The United States(!) of A
etarip wrote:indo-dreaming wrote:southernraw wrote:@indo, @burleigh. .
How so?
That's what happened on election day, and even recent polls have shown that Trumps approval rating is high, the things that you might not like that Trump is doing, is the things he promised to do and that people voted for.
So how is that undemocratic?
So no i still 100% support democracy.
Id honestly love to hear why or how you think he is dismantling democracy since being elected?
To me that claim makes no sense at all.
More Americans have an unfavourable opinion of DJT than positive Indo. How do you reconcile this fact with your comments above?
I was going off the poll that was discussed here the other week as it was the only poll id seen, if things have changed so be it, but at the end of the day it's only elections that matter, voter's will have to wait another four years to have their say again. (that's democracy)
And many if not most leaders approval ratings fall once elected they rarely improve, because people aren't easy to keep happy.
Just because an approval rating falls or becomes less than 50% doesn't mean that democracy is somehow lost
I think many people here (and elsewhere) are just butt hurt cause Trump got elected and is doing shit they dont like, nothing more.
And what's worse is most people whinging or making silly claims aren't even USA voters so all theirs and our opinions are pretty much irrelevant anyway.
https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-approval-rating-world-leaders-2027934
Michael Popoks law firm is representing one of the families affected by the downing of
Flight 5342 , which was hit by a Black Hawk helicopter, crashing into the Potomac River, claiming 67 lives.
Trump and DOGE fired hundreds of workers at the FAA a week after the crash.
The Department of Defence, the Federal Aviation Administration and the Trump government are being sued.
@rooftop and @olddog.
Great posts.
Great great posts.
I think that succinctly describes what i'm having trouble putting into words.
Thanks.
Confusion wrote:Michael Popoks law firm is representing one of the families affected by the downing of
Flight 5342 , which was hit by a Black Hawk helicopter, crashing into the Potomac River, claiming 67 lives.
Trump and DOGE fired hundreds of workers at the FAA a week after the crash.
The Department of Defence, the Federal Aviation Authority and the Trump government are being sued.
Waddya mean Jeffy?
You mean if they sack all the qualified people, there's consequences??
southernraw wrote:Confusion wrote:Michael Popoks law firm is representing one of the families affected by the downing of
Flight 5342 , which was hit by a Black Hawk helicopter, crashing into the Potomac River, claiming 67 lives.
Trump and DOGE fired hundreds of workers at the FAA a week after the crash.
The Department of Defence, the Federal Aviation Authority and the Trump government are being sued.Waddya mean Jeffy?
You mean if they sack all the qualified people, there's consequences??
Oh yeah, it’s what the people voted for. ay
Jeff .?
Sorry.
Jeffrey.
Glad you're back if indeed it is you good sir.
southernraw wrote:Sorry.
Jeffrey.
Glad you're back if indeed it is you good sir.
Nah it’s just another MTN fan , couldn’t possibly be jeffy and I agree SR , rooftop’s post was very well written .
Don't want to be late to the party, welcome back Confucius
Supafreak wrote:southernraw wrote:Sorry.
Jeffrey.
Glad you're back if indeed it is you good sir.Nah it’s just another MTN fan , couldn’t possibly be jeffy and I agree SR , rooftop’s post was very well written .
hehe i think he came back cos he missed ya Supa!!
Hope you're getting waves legend.
indo-dreaming wrote:etarip wrote:indo-dreaming wrote:southernraw wrote:@indo, @burleigh. .
How so?
That's what happened on election day, and even recent polls have shown that Trumps approval rating is high, the things that you might not like that Trump is doing, is the things he promised to do and that people voted for.
So how is that undemocratic?
So no i still 100% support democracy.
Id honestly love to hear why or how you think he is dismantling democracy since being elected?
To me that claim makes no sense at all.
More Americans have an unfavourable opinion of DJT than positive Indo. How do you reconcile this fact with your comments above?
I was going off the poll that was discussed here the other week as it was the only poll id seen, if things have changed so be it, but at the end of the day it's only elections that matter, voter's will have to wait another four years to have their say again. (that's democracy)
And many if not most leaders approval ratings fall once elected they rarely improve, because people aren't easy to keep happy.
Just because an approval rating falls or becomes less than 50% doesn't mean that democracy is somehow lost
I think many people here (and elsewhere) are just butt hurt cause Trump got elected and is doing shit they dont like, nothing more.
And what's worse is most people whinging or making silly claims aren't even USA voters so all theirs and our opinions are pretty much irrelevant anyway.
https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-approval-rating-world-leaders-2027934
I wonder how many butt hurt MAGAs there are who have lost their jobs, their insulin going up from $6 to $80 , the price of groceries sky rocketing , the war in Ukraine not finished on day one but escalated on day 30 , MAGA farmers about to lose their farms because of lack of workers, no more produce for USAid and tariffs , and an alienation of all US allies.
Not to mention Chinese naval ships conducting unprecedented live firing exercises 230 KMs off the coast of Tasmania today or yesterday , , great outcome there guys!
Breathe jeffy
Confusion wrote:indo-dreaming wrote:etarip wrote:indo-dreaming wrote:southernraw wrote:@indo, @burleigh. .
How so?
That's what happened on election day, and even recent polls have shown that Trumps approval rating is high, the things that you might not like that Trump is doing, is the things he promised to do and that people voted for.
So how is that undemocratic?
So no i still 100% support democracy.
Id honestly love to hear why or how you think he is dismantling democracy since being elected?
To me that claim makes no sense at all.
More Americans have an unfavourable opinion of DJT than positive Indo. How do you reconcile this fact with your comments above?
I was going off the poll that was discussed here the other week as it was the only poll id seen, if things have changed so be it, but at the end of the day it's only elections that matter, voter's will have to wait another four years to have their say again. (that's democracy)
And many if not most leaders approval ratings fall once elected they rarely improve, because people aren't easy to keep happy.
