Is there even a difference anymore? The only mainstream "conservative" party in America just acquitted a former politician who lead a mob to riot at the Capital. "Conservatives" are either implicitly supporting fascism or they're so detatched from the major political agents that they're politically insignificant.
if your definition places injuries to human beings in the same category as damage to things, then your definition is just an excuse to do violence on people
There is a difference. Fascism is originally defined as national socialism by Mussolini. What Republicans do you see advocating for any such thing? Under actual Fascism, private ownership of businesses was allowed, but the government limited the profits they could make. Point me to where Republicans are trying to limit the amount of profits any company in the US can make.
If the comparison is totalitarian tendencies, you have a lot of effort to go through to frame this as a one sided problem as both sides exhibit such time to time.
The only thing conservatives and Fascists have in common is they are nationalist at this point, that's it. The constant throwing around of the Fascist label upon the right wing in this country is so disconnected from reality, as someone who loves history it makes me cringe to no end.
Nobody said that it does or has to do in that exact form but at this point some people want to be to loose in order to make a dishonest picture of anyone to the right of Mao
I wouldn't associate the american right with fascism in the abstract but I think anyone who believes that Trump himself didn't at very least have some deeply worrying fascist-ic tendencies is kidding themselves: The ethno-nationalism, the distaste for democracy, the love of "powerful" men like Kim and Putin etc - the list is long and the signs were there from day 0.
That's not "ooh you're a fascist now let me drink my starbucks"-fascism, but actual, dangerous, fascism that slips through the cracks - the US effectively came within one arbitrary vote in congress of ignoring an election result: If someone less inept than Trump comes along one day and tries I suspect it'll be a slam dunk in the land of the free.
Counterargue my friends, facts don't care about your feelings
The four states pillars of the Constitution of my home country, Bangladesh, are “nationalism, socialism, democracy, and secularism.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mujibism
It seems quite bizarre to me to not have a level of nationalism. Obviously the purpose of American government is ensuring the prosperity of Americans. What else could it be? And how else can you get 330 million people—who don’t share an ethnicity, history, first language, etc.—to consent to common governance without encouraging a healthy level of nationalism?
Fascism is nationalism taken to the level of justifying war on others because of self-declared superiority. That’s beyond ordinary nationalism.
Why are you downvoted? How much motherland rhetoric did the soviets push? What about the CCP pushing for a "strong China" narrative. Venezuela was a very "venezuela first" ideology.
Yes, left wingers, socialists and communists are very nationalistic as well. That or are "the party" first... which just ends up being nationalism with an extra step.
Such as who? Ted Cruz? Face it, when conservatives chose fascism over democracy the game was over for them. There’s no going back after supporting insurrectionists.
> a former politician who lead a mob to riot at the Capital.
Not a word you wrote is true.
Trump was a sitting President, and the riot started before the end of his speech. His tweets for peace were deleted by twitter. (Pelosi refused to pay for Capitol Hill security before the large rally.)
The only insurrection was the 8-months of city burning endorsed by the DNC. Why isn't Pelosi on trial yet?
Trump didn’t endorse a riot either. And at the time of his speech, the pro-Trump protests after the election had been peaceful, to many people’s surprise. (DC had geared up for violence after the election, with plywood covering the windows, and until November 6 nothing happened.)
I think Trump should have gotten impeached back in December for continuing to deny the legitimacy of the election after losing his legal challenges. But saying he incited the riot was an extremely tenuous charge.
The rioters clearly believed that they were doing what Trump wanted and following his desires if not his explicit orders - that impression didn't come from nowhere, it came from months of his encouragement and sympathy with with a deranged conspiracy theory provided by Trump himself. There are clearly implications in Trump's rhetoric that mere peaceful protest would not be enough:
“We will never give up. We will never concede. It doesn’t happen. You don’t concede when there’s theft involved. Our country has had enough. We will not take it anymore, and that is what this is all about. And to use a favorite term that all of you people really came up with, we will stop the steal. …
“You will have an illegitimate president. That is what you will have, and we can’t let that happen. These are the facts that you won’t hear from the fake news media. It’s all part of the suppression effort. They don’t want to talk about it. They don’t want to talk about it. …
“We fight like hell, and if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.”
