You completely misunderstand… which isn’t very surprising, frankly.
Actively recognizing a dangerous threat to my safety and well being (not to mention anyone who happens to look like me) doesn’t automatically equate to ‘hatred.’
I don’t “hate” the bigots and willful idiots that support 45, any more than I hate the fatally poisonous plants or rabid animals which abound on the planet; that would be a needless waste of time and energy.
Staying aware of the hazards that could imperil me or mine is merely pragmatic self-preservation.
It’s an accurate description of people who would willfully see me come to harm, as well as those who just don’t care as long as that harm benefits them in some way.
What’s really fucked up about that view is that the way to get that is not to ban abortion, it’s to have generous and free access to birth control, from the teen years, and giving kids a robust understanding of their bodies and how babies are made in the first place. Banning abortion does nothing but drive it underground (look at Romania during the Cold War or US states where it was banned, etc).
But the reality is that it’s not really about ending abortions, it’s about trying to roll back the clock on women’s rights and autonomy. That’s the REAL goal, whatever they might say. Their actions reveal them, since many also want to end the right to birth control, too.
Agreed; they seem to want to relegate women to being mere walking baby mills/pleasure-bots, and everyone who isn’t rich to becoming legal slaves, via the prison-for-profit system.
And? We’re describing here, not proscribing. As has been pointed out upthread: we’re not going to reach these people (that is to say, those who haven’t and won’t leave him on their own).
Semantics are highly irrelevant; the behavior they engage in or indirectly enable is fascist, bigoted behavior, and it is a detriment to very concept of a sustainable society.
There’s a movie that’s always terrified me, because it shows the inherent damage that comes from enabling inhumane antisocial behavior; the Accused.
In it, Jody Foster plays a woman of so-called “questionable” morality who is out drinking at a bar when she is sexually assaulted by multiple men in front of many witnesses.
In the movie, the witnesses not only dont help Foster’s character as her assault occurs, they whoop and holler and egg on the perpetrators.
Later when Foster lawyers up and sues for justice her attorney decides not to just go after the rapists, but all the men who actively encouraged them to commit the crime, under the charge of criminal solicitation. (And she wins, which is sadly the most unrealistic part of the narrative.)
Now to my point:
The men who goaded on the rapists were not actively rapists themselves, but they were just as complicit in the rape because they saw something evil happening, and not only did they do nothing to stop it… they cheered and encouraged it.
I think that reasonably intelligent people know what fascism is and what its practical espousement implies. I don’t think that a reasonably intelligent person who happened to be against fascism would take on the job of defending fascist actions and views. I wouldn’t take that job, and I’d like to think that no one here on BBS would also.
I don’t know anything about Russia’s plans. I have seen and tend to agree with BoingBoing posts, newspaper editorials, mainstream pundits on TV, and Faceboob posts that portray the orange shitgibbon’s supporters as fascists, but I certainly haven’t seen them all. I realize, as I hope you do, that some may be “false flag” messages intended to enrage the side they mean to manipulate. Caveat emptor. Most is genuine, but we HAVE to win over the folks who aren’t fascists, just poor uneducated white country people and others who have lost hope and may fall for this bs. They aren’t boingers. Happy mutants can laugh all we want to here on BoingBoing at the level of stupidity that must be required to support Trump, but outside, at least on the working class Kansas City streets where I live, ya need to stress the commonalities, white, black, and brown,to win our shared fight.
I’d argue that the problem with the far-right (and less so the far-left) goes beyond mere information bubbles and echo chambers. Far-right tactics abandoned good-faith debate ages ago.
We can write them off, but what is more important is that the mechanisms for the brainwashing/propaganda are dismantled and abolished in the long-term.
