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

[laklak]

I'm a libertarian. If anybody doesn't like that they can suck my dick.

Actually pretty much anybody who wants to can suck my dick, but that's for another thread.

[pErvinalia]

I.e you've just realised you leapt to an assumption. The anti left around here do that all the time.

No. I didn't feel like explaining to you that I'm amused by the hypocrisy evidenced by the left in lazily classifying the entire right as Nazis in the worst cases, and maybe only Trump supporters in the better ones,

Pity you didn't feel like that the last ten times you erected this straw man.

and then disclaiming any identification of Antifa violence on the basis of whether they were in uniform

Evidence or stfu.

[Jason]

[Jason]

Laura Ingraham proposes declaring antifa a 'terrorist organization'

Fox News contributor Laura Ingraham called for left-wing anti-fascist protesters to be designated as a terrorist organization in an interview on "Fox & Friends" Tuesday.

The suggestion by Ingraham comes after a group of more than 100 "antifa" protesters dressed in black attacked several people at a rally in Berkeley, Calif., on Sunday.

Several supporters of President Trump were injured in the clashes, according to local media, leading to 14 arrests.


"You go on YouTube, you can watch all of these videos. It is scary," said Ingraham, who also hosts as a nationally syndicated talk radio program. "And we should also urge everyone to consider pressing this idea of declaring antifa a terrorist organization."

“Will the Democrats do that?” asked co-host Pete Hesgeth.

“They’re volunteering all of this condemnation joyfully against President Trump post-Charlottesville," Ingraham replied. "They piled on him as fast as possible after Charlottesville.

"This group [antifa] is actively trying to intimidate, suppress free speech, and violently attack people with whom they disagree," she continued. "There’s a possible RICO action that could be filed here, Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organization statute that we could pursue here.

"There are lots of different ways to act against this disparate group called antifa," Ingraham concluded. "It’s kind of an amalgam of a bunch of left-wing anarchists and activists. There is not one central organization, they’re all over the place, but there is a way to pursue this and I hope this administration is looking at this very carefully because people could die here.”

Charlottesville, Va., was the scene of clashes between white supremacists and anti-fascists and other protesters earlier this month, which left one counterprotester dead. White supremacists had rallied earlier that day in the city, ostensibly to protest the removal of a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee.
An online petition calling for the government to designate "antifa," militant far-left groups that resist neo-Nazis, as a terrorist group has garnered more than 300,000 signatures, clearing the 100,000 threshold required to prompt a White House response.

http://thehill.com/homenews/media/34838 ... ganization

[JimC]

I wonder whether all the neo-Nazi and white supremacist groups will also be labelled as terrorist groups?

[Jason]

The justness of it isn't the point; it's the fact that Antifa has pushed the legitimate left to the point of being associated with a group many would have labeled 'terrorists.' Antifa is bad mojo. They need to be shutdown so that reason can prevail. The legitimate left needs to distance themselves from these people immediately and in no uncertain terms.

The modern left lives, or dies, by identity and movement politics which depend heavily on their having the moral authority to assert their dominance. Without that there is no political power on the left. Electoral politics will be dead for every liberal.

I suspect this is exactly what Antifa, many of whom are Anarchists anyway, wants. To turn people away from legitimate process.

[Jason]

Antifa: Left-wing militants on the rise

What exactly is Antifa?
The social causes of Antifa (short for anti-fascist or Anti-Fascist action) are easily identifiable as left-leaning.
Most members oppose all forms of racism and sexism, and strongly oppose what they see as the nationalist, anti-immigration and anti-Muslim policies that Mr Trump has enacted.
However, as their name indicates, Antifa focuses more on fighting far-right ideology than encouraging pro-left policy.
Unlike the mainstream left, they do not seek to gain power through traditional channels - winning elections and passing bills into law.
Antifa is anti-government and anti-capitalist, and their methodologies are often perceived as more closely aligned with anarchists than the mainstream left.
Antifa does not shy away from militant protest methods, including the destruction of property and sometimes physical violence.
They were present at the 2017 Berkeley protests of right wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos and at violent protests against Donald Trump's inauguration; they were also present at Charlottesville.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-40930831

[pErvinalia]

Well, there's the definite anti-left, I suppose, but there's also the "left contains some good ideas, but they're not all knights in shining armour"

I'm not anti-left, whatever that is. Maybe rEv just coined it, or maybe it's the latest response by the Punch-A-Nazi folks to criticism, I don't know.

If you're not anti-left, then stop tarring the whole left with the same brush. viz a viz: "..the hypocrisy evidenced by the left in lazily classifying the entire right as Nazis in the worst cases, and maybe only Trump supporters in the better ones,"

ETA: Just so you're clear pErvin - offering criticism isn't being anti-something.

The above doesn't even rise to the level of criticism. It's just lazy thinking.

