I just noticed something on Facebook. They have this pane titled “Suggested Groups” where they recommend stuff based on your browsing habits, I guess, and there were two of them being pushed at me. Here are their logos.
Is it just me, or do you see it too?
Several of those guys pictured are dead. One, Neil deGrasse Tyson, doesn’t want to be associated with movement atheism. But that isn’t what bothers me most.
One problem is that they’re all guys, every one, except for Ayaan Hirsi Ali. They couldn’t be bothered to copy and paste a picture of Susan Jacoby or Annie Laurie Gaylor or Madalyn Murray O’Hair or Margaret Downey in there — heck, not even Ayn Rand, but maybe that would be too revealing of their political philosophy. If you wanted to demonstrate that atheism is a boys’ club, all you have to do is look at how they advertise themselves.
But another big problem is how much of a cult of personality this whole movement is becoming. All that matters is who you know, how compatible you are with that gang of 5 to 10 men who are the big names, and your ideas don’t matter otherwise. It’s all about conformity. You need to be centrist or right of center (or dead, if you’re liberal), and if you’re not, you’ve got to accommodate yourself to the status quo. You’ve got to be a man. It helps to be vigorously anti-Muslim, again part of that right-of-center bias. You should be white, but they’re happy to bring in a few tokens, even if they don’t ask to be part of this mess. It’s all part of the marketing of establishment atheism, which is going to be built around people you like, rather than ideas that challenge the culture. It’s a brand now.
It’s also focused on the past. Aww, aren’t you pinin’ for the days of George Carlin and Carl Sagan, when the atheist boys’ club could be all rational and shit without some girl or social scientist or somethin’ coming along and putting a damper on the party with complexity and exposing your underlying assumptions?
By the way, I have zero interest in joining either of those groups. Negative interest, actually.
“Fanpage”? Blech.
There are many things about this phenomenon to inspire multiple blechs.
One reason I’m not on Facebook, nor have any desire to be. And I would avoid such male-heavy sites just out of principle.
Safehouse?
I thought safe spaces were for us whimpy SJWs.
But no wonder the only woman they deemed acceptable is the hateful individual Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Funny how the very same people who regularly accuse feminists of only listening to the women who agree with them only listen to women who agree with them.
My observations is that rather than what you propose here, that is, that the perception that most “big name atheists” are right of center is completely wrong.
I am right of center, at least on fiscal matters. I do support same sex marriage, gender equality and equal rights for all. Period, no exceptions.
What I don’t support is what I percieve to be a caterwauling of those prominent atheists you refer to in support of the so called “Social Justice Warrior” (I do not use the term as a perjorative) brigades. They stepped over the line when groups like Antifa promote and execute violence, and when speakers who are not part of the echo chamber are driven off campuses. I can’t stand persponalities like a Anne Coulter, but she has a right to be heard, just as much as a Laci Green does, who I can’t stand either.
Universities used to be a place for ideas to be exchanged and developed. That proud heritage needs to be continued, no matter what your leanings are. I would like to see more right leaning atheists be promoted and exposed on these channels, rather than almost universally being lumped in with the antics of the alt-right. We are (conservative atheists) are just as skeptical in our thinking politically, socially and economically as we are in our philosophical considerations of any religion.
We do have a place.
@Skeptic
The reason people like Ann Coulter gets shit on in universities is because she does not bring in intelligence, new, bold, or interesting ideas. She, and others like her bring the same tired shit we have seen for decades upon decades, and the only reasons their failed arguments survive is because they hijacked the left wing value of free speech and perverted it so that gullible right of center people like you can keep their failed, never changing ideas alive. You say universities are a place for exchange and development of ideas, but what happens when one party doesn’t want to develop their ideas? Their goal is to propagandize. Universities are also suppose to be a place of EDUCATION. And you do not educate people by giving equal time to stupid bullshit. Also I must point out that no one does this “have the right to be heard” to idiotic left wing ideas like anti-vaxxers stuff. Its only the dumb right wing ideas that get to hide behind the mantle of ‘freeze peach’.
Becoming? I’m sorry, it’s been this way as long as I’ve known.
@6
Far away from the rest of civil society, ideally.
How about you guys go Galt and leave things to people that don’t buy into bigoted, backwards belief systems (ie, conservatism.)
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a commenter in possession of the term “skeptic” is usually really not.
Did you run all the way from your little atheist place of worship?
@logicalcat
You know, denigrating and dismissing positions because you think is “stupid bullshit” is exactly what the alt-right does. It’s pretty disingenous to suggest that YOUR particular point of view is the only correct one, and shout down any other POV, and then suggest you value exchange of ideas.
I probably don’t agree with your perspectives on many issues, but I bet you and I can come to agreement on some. That means a courteous, genuine exchange in discussion. However, if you feel shouting and denigrating is valuable, then that is your problem, not the rest of society.
@11
Yeah, but see, we’re not nazis. Or “white identitarian nationalists”, as if there’s a difference. Pretty, y’know, major distinction.
Why exactly would we want to meet in the middle with conservative atheists when there are plenty of left-leaning atheists and theists to ally with? Centrism is a cancer, though admittedly a lesser one than conservatism.
No, that’s pretty much the definition of having one. Of course I (and logicalcat, I suppose) think that we’re correct on certain issues and others are wrong and so do you. The only reason you’re here is to disagree and tell people they’re wrong.
I can say the same of the Pope.
The fetishisation of manners over substance is noted.
Listen, this is not a game for us. We’re not a high school debate club. The things at stake are actual people and their lives and there can be no “courteous, genuine exchange” on those.
I notice that “sceptic” has nothing whatever to say about PZ’s main point. Evidently, atheism or “scepticism” being a boys’ club is just fine with “sceptic”.
Who is “they” here? Anyone who favours social justice, presumably. Well, “sceptic”, will you, by the same token, accept responsibility for all the murders carried out by far right scumbags? (Incidentally, AFAIK, no-one identifying themselves as “Antifa” has yet carried out a political murder.)
“Antifa” should be added to the bingo card for talking with conservatives. I’ve now been in a number of conversations with unconnected people where it is brought up as part of a “both sides” argument, as if they are morally equivalent to armed white supremacists.
Somehow I got bounced off Pharyngula much more than a year ago and could not resubscribe. I’m posting here to see if this corner of the internet is a self-healing entity. I’ve really missed all of you.
“Skeptic”
The word is in quotes because you aren’t, so far as I can see, a skeptic at all. For instance, you claim to be “right of center” economically.
So perhaps you can explain to me how a country which, like the USA, is the monopoly issuer of a purely fiat currency, can somehow run out of it?
