Throwaway.
Cast: Me, Roomie, and we'll call him Notsee.
Background: My Roomie has a new partner (don't know the actual labels but they have a primary) over for the weekend. It's the first time they've met as they met online and he lives a few states away. They met playing Warhammer 40k RPGs, relevant later. So I've chatted with him as he's been around and the conversation has mostly been good though we've butted heads a little as we both seem to be a bit opinionated. Though he is opinionated with conviction. What he knows and thinks is right etc.
Last night we were chatting after I got home from work. Don't recall what spurred it but I brought up an incident in the Warhammer 40K world that happened back in November where at a tourney for the tabletop version of the game there was someone who entered under a name that translates to "Austrian painter" and attended wearing nazi regalia. Some of the other players rightfully refused to play a literal nazi. Notsee said he thought it was "hilarious" and gave out some huge laughs and said he would have loved to have seen people's reactions. Then he went on to say "the best way to deal with nazis is to play and beat them" and paraphrasing here "I think any viewpoints should be allowed"
I could see similar feelings of disgust on my Roomie's face that I felt on mine. So hopefully they feel disgusted by his comments as well. After those comments I promptly left the conversation. My first clue was that he said he didn't care about Jan 6th and what happened a year ago.
The more I thought about his comments the more it bothered me. To say those things you have to either grossly misunderstand nazism and what they've done or feel that it's a valid viewpoint that deserves a place of recognition. NAZISM IS NOT A VALID VIEWPOINT. We cannot and should not be tolerant of intolerance. To do so is to validate and welcome that hate into any space we allow it. Do not give them a place at the table.
I haven't talked with my Roomie about it yet so don't know how they feel but if it were me those comments would be a deal breaker if an extremely serious conversation and examination of those view points didn't happen. They've certainly got some NRE going to the point where they woke me up 4 times the night before 2-3 of which was having sex. Roomie's bedroom is above mine. They both apologized though in his apology I heard h
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#Voter fraud
Four residents of The Villages, a Florida retirement community known for enthusiastic pro-Trump zeal, have been arrested for voter fraud over the past month. All four allegedly voted in both Florida and in states in which they own separate homes.
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Charles Barnes, 64, was arrested last week. He is not currently registered with a political party in Florida. His mailing address indicates he likely cast the second vote in Connecticut.
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Jay Ketcik, 63, was arrested for allegedly casting a mail ballot in Florida while also casting an absentee ballot in his original home state of Michigan. He is a registered Republican.
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Joan Halstead, 71, voted in-person in Florida but also allegedly cast an absentee ballot in New York. She is a registered Republican.
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John Rider, 61, allegedly cast an in-person ballot in Florida and an absentee ballot in New York. He did not have a party registered on his Florida records.
Ketcik, Halstead, and Rider reportedly posted pro-Trump messages to Facebook.
#Covid battles
Washington state Rep. Jim Walsh, a Republican representing Aberdeen (southwest WA), is looking to take over the anti-vaxx wing of the state’s Republican party after the death of his fellow lawmaker. State Sen. Doug Ericksen (R), of Ferndale (northwest WA), died last month after fighting a Covid-19 infection in El Salvador.
>“I took a trip to El Salvador and tested positive for COVID shortly after I arrived,” he wrote. “I cannot get back home, and it’s to the point that I feel it would be beneficial for me to receive an iv of
... keep reading on reddit ➡r/ ChadLand memes and videos openly celebrate Nazi Germany, commenters are allowed to use racist and homophobic slurs completely without consequence and constantly make extreme racist, antisemitic and homophobic remarks. Although I will not be copying users' direct names into the report in accordance with anti-brigading rules, it should be noted that many of the posters' usernames contained antisemitic, Nazi and racist references, such as "race war", "Zyklon B" (gas used in Nazi death camps), "Nat(ional)Soc(ialist)" and "white power."
TW for offensive language and symbols.
• Post celebrates statement on article in The Independent that 22 million Americans support Neo-Nazism. Commenters type in Swastika symbols, openly support Nazism and make antisemitic and racist comments:
>That's like more than half of the entire black population (+3)
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>~
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>Heil Hitler. (+10)
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>-> [censored Swastika] (+3)
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>~
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>[censored Swastika] 🦀🦀🦀🦀🦀[censored Swastika] (+5)
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>~
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>The poll probably was like: Do you completelly submit to jewish ideas and pledge alliance to the jewish people, antifa, and BLM?
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>-Option A: Yes, i would love to be assraped by a black man daily, beaten up by the peaceful antifa hordes, and attend a synagogue for 4 hours everydyay.
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>-Option B: No, i am a nazi. (+4)
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>~
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>Q: Are you white?
