A thread for Democrats Only
POSTED BY: THGRRI
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 15:36
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Quote:
Originally posted by reaverfan:Quote:Where the fuck did that come from?
Originally posted by THG:
Does ANTIFA, the far left, still believe 911 was an inside job? Point being, those people are as nuts as the far right.
T
The far left has made outrageous claims just as the far right. I see both as being a problem.
The people who think 9/11 may have been an 'inside job
https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-trending-42195513
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American strongman — where does Trump fit in the past and future of authoritarians?
A few years ago, a student of strongmen — think Mussolini, not muscles — took a look at Donald Trump and saw something familiar. Lots of things, actually: a cult of personality. An exaggerated sense of virility. A bellicose tone. A desperate need to discredit the media or any entity that might conflict with his view of events. Ruth Ben-Ghiat had spent a career studying fascism, primarily, “Il Duce,” Italian Dictator Benito Mussolini. She had long recognized Trump’s strongman inclinations. She watched his march to the presidency. The 2017 op-ed Ben-Ghiat wrote for CNN on the eve of Trump’s inauguration, an event forever defined by the administration’s use of “alternative facts” to exaggerate public attendance, was headlined “Trump is Following the Authoritarian Playbook.”
Many laughed off such comparisons, thinking the reality TV star too bumbling, his approach too undisciplined, his ideological principles too nonexistent to present a serious threat to the world’s oldest democracy. The laughs quieted over the past four years and have all but ceased in recent weeks as Trump has refused to concede his obvious loss of both the electoral college and the popular vote, clinging to the presidency as though it were his birthright.
As we see in Ben-Ghiat’s new book, “Strongmen,” refusing to budge from power is also part of the authoritarian playbook. Trump admires Vladimir Putin, known to freely poison rivals and bend the constitution to his will, allowing him to stay in office until 2036 if he wants. Trump has only joked on Twitter about life without term limits, but his recent behaviors suggest he’d embrace such a life in a heartbeat.
About one thing Ben-Ghiat is adamant: It’s fruitless to compare Trump to any other president, at least from this country. “We can’t use democratic metrics to measure what Trump is doing,” she says by phone. “Those have never been his goals. He’s not interested in good government or public welfare. He’s interested in making money for Trump organizations.”
Books such as “Strongmen,” Madeleine Albright’s “Fascism: A Warning” and Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt’s “How Democracies Die” have all looked to place the rise of Trumpism in historical context, to remind us that he didn’t materialize in a cloud out of nowhere and to warn that things can get a lot worse. But “Strongmen” is unique for focusing on the character traits that bond authoritarian leaders, from sexual gluttony to a violent emphasis on past national glories real or imagined. (Ben-Ghiat steers away from labeling Trump a fascist — the U.S. isn’t a one-party system, and it still has open elections, as fraught as they’ve become — though his behavior practically does it for her).
More at https://web.archive.org/web/20201120210030/https://www.houstonchronicl
e.com/opinion/outlook/article/Opinion-American-strongman-where-does-Trump-15742838.php
Get the free download of the book "Strongmen" (2020) from https://libgen.unblockit.app/search.php?req=Ruth+Ben-Ghia
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Get the free download of the book "Strongmen" (2020) from https://libgen.unblockit.app/search.php?req=Ruth+Ben-Ghia
Chapter Ten - Endings
On October 20, 2011, Gaddafi hid inside a drainpipe, hoping that his enemies would not find him. The Libyan Revolution had started eight months earlier, buoyed by the Arab Spring that had deposed Hosni Mubarak in Egypt and Zine El Abidine Ben Ali in Tunisia. Gaddafi had always dismissed the idea that he was next. His people loved him: he had given them the highest per capita GDP and life expectancy in Africa, and he was a different kind of man. “I am a fighter, a revolutionary from tents,” Gaddafi said at the uprising’s outset, warning that he would never surrender. For his pursuers from the National Liberation Army, the military arm of the National Transition Council (NTC) interim government, the toll of forty-two years of terror outweighed any material benefits he had bestowed. Libyans lacked what mattered most: freedom. For the rebels who now closed in on his hiding place, Gaddafi’s end was long overdue.
