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It's a slippery word. The best attempt I've ever seen at a definition is the wonderful essay "Eternal Fascism", by Umberto Eco, who himself grew up under Mussolini's regime.

It's well worth reading in its entirety; but in short he argues that, while there is no single, definitive list of beliefs or policies that a political movement must have in order to be labelled as "fascist", there is a large number of common characteristics of such movements, and any group which possesses a certain subset of these can reasonably be considered to be fascist -- even if that subset is very different from another group's. But I don't do him justice. Read the essay instead!

Re So the point is? I guess every generation reflects back on computer use?
I always liked Umberto Eco on The Holy War: Mac vs. DOS from 1994
http://www.themodernword.com/eco/eco_mac_vs_pc.html
..."DOS is Protestant, or even Calvinistic"...
'To make the system work you need to interpret the program yourself: Far away from the baroque community of revelers, the user is closed within the loneliness of his own inner torment."

The fact is that the world is divided between users of the Macintosh computer and users of MS-DOS compatible computers. I am firmly of the opinion that the Macintosh is Catholic and that DOS is Protestant. Indeed, the Macintosh is counter-reformist and has been influenced by the ratio studiorum of the Jesuits. It is cheerful, friendly, conciliatory; it tells the faithful how they must proceed step by step to reach -- if not the kingdom of Heaven -- the moment in which their document is printed. It is catechistic: The essence of revelation is dealt with via simple formulae and sumptuous icons. Everyone has a right to salvation.
DOS is Protestant, or even Calvinistic. It allows free interpretation of scripture, demands difficult personal decisions, imposes a subtle hermeneutics upon the user, and takes for granted the idea that not all can achieve salvation. To make the system work you need to interpret the program yourself: Far away from the baroque community of revelers, the user is closed within the loneliness of his own inner torment.
You may object that, with the passage to Windows, the DOS universe has come to resemble more closely the counter-reformist tolerance of the Macintosh. It's true: Windows represents an Anglican-style schism, big ceremonies in the cathedral, but there is always the possibility of a return to DOS to change things in accordance with bizarre decisions: When it comes down to it, you can decide to ordain women and gays if you want to.

Umberto Eco, 1994

.... and here is the Eco piece as well

http://www.themodernword.com/eco/eco_mac_vs_pc.html

Yes, one of the 14 theses about Ur-Fascism, or the fundamental traits of Fascism.

Then again Luddites aren't necessarily as ignorant or anti-progress as these politicians.

Right; we're going to need some sort of Godwin's Law equivalent soon.

Thanks for the interesting comments on Japanese history. As for the European varieties of fascism, their fundamental characteristics have been dissected in detail by the inimitable Umberto Eco, in a 1995 article called Eternal Fascism: Fourteen Ways of Looking at a Blackshirt.

This technology will never take your job. It will take the job of the Chinese animator who takes your job. The money saved in each instance will go to the executives and stockholders of the company. Luckily, in America, you will still have some options to keep a roof over your head. These are welfare and prison. This is the system being used for the displaced auto manufacturing employees in Detroit.
Thomas Pynchon explains it all here:
http://www.themodernword.com/pynchon/pynchon_essay s_luddite.html

Before the introduction of beans, peas, and lentils in the 11th century in western European agriculture, the "vegetarian" diet many serfs lived on was positively dangerous. They lived short lives and were thin, small of stature, and weak. The difference between the meat-eating lord and vegetarian subject was readily apparent from their physical strength and stature, and Roman writers often describe the pastoral Germanic invaders as fearsome "giants".

In northern Europe (Scandinavia, Netherlands) the population in sparsely populated areas had a mostly pastoral lifestyle up to the 12th-13th century. Today the diet in those countries is very high in fish, milk, eggs, and meat, and they are the tallest people of the world. The funny thing, however, is that the Dutch quickly became one of the shortest people in Europe for a few centuries after switching to agriculture, even though they still had comparatively diverse diets, suggesting that they had an unusally low tolerance of vegetarian diets.

The difference in adaptation to agriculture between northern and southern European populations is quite large, considering that the northern populations have been exposed to agriculture just one millenium, compared to two to nine for people more to the south. These millenia of course are nothing in comparison to the hundreds of thousands of years mankind depended mostly on meat for nutrition, just like pastoral peoples today (70% nutritional value -- not volume -- from meat). And, obviously, before that we descended from herbivores, but that is true of any carnivore.