And there is also the content of his now deleted tweet after the fact where he appeared to justify the violence and praise those who committed it[0], and his phone call with House minority leader Kevin McCarthy on the 6th where Trump actually seemed to be smug about it[1].
And yes, in the deleted tweet he told people to "go home with love and peace," but that's hardly a condemnation of their actions.
Maybe it doesn't rise to a strict legal definition of incitement, but the narrative being painted in his defense of there being no causal relationship between Trump and the riots, that he simply wanted law and order and peace, is clearly specious.
So investigate the people who rioted. Isn't that logical? One of the first rioters who entered the Capitol has admitted to being BLM/antifa. So much for your false narrative.
> bunch of quotes containing common non-specific poliical rhetoric
I agree with what Trump said since there clearly was election fraud, as there is every time mail-in ballots are used by people who moved out of state. I don't see how that's an insurrection to say what everybody knows is true.
Impeachment is a political finding, not a legal finding. It’s Congress that decides what qualifies as high crimes and misdemeanors.
What was Trump guilty of? You say not quite the legal definition of incitement. Well how about asking to find just enough votes in Georgia and threatening consequences for not doing so?
Did Trump tweet that the protestors should leave? Eventually. Surely the call with McCarthy suggests not only a significant delay in doing so, but also his state of mind regarding the riot.
As for whether he incited the riot to begin with — the most senior member of the Senate GOP disagrees with you: Trump incited the riots but should be acquitted for procedural reasons (you can’t impeach a former President).
> It’s Congress that decides what qualifies as high crimes and misdemeanors.
I suggest you read your own silly comment again.
No constitional lawyer will say that holding a rally is either of those charges. In fact, the DNC had a rally in 2018 that invaded the Capitol building. I don't see endless sputtering about that, do you? Oh, TDS.
> Did Trump tweet that the protestors should leave? Eventually.
The same day. Unlike Pelosi, who took months to condemn the downtown burnings ... because pandering to intersectionalist votes. Not a good look for one of the top politicians in the US government, is it?
> Well how about asking to find just enough votes in Georgia and threatening consequences for not doing so?
Voter fraud is subject to various laws (ie. consequences.)
Can you name the owner of Dominion voting systems, used in 29 states? The State of Texas couldn't, so Dominion was banned.
Here's a hint: the CCP paid $400 million for Dominion just before the election. The CCP filed a billion dollar lawsuit against Trump associates as part of "lawfare." Now what's your narrative about voting fraud?
Here's a reality check for leftists: Trump is no doubt a narcissist, and you don't have to like him, but he was our leader, and one of the best in the last 100 years. The nearly 5 years of pointless impeachments was shameful - the more petty the DNC gets (and Pelosi is senile enough to admit the impeachments were partisan), the more welcoming the Republican party looks. Think about that.
That was a more credible claim before the McCarthy phone call story broke, in which we learned that Trump actively resisted calls from the GOP to help end the riot and acknowledged that they were rioting in his name. And, even before we learned about that call, we knew that he tweeted criticism of VP Pence after the mob turned violent. Meanwhile, by dint of his office, he had a duty to stop the riot no matter its origin. His culpability looks pretty clear: he's a firefighter who stacked kindling next to a house, watched a fire get lit, threw some gasoline on it, and stood there cackling while it consumed the building. His best defense seems to be "it wasn't much gasoline, all things considered".
I hadn’t read about the McCarthy call. That certainly makes his state of mind seem worse, and now I agree with you that it’s impeachable vis-a-vis being a dereliction of duty. But maybe I’m caught up in the legal definition of “incitement” but I don’t think either the speech or failure to stop the rioting doesn’t qualify as incitement.
