The core of fascism

I have been struck by news of late demonstrating what I have called “medical fascism.” The core of fascism, as I am coming to see it, is a collective conviction combined with intolerance of divergent views. Benito Mussolini was the stated author of The Doctrine of Fascism, co-written with Giovanni Gentile, a fascist philosopher.  From the copy published by the World Future Fund, allegedly copied directly from an official Fascist government publication of 1935, Fascism Doctrine and Institutions, by Benito Mussolini [my emphasis]

A party governing a nation “totalitarianly” is a new departure in history. There are no points of reference nor of comparison. From beneath the ruins of liberal, socialist, and democratic doctrines, Fascism extracts those elements which are still vital. It preserves what may be described as “the acquired facts” of history; it rejects all else. That is to say, it rejects the idea of a doctrine suited to all times and to all people. Granted that the XIXth century was the century of socialism, liberalism, democracy, this does not mean that the XXth century must also be the century of socialism, liberalism, democracy. Political doctrines pass; nations remain. We are free to believe that this is the century of authority, a century tending to the ” right “, a Fascist century. If the XIXth century was the century of the individual (liberalism implies individualism) we are free to believe that this is the “collective” century, and therefore the century of the State.

However, this source has from Fascism Doctrine and Institutions:

. . . this will be a century of authority. [no mention of the “right.”]

And an “official translation” published in the Political Quarterly, apparently 1933, has:

. . . this will be a century of authority, a century of the left, a century of Fascism.

Which is it, the “left” or the “right”?

My answer at this point is that fascism is opportunistically left or right, it is both and neither, it may be populist, thus it may even be “democratic” by some definitions (particularly majoritarian or strongest-faction forms of democracy), but key is that it is always authoritarian, intolerant of dissent, willing to use coercive power to enforce its vision of “truth” and “morality,” and Mussolini openly endorsed this.

Fascism may then be racist in some contexts, and anti-racist in others.

And it may be apparently skeptical in one context and pseudoskeptical, proclaiming the truth of “science” vs. “pseudoscience,” in another.

(The scientific method does not generate certainty, only, at best, probability, and there are many situations where “scientific consensus,” i.e., the apparent consensus of experts, was not formed through diligent application of scientific methods, but rather politically and socially; this “collective view” being enforced, with deviation sanctioned.

That is scientific fascism, pretending to “collective knowledge,” with all else being termed, not skepticism, but “denialism.”

The common thread in fascism is certainty, where the truth of some proposition is not to be denied, where it is not allowed under penalty of the strongest opprobrium or worse.

As well, movements and positions create their opposites that are just as convinced and certain and willing to censure and condemn opposing opinions.

I have recently seen many stories in the media about what might be called “anti-vaxx hysteria.” Those who suggest that there may be some risks or negative consequences from vaccination are being called “murderers.”

And then some anti-vaxxers are calling doctors who support vaccination the same.

Both movements are medical fascism, the “pro-vaccine” position commonly refusing to allow any possible critique of vaccination, and the anti-vaxx position claiming that all support for vaccination is coming from Big Pharma shills, with government in their pocket, uncaring about continued study of complications and individual rights.

So from the Guardian, New York county bans unvaccinated children from public spaces amid measles outbreak.

It is the latest region of the US to take drastic steps to counter the virus, with the spike in measles cases leading to concerns that anti-vaccine parents may be putting their children at risk. . . .

The state of emergency in Rockland county, which comes into effect at midnight on Tuesday, bars anyone under 18 who is not vaccinated against measles from public places for 30 days. . . .

. . . the county had traced the outbreak to seven “unvaccinated travelers” who had visited Rockland in 2018. The county has had 48 cases of measles in 2019 alone, according to a spokesman.

From 1 January to 21 March of this year 314 cases of measles were confirmed in 15 different states, according to the CDC. There were 372 cases in 2018, more than triple the number the previous year. The rise has been linked to “anti-vaxxers”, activists who claim, incorrectly but loudly, that vaccines can have negative effects.

