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   Susan Kaye Quinn 🌱(she/her) (susankayequinn@wandering.shop)'s status on Friday, 25-Apr-2025 06:07:47 JST Susan Kaye Quinn 🌱(she/her)

   this is gonna sound crazy but

   (enough) people gotta decide that Andrew Tate and Elon Musk and Donald Trump are not actually the good guys in this story

   that's pretty much it

   that's what needs to happen

   • Embed this notice
     Paul Cantrell (inthehands@hachyderm.io)'s status on Friday, 25-Apr-2025 06:07:45 JST Paul Cantrell

     in reply to

     @susankayequinn
     I agree, with this bit of nuance:

     It’s not just about convincing people that they’re the bad guys in terms of making bad decisions; the idiotic damage they do is a large part of their selling point. It’s about making them uncomfortable and vaguely humiliating to be associated with. Not so much “bad guys” as “losers.”

     I still maintain that one of the few things that would instantly hurt Trump’s reputation with his supporters is being subjected to middle-school-style public physical humiliation, like being pantsed on live TV. Like the dog getting his head stuck in the “Cone of Shame” in Up.

   • Embed this notice
     Paul Cantrell (inthehands@hachyderm.io)'s status on Friday, 25-Apr-2025 06:33:41 JST Paul Cantrell

     in reply to

     @susankayequinn
     I think this all fits together somehow. I do think your OP is on target. I don’t think either alone is sufficient: destruction of things they care about won’t suffice by itself, and neither will humiliation. There’s some kind of combination of these where personal social and material harm intersect.

   • Embed this notice
     Susan Kaye Quinn 🌱(she/her) (susankayequinn@wandering.shop)'s status on Friday, 25-Apr-2025 06:33:42 JST Susan Kaye Quinn 🌱(she/her)

     in reply to

     • Paul Cantrell

     @inthehands while I agree with humiliating fascists, pretty much without reservation, I'm not talking about approaching someone who thinks these are the "good guys" & talking them out of believing that

     That's not gonna work.

     They will need to be convinced by the actual destruction of things they care about. And they will need to (correctly) attribute that to these dudes who did it, not some trans kid in Maine.

     Meanwhile, I found this a good framing of where we are: https://www.liberalcurrents.com/the-present-crisis-and-the-end-of-the-long-90s/