You also have extremely politicized courts. Courts are (among their other tasks) supposed to protect the people from the government. If the government comes to stomp on your rights, the courts are your avenue to fight back. They are what keeps democracy from being a tyranny of the majority. But in the US the courts are mostly just proxies for the political parties, so individuals don’t really have these protections.
Your local police forces have black sites to disappear people into for torture. That’s not the early-twentieth-century political movement “fascism” but it sure is the pejorative “fascism.”
Well, part of my issue was that he’s using the pejorative form in a context claiming that a bunch of academics have endorsed that view and I’m asking who those academics are. Also, the pejorative form of fascism has been leeched of all meaning because everyone uses it as a stand in for “I didn’t get what I wanted out of the political process.” Whether or not @redesigned intended it that way, crying fascism just always feels like petulance to me now. Either way, he’s claiming our government system is fascist and that there are a bunch of academics to back it up. Then someone said they were dubious and he responded by saying don’t be, I’ve got academics on my side. All I’m saying is, show me the damned academics, not a wikipedia article defining fascism. (his linking to which further implies the strict political definition of fascism rather than the pejorative.
Also, while I am aware of the Chicago PD black sites, (and I don’t want to diminish that, those are real and horrible) I was unaware of other police black sites existing throughout the nation. I worked in criminal law for a while in a minor major city and I never heard anyone rumbling about their client being detained in anything like a black site. So, while the Chicago PD has some serious abuses to answer to, I’m not ready to expand it to all local police forces. I am willing to say that police departments across the nation abuse their power, seem incapable of respecting people’s rights, and are populated with trigger happy shits who act like killing a black person is on their bucket list. I just don’t think they all have black sites.
Forgive my hyperbole, I’m sure they don’t all have them. Maybe “fascist” has become a petulant term, but my government is in the middle of setting up a tip line to turn in your Muslim neighbours, so it jumps to mind a lot these days. I feel like our general line of defense against police states and worse is to say, “It could not happen here,” to ourselves.
Also, while I agree that if someone is going to site academic research then it would be worth linking so that we can all judge the research for ourselves, how could it possibly not be true that some academics say America is fascist. I mean, Noam Chomsky sure says it.
[quote=“anon50609448, post:188, topic:66899”]
Forgive my hyperbole, I’m sure they don’t all have them. Maybe “fascist” has become a petulant term, but my government is in the middle of setting up a tip line to turn in your Muslim neighbours, so it jumps to mind a lot these days. I feel like our general line of defense against police states and worse is to say, “It could not happen here,” to ourselves.[/quote]
I totally agree that “It could not happen here” is an inadequate defense. If I am overly harsh to people using the word fascist, it is that I fear a boy who cried wolf sort of thing where the general public has what I guess I’d term “fascist fatigue.” And anti-Muslim bigotry as well as a host of other things in this thread are absolutely worth fighting against. I just feel like I’ve heard fascist applied to just about everything at this point, from both sides of the political divide. It’s one of the first words out of a lot of assholes mouths when gun control comes up.
Yeah, I just felt that he’s claiming that he has some huge posse of academics on that. I can find a handful of researchers to claim global warming isn’t real, but I, personally, want the full context which shows that that handful are a definite minority with questionable backing. I respect the hell out of Noam Chomsky, but I’d want to read his writing on it, not just hear that someone, somewhere, with an advanced degree, has said it.