Just because an approval rating falls or becomes less than 50% doesn't mean that democracy is somehow lost
I think many people here (and elsewhere) are just butt hurt cause Trump got elected and is doing shit they dont like, nothing more.
And what's worse is most people whinging or making silly claims aren't even USA voters so all theirs and our opinions are pretty much irrelevant anyway.
https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-approval-rating-world-leaders-2027934
I wonder how many butt hurt MAGAs there are who have lost their jobs, their insulin going up from $6 to $80 , the price of groceries sky rocketing , the war in Ukraine not finished on day one but escalated on day 30 , MAGA farmers about to lose their farms because of lack of workers, no more produce for USAid and tariffs , and an alienation of all US allies.
Not to mention Chinese naval ships conducting unprecedented live firing exercises 230 KMs off the coast of Tasmania today or yesterday , , great outcome there guys!
Agreed!!
Supafreak wrote:southernraw wrote:Sorry.
Jeffrey.
Glad you're back if indeed it is you good sir.Nah it’s just another MTN fan , couldn’t possibly be jeffy and I agree SR , rooftop’s post was very well written .
Wow that surf boarding looks like it would be fun, Is it?
Confusion wrote:Supafreak wrote:southernraw wrote:Sorry.
Jeffrey.
Glad you're back if indeed it is you good sir.Nah it’s just another MTN fan , couldn’t possibly be jeffy and I agree SR , rooftop’s post was very well written .
Wow that surf boarding looks like it would be fun, Is it?
You would probably find it a bit confusing between the 4 of you .
?si=nF0Mp_vpc1EK1mgN Supafreak wrote:Confusion wrote:Supafreak wrote:southernraw wrote:Sorry.
Jeffrey.
Glad you're back if indeed it is you good sir.Nah it’s just another MTN fan , couldn’t possibly be jeffy and I agree SR , rooftop’s post was very well written .
Wow that surf boarding looks like it would be fun, Is it?
You would probably find it a bit confusing between the 4 of you .
?si=nF0Mp_vpc1EK1mgN
I think the other 3 went back to surf in Venezuela , when they took the handcuffs off. !
Trump aint happy, it was a big week.
"President Donald Trump delivered a fiery speech at the Governors Working Session, where he condemned Hamas over the tragic killing of the Bibas family. Trump expressed his outrage at the group’s actions, calling it a "shocking and unforgivable error." He also reaffirmed his support for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Gaza plan, emphasising the need for a strong response to Hamas’s actions"
In the last week
First the dead hostages bodies were released with a crazy propaganda ceremony, the kids bodies ended up being correct and autopsy showed had been strangled by bare hands. (further non Israel sources will be allowed to confirm for the skeptics)
But Hamas sent some random Gazzan's body instead of the mothers body, so that body was sent back to Gaza and Hamas handed over the correct body.
The other body sadly was an old guy that was ironically an Israeli pro peace activist that worked with groups driving Gazans mostly kids that needed medical care in Israel procedure's that couldn't be done in Gaza
The six live hostages were then released on the weekend, but Israel is playing hard ball and delaying Palestinians release for all the fuck ups and violation's (two more rocket fire attempts happened from Gaza too)
I think there is only four more dead bodies to come back in this phase of the deal, no more live hostages in this phase.
I cant see the second phase happening, IMHO its likely the war will restart soon Trump & Israel are clear Hamas arent going to be allowed to survive.
indo-dreaming wrote:First the dead hostages bodies were released with a crazy propaganda ceremony, the kids bodies ended up being correct and autopsy showed had been strangled by bare hands. (further non Israel sources will be allowed to confirm for the skeptics)
What are the odds of non-Israeli sources even getting the chance to corroborate the "findings" of autopsies done by Israel? Buckley's and fuck all I expect.
What's more likely, that the country that killed a whole bunch of their own under the Hannibal Directive October 7, the country that bombs hospitals and refugee camps, the country that has killed dozens of journalists, the country that has indiscriminately bombed the living piss out of Gaza and slaughtered tens of thousands of innocent people is lying, and will keep lying until the Bibas family aren't as useful for manufacturing consent and/or they are forgotten about, or that Hamas, who had myriad good reasons to keep that family alive, instead strangled them with their bare hands?
You wanna talk about propaganda, indo, you're swellnet's major arm of it, kook.
Edit for above post in parentheses:
Hiccups wrote:and will keep lying until the Bibas family aren't as useful for manufacturing consent and/or they are forgotten about (killed that family with their big bomb energy), or that Hamas, who had myriad good reasons to keep that family alive, instead strangled them with their bare hands?
TFP nailing it again:
Very clever wording.
stunet wrote:TFP nailing it again:
I Can Explain Why the Nazi Salute Is Back by Bari Weiss
When Steve Bannon gives a stiff-armed salute after a speech about American greatness, we are watching an oppositional culture so addicted to opposition it can’t help opposing itself.
<script async="" charset="utf-8" height="" src="https://substack.com/embedjs/embed.js" width=""></script>
Already had me shaking my head here: "Most ordinary people, including the Anti-Defamation League gave it a pass.". That's Richard writing about Elon's "arm gesture". A: That's speculation, and B: It was clearly a Nazi salute.
Jonathan Greenblatt, the head of the ADL, a pro-Israel unit, has previously compared the Palestinian keffiyeh to the Nazi swastika, so I don't think they're in the greatest position to be giving any sort of pass in these matters. "Ordinary people" (wtf are they anyhow) that I've spoken to and a great deal of things I have read are pretty, pretty sure that Elon did the ol' sieg heil that day, and no, I don't just look at commentary from some lefty bubble.
