On Saturday The BBC published an article entitled The Unlikely Similarities Between the Far Right and IS. The article begins with:
Far-right extremists in Britain have been accessing terrorism material published online by the Islamic State group, counter-terrorism experts have told the BBC.
They say neo-Nazis and other right-wing extremists have been studying methods of attack shared by jihadists with their followers on the internet.
But we should not be surprised that they do share some similarities.
The author then seeks to provide the answers:
Counter-terrorism officers have been using a range of methods, including phone taps, to gather intelligence on what the most violent individuals have been planning or aspiring to do.
In some cases, arrests have been made after suspects have been caught downloading child pornography. But officials say that neo-Nazis and other extremists have also been accessing material to plan attacks published by their ideological enemies, Islamic State.
This may seem strange, but it should not come as a surprise.
Their ideologies may be diametrically opposed to each other but there are some disturbing similarities between them, some of which are obvious, others less so.
He goes on to tick off a list of similarities from intolerance of anyone else’s views first among them. Nado Bakos, more popularly known by the title to her forthcoming book as The Targeter, tweeted out the article without comment:
The unlikely similarities between the far right and IS https://t.co/TdSRMA4vN1
— Nada Bakos (@nadabakos) April 1, 2019
Marcy Wheeler, more popularly known by the name of her blog EmptyWheel made an interesting reply:
No explanation, at all, about why this is "unlikely," and an underestimate of the possibility for coordination. https://t.co/w6TvLILhsC
— emptywheel (@emptywheel) April 1, 2019
What Wheeler has zeroed in on, and correctly so, is what is missing from the article: historical context about connections between these groups and what facilitated and enabled that connection. Specifically the historical context that can be provided by someone who has been doing comparative research into violent extremists and terrorists since the early 1990s. And that’s where I come in. One of the oldest, and now apparently no longer available, white supremacist websites was named Be Wise as Serpents. You can see a reference to it with a link that does nothing at this page cataloguing these sites at GWU. Be Wise as Serpents was one of the primary websites for the Aryan Nations, which was, at one time, the most active of the Christian Identity groups. It spun off two active terrorist groups: the original The Order and a subsequent group of the same name. The sites name is derived from Matthew 10:16 and, in addition to having the standard Aryan Nations and Christian Identity information, conspiracy theories, etc, it also linked to the website of an expatriate Algerian army officer who had fled to Sweden seeking asylum to avoid prosecution for his adherence to an extremist version of Islam. This individual’s website hosted The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, as well as just about every other anti-Semitic conspiracy theory known in the early to mid 90s. He also linked back to the Aryan Nations’ site.
Both of these sites are now defunct, but back when I was still an academic and teaching courses on terrorism and extremism, I would use them as examples in my classroom – first at UF, then at Temple, and then at UCA. The commonality that led these two disparate groups of extremists – white supremacists adhering to a racialized version of Pentacostalism in the US and an Islamic extremist asylee in Sweden – was anti-Semitism, specifically the conspiracy theory that Jews have always and were continuing to manipulate politics, economics, global events, and even non-Jewish religions to their own benefit. What allowed them to link up into a loose and informal network was the Internet.
As Wheeler’s commentary by tweet so accurately points out, this is not unlikely at all and the reporter downplays the likelihood/possibility of coordination even though that is not an accurate assessment. That’s because the coordination, even as innocuous as being able to easily and quickly access information to both confirm and further one’s own extremist views, has been going on for a very, very long time. The coordination is really all about the sharing of ideas. The Be Wise as Serpents site eventually went defunct as the Aryan Nations came apart from both the lawsuits filed against it by The Southern Poverty Law Center, the death of its longtime leader Richard Gurnt Butler after a period of scandal*, and the fighting by those claiming to be his successors. I have no idea what happened to the guy in Sweden. But these connections, and the directions of influence, go back to the earliest days of the Internet, which facilitated linkages between individuals and groups that would otherwise be considered strange bedfellows. Because as different as white supremacy and racialized Christianity may be from the various extremist versions of Islam, they do have one commonality in their extremism and conspiracism: the anti-Semitic belief that the Jews are manipulating politics, the economy, global events, even other religions for the sinister benefits of the Jews. And, perhaps more importantly, these connections and the influence they facilitate among extremists of different backgrounds, are going strong in 2019.
Open thread!
* Butler, in his final years of life, got involved with and, according to some reports had married, Wendy Iwanow, who was describing herself at the time as an Aryan Princess and tattoo artist. Iwanow was better known by her professional name Bianca Trump, The Latin Princess of Porn, who had starred in such classics as Brassiere to Eternity.
LivinginExile
Opposite sides of the same coin.
Betty Cracker
Makes sense. God-bothering extremists also usually have misogyny and homophobia in common.
Gin & Tonic
@Betty Cracker: Same reason for the love affair of the evangelical Right with Russia.
??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??
@Gin & Tonic:
They also probably crave the same power Putin has and want to replicate that here to righteously punish their enemies
Roger Moore
@Betty Cracker:
I think there’s also a big element of anti-liberalism that all these groups have in common. They may come to blows with each other eventually, but they need to take back control from the liberals first.
trollhattan
I suspect New Zealand would chime in about RW terrorism and its similarities to acts committed by IS and other True Believer sects. Now that they’ve done something about military weaponry they’d do well to monitor truck rentals.
Speaking of military weaponry and activist judges, this asshole federal judge seems to be manufactured by the NRA, perhaps using a 3-D printer.
Chapter and verse.
Emma
Bianca Trump? Someone call the Gods of Coincidence and Irony and tell them to knock it off.
I am still trying to wrap my head around how all these groups end up linking to each other. How far back and how deep does this go? Adam, any readings you can recommend? Alternatively why don’t you write it?
trollhattan
@Roger Moore:
We all know hippies are the real enemy. Always a good day for hippie-punching.
Adam L Silverman
@Emma: I wrote several compare and contrast papers for publication on this topic back in the early 00s. These are based on conference papers going back to the mid 90s, as well as both my masters theses and my doctoral dissertation.
The connections go back as far as the popular usage and consumption of the Internet. Once it became easy to search and find information that had formally been available only to members of the groups promoting it, or those they were trying to specifically recruit and/or influence, the connections were made. The creation and proliferation of social media has only accelerated this.
feebog
@Adam L Silverman:
Wasn’t Butler based in Southern California for a while? I seem to remember something about a cross burning in the San Fernando Valley, after which he fled to Idaho. Or am I thinking of someone else?
Adam L Silverman
@feebog: I think he may have started there in the 50s. A lot of these guys worked in the aerospace part of the defense sector after their service in WW II or Korea. They came back, either reembraced their white supremacism or migrated into it, and off they went.
But you may be thinking of Gerard L K Smith.
??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??
@trollhattan:
Don’t forget the argument that having military grade small arms will stop the modern US military because… wait for it…
“The VC did it in Vietnam”
And my response is always this:
The US military didn’t have Flying Death Robots (aka Predator drones) in Vietnam
Adam L Silverman
??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??
@Adam L Silverman:
Didn’t some of these guys witness the horrors of the Holocaust/Nazi Germany first hand during their service? I remember reading about Charles Lindbergh, who basically admitted post ww2 that he had been wrong about the Nazis all along. He was an anti-semite too, IIRC.
It’s always interesting and sad that different people can process the same information differently, to tragic results.
Kent
Goes back a LOT farther than that. To the original Nazis
https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/MAGAZINE-revealed-photos-of-palestinian-mufti-visiting-nazi-germany-1.5483980
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Adam L Silverman: He seems nice. //
Mary G
Everything old is new again. I know anti-Semitism never went away, but I never expected to live in a time when the president of the United States would say that a torch-bearing mob screaming “Jews will not replace us” contained some very fine people.
Adam L Silverman
@??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??: You’ll need this:
https://www.marxists.org/archive/giap/1961-pwpa.pdf
Barb 2
My Sociology Professor in a lecture said that extreme leftists and extreme Righists meet in the middle. Rather than a long straight line with most people falling somewhere in the center (i.e. describing someone as left of center) – it is one huge circle. It is not uncommon to see similar tactics etc. used by people in either extreme political grouping. Fanatics learn from each other.
