As the January 6th assault on the US Capitol demonstrated, fascists ultimately do resort to violence, as they won't accept political defeat by legal, nonviolent means. And violence is necessary to perpetuate the engine of scapegoating and hatred that drives the popularity of fascism.
I'm drying out from coffee this week. Serves me right for trying to post.
US Antifa comes from Antifaschistische Aktion that directly fought Hitler and were killed or driven into hiding as NSDAP took power and crushed all that opposed it. Considering the holocaust and the war, there is a lot to fear, and a lot to drive them to the conclusion that Fascism is a threat to be annihilated at all cost.
And yes, even in the states, while Antifa is a decentralized group, it still adheres to the notion that fascism is too dangerous to allow it to be endorsed openly. And yet, Antifa has a lower violence rate than the white-supremacist and neo-nazi groups that it commonly rallies to oppose. So Antifa doesn't have to instigate violence, but not shy away from it when fascists open hostilities.
As the January 6th assault on the US Capitol demonstrated, antifascists ultimately do resort to violence, as they won't accept political defeat by legal, nonviolent means. And violence is necessary to perpetuate the engine of scapegoating and hatred that drives the popularity of fascism.
Parallel to this are the reminders recently published that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr's message was not simply an advocacy of peace, but the peace that is afforded by a just society:
...Peace is not merely the absence of this tension, but the presence of justice. And even if we didn’t have this tension, we still wouldn’t have positive peace. Yes, it is true that if the Negro accepts his place, accepts exploitation and injustice, there will be peace. But it would be a peace boiled down to stagnant complacency, deadening passivity, and if peace means this, I don’t want peace. -- Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
The Civil Rights movement never had to resort to violence because the police were always glad to engage. These days, BLM can rely on the same tactics, since the responding police are eager and generous with rubber bullets and CS gas. And now BLM has the advantage of the ubiquity of phone cameras and an internet glad to reveal developments as they happen on the ground.
So those who are interested in the actual truth can watch police brutality as it unfolds, incident by incident, and there's no way to spin it as acceptable in civilized society.
During the early aughts Tom DeLay would use coercion (extortion) to keep the GOP representatives in line, so they votes as a unilateral bloc. They had to get permission from him directly to vote differently (say when it was an issue in their state).
After that, civility in the federal Congress ended. There was no reason for Democrats to negotiate with Republicans who would vote against them anyway. There was no reason for Republicans to negotiate with Democrats since either they had the votes or didn't.
Then during the Obama administration the GOP decided to obstruct the Black Man to thwart any agenda at all.
We saw the last vestiges of McCain Republicanism in 2017 as the GOP repeatedly tried to terminate the ACA and failed, having also failed to offer a healthcare system that wouldn't massively increase the death toll.
At this point the Republican party has even gone against its own principles in favor of pure demagogy. They offer permission for white Christian men to hate everyone else.
We were pretty gracious about George W. Bush in 2001.
Look where that got us.
We knew Trump was a monster and were stunned that so many Americans would have the desperation to vote for them (though they presented it as audacity).
Really, I was terrified as one check after another that was supposed to comb out monsters failed to do so. And Trump started his presidency by announcing there was carnage in the streets (not really, and surely not the carnage he cared about) and he was going to clean it up. (No, he made it worse.)
Look where that got us.
We may be past civility. The US might have proven Antifa's point that fascism is so great a threat we have to ignore human rights to put it down, or it will consume us. But -- I've learned in the recent days -- I will not ever need to advocate for going to war to make things right: The fascists will gladly shoot first and empty their mags.
Dude, your team is having a bad week. Maybe lay off the internet and the FOX News for a while? Maybe take some time and rethink what you're going to do?
We had to go through similar reckonings in 2001 when George W. Bush got sworn in after a minority victory. He made a lame speech, rolled back environmental protections ten years and then veered hard right, and then again in 2016 when Trump warned of American carnage.
It's not a good feel. I get it. Take a break. Regroup. We're not going to collect your guns this week. We're not going to start singing Гимн па́ртии большевико́в at least until March.
We human beings are clearly susceptible to some kinds of speech. It's one of the reasons we regulate for incitement, for slander / libel, for hate speech. The last four years have been a vicious cycle of ideologies that not only encourage hate speech but the deregulation and euphemizing / dog-whistling of hate speech, so that the more the GOP was in power, for instance, the more Churches were allowed to push political agendas, the more normalized it became to suggest non-whites were less human.
