Agreed @legowarrior. I always wonder which European Culture they are talking about? French? German? English? Welsh? Scottish? Irish? Italian? Finnish? Polish? Russian? Dutch?
When they say European Culture, do they mean the European Union? Because that would be trying to have a European Culture, wouldn’t it? And yet those racist shitbags all want to destroy the European Union so they can’t mean the European Union, right?
Yes, exactly. I mean, the bastards despise Europe, except maybe for fish-and-chips-land. Who are they kidding?
I think that Trump himself is a racist. No person who wasn’t/isn’t ever seriously entertained the notion that President Obama was not born in Hawaii on August 4, 1961, for one thing. He not only entertained it privately but made it a big deal around the time of the 2012 elections.
Now is being a racist and using the term “infesting” when discussing illegal immigration along the border with Mexico enough to qualify as “Alt-Right”? What about completely mischaracterizing the nature of the killing of that woman in San Francisco who happened to be hit by a ricochet shot discharged by a gun then in the possession of an undocumented immigrant by saying he “gunned her down”? In my book, absolutely. Anyone who defends Trump after stuff like that is at least excusing “Alt-Right” bullshit.
Not even most effective, it’s hardly effective st all. It has zero bearing, really.
Nope, because Europeans overstay their visas too, and you won’t hear one peep about them.
Because they’re white.
I wish it weren’t so, but the facts speak for themselves, this policy is deeply rooted in racism and fear of non white people. Otherwise, as you say, they’d crack down on white and Asian immigrants with the same vigor.
But they don’t.
@Sharpe has eloquently laid out how employment enforcement is by far the most effective, humane, and cost efficient means of curbing illegal immigration.
Of course it would, but then the big agricultural interests would squeal like stuck pigs and get their Senators to fix any “burdensome enforcement” right quick. It’s all well and good to hate on brown people, but hit some some rich agribusiness concern in the pocketbook, that’s another story.
Only if they use white supremacist talking points.
And that’s not a “right” talking point. I can find you a few dozen conservatives easily that would call it out pretty easily. You’re the one equating them, throwing up your hands and saying, “Well we can’t say anything against racism because the entire Republican party message is racism.”
That’s just horsecrap. It isn’t remotely the case and you’re doing a disservice to actual conservatives by saying they are.
Trump isn’t anything other than Trump. He has no ideology and uses whoever he can.
Cruz and Spencer aren’t equivalent, though Ted’s been trying real hard to get there of late. Then again Ted has that problem of being Hispanic going against him, so he can’t really make the jump to Spencer territory.
Only the racist ones? If someone starts talking about White Culture or the like… probably. Again not all Republican talking points are racist and equating them elevates the racists and legitimizes them while pushing conservatives who are racist into the shit with the Nazis and their ilk.
Most illegal immigrants actually fall into this category.
But no one is gun ho about sending them back because a lot of them are white people. They’re more than happy to count them when depicting their “brown hordes coming across the border” narrative though.
Personally, I’m a huge fan of European Culture, but I’m not sure it needs protecting, what with all those Chinese gals playing Mozart at age 4 on Youtube.
This is all about the one book he recommended right?
Given that book has been recommended in mainstream nonracist sources you can’t simply label anyone who recommends it as a white supremacist.
The author is not generally regarded as alt right in the U.K. Maybe that’s due to a certain amount of self censorship in terms of his involvement with the mainstream media.
If the censorious left is unable to even entertain discussions around these issues, then only the cranks will talk about it, which is fine until a lot of the population are concerned about it, at which point they start listening to the cranks.
You lot are effectively saying a gay person can’t be concerned about homophobic enclaves in the U.K. You’re effectively saying Jews can’t be concerned about a major anti Semitic influence in U.K. politics. Maybe Tom should ban all of you as homophobes and antisemites? It’s just as reasonable as your demand that anyone recommending Doug Murray’s book should be banned.
For the avoidance of doubt I think Doug Murray is a nasty piece of work and don’t agree with what I understand are the conclusions of his book, but I think the concerns around Islamic integration are not entirely without basis in fact and the absolute worst thing for the liberal left to do is to pretend the problem doesn’t exist, because when you do you let people like Doug Murray define the problem in the public sphere.
No, he actually did say that he was very much in favor of protecting European culture on his very own volition.
