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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@Cyborgette
I know. I was agreeing with you. I was trying to say we shouldn’t be comparing/minimizing genocides, sorry if that was unclear.
@Naglfar
Ah gotcha, sorry. I’m… pretty angry and disappointed right now, and maybe not thinking that clearly.
The good news about Trump’s bizarre little jaunt is that it’s confirmed once and for all how little he cares about his Secret Service detail, which is useful as it suggests he’s not going to be able to hope for much help from them if he tries to stay in power illegally, just reinforcing the sense one gets from this:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-seemed-to-defy-the-laws-of-science-and-disease-then-the-coronavirus-caught-up-with-him/2020/10/02/5b4c5232-04bf-11eb-897d-3a6201d6643f_story.html
@naglfar re DO vs MD.
In the UK I think they are more woo ish and less medical than in the US. In the US they are doctors and that’s about it. They went to a different medical school.
Anecdotally, the sports medicine doctor I saw is a DO. She’s also a professor at NYU’s medical school. An old friend is also a DO. She’s a respected pulmonologist.
@Naglfar:
It means he’s swallowed his own Kool-Ade and is using the same kind of quack doctors he was using to promulgate his ridiculous ideas for coronavirus treatment before.
Which means he has quite likely hoist himself on his own petard.
Which he already had done by getting the virus in the first place after doing so much to aid its spread among others.
A petard within a petard … it’s petardception!
@Threp:
I’m still waiting for the tape to surface of him saying “You gotta admit, I played this stinking country like a harp from Hell!”
I wonder if that would finally get his base to turn against him. With the reason being specifically that he called it “this stinking country”.
@rabid rabbit:
Yep. And now he’s in an exceptionally vulnerable state, utterly dependent on the kinds of experts and know-it-all types he and his Republican pals have been vilifying and defunding.
And people he’s abused for decades, some of them trusted people with access from within his inner circle (Ivanka for one), know it …
Nested petard #3?
@Surplus
Seeing as they didn’t have a problem when his inaugural address (which was 4 years ago but feels like it was decades ago) talked about “American carnage,” I feel like he could easily explain it away by saying he meant stinking with the smell of “antifas.”
@Cyborgette
Fucking thank you for this. I’ve been kicked out of certain facebook tag groups because I refused to stop calling Trump’s concentration camps what they are, or calling what this administration is doing genocide, and a small but vocal minority of Jewish people took offense to that. The Holocaust was one of the worst instances of genocide in human history, but it wasn’t the only one and it wasn’t the biggest even (Native American genocide numbers are allegedly around 100 million).
As far as I’m concerned, the only argument I see as to why you cannot hang so many people is logistics, not morality (no real effective way of prosecuting and hanging all these people, and still being able to guarantee a Due Process to prevent the wrongly accused from suffering an injustice). The real issue behind these positions is legitimacy. I believe you can define violence in two broad categories: institutionalized versus subversive.
Institutionalized violence is violence used as a means to affirm, maintain or uphold social hierarchies; whereas subversive violence is violence used to either abolish or subvert said hierarchies.
If you accept that premise, you quickly come to the conclusion that everyone supports violence, even if they claim they don’t.The reason why people get away with claiming that they don’t is because institutionalized violence is so normalized that it might as well be invisible. Whether it involves detaining a criminal or enforcing property rights, institutionalized violence is seen as legitimate, and so it slips beneath our notice.
And mind you, institutionalized violence is not always legal, but it gets the benefit of being perceived as legal because it is upholding the power structure that benefits the majority ethnic group. Thus, even as pervasive and horrid as police abuses are, they will be deemed as legitimate, so long as they are used to disenfranchise minorities.
In contrast, subversive violence is not seen as such, even when it involves the single most basic forms of self defense or survival. We are literally talking about a group of people who not only talk about enslaving and/or exterminating groups due to their ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender, religion, etc; but also have been dutifully carrying out the actions to materialize such plans, aided and abetted by government institutions, and yet fighting a war with them or giving them the death penalty so that they won’t endanger others is considered to be just as barbaric.
People think inaction has no intrinsic moral value, but when your inaction is enabling Nazis to kill unimpeded, then that couldn’t be further from the truth. When a group of people is committed to exterminating others, and when they have decided that they will fight to the death to continue carrying out such plans, then allowing them to live is having indirect responsibility for the graveyards they fill.
