| I agree: "The human mind is a great pattern matching machine but has a problem with false positives." But, I think you have stripped the context from the quotes you offer, and in so doing, made them applicable to anything. For instance, regarding point (1), you're stereotyping the BLM protests. Read their website and it's all about intersectionality and inclusion and a bunch of other academic buzzwords. It's not really about protest for protest's sake: specific demands have been given. And it's not anti-intellectual, which is the context you removed from point 1. You have done a similar thing with the next point. The original point is about fear of intruders from outside the nation I would agree that there are parallels of certain parts of, say, the anti-globalization protests of the late 1990s (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1999_Seattle_WTO_protests) with this synopsis of fascism. A lot of that was action for action's sake: dress up in black and break store windows. But take, on the other hand, the OWS protests. It was partly because of the authoritarian tendencies of other protest movements that OWS adopted various egalitarian habits - not addressing crowds with bullhorns, the consensus process, etc. (For more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupy_Wall_Street#Main_organi...). In sum, I think you're not being careful about your reasoning, and you are reasoning backward from the answer you want ("a pox on both their houses"). We're not talking about mere groupthink, smug activists, or misguided protesters. We're talking about actual fascism. |
It doesn't have to mean physical intruders though, that certainly wasn't what the Nazis were mainly concerned about.
> We're talking about actual fascism.
Which is, I would argue, on a spectrum. Groupthink isn't really benign IMHO.