'But I don’t think the answer can be “violence is permissible when you can classify someone with a loaded term so vague that people regularly use it to describe expedited restaurant permitting”. '
This, I think, is the main point of the article. I don't disagree, and I tend to argue for at least trying to talk to people, but I admit that I am concerned about how much I am hesitating on even discussing some subjects with people.
Even George Orwell who fired a rifle at fascists eventually concluded that "The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable’"
I think the Charlie Kirk thing scared people straight for a few weeks but I've definitely seen an uptake of submissions to HN about various tempests in teapots such as the recent drama about an open source project that was big in 2005 and only niche since 2012 or something about waffles and now a laptop maker that tweeted a link to the wrong thing or something.
There is still this emphasis by certain on canceling people at conferences and stuff because they are "fascists" but a lack of recognition that the democratic institutions that they like so much are putting "fascists" in power throughout the world -- and if they want it to be different they're going to have to stop dehumanizing people who vote the wrong way and talk to them. The message of "you are bad", "your society is bad" just doesn't sell, in fact Black people don't want to hear about they weighed down by the legacy of slavery, they want to maximize the life that's in front of them.
Thing is that people find meaning in believing "society is bad" so it serves the interest of this selfish meme to put "fascists" in power; the Heritage Foundation or the Federalist Society or Fox News couldn't have done a better job engineering a fifth column for the left which would keep the right in power permanently.
In what sense is the current administration not a fascist one? They are consolidating plenary authority in the executive, erasing democratic norms, enacting lawfare against political enemies with the DOJ, abducting undesirables to torture camps in legally untouchable countries, pardoning convicted insurrectionists, and treating Blue areas like enemy territory -- up to and including military occupation. This is unprecedented in American politics since the Civil War.
Not everyone to the right of the "far left" is a fascist, but the administration in power undeniably has a fascist core. And people who actually study this stuff professionally largely agree.
"We are in the process of the second American Revolution which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be."
Whether or not it is, the repetition of that word by you and your friends is a magic spell that brought that administration into reality. For years it has been "Kier Starmer is a fascist" or "White people are fascists" or "Your local police department is fascist", etc.
A certain amount of blame can be laid at centrist politicians who can't take advantage of left-wing populist sentiments because they are too afraid of donors. [1] But an ultra-left that is obviously warming up the ovens for DHH because he said something stupid once and might come for me because I'm cisgender just seems fascinated with fascism because they're jealous the same way Charlie Kirk was fascinated with "cancel culture" because like David Horowitz he wished he could punish anyone in academia who he disagreed with.
[1] Look at the donors who will give money to anyone who isn't Mamdani no matter how bad because they don't have faith in the ability of blue state institutions to completely frustrate and hamstring anyone who tries to do anything.
Yes this administration definitely has strong, disturbing authoritarian tendencies. The censorious tendencies of the "far left", though, took us a meaningful distance here. Executive power and Congress's uselessness has been accelerating for decades now, but it's not hard to see the place we're at as an extension of where we were.
Jimmy Kimmel's attempted cancellation was just a more state-sponsored attempt at cancelling than the social pressure cancellations of the late 2010s. Sure state-sponsored is what makes it technically censorship but the practical difference it makes for the individual and their platform is almost none. Generating massive amounts of outrage over calling the default git branch "master" is how you get Anduril and Palantir virtue signaling to the right about how their work is keeping America safe and competitive. College student bodies insisting on their administrations doing land acknowledgements is what brought contrarian shit-stirrers like Charlie Kirk to colleges in the first place.
And as a result the modern Democratic party is broken. The "far left" has been obsessed with destroying the Democratic party's coalition because of their insistence on ideological purity. The center left moderates have been vilified and alienated and are too shy to endorse populist left candidates like Mamdani because of how much they've been punched. Free speech advocates have been exiled as progenitors of "hate speech", only for the current administration to use the same "hate speech" rationale to silence the opposition (labeling something as stupid as "Antifa" dangerous.) Left libertarians have been sneered at for so long as agents of greed and enemies of state capacity that now that the state is trying to quash the freedom of those on the left, the left libertarians don't want to speak up.
So yes we're in bad shape, very bad shape. But I have zero confidence that it's the "far left" who is going to save us. If anything I think if the "far left" and the MAGA-ites continue the way they do we're going to end up in an American version of the Spanish Civil War. I think the MAGA-ites just realized that nobody is willing to adhere to historical American norms on liberal democracy; the emperor has no clothes. Might as well push liberal democracy as far as it can go since nobody is willing to fight for it.
EDIT: I'm expecting downvotes for this opinion and it's one I don't share on lefty social media spaces because it's always a very disliked one but I'd welcome actual discussion on this. The closest I've seen to a rebuttal is "if we need to moderate our positions then we become as bad as the other side, so what's the point?" which I also disagree with. An inability to talk about this is yet another mark that shows how far the gulf between the sides are in the US.
Only russians talk about fascism. They are obsessed with it. They even believe by attacking Ukraine they fight against fascism.
And if nowadays people suddenly talk about fascism again they are spreading russian propaganda. Because as you should know russian propaganda supports both sides (fascist and anti-fascist), just to increase the level of social tension. Its a devilish plan to destroy solidarity in western societies. And until now it works. Political polarization is sky high in many western countries nowadays.
