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from the keep-your-friends-close-and-your-enemies-closer? dept.
An article at vice.com reports The Number of U.S. Hate Groups Keeps Surging, Largely Thanks to Young, White men:
The number of hate groups nationwide reached a record high in 2018, driven partly by the persistent growth of white nationalist groups catering to young, college-aged men.
There are currently 1,020 active hate groups in America — up from 954 in 2017, and 917 the previous year, according to an annual tally by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). The new, young face of hate emerged from the shadows during the 2016 election and organized through a shared language of memes and under the banner of the “alt-right.” Many hailed then-candidate Donald Trump, with his hard-line views on immigration, as a hero. In celebration of his election, the alt-right’s one-time de facto leader Richard Spencer led a room full of young men in suits to give Nazi salutes.
Since then, Spencer and other prominent actors, entangled in costly lawsuits and tired of being heckled by anti-fascist protesters, have faded into relative obscurity.
At the same time, groups like Identity Evropa — whose khaki-clad members were a formidable presence at the violent “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017— have proliferated and expanded their reach by setting up new chapters across the country. Patriot Front also grew significantly in 2018 after splintering from Vanguard America, the group linked to the 19-year-old neo-Nazi who rammed his car into a crowd of protesters during the Charlottesville rally and killed Heather Heyer.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Azuma Hazuki on Friday February 22 2019, @04:05PM (12 children)
My take on it is "given that in the worst possible case, there is still a 9 in 10 chance that any accuser is telling the truth, these things should not be dismissed out of hand. All accusations need to be investigated." I said outright that 2-10% of accusations are false, and now you claim I said no women lie, ever? God damn, do you ever have a reading comprehension problem.
That said we have an example in this very thread of women playing the system and almost ending a man's life with a false accusation. Does it sound weird coming from the local lesbian feminist that I'm on his side 100%? If for no other reason than that every false accusation makes it that much harder for actual rape and assault victims to be taken seriously?
We *do* live in a rape culture, Arik. Most assault goes completely unreported. I've never told anyone about most of what was done to me, because what would be the fucking point? I'm poor. Poor people don't get justice. Seen it happen to friends and family, too. You say there's probably no worse accusation than rape, but why? What is it about this culture that makes that such an issue?
I'll tell you: we're still seen as objects, things with fluctuating (read: constantly depreciating) market value based on our bodies and our sexual organs and, in many cases, "sexual purity." Look, really look, at most advertisements featuring women. Our bodies are used to sell things. *Rape is still seen as a property crime by far too many people." And very often the "property" doesn't even really belong to the woman whose body it is!
This all comes down to power and money. Those three assholes tried to screw the poster over; they had power and money over him. I class them as every bit as sociopathic as Epstein himself and gender or sex be damned, what's wrong is wrong.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 2) by Arik on Friday February 22 2019, @05:44PM (11 children)
Absolutely.
"I said outright that 2-10% of accusations are false, and now you claim I said no women lie, ever?"
No, I didn't say that at all, quite the opposite. :/
I was pointing out that obviously you *do* realize that women lie as you had just said so yourself.
Accuse me of belabouring the obvious if you will, but I did not misrepresent you there.
"Does it sound weird coming from the local lesbian feminist that I'm on his side 100%?"
It *shouldn't* sound weird, but to some degree it does, and that's kind of what I'm trying to point it out. Perhaps I didn't make that point plainly enough but that is perhaps what bothers me the most here. This is a very bad meme and it's become shockingly prevalent. If you listen to the accused male with an open mind, you'll probably be called a traitor. If I listen to a palestinian with an open mind, I'll hear it too. Black republicans hear it all the time.
"We *do* live in a rape culture, Arik."
Perhaps you do. I certainly won't discount your experience. But that is not my experience. That's not the experience of anyone I've known.
"Most assault goes completely unreported."
