Right-wing vs. Left-wing Clashes [MOD NOTE POST #1]

Inquitus wrote: »

The Legend Of Kira wrote: »

What exactly do " Nazism, Racism or White Supremacy " have to do with a rational public debate on Immigration policy ? what,s the relevance ? other countries publicly debate Immigration like Australia + the Uk , are such public debates " nazi " or " racist " in your view ?

Your entire debate in this thread is around normalising White Supremacist, Nazi, Racist, protestors in Charlottesville, you cannot pick and choose how you define that given what you have said in this thread, clearly you think White Supremacy, Nazism and Racism are deserving or a platform and I disagree with you.

You dodged what I asked you in other post, but since you like to conflate " White Supremacy, Nazi, Racism " with a public debate on Immigration here are two tweets from Elaine Byrne regarding Immigration not being debated etc.




By those tweets is she advocating " " White Supremacy, Nazi, Racism " in your view ?

Ah, I searched up the thread a bit to find out your position.

Eric Cartman wrote: »

The protest is against the continued destruction of white and conservative history in the US, it was organised and attended by a lot of the moderate right. Some white supremacists joined in because it aligns with their beliefs, . . .

It was not organised or attended by "a lot of the moderate right." For attendees, see the link in the previous post. It was organised by Jason Kessler, a notorious white supremacist. Are white supremacists now considered moderate right? Maybe so. I despair.

"The continued destruction of white and conservative history"? Please. Sensible people realise that the enslavement of humans is a shameful period of our history. Especially since the terrorist Dylann Roof shot up the black church in Charleston several years ago, lots of towns across the South have attempted to get rid of the Confederate statues and shrines that were erected during the 1920s, with the rise of the Klan, to intimidate blacks who were attempting to assert their rights.

I'm a native Virginian, so please forget about "schooling me" on the South or on Robert E. Lee. Someone upthread defended Lee. Read this, and understand why no one but hardcore white supremacists should support his cult of personality:
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/06/the-myth-of-the-kindly-general-lee/529038/


I'm also an alumnus of the University of Virginia, so I know Charlottesville pretty well. They deserve so much better than this. Brave of them to stand up against Nazis, KKK, and other white supremacists flooding into their beautiful and once peaceful city.

Eric Cartman wrote: »

it was organised and attended by a lot of the moderate right.

Fake news

Sad!

Eric Cartman wrote: »

I was not aware of that. I'll have to do some further research into Kessler.

Slavery is ofcourse a shameful part of history but the american civil war is an incredibly important time period in US history, I personally believe the statue is not to celebrate slavery but a reminder of that time period, history, no matter how awful should never be forgotten or destroyed.

Yes, sometimes it should be, when symbols of its power are left to become symbols of a new generation with the same ideals as the old one. That is why the statues of dictators are famously toppled when the regime falls. It is a symbol of a new dawn without the evils of the past.

It should not be forgotten, quite, but there is a clear line between remembering the past and idolising it.

Why should, say, black people who live there have to put up with that statue still acting as a beacon to those that would happily see them killed or driven out? Why is the history of the aggressors more important than the life now of the descendants of their victims? And why was that statue worth more than human life to James Fields and those that have lauded him?

wonderfullife wrote: »

It's just a catch-22 situation.

If you just *ignore* the assembly of white nationalists, racists etc it empowers and emboldens them to grow their base. It's just like any cult, the more you let them talk without pushback, the more followers they will attract.

On the other hand, counter-protesting always seems to end up in arrests and violence and that holds true across the world, even in Ireland. Obviously plenty of examples up north of counter-protests to Orange marches etc, it never seems to end well.

So I don't know really what the answer is.

There are third and fourth options, though. The third option is to allow them to have their march / rally, and then organise a rally for an opposing ideology the following week, showing that this has far greater numbers. Rather than directly confronting the racist march, have a pro-equality march afterwards and entirely separately, and let the numbers speak for themselves.

I make the same argument with regard to pro-choice and pro-life marches. I detest "counter demos" for many reasons - rather than trying to disrupt or impede the march you disagree with, I say respect their right to free speech and then challenge their ideology with a march of your own, on a different day.

The fourth option is ridicule. Rather than opposing them in a confrontational way, if you must try to disrupt them, do so with comedy. Far more effective and far less likely to descend into anarchy - one of my favourite videos of the last few years is this guy, who saw a KKK march passing his house and decided to have a bit of craic with a tuba:



Straight away he's making them look moronic without giving them any claim to martyrdom - he's not trying to physically impose upon their right to assembly, he's not attacking them, he's certainly not intimidating - and yet he manages to make them all look like a bunch of absolute muppets.

