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Viewing US political culture from outside makes this even more entertaining. It appears to many people in Europe to be mostly two center-right/right groups call
by andybak 9y ago
Viewing US political culture from outside makes this even more entertaining. It appears to many people in Europe to be mostly two center-right/right groups calling each other nasty names.
Of course the standard left/right dichotomy is a historical accident and contingent on many local factors. And yet we continue to reify it as if it were some Platonic truth.
- leereeves 9y agoAmerica's extreme leftists (AKA SJWs) aren't center-right. They want socialism, they want to silence everyone who disagrees with them, they are willing to use any tactic (including censorship and even violence) to get what they want, and yet, in a startling lack of self-awareness, they consider the center-right half of the country "Nazis". This attempted act of censorship by an ex-Twitter employee is a fairly tame example of their tactics, though notable for affecting the President.
- oblio 9y agoAll of America's extreme leftists would probably fit in a 200sqm hall, with room to spare. Why worry about a statistical anomaly? Just because they have Tumblr accounts? :) (For the downvoters, prove me wrong, how many votes did a far left party get in US elections in the past 20 years? Does the US even have a far left party? :) )
- leereeves 9y agoIt's much more than a statistical anomaly. It's a rather large group of people, some quite famous and powerful. Lea DeLaria: "Or pick up a baseball bat and take out every f-cking republican and independent I see" Madonna: "I’ve thought an awful lot about blowing up the White House." Mickey Rourke: "I’ll meet [Trump] in a hotel room any motherf-cking day of the week and give him a Louisville slugger." Bow Wow: "@realDonaldTrump shut your punk a-- up talking s--t about my uncle @SnoopDogg before we pimp your wife and make her work for us." Eminem: "And fuck Ann Coulter with a Klan poster. With a lamp post, door handle, shutter. A damn bolt cutter, a sandal, a can opener, a candle, rubber. Piano, a flannel, sucker, some hand soap, butter. A banjo and manhole cover" Then there's Kathy Griffin's famous photo with a severed "Trump" head, Snoop Dog's video shooting Trump ... And that's just Hollywood. There's no room here to discuss all the incidents of actual violence, or protesters denying people the right to hear speakers at public universities, etc, etc.
- guywaffle 9y agoEminem isn’t a good example. He hates politicians and Hollywood “elites”, and Trump is both
- breakingcups 9y agoNo please. There's enough room to discuss incidents of actual violence. I'd like to see them, backed up by sources. It would be interesting to compare statistics. 7 celebrities talking shit does not equate a massive, unified, violent left-wing movement in the US with conspiracy-like powers and tactics to censor the right. I think the right is pretty well represented in the US.
- leereeves 9y ago7 celebrities "talking shit" (encouraging violence) and being applauded for it. And there are more than 7, but I thought 7 would sufficiently illustrate the point. Measure the support for the movement by the number of people who celebrated those remarks. A lot of people.
- Turing_Machine 9y agoSteve Scalise.
- gspetr 9y agoHow about this one? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRS_targeting_controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRS_targeting_controversy EDIT: Twitter literally suppressed the leaks of DNC and Podesta emails hashtags and admitted to it: http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-11-01/twitter-admits-it-buried-leaked-clinton-email-tweets-last-two-months-campaign http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-11-01/twitter-admits-it-b... https://www.lgraham.senate.gov/public/_cache/files/4766f54d-d433-4055-9f3d-c94f97eeb1c0/testimony-of-sean-edgett-acting-general-counsel-twitter.pdf https://www.lgraham.senate.gov/public/_cache/files/4766f54d-... Is that conspiracy enough for you? How about this: On October 31, 2016, The New York Times reported: "CNN has severed ties with the Democratic strategist Donna Brazile, after hacked e-mails from WikiLeaks showed that she shared questions for CNN-sponsored candidate events in advance with friends on Hillary Clinton's campaign." And that's just off the top of my head. EDIT 2: Can you explain how all these very similar headlines were possible without there being a conspiracy? And yes, those are real, I saw it when it happened. https://pics.onsizzle.com/headlines-think-the-media-got-the-memo-in-acceptance-speech-3136408.png https://pics.onsizzle.com/headlines-think-the-media-got-the-...
- arkh 9y agoAll of America's neonazis would probably fit in a 200sqm hall, with room to spare. Why worry about a statistical anomaly? Just because they have Voat accounts? :)
- oblio 9y agoAs an outsider, I don't see the far left having an influence on American politics. The far right, on the other hand, does seem to have one. Or am I mistaken?
