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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   15310 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 6, 2025

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a country with a fundamentalist religious tradition experiences a mass movement around a figure

fear of immigrants and immigration

contempt for journalists and journalism

violence

but when the people said: this is fascism

there were always those who said, no it isn't!

if it were fascism, he would be glorifying war!

he's the anti-war candidate!

now

he's been elected to deploy the military domestically

and he indicates he will expand the borders using the military

this is fascism

... duh.

  • -71

I see you're a sockpuppet. I don't know if you're a venting lefty or a trolling righty or some other kind of bait, but there's something I've never seen talked about, and it's worth talking about. This topic is endless tragedy and comedy, tragic where the real villain of the 20th century, communism, wasn't vanquished, and comic where we explore the history of the word "fascism."

Other commenters here have already observed how "fascism" and "fascist" have become meaningless pejoratives, and that's what's funny: fascism has always been a meaningless pejorative. You can cite dictionaries but if you look at the original critiques by Marxists, be it Clara Zetkin or Trotsky or Georgi Dimitrov, you'd see it was meaningless when they wrote and spoke about it. It meant nothing. Well — almost nothing.

Zetkin:

Fascism is a characteristic symptom of decay in this period, an expression of the ongoing dissolution of the capitalist economy and the decomposition of the bourgeois state. Fascism is rooted above all in the impact of the imperialist war and the heightened and accelerated dislocation of the capitalist economy that it caused among broad layers of the small and middle bourgeoisie, the small peasantry, and the “intelligentsia.” This process dashed the hopes of these layers by demolishing their previous conditions of life and the degree of security they had previously enjoyed. Many in these social layers are also disillusioned regarding their vague expectations of a profound improvement in society through reformist socialism.

The reformist parties and trade-union leaders betrayed the revolution, capitulated to capitalism, and formed a coalition with the bourgeoisie in order to restore class rule and class exploitation as of old. All this they did under the banner of “democracy.” As a result, this type of “sympathizer” with the proletariat has been led to doubt socialism itself and its capacity to bring liberation and renew society. The immense majority of the proletariat outside Soviet Russia tolerated this betrayal with a weak-willed fear of struggle and submitted to their own exploitation and enslavement. Among the layers in ferment among the small and middle bourgeoisie and intellectuals, this shattered any belief in the working class as a powerful agent of radical social change. They have been joined by many proletarian forces who seek and demand action and are dissatisfied with the conduct of all the political parties. In addition fascism attracted a social layer, the former officers, who lost their careers when the war ended. Now without income, they were disillusioned, uprooted, and torn from their class roots. This is especially true in the vanquished Central Powers [Germany and Austria-Hungary], in which fascism takes on a strong antirepublican flavor.

Trotsky:

The historic function of Fascism is to smash the working class, destroy its organizations, and stifle political liberties when the capitalists find themselves unable to govern and dominate with the help of democratic machinery . . . . Fascism is not merely a system of reprisals, of brutal force, and of police terror. Fascism is a particular governmental system based on the uprooting of all elements of proletarian democracy within bourgeois society. The task of fascism lies not only in destroying the Communist vanguard but in holding the entire class in a state of forced disunity. To this end the physical annihilation of the most revolutionary section of the workers does not suffice. It is also necessary to smash all independent and voluntary organizations, to demolish all the defensive bulwarks of the proletariat, and to uproot whatever has been achieved during three-quarters of a century by the Social Democracy and the trade unions. For, in the last analysis, the Communist Party also bases itself on these achievements

Dimitrov:

Fascism is not a form of state power “standing above both classes — the proletariat and the bourgeoisie” . . . It is not “the revolt of the petty bourgeoisie which has captured the machinery of the state,”. No, fascism is not a power standing above class, nor government of the petty bourgeoisie or the lumpen-proletariat over finance capital. Fascism is the power of finance capital itself. It is the organization of terrorist vengeance against the working class and the revolutionary section of the peasantry and intelligentsia. In foreign policy, fascism is jingoism in its most brutal form, fomenting bestial hatred of other nations.

I actually laughed the first time I read Trotsky's full critique because it really is just "Fascism is when the fascists get in there and fascist all over the place."

When you pare away the rhetoric you see exactly what they're doing: Our righteous freedom fighters, their fanatical terrorists.

"Nuh-uh, you're the ones exploited by powerful people who hide the truth and want to take away all your rights!"

They hated their opposition because they were a proletarian revolt who wanted to fix the existing system instead of overthrowing it and implementing communism. That's it, that's literally all it has ever been, commies mad that people saw through their horseshit but recognized the power in banding together. What else would communists do but wordswordswords slander them as having dishonest motives? And dishonest motives, oh boy. Look at every communist government in the last 100 years. "Not true communism" yeah maybe, but the purpose of a system is what it does, and every communist party that has ever risen to firmly control a country has behaved in exactly the same way. Tyranny and genocide.

What's happened since Trotsky et al. is not what I would call classic leftist behavior so much as the inclination that begets leftism as a method of obtaining political power: control of language. I do feel this is an important distinction, because where I view leftism poorly is almost entirely on the ones who manipulate language to equivocate and ultimately deceive, not those of their voters who believe they're doing good and want to out of genuine altruistic impulse. Unfortunately the people who reach high power from the left frequently use those techniques. There are minor exceptions in parts of Europe but it's not the case in the major leftist establishments of the US, the UK, France, and Germany, and they influence their comrades elsewhere. They manipulate terms, they equivocate and deceive. Like "fascism." They've had a century to define it around Nazi villainy, and then they adjust and readjust the definition so it can always be used to slander their opposition. The changing definition also probably continuously adds to the social inertia against anyone who might stand up and say "Hey, wait a second, the original definition was what?"

It's taken on socioreligious power, it's analogous to religious conviction. For me to tell someone "That's not fascism" or especially "You don't know what fascism is" is like saying "Good is bad, bad is good." It's a fundamental difference in paradigm, so such a statement has negative weight. It's meaningless.

There are governments who called themselves fascist and that would mean something here if the relationship between communism and fascism were discussed honestly, but it's never been honest. Fascist persists as an insult because communists persist, entrenched in power, and being masters of manipulative language, had means after obvious motive to downplay the horrors of communism and play up the horrors of nazism (both bad, the former orders of magnitude and uniquely worse). And we're humans and we can't help but calling our enemies the worst names we know. From Truman likening Dewey to fascists to generations of kids matriculating under communist professors who see fascism in everything and it repeats and repeats and repeats.

It's about to stop.

If I called one of my irreligious friends a reprobate sinner they'd laugh. They'd think I was joking, the word has no meaning for them. That's happening again. We're in the cultural singularity and culture is progressing very fast indeed. In at most 10 years, fascism and racism and sexism and every other -ism and -ist and -phobe, having finished the sprint from "No we're not/You're the real fascists" to "If it's bad, so be it" to "u forgot the gigachad" will then move into pure mockery, just as I would face if I went to proselytize in ratheism by condemning their lives of sin.

I'd like to believe there's value still in arguing this, and maybe things change just right in the coming years and we can have a real discussion, but that's the best case for this idea, approaching it on its angle and in good faith. I'm not approaching this idea on its angle, but I do mean this in good faith. Every last bit of power is being wrung from those words, its a score of levers about to snap off their fulcrums, and all the people who hold to these need to understand this and be prepared for when those words they use to frame their very sense of politics and the world become meaningless.

@FCfromSSC already warned you downthread, but you're still filling up the mod queue with reports on your posts, so consider this me underlining what FC said and highlighting a few more things.

Your username is suggestive and seems calculated to provoke, but that's fine - if someone was genuinely a member of the "antifa" movement or sympathetic to them, they would be as welcome to post here as anyone else (and it would be interesting to have their perspective). I don't know if you are sincere or trolling, but either way, you need to understand a couple of things: first, you're going to encounter a lot of hostility. We (mods) factor that in, so when you're being reported just for posting leftist opinions, we aren't generally swayed by that. However, you are following into an unfortunately familiar pattern that many hardcore lefties do when "arriving" here. (I put "arriving" in quotes because you created this account today, and you're clearly not new here, and I have a pretty good suspicion about who you are.) And that is being preemptively rude, condescending, and belligerent, with an attitude of "I am here to set you fascists straight."

Not only is that not going to be received well (or generate any decent discussion), it's against the rules requiring everyone to interact with charity and good faith. No matter how much you don't want to because you think of yourself as doing battle against the forces of evil fascism wokeism Jews the mods.

this is fascism

... duh.

you're afraid, aren't you? you're afraid that you missed the fascism

so your correction is that because some leftists were total psychopaths that makes it better that you failed to notice the fascism and were rude to leftists? wow

This is all condescending, belligerent, and just reads as bad faith.

I see no reason to let you continue to participate with a newly rolled alt if you are going to do so in bad faith. So if you continue in this manner, I'm going to move to go straight to permaban rather than letting you progress through the usual tedious cycle of increasingly longer bans just so you can come back every few weeks to play again.

You're a real sweetheart, you know that?

Thank you. And you're banned. Good-bye, Impassionata. And I deleted your long post which was the last straw and removed all doubt.

I wish that you would recognize the reason “leftists” come in hot “arriving” here is because, I believe, you allow a hilarious amount of boo-outgrouping from “the other side” on here without the same vigor. One of the “quality contributions” literally goes on about how leftists don’t care about raped children, and somewhere down that line someone declares proudly that prep is a drug for gay people to attend orgies. Exactly where is the charity and good faith in declaring such things? Would I really be received with such neutral attention if I said such things about other outgroups? I think the answer is no. Therefore, I hazard most leftists look at your “be charitable” rule and laugh at it because they think you seem to define “chartiable” as “don’t say bad things about conservatives at all but feel free to dunk leftists” and therefore disregard the etiquette since to them you are disregarding it as well.

I’m pretty empathetic to the job the mods have to do and won’t defend user antifa, but I tend to agree strongly with what you have to say here. For a place that claims to optimize for “light, not heat”, things such feel like an echo chamber in here too often.

I also don’t think it’s a problem that can be solved by any level of moderation. For example, this post from last week’s Culture War thread felt like the kind of low-effort strawman I am used to seeing on Twitter, yet it received a lot of upvotes and was not criticized by other users.

I think we should do more to hold ourselves accountable to a higher standard of discussion, no matter what political slant is being invoked. Mods can only referee here, they can’t make the plays.

For example, this post from last week’s Culture War thread felt like the kind of low-effort strawman I am used to seeing on Twitter

It is a low effort post that could be dinged for consensus building, but is it really a strawman?

It's a skeptical (Motte-friendly) yet accurate description of what the article relays about environmentalism of the era. It is pretty much a bare link, but not every post needs 8 paragraphs. I would have appreciated a high effort counter-narrative posted here or elsewhere. The closest thing is an almost too charitable "that's how science works, stupid." This is Dr. Near, the same researcher in the article, quote tweeting. That seems to be a narrow interpretation when, in the article, opponents are quoted as saying:

“Whether he intends it or not, lumping is a great way to cut back on the Endangered Species Act,” Dr. Plater said of Dr. Near.

If you have a different or better idea for a top-level you can do that. It seems more typical to leave the lazy post up if it generates good enough discussion. Once the thread is scrolling it's hard to justify nuking everything when mods can't be sure if someone else will make the effort post to replace it. Put the effort post under the lazy one. The only reliable way to get ahead of this is for You to make the effort post.

