Antifa LARPing
(From 8 years ago!!)
https://www.reddit.com/r/CapitalismVSocialism/comments/6sitjj/comment/dldb8x8/
LARPing is the verb form of LARP, which is an abbreviation for Live Action Role Playing. It originates from the D&D/pre-internet roleplaying community to refer to players who opt to act out their RPG games. As with most things, most of the players are very dull, average and less than psychotic but, as with most things, the craziest elements are amplified by people on the outside who find it amusing. So, you’ll hear the most about the people who take it way too seriously.
In political terms, it’s a pretty recent one. It refers to political activists, almost always anarcho-communists, who use an ideology as an accessory to their identity and a fun thing to go out and do on weekends, but don’t really understand the theory of, and don’t really care that much about beyond a surface level. It was coined, as far as I know, as a response to anarcho-communists and Antifa activists who protested at Berkeley earlier this year, or who supported them online. It was incredibly common to see people who fancied themselves as revolutionary guerilla fighters, or saw this as some sort of civil-war battle against reactionary forces, despite the fact that the whole thing was a glorified riot where both extremists attacked peaceful moderates and then pretended like they were attacking the other extremists (I say ‘both sides’ in an attempt to sound balanced, but really it was just the communists.)
The theme that anti-coms noticed was that these people seemed more interested in pretending to be rebels than they were in affecting real change. They somehow thought that they were going to overthrow the capitalist system by pepper-spraying libertarians or throwing M-80 firecrackers at groups of Kekistan nerds. Despite the fact that, one some level, they must have known how futile this riot would ultimately be, they still carried themselves like it was some decisive battle that would in some way hurt the opposing side.
So, a parallel was drawn. Much like role players who get sucked too far into their game and almost seem to not know the difference between the game and real life, these protesters were likened to role players who got sucked too far into their activism and now seem to think that they’re soldiers in a revolution. They’ve lost track of the true importance of their actions and now place far more importance than is warranted on relatively unimportant events. They’re like crazy, live action role players.
As with most terms on the internet, it’s good and clever for about a week, then it enters the common vernacular and begins to lose all meaning. People sometimes refer to all online Socialists as LARPers, which isn’t true. Many of them truly believe in their ideology, understand it well, and understand that we are, at the very least, a very rough half decade away from any real communist uprising. Some people refer to the cringy Kekistan kids as LARPers, but this also isn’t true. The logic is that they dress using Roman or Spartan armor, or use an aesthetic derived from medieval crusaders, and that they too are LARPers. I think this is incorrect. While the Antifa protesters truly think that they’re communist revolutionaries fighting the system in a meaningful way, the Kek geeks are really just stirring the pot. They use the aesthetics they do because it’s a meme, and because they know it’ll upset the leftist protesters. While the leftists truly believe that they’re fighting in a revolution, the Cuckistanis do not really believe that they’re in the holy land fighting Arab muslims. It’s a false equivalency, although I do find them pretty cringeworthy.
And lastly, it should be said that most of the leftist protesters at Berkeley were not LARPing. Sure, a few of them got too into it, but most of them were simply young people looking for an excuse to perform morally-justified violence. They know this isn’t a revolution, and they know their actions ultimately won’t mean much. They just wanted an excuse to physically harm people for the crime of disagreeing with them. Blanketing their actions with the excuse of stupidity or a tenuous grasp on reality is an unjust way to relieve them of the responsibility for their actions in a small way. A few of them were LARPers, but most of them were just delinquents and shitty people.
Oh, the only other group you need to worry about legitimately being called LARPers are Tankies. The ones who go on making cringy “communist party” groups on DeviantArt and Steam and as an after-school club. Honestly, they’re mostly kids who like the aesthetic and want to RP and I can’t begrudge them for that. It’s not a crime to be a stupid kid, and they’ll grow out of it.
The uncivil strategy for offensive Leftism
The Left foreshadowed their ongoing street theatre of harassing leadership and throwing up phoney charges at the opening of the Kavanaugh hearings. Audience members jumped up shouting and wailing in a calculated and prolonged demonstration, made to appear like random testaments, to insert themselves into, and destroy the hearing process – egged on by phoney procedural delay attempts from their Leftist Senators.
It was all planned, and it raised a big middle finger to the American people who tuned in to learn something about their government.