Richard Hanania, the author of this and other dross, and man who would like to see people's, no, black people's civil liberties infringed upon: "We need more policing, incarceration and surveillance of black people", continues by suggesting that any such saluting as trolling and performative in nature. Bro. Even if that's what's being going on with Elon, Bannon, et al despite all the nazi-esque things they've said and done, you don't think that Salute by the richest man alive on the world stage empowers people go on their own merry racism sprees? People should not just dismiss and/or put their heads in the sand when fascist symbolism shows up. Pathetic.
Hiccups wrote:stunet wrote:TFP nailing it again:
I Can Explain Why the Nazi Salute Is Back by Bari Weiss
When Steve Bannon gives a stiff-armed salute after a speech about American greatness, we are watching an oppositional culture so addicted to opposition it can’t help opposing itself.
<script async="" charset="utf-8" height="" src="https://substack.com/embedjs/embed.js" width=""></script>
you don't think that Salute by the richest man alive on the world stage empowers people go on their own merry racism sprees?
Jeez man...did you even read it? That's largely the point of the article.
Hiccups wrote:indo-dreaming wrote:First the dead hostages bodies were released with a crazy propaganda ceremony, the kids bodies ended up being correct and autopsy showed had been strangled by bare hands. (further non Israel sources will be allowed to confirm for the skeptics)
What are the odds of non-Israeli sources even getting the chance to corroborate the "findings" of autopsies done by Israel? Buckley's and fuck all I expect.
What's more likely, that the country that killed a whole bunch of their own under the Hannibal Directive October 7, the country that bombs hospitals and refugee camps, the country that has killed dozens of journalists, the country that has indiscriminately bombed the living piss out of Gaza and slaughtered tens of thousands of innocent people is lying, and will keep lying until the Bibas family aren't as useful for manufacturing consent and/or they are forgotten about, or that Hamas, who had myriad good reasons to keep that family alive, instead strangled them with their bare hands?
You wanna talk about propaganda, indo, you're swellnet's major arm of it, kook.
All while you spread Hamas propaganda. You don't know the truth, I don't know the truth. Were all victims of propaganda.
Nobody can verify Hamas claims of deaths by Israel either, but that hasn't stopped you shouting it.
I read up to the paywall. Enlighten me as to how he walked back excusing fascism.
burleigh wrote:Hiccups wrote:indo-dreaming wrote:First the dead hostages bodies were released with a crazy propaganda ceremony, the kids bodies ended up being correct and autopsy showed had been strangled by bare hands. (further non Israel sources will be allowed to confirm for the skeptics)
What are the odds of non-Israeli sources even getting the chance to corroborate the "findings" of autopsies done by Israel? Buckley's and fuck all I expect.
What's more likely, that the country that killed a whole bunch of their own under the Hannibal Directive October 7, the country that bombs hospitals and refugee camps, the country that has killed dozens of journalists, the country that has indiscriminately bombed the living piss out of Gaza and slaughtered tens of thousands of innocent people is lying, and will keep lying until the Bibas family aren't as useful for manufacturing consent and/or they are forgotten about, or that Hamas, who had myriad good reasons to keep that family alive, instead strangled them with their bare hands?
You wanna talk about propaganda, indo, you're swellnet's major arm of it, kook.
All while you spread Hamas propaganda. You don't know the truth, I don't know the truth. Were all victims of propaganda.
Nobody can verify Hamas claims of deaths by Israel either, but that hasn't stopped you shouting it.
Photos don't lie.
Hiccups wrote:I read up to the paywall. Enlighten me as to how he walked back excusing fascism.
So you don't know what the article is about but jumped to a ready-made conclusion?
Right...
Might save my time and ignore your request.
stunet wrote:Hiccups wrote:I read up to the paywall. Enlighten me as to how he walked back excusing fascism.
So you don't know what the article is about but jumped to a ready-made conclusion?
Right...
Might save my time and ignore your request.
I know who the bloke is, what he's said in the past, and I know what the first couple a paragraphs said. If old mate wants to be vaguely fence sitting and muddying the waters around fascism, then I'm not sure how he would've redeemed himself during the rest of that article. Probably paywalled it at that point to grift people who want to see where he could possibly be heading. Glad you enjoyed it though, Stu. Don't get redpilled now, ya hear.
Red pilled?
I'm happy to ask questions that help me understand the moment, 'cos I struggle to make sense of the chaos. If you've got it all figured out then that's great.
stunet wrote:Red pilled?
I'm happy to ask questions that help me understand the moment, 'cos I struggle to make sense of the chaos. If you've got it all figured out then that's great.
I've far from figured it out, who has? I have, however, figured out that fascism and racism = bad. Keeping an open mind to the words of fascism apologists and racists = also bad. Hope that helps.
For anyone curious about those stiff-armed salutes but not so shrill as to call it Nazism - I mean, really? So what's it all about then?
I care little about what the author has said in the past, it doesn't colour my understanding of what he said here:
Nazi—excuse me, Roman—salutes have become all the rage on the American right.
It started with Elon Musk, on the day of Trump’s inauguration. Musk was onstage in Washington, D.C., winding up the end of his speech, and claimed the arm gesture was simply the physical expression of his subsequent statement that “my heart goes out to you.”
Musk’s most strident critics saw it as something more sinister. Most ordinary people, including the Anti-Defamation League, gave it a pass.
Then a local GOP official in Pennsylvania lost her job for recreating Musk’s gesture in a TikTok video. Finally, from the CPAC stage over the last few days, we’ve had two more: Steve Bannon, and Mexican actor Eduardo Verástegui. Jordan Bardella, the leader of the National Rally in France—a country where the use of Nazi imagery and slogans is punished by law—pulled out of the conference as a result.
What exactly is going on here? The standard answer is trolling. This is plausible in light of the alternative explanation, which is that they all really mean it and figures like Rachel Maddow and Joy Reid have been right since 2016 in asserting that MAGA is a fascist movement.