I took it as a strawman because the term experts was doing a lot of heavy lifting. I think you may have better characterized the correct criticisms of the post.

I have no skin in the particular game of that top-level post and not much to contribute to the discussion, but I reserve my right to criticize. On the subject of effort posts, I hope you will instead visit my recent top level post in Transnational Thursday though!

It is intimately refreshing to read what you're saying because I agree wholeheartedly, except that it can't be solved by moderation. I believe moderation can solve it by setting the trend. If we can all agree what "not responding to eachother" looks like, or "debate fallacies", or "poor standard of discussion", which I think we can do, then we can start calling each-other out on it and only resort to mods for reinforcement/clarification. I swear on my pinky toe the same problem would be here if there was a healthy leftist population.

prep is a drug for gay people to attend orgies

You think this is an uncharitable take? What is the PREP take wherein an incredibly expensive drug/set of drugs is spammed by a group of people when its easily replaced by safe sex practices?

It is uncharitable, because that is not what it is exclusively used for. I know this because my roommate has HIV. He got it because his boyfriend at the time has AIDS and didn’t know it because he didn’t get regularly tested and lied that he did. You can get HIV by coming into contact with the blood or sexual fluids of someone who has HIV or AIDS and isn’t taking the ART drug that arrests the development of HIV. Using a condom isn’t very safe, because it only takes a trace amount of said fluids to infect you, unless you are actively taking prep. When my roommate went for his monthly testing, he came back positive and was devastated.

Now he has to drive to the city every month to take a medication for HIV, known as ART, and if he doesn’t take it perfectly, his body can develop a resistance to ART and then he is dead. I, as his roommate who shares laundry machines and dishes with him, am sure glad that regardless of his employment status, he will still have access to those meds, so that the only thing I have to worry about is him being honest in him taking them on time.

Therefore, in practicing safe sex, any current or future sexual partner of his should also be taking PREP as a final preventative measure. I’m glad that there exists silver linings for him in that he has options for his sexual partners, but before he got his current boyfriend who agreed to take PREP, many of his potential hookups weren’t taking PREP and, like, it’s not very sexy telling a cute dude at the club that “oh by the way I have HIV so if you’re not comfortable with that we’re going to have to wait a couple of weeks for the PREP to kick in”. Kinda a boner killer.

So, my roommate practiced safe sex as best as he could, and because of the lies of someone else, he got a lifelong disease that will kill him if he doesn’t take his meds every day at exactly the same time, and thankfully doesn’t have to worry that if he loses his job his boyfriend won’t be able to afford the drugs that allow him to have a sexual life with his loved one, on top of the life saving drug he takes. Does he belong in the same camp as people who spam PREP to have orgies? I confidently state no, and therefore find statements such as “PREP is just a drug used for orgies, why don’t they practice safe sex?” uncharitable.

Edit: an additional and critical counterargument; gay people are not the only people who can contract AIDS and HIV.

gay people are not the only people who can contract AIDS and HIV.

Outside of Africa they're somewhere around 95% of people that take PrEP, though.

It is not exclusively for gay people, and it's not exclusively for orgies, but I don't think you'd appreciate it any more if they had hedged with a description that covers 95% of Western usage.

Having sex with someone who lied to you and with someone you just met wherein an honest conversation is a "boner killer" is not practicing safe sex

I agree, having sex with someone who lied to you isn't practicing safe sex. But then, does the argument "prep is a drug for gay people to attend orgies because they keep having sex with people who lie to them" valid from my example? No. Firstly, because it's anecdotal, and secondly, the anecdotal evidence already contradicts your claim that prep can "easily be replaced by safe sex practices". Do you believe my roommate is responsible for his boyfriend lying about getting tested? Because I don't think so.

I don't know what you're trying to say with the second part there. Exactly how is "having sex with someone who thinks talking about HIV is a boner killer" not practicing safe sex? Unless you're trying to say, "your roommate not telling people at the club he hooks up with he has HIV because it's a boner killer isn't practicing safe sex", in which I would agree that isn't practicing safe sex, but...that's not what I said my roommate was doing. I said the prospect of getting rejected repeatedly by potential hookups who do not want to have conversations about taking PREP was adversely affecting his mental health and that he was, in fact, practicing safe sex by not going to a place where the proper thing to do is explain his medical status.

In my experience, most of our moderation is chiding right-wing people for frothing about left-wingers. There are a lot more of the former.

I will admit I declined to moderate the prep comment partly because I wanted to argue with it. Perhaps that was a mistake.

In the spirit of discussion I’ll have to bite the bullet that I just am not going to say everything I want to say on my phone; I sincerely don’t believe the moderators here are intentionally letting right-wingers boo outgroup leftists and then whistling when it gets pointed out. I believe instead there is a bias problem going on and rather it’s not being recognized. I think the problem is not even specifically “right wingers are booing left winger”, it’s that in a forum trying to be a debate club, there is a lot of just bad debate happening. There is, in my opinion, way too many declarative statements about broad populations without the evidence to back it up or even visible rigorous debate. When someone says “prep is for gay orgies”, there isn’t the expected, “what is your bailey behind that motte, do you actually think all gay people demanded that drug specifically for orgies” in responses. It’s just a bunch of people also going “yes I agree, leftists can’t comprehend civilization properly” and “well, you can’t expect Democrats to know how to tell the truth”. And it happens really, really subtlety.

I swear, if there was an equally healthy population of leftists on here, you’d have the same problem. I’ve seen ya’ll mods say too many times over too many years you’re not trying to unfairly mod to believe it’s just a nothing statement.

Okay. I agree there are a lot of shitty comments, and we don't get them all.

I'll ask you the same thing I ask @SteveKirk. He never answers (except with some version of "ban people who say things I don't like") and I don't expect you to either.

What solution do you propose?

I don't say that, I say "ban people who are literally only here to disrupt discussion of any topic they consider 'problematic'."

But yes, a bunch of trolls organized by impassionata pouring out of the woodwork all at once? I suggest being liberal with the banhammer, because you're being raided.

I don't say that, I say "ban people who are literally only here to disrupt discussion of any topic they consider 'problematic'."

We do that. I just did that. And that's not all you ask for; come on. This isn't our first rodeo.

But yes, a bunch of trolls organized by impassionata pouring out of the woodwork all at once?

Can you point at this "bunch of trolls"? @justawoman has been around for a while, and I don't think she's a troll. Coincidentally, right now we also have a bunch of alts being spun up by the guy who who was literally only here to disrupt discussion because he hates us, but he's on the right - why is he not setting off your troll alarms?

We really are open to suggestions about how to do things better, but we are pretty much stuck in the same old pattern: If everyone thinks we suck, then we're probably being fair. We aren't psychic and this isn't a job we get paid for, we're just trying really hard to provide a platform for open discussion even between people who hate each other (and us).

I have finally been elevated from troll status? Don’t say more senpai, you’ll make me blush uwu

More comments

It’s terribly frustrating that the far more rich response I had typed while at the laundromat got deleted because my stupid timer went off. I’m going to try to think out loud for a second.

I think it can sound corny, but I want to follow the lessons I learned in my high school statistics class because I think they can apply here to answer your what I think is a critical question.

Since I’m making an objective claim about a general trend, I need the data to prove it, right? Charts that don’t have data behind them are literally air. The claim is that I think the moderators on this site are unintentionally allowing debate fallacies which is driving away the spirit of debate here and therefore the leftists. Ok. One data point I have is that I think therefore I am and I’m really, really liberal (blood bleeds blue and I feel a spiritual connection to donkeys). However, literal one data point for one data pool is also the makings of a useless chart.

Therefore, I would be happy to include in my lurking routine for this site privately copying comments on my note app I believe need to be modded but aren’t being modded and how I think they should be modded but aren’t. I can do this for months so that I have an appropriately large data pool.

What to do with the data? Bear with me, but what follows is an X and Y axis yadda yadda. If my claim is that certain types of debate fallacies are not being appropriately squashed and therefore facilitating an unwelcome environment due to the large conservative majority, I should be able to a) define what those fallacies are b) sort the comments I collected into said fallacies by highlighting which parts I think demonstrate them c) count the number of fallacies and d) declare the amount to be demonstrative of an unconscious bias.

Alright, so hypothetically I’ve proven my claim with valid evidence. What’s next? From my experience on heavily moderated Discords, the most effective way to stop trends in conversations is to know what you are looking for, tell the commenter to stop, and repeat until most regulars know if you do x you’ll hear y, so that the majority of offenders are newbies unfamiliar with the vibes. If I’ve done my math correctly, I should be able to condense the data into like one or two sentences and be like “look out for that”.

After that, I can privately send you and other mods the whole thing. It is the best objective method I can think of at the moment to prove my claim, and also a way to condense a complex solution. Look it’s also hard because I think everyone’s a special snowflake and deserves unique consideration blah blah blah but also I think there’s, what, two mods? I think ya’ll don’t have enough bureaucracy to do that. The question of “how to moderate a community” is one that will never have an answer but should still be asked. All things considered, I do appreciate the effort and think there is genuine charity in the mods’ efforts.

Edit: And no I don’t think banning will work because you will drive away otherwise potentially valuable contributors who just aren’t familiar with the rules and vibes. I think what will work instead is clear, consistent and concise moderation: “please don’t do x, read the sign please”. It’s exhausting as a moderator to give a lot of chances for repeat offense before resorting to banning but I believe eventually the community will self-moderate.

Edit edit for brevity and a little humor to lighten the air: Or, you know, as a liberal, like, raise your taxes and get some more bureaucratic administration to reinforce your in-need-of-redefining environmental regulations, Orange Man Bad, yo.

I don't find either of your examples to be anywhere near the level of dunking or the vitriol that's displayed by antifa here. Wording meaningful claims about truth in a way that's meant to sound controversial isn't good, but it's a whole other world away from content-less naked loosely connected declarations that amount to booing the outgroup. Like, the question of whether or not leftists care about child rape isn't pleasant, nor is it nice, but it's a real question that can be honestly, in good faith, answered as No given the political issue being discussed (as a leftist myself, I'm perfectly okay with saying that when I was a younger, more naive leftist, I genuinely didn't care about child rape or other potential negative consequences of unmitigated immigration, such as lower wages or suicide bombings; such things were the cost I would gladly have me and my fellow citizens pay for giving more poor people the opportunity to thrive in a first world nation like the USA. My opinion on that has changed since; I think I've gained greater empathy than I used to have for certain groups of people). And characterizing a drug as for aiding gay men in going to orgies isn't nice, but IIRC that was just one off-hand line in a comment that otherwise had some meaningful thing to say about different ways different drugs are covered by insurance. There's actually meat to the bones, along with all that shit.

The comment here by antifa, and IME the occasional leftists who come in "hot" here, are basically pure shit with perhaps some bones and ligaments there. That difference matters to people who care about the meat on the bones, i.e. the actual content of the arguments, but that difference matters little to people who care primarily about getting their views lauded and their outgroup's views booed. This is one reason why, even as a leftist, I find the quality of conversation and discussion here, where it's predominantly populated by people well to the right of the most right-leaning person I might meet IRL. Who cares if they'll drop in little - or big - digs at me and my ingroup here and there or all the time? Their actual substantive criticisms are actually interesting and valuable and the wording and the digs don't affect the level of charity or quality of arguments.

