Problematic Stuff

[Jason]

Meh, I have no time to play your cup games. It's done by the same people, I don't care what flag they want to fly for each operation they pull.

[Brian Peacock]

I feel a better case has to be made for bringing violence into political discourse than applying the past to the future or downgrading a political standpoint to the status of 'by their views they've brought it on themselves'. Without that case, our use of political violence is indistinguishable from its use by those we oppose - we're just adding violence upon violence to create more violence in a discourse already predisposed to violent, unreasonable action.

The reference to the past is not meant to serve as a justification for bringing violence into political discourse. The aims of the alt-right suffice. I only brought up the past in order to point out what those aims are apt to lead to, but not even that ought to be unnecessary. Again, the aims of the alt-right suffice as a justification of violence against the movement. We are not "just adding violence upon violence to create more violence in a discourse already predisposed to violent, unreasonable action". We are using violence to destroy an utterly inhumane political and social cancerous growth. As with all cancers, the sooner the better. Nip it in the bud.

Are you organising and putting in the practice with your pickaxe handles and bike chains? Or are you going to burn them out of town, or drag them behind the truck and dump them in the river? What kind and level of violence are you hoping for and when do you intend to start? And most importantly, what colour will your uniform be?

[Hermit]

I feel a better case has to be made for bringing violence into political discourse than applying the past to the future or downgrading a political standpoint to the status of 'by their views they've brought it on themselves'. Without that case, our use of political violence is indistinguishable from its use by those we oppose - we're just adding violence upon violence to create more violence in a discourse already predisposed to violent, unreasonable action.

The reference to the past is not meant to serve as a justification for bringing violence into political discourse. The aims of the alt-right suffice. I only brought up the past in order to point out what those aims are apt to lead to, but not even that ought to be unnecessary. Again, the aims of the alt-right suffice as a justification of violence against the movement. We are not "just adding violence upon violence to create more violence in a discourse already predisposed to violent, unreasonable action". We are using violence to destroy an utterly inhumane political and social cancerous growth. As with all cancers, the sooner the better. Nip it in the bud.

Are you organising and putting in the practice with your pickaxe handles and bike chains? Or are you going to burn them out of town, or drag them behind the truck and dump them in the river? What kind and level of violence are you hoping for and when do you intend to start? And most importantly, what colour will your uniform be?

Yes and yes, but no uniform needed (writes Hermit, quite deliberately isolated from the hubbub somewhere out back of a country on the other side of the world). I have no concrete plans whatsoever. I'm just really angry about the ease with which alt-right rabble rousers gather morons, who then proceed to enthusiastically piss into the wind while demagogues and sundry conservative leaders gleefully exploit the situation to help the 1%ers to ever increasing amounts of plunder. I don't even know if violence does any good. I do know that extending toleration to racists, fascists and associated fuckheads is very, very dangerous. It takes just one charismatic leader to unite the many small ragtag groups of losers and transform them into one galvanised organisation for history to repeat itself. My reaction to the current situation is emotional. Resist by any means, people. Smash, burn and kill. That is becoming my exhortation. I'll be watching from the sidelines.

[Brian Peacock]

So you're only really inciting others to violence then?

[Hermit]

So you're only really inciting others to violence then?

Was I not clear enough?

[pErvinalia]

Meh, I have no time to play your cup games. It's done by the same people, I don't care what flag they want to fly for each operation they pull.

ANTIFA are anti fascist, whatever else some of its members may be. And they are the ones standing up to racists and white supremacists, while you are whining about them.

[Brian Peacock]

Antifa are not the only ones standing up to racists though - it's not like it's antifa or no-one is it?

[Jason]

I'm always against racism. It's my default position. I think most reasonable people are the same.

[L'Emmerdeur]

I'm not in a position to dismiss this as entirely delusional:

'Trial runs for fascism are in full flow'

To grasp what is going on in the world right now, we need to reflect on two things. One is that we are in a phase of trial runs. The other is that what is being trialled is fascism – a word that should be used carefully but not shirked when it is so clearly on the horizon. Forget “post-fascist” – what we are living with is pre-fascism.

It is easy to dismiss Donald Trump as an ignoramus, not least because he is. But he has an acute understanding of one thing: test marketing. He created himself in the gossip pages of the New York tabloids, where celebrity is manufactured by planting outrageous stories that you can later confirm or deny depending on how they go down. And he recreated himself in reality TV where the storylines can be adjusted according to the ratings. Put something out there, pull it back, adjust, go again.

Fascism doesn’t arise suddenly in an existing democracy. It is not easy to get people to give up their ideas of freedom and civility. You have to do trial runs that, if they are done well, serve two purposes. They get people used to something they may initially recoil from; and they allow you to refine and calibrate. This is what is happening now and we would be fools not to see it.

...

You have to undermine moral boundaries, inure people to the acceptance of acts of extreme cruelty. Like hounds, people have to be blooded. They have to be given the taste for savagery. Fascism does this by building up the sense of threat from a despised out-group. This allows the members of that group to be dehumanised. Once that has been achieved, you can gradually up the ante, working through the stages from breaking windows to extermination.

...