While this may be true, it's quite difficult to prove. There have been different studies with different methodologies that came up with different estimates. I'm guessing you might be referring to the DoJ estimate that roughly 65% of sexual assaults were not reported in 2013, and that may be the best estimate available. But note that it does not say 'rapes' it says 'sexual assaults' which is a much broader class. The category of sexual assaults is so broad, in fact, that it's shocking to me that anyone claims not to have experienced it. "Unable to provide consent due to drug and alcohol use" - just by that line alone I was sexually assaulted repeatedly, and virtually everyone I knew in college was too. No one reported it because no one saw it as anything to report. It even includes non-physical contact (i.e. eye contact) as sexual assault. By that definition as well, I've been sexually assaulted many times, and never reported it to the police. That statistic looks very padded to me just by definition, if we're talking about rape.
"I've never told anyone about most of what was done to me, because what would be the fucking point? I'm poor. Poor people don't get justice."
Unfortunately *that* is *mostly* consistent with my experience. Every human society has the potential for injustice and oppression, and large societies have incredible potential to become inhuman machines that just chew people up and spit them out. That said, we've made progress. This isn't ancient egypt or medieval europe. I think it's important not to jump backwards to an even worse state.
"You say there's probably no worse accusation than rape, but why? What is it about this culture that makes that such an issue?"
I don't discount your experience and I think I can see your point of view. There is a difference in perspective, as we should expect.
"I'll tell you: we're still seen as objects, things with fluctuating (read: constantly depreciating) market value based on our bodies and our sexual organs and, in many cases, "sexual purity." "
Yes, and? Do you think men have it generally better in this regard?
Society tends to view individuals of both sexes primarily as vehicles for it's own perpetuation. This is not particularly humane to either, at least in the case of those individuals who for whatever reason are not happy simply conforming to expectations.
Women are seen as baby carriers in this view, I know. And as a baby carrier you're at highest value shortly after onset of menses, depreciating slowly until the late 20s and then dropping off a cliff as the stock and quality of eggs deplete. I can understand being unhappy with that. It's kind of grim, isn't it?
But from that same point of view, the outlook for men is even more grim. Where a fertile young woman is treated as intrinsically valuable in this analysis, as a source of those extraordinarily valuable eggs, the male is treated more like a single sperm swimming among 100 million. He's emphatically *not* treated as intrinsically valuable. The egg isn't chasing him, he's running a race to get to her. He'll probably lose the race, and no one will care a bit. He needs to run that race, and he needs to win, before anyone is going to give a damn about him to begin with.
"*Rape is still seen as a property crime by far too many people." And very often the "property" doesn't even really belong to the woman whose body it is!"
The only time I've experienced anything like that attitude it's been people from other countries with very different mores. Not from any of the red state USA yokels, never, though I've spent the bulk of my life surrounded by them.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Azuma Hazuki on Friday February 22 2019, @06:38PM (10 children)
The key difference here is that this system is imposed by men on men *and* women. THIS is why I keep saying men need feminism and feminism needs men: when ordinary men open their eyes and see what "the patriarchy" is doing to them as well, and how it then manipulates them to vent their suffering on women, it's a complete game changer. I tend to use the word kyriarchy rather than patriarchy for this very reason, and have a class-based although not Marxist approach to feminism.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 22 2019, @07:05PM
Patria means family, for those under any illusion about the true intent of Marxists.
(Score: 2) by Arik on Friday February 22 2019, @07:05PM (8 children)
Imposed by men alone? Which men, specifically? All men?
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 22 2019, @08:40PM (7 children)
No not by men alone, plenty of women drink the regressive kool-aid. Also not all men, but definitely most. This is rarely intentional and more a byproduct of society's evolution. There are many things we do that seem perfectly normal because that is how we grew up. Like gamers who grew up using "faggot" as a generic insult, or boomers who grew up with their racist family telling bad jokes. We often see things as harmless humor until someone explains the real world effects such things have.
Saying women "ask for it" by wearing sexy clothes is one example. "Locker room" talk. "Just a joke" racism, disregarding someone's personal story with "nah they weren't actually being racist maybe it was more innocent." That last one I was guilty of recently, I downplayed an old white lady who said "speakee eeenglish" to a brown skinned kid who was wearing a south-american style sweatshirt. Even if he wasn't US born and raised it is still an offensive way to address a customer.
