Virtue signaling or desperate approval seeking?

Only way to be relevant. Grasping.

Let's ridicule her for this, too.

You wouldn't believe how many web pages come up when you do a Google search for "Zuckerberg + dissembling".

Racism's worth so much money, and at the root of much of it is one of the biggest lies in history.

Hah on "dissembling." Lying, that is.

Donna Zuckerberg, Mark Zuckerberg's sister, at "the New Eidolon." She bills herself as a "Silicon Valley-based Classics scholar. Editor of Eidolon": Classics as a discipline has deep roots in fascism and reactionary politics and white supremacy, and those ideologies exert a powerful gravitational pull on the discipline's practitioners. If we want to fight those forces, we need to actively work against them.

These uneducated doctorate-holding people know nothing about fascism. To them, everything with which they disagree is "fascism." Idiots.

This is the magazine she "edits." It's little more than a left-wing political manifesto dressed up as erudite scholarship and sprinkled with pop culture references in an effort to be hip.

In ancient Greece, an eidolon was "a spirit-image of a living or dead person; a shade or phantom look-alike of the human form." So, the magazine is a ghost or look-alike of a real magazine. The magazine is a little girl dressing up in her mother's heels and furs and pretending to be a sophisticated adult.

People like this remind me of 15 yr olds who have just discovered that the world is not all rainbows and unicorns and are really pissed. They think no one else realizes that people lie, that there is injustice, that planes crash, and that it is all just soooo unfair. So they are going to rebel against the adult world--not fix it, not find a way to make a good life in spite of the mess, just reject it. So you get self-important fake magazine editors and antifa, revolutionaries who only want to destroy, not build.

Classics as a discipline has deep roots in fascism and reactionary politics and white supremacy, and those ideologies exert a powerful gravitational pull on the discipline's practitioners. If we want to fight those forces, we need to actively work against them.

Leftists and progressives have a bad habit of labeling anything with which they disagree "fascist" without any knowledge of what fascism really is. Fascism is not simply a person or cultural phenomenon that you don't like.

Unfortunately, for an unbiased study of the effects of fascism, we only have 4-5 solid examples of fascist governments in history. At least two of which were infused with racism and committed such horrible atrocities as to darken the name of fascism forever.

1. Italy - Fascism (Mussolini)
   
2. Germany - Naziism (Hitler)
   
3. Japan - Showa emperor
   
4. Spain - Fallangism (Franco)
   
5. Argentina - Peronism (Peron)
   

Some have argued that Peronism is not fascism, despite its corporatist and authoritarian nature. However, because of its embrace of authoritarianism, collectivism, and corporatism, there is a good argument for its inclusion on the list.

Racism is not automatically a part of fascism. It is often included as a part of the nationalism that fascism embraces.

Some right-wing dictators have been called fascists, but their reigns lacked a cohesive political ideology - e.g., Pinochet was a dictator; he did not impose a new political or philosophical paradigm on Chile.

In all cases, fascist governments spoke the language of collectivism and national rebirth. In all cases, the imposition of one-party rule was unquestioned.

Mussolini used the fasces, an ancient Roman symbol of authority, as a symbol of unity and strength in numbers. That symbol is still in use today.

The Nazis promised a minimum wage, old age pensions, and unemployment insurance - along with law and order.

Peron and Mussolini used collectivism to appeal to the working classes.

Each person in a fascist society was expected to play his or her role in the advancement of the nation, subjugating their individual desire to achieve a greater collective benefit.

Fascism differed from the other collectivist political philosophies in vogue at that time in several ways:

• it embraced nationalism and eschewed internationalism
  
• it embraced traditional sex roles instead of sexual liberation
  
• it embraced private ownership of the means of production instead of collective ownership
  
• it emphasized the state over the people
  

The Japanese and Germans mixed racism and xenophobia with their fascist philosophies, holding their own races as superior to all others.

The Spanish and Italian fascists were less successful at generating widespread racial hatred and using it to propel the movement. The fractured nature of Spanish and Italian nationhood may have impeded a "master race" type philosophy from taking hold the way it did in Germany and Japan.

The American and British fascists were never more than fringe movements.

Does that mean fascism is a relatively harmless political philosophy?

No. Like socialism, it has destroyed or diminished every country in which it has prevailed, leaving psychic scars that take decades to heal.

Any one-party system that subjugates the individual for the collective, no matter the party or the philosophy imposing it and no matter the basis on which it is imposed, is an open invitation to authoritarianism and tyranny.

File under "my sibling got filthy rich so I have to pretend I'm, like, rilly smart n stuff".

File under "my sibling got filthy rich so I have to pretend I'm, like, rilly smart n stuff". ~ Gog_Magog_Carpet_Reclaimers at August 26, 2017 6:05 PM

My brother is consequential, so I must do everything I can to be consequential, too. But I won't actually do anything of marketable value, I'll be a social justice warrior. That way, I can claim to be morally superior. He may be rich, but I'll be righteous.

Gog, that was an interesting writeup. What's interesting now is that, today, we are facing a trans-national form of fascism, something the West has not seen before. How does it work? Easy access to transportation and communications has facilitated the self-elect in different countries to closely coordinate their thoughts and maintain a class status quo, in a way that was not possible before. If someone steps out of line, the rest of the world will hear about it in minutes. The second bit is the substitution of classism for nationalism. Trans-national fascism appeals to certain minorities, seeking to bring them into the dependent classes who will offer reliable political support to the elites because they don't really have a choice. Again, easy mass communications makes it possible to call out and denounce the incorrect, and keep people divided along ethnic and class lines.