And now we're in a pit we can't dig out. And as soon as Rupert dies and his son considers reforming FOX News (the same thing happened with Hearst and his papers) there will be a handful of competitors ready to continue the flood of pro-fascist hate-fueled propaganda.
As someone in the psych sector, my impulse is to study the snot out of the phenomenon, isolate identifiable characteristics of inciting hate speech and then regulate it the way we regulate gambling or advertising to children.
But that will take time.
And in the meantime we're still in a precarious position where the GOP can still lock down branches of government which will lead us towards a new fascist government as precariats panic to government failure.
It's very difficult to not want some slow miserable fate worse than death to befall Mr. Pai for all the harm he's done. Not that his suffering would do us any good.
Maybe he can serve as an example of the kind of official that is a symptom of regulatory capture and the kind of person we don't want our children to grow up to be.
I figure the might and political clout of team MAGA are their adherents who are agents-in-place...that is if they act to serve their cause and not their station. I'm not willing to rule out some might actually have a sense of duty.
As of today, the drone strike programs are in the hands of Biden. I suspect signing an order to stop the sorties cold is not on his first-week agenda. Or even first one-hundred days.
If you submit a picture of a state ID, a photo is super easy to shop to look like someone else. Easier still if they don't call in somewhere to check if the ID number is associated with the name.
(This is a workaround for places of employment if you can encourage their HR to let you send them a scan rather than bringing the ID to HR. See how clever subversives can be?)
Private detectives and investigative journalists are typically all over these tricks.
PS: If you need an SSN, use Elvis Presley's: 425-26-8732. He's not using it right now.
So the 764-page amendment is the part that implements all these reforms, or is it the part no-one has read yet?
My experience here on TechDirt regarding last-minute amendments no-one has read does not lead me to feel optimistic. Not only do such riders neutralize the bill in question, but also tend to add stuff to make the situation worse.
Are we to expect the police will get a tank and one hundred attack dogs with which to patrol poor neighborhoods?
I suspect there's enough of both to go around, at least hire those who are doing it.
And yes, it's troubling that corporations seem glad to pay their lawyers to sue white-hats rather than paying their (meager) fee and some technicians to bolster their security. That's not encouraging at all.
If I infer from you correctly that it would be better if real journalists, real police detectives and real white-hats all got better compensation for their efforts so that black-hatting wasn't as tempting, I entirely agree.
Black-hat work seems to make more money than journalism, white-hat work or police work. I suspect that whatever resources journalists and police have, black-hats do as well.
At any rate investigators (journalist and otherwise) are already finding ways to get themselves on Parler and report what they see and what kind of mischief can be made.
Another opportunity to plug the You're Wrong About podcast. In the episode on Gangs, Michael Hobbes deconstructs the notions we have about street gangs, which had -- in the minds of law enforcement and news media -- developed an Antifa-like reputation in the nineties as a pervasive well-armed threat that dominates municipal centers. (Gangs picked up the bogeyman mantle dropped by the serial killers of the seventies and eighties, and later taken up by the Islamist terrorists of the aughts.)
One question was how a street gang can be a pack of uncivilized feral teens who cannot be negotiated with, except through violence and yet is simultaneously a global syndicate vertically stacked producers and distributors of drugs, with prostitution, booking and hit jobs on the side.
Amusingly, the Saints Row series of video games capitalized on the notion that street kids wearing gang colors could elevate themselves to international celebrity with armies of homies and fleets of gunships by sheer force of will and street-cred.
Oversight reviews of collected dossiers on street gangs by Violent Gang Task Forces (The FBI has one) revealed they have about as much actual data on youth groups and drug supply networks as Heinrich Kramer did regarding witches when he wrote the Malleus Maleficarum. These reports were less about understanding the street-teen gang-member as demonizing him so he could be easily dispatched.
So at the point that even when Wikipedia has an article on Juggalo gangs, I'm skeptical -- pending evidence -- that it's anything more than either a) ICP fans who might also have other gang identities or motives to engage in gang behavior† or b) ICP fans who are driven by more common reasons to resort to crime (drug withdrawal will do it).
† Gangs often form as an ad hoc neighborhood watch, especially when another gang is shaking a community down. Since the 1990s, the most common gang to move into a town and cause trouble has been: law enforcement.
When the police in general tolerate bad officers without even a Dude! Not cool! then it really is a police in general problem.