Back in the 70s we had so many examples to study in real time. Like the Weathermen the bombers. Lots of bomb scares and evacuation of buildings – at least on the west coast where I went to high school and college. John Birch society etc on the right, also the minute men I think that’s what they called themselves.
Ruckus
Those whose primary motivation is hate will always find each other.
Brachiator
What a weird, twisted little world.
Adam L Silverman
@Kent: The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem had very little influence on Hitler or the policies the NAZIs put into place.
Barbara
@Barb 2: I don’t think the issue is ideology, per se, the issue is, are they willing to use violence, and if so, what role does violence have in achieving their goals? Once you cross the threshold of being willing to use violence, then you get to the issue of whether it should be targeted or random, whether the violence will be the direct means of achieving the goal or the indirect means, and sometimes you don’t exclude either depending on the circumstances. Some ideologies are more compatible with the idea that violence advances the cause than others: an ideology with a highly structured code of acceptable living and/or devoted to the idea of separating people into the elect and everyone else are more likely to thrive by punishing the non-adherents and those who don’t fall within the elect group.
ruemara
I don’t even begin to understand why they think it’s unlikely. They’re not enemies as long as there are other people to hate & quell first. Then they’ll fight each other.
Getting a bit annoyed & anxious at these monthly “Nothing new to report. Just sitting here waiting on your application.” email from immigration. This is taking forever and I have to cross my fingers in hoping a layoff isn’t a problem.
Tenar Arha
@Adam L Silverman: Yeah. The extremism really is bleeding back over/back into lots of institutions.
Adam L Silverman
@Barb 2: The horseshoe theory of ideology. In the case of actual violent extremists, there are significant differences. Right wing and religious extremists have significant overlap in the basic structure of their ideologies or theologies and worldview and doctrine and specific significant overlap in their tactics and targeting. This has to do with the fact that both are exclusionary. Only members of the right group – religious and/or racial/ethnic and/or ideological – can belong. Everyone outside of the group are either potential targets for recruitment if they’re of the correct religious, racial/ethnic, and/or ideological orientation or potential targets for attack if they are not. As a result right wing and religious terrorism, and often they’re the same thing as is the case with ISIS, a lot of the white supremacist extremists, the settlers in Israel, the extremist loyalists in Northern Ireland, etc, look almost the same. Left wing terrorism, however, looks very, very different. Or it did as there is almost no left wing terrorism left in most places outside of some rebellions and revolutions in developing states. The left wing terrorists, regardless of specific issues they are concerned about, are almost always rooted in some variant of Marxism, Marxism-Leninism, Maoism. And, as a result, the point of their tactics and targeting is to trigger the revolution on behalf of the oppressed masses. And this leads them to be far more discriminating in their targeting and tactics. Even in the rare cases, like the Irish Republican movement, where you had a significant religious (Catholic) component to the movement’s ideology. If you look at the violence statistics for the different groups involved in the Troubles in Northern Ireland, the IRA and its offshoots actions led too much lower casualties and deaths, while the extremist Loyalists led to much greater ones. The latter would blow up an entire building full of Protestants to kill just one Catholic because they weren’t looking to generate popular support for a societal revolution. Rather, they were looking to just cleanse Northern Ireland of Catholics.
Betty Cracker
@Adam L Silverman: I don’t subject myself to the Fox line-up, ever, but I do see an occasional clip of the Tucker Carlson White Power Hour that people post on Twitter, and it’s shocking. I realize those are the cherry-picked bits, but there’s no context that can excuse the shit said on that show, and I’m not surprised the neo-Nazis love it. Then Carlson has Greenwald on as a guest to blame everything on Democrats. Strange times we live in.
schrodingers_cat
@ruemara: When was your bio-metrics appointment.
jl
Thanks for an informative and important post, Adam.
@??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??:
“The VC did it in Vietnam”
The losses of the VC in Vietnam, and also those of the formally organized North Vietnamese military forces, were horrific and very prolongedly horrific, during the war.
The reactionary fascists don’t have enough people, they are not organized enough, and how much slaughter of their members will be tolerable for a BS cause? These are dangerous people who are capable of horrific crimes, as long as they feel they can walk away unharmed, but they can be defeated, Anyway, their arguments are pathetic and dangerous mental cosplay.
West of the Rockies
@Adam L Silverman:
This seems to be getting very little attention in the MSM.
schrodingers_cat
@Adam L Silverman: Do you have any insight about Hindutva RWNJs, the Sangh? Their founder was inspired by Mussolini in the 1920s and 30s. They have a spot for Hitler and they also admire the state of Israel.
Gin & Tonic
@Tenar Arha: A guy I’ve known for a long time is a fairly recently retired Chicago PD guy, had some medium-high position. A more racist, sexist, retrograde MF would be hard to imagine. The only way to “clean up” the Chicago PD is to fire every single one and start over.
jl
@schrodingers_cat: Thanks for info. I don;t find it surprising at all that religious fundamentalists of all sorts find fascism to be an attractive ideology.
But, I wonder if they really admire Israel, or the extreme right wing influence on Likud in how it runs Israel. Historically, anti-Semites have reserved the right to decide who is really Jewish, and should be persecuted, depending on convenient alignment or tolerance of fascist ideology and crimes committed for the sake of the ideology. As soon Israel as a state departs from its current reactionary and misguided course, the admiration will disappear.
Jay
@Kent:
There were a bunch of colonized people who turned to the Nazi’s and Japan for “support” before and during WWII.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lehi_(militant_group)
Sometimes, this went so far as copying Nazi doctrine and organizational structure.
Bosnians, Hindi, Croats, Serbs, Indonesians, etc.
schrodingers_cat
@Jay: Hindi is a language.
Adam L Silverman
@Tenar Arha: Bless their hearts!
Barbara
@Tenar Arha: Rahm Emanuel must be so proud.
JaySinWA
@Adam L Silverman: I thought the flow was more from NAZI’s to the middle east. IIRC there was some talk of deNAZIing the political party in Iraq post Saddam. Claiming that they had adopted the organisational structure during and after WWII, But then there was so much propaganda flying around then for me to know if that was accurate.
randy khan
@Barb 2:
The far left/far right convergence definitely is real, even to the way they argue. Basically, it’s all radicals of whatever stripe. Many years ago, I came across an academic article about the rhetoric of the Birchers, and it was remarkably similar in style to Louis Farrakhan.
Adam L Silverman
@Betty Cracker: Every so often, usually about once a week, I get to the gym late and he’s on as one TV out of every bank of four, is always set to Fox News. One to CNN. One to local news. And one to ESPN. He’s a full on conspiracy nut at this point. Last week he was railing about the college entrance scandal by blaming it on entitled coastal elites. Tucker Carlson is from the greater DC area, is one of the two heirs with his brother, to the Swanson frozen food empire, went to elite boarding schools and private colleges, his father was an ambassador and a CEO, and he’s always been paid in the millions to opine in print and on air. But he’s going to hold those damn coastal elites accountable!
Kelly
@??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??:
I’m doubtful our wingnuts would continue combat while sustaining losses and hardships the VC endured.
Jay
@Betty Cracker:
Yellow Vests Canada Exposed, and a bunch of others, have documented the “bleed through” and online radicalization path that turns a young, white, conservative male into a slavering mass murderer.
While Facebook and other Social Media companies have taken steps and changed policies to block Nazi sites, ( I don’t bother to parse Nazi groups, I’m a lumper),
They have left enough holes in the policies to drive a Blitzkrieg through.
And they have done nothing about the “questioning shit lord” like Jordan Peterson or Candace Owen’s, such as demonetizing them, that are the feeder sites for online radicalization. Too much money to be made.
JR
Weren’t the Nazis allied with Iraq, Tunisia, Algeria?
Adam L Silverman
@schrodingers_cat: Fascists of a feather flock together.
ruemara
@schrodingers_cat: Back in January.
