Someone in Scott Alexander's Community is really Doing The Work

For those of you who aren't familiar, Scott Alexander is the idiot who wrote "You Are Still Calling Wolf," platformed a neo-reactionary computer programmer who admitted he was unqualified,

and became a guiding star in the wrong direction for people who suffer from Woke Derangement Syndrome.

His community hosts "Book Review" where audience members can submit written reviews of relevant source material and this struggle session is a real one.

What you have to understand about these people is:

They're largely SFBA Rationalist cult, and it matters, unfortunately: they're the slow class that believes they're the advanced class.

Their politics has these flaws: 1) respectability politics with a grievance, the under-educated aware of their lack of education and still secretly afraid it discredits them because they likely know it should, somewhere. 2) the mensa effect, intellect as a virtue.

1. A propensity to "platform the lizardman constant." There is no obligation to platform the lizardman constant. But these people are stuck in an uncomfortable space where any lizardman constant belief lampshading the most recent Trumpian authoritarian gesture was immediately seized upon and updooted.

If you're going to have a free market of ideas? Better make sure it's a well regulated market, not one with captive regulation that platforms fascists and racists.

And finally, 4) An obtuse reluctance to engage with ideas of context and nuance in favor of ideological explanations faulting individual transgressions in the standard neoliberal cogitation of violence is bad mmk? A preference for politics to be thought of as a list of rules for proper do-good thinkerinos to accomplish and follow. They're authoritarians because the state grants them the authority of intellect and they're dumb enough to fall for it. That's why they're so obsessed with g.

Consequentialist matters of reputational damage being wholly deserved are left as an exercise for the reader.

You remember Godwin's law and the fact you live in a culture afflicted with Nazi apophenia. You start to question whether the incontrovertible Hitleriness of the action in question is so incontrovertible after all. But how do you decide when an invocation of the 20th Century's most famous villain is an unhelpful exaggeration and when is it a prescient warning?

The clearest thing to do is slap these people in the face. The Nazi apophenia stopped being apophenia in 2016 and people who aren't easily led morons could tell back then. This person is trying to lead the easily led morons back to political sanity and it's a long trek from where Scott Alexander ended up.

And if we say “Watch out: this is exactly how Hitler came to power!” once a week, eventually no one will even bother turning their head to look.

This is regurgitating the party line in Scott Alexander's space: it's always a problem of the people who disagree with the "How can we know if it's fascism???" types.

At last, the Nazi Party was entirely within Hitler's control.

The author is relying too much on subtext here, and easily led morons don't believe in subtext so I'll spell it out for you: the Republican Party is more or less in Trump's control if 70% of Republicans believe Trump that Trump is the correct president. As in we are actually in a "Two Popes" situation de facto. There are two "official" records being written.

Then he took Kahr, Lossow, and Seisser into an adjoining room and tried, by means of waving his pistol and speechifying, to convince them to join in a revolt against the Berlin government. They refused. Undeterred, Hitler went back into the main hall and announced the triumvirs had agreed to back him.

They lie.

The Nazis targeted propaganda specifically at the army,

Thus the interest when the Navy Seals are said to be compromised by Trump supporters. Are you listening yet, Scott? Are you listening to the people who have called wolf? I know this is a rough one but you done goofed with "You Are Still Calling Wolf," you done goofed when you sought a neo-reactionary audience, and now you're watching your last chance to redeem your community in the eyes of the literate slip away.

I have to hand it to you, someone's putting a lot of work in to steer you.

In addition to this, the public really believed there was an actual communist threat.

Brilliant. Fantastic work.

The Social Democrats and the Communists both opposed the measure, but with all the Communists and a number of the Social Democrats having been arrested in preparation for the vote (courtesy of the Reichstag Fire Decree), the remaining representatives did not have enough votes to prevent Hitler's coalition from obtaining a two-thirds majority.

This is why you have to pay attention to what the foot soldiers disrupt, which is why comparisons to BLM, a protest about the actual illegitimacy of the police stations, are tepid and poorly formed.

Swastika-loving internet trolls, however offensive, are not about to usher in a reign of terror.