The Left cannot permit reason to control. Under reason, they lose. But the rule of law is no match for the rule of the mob. Civility can’t compete with barbarity. Consent means nothing in the face of force.
The Left moved the bar to shouting, property destruction, procedural disruption, and all things uncivil. Without civility, what remains to check human impulses? How long until they start shooting?
That’s how previous Leftist movements all ended up. The fascists, communists, and socialists always end up imposing violent repression because citizens don’t usually voluntarily give up their freedom. Freedom gets taken surreptitiously. It’s stolen quietly, a bit at a time.
Like now. Our Supreme Court nomination process has been taken from the people and put under the force of Leftist dominion. Our Republican leadership seems oblivious to the theft.
Antifa, BLM, the Indivisibles, the Resist movement, the DSA, all the Soros-funded groups, etc., want their violent escalations to end up in revolution. No way are they moderating themselves.
Denver, Cleveland, here they come….
A protest leader talks about "militant tactics" & "self-defense" to shut down "Nazi recruitment rally" @ABC10 pic.twitter.com/fpIcIKrz1X
— Frances Wang (@ABC10Frances) June 26, 2016
Revolution persists
Recent events in Ferguson, other American cities, not to mention Syria, Iraq and the Ukraine, all host to rampage and destruction, have affirmed the enduring nature of the French Revolution.
“The pagan religions of antiquity were always more or less linked up with the political institutions and the social order of their environment, and their dogmas were conditioned to some extent by the interests of the nations, or even the cities, where they flourished. A pagan religion functioned within the limits of a given country and rarely spread beyond its frontiers. It sometimes sponsored intolerance and persecutions, but very seldom embarked on missionary enterprises. This is why there were no great religious revolutions in the Western World before the Christian era. Christianity, however, made light of all the barriers which had prevented the pagan religions from spreading, and very soon won to itself a large part of the human race. I trust I shall not be regarded as lacking in respect for this inspired religion if I say it partly owed its triumph to the fact that, far more than any other religion, it was catholic in the exact sense, having no links with any specific form of government, social order, period, or nation.
The French Revolution’s approach to the problems of man’s existence here on earth was exactly similar to that of the religious revolutions as regards his afterlife. It viewed the “citizen” from an abstract angle, that is to say as an entity independent of any particular social order, just as religions view the individual, without regard to nationality or the age he lives in. It did not aim merely at defining the rights of the French citizen, but sought also to determine the rights and duties of men in general towards each other and as members of a body politic.
It was because the Revolution always harked back to universal, not particular, values and to what was the most “natural” form of government and the most “natural” social system that it had so wide an appeal and could be imitated in so many places simultaneously.
No previous political upheaval, however violent, had aroused such passionate enthusiasm, for the ideal the French Revolution set before it was not merely a change in the French social system but nothing short of a regeneration of the whole human race. It created an atmosphere of missionary fervor and, indeed, assumed all the aspects of a religious revival–much to the consternation of contemporary observers. It would perhaps be truer to say that it developed into a species of religion, if a singularly imperfect one, since it was without a God, without a ritual or promise of a future life. Nevertheless, this strange religion has, like Islam, overrun the whole world with its apostles, militants, and martyrs.”
Alexis de Tocqueville, The Old Régime and the French Revolution, 1858.
Translated by Stuart Gilbert, 1978, pp. 12-13.
intensity X intelligence = a constant
Post by Brooks Imperial.
Greens spending the gold
Big Money And Radical Activists Lurk Behind Fracking Bans Across Front Range
October 16, 2013
Cliff Willmeng, seen here on Facebook expressing his views to oil and gas executives, is a key leader in a network of hyper-confrontational activists who guide the anti-fracking movement in Colorado
The debate over the fracking bans in Broomfield, Fort Collins and Lafayette on the November ballot has been a heated one in recent months, with plenty of media coverage of claims by opponents of fracking.
But missing from any media coverage of the ideological crusade against fracking is the checkered history of the most influential voices in the anti-fracking movement, and the underground money machine that sustains it. [Read more…]
hyperbolic times
Dr. Ileana Johnson Paugh
Polite debate is no longer the accepted norm in our society. The liberal left is not tolerating divergent opinions, they want them eliminated. Outrageous labels, personal threats, and even violence have escalated during what used to be polite discourse and disagreements of opinion. [Read more…]
winners and losers
When the Democrat-controlled Colorado Legislature gets through imposing restrictive gun laws upon law-abiding citizens, will we be any safer? No, we won’t, because none of the prescriptions contained in any of these new bills address any element of the crimes committed with guns that will have motivated the bills’ passage.