Every strongman’s fall is different, but Gaddafi’s involved dynamics common to others in the past. A disaffected population found momentum from events in other countries to take to the streets. Elites who had supported the leader for decades now subtracted their support. A central opposition force gained international recognition and the assistance of foreign military. Several generations of exiles returned to fight. Each group waged resistance against Gaddafi in its own manner, but enough of them came together at a fateful moment to make his end possible.
The authoritarian playbook has no chapter on failure. It does not foresee the leader’s own people turning against him, from military men he trained to young people he indoctrinated to women he rewarded for having babies. It has no pages on how to deal with becoming a national disgrace, someone who is pelted with tomatoes and eggs when he appears in public after leaving office, like Pinochet, or forced into exile, like Amin. Its discussions of how to control minds and exploit bodies do not extend to the deterioration of the leader’s own. Aging and the ebbing of virile powers is difficult for leaders whose “entire sense of self is bound up in being revered,” in psychological profiler Jerrold Post’s words. Disappearing from the scene due to illness, as Mobutu did in 1996, can be dangerous for men already on the decline. Nothing prepares the ruler to see his propaganda ignored and his charismatic hold weaken until he loses control of the nation and is hunted by his own people, as happened to Mussolini and Gaddafi.
For the strongman, such outcomes are unthinkable and yet ever-present. They fuel behaviors that make him feel safer and brush away thoughts of mortality. That might mean persecuting more enemies, firing more truth-tellers, hoarding more women and riches, or consulting astrologers (many are superstitious) about his fate and his legacy. Such rulers also brood about what happens to their peers. Hitler made sure he did not end up like Mussolini, and Gaddafi cooperated with Americans and Europeans to avoid ending up like Hussein. Analyst Stanislav Belkovsky notes that the Arab Spring revolts made a big impression on Putin, who knew that “the destiny of Gadhafi could be waiting for him.” Trump’s desire to stay in office indefinitely reflected the same fear of meeting a bad end, losing immunity from prosecution, or becoming a nobody. “You’ve got to put your name on stuff or no one remembers you,” said the president, who showed familiarity with the anxieties about irrelevance that spur authoritarians’ demands for loyalty and attention, especially in the end stage of rule.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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William Barr’s Lame-Duck Execution Spree Is Unprecedented. With these plans, the administration not only thumbs its nose at precedent, it also reveals yet again its true character.
Last week, the Trump administration announced that it would continue to carry out executions in the days and weeks leading up to the inauguration of President-elect Joe Biden, with the last one now scheduled just five days before Biden takes office on Jan. 20, 2021. This bloodthirsty decision is another and particularly grotesque way in which President Donald Trump and his Justice Department are defying the norms and conventions for modern presidential transitions.
The Death Penalty Information Center reports that the last time an outgoing administration did anything remotely similar was more than a century ago, in 1889. At that time Grover Cleveland, the first Democrat to be elected president after the Civil War and the only president ever to have served as an executioner (when he was the sheriff in Erie County, New York), permitted three executions to proceed in the period between his electoral defeat and Benjamin Harrison’s inauguration in March 1889.
Since then, every outgoing administration has halted the federal death penalty during the transition period. Trump and Attorney General William Barr are not merely failing to engage in a merciful pause: They are rushing to execute persons who might be spared by a new administration.
Indeed, the Biden administration intends to try to abolish the federal death penalty and provide incentives for states to abolish it as well. A spokesperson reaffirmed this intention on Saturday: “The president-elect opposes the death penalty, now and in the future, and as president will work to end its use.”
It will be the first time that the federal government ends up carrying out more executions (10) in a single year than are carried out in all the states which retain capital punishment (8). Those 10 executions would be the most carried out by the federal government since 1896, when Cleveland’s second administration put 16 people to death.
From 1995 to 2000, 42 percent of the 183 federal death cases submitted to the attorney general for review came from just five of the 94 federal districts. And federal death verdicts, like those in the states, are concentrated in states that were claimed by the former Confederacy. Three of them—Texas, Missouri, and Virginia—account for 40 percent of the total.
More at https://web.archive.org/web/20201125030835/https://slate.com/news-and-
politics/2020/11/william-barr-lame-duck-execution-spree-is-unprecedented.html
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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T 
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RIP, Maradona.
Nice interview, if you speak Spanish.
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