By David Futrelle
Seems like only yesterday that everyone to the left of Donald Trump was mad at the Nazis. Now for some reasons a lot of these same people are yelling about AntiFa. Nancy Pelosi has officially denounced AntiFa, and a piece in the generally liberalish Washington Post today declared that AntiFa are the “moral equivalent” of the literal Nazis they oppose.
Now I’m not exactly the most militant dude in the world but WHAT IN HOLY CRAP IS GOING ON. We are up against LITERAL NAZIS. One of them LITERALLY MURDERED A WOMAN with a car, and then the rest of them LAUGHED ABOUT IT and SAID IT WAS JUSTIFIED. They go to every so-called “free speech” rally they organize with the intent of doing bodily harm to as many people as possible. and unless we stop them it’s only a matter of time before they kill more people. So fuck this shit. Hug an AntiFa today.
On to the tweets. First, the dumb shit.
Pelosi puts out statement condemning Antifa violence in Berkeley. pic.twitter.com/0RlU6RlWmX
— Alex Seitz-Wald (@aseitzwald) August 30, 2017
Opinion: Yes, antifa is the moral equivalent of neo-Nazis https://t.co/dt9vInRh1q
— The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) August 30, 2017
Now, some rebuttals. First, a good short thread on how the discussion has shifted from ACTUAL FUCKING NAZIS to endless hand-wringing about antifas.
I am perpetually amazed at the ability of lockstep, bad-faith arguments on the right to steer and transform national conversations.
— . (@swordsjew) August 30, 2017
And here’s a response to the Washington Post thing by a Mother Jones journalist who was there at Berkeley.
https://twitter.com/shane_bauer/status/902969494808625152
Some historical perspective:
https://twitter.com/thalestral/status/902614776269955074
Every time I see news coverage of a protest I remember this image pic.twitter.com/ZAL0TwI61R
— Tom Hatfield (@WordMercenary) August 30, 2017
More AntiFa stuff:
https://twitter.com/pixelatedboat/status/902790386619318272
https://twitter.com/daniecal/status/902542063543009280
Antifa dropped a piano on my head and when I popped out of the top moments later I had a lump on my head and had its keys instead of teeth
— Jules (@Julian_Epp) August 29, 2017
I defended the honor of George Orwell against an Alex Jones employee.
Orwell went to Spain to fight the fascists. With guns. He wrote a book about it. https://t.co/vdulXAE58e
— David Futrelle (@DavidFutrelle) August 30, 2017
Snopes also has a thing to say about the attempts to portray the fascists and AntiFa as somehow equivalent:
Lmao Snopes dot com is to the left of Nancy Pelosi https://t.co/Pf9aYyNBHR
— Ann 'tifa' Coulter Classic™ (@AntifaCoulter) August 30, 2017
AntiFa may have dealt with a lot of undeserved shit today, but happily our dear leader Donald Trump was also dealing with some richly deserved shit.
https://twitter.com/fmanjoo/status/903027267940491264
Turns out Trump is not making America great again. Fox News poll finds an 11-point jump in dissatisfaction with the way things are going. pic.twitter.com/YwPvEVxSoB
— Geoff Garin (@geoffgarin) August 30, 2017
Not sure that 58% believing Trump will finish his term when he's just seven months in is quite the accomplishment someone might think it is. https://t.co/QZM073IuaA
— The Darkest Timeline Numbersmuncher (@NumbersMuncher) August 30, 2017
Trump's approval rating among people aged 18-29 has reached a new low of 20% in Gallup's tracking poll. https://t.co/5VWTe33ZFN
— Axios (@axios) August 29, 2017
Huckabee Sanders: Trump was correct to say he'd seen Harvey devastation first hand because he'd been briefed on it pic.twitter.com/y4MmUp0aoZ
— Rhys Blakely (@rhysblakely) August 30, 2017
W. screwed up royally during Katrina but at least he didn't make a speech about how rich people need lower taxes WHILE IT WAS STILL RAINING.
— L O L G O P (@LOLGOP) August 30, 2017
Meanwhile, the creator of Pepe is taking the Pepe Nazis to court and winning:
https://twitter.com/MaxTemkin/status/902700195577823232
And here are some animals!
https://twitter.com/awwcuteness/status/902839313276252160
https://twitter.com/CuteEmergency/status/902748977531162625
https://twitter.com/MeetAnimals/status/903024790675611648
https://twitter.com/lordflaconegro/status/902687000544911362
Semi OT: if you scroll down to the next story on that Daily Beast Cantwell story Alan linked, you’ll get a fascinating look inside Laura Ingrahman’s LifeZette news service, her answer to the Huffington Post news service.
