Scholar

But this is precisely the problem. Think about what is happening here. You said it yourself, Trump does fascists things and then people dismiss it. Genuinely ask yourself, trying to reflect on how other human beings operate: Do you believe that labelling what Trump is doing "fascism" and being adamant about it will change whatever the problem here is? I just don't see how this is a rational response. If people see what Trump is doing and dismiss it, there is something far deeper wrong here that needs remedy that will not be resolved through point to the thing and labelling it fascism. If anything, this will likely cause more resistance in them. I think there is a natural cognitive resistance here because, I think if we are honest, we realize this situation is more scary than it appears to be. The fact that people are this ignorant is profoundly concerning, and the idea that the fascist discussion will do anything to truly help the situation is almost delusional in light of the significance of the problem we are facing. This is a far deeper and more serious issue than the proposed solution is presuming. Calling it what it is does nothing Emerald. This is what has to be realized. Just look at the reaction in here. This is pure desperation in the face of an existential threath. It's like trying to shoot rockets at a planet sized object that is hurling towards the earth. It makes you feel saver, but it's unlikely to do anything to impact the issue at hand.

I don't understand what this means "handle people with kid gloves". This is a serious matter Emerald, it's not a game. In such circumstances we need to have the maturity to do what we believe to be effective, not what makes us feel good. Telling the truth isn't some sort of virtue that at all points must take precedent. But we seem to have empirical disagreements. I believe using terms like fascisms actively makes it less likely that individuals alarms are raised. I think it does the opposite of preventing people from getting sucked into fascism because they begin misidentifying the cause of fascism. The term fascism isn't even really accurate. What we are describing here is something far more fundamental to the human condition, something that was present in communists, fascists, feudalists and even capitalists. Fascism was just one expression of this aspect, and precisely because todays form looks different from historical fascism, it will make people dismiss your critique. They lack the understand to recognize what you are truly referencing. You can't do all of this in an informational environment in which fascists are considered the worst thing that exists. That's just how people perceive fascists. So, before using this lable could ever be effective, you would have to change how people understand fascism in the first place.

Half your country supports Donald Trump, the magnitude of the problem goes beyond just galvanizing your side to vote. But I doubt that using words like fascism is effectie to convince inactive moderates to act against what is happening. The term fascism has sadly been overused by the left in the past decade, like the word racist. Nobody takes it seriously anymore, it simply has no weight to it, people will dismiss you if you apply it even if you are accurate. If the facts of what Donald Trump is doing is not sufficient to get people on your side, calling it fascism will not change that fact.

You are misunderstanding. When I mean "enemy", I mean in particular identifying fascism as a problem and focusing on it as a problem. It's not the problem, it's the symptom. You can advocate calling fascism fascism, but that does literally nothing. It alienates everyone from themselves, from recognizing their own evil, because we have created in culture in which only evil people are nazis. But nobody considers themselves evil, so using fascism as a label literally veils their evil, renders it invisible. If we lived in a society in which everyone recognize the humanity of Adolf Hiter, then calling out fascisms might be effective. But in this world, I don't think it does anything other than further blindness and ignorance. If you were to not muddy the waters, you would be calling every democracy on this planet fascistic, given what every society on this planet does to animals. It dominates entire subgroups of individuals, exterminates them, enslaves them, for the same underlying reasons the fascists did the same to those they considered subhuman, or the communists to those they considered class-traitors. Focusing on fascism is a red herring.

It is muddying the water, because people externalize fascism. Calling it out will do nothing other than give the fascists what they need, which is conflict. You are treating symptom rather than causes. And in this particular case, treating the symptoms worsens the causes. I don't understand why anyone believes that calling out fascism will do anything. If this is the propose solution, then you are lost. In that case, the only way forward is through the darkness.

Making fascism your enemy gives fascism precisely what it needs to fester and grow: Resistance, conflict. Fascism never was your enemy, humanity was. You were too late to recognize it, and now it might be too late to stop it. Most likely, your actions now will serve to accelerate the process rather than prevent it. That is the sad reality.

