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Politics: where a week is a long time
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There are no “banned dr Seuss books”.
Exactly! They banned them, so they don’t exist! Here’s a picture of Biden throwing the last known copies into the White House barbecue last week:
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This whole thing is more entertainment than politics I think. People like to pretend to be outraged by this stuff. Yes a lot of popular culture is dumb, but that doesn’t mean a return to traditional values like the right pretends to be in favor of would be a good thing.
The problem is that there are a lot of people who legitimately want to do all that stupid shit like remove rights from LGBT people, women, ethnic minorities, legislate against rock and rap music or whatever. And there are a lot of people who claim to be for those things because it gets them attention and money, and then people who claim to be for those things because it gets them political support. But radicalisation works very effectively via social media and it’s very easy to go from “ironic” racism to actual racism and all of a sudden the politicians and pundits who thought they could control the reactionary mob find themselves having to kowtow to them or lose support – see the reaction to any conservative who even vaguely criticised Trump in the last 6 years for example.
All that said, I guarantee that in 20 years or so, if Cardi B decides what WAP was a bit too much and decides to stop selling the song, Candace Owens and Ben Shapiro or their somehow even worse equivalents will be decrying this as censorship by whatever buzzword used to demonise the other side is in vogue at the time.
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There are no “banned dr Seuss books”.
Where have you been?
https://apnews.com/article/dr-seuss-books-racist-images-d8ed18335c03319d72f443594c174513
Those books weren’t banned, the publishers decided not to reprint them. And if that counts as banning books, I have some very bad news for you about 90% of all books ever published.
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It’s all a strategy to engage in this culture war. Here is an interesting article:
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.
This whole thing is more entertainment than politics I think. People like to pretend to be outraged by this stuff.
It’s a thin line. Remember all the War on Christmas crap on the O’Reilly Factor years ago. Sure, it’s entertainment, it’s getting attention and money in, but it’s also stoking a “culture war” by building straw men all over the place and then starting the rage. It’s a big part of what made those people storm the Capitol.
It’s an interesting analysis that they’re doubling down on this because Biden doesn’t give them much to attack.
From the article:
The conservatives’ relentless focus on culture wars rather than the new president highlights both their strategy for regaining power in Washington and their challenge in doing so. Unlike previous Democratic leaders, Biden himself simply isn’t proving to be an easy target or animating figure for the GOP base, prompting Republicans to turn to the kind of cultural issues the party has used to cast Democrats as elitist and out of touch with average Americans.
Also, it sounds like the White House knows what it’s doing:
Biden’s strategy on the culture war issues has been to largely not engage. White House press secretary Jen Psaki danced around questions about Dr. Seuss.
Biden himself has largely stayed gaffe-free, with the exception of his calling decisions by Republican governors to lift mask mandates “Neanderthal,” which generated a brief tempest on the right.
Instead, the West Wing has focused on the relief bill, believing that Americans will reward results, not controversy.
“The cancel culture is a huge meme on the right and it may work with the base, but the base is not the country at large,” said David Axelrod, former senior adviser to Obama. “That is a sideshow right now, the main event is the virus and how quickly are we going to be able to get back to normal.”
Biden, Axelrod said, has remained “a difficult target” for the Republicans.
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Biden’s strategy on the culture war issues has been to largely not engage.
Yeah, apart from that book burning thing.
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This whole thing is more entertainment than politics I think. People like to pretend to be outraged by this stuff.
I agree. A large part of the ‘culture wars’ is essentially a concoction to spur attention and debate for click money and distraction.
We spend a lot of time talking about things that are either not true or just unimportant. None of these people actually care about the Dr Seuss books in reality, if an interviewer asked them a simple question like which titles have not been reprinted I’d bet my house they couldn’t tell you.
It’s what radio host James O’Brien does repeatedly in the UK, he asks Brexit fanatics to name one EU law they want repealed and they can never answer, even though presumably they know by now he’s going to do it. The whole thing is just manufactured anger.
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The problem is that there are a lot of people who legitimately want to do all that stupid shit like remove rights from LGBT people, women, ethnic minorities, legislate against rock and rap music or whatever.
True, I don’t deny there is a very serious side to it. It is literally the same strategy nazis used, with entartete Kunst etc. Creating the idea that your culture is under attack.
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Those books weren’t banned, the publishers decided not to reprint them
Sorry, my mistake. I guess I fell into it as well…
The GOP is apparently calling it a “canceling” of the books, conveniently leaving out the fact of the publishers decision.
The are hoping this “culture” war will create a social backlash of sorts to enable a GOP candidate to ride the wave into office. -
And there are a lot of people who claim to be for those things because it gets them attention and money, and then people who claim to be for those things because it gets them political support.
Yup and it’s sad too that the confrontation that creates builds barriers. It puts people naturally on a defensive footing so we can get the scenario where the well intentioned but poorly communicated get slammed down. That then puts them on the defensive.
It’s why I still adore the Neville Southall thing from a few years ago. Where he as a white middle aged man very sincerely asked to understand trans issues because he was coaching kids and it came up and he didn’t know anything about it. The level of sincerity in every direction in that conversation was so refreshing, by entering with an open mind and no ego.
A couple of years back I met a work colleague in a pub and this Canadian woman who was over for a couple of weeks introduced herself randomly as she knew nobody. She started a conversation with my colleague, a Chinese Malaysian, about where he mentioned ‘Malays’ and not being one. Now Malay is actually an ethnic identity, in fact technically Thai and Indonesian and Filipino people can and have been described as Malay. Unlike in the west where ‘Brit’ for example is just a national identity here that is split in language.
So she kept thinking he was saying he didn’t identify as a citizen which is not what he was saying at all. He wasn’t a “Malay’ in the same way a white American is not a “Native American”. In fact even the original native tribes of Malaysia are not described as Malay but ‘orang asli’ which translates as ‘original people’ as the Malays originally came from Indonesia.
If she’d asked him if he was ‘Malaysian’ he’d have given an emphatic yes but he also didn’t understand that nobody would automatically assume differently as that’s what he’s used to.
