I find myself laughing in an almost unseemly fashion over this story of an anime Nazi running afoul of more typical American Nazis at a pro-Confederate rally in Houston. 4chan, meet Three Percenters.
The funniest thing about this confrontation is the fact that a "Sergeant Rock" cosplayer told the White Power/Green Frog guy, "Dude, this is not Comicon."
Meanwhile, poor alt-right kid just wanted to make friends, plaintively crying, "These are good memes!" Silly boy, Jethro doesn't care about your memes.
It's heartening to see that the right is fragmented and prone to internecine conflicts. Hopefully, they will bring each other down. I hate emo-boy Nazis, and it looks like other Nazis do too.
I saw that - it got me thinking about how, in the current liberal vs. conservative civil war, they are willing to embrace Nazis and Russians as allies because of shared hatreds, despite the years and wars where they were the undisputed enemy. It seems kind of stupid to me - you can be a vicious bigot and still not embrace Nazi symbolism and messaging, but in many cases the Nazis represent a ready-to-wear framework for a certain kind of virulent racial and sectarian bigotry.
ReplyDeleteMeanwhile, on the other side, the al Quaedas and ISISs of the world share the same kind of violent, mindless hatred of their own list of 'enemies'. And there's always a bigger economic or political power willing to exploit their extremist ideologies to accomplish a set of political goals.
From where I sit, I can't see a peaceful end to the political conflict in the US. The country is too big, too polarized, too well armed and too willing to see violence as a preferred method for conflict resolution. If scientists had created a population in a petri dish that was perfectly predisposed to civil conflict, it would be the United States of America.
Yeah, Mikey, as this morning proved, things aren't looking better. Oddly enough, I feel detached from most of this, being in the Northeast... it's like the world depicted on the news has only a tangential bearing on my reality.
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