politics

Controlling the universities is for control of information.

The Nazis could easily burn down the Institute of Sex Research and all it contents. Today’s fascists cannot burn down the science on queer people and global warming.

Universities have smart people who can say “hey this is the way your economic policies are harming this group of people” or “being LGBT is a normal human variation” or “the American civil war was fought over slavery” or “here are characteristics that seem to be common to every incarnation of fascism, and how they all seem to be related to what’s happening now.”

The idiot arm attacks knowledge online with Alex Jones style “information warfare” - just repeating insane falsehoods over and over again. Never playing defense, always flooding the web with lies and half truths. This is also why fascists love AI so much. (How much time do people waste arguing with bots? And the amount of bots makes these ideas seem more “normal” and common then they are…)

It kinda seems like immigrants and anti-war protesters made it to the top of the list this time.

The goal will be to send Americans to die in war in Greenland and other countries through drafts. They will use American citizens to fight against the allied nations of World War Two. They will send you to die against your friends. Open your fucking eyes.

Seriously. I wonder why European countries aren't massively jumping on this opportunity. Like every developed country, the nations of Europe need immigrants to prop up their demographics. Most of Europe's immigrants have been coming from countries in the global South. And while such immigrants have done well for the nations of Europe, there will always be less friction in bringing in immigrants from countries of more similar culture. Fuck any racists who hate Muslims. But the cold truth is it's probably a lot easier to integrate large numbers of politically liberal Americans into European countries than it is to integrate immigrants from Muslim countries. European countries desperately need immigration, but right wing politics is on the rise, in large part due to the frictions of immigration. Obviously American and European cultures are not the same; there are still very real cultural differences. But European vs. American culture is far closer than many other cultural pairings out there.

European countries do have some very limited ancestry-based immigration policies. But they usually only go back a generation or two. If your parent or grandparent immigrated from a European country to the US, you can get easy immigration in a lot of EU countries. But for most Americans of European descent, that immigration happened generations ago.

If the EU countries were clever right now, they could take advantage of this opportunity to bring in large numbers of disaffected Americans. They could offer relocation assistance, make it cheap and easy for educated American progressives to pack their bags and jump the pond. And in exchange they get workers in their economies they don't have to train to educate, and immigrants who would assimilate quite readily into the existing cultural milieu.

Hell, personally, I'm a typical American in that I have a hodgepodge of European ancestry. But my ancestors came over before 1900, there's nowhere in Europe I qualify for immigration based on ancestry. But if one of the countries my ancestors came from wanted to made it cheap and easy for me to return to the old country, I would jump on that.

Hell, the politics of it sell itself. Bill it politically as "bringing the European diaspora home."