The left also thinks corrupt government is a problem
Meanwhile the right proudly advertises their love for corrupt billionaires
This is in fact incorrect: the right doesn’t say corrupt government is the problem The right says trans kids and brown people are the problem. Because the right is dumb as a fucking brick, and the billionaires managed to brainwash the dumb right into hating someone other than themselves.
The most terrifying words from in the English language are: “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.”
Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.
– Senile retired actor mouthpiece for the ultra-wealthy
Senile retired actor mouthpiece for the ultra-wealthy
…who was voted in based on a single issue campaign. The anti-abortion-access movement convinced their flock that abortions were literally as bad as killing babies, and Falwell successfully created a voting block based on that one issue. That base didn’t realize it came with massive deregulation, and they weren’t smart or knowledgeable enough to care.
Reagan was the beginning of the end. I was fourteen when he was elected.
It’s an issue with definitions. When the right says the government is corrupt, they mean socially corrupt. When the left talks about the corrupt, they mean fiscally corrupt.
No, the right is also morally and legally corrupt.
My favourite logical fallacy is this: big, democratic government having control is bad, there’s too little oversight and too much corruption. Therefore, it is better if a billionaire, who rules autocratically without any oversight, is better.
The right thinks that people are socially corrupt. Not the government. They think the government shouldn’t enable that corruption. But when it comes down to it, they hate people. They don’t hate institutions.
The right wanting to eradicate minorities has nothing to do with fiscal corruption. It’s just pure evil.
I am declaring war on fat, gay kids.
Finally! A new angle!
The “right” isn’t a monolith anymore than the “left”.
While it manifests in different ways the American “left” has been just as willing and happy to sacrifice brown, trans, woman, etc. persons because they are equally dumb and brainwashed.
“If we don’t let Israel burn down Gaza we might lose votes and if we lose votes then Trump will win and if Trump wins then it’s your fault when minorities are hurt.”
Look what you made me do!!
We are literally caught between two political parties which are both using different styles of psychological abuse to get our votes.
Liberals are center-right at best, the US has no left
I know this is a shitpost, but I’ve seen people legitimately give this argument like it’s a gotcha. It’s like, okay? So if we get rid of the corrupt billionaires running the corrupt government, then the other corrupt billionaires will use their vast wealth to seize power for the billionaires again, so the problem is indeed the corrupt billionaires - we need to get rid of them all. It’s like taking antibiotics - you can’t stop when you start feeling better, you can only stop when you’ve gotten rid of the whole infection, or it’ll just come back stronger.
A system designed deliberately to incentivize greed will inevitably reproduce these exact circumstances, the greediest and least scrupulous always rise to the top
Corrupt billionaires is redundant. You cannot have billionaires without a corrupting influence on government. Even if there were such a thing as a “good billionaire”, it wouldn’t justify the risks posed by all the bad ones.
Corrupt billionaires was the problem when it was a monarchy. It was a problem when they were plantation owners. It was a problem when they were railroad barons. It was a problem when they were automotive industrialists.
During Hoover, even the US people, who were taught to be terrified of communism knew that what we had wasn’t working. FDR pushed the New Deal through as a last bastion of western capitalism, and at that very moment, the ownership class started working to roll all that back.
Curiously, billionaires can’t seem to remember the whole thing about the social contract, that to keep the working class from burning it all down, you have to make sure they are compensated enough to survive. They’re not doing that, and eventually too many people are going to have a grudge and would rather no system than this system.
You become a billionaire by fucking over just enough people. Too many and they turn on you, too few and you have to settle for being a filthy multimillionaire. The entire job, as it were, of a billionaire is to go as far as you can without pissing off the wrong people. They didn’t forget about the social contract, they’re just confident that a little more won’t hurt.
Edge cases of billionaires who genuinely innovated their way to the top aside (I can’t think of any) I think going too far is just a feature of billionaires as a class.
Curiously, we live in an age in which billionaires are glad to broadcast every whimsical thought they have to the rest of the world. Tycoons of previous ages didn’t have that capacity even when they wanted it, and the best they could do is hire a biographer.
But because of this, we are certain of how our billionaires today have gone mad with power, believe that somehow they’ve earned their lucre, and have total disregard of the well-being of the working class, even those whom they’ve hired and depend upon. They seem entirely oblivious to the possibility of revolt of the masses, or believe that robust surveillance and security will be enough to stop the onslaught. So, too, believed the French aristocracy in King Louis XVI’s court.
Stark-raving-mad billionaires are not really a new phenomenon. Andrew Carnegie once got a chill when he realised that J. P. Morgan would totally shank him to take is assets if he could. Carnegie was only slightly less ruthless, himself.
This has created a dilemma for many of them since they want mercenaries and servants to support them in their apocalypse bunkers, but don’t want to be at their mercy when suddenly the billionaire, himself, is no longer useful to the killers that he’s hired. The only solution that has emerged from futurologists is maybe be nice to them so they don’t turn on you. But rare is the billionaire who is capable of actually doing that.
