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Randahl Fink

Imagine you could take a time machine back 20 years and tell people, that in 2025 the world is on the brink of World War 3 and desperately in need of a leader, but the Americans elect a reality tv personality for president, and he starts by embracing Vladimir Putin, wanting to dissolve NATO, and annex Canada, Greenland and parts of Panama.”

— Not a single person would believe you.

@randahl

i'm sure plenty of us who lived through Ronald Reagan would believe you... at least Trump didn't co-star with a chimp...

@peachfront @randahl Yeah, I 100% would have believed this 20, 30 or even 40 years ago. My only surprise would have been that you weren't talking about President Schwarzenegger.

@jwz @peachfront @randahl +1 I did not expect them to go with "that corrupt property developer so cartoonishly evil he was parodied on Sesame Street"

@peachfront @randahl At least Reagan didn’t encourage armed militants chanting “Hang Bonzo.”

@peachfront @randahl well, when you already have one chimp in your movie you don’t need a second.

@randahl

My grandfather was Mario Cuomo's COS for a while, other roles too. He told me that this was going to happen when I went to visit with him in 2001, a couple of months before 9-11. According to him:

NY GOP was in bed with Russia in the 80s
The GOP was going to go over to Putin.
Trump was going to be president w/strong backing from the evangelicals.

I excused myself to the bathroom because I thought his mind was slipping. It sounded so insane.

@noyes @randahl so your saying your grandfather had a time machine...

@ATLeagle @randahl

Grandfather. Keen political instincts. I remember him saying that the GOP wanted Trump to run for governor in the early 90s, but that Trump didn't want to do it.

@noyes @randahl i edited that, so some people will think I'm not a moron.

That really makes me think about what was going on back then. We know guiliani replaced the Italian mafia with Russian, but how deep was the influence at the national level

@randahl Well, did you have this on your 21st century bingo card?

@randahl I'm not sure I want to believe it now.

@randahl If someone had told me last summer that The Hill would publish articles listing different countries that would probably want to be part of the US (and joking they should be on our shopping list) I wouldn't have believed it. But here we are.

"Imagínese que pudiera viajar en una máquina del tiempo 20 años atrás y decirle a la gente que en 2025 el mundo está al borde de la Tercera Guerra Mundial y necesita desesperadamente un líder, pero los estadounidenses eligen a un personaje de la televisión de realidad como presidente, y él comienza por abrazar a Vladimir Putin, queriendo disolver la OTAN y anexar Canadá, Groenlandia y partes de Panamá”.

— Nadie le creería."

@randahl

@randahl

Like a bad Hollywood B movie…

@randahl and anyone who did that would probably still be in the Looney Bin.

In my imagination:

Somebody did; and somebody believed them; and the believers begat MAGA.

@randahl

@randahl Probably the 'leader' part is the problem. Better trying without leaders, because that gives less problems.

@randahl Parts of Panama you say? If Trump takes over the Panama canal I wouldn't be surprised if he finds a sudden need for a "safety buffer" that covers the entire country.

@randahl
It should have been all hands on deck to stop this insurrectionist traitor, but instead the corrupt GQP bowed down to a Moron Dotard sociopath, and the DOJ did not act with the urgency demanded by his heinous attack. The criminal Traitor was allowed to run again although the constitution forbids it. The "Supreme" Court destroyed Amerikka in 2024. The parallels with Hitler are shocking. Now we are at the part where the industrialists bow down and kiss the ring. 🤬

@randahl I mean, 20 years ago today Bush was just re-elected after starting multiple unwinnable forever wars. But a good point in general.

@kaye @randahl I thought the exact same thing. Bush was controversial to put it mildly, and it was a scary time for a lot of people.

Even so, not anywhere near where we are now.

@randahl Many would.

2004 is when I started noticing that whatever the republican US states were doing looked way too similar to how Donetsk mafia behaved with Russian backing.

Electing Trump fits that pattern quite well. Tuzla incident was still fresh in mind to believe Russians would be Russians. And US wasn’t looking good on “we won’t threaten annexations” front either.

I doubt other ex-colonies would find current developments surprising either.

