john eden

male pale and stale
Someone on the internet said that a particular person, who is or used to be a contributor to this forum, should have his tongue cut out, as punishment for questioning the use of mob tactics to shut down a gallery.

And please, do I really have to point out that an obvious neo-Nazi is a bad person in order to avoid implications that I'm somehow sympathetic? Bit of a dick move there John, no? For the record, NAZIS ARE BAD. Thanks for listening.

My point is that he still has his tongue, whereas the victims of Breivik are still very much dead.

You may have noticed that there is a toxic internet culture in which threats are tossed about willy nilly every second. I am not especially happy about it, not least because it seems overwhelmingly biased against the traditional victims of fascism - women, gay people, and non-whites.

Once again you have leapt on and fixated on this one unrepresentative thing (as you did with the Morning Star in the "what do the right get right" thread) to the exclusion of everything else. Antifa and any attempts to oppose fascism is bad because one anonymous person (who for all we know isn't even an anti-fascist) said something bad on the internet.

In other news, I am still alive despite being threatened by some actual Nazis some years ago. Some of the people I know in that video are still around despite being involved with proper physical confrontations with Nazis.

LD50 is gone, and most people apart from you think that Josef K is a dick. At the end of the day he has lost a bit of a cardboard with some writing on it and not been able to give a talk about Evola. Call me Stalin, but I think that is a price worth paying for not having Nazis congregating in my community.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
My point is that he still has his tongue, whereas the victims of Breivik are still very much dead.

Yes, clearly that's true - but no-one here is supporting Breivik, or supporting this other guy who supports Breivik, or saying "anti-fascists are just as bad as fascists".

You may have noticed that there is a toxic internet culture in which threats are tossed about willy nilly every second. I am not especially happy about it, not least because it seems overwhelmingly biased against the traditional victims of fascism - women, gay people, and non-whites.

Again, yes, this is obviously true. Equally obviously, people who live for the thrill of making kneejerk accusations of racism and fascism are making the problem worse.

Antifa and any attempts to oppose fascism is bad...

Oh come on, who's generalizing now? Where did I ever say opposing fascism is bad? Again, if I have to state the bleeding fucking obvious, any action that's likely to reduce the sum total of fascism in the world is a good thing and to be applauded. And I don't think it's unreasonable to be concerned about actions that, however good they may feel to the person making them at the time, may be having an effect opposite to the one intended.

...because one anonymous person (who for all we know isn't even an anti-fascist) said something bad on the internet.

If you're advocating cutting tongues out of a certain sort of person, I think it's fair to say you are "anti" that sort of person.

.In other news, I am still alive despite being threatened by some actual Nazis some years ago. Some of the people I know in that video are still around despite being involved with proper physical confrontations with Nazis.

LD50 is gone, and most people apart from you think that Josef K is a dick. At the end of the day he has lost a bit of a cardboard with some writing on it and not been able to give a talk about Evola. Call me Stalin, but I think that is a price worth paying for not having Nazis congregating in my community.

Physical confrontations with actual Nazis are totally fine by me, and I never said otherwise. It was fine in 1939 and it's fine now.

I have no personal friendship with josef k, and it may well be the case that he is a dick. I would like to think not, because I had some interesting conversations with him on here years ago, but then it's possible to have interesting things to say and still personally be a dick, just as it's possible to be dull and pleasant. I'm glad no-one got stabbed or had their tongue cut out, and I'm sure he'll recover from the trauma of being de-placarded and called some nasty things. It may even be the case that the stuff on show in LD50 was so unequivocally fascistic (I haven't seen any of it myself, of course - in common with everyone else here, I think?) that the only possible response from a decent person would've been to call for it to be cancelled. Maybe that was the whole point right from the start. Does that make josef k a "fascist" for disagreeing with the way this was done and objecting to the way he was subsequently treated? The possible negative consequences of this kind of behaviour are not that placards get nicked or talks cancelled, but that people who are not actually fascists may end up being forced into a default position that looks like apology or sympathy for real fascists by activists whose tactics of first resort are to clamour for events to be shut down and then enforce those demands by making threats.
 

john eden

male pale and stale
If you're advocating cutting tongues out of a certain sort of person, I think it's fair to say you are "anti" that sort of person.

Well no, because it's an established tactic of the alt-right (and the state, if you want to get into it) to discredit the left with wildly over the top provocations. Hence:

https://www.buzzfeed.com/josephbern...-protesters-as?utm_term=.yy0bYxvGg#.cx12YB0nd

In addition to that, there are a lot of very bored alienated people sitting around on the net who like to make threats which never come to fruition.

Physical confrontations with actual Nazis are totally fine by me, and I never said otherwise. It was fine in 1939 and it's fine now.

OK good, but you do accept that it is not possible to do this without there being some mess sometimes?

