the alt-right

there was a ton in there that was interesting/revelatory as to the closeness between these different right wing orgs

the redemption angle doesn't play, there's vague overtures towards owning what she's said in the past and taking responsibility for it, but what's she really doing except...saying vague things? they can photograph her like a wide-eyed innocent but trying to push it slightly towards the "a corrupted person comes to their senses" is fitting a square peg into a round hole. with her right-wing shit she escalated herself, she wasn't escalated by others.

i know dick all about Allegheny College but man just imagine feeling aggrieved & inferior to wealthy greek assholes in college and deciding to saddle up w the likes of... tucker carlson and richard spencer.

The video of Tommy Robinson getting milkshaked in Bury. So. Good. pic.twitter.com/3HpxtxtZH2

— Henry Langston (@Henry_Langston) May 2, 2019

That Union Square egging was great too.

yeah he must be furious and embarrassed to have millions of his enemies talking about him

Milkshakes only make him stronger, more powerful

That's actually the milkshaking in Warrington - the one in Bury was yesterday.

He absorbs eggs and uses the albumen as fuel to make his hate burn ever brighter

So he can run away even faster from Lancastrians shouting "Are you a ponce?" at him.

social media has been a non-stop disaster for the right - thank god we have it, otherwise how would we fight them?

And your point is, caller?

The left is platforming the otherwise obscure Yaxley-Lennon by noting that he keeps getting publicly owned

fernando hierro with another hot take

aye it should be a half-brick instead of a milkshake, it's still good but

Hot Takes and Milkshakes

I just can't really see how this kind of attention is bad for a figure like TR. He doesn't even have to make his own viral videos etc.

That doesn't equate to condemning the act IRL - just I think he gets a net gain from any publicity.

Call me a hapless boob but I'll take this over Newsnight spending 20 minutes trying to explain or understand the concerns of his followers.

every response to a fascist brings attention to them though? i would agree with "just ignore him" as a policy if we were talking about the halcyon days of EDL demos in provincial cities with like 6 eejits turning up, but ol' yaxley-lennon the west brit has a sizable following

Yeah that’s a bolted horse

it's a bit chicken and egg but i find it hard to see how this strategy of mass sharing isn't beneficial ultimately. i mean, his rise is quite tied to social media and it's hard not to say that reaction to him is part of the cycle.

i mean, i'm not going to go to whatever underbelly and find out, but if i ask myself is he (a) desperate for this milkshake video to be taken down or (b) already using it or planning to use it for further promo, the answer seems fairly obvious.

he's top trending on twitter right now - the independent story comes up first with his electoral poster as the main pic. if lolling at this type of person on twitter stops them, why are they becoming more popular?

i'm not saying 'just ignore him' but it does seem like we maybe need to properly be selective about our behaviour, which seems almost impossible.

some good news!

Facebook just banned Laura Loomer, Infowars, Paul Joseph Watson, and many more https://t.co/nKJwRbT4V7

— Will Sommer (@willsommer) May 2, 2019

"Milo" banned too, pour one out etc.

aye it should be a half-brick instead of a milkshake, it's still good but

― findom haddie (jim in vancouver), Thursday, May 2, 2019 2:33 PM (seven minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

No half measures.

The idea that throwing milkshakes at Tommy Robinson will just ignite his own followers misses that political violence is rooted in the far-right. They aren't retaliating when they assault minorities. They do so as thugs. Heavy street presence is what beats them back.

— R.A.S | رابّيل (@abrownrabbit95) May 2, 2019

got a Washington Post alert that said "FB bans far-right figures like Milo, Farrakhan, etc," before getting a correction that changed "far-right" to "extremist," probably because a lot of people on the right complained about Farrakhan being called "far-right."

He’s so old. Is he still active on twitter?

Alt-Right-adjacent ghouls freaked out that Farrakhan was finally correctly labeled as a figure on the right, and Wapo caved, shameful. pic.twitter.com/EFGQVMWzEP

— Eli Valley (@elivalley) May 2, 2019

So when will the WaPo correctly label Neil Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas as "extremists"?

so i know the thread has moved on but i haven't, i want to talk a little more about forgiveness

i can't speak for anyone else but in my case when i don't forgive ex-nazis it's not because i'm cruel or vindictive or don't believe in giving people a second chance. i want to forgive people, particularly, for some odd reason, people who happen to look like me. forgiveness feels good to me. choosing not to be kind to someone who's down on their luck feels bad.

to not forgive is a struggle, it's something i have to remind myself to do, an unpleasant thing i've had to learn not to do over time. i remember when obama was elected and there were plenty of people who wanted to hold gwb and his administration accountable for all the things they did, and i was right there with the people dismissing them for being vindictive, saying his presidency was over, we can't be stuck in the past like the republicans were/are about clinton, no point in cadaver synods

that attitude didn't really work out, i don't think, in practice. in 2016, yeah, i wanted to forgive trump voters, wanted to heal. i've cut people out of my life who i love and didn't want to cut out of my life. i wanted to forgive them, but i couldn't, because there was no acknowledgment of wrongdoing, just a series of excuses accompanied by a dogged belief that they should be released from the consequences of their words and deeds. as of 2019, this has become a continuing decision which is painful on a continuing basis, an open wound i'm not allowing to heal.

because without contrition, i can't forgive, only excuse. with contrition things are different. the painful lesson i've had to learn is that white people apparently _do_ have the practical ability to "forgive" people for being nazis despite not the fact that white nationalism doesn't actually pose any sort of a threat to them. white people also, apparently, have the ability to absolve nazis of the consequences of their words and deeds. these are terrible things which need to stop. which means, again in practical terms, that i as a white person need to quit doing that.

rusho otm

Good post, rush.

