Extremely unfun fact: before even the Jews, they came for LGBTQ+ people. The first major Nazi book burning was at the Institute For Sexuality which, apart from being a research institute dealing with all sorts of “nonstandard” sexuality in a scholarly rather than punitive manner, was also the world’s first trans clinic.
The reason it’s not mentioned is that Pastor Niemöller, being a conservative pastor, didn’t see anything wrong with the persecution and erasure of LGBTQ+ people.
One of the reasons it’s important to remember that the LGBTQ+ community were the first targets of concerted Nazi erasure even though they were far from the first targets of nazi hatred and slander is that the GOP are doing the same thing and they’ll go through the rest of the list too if they aren’t stopped.
This is also why people think being trans is a “new” thing. The Institute For Sexuality was the first and only place performing research and on trans people and offering gender affirming care. When the Nazi book burnings happened, they burned the entirety of the world’s research on trans people.
Worth mentioning that Magnus Hirschfeld (guy who ran the Institute For Sexuality) was Jewish, and that is a big part of the reason why his institute was attacked. According to Nazi propaganda, his institute (and queerness in general) was a Jewish plot to weaken the white race.
Which goes to show, fascist propaganda hasn’t changed all that much since then!
Some LGBTQ+ people even vote for conservatives, as too do black, disabled, women, other non-white “minorities” (I put in quotes b/c white people are actually the minority in the USA now, but on the other hand that fact doesn’t seem to matter one bit to those who use that term the most… Edit: sorry I misremembered, it is only the under-18 crowd where that is true for now).
And these people are shocked, Shocked I tell you, SHOCKED when the conservative party eventually turns on them. I know, shocking, right?
They don’t understand that the result of pyramid-thinking is by its very nature exclusive rather than inclusive (Innuendo Studios video “There’s Always a Bigger Fish” + Endnote video “The Origins of Conservatism”). They haven’t been excluded from it - YET! - but they will, it is only a matter of time. It’s karma. What is done - and allowed to be done - to others, can easily be done to YOU.
Ironically, Jesus Himself said “Treat others as you would wish they would do for you, in fact, even better than that - and nobody gets excluded from that”. Also the Bible says a bunch of other stuff - the worker deserves their wages, live & let live, and so, so much else that just flat gets ignored by the people using it as a club to beat someone with.
Okay yeah I misremembered my terms - whiteness is on its way out, and in fact the under-18 crowd has white as a minority already, though I forgot for a moment that the rest of the age groups won’t catch up until the next decade or two as the Boomers and such die off. White people tend to have fewer children than non-white people, so that’s just how that works.
More important is the fact that conservative voters are in the minority, and have been for a long time. While not precisely the same thing, it is somewhat related.
even with white people’s population plateauing, white people will be the largest single group for a good while. Also, while we are seeing the largest total growth from the latino population, and the largest growth per capita being asian, all demographic’s fertility rates drop after their family has been here for ~3 generations as they adjust to the cost of living. So we have white people as the most influential group for quite some time to come.
But, yes, people who identify as conservative republicans make up about 30% of the population. However, due to awful voter turn out, they represent much closer to 50% of the population that actively votes, because they are far more likely to do so per capita. So it will also be a while before their level of influence declines. That is, unless, we suddenly convince 60% of the population to take voting seriously.
However, due to awful voter turn out, they represent much closer to 50% of the population that actively votes
I realize you may not want to hear this from me after my mistake earlier, but I believe that is not true. The “popular vote” is also counted in each Presidential election, even though it does not determine anything, and the last time a Republican won that was 2004. For the last 20 years, people’s votes simply aren’t being counted, bc they tend to aggregate together in cities and university towns, rather than spread far out across hundreds of miles of farmland, as e.g. people in Idaho do.
If you live in an area that leans >80% one way or another, then I don’t blame people for not voting, bc their votes won’t affect anything whatsoever. Especially young people, who have a disproportionate hardship to “just get out and vote” - having to take time off from work (retired people don’t), college students may need to drive hundreds of miles to get “home” (which even if they do “often”, still has to coincide with voting time, and comes at cost of sleep, studying, homework, etc.), people with kids have to struggle with daycare, and so on.
