Weimar Republic economy gets Weimar Republic results
(midwest.social)
collapseI am being absolutely serious here with the Weimar Republic comparison. Because people are fucking miserable and it's fucking terrifying.
A hundred years ago, broke people in big cities would go to fascist rallies because they were free, and because sometimes the organizers gave out free food and beer, and because people had nothing better to do.
And they stayed because hate feels good when you're hurting and simple violent solutions appeal to the angry monkey parts of our brains.
And the fewer community connections you have - the more the economy strips your life down to work and sleep, or to job hunting and sleep, or to scrounging in the gutter to survive and sleep, and the less you go out and socialize with actual human beings - the more appealing the fascist illusion of unity, of being part of a powerful group, becomes.
And the only difference today is that the fascist rallies are beamed directly into your home.
This 100%. Growing up my blue clollar janitor dad paid a mortgage on a 5 bedroom house to raise kids with my mom. someone could work just weekends at a bar or restaurant and afford an efficiency and get by.
My screen was absolutely not free. This stupid thing was goddamn expensive as fuck.
But you need it for life, unfortunately, so it’s already there. Even many homeless people have smartphones, though they’re a little busy trying to stay alive to get to stuck on a phone.
It's not just that. Economy in my country isn't that bad (yet. the increased energy costs are going to fuck us up real soon). Clubs just never got back to the pre-covid numbers. Like even with most of the competition closed down, the biggest one in the capital still didn't have enough visitors to warrant staying open (having to heat up a goddamn castle with 40-50 meter high ceilings in the winter months may have been a contributor). They're now an "event center" and will open for special events only.
Turns out we all learned you can just buy drinks and enjoy them at home for much less money, with less noise, etc.
Additionally, statistics are showing that young people are just living healthier lives and consuming less alcohol. And who'd want to go to a nightclub without alcohol?
Concerts, stand-up shows, etc, are still booming though. Stand-up comedy is bigger than ever here, since the scene only started developing some 10-15 years ago (Comedy Estonia had a show called "Esimene eesti keeles!" ("First one in Estonian!") in 2014). But partying, as in going to a night club, getting wasted, embarrassing yourself in an attempt to pick up a potential partner for the night, is just dead. It's an old people thing now. Most of the popular "dance music" bands here have been around since the 90s.
Tell me the Pussirohukelder in Tartu is still going...
Püss is definitely still going, though personally I haven't been there in about a decade. Was more my kinda jam back in university, but it was just so loud I couldn't stand it anymore at some point.
I can tell you though that Rüütli street feels dead compared to a decade+ ago. Like there's still bars, there's restaurants, they all seem to be doing well enough to stay open... But at least when I last visited it on a spring evening a few years ago, it wasn't as swarming as it used to be in say 2014 or 2015. Of course I guess that was when we still faintly remembered that COVID exists, maybe 2021 or 2022, so perhaps it's changed for the better.
There's also plenty of great bars to visit that have been open for a while and are still going. Möku (in the rooms of Genialistide Klubi for well over a decade now), Pirogovi Lokaal and of course Barlova. They all seem to be doing well, the nightclub scene has taken a much bigger hit than the bar scene IMO. I may of course be biased as well, I've never liked night clubs and I don't overly like socializing with the type of people that love night clubs, I like bars and I like people that like bars. If that makes sense at all lol
the less you go out and socialize with actual human beings - the more appealing the fascist illusion of unity, of being part of a powerful group, becomes.
This has not been my experience, but I acknowledge my weirdness. The less I'm with people the less I want to be with people.
People are really going out of their way not to see the demand destruction phenomenon for what it is. My experience is that older people think the economy is doing great because they all had explosions in their asset values over recent years. The youth on the other hand complain about being broke and finding it difficult to keep up with basic living costs. There is a total breakdown in communication between these two groups.
The K-shaped economy in action.
The rich get richer, the poor get poorer.
