I Went to a “Dangerous Alt-Right Rally”
joshcsimmons.com
joshcsimmons.com
see huge gadsen flag on a pickup truck next to a giant thin blue line flag
sir, who exactly do you think will be doing the treading?
see texas cannon design "come and take it" bumper sticker next to a big thin blue line sticker.
sir, who do you think will be coming and taking it?
This is like making the Black Lives Matter/All Lives Matter argument, or arguing with "it's okay to be white"[0]. It is foolish to argue with a slogan that is designed to be as agreeable as possible. You are fighting in the motte.
The rally actually had very little to do with the article other than some framing.
I think he did a reasonable job raising his issues without hyperbole. In essence, we just need more conversations and attitudes like this out in the social media jungles so we can move forward. It's a sad indictment that someone like this (reasoned and honest opinions) is losing friends still.
I portion a decent part of the blame on the media (inc. social media); they do nothing whatsoever to encourage honest and earnest discourse yet have massive influence over the attitudes of their viewers. They let politicians get away with posturing and dodging and go more for opinions and editorials than searching for data and 'truth.' Social media platforms are focusing all their resources on blocking content rather than behaviour, completely the wrong way around.
That's what happens when you replace journalism (professional, paid) with social media (shallow, volunteer).
News media had its faults, but what we have now is objectively worse.
Huh? What gun rights are Republicans trying to take away?
"This kind of oversimplification of things encourages an “us vs. them” mindset"
"or is this actually an insane amount of posturing, it’s impossible for me to tell"
"I’m a walking bias. We all are"
I wonder how the piece would read with all sentences starting with "I" removed.
The piece describes the experience and the in-the-moment feelings of the author's experience simply. A good read, though I definitely also want to read the piece written a few weeks later with the benefit of time to work through the emotions and thoughts raised here. (Assuming that such a piece is going to exist!)
Otherwise it read like a pretty run of the mill review of the politicans' public personalities plus some "centrist" appeals to the golden mean fallacy which are generally used as a pry bar to keep stretching the overton window to the right. Should we engage libertarian age of consent abolitionists for the good of open discourse and reach for 'not a black-or-white' answer there?
For what it's worth the "culture war issues" aren't a left vs. right issue anymore. The people in the middle, realistically the swing voters, are beginning to express concerns at how quickly discourse is crumbling under various regimes of speech control. It takes nothing but a trivial Google to see how many news articles are now writing about this.
To assert "culture war" is a far-right view is really a strawman. A lot of Americans who don't involve themselves in the extremes are concerned about the degradation of even mundane discourse in the US.
Your final paragraph
> Should we engage libertarian age of consent abolitionists for the good of open discourse and reach for 'not a black-or-white' answer there?
Is set up to be a perfect strawman. In otherwords, you're saying (without saying) "these libertarian pedophiles shouldn't be engaged". Very dishonest to associate an entire group of (most likely unrelated) people with an extreme fringe of the libertarian party in order to make an underhanded shot at conservative viewpoints in general.
> There are loads of different PTSD support groups (veterans, service industry workers, family trauma, just flat out for men) to the extent you almost need to willfully choose to seek out a domestic/SA group where they aren't comfortable with men.
Specifically targeting PTSD will capture veterans, police, firefighters, etc. Primarily male dominated fields. Men are over twice as likely to be without help in almost any domestic issue. There are more homeless men than women. Many (almost a majority) of these homeless are veterans. This is well known, and to be so dismissive of it is more telling of your own political bias than the truth of the matter.
Local news said it was a couple dozen boats.
A more productive thing to do is to look at why they still exist, what they do better than progressives (i.e. they build enduring societies, something that is not at all obvious progressivism does because of, for example, the extremely low birthrate in progressive societies). And figure out ways to improve progressivism from what these other societies are doing.
Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic. On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting.
The anti-anything-at-all-political bias is way out of control, utterly unchecked, and absurd. [Ed: Im ok with this particular flagging, but it makes me so sad that some of the biggest & widest & most impactful parts of our world are off limits to discussion.]
So, no. It is indeed true that the borg-mind flags only those political topics that induce cognitive dissonance in itself.