Election 2024: beware of emotions

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I just now noticed the following, in an earlier post of yours in this thread:

What specific fires are you referring to?

Googling "Antifa lit fires" brings up the following:

- Oregon Officials Warn False Antifa Rumors Waste Precious Resources For Fires, NPR, September 13, 2020

and a few other news stories about false rumors of arson by Antifa folks. Are you sure there are any verifiably true stories of such fires?

Anyhow, please see also my reply here.

Last edited by Mona Pereth on 23 Oct 2024, 6:27 pm, edited 2 times in total.

I strongly endorse your opinion, but I think what the OP was driving at was the way propaganda can bypass critical thinking by appeals to the emotions.

Armed 69-year-old ‘antifascist’ shot dead after firebombing immigration centre

Fires set at Portland ICE building, no arrests made, police say

Only the first of the above two articles mentions that the person identified as "antifascist." The second article contains no mention of "Antifa," "antifascist," or any variant thereof.

Anyhow, doing some more googling, I find some news stories (such as this one) about other anti-police militants setting fires in Seattle or Portland in 2020, but the militants are not identified as being "Antifa," specifically -- at least not by the more reputable sources.

In general it appears that right wing sources have a tendency to conflate almost every form of left wing activism, especially the more militant forms, with "Antifa."

I also ran into a very disturbing story about an incident just this year, Seventeen Cop Cars Burned. Are Portland Anarchists to Blame?, Rolling Stone, May 10, 2024. This story includes a link to a manifesto by something called the “Rachel Corrie’s Ghost Brigade,” posted anonymously on a website called "Rose City Counter-Info." Neither of the latter look like Antifa to me, although a Jerusalem Post article labels this group "Antifa" (erroneously, I suspect).

WWII vets were not the only people that felt that way. When national guardsmen killed 4 and wounded 11 students a Gallup Poll reported 58 percent of respondents blamed the students, 11 percent blamed the National Guard. Many college students upon returning home were told things like “too bad they did not kill them all”

During the Vietnam era the WWII vets were in their 40s and 50s and often the parents of the protesters. As you said there was no protesting WWII once the U.S. got involved. The mentality of that generation was that in wartime no matter how you voted you fully supported the war effort. If you were eligible you served your time. That generation desired that the one following them do better then they. The vets went to work not only to feed the family but to save to pay for the children's college. Thus to most in that generation protesting an ongoing war was a completely foreign concept.

There was also a class element to this. Kids of working class parents did not go to college on deferment, they often went to Vietnam. Working class parents often believed the protesters living the easy life in college were emboldening the enemy putting their non draft dodger kids in more danger by emboldening the commies.

Not everybody felt that way. In liberal areas the anti war protesters were supported by older people. I grew up in a neighborhood with a lot NYPD and NYFD members and people that worked with their hands. There were “America Love It or Leave It” decals, America Flags flying and people saying “a good hippie is a dead hippie”.

As has been pointed out has Antifa has set themselves up to be very loosely organized. Protesters did not carry signs and chant “Antifa”. This was done to deflect blame, so people can say there is no hard proof, it’s mostly hype. There were two loosely organized groups associated the violent protests that happened during the later 2010s and early 2020s Black Lives Matter and Antifa. ICE was not BLM’s target, it was Antifa’s. So I am pretty confident the about the second story I posted.

I agree with you about “Rachel Corrie’s Ghost Brigade” that is why I did not post that. The Jerusalem Post article said this about “Antifa”

“Rose City Counter-Info claimed Tuesday that Antifa forces had attacked Banks, Louis Vuitton, Gucci, Starbucks, Verizon, and other businesses while chanting “Intifada Intifada, long live the Intifada.” They also reportedly caused a campus police officer to flee with a stoning attack.
Antifa factions had fights and confrontations with the pro-Palestinian encampment factions, who regulated who could enter the occupied zone. Antifa was accused of “triggering Palestinians by wearing black” and told that they were not welcome because they were interfering with “A Muslim image” of non-violence.

“The actions of the black bloc will only get innocent people of color arrested,” a Muslim activist said, according to the Antifa blog.

The Antifa bloggers denied that the sentiment was shared by the majority of the encampment and criticized those who had established themselves as authorities of the occupied library. They argued that violence had to be used and that peaceful protest would not achieve their objectives.”

It’s possible that this group is Antifa associated trying to stay relevant by gloaming onto the Anti-Israel movement. Attacks on banks etc if they occurred does sound like something Antifa would do. The article does not link to stories about these so called attacks and expects us to believe the bloggers are Antifa on their say so.

If they are Antifa associated or wannabes they failed miserably.

Kamala has most of the reasonable progressive vote, like she's not going to convince any progressives who are set in not voting for her because Israel vs Palestine but this close to the election it make sense she'd be appealing to voters outside the left who are undecided and could maybe be swayed to vote for her. With Kamala we can still fight for more socialism in this country, with Trump it might be illegal to be a socialist I think I would prefer the former.

Those are the two we heard about the most, but I'm sure there are others. Large protests tend to attract lots of different groups. (Have you ever attended in a large protest?)


Actually, ICE is not a primary target of either BLM or Antifa, although it's a general concern of many leftists. It is certainly possible for someone to be both an Antifa activist and an anti-ICE activist, militant or otherwise, but being anti-ICE does not imply Antifa. The main focus of Antifa per se isn't on government institutions of any kind, but rather on counteracting fascists, white supremacists, etc.

