EngineerSean posted:

Majorian please answer with intellectual honesty and using standard D&D rules why islamofascism isn't real but white nationalism is. I mean if you're going to shitpost in here all day you might as well entertain me a little bit. I've got a full day of work to do but I guess I'll try to check back in four hours or so.

Helsing posted:

The word accomplishes nothing that isn't better described under the term "Islamist".

quote:

If all you want to do is point out that radical Islamists like the Taliban are as creepy and evil as facists then fine, most normal people won't get super pedantic and argue with you because both Islamists and fascists are bad.

Jacobin posted:

So this old guy punched a black guy walking out of the NC trump rally and security jumped onto the black guy and left the punching dude completely alone

How normal is this stuff yet? like, this is just new normal?

caberham posted:

I just clicked out the white nationalist link and it was pretty crazy Then I went to storm front and read a few posts there. Wow, all you have to do is post pictures of random white families and everyone is all happy

White Nationalists are so hosed up.


Do you have a video?

Jacobin posted:

https://www.facebook.com/OccupyDemocrats/videos/1084955338264186/?permPage=1

Wish there was a less baiting link but yeah still

Jacobin posted:

So this old guy punched a black guy walking out of the NC trump rally and security jumped onto the black guy and left the punching dude completely alone

How normal is this stuff yet? like, this is just new normal?

InsanityIsCrazy posted:

Homicidal leftists! YUM

EngineerSean posted:

Majorian please answer with intellectual honesty and using standard D&D rules why islamofascism isn't real but white nationalism is. I mean if you're going to shitpost in here all day you might as well entertain me a little bit. I've got a full day of work to do but I guess I'll try to check back in four hours or so.

EngineerSean posted:

Pre-emptively posting a to show that I don't believe Majorian's answer will be intellectually honest and in fact will sound as dumb as my claim that white nationalism doesn't exist because #notallwhites

DAD LOST MY IPOD posted:

"Fascist" has gotten so much definitional creep over the last half century that it's pretty much used to refer to any autocratic system of government. Trump has fascist qualities, not because he's a big loud buffoon but because he wants to institute economic protectionism and intervene heavily in the economy, is seizing on populist nationalism, and is using the language of national decline and victimhood to motivate revanchists. Like, I doubt he's read Maurras and he certainly doesn't seem to want a dictatorship, but there are elements of fascism there. Still, he's not "a fascist."

Jacobin posted:

So this old guy punched a black guy walking out of the NC trump rally and security jumped onto the black guy and left the punching dude completely alone

How normal is this stuff yet? like, this is just new normal?

stoutfish posted:

if trump wins hate groups will be energized and we will live in a pseudo state sponsored violence state so yes.

quote:

Major U.S. hedge fund managers are on pace this year to more than double the amount they gave in the 2012 election campaign, with independent fundraising groups backing Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton and Republican rival Ted Cruz receiving the most so far.

About $47 million has been lavished on presidential candidates and lawmakers and the political action committees that support them by two dozen of the industry's top managers in the first 13 months of this election season, according to a Reuters review of Federal Election Commission filings. (For a list of the top givers see tmsnrt.rs/1nlPYZv)

Most of the hedge fund support going to Cruz and Clinton has come from a handful of people out of the two dozen managers studied.

Robert Mercer, co-chief executive of Renaissance Technologies, for example, has given $11 million to Keep the Promise I, a Super PAC that supports Cruz. Mercer is an enigmatic computer programmer who is a powerful financial force in conservative politics.

Cruz wants to abolish the tax-collecting Internal Revenue Service, slash income and payroll taxes and impose a new "business transfer tax." Cruz's wife, Heidi Cruz, is a Goldman Sachs executive in Houston.

Clinton’s main benefactor is billionaire George Soros, a long-time patron of Democratic and humanitarian causes and chairman of Soros Fund Management. Soros alone is responsible for $7.3 million of the $11.7 million that has gone to Super PACs and other committees supporting Clinton.

The hedge fund managers' spokespersons either declined to comment or did not respond to queries from Reuters.

But Whitney Tilson, a hedge fund manager who runs Kase Capital, said one reason fellow managers are spending more this election is Donald Trump, the front-runner for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination.

