Charlottesville

Started by Lustful Bride, August 12, 2017, 11:14:08 AM

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WindFish

If you as President can't bring yourself to say the words "Nazis are evil and I condemn them", then perhaps you're not qualified for that position.

I think Germany has the right idea when it comes to banning Nazis. They learned from their mistakes, and yet they still manage to comply with EU free speech laws in doing so.
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Trigon

#101
Quote from: Lustful Bride on August 17, 2017, 08:58:46 PM
If they did, the Federal Government would crush them. It has spent the last decade fighting insurgencies far more well equipped, determined, and trained, than many of those idiots. And for an real successful insurrection you need numbers, real weaponry and support. At most they would cause some civilian deaths and injuries via IEDs before the National Guard came in and really brought the boot down on them.

Even Regular police forces are now being equipped with surplus military gear, including armored vehicles. The problem is it would screw over a lot of good people and the government would probably use that as the final excuse to go all out on gun regulation. :/

But maybe if it gets that bad.....I would accept harsher legislation, for the good of the country. :(

Seriously, I will admit they could be hard in a few fights, but they are small time compared to other insurgency groups, and to the original Nazis.

One would think so, but as the government is currently run by a bunch of Nazi sympathizers we can't be so sure they will make an attempt to do so when the barbarians are at the gates.

By the way, word on the street is that more Charlottesvilles are planned in the coming months by the far-right: https://www.thecanary.co/2017/08/16/trump-reveals-true-colours-far-right-plans-charlottesvilles-revealed-tweets/

As this is just merely the first stage of a fascist coup I can't say I'm terribly surprised.

Quote from: WindFish on August 18, 2017, 07:28:43 AM
If you as President can't bring yourself to say the words "Nazis are evil and I condemn them", then perhaps you're not qualified for that position.

I think Germany has the right idea when it comes to banning Nazis. They learned from their mistakes, and yet they still manage to comply with EU free speech laws in doing so.

That was obvious from the beginning. Unfortunately a significant chunk of the population (I estimate some 15-25% of it) are either supporters or fellow travelers for the Trump regime. And some may not even care that he's an idiot, so long as he manages to burn things to the ground.

Trigon

And also, so much for the second amendment ensuring protection against tyranny. Turns out that, it does jack shit when the population would gladly and voluntarily submit itself to an incipient dictator. What a joke!

gaggedLouise

Very good editorial on Trump in Economist - and a fabulous caricature to top it off. The pic is on the cover of the new print issue of the paper!  :D

https://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21726696-u-turns-self-regard-and-equivocation-are-not-what-it-takes-donald-trump-has-no-grasp-what-it

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Quote from: gaggedLouise on August 18, 2017, 08:27:32 AM
Very good editorial on Trump in Economist - and a fabulous caricature to top it off. The pic is on the cover of the new print issue of the paper!  :D

https://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21726696-u-turns-self-regard-and-equivocation-are-not-what-it-takes-donald-trump-has-no-grasp-what-it

The magazine covers are pretty clear about things.


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#107
Quote from: SidheLady on August 14, 2017, 10:56:59 AM
Oh, and while I'm throwing gas on the fire here, Trump's response was right. He called out violence on both sides, and this didn't go far enough for the media because he didn't just go for one side

SidheLady, I've actually been thinking a lot about this statement of yours since you posted it. After more than a week of trying to decide why Trump's response felt so off, and why I think he was wrong, this is what I've come up with.

I think that Trump’s reaction on Saturday and since were extraordinary, both in that he behaved in a way we don’t expect Donald Trump to behave, and he also behaved in a way that we don’t expect the President of the United States to behave.

Donald Trump’s typical reaction to tragic events in the news that he sees as un-American has three parts.

1) He calls it out as being horrible, despicable, and un-American, and he calls it out fast. Often before all the facts are in, like when he denounced the shooting in Milan as an act of Islamic terrorism, turned out to be a much more mundane bank robbery. He didn’t do that here when talking about the neo-Nazis.

2) Under usual circumstances, anyone who says to Trump’s blunt explanation of things that it’s more complicated or there’s contributory violence or a wider context. Trump uses that as proof that they don't understand the big truth and he ridicules for it. He argues that anyone who doesn’t understand the bigger issue or what he sees as the most important part of a thing as proof that they don’t understand it as well as he does. In this case, Donald Trump was the one arguing for a more complicated, nuanced view of things. There was contributory violence from the left. The wider context is that there were fine people on both sides (and I’m willing to grant for the sake of argument that Trump is not arguing that the Nazis were fine people, just that there were fine people marching with the Nazi.)