Americans simply are so ignorant and arrogant, there is no other way to remedy it than through experiencing suffering. You have been maggots swimming in bacon for too long. This is pessimistic, but I truly do not see any other way. The ignorance is not going to just go away by itself. There is a humility that comes from experiencing the horrors of human nature. If you have had no contact with that horror, it is hard to motivate yourself to put in the effort to prevent it.

You are muddying the waters, as I described above. You keep making it about fascism, when it is about humanity.

I wish you could know how misguided this is.

The issue is that people have not learned from the lessons of World War 2. I think the fascist/nazi label as it is employed by americans reveals that they have no understanding of what fascism is or how it emerged. It has been assumed that fascists are these abnormal individuals who radical ideologies who will infect the public with their ideology and radicalize them. It's "them", the "fascists", they are "out there". This externalized view of what fascism is makes it impossible to actually prevent fascism. The key lesson that we were supposed to learn from the holocaust is that, it's not "fascists" who are going to bring the hatred that will be the prerequisite of new authoritarian systems. This label fundamentally veils what fascists are: Normal human beings. This was the lesson, that perfectly normal human beings, perfectly upstanding and otherwise moral individuals, could end up supporting a system that would genocide entire subgroups of humans. By externalizing and conceptualizing this threat to "the rise of fascists", fascism was in fact enabled, impossible to prevent. Why? Because to prevent fascism, you must prevent aspects that exists in all of us from taking hold. It's not about ideology, it's not about "fascists", it's about the average person. When you say "They are fascists", what you in essence have done is give fascism an invisibility cloak. Nobody considers themselves a fascist, and therefore whatever aspect that will give rise to fascism, they will simply reject as being what will allow fascism to take hold. Because they are not fascists, they are just normal humans. When you label the problem "fascism", you make it seem like it requires something special to enable fascism. It requires an ideology, specific political or moral attitudes. In germany, children have always been taught that it was normal human beings, just like them, who caused the holocaust. It wasn't "THE FASCISTS", or "THE IDEOLOGY", it was just normal human beings, with normal human tendencies, who inevitably treaded down the road of darkness. Why is this so essential to understand? Because it makes clear that what enables "fascism" is something that exists within everyone on of us, always. The nazis were not special, they were not evil, they were good people convinced they were doing the right thing. The mental model of fascism as an infectious ideological disease does the precise opposite of preventing it. By framing fascists as evil, no good person will ever consider themselves a fascist. And everyone considers themselves to be good. This is precisely what ENABLES fascism to take hold. Good people who believe that only bad people can lead us down a path of fascism. That fascism is a sickness of the mind, not a part of the average human condition. The model as it is employed right now fuels fascism, it amplifies it. Because you are doing precisely what is required for fascism to be enabled: Making the average person blind to which of their perfectly normal human tendencies will cause the rise of the next path towards darkness. You actively make people blind, making them believe that fascism is external, an exceptional state of human depravity. But it's not, "fascism" is the norm, not the exception. If you doubt that, you merely have to look at what human beings do to animals.

You have to recognize that comparing extreme fringe intellectuals and the most radical elements of the non-liberal left (that liberals do reject anyways), to the mainstream of the right is simply silly. Yes, the fringes on both sides are insane. If you want to compare the radical lefties, compare them to the radical righties, which are literal nazis and ethno-nationalists. That's not the problem, crazy people exist on both sides. The issue is that the rights mainstream is absolutely insane. They are violent, engage in full blown authoritarianism and are calling for civil war, when right wing violence far exceeds left wing violence. You simply can't compare the two, this is 95% a right wing problem.

I am referring to your claim about people who were "working in our school systems". Yes, tankies and communists are radical and support violence. You can find the same on the alt right. But we aren't talking about the most extreme actors on either side, we are talking about the majority of the voters of the given party and their representatives. It's not just the extreme alt right that is violent and radical for the republicans, it's the president of the united states, congressmen and women, judges, maintstream media outlets who are absolutely bonkers pro violence.

Name a few of those individuals.

