Yes, an open thread. In which to share links and bicker.

I’ll set the ball rolling with some augmented reality and an offer of possible interest.

Oh, and your weekly reminder that members of Antifa are just like normal people and in no way unhinged or likely to be afflicted with quite serious personality disorders. 

[ Added, via the comments: ] 

As I’ve said before, Antifa is not so much a political movement as a metastasising personality disorder, a Cluster B contagion. Which is to say, I think the root motive is psychological – a desire to do harm to other people, to cow, obstruct, frighten and assault, while feeling important and, via mob coercion, powerful. The politics, such as it is, is largely a pretext, a focus, a convenient excuse. Which would explain why its glaring idiocies, routine inaccuracies and inversions of reality do nothing to impede participants, and why the victims of Antifa aggression include disabled old ladies trying to use a pedestrian crossing. And who find themselves being gleefully harassed, physically intimidated and screamed at as “Nazi scum.”

A less deranged person might register the optics of such behaviour, the nakedly opportunist sociopathy. Menacing little old ladies, because you can – and hey, why not? - is a strange expression of “social justice” or “anti-fascism” or “resistance” or whatever. But the creatures typically drawn to Antifa, which include an extraordinary concentration of resentful misfits and the mentally unwell, are enjoying themselves far too much to care. The screeching, thuggery and harassment isn’t principled or political so much as compulsive and recreational. They do it because they enjoy it, because they want to, and because it makes them feel powerful.

It’s worth bearing in mind that while dogmatic morony is commonplace, not least among Antifa and leftist student agitators in general, many of the participants are choosing to believe, or pretend to believe, whatever it is that offers opportunities to behave in threatening, controlling or antisocial ways. Facts are not a priority and are often actively avoided.

And so, for instance, Charles Murray is attacked by a mob and denounced as “sexist,” “racist,” “anti-gay” and a “white nationalist.” By people who boast of having never read his books. As even the briefest use of Google would reveal, Murray married a Thai woman while in the Peace Corps, has mixed-race children, has tutored inner-city black children for free, and was an early advocate of gay marriage – hardly the most obvious markers of a supposedly anti-gay white nationalist. 

There are several video clips of Antifa ‘activists’ and other leftist delinquents harassing people and accusing them of various, lurid, quite particular sins, only for their targets to explain how impossible that would be – say, by not being anywhere near the site of the alleged sin at the time it supposedly occurred – and for the accuser to promptly reply, with a grin, that it doesn’t matter whether the accusation is true or not – and then immediately resuming their harassment. As one Antifa member put it, “Oh, yeah, I just fucking made it up, ‘cause I can make shit up if I want.” For devotees and opportunist LARPers alike, any pretext will do, any baseless accusation, even outright lies.

That’s who they are.

It’s a ball of malice with delusions of grandeur.




Subscribestar
Share: