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This is political dog-whistling. As Orwell pointed out almost eight decades ago: "The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable’."[1] and is now obviously only a dog-whistle for fellow ideologues. This does not belong on HN.
[1] https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...
I'd love to say, "he's just blustering", it's what my father said but he's enacted just about every thing he said. Should he begin speaking about a third term i don't think we have the luxury to ignore that anymore. To annex our nearby "allies" who've now become a united front opposing any economic relationship. What is that called? What would you have us say?
Most people say "fascist" when at most they mean "authoritarian". But maybe the latter's not scary enough for the boogeyman you want to evoke. Sometimes they say it when they should say demagoguery (which is, in my opinion, more than alarming enough of a word in ways that I can forgive people for feeling "populist" isn't). Quite often though, people merely mean "distasteful", but since tastes vary quite a bit, this might not alarm anyone at all.
>suspension of due process/disappearing of political enemies
You mean that when they send people back to their home countries because they're no longer welcome here?
>The talk of a third term?
From a man so old and in such ill health it seems quite likely he won't survive his second term? Mostly he's just trying to get a rise out of you. I don't like bullies, but when they do the "made you flinch" thing, part of me wants to smirk. Couldn't you just this once not flinch?
>To annex our nearby "allies"
He did it in the most asshole way possible, but offering them a proportionate number of votes in our Senate is hardly the insult they make it out to be. Especially when they're all dragged along by our policy already and just have no say in it whatsoever. "We want you to join the richest and most powerful nation on Earth and the benefits are truly too long to list" shouldn't send them running away screaming in terror.
> I don't like bullies, but when they do the "made you flinch" thing, part of me wants to smirk.
You like bullies, actually - you just don't like thinking you like bullies.
I keep waiting for it to happen. Hoping. And yet you always disappoint.
Illegally, without due process. That's why a federal judge has been ruling against them on this. They also lied that everyone deported was part of a Venezuelan gang (or at least that they had proper grounds for thinking so, thus the importance of due process), and they lied that it was some kind of invasion.
And what process, exactly, is due? Why is it due? My understanding of the term is that due process is mostly that because everyone gets the same... if some are getting different treatment, this raises due process concerns. If there was never any process designed, or if it has been abandoned. The bureaucracy can change the rules to some extent, they are not written in stone.
>That's why a federal judge has been ruling against them on this.
No one believes that, not even the left. They're happy that it's occurring of course, and they're clever enough to pretend that they've got real arguments... but in the back of their minds they know that the federal judge would rule against this no matter what, because the Trump administration is doing it. After all, for a full 2 months afterward they had people who were claiming the election was rigged and hoping that somehow that it would be invalidated. Their imaginations ran wild with ever-more-fanciful schemes. Now that's not happening, they've moved on and believe their in some sort of counter-coup.
>and they lied that it was some kind of invasion.
What's the definition of "invasion"? If an enemy were to invade with tanks and guns, they'd be wiped out. A clever enemy might just encourage its people to "migrate". To foment a sort of economic war. Or the word invasion can even have more metaphorical or casual usage. If someone says that mice have invaded their home do you complain that the word "invade" is wrong because the mice aren't wearing military uniforms and trying to accomplish some general's strategy?
That right there is an admission that you're just using the term as a generic "person bad" term, which is bad in itself. It's evil to intentionally conflate and manipulate language to serve political goals. You would object to taking a person that's known to be a Nazi and calling them autistic, or vice-versa. That you are not objecting here is malicious.
It has been consistently defined through the decades, especially during the 20th century. Here's one common example you can find from the 1983 American Heritage Dictionary and it sounds pretty familiar:
"A system of government that exercises a dictatorship of the extreme right, typically through the merging of state and business leadership, together with belligerent nationalism."
If anything, this definition is a better argument for the parents’s point.
Dictatorship, belligerent (North Korea style) and nationalism seem much more important features than left or right.
[1] https://archive.org/details/umberto-eco-ur-fascism/umberto-e...
