it's wild how the takeaway boomers have had from Kent State is that it's now their turn and they want to do it daily on every campus.
I understand that when Kent State happened there was a significant proportion of the country that approved.
A Gallup poll the following week revealed nearly 60 percent placed total blame on the students, while only 10 percent blamed the guardsmen (30 percent had no opinion). Means cites multiple uses of the phrase “They should have shot more of them [students]” and similar sentiments.
Kent State (and Jackson State) should have been the moment every American was radicalized. Instead a majority proved their loyalty to the Great Satan.
heard about kent state massacre as a kid, was in my 20s before i knew they did a second one at an HBCU ~11 days later.
Tulsa, Kent State, and Philadelphia are why I am as openly and intractably "unlimited genocide on the first world". These are not our allies, they will never be.
Smash cut to David Bowie and Trent Reznor's "I'm afraid of Americans".
Holy god, I now see why none of these assholes care about Palestinians - they think they should have just stayed in their place and accepted the harm that was happening to their people. What’s the word for that kind of mentality?
What’s the word for that kind of mentality?
Genocidal. Fascist. Reactionary. Chauvinist. Imperialist. Colonialist.
Any of the above will do
Evil. When I was a kid and blindly followed American conservatism, then liberalism, I was never able to fully buy into any of it because no matter what they say, I knew Americans - and the majority of westerners - saw me and my friends and family as subhuman to be exploited and killed. Every time I repeated some DOD talking point, there was a nagging voice in the back of my head that wanted to clarify that I didn't support any of the callous policies, but then I realized that it left me with nothing else to support because it's all callousness.
Most Americans weren't against the war. Most support the soldiers regardless of how they view the war. The country is simply uninterested in caring about human suffering unless it's their baby boys in uniform, and only nominally because they can't even bothered to do anything to help imperialists when they come home.
Isn’t that how boomers are with everything? We had to go through it, you should be forced through it too! The ones complaining about student loan forgiveness and believing you should be able to raise a family on minimum wage.
it's nauseating how much human rights rhetoric is used to prop up the violence of capitalism. I know this is an absolutely tepid point to make on hexbear.net but like... fuck, it's just gross
No you're 100% the naked hipocrisy and selfish cruelty of it never stops being revolting. I think half the reason we all shitpost so much is we're essentially hiding in absurdity because trying to raw-dog this society after you've seen the rot behind the mask is too maddening.
I think half the reason we all shitpost so much is we're essentially hiding in absurdity because trying to raw-dog this society after you've seen the rot behind the mask is too maddening.
you hit the nail on the head. i have to engage with the global news through shitposting because i don't have the emotional fortitude to take it head on. Frankly, I'd be concerned if someone did have the emotional strength to take it all at face value
There is an entire thesis to be written on the parallels between internet memes, particularly since 2008, and the Dadaist and Surrealist movements that sprang from WWI.
So true like I can't go up to people and say "fuck human rights" because they'll think I'm the one who wants to murder a bunch of college students. Fucking wild.
"Now let's send in some jack-booted thugs to kill some kids for the grievous sin of thinking we shouldn't be killing kids. That way they'll finally shut up and we can get back to sending unlimited munitions to Israel, so they can continue killing kids too (we're going to anyway, but I don't want it to be such a downer all the time). And may God have mercy on your child-hating soul if you even think about impeding this!
...
We're the, uh, good guys by the way."
It has not, and that's a bad path to go down to even suggest so.
it's not exactly a controversial or very original point to say that the meaning of antisemitism has been seriously trivialized, given how often it's been used recently to mean justifiable criticism of israel
Israel has said flat out that it uses antisemitism accusations as a means to stifle criticism. Have you not seen the news since Oct. 7th? We have zionists swearing up and down that "from the river to the sea" is antisemitic for christ's sake. It's totally trivialized the word and given cover to actual antisemites, I'm talking real neo-nazis to spread hatred, it's totally backfired.
The ADL is so fucking craven and cowardly with it's shit. The head of it was gloating the other day on CNN over Asna Tabassum getting stopped from speaking.
that doesn't mean that the word antisemitism has no meaning or that antisemitism isn't a real and present factor.
The concept is very real, and absolutely a pressing problem.
The word becomes less and less meaningful the more zionists use it to justify blowing children to smitherines.