"Morality" is about immorality, about justifying punishment/persecution, about drawing lines that someone is on the wrong side of.
Ethics is (nominally) universal; morality is about identity and therefore about exclusion. Morality is a weapon: that is why the people who like it like it.
"Morality" is about immorality... Ethics is (nominally) universal;
Ethics is moral philosophy. Most of the time these terms are used interchangeably but your description of the accepted difference is inaccurate and inflammatory.
Ethics is the moral standard accepted at community level, not quite universal. Morality is the projection (or rejection) of parts of ethics on individual level. In itself, morality is not a weapon and it's not about exclusion, at least no more than ethics can be.
> Morality is a weapon: that is why the people who like it like it.
Ironically, you are trying to blame moral people for being immoral because they like the "weapon" called morality... You speak from the view point of your morality that rejects morality and it gets funny.
I guess the point is that we can torture this until it appears to be a mind-bending paradox.
Alternatively we might just remember the basics: "Even if you disagree very strongly, don't injure, imprison, or kill each other at will, like lunatics. Follow the law instead."
> Logic is inapplicable here. Politics is arbitrary, and labels/categories are worse than arbitrary, they are random.
Broadly speaking, at some level, I agree with them.
There is no machine that will flash an indicator when pointed at a “fascist”. Yet certain intelligent people are always willing to use pure reason to confront a world that does not admit such scientific classification. The retort is always, “You know one when you see one.”
The is a definite humility that is lacking in such debate, as if everyone shares a logically necessary psychological reality.
None of these thinking persons, of any stripe, are prepared to do the work of articulating, with nuance, where the logical consequences of another contradict their own, and more tellingly, where interpretations of words/labels/categories are themselves foundational in arguments.
People, myself certainly included, are not free with their energies teasing these details out, and are instead more than ready to indicate, in laborious, technical detail, why they are right.
This is a very sick time in shared discourse. I want people to pause and ask if this intellectual turmoil is indeed useful in the present moment or is irrational behaviour forced by economic, social, and environmental anxieties of our time.
This is a tedious article re-iterating a common point that fascism is a catch all term. Political words and phrases are not going to be used in strict adherence to deductive syllogisms. People vary.
In any case, here is a quote from Stephen Miller, who inspired this blog post, naming and shaming a nebulous enemy:
> They cannot conceive of the army that they have arisen in all of us because we stand for what is good, what is virtuous, what is noble. And to those trying to incite violence against us, those trying to foment hatred against us, what do you have? You have nothing. You are nothing. You are wickedness. You are jealousy. You are envy. You are hatred. You are nothing. You can build nothing. You can produce nothing. You can create nothing.
People hurling the word fascist around always seem to have some kind of authoritarian bent themselves. This makes sense because those people have to worry about how their own brand of authoritarianism is different from fascism so that they can adequately pitch it to others.
Meanwhile, most of us see policies that are obviously authoritarian, don't worry about which brand, and oppose them for the usual reasons: no one should have that power, or we don't know how to organize humans to use that power safely, or it will normalize giving away a different power, etc.
Absolutely true, and well said. Communism and fascism have always been two heads of the same hydra. They always appear together, and vie for the same radicals as potential followers. Benito Mussolini himself was originally a Marxist revolutionary.
I have a hard time with this, and I don't think that you understand the word fascism well enough. Rather I think that what you really mean is that Communism has always wound up in authoritarianism. Fascism of course starts in authoritarianism, and I think that is where you get confused. So some definitions:
Authoritarianism: a political system where a smaller group winds up with power, often with a military (or a monopoly on violence) to enforce that power. Often characterized by laws that are selectively enforced one some people, or "some who the law protects but does not bind, and others that the law binds but does not protect".
Communism: a philosophy of government where the government holds the "means of production" in the name of the people. In practice this devolves into a singular group ("the Party"), controlled by relatively few people deciding what is best for people, and this usually winds up in authoritarianism in anything larger than a small community (where individual social pressure can keep it in check).
Fascism: a philosophy of government that starts with authoritarianism, but goes hard into picking out groups of people from within the country as "the enemy" and blames all of a societies ills on those people (Mussolini picked socialists and labor unions first, Hitler also started with socialists and the disabled before moving on to Poles, Gypsies, Jews, and others). Part of this is also picking a chosen people, and creating a nationalist image around those people (True Italians for Mussolini, "Aryans" for Hitler), while at the same time projecting those people as the victims of the minority that is being blamed. Violence against these enemies is justified as being right (often in religious terms), and any check on that violence is portrayed as evil (e.g.: due process).
So the Soviet Union was actually less fascist than the U.S. was at the time (not saying the U.S. was fascist, but we certainly blamed black people for a lot). E.g.: the U.S.S.R. often mostly-correctly propagandized how much better the few black people that were in their country were treated. But the Soviet Union certainly was more authoritarian than the U.S. was.
Isn't "political violence against fascists" basically a fallacy in practice, at least in the current US? Almost all the physical violence we've seen so far has been performed by the fascists. The Left are almost strictly defined by their desire to follow the laws and morals and work within the system. The Magas seem to revel in disrespecting those structures.
To suggest otherwise seems like a false equivalence.
