.
What do you mean by broad and denigrating ... Does that mean you would prefer I list them individually?
Or are you pretending you are Siri ... And think
"I will not respond to the request" is sufficient?
Speak ... Don't say nothing and think that will ever float with me ...
I'll extend the invitation again.
.
About what specifically? You and I have widely widely divergent views, you are a rightwing libertarian and I’m a left wing liberal. Neither is a derogatory label.
You seem to view (no, I’m not speaking FOR you, just trying to understand what you you have posted) the federal government as the enemy and you seem to think I or people like me view it as something one step down from God. Is that correct? If not, enlighten me.
This is what you said:
Anyone can have high ideas when they are spending other people's money,
and pretending all they need to do is vote.
Every human government that I can think of, has a system whereby people pay into in order to get the basic services a government is supposed to provide. That means no matter how you parse it, they are spending other peoples money for someone’s high ideals. We just don’t always agree on what those “high ideals” are.
And people do have more power over their state governments ...
That's why they are not all Progressive shitholes with Authoritarian Fascist ambitions.
Bull manure.
When your state is gerrymandered to hell. No.
And chicken poop on the cheap bumper sticker slogan (though I’m guilty of the same).
Fascism:
Umberto Eco Makes a List of the 14 Common Features of Fascism
While Eco is firm in claiming “There was only one Nazism,” he says, “
the fascist game can be played in many forms, and the name of the game does not change.” Eco reduces the qualities of what he calls “Ur-Fascism, or Eternal Fascism” down to 14 “typical” features. “These features,” writes the novelist and semiotician, “cannot be organized into a system; many of them contradict each other, and are also typical of other kinds of despotism or fanaticism. But it is enough that one of them be present to allow fascism to coagulate around it.”
- The cult of tradition. “One has only to look at the syllabus of every fascist movement to find the major traditionalist thinkers. The Nazi gnosis was nourished by traditionalist, syncretistic, occult elements.”
- The rejection of modernism. “The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity. In this sense Ur-Fascism can be defined as irrationalism.”
- The cult of action for action’s sake. “Action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without, any previous reflection. Thinking is a form of emasculation.”
- Disagreement is treason. “The critical spirit makes distinctions, and to distinguish is a sign of modernism. In modern culture the scientific community praises disagreement as a way to improve knowledge.”
- Fear of difference. “The first appeal of a fascist or prematurely fascist movement is an appeal against the intruders. Thus Ur-Fascism is racist by definition.”
- Appeal to social frustration. “One of the most typical features of the historical fascism was the appeal to a frustrated middle class, a class suffering from an economic crisis or feelings of political humiliation, and frightened by the pressure of lower social groups.”
- The obsession with a plot. “Thus at the root of the Ur-Fascist psychology there is the obsession with a plot, possibly an international one. The followers must feel besieged.”
- The enemy is both strong and weak. “By a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak.”
- Pacifism is trafficking with the enemy. “For Ur-Fascism there is no struggle for life but, rather, life is lived for struggle.”
- Contempt for the weak. “Elitism is a typical aspect of any reactionary ideology.”
- Everybody is educated to become a hero. “In Ur-Fascist ideology, heroism is the norm. This cult of heroism is strictly linked with the cult of death.”
- Machismo and weaponry. “Machismo implies both disdain for women and intolerance and condemnation of nonstandard sexual habits, from chastity to homosexuality.”
- Selective populism. “There is in our future a TV or Internet populism, in which the emotional response of a selected group of citizens can be presented and accepted as the Voice of the People.”
- Ur-Fascism speaks Newspeak. “All the Nazi or Fascist schoolbooks made use of an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax, in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning.”
A pretty good description of fascism as it applies beyond Mussolini. But I’d won’t fit on a bumper sticker, doesn’t make a good political rallying cry, and is usually inconvenient.
www.foxnews.com
