I’ve been commenting at length on a few YouTube videos, most recently ones with the December 15 Arpaio/Zullo news conference and video. I’ve been trying to do my best to present level-headed, fact-filled replies to the points in the video and the comments of others. I have received several closely-argued rebuttals, such as this one:
I have set an email filter to auto-delete comments from one YouTube commenter. This one was pulled from the trash:
Here some others:
This one is from teaparty.org:
Yes, ford5522 is a real piece of work. I have encountered that jackass before.
Lol yep I think he blocked me I used to run into him a lot. Bizzwoofer just throws out homophobic slurs. It stopped responding after a while.
Your point being?
Surely we knew this already and we’ve all see even worse examples.
This – I rush to add – is not singular to America, though from my own delving into the French swamps, I got the sense (perhaps based only on anecdotal evidence) that our own scum tend to be more literate, though in the end it hardly matters.
What’s important IMHO is : what do we do about this? Do we allow the scum to be manipulated into a fascist takeover or do we fight it.
We here have tried, and are trying with a sense of renewed urgency since Brexit, and now Trump. We’ll see in 2017 if our efforts bear fruits or fail. I’m not necessarily optimistic, despite a few good town meetings we’ve had here where we’ve tried in a non-partisan fashion to explain Europe and politics to the local folks and correct factually wrong misconceptions. Fingers crossed.
Your society (and the UK to a large extent) OTOH have done nothing or virtually nothing, which means Obama may very well be your Gorbachev. The OECD released a nonpartisan report about the UK in 2030 and it’s brutal. It’s harder (if not impossible right now) to quantify the Trump impact in a similar manner, but my gut tells me it’s going to be brutal too, possibly making the US into an almost-failed state.
Someone who uses that kind of slur that often, is deeply trying to deny something to themselves.
I am looking towards posterity at this point, to people who have not been enmeshed in this stuff for years. My thesis is that birtheriem is an obscenity and the practice of birtherism erodes character. The first part is a value judgment, and the last part will be hard to prove.
Deplorable – in just so many ways.
I couldn’t agree more on all counts. Arguably this form of madness goes back to the Clinton Impeachment years. I used to frequent the rec.arts etc. forums and there were some real lunatics then. It’s only gained traction since.
The internet & social media has made this dark side of America more visible, but William Manchester’s writings about Father Coughlin and the reaction to FDR shows this is not a new phenomenon.
William Shirer’s detailed study of the French Right’s reaction to the election of the Popular front in 1936 which was one of the factors that led to WWII (or failed to prevent it) is a somewhat good analogy with what happened in 2016 America.
Perhaps because of our history, I have always been more alarmed about birtherism as most of you (or so it seemed to me). I certainly hope you don’t have reasons to regret it in the next few years.
My question is which came first: Eroded character or birtherism? I think birtherism is just a symptom of a corrupted spirit and evil mind that produces a person incapable of civil participation in life.
eroded character. Birthers seem to have deep character problems even before they became birthers
Off topic, but it is January 1, 2017 and we need the final open thread of Obama Conspiracy Theories. Perhaps Doc is working on a clever title for it!
Hey, that should be next-to-last!
Well, looking for the pay-el in that erster, that fellow who said we were going to have a president who will bring us back to the level of respect and dignity we used to project before Obama came along might be onto something– but he’s not going to stop there. He’ll just keep pushing it further and further down.
I failed to get the calendar alert last night. There will be at least one more Open Thread before January 20.
Well, they all seem nice.
There’s a way to tell Youtube not to bother you with notifications of replies from particular users. I can’t remember what it is, because I only used it once, years ago, on ford (after he stopped pretending to debate, and just posted his canned insults on every thread).
Hmmm, I just looked at a Youtube notification email, and there’s a link to “Mute updates from this post”. I think there used to be one to “Mute replies from this user” (or somesuch). If so, it’s gone (another casualty of Google’s ongoing effort to screw up their UIs 😡 ).