RE: https://mastodon.social/@Green_Footballs/115998586927326681
You know, if you're a white supremacist and your goal is to deniably exterminate the untermenschen in camps by negligently letting plagues rip through them instead of gassing them, it shows a REMARKABLE lack of foresight to put an anti-vaxx nutcase in charge of your master race's public health policy, doesn't it?
These guys are evil but they're not terribly smart.
@Green_Footballs
The "not terribly smart" are usually the marks, not the con men.
Stupid evil is just as bad, but targeting them before the smart evil is not a winning tactic.
I simply can't believe the US current speedrun to be the product of mere stupidity.
So: Never underestimate your enemies.
@iwein @Green_Footballs "not terribly smart" is however a common characteristic of the gilded failsons of the ultra-rich. Inherited wealth means not having to care where the toilet paper you wipe your ass with comes from.
Apparently as of a few years ago NONE of the US billionaires aged under 30 were self-made. It's all inherited wealth now, and the competent-evil grown-ups who built those giant fortunes are dying off.
Just like the people at the orgies in Rome, these nitwits are not the architects of history. I sure would like to understand who is, and kick them in the balls.
Bear in mind that the Nazis exterminated non-whites, but also whites who were “unfit”.
Similarly, RFK doesn’t think all white people deserve to be alive.
His belief is that vaccines are responsible for keeping “unfit” individuals alive, thus degrading the human race — including the white part of it — and that superior people will survive infection. So he has no problem with measles escaping these camps and infecting white people.
@bodhipaksa @cstross @Green_Footballs ironically, as I recently learned from Caste, by Isabel Wilkerson
It was the lower caste I.e. black slaves who were the first ones showing the success of vaccination.
@bodhipaksa @cstross @Green_Footballs
I still find it amazing/horrifying that one crowd of idiots, who ideologically misunderstand biology and evolution, are able to cooperate with the other crowd of idiots, who deny evolution exists. Surely there is a way to drive a wedge between these two, to break up their evil alliance?
@cstross @8r3n7 @bodhipaksa @Green_Footballs roughly this, but not quite. When I say these people idolize Nazis, that is not hyperbole or untrue. They absolutely do. They don't care about those differences, they serve the Fuhrer.
And of the DHS "facilities" are, as a point of fact, concentration camps. In the style of the Nazis. Except they care even less about if the guards also die. Everyone not on their list is entirely disposable.
@bodhipaksa @cstross @Green_Footballs @8r3n7
Their alliance is based on white supremacy, and that's the core fundamental principle of Trumpism, so I doubt it's going away any time soon
@8r3n7 You're treating the public rationalizations as motivations.
The actual motivations are to guarantee the primate band status they think they deserve. ("I can hit who I want" and "I can fuck who I want") Absolutely everything else is a post-facto rationalization to keep you from forming a group that can object effectively.
It works to think of this as a parasitic condition on the basic cognitive tools of civilization.
@8r3n7 Humans are nigh-eusocial, and we do it with culture. "I will give up immediate direct benefit for deferred, indirect benefit" works spectacularly but it's also kinda intolerable in primate band status terms; you have to insist you don't have any.
What we're seeing is an organized mass of "but I'm special, the rules are for them, not me" combined with a complete failure of leadership by people who don't want to be thought mean, not cool, etc.
That doesn’t really jive with what I have learned about in-group vs out-group signalling, and the importance of proving one’s devotion by taking a strong stance, making sacrifices, and similar behaviours.
Unless you are distinguishing between the cynical leadership, who only “believe” things expediently and superficially, and the followers who adopt “true belief”.
It can be some hyper-zealot (possibly also cynical) who figures out that the leadership is in league with heretics, and starts a schism. I just want to consider how to speed up the schism!
@8r3n7 Ever seen or heard tell of an ex-nazi?
The fash are a post-Reformation/Counter-Reformation movement that's more or less immune to schism. (Rather like so-called mainstream Protestantism underwent relentless schisms but evangelical mammonism doesn't.)
And while they certainly do have in-group/out-group signalling, you can't believe what they tell you about their motivations.
tl;dr they believe stuff, but they don't care what you think about them.
High level, what is the most likely process of dismantling fascist power? Is there a non-violent, or minimally violent, strategy?
OK, so ideological critiques by outsiders are ineffective. I was thinking that ideological fractures might work from inside. But you are saying that has a snowball’s chance in hell. Can we still hope for raw internal power struggles? Are we waiting on the King to die, amd trigger violent struggles between princes?
Their rigid hierarchy is still objectively bad for the peons, no? They might believe they can “hit” who they want. But they can only hit down. So they will need a lot of self-restraint, or external motivation, to redirect their appetites. Where? Perpetual soldiering, raping, pillaging? And the rest of us waiting for that old story to play itself out?
(BTW, yes, I have read stories of ex-nazis, but they are certainly rare, mostly because they get so little support.)
@8r3n7 Fascists are an eliminationist philosophy; everyone who does not grant them their status is broken/defective and should die.
Non-violent resistance to eliminationist movements is not plausibly effective. About the best you can do is to apply the civil power's construction of force.