When I intervened just to try and fill the gap she aggressively told me to shut up as she wanted the ‘authentic’ voice of my friend and not mine. She may have gone back to Canada telling everyone that Chinese Malaysians feel so rejected by racism they denounce their country when to him he was just stating a simple fact, he’s not Malay. She was well intentioned but we have created a scenario where shutting down and not asking and listening sincerely is often the norm.
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Pres. Biden may have been VP under Obama, but he stands down and stands by while the Turner Diaries are published, keeping to the insane notion that is Free Speech.
I don’t think Biden maintaining freedom of speech is a clear indication that he is a KKK neo-nazi.
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Those books weren’t banned, the publishers decided not to reprint them
Sorry, my mistake. I guess I fell into it as well…
The GOP is apparently calling it a “canceling” of the books, conveniently leaving out the fact of the publishers decision.
The are hoping this “culture” war will create a social backlash of sorts to enable a GOP candidate to ride the wave into office.the manufactured outrage has been a staple of the Republicans for decades – Metal, rap, D&D, Harry Potter, opposition to so-called Cancel Culture is just the latest version
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Besides, he was alive during Woodstock so he’s probably one of them acid-dropping weed-smoking nudist hippies.
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'Really bad day': Sheriff spokesperson criticized for minimizing alleged Georgia gunman's deadly rampage https://t.co/rlZKNCWhZj pic.twitter.com/GUYswMw5E9
— Eyewitness News (@ABC7NY) March 17, 2021
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We had elections today, the result according to exit polls is expectedly boring. VVD wins, left wing liberal party D66 gains a lot of seats and comes in second. Pleasant is the fact that our far right parties PVV and FvD do pretty badly.
The numbers indicate seats, not percentages. There are 150 seats in parliament.
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Last night's shooting & the appalling rise of anti-Asian violence stem frm a sick society where nationalism has again been stoked & normalized. Anti-Black & anti-Asian racism & violence run in tandem in the U.S. Both grps were brought here for labor but never meant to be citizens
— Ida Bae Wells (@nhannahjones) March 17, 2021
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“In a Facebook page associated with Capt. Jay Baker of the Cherokee Sheriff’s Office, several photos show the law enforcer was promoting T-shirts with the slogan ‘COVID-19 imported virus from CHY-NA.’” https://t.co/UVeZvHmYSs
— Katie S. Phang (@KatiePhang) March 17, 2021
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Also, it’s not censoring to stop radicalization. It’s that not only the fact that I say that the book should not fall under the protection of the first amendment, but I also think those who continue to publish it are basically accessories to terrorism/murder. Even if that’s not the official reason they would be in trouble, it would allow some legal showing of their responsibility. It’s about justice.
Well, if you want to ban books that are proven to incite violence, you’d have to start with the Bible, The New Testament and the Koran.
Essentially, though, no book incites violence. Show me the person who was nice, tolerant and peaceful until they read the Turner Diaries and became a domestic terrorist. I’ve even read articles from foreign policy analysts that speculate Frank Herbert’s DUNE and Asimov’s FOUNDATION series influenced the formation of Al Qaeda (which apparently can be also be translated as “the foundation” in Arabic).
On the other hand, if we do actually ban books or tracts from terrorist groups like Al Qaeda, then it would be paradoxical that we wouldn’t ban the Turner Diaries or The Anarchist Cookbook. However, like trying to stop gang violence by banning video games or alcohol abuse by illegalizing alcohol, it doesn’t seem like that will solve anything. It’s wasting time and attention on the wrong thing.
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The Turner Diaries are interesting though, it has to be said. That a single piece of fiction directly inspired so many terrorists isn’t something we’ve seen often in the modern age, is it?
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Fwiw, the app Tiktok used to be video snippets of dance challenges and overall pop culture entertainment. Nowadays, a lot of college students and educators are posting social, political, and historical commentary in light of recent events, wanting to “set the record straight”.
I found out a little bit of how Asians were brought in as cheap labor (mostly on the West Coast IIRC) working on the rails among other jobs. There were fights, riots, and even massacres against them. There was even this law titled The Chinese Exclusion Act that limited their economic mobility. Add to all this, the internment camps of the Japanese Americans in WW2… Interestingly, the “model minority” myth was developed primarily in the 60’s to pit successful Asians against Blacks during the Civil Rights movement and even nowadays. Also, in some cities, the urban neighborhood development, there is a white neighborhood, followed by an Asian neighborhood, then the black one, essentially using the Asian community as a “buffer” of sorts between black and white.
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If someone was publishing pro-ISIS or Al-Qaeda tracts, then that should be banned. If anybody, Jew or Christian, was publishing tracts that were encouraging violence against LGBTQ+ people based on their interpretation of Leviticus, that should be banned. But that’s because they wrote it specifically to apply in the current situation.
However, my question is what does that accomplish? Has a book ban ever actually worked? It seems like another way to simply ignore the real problem in that the book did not create its own audience, but found an audience that was ready for it – a much smaller audience than for Atlas Shrugged or the Communist Manifesto, actually.
The only times I remember book bans being effective were in police states where the people were all too ready to throw them in the bonfires.
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In all honesty it seems a bit of a 1980s debate too.
Kalman has dedicated hundreds of posts here to his South Park episode banning, not only was it not banned by any law but decided not be reshown by the network but I just Googled it and on the first page is a link to the entire episode.
The UK used to have bans on sexy stuff when I was young, they had mags with naked people and the like but nothing stronger (as did the US for nearly as long no matter what the 1st amendment says). The existence of the internet basically makes it all pointless, as it has with betting laws.
So you can ban whatever you like but does it make any material difference?
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First, there is the problem that holding people as accessories to actual crimes when they have no physical or material participation or knowledge of them is difficult unless you are willing to give the government the ability to broadly prosecute people on a political basis. Again, another element of police states.
Second, and even more obvious, is that banning the material simply confirms its perspective that there is a conspiracy to persecute, prosecute and silence white supremacists and their only recourse to survive is to start an underground guerilla movement.
Finally, it’s cowardly. Rather than directly confront the ideology and the actual organizations, go after the Turner Diaries and turn its author into retroactive martyr for the cause and rejuvenate the movement that already disintegrated and decline which is the usual course for these groups.
