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#extremism
queerism1969 · 3 months
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This is what happens when we don’t teach people which books it was that the Nazis burned.
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thefloralmenace · 18 days
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If you've followed me for a minute, you've probably gathered that my big thing is practical anarchism/activism, and I've realized that a huge portion of that is just "activism informed by natural human behavior," i.e. guilt-tripping can't sustain a movement; no one likes to be belittled or screamed at for not knowing things; if you're trying to change someone's mind, you really do have to handle them gently even if it's annoying; being too intense about things is an overall detriment to your cause because it drives people away from you, etc.
What I've also realized is that extremism is just activism uninformed by human behavior; it focuses on absolutes like "all people should do ___, think ___, care about ___," etc. and refuses to acknowledge what people naturally will and won't do by instead demonizing normal human behavior/failings or deeming anyone who displays them as dirty/unworthy. And the reason extremism just isn't effective in the the long-term is because instead of anticipating and accommodating the behaviors that pretty much everyone will express or give into at some point, extremism can only maintain its goals via threats and force, and once that threat/force-level reaches a certain point, the people experiencing it are willing to either run or fight to be rid of it, which will then erode the extreme ideology.
While extremist ideology can get people wound up to do something in the short-term, if you want to build a world that is both better and sustainable, you have to account for the way people are rather than just being edgy about the errors of mankind and all that shit.
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brantheblessed · 13 days
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lilithism1848 · 2 months
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tomorrowusa · 3 months
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Mike Godwin is an internet legend. He was the first known person to use the word meme in its internet context. He's also the originator of what's become known as "Godwin's Law".
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In a recent interview, Mr. Godwin stated that comparisons of Donald Trump to Hitler or Nazis are fair and appropriate.
So to be clear — do you think comparing Trump’s rhetoric to Hitler or Nazi ideology is fair? I would go further than that. I think that it would be fair to say that Trump knows what he’s doing. I think he chose that rhetoric on purpose. But yeah, there are some real similarities. If you’ve read Hitler’s own writing — which I don’t recommend to anyone, by the way — you see a dehumanizing dimension throughout, but the speeches are an even more interesting case. What we have of Hitler’s speeches are mostly recorded, and they’re not always particularly coherent. What you see in efforts to compile his speeches are scholars trying to piece together what they sounded like. So, it’s a little bit like going to watch a standup comedian who’s hitting all of his great lines. You see again and again Hitler repeating himself. He’ll repeat the same lines or the same sentiment on different occasions. With Trump, whatever else you might say about him, he knows what kinds of lines generate the kinds of reactions that he wants. The purpose of the rallies is to have applause lines, because that creates good media, that creates video. And if he repeats his lines again and again, it increases the likelihood that a particular line will be repeated in media reporting. So that’s right out of the playbook. You could say the ‘vermin’ remark or the ‘poisoning the blood’ remark, maybe one of them would be a coincidence. But both of them pretty much makes it clear that there’s something thematic going on, and I can’t believe it’s accidental. The question is why do it on purpose. Well, my opinion is that Trump believes, for whatever reason, that there is some part of his base that really wants to hear this message said that way, and he’s catering to them. He finds it both rewarding personally for himself and he believes it’s necessary to motivate people to help him get elected again.
He adds this cautionary comment about the state of American democracy...
When I was growing up and being taught the American system of government, we would always be taught that the U.S. government has checks and balances in its design, so you can’t take it over with a sentiment of the moment. But I think what we’ve learned is that the institutions that protect us are fragile. History suggests that all democracies are fragile. So we have to be on the alert for political movements that want to undermine democratic institutions, because the purpose of democratic institutions is not to put the best people in power, it’s to maintain democracy even when the worst people are in power. That’s a big lift.
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commonsensecommentary · 6 months
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“Currently, fewer than two-in-ten Americans say they trust the government in Washington to do what is right “just about always” (1%) or “most of the time” (15%). This is among the lowest trust measures in nearly seven decades of polling.”