It seems to be the tenant, not to be questioned, of those who subscribe to “right wing” economics that a country that can legally produce all the money it likes basically out of thin air, can somehow run out of what it makes for free. This nonsense is used to oppose any and every even mildly progressive idea with the claim that the country can’t afford it!! And the “left”, to it’s shame, seems to keep falling for it.
Shouldn’t a skeptic look at actual facts? I think the actual facts about how money is produced and used are at variance with standard so-called “economics”, let alone right wing economics. And I think that’s important, indeed I think it is the Big Lie that must not be questioned. To the detriment of us all.
skeptic:
You seem to be labouring under the popular “centrist” delusion that good ideas and bad ideas warrant the same amount of protection and promotion just because they’re both “speech”. This is dangerous nonsense.
The truth and lies are not morally equivalent, and our efforts should be directed towards determining the truth and destroying the lies, not playing the agnostic in the name of “free speech”. You can have the courage of your convictions and fight the spread of (what you consider) lies without losing your skeptical openness to being proven wrong.
Also, universities do not have a tradition of letting any random loon walk in off the street and occupy an auditorium. Speakers are selected because someone thinks they have good (or at least interesting) ideas. There is always a process of vetting, where we decide which ideas are worth being exchanged and developed. If someone wants Ann Coulter to speak at a university, they have to demonstrate that her ideas are worth the time and effort. In the meantime nothing is stopping her from expending her own resources to promote them.
What currency isn’t Fiat currency, and don’t tell me “gold”, because F, that is only valued by idiots because it was once really hard to get, and shiny, so it made a nice thing to exchange for other things. You still can’t eat the damn stuff, any more than you can eat a dollar bill, so its not “valuable” outside of what you trade it for. That said, I know exactly how money “loses” value. You print the crap, then let rich people flush it down a toilet, called “hoarding”, where no one spends it, and then you print more money, but since you now have two $1 bills, but one of them has been flushed, the “value” looks like its $2, but its still only $1, because no one can freaking trade the one that got flushed. Only… We *need* both dollars, so.. what do we do, print more of the freaking things, to try to make up the difference, while someone flushes yet more of it down the drain, into the sewer of their private savings? Because, now you have four of the things, but two of them are in someone’s vault, and you *still* don’t have the same amount of money you started with, in terms of actually being able to trade it.
See, the only way this works is either a) you are not allowed to hoard the damn stuff, at all, unless its for a clear purpose of eventually spending it, or, b) if you do hoard it, eventually it all gets not just flushed out of the economy, but burned, so that its not stealing value from everything out there that actually *is* being traded for real goods. I.e., either way, you can’t keep it bloody forever. The same would be true if we where using gold, and some bloody idiot decided they wanted to make a giant hole in the ground, and buy up 50% of all the gold that existed on the planet, to fill it.
There is a bloody reason why, back when we did use a gold standard, there where limits on how much people where freaking allowed to have as individuals, then.. we went to money being its own backing, and all of the sudden you could hoard as much as you wanted to, forever. Yet… we can’t grasp why this doesn’t work? Nope, its sort of magic, you can claim that this thing is worth a candy bar and there are $5 billion of them out there, then someone flushes $2.5 billion of it does the drain into a their private vault, and somehow, just printing more of it is supposed to offset this… How? Because, as long as the asshole that did that still has $2.5 billion candy bars worth of value in their vault, no one can spend it on anything useful. But, everyone else needs to. Either you devalue “all” of it, spent or otherwise, or you just devalue what the hoarder is keeping. But, that would be “unfair”, so we screw everyone equally, to compensate for the fact that some idiot just buried it all in a hole.
Sure, I suppose, we could just bloody ignore this, and freaking hand out dollar bills as though they where “forever stamps”, but… does that really make sense either?
Nobody has “a right to be heard”. You have a right to speak, but you can’t insist that people listen to you if they don’t want to.
No movement. No heroes.
Kagehi: Yeah, pretty well all money is “fiat” these days. I don’t get your conclusions from that, though.
Anyone can start a fiat currency of course, but the trick is to get everyone to use it. Only governments have that power, although they can of course contract it out, as the USA has done to the banks.
So when I speak of a fiat currency I am talking about a currency run by a federal government, one that runs an dependent nation. And such a government can create all the money it want’s out of basically nothing. What follows from that? OK, I know some of this may sound “crazy” but I beg your indulgence and forbearance. I believe the following points follow logically:
1. Federal taxes don’t fund the Federal government. For there to be money in the economy it has first to be created by the only entity with the right to do that – the Federal government or those it contracts this right to. The Federal government thus spends first, and then it taxes. “Tax and spend” is a lie so far as the Federal government is concerned.
2. The Federal government has no need to borrow to spend.
3. It can buy anything for sale in it’s own currency, without limit.
4. Taxes serve the purpose of giving the fiat currency value. The Federal government levies taxes and guarantees that you can pay those taxes with it’s fiat currency
5. Federal borrowing is a service that provides a safe savings vehicle for those with the desire and financial means to save.
6. While there are no *financial* limits to the Federal government, there are *real* limits. These are the availability of real resources and labour, and the onset of inflation. The USA couldn’t have put a man on the moon in 1963 by dumping infinite amounts into NASA. It had to develop the real resources to allow that to happen and it took time.
I’ll stop there, and with apologies to P.Z. in advance if he feels I’ve hijacked the thread. I mean I don’t think I have but P.Z. is the boss and final arbiter of this.
“But another big problem is how much of a cult of personality this whole movement is becoming.”
Sometimes you are really behind the times, PZ. When was the title The Four Horsemen of Atheism coined? According to Dutch Wikipedia it stems from a meeting in 2007. From the very beginning it was clear that the admiration that accompanied this honorary title would result in a cult of personality.
That may technically be true.
Azkyroth, B*Cos[F(u)]==Y:
“(We are (conservative atheists) are just as skeptical in our thinking politically, socially and economically as we are in our philosophical considerations of any religion.)
That may technically be true.”
No, I think that must be technically wrong since conservatism is almost by definition an attempt to hold on to a past that no longer exists, and that is precisely a *failure* of skepticism, at least to my mind.
@Skeptic
Like I said (and you ignored) they are not here for an honest discussion. They are there to propagandize. They are not there to seek common ground or any of that bullshit. They are there because after having their worthless ideas slaughtered throughout academia in the honest exchange of ideas (of which you claim to want) their only recourse in now to dishonestly appropriate liberal values like free speech in order to spread a hateful ideology in which the conclusions are limiting free speech of the marginalized. At this point we are not even talking about mere conservatives. people like Coulter are racist, simple and plain. And you deal with that shit by limiting their influence. Not by helping them gain traction.
