You are welcome to defend rising fascism if you want. People will justly criticize you, of course.
What happened to intellectual seriousness? Why should you be so frightened of people criticizing you?
This is consistent with my expectation of the future of fascism. The appearance of seriousness but once you have a gun pointed in my face the presence of discussion will be dropped in favor of a bullet in my skull.
I don't like Yarvin's ideas that I've heard, but GP has a point. There's almost no point to posting something that will just get downvoted quickly (which any defense of Yarvin certainly would), regardless of whether it makes any interesting points. Once it's dead it won't get much if any interaction. It's not about being afraid of people criticizing, it's about expending the effort to write a quality comment that won't be viewed or engaged by anyone.
I do think we on HN have gotten way too reflexively downvoting of opinions we disagree with. IMHO downvoting should be used like a moderation tool to downrank low effort/spammy or factually/objectively incorrect posts that don't contribute anything interesting to the discussion, not as a lazy way of expressing our disagreement.
> This is consistent with my expectation of the future of fascism. The appearance of seriousness but once you have a gun pointed in my face the presence of discussion will be dropped in favor of a bullet in my skull.
You could dismiss almost any political ideology with this. Certainly there's a lot of people who experienced this in the USSR, North Korea, China, and more, and those are/were hardly fascist governments.
It probably has a lot to do with Yarvin's influence at least partially leading the tech CEOs and the current administration down a similar authoritarian path as the USSR, North Korea, China. Or maybe better comparison, Putin's Russian and Orban's Hungary.
Why should we take those ideas seriously in liberal democratic societies? We don't take Mein Kampf's ideas seriously.
I don't know about other liberal democratic societies, but there are plenty of people in the US who take Mein Kampf's ideas seriously, and there have been since it was published. Hitler credited America's genocide against Native Americans, segregation and eugenics ideals as an inspiration in it.
American culture has never been entirely averse to authoritarianism, so long as it sends the correct signals (white majority, Christian sympathy, anti-government.) There will always be a significant number of Americans taking such ideas seriously, this is simply inevitable in a culture whose second most foundational principle is the right to shoot people with guns.
Yarvin’s views spread on hackernews and reddit. The world would be a better place if he was just downvoted to hell initially. I will not participate in something that we already know led to harm.
Academics and anti fascist activists should study authoritarians. But in some random web forum the person boosting these ideologies isn’t engaged in any sort of meaningful anti fascism. They are at best a useful rube and at worst genuinely advocating for these illiberal positions.
The broader issue here seems to be that C.Y. isn’t a random online person venting, in that allegedly the VP endorses his stances [citation needed]. If he was a random kook with a blog nobody knew, we would pay no attention to it.
But actively suppressing dissident speech is indeed the slippery slope, and he may get more endorsements as a result. Plus, it just looks bad to silence opposition because it makes the anti-fascists look like fascists. This has been addressed in one of the other comments.
Therefore the way you handle these types of situations may count for a lot. Or it may count for nothing and the response is overblown. Seemingly, it’s worth something given the amount of attention he is getting. Choose wisely.
Edit: I should point out that the same dismissal and suppression has led to 2 terms of Trump. So maybe there is a lesson to be learned rather than closing eyes and putting hands on ears like what this thread has exhibited.
When it comes to rising fascism, the political mainstream that you so passionately defend and is currently having having apoplectic fits doesn't have the best record, does it?
If you remember the 2000s, there was a great deal of consternation with respect of George Bush, his anti-terrorism laws, etc. He was clearly marked as fascist who was going to establish a dictatorship. That clearly didn't happen.
Meanwhile, after the fascist Bush was overthrown, the Obama administration found it wise to reset relations with the government of Vladimir Putin, which had already invaded neighboring Georgia.
In fact, virtually all the steps in the annihilation of Russian democracy were clearly supported by the political and administrative class that currently seeks to insinuate the present American government is fascist (and in the pay of Putin), going as far back as Yeltsin sending his tanks against parliament in 93.
And that's just a recent example. There are worse ones. If you listen to mainstream political scholarship the Committee for Union and Progress should be the furthest thing from nazi ideology.
Which is why you should be silent in this discussion. Curtis Yarvin may be a fascist, or he may not. In any case, your opinion is just noise. You do not know what fascism is, and neither do the people that form your opinion (the writers in the New Yorker for example).
If you were to support a resistance movement, the government that you would fight to bring about is more likely to engage in ethnic extermination than the "fascist" regime that was overthrown.
The US has ample evil within it and has a long history of authoritarian monstrosity. I also spend time and money fighting illiberalism within the existing system.
The problems within the US do not justify constructing a system that has illiberalism as a goal, which will permit no possible internal resistance to authoritarianism.
I am not saying that Yarvin’s state is the only one that will kill me. I am saying that it is substantially more likely to do so.
What happened to intellectual seriousness? Why should you be so frightened of people criticizing you?
This is consistent with my expectation of the future of fascism. The appearance of seriousness but once you have a gun pointed in my face the presence of discussion will be dropped in favor of a bullet in my skull.