When I think about what I've heard in the news about Denmark recently, most of the times it's come up, it's been in the context of claims that Denmark is doing a better job of dealing with nonwhite and Muslim immigrants there than some comparable European countries because it uses some fairly-authoritarian policies designed to limit immigration of these foreigners to Denmark (e.g. https://theconversation.com/think-twice-before-copying-denma...).
Obviously the reason that fascism is something people in the modern world care about is because it's a way of characterizing present-day political policies as violent and gravely immoral, akin to the violent and gravely immoral policies that the historical Nazi party of Germany did. And obviously, everyone has an interest in characterizing the policies of their political enemies as fascist, and fighting claims from their enemies that their own policies count as fascism.
I ctrl-F'd this article and didn't find one mention of words like "migrant", "white", "refugee", "muslim", "of color", "racism", "anti-Semitism", etc. And what that tells me is that this LARP that tries to teach kids that fascism is bad (and that is explicitly concerned about the possibility of "accidentally teaching teens that fascism is actually awesome.") is not even attempting to address the single most important contemporary political issue that makes fascism salient; namely how should white societies deal with the ostensible problems caused by nonwhite communities living in close proximity to them - and are there ways of dealing with these problems that are so gravely immoral that it is morally important to stop them with antifascist violence?
After all, what's the most important thing the historical Nazis did? The genocide of European Jews because of their ostensible racial threat to Aryans, i.e. whites.
I looked at the pictures of this LARP and did not notice a single nonwhite person. Maybe the nonwhite student and faculty population at this Danish boarding school is extremely low. In my country, this is the very first thing that someone seeking to characterize the boarding school itself as fascist would point out. Are they correct? Is Danish society itself fascist for being a society where no one raises this question in an article describing an ostensible attempt to teach teenagers in school that fascism is bad?
How could any decision that voters make about how to cast their votes be a threat to the democratic process? A voter grounding their decision about who to vote for on a single issue is democracy working as intended. If this is bad it's only bad in the sense that voters in a democracy can vote for bad people or policies - but this is not something democracy as a system does or can promise to avoid.
Do you think the librarians' choice about what books to stock in their library aren't motivated by political or religious worldviews? What kind of person becomes a school librarian? One motivation is that they want to influence what kinds of written information young people do and do not readily have access to.
You're more likely to be aware of a library book curation decision where parents are publicly fighting to remove a book the school library management wants to keep; compared to a curation decision where the school library management simply never decides to make a book available to begin with.
If you are not a hardcore prison abolitionist you are comfortable with the idea of a government provided list of undesirables to exclude from society. If you are a hardcore prison abolitionist, and you're not insane, then you probably have some other libertarian/anarchist idea for how to create a list of undesirables to exclude from society that, in practice, amounts to recreating a government in a roundabout way.
> Opposing rent-seeking is literally why we have American democracy, which paved the way for French, Brazilian, Canadian, Indian, Mexican and so many other democracies. Kings were the ultimate rent-seekers: every citizen was the product.
It's really not. Opposing rent-seeking in a general sense isn't what motivated the American revolution; and the King of England in the 18th century wasn't primarily a rent-seeker. The royal family did and does own a great deal of land in Britain which they collect rents on, but this is true of a lot of the historic and current British nobility; and the institution of the British monarchy was and is doing a lot of other things socially that just have no relationship to rent-seeking one way or the other. Ruling monarchs aren't "rent-seekers" where their citizens are "products", except insofar as any government of any group of people is; and I think that's way too reductive a way to explain why societies and governments work the way they do.
Rent-seeking is a temptation that all sorts of people under all sorts of political and economic systems are prone to. Democracy is no particular guard against it, because people who benefit from rent-seeking in some particular set of circumstances can vote too.
This isn't to say that rent-seeking is good, but it's also a pretty hard thing to regulate. It's really hard to codify in law which economic activities are rent-seeking and which ones are people buying a product or service that someone else thinks is a bad deal for them.
> We've designed a world where math mostly doesn't hurt you when you're not thinking about it, but boy, oh boy, can your community, social circle, or people you don't even know hurt you if you haven't paid attention to and aligned yourself with the common sentiment.
This isn't the result of anyone's design. In human communities hundreds of thousands of years ago, your community, social circle, or people you don't even know (because they are foreigners from a different 100-person hunter-gatherer band than your 100-person hunter-gatherer band) could absolutely hurt you; and these are the conditions that human beings evolved our social skills in. Understanding math came much later in the history of humanity.
There's a substantial number of people who see drug decriminalization as a failed experiment. The most salient example is the state of Oregon re-imposing criminal penalties for drug possession in 2024 after having decriminalized them in 2020.
You can also look at discourse from people who are unhappy with de facto marijuana legalization for a variety of reasons, including that it causes more public places to smell obnoxiously like weed; or that legalization allows legitimate profit-seeking firms to market marijuana more effectively to more people, creating additional marginal lazy stoners and thereby making society generally worse off.
A lot of people got extremely angry at the covid lockdowns; and extremely angry at the inflation caused by the transfer payments to (some) people (in ways that often had little to do with whether or not they could work); and extremely angry at the widespread fraud in applying for covid-related benefits; and extremely angry at (and increasingly distrustful of) the state/medical establishment's disease-related guidelines.
What one person thinks improves society, another person thinks makes society worse. In a democracy, they both can vote; in a non-democratic system, the one whose desires are constantly thwarted by the non-democratically-accountable governance officials might revolt.
