23 ms·

Extremism is relative. The opinions of an average American in 2008 would be labelled "far-right" today (see: opposition to gay marriage, transgenderism, suppor

Extremism is relative. The opinions of an average American in 2008 would be labelled "far-right" today (see: opposition to gay marriage, transgenderism, support for colorblindness, I could go on). Sooner or later, people will see that it's a fool's errand keeping up with this runaway train of an overton window.

betterunix2 6y ago
The average American in 2008 was not walking into a synagogue and murdering people. Let's not pretend that far-right extremism is something other than what it actually is.
- readflaggedcomm 6y ago
  But they are now, correct? which Fuentes condoned, I presume.
  - betterunix2 6y ago
    The average American is not a terrorist. Extremists are a small (but very dangerous) minority of the country.
- leesalminen 6y ago
  The average American in 2008 wasn't setting fire to courthouses. Let's not pretend that far-left extremism is something other than what it actually is.
  - guscost 6y ago
    Oh and also, nearly killing a US representative with a semiautomatic rifle.
    - twiclo 6y ago
      Every rifle is semiautomatic
      - betterunix2 6y ago
        Not true, here is one of many counterexamples: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remington_Model_700 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remington_Model_700
      - seneca 6y ago
        > Every rifle is semiautomatic This is just incorrect. Bolt action and muzzleloaded rifles are both extremely common and not semiautomatic. That being said, "semiautomatic" is usually a useless scare-word thrown in by people who have no clue what they're talking about.
        leesalminen 6y ago
        My mother believed for the majority of her adult life that “semi-automatic” meant “fully automatic”, as in “squeeze once, all the bullets come out”. It’s incredible that people with little to no knowledge of the mechanics of guns want to regulate exactly that.
        seneca 6y ago
        Indeed, and that's exactly why it is used that way. It's an intentional weasle-word used by gun control advocates to scare observers.
        grimjack00 6y ago
        The current scare-term is "fully semi-automatic".
  - betterunix2 6y ago
    That is classic, soviet-style whataboutism. Yes, there are some left-wing extremists who have committed terrorist acts in recent years, but no, it is not the same as right-wing extremism. There are no left-wing militias running drills and planning to kidnap governors. Right-wing extremists exist in greater numbers, are more organized, and have been responsible for more violence in recent years than left-wing extremists.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - 2lwxxtj 6y ago
      How exactly are you quantifying the amount of violence for which each side is responsible?
- s9w 6y ago
  The average American is not walking into a synagogue and murdering people in 2021. The most "far-right extremists" view you could possibly imagine is literally "please let me live and allow me to have children". That's literally the 14 words.
- freeflight 6y ago
  FYI: In 2009 a 88-year-old white supremacist started murdering people in the Holocaust Memorial Museum [0] That period was also heavily dominated by Islamophobia in the US with firebomb attacks on Islamic Centers and random brown people getting assaulted and called "terrorists". Heck, a mere 4 days after 9/11 happened a Sikh was shot for being mistaken as an Arab Muslim due to his turban [1]. Which actually makes no sense but hate rarely does. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Holocaust_Memorial_Museum_shooting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Holocaust_Memori... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Balbir_Singh_Sodhi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Balbir_Singh_Sodhi
  - betterunix2 6y ago
    Again, the average American was not out doing these things. I am not denying that there was a problem then, I am only saying that it is not representative of the average.
    - freeflight 6y ago
      How do you even define the "average American" and in what context? Are these people average Americans? [0] No offense, but this sounds a lot like the argument how Trump supporters are allegedly just a "loud minority", a claim that's factually disproved not just by results from the public votes of two presidential elections, but the fact that he won one of them and only barely lost the other one. Where does the "average American" fall in that context? Is there even an "average" when the only two valid political choices have become distilled down to a superficial "We are not the other party" forcing everybody to pick between two allegedly completely opposing sides? [0] https://youtu.be/KHJlZyFxp88 https://youtu.be/KHJlZyFxp88
emodendroket 6y ago
Yeah sure, but is QAnon stuff ever going to be mainstream? Probably not.
fatsdomino001 6y ago
Support for colour-blindness is far-right? Who knew MLK was such a far right extremist eh?
- milkrocks 6y ago
  Don't you know being color-blind isn't ok, because you're not validating POC's struggles.
- bitdizzy 6y ago
  MLK was not by any means color blind. The only way you could come to that conclusion is if your entire understanding of his politics were a single sound bite.
  - yostrovs 6y ago
    He did want a color blind society. He explicitly talked about it.
  - rscoots 6y ago
    He advocated for a color blind future. Obviously he did not bury his head in the sand to the non-color blind injustices he saw in his country.
    - TheBobinator 6y ago
      MLK recognized that people are, and are always going to, judge others as they are and like people who are similar to them. This is human nature, and it's important for our survival. People are always going to be different, but they can however, make a decision to treat others with basic dignity and respect, to set boundaries around dignity and respect, and not use those diffrences as a reason to persecute or take advantage of them. It was that humility and basic desency that he advocated for. It's easy to look at someone and pass judgement. It's expensive to get to know someone, especially if they are very different than you are. Learning to judge someone by the content of their character is a difficult thing to ask of someone. Imagine having to get to know Ed Gein. At the very least if you listened to the mans life, you'd be questioning if there really was a god or if nature really had any sanity, given the developmental trauma he experienced. It's way easier to see a guy wearing his mother's skin on his face and go "yep, crazy". It's harder to look beneath that and go "How the hell did society fail you?". That is the reason why his message resonated so well. Not because he was color blind, that is naieve. It is because he pointed out, and very rightly, that ignoring the black community or any community of people over racism creates a lost opportunity.
TheBobinator 6y ago
Sensationalism generates extremist beliefs as a consequence of its operation. The mainstream media\media monopoly has two deeply engrained habits; one, the belief in distributing free news, two, in sensationalizing every story to maximize ad revenue. Technology reduces cost, ergo, when costs reductions meet these two habitations, the net result is training the audience to accept sensationalisation itself as a brand and if they do so, you tend to polarize an audience in unpredictable ways as a consequence of operating your media empire. Think about it this way. The reason the MSM puts out news is to sell advertising, and to the advertisers, we are products the MSM is selling to them. What do you do with products once you are done with them? You throw them in the garbage. Once we're used up we become trashed. It's the belief that sensationalism itself is trustworthy that creates this trashing, and I would encourage anyone to learn to detect sensationalism as the psychological baseline for stimulation has risen to such an extreme these days. In this instance, the moment we refer to any kind of warfare operation as "whack a mole" is when you begin rolling your eyes as the author is not treating people with respect. Good, accurate information is expensive. If you need proof of that, talk to a historian.
- 2lwxxtj 6y ago
  >The reason the MSM puts out news is to sell advertising I'm pretty skeptical about that. The major media outlets have significant influence over the political ideas that circulate through the electorate. In a democracy, that means having a lot of influence over which candidates are viable in elections, which, given how powerful governments are, is worth quite a lot more than ad revenue. Why do you think Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post? Do you think he was after the ad revenue?
  - Dirlewanger 6y ago
    >Why do you think Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post? Do you think he was after the ad revenue? So he can control the narrative about Amazon via one of the largest US newspapers and allow it to make more money. It's always about money. Power is just a proxy to money. Or maybe it's the other way around...
  - TheBobinator 6y ago

