Milo Y. looks like the guy at the party in Blade who doesn’t realize everyone else is a vampire and they invited him so they could eat him.
—— Gin and Tacos
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Why oh why did I click on this?
110 posts after a couple hours’ absence is never a good sign. Holy fucksocks…
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Name-calling. Ad hominem.
I never argued otherwise. Straw man.
You’re trying to discredit me by attacking my character instead of my arguments. Ad hominem.
Sorry, I missed one of your comments:
Those were two different arguments:
- The left has engaged in more political violence than the right in the context of 21st century USA.
- Historically, when the left engaged in “preemptive” violence or initiates violence, the results are pretty much inevitably human rights catastrophes.
I can’t help but think you’re moving the goalposts on me.
- I have provided some evidence for my position on request.
- You have not.
- You’ve engaged in name-calling and invective instead.
- Every time I provide evidence, you come back and give me a reason why it’s not good enough – but not one that was mentioned in your previous request (this is pretty much the definition of “moving the goalposts”).
Moreover, my point is easy to refute. All you have to do is provide approximately equal evidence of right wing political violence in the 21st century USA that is on a similar or greater scale than what I have provided evidence for, and I would be in the position of having to find better evidence to support my claims. As it is, you are acting as if you’re special and don’t need to give evidence for your position but can keep demanding more and more evidence for mine, even though I’ve already provided sufficient evidence to make my point.
As to your specific complaint – “these anecdotes merely show that there has been violence, not that it has been increasing” – that actually supports my point. I’ve shown that the left has been fairly violent recently. Either:
- This is a legitimate increase from what was already going on (in which case my claim is satisfied)
or - There was already a similar or greater amount of political violence on the left before the last few months
In either case, the left is more violent than the right in 21st century USA. (in which case my claim is satisfied)
Moving the goalposts won’t help your case at this point. You need to provide some evidence. Either show that the riots reported in the news are fictitious, or provide evidence of similar riots or coordinated group violence on the right.
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I think Milo knows what everyone is, but is deluding himself into thinking he can control them.
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You’re a Pinochet apologist and a Bundy-ite. How do you live with yourself,
supporting the assholes like you do? Your own personal character is the lie
to your argument. No further documentation required.
#MAGAman
Seriously, what the fuck.
One possibly more productive form of protest would be to reserve as many tickets to the talk as possible and during the talk stand backs facing the speaker in total silence. The talk itself would be extremely unsatisifying for Milo Yiannopoulous and anyone supporting him. The point would be made without providing anything to use to misdirect attention to the supposed violent leftists. Can’t even say his right to be heard was denied.
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I think if he’s getting paid to give the talk it would be extremely satisfying for him.
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Great. Trump agrees.
“You know what solves it? When the economy crashes, when the country goes to total hell, and everything is a disaster, then you’ll have riots to go back to where we used to be, when we were great.”
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Where did I apologize for Pinochet? Where did I support anyone on the right? Where did I say anything about “MAGA”?
My politics are solidly left anarchist. If you want to prove otherwise, you need to provide some evidence based on things I’ve actually said rather than your fevered imagination.
I’m making the arguments I am because this weak, meaningless protest violence is tactically unsound. It’s how you lose. I want the left to win, so I’m criticizing tactics that I think are bad. If you think the weak, meaningless protest violence is somehow going to lead to victory over fascism, then please feel free to explain how. Otherwise, acknowledge the arguments I’m actually making instead of putting words in my mouth.
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That’s basically what I was getting at with the “weird videos” – like the blond girl with the MAGA hat, who happened to be being interviewed, and happened to be pepper sprayed. It’s definitely possible that it was staged (although certainly still possible that it wasn’t). In any case, though, it still “happened,” and may still affect people’s views.
Also - does it matter? Whether you are a hardcore Anarchist who actually believes in the tenets of anarchy, or someone who is angry and/or confused and found a group willing to lash out, the results are the same.
I wanted to touch on this and others who brought up false-flags. It seems to me, isn’t this mostly more or less conspiracy theories? Every god damn time something bad happens I hear one side or another, in various degrees of sincerity, contemplate the event being a false-flag or insiders. While I am sure there are historical examples, I can’t even really think of one perpetuated by the government (which the Right-Wing kooks seem to be enamored with) within recent history. And not even Group B going to a Group B event, pretending to be Group A to make Group A look bad. I mean, I am sure it has happened somewhere, but not nearly as often as it gets accused. I know that one documentary guy got accused of trying to hirer protestors to be disruptive, but that is one guy and no evidence it happened. I hear accusations all the time that protestors are being PAID to do it, and that the outrage is largely manufactured, yet no evidence to support this.
It seems people forget that there are more than just two Parties out there. When the Women’s March happened I tried to remind some people that there were multiple reasons people were out there, and you honestly could ask 10 people and get 10 different answers, many with some overlap. Nor does one fringe group latching on to a protest or something invalidate the reason of protest. i.e. BLM and violence in some areas. Or Anarchists at this event or others. Too many people are too eager to write the whole thing off and focus on the bad actors, even though 1) most people aren’t acting that way and 2) even if some or many do, their overall point may still have a lot of validity.
