US Politics Mega-thread - Page 5297

On October 03 2025 03:10 LightSpectra wrote:


Anyone who figures out a successful strategy to combat disinformation will genuinely be heralded as the savior of civilization.

I saw an article in Ars Technica recently that said prebunking (information campaigns before disinformation has a chance to flourish) has shown some promise against election denialism, but it's unclear how to use the same tactics to fight anti-vaxxers and whatnot.

On October 03 2025 01:39 KwarK wrote:

What gets me is that there is a fundamental misunderstanding of what is wrong with the Holocaust. They literally don't get why it is bad.

The Nazis asserted that Jews were poisoning the nation and, if left unchecked, would destroy the German people. They asserted that by fighting the Jews they were really acting legitimately and legally in self defence.

The critical issue with their assertion is that they made the whole thing up. Jews weren't destroying Germany, Nazis were destroying Germany and blaming Jews.

It's like a guilty man insisting that his incarceration is basically the same as Nelson Mandela's. The comparison works as long as you have absolutely no understanding of why it was wrong to imprison Nelson Mandela.

On October 03 2025 10:14 RenSC2 wrote:

It's basically the same as a debate tactic where you acknowledge and dismantle the opponent's position before he lays it out. It can be quite effective.

Once someone has laid out a position and gotten it stuck in the audience's mind, even good evidence will be hard to dislodge that thought. However, if you systematically dismantle an argument before anyone argues it, the audience will be skeptical of the argument before it's even presented by its proponents.

The problem is that people would literally have to pre-bunk every bit of disinformation that will come out. Sure, we can catch a lot as it gains a small toe-hold in the zeitgeist and then pre-bunk it, but it still has a toe hold. Meanwhile, some bit of disinformation can spread across the world in minutes in the social media age. Hard to pre-bunk some lie that didn't even exist until someone made it up a minute ago.

You also have the issue of getting the pre-bunking in front of the necessary audience and its rare for the boring old truth to spread as fast as some salacious lie.

So while it does work in specific cases, it'll never be enough to stay ahead of the disinformation campaigns being waged worldwide.

On October 03 2025 10:43 Razyda wrote:


Really, thats your problem?

"Once someone has laid out a position and gotten it stuck in the audience's mind, even good evidence will be hard to dislodge that thought."

Thats propaganda.

On October 03 2025 07:01 KwarK wrote:

+ Show Spoiler +The world is truly fucked.

On October 03 2025 10:43 Razyda wrote:
"The critical issue with their assertion is that they made the whole thing up. Jews weren't destroying Germany, Nazis were destroying Germany and blaming Jews."

You simply not cold enough, bolded is true, italic is not. After loosing WW1, in 20 years they became a superpower. Their internal politics wasnt destroying Germany, it was external one which destroyed it.

On October 03 2025 11:00 RenSC2 wrote:

Yes, the problem is that it's an impossible task. So propaganda flourishes and the truth is lost. You are a victim of it. You have been brainwashed by right wing media and no matter how much good evidence you are presented with, you refuse to accept it because the right wing media's disinformation campaign got to you first.

On September 27 2025 22:15 Phyanketto wrote:

MSNBC. Chopping a story or EO or Legislation down to its most palatable parts and not discussing any kind of implications essentially normalizes the right's praxis of gish galloping scandal.

On October 03 2025 11:40 Razyda wrote:


You really have not a clue do you? I am an avid reader of left wing media. (to be fair some here believe that:




Really? ) So our definitions may differ. Ultimately remove adjectives then read the news.

On October 03 2025 04:50 KwarK wrote:

I disagree. If the problem were CO2 emissions then the impact of what we're doing on TL is about as impactful as an individual forgetting to use a reusable cotton shopping bag. Sure, you can say that CO2 is either irrelevant or it's not, but scale matters. We can identify that there is an important issue, and that there is technically a link between an activity and that issue, without assigning that activity more weight than it is worth.

