Helping defeat Nazis and Fascism?
You mean when, for example, there were Jim Crow laws in effect in the U.S. and women couldnāt have their own credit cards or checking accounts, and folks were in iron lungs due to polio?
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Fair point, the greatness of a country has always seemed like a subjective idea to me. However helping defeat fascism and free Europe from the Nazis is something to be proud of, domestic inequality and racism, substantially less so.
Itās an interesting question actually, and one I have pondered myself, what do they envisage when they talk about making America great again? Iām pretty sure not everyone means the same thing, when they use the expression.
Iād say it never was truly āgreatā. How could it have been when: For 80 years of its existence it was legal to own human beings and employ them as forced labor. And then for the next 100 years we had Jim Crow laws, which marginalized freed slaves, disenfranchised them, lynched them, and kept them in virtual, if not actual servitude. For the first 140 years of this countryās existence half the adult population couldnāt vote merely because they lacked a penis. The indigenous native population was nearly exterminated and the remnants moved onto reservations. Rampant racism against blacks, Chinese, Italians, Irish, and other ethic groups, some of it lasting to the present day. Confinement of citizens of Japanese extraction in concentration camps. Segregation of races that was supposed to be āseparate, but equalā, but it was anything but. Child labor laws where children as young as 10 were employed in dangerous jobs such as coal mining and textile mills. I could go on, but I think you get the point.
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One could write an entire book on why people support Trump, and Iām sure some have been. Here are some of the major reasons as I perceive them:
White, christian, males have enjoyed great privilege in this country from its beginnings. Thatās starting to change as minority groups and women gain political power and religion declines in numbers. These people are loath to give up any of their power and privilege to groups they see as their social inferiors because they see it as a zero sum game whereby any power and privilege other groups gain come at their expense. Trump panders to these people by pushing the religious narrative and ranting about immigration taking their jobs and āreplacingā them. Trump himself is not overtly religious and has employed illegal immigrants on his building projects, but he knows how to push the buttons of his supporters.
The religious crowd sees Trump as a means to an endānamely to push their abortion agenda and to break down the wall of separation between church and stateāeven though Trump himself talks the talk but does not walk the walk. This relationship is purely transactionalāas long as Trump continues to push their agenda they donāt give a damn that Trump is a twice divorced, thrice married, womanizing rapist who never goes to church and canāt quote even a single bible verse.
Thereās a big gun culture in the U.S., and Trump claims to support nearly no restrictions on gun ownership (although he did ban bump stocks after the Vegas shooting which the Supreme Court recently overturned). This group supports Trump because they believe a Democrat president will work to restrict access to guns.
Thereās a big group of voters in the rustbelt in the Midwest who have lost their jobs or will lose their jobs as companies move production to Asia and other low-cost labor markets. These tend to be people without college degrees whose future job prospects are bleak. The anti-immigration rhetoric Trump espouses appeals to these people because they fear that immigrants will take whatever jobs they still have. They donāt understand that itās primarily Republican CEOs who are moving their jobs to other countries and that Republican administrations tend to pass tax breaks for their rich buddies, typically at the expense of the middle and lower classes.
Based on interviews Iāve seen of Trump supporters, they tend to have bought in wholesale to the various conspiracy theories pushed by Trump and his followers, including the big lie of a stolen election in 2020 and the all of the rest of the nutjob stuff like Pizza Gate and the Obama birther stuff. These people truly are lacking in basic intelligence.
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On my random clickings on the YouTube, lots of weird stuff pop up. Like this one, which is a somewhat relevant commentary to the current situation over there in the US:
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I really enjoy Randy Rainbow!
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Anyone seen the video of MTG saying "fake meat, that is grown in a peach-tree-dishā¦comedy goldā¦
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Well, she is from Georgia, the Peach State.
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Yeah, Gazpacho police was another of my favouritesā¦blessā¦
Its always been great for the rich and less great for the working class.
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Iām reminded here of a comment that was made elsewhere, possibly by a commentator in the comments section of PZ Myersā Pharyngula blog, but the wise will double check this in case my memory is imperfect here.
The comment centred upon the manner in which a certain Thomas Kinkaid built a career out of selling chocolate box āartā to the fundagelical crowd. The poster in question uttered such gems as āthey mistake sincerity for quality, and spoon up the most noisome dreckā.
The MAGAlāQaeda loons have moved on from this, treating blatant sycophantic fawning as an indicator of quality, and hoovering up the most excremental garbage.
Before posting, I discovered that my original link no longer works, but this one does, and the comment can be found if you scroll down the page. Or, more quickly, perform a āfind in pageā search on āZenoā once the page is fully loaded.
The topic of that blog post is a review by Myers of a crappy Christian computer game called Noahās Adventures, and the astute wonāt have to exert much mental effort to imagine the savaging said game receives on that page. It wonāt surprise me to discover that someone is either working on, or has already produced, a TrunpenfĆ¼hrer worshipping video game featuring atrocities that even the GTA 5 āHot Coffeeā mod steered clear of.
After all, neo-Nazis released a game online some years ago, giving assorted sickos the opportunity to act out their nastiest concentration camp guard fantasies, so reworking that with a MAGA style āown the libsā theme with a spot of added torture porn for good measure, is either in production or already doing the rounds on Free Republic or Stormfront. Wonder if Barron is involved in this when heās not snuffing out small furry animals or wading in the crypto swamp?
For those unaware of this, there are quite a few reports coming out that the youngest Trump sprog is quite the little sociopath in training, of which this is a typical sample. Getting involved in a torture video game featuring Daddy doing unspeakable things to various enemies would be pretty much up his street.
āCultural sewageā is probably the most apposite description of the MAGA disease, which seems to be in a headlong race to outdo Julius Streicher in the warped obscenity department.
And, after all the rabid mouth frothing by the swivel-eyed MAGAlāQaeda loons about supposed Democrat connections to Epstein and āLolita Islandā, who should we find using Epsteinās former jet on the campaign trail?
Watch the complete silence from the cultists on this.
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How many more pics and veridied connections of Drumpf with Epstein does anyone need to know what the likely connection was?
No more are needed by reasoning adults. But that leaves a few million of the shit-gibbonās minions for whom nothing is enough.
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I did write āsupposed connectionsā in anticipation of such a response ā¦ 
Indeed, Iāve been aware for some time, that every reich wing accusation is subsequently revealed to be a projected confession, and in no other arena of human activity is this more robustly demonstrated, than in the arena of sexual criminality.
It is, of course, necessary to point out here, that I donāt include what consenting adults do in private under that heading, while noting that many of the rabid specimens seek to return to the hideous days of criminalising everything other than the missionary position within a narrow and parochial definition of āmarriageā ā¦ with of course the exception of child brides, for which several of the reich wing creatures have a lurid and creepy fascination.
Which, of course, merely adds to the steaming hypocrisy endemic to the whole reich wing Epstein cant, a good portion of which is tossed loudly into the public domain by specimens exhibiting clear signs of recursive genealogy in their families, and whose own histories probably involve more than a passing familiarity with emissions in a Humbertian setting. A suitably foetid example of the underlying duplicity is provided by Warren Jeffs, who took ruthless advantage of the workings of religious cultism to facilitate his preying upon 12 year old girls, and followers of this now convicted sex criminal still fawn over his utterances, despite the obscene revelations produced during his trial.
Indeed, Iāve taken the view that much fundamentalist Christianity is, at bottom, driven by the dark yearning to savour first hand the business of dishing out to others, the nastiness endemic to large tracts of the OT. I suspect that business in Numbers 31:18 is a go-to fantasy for quite a few of the usual suspects.