Elections in various countries

[rotting bones]

This is what I mean by "hyperbolic statements" -- you could simply state what the center has been doing for what it is, but instead you make a statement that sounds like it has more impact (because obviously to be "to the right of Hitler" must be the worst thing ever, amirite?) but which actually weakens your argument (because it is hard to state that simply sending Israel arms, in the case of the Democrats, trying to suppress demonstrations against Israel, and making statements in support of Israel, as bad as they are, are worse than directly setting up networks of concentration camps and death camps and using them for mass extermination and enslavement on an industrial scale, carrying out mass executions with mobile killing units, carrying out mass euthanasia of disabled people, carrying out large-scale medical experimentation, etc. etc. etc.).

The IDF has targeted journalists and intellectuals. Their snipers are targeting children. They have conducted mass arrests of civilians without charge many times, recently in the West Bank, torturing and raping them. Israel is getting into fights with multiple neighboring countries. I don't know how much detail you want me to go into. I am not a historian and I have to work in a full time job. If only history bloggers are allowed to complain about genocide, this gatekeeping attitude makes you worse than Hitler all by itself.

Aiding and abetting this DESPITE ALL THIS BEING KNOWN AND DOCUMENTED, shaming politicians for not condoning it, cracking down on protesters, sending weapons so that can be carried out and creating an environment where all protest is silenced, is worse than Hitler because the Nazis tried to play down the fact that they were mass murdering thugs, whereas the crimes of the IDF have been publicized by themselves. They have been celebrating their war crimes on social media. The political center in the 21st century has no shame.

Also, this is not just the IDF. The Islamist celebration of violence against Jews is farther to the right of that, landing them in eldritch abomination territory. The reason I'm complaining about the IDF is that mainstream centrist politics is on board with it.

[zompist]

The reason I'm complaining about the IDF is that mainstream centrist politics is on board with it.

It's not. Americans' support for Israel's war has declined from 42% to 32% in the last year. Among Democrats, it's 8%. Among independents, 25%.

This chart shows that around the world, the center has an overwhelmingly negative view of Israel (over 60% except in Canada). In many countries even the right is negative.

US leaders are way behind their voters, but even that is changing.

[rotting bones]

It's not. Americans' support for Israel's war has declined from 42% to 32% in the last year. Among Democrats, it's 8%. Among independents, 25%.

This chart shows that around the world, the center has an overwhelmingly negative view of Israel (over 60% except in Canada). In many countries even the right is negative.

US leaders are way behind their voters, but even that is changing.

By centrist politics, I mean centrist politicians, who are always out of step with the voters. I would be pleasantly surprised if they can overcome systemic forces and bring themselves to condemn genocide. I'll believe it when I see it. I will try to convince people to vote for these Hitlers regardless.

[Travis B.]

This is what I mean by "hyperbolic statements" -- you could simply state what the center has been doing for what it is, but instead you make a statement that sounds like it has more impact (because obviously to be "to the right of Hitler" must be the worst thing ever, amirite?) but which actually weakens your argument (because it is hard to state that simply sending Israel arms, in the case of the Democrats, trying to suppress demonstrations against Israel, and making statements in support of Israel, as bad as they are, are worse than directly setting up networks of concentration camps and death camps and using them for mass extermination and enslavement on an industrial scale, carrying out mass executions with mobile killing units, carrying out mass euthanasia of disabled people, carrying out large-scale medical experimentation, etc. etc. etc.).

The IDF has targeted journalists and intellectuals. Their snipers are targeting children. They have conducted mass arrests of civilians without charge many times, recently in the West Bank, torturing and raping them. Israel is getting into fights with multiple neighboring countries. I don't know how much detail you want me to go into. I am not a historian and I have to work in a full time job. If only history bloggers are allowed to complain about genocide, this gatekeeping attitude makes you worse than Hitler all by itself.

Aiding and abetting this DESPITE ALL THIS BEING KNOWN AND DOCUMENTED, shaming politicians for not condoning it, cracking down on protesters, sending weapons so that can be carried out and creating an environment where all protest is silenced, is worse than Hitler because the Nazis tried to play down the fact that they were mass murdering thugs, whereas the crimes of the IDF have been publicized by themselves. They have been celebrating their war crimes on social media. The political center in the 21st century has no shame.

