Comment by gortok
6 days ago
The humorous part to me is when folks talk badly about 'antifa' they either forget or gloss over what the 'fa' means in antifa.
6 days ago
The humorous part to me is when folks talk badly about 'antifa' they either forget or gloss over what the 'fa' means in antifa.
Probably not as humorous as this: https://i.redd.it/000igemozcl61.jpg
The Berlin Wall was officially called the "Anti-Fascist Protection Rampart". Russia claims they are fighting in Ukraine to denazify their regime. North Korea is called the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.
A bit naive to take these self-appointed labels at face value.
Sure but gay rights activists were sincere about gay rights.
AIDS activists like Act Up were genuine about the threat of AIDS.
The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in the civil rights movement were genuinely students committed to nonviolence.
The suffragists genuinely wanted woman's suffrage.
But for anti-fascists, we have jpeg memes calling them fools.
Just like how racists dismissed the civil rights movement, homophobes dismissed gay marriage, people against women voting dismissed suffragists, and people made jokes about AIDS in the 80s, people who dismiss anti fascists are probably... well...
We'd all like to imagine we're August Landmesser - especially those who were driving around with American flag bumper stickers during things like Abu ghraib. The ones who are most fervent about saluting also swear they'd never be heiling. Sure.
Right. Nobody ever thinks they're the bastard.
>But for anti-fascists, we have jpeg memes calling them fools.
Yes, because "fascist" is possibly one of the most abused words in our political landscape.
If a group showed up from the right promising to beat up "commies" I don't think people would be too keen on that either.
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You can make arguments against people you disagree with without using rhetoric that self-identifies oneself as 'fa'. Most 'fa' strangely chose not to.
To be clear: the comment I'm replying to is a thinly veiled (if snark can be considered a veil) accusation of the GP being a fascist. This is apparently based on pointing out that groups of people don't always have names that accurately reflect their actions, from an outside view. I don't understand how this is supposed to follow logically.
No, they don't. Highlighting the irony is a core aspect of the critique, in fact.
they've redefined it as "first amendment". Also they've convinced themselves that hypernationalistic fascism was somehow a project of the leftists the fascists rounded up and slaughtered.
It's the same mechanism of imagining an enemy causing the negative consequences of the policies they advocate for.
It's actually the core thing that connects tech startups, conspiracy theories, medical quackery, and fascism - a desire to be guided by the imaginary and construct necessary delusions to deny reality.
Wildest thing is, every now and then, it works out - the most delusional Bitcoin people of 2010 are genuinely billionaires now.
Most of the richest people had to deeply believe in what was, at some time, an irrational fantasy and that taking inadvisable acts of insanity would somehow work out.
> the most delusional Bitcoin people of 2010 are genuinely billionaires now.
It seems a bit odd to call them delusional while in the same breath admitting that they were right all along.
Both are true. The world is complicated.
You can go to the old Bitcointalk forum. Some people stocked up, for instance, because they thought the American dollar and civilization would collapse in 2012 due to the supposed Mayan apocalypse.
Some bought feverishly in 2016 predicting a communist takeover by Hilary Clinton...
There's many dumb reasons people bought and held.
Think back about what investments you could have done to maximize your income - you'll invariably come up with things like "I should have put my life savings into Tesla before they delivered they're first car instead of $100. Then I should have held on regardless"
or "I should have trusted that Steve Jobs returning to Apple after failing at Next was going to be a legendary turnaround by combining his failed NextStation into a new operating system. Then he'll come out with Apple Newton 2.0 and it will make them one of the most powerful companies in the world"
If I had told you in say, 2004, to take all the high end CRTs being tossed out en masse, put them in a huge barn in the desert and then sell them for thousands each in 20 years, you'd call me nuts.
These are all absurd things that happened.
You can be a stupid fool and still hit it right sometimes.
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