Once again, right-wing foot in right-wing mouth


This is Minnesota. We’re mostly pale and of Scandinavian/German ancestry up here, which means our local racists are mostly blithely confident and don’t have much opportunity to express themselves. We just saw one interesting example of a regional Republican party with a contemptuous attitude towards Hispanics…but you’ve got to go to the teabaggers to see that topped.

Members of the Mille Lacs Tea Party Patriots held the second annual Tea Party rally on Thursday, April 15 in Milaca. Roughly 60 people turned out for the event in which Sue Bican told attendees they must resolve to become active, to do something. “If we do nothing, we are no better than the Jews who stood in line for the gas chambers, Bican said.

Yes, because being a white Republican in Minnesota is exactly like being a hated minority targeted for extermination by racist Nazis.

Comments

  1. sirutka says

    That statement is also in line with the standard “blame the victim” motif that conservatives of all stripes seem to love. Yes, because if the Jews only fought back everything would’ve been just peachy, what the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising? Never heard of it.

    No better my ass, these people would be privileged to be shat upon by the victims of the Holocaust.

  2. MAJeff, OM says

    In parts of Minnesota, there are some conservative Germans who likely would have been happy to guard those lines.

  3. Mousekewitz says

    Clearly, the Jews should have just “resolved” to escape the internment camps. They just weren’t active enough!

  4. a_ray_in_dilbert_space says

    Wow, just wow. Every time I think that these folks can’t get any stupider, they get stupider. Every time I think they can’t become any more estranged from reality, they move further onto the imaginary axis.

    These folks don’t even acknowledge reality–they think it’s a liberal conspiracy.

  5. Utakata says

    *Bites tounge in wanting to say, “I thought white Republicans and racist Nazis where one in the same thing, just the former is mostly less explicit about it.”*

    …you know, I’ve gotten into trouble by saying something like that in the past. :(

  6. MadScientist says

    Isn’t this just more jesus cult fundamentalism associating themselves with the jews? Why, on the news the other day there was the pig-ignorant dog who was saying the Palestinians have no right to occupy the territories they are in. Yeah, it’s not like those people and their ancestors didn’t live in that region even before the mythical jeebus was claimed to have existed.

  7. gregfromcanada says

    Well, she is right about one thing; like those Jews who were forced at gunpoint into “showers” after what was likely weeks or months of slave labor, the Teabaggers are being lied to by a bunch of Fascists…

  8. TimKO,,.,, says

    …because it’s much easier to escape from a guarded prison after you’ve gone without calories for a month…

    (and yet there are those like Penn Teller who argue that the Tea Party has no racism inherent in its ideals)

  9. Kraid says

    It’s kind of weird, funny, and sad that this no longer surprises me at all. If I’d seen this a few years ago (like, prior to the invasion of Iraq), I might have felt shocked or angry at some wingnut cheapening the Holocaust for the sake of a really shitty analogy. Now it’s just more of the same lunacy that I’ve come to expect from the reality-impaired.

    Just think, these people get to vote.

    And reproduce.

  10. Pygmy Loris says

    Just when you think they can’t get any lower, the teabaggers blame the Jews for their own deaths in the Holocaust.

    This does make sense in a twisted way. If Obama really is a fascist, like Hitler, then the teabaggers are under a real threat. Therefor they have to believe that the Jews could have escaped the Holocaust if they had just tried hard enough. The alternative, that the persecution of the Jews proceeded in spite of violent uprising, is terribly frightening because it means all of the teabagger activities will not prevent their persecution (and death, cause they’re insane and think like that) at the hands of the fascist Obama.

    It’s hard to understand why they would say such a thing because it’s very hard to understand why such a large group of Americans have a huge disconnect with reality.

  11. Yubal says

    @ Kraid #16

    Just think, these people get to vote.

    And reproduce.

    No worries, let ’em vote and reproduce. I estimate we get three out of four of their offspring to change the sides, simply by education and reason.

  12. sirutka says

    Pygmy Loris, I would say that teabaggers are required to think that the Jews didn’t defend themselves. Part of the great American myth they’ve wrapped themselves in is that a small dedicated group of freedom fighters will always win out over the evil invaders (this doesn’t apply if you’re Muslim, of course). I blame the romanticized history of the American revolution, and the rugged individualism of the “old west” for being the seed of this myth. Sow in the fertile fields of craziness.

  13. Pierce R. Butler says

    Not to mention the 2-million-plus Soviet POWs who absent-mindedly allowed themselves to be starved shortly after capture by the Wehrmacht, or the million-plus Poles from-all-walks processed by the same SS facilities that hosted those same Jews.

    There are millions, probably tens of millions, of Americans who believe this sort of stuff; millions more who support, with real money, the likes of Robertson & Ratzinger; a large segment of torture advocates; hysterical homophobes & misogynists; we all know the list.

    Yet most of us have also met enough ‘wingers capable of making sense in other realms so as not to write them all off completely. These are our neighbors and families, who really do want to do what’s best for the country: they just need some help sorting things out …

    Let’s consider this as a logistical problem. Just how the hell could we even begin to re-educate these people without opening some camps?

    *Moo-hoo-ha-ha-ha!*

  14. Pygmy Loris says

    sirutka,

    Pygmy Loris, I would say that teabaggers are required to think that the Jews didn’t defend themselves.

    That was my point. If they thought the Jews defended themselves and failed, it would mean the teabaggers’ “defense” would fail.

  15. sirutka says

    Pygmy Loris,
    Yeah we’re on the same page here (sorry if I wasn’t clear, totally agree with you) I was attempting to offer a reason why the teabaggers have a huge discount with reality.

