junkshop
Otto's Favourite
Marathon.
Split Thread Are Antifa and violent leftists the cause of everything wrong in America?
- Thread starter Opcode
- Start date
Does this include the actions of the rioters on J6? Property was damaged, some people, including police were attacked and injured. Were they terrorists? Trump said he loved them and gave them pardons, but surely this does not excuse them in your eyes?
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We used to have a man, William F. Buckley Jr, who worked very hard to keep the kooks out. Instead of explaining this on my own, I asked Google Gemini to do it, an excerpt that I include below:
"Buckley's primary goal in founding National Review in 1955 was to unite traditionalists, libertarians, and anti-Communists into a coherent political force that could challenge liberalism. To do this, he had to purify the movement of figures and groups whose extreme or nonsensical ideas would make all of conservatism seem "ridiculous and pathological" to the mainstream.
"His most famous act of gatekeeping was his decision, in 1962, to denounce the John Birch Society (JBS), a powerful group whose leader, Robert Welch, promoted conspiracy theories, including the belief that President Dwight D. Eisenhower was a conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy.
"Buckley's actions defined the modern American Right by exclusion, drawing a "red line" against:
- Conspiracy Theories: Rejecting the belief in hidden, systematic subversion of American institutions (like the JBS's claim about Eisenhower).
- Bigotry: Rejecting overt anti-Semitism, racism, and white supremacy.
- Intellectual Dishonesty: Insisting that conservatism must be grounded in "truth and his love of country," not "pathological fantasies."
"In essence, his gatekeeping was a necessary, though painful, political move that separated the emerging "New Right" from the embarrassing and marginal "Old Right" fringe, making conservatism a serious, durable, and politically viable force."
William F. Buckley Jr. died on February 27, 2008.
One of the reasons I'm angry at Donald Trump is for doing exactly what Buckley tried to prevent. Donald Trump is doing all he can to bring the kooks *IN*! It almost looks like Trump is doing this intentionally, in an attempt to destroy government agencies. I think he is discrediting the Republican Party in the process. However, Donald Trump always has been a New York Liberal, and he might not be aware of what he is doing. That seems unlikely to me, though. I think he knows what he is doing.
I think it's more a matter of people riding the coattails of success, or, at least, recognizing that resistance is fatal.
That may be true, but it is not true that if you are anti-fascist, you are Antifa.
Antifa refers to a set of ideology that is not inclusive of everybody who opposes fascism. That's why members of Antifa beat up or oppose other people who also oppose fascism.
You would be wrong in doing so, though.
But, he probably isn't a member of Antifa. He probably wouldn't join a local group of Antifa. Compared to the Chinese Communist Party, Antifa are a bunch of amateurs.
I suspect you might.
We don't have any fascist leaders in the Republican Party. We have a lot of kooks, some extremists, but no actual fascists. The term is used hyperbolically by the opposition.
This leads to the heart of the matter. Those on the Left who imagine what the law is based on what they want it to be, versus the government enforcing the actual laws. The Left thinks that arresting and deporting people who are in the US illegally is a violation of US law, maybe a violation of the Constitution. The Left thinks that using physical force to stop law enforcement from doing its job is protected speech. The Left thinks that women's rights or reproductive health means the right to kill a fetus, and claims that opposing abortion is an attack on women, even though a lot of women oppose abortion. The Left thinks that redefining the meaning of "man," "woman," "marriage" or anything else changes objective reality. The Left plays a lot of mind games, a lot of word games, to delude the public into going along with their insanity.
I gave Google Gemini the following prompt: "A research paper several years ago mathematically proved that a voting system with more than two political parties cannot be fair."
Gemini's partial reply: "Yes, the research you're referring to is known as Arrow's Impossibility Theorem (also called the General Possibility Theorem).
"Arrow's Impossibility Theorem
"The theorem, developed by economist Kenneth Arrow in his 1951 doctoral thesis, mathematically proves a fundamental issue in social choice theory. It states that when voters are asked to rank three or more distinct options (or candidates), no ranked-voting electoral system can convert these individual preference rankings into a single, community-wide, ranked preference order while simultaneously satisfying a specific set of seemingly basic and reasonable "fairness" criteria."