I have no personal friendship with josef k, and it may well be the case that he is a dick. I would like to think not, because I had some interesting conversations with him on here years ago, but then it's possible to have interesting things to say and still personally be a dick, just as it's possible to be dull and pleasant. I'm glad no-one got stabbed or had their tongue cut out, and I'm sure he'll recover from the trauma of being de-placarded and called some nasty things. It may even be the case that the stuff on show in LD50 was so unequivocally fascistic (I haven't seen any of it myself, of course - in common with everyone else here, I think?) that the only possible response from a decent person would've been to call for it to be cancelled. Maybe that was the whole point right from the start. Does that make josef k a "fascist" for disagreeing with the way this was done and objecting to the way he was subsequently treated? The possible negative consequences of this kind of behaviour are not that placards get nicked or talks cancelled, but that people who are not actually fascists may end up being forced into a default position that looks like apology or sympathy for real fascists by activists whose tactics of first resort are to clamour for events to be shut down and then enforce those demands by making threats.

1. Nobody was ever going to get "stabbed or have their tongue cut out". FFS.

2. I have posted one of the LD50 exhibits upthread which is a Hitler quote next to Taylor Swift alongside the "3 7s" swastika variant that was used by the AWB in South Africa and by the explicitly neo-nazi Blood & Honour group in the UK. Luka has posted a quote from an LD50 speaker who inspired Breivik and who praised him after his crime. Maybe that isn't "unequivocally fascist" to you?

3. I don't know whether Josef K is a fascist or not. (The person behind the camera is a rising star of the alt-right and is a friend of Tommy Robinson of the EDL, but I understand they don't know each other). If he chooses to defend fascists then I'm afraid he can't expect that to be a neutral, intellectual, emotion free experience. The same is true (more so) for people who publicly oppose fascism. All of this mock horror raised eyebrow stuff is duplicitous bullshit. If you go to an anti-fascist protest to defend fascists there will be a reaction. Usually it will be proportionate, as it was in this case.
 

droid

Well-known member
And this isnt just some abstract arty bullshit. LD50 hosted what was effectively a secret fascist conference.

Guests at LD50’s Neoreaction conference last summer included Brett Stevens, the white supremacist whose writing was an inspiration to Oslo far-right terrorist Anders Breivik, who murdered 77 people in 2011.

After Breivik’s attack, Stevens wrote: “I am honored to be so mentioned by someone who is clearly far braver than I, no comment on his methods, but he chose to act where many of us write, think and dream.”

Others on the conference programme included anti-immigration activist Peter Brimelow, who runs Vdare, described by the Southern Poverty Law Centre as “an anti-immigration hate website” that “regularly publishes articles by prominent white nationalists, race scientists and antisemites”.

Brimelow’s talk at LD50 was orientated around the threat imposed on “native white Americans” by a “great influx of third world immigration”. He said that while it was socially acceptable for Hispanic and Asian ethnic activists to call for more immigration, the only people who get criticised are whites; described the Black Lives Matter movement as a Democratic party racket purely designed to increase turmoil; and referred to the Jewish faction of the Democratic party vote as problematic.

Gallery owner Lucia Diego said in a statement published on the LD50 website that the programme was intended to create “a dialogue between two different and contrasting ideologies” and that the audience for the conference was “very liberal”.

However, a recording of Brimelow’s talk reveals that members of the audience who contributed to the discussion were predominately sympathetic to his views, agreeing with his statement about the need to remove the “corrupt treacherous elite” in government and one professing support for David Duke, the former Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan and Holocaust denier.

Shut Down LD50 has accused the gallery, which has previously exhibited works by Turner Prize nominees Jake and Dinos Chapman, of curating “one of the most extensive programmes of racist hate speech to take place in London over the past 10 years”. They said the fact that the list of names of the conference speakers had been made public only after the event was finished was telling. “At first in secret, LD50 has acted as a platform for a cross-section of the most virulent advocates of contemporary extreme-right ideology.”
 
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firefinga

Well-known member
You may have noticed that there is a toxic internet culture in which threats are tossed about willy nilly every second.

There have been some cases in Austria where those kind of threats led to convictions last year. It helped, that the people threatened were politicians (by the Green party mostly) but still.
 

john eden

male pale and stale

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Well no, because it's an established tactic of the alt-right (and the state, if you want to get into it) to discredit the left with wildly over the top provocations. Hence:

https://www.buzzfeed.com/josephbern...-protesters-as?utm_term=.yy0bYxvGg#.cx12YB0nd

That may be so, but I don't think it means genuine instances should just be brushed off as if they mean nothing.

And on the other side, there have been various cases of social justice activists caught faking hate crimes against themselves. Am I therefore going to claim that real hate crimes don't happen, or as inconsequential? Of course not, that would be ridiculous.

In addition to that, there are a lot of very bored alienated people sitting around on the net who like to make threats which never come to fruition.

1. Nobody was ever going to get "stabbed or have their tongue cut out". FFS.

As far as I know, none of the many people who've threatened to beat up, rape or murder Anita Sarkeesian have so far made good on their threats - so she should probably just chill out, yeah?

