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Comment by JumpCrisscross | Hacker News Reader

Is there a general term for metastatic semantic overinclusivity?

Terrorist. Racist. Colonist. Fascist. Historically-rooted and precise terms that are collectively decohering in a self-amplifying and propagating way as everyone feels increasingly free to detach more and more words from their original meanings.

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you have seriously got to read and understand Eco's 14 tenets of Ur-Fascism [0] if you think that contemporary applications of the term "fascist" are inaccurate in describing what's happening right now in the US.

[0] https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/umberto-eco-ur-fasci...

> if you think that contemporary applications of the term "fascist" are inaccurate in describing what's happening right now in the US

Didn't say that. I'm saying I've seen the term thrown around wildly to apply to all manner of things. Like the other terms.

The term is probably fundamentally fucked. If you asked Hitler if he's a Nazi, he'd say yes. If you asked Mussolini if he's a Fascist, he'd say yes. These were the words they used to describe themselves. The reason I'm describing the phenomenon versus blaming the folks using the terms broadly is because I don't think this is a personal failing by anyone as much as something that's linguistically happening.

Unless you are suggesting an alternative word, IMHO, that's a great way to side line people that are actually talking about real harms.

> that's a great way to side line people that are actually talking about real harms

Valid. This is a real linguistic process. But it absolutely debases the original term. I’m not convinced we have to choose between empathy, on one hand, and accuracy, on the other hand.

There's also a pragmatic elephant in the room: By the time certain labels are perfectly and undeniably true to say, it's no longer safe for people to speak out and use them!

So our desire for word-correctness should be tempered by our desire for word-utility.

Orwell said something similar.

George Orwell - What is Fascism? https://www.orwell.ru/library/articles/As_I_Please/english/e...

i think a great example to back your point is that the terminally online turn out in droves to apply the nazi label to all those not in favor of maximising immigration , rational discourse seems to have broken down and the resulting vacuum of meaning is filled by hyperbole as people scamble to feel heard in a world of weak voices & closed ears

"all those not in favor of maximising immigration" is an hyperbole. Do you think the comparison between ICE and the Gestapo is completely unwarranted? Obviously the scales are very different (for now), but it feels justified enough to associate the two, if for no other reason than to remind people that we are on similar tracks that led to the worst times of our shared History.

Seems to me that "all those not in favor of maximising immigration" have largely turned out to be perfectly happy with revoking status from legal immigrants and using unnecessary violence to round people up. The line was always, "We're fine with legal immigrants," which turned out to be a lie, and "follow the law and you have nothing to worry about" which also turned out to be a lie.

How many of those people who got called Nazis are now fighting against the administration's lawless crackdown?

plenty of people get executed under regimes of parties both left and right , im referring to the idea at global scale not specific to any particular country

How many US citizens did the Biden regime execute?

Mussolini literally coined the word "fascist" to name his movement. Hitler never hid the fact he based his own movement on Mussolini's, so he'd probably describe his party as fascist too. Later, the word became extremely negative for obvious reasons, such that current fascists pretend not to be such, but it doesn't mean they aren't. Overall, I'd say it's used well enough.

I think most people who are being described as racists, colonists, or fascists are racists, colonists, or fascists, but they're the same people who own the megaphone that tells you they're not. Can you bring specific examples?

Perhaps, but the same argument also works for "Communist" and "Socialist" and so on.

A former partner's mother was once called a liberal or a democrat for something minor, I forget what now possibly asking for a tip, and her response was "No sir, I'm a communist".

I'm never actually delved too deeply into the mother's political views, but my ex herself was openly, explicitly, literally, a communist.

(For various reasons, even though said ex is American by birth, I suspect her well-documented politics may now cause me difficulty entering the USA were I to attempt it).

It's called newspeak. There was a documentary written about it in 1948.

Death of the author.

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