(Also; resistance is what you do when you've already lost. Don't romanticize resistance. It's a failure condition from which one strives to recover.)
When I said “non-violent” I meant “avoiding open warfare”. I am fine with rounding them all up and putting them in prison, using whatever force is necessary. given a clear definition of the laws that they have broken.
Although, as hinted, I think that the ranks of fascists are swollen by soft, even doubtful members, seeking camaraderie; they are not true believers. I don’t have empirical evidence, only anecdotes. Would like to see evidence, either way.
The structure is not as strong as it appears. It is built on lies and nonsense. There are fractures, and weak points. Destroying a (seeming) monolithic structure means applying stress to the fractures, not wasting energy on brute force attacks across the entire edifice.
@8r3n7 There's a military parable about that, generally told about a famous general demonstrating that sometimes you can squeeze a walnut open and neatly extract the edible contents; the next demonstration is that you can smash the walnut into fragments. The distinction made is that the first approach works sometimes; the second approach always works.
Ending cultural continuity of fascists is more important than doing it artistically.
What if the walnut is extremely large? What if we all live inside the walnut? I am wary of too-convenient analogies.
Expedient cynics can be found everywhere. But that may be different from what Graydon meant. I think he meant “reformed Nazis”, aka, ex-true believer. Then again, even a true believer can see which side the bread is buttered on, when the alternative is to get hanged.
@GalbinusCaeli It is in no way clear any of them had altered their convictions in any way.
They were "ex" by force majeure and political fiat, not personal change.
I thought Braun et al were better categorized as nihilists or some version of sociopaths—not invested in the Nazi rationalizations and justifications, but simply ready to take research funding from anywhere they could get it. Sorry if I’m mistaken or just splitting hairs. But one does deal with such as them differently than with the zealots. The distinction is useful to remember when looking for ways to dismantle a movement.
@bodhipaksa @cstross @Green_Footballs @8r3n7 neither group actually cares about that though so it's not a wedge issue.
As long as the evolution misunderstanders aren't using their misunderstanding to challenge the beliefs of the evolution deniers, the deniers are ok with that, and as long as the deniers have no moral qualms with what the misunderstanders really want to happen i.e. racial genocide, they're fine the other way too.
The common goal is bigotry, that's the actual belief system.
@8r3n7 @bodhipaksa @cstross @Green_Footballs The evolution deniers usually don't deny that evolution (variance and selection of heritable traits) exists. Their red line (motte in the motte-and-bailey meme) is whether the origin of humans was due to evolutionary speciation or divine intent.
An awfully narrow crack for a wedge issue, especially since the misunderstanders aren't very historically or scientifically inclined.
@8r3n7 @bodhipaksa @cstross @Green_Footballs
"ideologically misunderstand biology and evolution"
Seriously!
@cstross If you want patriarchy, you have to reverse the demographic transition.
That means killing a lot of kids, including white kids.
(It also means reversing industrialization, because a whole lot of the demographic transition is lowered fertility rates due to industrial effluent. "Warming" will do that.)
"Take away healthcare for everybody who isn't an overlord" is deliberate, conscious policy, mostly made by people incapable of thinking their kids won't be fine.
@graydon @cstross @Green_Footballs
All the evidence I've ever seen is that lower birth rates are due almost entirely to having good contraception.
Subtle poisoning from industrial effluent isn't affecting us any worse than it affected the Victorians, surrounded by unregulated factories.
Human fertility is so persistent that a small reduction in conceptions / live births per 100 conceptions doesn't reduce population growth.
It took 99.5% effective contraception to give us low birth rates.
@Kathmandu @cstross @Green_Footballs The 20th century drop, yes. The 19th century drop, the timing doesn't work out unless there was a lot of contraception available no one wrote down.
Though I will point out that contraception is way high on the "get rid of it" list from the right.
This approach seems to be traditional in USA .
How Commonly Was Smallpox Used as a Biological Weapon?
Once introduced into the Americas, smallpox spread everywhere. Is it possible to know how often that was done intentionally to kill people?
https://daily.jstor.org/how-commonly-was-smallpox-used-as-a-biological-weapon/
If they think letting disease rip through the population will "evolve" us, by selecting for good genes... well, that takes a while to happen.
Here's a walk-through of a paper on the evidence for an ancient viral pandemic in Asia. Yes, it changed the genome... slightly (42 genes with evidence of some selective mutation).
But... that pandemic apparently ran for about 20,000 years.
Charlie Stross
Christopher Neitzert
Seiðr
Szymon Sokół 🇵🇱🇪🇺🇺🇦
Steveg58
Christian Praetorius
HighlandLawyer
David S
iwein
Deborah Rose ❌👑
Bodhipaksa
LightFIAR
Wayne Werner
Poligofsky 🇨🇦 .. 🚫🤖
RootWyrm 🇺🇦
slowtiger
Prof Kemi FG
Graydon
Ken Brucker
Galbinus Caeli
Kevin Granade
Joborg
Phosphenes
Kathmandu
Gehtso
Weekend Editor