1/200 S2E118 - WestWatch

What this episode covers

We discuss the current state of western politics, modern day fascism and its roots. https://ongenocide.com/ Afterword: a couple of extra thoughts from Kieran Firstly, I was unduly harsh about Karl Popper’s Open Society and its Enemies. I disagree strongly with the central premise of the book, but I recall thinking that there were some good valid points made by Popper. Secondly, I regret not expanding more on the simplistic, anti-intellectual and emotive aspect of fascist politics – or at least the public-facing part of fascist politics. Like neoconservatives, fascists like to feed simple narratives to people in a very direct purposive way. This is another reason that the sophistication and simple brute force (in terms of scale and access to resources) of public relations techniques has actually helped create a generalised fascism. Modern communications techniques show exactly what psychological buttons to push to get the desired results. Not only does the professionalisation of political rhetoric make fascist-style manipulation open to anyone with money, it makes it virtually compulsory among major political parties. Their reliance on oligarchy money and institutional power means that they cannot organically represent democratic wishes, so they must create political backing through such manipulation – hence the culture war. In the simplistic political discourse thus created, nonsense is more effective than reasoning. Calling concerns over climate change “woke”, for example, is like throwing red meat to the faithful who are conditioned to respond to a very amorphous non-specific notion of what is good and what is bad. This sort of appeal to gut instinct is very characteristic of fascism and it may be the most dangerous thing we now see because the anger that is provoked by a meaningless term cannot be argued with. This episode’s co-hosts Kieran, Kyle Timestamps 0:00 Introductions 2:09 The Undercurrent 3:54 Political Binary  14:11 Putting on a Persona 23:59 Tying in the Last Four Years 28:44 The Will to Power  32:35 David Seymour 37:01 Victimhood 44:10 Embedding Journalists 47:50 Scratch A Liberal 55:04 Absurdities 1:02:54 Urgency and Might 1:09:18 Right Wing Fracturing 1:13:18 Meddling With The Numbers 1:19:21 Seymours Love of Liberal Ideology 1:21:33 Closings Intro/Outro by The Prophet Motive Support us here: https://www.patreon.com/1of200