Prelude to the Apocalypse

[BIL]

Please become a TV comedy news anchor, BIL.

Might not be the worst time for a career move! Especially now that DER RITTENHOUSEPRÄZEDENFALL has OFFICIALLY legalised SUPER MURDER, or to use the proper terminology, MM-VAPORSOH (Mayo Monkey™ Violence Against Persons On Right Side Of History). Checkmate, Cancel Culture!

[emphatic]

Please become a TV comedy news anchor, BIL.

+1

[Sengoku Strider]

"Antiracism" attracts a variety of malcontents for reasons that might not be so pure.

Quite unlike the salt of the earth proracism contingent.

[emphatic]

"Antiracism" attracts a variety of malcontents for reasons that might not be so pure.

Quite unlike the salt of the earth proracism contingent.

[Mischief Maker]

So you're telling me the "Jews will not replace us" "day of the rope" crowd would counteract the social effects of redlining if people would just stop acing so morally superior to them?

Do conservatives have any personal agency?

It's always, "I wouldn't be an anti-vaxxer if you weren't all up in my grill about the largest mass-death even in US history all the time!"

[emphatic]

It's always, "I wouldn't be an anti-vaxxer if you weren't all up in my grill about the largest mass-death even in US history all the time!"

"It's always"? Stop generalizing.

[BIL]

So you're telling me the "Jews will not replace us" "day of the rope" crowd would counteract the social effects of redlining if people would just stop acing so morally superior to them?

Do conservatives have any personal agency?

I don't know if the Turner Diaries LARPers would consider themselves conservatives, by mainstream US standard. They shouldn't, at any rate, if they've read their book. John Q Conservative (and his BFF Larry J Libertarian) got the rope that day too, for their treasonously appeasing (read: coexisting with) The Jews and their non-white pawns.

The contempt for "racist" "Nazi" "white supremacist" etc among US commentators seems comparable to the left's justified rejection of "communist." As in "Wow, you're for socialised medicine, what a communist." (I spent a week on the moon, last summer, blasted out of my gourd on the finest taxpayer-subsidised Ching Chong Chinaman Charlie. Can't remember shit! Brainbox fixed! Paid fuck-all! Lifelong communist)

"Wow, you think defunding the police will put Philly on track to its deadliest year since records began, what a Nazi."

There are Nazis and Commies at the extremes of either wing. That's inevitable.

...an outsider's musing. I know you only do typos when you're posting on mobile or otherwise inconvenienced.

[Mischief Maker]

Okay, racism aside, what's the grammatical error you guys are placing on my shoulders?

It's always. = It is always. I didn't type "Its always."

[BulletMagnet]

Stop generalizing.

I'm not sure I've ever encountered a rightie, "moderate" or otherwise, who doesn't subscribe to the notion that "people who call others racist, for any reason, are the real racists."

Meanwhile, while we're arguing in completely good faith about whether racism actually exists, remember that Alzheimer's drug that got approved a little ways back despite having demonstrated little to no effectiveness? Not only has it lowered the bar for drug approval even further, but despite the fact that only around 100 people have been prescribed it, it's also solely responsible for half of this year's Medicare Part B price hike.

But, y'know, Critical Race Theory!

[BIL]

what's the grammatical error you guys are placing on my shoulders?

acing / acting
even / event

SPEAK MURICAN OR DIE （＾w´ ）

I tried this schtick on black twitter and got called a Tom 3;

Good job I don't take those Hotep chumps seriously!（＾w´ ）♫

[Mischief Maker]

"It's always"? Stop generalizing.

acing / acting
even / event

[BIL]

[Sengoku Strider]

I don't know if the Turner Diaries LARPers would consider themselves conservatives, by mainstream US standard. They shouldn't, at any rate, if they've read their book.

As an avid follower of their thinking-man's adventures, I can tell you that unfortunately they're not even close to the margins of US conservatism (remember Trump telling the Proud Boys to "stand down and stand by"?).

John Q Conservative (and his BFF Larry J Libertarian) got the rope that day too, for their treasonously appeasing (read: coexisting with) The Jews and their non-white pawns.

