Every time I've been to that subreddit, it only takes perusing the comments for 5 minutes to find way worse stuff. From people being openly racist, to people calling for Hillary Clinton to be raped, etc. Bunch of great people, really :\
I browse T_D frequently and I have not once seen someone calling for HRC to be raped. I'm not saying it never happened but I'm curious 1) how upvoted the commment was and 2) how you've glanced at the site for 5 minutes and saw something that I missed after having browsed the site since 2015
The post was on the front page of r/t_d, so I'm assuming it was fairly upvoted, and had plenty of comments from people supporting the spirit of the message. I remember linking it somewhere else on Reddit, to show just how vile the subreddit was (it was during one of the many discussions like this that try to portray r/t_d as a "high energy subreddit for fans only!")
No, they want to cleanse the bourgeoisie, they're very multi-ethnic in their genocides. And not all of the far left is colorblind, we generally consider people who want to ethnically cleanse white people as far left.
They specifically advocate for inclusion of races, and a destruction of a class system. Nowhere in this does "color" or "ethnicity" make its way into this.
Please point me to posts on those subreddits calling for a bloody revolution and the killing of the bourgeoisie? There's been this new meme circulating on right-wing circles that if you are not a card-carrying alt-righter then you must be - by necessity - Che Guevara's second coming. It's pretty disingenuous, and quite silly to be honest.
No, there's a meme among normal people that if you violently riot and attack people and property when you don't get your way politically, you're a nuisance to democratic society and have more in common with the Red Guard than soldiers who stormed the beaches in WWII.
Oh man, yeah... we have literal Nazis rallying with the tacit approval of the president (BTW, using the same anti-Semitic rhetoric you mention), but Antifa are the Nazis now.
WOW, the cognitive dissonance is so strong, you'll blow a gasket when you finally decide to be honest with yourself and admit you are part of the problem.
Far left and anarchist groups are generally considered to be unsuccessful in the arc of modern history, with even China partially adopting western aspects of governance to remain competitive. Their successes are almost entirely in appealing to moderates and with heavy appeasement of capitalism. One of the most famous attempt at true communism ended spectacularly, with a bulk victimization of many marginalized people who had been coaxed out of the shadows by a regime that failed to hold power to protect them.
Far right groups are taken much more seriously, because a conflict they started and escalated blighted an entire continent.
If it seems unfair that it's okay to make a video game (admittedly: a very fun, enjoyable game) about killing nazis by the dozen is pop culture but games about killing antifa can't even get news coverage, maybe that's true. It's because the victors of the last conflict against organized fascism accept violence as a constant reaffirmation that the binding substrate of civilization is democracy. You're "in-tribe" if you're on that train. If you seek to subvert or destroy democracy, that triggers violent a rejection by most of the western world.
A topical example: It's generally regarded as somewhat funny that Richard Spencer gets punched. Technically, it's illegal and we accept violence is no way to treat citizens in principle. Yet a lot of people in the US do hold racist views even if you take a very narrow definition of racism, and we don't see mass punching at scale. Spencer's singled out because he's publicly part of the ideology proposing the subversion and destruction of democracy. This turns off many of the typical restraints we'd exercise. Bannon and Yarvin probably need to be cautious of punch sqads as well as their profile raises.
Perhaps unsurprisingly (and imo, justifiably) so. As a general rule, America bends its own rules when it perceives something taking advantage of said rules. That's not a new thing, and it explains a lot of the legislative dithering that we have seen over the decades and a lot of the political rhetoric we see playing out today.
But I really do want to stress how much fun it is to have pop cultural license to go back and play a mindless game like Wolf2 for a bit.
I had to do a double take that the KirinDave talking about politics on HN is the same one I watched years back play and manage a Minecraft server with the Yogscast. What a small world!
> Far left groups are generally considered to be unsuccessful in the arc of history
Um, what? China, the Soviet Union, Cuba, North Korea, just to name a few of the more famous ones. Tens of millions killed in the name of a communist utopia.
