So.
Antifas have been in the news a bit lately.
What is up with these people? Where did they come from?
While SJWs and progressives are well at home in academia, you don’t see a lot of explicit antifa support in the typical edition of Yale Magazine (though I am sure you can find it if you look hard enough.)
Honestly, I feel like we’re dealing with a completely alien, a-American ideology that has infected America, not through the universities, but some other mechanism.
Way back in the day, I read Satrapi’s Persepolis, and Satrapi (or one of her characters) claimed Bakunin was “the anarchist,” so naturally I read Bakunin, found him insightful, and attempted to find like-minded people online.
Unfortunately, the anarchist communities I found were infested with violent communists who seemed unclear on the principle of not coercing others, so I left. I was pretty busy those days so I didn’t give it too much thought; I figured perhaps weird ideologies just attracted a lot of crazy people.
I understand people who don’t like coercion or just don’t like other people telling them what to do. There are plenty of old-fashioned freedom-loving, libertarian-minded folks in my own family, after all.
This “anti-fascist” business, though, feels entirely alien. After all, how can you be “anti-fascist” in a country that has never had a significant fascist presence? You might as well call yourself anti-malaria.
Maybe there are organized fascist parties in Europe for anti-fascists to attack. I’m not European so I don’t really know, but I hear that dynamic is more of a thing over there. But over here, what boogeyman are they forced to invent to justify their existence? The Republicans?
No matter what your politics, you have to admit that’s some pretty bad linguistic creep.
Anyway, sorry this post is kind of late. Things have been really busy around here lately. (Whoops, looks like Thursday’s post went up before this one!)
On to the Comments of the Week:
Here’s BaruchK, disagreeing with me on “The Government is Us”: Brahmin Tic and the Civil War:
>which side you’re on probably has a lot to do with whether or not the government marched in and burned down your great-great-great-grandparents’ farm in 1864
I don’t think so.
Lower and middle class whites in various factory towns in the North and West are generally not huge fans of the government (especially since the government has decided to ethnically cleanse them from their neighborhoods via proxy racial warfare.)
It has more to do with whether you/your friends and loved ones are in a government-affiliated career field or community (the military and law enforcement are somewhat excluded, though the more intellectual parts of the military like the NSA lean left.)…
RTWT
and Chauncey Tinker, offering a positive perspective on Rumor, Outrage, and “Fake News”:
I think this is really a teething problem. The internet is still too new for systems to have evolved. Just a few years ago Wikipedia was really unreliable but it has improved a lot. A teenager managed to insert his name into several pages stating that he was a company executive although he wasn’t. Now its much harder to do this sort of thing.
Its easy to see the negative aspects and miss the positive ones as well. What has become increasingly obvious, thanks to alternative news sites and social media, is how much the current mainstream media that we have relied on for so long often in fact are misleading us by misrepresenting what is really going on. A good example of this was seen in coverage of the migrant crisis in Europe. The migrants were overwhelmingly fit young men, but the MSM chose to publish pictures of the few small children and women who were among them, giving a hugely distorted picture of what was really going on. The MSM’s “politically correct” agenda has been to a degree exposed and undermined by video evidence that circulates on youtube. …
A couple of my posts on related matters:
Here are a couple more quotes I saved over the weekend:
So guys, how’s it going? What are you thinking about?
evolutionistx 
[…] Source: Evolutionist X […]
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The 4chan quote is probably fake and pretty much completely unverifiable. Remember /b/’s disclaimer “The stories and information posted here are artistic works of fiction and falsehood.Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact.” or what it is usually summarised as “Autistic works of fiction”.
My understanding is Antifas evolved or are a subset of anarchist and socialist groups mainly focussed on combating fringe nationalist parties like the National Front (UK) or the Front National (FRA), whatever their equivalents were in other Western Europe countries etc, in the 70s-90s. Honestly they’re just black bloc dickheads who want to pretend they’re fighting Hitler.
