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Comment by andybak | Hacker News Reader

Viewing US political culture from outside makes this even more entertaining. It appears to many people in Europe to be mostly two center-right/right groups calling each other nasty names.

Of course the standard left/right dichotomy is a historical accident and contingent on many local factors. And yet we continue to reify it as if it were some Platonic truth.

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America's extreme leftists (AKA SJWs) aren't center-right. They want socialism, they want to silence everyone who disagrees with them, they are willing to use any tactic (including censorship and even violence) to get what they want, and yet, in a startling lack of self-awareness, they consider the center-right half of the country "Nazis".

This attempted act of censorship by an ex-Twitter employee is a fairly tame example of their tactics, though notable for affecting the President.

All of America's extreme leftists would probably fit in a 200sqm hall, with room to spare. Why worry about a statistical anomaly? Just because they have Tumblr accounts? :)

(For the downvoters, prove me wrong, how many votes did a far left party get in US elections in the past 20 years? Does the US even have a far left party? :) )

It's much more than a statistical anomaly. It's a rather large group of people, some quite famous and powerful.

Lea DeLaria: "Or pick up a baseball bat and take out every f-cking republican and independent I see"

Madonna: "I’ve thought an awful lot about blowing up the White House."

Mickey Rourke: "I’ll meet [Trump] in a hotel room any motherf-cking day of the week and give him a Louisville slugger."

Bow Wow: "@realDonaldTrump shut your punk a-- up talking s--t about my uncle @SnoopDogg before we pimp your wife and make her work for us."

Eminem: "And fuck Ann Coulter with a Klan poster. With a lamp post, door handle, shutter. A damn bolt cutter, a sandal, a can opener, a candle, rubber. Piano, a flannel, sucker, some hand soap, butter. A banjo and manhole cover"

Then there's Kathy Griffin's famous photo with a severed "Trump" head, Snoop Dog's video shooting Trump ...

And that's just Hollywood. There's no room here to discuss all the incidents of actual violence, or protesters denying people the right to hear speakers at public universities, etc, etc.

Eminem isn’t a good example. He hates politicians and Hollywood “elites”, and Trump is both

The quote I used from Eminem was about sexually assaulting Ann Coulter. Does he routinely talk that way about political pundits?

Umm listen to the Marshall Mathers LP and then get back to me

No please. There's enough room to discuss incidents of actual violence. I'd like to see them, backed up by sources. It would be interesting to compare statistics.

7 celebrities talking shit does not equate a massive, unified, violent left-wing movement in the US with conspiracy-like powers and tactics to censor the right. I think the right is pretty well represented in the US.

7 celebrities "talking shit" (encouraging violence) and being applauded for it. And there are more than 7, but I thought 7 would sufficiently illustrate the point.

Measure the support for the movement by the number of people who celebrated those remarks. A lot of people.

Steve Scalise.

How about this one? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRS_targeting_controversy

EDIT: Twitter literally suppressed the leaks of DNC and Podesta emails hashtags and admitted to it:

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-11-01/twitter-admits-it-b...

https://www.lgraham.senate.gov/public/_cache/files/4766f54d-...

Is that conspiracy enough for you?

How about this:

On October 31, 2016, The New York Times reported: "CNN has severed ties with the Democratic strategist Donna Brazile, after hacked e-mails from WikiLeaks showed that she shared questions for CNN-sponsored candidate events in advance with friends on Hillary Clinton's campaign."

And that's just off the top of my head.

EDIT 2: Can you explain how all these very similar headlines were possible without there being a conspiracy? And yes, those are real, I saw it when it happened.

https://pics.onsizzle.com/headlines-think-the-media-got-the-...

Mickey Rourke is a Republican who endorsed Ben Carson.

https://www.thewrap.com/mickey-rourke-calls-donald-trump-big...

All of America's neonazis would probably fit in a 200sqm hall, with room to spare. Why worry about a statistical anomaly? Just because they have Voat accounts? :)

As an outsider, I don't see the far left having an influence on American politics. The far right, on the other hand, does seem to have one. Or am I mistaken?

I think the far left's primary influence in 2016 was in pulling Hillary to the left during the primary, which caused lasting damage to her campaign (as she said) and helped lead to Trump's election.

They sure have some influence on medias. Also, a lot of events thought as right-leaning get disturbed: MRA conventions, speech from "not the right people" in gaming conventions etc. which have security prices jacked-up because of bomb threats, fire alarm pulled to interrupt it. Also you get the antifa violence which everyone seem to have forgotten.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_Party_presidential_...

A literal socialist reaching 43.1% of votes not influential enough?

American democratic socialists like Sanders aren't far left, and are really more social democrats than “literal socialists”. (Sure, DSA is part of international socialist fora, but so is the UK Labour Party, and no one sane is calling Labour “far left” either.)