From writer Umbertbo Eco:
http://www.themodernword.com/eco/eco_blackshirt.ht ml
From the partisan but informed Dr. Lawrence Britt:
http://www.rense.com/general37/char.htm

Arrested for a political T-shirt

Arrested and prosecuted for a political sign

Three years in prison for a political cartoon

Grounds for concern, I hope you'll agreee, even if you don't consider it Fascism.

I suggest if you feel that way then you should hop over to http://www.metafilter.com./ The conversation there is almost always fantastic and they have developed the art of relevant hyperlinks into an art form. The group mind at metafilter basically says thou shalt not state opinions without in-line hyper links. There is also an excellent article by Umberto Eco to much the same effect, but then again most slashdotters have probably never heard of venerated master of literary tradition. http://www.themodernword.com/eco/eco_future_of_boo k.html

Umberto Ecco's list is a good starting point as well.

Fits well with a disturbing number of current western regimes...

The word's become a more or less content-free insult to throw at anyone you don't like, much like "liberal". But the ever-interesting Umberto Eco has come up with a list of characteristics of a fascist movement:

Eternal Fascism:
Fourteen Ways of Looking at a Blackshirt

This is just a summary. The original was published in the New York Review of Books, but I can't find a copy online.

Note, though, that he describes fascism as a popular movement, based in large part (though the summary doesn't say so) on his experiences with the Italian fascisti before and during WWII. This doesn't really have much at all to do with the lobbyist- and special interest-driven nonsense that we're seeing today. We need a new word.

The problem is many people don't understand the difference between an explanation (why something happened) and an excuse (why what happened is okay).

This has led to the belief that understanding terrorists is the same as excusing the terrorists.

This has led to us not understanding the terrorists, and thus being ineffective at fighting them.

I always considered this phenomenon a nasty rhetorical trick, akin to debate-spoiling tricks like ad hominem. Your observation reminded me of a phrase in a paper by Umberto Eco, who grew up under Mussolini:

When I was a boy I was taught to think of Englishmen as the five-meal people. They ate more frequently than the poor but sober Italians. Jews are rich and help each other through a secret web of mutual assistance. However, the followers of Fascism must also be convinced that they can overwhelm the enemies. Thus, by a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak. Fascist governments are condemned to lose wars because they are constitutionally incapable of objectively evaluating the force of the enemy.

They are constitutionally incapable of doing so because rational debate on foreign policy will erode their power base, and therefore they are condemned to lose the war to keep their power. The puzzling thing is why this type of argumentation works for politicians, and why so many people copy these arguments.

Of course, by quoting this I put myself in the situation described by Godwin's Law, which is itself both an observation on a nasty rhetorical trick and a new nasty rhetorical trick.

This is false! Kids, listen: If you want to get laid, buy a Powerbook, get some black-rimmed glasses and a dog-eared copy of a Thomas Pynchon novel, and go find a good coffeehouse near a university. Grab a table near a napkin dispenser. Do not open the Powerbook but place it conspicuously on the table in front of you. Pretend to read the novel. Make eye contact with the grad student across the way and smile.

If things go well, she will decide that she needs some napkins, and while gathering them together will accidentally drop some on the floor. Help her pick up the excess paper and make a stupid little joke, something like "Oops, there go some trees." She will then say something like "I love Pynchon" at which point you reply "Have you seen Zak Smith's illustrations for Gravity's Rainbow?" You will then open the Powerbook and visit the site via a bookmark in a folder named 'Diversions'. It is important that she not see the folder marked 'Linux stuuf' or 'pron'. Spend the next thirty minutes saying things like "I really do think media is ultimately the message" etc. If you successfully complete this sequence of steps, sex is all but guaranteed.

It was ok, but they could have left out the silly sound effects. There were a lot of string plucks and boings that belong on a Spike Jones record than a sci-fi comedy.

What is it with you and absolutes / dualities? The people your judgement rests upon in the above quote have overcome more than most: one of them was an olympic-qualifying athlete who mastered extremely complex heavy equipment and rose to the top of her field despite being the only female in it within 300 miles, suffered extreme working conditions, raised intelligent independent children and a large garden while doing all that... and fell into addiction despite it. More strength and perseverance of spirit through most of her life than a gaggle of Nietzschean strutting bozos.

The Low don't have the stomach - or the heart, the brains - to defend their rights every moment of their lives.

