Happy Thanksgiving and/or Thursday! Open Thread

Shocking. Quite inexcusable. The initial phrase is adjectival and should thus clearly be hyphenated, appearing as Wotsit-Faced (or of course Cheeto-Faced in this creature’s native habitat); I appeal to my learned colleagues, however, to determine whether the nominative should more appropriately be written Shitgibbon or Shit-Gibbon. Harrumph.

Is this AMA from before or after Teresa May told Trump off again after he doubled down over retweeting those anti-Muslim hate videos posted by “Britain First”

I commend m’learned/my honourable friend Weird (and tired of trumplings) Eddie’s erudition to the House Herd (of Mammotheers).

Quick note from a lurking anon from the US – “hoosegow” is hilariously quaint and archaic, a bit like calling a local bar a speakeasy, or a jazzhouse, or similar.

Mind you, as a fan of archaic language, I think using the word is positively the bee’s knees.

@All Mammotheers going through horrible, awful, bad times
I’m so sorry. Stay strong. Wishing you the best.

@Alan
The kitty on the unicorn, coupled with the Bible quote: That’s a unique take on Revelation, one I’m totally down with. I’ll never be able to picture the Rapture or Armageddon the same way again.

@Jesalin
That orange kitty’s expression is priceless. The other kitties have broken my cuteness meter. This time it cannot be fixed.

@Mish

I just now hopped on to Facebook and saw this post from my wonderful, beautiful niece, currently in Thailand with her wonderful, beautiful girlfriend.

“I asked my best friend to marry me – she said yes.”

I has the happy tears, and ALL THE FEELS.

Reader, she said yes.

Congratulations to all involved!

@Anne Lewis

“First-rate Pussy” would be an excellent name for a riot grrl band.

ETA: Or a website for photos of pampered cats.

You said it!

And although I’ve never before rated my pussy, I will now: My pussy is first rate. At least first rate. Possibly better. And my vagina is pretty freakin’ awesome too, what with its self-cleaning ability (like postmod ovens) and the way it helps to push out a baby (should one be present and ready to be born).

@dreemr

In other disappointing news, one of my male “progressive” FB friends just posted “When are we gonna talk about WOMEN WHO FLIRT AT WORK, hmmmm?” bullshit. I do believe he is about to be unfriended.

Because FLIRTING is totally equivalent to SEXUAL ASSAULT and RAPE.

To quote several women on Jezebel, Burn. It. Down.

The Atlantic just released a LONG and very informative article on Andrew Anglin. It’s worth a read, there were a lot of things in there that surprised me (including that he apparently went through a gay phase in high school). Also, just months before starting Total Fascism, he was in the Philippines trying to raise dowry payments to marry two Muslim girls. He is undergoing yet another worldview shift right now, as he’s recently started ranting about reptilian aliens etc., which is a topic he used to harp on a lot before he became a Nazi, and he’s once again claiming that he was “only joking” with the Nazi stuff.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/12/the-making-of-an-american-nazi/544119/

For our friends across the pond – you’re not alone. 😛

The UK has it’s own right wing terrorists.

They’re along the lines of Pamela Geller – both repulsive and slightly dangerous (in the same way any small animal with sharp teeth is).

@Alan – there’s not a hairs difference in practice.

The Britain Firsters hate all immigrants, not just different coloured people though.
We’ve got a couple of them around here, and the hate they have for the Poles and Lithuanians who live in the area (and who incidentally take “their jobs” in building and plumbing) is disturbing, to say the least. Had a run in with one of them down the pub. That were fun.

Listing them is probably the right thing to do.

I have an issue with the article calling him a Nazi “sympathizer”, he isn’t a sympathizer, he’s a feckin’ Nazi.

Hmmm… I’m of two minds about it. David Neiwert, who studies right-wing radicalism for a living, is very cautious about applying that label only to those who conform to the Hitler admiration and iconography inherent to Nazis. People with shaved heads, swastika tattoos and Sig rune patches on their collars, those are Nazis, and they are distinct from the racist immigrant hating “Patriot” groups out there, despite ideological overlap.