Gemini goes into more details, but I just wanted to point out that having more than two political parties cannot result in fair elections.
arthwollipot
Limerick Purist
Not to mention the things done by Trump.
AmyStrange
Philosopher
Waitress: "Would you like some more crapola with the, sir?
Me: "No, I think I've had enough."
Me: "No, I think I've had enough."
We haven't reached the point where our money is not worth the paper on which it is printed. All nations have problems. Pre-Hitler Germany had a lot more problems than modern US does.
They were trying to stabilize a chaotic parliament. The Nazis (NSDAP) and the Communists (KPD), often blocked legislation, making normal function impossible (like what US Congressional Democrats do when they can't get their way) and the nation was still fighting the Great Depression and massive unemployment. Yes, they misestimated Hitler and themselves, and the sinking ship of state made the situation dire.
AmyStrange
Philosopher
Opcode thinks J6 was just a lot of tourists milling around, and anyway, it didn't cause anywhere near the billions of dollars' worth of damage like the alleged burning down of cities (by that violent terrorist group antifa) during the alleged BLM riots.
Nihilianth
Illuminator
- Joined
- Feb 25, 2011
- Messages
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Opcode thinks you can be antifascist and antifa, but you cannot be antifa and antifascist. Nothing that troll says makes a lick of sense. This thread is boring now. lol.
AmyStrange
Philosopher
Yup, and they also think (without any proof) that anyone who's violent is antifa, and all leftists are members of this secret terrorist group, who will burn down cities to the ground and even pay you to do it too.
And I also agree that lying can get really boring when all you're doing is just repeating the fat clown's garbage, like it's coming from some military, economic genius or something stupid like that.
I couldn't stop laughing while writing that last line.
TBH, I only come here for the laughs anyway, and the hope that someday they'll actually post the evidence that they have to prove their blanket statements are true, but I'm not holding my breath.
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Pixel42
Schrödinger's cat
How can anyone type this with a straight face after what Republicans did during Obama's presidency, including preventing him from appointing a Supreme Court judge?
arthwollipot
Limerick Purist
Us normal people can see that the government shut down because Republicans wouldn't budge on healthcare. Republicans control the Executive, Legislative, and Judicial branches of government. They own the government. If they didn't want it shut down, they could have not shut it down. But The Authoritarian in the White House decided that he was going to be stubborn.
Now there are signs that the Democrats are caving. They're about to give The Authoritarian everything he wanted with zero gain for themselves.
The Democrats did not have a lock on all three branches of government at that time.
A lot of people have pointed out the hypocrisy of news reporters standing in front of burning buildings set on fire by protesters while claiming these are "mostly peaceful protests," while denouncing the J6 riots, where no fires were set and only a(n unarmed) protester was shot as an insurrection. FWIW, I think the J6 protest was ill-advised, poorly organized and some people clearly committed crimes and should be punished. Others just walked through the doors held open by police and on through the public buildings. It's odd how the Left can ignore an entire Summer of multiple riots by Leftists (including Antifa and BLM) that caused many millions of dollars in damages to private and public property, but obsess on a single riot where nobody died.
Pixel42
Schrödinger's cat
Maybe it's because the former was ordinary citizens protesting about legitimate grievances, and the latter was incited by a sitting President in an attempt to prevent the peaceful transition of power to his fairly elected successor?
I'm sure that the people who lost their businesses or saw their friends die don't see it that way. The former were terrorist activities based largely on Leftist lies. As for the election, despite assurances to the contrary, the voting results do look strange. It's odd that the candidate whose few public appearances were barely attended had more votes than the candidate whose many appearances had packed venues. It's odd that the election results depended so heavily on voting by mail. Of course, the mere fact that a major election was held during a pandemic, under very dissimilar public distancing rules nationwide, meant it was a weird year in general. I'm not surprised that Trump would protest the results. Some people got carried away. The press, of course, sensationalized it, and the Democrats have always been happy to feed into that energy.
A President is not in charge of Congressional budget negotiations. If the people who elected the Congressmen wanted Congress to fund these demands, Congress would have. As you said, the Republicans own the three branches, at least for now.
Congressional voting on Presidential nominees is part of Congress' Constitutionally mandated job. Shutting down the government because you want your tax-and-spend bad idea passed is not.