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[SalmonGod]

I'm not so sure about widespread death, but, yeah, if the far right did dominate politics I think there definitely would be at least widespread misery for minorities. I'm no fan of the far right because despite how a lot of people want to deny it, that's true. I just get annoyed with the general slinging around of "Nazi" (not that PTTG actually did so, but I felt the implication was there) both because as I outlined I don't think it's entirely honest but perhaps even more because I think it's a way to avoid having to really think about one's values and how to address those who don't match up with them. Most of the time, at least for me, it's a really fruitful endeavor to actually talk to people in-depth and learn what they think and this is something I feel ought to be the norm, but when there's the shock option to hit just in order to put people on the back foot I think it prevents this and allows for ignorance.

I agree that call-out culture sucks.  Sincere dialogue has been abandoned too much.  But I think the term Nazi is more often appropriate than you probably think.  Genocide wasn't the Nazi's first idea, either.  It's the natural conclusion of a racially charged fascist mode of thought.  There's a good breakdown of it beginning at about 58:20 here.

[Frumple]

I'm not so sure about widespread death, but, yeah, if the far right did dominate politics I think there definitely would be at least widespread misery for minorities.

You can be absolutely damn certain about widespread death. Beyond the economic shitpiles the groups in question wallow in that would see QoL and life expectancy tank for basically gorram everybody or the environmental bullshit they like to peddle that could end up being functional or literal species scale suicide, we already have minorities in the US with fatality rates on par with or higher than fucking frontline soldiers in the middle of a battlefield.

Let the fuckers that were cheerfully lynching people in living memory and their allies/rough ideological compatriots go balls out on policy and that shit is going to get very much worse. People have already been dying a hell of a lot more than they need to and far right policy just as a general ruddy thing sets itself out to exacerbate that on just about every front it can get its hands on.

There's damned unfortunate reasons right-wing policy in the US is a legitimate existential threat for portions of our population, even if you're trying to be bloody charitable to it. If you're not, thanks to the environmental positions that heavily dominate that side of the US political spectrum, they're explicitly trying to kill literally sodding all of us.

[Powder Miner]

I really appreciate your approach to this, by the way, but I do have a couple of problems with his line of logic, which ultimately boils down to definitions.

The quote "This isn't a slippery slope argument; this is the built-in conclusion to contemporary fascism" sticks out to me as what most reveals this problem to me -- genocide is the built-in conclusion to "contemporary fascism", but it's built-in because he has built this conclusion into his definition of the alt-right from the start.

Fascism is a term with very vague meaning, meaning anything from just being racist to being a literal Nazi to being totalitarian, and in fact I know someone who actually has described himself as fascist, but without a single ounce of racial rhetoric, he literally just wants (maybe wanted) a totalitarian state, sometimes modeled on certain organizational structures of historical fascism, such as national direction of corporations. With the way fascism is used in modern discussion, I suspect most people wouldn't think to label him as fascist at all.  Fascism is a very easy label to use as one desires because it can be applied to a wide array of things and then used to portray these things as something much more rigid, specific, and coherent as an ideology.

This is what I believe this guy does. He portrays white nationalism as "contemporary fascism" -- an ideology with a defined goal, which desires it in absolute terms, and which will do whatever it takes in the end to reach that goal, but I don't think that's actually a correct portrayal of the more milquetoast alt-right or even most white nationalists. In general the alt-right holds a loose collection of related reactions and values that they'll get mad about when something happens they don't like, they'll have a pet policy or a pet problem; the alt-right doesn't have a unified logic. Even the concept of "white genocide", which he uses as a core piece of his argument, is something that is kept to a minority of the alt-right, not your Sargons of Akkad, and I'd wager most people who talk about white genocide don't have the full demographic shift conspiracy, but rather a more vague idea of thinking that policies are being made to get rid of them.

His argument holds up with the givens that he's set in order to make it, but I don't think that his givens are actually at all accurate, because they rely on using the definition of fascism's vagueness to its fullest extent.

Frumple:
No, I don't think so. The United States is not a poor country, and it's not a "third world" country even in its poorest areas -- the economic situation is not always fantastic but it is far away from being the point of mass starvation or mass death even in the most miserable parts of the country. This gulf is massive and I think underappreciated, and it would take genuinely cataclysmic events for it to be crossed. Every single one of the major things that can cause that kind of widespread death is out of reach for the United States. There are no areas of the country that are starving to death. There are areas of the country where food insecurity and malnutrition are very prevalent problems, but there are no areas of the country under even the kind of chronic famine you find in impoverished countries. Mass death through violence isn't a problem that exists in the US either -- actual demographic-changing waves of violence and war are magnitudes of order beyond the worst incidents we see in the United States because of this economic base level as well. Disease isn't this kind of issue either; things like heart disease are pretty major problems but actual decimating waves of disease that can meaningfully cause an existential threat to a population aren't possible without some seriously terrifying superbug -- but that kind of superbug has never actually spread on a large level because even superbugs always have alternate methods of treatment, so I'm not seriously worried about that either.