EVERYONE does this. The alt-right, you, me, anti-vaxxers, global warming deniers, ppl who accept global warming, ppl who accept vaccines. The difference is that out of all those groups of people, some of them are actually right. And you know what? I don’t have to respect a wrong and terrible idea. There is nothing to actually learn by respecting the dishonest.
I do value the exchange of ideas…when they have worth. For fuck sakes man, you are suppose to be a skeptic. Do you entertain every single stupid idea that you come across as worthy of discussion? How about that imaginary dragon in my garage?
You don’t sound like a Nazi tool, so probably. What about Ann Coulter though? What common ground am I going to have with her?
You know what your problem is? You step into the middle of the conversation, start expressing your criticisms, and never wonder if maybe there was this whole other side of the conversation that you missed because you stepped in the middle of it. WE. ALREADY. HAVE. BEEN. THERE. We already did the “courteous, genuine exchange in the discussion”. We did that. And you know what? It didn’t work. You are being played. What you suggest didn’t work because, again, one side is not interested in a “courteous, genuine exchange”. They are there to foment hatred, and gullible centrist fools like you are the reason why it happens. It is a society issue because the world is made up of gullible centrist like yourself who make shity rationalizations for terrible people in the interests of “fairness”. I put that shit in quotes because what you really want is not fairness, its silence. We are living in the most pseudo-sciency era in modern times, and its on the backbone of people like you. Who give more credence to manners and politeness, rather than truth and justice.
Also I have to note you accusing us of not valuing the exchange of ideas while simultaneously exchanging ideas with us in this very thread shows a fundamental lack of logic on your part.
@25
I think Azkyroth was being ironic, by implying that Sceptic is neither particularly skeptical about politics nor about philosophical pursuits.
Morgan!? ♥ ʕ•ᴥ•ʔ
Nice to see you!
Things have changed a bit around here.
Caine is blogging here at Affinity.
Click on the side-bar.
@ the “skeptic”, who says:
From #6: “I am right of center, at least on fiscal matters. I do support same sex marriage, gender equality and equal rights for all. Period, no exceptions.”
From #11: “You know, denigrating and dismissing positions because you think is “stupid bullshit” is exactly what the alt-right does. It’s pretty disingenous to suggest that YOUR particular point of view is the only correct one, and shout down any other POV, and then suggest you value exchange of ideas.”
I see your contradiction and raise you a wooden nickel’s worth of that “value of the exchange of ideas” you mention.
Whilst playing with the new chew-toy (“skeptic“), logicalcat@7 mentioned en passant:
A not-so-minor challenge on that (i.e., citation needed), specifically, that it’s a problem found more on the “left” than on other political leanings. Problem is, it seems to be an issue of both the extreme-left and extreme-right, Anti-vaccination beliefs don’t follow the usual political polarization (August 2017):
And, The biggest myth about vaccine deniers: That they’re all a bunch of hippie liberals (January 2015, slightly reformatted):
Says a lot bout them when they use a professional fraud like Ayan Hirsi Ali as their token woman.
@ Skeptic, #6
Violence against actual Nazis is no vice. It is, in fact, necessary for the survival of non-Nazis.
Fascism is a lethal plague. You can kill it, or you can allow it to kill you; there is no third option.
It’s a more complicated than “browsing habits,” of course, and naturally it’s to make money. If you’re interested in some info on what Facebook is doing, read this Wired article: “How Trump Conquered Facebook—Without Russian Ads” by Antonio Garcia Martinez, who worked for Facebook on it’s early monetization team.
Health woo in general, not just anti-vax ideas, is found across the spectrum. For example if you go to Alex Jones’s website you’ll find he sells a bunch of supposed health products in his online store.(Some are overpriced vitamins, while others are weird concoctions like a product called DNA Force.) Alternative medicine and anti-vaxxer Mike Adams, the self styled Health Ranger, has appeared a number of times on Infowars promoting his nonsense.
Seems plausible, albeit perhaps for not all woos. However, anti-vaccine nonsense is notably different than many other woos in that it is an active public health danger. That is perhaps why I took exception to the unsupported assertion that was made; e.g., selling expensive “crystals” to do weird things with is much much less likely to harm large numbers of people than too high a rate of missing or incomplete vaccinations.
skeptic, #6
Ideas that are designed to hurt marginalized people shouldn’t be given platforms.
skeptic, #6
Don’t let your fellow conservatives hear you say that.
@22
Well, to be honest, I just don’t get “your” interpretation. See, the problem is that, prior to setting a single currency, pretty much anyone could print the stuff, and its value, literally, had jack to do with taxes, or government spending, but was instead a nasty, volatile thing, which people could just for no reason other than greed, or malice, decide to just plain not accept any of from individuals, or entire groups, of people.
Can’t say that sounds like much of a better idea. The rest… just seems a bit to bloody simplistic to me. And, I am deeply suspicious of people offering simple answers to how “anything” works, especially if it involves money. Now, if you had an example of “any” currency, any place in the world, which found it at all reasonable to treat what they print this way… But, seems like everyone presumes it has some sort of tangible value, and, as long as they do, you still have the same problem – if people hoard it, then even if the government itself could, presumably, print endless amounts of it, they are not bloody giving it out to all the people who are not being paid out of all that money that was dumped into a proverbial hole in the ground by corporate CEOs and the like, never to be seen again.
But, on the original subject of the thread, as usual, the “enlightened” actually mean, “only looking out for themselves.” Seems like you need a special dictionary for what is now defined as “conservative”, and especially libertarians. It would, quite simply, just define every word that involved morals, economic policy, etc. as its direct opposite. lol
Looks like skeptic wasn’t really interested in dialogue. I feel like my free speech rights have been violated.
Has anyone actually listened to The Thinking Atheist podcast?
I feel that health woo being found across the spectrum is a rather recent thing. Anti-vaxxers definitely used to be a left wing style of crazy once upon a time. Or maybe it just feels that way because the right wing believers are not as prominent. Either way its no surprise to me that right wing would gravitate towards another form of bullshit anyways.
Maybe a better example would have been if I pointed out all the left leaning speakers that were de-platformed due to right wing outcry. Nobody seems to give a shit about them and their freeze peaches, but when actual harmful racists and other bigots get de-platformed all of a sudden its all “they have the right to be heard!”
@38
Thanks for engaging. Yes, my presentation was deliberately oversimplified for the purpose of clarity.
And I’ll admit that the “chartalsim” presented in my 4th bullet is debatable, though I think it’s well supported, that’s my opinion, of course.
But you need some explanation of why anyone chooses to use a fiat currency that has no intrinsic worth and the chartalist explanation is at least plausible and we have explicit examples of the levying a tax causing those who must pay it to use the currency it is paid in.
