Bay 12 Games Forum

Quote from: SalmonGod on August 20, 2019, 06:28:16 am

Quote from: Reelya on August 20, 2019, 05:12:33 am

I think it's a false dichotomy to say that because we haven't got any better idea, then Antifa is the default best action. I'd say Antifa is the best recruiting tool the right actually has. It's not really causing people to flock to the left.

If someone just waves a flag and Antifa guys come and beat that person with steel pipes, then that looks awfully similar to events such as when the British beat down peaceful protestors in India back in the colonial days. It's very bad PR. The right has awful propaganda? Don't just hand them even better propaganda on a plate. If you beat down an individual with clubs, you stop that one guy, but he becomes a martyr for his cause.

Ok, so that's why fascism was growing before antifa?  Because they have awful propaganda?... and you're ignoring this thing I've repeatedly brought up after I very politely said plleeeeeaaaaase... why?  I'm not going to let the claim go that antifa is responsible for the growth of fascism until somebody addresses this.

Because it is a nonsense point. Regardless of antifa's be or not be as a propaganda machine for the right, there could also be other events, people, or ideas that cause people to move rightwards. Your "antifa can't be contributing to right wing growth because the right wing was already growing before" is a false dichotomy or whatever you would call the fallacy of thought in question.

No.  That is a complete departure from what has been said so far. 

I'm driving this in response to the idea that has been repeated over and over again here and every other place this discussion has ever happened that the proper response to fascists is to ignore them.  That if they are just left alone, they will make fools of themselves and get nowhere.  That if antifa wasn't making a spectacle of them, that everyone would ignore them or regard them as a laughingstock.  That it's the street confrontations that are giving them a platform and winning them sympathy.  That the marketplace of ideas would shut them down if only the likes of antifa wasn't making the issue emotional instead of calm and rational.  And most recently, Reelya saying that they have awful propaganda.

Over and over and over again the single most common argument against antifa is comprised of two basic premises

1.  That the fascists are pathetic and incapable of getting anywhere if left alone
2.  We need to be ever so afraid that being confrontational with them will grow their cause

I'm saying these two premises are demonstrated factually incorrect by recent history because

1.  While everyone ignored them, they grew large and entrenched enough to install a president and instigate mass scale illegal abuses of law enforcement power targeting immigrants.
2.  Maybe... but it's not proven.  Nobody has backed this up in any other way other than repeating it over and over, I'm assuming on the basis that it's intuitive.  Meanwhile, everything everybody says about how we should respond to the rise of fascism HAS been proven by recent history to allow fascism to grow, a la premise #1.

And I think I've provided a sufficient starting point for discussing these premises if anybody really wants to step up and back them up in any way.  But until somebody does, I'm going to continue calling bullshit on them and every time it's stated point out that the calls of bullshit are being ignored.

I'm saying words in response to the things people are saying, and the same things are just being repeated as if they haven't been said before and I never responded to them.  So.... *shrug*

Except for weird... who sort of just re-stated an old sentiment which has also been debated here before, and has sort of been addressed this time around too but maybe not directly enough. 

The problem is fascists aren't putting forth arguments to be deconstructed and debunked.  They're putting forth propaganda.  And responding to the propaganda as if they're arguments just assists them in maintaining a platform for their propaganda under the guise of "rational debate".  It doesn't dissuade anyone from seeing things their way.  Those who *feel* drawn to fascist mythology and promises continue to find and embolden each other.  To everyone else, it just normalizes exposure to their language, so it becomes not alarming and just your average political discussion. 

And the immediate consequence of this is fascism is free from there to recruit and organize and actually engage in politics and take control of state apparatus to carry out their violent ideology through channels that may provoke condemnation and protest but carry that validity and force the state has and becomes really hard to do anything about... you know... the thing that actually happened because we mostly ignored fascists as they rationally debated us through forums and social media and video essays for the 20+ years leading up to 2016.

Again, Olly's got a great section on the nature of propaganda here -- Philosophy of Antifa

Maybe.... actually look into this and when you guys repeat the same ideas, maybe do it in a way that acknowledges in some fashion the things I've said about those ideas.

You're comparing a higher level concept of violence to literally throwing a brick at someone's face, or smashing a can of Pepsi in to it.

When someone spits on you, blocks you from going anywhere, throws a punch, then that's violence everyone, including the law, can and does recognize.

Also, like.... you do realize you wrote these two sentences in the same post, right?

No, the spiral has been getting deeper and uglier for decades, precisely because we have ignored it.  I've seen it festering since my mid-teens 20 years ago.  Stormfront, as one example, set up their website in 1996.  And according to Wikipedia, their membership grew from 120,000 to 300,000 between 2009 and 2015 (notably pre-Trump election).  Active recruiting, because the taboo on supporting fascist ideology has faded over time.