Jay
@schrodingers_cat:
What’s the correct term for a plural of Hindu?
schrodingers_cat
@Jay: Hindus
ETA: Subhas Chandra Bose who formed a strategic alliance with the axis powers was a leftist (Forward Block was his party). India’s homegrown Fascists (Hindu Mahasabha and RSS) were British stooges.
Gravenstone
@trollhattan: If you can’t hit what you’re aiming at with 6 rounds (or less) you either 1) suck as a marksman and/or 2) have the wrong fucking tool for the job. Expanded capacity magazines are the lazy asshole’s way to pretend they can “spray and pray”. Of course, that approach only increases the likelihood of bystanders being injured or killed, rather than the “bad guys”.
Ruckus
@Adam L Silverman:
How many entitled assholes ever think that they got anything handed to them, that they really are entitled assholes?
Jay
@JaySinWA:
At the end of WWII everybody, including the Soviets, made use of any willing to be used, Nazi’s.
Wanted Nazi’s who fled into exile often found they had to make themselves useful to their Host Government and it’s International Sponsor, to keep their protection, like Klaus Barbie.
@JR:
Iraq, Algeria and Tunesia were all colonies in some form.
Gravenstone
@Adam L Silverman: If Tucker had a lick of sense in his pointed head he’d be all asking them to kindly not mention his name, at all, ever. Instead, he’ll embrace it as a mark of distinction among his people.
Mnemosyne
@Adam L Silverman:
I remember seeing a theory that a lot of this anti-Semitic stuff was being funneled to Islamist groups by Russian intelligence in the 1980s — true or false, or somewhere in between? Apparently the purpose was to prevent Israel from being able to make any kind of peace with its neighbors by getting Islamist extremists to pick up on classic Western anti-Jewish tropes, including the blood libel. ?
And, obviously, as a scholar of these things, you would appreciate the irony of the KGB distributing the “Protocols” just like the Czar’s secret police did.
Adam L Silverman
@Jay: Lehi, also known as the Stern Gang after it’s founder, where the militant followers of Zeev Jabotinsky the father of Betar, the reactionary ideology at the heart of the modern Likud Party. Stern’s lieutenants included Menachim Begin and Yitzhak Shamir. And one of both Jabotinsky’s most devoted ideological followers was Benzion Netanyahu. Rather than fight in the Haganah, he moved to the US from the Yishuv/Mandatory Palestine in 1940 to serve as Jabotinsky’s personal secretary. When Jabotinsky died, Netanyahu took over for him. You’ll notice Jabotinsky wasn’t willing to put his life at risk for the creation of a state for the Jews in Mandatory Palestine either. That’s why he lived in NY, where he was also not willing to join the US military and fight in Europe against the NAZIs during WW II.
Ruckus
@Gravenstone:
The real issue is that they think that most everyone is an enemy. They aren’t trying to eliminate one or two. They want as big a body count as possible to prove their position.
Jay
@randy khan:
Lehi’s a good example, the switched from a form of National Socialism of the Nazi kind, to National Bolshivism of the Stalinist kind, seamlessly as the tide turned during WWII.
Adam L Silverman
@JaySinWA: The Iraq stuff was garbage. Wolfowitz equated the Ba’ath Party with the NAZI Party, which is an argument that can only be made based on the fact that they’re both parties. There was no equivalency between them, they weren’t organized at all alike. The founders of Ba’athism weren’t working from the NAZI playbook. But for Wolfowitz, it is always 1939 and someone is always getting ready to appease Hitler.
Betty Cracker
O/T, but my dumb dogs were on the porch a while ago and both managed to get stung by the same half-dead wasp. It was on the ground, and first Badger pawed at it and got stung on the foot. His yelp alerted me, so I ran toward the trouble, but before I could stop her, Daisy tried to eat the wasp and got stung on the lip. Dummies! There’s not much swelling and they don’t seem terribly distressed, but I’ll keep an eye on them.
rikyrah
UH HUH
UH HUH
If you don’t smell a gigantic rat with this Lucy Flores interview I can’t help you. as somebody who’s done a hell of a lot of media training I can tell when somebody’s been preppef for an interview to within an inch of their life. And she was prepped af for that interview.
— Rick Wilson (@TheRickWilson) April 1, 2019
Immanentize
@??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??: Let’s go back further — the pre-WWI aliance between Germany and The Ottoman Empire/Turkey helped the latter militarize and certainly emboldened them to etnically cleanse (and worse) the Armenian population.
Led, in echoes of today, by the political rise of the Young Turks. Hmmmm.
Jay
@Adam L Silverman:
And the State of Israel had to go to war against Lehi because Israel wasn’t good enough for Lehi.
When you encounter a ideology that is toxic to the State, sadly, it has to be dug out, root and branch, otherwise, it comes back.
But you know, freeze peach and guns,……
Adam L Silverman
@JR: @Jay: A number of NAZIs fled to the newly independent states in the Middle East. If I remember correctly, and I do, they went out of their way to infiltrate into the various states’ ministries of education thereby embedding anti-Semitism into curricula to radicalize majority Muslim populations.
Adam L Silverman
@Mnemosyne: Yep.
Mr Stagger Lee
I am listening to It Could Happen Here, a podcast talking how an insurrection could happen in the US. It is not some Alex Jones fantasy, but a sobering look of what could happen. The host Robert Evan’s is a journalist. He is the host of Behind The Bastards podcast. (Very entertaining podcast I would say.)
Adam L Silverman
@Jay: Lehi didn’t even make it that far. The Haganah had to run them to ground because their terrorism against everyone and everything that didn’t agree with them was causing problems for the Haganah.
(And before anyone says anything, yes, I know, the “ha” in Haganah means “the”, but this is how it is written when referring to it in English even if it means I’m technically writing The The Defense.
Humdog
@rikyrah: How do you square this with the numerous photos of Biden being way too close or even nose deep in other women’s hair? Cannot judge this one woman, but there is a pic of him digging his nose into Eva Longoria’s hair from the exact same event.
He has long given off a “too many touches uncle” sort of vibe. Tons of photos of it.
Go enjoy your retirement, Joe!
Jay
@Immanentize:
WWI German officers in the Ottoman Empire didn’t embolden the Ottomans to create the Armenian Genocide, they were of two classes, the horrified, and those who took notes.
The lack of International response post war, due to geopolitics, emboldened the Nazi’s in their own Genocide.
trollhattan
@Gravenstone:
I can well imagine being next door watching my house get ventilated by granny’s AR-15. The judge vocalized every gun-humper’s fever dream in his ruling. I now wonder what, if any class of weapon he would find inappropriate in civilian hands.
Roger Moore
@??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??:
The VC:
1) Had a hell of a lot of external help
2) Were armed with much more than small arms
3) Were largely wiped out before the war was over
4) Didn’t succeed in toppling the South Vietnamese government; that was done by a conventional military attack by the North Vietnamese army.
Gin & tonic
@Adam L Silverman: What, you think there are people here pedantic enough to do that?
Adam L Silverman
@Roger Moore: And totally dominated the tactical pyjama domain!
schrodingers_cat
@Adam L Silverman: True enough. But I was wondering if you had any scholarly insights into the Sangh.Until the late 80s they hadn’t made a dent in electoral politics. Also, unlike Europe India does not have history of anti-Semitism. And the Sangh’s rhetoric has been mostly anti-Muslim and anti-Dalit. But now they are threatening the fabric of India.
trollhattan
@Betty Cracker:
Not every dog groks “stripes=BAD.” Mine points bees (IKR?) and has been known to go after them. I saw him stung in the mouth but am not at all sure he took to the lesson.
Amir Khalid
@Adam L Silverman:
i think you could opt to leave out “the” before Haganah. No one ever says “the al-Qa’idah”, and this is exactly the same thing..
Jay
@Adam L Silverman:
I know of the ones who fled to Egypt, Iraq, Syria and were used for their alleged anti-communist cred, WMD skills, alleged military skills and arms sales connections, but not education.
