re: #53 Nyet

Alright, now we’re getting somewhere! Thank you for producing the first substantive reply in this entire thread.

You have raised a question of crucial importance in the internet age, which is to what extent comments and web postings assumed to be by the rank-and-file should be taken as indicative of the pathologies and dangers posed by political movements?

The consensus at Little Green Footballs seems to be that indeed comments and tweets eminating from the right wing of American politics should be taken as indicative of the dangers posed by that segment of the political spectrum. For example, these front page postings are based primarily on raising the alarm about anonymous comments which appear on right wing websites:

here
here
here
here
here
and of course many others.

Then there are the front page postings which point to ridiculous articles and tweets by (not necessarily prominent) right wingers as indicative of rot within the movement, recent examples of which include:

here
here
here
and of course many others.

And then there is the constant highlighting of the insane rantings of Charles C. Johnson (22.4K followers, less than 1/10th the followers of, for example, Louis Farrakhan), which is taken implicitly or even explicitly to be indicative of ideological rot within the American right. I trust I don’t have to link to examples of that, since there is always one or more at the top of the front page.

And you know what? I agree that what appears on blogs and comment boards is potentially relevant in evaluating the rationality and fitness of a political movement.

So if comments and articles that appear on right-wing blogs and articles are appropriate fodder for evaluating the rationality and fitness of the contemporary American (far) right, why is the same not true for the contemporary American (far) left? For every quote the ‘Stormfront or SJW’ web game links to the site in question. You can see that those sites appear to be sincere in, for example, their desire for racially segregated schools, their opposition to interracial relationships, their calls for legislation against or even culling ‘cis’ people, their calls to ‘abolish’ prisons, and so on. I believe that these opinions are relevant in evaluating what the far left means in the context of contemporary politics.