I had this exact debate with a far left friend who kept calling people, including Charlie Kirk, fascists. You can't say you don't support violence and then call someone a fascist. Calling someone a fascist is calling for their murder in our society.
That's not my impression at all. The logical "contradiction" it spends all its time talking about only applies if everything is strict binaries, and falls apart if we start addressing how much for every single point.
Or to pull out another example: what level of overstep is necessary for it to become acceptable (praiseworthy?) to throw your shoes at George W. Bush?
It has no basis in psychological discourse, politics is by nature illogical. So creating logic games from arbitrary metaphors (what politics is based in and especially when each side is calling the other with the same arbitrary label) is like creating a card game that only let's the house win.
As a work, it’s political philosophy. Not science. Which makes it odd as a counterpoint to arguing the article in question is too aloof.
(Also, conflating irrational and illogical is unfounded. Nature is irrational. Per Caplan, individual agents may find it advantageous to act illogically. It doesn’t follow that one can’t use logic or rational thought to characterize the system.)
It's philosophy, Michael Huemer is a philosopher, not a "political philosopher" which is oxymoronic. Nature is neither rational nor irrational, nor is it logical or illogical.
By nature, irrational things or behaviors are not logical, which means politics has no basis in logic-derived axioms as propagated by Alexander.
Please adhere to a scientific, or axiom-based argument. Your replies are extremely irrelevant.
To conclude the thread, yes, you obviously can reason about politics in the same way one can reason about anything else that doesn't behave rationally, like fish, through to things which can't reason at all, whether they be oceans or planets. Moreover, one can logically characterise that which behaves illogically in the same way we can mathematically characterise and constrain the behaviour of fractals and fluids and other objects which are, fundamentally, impossible to precisely describe.
Math has no relationship to behavior, nor do almost all terms used to describe behavior, engineers should have already grasped cog-sci is folk science.
If engineers remain uneducated in this way, you'll become sycophants led as lemmings by cult figures like Alexander.
We're talking about "you obviously can reason about politics in the same way one can reason about anything else that doesn't behave rationally, like fish"
Lol what? You just posted a cog-sci op ed whose first third rambles on being refused publication decades prior. (The second two thirds pretends behavioural neutoanatomy, where we stimulate brain structures to see what happens, doesn’t exist.)
You don't even grasp what that paper is. It's not an op-ed, it's a theory/review article with empirical evidence that's increased many percentages since it was refused publication, now it's a primary approach in neurobiology. Read carefully.
Math may be able to model those things momentarily, but ultimately "all models are wrong yet some are helpful" so YES math has no relationship to behavior, it cannot reference it. It can only symbolically (arbitrarily) model it.
> ultimately "all models are wrong yet some are helpful" so YES math has no relationship to behavior, it cannot reference it. It can only symbolically (arbitrarily) model it
Sure, nothing is knowable. Great if you’re trying to get social sciences funding. Not super useful for anything practical.
It is, but only for those who know neither logic nor politics.
> So creating logic games from arbitrary metaphors
So don't create them.
> arbitrary metaphors [are] what politics is based in and especially when each side is calling the other with the same arbitrary label.
That's true for the R/D circus but it's not true for politics in general, it's not a law of nature, it's just a fact of present day politics.
More importantly, framing that fact as something inevitable renders the framer incapable of recognizing its utmost importance as a piece of evidence that can help a diligent investigator uncover the political truths hidden behind it.
The framer has no valid framework. There are no such things as empirically valid statements in political science, as the field is composed of subjective narratives. There are no such things as political truths.
Oh, yes it is, there's history to learn from, just because you're unaware of it doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
> The framer has no valid framework.
If you understood the comment you replied to, you'd realize that "the framer" there refers to you, so your statement above means "mallowdram has no valid framework". Ironically, it's true - you lack a valid framework because you lack knowledge of logic, history and politics.
I'm an anthropologist who's delivered papers at the presidential level at the AAA, which outside of authoring monographs is about as high as it gets. Now I'm training to be a neurobiologist. Not only do I know what science and logic is, it becomes obvious you're not trained in these.
Why did the mods not turn off flags for this other recent article, which garnered a lot more upvotes and had a pretty active discussion going? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45454026
This smells like yet another example of "enlightened centrist" moderation bias on this site. The userbase voted; leave it flagged, and leave your politics out of it.
It's fascinating seeing the extent to which Republicans have monopolized both violence and victimhood. The entire article seems to be a standard exercise in bad faith commonly seen from right-wing pundits.
Here, labeling certain individuals on the right as fascists is claimed to necessarily also be a call for violence against them. The only example provided for this claim is a reference to a musician in the middle of WW2 sporting a "This machine kills fascists" sticker on his guitar, as if wartime propaganda from 80 years ago is still relevant today.
I certainly haven't seen any relevant individual on the left calling for violence - whether that be people with significant followings in media and especially not among elected individuals.
In contrast, not only do I see pretty significant calls to violence from the right (e.g., Trump's rallies calling for violence against media members, his speech on 2021-01-06 whipping his crowd into a frenzy before the attack on the capitol, the "enemies within" speech he just gave to top military brass, etc.), but we're also seeing ICE becoming increasingly violent.