I think you have to admit that you're an extremely unusual leftist though. I would think most people on the left side of the spectrum would find it more plausible that it's the right wing who don't actually care about child rape and just find it to be an extremely convenient cudgel in debate and drumming up passions. If they really cared they'd act very differently and choose very different leaders.

Sure, that's what many/most people on the left side of the spectrum would find more plausible. Whether or not right-wingers care about child rape has little to do with whether or not left-wingers do, though. Maybe they both don't. Maybe left-wingers don't care to a lesser extent than right-wingers, and that's a W that we should put on our mantle.

In any case, what left-wingers find to be plausible about what right-wingers care about doesn't seem likely to have much truth value except by coincidence, similarly to what right-wingers find to be plausible about what left-wingers care about. It's because I'm a leftist who, from within leftist spheres both experienced and observed directly the explicitly non-caring about child-rape with respect to immigration (and more recently male access to female locker rooms in schools) through a lack of curiosity about negative consequences of one's preferred policies that I'm willing to carry water for this claim made by a right-winger about left-winger beliefs.

Okay see this is what I am trying to illustrate as bad debating. The question of “whether or not leftists care about child rape” isn't a real question that can be honestly, in good faith, answered as “No.” solely because of your anecdotal experience of not caring about certain potential negative consequences of unmitigated immigration when you identified as a liberal. Anecdotal evidence isn’t enough to make declarations like that, because, uh, I’m so liberal I sat under the Democrat tent on election day and advertised Harris yardsigns and I care about child rape lmao. Does my experience trump yours? Does yours trump mine? Like how am I supposed to argue with that? That’s why I believe in the spirit of debate anecdotal evidence holds little weight compared to objective evidence and I would like to see if you have other data pools to prove that “leftists don’t care about child rape” otherwise…I dunno what to tell you other than we’re not debating anymore lol.

No one who says "[x] do/don't care about [y]" mean that "literally every individual within the group [x] do/don't care about [y]." This is common sense and shouldn't need to be explicitly stated in a discussion like this. In this situation, the question is relating to how "policies that leftists prioritize/champion have predictable outcomes on child rape such that their level of caring about it is necessarily below others and below some meaningful threshold in order to prioritize such policies." And, again, as a leftist who used to champion such policies, I was by no means unusual as someone who openly said that, if allowing in poor people that Republicans dislike into our country also means that some of those poor people will do things like rape more children in the USA, then so be it. But more common were people who would outright deny that such policies would lead to bad outcomes without doing the very very hard work of actually checking with multiple adversarial sources that disagree heavily with oneself, which is the ultimate form of not caring about those bad outcomes, i.e. child rape in this case. I am perfectly comfortable saying that those leftists would absolutely, 100%, honestly, in good faith believe they care about it, but their lack of curiosity in actually checking if their beliefs about reality are correct shows that their belief about what they care about is incorrect.

Okay, but we’re trying to debate and your response was “I think that leftists don’t care about child rape because of my anecdotal experience of being a leftist” and I responded with “anecdotal evidence isn’t enough, do you have evidence outside of that”, and not only have you not responded to my claim about anecdotal evidence you have not responded about providing said evidence. I’m not saying you need to agree to those points or some type of action or whatever, but you have to acknowledge those points so we can move on to the next point of debate or we are literally talking over eachother.

This is, again, illustrating the problem with the Motte. It is not that you’re a right winger insulting me a left-winger; you’re being a bad debater. Part of the rules of this site are “speak clearly”, so yes, you DO have to clarify that when you say “leftists don’t care about child rape”, you SHOULD say “policies that leftists champion lead to child rape and so on” or that “leftists believe in stopping child rape but don’t take action”.

It is sincerely a gigantic waste of time for everyone if we can’t agree on debate rules and you keep making me feel like you’re not even reading what I’m saying until I quit the conversation, which I am really close to doing. If you cannot provide evidence outside of anecdotal evidence for your claim so we can properly debate it or even just respond to my request for such I’m going to assume you’re not interested in a conversation.

This is, again, illustrating the problem with the Motte. It is not that you’re a right winger insulting me a left-winger; you’re being a bad debater. Part of the rules of this site are “speak clearly”, so yes, you DO have to clarify that when you say “leftists don’t care about child rape”, you SHOULD say “policies that leftists champion lead to child rape and so on” or that “leftists believe in stopping child rape but don’t take action”.

No. One of the rules of this place is to be charitable, and I believe that an obvious charitable reading of “leftists don’t care about child rape” is something akin to “policies that leftists champion lead to child rape and so on.” I would agree that wording it this way is not nice, and certainly something that I would prefer to see less of in this space, but it's a world away from the type of crap that the likes of antifa posted.

Okay, but we’re trying to debate and your response was “I think that leftists don’t care about child rape because of my anecdotal experience of being a leftist” and I responded with “anecdotal evidence isn’t enough, do you have evidence outside of that”, and not only have you not responded to my claim about anecdotal evidence you have not responded about providing said evidence. I’m not saying you need to agree to those points or some type of action or whatever, but you have to acknowledge those points so we can move on to the next point of debate or we are literally talking over eachother.

If we're having a debate here, it's certainly not about whether or not leftists care about child rape. Commentary on the truth-value of that was something I put in a parenthetical to point out that the answer of "No" is one that I agree with. You don't have to agree with it, and I don't care if you do.

My actual point, the point surrounding whatever debate we're having, is that this is a perfectly reasonable question to ask and to answer with a "No" given the topic at hand. It's not a particularly productive question, nor is it a nice question (though personally, I'd say it's a productive question for a leftist - or really anyone - to ask himself, based on my own personal experience as a leftist who did, but not productive for someone to ask about others). But given the topic and underlying reality at hand, it's a question that makes sense both to wonder about and to answer with "No."

One of the rules of this place is to be charitable, and I believe that an obvious charitable reading of “leftists don’t care about child rape” is something akin to “policies that leftists champion lead to child rape and so on.”

In this sentence you don't even try to prove you have been charitable, you are just asking others to be charitable with you. Basically "I don't really follow the rules, but I think no one can tell it because it would also break the rules".

Okay, well I think you're wrong in thinking that the charity rule means posting baileys (leftists don't care about child rape) instead of mottes (policies that leftists champion lead to child rape) is acceptable. This site is...literally called the Motte. "It's obvious this is what I'm saying" is literally the shady thinking we are trying to avoid. It's the exact same poor debating as what antifa is doing.

I mean, this debate started because you said "I don't find either of your examples to be anywhere near the level of dunking or the vitriol that's displayed by antifa here because the question of whether or not leftists care about child rape isn't pleasant, nor is it nice, but it's a real question that can be honestly, in good faith, answered as "No." because when I was a younger, more naive leftist, I genuinely didn't care about child rape or other potential negative consequences of unmitigated immigration." therefore the comment here by antifa, and IME the occasional leftists who come in "hot" here, are basically pure shit with perhaps some bones and ligaments there, whereas the comments left by right-wingers are not."

I responded with, "I don't think you can answer "do leftists care about child rape" with your own anecdotal evidence, because anecdotal evidence is bad on its own. Do you agree that anecdotal evidence is bad on its own, and do you have other evidence that "leftists don't care about child rape" other than anecdotal?"

You responded with "I'm not saying every leftist doesn't care about child rape, I'm saying leftists would absolutely, 100%, honestly, in good faith believe they care about it, but their lack of curiosity in actually checking if their beliefs about reality are correct shows that their belief about what they care about is incorrect. And, additionally, my anecdotal evidence stands because I was no means being an unusual leftist as someone who openly said that, if allowing in poor people that Republicans dislike into our country also means that some of those poor people will do things like rape more children in the USA, then so be it."

I responded with, "Okay, but why are you not saying what you think then? There is a world of difference between "leftists don't care about child rape" and "leftists are unwilling to look at the true ramifications of their policies and therefore don't actually care about the results". Additionally, you haven't responded to my claim anecdotal evidence on its own isn't valid, much less my question if you have any other evidence than that, you just repeated your anecdote, which I assume means you think that type of data is valid and you don't have that evidence, but then can you say that out loud so we can move on?"

And now it seems you don't know what we are debating about, as you said "whatever debate we're having". This is what I mean. I believe your bad debating habits have derailed the conversation. Your actual point was not "saying leftists don't care about child rape is valid", it was "I don't find either of your examples to be anywhere near the level of dunking or the vitriol that's displayed by antifa here." I think my examples do support my claim which wasn't and isn't even that there is too much vitrol and dunking on leftists but that debate fallacies were derailing conversations and driving away leftists because the mods have an unrecognized bias towards these debate fallacies.

This is where I would like some type of mod action that is similar to debate moderators, in which a clear direction of, "07mk, you are talking about this, and justawoman, you are talking about that. Respond to eachother so this debate can be productive instead of a bunch of hot air."

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I wish that you would recognize the reason “leftists” come in hot “arriving” here is because, I believe, you allow a hilarious amount of boo-outgrouping from “the other side” on here without the same vigor.

I don't know what to tell you - we mod people for "boo outgrouping" every day. Yes, this is generally not a friendly environment for those on the left (and don't I know it, as someone nominally on the left), but the exact degree to which we calibrate how much we let people badmouth their ideological opponents is never going to satisfy everyone. Too much moderation and we're suppressing basically any degree of heat or emotion; not enough and the people being talked about feel like it's open season on them. We have had these arguments (and internal mod discussions) since the reddit days, and whenever someone proposes a "solution" that will achieve perfect balance, it turns out that solution maps precisely to "moderate exactly to the degree that would make this place conform to my preferred state."

Also, bluntly, I think you are wrong about causes. Leftists who come in hot are mostly not new posters but people arriving with a grudge because we exist and haven't changed the rules to their liking. Or someone who got linked here, takes a quick gander, is shocked and appalled at what we allow to be posted, and decides some corrective mocking is necessary.

One of the “quality contributions” literally goes on about how leftists don’t care about raped children

I'm not sure exactly which post you are referring to, but I know another recent post that asserted that got modded.

and somewhere down that line someone declares proudly that prep is a drug for gay people to attend orgies

That one was borderline, and got some pushback from a mod (albeit without modhat on). My own opinion is that the claim was not entirely offbase factually (my understanding is that the only reason prep is needed is because gay men don't wish to refrain from activities that spread AIDS), but reducing it down to "gay orgies" was rather inflammatory. Was it a particularly nice thing to say? No. Was it a defensible claim to make, even if it hurts feelings? With a bit more effort, yes.

Exactly where is the charity and good faith in declaring such things? Would I really be received with such neutral attention if I said such things about other outgroups?

It depends on what you said. If you just come in calling everyone who voted for Trump a fascist, no. If you made an argument that Trump is a fascist, you'd probably be downvoted a lot, unfortunately, but you would not be modded if you were civil about it. What else is it you want to say that you think you wouldn't be allowed to say here? There is a difference between "The mods will let you say it" and "Many people will argue with you, perhaps not very nicely, and downvote you."

Therefore, I hazard most leftists look at your “be charitable” rule and laugh at it because they think you seem to define “chartiable” as “don’t say bad things about conservatives at all but feel free to dunk leftists”

Then they are wrong and they don't actually look at our mod log.

and therefore disregard the etiquette since to them you are disregarding it as well.

This is incorrect. Every week I mod multiple people for "dunking on leftists" (and predictably get bitching and downvotes for it).