Also, this is not just the IDF. The Islamist celebration of violence against Jews is farther to the right of that, landing them in eldritch abomination territory. The reason I'm complaining about the IDF is that mainstream centrist politics is on board with it.

I am not denying Israel's many crimes here. Rather, I am questioning the idea that the fact that mainstream centrist politicians (not the génocidaires themselves) have largely not publicly turned against Israel makes them "to the right of Hitler". Yes, the Nazis did play down the fact that they were génocidaires, but that makes them no less right wing, so that is a very high bar to compare mainstream centrist politicians against.

Also, making this comparison significantly dilutes the significance of what the Nazis did, as if mainstream centrist politicians today are "to the right of Hitler", so are many other people. In the end, if anyone can be "to the right of Hitler", the Nazis become less significant as an evil as a result.

[WeepingElf]

rotting bones is a troll. I whole-heartedly concur with Travis's post.

[alice]

I'd also like to point out, humbly, that calling someone "a Hitler" is not usually helpful.

[WeepingElf]

For similar reasons, I avoid calling today's far rightists "Nazis". That relativizes the atrocities of the actual Nazis, which are unparalleled in history.

[Travis B.]

For similar reasons, I avoid calling today's far rightists "Nazis". That relativizes the atrocities of the actual Nazis, which are unparalleled in history.

I prefer to limit comparisons with the Nazis to people like the Khmer Rouge myself. (I am even hesitant to compare the many crimes of Stalinism and Maoism* to those of the Nazis, as the Stalinists and Maoists weren't single-mindedly bent on extermination**; even the Holomodor can be argued to be more a case of horrific mismanagement than planned genocide.)

* You could argue that the Khmer Rouge were Maoists, but they went far beyond anything other Maoists did such that no parallel can be made; while the Great Leap Forward had a higher overall body count, extermination was not its goal.

** The key thing to remember is that the Nazis placed the extermination of the Jews as a people over military victory, such that they made decisions that favored genocide over survival as a state.

[Raphael]

For similar reasons, I avoid calling today's far rightists "Nazis". That relativizes the atrocities of the actual Nazis, which are unparalleled in history.

Disagree. Completely.

First of all, the atrocities of the Nazis weren't completely unparalleled. If you count the entire history of European colonialism as one big event, then that event was worse than the crimes of the Nazis. If you split it into a lot of smaller events, some of them are still serious competitors with Nazism in terms of sheer horribleness. Before that, there was the founding and expansion of the Mongolian Empire, which involved atrocities of an incredibly massive scale, too, and was, not coincidentally, apparently admired by Hitler himself.

Second, even if you assume that the crimes of the Nazis were unparalleled, why would that be any reason to be less harsh when talking about people who admire those crimes and would love to repeat them? If someone thinks Hitler was great, and we need someone like that again, then refusing to call that person a Nazi is, frankly, Verharmlosung.

If someone proudly calls themselves a Nazi, why would you refuse to call them a Nazi?

If someone, like many far right types today, takes a stance of, "Well, technically, you can't prove that I'm a Nazi, na na, na na na, nudge nudge, wink wink", then why on Earth would you refuse to call them a Nazi? In that case, you're arguably doing their bidding by refusing to call them a Nazi.

If someone gleefully posts gas chamber memes on social media, why would you refuse to call them a Nazi?

Because these people haven't killed many millions of people yet? Well, many of them are still quite young, and likely to have a lot of time left in their lives. Besides, by that standard, the Nazis of 1932 wouldn't really have been Nazis either, because at that point, they hadn't committed unparalleled or near-unparalleled atrocities yet either. By your standard, Hitler himself, on the day before he became Chancellor, wasn't yet a Nazi.

Finally, if nothing else was or is like the mid-20th century Nazis, then we can't really draw any lessons from remembering their history, because any lessons we could draw couldn't possibly apply to anyone else. The statement "Nazis are very bad, and we should fight them as much as we can" becomes almost meaningless if you, at the same time, assert that no one alive today under the age of 90 could possibly be a Nazi.

It's all a bit as if you would come up with very convincing reasons why a specific person who keeps churning out pamphlets, columns, and blog posts with titles like Why Conservatism Is The Only Political Position That Makes Sense shouldn't be called a "conservative".

