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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   38173 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 5, 2023

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How is this extremism? His politics essentially are that he wants to avoid massive demographic change that will not only greatly replace his own ethnic group but also causes a low trust and dysfunctional society. Not wanting wage dumping by cheap illegal migrants isn't extremism.

Wanting to fire 750 000 rounds containing depleted uranium over Iraq causing thousands of children to get birth defects is more extreme than not wanting mass migration. Wanting to burn thousands of Libyans alive in firestorms in order to turn Africa's most developed country into a mess run by jihadist groups is extremism. Killing a thousand people without trial by targeted drone strikes is extremism. Labelling every 16+ year old man in Afghanistan a legitimate military target while backing drug cartel government is extremism. Bailing out the banks while people foreclose on their homes is extremism. Going 30 000 000 000 000 dollars in debt largely due to spending more on the military than the next 9 biggest militaries combined when your neighbors are Canada and Mexico is extremism. The patriot act and the incredible power of the NSA is extreme. Pretty much the entirety of mainstream Republican Party positions are extremist positions that ordinary people would have a difficult time supporting if it was explained to them.

Wanting the politics that Republicans would call far left anti Israel politics if it was applied to Israel isn't right wing extremism just because it is in the US. Why is a wall In Israel not an extremist policy, but a wall separating the Mexican drug war from the US is when tens of thousands of Americans die of fentanyl overdoses every year?

Wanting to fire 750 000 rounds containing depleted uranium over Iraq causing thousands of children to get birth defects

What birth defects?

the reviewed studies and the available research evidence do not provide a clear increase in birth defects and a clear indication of a possible environmental exposure including depleted uranium

Are you under the impression that the only thing Fuentes, BAP, etc endorse is an end to mass immigration and ‘the wall’? They make fun of the wall all the time.

Wanting to fire 750 000 rounds containing depleted uranium over Iraq causing thousands of children to get birth defects is more extreme than not wanting mass migration.

Not understanding the difference between terminal goals and instrumental goals is more extreme than doing so.

Killing a thousand people without trial by targeted drone strikes is extremism.

I heard that the Ukrainians have killed more than two thousand Russians without trial. If you're at war with someone (declared or not) that's sort of the point.

This is just an anti-Republican Gish Gallop.

Not understanding the difference between terminal goals and instrumental goals is more extreme than doing so.

Claiming to advocate for the war while being against the results of the war is absurd. Did they advocate for invading Iraq with water guns? Advocating for these wars was advocating for extreme violence and the death of vast numbers of innocent people. Did they actively speak out against torturing people, bombing their homes and committing numerous war crimes? Did they demand that the US army stopped defending drug cartels in Afghanistan when the price of heroin fell through the floor?

If you're at war with someone (declared or not) that's sort of the point.

Exactly, advocating for war is advocating tremendous tragedy. Advocating for unprovoked wars in the middle east is extreme.

I took the so-called extremist position, after 9/11 the obvious solution was that people living in a cave in Afghanistan shouldn't be allowed to enter western countries.

Advocating for bombing the middle east for 20 years, spending trillions of dollars of borrowed money and flooding the west with migrants was apparently the non extremist position.

Claiming to advocate for the war while being against the results of the war is absurd.

"Not being against" and "wanting to" aren't the same thing.

Advocating for bombing the middle east for 20 years, spending trillions of dollars of borrowed money and flooding the west with migrants was apparently the non extremist position.

"Killing a thousand people without trial by targeted drone strikes is extremism" implies that you are objecting because of the number of kills, not because of the expense or migrants. In fact, you listed the expense separately.

Extremism must surely be defined in relation to the political mainstream, and wanting a massive reduction in immigration partly on grounds of 'demography' is really quite far outside that mainstream.

Wanting the politics that Republicans would call far left anti Israel politics if it was applied to Israel isn't right wing extremism just because it is in the US. Why is a wall In Israel not an extremist policy, but a wall separating the Mexican drug war from the US is when tens of thousands of Americans die of fentanyl overdoses every year?

The advocatus diabolus case would probably be something like: "Because what is extremism and what isn't is path-dependent, and the Jews have recent historical form to believe that people are trying to genocide them, whereas white people don't. They're karmically allowed a surfeit of caution, you're not."

But this is fairly easily defeated by pointing out that in 1933 no-one had recently tried to genocide the Jews, but this time they actually were. The fact that systematic extermination hadn't been seen before was insufficient defence against it happening in 1933, and so by analogy it's no defence against it happening to whites in 2023.

But this is fairly easily defeated by pointing out that in 1933 no-one had recently tried to genocide the Jews

Not fully, but Jews had been conditioned over the past 100 years to the idea that their neighbors could turn on them at any moment in smaller-scale violence (i.e., "only" 5-10 dead, and maybe a dozen women raped plus various property destruction, sub-lethal beatings, etc.) which occasionally escalated in turn into something much worse. Like, imagine if the 1992 LA anti-Korean riots kept occurring in LA every 5 years or so, with fatalities each time. Or if BLM went out and rampaged through white suburbs every couple years. Under those conditions, it seems pretty obvious why they would have been a mite twitchy.

But this is fairly easily defeated by pointing out that in 1933 no-one had recently tried to genocide the Jews, but this time they actually were. The fact that systematic extermination hadn't been seen before was insufficient defence against it happening in 1933, and so by analogy it's no defence against it happening to whites in 2023.

I'm not a big fan of the 'holocaust means Israel gets to do settler colonialism' argument but your argument is either trivial or really bad. If your point is "an unprecedented thing happened once, therefore the probability of it happening again is not 0", then sure, but that doesn't tell us anything about what the actualy probability is. If your point is the probability of Jews getting genocided in 1930's Germany is similar to the probability of whites being genocided in 2020's America that's ridiculous. Just the difference in population share should be enough to indicate the situation is wildly different before we even get into the waves of pogroms that swept Eastern Europe during the Russian Revolution and the relative recency of Jewish legal equality in Germany.

The better argument is that identity politics shouldn't stop at race. "People like me" were very much subject to murder and internment, more recently and in more places than the Jews, the rich the educated and Christians were killed or imprisoned in Cambodia, China, Russia. That those people were "like me" in our social class and means of subsistence rather than in some nebulous genetic sense doesn't alter the impact.

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