Someone, therefore, from the moderate left getting a sizable minority of votes within the left-most party of a two-party system where the most votes in that party went to a center-right neoliberal is not evidence of the far left having much (or any) influence, especially when it's the best anyone not from the center-right has done in that party for at least a quarter century.

The man literally visits Soviet Union as his idea of honeymoon after his wedding.

There's circumstantial evidence he was even a Stalinist at one point: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=sanders+stalinist+kibbutz

You do realize how closely your argument resembles a "No True Scotsman" in this case, yes?

Person A: "No Scotsman puts sugar on his porridge."

Person B: "But my uncle Angus likes sugar with his porridge."

Person A: "Ah yes, but no true Scotsman puts sugar on his porridge."

EDIT: Here he is, calling himself a socialist without any qualifiers in 1989: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M_QLek6Qvzg

Were any policies he actually proposed socialists?

1. People can change.

2. People might moderate their actions when faced with reality (heck, even Trump does/is forced to).

From what I remember back when he was campaigning, most things he was proposing would definitely fall under socialist-democrat in Europe.

If he became president and succeeded at first he might have been widely celebrated, as comrade Chavez was. Then he would have likely won the re-election in a landslide that dwarfed Reagan's victory and implemented policies further to the left.

And then a decade in the future (might even be more than that, US is resilient) it would have blown up in everyone's faces, just as it did in Venezuela.

The general public has a short attention span, it seldom thinks of what would happen 10-15 years down the road.

Sanders is certainly a socialist by some definitions; and there are certainly definitions of socialism by which it is exclusively a far-left ideology.

The problem is that they aren't the same definitions, and the game being played of pretending that they are is the fallacy of equivocation.

https://www.sanders.senate.gov/newsroom/must-read/close-the-...

"These days, the American dream is more apt to be realized in South America, in places such as Ecuador, Venezuela and Argentina, where incomes are actually more equal today than they are in the land of Horatio Alger. Who's the banana republic now?"

Would you describe Venezuelan regime as center-left social democrat?

Who's the banana republic now? Indeed, the irony would be amusing if only this failure did not leave millions and millions of people with no money, no food and no hope.

There are a lot more than the far right, as evidenced by the recent protests around the country by BLM and Antifa. And the recent trend of fighting free speech on college campuses doesn't seem to be limited to a few institutions.

Can you fit 200 000 subs of https://www.reddit.com/r/SandersForPresident/ in a 200sqm hall?

Can you fit all his voters there?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernie_sanders

His wiki mentions "socialist" 35 times. Is that not leftist enough for you?

There's circumstantial evidence that he was even a Stalinist at one point: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=sanders+stalinist+kibbutz

You are aware that outside of the US "socialist" isn't quite as pejorative as you seem to think it is? The mainstream center-left parties in many European countries have the word "socialist" or a variant thereof in their names.

Yes, but we can't have a meaningful discussion if we disregard Occam's razor (If the man calls himself a socialist and has done so for decades, then that's what he is) and go into the "No true Scotsman" territory instead.

The narrative you describe in your post is largely fabricated to rally, enrage and indoctrinate individuals.

It's disheartening how deeply the "us vs. them" mindset dominates our politics. You used the term "they" or "them" seven times in your short post. Seven. Who are they? A few trolls on twitter does not equal a meaningful movement. Categorizing half of the American populace based on the views/actions of fringe nutjobs is absurd and not conducive to meaningful discourse.

Having a slang term for "them" (SJW) implies that it's a such a common issue that people face daily, when in reality it's a strawman argument largely fabricated by organizations interested in keeping you squabbling vs examining their policies.

You go on to say "attempted act of censorship by an ex-Twitter employee is a fairly tame example of their tactics" "Their Tactics" as if this incident was part of a master plan orchestrated by a shadowy far-left extremist org. This is pizza-gate levels of delusion.

"Categorizing half of the American populace based on the views/actions of fringe nutjobs is absurd"

1) Lena Dunham has called for the extinction of white men. 2) The President of the United States then sent his teen daughter to do an internship with this "fringe nutjob".

Sorry, this crazy, hateful bigot is not "fringe", she's squarely in the mainstream of the modern Democratic Party. They need to fix that if they're planning to ever win a national election again.

> Lena Dunham has called for the extinction of white men

Had to Google that. Is there more than the 30 second animation? Because as a straight white male, I didn't feel particularly victimised by it.

It doesn't matter whether you, personally, feel "victimised" by it. Most participants in Internet lynch mobs don't actually feel personally threatened by whatever it is they're screaming about.

If she had done that to any other identifiable group, she would have been hounded from the public sphere.

Instead, she gets rewarded with some personal time with the President's daughter. Do you think Trump, or Bush II, or Bush I, or Reagan, or Nixon... would have sent their child off to intern with someone who called for the extinction of, say, black people? Nope.

And no, that's not the bottom of her lunacy, not by many, many levels.

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