As a fellow centrist I have to point out that people have a right to defend themselves against unprovoked aggressors. To claim otherwise is to play into the aggressors’ hands, which is probably why you look like an alt right sympathizer right now.
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he’s nothing like O’Keefe, who is a liar and criminal fraudster. at worst Ngo seems to be a bit dumb at times.
I see no tacit support for fascists from him, I see resistance to the fascists and to antifa and other radical leftists. I’m on his side here as both need to be resisted. I might disagree with his priorities, but I don’t live in Portland, maybe if I did I’d think differently.
There have been numerous accounts of them starting fights, and not just with members of the far right (or people they wrongly slander as far right, like Ngo), e.g. Marines Testify About the “Antifa Mob” They Say Attacked Them in Philly. The idea that they’re not opposed to liberals is ridiculous, anyone who even vaguely disagrees with them on anything is immediately labelled a nazi.
Reviewing your posting history, you’ve gaslighted for right wing groups like Patriot Prayer in 5 threads like this, multiple posts.
If you think you’re a centrist, you’re doing it wrong.
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For millions upon millions “Centrist” means “Just slightly less extreme than whatever the right-wing fringe is doing at the moment.” As the right marches further right it becomes fascism, racism, nativisim and all the rest.
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Those aren’t centrists, they’re appeasers. They don’t want to pick sides between those fighting for liberal democracy and those who want illiberal government. They aren’t sure who’s going to win and they don’t want to back the losing team.
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I said “little better” and, based on his bio as quoted above, I’ll stick to that. I also don’t think he’s dumb – he was able to get into UCLA and grad school, and he had enough animal cunning to get into his current racket enabling fascists.
If you don’t see doxxing members of antifa so that fascists can harass and rob them as tacit support, I don’t know what to tell you. Feel free to join Dustin_Dopps in pretending he’s some innocent neutral journalist instead of a conservative activist with an agenda, but don’t expect anyone who actually reads his bio to buy it.
There’s no doubt that individuals calling themselves antifa do start fights (as in the article you mentioned) and punch Nazis (e.g. the Richard Spencer incident), but so do individuals calling themselves white supremacists and such – as seen in recent weeks, these stochastic terrorists use firearms instead of fists when they’re operating alone.
What’s being discussed here are people marching and counter-demonstrating in a large groups – in 99% of those cases, whether in Portland or Manhattan or Charlottesville or elsewhere, the first punches are thrown by the fascists (this was also the case in the 1920s, until Rotfront made the mistake of becoming what the establishment of the day portrayed them as).
I mean, I get it. You’re dedicated to preserving capitalism and economic (neo)liberalism, even in its current late-stage form, and thus see “radical socialists” (whatever that means in 2019) and anarchists (however small and negligible a group they are) as the greater or at least equal threat in terms of scale and support and willingness to initiate violence. You wouldn’t be the first capitalist to sacrifice some of your support for social, cultural and political liberalism by compromising with or downplaying the actions of far-right figures who make the correct Libertarian noises about the “free” market.
You have to understand, though, that most of us here – including FDR-style liberal capitalists such as myself – see fascists, white supremacists, Identitarians and their ilk as the problem when the police and the corporate media and the GOP and the president* and his officials are making the same excuses and false equivalencies and expressing the same “concerns” that you and Dustin Dopps are.
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Mmmm, except that even at its best “centrist” is kind of defined by being in the mythical center between whatever the two dominant parties are doing. That means they’re defined not by what they believe but by sitting wherever the fence happens to be. It’s not a place for any woman or man of principle. It’s a way of being smug at not taking a stand.
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Fascist: “That man is a socialist! Seize his property, abduct him and his family to camps and work them to death to give me profit!”
Socialist: “No, don’t do that.”
Centrist: “Come on, Socialist, at least hear him out!”
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What’s actually telling is how willing you are to engage in bad faith arguments (and sad how easily other posters on here fall for such tactics), distorting what I’ve very clearly said in this thread to slanderously paint me as a far right apologist. A rather transparent tactic to avoid engaging with the actual content of my criticisms.
Let me repeat myself, and we’ll see if you can stop with the distortions.
Which makes it pretty clear that I am not more worried, or even just as worried, about antifa compared to current far right groups in the US. The far right is clearly a much bigger threat, the only thing I’m worried about with regard to antifa is that if the situation continues to escalate we’ll see them behaving more like they used to behave when first established (which wasn’t just as a reaction to fascists, but as an armed wing of a revolutionary political party), or how they behaved across Europe after the war (mostly from the 70s to the 90s, which included bombings, bank robberies, kidnapping, etc). A further escalation from the left would also lead to a further escalation from the right, so even in the event of such a thing happening I’d probably still be more worried about the fascists (because at least the far left are very far from power anywhere in the west at the moment, and without state backing the damage they can do is limited).