I read a book a couple of years ago that effectively made the case that the Operation Paperclip Nazi’s and the Covert Nazi’s radicalized post-war Western Science, Military, Police and Government Policies.
Adam L Silverman
@Gin & tonic: Yes, yes I do.
Humdog
https://mobile.twitter.com/DoggoDating/status/1112005616296431616
I am no good at linking, but this was funny enough to try.
Adam L Silverman
@Jay: If I’m recalling correctly, the guy who set up the Saudi Ministry of Education after WW II was one of Goebbel’s lieutenants.
Adam L Silverman
@Humdog: I fixed it for you.
Betty Cracker
@trollhattan: You’d think one dog yelping and running away limping would clue the other in on the danger, but sadly no! She had to go stick her FACE on it! I live in fear of them squaring off with a coral snake or something truly dangerous.
A Ghost To Most
@trollhattan:
Make my day. This hippy is a counter-puncher.
Leto
@Ruckus: This. The military needs volume of fire for maneuvering and killing the enemy. Civilians for home defense? Seriously? Merchants of death with the judiciary for hire.
oatler.
@Mr Stagger Lee: Not sure about that. When the Bundy Cosplayers took over that Oregon ranch, they demanded provisions: not jerky and hardtack, but fruit rollups and computer games.
JPL
@rikyrah: I’m shocked, just shocked.
justawriter
OT: Another mass shooting, Mandan, N.D., nothing officially released but I heard through back channels, seven people shot dead, suspect in custody, took place at the shop of a company that handles rentals and maintenance for property owners.
Brachiator
This just in. Trump’s Supreme Court sanctions cruelty as part of capital punishment.
Did they expect him to die, come back, and give a report on how well he had been executed?
Strange times.
Humdog
@Adam L Silverman: oh man, I thought I did it correctly. What did I mess up?
A Ghost To Most
@rikyrah:
I used to despise Rick Wilson, but now I look forward to what he has to say. I doubt it will last past T.
debit
@A Ghost To Most: Same. He’s already getting his feet back in the pool by writing articles about how the Democrats are already losing 2020.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Amir Khalid: Yes, but everyone says ‘the La Brea Tar Pits’.
ruemara
@Brachiator: Jesus, they’re horrible.
Denali
Re the Biden uproar. I too smell a rat. As soon as Biden made a strong showing in the polls, this claim happens. The takedown it is a thing.
Uncle Cosmo
@Jay: That might depend on the subsequent careers of those Reichsheer officers who participated in the Herero and Namaqua genocide of 1904-08 in German SW Africa.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Humdog: Doesn’t look like you closed the link.
Roger Moore
@?BillinGlendaleCA:
And plenty of people talk about the Rio Grande River.
A Ghost To Most
@Adam L Silverman: How does Antifa fit into this? They only appear in front of Nazis.
Alternative Fax, a hip hop artist from Idaho
I interpreted the “comment” from Nada Bakos as “what far too man people believe are unlikely similarities.” Which is not to say Marcy doesn’t get it right, but I’m pretty certain Nada’s aiming at a different audience. And she sure as hell knows it’s not unlikely, though I doubt she’d write nearly as thoughtful an essay comparing and contrasting the quality of tragedy from Marlowe and Shakespeare.
Betty Cracker
So, AP is reporting that Trump may appoint an immigration “czar” and is considering xenophobic dirtbag and voter fraud liar Kris Kobach or wingnut former AG Ken Cuccinelli, also an anti-immigration hysteric. Kobach is probably the worst of the two in a close race, so my guess is he gets the nod.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Roger Moore: Yeah, don’t get me started on Jujudo Island.
Kent
@Adam L Silverman:
Of course not. I’m just saying that, to the extent that they needed any help in the matter, the Arab nationalist movements in the 30s and 40s learned their antisemitism from the real pros.
And that connections between Nazis and Arab extremist movements go back way farther than Neo Nazis and ISIS making friends online.
Alternative Fax, a hip hop artist from Idaho
@Gin & tonic: I certainly can’t imagine such a thing.
Leto
@Adam L Silverman: No insurgency is complete unless you have tactical pyjamas. And I hope to dog I never have to see Joe Sixpack, aka 300lbs of redneck Bubba, in tactical pyjamas. There’s just not enough eye bleach in the world for that.
schrodingers_cat
@ruemara: My interview was three months after the biometrics appointment, and I got the notice at least a month before the interview IIRC.
Immanentize
@Jay: That is perhaps the better way to see it. But Germany was not just an observer like they were not just observing in Spain in the 30’s. Although Spain is recognized as a practice ground.
A Ghost To Most
@debit: There’s a media industrial complex now of Rs telling D’s how to run in 2020. Fuckem.
Did anyone claim the cat yet?
Miss Bianca
Today’s top entry in the “You Can’t Make This Shit Up” category.
SiubhanDuinne
@Roger Moore:
The big Rio Grande River.
See also: Mount Fujiyama. And ATM machine. And “Please R.S.V.P.”
/signed, the hoi polloi
A Ghost To Most
@Betty Cracker: Don’t undersell Cooch. He’s a world class asshole as well.
A Ghost To Most
@Miss Bianca:
Have we ever seen the two of you at the same time?
JPL
@Betty Cracker: Wait appointing czars to by pass congressional approval is bad. or is that just for dems.
debit
@A Ghost To Most: Aleta has stepped up to the plate. We’re just hammering out transport options now. Anne Laurie should have a post later to rattle the cup.
Immanentize
@Brachiator:Sadly, this has been the Supreme Court’s position for years. As Scalia put it, the Constitutional says it has to be cruel AND unusual. One alone is not enough because all punishment is cruel.
Miss Bianca
@ruemara: @schrodingers_cat: OK, pardon my ignorance and perhaps unseemly curiosity, but what the hell is a “biometrics appointment” and what does it have to do with immigration?
Immanentize
@?BillinGlendaleCA: but people generally do NOT SAY the Big Rio Grande River
A Ghost To Most
@debit: Cool.
Barbara
@randy khan: I really don’t think this is true, for the reasons Adam explained and that I posted in response to Barb2. We can get wrapped around the axle of what counts as “leftist” and “rightist” that makes this discussion mostly fruitless and futile. However, the use of violence among separatists who might be called leftists, let’s say the IRA or Basque Separatists tends to be highly targeted at politically useful targets and tries to avoid civilian violence. That discipline can obviously break down as groups splinter and so on, but it’s more true than not.
The use of violence among groups that we might associate with the right is more likely to be random, at least within certain locations (e.g., the west) but if it is targeted, it is targeted at people who are not members of the “elect,” e.g., blacks or Jews or gays. Importantly, these same groups are targeted by both white nationalists and Islamic extremists, when operating as such. Islamic extremist might also target those who are associated with “degeneration” such as those at music concerts and so on. But the point is, the avoidance of civilian casualties is not even a consideration and might be desired.
Whereas, leftists generally want civilians to come into their fold, white supremacists and Islamic extremists mostly don’t. These don’t make the use of violence by leftist groups better, but it should make it apparent why there is not nearly as much of it as there is of the other kind. Because, mostly, as a strategic tactic most leftists have conceded that it doesn’t work to advance the causes they support.
Miss Bianca
@A Ghost To Most:
err…what? What are you talking about?
encephalopath
Christian right wing nut jobs have similar values and thinking to Muslim right wing nut jobs. No one could have predicted.
Immanentize
@Roger Moore: Beat me to it with a different perspective!
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Immanentize: Did I mention the Rio Grande? Take it up with 007 and Subaru Diane.
schrodingers_cat
@Miss Bianca: USCIS takes your finger prints and a photo for a background check.
ETA: They do that for your GC application as well.
Immanentize
@Barbara: This a good point
A Ghost To Most
@encephalopath:
Religious terrorists really don’t differ much by theology. The brainwashing methods are the same.
If they can make you believe absurdities, they can make you commit atrocities.