It's not really a good quote because it demonstrates he misses fundamentally why violence occurs. He and his ilk are framing non-christian leftists as satanic and evil. He in fact is in favor of children viewing public executions. He specifically considers empathy as weakness. You can talk about supposed non violence all day, but if someone believes what someone else does is not only evil but stems from some sort of satanic evil, then this will justify violence against them in the eyes of especially more radicalized and unstable people. Charlie Kirk was a staunch supporter of the most violent president, with the most violent rhetoric in recent US history. Him paying lip service to principles of civility because at the time it specifically served him to do so does not mean the guy was anti-violence. It's like saying Trump was anti-violence because he once uttered the words "Violence is bad.". You can talk about non-violence, but if you truly frame anyone who supports Israel a zionist, and then a zionist someone who supports an ongoing genocide, you will obviously get people who will want to commit violence against such people. Because we celebrate violence as a culture, we celebrate killing nazis, and you in the US especially celebrate things like executions of criminals. This is all part of a culture which you cannot just negate by saying you are pro-civility. If you want to prevent the kind of political violence that is occuring today, it would require a fundamental change in the culture and the way social media platforms operate.

It's probably artifacting from the quick motion.

Nobody is innocent. We live in a society in which there is a subgroup of individuals which is treated as objects, raped, murdered and enslaved by the billions. Even the most progressive individuals not only support but participate directly in that objectification through consuming the tortured corpses of those individuals. Basically nobody is protesting it, everyone is making excuses for it while only giving importance to moral issues that relate to their own ingroup (humans). You should be very careful with your condemnations. There are individuals who, rightfully, view you and every one of your progressive friends as genocidal supremacist barbarians who justify, participate, downplay and do nothing about the greatest moral atrocity in the history of the planet. To the animals, all of you are nazis, genocidal murderers, propagandists, pedophiles (animals are child like beings who are sexually exploited by the billions every year) slave-owners, cannibalists. If you are going to play the moral crusade olympics, I can guarantee that you will not find yourself on top of it. If violence against the likes of Kirk is justified, it is justified against you and 99% of progressives, even those who pay lip service to this issue, and especially those that talk all day about human genocides while turning a blind eye to the the animal holocaust. Ignorance and selfishness exists in all of us, to a far greater degree than you can imagine. Your ignorance of that fact renders you no different from the likes of Kirk. A sense of false moral superiority fueled by irrational moral outrage rather than an effort to improve the world and bring light where darkness has previously been. You are morally depraved, it's part of the human condition. The more you deny it and frame yourself as superior to others, the more evil you are.

Psychedelics can make you more neurotic and less mindful even if they might permanently shift your consciousness towards less egoic engagement. Mindfulness practices remain essential even after exhaustive psychedelic breakthroughs and integration, if one wants to avoid egoic traps and self-deception.

It doesn't matter, people's identities are hijacked. Even the most rational and conscious of us struggle to not be swept away by it. Once fundamental social constructs get eroded, those that relate to civility especially, it might not be possible to regain them in this environment. https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/11/16761016/former-facebook-exec-ripping-apart-society They have been warning us for more than a decade that this would happen, they know exactly why it is happening. Back then it wasn't even half as bad as it is now. And beyond this, you have bad faith state actors that maliciously stoke the flames. It's been only a decade of this, really. Now you have entire generations raised on it, we have simply no idea what this will do to people. You see politics everywhere now. Casual podcasters, gaming channels, everyone is driven to the lowest consciousness drivel there is.

This assumes that there is some sort of agency humans as a collective have in relation to what is going to transpire over the next years and decades. But the reality is that social media is unprecedented. There was no amount of human agency that could have prevented the chaos and totalitarian ideologies that arose due to new information technologies like the printing press or radio. You can't just fix this by telling people to act well. Identities are deliberately hijacked on a scale never seen in history before, driven god knows into what sort of insanity. We have simply no idea what will happen as a result of this. In hindsight, it will seem obvious that it could not possibly have ended any other way. It's MK-Ultra applied to every person who can afford a phone.

