(Thread IKs:
OwlFancier)
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OwlFancier posted:I would note that "old labour socialism" also means virtulently transphobic. Got some real "what if transgenderism is a plot to corrupt the yooths" types there. I think he's more conspiracy theorist than politician.
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Feb 29, 2024 18:02
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| # ? Apr 28, 2024 16:39 |
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Last time he came up in discussion, I'm pretty sure he was established as being firmly in the 'I will happily throw [x] marginalised group under the bus and side with their opressors if it will advance my agenda' kind of old-school socialism.
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Feb 29, 2024 18:03
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Yeah not to say that politician and conspiracy theorist are necessarily opposites but I don't think he primarily understands the world in terms of real things that happen and the systems that cause things to happen, I think like most people who have that extremely scattershot politics that doesn't really seem like it could work as a cohesive whole, their primary form of interpreting the world is through conspiratorial thinking with the politics being downstream from that. And that also dovetails well with him being a grifter who is desperate for attention and people to throw money at him because he will happily say things that are outlandish whether that's something that resembles an actual critique of real things, or utter nonsense that you'd expect to hear from alex jones.
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Feb 29, 2024 18:04
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Failed Imagineer posted:Still thinking about that Big Naan 
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Feb 29, 2024 18:05
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It's a shame because Galloway does have (or at least has had in the past) some good points, and been one of the few people allowed on Question Time to spout them to a national audience. But otoh he's been a dogshit grifting weirdo for ages now. Still funny if he wins, though.
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Feb 29, 2024 18:10
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galloway is far left and therefore both side are the same you see  ... oh this jar? i like to capture my farts so i can huff them on the go at my convenience
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Feb 29, 2024 18:12
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The first time I ever saw Galloway in action was in I think 2005 on a tv in the Sinai - the only English language channel I could get on the tv. He was called before some senate committee in the US and I was very impressed at the way he handled it. Obviously since then I've found out a lot more about him. The business in the cat suit was so embarrassing.
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Feb 29, 2024 18:21
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Yeah he opposed the Iraq War, but then again so did David Icke. If you just assume that everything everyone is doing is the result of a shadowy plot you'll end up getting things right now and again.
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Feb 29, 2024 18:27
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I know that the horseshoe theory is 100% bullshit, so for those people who claimed to have been on the far left and who are now very firmly on the far right, were they just pretending beforehand, or are they simply grifting fuckwits with no morals or standards?
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Feb 29, 2024 18:32
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I enjoy david icke's current claim that the supposed anti-new-world-order types are all sucking up to elon musk despite him literally being the thing they all spent the last 20 years screaming about being an international billionaire who controls the media and wants to put computer chips in your brain and run the world with AI, because they're all dependent on him for a platform so he's actually good. Which is 100% correct and it seems to annoy the hell out of alex jones in particular, doesn't make david icke right about anything else but even a clock controlled by lizard men is right twice a day.
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Feb 29, 2024 18:32
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OwlFancier posted:Which is 100% correct and it seems to annoy the hell out of alex jones in particular, doesn't make david icke right about anything else but even a clock controlled by lizard men is right twice a day. Must be the dumbest arguments on earth "the chemicals are turning the frogs gay" "no the space frogs are turning the children trans" "you're a statist shill!" "you're a secret iguana!"
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Feb 29, 2024 18:37
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fuctifino posted:I know that the horseshoe theory is 100% bullshit, so for those people who claimed to have been on the far left and who are now very firmly on the far right, were they just pretending beforehand, or are they simply grifting fuckwits with no morals or standards? ehhhhhhh I kinda think there's something to it, if you remember that politics goes along multiple axes. We've seen plenty of people who slip over the line from "America bad because of all the bad things it does" to "America bad, axiomatically, therefore opponents of America are good" and wind up saying Putin and Kim are heroes of the working class. On that one axis, it might apply.
