Charlottesville

[DMT]

Yeah, I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that lumping Lenin and Marx in with Hitler is inappropriate. Marx was a German (Prussian) philosopher and economist who never held any position of prominence or power, and never even visited Russia so far as I know. He died over 30 years before the Revolution. People hate him for what some of his early ideas now are seen to represent, and they hold him responsible for the subsequent slaughter of millions by the Communists. But is that reasonable? Lenin has a more direct connection, as he was instrumental in forming the USSR, but he died in the early 20s, long before the purges, after warning everyone to do whatever they could to keep Stalin out of power. Now there's a guy who deserves to be on the list of 'horrible' people.

Agreed.

[swampdragon]

http://www.newsweek.com/trump-press-...-quotes-651178

a bizarre offensive malinformed rude speech

and he never forgot about advancing the Trump brand at the end

[Hornsby]

Well, it's pretty official now, Trump has gone full Nazi. His press people say off the record that he wasn't supposed to answer any questions today, but he want "full rogue". The thin veil fell today, the President of this great Nation said that there were "good people on both sides". No, there are not "good people" on the side of Nazis, they are hateful spiteful, fearful little people. And don't act surprised at what Trump said today, he's been showing it with his every action while in office.

Today, he shed the pretense of civility and leadership, and simply embraced what he thinks is naked power.

[Igor]

Acorn, Soros, ANTIFA. Find one example on the left and pump up the eqivilancy.

[Redbirds Fan]

"Why, it's reprehensible! Indefensible! It's incomprehensible!"

[umjewman]

I thought Trump's comments were very touching and from the heart about the fine people who were being awarded the Medal of Honor.....wait, what's that? He was referring to Nazis when he was talking about the good people? Yeah, I got nothing.

[Sour Masher]

Acorn, Soros, ANTIFA. Find one example on the left and pump up the eqivilancy.

This tendency, and the dumbfounding effectiveness of it, is one of the less talked about but infuriating aspects of this. It is the same strategy that has somehow worked for them on issues like climate change and evolution. None of these dichotomies are equal, but the spin masters who set these up know that human brains often treat dualities as roughly equal. Trump's use of the term alt-left disturbed me for this reason. I fear it will become just as effective as his re-appropriation of "fake news" in terms of normalizing what happens on the extreme right in this country.

[DMT]

This tendency, and the dumbfounding effectiveness of it, is one of the less talked about but infuriating aspects of this. It is the same strategy that has somehow worked for them on issues like climate change and evolution. None of these dichotomies are equal, but the spin masters who set these up know that human brains often treat dualities as roughly equal. Trump's use of the term alt-left disturbed me for this reason. I fear it will become just as effective as his re-appropriation of "fake news" in terms of normalizing what happens on the extreme right in this country.

Amazing how many independently-minded people fall for the same trap.

[DMT]

Here ya go, BG.

https://twitter.com/stevesilberman/status/897505397791014913

[Kevin Seitzer]

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/08/what-trump-gets-wrong-about-antifa/537048/

So, yes, antifa is not a figment of the conservative imagination. It’s a moral problem that liberals need to confront.

But saying it’s a problem is vastly different than implying, as Trump did, that it’s a problem equal to white supremacism. Using the phrase “alt-left” suggests a moral equivalence that simply doesn’t exist.

For starters, while antifa perpetrates violence, it doesn’t perpetrate it on anything like the scale that white nationalists do. It’s no coincidence that it was a Nazi sympathizer—and not an antifa activist—who committed murder in Charlottesville. According to the Anti-Defamation League, right-wing extremists committed 74 percent of the 372 politically motivated murders recorded in the United States between 2007 and 2016. Left-wing extremists committed less than 2 percent.

Second, antifa activists don’t wield anything like the alt-right’s power. White, Christian supremacy has been government policy in the United States for much of American history. Anarchism has not. That’s why there are no statues of Mikhail Bakunin in America’s parks and government buildings. Antifa boasts no equivalent to Steve Bannon, who called his old publication, Breitbart, “the platform for the alt-right,” and now works in the White House. It boasts no equivalent to Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, who bears the middle name of a Confederate general and the first name of the Confederacy’s president, and who allegedly called the NAACP “un-American.” It boasts no equivalent to Alex Jones, who Donald Trump praised as “amazing.” Even if antifa’s vision of society were as noxious as the “alt-right’s,” it has vastly less power to make that vision a reality.

And antifa’s vision is not as noxious. Antifa activists do not celebrate regimes that committed genocide and enforced slavery. They’re mostly anarchists. Anarchism may not be a particularly practical ideology. But it’s not an ideology that depicts the members of a particular race or religion as subhuman.

[DMT]

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics...antifa/537048/

Exactly, thanks for sharing.

[Kevin Seitzer]

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2017/08/what_the_alt_left_was_actually_doing_in_charlottesville.html

Lot of stories in that article. Here is an excerpt from the last one:

A phalanx of neo-Nazis shoved right through our human wall with 3-foot-wide wooden shields, screaming and spitting homophobic slurs and obscenities at us. It was then that antifa stepped in to thwart them. They have their tools to achieve their purposes, and they are not ones I will personally use, but let me stress that our purposes were the same: block this violent tide and do not let it take the pedestal.

The white supremacists did not blink at violently plowing right through clergy, all of us dressed in full clerical garb. White supremacy is violence. I didn’t see any racial justice protesters with weapons; as for antifa, anything they brought I would only categorize as community defense tools and nothing more. Pretty much everyone I talk to agrees—including most clergy. My strong stance is that the weapon is and was white supremacy, and the white supremacists intentionally brought weapons to instigate violence.

[Igor]

An interesting piece of satire on building a false equivalency argument.

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/08/do-you-believe-the-eclipse-is-going-to-happen/537090/