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The Alt-Right has a new plan to take over the culture … by appropriating the “corporate symbols of the left” and — get this! — subverting them. And then, like, pasting them on buildings and stuff. Because no one has ever thought of THAT before!
In a recent blog post, the pickup-artist-turned-white-supremacist-Trump-superfan “Heartiste” proudly posts a photo of one such subversion: street posters that have transformed the Apple logo, “an iconic image of globohomo shitlibbery,” into “a pro-Trumpening war banner” by turning the standard bite from the apple into a Trump silhouette.
Aw, it’s cute — they think they’re Banksy!
Heartiste then posts his own contribution to the “existential war for the soul of Western Man.”
If you’ve ever wondered if it was possible to screw up in Photoshop if all you’re doing is posting words onto a plain white background, it turns out the answer is “yes.”
Here’s a slightly more clever use of the Adidas brand:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JNua1lFDuDI
Vis, if you ban all trash fashion, I won’t have anything to wear! :C
@Pol:
Nthing the “nope, he doesn’t need a girlfriend to fix him” contingent. He needs to fix HIMSELF. And only then will the ladies finally stop waving him off, as they are currently doing. Right now, they only see him as a sort of pushy door-to-door vacuum-cleaner salesman, except that the vac is his dick. Getting laid will only reinforce his belief that one has to be macho, mean, and a fucking fascist in order to “win” all the women he keeps throwing himself at. Better that everyone avoids him until he learns how alienating his behavior really is, and stops it. I wouldn’t wish him on any woman in his current incarnation.
And yes, “Heartiste” is a dude. I’ve seen his pictures. He’s unremarkable looking and may still be sporting that goofy emo-kid haircut years after it went out of style (and he was way over the usual age to be wearing such a style, to boot), but he is still a dude. An assholish and unstylish one, but unmistakably a human, male, and not an object (which is the only acceptable time to use “it”, unless maybe you’re a very old-fashioned anglophone referring to a newborn baby, which he ain’t, either). If referring to a person of unknown or unspecified gender, “they” is the best pronoun to use. It’s been done since at least Geoffrey Chaucer’s day. But he’s not a “they”, since his gender is known. Use correct pronouns, and if you don’t know how, learn. Otherwise, you too will alienate everyone, just as he does.
In short: Knock it off, and don’t do it again under another name, either.
@Viscaria
O SNAP
Remember Jared Fogel? The Subway spokesman who was caught with child abuse imagery? Well, Subway knew about his molesterly behavior for years. But they didn’t do anything about it assuming that because he was getting married, that would fix him.
Yeah, not so much. The love of a good woman can’t fix an abuser.
@ Viscaria *hugs flared pants to chest*
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!
re: outdated fashion
I’ve been described as having the fashion sense of a 90-year-old church lady if left to my own devices.
The difference is in what the two sides would DO about the “rich fat cat question”. The Alt (and traditional) Right would have the government give them tax breaks… THAT’LL make them stop their bad behavior!!
Looking historically at the gilded era, what the robber barons were doing is still a how-to manual for corporations on how to manipulate the system and the law to their benefit. I’m sure the Fartiste’s of the world don’t give a rat’s ass how this corporate maneuvering affects anyone, as long it doesn’t affect them directly, and they are confident their (presumably) privileged position will insulate them. Still, they rage about their jobs going to Asia, but they don’t see WHO it is SENDING the jobs to Asia. They rail about the corporatists buying the political process, but they rail about it ONLY because the corporatists’ aren’t using the process to benefit white people. Instead, the wingnuts see the corporatists as being ONE with the wimmin’n’non-whites’n’non-christians’n’gays… as if Adidas’ Asian sneaker factories were built for the purpose of raising the workers’ standard of living. Because, once you reach a certain state of detachment from reality, there really IS only “us” and “them”…. 🙁
Can we get this engraved on a stone pillar on every street intersection or something? Maybe we can get someone to laser-etch it into the moon? ’cause, let’s be honest here, “all he needs is a good woman” is sayin’ not much more than “If he’s abusing you, it’s your own fault,” or “stop trying to defend yourself and just surrender, he’ll come around.” Skin-crawling grossness. Of all of the “pearls of wisdom”, it’s the myth of the healing power of a woman’s love that needs to die the most.