Big picture, sure, internet idea spread is changing things. No argument there, you'd be insane to deny it, 100% right. You make a new youtube account and within a few videos it is putting right wing content in your feed. You watch a right wing video and it suggests more and pretty soon you're chanting that the Jews will not replace us.

But that's algorithms, influencer culture, big tech, botnets upvoting/retweeting content, Russian money flowing to DW people, and so forth.

What we're doing here is early 2000s era text posting on a forum dedicated to an ancient video game. We don't even have a feed here. None of us are doing shortform clickbait video content. It's just not relevant.

On October 03 2025 08:48 LightSpectra wrote:


It's making people willing to vote for anti-establishment rhetoric, which some factions on both the left and the right are gaining from at the expense of neoliberalism. I don't think the future is set in stone.

On October 03 2025 17:42 Simberto wrote:


One would think that, but at least here in Germany, and apparently in a lot of other places, left-wing anti-establishment is not gaining anything. All the votes go to the hard right.

Of course, having a viable left-wing party that is not kissing russian ass would be a nice thing. But the right doesn't seem to care about any of that.

On October 03 2025 10:43 Razyda wrote:


What gets me is that people dont understand where Holocaust came from. It came from bunch of people believing that they are better than the others (sounds familiar?) See once you believe that, you giving yourself mandate to be right on everything by the virtue of being better. Pretty much whatever evil shit you do can be justified from that position.

"The Nazis asserted that Jews were poisoning the nation and, if left unchecked, would destroy the German people. They asserted that by fighting the Jews they were really acting legitimately and legally in self defence."

"I had enough of his hatred. Some hate can’t be negotiated out."

There is more to it though. To push genocide nazis had to dehumanise jews enough, that killing them will be about as evil as killing a fly, however they also had to make sure that they are seen as humans, enough to paint them as threat, and justify going this extra length to kill them. Right now there are exactly 2 words achieving this effect: Nazi and paedo.

"The critical issue with their assertion is that they made the whole thing up. Jews weren't destroying Germany, Nazis were destroying Germany and blaming Jews."

You simply not cold enough, bolded is true, italic is not. After loosing WW1, in 20 years they became a superpower. Their internal politics wasnt destroying Germany, it was external one which destroyed it.

Dont take me wrong I hate nazis more that you ever will. You see this is generational and geographical difference. For you WW2 is interesting because lots of people were fighting and dying. For me those lots of people were parents of my uncles/aunts (kinda second line), siblings of my grandparents, my great grand parents and so on.

"It's like a guilty man insisting that his incarceration is basically the same as Nelson Mandela's. The comparison works as long as you have absolutely no understanding of why it was wrong to imprison Nelson Mandela."

For comparision: I think liberals are Charlie Mason.

Edit:



Really, thats your problem?

"Once someone has laid out a position and gotten it stuck in the audience's mind, even good evidence will be hard to dislodge that thought."

Thats propaganda.

On October 03 2025 11:40 KwarK wrote:

Razyda coming in out of the blue with the idea that Nazism made Germany strong. That their internal policy was successful, it was only foreign policy where they went wrong.

Weirdly enough, that’s not a thing historians think. Historians think Germany was already a European great power in 1933 due to the demographics, cutting edge science and engineering, and industrial output. Historians think that the spending projects of the Nazis are inseparable from their cannibalism, that they could only sustain the state by consuming first the property of German Jews and then the wealth and people of other nations. That without all the murder it all falls apart.

But you know who thinks that it was the Nazis who saved Germany? Who thinks that they had some great domestic policy ideas? Nazis. And also Razyda. Isn’t that weird?

Edit to explain in more detail just how much bullshit the Nazi economic mirage is.
In 1933 military spending was 3% of German gross national product, by 1936 it was 13%, by 1939 it was 23%. Almost 1/4 of all labour was nonproductive, not helping improve the quality of life of Germans, used entirely for destruction, by 1939.
The economy was transformed into a war economy which did a lot to lower unemployment but devastated consumer spending. The material consumption of Germans fell dramatically under the Nazi economy, they worked harder than ever and yet had less and less to show for it.
Between 1936 and 1939 rearmament was consuming 60% of all capital investment in Germany, new factories, new equipment, new jobs, were all going into the war.