Say what you will about these men: None of them proclaims a Hitlerian worldview. Not too long ago, Steve Bannon was taking a page out of Al Sharpton’s book and denouncing Silicon Valley bosses for not hiring enough blacks and Hispanics, which would make his brand of Nazism quite peculiar. Elon Musk has time and again pledged support for the Jewish people. He visited Israel in late 2023 and wore dog tags given to him by the father of an Israeli hostage in Gaza. Later, he went to Auschwitz with Ben Shapiro.
But it’s too easy to say that these people are simply trolling and leave it at that. A good troll—and as someone who has done quite a bit of trolling myself, I have a deep appreciation for the art form—makes an underlying point, stimulates thought, provokes serious discussion and, best-case scenario, is open to interpretation. Worst-case scenario, it confuses the weaponization of taboos for the taboos themselves, and instead of resisting their weaponization, winds up denying their original purpose.
Nazi salutes are therefore deeply offensive to me on two levels. I abhor the underlying ideology such gestures represent. But also I think they’re incredibly lazy—the cheapest imaginable way to get a rise out of people.
That said, even the crudest trolls have a message. With the recent spate of stiff-armed salutes, what we are observing is, in most cases, not sincere Nazism but an oppositional culture that, like a rebel band that keeps wearing fatigues after victory, has failed to realize it’s no longer in the opposition.
To understand where this comes from you need to go back to the 2010s. Back then, online rightists reacted to the Great Awokening by leaning into performative racism, sexism, and homophobia through edgy memes and jokes.
I would know. I was one of them.
As the woke fever swept the culture, I began writing for far-right websites under a pseudonym. At the time, my concerns were similar to those that animate many on the right today, although like many of them, I became something of a crude caricature of what leftists claimed to be against. I believed that the left was out of its mind on racial and gender issues. I felt that it denied the important role that heredity plays in human affairs, as if acknowledging the existence of genes meant rejecting the right of individuals to be treated equally. And, like many others, I was alarmed by its tolerance of crime and social dysfunction. I still believe all those things.
Unfortunately, many of the people who agreed with me on these topics tended to believe also that the answer was for white Americans to imitate the identitarian left and form a movement that put race at the center of its worldview. I eventually came to see that this was a moral and intellectual dead end, as white identitarianism was simply the evil twin of the collectivist worldview of the far left that sees whites as the cause of all of the world’s problems.
By 2013, I had enrolled in a PhD program at UCLA and left racist blogging behind.
Unfortunately, the ugly ideas I had found appealing at an earlier point in my life didn’t die out. They blossomed.
As the Overton window in debates within elite institutions narrowed, so that even people who said unquestionably true things were smeared as bigots, the opposition’s Overton window widened, allowing offenses useful to trolls to gain mainstream currency. Those who were canceled—or the millions who observed with disgust as others were—lost all trust in mainstream institutions like academia and the press. The more one side pretended that innocuous things were harmful, the more the other side pretended that harmful things were innocuous.
After Trump’s 2016 victory, left-leaning elites blamed the result on hate and misinformation. It was at that point that Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook began to censor more aggressively. This spurred further entrenchment on the right, which became tolerant of most forms of open bigotry. In their eagerness to form a united front against leftist attempts to police speech, conservatives, particularly those who were online or leaned toward MAGA, made expressions of bigotry a banner the way some on the left had once used pornography as a First Amendment standard.
People who were actually racists loved these developments and helped push them along. After all, if any offensive thing you say can be brushed off as a joke, then ironic trolls and actual Nazis begin to look a lot alike, and a movement inclined to defend only the former will begin to have a knee-jerk positive reaction to the latter.
What the right seems not to have noticed since early November is that it has largely won. Not just the White House, the Senate, and the House, but on the censorship issue, too.
But rather than accept victory graciously and use it to strengthen the freedoms that the left’s demonization was intended to exclude them from, some of the most influential members of the MAGA movement are using this moment to flout health taboos against open bigotry. They justify this by arguing that wokeness remains an all-pervasive threat that necessitates using any means at one’s disposal to fight back. But because there are now legitimate means at their disposal—like the White House, Congress, and the ear of the wealthiest man in the world, who is also the owner of the most politically significant social media site—and because there are actual bigots who believe in ideas others profess ironically, they risk turning the victory that brought them in from the cold into a defeat. It would be a defeat not only for themselves and their movement but the country, whose freedoms many voters genuinely hoped to restore.
This dynamic isn’t new. There are plenty of examples from our recent past of what it looks like for a repressed social movement to win—and then snatch defeat from the jaws of victory because of an addiction to the fight itself, or because a minority within the movement had radical designs that mainstream members failed to confront.
Consider what has happened with the gay rights movement. Gay marriage was legalized across the country in 2015. Two years later, the Supreme Court affirmed conclusively that states must apply parenting laws equally to same-sex couples. Finally, in Bostock v. Clay County (2020), the justices ruled that discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity violated the Civil Rights Act of 1964, with the conservatives John Roberts and Neil Gorsuch signing on to the majority decision.
By that point you would imagine that the organizations that had fought for gay rights might start packing it in. That’s not what happened. There’s an old Simpsons episode where, during a Gay Pride march, participants chant “We’re here, we’re queer, get used to it!” Lisa responds “You do this every year. We are used to it!”
Continuing to see themselves as victims even in deep-blue urban areas where legal and social victories were openly embraced by official institutions, LGBT organizations formed partnerships with federal agencies and Fortune 500 companies, scouring America for any holdouts—including small-town Christian bakers. They made drag queen story hour a litmus test issue for public figures.
Ultimately, they ended up taking what in hindsight turned out to be truly indefensible positions, such as advocating for minors without a history of gender dysphoria to begin medically transitioning as soon as they said they had been born in the wrong body.
Given all this, the backlash shouldn’t be surprising. Support for gay marriage has slightly slipped in recent years. Americans who had once been sympathetic to the LGBT cause are beginning to feel that it has gone too far.
The anti-woke movement on the right now risks following the same trajectory.