  16. OurDeadSelves says

    I’m sorry, but every time I hear about a tea-bagger making an ass of themselves, I just can’t help but think that someone on the inside is seriously fucking with them. Nobody can be that heinously stupid.

  17. Alex P. says

    Stood in line for the gas chambers? Way to blame the fucking victims.

    You know, who were mostly elderly, mothers, pregnant, sick or children.

  18. Rorschach says

    If we do nothing, we are no better than the Jews who stood in line for the gas chambers, Bican said.

    The utter stupidity of some of those people is inconceivable.

  19. ambook says

    What a bunch of offensive morons. The emphasis on the Holocaust in American culture really creeps me out. Why aren’t we talking about slavery as a metaphor instead, given that it actually happened here? It feels like voyeuristic weirdness a lot of the time.

    Oh, and to respond to a question from another thread, the difference between Sweden and Minnesota may be a lot of the crazy ones from Sweden moved to Minnesota and joined the tea partiers.

  20. ursulamajor says

    The emphasis on the Holocaust in American culture really creeps me out. Why aren’t we talking about slavery as a metaphor instead, given that it actually happened here?

    Because they need to make Obama the “other”. They can’t make him the other if they are comparing him to themselves.

  21. RamblinDude says

    I’ll give her the benefit of the doubt and say that her intention was probably to convey the sentiment that she felt her beleaguered party was in the same situation as the Jews standing in line to be gassed, but even so, what an astonishingly inappropriate and stupid thing to say.

    The teabaggers have taught us much about human nature, and it’s not flattering.

  22. KCM7 says

    The new Confederacy is on the rise. When the Republicants talk about reclaiming their country they are not talking about taking us back to the good ole 1950s, they mean the 1850s.

  23. Yoritomo says

    On second reading: If the teabaggers do something, they believe they are better than the Jews killed in the Holocaust? WTF?!

  24. mxh says

    The teabaggers say crap like this to shock reasonable people (and to get on FoxNews). The problem is that they’re too stupid to use this technique to say anything of substance… all they end up doing is essentially name calling.

  25. Ing says

    As much as I hate the Teaparty for digging through Aushwitz to find more corpses to rape, I have to agree with Penn by technicality. There’s nothing in their insane pseudo anarchist doctrine that is racist. There’s nothing inherently racist. It’s just made up majority wise by a LOT of racists.

    You know in the same way there’s nothing INHERENTLY catholic about Rome.

  26. foolie says

    This is an over-reaction. Can you really consider yourself so much smarter and more insightful than them when you’re unable to look past the elements of a metaphor to appreciate its meaning? As far as the Tea Partiers are concerned, our country is going downhill in the same way that Germany was during the 30s. It’s perfectly reasonable to call that idea silly, but grant them that term for the sake of the hypothetical. Many German Jews did not act in response to the rise of the Nazi Party until it was too late.

    Of course there’s probably little that German Jews could have done at all, considering the Nazis never would have come to power had antisemitism not already been prominent in Germany, but that detail doesn’t make the point being made less clear.

  27. RamblinDude says

    This is an over-reaction. Can you really consider yourself so much smarter and more insightful than them when you’re unable to look past the elements of a metaphor to appreciate its meaning? As far as the Tea Partiers are concerned, our country is going downhill in the same way that Germany was during the 30s.

    I can’t excuse them for that. They are working themselves into a froth by purposely scaring themselves with, and allowing themselves to be scared by, such comparisons. It’s a measure of their lack of education and discernment and fundamental honesty that they keep metaphors like this going.

  28. Ing says

    “This is an over-reaction. Can you really consider yourself so much smarter and more insightful than them when you’re unable to look past the elements of a metaphor to appreciate its meaning? As far as the Tea Partiers are concerned, our country is going downhill in the same way that Germany was during the 30s. It’s perfectly reasonable to call that idea silly, but grant them that term for the sake of the hypothetical. Many German Jews did not act in response to the rise of the Nazi Party until it was too late. ”

    No NO NO NO NO BULLSHIT!

    Equating HCR or Obama to the Holocaust and Hitler over inflates one while belittling the other. If I get a paper cut and say “Damn, I’m being RAPED HERE” that shows that I have a piss poor dismissive attitude towards rape. those of us who believe in the whole ‘never again, never forget’ stuff ALSO have a responsibility to make sure that these fuckers don’t rewrite history.

  29. Ing says

    “This is an over-reaction. Can you really consider yourself so much smarter and more insightful than them when you’re unable to look past the elements of a metaphor to appreciate its meaning? As far as the Tea Partiers are concerned, our country is going downhill in the same way that Germany was during the 30s. It’s perfectly reasonable to call that idea silly, but grant them that term for the sake of the hypothetical. Many German Jews did not act in response to the rise of the Nazi Party until it was too late. ”

    No NO NO NO NO BULLSHIT!

    Equating HCR or Obama to the Holocaust and Hitler over inflates one while belittling the other. If I get a paper cut and say “Damn, I’m being RAPED HERE” that shows that I have a piss poor dismissive attitude towards rape. those of us who believe in the whole ‘never again, never forget’ stuff ALSO have a responsibility to make sure that these fuckers don’t rewrite history.

  30. howard.peirce says

    I haven’t lived Up North in decades, but isn’t Mille Lacs near the Rez? I don’t know what the situation is like there now, but back in the ’60s and ’70s, talk like that meant you had to be awful careful what back road you were on when traveling from place to place.

    Free Leonard Peltier!

  31. Ing says

    “Of course there’s probably little that German Jews could have done at all, considering the Nazis never would have come to power had antisemitism not already been prominent in Germany, but that detail doesn’t make the point being made less clear.”