Amongst other things, the dude running the day-to-day operations has no qualms about being a sexist bore in front of everyone, and the company itself seems to have taken a few pages from Trump on how to treat their subcontractors.
Interesting stuff, at least to me.
She seemed a lot more chilled when she lived in that little house on the prairie.
The thing that boggles my mind about the claim that Antifa provokes violence from otherwise peaceable white supremacists is that it’s flatly contradicted by the evidence. Right-wing demonstrators at Charlottesville showed up with guns, clubs, and knives. One of their number drove a car into a group of people and killed one of them. There were many reports of them headed towards predominantly black neighborhoods before counter-protests headed them off. White supremacist violence was already happening—was probably always going to happen—and eyewitness accounts show that Antifa was saving lives by responding with violence, time and again. Even if Antifa didn’t show up and allowed a bunch of activists and clergy to get their skulls cracked in the name of “nonviolent protest,” white supremacists were ready to invent violence on the left to justify violence on the right. That’s how it’s always been, this isn’t news (except to centrist pundits with no historical memory, that is).
Of course, we live in a white supremacist society where the only meaningful distinction between ideological groups is whether or not they’re disruptive to the order of things, so Nazis and Antifa are really just the same (and actually Nazis are less threatening because they only target white people if the latter oppose them). I’m not sure what else I expected, but…
@Mish: Appropriation and giving ourselves pats on the back for damn near everything is an American tradition!
@Alan
My desire to repeated punch the Nazi is outweighed by the satisfaction of seeing him suffer. Yes I know finding joy in others’ suffering is bad. No I don’t care because he’s a fucking Nazi who’d kill my “t****y” ass if he could get away with it.
According to recent research that helped quantify the sub-sea-floor prokaryotic and bacterial biomass, the current estimate is 614 to 827 PgC, Petagrams of Carbon, with an average of 713. This is still really unsure, since it’s very hard to estimate ocean biomass. Wikipedia lists around 560 PgC, but leaves out bacteria and ocean floor biomass, which is still under debate. Taking the 713 as accurate, that’s 7×10^14 kg of biomass.
Earth is 6×10^24 kg in total. So, biomass accounts for 1/1×10^10 of Earth’s mass.
As for your specific “most of the biomass is subsurface”, that’s apparently based on old estimates of oceanic biomass? Which is in the process of being overturned. So, I don’t know what to make of it. Very active research going on at the moment!
http://www.pnas.org/content/109/40/16213.abstract
*pinches bridge of nose*
Alright. Can I just say that I’ve NEVER understood this. This hand-wringing, squirmy, whinging performative introspection that the left does, whenever the right invokes this falsely equivocal political landscape where suddenly we’re “just as bad” as their worst elements if we do X? HOW?
I just…is this a White People Thing? I’m seriously fucking asking. Because I have NEVER had this issue. Coretta Scott King told us famously what “violence” truly is. The judgment of Nazis and their sympathizers adds up to exactly jack dollars and shit cents. Stop, and get it together. There’s work to do.
Thing that gets me about the whole ‘who beat the nazis most’ stuff is that it doesn’t matter. There were literal nazis. And not like today nazis with sedans and torches (which can obviously be used to tragic effect ?). Tanks and flamethrowers, y’all! If there’s any time for participation trophies, it’s when fighting nazis. And winning! Hifives and celebratory pizza after. Team effort, good game! Dunking Gatorade and inspirational speeches. I’ve run outta cheesy sports metaphors, but point made. Everyone who fought the nazis (material/logistical support counts too), gets nazi fighting points. Quit arguing about who’re the best nazi fighters, it’s nonsense…
@BlackBloc
I was at the Berkeley rally -and the San Francisco one, for contrast- and I’m finding the whole situation somewhat difficult to parse, which I suspect is the actual reality of the thing. Antifa never showed up downtown in SF, and everything was nice and happy-go-lucky (which is not necessarily how an anti-nazi protest should go?).
In Berkeley, there were maybe 300 protesters already in the park when Antifa showed up in force. The cops put on their masks, formed their line, and the whole mood went from generally tense to extremely tense. However, the cops stood down and left the park entirely with no violence- a victory of sorts. Police militarization and oppression are real problems. But whose weren’t the only problems we were there to… um… discuss.
So all this hand-wringing a la Pelosi seems like a call for moral black-and-whites, which just isn’t possible. I abhor violence, but I’d have to use it in self-defense would I not? And when is that line crossed, that protesting nazis requires aggressive self-defense? I’m not crazy about Antifa but neither can I possibly condemn them. They seem to have positives and negatives. And thus far there’s more positives to their selective use of violence than negatives, I suspect.
