Today in Breitbart Comments: Breitbarters go all-out Nazi after learning that HBO blabber Bill Maher has declared that he would vote for Hillary Clinton even if she were dead rather than pull the lever for the “#TangerineNightmare” that is Donald Trump.
While that is pretty much my position as well, I’m not exactly a fan of Maher, who regularly says terrible stuff about, among others, Muslims, women, and trans folk.
But none of those things seem to be issues for Breitbarters, whose critiques of Maher center around a rather different set of, er, concerns. By which I mean that what they say about Maher sounds an awful lot like what one might expect to hear from the literal Adolf Hitler, were he alive today and commenting on Breitbart (and for all we know he is).
A “Kapo,” Wikipedia tells us, “was a prisoner in a Nazi concentration camp who was assigned by the SS guards to supervise forced labor or carry out administrative tasks.”
Other Breitbarters have convinced themselves that Maher, in addition to being a “bagelite,” is also gay:
Maher, for what it’s worth, was raised Catholic. “Until his early teens,” Wikipedia notes, “he was unaware that his mother … was Jewish.” Though he’s been dogged by rumors that he’s gay, he says he’s not (not that there’s anything wrong with that).
Also, Muslims as a group don’t throw gay people off roofs any more than Christians as a group bomb abortion clinics. ISIS has thrown gay people off of roofs; extremist pro-lifers have bombed abortion clinics. Neither ISIS militants nor pro-life bombers represent the entire religions whose tenets they profess to follow.
That said, I should note that not all Breitbarters went with the “gay Jew” angle. Some offered thoughtful commentary on human mortality:
One might be tempted to label Breitbart a “basket of deplorables,” in the parlance of our time But that’s an understatement, to put it mildly. To borrow a metaphor from Twitter’s @OhNoSheTwitnt, Breitbert is more like a “gigantic burning dumpster of reprehensibles.”
Don’t like Maher’s elite dem bubble that tends to exclude minorities and other people, still don’t wish him to get gassed by wannabe SS.
I like how many of the alt-right have started adding “Deplorable” to their handles, as if that proves Hillary was wrong, and they’re not.
I’m thinking that doesn’t quite prove what they think it proves.
Should’ve figured the day would come where I’d find myself sympathizing with Bill Maher. Welp. No, being an advocate for marijuana doesn’t get you a pass, nor does pissing off the nazis, because that’s pretty easy. But still, you have my sympathy, for what little it’s worth.
@JS
For Pete’s sake the “deplorable” thing is so dumb. The Daily Stormer posted each and every last one of their bullshit articles with the word “deplorable” in the headlines for two or three days. They don’t understand how claiming works !
Oh, but I think they do.
(Well, no, not really, but still)
These are people who post pictures of Bane and the Joker as their avatars and as inspirational memes supporting their ideas; they photoshop their icons into Holocaust iconography and gleefully spread around sprays of bloodshed, murder, and conquest. They know what deplorable means and they love it.
It started as a joke for most of them, a way to shock their parents or to earn social credit on a message board. Now it’s a part of them.
Weren’t the Kapos always non-Jewish criminals or political prisoners? I guess I probably shouldn’t expect logical consistency from racists.
No, no, that’s fine, heterosexuals can have him.
Maher is a member of the libertarian left – a dying breed in the US. Which is why he gets plenty of hate on both sides: he’s a liberal from the point of view of most conservatives, and a conservative from the point of view of most liberals. And they’re both sort of right.
Whatever else you might say about him, I seriously doubt he’d lie about being gay if he was.
“Fundamentalist Bagelite” is the best religion ever. I don’t believe in a deity but I kinda want to now.
@ SpecialFrog Nope, not always, though the SS did prefer them as they were more likely to help the SS and not secretly help the prisoners.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kapo_(concentration_camp)
@Snowberry
He’s no such thing, nor anything close to it. He’s most assuredly a capitalist running-dog. The libertarian left is folks like the IWW.