The only reason people don’t grasp it is because Nazism, as abhorrent as it is, is merely the most extreme form of institutionalized violence. And, whether in the conscious or subconcious of the vast majority of people, it still has a slight bigger veneer of legitimacy than subversive violence.
@Impish Pepper
Do we all regard this as a good thing, or as an neutral thing, or another thing? I’m just wondering how we *all* seem to feel.
So millions of Nazis have been killed, and yet here we are, with fascism and racism gaining strength every day. So I guess killing millions of Nazis alone isn’t enough, after all.
Which was my point. Killing will never be enough, since the problem is insidious and societal. And we’d have to kill everyone to achieve it.
Which brings us to the problem of defining who is a Nazi, and how many Nazi beliefs a person has to hold to be considered a Nazi, and most importantly who gets to define who gets to live, and who gets to die.
@Lukas Xavier
And I wonder how many people will die while people fantasize about Nazis dying, instead of actually doing something productive with their time?
@Diego
Sorry if I seem to be coming from a sanctimonious place. You seem like a really good person. Thank you for being empathetic before.
My biggest concern is simply not becoming like the abuser. Because this is how most of them think. They think they’re 100% right, they think that they’re the true victim, they focus their blame on others, they 100% convince themselves that their victim of blame is hurting them, and therefore deserves whatever comes. They lack empathy, and have all the reasons why the shouldn’t have it.
And I don’t want any part of that.
Maybe think more about how to free all the people from american concentration camps where they are poisoned with insect killer and have hysterectomy forced on them, than if we should kill nazis. Nazis are a direct threat. Us government is fascist and it is a direct threat. I agree, it is only about logistics. Revolution must be violent when the opressor is violent.
Maybe this is surprising for you, but people can think about and care about and do more than one thing at a time. The people you accuse of fantasy are the ones in the street protesting and fighting to stop the deaths. It is not a fantastic to kill nazis, it is NECESSARY.
@Impish Pepper
No one, not even the absolute dregs of humanity, should be executed without due process. The French Terror and many other events throughout history shows us what happens when we do not. Even nazi war criminals were tried before they were hanged. (And your line about millions of nazis being killed without trail is highly misleading. Those were casualties of war, that’s not the same thing)
@Moogue
For a while that was my biggest concern, however there is a lot of nuance and context to that. Ultimate what an abuser seeks is control over the lives of others, whether this is achieved through the exercise of physical, emotional or financial leverage, or through manipulation and playing the victim.
So the litmus test to decide on whether or not you are behaving like an abuser, and whether or not you are justified in hurting someone, it all comes down to your motives. Are you trying to gain control over that person, or are you trying to stop them from hurting others? If you hurt them and they did stop, would you then be able to walk away once you’ve achieved said goal, or would your mind wander back to that person in a desperate bid to see how else you could one up them?
@Valentin
I’m not going to further discuss your point about broad killing being necessary, because here it’s moot. Fantasies can be necessary or unnecessary, but they are still imaginary. And imaginary things save exactly zero lives.
Their time would be better spent focusing on doing something positive and concrete, like continuing with doing their thing raising awareness, fighting, protesting, etc.
Sorta, but not really.
@Diego
But there’s the rub, you can’t seperate the morality of something from the logistics of it. Even brushing aside the morality of killing people en mass, Trump supporters aren’t NPCs in a video game that can be killed without dramatic and unpredictable consequences. These are people who have lives and families. For example, they may be the sole caretakers of sick relatives. They may have kids. They may be giving support to their grown child as they try to escape an abusive relationship. Or so on.
At the very least, they may be assholes that will go out in public without masks and cough everywhere if they were to get COVID, as people here wished.
But that comes down to my earlier concern, I don’t think that human beings as a whole can ever be 100% sure of their motives.
Abusers do seem to be a good example of a group that seems to be particularly bad at this. I don’t think that I’ve heard of many abusers that don’t think that they are wonderful people, and that their motives are as pure as driven snow. Many don’t seem to have very much awareness of their entitlement, and their need to dominate and control, even if they do have a little bit of clarity here and there.
I honestly can’t believe that we’re debating whether it’s OK to mass-kill people who have been accused of being Nazis but haven’t been proven to be anything.
Is this really WHTM? What happened to the comments policy?
That elides the trial that has to take place to prove that any given person is a Nazi and that that person has committed crimes deserving of death. No random person gets to pick and choose who lives and who dies based on gut feeling or whatever it is that we’re talking about here to identify the Nazis.
