Alt-Right dinguses really very excited that one of them punched a woman in the face

Leo, no. Nathan Damigo, a know white supremacist with the Twitter handle “Fashy Haircut”, walked up to her.

She extended her arms to stop him.

It was NOT a mutual kind of thing.

@Alan, that woman is magnificent. She kept that smile on her face the whole time.

Thirty years ago I had a problem with a group of boys at my high school – they’d surround me at my locker every day and five of them would watch while the sixth, their leader, threatened to rape me. Every day. For months.

I got a shitload from the school administration about “not giving them the reaction they wanted” (that’s right, their decision to harass me was my fault) and “just ignore them” and even “don’t put myself in bad situations.”

What I was supposed to do – stop using my locker? Drop the class that put me in proximity with the scumbags? Drop out of school altogether? How much of my life did I have to cede to them?

Leo, intent’s not magic. You’re concern-trolling. Fucking stop.

@ jokuvaan

Member when feminists wanted to end chivalry?
Congratulations, you have achieved said goal

Thank fuck for that. You any idea what it costs to feed a war horse these days?

@ Simon

Just been chatting to Stewart (the guy in the video). He says that if smiling lass (or any of her friends) wants any free Krav lessons he’d be happy to oblige. He’s quite the fan. So if you know her pass that on.

@ lea

It wasn’t “being nice to ladies”.

Unless lady horses count.

It’s ironic that the alt-right lot should put so much emphasis on chivalry, what with their general Islamophobia. Chivalry in Europe was a nostalgia myth arising from fanboying about Saladin and ripping off Arab folk tales.

@ viscaria

“You gotta fight, for your right, to Nazi” :-/

They realize they are singing the song of the late great Freddy Mercury and known homosexual right?

Someone should remind them of that so they won’t dirty Queen’s greatest hits.

I don’t even understand why they have so much anger.

”
Leo, no. Nathan Damigo, a know white supremacist with the Twitter handle “Fashy Haircut”, walked up to her.

She extended her arms to stop him.

It was NOT a mutual kind of thing.”

“100 scalps” + weighted/studded leather glove + putting her hands on him first while directly engaging him in a fight isn’t sufficient to suggest that it was in fact a mutual thing ? These rich white kids aren’t using their privilege for good and it is clear to everyone that these types of people are dangerous and unprincipled.

I wasn’t really sure what was going on honestly, it looked kind of like they approached each other and it was already a bit of a free for all, and in the chaos of it I’m not sure how easy it would be for anyone involved to discern the potential threat. But, I’m not sure honestly. It wouldn’t be morally equivalent either way.

Though, I do think it’d be naive to think no Antifas want a fight, it’s not exactly only the far right that ever do that.

@Hippodameia
I’m really sorry to hear you went through that. Of course the school were unreasonable, they should have stopped it. But that’s not the same as this situation because they were there every day and you couldn’t avoid them.

I’m not concern trolling, you can’t do that by accident, I’m really worried, when some of these Neo-Nazi types seem to actually want to kill someone, and when the potential is there for that to happen even less intentionally in a chaotic situation. It’s not exactly an out there statement to say ‘maybe don’t fight potentially dangerous people if it can be avoided, when it’s not even clear what if anything will be accomplished by it’.

@Policy of Madness
Yes, I can definitely see there’s this embedded problem with racism, and it’ll be really hard to shift, a very difficult problem. If they’re ‘only’ privately racist, then that’s at least some slight progress towards them realising it’s unacceptable, though – and yes, you should challenge them if you’re there when they are, absolutely. Whereas the ones being publicly racist are more hopeless cases, to try to change. But I’m not saying make no verbal challenge to them either (though, I’d go for disbelieving mockery like the woman confronting the EDL member in the photo, rather than taking them seriously. I’ve tried the latter and it doesn’t work).

