I disagree. This is a corporation being authoritarian in deciding what is acceptable or unacceptable social behaviour. And an implementation of the proposed policy has financial consequences / penalties or actual fines as would a government entity.
Well, for an 'authoritarian company' as you put it, they sure took down the policy in a big hurry. No innocent civilians were hurt in the process.
But frankly kurt, compared to the human rights abuses committed by stalwart US allies such as Egypt and Morocco, this PayPal incident is hardly worth discussing.
I disagree. This is a corporation being authoritarian in deciding what is acceptable or unacceptable social behaviour. And an implementation of the proposed policy has financial consequences / penalties or actual fines as would a government entity.
Don't use them. it's not authoritarian, it's the free market.
it's amazing how the small-government, no-regulation folks want to tell private companies how they should act about ... wait for it... lying and dishonest behavior. I guess when you follow a liar, honesty and responsibility become liabilities.
kurt: This is not corporate fascism. Corporate fascism is more akin to the elbows up Neo-Mercantilism practiced by both President Trump and President Biden. But otherwise, I agree with your sentiment. Misinformation and lying are key components of American culture. Consumers should not be punished for just being 'American'.
I disagree. This is a corporation being authoritarian in deciding what is acceptable or unacceptable social behaviour. And an implementation of the proposed policy has financial consequences / penalties or actual fines as would a government entity.
Corporate fascism is more akin to the elbows up Neo-Mercantilism practiced by both President Trump and President Biden.
But otherwise, I agree with your sentiment. Misinformation and lying are key components of American culture. Consumers should not be punished for just being 'American'.
This seems like the right place to post this example of attempted corporate fascism.
Found this over at Discogs where we are all forced to use Pay Pal for all transactions conducted on the site. The comments section is also interesting as well.
Fascists In Our Midst - Chris Hedges Supreme Court rulings, including the overturning of Roe v. Wade, herald the ascendancy of Christian fascism in the United States.
I didn't mean to do that in the least. In no way do I mean to exonerate the people who voted for him or who later aided and abetted the war and holocaust. Hitler appears to have been a very sick person, yet enough Germans voted for him. But not the majority. And certainly not all Germans. You don't need a consensus for a country to go off the rails and lose its moral compass. This is the very lesson that history teaches us but often gets overlooked, particularly when Germany and Germans as a whole are painted black. IMO that is a dangerous over-simplification and misses the point - it really could happen anywhere, given the right conditions. Someone lets the dogs out and the passive majority don't have the balls to take a stand against it, or tacitly, through their inaction, approve it. And those few courageous individuals that do protest get eliminated. It is a smaller step into collective madness than most people realize.
I didn't mean to do that in the least. In no way do I mean to exonerate the people who voted for him or who later aided and abetted the war and holocaust. Hitler appears to have been a very sick person, yet enough Germans voted for him. But not the majority. And certainly not all Germans. You don't need a consensus for a country to go off the rails and lose its moral compass. This is the very lesson that history teaches us but often gets overlooked, particularly when Germany and Germans as a whole are painted black. IMO that is a dangerous over-simplification and misses the point - it really could happen anywhere, given the right conditions. Someone lets the dogs out and the passive majority don't have the balls to take a stand against it, or tacitly, through their inaction, approve it. And those few courageous individuals that do protest get eliminated. It is a smaller step into collective madness than most people realize.
The bottom line (that it could happen anywhere) is dead on, and our history proves it. We didn't slaughter our Japanese-American population but we took al the steps necessary to make it possible. We did slaughter our native population, both to broad public approval.
Fortunately the vast majority of both countries are ashamed of those actions in the past, but the re-emergence of populism in both places is horrifying. Both countries should know better.
Prior to the rise of German fascism, Germany was defeated in WW I and then humiliated in the Treaty of Versailles. Nothing similar has occurred in regards to the USA.
Trumpism will not lead to fascism. But it appears to have accelerated the decline of US hegemony. As a result, the USA will be less powerful and less wealthy. It will have lost some ability to diplomatically influence global events in a cost-effective manner.
Worst yet, Americans will have earned a reputation for speaking with a forked tongue and unilaterally ripping up international agreements.
Worst of all, more and more people will wonder if Americans truly believe in rules-based freemarket capitalism and will wonder if all that freemarket rhetoric in recent decades has been nothing but a smoke-screen. Proof in the pudding? Cuba.
I also don't think the US will go down that road. But the old consensus of playing by the (sometimes unspoken) rules between the two main parties has well and truly been trodden in the dirt, which I find dangerous. There now appears to be a lot more distrust and suspicion between sides and little sign of a willingness to cooperate. Re Germany and WWI... very true. But I don't think the roots of fascism necessarily lie in a real grievance. A perceived grievance can suffice, even when entirely concocted.