    Actually, that’s entirely the point. We’re not even talking apples and oranges here. We’re talking apples and suspension bridges. twisting the history THIS far to make your point is a kind of holocaust denial.

  32. OurDeadSelves says

    Can you really consider yourself so much smarter and more insightful than them when you’re unable to look past the elements of a metaphor to appreciate its meaning?

    Wait… you think that the tea-bagging element is smart enough to properly form a metaphor?

    Excuse me, while I laugh my ass off.

    There’s is a huge difference between an actual scape-goated persecuted minority and a majority who gets their jollies by feeling angry at the establishment. The right-wing is by no means under any threat and if you think any differently, then you’re just as deluded as the rest of ’em.

    Grow up and learn some history. Then maybe you can sit at the big kids table, too.

  33. Pygmy Loris says

    foolie,

    You have chosen your pseudonym well, for you are a fool.

    This is an over-reaction. Can you really consider yourself so much smarter and more insightful than them when you’re unable to look past the elements of a metaphor to appreciate its meaning?

    You know what’s like the Holocaust? The fucking Holocaust! You know what’s not like the Holocaust? Having a center-right president when you want a right-wing nut job. Got it?

  34. iamjustme says

    Yubal @18

    No worries, let ’em vote and reproduce. I estimate we get three out of four of their offspring to change the sides, simply by education and reason.

    Of course, you’re assuming they’ll let their kids be exposed to education that is based on reason. They will resist it.

  35. tsg says

    No worries, let ’em vote and reproduce. I estimate we get three out of four of their offspring to change the sides, simply by education and reason.

    You mean the children of people who are against public education and impervious to reason?

  36. Ing says

    “Man my boss was really on my ass today. We got to do something, I swear we have it worse off than the black slaves”

    DOESN’T REALLY FUCKING FLY NOW DOES IT!?

  37. Ing says

    What is with the right wing and the holocaust? With Expelled and the Tea baggers and all?

    It’s like there’s a creepy fetishing of it by them.

  38. BlueEyedVideot says

    Fuck Sue Bican and the tea bag she rode in on.

    I just sent Sue this note on Facebook:

    Did you really say, “If we do nothing, we are no better than the Jews who stood in line for the gas chambers..”?

    If you did, what a horrible, horrible person and poor excuse for a human being you must be.

    On behalf of the millions of Jews and others who lost their lives to the Nazis, I curse you. May you and your fellow tea-bagging imbeciles be forced to have the government you deserve.

    With loathing and disgust I remain,

    I ordinarily shrug these things off, but for some reason, this witch’s screed really set me off. I will be extremely pleased to cancel her vote nationally, and I’m hoping there are several of you who will help do the same on the local, county, and state levels as well. This shit’s got to stop.

    I apologize for my outburst, but I just had to do something…

    _richard

  39. mxh says

    @#47, Ing

    What is with the right wing and the holocaust? With Expelled and the Tea baggers and all?

    It’s Godwin’s law. Their arguments make no sense and they’re too stupid to realize it, so they automatically go to what’s ingrained in their small brains as bad. So, in their minds Different from me = Unamerican = Hitler = Holocaust = Communism = Muslims = Mexicans = Abortions = … and whenever they try to say anything, they pull one of those “bad” words and accuse whoever they don’t like of it.

  40. raven says

    foolie:

    Can you really consider yourself so much smarter and more insightful than them

    Sure. These people are really stupid and crazy. My cat is smarter than they are. My cat is smarter than you if you can’t see that.

    when you’re unable to look past the elements of a metaphor to appreciate its meaning?

    The Tea Bagger morons wouldn’t know what a metaphor was if you gave them a dictionary open to that page. This woman is white and some sort of xian in a state where 88% of the population is white and 81% are xians. Not exactly a small minority and who is going to put them in gas chambers anyway? The 1% Amerindian or the 3.5% Asians.

    What do you think the real minorities feel like in Minnesota, the 1% Amerindian or 13% No Religions? Probably a bit nervous and hoping the more wacko elements of the white xian majority don’t decide to launch another crusade, inquisition, witch hunt, or take over the school boards to teach creationism and declare Thomas Jefferson an unperson.

  41. OurDeadSelves says

    And a big ol’ p.s. for foolie:

    Remember, fascism is always a right-wing movement. All of the tea-bagger’s Nazi/Holocaust metaphors fall flat, regardless of how offensive they are.

  42. raven says

    What is with the right wing and the holocaust? With Expelled and the Tea baggers and all?

    They are not bright, not educated, and nonthinkers. So when they try to insult something/someone or express an emotion, they don’t have much of a vocabularly or knowledge base.

    Most of them have heard of the Holocaust so that gets dragged around as an all purpose evil act to blame on anyone they don’t like. Sort of like playing Pin the Tail on the Donkey. Pin the Atrocity on whatever Donkey you want.

    Ben Stein claimed that when his relatives were pushed into the gas chambers, it was by scientists, presumably in white lab coats. Which is a laughable lie. The guards in the camps were all Catholic and Lutheran xians, German soldiers.

  43. raven says

    Joseph Goebbels [Nazi Propaganda Minister]:

    “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.”

    Sue Bican is just channeling Goebbels with his Big Lie tactic.

    Can’t say it worked too well for Joseph Goebbels at the end. As the allies closed in, he killed his 6 kids, killed his wife, and then killed himself. Poetic justice but a bit hard on his family.

  44. Cheezits says

    *boggle* *THUD*

    HOLY SHIT, did they just blame the Jews for going to the gas chambers??????????