Only marginally related, I suspect that we’re in for some alt-righty chaos in the future! 4chan can’t afford to stay in operation as it currently stands! It can’t make money off of advertising, as (shock and surprise) no one wants to advertise on a porn-packed message board full of nazis, racism and hate! So they have been talking about doing things like getting rid of /pol/, home of the alt-right, lair of the Milo clones! Glorious! I mean, there would be a diaspora after as they migrate over to a new message board, but, still! Chaos!
Of course, shortly after that was announced, a certain someone said they would be willing to join 4chan’s board to help pay for costs… Martin Shkreli! Yeah, that Martin Shkreli, the one who bought the rights to distribute a vital AIDS drug and then raised the price from $13.75 to something like $50,000.00 per pill. And then defended it. And … well, he’s just a horrible human being. But it looks like he might be the next Lord of The Chans.
It’s gonna be interesting.
Mm. I don’t know. I’m not saying you’re wrong here. I just feel like there’s a lot of unknown in this problem, and it’s too fuzzy. The principle of charity suggests that they actually want good outcomes for people (note that good doesn’t really mean equitable, in this case it’s probably closer to justice). It also suggests that, from their perspective, their actions are the most sensible route to get to those good outcomes.
With that in mind, I dunno if those are the right conclusions. I’m sort of searching in the dark here, but by “corporatist” they likely mean the opposite of “successful business”. I’m gonna suggest that they think that the big multinational corporations that are lobbying for tax cuts, etc, are actually massively inefficient and bloated and weak, and that they would collapse and get torn apart by smaller and more agile companies in a free market. It’s the government that keeps them alive and on top through regulations and selective enforcement of legislation.
At the same time, government is also bloated, inefficient and weak, and is crushing the freedom of the people so that those people can be exploited by the corporations. The government spends money on “social services” which sound like they’re to help people, but which actually just tie people into a system of modern serfdom, with the corporation as the feudal lord and the government as the monastic church.
I’m not sure if that’s how they see it – that’s just a guess I’ve cobbled together from the perspectives of the alt-righties I’ve talked to. If you see the world that way, then sure, I can see the Left as being a corporatist, globalist, authoritarian tyranny.
Of course, it’s wrong. Those big corporations don’t use the government to keep the small, agile companies from tearing them apart, they use the absolutely massive reserves of money that they have. They bribe the government to lower taxes for them, increasing that pool of money, and they also use bribes to reduce the strength of regulation on them – that part at least they’ve got right.
The government, for its part, is only a complicit partner where individual officials accept bribes, and has no overarching goal of crushing its populace. Perhaps they mistake that for the function of “maintaining civilization”? Social services of course don’t tie people into a feudal system, in fact they largely free them – they provide options which would otherwise be unavailable because of financial concerns.
The whole righty viewpoint feels like it’s the primacy of the self over others, from a psychological viewpoint. The creation of a powerful enemy to defeat, a dragon for Don Quixote. A vast conspiracy to be overcome. I dunno, these ideas could all obviously use a lot more work, but that’s how it’s feeling to me right now.
Yes. And it’s that myth which underpins everything from the incel rage at women (as far as they are concerned, women are Martin Shkreli, withholding the vital healing medicine incels need and laughing while they jack up the “price” of sex beyond their reach); to the way women are constantly wheedled to “just give him a chance” when they object to being creeped on and harrassed by strangers; to songs like “Fixer Upper” in Frozen, wherein Anna is abruptly shoved together with Kristof and married off to him (by trolls, no less), with the admonition that with a little bit of love, she can transform his smelly feet, grumpiness, social awkardness, etc. into relationship gold. (And the unspoken corollary: if he doesn’t shape up, it’s because the woman wasn’t good enough/didn’t try hard enough. It’s The Secret, applied to relationships).
Women are supposed to be able to see beneath the surface of other people to the true diamond shining underneath. While that’s an admirable quality, it’s been used since time immemorial to manipulate women into settling for abusers. No similar expectation exists for men.
Oh, well, women aren’t human, yanno, Buttercup! Women are magical nature fairies. They’re fickle and fey, irrational and vain, but if you catch them unawares and say the magic words before they disappear into dewdrops, they fall in love with you and turn into a devoted elf-wife. Kind of like a dog, really.
