I have an in-law that’s a teacher, and she says it’s fucking crazy how radicalized some kids are. Her coworkers have dealt with 11 year old boys straight up telling female teachers they don’t have to listen to them because they’re women.
They’re apparently always talking about shithead influencers like Andrew Tate too, and the ones that aren’t down the pipeline are definitely still heavily exposed to the ideas. Real disturbing shit.
I’m hoping that it’s just the gen z/alpha version of an edgy atheist phase that they outgrow. For what it’s worth she also says a lot of kids are way more chill about LGBT students, including being respectful of pronouns.
My experience with teenage atheists is that they usually remain atheists into adulthood.
I really think the left have lost a whole ass generation and don’t even realize it.
Nah, some of have been calling out right wing propaganda and the impact it’s having on the political scene for a while now. And it’s not just teens. Right wing propaganda has infested the left as well, to the point where you still have people repeating confirmed propaganda from the 2016 election because they’ve internalized it and can’t let it go.
It’s not that the left has bad messaging or unpopular ideas, it’s that there are a ton of cynics under the big tent. Cynics who actively poison outreach efforts because they are intellectually lazy, but love their own farts.
It’s not that the left has bad messaging or unpopular ideas
Good ideas, but terrible messaging. For example, imagine you wanted to sell Appalachia on the idea that the coal market is in decline so we should look at expanding other market sectors in the region so the entire region doesn’t increasingly resemble dead mine towns as time goes on. What’s the single worst possible way you could try to express that idea to those people?
“I’m going to put a lot of coal companies and coal miners out of business” - Hillary Clinton, 2016.
They have, they’re just now waking up and realizing there are actual stakes involved and thr right has a 50 year headstart.
The way I see it, the left had a good go and had the right on the ropes and lost it in the last 15 - 20 years. Not 50.
I saw a systematic push to pretty much remove the left from the internet and weight the algorithms towards right wing issues while vilifying the left as pompous know it all’s and out of touch with the regular man. Which is crazy because 15 years ago most people would have agreed with so many of the values that are vilified today.
Canadian sub reddits is a perfect example. One day accounts started showing up and laying into anyone looking to do discuss politics. And then hammered them over and over. Then a new sub showed up specifically for left leaning Canadians that drew the ones who didn’t want confrontation towards. At the same time the moderation team started recruiting and low and behold were hammered with right wing applications until they have what is essentially moderators from the r/The_Donald. Now there’s multiple Canadian sub reddits and almost all are heavy right leaning to the point you can’t post even moderate stuff. It all has to be headlines like “Lookie what these brown fellas are doing now”.
Crazy times. Even saw voices that were kind of cool become social pariahs as online users seemed to unanimously agree that “science guy 1” was faking it and pompous and “science guy 2” was also a giant piece of shit. We’re not even leftists but were people who would convince people to think critically and question even your own views. Could not let those channels and people grow. We all had to read about their vocal fry every time they posted a video. Decimated engagement for every voice the left tended to enjoy and who acted as lightning rods for different ideas and values such as common sense and logic were knee capped by the denizens of these newly seized territories who all unanimously agreed that these people were annoying. And since we’re social creatures, if you have 1000 voices saying someone is annoying and 10 say “what the fuck is going on in this comment section” we all tend to really focus on the annoying bits wondering about it ourselves until its just a truth. Meanwhile middle aged Comedian with views like “Students are shitting in litter boxes” and “Maybe wearing masks will kill you” were amplified.
Internet was a new frontier and seems like groups that had resources really seized on the opportunity to take back territory so they could relay a foundation that was pro their own cause. I think the left had a big part in helping without realizing it because they just didn’t care to see what was happening. Like a death by 10 000 paper cuts.
Her coworkers have dealt with 11 year old boys straight up telling female teachers they don’t have to listen to them because they’re women.
That’s hardly new. Obnoxious pre-teens finding any excuse to rebel are just a hazard of middle school life.