And when young Americans finally lose their fucking temper - when we get "Occupy the Suburbs" instead of "Occupy Wall Street", when the rhetoric is turned against the 10%, whose stocks and bonds and 401Ks ballooned in value as a side effect of the hyperbillionaires looting and pillaging the American working class in the greatest wealth transfer in history - those old fucks aren't going to have the slightest idea why most of America hates them.
And the hyperbillionaires who maintain their power by dividing Americans against one another are going to laugh all the way to the bank.
Dang, when did we inflate 1% to 10%? People driving BMWs but still working for a living are easier to throw rocks at than real villains?
When the 10% who have savings and stock market investments and 401Ks are getting richer and richer, seeing their personal net worth rise, and feeling pretty good about it.
And the 90% who don't have savings and investments and are working paycheck to paycheck are seeing mass unemployment and salary cuts and hyperinflated rents and grocery prices and are struggling harder and harder and just getting further and further behind.
And then the 10% tell the 90% "I don't see any problem, the economy is great".
I don't think we're there yet. Hopefully the American economy pulls back from the brink. I don't want to live in a country where being upper middle class means living in walled compounds and having armed bodyguards escort your kids to private schools to keep them from being kidnapped for ransom. But frankly, I think that's where we're going - a United States where the people lucky enough to own stock see those stock prices go up, and up, and up, while the wealth of the people goes down, and down, and down, enjoying their enclaves of wealth while surrounded by more and more of the desperate poor.
Because, I mean, you may not have helped the hyperbillionaires screw over 90% of America to pad their stock prices, you may not have orchestrated the biggest wealth transfer in history from the poor to the rich, but you sure as fuck didn't try to stop them.
There is no middle class. There's labor and capital. Confusing the two only helps capitalists
Another thing that pisses me off about it all is that more and more of our money leaves our communities and goes to billionaire scum that use it to lobby against our interests.
That's why for YEARS, I have been saying that Campaign Finance Reform is the issue from which ALL other issues flow.
Billionaires pay a miniscule, totally unnoticeable percentage of their fortunes to strongly, relentlessly lobby for laws,.rules, regulations, loopholes, tax breaks, etc. that will bring them even more money, many more times than what they invested.
Lobbying, and trading favors for campaign donations, has to end, it is literally the reason behind nearly every bad thing in our country, and it is only getting worse.
I'm right with you.
Political money needs to be regulated with an iron fist.
We need a Constitutional amendment to strictly define the framework for campaign contributions and violating those laws comes the highest criminal punishments imaginable.
Even when people put great effort into a tiny win you know what the lobbyists do? Go back to work on Monday and try again.
Oh, yeah. In the 90s we had the McCain-Geingold Campaign Finance legislation, and Republicans immediately went to war against it, and piece by piece, they chipped away every bit of it, until it was gone. They did the same thing with health care.
MAGA needs to be prohibited as a National Security Threat.
https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/2026/04/viktor-orban-defeat-tisza-islands-hungary/686827/?gift=-6U2tqrGiy0dwsaWbehJnLcCG4X9T4slVFUTmaWJFUw
Tisza Islands…
What, I wondered, did people do on these islands? The answer was surprisingly banal. These were partly debate societies, where members could gather and talk about local issues, such as a factory that was polluting the countryside, or whether the village medical center was well stocked. The groups also organized litter pickups and painted bus benches. There was talk of movie nights.
Under one subreddit query from nine months ago that asked, “What are the Tisza islands doing?” the responses mostly showed people coming together and being neighborly. “Things we’ve done,” began one post: “Water distribution in the heat, we collected school supplies and clothes for the family support center.” Also, “we organized a cooking competition.” This was a perfect illustration of Robert Putnam’s idea in Bowling Alone, his book about growing atomization in America—that civil society depends on people simply doing things together.
Mutual aid groups. Prefigurative politics. Starting local with boots on the ground, finding little ways to make your community better, actually pays off.
(Nobody tell the MLs.)
We are NOT practicing anarchism, we are having potlucks and have a favor board.