That's an absurd amount of Keynesian stimulus, almost overnight the Nazi government became by far the largest employer and investor in the German economy, everyone had a job because the demand of the total war economy was so high. But anyone who understands Keynesian stimulus knows that it doesn't actually make the economy bigger, it doesn't increase the number of workers or the number of hours in the day, it rearranges the existing economy. You're taking value that was being used for one thing and using it for another. If the government is suddenly spending vast amounts of money on nonproductive purposes then this must surely either be balanced by massively increased taxes which literally take value out of the private economy to make room for the government or by inflation.

There are a few answers to this.
1. Debt. In 1932 it was about 8.5b RM. By 1939 it was 47.5b. (and by 1945 390b).
2. Seizures. The property of all German Jews, then later the considerable treasuries of Austria and Czechoslovakia.
3. De facto seizures of bank balances. They created a second currency called MEFO bills. When a German arms supplier was paid for weapons they weren't paid with cash, they were paid with MEFO bills which they then declared were redeemable for cash. They issued shitloads of these and made them hard to redeem. They issued far more MEFO bills than they actually had cash for, by 1938 there were 6b RM of MEFO bills outstanding and never redeemed. In theory the supplier had been paid, but in practice they had an IOU, an off the books government debt that would never be cashed. Industry was forced to hold their "cash" balance in MEFO bills rather than actual cash.
4. Actual seizures of bank balances. The Nazis gave German workers jobs in rearmament and paid them. The German workers deposited their pay at the bank. The banks were then required to "loan" their money to the German state, despite there being no possibility of repayment. The German state then had money to pay the workers. The German workers were being paid with their own money, they had been converted to slaves, unable to actually spend any money on themselves. Not that it made a huge difference to them because there weren't any consumer goods to buy in the first place. And if you were a German who didn't like your new status as essentially a slave the Nazis were happy to have a discussion with you about your thoughts on labour relations.
5. Out of control real terms inflation. Germans had jobs, they were getting paid, but the German economy wasn't producing consumer goods for German consumers, it had been converted to a total war economy fueled by out of control debt spending. Paper money was in ready supply but actual goods were hard to come by. Costs spiraled and there were shortages everywhere. The Nazis addressed this in two ways. First, they simply set wages and prices from the top. It didn't actually address the issue but they're a police state and didn't need to. And secondly, they banned trade unions and murdered rabble rousers who complained about working harder than ever for less real pay.
6. Literal slavery.

The Nazis were incredibly bad at economic management. Like absurdly so, and in a way that is absolutely inseparable from the fact that they were Nazis. You've got to remember that these are not educated people, they were idiots with absolutely no clue what they were doing but were confident that they could micromanage it all with sufficient dedication to the ideology. They bounced from crisis to crisis, papering over the cracks with ever increasing amounts of theft. Can't pay your workers? Rob the bank. Workers complain that the price has gone up? Force the stores to sell it at a loss. Store complains about selling it at a loss? Seize the store, execute the owner. Can't run the store at a profit? Rob the bank again. And, as with all totalitarian systems, it was extraordinarily corrupt. If you knew the right person you could get your MEFO bills redeemed, and of course they'd take a cut. If you knew the right person you could have the prices set in your favour. If you knew the right person then you could complain about the raw materials to your factory being too expensive and the supplier would get a visit letting them know that their patriotic duty was to give you what you needed at the price you wanted.