@ scilfreja
Cheers for that. So life is practically irrelevant in the planetary grand scheme of things. I’m glad it exists though, if only for selfish reasons.
I’d heard something about bacterial life in the 0 – 2 metre depth range. Which I found interesting because of the implications for life on Mars.
Unfortunately the Berkley rally in which a fascist (who was unarmed and part of groups that had peacefully assembled) was beaten beyond helplessness pretty much killed the antifa brand (the same way riots at a number of BLM protests killed the brand). If the Dem party did as you ask you might see them get knocked down to around 150 seats. I realize that doesn’t matter because it’s easier being pure than trying to get in government and actually do something, but it is what it is.
Though for what it’s worth, any reading of political science andhistory shows that when there is no agreement on the nature reality, civil ear is inevitable. As part of a political cult, the trumpers (including fascists) will never agree in the nature of reality so…
I’m fully expecting the category ‘premature anti-Fascist’ to be revived. There are already yowling hammerheads on Facebook complaining about the Communists behind Antifa.
Maybe the reason why we think of Nazis as more evil than the Soviets is because they were. That should not be a controversial position.
“I decline utterly to be impartial as between the fire brigade and the fire.” -Winston Churchill
Counterpoint: Obsession with “brands” to the detriment of principled stances on anything is what has led the Democratic Party to its current state of weakness and dissolution. The establishment didn’t take Trump seriously because they thought his personality and behavior compromised his brand too much to make him electable. Turns out, if you agree with someone on principle, for better or for worse, you’ll generally do whatever moral backflips are necessary to bring yourself around to voting for them. I’m not saying that Pelosi should be praising Antifa, but issuing virtually identical condemnations for Antifa and for Nazis does a great job of pushing the already-disaffected left further away from the party while failing to convince the rest of America that said party, as opponents of the GOP and Trump, don’t somehow bear responsibility for the existence and succor of one (or both).
Still, I also fear that some shade of civil war is inevitable. There is no example in history where fascism, a political ideology of violence and exclusion, has been defeated without resort to violence by its opponents. Even the Nazis in the punk scene had to be driven out by anti-racists and anti-fascists willing to start fights with them whenever they showed up, supported by vocal condemnation by musical artists and the broader community. Since we can’t exactly count on Trump, Sessions, and company to deploy the state’s monopoly of violence against hate speech and crimes, it’s probably going to be people on the street throwing those punches while we wait for the broader community of Americans to raise their voices. I don’t look forward to it.
Yeah, from my white person perspective, it’s a white people thing. Those Nazis look like us, so lots of white people have an itch to forgive them, since they look like our in-group. Double strong with white dudes, since there’s also the gender similarity, given the strong bias towards the Nazis being dudes.
They’re just trying to avoid introspection IMO. They don’t want to consider the possibility that – gasp – they themselves might have things better than other racial or ethnic groups, and that they might actually be a little bit racist. So they have that urge to forgive Nazis, cause gosh, they’re just mad about oppression! See, they’re oppressed too!
Seems like it’s a knee-jerk reaction that some people have anytime someone tries to widen the circle of “who do I have to treat as a human f’n being.” Minorities and the disenfranchized already have a big circle, while people don’t necessarily. Opening that circle gives them fewer targets to scapegoat, bringing the responsibility for failures home to roost. So yeah, privileged people trying to avoid taking responsibility.
I dunno though, I’m just rambling. Something in that above there feels a bit wrong on a second read, but Im’a post anyways. Please correct me!
@Fiqah
Ayyyup. Neither Antifa nor Klan 3.0 are gonna fight them so long as they don’t make a scene, so they don’t hafta worry. Thus, to them, ‘both sides’ are similarly rowdy distractions. They don’t care about the violence, they just care about the disturbance of their quiet. Dr King talked about the white moderate 60 years ago. Muffugas ain’t changed a damn since then
@Test
No, black people being loud ‘killed the brand’
Bullshit. Nobody’s asking the Dems to wear black and red and make national holidays in honor of the fash punchers. The only thing that’s being asked here is not to equate protesters with literal. Fuckin. NAZIS!