Anyone can print “money”, the trick is to get people to use it. And where that happens it is universally because the government is the one “printing” it (actually most money is just double entry book entries, but they are denominated in the Government fiat currency) and legally claims a monopoly in that currency. And any understanding of how modern fiat currencies work must have some explanation of why that currency is used instead of something else. I like ” chartalism” but you may have an alternative – but you need one if you reject it.
Let me try to make some perhaps less controversial points:
1. Money is not wealth. Money is a claim upon wealth but is not wealth itself except to the extent that it may be reliably exchanged for real wealth, by which I mean things or services that we humans value.
2. We find that, pretty well universally, modern “fiat” currencies are run solely by governments, which claim monopoly rights to it’s creation. Often governments contract this out but universally they “own” their own currencies.
3. Fiat currencies may be created in virtually any amount from virtually nothing. Therefore it follows that a currency issuing government cannot run out of it.
4. I think if the above points are correct then it also follows that government does not need to tax to spend. Spending comes first, not second. In practice hen a government adopts a budget for the coming year it does not stop spending until the taxes come it. It spends and the taxes come in later.
So maybe you can explain where my logic or reasoning is faulty? Or where I have my facts wrong?
That is the important distinction. None of the freeze peachers ever stand up for anything but far-right nuttery, thus showing that they’re really just mouthpieces for said nuttery and their appeals to things like fair play are completely insincere.
I’ll take self-contradiction for $500, Alex. I suspect (I.e., I have no more evidence than you have given for your feeling ;-) that it was always a “both sides” canard (I don’t mean there aren’t lefty anti-vaxxers, but that it is and was used as a (false) example of a conspiracy theory “belonging to” the left).
Nobody has “a right to be heard”. You have a right to speak, but you can’t insist that people listen to you if they don’t want to.
True enough, but rather than shouting down people you can’t stand, why not just stay away from their talks? Let them come to an empty room. What I don’t understand is the need to lock down a university with protests, or (in the worst case) death-threats to speakers or administrators.
Ann Coulter, Milo Yannowhatnow et. al. are human trash, we agree, but the throwing-a-hissy-fit-method of argumentation is losing the battle for minds. Stop giving these conservative shitheads ammunition to use to claim that liberals are actually fascist censors. Simply don’t show up to hear their shit. Boycot their events by staying away.
@45
If what they have to say is so irrelevant, why should we care if they call liberals “fascist censors”?
Dangerous ideas shouldn’t be given platforms, and I couldn’t give less of a shit of de-platforming them makes call people mean names.
My bad on that contradiction.
I seem to remember that some of the biggest anti-vaxxing cities, with the most reported cases of preventable illness, came from predominately left leaning places. I think I saw this on the daily show back in the day. Maybe it was bullshit all along.
@Mikkel
You ignore them, they grow stronger. If left unchecked, they get stronger. That MLK quote about moderates being worse than the ones who lynch black people is ever relevant. He argues that the real enemy to justice is the moderate who favors “peace”, that is the absence of conflict over actual justice. At the end of the day the people who hold the real power to defeat them is YOU. But you wont because being in opposition to people who want to oppress and eradicate minorities is apparently throwing a “hissy fit”. Its that kind of bullshit why some of us see people like you as worse than Nazis.
I remember anti-vaxxes on the right back in the early 90s. They talked in my churches and appealed to anti-government and anti-community norms. It was weird to me to find it on the 90s later.
There is only respectful dialogue with people who disagree with me if I have any trust that they are a) going to listen back and b)have any evidence that we have the same goals. I don’t for conservatives. And when you think that having someone coming to a school advocating for abolishing women’s suffrage or killing people for oil is an idea worth giving to a platform for, in the name of free speech (as if telling someone that they should die or be disempowered is a good way to get them to talk or others to listen to them) I’m going to give you some serious side-eye.
What logicalcat said. You know you’ve drank too much of the centrist kool-aid when you call protesting “throwing a hissy fit”.
Not to mention that Milo in particularly actively makes the campuses he goes to a more dangerous place, notably by doxing trans people on campus and turning his riled-up crowds out on them. Why the fuck should we let someone on campus who is going to use their platform to call a hate mob on members of that very fucking same campus?
Do we have to let every deranged moron have a speaking gig? When does the line get drawn? Should I be forced to let Stormfront rejects come to campus and dox jewish students to their braying followers?
It was weird for me to find it on the left later. Sorry.
@31 garydargan — Slow. Clap. She is a hideous human being. And The Sam Harris camp was seduced by her for years, oh look, an abused Muslim woman who tells us to hate Muslims, woo-hoo! The logic behind her fan base was no different from John McCain’s, oh look, he was a POW, he MUST be the perfect somethingorother, victimhood automatically confers ethical bona fides! Dumbest logic ever. Like some of those old blues men who sang you had to beat your dogs and your wives regularly to get them to behave…..it’s okay, because they’re so AUTHENTIC, plus poor and black. Em…..no. Ethics actually have some universality to them, and cultural relativism is corrosive when you use it to excuse assholes.
If Ayan Hirsi Ali is your token woman and POC, it automatically belies your probity on both.
PS@51 — and don’t forget that two of Milo’s fans brought a gun to one of his speaking events at U Washington and shot a protestor. They came with the hope of injuring “snowflake” protestors after provoking them enough to claim self-defence. We know this because they wrote it in a Facebook post the day before the event. So, sure, let’s hear again about how free speech means Milo should be allowed to speak on campuses even if the faculty, the students, the administration, and the local police all think it’s dangerous.
antigone10 — the evidence is pretty clear that anti-vaxxer sentiment cuts across political lines. The idea that it’s a left-wing thing is wrong. There are anti-scientific beliefs that are more frequent on the left, of course, because it’s impossible to have a movement, even a noble one, without some irrational adherents. One example is the loopy wing of the anti-nuclear movement (the ones who want to ban all nuclear technology, including small reactors that create isotopes for medical treatments and scientific research and are incapable of being scaled up to produce power or weapons-grade material) — but they are a small fringe with almost zero political influence.
Not showing up to hear their speeches is not the same as leaving them unchecked. You still have a vote, and you can still debate people, argue with friends, relatives, on internet forums and so on. Shouting them down and getting institutions closed just because some moron is trying to speak there is playing into their hands. You are having the opposite effect than what you want. They play the “omg look at the communists trying to censor non-pc-speech” card and I’m afraid it seems to be working. Otherwise normal people start to think we are afraid of hearing what they have to say, as if the mere words have magic powers.
Stop giving them cards to play. Boycot their stupid speaking engagements, or show up and ask difficult questions they can’t answer, or have another talk immediately before or after theirs by people who actually have interesting and well-researched things to say instead of their tailored-to-stir-the-amygdala shit they spew.