Nazis are cannibals. Always have been. Always will be. Nazi apologists like Razyda always like to imagine "what if" scenarios that don't make sense like "what if the Nazis just stayed within Germany" or the perennial "what if the Nazis tried to fight WW2 in a rational way instead of dedicating half their war effort to eradicating the Slavs". Well, if they did that then they wouldn't have been Nazis. Nazism as an ideology cannot be separated from the spiral of seizure, slavery, murder, and war, because that is the only fuel the engine of Nazism burns.

Recommended for further reading.
https://www.amazon.com/Wages-Destruction-Making-Breaking-Economy/dp/0143113208
I can put it on google drive for anyone who wants it.

On October 03 2025 15:18 EnDeR_ wrote:


I don't think internet forum discussions are meaningless. For me, it's been a good way to see different points of view and understand why some people make the choices they make. It may sound silly, but this forum has been the main source of my knowledge for US politics.

The other thing is that LLMs are trained on our (as in the broader context) text. Enough GH types talking about genocide enablers or the multiple ways democrats are particularly ineffective, it will get confidently spouted by some bot to some kid somewhere. The points you make, in aggregate, make their way to people's eyeballs.

On October 03 2025 22:44 KwarK wrote:

It’s a question of scale. You say the forum posts have impacted you. Okay, but you’re not relevant either to the problem either. That’s the problem with the assertion that it we stopped engaging bad actors on TL and focused on good political posting on TL then we’d have fixed late stage capitalism on TL by now. Well, one of the problems at least.

Enough of it in enough places could have an impact as you say. But that’s an argument you make in support of building a million twitterbots, it doesn’t impact the reach we have here.

On October 03 2025 11:40 KwarK wrote:

Razyda coming in out of the blue with the idea that Nazism made Germany strong. That their internal policy was successful, it was only foreign policy where they went wrong.

Weirdly enough, that’s not a thing historians think. Historians think Germany was already a European great power in 1933 due to the demographics, cutting edge science and engineering, and industrial output. Historians think that the spending projects of the Nazis are inseparable from their cannibalism, that they could only sustain the state by consuming first the property of German Jews and then the wealth and people of other nations. That without all the murder it all falls apart.

But you know who thinks that it was the Nazis who saved Germany? Who thinks that they had some great domestic policy ideas? Nazis. And also Razyda. Isn’t that weird?

Edit to explain in more detail just how much bullshit the Nazi economic mirage is.
In 1933 military spending was 3% of German gross national product, by 1936 it was 13%, by 1939 it was 23%. Almost 1/4 of all labour was nonproductive, not helping improve the quality of life of Germans, used entirely for destruction, by 1939.
The economy was transformed into a war economy which did a lot to lower unemployment but devastated consumer spending. The material consumption of Germans fell dramatically under the Nazi economy, they worked harder than ever and yet had less and less to show for it.
Between 1936 and 1939 rearmament was consuming 60% of all capital investment in Germany, new factories, new equipment, new jobs, were all going into the war.

That's an absurd amount of Keynesian stimulus, almost overnight the Nazi government became by far the largest employer and investor in the German economy, everyone had a job because the demand of the total war economy was so high. But anyone who understands Keynesian stimulus knows that it doesn't actually make the economy bigger, it doesn't increase the number of workers or the number of hours in the day, it rearranges the existing economy. You're taking value that was being used for one thing and using it for another. If the government is suddenly spending vast amounts of money on nonproductive purposes then this must surely either be balanced by massively increased taxes which literally take value out of the private economy to make room for the government or by inflation.

