I thing Reagan and Trump are both more evil than Nixon ever was, but they never would've been elected if not for the groundwork that the Nixon administraton did.

[–] SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone 60 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (6 children)

Trump is a difficult one because he's honestly in a lot of ways a complete fucking idiot and would be flailing and failing if it wasn't for an obscene number of people in his orbit who enable him.

Trump is just a narcissist high on his own grandiose supply. I'm not sure that counts as evil moreso than "stupid."

Literally all the plans he floats are absolutely fucking idiotic shit that will send this country spinning down the toilet faster than you can say "Make America Great Again."

So while I get that Trump is a spearhead behind some of the worst things, the reality is he is just a racist who wants other people to like him, and he's figured out how to pander to racists to get what he wants. He's not a calculating supervillain, he's just an ugly rich chode who thinks he's the main character.

He's not pursuing Dictatorship because he understands it. Hell, he didn't even want to do the job of the Presidency, do you think he actually wants to be in charge and responsible for anything? During COVID he famously said "I don't take any responsibility at all."

Save it, Trump is a fucking idiot through and through who is well on his way to join Reagan in Dementia City, but he's enabled by some far more seriously dangerous people.

[–] Godort@lemm.ee 35 points 10 months ago

That's a fair read, but I argue that you dont have to be smart to be evil, just selfish and willing to let people suffer for wants.

[–] HAL_9_TRILLION@lemmy.dbzer0.com 20 points 10 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

I actually believe he's just plain dumb - he's never had to improve himself and wasn't too bright to begin with. But he has something that is hard to come by.

That culty gift of gab. He utterly captivates huge swaths of people with just his speaking cadence alone. Granted, he's not captivating them because there is any actual substance to his words. But people are dumb as dogshit. That he has money and peripherally gives lip service to supporting their political causes is really only secondary. He speaks to them and it's impossible to not notice it.

That shit is worth gold. Note that everyone is pretty much in agreement that if he dropped dead tomorrow the cause would suffer a potentially irreparable blow, because there isn't anyone else in the party that has what he has. Very, very few people do. Anybody think Don Jr. could pull that off? No fuckin' way.

So Trump is extremely valuable right now because he is able to get all these people to turn off what few critical thinking skills they possess while the party's powers-that-be quietly lay the real groundwork for dictatorship. Once that groundwork is fully cemented, it will not matter who the autocrat is in charge, he will be a figurehead.

[–] zephr_c@lemm.ee 11 points 10 months ago

That's not an argument against him being evil though. If you want an example where the immense damage done to the world was more incompetence than malice that'd be Dubya, and even he was realistically pretty aware of a lot of what he did.

If Trump was smarter and less manipulated by the vultures around him he would have done even more damage, not less. His incompetence does not excuse his evil.

[–] bstix@feddit.dk 8 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (2 children)

I'd argue that his ignorance is the true evil. It's because of his ignorance that he let the yes-men do their thing. Ignorance is evil.

Nobody wakes up in the morning thinking "I want to do evil stuff today". It happens because of ignorance.

His enablers do it out of greed, however nobody wakes up in the morning thinking "I want to do greedy stuff today". It happens because of their ignorance too.

[–] imPastaSyndrome@lemm.ee 14 points 10 months ago (2 children)

Nobody wakes up in the morning thinking "I want to do evil stuff today"

There's plenty of people who wake up and do that

[–] frezik@midwest.social 9 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

Yeah, I used to think that way, but the first Trump term convinced me otherwise. There's clearly people in his orbit that are straight up evil and do not care.

[–] SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone 7 points 10 months ago

And plenty of them are fucking brilliant, not stupid.

[–] SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone 11 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (2 children)

In my life I have seen ignorant people have just as much capcity for empathy as the educated. This is kind of a grossly elitist attitude.

Education/high intelligence isn't a requirement for empathy. Plenty of non-book-smart people have excellent emotional intelligence.

Plenty of highly intelligent people have high capacity for malice and evil.

Henry Kissinger comes to mind when it comes to people who are highly intelligent and have deep capacity for malice and evil.

This is a gross, classist opinion.

