Just seen this wonderfully timely video by Shawn Grenier (aka "The Canvas") and it made me giggle at how many pearl-clutching, brain-melted liberals have taken to the comments to howl about "bad taste". Along with actual nazis threatening vengeance. It absolutely mashes my head how liberals and other self-claimed "moderate" "centrists" persist in finding equivalence between the Left and Right, even to the extent of misrepresenting what Shawn is saying in the video regarding "not celebrating, but not mourning either". I'm afraid Liberalism, as an ideology, is just not up to the task of handling either the complexities of reality, or more pertinently, understanding the nature of fascism and the mechanics of how it works, or the threat it represents. The fact that Trump's first instinct was to start throwing absurd accusations at the Democrats demonstrates that fascists don't give a shit about truth or principles or decency or any of that: all they care about is "what is expedient in the pursuit of power?" Fascism is fundamentally an anti-Enlightenment, anti-rationalist, anti-democratic idea, and somehow liberals remain wilfully blind to this.
Fuck, I am tired.
The following is something loosely relevant that I posted elsewhere nearly 5 years ago.
Y'knarr, the trouble with liberalism is that it puts individuals in bubbles, devoid of any social context and proceeds from there. So the liberal conception of free speech, for example, runs like: all people are inherently intelligent and rational so if we allow all speech in a free market of ideas, then, all else being equal, the truth will inevitably emerge and consensus will form around the best ideas... all while blithely ignoring the fact that in a liberal capitalist society, all things are not equal. It's assuming that free speech occurs only between individuals and that these individuals have the same access to facts and study resources. It's ignoring the fact that inequality of wealth equals inequality of power, and that the rich can amplify their viewpoint through mass media and marketing. It also ignores the fact that the rich can exert political control over social institutions like schools, and ownership over forums for debate, whether it's social media or pseudo-public physical spaces like Market Square in town. Consequently, the truth won't always out: not when virtually the whole of the press are willfully spewing lies and propaganda. Nor will the best ideas necessarily win out: not if they conflict with the interests of the rich and powerful. However intelligent and rational people inherently are (and that's another topic for another day), they are massively, even fatally, impeded by the difficulties of having to constantly sift through endless tides of bullshit, just trying to establish even one fact. It may or may not be ironic that the capitalist free market actually makes the free market of ideas an impossibility.