CitizenKong

Oh yeah, that's way worse! But it doesn't make me very optimistic about Germany's future either, even without the Trump tragedy.

Yeah, that's also wild.

Our current government literally just collapsed today so... yeah.

He got elected democratically. In the German system, one party gaining the absolute majority is very rare and coalition governments are the norm. The cancellor is usually the candidate of the party with the largest percentage in that coalition. In the case of the NSDAP, that was Hitler. The conservatives formed a coaltion with him because they were sure the conservative president would be able to keep Hitler in check. Unfortunately, said president did the opposite and was instrumental in giving Hitler absolute power.

"May you live in interesting times."

Also social media sequestering people in cozy filter bubbles that distort reality.

Social media, or more precisely, algorithms designed to create ever growing engagement by feeding into confirmation bias and only showing you stuff you like, have destroyed the ability of critical thinking in a majority of people.

This doesn't only apply to the right spectrum either, as evidenced by all the "hopium" articles here and on r/politics that were trying to construct a blue win or even a blue wave when all polls pointed to a Trump advantage. I had fallen into that trap myself. And everybody was also smugly making fun of the articles in r/conservative predicting the same thing for Trump. Well, turns out they were right.

Literally out in the open, in the case of Musk.

Yeah, that's the tragedy of it. Even in a country where it already happened once and millions of people died because of it, there are people eager for another run at it.

I'm German, and non-Germans always find it weird that most of us don't have a very strong sense of national pride and are even very critical of our country, sometimes maybe even excessively so.

We have learned what uncritical, unreflected national pride leads to. What the price is to not confront the dark side that every society has.

And now, sadly, the US has to learn the same lesson the hard way too. I only hope the US and the rest of the world can come out of it with as little bloodshed as possible. But I fear for the worst.

"Remember, remember the 5th of november." has a altogether new meaning now.

It will only incentivize Elon (and all the other filthy rich) to build air conditioned luxury bunkers guarded by AI killerbots in places like New Zealand.

Or maybe something like the titular space station in the movie Elysium, where they enjoy the newest medical treatments while looking down on the rest of humanity trying to survive on a planet that has turned into a helhole.

German here. The Supreme Court has already given Trump all the power Hitler got by declaring a state of emergency. The Weimar Republic actually had better checks and balances then the US has now.

Also, rolling back the little the US did to combat climate change, making sure the climate catastrophe will only accelerate in this century.

By the end of the century, the US being a fascist state might not even matter because civilisation as we know it will break down anway, with worldwide temperature rising as far as 5 degrees above preindustrial standards (that's the worst case scenario of the IPCC).