• Snowclone@lemmy.world
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        4 days ago

        Unfortunately there’s a limit to ‘‘rilled up’’ for intelligent people, because eventually you just stop engaging with politics because you need to survive and paying attention is fucking exhausting.

      • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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        4 days ago

        Do you know how many times I’ve heard, “if X happens, it will radicalize the people and they will take to the streets” and then X happens and it doesn’t?

        Because I’ll give you one huge as fuck reminder: the end of Roe v. Wade.

        Women across the country became second-class citizens overnight and it sure didn’t bring about any sort of glorious revolution.

        Expecting Americans to get radicalized by him getting arrested compared to that seems a bit silly to me.

        • grue@lemmy.world
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          4 days ago

          “But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. That’s the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked—if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in ’43 had come immediately after the ‘German Firm’ stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in ’33. But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.

          And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying ‘Jewish swine,’ collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose. The world you live in—your nation, your people—is not the world you were born in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God. The system itself could not have intended this in the beginning, but in order to sustain itself it was compelled to go all the way.”

          ― Milton Sanford Mayer, They Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1933-45

      • grue@lemmy.world
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        4 days ago

        “Radicalized libs” is an oxymoron. “Radicalized leftists,” sure, but “libs” are centrist (if not center-right) by definition.

        Edit: I should’ve said “moderate” rather than “centrist,” as my point was more about this sort of thing than pinning down exactly where libs fit on the political spectrum.