The kind of shock that it would take to upend any of this amounts to more or less destruction of society as a prerequisite. The more I think about it, the more distant the idea of widespread death seems.

As for the one comparison you've made... well... Frumple, frontline soldiers in the middle of a battlefield don't have a high rate of fatality at all. In fact, they have a low rate of fatality. They have an extremely low rate of fatality, it's not a good benchmark. Soldiers in the US don't die at anywhere close to the way people envision them as dying, that's why national news is made every time an American soldier dies abroad. Dying at the rate of frontline soldiers is actually not significant and not very hard to attain.

[Frumple]

... I mean, I guess you can try to downplay the amount of death and suffering full-bore right-wing policy would bring about by trying to go with it not being literally country destroying. We're probably considering different definitions of widespread death.

Right-wing policy would very, very much cause a very noticeable increase in the amount of dead Americans, particularly among our most vulnerable populations, regardless of whether or not it's equivalent to some kind of modern day black plague. This is especially true if, again, you let loose the fuckers that were lynching people when my still living grandfather was a kid. Which is part of that full-bore would entail.

Any case, if you want a less contentious death rate comparison, just think "significantly more than normal for our populations". It's not been difficult to notice over the years we're still pretty rough on some of our people, or that pursuing policy that actively targets them -- which right-wing policy very much does, just for lgbt folks as a general example -- wouldn't exactly make things better on that front. Far as I've noticed the shit's not exactly gentle to our immigrant, religious minority, or remaining native populations, either, just as a sort of start.

The only way you're going to maybe be able to frame a strong right-wing dominance as not getting a lot of people killed is if you don't think anything except male WASPs count as people. Even that's not guaranteed when you consider shit like the opioid epidemic or how the general mess of folks in question want to handle healthcare and basic please-don't-poison-our-drinking-water regulation.

[Powder Miner]

I think that lynching outright returning would require a level of change that I suppose could be possible with, like, the really bad sector of the far right gaining political dominance but that's not something I think is a realistic risk, because at that point you have to have such a fringe domination I don't think it's possible.

Anyway, I'm not trying to defend far-right policy so much as point out that what you're talking about now just falls into the realm of normal politics (I was indeed thinking of a much larger scale with "widespread"), because a lot weighs in the balance by politics' very nature, and we're no longer talking about the drastic kinds of destruction that warrant drastic measures in return. I don't mean to say that the far right isn't a threat, because yeah it is -- now that I understand the scale you're talking about you're definitely right in that regard. But remember, this was on a discussion about if the far right's policies would be genocidal, not about whether or not the far right should be opposed altogether, and the effects wouldn't be on the scale to be genocidal.

[Frumple]

... I mean, scale of America being what it is you're still talking hundreds of thousands to millions of deaths, near as I can recall from seeing general policy evaluation over the years.

Like, no, relatively speaking it's not actively genociding the american population as a whole, but you're still considering death tolls that would depopulate smaller countries, some outright, and likely pretty damn close to active genocide for some of our minorities. I'm thinking, say, transfolk as an example who are already massively shat on even with token attempts to protect them coming from our less reactionary groups -- without even that I'm not nearly as confident as you seem to be that our primary source of domestic terrorism and politically inclined murder isn't going to kick things up another notch.

Full bore US right-wing policy making would result in shit that's very much outside normal political stuff in terms of death and general societal harm, is what I'm saying. Particularly relative to what gains we've managed over the years and, like, not the ruddy Gilded Age or somethin'. Right-wing politics and media may have been doing their damnedest to normalize that crap for the last few decades but it damn sure ain't normal.

[SalmonGod]

Fascism is a term with very vague meaning, meaning anything from just being racist to being a literal Nazi to being totalitarian, and in fact I know someone who actually has described himself as fascist, but without a single ounce of racial rhetoric, he literally just wants (maybe wanted) a totalitarian state, sometimes modeled on certain organizational structures of historical fascism, such as national direction of corporations. With the way fascism is used in modern discussion, I suspect most people wouldn't think to label him as fascist at all.  Fascism is a very easy label to use as one desires because it can be applied to a wide array of things and then used to portray these things as something much more rigid, specific, and coherent as an ideology.

Yeah, this is why I specified racially-charged fascism in my post where I referenced the video.  I agree that it's a word that defies commonly agreed upon definition, and being just-plain totalitarian would not be the same.  But I think Philosophy Tube guy's description fits if a faction of the alt-right with Whiteness as a primary concern were to come into power, and I do believe whole-heartedly in what he says regarding the nature of Whiteness as a social construct.  There is a lot of material out there regarding the history of what it's meant to be White.