Can vaccines have negative effects? The Guardian states as if it were fact that this is “incorrect,” yet that extreme position is preposterous.

The issue is not the existence of negative effects, but the rate. I had a friend die from polio when his daughter was given Sabin oral vaccine in about 1978 or so. By effectively claiming that anti-vaxxers are merely “loud,” and essentially liars and murderers — and I have seen that — authorities are taking a fascist approach to collective welfare, even if they are “right,” i.e., that the benefits of vaccination outweigh the harms.

That denial of any value to the “other side” is typical of fascist propaganda. I had all my children vaccinated and was vaccinated as appropriate for travel when I went to China and Ethiopia to adopt. But I chose to do that. If someone had told me that it was required or else I’d be charged with a criminal offense, I might reconsider! If it is necessary to enforce good sense with criminal penalties, maybe it is not good sense!

And in the other direction, but also from the Guardian:

Anti-vaxx ‘mobs’: doctors face harassment campaigns on Facebook

When the naturopath Elias Kass testified before a Washington state senate committee on 20 February with a baby on his chest and a pacifier in his hand, he knew that his arguments would be unpopular with the anti-vaccine activists in the room. Amid a measles outbreak that has infected 66 people so far, legislators were considering a bill to eliminate personal and philosophical exemptions for childhood vaccinations, and Kass was one of several practitioners to speak in support of the measure.

It astonishes me that good people support fascism, but it happens. I’m sure that Kass is sincere, but he is encouraging removing the right of choice over health care decisions from parents, instead assigning it to the state. Yet in a mature society, he would have the right to express his opinion without the kind of harassment he encountered.

Kass faced some anger in the hallway after the hearing, he said, with one person calling him “a disgusting liar”. But it wasn’t until several hours later that “the shit hit the fan”. That’s when Kass realized that his Facebook page was being flooded with one-star reviews calling him everything from a “disgrace” and a “pedophile” to a “Nazi pharma shill” and “scumbag shilling for infanticide”.

Now, the comparison here may be unfair. A social movement like anti-vaxx has no direct control over what “supporters” do. And I have seen impersonation trolling, where someone pretends the opposite of their own position, with extreme expression, intending to discredit those of that view as fanatics. (I.e., there is no proof that those harassers were actually anti-vaxxers. But there may be anti-vaxx organizers that may have responsibility, I have not investigated this.)

Impersonation can work because people often don’t read carefully and don’t realize that anonymous comments on the web are just that: anonymous, and not to be trusted ever.

(Edits on RationalWiki and Wikipedia, appearing to be from me, aren’t — or in the case of RatWiki, the vast majority are not. I don’t vandalize, I don’t spam, and I don’t harass and make legal threats with wiki edits. I might by certified mail.)

Yet structures have been created where anonymous positions can dominate. Wikipedia is a clear example, in fact. When it works, it’s great, but it can fail spectacularly.

The enemies of humanity here are two old allies: contempt and hatred.

Both poison human freedom, and “antifascism” can be just as full of contempt and hatred as “fascism.”

The vaccine skeptics, I’ll call them, point to an alleged lack of adequate testing of vaccines, claiming that drug companies were given exemptions in the public interest, and that kind of story has been all too common in the history of science and public health.

When dietary guidelines blaming dietary fat for heart disease were adopted and promoted, it was known that the science was not adequate to establish that as medical fact, but it seemed likely and we couldn’t wait, millions could die!

We did not actually know that making those recommendations would save lives, overall, and from what I’ve seen, so far, it seems quite possible that, instead, there were millions of premature deaths. Bad Science can do a lot of harm!

(Murderers? No, not unless they knew, or clearly should have known. But where and when do we become responsible for ignorance?)

How can we both protect public health and act to avoid harm? Any time millions of people are subjected to a medical procedure, there is risk of harm, the claim of “harmless” was crazy — yet there it was, in a major newspaper, as if fact.