"There are some pretty heated emotions about Donald Trump," said Tilson, who plans to support the Democratic Party nominee.

Trump, who says he is self-funding his campaign, supports closing a loophole that lets some hedge fund managers pay less than the usual income tax rate on performance fees they get known as "carried interest." Clinton supports this, too.

The Managed Funds Association, an industry lobbying group, declined to comment on policy aims under the next president.

BIG MONEY, LITTLE IMPACT

There are other worries, too, about a Trump presidency.After months of campaigning and debates, Trump's economic and financial policy positions are still sketchy or unknown.

A Trump presidency could bring "tremendous uncertainty and instability," said Gregory Wawro, a political science professor at Columbia University.

Wawro speculated that Trump’s popularity with blue-collar and middle-class voters could prompt the Republican Party to reassess an approach to taxes and economic issues that has favored top earners and major corporations in recent years.

The surge of hedge fund donations has had little effect on the Republican race so far.

Cruz is running well behind Trump while U.S. Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, who is seen by establishment Republicans as their best hope to stop Trump winning the nomination, is a distant third.

Conservative Solutions, a Super PAC that backs Rubio, received $2.5 million from Paul Singer, the long-time Republican fundraiser who runs Elliott Management, and another $2.6 million in contributions from hedge fund manager Kenneth Griffin of Citadel Investment Group.

Two other Republican candidates with major hedge fund backing, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie and former Florida Governor Jeb Bush, have dropped out of the race.

Christie's Super PAC, America Leads, received about $3 million from Steve Cohen of Point72 Asset Management, while Right to Rise, a PAC that supports Bush, drew $450,000 in donations from managers including Citadel's Griffin, David Tepper of Appaloosa Management and Larry Robbins of Glenview Capital Management.

In the Democratic race, U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders has eschewed donations from Wall Street. He has racked up a string of wins in early state nominating contests with attacks on Wall Street and calls for a more equitable distribution of the country's wealth.

Overall, hedge fund contributions to 2016 presidential candidates and lawmakers and the PACs supporting them favored Republicans over Democrats by about 3 to 2.

For a list of the top hedge fund donors in 2016: tmsnrt.rs/1nlPYZv

(Additional reporting by Svea Herbst-Bayliss; Editing by Kevin Drawbaugh and Ross Colvin)

DAD LOST MY IPOD posted:

"Fascist" has gotten so much definitional creep over the last half century that it's pretty much used to refer to any autocratic system of government. Trump has fascist qualities, not because he's a big loud buffoon but because he wants to institute economic protectionism and intervene heavily in the economy, is seizing on populist nationalism, and is using the language of national decline and victimhood to motivate revanchists. Like, I doubt he's read Maurras and he certainly doesn't seem to want a dictatorship, but there are elements of fascism there. Still, he's not "a fascist."

The governments often referred to as "Islamofascist" often use many of the same tools by appealing to disaffected youth who feel humiliated at the hands of the West. They also obviously share fascists' love of direct action/propaganda of the deed and believe in the legitimacy of political violence. However the governments known as "Islamofascist" also have some pretty distinct differences from fascism, such as their substitution of sharia as the organizing principle and telos of the state rather than nationalism or the will of a strongman.

BigBoss posted:

If a country's national identity is defined largely by it's Moslem-ness, then at a certain point the semantics games people play become meaningless. Islamofacism is a very real threat to freedom and peace in the world.

BigBoss posted:

If a country's national identity is defined largely by it's Moslem-ness, then at a certain point the semantics games people play become meaningless. Islamofacism is a very real threat to freedom and peace in the world.

DAD LOST MY IPOD posted:

they're not, though.

Immortan posted:

I too believe Islamism is fictional.

Jacobin posted:

So this old guy punched a black guy walking out of the NC trump rally and security jumped onto the black guy and left the punching dude completely alone

How normal is this stuff yet? like, this is just new normal?

DAD LOST MY IPOD posted:

It's just throwing vaguely related terms together for scare purposes.

Immortan posted:

Leftists know all about this.

