Re: <nettime> nettime-l Digest, Vol 19, Issue 5

[GM - tedbyfield via nettime-l <nettime-l@lists.nettime.org>]

On 23 Jan 2025, at 12:42, Michael Benson:

> It's fascism. Sometimes a cigar really is a cigar.

🎯

We’ve had nearly a decade of experience with educated, seemingly 
cultured people indulging in this kind of scholastic quibbling and what 
I call Arendtsplaining: “it’s not *really* ‘fascism’ because it 
doesn’t meet [X or Y criterion peculiar to 1930s Europe].”

I’ll never forget those golden moments when people — again, 
educated, seemingly cultured people — argued that J6 wasn’t *really* 
a “coup” because it failed, or because the armed forces weren’t 
involved.

Note the centrality of negation in both arguments: they invoke some 
notionally authoritative abstract model then fault reality for failing 
to comply with it. In that respect, I see these kinds of digressions as 
consistent with the *applied platonism* that’s consumed so much of 
leftism — a by-product of its retreat into the academy, imo.

This function of this kind of pedantry seems to be ritual: under the 
guise of conceptual precision, its mainly serves to (a) prop up the 
speaker’s sense of superiority, and (b) shift the focus from *what is 
to be done* to *how should it to be named or defined*?

Liberal denialism runs very deep indeed, and that’s how this 
obscurantism is best understood.

Cheers,
Ted
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