In order to ensure that this thread continues to meet TL standards and follows the proper guidelines, we will be enforcing the rules in the OP more strictly. Be sure to give them a re-read to refresh your memory! The vast majority of you are contributing in a healthy way, keep it up!
NOTE: When providing a source, explain why you feel it is relevant and what purpose it adds to the discussion if it's not obvious. Also take note that unsubstantiated tweets/posts meant only to rekindle old arguments can result in a mod action.
This interview is a really good overview of the left's view of Antifa, from probably the furthest left american news outlet (Democracynow!). There's video or full transcripts if you prefer.
[...] MARK BRAY: Right. So, the way people understand fascism, or the way they’ve been taught about it, is generally exclusively in terms of regimes. So, the thought goes, as long as we have parliamentary government, we’re safe. But we can look back to the historical examples of Italy and Germany and see that, unfortunately, parliamentary government was insufficient to prevent the stop—to prevent the rise of fascism and Nazism, and actually provided a red carpet to their advance. So, because of that reason, people think of fascism in terms of all or nothing, regime or nothing.
But we can see in Charlottesville that any amount of neo-Nazi organizing, any amount of a fascist presence, is potentially fatal. And, unfortunately, Heather Heyer paid the price for that. So that’s partly why anti-fascists argue that fascism must be nipped in the bud from the beginning, that any kind of organizing needs to be confronted and responded to. Even if, you know, people are spending most of their time on Twitter making jokes, it’s still very serious and needs to be confronted.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you—can you talk about—I mean, very interesting, during the South Carolina protests against the white supremacists, there were flags of Republicans in Spain fighting Franco.
MARK BRAY: Right. So, one of the most iconic moments in anti-fascist history is the Spanish Civil War, and, from an international perspective, the role of the International Brigades, brave anti-fascists who came from dozens of countries around the world to stand up to Franco’s forces. Franco had the institutional support of Nazi Germany and Mussolini’s Italy, whereas the Republican side really only had support of the Soviet Union, which, as I discuss in my book, had a lot of problematic aspects to it. So, if we look at the role of the International Brigades, we can see that anti-fascists view their struggle as transnational and transhistorical. And so, today, if you go to an anti-fascist demonstration in Spain, for example, the flag of the International Brigades, the flag of the Spanish Republic is ubiquitous. And these symbols, even the double flags of anti-fascism that people will frequently see at demonstrations, often one being red, one being black, was originally developed as a German symbol, which, in its earliest incarnation, dates back to the 1930s. So, it’s important to look at antifa not just as sort of a random thought experiment that some crazy kids came up with to respond to the far right, but rather a tradition that dates back a century.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: You also talk, in your examples, of other countries, not only the period of the 1930s and ’40s, but more recent periods, in England in the ’80s, and in Greece, as well, even more recently, and the importance of direct action by anti-fascists to nip in the bud or to beat back the rise of fascist movements.
MARK BRAY: Right. So, part of what I try to do with my book, Antifa, is draw certain historical lessons from the early period of anti-fascist struggle that can be applied to the struggle today. One of them is that it doesn’t take a lot of organized fascists to sometimes develop a really powerful movement. We can see that recently with the rise of Golden Dawn, the fascist party in Greece, which, prior to the financial crisis, was really a tiny micro-party and considered a joke by most. Subsequently, they became a major party in Greek politics and a major threat, a violent, deadly threat, to migrants and leftists and people of all stripes across Greek society. This was also true back in the early part of the 20th century, when Mussolini’s initial fascist nucleus was a hundred people. When Hiller first attended his first meeting of the German Workers’ Party, which he later transformed into the Nazi Party, they had 54 members. So, we need to see that there’s always a potential for small movements to become large.
And one of the other lessons of the beginning of the 20th century is that people did not take fascism and Nazism seriously until it was too late. That mistake will never be made again by anti-fascists, who will recognize that any manifestation of these politics is dangerous and needs to be confronted as if it could be the nucleus of some sort of deadly movement or regime of the future. [...]
