the alt-right

It's so hard to take any of this Pepe shit seriously, but I guess that makes it effective as an insidious viral meme. Its hard to Condemn something so patently ridiculous. the actual meaning is shrouded in so many layers of sarcastic abstraction as to be indistinguishable from self parody.

Online harassment and firing rifles in pizza places is easy enough to take seriously.

Obviously the 1st amendment is pretty unique in its extent, but our (relatively) liberal western democracy is not radically different from, say, England's or Germany's. And yet, neither of those countries have the same freedom of speech that we have here. For example - and someone correct me if I'm wrong - in England libel laws are nowhere near as generous as they are here, and in both the UK and Germany, hate groups and hate paraphernalia can be or are often outright banned in a way that doesn't (or can't) happen here. The question I have, especially for board Europeans, is have these limitations on speech at all adversely affected life in these countries? Does the press lack the freedom to report, well, freely? Are people unable to speak their mind? Is hate speech punished? How is it punished? If someone marched in full Nazi regalia in Berlin, what would happen to them? And how has the advent of internet anonymity changed things, if at all? I'd love to know what the lack of a protection as extreme as the 1st Amendment means in practice.

Yes, it was a great piece by Tara Isabella Burton. First time in ages I've admired a piece like that. Probably helps that she writes fiction for the sort of ghost story and science fiction magazines I'd read.

Just discovered Laurie Penny writes science fiction but I'm not sure I'd like her.

Well, you could begin by not referring to the UK as England. Libel laws in England, in this case it's appropriate, are set up to make rich people even more richer, that's why oligarchs from every shithole imaginable queue up to use the courts over here.

From the outside looking in, the USA doesn't appear to be appreciably 'freer' than other Western democracies, it might well be, but not so's I've noticed tbh.

xpost Sorry about conflated UK/England. But anyway, you half answer my question. How do libel laws in England make rich people richer, and more pertinently, have they hindered the press?

And we do have freedoms here they lack elsewhere - just this week England banned some neo-Nazi group, which is why it was fore in mind - but I'm not sure how being legally allowed to march with a Nazi flag makes our freedoms any better, which was partly my question.

It certainly can hinder the press. I'm not sure the First Amendment is all that unique in countries with a written constitution - we don't have one.

Libel laws are a pretty terrible way to make yourself richer. Making lawyers richer, yes.

I'm generally in favour of them, though they are open to abuse. On the whole, if the press maliciously or recklessly prints something defamatory about someone that they can not defend in court, there should be a price to pay. The down side is the chilling effect where the cost of defending an action, even if there is a reasonably good chance that you could win, makes journalists more reluctant to print things they may have a reasonable belief are true. That cuts both ways though - most defamatory content is never litigated as it's not worth the risk of bankrupting yourself to fight.

TS: freedom to march down the street with a Nazi flag vs freedom to drink a beer in public

i think our press seems to be doing just fine printing whatever it wants to tbh

Just chiming in that the Apocalypse Whatever thing is indeed excellent

You can't drink a beer in public in Glasgow either fwiw.

OK erm... freedom to cross a street wherever the hell you want to?

lots of UK places won't allow open carry in the city centre at least

which is racist really cos Poles seem to need a can of Tyskie on them at all times

pretty sure you'll go to jail in germany for walking down the street in nazi regalia

yeah, or for putsching in a beerhall

which is racist really cos Poles seem to need a can of Tyskie on them at all times

Na zdrowie!

so that's how you spell that

And we do have freedoms here they lack elsewhere - just this week England banned some neo-Nazi group, which is why it was fore in mind - but I'm not sure how being legally allowed to march with a Nazi flag makes our freedoms any better, which was partly my question.

in theory the idea is that if you have the power to ban A there's a slippery slope that gives you the power to ban B or C which are things that maybe we don't want banned. in practice maybe it's not crazy to say that everything should be legal unless there's a specifically good case to ban it. which is why i've never found holocaust denial laws in places like germany particularly unreasonable - it's not like it's confusing why they've banned the topic, even tho as an american i want to be a free speech radical it's not like the historical circumstances of ww2 germany are therefore going to lead them to ban moon landing denial or whatever. tho even then i mean what if they're like "and bc of our history w/ communism we're banning soviet paraphernalia too." and where do the lines of either of these get drawn - i mean maybe you should be allowed to call for fascism as a system of government as long as you don't link it to the aesthetics of the Nazi party, and similarly for Communism (in this theoretical regime) as long as you're not specifically name-checking Stalin. there are just so many problems that maybe the US is right and it's best to just make it all legal.