[Travis B.]

What is unique about the Nazi Holocaust is not the scale of the killing, as there have been other instances of mass murder in history that rival it in the numbers killed and/or the percentage of the target group murdered, but rather the level of systematic industrialization of mass murder. This is what makes it special out of all of history.

[MacAnDàil]

I don't think that horseshoe theory really equates the far left and the far right. If it did that, it would have to be called ring theory. The idea is that the far left and the far right are in some ways closer to each other than some might think at first, not that they're the same.

Wikipedia says: "Proponents of horseshoe theory argue that the far-left and the far-right are closer to each other than either is to the political center." That's close enough, right?

I don't think horseshoe theory usually applies, at least not in a late-20th C/early 21-C Western democracy. In France specifically, what is happening though is that LFI is deliberately trying to be as bad as the far-right.

Whether David Guiraud for example are as bad as the far-right, I might consider but the intention, even when wrong, is to defend against genocide and be the "real" left-wing when the others are supposedly weaksauce or "traitors".

I don't know details about Melenchon, but I agree that leftist parties should do more to eject Islamist and Arab nationalist infiltrators. As for what you say about the lack of internal democracy, the same thing applies to the Democratic Party in the US.

Right wingers see Islamism inflitration in LFI but I don't agree with them. There's very little evidence of it, if at all.
As for the Democrats... no. At least there are different tendancies with the Democratic Party; there are primary elections; at least they keep up appearances. Not so with LFI which is purely a vehicle for Mélenchon's ambitions.

I disagree because Mélenchon is neither elected official nor candidate nor party leader at the moment. Even assuming LFI was solely for its former leader's ambitions, it stopped be such three years ago.

What does it matter when today's political center is to the right of Hitler?

That's complete nonsense, and I think you're smart enough to realize that.
If you think about it for a second, I think you'll find it self-evident that it's better to deal with Starmer, Macron or the Democrats than with, say, Narendra Modi.

Indeed.

[MacAnDàil]

Right wingers see Islamism inflitration in LFI but I don't agree with them. There's very little evidence of it, if at all.

I don't know about parties, but I have seen videos of these people at pro-Palestine protests (assuming they weren't all provocateurs).

People generally go to Palestine marches because they are opposed to the Likud government killing innocent men, women and children. Most are not even Muslim, let alone Islamist.

[MacAnDàil]

It's about the failure modes of values-driven organizations, and free software projects, activist groups, and churches all provide good examples of values-driven organizations.

That's where I have to disagree I feel that software projects are not value-driven; certainly not in the way an activist group is. And I'd argue a church is yet different.

A software project aim is to produce code that solves some kind of practical problem. The aim of the Linux kernel project is to provide a state of the art OS kernel a computer can run without noticeable bugs. Extinction Rebellion aims to affect political change towards limiting climate change. A church aims at the supernatural salvation of its members. All three are very different things!

Software projects don't have to be values-driven, but there are those who want them to be, particularly those with an activist mindset. The kind of failure modes discussed in this piece are why they shouldn't be values-driven, and why those who want them to be should be kept out no matter how good their intentions. (This is a big part of why I oppose CoC's and those who push them.)

That is not what the articles argues for. It makes clear at the end that values-based organisations are useful and preferable to the alternative. They should just better build in safeguards to prevent the potential failure modes before they occur.

[MacAnDàil]

@rotting bones: I can't make sense of what you're saying.
Or rather, I hope I can't understand it, and I hope you don't fully realize the full implications.

I'm saying people should vote center-left because populists like Trump and Modi will probably torture us for years and years instead of killing us outright. Low reading comprehension sure takes the fun out of suicidal ideation.

I understand similarly to Ares Land. Is it more likely that two people misunderstood a third due to low reading comprehension or unclear expression?

Despite all this, people should vote for the center-left. Hitlers like you, which almost everyone is these days, are still better than Cthulhu.

This takes the Godwin way too far.

edit: I realised on rereading that I had misattribued this accidentally.