Yeah, we're definitely not going to resolve all of impeachment here (despite having a much stronger opinion about Trump's guilt than you do, I also think impeachment is a waste of time, and I'm not wild about the precedent of preemptively stripping someone's ability to run for office in the future, a move that penalizes Trump's voters as much as it does him). It's all complicated. I'm just saying the case against him is clearer than it given credit for.
> Because she didn’t endorse a riot and neither did she endorse that cities should be burned.
Pelosi is a Democrat who is Speaker of the House. She did not condemn downtown burnings in cities with Democratic mayors for several months in order to pander to intersectionalist votes.
> It’s utterly breathtaking how much Trump lies. But in your worldview, he’s the victim.
He is certainly a victim of almost 5 years of failed impeachment hearings, and being deplatformed.
The first impeachment investigation occurred after H. Clinton paid off a British man for false testimony, and J. Biden made a false FISA court complaint. That's why the first impeachment failed, and why you don't hear the Democrats talk about it further.
Honestly, you sound like a crazy person who avoids facts to preserve a twisted, leftist narrative.
Trump did not start a riot on Jan. 6 - Pelosi refused to pay for enough security to maintain order.
Oh, and Happy Presidents' Day to Mr. Trump. He will go down in history as one of the most productive Presidents wrt foreign policy, red tape reduction and the Wall since Reagan, or maybe even Roosevelt.
It endorses the unfortunate habit of collapsing distinctions on both the left and the right. In truth, although conservatives have occasionally aligned with fascists for pragmatic reasons and because they do share some values, they are not the same. When fascists come to power, conservatives are usually supressed; all conservative political parties were banned in Nazi Germany, for example. Anti-Nazi conservatives were among the victims of the Night of the Long Knives. Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen's Diary of a Man in Despair provides useful insight into how conservatives of the era viewed Nazis. He died in Dachau in 1945.
The point people are miss is that Post-18th Century conservatism is a shade of liberalism in the broadest sense (not progressivism though), whereas fascism is resolutely anti-liberal. That said, right-of-center political parties contain lots of people who aren't remotely conservative: radical pro-market capitalists, libertarians, and the occasional fascist. They might all refer to themselves as conservatives, but that doesn't mean they are.
What I learned so far is that Silicon Valley doesn't actually believe in anything. Ideas get adopted if they're profitable. That's it. There's no morality involved in this machine. It's genuinely wonderful that ideas about inclusivity and diversity are being accepted, but it's because of the understanding that people can do great work regardless of their background or sexual orientation that it happened, and not because of some moral imperative. It's how we can justify and talk up diversity while working on AI tech that can identify homeless people or ex-convicts. It's how we can condemn actions by the Trump administration while criticizing labor activism in Asia by coldly crunching the numbers to demonstrate that you can save money by putting your factory in a country that doesn't allow its people to protest.
And you know what, fine. Just keep tossing anyone who doesn't play nice to the wolves. But please just stop pretending there's morality involved. Let's accept it: we're here in pursuit of profit. Any good that we do is just a nice side effect. The sooner we understand that the sooner we can actually do something about it.
This applies to the media too, of course. I love the manic obsession with stability and morality combined with a lot of corporate and government money in a lot of US journalists' stories. You get great gems like hit pieces on privacy and encryption painted with a moral coat of paint that are better than anything the alphabet soup agencies could come up with - the Silicon Valley nazis are using Clubhouse, the pedophiles are using Signal, we must let the government monitor communications now! You get stories about reddit users in the stock market that somehow try to paint them as the alt-right while completely sidestepping any discussion of wealth inequality. Love it!
Finally, a sane voice! It's time that we realized that many things are simply not political in nature, no matter what social justice demagogues want to tell us. Selling customer data to advertisers is economic, not political. Resisting being forced to classify independent business partners as "employees" is economic, not political. The ethnicity, race, and gender of your applicant pool is economic, not political.
