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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32404 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 23, 2023

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This helpful article from Wikipedia may explain it all to you, it certainly opened my eyes:

Far-right politics, also referred to as the extreme right or right-wing extremism, are political beliefs and actions further to the right of the left–right political spectrum than the standard political right, particularly in terms of being radically conservative, ultra-nationalist, and authoritarian, as well as having nativist ideologies and tendencies.

Historically, "far-right politics" has been used to describe the experiences of fascism, Nazism, and Falangism. Contemporary definitions now include neo-fascism, neo-Nazism, the Third Position, the alt-right, racial supremacism, National Bolshevism and other ideologies or organizations that feature aspects of authoritarian, ultra-nationalist, chauvinist, xenophobic, theocratic, racist, homophobic, transphobic, and/or reactionary views.

If Sanderson believes his church's teachings, and his church teaches that gay acts are sinful, then his church is homophobic. And being homophobic means you are far-right, which means you're the same thing as a Nazi. Doesn't matter if he never personally burned a gay or trans person at the stake, until and unless he denounces Mormonism and acknowledges his guilt and accepts he was wrong all along, he's a Nazi. And you don't tolerate Nazis, now do you?

You are drawing so much conclusions from a factual wikipedia article.

  1. It is a fact that the nazis were homophobic. It is also a fact that the nazis were far right, and also a fact that homophobia is a view held by a lot of far-right people. Are you challenging any one of these facts? It does not mean that if you are homophobic you are far right or a nazi. You know, most people have two legs but birds aren't people. By the way, you should have noted the "and/or" in the list, which suggests that far right people hold several of those views, not just one.

  2. "Doesn't matter if he never personally burned a gay or trans person at the stake, [...] he's a Nazi." When you do this comment, it seems to me you are saying that anyone who did not personally burned anyone cannot be a Nazi. In this case, there have been very few nazis. Hitler, for example, did not burn anyone "personally", as far as I know. At the end, the holocaust was organized in such a way that almost no one had to kill anyone directly. Not every nazi is a war criminal. Most nazis were just people like you and me that lived their lives peacefully. They just happened to vote for some nazi guy once, and to help the regime once in a while.

  • -10

you don't need to quote four paragraphs of a parent's post in a reply, FYI - if you want to reference a big block concisely, add a ... between the first and last sentence or something lke that

Lumping in "homophobic" as a signifier of "far right" is doing a lot of reaching. If the Mormons don't teach that the sin of Sodom was really lack of hospitality and Jesus Himself was probably fucking at least a couple of the apostles, then they're homophobic. And that means they're Nazis.

Do they subscribe to the principles of National Socialism? Are they building concentration camps there in Utah? Don't be silly, that's not what we mean, we mean "they're Nazis because they don't say what we want them to say".

Hmmm - Hitler didn't personally burn anyone, Brandon Sanderson didn't personally burn anyone - my Harvey Milk, do you realise what this means? Sanderson is Hitler, alive and well and writing schlocky fantasy!!!!

Don't do that, if you don't have a retort just don't reply please.

Then either downvote and move on, or if you feel mod action is warranted, report and move on. Comments that are merely a brief statement of agreement or disagreement are officially discouraged by the local ruleset.

I will comply, but should I really report someone that is arguing like that? It seems to me that he broke no rule apart from those of logic.

It's not an explicit report option, but we do have a catch-all rule against being "egregiously obnoxious". That post did lean a little hard into the sarcasm, so "antagonistic" might also have fit.

Then if you want to criticize the logic, you need to actually criticize it (meaning, point out the logical flaw), not just say "It's bad."

It is also a fact that the nazis were far right

I'll dispute that. There's a reason PoliticalCompassMemes classes them as AuthCenter. Nazism is weird, and very clearly a mutation off of socialism. There is definitely a reasonable argument that they shed core elementals of socialist thought (like class abolition) during that mutation, but they kept others (like the framework of being a revolutionary ideology to remake all society in their own image), and that leaves in them a weird position compared to other types of "right-wing" ideologies. If just being racist and homophobic is enough, then Marx, Engels and Guevera are "far-right". If we're going to ignore the distinctions and categories enough to group Brandon Sanderson with the Nazis, then everyone to the left of Joe Manchin is Stalinist - and apparently it doesn't matter if they never sent anyone to the gulag.

