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The NZ Thing

Started by Bad Penny II, March 16, 2019, 02:19:59 PM

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Bad Penny II

QuoteA 28-year-old Australian man has been charged with murder after a terror attack at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand left 49 people killed.

Sorry.

I'm just returned from the marriage thing of my younger sister to a nice NZ guy.
Take my advice, don't listen to me.

Bad Penny II

Take my advice, don't listen to me.

Tom62

The usual reactions again on social media. I liked this reaction though on YouTube

The universe never did make sense; I suspect it was built on government contract.
Robert A. Heinlein

No one

Humans suck, that's all there is to it.

Recusant

The mass murderer apparently idolized the British fascist Oswald Mosley. Some may be familiar with that name. In the most recent issue of The Atlantic, there is an excellent examination of the historical development of xenophobia and white supremacism in the US in the 20th century, and how those ideas spread into the rest of the world, taken up by people like Mosley and Hitler. Not to say that we can exclusively blame the US for bringing either plague into the world, of course.

"White Nationalism's Deep American Roots" | The Atlantic

QuoteAmericans want to believe that the surge in white-supremacist violence and recruitment—the march in Charlottesville, Virginia, where neo-Nazis chanted "Jews will not replace us"; the hate crimes whose perpetrators invoke the president's name as a battle cry—has no roots in U.S. soil, that it is racist zealotry with a foreign pedigree and marginal allure.

Warnings from conservative pundits on Fox News about the existential threat facing a country overrun by immigrants meet with a similar response. "Massive demographic changes," Laura Ingraham has proclaimed, mean that "the America we know and love doesn't exist anymore" in much of the country: Surely this kind of rhetoric reflects mere ignorance. Or it's just a symptom of partisan anxiety about what those changes may portend for Republicans' electoral prospects. As for the views and utterances of someone like Congressman Steve King ("We can't restore our civilization with somebody else's babies"), such sentiments are treated as outlandish extremism, best ignored as much as possible.

The concept of "white genocide"—extinction under an onslaught of genetically or culturally inferior nonwhite interlopers—may indeed seem like a fringe conspiracy theory with an alien lineage, the province of neo-Nazis and their fellow travelers. In popular memory, it's a vestige of a racist ideology that the Greatest Generation did its best to scour from the Earth. History, though, tells a different story. King's recent question, posed in a New York Times interview, may be appalling: "White nationalist, white supremacist, Western civilization—how did that language become offensive?" But it is apt. "That language" has an American past in need of excavation. Without such an effort, we may fail to appreciate the tenacity of the dogma it expresses, and the difficulty of eradicating it. The president's rhetoric about "shithole countries" and "invasion" by immigrants invites dismissal as crude talk, but behind it lie ideas whose power should not be underestimated.

The seed of Nazism's ultimate objective—the preservation of a pure white race, uncontaminated by foreign blood—was in fact sown with striking success in the United States. What is judged extremist today was once the consensus of a powerful cadre of the American elite, well-connected men who eagerly seized on a false doctrine of "race suicide" during the immigration scare of the early 20th century. They included wealthy patricians, intellectuals, lawmakers, even several presidents. Perhaps the most important among them was a blue blood with a very impressive mustache, Madison Grant. He was the author of a 1916 book called The Passing of the Great Race, which spread the doctrine of race purity all over the globe.

[Continues . . .]
"Religion is fundamentally opposed to everything I hold in veneration — courage, clear thinking, honesty, fairness, and above all, love of the truth."
— H. L. Mencken


Ecurb Noselrub

No question there is racism and white supremacy here in the USA, but those attitudes find fertile ground everywhere .  It's simply a manifestation of tribalism, which is at our core.  If we can ever overcome those instincts, we might be able to survive and thrive.   If.

Bluenose

+++ Divide by cucumber error: please reinstall universe and reboot.  +++

GNU Terry Pratchett


Icarus

^ An Aussie like Fred Rogers.  It is pleasing to know that there are others who cherish little children and try to make them comfortable.

Bluenose

I should have pointed out that the Playground Politics video is not an actual children's program.  This is a satirical program that mostly looks at Australian politics in a way that mimics a very popular children's program, Play School, but is aimed squarely at adults.  I think part of the joke is to say that Parliament acts like a bunch of preschoolers much of the time.  I am sure it is the same in other countries.
+++ Divide by cucumber error: please reinstall universe and reboot.  +++

GNU Terry Pratchett


Icarus

^ I am easily beguiled it would seem.

Bluenose

Quote from: Icarus on March 27, 2019, 02:50:09 AM
^ I am easily beguiled it would seem.

Well, to be fair, without the proper context it is easy to see how that could happen.  No shame there.
+++ Divide by cucumber error: please reinstall universe and reboot.  +++

GNU Terry Pratchett