Well. how about THAT for an October Surprise?
I would point out the ironies here but there really aren’t any. It’s basically the opposite of irony: Dude downplays the danger, doesn’t wear a mask and hangs out with other people not wearing masks, all because he thinks he’s a genetically superior human who’s immune to disease. Well, turns out he isn’t.
I have no idea how this is going to play out. This tweet pretty much sums it up:
Yep.
Open thread!
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@Diego
I can’t speak as to the motives of South American Trump supporters, but internalized misogyny definitely played a huge part in his rise to power. After all, a majority of white women in America voted for Trump, so I’d imagine women of other races who support Trump have the same internalized misogyny.
@Dali : *NOTHING* justify automatic killing. Absolutely nothing. At the very, very, very least, you need a proper trial. You act and talk exactly like a far right goon, and I know since I have some in my family. It’s just that you pick up on other groups than them.
And, seriously, when your defence about acting like a nazi is that your outgroup is despicable, you’re way, way past the moral line. That being said, you’re a shining example of how fast righteous fury can turn into the french Terror.
@PoM : I fully agree. And it’s very important to be aware of that, because thinking oneself above that for whatever reason is fast track to being a racist facilitator. The main thing to remember is that outgroups will almost alway hate other minorities and outgroups. That’s why anti-white racism is alway to be considered with a ton of suspicion ; by and large, they don’t tend to be a target
Directly linked to the post : we have had the confirmation that Trump have been put on oxygen. It make his odds of dying dramatically higher, but still not super high. That being said, since the WH is so anally retensive about information, maybe he is in a medical coma right now, who know. Or already dead.
That being said, the informations we have is that he is in a bad spot, but still will likely survive. Sadly, as far as I know. Well, the way to the even better thing of him surviving, going out of coma after six or so month, and being indicted for life in prison afterwar is still open I guess.
I’m not talking about anti-white racism, which is just not a problem. White people have enough resources and power to shrug it off. I’m not talking about punching up.
I’m mostly talking about anti-indigenous racism, which is a huge issue in literally every country that has both an indigenous and a colonizer population. Which is to say every country in the New World and many in the Old. Any time there is conflict between colonizers and the indigenous population, the colonizers engage in systematic, institutionalized racism. This is just as big of a problem in Brazil and Canada as it is in the US.
However, anti-black racism is also a big thing in most places that have black and non-black populations. So you can include that as well.
@PoM : I know. It’s more that when I say “every group can be racist” I usually hear a speech about how arabs hate frenchs and white people. While they actually tend to hate black and Romani (in France at least). I guess that here, I am not that likely to hear that tho.
@Diego
Well apathy is a passive thing- it implies no action. My issue isn’t with feeling things passively about deaths you’ve played no cause in. I agree, criticizing people for feeling the wrong thing is always fucked up and would be shaming. But actions? Actions are always fair game for criticism.
And again, I feel like we’re confusing what is ok on a personal level, which has “simple” factors, and things happening on a societal, which has complex factors.
Context including the type of death, how physically close you are to the actual death (videos of deaths online are so clinical that they don’t even count), and so on. But there’s a reason why I said (in-person) death as a verb, most people take time to die, and generally it’s not entirely a pleasure cruise for the person that it’s happening to, especially if it’s happening outside of proper medical(palliative) care. If someone, as a human, can override feeling empathy or mirroring when faced with all that, then yes, they are lost.
It’s normal to feel relief, or even elation, at death. I actually felt tremendous relief myself after witnessing them die. Not in a malicious way, or in a “death of an abuser” way. (My abuser is very much alive). Fact was, medicine couldn’t save them, they were in tremendous pain, they were suffocating, and now they were at peace, they were free. Emotions are kind of fucked up like that.
Now if I could just forget the sounds, and other minute details of their struggle, that would be nice.
Eh, that’s debatable depending on which group we are speaking about at which time, although it’s probably fair to say that racism was always different in Latin America than it was in the British colonies.
The point is, that it was there, an ember waiting to be flamed. Ergo, Hispanics would have to be all sent to the gallows, as well, to prevent the possibility of society eventually reaching this point in time.
I don’t think you can honestly throw around the Reign of Terror as some sort of absolute measuring stick of evil without considering the regimes both before and after: the Ancien Regime, which participated in colonization and used chattel slavery to develop its colonies; and Napoleon’s empire, which restored chattel slavery after the Directory had abolished it. Nor do I think you can be internally consistent in saying “Nazis at least deserve a trial” when millions of Nazis have already been killed without going to trial and we all seem to regard that as an overall good thing.
