Saturday, August 27, 2016

Commentary Tidbits

Revolutionary Faith: When Con Men Use the Bible to Sell Evil

Southern Poverty Law Center: What Is the Alternative Right?

Media Matters for America: What Is The "Alt-Right"? A Guide To The White Nationalist Movement Now Leading Conservative Media

The Life and Times of Bruce Gerencser: The Rick Trotter Saga: Yet Another Example of Churches Not Protecting Members from Sexual Predators 

Slate: Hello Goodbye: The author of a best-selling abstinence manifesto is reconsidering the lessons he taught to millions

Daily Beast: The Right’s Favorite Anti-LGBT Doctor Strikes Again


7 comments:

  1. Zosimus the HeathenAugust 30, 2016 at 1:50 PM

    Those two pieces on the Alt-Right were lengthy but interesting reads. I probably first became aware of this movement myself way back in 2008, when I used to frequent the blogs of people who have since jumped on board the Alt-Right bandwagon. Among such blogs were those of the odious PUA and rape apologist Roosh V (who, amusingly enough, despite expressing support for their views, has been rejected by the white nationalist crowd on account of his being Persian), the equally repugnant PUA Roissy/Heartiste (who initially came across as something of a lovable rogue, but whose blog has long since degenerated into a cesspool of racism and anti-Semitism), and this now-defunct site called 2 Blowhards, which had a lot of interesting articles on it, but also, unfortunately, a lot of so-called "human biodiversity" (which is totally, totally not old 19th/early 20th Century "racial science" with a modern scientific veneer!) crap on it as well (the individuals who ran the site also seemed to be really into the whole "paleo diet" malarkey, which a lot of the Alt-Right crowd seem to be into as well, for some reason).

    Another individual from the Alt-Right I've followed on and off over the years is a guy called Matt Forney, who used to run a blog called In Mala Fide (under the moniker Ferdinand Bardamu). The last was a well-trafficked site that served as a sort of "one stop shop" for far Right beliefs of every kind, but has long since shut down. Since its demise, Forney has been blogging under his own name, but his current blog doesn't seem to be getting anywhere near the traffic his old one did; as a result, he seems to have been reduced to resorting to ever more desperate attempts to troll and outrage people to get attention. He also shills for supplement companies, and writes rave reviews for so-called "smart drugs", which he really should stop wasting his time with, as they don't appear to be doing him much good! For added lulz, he's another white supremacist who seems to be anything but the specimen of Aryan perfection he no doubt believes himself to be; he also gave a rave review to a book he wrote himself under his old pen-name, no doubt hoping no-one would notice!

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  2. Zosimus the HeathenAugust 30, 2016 at 1:52 PM

    (cont'd)

    While Milo Yiannopoulos has gotten a lot of attention as a gay member of the Alt-Right, I know of at least one other gay man who has associated himself with the movement: a guy called Jack Donovan. He's a bit of an odd character himself, having come up with a concept of male-to-male homosexuality that he's dubbed "androphilia", which could probably be summed up as gayness that's totally not gay (it's very macho). He also appears to have an overly romantic view of all-male gangs, seeing them as the ultimate expression of male honour and brotherhood - while I probably would have embraced this idea myself during my edgy teens and twenties, a lot of reading I've done on gangs since then has disabused me of any illusions that much of their behaviour is "honourable" in any way.

    As for that Mike Cernovich character mentioned in the second piece, he's someone else I've long known about. On his Danger and Play blog, he had the rather craven habit of rewriting comments he didn't like, so that they'd say something suitably unflattering about the people who submitted them (eg "I'm a fat, ugly feminist with a raging yeast infection"); a lot of stuff I've read about him elsewhere has generally exposed him as a complete fraud in pretty much everything he's professed to be an expert in, which probably shouldn't come as a surprise.

    Sorry for rambling a bit here. I just find these folk really, really interesting in that proverbial "car wreck" kind of way. I'm not sure how concerned we should all be about them; while they seem to be getting a lot of media attention right now, they might turn out to be just another noisy group of extremists nowhere near as powerful and significant as they believe themselves to be. One heartening thing is that most of them turn out to be little more than con artists when exposed to media scrutiny (the aforementioned Cernovich being a prime example); that said, many of the people in the Nazi Party were losers and misfits as well, and they ended up nearly ruling half the world!

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    1. Zosimus -- Thanks for this information. I focus on the Christian Right primarily, so I know very little about the racist Alt-Right. I knew about Roosh V as a PUA and rape apologist, but I didn't know that he'd been leaning in this political direction. It sounds like the Alt-Right is dripping with toxic machismo.

      I don't know enough about the movement to make any commentary on their size or threat, but I am concerned that some Alt-Right figures have found their way into politics.

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    2. I think there's some overlap between the Alt-Right and Christian Right, but a Venn diagram of the two probably wouldn't be a perfect circle. Not surprisingly, the Christians I've seen in the Alt-Right movement have tended to be fundamentalist, evangelical or traditionalist types, though it's often hard to be sure if any particular Christian is an Alt-Righter or vice versa - as is the case with all religious and political movements, there seems to be a lot of infighting among those on the Far Right, with groups that were best friends one day becoming bitter enemies the next.

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    3. Zosimus -- I should pay more attention to the Alt-Right, to see how it interacts and overlaps with the Christian Right.

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  3. Oh, and that piece on Paul McHugh was interesting too. As someone who resides somewhere under the LGBT umbrella, I'm often amused/bemused by the theories people like him have come up with to explain how people like me ended up the way we did. Funnily enough, a lot of them claim to be sympathetic towards guys who, like me, could probably be considered sensitive and artistic, and insist that they're not claiming there's anything wrong with that, but I'm never sure how sincere they are when they say that (I once recall, for example, watching a YouTube video by a young gay man who claimed that when his parents sent him to a gay "conversion" camp, the people running it tried to "cure" him of his love of the arts). Often their ideas of what constitute acceptable vs unacceptable "feminine" traits for boys and men to possess seem very arbitrary; that said, I've noticed the same thing with people I've known in real life too!

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    1. Zosimus -- I suspect that many of these right-wing quack "researchers" are insecure about their masculinity and sexuality, which is why they try to impose rigid, binary gender categories with so much gusto.

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