This is where it gets scary, because someone who has great moral fortitude in the realm of the senses takes it upon themselves to decide who is deserving or isn't, based on the limitations built into their particularly specialized (and generally grossly reductionist) way of thinking. Oh yes, there are a great many fools who could do with some decent education (I don't mean a 'public' school). Yet I've met many ordinary unschooled folks who lead simple lives, have a little fun, work hard, keep their own mind about things and treat others fairly. I've met internationally lauded heros and leaders, prophets and great artists; they are all weak, they all have mastery over some part of their spirit, they are all fools and geniuses. (Orwell's a good example of that: very insightful, but overconfident, and at once compassionate and a real prick.) You crave a simple humanity, in your writing. Perhaps you misrepresent yourself.

By the way I am no authoritarian; just the opposite.

Yet you claim "Drugs are dangerous" and advocate that the government extends its dominion into our personal chemistry, despite the evidence that prohibition doesn't work.

individual liberty notwithstanding I don't see that the rest of us owe it to you, to let you drink yourself to a painful squalid, undignified and utterly pointless death like my father suffered. If I can stop you doing that I will be glad to do so, no matter how much it may prick your sense of injustice.

No, never let someone ruin their lives needlessly. Please stop people doing that when you see them... just don't try to put them in jail, because that's worse, or tell them they're low animals, because that's just stupid, or hand the responsibility over to a legislative body, because their motives are perverted by the process. Perhaps your utopian studies can include things like peer intervention, popular education, a sense of purpose and self-esteem, and other tools for strengthening atrophied spirits. Regulate substances by demanding purity standards and good strong labelling, fine. Control consensual behaviour by fiat? Time to grow out of that.

in your terms, either we all have the right to do whatever we want to ourselves, or else it's fascism.

Now, you see? You're doing it again, without quoting me, and durn near invoking Godwin's Law while you're at it. Well, you started it:

10. Elitism is a typical aspect of any reactionary ideology, insofar as it is fundamentally aristocratic, and aristocratic and militaristic elitism cruelly implies contempt for the weak.

-- U. Eco, Eternal Fascism: Fourteen Ways of Looking at a Blackshirt

Anyway, you have to believe me when I say I think the world's analog. Consensuality is context-dependent (and don't go making puddles about sophistry and shit; it's a real-world notion, not an abstraction). Don't get intoxicated in the park, or I and some friends will encourage your departure, because you'll ruin it for us. But a can of beer with lunch on a park bench? Whate

I think that's a bit harsh for novels and graphic novels. Some of the comics cited above are difficult, intelligent stories with involved character development and a good story to tell.

Please, are you kidding us? I read Batman: The Dark Knight Returns which was okay, but at the back it already admitted they basically made up the last two parts on the fly under pretty intense deadline pressure. And it shows, similar to the way Coleridge's Kubla Khan took something of a dive after he was bothered out of his drug-induced state and the dropped his inspiration -- except I'm not sure Dark Knight part 1 is exactly Coleridge at his best.

Look, I enjoyed Spider-Man vs. Wolverine as much as the next fellow and I'm glad comic book characters have outlets to behave a little more maturely than they do in a short monthly comic, but if you want to find great mainstream literature these days, take a look at Umberto Eco or Toni Morrison, not Frank Miller, please. Graphic novels are perhaps better called the new graphic novellas; they simply aren't replacements for 200-600 pages of truly great writing.

Does Stephenson's expose of economic 'reality' take into account forces like the Masons, Knights-Templar, Rothschildes, the Jews and all that good stuff

Yes. And Quakers. And non-conformists. And alchmists. And Dutch nationalists. And MIT. And much, much more.

This is rich, deep and seriously hard work to read. It's a book for when you have a lot of time to read and aren't going to be distracted. I'm about halfway through Quicksilver and struggling a bit because it isn't an easy book to read in ten minute snatches in the midst of a busy life, but my opinion is that it's worth it.

I think the comparisons between Stephenson and Umberto Eco are fair, and I also think that Eco was the best writer of the twentieth century.