In my experience, it's the other way around: forgiveness does not come easily to most, even when contrition is involved. And it is indeed a necessary condition – unless you're, say, a practicing Christian, there's no reason to even attempt forgiveness without it. I doubt anyone itt believes otherwise.

if you can't trust ppl not be nazis I don't know how you can trust ppl to have a sensible working idea of accountability

"Forgiveness" (more or less) of the Confederacy is what started the slow unravelling of the American experiment, with the greatest expansion of human rights in our history soon followed by decades of contraction, with the ideological divide increasingly codified.

truth

"Forgiveness" (more or less) of the Confederacy is what started the slow unravelling of the American experiment, with the greatest expansion of human rights in our history soon followed by decades of contraction, with the ideological divide increasingly codified.

― Josh in Chicago

i'm more cynical and would argue that the american experiment was a ticking time bomb from the start. reconstruction failed to heal the wounds caused by founding a nation with race-based chattel slavery encoded into its constitution but i'm not sure the damage was actually reparable

white northerners' abandonment of black lives - almost always justified on grounds other than racial grounds - accompanied by the acceptance of the "lost cause" propaganda lie (and its accompanying lies, like the whopper of "the civil war wasn't about slavery") - did serve to give the south victory in defeat.

In my experience, it's the other way around: forgiveness does not come easily to most, even when contrition is involved. And it is indeed a necessary condition – unless you're, say, a practicing Christian, there's no reason to even attempt forgiveness without it. I doubt anyone itt believes otherwise.

― pomenitul

even when i was a practicing christian (which experience taught me a lot about the power of forgiveness) i found it meaningless to forgive someone who didn't believe they'd done anything wrong. i typically outsourced that work to god, who i took to be more equipped for that sort of thing.

I don't know what "forgiveness" is, short of an abrogation of the call for revenge, our surest sense of justice. To forgive is to concede our role in realizing justice, to let someone else worry about making things right. Whether the person is contrite is only psychologically relevant.

I don't know what the context of this discussion is, though---whether one should forgive racists who seek forgiveness, particularly if one is of the same race as the racist? We wonder: how to make things right? And are we well-disposed to do so, or are we likely to remain complicit in injustice despite our best intentions? The making things right is what matters; forgiveness comforts the wrongdoer, but does that confort contribute to making things right?

Forgiveness can comfort the wronged, too. It enables the letting go of corrosive resentments.

Booming post, rusho.

The legitimate transition from an embrace of Nazi ideals to genuine contrition wrt someone who's already well into adulthood would involve such a level of sustained work and honest reflection that, while I wouldn't say it's impossible, it seems unlikely to happen terribly often. People generally do not change unless they really really want to, unless they see genuine value in becoming a whole other person. Far too often, the attitude of these ex-Nazis seems to be more like 'oops, I might have gone a little bit too far with or been a little too vocal about my extremist views, my bad' rather than a wholesale repudiation of who they were (and likely, to some extent, still are). So, yeah, my own forgiveness is going to be pretty hard-won in those circumstances.

whether one should forgive racists who seek forgivenes

My problem with foregiving these racists is that, when they suffer slight consequences for their racist beliefs, such as a loss of job (rather than loss of teeth/jaw/ability to eat solid food like they deserve), what they invariably are seeking is not forgiveness, but another job.

Eye for an eye in the sense of proportional justice is also encouraged as a practicing Christian, no?
Even under a secular context, "tit-for-tat then forgive" is a game theoretic solid strategy.
I feel like the emboldening of alt-right sensibilities is the result of broader civilized culture's forgetting the tit-for-tat part and skipping directly to forgive.

I feel perfectly comfortable with not forgiving any of these people, actually. By the time they go on their journey of mistakes and regrets they’ve likely already contributed in some way to making another innocent person’s life worse. I don’t feel bad about this at all - they don’t know I exist and I don’t owe forgiveness to anyone who’s spent time spreading hate and bigotry which, as I think we all know by now, goes way beyond words.

acc to jewish tradition you can't forgive someone for something they did to someone else

(even god cannot. if you harm another person you need forgiveness from them - no matter how much you repent to god he cannot grant it.)

I guess it’s arguable someone in a white nationalist/racist/ Neo-Nazi movement agitating publicly for their aims is affecting all of us?

that's true but obviously some people are affected a lot more than others

if you can demonstrate real harm maybe but i don't really recall atm whether a category call "crimes against the community" really exist in the sense that you're talking about xp and nb that even "real harm" has to be an actual real thing. not liking what they're agitating for (even if it's pure evil) doesn't rise to the level of a sin against you. it would have to be an actual damage (it could be an emotional damage but it would have to be direct + personal).

iirc in one of Wiesel's books he talks about a Nazi who begs him for forgiveness and Wiesel rejects him on the basis that the Nazi never harmed him personally and he can't forgive the Nazi for the harm he did to other Jews - i think this is consistent with the laws of forgiveness as i remember them (disclaimer that i haven't read Wiesel or seriously studied said laws since high school).

as for how we treat ex-nazis as a society, I feel like there should be some path to redemption no matter how far you've gone, if only because it might encourage some racists to actually change their beliefs rather than digging in even deeper