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Comment by _lffv | Hacker News Reader

"Psychologically, they are in many ways the same type of person as the Bolshevik and the Nazi."

Congratulations. You just compared the people who want you to stop using racial slurs to the people who killed millions based on their race.

- of course, this is slightly exaggerated, but not really. There's no clarification here and my reading wasn't awaredly malicious. The "wokeists" in the article are abhorrent virtue signalers, absolutely, but "cancelling" someone for (extreme example) a slightly risque joke is totally different from committing mass genocide.

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Most Bolshevik supporters would probably not have been willing to personally kill a landlord. Most Nazi supporters were uncomfortable with the idea of mass-murdering Jews - this is probably one of the reasons why Nazis tried to keep the death camps a secret as much as possible. In any case, I am referring to a psychological type. And sometimes there really is a slippery slope to watch out for.

Also: they do not just want me to stop using racial slurs. They also sometimes want me to deny, under penalty of social ostracism and financial ruin, what I think are rationally justified perceptions of reality.

And further: yes, in an absolute sense it does not make sense for me to fear hardcore wokists as much as Bolsheviks or Nazis. But my fear is, of course, relative to the actual threats that I face in life. Since I live in the US, wokists pose a much greater threat to me than Bolsheviks or Nazis do. Wokists have much more power in the US than either hardcore economic leftists or Nazis do.

If you wanna refer to some "psychological type" you should define it and explain it. Throwing around "X is a sociopath" "Y is the type of brigading that leads to Hitler" without explanation or clarity is crying wolf to the people who will read your comment and associate it with your belief. They could be totally valid analogues! But personally I find it hard to connect self censorship to fascism when the "other side" (subjective) stormed the Capitol in an attempt to overturn a democratic election. Of course, maybe we're doomed on every direction we could turn.

If you add up all of the political violence used by the two main power groupings against each other in the last year or so, I think it ends up being about the same. To me, the storming of the Capitol has roughly the same weight as all of the BLM-related violence does.

The psychological type I am referring to is something like this: Hatred and desire for revenge and power wrapped up inside an ideology that claims to base itself fundamentally on something other than just hatred and desire for revenge and power. Psychological poverty and inflexibility - there is a one-sided obsession with politics to the point that everything is primarily seen through a political lens and other people are viewed not as three-dimensional but primarily along tribal lines. Moral obsession - a conviction that one has a moral mandate. Simplicity - ideology and propaganda that reduces complex issues to simple ideas and slogans. Intolerance for opposing thought and speech - love of censorship and so on.

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