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Comment by opendomain | Hacker News Reader

I agree completely.

20 years ago I gave Dries the domain Drupal.com for free to support open source.

I recently gave the domain MrBeast.org to Beast Philanthropy.

But more important than Open Source is Freedom. I recently acquired the domain antifascist.org to fight the rise of fascism. This will be a website to share information on protecting your loved ones - it will be open source in that everyone can contribute.

I welcome anyone that wants to help - send an email or use the contact form on the website.

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I forgot to mention - I won the lottery! I won the 2nd prize of the recent Powerball - $50,000 and I am donating it to the new AntiFascist foundation.

I am NOT rich. This money could have a significant impact on my life. But I wanted to help others and so I am showing my commitment to fight for Freedom.

I have run OpenDomain for 25 years and have contributed domains to Open Source worth millions all for Free. I am ending that project to fight the rise of fascism.

I welcome ANY help or criticism - https://Antifascist.org

That sounds really great, but right now the site is still 80% template text/pages. I'll check back and make a donation once it's ready and lists the non-profit receiving the money.

That is awesome!

We have registered as a non-profit as “AntiFascist Foundation” and should finalize our paperwork this week.

Please note that since the goal is social activism, we are a 501c4 and donations may not be tax deductible.

We also would love any help on the design or messaging - any help would be greatly appreciated. Contact me and you can be part of the project

This might seem like a ridiculous question but, exactly what do you consider fascism?

Have you not seen the videos of people doing the nazi salute?

Marches of masked men with flags bearing nazi symbols?

Perhaps you have heard of deployment of military inside the country used for oppression?

Seizing people without hapeas corpus? And then deporting citizens without any criminal record at all?

The first two are effectively rituals. If we stopped the such rituals, should antifascism be considered successful?

The military is deployed inside the country, if only law enforcement officers were conducting the same work would antifascism think it was a job well done?

And therefore, exactly what do you consider fascism? Hence my question.

It’s always weird to me how when I try to talk about what fascism means to antifascists they go silent and assume I’m somehow pro-fascist. I’m pro-“Liberty and Justice for all.”

I am also an engineer: One that sees poorly defined requirements, and not a fan of authoritarianism.

It could be because 99.99% of people who decide to get into arguments about what fascism is turn out to be fascists. I believe it's called "sealioning": stalling actual discussion and wasting time of your opponents by endlessly asking basic questions politely.

Sounds like people playing it fast and loose with the term fascist. Or maybe overloading the term. And that’s a big problem, not only does it create an in-group / out-group divergence in language but it is the foundation of an ideological motte & bailey.

Do you think it's possible that people get called fascists by antifascists because they are actually fascists?

How do you define a fascist? I'd say followers of fascism are fascists. Perhaps you think only the ones in power, actually doing the fascism, count as fascists. That would be a mere semantic difference.

I’ve seen of accusations of fascism levied on all sorts that do not believe in: authoritarian political ideology that seeks a centralized, dictatorial government, suppresses dissent and opposition, ultranationalism promoting the supremacy of one group over others, and rejecting democratic institutions and liberal freedoms.

I suppose you can pick your poison, either condemn an innocent so no guilty escape or the opposite. But in that condemnation I often see: authoritarian political ideology that seeks a centralized, dictatorial government, suppresses dissent and opposition, rejecting liberal freedoms. And they self identify as antifascism. Its not a new thing, “horseshoe theory” has been around for ages.

I think we can collectively do better in combating trends towards fascism and its ilk than that. But not without understanding the problem, and the context in which it rests.

And you identify the paradox of tolerance, almost.

Killing people is bad, but Adolf Hitler is bad. So is it okay to kill Adolf Hitler, or would that make you as bad as him?

What if you were sent back in time, to before he did the bad things?

This is the extreme version of the "antifascist is fascist" debate. In the current time most of the bad people are not Adolf Hitler and we don't kill them and we aren't even 100% certain they'll be bad because we don't have time machines (only pattern recognition), but the same moral quandaries apply mutatis mutandis.

Some questions don't have simple answers. And it's better to at least acknowledge that, than to assert a particular simple answer, as a defense mechanism to allow yourself to continue believing there is always one.

The “paradox of intolerance” is bullshit that makes a nice cartoon. It embraces a false dichotomy

This comment is a thought-terminating emotional outburst with no logical substance.

> fight the rise of fascism.

Where?

The connotation for fascism appears to be opposition to Bolshevism. So most normal English speaking people are considered to be naturally fascist.

Yeah, no. Nothing of what you said is actually correct, starting with "The connotation for fascism" ending with "naturally fascist". It to an almost impressive degree semantically nonsensical as well as logically incoherent. But at least one can concluded that you don't like the term fascism for some reason, a term that has reasonably well defined and commonly agreed meaning (and nowhere near anything what you said), albeit with a tendency to be overused.

I don't know how else you come to the conclusion that it's "on the rise."

Well, first off: it's not my conclusion (I would likely have used some other and more precise term, like "modern authoritarianism", which has enough similarities to historical fascism to cause alarm). Secondly, "fascism is on the rise" is such an ambiguous statement that could mean anything from "the seeds on fascism is forming somewhere" to "the number of fully fledged fascist states are increasing", which just leads to thirdly: I could certainly continue to help you get out of your mental block where you can only see one absurd reason for fascism being on the rise, but I think we can agree that this really isn't necessary.

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