Yup, this basically perfectly summarized the false equivalency bull**** these people give to antifa. And how the media is far too sympathetic to the right wingers, and what that's indicative of.

I still plan to effortpost about the fascism in America today, but I'm inundated with exam grading, exam studying, homework and software deadlines so no big posts are happening for a while.

��

I'm confused; when did Cracked, a website about humorous top 10 lists, start doing actual news stories?

By the way, a quick comment about the stock market. The rise in the stock market since the 80's is pretty well correlated with the rise in income inequality. Because rich people are far more likely to try and invest their cash, and own much more stock than anyone else does. There isn't an unlimited supply of middle class families to rob. So yes, this transfer of cash fueling stock market growth has to end someday.

There's a bigger obstacle than running out of middle class families:

https://hbr.org/2014/09/profits-without-prosperity

Corporations are using the money they used to spend on wage raises and capital reinvestment for direct transfers to the rich. Sometimes they even go into debt to do it. It's not just stealing from the middle class, it's stealing from the future.

What a ********

https://mobile.twitter.com/NBCNews/status/914613694822195200

Not sure I buy the argument here. Yes, because of outlier bias, the media may disproportionately represent violence at protests in ways that distract from the substance of the protests. But that doesn't erase the fact that antifa embraces violence, and that violence and the destruction of property is newsworthy. I think Trevor Noah's argument is on point, and actually undermines the central contention: violence may bring media attention to protesters' cause, but not the kind that protesters want if they want to be taken seriously, so it is a self-defeating tactic.

It's a clear double standard: we want to condemn the vast majority of Republicans for what Nazis do, but we're unwilling to accept that we have violent elements on our side as well.

I'm not sure what you mean by "taken seriously". It sounds like "seriously at their word", which I'm not sure about, I think it definitely means people will be taken more seriously more broadly. Is coverage biased in favor of violence? I think clearly yes. So violence can displace message. Realistically though, with or without violence, the media is probably not going to cover what the protestors want anyway, because frankly they don't give a damn what anarchists think. And that's what the problem is to me, the media doesn't want to show people saying and acting reasonable.

I think many people more moderate on the left do actually condemn the violence. You'll see hesitation to criticize when somebody is in a "camp" (a conservative friend of mine really believed for a long time that the Cville murderer panicked and didn't ram his car intentionally, until she heard a local policeman talk about the guy's words after he was arrested). That's just how it is.

There's nothing mysterious about what I'm saying. Protesters protest because, among other reasons, they want to persuade others to be sympathetic to a cause or to change that their trying to bring about. Violence makes it more difficult to achieve that goal, by inviting the media to make ad hominem attacks about how protesters were lashing out, and therefore distracting from their message, or even undermining it.



I see plenty of censuring of violence. But I also see a lot of tacit approval of violence too, and there isn't much of a correlation between whether someone is a more moderate liberal or further on the left. For example, after (and since) Charlottesville many on Twitter have posted pictures of allied soldiers during WWII and described them as "antifa", or at the very least were drawing a connection between violent counter-protesters and the heroism of WWII soldiers. The point was clearly that since it was obviously a legitimate use of force to fight against the Nazi regime, it's equally legitimate to use violence against Neo-Nazis.

I guess what I mean is that, stopping violence isn't going to stop the media from slimy ad hominem and won't make them respect us. Hell if anything violence makes it worth paying attention to. But stopping won't change who hears the message.

So there's no real advantage to it, and it's done out of desperation and a sense that nothing really matters anyway.

Hmm.

I guess. I mean if you see the fascist direction the country is heading what else is there to do?

I'm not really sure what you're driving at. It feels like you're digging to get a hot take on antifa violence when I don't think there's really a fascinating new position to take. Realistically it's a bad choice for them to make, yeah, but I also don't think it's morally wrong to punch someone who literally advocates those kinds of views. And I think it's bad for long term strategy. Other than that Idk I don't put in much deep consideration.

If you ever catch yourself saying "we just need to out-debate the fascists" it means you don't understand either fascism or debate.

If you live in a country that has fallen to fascism, you have three options.

1.) Live with it, hoping that nobody who looks like you ever outrages one of the fascists.
2.) Leave.
3.) Commit violence.

If you live in a country that is at risk of falling to fascism, you have three options.

1.) Live with it, hoping that nobody who looks like you ever outrages one of the fascists.
2.) Educate as many people as possible about fascism and how to recognize it, hoping they won't achieve enough power to kill you for doing it.
3.) Commit violence.


An attentive reader will note that "convince the fascists not to be so fascist" isn't on the list.

Well the comments to this video are ****ing cancer.

It should be appalling that in the discussion of a group of people sometimes getting violent, and literal Nazis coming to the forefront of American society and culture, people obsess about the people sometimes getting violent.

You know, the thing about all of this as well is 99% of the force behind all of this isn't even anybody in the real world, it's angry keyboard warriors. Everybody has an opinion on antifa but very few have been to the protests, they just get what trickle of data they see through some youtube videos or the MSM and everybody tromps around acting like they understand it and everybody else is stupid for not agreeing with them.

Only #moderates here get the horseshoe extremists #out

The horseshoe meme might be one of the single most stupefying things I frequently see on the internet now.

Going back to fascism. I'd like to start by linking one Reddit reply, and it's one that I hope will defeat a strain of thought that entered the debate and won't leave: here we go.