(Not a surprise, is it?)
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luckybyler · 4 months
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1. So I’m trying to write a counter reply to a reply I got, but the question is, how do you argue with someone when you realize that said someone and you are living in completely separate, different realities? How do you explain things to someone who may just not have the capacity to comprehend them?
2. I made a couple of posts that got many many replies, Some very nice to me, some not so much, some were straight-up vulgar. Lots of arguing back and forth in the replies.
What worried me tho, is that I saw at least one person that strikes me as being radicalized, or in the process of radicalization. Just so we’re clear: RADICALIZATION IS A BAD THING. And it’s not because they disagree with me (many people did), or even that they were rude (many people were), it’s the specific way this specific person answered. I’ve been on Tumblr longer than some people here have been alive, and while it has always had its problems, this is the first time I’m seeing its use as a radicalization avenue in action. And the worst thing is that there’s no avenue to sound an early alarm and prevent something worse as far as I know. It gives me the heebie-jeebies.
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cardassiangoodreads · 4 months
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I know the post this inspired is a few days old, but while it's true that people become more susceptible to extremist groups and cults when they're in bad life situations, a) you can arm yourself against this by teaching yourself critical thinking skills, how to recognize propaganda and dogwhistles, and so on. It's not that different from how like, you can arm yourself against abusive friends/romantic partners by looking for red flags of abuse like love-bombing, and thus if your "new friend" bombards you with 15 texts in as many minutes, you're probably going to be wary of them! There are some of us who've been in those desperate-for-friends, ultra-lonely life moments and found ourselves talking to someone who tried to give us some questionable shtick and we still recognized it and stopped talking to them fairly early in that conversation, not several hours later. b) Hate group and cult members do in fact try to recruit from people who seem likely to buy their bullshit. That doesn't mean they're always successful, but there's probably something about you that makes you seem like a likely recruit and yeah, some of it's an accident of demographics - for instance, some particularly stupid and young TERFs on here will often just follow any feminist blog run by a cis woman in hopes of getting a chance to sell on her on their garbage - but if you're getting the actual Spiel (TM) then you've likely done more than just "be a white able-bodied person," but in fact given some indication that you might be receptive to that sales pitch. It's important, especially if you were talking to Nazis for hours at a protest before realizing what they were, to think about what caused them to target you! And to re-up your familiarity with hateful rhetoric so this doesn't happen to you again. Given the number of people who think they're just being "anti-Zionist" who are circulating Protocols-of-the-Elders-of-Zion level antisemitic tropes on here, I am really not surprised some of you were seen as likely targets by Nazis! But that's an opportunity to fix that: and to listen to Jewish people when they tell you about this, and not require them to prove their political bona-fides to you before you do so.
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schraubd · 10 months
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The Most Dangerous Threat To Jews Are The People Threatening To Kill the Jews
Yesterday, June 16, 2023, a federal jury officially convicted Robert Bowers, the White supremacist whose 2018 mass shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania that was the deadliest antisemitic incident in American history.
Also yesterday, a man in Michigan was arrested on charges he plotted to conduct his own mass shooting at a synagogue in East Lansing. Like Bowers, Seann Patrick Pietila was also a far-right White supremacist, though it appears his immediate inspiration was the Christchurch Mosque massacre, on whose 5th anniversary he planned to launch his own killing spree.
There is a line one increasingly hears in conservative Jewish circles that insists that Jewish fears over right-wing antisemitism are naught but a ginned up panic. Just a few weeks ago, Jonathan Tobin had the gall to claim that "It isn’t going too far to assert that Soros is endangering far more American and Jewish lives than stray marginal extreme right-wingers." To say that at a moment when the Tree of Life survivors are forced to relive a massacre perpetrated by one of those "stray marginal extremists", one whose violent hate was inextricably bound up in the fever swamp of antisemitic conspiracies for whom George Soros is a central figure and which the likes of Tobin are now trying to render Kosher, is sickening.
