Category Archives: Fascism

Stinkin’ “Facts”

03 Saturday Dec 2016

Posted by in Authoritarians, Donald Trump, Fascism, Logic, Relativism

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So, this just happened. The self-promoting and galactically stupid Scottie Nell Hughes, neo-fascist Trump-booster extraordinaire, sincerely declared that “There are no such things as facts.” Looking at the full discussion – in addition to Hughes well-demonstrated inability to engage in any activity which might be mistaken for showing minimal signs of intelligence – it is clear that Hughes was genuinely characterizing her own viewpoint. How absolutely precious.

facts

It is ironic – given how new-wave fascists lack the miniscule intelligence needed to appreciate irony – that they have for so many years decried liberals for their supposed “relativism.” It is clear enough, once you think about it, that these sorts of extremists have no clue what the word “relativism” might mean. But one way to break down the differences between conservative and liberal approaches to the world might be this: the conservative believes that there are fixed rules that one simply obeys, while the liberal believes that the world is a dynamic process which must be inquired into. Because liberals do not believe in such fixed rules, conservatives accuse them of believing in relativism. However, because conservatives do not believe in inquiry, they are the ones who actually practice relativism. Continue reading →

Red Flags and Dog Whistles

02 Friday Dec 2016

Posted by in Authoritarians, Critical Thinking, Donald Trump, Fascism

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Let us not cower from confrontation: The flag is a rag.

Notice that I say “confrontation,” rather than “controversy.” There is no real controversy in my phrase above. The flag as an object (obviously by “THE” flag, I mean the American flag) is nothing but a wad of cloth; it is simply a rag. Granted it is a very colorful rag – all those primary reds, whites, and blues – but a rag none the less. Notice how people will denounce the above phrase – to say nothing of the burning of such a rag – yet be happy enough to wear the flag as a t-shirt, or print it on napkins to wipe their mouths with it, calling themselves “patriots” for doing so.constitution-of-united-states

The Butthurt-baby Electi has recently declared that he would deny citizenship, and/or impose jail time, for anyone who burned the rag (presumably in an inappropriate manner, since proper flag protocol demands that an old and worn flag actually be burned.) This, of course, is the method of fascists – to abandon legal, logical, &/or principled constraints, in favor of mythological and emotional symbols, waved about enthusiastically as justification for the hysteria of the mob. In this context, I invite you to reflect on the leading picture of this post as we move forward. That picture is of my personal copy of the Constitution of the United States, which I keep with me, pretty much at all times. Continue reading →

Dis

29 Tuesday Nov 2016

Posted by in Critical Thinking, Donald Trump, Fascism, Hillary Clinton, Politics

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And my dark conductor broke
Silence at my side and spoke,
Saying, “You conjecture well:
Yonder is the gate of hell.”
– A.E. Housman, “Hellgate”

white_house_dcIt is discouraging, but unsurprising, to read how many people are telling us that, while the ascendancy of the narcissistic sociopath Donald Trump to the White House is a disappointment, we shouldn’t overstate how bad things will get. This is, of course, simply another demonstration of Herstein’s First Law, “never underestimate human capacity for denial.” Trump’s overt fascism is transparent, as is his racism, bigotry, greed, criminality, not to mention the emotional stability a spoiled three year old. But we won’t speak of such things, because we are too busy with the process of “normalizing” the inexcusable, and pretending that unsupported allegations, innuendos, and wild-eyed conspiracy theories against Clinton count more than the irrefutable facts that absolutely damn Trump. It is just another election, a bit disappointing for those of us who are not White Supremacists, neo-Nazis, or otherwise completely devoid of the possibilities of either intelligence or decency, but nothing to really worry about … Continue reading →

Hillary Derangement Syndrome

03 Thursday Nov 2016

Posted by in Critical Thinking, Endorsing Trump, Fascism, Green Party, Hillary Clinton, Jill Stein, Logic

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DEFINITION: “Hillary Derangement Syndrome” (“HDS”)

The willingness to accept – without a first, much less a second thought – anything read or stated about Hillary Clinton, on no other grounds than that the thing read or stated is negative.

I’d rather hoped to avoid writing another political blog post for a while, but closing in on the election it is clear that the general insanity that has come to define (to the extent that it hasn’t strangled it in the streets) our community of discourse that is American politics, I find myself having to say one last word before the votes are all cast and counted.

Severalls Lunatic Asylum

Interior of Severalls Insane Asylum, something to look forward to in Trump’s America

 

One of the more despicable points of intractable dogma amongst so many “cry baby” progressives is that, “If we can’t get everything we want, exactly the way we want it, the instant we want it, then making things worse is actually making things better!” Now, few if any of such progressives (who are not all, or even a majority of progressives, by any means) will actually admit to embracing such a position, since doing so would require a level of intellectual honesty which they have rejected wholesale. Nevertheless, it is there, and it manifests itself as raving HDS that is often times even more singularly unhinged than what one finds on the right-wing of the political spectrum.

Continue reading →

Arrow’s Paradox of Voting

26 Tuesday Jul 2016

Posted by in Critical Thinking, Fascism, Logic, Politics

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Kenneth Arrow is a well known economist, logician, statistician, and political theorist. While his scholarly contributions are numerous, his best known was his first, published as a part of his dissertation. This is the above titled “paradox of voting,” which is also referred to has his “impossibility theorem.” This latter is evidently the technically correct title. However, I learned about it as the paradox of voting, and that’s the title I’ll stick with here. For one thing, calling it his “paradox of voting” makes it more clear at the outset what the theorem is about, and suggests what is really at stake. Details of the impossibility theorem are readily found for no more effort than looking, so my intention here is to provide a non-technical gloss of the topic. Still, enough of what I say here is about basic logic (and not merely political screed) that I am satisfied that this topic falls within my basic parameters for this blog.

