Comment by moolcool
Comment by moolcool 19 hours ago
[flagged]
Comment by moolcool 19 hours ago
[flagged]
I agree the term is vague. But what then would you have us call it? The whole, constitutional crisis, outright flouting of the rule of law, suspension of due process/disappearing of political enemies in the streets type thing that is verifiably happening right now. Are you requesting that the word fascism be banned from HN? Have you seen the videos of legal college students being shoved into unmarked vans by unmarked and masked officers of the law? What do you call that? The talk of a third term?
I'd love to say, "he's just blustering", it's what my father said but he's enacted just about every thing he said. Should he begin speaking about a third term i don't think we have the luxury to ignore that anymore. To annex our nearby "allies" who've now become a united front opposing any economic relationship. What is that called? What would you have us say?
>But what then would you have us call it?
Most people say "fascist" when at most they mean "authoritarian". But maybe the latter's not scary enough for the boogeyman you want to evoke. Sometimes they say it when they should say demagoguery (which is, in my opinion, more than alarming enough of a word in ways that I can forgive people for feeling "populist" isn't). Quite often though, people merely mean "distasteful", but since tastes vary quite a bit, this might not alarm anyone at all.
>suspension of due process/disappearing of political enemies
You mean that when they send people back to their home countries because they're no longer welcome here?
>The talk of a third term?
From a man so old and in such ill health it seems quite likely he won't survive his second term? Mostly he's just trying to get a rise out of you. I don't like bullies, but when they do the "made you flinch" thing, part of me wants to smirk. Couldn't you just this once not flinch?
>To annex our nearby "allies"
He did it in the most asshole way possible, but offering them a proportionate number of votes in our Senate is hardly the insult they make it out to be. Especially when they're all dragged along by our policy already and just have no say in it whatsoever. "We want you to join the richest and most powerful nation on Earth and the benefits are truly too long to list" shouldn't send them running away screaming in terror.
>You mean that when they send people back to their home countries because they're no longer welcome here?
> I don't like bullies, but when they do the "made you flinch" thing, part of me wants to smirk.
You like bullies, actually - you just don't like thinking you like bullies.
> You mean that when they send people back to their home countries because they're no longer welcome here?
Illegally, without due process. That's why a federal judge has been ruling against them on this. They also lied that everyone deported was part of a Venezuelan gang (or at least that they had proper grounds for thinking so, thus the importance of due process), and they lied that it was some kind of invasion.
>Illegally, without due process.
And what process, exactly, is due? Why is it due? My understanding of the term is that due process is mostly that because everyone gets the same... if some are getting different treatment, this raises due process concerns. If there was never any process designed, or if it has been abandoned. The bureaucracy can change the rules to some extent, they are not written in stone.
>That's why a federal judge has been ruling against them on this.
No one believes that, not even the left. They're happy that it's occurring of course, and they're clever enough to pretend that they've got real arguments... but in the back of their minds they know that the federal judge would rule against this no matter what, because the Trump administration is doing it. After all, for a full 2 months afterward they had people who were claiming the election was rigged and hoping that somehow that it would be invalidated. Their imaginations ran wild with ever-more-fanciful schemes. Now that's not happening, they've moved on and believe their in some sort of counter-coup.
>and they lied that it was some kind of invasion.
What's the definition of "invasion"? If an enemy were to invade with tanks and guns, they'd be wiped out. A clever enemy might just encourage its people to "migrate". To foment a sort of economic war. Or the word invasion can even have more metaphorical or casual usage. If someone says that mice have invaded their home do you complain that the word "invade" is wrong because the mice aren't wearing military uniforms and trying to accomplish some general's strategy?
No, it does not mean anything. Different people from the same side of the political spectrum define it differently, let alone different parts of the spectrum. If you don't define it before using it, it's a dog-whistle, full stop.
I've heard this dismissal a good bit often ("that's just a nothing word that means 'bad thing I don't like' ") but that's really just not true.
It has been consistently defined through the decades, especially during the 20th century. Here's one common example you can find from the 1983 American Heritage Dictionary and it sounds pretty familiar:
"A system of government that exercises a dictatorship of the extreme right, typically through the merging of state and business leadership, together with belligerent nationalism."
I kinda feel like that would work just as well with ‘right’ replaced by ‘left’.
If anything, this definition is a better argument for the parents’s point.
Dictatorship, belligerent (North Korea style) and nationalism seem much more important features than left or right.
One could do worse than using Eco's Ur-Fascism[1] as the starting point. The man had personal experience and he could write (oh how he could write.) However, I'd expect that some would dismiss him as an inveterate lefty (he wasn't), so we're back on square one.
