It is time for global co-operation against Trump. Forget this silly divide and rule nonsense this bully is attempting.

All countries subject to tariffs now co-operate on joint tariffs against the US.

It is time we all put an end to this nonsense before it escalates. Let’s put this moron, this belligerent non-cooperative fascist country in its new, much reduced globally influencing, box.

It is time for the US to pay its deficit.

Edit - I will say that Trump might want other countries to sell their US debt, in order to weaken the dollar to make the US an affordable manufacturer.

So:

1. The rest of us decide on which currencies we buy: and this can not be the bitcoin the US might want countries to buy (rather than say the Yuan, or a basket of currencies that reflect global production).
2. Selling debt has to be accompanied by a boycott of all US goods on an ongoing basis.
3. This ends the post WW2 … > … petrodollar era of America’s exorbitant privilege.
4. Trump starts it, the rest of the world ends it. This is how, say, Europe, avoids the US/Russia alliance now threatening it.

You must stand up to bullies.

The financial industry deploys capital solely on the basis of its profit.

The vast majority of £'s in existence are created by banks and deployed for the purposes of their profit. Government spending is a relative drop in the ocean. This is the basis for the ‘development’ of our society.

The UK have experienced a slow motion version of Musk and Trump’s slash and burn, except we are coming to the back end of fifty years of it.

We haven’t needed to sell bonds for more than fifty years now. We don’t have to have an grossly underfunded NHS and public services, and collapsing quality of life on a contracting basis. It is going into the city of London’s pockets instead.

It isn’t just that neoliberal ideology has captured both main parties, and the lib dems. There is such a lack of talent, even intelligence, in government.

We see the criminalisation of what should be lawful protest.The powers that be want us to quietly accept being stripped of material and environmental wealth so that they can get fat, and insulate themselves against the coming disaster of climate change their over-consumption is the primary driver of.

Neoliberalism has taught, for decades, that ‘the hidden hand of the market’ meant that ‘enlightened self interest’ lead to the bet outcomes for everybody. So, yeah, they were told literally this.

Clearly you didn’t. You have now.

paywall

Farage was on telly for years prior to the brexit referendum. Despite having mp’s the green were not.

The lib dems campaigned on proportional representation and cutting tuition fees in 2010, then immediately scrapped those ideas when they got into coalition government.

Please don’t waste my time, thanks.

I presume they will lumber on for however many years or decades, but they were done a long time ago.

Offering nothing but a fake opposition to neo-liberals is just harmful. They won’t just merge with the Conservative party, but that is the honest thing to do.

And now we have Andy Burnham, literally an officer of the conservative party until he left college now being touted as the next leader of the Labour party. There is literally no option for people to vote for. Implicit in the acting of voting is the giving of consent. If you give consent to this fake Tory v. Tory choice you do not have a right to complain when you get neoliberalism playing out, more cuts, and the UK steadily falling down the ranks of wealthy nations.

Cuts to disabled people and civil servants. Hand money to silicone valley broligarchs.

Red Tories.

This ended up long.

There are many reasons why I think fascism is inevitable. I can only throw a few ideas at this post. It is a bit scatter-gun, hopefully it paints something of a picture of the various conditions we are facing. I don’t like pretty much any of the reality of our global situation, but I am looking at dealing with reality rather than the world I would like to be in.

tl/dr: the currently rich and powerful prefer fascism over an egalitarian society in which their and their children’s advantage is taken away. The conditions for totalitarian fascism have been created and are in use. Exploitation of fossil fuels (and the green revolution) has resulted in several billion too many of us as we approach a resource constrained future and huge biospheric degradation. World War 3 is hotting up, meaning some degree of fascism might be necessary for simple self-defence. Impoverished former working class people are given no other credible alternative. Climate change is a crisis multiplier whose impact is going to intensify dramatically over the coming years and decades.

A definition of ‘fascism’ I arrived at (that might be commonly held I don’t know) is: ‘the extremism of the centre ground’. I know that this doesn’t encompass all aspects of fascism. It helps inform my conclusion regarding its inevitability here in the UK and more broadly.

At one point, amongst a lot of other reading, I listened to fifteen or twenty hours of podcasts that Roger Hallam (one of the founders of Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil) recorded about creating a social movement to try and tackle climate change.

Hallam spent a couple of years studying for a PhD, researching how to achieve social change through civil disobedience and radical movements. I get the impression he decided to act rather than be an academic. I don’t agree with him in terms of the timeline for climate change, but he has studied protest and social movements, and has put his money where his mouth is. He might be in prison now, he was sentenced last year to five years.

Anyway, I got the impression that he wants to have a social movement in place for when, if, we get to an inflection point where mass civil disobedience (and thousands of prison sentences) could lead to the change that is necessary to try and avoid the worst-case scenarios for climate change that we are currently accelerating towards. There is a societal equivalent to this, in terms of the rise of the far right, that is relevant to this post.