To see, as most commentary has done, the deliberate traumatisation of migrant children as a “mistake” by Trump is culpable naivety. It is a trial run – and the trial has been a huge success. Trump’s claim last week that immigrants “infest” the US is a test-marketing of whether his fans are ready for the next step-up in language, which is of course “vermin”. And the generation of images of toddlers being dragged from their parents is a test of whether those words can be turned into sounds and pictures. It was always an experiment – it ended (but only in part) because the results were in.

And the results are quite satisfactory. There is good news on two fronts. First, Rupert Murdoch is happy with it – his Fox News mouthpieces outdid themselves in barbaric crassness: making animal noises at the mention of a Down syndrome child, describing crying children as actors. They went the whole swinish hog: even the brown babies are liars. Those sobs of anguish are typical of the manipulative behaviour of the strangers coming to infest us – should we not fear a race whose very infants can be so devious? Second, the hardcore fans loved it: 58 per cent of Republicans are in favour of this brutality. Trump’s overall approval ratings are up to 42.5 per cent.

[laklak]

I lean more towards a meta-conspiracy. Trump is the Judas Goat, but the whole Bilderberg / Rothschild / Reptilian group is in on the con.

[Brian Peacock]

In his essay on fascism, entitled Ur-Fascism (or Eternal Fascism), Italian academic Umberto Eco outlined a list of features typical of fascism. While he acknowledged that fascism took many forms, he also noted that "the name of the game does not change.” Not all of these features have to be present for fascism to be present, and he points out that some plainly contradict each other, but though any one of these features might be a common-or-garden feature of despotism or fanaticism, in his view, "it is enough that one of them be present for fascism to coagulate around it." I have snipped and paraphrased that list below...

1. The cult of tradition."Truth has been already spelled out once and for all, and we can only keep interpreting its obscure message."
2. Irrationalism. "[The Nazis] rejection of the modern world was disguised as a rebuttal of the capitalistic way of life, but it mainly concerned the rejection of the Spirit of 1789 (and of 1776, of course). The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity. In this sense Ur-Fascism can be defined as irrationalism."
3. Action for action's sake. As he puts it, "action, being beautiful in itself, must be taken before, or without, any previous reflection. Thinking is a form of emasculation therefore distrust of the intellectual world is also a symptom of fascism."
4. Rejection of compromise. "In modern culture the scientific community praises disagreement as a way to improve knowledge. For Ur-Fascism, disagreement is treason."
5. Exclusionism. "The first appeal of a fascist or prematurely fascist movement is an appeal against the intruders. Thus Ur-Fascism is racist by definition."
6. Social frustration. "One of the most typical features of the historical fascism was the appeal to a frustrated middle class, a class suffering from an economic crisis or feelings of political humiliation, and frightened by the pressure of lower social groups ... [W]hen the old “proletarians” are becoming petty bourgeois (and the lumpen are largely excluded from the political scene), the fascism of tomorrow will find its audience in this new majority."
7. A Conspiry cult. "[A]t the root of the Ur-Fascist psychology there is the obsession with a plot, possibly an international one. The followers must feel besieged. The easiest way to solve the plot is the appeal to xenophobia."
8. A powerful, humiliating enemy. "[T]he followers must be convinced that they can overwhelm the enemies. Thus, by a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak."
9. Armageddon complex. "For Ur-Fascism there is no struggle for life but, rather, life is lived for struggle. Thus pacifism is trafficking with the enemy. It is bad because life is permanent warfare."
10. Despising the weak. Since fascism is "hierarchically organized (according to a military model), every subordinate leader despises his own underlings, and each of them despises his inferiors."
11. The cult of the hero. Eco suggests that all fascist are, without exception, the hero of the world: "[T]he Ur-Fascist hero craves heroic death, advertised as the best reward for a heroic life. The Ur-Fascist hero is impatient to die. In his impatience, he more frequently sends other people to death."
12. Machismo (My rocket is bigger than yours). "Since both permanent war and heroism are difficult games to play, the Ur-Fascist transfers his will to power to sexual matters. This is the origin of machismo (which implies both disdain for women and intolerance and condemnation of nonstandard sexual habits, from chastity to homosexuality). Since even sex is a difficult game to play, the Ur-Fascist hero tends to play with weapons—doing so becomes an ersatz phallic exercise."
13. Qualitative populism. "For Ur-Fascism ... individuals as individuals have no rights, and the People is conceived as a quality, a monolithic entity expressing the Common Will. Since no large quantity of human beings can have a common will, the Leader pretends to be their interpreter. Having lost their power of delegation, citizens do not act; they are only called on to play the role of the People."
14. Newspeak. "All the Nazi or Fascist schoolbooks made use of an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax, in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning."

I invite you to read the complete essay here: https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1995/06/22/ur-fascism/

[pErvinalia]

I invite you to bite me!

[Brian Peacock]

You wish. :snooty:

[Animavore]

More real, genuine problematic stuff.

https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-ne ... t-profile/

[Brian Peacock]

Within the past year, the Proud Boys, launched in 2016 by Gavin McInnes, the co-founder of Vice Media, has elevated its Pacific Northwest profile. Members often are savvy users of social media and take part in right-wing rallies sponsored by Patriot Prayer...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patriot_Prayer