uriel238

The enemy within rhetoric is a fascist tool used by autocrats to keep public discontent down. Heydrich, when he was running the Sicherheitsdienst realized this is what kept the common NSDAP party followers loyal.

But it only works for a while. You can prolong the effect by arresting / containing / purging / disposing of undesirables ( untermenschen or lebensunwertes Leben ) in large numbers which his why the SD hunted and arrested felonious Jews (as they were tasked to do) but any Jews they could add onto their list. Compare the ICE program to arrest and detain immigrants in the US, where they were tasked only to go after felons, but disregarded that qualifier, overwhelming their detention centers, yet allowing disease and filth to spread among the contained population.

Another method to prolong the effectiveness of enemy within rhetoric is to expand the list of undesirables that are persecuted, to discover that opposing ideologies have penetrated into newly-suspected populations (see also the McCarthyism era, circa 1950s) which is why most Christians are ultimately in danger even in a Christian Nationalist movement, once a state religion is established, those denominations that count as acceptable will narrow until there is only one left, and even then some parishes will be determined to be insufficiently pious.

Similarly, after the July 20 plot failed to kill Hitler, about 7,000 arrests and 5,000 executions followed, though few of them were actually associated with the plot itself, rather were gadflies of the NSDAP party and the SS, ( society offenders who might well be underground / and who never would be missed / who never would be missed ) since politics in the German Reich was conducted with long knives.

Eventually there are more people in the population who are hiding an aspect of themselves from the state and their neighbors then are people who have nothing to hide, which makes a society fecund for organized criminal syndicates to arrange for protection from the state. (The Sicilian Mafia started as a counter to the Holy Inquisition, for example). But hopefully before it gets to this stage the Allies storm Berlin and the genocide engine is shut down.

I still hold to my hypothesis that self-proclaimed alpha-males experience the same kind of body / identity dysphoria experienced by some folks in the trans and enby communities, specifically they feel less masculine than they want to be, and are possibly unable to feel adequately masculine no matter how much they express themselves.

Part of the problem is the failure of patent offices to do due diligence. Granted, this was exacerbated by the lack of an electronic database that tracked prior patents, public domain stuff, and things declared too general to be patented by the courts.

The project in the US to transfer old patents to digital and make them searchable is way underfunded and understaffed, and still is expected to take decades to finish.

The thing is, big companies like being able to win IP cases just by outspending their opponents, so they lobby to keep IP law byzantine and draconian, and to install judges who are either ignorant or just will side with the bigger company.

WTF?

After about fifteen minutes in the sun I feel like something's wrong. Depending on if it's nice and overcast, or a bright summer day, I have from ten minutes to an hour before nausea takes over.

I also have a crazy, almost fetishistic thing about consent.

I might be a vampire.

In the aughts George W. Bush signed an executive order instructing the IRS not to enforce the restrictions on churches regarding political speech non-profits are not supposed to endorse parties or specific candidates, though they can talk about issues).

After that dozens of right-wing political action committees and activism organizations redefined themselves as churches, what are now called parachurch organizations that are tax-free and political.

So yes, it is already a laundering business taking advantage of Christian nationalist leadership who believes in loyalty over principle.

Wow. Is this normal behavior for you?

If England is gone, Imperial France would have prevailed. Heck the war of the first coalition might have gone to Napoleon.

Granted, buggery and interracial marriage would have been legalized sooner.

Public equality and public liberty are the responsibility and purview of government. If they are not, we can't really have government by consent. Instead we have hegemony in which the lower strata are governed by force.

Here in the states, the social norm of taking personal responsibility for all our misfortune and lack of career opportunities allows our industrialists to take credit for propelling themselves to greatness (even when their inherited wealth did the heavy lifting).

So yeah, a latchkey kid childhood (in which I was home alone, because all the adults in my house had to work) figures largely into my lifelong major depression. I suspect our intergenerational mental health epidemic here in the states is informed not only by intergenerational dysfunction (each generation taking the abuse of the previous and then abusing the next) but also by the isolation created by nuclear families without strong communities.

Then there's the matter that we humans tend to blame ourselves for trauma, as seen by studies of mothers who endured a miscarriage, and the disproportionate tendency to blame themselves for circumstances that could not have been affected by behavior (diet, attitude, whatever). Also people who survive the recently deceased often will look to themselves to see how circumstances of the death might have been changed.

Well, I certainly can't make my point to you. You have bested my patience, my fellow lemming.

Newton's Long John Silver was a solid enough performance to warrant a sequel / spin-off, so TTAPD would be like a day to honor Bela Lugosi's Dracula or even James Earl Jones' Darth Vader.

These people have absolutely made their mark on American culture.

Black Friday, the shopping day is a gimmick taking advantage of an already popular shopping day. Not necessarily the most popular or most profitable or even the worst day for shopper shennanigans and violence. But then, it's difficult for capitalist phenomena to not be turned into gimmicks used to market more sales.

Nah, I'm good.

I think an athiest would have a better chance trying to deconvert a Catholic Bishop than I'd have getting you up to speed.