Reply #99: Thanks for one of the few substantive arguments I've received. [View All]

[Donald Ian Rankin]

Your rebuttals to 2,3,5 and 13 - that "it's not as bad in America as most places" doesn't mean "it doesn't exist in America", if I understand you correctly - is logical as far as it goes, but the problem with it is that if you take those as beign signs of fascism in America then you're implicitly committing yourself to the claim that most countries in the world are fascist, one I suspect very few people are willing to make and one I think is certainly false.

Out of curiosity, what do you mean by "cultural relativism"?

We seem to be pretty much in agreement on 4 and 9, and not to have much to discuss about 6.


As to (1), while the government has certainly made many attempts to identify itself with the nation, and that is a tactic used by (although not only by) many fascists, it hasn't succeeded.

As to (7), while I agree that the HSA and the Patriot Act are bad things, they're *far* less sweeping than e.g. the powers of the Gestapo under Hitler.


On (8), you say "How about those "power sunday" meetings held in mega churches nationwide earlier this year, attended via teleconference, by such prominent politicians like Bill Frist and General Boykin." - those are politicians trying to convince voters that they share their religious views, not politicians trying to convince people to change their religious views, so far as I know - again, it's government pandering to religion and not vice versa.


With regards to your point on the power of labour in the US, (10) - I would point you towards all the furore over offshoring, which is happening precisely because America's labourers are able to demand better working conditions that pretty much anywhere outside the West and the Far East.



I suspect that the reason universities are regarded as liberal-dominated (11) is because, at least in the UK, they are - I'm currently a PhD student, and the people I've met through universities are considerably more liberal on average than a cross-section of the British population. Even many (although not all) of those people I've seen attacking "liberal bias in universities", though, still seem to phrase their attacks in ways that suggest that they value the universities and want to conservatise rather than destroy them, though.



Your response to (12) - "the US is one of the last western nations to gleefuly hold onto the idea of capital punishment" is interesting. Why are you comparing only against Western nations? See also my initial comment.



On (14) you say "Sort of fraudulent is like being sort of pregnant".

I disagree. There are more and less legitimate tactics: purging the roles of voters in uneven fashions, checking up more on some people's paperwork than others, the positions, opening and closing of polling booths, media management, the timing of the election, allowing or denying recounts, publicising the election more in some areas than others, and so forth can all influence the result of an election in ways that aren't technically illegal, but are clearly cheating (or they can do so in outright illegal fashions). It is pretty much inevitable in a nationwide election than some people in some places will do some dubious things. So fraudulent is definately analogue, unlike pregnancy which is binary.