Errors in moral reasoning

Events occurring and how they relate/affect Anabaptist faith and culture.
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Re: Errors in moral reasoning

Post by Bootstrap »

temporal1 wrote:frankly, the stated evil ones have been social outcasts all-along, they are watched carefully for any miss-steps, they are not honored or encouraged or funded by government. the suggestion this is not true is a bald-faced PC lie.

for an opposite group, supposedly well-educated, to take up their hateful tactics, then demand to be given a pass for doing the same, "only justified" .. is, worse-than.

"when you know better, you do better," if not, you are worse-than. :(
Be careful with those grievance narratives and stereotypes.

The alt-right organizers of this rally probably all have college degrees, and they know how to work the media. According to the poster, the organizers are Richard B. Spencer, Mike Enoch, and Jason Kessler, in that order. The first two are well known leaders in the alt-right, Kessler was not very well known before Charlottesville.

Richard Spencer has master’s degree in humanities from the University of Chicago. He runs a think tank, is a podcaster, runs several web sites, and speaks at colleges. He's the guy who wants a homeland for a "dispossessed white race" and advocates "peaceful ethnic cleansing". He's also the guy in the video where he leads a crowd in the chant "Hail Trump, hail our people, hail victory!", while they give the Nazi salute. He looks good in a suit. Donald Trump invited him to his presidential nomination, where he expressed racist views in an interview and was slugged by someone dressed as an Antifa protester.

Mike Enoch is a co-host of the Daily Shoah. Shoah means "holocaust", and the show's hosts call themselves "the death panel". He has spoken at quite a few universities. Some hackers found his true identity, and also found out that his wife was Jewish, which is a little bizarre for an anti-Semitic activist. That caused a big stir on the right, but eventually they forgave him. HIs wife and he are now separated.

Jason Kessler got his bachelor's degree from the University of Virginia in 2009. He's not as well known, he seems to have written a couple of books. His views seem to be in line with Spencer and Enoch. All three say things that should shock most decent people.

I think you are saying that people with college degrees should be held to a higher moral standard. Maybe, but a lot of kindergarten kids know that threatening and intimidating people is wrong. I don't think it takes a college degree to know that.

Does anyone know who led Antifa in Charlottesville? There were no posters listing their names.

At any rate, my sympathies are for the citizens of Charlottesville, who should not be threatened, and for the non-violent protesters. And when we criticize Antifa, let's be careful, it can sometimes sound like we are trying to let the white supremacists off the hook.
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Re: Errors in moral reasoning

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temporal1 wrote:not sure why it was necessary to exaggerate, "The other side is the one that took innocent lives on those same streets."
from what i understand, 1 life was lost, and, in all honesty, it was more of a "flip of the coin" about "which side" caused the death.
Let's not exaggerate, but let's not minimize either.

It wasn't a coin toss. He is responsible for killing someone. And he was part of a group that wore uniforms and carried shields, threatening and intimidating the people who live in Charlottesville, chanting "whose streets? our streets!" and "blood and soil" while waving Swastikas and KKK symbols to make it clear who does not belong on these streets. When someone who marches with you as part of your team kills someone during an event, that tends to reflect on your group.

By all means, let's oppose the violence of Antifa. All violence should be treated equally. But Antifa wasn't threatening the citizens of Charlottesville, they were threatening the white supremacists who were threatening the citizens of Charlottesville. That's wrong, they should leave that up to the police, and they are legally liable for what they do. But I do think the motivation to defend is a little more admirable than the motivation to threaten.

And don't let white supremacists off the hook.
Using the phrase “alt-left” suggests a moral equivalence that simply doesn’t exist.

For starters, while antifa perpetrates violence, it doesn’t perpetrate it on anything like the scale that white nationalists do. It’s no coincidence that it was a Nazi sympathizer—and not an antifa activist—who committed murder in Charlottesville. According to the Anti-Defamation League, right-wing extremists committed 74 percent of the 372 politically motivated murders recorded in the United States between 2007 and 2016. Left-wing extremists committed less than 2 percent.

