the terror organization known as the so-called united states
U.S. actually the heel all along
good guys actually obscure village of farmers in remote province of China
First Libertarians and now crazy Leftists? am I the only one who likes roads?
This is an okay argument for white nationalism honestly
Legitimately, one of the arguments by White Nationalists these days is that only white men (on average, and maybe Asians?) want roads and other infrastructure of prosperity, so it’s probably best not to disparage essential infrastructure like roads as being the domain of white men.
can’t have viciously genocidal warfare between the tribes if you’ve already eradicated all the other tribes, tapping head meme etc.
Dude,
Do you realize what the optimal strategy strategy is under the Collective Intergenerational Justice certain political factions love so much?
Total extermination. There is no giving all the land back if there is no one left to give it back to.
Self reblogging to add a thing I found:
http://overland.org.au/previous-issues/issue-208/feature-malcolm-harris/
The account @Anti_Racism_Dog didn’t last long. Twitter suspended it quickly, a fate reserved only for the most aggressive, abusive and hateful users. What could a dog – an anti-racist one, at that – do to deserve it? @Anti_Racism_Dog had one real function: to bark at racist speech on Twitter. The account responded to tweets it deemed racist with the simple response ‘bark bark bark!’ Sometimes it would send wags to supporters but that was pretty much it.
For the short time it lasted, it was amazing to watch how people reacted to @Anti_Racism_Dog. The account would respond mostly to what the sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva would call ‘colour-blind racism’, that is, racisms that are generally right-libertarian in orientation and justified through appeals to supposedly objective discourses like science and statistics. It’s a notoriously insidious white-supremacist ideology, a virulent strain evolved specifically to resist anti-racist language. Colour-blind racism defends itself by appeals to neutrality and meritocracy, accusing its adversaries of being ‘the real racists’. Although its moves are predictable, they’re hard to combat rhetorically since they’re able to ingest the conventional opposition scripts. Colour-blind racists feed on good-faith debate, and engaging with them, especially online, is almost always futile. But when they’re barked at by a dog, one whose only quality is anti-racism, they flip the fuck out. They demand to be engaged in debate (‘Tell me how what I said was racist!’) or appeal to objective definitions (‘The dictionary says racist means X, therefore nothing I said was racist’), but @Anti_Racism_Dog just barks.
@Anti_Racism_Dog inverted the usual balance of energy in online dialogs about race. Precisely because the dominant global discourse is white-supremacist, it is rhetorically easier to make a racist argument than an anti-racist one. Look at almost any comment thread or discussion board about race and you can see anti-racists working laboriously to be convincing and to play on their opponents’ ‘logical’ turf, and racists repeating the same simple lines they were taught (‘I didn’t own slaves’, ‘I’m just stating the facts’, ‘The Irish were persecuted too’, etc.) ‘Trolling’ as a certain kind of internet harassment is tied to time: the successful troll expends much less time and energy on the interaction than their targets do. It’s the most micro of micro-politics, an interpersonal tug of war for the only thing that matters. But have you ever played tug of war with a dog?
A true troll doesn’t have a position to protect because to establish one would leave it vulnerable to attack, and playing defence takes time. @Anti_Racism_Dog, by fully assuming the persona of an animal, was invulnerable to counter-attack. You can’t explain yourself to a dog and you look like an idiot trying. The only way to win is not to play but this is the colour-blind racist’s Achilles Heel: they’re compelled to defend themselves against accusations of racism. It’s the anti-racist argument that gives them content; theirs is an ideology that’s in large part a list of counter-arguments. After all, white-supremacists are already winning – their task now is to keep the same racist structures in place while making plausibly colour-blind arguments against dismantling them. @Anti_Racism_Dog was empty of anything other than accusation and so left its targets sputtering.
The account served a second purpose: as a sort of anti-racist hunting dog. @Anti_Racism_Dog quickly attracted a lot of like-minded followers who understood the dynamics at play. Whenever it would start barking at another user, this was a cue to the dog’s followers to troll the offender as well. There’s only so much one dog can do alone. Colour-blind racism is particularly dangerous because it isn’t immediately visible as such. It provokes good-faith discussion from liberals about what counts as racism, muddying the water. But @Anti_Racism_Dog’s strategy draws new lines about what constitutes acceptable discourse on race, placing colour-blind racists on the other side by speaking to them like an animal. What would be taken as totally insane in flesh space can be infuriatingly clever online.
THIS ARTICLE HAS TEETH
I WANT ANTI RACISM DOG BACK
fuck twitter Im going to go delete mine
useless piece of shit it is
Ngl, this makes me feel a lot better about the ridiculous amount of time I spend tryin to counter racist bullshit in comments sections.