Put it this way - if you had a suspicion that James Alex Fields was going to get in his car any moment and murder people, you'd punch him in the nose, beat the crap out of him and wait for the police right? You wouldn't just let him go kill people.

That is correct. But speech and physical violence are two entirely different things.

The sad reality of Donald Trump is most of his base are racists. Most of them are longing for an idealized version of America that is never coming back. An America where men are men, women are women, whites are in charge, coal-mining and manual labour jobs are plentiful...

Instead the future is technology, education, diversity, progress.

I agree. But they have a right to hold and express whatever backwards opinions they feel like holding, even if we detest them. Such a right is fundamentally important in a democratic society. Should they evolve from merely stating their hatred to openly advocating for violence, that becomes an entirely different matter, because they are now guilty of conspiracy to violence. But to use a relevant analogy for the European alt-right, there's a huge difference between #KillAllMuslims and #IslamIsEvil. The former is a call to violence, the latter is an expression of a hateful opinion. Even though I despise the latter ideology, we must all reluctantly accept that people must have the right to air their opinions.

To my mind there's an inevitability that there's going to be huge violence in the next decade in America because there's simply too many people rejecting an inevitable path towards change.

I agree, but I regard the alt-left (AKA the SJW left) and its deliberate antagonism of disaffected straight, white men (the only group that it currently acceptable to direct hate speech towards) as being hugely responsible for this. If you poke a bear often enough, it's going to try to maul you. The idiots who do things like tweet #KillAllMen and then say "well, I'm a woman, so because I don't have privilege it's impossible for me to be sexist - but men can't fire anything back, bwa ha ha" are fuelling this sh!te.

There's a fantastic article about how the deliberate attempts to antagonise and goad white people are contributing to the rise in alt-right attitudes:

Note that this author doesn't actually defend hatred, he merely points out that it is an inevitable consequence of having one's identity dragged through the coals for no legitimate reason.

http://thefederalist.com/2016/05/23/how-anti-white-rhetoric-is-fueling-white-nationalism/ - "How anti-white rhetoric is fuelling white nationalism"

"One of the key components to the success of this racism is the almost-daily parade of silly micro-aggressions and triggers, specifically on college campuses. Conservative media seize upon disputes over the cultural appropriation of taco night or banning hoopskirts as evidence that minority racial grievance has gotten unhinged."

And

"Young white men, reacting to social and educational constructs that paint them as the embodiment of historical evil, are fertile ground for white supremacists. They are very aware of the dichotomy between non-white culture, which must be valued at all times (even in the midst of terror attacks), and white culture, which must be criticized and devalued. They don’t like it.

The result of these societal double standards is for many a desire to lash out against it. For every white college student who dutifully accepts his privilege, many more resent the idea and wish to fight it. The sharpest arrow in their quiver is to be offensive."

This situation will keep getting worse until the deliberate antagonism and trolling of white men by the "liberal" left is opposed. I mean I even found myself getting sucked down the Voat rabbit hole for a few brief moments when I got so utterly fed up of all the "men are the root of all evil in the world" narrative being pushed by the mainstream media. It's inevitable that for every ten people who take a glance at it and decide that it's too racist and too sexist for them to stomach, there'll be one person who's angry enough at having their identity constantly attacked that they won't care - and these are the "unite the right" marchers of tomorrow.

It's all about perspective and to those looking on what is being remembered or commemorated as important - is a statue of Oliver Cromwell appropriate or a bronze cast depicting famine victims...a statue of Hitler or enshrining Auschwitz-Birkenau as a memorial...just because history is important doesn't mean it isn't equally important for moving forward, healing and forgiveness what emphasis is put on that history....

BillyBobBS wrote: »

The KKK and Antifa looked like the idiots they are at these clashes. White hoods, black hoods flipping jumped up twats. Morons at the far extremes of the left and right wings.

It is a good auld fashioned Southern Family Feud. Both so alike one can hardly tell the difference and most ordinary people happy to let the complete asshole collective to it.

Eric Cartman wrote: »

Slavery is of course a shameful part of history but the american civil war is an incredibly important time period in US history, I personally believe the statue is not to celebrate slavery but a reminder of that time period, history, no matter how awful should never be forgotten or destroyed.

The purpose of these monuments was, and for many, still is, to venerate "heroes" of the Confederacy and to support what they stood for. The defenders of these monuments --- as well as the Confederate flag --- do not see them as remnants of a shameful past, but as symbols to rally round in support of the ideals of white (male, Christian) supremacy. How could there be any more clear demonstration of this than what happened this weekend? Nazis and KKK rallying around a monument to their "superiority," shouting hateful racist, antisemitic, and homophobic slurs and attacking people who challenge their dangerous delusions.

