Comment by xp84
3 days ago
Was Bill Clinton fascist when 128-bit SSL was on export controls? Can’t government be simply bad or dumb anymore without having to slap the “F” word on it?
We’re gonna apply it to so many things it’ll have lost its meaning soon.
Hello. I live in St. Paul, Minnesota. In January of this year my city was under hostile armed occupation. I volunteered for weeks packing boxes of food for people who were afraid to leave their houses because the masked secret police were ripping people off the streets with little regard for legality. Two of my neighbors were murdered by the secret police; a hundred of us sang hymns outside the local elementary school in 20 below weather. One of those murdered was my friend's coworker. The secret police agency has so far successfully opposed any attempt to bring the murderers to justice, and indeed was trying to bring legal charges against the families of the murder victims.
Which 'F' word do you think is appropriate to describe all this? Or has meaning already been lost?
We were talking about LLMs. I don't see how this is on-topic.
Thank you for your service.
Fear. Fear can make people act irrationally and cloud one's understanding of the lawful actions taking place around them.
I guess anything is ok… as long as it’s ‘lawful’. No government would ever make an unjust law.
Lawful doesn’t mean right. Slavery was lawful.
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You realize that creating fear in the public, especially your political opposition (i.e. blue cities), using lawful or arguably-lawful means is absolutely a hallmark of fascism, correct?
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You may want to review the 14 points of fascism.
https://ratical.org/ratville/CAH/fasci14chars.html
It's hard to take that seriously, given how obviously it's written by someone with a specific leftist agenda. For instance: "The governments of fascist nations tend to be almost exclusively male-dominated." By this logic, I think every government is "fascist."
Also, the World Cup brings out a ton of patriotic songs and flags. Does everybody get fascist at World Cup time?
> "The people are rallied into a unifying patriotic frenzy over the need to eliminate a perceived common threat or foe"
Here's another really nice one: it cannot be falsified, as by this definition, as it takes for granted that we don't have any common threats or foes. All threats are presumed to be fake and ginned up by the fascists.
> "Disdain for Intellectuals and the Arts: Fascist nations tend to promote and tolerate open hostility to higher education, and academia. It is not uncommon for professors and other academics to be censored or even arrested."
What about if a party disdains academia because (apart from just being a scam to get students indebted) it's become an echo chamber where only leftist discourse is welcome, and professors get fired for disagreeing with that. Which side is fascist here, now I've lost track.
What I've learned from this list is basically what I was implying in my original assertion: "Fascism" = "Anything leftists don't like"
Imagine thinking a person's political philosophy could be determined or disproven by a singular datapoint lmao
Everyone who has touched currency is a capitalist, everyone who has paid taxes is a commie, everyone who has regulated a technology is a fascist
Or perhaps... one must look at the full fact pattern of a person's behavior to approximate (and always imperfectly!) their political philosophy.
Hilarious