"Alt-left" Parading Ignorance, Stupidity, Malice, Etc.

[Svartalf]

AntifaAreFascists.png

https://twitter.com/michaelshermer/stat ... 7040100352

More naivety and false equivalence.

You're right. These Antifa are more like the Sturmabteilung than Nazis proper.

Antifa are a defensive force. They are defending people from oppression. The Nazis are an oppressive force and want to destroy civil rights. To equate them is puerile.

the antifa are gratuitously and deliberately violent, they actively look for confrontation and violent encounters.

[JimC]

Maybe not all of them, Svarty, or all of the time, but some of them, some of the time, certainly, and when they do, it does the overall cause of opposing the fascists some harm.

There is a personality type that thrives on street confrontation, and it is this that allows at least some psychological overlap between antifa and their foes.

[Svartalf]

I've known of the antifa for years, then nickname for the is redskin(head)... because of their political leaning and other customs.

[JimC]

We certainly have them here too, and they are prominent when anti-islamic rallies (involving not reasoning atheists, but rather nasty red-necked racists) are held. The 2 sides get stuck into each other unless there are enough police to keep them apart. I sometimes sense the cops thinking "what the hell, why don't we just let them kick the shit out of each other, then arrest the remains"...

[pErvinalia]

AntifaAreFascists.png

https://twitter.com/michaelshermer/stat ... 7040100352

More naivety and false equivalence.

You're right. These Antifa are more like the Sturmabteilung than Nazis proper.

Antifa are a defensive force. They are defending people from oppression. The Nazis are an oppressive force and want to destroy civil rights. To equate them is puerile.

They are quite on the offense, I suppose you aren't following the news or are selecting against such stories for whatever reason. As far as the destruction of civil rights goes, the Antifa wish to deny the universality of civil rights because they find the Nazis offensive. Not that they shouldn't find them offensive, but they should raise their voices in non-violent action counter to the Nazi voice, not attempt to beat them into silence ('defending' the rallies of the real Nazis by beating the other side is what the brownshirts did btw).

That may be true, but they still aren't equivalent. NineBerry has pointed this out to you in regards to the UN declaration of human rights.

As far as actually defending people against violent action, that's the job of the police.

Oh the naivety.

[pErvinalia]

Assuming any level of intelligence can be dangerous.

WhiteSupremacistBigotedProfessors.png

https://twitter.com/michaelshermer/stat ... 0091796481

Firstly, no faculty has condemned the two profs. Secondly, the 54 alumni and five law professors have not condemned the values listed by Shermer. Thirdly, though carefully couched in terms of "cultural orientation" and "cultural norms", Wax's mask slipped in an interview when she clearly described Anglo-Protestant cultural norms as superior.

"I don't shrink from the word, 'superior,'" she said, adding, “Everyone wants to come to the countries that exemplify” these values. “Everyone wants to go to countries ruled by white Europeans.”

. Fourthly, Wax and Alexander's view of the fifties as a wholesome, harmonious Arcadia is rendered hopelessly inaccurate by what their pink lenses filter out.

While the values they list are commendable per se, the 1950s Anglo-Protestant middle class America is not, but that is precisely what Wax and Alexander are pining to return to. It's an era of utter sexism, racism and enforced conformism with bonus witch hunts thrown in made to look like episodes of Father Knows Best, Dennis the Menace and Bewitched.

Where did you get this information from? Have a link?

You do realise that there can be no links to shit that did not happen, don't you, such as faculty condemning two professors, or others attacking motherhood type values per se as bigotry and racism.

You'll find the bit of Wax's racism, disguised as "cultural norm" that I quoted here. The letter from the alumni is published in full here and the piece by the five law professors here.

I'm glad you dug around in this issue, Hermit. Right from the start it looked like a strawman argument.

[pErvinalia]

AntifaAreFascists.png

https://twitter.com/michaelshermer/stat ... 7040100352

More naivety and false equivalence.

You're right. These Antifa are more like the Sturmabteilung than Nazis proper.

Antifa are a defensive force. They are defending people from oppression. The Nazis are an oppressive force and want to destroy civil rights. To equate them is puerile.

the antifa are gratuitously and deliberately violent, they actively look for confrontation and violent encounters.

With the people who want to oppress large segments of society. They are the sheep dog to your sheep...

edit: and also you are painting with a broad brush. Not all, and probably not even a majority of antifa are violent, let alone deliberately or gratuitously so. You're being led by the nose, man.

[JimC]

I'll grant you the "not all", but I dispute the "probably not even a majority of antifa" being violent...