  45. shegeek1000101 says

    This sort of rhetoric shouldn’t surprise anyone, not even with its sheer stupidity and audacity. These people seem to think that “The X-Files” was a documentary (Death panels? Really?)after all therefore they, and only they, have all the answers to well, everything.

  46. llewelly says

    Yubal | April 26, 2010 9:25 PM:

    @ Kraid #16

    Just think, these people get to vote.

    And reproduce.

    No worries, let ’em vote and reproduce. I estimate we get three out of four of their offspring to change the sides, simply by education and reason.

    In college, I had a friend (whose advice I often took far more seriously than was warranted), who was often vocally upset about the “stupid” people out-reproducing the smart. And when I would mention I was not going to reproduce, she would argue loud and long that I had a “duty” to reproduce, because I was especially smart (her opinion), and I was contributing to the defeat of rationalism, science, and intelligent people by not reproducing. When I pointed out to her that many intelligent, rationalist, science-interested folk were born to irrational and / or ignorant people (and, I would add, my own mother believed the earth was less than 10,000 years old), she would argue that depending on recruitment alone was a losing strategy.

    I was never convinced that this “duty” overrode my right to not reproduce1. But I do wonder, whether rationalism is gaining or losing ground, and I do wonder at the consequences for the future.

    1As a man, I did not face as much pressure to reproduce as most women do. This I think makes resistance psychologically easier.

  47. stomatopoda says

    I love one of the signs on the page there.

    “socialized health is NOT FREE”.

    Yeah, no shit. As if a $50,000 medical bill was some brilliant alternative.

  48. ArcanaKnight says

    *sigh* It doesn’t happen that often, but there are times when I am embarrased to be a Minnesotan. On the bright side, at least we haven’t made any laws requiring presidential candidates to show their birth certificates…yet.

  49. MoonShark says

    Wow. Sue Bican is clearly the Rosa Parks of… uh, white Republicans being oppressed by minorities. Or something.

  50. yiab.pip.verisignlabs.com says

    What irritates me the most about statements like this one is that it is so close to merely being overblown, unconscionably hateful rhetoric. If they would only learn a little about history and compare themselves to the Jewish sonderkommando (the Jews who were forced by the Nazis to drag corpses from the gas chambers to the crematoria), they could raise their bigotry to the level where they deserve the disgust and hatred they think they are already experiencing.

    Maybe if they study really hard for the rest of their lives, they can even be worthy of the astonishingly minor revulsion currently directed at them, but right now I have a hard time seeing people who will make and believe comparisons like this as having any potential to think at all.

  51. https://me.yahoo.com/a/SaqGVG0xvJEQVwURVamS3DTCdvov0BLhXK1jOsYPPJQ-#b4893 says

    Well, my sister is closer to leaving Tucson for good now.

    I can’t blame her.

    By the way, this will be the GOP’s get-out-the-conservative-vote tactic, maybe in 2010, more likely in 2012. Propose to states exactly what Arizona just enacted, and it’ll bring out the Teabaggers in droves.

    I was hoping to get arrested in AZ, just so I could claim to be an illegal. “Arrest me, man; I ain’t got a green card.”

    MikeM

  52. chaseacross says

    Wow. To think that this view reflects a full quarter of the country.

    How long can our Republic last? Does it serve our citizens collectively to be yoked to people that they have almost nothing in common with? I went and visited the Tax Day Tea Party crowd for a lark, and as I stood there chatting with them (they were a chatty, very friendly lot), it occurred to me that I had very little in common with them- in terms of background, perspective, taste, learning, expectations, income, age, culture, education, what have you. I hope they drive some kind of secession crisis: either they can leave as friends or we can settle for good and all the questions that have divided us. Either way is fine with me.

  53. truth machine, OM says

    Can you really consider yourself so much smarter and more insightful than them

    BWAHAHAHAHA!!!!

    Yes, we can, and rightly so.

    when you’re unable to look past the elements of a metaphor to appreciate its meaning?

    We know what it means moron. It means that they think they are facing doom and if they do nothing to stop it then they are passive sheep — like those Jews who willingly walked into the gas chambers. (I have to fight to keep from vomiting all over my keyboard just for typing that.)

    As far as the Tea Partiers are concerned, our country is going downhill in the same way that Germany was during the 30s.

    The statement wasn’t about Germany during the 30s, idiot, it was about Jews and gas chambers. Few teabaggers know enough about history to make the comparison you’re making, and Bican didn’t.

    It’s perfectly reasonable to call that idea silly

    Gee, you think?

    but grant them that term for the sake of the hypothetical

    What term? I’m going to guess that you mean “Jews”. Aside from the fact that the “hypothetical” that Obama and the “liberals” will take the U.S. where Hitler and the Nazis took Germany is beyond ludicrous and not to be granted to anyone, what part of PZ’s Yes, because being a white Republican in Minnesota is exactly like being a hated minority targeted for extermination by racist Nazis are you too fucking stupid to understand? The teabaggers aren’t like Jews in Germany and they are assholes for making the analogy and you’re an asshole for defending their doing so.

    Many German Jews did not act in response to the rise of the Nazi Party until it was too late.

    Fuck you and your anti-semitic anti-historical bullshit that, like the teabaggers, blames the Jews for what happened to them.

    Of course there’s probably little that German Jews could have done at all, considering the Nazis never would have come to power had antisemitism not already been prominent in Germany, but that detail doesn’t make the point being made less clear.

    The “detail” that you have no fucking idea what you are talking about when you refer to what German Jews did or could have done makes clear that you’re a jackass. As for “the point being made”, it’s like “that term” … what point? Sue Bican’s point? Your point? Just what the fuck is that?

