Puck, on 01 July 2019 - 07:38 PM, said:
I'm a little confused as to how the assassination of regional politicians is equivalent to setting a car on fire? Also, not all antifa participants are black bloc rioters. They are often an immune system against the inherent violence of fascism. Antifa hasn't and doesn't go out aimlessly committing violence. Instead, they are often the explicit consequences to someone else's (usually fascist) use of free expression. Fascism marks a ever-present existential threat to minority groups, we know this from history. Without the presence of fascism, there would be no presence of antifa. There's also a false equivalency here: the murders and massacres of the far right cannot be equated with damage to property of the left. There is no 'both sides' argument that can map the two onto one another in an equivalent fashion. One kills people the other doesn't. There's the demarcation between the violence of the far right and the left.
Also, the rumours of dry-cement are dumb since a presence of sugar with cement makes it so that cement doesn't dry. If cement can't dry, it can't cause damage to skin due to exposure. The fiction that's been produced by the far-right makes no sense due to chemistry.
Also, Portland Police have a history of siding with the far right. For a long time, Oregon was full of sundown towns--places where segregation survived and thrived. (https://en.wikipedia...ki/Sundown_town). It is only a recent phenomenon of Oregon having left-leaning communities outside of urban centres. A recent case of the the stabbings in Portland on the train, and the delays associated with the prosecution of the perpetrator, point to this as well. (https://en.wikipedia...nd_train_attack). Note that the perpetrator was a member of the Patriot Prayer white-supremacy group. The same group that the PPD stumbled onto setting up sniper nests above an antifa demonstration and allowed to freely disperse while suppressing the story for days to weeks. So again, there is a bit of a difference between antifa--who demonstrate against fascists--and the far-right fascists--who set up sniper nests to target antifa and aren't arrested when caught by the police. Two very different levels of violence, two very different reactions to said violence by the police.
Moreover, there's a disinformation campaign that tries to present antifa as specifically attacking an elderly man during this weekend's demonstrations. They claim the elderly man was innocent when there is photographic evidence of him possessing an extendable baton, and videographic evidence of him using said baton on antifa demonstrators. So, while it is easy to glance at the situation this weekend and see it as antifa being violent, it is once again a series of events where violence is enticed by fascists and then the immune system of antifa faces against said violence and then antifa is interpreted as causing and escalating the violence. We have long histories of this happening over and over and over.
The far-right is trying to twist this into "see, antifa are violent!" when it should really be "hey, look, the fascists were violent again and antifa is getting blamed."
Edit: I'd also like to point out Karl Popper's Paradox of Tolerance: "In order to maintain a tolerant society, the society must be intolerant of intolerance." Antifa is the immune system within a tolerant system that's intolerant of the intolerant. Fascism is intolerant of all things not within their fluidly defined in-group. As soon as any group begins to slip outside those fluid boundaries of in-and-out, that group is ostracized then either enslaved or exterminated. One group says "no, you can't exterminate all of these minority groups" while the other says "yes, I can exterminate all of these minority groups and you have to tolerate it." There is no equivalence between these two ideologies. They are not analogous to one another. One is an existential threat, the other is the first line of defense against the existential threat.
This post has been edited by Pherikus Nul: 02 July 2019 - 02:13 PM