I don’t think the people saying it is overall good if Trump and his supporters get sick and/or die are the ones trapped in black-and-white thinking.
Anyone else catching the distinct whiff of “tankie” off Dali lately?
@Moogue
Well then, I declare myself proudly lost, because I’ve been in the same room as my abuser when they died, and I did not feel empathy; and neither did some of their other victims. And I know they felt that way because they verbally expressed it after the person was gone.
In contrast, that was nothing in comparison to having witnessed an accident in person, where a man was ejected through the windshield of his SUV and killed upon impact with the pavement. That did shake me up and make me feel absolutely sick, even though I had absolutely no connection whatsoever to that man.
I keep hoping I’m going to come up with a way where, as the Doctor said: “Everyone lives!”
I wonder how many people will die, while I’m trying to come up with a way that saves the nazis, too.
@An Impish Pepper : I don’t get your point. The French Revolution started on good sentiment, and got very fast into a super authoritarian, super into genocide mess, called the Terror. There have been worse time before (even if it’s not super clear how much worse the ancient regime was ; most french kings didn’t have absolute power apart from Louis XIV, and most didn’t do mass purge, except once again Louis XIV), and there were worse time after, but they aren’t relevant because nobody here is trying to get crowned king, emperor, or first consul.
Nazis, and to be honest most republicans nowaday, have to be treated like soldiers. If they die because they are in the way, so be it, but don’t execute them in masse for any reason. Once again, I don’t really see any inconsistency.
Also, and seriously : read up on terror. The general idea that the Napoleon Empire was worse is based on seriously shaky ground. The Terror was on par with the Khmer Rouge and the worse excess of stalinism, and in addition to the hundreds after hundred of public execution, there were also brutal ethnic oppression, in particular of supposedly-royalist regions. Sure, Napoleon regime sucked big time for a lot of people, and chattel slavery is very bad, but let it to humans to find way to be *way* worse than that.
@Surplus
I don’t think Dali is a tankie. I think she’s very direct, yes, but I don’t think she’s an authoritarian communist and/or Stalin apologist, which are both prerequisites for being a tankie.
I’m about a day late on this, but it turns out Trump’s physician who ok’d him for all the experimental treatments isn’t an MD but is an osteopathic doctor.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2020/10/03/who-is-dr-sean-conley-physician-president-trump/3608901001/
I don’t actually know what that means for Trump, but maybe some here would interested to know.
@ naglfar
A brief bit of googling suggests that they do exactly the same syllabus as regular MDs but then an additional 400-500 hours of osteopathic stuff.
That does set off my woo alarm a bit; but as someone who thinks just about every ailment can be cured with a long walk and a nice cup of tea I’m probably being a bit hypocritical there.
DOs are licensed to carry out all the same activities and specialties as regular MDs; and I personally think there is something to be said for taking a holistic and prophylactic approach.
So whilst his media skills may be a bit suspect I don’t think he’s in Theodor Morell territory.
It looks like trump is has been released from Walter Reed just now.
@ tovius
Apparently it was just a short drive-by in a car to wave at the adoring fans; but he’s back in WR now.
That’s what I’m getting anyway. Who knows in these weird times?
Well, that’s my whole point, that you can’t just go around calling hypotheticals applied to fascists a slippery slope to *insert left authoritarian purge here* without making a lot of simplifying assumptions. (This is kind of similar to what right-wingers like doing. Wow, it turns out it’s really easy to make someone sound like a right-winger with the right framing.)
I don’t know that I would necessarily judge Napoleon as worse than Robespierre, but also, SLAVERY. I think people often don’t realize the sheer gravity and impact of SLAVERY when they try to compare it to bad things that leftists have done. Nobody’s trying to say that any of these situations are the most ideal. I just don’t think it’s so easy to assume that “hang[ing] every last slaveholder higher than Haman after the Civil War” would not have resulted in less death and misery overall. We only know for sure how shitty the reality we live in is, not how much more or less shitty other hypotheticals could have been.
Eh, he’s a shit on every level and several levels we’d never heard of before, but … (and I know, there’s usually something bad after the but)
… arsehole’s a showman. A carny front. It might be the one thing he has that he can be honestly proud of – he does it well and plays his audience like a full on orchestra.
I’ll not take that from him.
