Justin Mohn, a 32-year-old Pennsylvania man, is in police custody after allegedly murdering and decapitating his father, claiming the latter was a “federal employee” and a “traitor.” Before his arrest, Mohn posted a 14-minute video to YouTube in which he displayed his father’s severed head, proclaiming: "This is the head of Mike Mohn, a federal
US doing a bang up job of curbing that far right terrorism problem. At least this one wasn’t part of the armed forces.
This is a major argument for anti-fascist action. Liberal mainstream society has always been very bad at combating fascism because they desire calm and order and lawfulness which fascists can exploit. So besides “liberal anti-fa” using legal means like suing the KKK out of existence you also need autonomous anti-fa to prevent fascists from recruiting. That is why it’s legitimate to prevent fascists from speaking using “impolite” means, because fascists speech using clever lies creates fascist thinking. The right to free speech has to exclude hate speech.
PS: A very good book on this topic: Fascism Today: What It Is and How to End It (link)
Going to read that article, but first an aside… Look at all those fucking rich white people in that photo.
How could anyone ever think that the Republicans actually represent anyone besides rich white people? And mostly men at that.
Somehow the most calm and vegetarian liberal mainstream societies are also the least fascist, and fascism doesn’t grow there. So maybe it just works and your fixes are not required.
Why would you attack their visibility if the problem is their existence and visibility is a feedback allowing to measure it?
Only if fascists use clever lies, how does one tell between “liberals” and fascists?
And also that fascist thinking is exactly …
… this. Exclusion of rights given as a dogma.
You don’t need that, you can just allow people to not communicate with carriers of views they consider inhumane, but you still choose the most fascist way of countering fascism.
Also:
You allow you child to do everything, they might get wounded in one way or another, they might become somebody whom you wouldn’t want them to be, they might make mistakes, but they might also be happy.
You keep them locked (figuratively), and they won’t become anyone at all.
You make your own choices in between and they become closer to the latter, but conscious of what they could have been.
Yes absolutely true. Fascism needs specific circumstances to grow. My thinking is that democracy needs prosperity, security and education.
Property: I mean a modest prosperity instead of precarious living like having a job and being able to afford a home and to raise children without working yourself to death and also without both parents having to work full time (or 2-3 jobs) and neglecting the children. Security: Not being at war and not in constant fear about terrorists and evils that besets society on all sides pumped through the media. Education: Media that doesn’t constantly deceive, obscure and manipulate you
I’m not interested in measuring it that way.You can measure it differently. But every time you let crypto fascists speak with their dogwhistles and whatnot they recruit people - depending on the overall material conditions of society too of course. But it is a naive view to think that people are pure or immune to recruitment by fascists. History tells us.
Yeah good point. I’d argue that the current spade of fascists are mostly interested in grabbing power. Trump and the new GOP isn’t an ideological fascist party, they just use the mechanisms of fascism to gain power and serve their masters interests. Liberals use other mechanisms to gain power - which are shit too but they do not base inequality
But this explains why e.g. climate activists or pacifists view the current "leftist"parties in the US and EU as kind of right wing extremists. It’s not fascism, but… well.
No, fascist thinking is a belief that inequality based on mythological identity is not just acceptable but morally correct.
What I said is that specific actions do not serve the underlying goal of free speech but the opposite. And it’s not dogma because we have strong psychological and historic evidence for this. It’s also law in many EU countries since fascism last rise.
But I agree that it’s far from ideal. And autonomous anti-fa action against fascist speech shouldn’t be legal either, but it has good arguments going for it. Ideally we do not have the socioeconomic conditions that creates fertile ground for it. You can see I again blame the mainstream establishment for trump even though the act shocked, just shocked and bewildered by all this. This is the core of why liberal societies are bad at combating extreme fascism.
I don’t quite understand what you mean here. But like I said, laws like that are not fascist, you could call them authoritarian or statism. But autonomous anti-fa is grass roots not authoritarian / statism.
On an unrelated note: The goal of free speech / that amendment is to allow accountability of those in power and dissenting voices to be heard. So that people can say what is wrong with the country and have a chance to be heard.
The current monopolization of news and social media under the control of a tiny minority of ultra-rich goes completely against the idea of free speech - at best they treat speech as a commodity and bias everything in favor of the most profitable speech (clickbait that leads to endless circular arguments and more ad sales). At worst someone like Elon Musk pushes his own personal uneducated beliefs about society. Quasi-Monopolization violates the 1st amendment imho.
So about your “let your child do some stupid things so they can learn”. That would require at least that they see the consequences of their action, and in this case it’s unimaginable suffering. And how couldl the learn if the media is captured by corporations? So I disagree, they should learn from history or from science. But corporate interest also launched massive anit-science PR campaigns because of climate change.
PS: Oops I wrote way too much lol
In short, my opinion on this exchange:
It’s a complex subject. I think there’s a bit of bias in the direction of wealth inequality in your view, and a bit of bias in the direction of skepticism of managing society by laws (I don’t trust a person to make the right decision for another person) in my view.
I think this guy is just fucknut crazy, not a terrorist per se. Either way though, it’s not a great look.
It’s not a coincidence that a batshit crazy person is spewing right wing insanity and not singing kumbaya with the lefties. Just saying.
Terrorism is “fucknut crazy”. Killing others in the name of a belief system that controls and represses others, for political or theological reasons, is fucking nuts. This isn’t the control of “don’t shit on LGBTQ people” that conservatives whine about and claim is liberal tyranny, this is the control that physically harms people because they don’t conform to their fucked-up belief system. Which is what this guy did.