I’m not advocating doing nothing in all situations. What I’m suggesting is, right now at this present moment politically, rather than going out to a ‘free speech’ protest and getting into physical confrontations with attendees who weren’t necessarily even all actual Neo-Nazis (which potentially plays absolutely terribly to the more ‘normal’ Republicans and centrists -do you even have centrists? Some, kind of, I’d guess, sort of?- regardless of the fact we know it damn well wasn’t intended just as an innocent protest), you take no notice of them where possible (might not always be), or of the more overtly fringe far right events, and instead concentrate efforts in other ways. The message I want to sent is ‘lol aren’t they ridiculous, getting their knickers in a twist over nothing?’, ‘these are fringe, not worth our time, no one takes them seriously’ not ‘these are so significant and dangerous our only option is to physically fight them’ (which can look like a desperate act, Roosh, entirely vile though he is, isn’t wrong there). Then, where possible, to go from there to ‘haha, they really think [awful thing even ‘normal’ Republicans won’t agree with], I can’t believe anyone thinks that/still thinks that’ (which positions them as out of touch). It is possible to convince right wingers this way sometimes, I’ve tried it, and certainly possible to move moderates further left. Even if it’s (carefully applied) strawman tactics (hard, with them, given the terrible things they actually do say and mean, but…) well, they’ve been very successfully pulling that one off themselves against liberals (and this kind of thing will be utilised that way by them, with them distorting what happened), so.

I wouldn’t bother to turn up to counter-protest, let alone to physically fight(!), against every bunch of fringe extremists protesting something or other, would you? Westboro Baptists might be fun to antagonise, but surely not each and every damn time. Otherwise that’s not politics, it’s trolling and counter-trolling, like the real life equivalent of invading each other’s message boards, but a potentially lot more dangerous.

I mean, if the Alt-Right are going on about ‘You can’t say anything any more, free speech!’ and what they actually mean is that they can’t (unchallenged) say all their ‘racialist’ rhetoric peppered constantly with the N-word (hope that way of censoring the slur is appropriate?) and yet that’s not explicitly stated by them, their listeners hearing this message, who may be racist, but not that blatantly racist/at least not Neo-Nazis, will potentially mentally substitute (as they’re intended to do), for the ‘things we are not allowed to say’, something less glaringly racist and unreasonable. And then there’s a ‘free speech protest’, and look, those illiberal liberals are proving you can’t say anything, by going and hitting the people who are merely protesting in defence of the glorious constitution! Gosh, you really can’t say anything, these people are Anti-American. Etc.

I know it really really sucks, and gawd knows I wish it was faster, but you often get incremental change, not radical, whichever you aim for. The racist grandma will not be around forever, it’s the younger generations who can take it forward – but if her grandkids tell her we don’t say that about PoC anymore, maybe she won’t, either (this isn’t just ageism obviously, it’s the difficulty of changing a person’s entrenched views compared to teaching them better younger). As a means of enacting radical change, I’m not sure this specific type of confrontation with the Alt-Right will succeed, as a tactic.

@Leo: You’ve said you aren’t American, I believe. Perhaps you should listen to the Americans who have said that they have tried what you suggest, and that it hasn’t really worked?

Continually expanding on your point “But really, just don’t engage! That will show them!” when people keep telling you that doesn’t really work, and just keeps the social power structure the same because no one changes unless something actually affects them in some way, doesn’t help anyone.

Being nice doesn’t help anyone. Calling out bullshit might not change the minds of the person spouting it, but it will show someone in the crowd that not everyone thinks the same. It will help show that the racist/sexist/transphobic/homophobic/etc ‘silent majority’ is a lie.

Should you enter every engagement with aggression? No, obviously not. However progressives shouldn’t be tone policed out of being able to show aggression or fear in the face of what is happening.

Maybe all of this will work in the UK. Though Brexit happened, UKIP is scary, and apparently the election is predicted to have a *stronger* tory majority result… ~shrug~

Indeed it is but what if I’d told you that they were never mutually exclusive in the first place?

I would say that chivalry in the modern sense is a voluntary agreement between men wherein they acknowledge/exaggerate their much greater power (social, financial, etc.) as compared to women and then agree not to exercise all of that power against women who they consider well-behaved, and even to use it to help us occasionally, like with those big, heavy doors that our pretty little arms just can’t open. They then pat one another on the back for being such incredibly generous gents. It only works if men hold all the cards.

I would also say that my points were these: 1) as Lea indicates above, chivalry has never kept women safe from violence. Sometimes the idea of losing face in front of other men has kept certain men from punching certain women in public, but that’s about the extent of it, and it has never extended protection to women who aren’t quiet and demure. 2) Men who go on about chivalry all day seem to think not hitting specific women under specific circumstances is the most noble goddamn sacrifice the world has ever seen.

That’s a big wall of text, Leo, and I’m not going to respond to it point by point. You’re missing the entire point of nonviolent protest. You continue to miss it even though I have explained it more than once. You are a hopeless case and I’m done with you.

I’m not concern trolling, you can’t do that by accident,

You are the classic concern troll.