Politics has to do with generation-defining issues of our time, like choosing a more rational voting system at the national level and building broad support for a sensible third party that genuinely represents the interests of voters like myself, who are poorly served by the trifling squabbles of the current political "establishment." All this other stuff that certain biased parties want to paint as "political" is just the natural outcome of well-understood deterministic processes of economic self-interest, nothing more and nothing less. No use whining about cold, hard reality!!
What's "politics" anyway? I think we need to be very careful here. Economic problems can be caused by nasty politics and vice versa. It can be very easy to fall into the trap of saying "well, that's just how economics work, sorry!" while ignoring the underlying political causes of why entire groups of people found themselves barely able to feed their families.
At the same time, politics are an unavoidable fact of life for a lot of people. It's hardly fair to tell somebody to just get away from political topics when it's their rights and liberties being debated on C-SPAN.
You seem to argue that politics is whatever issues where you support change and "not politics" is whatever issues where you support the status quo.
It is quite hard to not see your examples as political _but_ you don't want any of the changes currently being advocated by leftist activists.
> Selling customer data to advertisers is economic, not political
If selling customer data was forbidden, then it would not be a natural outcome of well-understood deterministic processes of economic self-interest. It seems the "natural outcome" is wholly dependent on current laws.
How are these examples not political? Yes, the entities in question might not do them for political reasons (as in for or because some kind of affiliation) but the issues are absolutely political.
"It's genuinely wonderful that ideas about inclusivity and diversity are being accepted, but it's because of the understanding that people can do great work regardless of their background or sexual orientation that it happened, and not because of some moral imperative."
I do not even believe this at all. The corps just do not want to be nagged by activists, so they use a lot of the expected words to signal that they are not to be attacked.
I remember the banking boss kneeling during BLM in front of a huge vault [1] - a pure photo-op for the media. It is the same with Google et al.
Of course, I didn't mean to imply that the big corporations just suddenly decided that discrimination is bad - it took centuries and centuries of activism to drive that point in. But that's still ultimately because that position became profitable. They don't give a shit in reality. It's why BLM was filled with empty gestures like that, it's why the likes of GitHub make noise about scrubbing problematic terminology and promoting inclusivity while continuing to work with ICE.
No matter how wholesome its branding appears to be, no matter how many rainbow avatars it uses on social media, no matter how many times its executives kneel for photo ops, a big corporation doesn't actually give a shit about anything besides profit.
>You get stories about reddit users in the stock market that somehow try to paint them as the alt-right while completely sidestepping any discussion of wealth inequality. Love it!
Or similarly, you get screeds accusing random bloggers of spreading "alt-right" views that completely gloss over the role of, say, Robin Hanson at George Mason University in spreading the notion that it's actually a humanitarian act to outsource manufacturing to Bangladesh.
> What I learned so far is that Silicon Valley doesn’t actually believe in anything. Ideas get adopted if they’re profitable. That’s it. There’s no morality involved in this machine.
I’d argue that is more of a characteristic of Capitalism at this point.
But it is full of useful idiots. Reading up on the role of German industry in the Weimar Republic, or on the how and why of Russian psy ops methods; such knowledge is often avoided in favour of simple one-liners like "limitless freedom of opinion good".
Its one of those excellent demonstrations of how one can be both intelligent and yet not at all at the same time.
The American political environment actively discourages nuance, which gets into discourse at every level unfortunately.
SV is overwhelmingly liberal in a general sense (like almost all urban, educated regions), and lacks a lot of gun rights advocates and church goers or standard conservatives, which is what Noah appears to be looking for in the piece. When people talk about fascism in tech they don't talk about a 'bum with a swastika on the arm', but what Jeffrey Herf coined 'Reactionary Modernism'[1]. An extreme belief that technology will replace liberal or democratic values altogether. And there is a substantial, and fairly hidden, adherence to this in tech. And because those people don't storm the capital and probably vote Biden they don't show up in so many surveys.