It’s obvious to me that we need more research, and we need ongoing monitoring of all major health programs. Who is going to pay for this? We have a system that expects drug companies to do the research, and a public that then often blames them for being greedy. But we set that up — or relied on it and allow it to continue! It is clear that we need to fund research, but we don’t necessarily have trustworthy institutions to manage this. The nonprofits have themselves been corrupted — or appear to have been corrupted — by corporate support. We need to directly support and supervise collective institutions, or at least set up and fund watchdogs.

Instead, our habit is to blame others, rather than taking responsibility, by recognizing what is missing, and supplying it.

To declare an antifascist manifesto here, the future belongs to collective freedom, that creates cooperation and non-coercive, voluntary  coordination.

Impersonation of “Cold Fusion” supporter and “Friend of Lomax” on WMF wikis

Normally, I do not use blog posts to cover the issue of massive sock puppetry by Oliver and Darryl Smith, though there is a connection with cold fusion (which is why I even cover this in the less-visible pages here). Today I was notified by a friend of an account created on Wikipedia. He seems to have believed it was me. First, facts, then conclusions:

The WikiMedia Foundation banned me in early 2018, no reason given, and a mail to their registered agent was ignored. I did file a lawsuit over the announcement of that ban. The lawsuit names the WMF and Does 1-9. The WMF has not yet been formally notified of the suit (but anyone representing the Foundation is welcome to contact me. Perhaps the matter can be resolved with no further fuss and expense.

From Wikipedia:

Cold fusion deletion

Last year you got Abd Lomax banned and all his cold fusion research deleted on Wikiversity. Lomax has now filed a lawsuit against you and eight other John Does for his ban [2]. You had no reason to delete his cold fusion research project. Abd at the time was being funded by a cold fusion research institute who invested a lot of money into his Wikiversity project and you had it deleted because of your pseudo-skeptic viewpoint. Could you put the project back? I am not Lomax but I support his cold fusion research. He has been targeted by pseudo-skeptics. Cold Fusion 2019 (talk) 18:46, 14 March 2019 (UTC)

From Wikiversity:

Lomax has filed against you and 8 other John Doe
My collegue Abd Lomax has finally filed https://www.pacermonitor.com/public/case/27215121/Lomax_v_WikiMedia_Foundation,_Inc_et_al https://dockets.justia.com/docket/massachusetts/madce/3:2019cv30025/207020 Friend of Lomax (discuss • contribs) 17:46, 7 March 2019 (UTC)

I’m aware of that. –mikeu talk 17:48, 7 March 2019 (UTC)

    • 15:50, 8 March 2019 Mu301 filed a checkuser request
        • Friend of LomaxDiscussion: “Lomax has filed against you and 8 other John Doe” per No legal threats
          Reason(s): Suspected block evasion. Inappropriate notification of legal action that could reasonably be perceived as an attempt to harass and/or intimidate. mikeu talk 15:50, 8 March 2019 (UTC)
      • Confirmed with 19 other accounts, see Checkuser results for study.

Conclusions

The checkuser results are a red herring. Those accounts appear to be people who used a Tor node during the checkuser window. Except a few of them who created accounts in a short period of time, they are unrelated. The troll first pinged Mu301 on Wikiversity, then waited for the smoke to clear, then did the same, with more detail, to Jzg and ජපස (jps or Joshua P. Schroeder) on Wikipedia. All these were involved in the fracas over the deletion of the Cold fusion resource on Wikiversity.

I had been threatened by a sock puppet (later identified with Darryl L. Smith, very active in harassing targets) that if I did not stop documenting the Long Term Abuse of whoever was behind the impersonation socking I was confronting, he would get all of my work deleted. He did accomplish that on Wikiversity, in the process demolishing Wikiversity academic freedom, the whole sequence was contrary to policy and went against the strong traditions of that project.

The lawsuit, however, does not name anyone other than the WikiMedia Foundation. To have a claim against others, I would have to know that I was defamed by them. So part of the purpose of the lawsuit is to gain access to the records of the WMF through discovery, because the evidence they relied upon when making their decision would be relevant.