Second, antifa activists don’t wield anything like the alt-right’s power. White, Christian supremacy has been government policy in the United States for much of American history. Anarchism has not. That’s why there are no statues of Mikhail Bakunin in America’s parks and government buildings. Antifa boasts no equivalent to Steve Bannon, who called his old publication, Breitbart, “the platform for the alt-right,” and now works in the White House. It boasts no equivalent to Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, who bears the middle name of a Confederate general and the first name of the Confederacy’s president, and who allegedly called the NAACP “un-American.” It boasts no equivalent to Alex Jones, who Donald Trump praised as “amazing.” Even if antifa’s vision of society were as noxious as the “alt-right’s,” it has vastly less power to make that vision a reality.

And antifa’s vision is not as noxious. Antifa activists do not celebrate regimes that committed genocide and enforced slavery. They’re mostly anarchists. Anarchism may not be a particularly practical ideology. But it’s not an ideology that depicts the members of a particular race or religion as subhuman.
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Re: Errors in moral reasoning

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[All violence should be treated equally. But Antifa wasn't threatening the citizens of Charlottesville, they were threatening the white supremacists who were threatening the citizens of Charlottesville. That's wrong, they should leave that up to the police, and they are legally liable for what they do. But I do think the motivation to defend is a little more admirable than the motivation to threaten.
You're one step away from saying some violence is "admirable" and OK as long as it's directed towards people you consider your enemy - the "other".
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Re: Errors in moral reasoning

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Josh wrote:
[All violence should be treated equally. But Antifa wasn't threatening the citizens of Charlottesville, they were threatening the white supremacists who were threatening the citizens of Charlottesville. That's wrong, they should leave that up to the police, and they are legally liable for what they do. But I do think the motivation to defend is a little more admirable than the motivation to threaten.
You're one step away from saying some violence is "admirable" and OK as long as it's directed towards people you consider your enemy - the "other".
I don't think so. I think I'm saying that (1) violence is bad, (2) threatening people because they are black or Jewish is bad, (3) the desire to protect people from bullies is more admirable than the desire to threaten them, but that doesn't justify violence, and (4) seriously, folks, let the State maintain order, we don't need rival armed gangs.

Is that clearer?

I think that makes Charlottesville different from this event, where Antifa were really the bullies:

Black-clad antifa members attack peaceful right-wing demonstrators in Berkeley

About 100 violent people jumped into a crowd of 2,000 protesters carrying clubs and attacked a few right-wing people who were using fighting words but were not armed or really threatening anyone. It's really hard to have anything but contempt for that.

On the other hand, I admire this:

Reveal host Al Letson shields man from beating at anti-hate rally
Meanwhile, Letson said, a man who appeared to be one of Gibson’s supporters was also chased by 20 to 30 antifa protesters, who began to kick and hit him with sticks.

Letson dove on top of the man, suffering a few collateral blows but no injuries.
The man he protected seems to be one of the alt-right protestors. Letson is a liberal investigative journalist. And black.
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Re: Errors in moral reasoning

Post by haithabu »

Boot,

I find that the term alt-right is being used rather loosely nowadays by many people including yourself. Could we have a discussion as to exactly what alt-right means, and whom it includes? Neo-nazis and white supremacists only? Or does it include people demonstrating in favour of free speech and against neo-Marxist repression? Further, is the idea of a threat to individual freedoms from the left just an alt-right meme? Is the idea of freedom of speech an alt-right meme? If I show up at a free speech rally in Boston, does that then make me alt-right? And if Nancy Pelosi calls the organizers of a rally against Marxism in Berkeley white supremacists, does that then make me a white supremacist if I attend?