3) The third and final part of Trump’s typical response to this sort of thing is that he has often had a relaxed attitude towards violence done to those he identifies as un-American. We saw this repeatedly in the campaign. When a guy there protesting was blindsided and punched by a Donald Trump supporter, he said (and I’m paraphrasing here), “Well yes, I don’t condone violence, but the guy who was hit was gesturing with his middle finger.” As if to say that sometimes people have it coming if they get punched or beaten.

The above three elements are the things that Donald Trump has shown us as part of his response to this sort of thing time and time again when something makes the news and he thinks of it as un-American. And yet, in this case, he completely reversed himself on all three elements. By his own standards and behavior, he was acting out-of-character.

Now Donald Trump (like most people, in the spirit of honesty) has been known to change his standards before. In this case, the question becomes “Why is Donald Trump changing his behavior?” Either by design or by accident, it’s to protect white nationalists, neo-Nazis, and the Klan.

And that brings me to the second way that this was unexpected because it’s not the way that Presidents normally address American fascism and racism, at least in the modern era. Presidents are usually quick to respond to this sort of thing in moral terms. The people who were marching with Nazi flags and chanting “Jews will not replace us,” usually get denounced by everyone on both sides of the political spectrum. They will usually say that the ideas of the Nazis are totally antithetical to what we think America is.

Donald Trump has refused to engage in that morally at all, at least in his first statement. In fact, he did context-free analysis that suggested that there was some equivalence between both sides, which again is kind of the opposite of what a President normally does.

That’s why I think, after nearly a week of going over this, that Donald Trump’s response was ‘wrong.’ It was atypical, both for Trump himself and Presidents generally, and politicians overall.

When we have Jeff Sessions, who has troubling questions in his own past about race relations, taking the moral high ground and looking like the ‘law and order’ guy by calling what happened to Heather Hayer an act of domestic terrorism, it goes to show that standing against the Nazis was a simple thing that would have been universally praised if Trump had gone there with him.

There’s no sports metaphor to describe how easy it is for any President to denounce Nazism. It’s a slam dunk on a two-foot basket. It’s a four-inch putt. For a President who’s being praised by the Imperial Wizard of the KKK, and who has baggage on race issues (lawsuits about housing discrimination, the Central Park 5, insinuations about Barrack Obama), it’s not just an easy thing to do, it’s imperative. It’s also telling that Donald Trump once said of his rock hard base that he could shoot someone on 5th Avenue and not lose votes didn’t do this. If true, then there was no downside for him to denounce Nazis. But he didn’t, he suggested that there were good people there marching with the Nazis.

And I don’t think that can be argued. I don’t think a good person would look to their left and see a Klan robe, and look to their right and see a Nazi flag, and want to be associated with that kind of support. I don’t think that a good person would have stayed, even if they were a historian to whom the Civil War was their life’s work, and if they had met the love of their life in that park and proposed to them beneath the statue of Robert E. Lee.

That’s why I think Trump’s remarks were wrong because they were atypical for Trump, atypical for Presidents, atypical for politicians, and factually wrong in saying that there were good people marching with white supremacists on the issue of Confederate statue removal.

Trigon

Meanwhile in my home city of Boston, the counter-protesters were successful in giving the neo-fascists the boot: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2017/08/19/thousands-expected-at-boston-free-speech-rally-and-counter-protest/?utm_term=.5df7f1684313

They had to end their march early, since they were completely overwhelmed. Not a single shot was fired, and no one was run over. We just now have to keep this up all over the US so that they can end up in the dustbin of history where they belong!

Oniya

I have in-laws in the Boston area.  This is the sort of thing I'd expect from the home of JFK and John Adams.
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Skynet

#110
Quote from: Regina Minx on August 18, 2017, 07:04:23 AM
The "both sides" nonsense doesn't seem to be a new line of attack.



Not just political cartoons either: 50s and 60s political figures too.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/retropolis/wp/2017/08/16/politicians-blamed-both-sides-during-the-civil-rights-movement-kkk-and-the-naacp/

There are definitely problems within US antifa and Black Lives Matter, but both groups combined have nowhere near the amount of blood on their hands as white nationalists, nor are their stated goals anything close to theirs.

Trigon

Quote from: Skynet on August 19, 2017, 02:27:07 PM
There are definitely problems within US antifa and Black Lives Matter, but both groups combined have nowhere near the amount of blood on their hands as white nationalists, nor are their stated goals anything close to theirs.

Yeah, this is the one thing that seems to be lost on those who criticize both sides. Even if the Left is flawed (though examples are never elaborated on when you begin to demand them), the point is that the Right is even worse. Much worse, in fact, because they have already explicitly stated that their end goal is to create a new and violent form of hierarchy.

Iniquitous

I have, much like Regina, spent a lot of time looking at this situation with the idiot’s response.  Not because I had any doubt on how wrong he was, or because I needed to figure out why I believe him to be wrong.  My job deals with talking to people.  Usually, I have a pretty firm grip on the conversation and can keep it from venturing into territories that I’d really wish to stay out of.  But there are those times that I get blindsided by a customer and end up in shark infested waters.