If we truly wanted more people to vote, then as a nation we would encourage that - e.g. give everyone a break from work, have appropriately equipped (e.g. staffed) recipient stations, and/or better yet allow mail-in voting. Making votes from some particular areas “count” while those from other areas not count, is very much a feature that was designed - as the very people that did it freely admit, and continue to push forward all the time.
Put another way, voting turnouts heavily correlate with age, aka the ability to vote with greater ease.
take voting seriously
I guarantee you - bc it’s simply math - that if every single liberal Democrat were to get out and vote in the next election, thus representing the popular vote by 100% of the eligible people on that one side, it still would have extremely low impact on the actual end result. What would instead have a MASSIVE impact would be a bunch of liberals moving to a state like Texas, and rather than continue to vote from San Francisco or NYC, to influence the Electoral College system from that new location where it has a chance to actually flip it from red to blue, rather than reinforce the already blue still further.
Which has been happening lately - e.g. Austin - but also, I can’t blame people especially women who due to the overall lack of healthcare and toxicity of surrounding neighbors may not wish to do that.
All that said, yes overall engagement will be necessary to combat the issues facing us all - e.g. people need to step up and run for office, or else we end up getting the jokers that we currently have. But it’s nowhere near as simplistic as you make it sound, like all that would be needed would be to “vote”. imho at least!:-)
Niemöller made confession in his speech for the Confessing Church in Frankfurt on 6 January 1946, of which this is a partial translation:
… the people who were put in the camps then were Communists. Who cared about them? We knew it, it was printed in the newspapers. Who raised their voice, maybe the Confessing Church? We thought: Communists, those opponents of religion, those enemies of Christians—“should I be my brother’s keeper?”
Then they got rid of the sick, the so-called incurables. I remember a conversation I had with a person who claimed to be a Christian. He said: Perhaps it’s right, these incurably sick people just cost the state money, they are just a burden to themselves and to others. Isn’t it best for all concerned if they are taken out of the middle [of society]? Only then did the church as such take note.
Then we started talking, until our voices were again silenced in public. Can we say, we aren’t guilty/responsible?
The persecution of the Jews, the way we treated the occupied countries, or the things in Greece, in Poland, in Czechoslovakia or in Holland, that were written in the newspapers. … I believe, we Confessing-Church-Christians have every reason to say: mea culpa, mea culpa! We can talk ourselves out of it with the excuse that it would have cost me my head if I had spoken out.
We preferred to keep silent. We are certainly not without guilt/fault, and I ask myself again and again, what would have happened, if in the year 1933 or 1934—there must have been a possibility—14,000 Protestant pastors and all Protestant communities in Germany had defended the truth until their deaths? If we had said back then, it is not right when Hermann Göring simply puts 100,000 Communists in the concentration camps, in order to let them die. I can imagine that perhaps 30,000 to 40,000 Protestant Christians would have had their heads cut off, but I can also imagine that we would have rescued 30–40,000 million [sic] people, because that is what it is costing us now.
A large part of the very founding of the USA was due to Quakers escaping the persecution of slave owners, b/c they were so radical in their advocacy to halt slavery. And then it was Anglicans, Baptists, Presbyterians, Methodists, Congregationalists, and other faith groups of all kinds who worked to actually stop it, in the UK and the USA. Sadly they worked against others of the same religions who argued (almost) just as vociferously to continue it…
My point is that religion can do great things, if only it would DO IT. It could help ensure that the worker receives their wages, feed the homeless, take care of widows & orphans (& everyone), be kind and like visit the sick or in prison, and on and on it goes - and to the extent that religious people do these things, that is awesome! But… it takes actually reading the book that is claimed to be “holy” (e.g. “show love to one another - be ye not Karens or Dicks to one another”), and second, it takes courage to actually act upon one’s convictions, rather than merely say in words how much one “believes”.
You know, I often think that Putin is a progressive politician. Just the meaning of progress that exists in the society differs to the one that is in the reality
There is an external definition of “progressive” though, part of which is all about minorities rights. Does he really identify himself with progressivism, or does he just think that he’s correct, maybe even that the still he’s doing is so correct that it’s beyond the scale of progressive vs. conservative philosophies?