Personally, I think it’s more effective to broadcast widely the ideas of the Turner Diaries and illuminate the craziness since often once the actual immature ideology of the movement becomes the source of ridicule and disgust, it does more to isolate the extremists than motivate them. Scientology found this out when their secret materials (the Xenu story) were released and Tom Cruise nearly wrecked his career trying to be a spokesman for them. Rather than banning books, take control of their perception.
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I think it’s a game of whack-a-mole if you ban a certain book. It is pretty much useless because another book or pdf file or bitchute video will pop up which does the same thing. I do agree with non-platforming to a certain extent, I don’t think it is a very good thing if twitter or youtube gives nazis a megaphone to spread their message.
There is a Dutch translation of Mein Kampf available with an explanation of the context and critical annotations that counter the ideology. That seems like a good approach to me. I don’t know why it was allowed to be published, because it had been forbidden previously.
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And then someone shoots up somewhere in the US, killing a load of people and the shooter rejects all responsibility because a book “made them do it”.
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The thing about something like the Turner Diaries is that it in and of itself isn’t going to radicalise somebody. Nobody will read it and go “This night of the Rope is a fucking great idea!” They need to be primed to accept it – they’re already radicalised to some degree and this is the thing that drives them towards violence as the output of their radicalisation.
Like, I’m an anarchist, my politics are by definition radical and I will freely admit to having been radicalised. But I’m not a bomb-throwing anarchist (so far as you all know) and I don’t think a violent uprising is the best way to instil a Worker’s Paradise. Friends of friends are outspoken anarchists on YouTube and have literally gotten shit for saying that they’d be bad at violence if the Revolution went down that road and people demanded they get into shape or they were bad anarchists.
The thing that best curtails Nazis and other violent reactionary groups is vastly restricting what is legally allowed and socially acceptable for them to do. It’s basically impossible to legislate something out of existence – you can’t really stop someone owning a Nazi flag but you can make it illegal for them to fly it in public, same for other symbols of hate. Banning book as a legal action is dodgy, but you can make it uncomfortable for a publisher to release it. A big part of the problem as well is that in the modern news environment controversy sells even moreso – a big part of Richard Spencer’s rise to fame was nominally liberal newspapers and websites doing profiles on him because he was well-dressed and erudite, spreading his message to far more people to begin with. What brought him down was activists making his life a misery when he stepped out the front door.
And ultimately, banning one specific book won’t stop people from being radicalised because at worst there’s another book with a similar message out what, a year or two later? The way you stop fascism from rising is to combat the material conditions that cause it to rise, and unfortunately fascism is the radicalisation of the middle class to reaction more than it is the manipulation of the working class. The current financial landscape where the middle class is slowly being squeezed out of existence leads to a lot of people seeing their life getting worse and a lot of media coverage of ethnic and social minorities, and wind up blaming those minorities instead of the people who are actually making things worse for them.
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Here in the Netherlands the far right is strongest in some towns that used to be far left. In East Groningen the old Dutch communist party always got a lot of votes, now those votes go to Wilders. This is an economically neglected area. Similar to how the rust belt in the US was important for Trump’s victory.
I think the lure is powerful for people who are down in some way. I admit I felt it too at times, I swung to the right a bit some time ago, but I’m not “alt right” or some white supremacist. The techniques the right uses are seductive and I was naive about that. They exploit economic discontent, but also a kind of “spiritual malaise”. They tell you your culture is under attack and is subverted and that’s why you feel like shit.
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What brought him down was activists making his life a misery when he stepped out the front door.
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The current financial landscape where the middle class is slowly being squeezed out of existence leads to a lot of people seeing their life getting worse and a lot of media coverage of ethnic and social minorities, and wind up blaming those minorities instead of the people who are actually making things worse for them.
This is the headache that is being really poorly perceived in the media. When media figures and celebrities of all races who are actually privileged with fame and fortune are on television talking about “white privilege” to working class people who are about to lose their homes because they were laid off from jobs that were already killing them for a wage that hasn’t been raised in 50 years, naturally, those people are going to ask “what white privilege?” That’s millions of white Americans and their families also currently in the middle of an opioid epidemic on top of a pandemic.
So, they’re definitely not going to think the liberals and progressives are on their side, and meanwhile the mouthpieces of the people who are eliminating their jobs and taking their houses are the ones that claim to be speaking for the working class or worse, they’ll be attracted to the race fanatics that tell them the Commie Jews, Gays and People of Color are in control and waging a war against White People.
The problem isn’t with the working class though – People of colour and LGBT people are disproportionally working class, and the spike in popularity for Trump was white, middle class people without college educations. The issues you’ve identified are genuine, but the people effected by it are different.
It is something that is missed when reporting on isolationist white nationalist communities. Many of them take the Socialist part of National Socialist very seriously in much the same way Mussolini, who was a Marxist, used it as the basis of Italian Fascism (influencing Hitler rather than the other way around).
The Socialist part of National Socialist was a lie though – they appropriated the term because it was popular and they were trying to appeal to the working class while not actually having any socialist policies, even before they purged the more leftward elements of the party. And Mussolini was a Marxist for like 3 years at most – he joined the Socialist Party in 1912, was kicked out in 1914 and had totally rejected the philosophy by 1917.
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Three Arrows has a good video in wether “Hitler was a socialist”.
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So, they’re definitely not going to think the liberals and progressives are on their side
Also because they’ve failed them.
This is the uncomfortable truth for liberals. Their solutions in the main for areas of economic decline has been to not stem the decline but paper over cracks with welfare.
As the Manic Street Preachers wrote in 1996:
Libraries gave us power
Then work came and made us free
What price now
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Three Arrows has a good video in wether “Hitler was a socialist”.
Hitler certainly wasn’t, but it is important to examine more nuance in Mussolini as he is much more responsible for the ideas central to fascism. His father was a socialist with anarchist leanings, but also an Italian nationalist, and Mussolini was raised deeply immersed in his dad’s ideology. This led to a great division from the standard Marxist idea of internationalism. Mussolini’s primary rejection of Marxism started there with the idea that nationalism was important to his socialist philosophy and that got him rejected by the Marxist.
