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https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-48830980
But will they listen?
We cannot unmake the internet without damaging our polities. We can make the internet giants more responsible in terms of oversight, taxation, and compliance.
Of course the far-right used social media to forward it’s agenda. And of course they got the drop on the rest of us, much like Uncle Vlad did. However, such right-wing thinking has become normalised in society. I expect the detention centres will get a few more rolls of barbed wire and some nice new machine guns.
Not racist, just ethnopluralist.
It’s a new world, evidently; or maybe a retconned, rebooted, rebadged and rebranded one. It’s the same stuff beneath the packaging though.
But will they listen?
We cannot unmake the internet without damaging our polities. We can make the internet giants more responsible in terms of oversight, taxation, and compliance.
Of course the far-right used social media to forward it’s agenda. And of course they got the drop on the rest of us, much like Uncle Vlad did. However, such right-wing thinking has become normalised in society. I expect the detention centres will get a few more rolls of barbed wire and some nice new machine guns.
Not racist, just ethnopluralist.
It’s a new world, evidently; or maybe a retconned, rebooted, rebadged and rebranded one. It’s the same stuff beneath the packaging though.
no subject
Date: 2019-07-09 06:01 am (UTC)links to
http://https//www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-48830980
"Ethnopluralist" basically means "apartheid".
no subject
Date: 2019-07-09 07:00 am (UTC)About a decade ago, a few new bugs dropped in on politicartoons and other forums I frequented; and a year or so down the line some surprising folk ended up spouting alt-right ideas. Now politicartoons was always a broad comm with its fair share of extremists, I mean you had to have been there for wayneforbush08 and his particular take on things as it was all redacted; but at least those guys were overt.
I've been thinking about my own experiences of redpilling, and how many sane and rational folk ended up estranged from what I can only term "consensual reality". Brexit is a symptom. The growth of the Alt-right is another.
It just goes to show that education, information, and critical thinking can be repurposed in support of what to my mind is provable madness. Can neo-Nazis be scholars? Yes, obviously.
Is all of their scholarship tainted and in need of rigorous review to necessarily decontextualise it to make it consonant with reality? I'd say yes again. We will never do the awful, evil experiments that happened in the concentration camps. But can we use the data? Another example is the early advances in obstetric medicine which may have been enabled by, again, some really evil murderous behaviour. By renowned doctors, no less. Murderers can give us data, can fascists?
I do know what ethnopluralist means and implies. I'd like other folk to understand it too.
But when it comes to extremely-well educated madness may I recommend something from the other end of the spectrum: "The Black Celts" by Ahmed Ali, which my mother bought me for Christmas some two decades or so ago. I lent it out to chums, and we all picked through it. Some madnesses are quite beautiful, which is disturbing in itself. Which is, at a guess, the appeal of neo-fascism; some folk find it a beautiful madness.
Which is why I think that this is true:
When all the physical questions in the universe are answered there will still exist the questions of morality - what is right and wrong. When those questions are answered all we are left with is æsthetics; what colour should it be?
This wallpaper is simply awful, one of us must go.
no subject
Date: 2019-07-10 05:03 am (UTC)I did do that once at a comedy show. :)
It was one of those events where the comedian was interacting with the audience, quite extensively, and integrating a random call from the peanut gallery into their act was part of what they did.
Anyway, he went on a long rant with increasing speed, building up to a punch line, and I recognized what it was going to be, so right at the appropriate moment I yelled it out. The comedian looked a little gob-smacked, but it generated the requisite laughs from others present and, to his credit, he continued on in stride.
> the appeal of neo-fascism; some folk find it a beautiful madness
It's particularly insane when you stop for a moment and ask "given the changes in travel and movement of population in the last one hundred years, what do you think will happen in the next hundred years?"
Do they seriously think that people will be doing less travel and there will be less cultural integration, or more?
no subject
Date: 2019-07-10 06:37 am (UTC)Travel is one of those things that I think will have to diminish. That's just because climate change stuff is changing the patterns of our behaviour. But I think the internet means that there will be a greater spread of polarised cultures as this sort of internet divisiveness infects a lot of our thinking. As a species, we don't need to travel and migrate much more to have increased the genetic diversity of our local populations by a significant amount. (This is good for the survival of the species as a general principle; but unless we get off-planet it ain't going to matter much.) So I wonder if there are large-number population evolutionary reasons for such forms of "ethnopluralist" thinking.
There has to be an ætiology of the insanity. I can't help but speculate wildly, because some of these folk aren't consciously evil, merely astonishingly wrong.