I am claiming if I make an argument that Trump is a fascist, I agree, I’ll be downvoted (but like idc), and yes, I won’t be modded if I keep it civil, but also virtually all of the replies will be so riddled with logical fallacies, not to mention subtle boo outgrouping, that not only do I have no desire to continue debating in good faith but I’m at risk of losing my cool in a sea of what seems to me to be absolutely laughable debating bizarrely not getting modded and then definitely getting myself modded. I’m also claiming that my reaction is likely a common reaction most other leftists are having and therefore is the explanation for why the leftist population is nonexistent here without the other explanation being “the mods are secretly fucking elephants and flipping off liberals while they do it.”

Edit: to address directly your question of “What else is it you want to say that you think you wouldn't be allowed to say here?”, I believe it is, “I literally can’t argue with this trashy argument because it doesn’t even fit the definition of the argument. Do you even know how to have a conversation, random_Motte_user, much less want to? Like how am I expected to work with this? Mods where are you guys isn’t this supposed to be a debate club? Why are all the users absolutely shit at debating.” Or something less inflammatory.

I am claiming if I make an argument that Trump is a fascist, I agree, I’ll be downvoted (but like idc), and yes, I won’t be modded if I keep it civil, but also virtually all of the replies will be so riddled with logical fallacies, not to mention subtle boo outgrouping, that not only do I have no desire to continue debating in good faith but I’m at risk of losing my cool in a sea of what seems to me to be absolutely laughable debating bizarrely not getting modded and then definitely getting myself modded.

You're right, a lot of people argue with fallacious logic and straw men. We have a few rules against things like weakmanning and boo-outgroup, but generally speaking we don't mod on the quality of someone's arguments, let alone whether we think they are factually correct (or even truthful). That's the whole point of this place; moderating on tone, not content. I realize a lot of people dislike "You can make ridiculous and absurd claims as long as you're polite about it," but yes, that's how it works. That's where the "test your shady thinking" part of the Motte comes from. People can make ridiculous and absurd claims, and hopefully someone else will call them out on it.

I sympathize-I really do-that being in a distinct minority means you will get a lot of shit flung at you, and if you respond in a heated fashion you risk getting modded yourself. All I can say is that I think that lefties have gotten entirely too comfortable with everywhere else on the Internet being for them, and what you want is pretty close to demanding that we be like everywhere else, where you won't have to read people being mean to your opinions.

“I literally can’t argue with this trashy argument because it doesn’t even fit the definition of the argument. Do you even know how to have a conversation, random_Motte_user, much less want to? Like how am I expected to work with this? Mods where are you guys isn’t this supposed to be a debate club? Why are all the users absolutely shit at debating.” Or something less inflammatory.

You could say that (maybe not calling everyone shit at debating). You can certainly tell someone you think their argument is bad. Like, you have gone off on how you think "Prep is to enable gay orgies" is a bad argument (and you even had mods agreeing with you!). You wrote a thoughtful post about why you think that argument is wrong.

If you interpret what I’m suggesting as “pretty close to demanding that we be like everywhere else, where you won't have to read people being mean to your opinions”, then I don’t know what to tell you. I feel I have said repeatedly the problem is not that right-wingers are saying mean things about left-wingers, it’s that bad debate etiquette is so pervasive here that it’s impossible to have a discussion.

Like kinda right now. I am scratching my brain on how, despite what I interpret as carefully wording my response to be as clear as possible about my opinions, you walked away with “justawoman doesn’t like reading mean things about her political beliefs like all the other leftists online”. I literally do not care if I get downvoted a lot, I don’t care if I get vitriol thrown at me, and can you show me which part of my responses implied I don’t want to read mean opinions?

To reiterate my position once more; I do not care if I read bad opinions here. But if I can’t debate the bad opinions because my opponent won’t respond to what I am saying, then yeah, something needs to change because none of us can test our shady thinking on here if we aren’t actually doing debate.

If you interpret what I’m suggesting as “pretty close to demanding that we be like everywhere else, where you won't have to read people being mean to your opinions”, then I don’t know what to tell you. I feel I have said repeatedly the problem is not that right-wingers are saying mean things about left-wingers, it’s that bad debate etiquette is so pervasive here that it’s impossible to have a discussion.

Yeah, but you still haven't told me what concretely you think we should do, other than be stricter. Maybe "@justawoman doesn't want to read mean things about her political beliefs" is not fair, but all your examples are basically people making bad arguments - and many of them are bad arguments! - which you want us to mod. We don't mod people for making bad arguments here! We mod people for making rude/uncharitable arguments or being insulting.

But if I can’t debate the bad opinions because my opponent won’t respond to what I am saying

If your opponent won't respond to what you're saying, what do you want us to do about it? And again, I disagree with you, because from what I have seen, some of your opponents might go off on tangents about how much leftists suck, but most of your opponents are responding to what you're saying. Here, @07mk responded to your complaint about posts claiming leftists don't care about child rape. Here and downthread people steelman the "Prep is for gay orgies" argument. Are they good arguments, or arguments you agree with? Maybe not. And your response to @7mk was basically "I think your argument is bad, ergo the Motte sucks." What do you want us, as mods, to do about this?

You are not the first person to write about how you think the Motte has gone downhill (or was always bad) and that the problem is the users and we don't enforce quality standards enough. Some people have a long list of rules they think should be enforced that would prevent people from bad-posting. They all tend to be some combination of (a) a lot more work for the mods, who would basically be delegated as editors and proofreaders for all posts, and (b) banning more posters who fail to meet the complainant's quality standards. Which effectively does boil down to "bad people who make arguments I don't like."

I can certainly envision ways we could implement this. Back on reddit, when the discourse had been turning particularly sour and low-quality for a while, we would institute periodic "reigns of terror" wherein we would become far more trigger-happy about banning people for low-effort and disparaging comments. It's not clear to me if these were particularly effective long-term; short-term, people mostly buttoned up a bit and toned down their vitriol, but of course we got all the usual whining about how we banned Suzy but we didn't ban Jane. We probably could decide we're going to start getting much harsher about modding dunks and cheap shots and low effort comments, and the result would be to force people to write longer posts with more effort, but it would also suppress a lot of discourse. Would it be for the better, or would it drive more people off-site? We already get a lot of complaining that moderation is driven by word-count, or that too much moderation makes everyone afraid to post and thus kills conversations.

So what concretely do you want us to do that isn't demanding a shitload more work from us and also isn't heavily biased towards making the Motte exactly the place you would like it to be, but not necessarily what everyone else wants it to be?

I replied downthread the proposed solution and went into detail. I genuinely am asking if you have read it? The one about statistics and me collecting a data pool? I feel like it has answers already to these questions on it, and no! It's not going ban crazy, and it's not using up all your energy to proof-read.

Otherwise, concretely, I want you guys to be able to identify the debate fallacies going on and tell the users who are utilizing them to knock it off so that legitimate debate can be had and you're not driving off the leftists that you want. In your first example with 07mk, is a great one; no, I think he did not respond to what I said. I first posited a) their claim about leftists' attitude on child rape couldn't be substantiated with just anecdotal evidence and b) did they have any evidence other than anecdotal. Neither of those points were addressed in their response. To me, appropriate mod action would be something along the lines of "07mk, you cannot expect justawoman to continue the conversation if you don't continue it appropriately. Please respond to her two claims a) Do you think such a claim can be substantive on anecdotal evidence and b) do you have evidence other than anecdotal, then move on to the next claim." I said in my response earlier I would be happy to document these things privately so that I had data to back my claims and also to point out these general trends and condense them into a sentence or two so that the small mod team here has concrete examples to look out for.

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The really funny part is banning people for describing the exact perspective of this user in terms he would agree with himself, re.

It is the common good for everyone that social conservatism, much like institutional Civil War era slavery, is no longer tolerated by civilized societies, and is socially ostracized. Such as, for example, Turning Point. I do not believe that organization has anything useful to say, and so I find the motivations for why someone would want to listen to useless things dubious, unless they found it useful.
progressivism cannot exist alongside conservatism, because all of the progress done by the former will always be challenged by the latter.
the value of a forum like this is that it allows progressives, at least such as myself, to observe a rich diversity of right-winged thinking to identify the more insidious and subtle dogwhistles indicating the traits of a conservative, so one may steer clear of them in IRL interactions.

There needs to be some discussion about this. I'd be happy with a rule requiring all claims of "this is what leftists believe" to be backed up by quotes. But there needs to be some way to say "look, they openly say they have no intention of communicating with you, let alone coexisting with you" without breaking the rules, especially when literally everyone involved on all sides agrees it's true.

I’m at the laundromat for context as to why I haven’t responded to other comments yet, since my main mode of using this site is lurking on my phone in-between things. Anyway, just to clarify, I am verily not a man. I’m just a woman.

Additionally, I try to be clear about putting subjective opinions as “I think” or “I believe” in the spirit of debate. Yes, I still believe not only subjectively but objectively social conservatism should be rejected by civilized society. But since I don’t have nor want to find the evidence suitable for making such a claim that “it’s not just my opinion, objectively social conservatism is social cancer and everyone here who believes it has drunk the Koolaid” here, and therefore can’t, I try to keep everything within the realm of what I personally think. It is just my opinion.

That is to say, a long winded way of saying I can’t represent all of leftism, anymore than I think you represent all of, uh, I dunno. Everything else? I don’t know you sincerely. I’ve lurked on here for years since reddit times and I only remember Walterodim because of the cheeky Witcher reference and Amadan because of the big red color on their name.

If you want to have a good faith discussion of this, I will be happy to discuss it with you. I just have low expectations because all previous attempts have resulted in you accusing us of running cover for leftists, being hypocrites, etc.

The key point you are missing is that what one person says is not representative of an entire group, and that's why we have an entire paragraph in the rules about being specific about who you're talking about:

Post about specific groups, not general groups, wherever possible. General groups include things like gun rights activists, pro-choice groups, and environmentalists. Specific groups include things like The NRA, Planned Parenthood, and the Sierra Club. Posting about general groups is often not falsifiable, and can lead to straw man arguments and non-representative samples.

So when you say "look, they openly say they have no intention of communicating with you, let alone coexisting with you" - who is they? Because it's certainly not "leftists." It is definitely some leftists. Every bad thing you have ever said about leftists - everything you've ever been modded for for saying about leftists - if you said "There exist leftists who say and think this," I would agree with you. And if you said "That person who's posting is openly saying he has no intention of communicating with us," you would not be modded for that.

But when you take that person as an example and say "He's a leftist, therefore he proves that leftists are blahblahblah..." I mean, do you even see the distinction I am making here, or am I talking to air? You think we're ignoring the behavior of individual bad actors, when those bad actors usually get modded. But because those bad actors exist, you want us to treat every leftist as being the same, and then get mad that we don't ban leftists on sight.

And if someone comes rolling in with "Right-wingers are a bunch of racist, sexist, anti-semitic homophobes" - well, some people in this forum wear all those labels proudly! And yet it is clearly not true of all rightists, such generalizations are clearly intended to be derogatory, and we would mod someone who said that. And you'd be angry at us if we didn't mod someone for saying that.

I don't know why it is so hard for you to distinguish between "What this jerk says" and "This jerk is speaking for everyone who votes like him and thus they can all be treated as interchangeable."

We have had these arguments (and internal mod discussions) since the reddit days, and whenever someone proposes a "solution" that will achieve perfect balance, it turns out that solution maps precisely to "moderate exactly to the degree that would make this place conform to my preferred state."