He still believed the working class should lead society and that the State should have total control over the mode of production – the central socialist ideal. However, like all dictators, that became essentially that he should have total control – all dictators believe they are the State so in any ideology where the state is given absolute political control, it will likely become a pathway to new monarchies.
Similar to the way the Bolsheviks in Russia were able to become Stalinism. In the end, they were all dedicated Communists. There is an interesting conversation between Stephen Kotkin and Slavoj Zizek where they discuss that the big surprise revealed when the Communist Party secret archives were made available to scholars was that behind closed doors when no one outside the party was listening, the Communist leaders were still truly communist. They spoke along exactly the same terms in private as in public and their actions were justified by their Marxist-Leninist ideology.
The most apparent explanation for Stalin’s decimation of the Russian peasants (Holodomor and dekulakization) is that he needed to do it to bring communism to the entirety of Russia. The peasants had defied collectivization after the revolution and Stalin could not have a market economy in the countryside and communism only in the cities.
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Pretty much a real Nazi, though a nice guy.
“..you also had people that were very fine people, on both sides”
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State should have total control over the mode of production – the central socialist ideal.
That’s not the socialist ideal though. The socialist ideal is that the Workers control the means or production through democracy of the workplace.
Fascism is wholly incompatible with socialism because it doesn’t place any limits on industry so long as the needs of the state are fulfilled first. It’s worth noting that privatisation was a term invented to describe what the Nazis did to the German economy when they took over.
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Ideally, the state is supposed to stop existing in the stage of communism, but the apparatus of the state is necessary to accomplish that so, inevitably, the state achieves absolute control. The problem is that when that happens, that stage usually ossifies into permanence whether it’s fascism in Italy or Marxist Leninism in Russia or North Korea or Maoism in China.
I think you’re right that the central difference is that fascism doesn’t expect the state to stop existing, but in communism it ended up in the same place.
The crazy thing is that no matter how absurd the fascists and socialists are, there is really nothing more absurd or destructive as the way capitalism and capitalists have affected society and politics.
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I think fascism is mostly complete worship of and submission to the state, with violent tendencies.
Nazism is a bit different, but it is seen as a variation of fascism sometimes. I think nazism much more than Italian fascism put the emphasis on a biologically superior race and a Darwinian struggle for survival.
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Ideally, the state is supposed to stop existing in the stage of communism, but the apparatus of the state is necessary to accomplish that so, inevitably, the state achieves absolute control. The problem is that when that happens, that stage usually ossifies into permanence whether it’s fascism in Italy or Marxist Leninism in Russia or North Korea or Maoism in China.
The thing is that the USSR or China couldn’t move to communism because as you say, stateless society. You can’t have a stateless society when there are other nation-states that see your ideal society as wholly contrary to theirs. And while you can move to communism via state control, I don’t think you need to do it that way – especially as it’s very vulnerable to the flaws that we saw in the Soviet Union and China especially. The Vietnamese strain of Marxism-Leninism has certainly avoided the pitfalls of Stalinism and Maoism – but Ho was far more of a dude than Stalin and Mao.
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but Ho was far more of a dude than Stalin and Mao.
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"You really only need to hear congressman Chip Roy to understand how big the problem of race is in this country."
CNN's @DonLemon discusses the outrage over Rep. Chip Roy's comments made during a House Judiciary hearing on Asian American discrimination. https://t.co/Ee84qFZ5ik pic.twitter.com/MVVlM6GIEF
— CNN Tonight (@CNNTonight) March 19, 2021
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I think capitalism to some extent is unavoidable and probably every political system ever invented was to some extent capitalistic. It is just the human instinct to accumulate stuff, like money and resources.
The way you can combat the worst excesses of it is to declare certain resources and corporations as being under public ownership. On the other hand I think free enterprise is still a good thing, and hard work should be rewarded, so not everybody is equal, in economic terms at least. I wonder if you could institute some guideline in some companies, that the CEO can’t make more than, say 4 x what the lowest paid employee makes.
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OK, so let’s say you push this legislation out about the Turner Diaries. And then someone writes a similar book that has the same rhetoric but is sufficiently different to not be legally the same book. You’re back to step one.
Books are a tricky subject.
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Also, you can’t deny that nationalism is just as strong inside China, Vietnam and North Korea as it was in any of the European fascist countries of WW2. Certainly, communism in China seems to only be for the benefit of the Han Chinese rather than Tibetan or Uygur Chinese citizens. Probably even more than any sense of nationalism that existed in the Soviet states.
Today, I think a form of stateless society will actually more like emerge from capitalism in the anarchic interconnection of people all over the world through electronically complex connections forming inside nations while communist and dictatorial states are more likely to prevent that connection from occurring as they rely on a complete monopoly of economic and political control.
It’s worth noting that nationalism isn’t inherently bad. Irish nationalism was the core of our revolutionary movement 100 years ago, for example. White nationalism and similar movements are less about the self-determination of a particular culture and more about the imposition of one. It’s Imperialism but turned inwards.
I do agree that we’re more likely to move to a post-capitalist society through dual power structures, direct action and people working together under the nose of capitalism. Like the Aerogel revolution of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars novels.
I think capitalism to some extent is unavoidable and probably every political system ever invented was to some extent capitalistic. It is just the human instinct to accumulate stuff, like money and resources.
The way you can combat the worst excesses of it is to declare certain resources and corporations as being under public ownership. On the other hand I think free enterprise is still a good thing, and hard work should be rewarded, so not everybody is equal, in economic terms at least. I wonder if you could institute some guideline in some companies, that the CEO can’t make more than, say 4 x what the lowest paid employee makes.
The problem is that capitalism requires growth, and if you institute tight controls the capitalist class will begin eroding them as quickly as they can. At the moment that need for growth is incredibly wasteful, like the amount of food that’s discarded is enough to feed everyone alive and another couple of billion – yet people are starving every day.
And it’s worth noting that under socialism there’s no reason that there can’t be personal accumulation of property, and jobs wouldn’t necessarily be all paid the same salary regardless of work. The core is ensuring that nobody goes without food, shelter, and healthcare and then work upwards from there.