Yes, Nazis will kill their current target du jour without a trial or any kind of due process. That doesn’t meant that we, as non-Nazis, are OK doing the same thing in return. We don’t let Nazis set the floor for our behavior. We are better than that. We are civilized people who don’t just run around pointing fingers and saying, ‘LOOK A NAZI’ and then murdering that person outright.
Again. What Nazis do is not OK, and it doesn’t become OK if non-Nazis take up the same tactics. Nazis are not the exemplar that we should emulate.
I’m popping in to second PoM’s “WTH is going on?!”
I do not have the mental capacity to deal with whatever the heck is happening here right now, but yikes.
What a mess.
1. Executing Nazis? Yes…after a trial. See, Nuremberg
2. Killing all slave owners without trial? How about trying them for treason and hanging the guilty ones?
The rest? Confiscate land and assets. That’s what SHOULD have happened. That it didn’t still baffles me to this day.
3. Some very white people from privileged backgrounds have an interesting habit of mocking and gaslighted people targeted IRL by racism… while at the same time going online and MAKING A BIG SHOW OF ANGRY WOKENESS.
I say “interesting”, but it’s more fake ass hypocrisy, with shades of appropriation. This mentality can drive spewing extremist veiws like “kill them all” with no nuance whatsoever.
(Are they including children who would inherit? Do we want to know?)
It wasn’t that long ago that “I hope you step on a lego” was the most violent thing we wished on people.
Somebody already mentioned nazis as casualty of war this is what I mean when I say necessary. If we are at the stage where nazis stand trial for their crimes, that is a long time in the future and I hope actually that we do not have to make another Nuremberg trials or similar. What is happening right now is violent fascist oppression, police murdering peaceful protestors and Christian organisations raising thousands of dollars for murderer Kyle Rittenhouse. Violent resistance is necessary against violent oppression. There are concentration camps where people have medical procedures to sterelise them and children are separated and die. They have found mass graves in the desert. Trucks filled with children. This situation is escalating very fast, that is what I mean when I say necessary. Violent resistance is necessary. I do not mean that Nazis should not stand trial if possible I just mean that it is not always possible. I believe that if we are at a stage where we are making trials for hundreds or thousands of people accused of nazis, then we already failed in resistance. The protests of this year in america are actually a very good example to countries like britian, which are also sliding to fascism. This energy should continue, people should realise the state and the police are not on their side and they cannot trust the old system of voting and government. Not all people can or should be in the violent resistance, but I dont judge the people who are, their actions are the actions of their ancestors in resistances of history in Europe against the nazis.
The protests this year in America have been peaceful. It’s been provocateurs and plainclothes cops and amoral opportunists who have been responsible for the window breaking and looting. It’s been the cops who brought in tanks and tear gas. Protests have been peaceful.
When you say “this energy should continue” and use the American protests as an example, that’s fine, but when you expand out to “and we should all turn violent today” you’re losing the plot. You literally cannot fight the state on its own terms. You can’t go up against the National Guard and win. Even if every protester had an AR-15 and twenty clips of ammo and was willing to go down in a hail of bullets, you wouldn’t win.
You talk about killing Nazis like you’re the one in control and you get to choose who is a Nazi and who isn’t. That isn’t the reality, on multiple levels. At best, at best, you’re talking about going terrorist. Terrorist groups don’t win. They don’t get what they want. It’s a counterproductive tactic, not to mention the horrific moral problems. Peaceful demonstrations and civil disobedience are ultimately more successful, so if what you want is to change the system, going terrorist on the grounds that: Nazis is not going to get you what you want.
The successful history of Europe against the Nazis was one of state organized violence. Armies won the day, not terror cells. There is zero chance that ordinary people are going to form an effective army that can successfully overthrow the actual, trained, state-backed army. That’s so silly I don’t even know what to do with it.
When we go out to get the Nazis, can we deal with the TERFs at the same time? ?
Weighing in on the DO vs MD – as others have said, they’re doctors here in the States. Most DO physicians I’ve known have been in sports medicine or osteo, but that is probably more due to the region I’m in than anything else. I’d see a DO if need be, though my current family doctor is an MD.
Honestly, I don’t care so much about DO vs MD as I do about the specialty. I want to be hearing from an infectious diseases specialist, not a GI or radiologist or whoever else the Trump administration wants to parade out in a white coat.
PoM
By energy I mean I like that americans realise now that they cant trust their government to make change for them or support their interest. They realise that they must take power for themselves. Other nations people dont realise this yet.