We are all responsible for our actions even if they stem from circumstances beyond our control. Some PC stuff is ridiculous and people need to be a little more understanding of mistakes when no offense was intended, but on the flip side the anti-PC brigade (so many of the posters here) needs to realize that it isn't OK to be offensive.
THE most important behavior for this is simply apologizing if you offended someone and trying to not repeat the mistake. It is totally fine to apologize for something even if you didn't intend it to be offensive, and these days being able to do so is a sign of strength.
If someone tells you that you are evil for being a white male well that is stupid bigotry and you are free to say "that's racist/prejudiced, I haven't done anything to you" or some such. It swings both ways, but right now white conservative males are freaking THE FUCK OUT because they are getting a taste of prejudice. It is pathetic, put on the big boy pants and weather the storm. It will calm down, but not if you keep refusing to acknowledge the real issues.
Want to start down the healing path? Easy. Support Kaepernick, that is an easy win against police sanctioned murder.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 22 2019, @09:43PM
^^
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The parent is the most reasonable post I have ever seen on SN, in it's five years of existence! +5 Rational mod!
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Friday February 22 2019, @11:17PM
I'm out of mod points, else this would have been hit with a +1 so fast it would have shown an appreciable blueshift :) THANK YOU for providing one of the few and all too rare voices of reason in what is becoming an increasingly more virulent swamp of RWA poison.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 0, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 23 2019, @01:11AM (3 children)
Not but a couple.. because flamebait..
When a woman wears pasties, goes out, gets drunk, tells her friends to fuck off, goes out with a guy she doesn't know, there's nothing that anyone can do for that woman. You seem to not know the definition of the phrase, "Asking for it".
So, examples of "asking for it" would be:
- Talking back to your parents, knowing you'll be spanked
- Applying to join a gang, and getting beat up for initiation
- Paying for something online by wire transfer, and not receiving the item
- Getting beligerently drunk with a group of people you don't know, passing out, and having your wallet stolen
- Getting beligerently drunk as a female with a gang who is "so much fun", and getting a train run on you
These things are known even to _dumb_ people. You can't fix stupid. Further, there is _NOTHING_ that can be done to help these people short of sending a police escort with them at all times, but of course that wouldn't be accepted.
Going out in a sexy dress? Hey cool. Flagging down some random guy on a bike in a sexy dress, smiling and licking your lips, and asking him if he knows where you can get some coke? (This has actually happened to me) -- you're just asking to be taken to some random place and use you for whatever the hell anyone wants -- sold to someone else, robbed, sexual assaulted, or perhaps to find out what flesh feels like when it's filleted. We know the absolute conclusion of this behavior, and it is these times when we say a person is "asking for it". When there is nothing that any person can do to help the person, and when the person did something so stupid anyone would laugh at them knowing their inevitable misfortune -- like strapping gutted fish to you and diving with sharks without a cage.
If you had any idea what males go through growing up. That whole "Thicken skin" thing? It's actually _important_, lest you be offended by Free Speech, and try to restrict others' rights because you don't have a thick enough skin to survive in _any_ society.
Don't like it? Don't be friends with the person. I know, I know, you want to throw away the first ten amendments. Hey, lets get rid of the 14th amendment too, while we're at it!
Oh My Gawd you disrespected me, POLICE!!! ARREST THAT MAN!! because of course only _males_ are capable of disrespect.
Wow.. so you're a male. I do hope you spent a mandatory term in prison. Congratulations, you're a criminal. Or, you would be, if you actually had your way with the legal system in this country. (Or are you a member of the One True Hate Group, excepted from such trials?)
Consider how women are documented as acting, what is expected of people who want to do something technical, acting on technical grounds. Consider the offense that men are commiting by _existing_.
http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=6918 [ibiblio.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 23 2019, @05:51AM
That does demonstrate a flagrant lack of common sense... It is available from practically any convenience store or grocery store soda aisle. Come on!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 23 2019, @07:22AM
Holy crazy fuckwit Batman!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 23 2019, @11:39AM
I would say this post is just asking for it. Look at the language it is using! No wonder multiple random Soylentil ACs wanted to dry hump it into oblivion! Poor AC. Probably a slut, though. Who else would post that way? Probably better that the post got fucked earlier than later, for great justice.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Arik on Saturday February 23 2019, @02:34AM
So by regressive people, generally speaking, is that what you're saying?
