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Notes -
I'm having a hard time latching on to this post. Can you give a brief topics for conversation that don't involve reading 5 articles? What's the elevator pitch here?
I'll start.
@gilmore606 posted something which I'll paraphrase like this:
That's a pretty good take I think.
Daily reminder that it is never 5d chess.
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I'm sorry. I got carried away and forgot a thesis, and I even knew it was going to be disjointed, too.
My topic for conversation is that Elon Musk is not a neo-Nazi, it's a frivolous comparison, evidence for him being a neo-Nazi is weak, and even further, there is no unified thesis for accusations of neo-Nazi anymore. Does anyone seriously think Elon Musk hates Jews and thinks they're ruining the country or that they faked the Holocaust? If not, then what makes him a neo-Nazi, other than these articles you're wildly gesturing at?
Oh, he's clearly not a Nazi. Only morons think that.
There's a plausible case that he did the Nazi salute to troll people (either for the strategic reasons that I outlined, or for the lulz). More likely, he was just sperging.
In any case, what we're witnessing is the death of Nazi as an insult in real time. This is shit that happened 80 years ago. You know who wants to kill the Jews today? It's not right wingers. It's Muslims and their enablers on the progressive left.
Maybe Elon is playing 4D chess and sees how this conversation plays out. My guess is that he doesn't and he just "does stuff" because it's always worked out in the past.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pittsburgh_synagogue_shooting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poway_synagogue_shooting
It's correct to say anti-semitism is not exclusively a right-wing problem, but right-wing anti-semitism in the US is very real and very definitely capable of violence.
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I agree that in a raw sense the greatest threat to Jewish lives is Palestinians (and the opposite is also true, of course), but I find it ironic to claim that right-wing antisemitism is dead by posting here, of all places.
This is a bad argument. We tolerate a diversity of viewpoints, even one or two anti-Jewish people. Freedom of speech is a good thing.
But the overall attitude of the motte is certainly not anti-Jewish. Who is anti-Jewish? How about the progressive left, known for chanting "kill the Jews" on elite college campuses.
In any case, how sure are you that our very own SS poster is not a Muslim herself?
This is a total non-sequitur.
My point is simple, and really quite humble. I am not saying that the motte is broadly anti-Jewish; I'm saying that the motte has right-wing antisemitic posters, which indicate that right-wing antisemitism is a real thing that some people in the world believe, that it therefore still exists.
While there are certainly antisemites on the left, like the chanters you mention, most progressives -- even most progressives who are critical of Israel were horrified when such things went down. To say those chanters represent the progressive left is to paint with far too broad a brush, or in other words to make general claims about general groups, not specific claims about specific groups.
Is it really so hard to acknowledge that, despite growing antisemitism on the left, right-wing antisemitism is not dead? There are lots of ways you could argue against my point -- saying that right-wing antisemitism has no power, that it's rejected by a larger sum of the right than left-wing antisemitism is by the left, that left-wing antisemites are more acutely dangerous. You say I made a bad argument, but you're not even making an argument at all: just repeating what you already said in a firmer tone, and acting offended that I pointed out that right-wing antisemitism exists, as evidenced by local posters who are right wing antisemites.
What I think has happened is this: you made a massive overgeneralization, treating all your opponents as one bloc and imputing to them the dreaded term of "anti-Jewish," while denying that anyone remotely on your side of the political spectrum holds similar views. You were treating antisemitism like a moral cancer, that pollutes anyone in the blast radius, even uninvolved but similar parties. In a certain ironic sense you were saying that it poisons the well. "Some left wingers are antisemites, therefore antisemitism is left wing." You should know that the left does the same thing with racism, and are every bit as wrong.
Because you were thinking in terms of overgeneralizations and boo lights, when I suggested the motte provides counterevidence, you became defensive, acting as though I had made a similar general claim: "no, we're not anti-Jewish, we tolerate viewpoints, we're not the heretics, it's them." But I wasn't saying what you thought I was saying. I'm not treating antisemitism as a moral pollutant, just as a factual description of certain views, both left and right -- some of which are present here, indicating that they still exist in the world.
The idea that SS is Muslim is... pretty bizarre, and rather reminds me of Hylinka saying right wing identitarians are simply the same thing as left wing ones, all evidence to the contrary.
We don't have to be opposed here, and I'm not trying to start a fight. I just think you made a shady argument and wanted to point out the counterevidence.
I'm not disputing your point that there are anti-semites on the right, but I wanted to respond to this:
Assuming you're talking about actual progressives, not normie liberals, didn't they broadly respond to the "let's kill the jews" marches by reminding us we needed to pay attention to the "context" of such slogans?
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The fact that there are anti semitic right winger doesn’t change the fact that institutionally the LW has an antisemitism problem the RW doesn’t.
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It’s starting to seem like antisemitism is becoming a small but vocal minority on both the left and the right, to the point where neither side can really throw stones at the other for it. A few years ago you could maybe argue that on the left it was just anti-Israel sentiment and not actually antisemistism, but I think that argument has evaporated in the last couple of years.
I don’t actually know anyone on the far left, but it seems like basically every right winger who deviates from the party line becomes an antisemite eventually- and usually, this is purely political antisemitism. If they were absolute dictators they probably wouldn’t repress Jews that much in practice even as they gave some antisemitic speeches.
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It’s not the same. You can be a mainstream elected Democrat and be an antisemite. That’s not true for Republicans.
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