But in this late hour, I bet the tolerators are getting outnumbered by the brutalists, the sex-assaulters, the confiscators and the ones that get high in the evidence locker.
If those identities come with credit card information, they could start porn sites. (When my identity was stolen by hackers in Ukraine, they used my credit card to rent hosting space for a porn website.)
Hacktivists might empty bank accounts and credit cards into laundering sites and forwarded into hate-watch and poverty relief charities, if we want to go full cyberpunk.
On the post: Fox News Needs To Accept Some Of The Blame For The Insurrection; But That Doesn't Mean We Toss Out The 1st Amendment
An extra anti-
Oh my! Yes I did. It should read:
As the January 6th assault on the US Capitol demonstrated, fascists ultimately do resort to violence, as they won't accept political defeat by legal, nonviolent means. And violence is necessary to perpetuate the engine of scapegoating and hatred that drives the popularity of fascism.
I'm drying out from coffee this week. Serves me right for trying to post.
On the post: Fox News Needs To Accept Some Of The Blame For The Insurrection; But That Doesn't Mean We Toss Out The 1st Amendment
The antifa creed
US Antifa comes from Antifaschistische Aktion that directly fought Hitler and were killed or driven into hiding as NSDAP took power and crushed all that opposed it. Considering the holocaust and the war, there is a lot to fear, and a lot to drive them to the conclusion that Fascism is a threat to be annihilated at all cost.
And yes, even in the states, while Antifa is a decentralized group, it still adheres to the notion that fascism is too dangerous to allow it to be endorsed openly. And yet, Antifa has a lower violence rate than the white-supremacist and neo-nazi groups that it commonly rallies to oppose. So Antifa doesn't have to instigate violence, but not shy away from it when fascists open hostilities.
As the January 6th assault on the US Capitol demonstrated, antifascists ultimately do resort to violence, as they won't accept political defeat by legal, nonviolent means. And violence is necessary to perpetuate the engine of scapegoating and hatred that drives the popularity of fascism.
Parallel to this are the reminders recently published that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr's message was not simply an advocacy of peace, but the peace that is afforded by a just society:
...Peace is not merely the absence of this tension, but the presence of justice. And even if we didn’t have this tension, we still wouldn’t have positive peace. Yes, it is true that if the Negro accepts his place, accepts exploitation and injustice, there will be peace. But it would be a peace boiled down to stagnant complacency, deadening passivity, and if peace means this, I don’t want peace. -- Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
The Civil Rights movement never had to resort to violence because the police were always glad to engage. These days, BLM can rely on the same tactics, since the responding police are eager and generous with rubber bullets and CS gas. And now BLM has the advantage of the ubiquity of phone cameras and an internet glad to reveal developments as they happen on the ground.
So those who are interested in the actual truth can watch police brutality as it unfolds, incident by incident, and there's no way to spin it as acceptable in civilized society.
On the post: Fox News Needs To Accept Some Of The Blame For The Insurrection; But That Doesn't Mean We Toss Out The 1st Amendment
Boiling hatred
During the early aughts Tom DeLay would use coercion (extortion) to keep the GOP representatives in line, so they votes as a unilateral bloc. They had to get permission from him directly to vote differently (say when it was an issue in their state).
After that, civility in the federal Congress ended. There was no reason for Democrats to negotiate with Republicans who would vote against them anyway. There was no reason for Republicans to negotiate with Democrats since either they had the votes or didn't.
Then during the Obama administration the GOP decided to obstruct the Black Man to thwart any agenda at all.
We saw the last vestiges of McCain Republicanism in 2017 as the GOP repeatedly tried to terminate the ACA and failed, having also failed to offer a healthcare system that wouldn't massively increase the death toll.
At this point the Republican party has even gone against its own principles in favor of pure demagogy. They offer permission for white Christian men to hate everyone else.
On the post: Fox News Needs To Accept Some Of The Blame For The Insurrection; But That Doesn't Mean We Toss Out The 1st Amendment
Crying foul in 2016
We were pretty gracious about George W. Bush in 2001.
Look where that got us.
We knew Trump was a monster and were stunned that so many Americans would have the desperation to vote for them (though they presented it as audacity).
Really, I was terrified as one check after another that was supposed to comb out monsters failed to do so. And Trump started his presidency by announcing there was carnage in the streets (not really, and surely not the carnage he cared about) and he was going to clean it up. (No, he made it worse.)
Look where that got us.