Well it's not really related to politics, but it seems like you are using a band-aid solution to overcome a deeper issue that needs resolving. Nothing wrong with that as long as it doesn't come with more negatives than positives, but it is a crutch that you should eventually be able to set aside through resolving the trauma.

The more you judge others, the more ignorant you are of your own selfishness and evil. That's it. That's all you need to know. If you knew the depth of your own evil and selfishness, you would realize that the difference between you and Adolf Hitler is an illusion. You are fundamentally the same, all that changes is the shape of your selfishness and ignorance. The more you will judge others, the more evil you will become. This is universal. There is no escaping it. Judgement requires ignorance of your own selfishness, which is what evil is. In fact, judgement is nothing other than the ignorance of your own selfishness, it is evil itself. Your ignorance and selfishness is not that far apart from the likes of Netenyahu, Putin or Trump. It only appears to you that way because you make a big deal out of marginal differences in selfishness such that you can proclaim yourself as "good" as opposed to "evil", which is what allows you to continue to be ignorant of your own evil and therefore to continue being evil. That's exactly how all of the above function as well.

This is how modern politics works because of ease of information distribution: Individuals have values, politicians appeal to those values to get elected. The solutions politicians propose are supposed to get them elected, so the solutions attempt to fit the values of the particular electorate. But it's worse today because now you can appeal to people's values through advocating for problems that people will care about if they think it is a real problem. Trans-scare is an easy example. Virtually nobody is ever in contact with any trans person or negative effects of transitioning, yet people deeply care about it because conservatives know they can get people to care about and know they will care enough about it for them to elect them instead of progressives. So the politicians job today is not just to tell the electorate what they want to hear, it is also to tell the electorate what they should care about. And that's how lobbying works most prevalently. Corporations don't have to buy politicians, they just have to convince the public that they should care about whatever is in their interest. The oil industry did this successfully through convincing the public that the regulations against the oil industry was to take peoples freedoms away. It's just that today you don't just have corporate and political interests influencing what individuals should care about, but you also have individual actors, thanks to the ease of information distribution and monetization, who get people to care about simply because if they care about it they will listen to them more and generate profits that way. Educated voters have always been rare, the issue today is that you can easily politically activate people who should never have engage in politics simply because they are too uneducated to even know what they want themselves, so they are just swept away by various propaganda forces.

That's not true, mariupol alone might have more civilian causalities than the entire gaza conflict. The total civilian death count might be around 40.000 - 100.000 civilians. The confirmed death numbers you see do not include the regions that had the highest death tolls, namely cities that are occupied by Russia as we speak. There is also several asymmetries between the I/P conflict and U/R conflict. Most military conflicts in Ukraine occur in open fields or mostly abandoned city, while the I/P conflict has Hamas employing strategies (officially, by their own account) that maximize civilian deaths on their side. Hamas specifically does not allow civilians to use bomb shelters and have their military infrastructure integrated into civilian infrastructure. Hamas controls civilian movements and often times forced civilians to remain in conflict zones to maximize civilian death or to gain a military advantage. Given the population density, the combatant to civilian death ratio is better than in most other comparable conflicts in the region, including military campaigns by US and various western countries in which insurgents did not attempt to maximize civilian deaths on their side. If you compare them to actors of the region like Saudi Arabia or Syria, the civilian to combatant death ratio is significantly better. While Israel is engaging in war crimes and possibly ethnic cleansing campaigns, it is delusional to claim they are engaging in an attempt to eradicate the palestinian people.

Israel is not intentionally targetting civilians, whereas Russia actually is. Look up "Human Safari", russian drone operators have orders to literally hunt civilians in cities with drones. They themselves prouldy upload the footage on their social media and people cheer it on. Russia literally has been talking about exterminating Ukrainians and ukrainian identity for years now, it's all over Russian media. People regularily call for literal genocide and eradication.

By the way for those who say "Russia didn't want a NATO country bordering them, they need a buffer zone!". There already are NATO countries bordering Russia, there have been for a long time, and they are much closer to the Moscovites than Ukraine.