I’ve gotten a number of extremely thoughtful responses from assorted alt-right twitterists to my post yesterday in which I offered an improved version of the new alt-right logo, with a Ku Klux Klanner head replacing the stylized “a.”
And by “thoughtful,” I mean “don’t read the following tweets if you’re not in the mood for jokes about murder, suicide, and the Holocaust and/or a defense of the KKK’s lynching of black people.”
I think I hear your oven timer going off, it's at 616 degrees right now.
— GrauTiger? (@PZKW117) September 12, 2016
https://twitter.com/soObviousTurtle/status/775460982239989760
https://twitter.com/AmericanReset88/status/775488975544856576
https://twitter.com/NationalistHero/status/775468355109007360
https://twitter.com/RedskinRey624/status/775469805046337536
https://twitter.com/RedskinRey624/status/775477705978421248
Oh look, a death wish:
@mc_morn Another leftist loser living with his mother. Delete your acct. David, then yourself. pic.twitter.com/tEyZAWiXCc
— Concierge Monthly (@ConciergeMthly) September 12, 2016
Followed by a death threat:
@mc_morn Save us the trouble of hunting you down…..:)
— Concierge Monthly (@ConciergeMthly) September 12, 2016
This one, posted by someone using a picture of racist mass murderer Anders Breivik as an avatar and featuring a photo of actual dead people, is a little too NSFW to post here.
Given the, er, high racist content of these responses, I’m not quite sure why exactly any of these people are mad about being compared to the KKK.
To be fair, though, they weren’t all mad. There was one Pepe-avatared alt-right Twitterer who liked my fixed logo:
https://twitter.com/freed_humanity/status/775459668562849792
Oh, and FYI, Twitter Nazis, I’m not actually Jewish. Like a lot of the people sporting “echoes” around their names on Twitter, I added the marks as a tiny little “I’m Spartacus”-style act of solidarity. That said, I did go to a Jewish day camp for several summers as a kid. One time we got to meet Sandy Koufax! That makes me practically a Jew.
@ Alan: yep. We even know exactly who they copied from: Geert Wilders.
<a href="http://mobile.abc.net.au/news/2016-07-11/pauline-hanson-sections-of-party-policies-lifted-from-internet/7587652"
Sorry, I’m a ham-fisted linker.
http://mobile.abc.net.au/news/2016-07-11/pauline-hanson-sections-of-party-policies-lifted-from-internet/7587652
These tweets are contaminated. They have wit flu virus.
@ croquembouche
That’s definitely not halal, or kosher
Yeah, but they’re so lazy just modifying previous conspiracy theories.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kosher_tax_conspiracy_theory
@Virgin Mary – I think it’s too linked to one of the darkest times in human history to even consider reclaiming, certainly while some people that lived through it are still around. If it happens, I wouldn’t recommend it for a few generations yet.
Anyone else think with that RRR thing, it’s like Scooby Doo trying to say the kkk, like ‘ru rux ran’?
@Virgin Mary
I have mixed feelings on the matter. On one hand, I really, really want the symbols to be redeemed. Like the celtic ones that french nazis abuse on a daily basis. I got a friend whose tattoo is now far more known as a far right emblem than its original meaning. She always wears long sleeves or an armband over it now, unless everyone in the room is already informed of the whole situation… It sucks. On the other, ehh… I don’t know if I can help thinking of the nazi swastika even when I see the original one, even if the nazi one was heavily modified and it’s basically not the same symbol anymore.
Re : halal funds terrorism trololol
That claim also exists in the US (who’d a thunk) and France (because of course it does), and it’s identical. Another one I love is weed funds terrorism trololol. We have this mandatory day in France, where once you turn 18 you have to visit the nearest military base and be given a full goddamn day of lectures on why the army is good and who the bad guys are. They asked “who smokes” around the room, hands were raised, they asked “who smokes weed” and I was the only kid dumb enough to keep my hand raised. Officer dude gives me his sternest look and says I fund terrorism. By smoking weed that’s grown in a backyard next town, apparently.
@Mish
Weeeell to be fair Canada is more my kind of clime. I’m more a creature of the cold. Although, both countries have a really cool feature : humans are actually among the least dangerous animals. Okay that’s more because everything else wants you kill you so hard you die to death, but still. Also Canada has Trudeau.
On one hand I don’t really wanna stay in France, on the other there’s invisible chains and they’re the painful kind. I think I need to deal with those (meaning : deal with my own brain) before I can take that step.
