I am moderately surprised that this didn’t have anything to do with Trump or Elon Musk. I was pretty curious what activist organization Erik Uden ran. But, the punchline wasn’t that, and was in the Mastodon replies.

Interestingly, two days before Oracle deleted my account and all servers associated with it, I publicly criticized Oracle’s CEO in a viral post for promising dystopian AI surveillance technology to his investors.

https://mastodon.de/@ErikUden/113879369270806353

What a weird coincidence

No, I was just confused between boyfriend versus husband. I didn’t pay enough attention to be properly aware of the details and made some mistakes in my summary. I think the other people with better knowledge in the comments here are the ones worth listening to.

I tried to read up, to educate myself since I clearly am confused about aspects of it, and I got as far as:

The attack was planned by Jeff Gillooly, then-husband of fellow American figure skater Tonya Harding, and his co-conspirator Shawn Eckardt.[1][2][3] They hired Stant and his uncle Derrick Smith to carry out the attack. Gillooly and Eckardt

… and that was too many names, and I stopped caring.

Oh, shit, TIL. I never knew any of this stuff.

I was completely joking. Her boyfriend was the one that physically bludgeoned Nancy Kerrigan, but it certainly wasn’t because he’d suddenly developed a passionate interest in figure skating, I don’t think.

Not true, it was Tonya Harding’s boyfriend they had to worry about. All Tonya herself did was give them dirty looks during competitions.

• 1932 Germany
• Two months ago, thanks guys, Palestine and immigration policy are saved now

This one, at least as applies to liberals in government in the USA, is a lot more accurate.

Oh and also they need some money for medical bills now. They’ll be sure to send you some texts about it.

Wait: So after the KDP tried to do a violent revolution against the fragile post-first-revolution government of 1919, including explicitly rejecting the idea of holding elections because they might not go the KDP’s way, they were still so butthurt about the fashion in which the rest of the government had defended itself against getting shot and overthrown, that a generation later they still couldn’t stomach the idea of getting together with the SDP even to ally against literal Hitler. Even though the SDP by that point didn’t give a shit about their own attempted overthrow anymore, and just didn’t want the Nazis. And in your mind, that’s all the SDP’s fault for not just getting shot or exiled, like the KDP had in mind in 1919.

Like I said: The real life example is very different than the meme. The Marxist tried to shoot the liberal 13 years before, and was still so upset about the shooting-back that they got, and so, the windmilling and FUCK YOU. Great. Sounds like a fun bunch to interact with. Oh, and also, when they finally DID get in charge of things in the East, after the war, it was a fucking nightmare that lasted for decades. Which was part of the SDP’s objection to it in the first place. Great stuff.

The liberal in question had spent the last decade handing military equipment to the brownshirts to massacre communists

Citation?

They also hadn’t been massacring, that I know of, it was street fighting, almost all non-fatal. You can show me if I’m wrong, though, that’s just my impression.

before staffing the cabinet with fascists

and making Hitler chancellor

Incorrect. The conservatives did both of those things. The liberals had gotten castrated by the refusal of the KDP to work with them in any respect, and so they couldn’t really do anything against either the KDP or the fascists, and so the left went down as did the liberals as did the rest of the establishment, without any unified front against the fascists. But the liberals had tried very explicitly to ally with the KDP against the fascists, and the KDP refused, calling the social democrats “the main enemy.”

I am sure there is some portion of blame to go to the SDP as well. Pointing fingers after a catastrophe is a time-honored tradition and maybe not a useful one. My point was that in the one real-world example of this that I know of, the Marxists absolutely refused to form a coalition against the fascists, if it meant they would have to work with the liberals, and the fascists were able to win amongst all the leftist infighting. So the particular brand of finger-pointing that exists in OP’s meme definitely has a real-world counterexample.

I actually don’t think there is a strong enough left in the US for this to be a useful model of what just happened in the recent election here. But it wasn’t for lack of trying, by the portion of the supposed far-left that is on Lemmy.

Lemmy.world is such a weird place, man. I also like how in the propaganda version, LW is like this crazy liberal place where you will get banned for saying what based on this comment and voting is clearly the majority view.

So this story actually happened, in 1932 Germany. No one had the gun at the beginning. The liberal said to the Marxist, “Holy shit that guy is really dangerous, let’s stop him.” The Marxist said “FUCK YOU YOU’RE REALLY DANGEROUS” and started swinging his fists in every direction. The liberal was still trying to talk with the establishment conservative, to gang up on the fascist, while the Marxist was still windmilling to no particular purpose, when the fascist got the gun. The first one he shot, of course, was the Marxist. The anarchist stood in the corner, facing away from the room, and said that turning around would be giving consent to what was going on, and so he refused to do it.

The Marxist, wounded, left the room, what was left of him, and found the communist room. When he got there, the communists shot him, and killed him.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communist_Party_of_Germany and search for “KPD leaders purged by Stalin”

And so then I say, “Well, that’s not completely the point. There is almost no big organization you interact with that doesn’t have at least some part of it devoted to some monstrous crime. Your phone is made with slave labor, the people who grow your chocolate have never eaten chocolate, your soda is made in factories where villages used to be before armed goons evicted the former residents and killed anyone who wouldn’t leave. If 0.01% of Google’s operation is helping genocide then they’re actually ahead of the curve, because the whole modern world is evil in specific parts of it.”

