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Exceptionalism

With the AI on the fritz again, dear leader’s tenuous grip on a very limited supply of marbles, and the corporate media unable unwilling to call any of this what it is, the importance of checking the scores is our go-to.

Not those scores.

Here’s what I found: Once fascists win power democratically, they have never been removed democratically. Not once. Ever.

I know that sounds impossible. I kept digging, thinking surely someone, somewhere, stopped them. The actual record is so much worse than you think.

Let’s start with Germany because everyone thinks they know this story. Franz von Papen, the conservative politician who convinced President Hindenburg to make Hitler Chancellor, said “We’ve hired him” in January 1933. He thought he was so clever. Within 18 months, the Nazis were machine-gunning von Papen’s allies in their homes during the Night of Long Knives. Von Papen himself barely escaped to Austria with his life. Every single conservative who thought they could “control” or “moderate” Hitler was either dead, in exile, or groveling for survival by 1934.

Italy was even dumber, if that’s possible. October 1922, Mussolini announces he’s marching on Rome with 30,000 blackshirts. Except here’s the thing: they were poorly armed, disorganized, and the Italian military could have crushed them in about three hours. The King had his generals ready. He had martial law papers drawn up. The military was waiting for the order. Instead, he invited Mussolini to form a government. Just handed him power. Twenty-three years later, partisans hung Mussolini’s corpse upside down at a gas station while crowds beat it with sticks. The king died in exile. Hundreds of thousands of Italians died for that moment of cowardice.

Spain might be the worst because everyone saw it coming. Three years of escalating fascist violence. Actual assassination attempts. Then in 1936, Franco and his generals launch a straight-up military coup. The Spanish Republic begged for help. France said “not our problem.” Britain said “both sides are bad.” America declared neutrality. The result? Franco ruled for 39 years. He died peacefully in his bed in 1975. They’re still finding mass graves in Spain. Still. In 2025.

Want something more recent? Look at Hungary. Orbán won democratically in 2010. By 2011 he’d rewritten the constitution. By 2012 he controlled the media. By 2013 he’d gutted the judiciary. It’s 2025 and he’s still in power. The EU has been “very concerned” for fourteen fucking years. They’ve written strongly worded letters. They’ve held meetings. Hungary is now a one-party state in the middle of Europe and everyone just… accepts it.

Okay, but surely someone, somewhere, stopped them?

The dreaded ‘someone.’ Not be outdone by Herr von Hindenburg

Want to know how many times people successfully “controlled” the fascists they allied with? Zero.

Are we feeling special?

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Encoding the Model of the Object

Whether that object be of desire… of derision… of worship… of my affection… of a preposition. Staying with the quantum mechanics meme (and why shouldn’t we?), there comes the matter of no small consequence surrounding the, what’s the scientific term… uh, bizarro quantum world condition by which, even if you already have all of the possible information that is allowed to be known about a certain activity or event, you can still only talk about the probability of the event happening. Same for coin flips as a nanoscale bridge.

Quantum mechanics operates in a bizarro world that includes superposition, where atoms can maintain more than one state at a time. Matter can also become entangled so that it remains connected across vast distances — a ghostly phenomenon dubbed “spooky action at a distance” by Albert Einstein.

So, yes, the model of the object, a Hamiltonian; no, not that one. This one:

The energy conservation (quantum) law written with the operator H as the Schrödinger equation is fundamental in quantum mechanics and is perhaps the most utilized, mathematical computation device in quantum mechanics of systems with a finite number of degrees of freedom. There is also, however, the alternative approach in the Heisenberg picture, or formulation, in which the observable and other operators are time-dependent whereas the state vectors $ psi$ are time-independent, which reverses the time dependences betwen operators and state vectors from the more popular Schrödinger formulation.

It’s the thing, in other words. That says whether you’re talking about an electron or a bicycle. The first piece of information you need is the Hamiltonian of an object.

Ah, the rush of knowing… feels the same even when it’s about all you don’t know.

Now… there is an implication to the above, and I won’t say what it is, that is completely deterministic about the future. Do I already know what that is? Maybe. But since time is merely one factor among many, there’s really no rush.