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Cake day: June 29th, 2023

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  • Hitler was actually extremely childish as was his entire regime. The similarities are remarkable.

    Henry VIII of England was basically what would happen if a pro American football player was a powerful king. He’s suspected to have had CTE.

    Versailles was basically a cruel experiment on the mental health of trapped nobility and rulers, that involved basically nothing but petty social games for power and prestige, but no options to use them.

    Rome had plenty of emperors like this including Caligula and Nero. Nero had a neck beard and unhealthy attachment to his mother. Meanwhile if half of what was written about Elagabulus is true then we have proof of how bad of an idea it is to give absolute power to a horny teenager with neither qualifications nor training.

    Speaking of weird mommy issues, Wilhelm I of Prussia/Germany was a weird childish man whose family spat was the first world war. On the other side was Nicolas of Russia who wasn’t much better.

    Also Ghaddafi was nuts, like in funny and horrifying ways, but definitely never matured after taking power young.

    So yeah, I’m conflating kings, emperors, and dictators as all more or less the same, because they kinda are. Julius Caesar took the title of dictator, was assassinated to prevent him from being a king, and was invoked by the emperors. We have a modern tendency to think of dictators as people who came to power through coups or the military, which can lead towards more mature and sane figures, but we still use the term for the hereditary absolute ruler of North Korea (it’s a socialism themed monarchy) and we don’t use it to describe the huge portion of roman emperors who were generals installed by coup. Additionally, history indicates (to me at least) that you likely have to be a bit nuts and immature to overthrow an established republic, because of the behavior shown by citizens in a destabilizing republic.

    I understand the urge to treat this administration as a freak of history, but they’re just too similar to the third reich to do so responsibly. And yeah those similarities include immaturity. It seems that a destabilizing republic is best hijacked by the narcissistic, and narcissists who are leaning into their disorder tend towards immaturity because growth often requires painful self reflection.


  • It’s also meant to say “look see we can make them regret it” as well as to draw into the paternal metaphor they keep using. Those weird comments they keep making about “daddy” being home to punish dissenters, feels very in line with this. The idea being that they’re trying to depict themselves as tough but necessary, and opposition as the same as a child misbehaving because of unenforced boundaries. In this regard they’re depicting her as crying to treat her like a child who has been spanked, and as such (in their eyes) one who will in the future respect their authority and eventually thank them for it.

    They need to maintain the narrative that the protesters to contain both hardened rebels, and primarily be ordinary people who just don’t understand discipline and the need to enforce the rules.













  • As an American, honestly I feel like anticommunism was a huge factor in the decline of our civic virtue. When you start praising and empowering wealth over mutual benefit you weed the ethical and the dutiful from the leadership pool, both politically and culturally. Many left wing movements of the late 20th and early 21st centuries in America prioritized civic duty separate from the state (left wing) or through it (liberal).

    I think the other big damage to it was the American civic religion. The country went from a huge machine we each had to play a part in, built on philosophies that everyone was supposed to understand, to a golden calf. The constitution went from the foundational rules meant to steward us towards the goals stated in the preamble it became a holy text thats name is cited, but its goals are not cherished. People often don’t actually think about how what they want fits in to a reasonable interpretation of say, the 4th-8th amendments.

    Idk, sometimes I feel massively outnumbered here as someone who takes her civil duties seriously.