You defended the Pinochet & other right-wing regimes by claiming that there
were more leftist authoritarian regimes, that leftists were propagating
violence, etc. Stalin does not justification for Pinochet make, MAGAman.
The fact is that the majority of violence in both the 20th and 21st century
was perpetrated by right wing authoritarians and their corporatist backers.
Stack the corpses of Stalin, Mao, and the Khmer Rouge and they pale in
comparison to the right’s. Shit, GWB’s regime killed more people this
century than NK did last.
I am by no means a conspiracy theorist, and generally loathe them. But when you have events centering around known propagandists whose stock in trade is stirring people up, rabble-rousing, and casting blame, and a situation in which violent protest is the ideal outcome for Milo’s M.O., it seems a little too weird for a bunch of black bloc protesters to suddenly show up, smash things, and not get arrested. And when there’s actual Breitbart affiliates who’ve been caught trying to pay protesters to riot, I have to wonder about other Breitbart folks using that tactic.
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How about Forsyth County v. Nationalist Movement, 505 U.S. 123, 134-135 (1992). The US Supreme Court ruled that “[s]peech cannot be financially burdened, any more than it can be punished or banned, simply because it might offend a hostile mob.”
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I’m not saying the right doesn’t use violence. I’m saying that it doesn’t work well when the left tries to initiate violence.
I agree. The thing is, I think the left is going about this completely backwards.
The left is doing everything in its power to avoid being able to effectively wield violence in self-defense. At the same time, the left is engaging in petty, meaningless violence to vent their rage but achieve no long term goals. This short-term meaningless violence alienates potential sympathizers and justifies retribution by the police and justice system. We’re calling down violence from which we are not prepared to defend ourselves.
I never claimed that, and invite you to try to find a quote where I did.
They are. I provided several links to respected news sources reporting on such incidences. If you disagree, you should find a way to dispute the quality of my evidence rather than attacking my character.
Could you provide some evidence for these claims please? I’m pretty sure that Stalin and Mao’s combined body count blows everyone else’s out of the water.
This is not an argument that leftism is inherently violent or anything like that. It’s not a moral claim or moralistic accusation at all. It’s a simple debate of facts. Did right-wing regimes kill more people or did left-wing regimes? This is not a debate that can be “won” by yelling louder or calling the other person more clever names, or by claiming that they’re a bad person who kicks puppies. It requires evidence.
As I mentioned before, I didn’t actually make this comparison. Thus, you are the one claiming the right has engaged in more violence during the 20th century. The onus is on you to provide evidence for it.
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I share a concern about false flag attacks, and I think the concept of “conspiracy theories” is itself a propaganda technique for preventing people from suspecting that powerful people have a lot of control over the lives of others (which to me is a simple and obvious truth about the world).
However, I think that trying to justify preemptive violence plays into the false flag attacks, and that the only sensible response is to decry, disavow, and shun anyone who engages in pre-emptive violence, even to the point of calling the cops on fellow protesters if they start breaking the law. The left needs to establish a reputation for peaceful protest and for rejecting violence to have any credibility to establish the reality of false flag attacks.
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If you are an employee working the register at a particular McDonalds location, the government can’t arrest you for telling a prospective customer that the food at this location is awful and they should go to the Burger King across the road. Your boss can and almost certainly will fire you for saying that, however. Will your (former) boss be an asshole for firing you? In my opinion, no.
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I draw a distinction between people who are there to express political views by throwing rocks and people who are there because they are pretty sure they can throw some rocks and get away with it.
I don’t think you can just reject this as “conspiracy theory.” When someone suggests that a half million people are actors hired by George Soros to protest, that’s nonsense. When someone says that the US government perpetrated 9/11 against itself, they are suggesting a sweeping conspiracy involving thousands of people.
If a video on the internet with one person pepper spraying another looks weird, though, it’s not a crazy theory to think that one or two people might have agreed to make it. If a handful of people threw rocks it’s not crazy to point out they could have just as easily been there to make the protesters look bad, or been totally unrelated and just thought vandalism was fun. People out there are making 10 twitter egg accounts to send rape threats at people who Milo doesn’t like, it’s not a stretch to think that they would attempt to deceive people on the internet. This isn’t about conspiracy theory, it’s about keeping an open mind to the myriad of plausible scenarios.
So if there is a large riot, then I don’t think it’s plausible that the whole riot was composed of “false flag” forces. But if there is no riot, and no violence, is it plausible that videos of violence will surface anyway? Of course it is. We are in the post-fact era.
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@wysinwyg, I have one question regarding all of this: What, exactly, would your suggestion be in cases like this? Don’t protest at all and let Yiannopoulos have his stage, as @time suggests? Have a protest, but maintain a tight control over the protestors to make sure that no acts of violence occur? Something else?
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