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>Q: Do you hate yourself? (+3)
• This 'wojak' style meme praises identification as a Nazi with image of two 'chad' Schutzstaffel (SS) death squad soldiers. A commenter advocates Germanic white supremacist and antisemitic rhetoric:
https://archive.is/Otrpa, +179
>You are a “neo Nazi” because you don’t like black people
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>I am a National socialist because I believe it is a paramount imperative that the Germanic peoples gain the soil to be self reliant, thrive and oppose the Judo/Asiatic Hordes
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>We are not the same (*+*29)
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>-> Based and Zyklon pilled. (+14, refers to Zyklon B: gas used in Nazi death camps)
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>-> You forget to mention Natsoc is the completion of centuries long project of German Idealism
Commenters condemning Nazism are downvoted, and answered with additional antisemitic statement about
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>The UN General Assembly has adopted a resolution condemning Nazism, neo-Nazism and all forms of racism, and the U.S. and Ukraine voted against it, while a few countries, mainly US allies, abstained. The resolution was co-sponsored by Russia.
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>On December 16, the UN General Assembly passed its annual resolution on “Combating Glorification of Nazism, neo-Nazism and other practices that contribute to fueling contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance” with 130 countries voting in favor and only two in opposition.
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>Out of a total 193 members countries, 51 countries including all members of the EU, Australia, New Zealand and Canada were among those who abstained from voting on the UN resolution asking members to eliminate all forms of racism and attempts to glorify Nazism. The resolution was passed with overwhelming support from the Third World countries.
I've seen some discourse surrounding that NonCompete discussion questioning the point Vaush was trying to make about Nazi's (and of course the "Nazi's had a point" meme) and found an excerpt from Zizek that I believe really demonstrates the point Vaush was trying to articulate about the nature of Nazism and anti-Semitism. Here is Zizek discussing how anti-Semitism is still wrong even if there are kernels of truth in the Nazi narrative, I found these thoughts to be extremely illuminating:
"Let us suppose, for example, that an objective look would confirm - why not? - that Jews really do financially exploit the rest of the population, that they do sometimes seduce our young daughters, that some of them do not wash regularly. Is it not clear that this has nothing to do with the real roots of anti-Semitism? Here, we have only to remember the Lacanian proposition concerning the pathologically jealous husband: even if all the facts he quotes in support of his jealousy are true, even if his wife really is sleeping around with other men, this does not change one bit the fact that his jealousy is a pathological, paranoid construction...
The proper answer to anti-Semitism is therefore not 'Jews are really not like that' but 'the anti-Semitic idea of the Jew has nothing to do with Jews; the ideological figure of the Jew is a way to stitch up the inconsistencies of our own ideological system" - The Sublime Object of Ideology pg 48-49
I hope we see the point - anti-Semitism isn't about the empirical reality of Jewish people (they are just people after all, with character flaws like every other idiot), the reality of anti-Semitism is the way the narrative functions in the Nazi's psyche. Nazism views the world as a harmonious whole, so if there are social problems, these problems are the result of an outsider, a parasite. This is the nature of anti-Semitism - there are huge problems in the world and the ideological figure of the Jew becomes the 'solution'.
Link to the article (you may have to subscribe, sorry - it is from a good newsletter I subscribe to called Popular Information)
In Indiana, State Senator Scott Baldwin (R) has introduced sweeping legislation that Baldwin says is designed to ban Critical Race Theory (CRT) and related concepts in K-12 education. During a committee hearing on the bill earlier this month, Baldwin told a high school English teacher that he should be "impartial" when discussing Nazism. It is a case study about how the frantic efforts to ban CRT can quickly lead to absurd outcomes.
Among the provisions in Baldwin's 36-page bill is a requirement that teachers "remain impartial in teaching curricular materials or conducting educational activities." At the hearing, Indiana history teacher Matt Bockenfeld said he was concerned about that language. Bockenfeld told Baldwin that he could not be "neutral" on the rise of Nazism before World War II.
For example, it’s the second semester of U.S. history, so we're learning about the rise of fascism and the rise of Nazism right now. And I'm just not neutral on the political ideology of fascism. We condemn it, and we condemn it in full, and I tell my students the purpose, in a democracy, of understanding the traits of fascism is so that we can recognize it and we can combat it.
…We don't stand up and say who we voted for or anything like that. But we're not neutral on Nazism. We take a stand in the classroom against it, and it matters that we do.
Baldwin objected to Bockenfeld's approach and said specifically that he did not believe Bockenfeld should be permitted to express his views on Nazism or any other "ism" in the classroom:
Baldwin said he doesn’t discredit Marxism, Nazism, fascism or “any of those isms out there.”
“I have no problem with the education system providing instruction on the existence of those isms,” he said. “I believe that we've gone too far when we take a position on those isms ... We need to be impartial.”
Baldwin said that even though he is with Bockenfeld “on those particular isms,” teachers should “just provide the facts.”
“I’m not sure it’s right for us to determine how that child should think and that’s where I’m trying to provide the guardrails,” Baldwin said.
Later, when Baldwin was contacted about his remarks by the Indianapolis Star, he partially backtracked. Baldwin sai
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https://youtu.be/vvzmBhCpWvA?t=2
