Your Politics Are Showing, Now Where Are Your Brains?

The fact that people can't discriminate between vastly different concepts is just infuriating. Like calling someone a Fascist and then talk about how that same person is ushering in socialism. One of these things applies to a political ideology, and has bad connotations all around (I don't give a crap if those trains did run on time) and the other gave rise to a modern political system based on an economic model that ACTUALLY WORKS. You can't be a socialist AND a Fascist. Unless you're seriously confused. Or in the ranks of the tinfoil hat brigade. I mean, it's a pretty big club. You might already be a member!

Discussions of politics and economics get complicated, but here's a simple (oversimplified) primer:

Fascism (political ideology): Authoritarian. Nationalist. Totalitarian. Protectionist. Governance through subjugation and violence. Economy regulated and controlled by the state (i.e., Big Government). Generally in opposition to concepts espoused by both liberalism *and* conservatism.

Socialism (economic principle that can be applied to certain political movements): Cooperative. Class-conscious. Open market. Promotes social responsibility and a level of social equity. Applied to capitalism to develop a social democracy (see: the Nordic Model).

I, like many people, will be glad when election fever has subsided. But I have no expectations that I will be spared the uneducated opinions of other people. It's just a part of life. I deal with it. But I also try to correct people when they're factually wrong. Of course, when someone isn't talking facts and they are just spouting bullshit you can't argue facts. And this election is so not about facts. It's all emotion and what people think and feel and what they read in some email their aunt's hairdresser forwarded to everyone they know...

Or what they read on some blog, without so much as a byline, the same story regurgitated over and over and over by fawning acolytes of some bloviating talking head or another. Because news is news, right? And the internet is one giant sentient entity that has nothing but the intention of informing and educating us in mind? It's not a lawless data wasteland that some people use as a means of propagating misinformation and outright lies to promote an agenda? Right?

I didn't think so.