I think you should read up on your history of the Weimar Republic. Back then most people were shit scared of socialism (Bolshevism to be more precise) as you seem to be now and industrial interests were happier with the idea of supporting the National Socialists than running the risk of a communist revolution (which btw came damn close to succeeding in Germany) . Also try to put yourselves in the shoes of someone in the early 1930s before the Holocaust had happened. A helluva of a lot of moderate German's supported the National Socialists under the mistaken impression that the extreme rhetoric wasn't really meant that way. And then when people started getting carted off on trains the truth was so appalling they turned a collective blind eye to it in a case of mass psychological dissonance. Very few individuals saw what was really happening and those that dared to protest got eliminated.
Sadly, it is a small step from the empty rhetoric to the appalling reality. I don't think any country is immune to this risk. Not one single one.
While your history is mostly on the mark you are giving the German populace too much of a pass on antisemitism. The Nazi scapegoating didn't come from thin air, they tapped into a deep well of racist sentiment. After the war, when the extent of the atrocities was clear most Germans would say they didn't know what was going onâstate control of the media saw to that. But the machinery of mass extermination brushed up against ordinary people in countless ways. The ignorance was willful, and had they known most Germans would have approved.
I didn't mean to do that in the least. In no way do I mean to exonerate the people who voted for him or who later aided and abetted the war and holocaust. Hitler appears to have been a very sick person, yet enough Germans voted for him. But not the majority. And certainly not all Germans. You don't need a consensus for a country to go off the rails and lose its moral compass. This is the very lesson that history teaches us but often gets overlooked, particularly when Germany and Germans as a whole are painted black. IMO that is a dangerous over-simplification and misses the point - it really could happen anywhere, given the right conditions. Someone lets the dogs out and the passive majority don't have the balls to take a stand against it, or tacitly, through their inaction, approve it. And those few courageous individuals that do protest get eliminated. It is a smaller step into collective madness than most people realize.
Prior to the rise of German fascism, Germany was defeated in WW I and then humiliated in the Treaty of Versailles. Nothing similar has occurred in regards to the USA.
Trumpism will not lead to fascism. But it appears to have accelerated the decline of US hegemony. As a result, the USA will be less powerful and less wealthy. It will have lost some ability to diplomatically influence global events in a cost-effective manner.
Worst yet, Americans will have earned a reputation for speaking with a forked tongue and unilaterally ripping up international agreements.
Worst of all, more and more people will wonder if Americans truly believe in rules-based freemarket capitalism and will wonder if all that freemarket rhetoric in recent decades has been nothing but a smoke-screen. Proof in the pudding? Cuba.
I think you should read up on your history of the Weimar Republic. Back then most people were shit scared of socialism (Bolshevism to be more precise) as you seem to be now and industrial interests were happier with the idea of supporting the National Socialists than running the risk of a communist revolution (which btw came damn close to succeeding in Germany) . Also try to put yourselves in the shoes of someone in the early 1930s before the Holocaust had happened. A helluva of a lot of moderate German's supported the National Socialists under the mistaken impression that the extreme rhetoric wasn't really meant that way. And then when people started getting carted off on trains the truth was so appalling they turned a collective blind eye to it in a case of mass psychological dissonance. Very few individuals saw what was really happening and those that dared to protest got eliminated.
Sadly, it is a small step from the empty rhetoric to the appalling reality. I don't think any country is immune to this risk. Not one single one.
While your history is mostly on the mark you are giving the German populace too much of a pass on antisemitism. The Nazi scapegoating didn't come from thin air, they tapped into a deep well of racist sentiment. After the war, when the extent of the atrocities was clear most Germans would say they didn't know what was going on—state control of the media saw to that. But the machinery of mass extermination brushed up against ordinary people in countless ways. The ignorance was willful, and had they known most Germans would have approved.
I think you should read up on your history of the Weimar Republic. Back then most people were shit scared of socialism (Bolshevism to be more precise) as you seem to be now and industrial interests were happier with the idea of supporting the National Socialists than running the risk of a communist revolution (which btw came damn close to succeeding in Germany) . Also try to put yourselves in the shoes of someone in the early 1930s before the Holocaust had happened. A helluva of a lot of moderate German's supported the National Socialists under the mistaken impression that the extreme rhetoric wasn't really meant that way. And then when people started getting carted off on trains the truth was so appalling they turned a collective blind eye to it in a case of mass psychological dissonance. Very few individuals saw what was really happening and those that dared to protest got eliminated.
Sadly, it is a small step from the empty rhetoric to the appalling reality. I don't think any country is immune to this risk. Not one single one.
that article is a bit over the top however all of this sort of reminds me of a book i read long ago
The Ominous Parallels: The End of Freedom in America is a 1982 book by philosopher Leonard Peikoff, in which the author compares the culture of the United States with the culture of Germany leading up to the Nazis. Each of the philosophic principles essential to the rise of Nazism in Germany has a counterpart in present-day America.