The most dangerous threat to American Jews is not liberal Jews supporting policies supported by most other American Jews. The most dangerous threat to American Jews is, and continues to be, the people trying to murder Jews, right alongside the people ginning up, spreading, apologizing for, or horrifyingly endorsing the conspiracies that justify those murders. It's not that complicated. But apparently it still needs to be said.
June 16, 2023, in some ways represents the ongoing circle of antisemitic death, closed in on itself. One antisemitic mass murder reached "closure" (if such a thing is possible). Another was thankfully averted, due to the vigilance of law enforcement who fortunately did not take Tobin's unsolicited, misguided, politically opportunistic, and downright dangerous "advice" that right-wing antisemitism is non-threat.
They know it. We know it. The Tobins of the world, trying to deny it, are absolutely and utterly beneath contempt.
via The Debate Link https://ift.tt/OvkZ4PY
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saywhat-politics · 10 months
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An early Biden administration initiative to root out extremism in the military was designed to identify people like Jack Teixeira, the 21-year-old Air National Guardsman with a long-history of violent and racist behavior now accused of perpetrating one of the biggest leaks of classified documents in modern history.
But more than two years after the Countering Extremism Working Group was formed inside the Pentagon, the effort has vanished virtually without a trace.
As the Pentagon grapples with the aftermath of the leak, the working group’s stated objectives look eerily prescient, and, in some cases, tailor-made to zero-in on the sort of anti-government, White supremacist behavior and views espoused by Teixeira.
CNN interviews with multiple sources familiar with the working group reveal that the Pentagon largely abandoned the effort to combat extremism in its ranks, as senior officials folded under political pressure from Republicans who lashed out at the initiative as an example of so-called wokeism in the military.
Of the six recommendations the working group made at the end of 2021, only one has begun to be implemented across the Defense Department, a Pentagon spokesperson told reporters on May 18.
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queerism1969 · 1 year
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jensorensen · 4 months
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I'm glad to see that Trump's "vermin" comment has been widely condemned for what it is. Yet I find myself wondering if this will follow the same pattern as so many other examples of extremism that shocked us initially, only to become normalized over time. After the January 6 insurrection, many corporate donors tried to distance themselves from the coup attempt. Now we have an election denier as Speaker of the House, and others making regular appearances on talking head shows. 
Help keep this work sustainable by joining the Sorensen Subscription Service! Also on Patreon.
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Clay Jones
* * * *
LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN
December 29, 2023
HEATHER COX RICHARDSON
DEC 29, 2023
When asked at a town hall on Wednesday to identify the cause of the United States Civil War, presidential candidate and former governor of South Carolina Nikki Haley answered that the cause “was basically how government was going to run, the freedoms, and what people could and couldn’t do…. I think it always comes down to the role of government and what the rights of the people are…. And I will always stand by the fact that, I think, government was intended to secure the rights and freedoms of the people.”
Haley has correctly been lambasted for her rewriting of history. The vice president of the Confederacy, Alexander Stephens of Georgia, was quite clear about the cause of the Civil War. Stephens explicitly rejected the idea embraced by U.S. politicians from the revolutionary period onward that human enslavement was “wrong in principle, socially, morally, and politically.” Instead, he declared: “Our new government is founded upon…the great truth, that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery—subordination to the superior race—is his natural and normal condition.” 
President Joe Biden put the cause of the Civil War even more succinctly: “It was about slavery.” 
Haley has been backpedaling ever since—as well as suggesting that the question was somehow a “gotcha” question from a Democrat, as if it was a difficult question to answer—but her answer was not simply bad history or an unwillingness to offend potential voters, as some have suggested. It was the death knell of the Republican Party.
That party formed in the 1850s to stand against what was known as the Slave Power, a small group of elite enslavers who had come to dominate first the Democratic Party and then, through it, the presidency, Supreme Court, and Senate. When northern Democrats in the House of Representatives caved to pressure to allow enslavement into western lands from which it had been prohibited since 1820, northerners of all political stripes recognized that it was only a question of time until elite enslavers took over the West, joined with lawmakers from southern slave states, overwhelmed the northern free states in the House of Representatives, and made enslavement national. 
