The Wow I Can't Believe That News Story Thread

[Trollheart]

I believe Batty is talking about trans people, not queers. Which, in itself, is not a very flattering term to use for gay people. Isn't that a slur? Unless you're one of them yourself of course. Like using the N word when you're not black?

[The Batlord]

Oh look, the guy who can't get Foucault's Boomerang right.

[jadis]

Originally Posted by Trollheart

I believe Batty is talking about trans people, not queers. Which, in itself, is not a very flattering term to use for gay people. Isn't that a slur? Unless you're one of them yourself of course. Like using the N word when you're not black?

It's long been reclaimed and is now one of the preferred umbrella terms of choice for LGBTQ+ people. We even have Queer Theory in universities https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queer_theory

I like that it used to mean "oblique" (before acquiring the sexual undertones sometime in the 20th century). It's used in the first story in Joyce's Dubliners, Sisters, and there the denotation is still "strange, not quite right" but the sexual connotation is very much there (it's about an elderly priest and a young boy, do the math...).

Originally Posted by The Batlord

Oh look, the guy who can't get Foucault's Boomerang right.

Foucault's Boomerang is not a thing, it's the mother of all "taken out of context". Foucault gives a nod to a theory that was around long ago in a lecture course where he develops ideas that couldn't be further from that.

It comes from some blog, where the guy randomly pulls this short paragraph to co-sign Foucault onto a set of propositions Foucault's would've rolled his eyes at. I want to say "this would've never passed peer review" but I've seen stuff on this level get published by Anglo sociologists and esp in the so-called "security studies". You latch onto the one paragraph you are comfortable with and ignore the rest.

[jwb]

Bro. I had my entire reponse types out on my ****ty ass phone and somehow pressed back and couldn't get it back. I had to bring out the laptop I'm so pissed.

Originally Posted by The Batlord

1. Plausible deniability yes but there is no open question about trans people. Trans and gay people ARE grooming children and people WILL kill them for it, the only "question" is what "happens next" if trans and gay people keep grooming children, which isn't a question but a veiled threat since the answer has already been given.

I would say the "questions" surrounding the JQ are similarly not real questions, and the answer to the so-called JQ has long since been solved. The questions serve not to open a genuine line of inquiry, but to paint the Jews as a nefarious and often almost other-worldly threat. I really don't see much of a functional difference between this and what Tim Pool is doing in that tweet.

2. It's just dishonest to say I'm using one tweet to make my case. This current discussion started with me posting an article about Texas trying to find trans people through drivers licenses and I've already mentioned lawmaker rhetoric and legislation. We're both aware of the current grooming moral panic that is being trumpeted from MTG to Greg Abbott to DeSantis to Matt Walsh to chuds on the ground protesting drag shows to Facebook boomers screaming about trans people in women's sports.

And hey here's a story of a trans community alpaca ranch who have to do armed patrols of the property and put up a fence cause of threats and armed trespassers.

[url]https://www.cpr.org/2021/05/07/in-custer-county-owners-of-a-trans-friendly-ranch-pack-heat-and-build-a-fence-in-the-fharassmen

It seems like the Tim Pool tweet is the main metric you use to dismiss the overall climate of anti-semitic rhetoric as just being in the phase of "just
asking questions," since there is no analog to that tweet for other groups. That is your common refrain in this discussion from my pov.

The ID thing i didn't comment on because i haven't looked into it but on the face of it, it sounds like one of those culture war type issues like the bathrooms thing or the trans sports ****. Although I understand how it sounds draconian and you could easily suppose a scenario where that's the first step to rounding people up, I don't believe that's what they're actually after.

I do think they want to make it less acceptable socially. Ultimately that's what all of this is about, in my opinion.

I was aware of Mel Gibson when posting. He never was willing after the story hit to go on camera and talk about the JQ. He went deep underground and hoped it would all go away and did not become a willing tool for right wing "question asking".

That's fair. That was a bad comparison. I'll take that L.