They sort of had class abolition. There was volksgemeinschaft, no class divisions here we're all Germans! But they weren't in favor of class struggle, which is a key Marxist concept.

It depends upon how you interpret the meaning of class abolition I suppose, whether it's killing enough kulaks that the class is liquidated or whether you just remove the category of kulak and consider them to be farmers.

I'm happy to join in disputing the "fact that the nazis were far right" but I would emphasize the worthlessness of the left/right spectrum.

Reactionaries, those throne and altar guys like the Hapsburgs and the Romanovs, are right wing. Florian Geyer had "no crown, no cross" scratched on his sword, the sword that he used to fight for peasants during the Peasants Revolt; not right wing. Hitler thought Florian Geyer a hero and was happy to have an SS regiment named after him. I'm thinking that Hitler and Stalin had rival takes on how to stick it to the Kings and Priests, but both thought of themselves as acting on behalf of the workers and the common man.

If one really wants to have Hilter->right and Stalin->left, then one gets into trouble with reactionaries, monarchists, and integralists. All the classic right-wing positions have to be kicked off the spectrum to make room for Hitler. You even have to horse-shoe Florian Geyer and get him to the right to have Hitler think him a hero.

I would emphasize the worthlessness of the left/right spectrum.

and I would disagree, as much as the terms get abused these days I think that the underlying ideas about human nature being bound vs unbound and "on which side would one fall in the French Revolution" is still very relevant and useful no matter how much blue-tribe academics like to assert otherwise. Heck I would go so far as to say that half the reason academic left keep asserting that it's worthless is precisely because they don't want to bite the bullet on the implications.

Some of the difficulty is probably also due to political views not truly being one-dimensional, even though people often treat it like it is.

Nazis were textbook socially right-wing. Anschluss, lebensraum, ethnic nationalism is categorically opposed to cosmopolitan liberalism. (Cue jokes about modern woke racial grievances…) I’ve definitely seen Stalin up there on authcenter, too, when the poster correctly observed Soviets placing party over ideology.

I think it’s more clear in the old-school political compass where the two axes are “social” and “fiscal.” The “auth” axis leaves it hard to separate different varieties of statism.

Nazis were textbook socially right-wing. Anschluss, lebensraum, ethnic nationalism is categorically opposed to cosmopolitan liberalism.

*presses X to doubt* Magic A is Magic A, and socialist infused Id-Pol is socialist infused Id-Pol.

If the Nazis were right wing, so where the Bolsheviks, Benito Mussolini, Margaret Sanger, and Woodrow Wilson and I'm not buying it.

Edit: see my earlier comment about "implications"

like the framework of being a revolutionary ideology to remake all society in their own image

The libertarians are the same, so they are some kind of socialists?

If just being racist and homophobic is enough, then Marx, Engels and Guevera are "far-right"

Racism and homophobia weren't particularly important in their politics. That is what matters.

If we're going to ignore the distinctions and categories enough to group Brandon Sanderson with the Nazis

I never said you should group Brandon Sanderson with the nazis because I don't know him and I'm not interested in fantasy authors anyway. That is not my point, and that is certainly not the point of the wikipedia article either.

The libertarians are the same, so they are some kind of socialists?

There is no similarity there. Let me know if you ever find a self-professed libertarian group that wants to forcibly split children from their families to indoctrinate them into a new Year Zero totalizing ideology, so I can start repudiating them.

Racism and homophobia weren't particularly important in their politics. That is what matters.

That seems like a very isolated standard that I have never seen applied to anyone before, and doesn't hold besides. Guevara had gay men sent to camps to work the gay out of them; that seems like a much more central example of political ideology and power than waffling about gay marriage.

That is not my point, and that is certainly not the point of the wikipedia article either.

What did you think the point of the wiki article was, if not offering institutional support to a wildly expansive definition of "far right"?

That seems like a very isolated standard that I have never seen applied to anyone before, and doesn't hold besides.