George Soros
I love how at least like a decade ago, Soros and Gates were the only billionaires that the right hated and somehow they also thought those two billionaires were commies or something and that people on the left loved them. Well maybe Gates was doing a solid whitewashing campaign but Soros? Never heard anyone praise him.
gates started getting hate starting the pandemic, apparently anti-vaxx is the key to unifying the "conspiracy theorists(from left to right wing) and right wingers. Soros is a little harder to figure out, maybe its the way he earn his money? through his stocks?
Why does everyone always miss the point that Tyler Durden is a fucking fascist.
Really changes what this meme means.
He’s not a good person’s identity, by any means. But he’s not fascist.
He wants to return to a glorified past that never existed by tearing down the current system, a return to where everyone is living off the land like early humans (“climbing the vines growing along the Sears tower”). He promotes the idea that men must return to being warriors, and something about the modern world has made them “weak.” He promotes that such strength must be used to dominate, and claims it can be used to improve people’s lives, as he claims with Raymond K. Hessel (whom Tyler threatens to murder if Hessel does not follow his dreams), despite the fact that Hessel is most likely left devastated with trauma and unable to move forward due to fear of being murdered. We never see Hessel’s outcome, so Tyler gets to pretend he “helped” by completely traumatizing a person (reminds me of Trump bragging about “lifting people off of food stamps” when he actually kicked them off and made them more hungry, his followers don’t see the outcome so they just believe the lie). Tyler captures the attention of disaffected, alienated young men and brings them under his wing to become part of their in-group, making them more likely to go along with extreme demands because now they have found family in Project Mayhem. He literally beats the living shit out of one of his men, destroying his pretty face, and yet still commands the respect of his men while disfiguring one of them potentially permanently. With Project Mayhem he intends to bring about his ideal world by force.
So we have numbers 2, 3, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, and 13 of Umberto Eco’s 14 features of Ur-Fascism in Tyler and Project Mayhem, in my opinion.
But sure, he’s not a fascist.
Without your bad rephrasing:
1 - “The cult of tradition” - At no point he gives any shit to tradition
2 - “The rejection of modernism” - That’s partial at best, and partial hits do not count on that scale
3 - “The cult of action for action’s sake” - Yes
4 - “Disagreement is treason” - Absolutely not
5 - “Fear of difference” - Dude, how the fuck did you claim he hits that one? Absolutely not
6 - “Appeal to a frustrated middle class” - Yes
7 - “Obsession with a plot” - Yes
8 - cast their enemies as “at the same time too strong and too weak” - Their enemies are never strong
9 - “Pacifism is trafficking with the enemy” - Absolutely not
10 - “Contempt for the weak” - Absolutely not
11 - “Everybody is educated to become a hero” - Yes
12 - “Machismo” - Yes
13 - “Selective populism” - Yes
14 - “Newspeak” - No
Anyway, it’s complete bullshit to just list those criteria like they are a checklist. I’ve listed them here just to show that even that bullshit argument is bullshit by its own standards.
Are you claiming that fascists don’t need to be authoritarian? It’s not on the list, by the way.
- Rejection of modernism. He literally wants to return to a tribal society. He says this specifically in both the book and film, he describes the future he sees:
“In the world I see you are stalking elk through the damp canyon forests around the ruins of Rock feller Center. You’ll wear leather clothes that will last you the rest of your life. You’ll climb the wrist-thick kudzu vines that wrap the Sears Towers. And when you look down, you’ll see tiny figures pounding corn, laying stripes of venison on the empty car pool lane of some abandoned superhighways.”
-
Fear of difference. He literally beats the shit out of the pretty guy for being “different” and pretty. Project Mayhem are all forced to dress the same and have no names. They are forced to shave their heads and become his “space monkeys.” They are berated for a week in front of the building before being accepted. EDIT: Further, this treatment of the Project Mayhem recruits is authoritarian, they have to follow all Tyler’s rules which they repeat them ad nauseum and they have to shed their prior identity to fit into the new group.
-
Cast the enemies as both too strong and too weak. In the film Tyler plans to destroy credit card companies and reset debt to zero, a lot of people would claim the financial system is an enemy that is strong, but also portrayed as weak when they strong-arm the politician threatening to cut his balls off. In the book he wants to destroy museums, destroying history, writing a new history, which is also fascist. He says museums represent a dead world and that “this is our world now.”
-
Pacifism is trafficking with the enemy. They threaten to cut off people’s balls who threaten to expose them, the cops are literally about to do it to the narrator/Tyler himself at the end of the film, because stopping Project Mayhem is a pacifist route.
-
If you don’t see the contempt for the weak here and how they only accepted Bob into their fold because the narrator pitied him, I don’t know what to tell you. Tyler would have rejected Bob as unfit and weak. When their homework is to go start a fight, the lesson is that most people will avoid fights (and by extension this makes them “weak”). Fight Club is portrayed as “strong” because they will chase a fight. They’re different, they’re special, they’re enlightened by violence (once again, fear of difference).
These are the ones we obviously disagree on, so these are the ones I’m addressing.