> I've been thinking about this too: why aren't we able to run safe political experiments?
Often, the reason is that some constituency, possibly a small one, that strongly benefits from the existing status quo, actively works against the political experiment using the judicial system; and the rest of the electorate doesn't care enough to fight them effectively to make the experiment possible.
This is actually a problem of decentralization, not of centralization. A stronger central planner would be able to just crush a small group of concerned citizens who are independently organizing to fight a political experiment that impacts them, and do that experiment anyway. This is a good thing if you expect that the political experiment is just fucking over some innocent people for no reason; and it's a bad thing if you think that the small, dedicated group of activists are actually rent-seekers in some sense who are benefiting themselves and making everyone else in society slightly and diffusely worse off.
A more nuanced version of this argument is, different people in democratic electorates disagree wildly on what constitutes an improvement to society. A practice or institution that is an improvement to one constituency is a detriment to another constituency, and that other constituency will seek to destroy the practice the moment they have the electoral power to do so.
I want humanity to have the power to radically reshape the uncaring physical world to suit the needs and desires of individual humans. This requires harnessing as much energy as possible (as well as having the technological capacity to direct that energy towards ends that benefit human beings).
Harnessing as much energy as possible entails making use of energy resources much in excess of what's available via fossil fuel exploration; we should be thinking on the scale of massive solar panel arrays in space beaming immense amounts of power to Earth, the sort of structures that are plausibly the beginning of a Dyson sphere. Also, with prodigious amounts energy available, lots of ways of directly controlling the amount of atmospheric CO2 become unlocked, that are currently prohibitively expensive, and this solves climate change as well as a host of other human problems.
But we're nowhere near that point yet, and humanity still does need fossil fuels to power the current economy, which is the same economy that is leading us towards that energy-abundant goal. I don't want to unnecessarily delay a future where we're harnessing all the power of the sun, by prematurely forestalling energy use using less desirable fossil fuels right now.
Yeah, oil exploration is clearly not what the people who originally set up the rules for "green transition" investment funds had in mind. But my own position is that ensuring that humanity as maximal access to energy, even if it's fossil fuel-based energy right now, is the most effective long-term way to ensure human flourishing and also achieve environmentalist goals. So I've never cared about investing my own money in investment funds that have inclusion rules based on the "green transition", and I don't really care if the formal rules for those funds are getting severely bent, because I never supported any investment philosophy that limited itself to investment in funds formally-classified as "green transition" funds to begin with.
The color green has long been symbolically associated with environmentalist political causes, because the earliest environmentalist concerns were about literally-green plants being replaced by human-made machinery that is typically brown and grey. The fact that, today, the biggest environmentalist political concern is atmospheric CO2, and the fact that one effect of larger amounts of atmospheric CO2 is literally more green, photosynthesizing plant life, is a true enough fact; but not really relevant to the color symbolism.
If this is the law in Sweden it should be immediately repealed, precisely in order to prevent people from arguing that a political donation counts as legally-punishable "damage to a company" if it's the wrong kind of political donation.
The fact that you're claiming that a donation to an anti-immigration political party is the sort of conduct that people "held to a higher standard" by law should be forbidden from doing is a type of political censorship that you're trying to enact via the mechanism of corporate law, and it's worth destroying that mechanism of corporate law over it.
There's not actually all that many useful things that can be made in poor, underresourced countries and villages. It's cheaper to buy them from a Chinese factory that is highly specialized at making those useful things in huge quantities and send them via container ship to the place where they're needed. This is as true for random poor people in Africa as it is for me when I buy stuff cheap on AliExpress.
I think there's a reasonable chance that the judge and prosecutors in this case are familiar with _Days of Rage: America's Radical Underground, the FBI, and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence_ by Bryan Burrough; and consider the failure of the criminal justice system of the time to impose extremely severe prison sentences on the domestic bombers of the 1970s to be a mistake that they do not intend to repeat.
Obviously the reason that fascism is something people in the modern world care about is because it's a way of characterizing present-day political policies as violent and gravely immoral, akin to the violent and gravely immoral policies that the historical Nazi party of Germany did. And obviously, everyone has an interest in characterizing the policies of their political enemies as fascist, and fighting claims from their enemies that their own policies count as fascism.
I ctrl-F'd this article and didn't find one mention of words like "migrant", "white", "refugee", "muslim", "of color", "racism", "anti-Semitism", etc. And what that tells me is that this LARP that tries to teach kids that fascism is bad (and that is explicitly concerned about the possibility of "accidentally teaching teens that fascism is actually awesome.") is not even attempting to address the single most important contemporary political issue that makes fascism salient; namely how should white societies deal with the ostensible problems caused by nonwhite communities living in close proximity to them - and are there ways of dealing with these problems that are so gravely immoral that it is morally important to stop them with antifascist violence?
After all, what's the most important thing the historical Nazis did? The genocide of European Jews because of their ostensible racial threat to Aryans, i.e. whites.
I looked at the pictures of this LARP and did not notice a single nonwhite person. Maybe the nonwhite student and faculty population at this Danish boarding school is extremely low. In my country, this is the very first thing that someone seeking to characterize the boarding school itself as fascist would point out. Are they correct? Is Danish society itself fascist for being a society where no one raises this question in an article describing an ostensible attempt to teach teenagers in school that fascism is bad?