Are you saying there are people who might misrepresent their political beliefs and background, and be disingenuous for some kind of ulterior political motive? And we need to be wary of them and ask probing questions and think critically about what they're saying and what reasons they might have?
Personally, as a veteran of this comments thread, I actually think you might be onto something.
Yes people with nazi adjacent tattos exist in the army. The people who do the examinations can be nazi adjacent too and then those type of people fall through the cracks.
Yes, that sure is how it works in the army. Everyone who's tasked with some responsibility just kind of lets things slide based on their personal feelings or allegiances, and no one notices later "hey this guy has a Nazi tattoo even though Frank was supposed to inspect him" or asks "so what the fuck is up with THAT" or follows up on it.
Also you aren’t really inspected on tattoos after your initial examination (at least when I was in the service).
Yes, you're definitely not inspected yearly for tattoos on any particular system. They're generally pretty lax about that stuff, as is well known, it's just kind of a free-for-all.
If you’re trying to imply I’m not from Maine or didn’t spend time in the military then you’re mistaken
My apologies Corporal
I grew up in Piscataquis county and knew plenty of guys like him
You know lots of people from Piscataquis county who call themselves communists and are really vocal about medicare for all?
Personally i learned about the totenkopf when i was in basic training (in 2001, he enlisted in ‘03 so same time frame) when they showed us tattoos that you can’t have in the military.
Fascinating. So presumably, he wasn't permitted to have this tattoo that you can't have in the military because it's a Nazi symbol? He got it in 2007, and then wasn't permitted to have it in the military when he reenlisted in 2010?
Tell me more about your personal experience with this particular topic, which enables you to speak with authority on it. What were some of the other symbols they showed you? It's lucky that we have some military people and some people from Maine showing up here to speak from a place of authority about why Graham Platner is officially bad and we can't vote for him.
Don't you want an open measurement of the strength between New Yorkers and Proud Boys?
I mean these two scenarios are not mutually exclusive. If you think bullying a squad of ICE people is easy, wait until it's a little handful of Proud Boys with absolutely no legal protections getting chased out like Patriot Front in Philly.
It's complex. There are a bunch of ways it can play out. But I think the Trump forces losing the de-facto legal protections that ICE people have, and losing the pretense of legitimacy that's so far kept them from getting arrested, would be the perfect tipping point for everyone to just get sick of Trump's shit and start tackling them and getting away with it as far as the local authorities are concerned.
There are other ways it could play out, it could be bad or real bad also. I'm just saying that Proud Boys coming out and fucking everything up for this whole operation could come in conjunction with bullying the ICE people away through sheer numbers.
Not exactly.
Two books that are absolutely essential to understanding what's going on now and what can be done about it: On Tyranny and From Dictatorship to Democracy (edit: Freudian slip...). "On Tyranny" talks about a very specific progression of how fascism undoes the law. I'll let Snyder explain:
Most governments, most of the time, seek to monopolize violence. If only the
government can legitimately use force, and this use is constrained by law, then the
forms of politics that we take for granted become possible. It is impossible to carry
out democratic elections, try cases at court, design and enforce laws, or indeed
manage any of the other quiet business of government when agencies beyond the
state also have access to violence. For just this reason, people and parties who wish
to undermine democracy and the rule of law create and fund violent organizations
that involve themselves in politics. Such groups can take the form of a paramilitary
wing of a political party, the personal bodyguard of a particular politician—or
apparently spontaneous citizens’ initiatives, which usually turn out to have been
organized by a party or its leader.Armed groups first degrade a political order, and then transform it. Violent
right-wing groups, such as the Iron Guard in interwar Romania or the Arrow Cross
in interwar Hungary, intimidated their rivals. Nazi storm troopers began as a
security detail clearing the halls of Hitler’s opponents during his rallies. As
paramilitaries known as the SA and the SS, they created a climate of fear that
helped the Nazi Party in the parliamentary elections of 1932 and 1933. In Austria
in 1938 it was the local SA that quickly took advantage of the absence of the usual
local authority to loot, beat, and humiliate Jews, thereby changing the rules of
politics and preparing the way for the Nazi takeover of the country. It was the SS
that ran the German concentration camps—lawless zones where ordinary rules did
not apply. During the Second World War, the SS extended the lawlessness it had
pioneered in the camps to whole European countries under German occupation.
The SS began as an organization outside the law, became an organization that
transcended the law, and ended up as an organization that undid the law.
For violence to transform not just the atmosphere but also the system, the
emotions of rallies and the ideology of exclusion have to be incorporated into the
training of armed guards. These first challenge the police and military, then
penetrate the police and military, and finally transform the police and military.
