AntiFa ate my baby: Today in Tweets

To me Dalilama just seems frustrated/angry with people who equate all violence as being the same and condemn any use of force for the sake of optics.

@Tree Person

its also commonly speculated (even by Hitler himself) that if the nazis rallies were met with sufficient force in Germany during the early stages of their rise to power said raise to power (and the holocaust) might have been prevented.

When I was at university a million years ago, I remember reading that the German troops who enacted Hitler’s first “land grab”* – the retaking of the Rhineland – had standing orders to turn back if they met any resistance from the (I think) French occupying troops. They didn’t**, but imagine how history might have played out if the first sally forth had failed.

This is the fact I remember most frequently when told we’re over-reacting to the extreme right. Over-reaction is the appropriate response; they take everything else as encouragement.

* Inverted commas because the Rhineland was German territory. It was occupied under the terms of the Treaty of Versailles.

** I assume the lack of resistance was largely due to the political distaste at occupation 15 years afterwards feeling more like humiliating the loser than a necessary defence. Not because of superior forces or anything. But I could be wrong.

ETA I’m now thinking I mean the Ruhr- unless that’s the same. Memory!!!

@Dali

You’re doing a much better job at defending your position (and mine) than I ever could so I’ll just leave you to it, but while you’re here, I hear you made a Discord for WHTM, so I wanted to know if I could get a link 🙂

@Sinkable John
Try the link in Dali’s name and let us know if it doesn’t work.

I should’ve paid attention :p

Thank yous.

Now to figure out how to use the link but my own app instead of the browser one – I only just recently started using Discord so I haven’t found all my bearings yet.

Edit : nevermind that, gots it.

Scildfreja – One of my dad’s favorite quotes was “Foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” I think it’s Emerson.

Oh gosh, yes. I’m sorry about your brother :C I misread that at first. That’s awful. I’m so sorry.

I’ll be honest, initially I did vacillate a bit. I found myself thinking what was going on in the US was just a temporary nightmare and in 4 or 8 years time it would just be seen as a particularly bad presidency but then things would return to ‘normal’ (not that that’s any better for a lot of folks). And I reminded myself that fascist.and Nazi gets banded around a lot in political discourse.

But I kept coming back to this:

And it does seem all the same boxes are being ticked. But with one major difference. As has been pointed out upthread, the original Nazi threat did sneak up on the world a bit. It was easy to convince oneself that it was just fiery rhetoric, and the anti semitism was just economic anxiety. It’s not like the Wansee Conference was televised.

But this time there are no excuses for not seeing what’s going on. They’re quite candid, indeed ‘proud’ of their intentions. Trump didn’t pardon a racist cop covertly or reluctantly. He did it in the full glare of publicity using a national disaster to boost the ratings (we need a new definition of cynical, the old one’s redundant).

I’m thousands of miles away. And as a cishet white guy I’m probably way down the list. Heck I’m even tall and have blue eyes. If I whack on a polo shirt I’d be safe for ages. My less inconspicuous friends don’t enjoy that luxury. When Nazis threatened white Europeans we had a world war about it, so I’m not going to blame their victims now if they feel the need to get a bit percussive about things.

I’m bringing this up here, because the fascist sympathies of police were repeatedly mentioned earlier in this thread.

I’m in a middling-size city in Canada, and over the past year or so I’ve noticed a steep increase in police presence. They’re not hired from the local community either; they are the area’s provincial police.

Prior to about 2016, I saw police vehicles quite rarely when out and about town, mostly just two or three parked behind the police station if I happened to be passing near there. Since then there is frequent apparently random patrolling of the streets, and the number of police vehicles in the town seems to have (at least) tripled. Also, the ordinary black-and-whites have been joined by several large, aggressive-looking SUV things with “cow catcher” like barred apparatuses on the front, which I can’t imagine are intended for any purpose related to “keeping the peace”.

There is more, unfortunately: it seems police harassment of citizens has increased in proportion, if not more so. In a decade or so of living here until now, and walking to most places to save gas money, I’d been hassled exactly twice, both times for “obstructing traffic” by walking along the side of the road. In the first instance this was because the sidewalk didn’t exist, and in the second, the city had not bothered to put sand or salt down on them and I’d left my ice skates at home. In neither instance was I ticketed or given any other lasting consequence.

About three weeks ago, and roughly a year after the increased numbers and the aggressive-looking SUVs began to show up, one of those SUVs drove past me, turned onto a side street, and stopped blocking my path, where I was walking on the sidewalk approaching the crossing on that side street. I started to walk around it but the cop inside said to stop, and demanded to know where I’d been. I told him (truthfully). He then started badgering me for my name and other information. I asked him “Am I being detained?”, to which his answer was “no”, but when I went to continue walking he stepped into my path again and resumed badgering me for information he had no right to demand. He mentioned something about a(n alleged) string of robberies, and a very vague description of the suspect, saying I matched it — I in fact did not, as the one actual detail given in his description did not match me. I pointed this out, said I wasn’t his guy and that he was wasting his time, and again tried to resume walking. He moved ahead of me again and threatened me with “investigatory detention”. At around this time an unmarked van with two large antennae on its roof stopped next to his parked vehicle (I was a quarter block past it by then) and he turned to talk to the people inside it (more cops, I expect). I resumed walking, and altered the rest of my route home to add significant zigging and zagging and a stretch along a vehicle-impassable footpath.

