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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
There's a reason that some people who are prone to zealotry, when confronted with evidence that their worldview is wrong, leap to the opposite end of the spectrum. For example, people who grow up imbibing American Exceptionalism only to become viciously anti-American after learning about the shady things the USA has done in its lifetime.
Disgusted, but not surprisedI quite agree that extremist personalities if nothing else tend to be similar.
edited 23rd Apr '18 7:02:02 PM by Fourthspartan56
"Einstein would turn over in his grave. Not only does God play dice, the dice are loaded." -Chairman Sheng-Ji YangThe ideologies themselves tend that way too sometimes. I had to do a little googling to find it, but way back when some White Supremacist groups actually held a meeting with several Black Supremacist groups, and they praised each other for their mutual dedication to racial separation and Antisemitism.
The things that draw people to extremist movements are similar, which usually means those movements have similar strategies and rhetoric.
They should have sent a poet.More GOP Candidates Begin to Echo Trump's Fascist Tone
....
Two new articles — one in the New York Times, the other in National Journal — illustrate what’s happening in many of these GOP primaries. The Times piece, by Jeremy Peters, reports that in West Virginia, GOP Senate primary candidate Don Blankenship is running an ad that says: “We don’t need to investigate our president. We need to arrest Hillary … Lock her up!”
In multiple GOP races across the country, the Times piece reports, candidates are employing phrases such as “drain the swamp,” “build the wall,” “rigged system” and even “fake news.” The GOP Senate candidate in Tennessee ran an ad that promises to stand with Trump “every step of the way to build that wall,” and even echoes Trump’s attacks on African American football players protesting systemic racism and police brutality: “I stand when the president walks in the room. And yes, I stand when I hear ‘The Star-Spangled Banner.'”
Meanwhile, National Journal’s Josh Kraushaar reports that in the Indiana Senate GOP primary, Mike Braun, the candidate who is most vocally emphasizing Trump’s messages — on trade, the Washington “swamp” and “amnesty” — appears to be gaining the advantage. Braun’s ads basically recast true conservatism as Trumpism in its incarnation as populist anti-establishment ethno-nationalism.
RE: Horseshoe Theory - similarly, hyper-liberals (aka neo-hippies) and hyper-conservatives both distrust vaccinations, and both due to "We're putting chemicals in our bodies!" - with liberals, it's a "back to nature" idea, while conservatives are "back to God" at best, or "The government's poisoning us!" at worst.
"Why would I inflict myself on somebody else?""For example, people who grow up imbibing American Exceptionalism only to become viciously anti-American after learning about the shady things the USA has done in its lifetime."
That happen with a friend of mine who move for being extreme pro US to like the nazis by not other reason they move against US, I have to point out the facist and ineficient aspect to shake him out of it.
"My Name is Bolt, Bolt Crank and I dont care if you believe or not"
I dislike most anti-Americanism generally, as the people who do so are usually rabid nationalists about their own countries, but in Latin America's case they've got more than enough reasons to justify it.
I tend to draw a line between criticizing the US government and Americans themselves. Criticizing the US government is perfectly fine. Spewing hatred about the American people is not.
Of course - fascism and Nazism should never be tolerated.
I should have clarified that historically the US has done some nasty things in exploiting and oppressing Latin America, such as the United Fruit Company and propping up the juntas. Their anti-Americanism is a result of this bitterness, plus years of fighting against authoritarian US-backed governments.
But supporting fascism for the sake of hating on the USA is totally unjustified.
edited 23rd Apr '18 7:46:44 PM by TheWildWestPyro
Extremist personalities typically lack nuance, that's why they're extremists. And when something succeeds in disillusioning them they don't handle it well; hence the jump to the opposite end.
Although some of the people who make the jump from "American Fuck Yeah!" to "Fuck America!" are less extremists transitioning from one end to the other, and more college kids nursing a sense of betrayal they have no idea what to do with.
Chomsky poisoned leftist discourse to a degree that's just frightening. He's never moved on from Vietnam, which is how we get idiocy like his denial of first the Cambodian genocide, and then the Yugoslav ones, since poor innocent Communists would never commit mass murder. He always wants to believe that every left-wing dictator is another Ho Chi Minh, and never likes the reality that all too often they're another Stalin or worse.
And then there's his flirtation with various Holocaust deniers, which seems to have grown out of his Israel bashing.
I think that the horseshoe theory gets it right politically in that it's very easy for allegedly-socialist revolutions to turn into non-ideological authoritarian states. (Trotskyist true believers refer to this as "degenerated workers' states" or "deformed workers' states," though they apply the terms more broadly than I would.) I mean, I don't see anything particularly socialist about Syria, Saddam's Iraq, Singapore or modern Vietnam.
On the other hand, I definitely see some significant differences between Stalinism, Maoism and Juche (the most extreme forms of socialism) and National Socialism, and further distinctions between that and pure authoritarianism (Putin's Russia).
Saw this earlier today, made me chuckle:
https://twitter.com/atommorgan/status/771510517433262080?lang=en
It’s also downright offensive, considering the fact that most trans children are actually abused or kicked out on the street when they come out. I’ve only ever met one child younger than 10 who was able to come out, and that’s partly due to his mother having prior experience with trans people (she was a teacher of mine).

"But that ignores that their systems were extremely different and complex."
And yet they really have similiar tatics and some of their rethoric strike the same chores: atacking a scapegoat, romantization of violence, cult of personality, a "us vs them" and they are more than willing to throw everyone under the bus.
That is a patten that have show with all extremist.
If anything, I have seen more a kneejerk reaction to said bothism to everything that dosent paint one side above the other in every way.
"My Name is Bolt, Bolt Crank and I dont care if you believe or not"