So in 1854, after Congress passed the Kansas-Nebraska Act that allowed the spread of enslavement into previously protected western lands, northerners abandoned their old parties and came together first as “anti-Nebraska” coalitions and then, by 1856, as the Republican Party. 
At first their only goal was to stop the Slave Power, but in 1859, Illinois lawyer Abraham Lincoln articulated an ideology for the new party. In contrast to southern Democrats, who insisted that a successful society required leaders to dominate workers and that the government must limit itself to defending those leaders because its only domestic role was the protection of property, Lincoln envisioned a new kind of government, based on a new economy.
Lincoln saw a society that moved forward thanks not to rich people, but to the innovation of men just starting out. Such men produced more than they and their families could consume, and their accumulated capital would employ shoemakers and storekeepers. Those businessmen, in turn, would support a few industrialists, who would begin the cycle again by hiring other men just starting out. Rather than remaining small and simply protecting property, Lincoln and his fellow Republicans argued, the government should clear the way for those at the bottom of the economy, making sure they had access to resources, education, and the internal improvements that would enable them to reach markets. 
When the leaders of the Confederacy seceded to start their own nation based in their own hierarchical society, the Republicans in charge of the United States government were free to put their theory into practice. For a nominal fee, they sold farmers land that the government in the past would have sold to speculators; created state colleges, railroads, national money, and income taxes; and promoted immigration. 
Finally, with the Civil War over and the Union restored on their terms, in 1865 they ended the institution of human enslavement except as punishment for crime (an important exception) and in 1868 they added the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution to make clear that the federal government had power to override state laws that enforced inequality among different Americans. In 1870 they created the Department of Justice to ensure that all American citizens enjoyed the equal protection of the laws.
In the years after the Civil War, the Republican vision of a harmony of economic interest among all Americans quickly swung toward the idea of protecting those at the top of society, with the argument that industrial leaders were the ones who created jobs for urban workers. Ever since, the party has alternated  between Lincoln’s theory that the government must work for those at the bottom and the theory of the so-called robber barons, who echoed the elite enslavers’ idea that the government must protect the wealthy. 
During the Progressive Era, Theodore Roosevelt reclaimed Lincoln’s philosophy and argued for a strong government to rein in the industrialists and financiers who dominated society; a half-century later, Dwight Eisenhower followed the lead of Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt and used the government to regulate business, provide a basic social safety net, promote infrastructure, and protect civil rights. 
After each progressive president, the party swung toward protecting property. In the modern era the swing begun under Richard Nixon gained momentum with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. Since then the party has focused on deregulation, tax cuts, privatization, and taking power away from the federal government and turning it back over to the states, while maintaining that market forces, rather than government policies, should drive society. 
But those ideas were not generally popular, so to win elections, the party welcomed white evangelical Christians into a coalition, promising them legislation that would restore traditional society, relegating women and people of color back to the subservience the law enforced before the 1950s. But it seems they never really intended for that party base to gain control.
The small-government idea was the party’s philosophy when Donald Trump came down the escalator in June 2015 to announce he was running for president, and his 2017 tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy indicated he would follow in that vein. But his presidency quickly turned the Republican base into a right-wing movement loyal to Trump himself, and he was both eager to get away from legal trouble and impeachments and determined to exact revenge on those who did not do his bidding. The power in the party shifted from those trying to protect wealthy Americans to Trump, who increasingly aligned with foreign autocrats.
That realignment has taken off since Trump left office in 2021 and his base wrested power from the party’s former leaders. Leaders in Trump’s right-wing movement have increasingly embraced the concept of “illiberal democracy” or “Christian democracy” as articulated by Russian autocrat Vladimir Putin or Hungary’s prime minister Viktor Orbán, who has demolished Hungary’s democracy and replaced it with a dictatorship. On the campaign trail lately, Trump has taken to echoing Putin and Orbán directly.