Bark at racists online 2k17
This is amazing. I want something like this, but it barks completely at random, and when you reply to it, somebody else automatically berates you for not listening to it and believing properly.
Maybe this has already happened.
The obvious exploit here is to accuse anti-racism-dog of classism/sexism/antisemitism/ageism/ableism or literally anything else. Anti-semitism-dog cannot defend itself.
Maybe do it in a friendly-reminder-callout-uwu way and let people know that the guy behing anti-racism-dog is 41 years old, has poor grooming, jerks off to anime titties, ships two underage characters, or draws problematic fanart.
If anti-racism-dog works, it will make the discourse worse, give its enemies ammunition, and eventually eat itself.
If it does not work, all it does is signal boost and shametweet people on twitter, use its follower base to incite harassment against its targets, embroils its follower base in exactly the kind of argument they want to avoid, and make their enemies look sane in comparison.
Dear OP,
My assessment of the validity of online racism accusations has just decreased. Again. If it keeps getting worse because of people like OP and that twitter account, it may eventually flip negative.
That is a bad thing, OP. Literal Richard Spencer himself said that he can openly call himself a Nazi because so many people throw around the term willy-nilly that no one thinks it means real Nazis anymore. Abusing terms destroys them. Some of those terms actually have value.
One antibiotic resistant super-bacteria has already been created. And by that, I mean that an Orange Internet Meme has been elected President.
These actions have consequences.
Sincerely,
Mitigated Chaos
All kinds of pop culture concepts cross the Atlantic Ocean and I’m fine with that. Some stay where they are and never make it here. I don’t think buying milk in 3.78 litre jugs will ever become the norm here.
Political science and activism concepts are constantly exported from the US. People here start to think in these concepts. Academics in the US get feedback about the situation here and interpret it through the lens of the status quo in the US.
I used to get exasperated at people using identity politics from the US without adapting the terminology (calling Frenchmen of Algerian descent African-American for example). I used to get exasperated at people assuming that health insurance was the most pressing concern in every country, or that any EU country could learn anything from Obamacare.
People are starting to assimilate Trump’s Mexican Border Wall Discourse in the context of the refugee crisis in Europe. For once I wish it was the other way round. I wish people in the US would say that immigration from Mexico is primarily a humanitarian concern, because of ISIS, but many “Mexicans” are actually from Morocco and Afghanistan. This is how it feels.
I wish people would sometimes act as if the main problem in US politics right now is too many parties in parliament, haphazard privatisation of state-run heavy industry, too much cheap but empty housing, organised crime in local government, or austerity measures imposed on the US by Germany, France and Britain.
Americans are acting like WE elected Trump TOO. Some of this might be in order to act as if THEY TOO elected Macron.
Just saw this on Branko’s twitter and all I can think of is “What’s the economic growth of a million ‘steam slaves’ with no materials for them to process?“ Does someone need to explain the concept of “Necessary but not sufficient“ here?
Having those machines means you will absolutely need as much raw material as you can get, if that’s the bottleneck, it’s easy to see that more industrial capacity could increase the level of labor exploitation.
One thing here he reaches right up to but does not realize is that colonies are useful precisely because they are so far away. You can keep your pampered well-fed skilled artisans in Britain, and so when the labor uprising happens in Africa they’re not at risk or even bothered. That’s in addition to the fact that having resources be distant makes the whole process very profitable and therefore gives capacity and desire for more intense investment
Also talks about the ”heydays of capitalist growth in the West in the period 1945–1973“ without commenting on the fact that it ended. I can easily argue that wasn’t actually stable and it was a weird period in multiple ways.
I feel I could be convinced that slavery/colonization/whatever wasn’t actually necessary for industrialization but people are so bad at arguing it.
You see, I’m the other way around. Ever since I read that “they found harder ways to work the slaves to get more cotton” was bullshit and actually much of the productivity growth was due to breeding better cotton, I have been even more suspicious of claims that slavery/colonization/etc was required as a class.
They seem less about a study of the matter, and more about saddling the West with an infinite moral debt that can never be repaid, and excusing the impact of culture on development.
I keep thinking this shit isn’t real but it is.
The fucking colors and type styles too! Like… I’m not sure how to explain it, but those type styles/color palette really says “hipster” to me . I feel alienated.
It isn’t self-parody, but this is how I imagine the alt right imagine the democrats imagining themselves.
(Note: Rehashing things I’ve said before, definitely a late-night rant)
I still find the fact that 46% of the country decided to vote for Donald fucking Trump of all people for President to be completely baffling at a gut level.