The claims about attacks on freedom of speech are similar.
Those on the left organize protests and boycotts against people they disagree with, thus exercising their own freedom of speech. Occasionally, such actions have resulted in individuals losing their jobs and their reputation. I won't claim that cancel culture doesn't go too far sometimes or get started over some incredibly petty things, but by and large, it's a movement that relies entirely on exercising speech as its mechanism.
Contrast this again with actions on the right. We have a sitting president launching lawsuits against anyone who says something he doesn't like. At the same time, he's directed his FCC secretary to threaten removal of broadcast licenses and interfere with business mergers of anyone using speech critical of Trump. That is textbook government censorship.
And no, Biden's administration requesting things on social media being taken down is not the same thing unless you can demonstrate said requests were also accompanied by threats of government action. It probably shouldn't have happened, and it definitely should have resulted in political consequences of some sort (it did), but it's not the same thing without threats being levied.
That musician is woody guthrie, he was writing songs for the organized left in the US, what is on the guitar has nothing to do with europe. He was active when the US persecuted the entire left and workers movements for the capital owners. He was concerned with american fascism.
"Fascist societies rhetorically cast their enemies as 'at the same time too strong and too weak.' On the one hand, fascists play up the power of certain disfavored elites to encourage in their followers a sense of grievance and humiliation. On the other hand, fascist leaders point to the decadence of those elites as proof of their ultimate feebleness in the face of an overwhelming popular will."
We have an actual consistent way to define fascism. And yeah, people who throw that name as a slur for "something you dont like", helps nobody.
Now, how to define the metrics are outside of my comment, including the current administration. But Ive been seeing quite a few of these seem to match here in the USA for quite some time. And now, more seem to match quite well with historical fascist movements.
1. Powerful and Continuing Nationalism
2. Disdain for the Recognition of Human Rights
3. Identification of Enemies/Scapegoats as a Unifying Cause
4. Supremacy of the Military
5. Rampant Sexism
6. Controlled Mass Media
7. Obsession with National Security
8. Religion and Government are Intertwined
9. Corporate Power is Protected
10. Labor Power is Suppressed
11. Disdain for Intellectuals and the Arts
12. Obsession with Crime and Punishment
13. Rampant Cronyism and Corruption
14. Fraudulent Elections
And why should we accept this list as a definition? Like Unberto Eco's list, there does not appear to be evidence that it is broadly recognized as a definition, other than it being frequently being reposted by partisans.
In fact, a casual search suggests that the supposed author (From your link, "Political scientist Dr. Lawrence Britt") is neither a Ph.D nor educated in political science: https://danielmalmer.medium.com/the-long-complicated-history... so it cannot even be used as an appeal to authority. This seems to be confirmed by the publication from which the list is taken, (note the different spelling of the first name): "Laurence W. Britt is a retired international businessperson, writer, and commentator. He is the author of 'Fascism, Anyone?' (FI, Spring 2003), the most reprinted—and most pirated—article in the magazine’s history." (https://secularhumanism.org/authors/laurence-w-britt/). Interestingly, the author seems to have no footprint online other than his fame through this list, so this guy is, in a non-derogatory sense, a non-entity.
[EDIT] More searching turns up a post in which comments purportedly by Laurence Britt (#24) also deny that he has academic credentials and also provides more context (#26) about writing the list: https://www.ryananddebi.com/2004/10/16/laurence-britts-14-po...
but it's hard to find a functioning organization that doesn't have some of his characteristics because a certain in-vs-out distinction is necessary to an organization surviving as much as a cell needs a membrane. "Anti-fascism" as it as practiced today ticks at least eight of the boxes.
Well yeah, fascism doesn't have an actual definition. People even disagree about what it is. Is it a political ideology, a worldview, a form of government, a movement, a type of psychosis? And yet people do retrospectively agree that certain people or groups were fascists. There's an idea in peoples' minds that defies a simple dictionary definition. For an idea like that, we turn to a list of soft criteria. People can and will disagree on that exact set of criteria, or over whether one is met under specific circumstances. But really, that's true of all language outside of hard mathematics.
Who gave Britt final say? Nobody in particular, and yet his criteria are often cited and used in more serious discussions of fascism. So a lot of people seem to think his criteria are useful. Language is a collaborative thing, meaning comes from diffuse and tacit agreement. If you expect that some power authorize and enforce a rigid definition of any political or sociological term, prepare to be deeply disappointed when you realize that nobody can provide such solid and concrete definitions of any terminology, even words you think you understand. What's democracy? Capitalism? Authoritarianism? Socialism? They're all defined by tacitly approved sets of criteria invented by an unofficial source and iterated upon by academics and misconstrued by and to the broader population.
Checklists are absolutely important, as one can compare various governments across those metrics. And those can be seen as a percentage as to compare scientifically.
You added 'final say what fascism is' to create a controversy where there is none. That was never the claim. This was a set of commonalities of previous historical fascist governments.
And you add in an ad hominem to Political scientist Dr. Lawrence Britt. His study is in this realm, giving proper credence as an evidentiary start of analyzing fascism.
And yes, the abbreviated list I copied and pasted pales into comparison to the source. But I find many on HN dont bother to read linked articles, and instead create strawmen of the copied text. After reading tge posts so far, well, point made.