Helsing posted:

Yup

George Orwell posted:

It will be seen that, as used, the word ‘Fascism’ is almost entirely meaningless. In conversation, of course, it is used even more wildly than in print. I have heard it applied to farmers, shopkeepers, Social Credit, corporal punishment, fox-hunting, bull-fighting, the 1922 Committee, the 1941 Committee, Kipling, Gandhi, Chiang Kai-Shek, homosexuality, Priestley's broadcasts, Youth Hostels, astrology, women, dogs and I do not know what else.

Yet underneath all this mess there does lie a kind of buried meaning. To begin with, it is clear that there are very great differences, some of them easy to point out and not easy to explain away, between the régimes called Fascist and those called democratic. Secondly, if ‘Fascist’ means ‘in sympathy with Hitler’, some of the accusations I have listed above are obviously very much more justified than others. Thirdly, even the people who recklessly fling the word ‘Fascist’ in every direction attach at any rate an emotional significance to it. By ‘Fascism’ they mean, roughly speaking, something cruel, unscrupulous, arrogant, obscurantist, anti-liberal and anti-working-class. Except for the relatively small number of Fascist sympathizers, almost any English person would accept ‘bully’ as a synonym for ‘Fascist’. That is about as near to a definition as this much-abused word has come.

But Fascism is also a political and economic system. Why, then, cannot we have a clear and generally accepted definition of it? Alas! we shall not get one — not yet, anyway. To say why would take too long, but basically it is because it is impossible to define Fascism satisfactorily without making admissions which neither the Fascists themselves, nor the Conservatives, nor Socialists of any colour, are willing to make. All one can do for the moment is to use the word with a certain amount of circumspection and not, as is usually done, degrade it to the level of a swearword.

stoutfish posted:

we have a better word than facist, authoritarian

DAD LOST MY IPOD posted:

they're not, though. ISIS doesn't really have a "national identity" as distinct from its stated telos of bringing about a prophesied global caliphate. The "nation" is a tool towards that end, not an end in itself. Saying that Islamism is just Fascism Classic with "our country" crossed out and "Islam" written in in crayon is stupid. It's something virulent and toxic that diverges pretty wildly with fascism, in that it's at least ostensibly universalist and doesn't believe in use of the "state," such as it is, to mediate class conflict (a pretty central concept to fascism). They're totalitarian but that's about it, calling them fascist is like calling Obama a Muslim atheist communist socialist nazi. It's just throwing vaguely related terms together for scare purposes.

Laphroaig posted:

http://orwell.ru/library/articles/As_I_Please/english/efasc

Al! posted:

John McGraw, the 78-year-old Donald Trump supporter caught attacking a protester, defended his actions in an interview posted by Inside Edition on Thursday.

“He deserved it,” McGraw said of the protester, Rakeem Jones. “The next time we see him, we might have to kill him. We don’t know who he is. He might be with a terrorist organization.”

Majorian posted:

Well, but I don't think the Bush Administration and its supporters used the term "fascist" simply because it can be a byword for "bully." They used it because they were trying to paint al Qaeda as an existential threat to the U.S. that, without our immediate action, could achieve world domination, genocide, etc. In other words, they wanted to liken Islamist terrorist groups to the Axis Powers, turning the GWOT into a black-and-white, with-us-or-against-us model.

Laphroaig posted:

Thought Experiment:
If Donald Trump is assassinated, will your first thought be "Oh the horror, the type of extremist language lead to this act of political violence, it is against everything America stands for!" or will you be gleefully glad he is dead? Because you know it is the later, and you are just massive concern-trolling hypocrites.

I personally won't care,

Immortan posted:

Oh look, another self-proclaimed "progressive" wishing death on political opponents.

Laphroaig posted:

You are a giant loving idiot who is unable to either read or comprehend any level of nuance beyond TRUMP *click*, aren't you?

Immortan posted:

Laphroaig posted:

What I hate about Trump and the Right is their hypocrisy, how they constantly attack women and use gendered insults vs. Hillary etc. He is going to lose the women's vote.

Now, how about Nancy "blowjobs" Reagan dying right? may she rest in piss. RIP in piss Mrs Gobblecocks!