And then the guy with the sign starts screaming “Yes that is EXACTLY THE POINT!”

In Pinto’s defense he did, after some soul searching, decide not to fuck the passed-out girl. Congrats, Pinto.

Yeah. It’s absolutely nuts.

In the 60s, if you were a man in a movie, you could hit women if they were getting crazy, to set them straight.

In the 80s, the heroes of movies could commit rape (Revenge of the Nerds) or child molestation (Indiana Jones) and still be the heroes of the movies.

In the 90s, the simple fact of a character being gay, or God forbid trans, was its own comedic element, without anything additional needing to be added.

Things have changed. Like changed a lot.

The culture shift is stark sometimes when you watch old stuff.

On the other hand, don’t let them turn that into an excuse. You know what dealt with trans rights in a pretty honest, raw, and understanding way, in the mid 1980s? Fucking Hill Street Blues. One of the cops gets together with a woman, he’s happy to be with her, and then the other cops start giving him hell for it because she used to be a man. He gets disgusted and angry, goes over to her place, and she lectures him about it and sets him straight, tells him to figure out if he wants to be with her, but don’t try to turn who I am into some kind of thing I did to you, or make me feel bad about it. He sort of accepts it, because she clearly has a point, and that’s the end of the episode.

Hill Street Blues, man.

It’s the best. I used to think Oppenheimer telling Harry Truman in the oval office that he had blood on his hands, was the best, but this is my new favorite.

This is America. And in America, what do we do when our boss tells us to violate the constitution? That’s right: We punch him in the face.

FUCKING YES

Make them work. Say no. Don’t hope that someone else will stop it for you.

There’s a wonderful story from the Nixon years. This is heavily edited for clarity:

I said to Henry, “You remember what I said in my letter when I came here? Well, you have just called my bluff and my loyalties are to the American people and I’m refusing the assignment, I am leaving.”

And then Kissinger said something that I will never forget. He said, “Your views represent the cowardice of the Eastern Establishment.”

I just came up out of my chair swinging, I was so damn mad, and missed him. He ran behind his desk and said, “I am only kidding.”

I said, “Well, you don’t kid about something like this,” and just stormed out of the room.

Later:

Haig came flying out of Henry’s office. He said, “What the hell did you say to Henry? He is furious. He’s throwing books around the room and screaming and yelling.” So I told him that he said I was to be the staff coordinator and I wouldn’t do it.

At that point Haig then looked at me. He said, “You have had an order from your Commander-in-Chief and you can’t refuse.”

I looked at him and said, “Fuck you, Al, I just have.”

Edit: “Henry” is Henry Kissinger. Kissinger asked William Watts to violate the constitution, Watts said no, Kissinger insulted him for it, so he tried to punch Kissinger and cursed out the secretary of defense and quit to get a different job. Be like William Watts.

Not really. Big company incomes, along with pretty much any other economic metric you want to choose, very consistently do better under liberal government in the US. It is one of very few actual consistent and simple truths about economics and politics in the world. And Trump is infinitely worse than an average Republican. He’s likely to crash the entire economy, or worse.

https://www.epi.org/press/new-report-finds-that-the-economy-performs-better-under-democratic-presidential-administrations/

They don’t seem at all reluctant, no. Why are you saying they’re gleeful, though? How do you know?

Not only that: They rely on people pre-emptively obeying them before even being threatened. Zuckerberg, Tim Cook, all those guys, they know better. They’re also doing fine money-wise. They had every option to just tell Trump to get fucked, and mess up their company if he wanted to make that decision. They wouldn’t have been out on the street, whatever happened, and they would have had a chance to do something noble instead of just optimizing for the money function like a malfunctioning AI superintelligence.

One of the critical factors in fascists taking power is “obeying in advance.” Because, yes, they can’t be everywhere. Fuck that. I fully support this message.

Edit: Typo

They haven’t even stopped killing. Most of the death at this point is from injury, disease, and starvation, and I’m sure they are still not letting any food come in. And they’ve still been shooting people. And they did an air strike on a refugee camp in the West Bank yesterday, too, which they had been leaving alone for the most part.

Presumably, they’ll keep doing that until someone shoots at the IDF, at which point it will suddenly become a big deal that “Hamas broke the ceasefire” and they’ll resume unapologetically shooting people at scale. Starvation and disease, meanwhile, will be doing their gruesome work throughout, unabated.

I don’t honestly know whether Netanyahu engineered the timing on purpose, to give an opportunity for craven propaganda outlets to make a big fanciful noise about what a genius Trump is because he fixed Palestine, unlike that loser Joe Biden. I could see it either way: It would cost him nothing, but on the other hand, why bother? I’m not sure he really cares what people say about Trump. Either way, he gets what he wants.