We may be past civility. The US might have proven Antifa's point that fascism is so great a threat we have to ignore human rights to put it down, or it will consume us. But -- I've learned in the recent days -- I will not ever need to advocate for going to war to make things right: The fascists will gladly shoot first and empty their mags.
On the post: In Departing Statement, FCC Boss Ajit Pai Pretends He 'Served The People'
Cybermen have tear ducts?
On the post: As Predicted: Parler Is Banning Users It Doesn't Like
Projection
Every accusation, a confession
Dude, your team is having a bad week. Maybe lay off the internet and the FOX News for a while? Maybe take some time and rethink what you're going to do?
We had to go through similar reckonings in 2001 when George W. Bush got sworn in after a minority victory. He made a lame speech, rolled back environmental protections ten years and then veered hard right, and then again in 2016 when Trump warned of American carnage.
It's not a good feel. I get it. Take a break. Regroup. We're not going to collect your guns this week. We're not going to start singing Гимн па́ртии большевико́в at least until March.
On the post: Fox News Needs To Accept Some Of The Blame For The Insurrection; But That Doesn't Mean We Toss Out The 1st Amendment
It's a conundrum
We human beings are clearly susceptible to some kinds of speech. It's one of the reasons we regulate for incitement, for slander / libel, for hate speech. The last four years have been a vicious cycle of ideologies that not only encourage hate speech but the deregulation and euphemizing / dog-whistling of hate speech, so that the more the GOP was in power, for instance, the more Churches were allowed to push political agendas, the more normalized it became to suggest non-whites were less human.
And now we're in a pit we can't dig out. And as soon as Rupert dies and his son considers reforming FOX News (the same thing happened with Hearst and his papers) there will be a handful of competitors ready to continue the flood of pro-fascist hate-fueled propaganda.
As someone in the psych sector, my impulse is to study the snot out of the phenomenon, isolate identifiable characteristics of inciting hate speech and then regulate it the way we regulate gambling or advertising to children.
But that will take time.
And in the meantime we're still in a precarious position where the GOP can still lock down branches of government which will lead us towards a new fascist government as precariats panic to government failure.
On the post: In Departing Statement, FCC Boss Ajit Pai Pretends He 'Served The People'
Nothing but bitter resentment
It's very difficult to not want some slow miserable fate worse than death to befall Mr. Pai for all the harm he's done. Not that his suffering would do us any good.
Maybe he can serve as an example of the kind of official that is a symptom of regulatory capture and the kind of person we don't want our children to grow up to be.
On the post: Parler Attempting to Come Back Online, Still Insisting The Site's Motivation Is 'Privacy' Despite Leaking Details On All Its Users
The clenched fist of MAGA
I figure the might and political clout of team MAGA are their adherents who are agents-in-place...that is if they act to serve their cause and not their station. I'm not willing to rule out some might actually have a sense of duty.
As of today, the drone strike programs are in the hands of Biden. I suspect signing an order to stop the sorties cold is not on his first-week agenda. Or even first one-hundred days.
On the post: Parler Attempting to Come Back Online, Still Insisting The Site's Motivation Is 'Privacy' Despite Leaking Details On All Its Users
Making IDs
If you submit a picture of a state ID, a photo is super easy to shop to look like someone else. Easier still if they don't call in somewhere to check if the ID number is associated with the name.
(This is a workaround for places of employment if you can encourage their HR to let you send them a scan rather than bringing the ID to HR. See how clever subversives can be?)
Private detectives and investigative journalists are typically all over these tricks.
PS: If you need an SSN, use Elvis Presley's: 425-26-8732. He's not using it right now.
On the post: Illinois Legislature Sends Massive Police Reform Bill To The Governor's Desk
felony murder = anything made-up by a prosecutor
This sounds conspicuously about how a crime crosses state lines if the internet-part involved a server somewhere out of state.
On the post: Trump's Support Of Cops Pays Off: Multiple Police Officers Under Investigation For Illegal Invasion Of The Capitol Building
Things that are bad.
Aw, man, but I gave him an open-book test. I figured he might learn something.
On the post: Trump's Support Of Cops Pays Off: Multiple Police Officers Under Investigation For Illegal Invasion Of The Capitol Building
20th-century traditional soviet values
Out of curiosity, what specific traditional soviet values are these?
Care to name three that match the US Democratic platform?