That's a key part of the fantasy. The whole MAGA thing thrives on hating "the mainstream conservative establishment," - if you recall, the spark that effectively started it was Republicans trying to attract the conservative religious latino vote after losing to a black guy twice. They certainly do consider themselves the true defenders of Christendom; anyone who doesn't tell MAGA world what they want to hear is a RINO, and deserving of whatever they get when Trump declares "The Storm Is Upon Us."



This is the type of thing corporate conservative commentators are spouting on the regular these days. Warning, contains patriotic freedom:

Spoiler

[Mischief Maker]

Marjorie Taylor Greene, she of the jewish space lasers and drunkenly harassing AOC's staffers through the mail slot, is the #1 grassroots fundraising member of the Republican party.

[orange808]

It's always, "I wouldn't be an anti-vaxxer if you weren't all up in my grill about the largest mass-death even in US history all the time!"

"It's always"? Stop generalizing.

Like calling any person with a general aversion to racism a kid diddler--and backing your claims by playing a fucking video game?

[BIL]

I don't know if the Turner Diaries LARPers would consider themselves conservatives, by mainstream US standard. They shouldn't, at any rate, if they've read their book.

As an avid follower of their thinking-man's adventures, I can tell you that unfortunately they're not even close to the margins of US conservatism (remember Trump telling the Proud Boys to "stand down and stand by"?).

John Q Conservative (and his BFF Larry J Libertarian) got the rope that day too, for their treasonously appeasing (read: coexisting with) The Jews and their non-white pawns.

That's a key part of the fantasy. The whole MAGA thing thrives on hating "the mainstream conservative establishment," - if you recall, the spark that effectively started it was Republicans trying to attract the conservative religious latino vote after losing to a black guy twice. They certainly do consider themselves the true defenders of Christendom; anyone who doesn't tell MAGA world what they want to hear is a RINO, and deserving of whatever they get when Trump declares "The Storm Is Upon Us."



This is the type of thing corporate conservative commentators are spouting on the regular these days. Warning, contains patriotic freedom:

Spoiler

Marjorie Taylor Greene, she of the jewish space lasers and drunkenly harassing AOC's staffers through the mail slot, is the #1 grassroots fundraising member of the Republican party.

It's the scenario you both identify - a burgeoning extremism with WL Pierce's dreams of exterminating all to its left - that makes Western media's flogging to death of terms like "white supremacist," "Fascist" and "Nazi" so concerning.

England's press and its then-Labour government had a similar arrangement, circa 2010, best summed up by the Gillian Duffy aka "Bigoted Woman" affair and its electoral fallout. Now the place is Mega-City One from 2000AD, to hear our unelectable left tell it. (it's not, obviously. unless you're Jewish. but that's hardly exclusive to Blighty, inshallah!)

Maybe the identitarian hustle Thomas Sowell describes is just an inescapable parasite of the diverse, liberal West. So many juicy socioeconomic fault lines. It's certainly killing a lot of people it purports to stand for, that much is ghoulishly obvious from a glance at London or Detroit's murder rates. I'm pretty sure it's going to enable truly epochal horrors, eventually, if its strangulation of discourse to the point that random black conservatives are casually designated "white supremacists" is left unchecked. The shameless, coordinated repurposing of WI v Rittenhouse as The Revenge Of White America isn't encouraging.

[BulletMagnet]

Maybe the identitarian hustle Thomas Sowell describes is just an inescapable parasite of the diverse, liberal West. So many juicy socioeconomic fault lines. It's certainly killing a lot of people it purports to stand for, that much is ghoulishly obvious from a glance at London or Detroit's murder rates.

Off the cuff, in the US in recent years many of the societal maladies which had largely been synonymous with, at least in the public consciousness, inner cities (rising crime, drug use, broken families, etc.) have rapidly ramped up in majority-white, rural areas; notably, many of the same people who for years have been insisting that the root of these issues was "cultural deficiencies" and that the solution is to "cut the crap about inequality and start cracking some heads" are now almost without exception blaming this latest wave solely on factors completely outside the perpetrators' control and prescribing patient, open-minded understanding and no-strings-attached aid as the remedy.

Color me skeptical that the far-and-away main culprit, to be tackled before all others, behind these problems is that we're being too nice to certain people who just won't get with the program, and even more skeptical that people with far more scholarship behind them - and much greater financial incentives to come to certain preordained conclusions no matter what - than myself actually believe this.