Zionist are just extremely disingenuous. I read Innuendo Studio's curious cat and every Israel apologist there just talks like they are trying to get him in a gotcha. Some examples that come to mind:
-Keep accusing him of wanting to exterminate Israel or being in the 'Israel should not exist' camp when his stand has always been 'Israel should stop being an aparthied and grant equal rights to Palestinians'
-Accusing him of comparing Jews to nazis (more often than not is other curious cat askers on his page that are comparing Israel, not the Jews, to the nazis). Every time he says 'Israel is conducting genocide' these hasbara brigaders jump to accusing him of calling Jews Hitler.
-I remember one user who after Innuendo Studios said that Israel should stop being an ethnostate/ aparthied was like 'oh so you support soft genocide where one race mixes with another to eventually produce offspring who dont resemble their parents'. When he called this mindset out as nazi shit they, predictably, accused him of calling Orthodox Jews nazis.
-Inventing bullshit hypothetical scenarios that are not happening right now. Like wrt the Ansar Allah blockade one asker was like 'would you still support them if they were nazis'. Basically what he called Values-Neutral Governance in the You Go High, We Go Low Alt-Right Playbook video.Israel should not exist. This is not anti-Semitic to say. Colonial projects have no legitimacy and Israel has no more right to existence than Rhodesia or Apartheid South Africa
it has when used by anyone besides leftists. Center and right cannot distinguish between anti-zionism and anti-semitism so they cannot be trusted when they cry wolf.
I think there might be something wrong with you if you don't look at 99% of the accusations of antisemitism being levied at people who are like "don't genocide Palestine" and see something wrong with that
Or like shit like jk Rowling (who wrote very antisemitic caricatures in her shitty books) calling Corbyn an antisemite. Actually I literally only ever see accusations of antisemitism when it's being used by right wingers like her in bad faith, or zionist Jews conflating criticism of Israeli imperialism with it.
I think there has to be something very wrong with you if you think that dishonest accusations of antisemitism renders the concept meaningless. This is a garbage post, and if you genuinely think that antisemitism has ceased to be a factor because of people like Podhoretz then you are also a garbage person.
The word "antisemitism" has lost all meaning.
They're pretty explicit in talking about the word, not the concept. Nobody here is saying antisemitism, the concept, doesn't exist or isn't important, but that the signifier less and less frequently refers to the actual concept of antisemitism.
I think you might just be arguing at cross purposes. Original post was borderline a purely linguistic observation, but you're talking about the underlying phenomenon.
Both can essentially be the case.
In media especially, the popular use and meaning of antisemitism has been so thoroughly degraded and twisted that it's not only largely useless, but I think should actually be a watchword for 'more investigation of this claim is needed'.
But that doesn't mean that the original and accurate meaning and the thing it actually describes does not exist or is not a problem, or that we should accept it's shameless misuse and attempted perversion.
Wasn't the original meaning/usage nazis trying to sound smart and scientific? Maybe this is wrong of me, but I think the word needs to be scraped for something more accurate.
Similarly, I am extremely grossed out by the common usage of the term "ethnic cleansing" to describe acts of violent displacement and genocide of people. It's uncritically accepting the framing and language of the perpetrator of the crime, that they are doing a "cleansing" act by killing "unclean" people. That even leftists use the term gives me big heeby-jeebies.
idk that compound always made the "cleansing" part sound really gross to me, like a nazi was saying it and winking, rather than any association with cleanliness. If you don't hang out with newage crystal healing weirdos you probably don't even hear the word "cleanse" outside of the genocidal context.
the term is not used with a wink though, as a satirical critique of perpetrators of genocide. It is used straight, as a flat description of the process of "genocide lite". Like even international legal documents will call it "ethnic cleansing" which is not appropriate whatsoever in my view, to accept the Nazi phraseology in such explicit ways
It's weird, I have too had issues with the term, but never really thought of it in the sense of accepting the language of the perpetrator. I just hate it in the context of Palestine, where it is sort of used by libs to, as you say, soften the accusation of genocide. This of course rests on the false premise that the Israeli don't want to outright genocide Palestinians, but simply "drive them out", as if Palestinians were just generic "arabs" who will immediately assimilate and become Egyptians, Jordanians, Syrians etc. if they flee, and not a unique people with a unique culture and a homeland - which the Israelis want to destroy and build fucking beach resorts on. It's kind of a bullshit term for people too chickenshit to call a genocide what it is.
Anyway, not sure I added anything to your point, I just thought your almost etymological objection to the word was interesting. Just another reason to call a genocidal spade a genocidal spade.
It always struck me as weird how the word calls Jews "Semites"... like what's that about? We call bigotry against Muslims islamophobia so I don't understand why we don't call bigotry against Jews judeophobia.