[1] https://archive.org/details/umberto-eco-ur-fascism/umberto-e...
Dog whistle for what? Please define what it is a dog whistle for. Maybe in that context you'll find the common definition understood by people using it
The word is starting to be used by the left in the same way the right uses "woke": It's become watered down and an over-used way to simply say "anything my side doesn't like".
- Climate change is real: "woke"
- Firing people in government: "fascist"
- Compassion and fairness: "woke"
- Cruelty toward political enemies: "fascist"
- Expertise-driven and reason-driven policies: "woke"
- Stacking government positions with loyal cronies: "fascist"
- Rights for women, minorities, gay people, and so on: "woke"
- Handouts to corporations: "fascist"
They've become vague words that mean the same thing: "Politics I don't like"
In the academic community the term still has a useful meaning and is often used appropriately in those circles.
But you could substitute neoreactionary in GP and it would still be referring to real bloggers that are treated as if they're making legitimate and justifiable arguments.
It's a serious concern, I think it's good to criticize this tendency.
if what you mean by anti-democracy, is government oppression, then the left and right both use this equally.
there is only one continuum: liberty from government oppression, or lack thereof.
I hope you don't seriously consider the oligopoly of two parties and small circle of connected elites, dependent on financial backing from ultra high net worth oligarchs, corporations, special lobbying groups - a democracy. This is not democracy, it is plutocracy (the power of capital/rich)
US is not a democracy. Trump got like ~77 mln votes, which roughly compares to 23% of the population of 340 mln people. so Trump doesn't even represent the a quarter of US population.
other countries are more democratic, in a sense that winning candidate represents larger share of people living there
This is the opposite of a dog whistle it's entirely explicit. There are people being thrown into vans for speech right now. There are law firms that are negotiating to lift bills of attainder for their prior political litigation. They are _literally_ throwing people in El Salvadorean prisons without due process, including people that were in this country legally.
Every rationalist movement eventually ends up at odds with rational people.
But then, whom are you dissing? Whom is GP dissing? Because it's really unclear. On the one hand, "rational people" keep their views even as they drift apart from a wider "rationalist movement". On the other hand, it's the rationalist communities - the movement - that's much more likely to actually know something "about the foundations of economics or political science". On the grasping hand, such communities can and do get stuck missing forest for the trees.
But then on the slapping hand, approximately all criticism of rationalism (particularly LessWrong-associated) I've seen on HN and elsewhere, involves either heresay and lies, or just a legion of strawmen like "zomg Roko's basilisk" or GP's own "arguments" like:
> Nobody likes a technocrat, because a technocrat would let a kid who fell down a well die there, since the cost of rescuing them could technically save the lives of 3 others someplace else
It's hard to even address something that's just plain bullshit, so in the end, I'm still leaning towards giving rationalists the benefit of doubt. Strange as some conclusions of some people may sometimes be, they at least try to argue it with reason, and not strawmen and ideological rally cries.
EDIT: and then there's:
> They often re-hash arguments which have been had and settled like 200 years ago
Well, somebody has to. It's important for the same reason reproducibility in science is important.
I'd be wary of assuming any complex argument has been "settled like 200 years ago". When people say this, they just mean "shut up and accept the uninformed, simplistic opinion". In a sense, this is even worse than blindly following religious dogma, as with organized religions, the core dogmas are actually designed by smart people to achieve some purpose (ill-minded or not); cutting people off with "settled like 200 years ago" is just telling them to accept whatever's the cheapest, worst-quality belief currently on sale on the "marketplace of ideas".
Rationalism, and the people who believe in it and promote it, has the problem that the human mind unavoidably decides to act as the arbiter of what is rational or not. This limits your vision to only that which the mind internally 'agrees with' or not, entrenching hidden biases.
Fundamentally, it's the mind only engaging with the cognitive, and ignoring the limbic. Engaging with the limbic, with the deep, primal parts of the brain, challenges cognitively-held truths and demands you to support these truths from a broader context.
This is why rationalists are more prone to engage with fascist viewpoints, they seek more power for their held beliefs and fascism offers that in spades. You're not thinking about the history of fascist movements and how horrible they all turned out. You're thinking: How can we do it better this time?
Just like in math, the rational is a subset of the real, and you need both the rational and the irrational to make reality. Focusing exclusively on rationality is intentionally blinding yourself to messy reality.
That's an interesting take, but I can't see how you can dismiss rationality/rationalism as insufficient to process reality on the basis of "ignoring the limbic", without dismissing all of science and mathematics in the process.
