this post was submitted on 23 Jan 2024
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His intellectual defenders make their case that the danger is overblown.

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[–] pearsaltchocolatebar@discuss.online 91 points 7 months ago (3 children)

He literally said he was going to be. I'm not sure why this is even a question.

[–] OpenStars@startrek.website 10 points 7 months ago (1 children)

It is not. Conservatives are gaslighting you, and the media is trying to sell their clickbait. Possibly unpopular thought: at some point it becomes our own fault for choosing to engage? Like the big bad wolf asks "are you home right now?", where even if you answer "no!" then you have still fallen for the trick? (i.e., of COURSE he would be a dictator, that's not even a point, but why allow them to control the conversation to switch to the talking points that they choose, rather than driving our own points that we would rather be discussed, like what to do about school shootings or climate change and such?)

Innuendo Studios has a fascinating whole entire video series called "The Alt-Right Playbook" if anyone wants to learn more about their limited variety of tactics, that are nonetheless extremely effective for those who do not recognize them.

[–] SoupBrick@yiffit.net 4 points 7 months ago (1 children)

I really enjoyed that series. Very informative.

[–] OpenStars@startrek.website 6 points 7 months ago

IRK? It totally changed my method of responding to the world... I used to painstakingly attempt to respond unless it was extremely obvious that someone was 110% a troll, but now I know that even halfway reasonable people simply cannot be "reasoned" with, if they have an entirely different worldview than me. i.e., don't give someone a list of 100 reasons to not allow Trump to win - they don't care (after the 1st impeachment, and the 2nd impeachment, and January 6, and everything else), nor are they looking for facts and willing to change their minds. I would change my mind in a heartbeat if the facts pointed in a different direction, but they will not, b/c it is not "facts" that are causing them to support him, even if for some people that once was true.

Ofc I still fall for the tricks, but like 90% less often now:-).

[–] xor@infosec.pub 10 points 7 months ago (1 children)

i don't see how there's any other topic in the discussion at this point
"well moving on from the plan of a brutal, unending dictatorship, what's your position on corn subsidies?"

[–] Zorque@kbin.social 0 points 7 months ago

Gotta feed the news goblins.

[–] linearchaos@lemmy.world 4 points 7 months ago

And he's currently fighting in court to receive dictator benefits for breaking laws.

[–] antidote101@lemmy.world 37 points 7 months ago (3 children)

Project 2025 is a plan to reshape the executive branch of the U.S. federal government in the event of a Republican victory in the 2024 U.S. presidential election.[2][3] Established in 2022, the project seeks to recruit tens of thousands of conservatives to Washington, D.C., to replace existing federal civil service workers it characterizes as the "deep state", to further the objectives of the next Republican president.[4] Although participants in the project cannot promote a specific presidential candidate, many have close ties to Donald Trump and the Trump 2024 presidential campaign.[5] The plan would perform a swift takeover of the entire executive branch under a maximalist version of the unitary executive theory — a theory proposing the president of the United States has absolute power over the executive branch — upon inauguration.[6]

[–] xor@infosec.pub 9 points 7 months ago (2 children)

"yeah sure, but biden is really bad too...
basically the same thing..."

  • pseudo-leftists on hexbear
[–] squiblet@kbin.social 2 points 7 months ago (1 children)

They tend to act like democrats are actually worse.

[–] xor@infosec.pub 0 points 7 months ago

i never understood one...

[–] OpenStars@startrek.website 0 points 7 months ago (1 children)

I gave up on hexbear entirely, and lemmygrad too. The sheer tone of voice finally was enough to convince me. Plus, responding to my comment like an entire week later after everyone and their brother (& sister, & mother & father too) has already jumped all over it and I long since stopped responding - they obviously are simply looking for an excuse to work in a "dig", not even realizing what self-pwns they were dishing out the entire time. Consent should matter to people... but sadly it does not always do so.:-(

It is such a truism - actual scientists are all like "well I am not 100% certain of this, but I think what might be going on is...", while it is the literal, actual children that come back with "nuh uh, I know you are but what am I? your [sic] stupid!"

My experience on Lemmy has improved 1000% since blocking both instances, after the upgrade to v0.19. I am not here to babysit.

[–] xor@infosec.pub 2 points 7 months ago (1 children)

it's pretty weird... im pretty sure it's half actually paid trolls, and half mentally ill people...
i've seen it on every leftist group that wasn't heavily modded...
the goal being, of course, make leftists seem like absolute garbage people...
i mean, on hexbear it's been, yes a torrent of people digging on me, intentionally misinterpreting things i say and acting enraged, and extremely repetitive...
it's doesn't seem organic...
...
but if you go to any leftist meetup in person, they're all the nicest, most considerate people ever...

online it's always caricatures of the super unreasonable leftist memes...