Andrew Tate’s brand of misogyny is the thing YouTube loves to promote in between Spider-Man Vaccinating Pregnant Elsa and Hysterical Child Unboxing videos. But if it wasn’t him, it could just as easily be Blink-182 lyrics or kids immitating what they saw in a Caillou episode.
I just found out the lady who cuts my dogs hair is a groomer. You just never know who you’re dealing with I guess.
:D*
*emoticon used because the joke is funny NOT because of the implications of what the joke meant. Results may vary restrictions apply call your lawyer before making bold statements have a nice day
I don’t disagree with any particular point - Christo-fascism is on the rise and it’s terrifying - but specifically the nazis were very much anti-church and thus anti-ten commandments lol
No, no, he is right. Republican and Nazi are the same side of the coin.
To quote Hitler
“We tolerate no one in our ranks who attacks the ideas of Christianity… in fact our movement is Christian.”
Speech in Passau 27 October 1928
Hitler also told a lot of people they were part of the movement. Then the Night of The Long Knives happened. He was meth addict willing to say whatever he needed to say.
The Nazis were very much Christian. Claiming otherwise is distorting the facts.
The nazi party espoused its own distinct, schismatic form of Christianity as it repressed Catholics and Protestants across the country. I am NO defender of the church but to act like churches/institutions weren’t attacked during that era is revisionist history. They were absolutely repressed, if certainly nowhere near as severely as Judaism was (which “repressed” doesn’t even come close to covering).
So, they were attacking other religious sects and churches that were different than their specific version of Christianity?
That sounds like Christianity to me.
Just because it wasn’t the form of Christianity we recognize today, doesn’t mean it wasn’t a valid religious movement. Sure, it specifically helped the Nazi party, but all the pieces of the puzzle to create their christo-fascist state were there for them to put together.
And they used Christianity to do it. Saying otherwise is being disingenuous and revisionist. They espoused Christianity. They espoused the teachings of Jesus. They claimed moral superiority just like every other religion does.
Sure, they used it to attack other religions to set theirs up as the state religion, but that doesn’t make it less like Christianity. Just a form that doesn’t exist today.
Repressing other religions is a cornerstone of most religions, including Christianity. To say otherwise is invoking apologetics.
Give one good reason why the Nazis started with the Jews and not the millions of other groups that are much further separated from their idea of the Übermench.
I’ll give you one. Because Nazis were Christians, and they hate the Jews for not accepting Jesus as their messiah.
To understand nazis religion it is important to understand religion in germany.
Back in the day, and today is similar in former west Germany, Germany had a fairly even split between catholicism and protestantism.
So the nazi party taking a strong religious dogma either way would had been very harmful towards their objectives, as half the population could refuse to follow a catholic/protestant movement. That’s why their leader and the party didn’t really seemed to take a strong religious stance. But at the end they were linked to the conservative values that are associated with religion. And his allies, Spain and Italy. Both formed fascist dictatorships very linked with the Catholic church, being their countries homogeneous in that aspect. In fact Spanish dictatorship is often refered as national-catholicism, and Mussolini had full support from the Vatican and the Pope.
At the end fascism, in whichever form and name it takes, tend to link with conservative values that are usually also linked with religion. The nazi party being just an exception due Germany particular religion situation.
Think of it more like the flu. If I caught the flu I might have a temperature, a sore throat, loss of appetite, and headaches. If you catch the flu you might get headaches, diarrhea, exhaustion, and a dry cough.
Fascism is built upon and characterised by the exploitation of the current fissures of a stressed society. It is unlikely to lead to gas chambers and Hugo Boss uniforms as they were part of the specific evolution of fascism in Germany after it was crippled by the loss of the first world war. Usually, there are all sorts of barriers to full blooded fascism that give it part of its local character too as it tries to morph into whatever conglomerate of memes that it can ride to power.
Right now in America the pressure for fascism is being built with the tacit support of a lot of evangelical christians. It is not the whole of the story. It is part of the conglomerate. So the pride flags come down and the ten commandments go up.
