Trump Supporters are Imbeciles

[Brian Peacock]

That's good. What does he say about freely conflating Trump supporters with Nazis?

[Sean Hayden]

The idiotic opinion is popular, so what?

[Sean Hayden]

It's also popular to accuse the US of ethnic cleansing for its treatment of illegal immigrants in certain situations, and to continue to do so with a straight face even after being presented with the facts of our rapidly changing demographics and the number of immigrants that come in every year.

This is even popular apparently with people that agree the state has a right to remove illegal immigrants!

--//--

I disagree, especially where US exceptionalism has caused us to take responsibility for this side of the globe. You can't shuck that responsibility when it suits you e.g. the border issue, and then claim it is a god given right when you feel it is to your advantage e.g. interfering in South American governments. That must in some way influence our willingness to accept and naturalize so many immigrants, which we do, every year.

[laklak]

I'm also an open border kind of guy, its de rigueur for consistent libertarianism. But it's gotta work both ways. I'm good to open the Southern border to Mexico as long as they're also open to us. I want to move there, get a job, open a business, etc. without hassle and paperwork.

[Seabass]

That's good. What does he say about freely conflating Trump supporters with Nazis?

I don't know, but it's probably unfair to Nazis. They didn't have the benefit knowing beforehand where Nazism leads.

[Seabass]

It's also popular to accuse the US of ethnic cleansing for its treatment of illegal immigrants in certain situations, and to continue to do so with a straight face even after being presented with the facts of our rapidly changing demographics and the number of immigrants that come in every year.

This is even popular apparently with people that agree the state has a right to remove illegal immigrants!

--//--

I disagree, especially where US exceptionalism has caused us to take responsibility for this side of the globe. You can't shuck that responsibility when it suits you e.g. the border issue, and then claim it is a god given right when you feel it is to your advantage e.g. interfering in South American governments. That must in some way influence our willingness to accept and naturalize so many immigrants, which we do, every year.

It's also popular for white America to be more annoyed by complaints about racism than the actual racism.

[Sean Hayden]

More racist nonsense from you eh Seabass? Like I said, my disagreement with you isn't me being white.

[Sean Hayden]

I mean wtf? What are you even claiming here Seabass? That all your bullshit about ethnic cleansing and Nazis was really just an expose on the systemic racism in the US, and by denying ethnic cleansing and our inevitable fall into Nazism I've denied the racism? What crap.

[Brian Peacock]

That's good. What does he say about freely conflating Trump supporters with Nazis?

I don't know, but it's probably unfair to Nazis. They didn't have the benefit knowing beforehand where Nazism leads.

That's disingenuous. You haven't really engaged with any of my points and again just pop out these insinuations that I'm soft on fascism simply because I'm challenging what I see as an over-simplistic view which actively targets the wrong people as 'the problem'. I've pointed out where and how I think you're conflating Trump supporters/voters with Nazis and why the justifications for your rage against them appears circular. You could talk about that if you like.

[laklak]

Trumpanzees are the new Jews.

[Seabass]

That's good. What does he say about freely conflating Trump supporters with Nazis?

I don't know, but it's probably unfair to Nazis. They didn't have the benefit knowing beforehand where Nazism leads.

That's disingenuous. You haven't really engaged with any of my points and again just pop out these insinuations that I'm soft on fascism simply because I'm challenging what I see as an over-simplistic view which actively targets the wrong people as 'the problem'. I've pointed out where and how I think you're conflating Trump supporters/voters with Nazis and why the justifications for your rage against them appears circular. You could talk about that if you like.

Did you miss my post where I explained why I've made some of these comparisons?

viewtopic.php?p=1862735#p1862735

Please disabuse yourself of the notion that I think people who voted for the NSDAP are two dimensional movie villains.

[Sean Hayden]

Trumpanzees are the new Jews.

They're unlikely to win as many "nobles".

[Sean Hayden]

I'm also an open border kind of guy, its de rigueur for consistent libertarianism. But it's gotta work both ways. I'm good to open the Southern border to Mexico as long as they're also open to us. I want to move there, get a job, open a business, etc. without hassle and paperwork.