betterunix2 6y ago

The average American in 2008 was not walking into a synagogue and murdering people. Let's not pretend that far-right extremism is something other than what it actually is.

readflaggedcomm 6y ago
But they are now, correct? which Fuentes condoned, I presume.
- betterunix2 6y ago
  The average American is not a terrorist. Extremists are a small (but very dangerous) minority of the country.
leesalminen 6y ago
The average American in 2008 wasn't setting fire to courthouses. Let's not pretend that far-left extremism is something other than what it actually is.
- guscost 6y ago
  Oh and also, nearly killing a US representative with a semiautomatic rifle.
  - twiclo 6y ago
    Every rifle is semiautomatic
    - betterunix2 6y ago
      Not true, here is one of many counterexamples: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remington_Model_700 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remington_Model_700
    - seneca 6y ago
      > Every rifle is semiautomatic This is just incorrect. Bolt action and muzzleloaded rifles are both extremely common and not semiautomatic. That being said, "semiautomatic" is usually a useless scare-word thrown in by people who have no clue what they're talking about.
      - leesalminen 6y ago
        My mother believed for the majority of her adult life that “semi-automatic” meant “fully automatic”, as in “squeeze once, all the bullets come out”. It’s incredible that people with little to no knowledge of the mechanics of guns want to regulate exactly that.
        seneca 6y ago
        Indeed, and that's exactly why it is used that way. It's an intentional weasle-word used by gun control advocates to scare observers.
      - grimjack00 6y ago
        The current scare-term is "fully semi-automatic".
- betterunix2 6y ago
  That is classic, soviet-style whataboutism. Yes, there are some left-wing extremists who have committed terrorist acts in recent years, but no, it is not the same as right-wing extremism. There are no left-wing militias running drills and planning to kidnap governors. Right-wing extremists exist in greater numbers, are more organized, and have been responsible for more violence in recent years than left-wing extremists.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - 2lwxxtj 6y ago
    How exactly are you quantifying the amount of violence for which each side is responsible?
s9w 6y ago
The average American is not walking into a synagogue and murdering people in 2021. The most "far-right extremists" view you could possibly imagine is literally "please let me live and allow me to have children". That's literally the 14 words.
freeflight 6y ago
FYI: In 2009 a 88-year-old white supremacist started murdering people in the Holocaust Memorial Museum [0] That period was also heavily dominated by Islamophobia in the US with firebomb attacks on Islamic Centers and random brown people getting assaulted and called "terrorists". Heck, a mere 4 days after 9/11 happened a Sikh was shot for being mistaken as an Arab Muslim due to his turban [1]. Which actually makes no sense but hate rarely does. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Holocaust_Memorial_Museum_shooting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Holocaust_Memori... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Balbir_Singh_Sodhi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Balbir_Singh_Sodhi
- betterunix2 6y ago
  Again, the average American was not out doing these things. I am not denying that there was a problem then, I am only saying that it is not representative of the average.
  - freeflight 6y ago
    How do you even define the "average American" and in what context? Are these people average Americans? [0] No offense, but this sounds a lot like the argument how Trump supporters are allegedly just a "loud minority", a claim that's factually disproved not just by results from the public votes of two presidential elections, but the fact that he won one of them and only barely lost the other one. Where does the "average American" fall in that context? Is there even an "average" when the only two valid political choices have become distilled down to a superficial "We are not the other party" forcing everybody to pick between two allegedly completely opposing sides? [0] https://youtu.be/KHJlZyFxp88 https://youtu.be/KHJlZyFxp88

