Am I obliged to sacrifice my time to correct nonsense? I don’t think so.

Do your own due diligence if you don’t believe me.

I just don’t feel like responding because it would take some effort to refute all of that. I think anyone who does even half a decent amount of research will quickly realize that it’s either simply wrong or cherry picking. It’s pointless anyway to try to convince people who are so entrenched in their opinions.

But hey, it’s good to know that people are impressed just by mentioning a few random sources.

You’d be better off reading the Wikipedia article about Orwell instead of forming an opinion based on random social media comments.

Not sure if we are talking about the same George Orwell here or how you came to the conclusion that he was a “right-wing POS” - he was definitely not.

I wonder what George Orwell would have to say about all this… nvm, he already said everything there is to say.

All good points, but I’m not at all sure that will matter. These things are only relevant if there are still elections.

Here are a few points that suggest to me that Drump is planning to turn the US into a dictatorship where there will be no more elections.

• It is an open secret that Drump is preparing to declare himself president again or again be candidate in a mock-election (Putin regularly gets elected as well), which would be a violation of the Constitution.
• After his last term in office, he already attempted a coup, which, as you say, was not punished as such.
• He is building up a secret police force through (barely) hidden tax increases in the form of ubiquitous tariffs – namely the ICA, which he is staffing exclusively with loyal followers.
• He (and his followers, who cannot hope for impunity via the “the President is king” Supreme Court decision) are already disregarding applicable law and court decisions. It’s unlikely that they would do that in such a manner if they would fear to be prosecuted once a new administration comes along (they would be because what they do is so brazenly illegal).
• He is already persecuting political opponents (such as the judges who convicted the January 6 insurrectionists).
• He openly calls for the persecution of dissidents, including among the civilian population (most recently Bruce Springsteen, for example).
• He has already brought the media (both traditional and, in particular, social media) into line, as evidenced by the completely inadequate coverage of the massive 50501 protests, to name just one example among many.
• Even without the unlimited powers granted to the president by the Supreme Court, the US system is highly vulnerable to a coup by the incumbent government due to the concentration of power in the hands of the president (he is commander-in-chief of the army, can declare a state of emergency and is then also commander of the police and National Guard etc.).

The list goes on – even though Drump has only been in office for six months. If this continues, and I am convinced it will, the government will soon make civil resistance impossible – as in Russia, where by no means everyone is a Putin supporter, but his opponents have been silenced by force.

Of course, I don’t want to paint a picture of doom and gloom, but unfortunately I am honestly convinced that Drump wants to replace what little democracy still exists in the United States with a dictatorship. And he is not even doing it by himself - I think he is just a straw man for the guys pulling the strings (the one percent who all support him).

I completely agree with you except for one thing: I don’t think things will get better – at least not on their own. On the contrary, I think the situation will actually get much worse, because I believe that US institutions have long been infiltrated, as exemplified by the Supreme Court’s absurd ruling that the president is above the law. This has, in my opinion, nothing to do with democracy anymore.

Nevertheless, I wish you all the best and am keeping my fingers crossed for all the good and decent US citizens.

Edit: I’m from Germany and I post things like this because of our history, which is well known in the US too. Don’t do as we did back then, act while you still can!

Another appropriate word that comes to mind is traitors.

I see, the land of the free. It’s really a a great democracy you’ve got going over there.

Drump is even worse in that regard, or am I mistaken? I think he’s worse in every regard imaginable.

This US administration is truly a danger to the entire world.

Could you please finally lock Drump and his henchmen up for all their crimes and put some halfway decent people in their place?

For a devout Christian, this could seem like God’s punishment for misdeeds that society has allowed to go unpunished; for rational people, it looks more like the consequences of unbridled greed at the expense of the environment.

Either way, there will be much more of this in the future.

Yesterday, I finally talked my parents into canceling MS356 and switching to LibreOffice and Thunderbird.

Now, the excessive subscription fees for MS365 goes to them instead.

If Microsoft keeps this up, I might even manage to persuade them to switch to Linux at some point.

Well, even if it was a patriotic song, Springsteen was first. And he is a good guy - especially compared to those morons.

Yes, Born in the USA is by no means a patriotic anthem, but rather a critical song about the miserable situation of veterans and workers in the US. The MAGA people are just too stupid to understand that.

Springsteen has repeatedly criticized the fact that the song is being misused in this way and has long been a vocal critic of Drump.

It has become abundantly clear that the US is now run by organized crime. How else can one describe all this?

I hope that doesn’t sound too pessimistic. I wouldn’t say all is lost, especially since there are definitely positive developments, of which the Fediverse is just one example among many.

Overall, however, I fear that technology alone will not change society, since it is always embedded into society itselfs and therefore functions according to its inherent logic.