  54. Midnight Rambler says

    Jeez guys, you all TOTALLY missed the message, probably because you haven’t been listening to tea party rhetoric enough. It wasn’t that the Jews were too wimpy to fight back, the problem was that they couldn’t because Hitler’s first act was to confiscate everyone’s guns!

    That’s why the most American thing you can do right now to show you support the restoration of the Constitution is to get your guns and march on Washington to demand the resignation of this illegal, illegitimate, Marxist government. And if they refuse, well, they’ll get what’s coming to them…

    [see how easy it is?]

  55. Walton says

    “If we do nothing, we are no better than the Jews who stood in line for the gas chambers, Bican said.

    A day in the life of Ms Bican:

    Ms Bican gets out of bed. She accidentally stubs her toe on the wall. Falling over in pain, she rings for an ambulance. “ARRRGH! I just had my leg blown off by a terrorist mortar attack!!!” The operator believes she is making a hoax call.

    Later that morning, Ms Bican drives to work. Just as she is coming up to the stoplight, it turns red, and she has to stop and wait. “ARRRRGH,” she rages. “I’m being repressed!!!! This is just like what Stalin did during the Great Purges!” Spurred to greater heights of rebellion, she presses the accelerator and cuts through the red light, narrowly dodging oncoming traffic.

    Angry, Ms Bican drives faster and faster. She gets pulled over by a cop, who attempts to give her a speeding ticket. “You fascist thug!!!” she screams. “You’re going to execute me summarily as a political dissident agaisnt the Obama regime, BECAUSE I KNOW THE TRUTH!!!!!!!11!!” The cop just raises an eyebrow and writes the ticket.

    She arrives late at work. There is no coffee left in the coffee machine, and her co-workers have eaten all the cookies. She collapses on the floor, weeping. “This is starvation!!!” she whines. “I’m just like the victims of the Ethiopian famine!” Her colleagues look at her strangely.

  56. greg.bourke0 says

    What she meant to say was that they are no better than that Jew who allowed himself to be crucified.

  57. RossM says

    Getting back to the ancestry theme, I recently read ( http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100420/full/news.2010.194.html )that a research team in the US has announced they have found traces of neanderthal DNA in european and other DNA. The neanderthal traces date from from around 60,000 years ago (Europe) and 45,000 years ago (East Asia). That is, the neanderthal DNA is only found in non-Africans.

    In which case Africans would appear to be the only true-bred homo sapiens on the planet, and the rest of us are the products of miscegnation with primitive neanderthals or possibly even heidelbergensis. I wait with interest to see how Fox news carries the story.

  58. Shplane says

    Seriously, what the fuck am I reading? This is the kind of shit I expect a troll to say on /b/, not, y’know, anyone who gets to speak publicly in real life.

    Why do so many humans feel the need to challenge my humanism?

  59. Copyleft says

    As “This Modern World” has pointed out, a lot of people think that what affects THEM is automatically on the same level as the worst things that ever happened to anyone, throughout all human history.

    “Ow, I stubbed my toe! This is worse than the Bataan Death March!”

  60. Ing says

    “Jeez guys, you all TOTALLY missed the message, probably because you haven’t been listening to tea party rhetoric enough. It wasn’t that the Jews were too wimpy to fight back, the problem was that they couldn’t because Hitler’s first act was to confiscate everyone’s guns!”

    Except their protesting, not a gun law, but a health care law. also government in general. And it still doesn’t’ fly because of it necessarily shitting on the faces of all holocaust victims and survivors.

  61. SC OM says

    Thanks for the link, RossM. I’ve always wondered about that. Sounds like we’ll be learning more soon.

  62. broboxley OT says

    @Pygmy Loris #42

    You know what’s like the Holocaust? The fucking Holocaust! You know what’s not like the Holocaust? Having a center-right president when you want a right-wing nut job. Got it?

    brevet and oak leaves for succinctly putting it on point

  63. SC OM says

    Can you really consider yourself so much smarter and more insightful than them when you’re unable to look past the elements of a metaphor

    Simile.

  64. Ing says

    ” Can you really consider yourself so much smarter and more insightful than them when you’re unable to look past the elements of a metaphor”

    “Simile.”

    WIN

  65. Birger Johansson says

    @ 26: “Oh, and to respond to a question from another thread, the difference between Sweden and Minnesota may be a lot of the crazy ones from Sweden moved to Minnesota and joined the tea partiers.”
    People in Sweden are usually enlightened (we have a big immigrant population ever since the boom years of the fifties and sixties) but with the recession, a jingoist group of right-wing populists calling hemselves “Sverigedemokraterna”
    have grown enough to possibly get represented in parliament after the elections this fall (we have a 4% barrier for parties to get into parliament).
    -The mainstream Swedish parties have just pledged to refuse any cooperation with the SD after the election.

  66. Mu says

    RossM @ 69 wrote
    In which case Africans would appear to be the only true-bred homo sapiens on the planet
    You’re reading that wrong, it’s the neanderthal that gave the Eurasians their superior whiteness, 40,000 years before God created them in his image.

  67. tutone21 says

    Everyone needs to add the mille lacs page to their favorites so whenever you hear some stupid dipshit say, “The Teabaggers aren’t racist.” You can send them the link of this moron woman.

    Hmmm…to think WWII could have been prevented if only the Jews would have stood up for themselves. Maybe we need to have her go to Warsaw and give her message there. In the realm of peaceful demonstration, is spitting a big fat snotwad in her face fair game? Vile people! Now my morning is all fucked up because I am pissed off!