In contrast, conservativism is all about “traditional values” and authoritarian thinking. So like a progressive may not like LGBTQ+ stuff but they will defend their right to exist, while a conservative will actively work against their existence and even to take steps to force people to conform (e.g. electroshock therapy).
On the other hand, while Russia seems to be pushing the message of conservativism hard, leaving no room for “progressive” thought, Putin himself may be more of an opportunist and simply uses people and even the whole country as a means towards his own ends of personal gratification. Which at his age is probably to leave behind a legacy that will cause him to be remembered (which will definitely happen, but probably not how he hoped!).
There is an external definition of “progressive” though, part of which is all about minorities rights
I don’t like it. It’s wishful thinking that history progresses in the direction you want.
In contrast, I mean that history is progressing towards more people like Putin and more regions like Russia.
Putin himself may be more of an opportunist and simply uses people and even the whole country as a means towards his own ends of personal gratification
Setting aside whether either of us “like” progressivism - we could get into that but atm I just don’t want to get distracted by it - you might be throwing together the ideas of progress-IVE with progress-ING.
Conservatism can make “progress” too - e.g. abortions are now illegal in many parts of the USA, whereas they were not before, that is a step towards the goal that the conservative Right has had for many decades now. The difference, as I understand it anyway, is that Conservatism want to “return to traditional values”, whereas Liberalism wants to make up new ones, like historically LGBTQ+ were considered bad but liberals want to expand human rights to include the right of each person to choose their own sexuality. Both move in a “direction”, both move “forward”, into the “future”, but conservatives choose their direction as the past, seeing that as good, while liberals choose… as you say, something that came out of wishful thinking, aka a fantasy, that they want to make into reality.
Where I think it gets confusing - to me at least - is when politicians mix it up to claim one thing while doing the exact opposite (or worse, pick and choose a little bit from each side). Like Hillary Clinton despite being a Democrat, was extremely like a conservative (pro-war, pro-big business, having little to no social justice components in her platform iirc, etc.), and George W. Bush despite being a Republican was very much like a liberal (pro-socialism e.g. school funding, feeding the homeless & needy, etc.).
I am no political theorist, but it looks like there is a Theory, and that is where these terms fit, and then there is the Reality, where anything goes:-P.
But anyway, yes you are correct: most parts of the world seem to be advancing towards Authoritarianism. The rise of super-corporations and the effects of globalization and automation probably made that inevitable - after all if corporations are literally more powerful than governments, then the natural reaction of a government is going to want to become stronger, to keep up. But that is progress-ING, not progress-IVE. And Russia in particular had an extremely authoritarian regime before the Bolshevik revolution, so moving away from democracy and towards an autocratic government with Putin or his successor at the helm, is “conservative”, returning to traditional valuations rather than engage in the fantasy play of trying to make a democracy viable.
Which btw is why a lot of people are fleeing Russia right now, to one of those fantasy playgrounds where citizens receive more from their governments. Whether liberalism has any long-term viability remains to be seen, but in the short-term it seems quite attractive, to many people.
Aren’t they all?
Abso-fucking-lutely. Or, at least the smart ones do. But, the crucial point is, not equally so. i.e., some give more back to the People than others, i.e. some are simply better at their jobs. Putin naively believed his advisors when they told him that they would win the Ukranian territory in “3 days”, and now look at what it has cost the nation? Not only does it look increasingly likely that a Russian victory is not inevitable anymore, but as more time passes the cost compounds further and such a “victory” starts to look more and more like an abysmal defeat, in the sense that what was delivered was not as promised.
A ton of people want a “strong” leader, but the hard part is that the mere appearance of strength is not the same thing as the reality of it. Same with Trump in the USA, Boris Johnson in the UK, etc., so I’m not just arbitrarily picking on Putin - as you say it’s a trend progressing across the world right now. Anyway, it’s not that Putin’s message is bad (strength, protection, stability, order), it’s that he is an opportunist who merely claims that he would, but then has actually failed to, deliver upon those promises. And again, Trump failed to deliver upon his as well (mostly), and Boris Johnson too (I mean… Brexit happened, but are people satisfied with that outcome? Polls show that most say they are not, and if they could un-do it they would, but they cannot go back in time).