Trump’s election victory—and his administration’s laser focus on dismantling DEI and issues like protecting the integrity of women’s sports—in addition to Musk’s purchase of Twitter (now X), which has been followed by other social media companies in relaxing censorship standards, have likewise given the anti-woke right much of what it once demanded.
But winning is apparently insufficient. They are still spoiling for a fight with those who called them racist, deplorable, and fascist for years. The great irony, of course, is that provoking them with the old outrages, now that they are in power, proves their accusers right—in appearance, if not fact. Trying to poke someone in the eye with a stiff-armed salute is to embrace or laugh off true bigotry—and to associate oneself with an enemy Americans are rightly proud to have defeated.
Anyone who spends any time on X today knows that the right has a serious Nazi problem, which those in the broader movement refuse to speak out against for fear of being seen as sympathizing with the enemy. When it turned out that a DOGE engineer was posting “normalize Indian hate” a few months earlier, he ended up resigning but was subsequently defended by Elon Musk and J.D. Vance and then rehired—as if talking like this was appropriate for someone with an important position in the federal government.
In addition to reflecting the existence of an opposition culture that can’t yet acknowledge it has won, the rise of Nazi salutes reveals a movement that has yet to get serious about policing its own borders, a necessity for expanding its base and effectively wielding power. For those trying to form political coalitions and have an influence on public policy, Nazi salutes are obviously a hindrance to their goals—and they give leftists new life.
Owning the libs is not a philosophy or a winning political strategy. As someone whose brain has undergone the same process as many on the right, I’ve learned that turning into a caricature of what your political opponents are against is both intellectually and spiritually stifling. One becomes as much a mental slave to the censors of the far left as any of their most devoted foot soldiers. It takes away the ability to engage in a measured consideration of issues or social trends, and introduces an intellectual inflexibility that makes one unable to recognize when circumstances have changed. Becoming an ironic Nazi or feeling the need to defend such posturing is little better. It is a method of communication that was almost certainly never productive but under current conditions has become truly grotesque—and should have no place in public life.
Thanks for sharing it. Messy times indeed.
stunet wrote:I care little about what the author has said in the past, it doesn't colour my understanding of what he said here:
Here's the problem. It SHOULD colour your understanding of what he says in the article. It isn't a list of facts, it's an opinion piece. An opinion piece by this guy.
"The Old Hanania said Black people are naturally stupid and can’t control their animal impulses, leading to high crime rates in their neighborhoods. The New Hanania leaves out the first part — “the sources of such disparities” — while heaping blame on Black people for their problems and calling for aggressive action. On May 13, he tweeted, “We need more policing, incarceration, and surveillance of black people. Blacks won’t appreciate it, whites don’t have the stomach for it.” In a post on his popular Substack that day, he explained that Black crime has ensured that “some of the most valuable urban real estate in the country is basically uninhabitable,” ascribing the near-total absence of white people from many Black neighborhoods to bad Black behavior.
White liberals, he explained, simply pay top dollar to avoid living near Black people. “Liberals are correct that entire swaths of a major city don’t end up with zero white people by accident,” Hanania wrote. “They just attribute this to ‘racism’ rather than the desire not to be sexually assaulted or physically harmed.”
Hanania is proudly ignorant of the fact that his laboratory for proving this theory, Chicago, is a source of some of the richest scholarship available on the subject of residential segregation and its relationship to crime. The work of historians like Arnold Hirsch and Beryl Satter, along with that of sociologists Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton, details how the city’s white residents and political and financial institutions transformed formerly white neighborhoods into Black ghettos through the early-to-mid-20th century. In Chicago and elsewhere, enterprising white real-estate agents would use a socially mobile Black family to frighten away white homeowners with threats of declining home values — a veritable guarantee given that neither banks nor the federal government would insure mortgages where Black people lived. They would then divide the evacuated houses into smaller segments, converting garages and guest bedrooms to create entire housing units for poor and working-class Black families."
Taken from https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/08/richard-hanania-racist-message.html
And from his own article: "Nazi salutes reveals a movement that has yet to get serious about policing its own borders, a necessity for expanding its base and effectively wielding power. For those trying to form political coalitions and have an influence on public policy, Nazi salutes are obviously a hindrance to their goals—and they give leftists new life."
He's talking about himself. Saying the quiet part out loud. Sugar coat your base tendencies and use faux-moderatism as a Trojan horse for fascism.
His base tendencies are described, by himself, as "his old ugly ideas".
But TBH I don't care about backstory or redemption or whatever, I think you misunderstand the moment when you call what's currently happening Nazism or fascism. You're doing a deep dive into the shallow end of a toddler pool.
There's something else happening - owning the libs, trolling, getting a rise - and it works. Much as the far left destroyed the centre-left's base, forcing it to accede to greater demands lest they be called traitorous, the right is now facing the same force from the far-right.
Will those who invoked ironic nastiness rein in those with genuine nastiness?
"People who were actually racists loved these developments and helped push them along. After all, if any offensive thing you say can be brushed off as a joke, then ironic trolls and actual Nazis begin to look a lot alike, and a movement inclined to defend only the former will begin to have a knee-jerk positive reaction to the latter."
I agree with this. I think it's fascinating and appalling in equal measure.
I don't know if a Nazi salute equates to a dislike of Jews, as such, as it's historically understood, or if it's more of a tip of the cap to dictatorship, letting your intentions be known in broad daylight.. or at least appearing to be that way.
That's how i read Musks symbolic gesture.
Yes, you are a traitor now stu as you are sharing work of someone who should be banished for life. You can only be a 100% perfect individual to be heard in some circles. No forgiveness is allowed.
No one is, of course, perfect. Humans, by definition, are more broken than perfect. Life is not a one way street. So, it's not surprising that perfection demanding, virtous extremists are losing support.
stunet wrote:For anyone curious abut those stiff-armed salutes but not so shrill as to call it Nazism - I mean, really? So what's it all about then?