Curious minds want to know.
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Re: Errors in moral reasoning

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haithabu wrote:I find that the term alt-right is being used rather loosely nowadays by many people including yourself. Could we have a discussion as to exactly what alt-right means, and whom it includes? Neo-nazis and white supremacists only? Or does it include people demonstrating in favour of free speech and against neo-Marxist repression?
I do think people mean different things when they use the term, and that's a reason to use more specific terms like white supremacist or white nationalist instead.

I think this is an accurate definition of how Richard Spencer uses the term, and he invented it.
The alt-right, or alternative right, is a loosely defined group of people with far-right ideologies who reject mainstream conservatism in favor of white nationalism. White supremacist Richard Spencer initially promoted the term in 2010 in reference to a movement centered on white nationalism, and did so according to the Associated Press to disguise overt racism, white supremacism, and neo-Nazism.
I don't think that includes people who protest in favor of free speech - after all, the ACLU took the city of Charlottesville to court in order to allow them to have their rally, that hardly makes them alt-right. And I think that almost all Americans oppose the anarchist / communist orientation of Antifa, the vast majority oppose their violence, even when standing up to the alt-right. That hardly makes all Americans alt-right.

And I think it is important to remember that Alt-Right does not mean conservative. As the National Review explains:
One of the only nice things about the alt-right is that its leaders are honest about the fact that they want nothing to do with traditional American conservatism. Like the original Nazis, they seek to replace the traditional Right with their racial hogwash.
The alt-right groups are trying to tell people that white supremacists are the true conservatives, that they are the ones who really represent the right. And traditional conservatives want to stay far away from that garbage.

So ... what about Breitbart? Steve Bannon once proclaimed Breitbart was "the platform of the alt-right". In an interview, a senior editor of Breitbart claimed Breitbart has almost no alt-right content at all.
INSKEEP: I mean, let me just stop you there because I do want to ask about something that you said. You were talking about facts and data and how he ran Breitbart. Why did he make Breitbart the platform for the alt-right?

POLLAK: You know, all I can speak to is the content on the website. And the only alt-right content we have is a single article out of tens of thousands of articles, which is a journalistic article about the alt-right by Milo Yiannopoulos and Allum Bokhari, which basically went into this movement and tried to figure out what it was about. That's not racist. That's journalism.
In that quote, he does not deny that alt-right means racist, and strongly implies that "not racist" means "not alt-right". And Bannon is clearly disowning those people:
He dismissed the far right as irrelevant and sidestepped his own role in cultivating it: “Ethno-nationalism—it's losers. It's a fringe element. I think the media plays it up too much, and we gotta help crush it, you know, uh, help crush it more.”

“These guys are a collection of clowns,” he added.
Now to be clear, there's a second definition that you see in articles like this one from Allum Bokhari & Milo Iannopolous An Establishment Conservative’s Guide To The Alt-Right and in this MN thread. And that's what makes it confusing. In From 4Chan to Charlottesville: where the alt-right came from, and where it's going, a women who has studied these groups intensely says that the other channels on 4chan and 8chan are distancing themselves from the people still calling themselves alt-right. I think it's a poisoned term for anything beyond white nationalism, and people are backing away from it.
haithabu wrote:Further, is the idea of a threat to individual freedoms from the left just an alt-right meme? Is the idea of freedom of speech an alt-right meme? If I show up at a free speech rally in Boston, does that then make me alt-right? And if Nancy Pelosi calls the organizers of a rally against Marxism in Berkeley white supremacists, does that then make me a white supremacist if I attend?
No to all of these questions, of course. Antifa is a threat - and in Berkeley, they were clearly the provocateurs. There were about 2,000 protesters against white supremacism in Berkeley, about 100 Antifa, and only a handful of white supremacists, because they called off their rally. So protesting white supremacists does not make you Antifa, and favoring free speech does not make you alt-right or a white supremacist.

It does look like the term alt-left was invented by the alt-right, probably as a kind of whataboutism.