The cops elected not to follow.

I have been somewhat disturbed by this incident ever since. I had committed no crime, did not match the description of the (alleged) thief they were (allegedly) after, and nonetheless was badgered, private information demanded, and threatened with jail. Civil rights seem to be eroding, not only in the US but (at a slower pace, or we’re just earlier on the curve) in Canada as well.

It should be noted that I am white and don’t visibly fall into any commonly police-oppressed group, save possibly one. Walking a significant distance with a pack full of shopping is, obviously, going to correlate with lower socio-economic status. I wouldn’t quite consider myself poor, per se, just being frugal, but that could be the assumption being made. So it looks like one can not only be pulled over and hassled for DWB, but now also for WWP (walking while poor).

I’ve been out a few times since then, still usually saving money (and carbon footprint) by walking, but avoiding the more major streets as they are the most heavily patrolled. But I should not have to do this, and I should not have to fear that there will be another instance of unprovoked harassment, one that perhaps might escalate further than that one did. Why is this happening, and is it peculiar to my neck of the woods or widespread in Canada? Is it linked with the rise of the alt-right in the US?

In an attempt to answer the latter question I tried to apply Peter Turchin’s structural-demographic hypothesis to Canada. My off the cuff estimate was that, since Upper and Lower Canada and the maritime provinces united to become the Dominion of Canada right at around the same time as the US Civil War occurred, perhaps Canada was 180 degrees out of phase with the US in terms of the longer “secular cycle”, in which case it should be moving into an integrative phase now, not a disintegrative one. When I looked at political violence in Canadian history, however, I found no evidence at all for Canada having a secular cycle. Turchin’s shorter 50-year cycle stood out clearly, and seems to be synchronized with the US cycle, with the Riel Rebellions, FLQ crisis, and other significant (by Canadian standards) political violence outbreaks lining up with US counterparts. The last two such led the US peaks by about five years, and the next should actually be just finishing now (while the US’s is just starting, with Charlottesville). There were a few small-scale attempted terrorist acts in the capital over the past few years, which seems to have been Canada’s counterpart.

So, Canada does not look, at first blush, like it’s about to come apart at the seams. On the other hand, “there’s a first time for everything”. I know several other readers here are Canadian and hope that some of you have some insight, even if just reports “from the trenches” of similar events (or a lack of them) in disparate areas of the country. Is Canada heading for a structural-demographic crack-up, or is something else (perhaps more benign) at work here, such as spillover/trend-following from recent US behaviors such as militarizing the police?

@ChimericMind
Valerie Solanas was mentally ill (paranoid schizophrenia), held in a high-security psychiatric hospital, and sectioned again multiple times later, whatever your stance on the use of violence and whether you think it justified or not, she’s not an idealogical example given her illness really did influence her actions.

@Alan Robertshaw
To me the thing is, is Trump a particularly bad President (he’s a bad President, for definite) exactly, depending on how you look at it? His rhetoric is horrendous, he’s certainly said he’ll do awful things, and done some of them, and he provides encouragement for the Neo-Nazis. So far (and he certainly has time), I’d not swap him for Bush, though, because Bush’s actions had even more destructive effect, helped considerably by his relative competence. Would Bush be wanting to go into NK now, maybe, Axis of Evil and all (he might express himself less crudely, but it wasn’t really always better what he was saying), so far Trump is a lot of bluster, and may that continue.

It’s all part of the ongoing history of the US, I think, rather than a single ‘this could be it’ moment. That’d be the nukes, anyway, not small groups of Nazis, horrible though they are.

that person was there to support Donald Trump, and not white supremacy.

Well, there’s a distinction without a difference.

@Everyone who gave condolences: Argh, dammit, this was not how I intended my statement to be received, but it’s my fault for wording it wrongly. I’m not saying that my foster brother actually WAS killed (although there have been a number of narrow escapes that a lot of other trans folk here have experienced the likes of). I feel terrible for drawing unwarranted sympathy in that area. My point is that my trans brother DOES have a job with his county’s Democratic Party HQ (as one of two jobs, since it naturally doesn’t pay much). I was bringing him up as someone that would be killed if someone acted on Dalilama’s combined implication that violence against the Democratic Party was justified because of its internalized racism. It was my way of saying that people within the same community, where people are supposed to look out for each, would be threatened by casting everything in black and white stark absolutes.

I am willing to accept Scildfreja’s critique of my logic, and I appreciate the clarifications brought in by her and Catalpa. So, let’s do a test and see if we can separate out the misunderstanding: Dali, are you of the opinion that Nazism can be separated from general racism, and thus it is not mandatory to confront all racism with violence? Because if so, I withdraw my objections and I’ll apologize for misunderstanding. If not, then it will at least highlight my problems with what I’ve perceived from your statements.