What worries me is that it seems like it’s only that label Nazis that gets people’s attention now. When that guy shot up the Holocaust Museum a few years ago killing a security guard, the fact that he was a white supremacist was all we needed to know that he was a terrible human being. It’s articles like that godawful NYT column that has normalized white supremacist talking points to the point that it’s not enough to get this kind of response.

I’ve noticed this rhetorical trick on plenty a Twitter or YouTube exchange:

1. Internet douchebag (like say Chris Ray Gun) uses racist and white supremacist talking point about multiculturalism.
2. Other internet denizens (such as Dick Coughlan) point out that talking point’s dog-whistle status and conclude it’s racist and promotes white supremacy.
3. Internet douchebag responds “You’re calling me a Nazi?! You SJWs say that so often it’s lost all meaning!”

This was a dynamic I saw play out in the aftermath of GamerGate with a YouTuber by the name of LaughingWitch (who I miss dearly). Phil “Thunderf00t” Mason, being the shitty debater that he was, started using the utilitarian argument that terrible things like the Holocaust can lead to great things like the Haber process (which is not only absurd but factually incorrect because the discovery of the Haber process predated the Holocaust by 30 years) during a debate with Ray “Banana Man” Comfort. LaughingWitch contacted Thunderf00t’s employers with a letter that called him a Nazi, and Thunderf00t banked on both his employers taking no action and an incredulous reaction on his part to carry the day. It did and ultimately it was LaughingWitch whose business was blockaded by Thunderf00t’s followers. She then quit making YouTube videos shortly thereafter while Phil is still standing (albeit his profile has eroded since GamerGate and Brexit).

As per Innuendo Studios latest video on the rhetoric of the alt-right, this is part of “Never playing defense”. Character assessments can be tough for a casual observer to swallow and they do demand significant evidence be presented to convince people. While it’s easy to just label somebody a Nazi, I think it’s better to stick to the talking point and say “Yeah, that’s what Nazis say.” Don’t spend an hour explaining the way Coughlan did because if you’re explaining, you’re losing (although his video response was great), but put them back on the defensive by pointing out the dog-whistle. This serves to take away that incredulous reaction and forces them to account for it, usually forcing them to follow up with “Haha, it was just jokes!”

If these talking points accumulate, then the labels can stick better (see: Richard Spencer).

He got fired, his sister got fired, his brother in law got fired, and he’s probably going to lose his house, in case anyone can’t read the article.

Echoes of that article I posted about collateral damage. Based on the fact that their mutual employer asked the brother-in-law, it’s likely he shared those views, so I would say justified collateral damage. I just wish this awakening happened a couple years earlier… maybe LaughingWitch might still be around.

@wwth

He’ll not roll over – unless the offer for doing so is very good indeed for him personally.

I know Flynnflam. Had the rather dubious pleasure of working alongside ( or more accurately in spite of) him for a bit, and there’s rarely been someone I wanted to just take out back and shoot more.
He’s a credit stealing chancer, and a tosser. Also an incredibly shitty officer, but that’s not important now.

Having said that – he does tend to stay bought from what I’ve seen and heard. 🙁

We need more articles talking about these nazis as goddamn nazis. They aren’t monsters under the bed or a nebulous figure in msm. They’re real people, like your neighbors, friends and family members. Thats the real horror – that they’re also ‘normal’ and believe its normal to hold violent fantasies, wishing it will be reality (and voting for those in office who think so too)

Also

..just months before starting Total Fascism, he was in the Philippines trying to raise dowry payments to marry two Muslim girls. He is undergoing yet another worldview shift right now, as he’s recently started ranting about reptilian aliens etc., which is a topic he used to harp on a lot before he became a Nazi, and he’s once again claiming that he was “only joking” with the Nazi stuff.