Checklists are good, including in public discourse. A 14-point list where every item is ambiguous, is not.
It’s not useless per se. Just insufficient as a consistent definition.
> you add in an ad hominem to Political scientist Dr. Lawrence Britt
Literally don’t. (Ad hominem would be me saying I hate Dr. Britt and rejecting his checklist on that basis.)
Saying I reject Britt as a final authority on a topic I don’t believe we have any final authority on yet is very different from rejecting them in any capacity.
I think the issue is that Americans associate fascism with the Axis powers in WW2, but it’s difficult to see Trump mass murdering minorities or invading Europe even though his policies have some elements of fascism. Those elements seem to align with historic American isolationism and populism and thus be more benign than the conditions that led to WW2.
It's actively performing military action in South America, not just flirting with it. Flirting would be rhetoric, positioning ships and aircraft. We're using aircraft to kill alleged drug runners, but with no evidence provided that they even were drug runners (not that I think that would be sufficient justification, but it's better than "because I said so").
Every American administration in recent memory has engaged in military action.
He doesn't have plans to seize the entirety of South America. He just wants to depose a dictator and it's not even clear he will actually do it. He's just putting pressure on it to happen.
Political violence has never been entirely unacceptable in the US. The country was born and bred in violence, slavery and genocide. Descended upon and torn apart by European colonizers with the rabid ferocity of hyenas. America, perhaps alone, defines a free state by its capacity for political violence. Americans have romanticized political violence as an ideal for centuries in the archetype of the armed rural patriot, the New World version of ancient Rome's yeoman farmer, waxing romantic about watering the tree of liberty with the blood of patriots and tyrants. The US has blood soaked into its floorboards.
Political violence against fascists has only become morally questionable as fascism has become normalized. The article is correct that political violence is extremely bad, but it has also always been acceptable (or at least easy to culturally compartmentalize) against certain groups. That is the norm, not some idealized abstract notion of politics entirely encapsulated within rhetoric and debate, which has only recently been broken by "the left." A country that burns crosses and shoots up synagogues and bombs abortion clinics, where the police and ICE kidnap and kill with impunity, that sends the military into its own cities to kill immigrants and harass political dissidents, that builds concentration camps for "enemy combatants" in undeclared wars, has no right to clutch its pearls over actual white supremacists and neo-nazis - unambiguous fascists - taking what they themselves would freely give.
This, I think, is the main point of the article. I don't disagree, and I tend to argue for at least trying to talk to people, but I admit that I am concerned about how much I am hesitating on even discussing some subjects with people.
https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...
I think the Charlie Kirk thing scared people straight for a few weeks but I've definitely seen an uptake of submissions to HN about various tempests in teapots such as the recent drama about an open source project that was big in 2005 and only niche since 2012 or something about waffles and now a laptop maker that tweeted a link to the wrong thing or something.
There is still this emphasis by certain on canceling people at conferences and stuff because they are "fascists" but a lack of recognition that the democratic institutions that they like so much are putting "fascists" in power throughout the world -- and if they want it to be different they're going to have to stop dehumanizing people who vote the wrong way and talk to them. The message of "you are bad", "your society is bad" just doesn't sell, in fact Black people don't want to hear about they weighed down by the legacy of slavery, they want to maximize the life that's in front of them.
Thing is that people find meaning in believing "society is bad" so it serves the interest of this selfish meme to put "fascists" in power; the Heritage Foundation or the Federalist Society or Fox News couldn't have done a better job engineering a fifth column for the left which would keep the right in power permanently.
Not everyone to the right of the "far left" is a fascist, but the administration in power undeniably has a fascist core. And people who actually study this stuff professionally largely agree.
"We are in the process of the second American Revolution which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be."
A certain amount of blame can be laid at centrist politicians who can't take advantage of left-wing populist sentiments because they are too afraid of donors. [1] But an ultra-left that is obviously warming up the ovens for DHH because he said something stupid once and might come for me because I'm cisgender just seems fascinated with fascism because they're jealous the same way Charlie Kirk was fascinated with "cancel culture" because like David Horowitz he wished he could punish anyone in academia who he disagreed with.
[1] Look at the donors who will give money to anyone who isn't Mamdani no matter how bad because they don't have faith in the ability of blue state institutions to completely frustrate and hamstring anyone who tries to do anything.
(One may also want to actually *say* the things and provide some evidence rather than gesticulating vaguely towards them.)
Jimmy Kimmel's attempted cancellation was just a more state-sponsored attempt at cancelling than the social pressure cancellations of the late 2010s. Sure state-sponsored is what makes it technically censorship but the practical difference it makes for the individual and their platform is almost none. Generating massive amounts of outrage over calling the default git branch "master" is how you get Anduril and Palantir virtue signaling to the right about how their work is keeping America safe and competitive. College student bodies insisting on their administrations doing land acknowledgements is what brought contrarian shit-stirrers like Charlie Kirk to colleges in the first place.