I do agree there's more to human experience than just the cognitive / "system 2" view, but the important aspect of our cognitive facility - aspects that put humans on top of the global food chain - is that we can model and reason about the "limbic", and even though we can merely approximate it in the cognitive space, we've also learned how to work with approximations and uncertainty.
This is to say, if reason seems to justify viewpoints generally known, viscerally and cognitively, to be abhorrent, it typically means one's reasoning about perfectly spherical cows in a vacuum instead of actual human beings, and fails to include the "deep, primal parts of the brain" in their model. That, fortunately, is a correctable mistake.
Just like in math, if you construct a seemingly solid edifice of theorems and proofs, but forget and subsequently violate a critical assumption, all kind of wild conclusions will come out the other end.
> I can't see how you can dismiss rationality/rationalism as insufficient to process reality on the basis of "ignoring the limbic", without dismissing all of science and mathematics in the process.
Only a rationalist could make such a statement. I tell you rationalism is only a part of reality, not the whole, and you take that as a dismissal of all of the rational. I have no problems with science and maths, I just don't elevate them to the level of prime importance that rationalists do. I watched the Veritasium video on Cantor and the Axiom of Choice before I saw it on HN, and I follow Dr. Angela Collier on YouTube.
I'm an intuitionist, not a rationalist. I believe in a broad and rich informational diet, and that intuitive understanding is better than reductionist, which is the only kind of understanding rationalists seem to value.
> is that we can model and reason about the "limbic",
We can, and the academic domain that produces is generally called the humanities, and the humanities seem to be almost universally dismissed, even despised, by rationalists. So color me unimpressed when rationalists do this acceptance / dismissal dance regarding them. You don't really care about the humanities, just that we can model and reason about them. You want your rational bent to encompass the irrational, when fundamentally it cannot do that. Yes we can study the humanities. Just not with science or math or any other positivistic approach that would satisfy a rationalist.
And I fundamentally disagree with the notion that it's the cognitive that allowed us to dominate. In fact it's the cooperation between the cognitive and the limbic that produces the language that allows us to communicate with each other that gave us the advantage. Without the limbic there's no reason or room to cooperate.
All your viewpoint seeks to do is reduce the real into the rational.
> Just like in math, if you construct a seemingly solid edifice of theorems and proofs, but forget and subsequently violate a critical assumption, all kind of wild conclusions will come out the other end.
Hence Elon Musk's Nazi-esque government takeover.
Everyone likes to use fascist to smear their political opponents, yet I'm not seeing a lot of evidence that the "anti-fascists" are any different. They support mass censorship, state propaganda, political violence, forever war, discrimination, debanking, lawfare, lockdowns, and ironically even infringement of bodily autonomy through unconstitutional vaccine mandates.
I hope this "I know you are but what am I" approach to politics falls out of fashion soon. Like listening to children playing cops and robbers.
> whom are you dissing? Whom is GP dissing?
Just a nit, it's "who" in this case, not "whom," because it is a subject not an object. "Whom" is more often used as "to/with/for whom."
Thanks! English is not my first language, and I still have problem with this particular thing.
(IIRC use of "whom" was never covered in my English classes; I only learned about it from StarGate: SG-1, a show in which one of the main characters had a habit of mocking enemies by correcting their grammar.)
It always falls down because the end-goal of ones "rationalism" always has to be determined by a set of values.
If you want to form a political ideology based on rationality, your very first step will stick you right in the middle of the sticky-icky world of the humanities. 'Hello deontology, my old friend.'
Even definitions there are extremely hazy. "The most good for the most people".
Define "good". Happiness? Economic prosperity? Community? And over what time span?
Define "most". Percentage of people served? Number of people served?
Define "people". Are you counting citizens? Immigrants? Foreigners? Prisoners? People in the future?
You know the joke in the sciences about how everything distills down to mathematics? I would argue that we just as often distill down to philosophy. You have to reckon with a lot of questions which a stats degree can't help you much with.
Its almost like you’ve discovered content manufactured whose only purpose is propaganda
What's also remarkable is that these people often have incredible disdain for communities of experts who study these topics for their careers. The number of times that I've seen one of these blogs discuss a topic that they believe they have invented while ignoring the mountains of literature already produced on the topic is... concerning.
This is what no humanities education does to a motherfucker.
> fascism and fascist ideologies
This is political dog-whistling. As Orwell pointed out almost eight decades ago: "The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable’."[1] and is now obviously only a dog-whistle for fellow ideologues. This does not belong on HN.
[1] https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...