Originally Posted By u/Buster_xx At 2025-06-01 01:27:38 PM | Source


  • captainlezbian@lemmy.world
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    3 days ago

    Its not fascism, but it’s really bad nonetheless and something that happens in fascism.

    We’ve moved from politics being bounded by what the evidence can justify, through ignoring inconvenient evidence and consensuses, and hit “the party will decide what truth is.” And ultimately it’s a very bad position to be in.

    Lysenko was as unable to convince the wheat to grow as he thought it should, as it was to convince him to plant it in a way that made it thrive.

  • Schadrach@lemmy.sdf.org
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    5 days ago

    I mean obviously there’s fascism going on, but given this admin is it more likely that they intentionally fabricated a false study by this epidemiologist or that it’s just an unchecked reference hallucinated by an AI chatbot told to write something in support of his position? Basically is this citation purely malevolence or stupidity in the service of greater malevolence?

    • leftzero@lemmynsfw.com
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      5 days ago

      Hanlon’s razor: don’t assume malice when stupidity is sufficient explanation.

      Though, in this case, I think it’s almost certainly both.

      • OneWomanCreamTeam@sh.itjust.works
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        5 days ago

        Honestly, with this administration we should be using the reverse of Hanlans razor: Don’t assume incompetence when malice is sufficient explanation.

        • barneypiccolo@lemm.ee
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          5 days ago

          I’ve been saying that whenever someone brings up Hanlon’s Razor. There needs to be a new one, called The MAGA Razor - always assume the reason is deliberate malice, even enthusiastic cruelty.

          • OneWomanCreamTeam@sh.itjust.works
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            5 days ago

            So incredibly, bafflingly, stupefyingly incompetent that even if you use the MAGA Razor they still look like pants-on-head-stupid, coconut-bonkers, clown-shoes dipshits.

          • barneypiccolo@lemm.ee
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            5 days ago

            I always describe MAGA as “virtuosically incompetent.” It’s breath-taking how stupid/ignorant they are, and yet they are so absolutely CONVINCED they are correct.

    • Gsus4@mander.xyz
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      5 days ago

      Depends on whether you take the mistake at face value or see it as yet another symptom of a disease taking root in the context of the whole administration’s war against truth and accountability. But on its own it would muddy the waters to call it fascism.

  • Gsus4@mander.xyz
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    6 days ago

    When this postmodern “the truth does not exist” bullshit reaches the government, this is what happens. Totalitarianism follows, because people can’t organize against power if they can’t communicate or trust each other under a flood of lies. It is like inflation, but for facts instead of currency.

    • Genius@lemmy.zip
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      5 days ago

      If fascism is when postmodernism, how come fascists hate postmodernism?

          • DragonTypeWyvern@midwest.social
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            5 days ago

            “alternative facts”

            Conservatives believe that the rejection of the idea of objective truth is in reference to gender identities and the idea that it’s bad to murder people for being the wrong religion and not their willful ignorance of actually provable reality.

            • Genius@lemmy.zip
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              5 days ago

              https://www.britannica.com/topic/postmodernism-philosophy

              Postmodernism is largely a reaction against the intellectual assumptions and values of the modern period in the history of Western philosophy (roughly, the 17th through the 19th century). Indeed, many of the doctrines characteristically associated with postmodernism can fairly be described as the straightforward denial of general philosophical viewpoints that were taken for granted during the 18th-century Enlightenment, though they were not unique to that period. The most important of these viewpoints are the following.

              1. There is an objective natural reality, a reality whose existence and properties are logically independent of human beings—of their minds, their societies, their social practices, or their investigative techniques. Postmodernists dismiss this idea as a kind of naive realism. Such reality as there is, according to postmodernists, is a conceptual construct, an artifact of scientific practice and language. This point also applies to the investigation of past events by historians and to the description of social institutions, structures, or practices by social scientists.

              Postmodern philosophy denies naive realism, and with good reason. The fact that reality is socially constructed is a generally accepted truth in sociology and psychology. No serious scientist in the 21st century denies it.

              https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naïve_realism_(psychology)

              In social psychology, naïve realism is the human tendency to believe that we see the world around us objectively, and that people who disagree with us must be uninformed, irrational, or biased.

              Several prominent social psychologists have studied naïve realism experimentally, including Lee Ross, Andrew Ward, Dale Griffin, Emily Pronin, Thomas Gilovich, Robert Robinson, and Dacher Keltner. In 2010, the Handbook of Social Psychology recognized naïve realism as one of “four hard-won insights about human perception, thinking, motivation and behavior that … represent important, indeed foundational, contributions of social psychology.”[5]

              Many philosophers claim that it is incompatible to accept naïve realism in the philosophy of perception and scientific realism in the philosophy of science. Scientific realism states that the universe contains just those properties that feature in a scientific description of it, which would mean that secondary qualities like color are not real per se, and that all that exists are certain wavelengths which are reflected by physical objects because of their microscopic surface texture.[19]

              • DragonTypeWyvern@midwest.social
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                5 days ago

                And many post-modernists reject scientific realism as well, choosing to believe we live in a void made up of pop-science understandings of the observer effect and other forms of mystical thought.

                • Genius@lemmy.zip
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                  5 days ago

                  I’m going to pretend you didn’t just build a strawman, and pretend you accurately described postmodernist beliefs, and tell you many scientists and epistemologists also believe what I’m pretending you described.

