Dunderheads to the left, dunderheads to the right

By -
Right-wing ninnies call everyone with whose policies they disagree a "socialist."

Meanwhile, left-wing ninnies call everyone with whose policies they disagree a "fascist."

Look, I disagree with the Koch brothers on a number of issues. But "fascists"? No, I am pretty sure they are not for the massive government intervention in the economy that characterized fascism. Nor are they for the militarization of society that characterized fascism.

Comments

  1. Keshav Srinivasan7:21 PM

    A little while ago you had a post about how the left and the right often use the word capitalism in different ways, the right using it to mean the lack of government intervention in economic affairs, and the left using it a system designed to benefit the owners of capital. I think something similar is going on here. I think the left is using fascism to mean a system where society is controlled by the interests of big business, whether it is done through activist government policies or by other means, like the deliberate withdrawal of the government from certain areas so that corporations can have free reign.

    Or liberals may view deregulation as merely a tactic by the right, designed to allow corporations to grow in power to the point where they can commandeer the government and skew the laws toward activist intervention in favor of business interests.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Samson Corwell1:19 AM

    I truly hate political spectrums of any sort. There's something about the use of sliding scales as a classification tool for political positions that just seems off to me. It also tends to be highly distortive.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Libertarians, My Libertarians!

By -
Cruel to be kind means that I love you . Because, while I think you are mistaken, your hearts are in the right place -- yes, even you, Silas --  unlike some people . This Breitbart fellow (discussed in the link above), by all appearances, deliberately doctored a video of Shirley Sherrod to make her remarks appear virulently racist, when they had, in fact, the opposite import. I heard that at a recent Austrian conference, some folks were talking about "Callahan's conservative turn." While that description is not entirely inaccurate, I must say that a lot of these people who today call themselves conservative give me the heebie-jeebies.
Read more

"Pre-Galilean" Foolishness

By -
 I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose
Read more