It is those times, and the fact I live with a die hard Trump supporter, that has given me the chance to listen to every conceivable side to this tragedy.

Personally, I fully believe the idiot in the oval office is a closet racist.  He was raised by a card carrying Klansman (not sure if his mother was a full blown racist or not).  Sure, he could totally have a different view than his father did, but based upon his past, I suspect that he is.  He will never admit it - that would be political suicide and harm his brand in ways that I doubt he’d be able to repair.  An idiot he may be, but stupid he is not.

His response of ‘violence on both sides’ irks the shit out of me.  He was trying to take the middle ground so as to not piss off one side or the other.  He was trying to keep from having to take a stance.  That, to me, is cowardly.   You cannot go through life never taking a stance against the wrongs in the world.  Do I think he has a reason for trying to not take a stance?  You betcha.  And that reason became clear when David Duke started tweeting his thanks to Trump.  He knows that his largest group of supporters is the angry, racist white.   Again, he’s not stupid and his whole campaign was played straight to that demographic.

It has been pointed out that it would have been SO very easy for this idiot to condemn the hate groups with his racist Attorney General and be done with it.  He would have been praised for coming out against hate - and he does so love being praised.  Lives for it.   The fact that he actively avoided a situation where he would have been praised by the whole fecking world just gives me more reason to believe that he is, in fact, a racist and he was desperate to not piss off his largest group of supporters.

Now, over the past week I have heard so many theories - most of which make me wish I could either smack the person spewing them or beat my head in against the nearest hard surface.  Everything from mimicking the idiot’s stance of ‘well, the counter protesters shouldn’t have been there!’ to ‘George Soros paid the hate groups and the liberals to be there and clash!!’

I’ve heard everything from George Soros is trying to start a race war to this is the beginning of the country turning against the government.

And here’s where I stand.  Hate does not belong in our society.  We should never stand by and allow a group of people hell bent on inflicting terror, hate, and harm to succeed.  I stand by the phrase “see a nazi, punch a nazi”.  I think that is a perfectly fine response to have when you see some asshat waving the swastika or giving the salute.   I firmly believe in shouting longer and louder than them.  I believe that the US needs to adopt the same attitude towards any nazi propaganda that some of the European countries has…. Make it fecking illegal. Waving symbols of hate is not part of the first amendment.  Those symbols are an incitement to violence - and that is not part of free speech.  Terrorizing groups of people is not part of free speech.   

It is that stance that I have that makes me see red when I hear someone parrot what the idiot in the oval office said.  No.  This is not a time to try and point fingers at the counter protesters and blame THEM for the death of one of them.  There should have never been a permit given to the damn ignorant fools that wanted to spew their hate.

And as I see it right now - on Tuesday, Trump metaphorically stood in the middle of 5th Avenue and shot Heather Heyer. 
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Trigon

Quote from: Oniya on August 19, 2017, 02:25:40 PM
I have in-laws in the Boston area.  This is the sort of thing I'd expect from the home of JFK and John Adams.

You may find this tweet rather amusing: https://mobile.twitter.com/evanmcmurry/status/898989750295470080

A comparison of the two crowds between the "free speech" protesters, and the much larger counter-protester crowd...

Oniya

I had to strip out the 'mobile' part, but yup.
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And in that endeavor, laziness will not do." ~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~Don't think we're never gonna win this war
Robin Williams-Dead Poets Society ~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~Don't think your world's gonna fall apart
I do have a cause, though.  It's obscenity.  I'm for it.  - Tom Lehrer~*~All you need is your beautiful heart
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DominantPoet

Quote from: Trevino on August 20, 2017, 06:21:34 AM
You may find this tweet rather amusing: https://mobile.twitter.com/evanmcmurry/status/898989750295470080

A comparison of the two crowds between the "free speech" protesters, and the much larger counter-protester crowd...

Wow. Makes sense now why the "free speech" rally there was nulled so quickly.

*crosses my fingers it's also an apt example of how the genuinely good people outnumber the bad in this world*

Skynet

#116
Debating whether to make this video link its own thread or here. But since Charlottesville seems an active thread, why not here?

After the huge negative publicity, fascists and white nationalist sympathizers are going to go back into the shadows. But dog-whistle politics are a tried and true tactic, they're going to adapt new terms in an attempt to win over centrists and people inclined towards mainstream conservatism as well as folks who style themselves as liberals.

The above video is a very good explanation of the phenomena, and ways one can recognize and see-through crypto-fascist talking points. It's a good watch overall, but if you're pressed for time the beginning of common strategies starts at the 7:40 mark.