10-31-2016, 10:58 AM
(10-31-2016, 06:57 AM)Odin Wrote:The Sanders supporters who have decided that Hilary Clinton may be flawed, but not evil as is Donald Trump, draw little attention. They will be voting, and they will be voting for Hillary Clinton.(10-30-2016, 02:01 PM)TeacherinExile Wrote: I have tended to agree with Bob Butler in the past that we were not close enough (yet) to the kind of eliminationist rhetoric that triggers a spiral of violence against "The Other." I am now prepared to say--seven years after David Neiwert first published his prescient book--that we are now dancing on the edge of the abyss. The hate speech--and let's call it what it is--is no longer limited to the extremist windbags of talk radio or cable TV. As author and journalist Chris Hedges has said before, "America Is a Tinderbox," and Trump and his ilk seem hell bent on lighting the match.
"Trump rally speaker fantasizes about death of Hillary Clinton"
LAS VEGAS — A speaker warming up the crowd for Donald Trump at a campaign rally fantasized about the deaths of Hillary Clinton and a senior aide on Sunday morning.
Conservative commentator Wayne Allyn Root describing his fantasy of a made-for-TV movie about Clinton and aide Huma Abedin, said, “We all get our wish. The ending is like ‘Thelma and Louise.” In the 1991 film, the title characters drive over a cliff to their death. Root’s line drew cheers from rally attendees.
Root’s call is the latest elevation in the increasingly extreme and violent rhetoric directed by Trump and his surrogates at Clinton at campaign events...
Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2016/10/clinton-trump-abedin-death-230510#ixzz4Ob1sS3zn
Those who utter such rhetoric may claim that their speech is merely allusive or archaic, and not an incitement to violence, but it is highly suggestive--and very, very dangerous in the current political climate.
I've noticed that in the past couple weeks there has been a wave of bitter, childish, angry Bernie Sanders supporters on Millie-dominated sites like Reddit openly supporting Trump because they are so enraged that they openly want to "burn everything down", It's sickening that so many grown men (and it is almost exclusively men spewing this shit) are acting like spoiled toddlers throwing a temper tantrum against "the system" because they didn't get their way in the primaries. These people are unironically regurgitating 25 years of right-wing lies about the Clintons as if it were gospel truth.
Bernie Sanders did excite the Radical Left... but radical leftists are more likely to go to the Far Right than to the mainstream center when the dreams of the Far Left are made impossible to achieve. We need avoid letting the Perfect become the enemy of the Good... Donald Trump is undeniably awful. The only rationale that anyone on the Left can give for transitory support to Demagogue Don is that he will make things so bad that people will quickly become supporters of radical causes. Thus as Fascism fails the socialist insurrection can succeed because the bourgeois order has lost all claim to any liberal benevolence.
The only part of that story that I believe is that Donald Trump will make America very bad very fast.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.