Plenty of death threats were written as comments to news articles and on forums. "We'll eventually get him", "If he ever gets out of prison I am out to get him". Etc.
Nothing has come of it so far ( he is out of prison for some years ).
Fortuyn was far-right.
"Fortuyn's beliefs began to shift to the right in the 1990s, especially related to the immigration policies of the Netherlands. Fortuyn criticised multiculturalism, immigration and Islam in the Netherlands. He called Islam "a backward culture", and was quoted as saying that if it were legally possible, he would close the borders for Muslim immigrants."
This kind of black-and-white thinking also applies to Assange and WikiLeaks, and has had the unfortunate effect of removing his support from both the left (because of the Guccifer leaks) and the right (because of the Collateral Murder leaks).
> He was also openly gay
you can be gay and be far-right. those are not somehow mutually exclusive. another example off the top of my head: Milo Yiannopoulos and Dave Rubin are both openly gay and far-right.
> This kind of black-and-white thinking
no. the issue here is doublespeak and misdefining commonly used words. like on that wikipedia page i linked to his far-right views are laid out in detail, yet it also notes that he asserted that these far-right ideas are not far-right.
i mean, unless you're arguing that islamophobia and anti-immigration aren't right-wing?
I don't associate the far right with drug legalisation, women's and LGBT rights, the right to die, or direct democracy. Pim Fortuyn supported all of these. He was also rabidly bigoted against Muslims, in a way that intersected with his support for other minority groups. Political positions are complicated and sometimes you need more than two words to describe them.
i doesn’t really matter if he supported those things individually. look at Reagan proclaiming he is fighting for everyone (including the black community), yet then behind closed doors he refers to black people as “monkeys” (that famous call with Nixon) [1]. so it doesn’t matter if Pim held those beliefs, it matters what policies the party overall pursues, with whom they ally themselves, and what actions come after their stated political aims/programs. when we take a look at similar political parties that came before it does not look good.
my point is: pursuing certain xenophobic ideas and pushing for far-right change nearly always ultimately means you end up forfeiting these ‘smaller’ standpoints when push comes to shove.
e.g. from Pim’s wikipedia page (under 'Political career') it is well-described how he had already journeyed from being a marxist to becoming a free-market neo-liberal. if he hadn’t been killed i’m sure he would’ve further completed this arc and becoming a far-right neo-conservative populist politician like the Trumps, Baudets and Wilders of today.
> I'm arguing that "right" and "left" are a linear one-dimensional approximation of complex multi-dimensional beliefs.
did you mean “aren’t” instead of “are”? i’ll assume so, because it seems to make the most sense to me from your other arguments (if not then i am not following you at all)
you are trying to redefine the right to left political spectrum to a ‘both sides’ centrist view. this is a dangerous right-wing strategy that aims to reframe a debate on it's own terms; a deflection and distraction away from important systemic critiques (which ultimately leads to a continuation of a systemically violent status quo).
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/07/ronald-rea... (archive version - https://archive.md/OdpeR), direct link to call audio https://soundcloud.com/user-154380542/nixon-013-008-630-650/...
You can't be "far-right" to someone. It isn't a verb. And if someone only takes far right positions on the topic of brown people they aren't far right - they are something complicated that needs more description.
i think you're willfully misinterpreting here to try to somehow discredit them or 'get' them, without actually offering any meaningful counterarguments. it's easy to understand what that person means.
> if someone only takes far right positions on the topic of brown people they aren't far right - they are something complicated that needs more description.
please would you elaborate? i haven't seen that before.
To figure out what political philosophy we'd need to know about their other, non-far-right-wing, views.
By definition and context, their other views are either mild right wing, neutral or left wing. We'd need to have specific information to classify them. It is impossible with only one, context specific and relatively common, view.
> i think you're willfully misinterpreting here to try...
Given I'm literally correct, a safer assumption is that I'm the sort of person who cares about being literally correct? Far-right isn't a verb. And racism against brown people is an extremely common thing across the political spectrum; it isn't enough to characterise someone as far right.
edit: also, the murder was silently condoned by a large fraction on the left.
Is that known for a fact?
Implying that someone 'silently condoned' something is very convenient because it's basically impossible to prove or disprove, it's like accusing someone of thoughcrime.
The difference between 'this has popular support' and 'there are a few nutjobs' is kinda key, don't you think? Otherwise you might as well write 'a large section of leftists cut off their own penises"
that sounds like the oppsoite of a neutral picture ...
That is not my impression at all. If there's any sort of "silent condoning" going on then it's very very silent indeed, as I've never encountered it in spite of spending plenty of time in leftist circles. No doubt you can find a few crazy extremists, but they do not get to define "a large fraction on the left".
well you succeeded, here we are talking about your 'neutral' picture
Also here's the motivation for "islamophobia":
> "I have no desire to go through the emancipation of women and homosexuals all over again."
For the most part, it's hard to underestimate individual crackpots. Take them as a whole, and it's a different story however.
That said, Peter Medawar had it right[0]:
"The USA is so enormous, and so numerous are its schools, colleges and religious seminaries, many devoted to special religious beliefs ranging from the unorthodox to the dotty, that we can hardly wonder at its yielding a more bounteous harvest of gobbledygook than the rest of the world put together."
N.B.: I am an American.
[0] https://www.quotetab.com/quote/by-peter-medawar/the-usa-is-s...