Oh so Antifa is a single formal political party with card carrying members, a clear leadership structure and participation in mainstream public political life? I had no idea. Your analogy makes perfect sense. Where is the Antifa national headquarters?
Kinda funny, Noem claimed to have arrested the "Leader of Antifa" in Portland a few days ago [1]. Turned out it was just some guy who lived near I.C.E. HQ, who let nearby protesters use his bathroom and clean out mace from their eyes.
The American political situation is best characterized by the image of two deformed, monstrous, and vicious imbeciles wrestling for power. These are creatures that belong in a zoo, not in the political forum.
You should calm down and knock off the puerile snark.
I see I have to spell things out for you. It is of no relevance whether Antifa is a formalized organization with formal membership. That's why it's called an ANALOGY. You seem to have confused analogy with univocity...which is precisely what analogy is not. The essential point, which you seem to have missed by a mile, is that labels are irrelevant. That "Antifa" comes from "anti-fascist" tells me very little, if anything, about what the movement is actually, empirically about: what its principles actually are, what political ends it seeks to achieve, what means it uses to achieve them, and so on. The fact that the movement is informal actually makes the actions more relevant in characterizing and judging the movement, regardless of the label it uses.
In summary: the name given to a thing tells me nothing certain about the thing, and I would think this would be obvious to anyone.
Huge can of fallacies mixed with arrogance, as is typical in HN.
Pointing out the "socialist" in NSDAP or whatever is idiotic. Just because they used the same word later used by other people doesn't equate both. You can't say the Spanish socialist party is racist because they happen to use the word also used by the Germans 100 years ago.
The other slight of hand you're doing is reification - talking about an abstract concept as if it were concrete. Again, where is the national hq of Antifa? You can't tell me because there isn't one. And that is because it is not a single, organized movement.
When people like you say they are anti antifa, it doesn't take a lot of IQ to read between the lines. You don't need there to be a single formal entity to fight against because you are not against a concrete, specific movement. You are against the idea of anti fascism.
Although at odds with the official narrative of your country, this is hardly surprising or unprecedented. The US has a long and rich history of being anti anti fascist, or more simply, pro fascist.
What an incoherent mess. And yet you have the audacity to call my comment fallacious and arrogant. I'm floored. Consider peering into a mirror sometime.
> Pointing out the "socialist" in NSDAP or whatever is idiotic.
Where did I make this claim exactly? In fact, the essence of your claim here agrees with mine. The label does not give us a certain picture of the thing labeled.
> The other slight of hand you're doing is reification - talking about an abstract concept as if it were concrete. Again, where is the national hq of Antifa? You can't tell me because there isn't one. And that is because it is not a single, organized movement.
What? Reification has no relevance here. I never made any comment about the institutional status of the movement. Of course, for "Antifa" to have any meaning, it must refer to something, right? My only remark concerned the relation between label and labeled. I was criticizing a fallacious inference from the former to the latter.
> When people like you say they are anti antifa, it doesn't take a lot of IQ to read between the lines. You don't need there to be a single formal entity to fight against because you are not against a concrete, specific movement. You are against the idea of anti fascism.
What truly bizarre remark. Calling this projection would be an understatement. Perhaps log off social media? I didn't say anything about my personal stance w.r.t. "Antifa" (whatever you mean by that). AGAIN, my comment was a correction of the earlier claim that because "Antifa" stands for "antifascism", it follows that whatever falls under the name of "Antifa" is antifascist. This is called the nominal fallacy. That's it. The rest is your baggage, I'm afraid. And frankly, it is comical to hear someone claim that if they're against "Antifa", you must be against "anti-fascism", whatever that means, given how ignorant of the meaning of the word "fascism" so many are who throw around that term.
> Although at odds with the official narrative of your country, this is hardly surprising or unprecedented. The US has a long and rich history of being anti anti fascist, or more simply, pro fascist.
You don't know what my country is. You might be surprised by the truth. (FYI, my family suffered under a brutal double occupation, by both a certain fascist state, and by a certain socialist/communist state. Chew on that.) You know nothing about me, but you certainly presume a good deal and have placed me in a box in your intellectually impoverished worldview. Your views are childish and shallow, full of weird personal attacks; I suggest you try to enrich yourself instead of lazily absorbing what is clearly an unsophisticated and emotionally unhinged ideological stance. You don't have to fall prey to the insane cultural and political patterns and paradigms of our times.
There was no "snark" or personal attack on my first comment, unlike yours, which is now just eristic and name-calling.
My mistake on assuming you were an American, I apologize (neither am I) - you did write "Frankly, our political situation is rife with insanity" though, and this is a topic about something happening in the US.
My point is that Americans tend to fabricate a concrete Antifa (which does not exist as a single entity) so that they can use it as a proxy to attacking the idea itself. It is not yet acceptable to be openly pro-fascism, but it is very much acceptable to be against terrorism, which is how the US government classifies Antifa ("Domestic Terrorist Organization ").
So you got my point backwards: I'm not saying that these people are pro-fascism because they are anti-Antifa, I'm saying many Americans are already pro-fascism, and a politically acceptable way to express that today is by being anti-antifa -- which does not mean that _all_ people against specific Antifa-related groups are pro-fascist.
You don't even need to use examples that westerners find polarizing because they want to minimize or maximize their badness for political reasons.
Africa is full of factions with grand names doing less than grand things that nobody here has any attachmennt to and do not cause complexities when comparing to.
> You don't even need to use examples that westerners find polarizing
Yes, but they are illustrative, because apparently, some people have a problem understanding that labels don't necessarily reflect the thing labeled. African factions are too foreign for most Westerners to appreciate the analogy. But if that helps someone understand what should be an obvious principle for any adult, then that's great.
"Despite the name, The Party of Peace and Love is actually authoritarian and horribly repressive, as you can see from the millions of people they've killed."
"Despite the name, Antifa is not just 'anti-fascist' but is actually _________"
The blank is "the OTHER group". Like brown people, poor people, and (say it quickly so it doesn't get too noticed) women.
And anyone from the OTHER group is the enemy. Stop thinking, you have arrived to the conclusion. Now, here are some news ... I mean, entertainment, to make you fear them more.
__an identity claimed by people who are taking direct action against what they perceive as fascism, but currently more often the term is applied as an unthinking boogeyman by right wing authoritarians__
> So they just said "These people are anti-violence and anti-hate and this is a bad thing"
(Frankly, our political situation is rife with insanity. I think the hotheads across the political spectrum need more nous and less thumos.)