I wasn't even addressing the specifics of the last 2 pages, but let me do so now. Plansix' history degree appears to have little to no value considering that he doesn't understand that Southern politicians were not in charge of their own polities until around the beginning of the 20th Century - coincidentally, the time when many of the statues were being erected. There's this thing called Reconstruction and Carpetbaggers, where Unionists and Northerners were pretty much occupiers for decades. Of course, no Confederate statues and monuments are going to be erected by these people. So, the insinuation that for 30+ years southerners were in charge of their polities, but decided to not erect statues and monuments until black civil rights movements started to become powerful and widespread is just simply false. Now, I'm not going to defend many dixiecrats because they were awful people, but the argument that these monuments are only simply racist markings is patently false. Of course, I wouldn't expect Northerners to understand it especially not with the education on this subject by the Government schools.
bayesian priors are a belief system that is always only a justification a posteriori. you are sitting here making claims that its "rational" to be scared of blacks on a train because of "statistics" about "the violence of black people" (in comparison to the US) with no reference to any other detailsand no acknowledgement that the criterion black is always an arbitrary criterion.
in other words, if you and i were betting on indidual crimes in trains i am quite positive that i would beat you over the long term by using "average rate of crimes in trains" if you were using a "racial propensity for crime" model. i am aware that this is almost tautological but i am also sure that there are nearly an infinite number of models that would have a better performance than "are the people on this train black?"
now i am not arguing that a feeling of fear is never warranted (imagine a gang of bloods dressed all in red with doo rags and face tatts and all those "im black and dangerous" indicators and flashing a gun) but the millions of pieces of data your brain is analyzing has only the slightest resemblance to this "racial stereotyping" abstraction you are talking about, not all of it inherently racist, while your racial stereotyping abstraction is exactly that. for another thing there is no way that anyone working with stereotypes in practical situations has access to rigorous data of the right type. its always an operation of unjustified belief.
you seem to have missed the point here ("oh you just dont understand bayes theorem! you see there are these things called 'priors' that are really cool"). yeah i know what bayes theorem is and i know what a prior is. a prior is the conscious assignation of a value to what amounts to more or less of a gut feeling. even framing the question structures priors. why are we asking "whether black people are more dangerous" rather than "whether train riders on a wednesday at noon" are more dangerous?
On August 17 2017 10:11 thePunGun wrote: I think it's hilarious, how both white supremacists and antifa are so blinded by their own ideology, they fail to see, they're exactly the same! We the human race are doomed, we're too easily manipulated by mob mentality. We'd rather believe in our own bullshit, than opening up and calling it out, sadly those who do are ridiculed by each side for not picking a side. “Those who are able to see beyond the shadows and lies of their culture will never be understood, let alone believed, by the masses.” - Plato
Yeeeeaaaaaah.....
Been over this quite a bit in the thread. If you want to compare anyone with actual Nazi or KKK groups, you'd better have more than "they're both mobs".
Well commies killed more people than Nazi's, so....I see a lot more people in this country who defend communism than Nazism, so if Nazism is this existential problem right now that we must stop, then our animas needs to be pointed at the communists just as much if not more so. This is a problem of the media imho. It gives false perception of a thing being vastly more than it is. I'd wager less than 0.02% of Americans subscribe to Nazi ideology. It's the same thing with Muslims and the "right". Folks like ISIS are not some existential threat that must take up vast amounts of time, energy, and $$$ on.
I do love revisionist history and the victimized South. The vast majority of those monuments were erected during the Jim Crow era, when the South was finally able to be just as racist as it wanted. But because I don't buy into the revisionist history crafted by confederate apologist, I guess my degree is worthless. My teachers accredition is out of date, but I guess I should return that just to be safe.
On August 17 2017 10:11 thePunGun wrote: I think it's hilarious, how both white supremacists and antifa are so blinded by their own ideology, they fail to see, they're exactly the same! We the human race are doomed, we're too easily manipulated by mob mentality. We'd rather believe in our own bullshit, than opening up and calling it out, sadly those who do are ridiculed by each side for not picking a side. “Those who are able to see beyond the shadows and lies of their culture will never be understood, let alone believed, by the masses.” - Plato
Yeeeeaaaaaah.....
