Alt Right goes Alt Banksy with amazing(ly dumb) Adidas meme

I found out today that Forbes has this rule call ‘The Trump Rule‘, and what it is is that whenever Trump states how wealthy he is, he’s actually worth only a third of what he says he does.

I love it.

@ Scildfreja

Because them leftists sure love their bloated inefficiencies, I guess?

This is one of the standard canards of the Right, yes.

Which is how you can have a boardroom of “Leftist” billionaires that are ordering the crushing of dissidents in African holdings, sending bribes to the government to get lower taxes, and destroying the last remaining wildernesses on the planet, all while laughing and patting themselves on the back.

Ah, but you see, they also donate to Pride and say they’re equal opportunity employers, so clearly they’re evil SJWs.

It’s sad, really, because in the end we both think that those rich fat cats are the bad guys.

For totally different reasons, however. If the fat cats would just go back to publically shitting on minorities, the fascists would love them wholeheartedly again.

For some reason the alt-right doesn’t want to realize that we oppose those plunderous assholes with our every breath, because then they might have to work with us to beat them.

They don’t want to beat them. They want to join them.

Better to blame the left as a willing accomplice to their rise instead of owning up to the fact that it’s traditional conservative right-wing thinking that led to their rise.

Well, if they had foresight or a sense of history, they wouldn’t be fascists, would they?

The principle of charity suggests that they actually want good outcomes for people (

The principle of charity can let you down sometimes. Fascists don’t want good outcomes for you, or for me. They want good outcomes for cishet christian (usually) white men, and they want everyone else dead or enslaved.

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”.

Right-libertarians like to pretend there’s a distinction between ‘real’ capitalism and ‘crony’ capitalism, but other fascists usually don’t bother.
@Weird (not wired) Eddie

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.

No, it was spawned out of anger at the election of Barack Obama. (Technically, it was spawned by yet another Koch-funded propaganda mill back in 2002, as a generic astroturf anti-tax group, but it really took off when Obama won the election). There was never even the tinienst fraction of a second where it was a legitimate movement with a legitimate cause.

In the streets, that movement should instantly make common cause with the Occupy Wall Street movement.

This also assumes that Occupy would have anything to do with them. And if they had, I’d’ve dumped them like a hot rock in that very instant. No ally of the tea party is an ally of mine.

Does anyone else find the ‘they’ (singular) pronoun feels a bit impersonal at times?

Sometimes it seems fine

“I was out with Bob last night; they’re a right laugh”

But at other times it seems a bit ‘distancing’

“Bob rang; they wanted to speak to you”

I know it’s the best we’ve got at the moment, but does anyone else experience this or is it just me? And if it is a real thing, any linguists have any ideas what’s behind it?

@ Dalillama

There was never even the tinienst fraction of a second where it was a legitimate movement with a legitimate cause.

Conservatives, particularly economic conservatives don’t have “legitimate movements” regarding economic issues… they don’t need to because they’ve almost always got the ear of the economic policymakers. That was not the case in 2008/2009. There was a large grass-roots conservative movement against the TARP bailout bill. CBS/NYTimes polled tea partiers (sorry, I don’t have the date, I .pdfed the article in May ’09) and found 79% opposed to TARP while only 56% of non-tea repubs opposed it. Repub legislatures who voted for TARP were 2.5 times more likely to be voted out in 2010 than were those who voted against it. NoWallStreetBailout.com, funded by the FreedomWorks conservative/Libertarian organization circulated a petition against the bill, here is a sample of petition signers’ comments:

“We’re MAD As Hell & We’re NOT going to take it ANYMORE! … RESTORE the AMERICAN WAY of LIFE!”—

“No Wall Street or auto bailouts! Maybe Americans should boycott paying 2008 federal income tax – no income tax revenue, no bailout.”

“This bailout could end up breaking the spirit that underlies the true American way. The key word is “RESPONSIBILITY!” WHERE IS IT?!

“This is outright stealing from the taxpayers! We’re socializing (government ownership or funding) every major industry of the economy. It’s immoral, bad economically and unconstitutional.”

“This bailout will destroy what remnants we have left of the free market economics, which have allowed this nation to become the worlds greatest economic power. It was precisely this kind of government interference that created a culture of recklessness within the financial Investments Industry that has led us to this national economic crisis. You do not have my consent (nor my future vote) to turn this nation into an economic dictatorship!”

“Our country will now be called, ‘THE UNITED SOCIALIST STATES OF AMERICA,’ if the government bails out and owns most of these failed companies.”

(I’ll be interested to see if that blockquote works! Edit: IT WORKS!! IT WORKS!!) This flailing rage never gelled into a cohesive movement because: 1) it wasn’t a raging against the banking system, or even against the banking practices, so much as a “let them reap the spoils of their foolish practices”, which didn’t happen — TARP passed; 2) conservatives would find it hard to sustain a grass-roots movement which opposed moneyed capitalism for ANY reason, as money and capitalism are both seen as sacred; and 3) as you so eloquently state, there was a much bigger bogeyman, as Barack Obama had just been elected President. This tapped a huge reservoir of bigotry against a virtual buffet of people and practices, and the rest is history.

