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Following the events in Charlottesville, VA (in which a piece of shit Nazi murdered Heather Heyer and injured several other anti-racism demonstrators when he plowed his car into the group), a number of companies are finally starting to take action against white supremacy groups, Nazis, and Nazi sympathizers. Discord said today that they have shut down an alt-right server and a number of associated accounts.A few followup tweets by Discord said that they do "not read people's private conversations." However, they will "take action when people violate (their) Guidelines/ToS, and actively endorse violence against others." Those on the alt-right and Nazi sympathizers (interchangeable) have cried fowl saying that Discord should also ban anti-fascist servers too.
The website for the server that was taken down issued a response (not linked because fuck them). They said that Discord's employees are "pathetic nerd cucks" that have "joined the war against free speech." They continued on to say that "Globo-Corpo-Homo-Judeo establishment is coming at us from all angles and lobbing everything that they have our way... Boy, oh boy. They sure picked the wrong enemy. History has shown us that regions of disenfranchised, intelligent and motivated young men are very very good at resisting tyranny."
In related news...
It's a "made-up term" used by people on the right to "suggest there is a similar movement on the left," Segal said.
But there's no equivalent with the anti-Semitic and bigoted groups that call themselves "alt-right", he said.
George Hawley, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Alabama, said the "alt-left" term has been most aggressively pushed by Fox News Channel's Sean Hannity, but it's not a label anyone or group has adopted for themselves.
"There is no such movement as the alt-left. Obviously, there are left-wing extremists but there is no congruence between the far-left and the alt-right."
Antifa, which is short for anti-fascist, is a controversial opposition group formed by a broad group of people whose political beliefs lean toward the left but do not conform with the Democratic Party platform. Members are known for causing damage to property during protests and some employ radical or militant tactics to get their message across.
"There is violence on the left. The anti-fascists engage with those they oppose through physical confrontation. And that is a problem. That is an extremists tactic. There is also bigotry on the left," Segal said.
One reason could be that left groups are not trying to repackage themselves to go mainstream as the far right has, he said.
"Do not get me wrong; there are extremists on the left, including very problematic ones. But the "alt left" is not a thing. It's just an insult," wrote Mark Pitcavage, a senior research fellow at the ADL center, on Twitter.
Something like “alt-left” was always going to happen; it’s a product of whatever it is in our brains that conditions them to think in terms of opposites. As soon as everyone starts talking about the “alt-right”—that inchoate and incoherent grouping of Nazis, Klansmen, resentful failsons sweating from video games and chicken fingers, cynical media wannabes, bloviating internet commenters who think they’re Ignatius J. Reilly, and others who think they’re the Joker—that word seems to sit on one side of a seesaw, across from a silence waiting to be filled. If there’s an alt-right, there must, somewhere, somehow, be something called an alt-left, otherwise the universe is unbalanced. And while the universe is unbalanced—everywhere, from the points of terrifying heat scattered haphazardly across a lonely void, to the murder and oppression that break out constantly across the world and are never met with justice—for a lot of mediocre intellects, good judgment basically consists of pretending that everything balances out somehow, and all the ledgers are even. Something like the alt-right sticks out, a lexical blasphemy: to put the world in order, you have to invent something equivalent on the left.
Now that Trump has added “alt-left” to his armory of insults, many of these same centrist constituencies are appalled that anyone could ever draw a moral equivalence between fascists and those opposing them. But this is exactly what they did, and what they’ve been doing for over a year.
Researchers who study extremist groups in the United States say there is no such thing as the “alt-left.” Mark Pitcavage, an analyst at the Anti-Defamation League, said the word had been made up to create a false equivalence between the far right and “anything vaguely left-seeming that they didn’t like.”
Some centrist liberals have taken to using this term.
“It did not arise organically, and it refers to no actual group or movement or network,” Mr. Pitcavage said in an email. “It’s just a made-up epithet, similar to certain people calling any news they don’t like ‘fake news.’”
“It seems to have just been created as an opposite to ‘alt right,’” he added, “so in some ways it’s a term that is meant to be pejorative, and a label to slap onto people you don’t agree with.”
"It's a made up term" of course it is. We make terms up all the time.
"Do not get me wrong; there are extremists on the left, including very problematic ones." "There is violence on the left. The anti-fascists engage with those they oppose through physical confrontation. And that is a problem. That is an extremists tactic. There is also bigotry on the left,"
There's your alt left. Done.
"Some centrist liberals have taken to using this term." You mean, a term, we made it up, now we're using it? This is almost like language is happening!
"doesn’t seem to be something that anyone calls themselves," I'm pretty sure as the term spreads there will eventually be some group that does call themselves that.
I'm not sure you understand how words work. If you see the statement of "Do not get me wrong; there are extremists on the left, including very problematic ones" as true, and you see the statement of "There is violence on the left. The anti-fascists engage with those they oppose through physical confrontation. And that is a problem. That is an extremists tactic. There is also bigotry on the left," as true, but you can't see "the alt left exists and is bad as the alt right" as true, you're just arguing semantics.
There are people on the left just as violent as people that are called "alt-right." Refusing to call violent people on the left "alt-left" is just playing with words.
Going farther as to pretend there is no such thing is a slippery slope before you start making it sound like whatever violence the left has it's "not as bad" or doesn't exist when compared to the right. And that's where a lot of liberal-slanted media is right now.
And I don't think ANY violence should be ignored or dismissed, especially through as lame an effort as semantic dismissal. Every time you say "there's no alt left", as the term gets used more in more in spite of you, the meaning of your statement slowly becomes "there's no violence on the left" and that's just flat out wrong. Stop resisting other people using words in a way that clearly makes sense to do.
That said, as I've noted above, I seriously doubt there was any 'alt left' in attendance in Charlottesville.