Do you mind explaining what you mean by this?

which part?

I'm interested in whether the same engenders within the viewer a sentiment of self-loathing.

How do you feel the hard left enables fascists?

I didn't say they enable fascists; I said they encourage protofascists, those who aren't there yet but are on the path.

When someone is just flirting with the ideas of the hard right, and they see the antagonism and effrontery of the hard left, they aren't exactly drawn away from opposition thereto.


An anecdotal example - I know somebody who tried to talk to a friend about Milo's approach to radical freedom of thought; the friend responded by outright calling this person a nazi; the person, a jew, felt that Milo's arguments that "the left" wanted to stymie freedom of thought were thereby vindicated, and drew closer to Milo's work.

Thinking that the left wants to stymie freedom of thought is the path to fascism? Yikes

on two levels -

on one, that the Other (here, the self-identifying Left setting itself as Other to the affronted/-ing individual) is bad, so its opposite must be good

on another, that one side is doing it, justifying the other side's participation in the same, even if only to combat that the first side is)

and then once one identifies The Left as The Enemy on that basis, one may become more inclined to disregard other positions associated with The Left (ie, socialized welfare, racial rectification, gender empowerment, etc) as either or both underpinnings of the Left's malice or merely symptoms of it

Are the Chinese communists free?

Are they the left? Do they have free Internet even?

Does birdman believe in re-education camps? That the left wants to stymie freedom shouldn't even be a debate

yeah LordJvK made similar arguments as you are making now IANAW. That he was driven to be a “conservative” because of the left or something

In general the conception of a political “left” is an idealist notion. There is no “left”.

There are classes and there is class struggle.

A while ago, I made a big stink itt about calling people "racist".

When someone says "people on welfare are just lazy", and you say "you only think that because you are racist", that person doesn't suddenly come to jesus and realize they have transgressed. Instead, they internalize that supporters of welfare are irrational, undermining the credence the supporters lend to welfare as an idea.

The left/right spectrum is mostly bourogisie idealism. Your politics either have a bourogisie class character or a proletarian one.

Can any Trump supporters ITT explain this tweet yesterday?


https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/...46945640525826

Ignoring for a moment how LOL it is for Trump to be calling out his own AG that he selected on Twitter like this, why is Trump so concerned?

There's no chance of impeachment in the current make up of the House, and it's still not likely if the Democrats take a slim to moderate majority next year. And even if he does, it's preposterous to believe that he would get a 67 vote conviction in the Senate. So what's he afraid of?

I'm not sure, in practice, how much the "what about..." justification for "proto-fascism" really depends on the truth of claims about the other side being bad as well. I don't really see a lot of thoughtful takes from right-wingers about Antifa.

Like, I think it's true that movements on the right use radicals on the left as fodder to construct counter-movement framings. We thought a lot about that in our research on the men's rights movement last year. And sometimes of course I even disagree with some of the radicals who provide that fodder. But if your reaction to that is to think that you can neuter those counter-movement framings by getting rid of left-radicals, I think that's too naïve in a couple ways.

The first is just that it assumes too much good faith on the part of right-wing movement actors. There's plenty of evidence that they will continue to manufacture those framings regardless of how ridiculous they are. So for example in some of the MRA framings it's enough to make any random social media post from any random woman stand in for "feminism".

Which gets to the second point, which is that you can never actually control the discourse or political activism enough to eliminate whatever activity you deem to be too radical to be helpful. Or at least, that idea is more authoritarian in practice than whatever fascism you might be worried about to begin with. So there's always going to be fodder for people who want to justify their radicalism by "what about" appeals to some more radical elements on the other other side.

"Left radicals are bad because they encourage right radicals" as a notion doesn't get you anywhere useful, even when you're only concerned with movement framing effects and not any substantive comparison of the two groups, and in fact it just concedes the game to those same right-wing radicals.

google used to have the rep, and maybe even mission statement, of trying to make the world a better place

authoritarian left, so (1) no and (2(a)) yes

(2(b)) idk how their formal subscription works, but basic "free lunch" economic theory points to "no"

(3) seems to be "yes", unless he would prefer to save time and resources and use bullets instead (which Monkey suggested a long while ago)



That a topic "shouldn't even be a debate" is an interesting position for you maintain in this context, Luckbox!

not exactly ad hominem, I don't think, but pretty darn close

does that fallacy's intersection with appeal to authority have its own name?

Class is an idealized notion.

The issue is you are operating under the premise that successful politics involves persuasion and the marketplace of ideas. If someone believes that people on welfare ARE lazy that IS, in point of fact, racist.

There are rare cases where you can explain that to someone and have them come around through “civil discourse”, but more often than not it is material conditions that drive people to believe what they believe. We have it happen time and again in this thread. How many different ways have people tried to show zorkman that the policies he advocates for abortion are self-defeating and actually perpetuate abortion? It’s not because he cares about abortion, it’s because he cares about exercising power over women’s means of reproduction. So all the “civil discourse” in the world isn’t going to change his mind. So why bother telling him his views are anything but sexist?

maybe Paul Manafort's trial looking grim

maybe Trump knows that all press is good press

No it’s not. Class is an observable fact. It describes a persons or groups relation to the means of production. That is material no ideal.

There were some minor transcription errors. Corrected: "Do, know evil".

I was looking at a software jobs site. One of the criteria it allowed for search was "social good", but all of the social good companies were actually doing social bad. Very obviously bad, worse than the companies without the social good property.

When you grade on a curve google looks better. "Google builds data centers to be carbon neutral; decent search forwards human research capacity. Android is a free OS they basically give to the world. They also took one look at what the NSA was doing and encrypted all the links over internal networks and dark fiber. They also fired that nazi, and cancelled their project to do machine learning on drone footage from .mil." (a googler I know)

There is plenty of bad from google too.

does it help if I frame my position such that left-radicalization is a sufficient condition for right-radicalization, if not a necessary one?

my suggestion is to promote the notion of pragmatism, a concentration on efficacy, in polemics; moral dick-waving has never ended well

You can make that claim, but I see no reason to believe that it's true.