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OK, so let’s say you push this legislation out about the Turner Diaries. And then someone writes a similar book that has the same rhetoric but is sufficiently different to not be legally the same book. You’re back to step one.
Books are a tricky subject.
I feel it’s worth noting that the books being burned in that photo were a large part of the largest body of research into LGBT people in the world at the time, including a massive amount of knowledge about trans people that may not have been fully reproduced even today. The Nazis made sure to keep the personal details of every subject of that research they could though.
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you have some degree of responsibility for the attacks.
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The thing about something like the Turner Diaries is that it in and of itself isn’t going to radicalise somebody. Nobody will read it and go “This night of the Rope is a fucking great idea!” They need to be primed to accept it – they’re already radicalised to some degree and this is the thing that drives them towards violence as the output of their radicalisation.
That’s not the point. My call for banning the distribution and publication of the book is basically a legal censure of the rights owners- “you have some degree of responsibility for the attacks. Obviously, we cannot call you accessories, but the whole history of the book comes damn close to that, so there will be whatever legal consequences that can be done since we’re not a police state. Your continued publication is irresponsible.”
So we’re rounding up everyone who has owned or published a copy of the Turner Diaries then? Cool. No, don’t worry about due process, you’ve just got to decide if they’re going in normal prisons or special camps? Don’t want them influencing other prisoners, I guess, so camps it is. Man, those camps we built can hold a lot more people. And you know, Catcher In The Rye supposedly inspired a lot of high profile murders too. Sod it, let’s ban that one too. Oh and Harry Potter, because the senator from Kansas thinks it’s full of devil worship.
Ooo, you know, we had to build more camps for the Harry Potter nerds (don’t worry, we let them segregate themselves by their Hogwarts house) but they’re actually under capacity. And I watched the first twenty minutes of Footloose the other night and that preacher seemed like he was on to something, so let’s ban all music you can dance to as well.
Wow, this is going swimmingly and we haven’t even looked at banning religious texts yet!
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you have some degree of responsibility for the attacks
You voted for Donald Trump. Everything he did and said and incited and molested and raped and stole and lied about, you have some degree of responsibility for.
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The thing about something like the Turner Diaries is that it in and of itself isn’t going to radicalise somebody. Nobody will read it and go “This night of the Rope is a fucking great idea!” They need to be primed to accept it – they’re already radicalised to some degree and this is the thing that drives them towards violence as the output of their radicalisation.
That’s not the point. My call for banning the distribution and publication of the book is basically a legal censure of the rights owners- “you have some degree of responsibility for the attacks. Obviously, we cannot call you accessories, but the whole history of the book comes damn close to that, so there will be whatever legal consequences that can be done since we’re not a police state. Your continued publication is irresponsible.”
So we’re rounding up everyone who has owned or published a copy of the Turner Diaries then? Cool. No, don’t worry about due process, you’ve just got to decide if they’re going in normal prisons or special camps? Don’t want them influencing other prisoners, I guess, so camps it is. Man, those camps we built can hold a lot more people. And you know, Catcher In The Rye supposedly inspired a lot of high profile murders too. Sod it, let’s ban that one too. Oh and Harry Potter, because the senator from Kansas thinks it’s full of devil worship.
Ooo, you know, we had to build more camps for the Harry Potter nerds (don’t worry, we let them segregate themselves by their Hogwarts house) but they’re actually under capacity. And I watched the first twenty minutes of Footloose the other night and that preacher seemed like he was on to something, so let’s ban all music you can dance to as well.
Wow, this is going swimmingly and we haven’t even looked at banning religious texts yet!
To be fair, The Turner Diaries is literal Nazi propaganda. It was originally published in an underground paper for fascists and is self-published by the author, an outspoken neo-nazi. Unlike Catcher in the Rye or Harry Potter, it has no artistic merit at all. I just don’t think targeting it specifically is going to fix anything.
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The thing with determining some writing is responsible for some act is it’s not going to stop with one thing. With enough fantasy you can see responsibility everywhere. It’s like the episode of Seinfeld where Kramer felt responsible when some guy killed somebody because he (Kramer) had been unfriendly to the killer. It’s not going to stop with one thing if you make this too easy, the quran could get banned, Lolita could get banned because it sets off pedos, music videos could get banned because they inspire violence. It would worsen things.
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GOP warns HR 1 could be ‘absolutely devastating for Republicans’
In the aftermath of the GOP’s assault on the integrity of the 2020 presidential election and amid a torrent of Republican measures aimed at restricting voting rights in the name of security, Democrats are pushing for a far-reaching solution to counter attempts at narrowing access to the ballot box.
H.R. 1, known as the For the People Act, seeks to abolish hurdles to voting, reform the role of money in politics and tighten federal ethics rules. Among the key tenets of the bill to overhaul the nation’s election system: allowing for no-excuse mail voting, at least 15 days of early voting, automatic voter registration and restoring voting rights to felons who have completed their prison sentences.
Democrats’ comprehensive bill passed the House — for the second time — nearly along party lines earlier this month and was introduced in the Senate this week. But it faces steep opposition from the GOP over its potential implications for future elections, including the 2022 midterms, with some Republicans openly fretting that broader access to voting will harm the party’s chances.
For Republicans, H.R. 1 represents a Democratic “power grab” that could tilt elections in their favor for years to come, as Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., put it. One Arizona state lawmaker called it “anti-Republican.”
“H.R. 1 is an attempt to use the Democrats’ slim majority to unlevel the playing field and take away the rights of roughly half of the voters in the country,” said Mark Weaver, a GOP consultant based in Ohio and an election law attorney.
Other Republicans condemn the bill as a naked federal overreach of states’ rights, saying the legislation will usurp the decentralized electoral system in favor of a nationalized, one-size-fits-all approach.
And some Republican lawmakers, officials and strategists go even further, signaling the GOP’s opposition to such extensive electoral reforms is based on the fear it will cause them to lose elections.