"Also not all men, but definitely most. "
So you're saying the majority of men are regressive?
"There are many things we do that seem perfectly normal because that is how we grew up. Like gamers who grew up using "faggot" as a generic insult"
If I'm understanding this part correctly, you think it's a homophobic insult, and this makes it verboten, a word no right-thinking person would use (though you just did, apparently you allow an exception for use in abstract rather than earnest?) And then you refer to others who understand it differently, as a generic rather than specifically homophobic insult, and therefore think it's ok to use.
Well let me blow your mind for a moment. To me, it's not even an insult. It's a word I've many times used to refer to myself and my friends. My generation of gamer reclaimed it and adopted it as our own. It's a great word, actually, if you grok the actual meaning and history of it. It goes back to the british empire with its system of boarding schools. It originally meant lowerclassman, or in less formal language you might say 'noob.' Upperclassmen were assigned roles of noob-master and expected to haze the noobs to break them down psychologically somewhat like what is done today to slightly older young men in basic training. So it referred to someone that was regarded by the system as a raw recruit, unusable in current form, that needed to be torn down and recreated into an appropriate tool of the Queen.
By my time it had morphed a bit and it was more the word the beautiful ones used pretty indiscriminately against any out-group males. Since the beautiful people tended to be obsessive homophobes I can see the interpretation of it as homophobic but that's putting the cart before the horse. We aren't *all* gay. We're just the people that the herd considers defective. Moo.
And here we go, a few years later, afraid to even use my own favorite word for myself in public because some hate mob might interpret it as a homophobic insult. It's not just 1984, it's been rewritten as black comedy.
"That last one I was guilty of recently, I downplayed an old white lady who said "speakee eeenglish" to a brown skinned kid who was wearing a south-american style sweatshirt. Even if he wasn't US born and raised it is still an offensive way to address a customer."
Her age, not her skin color, might well explain that. What is 'offensive' is so subjective and so mercurial it's sometimes hard for young people to keep up. It's even harder as you get older, and you're also even more likely to come to the understanding that you can't live your life on eggshells worrying that someone might be offended. Life's too short and it's a waste of time.
Look, taboos are silly. Taboos on words are one of the silliest sorts of taboo. These things have gone in and out of fashion throughout the history of language and they never did any sort of objective good for us. They don't change behaviour, they don't change thought. they only complicate language. The polynesian languages, for instance, split more quickly into unintelligible branches because, among other reasons, they practiced a lot of word taboos. Every time one word became taboo, another way of saying the same thing was always devised, of course. Either a circumlocution or flat-out borrowing a word from a neighboring language or whatever. After so many generations a lot of common words look totally different.
Just in my lifetime, the words you're *supposed* to use to refer to different groups of people in order to avoid 'giving offense' have changed multiple times. What point did that serve, other than to make it easier for someone to unintentionally 'give offense?'
"Some PC stuff is ridiculous and people need to be a little more understanding of mistakes when no offense was intended, but on the flip side the anti-PC brigade (so many of the posters here) needs to realize that it isn't OK to be offensive."
Unfortunately the second clause is a poison pill of a postulate. We need to be more worried about whether or not something is *true* than whether or not it offends us, first off. If it is true, and it offends us, then perhaps /we needed to be offended./ Offense, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. Language is meant for communication, and taboos on language only inhibit communication.
And once you admit the principle that you can be penalized just because someone else claims to be offended by something you said, no one is safe. Public dialogue, public conversation, the 'lifeblood of democracy' as it's so often been called - well that breaks right down, it becomes impossible.
So no, sorry, it IS ok to be offensive. That's the entire point of the first amendment. You think we needed a constitutional amendment to protect speech that everyone agreed was ok? Speech that offended no one?
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?