tho of course it's not all legal here either cf fires in theaters, fighting words, incitement to violence etc

fwiw I think the neo-Nazi group banned this week was banned due to incitement to violence.

our freedoms are pretty idiosyncratic in the US and i assume the product of our unique circumstances. speech + religion are radically free both bc of our bill of rights but also bc they were the premise upon which emigration from England was justified. guns are radically free bc we were a colonial settler society and you need guns when you're living on the frontier, and again bc the circumstances of the birth of our country which involved an armed revolt against the monarchy. otoh the founders of this country were looking for religious freedom bc they were pretty religious which is why our abortion laws and drinking laws etc are so fucked up. (obv this is more complicated and there's legacies of stuff like prohibition which wasn't exclusively about religion.)

It's worth bearing in mind that National Action was proscribed as a terrorist organisation, rather than simply being 'banned', that they provide combat training and that they have been linked to at least one murder.

The laws on walking down the street with a Nazi flag are fairly complex and, to some extent, arbitrary. The far right does stage protests, and is allowed to do so, but can be stopped from, for example, organising marches in Jewish areas. They would also be subject to general and very broad 'public order' laws designed to stop people causing alarm and harassment.

xps

we famously allowed a group of neo-nazis to stage a march through an area w/ a lot of survivors just to demonstrate how committed we were to the ideal

Mordy iirc and i can't be arsed to do the research right now but firearms were equally free in the UK before and after the War of Independence, i seem to remember UK firearms controls coming late in the 19th century tho i could be wrong datewise

hey SV Spiked says National Action isn't a terrorist organization so i don't know man

pretty sure you'll go to jail in germany for walking down the street in nazi regalia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strafgesetzbuch_section_86a
You can't display a Daesh flag, either.

Ben Shapiro was on Dave Rubin's show and said Yiannopoulos chickened out of a debate with him. Also that Yiannopoulos believes all taboos should be broken to fix everything, so Shapiro asked Rubin to dare Yiannopoulos to say the N-word on his show. Rubin said he would do that but I'd be surprised if he did.

http://www.ligotti.net/showthread.php?t=11453

The response to me posting that article.

he seems pretty bright - you should invite him to post on ilx. we could use some ideological diversity.

He also called Ibrahim R Ineke (a comic artist I'm friends with) less than an ant or a fish because he's a Muslim. Advocated bombing muslims and he's into "racial realism"

He seems to identify as Persian - am I misreading him?

I asked him now but I have no idea if he'd go for it. He does identify as Persian and he's not white.

ppl who identify as 'persian' include some of the world's most committed racial supremacists. they claim to be the 'master race', the 'original western race' etc

lol @ mordy's first post there

Yeah it's where the term aryan comes from but I wonder bout his tiepoih
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Religious beliefs

It's strange, two years ago he was obsessed with eastern mysticism and now, all that stuff on the thread I linked.

He said he's not joining here, he's started his anti-Islam stuff against Ibrahim and the thread will doubtless be deleted within a day. I'm amazed he hasn't been banned yet.

Yeah it's where the term aryan comes from but I wonder bout his tiepoih
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I wonder bout his tiepoih
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too

ha i wonder if it's better to leave that as is without explanation & allow u to fill it w/ yr own esoteric meaning or admit that i was composing it on Zing in the rain while trying to get my recalcitrant daughter into her carseat and that was the result

def thought 'tiepoih' was a cool hebrew concept. the rest is just suggest ban, baby

Kids, eh?

better than pets amirite

more like the alt-shite

The heck is that messageboard

It's the Thomas Ligotti forum. Ligotti is one of the biggest figures in modern weird/horror fiction and he got a book in penguin classics recently. He's probably the most famous anti-natalist and he's big on pessimism too. We discuss all that and lots of related stuff. The Persian guy (or a moderator) deleted most of his posts in the thread, so it makes no sense now.

Nick Land is also into all that stuff I think. I think those guys are few and far between but nihilist posturing often goes together with fascistic ideas.

Is N1ck L4nd famous for something other than being NRx/fascist?