“If the Democrats pass H.R. 1, it’s going to be absolutely devastating for Republicans in this country,” said Jay Williams, a Republican strategist in Georgia, a state seeing one of the most aggressive campaigns to restrict voting. “They’re just going to basically just shaft so many Republicans in places where they would actually have opportunities to pick up.”
In Arizona, another battleground seeing an onslaught of election-related legislative battles, state Rep. John Kavanagh, a Republican, told CNN, “Democrats value as many people as possible voting, and they’re willing to risk fraud. Republicans are more concerned about fraud, so we don’t mind putting security measures in that won’t let everybody vote — but everybody shouldn’t be voting.”
After more than a decade of Republicans scaling back voting access, the latest push comes after former President Donald Trump and his allies spent months seeding distrust in the electoral system based on fabricated claims of a “stolen” election.
The measure comes as many Republican state lawmakers, some of whom peddled Trump’s baseless allegations of widespread fraud, are now leaning into what they cast as a lack of confidence in the democratic process to justify their election-related offensive. Republican state lawmakers across 43 states have advanced at least 250 bills so far aimed at limiting absentee and early voting and implementing stricter voter ID laws, among other provisions, according to the Brennan Center for Justice.
The debate over H.R. 1 reflects the broader reckoning within the GOP over how to win elections in the post-Trump era, when the most significant motivator for both sides is no longer on the ballot. With both history and conventional wisdom pointing to an advantage for the out-of-power party in midterms, some Republicans are convinced H.R. 1 could make a difference.
“I think stopping [H.R. 1] is more relative to Republican success in the future than Donald Trump,” Williams said, as the former president remains the most influential Republican in the party. “The ramifications of passing legislation like that would be very difficult for Republicans to win a majority status after that.”
But Republican fears don’t necessarily permeate in states where — even with more people voting — they found success in 2020, such as North Carolina, Ohio and Kentucky.
“I think it’s a mistake for Republicans to believe that under any particular voting model they can’t win elections. I think that’s wrong and absurd, but it’s the same error the Democrats are making trying to push H.R. 1,” said Michael Adams, Kentucky’s Republican secretary of state, before adding that in the last election, high turnout resulted in more registered Republicans participating than Democrats for the first time in the state’s history.
Democrats, for their part, point to the wholesale Republican push to curb voting rights as the impetus for more urgently pressing ahead on H.R. 1, which could serve as a backstop to thwart the state-level clamp down on voting.
President Joe Biden made clear in a statement that the bill’s reforms were “urgently needed,” adding that he looks “forward to signing it into law after it has passed through the legislative process.”
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., underlined the string of attacks from Republicans on the electoral system in his defense of the Senate’s companion bill.
“If one political party believes ‘heads we win, tails you cheated,’ if one political party believes that when you lose an election, the answer isn’t to win more votes, but rather to try to prevent the other side from voting, then we have serious and existential threats to our democracy on our hands,” Schumer said Wednesday. “That’s why we need S.1. so badly.”
The proposal faces a tricky path forward to overcome the 60-vote threshold in the evenly divided Senate unless Democrats reform the filibuster.
Biden said in an interview with ABC News on Wednesday that he isn’t opposed to looking at a return to the “talking filibuster,” which would require opposing senators to ceaselessly speak on the Senate floor until the bill is dropped or proponents have the votes.
Schumer made clear during a press conference Wednesday that Democrats will “decide the appropriate action to take” on the bill since “failure is not an option.”
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The core is ensuring that nobody goes without food, shelter, and healthcare and then work upwards from there.
Yeah, that’s why I’ll never be right wing. I think there are some leftists who just aren’t nice people, or just confused, but in the end the ideals of the liberal left are always more humane.
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I think there are some leftists who just aren’t nice people, or just confused, but in the end the ideals of the liberal left are always more humane.
bUt WhAt AbOuT pRoFiTs aRjAn!!!
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I think there are some leftists who just aren’t nice people, or just confused, but in the end the ideals of the liberal left are always more humane.
bUt WhAt AbOuT pRoFiTs aRjAn!!!
Hey, WARMBO is all about being nice and respectful, Arjan!
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I sometimes think I’m handicapped talking about international politics because left and right here in the Netherlands usually get along better than in some other countries. There’s not a lot of conflict. We don’t really have a political party like the Tories or the Republicans though, our right wing parties are more left wing and liberal ( except the two far right parties, who are pretty scary but they don’t get a lot of support).
Politics used to follow the polder model. Although that changed a bit, but the fundament is still there. Basically “keep talking until you agree.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polder_model
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Under a PR system your political parties have more incentive to get on Arjan.
Both the US and UK are with FPTP, with too many of our current lot going with the “we won, you lost, fuck you” interpretation.
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Under a PR system your political parties have more incentive to get on Arjan.
Both the US and UK are with FPTP, with too many of our current lot going with the “we won, you lost, fuck you” interpretation.
Yeah that’s it I think. We have always had more political parties in the parliament, and they have to form a coalition to form a government, so they can’t be too nasty to each other. After this election we get 17 parties in the parliament. It is unwieldy but better than just 2 parties.
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The law would be general, that if a work was created with clear intent to radicalize or to cause someone already radicalized to turn to violence.
Radicalizing isn’t a crime though. Instigating violence also isn’t always a crime. Saying “punch a nazi” for instance is instigating violence, but isn’t penalized. Or for instance, if someone writes a book saying abused people have the right to kill their abuser, I don’t think they would be prosecuted for that.
So in these cases you have to be very precise I believe. I think there are in most countries actual laws already, that forbid someone from instigating what is clearly a hate crime. If Turner Diaries tells readers to go out and kill black people or Jews, that is probably criminal in most countries. Same as an ISIS pamphlet that tells people to blow up a train station. If Turner Diaries does that, I think it can be banned.
But given that it is a work of fiction, that would be difficult to prove. Your idea that Biden and Obama must be neo nazis or else they would have outlawed the book is delusional. It is tough, it is obviously a horrible book and it would probably be better if it didn’t exist. But for a society to say that spreading certain ideas in print or otherwise should be illegal, there should be a very, very high bar for that.
And it probably doesn’t work anyway even if you do that, as has been pointed out. Another book will pop up that does the same thing, or the idea is spread in another form. The best way to stop these ideas from spreading is creating a better society.