The general dressing in black and breaking stuff style of leftwing activisim is known as black blocs. Basically just dress up in black cover your face and break things. I think it was popularised as a tactic originally against groups like the IMF and WTO, in the US at least it was probably due to “The battle for Seattle”, that was opposition to the WTO. You get routine riots and mischief by groups who perform the same behaviour for various left wing causes all around the world. I think Oakland has a lot of those guys behaving like dicks semi-consistently.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_bloc
Also did you see the posts floating around summarising and talking about leftist radicalism in the 70s and their institutional backing? Reminded me of your Stanford post.
https://storify.com/sphenoid/days-of-rage-pt-1
https://storify.com/sphenoid/days-of-rage-part-3
https://storify.com/sphenoid/days-of-rage-pt-4
https://storify.com/sphenoid/days-of-rage-pt-5-finale-what-does-it-portend
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Thanks for the information!
Ironic that the folks fighting against globalism in Seattle are fighting for it now.
I agree that it’s unverifiable. Ah, well. Interesting times.
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“But over here, what boogeyman are they forced to invent to justify their existence?”
If you are choosing sides, and this is what is going on, you can’t expect the “other side” to just show up with a banner that says, “The Other Side.” It is a concept that changes and has to be changed.
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I dunno; next time I go to a protest, maybe I’ll just bring a sign that says, “The Other Side.”
But what should I write on the back?
:)
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Pacifism and non-violent protest are legitimate and have a history. You would need to answer for yourself the question whether this pacifism is absolute or not. If it is not absolute then you need to answer the question as to when violence is permitted. Would you have joined John Brown? Would you have fired on Fort Sumter?
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The problem with second-guessing the past is that I know how things turned out.
In my experiences with people, I have found that sometimes being more peaceful works wonders, and sometimes being aggressive works wonders. Different people and different situations are, well, different. Gandhi did his thing and it worked, but I doubt it would have worked 50 years earlier–Imperial Britain wouldn’t have cared that some guy was starving to death over in India.
A lot of things people break windows over and kill people for turn out, ultimately, to either fail completely or actually make everything worse. Again, I can only say that because I have hindsight, but I consider it a strong caution. Often I think we do or advocate violence because it makes us feel good (and goodness, there are times I really want to punch someone, too,) but society is complex enough that there are a lot of problems that can’t just be solved with punching.
On the other hand, there are a lot of problems that can. Take the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia that ousted the Khmer Rouge. Sounds good to me.
I think everyone involved in the Civil War massively underestimated the amount of suffering it would cause. If they had known ahead of time, they probably would have come to some peaceful, gradual agreement.
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Violence in order to feel good is not a good thing and I am sure that you agree.
You are right about hindsight. I think that is one of the main reasons people turn to political violence. There are plenty of examples where it worked and was the “right” course of action. Also, like you said, most times it fails or makes things work. People always think that they are going to hit the winning number so they keep trying.
“If they had known ahead of time, they probably would have come to some peaceful, gradual agreement.”
The slave owning aristocracy wanted to keep its position. Slavery was going to be abolished. If they fought a war, there was a chance that they could win and delay the elimination of slavery. It was the rational choice for the slave owning aristocracy. As it turned out they were able to re-assert control, but this would not have been assured beforehand.
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I think maybe we get overly hung up on labels where they are of limited utility. Antifas seems not dissimilar from any number of insane 1960s groups.
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Right. Not to mention insane 1860s groups, and insane 1760s groups.
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This is true, though I think a lot of the insanity of the 60s died down for a long time.
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Off topic, but you’d posted something about SAHMs (on Twitter?), which is a topic near and dear to me. When my first child was born, we decided that it made little sense for me to keep working (a mix of retail and military reserve duty) just to pay for childcare. At the time, I was still fairly progressive, and figured that being a SAHD was about the pinnacle of achievement for an American man. It still garners a mess of status amongst the progs, but quickly became a pretty bitter red pill. SAHMs are treated so thoroughly poorly in my social and economic strata that most of them are buckets of neurotic insanity (which is not great for their kids).
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It’s an open thread, new topics are welcome. :)
Isolation is one of the biggest problems for SAHPs. I love my kids–they’re wonderful, funny, sweet, kind, great, etc.–but babies are terrible conversationalists. It’s especially frustrating if you’re the first/only person in your friend group who has kids, because most childless adults don’t exactly think going to the playground or the zoo sounds like fun, and you can’t haul kids along to the club. (And the zoo is not cheap!)