[Sengoku Strider]

It's the scenario you both identify - a burgeoning extremism with WL Pierce's dreams of exterminating all to its left - that makes Western media's flogging to death of terms like "white supremacist," "Fascist" and "Nazi" so concerning.

England's press and its then-Labour government had a similar arrangement, circa 2010, best summed up by the Gillian Duffy aka "Bigoted Woman" affair and its electoral fallout. Now the place is Mega-City One from 2000AD, to hear our unelectable left tell it. (it's not, obviously. unless you're Jewish. but that's hardly exclusive to Blighty, inshallah!)

Maybe the identitarian hustle Thomas Sowell describes is just an inescapable parasite of the diverse, liberal West. It's certainly killing a lot of people it purports to stand for, that much is ghoulishly obvious from a glance at London or Detroit's murder rates. I'm pretty sure it's going to enable truly epochal horrors, eventually, if its strangulation of discourse to the point that random black conservatives are casually designated "white supremacists" is left unchecked. The shameless, coordinated repurposing of WI v Rittenhouse as The Revenge Of White America isn't encouraging.

Well okay, but think of the contradiction this type of argument is based on. "If we keep calling racists racists, they'll get racister. Best just leave the whole thing be." It presumes that only one side has any type of adult agency, or is expected to put up with abuse indefinitely lest they be 'responsible' for said abuse metastasizing into attempted genocide.

I know it's absolutely not your intent; but the problem is the contention echoes the same basic disingenuous logic that's at the heart of the generic reactionary bigot movement:



It all rests on a historical amnesia that everything was fine and then suddenly one day "they" started it.



Just the regular understandable response of an every day mom to a genocidal Tide commercial.

Which is why the basic premise of the Sowell remark is not even worth commenting on. The man's written corpus was a cavalcade of self-serving WTF; one would have to live in the ivoriest of towers not to see just how much genuine bigotry is at work in the present world, and in the United states in particular. If we're talking identitarian movements, the evangelical right rests on a fundamental assumption of white supremacy. Not in the hypersensitive Twitter activist sense, I mean the real all-pcb-no-emu deal. All you have to do is put on a hazmat suit and go into the comments section for evangelist Kenneth Copeland's Victory Channel:



Social media managers co-signing N-bombs with triple prayer emojis is White-Americans-Are-God's-Chosen-People in its most distilled symbolic form. If the fan ever does get hit with the proverbial excrement, Bible Militias will be front & centre:



Now look, among social justice activists are there shallow narcissistic bullies who are every bit as bigoted as the people they profess to hate? That would be a √√√. No argument here. I deal with them all the time, and plenty of them make it to graduate school. But to say they're emblematic of the aims of the movement as a whole is just not the case, they're just obnoxious and easy for disingenuous media to cherry-pick.

As far as the prodding-the-bull thing goes, there is absolutely an element of this wherein a whole lot of people on the right stopped listening to the actual words of racial justice activists years ago (presuming there was ever a golden age where this was a norm), and just started feeling attacked by the emotion behind the words. You could tag plenty of points in history, but let's just go with people losing their minds over a statement as simple, well-intentioned and self-evident as 'Black Lives Matter.' Somehow a whole lot of white people brains twisted this into having a second hidden clause "...more than yours." And then went into Drunken Master 2 level mental gymnastics to try and retcon some kind of rationale into this emotion. Let's call it doing a Tucker Carlson.

{Pictured: Tucker explains that "Black Lives Matter was never about black lives."}



So by that reasoning, more arguing and accusation is pointless. But this comes back around to the initial contradiction: only one side is entitled to their emotions, and for some reason it's the dickhead one. The trouble with emotions is they're hard to shut off, especially when one side sees their kids getting shot for no reason and it getting waived off as no big deal, while the other's gripe is that they don't want to think about it go away and play basketball or something.

So the end result is people learning that the "peaceful protest and honest open conversation" canard was always just a deflection, and realizing fuck it, we've talked, written, sung, painted, explained, peacefully marched, written poetry, Cosby Showed and Fresh Princed, rapped, and even Jimi Hendrixed. Literally the only things left are yelling or smashing shit.

