Perfect!

What brought that on?

Hmmmm...the reason it can't apply to economics is that it's a misunderstanding of Darwinism, which tells us that the individual struggle for survival is the driver of progress, and that distinct race (species) is an illusion - while fascism, otherwise similar, demands that the individual is an illusion and only the race is real.

So if communism is applied Marxism and fascism is applied Darwinism, which political movement is applied Freudism? Clintonism?

OJ:

"A form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elite's, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion."

That could describe you, OJ.

The irony, of course, is that those -isms who are supposedly emphatically Darwinian (ignoring for the moment your fallacy of consequences) are in fact the least so.

Claims to fitness doth not fitness make, as Evolution has shown.

Greg:

Freudianism explains why they feel the need to kill God.

Mike:

No, Darwinism is the observation that free market economics works and then its misapplication to Nature. Fascism then tries to force its application.

"while fascism, otherwise similar, demands that the individual is an illusion and only the race is real."

Actually,the racial nation/state.

"while fascism, otherwise similar, demands that the individual is an illusion and only the race is real."

Actually,the racial nation/state.

Of course, it is wise to keep in mind that other, so far unmentioned, fascism: Islamo-fascism.

Completely exterminationist in intent, and no more well versed in Darwinism than the Federalist Papers.

Jeff:

Darfur is applied Darwinism.

Fascist economics works? According to whom? The idea that Hitler's economic policies were good for Germany is a myth.

http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1568/is_4_31/ai_55343571

Socialism and central planning, even in rightist form, may seem to work at first, but ultimately result in stagnation or collapse. It's like saying cocaine gives you energy: that's what it seems like, but you'll pay for it later on.

Papaya:

No, capitalism does, which is where Darwin got his ideas.

Ah, I misunderstood which you meant by "it."

You could take the bullet points in your review and replace 'fascism' in each instance with 'Christianity,' and easily serve up numerous examples of Christians doing those same things.

The idea that fascism is an incoherent melange of yearnings -- to call them ideas is too generous -- is hardly original with Paxton. That was Laqueur's view.

Insofar as fascism had a theory (stated most clearly by Mussolini), it was authoritarian, corporatist and antiindividualistic. In other words, all the Christian political virtues.

When Acton said that 'power corrupts,' he was not talking about atheists.

No wonder Christians around the world loved it. Frank 'I thank God for a man like Adolf Hitler' Buchman was more direct than most, but you'd have to look pretty hard to find Christians who disliked any part of fascism except, among the squeamish, the death camps. Even there, plenty shrugged and considered that the making of omlettes required the breaking of Jewish eggs.

This position is exactly that of the Church toward heretics.

Naziism was applied Lutheranism.

In Catholic countries, fascism did not take that tack, presumably because of faintheartedness.

It is true, isn't it, that virtually all fascists were Christians? And that until it came to open warfare among states, few of fascism's opponents were?

One last point. In Germany at least, fascism was grafted onto militarism, not the other way around. Paxton has got that exactly backwards.

I find it truly ironic that OJ uses fascism to hoist Darwinism, because fascists (excluding, at least, the Islamo variety)used Darwin as an excuse.

The irony being their failure was ordained by the very processes they claimed as justification. As was our success.

Evolution, of course, couldn't care less one way or the other. But it seems odd to pillory a theory overtly claimed by others, but the processes of which thoroughly vindicate our system.

If you are going to fall prey to fallacy of consequences, at least you should pick the right ones.

Jeff:

You're misusing the word irony. Darwinism is just capitalism carried to fields where it doersn't hold true. Darwinism's failure is thus inevitable.

Harry:

No, it isn't true, no matter how much you wish it.

But you're right that there are many similarities between Fascism (Hitler variant) and regular conservative authoritarianism, so the question is what is the difference that makes only fascism genocidal? That's simple--absence of a strong Church and other normalizing influences on the Right and the succumbing to scientific theories of evolution, race, and hygeine.

Theories of race are political, not scientific.

mike:

So Darwinists have had to claim in a futile bid to distance themselves from eugenics and genocide.

Fascism was not any more genocidal than Christianity or Islam, and quite a bit less effective.

Fascism (or Communism) never did exterminate any human society. Christianity did it many times.