I remember studying Thomas Pynchon in school, and upon hearing how his military records and university records were lost, I often wondered if his books were some kind of method of covert messaging, due to the code-like writing style he has, and the ominous history he has. Using spam as a method of communication is useful in the sense that it can be hard to tell who the real message is going to; making it impossible to identify the two points of connection, and therefore limiting accountability and obscuring who is doing the talking; so if Pynchon's books are like this... it would also be impossible to tell who the books were intended to (and therefore the US Mil could contact spies who could be in a tight spot, or informants who may be in a tight spot). The books could also contain a bunch of different messages using different cryptographies, in plain sight, to communicate with multiple agents. This is likely incorrect and way off the tin-foil-hat scale of reason, but the thought did occur to me when I read The Crying of Lot 49, and even more so when I read Mason and Dixon.

I remember studying Thomas Pynchon in school, and upon hearing how his military records and university records were lost, I often wondered if his books were some kind of method of covert messaging, due to the code-like writing style he has, and the ominous history he has. Using spam as a method of communication is useful in the sense that it can be hard to tell who the real message is going to; making it impossible to identify the two points of connection, and therefore limiting accountability and obscuring who is doing the talking; so if Pynchon's books are like this... it would also be impossible to tell who the books were intended to (and therefore the US Mil could contact spies who could be in a tight spot, or informants who may be in a tight spot). The books could also contain a bunch of different messages using different cryptographies, in plain sight, to communicate with multiple agents. This is likely incorrect and way off the tin-foil-hat scale of reason, but the thought did occur to me when I read The Crying of Lot 49, and even more so when I read Mason and Dixon.

After some searching, I found Semiotics for Begineers, which was a pretty good introduction to the field, and written with enough clarity that even this programmer could figure out the strange language. Go give it a try.

It might also help you as a programmer. We use esoteric language all the time, like '\n', 0xDEADBEEF, deques and queues, stdout, stderr, stdlog, etc. etc., and semiotics tries to explain how these somewhat random characters can be attached to ideas, so that our community can send the characters back and forth to communicate the ideas. However, if it comes to an assembler class vs. a semiotics class, please take the assembler class.

Philip K. Dick was, especially in his later works (Valis, for example) strongly influenced by Gnosticism; the article fails to mention this, but there's an interesting essay exploring some of the connections here, for those interested.

(Unrelated, but still amusing, is this letter that he wrote to the FBI, accusing Stanislaw Lem of being a "composite committee". Fun stuff.)

Feature #8: The followers must feel humiliated by the ostentatious wealth and force of their enemies.

Finding loopholes in Godwin's law since 2001

Ah HA! This paper was, in fact, NOT written by the esteemed group of security experts that are listed - the true author is the famed author Umberto Eco as is evidenced by the document information in the PDF file.

Few people know that the author of The Name of the Rose and Foucault's Pendulum is also a secret info-sec expert.

Also amazing is that, for all of the insecurities brought on by Microsoft's products, the authors still used it to write this paper (or at least to create the PDF). Based on that, I would assume that this paper has been hacked, and not believe anything it says.

Fight Back!

</humor>

I found an interesting paper on the history of the luddite movement.

Perhaps that is the way to go - escue all technology and move to the woods - collect our own cotton and wool and build human powered looms (even that is a bit too much technology...) to make our RFID-Free clothes...

Ok, where did I leave my PDA?

His middle name was "Kindred". That's just weird.

There's a lovely biography of him here. Note the highlights: dead twin sister inspiring themes of duality, depression leading to meth addiction leading to incredible productivity but also debilitating paranoia. Also, the incredibly weird beliefs. "This system took the form of a ship in outer space, delivering highly concentrated doses of information to him through beams of pink light."

Also note the suggestion that Mulder's search for his sister on The X-Files is one big PKD homage.

--grendel drago

(The above post is redundant *and* repetitive. Too much use of the word "interesting")

Pynchon resources:

The Modern World

Pynchon quotes

Crying of Lot 49 resources

(The above post is redundant *and* repetitive. Too much use of the word "interesting")

Pynchon resources:

The Modern World

Pynchon quotes

Crying of Lot 49 resources

(The above post is redundant *and* repetitive. Too much use of the word "interesting")

Pynchon resources:

The Modern World

Pynchon quotes

Crying of Lot 49 resources

Lot49.com is an interesting tribute to Thomas Pynchon's Crying of Lot 49 , an intersting exploration of life in CA. (My favorite part is the name of one of the bands--Sick Dick and the Volkwagens)

For those interesting in a real headtrip, try to plow your way through Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow.

Pynchon is an interesting hermit. He didn't accept his award for Gravity's Rainbow.

Instead, he sent Irwin Corey.

(BTW, You'll enjoy GR a lot more if you read it with a companion.)