2. I have posted one of the LD50 exhibits upthread which is a Hitler quote next to Taylor Swift alongside the "3 7s" swastika variant that was used by the AWB in South Africa and by the explicitly neo-nazi Blood & Honour group in the UK.

TBH that image was so utterly ludicrous I took it to be a supposedly humorous comment on the furor over the exhibition, particularly with the photo of the swastika daubed on the door. But I didn't post in this thread to defend the exhibition - which, by the sound of it, was without any merit whatsoever - but to question whether it's wholly fair for the label of "fascist" or "Nazi" to spread like a mould from the exhibition itself to any person or group with any relation to it other than absolute, unqualified condemnation.

But perhaps you're right - I mean, if the content really was as obviously offensive, reactionary and worthless as that image indicates, then there's probably justification in saying that any stance other than outright condemnation constitutes at least tacit support, whether the person saying it intends that or not, in the same way that someone saying "Weeell, maybe the Holocaust happened, maybe it didn't" is clearly not being 'neutral' about the Holocaust.

All that said, I stand by my position that some of the loudest and most unhinged hard-left activists not infrequently harm their own causes by doing and saying things that just appear blatantly idiotic to the majority of people who are neither Postcolonial Studies PhDs nor insane Kek-worshipping alt-right monsters.
 

luka

Well-known member
i think constantly harping on about the excesses of some self-identified radical leftists might be starting to grate on some people though tea, and, in addition, viewed with a degree of suspicion. as in, what are this lads actual motives here?
 

luka

Well-known member
yeah if you dont cringe watching it theres something wrong with you. so embaressing.
 

baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
All that said, I stand by my position that some of the loudest and most unhinged hard-left activists not infrequently harm their own causes by doing and saying things that just appear blatantly idiotic to the majority of people who are neither Postcolonial Studies PhDs nor insane Kek-worshipping alt-right monsters.

But whatever things you're referring to only 'harm their own causes' if you can't separate the individual from the cause. The substance of left wing politics isn't harmed by individuals associated with it doing stupid things. That remains the same, regardless.
 
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Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
i think constantly harping on about the excesses of some self-identified radical leftists might be starting to grate on some people though tea, and, in addition, viewed with a degree of suspicion. as in, what are this lads actual motives here?

I think what it is, is this: considering the vast amounts of emotional energy that a lot of people all over the world pour into progressive and radical causes, how come, almost wherever you look, mainstream politics is taking a turn for the reactionary and authoritarian? You could maybe argue that without those people's efforts things would be even worse, but I don't find that convincing at all. I'm unhappy that the Tories are in charge, I'm unhappy about the prospect of them being returned with a huge majority in the summer while Labour gets annihilated, I'm unhappy about Brexit and I'm unhappy about Trump (and le Pen, and Wilders, and Putin...). I presume you're not thrilled about any of these things yourself. And I see all these people putting so much effort into being so loudly and visibly right, but what is it actually achieving?

I foolishly allowed myself to get dragged into conversation with a real Corbynite true believer on Facebook the other day. He seemed absolutely certain Labour were going to romp to victory and usher in a new era of justice and fairness. I pointed out that Labour are trailing the Tories by nearly 20% in recent opinion polls, and that while these polls are often wrong by a few percent, they generally aren't wrong by 20%. His response was "fuck opinion polls"- which may have been followed by a smiley face, I can't recall. Because Corbyn is right and the Tories (and non-Corbyn Labour) are wrong, and right people always triumph over wrong people.

I dunno. I don't claim to have any answers, I just see the world regressing in many important ways and a lot of people treating twitter and tumblr and Goldsmiths art department like they're the battlegrounds where the struggle for the future is being waged.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
BTW I fully own up the fact that my engagement in politics is limited to voting every couple of years, and talking about it, and occasionally signing one of those petitions, so a response of "Well what are you doing to make things any better?" is to an extent justified. Then again a lot of people don't even do those things.
 

luka

Well-known member
Silly people do silly things. Always have always will. I suppose I'm more concerned with evil cunts doing evil things myself.
 

luka

Well-known member
So while you could argue that sjw twitter begets frog twitter I don't think you can blame it for Le Pen, for example
 

luka

Well-known member
And it's hard not to be suspicious of people who seem to be more indignant about people's reactions to injustice than the injustice itself.
 

luka

Well-known member
To give an example when I see someone respond to some unarmed black geezer getting shot dead by police by saying well if they didn't commit crimes they wouldn't come into contact with the police would they? My first thought isn't to blame the tactics of BLM or to examine the actions of individual members of BLM. Not that those things can't be discussed or criticised, it's just not the first thing I'd think about
 

luka

Well-known member
My assumption is that there are deep seated historical, emotional, psychological and possibly even genetic factors behind the appeal of tribalism, authoritarianism, sadism etc and that the left has to go against the grain to some extent. I think it's maybe a harder sell.
 
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