@ Alan Robertshaw
That does sound like the kind of stupid think trump would do.
looks at this thread, sighs in disbelief
Yeah IDK why anyone would object to hanging every last slaveholder. These were people who bred and sold other human beings like animals, raped their captives as they saw fit, and all told carried out crimes against humanity on the same kind of level as the Holocaust. Millions died in the Atlantic passage alone, and the sheer generational trauma causes health problems for descendants of survivors. I don’t think most of us (white people) have a fucking clue about how bad it was TBH. We’re talking, like, the creepiest rapist/kidnapper shit you can imagine as a venerated institution. The system as a whole was plenty guilty (and still is, look up The New Jim Crow) but honestly? Any white adult of the slaveholding class who didn’t run screaming from that monstrosity absolutely gave up their right to live. I know y’all would say the same about Ariel Castro, don’t act like these people were any better just because their society coddled their evil.
Other white folks here: if murdering slaveholders makes you uncomfortable, but murdering Nazi bureaucrats doesn’t, I think you should take a good hard look at the feelings underlying that. Might be that you’re placing less value on the lives of Black people under slavery than those of (white) European Jews under Nazism, and that’s not okay at all.
And BTW re comparisons between the Holocaust and Southern slavery: don’t come at me. I am a Jew, thanks, and I will not stand for weaponization of the genocide against us to minimize genocides against others. Fuck that noise.
@Dalillama – I know we don’t always get along, but you have my solidarity on this. Seriously y’all, WTF.
@Alan Robertshaw
I have a theory that his condition is a lot worse than his people are letting on. He’s received steroids and various experimental treatments that have risk that probably wouldn’t be given to someone with a less serious case. His doctor also admitted to lying about his use of oxygen, so who knows what else they’re covering up.
@Cyborgette
It really annoys me when other Ashkenazic Jews try to draw this parallel. The same happens with regards to the Armenian Genocide being compared to the Holocaust, and that isn’t okay either.
@Naglfar
We don’t get to weaponize our genocide to minimize others, that’s fucking final, sorry not sorry.
@An Impish Pepper : so, since it apparently need to be developped : the Terror was created when a bunch of idealists thought killing every evildoer was better than due process. Then it degenerated because once you kill people for what they think without oversight, it degenerate quickly.
It happened several time. The Khmer rouge is another example, albeit I am much more comfortable about calling out my people than other countries.
If you don’t know your history, you’re bound to repeat it. No amount of “time was different at that time !” will change that.
So, once again, what is your point ? I guess it’s “I really, really want to hang people I think are evil”. Which is fine and dandy when you’re super sure that you know who is evil, and the history is full of people who thought they knew that and were horribly wrong.
And, to develop : we *know* that death penalty isn’t a good deterrent for anything. English people tried to inflict death penalty for shoplifting and it had pretty much no effect. Dictators all over the worlds try to dissuade political activism via death penalty, to pretty much no effect. To a less grim extend, France tried to bleed Germany dry to prevent it from being belligerant after WW1, and that was the stupidest thing ever done. While we can’t be sure, there’s a ton of indication it would pretty much that killing every slaver would have not have any good effect.
@Cyborgette : and yet, you never even have come close to justify killing any slavers.
Your whole paragraph just mean “I hunger for blood of evil people”, and sorry not sorry either but I won’t accept that shit. Your need of vengeance isn’t a valid reason.
We talk of human life, not of bargaining chips or abstract concepts. I can understand killing people to prevent them doing harm, or if there’s a solid reason to think it will improve society. Pretending that killing all slavers would improve society is actually pretty fucking hard, because most clue point to “it won’t”.
I’m a little hesitant to weigh in, but wouldn’t someone who’s anti-death penalty be against mass executions—even of the worst people imaginable? Wouldn’t they say Ariel Castro did not, in fact, lose his right to life—at least in the sense he shouldn’t be killed by the government? Or am I confusing two separate issues?
I’m asking honestly—not trying to be sarcastic or anything.
@Ohlmann
Oh I see we’ve come full circle to the “blood knights” thing again, how lovely.
Again, we’re talking about people who carried out mass rape, mass kidnapping, forced labor, mass physical torture and starvation, as an institution, that their wealth was build directly on top of. Such that almost every luxury they were used to in their lives was built on this abuse.
Killing people like that would absolutely fall under prevention, same as for Nazi war criminals. If they could live with themselves and justify that to themselves, if they’d already proved their willingness to carry out those atrocities, then they were absolutely too dangerous to keep alive, let alone allow to walk free with compensation (which is what happened with most of them).
Come on. This is not fucking hard.