Oh gosh, John, Canada doesn’t have scary monsters like Australia does. The big predators like Grizzlies and whatnot really try to avoid humans. Polar bears are the only ones who don’t have that reflex, and they don’t come south, so just don’t go to Churchill? Otherwise the animals here are all shy and do their best to stay out of our way, the poor dears. We barely even have poisonous plants here. Humans and animals and plants all sort of get along here.
This is because we all have the same enemy, and it is both implacable and ruthless. Winter is the thing that wants to kill us so hard we all die to death, but even it’s a sweetie about it – dying by hypothermia is soft and gentle and painless, so they say. As you get colder the shivers go away, and the feeling of coldness is replaced with a mild warmth in your core. You get weary and drunken, and the snow looks so soft, and you can afford a rest for a moment before you move on to finding shelter, so you settle into the soft blanket of snow and never wake again…
… eesh, yeah, sorta scary. Just not, well, giant-venom-spider scary.
@Scildfreja
True, I was mainly thinking about bears. Besides, you have Janet Bloomfield and her crossbow. She makes a compelling point about humans being way more dangerous to body and mind alike.
I’ve experienced this “cold sleepiness” once when I was an 8yr old snowboarder with more free time than adult supervision. I got stuck under a massive amount of snow with only my legs sticking out, to be fair it must’ve looked extremely comical. It does indeed feel like you’re drunken and falling asleep (which I only found out about much later, heh). Weirdly enough it’s a good memory. Warming up though – that was the painful part.
Bears are scary, but they aren’t the worst. They’re only going to fight you if you’re invading their personal space, or if they’re extremely hungry. Humans and other animals our size are too much effort to hunt when almost every plant around them is potential food. Just don’t be around them in the winter and you’ll be fine – if something woke a bear up from hibernation, it’s gonna be hungry, and it’s gonna be grumpy.
Otherwise? They’re just sorta curious, and you’re probably carrying something that smells tasty. I’ve had a bear sneak up on me in a raspberry patch before – wild raspberries can grow three meters high, and the paths through them have terrible visibility. Scary, but not unpleasant. He wasn’t upset at me.
I’ve never had the cold-sleepies before, and gosh, that sounds like it must’ve been scary in retrospect. I can imagine it being a nice memory, though. Most reports of it happening involve the person involved taking off clothes (they feel it’s too warm) and their trail starting to get erratic. All of the wilderness survival courses teach to never go out alone, and watch one another for signs of hypothermia – you can’t normally tell if you’re getting hypothermia, but you can usually see the behaviour change in others.
And oh god the warming up again. Every Canadian knows that feeling. You foolishly think “oh, a nice warm bath will make me feel great right about now”, and that nice mild water is oh god why is everything is on fire.
Ahh, winter. My favourite season.
Thus Spake ZaraKeated:
“Now let’s see who you really are… Why, you aren’t a hip, scientifically-grounded modern grassroots political movement at all! You’re just plain old 19th-century racism wearing a mask!”
“And I would have gotten away with it, too, if not for you meddling kids!”
“Rood run, Raggy! Reeheeheeheehee!”
@Scildfreja
I was terrified at first, because I thought I was going to die. I was pretty far off-track, in a rather popular spot but also in the middle of a nasty storm which discouraged most people from going. I didn’t honestly think someone was going to find me. But then I couldn’t take off my clothes either, since I was pretty much encased in snow. It’s scary how fast that stuff packs when it falls over you. The skiier who shoveled me out and carried me and my snowboard downhill in the middle of a storm told me how lucky I was that she stumbled on me (quite literally, actually – she fell in the same spot I did and pretty much landed on the pack of snow that was burying me). That’s the whole thing, I think : I didn’t die, I didn’t suffer any permanent damage to my body, even though all odds were against me. It’s great ! It gave me this general outlook, being happy about being so lucky in deadly situations. My stepfather didn’t understand when I laughed so much that time he fell down a steep slope, rebounded on a garden table and ended up in a swimming pool, all while riding a lawnmower, and walked out unscathed save for a tiny cut on the leg (he’s clumsy as all hell, hilariously so).
A few years ago I read about someone who found a bear scavenging the garbage in the back alley behind their place in the middle of town. I think that’s probably when I developped this idea of Canada being this fascinating place, a mix between Florida and the great wilds of wherever, where enormous and scary animals turn up at your door.
