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    • AMMDI is an open-notebook hypertext writing experiment, authored by Mike Travers aka mtraven. It's a work in progress and some parts are more polished than others. Comments welcome! More.
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from ThisMachine/agonizes about killing fascists
    • Original title is bad, inflammatory and unfair. Also an example of what Scott is pointing out. I'm sneeringly labeling him a fascist or fascist-ally or something. I don't think he is, certainly not in an obvious way anyway.
    • Need a new one
      • "Fascism" as cudgel, Fascism as reality (too long and complicated)
      • What to do about fascism (nah too generic)
    • Scott Alexander wrote a post about how there is a problem with how we talk about fascism, violence, and the bounds of moral acceptability. This is obviously a timely topic of great concern to everyone. Fascism is on the rise, violence is on the rise, and we are all obligated to figure out where we stand on the questions it raises. We (him, me, his audience) are not fighters by nature, we don't like violence and probably would like to avoid it, but the world is what it is.
    • This is not some boring hand-wringing about how violence is bad. There are cases where it is called for, almost obligatory. He's not anti-anti-fascist, because he recognizes that sometimes violence is a necessity, a practical and moral obligation when done in defense.
    • From Miller’s perspective: people absolutely use “fascist” as a synonym for “person who it is acceptable to hurt because of their politics”.
      • I absolutely agree here and am not sure why he says "from Miller's perspective", that is just the simple truth of the matter. That is indeed one of the social performative purposes of the term. The interesting thing here is not "Miller's perspective", it is that he is actually performing this, twisting the word fascist to use against anti-fascists. Everyone knows what he is doing, a bit of verbal black magic. You can see the political usage of words being molded right before your eyes.
    • His key argument is the simple logic:
      • that the following things can’t all be true:
        • Many Americans are fascists
        • Fascists are an acceptable target for political violence
        • Political violence in America is morally unacceptable (at the current time)
      • I get his point, but for an ironclad logical argument there are a lot of gaping holes in the cladding.
        • The use of "acceptable"
        • Binary rather than quantitative thinking
          • Or equivalently maybe, monocausal vs systems thinking
        • Treating violence or moral choice individualistically. Political violence is an emergent phenom and can't be reduced that way
      • After saying we should retain (1) and (3), he concludes we must retain (2) and conclude
        • 2. Fascists, although evil, aren’t automatically a legitimate target for political violence.
      • "legitimate" is the word to watch there.
      • But all of these are their own sorts of slippery slopes.
      • Ah yes. He's right about it being a slippery slope, wrong for thinking that being on that slope is something we can avoid. Not that kind of slope! That's the thing about violence, in most cases it is not a choice.
      • But would-be dictators are masters of boundary-pushing and frog-boiling; there’s almost never one moment when they say outright “Today I will be cancelling democracy for no reason, sorry”.
      • Absolute agree (although a pretty trite observation)
      • But I don’t think the answer can be “violence is permissible when you can classify someone with a loaded term so vague that people regularly use it to describe expedited restaurant permitting”.
      • Mm. I think people are capable of distinguishing the different uses of the word "fascist". But OK, the term is dangerously flabby. It's easy to use as a weapon against whatever you don't like, and there's a history of it being used in exactly that way be totalitarian regimes on the other side.
      • Few people use fascism in a purely innocent denotative way; if they did, it would serve their purposes equally well to replace it with a synonym (like “far-right nationalist authoritarian corporatist”) or even a more specific subvariety (like “Francoist”). But it wouldn’t serve Gavin Newsom’s purpose to call Stephen Miller a far-right nationalist authoritarian corporatist, because Gavin Newsom specifically cares about the negative connotation of “fascist”, rather than its meaning.
      • I was nodding in agreement with this until the very last part, where I suddenly feel a shock of disrecognition. Does he really think that "fascist" has some objective meaning distinct from its negative connotation?
      • I think it’s probably bad practice to demand that reasonable people not use the word “fascist”. It risks giving unreasonable people a heckler’s veto over every useful term - if some moron says it’s okay to kill environmentalists, we can’t ban the term “environmentalist”, and we certainly can’t let other people back us into banning the term “environmentalist” when it’s convenient for them just because they can find one violent loon...I personally won’t be using this word when I can avoid it.
      • I mostly agree with this. Well, not entirely. I too dislike the use of the word as a cudgel, and do not practice that. But as a term, it is analytically accurate and powerful and I'm not going to give that up. If I say that the Trump regime is fascist, it's not because I hate them and want to hurt them. It's because I believe that is the most salient term for it. Because the term both connotes and furthers violence when it is used, that it is part of the fight, a fight I am actually engaged in in my tiny way.