On the post: Illinois Legislature Sends Massive Police Reform Bill To The Governor's Desk
764-pages
So the 764-page amendment is the part that implements all these reforms, or is it the part no-one has read yet?
My experience here on TechDirt regarding last-minute amendments no-one has read does not lead me to feel optimistic. Not only do such riders neutralize the bill in question, but also tend to add stuff to make the situation worse.
Are we to expect the police will get a tank and one hundred attack dogs with which to patrol poor neighborhoods?
On the post: Parler Attempting to Come Back Online, Still Insisting The Site's Motivation Is 'Privacy' Despite Leaking Details On All Its Users
Real journalism and actual police work
I suspect there's enough of both to go around, at least hire those who are doing it.
And yes, it's troubling that corporations seem glad to pay their lawyers to sue white-hats rather than paying their (meager) fee and some technicians to bolster their security. That's not encouraging at all.
If I infer from you correctly that it would be better if real journalists, real police detectives and real white-hats all got better compensation for their efforts so that black-hatting wasn't as tempting, I entirely agree.
On the post: Trump's Support Of Cops Pays Off: Multiple Police Officers Under Investigation For Illegal Invasion Of The Capitol Building
No police around when I need one...
Adding police to any situation is kinda like adding an angry rhinoceros or a California wildfire.
Yeah, I hope they're not around when I need one too.
On the post: Parler Attempting to Come Back Online, Still Insisting The Site's Motivation Is 'Privacy' Despite Leaking Details On All Its Users
Journalists and black hats
Black-hat work seems to make more money than journalism, white-hat work or police work. I suspect that whatever resources journalists and police have, black-hats do as well.
At any rate investigators (journalist and otherwise) are already finding ways to get themselves on Parler and report what they see and what kind of mischief can be made.
On the post: Parler Attempting to Come Back Online, Still Insisting The Site's Motivation Is 'Privacy' Despite Leaking Details On All Its Users
Gangs in the United States
Another opportunity to plug the You're Wrong About podcast. In the episode on Gangs, Michael Hobbes deconstructs the notions we have about street gangs, which had -- in the minds of law enforcement and news media -- developed an Antifa-like reputation in the nineties as a pervasive well-armed threat that dominates municipal centers. (Gangs picked up the bogeyman mantle dropped by the serial killers of the seventies and eighties, and later taken up by the Islamist terrorists of the aughts.)
One question was how a street gang can be a pack of uncivilized feral teens who cannot be negotiated with, except through violence and yet is simultaneously a global syndicate vertically stacked producers and distributors of drugs, with prostitution, booking and hit jobs on the side.
Amusingly, the Saints Row series of video games capitalized on the notion that street kids wearing gang colors could elevate themselves to international celebrity with armies of homies and fleets of gunships by sheer force of will and street-cred.
Oversight reviews of collected dossiers on street gangs by Violent Gang Task Forces (The FBI has one) revealed they have about as much actual data on youth groups and drug supply networks as Heinrich Kramer did regarding witches when he wrote the Malleus Maleficarum. These reports were less about understanding the street-teen gang-member as demonizing him so he could be easily dispatched.
So at the point that even when Wikipedia has an article on Juggalo gangs, I'm skeptical -- pending evidence -- that it's anything more than either a) ICP fans who might also have other gang identities or motives to engage in gang behavior† or b) ICP fans who are driven by more common reasons to resort to crime (drug withdrawal will do it).
† Gangs often form as an ad hoc neighborhood watch, especially when another gang is shaking a community down. Since the 1990s, the most common gang to move into a town and cause trouble has been: law enforcement.
On the post: Trump's Support Of Cops Pays Off: Multiple Police Officers Under Investigation For Illegal Invasion Of The Capitol Building
There's that whole tolerating thing...
When the police in general tolerate bad officers without even a Dude! Not cool! then it really is a police in general problem.
But in this late hour, I bet the tolerators are getting outnumbered by the brutalists, the sex-assaulters, the confiscators and the ones that get high in the evidence locker.
On the post: Parler Attempting to Come Back Online, Still Insisting The Site's Motivation Is 'Privacy' Despite Leaking Details On All Its Users
Stealing Parler identities
If those identities come with credit card information, they could start porn sites. (When my identity was stolen by hackers in Ukraine, they used my credit card to rent hosting space for a porn website.)
Hacktivists might empty bank accounts and credit cards into laundering sites and forwarded into hate-watch and poverty relief charities, if we want to go full cyberpunk.
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