And this is very SV specific. You won't find this in the tech scene of Berlin, Zürich or New York. It's closely tied to the 'Californian Ideology', a sort of new form of futurism that is in many ways similar to its historical predecessor.
Sure, but on a certain level, what actually matters for real politics is that "those people" didn't storm the Capitol and probably voted for Biden. Technocracy is bad, but it's simply not the kind of "fascism" up for discussion in American mainstream media right now.
I am somewhat perplexed by the headline, who in their right mind would argue that FANG are fascists or even conservative? It borders on the absurd if anything having openly right-wing opinion in tech is a good way to be excluded at work.
I wouldn't say that SV leans left either, most actions are virtue signaling to appeal to changing public opinion.
But the NYT article really put an emphasis on that Silicon Valley is far from "classic" US conservatism when it talks about Red vs Blue vs Gray tribes. There is no need to argue that most of tech elite are hardly Trump voters, especially in terms of identity politics.
But in terms of economy I think the SV discourse is maybe already much closer to what Scott Alexander had outlined in his Left Libertarianism article. [0]
I feel that this ideology which combines unregulated capitalism with social safety net is very far from socialism, progressivism, social democracy etc.
What I do not understand - why is it such a shame in not being a leftist for educated middle-class coastal Americans?
Fascism is ultranationalist, collectivist authoritarianism. Silicon Valley is definitely not ultranationalist, and for the most part not particularly collectivist. Certainly no one in silicon valley is calling for corporatist autarky, nor would you find much support for mass militarization of society or paramilitary violence.
Technosolutionism is not fascism, libertarianism is not fascism, cancel culture is not fascism, socialism is not fascism, laissez faire capitalism is not fascism, letting fascists express their opinions is not fascism, censoring fascists is not fascism.
Of course this is semantics, and when most americans talk about fascism, they are talking about something else which may or may not have some vague resemblance to fascism, but meaningful dialogue is impossible if we can't agree what it is we're discussing.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 115 ms ] threadYes there is a difference
noun
You can't have freedom and liberty without the security of private property. Learn some history.
If the comparison is totalitarian tendencies, you have a lot of effort to go through to frame this as a one sided problem as both sides exhibit such time to time.
The only thing conservatives and Fascists have in common is they are nationalist at this point, that's it. The constant throwing around of the Fascist label upon the right wing in this country is so disconnected from reality, as someone who loves history it makes me cringe to no end.
Wait until you learn that "Nazi" doesn't always explicitly refer to a member of the German National Socialist party.
That's not "ooh you're a fascist now let me drink my starbucks"-fascism, but actual, dangerous, fascism that slips through the cracks - the US effectively came within one arbitrary vote in congress of ignoring an election result: If someone less inept than Trump comes along one day and tries I suspect it'll be a slam dunk in the land of the free.
Counterargue my friends, facts don't care about your feelings
It seems quite bizarre to me to not have a level of nationalism. Obviously the purpose of American government is ensuring the prosperity of Americans. What else could it be? And how else can you get 330 million people—who don’t share an ethnicity, history, first language, etc.—to consent to common governance without encouraging a healthy level of nationalism?
Fascism is nationalism taken to the level of justifying war on others because of self-declared superiority. That’s beyond ordinary nationalism.
Yes, left wingers, socialists and communists are very nationalistic as well. That or are "the party" first... which just ends up being nationalism with an extra step.
Not a word you wrote is true.
Trump was a sitting President, and the riot started before the end of his speech. His tweets for peace were deleted by twitter. (Pelosi refused to pay for Capitol Hill security before the large rally.)
The only insurrection was the 8-months of city burning endorsed by the DNC. Why isn't Pelosi on trial yet?