How utterly fatuous. No, poeple who lynch other people are worse than moderates. People who lynch other people are extremists, and extremists are worse than moderates. This really should go without saying.
There are many different kinds of conflicts. Nobody is telling you to shut up and pretend they don’t exist in all areas of your life, but rather to challenge their inhuman views in ways that don’t play into their hands. At this stage I’m convinced they WANT you to censor them so they can keep up getting invited to do podcasts and interviews so they can blather about “see all these millenial SJW college kids safe-space spoiled brats who are afraid of hearing the truth bla bla bla”.
Stop giving them that card to play, because they play it well.
Being in opposition to something is not the same as trying to censor them, which again just plays into their narrative. There are other ways of combating bad speech than trying to shut it down by screaming over and threatening participants, particularly when that bad speech feeds off your very attempt to stamp it out.
That just makes you stupid in my eyes, but okay whatever floats your boat. The sad fact is we’re in the same boat here in that we are allied socially and politically, it’s just that I want to be effective, I want to win this debate and not have Trump re-elected, or similar right-wing swings happen in europe. I think that can in part be achieved by not playing into their whole insane “the white conservative(some times christian) male voice is being persecuted and censored by the liberal commie (jewish) leftist university conspiracy”.
Stop giving them ammunition, they are succeeding when they can keep propping up this controversy by showing how at yet another college they were “censored” from speaking.
You aren’t as smart as you pretend to be. Those in the middle who don’t speak are more dangerous than the bullies who will shut the fuck up if their intimidation doesn’t work. They tend to crawl back to their holes….
Extremism can only gain if those in the middle the don’t oppose it, by showing they don’t and won’t agree with it, the extremists are shove back into their holes.
That is what MLK was saying, and is still true today.
Whilst acknowledging that memories may be faulty — mine certainly is! — this is making a correlation which doesn’t seem to hold up, namely “anti-vax in left-leaning locales = left-leaning is anti-vax”. That is discussed in at least the second cited article in @30:
Thing is, people who were involved in lynchings were not considered extremist when I was a kid. Go look at the pictures of lynchings that are available. Look at the crowds.
Also addressed in @30: Right-wing anti-vaxxers are more likely to insist a child’s vaccinations are a decision of parents. That is in addition to considering vaccinations dangerous, which is a delusion shared with the left-leaning anti-vaxxers.
Your opinion of how smart I appear is of no consequence to me.
Not taking your word for it.
As I was saying there are different methods of opposition. Some of them are ineffective because the sad fact is they feed into a populist narrative that those of us on the left of these issues are afraid of even hearing certain facts stated out loud. I’d rather win this game by removing the opponent’s chess pieces with mine, as opposed to chopping off my opponents hands.
I don’t disagree that we can’t just close our eyes and ears and pretend they don’t exist and then sit home in our living rooms and hope they go away. But I believe we can win the battle of ideas because our ideas really are better, not because we can shout them louder.
They claim discrimination regardless, and when they are allowed to give speeches on college campuses they threaten the students. If they want to hold rallies, they’re still perfectly free to hire private venues just like everyone else. And we can combat the “normal people” thinking that we’re afraid by pointing this out. As many times as necessary.
Except that letting fascists hold rallies on college campuses doesn’t defeat them. It normalizes them.
Sorry, Reconstruction ended in t 1880’s and Jim Crow really isn’t done today. Sorry, History in this country says you lie and bullshit.
Show me third party evidence otherwise. I doubt if you can….
@ Mikkel Nif Rasmussen:
What exactly are “extremists”, what are “moderates”, and why is this “moderation” automatically, inherently better? I am baffled by the idea that this is some sort of self-evident truth.
This is another dangerous fallacy. Ideas that are “good” in a pragmatic sense, ideas that confer some material benefit, tend to prevail because they give you an advantage over people who don’t adopt them, letting you outcompete them. Ideas that are “good” in a moral sense, however, don’t. Being a good person does not confer power. There’s no historical trend of nice people winning battles or debates.
And so being able to “shout louder” is a vital tool, especially when you’ve already handicapped yourself by committing to truth and fairness while your opponents feel free to lie and slander. We need to take every advantage we can get, not attempt some sort of forthright Queensberry Rules “battle of ideas” with an opponent who will kick us in the balls and shiv us first chance he gets.
@Mikkel
And of course you expect us to take yours? You haven’t even provided us any evidence that any of those weaksauce methods of yours are actually effective. You just believe they do. MLK said what he said because he saw that shit first hand and came to the conclusion that moderates are worst than extremists, on the simple ground that they allow it to happen. We can also look at Charlottesville and the fact that what was suppose to be a multi-city display of power for the Nazis ended up being ineffective due to the fact that antifa was there (even if there was a casualty on our side). It was only when they started appealing to moderates like yourself is where they were able to salvage something after that. Its incredibly naive to think that our ideas will win out because they are better when in the history of mankind bad ideas have been prominently featured even when the counter arguments to them are so much stronger.
Also these institutions are places of learning. If you give voice to uneducated garbage, then they failed at their job.
For fucks sakes, Milo came to a campus, told his followers to compile him a list of potential victims and then started putting some of them in active danger. That’s what spawned the riots. So tell me, how is a boycott (or whatever) going to save the day?
Also you ignore the fact that all the shit you mentioned was already tried*, and failed. Ppl like Coulter don’t care if you dismantle their arguments, they are there to propagandize.
I expect the alt-right to be wholly terrible. But you…I expect you to help. You don’t. You bought into the false narrative they spun while trying to pretend that you are not playing into their hands. You are. Their goal is to make us look ineffective, and they are using you to do it. I second nerd’s comment earlier. You are not as smart as you pretend to be.
*Everyone always ignored this fact. You think we all started with de-platforming?
@ Mikkel Nif Rasmussen:
You’re playing chess. They’re advocating genocide.
They do not deserve the room to do so,
I’m reminded of the KKK cartoon at: https://thenib.com/centrist-history
@42
Well, no, I would argue that the reason people use such currency is the expectation that the entity that printed it will continue to do so, and that it will have some defined value. Now, you can argue, and you may be 100% correct, that our government is playing games with the value, and therefor its not “that” trustworthy. Problem is, what do you use instead, some other country’s currency? Because we are back to the same issue – how do you get anyone to even use it in the first place, never mind trust you more than they trust the US government?
