this post was submitted on 18 Aug 2023
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Geez! Why is this shit happening everywhere? It's like fascists got a direct connection to a lot of people's brains.
Billionaires buying newspapers and TV channels in order to propagate their ideas. They like fascism better than socialism.
My take is that there is a link to the fact that energy is getting harder to access
The economy is directly related to energy, economic growth is linked to energy consumption growth. As long as we had plenty of fossil fuel easily available to economy was booming, the "American dream" period was also the period when the US was had a lot of oil field easily exploitable.
Thanks to this fossil fuel energy life was getting better every year for everyone. Everyone was getting a "bigger slice of cake" every year. In this context we've seen a lot of social progress.
Now energy is less accessible and most of the economic growth is going toward the 1% - 0.1% richest. So the "slice of cake" is now stagnating or even shrinking for most of the population. In this context fascism is tempting.
Hot, but probably not too hot take: Other factors aside, people got dumber due to covid. They got literal brain damage. So when a reasonably intelligent person would be able to tell fascism as insustainable, they wouldn't after their second or so infection.
The timing is wrong. The pandemic happened, at least in part, because fascism was already here before it started.
Trump clearly is fascist (and so is Bolsonaro, for the sake of argument), but that's just two samples. Whereas e.g. france got rid of that Napoleon dude (you know who I mean) in favor of Macron.
I was making a much more narrow argument that the pandemic might have been averted entirely if not for the specific Trump policy I linked.
Possibly. Hard to tell how much time that would have bought.
The pandemic got exacerbated in the US because of Trump's dumbfuck negationist policies, but even countries with far tougher positions suffered pretty bad cases of COVID.
The CDC teams Trump shut down were designed to find new pathogens and stop them before they became pandemics. They might have prevented it from ever even leaving China and therefore saved the entire world from it, if they hadn't been dismissed.
There was no Covid until late 2019, Trump, Alex Jones, Putin and other’s followers can’t use it as a Defense.