Call it self-righteousness or bloodlust if you like.  We differ on strategy.  If you think the goal is to change someone's beliefs by kicking the shit out of them, then you haven't been paying attention the several dozen times this subject has come up, including this one.  The recent surge of fascism is not something that happened suddenly.  It's something that has been built up to for decades, because they have been ignored as they built up numbers, infiltrated law enforcement (as it has been pointed out multiple times the FBI had a task force assigned to monitoring and verified was a real problem), and wedged tolerance for instigation of violence as free speech into our cultural narrative. 

The goal is to re-establish the taboo on publicly espousing their rhetoric, which allows them to more easily recruit and organize.  I know the argument is that this just helps them to draw more attention to themselves.  But this is naive.  These people are savvy.  If conflict didn't come to them, they would go out and create it.  They don't need antifa types to do this for them.  We keep being told that they need to be allowed to fail in the marketplace of ideas, and let them paint themselves negatively by being the exclusive perpetrators of violence.  But Breivik was a Stormfront user.  Did widespread condemnation of his massacre slow down Stormfront recruiting?  Fuck no.  Their numbers doubled in the 4 years following what he did.  You think 180,000 people joined up between 2009 and 2015, because they saw a nazi get punched and felt sorry for them?  Recall again when the nazi punching videos and memes started getting popular?  Their numbers are exploding because people sympathetic to their ideas have always been around, but taboo kept them isolated and dormant, unsure of how many others out there felt the same way and whether they could get away with gathering together.

Spectacle will be a part of their game no matter what, whether we participate in their spectacle or not.  The point is to de-platform them.  They have the right to speak all they want.  They don't have a right to a platform.  Nobody has to give them the space.  Nobody has to be silent while they speak.  And above all, the taboo needs to be re-established at any cost.  If the fascists are going to create a spectacle no matter what, then it's imperative that part of that spectacle is deterrent.  That dormant fascists out there don't get the idea that they can just show up to a rally where they have a pleasant weekend hanging out in public with fellow fascists to discuss ethnic cleansing without fear of repercussions.  That they can expect the possibility of getting hurt, fired, etc.  It needs to always be scary to have one's name and face associated with fascism.  Because as soon as it's not, the way their numbers are growing right now will look like nothing.

Yeah, I know.  The timing of your comment was just comedic to me.

But also... this image really isn't all that a-typical of antifa counter-protesters.  The only thing notable about it is the picturesque framing of the 3 front and center, unmasked.  Disabled people and children aren't even that uncommon. 

Your point was trying to frame them as "violence hobbyists".  Pay attention to the body language of these people.  Or any picture of a group of antifa where they are not immediately engaged in direct confrontation.  Aside from the big black guy, they do not look like people who are there wanting a fight.  They look like they're ready and accepting that it's what they're there for, but not really enthusiastic about it.  There's no aggression in the way they're standing around.  Or in most pictures of antifa.

Compare to pictures of alt-right people at their gatherings.  They almost always look angry, aggressive, poised and ready to clash.

Or you could like.... compare data on who the perpetrators are of actual verified instances of violence and their severity.  Or even read alt-right event planning chat logs, because plenty of them have been leaked.  They pretty openly talk about their desire for violence and how to control the narrative so they can go at it and still appear sympathetic.

The left sees a woman murdered by nazis. The right sees a group of fascists(yes, fascists... that's how antifa is viewed by the right) infringing on their free speech and the violence being a side effect of their side being attacked.

Yeah, sorry, but one side is just plain factually wrong there on multiple levels.  And if they see the violence as a "side effect", then they're siding with the fascists.  And it's abusive as fuck.

Imagine a man threatening to beat his wife.  He had beaten her before long in the past, but behaved himself for 20 years since.  His wife reports this threat to authorities and makes it clear to her husband that even though it was only words, she won't stand for being terrorized in her own home again.  In response, the man actually beats his wife.  Authorities show up.  Man tells authorities that his free speech was under attack, the beating she received was a side effect of her own behavior, and the only way to prevent him from regressing into his old self is to ignore him.  See what that argument looks like?

Now, not to bash your views, but the arguments you've presented recently seem based on maybes and suppositions that aren't really backed up by experience (at the time at which you're presenting them). You're coming across as a sort of yeah I know what all of our observed data says, but I don't think any of it is true because we can't literally have 100% proof in front of us. Like psychological models of humanity are somehow not taking any data from anyone but the 1%.
 
Sure, maybe all of our observation of humanity including the majority of our findings in the field of psychology are wrong and it's just some people that are hardwired to pursue a means of rising above the rest of humanity through cold competition. But that's not really enough to draw a conclusion. My own position is not that humanity is inherently or predominantly greedy or malicious, just that there are negative traits endemic to humanity. No person lacks greed or cruelty, and it's by speaking to these parts of us that society has been able to steer itself the way you describe.

