the alt-right

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

i think there is a path to redemption. keep your head down, take a low profile job, maybe change your name if it was particularly egregious. idk that we need a route to redemption for former nazis who still want to be public figures tho.

maybe if the kind of public figure they want to transition into is explicitly doing anti-nazi work for the rest of their life

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.

maybe if the kind of public figure they want to transition into is explicitly doing anti-nazi work for the rest of their life

This is the only path to forgiveness for them imo.

I do believe that everyone should have the opportunity for redemption/rehabilitation. I don't believe most people in need of redemption truly possess the patience/honesty/humility to see it through to fruition (and I don't think those on the path can safely declare they've reached its terminus until there's some general agreement from the world-at-large).

This TPM piece on the McHugh story is funny and somewhat interesting.

At least half of my time reading the piece I was thinking, why does this person merit a profile? As you probably know, I have little truck with the idea that we shouldn’t focus attention on horrible people. The whole idea that you accomplish anything by ignoring this stuff is something I’ve never bought into. But even in that world, she’s like a 4th tier generally ridiculous player. Really just a frivolous racist idiot. Reading the piece I wasn’t quite clear in what sense McHugh was even a journalist as opposed to someone who had a job for a far right publication and had a lot of racist tweets. And here I mean ‘journalist’ in the very thin sense in which I can accord the term to quite a few racists and habitual liars. Why am I reading this? There’s an element of coming of age narrative the story is presented with. But really it seems much more like she was another callow racist who zigged when she should have zagged and is not out of a job and broke and wants to change her story. In fairness, this version of the story doesn’t seem lost on the author of the article, Rosie Gray.

Maybe not alt right exactly but close enough for me. A well done graphic breakdown of the Punisher skull aesthetic.

https://popula.com/2019/02/24/about-face/

i complained about its failure to so much as mention don pendleton's "executioner" series last time it was posted, which got me an eye-roll, but i still think it's a pretty fucking critical oversight and will still complain about it

Wow at Laura Loomer having a meltdown on Alex jones show, and Alex Jones muted reaction is...."uh who is the crazy person on my show"

Get yr Ben Shapiro self-own lulz here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6VixqvOcK8E

i...i dont understand why he has a following. he's just a deeply unpleasant person to listen to.

Would love to hear more about these "the conservative halls of intelligentsia" where they're thrashing out new policies on healthcare.

(xxp) The lesson is never get into slanging match with a guy from Paisley.

Shapiro trying the classic motte and bailey approach, doesn't seem to work against tory disdain

Neil should have been better on the 'Ben Shapiro DESTROYS' better videos though, as they appear on his own website and Neil didn't seem aware of that

ben shapiro has ted cruz levels of anti-charisma

who is doing the violation

https://scontent.fewr1-4.fna.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/60011454_576156412873747_2844152649358508032_n.jpg?_nc_cat=102&_nc_ht=scontent.fewr1-4.fna&oh=6246d76ec9e16d8fde9e757c05bf7775&oe=5D70AAD1

Majority Report had great fun with it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72kAibX4dJU

I was just scrolling through Facebook and saw an article that a relative posted. It was a USA Today article about Baltimore, MD being the most dangerous city in America. I clicked away from Facebook, but then wanted to go back and check out the article anyway. So I google up baltimore most dangerous city 2019 USA today. What was the first search result? Not USA Today, but amren.com!

Fuck Google.

This is some really, really scary shit.

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/josephbernstein/youtubes-newest-far-right-foul-mouthed-red-pilling-star-is

You weren't overstating it…

Fuck

i...i dont understand why he has a following. he's just a deeply unpleasant person to listen to.

if you're looking for a conservative who can occasionally sound smart it's either him or Scott Adams

the other thing is despite this guy's constant whining about "media bias" you're apparently only 2 clicks away from a Ben Shapiro video no matter what you're searching for

lol

D. M.1 month ago

This Soph kid is the physical manifestation of the Youtube algorithm after you accidentally click on one Joe Rogan interview

Wait, wait, this is just a kid. Let’s not go overboard with call out culture.