And that is understanding that violence in defence of self or others is clearly OK...

Beyond that, not so much...

[Svartalf]

the antifa are gratuitously and deliberately violent, they actively look for confrontation and violent encounters.

With the people who want to oppress large segments of society. They are the sheep dog to your sheep...

edit: and also you are painting with a broad brush. Not all, and probably not even a majority of antifa are violent, let alone deliberately or gratuitously so. You're being led by the nose, man.

Far as I know, my brush is not particularly broad, groups that self identify as 'antifa' ARE violent, even the old S.C.A.L.P. that goes back to the eighties had an exageratedly developed 'order section' compared to its moderate/pacific membership... and I suspect the latter was a graft on the basically paramilitary movement when it became famous and attracted 'normal' folk rather than an actual part of its core

[pErvinalia]

Unless it's changed, I'm fairly certain what was known as "black bloc" is now being unjustly lumped in with Antifa. I've been to a number of protests where Antifa was present and there hasn't been a single incident of violence. How many have you and Jim been to?

[JimC]

Unless it's changed, I'm fairly certain what was known as "black bloc" is now being unjustly lumped in with Antifa. I've been to a number of protests where Antifa was present and there hasn't been a single incident of violence. How many have you and Jim been to?

Admittedly, not so many in recent years...

(Though I have been bashed by police in the 70's in a peaceful demonstration against the visiting South African Rugby team in the apartheid years...)

But there have been many, many TV shots of violent clashes between left (maybe antifa, maybe not) demonstrators and the red-neck anti-islamic racists. I have already said that I'm not equating their ideological worthiness, merely disputing whether violence (initiated rather than defensive) is a good long-term strategy...

[pErvinalia]

What I'm question is whether it's antifa at all. I'd say it's just lazy journalism, but I haven't been to a rally for a couple of years now, so maybe antifa has morphed into a raging horde. But that definitely wasn't them when I used to see them at protests.

[Svartalf]

and maybe the term does not mean exactly the same depending on country... French antifa are definitely violent and confrontation seeking, I don't know about elsewhere.

[pErvinalia]

How do you know they are antifa? If they are wearing black, they are most likely not antifa. Antifa have a flag and often wear a shirt with the flag emblem on it.

[L'Emmerdeur]

You'll find the bit of Wax's racism, disguised as "cultural norm" that I quoted here. The letter from the alumni is published in full here and the piece by the five law professors here.

The last two links are duplicates. For the law professors' guest column see "Guest Column by five Penn Law professors | Notions of 'bourgeois' cultural superiority are based on bad history"

Nostalgia for the 1950s breezes over the truth of inequality and exclusion. The “racial discrimination” and “limited sex roles” that the authors identify as imperfections in midcentury American life were in fact core features of it.

Exclusion and discrimination against people of color was the norm, North and South. During this period, home ownership, high-quality education, jobs with fair pay and decent working conditions and the social insurance benefits of the New Deal welfare state remained unavailable — by design — to most nonwhite Americans.

People of color were largely excluded from the housing and education benefits of the GI Bill of Rights for veterans. Segregationists ensured that social insurance legislation such as the Social Security Act and workplace protections such as the Fair Labor Standards Act exempted domestic and agricultural jobs held mainly by African Americans. And severe public school segregation persisted despite the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education. Many of the same Anglo-Protestants whom Wax idealizes conducted a sustained campaign across the 1950s to paint Catholics as un-American.

Gender discrimination was also fundamental to governmental and social policies in the 1950s, and to the broader culture that supported them. Before laws prohibited discrimination based on sex, race and religion, and a constitutional right to privacy eased access to contraception and other reproductive health services, women of all backgrounds could be denied jobs, fired for pregnancy and denied the ability to control their reproductive lives.

For women, social insurance benefits depended on marriage to a breadwinning male head of household. Government policy conditioned public and private benefits on “traditional” marriage and excluded, stigmatized or criminalized other relationships. The legal and social privileges afforded only to two-parent nuclear families virtually ensured that alternative family models remained at a material disadvantage into the twenty-first century. The connections between contemporary inequality and earlier discrimination are clear.

Assertions of white cultural superiority like those Wax makes explicit in her interview with the DP proliferated during this period. Segregationists warned that racial integration would spread the contagion of sexual immorality. Some states forcibly sterilized women who bore children “out of wedlock” and excluded children from white schools based on their parents’ marital status.

Even when framed in ostensibly race-neutral terms — as assertions of cultural rather than biological supremacy — those claims were widely understood as resistance to the hard-won gains of racial justice movements. They cannot be revived today washed clean of their racist roots.