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Feb 29, 2024 18:38
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Turns out the dad of one of Brianna Ghey's murderers is a nonce
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Feb 29, 2024 18:39
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fuctifino posted:I know that the horseshoe theory is 100% bullshit, so for those people who claimed to have been on the far left and who are now very firmly on the far right, were they just pretending beforehand, or are they simply grifting fuckwits with no morals or standards? I think some people, probably most people to some degree but some people moreso than others, aren't really sitting down and thinking 100% about everything they believe. Beliefs are shaped by environment and if they're in a left wing environment they will adopt those ideas because it's easier if you have other people around you reinforcing them. The ideas themselves probably do make sense to you to some extent and you might even believe them, but the important bit is the emotional and practical fulfilment you get from them. If you're employed as a politician for and associating with with lefties then you are more likely to espouse left wing beliefs, but if that ceases to be the case and your social circle changes to a bunch of weird grifters (and politics is already more than a bit grifty) then it becomes easier to start taking on their ideas. And your brain can do the work of synthesising those beliefs together with your old ones to make them all work somehow. Leftism can simply be another bit of useful cred to appeal to some people, it makes you seem "anti authority" which is useful to attract a new conspiracy driven audience. Lacking a firm anchor, some constant thing that keeps you in the same experiential space, it becomes easier for things which to you and I are inescapable facets of our lives and inform our politics, to just kind of... drift away. Galloway doesn't have a real job where he's constantly at the mercy of his boss or alternatively the DWP, I don't imagine he struggles with money generally, he's used to an element of celebrity in his life. His environment is one that makes it easy to believe daft shite because he isn't going to die from believing it Guavanaut posted:The funniest thing I ever found out from Jon Ronson's deep dives into the conspiracy world is that Icke and Jones have hated one another for years, since the late 90s at least. Apparently they are on speaking terms cos icke was on alex's show the other week. I think they have one of those on again off again relationships where each is occasionally either an agent of the new world order or a bold rebel speaking truth to power, depending on what serves the narrative today.
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Feb 29, 2024 18:41
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OwlFancier posted:Apparently they are on speaking terms cos icke was on alex's show the other week. I think they have one of those on again off again relationships where each is occasionally either an agent of the new world order or a bold rebel speaking truth to power, depending on what serves the narrative today. He was on Alex's show specifically to accuse him of distracting people from the danger of the Jews by focusing on dumb nonsense that isn't important, so it's a bit less chummy than you're summarising there. And Icke was right, somewhat, to accuse Jones et al of being grifters. But it's definitely a case of the poo poo calling the turd disgusting.
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Feb 29, 2024 18:46
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Tesseraction posted:He was on Alex's show specifically to accuse him of distracting people from the danger of the Jews by focusing on dumb nonsense that isn't important, so it's a bit less chummy than you're summarising there. Yeah but alex invited him on and repeatedly kept trying to say how friendly they are. That may just be because I think they were more chummy a few years ago during the height of the pandemic where they bonded over vaccine conspiracies. A marriage of convenience.
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Feb 29, 2024 18:49
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Guavanaut posted:The funniest thing I ever found out from Jon Ronson's deep dives into the conspiracy world is that Icke and Jones have hated one another for years, since the late 90s at least. I tried listening to that but for some reason he pronounces antifa as "an-TEE-fuh" and I cannot take him seriously
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Feb 29, 2024 18:51
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OwlFancier posted:Yeah but alex invited him on and repeatedly kept trying to say how friendly they are. That may just be because I think they were more chummy a few years ago during the height of the pandemic where they bonded over vaccine conspiracies. A marriage of convenience. Oh well that I think is him desperately trying to build some bridges as his house gets repossessed.