And as a result the modern Democratic party is broken. The "far left" has been obsessed with destroying the Democratic party's coalition because of their insistence on ideological purity. The center left moderates have been vilified and alienated and are too shy to endorse populist left candidates like Mamdani because of how much they've been punched. Free speech advocates have been exiled as progenitors of "hate speech", only for the current administration to use the same "hate speech" rationale to silence the opposition (labeling something as stupid as "Antifa" dangerous.) Left libertarians have been sneered at for so long as agents of greed and enemies of state capacity that now that the state is trying to quash the freedom of those on the left, the left libertarians don't want to speak up.
So yes we're in bad shape, very bad shape. But I have zero confidence that it's the "far left" who is going to save us. If anything I think if the "far left" and the MAGA-ites continue the way they do we're going to end up in an American version of the Spanish Civil War. I think the MAGA-ites just realized that nobody is willing to adhere to historical American norms on liberal democracy; the emperor has no clothes. Might as well push liberal democracy as far as it can go since nobody is willing to fight for it.
EDIT: I'm expecting downvotes for this opinion and it's one I don't share on lefty social media spaces because it's always a very disliked one but I'd welcome actual discussion on this. The closest I've seen to a rebuttal is "if we need to moderate our positions then we become as bad as the other side, so what's the point?" which I also disagree with. An inability to talk about this is yet another mark that shows how far the gulf between the sides are in the US.
And if nowadays people suddenly talk about fascism again they are spreading russian propaganda. Because as you should know russian propaganda supports both sides (fascist and anti-fascist), just to increase the level of social tension. Its a devilish plan to destroy solidarity in western societies. And until now it works. Political polarization is sky high in many western countries nowadays.
Ethics is (nominally) universal; morality is about identity and therefore about exclusion. Morality is a weapon: that is why the people who like it like it.
Ethics is moral philosophy. Most of the time these terms are used interchangeably but your description of the accepted difference is inaccurate and inflammatory.
Ethics is the moral standard accepted at community level, not quite universal. Morality is the projection (or rejection) of parts of ethics on individual level. In itself, morality is not a weapon and it's not about exclusion, at least no more than ethics can be.
> Morality is a weapon: that is why the people who like it like it.
Ironically, you are trying to blame moral people for being immoral because they like the "weapon" called morality... You speak from the view point of your morality that rejects morality and it gets funny.
Alternatively we might just remember the basics: "Even if you disagree very strongly, don't injure, imprison, or kill each other at will, like lunatics. Follow the law instead."
> Logic is inapplicable here. Politics is arbitrary, and labels/categories are worse than arbitrary, they are random.
Broadly speaking, at some level, I agree with them.
There is no machine that will flash an indicator when pointed at a “fascist”. Yet certain intelligent people are always willing to use pure reason to confront a world that does not admit such scientific classification. The retort is always, “You know one when you see one.”
The is a definite humility that is lacking in such debate, as if everyone shares a logically necessary psychological reality.
None of these thinking persons, of any stripe, are prepared to do the work of articulating, with nuance, where the logical consequences of another contradict their own, and more tellingly, where interpretations of words/labels/categories are themselves foundational in arguments.
People, myself certainly included, are not free with their energies teasing these details out, and are instead more than ready to indicate, in laborious, technical detail, why they are right.
This is a very sick time in shared discourse. I want people to pause and ask if this intellectual turmoil is indeed useful in the present moment or is irrational behaviour forced by economic, social, and environmental anxieties of our time.
In any case, here is a quote from Stephen Miller, who inspired this blog post, naming and shaming a nebulous enemy:
> They cannot conceive of the army that they have arisen in all of us because we stand for what is good, what is virtuous, what is noble. And to those trying to incite violence against us, those trying to foment hatred against us, what do you have? You have nothing. You are nothing. You are wickedness. You are jealousy. You are envy. You are hatred. You are nothing. You can build nothing. You can produce nothing. You can create nothing.
Meanwhile, most of us see policies that are obviously authoritarian, don't worry about which brand, and oppose them for the usual reasons: no one should have that power, or we don't know how to organize humans to use that power safely, or it will normalize giving away a different power, etc.
Authoritarianism: a political system where a smaller group winds up with power, often with a military (or a monopoly on violence) to enforce that power. Often characterized by laws that are selectively enforced one some people, or "some who the law protects but does not bind, and others that the law binds but does not protect".
Communism: a philosophy of government where the government holds the "means of production" in the name of the people. In practice this devolves into a singular group ("the Party"), controlled by relatively few people deciding what is best for people, and this usually winds up in authoritarianism in anything larger than a small community (where individual social pressure can keep it in check).
Fascism: a philosophy of government that starts with authoritarianism, but goes hard into picking out groups of people from within the country as "the enemy" and blames all of a societies ills on those people (Mussolini picked socialists and labor unions first, Hitler also started with socialists and the disabled before moving on to Poles, Gypsies, Jews, and others). Part of this is also picking a chosen people, and creating a nationalist image around those people (True Italians for Mussolini, "Aryans" for Hitler), while at the same time projecting those people as the victims of the minority that is being blamed. Violence against these enemies is justified as being right (often in religious terms), and any check on that violence is portrayed as evil (e.g.: due process).
So the Soviet Union was actually less fascist than the U.S. was at the time (not saying the U.S. was fascist, but we certainly blamed black people for a lot). E.g.: the U.S.S.R. often mostly-correctly propagandized how much better the few black people that were in their country were treated. But the Soviet Union certainly was more authoritarian than the U.S. was.