However, there is a minor caveat that I can see in the whole thing, which is that we exchange the US currency with “other” currencies, so even if we did some sort of “forever stamp” thing with it, inside our own country, its value would still fluctuate, based on its perceived value in every nation we exchange it with. I don’t think you can get around some of the problems entirely. And, honestly, some taxes may have been intended as a means to prevent exactly what we have now allowed – single individuals, or organizations, being able to buy elections, bribe officials, or undermine individual success, in the last case by simply buying up everything they can get their hands on, so as to stop someone from competing with them. Whether or not there is another solution, which would actually work, or taxes, as you assert, are just not necessary at all, I don’t pretend to know. You have an interesting theory. One has to wonder why, if its accurate, no one, at all, even new countries that form(ed) recently, are doing it. One possibility, as paradoxical as it is, would be that *most* people wouldn’t trust a government that just prints money, to pay for things, without a visible means to actually acquire something for a basis – like taxing people for it.
Then again, like I said, even when there was some tangible backing to things, it was slight of hand, and no one came up with this, “Just print more, without any account for how we can do so.”, version of things either… Did they just not see it?
@ Mikkel Nif Rasmussen, #56
Seriously? Do we have to have the “you must calmly debate the people who have baldly stated their intent to exterminate you and everyone you care about; if you show any emotion then they win, and if you dare to punch one then they win forever” discussion every damn day?
For the millionth time: Even if we completely ignore the existence of Nazi scum like Milo Y and Richard Spencer, they will still claim they’re victims. They’ll still find a bunch of disaffected asshole recruits and swell their numbers. They’ll refine their hatred until they’ve pulled in enough people to carry, and then the killing will start all over again. We know where this road leads. We have plenty of examples from history.
The reason that MLK was calling out moderates is that moderates/centrists are always against anything that upsets the status quo. They don’t actually give a damn about anything but remaining comfortably ensconced in their enclaves of privilege. Anything that threatens the slightest disruption to those enclaves must be crushed with extreme prejudice… prejudice that the moderates will shake their heads at and cluck their tongues, whilst quietly paying the salaries of the head-breakers who preserve their privilege.
The people who turn firehoses and dogs, rubber bullets and tear gas on protesters work for the ‘moderates’. Hell, rip the sheets and hoods off the people who carry out lynchings, and I guarantee you’ll find a bunch of moderates mixed in with the extremists. They won’t actually jerk the rope, but they fucking paid for it.
This is literally impossible. They don’t give a damn about what’s true; they make shit up and their followers swallow it whole no matter how much evidence we shove under their noses because ‘it feels true.’
We cannot fight white nationalism with dry appeals to reason, because white nationalist recruits aren’t won on reason. They’re following their ‘gut,’ and their gut says they’ve been dealt raw a deal in some aspect of their lives. That much is often true. The Nazis and their fellow travelers give their new recruits a scapegoat. You can’t hope to win that fight with reason alone.
I am an extremist because, when the other side is literally advocating genocide, moderation is a mortal sin.
Bif-
Nothing I said contradicted what you said at 30.
Case in literal point, Alex Jones in on twitter causing a huge ruckus about how youtube is going to close his channel tomorrow, despite them vehemently saying the opposite.
The alt-right lies. It’s what they do.
It doesn’t matter if you give them ammo, they’ll invent straw SJW’s to attack and not a single one of their followers will fact check to see if that belief is real as long as it’s ideologically appropriate.
If only those German Jews had been better at arguing against genocide!
Yes they do, and they lie through their teeth. But facts matter. If er can show that, in fact, they aren’t discriminated against, er have the upper hand in a putative argument. We don’t have to debate them on a stage, there’s no reason to give them a platform, but we can still avoid playing into their victim narrative.
We challenge their ideas because we want to convince otherwise undecided people who to trust and support. Most of you responding to me since my previous post seem to have gotten the impression that I think we should debate these people in order to convince them to change their ways. Of course we’re not going to debate fucking Richard Spencer, or Steve Bannon, because we have some insane faith that he’s going to stand there on stage and admit he’s wrong, that’s preposterous. (And you’re not going to debate them at all. Full stop. As that is just giving them a platform). We challenge their bullshit and lies in order to prevent confused and undecided people from swinging to their side of the issue.
But you w cehallenge their ideas and expose them for the lies they are in other venues and using other methods than to engage in the very “censorship” and theatrics that I fear is part of what is fueling their populist movements.
It just doesn’t seem to be working. I’m not here arguing because I think I’ve found the one magic bullet that is going to prevent the rise of populist racism-motivated nationalist movements. But my fear is that what has been happening on some college campuses is counterproductive.
Everywhere I look there is some idiot conservative being interviewed and given media-attention because he’s been shut down and prevented from standing somewhere and spewing conservative and capitalist-apologetics on a college campus. And many of them aren’t nazis, they’re just conservatives, or even just confused. I find their ideas repulsive and fascistic, or at best confused and misleading, but not all of them are dreaming of the 3rd Reich glory days. I’m talking about people like Bret Weinstein, Ben Shapiro, and Jordan Peterson. All three of whom talk quite a lot of shit, but aren’t exactly nazis or white supremacists.
It is my impression that the civil rights movement in the US was successful in large part because MLK advocated nonviolence and civil disobedience. By showing that black people are human beings too, in constrast to the murderous thugs of the KKK and other racist groups. The peaceful attitude won minds.
I’m not advocating that we shouldn’t participate in rallies and marches, or organize protests against hate speech and facism, or organize counter-marches when fucking nazis and white supremacists try to organize such events, but there’s a pretty large difference between some random conservative fuckwit trying to have a speaking engagement on some political panel on a college, and Richard Spencer trying to organize a fucking Nazi rally. Don’t lump these things together.
But we’re not just talking about people who are Nazis. Is a moron like Jordan Peterson a nazi? Bret Weinstein? That’s ridiculous. Not everyone we disagree with on social and political issues wants to bring back the gas chambers ffs.
I can only point to what is happening around us for example on social media and in elections in the US and western Europe. Populist anti-immigration, nationalist, and conservative movements are gaining ground, and a recurring and constant talking point is the leftist liberal college educated safe-space-demanding millenial that wants to police what anyone and everyone should be allowed to say and think. And evidence presented as somehow being in favor of that talking point is when loud blockades and hysterical protests break out on college campuses because random conservative talking head #24 (who isn’t necessarily a nazi or white supremacist) was again prevented from even saying a word.
And please don’t confuse me advocating not organizing a total institutional blockade on some college campus with a screaming mob, as somehow constituting a claim that we should not organize counter-protests when the fucking Nazis try to organize a march through town or hold rallies.
Then MLK was talking about a very different kind of moderate, who does nothing at all. That isn’t what I’m waying we should do.
Yes, and when the nazis organize a march, organizing a counter-protest is fine. That isn’t what I’m arguing against.
Obviously we need to spread those ideas, but there are good and bad ways of doing that. Threatening a university with total boycuts and lockdowns because some random conservative idiot is invited to blather on some political panel isn’t a good way of doing that.