But even so I think that Kanye represents a threat, and sometimes threats come in anomalies, like Trump. But even beyond that, guys like Nick Fuentes are even more worrying looking forwards. I was watching his debate with AJ and they played a video in between of Fuentes ranting about the Jews that was like a straight up Hitler speech. I can't find the video on youtube but here's the quote from Fuentes:

"When it comes to the Jews, here's the silver lining. It tends to go from 0 to 60. Like, they're not wrong about that. But there's a reason for that. And the reason is them, ok? When it comes to the Jews, every society where **** has gone down with these people, it always goes from 0 to 60. It never starts with burning all the Talmuds in Paris, OK? [laughs] It never starts that way. But frequently, it seems to end that way, and it gets there very rapidly. Doesn't start there but it frequently ends there. But I would say the Jews had better start being nice to people like us. Because what comes out of this is going to be a lot worse and a lot uglier than anything that has been said on this show or will be said on this show."

Kanye has brought antisemitism into the spotlight by virtue of how insane the spectacle is. Trans people merely have to exist and be visible for lawmakers to bandy about bathroom laws.

Ehh no. Ye brought it back into the limelight for sure but people were marching in Charlottesville in 2017 chanting "Jews will not replace us." Richard Spencer is no longer relevant but the Jew hatred did survive to the next generation of the dissident right, and it lines up pretty neatly with a lot of the QAnon christian nationalism type vibe of the modern right.

[jwb]

Originally Posted by jadis

*movie trailer voiceover* a BRAIN WAR between two MB heavyweights

DEBATING

which group is gonna get genocided first, THE QUEERS or THE JEWS

TUNE IN etc

lol

to be clear, my original point was that while trans and lgbt people get targeted in certain ways I don't think they're on the verge of genocide, and in addition to that I thought there are other groups we can make similar arguments about using pretty much the same metrics. I don't think the Jews are on the verge of a genocide either though.

[jadis]

Originally Posted by jwb

lol

to be clear, my original point was that while trans and lgbt people get targeted in certain ways I don't think they're on the verge of genocide, and in addition to that I thought there are other groups we can make similar arguments about using pretty much the same metrics. I don't think the Jews are on the verge of a genocide either though.

Right. The real effect of comparing everything to Nazis and Auschwitz, which is a real hobby for some, is that it obscures the very real dangers posed by the rise in extremism today.

I heard an interview with a Jewish historian of anti-semitism on French radio and he was 1) very concerned about the rise in violence targeting Jews in France today 2) annoyed that some compare it to the 1930s. The situations have nothing in common, he said, and lead people to misunderstand and minimize the uniquely desperate situation of European Jews in the 1930s, who were utterly abandoned and couldn't expect help from any quarter. We live in a different world today that poses its own multiple dangers and those should be assessed in their specificity.

I get it that it's more exciting to think of yourself as an anti-fascist warrior rather than another guy from the suburbs. That's perfectly human. But it's funny to me that the Soviet victory over the Nazis (which fueled the myth of communist anti-fascism in the West and was a reliable tool to recruit useful idiots to the cause) was always a Russian nationalist myth within Russia, with only the thinnest veneer of universalist values even during the Soviet era. Now that it's mobilized by Putin in Ukraine, some of the self-professed anti-fascists are temporarily embarrassed and scrub all the heroic Soviet imagery from their twitter profiles. Wonder if that's the end of that or is it due for another rewarming.

[The Batlord]

Thank you. I hadn't considered that two situations could be different. Aren't you supposed to be smart?

[jadis]

I'm not necessarily talking about you in particular but of a broader trend which I like to observe on Twitter and of which you seem to be broadly representative. I have no interest in following the evolution of your rhetoric and registering whether you did or did not, at some point, learn to insert "but it's more complicated than that" or something to that effect. Overall, it still seems that your worldview is informed by categories derived from Star Wars and video games and things of that nature, but if you're working on complicating that picture, good for you. Chapeau.

[The Batlord]

And you seem to like shadowboxing with the leftist in your head and posting about a French Jew who probably hates sharing the Holocaust with gypsies.

[jadis]

Originally Posted by The Batlord

And you seem to like shadowboxing with the leftist in your head and posting about a French Jew who probably hates sharing the Holocaust with gypsies.

I'm talking about a very well-known phenomenon, which I've witnessed for years in a city with four universities and a long and storied history of left-wing student activism (some of which, moreover, I'm really proud of). For the way the rhetorical mechanism of "anti-Fascism" worked throughout the 20th century, see Furet's great book The Passing of an Illusion.

The remark about the French Jew is pretty shameful tbh. As usual, you make presumptions without basis, which is understandable. But I'd be more careful in this particular context.