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So in these cases you have to be very precise I believe. I think there are in most countries actual laws already, that forbid someone from instigating what is clearly a hate crime. If Turner Diaries tells readers to go out and kill black people or Jews, that is probably criminal in most countries. Same as an ISIS pamphlet that tells people to blow up a train station. If Turner Diaries does that, I think it can be banned. But given that it is a work of fiction, that would be difficult to prove. Your idea that Biden and Obama must be neo nazis or else they would have outlawed the book is delusional. It is tough, it is obviously a horrible book and it would probably be better if it didn’t exist. But for a society to say that spreading certain ideas in print or otherwise should be illegal, there should be a very, very high bar for that.
True – look up US Code 2385
Whoever knowingly or willfully advocates, abets, advises, or teaches the duty, necessity, desirability, or propriety of overthrowing or destroying the government of the United States or the government of any State, Territory, District or Possession thereof, or the government of any political subdivision therein, by force or violence, or by the assassination of any officer of any such government; or
Whoever, with intent to cause the overthrow or destruction of any such government, prints, publishes, edits, issues, circulates, sells, distributes, or publicly displays any written or printed matter advocating, advising, or teaching the duty, necessity, desirability, or propriety of overthrowing or destroying any government in the United States by force or violence, or attempts to do so; or
Whoever organizes or helps or attempts to organize any society, group, or assembly of persons who teach, advocate, or encourage the overthrow or destruction of any such government by force or violence; or becomes or is a member of, or affiliates with, any such society, group, or assembly of persons, knowing the purposes thereof–
Shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than twenty years, or both, and shall be ineligible for employment by the United States or any department or agency thereof, for the five years next following his conviction.
The primary difference between this and other radical literature such as black nationalist or Islamic caliphate proponents is that it is a work of fiction.
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You’re pretty much creating a strawman of my opinion. I never suggested rounding up anybody, I never suggested no due process, and my idea is clearly targeted to clear and stated responsibility.
You’re right. I’m making a horrible mockery of your very sensible plan to criminalise books you don’t like. I’m sorry.
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My point is that the author clearly sent multiple signals that the work was meant to be more then a novel. My argument is from intent- since Pierce signaled that he viewed his “novel” as really being a call to action, it should be treated like so. Otherwise, what stops other radical groups from disguising their calls to action as “novels”? I don’t think the intent of the author should be allowed to hide behind the supposed genre.
It’s not hiding. It’s really straightforward, but it is also legal. The whole point of Freedom of the Press (and speech) is to protect dangerous, divisive and offensive publications and speech from government infringement. We don’t need the 1st amendment if all that gets published are innocuous books and articles, and we don’t have freedom of the press if that’s all that is allowed to be published.
So, no matter how you justify it, this would be censorship. Censorship is the suppression of any material whether factual or fictional or through legal or social means.
Nevertheless, the laws exist that allow censorship of material under these circumstances, and certainly in the 90’s and 2000’s, there was never a better time to censor the Turner Diaries, BUT how would that be accomplished in the courts. Our Constitution is Democratic and laws apply equally to all people including the government. No one has the authority to issue a decree to ban a specific book any more than they could issue a decree that you and you alone are not allowed to eat hamburger. Any ruling has to apply equally to all people – so all authors in this case – and only applies from the moment a ruling is made. You can’t be held accountable for an illegal act that was committed before it was ruled illegal or before a law was passed that made it illegal.
Obviously, if there was any court case that attempted to rule that The Turner Diaries was treasonous material advocating directly the violent overthrow of the government, you’d probably find someone like Alan Dershowitz arguing for the defense and making claims like “Yes, your honor, I agree that the novel advocates the overthrow of the US government, BUT we’re talking about the fictional government of the year 2099. Not any government that actually exists today.”
The reason no federal prosecutor pursues the case is that they’d end up looking ridiculous AND would also be far more concerned with actual acts of terrorism than fictional ones. With tracts advocating for action in the real world against present government officials, elected and unelected, and institutions. This would be perceived as a waste of time in pretty much any branch of the government. Something the FBI keeps in a file.
Also, this law is an interesting one. Let’s say you claim that Biden is a White Supremacist in one tweet. Later, down the line, you claim that any white supremacist politician or government should be opposed, even violently if necessary. Well, you may have just committed treason.
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Biden or Obama probably couldn’t do anything about the Turner Diaries even if they wanted. You could sue the publisher though, on the ground that they are inciting a crime. A book seller was sued in the Netherlands for selling Mein Kampf, but was found not guilty.
edit: I’m not sure how that works with say ISIS though, I believe spreading their propaganda is illegal in some countries.
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Intent is secondary to the legal question I think. What matters is wether incitement is imminent and realistic.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imminent_lawless_action
The principle of free speech can suck sometimes but it is there for a good reason. You know, if you wanted to, you could do something, for instance you could ask the SPLC as to why they don’t sue the publisher. There are a lot of people in the US who are deeply engaged in battling anti-semitism and racism, I bet they could give a better explanation than we do about why Turner Diaries isn’t banned.
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Once we have that author’s commentary, can we really interpret the 1st amendment as distinguishing between surface form, once that intention has been revealed?
Literally every proponent of “death of the author” would emphatically shout yes.
Pierce’s intentions for what his book would be interpreted as have no bearing on what any reader may find of it. Ray Bradbury intended Fahrenheit 451 as being about television stunting the intellectual capacity of its viewers and stopping them from reading. Pretty much everyone who has read it instead thinks it is (or has been taught that it is) a book protesting government censorship.
So say two people are directly influenced by the different interpretations of F451 and take action from it – one burns down his local TV station because he agrees with Bradbury and thinks TV is dumbing society down, the other revolts against encroaching government censorship and I don’t know, burns down the MPAA. Which of those people would Bradbury and his novel bear responsibility for? Only the one that agrees with his literary intention? Both?
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DOJ official says there is evidence to charge sedition in U.S. Capitol assault: ’60 Minutes’
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Federal investigators have found evidence that would likely allow the government to file sedition charges against some of those involved in the deadly Jan. 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol, a Justice Department official told CBS’ “60 Minutes” on Sunday.
