You can debate with someone the merits and problems of, say, single-payer healthcare.
You cant debate with somebody whose whole platform is “you are subhuman and if I get my way you will be dead or enslaved”. What is he going to do, convince you of the merits of his proposal? What are you going to do, show them a rational explanation why you deserve to live?
“ABOVE ALL, AVOID CONFRONTATION WITH THE ALTRIGHT SPEAKER AND SUPPORTERS”
Well, the Left loves its confrontations too. Both extremes have a long reputation of trying to shut down any discourse, or indeed anything, they do not agree with.
A very strong tendency to shout 'If you’re not for us your against us" pervades both rends of the spectrum.
The current suggestions though are outstanding. The best way to drivre out bad speech is with good speech, good actions to drive out bad and so on.
What is happening now does need to be stamped out without giving these pseudo-Nazis excuses for violence. (Real WW2 Nazis would kick their pasty little behinds.)
God help me, I’m what was once a conservative who, without changing anything, finds himself a middle of the road liberal simjpy because both sides have become so extreme.
I even find I am willing to stand with the Wobblies (IWW) in their march against this racist BS in my town and at no time my life could I have foreseen that ever happening.
But the cause of racial equality and elimination of racism transcends left or right. Ultimately, it’s about people controlling the government or the government controlling people.
Well, that is how “Christianity” works: “You are a sinner and unworthy of anything but eternal damnation and endless torture. Your finest efforts are less than a child painting with their excrement and even God doesn’t know why he bothers with you but God will overlook it if you give me lots of money” and yet people sign up in droves.
It works better than the one with fasces shaped wheels.
“You want me dead and i want me alive. Let’s come to a reasonable middle ground through careful logical debate.”
Good advice.
Also… if one of these bozos walks into our local Applebee’s – carrying a loaded AK-47 – and my family is with me?
There is a baseball bat in the trunk of my car.
Because – “tolerance” has its limits.
Please listen to the gentleman who starts speaking at the one minute mark on this video. He has three talking points.
The third is that he wants to put me – this flesh and blood person typing right now, who’s drinking coffee out of a Wonder Woman mug and thinking about what she’s going to about the slow leak in her right front tire – in an oven.
How do I debate that? Where does Robert’s Rules of Order cover genocide? What would you have me do?
If the alt-right is coming to campus, the local Republican Club may have invited them, but it’s the Young America’s Foundation pulling the strings, paying for the trip and the speakers’ fees.
Revenue: $36,193,437
Assets: $68,944,447
Contributions: $20,699,924
It’d be interesting to see how many speakers to right stronghold locations that they’ve paid for, or is this all about irritating prods to the non-right?
While there’s a lot of political stances in this thread, and while I acknowledge boingboing readers probably aren’t the best to rely on for direct action, I’m still surprised nobody has questioned the OP.
If it wasn’t for months of organizing by those that some of you conservatives call ‘extremists,’ there wouldn’t have been a sizeable resistance to the Unite the Right march in Charlottesville. They would have walked freely. We do not want them to walk freely. This only empowers them because they think they are accepted.
It is extremely important to shut them down at any public event. Holding a party far away will not only do nothing to prevent them from marching, but will detract liberal allies from assisting groups like antifa. When liberals don’t show up, police arrest left wingers en masse.
Cory you’re Canadian, you should know this. Toronto ARA in the 90s.
would you say that all opposition / protesters are extremists? Seems like jumping from talking about extremists to saying “both groups” might lead some to that conclusion.
I assume you’re both addressing the U.S. context, whee I also live. So i have to ask, where is this dangerous, organized, murderous left of which you speak? Who are they? What intimidating, weapons-laden marches have they organized? Who have they killed, and who do they say they want to kill en masse, and how much power do they actually have toward doing so?
Seems to me this dangerous far left doesn’t exist in the U.S., except as a trumped-up figment in the collective imagination of some frustrated, scared white guys, guys who are angry at the wrong targets.
They went to Charlottesville ostensibly to protest the removal of a Gen. Robert E. Lee statue. Ironically I suspect the violence and media frenzy from this weekend will finally convince the city council to remove the statue; if these goons are going to show up and “protect” the statue every few months with torches, thus bringing more counter-protests, then the sooner they remove it the better.
They clustered around that statue with burning torches. Imagine if beforehand someone had gone up and coated the statue in some kind of flammable goop, so the minute they got close it burst into flame. Hopefully nobody would get hurt, and that statue was set to be removed anyway. Of course these guys like burning crosses so maybe a burning General Lee isn’t such an affront to them.
“These monuments purposefully celebrate a fictional, sanitized Confederacy. . . After the Civil War, these statues were a part of that terrorism as much as a burning cross on someone’s lawn; they were erected purposefully to send a strong message to all who walked in their shadows about who was still in charge in this city.” --Mitch Landrieu, Mayor of New Orleans
…Of course to go with the Tiki Torches, they should have been wearing Hawaiian shirts instead of White Polos…Perhaps a Luau would be the appropriate “fun” anti- themed event.
I mean, what about McDonald’s and Starbuck’s windows the black bloc like’s the smash? I mean, isn’t that just as bad as what the alt-Reich advocate? /s
I guess that, if they look like idiots on the TV, their natural audience will say it is the “Librul Meeja” making them look bad.
Deflect, deny, marginalize; lather, rinse, repeat.
The only Stalinists I’ve seen active in American politics in my lifetime were the clowns at International ANSWER, who could barely control their own street protests in the early 2000s. They’ve been irrelevant since Prince Bush left office, and they certainly weren’t backing Clinton in 2016.
Meanwhile, during the same period Hitler-loving white supremacists have only grown in power, enabled by and enabling the GOP to the point where, as a movement, they helped elect the current president*, who has further emboldened them.
So, yeah, totally the same threat level. /s
Given what happened in Charlottesville, this gif might not be appropriate…
It had occurred to me that the arsehole murderer may have been emulating that scene, given the repeated lies in their echo chamber about how the left are Nazis.
