4 ms·
I agree with most of what the article has to say, but I feel like it's dancing around the fundamental issue. Like: > These apparently disparate events all feat
by SpicyLemonZest 4mo ago
I agree with most of what the article has to say, but I feel like it's dancing around the fundamental issue. Like:
> These apparently disparate events all feature one obvious commonality: race. In each case, the riots were sparked by an act of violence in which the victim(s) were white and the attackers were not. The context: these events were focused largely in ethnically diverse working-class neighbourhoods, communities where resources are stretched.
I know the author is smart and informed enough to see the parallels between this and a number of high-profile incidents in the past decade. There's an increasingly widespread idea that this is simply how a wise person should see interracial crime, not as a series of tragic individual incidents but as attacks on the whole of Group X by the whole of Group Y. The idea has achieved enough prominence that it's starting to overcome the hard-fought taboo on white identitarianism, and now for the first time in decades we have to deal with it as an open political force.
I emphasize that white identitarianism is a bad ideology, incompatible with many of the nice things we enjoy about the modern world, and we have to defeat rather than accommodate it. But defeating it requires taking a serious look at the factors that allow it to grow.
- archagon 4mo agoIt could well be the case that the growth of white identitarianism is almost entirely driven by white supremacist media moguls, who are unfathomably rich and shape the zeitgeist to a large degree. See also: antisemitism in Nazi Germany. I’m sure some Jewish people committed serious crimes against non-Jewish Germans. But that was incidental, not causal, to the vile propaganda that eventually led to the Holocaust.
- SpicyLemonZest 4mo agoIt could be, but I really don't think so. The splintering of Reform UK and then Restore Britain strongly suggests to me that there's a mass movement. If it were a plot by media moguls, I would have expected them to carefully manage discontent to keep people within the Tories.
- roryirvine 4mo agoBut Musk isn't a traditional media mogul, and understands very little of the nuance in UK politics. I don't think he has any particular strategy in mind other than recklessly stirring up trouble in whatever way he can.
- archagon 4mo agoTo echo roryirvine, I don't think there's any plot. I do think that these moguls are genuinely, virulently racist and jump at the chance to propagate their toxic politics as widely as possible.