Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.

Irfan, thanks for the elaborate and thoughtful reply. This clarified a number of things for me. Your position does sound reasonable, albeit quite different from the norms and beliefs I have held about infectious diseases. Perhaps you are right that …

If John Catanzara’s views are representative of sentiment within American law enforcement, that institution is gradually pushing us into an American equivalent of the Third Reich. The president of Chicago’s largest police union defended the actions of a mob of Pro-Trump rioters who stormed the U.S. Capitol—an incident that resulted in four deaths on Wednesday.…

In reply to mlyoung57. I really don’t understand your position here. In your first comment, you wrote: In popular usage, I take ‘fascist’ to be something of a moving target in its descriptive content. Though there is perhaps a core descriptive m…

In reply to Irfan Khawaja. I was speaking to a common, public meaning of the term (not to the term as a literal description of a political movement or doctrine). What you say about proper and improper use is of course true, but consistent use in a popu…

This portrait of the protesters/rioters is worth dwelling on. At a bare, bare minimum, the people who continue to support the likes of Evans and Griffin are fascists, no matter how “nice” they may seem in person. LikeLike

In reply to mlyoung57. That argument just seems to me to be a logical non-starter–a non-sequitur leading directly to a reductio. It’s one thing to dispute competing definitions of “fascism,” and/or to dispute whether Trump satis…