Of course I’ve done no such thing, while there has been a growth in visible tankies over the last few years, I don’t think current antifa groups have much to do with Stalinism, there’s a much wider spread of different ideologies involved, and probably more anarchists than socialists. It doesn’t really matter what ideologies they espouse though, if they ever got into power it would all devolve into something very much like Stalinism anyway. The far left in the past have been just as scary as Nazis, if not more so - given they were more successful and murdered far more people. It’s eminently sensible to worry that this might become the case again in the future, just as it’s right to be shocked and incredibly worried about the growth and normalisation of the far-right today.
Centrism is the belief that democracy and free market capitalism are the perfect counterbalance to each other. Where government fails to meet the needs of the people but private businesses can, you let private business take care of it. If private business fails to meet the needs of the people, you let a democratically elected government make the necessary changes so that they are met. To go right wing is to favor business, to go left is to favor democracy.
Democrats are a center right party with a handful of progressives trying to pull it back to the left. Meanwhile, Republicans are knocking on fascism’s door.
Left, right, and center stays in place. Whatever your political parties do has no effect on this scale.
Fascist: “We want to kill all the Blacks, Gays, Muslims, and Jews.”
Socialist: “Hell, no!”
Centrist: “How about only killing the Blacks and Jews?”
Fascist: “I can work with this for now.”
Socialist: “Hell, no!”
Centrist: “The Left is unrealistic. They just won’t compromise.”
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In other words, it has moved steadily to the Right over the last fifty years.
During the Nixon years “Frozen Ps” and the creation of the the EPA were Republican positions.
During the Eisenhower Administration integration, the Great Compression, immigration, high marginal tax rates, support for Unions, and other things to control so-called “Free Market Capitalism” were planks of the GOP platform. “Centrists” were not in any sense to the Right of these.
Thank you for demonstrating my point
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Maybe stop worrying so much about what antifa as movement might do and worry more about what the far-right as a movement is and has been doing – with the support of or complacency on the part of the American political and corporate media establishment.
When the antifa start acting in a co-ordinated manner like the thugs of the KPD did in the late 1920s I’ll start worrying about them, but right now they’re avoiding that trap.
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No, you very clearly don’t get it. See my previous post. I’ve never once downplayed the actions of the far right. Nor am I swayed by libertarian noises about the free market, not being a libertarian. Liberals make the right noises about the free market and the role of government in regulating it’s failures, so I tend to listen to those kind of people.
I also see them as a problem, the only thing I’d disagree with here is that there has to be only one problem, humans are more than capable of coming up with multiple ways of making things worse at the same time unfortunately. Just because they’re currently a bigger problem doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be wary of creating more problems for ourselves down the road, playing into the hands of the fascists at the same time.
I’ll reserve the right to worry about whatever I want, and I do worry more about the far-right already.
It generally makes sense to worry about problems that might happen, before they happen, not after.
You’re making false equivalencies between their current actions and the antifa’s potential actions. That amounts to the same thing.
You may reject that embarrassing label, but your comment history here indicates that the “free” market is your priority, with a willingness to sacrifice or compromise the other pillars of liberalism (cultural, social, political) to preserve it. If you have an issue with that perception (apparently not one I alone hold) you might want to consider that you’re having difficulty articulating your true position.
That’s fine. But you can’t act puzzled when you come off as making false equivalences or denying facts that end up downplaying the real danger.
As long as you’re not trying to give them equal weight with problems that are occurring right now, I agree. But you’ve spent most of this topic doing just that, despite your protestations to the contrary.
My priority as a liberal is making fascists, white supremacists, neoNazis and the like as societally unacceptable as they were before 2007 – when that happens you won’t have to wring your hands so much about the antifa movement, because (as the term suggests) it exists only in opposition to them. Anything that distracts from that goal is something that a liberal (at least one who’s studied the history of the 20th century) can’t afford to indulge in at this moment.
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So not more worried. The fascists are clearly a bigger threat, but the potential for the anti-fascists to perhaps turn into something they currently aren’t behaving like at all, is something to be concerned about.
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In other words, the fascists ARE doing violence against everyone who isn’t them because that’s their stated aim and core value.
The people who don’t like fascism could conceivably with weird quantum fluctuations we’ve never seen hurt someone who isn’t a fascist. They haven’t, but they might could possibly some day.
And that makes them worse. Your insinuations read much better by gaslight than the harsh light of reason.
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Well, Ngo might not be a fascist. Just an opportunist and fascist appologist, but getting into hair splitting territory isn’t particularly helpful. (I’m not sure if premptively invoking the one “counter example” is either, but I’d rather give it a try than wait for someone to start flogging it again.)
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If I can make any actual point, maybe listen to this: what you call a centrist or moderate or whatever, might be beneficial. The group-think on the far left is very strong. Having a voice that creates a small modicum of dissent might not hurt you. Maybe, perhaps, listen to how you sound to others.
I’m not trying to silence anyone. But, clearly, people here want to silence me. That should give you pause. Legitimately.
No. Actually the opposite. People are engaging you. Don’t be such a whiner, nobody’s even flagged you.
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