Sven Slootweg (soft-deprecated) @joepie91@pixie.town

@Ashedryden If you have outdoor space available, setting up a shade/tent with chairs and tables outside? Some subset of people will naturally gravitate towards hanging out outside, and the less people density indoors, the better.

@pascaline Right, I see where you're coming from, but I still don't feel that the motivations are too important even in that context.

I personally think the structures and mechanisms are more important to understand than the motivations; there are plenty of people who are power-hungry, and they all have their own strategies, but what made them *succeed*? How could they turn their (unspecified) motivations into actual power?

Looking at historical fascist governments in democracies, the picture looks roughly the same every time - there is heavily centralized power in a government that's nominally benign, there's a culture of "listen to all sides no matter what" that fascists exploit to manipulate people emotionally, and eventually the fascists gain power over those centralized power structures in a nominally legitimate way (by the rules of the democracy anyway), and immediately turn it on the people and tear down the democracy.

From that perspective, there are two main problems:

1. "Listen to all people no matter what", basically the centrist view that treats all opinions as equally politically valid no matter what. Even if that opinion is oppressive or outright genocidal.

2. Central government with a lot of power; lots of institutions, laws and processes that can be used as weapons if they were to ever fall into malicious hands. This is and always will be a juicy target for power-hungry people.

I think the problem can be addressed through either of those two points, but I suspect that solving the latter is the more durable option, because it's harder to undo with propaganda. Either approach would solve the problem by removing (one of) the critical angles that fascists exploit.

(As a sidenote, the rise of the nazis before WWII happened in pretty much the exact same way. Exploiting the apathy of existing systems of power to gain a lot of power very quickly. So this definitely isn't the first time.)