I did not create those accounts, and would not. By violating the ban, I would be clearly violating the terms of service, and part of my claim is that I did not violate the terms. That ban was immediately used for defamation in the article on me on RationalWiki (under the name Abd ul-Rahman Lomax), where very many sock puppets have been created like the two mentioned above.

This creation of abusive socks that appear to be those who are actually their targets is what got me involved with them in the first place. That’s a long story. They do this because it works. Studying Wikipedia activity, I’ve seen it again and again. Account appears, John Doe is the greatest, where there is a blocked user John Doe, and many assume that this must be John Doe! After all, who else would write that? They don’t actually ask that question!

In cases where I know what was happening, it was never John Doe!

The AN/I discussion was unaware of the prior checkuser activity:

Lawsuit talk by Cold Fusion 2019

Cold Fusion 2019 (talk · contribs · logs · edit filter log · block log)
This user contacted ජපස (aka jzg) about an ongoing lawsuit against Wikipedia ([86] [87]). WP:NLT seems to apply to this, but I’m honestly not 100% sure. EvergreenFir (talk) 19:05, 14 March 2019 (UTC)

Did you mean jps? -Roxy, the dog. wooF 19:12, 14 March 2019 (UTC)

I did… I don’t even have a good excuse for that. EvergreenFir (talk) 19:15, 14 March 2019 (UTC)

Actually, you have a decent excuse for that; CF19 left an identical message for JzG. –Floquenbeam (talk) 19:17, 14 March 2019 (UTC)

And a shorter version a few days earlier for Mu301 on Wikiversity.

Oh! That’s where I saw that… somehow mixed up ජපස’s signature with JzG EvergreenFir (talk) 19:19, 14 March 2019 (UTC)

I’ve indef’d Cold Fusion 2019 for NOTHERE. Their ONLY two edits are to post about a lawsuit filed against Wikipedia? Chances are it’s very likely a sock as well. Either way, block applied. RickinBaltimore (talk) 19:21, 14 March 2019 (UTC)

Yeah, my guess is SF-banned User:Abd. –Floquenbeam (talk) 19:22, 14 March 2019 (UTC)

Which is exactly what the sock master wants to be guessed. In fact, anyone who knows this person’s long term behavior would recognize it. And what I was really banned for was creating a Long Term Abuse study on Anglo Pyramidologist on meta. Most AP socks never make in into the SPI case.

I saw this elsewhere. CF2019 is not the one doing the suing. I am not sure NLT applies in this case. spryde | talk 19:31, 14 March 2019 (UTC)

Just because CF19 says they aren’t the ones doing the suing, doesn’t mean they aren’t the ones doing the suing. –Floquenbeam (talk) 19:35, 14 March 2019 (UTC)

That’s true, but just because an account says “I’m a friend of Lomax” doesn’t mean he is. Just because he uses “Cold fusion” in his name and claims to be a supporter doesn’t mean he is. 

FYI if you’re interested in the plaintiff’s perspective – I couldn’t access the actual lawsuit. [[88]] TimTempleton (talk) (cont) 19:40, 14 March 2019 (UTC)

The link is to my review of the RationalWiki article on me, which was created as revenge for that documentation of impersonation and other socking by the brothers behind AP. Thanks, Tim.

Anyone can access the documents using the U.S. Federal Court system. The first 150 pages are free. People probably need a U.S. address. And, of course, people can contact me directly. I am entirely unlike the socks involved here.

They figured that out on Wikipediocracy.

Not really. I just remember him from long ago in the WP community and other groups. spryde | talk 19:45, 14 March 2019 (UTC)

Even if this is not the person pursuing the legal case, they are making demands based on the legal case, and I’d say NLT very much applies. Boing! said Zebedee (talk) 19:47, 14 March 2019 (UTC)

[. . .]

This was not accurate. The comment does not make a threat. It lies about the users being named, “John Doe” does not name someone. It was, however, obvious socking of some kind. If it was me, it was a global ban violation, if not me, it was a “meat puppet,” or sufficiently clear to be one that one could block. But it was simply blocked for simpler reasons.