This debate about the narrow issue of whether gman was racist or a member of the alt-right is not a useful one in my view. It’s a symptom of the outdated “one drop” view of racism which views any racism as REQUIRING MAXIMUM DEATH PENALTY PUNISHMENT OR YOU ARE TOLERATING RACISM!!! versus ONLY BAD PEOPLE ARE RACISTS THEREFORE I CANNOT BE A RACIST B/C I AM POLITE DESPITE THE FACT THAT MY POLICY POSITIONS ARE ABHORRENT!!! It’s a lot of volume and not much message, IMO.
The real issue in my view is what was the appropriate, proportionate response to gman? My view now is that after a few days of his posting, once his overall pattern of conduct was clear, he should have been banned.
I understand the frustration some feel over the length of time it took to reach that point, but my view is that this was a learning experience for Tom and the mods. It’s another example of how the times we live in are not normal, both in terms of an educated and articulate person like gman exploiting an open forum for information warfare and also the deep taint on the far right caused by the unveiling via Trump of the overt racism on the far right, the racism that a lot of us were comforting ourselves to sleep by assuring ourselves that racism was much smaller and less intense than reality.
My view is that this episode was rough for the forum but I believe the powers that be at QT3 have learned from the experience.
I will disagree with Tom in one way: his new approach is to emphasize the fact that racism is not tolerated on QT3, but I think the better approach is to look at the bigger picture. Focusing on racism is too narrow and too subject to semantic lawyering of the definitions. The bigger issue is whether gman was behaving in an overall way that was problematic for the forum. I feel that there were racist assumptions underlying some of gman’s positions, but I see no evidence that he was a pro-genocide hater who views people of color as sub-human. Am I saying that he was a racist or not a racist? Who cares? It’s a semantic definition.
Did gman support, promote and promulgate views that contain abhorrent racial elements? Hell yes. Just look at the pages he danced around Timex’s demands that he condemn family separation like a legal mosquito on PCP, as one example. Did this cause many people on the forum to be extremely unhappy, even feeling threatened in some cases? Hell yes. Was his overall pattern of behavior, including but not limited to the racial elements, disruptive to the forum? Hell yes.
That’s the issue in my view. You can’t ignore the racial elements but in this particular case racial elements were not the sole or even the primary problem with gman. They were part of the package of problems with gman.
That’s some inspired naming. Now you just need to pitch it as a spiritual successor to the original Atlantic Wall, and Trump’s base would eat it right up. Look, the Nazis even made the French pay for it.
Good point. Really, anyone that feels that there is justification in separating children, especially young children, from their parents because they crossed the borders illegally is racists and/or evil.
I guess you could just be evil and just enjoy putting children and families through emotional distress and likely abuse, regardless of the persons race.
The issue isn’t conservatives, Shiva. It hasn’t been for a while. The issue is Republicans.
Do you need me to find you a few dozen Republicans talking about white culture? It’s not that hard to do.
-Tom
For the record, it’s not a new approach. There were a couple of requests that we make a statement that open bigotry would not be tolerated. Since it was never tolerated anyway, sure, a few lines in the forum rules are easy enough. But the same policy has been in place all along.
-Tom
Against my better judgment, I’ll attempt to expand my thoughts. Apologies in advance: I’m going to drop the fun mask for a sec. Well, more than a sec. This one’s long. In particular, my thoughts begin at a longer reply from Tom above, so I’ll quote for clarity.
To answer the last two questions bluntly, yes. I also don’t think this is a new revelation we’ve only just stumbled upon; it’s been true for decades.
Certainly, the public, mass-media arm of the American Right wore a thin veneer of respectability and equanimity for decades while their policies sought to do exclusively hateful, horrific things, so I can grant that it’s at least possible that a Republican voter in, say, 1980, might be so grotesquely ill-informed, cripplingly uncurious, and alarmingly un-empathetic that they might have missed enough of that to justify voting for Republicans without actively acknowledging the enormous, absolute, and unquestionable harm that those votes brought, but the last 10 years or so have utterly pulled off the mask and unveiled the gleeful racism, misogyny, classism, and general-purpose hatred that thrive at the heart of the American Republican party. We are past the point of being able to afford to give people the benefit of the doubt any longer.