To my knowledge, there has never been a nation since the American and French Revolutions that has survived as a stable autocratic country for awhile - the cat was let out of the bag, and once people realized that they did not have to bow down as slaves before an overlord, they henceforth refused to. Then again, modern democracies are extremely vulnerable to disinformation campaigns spread by modern technology so… it is not like I am trying to say that one is superior or will win out over the other - in truth I have no idea what will happen:-P - I am just pointing out some components that I do see.
Not really… the white middle class in the US is coming down from their cozy New Deal high and realizing all the “soft power” was literally just empty propaganda. There is a good reason why the US has inspired some of the most evil events of the modern era - Putin cannot hold a candle to that.
Extremely unfun fact: before even the Jews, they came for LGBTQ+ people. The first major Nazi book burning was at the Institute For Sexuality which, apart from being a research institute dealing with all sorts of “nonstandard” sexuality in a scholarly rather than punitive manner, was also the world’s first trans clinic.
The reason it’s not mentioned is that Pastor Niemöller, being a conservative pastor, didn’t see anything wrong with the persecution and erasure of LGBTQ+ people.
One of the reasons it’s important to remember that the LGBTQ+ community were the first targets of concerted Nazi erasure even though they were far from the first targets of nazi hatred and slander is that the GOP are doing the same thing and they’ll go through the rest of the list too if they aren’t stopped.
Also important to remember when people are talking about queer identities being a “new trend” or whatever
It’s not
We just got erased from history
This is also why people think being trans is a “new” thing. The Institute For Sexuality was the first and only place performing research and on trans people and offering gender affirming care. When the Nazi book burnings happened, they burned the entirety of the world’s research on trans people.
Worth mentioning that Magnus Hirschfeld (guy who ran the Institute For Sexuality) was Jewish, and that is a big part of the reason why his institute was attacked. According to Nazi propaganda, his institute (and queerness in general) was a Jewish plot to weaken the white race.
Which goes to show, fascist propaganda hasn’t changed all that much since then!
Some LGBTQ+ people even vote for conservatives, as too do black, disabled, women, other non-white “minorities” (
I put in quotes b/c white people are actually the minority in the USA now, but on the other hand that fact doesn’t seem to matter one bit to those who use that term the most…Edit: sorry I misremembered, it is only the under-18 crowd where that is true for now).And these people are shocked, Shocked I tell you, SHOCKED when the conservative party eventually turns on them. I know, shocking, right?
They don’t understand that the result of pyramid-thinking is by its very nature exclusive rather than inclusive (Innuendo Studios video “There’s Always a Bigger Fish” + Endnote video “The Origins of Conservatism”). They haven’t been excluded from it - YET! - but they will, it is only a matter of time. It’s karma. What is done - and allowed to be done - to others, can easily be done to YOU.
Ironically, Jesus Himself said “Treat others as you would wish they would do for you, in fact, even better than that - and nobody gets excluded from that”. Also the Bible says a bunch of other stuff - the worker deserves their wages, live & let live, and so, so much else that just flat gets ignored by the people using it as a club to beat someone with.
71% of the US population is white.
Okay yeah I misremembered my terms - whiteness is on its way out, and in fact the under-18 crowd has white as a minority already, though I forgot for a moment that the rest of the age groups won’t catch up until the next decade or two as the Boomers and such die off. White people tend to have fewer children than non-white people, so that’s just how that works.
More important is the fact that conservative voters are in the minority, and have been for a long time. While not precisely the same thing, it is somewhat related.
even with white people’s population plateauing, white people will be the largest single group for a good while. Also, while we are seeing the largest total growth from the latino population, and the largest growth per capita being asian, all demographic’s fertility rates drop after their family has been here for ~3 generations as they adjust to the cost of living. So we have white people as the most influential group for quite some time to come.
But, yes, people who identify as conservative republicans make up about 30% of the population. However, due to awful voter turn out, they represent much closer to 50% of the population that actively votes, because they are far more likely to do so per capita. So it will also be a while before their level of influence declines. That is, unless, we suddenly convince 60% of the population to take voting seriously.
I realize you may not want to hear this from me after my mistake earlier, but I believe that is not true. The “popular vote” is also counted in each Presidential election, even though it does not determine anything, and the last time a Republican won that was 2004. For the last 20 years, people’s votes simply aren’t being counted, bc they tend to aggregate together in cities and university towns, rather than spread far out across hundreds of miles of farmland, as e.g. people in Idaho do.