There’s a difference between having a political discussion, or a speaking engagement, and actual classes and lectures. And not everyone we disagree with are uneducated, even if they still spew what I consider garbage.
I’d be more interested in hearing how you think this religious fantasy of yours is that screaming at people invited to speak on a university is going to change the political trajectory of many western democracies. Your antics are failing. Time to adapt and not give the opponent cards to play.
You don’t engage these idiots because you expect them to agree with you, you engage them with superior arguments and evidence and then advertise that you did this, so the rare undecided and confused voter knows who has facts, empathy, humanity, and evidence (as opposed to merely hysterial screaming) on their side.
I believe you don’t know the first thing about me, or what constitutes help, or how well it works.
No I can just look at elections, mainstream and social media and see what is happening. The conservative talking points are running non-stop about how we are afraid of the truth and the facts on the left.
We aren’t, but some people act as if we are and it is doing us a massive disservice.
You are. Their goal is to make us look ineffective, and they are using you to do it. I second nerd’s comment earlier. You are not as smart as you pretend to be.
I second my reply: I don’t give the slightest fuck about your halluscinations about my intellect.
What did you start with, and where, and how did it work? When did “it” even begin? Enlighten me.
I agree with all that, except to say that it isn’t Alex Jones and his committed sycophants we are trying to reach. They are beyond help. It is the undecided, the fence-sitter, the person who decides the next election we need to convince. Forget the front-men and their einzatsgruppen acolytes and henchmen, they have lost their minds and can’t be persuaded otherwise.
But there are are still lots of people out there who is watching this clash of ideas, and if we can manage to not feed into the right-wing narrative that people on the left are afraid of the truth, we are giving the occasional, rare individual who DO fact-check, a very good reason to not buy into their crap and come to our side instead.
Mikkel Nif Rasmussen,
Since you’ve been obsessively posting here with the same old, same old crap we’ve heard a thousand times before, we know quite enough about you.
So, is it “lots of people” or “the occasional, rare individual”? You can’t even keep your agument consistent within a single sentence! We can’t defeat the far right (and almost anyone likely to be invited to speak at a university in the USA who users the label “conservative” is now part of the far right) by rationally countering their rhetoric, because their appeal is not a rational one. Instead, we have to seize the initiative by spreading an alternative, truthful, but equally emotive narrative, laying the blame for the issues the far right feeds on – economic and social insecurity, crappy or absent jobs, the feeling of being powerless before hostile forces – where it actually belongs, with the oligarchs and their tools. Arguing about whether a particular rightwing loudmouth should be prevented from speaking at a specific venue is of secondary importance.
Nah, they just want to kill “degenerates” through already established societal means. Being a conservative and being a Nazi is just a difference in blatant-ness and degree, not a difference of kind.
“Conservative” and “Not necessarily a white supremacist” are mutually exclusive states. Damn near every policy conservatives support has the hidden bonus of making non-white people die in droves.
I agree that it’s time to adapt, though I lean more on the “it’s time to stop protesting and start putting nazis in the ground” sort of idea. Shouldn’t be too hard to get someone within 10 feet of Richard Spencer.
“Undecided and confused voters with empathy and humanity” don’t side with nazis in the first place. If they’re even considering conservatism, they don’t have empathy and humanity.
Obsessively posting here? C’mon don’t be silly. This is literally the only thread on this whole blog-site where I have ever participated on this subject. Stop being an idiot, you know nothing about me.
Those two are not mutually contradictory. You are familiar with the concept of a certain type of individual being rare out of the total population? But because the total population is large, those rare individuals, while being rare in the sense that they constitute a small minority of the total population, still number enough in total to have significant political effects if their votes can be attained.
It is often estimated that of the total number of people that vote, only about 5% are likely to change their stance since most people stay with their parties. So such individuals are are, but 5% of´, for example, 150 million is still lots of people. They potentially decide elections.
The claim doesn’t follow from the premise. It doesn’t follow that we can’t defeat the far-right by rationally countering their rhetoric just because their rhetoric isn’t based on reason.
And in any case, I’m not arguing we merely stick to rationally countering their rhetoric, which is mostly based on fear. Though we certainly need to do that too. We can be very emotive, and there are very powerful emotional reasons for not buying into their ethno-nationalistic narratives and fear-mongering. But such reasons can be expressed without it involving censorship of people who aren’t actually nazis.
Yes, I fully agree.
But it’s important to them and their message, and their ability to persuade confused, scared and undecided people to come to their side, which is why I want to avoid feeding into it.
I’m sorry but with statements like those you have completely left the arena of rational discourse.
@82
I mean, yeah? You’re the one that fetishizes rational discourse, not me.
Here’s the thing, Mikkal: your ideas are not new, they’re not original, and they don’t work. Everything you’ve suggested has been tried numerous times to the same outcome: zilch. You’re going the Neville Chamberlain route: fetishistic peace and rational dialogue while ignoring what the other side is actually up to.
On Phyrangula, there are a lot of people on the LGTB spectrum. The American Fascist crowd wants to inflict violence against us and has a long history of doing so, and you are busy telling us that we just need to reason with them and everything will be fine. You are exactly the kind of useless moderate that MLK was talking about who sits fat and happy, complaining about how not nice black people are being while extremists try to kill them.
I take it that Mikkel is continuing to lecture us without any evidence that backs up his numerous claims? And we are the ones who left the arena of rational discourse right?
@Mikkel
We are failing because you are the ones who hold the cards. Extremism exists because moderates allow it. That’s history. You call it a religious fantasy of mine-I call what you are doing projection. Since mines is not a fantasy, and its relying on historical trend. Also known as evidence. And since I asked you to provide me with evidence that your method works and you decided to deflect the burden of proof unto me-this shows me that you yourself do not even want a rational discourse. Your very actions in this page shows us how futile it is to rationalize with the irrational.
Yep, typical tone troll, trying to pretend they are engaged in rational dialog, but never takes that dialog to actual third party evidence, and ends up just trying to bully us into submission. Yawn, boring. Been there, done that, and they never win.
antigone10@71, Yes, I completely agree, nothing you said contradicted @30. Rereading @60, I can see it was very poorly phrased. My bad. Instead of starting with , I perhaps should have started with something like “Indeed, those ‘anti-government and anti-community norms’ and similar would seem to fit in with…”. Sorry!
Giliell@73: “If only those German Jews had been better at arguing against genocide!”
Thank you! I’ve been trying to think of a way to put this for some time and you nailed in 12 words. The idea that good ideas win out in free and open discussion is a common refrain of the free-speech-at-all-costs crowd, and I’ve been itching to point out that this concept only works in a very specific, very liberal cultural milieu — in Nazi Germany arguing against genocide could get you killed. And while we’re not in as bad a place as Nazi Germany, we’re certainly not living in the kind of near-utopian liberal culture where we can afford to tolerate the speech of fascists.
