https://www.faena.com/aleph/umberto-eco-a-practical-list-for-identifying-fascists

In an essay published in the New York Review of Books, Umberto Eco distilled the 14 typical elements of “Ur-Fascism or Eternal Fascism,” while warning that, “These features cannot be organized into a system; many of them contradict each other and are also typical of other kinds of despotism or fanaticism. But it is enough that one of them be present to allow fascism to coagulate around it.”

• The cult of tradition. “One has only to look at the syllabus of every fascist movement to find the major traditionalist thinkers. The Nazi gnosis was nourished by traditionalist, syncretistic, occult elements.”

• The rejection of modernism. “The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity. In this sense, Ur-Fascism can be defined as irrationalism.”

• The cult of action for action’s sale. “Action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without, any previous reflection. Thinking is a form of emasculation.” Disagreement is treason. “The critical spirit makes distinctions, and to distinguish is a sign of modernism. In modern culture, the scientific community praises disagreement as a way to improve knowledge.”

• Fear of difference. “The first appeal of a fascist or prematurely fascist movement is an appeal against the intruders. Thus Ur-Fascism is racist by definition.” Appeal to social frustration. “[…] one of the most typical features of the historical fascism was the appeal to a frustrated middle class, a class suffering from an economic crisis or feelings of political humiliation, and frightened by the pressure of lower social groups.

• The obsession with a plot. “The followers must feel besieged. The easiest way to solve the plot is the appeal to xenophobia.”

• The enemy is both weak and strong. “[…] the followers must be convinced that they can overwhelm the enemies. Thus, by a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak.”

• Pacifism is trafficking with the enemy. “For Ur-Fascism there is no struggle for life but, rather, life is lived for struggle.”

• Contempt for the weak. “Elitism is a typical aspect of any reactionary ideology.”

• Everybody is educated to become a hero. “in Ur-Fascist ideology, heroism is the norm. This cult of heroism is strictly linked with the cult of death.”

• Machismo and Weaponry. “This is the origin of machismo (which implies both disdain for women and intolerance and condemnation of nonstandard sexual habits, from chastity to homosexuality). Since even sex is a difficult game to play, the Ur-Fascist hero tends to play with weapons—doing so becomes an ersatz phallic exercise.”

• Selective Populism. “There is in our future a TV or Internet populism, in which the emotional response of a selected group of citizens can be presented and accepted as the Voice of the People.

• Ur-Fascism speaks Newspeak. “All the Nazi or Fascist schoolbooks made use of an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax, in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning.”

Never has more divorce been captured in a single photograph

I hope that every last trump voter is held to collective responsibility for whatever atrocities lie ahead. After the Nazis were defeated, Germans were shown posters like this one that said "These Atrocities, Your Fault!"

I, for one, welcome our new kakistocratic overlords.

Not normal at all. This was America's 1932 Germany moment, there's no going back now. 70 plus million of the dumbest Americans on the planet welcomed the Nazis with open arms.

Last I checked, Iroquois county had 9000 yes votes to secede. Good luck with that massive tax revenue base. Chicagoland's 10 million plus residents will be happy to stop sending them money.

The media completely failed at their job of informing the public.

A democracy requires an informed citizenry, and the US media over the past eight years in particular created an increasingly misinformed citizenry.

When people are more concerned that a trans girl might play on a softball team than that the climate crisis might profoundly devastate the biosphere and much of life on it, human and otherwise, for the next 10,000 years, the media has failed. When people worry about crime when it is low, an economy when it is thriving and immigrants when they do much of the hard work that sustains that economy and commit fewer crimes than the native-born, the media has failed.

When it came to Donald Trump, they went easy on him, and they again and again let him and the far right set the agenda. They constantly treated asymmetrical issues as symmetrical ones – if the Democrats resisted Republican outrages, both sides were “polarized”. In the media everything had two sides, even if one side was the truth and the other was the lie, one side was the human rights or the law and the other side was their violation.

They went soft on Trump’s criminality and incompetence, and his sheer volume of scandals meant that the past ones were forgotten as the next one erupted. He would not have won his 2016 minority victory had the US news media adequately conveyed that Trump was not the fun fictional character in the reality TV show The Apprentice; he was a serially bankrupt man repeatedly accused of sexual assault with a lot of criminal ties and a history of not paying his bills, being helped on by the Vladimir Putin regime, which had itself seriously corrupted the information environment of the election.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/nov/07/us-progressive-election-trump-maga

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9542152/

In summary, we observed significant and consistent differences in dental caries experience in the primary dentition between Grade 2 children in Calgary (fluoridation cessation) and Edmonton (still fluoridated), Canada, 7‐8 years following cessation in Calgary. Our findings are consistent with an adverse impact of fluoridation cessation on children's dental health in Calgary, and point to the need for universally, publicly funded prevention activities including, but not limited to fluoridation.

As long as I can remember, Republicans would inevitably crash the economy, Democrats would set it back on a good course (which of course takes a while), and the Republicans would go and crash it again. They got pretty good at timing the crash so it was right as they were leaving power.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/02/opinion/sunday/democrats-economy.html#

This is my favorite thread of the day. I learned something, and it brought back memories of plugging one of these into my parents '87 Buick LeSabre wagon. Complete with wood grain panels. Yeah, I didn't date much back then.

The full plan is detailed here: https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/little-secret-trump-johnson-election/.

Basically, they just need enough States to withhold submitting valid slates of electors, which are due on Dec 11th. If that doesn't happen, and it lowers the amount of electoral college voters enough so no single candidate has a majority, then the US House gets to decide.

In other words, we're fully reliant on GOP controlled States doing the right thing. We're fucked.

Damn dude, there's not enough xanax in the world to help me cope with that mental image.

I found the NYT's sanewashing of Trump irresponsible, so I took my WaPo subscription to The Guardian. It's a sad reflection on the US when a foreign paper has better reporting than any domestic source.

Video of the pacing:

https://bsky.app/profile/bubbaprog.ilovecitr.us/post/3l6tb2nxfyo2o

This is a complete sanewashing article... Roberts read all the dissents, he knew exactly what he was doing. Putting Trump above the law.

My ideal weekend

Waterboard that bitch til it talks

Florida (desantis) recently enacted concealed carry, so I'll be curious to see what law this nut actually broke.