• TotallynotJessica@lemmy.world
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            10 days ago

            Disagree. Liberals are bad, but fascists are explicitly not liberals. Fascism is socialism for dummies. It requires rejecting liberalism, socialism, or anything that has common rules to mediate power. It’s a state of nature without the pretense of a social contract.

            Liberalism eventually collapses into fascism or socialism(rarely successfully), but that doesn’t make it fascism or socialism. Current China has been increasingly fascist recently, but they are still loosely bound by rules and norms that resemble liberalism at this point. Fascists like Trump use norms for brownie points while talking out of both sides of his mouth in the same breath. They are for nothing but spreading like a plague.

            • spujb@lemmy.cafeOP
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              10 days ago

              hehe i was just repeating a pithy little saying not start a debate :) fully agree with you for the record

              Liberalism eventually collapses into fascism

              my opinion is this as well. again fully agree with you i wasn’t trying to engage at all. take care :)

              • ToastedPlanet@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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                10 days ago

                Neoliberal ideology leads to fascism. The actual neoliberals themselves are not fascists. We can work with neoliberals. The problem with scratch a liberal and a fascist bleeds is that it’s a mindset that creates enemies out of people who are our allies.

                Don’t get me wrong. Neoliberals need to abandon their ideology in favor of socialism. And a populist narrative wouldn’t hurt the Democrats either. But if we blind ourselves to the difference between neoliberals and fascists, we are making things harder for ourselves.

                I think we actually agree on this, we just phrase it slightly differently.

                • TotallynotJessica@lemmy.world
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                  10 days ago

                  I’m a firm believer in providing answers to why we’re here. The buck stops with power, and the rich had all the power. Neolibs did their bidding, and thus they deserve no kindness. I’m never listening to their arguments for business again. They need to be told to shut the fuck up. They have no goodwill from the public, so we don’t need to pretend to like them.

                  They can be our allies because our interests might align, but we gain more by explaining why they failed than by letting them have respect. We need to build the left as an answer, and neolibs have no place with us.

                  • ToastedPlanet@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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                    10 days ago

                    Rather than scratch a liberal and a fascist bleeds a more useful statement would be today’s neoliberals can be tomorrow’s socialists. But to do that we have to do the work of convincing people to be socialists. Teaching people neoliberalism is a scam is the first step in that.

                • EndlessApollo@lemmy.world
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                  9 days ago

                  Neoliberals rely on fascists to exist, there is no collaborating with them. Democrats will literally always side with the far right over the even remotely left, and will always collaborate with Republicans and recognize them as a legitimate party rather than a legitimate cancer that needs to be stopped. Neolibs (libs in general really) are the left wing of fascism, and can absolutely never be relied upon to fight fascism, because they will always work with fascists against the left until fascists kill them all

            • spujb@lemmy.cafeOP
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              10 days ago

              i will lash out against everyone unapologetically funding genocide, thank you very much ❤️

              • ToastedPlanet@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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                10 days ago

                Biden wasn’t running for president. Harris wanted to end the war. Trump wanted Israel to finish the job. Accelerationist rhetoric hurt the Democratic Party’s chances of winning at the expense of your goal to help the Palestinians. Now the genocide will be allowed to continue indefinitely.

                You’re free to debilitate yourself as much as you want. Could you like, stop though. Please?

                • TotallynotJessica@lemmy.world
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                  10 days ago

                  Harris was the candidate of liberal democracy. She was the status quo, which is not what we needed to beat fascism. We now know in hindsight that we needed an open primary from the start. By the time Biden decided to step down, it was too little too late.

                  • ToastedPlanet@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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                    10 days ago

                    That’s all true. But her campaign is the tool that we had in that moment. We did it before with Biden. We could have done it again with Harris. In the months leading up to the election we’ve got to care less about the quality of our tool and more how we use it. We can push the Democrats all we want further to the left up until then.

                    But the campaign we get after the DNC convention is the campaign we have to use. Some people couldn’t put aside their moral self-image to do that. Now they’re beating a dead horse, when Trump has threatened to send those Democrats to prison. We could all be heading to death camps starting next year, and I’m hoping I can reach some people to get their heads in the game before that.