It’s made me appreciate religion more, as most churches/synagogues I’ve encounter have some kind of kids’ program, community programs, parent-socializing program, etc., free or cheap.
I’m curious about what’s up with your economic/social strata.
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I felt my post turning into a rant and cut it short. We started younger than most of our peers, and are solidly upper middle class. It gets a bit funky now that we swapped thedes to team orthodox Jewish, since parents start younger, and money expectations are very different. That said, Jewish schools are expensive (if we get national vouchers we’ll be rich).
The crazy thing about the Jewish community is that the mainline, secular synagogues don’t even have much in the way of kids programming. We were often the only young parents hanging around at events. Secular Jews are something like 80%+ of American Jews, but had less than half the Jewish kids in the last few years .
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I suppose religious organization tend to do as many kids’ programs as they need. I got dragged to a very Mainline Protestant kids’ Christmas celebration, and my kids actually spent the whole time trying to leave because they were bored.
Orthodox Jews try to live near their synagogues so they can walk, right? I imagine that would make for a much stronger community.
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Antifa is American as apple pie. The use of violence to achieve political objectives is nothing new to communists, and America is a communist country. The original communist country. Don’t forget the civil war. Antifa is just updated antisla.
The reason why you’re seeing more antifa stuff now is that the communists have lost control of the Potemkin government. It’s not that they didn’t exist; it’s that rioting did not serve much political purpose. Pressuring Obama from the left was easy enough without violence. So using violence was fairly senseless.
I doubt that screenie you have there is legit — it’s too good — but in a sense it does not matter who posted it. The problem it depicts for the antifas is real. If the Trump admin actually does throw the book at those guys and get some long sentences, the antifas will take a huge blow. (The Potemkim government does have some power.) It’s fun to set fires and beat up people who can’t fight back; you get laid even if it’s some pierced blue-haired crazy chick. But only if there are no real negative consequences. Getting laid a few times is not worth a few years in prison.
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Dems constitute the majority of the bureaucracy and I think they’ve gotten used to thinking of the gov’t as theirs, so now they feel like it’s been stolen. They are not reacting terribly well.
Agreed.
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So, is there any objective measure on that “doomsday clock” that’s supposedly at 2 minutes til midnight now, or is it just the opinions of a group of people of, I assume, a certain political persuasion?
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I’d wager it’s a little of both.
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So, a little googling shows that they consider things now more dangerous than 1962. Unless they have access to Soviet and American files indicating that things simply weren’t as scary then as we tend to believe now, I’m rather skeptical of any of their pronouncements…
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“The Clock’s setting is decided by The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’s Science and Security Board and is completely arbitrary without a specified starting time. The Clock is not set and reset in real time as events occur; rather than respond to each and every crisis as it happens, the Science and Security Board meets twice annually to discuss global events in a deliberative manner.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_Clock
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The doomsday clock is pseudoscience.
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Human Biological and Psychological Diversity
http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40806-016-0081-5
Enjoy.
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Sorry to bother. I wanted to ask what the German Nazis view on IQ and IQ testing was. From what I know they didnt realy percieve intelligence as a very valuable trait in the first place, prefering physical strenght, endurance and “nordic racial traits”. They bred warriors not thinkers. Also one does hear that they banned IQ testing or at least strongly disliked it.
Do you know anything specific?
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My impression is the opposite, but I can’t recall reading anything definite on the subject. I honestly haven’t done much research on Nazis.
I heard they didn’t like cigarettes, though.
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[…] to comments of the week. First I’m reposting Unknown128′s question because I can’t answer it, but maybe one of you folks […]
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[…] Open Thread is on Antifas?… and the bone-crushing ignorance of the average journalist… among other things. My […]
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sorry what do you mean with “oposite”? That they didnt value intelligence or that they did?
I mean they were quiet anti intelectual and intelligence and its development was usualy a secondary topic even in their elite schools
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I think y’all need to understand the War of Northern Aggression time line a little better
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I wrote a lot of articles on antifa if you want to know more about them. Let me know what you think :^)
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Okay, thanks.
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Is your site still under construction?
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im trying to build it up over time. i plan on making it more and more polished as i go. Right now i’m /poor/ so i’m just making it better as i go.
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