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Feb 29, 2024 18:51
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political spectra are descriptive, not prescriptive. people, groups and ideologies are arranged into an order that is convenient for the observer. there's no underlying quantity of "left-ness" that you can alter to cycle along the political parties
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Feb 29, 2024 18:55
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Julio Cruz posted:I tried listening to that but for some reason he pronounces antifa as "an-TEE-fuh" and I cannot take him seriously OwlFancier posted:Yeah but alex invited him on and repeatedly kept trying to say how friendly they are. That may just be because I think they were more chummy a few years ago during the height of the pandemic where they bonded over vaccine conspiracies. A marriage of convenience. Ronson posted:‘DAVID ICKE,’ yelled Alex, suddenly, ‘IS A TURD IN A PUNCHBOWL!’ ‘What do you mean?’ ‘He talks about the global elite, the Bilderberg Group, these power structures which are all real, all true. Meat and potatoes! Something you can bite into! And then at the end of this he says, “By the way, they’re all blood-drinking lizards.” ’ ‘Really?’ ‘Al Gore needs blood to drink. So does Prince Philip. He’s discrediting the whole thing. You’ve got a nice fruit punch. Icke takes a great big dump right in the middle of it, and now nobody’s going to drink out of that punchbowl. That’s his job, and he’s doing his job well.’ And being all friendly like that may just imply that he sees himself more in need of a liferaft than a stepladder.
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Feb 29, 2024 18:58
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Julio Cruz posted:I tried listening to that but for some reason he pronounces antifa as "an-TEE-fuh" and I cannot take him seriously This is a very American pronunciation. I guess because they are fairly divorced from any actual anti-fash organising in living memory, and the right wingers want to occlude the etymology of the term in case it raises too many uncomfortable questions for them
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Feb 29, 2024 19:00
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Antifa Sutherland.
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Feb 29, 2024 19:03
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It's also pronounced that way in most languages other than English, so it's not too weird to me. In the US context it might partly be due to influence of Spanish. Private Speech fucked around with this message at 19:10 on Feb 29, 2024 |
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Feb 29, 2024 19:07
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All said though I would still find it very funny if Galloway wins Rochdale, because it's not like Labour and Tories aren't institutionally transphobic trash heaps with a bunch of other terrible opinions. e: lmao Danczuk is standing for Reform
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Feb 29, 2024 19:12
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Anti-fa sounds weird and awkward and at that point you might as well just say the full anti-fascist as it at least rolls off the tongue.
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Feb 29, 2024 19:30
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Failed Imagineer posted:Still thinking about that Big Naan im still thinking about that big naan
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Feb 29, 2024 19:33
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Guavanaut posted:All said though I would still find it very funny if Galloway wins Rochdale, because it's not like Labour and Tories aren't institutionally transphobic trash heaps with a bunch of other terrible opinions. "I'm voting for the guy who was bombed out of the Labour Party in disgrace. No, not that one. Not that one either. Yeah, him." It's a very weird contest. The cat in the hat winning his second by-election would in some ways be the least surprising thing about it.
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Feb 29, 2024 19:33
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I like the community note feature on twitter https://twitter.com/johnmcdonnellMP/status/1763120358838722937
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Feb 29, 2024 19:34
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Tesseraction posted:They tracked down the oompa loompa lass for a non Daily Heil interview https://www.vulture.com/article/glasgow-sad-oompa-loompa-interview.html it is entirely unsurprising that she and the actors haven't been paid it's been easy to sit back and laugh at the whole thing but what a horrid experience for the workers involved. i hope they can all get some actual work after this somehow. i'm glad she's at least in relatively good spirits about it.
