Rayvin

The one time I saw Sargon debate someone, he struggled. I think that harmed his credibility with some of his following. Don't know why it wouldn't be the same for others. Trump could still be a huge saving grace for us on this. He's incompetent but he is what the nutjobs wanted. Assuming he doesn't trigger nuclear armageddon, my position will be that we lucked out with Trump. We could have had someone who courted these sort of sentiments, but who was actually effective. Now we'll get a massive left wing campaign to oust him in 4 years, that should settle the issue for another generation.

Agreed. But how do you do that while you've got the entire fucking left wing calling everyone you've just noted, a Nazi. Identity politics strikes again. You're either a left winger with good intentions, or you're a nazi. That's literally the level of dialogue going on now in these groups in the US. Victim complexes and everything else follow naturally. I don't really care what we do with the real nazis tbh, but we're certainly losing out to the Alt Right on this evidence. This is a problem. Was this guy, who rammed his car into protesters, a life long Nazi? Or was he a recently converted Alt Righter? We'll find out I guess, but his mum sounded fucking horrified which leads me to think that he's a recent convert... radicalised online. Hence hearts and minds.

I'm not sure he had that one actually. To be honest, I'm making a solid drive for 'most tedious poster' based on how this thread is going. Might even edge out Wolfy at this rate.

My position is about finding a solution aside from virtue signalling and grandstanding. It's a lost cause tbf, so I may as well just fall into line. What concerns me, given how much time I've spent listening to and reading about these 'far right' and 'far left' people in an online setting, is that we're now starting to see a physical manifestation of what is ultimately quite a significant movement online. There are a lot of people online for whom it would only take a small push to send them into Nazism generally. A lot. They might not be out on the streets, but they'll vote that way when it matters. There's a hearts and minds battle to be fought here that no one gives a flying fuck about. And given how frequently we've been blindsided politically by 'not giving a flying fuck about' such people, I am wary. Please note, I'm not talking about a hearts and minds battle for Nazis. I'm talking about it for the people they're starting to pull over. 'Unite the Right' is a chilling thing to call this march, against this backdrop. EDIT - as for Antifa generally, I've seen how their involvement in a multitude of violent acts since Trump took power has played out to the above noted crowds. It's making the nazis look like victims because we have 'free speech' and this 'must be defended irrespective of what they're saying'. Such acts collected together with SJW Professors calling for things like 'white genocide' lead to your unthinking right wingers suddenly become a lot more interested in what Richard Spencer has to say.

Fair enough. Let's hope they make an example of the killer and that it puts off anyone thinking of doing something similar.

In terms of kicking off violence, they certainly seem to be. Their ideology is less bad, but that's just a moral position - I don't disagree with it (since Antifa think they're acting for the good everyone at least) but it doesn't change that fact that the violence has been broadly similar on both sides up until this guy killed someone with his car. I do wish to point out, again, that I said this escalation would happen. The problem with people generally is breaking them out of echo chambers and trying to get them to deal with actual problems. I do condemn the Neo-Nazis, in the strongest possible terms. However there were 200 of them there. They were allied with other right wingers. Unite the Right was the name of the march. I mean to be honest, we're just playing into their hands at this point because the non-Nazi right wing contingent will, I would now think, be far more sympathetic to them. How long do we let them use identity politics against us, exactly, before we actually fucking start trying to sort it out? It's all well and good ostracising 200 people in a population of 330m, but about 100m of those 330 voted for Trump, and are being pulled over to the Nazis as much by the Alt Right as they are being pushed by Antifa and the far left. You can say that these people are weak and insecure - a basket of deplorables if you will - but shockingly, that doesn't actually help. The bigger this gets, the bigger a problem we have - and I see nothing from the left that will actually combat this problem. Nothing. It's all just posturing and grandstanding. I'm not sure why my position would surprise anyone tbh. My views on Identity Politics are very clear, and I see terrorism and political fuckheadedness as a consequence of it. All of which we're living through - just so that politicians don't have to affect meaningful change because they can pit everyone against each other. Both on the left and the right.

Really? You think Sargon is asking for dialogue EDIT - I will also point out that Sargon is fervently anti-Corbyn and pro-Brexit, so I can't have choked down all of his rhetoric I'm capable of my own thoughts believe it or not, and I've said consistently on here that identity politics (and SJWs are one side of the same coin with the Alt Right IMO) is a cancer of rational, compassionate thought. It's given us Trump, it's given us Brexit, it's given us a resurgent Neo-Nazi wing and an increasingly insecure white voter base for them to prey upon. I mean if you guys thing we can just silence this stuff into submission then fine, good for you. I think evidence clearly - fucking clearly - demonstrates that we can't, but more power to you.

I'm just going off what I've seen but if you have evidence to the contrary I'm all ears. Again though, I don't mean this specific protest. I have no idea what happened there. I mean Antifa settings things on fire, launching fireworks at people (not Nazis, just Trump supporters) pummelling people when they're down until they lose consciousness, marching through town centres with automatic weapons, and now apparently shooting people. If I was a Nazi, the above would be an open invitation for escalation. By allowing Antifa to do this stuff, we've given Trump the excuse he needs to say both sides are in the wrong. They are. Ideological views to one side (both ideologies are fucking mental) they're both behaving like each other as far as I've seen.