        • Genius@lemmy.zip
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          5 days ago

          The first feature of Ur-Fascism is the cult of tradition

          Traditionalism implies the rejection of modernism. Both Fascists and Nazis worshiped technology, while traditionalist thinkers usually reject it as a negation of traditional spiritual values. However, even though Nazism was proud of its industrial achievements, its praise of modernism was only the surface of an ideology based upon Blood and Earth (Blut und Boden). The rejection of the modern world was disguised as a rebuttal of the capitalistic way of life, but it mainly concerned the rejection of the Spirit of 1789 (and of 1776, of course). The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity. In this sense Ur-Fascism can be defined as irrationalism.

          No syncretistic faith can withstand analytical criticism. 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. For Ur-Fascism, disagreement is treason.

          Guess who said this:

          “Works of art which cannot be understood in themselves but need some pretentious instruction book to justify their existence will never again find their way to the German people.”

          • Gsus4@mander.xyz
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            5 days ago

            21st century fascism (ok, I’ll call it neofascism to distinguish it from historical fascism) incorporates postmodern elements to distract and divide, it adjusted to new media, internet and social media. TV and radio was one-to-many, so fascists just needed one narrative. Now they want you to get lost in the pretentious instruction book and bickering whether elon’s nazi salute was a nazi salute or not…

            Anyway, what I’m saying is I think Habermas’ approach to communication is very useful and Rorty’s pretty useless to making sense of the world. But you can probably combine them both by using different methodologies to try to come to a conclusion about the truth, instead of just saying “the truth does not exist” and agree to disagree.

              • Gsus4@mander.xyz
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                5 days ago

                Which sources do you want, like examples? You know the examples. Something happens that goes against their schizo editorial line: either they find another scandal to distract from it, or they find the one expert that can twist the story to make it look good (e.g. climate deniers, antivaxxers)? They may produce an artificial controversy to pretend that there is disagreement among them. Multiple contradictory narratives aimed at different subaudiences that disagree with each other and plain manufactured stories…but I don’t watch it that much.

                And since I don’t know who I’m talking to, there is no point in investing too much time into this. But if you read Habermas and Rorty, you could try to see what I mean…or not… :)

                • Genius@lemmy.zip
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                  5 days ago

                  Okay, now provide a source that, say, twisting news stories to look good is a part of postmodernist philosophy.

  • njm1314@lemmy.world
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    6 days ago

    Oh wow it looks like Columbia bowing to Trump’s every whim hasn’t protected it and it’s faculty from exploitation from the administration. Who would have thunk?

  • I_Has_A_Hat@lemmy.world
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    5 days ago

    Oh, so “fascism” is the word that will soon lose all meaning due to its overuse and attributing it to things that don’t actually fit its definition.

    • VasovagalSyncope@lemmy.world
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      5 days ago

      One of the propaganda strategies used by troll farms is to pretend like harmful ideologies are subjective.

      Since 2016 the people saying “too many people said the word Nazi so it’s not worth evaluating if someone is a nazi” were literal troll farm employees from Russia and China.

      • ZMonster@lemmy.world
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        5 days ago

        The significance of whether or not that is true pales in comparison to whether or not the argument is effective, because the argument is EXTREMELY effective and your “truth” affects nothing but your own ego. They will do and say anything they can to get you to call them a Nazi. Obviously you know nothing about Alex Jones.

    • Phoenicianpirate@lemm.ee
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      5 days ago

      Hey net fascist. The 2000s called, they want your ass back for the gangbang at the boy’s club. You know… the club were everyone is in the closet and all want to kill gay men but like ass gangbangs because they think it is proof of straightness or something…

      I don’t know, manosphere guys have been going so far that to say that sex with girls and even looking at female nudes is now gay…

    • SmilingSolaris@lemmy.world
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      5 days ago

      They are fascists who are creating fake science and stealing identities to do it in order to justify their fascist plans to do more fascism. Yeah, it’s fucking fascism

        • SmilingSolaris@lemmy.world
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          5 days ago

          Maybe it’s wider than where you would consider, however I would ask you why you are so willing to give fascists or people flirting with fascism a wide berth to do their fascism before you feel comfortable enough to call them on it.

          My definitions and goal posts are pretty well set. It’s not hard not to be called a fascist. Don’t do fascist shit. Ez

  • arf
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    5 days ago

    Anyone have any info on who the epidemiologist is or the fake paper?

  • Blackmist@feddit.uk
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    5 days ago

    Somebody uses the ChatGPT hallucination machine to write his speeches. I guarantee it.

    • DahGangalang@infosec.pub
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      5 days ago

      Found the paragraph for the lazy:

      Although Keyes doesn’t know where some of the percentages mentioned in the report came from, she says, she did recently publish a paper in the journal JAMA Network Open that came to roughly the same conclusions as what was in the text.

  • Lovable Sidekick@lemmy.world
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    5 days ago

    TBH for many of us the moment of horror was when we realized Trump was actually winning. That’s passed now, and everything he and his cronies have done since then has just been yep… yep… yep…

  • VasovagalSyncope@lemmy.world
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    5 days ago

    ITT: “people” pretending none of this happened,.or admitting it did happen and then trying to downplay the severity of government propaganda targeted at citizens.

    • DragonTypeWyvern@midwest.social
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      5 days ago

      Yeah they’ve got the vibe (The Party told you to reject the evidence etc) but the specific usage depends on you already being knowledgeable enough to know what the fuck they’re talking about.