Not sure when not putting up with literal fuckin nazis, became derisively ‘pure’. This isn’t purity, it’s principles. And, if you can’t tell the difference, that’s a you problem not an us problem. Check yourself
I’ve seen this floating around. It’s the most meaningless, twee tripe I’ve ever come across. What’s a ‘disagreement on the nature of reality’? Seriously, what does that mean? And between whom? The fuck? Also, when’s ‘inevitable’? When did our supposed, current ‘disagreement’ start, and when’s our civil war coming? Doomsday preacher nonsense…
@This Handle is a Test
agent provocateurs have been sited at a number of anti-police brutality rallies so it kinda goes:
undercover police throw things at uniformed police,
uniformed police deploy chemical weapons and attack nonviolent but aggressive protesters in “self defense”,
media records chaotic videos of people screaming and running and clouds of tear gas possibly people trying to defend themselves from police,
talking heads on TV go on abut violence and chaos with the assumption the police can do no wrong by virtue of being police,
regardless fox news uses stock footage of violent riots from Russia or something and says its from the protest and there viewers believe them.
TLDR Violence gets injected into nonviolent movements by police and media so they can be delegitimatized.
All of the “this is going to cause a civil war!” is just asking minorities and the poor to shut up and “take it for the team.” Exactly the same was said about Rosa Parks and the lunch counter sit-ins. Exactly the same was leveled at MLK.
If it starts a civil war, it’s because the agencies of power won’t accept elevating the most vulnerable amongst us without one. I think they’re worth fighting for.
The Agencies of Power is my band name now. Possibly also my superhero team.
@ Fiqah
I have actually been thinking about this a lot. I think part of White Peoples (TM) issue with the violence is that since we were very young we have been taught about MLK in a very sterilized, ‘white-washed’ way. The importance of his use of nonviolence, even after all that had been done to him, his family, and other blacks people is an incredibly powerful story, but of course misses the nuance of the Civil Rights Movement.
I know because I struggle with it myself. I think nonviolence is an incredibly important and useful tactic during protests and movements. It allows the rest of the world to see the terribleness of the other side and compare their actions with inaction because it offers such a striking contrast (which humans often need to understand complex issues. as a group, we do not handle shades of grey easily). (Not to mention it frequently offers an easy moral upper hand in conversations about the issue and is therefore an easy shortcut for people not truly paying attention to the issue to understand the “correct party” in the struggle – you know, good ‘optics’).
But there also comes a time, I believe, when force is necessary. We were not going to beat Hitler with nonviolent protests. We were not going to solve the Civil War with nonviolent protests.
Again its something I struggle with – when is it okay to move from voices and signs to fists to something more. The part of me that was taught from a young age the power of nonviolence truly struggles with the current system. Academically I understand the argument, but it can be hard to escape the biases taught to you from your youth.
“I reasoned with Nazis, and all I got was this lousy paper”
http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2014/07/21/article-2699910-1FD66EB900000578-900_634x470.jpg
I wasn’t taught about MLK all that much in school, I’m in Canada, it was more Ghandi. We did get a general overview of the civil rights era though. We still have this white person worship of nonviolence, and I think the important question is to ask why the school system teaches non-violent protest so heavily. Part is obvious – violence is bad, m’kay – but that is contradicted by the way we teach wars. In general we teach them with a good side and a bad side, and our side is the good side that won, and their side is the bad side that lost because of x, y, and z.
Except when the war is a protest, and the target of the protest is our own government. Then it’s both sides had valid points and there’s a sudden need to acknowledge complex morality. We’re still the good guys, but the violence wasn’t justified violence against oppressors. I guarantee that if there isn’t an actual civil war and this period of history represents an incremental change with white people still holding onto power, our schoolbooks will talk about Antifa being a violent reactionary group that hindered the peaceful protests in their desire for change. Agencies of power protecting their own.
School curricula are designed by people living in the society, vetted by school boards and government education departments. They aren’t objective, and are painted with the desires of the dominant forces in society. Check out the revisionist history in Texas to get an idea of what every school board does to some degree or another.
Like Axe said, it’s about a desire to maintain order – in my opinion at least. I have poor perspective on the problem myself.
@Dan Hoan
I agree. We can see the same thing with the Suffragettes. People like to forget that they bombed letterboxes and lit cricket pitches and clubs on fire. (Compare that to the absolute nightmare of modern feminism… they make videos and roughly talk to you on colleges).
As for violence, it should be a last resort, but sadly, it has to be a resort.
@ scildfreja
I can understand why people might be sceptical about taking advice from Ghandi on how to deal with Nazis.
http://izquotes.com/quotes-pictures/quote-hitler-killed-five-million-jews-it-is-the-greatest-crime-of-our-time-but-the-jews-should-have-mahatma-gandhi-231149.jpg
I am still wondering why so much focus is given on that one Berkeley incident (which I condemn) when multiple occurences (such as the Deandre Harris beating) is glossed over…and when it’s pretty well-known that the alt-right *specifically* targets Berkeley because it is a liberal wellspring, and always has been.
The “Us vs Them” continues.