In fact, this was block violation by an Anglo Pyramidologist user, i.e., one of the two brothers, Oliver D. Smith (the original Anglo Pyramidologist) or Darryl L. Smith (best known as Goblin Face, originally Liveintheforests), almost certainly the latter. These are both widely-known and identified trolls.

This could be the same troll: Hallwang_Clinic

(A recent likely account of Oliver would be  Stronghold1990. For Darryl, it would be  Vanisheduser3334743743i43i434,  who created a huge mess on the internet over the deletion of a Wikipedia article, and who retired, claiming he had been outed. But he had not been outed, his sock puppets had accused someone else of being him, to harass the person. I did out him, exonerating that innocent target. He’s been doing stuff like this for years, and often getting away with it. He knows how to play wiki users like a fiddle.

While there is public information about the underlying facts, the only person on the planet, besides myself, likely to know enough to connect Mu301, jps, and jzg to that case would be the instigator, the one who privately complained to Mu301, socked at Wikiversity and canvassed Jzg and jps to show up there and probably to complain to the WMF, i.e., Darryl L. Smith (or, less likely, his brother).

But I have not named other defendants because the evidence is weaker than the very plain and simple evidence against the WikiMedia Foundation. They seem to have figured out much of the legal theory on Wikipediocracy.

And, yes, I have claimed damages. It’s a requirement for a diversity case, the legal minimum is $75,000. I paid the $400 filing fee out of pocket. Blasted my pocket all to hell, but who needs pockets if you don’t have any more money? After I serve the papers, I may open a GoFundMe. Those can work, the goal would be to retain a lawyer, and for other expenses.

Claim

Repeating the text of the sock edits on Wikipedia:

Cold fusion deletion

Last year you got Abd Lomax banned and all his cold fusion research deleted on Wikiversity.

How does “Cold Fusion 2019” know this? Besides the WMF, the only people who know who complained would be Darryl L. Smith, and any others who conspired in the defamation. Oliver Smith (probably) bragged about it, and there was mention of jps, JzG and Mu301 on another site, by either Oliver or Darryl.

Lomax has now filed a lawsuit against you and eight other John Does for his ban [2].

The lawsuit is against nine John Does, not eight and the one addressed. Only if that one actually defamed me, causing damage, would they be named as defendants, once evidence has been obtained.

You had no reason to delete his cold fusion research project.

He did not delete it. He argued for deletion.

Abd at the time was being funded by a cold fusion research institute who invested a lot of money into his Wikiversity project

My funding would be irrelevant, but this was untrue. No Infusion Institute funding was related to the Wikiversity project, which had been largely abandoned. In 2015, events convinced me that WMF wikis were not safe places to create content, not even neutral content. So I stopped nearly all work on the Cold fusion educational resource. When the deletion discussion was raised, in late 2017, I was being funded by the Institute (and I still am, for expenses), but this was entirely unrelated to Wikiversity.

and you had it deleted because of your pseudo-skeptic viewpoint.

It is unclear why it was deleted. The bureaucrat who deleted it violated policies and traditions, and he said he had received private complaints. The whole thing stank. But, as I had concluded, the community slept. I was blocked by that ‘crat, and an admin who planned to unblock was threatened privately with having his tools removed.

Could you put the project back? I am not Lomax but I support his cold fusion research. He has been targeted by pseudo-skeptics.

The two users targeted have no power to put it back, and this is irrelevant to the legal action. If Wikiversity were to decide to restore that resource, it would have no effect on the action for defamation.

This was all classic Darryl Smith socking. He does it to create impressions, in this case that Lomax is disruptive, vindictive, and demanding, as well as to strengthen the resolve of the “skeptical community” to resist coercion from “cranks.” Smith, pretending to be me, using troll sock names like these, has been threatening RationalWiki users with lawsuits for maybe a year.

Meanwhile, I have things to do, places to go ….