Spendrill

Ready to get knocked up and then knocked about? That's the Chav-life.

Ain't no cure for being a cunt.

How about the EU declares all their drugs generics and sets up a factory to produce them cheaply.

Mate, there are so many things that suggest I am on the spectrum now that I have given up keeping track of them all. I'm not sure that at my time of life there's anything that can be done for me even if I did get a diagnosis.

Yeah, if my memory is correct the flickers stopped completely for me at around 80hz. I'm talking about monitors here rather than TVs.

I used to be able to tell what refresh rate they were set to because everything below a certain point flickered. I'd ask people why their screens were flickering and they couldn't see it.

£218 for this? You're havin' a fuckin' giraffe, mate.

OK let's return to OPs original example. Mussolini strung up. Good job and all. I don't particularly like talking about deserts because it's a childish misunderstanding of the universe. Nobody deserves anything. They get what they get. Having said that, if you're a Fascist dictator who uses violence and fear on your own population, you're going to store up some resentment and if said resentment finds an opportunity and an outlet you can reasonably expect a bad outcome.

I would go one further than OP and say that if you materially aid and abet said Fascist dictator, as for example his girlfriend, you should reasonably expect to share that bad outcome and happily she did.

There were a great many partisans who took revenge on the fascists at the end of the war and this also should not have come as a surprise to them.

OP is using Mussolini as an object lesson here, to use the modern way of putting it: Fuck around and find out. Which Mussolini did and modern fascists may also expect to also.

The January 6th 'protesters' were pardoned but they also spent a deal of time in jail. They fucked around and they found out.

If the full weight of Trump's Republic protects them they may feel emboldened but eventually the fascist regime always falls because they are economically illiterate, their inner circle fight like rats in a sack, they are incompetent and once the leader dies the whole collapses. And at that point fascists who have been doing fascist stuff should expect not clemency or mercy or any of the things they denied other people. They should expect to be upside down in a petrol station or something equally unpleasant.

It used to be that even the most unthinking and, frankly, racist people that I came across in work and the various places I used to drink would have been appalled to be lumped in with fascists and Nazis who were characterised as social misfits and considered beyond the pail. Everyone who was racist knew it was wrong. And now it has been normalised. If we'd been less tolerant of people presenting the racist arguments year after year and rather than trying to educate or reason with them had offered them violence or the credible threat thereof we'd be in a better position now. They'd have never reached the mainstream because they'd have been seen as losers still by the unthinking.

I'd say that it's not about fascist appearing neighbours it's about preventing the normalisation of fascism, like it's just another mainstream political viewpoint.

I think what can be achieved is the splitting off of the unthinking mass who support curbs on immigration (in practical terms fascism can only do without immigration because it intends to institute some form of indentured or slave labour) from the hardcore fascists by making it clear that fascists are abhorrent.

Loads of normal people stood up to fascism everywhere it has occurred. Some did it it in big ways many did it in little ways and in 1945 it was fairly comprehensively beaten into submission. What OP recognises is that it's easier to oppose before it consolidates and not after. Part of the consolidation process requires that fascism be normalised and consent be manufactured. That is the stage we're in right now and that is why Huffman is making reddit a safe space for the normalisation of fascism.

People support fascism because they are persuaded that their political goals can and will be attainable through violence. Violence is central to the fascist credo. If they are challenged with the credible threat of equal or greater opposing violence they will not be so keen on their chosen route to their political goals because it will involve a level of personal sacrifice that they are not prepared to countenance. If the threat of violence is enough to change their view from fascism to something else then it is a worthwhile alternative to violence without the threat. Although people should be willing to carry out the threat if they do not change their view.

The argument that this view can be reversed so as to support the need for threats of violence and actual violence against anti-fascists overlooks the simple fact that anti-fascists are already being threatened with and exposed to violence. It's an integral part of the fascist package. That's the big lesson of the holocaust: by the time there's something to punish, it's already too late.