If anything, it's being pro-something, often the thing your criticizing. If I were anti-left I'd be happy to let you all continue being more Nazi than the Nazis,

More false equivalence. Punching people who advocate for mass genocide isn't morally equivalent to killing people and advocating for mass genocide.

[Jason]

You know, come to think of it, aren't you some kind of Anarchist pErvin? That would explain much.

[Jason]

Isn't it about time the anti-commies took them on?

Where are the guns?
Has America gone soft? It's beginning to look like it.

Anti-Anarchists, and some of them are prepping even now. Good thing there's a skillful politician in the White House...

[pErvinalia]

They're often dressed in black, with masks - beating the shit out of people https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/mor ... -berkeley/

Who is often dressed in black? If your claim is that antifa are, then that article provides no evidence. Black-bloc are the people who traditionally dressed in black. Antifa gather under a flag and symbol. What I'm trying to say here is that unless things have change and the groups have either merged, or antifa itself have gone rogue, then we are talking about separate groups here. It's seems that none of you have actually been to a rally with antifa at them. I have. At least twice and probably more. And there was no violence at all. In fact, I was probably more likely to go off like a firecracker at a moment's notice than them.

It's odd that anyone would be like "how do you know it's them??"

Why is it odd?? It appears to me as if there has been a conflation of two different groups by a lazy media (and public). But I have qualified that by saying I haven't been to a rally for a couple of years, so I accept antifa might have gone wild in the meantime. But any smashing shit up violence I've seen on the tv in the last few months has been done by people wearing all black. Why are people who are wearing all black all of a sudden considered 'antifa'? The "anarchist" black clad vandals were always black bloc.

That's the thing with the left nowadays. They just call whatever they oppose "hate speech" and then push for it to be silenced, with the extreme lefties doing it with violence.

Yeah, that's right. There's no such thing as an anarchist left, or the moderate centre-left.

[pErvinalia]

Antifa adherents — some armed with sticks and masked in bandannas — played a visible role in the running street battles in Charlottesville, but it is impossible to know how many people count themselves as members of the movement. Its followers acknowledge it is secretive, without official leaders and organized into autonomous local cells. It is also only one in a constellation of activist movements that have come together in the past several months to the fight the far right.

Driven by a range of political passions — including anticapitalism, environmentalism, and gay and indigenous rights — the diverse collection of anarchists, communists and socialists has found common cause in opposing right-wing extremists and white supremacists. In the fight against the far right, antifa has allied itself at times with local clergy, members of the Black Lives Matter movement and grass-roots social-justice activists. It has also supported niche groups like Black Bloc fighters, who scrapped with right-wing forces in Berkeley this year, and By Any Means Necessary, a coalition formed more than two decades ago to protest California’s ban on affirmative action for universities.

George Ciccariello-Maher, a professor at Drexel University in Philadelphia who counts himself as both an antifa follower and a scholar of the movement, said it did not have a single origin story. The group has antecedents in Europe, especially Germany and Italy, where its early followers traded shots with Nazis in the 1930s and fought against Benito Mussolini’s Blackshirts. Its more recent history has roots in the straight-edge punk rock music scene, the anti-globalization protests of the 1990s and the Occupy Wall Street movement.

The closest thing antifa may have to a guiding principle is that ideologies it identifies as fascistic or based on a belief in genetic inferiority cannot be reasoned with and must be physically resisted. Its adherents express disdain for mainstream liberal politics, seeing it as inadequately muscular, and tend to fight the right through what they call “direct actions” rather than relying on government authorities.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/17/us/a ... right.html

[pErvinalia]

You know, come to think of it, aren't you some kind of Anarchist pErvin? That would explain much.

You can't even muster up a defence of your position..

[Jason]

You know, come to think of it, aren't you some kind of Anarchist pErvin? That would explain much.

You can't even muster up a defence of your position..

Did you launch an attack that requires a defense?

[Jason]

‘Antifa’ groups only help the hateful forces they claim to oppose

THE LATEST symptom of America’s deepening political illness is the rise of “antifa” — short for “anti-fascist.” Clad in black and armed with clubs or pepper spray, these masked men and women style themselves the bane of neo-Nazis, Ku Klux Klansmen and other extreme rightists wherever the latter may appear. Unlike the use of force by the state, which antifa activists abhor as a matter of vague but intense ultra-left ideology, their violence is righteous — according to them.

Antifa and like-minded offshoots smashed windows and set fires in Washington on Inauguration Day, and committed such crimes again in Berkeley, Calif., soon after, to disrupt a planned speech by right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos. They were seen pummeling alleged right-wingers in Berkeley this past weekend, including a man they pushed to the ground and then kicked and punched until a journalist intervened. Whether the victim was or was not an actual fascist is not clear — but antifa’s indifference to such details is. “There is a complete mob mentality here,” the Los Angeles Times’s James Queally reported from the scene. “People are randomly accusing random people of being Nazis.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions ... 7fe0d3bb80