  68. Brownian, OM says

    As far as the Tea Partiers are concerned, our country is going downhill in the same way that Germany was during the 30s.

    Well, if you dumb fuckers would pick up a book and read it for once, you’d solve half the problems right there.

  69. ambook says

    I am tired of Christians using the Jews as a symbol of something or other in their religion. Please focus on someone else for a change – Jewish history does not exist solely to support your ideas about how the world works.

  70. raven says

    luimbe.com:

    It was a farce. This Tea Party wanted to project a mainstream image of a group that is anything but. A New York Times/CBS News poll released on Wednesday found that only 1 percent of Tea Party supporters are black and only 1 percent are Hispanic. It’s almost all white.

    And even when compared to other whites, their views are extreme and marginal. For instance, white Tea Party supporters are twice as likely as white independents and eight times as likely as white Democrats to believe that Barack Obama was born in another country.

    Furthermore, they were more than eight times as likely as white independents and six times as likely as white Democrats to think that the Obama administration favors blacks over whites.

    I’m sure a few of the Tea Baggers aren’t racists. One or two somewhere. According to polling data, the Tea Baggers are 98% white. IIRC, the USA is 20% or so minorities.

    Sue Bican missed an important point while playing Pin the Atrocity on the Donkey with the Holocaust. Things have been going downhill over the last decade in the USA. And who was in control during that time?

    Clinton presided over an expanding economy, low unemployment, mostly peace, and left a budget surplus. Bush doubled the national debt, destroyed the economy, started two wars that we are still tangled up with and left a mess for the cleanup crew.

    Really, we do have problems. The Tea Baggers solution is to shoot themselves in the foot, shoot themselves in the head, forget who ran the country into the ground, claim it is all Obama the Kenyan, Moslem terrorist’s fault and then claim they are the next minority group in danger of genocide while being members of the vast majority race and religion.

    It isn’t smart or helpful.

  71. stuv.myopenid.com says

    Jewish history does not exist solely to support your ideas about how the world works.

    Says who, you fucking commie!?

  72. David Marjanović says

    You know what’s like the Holocaust? The fucking Holocaust! You know what’s not like the Holocaust? Having a center-right president when you want a right-wing nut job. Got it?

    Thread won.

    Thanks for the link, RossM. I’ve always wondered about that. Sounds like we’ll be learning more soon.

    Seconded!!!

  73. Vene says

    I live in the area, and I think this is of note, there was a sign at the town’s museum for a tea bagger meeting. The fuckers were using a museum to organize to protest the government spending money. And now they’re distorting history. They’re despicable.

  74. ambook says

    Says who, you fucking commie!?

    Me. Spokesmom for the Jews who live in my house. Other Jews can speak for themselves. The problem is that trying to convey actual ideas to the Christians with the Jew-fixation tends to make their ears bleed and their eyes bug out as their “facts” are refuted. Plus it causes ulcers in my mouth and on my hands from biting my tongue to keep from calling them names and digging my nails into my palms to keep from punching them.

  75. foolie says

    I couldn’t ask for a more appropriate response to my accusation of over-reaction. Wow guys, way to make the team look good. I’d love to talk back to all of your snide comments, but I’ll just pick one:

    We know what it means moron. It means that they think they are facing doom and if they do nothing to stop it then they are passive sheep — like those Jews who willingly walked into the gas chambers. (I have to fight to keep from vomiting all over my keyboard just for typing that.)

    Alright, you’ve got it. Except that no one willingly walked into a gas chamber, and no one else is suggesting that. The Tea Partiers weren’t, though you’re too busy feeling superior to notice.

    The statement wasn’t about Germany during the 30s, idiot, it was about Jews and gas chambers. Few teabaggers know enough about history to make the comparison you’re making, and Bican didn’t.

    And you know what knowledge of history they have? You’ve done the research(which shows that they are better-educated than most Americans on average)? Or you’re just parroting what you’ve heard about them? Perhaps I’m overestimating them, but I’m pretty sure the statement was about Germany during the 30s–the figurative line to the gas chamber stretched over years as Hitler rose to power. By the time anyone was physically standing in one it was too late to change anything, making the comparison to the Tea Party’s supposed crisis completely meaningless rather than just hyperbolic.

    What term? I’m going to guess that you mean “Jews”. Aside from the fact that the “hypothetical” that Obama and the “liberals” will take the U.S. where Hitler and the Nazis took Germany is beyond ludicrous and not to be granted to anyone, what part of PZ’s Yes, because being a white Republican in Minnesota is exactly like being a hated minority targeted for extermination by racist Nazis are you too fucking stupid to understand? The teabaggers aren’t like Jews in Germany and they are assholes for making the analogy and you’re an asshole for defending their doing so.

    No, “Jews” was not the term I was referring to. I meant the element of their arguement, as in “define your terms and proceed from there”. We all agree that their terms (i.e. the Holocaust = the future of Obama-ruled America) are bullshit, but that’s not the issue that everyone here is so mad about. You’re mad because you’ve been whipped into a frenzy of outrage over their allusion to something you consider sacred, something I’d thought Pharyngulans to be above. I perfectly understand PZ’s point; I don’t understand how so many of you are so quick assume the black & white, us vs. them mentality I’d expect you to despise.

    Fuck you and your anti-semitic anti-historical bullshit that, like the teabaggers, blames the Jews for what happened to them.

    At this point I’m realizing it was a mistake to respond directly to the most brazen comment about me, because there’s really no point in arguing with stubborn idiocy like this. But shit, I’ve come this far. Explain how my comment was anti-semitic or anti-historical. The Third Reich was an assured reality since as soon as Hitler formed the Nazi party, and greater public opposition could not have feasibly stopped him? Talking about Jews and the Holocaust without profusely expressing how awful it was and how bad I feel for it having happend is anti-semitic?

