[taneq]

I feel like "form your own private paramilitary organisation with minimal oversight, then expand their reach by having them take over the operations of other government departments" has been done before somewhere, as part of a larger plan.

[nclin_]

This is a historical pattern: Bringing border forces to bear against your own population, because those border forces are trained to deal with people who don't have the rights of the state.

[gotwaz]

They dont have all the skills to do anything super complex in a sustainable way. Already proved in the first term. What their existence demonstrates is winning election is not super complex if you can find enough groups to precisely target and pander/capture attention. Social media has been a force multiplier for such behavior and the people that have emerged dont have any other skill other than attention capture. But thats short term win like full focus on marketing while product and operations have no hope of catching up. Every "large plan" will fail. Large plans in complex ever changing environments always need massive cooperation of very different skills. Never happens sustainably with just one skill dominating all.

[mattoxic]

They dont have all the skills to do anything super complex in a sustainable way.

And that's stopped them?

[gotwaz]

We know the answer. Whats stopping ebola or a hurricane from over running everything?

[encrypted_bird]

It has. (Unless you're being sarcastic, in which case I'm not surprised it went over my head. Lol.)

[taneq]

Yeah, I was aiming for irony but I should probably have added /s at the end there. It's definitely in the mid-late chapters in any "how to install a fascist regime" handbook.

[encrypted_bird]

Yeah, no worries, I'm pretty terrible at reading sarcasm on the best of days. Haha.

[ajkjk]

of course they were

[encrypted_bird]

Hey, tone doesn't translate well over text, they did not use anu tone tags, and I'm already terrible at reading tone in the best of times. Lol, can you really blame me for at least asking? Haha.

[ajkjk]

I dunno, it is the most obvious nazi reference I've ever seen. Personally I feel like tone does translate well over text, although it's proportional to the speakers' familiarity in how to do it whereas for verbal communication it comes through without effort.

Nothing wrong with asking of course. But maybe it's useful data that it was, in fact, obvious.

[encrypted_bird]

Not when you're autistic (which I am). ;D