[–] OpenStars@startrek.website 0 points 7 months ago (2 children)

I know what you mean - it sounds like a conspiracy theory, except there's tons of evidence to support it which makes it by definition not. Or I mean, that that stuff happens, not necessarily about any one situation in particular.

And Putin's troll farms have been caught influencing both sides of debates involving popular topics before, it is not hard at all to imagine it happening again.

Also sheeple are fairly mindless - once something like that is first made, it would involve far less effort to just allow it to coast forward from there....

So at this point it actually could be entirely authentic douchy people, just living their best lives by acting that way - it is sad to think that people could be really like that, but I am sure that some at least are.:-(

[–] xor@infosec.pub 1 points 7 months ago (1 children)
[–] OpenStars@startrek.website 2 points 7 months ago

Not just there - it was also cross-posted to World News@lemmy.ml. Yes, absolutely "conspiracies are never real", wink. :-P

[–] xor@infosec.pub 0 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

did you know the term "conspiracy theory" was invented by the cia to make conspiracies seem like a crazy idea?
conspiracies are constantly happening, you just can't identify it until way after the fact...
they've fiiiinally declassified the proof that the vietnam war was started with an imaginary attack... not even false flag, there was just no ship that sunk.
operation northwoods was declassified, where the joint chiefs of staff, of all the military branches, signed off on a plan to fake a cuban terrorist attack and crash a real drone plane... with whole fake backstories on each passenger.
the leftist online spaces became dominated by shills sometime around occupy wall street... or at least that when they shifted to the "shrieking incoherent accusatory left" narrative.
...
even r/conspiracy got turned into a nazi circle jerk...
....
in person, leftists are nice as hell...
i'm pretty sure when they do go online, it's only private forums and over 7 proxies

[–] OpenStars@startrek.website 0 points 7 months ago (1 children)

I think it is important to be skeptical about everything - including about being skeptical.:-)

For most things the extreme amount of effort required to figure out the truth makes finding out not worthwhile - hence people with money, time, and dedication are going to win out over those who have lesser investments.

Which makes places like hexbear and lemmygrad seem all the more insulting, if opponents of leftism think that will work. Except it's far more complex than that, bc at the same time it ACTUALLY does work, for the average joe. Then again, we cannot forget the more simple explanation: they might like to encourage such an extremist solution, but there truly are people that talk and think like that, and the latter sort did not need much encouragement to do so only a safe space to allow that.

Like the antivaxxer movement: it likely was not created externally so much as heavily promoted that way. i.e. it may have had an organic beginning, and be largely organic now, only needing promotion there for awhile to help grow it up to the national scale, hehe some might say to make it "go viral":-). If only there was some vaccine against misinformation - which in that case though, there is, and even reading a Wikipedia article about vaccination would have been sufficient innoculation.

[–] xor@infosec.pub 2 points 7 months ago (1 children)

i can say, ive met very nice, dedicated leftists in person, who say that they gave up on all online forums because it's 90% shills...
and it does work.
if all reasonable discussions are violent shit all over by "super hardcore leftists"... who's going to participate in that conversation other than unhinged leftists who see that as a good way to talk to people?
it's definitely partly natural, but then steered by "the man" or whatever...
one dead giveaway is the upvote/downvote totals...
come in with a calm head trying to just talk to people, that disagrees with some point... you'll get bombarded with troll posts, the same exaggerated emotion memes (super hard laugh, picard head slap, pig poop) over and over, trying to get you to react angrily...
and your downvotes will be more than total votes of the original post, the upvotes will be more than all of the other votes...
there's a good breakdown of tactics called "The Gentleman's Guide to Forum Sliding" out there...
really, as long as who is upvoting/downvoting on this, everything is easy to manipulate by a very small troll farm.. .
...
my strategy is just continuing to say what i think, and blocking anyone who seems sorta like a troll.
incidentally, i was banned from r/communism for posting the aforementioned guide, while being accused of posting it as a brag of how i'm manipulating the forum... even with a photo of vietnamese guards executing prisoners with a "sent to gulag" message...
...
tankies aren't real...