I care little about what the author has said in the past, it doesn't colour my understanding of what he said here:
Nazi—excuse me, Roman—salutes have become all the rage on the American right.
It started with Elon Musk, on the day of Trump’s inauguration. Musk was onstage in Washington, D.C., winding up the end of his speech, and claimed the arm gesture was simply the physical expression of his subsequent statement that “my heart goes out to you.”
Musk’s most strident critics saw it as something more sinister. Most ordinary people, including the Anti-Defamation League, gave it a pass.
Then a local GOP official in Pennsylvania lost her job for recreating Musk’s gesture in a TikTok video. Finally, from the CPAC stage over the last few days, we’ve had two more: Steve Bannon, and Mexican actor Eduardo Verástegui. Jordan Bardella, the leader of the National Rally in France—a country where the use of Nazi imagery and slogans is punished by law—pulled out of the conference as a result.
What exactly is going on here? The standard answer is trolling. This is plausible in light of the alternative explanation, which is that they all really mean it and figures like Rachel Maddow and Joy Reid have been right since 2016 in asserting that MAGA is a fascist movement.
Say what you will about these men: None of them proclaims a Hitlerian worldview. Not too long ago, Steve Bannon was taking a page out of Al Sharpton’s book and denouncing Silicon Valley bosses for not hiring enough blacks and Hispanics, which would make his brand of Nazism quite peculiar. Elon Musk has time and again pledged support for the Jewish people. He visited Israel in late 2023 and wore dog tags given to him by the father of an Israeli hostage in Gaza. Later, he went to Auschwitz with Ben Shapiro.
But it’s too easy to say that these people are simply trolling and leave it at that. A good troll—and as someone who has done quite a bit of trolling myself, I have a deep appreciation for the art form—makes an underlying point, stimulates thought, provokes serious discussion and, best-case scenario, is open to interpretation. Worst-case scenario, it confuses the weaponization of taboos for the taboos themselves, and instead of resisting their weaponization, winds up denying their original purpose.
Nazi salutes are therefore deeply offensive to me on two levels. I abhor the underlying ideology such gestures represent. But also I think they’re incredibly lazy—the cheapest imaginable way to get a rise out of people.
That said, even the crudest trolls have a message. With the recent spate of stiff-armed salutes, what we are observing is, in most cases, not sincere Nazism but an oppositional culture that, like a rebel band that keeps wearing fatigues after victory, has failed to realize it’s no longer in the opposition.
To understand where this comes from you need to go back to the 2010s. Back then, online rightists reacted to the Great Awokening by leaning into performative racism, sexism, and homophobia through edgy memes and jokes.
I would know. I was one of them.
As the woke fever swept the culture, I began writing for far-right websites under a pseudonym. At the time, my concerns were similar to those that animate many on the right today, although like many of them, I became something of a crude caricature of what leftists claimed to be against. I believed that the left was out of its mind on racial and gender issues. I felt that it denied the important role that heredity plays in human affairs, as if acknowledging the existence of genes meant rejecting the right of individuals to be treated equally. And, like many others, I was alarmed by its tolerance of crime and social dysfunction. I still believe all those things.
Unfortunately, many of the people who agreed with me on these topics tended to believe also that the answer was for white Americans to imitate the identitarian left and form a movement that put race at the center of its worldview. I eventually came to see that this was a moral and intellectual dead end, as white identitarianism was simply the evil twin of the collectivist worldview of the far left that sees whites as the cause of all of the world’s problems.
By 2013, I had enrolled in a PhD program at UCLA and left racist blogging behind.
Unfortunately, the ugly ideas I had found appealing at an earlier point in my life didn’t die out. They blossomed.
As the Overton window in debates within elite institutions narrowed, so that even people who said unquestionably true things were smeared as bigots, the opposition’s Overton window widened, allowing offenses useful to trolls to gain mainstream currency. Those who were canceled—or the millions who observed with disgust as others were—lost all trust in mainstream institutions like academia and the press. The more one side pretended that innocuous things were harmful, the more the other side pretended that harmful things were innocuous.
After Trump’s 2016 victory, left-leaning elites blamed the result on hate and misinformation. It was at that point that Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook began to censor more aggressively. This spurred further entrenchment on the right, which became tolerant of most forms of open bigotry. In their eagerness to form a united front against leftist attempts to police speech, conservatives, particularly those who were online or leaned toward MAGA, made expressions of bigotry a banner the way some on the left had once used pornography as a First Amendment standard.
People who were actually racists loved these developments and helped push them along. After all, if any offensive thing you say can be brushed off as a joke, then ironic trolls and actual Nazis begin to look a lot alike, and a movement inclined to defend only the former will begin to have a knee-jerk positive reaction to the latter.
What the right seems not to have noticed since early November is that it has largely won. Not just the White House, the Senate, and the House, but on the censorship issue, too.
But rather than accept victory graciously and use it to strengthen the freedoms that the left’s demonization was intended to exclude them from, some of the most influential members of the MAGA movement are using this moment to flout health taboos against open bigotry. They justify this by arguing that wokeness remains an all-pervasive threat that necessitates using any means at one’s disposal to fight back. But because there are now legitimate means at their disposal—like the White House, Congress, and the ear of the wealthiest man in the world, who is also the owner of the most politically significant social media site—and because there are actual bigots who believe in ideas others profess ironically, they risk turning the victory that brought them in from the cold into a defeat. It would be a defeat not only for themselves and their movement but the country, whose freedoms many voters genuinely hoped to restore.
This dynamic isn’t new. There are plenty of examples from our recent past of what it looks like for a repressed social movement to win—and then snatch defeat from the jaws of victory because of an addiction to the fight itself, or because a minority within the movement had radical designs that mainstream members failed to confront.