So in Western countries, I unfortunately have little hope for the “mainstream internet” with its ruthless platform economy, because real change for the better would either require meaningful antitrust regulations or has to be forced by the consumers themselves —both seems highly unlikely, as the past 20 years have clearly shown in my opinion: Today, there are even more and even more powerful global monopolies, while people just won’t stop to buy their stuff at Amazon because it is usually a little cheaper and so convenient that hardly anyone is willing to even consider all the comparable offers that do exist.

The same seems to be true of the media: fewer, but even more powerful conglomerates with significantly greater reach than before and platforms that can pretty much do whatever they want without losing too many users (x obviously censoring many viewpoints and run by a open fascist, reddit killed it’s API as if it wasn’t important so on and so forth).

In short, I fear that unregulated turbo-capitalism has done to the internet what it always does once monopolies have formed: Enshitification.

And this “enshitification” of our most important media channels is now showing it’s ugly face in all the negative impacts on most democracies worldwide. I mean democracy only works with free discourse, the willingness to compromise, and reasonably informed voters. Unfortunately all of this contradicts the logic of today’s so-called social media—at least when it comes to the few major platforms with their own political agendas and their greed for profit.

It’s almost like a large-scale social experiment, with the result that there seem to be many profoundly evil people whose malicious beliefs are artificially pushed by billionaire “gatekeepers” to a point where they can appear socially acceptable, a few good people who have less and less say due to social media logic and content overload, and a large majority who just stand by and watch civilization go down the drain because they’re too lazy to change their habits and just rely on someone else to fix this mess, if they even recognize the problem in the first place.

In this context, I think the definition of public opinion established by political scientist Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann back in the 1980s is once again highly relevant:

“Public opinion is the opinion dominant in public which can be expressed without risk of social isolation.”

The spiral of silence : public opinion, our social skin (1984)

Noelle-Neumann emphasized that public opinion is not just any opinion, but specifically those views that are visible, vocal, and supported by the majority, making them safe to express in public. This ties closely to her “Spiral of Silence” theory, where individuals may refrain from expressing minority views due to fear of social isolation.

The great problem of our current media situation seems to be that these public opinions are increasingly artificially constructed since they just seem like majority opinions, even if they are not, because they get pushed so hard by the influential crooks controlling major parts of the Internet (social media and search engine monopolies and so on).

So I think today’s web has become almost the opposite of what early Internet utopians had in mind.

I wish you all the best!

If you still have to play the one-country-versus-the-other card, I can’t help much. However, the facts are clear: minorities are already being unlawfully persecuted in the US and it’s obvious that it’s going to get worse. So what are you trying to say with this comment?

Of course I agree with you when it comes to making concessions to the culture in which you live. I mean, it is of course completely unacceptable if you are not prepared to recognize the self-evident rights of women, for example (and of course the rights of those who do not feel they belong to any of the usual genders).

Where we seem to differ a bit, however, is that I don’t think much of national concepts. Please don’t misunderstand, I am of course well aware that I enjoy privileges as a German citizen and I am also aware of the rich culture of our sphere and appreciate it very much - all that made me who I am. It’s just that I’m not proud of my home country as an abstract concept - I never felt the need to. And I think that does more harm than good.

Take for example the AfD in Germany or MAGA or any other political movement that explicitly embraces national concepts of origin: These people always invoke some imaginary notion of the noble people, you know, in case of the Germans, the concept of the poets and thinkers and so on, but none of this intolerant, misanthropic bunch have even an ounce of what they claim about themselves - they are complete idiots, many even monsters, and I think, these very people are the downfall of culture. They will do just as the Nazis under Hitler already did, systematically killing the poets and thinkers.

Again, please do not misunderstand: I also know Swiss culture well - I lived there for five years and am grateful for that wonderful time. I just value personal relationships and openly lived, shared culture much more than the prescribed preservation of traditions and the like (I experienced that in Switzerland as well and it was great!).

In short: I think culture is a living thing that changes. That’s why I’m happy when people abide by the law, especially the Constitution, which demands tolerance in Germany as well as in Switzerland.

I don’t think any other adaptation or even assimilation is necessary beyond that - except, of course, that you have to be prepared to participate in society, as you say, which of course requires learning the national language.

But apart from that, I think everyone should live as they please, as long as it doesn’t interfere with other people’s lives.

There may be a difference between Germany and Switzerland these days. We in Germany seem to be much more divided, and especially in East Germany there seems to be a conviction that we should go back to Nazism - I firmly reject that because it’s not culture, but inhumanity and anti-culture with reference to the achievements of people who have nothing whatsoever to do with all this, but would turn in their graves if they knew for what evil purposes they were being instrumentalized.

Please excuse this long, surely superfluous rant. It’s just that, as a German, lately I have to be ashamed of what some of my compatriots are demanding with false reference to our culture. It’s probably a bit different in Switzerland, although you also have some people like that in the ranks of the SVP and elsewhere.