[–] OpenStars@startrek.website 1 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

Yeah I do not doubt it - I've seen that happen in every Reddit sub I have ever visited. Quite frankly the problem is a general "information security" one for which there is much theoretical support - e.g. how does a cell avoid manufacturing a virus, how does a body avoid letting its cells grow malignantly, how does an engine avoid letting its parts bash around and destroy itself after one slips loose from its fashionings? Pro-Tip: most often the answer is "it does not", and the system gets destroyed. To counteract such contamination takes EFFORT, which is only possible b/c we do not exist in a closed system and instead have far more energy being thrown at us than we currently use even the tiniest fraction of. Nature has demonstrated SOME solutions for us, but ofc the wider issue remains, and any time the tiniest crack in the armor appear, something will manage to slip in, that is just entropy and there seems no way around THAT (possibly even in theoretical terms, at least within this singular universe; though extremely high efficiency could substantially flatten the curve).

Here on Lemmy several people including me have talked at length off and on over the months about how to make a better discussion forum environment where that does NOT happen. e.g. so many people say that karma should not be used, EVER, in an automated manner but I take a different approach. Certainly there should exists magazines that use that approach - like 4chan - but I for one would like to choose to not visit them:-P. Instead, I want people to talk who are vetted, e.g. someone who is not already known to be an absolute rabid asshole who cannot, WILL NOT hold their tongue, and instead delights in ruthlessly making fun of others, confident in the knowledge that nobody will stop them, and others will even egg them on. e.g. I am in fan of moderation, especially if it could be done in a mostly automated way. Wikipedia does this well imho.

Anyway, my idea would fail miserably in the situations you describe, b/c while wikipedia relied on the idea that people are inherently good actors, on the whole, in a place such as hexbear or lemmygrad, they seem to be... not? Innuendo Studies described that AT LENGTH in a video series Why Are You So Angry, discussing the tactics used by 4chan boards that predate the Alt-Right but where those tactics were later refined to work to even greater affect to involve someone who literally controls nuclear technology and could start WWIII on a whim, short of outright treason to stop it (hey, remember when someone did that at the end of the last presidency, and all the Republicans said "naw, don't worry about it dude, you did the right thing"? good times, good times, when WWIII almost began right then and there...:-P). So, moral of this self-centered portion of the story: I am not so smart. The approach used by wikipedia and the scientific peer-review process, does NOT apply when there are "bad actors", especially bots that can be spun up by the thousands and mimic the actions of humans.

Even so, I still think that there is something to the idea of Trust authentication, that is used to such good effect in so many places. It is vulnerable too, as are all things. And the thing I have to always remind myself: any tool can be used to whatever effect its wielder wants, so "those places" can use that SAME EXACT tactic to make themselves into wretched hives of scum and villiany (to borrow a quote from Star Wars:-D), just as other places want to do the exact opposite. The unfortunate part there is that they refuse to label themselves as such - i.e. they call themselves "leftists", the same way that the GQP (laughably) says that it is "Pro-Life", and the same way that those who showed up at the January 6 riots in the USA White House were "defending" (ahem) the Constitution of the United States of America. Even though all of those do the literal, full, and polar opposite of what they say.

Which, get used to it, is their RIGHT to do so, and is a condition that will remain forever - hence e.g. cancer is going to do its thing, and it takes a doctor to force it to turn around; and rioters are going to do their thing, until police or shopowners or whoever stop them; and so on and so forth for entropy to be overcome by effort. Can you tell how I've given up? Viruses will always do their thing, and I cannot cease the production of all viruses in all cells across the globe, I can only do my little part near me, so that is what I do, and I leave the rest alone.

[–] Kraiden@kbin.social 1 points 7 months ago

Where are you quoting that from?

[–] pottedmeat7910@lemmy.world 36 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Let's never ever find out.

[–] superfes@lemmy.world 7 points 7 months ago
[–] gregorum@lemm.ee 22 points 7 months ago

He will certainly try, and that’s bad enough.

[–] FlyingSquid@lemmy.world 15 points 7 months ago

Really, truly yes.

[–] Bytemeister@lemmy.world 9 points 7 months ago

He said he would, and he literally tried to. Were it not for a handful of DC police and Secret Service personnel, he probably would have.

Anyone who doubts this should probably abstain from voting, or really making any critical decisions until their brain damage can be evaluated.

[–] WastedJobe@feddit.de 6 points 7 months ago

Trump doesn't have intellectual defenders.

[–] Jaysyn@kbin.social 6 points 7 months ago

When people tell you who they are, believe them.

[–] xhieron@lemmy.world 2 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

Maybe not, but you know, just to be on the safe side, better vote against him just in case.

[–] anon6789@lemmy.world 1 points 7 months ago

Call me overly cautious, but I don't really want a president that jokes about becoming a dictator either...