In general the alt-right holds a loose collection of related reactions and values that they'll get mad about when something happens they don't like, they'll have a pet policy or a pet problem; the alt-right doesn't have a unified logic. Even the concept of "white genocide", which he uses as a core piece of his argument, is something that is kept to a minority of the alt-right, not your Sargons of Akkad, and I'd wager most people who talk about white genocide don't have the full demographic shift conspiracy, but rather a more vague idea of thinking that policies are being made to get rid of them.

That's what they are right now, because they don't have the kind of power that necessitates organizing further to agree on unified goals and policies.  And when they did, those goals and policies would likely be horrible, but not outright genocide.  But I fully expect that as their policies don't work and their goals don't satisfy their concerns regarding the safety and privilege of Whiteness, that their convictions would deepen and progress to more extreme actions, because the alternative is to simply let go of their fears.

Even those who just want to shut down immigration will be unsatisfied if they achieve that and it doesn't have the effects they thought it would.  Their beliefs aren't rational in the first place, so there's no reason to believe that they will suddenly realize how irrational they were.  So most will naturally move on to the next step in extremity of action, like let's segregate jobs or deport so many legal immigrants, and then revisit how we... feel... about our racially enshrined job security.  Don't feel right about it yet?  Either admit to being wrong or try the next thing in an effort to prove that your beliefs about the root of the problem were right all along, and just not addressed sufficiently yet.  We constantly see this in conservative politics today, where every failure results in the belief that they failed because they weren't conservative enough.

Also, conservatives pretty much do universally want trans people dead.  So there's that.

No, I don't think so. The United States is not a poor country, and it's not a "third world" country even in its poorest areas -- the economic situation is not always fantastic but it is far away from being the point of mass starvation or mass death even in the most miserable parts of the country. This gulf is massive and I think underappreciated, and it would take genuinely cataclysmic events for it to be crossed.

I don't think the disagreement here has so much to do with views on U.S. prosperity, so much as outdated views on the undeveloped "Third World" persisting for too long.  Not much of the world lives in primitive conditions today, and as far as I'm aware, regional famines aren't a thing anymore so much as varying percentages of the population being economically non-participatory and discarded being a continual feature of modern life everywhere the same as it is in the U.S.  A quick glance at worldbank looks like nearly 90% of the world population has electricity, basic access to water, and lives above the global poverty line (which is sort of a bullshit measure, I know...).  Idiot conservatives making jokes online about people from X country living in caves receiving pictures from people in those countries of their modern-looking cities has been a common thing for a while.  Entire villages of starving children that you could support for $1 a day are on the fringe, except in war-torn countries.  Some of what we might think of as Third World countries have better healthcare than USA.  Saying our poor are not living in Third World conditions is not saying very much these days.  The quality of life here can be quite abysmal in terms of global standard and what should be excusable.

[Kagus]

I'm just wondering when the Trump memorial $1,000,000 coin will be released. Coin, not bill, what with it being such a small denomination...

who is it that memes? It is me. It is me who memes.

[Max™]

This is one of the more cynical posts that's ever been in this thread.  What normality do you want to restore?  I can't think of any past version of normal that fits very well with where the future is headed.  I'd rather do better, anyway.

Yeah, I didn't bother responding due to the extreme misinterpreting of my statements and strawmanning going on.

Note that when I was talking about sites deplatforming actual nazis, I'm not saying "yeah now lets get al lthe alt-right cunts too" though I do think they're obviously cunts, I would think someone enabling them to spread their bullshit is at least as much of a cunt. You don't engage nazis and legitimize their arguments, you beat them down until they stop getting back up or change their minds, we fought a world war over this sort of shit already.

Is it a stretch to call alex jizz a nazi? Maybe, but he's definitely friends with lots of shitbags that are openly neonazi fuckwits, so fuck that guy, I'll fight for your right to disagree with me up until you start crossing into "what we really need to do is get rid of group A and or B because trait A and B makes them responsible for conspiracy C and D" at which point the only valid response is cutting you out of society.

[Trekkin]

This is one of the more cynical posts that's ever been in this thread.  What normality do you want to restore?  I can't think of any past version of normal that fits very well with where the future is headed.  I'd rather do better, anyway.

Yeah, I didn't bother responding due to the extreme misinterpreting of my statements and strawmanning going on.