But North Korea and pre-Stalin Communist Russia are not regarded as "successful" and Post-Stalin Russia is reasonably rejected as a tenable example of leftism. Cuba, I think, is looked upon more favorably now than when it was more centrally managed?
Is "not real communism" still the go-to counterpoint? Can we excuse the failures of Nazism and fascism by saying they weren't real fascism? I don't think so. Judge political ideologies by their results, not their lofty intentions.
The failure of Communist Russia was in losing power to someone who used fundamentist rhetoric to sieze power and then subvert that system.
Stalin's late Russia was something quite different from where it started. In much the same fashion that we recognize China's form of government fundamentally changed TO Communism we can recognize that it lost hold.
And if you need a source of negative propaganda about Communist government, look no further than China. A sexual harassment crisis it's illegal to talk about, systemic religious and ethnic persecution, a 2 tiered oligarchic economic system, dark but weighty rumors of involuntary organ harvesting... You name it, they got it, where "it" is bad outcomes.
I'm always surprised that there aren't more proponents of modern, IT-informed government systems in our community.
It's my personal belief that WikiLeaks is, perhaps has been for some time, a tool of a foreign state actor to threaten political candidates and push conspiracy theories (see: Seth Rich, Pizzagate.) That crosses a line for me, and the amount of "moral good" they do is significantly diminished when, instead of working with leaks that help align politician's actions with their speeches, seek to undermine democratic norms by dealing in crass and unfounded conspiracies.
I'd venture a guess that many people who don't like wikileaks now didn't feel that way when wikileaks was exposing the democratic president. Many likely thought and continue to think of Snowden as a hero. I find wikileaks sensationalist in a way that mirrors the sensationalism of grocery store checkout-aisle tabloids.
Promoting conspiracy theories about satanic rituals, pizzagate, the seth rich lies, and clinton-organized child kidnappings is not in any way exposing something resembling truth. They promoted conspiracy theories criticizing that the Panama Papers release was a George Soros-funded conspiracy to target Russia and the former USSR.
None of these claims had evidence attached to them. Leaks of truth are valuable, but I have lost all faith that wikileaks publishes in a non-partisan "truth for truth's sake" mission, rather, I think they have specific targets in mind and publish whatever it takes to harm those targets and help others.
But I think therein lies a horrible truth: Manning, her crime, her release, and everything that flows from that, has been turned into a purely political issue. What might have happened had it never entered the political arena? Perhaps a shorter sentence, confinement to a hospital instead of a prison, better care for her psychosis, an assortment of things could have been better. Her commutation was the single, greatest act of political f* you to America. Not even the pardoning of Nixon, or the failures of every single President since comes close to this level of politicization.
Couldn't agree more. The polarization I've seen in the last two years is just insane to me. I've always been pretty firmly in the center, and I feel like it's a lot of work to stay there.
Google seems to be culturally ahead of the curve, for better or worse: some of the craziest things I've heard in the last few years (eg explicit denial of the value of innocent-until-proven-guilty and idea pluralism), I heard internally from other Googlers _years_ before I would've expected to hear it outside. (Now, of course, both of those things are routine).
Similarly, there's been a bit of a turning of the tide publicly back towards sanity: the first thing I can recall seeing that signaled a defense of basic liberal tenets was The Atlantic's "The Coddling of the American Mind". No one with a baker's dozen of brain cells found anything new in that, but for the vast majority of people who only consider an idea when their chosen publications grant their approval,
it was a huge step. (Pres Obama pushed back against this kind of barbarity in his own half of the political spectrum much earlier, but he was politely ignored).
It's kind of interesting to see Google culture out in front of the pendulum's swing back, too. I can't imagine this kind of an essay being published in most "blue tribe" fora.
As you can tell, it's the kind of thing meant for the best seller list and isn't a scholarly work or anything, but the preface stresses it's based on lots of interviews.
If nothing else, it's a fun read and the background of the founders is pretty interesting.