The smashing stuff, of course, plays into the "See? I told you they were savages" crowd's wildest fantasies, so for now, I'll take the yelling.

[Mischief Maker]

Maybe the identitarian hustle Thomas Sowell describes is just an inescapable parasite of the diverse, liberal West. So many juicy socioeconomic fault lines. It's certainly killing a lot of people it purports to stand for, that much is ghoulishly obvious from a glance at London or Detroit's murder rates. I'm pretty sure it's going to enable truly epochal horrors, eventually, if its strangulation of discourse to the point that random black conservatives are casually designated "white supremacists" is left unchecked. The shameless, coordinated repurposing of WI v Rittenhouse as The Revenge Of White America isn't encouraging.

Or maybe this Sowell character is a hustler himself? All I know about the guy is someone paid Google a buttload of cash to make him the top suggested video for anything politically-related last black history month.

Anyway, I never brought up his race, I was responding to the silliness of his words with documented facts.

emphatic could have just posted the text of that quote, but the words alone would have been laughed off the site without the identity politics punch of a black face next to it.

[BIL]

Maybe the identitarian hustle Thomas Sowell describes is just an inescapable parasite of the diverse, liberal West. So many juicy socioeconomic fault lines. It's certainly killing a lot of people it purports to stand for, that much is ghoulishly obvious from a glance at London or Detroit's murder rates.

Off the cuff, in the US in recent years many of the societal maladies which had largely been synonymous with, at least in the public consciousness, inner cities (rising crime, drug use, broken families, etc.) have rapidly ramped up in majority-white, rural areas; notably, many of the same people who for years have been insisting that the root of these issues was "cultural deficiencies" and that the solution is to "cut the crap about inequality and start cracking some heads" are now almost without exception blaming this latest wave solely on factors completely outside the perpetrators' control and prescribing patient, open-minded understanding and no-strings-attached aid as the remedy.

Color me skeptical that the far-and-away main culprit, to be tackled before all others, behind these problems is that we're being too nice to certain people who just won't get with the program, and even more skeptical that people with far more scholarship behind them - and much greater financial incentives to come to certain preordained conclusions no matter what - than myself actually believe this.

I'm woefully unequipped to compare the economic situations of impoverished black and white Americans, but something I've heard a lot is the former's murder rate dwarfing the latter's, despite there being more poor - and armed - whites than there are blacks total.

(this unelaborated statistic is, unfortunately, red meat for Nazis - but frankly, so are all who even ponder a humanitarian response to these issues, so fuck 'em.)

I suspect there is some cultural element at work in the most staggeringly deadly US cities. Saying this after moving from a 90% black country of ~3million, to an 85% white one of ~70million - which hosts some depressingly familiar subcultures, in depressingly familiar inner cities. At college, I'd read with bleak amusement British reports on Yardie antics - by no means constrained to race or ethnicity. That ol' cracker David Starkey got immolated for his observation that young people of all ethnicities have a latent attraction to the classic gangsta brew. One whiff of that fatalistic hedonism and murderous machismo garnished with utter futureless despair, you'll never mistake it. (echoing Dreda Say Mitchell, and as Starkey tried to put across in his bumbling veddy British academic way, Yardie is merely a subculture, and a roundly despised one among wider Jamaican society. nobody likes a rude bwoy!)

US academia's Glenn Loughry and John McWorter get opprobrium for similar theory on their side of the pond, so points for consistency I suppose. A mutant strain of southern redneck honour culture hitching a ride during the Great Migration is their usual hypothesis, if I recall.

It's the scenario you both identify - a burgeoning extremism with WL Pierce's dreams of exterminating all to its left - that makes Western media's flogging to death of terms like "white supremacist," "Fascist" and "Nazi" so concerning.

England's press and its then-Labour government had a similar arrangement, circa 2010, best summed up by the Gillian Duffy aka "Bigoted Woman" affair and its electoral fallout. Now the place is Mega-City One from 2000AD, to hear our unelectable left tell it. (it's not, obviously. unless you're Jewish. but that's hardly exclusive to Blighty, inshallah!)