Miss Bianca
@schrodingers_cat: Ah, so “biometrics” is what the kids are calling it these days! I was thinking “biofeedback” and getting very confused indeed.
trollhattan
@Immanentize:
The “snowy Sierra Nevadas” is two, two, two sins in one.
Brachiator
Groundhog Day again in the UK
Meanwhile, we have had rounds of elections in Slovakia, the Ukraine, and upcoming, India
Immanentize
@A Ghost To Most: Hmmm. I wonder if Adam has an opinion about the differences/similarities between violent religious extremists and child soldiers?
(((CassandraLeo)))
@Adam L Silverman: Well said, and thanks for this post.
I’d add as well, as a lengthy digression prompted by horseshoe theory, that anarchists are also far-left and are quite, quite different from communists, much less from right-wing authoritarians of any stripe. The stated goals of communists and anarchists may look quite similar on the surface, but they advocate radically different ways to get there. Anarchists have historically rejected Marx’s “dictatorship of the proletariat”, and I think history has shown that to be a good judgement, given how most communist countries have turned out over the long run. Simply put, people who are given power seldom wish to give it up. (Though of course, there have also been anarchist-communists such as Pyotr Kropotkin, who have rejected Marx’s tactics but signed onto most of his economics.)
My point is that horseshoe theory is probably a somewhat useful metric by which to judge authoritarianism, but it completely falls apart when evaluating anarchism, particularly since if you scratch a right-wing “libertarian”, you usually find some authoritarian beliefs under the surface. The only right-wing libertarian whom I’ll refer to as such without scare quotes is Radley Balko, and even he has some anti-choice stances, so still not that libertarian. (The term “libertarian”, as I never tire of pointing out, was actually stolen from anarchists in the 1970s; before then it had been used as a reference to anarchist communism specifically or anti-authoritarian stances more broadly. It mostly still has this meaning outside North America, which can be a particular source of confusion for Americans when you see a Brit like Matt Bellamy describe himself as a libertarian; Bellamy may be a conspiracy theorist, but his stances are generally left-wing.)
In any case, anarchism advocates for a complete flattening of unnecessary hierarchies, mostly meaning the current structure of capitalism (boss/employee etc.) and the current political system (while in all likelihood an anarchist system would still have some form of political representation for issues that affected thousands, millions, or billions of people, the representatives would be subject to recall at any time should their decisions displease the people they worked for). There would, of course, still be some necessary hierarchies such as parent/child, teacher/student, trainer/trainee, etc. – in other words, distinctions based on knowledge and experience rather than social status. Nonetheless, these would be subject to scrutiny, too, as they’re not exactly immune from abuse. This makes anarchism a very different proposal from any of the authoritarian systems that have existed throughout history. (And yes, there are proposals for how to deal with issues like crime as well, but this comment is long enough as it is.)
However, as pie-in-the-sky as anarchism sounds on paper, a lot of anarchists are quite pragmatic about their stances. Noam Chomsky isn’t exactly a huge fan of Democrats, but he still tells people to vote for them if there’s even a slight chance the Republicans will win. He correctly recognises that our system is subject to Duverger’s Law, and that abstaining from elections simply allows authoritarians to consolidate more power; the time to make an ideological statement is in the primary election, and further leftward pressure can be applied through labour activism, advertiser boycotts, popular pressure on elected officials, and so on. Additionally, many people arrive at these stances not because they have faith in humanity, but precisely because they don’t: if humans are too flawed to be trusted with power, it naturally follows that we should do our best to minimise the amount of power any one human can have.
I largely fall into this category, actually, not that I expect to ever see an anarchist society in my lifetime (I’m in my mid-30s). My actual voting behaviour might be described as that of a Yellow Dog Democrat, but I mistrust hierarchies more or less on principle. Some of this is due to my personal experiences, I expect. I’ve been in a job where a turnover in one supervisor changed my work experience from tolerable to outright misery. I’m certain I was a victim of ADA discrimination, in fact, but because I had neither reliable documentation nor a system of adequate incentives to make it worthwhile to take legal action, I ultimately had no recourse but to quit and find other work. This is an extremely common experience among disabled people, as I’ve since learned.
Because of this, I have a deep mistrust for any system that gives one person unaccountable authority over others, and the news stories I’ve seen since my unpleasant work experience have done nothing but reinforce that mistrust. A particularly noteworthy example is #MeToo. Hierarchies didn’t cause the sexual abuse, to be clear, but they made it much harder for its survivors to get any sort of accountability for those who had abused them. When the legal system refused to do anything, who else could Harvey Weinstein be reported to? He was the authority in his own company. There was a massive system of incentives that flat-out punished people for reporting his assaults and harassment for decades, and although Weinstein eventually did face accountability, many other people in similar situations have not; moreover, it shouldn’t take decades for abusers to face consequences for their actions.
So as a result, I have deep mistrust of both capitalism and of government, and my proposal is: With the possible exception of parent/child relationships, any system that provides one person any sort of authority over another should have some practical sort of recall button. That is, a student should be able to select another instructor if a teacher proves unacceptable; likewise for a person receiving on-the-job training. Similarly, representatives should be subject to recall should they abuse their power. The United States’ lack of a practical mechanism for recalling presidents is a fatal design flaw; given the threshold required for convicting in the Senate, impeachment is unlikely ever to occur, and the 25th Amendment is an even heavier lift. This is also why gerrymandering is such a serious problem: many representatives are essentially entrenched until they retire or until some external political force changes the political map.
None of this relates directly to the original post, so now, coming back to that: The majority of anarchists over the past century or so have largely rejected the use of force on principle. Of course, that wasn’t always the case; William McKinley was assassinated by an anarchist in the early 20th century, back before anarchists generally agreed upon this. However, partially due to pragmatism (violence gives anarchism a bad reputation) and partially due to ideology (using violence in furtherance of one’s goals is inconsistent with anarchism’s emphasis on personal autonomy), “propaganda of the deed” ultimately became a discredited stance among anarchists. You might see anarchists smash windows these days (and many other anarchists honestly regard the black bloc as an annoyance), but few if any accept violence against people.
The amount of right-wing terrorism currently dwarfs that of any other kind, even if we count Islamic extremists separately. And that’s particularly alarming, because our government is doing less than nothing to discourage this. Indeed, as Adam has pointed out, stochastic terrorism has almost certainly increased as a direct result of Individual-1’s presidency*.
That’s a pretty alarming note to end on, so I’ll close on a less depressing, albeit off-topic note. There’s a massive amount of misinformation out there about the Green New Deal; MSNBC helpfully put up this entire Chris Hayes town hall as a corrective. I recommend watching it if you haven’t already. There are also around twenty minutes of web exclusives that didn’t fit in the broadcast. Neither the GND nor the town hall are perfect, but they’re a lot better than, respectively, the alternatives and most of the other coverage.
J R in WV
@Adam L Silverman:
Wasn’t Stern also responsible for the bombs set off at the King David Hotel, which was appropriated by the Brits as their HQ to rule the Palistinian Mandate from? Ah, never mind, I see via search it was Irgun. More research indicates they may have been the same by 1946?
Love your commentary. So obvious to me that RWNJ Muslim terror and RWNJ Christianist terror are very nearly the same thing, and they are all anti-semetic, all anti-freedom, all misogynist patriarchal dictatorship loving. Same, same!
ETA fix things after more research…
Steve in the ATL
@Miss Bianca: you forgot to add “no relation”
Jay
@A Ghost To Most:
Antifia simply means anti-facists,
White Flour Clowns are antifia,
The Singing Grannies are antifia,
Teachers against Facism are antifia,
SOAR are antifia,
The Furry Army are antifia,
The Interfaith Coelition are antifia,
All these, along with the Black Bloc and the Reds, show up at all the protests, war protests, G20 protests, Wall Street Protests, anti Nazi Protests,
All the hysteria about “Antifia” is Faux News Reich Wing noise because the Black Bloc ( Anarchists) and the Reds, ( small letter socialists and communists) are willing to punch back at the violent Nazis.
Miss Bianca
@Steve in the ATL: No relation TO WHOM?
Oh, I give up. I’ve got no patience for nonsensical non-sequitur today.