Consider what has happened with the gay rights movement. Gay marriage was legalized across the country in 2015. Two years later, the Supreme Court affirmed conclusively that states must apply parenting laws equally to same-sex couples. Finally, in Bostock v. Clay County (2020), the justices ruled that discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity violated the Civil Rights Act of 1964, with the conservatives John Roberts and Neil Gorsuch signing on to the majority decision.
By that point you would imagine that the organizations that had fought for gay rights might start packing it in. That’s not what happened. There’s an old Simpsons episode where, during a Gay Pride march, participants chant “We’re here, we’re queer, get used to it!” Lisa responds “You do this every year. We are used to it!”
Continuing to see themselves as victims even in deep-blue urban areas where legal and social victories were openly embraced by official institutions, LGBT organizations formed partnerships with federal agencies and Fortune 500 companies, scouring America for any holdouts—including small-town Christian bakers. They made drag queen story hour a litmus test issue for public figures.
Ultimately, they ended up taking what in hindsight turned out to be truly indefensible positions, such as advocating for minors without a history of gender dysphoria to begin medically transitioning as soon as they said they had been born in the wrong body.
Given all this, the backlash shouldn’t be surprising. Support for gay marriage has slightly slipped in recent years. Americans who had once been sympathetic to the LGBT cause are beginning to feel that it has gone too far.
The anti-woke movement on the right now risks following the same trajectory.
Trump’s election victory—and his administration’s laser focus on dismantling DEI and issues like protecting the integrity of women’s sports—in addition to Musk’s purchase of Twitter (now X), which has been followed by other social media companies in relaxing censorship standards, have likewise given the anti-woke right much of what it once demanded.
But winning is apparently insufficient. They are still spoiling for a fight with those who called them racist, deplorable, and fascist for years. The great irony, of course, is that provoking them with the old outrages, now that they are in power, proves their accusers right—in appearance, if not fact. Trying to poke someone in the eye with a stiff-armed salute is to embrace or laugh off true bigotry—and to associate oneself with an enemy Americans are rightly proud to have defeated.
Anyone who spends any time on X today knows that the right has a serious Nazi problem, which those in the broader movement refuse to speak out against for fear of being seen as sympathizing with the enemy. When it turned out that a DOGE engineer was posting “normalize Indian hate” a few months earlier, he ended up resigning but was subsequently defended by Elon Musk and J.D. Vance and then rehired—as if talking like this was appropriate for someone with an important position in the federal government.
In addition to reflecting the existence of an opposition culture that can’t yet acknowledge it has won, the rise of Nazi salutes reveals a movement that has yet to get serious about policing its own borders, a necessity for expanding its base and effectively wielding power. For those trying to form political coalitions and have an influence on public policy, Nazi salutes are obviously a hindrance to their goals—and they give leftists new life.
Owning the libs is not a philosophy or a winning political strategy. As someone whose brain has undergone the same process as many on the right, I’ve learned that turning into a caricature of what your political opponents are against is both intellectually and spiritually stifling. One becomes as much a mental slave to the censors of the far left as any of their most devoted foot soldiers. It takes away the ability to engage in a measured consideration of issues or social trends, and introduces an intellectual inflexibility that makes one unable to recognize when circumstances have changed. Becoming an ironic Nazi or feeling the need to defend such posturing is little better. It is a method of communication that was almost certainly never productive but under current conditions has become truly grotesque—and should have no place in public life.
Hear hear Stu!
'snatch defeat from the jaws of victory due to an addiction to the fight itself' great line and precisely why the Labor party in Australia is cannon balling toward the most humiliating of defeats - a one term government.
What is the unnecessary fight Labor is battling?
Trump aligns the US with Russia ,China ,North Korea and Iran , at the UN and reasserts his lie to the world that President Zelenskyy. is a dictator, and Russia had nothing to do with starting the Ukrainian war .
Confusion wrote:Trump aligns the US with Russia ,China ,North Korea and Iran , at the UN and reasserts his lie to the world that President Zelenskyy. is a dictator, and Russia had nothing to do with starting the Ukrainian war .
Would love to hear the Trump apologists on this thread's thoughts on blaming Ukraine for starting the war. @burleigh? @Indo??
Interesting long read on autocracy and democracy for anyone interested. Published this year.
https://www.cogitatiopress.com/politicsandgovernance/article/viewFile/90...
stunet wrote:There's something else happening - owning the libs, trolling, getting a rise - and it works. Much as the far left destroyed the centre-left's base, forcing it to accede to greater demands lest they be called traitorous, the right is now facing the same force from the far-right.
Did the "far left" destroy the centre left's base, or did centrists, the right, and the far right join forces, Voltron-style, to ignite and pour kerosine on the binfire that is the culture wars, knowing that they had control of the necessary propaganda outlets to make people believe that previous centrist beliefs are left wing? To believe that slightly left of centre beliefs are communist, and that people with traditional leftist ideals are "OMG THE NEW NAZIS!"?
Jonathan Greenblatt wrote:"People who were actually racists loved these developments and helped push them along"
He's talking about himself again, but using past tense. Bro is still a racist. As flollo so facetiously pointed out, we aren't all perfect, but I prefer not to give credence to the opinions of those who've espoused supremely odious viewpoints unless there has been some real act of contrition.
Joe Rogan finally realises that constant Musk worshipping, is no longer a good idea, as his ratings drop 30 percent in the last month , and he loses number 1 position of most popular podcast , to Meidastouch network, who’s ratings have gone up 100 percent in the last month , as people want to know what is actually happening.
Subscription to independent media is one way to counteract Trump’s inevitable attack on the free media.
M N G A
whatever happened to godwins law?
here's a little bit of advice for hiccups, joy reid, rachel maddow, and friends...
(geez you're in fine company there)
...every time you say fascism or nazi, you are creating the opposite effect to what one imagines you desire....
ie. people switch off, and internally say nutter
the only actual power it has, is the energy expelled for ones eyeballs to roll...
that's it!
