to put it in another way than the other replies: you will have 100x more pushback to an arguably-necessary ground-up rewrite instead of "just add this new feature to the existing codebase", even when you (as an engineer) know full well why "just adding a feature" is probably a bad idea.
disregarding the history of the term, you see that even posters on Hacker News Dot Com dispute the accuracy of the term "fascism" as applied to contemporary american politics, so what difference would it make? people who are okay with fascistic politics will not distinguish opposition with a name change.
you have seriously got to read and understand Eco's 14 tenets of Ur-Fascism [0] if you think that contemporary applications of the term "fascist" are inaccurate in describing what's happening right now in the US.
> if you think that contemporary applications of the term "fascist" are inaccurate in describing what's happening right now in the US
Didn't say that. I'm saying I've seen the term thrown around wildly to apply to all manner of things. Like the other terms.
The term is probably fundamentally fucked. If you asked Hitler if he's a Nazi, he'd say yes. If you asked Mussolini if he's a Fascist, he'd say yes. These were the words they used to describe themselves. The reason I'm describing the phenomenon versus blaming the folks using the terms broadly is because I don't think this is a personal failing by anyone as much as something that's linguistically happening.
There's also a pragmatic elephant in the room: By the time certain labels are perfectly and undeniably true to say, it's no longer safe for people to speak out and use them!
So our desire for word-correctness should be tempered by our desire for word-utility.
> that's a great way to side line people that are actually talking about real harms
Valid. This is a real linguistic process. But it absolutely debases the original term. I’m not convinced we have to choose between empathy, on one hand, and accuracy, on the other hand.
i think a great example to back your point is that the terminally online turn out in droves to apply the nazi label to all those not in favor of maximising immigration , rational discourse seems to have broken down and the resulting vacuum of meaning is filled by hyperbole as people scamble to feel heard in a world of weak voices & closed ears
"all those not in favor of maximising immigration" is an hyperbole. Do you think the comparison between ICE and the Gestapo is completely unwarranted? Obviously the scales are very different (for now), but it feels justified enough to associate the two, if for no other reason than to remind people that we are on similar tracks that led to the worst times of our shared History.
Seems to me that "all those not in favor of maximising immigration" have largely turned out to be perfectly happy with revoking status from legal immigrants and using unnecessary violence to round people up. The line was always, "We're fine with legal immigrants," which turned out to be a lie, and "follow the law and you have nothing to worry about" which also turned out to be a lie.
How many of those people who got called Nazis are now fighting against the administration's lawless crackdown?
plenty of people get executed under regimes of parties both left and right , im referring to the idea at global scale not specific to any particular country
Mussolini literally coined the word "fascist" to name his movement. Hitler never hid the fact he based his own movement on Mussolini's, so he'd probably describe his party as fascist too. Later, the word became extremely negative for obvious reasons, such that current fascists pretend not to be such, but it doesn't mean they aren't. Overall, I'd say it's used well enough.
Fighting fascist is the primary way to oppose them. The fighting bit often requires violence. That's what it takes, because it involves fighting a group of people that are not a peaceful bunch and have very violent intentions.
Yes, exactly my point. And once you are picking targets and taking violent actions, you can no longer excuse your aim and your violence by saying your heart is in the right place. Antifa has, for many decades, done wrong actions with good intentions. You can oppose them without being fascist.
Hm. Have you actually read that wikipedia page? I don't think it serves to validate your claims.
It does say that the Trump administration and one police department claims that they are like you say. On the same page it also mentions that the Trump administration has been involved on several hoaxes trying to incorrectly portray it.
Most of all the other groups paint it in a positive light.
> [g]iven the historical and current threat that white supremacist and fascist groups pose, it's clear to me that organized, collective self-defense is not only a legitimate response, but lamentably an all-too-necessary response to this threat on too many occasions.
I would not mind being associated with the group portrayed on that page.
The article from Freddie deBoer is from 2021. He writes:
> The association of antifa with violence stems from the fact [in Europe] that these fascists or neofascists would often prowl the streets [...] Though many people would love to pretend that this isn’t the case, we are not in fact living in an America where Proud Boys wander through Chelsea randomly beating up gay people without resistance from the police
I think he would write something very different today. He does mention one case were a journalist was shot paint and mace and was thrown on the group by a group that could have been antifa. Or not.
Third link is from 2017. Black-clad anarchists swarm "anti-hate" rally in California, says the title. But it was an "anti-marxist" and "pro-trump" rally, which was cancelled(?). But people showed up anyway(?). And then:
> officers were told not to actively confront the anarchists
Come on. That reeks of being staged. The people in black were almost certainly proud boys. The wikipedia page mentions their leader employing this exact tactic:
> In posts on Parler, leaders of the Proud Boys had disclosed plans to attend the rally wearing "all black" clothing associated with antifa activists and arrive "incognito" in an apparent effort to shift blame for any violence on antifa
I did this analysis in a bit more than 10 minutes, no LLMs used.
You mention the years a few times- the claim I was asked to cite was in the past tense and I deliberately sought sources from before the current regime. This is your sole criticism of the deBoer article. Antifa was still called Antifa and it was still short for anti-fascist in 2017 and 2021.
Wiki says:
>Some on the political left and some civil rights organizations criticize antifa's willingness to adopt violent tactics, which they describe as counterproductive and dangerous, arguing that these tactics embolden the political right and their allies.
>Both Democratic and Republican politicians have condemned violence from antifa
>CNN describes antifa as "known for causing damage to property during protests."
Among many other similar statements; I think your summary is inadequate.
I can't argue with false flag conspiracy theories, so I'll leave it at that.
If they genocided German citizens, yes! We still argue today about whether Hiroshima and Nagasaki were justified; nobody argues they weren't antifascist.
Of course I'm not saying this! There's no way to read what I said and get this out unless you put it in! You're supposed to be charitable here and you are actively doing the opposite.
If you punch John Doe in the face becaune you think he's Hitler; if you torture Hitler's parents just to stick it to him, yes, you are in the wrong.
By physically opposing fascism, I assume you mean they are taking specific practical actions rather than becoming one with the platonic concept of opposition to fascism.
It may seem an obvious or insignificant point, but it is critical here. If they physically oppose fascism by following and filming ICE, I'm very much on board. If they oppose it by molotoving innocent local government buildings, I am against. If both of these actions are the concept of opposing fascism, what does it mean to be against that?
Antifa are belligerants. They undermine protests by having the maturity to die for a cause but not to live for one. One can be against that without being fascist.
So your contention is that people who are following and filming ICE cannot be considered 'antifa' because you have decided that 'antifa' means 'people engaging in bad violence'.
I've seen this exact argument made numerous times in defense of some heinous people, or generally against "cancel culture" within tech, in favor of what they consider the political neutrality of "pure meritocracy."
If Jeffrey Epstein were a startup founder or if he had written a really important compiler or something that linked him to tech more directly, more people here would be defending him.
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