Particularly not if either of you gentlemen is amusing yourself by imagining any connection between me and a p*rn actress.
Major Major Major Major
@Jay:
This is not true, any more than “alt-right” simply means “right-wingers who listen to grunge.” Doesn’t mean the self-styled antifa who believe in violent street brawls with everybody they deem ‘fascists’ are numerous, but they’re not a figment of the right-wing’s imagination.
schrodingers_cat
@Miss Bianca: That’s the USCIS lingo.
Alternative Fax, a hip hop artist from Idaho
@Brachiator: Ukraine, while threatened, is its own country now, so it’s Ukraine, without an article.
It’s kind of a big deal for people with Ukrainian ancestry, so I try to remind people who might mispronounce the name, as it were. It’s almost the colonial equivalent of deadnaming a person.
J R in WV
@Betty Cracker:
Some wasps really sting Hard!!
@trollhattan:
OT TL; DR our dogs would snap at bees and get stung inside when they swallowed them…
As a child, we lived on a high ridge, with little to no free water, except for my grandpa’s little concrete pond, a square swimming pool with no pump, filter, heater, just the concrete pond. Very cold when filled from the trout-stream supplied water system, every 6 weeks we drained it and we kids scrubbed the algae off with lysol, so it pretty much was blue lips ice cold 55 degrees at least half the time.
The puddles we grandkids splashed onto the apron around the tiny pool attracted honey bees, mostly, for the water, otherwise they had to go all the way down off the ridge to the creeks in the hollows below. The dogs of the family “hunted” the bees, snapping at them, and sometimes they would swallow one still alive enough to sting them internally. They would snap at their side when this happened, trying to kill the bee they could feel but not reach.
No one was harmed but the bees. Long time ago, now, 1950s and 60s.
schrodingers_cat
@Brachiator: Ruling BJP will lose seats compared to their haul last election. Whether it is enough to unseat Modi is anybody’s guess. There will be a lot of horse trading after the elections.
debbie
@LivinginExile:
The Coin of Fanatics. I can’t think of a fanatic who is fanatic about just a couple things. A fanatic is fanatic about everything. So they would by their nature all think alike.
Tenar Arha
@Gin & Tonic: Yeah. I’ve been pretty sure for a while that we’ve been badly recruiting police officers everywhere; IOW recruiting people who shouldn’t be given authority bc they want it/enjoy it too much. But I think police department history, traditions, and culture can probably exacerbate these authoritarian tendencies, and from everything I’ve read, Chicago continues to be an example of notoriously bad policing & legal impunity helped along by politicians like their current Mayor. (And I’m from the Boston area, where I was recently reminded by an old Onion article that we like to play “big city,” where I sorta just expect for more of Fed/local corruption stories to come out).
Roger Moore
@schrodingers_cat:
I know a few people who had to wait so long after their biometrics that they expired and had to do it again. I still don’t understand how fingerprints expire. Isn’t the point that they’re stable?
BC in Illinois
@SiubhanDuinne:
I was waiting for this to emerge.
A kudos to you.
debbie
@Gin & Tonic:
In my city, they don’t conduct pysch exams on candidates, which to me seems criminal.
Jay
@Major Major Major Major:
You are referring I suppose to the “Black Block”,
Funny thing, none of those arrested at the Inauguration Protests were convicted of any crimes,
None of those arrested at Charlottesville, were convicted of any crimes, they were all acquitted on the grounds of self defence.
None of those arrested in Portland, despite the Cops being in the bag for the Patriot Prayer Brand Nazi’s were convicted, they were all acqitted on the grounds of self defence.
You may not have noticed, the Cops arn’t going to protect you from a violent Nazi assault.
The “Black Bloc” are anarchists, which means that they are as organized as a herd of cats.
Anarchists havn’t killed anyone in North America in a long, long time.
Reichwing terrorism is the #1 cause of terrorism deaths in North America, with Radical Islam a faint #3.
When the Nazi’s are beating you with metal pipes in full view of the cops, it’s members of the Black Block, ( or the Spartacists, they wear red), who will pull them off of you and drive them away.
So, tell me again why I should be afraid of the Black Bloc.
rikyrah
Actually, it’s a HALF BILLION DOLLARS over the past 5 years ??
But, who’s counting
https://twitter.com/coreybking/status/1112748703360712704
Mary G
I know this is a dead thread, but I don’t want to pollute the kitty post with my rage at this:
They have no bottom.
schrodingers_cat
@Roger Moore: USCIS runs on fees from all the applications. Biometrics expiring must be for the GC application, depending on the category and your country of origin the wait can be more than a decade, between the initial approval and the final status change.
Brachiator
@(((CassandraLeo))):
The idea of an anarchist society is as goofy as being anti-vax or believing in a flat earth. I understand the idealism, I suppose.
Jay
@Major Major Major Major:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antifa_(United_States)
https://www.csis.org/analysis/rise-far-right-extremism-united-states
Antifia is a “boogyman” to the Reichwing and Faux Notnews because they are willing to punch the Nazi’s back.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@debbie: Well, there’s the Canadian Fanatics, here’s one of them.
Jay
@Brachiator:
Communal groups and even small towns and small Cities could be run on anarchist lines, in theory. Codified in law it may even be possible to last.
Anarchist communes however tend to fail over time because a bloc seizes power, often violating their own philosophies and rules for the selfish advantages of power.
rikyrah
Less Chris Hayes and more of the basics.. like constituent services ???
https://twitter.com/notcapnamerica/status/1112820276641841152
J R in WV
@Mary G:
I have to agree. I am frequently horrified by Supreme Court decisions, but this one seems especially horrible.
Are we going back to public hangings?
Will the crowd be able to take souvenirs?
Must the person being executed be pronounced dead before souvenir taking may commence? /s
I refer to the old southern tradition of picnics and souvenirs at old timey lynchings which actually seem to be OK with the RWNJ justices of the Supreme Court today!!
?BillinGlendaleCA
@J R in WV:
Yes.
Of course.
First come, first serve.
Major Major Major Major
@Jay: I know people who identify as black bloc, and others as antifa, and no, I am not mistaken.
ETA i should note that your own wiki link describes the ideology as focused on militant direct confrontation.
Kent
@Barbara:
Maybe in a US context. But there are plenty of contrary examples from around the world. Khumer Rouge, Shining Path, Colombian FARC, etc.
B.B.A.
@J R in WV: If we’re going to have capital punishment (which I’m against), we should bring back firing squads. Let’s not have any illusions about what we’re doing, like it’s somehow more “humane” to poison them with a needle.
The Pale Scot
Back in the Pre_Internet days I read an article that covered a gathering of Christian, Muslim and Jewish fundamentalists. They admitted that they were a bit uncomfortable about how much they had in common.
&
Around the same time my roomie and I went to a restaurant down the street that catered to the olds in search of a steak. It had a piano bar with a nasally dude playing George M. Cohan tunes. I want to the loo, when I came back my friend was sitting there with a stunned look on his face. What happened? John pointed to a gammon faced geezer wearing a pink Izod. He told me that there’s no such thing as UFOs, It’s the Russians, and the reason why we don’t hear about it is because the Jews control the media.
Brachiator
@Alternative Fax, a hip hop artist from Idaho:
In keeping with one of the themes of this thread (hoi polloi, the La Brea Tar Pits) it is only fitting that I made the mistake of adding the article.
debbie
@?BillinGlendaleCA:
Oy.
J R in WV
I’m pretty much against capital punishment mostly. As my dad said, once someone is in prison, if they commit another capital crime, I don’t think more time is the answer for those folks.
I don’t know why they don’t just use fentenyl patches, just put them on all over until the person being put down quits breathing, then wait 20 or 30 minutes with no pulse. No sticks, no losing the vein, etc.
My dog Happy, who I was with as she was put down the end of January because of an abdominal bleed, went out knowing I loved her and was holding and petting her as the vet pushed the sedative. Fast, painless. I don’t believe in pain as a punishment.