I want to enjoy the same rights everywhere I go. But, we can't even get that between states here!

[rainbow]

Trumpanzees are the new Jews.

Proof.

White supremacists, neo-Nazis cheer Trump remarks
‘He used our talking points,’ says neo-Nazi Daily Stormer editor after US president equated far-right marchers to left-wing counter-protesters

https://www.timesofisrael.com/white-sup ... p-remarks/

[Brian Peacock]

That's good. What does he say about freely conflating Trump supporters with Nazis?

I don't know, but it's probably unfair to Nazis. They didn't have the benefit knowing beforehand where Nazism leads.

That's disingenuous. You haven't really engaged with any of my points and again just pop out these insinuations that I'm soft on fascism simply because I'm challenging what I see as an over-simplistic view which actively targets the wrong people as 'the problem'. I've pointed out where and how I think you're conflating Trump supporters/voters with Nazis and why the justifications for your rage against them appears circular. You could talk about that if you like.

Did you miss my post where I explained why I've made some of these comparisons?

viewtopic.php?p=1862735#p1862735

Please disabuse yourself of the notion that I think people who voted for the NSDAP are two dimensional movie villains.

I did read that on page 5, but I took it as a repetition of your justification for conflating Trump supporters/votes with Nazis - something we got into when you explicitly compared Trump supporters to Nazis after applying the 'Trumpzis' label earlier on in the conversation. As I've already implied, I feel you were too eager to invoke the spectre of the Nazi's as an emblem of clear moral hazard in order justifies your concerns, your anger, and your fears about the future as self-evident or unquestionable.

Let me be quite plain: I don't dispute your sincerity or that you have good cause to be concerned. In fact I think you have every reason to be concerned. I'm concerned as well, and I think I've said enough in recent times about capitalism, neo-liberalism, nativism, and fascism etc for you to know deep down that implying I don't take such things seriously, or even that I'm soft or ambivalent about them, is, frankly, a bit of a cheap shot.

Were you around in those heady post-God Delusion days when some people were encouraging atheists to call themselves 'Brights'? Well if you weren't then I can assure you it was actually a thing for a while. It strikes me that, in part, we define some aspects of our identity by what we are not? By being encouraged to identify as a 'Bright' we were being encouraged to not just distinguish ourselves from the religious but to declare that we were intelligent and serious - that we 'Brights' are not the stupid ones.

This never sat well with me as a term for those reasons. I wasn't the only one though, and it never really caught on. But the reason it didn't sit well with me was because, having once been of a religious bent, albeit a soft kind of religious, it didn't ring true that my own prior religiousness was a function of my relative intelligence or cognitive capacity - which is to say that when I abandoned religion, which I did casually and with hardly any effort, I don't think I became a more intelligent, clever person, nor di it lead me to thinking that I was once a less intelligent, stupider person. Religion was just something that was around, that everybody else seemed to have no problems with, something I just followed along with, absorbing bits here and there but otherwise not really paying much attention to it. It was something I just did, more a set of practices than a solid belief system - and it had singing and cake, of which I'm still a great fan to this day.

So why am I mentioning that? Well, what the 'Bright' thing brings up for me are issues around identity, in this case an attempt at a manufactured or constructed identity, but one which nonetheless seems intent on acting as more than just an identifier for some group of people (like, say, 'filatelist') - one which instead acts as a signifier for distinguisher of types or kinds of people, and in particular a distinguisher which elevates one group, our group, the 'Brights', above the other group, their group, the 'Dolts'.

I mean, if we are the intelligent, favourably cognitively endowed ones then is it wise or even safe to let the idiots make decisions or act on our behalf? Shouldn't 'Brights' be asking if 'Dolts' are even capable of making decisions on their own behalf, what with them being stupid an' all? I mean, some of them might be clever enough but they're still 'Dolts' aren't they? Should people like my former self, who are probably just saying and doing what they see everybody else around them saying and doing, let alone those fully committed to their doltish ways, not have their say, status, opportunities, and/or autonomy limited, for our good as well as their own - the stupid fuckers? You only have to look at the thread title here to draw a parallel so I won't labour the point.