The fact that you have seen it applied or not is not very relevant. You can write an abstract of Marx writings without ever mentionning race or homosexuality and you wouldn't miss much. The same cannot be said about far right leaders or thinkers. On guevara, you are probably right, I don't know. Anyway as I stated before those things cannot be taken in isolation. Just because you are homophobic does not mean you are far right. For example, I don't think the distinction between gender and sex makes any sense (at least not as it is applied in liberal ideology). Some people would call me transphobic. But as I'm not racist and homophobic, I don't think I would qualify as far right by any reasonable standard.

What did you think the point of the wiki article was, if not offering institutional support to a wildly expansive definition of "far right"?

As it is an article about the far right, I'd say its purpose is to inform people about what is called far right by most people in our society. I'd be very interested to read your version of a definition of the far right...

I'd be very interested to read your version of a definition of the far right...

I think it's difficult to give a coherent answer. The right/left dichotomy is an imprecise arrangement at the best of times, and the right side is harder to define than the left side, especially if we're defining the right as anything other than "not leftist". The article in question seems like an absolute dumpster fire written for partisan purposes, focusing narrowly on certain social topics. Compare it to the page for far-left politics, which exclusively mentions economic topics, and doesn't even pretend to explain anything about the ideology-space, while trying to flatter their image where it can. If you dig into the talk page, you can even see editors acknowledging that "far right" is a propaganda term in use by leftist academics, while there is no comparable "wiki appropriate" propaganda source for "far left".

Far left do focus on economy because that is what far left is about. Das Kapital speaks a lot about economy, Mein Kampf not so much. It's precisely the nature of the far left ideologies to think that everything is about making the rich richer.

Factual does not mean true, nor accurate, nor representative or illuminating. I do not trust wikipedia and neither should you, certainly not for an article created in 2019, certainly not for anything remotely political, certainly not without searching the talk and history pages first.

Then explain me what's wrong in those lines.

They were written by propagandists with a slant. Their purpose is not to convey truth but to color perception. I thought that was obvious from my prior comment.

Is there anything false?

Yes.

Dude either answer him properly or don't answer, one word answers are annoying for everyone.

Contemporary definitions of false include slanderous, misleading, deceptive, context-dependent, and/or manipulative statements.

I'm not quoting Wikipedia on this to claim that they're right, I'm quoting that article to show the disease of language that political partisanship has infested us with, and by "political" I do mean the progressive sexual elements as well.

I would classify that article as cow dung, save that dung is a useful thing. But the attitude on display is the one I want to emphasise, because it's very clearly biased but biased in the way that is acceptable to liberals, not just lefties and tankies. Racists are far-right, homophobes are far-right, and homophobia means not being enthusiastic about everything you are told to be enthusiastic about. If you're not waving the new flags, being an ally, and cheering on the idea of ten year old trans models, then you're a homophobe/transphobe. And that means you're alt-right. And that means you're a Nazi. Even the liberals and lefties who ten years ago would have been unremarkable for going "yeah, I dunno about putting a guy with a working dick in a women's prison" are, by this metric, Nazis because how dare you refuse to acknowledge that this is a real, beautiful, vulnerable, sensitive woman? Who just happens to have very much practically demonstrated functional male biology.

I am a Nazi for not weeping at the horrible injustice done to this poor meth dealer whose hopes and dreams of being a Real Girl were ruthlessly crushed by the brutal incarceral system:

When Lusk detailed some of the instances of abuse she has dealt with, she started to cry. She took a long pause and quickly wiped the tears from her face.

"That's why I want to move to Shakopee. I don't think the women are going to be as aggressive and horrible to me," she said.

Well, that's nice, but what about the women inmates? This person is big as a guy, built like a guy, and apparently still has their guy parts. I don't know if they're on hormones or not. How much of a threat will they be to the cis women there? This is not to say that they should be subject to abuse while in prison, but unless every woman in Shakopee is as big and strong as this person, we're talking about a genuine element of risk that they'll be violent or abusive. It honestly might be a solution to start building units for transgender (male-to-female and female-to-male) prisoners to be segregated from cis offenders; if we can do this for low-security offenders, maybe we can do it for the trans.

Racists are far-right, homophobes are far-right, and homophobia means not being enthusiastic about everything you are told to be enthusiastic about.

I'm sorry, where do you read this in the wikipedia article? Especially the part in bold?

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