[–] rustyfish@lemmy.world 1 points 7 months ago

First, I reached out to Roger Kimball, editor of The New Criterion, a highbrow journal of arts and ideas. Its most recent issue included a defense of Henry Kissinger, a lament comparing brutalist architecture to the increased acceptance of tattoos (which digressed into a complaint about the popularity of women’s soccer in Europe), and a review of a new translation of Plato‘s dialogues. Kimball himself has written several books and essays that warn against what he says are declining cultural standards. He seemed like the perfect person to place Trump in a historical context and show that our fears are overblown and that he is simply the latest iteration of the hurly-burly of American politics — rough around the edges, perhaps, but not much different from what we have faced before.

Oh, this truly sounds like someone anyone should listen to. Let’s see how grounded in reality these intellectuals defending Trump are. This will be good.

„What Trump said on January 6 was that you should proceed down and patriotically make your voice known. That is called petitioning Congress. There is a constitutional right to do that, and the more you look at what happened on January 6, the weirder it looks. There were clearly scores of federal agents in the crowd abetting people.”

Ah! I see. Intellectuals.

[–] Hyperreality@kbin.social 0 points 7 months ago

People thought Hitler was a bit of a joke and the danger was overblown in the 1920s.

[–] Paragone@lemmy.world -2 points 7 months ago (1 children)

See his trajectory.

See how having power & being threatened both alter his trajectory in the same direction, towards totalitarianism.

The economic rug-pull that is going to hand the Repubs lots of backlash vote, is likely to enable them to make him GEOTUS, which is their wet-dream

( go on www.wikipedia.org and search for GEOTUS and it'll land you on Donald Trump's page.

GEOTUS stands for "God Emperor Of The United States", and wikipedia altered their search-engine logic to hide that they have Trump as GEOTUS: the search-page-result-statistics don't include any GEOTUS page, but the search works )

Combined with the GenZ nonvoting, the total Muslim not voting for Biden, and the economic pain's backlash vote, I think Biden has little chance in 2024.

IOW, I believe that the reverse-takeover of the kkKonfederates is going to happen, and the beginning of US Civil War Part2 is certain, beginning within 3y of Jan1 2025.


the root-cause isn't political-left or political-right, the root-cause is Kahneman System-1 fighting-off considered-reasoning, aka Kahneman System-2.

It's the same world-wide.

"Putin Country" is a book on how rural Russia is the same as MAGA territory, just with different labels.

Rural Israel, rural Syria, the shitty education that condescended to the "lower class" students, and the "lower class" students were taught just how much contempt the "intellectuals" had for them, and they have equivalent contempt for the "intellectuals"...

that is part of it.

Bluntly, humankind is fighting-off considered-reasoning, reverting to imprinted-reaction, just as herdbeasts live in imprinted-reaction.

No moral-anxiety, when only-imprinted-reaction ( Kahneman System-1 ) is running, see?

Read "Thinking Fast & Slow" by Daniel Kahneman, & then see that all the politics is just "makeup" on this System-1 going "alpha" and obliterating System-2/considered-reasoning's having any say.

Globally.

Boosting petrol-consumption breaks the threat of loss-of-authority/alphaness ( never mind that it makes the planet more likely to drown in wildfires, megadroughts, extra-hurricanes, berzerk flooding, temporary deep-freezes, lethally-roasting regional temperatures, trashed ports due to sea-level-rise, etc, that "isn't real", right?

Not to imprinted-reaction mind, aka limbic-mind's "reasoning". )

so .. it is an animal-"need", right?

All the different variants of "supremacism" are all just animal herdbeast "alpha" bulling.

Corporate, oligarchic, class, legalism, etc.

Just variants on the underlying herdbeast politics.

The Great Filter is going to be pruning-down this species rather horribly, later this century.

Nothing infuriates a tantruming toddler with guns the way implacable-accountability does.

And that is all that humankind's unconscious-mind is: toddler-with-guns.

Trump's a symptom, not a cause.

So's Putin.

So's both Hamas & the Israeli gov't.

every continent has its own version.

Human nature.

It hasn't changed, and either Universe succeeds in force-changing it, this century, or our epitaph is going to be that we wouldn't grow-up, and we .. force-extinguished ourself.

_ /\ _

[–] krashmo@lemmy.world 1 points 7 months ago

You have some good points in there but your sentence structure and formatting makes this read more like the diary of someone battling a mental illness than a nuanced political opinion. If you want people to take you seriously I'd suggest you streamline things a bit. Just a suggestion.