Chris
10-16-2017, 10:09 AM
'Alt-right' leader Richard Spencer questions whether women should have right to vote (https://www.dallasnews.com/news/us-news/2017/10/15/alt-right-leader-richard-spencer-questions-whether-women-right-vote).
OMG! What an idiot.
But why even give this nitwit a voice? He's not alt-right, let alone right--he claims to be a socialist. He's some person who gives speeches to crowds of tens, one of his follwers is Tila Tequila.
How Not to Marginalize the Alt-Right (http://www.nationalreview.com/article/452684/alt-right-white-supremacism-left-right-conservatives-ta-nehisi-coates-ben-shapiro-federalist)
Leftist critics only help it by exaggerating its power and attacking even conservatives who oppose it. An old Jewish joke, full of the mordant humor of Judaism’s darkest hours, is typically told thus:
Rabbi Altmann and his secretary were sitting in a coffeehouse in Berlin in 1935. “Herr Altmann,” said his secretary, “I notice you’re reading Der Stürmer! I can’t understand why. A Nazi libel sheet! Are you some kind of masochist, or, God forbid, a self-hating Jew?” “On the contrary, Frau Epstein. When I used to read the Jewish papers, all I learned about were pogroms, riots in Palestine, and assimilation in America. But now that I read Der Stürmer, I see so much more: that the Jews control all the banks, that we dominate in the arts, and that we’re on the verge of taking over the entire world. You know — it makes me feel a whole lot better!”
I thought of that joke upon reading Thomas Chatterton Williams’s brave New York Times column on the common threads connecting the racialism of Ta-Nehisi Coates and the racialism of Richard Spencer:
I have spent the past six months poring over the literature of European and American white nationalism, in the process interviewing noxious identitarians like the alt-right founder Richard Spencer. The most shocking aspect of Mr. Coates’s wording here is the extent to which it mirrors ideas of race — specifically the specialness of whiteness — that white supremacist thinkers cherish. . . . Mr. Coates’s recent writing and the tenor of the leftist “woke” discourse he epitomizes . . . [is] in sync with the toxic premises of white supremacism. Both sides eagerly reduce people to abstract color categories, all the while feeding off of and legitimizing each other, while those of us searching for gray areas and common ground get devoured twice. Both sides mystify racial identity, interpreting it as something fixed, determinative and almost supernatural. For Mr. Coates, whiteness is a “talisman,” an “amulet” of “eldritch energies” that explains all injustice; for the abysmal early-20th-century Italian fascist and racist icon Julius Evola, it was a “meta-biological force,” a collective mind-spirit that justifies all inequality. In either case, whites are preordained to walk that special path. It is a dangerous vision of life we should refuse no matter who is doing the conjuring....
I’d excerpt even more, but you really should read the whole thing. Much as Der Stürmer did for the rabbi in the old joke, Coates makes white people sound like Sith Lords or the wizards in Harry Potter, a chosen people imbued with a secret power they need only unlock in order to thrum with supremacy and privilege regardless of their individual flaws.
Coates is a figure of enormous cultural power, the most enthusiastically praised political writer in American history. He has used that position of power and privilege to promote a vision of America in which individuals mean nothing and race is everything — a vision that many in academia are eager to embrace. Yet the irony of the fires he plays with continually escapes him....
OMG! What an idiot.
But why even give this nitwit a voice? He's not alt-right, let alone right--he claims to be a socialist. He's some person who gives speeches to crowds of tens, one of his follwers is Tila Tequila.
How Not to Marginalize the Alt-Right (http://www.nationalreview.com/article/452684/alt-right-white-supremacism-left-right-conservatives-ta-nehisi-coates-ben-shapiro-federalist)
Leftist critics only help it by exaggerating its power and attacking even conservatives who oppose it. An old Jewish joke, full of the mordant humor of Judaism’s darkest hours, is typically told thus:
Rabbi Altmann and his secretary were sitting in a coffeehouse in Berlin in 1935. “Herr Altmann,” said his secretary, “I notice you’re reading Der Stürmer! I can’t understand why. A Nazi libel sheet! Are you some kind of masochist, or, God forbid, a self-hating Jew?” “On the contrary, Frau Epstein. When I used to read the Jewish papers, all I learned about were pogroms, riots in Palestine, and assimilation in America. But now that I read Der Stürmer, I see so much more: that the Jews control all the banks, that we dominate in the arts, and that we’re on the verge of taking over the entire world. You know — it makes me feel a whole lot better!”
I thought of that joke upon reading Thomas Chatterton Williams’s brave New York Times column on the common threads connecting the racialism of Ta-Nehisi Coates and the racialism of Richard Spencer:
I have spent the past six months poring over the literature of European and American white nationalism, in the process interviewing noxious identitarians like the alt-right founder Richard Spencer. The most shocking aspect of Mr. Coates’s wording here is the extent to which it mirrors ideas of race — specifically the specialness of whiteness — that white supremacist thinkers cherish. . . . Mr. Coates’s recent writing and the tenor of the leftist “woke” discourse he epitomizes . . . [is] in sync with the toxic premises of white supremacism. Both sides eagerly reduce people to abstract color categories, all the while feeding off of and legitimizing each other, while those of us searching for gray areas and common ground get devoured twice. Both sides mystify racial identity, interpreting it as something fixed, determinative and almost supernatural. For Mr. Coates, whiteness is a “talisman,” an “amulet” of “eldritch energies” that explains all injustice; for the abysmal early-20th-century Italian fascist and racist icon Julius Evola, it was a “meta-biological force,” a collective mind-spirit that justifies all inequality. In either case, whites are preordained to walk that special path. It is a dangerous vision of life we should refuse no matter who is doing the conjuring....
I’d excerpt even more, but you really should read the whole thing. Much as Der Stürmer did for the rabbi in the old joke, Coates makes white people sound like Sith Lords or the wizards in Harry Potter, a chosen people imbued with a secret power they need only unlock in order to thrum with supremacy and privilege regardless of their individual flaws.
Coates is a figure of enormous cultural power, the most enthusiastically praised political writer in American history. He has used that position of power and privilege to promote a vision of America in which individuals mean nothing and race is everything — a vision that many in academia are eager to embrace. Yet the irony of the fires he plays with continually escapes him....