And let’s not mince words. Sure, they are the party of stripping immigrant children from their families and forcing 3-year-olds to represent themselves in cruel kangaroo courts and selling out Americans to import cancer-causing building materials from their Russian oligarch best friends, so there’s a certain level of almost cartoonish evil at play nowadays, but really, these are just an extension of facets that have been there since the 60s at least. The Republican party is and has been evil.
They are the party that has fought tooth and nail against every ounce of progress we’ve achieved for the rights of women, blacks, immigrants, Muslims, LGBTQIA+ individuals, the chronically ill, children, and the impoverished. WHerever the put-upon, downtrodden, and weak have stood bravely and demanded that they be heard and respected and recognized, you could guarantee you would find Republicans lined up against them, fighting tirelessly to hold them down and prevent their rise.
Theirs are the policies that leave women no choice but dangerous illicit back-alley abortions, leave blacks to the tender mercies of racist police forces, leave trans youth in the hands of religiously motivated bigots at their pharmacies and schools, leave the chronically ill to be abandoned by their insurance companies to die, and leave the poor to pull themselves up by bootstraps that they’ll be so very happy to sell to you for the low, low price of you can never afford it.
Republican policy does literal, actual, constant, measureable, and unquestionable harm to the weakest people in our country, and that is not a novel feature of Trump’s hateful administration. This is not a twist, a surprise, or a new development. It has been the case, constantly and utterly, for longer than I’ve been on this Earth. They’ve just stopped shying away from admitting it and now embrace the racists, misogynists, and worse that once lurked in the shadows of the party’s big tent, reveling in their adoration and crushing them underfoot as they serve their true masters: the vast oligarchic companies that would starve us all to save a dollar.
When someone advances these viewpoints and policies, they are advancing the literal, fatal consequences that they entail toward the people in this world that I love and care for most. They put whatever paltry concern it is they have–unlimited guns, the false words of a decrepit book, or the glory of a waving flag–over the lives and health and safety and freedom of millions of real, suffering, desperate people.
That is an evil that I cannot abide by. I can’t just look away from it. I can’t pretend it’s not there so that I can have a fun conversation about videogames with you. It’s not something I can forget about long enough to think your dog is cute.
It is an evil that must be overcome, crushed, and prevented from ever rising again. Those who continue to support that party and its tangential outgrowths are, at best, willing enablers of that evil. Most, I’m sad to say, are gleeful supporters of it, reveling in the harm that they cause. Kill the poor to cuck the libs, indeed. In any case, those that remain on that side, now that any possibility of pretending it is anything but what it is has been annihilated by a decade of increasingly hateful, ignorance-embracing, violence-enabling, death-causing rhetoric and ads and laws and policies, are beyond redemption in my eyes, and absolutely and entirely undeserving of my respect, my kindness, or my concern.
I have no use for them in my life, except insofar as a focus to keep the rage burning bright as I work to destroy everything they have ever built or striven for.
AKA, unlike many who will tell you that they only wanted gman gone when it became apparent that he was a troll, and that his views had nothing at all to do with it, his views had everything to do with it from my perspective, especially insofar as they functioned as poison in the well of my favorite internet hangout. What he espoused, supported, and presumably works and votes for is precisely why I have no interest in sharing this digital space, or any other, with him or his ilk.
A response that begrudgingly gives him the boot more because we all couldn’t restrain ourselves from feeding the troll rather than because of what he believed and spoke to and supports is one that deeply disappoints me on a core level, and the environment that creates here is precisely what I’ve been so unsure of my capacity to continue supporting.
Some of the things Tom’s said in the interim are encouraging, and others are deeply frustrating. That there is a not insignificant portion of the user base here that still feels he was wronged somehow, or that those who stood against him were in some way incorrect or too harsh, does not help.
It’s not my place to demand that every user to the right of Bernie Sanders be banned forthwith, but I am absolutely in support of any initiative that recognizes that hate speech goes well, well beyond calling for all them colored folk deserve to get strung up, and that it does, in fact, infiltrate every last position and element of the American Right to its very core.
tl;dr: Armando fucking rocks
Couldn’t disagree more. I forget, are we still trying to make Qt3 a more welcoming place, or does that only apply to people left of some arbitrary point in the political spectrum now?
Tolerating intolerance, it turns out, is not the best tactic. It tends to get you Trumps.
Another question:
When you found your movement, will it be known as Penism?