Very funny passage from an American journalist after visiting Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union in the late 1930's. There's a lot of funny bits here contextually, but the last bit of hysterical:

On first glance, Germany in 1936 was overwhelmingly attractive, and first impressions disarmed many a hardy anti-Nazi before he could lift his lance for attack. Its big cities were cleaner than big cities ought, by custom, to be. You could search far and wide through Berlin’s sea of houses or Hamburg’s huge harbour district, but you could never find a slum or anything approaching one. On the countryside, broad, flourishing acres were cut into neat checkerboards. People looked good. Nobody was in rags, not a single citizen. They were well dressed, if not stylishly dressed. And they were well fed. The impression was one of order, cleanliness and prosperity—and this has been of immense propaganda value to the Nazis.

There is a great fallacy here, and it is a mistake which an unfortunately large number of young American students I met in Heidelberg made and retained for a long time. The fallacy is in connecting this admirable order, cleanliness and apparent prosperity with the Nazi government. Actually, and this was pointed out to me by a German dock-worker on my first magic day in Bremen, Germans and Germany were neat, clean and able to do an amazing lot with amazingly little long before Hitler came to power. Such slums as existed were removed by the Socialist government and replaced with neat workers’ apartments while the Nazis were still a noisy minority chalking swastikas on back-alley fences. […] Once, however, I broke my routine and took a trip to Russia. That land impressed me disgustingly favorably for a individual who was still more Liberal than Socialist. Contrary to the development of my reactions in Germany, Russia looked better the longer I stayed and the more I saw. Russia was not neat, clean, and orderly. Russia was dirty and disorderly.

But the spirit of the thing got me. The Bolsheviks did not inherit cleanliness and order; they inherited a wrecked feudal society, and in a relatively short period wonders had been done. The edges were rough and the effort was amateur. But that was just it; it was amateur, everybody was doing it. You got the impression that each and every little individual was feeling pretty important doing the pretty important job of building up a State, eager and interested as a bunch of little boys turned loose in a locomotive and told to do as they please. It showed promise like a gifted child’s first scratchings of “a house” on paper. Klein aber mein; a little but mine own, as the proverb goes.

What is more, the standard of living was definitely rising, not falling. The whole picture was not as pretty as the German one, but the atmosphere, utterly devoid of any trace of militarism or racial prejudice, was clean and healthy as the streets were dirty. I knew all along the atmosphere reminded me of a word, but I couldn’t think what it was until I got back to Germany. The word was “democracy.” That, I know, is a strange reaction to a country which is well known to be a dictatorship, but the atmosphere simply did not coincide with the newspapers’ verdict.

- Howard K. Smith, The Last Train from Berlin

You should not refer to yourself as a "citizen." That is gay. Unless you have power (in which case, why are you here?) refer to yourself as a "subject" or a "peasant."

Fascism epitomizes a reactionary framework, yet it is contaminated by insidious infiltrations of democratic ideology—it is a manifestation of what contemporary discourse refers to as "right-wing populism," a distorted shadow of the ideal that is reaction. Should it falter, it simply dissipates; but if it prevails, these malignant democratic elements proliferate and metastasize. It's an improvement over communism; but barely.

The Amish should not have turned up to vote in masses. A major reason the Amish have been so successful is because of their passivism. Major chance that the sword of Damocles will drop in the near future

To survive, submit and adapt. To be destroyed, try to fight back.

Why be passive? You lack the power to change things. If you had the power, you would. Desire is no substitute for ability. Acting like you're powerful when you are not accomplishes nothing positive and, in fact, both makes you worse (dishonesty is bad) and makes your rulers angry. Why deny reality? Why add fuel to the machine that is crushing you? Are you, perhaps, so defeatist that your desire is to be crushed with haste? I encourage you to be patient.

GM

Cold Day in da Yoop today, eh

Went out and looked at a house for someone today. 4BR, 2 story, 2Bath, 1.5 acres. $60k. Overall great condition . Life can still be affordable.

Getting groceries while I'm out here. Nice little area.

Give me back my snowman emoji!

I have thought about it, and we will temporarily allow two types of reactions that ultimately do amount to basically the same thing. What this is an analogy for is an incredibly deep and esoteric mystery; I fear that nobody here will be able to figure it out.

Cthulhu may swim slowly.... But he always swims towards the UP

I'll rag on Houghton, but at least they are able to identify that two negros buying lots of lottery tickets with a credit card count as "suspicious."

The Daily Poor has no enemies

The Daily Poor has no enemies aside from Satan and his minions

The Daily Poor has no enemies aside from Satan and his minions and Bob's Red Mill

Talked to a young (3rd grade) writing student's Mom earlier. She said something like, "it's funny how different your writing assignment was from his work in school this week."

Turns out, while I had given him a fairly bland Thanksgiving writing assignment in which he was to write about what he was thankful for, his school, down in the land of trolls, had him write an essay about how he was sorry for genociding the Injuns or something.

Remember that this is a large part of the leftward mechanism in this country. The universities are always filled to the brim with leftists of the most extreme sort. One might think this matters little or fail to see the relevance; "what does that have to do with the grade school assignment, Professor Poor?" asks the curious Poorcel who's a bit new to the camp, and still learning the basics. Of course, it's not like my 3rd grade student is learning from a lib college professor.... However, just about any profession that is seriously involved with manufacturing public opinion educating the public, be it grade school teachers or journalists, has to go through a college training program in which they have to spend years being indoctrinated by those professorial leftists. Result: the infection spreads. The professors will move farther to the left, and the cycle will repeat with a sort of generational lag.

Even if you win elections, you won't make a serious impact in the long term until, I don't know, you have tanks on Harvard Yard or something. Was that in Trump's platform? I would be lying if I said I bothered to look.