- Climate change is real: "woke"
- Firing people in government: "fascist"
- Compassion and fairness: "woke"
- Cruelty toward political enemies: "fascist"
- Expertise-driven and reason-driven policies: "woke"
- Stacking government positions with loyal cronies: "fascist"
- Rights for women, minorities, gay people, and so on: "woke"
- Handouts to corporations: "fascist"
They've become vague words that mean the same thing: "Politics I don't like"
But you could substitute neoreactionary in GP and it would still be referring to real bloggers that are treated as if they're making legitimate and justifiable arguments.
It's a serious concern, I think it's good to criticize this tendency.
there is only one continuum: liberty from government oppression, or lack thereof.
I hope you don't seriously consider the oligopoly of two parties and small circle of connected elites, dependent on financial backing from ultra high net worth oligarchs, corporations, special lobbying groups - a democracy. This is not democracy, it is plutocracy (the power of capital/rich)
And, it's a kleptocracy, more and more, for a very long time now.
other countries are more democratic, in a sense that winning candidate represents larger share of people living there
Umberto Eco's 14 tenants of fascism still stands strong and is highly visible in modern discourse.
But then on the slapping hand, approximately all criticism of rationalism (particularly LessWrong-associated) I've seen on HN and elsewhere, involves either heresay and lies, or just a legion of strawmen like "zomg Roko's basilisk" or GP's own "arguments" like:
> Nobody likes a technocrat, because a technocrat would let a kid who fell down a well die there, since the cost of rescuing them could technically save the lives of 3 others someplace else
It's hard to even address something that's just plain bullshit, so in the end, I'm still leaning towards giving rationalists the benefit of doubt. Strange as some conclusions of some people may sometimes be, they at least try to argue it with reason, and not strawmen and ideological rally cries.
EDIT: and then there's:
> They often re-hash arguments which have been had and settled like 200 years ago
Well, somebody has to. It's important for the same reason reproducibility in science is important.
I'd be wary of assuming any complex argument has been "settled like 200 years ago". When people say this, they just mean "shut up and accept the uninformed, simplistic opinion". In a sense, this is even worse than blindly following religious dogma, as with organized religions, the core dogmas are actually designed by smart people to achieve some purpose (ill-minded or not); cutting people off with "settled like 200 years ago" is just telling them to accept whatever's the cheapest, worst-quality belief currently on sale on the "marketplace of ideas".
Fundamentally, it's the mind only engaging with the cognitive, and ignoring the limbic. Engaging with the limbic, with the deep, primal parts of the brain, challenges cognitively-held truths and demands you to support these truths from a broader context.
This is why rationalists are more prone to engage with fascist viewpoints, they seek more power for their held beliefs and fascism offers that in spades. You're not thinking about the history of fascist movements and how horrible they all turned out. You're thinking: How can we do it better this time?
Just like in math, the rational is a subset of the real, and you need both the rational and the irrational to make reality. Focusing exclusively on rationality is intentionally blinding yourself to messy reality.
I just want to highlight this, since it's the cleanest way I've seen this expressed. This is a fantastic hackernews comment.
>> Just like in math, the rational is a subset of the real
That only works if you think Rationality ⊂ Reality the same way ℚ ⊂ ℝ — which is like saying Space-time ⊂ Archery because time flies like an arrow.
Wordplay is not an argument.
Rationalists read poetry like "Compare thee to a summer's day? Pfft, impossible!"
I do agree there's more to human experience than just the cognitive / "system 2" view, but the important aspect of our cognitive facility - aspects that put humans on top of the global food chain - is that we can model and reason about the "limbic", and even though we can merely approximate it in the cognitive space, we've also learned how to work with approximations and uncertainty.
This is to say, if reason seems to justify viewpoints generally known, viscerally and cognitively, to be abhorrent, it typically means one's reasoning about perfectly spherical cows in a vacuum instead of actual human beings, and fails to include the "deep, primal parts of the brain" in their model. That, fortunately, is a correctable mistake.
Just like in math, if you construct a seemingly solid edifice of theorems and proofs, but forget and subsequently violate a critical assumption, all kind of wild conclusions will come out the other end.
