Yeah, but some of them are exactly that.
When you join a hate mob, but want sympathy for being the target of a mob formed in response to your own mob… That’s the kind of personal exceptionalism that unites these people. For many of them it’s not about racism, it’s about strength in numbers sought out from a fear of irrelevance. Walking away like a rational person - would be too huge an ego blow.
Just another redshirt who refuses to recognize we’re all redshirts.
It seems to me that there is a problem in a lot of societies when young men can’t get ahead economically that they start to do stupid stuff.
It’s not exclusive.
Unfortunately, immature fools can also be genocidal murderers.
Agreed. young men also tend to do stupid stuff when it is modeled for them as a route to prosperity.
Trolling has now gained someone the highest office in the land. I don’t see trolling going away.
Not sure if this exactly goes here, but interesting:
Propose a realistic route from my Point A to your Point B, please.
It’s hardly a single step, a I don’t think we’re accelerating down a slippery slope - so lay it out for me, how will the sky fall? Don’t jump to the catastrophic end and work back. Start today and realistically think it through.
Yesterday you said all Trump would have to do is empower some LE agencies, wrangle the friendly militias, and bobs your uncle - america ends.
I disagree. Please, fear is easy. Fear is simple. We understand your fear.
Still plenty of time for solutions, but we will have to ignore the doom and gloomers to get there - so please - knock off the constant ‘fear along with me’ doom n gloom?
Can’t get ahead economically? This kid went to Boston fucking University, for Christ’s sake!
Right, he’s a leader, right?
Guess I’m just trying to process some cognitive dissonance in my life.
We’ve just had a week of Trumpeters declaring their desire to annihilate North Korea and their complete indifference for the consequences for South Korea.
And you have literal, overt, self-declared Nazis marching through the streets. Feeling no need to conceal their identities as they do so, and being supported by the executive even after they kill.
If the threat isn’t obvious, I don’t know what could make it more so.
Link? I don’t recall saying that.
I can avoid the gloom, or I can respond to the questions you just asked. I can’t do both.
There is still time for solutions. There is not “plenty of time”.
Whatever action to take is up to you, but the time is now.
Despair is bad. Fear is useful. Anger is essential.
Sigh. You can’t push a rope.
Back in the 1990s when political correctness was a thing, we had what were called “moderate Republicans”. I think that moderate Republicans is a contradiction in terms, but that’s another discussion entirely. They tried to present themselves as basically normal people who maybe didn’t like taxes or liked guns or whatever, not as racists or religious freaks. However, their attitudes toward religion overwhelmingly but implicitly favored Christianity, and they either looked the other way or tacitly supported racism. It wasn’t surprising that every right-winger I tried to have a conversation with in those days was automagically a “moderate Republican”. It was good camouflage. Whenever anyone mentions bigotry, they would simply say they were one of the good guys, one of the moderates, and it was other people doing that stuff, and they personally cannot condemn it enough… all of the usual mouth farts.
If they won’t honestly admit to being bigots, how will they change?
Part of me thinks that racists being openly racist is a step in the right direction, because now they can’t deny who they are, and they can’t just greasily ooze into whichever incarnation of their political beliefs is the most socially acceptable. They are racist. They think things that I, as someone who isn’t racist, can’t even get my head around, and then use these positions as the linchpin in their political ideologies. They can’t walk it back anymore, they are who they are, they’ve self-selected out of the group of cool-guy moderate Republicans. Of course, the next logical step is:
But do not try to have a conversation with these people. They want genocide, not a conversation, and even the ones who appear nice and moderate and open to persuasion will never be willing to even admit to what they actually believe, let alone have a conversation about it.
He went to a very expensive private university on the East Coast, with people who come from money. He doesn’t exactly have a dearth of opportunity. Meanwhile, there are people scrimping and saving just to attend community college, and they are not only not Nazis, but they have held onto their liberal beliefs.
The idea that this is because of socioeconomic inequality is asinine and insulting.
Yes.
Fascism is a middle-class pathology. It isn’t about resisting oppression, it’s about retaining privilege. When the working class get bloodthirsty, they go hardcore communist.
The American working class are heavily PoC, and were the only socioeconomic group that did not support Trump. They aren’t the fascists; they’re the fascists’ primary target.
I cannot like this comment enough.
I noticed early on that Trump’s popularity was because of aggrieved privilege, not because of inequality. But nobody was listening to me then, they just continued to compare Trump with Bernie Sanders and Bernie Sanders with Trump.
We’ve got to call this what it is: fascism. The fascists have made the first move by self-identifying as fascists. We have to believe them, and call them what they choose to call themselves, not stick our heads in the sand and call them scared little boys and disenfranchised poor people, both of which are gravely insulting to the victims of fascism.
This is the time to act, not react, and denying that fascists are fascists isn’t even up to the same level as reaction.
To play a touch of devil’s advocate:
There are economic issues involved. Predatory American plutocracy has advanced so far that even the middle class were beginning to feel the effect. The poor in America are already fully exploited; the bosses needed new victims if they were going to continue getting richer.
But the middle class tend to live and work in communities that are much more racially and culturally homogenous than the working class. So they tend to be instinctively xenophobic. And they usually have a strong attachment to retaining their material wealth.
When they get scared, they punch down.
So you’re saying the powerful are using the middle class as a tool to scare various classes into providing cheap labor?
You know what? I need all those things. And I don’t get them. Neither do millions of other people, in this country alone.
Yep. I’m not the goddamn Giving Tree. Even if it was in my nature, which it isn’t, I wouldn’t act loving and giving to people after being treated like crap warmed over all day, especially if those people want to do so much more to me than be a normal everyday jerk.
Maybe more to the point is that TPTB are using the other classes to scare the middle class into being their enforcers.
Agreed!
I reject this idea that we can “love” the racism out of Nazis.
I saw those pictures, those people are not poor or oppressed, they go to college, they’re upper middle class, Richard Spencer is rich.
These people don’t want our empathy, they want our subjugation.
Nazis are people who are monsters and we need to meet their intolerance with violent reaction every time it comes up.