temporal1 wrote:i'm dismayed.
after decades of essentially socially castrating extreme groups by effective widespread (shunning) now they are elevated into the public arena by aggression tactics that are no more wanted from one side or the other. the new aggressors then self-righteously attack those not defending them with accusations of defending the first group.
after decades of rejecting and not defending the first group, in big ways and small ways, it's insulting to be accused of the opposite. many people have close family members who fought in formal wars against this, all have been hurt by it, this is no minor accusation.
but, as i believe it's actually about sowing division+unrest, mission accomplished.
insulting is an effective way to stir pots.
logic and reality are not actual factors. that's an entirely different premise.
I think the Internet makes it easy to find groups that agree with you, where you can do all kinds of nasty things that are harder face-to-face. This is true for sexual perversions, and it's also true for political hatred and other antisocial behavior - on the left or on the right.
And some of these groups that have developed on the Internet are establishing a beachhead on the ground, in elections, in demonstrations. On both the left and the right. So things are getting more extreme.
temporal1 wrote:the way i see the phrase, "alt-right" used, even on this forum, is a catch-all phrase to diminish-bash any-all conservatives, or any you happen to disagree with .. may as well say, "the evil ones."
Most conservatives do not consider themselves alt-right, and in the wake of Charlottesville most conservatives have been very clear that they do not support Nazis, the KKK, or white supremacy.
I usually use the term only for people who say they are alt-right. The guy who invented the term is
Richard Spencer:
Richard Bertrand Spencer (born May 11, 1978) is an American white supremacist. He is president of the National Policy Institute, a white supremacist think tank, as well as Washington Summit Publishers. Spencer has stated that he rejects the label of white supremacist, and prefers to describe himself as an identitarian. He has advocated for a white homeland for a "dispossessed white race" and called for "peaceful ethnic cleansing" to halt the "deconstruction" of European culture.
Spencer and others have said that he created the term "alt-right", which he considers a movement about white identity. Breitbart News described Spencer's website AlternativeRight.com as "a center of alt-right thought."
Spencer and his organization drew considerable media attention in the weeks following the 2016 US presidential election, where, at a National Policy Institute conference, he quoted from Nazi propaganda and denounced Jews. In response to his cry "Hail Trump, hail our people, hail victory!", a number of his supporters gave the Nazi salute and chanted in a similar fashion to the Sieg heil chant used at the Nazis' Nuremberg rallies. Spencer has also refused to denounce Adolf Hitler.
If you want to hear it from their own mouths, you can go to AlternativeRight.com.
That's not what most conservatives believe, and traditional conservative publications do not support the alt-right. But many people are reading more extreme publications that do sympathize with the alt-right, and some of them are confusing white identity memes with conservatism.
temporal1 wrote:i see a new phrase now, "alt-left."
I don't know any group that uses that term to describe themselves, I think Donald Trump used it, and he wasn't very clear who he was talking about. He may have been talking about Antifa, a group of communists and anarchists who see fighting the far right as one of their main missions.
We would do well to stay away from both groups.