Trump is a lot weaker than a lot of these "strongmen." He doesn't really have a loyal following; the Nazis had thousands of people looking to roam the streets brawling with Communists. Trump has to pay ICE people to do the same, and they have to hide their faces and cosplay as cops and people get to get up and scream in their faces and nothing happens. And, so far, there are little pockets of resistance from local law enforcement to that final intermingling stage, which is pretty unusual for this kind of thing. Definitely having people screaming at them or rescuing their victims and then getting away with it, or getting arrested for "assault" and then the grand juries refusing to indict, is very unusual. On the other hand, nothing's really stopping it. No cops are actually arresting anyone from ICE, which means this all can continue and escalate.
I would say that Proud Boys roaming around and trying to play the part of the brownshirts would be a great thing, because it would drive the wedge which is slightly inserted between ICE and local law enforcement in a little deeper. Because when ICE and the police really do knit together into a single law enforcement body (which would necessarily be obedient to Trump and not to the law), brother, watch the fuck out.
Oh... I get it. I looked more. So the issue and the complaint wasn't just that an anime image of a totally naked cyborg woman was treated as NSFW and put behind a click-to-show thing or something. That would have been fine, I do feel like that's normal. The issue is that they have some kind of image-alteration gimmick set up which interprets the red cables as blood or gore or something, and modifies the original photo to block out that section permanently. That's weird, yes. I don't think the issue is "even vaguely nude," though.
Actually, incompetent and compromised people are better from Trump's perspective. They're not capable enough to challenge his authority, and they owe him completely, without him they're sunk.
And you have to be really incompetent in order not to be able to muster a challenge for Trump. The man literally shuffles around shitting his pants and doesn't know the basic facts of almost anything. That's why the whole thing is such a motley assortment of weirdos and failures.
I mean, in fairness, that's pretty obviously a nipple.
Yeah. Even if he does turn out to be a Fetterman, that's still a step up to me. At least it is getting people thinking in the direction of actual humans being in congress, and then being judged by their actions and maybe we have to kick them back out and replace them with better, instead of it just all being these robot consultant people.
I realized really not that long ago that it is actually an asset for a certain type of team-building and camaraderie if people don't do much critical thinking, and just parrot with vigor whatever the winning team / officially sanctioned line says. You're always going to have some friction and argument if people are actually using their brains. If everyone's just saying "Stalin was great, that whole alliance with literal Hitler is way exaggerated!" "This progressive US Senate candidate is a super bad guy and evil and we hate him because (well you know)!" and not really thinking twice about either side of it, they can all cheer loud for both, and they all feel comfortable. It's a lot harder to do the work to build that team feeling if people are sometimes disagreeing with you, or telling you you're wrong or getting in debates about things.
It may seem like kind of a minor complaint. Whatever, she's a pop star. I just thought it was weird. Also I felt like it was notable because I haven't seen this style of disagreement in a while on "main Lemmy". I feel like this sort of unanimity of whatever-viewpoint-they-have-chosen, impervious to any logic or reasonable question, is getting more and more isolated to the banhappy instances as time goes on.
Collective human consciousness is full of imagined or mythical dream-like utopias, hidden away behind mountains, across or under oceans, hidden in mist, or deep in the jungle. From Atlantis, Avalon, El Dorado, and Shangri-La, we have not stopped imagining these secret, fantastical places. One of these, Xanadu, is actually a real place but has been embellished over the years into a place of legend and myth, and thus became the namesake of an Internet we never got to see like all of those other mystical, hidden places.
The Xanadu project got its start in the 1960s at around the same time the mouse and what we might recognize as a modern computer user interface were created. At its core was hypertext with the ability to link not just other pages but references and files together into one network. It also had version control, rights management, bi-directional links, and a number of additional features that would be revolutionary even today. Another core feature was transclusion, a method for making sure that original authors were compensated when their work was linked. However, Xanadu was hampered by a number of issues including lack of funding, infighting among the project’s contributors, and the development of an almost cult-like devotion to the vision, not unlike some of today’s hype around generative AI. Surprisingly, despite these faults, the project received significant funding from Autodesk, but even with this support the project ultimately failed.
Instead of this robust, bi-directional web imagined as early as the 1960s, the Internet we know of today is the much simpler World Wide Web which has many features of Xanadu we recognize. Not only is it less complex to implement, it famously received institutional backing from CERN immediately rather than stagnating for decades. The article linked above contains a tremendous amount of detail around this story that’s worth checking out. For all its faults and lack of success, though, Xanadu is a interesting image of what the future of the past could have been like if just a few things had shaken out differently, and it will instead remain a mythical place like so many others.
You had nipple rings the whole time you were in, and they were prohibited in your branch of service, and you just got away with it because... just no one in authority noticed or something?
I've never been in the military but I've known a bunch of people who were, and you are one thousand per cent full of shit.