[WeepingElf]

PLEASE leave Hitler out of the game, and do not pluralize that name, either. So far, we have no evidence that any of the far-right parties we are worried about intends to commit comparable atrocities - though what they appear to be planning is horrible enough. And PLEASE don't compare any centrists or moderate-right politicians to Hitler at all. It is not really appropriate to compare Trump, Farage or Le Pen to Hitler (I'd even avoid comparing Putin, though he gets closer than the others), it is even more inappropriate to compare centrists or centre-rightists to Hitler. The centrists may be partly responsible for the rise of the far right by making bad policies, but they have no intent to help the far right.

[Raphael]

Whether David Guiraud for example are as bad as the far-right, I might consider but the intention, even when wrong, is to defend against genocide and be the "real" left-wing when the others are supposedly weaksauce or "traitors".

I'd say that a bit contradictory, because if your idea of fighting against genocide involves seeing the vast majority of people as irredeemably evil for being insufficiently opposed to genocide, then you would have a perfect ready-made justification and motivation to commit a genocide yourself if you should ever get the power to do so.

As for the "traitors" part, well, where do I even start? Accusations of "treason" are one of the favorite pastimes of dictators, wannabe dictators, and their supporters. So when I see people getting called "traitors", my first instinct is usually to side with them.

[Raphael]

PLEASE leave Hitler out of the game, and do not pluralize that name, either. So far, we have no evidence that any of the far-right parties we are worried about intends to commit comparable atrocities

You mean, aside from pretty much everything they say? And from the fact that they themselves clearly see themselves as in the tradition of the original movement that did commit those atrocities?

These people are planning to murder me. Not to mention, to destroy everything I believe in and hold dear. I'm not interested in complying with requests to hold back from calling them what they are. No matter how polite these requests are phrased.

[Raphael]

Somewhat belated:

Now on to something lighter:

Over on Mastodon, zompist boosted a post linking to this piece: https://kennethreitz.org/essays/2025-08 ... heir-young

If we want to talk about that piece, I'd say this thread would be the best place on the ZBB to do this.

I myself mostly agree with the piece, although I think it would have been better without the *shudder* Hayek quote.

But to be blunt, zompist, I'm positively surprised that you boosted a link to that piece. I had long suspected you of being at least partly in favor of the things the piece criticizes.

One thing that strikes me is that it treats, in the same breath, very different institutions: free software, activism, churches. What sort of conclusions could you draw from this? Except very broad ones that apply to any group of people?

Or, to put it another way, tech projects and free software are important; but maybe not that important in the great scheme of things.

Well, the specific software projects the author is talking about seem to have some political values, even if that's unusual among software projects in general. Churches often have the one or other kind of political values, too, especially among the various varieties of North American Protestantism.

As for tech projects not being that important in the larger scheme of things, I guess the author talks so much about them because that's where his own background is.

[MacAnDàil]

Whether David Guiraud for example are as bad as the far-right, I might consider but the intention, even when wrong, is to defend against genocide and be the "real" left-wing when the others are supposedly weaksauce or "traitors".

I'd say that a bit contradictory, because if your idea of fighting against genocide involves seeing the vast majority of people as irredeemably evil for being insufficiently opposed to genocide, then you would have a perfect ready-made justification and motivation to commit a genocide yourself if you should ever get the power to do so.

As for the "traitors" part, well, where do I even start? Accusations of "treason" are one of the favorite pastimes of dictators, wannabe dictators, and their supporters. So when I see people getting called "traitors", my first instinct is usually to side with them.

OK, I disagree with the traitors part myself. However, what do you mean by the first part?

[WeepingElf]

PLEASE leave Hitler out of the game, and do not pluralize that name, either. So far, we have no evidence that any of the far-right parties we are worried about intends to commit comparable atrocities

You mean, aside from pretty much everything they say? And from the fact that they themselves clearly see themselves as in the tradition of the original movement that did commit those atrocities?

These people are planning to murder me. Not to mention, to destroy everything I believe in and hold dear. I'm not interested in complying with requests to hold back from calling them what they are. No matter how polite these requests are phrased.

I understand what you mean. They indeed want to destroy pretty much everything I believe in and hold dear, too. In a fascist state, I'd be helpless and left to die. Still, I'd be careful with Hitler's name in a discussion like this, and it is definitely inappropriate to liken politicians that aren't even far rightists to Hitler. Faced with a choice between centrists and far rightists, I'd choose centrists, no question.