    As I said before, I’m disappointed that people who read this blog are so easily swayed. I expected you to trust in only the facts that you can see, not to draw wild conclusions based on your own preconceptions. The woman wasn’t racist, she wasn’t declaring that the Holocaust was the fault of the Jews. She was just making a (wrong, not that it matters) point and choosing her words poorly.

  76. daninorlando says

    I noticed this in the article, and thought that it reflected the mindset in a certain hilarious way:

    The Tea Party will be hosting a preparedness class on Saturday, May 1 from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. at the Princeton Library covering sustainable gardening, food storage, water storage and purification.

  77. Jadehawk, OM says

    I noticed this in the article, and thought that it reflected the mindset in a certain hilarious way:

    The Tea Party will be hosting a preparedness class on Saturday, May 1 from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. at the Princeton Library covering sustainable gardening, food storage, water storage and purification.

    that’s actually the least crazy thing I’ve ever seen teabaggers organize around. More “Victory Gardens” are always a good thing.

  78. raven says

    foolie the tone/concern troll:

    As I said before, I’m disappointed that people who read this blog are so easily swayed.

    By who? Tea Bagger morons who can’t tell the difference between Nazis and Democrats and wouldn’t know a fact or metaphor if they tripped over one?

    And who gives a rat’s ass what you think. You are just a brain dead troll babbling like an idiot in the hope that you can waste 5 minutes of someone else’s life.

    I’m not disappointed that you are dumb and sick in the head. Someone has to anchor the bottom of the bell shaped curve.

  79. foolie says

    Swayed by the group think here that anyone not sharing your opinion must be a brain-dead moron. Really, saying “I think you guys are blowing this out of proportion” makes one sick in the head? And you wonder how the whole Church can turn a blind eye to rape?

  80. Ing says

    Fooli by your standard of “looking at it from their POV” then the Nazi’s were justified in their actions and rhetoric. Now, it may be easily dismissed as silly that there is a race of sub-human evil beings that are undermining the efforts of humanity but it’s what Nazi’s believe. Is their comments about wanting their irradiation really that outrageous then?

    You can’t build a house on a foundation of sand. If your premise is moronic your whole argument is moronic and your hyperbole remains offensive. It’s a form of holocaust denial in that it trivializes the holocaust.

    By the way, the “You got mad so I win” argument proves you’re the current avatar of stupid. Don’t mistake passion and, you know, caring about people remembering what the holocaust was with irrational response. Your concern is noted and swiftly discarded

  81. Ing says

    “Swayed by the group think here that anyone not sharing your opinion must be a brain-dead moron. Really, saying “I think you guys are blowing this out of proportion” makes one sick in the head? And you wonder how the whole Church can turn a blind eye to rape?”

    So you just compared people calling you a moron on the internet to a systematic conspiracy to protect child molesters.

    did you not hear a single fucking word anyone just said?

    THAT is why you’re called a moron, not because you have a different opinion.

  82. foolie says

    Fooli by your standard of “looking at it from their POV” then the Nazi’s were justified in their actions and rhetoric. Now, it may be easily dismissed as silly that there is a race of sub-human evil beings that are undermining the efforts of humanity but it’s what Nazi’s believe. Is their comments about wanting their irradiation really that outrageous then?

    IF one were to accept that Jews were all that, then no, Nazi comments to that effect wouldn’t be so outrageous. Having said that, I’m sure you’ll shout that I’m a Neo-Nazi and a disgusting individual. That’s not the case of course, because I don’t accept those Nazi ideas about Jews and I do believe that Nazi rhetoric was evil. None of that has any bearing on logical soundness, however.

    You can’t build a house on a foundation of sand. If your premise is moronic your whole argument is moronic and your hyperbole remains offensive. It’s a form of holocaust denial in that it trivializes the holocaust.

    You’ve never seen a house on the beach? And the idea that I have in any way trivialized the Holocaust, or that doing so is a form of Holocaust denial is simply absurd. It was an awful, reprehensible part of history, but it was just that. There’s no reason to hold it to some sacred, unimpeachable standard that all of the other countless atrocities of history don’t receive.

    By the way, the “You got mad so I win” argument proves you’re the current avatar of stupid. Don’t mistake passion and, you know, caring about people remembering what the holocaust was with irrational response. Your concern is noted and swiftly discarded

    Care to point out where I made that argument? I’m sure everyone here and everyone who was listening to Bican knows what the Holocaust is with a fair degree of accuracy. Your concern does not seem to be for some potential ignorance of the Holocaust being spread, but simply the idea that someone could mention it frivolously.

    So you just compared people calling you a moron on the internet to a systematic conspiracy to protect child molesters.

    did you not hear a single fucking word anyone just said?

    THAT is why you’re called a moron, not because you have a different opinion.

    If I haven’t understood what has been said, then surely it’s a two-way failure of communication. I know very well that you all have sticks up your asses with regards to rhetorical metaphors, which is why I used that hyperbole. No, being called an idiot on the internet is not as serious, nor as complicated as the situation with the Church. That’s why I never said that the two were the same; I said that they have a similarity, a common factor, which is that individuals within that environment who might take a more reasonable stance individually are pressured into conformity. I could have just as easily used the rise of the Nazis itself, but I figured a more recent and more discussed subject would illicit more attention.

  83. Kraid says

    I figured a more recent and more discussed subject would illicit more attention.

    would illicit more attention.

    illicit

    . . .