Maybe the identitarian hustle Thomas Sowell describes is just an inescapable parasite of the diverse, liberal West. It's certainly killing a lot of people it purports to stand for, that much is ghoulishly obvious from a glance at London or Detroit's murder rates. I'm pretty sure it's going to enable truly epochal horrors, eventually, if its strangulation of discourse to the point that random black conservatives are casually designated "white supremacists" is left unchecked. The shameless, coordinated repurposing of WI v Rittenhouse as The Revenge Of White America isn't encouraging.

Well okay, but think of the contradiction this type of argument is based on. "If we keep calling racists racists, they'll get racister. Best just leave the whole thing be." It presumes that only one side has any type of adult agency, or is expected to put up with abuse indefinitely lest they be 'responsible' for said abuse metastasizing into attempted genocide.

I don't care what people call Nazis. The problem is people calling everyone who disagrees with them Nazis, turning what should be a serious charge into a sugary, trendy rhetorical canape, making discourse impossible.

Swathes of US/UK media and their political bedfellows seem hell-bent on pushing this infantilised worldview, whether for profit or principle, I'm really not sure. All I know is that between the fabulously well-remunerated Diane Abbots and David Lammies, and the tragically disposable Sasha Johnsons, nothing is getting done about the piles of dead black kids (with the odd whitey).

Some say this willful breakdown of social cohesion leads to war, which sounds a bit alarmist to me, but then I've got the luxury of fucking off back home if things really go to hell.

I know it's absolutely not your intent; but the problem is the contention echoes the same basic disingenuous logic that's at the heart of the generic reactionary bigot movement:

[image]

It all rests on a historical amnesia that everything was fine and then suddenly one day "they" started it.

[image]

Just the regular understandable response of an every day mom to a genocidal Tide commercial.

The US is, indeed, famously full of easily-led white simpletons, as great gouges of the third world can attest to. No please! No more democracy! They can be dangerous. However...

Which is why the basic premise of the Sowell remark is not even worth commenting on. The man's written corpus was a cavalcade of self-serving WTF; one would have to live in the ivoriest of towers not to see just how much genuine bigotry is at work in the present world, and in the United states in particular. If we're talking identitarian movements, the evangelical right rests on a fundamental assumption of white supremacy. Not in the hypersensitive Twitter activist sense, I mean the real all-pcb-no-emu deal. All you have to do is put on a hazmat suit and go into the comments section for evangelist Kenneth Copeland's Victory Channel:

[image]

Social media managers co-signing N-bombs with triple prayer emojis is White-Americans-Are-God's-Chosen-People in its most distilled symbolic form. If the fan ever does get hit with the proverbial excrement, Bible Militias will be front & centre:

[image]

Al Sharptons, Ibrahim X. Kendis and Robin DiAngelos who reap their fortunes on imagined boogeymen while black Americans murder each other at astonishing pace can - and do - coexist with the Down-Home Jesus Is Comin' Back Y'All Canaan Land Ministry set. They're distinct phenomena with very different mechanisms of action. The former are deadly when their demographic of choice is kept disordered and self-destructive. The latter are deadly when their flock is given a prime target for democratisation.

Now look, among social justice activists are there shallow narcissistic bullies who are every bit as bigoted as the people they profess to hate? That would be a √√√. No argument here. I deal with them all the time, and plenty of them make it to graduate school. But to say they're emblematic of the aims of the movement as a whole is just not the case, they're just obnoxious and easy for disingenuous media to cherry-pick.

As far as the prodding-the-bull thing goes, there is absolutely an element of this wherein a whole lot of people on the right stopped listening to the actual words of racial justice activists years ago (presuming there was ever a golden age where this was a norm), and just started feeling attacked by the emotion behind the words. You could tag plenty of points in history, but let's just go with people losing their minds over a statement as simple, well-intentioned and self-evident as 'Black Lives Matter.' Somehow a whole lot of white people brains twisted this into having a second hidden clause "...more than yours." And then went into Drunken Master 2 level mental gymnastics to try and retcon some kind of rationale into this emotion. Let's call it doing a Tucker Carlson.