I agree with all of this I’m not entirely sure what kind of response is expected lol
I heard some PhD types who had written papers on Hitlers rise one time explain it that even though we can draw parallels to Hitler’s rise. It in no way means we should expect another group like the Nazi’s to rise to power. They were saying hindsight can say Hitler rose to power because X,Y and Z. But it in no way means that X,Y and Z are what create a Nazi power or means another one is going to show up. That it’s wrong to take something like lists that detail the things that contribute to fascism and say its happening now so therefore the other party are the next Nazi power.
I think what the message was that X,Y and Z only shows what could have contributed to Nazi’s seizing power but when used with foresight its not accurate.
He’s not wrong, but he’s not right either. Those lists are meant to be paired with deep analysis of the ideology and an academic understanding of the terms used. When used correctly they are absolutely useful for predicting oppressive authoritarian regimes. Can they predict the second coming of Nazis? No, because that was a unique moment in history.
Political scientists who write their papers and books on ideology have been sounding the alarm bells about conservative and fundamentalist Christianity since the 2000’s. There’s been papers about wealth ministry and the GOP since at least the 90’s.
So yeah, the brief lists on the Internet are about as effective as a Hogwarts personality test, but that doesn’t mean the watchers aren’t screaming at you to pay attention.
See I don’t really follow this stuff to hard. But that’s what I found funny was what you said sort of. These guys were the guys who write papers and study the rise of fascists and especially a focus on the Nazi’s and their opinion the were bringing up was that its not a predictive tool. Its something that is useful to look backwards and hypothesis what lead to a rise but it doesn’t work looking forward as well and can often be used to be a pretty big political hammer regardless of accuracy and that we should be more careful with it.
Right, fascism molds itself to a particular condition and ground truth. There’s actually a decent body of work which holds that it is a historical form of autocratic politics, and that searching for it in modernity is problematic because of how fungible the core ideology is. You can always stop fascism by stopping autocracy, regardless of whether you positively identify it as such, so all autocratic movements should be treated with the same level of urgency as Nazis. Easy peasy, okie dokie.
The biggest problem with this is that a lot of leftists like autocracy as well. And I am convinced that’s where a lot of this rhetorical pearl clutching really comes from. A whole generation of left wing opposition is effectively null and void because it reduces to a very inconvenient “well our autocracy is different…”
I’ll be the first to admit that there is a huge overlap between evangelicals (who pushed this initiative) and racist/fascist pieces of shit - but the ten commandments in and of themselves have no link to nazi-ism. :p
but the ten commandments in and of themselves have no link to nazi-ism
Yeah nahhh, like the Buddhist symbol was co-opted by the Germans, the commandments are used as a dog whistle by fascists now.
If it was about being Christian they would have used the Beatitudes (words of Christ) not the commandments. If it was about being chest thumping American they’d put the cononsitiution there, speration of church and state etc.
We know WHY they don’t use the Beatitudes, because theae fuckers are as close to being Christian as Hitler was to being Buddhist.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beatitudes
Gandhi’s famous quote summarizes whats so wrong with Christians doing stupid shit like pinning 10 Commandments to the wall, they have little resemblance to Christ
I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ - Mohandas Gandhi
I generally consider the (non-theist) Commandments to generally be generally good rules to live by.
I have to say the non-theist rules because several of them are about God and religion… Like, having no other gods before [him], not taking the Lord’s name in vain, the whole idols thing…
If you take all that theist stuff out, you basically get: don’t lie, steal, cheat, or kill, don’t covet others stuff, and respect your mother and father.
Pretty decent rules overall. At the very least, a good starting point.
Except it will depend on interpretation, and the “thou shall not desire” parts will be used to justify anti-communist paranoia.
Yeah, those are always on shaky ground with me.
It’s not just control over your actions at that point, it’s control over thoughts, and you can’t really police thoughts.
Plus there’s intrusive thoughts that we can’t really control. Things that just pop into our heads. Stuff we wouldn’t actually ever do, but the thought occurs to you anyways.
