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Who Goes Nazi? (1941)

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Re: Who Goes Nazi? (1941)

#61

Post by fennecfoxen »

lumberjack wrote: post #19

I think to better understand why people are attracted to Fascism it is better to read about the rise of Mussolini than about the rise of Nazism. Mussolini essentially was going to make Italy "great again". He was a former socialist but not an internationalist. While communists promised economic justice, fascists promised a better prouder more powerful nation. Today you expect wealthy people to be economically liberal…

> Today you expect wealthy people to be economically liberal but in those days many were attracted by the premises of fascism.

Oh, fascism can be great for the wealthy. Your company becomes an instrument of the state, turning your economic power into political power, and you don't need to worry about nonsense like Competition anymore.

Re: Who Goes Nazi? (1941)

#62

Post by batz »

pyre wrote: post #55
batz wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, I make an effort to be sufficiently even handed that only a committed partisan could take offense.

Reading what you wrote, and this comment seems to translate as: > I make an effort to insult everyone therefore if anyone is insulted they must be a zealot. It's certainly not possible for reasonable people to take offence to an insult so long as I also insult the "other side" of the debate. I'm not entirely sure that the "social math" you're attempting to use here actually works in real life. But to digress further,…

Inflammatory, by that do you mean, problematic, citizen?

It's not my social math, it's from the book I mentioned in the original post. There is a political calculus to power, and there are some good game theory models of it. It would be hard to deny that academia has seen a sea change in political thinking in the last 20 years (unless we've always been at war with eurasia), just as against all reason and sense, Trump has managed to become a contender. Stuff changes. There are models to describe some of it. Sorry if I tipped a sacred cow. I thought this was hacker news not reddit.

Re: Who Goes Nazi? (1941)

#63

Post by marbletiles »

danjayh wrote: post #49
mc32 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More people than just the right believe things to be a zero-sum game, else you would not see the kinds of things expressed in the Github diversity slide-show you saw in this article [1]. This is the main slide [2]. And, one could argue it is, for every man hired, that's potentially one fewer woman hired and for every one white woman hired that's one fewer minority woman or man hired, if you look at things from an ind…

I just cannot believe what's on some of those slides. Here are some snippets -- imagine if you were to swap the races around, and replace every 'white' with 'people of color', every 'asian' with 'white', and every 'people of color' with 'asian'. If you do these mental gymnastics, some of these slides will seem incredibly offensive -- so how is it that they're acceptable at all , regardless of what the races are. Here…

Because they describe asymmetric power relationships, so you can't meaningfully flip them.

"Workers can sack employers at will, and that causes employers financial hardship, so we need employer protection laws" is a less-charged example of why it doesn't work just to straight flip such types of statement.

Re: Who Goes Nazi? (1941)

#64

Post by GunboatDiplomat »

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #35
pinewurst wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mr C? "He is the product of a democracy hypocritically preaching social equality and practicing a carelessly brutal snobbery. He is a sensitive, gifted man who has been humiliated into nihilism." I didn't read him as psychopath so much as someone nursing serious grudges about his perceived exclusion from the top rank of society. Enough that he'd delight in "setting things right" even Nazi style. That was, for me, the…

I meant Mr D: "He spends his time at the game of seeing what he can get away with. He is constantly arrested for speeding and his mother pays the fines. He has been ruthless toward two wives and his mother pays the alimony. His life is spent in sensation-seeking and theatricality. He is utterly inconsiderate of everybody. He is very good-looking, in a vacuous, cavalier way, and inordinately vain. He would certainly f…

Sounds like he may have affluenza.

Re: Who Goes Nazi? (1941)

#65

Post by golergka »

Riod wrote: post #10
batz wrote: post #5

The essence of any totalitarian strategy is to seize some resources, invent a necessarily preposterous myth, then in exchange for demonstrating belief in the myth, re-distribute the resources arbitrarily among a minority of people who are easily replaceable and know it. The secret is to then reward people from the majority for denouncing and replacing members of the minority for not being zealous enough, so that they…

Way to shoehorn BLM and feminism (both movements seeking equal rights) into the same frame as ISIS and Trump.

This description doesn't differ whether the myth is true or not, and whether it's a good or evil myth. The methods are still the same.

Re: Who Goes Nazi? (1941)

#66

Post by rdiddly »

batz wrote: post #5

The essence of any totalitarian strategy is to seize some resources, invent a necessarily preposterous myth, then in exchange for demonstrating belief in the myth, re-distribute the resources arbitrarily among a minority of people who are easily replaceable and know it. The secret is to then reward people from the majority for denouncing and replacing members of the minority for not being zealous enough, so that they…

I appreciated the dispassionate detachment of the comment. Like others, I'm a little suspicious of your "feminism annexed academia" bit (though not in the same kneejerky way). But what I really wonder is, could you expand on "why Occupy failed?" I've never really viewed it through that lens.