A terrible mistake in an otherwise good digest. Why? The whole point of the biography you are engaging in is to show that a swastika-loving neet just bludgeoned his way into power. Even the fact that you're playing to an audience that wants to minimize the threat of swastika-loving internet trolls does not excuse this grave error, some accommodations to rhetoric must simply not be made.

The most dangerous threats to liberalism freely admit that they are enemies of liberal democracy.

Cite: all of the Trumpian authoritarian gestures. Trump freely admitted that he was an enemy of liberal democracy, Scott Alexander just wasn't paying attention to them because of Scott Alexander's Woke Derangement Syndrome.

He came openly, stating what he intended to do. His followers wanted him to do it. If you're looking for the genuine Hitlerian article, it's going to involve undisguised opposition to liberalism.

Another case of: it would be stronger to actually make the connection for Scott Alexander's insipid followers. An authoritarian movement composed at least in meaningful part of swastika-loving internet trolls with undisguised opposition to liberalism (Moldthug's flirtation with monarchism, Scott? You platformed him and that's why you're going down, as a writer, for your failure.)

Likewise, if you're on the left, you should be suspicious of the Black Lives Matter protests for the same reason.

Here it is, the horseshoe brain rot. The problem with this both sides idiocy is that it's a rhetorical tar pit in which you're stuck in an oppression olympics. It's easier to say that intelligent people should look at a police station burning down and think: the police must have failed at their job, and intelligent people should look at 1/6 and see a naked coup attempt. The problem with these logical shitheads is they're high on believing in a perfect social ruleset because they think that will save them. The idea that context matters is basically somewhere between inscrutable or indecipherable or blasphemous to the very way they relate to politics.

They build a second state.

The second state already exists. Another failure on the author's part. Arguably with assaults on power stations across the United States we're already in a Civil War. Whether or not we can avoid one depends a lot on whether or not the Republicans can smother Trump completely and they're showing every propensity for doubling down.

But I'll expand; I already alluded above to the existence of two "official" narratives. In a certain sense there are two presidents because there are two sets of beliefs about the president. You frickers fell hard for the postmodern construct of two movies on one screen and ended up in a multiplexed reality. One of the two screens is burning.

All it takes for a narrative of state to emerge is for a person to tell a story about how they're a descendant of the royal family out to reclaim the throne. It's like these frickers never opened a history book. Bless them for they're finding their way through the literature they need to find but it's a bit like... how do you tell the slow class that they're the slow class if they think they're advanced lurners instead of pseudo-intellectuals largely placed in Dunce Containment Fields until they can finish processing the 1/6 plot update which by the way that was three years ago and they're still spinning on it! I swear to God nothing I could ever dream up would be this funny.

But the reason why 538 listed election denialism on the 2022 election cycle was that's very specificially the marker of the fascist movement on US soil that has been here for 7 years. Scott. Are you ready to pull the fire alarm yet? You've been looking at the smoke all this time, going "but what if the smoke is coming from a candle?"

1/6:

A man summons a mob with a state narrative in which the mob chants: "Fight For Trump" and Trump says: "Thank you." That's it. That's all you need to know to understand whether or not Trump is guilty of treason regardless of what courts say. There's pieces on the map disrupting poltiics so that Trump can gain power. What about this isn't fascism? (Mao was merely authoritarian because Mao didn't need to lie.)

(If you ever wondered why Donald Trump was less revolutionary (for good or for ill) than many people expected him to be, this is why. He didn't have an organized movement ready to take the tiller of state and strike out in a bold new direction, and so he wound up doing a lot of things in surprisingly business-as-usual ways. To radically overthrow institutions from within, you need to do better.)

This is all sorts of deeply, badly stupid. Only an idiot thought Trump was revolutionary in any sense, and by that I don't mean that he wouldn't lead a "revolution" or call it a "revolution" but it's just a coup in which the existing state is placed at his dictatorial hands. If you thought Trump really would drain the swamp instead of demand complete fealty from it then you aren't paying attention to the times he just demanded fealty from e.g. Comey. These were the kinds of events that informed observers saw and went this is truly down the authoritarian path. But whatever, Scott Alexander, link TPO on your blog.

Bonus: if you click through to Scott Alexander's Erdogan article you can see Scott come right up to the edge of recognizing similarities in Erdogan's corruption to the events which got Trump impeached the first time. Completely broken thinking can't help but get obvious facts right eventually.