Been over this quite a bit in the thread. If you want to compare anyone with actual Nazi or KKK groups, you'd better have more than "they're both mobs".
Well commies killed more people than Nazi's, so....
This statement needs *way* more nuance. My understanding is that the neo-Nazis of today have a lot more ideology in common with Hitler-era Nazi government than the communists of today have in common with the Stalin and Mao-era communist governments.
(EDIT: I've probably wildly over-simplified in saying that "communists of today' have a consistent and unified ideology, and over-simplified in other ways, but the general point holds.)
On August 17 2017 10:57 Plansix wrote: I do love revisionist history and the victimized South. The vast majority of those monuments were erected during the Jim Crow era, when the South was finally able to be just as racist as it wanted.
This doesn't really rebut the proposition that that era was also the South's first opportunity since the Civil War to put up statues to its Civil War heroes, as far as I can see. Can you elaborate on that point specifically?
Even if true, all the proposition shows is that the racists were just waiting out the anti-racists until they could put up their monuments to racism. "Oh noes, bad northerners kept us from putting up racist statutes for a while. Once they stopped we put all kinds of racism all over the place!" How does that help the pro-statue argument?
what i am trying to emphasize is that the context under which stereotypes form is always limited and never fully applicable to the instant situation. you have come up with an example (the train example), which you will shift in the course of this discussion, and perhaps disown entirely as "just an example" (i.e. it's not about the specifics it's about the generality of stereotypes in making efficient decisions about known statistical distributions). and yet the framework about which distribution to use in any given situation is (usually) a pre-conscious given that has no possible rational justification other than belief. and in almost all cases is using bad data.
now if you think about how you want to run society, and how those pre-conscious judgments structure relations between people, you might say, "well a consideration about how likely any random black person is to be violent" is a racist consideration because it deliberately chooses his or her race as the arbitrary criterion for making a judgment to the exclusion of literally everything else we know about him or her (and often what we know about ourselves).
On August 17 2017 07:31 Kyadytim wrote: It's a little late to the party because I was unable to post for a while, but Vox Day's explanation of what the Alt-Right is contains the phrase "The Alt Right believes we must secure the existence of white people and a future for white children," which is a transparent paraphrase of the white supremacist slogan "We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children." Quoting that while arguing that the alt-right is not a movement where white supremacists have a large amount of representation and/or influence should be self-defeating.
I bet that you really don't understand why Vox Day included that point. Care to take another shot? It's all right there in the other points.
If he's incorrect and missing it and it's part of your argument you should be answering him and countering it. Not playing cutesy with asking him to take another shot. If it's right there, point it out yourself and explain why it doesn't mean what Kyadytim wrote.
It's much more effective and gratifying to lead people to the right conclusion than just give it to them.
And for everyone who is confused as to why Kyadytim was wrong, consider the following; Vox Day isn't white.
Just going off his wiki he looks pretty white to me. Source - I am a white guy
He's American Indian.
His listing of races has native american as last of four.
If I may lightly rant: the entire idea of people pointing out their heritages anything less than half is so fucking stupid. Good lord, as if being 1/8 polish or whatever has any impact on anything. People talking about "dur, uh, I am 1/8 german, 1/4 English, part native american and uh, and uh" I just roll my eyes.
Vox Day is exactly why I started to seriously question the identity basis to a lot modern arguments. "As a/an _____________, I don't think you can argue this that or the other." The seemingly necessary intersectional qualifier used to underly an argument reached a breaking point when I saw Vox take up the very same minority ethnic group arguments and turn it back on its head. (You can't touch my argument because I am American Indian, an oppressed class.) It was obvious to me that I disagreed with what he was saying, but it left me in a rather uncomfortable spot, if I wanted to be consistent.
Either 1) I had to get into a weird purity test, like what you seem to be doing- one needs to be sufficiently of a group to make certain claims. Well that seemed to make things even more hyper racial and I'm not exactly comfortable arguing "you are not X enough to belong to X group." That's not a path I wanted to go down.