"User driven moderation" or whatever you call it was a bad idea and a very good way to overmoderate any users in the minority. The only thing that makes sense is rules-based moderation...

Perhaps. But here's my take: first of all, we mostly do use rules-based moderation, but it mostly doesn't satisfy the complainers (because they think we are applying the rules unequally). To the degree that "Moderation is very much driven by user sentiment, I think you are taking that too literally. It does not mean that we moderate according to who gets upvoted or downvoted, nor does it mean anyone who gets reported gets modded. It's right there in that section in that part of the rules:

Note that "driven by" does not mean "controlled by" or "dictated by". We override more than 90% of all reports, and we will sometimes go against the will of the community. This is not a democracy and does not pretend to be one. However, the stronger that will is, the better a justification we'll need to do so.

Now, it is a known problem we've commented on before that someone who's really unpopular (or just posting unpopular opinions) gets reported a lot, and even though we are aware of this and try to factor it in, anyone who's both unpopular and getting reported a lot is probably having lots of arguments and thus sooner or later is probably going to say something uncivil and is more likely to be noticed doing it. Other than using our best judgment and talking amongst ourselves when we see this kind of thing happening, I do not know what a better alternative would be, because inherently we rely mostly on user reports to draw our attention to bad behavior. We don't get paid enough to be responsible for reading every single post and not letting anything slip our notice.

I'm not saying you're not trying, but honestly it's not just a minor problem. If the goal was really to engage with people you don't agree with, this website is a failure. I only come here when I want to know what a specific part of the right thinks.

A good starting point would be to drastically improve the quality of the so-called quality contributions. They should be held to the highest standard, so people can go there and see what's expected of them. What I got from doing that is that your message should be long, written in good english and be right wing. That will garantee you a place there with a 50% probability. Following the rules in their letter and spirit is obviously optionnal.

It's not just a minor problem, no, but I don't think it's solvable.

A good starting point would be to drastically improve the quality of the so-called quality contributions. They should be held to the highest standard, so people can go there and see what's expected of them. What I got from doing that is that your message should be long, written in good english and be right wing. That will garantee you a place there with a 50% probability. Following the rules in their letter and spirit is obviously optionnal.

You're not completely wrong here (I personally don't like that AAQCs are mostly determined by who gets a lot of AAQC "applause" from other members, and a long-winded but superficially polite polemic about how My Enemies Are Scum or Those People Are An Existential Threat will always get tons), but the alternative requires the mods being much more personally and directly involved in deciding what we consider to be a quality post. Is that what you are asking for? And are you sure our selections would be more satisfactory?

A first step is to just do a posteriori control, you eliminate the post that don't follow the rules strictly. However my feeling is that not much quality contributions would remain.

And the user driven evaluation could be more rules-based, instead of voting on a scale bad/good you could ask whether it's charitable, whether you agree or oppose the content, whether it is nice.

I have other ideas if you are interested, like categories for quality contribution: best left/right wing contribution...

Yes, I am interested in what you consider to be quality posts.

Maybe you could have two different sections of quality contributions; ones that got a lot of AAQCs (and didn't break any rules and weren't too egregious, like how you choose them now), and a separate "Mod's Choice" section. In particular, there's a lot of awesome life advice I see in Wellness Wednesdays, and I remember being disappointed one didn't make it. But I've never been one to nominate them myself much, anyway.

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YES. You guys are the mods! You set the tone of the entire site! You guys should have a personal standard of what is quality post and measure it against the popular post.

That is also why I come to this website, mostly to find out what the far-but-smart part of the right thinks. I have to say I would quite like it if smart parts of the left would come here and participate more often though – I feel that the essence of the moderation approach could potentially make for more interesting and productively adversarial debate if more ideologically diverse voices joined in. It's not always enjoyable to be a lone outspoken voice in this environment however, so I think something special may be required to get past that participation hurdle and get larger numbers of left contributors involved.

An idea would be to start an opposition day every week, a thread to specifically highlight topics or opinions that are not in the website consensus. There would still be an overwhelming crowd to harass you, but perhaps you would feel less alone.

Leftists who come in hot are mostly not new posters but people arriving with a grudge because we exist and haven't changed the rules to their liking. Or someone who got linked here, takes a quick gander, is shocked and appalled at what we allow to be posted, and decides some corrective mocking is necessary.

I think you missed the other possibility: that many people who come out hot are trolls deliberately trying to rile people up. I’ve seen people clearly trying to do this with both left and right wing personae. We have a strange overlap with rdrama, after all. I don’t get it, but some people love that kind of thing.

I don’t doubt some are sincere, but I doubt most ever intend to engage on any level other than useless mockery and I would argue that engaging with them as though they have pro social intentions is a waste of everyone’s time and feeds the trolls, like trying to deter violent assaults with a counseling session. There are new posters who have the ability to make a good argument but just need a little guidance in following the rules, but posters like OP clearly aren’t that.

So, if all the really bad things about fascism are not the ones that we are doing, what exactly is bad about fascism?

Ah expanding borders by invading foreign countries is not bad?

That depends a lot on who is doing the invading and who is being invaded, doesn't it?

I thought the context was pretty clear though.

This kind of context swapping is done by bad faith people who might actually be fascists.

Not particularly, no. Every human group in existence today owes its continued existence to the fact that its predecessors took land and resources from other groups. It’s by far the best and most morally and pragmatically legitimate reason to wage war.

Now, I’m perfectly happy to discuss whether or not other, more recently-emergent models of geopolitical coexistence have effectively obviated the underlying logic of wars of expansion. Maybe it’s genuinely no longer necessary to do so in order to secure prosperity and security for one’s people! Maybe the juice isn’t worth the squeeze. But clearly many very intelligent people are still dubious of that assertion, and see it as mere self-serving posturing by the victors of the last great territory-redistributing war(s).

It’s very easy to say “fighting wars to obtain territory is wrong” when you’re the United States, surrounded on both coasts by massive oceans, who defeated the last worthy competitor to any of its contiguous territory 150 years ago. When you’re one of the countries who lost a very substantial amount of territory and resources, though, it’s pretty understandable to be affronted by the assertion that it’s no longer acceptable to try and get any of that territory back.

Now, I’m perfectly happy to discuss whether or not other, more recently-emergent models of geopolitical coexistence have effectively obviated the underlying logic of wars of expansion. Maybe it’s genuinely no longer necessary to do so in order to secure prosperity and security for one’s people! Maybe the juice isn’t worth the squeeze. But clearly many very intelligent people are still dubious of that assertion, and see it as mere self-serving posturing by the victors of the last great territory-redistributing war(s).

It’s also true that almost all groups have at one point or another enslaved other peoples to our own benefit at some point historically.

But now in the modern world, we ideally don’t accept that behavior anymore, and we celebrate when slavers get their teeth kicked in. (You might be able to point to some modern slavers who seem to be getting a free pass, but I think it’s hard to doubt that modern people generally would celebrate to see them get their comeuppance and their enterprise dismantled).

Similarly, people who wage wars of conquest in the modern world, they often get ganged up on and it’s a modern value to celebrate at them getting their teeth kicked in.

Sometimes it’s hard, e.g. they have nuclear weapons or something. But boy, modern people often love to slap people who wage wars of conquest and that’s a pretty cool and adaptive recent novelty in human geopolitical behavior.

Every human group in existence today owes its continued existence to the fact that its predecessors took land and resources from other groups

Just like you have rapists, thiefs and/or murderers among your ancestors (because everybody does), however murder and rape are still evil.

Now, I’m perfectly happy to discuss whether or not other, more recently-emergent models of geopolitical coexistence have effectively obviated the underlying logic of wars of expansion.

It's not about models of geopolitical co existence, they are just a result of modern democracy and the abolition of slavery. It makes no sense for the US to invade Canada, because what do you do with Canadian citizens? You can give them voting rights, but then it would be a merge more than an invasion; you can give them no rights, but then it creates a class of sub-citizens (it looks pretty unconstitutionnal); you can kill them all, but if you don't think it's bad then I don't know what will be (don't bother me with "we do none of the bad things the fascists did" if you don't believe there are bad things).

It’s very easy to say “fighting wars to obtain terriorItory is wrong” when you’re the United States, surrounded on both coasts by massive oceans, who defeated the last worthy competitor to any of its contiguous territory 150 years ago.

That is a good thing that we were speaking about the US invading territories, then...

The question is very concrete and clear: is it bad for Donald Trump and Elon Musk to threaten to invade several countries which until now considered themselves as US allies?

The question is very concrete and clear: is it bad for Donald Trump and Elon Musk to threaten to invade several countries which until now considered themselves as US allies?

I reject the premise: neither Trump nor Musk is seriously proposing a full-scale military takeover of any U.S. neighbors. Contingent on them actually doing so, I would judge it to be a bad idea for reasons completely unrelated to fascism.

Oh I don't think they do it seriously either, but the discussion started on the premise that it did.

Donald J. Trump is incontestably not a Palingenetic Ultra-Nationalist.

If your definition of Fascism can't distinguish Franco from Falangists, it's fundamentally unserious. If it can't even explain the Spanish Civil War, how isn't it just an empty smear?

It is as silly as calling FDR a communist because he nationalized industries and seized private property.

If your definition of Fascism can't distinguish Franco from Falangists, it's fundamentally unserious. If it can't even explain the Spanish Civil War, how isn't it just an empty smear?

Franco's ruling party called itself Falange Española Tradicionalista and incorporated the OG Falangists. The young Franco was a royalist and not a Falangist, but I don't think the distinction between "a former royalist who ends up leading a Falangist political party" and "Falangists" is a particularly significant one. If Franco was still a non-Falange royalist after taking power he would have restored the monarchy before he was on his deathbed.

Of course he's an ultra-nationalist. Don't be a moron.

Of course he's a 'revolutionary' the whole point is that his supporters want him to rebirth the federal government.

You're a moron and it should be permissible to say so or we're wasting the gift of honest discussion on the Internet under assumed names.

Palingenesis implies a much more specific view of history than the mere belief in renewal. Trump may actually believe that he can bring back good days through the power of will, that also wouldn't be enough since it's also true of most progressives. Though I don't think

And Trump is a nationalist, not an ultranationalist. He hasn't advocated dissolving all sphères of life into a total incarnation of the nation.

We can say things, I just think it's boring to rehash Eco's lame attempt as polsci for the millionth time when anybody who actually takes the matter seriously knows it's vague nonsense with no explanatory power over even straightforward examples of military dictatorship.

Are we to believe Turkey has been a Fascist state for all of the modern period and none of its contemporaries noticed? Was Charles de Gaulle a fascist? Was Cromwell? Maybe even Washington? They all fit broad enough a definition.

Palingenetic Ultra-Nationalist

Can you elaborate on this?

For clarity I don’t think Trump is actually a fascist but below I say he often rhymes with one.

I’m looking up this terminology and I think it still fits.

Roger Griffin argues that fascism uses the "palingenetic myth" to attract large masses of voters who have lost their faith in traditional politics and religion by promising them a brighter future under fascist rule.[1][2]

More radical movements often want to overthrow the old order, which has become decadent and alien to the common man.[1][2]

The palingenetic myth can also possibly stand for a return to a golden age in the country's history so that the past can be a guidebook to a better tomorrow, with an associated regime that superficially resembles a reactionary one.[1][2]

Palingenesis being a word meaning rebirth. The palingenetic myth as I understand it seems to be about a rebirth of strength, vitality, and greatness from a society which is seen as decadent.