{Pictured: Tucker explains that "Black Lives Matter was never about black lives."}

I think the problem, for we non-Nazis who've no particular attachment to race or ethnicity, is that "Black Lives Matter" is both a statement, and the name of an organisation with some contentious aims, well beyond the agreeable humanitarianism of their moniker. I see they've scrubbed out the "dismantle nuclear family" thing on their site - smart move.

Antifa have a similar racket. How can you question them? You must love fascists!

I'm not contradicting myself, in the least, when my sentiments are respectively "Yes, obviously black lives matter, I'm mildly perturbed to think they wouldn't, can I introduce you to my granny?" and "lmao"

So by that reasoning, more arguing and accusation is pointless. But this comes back around to the initial contradiction: only one side is entitled to their emotions, and for some reason it's the dickhead one. The trouble with emotions is they're hard to shut off, especially when one side sees their kids getting shot for no reason and it getting waived off as no big deal, while the other's gripe is that they don't want to think about it go away and play basketball or something.

So the end result is people learning that the "peaceful protest and honest open conversation" canard was always just a deflection, and realizing fuck it, we've talked, written, sung, painted, explained, peacefully marched, written poetry, Cosby Showed and Fresh Princed, rapped, and even Jimi Hendrixed. Literally the only things left are yelling or smashing shit.

The smashing stuff, of course, plays into the "See? I told you they were savages" crowd's wildest fantasies, so for now, I'll take the yelling.

There has to be a better way, unfortunately. I'm not being rhetorical. One year on, the only evidence of 2020's unrest is ruined black neighbourhoods and skyrocketing black murder rates. And a whole lot of failed insurance claims, probably the most egregious sendup of the trendy "It's just property!" lie. It's not working, with material damages to attest.

One thing I hope all can agree on is that more conversation is better than less. A decade ago I'd have balked at this hippy blandishment, but now I'm regularly called a Tom or worse for pointing out that knives are dangerous, so I've had to scale back somewhat.

Fuck me, this has been depressing. It's that kind of thread!

Maybe the identitarian hustle Thomas Sowell describes is just an inescapable parasite of the diverse, liberal West. So many juicy socioeconomic fault lines. It's certainly killing a lot of people it purports to stand for, that much is ghoulishly obvious from a glance at London or Detroit's murder rates. I'm pretty sure it's going to enable truly epochal horrors, eventually, if its strangulation of discourse to the point that random black conservatives are casually designated "white supremacists" is left unchecked. The shameless, coordinated repurposing of WI v Rittenhouse as The Revenge Of White America isn't encouraging.

Or maybe this Sowell character is a hustler himself? All I know about the guy is someone paid Google a buttload of cash to make him the top suggested video for anything politically-related last black history month.

He could be. I have to admit, with hideous vampires like Sharpton masquerading as compassionate voices for black Americans (don't mention Tawana Brawley! or Freddy's Fashion Mart!), a black academic who'll so much as consider other explanations for the appalling state of affairs than the tried and failed "whitey keep a brother down" seems like Black Jesus.

Anyway, I never brought up his race, I was responding to the silliness of his words with documented facts.

emphatic could have just posted the text of that quote, but the words alone would have been laughed off the site without the identity politics punch of a black face next to it.

Oh no, I didn't think you were focusing on his race at all.

EDIT: fixed quote tags mis-attributing my haraam words to the innocent

[emphatic]

emphatic could have just posted the text of that quote, but the words alone would have been laughed off the site without the identity politics punch of a black face next to it.

Good, you're starting to understand how this works. In this thread, if you fail to show pictures, you won't win a prize. Haven't you been paying any attention to Sengoku Strider's posts?

[BulletMagnet]

I suspect there is some cultural element at work in the most staggeringly deadly US cities.

Some element, certainly - again, though, the issue is that when talking about certain people, the "cultural element" is invariably held up as THE issue, while when discussing other people, "culture" is all but completely and inevitably excluded.