EDIT: I'm trying to dance around being that asshat who attacks your argument rather than talking to you. Do you have some links to some material about your position? Thanks muchly!

I assume you're responding only to the point about status.  This is more just adding together personal experience + some other bits that I know about psychology + perspective that I think is rarely taken into account.  Science isn't immune to bias/unrecognized assumptions.  On top of that, psychology isn't a hard science, and it's questionable how objective a science it can possibly be.  As the practice of studying human thought must be undertaken from a frame of reference captured within human thought, it is going to be twisted by self-ideation, which effects what questions are asked, the manner in which observation takes place, and how observations are interpreted.

Personal Experience:  Whenever this topic comes up, I feel like I must be an alien.  Because I really don't relate to it.  I don't want to be a billionaire or world leader.  Never have.  I enjoy spending time around people that I admire, not people I feel superior to.  I also feel gross giving orders to anyone.  And I used to feel like I was alone in this, up until young adulthood.  But then I started meeting a wider variety of people in different contexts.  And since then, when I really think about the people that I know, most of them seem to have pretty modest desires and aspirations. 

Other Psychology Bits and Perspective:  Internalization is something that's been studied in psychology a lot for a while, and relates to this subject pretty strongly.

Racism is a good place to look for what I'm talking about.  White people were the dominant culture in the USA throughout the 20th century.  They controlled the vast majority of media, and made it in their own image, with positive representation being almost exclusively associated with whiteness.  As a result, black people growing up in this culture suffer problems with negative self-image on a massive scale, related to their appearance and beliefs about their own nature.  And this isn't about some great conspiracy of white people looking to destroy the psyches of black people.  White people just happened to be those doing media work, and they of course made what they personally related to.

Now when we're talking about the desire for status, you're speaking directly about dominance itself.  Whoever has it.  Wealth, political power, authority, and respect.  A concept which runs directly parallel to who has the most control in guiding the very direction and functioning of civilization as a whole.  So following the same principle, don't you think it would be natural that those with status will guide society in a direction that relates to what they can personally relate to, which is the experience of living with and desiring status?  And that this would trickle down to pervasive internalizations that everyone would struggle with?

Think about this mechanically.  Just as white people made media on the assumption that it was for people like themselves, we live in a society designed on the assumption that everyone is greedy.  Thus, the structure we all live in forces us to behave as if we are greedy in order to survive.  Even if we don't want it, we have to compete with others for material security, which often comes through association with other forms of status, not just direct ownership of material wealth.  So this is what everyone sees everyone else doing.  It's what we organize our lives around.  It's what we plan and strive for.  So if we build data from this based on empirical observations, what will that data show if the right questions are not asked to frame its context?

Let's say there's a management opportunity opened up in an office environment.  There may be 5 people fighting for that promotion - everyone considered eligible.  It may be possible that only 1 of them actually wants that position.  One person who dreams of climbing the corporate ladder to become a rich executive, who actually cares about having authority, or is interested in money for reasons beyond basic self-preservation.  Maybe 2 of them are fighting for it because they're drowning in bills and desperately need the pay raise no matter what, another because of high pressure expectations put by family, and another because it's what they've been told they want their whole lives and never truly reflected to determine for themselves if it's what they want.  If you were to engage in straightforward empirical observation of that situation, what data would you come away with?  That 100% of people eligible for receiving more wealth and authority were eager to compete for it.

And what type of research is likely to be most prevalent within the context of a society that subjects every attempt to establish a more egalitarian society to ridicule and violence?  Did anthropological and psychological research related to race in the slavery and Jim Crow days critically analyze the assumptions underlying race relationships in those days, or was it just a platform for reinforcing confirmation bias?  Assuming there is a great amount of scientific literature behind the idea that everyone desires wealth and status (I'm not aware of it), how much do you really believe that modern science is immune to foundational biases?

Even in harder sciences, we're still discovering those biases pretty regularly.  Here's an example.

I'm pretty much at a point where I regret not raising my children like Hit Girl (when I'm not regretting having children at all), and am resigned to being unprepared for the coming shitstorm because just surviving day to day on the way there was hard enough.  The best we can hope for is that everything collapses into total chaos, instead of a fascist government rising out of the fire and going into full extermination mode.

By which I mean the current government fails to hold together when the shit really hits the fan, instead of hardening up.  It's already a fascist government in early low-intensity stages of extermination mode.  When the next financial crisis hits is when they'll be most likely to kick into overdrive, and truly live up to the name Great Annihilation.

Six officers. They're going to further militarize the police, you know.

Question is... how much more can they militarize police?  They're already regularly outfitted with automatic weapons and body armor in situations that don't call for it.  They'll have to be patrolling the streets with tanks and rpgs to be any more militarized.