Posted by
glen ropella on
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/11-American-Nations-tp7584250p7584822.html
On 01/15/2014 04:34 PM, Steve Smith wrote:
> Methinks I am Vizzini to your Inigo?
Heh, if only I had the patience or persistence of Inigo. "I am not
left-handed!"
> All that too, but the element that I key on for referring to something
> as Fascistic is when the *controlling element* operates from a sense of
> tautological entitlement to exist, to control, and often to grow in
> extent and control. I am in charge *because* I am right, I am right
> because I am in charge. Next! (scenes from Gilliam's Brazil?)
Excellent! This adds an aspect I hadn't thought much about and
dovetails nicely into the thread about rationality. A tautology is the
ultimate in irrationality, as far as I'm concerned, whereas conjunction
elimination is the epitome of rationality. Hence, your concept of
fascism turns on what I would consider irrationality. That may well
flesh out the rest of the aspects of fascism as identified by Orwell and
Eco. For example, fetishizing the military appeals to an authoritarian,
machine-like lack of decision making ability ... at least at the leaves
if not the trunk.
Perhaps this could lead us to a measure of fascism? We can define a
scale from purely automatic <-> constrained decision-making <->
randomness. The dictator can be random (or purely determined by occult
mechanisms). Her inner circle retains decision-making ability, but is
heavily constrained. Etc. out to the soldiers/peons whose actions are
completely determined by their bosses.
> On 01/15/2014 09:17 AM, glen wrote:
>> But I don't think that's what most people mean by the word "fascist".
>> Although I can also admit that most of the people who _currently_ shout
>> "fascism" at the drop of a hat may well mean that. So, perhaps the word
>> is newly defined (evolved) and you're using the new definition?
> Said the PoMo Deconstructionist.
Hey, just because _I_ get to use words as if they have no meaning does
not mean _you_ get to do the same. You need to earn your abuse license.
> There is a uniform (volvo, grateful dead, birkenstock, etc.),
No, I call bvllsh!t on that one. There are similarities between the way
the lefties dress. But it's not a uniform. Metaphor may be rampant and
generally good. But that just means we need to watch for metaphor abuse
even more closely. ;-)
> there is a
> *small but not singular* group who act autocratically through the
> mechanism of a faux-democracy and as we know,
I doubt this one, as well. I counter with the idea that the lefties
always appreciate participation. That autocratic group might be a
stable clique, but it is not robust to penetration. To see this,
compare planting a mole in, say, the mafia versus planting a mole in
your local lefty community organizers. If I were wrong on this, I would
be banned from _every_ group I participate in... being the typical
Devil's Advocate for the righties in almost all these groups. But only
1 has actually banned me. And that happened a long time before I
fine-tuned my challenges.
> there is *always* an armed
> police force nearby, backed up by paramilitary SWAT... is regular
> "booting" of vehicles vs ticketing "physical force"?
I vacillate on this one. On the one hand, you're right. The cops tend
to defend whoever seems to be in charge, even if it's some abstract
concept of the status quo. They definitely intentionally limit the
degrees of freedom of the populace. But we can appeal to the "rule of
law" argument and suggest that they can be (or usually are in this
country) strategic in their application of force. I'm no fan of the
militarization of the cops... and most cops I meet, interpersonally, are
not "my type of people". To boot, our information-glutted society
amplifies any abusive act perpetrated by any cop. So, it's easy to
agree with you on this one. But I think it makes sense to try to be a
little more objective and compare the freedom preserving/inducing police
actions versus the freedom destroying/reducing actions.
> My point, apparently, is that even the most "well intentioned" can end
> up using the tactics that they resented in their beginnings. Or the
> lessons of negative attachment where you become your enemy or that which
> you abhor. The uniforms and fetishes have changed, the appeal to the
> "common man" has changed (from near homeless/students to now
> upper-middle class yuppie), the style of physical force has changed, but
> ...
This is a different point, I think, than asserting that a lefty-run
society can/does evolve toward fascism. This point is more about
consciousness and attention, perhaps even conscientiousness and empathy.
But it's not solely about negative attachment. It's also about
intention and unintended consequences, idealization, utopia,
over-simplification.
I will claim that this cognitive bias has much less to do with fascism
than with abstraction. Some of us are willing to abstract away the
detail until we're all happy and comfy with our own closed rhetoric
(called "sniffing your own farts" in the business world). We have
innumerable methods for avoiding that sort of thing, e.g. "eating your
own dog food", jury trials, dialectic, etc.
More importantly, I will also claim that lefties, being cognitively more
open to new experiences, are much less likely to fall into that trap.
So, even if we have some few examples of left-wing fascism, my
hypothesis is that left-wing fascism will be less frequent than
right-wing fascism. And even when it does happen, it will be a weaker
form of fascism, easier to break. (Note, however, that this might lead
us down a rat hole surrounding the meaning of "left wing fascism". What
is truly "left" and what is truly "right"?)
--
⇒⇐ glen
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