I thought a lot about moving to Canada to open my café a few years ago, but them were different days. Now I just don’t know. Is there a market there for a mix between a bar that serves mostly beer and wine and other low alcohol content drinks, and an open library where people drop their own old books and borrow the ones already available, in the aim of providing a space for people to discuss and exchange and tell their stories and find safe harbor ? As much as I love the idea, it’s not as popular as I feel it should be in France, and there’s already competition in my town (in fact I do voluntary work there).
Now that I think of it, does Janet Bloomfield still count as human, or as any other animal for that matter ? Can someone who’s made entirely of hate still count as a carbon-based lifeform ?
@John,
I haven’t had a whole lot of flirtations with death, just a few. Nearly drowned in a swimming pool when I was 7; it was a wave pool and I was getting sucked into the undertow. Life guards were upset at me for clinging to a ladder when I finally managed to make it to one! Otherwise, the biggest thing was nearly slipping off of a mountain, down a cliff, and into a rocky, turbulent glacial river some fifty meters down! The moss underfoot gave way and I ended up on my back; one arm reached out to a tree and the other hanging over the precipice. So, that was exciting!
If you want to see wild animals, you have to choose where to live here. There are usually some deer and coyotes and whatnot in the cities, but if you want to interact with the wildlife you need to move to a smaller city or town. Places like Peace River or Slave Lake or the like – lovely towns in the woods. You’ll get visitors snooping through your backyard from time to time then, looking for food or just snoopin’.
We do have wilds, but most of them are managed these days – the forests are divvied up into forestry zones, which controls where trees can be felled and where they can’t. We’re pretty good with sustainable forestry. If you want to see the wilds, though, there’s two choices for you. The easiest is to go to a protected area, like a national park, and go on a trail. Pristine, unworked wilderness for thousands of kilometers. Banff and Jasper are the typical tourist spots, and while there’s a lot of tourist’y stuff there’s ample opportunity to go see what a proper untamed wildland looks like.
The second option is a bit harder; it’s to just get a pack, find a spot on the map where the roads end, and go there. You don’t get groomed trails or rest stops, and you have to be a lot more careful because you’re almost certainly somewhere without phone service, but if you want to see the world from the eyes of our ancestors, that’s the best way to do it. Be sure to walk mindfully, and don’t forget to bring a pouch of tobacco for the tree, as a gift to its spirit before you cut it down.
As for your cafe, I’d love to go to a place like that. I work from home and like to work at coffee shops and libraries to get out of the house. But one that’d serve me a cider while I work? Yeah, every day. This said, small shop ownership is hard, and competition is rough everywhere. It sounds like you have a very good idea for one, and I bet you could make it! You should stock up on some board games as well as books, I’ve known a couple of places that do that. You’d probably want to open that sort of place in a proper city; smaller towns don’t really have the population to support it. But I imagine that’d go over very well on the west coast, or southern Ontario. It’s a great idea!
(Southern Ontario would of course bring you closer to Janet Bloomfield, but, well. Sigh. She’s one of us. We have our terrible people too… I think she’s some sorta arthropod.)
@Virgin Mary
The current association of the Republicans and the colour red is the legacy of the 2000 election, when the major U.S. news networks all designated states that went for Bush in red and Gore in blue. There was no particular reason for this, and in the past other colour schemes had been used, but due to the controversy about that particular election, those colours took hold in the public conciousness, and here we are.
I think that you are probably not someone who should be doing that. Leave it to Hindu and Buddhist immigrants to change the public associations of swastikas in Europe and the U.S. (Also some of the First Nations, in our case) if anyone’s going to.
@Alan
well, yes, there’s a fee to get practically anything to be certified as anything whatsoever, with an occasional (should be more) exeption when a government agency is doing the certifying. You’ve gotta pay the inspectors somehow.
@Sinkable John
My Asatru friends feel the same way about their symbols, but the thing is that the swastika doesn’t really fall into that category. There were no active religions or even major cultural traditions involving swastikas in Europe for ages before the Nazis; basically all of still-extant neopaganism postdates WWII
We got that in the States too. Originally the claim was about heroin, (which is not totally ludicrous given the poppy fields of Afghanistan) but soon it expanded to all illegal drugs, and then settled on weed. Reason being, there’s a whole lot more people who toke in the States than shoot up, and increasing numbers of people are wanting weed legalized. Heroin has a pretty bad rap on its own, too.
Some people in Finland freaked out when a conservative newspaper noted that all mutton that comes from NZ is halal slaughtered.