In the instant case, losers will be law-abiding citizens. Winners will be Democrat politicians, their adoring liberal media, their captive voters, and the criminals who will have an easier time of it going up against a less-armed law abiding citizenry. But that’s only in the instant case. There’s also winners and losers in the larger scheme of things.
The country’s Founders designed a system they hoped would protect minority rights under the governance of a majority. They contemplated that with all the checks and balances between the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government, the 4th estate of the press, and the people, that enough pauses to consider would exist in the public discourse over new law, that the best argument, the best philosophy, the best solution, the mostly soundly reasoned answer, would tend to carry the day.
They did not anticipate ruthless progressivism with its will to win at all costs, and notwithstanding the soundness of their argument. They did not expect that all of the checks and balances in our country would fail in their primary function and become the captive organs of a single cult mythology.
Wherever progressives get a political majority, they ram through their agenda. Sound arguments to the contrary are not rebutted, nor debated. Opposed parties are procedurally silenced, crowded out, shouted down, ridiculed, overwhelmed, and ignored.
Sure, we have instant winners and losers as each issue comes up under the progressive agenda. But the bigger loser is our system, the one that brought us to this point of social evolution, the one responsible for our success.
And perhaps the biggest losers of all are the progressives themselves. The ones who have no idea what they’ve lost by damaging their fellow American minorities, whom they take such joy in suppressing. The ones dancing in the streets after each victory, the ones shouting in the streets when they’re not dancing.
They’ve lost their minds.
B_Imperial
condolences
Critics painted me as a defender of the old guard. Ha! The only things I defended in this election cycle were competence, sound management, realistic thinking, and the rule of law. Tragically, these bedrock principles did not win today in the Elbert County Republican Party primary. Well, the principles still exist, and it appears I will have plenty more opportunities to defend them in the future.
Come November, commissioner choices will be between agenda driven liberals and, um, agenda driven liberals. I’m sure this prospect has the New-Plains democrats, populists, and leftists, dancing in their switch grass patches tonight, however, consequences for the county will be grim.
We’ll see ubiquitous zoning and higher taxes. We’ll see environmentalism and its basket of unfounded mythologies unleashed in a flurry of ersatz relevancy as they consume the public discourse. We’ll experience these mythologies fail in an expensive protracted drama full of denial and blame. We’ll see none of these agenda progenitors take responsibility when their no-growth, anti-industrial, country-in-county ideas further impoverish Elbert County. We’ll see the few of us who use their 1st Am. right to dissent from these prevailing insanities called more names, if that’s even possible at this point.
I never wrote for the sake of the old guard. I wrote for the sake of limited sound government. A voting minority of Elbert County voted for bigger more intrusive government. They made a big mistake, and the county government they’ve chosen for all of us will make us pay dearly for it. That’s what unbridled government does to people and these people are all about the unbridling of government power.
The left has won. You’re not going to like these new-strange bedfellows when they start implementing their plans for you.
B_Imperial
Obama and Ayers
“Despite having authored two autobiographies, Barack Obama has never written about his most important executive experience. From 1995 to 1999, he led an education foundation called the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC), and remained on the board until 2001. The group poured more than $100 million into the hands of community organizers and radical education activists.
The CAC was the brainchild of Bill Ayers, a founder of the Weather Underground in the 1960s. Among other feats, Mr. Ayers and his cohorts bombed the Pentagon, and he has never expressed regret for his actions. Barack Obama’s first run for the Illinois State Senate was launched at a 1995 gathering at Mr. Ayers’s home.
The Obama campaign has struggled to downplay that association.” Obama and Ayers Pushed Radicalism On Schools, Stanley Kurtz WSJ
(click to enlarge)
Occupy’s Attack On Democracy
Occupy’s Attack On Democracy Posted 05/01/2012 07:10 PM ET
The Left: After a day of mayhem, Occupy protesters have shown themselves to be little more than a dangerous mob. Democrats coddle them even as their outrages escalate. Criminal behavior has no place in a democracy. [Read more…]