We need a new way to counter this.
We don’t counter it; we embrace it. Start working on these guillotine gifs already!
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Wouldn’t it be better to somehow try to restore a more polite political climate? Or you can skip the pictures of guillotines and go directly to civil war.
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Go and tell that to the right wingers who have decided that entire groups of people are undeserving of rights because of immutable characteristics.
I’m fucking sick of being told to be civil towards people who want me dead.
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Ah yes, I remember from history class all those times people reacted politely and civilly to a group of fascist authoritarians who wanted them dead. They’re called victims.
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I said “restore a more polite political climate”, which isn’t quite the same thing as being civil while the other side can do whatever they want. Not that I have an answer, but I’m pretty sure threatening people with guillotines isn’t one.
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How many people in the US and Europe have been executed by left wingers in recent history?
How many POC/LGBTQ+ people have been murdered in the same countries because of their race, sexuaity or gender identity in recent history?
I think you will find that the statistics are heavily skewed in one direction. Tankies are not a realistic threat, but the far right is.
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And that threat is solved by trowing out threats about guillotines you don’t indend to go through with anyway? The only ones who profit from normalizing talk about killing opponents are the ones who really want to kill their opponents.
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Yes, we want more civil discourse. But we aren’t willing to play victim to get it. The murderers and fascists need to be driven out, and THEN we can have civil discourse.
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The guillotine memes aren’t threats, they are warnings to those who are ignorant of history. The conditions that led to the French Revolution are similar to the ones of today (high inequality, the rich finding loopholes that allow them to avoid tax to the detriment of the poor, political mismanagement by our leaders). The only thing that I know is different is that there aren’t food shortages, but those may be about to come to Britain in just over two weeks.
I do not think this is good, rather I am looking in horror at a slow motion train crash about to happen. Maybe it’s too late and there is going to be a tragedy no matter what, but I can’t allow myself to believe that.
So, the warnings will continue.
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The start of this particular subthread was b00fh writing: “We don’t counter it; we embrace it. Start working on these guillotine gifs already!” much later you wrote “I’m fucking sick of being told to be civil towards people who want me dead.” These are not abstract warnings about history repeating itself, they are explicit calls to get down and dirty, but remember the warning about mud wrestling with a pig.
If you say so.
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Some might say it’s like saying that showing people warning images of the result of stepping off of tall cliffs is threatening them with gravity.
But I couldn’t keep a straight face.
On the hand, I don’t think there are too many Citizens’ Safety Committee militias stockpiling guillotines and baskets, practicing their skills and waiting for the day. Lone guillotineer mass-killings are thankfully rare.
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You’re making a bigger stink about someone mentioning guillotine gifs than Trump’s conference being shown a church murder fantasy video.
You also thought blackface was a bit of abstract “fun” that people shouldn’t interpret as seriously threatening or demeaning.
You’re not against hostile symbolism, you only seem to be against it when it’s directed at the “wrong” people.
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My first comment here was “In the movie Harry Hart go on a killing spree because he is mind controlled. Who is controlling Trump to make him attack Americans?” I’m mostly confused why anyone would make a video like this to support Trump. If it weren’t for all real mass shootings I would have thought it a funny parody of how Trump see himself. And don’t kid yourself, those guillotine pictures are just as much murder fantasies.
I clearly and multiple times made it clear that I was talking about cosplay, not the “minstrel” style blackface meant to be demeaning. Why anyone should feel threatened by a kid dressing up as Black Panther and wanting to paint his face as part of the costume is a mystery to me. But that is another subject, long closed.
You would see Trump gunning people down as “funny” except for actual mass murders, but guillotine pictures aren’t “funny” because of what? The actual French Revolution?
It is a mystery to you. I believe that.
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Again with the hand-wringing over guillotine gifs. Once more, around here they’re not threats (like the Kingsman video); they’re warnings about the kinds of bad situations that arise for everyone when inequality gets out of hand. The French Directory Committee of Public Safety and the later permanent “dictatorships of the proletariat” in various countries weren’t exactly models of liberalism and progressivism. And guess which other populist regime that emerged out of deep economic inequality occasionally introduced the guillotine into its larger repertoire of execution methods.
A whole topic dedicated to this tiresome subject has been created. If you’re going to respond to me and others about it, please take the time to review our detailed comments there first.
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In a state of emergency, you don’t tell someone to not break into a house to see if they have fresh water if it’s abandoned or unoccupied because of some conventional concerns for property rights. You just break the heck in and see if it has freshwater as insurance will cover any damages. Similarly, demanding minorities to be all kid gloves with actual fascists isn’t going to make the fascists back down. In fact, it’ll make them emboldened to go after said minorities. If those minorities are prickly enough the fascists will back down.
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I would take this a lot more seriously if you were talking about anyone posting a gif here actually threatening people on the level of putting them in cages, or murdering them in churches.
It’s not about the speech, it’s about the actual context of who is being threatened, and how those threats actually track to people’s ability to harm.
Trump and his supporters are going to get a journalist killed, and you’re wringing your hands about gifs, here on the forum.
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I’m sure that many “moderate centrists” crawling through the rubble of Germany’s bombed-out cities in 1944 and 1945 comforted themselves by saying “hey, at least I wasn’t uncivil back in the Weimar years like John Heartfield or George Grosz.”* I wouldn’t be surprised if a few of them who ended up in Dachau didn’t express the same lack of regrets.
[* to be clear, contrast the very “uncivil” work of those two anti-Nazi artists with that of the caricaturists in Der Sturmer, which – like this video – actually threatened liberals and progressives]
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The politics of respectability did nothing more than get people killed.
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