Or 2) I could claim that they had internalized their oppression (queue h3h3 gif). This is a road certain feminists like to take when met with women who disagree with their particular branch of feminism. That too wasn't really a route I liked because while it is possible this is true in some cases, I don't think it can be true in all cases, and likely not true in most cases. At the very least it's a rather patrionizing argument- 'you don't really know what you are talking about, but I know what's up with you!' Well that's a rather arrogant claim, if you think about it. I'd like to think that while some people may be brainwashed, most people have reasons for thinking what they think. They might not even be good reasons, but they are reasons that they hold and not something that they are subconsciously being manipulated by other forces that they have no insight into but somehow I magically do.
So then I was left with 3) Abandon ship with underlying arguments with an intersectionality. The argument has to stand on its own. Because what I realized is that method of argumentation is very vulnerable to bullies and discriminatory views- there's no good defence against it. It works so long as everyone making the arguments are basically good people, but as soon as you have a malicious person that can legitimately wrap themselves in whatever oppressed class to spout all sorts of malcious things, you need to be able argue that they are making a bad argument, not that they are the wrong sort of person to be making that argument.
On August 17 2017 10:11 thePunGun wrote: I think it's hilarious, how both white supremacists and antifa are so blinded by their own ideology, they fail to see, they're exactly the same! We the human race are doomed, we're too easily manipulated by mob mentality. We'd rather believe in our own bullshit, than opening up and calling it out, sadly those who do are ridiculed by each side for not picking a side. “Those who are able to see beyond the shadows and lies of their culture will never be understood, let alone believed, by the masses.” - Plato
Yeeeeaaaaaah.....
Been over this quite a bit in the thread. If you want to compare anyone with actual Nazi or KKK groups, you'd better have more than "they're both mobs".
Well commies killed more people than Nazi's, so....
This statement needs *way* more nuance. My understanding is that the neo-Nazis of today have a lot more ideology in common with Hitler-era Nazi government than the communists of today have in common with the Stalin and Mao-era communist governments.
On August 17 2017 10:57 Plansix wrote: I do love revisionist history and the victimized South. The vast majority of those monuments were erected during the Jim Crow era, when the South was finally able to be just as racist as it wanted.
This doesn't really rebut the proposition that that era was also the South's first opportunity since the Civil War to put up statues to its Civil War heroes, as far as I can see. Can you elaborate on that point specifically?
Neo-confederates were allowed to put up monuments to celebrate the fight to preserve slavery. If they had only erected the statues and not passed endless racist laws alongside them, we would have a different discussion. But those laws took the rest of the century to remove. This is on top of a steady stream of violence against blacks. Those monuments both celebrated the confederates and where designed to intimidate blacks into knowing who is in charge. The entire civil rights movement is an effort to remove these laws.
On August 17 2017 11:07 Wulfey_LA wrote: Even if true, all the proposition shows is that the racists were just waiting out the anti-racists until they could put up their monuments to racism. "Oh noes, bad northerners kept us from putting up racist statutes for a while. Once they stopped we put all kinds of racism all over the place!" How does that help the pro-statue argument?
We call this putting the cart before the horse. You've all ready came to the conclusion that Southerners are racist, therefore anything they do is going to be coated in that light. You cannot even fathom that your a priori conclusion is wrong, so therefore, you reach the conclusion that you did. If any of you spent considerable time in the south living with us you'd not be so quick to otherize an entire region and people. Do some people view these monuments as racist memorials - sure, we saw that with the ugly scene in Charleston, but they're a tiny tiny minority and are not part of the movement of most people to preserve our heritage.
On August 17 2017 11:07 Wulfey_LA wrote: Even if true, all the proposition shows is that the racists were just waiting out the anti-racists until they could put up their monuments to racism. "Oh noes, bad northerners kept us from putting up racist statutes for a while. Once they stopped we put all kinds of racism all over the place!" How does that help the pro-statue argument?
We call this putting the cart before the horse. You've all ready came to the conclusion that Southerners are racist, therefore anything they do is going to be coated in that light. You cannot even fathom that your a priori conclusion is wrong, so therefore, you reach the conclusion that you did. If any of you spent considerable time in the south living with us you'd not be so quick to otherize an entire region and people.