A group of angry, socially active conservatives was an inviting target for the fundamentalists, and turning the economic rage of the rank and file into rage against “divergent” social groups deflected that anger away from conservative politicians and especiallyaway from banks and other moneyed interests. Frankly, a common bonding of the economic conservatives and the Occupy movement was very unlikely in this political climate — it’s not Russia in 1917, and we’re far from the kind of social unrest that puts those groups together in the streets. Still, when we stand up for what we believe in, sometimes we might be surprised who we’re standing next to.

Wait, what? Martin Shkreli seriously offered to buy 4chan? I thought that was some kind of hoax when I first saw it.

Shkreli is worth maybe $50mill, plus hidden assets, minus attorney’s fees… anyone know what the Nishimura paid for it a couple years ago?

@ kupo, dlouwe & axe

I’ve had a nice walk through the lanes muttering various sentence combinations to myself and I’ve arrived at a working hypothesis.

I’m very used to both using and hearing ‘they’ used mainly as a plural pronoun. So I’m conditioned to associating it with groups. It’s therefore got connotations of collective.

When used as a singular pronoun therefore there’s still that collective association. So it feels like you’re negating a person’s individuality. Thus it feels a bit dehumanising.

Doesn’t explain the exceptions but it’s just a hypothesis.

Re: clothing

Someone once said I dressed like I was trying to go undercover in Muggle society. I liked that.

@Alan : in french, using the plural pronoun instead of the singular one is overall a way to distanciate and show respect over people with a better social status. So I am with you in that “they” feel distancing, even if for me it’s by association.

(side note : in french, there is a plural masculine form and a plural feminine form, who is used *only* if all the element in the set are female. I have seen some discussions of people who want to change that rule to “use the gender most common in the set”, which cause trouble when you don’t actually know the gender of everyone ; and some other who tried to create an hybrid term, which have the problem of feeling unnatural, and usually – there is some variation – being unpronunceable or an homonym of something else entirely. I don’t know any solution that I truly like for that problem in french, so you english speakers are officially authorized to feel relieved to have such an easy solution)

In a vacuum, I kind of prefer to change the structure of a sentence to use “neutral” pronoun if it can remove pronouns, but that bring its own set of problem, mostly not alway being very natural. But I guess “they” is good enough.

Since I am not a linguist, I can’t say if plural for distanciation is a common trend across language.

More close to the topic : I feel that the economic grievance of the republican conservative base (*not* the alt right, but the empoverished working white class) are legitimate. But they campaign for things that rather obviously won’t improve things for them !

And, of course, them having real economic grievance don’t give them carte blanche to be racist assholes. The white working class is throwing a tantrum, and I feel annoyed at the thought that this tantrum may very well work. For them and only them, that is.

More close to the topic : I feel that the economic grievance of the republican conservative base (*not* the alt right, but the empoverished working white class) are legitimate. But they campaign for things that rather obviously won’t improve things for them !

@Ohlmann, exactly! They’re legitimate, and the thing is, they aren’t stupid! It’s easy to say “Oh, they’re just being misled”, but who’s to say that they’re being more misled than I am? If they are especially vulnerable to being misled, why? What’s that vulnerability? There are so many good questions to ask about why they seem to act against their own best interests. It’s really fertile ground.

@Scildfreja Unnýðnes
They’ll never go back to Something Awful, the moderation is too strict and the mods don’t take well to casual bigotry.

Now on the subject of whether or not for 4chan to change hands, eh cut the rotting mold from the batch. Let the con man who profits off people’s medical ailments pair up with the fascists, I see no problem with that.

On the subject of fe/male pronouns, as I may have mentioned before, I went to an Oxford college which was women-only, but went mixed after I left (all the Gaudy Night fans in the house say “chessmen!”).

Up until my year, a graduate was an alumna (collectively, alumnae). I thought the college missed a major trick in not sticking to that nomenclature. But no. Apparently I’m now a member (alumnus) of the alumni, because one alumnus was added to the group. It’s even more annoying that the wider society ALMOST gets it right by accident. People who haven’t studied Latin tend to pronounce alumni “alum – n – eye”, which is actually how alumnae is correctly pronounced. Alumni should be “alum-n-ee”. Oh well…

We also had a lovely banner saying “Liberty, Equality, Sorority”. I wonder where it’s gone.

@Scildfreja

Forming their reason as “because I want to crush people who aren’t like me” isn’t giving the argument the strongest form.

That’s the thing, it is. Literally their entire position is ‘If those uppity [slurs] would learn their place, everything would be peachy again.’ You’re looking for a stronger argument that simply isn’t there.

@ Diptych

Yay! Breaks my heart whenever I think about them.

What I love most, though (apart from the fact that Sayers clearly used Somerville as the template for her fictional Shrewsbury, as I can see in my mind’s eye every corner she describes), is that it’s a mid-thirties description of how Nazi Germany is being perceived, which robs it of any 20:20 hindsight allegations (for good or ill; the casual anti-semitism is wince-inducing, but all the more authentic for it).