The British government has responded to civil disobedience over the failure to address climate change with increased authoritarianism. We live in a data-totalitarian, almost permanent surveillance society: from mobile phones, obviously, to the decline of paper currency, cctv and npr, to ‘smart’ electricity meters (whose surveillance capability doesn’t seem to be widely discussed but is absolutely a factor in its roleout) and on and on. It is far more intrusive than even Soviet era East Germany. It is an ideal state precursor to fascism: the state apparatus has been built and is being ‘improved’. You can’t have the opposite with that apparatus in place. How would any social movement disband all of it?

I can’t remember whether I first heard from Roger Hallam that the common conditions necessary for ‘revolution’ throughout the 20th century are also the conditions in which fascism thrives: very briefly, former working class (an outdated term as the social contract those people previously enjoyed has been ripped up by neoliberalism), now working poor or precariat go hungry and have so little to lose that they are prepared to be locked or beaten up in protest. I get the impression he is hoping for a climate change analogue of the above conditions.

We are at the back end of 45 years of neoliberal economic/political ideology that has impoverished former working class people, following 250 years of fossil-fuel-powered capitalism whose decimation of the biosphere’s ability to support human life hasn’t even begun to really be felt. In the UK every benefit cut, every act of unnecessary austerity creates many thousand reform UK voters. The same scenario has played out in the US with poor former working class people being betrayed by the Democrats’ shift right. The coming climate change refugees (who have been created by the last several decades’ inaction) will be orders of magnitude greater than the UK’s currently nearly-a-London-a-decade. How will Europe deal with this? One of capitalism’s many ‘big lies’ is that is manages scarcity, when in fact it has come to exist in the period of greatest abundance (see primary energy consumption for incontrovertible evidence of this). Some combination of a genuine low energy society, and biospheric devastation is on the horizon. We are moving towards genuine scarcity and a collapse of the energy source that powered capitalism. What will follow fascism, in my opinion? Some form of feudalism.

Media owners, the rich and powerful, prefer fascism over an egalitarian society in which they lose their advantage. They want the vast majority toiling in a trickle-up economic system from which they profit. We see this playing out now as it has before. We saw during covid that actually most jobs are not ‘essential’. They exist because people are there to do them. Hyper-capitalist libertarian ‘tech bros’ are coming for those (many ‘middle class’) jobs with AI. If they get that together, the conditions for fascism are immediately in place.

World War 3 (previously playing out as proxy wars, and in the information, cyber, economic and no doubt other spheres) is in danger of hotting up. The 50 year petrodollar arrangement ended a few years ago, hastening the end of the dollar’s reserve currency era. The question was ‘could the US with the biggest army in the world, accept a much reduced global role (and portion of unearned global wealth) without using its military might?’ The US chose a leader who is clearly prepared to go to war. We don’t know how the next decade or so is going to play out, but the risk of a hot world war makes cooperation much less possible. Autocratic leaders whose concern is self-preservation in a global war scenario is a light form of fascism.

A bit bleak and depressing? Only if you haven’t come to terms with ideas such as progress being a fossil-fuel-powered capitalist myth. Every society creates them, of the past and the future. I suppose I hope I am wrong, and some sort of revolution to prevent the rise of the far right, of world war three, of biospheric collapse don’t play out. But I also think it is a mistake to fight battles that are already lost.

The truth is the vast majority of us are never going to invest time fact-checking or evaluating all the information we consume.

It isn’t possible for the vast majority of people to fact-check the information they consume online. My guess: you’d conservatively have to spend two hours scanning through academic papers, or more specialist sources you trust, for every one hour on lemmy.

Around fifteen years ago I started learning about climate change. At that point it was an eye opener to repeatedly see almost diametrically opposing headlines based off the same academic paper that obviously had the same (admittedly usually multi-faceted) conclusion.

It was and is very clear that you never could trust ‘mainstream media’, never mind whatever sources are around now, or bots on social media. Forget ‘ai’.

If there is fault here it is in the amount of information we allow ourselves to be subjected to. A mitigating circumstance is that social media, and sites like feddit.uk, upon which I am reading your post, are addictive. There is a spectrum of addictive behaviour and less overwhelming addictive behaviour on a personal level has a huge impact on a mass scale.

Us humans are always seeking stuff that gives us a dopamine hit, and if it wasn’t social media it would be retail therapy, vaping, caffeine, sex or any number of other engineered substances or behaviours. But given who is controlling information now, the world really would be a much better place with a lot less internet use at this point.

It should go without saying that unelected people heavily involved in the writing of legislation, whether that is peers in the House of Lords, or corporate lobbyists in Brussels, fatally undermines the credibility of those institutions.