Are you challenging the assertion that many people in the South at the time those statues were put up were racist?
Do some people view these monuments as racist memorials - sure, we saw that with the ugly scene in Charleston, but they're a tiny tiny minority and are not part of the movement of most people to preserve our heritage.
While I appreciate this is a difficult statement for you to prove, that doesn't mean that everybody else is obliged to take you at your word and have full confidence that you are not mistaken.
So in your fantasy land where the statues aren't openly and obviously about celebrating white supremacy, why did 80%+ of them go up during Jim Crow and the Civil Rights era? Just so much heritage going on during those times?
As someone who has a hard time understanding the culture war slant of some of these arguments, I'm having a little difficulty understanding something.
One of the arguments that's been made before is that the success and dominance of Western Christian culture affords it a special place where it deserves to be protected. But if it's success that makes such a culture worthy of protecting, doesn't that in turn also mean that unsuccessful subcultures of Western culture as a whole don't deserve this protection? Doesn't this argument then support the idea that Confederate American culture's failure to defend itself in 1865 thus lose it's special status as a "culture worth defending"?
Even if they were not put up for racist reasons, the context of what they were put up for and celebrating remains. Claims of heritage only work if the statues own up to the gross injustice of slavery and segregation. Without that, they are just symbols of oppression.
On August 17 2017 11:24 TheYango wrote: As someone who has a hard time understanding the culture war slant of some of these arguments, I'm having a little difficulty understanding something.
One of the arguments that's been made before is that the success and dominance of Western Christian culture affords it a special place where it deserves to be protected. But if it's success that makes such a culture worthy of protecting, doesn't that in turn also mean that unsuccessful subcultures of Western culture as a whole don't deserve this protection? Doesn't this argument then support the idea that Confederate American culture's failure to defend itself in 1865 thus lose it's special status as a "culture worth defending"?
I think the cultural preservation and cultural Darwinist factions are two very separate groups. The folk you are pointing to are more of the former - that is, it's about preserving culture because it is our culture, not because our culture is inherently superior. Indeed, the folk who support the latter are almost on the opposite side of that argument.
On August 17 2017 11:24 TheYango wrote: As someone who has a hard time understanding the culture war slant of some of these arguments, I'm having a little difficulty understanding something.
One of the arguments that's been made before is that the success and dominance of Western Christian culture affords it a special place where it deserves to be protected. But if it's success that makes such a culture worthy of protecting, doesn't that in turn also mean that unsuccessful subcultures of Western culture as a whole don't deserve this protection? Doesn't this argument then support the idea that Confederate American culture's failure to defend itself in 1865 thus lose it's special status as a "culture worth defending"?
What you aren't getting is that the international Jew and his rootless cosmopolitan allies denied us our ethnostate in 1865. Then he forced his values on the free peoples of the south with the help of the great charlatans and womanizers of the Civil Right movement. Once we replace the Jews the way they tried to replace us, then we will get the ethnostate we deserve. /s
**Money quotes at 3:55 where the leader talks about DJT being a cuck for handing off his beautiful daughter to that Jew Bastard Kushner
On August 17 2017 11:24 TheYango wrote: As someone who has a hard time understanding the culture war slant of some of these arguments, I'm having a little difficulty understanding something.
One of the arguments that's been made before is that the success and dominance of Western Christian culture affords it a special place where it deserves to be protected. But if it's success that makes such a culture worthy of protecting, doesn't that in turn also mean that unsuccessful subcultures of Western culture as a whole don't deserve this protection? Doesn't this argument then support the idea that Confederate American culture's failure to defend itself in 1865 thus lose it's special status as a "culture worth defending"?
schizophrenia of white supremacy, run a slave and agriculture economy that is in perpetual tatters while whining about the successful urban regions while at the same time thinking you're somehow superior to everybody else. If superiority was supposed to be taken seriously the whole US should turn into California
EPT
![[image loading]](https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/paI4sZBHZFEzmGA_IEKCsqcUqUU=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/9055897/Screen_Shot_2017_08_15_at_4.32.33_PM.png)