It’s utterly breathtaking how much Trump lies. But in your worldview, he’s the victim.
I think Trump should have gotten impeached back in December for continuing to deny the legitimacy of the election after losing his legal challenges. But saying he incited the riot was an extremely tenuous charge.
And yes, in the deleted tweet he told people to "go home with love and peace," but that's hardly a condemnation of their actions.
[0]https://media-cdn.factba.se/realdonaldtrump-twitter/13469549...
[1]https://thehill.com/homenews/house/538714-trump-told-mccarth...
Maybe it doesn't rise to a strict legal definition of incitement, but the narrative being painted in his defense of there being no causal relationship between Trump and the riots, that he simply wanted law and order and peace, is clearly specious.
So investigate the people who rioted. Isn't that logical? One of the first rioters who entered the Capitol has admitted to being BLM/antifa. So much for your false narrative.
> bunch of quotes containing common non-specific poliical rhetoric
I agree with what Trump said since there clearly was election fraud, as there is every time mail-in ballots are used by people who moved out of state. I don't see how that's an insurrection to say what everybody knows is true.
What was Trump guilty of? You say not quite the legal definition of incitement. Well how about asking to find just enough votes in Georgia and threatening consequences for not doing so?
Did Trump tweet that the protestors should leave? Eventually. Surely the call with McCarthy suggests not only a significant delay in doing so, but also his state of mind regarding the riot.
As for whether he incited the riot to begin with — the most senior member of the Senate GOP disagrees with you: Trump incited the riots but should be acquitted for procedural reasons (you can’t impeach a former President).
I suggest you read your own silly comment again.
No constitional lawyer will say that holding a rally is either of those charges. In fact, the DNC had a rally in 2018 that invaded the Capitol building. I don't see endless sputtering about that, do you? Oh, TDS.
> Did Trump tweet that the protestors should leave? Eventually.
The same day. Unlike Pelosi, who took months to condemn the downtown burnings ... because pandering to intersectionalist votes. Not a good look for one of the top politicians in the US government, is it?
> Well how about asking to find just enough votes in Georgia and threatening consequences for not doing so?
Voter fraud is subject to various laws (ie. consequences.)
Can you name the owner of Dominion voting systems, used in 29 states? The State of Texas couldn't, so Dominion was banned.
Here's a hint: the CCP paid $400 million for Dominion just before the election. The CCP filed a billion dollar lawsuit against Trump associates as part of "lawfare." Now what's your narrative about voting fraud?
Here's a reality check for leftists: Trump is no doubt a narcissist, and you don't have to like him, but he was our leader, and one of the best in the last 100 years. The nearly 5 years of pointless impeachments was shameful - the more petty the DNC gets (and Pelosi is senile enough to admit the impeachments were partisan), the more welcoming the Republican party looks. Think about that.
Pelosi is a Democrat who is Speaker of the House. She did not condemn downtown burnings in cities with Democratic mayors for several months in order to pander to intersectionalist votes.
> It’s utterly breathtaking how much Trump lies. But in your worldview, he’s the victim.
He is certainly a victim of almost 5 years of failed impeachment hearings, and being deplatformed.
The first impeachment investigation occurred after H. Clinton paid off a British man for false testimony, and J. Biden made a false FISA court complaint. That's why the first impeachment failed, and why you don't hear the Democrats talk about it further.
Honestly, you sound like a crazy person who avoids facts to preserve a twisted, leftist narrative.
Trump did not start a riot on Jan. 6 - Pelosi refused to pay for enough security to maintain order.
Oh, and Happy Presidents' Day to Mr. Trump. He will go down in history as one of the most productive Presidents wrt foreign policy, red tape reduction and the Wall since Reagan, or maybe even Roosevelt.
The point people are miss is that Post-18th Century conservatism is a shade of liberalism in the broadest sense (not progressivism though), whereas fascism is resolutely anti-liberal. That said, right-of-center political parties contain lots of people who aren't remotely conservative: radical pro-market capitalists, libertarians, and the occasional fascist. They might all refer to themselves as conservatives, but that doesn't mean they are.