Kenneth Arrow

Kenneth Arrow

The stakes here could scarcely be any higher, as they effect the very foundation of our nominally democratic system. Because of how our voting and electoral system is set up, we have a “winner take all” format that can (and often enough, does) allow a person to be elected even thought that person did not receive a majority of the votes. Once you have more than two candidates (or more than two parties) involved in any particular election, it is no longer possible to representatively distribute preferences in the election. This is the somewhat fancy way of saying things. The simpler way of saying it is that the more widely detested candidate can win. Continue reading →

American Fascist: The Reality Show

23 Monday May 2016

Posted by in Fascism, Politics, Trump

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So, Herr Drumpf is the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, and the concern about fascism coming to America has itself taken on yet another layer of poignancy. Concerns are being raised by individuals as diverse as neo-con and Iraq war cheerleader Robert Kagan, and leading expert on the structural characteristics of fascist movements, Robert O. Paxton. It is Paxton’s work on the subject that most interests me here. While this post can be viewed as a follow up to my earlier one (hence the recycled picture), this post can also be viewed as the first of a two part series on aspects of those structural characteristic Paxton so carefully analyzed, and how they are visibly playing themselves out this election cycle. My argument here will be a fairly informal one – I’ll not be providing detailed endnotes or extensive quotations (although, such quotes as do appear will have their location in the Kindle text provided). This is because the details I’ll be offering from Paxton’s work are entirely uncontroversial readings of his arguments. Besides which, Paxton’s book is readily available, eminently readable, and an essential book for any citizen caught up in contemporary events.Fascists

My concern here is to remind folks not only of some of the essential characteristics that go into making a fascist movement – and fascism is always a movement, a populist one at that, and not a party or a collection of policies – and consider some of the ways the Trump phenomenon differs from other post WWII forms of conservative extremism, ways that actually push it closer to fascism. The movements I’ll be describing will be European ones, and most of what I’ll have to say about these European forms of conservative extremism will be based on chapter 7 of The Anatomy of Fascism. First, however, it will be useful to remind ourselves about the nature of fascism itself. Continue reading →

Fear Sum

22 Friday Jan 2016

Posted by in Altemeyer, Authoritarians, Critical Thinking, Fascism

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Persons whose mode of interacting with the world is significantly determined by fear are not in a position to think clearly or thoroughly. This is not some new-age fatuousness or Star Wars homily, simply an obvious fact. And note that the language used here is fairly deliberate: I’m not talking about persons who are afraid all the time – a truly dreadful, and genuinely pathological condition to even imagine! I mean persons whose conceptual, perceptual, and affective approaches to how they frame and engage with reality have a substantive, more-or-less constant, fear-driven component. Even as this component is not the single greatest part of the entire puzzle (indeed, such persons will often enough hardly even realize that it is there) the fact that it is there, even though it whispers more than shouts, its endemic presence gives it disproportionate influence over the affected people’s lives. It turns out that such persons are overwhelmingly conservative in their political and social outlooks.Terrified scream

People who have this substantial (albeit subtle) inclination toward a fear-driven account of, and interaction with, the world are not particularly less intelligent than other people. Endless sniping to the contrary notwithstanding, neither liberals nor conservatives are less intelligent or less educated than the other. Many famous conservatives have advanced degrees: Newt Gingrich has a Ph.D. In European history, and Ben Carson is, by all accounts (not just his own) an extraordinary neurosurgeon. (Although, in Carson’s case, it may be legitimate to wonder about his genuine intelligence, as opposed to clever puzzle solving abilities..) But one of the aspects of Authoritarian thinking – which is often, if not mostly conservative in nature – is its ruthless compartmentalization. One can be very intelligent and very well educated, but within the fear-driven parameters of the Authoritarian mindset, that intelligence and that education will not be permitted to range freely across the full spectrum of inquiry for very long, if at all. This compartmentalization allows ideas to exist independently of rational critique, and they can take on an emotional tinge – such as fear – which is not objectively merited. Continue reading →

It Isn’t a Fallacy If It’s True

15 Tuesday Dec 2015

Posted by in Authoritarians, Critical Thinking, Donald Trump, Fascism, Logic

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Actually, it isn’t a fallacy if it is true and relevant, but that makes for a rhetorically clumsy title. The fallacy I want to talk about here is the argumentum ad nazium (sometimes called ad hitlerium.) This is the “fallacy” of dismissing some person or group as being Fascists or Nazis. We’ve certainly seen a great deal of this in recent years, with President Obama repeatedly denounced in the right-wing media as a Fascist communist Muslim Kenyan/Indonesian (with a time machine to fake his Hawaiian birth certificate.) These accusations are just part of the flood of infantile twaddle that organizations like Fox “News” butter their bread with. But what if someone in the public sphere – for example, running for national office – really is a Fascist?Fascists

There are many memes flowing through social media comparing Donald Trump to Hitler. I disagree with these comparisons somewhat, and a glance at the attached picture will indicate the nature of that disagreement (the specifics of THAT disagreement will not be explored here.) I will argue that it is both true and relevant to characterize Trump as a Fascist. However, before proceeding with that particular claim, I will spend most of my time talking about Fascism itself. This concept gets thrown about with promiscuous abandon, and the general disregard for what it really means is a disturbing sloppiness for which I have no sympathy. Continue reading →