Is the freest country on earth moving toward totalitarian dictatorship? What were the factors that enabled the Nazis to seize power in pre-war Germany? Do those same conditions exist in America today?
These are the questions raised — and answered, with frightening clarity — by Leonard Peikoff, Ayn Rand's intellectual heir, in his powerful book The Ominous Parallels.
"We are drifting to the future, not moving purposefully," Peikoff warns. "But we are drifting as Germany moved, in the same direction, for the same kind of reason."
Some of the "ominous parallels" between pre-Hitler Germany and the United States that Peikoff identifies are:
Liberals who demand public control over the use and disposal of private property — social security, more taxes, more government control over the energy industry, medicine, broadcasting, etc.
Conservatives who demand government control over our intellectual and moral life — prayer in the schools, literary censorship, government intervention in the teaching of biology, the anti-abortion movement, etc.
Political parties devoid of principles or direction and moved at random by pressure groups, each demanding still more controls.
A "progressive," anti-intellectual educational system that, from kindergarten to graduate school, creates students who can't read or write — students brainwashed into the feeling that their minds are helpless and they must adapt to "society," that there is no absolute truth and that morality is whatever society says it is.
A student radical movement (from the 1960's through the violent anti-nukers and ecology fanatics of today) who are, Peikoff maintains, the "pre-Hitler youth movement resurrected." The radicals are nature worshippers who attack the middle class, science, technology, and business.
The rise of defiant old-world racial hatreds disguised as "ethnic-identity" movements and "affirmative action."
A pervasive atmosphere of decadence, moral bankruptcy, and nihilist art accompanied by the rise of escapist mystic cults of every kind — astrology, "alternative medicine," Orientalists, extrasensory perception, etc.
In an introduction to Peikoff's book, Ayn Rand describes The Ominous Parallels as, "the first book by an Objectivist philosopher other than myself" and goes on to say that, "If you do not wish to be a victim of today's philosophical bankruptcy, I recommend The Ominous Parallels as protection and ammunition. It will protect you from supporting, unwittingly, the ideas that are destroying you and the world."
In brilliantly reasoned prose, Peikoff argues that the deepest roots of German Nazism lie not in existential crises, but in ideas — not in Germany's military defeat in World War I or the economic disasters of the Weimar Republic that followed, but in the philosophy that dominated pre-Nazi Germany. Although it was mediated by crises, Peikoff demonstrates that German Nazism was the inevitable climax of a centuries-long philosophic development, preaching three fundamental ideas: the worship of unreason, the demand for self-sacrifice and the elevation of society or the state above the individual.
"These ideas," Peikoff says, "are the essence of Nazism and they are exactly what our leading universities are now spreading throughout this country. This is the basic cause of all the other parallels."
Because it doesn't. Seriously don't we have enough rabid hyperbole already? Facism requires strong central control i.e. government, in 2019 American Facism will never be implemented through the personality of one person who is authoritarian in nature. Facism will occur at the behest of us through voting for those that preach for the increase of Government power under the guise of compassion, social justice and equality. In short in a modern day society, if we were to de evolve into outright Facism it will come under the banner of Socialism, but I don't even think that will happen till the resources dwindle, worldwide migration ramps up coming straight for us and population reaches dire levels when all of society will break down anyway. Odds are neither you or I will see the outcome of this debate, God willing.
I think you should read up on your history of the Weimar Republic. Back then most people were shit scared of socialism (Bolshevism to be more precise) as you seem to be now and industrial interests were happier with the idea of supporting the National Socialists than running the risk of a communist revolution (which btw came damn close to succeeding in Germany) . Also try to put yourselves in the shoes of someone in the early 1930s before the Holocaust had happened. A helluva of a lot of moderate German's supported the National Socialists under the mistaken impression that the extreme rhetoric wasn't really meant that way. And then when people started getting carted off on trains the truth was so appalling they turned a collective blind eye to it in a case of mass psychological dissonance. Very few individuals saw what was really happening and those that dared to protest got eliminated.
Sadly, it is a small step from the empty rhetoric to the appalling reality. I don't think any country is immune to this risk. Not one single one.
Because it doesn't. Seriously don't we have enough rabid hyperbole already? Facism requires strong central control i.e. government, in 2019 American Facism will never be implemented through the personality of one person who is authoritarian in nature. Facism will occur at the behest of us through voting for those that preach for the increase of Government power under the guise of compassion, social justice and equality. In short in a modern day society, if we were to de evolve into outright Facism it will come under the banner of Socialism, but I don't even think that will happen till the resources dwindle, worldwide migration ramps up coming straight for us and population reaches dire levels when all of society will break down anyway. Odds are neither you or I will see the outcome of this debate, God willing.