Where it gets really weird for me is there are other semites, but you would never hear someone being called anti semitic for hating Arabs. It kinda feels like erasing them.
Definitely agree with you on judeophobia being a better word.
quite interesting there's no word in English that's commonly used for hatred of Arabs. There's islamophobia for Muslims, but not all arabs are muslims and not all muslims are arabs (See: Iranians, Chechnyans, Uighurs, Christian Palestinians, etc)
This is something quite relevant to me as a non-practicing secular Arab Muslim (effectively an atheist). If someone were to commit a hate crime against me for looking Arab, would it be called “islamophobia”? Doesn’t seem quite accurate to what is actually at play since I don’t have a beard, don’t wear traditional Muslim garb or signifiers, if someone attacked me it’s because I’m Arab/brown/leftist not because I’m Muslim most likely.
As far as i understand it, the usage of "semitism" originates in the accusation that jews as a diaspora organize completely separately from the nations they live in for their own benefit, basically that they are only loyal to themselves.
This is also why it's suggested that you never hyphenate "antisemitism", as one word it only describes the beliefs of antisemites, while hyphenated it treats "semitism" as a legitimate force.
Whoa really? So "antisemitism" is itself antijewish, that's fucked up
the -phobic suffix is used much like the -phillic suffix in sociology, it generally means "averse to X" or "attracted to X" respectively. It's not used in the sense of an actual psychological fear, but as a sociological flat amoral description of a group being anti-X and averse to it.
Think Hydrophobic and Hydrophillic. Rightwing groups are homophobic because they are averse to homosexuality and don't want to interact with it, and when they come into contact with it they react negatively. Hydrophobic molecules are not "afraid" of water in a literal sense, it's a description of their reaction to water.
I can accept that as an explanation of academic use of the terms.
where do you think any of these terms come from? They all originate in academia in a more scientific and rigorous setting, and then leak out into the mainstream ideology. Specificity and rigor is lost when strict control over the definition is lost and the word enters the public zeitgeist and takes on a meaning of its own.
This type of non-moralistic descriptionist language is what Marxists should seek to use when describing society, our role is to do a cold autopsy not to sit in moral judgment. We will never be able to control the public usage and steer language and how it develops, but we can control how we describe the world scientifically to each other. What others do with it later is their problem.
The concept of an innocent fear is frequent rhetoric, especially was during the late 90s and early aughts regarding homophobia
I don't recall this personally, I recall instead it being framed not as fear but as ignorance and lack of understanding and willingness to understand. The 90s common knowledge among the more social-liberal portions of the public was that racism and bigotry were finished as powerful forces in the West, that they only existed in vestigial corners where education and diversity had not yet reached. It was not shown as innocent fear, but as a regrettable silly superstition that would be flushed out by history's end if we all just keep being polite to each other.
i'm not sure what your point is though. That we shouldn't use amoral descriptionist language when describing social forces? That we should seek to control public common language with an iron fist (something historically not very realistic)?
That a white supremacist society coopted a revolutionary idea and blunted it is not surprising, it's what it does to all revolutionary ideas it gets ahold of. Is that any reason to stop having revolutionary ideas?
I thought you were getting at the point that "homophobia" is a problematic and not useful term because it isn't inherently loaded with enough moral judgment against homophobes (compared to something like 'gay hate' or 'anti-gay bigotry'), or that the colloquial definition that has been adopted being less accurate means we should retroactively change our own descriptions and accurate usage of the term within sociology and left-politics.
Personally, I'm completely fine with the -phobia and -phobic suffixes to describe tendencies among populations and think it's better than using moralistic terms when it comes to understanding social forces at play correctly. It just depends on the context. If you're hurling invectives at a specific reactionary, go for the moralist jabs if it is effective with your current audience. If you're trying to do a sociological description of the forces of society among fellow comrades I think we should stick to the cold autopsy approach.
You're right. These words don't describe fear, they describe persecution. Framing it as fear absolves people of their active and purposeful involvement and makes them sound like victims. As if transphobia or homophobia or whatever is akin to agoraphobia. And as if targeted harm can only be done by the mentally ill.
It also leads us to falsely conclude that the solution to bigotry is individual - reaching out and educating bigots one by one. It totally ignores the systemic causes that motivate such bigotry and how oftentimes, it's not even bigotry! It's just people rationally working within the ghoulish constraints that capitalism imposes which is honestly worse.