How could anyone possibly have been comfortable voting for such an obviously mean, selfish, low-IQ, inexperienced, incoherent, authoritarian, and unserious person? How could otherwise educated, moral, rational people, have voted for this man (as many otherwise well-educated, moral, and rational Republicans did)? I still feel like I live in a bad satire of America rather than the real world.
Even if I grant every critique of his opponent, Hillary Clinton, and I try to inhabit the mindset of a person with conservative policy views, and I concede all the frustration with the cultural left that many on the right feel, I still don’t see how there is even a contest between which one would be preferable to run our military, our diplomacy, and our nuclear weapons. Like shouldn’t basic respectability and competence trump all else when the other candidate completely fails on those metrics?
I feel a deep shame whenever I think about the fact that such a horrible man is the face of my nation. I didn’t feel that way about Bush, I would not have felt that way about McCain or Romney.
Something is rotten about the right in this country, something so rotten that they all thought that somehow Trump was a lesser of evils choice. There were signs of this rot earlier: the rise of Fox News, talk radio, and Breitbart, the crazier elements of the Tea Party (Sharon Angle, Christine O’Donnell, Todd Aiken), the radicalization of Republicans in Congress and state legislatures, but it wasn’t clear until Trump how deep the rot went.
The left is by no means perfect, not even close, and if this were another time with a more normal President I’d be more comfortable focusing more of my time on that. But there really is no equivalence between the left’s dysfunction’s and the right’s. Right now there really is something truly different, something scary, something very big and uniquely bad going on with the right at a systemic, sociological level that I don’t really understand no matter how much I obsess about it, at least at an emotional level.
Half the country was willing to accept authoritarian rhetoric. Half the country was willing to accept incoherence and stupidity and lying. Half the country was willing to accept meanness, endorsement of sexual assault, and racist rhetoric. Most Republican voters are not authoritarians, racists, sexists, liars, or mean, but they didn’t mind voting for it at all.
That’s terrifying.
I want you to imagine that there was a group within your country that had been mass kidnapping kids for sex trafficking with more or less impunity, for years.
The police refused to do anything about it. The politicians not only claimed it wasn’t happening, but celebrated bringing more of that group. The media gaslit you and said it wasn’t happening.
In fact, when you raised objections, you were sent for ideological retraining.
Of course, I’m not talking about the United States.
But suppose someone in the United States did know about such a thing happening. And the same cycle of “but it isn’t real” was being used by the same ideological groups to claim that what happened in another developed country was impossible, that it would never happen, and certainly wasn’t happening there and could not possibly happen here.
Approximately how many layers of “FUCK YOU” would they want to send those ideological groups as a message? Why on Earth would they care about those groups’ criticisms when said groups are a bunch of lying hypocrites?
Quite frankly, if you’re actually baffled that they could put Trump in the Whitehouse, you don’t understand Trump voters as well as you think you do.
And those Very Serious People that Clinton was the representative of? Clinton wanted even more involvement in Syria than Trump has so far actually provided. She said as much right before he missile striked that airbase, and we all know that the MSM would have been chanting “YASS, QUEEN, SLAY! #STRONGWOMEN” the whole time.
I didn’t vote for Trump, but the Serious People have worn down the value of being perceived as serious. If we get through to 2020 with no new big wars, I’m going to chalk it up as a victory.
A LOT of right-wing stuff right now is designed to wind people up.
This is part of why some Left/Liberal organizations are having identity issues over whether they’re the Cool Subversives still. It used to be that the right wing were the uptights and the left wing were the shitposters, but not anymore.
Of course, part of the issue with whether the guy in the CNN story is an actual wannabe doxxer, is that there is no reason to trust that Leftists (that you don’t know personally) are telling the truth. They lie so fucking much as a group. They lie about the conditions in Europe. They lie about sexism. They lie about who is and is not a Nazi, and then commit violence based on those lies. They twist statistics, by, for example, making “made to penetrate” not be counted as rape and then using those same stats to claim that sexual violence by women does not exist.
The issue here being that for the correction to go around, there has to be some credibility. That credibility has been burned repeatedly, much like we shouldn’t trust anything non-trivial that former President GWB says (or many of the GOP pols generally).
It isn’t that the Trumpists don’t care about the truth more than other ideological groups, it’s that they know their enemies control the loudspeakers and non-governmental institutions, and they expect their enemies to always lie and not care about the truth. It’s similar to the phenomena of right-wingers shitposting because they know they’ll be called Fascists regardless, so they’ve decided to wind people up over it and make them look ridiculous.