Charlottesville doesn't want a magnet for haters its park. Imagine that.

Eric Cartman wrote: »

Well I suppose theres two sides to every story, there was the planned statue of che guevara to be erected in galway, I'm sure there are a lot of cubans who would be horrified and upset at a statue being erected to a murderous tyrant, then again many see him as a freedom fighter. There still remains some statues to lenin who's communist regime killed millions, sure even a US context the very holiday of thanksgiving is considered offensive to native americans. I don't think you can erect a statue of any historical figure without pissing off a lot of people. If it was a new statue planned I'd completely agree that its no longer appropriate but considering firstly that the statue was already in place, the period in history it concerns is a long time ago and the controversy it has caused , I would be in favor of leaving it.

It's one of those things that can be debated, but I'm in favour of taking it down as the city and many of its people wanted. These statues were erected mostly in the 1920s (not at the stage of the war itself) during a period of gentrification in many southern towns. This gentrification was quite often violent, but pretty much always focussed on shoving out the undesirables who brought the tone of the area down. That most certainly included black people.

The history that this statue is most emblematic of to those in the area (although perhaps the poster who grew up near there could correct me if I'm wrong) is the history of the poorer societies being pushed or thrown out, and these erected as markers of boundaries. That specifically applies to this statue of Lee and one of Jackson. http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/history/2017/06/how_charlottesville_s_confederate_statues_helped_decimate_the_city_s_historically.html

It's an interesting read. But this is not even all about the American war. This is an enduring insult, a symbol of black people in particular not really being people - and it's from more recent times than the Civil War. It continued being such in at least the lifetimes of the parents of many people living there. And now it's being used for similar purposes again. In my opinion, people have a stronger right not to have to live under a symbol of oppression than others do to have a symbol of oppression to admire and emulate.

As an aside to that, I'm bemused by the statue to Che Guevara in Galway, but I'm going to guess he had Irish ancestry. Him and half the rest of the world, and I think a statue to him is a daft idea.

Eric Cartman wrote: »

As for James Fields, if he was left wing, a muslim etc... you would have people out to say "ohh lone wolf, mental illness etc... ". I however will go with my hardline view on all people who do these things, regardless of political affiliation, ideology or any other factor, this guy was an asshole, a man completely devoid of compassion who murdered innocent people to defend nothing. The world would be better off without him.

Well, he's not left-wing, and there was someone in here earlier who was, I kid you not, arguing that obviously what happened was that a poor innocent white man was being surrounded and attacked by violent protesters and in fear of his life, he floored it. A "reporter" on the scene whose twitter feed I stumbled across was reporting in the face of all available evidence, which included video and PHOTOS OF THE PRISTINE CAR*, was adamant that it was covered in dents from the violent beating the nasty protesters had given it. She was standing at the scene, seeing the blood still on the ground and the shocked people around her, deliberately lying about it. Taylor something. Fake news artist extraordinaire and complete failure of a human being.

I'm with you on that he and his fanatical ilk, regardless of which ideology they are willing to sacrifice other people's lives for, are worthless scum, btw.

*Pristine bar the front, ofc, but even she wasn't attempting to argue that the smashed in front was from a baseball bat. Probably only because she didn't think of it in time though.

oscarBravo wrote: »

The Legend Of Kira wrote: »

...here are two tweets from Elaine Byrne regarding Immigration not being debated etc.

[...]

By those tweets is she advocating " " White Supremacy, Nazi, Racism " in your view ?

No, she's just being disingenuous. We have controls on immigration. The myth that we have uncontrolled immigration is one of the bizarre falsehoods that are so often trotted out to justify xenophobia.

Her first post that " Ireland is behind on Immigration debate " she is correct saying that as its a political issue that,s not publicly debated in the present or in recent years .

oscarBravo wrote: »

A Little Pony wrote: »

ROI is part of the EU, you most certainly don't have control over EU immigration. Any EU workers can work in Ireland if they have a job lined up.

Sure, like Carlow doesn't have control over immigration from Longford. There's no debate to be had over immigration from the EU, other than the whole "we need to control all foreigners coming in here" aspect of it, which - let's face it - still boils down to xenophobia.

Phobia is a word which is defined as a fear in most dictionaries, saying " control Immigration " I don,t see anything fearful in saying that statement, some of us may of migrated to Australia or had friends/relatives that migrated there in recent years, as many people will be aware if you migrate to Australia there are strict conditions for entry + if you overstat your welcome on your visa you get deported or if you have a criminal record you will be refused entry into their country, this is controlled Immigration which is perfectly reasonable .