Breitbart was a nasty website even when Andrew was alive. I went on there once in 2010 to defend Chelsea Manning and Wikileaks and the abuse I received was so horrible I needed a shower afterwards. One commenter who called himself “Tyler Durden” (what else?) kept calling me a “f-ing re–ard”. Name-calling was his entire repetoire. Others called me traitor, communist, the usual crap but nobody seriously engaged my comments.
I got more respectful replies from actual Nazis and racists I would argue with at the race-realist site TakiMag. As I’ve said in comments here before, I think it’s important for leftists to comment at right-wing sites, if only for the benefit of fence-sitters and novices at those sites. It’s a very unpleasant exercise though, and one which I’m no longer up to since chronic health problems (fibromyalgia) make it difficult just to get through a workday.
@The Other EJ
“Bagelites” sounds like a tribe wiped out by the Pastafarians at the command of the Flying Spaghetti Monster in Tortellonomy.
Which is part of the Antipastoment.
*ducks the rather appropriate tomatoes thrown at me*
@Dalillama: I thought that the libertarian left was just as big of “free market” capitalism as the libertarian right? And that the IWW has more in common with communists than libertarians? A cursory check of both seems to suggest that this is so.
Wait, isn’t the libertarian left basically libertarians who haven’t gone far-right ? Like, end to the War on Drugs, marriage rights, but nothing they feel would actually affect their precious free market ?
All I can think when I read this is Milo Yiannopoulos (sp) is a commentator and writer that I absolutely detest. I hate everything he says, and I hate everything he stands for. I’m in favour of laughing Milo Yiannopoulos out of public discourse. I would be happy if he was never paid to write and speak again. I want his ideas to be treated with derision and for his audience and platform to shrink until he becomes completely irrelevant.
But I don’t wish that he were dead. I don’t want to murder him with lethal gas. If other people I don’t like were to throw him off of a roof to his death, I wouldn’t say “who cares.”
You’re a bad person, Anne Lewis. A bad, bad person, and it amuses me intensely.
Not a fan of Maher at all, not a fan of harassing him either.
I hope that he reads that article on Breitbart and the comments. Maybe he will think more carefully the next time he insults women or minorities, how it is to be on the recieving end of a hate-mob.
He can learn something about his own behaviour from this.
-DSB71
“Quisling” of course being synonym for traitor and/or collaborator – after the Norwegian military officer and politician Vidkun Quisling – who (in)famously sold out his country TO THE NAZIS.
You’d think the nasty nazi-dudes above would abide 😀
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vidkun_Quisling
@Snowberry &Sinkable John
>:( >:( >:( >:( >:( >:(
http://awesomelytechie.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/Head-desk.gif
Now that I’m done with that, a quick explanation:
Left-libertarianism (originally just libertarianism, before the capitalist swine started using that one themselves) is communism*. These thinkers support personal rights limited only by mutual coercion mutually agreed upon, and seek an economy where business and industry are owned and controlled by the people who actually make them productive, i.e. the workers. We seek an economic landscape composed of sole-proprietors, partnerships, and worker cooperatives, where each person has a say in their own economic future. We also would like to see civic affairs managed in a consensus-based democratic manner; freedom and self-governance in civic and economic matters is our watchword. (As a note, the Emilia-Romagna region in Italy has been working on putting this into practice for quite a while, and they consistently show the highest wages and standards of living for equivalent administrative areas across Europe. IJS).
Your confusion is yet another thing the never-to-be sufficiently damned ‘New Left’ can shoulder the blame for (And if anyone wonders why I loathe Clinton so much, it’s because she’s the New Left’s current standard bearer). Basically, right-libertarians usually claim to be non-judgmental on matters of race, gender, sexuality, etc, and the New Left believed them, and started taking on board all of their market uber alles bullshit, the better to justify hideously regressive economic policies while claiming the banner of progressivism. This unholy union spawned a collection of theorists who highjacked the term ‘left-libertarian’ the same way that rightists highjacked the term libertarian to begin with.