@randahl
If it was you doing the telling, we’d believe you!

If I was to tell you in 20 years time:
• we’d be in a time of peace we’ve not seen before.
#Ukraine is the 4th largest economy in Europe.
• India is the 3rd largest economy in the world.
• America have universal healthcare.
• Kaliningrad is European and renamed Königsberg.
• Vladivostok is part of China and now called Yongmingcheng.

Would you believe me?

#TAATM2045

My track record is that I’m fairly on the money but wildly optimistic on the timeframe.

@randahl I remember an episode of an 80s TV show called "Night Court" where one of the cases was a guy (musician maybe?) who'd been kept on high-powered drugs by his therapist for years and was basically just coming back to reality. He was told the current president of the United States was Ronald Reagan and did a spit-take: "the ACTOR?!?"

That's when this timeline forked.

@randahl

I'm pretty sure I once saw a book with this plot that I did not read.

@randahl You forgot "convicted fellon".

@randahl

if i went back to 2005 and told the people i know about this, they would all wonder why it's not worse...

which, to me, is an indication that we've all been fighting on the right side, but we probably haven't been fighting as hard as we should have been.

it's time for us to "up our game" a few levels.

@randahl

1980s Houston Tx
1970s Crook Nixon POTUS meets future 2016-2025 Felon Trump POTUS

"If you travel to the States ... they have a lot of different words than like what we use. For instance: they say 'elevator', we say 'lift'; they say 'drapes', we say 'curtains'; they say 'president', we say 'seriously deranged git!'"

Alexei Sayle (UK comedian)

@randahl

I don't know if the data would bear me out. But my guess is that the people who absolutely WOULD believe this scenario (and be alarmed at the implications) were born in the 1950's or early 60's.

I.e. close enough to WW2 and the subsequent goverment-backed atrocities and misdirection to be hear the warning bells today.

Maybe it's a situation where the Olds need to step up to act on their knowledge.

@randahl I think I would have believed it, but I've been reading dystopian science fiction since I was little.

@randahl

I've feared essentially this since I learned about consent and coercion, democracy and fascism, as a sociology student about 40 years ago. Yet, sometimes I still struggle to believe it's happening now.

:mastodon:

@randahl

"Lest We Forget," implies the fear of fascism's return. Forget we did. In hindsight, it was certain.

"Those defending the new administration insist it isn’t fascism, but Americanism. This, too, was foretold: in 1938, a New York Times reporter warned: “When and if fascism comes to America it will not be labelled ‘made in Germany’; it will not be marked with a swastika; it will not even be called fascism; it will be called, of course, ‘Americanism’.”"
theguardian.com/books/2017/feb
:mastodon:

The Guardian · 'It will be called Americanism': the US writers who imagined a fascist futureBy Sarah Churchwell

@randahl @vwdasher I did an international studies and sociology degree from 2008-2011. I wish I’d saved the lecture recordings to re-experience an entirely different vision of society and the international order

@randahl I can't believe it right NOW!

@randahl least of republicans that this Putin-kisser was one of them

@randahl Twenty years ago was about the halfway point in my adult awareness of the road we've been hurtling down. So, yes, I and a lot of my fellows predicted it loud, clear, and fairly accurately.

@randahl no. Par fot the course, after Reagan and under Shrubya — at that point still fanning global conflict pretending the targets had anything to do with 9/11.

So the response would more likely be WHAT TOOK US SO LONG?

@randahl

Many would believe it, if the movie would be from Roland Emmerich.

@randahl

Yeah, kinda like “Back to the Future” when Marty goes back from 1985 to to the 1950s & tells Doc Brown that Ronald Reagan is President to Brown’s incredulity & amusement.

@randahl For context, that was 5 years into the Bush/Cheney administration, and 2 years into the Iraq war.

If you'd told 2005-me all that, I would have thought you were talking about the 2008 elections.

@randahl Robocop came out in 1987 with the "I'd buy that for a dollar!" show, so we were already quite cynical even then. Many of us 20 years ago would have sadly believed you, we just wouldn't have wanted to. We thought things were bad enough then. Ha! Little did we know....

@randahl
And that the president is an actor from Home Alone