Perpetuating arranged marriages in a culture that he isn’t apart of only to change 180 and embrace nazism and all its bigotry, being against that same culture. But that last part was just all a joke because the real issue are the reptilian aliens that are controlling the government while Illuminati brings the NWO.
Wow. Just.. wow.

@Katamount (formerly Gussie Jives)
I watch Shaun on YT too 😀 I’ve watched his videos on Stefan Molyneux and Black Pigeon Speaks; really do enjoy how he fact checks them. BPS honestly blames everything including the ~fall of western civilization~ on “weak, irrational women” having agency, rights and the freedom in choosing who they want to sleep with. Stefan’s the same… ‘women need to stop sleeping with ASSHOLES’ He doesn’t scare me, but his cronies who eat every word he spits out, does.

I love this!

https://twitter.com/joshtpm/status/936341623184744448

Perpetuating arranged marriages in a culture that he isn’t apart of only to change 180 and embrace nazism and all its bigotry, being against that same culture. But that last part was just all a joke because the real issue are the reptilian aliens that are controlling the government while Illuminati brings the NWO.
Wow. Just.. wow.

Have you read “The Authoritarians?”

http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~altemey/

I suspect these high-RWA types don’t actually have ontologies to call their own. They profess whatever the high-social-dominance person they currently follow professes, and if they switch to following a different leader, their apparent ontology is replaced wholesale as well.

It’s the only explanation I can think of offhand for the “misinformation soup ontologies” of Fox watchers and the rest of the right wing. They don’t figure things out. They don’t relate factual claims to one another. They don’t garden their ontologies. They just take others’ wholesale, transplanted, and remaining unexamined.

Unfortunately, this shortcut of relying on an authority rather than figuring out anything for oneself results in a high degree of not only inconsistency (and, often, hypocrisy) but also gullibility. So right wingers blow whichever way some wind blows them, and if someone gets their respect as a leader and then tells them to be a tornado and hit someone’s house, that’s what they do.

To them, personalities of people are the important things. They’re evaluative about those things, to decide who to follow and who to believe, just not evaluative about the actual facts on the ground themselves. And this is not an illness of any kind, it is normal for a significant fraction of the population. If anything, we people who think things through and figure things out deeply might be the minority.

The roots of this phenomenon probably go all the way back to the Neolithic and division of labor. The architect of a temple needs to think about space, geometry, and structural soundness. But the bricklayers just need to be loyal to the architect and put the next brick where the architect says to put it. Both mentation-styles have their uses for people employed in different types of work. The problem is the nasty side effect that if the architect tells the bricklayers “put this next brick there, and also, people who look different from you are evil and scheming to steal your bricklaying job”, they’ll take that as gospel too, and next thing you know there’s a baying mob of racist bricklayers.

As for a solution to this conundrum: don’t really have one. Most of the time society stumbles along more or less functionally, because the RWAs are usually law abiding by their very natures. So when the law says don’t discriminate, no violence, and so forth the problems are, if not eliminated, then reduced. But when the law allows leeways for things like, say, rape culture, there are problems, and when the law itself is brought into disrepute, as is happening now not just due to Trump but because of blatant plutocracy, bank bailouts and other giant gifts to the rich, cops literally getting away with murder, and so forth, and conflicting authority figures can exceed the duly constituted state in respect, that lets the RWAs pick and choose between the state and expressed will of the people, on the one hand, and these other authority figures. People like Spencer.

So the breakdown in society needs to be addressed, in the short term, where the state has come into disrepute and guys like Spencer (and Trump!) can gather followings. In the longer term, I think the RWA mode of thinking will itself become obsolete. What good is it once the bricklayers are all robots and all the humans are architects? At that point one hopes all people will be being raised to be architects and none to be bricklayers, so everyone will learn non-RWA modes of thinking and we’ll have a more thoughtful, contemplative civilization in which nobody obeys anybody else without question.