Sure. And fair. There are tons of people out there practicing anarchism-style community organization and mutual aid who get mightily offended at being called anarchists - e.g. the Zapatistas.
That's the cool thing about anarchism. It's focused on building community, so its ideas work to build community, whether you're an anarchist or not.
This made me happy 🥹
Don't forget, the fascist rallies also had one incredibly important thing that drew in more people than the free food and free beer - a simple, targeted reason WHY they're in the shitty situation.
You can throw as many economists and scientists and such at the problem and they'll (properly) show the reasons, but there won't be a simple solution. There won't be a singular "here do this and it will magically fix all your issues" point. Even the simplest fixes to the situation will be overwhelming for most people.
And most people just want that: a leader who promises to solve the crappy situation, without making them feel stupid, without convoluted long drawn out plans. A simple solution, a simple fix.
For Hitler that was "get rid of the Jews". For mango mussolini that's "get rid of the illegals".
And people liked the simple solutions so they signed up for the ideology.
"If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you."
-LBJ
And it doesn't matter if you're talking about different races, different sexualities, attached vs detached earlobes, whatever. Point to a group and tell everyone "They're the problem" and you're going to have an automatic following.
Pretty much, yeah.
Fascism, at its core, is Us versus Them. Under all the complexities and layers is one simple idea: Our problems are because They have Our resources, and we need a strong leader to go to war (figuratively or literally) against Them and take Our stuff.
And I think this is incredibly seductive because it triggers our old hominid instincts, from back when we lived in small tribes on the African savannah, and when our territory was hit by drought, or fire, or natural disaster, and we didn't have enough resources, the solution really was to go into another tribe's territory, drive them out, and take their stuff.
Lebensraum is as old as stone knives and bearskins.
And the more desperate people are, the more frightened and hungry and angry they are, the stronger those old animal instincts become.
But, you know, a good leader can simplify complicated issues. A good leader can identify problems, articulate actual solutions, and direct people's angry monkey brains towards fighting for those solutions instead of persecuting scapegoats. Not Us versus Them, but All of Us, together, fighting poverty and climate change and economic hardship and building a better future.
Unfortunately, in the United States and the "free world" as a whole, we have a handful of extraordinarily wealthy people who benefit from all the economic and social failures that are causing the problems we suffer from. And they want people to believe in a simple violent solution that blames the wrong people and doesn't actually fix anything, because they don't want the problems fixed.
And you don't get elected unless these extraordinarily wealthy people give you enough money to win an election.
So we don't get any good leaders. We get a choice between fascism and the status quo, which is also fascism.
Yay, democracy.
Y'all getting free screen?
Lol. Let's call it a "positive" externality. Pretty much everybody who's employed, or who wants to be employed, or who wants to stay in contact with friends or family, needs to have a cell phone and Internet access. And if you have to pay for that stuff anyway, you may as well doomscroll on it.
At least the Weimar Republic had amazing jazz and the Bauhaus
Party is wherever you bring that stolen bottle
Must . . . live . . . in . . . New York . . .
We need free healthcare. This obviously includes free food because you can't stay healthy if you don't eat.
"Fascism" really just means that people are unhappy with the current situation and want change. And that's ok, understandable even. We need to make sure to stir the movement in a direction that benefits people, instead of making the situation worse.
"Fascism" really just means that people are unhappy with the current situation and want change.
The meaning has changed significantly over the years. I understand that the original intent came from the Fasci Siciliani in the 1890s. Fasci meaning a bundle. The single stick is weak, but a bundle is strong. It was a farmers' movement seeking economic and land reforms. Later, it was invoked by a certain populist leader to claim he was fighting for the people. And so it came into its modern usage.
My great grandfather was killed on January 3, 1894 in the street in that uprising when the police fired into an unarmed crowd. His wife fled to New York City with their children.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fasci_Siciliani
Just like the Nazis, or national socialist, in Germany dragging socialism through the shit and soiling it with their ideology.
How about free healthcare and a universal basic income that covers food and a place to stay?
