#rightwing bullshit

[sarcastic-salem]

Just a reminder that TERFs & Nazis like to hide behind blank profiles, and they often create multiple blank profiles if they’re the catfishing types. So maybe think twice about not blocking those pornbots.

[trmpt]

Do people like this propagate this stuff as some kind of distraction from something they don’t want people to see? Or do they actually believe their own bullshit?

[raccoonnutella13]

"we have to wait for neil's response to know for sure-" ah yes because sexual assaulters are famously known for telling the truth

[nando161mando]

What is the mentality underlying Turkish soccer player Merih Demiral's wolve salute at the Euro2024?

The Turkish national player Demirel Merih cheered after his goal in the European Championship match against Austria with the "wolf salute", which is associated with the Turkish right-wing extremist group "Grey Wolves".

In social media, Turkish fascists tried to disguise the symbol as a harmless part of Turkish tradition. But behind the symbolism however, there is an ideology that millions have fallen victim to in the course of history.

[rexaleph]

so i've been scrolling past the pros and cons field on fragrantica bc who gives a shit, im looking for notes claims and written reviews, but for this one my eye got stuck on the truly very stupid phrasing and weird mays and mights on the cons side, and turns out the reason it's so stupid is that it's statistically generated from reviews lmao

anyway, consider getting Rituale by Mendittorosa for its Great power to conquer, Good quality and Stellar longevity, as well as Outstanding longevity, but do be aware that it May not last as long and Not everyone will like the Strong beeswax note, while the Amazing honey and fruity notes are I guess an unquestionable pro.

[troonwolf]

my mutuals watching me blog for the past week like: this dumb bitch keeps saying he’s gonna move blogs. keeps spouting some bullshit about a redbubble store. you know what? I don’t believe it. this faggot aint doing fuck except being ornery on the damn internet

[bowithoutadaemon]

Handed in my vote and had a fun little conversation with the person riding in the same elevator.

The wall panel I leaned against was loose and made a loud clanging noise. We joked that since it's a government building nobody can expect it to not be kinda broken and shoddily fixed with duct tape while everyone in charge waits for yet another form to be scanned in and sent with a fax machine or something.

[bitegore]

if we want to talk about problematic shows has anyone ever discussed how Daredevil literally wrote a show thats central theme was "these scary gross foreigners are taking over our good safe city and the people who want to work with foreigners are also evil, because as we all know americans are good people and foreign non-americans are all evil and fucked up even when they're on the "good side""

has anyone talked about that. has anyone literally ever on this website gone over that. it really feels like at all times all i see about daredevil is "oohhhh nice lawyer guy who helps ~the underprivileged~" and there's absolutely nothing by way of "it is a little weird that the bad guys are literally referred to as 'Fisk' (american) and then like "the [ethnicity]" for all the Scary Foreign Crime Groups

i didn't really like daredevil for a Lot of reasons, chief among them that i thought it was, frankly, really fucking boring. So I am hardly invested in talking it up. But also every time I watched it the way it posited Safe American Home Boy vs Scary Terrible Foreign Invaders against each other left an increasingly nasty taste in my mouth, and it continues to do so given i have literally never seen anyone even suggest that that might have been a slightly weird or politically charged choice.

[fandom-hoarder]

Reporting praegeru ads on YouTube for transphobia so i can have another 6 months where they leave me the FUCK alone.

[schimmelspore]

Isnt it wild that i sometimes just think that people might think bad about me or my Moral/political standing because im Bad at explaining myself and get annoyed at a lot of leftists or activists and such. And then i say something and catch myself sounding on the surface like i flirt with the right.

This is why my place is not in activism or sharing too much thoughts about stuff. Im Bad at wording shit. Its so much more productive for me and everyone if i shut up most of the time and share think pieces and Essays of others who are so much better at explaining than me.

[sarcastic-salem]

Anyone who thinks the rightwing is counter-culture doesn’t understand what counter-culture really is.

Counter-culture is anything that deviates from the white, Christian, heteronormative societal norms that have been mainstream since the 1950s. This is where the term “social deviant” comes from.

