by iKarith » July 28th, 2021, 3:05 pm
All right, after the third time that the claim has been made, as if it was a statement of fact, that any time there is some authoritarian shitbags they're "right wing", I'm speaking up. Authoritarianism exists across the "left" and "right" spectrum as people describe it today, only leftists continue to beat the drum that of course anyone who is a "fascist" is automatically right wing because of course THEY can't be cooperating with someone doing evil…
The problem with capitalism is that there are far too few capitalists and far too many serfs who are treated effectively like property. The problem with socialism is that you replace a small group of wealthy, powerful people acting on their own whims with an even smaller group of people who claim to be acting in everyone's best interests (and who invariably all become wealthy and powerful while everyone else gets and stays poor…) The thing that hasn't been tried really is making everyone into a capitalist, a stakeholder if only a small one, and easing regulations to allow the small shops to better compete with the large ones. Direct ownership and cooperatives. Not state ownership, but directly this is partly yours because you bought in.
If any of this was stuff you didn't know … I suggest asking yourself why you didn't know it. Anyone who would tell you what not to read, not to watch, not to pay attention to is trying to control what you think. And I've seen both left and right wing folks tell me not to read/watch/attend to stuff from the other side. My greatest political realization almost 20 years ago now was that the things the Democrats were saying about the Republicans back then was basically true, and what the Republicans said about the Democrats was also basically true. Yet … both were also basically false, because the arguments were full of misrepresentations, straw men, half-truths, and whole lies. It's the nature of politics.
So … fascism is always right-wing?
"Fascism" was literally invented BY A COMMUNIST, Benito Mussolini, who was kicked out of the Communist party not because he was violent, but because he was so enthusiastic about doing extreme violence to "eat the rich" that it was making them look bad. (Anyone who claims that communism is not about violence likely hasn't actually read Marx. And few Marxists realize that among the detractors of Marxism before he died was Marx himself!)
The leftist "hero" AND FABIAN SOCIALIST George Bernard Shaw said, "if you do not produce as much as you consume, or perhaps a little more, then your life is not of much use to us. And it cannot be of much use to you either.[/b]
He also described how Mussolini was not a bad socialist, but rather a good socialist with a bad face. Always scowling, it makes people distrust and fear him. But he's not scowling, see, he's got a happy face…
The leftist hero went one further… He described how the elderly should be able to go to some nice place with music and flowers and then there will be this "humane gas"… Yes, a left-wing socialist came up with the concept of the concentration camp gas chamber before Hitler did.
What Mussolini and Shaw didn't have for what people usually assume to be "fascism" today was any racial note to their respective authoritarianisms. Shaw pushed for government control of industry and property through collectivism. Mussolini pushed for government control of industry and property through regulation. Hitler (concerned about appearing to be part of the bourgeoisie, because that would be unseemly—he wrote that he wanted people to think he was a man of the proletariat!)
But fascism doesn't need that "right-wing" racist component. Not that you have to be right-wing to be a racist. I was raised to believe that if you declare negative attributes about a person automatically because of their skin color or country of origin or ethnic background … that makes you a racist. And yet racism is now not only acceptable to the "left", they demand more of it. The only cure to past racism is the present racism. And the only cure to this racism today will be future racism tomorrow. That's the basis of Critical Race Theory and it's in the first pages of the book everyone pushing that garbage tells you that you've GOT to read. I agree: You've got to read it. I encourage you to actually read it, though and ask yourself: If you swapped "white" and "black" (I'm an albino, you're all shades of brown), would it be racist? Because if it would be, then it's racist!
Franco took the fascism of Mussolini and substituted church for government. That didn't work well either. But since only the right wing supports (Christian) religion, that must have been a right wing fascism as well. And I'd agree that it was, but hardly for that reason.
How about Venezuela? Technically that's not "communism", but it's built around left-wing socialism taken to its logical conclusion. North Korea … I'm not sure if that one counts as communism or not. China calls itself communist, but they have an openly capitalist economy now.
All of this has damned little to do with Hasbro, save for the fact that it's all way more complex than a corporate entity can really get involved with in any sort of nuanced and limited way. You're either all in, all out, or your efforts to moderate will be seen as tokenism or weakness.
I said elsewhere my advice to Hasbro would be to get out of politics and just ignore any effort to drag them into it, be that by the woke crowd or the anti-woke crowd. Because both will effectively try to use the same techniques to force Hasbro to do as they wish the company to do. And Hasbro really should be focusing on making good toys and games, not appeasing at most half the people's politics.
ETA, folks on the left try to claim that any authoritarianism is "right wing", but people on the right do the opposite: After all, if you go investigate the neo-nazi scum on a site like Gab that won't just outright ban them … they sound an awful lot like the average leftist, except that they don't use code language about who they want to see "removed" from the planet. The style is different, not the substance.
Does that mean neo-nazis are leftists? What about antifa, are they rightists? Nope, in both cases. What they are is garbage. That's enough. Anyone who'd just decide to harm, hurt, maim, or even kill someone they don't know because of what they think they know about that "kind of person" is utterly contemptible. I think that's the only quality I need to assign to such people.
If the topic gets back to anywhere near Hasbro and what they're doing … I'll be interested in that. But this place is supposed to be about a game I play to get away from all of the above. Y'know, since both neo-nazis and antifa want me dead. Antifa are a more significant threat being from Portlandia. A dozen of them a few years back decided to chase the blind man down the street and just missed his brainstem with a crowbar. According to the cop who saw the surveillance camera footage, I was literally an inch from being an ex-albino.
<InSpectreRetro> All hail Zargon!!! Morcar only has 1BP.