mesonoxian
Well-known member
Several things. First off I am poor, and moving costs money. Secondly, I don't care about the US as an entity, but I quite like the region I live in (especially in the fall) and its culture. Also my family lives here, my ancestors are buried here, my church is here. All stuff I'd be very reluctant to leave behind, even if I could.People like @mesonoxian make me wonder why they even bother to live in the US if they dislike it so much.
I'm not trying to pull the "then leave" card here, it just genuinely baffles me. He hates private property, hates the basic ideals of capitalism, and hates the concept of nation-states.
So why do people like him continue to live here? Their communal belief system is fundamentally at odds with the ideas of the individualist USA, why not move to another nation that more closely aligned with their political and moral viewpoints?
And there really isn't anywhere on Earth where exploitation and coercion aren't happening, even if they might not be as obvious as here. Even places like the Nordic countries, where capitalism seems largely tamed and the people in the country are pretty well taken care of maintain their prosperity through exploitation overseas. And even if there were a utopia, it wouldn't be right to walk away from where evil is happening without helping the people subject to it. Not that I wouldn't be tempted.
I know people in the radical left wing circles in California. They are not happy about the wildfires. Rural California is still California and a lot of leftists, and families and friends of leftists live there, and a lot of people have lost their homes, never mind the health consequences so many people in the cities suffer when these kinds of wildfires happen. Even if antifa were the heartless monsters you seem to believe they are (and they're not), they would have no reason to do this.We love them anyways though
Also @mesonoxian i'm sorry but quotes aren't working for me right now, i think it's because i'm xbox 1 posting?. So i would like to address your post here. The incident you were talking about and the one i was talking about are two different ones i think?. There was an incident with a guy macing a security guard hired by a news team who was then shot with his most decidely non lethal mace. His social media was full of pro antifa and leftist messaging of course.
The one i was talking about was when a guy was walking down the sidewalk and a group of antifa ambushed him and shot him point blank with no apparent provocation on his part aside from wearing something pro Trump. The cops later went to apprahend the guy and he resisted or reached and got lit up.
You say there is no context in my fire video but i think you are maybe allowing yourself to be willfully blind. If some guy who was like 40 something,white,wearing khakis and a maga hat was found 20 minutes away from a violent right wing protest with numerous assaults and arson. Had matches but no cigarettes and an antifa flophouse was burning what would you think?
You also said there is no reason for a member of the terrorist group antifa to set fire in the area.There are a few reasons, for starters rural areas have long been associated with Trump supporters by the media and antifa themselves. Also during the riots it was quite common for the right to laugh and make comments about the left burning their own cities down. Antifa certainly use social media and would have been exposed to this right wing narrative of them only hurting themselves. This gives them additional motive.
I'm honestly amazed and terrified that the police and fbi are so partisian that the idea of the people commiting arson and hopping in a car to commit arson where their ideological enemies live is somehow impossible.
Groups like antifa and blm have committed a campaign of terror against the right. Unfortunately for both the right and left it seems to have worked with the stolen election of biden(unless Trump says 2020 is just starting ya'll) so it's clear to many on the right that the long standing belief that political violence will hurt your side in elections is no longer the case.
I honestly expect an explosion of right on left violence when or if it's clear that Trump is out. Afterall what do they have to lose?Congress woman aoc is making a list of them. They're jobs? they already lost them for wrong think or were 'cancelled'. They're families? prominent laft wingers gleefully speak about indoctrinating their children and destroying the family unit. You may say 'well that would hurt the Republicans' so what? Many if not most on the right see them as rino's and war starting neocons of the 'uniparty'. The Republicans without Trump are worthless for defending and advancing right wing beliefs.
The right would not be anywhere near as angry or radicalised were it not for the left and you're constant escalations and attacks on the right and the constitution. The left can laugh all it want's and act like it's above it all, ban and gaslight the right. But i don't believe they know just how absolutely PIST the right is right now.
This is just my personal ancedotal experience so it may not apply everywhere. My local neighborhood just formed a 'gun club'. A guy came and knocked on our door and asked if we would be interested in joining a local 'gun club' to learn about guns and if necessary defend the neighborhood. Like wtf right? We are not even close to any protest or blm stuff. My uncle in a neighboring town just joined his local 'neighborhood watch' ffs. The current situation in America is going to get much more ugly i fear as the right has nothing left to lose. Everyone should start praying Trumps legal team can turn liberal tears into wine otherwise America is going to get interesting.
Antifais about resisting fascism. Breaking up fascist demonstrations, and protecting protestors from fascist agitators who would frequently come and start trouble. They are also in my experience mostly really chill, nice folks.
This whole narrative seems completely divorced from reality as I see it. The US lurched wildly to the right in the 1980s and there has been basically no pushback. the Democrats just went along with it. The ACA was essentially the Republican plan in the 1990s, as an opposition to proper single payer health care. The voting rights act as has been gutted. The Democrats meekly went along with Bush's idiotic wars to avoid looking weak. The right wing militarized and radicalized all through the 1990s, claiming that utter centrist milksop Bill Clinton was the anti-Christ and an existential threat to democracy. (Which got us The OKC bombing). They radicalized under G.W. Bush, becoming increasingly hostile to immigrants and Muslims. They radicalized further under Obama, a complete boring centrist who continued Bush's wars and struggled to get a half-assed version of Romneycare over the finish line. And they continue to radicalize under Trump, openly embracing the racism and authoritarianism they used to pretend wasn't part of their ideology.
It wasn't the left that played chicken with defaulting on the debt to get their way. It wasn't the left that stole a SC seat. It wasn't the left that stole the Presidency in 2000 and treated a popular vote loss in 2016 as a mandate for radical change. It wasn't the left who described literal Nazis as "good people" or fought tooth and nail to deny gay and lesbian couples the right to marry, or who pushed back hard against civil rights protections. It wasn't the left that decided to launch campaigns of harassment at women who dared have opinions on the most superficial elements of culture, like comic books and video games, or to develop bizarre conspiracy theories about secret Islamic extremism or satanic pedophile rings in Washington DC. (And fantasizing about Satanic pedophiles has been a right wing pre-occupation since the 1980s, so it isn't some reaction to Obama.)
The Democrats (who aren't even the left) finally, finally started to push back a tiny little bit, by having some people object to attempts to "reach across the aisle" to people who have broken every rule and norm of government. AOC is absolutely right that the people who abetted Trump in his crimes shouldn't be allowed to slink away like so many of Nixon's cronies and the Iran-Contra conspirators and their enablers were allowed to. If somebody helped Donald Trump commit his crimes, they should at the barest minimum not be given work in their field. That isn't some call to shut down everybody who voted for the man, but the people who were significant in selling and running his presidency.
If you spend years doing actual harm to people, messing up their lives, hurting children, spreading disease, taking away their access to healthcare, threatening them and declaring them degenerate scum, then eventually they are going to be just a little irritated. The left is absolutely enjoying seeing Trump beaten and his followers demoralized. That is entirely natural. What they aren't going to do is spend the next four years trying to find policies that will hurt them and destroy the things they value for the lulz. Some people are really, really angry. They want to let the Republican voting areas rot, and ignore the economic hardships they suffer. The thing is, when they say things like that, people come out of the woodwork to tell them to stop being an idiot and trying to punish people and their families for having stupid political opinions. When is the last time you heard somebody on the right talk about fucking over urban America with anything but glee?
The left is not making this radicalism happen. Most leftists I know hate thinking about politics. They do it because they think it will help people. It isn't a game, these are people's lives we're talking about. But there is only so much farther even the most well meaning people can be pushed before something gives.