                • Sop@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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                  10 days ago

                  The amount of votes Harris lost compared to Biden 4 years ago can not be explained by accelerationism. Tbh I wish the left in the US was so big as to affect so many voters. Harris lost because she run a bad campaign. Her message did not appeal to the masses because it was centrist bullshit that would not improve anyone’s life in a meaningful way. She also alienated a huge part of her arab voterbase by clearly not giving a fuck about arab lives. Instead of condemning genocide she promised to keep supporting Israel. Trump also promised to end the war, that should tell you something about what those words mean.

                  • ToastedPlanet@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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                    10 days ago

                    We have a democracy for as long as we can keep it. There’s a good chance we just lost it. There’s no sense in giving up our agency because neoliberals are institutionalists. We knew what the Democrats were. Our options this cycle ended up being Harris or fascism. The goal was to get Harris elected to stop fascism for four more years. Instead of doing everything in their power to help get Harris elected, accelerationists did everything in their power to sink Harris’s campaign. We broke our only tool over our knee and threw it away because it wasn’t a better tool. Doing so wasn’t useful. edit: typo

                    Now people are beating a dead horse. Neoliberals are neoliberals. Fascists are fascists. Spend this energy attacking the MAGA movement.

                • spujb@lemmy.cafeOP
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                  10 days ago

                  i understand you are emotionally invested in this. but me being critical of the fact that every time she was asked why your tax dollars were going to a nation performing a HOLOCAUST she opened by saying “Israel has a right to defend itself” does not make me an accelerationist. it makes me a decent fucking person.

                  look through all 2000+ of my comments and NOWHERE will you find me advocating accelerationism or a democratic loss. you are forcing an entirely made up narrative and position onto me that i do not accept. get it through your head that decent people might want to call it out when murder is supported without question. and lastly be fucking nice.

                  • stetech@lemmy.world
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                    10 days ago

                    And now you (and us in the rest of the world) get democracy-dismantling Trump, who will continue to support Israel even more. That’s not even considering trans people, other demographics’ rights, or the climate. Good job being so virtuous in non-voting!

                    Said as someone not emotionally invested in her campaign.

                  • ToastedPlanet@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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                    10 days ago

                    I highly recommend you swap out subjective moral reasoning for utility. You’ve already convinced yourself that it is morally right that we all go to the death camps. But it’s not useful. There’s a chance we do something that’s useful between now and the death camps, but not if we care about being decent people more than we care about people.

          • TotallynotJessica@lemmy.world
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            10 days ago

            Sorry, liberals do that too! They’ve literally always done that, since like, the beginning. It’s always been a part of liberalism.

            Fascism isn’t just about being evil, but a particular type of evil. Liberalism is plenty evil in its own right. Saying that liberals are fascists gives both groups too much credit.

            Liberalism had a fucked up set of principles that were often ignored or bent, but kept at some level to allow cooperation. Fascism has no principles outside of whatever works for power. It’s why many understandings of fascism just describe common traits. Machismo and nationalism are strategies that work well, but not an inherent part of it. There have been fascists inspired by the Nazis that valued racial mixing instead of racial purity. No logic, only winning. No rules and customs, only the will to power.

          • germanatlas@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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            10 days ago

            There is no definition of fascism that is exclusively that. Let’s take a list of key features defined by Umberto Eco, who was the expert on fascism and you can decide for yourself if Harris fits that:

            • The cult of tradition
            • The rejection of modernism
            • The cult of action for action’s sake
            • Disagreement is treason
            • Fear of difference
            • Appeal to social frustration
            • The enemy is both strong and weak
            • Pacifism is trafficking with the enemy
            • Contempt for the weak
            • Everybody is educated to become a hero
            • Machismo and weaponry
            • Selective populism
            • Ur-Fascism speaks Newspeak
            • spujb@lemmy.cafeOP
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              9 days ago

              never forget that it’s hugely important to argue semantics when confronting genocide

          • Darorad@lemmy.world
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            10 days ago

            Fascism doesn’t just mean being a piece of shot, it has an actual definition.