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Feb 29, 2024 19:34
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fuctifino posted:I know that the horseshoe theory is 100% bullshit, so for those people who claimed to have been on the far left and who are now very firmly on the far right, were they just pretending beforehand, or are they simply grifting fuckwits with no morals or standards? What you have to remember I think is that people's views on things don't have to be coherent. I'd argue that being "on the left" is in the broadest sense about caring somewhat about people around you, even those you are not related to, and probably even those you have never met. Hating Jews or any other race, religion or marginalised group is not consistent with that main philosophical pillar, but nevertheless people can believe a lot of things that other leftists believe - socialism, nationalisation of services, social liberalism and all that jazz, but also believe that shadowy cabals of [insert group] are controlling the government/media/finances of the world, or whatever, even though there are contradictions there. It's more a thing that people on the right have incoherent views, because there are contradictions at the heart of right-wing politics which I think is why smarter people who think critically tend to skew left, and indeed it's been shown in studies that low-effort political thought leads people to right-wing tendencies. (Study here: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/224...gy%20increases.). It's still possible for people who are broadly on the left to not really have thought deeply about every single issue though and get sucked into gut reactions and biases from things/ideas they were exposed to when they were growing up, or what's in the right-wing media, or posted on the internet/youtube, and still have some lovely or downright insane views, about some things. If you have the sort of mind that keeps digging down into stuff and wants to understand things and asks questions like "why though?" and "does this statement match with actual reality?" then you'll usually end up "on the left" in some form or other because like I said, there are a lot of contradictions in right-wing thought. Stuff like them saying we live in a meritocracy, which is a really big part of believing in all the individualistic stuff. Those who work hard get the rewards etc... but it's really, REALLY easy to find people who have "climbed the ladder" based on nothing other than e.g. nepotism, and that's a big contradiction. All this is part of why I have a very high bar for starting to think "this person is sound, they should generally be trusted" because often people are until they aren't. They can seem for a long time to talk sense about political matters and then they'll say some heinous or ignorant poo poo that if not reveals them to be secret racists, reveals a blind spot in their thinking. That's not to say we should cancel everybody who ever says anything we don't agree with politically, but also there are levels. Again it's a reason people can fall into right-wing or conspiracy bullshit, because somebody they trusted - maybe a celebrity who writes good TV comedy, or a singer or actor or something who they have enjoyed for decades, comes out and says some ignorant or conspiracy poo poo, and lots of people think "Oh, I like that guy, I guess he's got a point!". Or often, people who actually are sound and knowledgeable about one area of things in which they are a specialist, then starts to comment on some other social issue and it's the same thing. So coming back to horseshoe theory, I think there is some truth that people who tend to go for the more extreme left-wing ideology are perhaps the sort of people who don't believe that stuff for rational reasons, they've gotten sucked into a movement and become really passionate about it and want to show how strongly they belong to that movement... but those people may also be more likely to get sucked into other extreme kinds of political thought like "and while we're at it we should stop all those rich Jews from controlling the space lasers". Arguably, you can say "Well if those people think that, they're not really 'on the left'", because they don't have a coherent leftist philosophy. But that's hard for a lot of people to grasp. We've had it so hammered into us that people are either "on the left" or "on the right" that it's easy to make the mistake of thinking that everybody MUST have some sort of coherent political philosophy, but I'd argue that the vast majority of people do not.
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Feb 29, 2024 19:37
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Nuclear Spoon posted:it is entirely unsurprising that she and the actors haven't been paid
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Feb 29, 2024 19:38
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Thanks for the detailed replies about people switching from far left to far right ideology. I think I can now see why people who I used to know and who portrayed themselves as advent lefties are now flag-shagging nazis. None of them were really firmly rooted in their beliefs back then, and they've also had over a decade of social media brainwashing to alter their views. I think many of them were more in love with the social aspect than any ideology. But the biggest thing that you've all successfully done is shatter my narrow 'left/right' construct that I'd been clinging onto. It really is a stupid metric/gauge when you think about it.
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Feb 29, 2024 19:48
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fuctifino posted:But the biggest thing that you've all successfully done is shatter my narrow 'left/right' construct that I'd been clinging onto. It really is a stupid metric/gauge when you think about it. It's very important to consider where someone would've sat in the French parliament some 250 years ago. Just as it makes perfect sense to try and plop people like Plato, Genghis Khan or Ceasar into those stupid libertarian-funded political four-fields with two axes It's just so painful when "left-wing" parties of today are still called that, even though they'd consider their own party members active in, say, the 1970s, to be insane commies or something. If only the out-right fascists started calling themselves that again, too
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Feb 29, 2024 19:52
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I think when people say "how did they used to be left and now are really right" isn't necessarily to suggest a single and universal left/right that covers everything, but to suggest "well I thought I understood what their worldview was like and I thought it was like mine, but now they're saying stuff that makes no sense to me so why were they saying things that made sense while apparently having a wildly different world view?" If you would self describe as left wing and agree with someone else, you might also think of them as left wing, but you aren't necessarily describing even the same kind of brain functioning much less view of the world.