That all sounds like classic MAGA to me.

Again I don’t think Trump is a true fascist so I’m just curious how you use the palingenetic ultranationalist definition to disqualify him.

Not attacking your position just trying to understand it. But this definition makes me more concerned about Donald Trump, not less.

He's not "ultra" because he's not a totalitarian, and he doesn't structure his political action according to cyclical history that can be forced to happen through will.

He stops short of it so you can say things directionally, but that's true of literally every single effective politician. Fascism is a specific thing, it's not when people with nostalgia do thongs

You can be a totalitarian without being a fascist (Stalin who believed in linear history) and you can be a palingenetic nationalist without being a fascist (Evola who did not believe in mass politics).

Trump is a nationalist businessman with mild autocratic tendencies. A common archetype of US ruler. The biggest myth surrounding him is actually that he's anything special or novel (relatively speaking) when you can throw a stone in US history and hit ten guys like that.

I think one might put it like "Trump isn't Hitler, but if there was an American Hitler, he'd probably look like a more racist and fascist Trump". Trump's not a palingenetic ultranationalist, but he's a somewhat palingenetic nationalist ("somewhat" mostly meaning that there's less need for palingenesis in America, which is arguably still in the height of its national power). Just crank his various attributes up to eleven, and you get an American variation of fascism - naturally different from German and Italian versions due to the considerable national peculiarities of base American nationalism, just as Italian and German fascisms differed from each other due to the national pecularities of base German/Italian nationalisms.

Trump's not a palingenetic ultranationalist, but he's a somewhat palingenetic nationalist ("somewhat" mostly meaning that there's less need for palingenesis in America, which is arguably still in the height of its national power).

I agree with you overall, but I think it’s pretty central to the American right’s worldview that the nation is currently deeply decadent and that a palingenetic movement is sorely needed.

I’m not a fan of palingenetic nationalism as a definition of fascism because the American right are nearly all palingenetic nationalists and I don’t think that they’re all fascists.

Maybe the difference is that they’d need to be palingenetic extremists who value the rebirth over the tradition of democracy. That’s a good definition perhaps.

American right are nearly all palingenetic nationalists and I don’t think that they’re all fascists.

Fascism is palingenetic ultranationalism plus totalitarianism. One of the things that has a lot of Trump critics sweating is that Trumpism is exactly that sort of reactionary populist movement and Trump personally makes lots of authoritarian noises. Combine that with Trump's lack of inhibition or scruples and the uncritical devotion of many of his followers and it's easy to see why someone might start throwing around the f-word. Is it fascist? No. Is it fascish? Yeah, kinda.

Should be noted that the Trump movement is currently at a new situation with the strong influx of Musk and other tech right types, who are really not palingenetic at all in their thought, and are strongly future-oriented.

“We have to destroy the woke mind virus so we can save western civilization and eventually get to the stars”

The American right is not consistently palingenetic- lots of American right wingers want to go back to the fifties, sure, but the libertarian right definitely doesn’t and there are plenty of hardcore isolationists and secessionists on the actually far right, and there’s always been an ‘America is awesome right now’ current.

That’s fair, but similar to socialists, I honestly rarely see actual libertarians outside of Internet forums. They just don’t seem to have much voice in American politics.

Maybe America will have a Milei figure to come along to shake things up at some point.

Edit: like the right often wants to reduce government spending, sure. But for example, it gets done in a DOGE fashion where figures such as Elon and Vivek are both very rhetorically palingenetic. The mind virus is destroying western civilization and we need to save it so we can go to the stars! In fact the more I think about it, an expansionist United States with Elon style techno-saviorism at the helm is a pretty credible model for the emergence of a 21st century American fascism. We’re gonna be great, we just need to destroy the woke mind virus, secure Greenland and the canal, master AGI, make a few cryptos go to the moon so that the peons are happy, and then get to the stars ourselves. The woke will try to interfere, but at a certain point might makes right and it’s our destiny and mission to shut them out of the political process.

Honestly this wouldn’t surprise me to see, lol.

Yes, actual libertarians are underrepresented among the republican base. Your median conservative hardliner is some kind of fifties revivalist, at least for a generous definition of fifties revivalist.

But there's plenty of far right wingers who are not that. The secessionists and hardcore isolationists aren't. The 'Murica, fuck yeah' ultra-patriots aren't- they think America is already awesome, democrats just need to stop harshing the vibe.

Fascism has an actual definition- a militaristic totalitarian state based around palingenetic ultra nationalism. This is not maga; there’s no deep history lore to justify blood and soil. There’s no actual totalitarianism, either, and Trump’s supporters mostly have attachment to institutions which would be disempowered or repressed by totalitarianism.

This is not a definition of fascism I've ever heard of, and would reject entirely. This "definition" looks suspiciously like Umberto Eco's 14 points; a blatant attempt at rigging the debate so we all can agree that "fascism" only refers to evil right-wing movements and had nothing whatsoever to do with Leftist movements of the time, and absolutely no relation at all to Socialism, that's just a right-wing talking point (pay no attention to the documented history showing membership of fascists in socialist movements)

This is not maga; there’s no deep history lore to justify blood and soil.

In support of this, I here submit Neema Parvini's "MAGA as Fulfillment of the Kali Yuga":

While writing The Prophets of Doom, it struck me several times, especially during the chapters on both Thomas Carlyle and Julius Evola, that Donald Trump and his MAGA movement are more truly liberal and truly democratic than their opponents. In other words, there are no truer believers in The Populist Delusion than the populists themselves. When Carlyle talks about the spirit of democracy as a spiral downwards and when Evola talks about involution as the inevitable consequence of American-style liberalism, it is difficult to picture the Davos set or even the decrepit incumbents of the Washington regime because these people do not embody the spirit of plebian energy ‘from below’ described by Carlyle or Evola. MAGA is a low-status ‘working people’s’ populist movement against a powerful, entitled and rich elite. If one considers the classic Anacyclosis as outlined by Polybius (see below), one can spot that the Trumpian figure comes after the oligarchy.

…

This way of thinking about the current predicament gives rise to some strange thoughts. For example, and I voiced this on my appearance on the Alexandria podcast, what if life under the populists is even more intolerably degenerate than life under the Regime? Afterall, MAGA is probably the most genuinely non-racist, pro-black, pro-LGBT, ‘easy going’ and ‘true 90s liberal’ movement ever to exist (aside from, possibly, the British Tory party since Boris Johnson). ‘We have won our country back!’ cry a right-wing led exclusively by people like Kari Lake and Caitlyn Jenner as the black Zoomer in the MAGA hat posts a video of himself drinking Coca-Cola to a Libs of Tik-Tok video to 100k+ likes on twitter. This is really what MAGA is in its core essence. Jerry Springer passed away recently, but his real legacy was MAGA, in all its gauche, loud American awfulness. Jerry! Jerry! Jerry! Jerry!

we’re a nation built on hard work and puritan ethic

The slave trade didn't hurt either

On balance I think it did

"Make America Great Again" sounds pretty palingenetic and nationalist to be fair. And threatening to invade foreign countries is quite militaristic and nationalistic, I'd say.

I agree, however, that there is no totalitarianism in the US right now.

There are broader arguments here, but I want to pick at a couple of the smaller bits:

a country with a fundamentalist religious tradition

This condition is neither necessary nor sufficient for something to be referred to as "fascism" in any meaningful sense. Nazism was more occult than religious, Pinochetism doesn't have much relation to religion, Oswald Mosley wasn't interested in Anglican authoritarianism.

To be more direct, the United States doesn't really have much of a fundamentalist religious tradition - it's a religiously pluralist country where the largest single religion is Catholicism, and it's a squishy strain at that.

violence

The American right broadly and Trumpists more narrowly are just not very violent at all. The central example of right-wing violence during the Trump era is a single riot where the only deaths were one of the rioters and a couple geezers that got too excited and had heart attacks. This wasn't nothing, I didn't like it because I don't like riots, but the political violence in the United States has been primarily racialized (BLM riots and associated violence) or Islamist (various acts of terrorism) for decades.

The American right broadly and Trumpists more narrowly are just not very violent at all.

Incorrect.

A primary motivation of January 6th protesters was the belief that the election was stolen by the other party, which is a decidedly anti-fascist motivation. Many of them were interested in more safeguards for the democratic process, like voter ID and a ban on election machines. This is in stark contrast to BLM, where the whole idea of American democracy and rule of law was thrown out in favor of an emotional narrative centered on an oppressed people — a textbook example of how fascists get into power. You may argue that Trump was being fascistic when he accused his opponents of election manipulation, but then the very fact he had to cloak his intention in the language of democracy is a testament to the absence of a fascistic undercurrent in the American Right. Which, in my opinion, is unfortunate, because there are a lot of good arguments for the introduction of fascistic aesthetics, prosocial values, and meritocracy to America. Isn’t China being fascist when they make the State beautiful and promote Han civic values and ban immoral entertainment and curtail the power of billionaires? How about El Salvador? Okay, it’s not exactly going poorly for them.

Were people riled up because of the sanctity of democracy?

I’m not sure that was the core motivation.

I think the modern new American right is one of the movements which is developing an anti-democratic undercurrent.

It’s not mainstream, but you start to see it pop up more and more. Your comment itself is bordering on being a testament to that.

I think people were riled up because they felt their voice within a democracy was being suppressed via extra-judicial means (e.g. Twitter files and similar machinations within its orbit; aggressive legal persecution of Trump; debanking and deplatforming of voices or platforms that served their ends)

Whether this is a truly accurate representation of reality may beg whether the movement is truly democratic or not, but the motivation to have a political movement fairly represented within a democracy is unquestionably pro-democracy, no?

the motivation to have a political movement fairly represented within a democracy is unquestionably pro-democracy, no?

Depends on the political movement.

Fascism is pretty often born out of democracy.

I’m not at all saying that this is Trump/MAGA.

But objectively, an anti-democratic movement could easily come to power on claims of shenanigans in an election, whether valid or not.

Alternatively, a simpler explanation is that Trump/MAGA doesn't care about the reality of the election and attempted to take power on January 6th anyway.

We definitely have a tradition of fundamentalist religions, even though no single fundamentalist tradition holds sway. The theological differences between Baptists and Pentecostals and Methodists haven’t kept them from converging on various policy positions. They get the Catholics on board surprisingly often, too.

Other than that, you’re correct. The MAGA wing is positively gentlemanly compared to the kind of mass protests we had over Civil Rights policy, let alone the labor battles of the early 20th century.

Yeah, this is a good and correct point. I waffled a bit about how I wanted to phrase it, because we certainly do have fundamentalists and not just a few of them. My objection is that phrasing it as "a fundamentalist religious tradition" suggests to me that this is a uniting force that is a key element of the current Trumpist movement. While some fundamentalists are part of that movement, they aren't exactly steering the ship - JD Vance is Catholic, Musk isn't religious, Vivek is (I think) Hindu, and the Cabinet nominees are a mishmash of different religions and constituencies. So, what I mean to say is not that the United States lacks fundamentalist religions, but that it isn't a fundamentalist nation and the Trump coalition does not emphasize fundamentalism. I unironically think integralist Catholics have more political sway with this administration than young Earth creationists.

I unironically think integralist Catholics have more political sway with this administration than young Earth creationists.

Integralist Catholics are creationists, albeit often old earth.

