I have an in-law that’s a teacher, and she says it’s fucking crazy how radicalized some kids are. Her coworkers have dealt with 11 year old boys straight up telling female teachers they don’t have to listen to them because they’re women.
They’re apparently always talking about shithead influencers like Andrew Tate too, and the ones that aren’t down the pipeline are definitely still heavily exposed to the ideas. Real disturbing shit.
Ah so you have a black friend so it’s fine.
Atheism isn’t edgy, it is a lack of belief. If you mean anticlericalism, then that’s an entirely different thing.
…“group up”? Never heard that phrase used this way, is this something I should be aware of?
And business casual is fine, nothing too fancy.
Atheism isn’t edgy, no.
But it can be, and that is what the whole discussion is about.
But if they are edgy misogynists in their teens and then they outgrow the edgy part…
… Then we’ll still have a bunch of misogynists on our hand, but now their beliefs are sincere rather than performative.
Really hard to take a niche religious belief seriously without a large dedicated community of fellow practitioners.
Like, if you’re not regularly going to a church, there’s no peer network or social reproduction. You might become “spiritual”, but it’s going to be some religion you invented in your own head that’s divorced from any other formal setting. As likely as a non-athletic teenager suddenly becoming a baseball professional.
Organized religion is as much about the organization as the religion.
The way I see it, the left had a good go and had the right on the ropes and lost it in the last 15 - 20 years. Not 50.
I saw a systematic push to pretty much remove the left from the internet and weight the algorithms towards right wing issues while vilifying the left as pompous know it all’s and out of touch with the regular man. Which is crazy because 15 years ago most people would have agreed with so many of the values that are vilified today.
Canadian sub reddits is a perfect example. One day accounts started showing up and laying into anyone looking to do discuss politics. And then hammered them over and over. Then a new sub showed up specifically for left leaning Canadians that drew the ones who didn’t want confrontation towards. At the same time the moderation team started recruiting and low and behold were hammered with right wing applications until they have what is essentially moderators from the r/The_Donald. Now there’s multiple Canadian sub reddits and almost all are heavy right leaning to the point you can’t post even moderate stuff. It all has to be headlines like “Lookie what these brown fellas are doing now”.
Crazy times. Even saw voices that were kind of cool become social pariahs as online users seemed to unanimously agree that “science guy 1” was faking it and pompous and “science guy 2” was also a giant piece of shit. We’re not even leftists but were people who would convince people to think critically and question even your own views. Could not let those channels and people grow. We all had to read about their vocal fry every time they posted a video. Decimated engagement for every voice the left tended to enjoy and who acted as lightning rods for different ideas and values such as common sense and logic were knee capped by the denizens of these newly seized territories who all unanimously agreed that these people were annoying. And since we’re social creatures, if you have 1000 voices saying someone is annoying and 10 say “what the fuck is going on in this comment section” we all tend to really focus on the annoying bits wondering about it ourselves until its just a truth. Meanwhile middle aged Comedian with views like “Students are shitting in litter boxes” and “Maybe wearing masks will kill you” were amplified.
Internet was a new frontier and seems like groups that had resources really seized on the opportunity to take back territory so they could relay a foundation that was pro their own cause. I think the left had a big part in helping without realizing it because they just didn’t care to see what was happening. Like a death by 10 000 paper cuts.
20 years ago rightwing talk radio was in full swing, already influencing huge swaths of America with their formulated, repeated talking points (something “the left” or even the Democratic party still can’t do), Rush Limbaugh had a TV show on one of the 4 major networks. For sure everything has picked up recently but they’ve been at this for decades, what we’re seeing now is the result of all the groundwork they’ve laid.
It’s a long listen but worth checking out How Conservatism Won by Robert Evans. He lays out in a clear concise way “how a consortium of rich failsons got together to fund a network of right wing think tanks and shift American culture in a fun new direction. (note: it was not actually fun at all).” They’ve been very successful and those think tanks are now pipelines used to funnel ideological purists into powerful positions like our current Supreme Court.
I tell people as often as I can, especially my trans and bipoc friends; now is the time. Get a couple guns (a long one and a short one) and learn how to use them. Learn some basic first aid, you really just need to know how to stabilize someone. Start networking with like-minded people in your communities. The police will not protect us, they’ve proven they’ll happily club senior citizens to the ground and shoot any protesters in the face with rubber bullets while escorting a rightwing murderer to safety.
Iran was a secular, liberal state until almost 1980 when they (mostly legitimately) elected an Islamist theocracy; it could happen here.
🛎 If You're New Subscribe ► https://bit.ly/BtBSubscribePart One: How Conservatism Won | BEHIND THE BASTARDSRobert sits down with David Bell to discuss how ...
Nah, some of have been calling out right wing propaganda and the impact it’s having on the political scene for a while now. And it’s not just teens. Right wing propaganda has infested the left as well, to the point where you still have people repeating confirmed propaganda from the 2016 election because they’ve internalized it and can’t let it go.
It’s not that the left has bad messaging or unpopular ideas, it’s that there are a ton of cynics under the big tent. Cynics who actively poison outreach efforts because they are intellectually lazy, but love their own farts.
It’s not that the left has bad messaging or unpopular ideas
Good ideas, but terrible messaging. For example, imagine you wanted to sell Appalachia on the idea that the coal market is in decline so we should look at expanding other market sectors in the region so the entire region doesn’t increasingly resemble dead mine towns as time goes on. What’s the single worst possible way you could try to express that idea to those people?