This is what I was touching on when I implied that this thread was indulging in identity politics, which is a kind of politics I essentially locate as being 'from the Right' - though it's fair to say that it covers all political bases these days. In this regard identity politics is essentially that which is carried out on the playing fields of the Right and undertaken by their rules - which is one reason why I've been keen for you to articulate what actual good you think you're achieving by joining that game - even accepting that you don't think you are.

I mentioned Carl Schmitt before in relation to this. I've brought him and his ideas up before so I'll just quote something I posted not that long ago...

...

The early 20th century political philosopher Carl Schmitt said that all politics (the big-P kind of Politics; The Political) boiled down to a distinction between friend and foe. The thing that defined a "foe" for him was not someone you were necessarily politically opposed or resistant to but someone that, when it came down to it, you'd be willing to see worse off than yourself; someone you'd be willing to let suffer, or; someone you could and would throw to the wolves. By comparison a "friend" was anybody who wasn't a "foe", such that your "friends" shared an "identity" - your identity.

For Schmitt this turned all political activity into a project that started with trying to figure who did and didn't share your identity: who was and wasn't your political friend. Schmidt didn't invent so-called 'identity politics' but he was among the first to articulate a description of the Political in terms of which identities, which "thems", you wouldn't necessarily mind being treated badly or being absent from society.

He didn't stop there of course, he went on to argue that it didn't really matter if the distinctions between friend and foe were reasonable or strong or valid in any kind of factual sense, only that they were believable and offered people a framework they could believe in - and when people did believe that 'the other lot' existed as a distinct identity who could have their status downgraded or be excluded from society then it becomes a lot easier to imagine that those who see you as 'the other lot' are probably just as happy to see you done down as your are them.

For Schmitt this was why it was vitally important to politically organise around your own identity: not only in order to oppose 'that other lot' who might want to treat you as shitty as you'd treat them, but also to ensure that your identity was protected by actively resisting 'the other lot' pre-emptively in order to make sure that your identity always stood on the top of the pile when it came to treating people in shitty ways.

Yeah, Carl Schmidt, the father of 'identity politics', was an actual, massive, bonafide Nazi, and one of the things his 'philosophy' shows is that Fascism always starts with the assumption that it's OK for some people to be regarded and treated in the kind of shitty ways we wouldn't tolerate or accept being treated ourselves - and we all know where that ends eh?

The thing is, how does one counter that kind of ideology of identity, because when it comes to MRAs, Alt-Righties, white-nationalists and white-supremecists, neo-Nazis and Fascists we're already dealing with people who are involved with and invested in a conflict of identities - a conflict between their identity and everybody else? And reason and history shows us that when someone who has basically declared war on you comes knocking at the door then inviting them in for cup of tea and a chat isn't a very sensible thing to do.

As I said earlier, the kind of questions asked at the end there are tricky with no ready, off-the-shelf pat answers. That list of reprobates (MRAs, Alt-Righties, white-nationalists and white-supremecists, neo-Nazis and Fascists), which I now lump together as 'ideological exceptionalists,' embody and represent identity politics. When they gain a foothold in our communities we have every right to be concerned. When we see them prosper we have every reason to be frustrated. And when they march down the high street chanting, "Jews will not replace us!" we have every right to be angry, to oppose them and, where necessary, to resist them. There's no giving them a 'fair hearing' or granting them an automatic free speech right to express their views, because their rhetoric is merely a precursor to actions which would oppress and exclude others from the community - in some cases structurally, in some cases forcibly, and in some cases murderously. However, I don't think that we can succeed in overcoming them by 'out identifying' them as it were - again that's just playing their game on their field by their rules.

Perhaps now you can understand why I'm reluctant to endorse blanketing Trump supporter/voters as imbeciles, as 'Dolts', as fascists, as 'Trumpzis', and how that kind of rhetoric applied to an entire demographic might actually be counter-productive and push people toward identifying with more extreme ideologues who are more than willing to exploit their concerns and fears?