Trump and Tom Cotton performed hypothetical violence by suggesting sending in troops/national guard, quite fascist. Direct and tacit support for lawlessness and chaos on the streets though? Nope.

The central example of right-wing violence during the Trump era is a single riot where the only deaths were one of the rioters and a couple geezers that got too excited and had heart attacks.

Are you referring to the Diet-Coke Hall Putsch?

There was also the Charlottesville Massacre. (Kind of book-ends it....)

Is "Charlottesville Massacre" meant sincerely?

I’d have gone with “PBR Hall Putsch,” personally.

Beer Hall Pudge

He was already president for 4 years and nothing happened.

I do not agree that Trump is a fascist, but I always found the argument of "nothing happened last time" to be super weak. Trump himself repeats that he had people in his administration constantly get in his way and prevent him from doing what he wanted to do. This is something both Trump loyalists and #resist people both agree on.

Not that I disagree, but I think the argument is more like "last time you all screamed he was orange Hitler, and nothing happened. Why should we believe you this time?"

There's a current amongst the left that makes the most recent right wing candidate out to be literally the biggest threat to democracy ever. After a while, it becomes obvious that there isn't any information value from these statements.

"Nothing happened" is obviously false, given January 6th and the events leading up to it.

Trump made a serious effort to stay in office despite losing the 2020 election, including (definitely) assembling a riotous mob outside the Capitol in order to intimidate Pence and Congress and (based on poorly-corroborated eyewitness testimony, but not seriously challenged) meeting retired generals in the Oval Office to discuss the possibility of a military autogolpe. That isn't nothing.

The people who said that Trump was a threat to democracy were right, even though American democracy was in fact able to brush off the threat.

Out of curiosity, where would you say the appropriate place to protest would have been? There was behaviour during the election that seemed very suspicious to the layperson (the water main breaking causing poll watchers to be sent home, which was followed by votes continuing to be tallied). The attempts to get the legal system to address it seemed to be brushed off (and I'm saying 'seemed', not 'were', because you don't have to be right to protest, you just need to believe something was wrong). The people absolutely believed that the election has been stolen, and showed up for what was actually an extremely peaceful protest, especially compared to the BLM protests earlier in the year.

We've seen similar protests from left-wing sources occupying state buildings to prevent votes (unfortunately, not being American, I can't recall the specific state; I believe it was some sort of trans bathroom bill that caused a Texan legislature to have to reconvene later, but I'm open to corrections if someone can find it). The same people who complain about Trump being a unique threat to democracy are silent on those protests.

There really isn't any set of events that could've led to the January 6 protests having Trump installed in office, short of convincing everyone that the vote had been stolen (in which case, yes, they would've been right to overturn it).

Out of curiosity, where would you say the appropriate place to protest would have been?

Given that the Constitution requires States to choose their electors and Congress to count the votes of the electors chosen by the States, the appropriate place to protest a choice of electors which does not reflect the popular vote would whatever the usual and customary place for large-scale protest is in the relevant State capital. Given US norms (which are not substantially different to other advanced democracies) I wouldn't have said that protesting on the Capitol lawn was inappropriate, but doing so while openly armed, carrying signs saying "Hang Mike Pence" and erecting a gallows crosses a line even if the building wasn't stormed. (FWIW, I would consider open-carrying at a political process to be per se a threat against government officials and therefore prosecutable, but I am aware that American gun culture sees things differently).

The people absolutely believed that the election has been stolen, and showed up for what was actually an extremely peaceful protest, especially compared to the BLM protests earlier in the year.

The ignorance of Trump's supporters is relevant to their culpability, but not his. Given his access to information, if Trump believed the things he was saying about how he won the election then he is sufficiently delusional that Pence should have invoked the 25th.

There really isn't any set of events that could've led to the January 6 protests having Trump installed in office, short of convincing everyone that the vote had been stolen (in which case, yes, they would've been right to overturn it).

Eastman wrote a memo telling Pence how to install Trump. I don't know what would have happened if Pence had followed the instructions in the memo and declared Trump elected, but it wouldn't have been good whoever ended up being inaugurated. There were at least five obvious ways that the January 6 protests could have "worked" in the sense of using political violence to cause an unnecessary constitutional crisis, although only the first two seem plausible to me:

  1. Pence, in fear for his physical safety, changes his mind and calls the election for Trump as presiding officer over the joint session using the Eastman memo as a guide.
  2. Pence is killed/hospitalised/in sufficient danger that he is whisked to a secure location by his Secret Service detail, Chuck Grassley presides over a reconvened joint session as President pro tem of the Senate, and (whether out of personal conviction, political calculation, or fear) calls the election for Trump per the Eastman memo.
  3. The count is delayed long enough for Team Trump to successfully run one of their other schemes, probably having another go at getting Republican state legislatures in states that voted for Biden to endorse the fake electors.
  4. The rioters manage to grab the chest containing the physical certificates of vote and burn them, dump them in the Potomac or similar, and an attempt to gather the backup certificates held by federal judges in each state fails, meaning that the electoral count cannot be run in a regular fashion.
  5. The disorder gives Trump an excuse to replace the Capitol Police with troops loyal to him, who proceed to coerce Congress into upholding challenges to the contentious electoral votes.

You military recruiters have gotten really clever, but we're still not going to join.
We all know how this works now: you sign up because of the recruiting video about jumping out of a helicopter with a flaming sword to deport giant Mexican dragons, and then you end up marooned in some desert for two years jerking off under a Humvee for $9.50/hr

it will always be surprising to me that the people on the Internet who experienced the New Atheism movement, which is to say, they had firsthand experience with the dangers of authoritarian religion, were so consistently and persistently blind to the fascism.

I think there was something in their genes that made them unable to perceive social cues.

and they distrusted the people who warned of the fascism because those people were rude

and they didn't like hearing the things they said because they were weak

they retreated to holes online where they could ignore the rude people and perform their own rudeness

truly, a tragedy

  • -45

it will always be surprising to me that the people on the Internet who experienced the New Atheism movement, which is to say, they had firsthand experience with the dangers of authoritarian religion, were so consistently and persistently blind to the fascism

You are, of course, referring to how they they turned on their heel and started mocking the very idea of freedom of speech, organizing campaigns to get people fired from their jobs for wrongthink, and collaborating with the corporate surveillance state, right? Right??

But if for some reason you're referring to the sentiment against immigrants turning sour, it's a simple question of getting mugged by reality. When the big wave of Syrian refugees first hit in 2015, I was cheering for them. Even when cars started driving into crowds, and things were going boom, I figured it's just a tiny minority of assholes. It wasn't until Cologne happened that I had the sinking feeling that people who were talking about incompatible cultures may have had a point.

Cool.

This is a discussion forum. So far you've made two posts back to back of short, declarative sentences. Declarations are not discussion. If you'd like to discuss something, it would help if you would put some effort into presenting the topic you would like to discuss, ideally by framing a question and elaborating a bit on why you think it's salient.

Alternatively, if you are not really interested in discussion but are only here to preach to an audience, then I'm afraid this is not the place for you. This presumes of course that we have not already seen above all the engagement you intended, in which case... problem solved, I suppose?

Here's a discussion question for you: how is it that the people here were so resistant to the idea that Trumpism was fascist?

And that's an entirely reasonable question. The answer I'd give is because most of us have spent several years discussing the "Trump is a fascist" thesis, and have concluded that it is garbage. A big part of that is that we used to have a lot more people who were willing to make the "Trump is a fascist" argument on specific grounds and under specific predictions, had their predictions falsified by subsequent events and subsequently went away. I've personally been considering a retrospective about the debates I had on Jan 6th-7th 2020 and the surrounding months, based on the grind of subsequent revelations.

Many of us, myself included, have a high tolerance for repetition and are more than happy for another round of the debate, if that's actually a debate you're interested in. I'm confident the facts are on my side, as they were the last several times I went round on it. Certainly your abbreviated position statements do not seem terribly revelatory. Just for starters, I'm greatly amused by

violence

given the facts readily available.

Likewise,

contempt for journalists and journalism

is most amusing. When humans act contemptibly, contempt is the appropriate response. the title of "journalist" is not a magic talisman against this obvious reality, and the modern journalist class is a trash disaster that beggars the concept of satire. Not all Journalists, of course. Just most of them.

And likewise

he's been elected to deploy the military domestically

but, shit, not like this or this, right? presumably this time it's a bad deployment of the military domestically? ...To speak plainly, the US Military has been "deployed domestically" for a variety of purposes, legitimate and not. Using the US military to assist with a large-scale breakdown in law enforcement is an entirely legitimate action of the President, has numerous examples in the past, and would not be necessary were it not for the chronic, lawless intransigence of the progressive coalition.

and he indicates he will expand the borders using the military

I'm confident that the US military won't be used by Trump to expand the borders of the United States of America, and that people worrying about it are wasting their time. I mean, just for starters, integrating Canada into the US would vastly increase the odds that Trump dies in prison, so he personally has every reason to avoid such an eventuality. It seems to me that he's running his mouth in a deliberate attempt to humiliate the Canadian government, which seems to me to be a reasonable action given the shit they've been pulling lately. Ditto for the UK, and Europe generally. Live by the multinational globalist coalition, die by the multinational globalist coalition; the Canadian, UK and European governments have taken an interest in the political process of my country, so I think we're justified in taking an interest right back.

First reddit link is a nice hat, was it supposed to be the 101st airborne bayoneting southerners?

Fixed, thanks. And apparently that image address consistently redirects. most odd.

Every reddit post has an id associated with it. The id consist of a short alphanumeric, case-agnostic string. The post associated with the string "media" is that /r/funny image post of Lady Gaga as you see by checking where redd.it/media leads. I assume it is some quirck of themotte that it interprets a link of the form https://old.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2FIMAGECODE.SUFFIX as pointing to the reddit post with the id "media".

interesting! thanks for the insight!

I've given up trying to hotlink reddit images, which is annoying since they're often in the top of image search results.

Hey @antifa, Did you forget to switch to your sock-puppet account before replying to yourself?

no I just had another thought obviously

Did you, though?

and they distrusted the people who warned of the fascism because those people were rude

“Rude” is a funny euphemism for totally psychopathic here

so your correction is that because some leftists were total psychopaths that makes it better that you failed to notice the fascism and were rude to leftists? wow

  • -16

Are mods on vacation? Who is this 4 comment troll

They've already been warned. I suspect they've self-deported in any case.

Fascism is a word that has an actual meaning. I understand that outside the motte it has become a snarl word which basically just means "political ideology I don't like" but I was under the impression that people here actually try to use the word properly. Donald Trump isn't a fascist - though I have no doubt that if he fails to do what his base want him to do his replacement most likely will be. He's already had four years to be in power, and none of the calamities that your crowd promised were on the way ever actually showed up. If you want to look at the actual actions committed by people in government Trump represents the only break from the Beltway consensus in living memory, and that consensus is responsible for so much more evil and destruction than anything Trump has done. Can you actually look at the long history of military interventions undertaken by the US since the defeat of Hitler and tell me that Trump represents some brand new evil that deserves a revolution to overthrow? How exactly is building a wall with Mexico some grand act of fascism but dropping agent orange on Vietnam or using depleted uranium rounds in Iraq to help establish a hardline Islamic theocracy is just business as usual?