[psychological-musings]

why do i keep seeing people say "get help" in the exact same way everyone was saying "y'all need Jesus" back in hyper conservative groups in 2012

like did y'all never work to deinternalize this stuff or

[mamuzzy]

My unpublished HP fanfictions don't even follow canon but it would be still considered transphobic and racist act to publish it to any place, eventhough most of my OCs are queer, diverse from many countries, and often not even humans. I don't even use canon characters or ships.

I can try and leave out the conservative british empire elements, even changing the worldbuilding entirely, it would still be considered transphobic and racist.

See how crazy this is?

Not because Harry Potter story is shit, it's because the author is doing horrible things to real people.

JK Rowling really ruined it for all of us. For those who are actually affected by her. For those who only just wanted a safe place to hide from reality.

Good people can make good art.

Good people can make shitty art.

Shitty people can make good art.

Shitty people can make shitty art.

People have got to get more comfortable with the fact that people with despicable moral values can create good art

"But Harry Potter was always shit-"

No. No it wasn't. It may have had its flaws, but people liked it for a reason. It was popular for a reason.

So many times people find out that the creator of something they liked was awful and then they go and claim that it was never good in the first place.

I think it's pretty dangerous to get into the mindset of horrible people can't create good things, because then you can't spot those people, or then you can use the fact that they obviously created something wonderful to deny that they've done anything wrong.

It's reductive. And it's dangerous.

[nando161mando]

The amount of times a Libertarian admit out loud that their Ideological Standpoints are a LARP to cover for the reality that they are Fascist Bootlickers that seek to appeal of Fascism is equal to the amount of grains of sand on a beach.

[centrally-unplanned]

I will always be annoyed as a very pro-welfare person that my "camp" is not going to come around to Social Security being Bad, Actually. It is so antiquated! Most crucially, it probably isn't even welfare - the best analyses in my opinion generally view it as neutral, maybe mildly progressive, and maybe even mildly regressive. Maybe your own paper thinks it is more on the progressive side? But it is ~5% of GDP! I do not have to "debate the progressivity" of food stamps, they are obviously insanely redistributive; the opportunity cost of Social Security is huge in this regard because you do in fact have a limited tax budget to play with.

More importantly to me, it is a redistribution from the young to the old in a society where that is becoming quite costly. The "forces of social reproduction", from work to innovation to families, are pretty universally created by the non-retired, and while most people are Doing Fine that doesn't mean we aren't creating unnecessary frictions for all of that. Right now we would all socially be better off "front-shifting" more spending, giving the ~30 year olds more income and the ~70 year olds less - 70 year olds in America are quite rich, they really don't need it.

Meanwhile the reasons for the program have vanished. I get why it was a decent idea in the 1930's - it is an insurance program built around the idea that the elderly can't "bounce back" from economic setbacks since they have a limited ability to work. In a world where bank runs junking someone's savings were common this makes sense. And in a world of fertility rates hitting 4.0+ targets it was easily affordable. But nowadays the idea that the median someone "cannot save for retirement" is very silly, they absolutely can safely and reliably - banks are stable and insured, government bond programs exist, and so on.

Of course, there are those who are too poor to save, which you can address with, like, actual welfare? I won't go down the UBI rabbit hole but it is very silly to fix the problem of elderly poverty with a universal forced savings plan that pays out to people based on their past income. Just give poor people money and cut out all the middleman bullshit.

Which is the rub of course - Social Security works politically precisely because it isn't welfare, it is something "everyone" gets. Which, again as a big UBI proponent, I get, it is how politics works. But that doesn't change the fact that Social Security probably makes most people on net worse off despite how much they defend it, and limits the fiscal capacity for better alternatives. From an ideological lens it isn't a left program, and shouldn't be treated as such. (And it isn't a right program either, but in the US rightwing ideology is pretty incoherent so who knows)

But in the end winning elections is the actual determinant of policy, so may the Democrats continue to worship it - and hopefully get the courage to slip some changes in that people don't notice somewhere down the line.

