I don’t know about anyone else’s experience here, but I am sick and tired of automatically being associated with the radical left-wing lunatics just because I don’t believe in sky daddy. There is a lot more variety in atheism than the fat, blue-haired, oversized glasses-wearing, nose-pierced, tramp-stamped, pro-Palestinian, standing-with-Ukraine, left-wing degenerate that you see posted on X. You know, the leeches that are squatting all over college campuses going on hunger strikes as if anyone cares. Don’t eat. That means more food for me.
Anyway, it’s rather shameful that some people have such a limited view of atheism. There are many people who are overwhelmingly conservative in various facets of life, but do not believe in religious fairytales. I ask you all, is it possible to be a devoted atheist while harboring largely conservative values in other areas? Society seems to think not. You don’t have to be a neckbeard leftard to be an atheist. You don’t have to be one of those blithering blimps standing around yelling, “my body my choice” to be an atheist.
I have conversed with MAGA atheists and libertarian atheists, and that didn’t surprise me to encounter them, because atheism is a straight up or down position on a single matter – whether there’s good reason to think there is even one deity.
More broadly, liberalism is a lot more than the caricatures of MAGA or anyone else. The Democratic Party itself is a coalition party, in a sense that the GOP is not and never has been. It contains right-leaning, centrist and various shades of progressives. So it is not a question of some specific appearance or positions. There’s a reason that Democrats have so many internal spats.
As I get older, I am becoming more conservative. Its a natural progression, as Hitch Said, when your young you are leftist. When you grow up your a conservative, paraphrasing there.
I don’t know about anyone else’s experience here, but I am sick and tired of automatically being associated with the radical left-wing lunatics just because I don’t believe in sky daddy.
I have a very good friend who is an atheist who is a Libertarian.
There is a lot more variety in atheism than the fat, blue-haired, oversized glasses-wearing, nose-pierced, tramp-stamped,
You should tell that to other conservatives, not atheists. You are describing the ridiculously false stereotype create by your ilk.
pro-Palestinian,
You know, it is possible to be against what Israel is currently doing, without being pro-Hamas.
And as being pro-Palestinian, well yeah, they are my fellow human beings, that are being slaughtered and starved, most of them innocent.
What the fvck happened to your empathy, that you can’t feel for the injustices being done to them?
standing-with-Ukraine,
Standing with a fledgling democracy against a totalitarian dictator seems like the right thing to do. Not even sure why this is controversial.
Halleluiah, thank you for that, people look at me as if I’ve lost my mind when I suggest that blowing up unarmed civilians, children among them is not the way forward.
I grow so tired of extremists presenting false dichotomies where you are either for them, or worse than Hitler.
What is truly tragic is the way media/social media are stearing ‘conversation’ that it is simply, ‘them and us’, as if people actually think in such ridiculous fucking binary ways.
I’ve watched from afar of this Charlie Kirk news and its remarkable as much as it sad.
Yes he may have been a smug git and one I took huge glee in watching Tilly Middlehurst at Oxford destroy him in debate and yet, still think his death utterly tragic.
Straight away both politcal sides are playing their usual chess moves…
Ive just watched left wing commentators on tv saying “well free speech doesnt mean freedom from consequences” essentially not condemning what happened… hows this going to convince the need for gun reform?
And now the right are looking to go down the cancel culture route…
Baffelling! Absolutely baffeling.
I yern for a new political movement thats actually sane and looks to actually do the will of the people.
Its no different here in the UK, utterly shocking how much of a shit show it is becoming.
You have to admit, it was a classic “fuck around and find out” moment. That doesn’t say anything about endorsing the shooter, or the shooting, or the violence. Kirk wasn’t merely a smug git, he was a virulent racist and homophobe and Christo-fascist who was instrumental in getting the current regime into power and is being offered state honors normally afforded only to high government officials.
Also, the shooter was even further to the right than he was. The shooter’s objection was that he wasn’t fascist ENOUGH.
People have been fired from their jobs here for merely posting Kirk’s own words without comment. You can unambiguously “condemn what happened” but if you don’t spout uncritical hagiography about Kirk they paint a target on your back anyway.
No i don’t, i find the notion abhorrent.
Likewise with the democratic governors that were killed.
I view both equally sides of the debate as equally childish.
As for the claim of him being this and the other, i genuinely would have to watch more full videos of him in order to gauge an opinion.
I will say however, that the calling of people as ‘nazi’s’ i find utterly grim! As the grandson of a great man who directly fought them and have the seen the carnage they did, its not a term that should be so easily thrown about.