I saw someone complain that halal meat is problematic (when funded by non-Muslims) because it creates a few jobs at the slaughterhouses that are only open for Muslims. I guess the same goes for the jobs at the halal certification agencies.
Such money. Very business. Much opportunity.
I was under the impression that kosher and halal slaughtering always demanded that the animals not be pre-stunned; so am I understanding correctly now that this is in fact not the case? I’d be very glad to find I was wrong!
Halal-slaughtered animals can be pre-stunned??? Does that go for kosher as well, does anybody happen to know?
@ opposable thumbs
Although there is an exception in UK (and EU) law from the normal requirement that animals be pre stunned for halal and kosher meat, in actual fact 80% of halal meat and nearly all kosher meat produced in the UK is pre stunned.
There’s obviously religious debate about the topic though. The consensus in the halal trade seems to be that ‘light stunning’ is permissable so long as the animal is conscious when it is killed.
For economic reasons (size of market) kosher meat tends to be produced in regular abattoirs so they just use the standard equipment with someone doing the blessing.
There’s no prohibition on importing non stunned meat though.
@opposablethumbs
According to my limited knowledge, pre-stunning is not permitted by kosher rules. It is permitted by halal rules, and nearly all halal meat products you’d find in a European or American grocery store comes from animals who were pre-stunned. In short, halal is a lot better than kosher.
@ John
It’s ok, I was just being silly. I’d rather live in Canada too, and not just because it has Trudeau, proper cold weather, and Scildfreja 😀
You just keep being your wonderful self, wherever it is that you live.
Re halal – Alan & Croquembouche (and everyone else) have already addressed this in excellent detail.
It’s infuriating when people use legitimate concerns for animal welfare as a way to promote racism and Islamophobia – and other forms of hatred.
I recently signed a petition against a new animal testing lab, and people in the comments were suggesting (actually, they were demanding) that prisoners be used as test subjects instead – involuntarily.
I don’t think the animal rights movement has always had these pockets of bile – Alan, what’s your experience in the UK?
I don’t know if they’d call themselves animal rights-ers, per se, but there’s long been a noticeable contingent of people who don’t give a fig about human rights, but are protective of animals in general. I often come across them in the comments of animal cruelty arguments – you know, someone mistreated their dog, so we should suspend habeas corpus and reintroduce hanging.
@ mish (& diptych)
Oh that’s a big subject. I’ll try to put something coherent (and concise!) together for you. But yeah, a common t-shirt you see in the animal rights fraternity here is “Why experiment on animals when there are (insert unpopular group)?”
I very much recognise what diptych is saying. There’s someone in my life who’s an avid anti death penalty campaigner (cut her teeth working pro bono for Clive Stafford Smith) but you harm an animal and she’ll happily disembowel you in the street.
I do fall into that view myself. Normally I’m placid to the point of indifference, but I have a particular abhorrence about harming people who can’t understand why you’re harming them, i.e. animals and children. I also think cowardice, especially when combined with cruelty, is the most repugnant thing imaginable, so I particularly hate canned and trophy hunting.
But it’s a complex and emotive subject so I’ll stop rambling and get something a bit more objectve done for you.
I read a truly imaginative argument against halal butchery a while back. Since the process involves an observant Muslim reciting a prayer to Allah, the meat has effectively been sacrificed to an idol – and Christians aren’t supposed to eat such meat.
Yeah, that was my reaction too.
Uh oh. If Allah isn’t the same deity as El/Adonai/Jehovah, that means the God worshipped by Baptists may not be the same God worshipped by Methodists, and definitely not the same God worshipped by Anglicans! They have been tricking you into eating meat sacrificed to idols all along! DUN DUN DUNNNNN.
@ Robert
The ‘cross cultural’ aspects of this can be fascinating. A lot of Muslims are fine eating kosher on the ground it meets the requirements. But Sikhs aren’t supposed to eat anything that has been ritually slaughtered.
The least convincing argument I’ve heard is from a mate who insists crispy bacon is halal.
@PocketNerd
The Adventists should be safe, though, right?
Gosh; that is fascinating. It invites the brain to find some neat solution that works for everyone, which is a pleasing sort of thought.
(Also, I feel I should add to my earlier comment, ’cause I don’t want to come across as blasé about cruelty to animals. I’m as much an animal lover as anyone, and have been a vegetarian for, oh, yonks upon yonks. I’m just into rule of law and animals.)