But on top of that, if you're actually serious about opposing people using the military to expand their borders and impose second-class citizen status on a bunch of poor people of the wrong ethnicity, why aren't you talking about Israel? They build walls, they set up apartheid, they kill children in terror attacks, invade foreign states, ask the US to invade others and supplied military equipment to all sorts of distasteful regimes. You still get to attack Donald Trump when you do to boot!

Leftists do talk plenty about Israel, I observe, when they're not in "those devious jews amirite" company (for obvious reasons). Themotte is closer to being such company than not.

In order to have a discussion on why Israel is wrong from the leftist world model (questions of universal human rights), you first have to have an agreement on the idea that human rights are universal (as opposed to only your ingroup's).

Fascism is a word that has an actual meaning.

It has a meaning which does at times resonate quite a bit with Trump though, I’d argue that although he doesn’t fully meet the definition there is a reason it keeps getting applied to him specifically. For example,

Fascists often:

Dismantle the systems of democracy. Trump didn’t do this, I don’t think you can call him a full fascist at this point, but he has tendencies on this point. For many people, including his former vice president, he’s the first US president to try to break the system of transfer of power. Whatever you believe about that situation, he said from the beginning that he’ll consider the electoral process rigged if he loses. And once he did, he loudly and consistently employed a whole host of means to try break the system, trying to get governors to “find votes”, to put up alternative electors, to halt the system of certification, etc. He got his followers so riled up about this that they formed a mob and broke into the US capitol building. These are all definitely tendencies toward the dismantle democracy aspect of fascism, and if you were in a country where someone did try these things, you might pre-emptively call that person a fascist.

Promote ethnonationalism and typically delineate a group of people as an enemy. Trump often takes steps in this directions and then pulls back. Actual ethnonationalists often have a love hate relationship with the guy because he’ll use promising rhetoric and then say something else which is pro x or y ethnicity and which pisses those guys off. But in the end he was elected on the central promise to conduct the greatest mass deportations in American history, and those vibes certainly match what would be expected for historical fascists to say as well.

Use authoritarian state force on internal minority groups. I don’t think he’s done this, kudos. Other people often think he has, “children in cages”, etc. But fascism tends to be crueler than this and less within previously established norms. There are obviously fears around this happening during the mass deportations, but that remains to be seen.

Crush dissent violently. This is often part of the dismantle democracy thing. I don’t think Trump has done this and this would be the biggest American norm to violate in order for a fascist to emerge. I do believe that Trump the man himself has these tendencies that could have emerged in a different context (consider his rhetoric in quotes such as his praise of China’s strength during the Tiananmen massacre, and lamenting that were not strong like that). There are many similar quotes that could be mined to paint a case that he sometimes has somewhat of a fixation on this type of “strength”.

Idealize the military and often use military force in expansionist ways. Trump has sometimes idealized the military in ways that previous American norms have not, e.g. calling for the US to begin doing military parades in the style of China or N Korea. But up until this point he has not shown much tendency to launch any sort of military adventure, much to his credit. (And of course to your point about previous presidents, much to their demerit). Recently he’s been making people edgy on this point, yesterday saying that he would use economic and perhaps military force to annex various territories around the world. Knowing Trump, this is likely his typical “start with the most extreme statement” bluster. But I think it can be pretty clear to understand why for people who think he does have certain fascist tendencies to become concerned when he suddenly starts talking about expansion or annexing territories. We’ll see if he actually is serious about using economic force to try and annex other territories. If so he fits the point about territorial expansionism. If he broke with norms so extremely to threaten Panama with the military in order to take territory from them that would obviously be extremely fascist coded behavior. The whole thing, in the end, shows hints of him breaking with norms that liberal democracies have had in the postwar era. Like in the Helsinki accords, to which the US is signatory; they respect each others sovereignty, they respect territorial boundaries, they do not threaten one another for territory, etc. Breaking these norms is definitely fascist coded, and we’ll see if he continues down that path or if it’s just another passing Trumpism to sit back and enjoy.

Fascists often:

Drink water.

Which is to say, that characterizing something that fascists do, even correctly, does that make thing a distinguisher of fascism.

Well there’s not a great definition of fascism, but I do think it’s a valid category that we shouldn’t do away with, nonetheless.

Me too. It should be reserved for believers of "All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state".

It should be permissible to use it to say "this movement will lead to a totalitarian state being imposed in which minorities are exterminated in camps."

You, and other leftists, are allowed to make the argument that Trump will impose a totalitarian state in which minorities are exterminated in camps.

You haven't.

That’s fair.

And do note, I never said Trump was a fascist.

But I get why he gets pattern matched as one.

You might look at what the commenter I responded to said.. “trumps replacement very well could be a fascist.”

You could look at breaking norms in a somewhat fascist coded way while having a cult of personality associated with you as a danger even if the subject himself isn’t likely to declare himself generalissimo.

But to talk about why that might represent a sort of danger you’d need to invoke fascism.

Fascists often

Do things that have been done in every other system including liberal democracy?

Liberal democracies tend not to do things like for example:

Crush a protest against the leader with authoritarian force, dismantle the system of democratic choice.

If you read my statement, I said that Trump didn’t do either of these things.

But he often does show tendencies toward these things, causing people to pattern match him to them.

Of course, if you are someone who is concerned about fascism, it’s important to pattern match potential fascists before they become actual fascists, so for those people it can be considered a worthwhile exercise.

Liberal democracies tend not to do things like for example:

Crush a protest against the leader with authoritarian force, dismantle the system of democratic choice.

Point of order: Trudeau and others pretty clearly did the first (crushing the trucker protests) albeit with financial force not physically. I can’t remember if other European countries used water cannons etc.

And moves like Germany constantly flirting with banning the AfD and France’s cordon sanitaire seem like moving in the direction of dismantling democracy, along with the attempted jailing of Trump and the general tendency of lock policy away behind non-democratic quangos, rights and treaties feel quite a lot like dismantling the system of democratic choice.

Growing up, everyone was making a lot of pro-liberalism arguments that basically boil down to the double-edged sword. “If you impinge the liberties of others, what happens when they get into power?” And it feels like in the past decade people have been increasingly willing to test that.

Point of order: Trudeau and others pretty clearly did the first (crushing the trucker protests) albeit with financial force not physically.

Financial force first, then physical force (trampling them with horses, how Canadian).

using depleted uranium rounds

My understanding is that the impact of that has been vastly overstated, usually by the same sorts of people who think the radiation from being near a nuclear power plant is worse than the radiation from being near a coal plant.

I think the acceptable number of birth defects caused by the use of your weapon systems in an unprovoked war of aggression against another state is zero, and the depleted uranium rounds used in Iraq have handily surpassed this number.

I think the acceptable number of birth defects caused by the use of your weapon systems in an unprovoked war of aggression against another state is zero

Uncleared minefields (and UXO in general, though to a much smaller degree) tend to produce injuries similar to congenital birth defects, up to and including the sorts of defects incompatible with life, like missing limbs or heads. They can be found wherever wars are fought.

DU by contrast is merely toxic, much like lead and TNT are.

I believe there are international efforts to ban the use of minefields that linger and cause problems after the war, and cluster munitions frequently cause similar issues.

This does not change my position that the acceptable number of mutilated and dead children caused by your advanced weapon systems is zero. I'm opposed to minefields, depleted uranium, the use of white phosphorus in civilian areas, the use of chemical/biological weapons etc.

I believe there are international efforts to ban the use of minefields that linger and cause problems after the war

Call me when a country whose military actually fights wars commits to that in any meaningful way. They haven't (and won't) for obvious reasons; the ultimate problem with mines is that they're both extremely useful, and extremely cost-effective. You can make them on 3D printers, and the Ukrainians are doing exactly that. That treaty did them a whole lot of good, clearly.

Cluster munitions are the same way (and again, relevant military powers all retain them for that reason)- they're great for exploding the slightly-older-children when they come out to repair the areas (typically runways) we drop them on. Of course, they're not as cute, so they're fair game, naturally.

If you're not willing to shell your own position and kill your own soldiers [that haven't even been born yet, in this case], you are not willing to win. Hamas is willing to win (that's why they position their forces in schools). The Ukrainians and Russians are also willing to win (that's why the Ukrainians are mining their own territory even though they pinky-swore not to do that).

The radiological hazard of depleted uranium is overstated; U-238 decays very slowly, and is sometimes (due to its density) used as shielding for more rapidly-decaying nuclides.

However, it poses a chemical hazard, as uranium is chemically toxic in a similar way to other heavy metals.

He's already had four years to be in power, and none of the calamities that your crowd promised were on the way ever actually showed up.

this is factually incorrect, but more importantly, it's stupid

But on top of that, if you're actually serious about opposing people using the military to expand their borders and impose second-class citizen status on a bunch of poor people of the wrong ethnicity, why aren't you talking about Israel?

this is obviously a deflection

you're afraid, aren't you? you're afraid that you missed the fascism

  • -29

this is factually incorrect, but more importantly, it's stupid

Factually incorrect? News to me. I was told there'd be a wall, mass deportations, crackdowns on civil liberties and the manifestation of Gilead into reality. I guess I actually did miss the fascism, because I didn't see any of that shit - have you got a source for any of this that's more rigorous than your arse?

this is obviously a deflection

I'm pointing out that every single thing you're threatening is on the way due to Trump IS ALREADY HERE. Why should I believe your stated motivations when you're supporting and condoning people who are far worse according to your own standards?

Nobody is afraid that they "missed the fascism", except possibly you because your brain is fried from huffing too much politics. Any "fascism" that is so subtle that you can fail to notice it while it's taking place in the cultural center of the world in the midst of a global political media circus (i.e. the election) is no fascism at all.

Fascism is not a mystic totem which once invoked will trigger Armageddon. If it's too subtle to notice, it's also too subtle to affect anyone's life in any way. If it's too subtle to affect anyone's life then it doesn't matter, no matter what scary words you use to describe it. If we can live in a fascist dystopia without noticing or being affected by it, then maybe the problem is that the word "fascist" is being used too lightly.

Nobody is afraid that they "missed the fascism", except possibly you because your brain is fried from huffing too much politics

His comment was bad, but please don't respond in kind.

Just a quick tip. The mods very literally and explicitly police on tone here. It’s an intentional, foundational part of the rules.

You can argue for virtually any viewpoint that you want, as long as you’re polite and charitable about it.

I’d really like you to stay because we have a shortage of leftists here, but if you don’t moderate your tone, you’re likely to get banned in short order. So please try to be a bit more level-headed in your posts. (Accusing someone of “being afraid they missed the fascism”, being seen as a generally impolite and uncharitable thing to accuse someone of, must be supported with substantial argumentation, rather than simply offered as a one-liner).

Any thoughts on how to get leftists back that aren't sockpuppets of trolls plaguing Scott Alexander spinoffs for 10+ years now?

Going with Amadanb's belief this was an Imp, so not the kind of leftists we actually want.

No, I don’t have any thoughts!

I’ve written some posts in the past detailing the reasons why leftists tend to self-select out of spaces like this. I don’t think it’s a problem that can be fixed unfortunately.

This. I want more leftists here but please don't do the "it's fascism and I don't need to explain why" thing antifa. If you want to argue Trump is a fascist, You DO need to explain in detail how you think Trump is a fascist because I and many others here don't see it, but I also DO see that ACTUAL fascism is growing as you normalize calling people "fascists" (and also fail to solve common people's troubles while doubling-down on identitarianism).

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