*specifically, it is anarcho-communism and/or anarcho-syndicalism. I would also like to clarify at this time that a)Marxism is not the be-all end-all of communist thinking, and b) that Stalinism and Maoism bear considerably less resemblance to Marxism than they do to fascism; note the cult of personality around the ‘great leader’ and the extreme nationalism, frex. Also, in the Stalinist system the State owned everything and controlled the entire economy, which resulted in disaster and is entirely contrary to any kind of communist thinking.**
** This practice is known as ‘State socialism’ or sometimes just ‘socialism’***, and it is a horrible, horrible idea.
***I reiterate here that INFRASTRUCTURE IS NOT SOCIALISM, NOR ARE TAXES, and that the social democracies of Europe are not Socialist, not even a little bit. (Except Finland, IIRC, where the government still owns part of Nokia and a few other big companies; this relates to a quite viable economic development plan for capitalist systems whereby a partial socialist economy is implemented to jumpstart important industries).
Wasn’t Maher partially responsible for making Ann Coulter famous? Still, that’s not enough to wish death on him. I just wish all his underpants be a little too tight or a little too loose.
@Dalillama
I’m… ashamed. I am a left-libertarian as you presented it. We call it “Libertaire” in Europe. Turns out I even splained it to someone (Alan I think) on here a few weeks ago. Somehow I just separated the meaning I know from the meaning I understood in the context of Maher. It’s not even my engrish failing, it’s just that I somehow forgot something that I could explain just a few weeks ago.
*slaps self repeatedly*
Okay but then what is what I described ? The libertarians who still agree on the issues they perceive as purely social and not incidental to the free market ?
Re: libertarian left
*sighs heavily*
Re: Maher
http://orig06.deviantart.net/a287/f/2014/327/4/9/ehif5_by_raptorwolf_aml-d87dp1k.jpg
Don’t kill him, obvs. I can’t muster the will to care about Breitbart commenters saying bad things about him
@Sinkable John
I call them assholes, personally. Seriously, though, I call them right-libertarians, because there’s no measurable difference; each right-libertarian picks the ‘social’ issue that’s one step too far for them, and if there isn’t one, they start calling themselves leftists. But they’re not, because capitalism underlies and reinforces all of those social problems (note, I’m not saying that racism, sexism, homophobia, etc. are caused by capitalism, but any and all hierarchies are reinforced by it). In the end, though, right-libertarianism is the home of ‘free’ marketeers and always will be, however they try to dissemble.
I’m not a fan of Bill Maher, and I don’t care that people bad mouth him (or bad mouth anyone really) but I can’t abide with people hating someone because of something they can’t control, you know, like how they’re slinging anti-semitic and homophobic fuckery at him.
(It doesn’t matter if he is or isn’t Jewish or gay, tbh, it’s something people can’t control.)
Hate the man for being smug fuckwit and wrong about a lot of things (he’s an anti-vaxxer, the last time I checked), but don’t be a fucking enema about it.
Same goes for even Milo, who actually is a gay Jewish dude. Hate him for being an attention-seeking troll, not because he’s gay and Jewish. It just shows how little people know about someone when they pick on stupid shit like that.
@Dalillama
…Assuming that’s true, then I’m pretty sure that most people would look at you as if you suddenly sprouted 5 new heads if you equated libertarians with communism. Because the current, common use of those words (at least in the US, not sure about elsewhere) is vastly different. So I’m not sure what good it would do to go around trying to correct people. It would like be insisting that gay means “happy” and only “happy”, and that using it to mean homosexual or stupid is incorrect.
(I would like to add that the Right has historically been very good at co-opting language and making it mean something else. The Reagan years completely changed the meaning of the word “individualist”, for example. They’re also good at “defining problems out of existence” in order to deny their political opponents the language to effectively speak about certain issues. Evil or misguided as that may be, it doesn’t change the fact that the common use of the words *have* changed and using them the “correct” way just ends up making communication less effective.)
Fine, so Maher is the “new left” version of “left libertarian”. And a no-longer-very-common variety, since most of the people who identify as some form of “left” has decided that it’s a bad idea to make fun of minorities, which Maher does sometimes. Happy now?