If you live in an area that leans >80% one way or another, then I don’t blame people for not voting, bc their votes won’t affect anything whatsoever. Especially young people, who have a disproportionate hardship to “just get out and vote” - having to take time off from work (retired people don’t), college students may need to drive hundreds of miles to get “home” (which even if they do “often”, still has to coincide with voting time, and comes at cost of sleep, studying, homework, etc.), people with kids have to struggle with daycare, and so on.
If we truly wanted more people to vote, then as a nation we would encourage that - e.g. give everyone a break from work, have appropriately equipped (e.g. staffed) recipient stations, and/or better yet allow mail-in voting. Making votes from some particular areas “count” while those from other areas not count, is very much a feature that was designed - as the very people that did it freely admit, and continue to push forward all the time.
Put another way, voting turnouts heavily correlate with age, aka the ability to vote with greater ease.
I guarantee you - bc it’s simply math - that if every single liberal Democrat were to get out and vote in the next election, thus representing the popular vote by 100% of the eligible people on that one side, it still would have extremely low impact on the actual end result. What would instead have a MASSIVE impact would be a bunch of liberals moving to a state like Texas, and rather than continue to vote from San Francisco or NYC, to influence the Electoral College system from that new location where it has a chance to actually flip it from red to blue, rather than reinforce the already blue still further.
Which has been happening lately - e.g. Austin - but also, I can’t blame people especially women who due to the overall lack of healthcare and toxicity of surrounding neighbors may not wish to do that.
All that said, yes overall engagement will be necessary to combat the issues facing us all - e.g. people need to step up and run for office, or else we end up getting the jokers that we currently have. But it’s nowhere near as simplistic as you make it sound, like all that would be needed would be to “vote”. imho at least!:-)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_they_came_…
Niemöller made confession in his speech for the Confessing Church in Frankfurt on 6 January 1946, of which this is a partial translation:
A large part of the very founding of the USA was due to Quakers escaping the persecution of slave owners, b/c they were so radical in their advocacy to halt slavery. And then it was Anglicans, Baptists, Presbyterians, Methodists, Congregationalists, and other faith groups of all kinds who worked to actually stop it, in the UK and the USA. Sadly they worked against others of the same religions who argued (almost) just as vociferously to continue it…
My point is that religion can do great things, if only it would DO IT. It could help ensure that the worker receives their wages, feed the homeless, take care of widows & orphans (& everyone), be kind and like visit the sick or in prison, and on and on it goes - and to the extent that religious people do these things, that is awesome! But… it takes actually reading the book that is claimed to be “holy” (e.g. “show love to one another - be ye not Karens or Dicks to one another”), and second, it takes courage to actually act upon one’s convictions, rather than merely say in words how much one “believes”.
We have a low tier propagandist in Russia who tweaked the last paragraph:
“And then they stopped coming. Because everything became normal.”
Jokes aside, last week he got accused of committing some kind of crime. Waiting for him to be jailed and the joke to be finished.
Russia seems like a country where Authoritarianism has “won”, and now the USA looks like it wants to join in on that “fun”. :-|
You know, I often think that Putin is a progressive politician. Just the meaning of progress that exists in the society differs to the one that is in the reality
There is an external definition of “progressive” though, part of which is all about minorities rights. Does he really identify himself with progressivism, or does he just think that he’s correct, maybe even that the still he’s doing is so correct that it’s beyond the scale of progressive vs. conservative philosophies?
In contrast, conservativism is all about “traditional values” and authoritarian thinking. So like a progressive may not like LGBTQ+ stuff but they will defend their right to exist, while a conservative will actively work against their existence and even to take steps to force people to conform (e.g. electroshock therapy).
On the other hand, while Russia seems to be pushing the message of conservativism hard, leaving no room for “progressive” thought, Putin himself may be more of an opportunist and simply uses people and even the whole country as a means towards his own ends of personal gratification. Which at his age is probably to leave behind a legacy that will cause him to be remembered (which will definitely happen, but probably not how he hoped!).
I don’t like it. It’s wishful thinking that history progresses in the direction you want.
In contrast, I mean that history is progressing towards more people like Putin and more regions like Russia.