Equally with the right, the demonisation of peole because of the sexual proclivities is shocking.
The point I was making in regards to the right, is that they are no better… with their hounding and harrassing of people due to having sexual orientations, proclivities etc… that goes against their beliefs.
Both sides of the aisle, even here in the UK are like petulant squabbling children.
This world desperately needs a new politcal movement that is more centrist, keeping the actual people at the heart of all legislation.
As for Epstein, I’d happily wager that his ‘little black back book’ was full to the brim of people of all different political persuasions.
It’s no surprise nothing has come to light from the last administration nor the current.
I would imagine it’ll stay that way.
Again though, my over arching opinion is that both sides of the aisle are arseholes.
P.s. sorry my previous post may have had typos that made it unclear, desperately fighting falling asleep due to another bloody migrane.
Why? One can observe that actions have consequences, without making a statement in favor of the consequences. If I drive 100 mph in a 50 mph zone and get into a horrific accident that takes my life and that of several others, unless I was having a seizure or something, that is a consequence of my carelessness and/or bad judgement and/or whatever. It’s simply a fact. Saying so does not say that it isn’t tragic or that my family won’t (or shouldn’t) mourn me.
It is a little like someone whose grandfather lived in Germany during Hitler’s rise related to me – as democracy was dismantled and various atrocities escalated, some newspaper did a puff piece about Goebbel’s family life. So his grandfather used to angrily say, in response to each new outrage committed on people, “But Magda Goebbels makes a great strudel!” That is what is happening here … Charlie Kirk condemns himself with his own words, which you can easily look up without me doing it for you. It was, he said, a terrible mistake to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Black women would never get jobs if it weren’t for affirmative action because they’re too dense, etc. The list is long and disgusting. There is no need to use his death to try to make him more relatable. He was an asshole, pure and simple, whatever redeeming qualities he may have had to some select people in his life, he was trying very hard to get a lot of other people marginalized, persecuted, and ultimately killed.
That he died tragically at the hands of an assassin doesn’t change that, even while his death was still wrong. Folks can chew gum and walk at the same time. I’m not going to engage in performative hagiography for him and ignore the several elephants in the room. That is actually mature and nuanced, not “childish”.
It would be a good idea for you to be more informed before judging the reactions to his death, and I’d recommend reading from reliable news sources (actual journalists, which nowadays means not the US legacy media) in preference to videos, although there’s certainly plenty of him on video spreading his vitriol, however it might be sanitized, sanewashed and framed at times.
It isn’t thrown about easily. If anything, too many discount it.
Nazi evil was as banal as the evil of the US regime, it started and built slowly the same as it did here, then suddenly accelerated – just as it has here. We already have the concentration camps, we just call them “ICE detention facilities”. We have masked men disappearing people in broad daylight instead of brownshirts. Some other details are different; the number of oligarchs behind the regime is probably greater than was true in Germany for example. But we’re well on our way. Hitler dismantled the German democracy in a couple of months. It is only taking a little longer here because Trump is administratively incompetent, ignorant and incurious compared to Hitler.
The world war part, they are trying hard to do that. Extra-judicial murder in international waters off the coast of Venezuela. Fomenting sedition in Iceland. Threatening to take over the Panama Canal. Catering to Putin’s whims and blaming Zelinsky for starting the war. Give it a little time, it will make WW2 look like a cakewalk.
As for your thoughts on centrism, good luck with that. It has ill-served us. There are some things you can’t “both-sides” or compromise on. The classic cartoon has hooded KKK on one side and some black people on the other. “Hang them all” says the right. “Leave us alone” says the blacks. And a nice centrist stands between them pleading, “Maybe compromise?”
HOW exactly?
What put the nail in the coffin of the Third Reich wasn’t compromise, it was defeat in battle by a united world and the Nuremburg Trials and consequences being meted out. My greatest fear at this point isn’t that the regime will crush the US and sell its assets at a discount, it is that when they inevitably fall out of power (and that ALWAYS happens because authoritarianism isn’t sustainable), they will not be brought to justice for their crimes against humanity. And if that doesn’t happen, it’s only a matter of time before they rise again. I don’t want Trump 3.0.
There’s so much i could reply to, but the comparison of ice detention centers to a places like auschwitz is quite possibly the most irretrievably stupid comment I’ve ever read.
