IMO we don’t need to attribute malice to it, which will drag everyone into a debate about what’s going on inside the clearly broken minds of a few rich men.
The sheer incompetence of it all is disqualifying by itself.
In my experiences arguing with MAGA, the incompetence argument lands a lot more convincingly than the evil argument.
What we are seeing is clearly an act of malice. We need to be honest about that. Trying to obfuscate what we are seeing helps no one. We should use plain English and talk in a straightforward way about what is happening.
I disagree. The nameservers still respond to requests on 53/tcp. It seems like someone messed up a firewall configuration or rolled out a bad server configuration. Shit happens - maybe exacerbated by the DOGE insanity. But there is no indication that this was done on purpose.
It's like shouting that the bridge is going to collapse because you see a few supports buckle. Anybody with eyes can see the bridge is standing and heavy ass trucks are driving on top of it.
Trumps first term was relatively neutered because people just refused to do what he asked. Those supports are gone now though and like the bridge collapse the observable changes happened slowly and then suddenly all at once.
I would agree with you if I had been talking about using "fascism" to describe first-term Trump and his hardcore supporters, but I was very specifically referring to the application of the term toward liberals and progressives who were deemed too moderate on identity politics. And to be clear, by "too moderate", I mean stuff like "advocating nonviolent protests" and "criticizing the weaponization of Title IX at universities".
I think warning about Trump fascism was appropriate and legitimate, but I think using the label as a lazy cudgel to get liberals and progressives to toe a poorly-conceived line did a tremendous amount to erode the term's significance and rhetorical power.
There can be incompetence and malice together in all this. The malicious often leverage the incompetent to further their goals.
One way to get more people on board with destroying government structures is to render the government structures as ineffectual and incompetent as possible.
You want to downplay the malice to avoid arguments about whether it's really malicious. I want to spotlight the malice because it's really fucking bad and a lot of people are going to get hurt, and that's not an accidental outcome.
If it’s malice then it’s an attack. You have react differently to an attack than to incompetence.
The EU made the same mistake with Trump‘s appeasement to Putin. They hoped it’s some kind of clever negotiation tactic but they learned it’s not. It’s just two autocrats teaming up at the expense of Ukraine.
You open with "IMO" but want evidence from me? Lol.
There were many dems who remembered Trump as the funny orange man, didn't really care to turn out against him, and fell for the "both sides bad" messaging that was absolutely rampant on the left (esp with regard to Kamala and Palestine). So no, I don't think the most important rally-the-base rhetoric was to ratchet up "Trump is Fascist" so much as suppress "Both Sides Bad" while we had an election to win.
"IMO" means "in my opinion." You made a statement as a fact, which is why I asked for evidence. Lol.
Agreed the "both sides bad" messaging was a huge factor here. But that's exactly why we should talk about these fuckups as questions of competence. They are unambiguous evidence of a difference in both sides' ability to actually operate a government!
Both sides were bad. Biden and Kamala were terrible candidates for the Democrats to run, and their campaign positioning lacked a unifying aspirational message.
Which was a horrendously stupid tag line. All people saw was "prices not going back." Everyone in America remembers simpler, better times. 1990s race relations alone were far better than they are now.
It is not incompetence to put people with no relevant experience into cabinet positions. It's purpose. Destruction with a huge amount of distraction is the purpose.
The sheer incompetence of it all is disqualifying by itself.
In my experiences arguing with MAGA, the incompetence argument lands a lot more convincingly than the evil argument.