- leereeves 9y agoI think the far left's primary influence in 2016 was in pulling Hillary to the left during the primary, which caused lasting damage to her campaign (as she said) and helped lead to Trump's election.
- arkh 9y agoThey sure have some influence on medias. Also, a lot of events thought as right-leaning get disturbed: MRA conventions, speech from "not the right people" in gaming conventions etc. which have security prices jacked-up because of bomb threats, fire alarm pulled to interrupt it. Also you get the antifa violence which everyone seem to have forgotten.
- gspetr 9y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_Party_presidential_primaries,_2016 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_Party_presidential_... A literal socialist reaching 43.1% of votes not influential enough?
- dragonwriter 9y agoAmerican democratic socialists like Sanders aren't far left, and are really more social democrats than “literal socialists”. (Sure, DSA is part of international socialist fora, but so is the UK Labour Party, and no one sane is calling Labour “far left” either.) Someone, therefore, from the moderate left getting a sizable minority of votes within the left-most party of a two-party system where the most votes in that party went to a center-right neoliberal is not evidence of the far left having much (or any) influence, especially when it's the best anyone not from the center-right has done in that party for at least a quarter century.
- akvadrako 9y agoThere are a lot more than the far right, as evidenced by the recent protests around the country by BLM and Antifa. And the recent trend of fighting free speech on college campuses doesn't seem to be limited to a few institutions.
- gspetr 9y agoCan you fit 200 000 subs of https://www.reddit.com/r/SandersForPresident/ https://www.reddit.com/r/SandersForPresident/ in a 200sqm hall? Can you fit all his voters there? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernie_sanders https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernie_sanders His wiki mentions "socialist" 35 times. Is that not leftist enough for you? There's circumstantial evidence that he was even a Stalinist at one point: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=sanders+stalinist+kibbutz https://duckduckgo.com/?q=sanders+stalinist+kibbutz
- andybak 9y agoYou are aware that outside of the US "socialist" isn't quite as pejorative as you seem to think it is? The mainstream center-left parties in many European countries have the word "socialist" or a variant thereof in their names.
- gspetr 9y agoYes, but we can't have a meaningful discussion if we disregard Occam's razor (If the man calls himself a socialist and has done so for decades, then that's what he is) and go into the "No true Scotsman" territory instead.
- lsmarigo 9y agoThe narrative you describe in your post is largely fabricated to rally, enrage and indoctrinate individuals. It's disheartening how deeply the "us vs. them" mindset dominates our politics. You used the term "they" or "them" seven times in your short post. Seven. Who are they? A few trolls on twitter does not equal a meaningful movement. Categorizing half of the American populace based on the views/actions of fringe nutjobs is absurd and not conducive to meaningful discourse. Having a slang term for "them" (SJW) implies that it's a such a common issue that people face daily, when in reality it's a strawman argument largely fabricated by organizations interested in keeping you squabbling vs examining their policies. You go on to say "attempted act of censorship by an ex-Twitter employee is a fairly tame example of their tactics" "Their Tactics" as if this incident was part of a master plan orchestrated by a shadowy far-left extremist org. This is pizza-gate levels of delusion.
- Turing_Machine 9y ago"Categorizing half of the American populace based on the views/actions of fringe nutjobs is absurd" 1) Lena Dunham has called for the extinction of white men. 2) The President of the United States then sent his teen daughter to do an internship with this "fringe nutjob". Sorry, this crazy, hateful bigot is not "fringe", she's squarely in the mainstream of the modern Democratic Party. They need to fix that if they're planning to ever win a national election again.
- andybak 9y ago> Lena Dunham has called for the extinction of white men Had to Google that. Is there more than the 30 second animation? Because as a straight white male, I didn't feel particularly victimised by it.
- Turing_Machine 9y agoIt doesn't matter whether you, personally, feel "victimised" by it. Most participants in Internet lynch mobs don't actually feel personally threatened by whatever it is they're screaming about. If she had done that to any other identifiable group, she would have been hounded from the public sphere. Instead, she gets rewarded with some personal time with the President's daughter. Do you think Trump, or Bush II, or Bush I, or Reagan, or Nixon... would have sent their child off to intern with someone who called for the extinction of, say, black people? Nope. And no, that's not the bottom of her lunacy, not by many, many levels.