      • I think Scott is too actually. That's what his post is about, he is trying to figure something out for himself (and for his readers and community). He is not dodging the hard questions. If my answer is different from his I don't think that makes us enemies, at least I hope not.
      • He thinks the struggle is on some abstract conceptual plane where certain words are acceptable or not.
      • He doesn't believe in evil, like a good modern person. Fascists presumably run the same brain software everyone else does.
        • Sorry might just be making stuff up here, I don;t know what he thinks about evil. He says fascism is evil! what more do you want. Maybe I dont berlieve in it but am trying to make myself
    • POP I can nitpic forever but it has this curious static, moncausal aspect to it. Violence is done to fascists, or it isn't, but the violence done by fascists hardly enters into it, is barely mentioned.
    • Violence only makes sense as part of coordinated strategy. This is why protests are important – not as a way of changing the present administration’s actions, but as a way to coordinate a group.
    • What's left unsaid: violent responses to fascism only make sense when coordinated (the Decker post he cites makes this point) but that means being part of the left, can't have that.
    • The Necessity of Shame - by Kate Manne - More to Hate
      • Link to a paywalled artcile htat says "political violence is the norm, not the exception" – this a dangerous (but arguably true) position. For marginalized groups, she means. And of course Scott is the opposite of that.
      • This is
    • Moved to substack, this is scrap
      • This is not some boring hand-wringing about how violence is bad, There are cases where it is called for, almost obligatory. He’s not anti-anti-fascist, because he recognizes that sometimes violence is a necessity, a practical and moral obligation when done in defense.
      • It’s also not “won’t somebody please think of the fascists?”, although that was my first impression. He’s not that concerned for the fate of the fascists, it is more the general danger and waste and chaos and disunity that are the result of political violence. He would like to prevent that, and who wouldn’t.
      • The term both connotes and furthers violence when it is used, that it is part of the fight, a fight I am actually engaged in in my tiny way. No violence yet but it isn’t hard to see what is coming.
      • I think Scott is too actually. That’s what his post is about, he is trying to figure out something important for himself (and for his readers and community). Violence is here, we need to respond to it in some way. He is not dodging the hard questions. My own thinking
from ThisMachine/kills the fascist within
    • Was reminded by this Brook Ziporyn essay on Bob Dylan that we all contain what we hate.
from ThisMachine/What is it like to get polarized?
    • This post continues from ThisMachine/agonizes about killing fascists riffing on Scott Alexander's, but I'm not setting out to critique him or sneer or anything. Just exploring the questions he is raising from my own perspective.
    • It is definitely true that using the word "fascist" to describe someone is not mere description, it's got this politically performative quality. It denotes and also helps create a certain state of affairs. How to characterize that state?
    • Well, it certainly does include something like "it is OK to hurt this person", as Scott points out. But it also says "this person is trying to hurt me". If it creates a permission structure for violence, it isn't the first step in that process. The buildup of hatred and polarization is already underway, and the namecalling is just a step along a path towards more serious violence.
    • One rather useful fact about the present moment is that the other side is not very imaginative, so is using "antifascist" in exactly the same way. They are trying to turn "antifa" into a scare term, something that labels someone as an anti-american terrorist who of course should be subject to the full violence of the state.
    • They are to be "rooted out" and "eliminated from society", comparing them to ISIS and MS-13, they have "an agenda to destroy us", etc. Put aside whatever the actual nature of "antifa"might be and look at this rhetoric, what is being done. The word "antifa" is being deployed in exactly the same thing as "fascist" – labelling people as dangerous enemies. Demonizing them, othering them. It is not just permitting violence, it is encouraging it, implying that it is necessary and possibly inevitable.
    • Here's where I find myself in perfect alignment with Scott, whatever quibbles I have with the details. He is (a) noticing the above phenomenon (b) getting quite justifiably worried about it (c) proposing a response to this state of affairs.
    • I've been known to label various speech acts, physical acts, and people as fascist. Here's the earliest public example I could find Omniorthogonal: A whiff of fascism where,

    • Meta

    • my god this is boring. Don't over-focus on him and his dire beige outlook.

ThisMachine

18 Oct 2025 - 18 Oct 2025
Open in Logseq
    • Emergent heading for a series on politics, specifically the question of what the fuck are you actually supposed to do about fascism?