I dont really disagree with that, especially the terrorism label. The point I'm trying to make is that irrespective of what you might want to believe, when trump got in it was the left wing activists that kicked off the violence. I said at the time that this would just give the right an excuse to do the same, and it has done. Great, we punched one Nazi in the face and all felt artificially good about ourselves for a bit. But now it has escalated and people are dying. Moreover, we need to look at why this is happening. There are MORE people rallying to these causes. The racists were a fringe group and even if Trump has legitimized them, that shouldn't be enough for right thinking people to go on marches with them. The point is that the left has othered the fuck out of white working class men for years now, and it's coming home to roost. There's only so many times you can #killallwhitemen before the more insecure white men start believing the racists about white genocide. My ultimate point, as fucking ever, is that everyone who has engaged in identity politics on a racial level has brought this on us, and there needs to be a collective headshaking about it. I'll grant you that there are two options. We can just start killing the nazis. That's one option. It's uncivilized and we'd lose something in the process, not to mention lives of good people as these Nazis will be well armed, but it's an option. The other is to deconstruct why they're suddenly in the ascendancy - and while yes, they're taking it out on the streets because of Trump, they were on the rise before him too. Shouting at them while they're protesting will of course achieve fuck all. It'll just entrench views. Unless the point is just for us to feel better about ourselves and not actually resolve the problem.

Glad I skipped this, sounds like an absolute abortion of an afternoon. New signing injured, Shelvey sent off is it? And we lost.

Then you have my respect and acknowledgement that you are a man of principle.

Hypothetically, how many lives is that principle worth? Because that's what it's starting to come down to.

Yep, that's what I'm saying. I'm not going to virtue signal in the face of evidence to the contrary, sorry. Having said that I'm making a more general point. I don't know the specifics of who started what at Charlottesville - maybe the racists are to blame for that entirely based on that single episode. But Antifa and the counter revolutionaries have a series of incidents of setting buildings on fire, hospitalising opposing protesters, hell one of them was killed in a fire fight a few weeks ago after trying to murder a republican politician. Just makes it acceptable for the racists to do the same stuff IMO.

I don't think we have white nationalist rallies because of Antifa, no. I do think escalation in violence takes two sides, though. On the rest, I remain satisfied with my current assessment of how things are.

Right, because these things should be tackled by cilivians. Vigilante justice all the way. It's only going to escalate, its only going to lead to more violence. We need a level of emotional maturity, not gung ho clusterfuck inducing 'social justice'. Also, as an observation, those Nazis are probably saying things like "aye it's not like history offers any examples of what happens when you just sit back and let communists get too big for their boots". Antifa are not left wingers like you or I. 'Liberals get the bullet too', according to Antifa themselves.

So it turns out 3 people died at this fucking crazy rally. What the fuck man. Some fuckwit decides to ram a crowd of counter protesters with his car, killing one and injuring 20, and two police killed in a helicopter 'accident'. This is why you don't punch political opponents. The violence escalates and people fucking die. The next one might be a full on pitched battle.

It's shameful but both sides are doing it. I've seen videos of "the left" walking through cities with Kalashnikovs. The political dialogue has become fucking mental.

Arsenal actually are beyond parody. It's an overused phrase but fuck me...

Doesn't he answer that in the statement before? We have too many players.

Yep, hard to argue with that.

As a political entity I agree. I think it's all about the humanitarian cost and the risk of having major powers facing off against each other. Trump's plan seems to be to publically humiliate North Korea into doing something stupid or shutting up. If they give him an excuse, he wipes them out. China accepts this and we're all good. I think if you can do it without collateral damage (which you can't, but for the sake of the moral argument let's assume you can), there would be no reason not to take them out. They're a repressive rogue state that is persistently aggressive to its neighbours and a destabilising force on the global arena. It's as cut and dry as it comes IMO. If you can do it without collateral damage.

Actually you're right - it's not a blinder if scenario 2 comes to pass as far as the human stakes are concerned, I meant more in a strategic sense - in terms of victory, Trump wins either way. If they North Korea settles down and doesn't fire, Trump has made a statement that has had to be choked down by one of the most unstable nations in the world. A statement that Putin and the Chinese will note. Whatever you might think about the guy, if North Korea back down here, it's probably a more significant diplomatic win over them than anything Obama managed. It's high risk though because obviously, if we end up in a war, that's not good.

I think most people are fine - I don't share this notion that we need to be systematically horrifying to different groups based on unchangeable physical attributes. It used to be that this was considered a liberal thing to think, but these days it seems not so much...

The Guardian strikes back! All men are lazy and don't work as hard as women. We sit at our desks playing poker and then ask for more money. I don't know how they worked it out, but the wimmenz are finally on to us, apparently. In my case they're right, tbf https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/aug/11/salma-hayek-feminism-inequality-men-women Compare this with the article they were losing their shit over from that software engineer...

See, you could have cut that post down by 2/3rds and conveyed exactly the same meaning. You're a lost cause, man.