I think the problem, for we non-Nazis who've no particular attachment to race or ethnicity

I can't speak for the situation in the UK, but in this neck of the woods I've harped before on the fact that there are a lot of "reasonable" people who don't themselves hold explicitly racist beliefs, but are very willing to ignore, if not actively indulge, those who do, and to justify just about any action the latter take as long as they can somehow call it a "win" for themselves (and before people say anything, yes, there is some degree of this on the "anti-racist" side as well, but I would very much like to hear anyone argue that it's even close to an equivalent issue): Exhibit A off the top of my head is the ongoing wave of voter suppression laws being passed in numerous states, which are not only entirely unsupported by the "voter fraud" claims that are supposed to justify their existence but almost without exception exclude minority voters far more than white ones, and are wildly popular among "non-Nazi" conservatives. In similar and more infamous fashion, of course, despite his open and incessant appeals to the "Nativist" contingent, Trump remains the undisputed de facto head of the GOP (and an inspiration to far-right candidates elsewhere in the world), and even made gains among conservative minority voters in 2020. To invoke my frequent turn of phrase, the yeeaahhh fuck yooouuu yeeahhh runs deep.

I guess the way I'd sum up my feeling on the matter is that, no, calling everyone you disagree with a Nazi is not terribly helpful, but when so many of those folks would absolutely rather support people and policies which draw very directly from xenophobic and authoritarian roots - even, in some cases, directly to their own detriment - than so much as consider you a "real American", let alone any election you win as legitimate, it can be difficult not to ask in frustration, "if 'the line' which would finally make you reassess where the borders of acceptable behavior lie hasn't already been crossed at this point, does it actually even exist for you?"

[BIL]

I suspect there is some cultural element at work in the most staggeringly deadly US cities.

Some element, certainly - again, though, the issue is that when talking about certain people, the "cultural element" is invariably held up as THE issue, while when discussing other people, "culture" is all but completely and inevitably excluded.

Yeah, that's worse than useless. No culture exists in a vacuum.

I've seen a few black US commentators I follow claim there's nothing to be done but flee. Guys who grew up in nightmarish hoods and passed through the penal system to find semi-steady work as Youtube pundits. I can't bring myself to agree with them, for nothing more than sentimentality, though I'm a rank outsider to their experiences.

I think of Patrice O'Neal's comments in my beloved Chimp Attack O&A segment, regarding then-beleaguered Terrell Owens. TLDR: Self-sabotaging stigma is real, and hellaciously dangerous to young people. Sad as hell, but I draw some hope from O'Neal's perspective - a marginally luckier black guy who was able to defy the stigma so many others are born into, learning everything he could to better his lot.

Needless to say, "better your lot or die at the hands of your peers" is a barbaric situation, which is where economic models and solutions are useful... clean water, for a start.

I can't speak for the situation in the UK, but in this neck of the woods I've harped before on the fact that there are a lot of "reasonable" people who don't themselves hold explicitly racist beliefs, but are very willing to ignore, if not actively indulge, those who do, and to justify just about any action the latter take as long as they can somehow call it a "win" for themselves: Exhibit A off the top of my head is the ongoing wave of voter suppression laws being passed in numerous states, which are not only entirely unsupported by the "voter fraud" claims that are supposed to justify their existence but almost without exception exclude minority voters far more than white ones, and are wildly popular among "non-Nazi" conservatives. In similar and more infamous fashion, of course, despite his open and incessant appeals to the "Nativist" contingent, Trump remains the undisputed de facto head of the GOP (and an inspiration to far-right candidates elsewhere in the world), and even made gains among conservative minority voters in 2020. To invoke my frequent turn of phrase, the yeeaahhh fuck yooouuu yeeahhh runs deep.

I guess the way I'd sum up my feeling on the matter is that, no, calling everyone you disagree with a Nazi is not terribly helpful, but when so many of those folks would absolutely rather support people and policies which draw very directly from xenophobic and authoritarian roots than so much as consider you a "real American", let alone any election you win as legitimate, it can be difficult not to ask in frustration, "if 'the line' which would finally make you reassess where the borders of acceptable behavior lie hasn't already been crossed at this point, does it actually even exist for you?"

1000x more considered and articulate than the twitter snark du jour. Maybe the move from forums to built-for-driveby microblogging really was the harbinger of the apocalypse, after all?

[Mischief Maker]

emphatic could have just posted the text of that quote, but the words alone would have been laughed off the site without the identity politics punch of a black face next to it.

Good, you're starting to understand how this works. In this thread, if you fail to show pictures, you won't win a prize. Haven't you been paying any attention to Sengoku Strider's posts?