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Feb 29, 2024 19:53
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Rappaport posted:If only the out-right fascists started calling themselves that again, too 
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Feb 29, 2024 19:55
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fuctifino posted:I know that the horseshoe theory is 100% bullshit, so for those people who claimed to have been on the far left and who are now very firmly on the far right, were they just pretending beforehand, or are they simply grifting fuckwits with no morals or standards? 
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Feb 29, 2024 20:06
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It's interesting if you look into some of the historical and ideological roots of the horseshoe theory.Adolf Ehrt posted:If you imagine the German parties and currents in the shape of a horseshoe, with the centre at the bend and the KPD and the NSDAP at the ends, then the area of the ‘Black Front’ lies between the two poles of Communism and National Socialism. The opposites of ‘left’ and ‘right’ cancel each other out by entering into a kind of synthesis with the unanimous elimination of the ‘bourgeois’. The situation between the two poles best reflects the tense character of the Black Front. and by interesting I mean Rappaport posted:If only the out-right fascists started calling themselves that again, too No wonder the sensible centrists love it even if it's terrible nonsense.
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Feb 29, 2024 20:15
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That's good but can you add Captain Tom's spa?
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Feb 29, 2024 20:16
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Failed Imagineer posted:Best of luck, when you unwrap that newspaper you'll discover you've been handed a plateful of curried dog!
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Feb 29, 2024 20:24
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The other thing is that arguably the second most important political axis is the authoritarian/libertarian axis. Authoritarian is when you want there to be a government with power to enforce political will, and libertarian is where you want the government to be hands-off or even non-existent with some level of self-governance from the people. When you go really far in one direction and end up as an extreme authoritarian or libertarian, you can become a dipshit in different ways, BUT then what can happen is that the "left" or "right" part of your "political compass alignment" becomes less important than the authoritarian/libertarian part. Extreme authoritarians in particular, whether on the right or the left can have a lot of similarities in their thinking (e.g. "people I disagree with politically should be fed into a big oven") and I think that's where some of the horseshoe theory thing comes from. But then using a horseshoe for that is not a useful diagram because you're trying to represent two political axes on a single (curved) line. Libertarian Right and Libertarian Left people really don't have that much overlap. They both think that government should be small but the Left want that to be the case so that people can organise with each other more directly or e.g. on a municipal level, and be more co-operative and equal, and the Right want that to be the case so that the shackles of government will be taken off of capitalism, and the "best" people will become immeasurably wealthy due to their inherent merits, and they further think that they personally will become King poo poo of poo poo Island, instead of a literal slave working down the lithium mines for MSNBC Time Warner Walmart Monsanto Incorporated, which is what would actually happen. E: Oh, also to say that there's a general tendency for leftists to be more libertarian and right-wingers to be more authoritarian in general. the "authoritarian left" are generally not a large part of the movement, but the authoritarian right can be. Many centrists are also fundamentally authoritarian too. So when people are espousing horseshoe theory they're essentially saying "Ah yes but those on the left (the small proportion of which who are authoritarian) are often just as bad as those on the right in terms of their political views!" and in some sense they are right, but they're also loving stupid (because they're actually only referring to a very small section of people who would consider themselves "on the left") and making apologies for literal nazis. And again those same people are the sort who say "Ah yes but those people who ARE literal nazis are just a small portion of the Right" but they don't get that the nazi stuff follows naturally/logically from the more "mainstream" right-wing individualistic stuff. WhatEvil fucked around with this message at 20:42 on Feb 29, 2024 |
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Feb 29, 2024 20:36
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