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The Alt-Right

Idris2002 said:
You'll recall that nobody in the Wire complains about African-American machine politics in Baltimore - because when the Irish and the Poles ran the city, the game was played that way too.
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and like in the dukes of hazzard when it's plain everything's in the gift of boss hogg, and you're supposed to cheer for the dukes who'd doubtless have been out in charlotteville themselves the other day.
 
I found the first bit of this interesting . What appears to be a conversation between opposing sides or view points on the ground that doesn't involve killing each other . Civilised engagement . Maybe I'm taking this up wrong , but going by the flags they are carrying on their shoulders that's how it looks . But it looked to me like positive engagement . Video NSFW as there's a feminist walking about topless later on .

Was quite surprised by this exchange given the events that had just occurred . But maybe it shows that some of these people could be turned around if engaged with properly .

 
ku-klux-klan-baby.jpg
 
Idris2002 said:
One point I've been meaning to make about the forms I.d. politics take in the US is that those forms are specific to that country, and go back to the first century of mass politics there. If you're an Irish-American immigrant, you vote for Boss Murphy because he got your cousin from Dublin the job in the police force.

And every time that happens, that's a job on the police that Boss Kowalski can't give to somebody's cousin from Warsaw. My point is that American identity politics are based on an assumed, inevitable conflict over inherently scarce resources. The socialist or social democratic assumption that such scarcity is not inevitable is alien to this point of view. And those who hold this point of view think that in conditions of scarcity, a gain for one group must inherently mean a loss for another group. The idea that a coalition of groups could overcome that scarcity and that conflict is one that they genuinely find hard or impossible to grasp.
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Having visited the States I was struck by the way people tend to deal with race and the assumptions they make. Legislative segregation may be over, but there's assumed segregation that's every bit as pervasive. A person's ethnicity is definitely something that does not go without comment.

Fields & Fields point out in their very useful book, Racecraft, that racism is first and foremost a social practice; an action or a rationale for action, or both at once. Whereas (their term) racecraft is the evidence that there has been racism at work. That socially ratified beliefs have been at work. (I'll get the precise definition when I get access to the book later on). So what you see in American society as an outsider is definitely not the same as you see in Europe. And that affects the language available to Americans to describe social inequalities. It has a pervasive impact on the way that class is seen and discussed.
 
You know what interests me is how people learn the ideology that explicit statements of collective blame addressed at white mothers aren't actually explicit statements of collective blame addressed at white mothers. I was first introduced to this sort of thing in the early 2010s through student politics and one thing that struck me was that nothing like that was ever explained by anyone, but that it was implicitly understood that you reacted to and responded to statements like that in ways which were different to the ways in which you would respond to it in other environments. This makes working within that sort of environment especially difficult given that saying the wrong thing, or the right thing in the wrong way, is not looked upon very favourably.

Very often those in the know and who knew how to play these linguistic games were privately educated, all of those who didn't were not, I know that private schools now do teach about things like white privilege as do organisations which recruit many privately educated or upper-middle-class people like Teach First.

In any case my point is that even if you are OK with white women being attacked because a young socialist woman was murdered and god knows why you would be, surely everyone must recognise that you need either prolonged exposure or some sort of induction into these linguistic conventions in order to be able to understand that very clear statements written in plain English do not mean that they would mean in any other context.

Here is a trade unionist, a white woman, objecting to being held collectively responsible for the murder of a white woman by a fascist.



and, seeing the absolute madness of the interaction, it is predictably jumped upon by a fascist.



Drip, drip, drip. Hey, they say they hate you... and they mean it, you know who doesn't hate you?
 
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Break the link ffs. Better still, don't bother posting it at all.

e2a: ta
 
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Rather than it being simple quibbling over terminology this stuff is critically important to work out.

The politics that underlie it lead people in certain directions in terms of their analysis, who they see as being (currently and potentially) on their side, and so ends up directing their political activity.

In simple terms... it's class/power or morals/biology. Take your pick.
 
Athos said:
The irony is that it's the one in the foreground whose organisation is killing more black people, now. A point that's easily overlooked by focusing upon identities rather than structural considerations.
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That photograph is a kind of rorshach test, people see such different things in it i noticed as it went around tweeter lately (its not from the events this weekend apparently).
 
J Ed said:
You know what interests me is how people learn the ideology that explicit statements of collective blame addressed at white mothers aren't actually explicit statements of collective blame addressed at white mothers. I was first introduced to this sort of thing in the early 2010s through student politics and one thing that struck me was that nothing like that was ever explained by anyone, but that it was implicitly understood that you reacted to and responded to statements like that in ways which were different to the ways in which you would respond to it in other environments. This makes working within that sort of environment especially difficult given that saying the wrong thing, or the right thing in the wrong way, is not looked upon very favourably.

