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I dont think that we have true fascists in the UK. There are those with some sympathy for it, but not the full Monty.

Real fascism requires paramilitary uniforms, a cult of leadership, milotarism and advocating political violence against internal and external enemies. A bunch of coked up fifty-somethings chucking beer cans at the police is just robbery, not fascism.

And let's not forget that Fascism is only now considered 'right wing' because of Soviet post-war revisionism.

Contemporaneous accounts of the 1930s and 1940s used a lot of terms to describe the Hitler and Mussolini regimes. 'Totalitarian', 'Despotic', plain old 'Evil'. You might've got a 'hardline Nationalist' in there when referring to Moseley.

But these movements weren't really presented as 'right wing' until after WWII, when the 'victorious' Soviets wanted to differentiate their own brand of wrongheaded Authoritarianism and state-sanctioned death cultury, as if they were polar opposites, when of course they weren't.

Horseshoe theory - which it didn't take long for most to twig - gets it semi-correct, but still allows the Octogenarian Strawman to remain standing.

'Far Right' *should* mean extreme Libertarianism/anarcho-capitalism. If being on the right is being pro-individual, small state, limited government then being far-right should mean being strongly in favour of such things.

I'd like to see a movement to Reclaim the term.

That doesn’t really make sense, though. That the Conservatives are a right of centre party isn’t in dispute. That they’ve become more right wing since they abandoned their pragmatism for Brexit, under Johnson and Truss, and having toyed with Patel, Braverman and Jenrick also isn’t in dispute. That Reform represents a further step to the right is hard to contest, that Trump is a step further appears clear, and if you project forward it isn’t that long before you arrive at a Mussolini type dictatorship.

It doesn't make sense because it's radical right bollocks.

I'd be interested to know what your typical small state anarcho-capitalist libertarian thinks about policing and border control.

A friend who's a small state anarcho-capitalist libertarian thinks it's really important we secure the borders and keep out the Muslims.

Not much of a libertarian, then. Or anarchist. Nor small state. Nor capitalist.
But apart from that...
You've a friend who likes to think of them self as...

I run in dark mode, I switched to light just to see if that was even worse....I could feel my retinas being burned away.

Is it really that bad? I am meant to upgrade tonight....

Now I dunno

It is that bad that if If the Labour government made OS'es.....even Gordon Brittas wouldn't fuck it up as bad.

Can anyone imagine what a Labour made OS would be like? A bit like Red Star, but more crap.

RedRose OS.

You'll begin on the SureStart screen.

Do you get a "completed it mate" message when it sees that you have bought an £800k flat ?

I dont think that we have true fascists in the UK. There are those with some sympathy for it, but not the full Monty.

Real fascism requires paramilitary uniforms, a cult of leadership, milotarism and advocating political violence against internal and external enemies. A bunch of coked up fifty-somethings chucking beer cans at the police is just robbery, not fascism.

And let's not forget that Fascism is only now considered 'right wing' because of Soviet post-war revisionism.

Contemporaneous accounts of the 1930s and 1940s used a lot of terms to describe the Hitler and Mussolini regimes. 'Totalitarian', 'Despotic', plain old 'Evil'. You might've got a 'hardline Nationalist' in there when referring to Moseley.

But these movements weren't really presented as 'right wing' until after WWII, when the 'victorious' Soviets wanted to differentiate their own brand of wrongheaded Authoritarianism and state-sanctioned death cultury, as if they were polar opposites, when of course they weren't.

Horseshoe theory - which it didn't take long for most to twig - gets it semi-correct, but still allows the Octogenarian Strawman to remain standing.

'Far Right' *should* mean extreme Libertarianism/anarcho-capitalism. If being on the right is being pro-individual, small state, limited government then being far-right should mean being strongly in favour of such things.

I'd like to see a movement to Reclaim the term.

That doesn’t really make sense, though. That the Conservatives are a right of centre party isn’t in dispute. That they’ve become more right wing since they abandoned their pragmatism for Brexit, under Johnson and Truss, and having toyed with Patel, Braverman and Jenrick also isn’t in dispute. That Reform represents a further step to the right is hard to contest, that Trump is a step further appears clear, and if you project forward it isn’t that long before you arrive at a Mussolini type dictatorship.

It doesn't make sense because it's radical right bollocks.

I'd be interested to know what your typical small state anarcho-capitalist libertarian thinks about policing and border control.

A friend who's a small state anarcho-capitalist libertarian thinks it's really important we secure the borders and keep out the Muslims.

And I think the 'issue' is that Communism is seen mostly as a set of economic beliefs...

