[ExI] Do you still think I'm paranoid?

Tue May 7 13:09:12 UTC 2019

John, this entire post is tending toward perseverating.  We have a list member who might be able to offer guidance on that: BillW.

spike

From: extropy-chat <extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org> On Behalf Of John Clark
Sent: Tuesday, May 7, 2019 5:55 AM
To: ExI chat list <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org>
Subject: Re: [ExI] Do you still think I'm paranoid?

On Mon, May 6, 2019 at 9:39 PM Dan TheBookMan <danust2012 at gmail.com <mailto:danust2012 at gmail.com> > wrote:

>> I honestly don't know if Trump will become a dictator, but I think there is a pretty good chance he will try, and 53% of Republicans would be OK with it if he did.

> Given that Republicans make up only around  24% of US voters, that means they simply won’t have enough support.

Dictators don't gain power because a majority of people are in favor of him but because a hard core minority are willing to kill and die for him .

52% of Republicans would support postponing 2020 election <https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/onpolitics/2017/08/10/52-percent-republicans-would-support-postponing-2020-election/555769001/>  

Note that that story is from 2017. Let’s look at something I recall seeing a few years back:

https://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/presidential-races/286105-majority-of-democrats-want-third-term-for-obama

The difference is Obama didn't publicly endorse the idea, Trump did. And before the presidential election Trump said the election would be rigged and even after he won he prove to be a sore winner, that wasn't the case with Obama.

> In my view, both parties are fascist in many ways,

If Bernie Sanders wins he could very well turn out to be a bad presadent but that's OK we've had plenty of those before and the USA is still not a hellhole; Trump is already a bad presadent but the thing that scares me is he's well on his way to becoming a bad dictator. 

> especially accepting fascist economic and monetary policies

Yeah bad presidents might tax you too much, but not enough to prevent you from buying the newest iPhone, however I'm talking about something qualitatively very different. Fascist dictators cancel elections, lead chants to imprison their political opponents, try to change the law so they can sue newspapers and close them down when they write articles against them, jail reporters who don't cooperate, order TV networks to stop satirizing them, tell police not to be gentle when they arrest somebody, and develop a cult following that will believe anything they say, such as vaccines cause autism or windmills cause cancer.

I don't use the word "fascist" lightly, I'm not in the habit, as some on the left are, of calling anyone who's politics I disagree with a fascist, but when it comes to Trump supporters I sincerely think the word is justified. Today it's foolish to claim there is a moral equivalence between the two major political parties, at one time there was one (and I was a Republican for most of my life) but there is no equivalence anymore. The Democrats have done stuff that is very unwise and unfair but it would be going way too far to call them fascist. A fascist political party is as bad as things can get, the sort of thing you saw in Europe in the 1930s,  and things are not currently as bad as things can get but only because the American Fascist Party (aka Republicans) still has some competition from a very large sometimes silly and often dysfunctional non-fascist party.   

> Will you at least admit that the US would be much better off with far less executive power regardless of who’s in office?  

YES!!!

> Anyhow, I wouldn’t panic just yet. And panicking here is extremely unlikely to do anything about it. 

If you can keep your head when everybody around you is losing his then you probably don’t understand the situation.

John K Clark

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20190507/dc7bd966/attachment.htm>