And I want to make it clear that I agree very much with what they're saying: comparisons with Hitler aren't useful and they overestimate the role of Hitler in the rise of Nazism. And, the point is that, comparing entire systems to fascism or Nazism is actually the more salient way to go about the discussion. So, I'd like to reemphasize the point that, when comparing the U.S. today to fascism, that I'm not all that interested in drawing a line between Hitler and Trump, and moreover really that it's a waste of our time to run that specific comparison. What we really ought to be looking at is the other aspects of fascism/Nazism.

I'm going to now quote Robert Paxton's definition of fascism, as I think it's useful to read:



So, uh, how much of this describes current events? Pretty much spot on, minus the outright lack of legal restraints. We aren't fully there yet, thankfully. But when you have people running down or trying to run down leftist protesters, and lawmakers trying to make that legal, and in general the hostility they foster against "cucks" - sounds a bit like a form of internal cleansing, trying to force opposition out of power.

When it comes to how directly racist the Nazis were perceived, I'll cite another Reddit comment:



And that's not far from today. Many people actively apologize for the far right today, not because they like Nazis, but because they've defined themselves in opposition to Antifa. The key problem is, though, so many people I know - whether they're Republican because they're Christian, or because they believe in gun rights, or because of whatever - they're disdainful of the racism that's too extreme for them, sure, but to them, being against Antifa is more important than resisting actual racism. And this is the sort of cultural trend that's what's most frightening to me. And the groups the right resists today - communists and the liberal establishment - are 100% the exact same categories that fascists and Nazis were reacting to in their day, with many of the same alliances, and for much the same reason.

Yeah, it's seriously dumb. It's a simulacrum of actual political theory. Makes people feel like they're citing something real and deep.

The horseshoe meme is dumb as an interpretation of the "political spectrum". And then I find the self-defenses of those on the left who refute the validity of the horseshoe pretty asinine. And then I assume that when you mentioned it in your last post, you brought it up playfully to make fun of it (and, especially, to make fun of those who think it's a valid way to interpret the relation between the far left and the far right), and to make fun of centrists, which... whatever. I guess I'm just not in on the joke.

I don't put much stock into the metrizability of political beliefs, so a theory that's based on the geometric consequences of a geometric approximation is a priori pretty dumb. It's better to not attempt quantification where it doesn't make sense and instead criticize things on a per basis.

The "joke" is that centrists can be annoying *******. There are good reasons to be in the political center in many cases, I'm not really judgmental about that. But when they try to act "superior" to people with more radical beliefs I find them annoying.

If you don't know, the Mosse mentioned in that second reddit comment is George L. Mosse. I had some of his writings in mind a few pages back in this thread when we were talking about Nazi propaganda. He's worth reading.

Actually, I just realized I'm sort of using someone's arguments from a book I read a year ago or so. Jacques Barzun was this really intelligent dude who wrote lots of books. He was incredibly insightful and criminally forgotten. He wrote a book called The House of Intellect, where he criticizes some of the shifts in intellectual culture in the 20th century. One of the things he criticizes is the "scientism" that has invaded humanities. And one of those manifestations is the desire to quantify ****ing everything, because giving numbers sounds more "sciencey". For instance, people who try to rate wine and give it a ranking number out of 10. Does a single axis even make sense for the quality of wine? Not really, and many people are going to disagree on any number someone tries to give. Likewise, many things that we talk about are just as hard to quantify. I'd argue that pretty much all of the "political spectrum" crap is just an extension, and outside of narrow, specifically defined statistical data, there's not much to it.

Er, well, the notion of a "political spectrum" is probably something that comes from political science, which is a social science, not a humanities discipline. But yeah I still see your point.

I suppose one could say the invention of the social sciences is itself a product of scientism.

Going back to Paxton's definition of fascism that you cited: if you take out a few words (such as "nationalist", and maybe the bit about "external expansion"), it strikes me that that it it could be just as validly be applied to the identity-left and much of the politics we see on university campuses these days.

True, I'm sure there's ways to make it fruitful. I glanced the Wikipedia for the term political spectrum and it claims early on that political scientists have frequently complained about the validity of the political spectrum, so I feel sort of justified in feeling cynical towards it. As far as social science proper, I don't think it's bad in itself, but I do think that there's quite a bit of work done that dresses itself as scientific when I don't think it should be, intelligent people came to good conclusions about stuff for centuries without pretending to be scientific about it.

How do you figure that?

Be careful, if you keep this up someone might accuse you of sounding like Tucker Carlson.

And here I was worried you were going to call me a centrist again. I guess I could be both a centrist and a Tucker Carlson-type at the same time.

No, I'm not saying you are Tucker Carlson, just that you're like Tucker Carlson.

Because in its extremist manifestations, identity politics is rooted in a sense of grievance and humiliation, makes demands on people to conform to socially acceptable ways of thinking, speaking and behaving that is rooted in a sense of ideological purity and ostracizes those who disagree, and it does so in ways that clash with liberal norms (e.g., using censorship in a way that clashes with currently accepted norms about free speech). And because adherents identify offensive speech as violence, many believe that censorship can be enforced using physically violent means.

Plus, it was the identity left that was most closely aligned with HRC and with corporate and political elites.

But you're Tucker Carlson. We can't both be Tucker Carlson.

Someone hasn't been reading Koobie's threads

lmao