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   simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Thursday, 14-Nov-2024 08:10:21 JST simsa03
   Always remember: The majority of US-ians wanted this. They wanted the Gaetz, Gabbaed, Rubio, Hegseth, Musk, Ramaswamy to be in charge. They wanted this fascism and they wanted this weird, old and dark America¹, this Kick-your-ass-America. They wanted minorities to suffer, migrants to bleed, thealth care to be abolished and abortion done again sophistically in the back alleys with cloathes hangers. They wanted tax cuts for the rich at the expense of infrasturcture investement for the lesser well-offs. So stop complaining. Stop raging. The US wanted this. And we'll be lucky if we can avert the nuclear bombs and their fall-out. Climate crisis? Fuck off! In the end, in four years time, when people turn up again from the dungeons to the daylight, they'll be happy they survived. "Look, it wasn't all that awful. Didn't he built great autobahns?" All who rage now will fall in line sooner or later. Because, why do you expect any different when Russia of today shows you clearly that you cannot stay apart, that you will be amalgamated with the regime? Until you agree, first hesitatingly, later strongly, and then beating up all others who still resist. You will become this regime because you will have forgotten how it is to be a human being. So you'll start roughing up the migrants, the refugees, the poor, or your students, in what some smartie-ass calls "lateral violence". It surely doesn't feel that way. When you become the regime, exerting pain onto other will show you how little you knew yourself, how little there was a chance that things might turn out differently, and how happy you are to act out your inner murderer. You will happily fall in line. Exactly because you think you are a "victim". Everyone is a victim, that's how tyrannies work. And the leader, he's not the butcher but the one who by acknowledging his own pain identifies it with that of the nation. So that the nation's healing and his very own become one and the same, his pain his looking glas by which he detects what it is that hurts the nation. And you want to stay apart? You wouldn't even recognize whether there was a place left to stay apart on. You will become the regime. And succumb with a sigh, of relief, of joy, of unity, of "family", of acknowledged pain. You will rejoice in your hate. And get out the vote for another term for this regime. Don't kid yourself. You who are the most opposed now will fall in line first. Because there is no difference between populace and regime. Nowhere.
   
   ¹ Alluding to Greil Marcus.
   
   #talkingtomyselflettingyoulisten
   • Embed this notice
     tinydoctor (tinydoctor@mstdn.social)'s status on Thursday, 14-Nov-2024 08:35:40 JST tinydoctor

     in reply to

     @simsa03 As you can see from the screen cap, according to Nate Silver's estimate, Trump won the vote by a margin of 1.4 percent. Trump won because 8.6 million people who voted in 2020 did not vote in 2024. I think it is probable that Harris would have won had those people voted. Of course I was wrong to think Harris would win, so why listen to me? I think many Americans will succumb or least do a go along get along. Not all. We'll see. Do you think I'll "unify" with the Dear Leader? I hope not.

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     tinydoctor (tinydoctor@mstdn.social)'s status on Thursday, 14-Nov-2024 08:36:17 JST tinydoctor

     in reply to

     @simsa03 Or am I kidding myself?

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     simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Thursday, 14-Nov-2024 08:45:28 JST simsa03

     in reply to

     • tinydoctor
     I don't want to answer your question because either way it makes me terribly sad. I wish I could say something hopeful or just help you and your family through these times. And yes, there are always exceptions, the ones who get through mostly unharmed. But that wan't the issue. Look to Germany in autumn of 1944, to Russia throughout 2024... what makes you think there can be a difference between populace and regime? Esp, when the regime ousts those who are againts it first: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c7049jn5kd3o
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     simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Thursday, 14-Nov-2024 08:51:59 JST simsa03

     in reply to

     • tinydoctor
     @tinydoctor
     Ok, so what I can come up with is that I'll try to remind you of your scurrility and oddness in the coming years, the Tent Show, the marbels clicking in your head. I will appeal to all the rotten angels that haunt your spirit, to keep you going by keeping them going, to make them stare into the abyss so taht you won't have to. Let me try to keep you insane, in order for you to save your sanity. And that of your family.
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     tinydoctor (tinydoctor@mstdn.social)'s status on Thursday, 14-Nov-2024 08:58:49 JST tinydoctor

     in reply to

     @simsa03 Els and I trying to plan and act fast, because we expect it to get bad fast. To save our daughter and grandchildren first, then ourselves. We may make it, we may not. Maybe we will being throwing heils along with the rest. We are on the edge of many fates. Watch the step, it's the end of a diving board.

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     tinydoctor (tinydoctor@mstdn.social)'s status on Thursday, 14-Nov-2024 09:07:06 JST tinydoctor

     in reply to

     @simsa03 Thank you. Keep me insane. I'm grateful for your friendship. By the way, some years ago during the Dubya regime, I proposed the Democrats and the Left were not insane enough, the GOP and the right wing were winning because they were willing to go insane to win. I thought our side needed more insanity, in short an Insanity Front. People thought I was joking.

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     tinydoctor (tinydoctor@mstdn.social)'s status on Thursday, 14-Nov-2024 09:10:58 JST tinydoctor

     in reply to

     @simsa03 There's a Hasidic saying (can't remember the specific rabbi): "If you're falling, dive."

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     simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Thursday, 14-Nov-2024 09:32:39 JST simsa03

     in reply to

     • tinydoctor
     The Electric Oracle says that the quote is from Joseph Campbell. How long these times have past... Do you remember Roberrt Blye, Iron John? From 1990. How open the future than felt, how unrealistic any doom appeared...
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     tinydoctor (tinydoctor@mstdn.social)'s status on Thursday, 14-Nov-2024 09:38:01 JST tinydoctor

     in reply to

     @simsa03 Yes, I remember Robert Bly. More for his earlier poetry tho.

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     tinydoctor (tinydoctor@mstdn.social)'s status on Thursday, 14-Nov-2024 09:45:22 JST tinydoctor

     in reply to

     @simsa03 Bly was part of the generation of poets I started reading in the 70s. Kinnell, Plath, Simic, Levine, Rukeyser, Rich, Levertov, Berryman... some older, some younger, but more or less the same cohort. All dead now, I think.

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     simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Thursday, 14-Nov-2024 10:15:54 JST simsa03

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     • tinydoctor
     That was too early for me. Finished high school in 1983, went to university in 1984. In the years before, I read the usual Tolkien stuff but also Peter Beagle, T.H. White, and such.
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     tinydoctor (tinydoctor@mstdn.social)'s status on Thursday, 14-Nov-2024 10:23:27 JST tinydoctor

     in reply to

     @simsa03 Yes, I read Beagle, White, Tolkien, just a bit earlier. My Uncle Jim was a voracious reader. He bought and read books in paperback, and every so often, every month or too, he'd drop off a cardboard box of paperbacks he'd finished, and then I read them. This was late 60s, early 70s. Which was good, mom would only let me check out like ten books from the library every two weeks.

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     simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Thursday, 14-Nov-2024 10:30:16 JST simsa03

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     • tinydoctor
     Of all of them it was the books of White that made me cry for laughter. So utterly funny and so deeply imbued with morality and humaneness. I only came across such books through the partner of my mother, and his friends, who often met in our house. The local library was boring to me. Whn not reading such things, in my teens, I did the Canon, more or less, the Russians, a bit the Germans and French. But White always got me. I guess it was him and is life circumstances that made me fond of the Great Britain of the 1920s.