In fact, it is demonstrably false that fascism withers when exposed to devastating rational criticism. Rational debate failed to protect the world from Nazism, Mussolini, Franco, Ständestaat, Ustaše, the Vichy regime, the Quisling government, the Imperial Way in Japan, and so on. And these historical examples are being repeated today with the rise of the alt-right, the elevation of Trump to the White House, the murderocracy of Duerte…none of which would have risen above laughable fringe status if rational discourse was an effective weapon against them.
Where have they been tried? When? Citations please.
What are they up to, and have I advocated not opposing that or are you taking my words to extend into situations that have not been discussed?
I have talked almost exclusively about some of the events where conservative speakers, who aren’t nazis or white supremacists as the less than rational individual above insinuated, were prevented from participating in speaking engagements on college campuses. Which is fucking ridiculous and makes all of us on this side look bad because it is being used against us and seems to be working.
Who the fuck has said you must only reason with people who want to inflict violence upon you? Not me. Of course you have a right to defend yourself if someone is trying to kill you. Don’t ascribe views to me I don’t hold.
Or maybe, just maybe, you don’t know shit about me or my views, and are taking the mere fact that I argue against some of the rather hysterical opposition to merely conservative speakers, to extend to views I simply don’t hold. Could that be it? Could you be wrong?
And by the way, quite incidentally, the civil rights movement was successful in large part because of MLKs advocacy of nonviolence and civil disobedience.
I have backed up my claims: White ethno-nationalistic populist movements are on the rise several western countries, and in a sad and ironic way, entirely well-meaning college-students are providing ammunition for their narrative that leftists (because some idiotic conspiracy about “the Jews” running everything) can’t stand to hear certain facts spoken out loud, so censor everyone who dare not share their views.
In polls, Trump voters (for example) will claim that factor in their voting was the view of so-called leftist identity politics, political correctness and so on. And when you ask them what they mean to this, they will regurgitate the bullshit they see on social media and conservative cable news outlets.
Not that those are the only factors, but it is one of them.
No, so far that one only applies to the idiot who insists that a conservative is de facto a nazi/white supremacist. So unless you share that view, you have yet to leave the arena of rational discourse.
In the words of Republican operative Lee Atwater
But conservatives totes aren’t white supremacists!1!1!
God I’m so rational.
No, extremism exist because some people come to hold extremist views. You can’t outlaw extremist thought (or you can, but it won’t work). You can outlaw extremist acts, but that doesn’t mean people who hold the views and secretly wish to perpetrate them somehow magically stop existing.
Moderates in the sense you are using the term might allow extremist individuals the freedom to carry out their acts, but they are not the perpetrators, nor are they worse than extremists, and a simple thought experiment reveals this:
Imagine you could replace all the worlds extremists (the ones who hold in their heads extremist views, and carry out the extremist acts) with moderates (the ones who might not share the extremist views, but fail to to prevent them because they naively think all it takes is peace and reasonable arguments).
Then you’d have removed all the people who hold and carry out extremist views, like advocating genocide and actually carrying it out. Which would seem to be a better situation.
So MLK was wrong when he said moderates are worse than extremists. Moderates in the sense he used the term might still be bad because of their failure to act to prevent acts of extremism, but they’re not worse. And MLK arguing that they were, doesn’t somehow magically transform his words into unquestionable truth.
What historical trend? Please inform me here of the historical developments where shutting down certain conservative speakers from having discussions or speaking engagements on college campuses successfully staved off rising populist nationalist movements.
It seems to me I’m the one who has been actually referring to what is going on in my surroundings by describing what takes place on social media, in mainstream news, blogs and so on, and the developing social and political situation in the west in general. What more do you want from me? I can’t travel in time and show you what will happen in the future. If I cannot persuade you (and by you I don’t necessarily mean you personally) that some actions taken recently have counterproductive effects and would be better avoided in the future, then in so far as I have failed in that and college students continue to get mere non-nazi conservative speakers banned, I can only hope that I’m wrong and that it won’t backfire and these nationalist movements die out eventually despite them feeding off these actions.
That’s a failure of logic right there. The fact that you don’t instantly succeed doesn’t mean you can’t succeed eventually, with persistence and patience. I have been persuaded to change my mind or admit to being wrong before, but it takes time and good arguments, not the mere fact of disagreement. And certainly not vague references to “historical trends”.
I find it sad how having an argument seems to you to be “bullying into submission”. Don’t be ridiculous. None of you are submitting ;)
The fact that being a conservative and a white supremacist aren’t mutually exclusive views, don’t magically entail that being a conservative necessarily also means being a white supremacist. C’mon, don’t be an idiot.
While white supremacists might be almost exclusively conservative, and therefore white supremacists might be comparatively highly overrepresented among conservatives, doesn’t mean conservatives are necessarily or automatically, nor even majority white supremacists. And you digging up a quote from a white supremacist conservative individual from the past, present or future does not constitute evidence about a necessary connection between them.
It just doesn’t follow.
@bif
Thanks for the clarification!
@95
So the fact that the vast majority of conservative policy interests are dogwhistles for racist policies and are intended to impact people of color negatively, as explained by a man who was an instrumental part of coming up with said policies, doesn’t show a tie between conservatism and white supremacy.
Gotta love that Rationality!
antigone10, “bif”: Very minor point, but it’s “blf”. I’m more amused than anything — don’t worry about it! — and bring it up only because its been tpyoed twice.
Mikkel Nif Rasmussen wrote:
While obviously the death threats are completely unacceptable, I have to wonder what your problem with protests are. Do the students not deserve the right to speak? Are you saying we should only allow the speech of the already popular or powerful?
Why? When denied ammunition, they just fabricate some themselves. From refusing a venue change and cancelling yourself to failing to pay your bills, there’s a lot of ways to make it look like an institution is “denying your right to speak”.
You really should read Martin Luther King Jr’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”. It’s not that long and is worth the read. In case you don’t, here’s the relavent portion:
The moderate is willing to tolerate an intolerable situation indefinitely, provided it doesn’t impact them directly. To make things worse, they’re always content with telling those in the intolerable situations that what they’re doing is the wrong way to go about it, or that it’s not the right time, or that being disrespectful is wrong. It’s easy to understand why the extremist hates you — their hatred is worn on their sleeve. The moderate, on the other hand, will watch the extremist beat you senseless, and then find fault with you when you raise a fist in your own defense. Sure, the moderate might have stern words for the extremist, too, but the extremist doesn’t give a shit what the moderate thinks of them when it’s only words.