“I’m going to put a lot of coal companies and coal miners out of business” - Hillary Clinton, 2016.
Hillary Clinton
left
As far as the US goes, Democrats are basically the best you get that has any chance of winning an election and she was their choice for 2016. I even held my nose and voted for her in the general (but not in the primary).
I won’t argue that progressives and the like shouldn’t be trying to either drag the party leftward or organize at a scale that they can actually win elections at some levels without needing the name Democrat behind them.
Her coworkers have dealt with 11 year old boys straight up telling female teachers they don’t have to listen to them because they’re women.
That’s hardly new. Obnoxious pre-teens finding any excuse to rebel are just a hazard of middle school life.
Andrew Tate’s brand of misogyny is the thing YouTube loves to promote in between Spider-Man Vaccinating Pregnant Elsa and Hysterical Child Unboxing videos. But if it wasn’t him, it could just as easily be Blink-182 lyrics or kids immitating what they saw in a Caillou episode.
No, no, he is right. Republican and Nazi are the same side of the coin.
To quote Hitler
“We tolerate no one in our ranks who attacks the ideas of Christianity… in fact our movement is Christian.”
Speech in Passau 27 October 1928
Republican and nazi are the same side of the coin
No argument here
So, they were attacking other religious sects and churches that were different than their specific version of Christianity?
That sounds like Christianity to me.
Just because it wasn’t the form of Christianity we recognize today, doesn’t mean it wasn’t a valid religious movement. Sure, it specifically helped the Nazi party, but all the pieces of the puzzle to create their christo-fascist state were there for them to put together.
And they used Christianity to do it. Saying otherwise is being disingenuous and revisionist. They espoused Christianity. They espoused the teachings of Jesus. They claimed moral superiority just like every other religion does.
Sure, they used it to attack other religions to set theirs up as the state religion, but that doesn’t make it less like Christianity. Just a form that doesn’t exist today.
Repressing other religions is a cornerstone of most religions, including Christianity. To say otherwise is invoking apologetics.
Give one good reason why the Nazis started with the Jews and not the millions of other groups that are much further away for their idea of the Übermench.
I’ll give you one. Because Nazis were Christians, and they hate the Jews for not accepting Jesus as their messiah.
I heard experts on a radio program one time explain it that even though we can draw parallels to Hitler’s rise. It in no way means we should expect another group like the Nazi’s to rise to power. Like hindsight can say Hitler rose to power because X,Y and Z. Today we can see X,Y and Z contribute to Republican party so therefore they are Nazi’s/Hitler.
I think what the message was that X,Y and Z = Nazi’s.
He’s not wrong, but he’s not right either. Those lists are meant to be paired with deep analysis of the ideology and an academic understanding of the terms used. When used correctly they are absolutely useful for predicting oppressive authoritarian regimes. Can they predict the second coming of Nazis? No, because that was a unique moment in history.
Political scientists who write their papers and books on ideology have been sounding the alarm bells about conservative and fundamentalist Christianity since the 2000’s. There’s been papers about wealth ministry and the GOP since at least the 90’s.
So yeah, the brief lists on the Internet are about as effective as a Hogwarts personality test, but that doesn’t mean the watchers aren’t screaming at you to pay attention.
That’s what I was saying. I guarantee you they keep a list as a reference. But they aren’t just xeroxing the list with checked boxes for their writing. Throwing the lists onto the Internet is the same thing as putting Fascist on a sign whenever the government installs a new traffic camera. That’s what has them upset.
And if they’re telling you there’s nothing to worry about with the current conservative movement they’re either bad at their job or part of the problem. Because every political science professor I know, even the conservative and libertarian ones, are telling anyone who will listen that we are dangerously close to voting ourselves out of a democracy.
Think of it more like the flu. If I caught the flu I might have a temperature, a sore throat, loss of appetite, and headaches. If you catch the flu you might get headaches, diarrhea, exhaustion, and a dry cough.
Fascism is built upon and characterised by the exploitation of the current fissures of a stressed society. It is unlikely to lead to gas chambers and Hugo Boss uniforms as they were part of the specific evolution of fascism in Germany after it was crippled by the loss of the first world war. Usually, there are all sorts of barriers to full blooded fascism that give it part of its local character too as it tries to morph into whatever conglomerate of memes that it can ride to power.
Right now in America the pressure for fascism is being built with the tacit support of a lot of evangelical christians. It is not the whole of the story. It is part of the conglomerate. So the pride flags come down and the ten commandments go up.
To understand nazis religion it is important to understand religion in germany.
Back in the day, and today is similar in former west Germany, Germany had a fairly even split between catholicism and protestantism.
So the nazi party taking a strong religious dogma either way would had been very harmful towards their objectives, as half the population could refuse to follow a catholic/protestant movement. That’s why their leader and the party didn’t really seemed to take a strong religious stance. But at the end they were linked to the conservative values that are associated with religion. And his allies, Spain and Italy. Both formed fascist dictatorships very linked with the Catholic church, being their countries homogeneous in that aspect. In fact Spanish dictatorship is often refered as national-catholicism, and Mussolini had full support from the Vatican and the Pope.
At the end fascism, in whichever form and name it takes, tend to link with conservative values that are usually also linked with religion. The nazi party being just an exception due Germany particular religion situation.
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