Philosophical crumbs

Fascism, Its Origins, Democratic Erosion, and the Rise of Technofascism   PART ONE I. What Is Fascism? The Difficult Definition Fascism is one of the most misused words in political language. It is hurled as an insult, applied loosely, and often stripped of meaning through overuse. Yet it has a precise, historically grounded definition — and understanding that definition is the first step toward recognising its modern descendants. The political scientist Robert Paxton, whose 2004 work The Anatomy of Fascism remains definitive, defined fascism not as a fixed ideology but as a political behaviour: a mass movement that abandons ethical constraints in pursuit of national rebirth, internal purification, and domination, driven by the belief that decline can be reversed only through a strong leader and aggressive action. Fascism is less a coherent intellectual system than a set of mobilising passions. "Fascism is not an ideology you hold. It is a practice you enact — a way ...

  The Founder and the Scapegoat Peter Thiel's Misappropriation of René Girard's Mimetic Theory Introduction: A Philosopher in Silicon Valley When Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal and Palantir, speaks of René Girard, he does so with the fervour of a convert. Thiel has called Girard “one of the most important thinkers of the twentieth century” and has described his encounter with Girard's work at Stanford as a formative intellectual experience. In interviews, books, and public lectures, Thiel repeatedly invokes Girardian concepts — mimetic desire, the scapegoat mechanism, sacrificial crisis — to explain everything from the dynamics of Silicon Valley competition to his own investment philosophy and his heterodox political commitments. Girard, it seems, gave Thiel a theory of the world. The problem is that Thiel's Girard is not quite Girard's Girard. What Thiel extracts from the French anthropologist's dense, theologically charged body of work is a sel...