DAD LOST MY IPOD posted:

i'd say "typical liberal reading" of the tea party is just FEAR OF A BLACK PRESIDENT, which i've already said is incorrect. give me some credit, i'm not majorian. i know the tea party, i know its antecedents, and i actually work on a daily basis with several legislators who expressly identify as "tea party" and got in on that platform, so i'm not just some random hack with an opinion.

that said, the tea party arose in the 90s and gained steam as a ron-paul affiliated movement in the 2000s, but it's not a coincidence that it exploded in 2009. the tea party as it exists today is a graft cutting transplanted onto the root stock established by "outsider" candidates in the 90s and ginned up by a throughline that governance by democratic presidents was illegitimate. the idea that "tea" stands for "taxed enough already" is a transparent attempt to subsume an angry populist movement into the greater grover norquist-style quest to shrink government. when it suddenly started showing up everywhere on fox news, that's when you could tell the GOP had found something that could drive its base to the polls-- they just didn't figure on what they'd have to deliver to do so, which has birthed the abomination we see now. years of using wedge issues to get people to vote against their economic self-interest had deluded the GOP into believing that their base really, truly believed in the grover norquist poo poo that was all they really cared about.

i admit obama has been a bad president. i don't think he's been as bad as, say, bush II or reagan or carter, but he's been bad. i think that the degree to which people's lives have deteriorated during his tenure is largely due to structural factors that predated him and his true failure was his unwillingness to confront these factors and attempt to reverse them (things like ballooning college costs, an eviscerated social safety net, the death of the manufacturing economy with nothing to replace it, a global military presence far outside what's needed for defense etc). add to that his unwillingness to directly admit the degree to which these things are problems outside of the vaguest bromides and hand-waving and you have a picture of a party that appears to think that everything is fine in america, when the ladder to social mobility has been yanked up into the treehouse.

the reason i zero in on illegitimacy as a cause is because of the rise of talk radio as a major venue for conservative thought in the 80s and 90s and the creation of the parasitic "liberals-are-what's-wrong-with-america" book industry. these have created a mode of political discourse in right-wing circles where the ideological opponents of the right are motivated not by a genuinely different vision for how to achieve shared prosperity, but an actual hatred for america and its people and a desire to intentionally cause it to fail. this sentiment obviously stretches back much further but it came into the mainstream much more in the 90s; reagan painted carter as a well-meaning but weak doofus (which he was) and got in that way. compare that to all of the insane clintonite conspiracy theories of the 90s and the half-assed impeachment. the clintons were not just well-meaning but misguided dupes, they were criminal masterminds who had to be stopped. this stepped up with obama, partially due to race i'm sure but mostly just from the ratcheting effect. because the GOP never cared about delivering actual economic prosperity, in order to keep their voters motivated after years of lovely stagnation they had to make the other side even worse.

to sum up an increasingly long post, i think the tea party had its genesis in anger at a failed establishment, was nursed by demagogues intentionally stoking that anger for material gain, was appropriated wholesale as a way to drive a shrinking base to the polls by people who did not care to understand its origins, and has mutated into a vicious stew of populist anger, nativism, and xenophobia

DAD LOST MY IPOD posted:

the tea party formed immediately after Obama got in. it's not entirely racist but racism is a prominent component. really the biggest factor is a rabid portion of the republican base constantly stirred up by demagogues and taught to see democratic governance of any color as inherently illegitimate

quote:

i think that the degree to which people's lives have deteriorated during his tenure is largely due to structural factors that predated him and his true failure was his unwillingness to confront these factors and attempt to reverse them (things like ballooning college costs, an eviscerated social safety net, the death of the manufacturing economy with nothing to replace it,

quote:

the reason i zero in on illegitimacy as a cause is because of the rise of talk radio as a major venue for conservative thought in the 80s and 90s and the creation of the parasitic "liberals-are-what's-wrong-with-america" book industry. these have created a mode of political discourse in right-wing circles where the ideological opponents of the right are motivated not by a genuinely different vision for how to achieve shared prosperity, but an actual hatred for america and its people and a desire to intentionally cause it to fail. this sentiment obviously stretches back much further but it came into the mainstream much more in the 90s; reagan painted carter as a well-meaning but weak doofus (which he was) and got in that way.