Nazis and the Confederacy
11:13 Saturday, 17 January 2026
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Words: 153
You may be wondering if I'm suffering from NDS (Nazi Derangement Syndrome), in suggesting that there is a through-line from the Confederate States of America and Nazi Germany, i.e. "losers" never forget history.
Here is a remarkable video of a Zoom lecture, Nuremberg Laws: How The Nazis Were Influenced by U.S. Jim Crow Laws. (It starts about two minutes into the recording and the audio sucks, but it's tolerable.) This is very worth your time to see the connections between immigration, eugenics, white supremacy and Nazi Germany. Spoiler alter: The Germans sent a delegation to America to study Jim Crow and decided it was too extreme for Germany. But they loved the eugenics, immigration and anti-miscegination laws. It also talks about the role of memory.
Great video.
If you don't want to spend an hour watching a video, here's a shorter piece touching on some of the same issues.
✍️ Reply by emailAll Nazis All the Time
07:57 Saturday, 17 January 2026
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Words: 466
My books are nearly all in storage, including volumes 1 and 2 of Werner Klemperer's I Will Bear Witness. He was an intelligent man who could see what was taking place all around him, who was relatively powerless to do anything about it.
So he wrote his diaries.
I'm pretty sure I'm going to lose most of my 11 readers if I start writing about Nazis and fascists exclusively, but there's only so many places I can direct this rage and incomprehension at the absence of rage all around me.
Losers remember all the wrong lessons from history, recalling only the humiliation and grievance of defeat, and nurturing it to one day try again.
Winners forget history. "Well, that's over! Glad we got that fixed! Let's go make money!"
ICE detention centers are concentration camps people!
"They're not Nazis. You're being irrational, hysterical. They're just Americans, Americans can't be Nazis!"
Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit.
Jesus H. Motherfucking Christ!
"America must have Greenland. Lebensraum! Er, I mean, "national security!"
I was trying to do something fun in another area, and kept encountering pushback and negativism because, well, reasons I guess. So that stopped being fun. Life's too fucking short.
I played Lode Runner on the Apple IIc Plus yesterday. Made it to level 16. Pisses me off that Total Replay doesn't seem to let you record your high scores. The app never let you save a game in progress. You could pause it, but you couldn't save it. In an emulator you can save the state of the emulator and return to it at any time, but there's no satisfactory joystick experience. Maybe I can use the keyboard? There's like over a hundred levels, I think the highest I ever got back in the day was in the twenties. All my muscle memory is on the joystick though, and that's slowly coming back.
Each level begins paused, so you can look at all the guards and chests and try and figure out an approach or strategy. I seem to recall that back in the day I was pretty confident that the only thing keeping me from finishing the game was the inability to save it in progress. That is to say, I became "good enough" to be able to identify the kinds of routes and the levels of bricks I had to destroy to get to the chests without too much difficulty. You get an additional life with each level successfully concluded, so you can afford to die a few times to figure something out. I don't think we called it "grinding" back then, but that's essentially what it is.
But there's only so much retro-gaming I can do as well.
Anyway. I guess it won't be all Nazis, but pretty damn close.
The beat goes on...
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