This is funny to me. Stolen meme but it rings true for me. How about that game last night?

Psyop. I don’t give a shit. If he dies it’s better for the actual “movement”.

Fascism is, originally "multiple strands or sticks bound together". The plantar fascia in your foot is multiple fibers that are stronger in unison than any fiber alone would be. This concept, taken from the latin meaning "band", was used politically originally to mean "unity". Alone we are weak, but together we are strong if we "band" together.

In that sense (which isn't at all what modern people mean by fascism) Abraham Lincoln was a fascist and indeed Donald Trump is a fascist. So is Joe Biden. In fact everybody who isn't libertarian is a fascist. Even people who believe in corporations are fascists, for what is a corporation other than multiple people joining together for some cause? All political parties are fascist. I could go on.

But no, that is not what fascism means to people today. What happened was that the original fascist party, which was named after the concept of unity, moved and changed and only became famous when Mussolini was running the show. And so what we call fascism today is misnamed. What we mean is "the policies and ideals of Benito Mussolini". We really should call it Mussoliniism, and leave the term fascism to continue to mean what it does in latin.

But of course language changes and is uncontrollable. I'm not seriously arguing that we should fight that trend. This is just a history lesson.

Libertarianism does not lead to fascism. That's directly contradictory.

But conservatives may leave libertarianism and head on over towards fascism.

The conservative and progressive movements are in a death-spiral, each periodically flirting with the authoritarian pole, then with the libertarian pole, but moving onwards, round and round the center. I was very aligned with progressives around 2000, very close to conservatives around 2016, and now I'm getting closer to equidistant again. And I don't think I've moved. I think they are moving.

Ok I'm going to go back to building a nostr client, but it is funny to hear that one of the parties is a personality cult. How many Trump supporters supported the vaccine he rushed through? If they were in a cult, they wouldn't have mixed opinions about him.

You are lucky that you didn't have my mother. (Sorry mom, I love you and all but you know our differences...)

I never believed in meaning to life, yet I am happy.

This topic can actually be deeply distressing, especially if you were raised with a deep meaning implanted in your childhood mind. I have forgotten about that. But I used to look for meaning in religion, in buddhism, in science, anywhere. Existence is just weird, and maybe something explains that weirdness. Many people are on a spiritual path, searching their whole lives for the answer to "the question of the meaning of life, the universe, and everything." It was for me, let's use a euphamism, "distressing" to unwind my mind and rebuild it on top of a basis which has no dependency on there existing any 'meaning' whatsoever. So decades after that, life is pleasantly and normally meaningless to me without any vacuum that needs filling. You can make up your own meaning to life, but even that isn't being true to the meaninglessness at the root. You could say I grew out of it.

Liberal democracy is supposed to be a political answer to that question.

I think you're engaged in a kind of ontological fallacy here, where you insist there's something necessary to directionality. The collective interest and the individual interest can simply be in tension, and mediate each other. Insisting on a simplistic grounding, as say praxeology tries to do, to me, is just weird. It just rejects any kind of dynamical notion around competing equities, and demands a universal starting point.

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