I'd appreciate an understanding of what's been misrepresented, then, because I felt you'd framed the problem incorrectly -- or rather, you'd pointed out that the way bloop_bleep framed it doesn't lead to any good solutions without making mention of the framing that actually does. "Who should have the power", and by extension "no one should have this power (but someone must)", highlight the absurdity of relying on the virtue of officeholders, on which point I feel we are in agreement; conversely, "there ought to be a law" and similar run afoul of the plasticity of parchment barriers. Accepting that we can't just ban new things and their concomitant new opportunities for exerting power wholesale, then, we need to think about the problem another way, and thankfully there is one suggested by history.

I was being slightly tongue-in-cheek by taking your idiom literally, for which I apologize, but my point was larger than your remarks alone: we, both on these boards and in the country generally, keep suggesting that if we either purge the government of bad actors or legislatively restrain their worst impulses, things will get better. That's a nice thought to campaign on, but historically it hasn't worked. If the American experiment has shown us anything, it's that opposing ambitions held in equilibrium are more durable than either while remaining responsive to urgent changes. It's therefore probably more productive to ask how to structure those feedback loops than to think in terms of who's to execute them.

[SalmonGod]

American experiment has shown us anything, it's that opposing ambitions held in equilibrium are more durable than either while remaining responsive to urgent changes. It's therefore probably more productive to ask how to structure those feedback loops than to think in terms of who's to execute them.

I hate to be that guy, because I recognize asking for details on a broad assertion is an effective common tactic for shutting down discussion.  It's burdensome and difficult to respond to without leading into tangents.

But I just can't see this when I look back through American history.  I see a lot of effort put into keeping minorities and workers down, until they get some concessions when legislation is passed under threat of civil order breaking down due to mass threat of violence and obstruction.  I don't see anything good ever happening because leadership is too busy in-fighting to worry about oppressing people.  Either I'm misinterpreting, or I need to be pointed to some specifics to understand where your view is coming from.  And I see the effects of power in hierarchical organization structures being continually exaggerated and more difficult to contest as was done in the past as time goes on and it means exclusive access to more and more powerful tools.

[Egan_BW]

Setting ambition against ambition is the basis of the separation of powers. The idea being that people in all three branches will inevitably want more power for themselves, but the equally power hungry people in the other branches refuse to give up their own power. Resulting in a basically balanced system even when none of the people involved WANT a balanced system.

[WealthyRadish]

It's hard to think of an example where the American presidential system operated in a way preferable to a parliamentary system, while things like our current shutdown provide ready couterexamples. The intention was to create a government that would be more dysfunctional and weak, but considering the economic and geopolitical challenges that the US has had to overcome relative to almost everywhere else (read: fuck all) this is like putting training wheels on a bigwheel trike.

It is the optimal government if you're a wealthy merchant, slaveowner, or root vegetable, for what that's worth.

[Kagus]

It's hard to think of an example where the American presidential system operated in a way preferable to a parliamentary system, while things like our current shutdown provide ready couterexamples. The intention was to create a government that would be more dysfunctional and weak, but considering the economic and geopolitical challenges that the US has had to overcome relative to almost everywhere else (read: fuck all) this is like putting training wheels on a bigwheel trike.

It is the optimal government if you're a wealthy merchant, slaveowner, or root vegetable, for what that's worth.

Given that you're a wealthy root vegetable, I'd think then that you'd be singing its praises then, no?

I prefer a more well-grounded grassroots organization myself.

[SalmonGod]

Setting ambition against ambition is the basis of the separation of powers. The idea being that people in all three branches will inevitably want more power for themselves, but the equally power hungry people in the other branches refuse to give up their own power. Resulting in a basically balanced system even when none of the people involved WANT a balanced system.

Yeah, I get that... but it only addresses a limited range of problems.  It prevents individuals or minor factions from seizing complete control and instituting tyranny for their exclusive benefit.  But for minorities who have no representation or on conflicts of interest specifically between the common people and those with wealth and power, the nature of tyranny for those people or on those specific issues remains unaltered.  Something they suffer until they fight it with their own hands.  Separation of powers didn't bring about civil rights or the 40 hour work week.  Popular pressure heavy enough to grind the whole machine to a hault did.  And I don't see how the erosion of the 40 hour work week is related to the erosion of the separation of powers.  Or how separation of powers addresses issues like mass surveillance or profitability of war or wealth inequality, which almost everyone in a position of power is able to benefit from to the detriment of everyone who isn't.  Those gaps can only be sealed by integrity, ideology, and legislation, or re-structured by direct action.  And as technology progresses, the gaps grow continually wider.  The tools available to power to leverage against everyone else grow more powerful, and their use higher stakes in nature. 

I know someone is going to bring up voting as the answer, but that's counter to Trekkin's point against the notion of throwing out the bad guys and passing legislation.  And information control is one of those aforementioned tools, and really effective at mitigating the threat of voting to upset the establishment of power.  It also ignores denial of voting rights to minorities via criminalization.