This situation is nothing new to Britain. What is maybe ‘new’, after nearly fifty years of neo-liberal economic and political policy, is a former working class of increasingly impoverished people primed to accept a far-right alternative that is the only option that has been presented to them: an alternative given airtime for years in spite of the fact that that party had not even one MP elected to parliament. This alternative is not going to be any better for those former working class people, which suits the wealthy and powerful who presented Nigel Farage as the alternative.

In the case of the US in 2016, you got Trump, or a continuation of the economics/politics that made Trump inevitable. Same here in Europe, playing out in its own way.

This appears to be the inevitable result of nearly fifty years of neo-liberal economic and political policy.

At the top of this post I wrote ‘it should go without saying’ because the reality is that we are so far from anything approaching idealism that the idea that we should worry about people buying peerages and writing laws that suit their mates, seems quaint.

I very clearly said “ultimately contributing to the rise of the far right” not “had had a major role in…”

My claim is that the economic inequality experienced in peripheral Eurozone countries will contribute to the rise of fascism in those countries.

The context being an economic/political liberalism that provides no credible alternative to arrest the reduction in quality of life for poor/former working class people.

The Euro: Peripheral countries get to borrow at the rate Germany can (at least until it fucks up for them). Germany gets a hugely devalued currency, allowing it to export.

Individual countries don’t have an exchange rate, the ability to devalue their currency, and until now, where Germany now decides to build itself a huge army, the ability to run deficits to manage downturns.

I understand the appeal European integration on a social level has to European people, but the Euro has accentuated differences between countries in it, ultimately contributing to the rise of the far right. The exact opposite of the social integration European people hoped for.

Nobody expects Labour to do zero positive things. That does not mean they are not red tories whose failure to address the needs of working people will eventually usher the Reform Party into power.

Why is David 'Will of the people, bollocks" Lammy in politics at all, never mind government?

No.

Elon’s mother stopped him having that cage fight with Mark Zuckerberg because of his bad back. That wasn’t his fault.

I don’t believe Nigel Farage for one second.

There is absolutely no doubt that immigration has battered poor, former working class people in the UK. From perfectly decent people of Eastern European origin taking the role of scab labour, undermining pay and conditions, leading to the misery of zero hours contracts, to difficulty getting any unskilled work, to the ‘benefits’ system and healthcare being absolutely hammered.

This simply isn’t sustainable.

The coming climate refugee crisis will make this look like a picnic. The line is going to be drawn, it is only a matter of when. We have missed all of the chances to minimise the impact of climate change, and help developing world countries achieve a demographic transition to a low birth rate future, without exploiting their fossil fuel reserves. It is too late.

Net migration to June 2024: 728,000. https://migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk/resources/briefings/long-term-international-migration-flows-to-and-from-the-uk/

Multiply that by ten gives you 7.28 million - nearly the number of people in London. This is primary school maths. You have wasted my time once, I will not have it wasted again.

And for the record, I am believing Oxford University, the link I provided, not Nigel Farage. Who are you believing? (This is a rhetorical question, I am not interested in an answer.)

I know that people want to feel good about themselves, and they also want a high consumption lifestyle (that is most contributing now to the future climate change refugee crisis). Political liberalism covers the hard fist of neo-liberal economics with a soft and fuzzy veneer of socially liberal policy. Neo-liberals don’t want to feel racist while consuming an amount that destroys others. Unfortunately for many people in countries like the UK, neo-liberalism’s sell by date is passing. The result in our case is the rise of Reform, Trump, and other far right parties across Europe.

You all just assume that is what I want. In fact I want the opposite.

You are currently incapable of dealing, or unwilling to deal with reality. This inability or unwillingness is contributing directly the Reform’s rise to power. This need to feel good about yourself while not only failing to be adult enough to deal with reality, while at the same time insulting and making incorrect assumptions about me is genuinely pathetic. You are an embarrassment. Most won’t be able to learn so the rise of the far right it is very likely to be. Well done.

If you are one of the lucky people who haven’t had their lives decimated by more austerity, more benefits cuts, interspersed by bouts of meaningless ‘essential’ work (such as stacking shelves) on a zero hours contract, good for you. You can have the luxury of taking that attitude, and feel good about yourself while you do so.

But, genuinely with the best will of the world, when you are looking at not far off a London a decade, immigration is simply not sustainable. Ignoring this reality pushes Reform towards power.

Pretty much all of your points are dubious or plain wrong, but the truth is I can’t be bothered wasting my energy on a reply. I say wasting my energy because the various attitudes you exhibited are very common, and will lead to the rise of Reform. And like most people, you are not able to change your mind in response to new information. I wish it wasn’t going to happen but it is.