To suggest otherwise seems like a false equivalence.
https://factually.co/fact-checks/politics/charlie-kirk-assas...
Isn't Stephen Miller behind the ICE raids?
And he's been itching to do it since the last administration: https://archive.is/QBh3p
Or to pull out another example: what level of overstep is necessary for it to become acceptable (praiseworthy?) to throw your shoes at George W. Bush?
https://spot.colorado.edu/~huemer/papers/irrationality.htm
The paper you cite is entirely unempirical. It’s using the same methods you criticize in the article.
Fair enough, in a formal manner it’s empirical.
As a work, it’s political philosophy. Not science. Which makes it odd as a counterpoint to arguing the article in question is too aloof.
(Also, conflating irrational and illogical is unfounded. Nature is irrational. Per Caplan, individual agents may find it advantageous to act illogically. It doesn’t follow that one can’t use logic or rational thought to characterize the system.)
By nature, irrational things or behaviors are not logical, which means politics has no basis in logic-derived axioms as propagated by Alexander.
Please adhere to a scientific, or axiom-based argument. Your replies are extremely irrelevant.
What would you call someone who waxes philosophy on politics?
> By nature, irrational things or behaviors are not logical
Lovely, so logic—by your construction—is useless given nature itself, lacking the ability to understand, is not rational.
(You’re mixing up sub-definitions of rationality. None of this is relevant, however, to the broader topic.)
> Please adhere to a scientific, or axiom-based argument
Was this written by AI?
Robust counterargument.
To conclude the thread, yes, you obviously can reason about politics in the same way one can reason about anything else that doesn't behave rationally, like fish, through to things which can't reason at all, whether they be oceans or planets. Moreover, one can logically characterise that which behaves illogically in the same way we can mathematically characterise and constrain the behaviour of fractals and fluids and other objects which are, fundamentally, impossible to precisely describe.
If engineers remain uneducated in this way, you'll become sycophants led as lemmings by cult figures like Alexander.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7415918/
The math of orbital mechanics has no relation to the behaviour of objects in orbit?
Stick to politics, that's the thread, engineer.
Lol what? You just posted a cog-sci op ed whose first third rambles on being refused publication decades prior. (The second two thirds pretends behavioural neutoanatomy, where we stimulate brain structures to see what happens, doesn’t exist.)
Of fractals and fluids? I think you misunderstood what they wrote.
Sure, nothing is knowable. Great if you’re trying to get social sciences funding. Not super useful for anything practical.
Stating that it's a model is not the same thing as stating that it is useless. Nor that the relationships are wholly wrong. You said it yourself.
> all models are wrong yet some are helpful
It is, but only for those who know neither logic nor politics.
> So creating logic games from arbitrary metaphors
So don't create them.
> arbitrary metaphors [are] what politics is based in and especially when each side is calling the other with the same arbitrary label.
That's true for the R/D circus but it's not true for politics in general, it's not a law of nature, it's just a fact of present day politics.
More importantly, framing that fact as something inevitable renders the framer incapable of recognizing its utmost importance as a piece of evidence that can help a diligent investigator uncover the political truths hidden behind it.
The framer has no valid framework. There are no such things as empirically valid statements in political science, as the field is composed of subjective narratives. There are no such things as political truths.
Oh, yes it is, there's history to learn from, just because you're unaware of it doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
> The framer has no valid framework.
If you understood the comment you replied to, you'd realize that "the framer" there refers to you, so your statement above means "mallowdram has no valid framework". Ironically, it's true - you lack a valid framework because you lack knowledge of logic, history and politics.
If you had an understanding of what history is, you'd understand it has no scientific validity.
https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262537995/how-history-gets-thin...
As there is no scientific basis for history, and there is no logic to politics (it is irrational), nothing stated by Alexander is valid.
Why did the mods not turn off flags for this other recent article, which garnered a lot more upvotes and had a pretty active discussion going? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45454026
This smells like yet another example of "enlightened centrist" moderation bias on this site. The userbase voted; leave it flagged, and leave your politics out of it.
Here, labeling certain individuals on the right as fascists is claimed to necessarily also be a call for violence against them. The only example provided for this claim is a reference to a musician in the middle of WW2 sporting a "This machine kills fascists" sticker on his guitar, as if wartime propaganda from 80 years ago is still relevant today.
I certainly haven't seen any relevant individual on the left calling for violence - whether that be people with significant followings in media and especially not among elected individuals.
In contrast, not only do I see pretty significant calls to violence from the right (e.g., Trump's rallies calling for violence against media members, his speech on 2021-01-06 whipping his crowd into a frenzy before the attack on the capitol, the "enemies within" speech he just gave to top military brass, etc.), but we're also seeing ICE becoming increasingly violent.
The claims about attacks on freedom of speech are similar.
Those on the left organize protests and boycotts against people they disagree with, thus exercising their own freedom of speech. Occasionally, such actions have resulted in individuals losing their jobs and their reputation. I won't claim that cancel culture doesn't go too far sometimes or get started over some incredibly petty things, but by and large, it's a movement that relies entirely on exercising speech as its mechanism.
