I'm sorry but it is very hard to understand what you said when the arguments against my various points are, in order:
> we should give up old paradigms that don't work
Why and how don't they work?
> Eco should come up with good, convincing arguments
Why are they not good? Why not explain how they don't convince you?
> The problem is that the way he does it is rather unconvincing
Again, how is it not convincing you? Elaborate...
> Can it even help us determine which of those things are fascist and which are not?
He does provide a very simple way to do exactly that. Why not argue against such a method, instead of implying it be a stupid method through countless examples, but never explaining how it would not work in such scenarios? This seems like such a destructive way to approach conversation. I can agree rhetorically on some points, but you are just pushing for the impossibility of effectively describing anything intangible.
I apologize if I am misinterpreting your arguments, but as I think I've shown there's very little of it around for me to meaningfully engage with it..
The first point seems rather impulsive. Should we give up functional but old paradigms simply for innovation's sake, even if we know they work? Socrates clearly did not ever argue the topics brought up by Eco, so what you're saying is Eco should come up with a different way to express himself. Innovation is great, but why should anything not innovative in its method simply be disregarded?
The second point seems to be an argument against any social science in general, rather than a critique or analysis of the essay. If every political science discussion had to start with a justification of why such phenomena are studied in the first place, we would get nowhere. Should we not study "democracies" or "states"? Is anything not tangible not worthy of study?
This also ties in to my last point: it's very disingenuous to call fascism "not sensible" without any real argument for it. It's been a giant hurdle in the history of many nations, it makes sense to want to analyze it and understand it. If your argument is that it's not sensible as in fascism is a far too general concept for it to be an effective label, then I'd expect you to directly challenge the list proposed, as it seems to me Eco does manage to describe an acceptable way to do such labeling.
It's a bit naive to compare it on those terms while completely ignoring the sheer superiority of ER's world building. It is of course personal opinion, but no open world RPG has amazed me as consistently when discovering new regions to explore. Fromsoft has provided what is probably the most beautiful and diverse world ever crafted at a macro level, while staying true to the Souls formula at a micro level. Even the worst of the small dungeons retain a very Souls-like quality to them which allows them to keep you always on your guard, hence making exploration much more dynamic.
It's also pretty disingenuous to state the differences between ER and other open world RPGs and then pretend it has to compete with other titles exactly on those points. It is true that ER has moved into a more popular genre, but it still remains a very niche type of game. It's not this incredibly popular because it moved to a full-on mainstream genre: it took some more widely appreciated concepts and adapted the souls formula to them, but what everyone is praising is how well they managed to keep those core souls values intact while moving to this new genre.
> we should give up old paradigms that don't work
Why and how don't they work?
> Eco should come up with good, convincing arguments
Why are they not good? Why not explain how they don't convince you?
> The problem is that the way he does it is rather unconvincing
Again, how is it not convincing you? Elaborate...
> Can it even help us determine which of those things are fascist and which are not?
He does provide a very simple way to do exactly that. Why not argue against such a method, instead of implying it be a stupid method through countless examples, but never explaining how it would not work in such scenarios? This seems like such a destructive way to approach conversation. I can agree rhetorically on some points, but you are just pushing for the impossibility of effectively describing anything intangible.
I apologize if I am misinterpreting your arguments, but as I think I've shown there's very little of it around for me to meaningfully engage with it..