[notaplaceofhonour]

Understanding Alex Jones’s place in the Bush-era anti-war scene would do the left a lot of good in understanding (and not repeating) similar mistakes that the current anti-war scene is making today.

For those who aren’t old enough to remember, there was actually a time when Alex Jones had a decent amount of goodwill on the far left. He was obviously always a lunatic conspiracy theorist, and most everyday people saw him as such, but there was a significant enough portion of the anti-war left that liked him, that actually promoted InfoWars, appeared on AJ’s show, and linked arms with him at anti-war protests.

Without the momentum that his Bush-era popularity gave him, Jones would not have become a recognizable or relevant media figure like he did. The model InfoWars pioneered, which helped pave the way for the entire far right griftosphere that sprang up around it—from Breitbart to OAN & the Epoch Times to the sea of smaller Q-fluencers—owes its success in part to this diagonal reach across political lines. The extreme right wing conspiracy theory platform that has all but consumed the GOP would not have been able to gain nearly as much of a foothold if it were not for the years of work InfoWars & outlets like it did to normalize it in the Bush years.

Obviously I am not going so far as to say “The Left Is Solely Responsible For Alex Jones™️”. But much of the anti-war/anti-government left absolutely participated in helping him rise to prominence. They were willing to jump in bed with Jones without paying attention to his work or else were willing to turn a blind eye to who Jones was, all because he was saying things that were convenient to their cause. It didn’t matter that he was a rightwing or grade-A bigot; he opposed the US government & the war.

And I’m fully aware that there’s a common refrain among a lot of that “I used to listen to InfoWars” section of the left that would push back against this and say, “well, yeah, Jones is obviously a fascist now, but back then he wasn’t like that; he was kooky back then, sure, but the pre-Sandy Hook, pre-Gay Frogs Jones wasn’t nearly as bigoted or rightwing as the ‘Hillary For Prison’ Trump-era Jones became”.

To that I say, no, that’s bullshit. If you actually go back and listen to his show from back then… holy shit. He was homophobic as fuck. He was racist as fuck. The entire NWO/Globalist framework that he hangs all his other conspiracy theories on is built around antisemitic tropes from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion he regularly hosted & promoted explicit antisemites like his pastor Texe Marrs, who openly espoused that Jews (often named as such) controlled the world politically, financially, and religiously through Zionism, a global banking cartel, and Communism. In some ways, Jones was even more transparent then than he is now.

“Okay, but what does this have to do with the current anti-war movement?” I hear you say. “I never fell for Alex Jones; I’ve always hated that guy.”

To begin with, you should be on the lookout for the internal biases and lack of vetting that lead the left to tolerate Jones in the first place, whether you think you’re liable to or not (arguably, it is all that much more important when you think you aren’t, because you are never more susceptible than when you think you aren’t). But unfortunately much of the anti-war left of today has been making the same mistake, just with different people and organizations.

Take for instance Jackson Hinkle, a tradcath & self-described “MAGA Communist”, who has gotten a lot of traction with the leftwing anti-Zionist crowd (and I would be remiss not to mention, has also been a guest on InfoWars). Or take another AJ, the media outlet Al Jazeera, which says a lot of things that are attractive to the left out one side of its mouth while spewing a bunch of rightwing theocratic garbage out the other, much like Bush-era InfoWars did. Take PSL/ANSWER (Pro-Putin Pro-Assad Pro-Xi atrocity denialists & conspiracy theorists) are one of the most common fixtures of the current protest movement, regularly advertised as organizers by other prominent organizations like JVP & SJP. A lot of people on the left have been embracing figures and organizations that espouse Khazar Theory, Deicide, Media Control, and Blood Libels not at all dissimilar to the accusations you could hear from Jones and his pastor friend Texe Marrs, with the same figleaf of “anti-Zionism” that Marrs frequently used himself.

Whether by sheer ignorance or willfully turning a blind eye, the left keeps making the same mistake of tolerating & even embracing figures & organizations with similarly noxious politics & conspiracy thinking now that was made with Bush-era InfoWars. We need to do better. We need to learn from the past so we can stop repeating its mistakes.