Well, that's where all those rankings come in.
Quote:
Originally Posted by CliffFletcher
What we're seeing in the U.S. today is a resurgence of populism. It happens periodically. Populism =/= fascism.
Anyone who thinks Trump is on the road to taking over all the arms of government, the media, the judiciary, and the schools has let reason become hostage to their fears. Get back to me when men with truncheons break into the taping of the John Oliver show and beat the host and audience senseless while the police stand by smiling and the courts turn a blind eye, and then we'll talk about American Nazis.
|
This is a big problem for people who want to oppose Trump, too, because it seems to imply that unless Trump is as bad as Hitler, he's not worth opposing. If you try to compare the GOP to the Nazis, every time they make it clear that they're not the Nazis, which is every day, you lose the argument. There's plenty of bad between where the USA stood going into the 2016 election and Nazi Germany, and you simply cannot grade on that curve.
But this doesn't seem to be the game we play anymore in politics. Good example, someone posted a story in maybe the mass shootings thread about a Republican lawmaker who was pushing for a law to ban airlines from putting pets in overhead storage, because United killed a dog. People pointed out that when a dog dies, he's outraged and jumps into action, but when kits are killed in Florida, radio silence. Good point.
But then we get into the theatre - half the responses I read either have the hashtag "#NRAisaterroristorganization" or accuse him of
hating children. What the hell am I supposed to do with that? Take those sorts of hyperbolic statements seriously, that they actually believe the NRA is analogous to Al Qaeda or that a representative secretly despises children and wants them to be shot? Okay, then the people making them are morons. Or am I instead expected to play this emperor's new clothes game where we pretend our ideological opponents are worse than they really are, that they're effectively Nazis, just to make it absolutely clear which side I'm on? Or do I again find myself cheering for the asteroid to come and cleanse us all from existence?
Seriously, it wasn't until this decade that I started thinking all those crazy movie supervillains might have been onto something.