Also, neo-nazis. Not nazis. Nazis were a very real political group. Some are even still alive. None of these teenagers were even born. Their PARENTS weren't even born.
https://www.npr.org/2025/02/06/nx-s1-5289337/elon-musk-doge-...
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c93q625y04wo
Tell me you really want your personal data in the hands of those people.
How about blaming the people who are actually acting like Nazis, and also the actual self described Nazis who are supporting them and cheering them on and recruiting off of Musk platforming and promoting them, of emptying the word of all meaning, among other much worse things.
The Nazis are pretty successful to have convinced you to debase yourself by sticking up for them and criticizing anti-fascists for simply calling a spade a spade.
So who do you consider worse: the actual Nazis, or people who you believe are emptying the word Nazi of all meaning (boo hoo hoo)? Because you're siding with and defending the actual Nazis from being called what they are. Is there a word for what that makes you?
If you wait for unassailable academic applicability, when you finally deploy it your prison guards won't care.
A quick sampling off the top of my head: The First Consigliere throws double Nazi salutes on national TV and smirks in ambiguity when questioned whether he intended it, the President defends a Nazi march as "very fine people", violent private groups serving their political ends have been placed above any (federal) prosecution, and the administration is actively boasting that they will remove undesirables by creating the largest deportation in the entire history of the nation using the same laws abused for the WWII Japanese internment camps.
The label may be rude, but it's not unreasonable... and the more reasonable it is, the better it is to be rude!
You aren't having a debate, its a mental street fight, and you gain respect by proving you know how they think and meeting them there.
Its why I say the dems are always wrong. I know that the only converastion is from using their own facts and then their own values.
The dems are always wrong, they do corruption badly. Trump pardoned 1600 people, and made 2 billion or something from 2 meme coins right before he was inagurated.
What do the dems have to show for it? 6 pardons?
So the Repubs are up 1594 pardons and billions in meme coins?
Did Trump do anything illegal? no! He exercised his powers. See! the dems can't even be corrupt or serve their own self interests effectively.
https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJA_jUddXvY7v0VkYRbANnT...
I innately want to believe that a comprehensive refutation grounded and logic and citations will win the day, but that doesn't seem to be how it plays out.
If you don't believe in facts and truth, you are just as big of a problem as Trump is.
More like... Truth is important to convey, lies are not permitted, but meticulous and detailed truth simply doesn't work against lies with better marketing.
You shouldn't surround your truth with a bodyguard of lies, but just throwing on more Truth as a raw ingredient doesn't advance the cause of people actually adopting Truth.
I like to say that the US used to have "the marketplace of ideas" as a goal, but has now become "the cesspool of ideas", which isn't a good thing.
I don't know what the solution to that is, but I don't think lying is going to get us out of it.
I don’t believe in giving up on that ideal, but I think it’s a fiction in the sense that actually achieving any semblance of a “free marketplace of ideas” is a vastly complex problem we have no capacity to solve right now. Humans aren’t a collection of simple, isolated units, we’re a vast colonial fungus. We struggle to understand individual biological organisms, but we assume that all of humanity talking to itself will be a system transparent to study, that it operates on simple principles. Ask a skilled marketer if he or she believes in the free marketplace of ideas.
Solving the problem would involve building a completely different social system from the ground up. Since we can’t do that, and nobody knows how to start, what I’m suggesting is that people try to study the communication networks as they are now and the memetics people are responsive to and build, carefully and cleverly, narratives which will actually have the practical consequence of bettering people’s lives, and that they use the truth to figure out how to do that and what that narrative should be. It’s not really lies or the truth, I’m calling for a pragmatic attempt to use the extremely flawed communication channels at our disposal to do the best we can.
What’s that mean? In how cool and fun they are? In their capacity to win elections?