I'm pretty sure Sengoku Strider's Qanon screenshots are intended to be laughed off the site.

[BulletMagnet]

1000x more considered and articulate than the twitter snark du jour.

An unexpected compliment for a post containing the phrase "yeeaahhh fuck yooouu yeeeahhh", but appreciated notwithstanding.

[BryanM]

"cut the crap about inequality and start cracking some heads" are now almost without exception blaming this latest wave solely on factors completely outside the perpetrators' control and prescribing patient, open-minded understanding and no-strings-attached aid as the remedy.

Oh god. This reminds me of this police chief that had no empathy whatsoever for drug addicts for decades and decades. Then suddenly, magically, he had empathy! "These are people who need help."

Was it because a hippy converted him with a pithy little speech? Or because the people he started seeing in his jail were becoming more and more "affluent"?

I don't care what people call Nazis. The problem is people calling everyone who disagrees with them Nazis, turning what should be a serious charge into a sugary, trendy rhetorical canape, making discourse impossible.

An important part of the culture war is to dehumanize and isolate the other. Slurs are a core component of that; on the internet, slurs serve the same function as gang signs. There's an incredible amount of churn on the right in this; I can't believe "cuck" has fallen out of favor already, so many invested so much into it.

Seeing liberals begin to resort to it (when their natural character trait is laying on the floor as a doormat) is just a symptom of the apocalypse - they know some things need to change, but they don't want to change anything, so cultural affects and anger at sock puppets versus root systematic issues it is. They saw Trump use it to great profit, and their minds think being a pale imitation, but a "mirror" version, is somehow useful. I guess it is - rallies the kind of people they want in their army, purges it of those they don't. Bernie Sanders Voter Joe Rogan is garbage because he talks to anyone he finds interesting, including cranks and non-cranks. As opposed to people who only talk to preachy boring people who work on developing statins and various other grifts, I guess.

Of the culture war, I'm not a fan of it. Everyone knows what side they're on. There's nothing thoughtful to add to or learn from it, it's all raw animal emotion. A Jerry Springer episode.

If I'm going to indulge in wrestling, I wanna see Jim Sterling get slapped in the face and then scream "YOU SLAPPED ME!" Has much higher production values. And better writing.

It’s interesting how people and news and so forth make Bernie sound crazy, but he actually seems to speak sense. I’m a staunch republican. This has been mind opening.

Before watching this, I thought Bernie was a left-wing nut. Yes, I lean republican but wow was I wrong about him. I don't agree with all of his policies but I always welcome new ideas and I believe he means well.

^^^ These kinds of comments make certain liberals seethe and seethe.

[BIL]

I don't care what people call Nazis. The problem is people calling everyone who disagrees with them Nazis, turning what should be a serious charge into a sugary, trendy rhetorical canape, making discourse impossible.

An important part of the culture war is to dehumanize and isolate the other. Slurs are a core component of that; on the internet, slurs serve the same function as gang signs. There's an incredible amount of churn on the right in this; I can't believe "cuck" has fallen out of favor already, so many invested so much into it.

Too true. I sometimes forget how much of this is pure Kabuki theatre, rigged up to Star Trek instantaneous communications. Just "YOOOOOOOO" as loudly and bawdily as you can at the other team, maybe while doing the international "big dong in mouth" gesture.

"Heard yo mama fat" "Oh yeah, heard yo mama eat all the food and cause the Holodomor" "Heard yo mama suck dick" "Oh yeah, heard yo mama so horny she invade Pole Land"

[Randorama]

[...]Now the place is Mega-City One from 2000AD, to hear our unelectable left tell it[...]

I am a bit appalled at this mistake. You probably mean Brit-Cit, right? I am pretty sure that ol' chap Devlin Vaugh would like to reprimand you, too, for such a blunder (but after Tea of course: everything stops for Tea!).

[BIL]

Still making unpardonable howlers a couple decades post-reunion with the mother country

[Randorama]

There, there, lad. 100 progs of your choice, by next Friday, and we shall all agree than your soul is cleansed
(...coming from someone who's 2+ years behind with progs and hasn't played WH40K since 2015, which is a rather embarrassing situation).