Since Darwinism is relative -- there are no foregone winners in natural selection -- it cannot logically be used to justify declaring a winner in advance.

Fascists, being explicitly antilogical, could claim Darwinism as a justification if they wanted, but that did not make the argument cogent.

The modern synthesis of Darwinism explicitly denies (by the definition of 'species') any difference among (or even existence of) human races.

But even if it did not, it is not within the remit of Darwinism to declare that Germans are superior to Jews; or, mutatis mutandis, that Jews are dominant over Palestinians.

As Jeff comes close to saying, the outcome of the allegedly Darwinian struggle between German Christian Nazis and the Jews did not have a determined outcome -- at least not the outcome that the Nazis thought was predetermined.

This was because the Jews turned out to have powerful friends.

People who think Darwinism picks winners don't understand it. It's the camera at the finish line; not the handicapper.

If Christian killers were so efficient then why were there so many Jews in Europe when Darwinism was unleashed? Never mind, the question answers itself.

Orrin:

Maybe Harry and Jeff believe Christians marched through history with killin' and plunderin' on their minds, but their addled mystical brains kept them from being very good at it. Sort of like a fifteen hundred year run of the gang that couldn't shoot straight.

Peter:

One of my favorites is all the rationalists who will tell you that when the Crusaders took Jerusalem they killed so many infidels that the blood ran up to their ankles. Work that one out scientifically.

Peter:

No--for one thing, my comments have not the first thing to do with religion in general, or Christianity in particular. In fact, you would need far better eyesight than mine to find either word in what I wrote.

My point is that claiming Darwinian justification has nothing to do with Darwinian success. As Harry said, it is the camera, not the handicapper that determines the outcome. The camera has provided all the distance from eugenics and genocide required--that approach failed.

OJ's fallacy of consequences--and the irony--is that he asserts Darwinism can't be true because some very foul actors have claimed its mantle. NB--the truth of a proposition is utterly independent of one's opinion of the proposition's consequences, hence the fallacy.

Also, note that the camera has ordained our system, for the time being anyway, the winner. That we are the winner is a material phenomena; Darwinism is a material process.

BTW--if Evolution isn't true, then it would be the first known instance of a non-deterministic, recursive system that isn't self modifying. If that is so, I am waiting for someone to state precisely why.

Jeff:

I was always under the impression that Orrin's rejection of Darwinism had more to do with the fact that it didn't make sense. The fact that it is a dangerous creed to boot is just icing.

Your self-declared gold medal in the existential Olympics is a result of your reliance on philosophical steroids. It's like all those East German medals nobody values or counts anymore.

The proper metaphor is not a camera but a fabulist.

You have not heard me say anything about Jerusalem, but I could about, say, the Canary Islands.

100% kill rate.

The reason there were Jews in Europe for the Germans to kill is that they were succored by secular (though at least nominally Christian) rulers who -- unlike the priests -- found some slight value in them.

In places where the secular authorities united with the priests (England, Spain), there were no Jews left.

The Canary Islanders were Jews?

Harry:

Please, for you and your family, give up the booze. It solves nothing.

OJ, Peter:

Please follow Harry's argument more closely. He was making the point that religion--including Christianity--can be very exterminationist; whether the Canary islanders were Jewish isn't germane.

Think of all the examples of recursive, non-deterministic, systems. Try to find one that isn't self modifying.

If you assert that natural history is that example, then you have to have a reason why. Or, failing that, find others that don't self modify.

Evolutionary processes are happening all around us in all kinds of systems. Denying self-modification to one system in particular because to grant such would make a hash of one's religious beliefs is an outstanding example of the fallacy of consequences.

Jeff:

Of course it can, we exterminated the Indians too and enslaved them and blacks. Aboriginal peoples weren't considered human.

The point is that the systematic extermination of another "race" of our own species is a function of applying Darwinism.

Of applying Christianity. The Canary Islanders were not murdered by Darwinists but by Christians.

It says something for the viciousness of Christianity that Christians were unable to recognize the humanity of Indians.

Why? We didn't recognize the humanity of any aborignals or blacks or asians. Indeed, Darwinism would suggesst that they're all sufficiently different as not to be the same species as we.

"Darwinism would suggesst that they're all sufficiently different as not to be the same species as we."

That is as ridiculous-and violently wrong- as anything you have said regarding Darwinism.