MRAs are angry about how fickle and vain they are. MGTOWs want to build a wall around the green hill and then throw rocks at all of the magical nature fairies inside because they’re so mean for not being their elf-wives. PUAs are trying to puzzle out what the magic words are so they can have a devoted sex-elf that will clean their house and make them dinner without complaining.
I should be clear that I love me some vintage fashion, and if I could fit into the flared jeans I wore in high school, by the FSM, I would. I just think it’s so absurd that racists are still fixated on black youth fashion from the 90s. Update your references, racists! Also… stop being racists.
@ Scildfreja
https://xkcd.com/1027/
someone earlier mentioned a xkcd ‘toon, so I had to go look. Then, I had to stay and read some more, and this one seemed appropriate to your comment 🙂
@ Scildfreja
In ref to the Right/Alt-Right and “corporatism”, I must confess to applying a single line of analysis to a subject which has more branches and thorns than a blackberry bush!
@Axecalibur
That’s what I get for not copypasting usernames
@[email protected]
Imo way better too, it’s still dumb, but dumb to upbeat, infectious music.
This is the crew that took the mega popular antifa/far left motto-slash-logo “Good Night White Pride” and turned it into the farcical mouthful “Good Night Left Side” without even bothering changing the silhouettes… which is from an iconic picture of a black anti-fascist protester stomping on a neo-nazi skinhead.
I doubt they’re cut out to be the new Banksy.
http://i.huffpost.com/gen/1256900/images/o-CRABS-BUSHEL-facebook.jpg
@JoeB
All good, buddy 🙂
To be fair, I did see a guy wearing saggy pants last week. And there has been fairly recent criticism of a local attraction practicing racial discrimination through the means of fashion policing vs. saggy pants. So it’s not like nobody does it anymore.
I think the links you’re missing here are the good ol’ just world fallacy, and cognitive dissonance. Although some business people/corporations somehow get labeled as scummy, most of them are viewed as deserving their wealth because they are morally superior to people who don’t have any wealth. If they are morally superior (which they must be, if the world is just) then it’s morally wrong to critique them. However, at the same time, we know that the largest corporations get very chummy handling from the government, which a morally superior actor would not require. Hence the rage against corporations.
The breakdown I’ve seen is usually financial institutions vs. companies that make or sell actual items. I’ve had people who rage against Goldman Sachs get irritated when I point out that Waldemort is at least as evil. The more likely someone is to actually interact with a megacorporation, the more likely they seem to be to put them into the just-world category rather than the crony-capitalist category. It takes some cognitive dissonance to make that distinction, but there is a certain logic to it: companies that make/sell stuff can be more easily rationalized to have “earned” their massive bucks compared with companies that never interact with the public. The second category simply siphons its wealth directly off the economy and there’s no two ways about that, whereas the first can be imagined to be the economy.
@ Scildfreja, @ Kit
I was thinking about that “common cause” just now. In the microsecond before it got co-opted by the christian fundamentalists, the Tea Party was a conservative movement spawned out of anger at the banks for the economic meltdown of 2008. In the streets, that movement should instantly make common cause with the Occupy Wall Street movement. For the conservatives who have that fundie type world view, this is a betrayal of everything else they stand for. They are the Glenn Beck/Rush Limbaugh Right.
There are others for whom that common cause would be less difficult, the new Alt-Right who see the large banks and corporations as being predatory, and see them as being in violation of the small, self-run business ethic which they believe to be the American ideal. They would make common cause with Occupy, simply intending to destroy THEM later.
http://65.media.tumblr.com/38cdd16b33458c3a9589ca27dbc039fd/tumblr_inline_nxl60brjnl1tgtco0_500.gif
Of fucking course he’d be a 4channer.
Skiriki – I’ve read about the Degenerate Art exhibit. The fact that it drew twice the attendance of the National Socialist Realism show makes it the first and only time modern art has been successfully marketed to the general public.
Ah, I didn’t realize. Point taken, PoM. Thank you!
@/pol/
So are you Pelagic or Scribbles? (Or both, that tends to happen around here.)
This got me thinking about my fashion choices lately.
I’ve been living in cargo shorts, T-shirt and short sleeve shirt combo since about April. It’s a good way for a middle aged white guy to go from inconspicuous to nearly invisible.