And you know what, fine. Just keep tossing anyone who doesn't play nice to the wolves. But please just stop pretending there's morality involved. Let's accept it: we're here in pursuit of profit. Any good that we do is just a nice side effect. The sooner we understand that the sooner we can actually do something about it.
This applies to the media too, of course. I love the manic obsession with stability and morality combined with a lot of corporate and government money in a lot of US journalists' stories. You get great gems like hit pieces on privacy and encryption painted with a moral coat of paint that are better than anything the alphabet soup agencies could come up with - the Silicon Valley nazis are using Clubhouse, the pedophiles are using Signal, we must let the government monitor communications now! You get stories about reddit users in the stock market that somehow try to paint them as the alt-right while completely sidestepping any discussion of wealth inequality. Love it!
Politics has to do with generation-defining issues of our time, like choosing a more rational voting system at the national level and building broad support for a sensible third party that genuinely represents the interests of voters like myself, who are poorly served by the trifling squabbles of the current political "establishment." All this other stuff that certain biased parties want to paint as "political" is just the natural outcome of well-understood deterministic processes of economic self-interest, nothing more and nothing less. No use whining about cold, hard reality!!
At the same time, politics are an unavoidable fact of life for a lot of people. It's hardly fair to tell somebody to just get away from political topics when it's their rights and liberties being debated on C-SPAN.
It is quite hard to not see your examples as political _but_ you don't want any of the changes currently being advocated by leftist activists.
> Selling customer data to advertisers is economic, not political
If selling customer data was forbidden, then it would not be a natural outcome of well-understood deterministic processes of economic self-interest. It seems the "natural outcome" is wholly dependent on current laws.
I do not even believe this at all. The corps just do not want to be nagged by activists, so they use a lot of the expected words to signal that they are not to be attacked.
I remember the banking boss kneeling during BLM in front of a huge vault [1] - a pure photo-op for the media. It is the same with Google et al.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-06-16/banks-sna...
No matter how wholesome its branding appears to be, no matter how many rainbow avatars it uses on social media, no matter how many times its executives kneel for photo ops, a big corporation doesn't actually give a shit about anything besides profit.
Or similarly, you get screeds accusing random bloggers of spreading "alt-right" views that completely gloss over the role of, say, Robin Hanson at George Mason University in spreading the notion that it's actually a humanitarian act to outsource manufacturing to Bangladesh.
I’d argue that is more of a characteristic of Capitalism at this point.
Its one of those excellent demonstrations of how one can be both intelligent and yet not at all at the same time.
The American political environment actively discourages nuance, which gets into discourse at every level unfortunately.
And this is very SV specific. You won't find this in the tech scene of Berlin, Zürich or New York. It's closely tied to the 'Californian Ideology', a sort of new form of futurism that is in many ways similar to its historical predecessor.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reactionary_modernism
I wouldn't say that SV leans left either, most actions are virtue signaling to appeal to changing public opinion.
But in terms of economy I think the SV discourse is maybe already much closer to what Scott Alexander had outlined in his Left Libertarianism article. [0] I feel that this ideology which combines unregulated capitalism with social safety net is very far from socialism, progressivism, social democracy etc. What I do not understand - why is it such a shame in not being a leftist for educated middle-class coastal Americans?
[0} https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/12/08/a-something-sort-of-li...
Technosolutionism is not fascism, libertarianism is not fascism, cancel culture is not fascism, socialism is not fascism, laissez faire capitalism is not fascism, letting fascists express their opinions is not fascism, censoring fascists is not fascism.
Of course this is semantics, and when most americans talk about fascism, they are talking about something else which may or may not have some vague resemblance to fascism, but meaningful dialogue is impossible if we can't agree what it is we're discussing.