There are a few answers to this.
1. Debt. In 1932 it was about 8.5b RM. By 1939 it was 47.5b. (and by 1945 390b).
2. Seizures. The property of all German Jews, then later the considerable treasuries of Austria and Czechoslovakia.
3. De facto seizures of bank balances. They created a second currency called MEFO bills. When a German arms supplier was paid for weapons they weren't paid with cash, they were paid with MEFO bills which they then declared were redeemable for cash. They issued shitloads of these and made them hard to redeem. They issued far more MEFO bills than they actually had cash for, by 1938 there were 6b RM of MEFO bills outstanding and never redeemed. In theory the supplier had been paid, but in practice they had an IOU, an off the books government debt that would never be cashed. Industry was forced to hold their "cash" balance in MEFO bills rather than actual cash.
4. Actual seizures of bank balances. The Nazis gave German workers jobs in rearmament and paid them. The German workers deposited their pay at the bank. The banks were then required to "loan" their money to the German state, despite there being no possibility of repayment. The German state then had money to pay the workers. The German workers were being paid with their own money, they had been converted to slaves, unable to actually spend any money on themselves. Not that it made a huge difference to them because there weren't any consumer goods to buy in the first place. And if you were a German who didn't like your new status as essentially a slave the Nazis were happy to have a discussion with you about your thoughts on labour relations.
5. Out of control real terms inflation. Germans had jobs, they were getting paid, but the German economy wasn't producing consumer goods for German consumers, it had been converted to a total war economy fueled by out of control debt spending. Paper money was in ready supply but actual goods were hard to come by. Costs spiraled and there were shortages everywhere. The Nazis addressed this in two ways. First, they simply set wages and prices from the top. It didn't actually address the issue but they're a police state and didn't need to. And secondly, they banned trade unions and murdered rabble rousers who complained about working harder than ever for less real pay.
6. Literal slavery.

The Nazis were incredibly bad at economic management. Like absurdly so, and in a way that is absolutely inseparable from the fact that they were Nazis. You've got to remember that these are not educated people, they were idiots with absolutely no clue what they were doing but were confident that they could micromanage it all with sufficient dedication to the ideology. They bounced from crisis to crisis, papering over the cracks with ever increasing amounts of theft. Can't pay your workers? Rob the bank. Workers complain that the price has gone up? Force the stores to sell it at a loss. Store complains about selling it at a loss? Seize the store, execute the owner. Can't run the store at a profit? Rob the bank again. And, as with all totalitarian systems, it was extraordinarily corrupt. If you knew the right person you could get your MEFO bills redeemed, and of course they'd take a cut. If you knew the right person you could have the prices set in your favour. If you knew the right person then you could complain about the raw materials to your factory being too expensive and the supplier would get a visit letting them know that their patriotic duty was to give you what you needed at the price you wanted.

Nazis are cannibals. Always have been. Always will be. Nazi apologists like Razyda always like to imagine "what if" scenarios that don't make sense like "what if the Nazis just stayed within Germany" or the perennial "what if the Nazis tried to fight WW2 in a rational way instead of dedicating half their war effort to eradicating the Slavs". Well, if they did that then they wouldn't have been Nazis. Nazism as an ideology cannot be separated from the spiral of seizure, slavery, murder, and war, because that is the only fuel the engine of Nazism burns.

Recommended for further reading.
https://www.amazon.com/Wages-Destruction-Making-Breaking-Economy/dp/0143113208
I can put it on google drive for anyone who wants it.

On October 04 2025 00:06 Razyda wrote:


Thats a great post and I will be grateful if you will indeed put the book on gdrive.

You somewhat misunderstood me, which is my fault for wording my post badly. When I said in 20 years they became superpower I meant Germany not Nazis. Starting next sentence with "they" didnt help.

I agree with your take on economy (although I would say 1933-1936 period differ slightly from the rest of nazi rule). There are also other things, to reduce unemployment they build shitton of roads, schools and hospitals. This is not exactly destroying the country. Ultimately though you are right that their economy would destroy it overtime, so point conceded.

There are still 2 parts of your post I disagree with you on.

" You've got to remember that these are not educated people, they were idiots with absolutely no clue what they were doing"

I generally have issue with calling nazi idiots. I mean upwards of 20 million people being killed by evil people sounds somewhat different than 20 million people were killed by retards. Latter kinda feels like it diminish the victims.
Also I believe US government went well out of its way to recruit bunch of them, hardly conceivable that they would put that effort for idiots.

"Nazi apologists like Razyda" lol .