Nichlemn,

i want to believe you and i agree it would be great if you were right but you seem really bad at predicting stuff and/or remembering what's already happened

And this is so vague and open to interpretation that you could have "predicted" the vast majority of American administrations should have become fascist dictatorships.

What I'd like to see is a formal predictive model of dictatorships. A model that has, in the past, been able to predict the rise of dictatorships at a rate significantly above chance. In particular, it should have been able to make accurate out-of-sample predictions (to show that it can actually predict the future and not just find a bunch of spurious relationships). I'd then like to see how that model rates Trump (and also other Presidents for comparison).

If it's really so easy to tell the signs, then the data should be damning. Maybe 20% of leaders who were like Trump became dictators, while only 1% who were like Obama. (Or if "dictatorships" have too small a sample size, a score on a political freedom index could be measured).

lol this ****ing guy has been the SUPER DUPER LOGICAL poster who magically always lands on the side of right wing nut jobs for going on a decade

News Flash: Stormy Daniels says Trump's lawyer violated the non-disclosure agreement which means she is free to now spill the beans.

Over/under on Trumps wife causing him to resign early?

He quits and our democracy is saved! Yay us! Now no one has to GTFO!

Oh wait, Pence will be in charge. crap. we are doomed.

"I think Trump is a bad President who is undermining democracy, but FFS thinking he's going to turn into literal Hitler is paranoid".

"Get a load of this right wing nutjob!"

I work with what the forum gives me. Dumb right-wing talking points get swatted away instantly here. Dumb left-wing talking points can fester away uninhibited in an echo chamber until they reach absurd levels.

(P.S. have you ever made a post that wasn't contentless snark in the last decade?)

Nichlemn is one of the few rational posters itt imo.

but then again I am one of the deplorables that dare disagree with the boys living in mommy's basement

I also apparently suck at history also, but it shows the sooner one GTFO of a looming disaster the better.

Pompeii, Hurricane Katrina, Nazi Germany, Little Big Horn, Titanic, take your pick. Early is better.

no, i called the russian interference plus trump losing by 3 million votes, more than any president in history, shockingly irregular because it was.

re:coordination/collusion/treason: we'll see. trump publicly called on russia to hack hildog and we know don jr colluded. trump's campaign manager's trial starts this spring so we'll both find out more on this topic soon enough.

he donated to project veritas which attempted to discredit the washington post and their story about roy moore.

dougie jones won the bama senate seat by more than 3x the threshold for triggering a recount and he still lost 6 out 7 congressional districts because the game in bama is rigged af what more rigging does trump need to do?

"the boys living in mommie's basement"
You realize that most here were/are successful poker players and many are lawyers

Most? I doubt that. Poker players and lawyers are some of the most deplorable people I know.

In the context of what I was saying, it was what would account for evidence of Trump using his power in an authoritarian way. The Electoral College is no evidence of that. Gerrymandering is done at a state level, precedes Trump, and has no relevance to a Senate election anyway.

I mean, calling out the basic ***** fallacies online is played out, but what is a literal hitler and who besides you is claiming that literal concentration camps are the main concern? Even if they were, did anyone see that **** coming from...literal hitler?

ice is literally breaking up families and you're like "they're not wearing the uniforms i imagine when i think of a fascist state, so this doesn't count"

Nich puts in effort and isn't completely atrocious.

You're still right tho.

idk, maybe I'm pining for the glory days of 5 years ago when Politics was just stupid internet arguments about make-believe political/economic systems instead of a daily onslaught of real world holy **** wtf.

An honest reading of my OP makes it clear I don't think we're near Hitler / Holocaust territory.

Literally the first sentence ITT refers to the Holocaust. Yes, OP says that he thinks we're far from it, but it's clear a lot of you don't think it's completely in the wrong ballpark.

And no, people didn't predict the Holocaust, but they could tell pretty early on that Hitler was an authoritarian dictator, like when in his first year he gained total power and banned all other political parties.

Like how Mr. Logic skipped over my post clearly laying out Trump’s unprecedented first year of American authoritarianism to knock down a strawman that only existed in his imagination.

Let’s logic this out. 1) ICE is currently aggressively deporting people that few people think should be deported on the flimsiest of pretexts. I’m talking men married to American citizens with American kids. ICE is saying we think your first marriage 40 years ago was a sham therefore you are permanently ****ed, say goodbye to your wife and kids. 2) Trump revoked DACA and is putting poison pills in legislation to protect them. Clearly setting the groundwork to blame Ds for his choice to unleash ICE on DREAMers 3) come March, an unhinged ICE will have the names and addresses of 600,000+ who are American in everything but name. And they will have the legal right to do whatever the **** they want to them.

And we are the crazy ones for being concerned? Are you sure about that Mr. Logic?

In the 1970s, the New Zealand government underwent dawn raids on Pacific Island overstayers and deported them. As of right now, we live in a fascist police state.

And that is pretty much the crux of my argument - more or less every "fascist" thing the Trump administration has done has had some equivalent thing done a million times before in the US or other countries while democracy survived just fine. If you judged every government in history by the standards you are currently judging the Trump administration, you'd predict that half the world would be currently under fascist rule.

That's why I'm going to reiterate my post above that no-one has yet responded to - show me a model. Something that shows real predictive power about the path to authoritarianism, but also one that doesn't have a massively high false positive rate.

These are all legitimate concerns about immigration policy. However, they've got nothing to do with whether democracy or free speech is being compromised.

Deporting DREAMers is the test. Arbitrary revocation of legal status to override the will of the people and arbitrarily ruin the lives of hundreds of thousands of people and round them up at the point of a gun when vast majority of people object.

I don't think democracy is the standard we should judging by given that the Southern US was a totalitarian police state from the 1700s until the 1950s to 60s or so while having Democracy the whole time as well as lots of other countries maintaining the semblances of democracy for legitimacy's sake while becoming increasingly illiberal.

So serious question, let’s tone down the snark. Trump saying repeatedly that he thinks illegal aliens voting are the only reason he didn’t win the popular vote...what exactly does that imply he will claim if he loses next election? The fact that he is already ignoring the sanctions. His son claimed attorney client privilege incorrectly and refused to answer questions. What exactly do you need to see before you will be worried he is not going to follow the rules if he doesn’t want to? When is the oh **** moment for you? If he fires Mueller? If (when) the midterms get meddled in (again) and he continues to ignore the issue? Muslim registry? What?

IMO all the little things he is doing right now that are seemingly inconsequential (to you) are trial balloons, and the info he, and us, should be collecting from them is pretty grim. It’s not just him, it is all the people who continue to support him, all the people who underestimate him still and all the people who don’t do anything regardless of how worried they are about it.

Lol, now you get to tell us all what you do

Independent contractor for large firms such as Google, IBM, Microsoft, Facebook, Twitter, etc

I peruse the internet and respond to and report on internet trends and activity. Current assignment is to keep tabs on communistic trolls that hate America and freedom.

Currently re-negotiating my contract(s) but about half way to seven figures.

Are you working your job ITT?