Contrast this again with actions on the right. We have a sitting president launching lawsuits against anyone who says something he doesn't like. At the same time, he's directed his FCC secretary to threaten removal of broadcast licenses and interfere with business mergers of anyone using speech critical of Trump. That is textbook government censorship.
And no, Biden's administration requesting things on social media being taken down is not the same thing unless you can demonstrate said requests were also accompanied by threats of government action. It probably shouldn't have happened, and it definitely should have resulted in political consequences of some sort (it did), but it's not the same thing without threats being levied.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ur-Fascism
Now, how to define the metrics are outside of my comment, including the current administration. But Ive been seeing quite a few of these seem to match here in the USA for quite some time. And now, more seem to match quite well with historical fascist movements.
https://ratical.org/ratville/CAH/fasci14chars.html
In fact, a casual search suggests that the supposed author (From your link, "Political scientist Dr. Lawrence Britt") is neither a Ph.D nor educated in political science: https://danielmalmer.medium.com/the-long-complicated-history... so it cannot even be used as an appeal to authority. This seems to be confirmed by the publication from which the list is taken, (note the different spelling of the first name): "Laurence W. Britt is a retired international businessperson, writer, and commentator. He is the author of 'Fascism, Anyone?' (FI, Spring 2003), the most reprinted—and most pirated—article in the magazine’s history." (https://secularhumanism.org/authors/laurence-w-britt/). Interestingly, the author seems to have no footprint online other than his fame through this list, so this guy is, in a non-derogatory sense, a non-entity.
[EDIT] More searching turns up a post in which comments purportedly by Laurence Britt (#24) also deny that he has academic credentials and also provides more context (#26) about writing the list: https://www.ryananddebi.com/2004/10/16/laurence-britts-14-po...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ur-Fascism
but it's hard to find a functioning organization that doesn't have some of his characteristics because a certain in-vs-out distinction is necessary to an organization surviving as much as a cell needs a membrane. "Anti-fascism" as it as practiced today ticks at least eight of the boxes.
One, a 14-point checklist is functionally worthless in politics.
Two, why is Britt the final say on what fascism is?
Three, this list is extremely ambiguous. When does criticism cross into disdain, interest into obsession, grim tolerance into rampant acceptance?
Everything on that list is accurate as a retrospective tool. But for contemporaneous measure, it falls short by failing to propose clear tests.
Who gave Britt final say? Nobody in particular, and yet his criteria are often cited and used in more serious discussions of fascism. So a lot of people seem to think his criteria are useful. Language is a collaborative thing, meaning comes from diffuse and tacit agreement. If you expect that some power authorize and enforce a rigid definition of any political or sociological term, prepare to be deeply disappointed when you realize that nobody can provide such solid and concrete definitions of any terminology, even words you think you understand. What's democracy? Capitalism? Authoritarianism? Socialism? They're all defined by tacitly approved sets of criteria invented by an unofficial source and iterated upon by academics and misconstrued by and to the broader population.
That’s my point. OP said “we have an actual consistent way to define fascism,” and that’s simply not true.
That doesn’t mean we can’t call out fascism in real time. But it does mean that everyone who disagrees with you isn’t necessarily a fascist.
You added 'final say what fascism is' to create a controversy where there is none. That was never the claim. This was a set of commonalities of previous historical fascist governments.
And you add in an ad hominem to Political scientist Dr. Lawrence Britt. His study is in this realm, giving proper credence as an evidentiary start of analyzing fascism.
And yes, the abbreviated list I copied and pasted pales into comparison to the source. But I find many on HN dont bother to read linked articles, and instead create strawmen of the copied text. After reading tge posts so far, well, point made.
Checklists are good, including in public discourse. A 14-point list where every item is ambiguous, is not.
It’s not useless per se. Just insufficient as a consistent definition.
> you add in an ad hominem to Political scientist Dr. Lawrence Britt
Literally don’t. (Ad hominem would be me saying I hate Dr. Britt and rejecting his checklist on that basis.)
Saying I reject Britt as a final authority on a topic I don’t believe we have any final authority on yet is very different from rejecting them in any capacity.
He doesn't have plans to seize the entirety of South America. He just wants to depose a dictator and it's not even clear he will actually do it. He's just putting pressure on it to happen.
No, it's actually not.
Although it's really more about the people running Trump. Trump by himself would be totally ineffectual.
Political violence against fascists has only become morally questionable as fascism has become normalized. The article is correct that political violence is extremely bad, but it has also always been acceptable (or at least easy to culturally compartmentalize) against certain groups. That is the norm, not some idealized abstract notion of politics entirely encapsulated within rhetoric and debate, which has only recently been broken by "the left." A country that burns crosses and shoots up synagogues and bombs abortion clinics, where the police and ICE kidnap and kill with impunity, that sends the military into its own cities to kill immigrants and harass political dissidents, that builds concentration camps for "enemy combatants" in undeclared wars, has no right to clutch its pearls over actual white supremacists and neo-nazis - unambiguous fascists - taking what they themselves would freely give.
As fascism has become normalized, or as the term has?
If you're going to label expedited restaurant registration as "fascism", then violence against fascism had better not be normalized.
Fascism. The normalization of the term has followed the normalization of the politics.
>If you're going to label expedited restaurant registration as "fascism"
I haven't done anything of the sort.