You’ll get no argument from me ;-)

Well, if they wear the flag, display the Swastika, do the salute or go on about white supremacy, that’s a pretty solid hint.

A Nazi is (originally) a particular brand of fascism, but much like champagne, it has become a generic term for the whole family of ideologies. The “ur-fascist” definition by Umberto Eco, who was witness to the fascist regime of Mussolini, highlights a few key traits if fascist ideology like a cult of tradition, emphasis on machismo and action over thought, obedience over independence, contempt for pacifism and weakness and populism that leverages frustrations, conspiracy theories and fears to rally its followers against some perceived enemy.

Not every trait is fascist on its own, but neither does some movement need to tick all boxes to be fascist. There’s sure to be some grey area, but if you have people rushing to inflict violence on anyone looking differently, spurred on by a guy promising to restore some ambiguous past glory by blaming the economic and social troubles on foreigners and beating the war drums… yeah, well, eventually the indicators start piling up.

Consider the distinction between accurate and efficient. If your way of speaking becomes technically correct by some standard, but inefficient for the purpose of communication, is that really a desirable outcome? Does it have to be perfect, or just good enough to convey thoughts?

type=exclamation&intent=approval&attributes=intense,profane&content="Hell Yeah"

BLESSED BE THE MACHINE AND ITS SPIRIT

I think this is one of those cases where I ignore the providence of the image for the entertainment value.

Certainly preferable to some other AI slop people produce.

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I also spent two weeks as a live-in cat sitter for a friend on vacation. He (the cat, not the friend) would yell at me, and when I approached him, 1/5 times he’d lead me to his bowl. The other 4, he’d walk to the couch then look at me expectantly. If I laid down, he’d hop on my chest, then flop over into my arm and start purr-snoring within a minute.

Hell Yeah

I miss him. But it’s a good pain.

As protests go, I like this. More visible and tangible than sitting somewhere they’ll never go, but not really violent (at least not as violent as other things you could throw). I also liked the shoes that got lobbed at Bush for the symbolism.

Cheap shot.

Not saying it doesn’t hit.

An elegant meme for a more civilised age

Hell Yeah

They’re all the wrong way

Some people just want to watch the world burn

Depending on the stakes, yes. It is categorically better than not voting at all.

There is still the spoiler effect to consider, which may make voting third party a worse strategy in the complex, blind game that elections are. In elections where that isn’t as big of a risk, it’s a good way to indicate dissatisfaction with the status quo and the parties on offer. If there is a particularly convincing third party that many agree on, it also communicates what people do want.

In presidential elections, in a country where the president already had so much power even before this whole shitshow, when one candidate is a much greater threat to the basic feasability of resistance, it’s a dangerous gamble, risking much for a fairly slim chance at an all-or-nothing victory.

FPTP is one of the many things that are fucked up, but not every election has that kind of impact, and particularly if you’re in states where one party is so dominant that the spoiler effect is negligible anyways, it may be the more valuable choice.

Agreed on all points. It’s kinda like a robbery – you probably won’t arbitrarily hand a random stranger your wallet, but if they point a knife, things look different.

Though in this case, it’s the robber barons getting mugged by their victims.

If, for whatever reason, the police collectively decides to no longer enforce the commands of those in power and no other group steps up to violently defend the status quo, a peaceful revolution in the form of civil disobedience would be conceivable.

Getting to that point without some measure of violence is what I believe to be unlikely – not impossible, mind you, and I very much hope for it, but it’s quite likely that an attempt to create such a consensus would (at least initially) be violently suppressed just as violent resistance would.

Even if it is achieved, the new society will need to guard itself against opportunistic egoists seeking to exploit the new power vacuum. Here too there may be at least an initial period of violence until that new dynamic is clear.

As long as there are people willing to hurt others for their own benefit, they will have to be fought.

But we should try to fight as little as possible.

The success of diplomacy and peaceful protest hinges on the existence of a credible threat that the alternative (war and riots, respectively) will be worse. Even if a (mostly) peaceful solution should be found, I suspect there will have to be some measure of violence to get that point across.

As others point out, the elites won’t go down quietly, and as long as there are bootlicks willing to fight on their behalf, they’ll rather let their bootlicks die than make concessions.

So while I don’t think violent revolutions are good for their own sake, they may be a necessary evil for good ends.

Cicero lived during the fall of rome

*he fall of the Republic. The Imperial era (Principate + Dominate, if you distinguish) in the west lasted another five centuries and its successors took a while to fully fragment. The eastern empire is a whole different chapter.

My own amateur attempts at understanding sources (and Bret Devereaux’s blog) make me want to point out that Rome’s decline wasnt such a clearly defined moment as the ascent of Caesar.

Tacitus was another century and change later. He will have grown up in the tail end of Nero’s reign end, witnessed the Year of Four Emperors and spent most of his early adulthood during the reign of Domitian, whose authoritarian style further curtailed the Senate’s powers.

Before that background, it’s not hard to see why he’d believe the fall of Rome to be imminent, depending on when exactly he wrote that sentiment. I don’t know what it’s from (but maybe someone else here does?), but I’ll place it shortly after the end of Domitian’s reign, about 100AD.

By the assassination of Domitian, Tacitus was 40. The city had (supposedly) been founded ~850 years ago, the Republic had been formed ~600 years ago, survived for ~450 years, and the Imperial era was ~150 years old. It would go on for another ~380 years. If we calculate from the legendary founding 753 BC to the deposition of Romulus Augustulus in 476 AD, Rome lasted just about 1200 years.

He obviously couldn’t have predicted any of that, but writers predicting the impending doom is such a common phenomenon, you could make a drinking game out of it: Go through the list of famous Roman authors and drink every time you find one bemoaning how far they’ve fallen from the glorious past. For the sake of your liver, you probably should limit it to Rome, because that trend is still going strong.

Revolutions stand or fall with public support. Voting is the most visible way to establish public sentiment. People like to quote that only a third of the US actually elected Trump, but do we have a clear idea of just how many oppose him, if so many voters apparently never expressed their opinion in any measurable way?

Doing nothing and complaining on the internet is useless. Doing something is scary. If you knew you had your community at your back, wouldn’t you feel more confident to step up?

You’re right that people need to know that voting won’t be enough, but it’s still important in order to communicate the public opinion that separates a revolution from a coup.

A building company using a prop shovel for some clip, except the shovel’s lacquer got chipped so they decided to re-coat it in order to have a pristine shovel.

600 bullets in a gun magazine

Counting shots in John Wick was fun for that reason: the count actually works out

The bulletproof cars, on the other hand, are still an issue.

I feel like it was a cheesy space opera, until it tried to pivot to the Marvel style action comedy dressed up as hero epic.

Cheesy, theatrical one-liners (“You failed, Your Highness. I am a Jedi, like my father before me.”) are replaced by quips that try to be humorous (“Every word of what you just said was wrong”) instead. The textbook dramatic arc of conflict, catastrophe and resolution is replaced by a comicbook escalation of ever greater threats. The final conflict of Ep VI was spiritual in nature, where Ep IX saw the Evil Wizard Reborn reach into his magic hat and pull out a fleet so massive that the only way to destroy it is a supercharged reprise of “dying lightning blast”.

Whether they’re good isn’t relevant here. Both are cliché executions of their respective genres, but cliché doesn’t have to be bad, nor does it strictly need to be good to be entertaining. My point is that they’re different genres to begin with, and it’s that genre shift that prompts fans of one genre to find the things they dislike about the other.

I think I could have enjoyed the Sequels as an “entertaining enough in the theatre” series, if they weren’t such a jarring departure from the setting and associated expectations they were tacked onto.