See my comment, it’s a phrase that is scientific and comes from the social sciences. It’s not about “absolving people” of sins, that’s moralism and unscientific and Liberal idealism. It’s a scientific description of a relationship between forces. You will never defeat the forces of reaction if you believe they stem from inherent evil in the souls of people instead of a materialist framework describing and addressing the root causes of the reactionary ideology
What's different about the academic term from the colloquial word? I don't see the distinction that you're referring to.
And yeah we're in agreement: reactionary ideology is rooted in material reality. And oftentimes what we call bigotry isn't bigotry per se, but rather people making calculated decisions, intentionally and purposefully.
Read my comment below, the correct original use is akin to hydrophobic. IE, Y can be described as X-phobic if it shows an adverse reaction or rejection of X. It has nothing to do with fear in the psychological sense, which is the colloquial definition that you are attacking.
Describing reactionaries who don’t like gay rights as “homophobic” is 100% correct and accurate and has nothing to do with baggage you are bringing in about fear or morals
I see. "Aversion to gay people" and "fear of gay people" is a distinction without a difference imo but whatever. I still don't like the parallel this jargon implies between panic disorders and persecution. They are nothing alike so our language should reflect that.
(also who cares what the original use is if people don't mean it like that. Also also I'm not talking about morality? Kinda feels like you're reading things into my comments that I did not say)
Your original comment was talking about morality when your issue with the term is that it ‘absolves homophobes’. Absolution is a moral term related to sin.
Framing it as fear absolves people of their active and purposeful involvement
You take issue with their term because of a moral stance. You don’t like the term homophobia because it is amoral when you want it to be moralized and loaded with moral sentiment.
You should care about the original definition, because the original definition derived from Marxist analysis of societal factions. That’s like saying “who cares what MLK or Lenin or Marx actually said and meant, what matters of how modern pop-culture understands their theories” which is obviously stupid and wrong
I meant absolve as in excuses/removes culpability. The same way you wouldn't be too hard on a claustrophobic person for panicking in a small room.
It makes it sound like homophobes have a mental illness and it's that illness which is the cause of their actions. But bigotry phobias aren't at all comparable to fear phobias so we should use different words to describe them. That's what I'm saying and that's what the OP was saying too, I'm pretty sure.
I meant absolve as in excuses/removes culpability
Culpability in what? An immoral act or sin. Again you are upset that the term isn’t moralistically loaded. You want it to aggressively impose guilt, this is a moral position and not a descriptive one.
The same way you wouldn't be too hard on a claustrophobic person for panicking in a small room.
Claustrophobia relates to psychological fears. Homophobia comes from a different source, from sociology and scientific descriptions of reactions between two parties. You are again using the incorrect definition, again in relation to how much moral blame to assign.
This is a fundamentally flawed way of analyzing society
What? I don't know what to say to you anymore. Goodnight dude
You know the scientific terms hydrophobic and hydrophilic used to describe various kinds of mechanical and chemical interactions? That is how sociology used the term “homophobic” when it created the term, describing that a certain group is anti-homosexuality.
What you are doing is akin to going up to a chemist and saying “I don’t like how the term hydrophobic lets phospholipids off the hook for their bigotry”. It’s adding morality into what should be a cold mechanical description of forces
It has. Read this article by Em Cohen
https://emcohen.medium.com/on-the-dangers-of-fighting-antisemitism-c888c0bbd79f
Nothing I can say about John Podhoretz would be more insulting than this byline cartoon of him
Show
isn't this guy in eastern europe being gay on the DL because his wife divorced him? pretty sure israel would disown him
Podhoretz is the nepobaby who writes long affronted articles about how the staff at wanky bistros only mildly tolerated his abuse rather than jerking him off while he yelled at them.
This is the guy who's the son of the longtime editor of Commentary magazine and is himself the current editor of Commentary.
That's not podhoretz, he's the treat monster.
You're thinking of Rod Dreher.
ohh is this the guy that moved to Hungary and just talks about how hot and masculine the men are all the time?
It's a ten year long anime with hundreds of story arcs that abruptly get dropped and then suddenly restart years later that's forgivable.
Still waiting for Cushman to finish his internal monologue and return as super saiyan and defeat Dark Brandon
well this guy should go to europe to be gay with the homies, it would probably chill him out
Its the treat addicted dude with the screetching voice and brain of a baboon.
I got no quarrel with Jewish kids. When I was out in the sticks, it was actually Jewish kids who got between me and the klan-borne crackers. It's Zionist kids that I don't give the first fuck about; and I hope they're violently shamed into abandoning the genocide their elders carry out.
you for real mate?