Very often those in the know and who knew how to play these linguistic games were privately educated, all of those who didn't were not, I know that private schools now do teach about things like white privilege as do organisations which recruit many privately educated or upper-middle-class people like Teach First.

In any case my point is that even if you are OK with white women being attacked because a young socialist woman was murdered and god knows why you would be, surely everyone must recognise that you need either prolonged exposure or some sort of induction into these linguistic conventions in order to be able to understand that very clear statements written in plain English do not mean that they would mean in any other context.

Here is a trade unionist, a white woman, objecting to being held collectively responsible for the murder of a white woman by a fascist.



and, seeing the absolute madness of the interaction, it is predictably jumped upon by a fascist.



Drip, drip, drip. Hey, they say they hate you... and they mean it, you know who doesn't hate you?
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Exactly. Unless you're part of that identity politics milieu, you'd have no reason to take that tweet other than in the way it reads on its face. But I'm not sure they care about that; i don't think they're trying to engage outside that echo chamber - just playing to the gallery for liberal kudos. Even at the cost of actively undermining potential solidarity.
 
Athos said:
Exactly. Unless you're part of that identity politics milieu, you'd have no reason to take that tweet other than in the way it reads on its face. But I'm not sure they care about that; i don't think they're trying to engage outside that echo chamber - just playing to the gallery for liberal kudos. Even at the cost of actively undermining potential solidarity.
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Yeah, I don't know how common it is outside the weird world of twitter but it's true that I've been acculturated to it (statements beginning with white women for instance) by prolonged exposure and repetition there. That's kind of how language goes though isn't it, we interpret things depending on the context in which we find the words.
 
bimble said:
That photograph is a kind of rorshach test, people see such different things in it i noticed as it went around tweeter lately (its not from the events this weekend apparently).
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The thing I noticed was the sign that the guy on the left is holding, and how sad it makes me feel about the gospel of john still sitting there in the bible polluting it with antisemitism. Now that is something that I am willing to take ownership of.

No Christian has any excuse to be quoting from that book anymore, and yet many do whilst ignoring the negative impact it has had over the centuries. If only the reformation had chucked that book out.
 
danny la rouge said:
Yes.

But how is that apportioned?
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I'm not trying to undermine the main thrust of your argument, I just didn't think that your case was well served by taking the original tweet out of context. The message was provoked by a public encounter with a group of white women who were offended by their children being exposed to rude language, but who didn't seem to mind them hearing racist thugs boast of violence. Those of us who argue that class politics offer a positive alternative to identity politics also need to show that we take the question of how racism is reproduced seriously.

Rutita1 said:
She is wrong IYO danny, yes I get that.

I think it's off to suggest those women that agreed with her don't understand or are just wrong though. Surely that's just as derogatory and sneerie as you are saying this writer has been. Akin to saying 'they don't know their own mind'. That you know better than them. I know you are not that dismissive but it's how it could be interpreted.
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If this line of reasoning holds up, what is to stop it from being turned against you? Aren't you just being 'derogatory and sneerie' by telling him that he doesn't know his own mind, too? By all means, argue with him and ask him to support his belief, but his opinions should be judged on their own merits rather than simply because he disagrees with others.
 
eoin_k said:
If this line of reasoning holds up, what is to stop it from being turned against you? Aren't you just being 'derogatory and sneerie' by telling him that he doesn't know his own mind, too? By all means, argue with him and ask him to support his belief, but his opinions should be judged on their own merits rather than simply because he disagrees with others.
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Eh? I haven't been sneerie or told him he doesn't know his own mind in any shape of form though. I have accepted his opinion as his own but pointed out that simply saying they are wrong or don't understand could be seen as condescending to say the least.
 
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bimble said:
Yeah, I don't know how common it is outside the weird world of twitter but it's true that I've been acculturated to it (statements beginning with white women for instance) by prolonged exposure and repetition there. That's kind of how language goes though isn't it, we interpret things depending on the context in which we find the words.
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Amongst the part of the left that does something beyond reproducing US/student "politics" tropes online, vanishingly rare.
 
The fifty three percent of white women voted for Trump thing is pissing me off. It's somewhere in the region of thirty five percent of white women who are eligible to vote in the USA that voted for Trump (and fifty three percent of those that turned up). I still haven't found turnout figures by race and gender to work out the exact percentage.
 
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