Concentration camps are “a place where large numbers of people, especially political prisoners or members of persecuted minorities are deliberately imprisoned in a relatively small area with inadequate facilities, sometimes to provide forced labor or to await mass execution.” (italics mine)
The forced labor will come soon, in the fields where the laborers used to at least earn meager wages.
The mass executions will probably come in due course as well. In the meantime, call it what it definitionally IS.
And just for the record: places like Auschwitz are not to be fetishized as special places beyond the pale, as if they could never happen again or elsewhere, or as if any mistreatment of humans is acceptable so long as it doesn’t involve gas chambers and ovens. Yet.
I had to reread the posting in question, and must say I disagree that a direct comparison was done. Auschwitz was not mentioned, and only a general comparison between the two concepts was done. What @mordant did do, however, was to draw the attention towards the parallels between the early stages of the Third Reich and contemporary US.
Because they were horrific beyond any imagination, Auschwitz and the other death and concentration camps of the Third Reich can and must be used as warnings and examples for the future as to what to avoid, both in concept and in detail. It must also be considered that Auschwitz et al. did not pop into existence from nothing, as there was a development in both scale and horrificness there.(*) Therefore, the development of the concentration camp system, in all its stages, can be legitimately used as a metric. As far as I can see, user Mordant did the comparison to the early stages. Which is imho legitimate.
In view of the above, I think there is ample reason to draw attention to and warn against the current development in the US. Besides, Mordant’s comparison serves as a comparison in development, not in scale.
(*) For those of you particularly interested in the topic, I can recommend the book The Origins of the Final Solution by historian Christopher R, Browning, which details the development of nazi jewish policy from the early days until the killing factories started gaining momentum.
Whilst I am inclined to agree, it is also inevitable that expressing this will be catnip to the usual extremist soundboxes. This tragic shooting is an illustration of an endemic problem in the US of gun violence being out of control, but also of people’s failure to grasp that democracy doesn’t always give you what you want, indeed cannot give you what you want. Democracy entitles us all to express how we feel, and no matter how anathema those views may be, no one has the right to try and suppress them.
Well, perhaps more often people ought to leave the word alone and simply point out why they think the word applies. Calling President Palpatine a fascist, is unlikely to achieve much, constantly reminding everyone that he violated his oath to protect the constitution, and has used rhetoric to suggest he thinks democracy is a barrier to his idealised view of what the US should be, I am thinking here of when he promised “lovely Christians” that if they voted him into the Whitehouse they’d not have to “worry” about voting again.
I dislike Trump both as a politician and man, and for a variety of reasons, but he is under no obligation to live his life for my approval, anymore than I am for his. I am however obliged to speak out when he does a crap job, or when his rhetoric demeans the highest public office in the US.
I’ll get off my high horse now, as I love satire as much as anyone, Jabba the Trump is def my favourite so far, but it does little to try and curb his worst policies. It’s lazy to stereotype and demean, the hard fight lies elsewhere, and I am not a US citizen, you all have my sympathies. Maybe this will help…
His presidency has 1219
DAYS, 10 HOURS and some odd minutes left…LINK
We can visit that countdown for solace…It’s actually quite soothing to watch the seconds tick away…
I think its fair to infer what I said, he brought up saying Nazi evil was as “banal as the us regime”, whilst also refering to the ICE detention centers as “concentration camps” that they “already have”.
No we know what went on at the Nazi camps, death marches to the camps, constant beatings, executions, mass murder in gas chambers, medical experiments, people forced dozen upon dozens to sleep in the same hut on concrete, random unprovked killings, disease outbreaks of (typhoid etc…), forcing people to burn their own in ovens, torture… need i go on?!
To draw even the slightest comparison is disgusting in my humble opinion.
I’d strongly suggest people visit one of these camps, be it Auschwitz, Belsen, Dachau etc…
To coin an american phrase, its not even remotely in the same ball park.
And even if as you say we are to put this down to Mordant using this to compare the “early stages”… the camps opened immediately in 1933 but were more used in '34.
Around 1938 they start mass killings with 41’ being when they started they really got going.
You’ve had ICE for what? 20 years nearly? Under W.Bush, Obama and Trump.
Even with the early nazi camps comparison, they are not being forced on death marches, being forcibly starved or having to live with disease like typhoid thay early nazi camp inmates did.
So its incorrect again.
And again for the record, i think Trump is a massive tosser, so this isnt me being right wing etc… but i just cannot stand the yelling of “nazi” everytime someone disagrees with another person, which is becoming common place.
Its no different to when the right call left wing socialists out for what happened under Stalin or Mao… its stupid.