It seems to me that Portland and Seattle have become hotbeds of general left-wing militancy, some of it violent, and not limited to the two specific movements of BLM and Antifa.


That, and subsequent paragraphs, appear to be an inaccurate paraphrase, by the Jerusalem Post, of this post on Rose City Counter-Info, which mentions Antifa only once, in quotes. The post talks primarily about the activities of a "black bloc," which is not the same thing as Antifa, although there is some overlap between Antifa and "black blocs." (See Wikipedia on Black bloc.)

The groups that post on Rose City Counter-Info appear to be an extremely militant, violent bunch, not representative of any of the movements they claim to support or be a part of.

As a right leaning Zionist outlet I expect reporting from The Jerusalem Post to have to a degree of slant. In my experience with them I have never seen them publish anything remotely as sloppy and apparently deliberately misleading as this article. More typical of them is this article I posted recently.





Washington ICE detention center attacker Willem Van Spronsen wrote 'I am Antifa' manifesto before assault

Antifa uses deliberate deflection techniques described earlier. I am not obligated to fall for them.

I perceive a divide, where, at this particular moment in time, you occupy the Left, and I occupy the Right. There are things, we may not agree on, and other things, we would. You have probably heard counter-arguments before, they are out there in the media, pretty common. And can be found on that pretty good Ground.com site, that I have been using for various things.

There are a lot of things that the police do on a daily basis that no one knows about. The only time the public ever hears about police, is when one of them does something bad. That is how people's impression of the police gets formed.

I have seen another side, for example when the police host the kids with Downs syndrome, and the kids that go to the Special Olympics. They invite them over to the police department for fun, movies and treats. Then there is shop with a cop, for the poor kids. There is an outreach program for the mentally ill and the homeless too. So in other words, police provide social services for the poor. They are the #1 provider of social services. They also remove bad actors from poor neighborhoods. They are tough on the ones that are beating people up. Domestic violence is the #1 serious crime. Then you have drunk drivers that could kill any one of us. And people that drive around with guns loaded, looking for trouble. What they will find is police, that are not scared of them and their gun, but ready for them.

It is a tough job. There is a lot that can go wrong. You deal with people that are on drugs, mentally ill, full of anger and rage, committing crimes, and they have guns and may not place any value on human life whatsoever. So there is something that can go wrong with those types, but also just with operating a car that has a computer in it, and all of the electronic gear, and a body camera. Can you imagine how many times all these devices malfunction? And even the guns jam or misfire. The cars, they break down, quickly, because of wear and tear.

Then the court system itself--there are delays, and attorneys want to blame the police, every police must be a racist, because that is what the headline said a few weeks ago, there is always a headline to that effect. Now for every case, the police must go to court, be sworn in and testify, and be cross-examined by an attorney. Some cases last many years.

So that is what I will share with you. It is difficult to know these things when you are on the outside and do not know any police, but only know what you see on the internet, what the news feed tells you. The news feed is not going to tell you anything good about anybody. News is always bad news, I found that to be the case.

Perhaps Antifa groups in Portland and Seattle are different, in some fundamental ways, from most other Antifa groups elsewhere.

While reading up on the "Rachel Corrie's Ghost Brigade" incident, I came across this Reddit thread in which most of the posters appear to be Marxists condemning what they call "adventurism," which they say is common among anarchists in Portland. (Not all anarchists are Antifa, or vice versa, but there is a lot of overlap between them.)

I hope Biden can make an executive order banning conservatism between now and the election.

That seems about as likely to occur (and to be effective) as Trump making an executive order banning liberalism.

How do you effectively ban an entire ideology? America couldn't even effectively ban a more fringe ideology like Islamism or Kahanism, how the hell are they supposed to ban an ideology with widespread support?

My impression of the police is not from the media but from personal experience. All it takes is living in an urban low-income neighborhood and being an activist who attends demonstrations for nearly all one's encounters with police to be bad, sometimes very bad. And I'm an old white woman, imagine how much worse many people's experiences are.

They get zero credit from me for hosting the occasional PR event where they get to play the good guys. The police are a danger to the public and have virtually no accountability for their actions.

Straying from topic...Policing is an inherently alienating occupation.
I've had both good and bad experiences with the constabulary (really?.. I chose "constabulary?")
I have spent most of my life being slightly on the wrong side of the law, largely due to self medication and poverty, yet still ended up as a "suitable person according to the act"
(Love that phrase)
What I miss most in this context is "common sense policing", where local police looked after the common good by looking after local miscreants and were a part of the community.
Then it became policy to always use non local police to "minimise perceived corruption."
I was at a friend's house (a mostly harmless mature age lesbian) while a local sergeant was chatting about a licensing issue, when his constable walked in and dropped a cannabis plant on the table. "Look what I found sarge!"
The sergeant said "go and put it back.... It keeps her out of the pub and I don't like her driving home on autopilot".
He actually had to re-plant it.
THAT'S what I call common sense policing!

Such an order would be contrary to the First Amendment. You can't ban an ideology here in the U.S.A.

Last edited by Mona Pereth on 25 Oct 2024, 4:41 am, edited 2 times in total.