Here, I'll give it a go. Certainly the unifying mythos was there - the 1%/the 99% - and by the way this isn't preposterous. But since you say "necessarily preposterous," would you say it was in fact, not preposterous enough? Too easily subjected to rational verification/quantification?

Also there were no resources of any import seized, for redistributing. Promises of future rewards seem like they were in place however.

The "prisoner's dilemma" portion, was effectively impossible without becoming an armed mob. They wanted to convert fence-sitters through sympathy, but I guess we're saying, fear is what works? Therefore instead of sympathy for the guys & gals getting pepper-sprayed, Joe Middleclass fears being pepper-sprayed himself, and the STATE is the one triggering the loss aversion. Interesting.

Re: Who Goes Nazi? (1941)

#67

Post by walshemj »

hodwik wrote: post #32

Written by Dorothy Thompson, first journalist kicked out of Nazi Germany. She also said: "No people ever recognize their dictator in advance. He never stands for election on the platform of dictatorship. He always represents himself as the instrument [of] the Incorporated National Will. ... When our dictator turns up you can depend on it that he will be one of the boys, and he will stand for everything traditionally…

er no Hitlers position was that Germany needed a dictator and the NAZIs ran on that platform.

Re: Who Goes Nazi? (1941)

#68

Post by 32bitkid »

sandworm101 wrote: post #36
hodwik wrote: post #32

Written by Dorothy Thompson, first journalist kicked out of Nazi Germany. She also said: "No people ever recognize their dictator in advance. He never stands for election on the platform of dictatorship. He always represents himself as the instrument [of] the Incorporated National Will. ... When our dictator turns up you can depend on it that he will be one of the boys, and he will stand for everything traditionally…

>> No people ever recognize their dictator in advance. He never stands for election on the platform of dictatorship. She obviously never imagined the state of American politics today. A good chunk of them now openly want a "strongman" in the high office. The degree to which they want to be bullied by those they elect boarders on socio-political masochism. So I disagree with Thompson. To say that people don't see the…

I know it's fashionable to have a defeatist view of current american politics, but I honestly don't see how the current political climate in the United States is any more dysfunctional than the American political machinations of the early 1900's that led to the election of Teddy Roosevelt, a notorious "strongman" in high office, who after being "disappointed" by his chosen successor, and then friend, Taft decided to run for a third-term in high office. And to suggest Dorothy Thompson would be ignorant of, then recent, political history seems misguided.

Re: Who Goes Nazi? (1941)

#69

Post by rustynails »

cstross wrote: post #8
batz wrote: post #5

The essence of any totalitarian strategy is to seize some resources, invent a necessarily preposterous myth, then in exchange for demonstrating belief in the myth, re-distribute the resources arbitrarily among a minority of people who are easily replaceable and know it. The secret is to then reward people from the majority for denouncing and replacing members of the minority for not being zealous enough, so that they…

how feminism annexed academia ... why Occupy failed but why BLM could grow exponentially No axes to grind here, hmm? (Hint: there's a huge difference between civil rights movements -- those demanding equal respect -- and the fulminations of the privileged who think life's a zero-sum game and anyone else making up ground means that they're losing out. Alas, you don't seem to get it.)

Feminism has never demanded equal respect. Two Si olé examples,

1. Australian right for women to vote. It took another 60 years because they didn't care about aboriginal votes. That's not equality!!! 2. An education system that went from a majority of honors students being male to 80% women earning honors in 30 years - and you call that equality? Do you argue that boys have become stupid (as is the modern myth of feminism) for such a drastic swing at almost all levels of academia.

Feminism has nothing to do with equality. The poster you responded to was totally correct. Research falling performance of boys before commenting. While you're at it, check hiring rates and incomes of younger women in the states. I hear the word pendulum swing (which means double standard hypocrite) a lot these days.

Re: Who Goes Nazi? (1941)

#70

Post by ericd »

woodruffw wrote: post #20

Very thought provoking. In spirit, it reminds me of The True Believer [1], published about a decade later. Take Nazism and replace it with any other movement of discontent (just or unjust), and you have a general critique of mass movements a la Hoffer. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_True_Believer

Interesting, thanks for the link. This part strikes me as particularly relevant to the current state of things in the US, especially for blue collar/middle class:

The "New Poor" are the most likely source of converts for mass movements/for they recall their former wealth with resentment and blame others for their current misfortune. Examples include the mass evictions of relatively prosperous tenants during the English Civil War of the 1600s or the middle- and working-classes in Germany who passionately supported Hitler in the 1930s after suffering years of economic hardship. In contrast, the "abjectly poor" on the verge of starvation make unlikely true believers as their daily struggle for existence takes pre-eminence over any other concern.[5]

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