emodendroket 6y ago

Yeah sure, but is QAnon stuff ever going to be mainstream? Probably not.

fatsdomino001 6y ago

Support for colour-blindness is far-right? Who knew MLK was such a far right extremist eh?

milkrocks 6y ago
Don't you know being color-blind isn't ok, because you're not validating POC's struggles.
bitdizzy 6y ago
MLK was not by any means color blind. The only way you could come to that conclusion is if your entire understanding of his politics were a single sound bite.
- yostrovs 6y ago
  He did want a color blind society. He explicitly talked about it.
- rscoots 6y ago
  He advocated for a color blind future. Obviously he did not bury his head in the sand to the non-color blind injustices he saw in his country.
  - TheBobinator 6y ago
    MLK recognized that people are, and are always going to, judge others as they are and like people who are similar to them. This is human nature, and it's important for our survival. People are always going to be different, but they can however, make a decision to treat others with basic dignity and respect, to set boundaries around dignity and respect, and not use those diffrences as a reason to persecute or take advantage of them. It was that humility and basic desency that he advocated for. It's easy to look at someone and pass judgement. It's expensive to get to know someone, especially if they are very different than you are. Learning to judge someone by the content of their character is a difficult thing to ask of someone. Imagine having to get to know Ed Gein. At the very least if you listened to the mans life, you'd be questioning if there really was a god or if nature really had any sanity, given the developmental trauma he experienced. It's way easier to see a guy wearing his mother's skin on his face and go "yep, crazy". It's harder to look beneath that and go "How the hell did society fail you?". That is the reason why his message resonated so well. Not because he was color blind, that is naieve. It is because he pointed out, and very rightly, that ignoring the black community or any community of people over racism creates a lost opportunity.

TheBobinator 6y ago

Sensationalism generates extremist beliefs as a consequence of its operation. The mainstream media\media monopoly has two deeply engrained habits; one, the belief in distributing free news, two, in sensationalizing every story to maximize ad revenue. Technology reduces cost, ergo, when costs reductions meet these two habitations, the net result is training the audience to accept sensationalisation itself as a brand and if they do so, you tend to polarize an audience in unpredictable ways as a consequence of operating your media empire. Think about it this way. The reason the MSM puts out news is to sell advertising, and to the advertisers, we are products the MSM is selling to them. What do you do with products once you are done with them? You throw them in the garbage. Once we're used up we become trashed. It's the belief that sensationalism itself is trustworthy that creates this trashing, and I would encourage anyone to learn to detect sensationalism as the psychological baseline for stimulation has risen to such an extreme these days. In this instance, the moment we refer to any kind of warfare operation as "whack a mole" is when you begin rolling your eyes as the author is not treating people with respect. Good, accurate information is expensive. If you need proof of that, talk to a historian.

2lwxxtj 6y ago
>The reason the MSM puts out news is to sell advertising I'm pretty skeptical about that. The major media outlets have significant influence over the political ideas that circulate through the electorate. In a democracy, that means having a lot of influence over which candidates are viable in elections, which, given how powerful governments are, is worth quite a lot more than ad revenue. Why do you think Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post? Do you think he was after the ad revenue?
- Dirlewanger 6y ago
  >Why do you think Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post? Do you think he was after the ad revenue? So he can control the narrative about Amazon via one of the largest US newspapers and allow it to make more money. It's always about money. Power is just a proxy to money. Or maybe it's the other way around...
- TheBobinator 6y ago