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Uhhmm... because they agree on like 99% of things?  Either one seems OK with the other getting the seat?  Why would they fight? Honestly....

Is it just me, or do they seem like they're just waiting for their polls to diverge so the less popular one can drop out and endorse the other in return for the VP slot?

OK, cool, looking forward to specific examples of non-violent Antifa making changes and whatnot instead of repetitive statements. Also some ways that their violence does not empower the right.

Let's do it.

Given their informal nature, will you also accept examples of groups of people who have indicated allegiance to or endorsement of Antifa making non-violent changes?

I've got an interview to get to, so I'll be offline the next few days, but I did want to raise the possibility that Antifa helps primarily by getting people energized to fight fascism and putting them in touch with each other, and the non-violent benefits happen in contexts where wearing masks and announcing oneself as a member of a potentially violent anti-fascist group are not helpful. It may be that Antifa's reputation for violence is enhanced by identity in the group being a transient thing, proclaimed primarily in contexts in which violence is abnormally likely.

In that way they are fairly anarchistic. No leaders except those whose ideas rise to the top.

I think this gets forgotten in the rush to equivocate Antifa and the fascists: the left and the right work differently. Not only do conservative brains actually work differently than liberal ones, most particularly in how they attribute causation, but they organize differently too.

It's easy to miss this when we look at their online conversations, where the loudest and most extreme voices will always dominate the echo chambers, but liberals don't actually tend to follow people with nearly the same fervor that they follow abstract ideas. This is partly why cancel culture has become such a thing, and also partly why liberals have a reputation for backstabbing and infighting. The upside, then, is that while the crazy radical liberals get a lot of likes, there's always a handy long-winded philosophical justification for doing nothing in any particular case.

The right, on the other hand, coalesces around people; even before the GOP supported Trump and tax cuts but nothing else, they've been running on Reagan hagiography for thirty years and counting. They're not in any ideological sense the party of Lincoln, but it still suits them to be the party of someone. Gavin McInnes is the leader of the Proud Boys in a way that nobody could ever be the leader of Antifa.

In short, when the boss says jump, conservatives jump. Half the liberals explain how they took a principled stance against jumping, find a new boss, and denounce the half who did jump, or at least expressed a general willingness to jump, as having lost the way.

It's a feature rather than a bug here too; without actual Nazis to fight, Antifa would splinter into a thousand little Antiflets bitterly angry at each other over miniscule doctrinal differences but fundamentally unwilling to do more than gripe, modulo the fraction that really are just in it for the violence. Without Antifa, the Nazis would just hurt people of color and LGBT people more quickly.

Quote from: Trekkin on August 18, 2019, 02:20:41 am

In short, to become a Nazi one must first be such a loser that one is not worth deprogramming.

And yet, deprogramming initiatives exist, and they inevitably don't involve any violence but a lot of compassion. The choice of action need not be binary, between ignoring and punching.

Sure they exist; I'm not arguing that they don't work as advertised, either. I'm saying that making ex-neo-Nazis is less efficient than preventing people from ever becoming neo-Nazis in the first place, because embracing white supremacy and fascism and all the rest is usually the last in a long, long series of poor choices -- some of which, to be sure, are externally imposed, but all of which represent opportunities to act prophylactically with more ancillary benefits and greater efficiency than may be realized by deprogramming extant extremists. On an individual level, endorsement of neo-Nazism is a lagging rather than a leading indicator of a failed human.

That doesn't mean they should be punched or ignored; on some level each of them represents a failure of society at large, and just because they're useless doesn't mean they're worthless. They're people too, after all, and deserve to be treated humanely. It simply means that stopping neo-Nazism must extend beyond our treatment of neo-Nazis themselves, working to make the demographics most likely to become neo-Nazis less susceptible to their filth so we can stop the process long before it snowballs into full-blown fascism.

Not saying I agree with far right demonstrations, but I still believe the proper response is to ignore them, not put them on the defensive and make them double down on "the neccesity of whatthey're doing"

While I can see the parallels between the far right and scared children acting out because negative attention feels better than being ignored, the purpose of ignoring performant misbehavior in children has a tutelary component that would be quite pointless here. The far right is full of people who could not envision any future in which anything they could ever be would be of any concievable use to anyone without the systematic elimination of all other alternatives, thus the chanting about being "replace[d];" the fear of a level playing field is what motivates all their bigotry. A cursory review of their more prominent members indicates that this self-assessment is probably accurate. In short, to become a Nazi one must first be such a loser that one is not worth deprogramming.

Given that, it makes sense to look at Nazism as an epidemic, assume it is functionally incurable, and focus instead on quarantine and vaccination until transmission is as low as reasonably achievable. Deplatforming is part of that, but Antifa has its role to play as well, if only as a ready source of freelance agents provocateur. They just can't do so effectively in isolation, so their cost in random disorder is out of apparent balance with the benefits they provide.

It makes sense to do that, by the way, in part because if you start looking at it as a social problem, it raises questions of deterrence that have very discomfiting answers. It only takes one person to ask how much depends on the Nazis' opinion of their leaders, another to notice their obsession with masculinity, and from there it's a clear path to someone asking about the propaganda value of putting Andrew Anglin or Richard Spencer alone in a featureless, windowless cell 24/7 for the rest of their life and broadcasting a round-the-clock camera feed of their cell as a picture-in-picture on Fox, and hang on now, let's not pretend the Constitution hasn't already been shredded, and really if it saves lives is it really going too far or are we seriously going to defend Nazis over their victims here? Besides, let's hear them complain about censorship now, har har poetic justice. Or maybe it'll be something else, something equally festooned with "well we have to do something" and concern over the greater good and a slow slide into monstrousness.

And then, one step at a time, we've ratcheted the culture wars up well past any sane point, and it's just going to spiral out of all control.

So let's maybe stop it while we can still do so humanely, because otherwise someone else is going to stop it inhumanely.

There's another shooting happening in Philadelphia right now. Six officers shot, none killed.

Can someone smart please reassure me that this definitely is not going to end with radioactive material being released into the upper atmosphere and then carried by the winds to every corner of the earth and leaving nothing alive except cockroaches?

Well, it's a cruise missile. They don't go into the upper atmosphere in the first place; they cruise like airplanes, hence the name. ICBMs are the ones that go in ballistic suborbital arcs.

It looks like the Skyfall is an attempt to build a cruise missile with intercontinental range so as to avoid our anti-missile defenses and demonstrate a new capacity to destroy Washington Mar-A-Lago with impunity.

...Are y'all accepting immigrants? Preferably ones with no money, skills or job prospects?

No need to go that far. Apparently your countrymen have developed an app for that.