Rewatching THE WIND RISES, and it's amazing how much it's literally a Merchant-Ivory film with sharper politics.

It is textbook fascism. It leaves no room to be any more fascist than it is. It is so openly fascist that any honest defense of it should simply embrace the ideology by name.

You morally cannot decline to call all of these people Nosferatu.

And maybe it's a very important part of teaching to say that we can.

A fellow college instructor who teaches in HS classes pointed out that you don't see posters in hallways anymore saying things like "Read!"

Similarly, there's a sign in a hall saying "We can't control what's going on but we can choose to be kind."

Nice, but actually we CAN control what's going on.

He's turned the party into an instrument of anti-immigrant racism, which is the end of the conversation really.

I have never read this, and it is amazing. Thanks for sharing.

I haven't watched this show, but this description reminds me of Sandra Oh in THE SYMPATHIZER, which I thought was a great performance in a great show.

That was a hilarious run on the latest episode of Edo folk reacting with beleaguered exasperation to these events!

Since you're in Philly, the "was the American Rev a revolution" argument also crosses my mind. Maybe I'm just in a comparative mood that's shading into semantics, but it's interesting.

One of the all-time best. The little TV documentary about it, circa 2002, is also a must-watch (and contains the deleted scene as well as a passionate defense of it from a priest on the censorship board.)

For some reason I've enjoyed leaving comments on Spotify lately, but I should put discourse in the discourse spot...

Does limited commoner involvement preclude the term "revolution" to describe this governmental shift? It's not my era, but I tend to think yes. Maybe coup > revolution > restoration?

It reminds me of those little birds they ate on the Titanic!

Minnie cracks me up the most. When she's mad, you know someone has screwed up.

On the Russians, I will admit I did used to suspect that Melania was a Russian plant. Sent to marry a well-connected guy with a known Slavic fetish. Then they just got crazy lucky with his political fortunes.

But now it appears that Epstein introduced them, which is more boring but more believable.

So these are weak arguments except for the scar itself - and on that point, it's easy to understand that wounds can vary widely. Not knowing the extent of the wound or the treatment options, it's absurd to deny that what we saw happen happened.

The Russia argument is appealing but a wild stretch.

You can't judge a reaction in that kind of situation, I think it's fair to say.

I also don't think we need to speculate about motive. The motives of assassins generally combine psychological distress with grudges real or exaggerated, and grudges would require no exaggeration in Trump's case.

A man incapable of foresight, secrets, or organizing simple events is not likely to be able to put together an elaborate ruse in real-time, but somehow forget to keep up the charade. It's insane to think that.

Much more likely, and provably true, is that YOU don't know what the injury was like.

I think you'll find more kinship there than I - after all, OP says this is a MAGA conspiracy theory.

Again, you have no idea what the injury was like. You have no idea if it was a hole or an abrasion as a result of a graze. All you see on either end of the event is pictures. Yet you believe the most difficult and least likely explanation of what you think you see. It's classic conspiracy thinking.

The most shootable guy on the planet got shot, but his ear doesn't look like YOU think it should look in pictures, so you say it didn't happen - brilliant!

You don't know how much was gone, and you don't know what the plastic surgery options were. You don't know a lot of things, so you default to the wildest, most exciting explanation instead of the likely ones. That's conspiracy brain. Stop it.

Because different injuries are different.

Different injuries are different! News at 11!

It's depressing how many people on the left believe it was staged. But then again, 9/11 trutherism used to be a fringe leftist theory before it became a fringe right-wing theory. To say nothing of the left-wing anti-vaxxers.

If you're thinking maybe there's something to this, stop. Do better.

No. It's good for maga to dive into conspiracy theories, but it's bad for you. Pull yourself out.

People fuck up, that is all.

Hans Moleman phone booth meme

Find me the tackiest t-shirt at the mall kiosk.

No, that's too tacky.

I remember when George HW Bush got in trouble for not being able to guess how much a gallon of milk cost.

It's surprisingly good!

They'd all have said the Great Depression wasn't so bad, because unemployment was only 25%, and GDP actually rose in most years.

I think you're off-base here on interpreting the data and on your political predictions. I wish I had the time and the reach to put forth the historically-informed counter-narrative. I tried a bit early in this discourse, and I did get one "economy is fine" person to recognize a cost error.