But after Charlottesville, I suspect alt-right basically means white supremacist in the minds of most people, and alt-left basically means Antifa in the minds of most people.
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Re: Errors in moral reasoning

Post by temporal1 »

haithabu wrote:Boot,
I find that the term alt-right is being used rather loosely nowadays by many people including yourself. Could we have a discussion as to exactly what alt-right means, and whom it includes? Neo-nazis and white supremacists only? Or does it include people demonstrating in favour of free speech and against neo-Marxist repression? Further, is the idea of a threat to individual freedoms from the left just an alt-right meme? Is the idea of freedom of speech an alt-right meme? If I show up at a free speech rally in Boston, does that then make me alt-right?

And if Nancy Pelosi calls the organizers of a rally against Marxism in Berkeley white supremacists, does that then make me a white supremacist if I attend?

Curious minds want to know.
.. good description of what's unfolded: madness, that renders these labels, and those tossing them around, ineffective and irrelevant.

community organization and political activism are getting bad names, now being first associated with aggression, violence, intolerance, extremism .. not constructive means to an end.

the money and leadership behind these groups should not be ignored; neither reports that some "protestors" are paid to appear, to do a job. i.e., mercenaries. reported pay scale is attractive.

this removes the organic, spontaneous, everyday citizen nature that is historically part+parcel of legitimate protests.

i was never a fan of the term, "alt-right," guessing only vaguely what it meant, altho understanding it was meant as a harsh criticism; "alt-left" is the natural, and, inevitable response. i would avoid using either.

i would not begin to imagine either gaining any type of respectable, universal meaning. both are meant to divide and cause ill-will. imho, the sooner forgotten, the better.

i don't believe my view is uncommon.
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Most or all of this drama, humiliation, wasted taxpayer money could be spared -
with even modest attempt at presenting balanced facts from the start.


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Re: Errors in moral reasoning

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temporal1 wrote:i was never a fan of the term, "alt-right," guessing only vaguely what it meant, altho understanding it was meant as a harsh criticism; "alt-left" is the natural, and, inevitable response. i would avoid using either.

i would not begin to imagine either gaining any type of respectable, universal meaning. both are meant to divide and cause ill-will. imho, the sooner forgotten, the better.
I agree with most of this - but there are people who call themselves Alt-Right, so we will see that in their quotes regardless.

Incidentally, here's a guideline that some journalists use for this kind of question:

How to describe extremists who rallied in Charlottesville
At AP, we have taken the position that the term “alt-right” should be avoided because it is meant as a euphemism to disguise racist aims. So use it only when quoting someone or when describing what the movement says about itself. Enclose the term “alt-right” in quotation marks or use phrasing such as the so-called alt-right (no quote marks when using the term so-called) or the self-described “alt-right.”
antifa Shorthand for anti-fascists, an umbrella description for the far-left-leaning militant groups that resist neo-Nazis and white supremacists at demonstrations and other events. Until the term becomes better known, include a definition in close proximity to first use of the word.
“alt-left” A term that some use to describe far-left factions. See “alt-right” for usage guidelines.
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Re: Errors in moral reasoning

Post by JimFoxvog »

haithabu wrote: 5) Moral supremacism - the temptation to think that there is no wisdom or virtue or good faith on the other side of an issue.

Another word for it might be moral narcissism, only this is a narcissism which takes place on a collective level rather than just on an individual level.

This attitude makes its holders correction proof. It impedes their goals by creating unnecessary conflict and resistance to their ideas.
The above came to mind when I read this:
What is most troubling, say these officials and others in government and on Capitol Hill who have been briefed on the episodes, are Trump’s angry reactions when he is given information that contradicts positions he has taken or beliefs he holds. Two intelligence officers even reported that they have been warned to avoid giving the President intelligence assessments that contradict stances he has taken in public. http://time.com/5518947/donald-trump-in ... -security/
Of course, this is a common temptation. How can we stay open to information that contradicts positions we've taken?
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Re: Errors in moral reasoning

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I thought this thread was locked because it was stirring up conflicts and judgmental behavior. Personally I think that this sleeping dog should be left alone because of that.
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