Those leaders insist that the equality at the heart of democracy destroys a nation by welcoming immigrants, which undermines national purity, and by treating women, minorities, and LGBTQ+ people as equal to white, heteronormative men. Their focus on what they call “traditional values” has won staunch supporters among the right-wing white evangelical community in the U.S.
Ironically, MAGA Republicans, whose name comes from Trump’s promise to “Make America Great Again,” want the United States of America, one of the world’s great superpowers, to sign onto the program of a landlocked country of fewer than 10 million people in central Europe.
MAGA’s determination to impose white Christian nationalism on the United States of America is a rejection of the ideology of the Republican Party in all its phases. Rather than either an active government that defends equal rights and opportunity or a small government that protects property and relies on market forces, which Republicans stood for as recently as eight years ago, today’s Republicans advocate a strong government that imposes religious rules on society. 
They back strict abortion bans, book bans, and attacks on minorities and LGBTQ+ people. Last year, Florida governor Ron DeSantis directly used the state government to threaten Disney into complying with his anti-LGBTQ+ stance rather than reacting to popular support for LGBTQ+ rights. Missouri attorney general Andrew Bailey early this month used the government to go after political opposition, launching an investigation into Media Matters for America after the watchdog organization reported that the social media platform X was placing advertising next to antisemitic content. “I’m fighting to ensure progressive tyrants masquerading as news outlets cannot manipulate the marketplace in order to wipe out free speech,” Bailey said. 
Domestically, the new ideology of MAGA means forcing the majority to live under the rules of a small minority; internationally, it means support for a global authoritarian movement. MAGA Republicans’ current refusal to fund Ukraine’s war against Russian aggression until the administration agrees to draconian immigration laws—which they are also refusing to participate in crafting—is not only a gift to Putin. It also suggests to any foreign government that U.S. foreign policy is changeable so long as a foreign government succeeds in influencing U.S. lawmakers. Under this system, American global leadership will no longer be viable.
When Nikki Haley said the cause of the Civil War “was how government was going to run, the freedoms, and what people could and couldn’t do,” she did more than avoid the word “slavery” to pander to MAGA Republicans who refuse to recognize the role of race in shaping our history. She rejected the long and once grand history of the Republican Party and announced its death to the world. 
LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN
HEATHER COX RICHARDSON
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thegoodmorningman · 10 months
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So what if you are, anyway?
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tomorrowusa · 5 months
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Do you need more proof that Republicans are becoming even more homophobic by the week?
Whenever you hear somebody thinking of sitting out the election or ruminating about wasting a vote on some automatic loser third party, remind them of the insidious evil which the Republican Party has become.
MAGA Mike Johnson is now the highest ranking Republican in the US. He received every single vote of GOP House members, including the alleged moderates, to become House Speaker.
15 Not-Fun Facts About Speaker Mike Johnson
1. He masterminded Trump’s election coup. 2. He's the least-experienced House Speaker in 140 years. 3. He worked for the conservative legal group behind the case that ended Roe v. Wade. 4. He wants to ban abortion nationwide. 5. He blamed abortion for school shootings. 6. He also blamed abortion for Social Security and Medicare cuts. 7. He blamed mass shootings on the teaching of evolution. 8. He fought to make taxpayers fund a Noah’s Ark theme park. 9. He fought to ban same-sex marriage in Louisiana. 10. He led an anti-gay campus movement. 11. He wrote a lot of homophobic op-eds. 12. He introduced a national version of Florida's "Don’t Say Gay" bill. 13. He was an advocate for "covenant marriage," which makes it harder to divorce. 14. He blamed post-Katrina looting on America turning away from God. 15. He doesn't believe in the separation of church and state.
^^^ click the link to New York Magazine just above the list for details.
The 2024 election pits the 17th century against the 21st century. Republicans don't accept any of that newfangled thinking from The Enlightenment.
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