At the height of my depression from burnout, my brain was concocting inventive ways to take myself out. These were undesirable and unwanted thoughts. It usually happened when I was driving around, looking for a tree large enough that if I hit it head on fast enough, I’d be certain to perish. I could not stop thinking these things.
I got help and I’ve been in a much better place since then. The ideations have stopped. I recognized something needed to change because I didn’t want to think those things.
However, this is a pretty good example of the intrusive thoughts we cannot control that we probably shouldn’t encourage. My environment caused me to get so stressed and burned out, which led to such a profound depression that I couldn’t stop such things from going through my mind. We all have those intrusive thoughts and policing them is basically impossible. Having any rules to that effect is nonsense, in the same way that we don’t have rules to stop people from being offended.
Utter nonsense.
This is why I assert that the commandments are a good starting point. Not the end goal. There’s some good guidelines in there, but they’re hardly the final ruleset that you should adhere to.
*I tried to get a piped link, but it wouldn’t play, probably because youtube is blocking API accesses by third parties now?
Forcing them into schools despite everyone’s First Amendment rights is absolutely Christofascism which people (correctly) call Naziism as an allegory.
Words have meaning. And while it is absolutely and fundamentally wrong to impose religious bullshit on the education system (or anyone, really), no, you are moving the goal posts: The ten commandments have nothing to do with Nazis. You arguing against evangelical fundamentalists doing whatever has nothing to do whatsoever with my previous comment,
You are trying to pretend there is no context involved. You are the one inventing a different scenario than what is pictured so you can feel better about whatever it is that’s got you down.
The actual Commandments or the deliberate mistranslations?
Because the original flavor is very clearly a list of rules made to enable theocratic control and create a religious apartheid.
Because the original flavor is very clearly a list of rules made to enable theocratic control and create a religious apartheid.
I am pretty sure you are over-interpreting here. Theocratic control? Kinda, that’s the whole point of all the “holy books” - I mean whaddya expect? But apartheid is separating people based on (perceived) ethnicity - and the ten commandments do not even attempt to separate people based on religion. They are presented as rules for everyone, no distinction made.
I can’t believe that you managed to present such a stupid take, that I, a lifelong atheist who thinks all religion is stupid, has to defend the commandments… facepalm
Have you considered that maybe I know something you don’t?
Like, for example, the direct translations of the original texts.
Even what’s actually listed on Exodus as the Commandments.
Impossible, I’m sure.
I was unaware the translation was this far off base. Can you give more about this? I love hearing about how bastardized the Bible has become from the ages of playing telephone.
You’ve got racist/fascist pieces of shit who aren’t nazis? What are they, lazy? 😄
Copy/Paste of an actual message I sent to my friend earlier today:
“You know if chemicals in rainwater were actually making frogs homosexual my family wouldn’t have such a problem every year with tadpoles in our swimming pool cover muck lol”
Because it’s not in rainwater, it’s in runoff from cities and dairy farms. The chemicals in question are basically synthetic estrogens and their metabolites and frogs are just more sensitive to those in the environment than mammals.
I’m not sure if what this person said is correct, but I can corroborate that there is some distant distant nugget of truth behind ‘the guvments makin da frogs gay!!’ that is actually an argument for better environmental protections
At the same time, Alex Jones has made a lot of women turn gay I’m sure and there’s no one investigating that …
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4586825/
Frogs and other amphibians are actually incredibly sensitive to all manner of chemicals. Heavy metals, trace pharmaceutical contamination in human wastewater… They basically breathe water through their very thin skin and have delicate tissues overall. They provide unique issues for conservationists because they are usually the first water related species to collapse.
Humans have a history of being able to tolerate years and years of direct contact with arsenic, lead and various toxins. Your basic oil paint set from before 1950’s has a lifetimes worth of a modern person’s regular exposure. Frogs are a poor indicator of how humans react to anything.
Plant based estrogens don’t impact humans much. They do sheep… But only because they have four stomachs and can actually sort of process them. In humans they just slip through the system mostly untouched.