Brachiator
@Jay:
Human beings are apes. Apes are social animals. Rules emerge which participants must follow. Agreement or coercion is built into how things run. Or you go live in a cave by yourself.
Codified rules again imply agreement (social co-operation) or coercion. If you don’t like the codified rule, you go live in a cave by yourself.
Jay
“What many don’t know is that Cambridge Analytica has its origins in another company, SCL Group. It is a British military contractor, and when I first started working there CA did not exist as a structure at all. Our task when I joined was to map out and predict the spread of radical Islamic narratives online and to analyze how recruiters are radicalizing young men and coercing them to do terrible things. We would then build systems and tools to act as early warning signals, so that a military or civil agency could interfere with recruiting and radicalization operations in different parts of the world. It all changed as soon as Steve Bannon sat at the helm of the company. All the technologies that were designed to interfere with the effectiveness and cohesiveness of terrorist organizations got fully inverted. With a few tweaks, they were now used against voters in the American elections – we started looking at ordinary Americans the same way the military was looking at radicals, and the dirty game of disinformation began to unravel.
Initially our algorithms easily identified parts of the American population that were more narcissistic, neurotic and conspiratorial. They were then targeted with messaging that encouraged more conspiratorial and neurotic thinking and lured them into forums, chat rooms and Facebook groups with people who shared the same thinking – or oftentimes bots that were parroting the same narratives. Once these groups grew to include a couple of thousand members, local events would be set up. At that point, even if only 5 percent of users actually showed up to those events, that would be enough to form a tangible community where conspiratorial thinking was completely normalized. What started as a digital fantasy had become their reality. The exact same techniques that the military would use to undermine a narcotics or terrorist operation were being used reversely, to essentially create an American insurgency that then became what we now know as the alt-right.”
http://www.ekathimerini.com/239065/article/ekathimerini/community/christopher-wylie-real-war-is-being-fought-online
The Pale Scot
@??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??:
And there’s no 3 layer tropical forest canopy to soak up the napalm and cluster bombs
debbie
@?BillinGlendaleCA:
I joined a FB group over the weekend that shares old photographs. Great, I thought, I love old photos. I’m accepted, and I start scrolling through their page. Right away, there’s a 19th century photo of a Persian who has been condemned to death by being tied to the front of an actual cannon that they’re about to set off. JFC.
lgerard
@Miss Bianca:
The fact that Ms Trump was known for her lesbian porn makes it even better
Who knew Nazis were into that?
Jay
@Major Major Major Major:
From the wiki:
“The idea of direct action is central to the antifa movement. Antifa organizer Scott Crow told an interviewer: “The idea in Antifa is that we go where they [right-wingers] go. That hate speech is not free speech. That if you are endangering people with what you say and the actions that are behind them, then you do not have the right to do that. And so we go to cause conflict, to shut them down where they are, because we don’t believe that Nazis or fascists of any stripe should have a mouthpiece”.[8] A manual posted on It’s Going Down, an anarchist website, warns against accepting “people who just want to fight”. It furthermore notes that “physically confronting and defending against fascists is a necessary part of anti-fascist work, but is not the only or even necessarily the most important part”.[42]
Jay
Comment at #161 stuck in moderation.
rikyrah
https://twitter.com/marcushjohnson/status/1112814961686966272
Why no tax returns, Bernie???
?BillinGlendaleCA
@debbie: That’s why I stick to old LA photos, we just have pics of the mob hits.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@rikyrah: Come on, Jane’s working night and day on those returns to get them ready to release(and has been for the last 5 years).
Jay
@lgerard:
“Lesbian p€rn” isn’t made for lesbians and it often does not even include lesbian actresses.
Major Major Major Major
@Jay: ok, if you think that’s an accurate description of the Raging Grannies and other groups you describe as ‘antifa,’ whatever.
All I’m saying is that there are in fact groups who use that name who organize to attack people they’ve detemrmined to be fascists, and it’s not a *complete* fever dream of Bill O’Reilly’s.
Steeplejack (phone)
@Jay:
Does antifia have some specific meaning, or is it a typo that has infected your autocorrect?
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Steeplejack (phone): Wait, now there’s autocorrect viruses?
Brachiator
@Jay:
The question is whether it is made for lesbian Nazis and includes any lesbian Nazi actresses.
Oh, man, I just love throwing Trump lesbian Nazi into the google algorithm machine.
lgerard
@Jay:
You clearly know more about this genre then I do!
A Ghost To Most
@Major Major Major Major: I prefer to think of Antifa as true patriots with spines. You never see them until they are in front of a bunch of nazis.
Ruckus
@rikyrah:
First time I had to go on TV I was prepped for the interview. And it’s a good thing because no matter how I felt about it afterwards, I was not ready. Thing is I still had to actually do the interview. Still got asked the questions and still had to form my own words. For someone with a story to tell, like Lucy Flores this would be different. I’d bet she’s been interviewed before, and a story like this? Yeah, sure she had to be prepped. And bears play bridge in the woods when we aren’t looking.
A Ghost To Most
@Jay: Thanks.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Ruckus:
I knew it!
Ruckus
@Leto:
A few decades ago now 2 dudes stuck up an LA bank. Military body armor, much semi/auto fire power. Held off the LAPD fro some time because the cops had 6 shot revolvers, no body armor, and sgts had shotguns. Some consider that the start of the militarization of the police. And of course if the cops have that firepower then the shitheads have to have it as well. It’s an arms race to the bottom and nobody wins, not the cops, the bad guys or the unarmed public.
Ruckus
@A Ghost To Most:
@debit:
Go read his twitter. He’s still and always a republican. He just doesn’t like Trump. He still writes crap about democrats and it’s obvious that he’s not a friend, just less an enemy at the moment.
The Lodger
@Ruckus: The people who sell the guns. They win.
Jay
“Sword-wielding Trump fan wearing MAGA hat attacks skater outside San Francisco roller-rink”
https://www.rawstory.com/2019/03/sword-wielding-trump-fan-wearing-maga-hat-attacks-skater-outside-san-francisco-roller-rink/
(((CassandraLeo)))
@Brachiator: I suppose one might think that if one misreads the word anarchy as simply meaning “lacking a government”. In point of fact, it means “lacking leaders”, which is a quite different stance. The principal conceit of anarchism, at least for those who have moved beyond the Sex Pistols’ “break shit for the sake of chaos” stance, is actually that people should have a direct say over matters that affect them, and few anarchists in my experience actually advocate removing the government immediately, at least until sufficient non-government organisations exist to fulfil equivalent functions. Potential organisations might include charities along the lines of Occupy Sandy (which actually received praise in the mainstream press, up to and including the FTFNYT, for providing aid more effectively than many long-extant charities), worker-owned businesses, and similar structures. I do not find any of this contradictory to human nature, because human nature tends to be quite malleable; society plays a major part in conditioning people to be altruistic or selfish.
It might be more helpful to think of anarchism as voluntary socialism and as democracy without a state: that is, as direct democracy, and with workplaces organised by their workers rather than led by bosses. (Anarchism is in fact the oldest form of socialism, advocating for the means of production to be controlled directly by workers rather than by the state.) Obviously, of course, if people spent time voting on every potential decision, nothing would ever get done, particularly since networks of more than approximately 150 people are inefficient. However, the current structures of both representative democracy and capitalism also have the latter weakness, and have an additional weakness that the people in charge of them frequently know next to nothing about the subjects they’re in charge of. Obviously, Individual-1 is a textbook example of this, but in addition, many CEOs have little to no experience actually doing the things that their workers do on a day-to-day basis. And of course, the market is not particularly efficient, as something like 95% of start-ups fail, and many others are driven into oblivion by inept leadership like Edward Lampert’s at Sears and K-Mart, which is a textbook study in the intrinsic weaknesses of capitalism.
