Dear Jezebel, a Polish progressive here. Yes, you’re basically right about the whole “dystopian nightmare” thing, things are getting really really nasty, BUT please - please please please - do not link our civil liberties issues to the “government doling out money” crap; it’s basically right-wing propaganda from the…

I think one of the silver linings of this shitshow is the unlikely alliances being formed; on the bright side, all us reasonable people are on the same side here. It’s truly strange times when Keith Ellison and Evan McMullin sound strangely alike, but it isn’t a bad thing.

Try Sinclair Lewis. And I am pretty sure that Orwell wrote quite a lot about how exactly it gets that way. He was a serious student of political communication. He would have sounded the alarm here decades ago.

Yup. The first thing Paul Ryan wants to do is torpedo the individual insurance market and kill off Medicare. The whole idea of Republicans lowering the retirement age, subsidizing child care (HA!) or really making life better for the non-wealthy in any meaningful way is frankly hilarious.

I told myself after brexit and all through the election that this was just the dying gasp of authoritarian fascism making its final stand.

Newly named:

They have also threatened to limit press access to the parliament. The people are not having it, though, and have been protesting for four days. And it seems to have worked, because the Minister of Foreign Affairs said this today:

This reminds me of the family guy episode when Brian and Stewie go to Germany. They take a guided bus tour of Germany, and the German giving the tour skips the time period of the late 30's.

This isn’t that surprising. Poland’s non-Jewish intelligentsia was gutted by the Soviets and its Jewish one by the Nazis, and the Communist system didn’t exactly encourage the development of a new one. Unlike in the Baltic States, the children of those who escaped mostly stayed in exile after the fall of the Iron…

I have Polish friends making concrete emigration plans for their families: the sense of a semi-willing annexation by Russia 2018/19 through L&J is becoming widespread. Their liberal (or, let’s be honest, non-idiot) friends in Latvia/Macedonia/Ukraine held very grim gallows humour wakes on the night after the US…

When I first read 1984, especially the appendices, I wondered “But how would it ever get to that state? How does that even happen?”

Also funny how threatening and in some cases murdering some of the 300,000 left (of the 3,300,000 before the war) who tried to return to their homes will continue affect that number... :-/

And this is just a tip of the iceberg. Learn from our nightmare. Greetings from Poland.

Also, what is it with secularizing the business world and de-secularizing everything else with Christians? I don’t think Jesus was like, “So be nice to everybody except during business hours in which case it’s a free-for-all.” Schizos all of them. That song at the beginning of The Apprentice was just perfect.…

Funny thing about fascist governments. They don’t give a whit about blogs, newspapers, magazines, demonstrations, protests, etc. They’ll just ignore you or jail you.

This. And the whole exceptionalism concept has been a sanitized cover for our globe spanning racism and greed and blinded us to the deepening problems here at home.

In a Facebook chat, a top equal rights official mused that Polish hotels should not be forced to provide service to black or gay customers. After the official stepped down for unrelated reasons, his successor rejected an international convention to combat violence against women because it appeared to argue against…

It was the dark side of the end to Communism in Poland as well. The folks who took over after the end of the Warsaw Pact essentially made peace with the Catholic Church over selling-out women’s rights.

Right? “There used to be a significant Jewish population, but they just all vanished one day. No need to think about that.”

“I’m here marching because it may be the last time we’re allowed to,”