Aren’t they all?
Setting aside whether either of us “like” progressivism - we could get into that but atm I just don’t want to get distracted by it - you might be throwing together the ideas of progress-IVE with progress-ING.
Conservatism can make “progress” too - e.g. abortions are now illegal in many parts of the USA, whereas they were not before, that is a step towards the goal that the conservative Right has had for many decades now. The difference, as I understand it anyway, is that Conservatism want to “return to traditional values”, whereas Liberalism wants to make up new ones, like historically LGBTQ+ were considered bad but liberals want to expand human rights to include the right of each person to choose their own sexuality. Both move in a “direction”, both move “forward”, into the “future”, but conservatives choose their direction as the past, seeing that as good, while liberals choose… as you say, something that came out of wishful thinking, aka a fantasy, that they want to make into reality.
Where I think it gets confusing - to me at least - is when politicians mix it up to claim one thing while doing the exact opposite (or worse, pick and choose a little bit from each side). Like Hillary Clinton despite being a Democrat, was extremely like a conservative (pro-war, pro-big business, having little to no social justice components in her platform iirc, etc.), and George W. Bush despite being a Republican was very much like a liberal (pro-socialism e.g. school funding, feeding the homeless & needy, etc.).
I am no political theorist, but it looks like there is a Theory, and that is where these terms fit, and then there is the Reality, where anything goes:-P.
But anyway, yes you are correct: most parts of the world seem to be advancing towards Authoritarianism. The rise of super-corporations and the effects of globalization and automation probably made that inevitable - after all if corporations are literally more powerful than governments, then the natural reaction of a government is going to want to become stronger, to keep up. But that is progress-ING, not progress-IVE. And Russia in particular had an extremely authoritarian regime before the Bolshevik revolution, so moving away from democracy and towards an autocratic government with Putin or his successor at the helm, is “conservative”, returning to traditional valuations rather than engage in the fantasy play of trying to make a democracy viable.
Which btw is why a lot of people are fleeing Russia right now, to one of those fantasy playgrounds where citizens receive more from their governments. Whether liberalism has any long-term viability remains to be seen, but in the short-term it seems quite attractive, to many people.
Abso-fucking-lutely. Or, at least the smart ones do. But, the crucial point is, not equally so. i.e., some give more back to the People than others, i.e. some are simply better at their jobs. Putin naively believed his advisors when they told him that they would win the Ukranian territory in “3 days”, and now look at what it has cost the nation? Not only does it look increasingly likely that a Russian victory is not inevitable anymore, but as more time passes the cost compounds further and such a “victory” starts to look more and more like an abysmal defeat, in the sense that what was delivered was not as promised.
A ton of people want a “strong” leader, but the hard part is that the mere appearance of strength is not the same thing as the reality of it. Same with Trump in the USA, Boris Johnson in the UK, etc., so I’m not just arbitrarily picking on Putin - as you say it’s a trend progressing across the world right now. Anyway, it’s not that Putin’s message is bad (strength, protection, stability, order), it’s that he is an opportunist who merely claims that he would, but then has actually failed to, deliver upon those promises. And again, Trump failed to deliver upon his as well (mostly), and Boris Johnson too (I mean… Brexit happened, but are people satisfied with that outcome? Polls show that most say they are not, and if they could un-do it they would, but they cannot go back in time).
To my knowledge, there has never been a nation since the American and French Revolutions that has survived as a stable autocratic country for awhile - the cat was let out of the bag, and once people realized that they did not have to bow down as slaves before an overlord, they henceforth refused to. Then again, modern democracies are extremely vulnerable to disinformation campaigns spread by modern technology so… it is not like I am trying to say that one is superior or will win out over the other - in truth I have no idea what will happen:-P - I am just pointing out some components that I do see.
The US joined that club before the ink on the constitution had dried. It has never left.
Okay so now the USA looks like it wants to join in more on that "fun"😄
Not really… the white middle class in the US is coming down from their cozy New Deal high and realizing all the “soft power” was literally just empty propaganda. There is a good reason why the US has inspired some of the most evil events of the modern era - Putin cannot hold a candle to that.
I am pretty sure that genocide is bad - even when the USA/Russia/China/Israel/Palestine/other country of choice supports it.