Well, yes. But those economic beliefs govern what you can own, how you are medicated, surgeried, fed, watered, housed and employed, how your children are schooled, and specifically prevents you from trying something better on your own initiative. It sounds good but it's stupid at best and murderous at worst.

Indeed: it's why communism is doomed to fail.

And also - of course - why little experiments at communism are perfectly allowable within capitalist systems. If you want to join a communist kibbutz, you could.

Communism in its original form is the ideal economic system for the context in which humans evolved: small kinship groups of hunter gatherers. Any other system in that situation tends to lead to conflict and social breakdown. Communism doesn’t however work in any other economic setting, not even subsistence cultivation or livestock grazing.

Perhaps this is why many are instinctively drawn to the ideal of communism. It represents some deep evolutionary vestige in the human brain.

But Marxist theory is predicated on an, and requires an industrial society. Lenin and Stalin* starved millions of agricultural peasants to develop one (built by Americans) so that they could have communism.

IOW, it was bollocks from the very start.

(And what China has now isn't communism in any sense, apart from the label they still insist upon.)

*Trotsky was more of your straightforward mass murderer.

What's your take on Castro?

Also a murderer, wasn't he? Anf mass-imprisoner? Also impoverished Cuba. I may be way off beam here, but my understanding is that Cuba and Puerto Rico were roughly equal in 1958. Not now. And you never got people risking death to flee Pherto Rico.

He may have looked good on a t-shirt but he the oboy reason he isn't considered one of tge twentietg centiry's greatest villains is that there was so much competition.

Lots of debits for sure. But it's more of a mixed picture than many other communist horror shows, I'd say. Certain things improved, at least for a while. There's a good BBC iplayer doc on him that I watched recently.

But things improved in the Soviet Union too. The question is, what would have happened in tge counterfactual?

Happily for political economists, the world has given us exactly three counterfactuals: pairs of two societies which started off from roughly the same place, but one went down tge communist path and the other did not: Cuba and Puerto Rico from 1959, North and South Korea after the Korean war, West and East Germany after WW2. I think on that basis it's hard to argue anything other than that communism was awful - both for the freedom of the people and for their material well being.

Has communism worked anywhere?

I can think of two places where Fascism arguably worked

Spain, perhaps

Chile, definitely

Does Cuba count as a success? I don't know. Bearing in mind no Government is completely successful.

If Chile, where 3000 were executed and tens of thousands were tortured, counts as a "definite" success, then it's hard to say Cuba hasn't "succeeded" too.

The great Pinochet managed to exterminate all the commies, meaning Chile is now the richest and most advanced economy in South America, unlike, say, Venezuela

Yes, it’s a success

Michael Palin just started an interesting series on Venezuela on C5 tonight

I heard him talking about it on the radio a few days ago. One of the few places he hadn't been to.

Has communism worked anywhere?

I can think of two places where Fascism arguably worked

Spain, perhaps

Chile, definitely

Was Chile under Pinochet fascist? Wasn't it a fairly standard military dictatorship, similar to the rule of the Junta in Argentina, only less incompetent.

And the situation in Spain was also messy. The west worked very hard not to categorise Franco as fascist after WW2; undignified grovelling towards terrible people who might be useful isn't a novelty in diplomacy.

Besides, there was a Spanish economic miracle, but it came after junking the actual fascists from government, replacing them with Opus Dei technocrats to run the economy (as in da Vinci Code and Ruth Kelly) and softening the regime to another fairly standard military dictatorship. Spain under Phase One Francoism was going absolutely nowhere.

Speaking of Opus Dei and Roman Catholicism, the Duchess of Kent's funeral today at Westminster Cathedral was the first Roman Catholic funeral of a member of our royal family since the early 16th century

I'm sorry to be really pedantic, but Mary I had a Requiem Mass at Westminster Abbey in 1558.

OK, out by 9 years and of course that was 345 years before Westminster Cathedral was even built

Has communism worked anywhere?

I can think of two places where Fascism arguably worked

Spain, perhaps

Chile, definitely

Does Cuba count as a success? I don't know. Bearing in mind no Government is completely successful.

If Chile, where 3000 were executed and tens of thousands were tortured, counts as a "definite" success, then it's hard to say Cuba hasn't "succeeded" too.

Chile has a left wing government now.

The president is from "The Party of Dignity" a sort of left wing popular front.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apruebo_Dignidad#:~:text=Apruebo Dignidad ([aˈpɾweβo ðiɣniˈðað],for the Constitutional Convention election.

The President of Uruguay too:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yamandú_Orsi

I dont think either country looks back fondly on its military dictatorship.