What I am talking about is revolution, not terrorism. In Euromaidan, when the government started murdering people from the rooftops, people fought back against them. It is possible to use these tactics for change. Yes the revolution of dignity was taken over by basratds like Poroshenko, but the power of the people to change things was very clear to see. This kind of revolution can be successful. And civilians armed themselves and went to the boarder to defend against invasion, that was ordinary people. I am seeing the same thing in the protester in america, it is the same energy, the same realisation. At least it is similar, becuase I know that the USA and UA are different in a lot of ways.
If the government or nazis are violent to you, violent resistance is justified, for self defense, to protect people who cant fight or protest with you.
In today’s world, a distinction without a difference. There is just no possible way for non-state actors to violently oppose first-world state actors without resorting to terror tactics. When the police are militarized and the military has weapons that can kill thousands in one hit, you can’t stand up to them, violently, without resorting to terror. You can certainly stand up to them non-violently and win, but not with violence. The police and military are too well armed and technology has run away from the ordinary citizen.
You’re making my argument for me.
Self-defense against someone literally at my door with a gun trying to kill me is one thing. It’s a completely different matter if I am the one leaving the premises with a gun because I want to murder Nazis, or people who I think are Nazis anyway, we haven’t bothered with a trial or any other kind of fact-finding so we’re just making assumptions that anyone with a MAGA hat deserves a shotgun to the face.
And that’s what you’re talking about before, after all: mass-murder of anyone we can plausibly accuse of being a Nazi, because it’s JUSTIFIED. Except that it is not actually justified. And it’s not like we are in the position of power here able to mete out life and death at a whim. So for both moral and practical reasons, the mass-killing-of-Nazis that wayyyy too many people on this board right now are up for, should not and will not happen. It’s not only ridiculous to talk about, like YOU’RE on the death squad going door-to-door and not the people on the other side from you, but it is not a very good look for anyone here. We’re supposed to be better than the Nazis, y’all. I will say it again: Nazis are not the standard to which we aspire.
@Cindy
We’re talking about putting people up against the wall here, so I don’t think your rosy-cheeked happy face is the appropriate response to this discussion. I don’t like trans-exclusives very much but I don’t think literal extrajudicial murder is the appropriate thing to wish on them, and I’m pretty put off by the fact that you put a smiley face after that wish.
@POM
I think this is basically where the disconnect is here. “We” in reality are far from civilized. Even if we aren’t actively committing violence directly, we all benefit from the continuing violence of neocolonialism, even in the most progressive countries with social democracy and everything. And I don’t think it’s fair to say that this one specific type of violence is special because it can’t easily be ignored.
In truth, I really don’t like talking about going to war or people deserving bad things to happen to them. That said, I’m also not going to shy away from calling what are effectively acts of war for what they are. The U.S.’s response to the COVID pandemic alone has killed over a dozen times more people in a shorter span of time than were killed by the French Terror. Early on, conservatives were talking about sacrificing what was projected to be literally millions of people, like over half the deaths caused by the Soviet famines, to “get over it” so “the economy” could move on. I, like I’m sure everybody else here, know people who could potentially end up jailed and/or killed in a hypothetical large-scale movement to overthrow fascism and the systems that allow it to take hold. I would rather not talk about people being jailed or killed in the hopes that more people will be prevented from being jailed or killed. It’s just that we probably don’t live in that reality.
That’s not the conclusion I get when I read history. I keep waiting for the detailed plan informed by history that will get rid of fascism at the root, never to take power again, and doesn’t end up with people being dragged into fights to the death. That’s not the same thing as a Nazi or manospherian wishing for the deaths of people they don’t like.
Only if you dont actually know what was wrong about Poroshenko, or what the revolution of dignity achieved.
I reckon that depends on who you’re including in the “we.” When I say that “we” are better than Nazis, I’m obviously not including Nazis in that? And I’m not including Nazi-adjacents and sympathizers in that either. I thought that was apparent but maybe not and I should be clearer.
The solution to this is not to go out and murder everyone we think is a Nazi.
If your answer to this (and it was undeniably outrageous, and remains so) is to start up some death squads, then we have nothing in common.
Okay. I can point to at least two movements without any research where peaceful protests and civil disobedience led to improvement: the Civil Rights movement, and the Indian independence movement. Can you name any successful violent uprisings against first-world state actors in modern times? I’m not talking about the American Revolutionary War, which was fought with muskets on both sides; I’m talking about a modern-equipped military power being successfully overthrown by people with civilian weaponry.