This was a good laugh, MTN eh https://www.pajiba.com/celebrities_are_better_than_you/whats-the-meidast... “ They’re basically the podcast equivalent of that liberal aunt who posts on Facebook every half hour and floods your Bluesky timeline with reskeets. In person, she’s great! Online, she needs to chill the f**k out. “ ………….. “ I won’t go so far as to call them grifters — although they are — but they thrive on liberal outrage, fear, and despair. They’re the outlet that convinced liberals that Trump would lose the 2024 election by a landslide before probably launching some election conspiracy theories of their own. They’ve perfected the Buzzfeedification of progressive media. Here’s a sampling of their recent episode titles (and keep in mind, they often drop three, four, sometimes five 10-20 minute episodes a day)………… “ They say exactly what the left wants to hear, whether it’s true or not. They’re basically a rapid-response team for the DNC, if the DNC were run entirely by SEO marketers and clickbait merchants. Some will argue that Democrats need to counter every GOP move with the same intensity, and this is what that looks like. It’s exhausting. I follow politics closely; MeidasTouch is for people who define their entire existence by it. “ https://www.pajiba.com/celebrities_are_better_than_you/whats-the-meidast... how many subscribers does MTN have ? 4 million ? How many does Rogan have ? 19 million ? Hmmmm
sypkan wrote:M N G A
whatever happened to godwins law?
here's a little bit of advice for hiccups, joy reid, rachel maddow, and friends...
(geez you're in fine company there)
...every time you say fascism or nazi, you are creating the opposite effect to what one imagines you desire....
ie. people switch off, and internally say nutter
the only actual power it has, is the energy expelled for ones eyeballs to roll...
that's it!
Well to you maybe. Everytime you write off the left/labor/dems, it has the same eye ball rolling effect.
that's fine southern roll away...
however, that cancels out any capacity to listen, learn, recalibrate...
and possibly win!
ever again...
look at stunet's well thought out posts, acknowledging excesses, attributing causes, and generally trying to understand what brought us to this strange place...
then hiccup's response
yeh nah, that's just the right, the far right, and a bunch of other morons I don't like, that don't like my extreme take on things...
and on it goes
again and again
the problem with democracy is...
it's democratic
certain forces on the left having real trouble coming to terms with this...
fact of the matter is, the left's extremism has been rejected
and now the right are all empowered and shit...
and their extremism pokes out it's ugly head
and they'll be accounted for accordingly...
by voters...
that's democracy!
Confusion wrote:Trump aligns the US with Russia ,China ,North Korea and Iran , at the UN and reasserts his lie to the world that President Zelenskyy. is a dictator, and Russia had nothing to do with starting the Ukrainian war .
Can only imagine it’s a blunt approach by Trump to extort rare earth metals out of Ukraine.
Old Ronald Reagan would be rolling in his grave. The Republicans siding with the reds.
Supafreak wrote:This was a good laugh, MTN eh https://www.pajiba.com/celebrities_are_better_than_you/whats-the-meidast... “ They’re basically the podcast equivalent of that liberal aunt who posts on Facebook every half hour and floods your Bluesky timeline with reskeets. In person, she’s great! Online, she needs to chill the f**k out. “ ………….. “ I won’t go so far as to call them grifters — although they are — but they thrive on liberal outrage, fear, and despair. They’re the outlet that convinced liberals that Trump would lose the 2024 election by a landslide before probably launching some election conspiracy theories of their own. They’ve perfected the Buzzfeedification of progressive media. Here’s a sampling of their recent episode titles (and keep in mind, they often drop three, four, sometimes five 10-20 minute episodes a day)………… “ They say exactly what the left wants to hear, whether it’s true or not. They’re basically a rapid-response team for the DNC, if the DNC were run entirely by SEO marketers and clickbait merchants. Some will argue that Democrats need to counter every GOP move with the same intensity, and this is what that looks like. It’s exhausting. I follow politics closely; MeidasTouch is for people who define their entire existence by it. “ https://www.pajiba.com/celebrities_are_better_than_you/whats-the-meidast... how many subscribers does MTN have ? 4 million ? How many does Rogan have ? 19 million ? Hmmmm
Is that why their viewers have increased
100 percent in the last month and Rogans have dropped 30 percent in the same period,
Because people have worked out your Right wing media is one big lie. and the Mainstream media, is very normalising of everything that definitely isn’t normal.
But @ supermarket obviously knows better than 4 million people in the U S and globally,
and US lawyers and ex D O J prosecutors and others in the US legal system.
And people have obviously worked out since the inauguration that Meidastouch were correct in their predictions and Rogan was one big shifty grifty swingalong however cool he appears.
Like Rogan still keeps backing the guy, breaking into departments and stealing everyone private confidential data, because he never gets off Fox News or Social Media??
sypkan wrote:that's fine southern roll away...
however, that cancels out any capacity to listen, learn, recalibrate...
and possibly win!
ever again...
look at stunet's well thought out posts, acknowledging excesses, attributing causes, and generally trying to understand what brought us to this strange place...
the hiccup's response
yeh nah, that's just the right, the far right, and a bunch of other morons I don't like, that don't like my extreme take on things...
and on it goes
the problem with democracy is...
it's democratic
certain forces on the left having real trouble coming to terms with this...
Correct Syppy! Stu's post was well thought out as always...he's a smart lad and well recieved. I appreciated Hiccup's too. Also alot of solid points.
Both had valid points.
But if you're gonna take swings at either, it better be from a strong foundation. Your constant beratement of anything even slightly left, makes it hard to take your posts seriously.
Gotta remember, there's moderates, mostly the bulk of most folk, that make up the majority. Personally, i'd consider myself centre left. Can't heap everyone in one basket.
Anyway, that's just my opinion. And i appreciate yours. Just reckon yours comes with caveats.
Septic Tanks are going to Septic Tank