[–] frezik@midwest.social 8 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

Kissinger wasn't as smart as he wanted you to think. There were many instances where he'd just agree with whichever side was convenient to him at the time, but did it in a way that made him look smart. He didn't have any real beliefs beyond wanting to put Kissinger in charge of things.

[–] bstix@feddit.dk 6 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I don't believe in good and evil. Those are escape words for when the true cause isn't immediately obvious.

Of course non-book smart and uneducated people can be intelligent and "non-evil". This has nothing to do with education. It has to do with the willingness to question one's own prejudices or narrow-minded views.

Even the Nazis thought they did the right thing. They didn't wake up in the morning to do evil. They woke up thinking they were doing good. They were obviously wrong, despite being educated. That makes them ignorant, because they were unwilling to understand what the right thing to do actually was.

[–] SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone 8 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

This assumes Nazis all were rational people who all were arguing in good faith at every step of the process.

Except we know and have mountains of evidence for the amount of bad faith argumentation made by Nazis to justify evil.

Like, did you forget all the propaganda made to compare the Jews with rats and the suggestion that both should be exterminated? That's just people "thinking they're doing the right thing?"

We're literally witnessing a resurgence of it in the USA from the Republican party.

If you really believe they don't know what they're doing, I have a bridge to sell you.

It's like this conservative guy I used to know who bragged about how him and his brother used to get away with shit, and how the cops couldn't nail them because they would never rat on each other, and that was the only evidence the cops had. "They can't get us to talk so they can't prove nothin!"

Conservatives literally run on "As long as I never say my evil thoughts out loud, people can't prove I'm actually evil. I just have to keep arguing in bad faith and never admit the reality, and no one can prove what's actually on my mind."

They basically live on "It's only wrong if you get caught" and the only real way to "get caught" is admit things out loud.

I've met plenty who operate like that, and we have mountains of history from German Nazi's who operated similarly, and so this argument that the Nazis somehow were all decent people who just thought they were doing the right thing is the most screamingly dumb bullshit I've heard in months.

Arguing in bad faith to win control over other people is the definition of thoughtful evil.

What the fuck even is this argument? You're so full of shit.

Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.

-Jean-Paul Sartre

[–] bstix@feddit.dk 6 points 10 months ago

You're putting words into my mouth there to sell your point.

I never claimed that Nazis were oblivious to the evilness of their actions or that they were decent citizens. I'm saying that they were ignorant. They literally called it a "solution" because they thought it was the solution to make things right.

The problem in USA and elsewhere with neo-nazi shit is that they're doing the exact same thing once again. They're fueled by prejudice and unwillingness to change or even understand anything that is different to themselves. They want to ignore all other points of view or other ways of life or anything that is different from their usual way of life.

They don't want to think about it. They don't want to learn. They are deliberately pursuing ignorance and attempting to make ignorance a virtue.

[–] evidences@lemmy.world 6 points 10 months ago

He's not pursuing Dictatorship because he understands it. Hell, he didn't even want to do the job of the Presidency, do you think he actually wants to be in charge and responsible for anything? During COVID he famously said "I don't take any responsibility at all."

Ain't that the fucking truth, during the run up to the 2016 election before Pence hopped on the ticket there was a rumor that Trump had approached John Kasich from Ohio to run as VP with the pot sweetener being Trump would put Kasich in charge of foreign and domestic policy. Now I'm no genius but that's sure seems like all the policy.

[–] Thermal_shocked@lemmy.world 5 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I like the "nuke a hurricane" idea.

[–] Tristaniopsis@aussie.zone 1 points 10 months ago

Didn’t some hairy German band do a song about that in the eighties?

[–] Glifted@lemmy.world 15 points 10 months ago

I think Behind the Bastards did a good job laying out why Nixon was possibly one of the worst in history in their series on Kissinger. Highly recommended if you have the time to listen to it.

[–] gAlienLifeform@lemmy.world 10 points 10 months ago

Yeah, I go back and forth all the time on who's the worst, one of those three or George "I knew Iraq didn't have WMDs and I killed 100k Iraqi civilians anyway, oh and you're welcome for ICE and warrantless wiretaps and extraordinary renditions and torture and Samuel Alito" W Bush