“I believe the facts do support those charges,” said acting U.S. Attorney Michael Sherwin for the District of Columbia. “I think that, as we go forward, more facts will support that.”
Hundreds of supporters of then-President Donald Trump stormed the Capitol in a failed bid to stop Congress from certifying Democrat Joe Biden’s presidential election victory, sending lawmakers fleeing and leaving five dead.
The Justice Department has already filed cases against 400 suspects involved in the assault, but none have yet been accused of sedition, the crime of opposing the authority of the U.S. government through force.
Since announcing a task force to investigate the rioters six days after the attack, Sherwin has said he will pursue sedition charges. So far, most arrested in connection with the riot have been charged with trespassing or assaulting officers, with a smaller number charged with conspiracy to obstruct Congress.
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I find it interesting that there is footage from a few years ago of Lindsay Graham calling Trump a narcissist and a liar. There is also video of Ted Cruz’s reaction to Trump saying Cruz’s father was involved in the JFK assassination and of Trump insulting Cruz’s wife, calling her ugly. Cruz said pretty much the same thing Graham said namely, that Trump is a narcissist and an ignorant liar. Both Cruz and Graham were at one time NeverTrumpers.
So what happened between then and now? What compromised them?
There is a big piece missing not just with those two but the rest of the GOP Senators. Did they all get hypnotized or drank some strange Kool-Aid concoction that made them so loyal to Trump? I would have to say that they all “read the room”, that is, they saw what Trump was doing, his populist message and appeal, and saw all the GOP constituency follow Trump. So the rest of the GOP Senators etc., followed suit, and being the politicians they were, switched their stance.
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I was going to comment on that picture in the image thread that said McConnell is a big asshole then a whale’s anus, that surely, no matter what someone thinks of McConnell, Cruz is a bigger asshole, but since you brought up Cruz’s douchebagerry, Al, I’ll say it here.
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The GOP saw the sway Trump has with the base. All they care about is power and they view Trump as their best bet at holding on to power. Granted, they’re ignoring that they lost the house, Senate and presidency because of Trump, but the base is basically fully radicalized and rabid now. If the GOP somehow loses seats in the house and Senate in 2022, they might start to rethink their strategy, but otherwise they’ll just keep on with this crap for the foreseeable future.
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Why do people keep voting for a party that embraces nutbags like MTG? I think I kinda understand neocons like Reagan and Bush, and why some people thought Trump would help them, but this new madness is really odd to me.
I listen to a podcast called Q anon anonymous which follows the development of all this Q madness and they have some very good episodes explaining their ideas, but even then I still find it hard to understand this line of thought. In their latest podcast they said the Q conspiracy is pretty much the same as things that were spread in crappy newspapers way back in the 80s, but amplified by the internet, and of course it bears a lot of resemblance with anti-semitic conspiracies like a Jewish global cabal, and the blood libel. It’s very concerning that these ideas are becoming so widespread.
I have to wonder if this just started as a troll campaign by some 4chan folks, or if there are serious committed nazis behind it. It’s also spreading in other countries, we have some of these folks in the Netherlands too. We even had some idiots destroying 5G antennas.
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Regarding the Culture war and Trump:
Overheard: Why do so many people who have a big problem with WAP didn't have a problem when the former guy said to grab 'em by it?
— George Takei (@GeorgeTakei) March 22, 2021
Well, I say it is like this: I don’t want to get into a big debate about the porn industry, but who do you think make up some of the consumers who make it a multi billion dollar industry? It is a guilty pleasure, which would explain why very few of them had a problem with Trump grabbing statement or his affair with Stormy Daniels. Trump is like teflon in that regard. Even the Christian evangelicals (of which Mike Pence is a member) overlook all that. You can’t call them on that hypocrisy. They will just brush it off and reply “And?”
What is interesting is that the GOP allow themselves all this leeway, while the Dems fire each other even over smoking pot in the past.
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The GOP saw the sway Trump has with the base. All they care about is power and they view Trump as their best bet at holding on to power. Granted, they’re ignoring that they lost the house, Senate and presidency because of Trump, but the base is basically fully radicalized and rabid now. If the GOP somehow loses seats in the house and Senate in 2022, they might start to rethink their strategy, but otherwise they’ll just keep on with this crap for the foreseeable future.
More importantly, the opposite still holds true. If they go against Trump, he’ll shit-talk them all and found his own party, and without Trump’s mob of crazy, the GOP doesn’t have the numbers to hold on to anything, really. So they have to try and ride that crazy bull.
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Why do people keep voting for a party that embraces nutbags like MTG? I think I kinda understand neocons like Reagan and Bush, and why some people thought Trump would help them, but this new madness is really odd to me.
It’s part of the end result of the factionalisation and extreme rhetoric of US politics. For a lot of people, hurting the other side is more important than helping their side, and Taylor-Greene is performatively cruel.
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For a lot of people, hurting the other side is more important than helping their side
True. I also think that sentiment lives on both sides, with the recent snowstorm in Texas I saw a bunch of people on twitter saying Texans deserved it.
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For a lot of people, hurting the other side is more important than helping their side
True. I also think that sentiment lives on both sides, with the recent snowstorm in Texas I saw a bunch of people on twitter saying Texans deserved it.
Yeah, the whole Red State/Blue State thing is stupid – more people voted for Trump in California than in the three smallest states Biden won combined, and Texas had more Biden voters than all but two states, IIRC.
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Yeah, the whole Red State/Blue State thing is stupid – more people voted for Trump in California than in the three smallest states Biden won combined, and Texas had more Biden voters than all but two states, IIRC.
For the most part, red and blue are divided between non-urban and urban settings rather than between state borders. Texans generally vote Republican except for large cities (Houston, Dallas, San Antonio, Austin, El Paso) and along half of the Mexican border. Same with Georgia, where Biden’s 49.5% of the vote came from less than 10% of the state (in terms of square miles) while Trump’s 49.3% came from the remaining 90%; and that 10% was clustered in the six major cities: Atlanta, Macon, Savannah, Augusta, Athens and Columbus)
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