  84. Kraid says

    That may have been overly snarky. Wrong word aside, I see your point. I have nothing further to add re: groupthink at this time, except to note that I think you’re probably mistaken in characterizing the condemnation of Bican as mere social conformism.

    Mainly I disagree with your argument that Bican was making a nuanced statement about the political conditions in 1930s Germany. Given the rabid wingnuttery of so many Teabaggers, your giving her the benefit of a doubt is probably a little too generous, IMO. It is more likely that she was making a hyperbolic and highly flawed analogy, which is all the more distasteful because it trivializes something real and horrible.

    It’s like when Peta compared caged chickens to Nazi concentration camps. Aside from being a poor comparison, it cheapens real human tragedy. That’s what makes it such a poor tactic in both examples.

    Additionally, as others have mentioned, she phrases the statement such that she imparts blame on the victims. Saying that X is “no better” than Y may be a neutral statement in the strictest sense, but idiomatically there’s a clear implication that something is wrong with Y (and therefore we frown on X for being no better).

    After adding that all up, is it clearer why people are calling Bican a dumbass?

  85. foolie says

    That’s true.

    I’ve been focusing more on the abstract point of it rather than the reality of the situation. I’m sure she is an idiot and agree that the remark was in very poor taste.

  86. truth machine, OM says

    I couldn’t ask for a more appropriate response to my accusation of over-reaction.

    You’re just another tone trolling cretin. My reaction to your stupidity is just what it deserved.

    Except that no one willingly walked into a gas chamber, and no one else is suggesting that. The Tea Partiers weren’t, though you’re too busy feeling superior to notice.

    They were, and you’re too fucking stupid to grasp it.

  87. truth machine, OM says

    IF one were to accept that Jews were all that, then no, Nazi comments to that effect wouldn’t be so outrageous

    IF one were to accept that you are the filched spawn of fucking your own mother in the ass and then traveling back in time to do it over again, then my comment to that effect wouldn’t be so outrageous, eh?

  88. Pygmy Loris says

    We all agree that their terms (i.e. the Holocaust = the future of Obama-ruled America) are bullshit, but that’s not the issue that everyone here is so mad about. You’re mad because you’ve been whipped into a frenzy of outrage over their allusion to something you consider sacred, something I’d thought Pharyngulans to be above.

    I’m mad because Bican basically blames the Jews for their own deaths in the gas chambers. Remember, she said “”If we do nothing, we are no better than the Jews who stood in line for the gas chambers.” The implication is that the Holocaust wouldn’t have happened if the Jews had just fought back. I don’t find that offensive because I think the Holocaust is sacred (it’s the opposite of sacred, profane), but rather because victim blaming is disgusting in its many forms. Further, the teabaggers have no legitimate fear of death at the hands of our center-right government. It’s patently ridiculous and absolutely, morally wrong to compare having a moderate president and Congress to the rise of Hitler and the Holocaust.

    As I said before, the fucking Holocaust is what’s like the Holocaust. The teabaggers are paranoid right-wingers who haven’t a fucking clue just how ridiculous their rhetoric is.

  89. truth machine, OM says

    Oops, I meant

    fielched

    There, that gets it more to the level of outrageousness I was seeking … but still not to the level of claiming that Jews are a race of sub-human evil beings that are undermining the efforts of humanity — a claim which, foolie says, it would not be so outrageous for Nazi racists to make IF we accepted it — in other words, if we were Nazi racists ourselves. This sort of idiotic and offensive tautology is what foolie calls an “abstract point”.

  90. Ing says

    “There, that gets it more to the level of outrageousness I was seeking … but still not to the level of claiming that Jews are a race of sub-human evil beings that are undermining the efforts of humanity — a claim which, foolie says, it would not be so outrageous for Nazi racists to make IF we accepted it — in other words, if we were Nazi racists ourselves. This sort of idiotic and offensive tautology is what foolie calls an “abstract point”.”

    Which he missed in my point in favor of babbling about houses on the beach because I paraphrased some platitude. Let me rephrase for the real point. Anything is valid if you accept it’s premise as valid. Something with an absurd and invalid premise as its foundation is bullshit from bottom up. No matter how good an architect and carpenter you have, if you build atop a sink hole that house is SOL. Suggesting that it’s reasonable from their POV is bull. Their POV itself is demonstrably bullshit, and as everyone pointed out it’s basically sophism (ie. it’s real for them). I’m not calling Foolie a neo-nazi for having the balls to see that his point applies to Nazis as well (godwin on myself btw), because he’s right and he misses the point. If the Nazis are allowed to have their premise as right and we only criticize from within their framing then there is nothing to criticize. The problem is that the idea doesn’t fly in the face of frakkking reality. Teabaggers are doing a false equivalency with US today where…really nothing has changed from the last 2 years, to Nazi Germany. I’m firm in my stance that such trivialization of Dalek level systematic evil is a form of holocaust denial.

    “I’ve been focusing more on the abstract point of it rather than the reality of the situation. I’m sure she is an idiot and agree that the remark was in very poor taste.”

    I retract saying you’re a complete moron and apologize. however, seriously reconsider this sophism, it’s an intellectual albatross and spewing it out is going to get you labeled as a moron.

  91. Knockgoats says

    foolie,

    I’m sure everyone here and everyone who was listening to Bican knows what the Holocaust is with a fair degree of accuracy..

    Then you’re a complete idiot.

    If I haven’t understood what has been said, then surely it’s a two-way failure of communication.

    How on earth would that follow? If most people here understand (which they have), and you don’t, the hypothesis that you didn’t understand because you’re an idiot has strong support.