But yeah, 10 out of 14 is pretty telling in my opinion. No, this list of Eco’s isn’t definitive, but it’s got good depth and is a good starting point showing that clearly Tyler has fascist tendencies. Enough that I am comfortable calling him fascist
EDIT: Also while there is no strict nationalism, the entire plot is deeply Amero-centric and treats the rest of the world as though it functionally does not exist when it comes to Tyler’s plans.
“You wake up at Seatac, SFO, LAX. You wake up at O’Hare, Dallas-Fort Worth, BWI. Pacific, mountain, central. Lose an hour, gain an hour. This is your life, and it’s ending one minute at a time. You wake up at Air Harbor International. If you wake up at a different time, in a different place, could you wake up as a different person?”
Not. a. single. foreign. airport. Not even Canada.
It’s been too long since I’ve read the book, but at least in the film it’s consumer culture in particular that he’s talking about when it comes to modernity. I think most of us agree with him on that one
“In the world I see you are stalking elk through the damp canyon forests around the ruins of Rock feller Center. You’ll wear leather clothes that will last you the rest of your life. You’ll climb the wrist-thick kudzu vines that wrap the Sears Towers. And when you look down, you’ll see tiny figures pounding corn, laying stripes of venison on the empty car pool lane of some abandoned superhighways.”
Tyler Durden in Fight Club. There’s a similar, slightly shorter version in the film when the narrator is in his “coma” and wakes up to Tyler gone, this is the dialogue Tyler speaks as he is abandoning the narrator just as the narrator’s own father abandoned him.
I don’t know how to read that any more clearly as a complete rejection of modernity, not just consumer culture.
I haven’t read this book in almost 20 years myself, but I remember these salient aspects of the text.
EDIT: Does no one else remember this kind of media from the early 2000’s (and really made it around on reddit, it was quite popular) clearly inspired by Fight Club and the “what to do in an emergency” flight cards, which the comic obviously mimics. To act like this wasn’t a major theme is literally absurd. The comic is presented in “how-to” format starting as a white collar office worker riot that eventually leads to the office being a tribal society inside the office building.
Obviously Fight Club Inspired Comic:
Emergency Flight Card from Fight Club:
Its been a long time since I’ve seen the movie but I always thought he was an anarchist who just wanted to burn everything to the ground.
I mean, presenting themselves as just standing for the common man and wanting to tear down a broken system and don’t have ulterior motives is one hundred percent on brand for fascists.
Also “waahhh, my penthouse is too nice, my job is too boring, I get paid too much and I’m a bored white man” is the narrator, the man Tyler was covering up, a weak man’s idea of a strong man. “I look how you wanna look, I talk how you want to talk, I fuck how you want to fuck.” He is literally a manifestation of what the narrator, a weak person, thinks a strong person is.
Fascists coopting socialist language to obfuscate their class loyalties and goals is unfortunately fairly common
Tyler Durden is not the good guy holy shit
Probably the same people who thought RATM went political in the mid teens…
In 2007 I was in the passenger seat of my girlfriend’s shitty Kia because I didn’t have a car.
We stop at a stoplight and up next to us pulls up a shiny new blue Audi, and two fratbros with popped collars and sporting Oakleys.
Their speakers are on extremely loud and blasting System of a Down, specifically “Fuck the System.”
I couldn’t help but think “Man, I’m pretty sure these guys are the system.”
Well…in my defense…I’ve never heard of Tyler Durden before. Is that the guy in the meme on the top right?
Bottom-center. This is if like the bottom was Steve Bannon.
…that’s not Brad Pitt??? I thought that was Brad Pitt.
Brad Pitt plays the character Tyler Durden in the film Fight Club, from which the bottom is a still photo. Thus that is Tyler Durden, from the film Fight Club, as portrayed by Brad Pitt.
Its not like that at all.
The left is saying billionaire are the problem. Their existence is a sign of corrupt system.
The right is saying all the left is corrupt. They don’t mind their corrupt politicians.
Also everyone should go check how this left meme started. The lady in the picture was actually very calm and reasonable. Perfect metaphor for how the right manipulates the media into creating stories out of nothing.
So billionaires are the problem?
Extreme wealth disparity is the problem. When people can get vastly more rich than everyone else, to the point they can buy entire governments, the system turns from democratic to autocratic.
It’s been a recurring problem in the US for generations, especially since the temptation once a person is elected into federal office (or even high state office) is to forgo fixing the system in favor of getting rich from lobbyist bribes.
I was curious about what the site attached to the watermark was like: https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/the-mind-unleashed/
The right in the US only says what their cult leader tells them to say. If he says the government is bad (which he often does when he’s not the one running it), it’s bad, but when he says it’s good, (which he often does when he’s the one running it) they say it’s good.
Soon there will be a critical mass of people who have nothing left to lose. In these times people instinctively, correctly, lash out at those who have the most.
/r/im14andthisisdeep
Right, so the proper order of operations here is to get rid of the corrupt billionaires, so that we can clean up the corrupt government.
So… Anyone up for Corrupt Socialism? It’s not looking so bad these days, eh?