But obviously, there are logistical problems with organising a society of large numbers of people without a hierarchy, and I can see why a person unfamiliar with the theory that has developed around this problem might think it to be an oxymoron. There are a number of proposals that qualify as anarchist, such as participatory economy/politics, anarcho-syndicalism, and so on. I’m not going to get into all the details, as there are literally enough to write a book around, but TV Tropes, of all sites, actually has a really clear and thorough (albeit long) overview, and An Anarchist FAQ is even more thorough (and probably does qualify as a book at this point). Other potential resources are George Orwell’s non-fiction book Homage to Catalonia, which goes into some detail about how Anarchist Catalonia functioned for a time (though more of it is focused on the Spanish Civil War); and Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, a fantastic novel that depicts in some detail how a functional, albeit flawed, anarchist society might operate. (Le Guin, who had a family background in anthropology, based her novel partially on anarchist theory and, it seems, partially on historical examples of anarchist societies such as Anarchist Catalonia and Ukraine’s Free Territory. Given the novel’s recurrent wall metaphor, it is also unexpectedly topical today.)
As I’ve acknowledged, I find it unlikely that anything resembling this will ever exist during my lifetime, but I also find it a useful goal to work towards. If we don’t have a vision of something better, then what’s even the point of political activism? And in any case, I don’t really need others to adopt the word anarchism for their beliefs, as long as they’re on board with reducing the disparities in power within society. Many modern activist groups use cooperative, horizontally organised social networks rather than top-down hierarchies, even if their goals aren’t explicitly anarchist. This alone might not lead to an anarchist society, but if it ultimately leads to a less hierarchical one, that’s a major step in the right direction where I’m concerned.
@Brachiator: We share roughly as much of our DNA with bonobos as we do with chimpanzees. I don’t think one could accurately describe bonobo society as particularly coercive. Although they aren’t completely pacifist, they would much prefer to make love than war. Indeed, sex is practically a greeting for them, and they also seem to use it as a major form of conflict resolution. This isn’t to imply that all humans should become polyamorous or anything like that, but it is to say that our biology isn’t as hard-coded as a lot of people think. Surely no one would think to imply that Nordic society is more cooperative than American society purely as a matter of genetics. Upbringing plays a large part in conditioning people to be selfish or altruistic.
Given that most anarchist proposals don’t advocate for one set of laws to govern every anarchist society (apart from the basics like forbidding rape and murder), it’s unlikely that anyone who did not want to do so would be forced to live in a cave. Most proposals provide for resources to enable people who are dissatisfied with their current circumstances to move to communities with other, more like-minded individuals. This is why most proposals provide for multiple polities that would in all likelihood operate with wide variations, in a comparable fashion to the different U.S. states; the only actions broadly forbidden across the board in most proposals would be actions that harm others (or the environment more generally).
Jay
@Major Major Major Major:
“Antifa participants also protected Cornel West and various clergy from attack by white supremacists, with West stating he felt that antifa had “saved his life”.[69][70] Antifa activists also defended the First United Methodist Church, where the Charlottesville Clergy Collective provided refreshments, music and training to the counter-protesters and, according to a local rabbi, “chased [the white supremacists] off with sticks”.[69][71]
Snip,
On the other hand, historian and political organizer Mark Bray has said “Given the historical and current threat that white supremacist and fascist groups pose, it’s clear to me that organized, collective self-defense is not only a legitimate response, but lamentably an all-too-necessary response to this threat on too many occasions.”[96] Alexander Reid Ross, a lecturer in geography and an author on the contemporary right, has said that antifa groups represented “one of the best models for channeling the popular reflexes and spontaneous movements towards confronting fascism in organized and focused ways.”[97] Eleanor Penny, an author on fascism and the far-right, argues against Chomsky that “physical resistance has time and again protected local populations from racist violence, and prevented a gathering caucus of fascists from making further inroads into mainstream politics.”[94] Cornel West, who attended a counter-protest to the Unite the Right rally, said in an interview, “we would have been crushed like cockroaches if it were not for the anarchists and the anti-fascists,” describing a situation where a group of 20 counter-protesters were surrounded by marchers who he described as, “neofascists.”[98]
Protesting is “direct action”, so is doxxing.
When the Nazi’s attack, it’s the Anarchists and the Sparticists that defend the Raging Grannies.
It’s never the Cops.
The Pale Scot
@Adam L Silverman:
Most Prods are OK people, Wolf Tone etc. The DUP dedicated Orange Order types are standard issue xtian fundies. The only reason they aren’t committing acts of terrorism in the U.S. is that they think they still have a pedestal to stand on. A Eastern European said that Russians don’t feel Russian unless they have their boot on someone’s neck. Same thing with all these scum, domination, even if it’s only their pet, makes them satisfied
Jay
@Ruckus:
It was actually the formation of SWAT Teams that started the process of the militarization of Police Forces in North America,
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Militarization_of_police
Brachiator
@(((CassandraLeo))):
Government is simply a function of social organization at a larger scale. I understand your idealism, but ultimately I think it is pointless. As always, your mileage may vary.
Bonobos are still little understood. It was only relatively recently that they were understood to be a separate species from chimps. But like early observations of chimps, some scientists wrongly idealize their society and gloss over anything that is not pacifist and “positive.”
But even bonobo societies have leaders and social organization and internal rules. Individuals do not run amok and defer to those in charge (and I want to avoid the simplistic nonsense of alpha, beta, etc individuals).
anarchist society is largely a contradiction in terms. But I certainly would like to be able to observe any that you can point me to.
libertarianism, communism, anarchism, all nice fantasies. But not much more than that.
(((CassandraLeo)))
@Brachiator: I already mentioned two historical examples. Anarchist Catalonia is a particularly sterling case, but given the outcome of the Spanish Civil War, it didn’t last. The Soviets are just as much to blame as Franco’s forces on this count. Ukraine’s Free Territory had several characteristics of anarchism, though Nestor Makhno did qualify as a leader in some senses; however, he regarded his leadership as entirely military, and there was some arguable justification for this, given that the region was threatened by and ultimately absorbed into the Soviet Union. The greatest threat to these communities seems to have been from outside forces rather than from devolution of their own political systems.
In more modern times, several observers have argued that southern Mexico’s Zapatista Councils of Good Government and the communal assemblies in the Rojava (western Kurdistan) region of Northern Syria share many characteristics of anarchism. I’ve also seen the Sarvodaya Shramadana movement in Sri Lanka cited as “roughly anarchist in its principles”. I will admit that I still know relatively little about any of these examples; they are topics I intend to research more.
I acknowledged that bonobos are not entirely pacifist; they are, however, much more averse to coercion than most modern human societies are. It is of course inevitable that some people will wield more social influence than others; some people are simply naturally skilled at persuasion, and others learn how to do it much better than others do. However, I see absolutely no reason why we should codify such power disparities into law more than is absolutely necessary. If the law codifies some power disparities, it seems inevitable that those who benefit from those disparities will manipulate social structures to ensure they maintain and even increase it. That is, in fact, arguably the predominant factor in the history of the last 50 years or so of human society. The ultimate protection against these disparities would be to forbid them outright as a matter of law.
A Ghost To Most
@Ruckus: Agreed about Rick Wilson. Right now, we have a common enemy. It does not make us friends.
Any Rs telling Ds what to do can fuck right off.
PIGL
@Gin & Tonic: I suspect that is true for most police departments.
Dev Null
uh, swooping in here to comment having read only a few comments, and yeah, alcohol …
… but srsly …
Adam Silverman quotes Marcy Wheeler …
… approvingly?!? …
De Debbil… he be ice skatin’.
/snark
(No offense intended, Adam…)
Tom DeVries
In a bar in Bosnia, just after the war ended, so early 90s, a European diplomat told me, a journalist, that the IRA had been training in the Beqaa Valley with Hezbollah for years.
Ruckus
@Jay:
And that event was one of the events that caused the departments to think they needed a swat team and better armed officers.
Joey Maloney
@Adam L Silverman: I know your grammatical heart is in the right place, but no, the word is הגנה, “Haganah”, meaning defense. It just happens to start with the same sound as the article. “HaHaganah” is perfectly correct.
One of the four railway stations in Tel Aviv is “HaHaganah”, found on “Haganah Street”.