Only a rationalist could make such a statement. I tell you rationalism is only a part of reality, not the whole, and you take that as a dismissal of all of the rational. I have no problems with science and maths, I just don't elevate them to the level of prime importance that rationalists do. I watched the Veritasium video on Cantor and the Axiom of Choice before I saw it on HN, and I follow Dr. Angela Collier on YouTube.
I'm an intuitionist, not a rationalist. I believe in a broad and rich informational diet, and that intuitive understanding is better than reductionist, which is the only kind of understanding rationalists seem to value.
> is that we can model and reason about the "limbic",
We can, and the academic domain that produces is generally called the humanities, and the humanities seem to be almost universally dismissed, even despised, by rationalists. So color me unimpressed when rationalists do this acceptance / dismissal dance regarding them. You don't really care about the humanities, just that we can model and reason about them. You want your rational bent to encompass the irrational, when fundamentally it cannot do that. Yes we can study the humanities. Just not with science or math or any other positivistic approach that would satisfy a rationalist.
And I fundamentally disagree with the notion that it's the cognitive that allowed us to dominate. In fact it's the cooperation between the cognitive and the limbic that produces the language that allows us to communicate with each other that gave us the advantage. Without the limbic there's no reason or room to cooperate.
All your viewpoint seeks to do is reduce the real into the rational.
> Just like in math, if you construct a seemingly solid edifice of theorems and proofs, but forget and subsequently violate a critical assumption, all kind of wild conclusions will come out the other end.
Hence Elon Musk's Nazi-esque government takeover.
The Iron Law of Wokeism is projection of the same crimes they commit upon others. We already have massive evidence the Democrats are corrupt and authoritarian, colluding with media, persecuting and assassinating whistleblowers (Assange, Snowden, Seth Rich). They engage in grotesque amounts of graft and inefficiency, as seen with California's High Speed Rail project, Biden's rural broadband and EV charging stations, which have delivered nothing. The Democrats don't even respect their voters choices in primaries, as evident by super delegates, Hillary conspiring against Bernie Sanders, the forced abdication of the obviously senile Biden, appointment of the obviously inept puppet that was Kamala Harris, etc. etc.
I hope real civil libertarians become in fashion. The self-described anti-fascists are basically communists who would create an authoritarian nightmare state, per usual. Funnily enough, the Berlin Wall was officially the the Anti-Fascist Protection Rampart, and Putin is engaging in a "special police action" against Ukraine in order to "de-nazify" the regime.
Interesting that you don't engage with the words at all, and lazily use insults. I'm actually somewhat curious what kind of person you really are, since you've accrued quite a few internet points here on HN. I hope you're independently wealthy by now, otherwise god help you.
Why should I? Your incoherence requires nothing more. There's nothing to say about the "Iron Law of Wokism". That's just mollycoddle you picked up from some trumptwaddle on YouTube somewhere.
You want to talk real politics, you're gonna have to smarten up, my dude.
> what kind of person you really are, since you've accrued quite a few internet points here on HN
Someone who gave his last fuck 20 years ago. Folks around here like that.
Just a nit, it's "who" in this case, not "whom," because it is a subject not an object. "Whom" is more often used as "to/with/for whom."
(IIRC use of "whom" was never covered in my English classes; I only learned about it from StarGate: SG-1, a show in which one of the main characters had a habit of mocking enemies by correcting their grammar.)
If you want to form a political ideology based on rationality, your very first step will stick you right in the middle of the sticky-icky world of the humanities. 'Hello deontology, my old friend.'
Define "good". Happiness? Economic prosperity? Community? And over what time span?
Define "most". Percentage of people served? Number of people served?
Define "people". Are you counting citizens? Immigrants? Foreigners? Prisoners? People in the future?
You know the joke in the sciences about how everything distills down to mathematics? I would argue that we just as often distill down to philosophy. You have to reckon with a lot of questions which a stats degree can't help you much with.
This is what no humanities education does to a motherfucker.