I agree that he went off the deep end with that post. Let there’s be no mistake about that; I live on cap hill in Seattle and his analogy falls flat on its face for many reasons.
But, I think we should allow ourselves the nuanced perspective of continuing to enjoy his weather posts even if we disagree with his politics.
I think that we owe it to ourselves to be able to pick and choose information from a person rather than writing them off entirely.
Isn’t that what we do with family members that we have disagreements with but still have to get along with? Are we not all one big human family?
I feel like I'm indirectly supporting his politics by engaging with his weather content. I'm generating ad revenue as a reader. And I'm increasing the size of the platform he can claim, which he can leverage for books, speaking gigs, etc. to promote whatever views he deems important. It's easy for me to find another weather source.
You have a point there; a public platform is certainly different than an intra-family affair.
You’re right about the breadth of viewership being a potential problem. Many folks believe anything they read.
This is where I really hope that individual critical thinking will save us. Media outlets shouldn’t be sources where the consumer feels ok with believing everything they hear. I think if that were not the case deplatforming wouldn’t be as appealing of an option as it currently is for handling these situations.
Alas, I’m not confident that critical thinking is alive (much less well) when so many people apparently think along party lines.
Probably deplatforming Cliff was the right thing to do in the big picture.
Honestly, one of my biggest problems with Cliff isn't even a new one ... his blog is almost wholly one-way.
He spent all this time to build a platform, but doesn't seem to care about his community at all. Doesn't respond to smart comments, nor dumb ones. Not on busy popular posts, nor quiet ones. Doesn't answer questions at all really.
When you are living history, you don’t know that ww2 is around the corner. I think the observations of the similarities between the brown shirts and violent protesters is correct. I don’t know if a better historical parallel. Look what happened to Aaron Danielson.
Brown shirts engaged in antagonism and murder towards people they perceived as evil in the same way these Antifa types do.
They terrorized businesses the same way these BLM types have been doing.
I do not understand the perspective of people who don’t have a regexp that fires on this- I want to be wrong, but I can’t stop seeing problems.
I don't understand how these parallels can be so easily dismissed. Is it because you don’t expect it to end in a Holocaust?
At least from my perspective this has been an ongoing problem for many years now and I would refer you to Godwin's law.
There is this weird sort of mystique about Hitler and the Nazi Party that keep people entranced that it was "pure evil" rather than a decade-plus political process taking place in a very unique time of history with many other actors in play. You can't use any sort of "slippery slope" argument because of course those don't exist. The fact that you can trace elements of both WW-I and WW-II to at least the mid-1800s in terms of holistic world upheaval doesn't even get mentioned. There doesn't seem to be many students of history these days.
Instead what we get is almost fantasy horror and when you try to make serious political arguments they are just dismissed. I mean, it can't happen here because unicorns don't exist either. I also find it troubling that many people have no appreciation for Marx, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao in light of the millions lives that were destroyed after WW-II. Some very horrific acts occurred in the 20th century and debating rather than dismissing these issues seems like not only a good idea, but probably essential if peace and humanity are truly desired.
> Do you reject the idea that there no parallels to the black bloc and the brown shirts behavior?
Yes. It's very clear that organised violence in the US is overwhelmingly from the far right. Anyone denying this either isn't paying attention or is being dishonest.
"In analyzing fatalities from terrorist attacks, religious terrorism has killed the largest number of individuals—3,086 people—primarily due to the attacks on September 11, 2001, which caused 2,977 deaths.10 The magnitude of this death toll fundamentally shaped U.S. counterterrorism policy over the past two decades. In comparison, right-wing terrorist attacks caused 335 deaths, left-wing attacks caused 22 deaths, and ethnonationalist terrorists caused 5 deaths."[1]
According to a 2017 report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office [1] "of the 85 violent extremist incidents that resulted in death since September 12, 2001, right-wing violent extremist groups were responsible for 62 (73 percent) while radical Islamist violent extremists were responsible for 23 (27 percent). The total number of fatalities is about the same for far right-wing violent extremists and radical Islamist violent extremists over the approximately 15-year period (106 and 119, respectively). However, 41 percent of the deaths attributable to radical Islamist violent extremists occurred in a single event—an attack on the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida in 2016."
In 2018, most ideologically motivated murders in the United States of America were linked to right-wing extremism [2].
As of 2020, right-wing terrorism accounted for the majority of terrorist attacks and plots in the US[3] and has killed more people in the continental United States since the September 11 attacks than Islamic terrorism [4].
You said it yourself. The political content of protests matters. Why not parallel with the Hong Kong protestors?
The brownshirts were paramilitaries operating in the open, in defense of the existing power structure. More in parallel to the KKK. After the ascent of Hitler, the police were explicitly forbidden from interfering with the assaults and murders.
I wrote this in response to your previous post, which was flagged:
I don't think this rioting, violence, and general unrest should be compared to the Brown Shirts. Groups engaging in "antagonism and murder towards people they perceived as evil" are not uncommon in history. An analogy to the Nazis in the 30s seems out of place because, as you say, of everything that the Nazis did after the 30s.
If you want to talk to about ideologues, people for whom the ends justify the means, people who are willing to engage in violence and destruction for ideological goals, then you can make a comparison here. You can put the Brown Shirts in this category, you can put current rioters in this category, you can put a large number of historical groups in this category, and I think this categorization is fair. (Note that sometimes this violence may even be justified).
But why pick the Nazis in particular for your comparison? Comparing this group or that group to the Nazis is almost always rhetorical trick precisely because of the Holocaust. Why not pick some other group in history that used violence to pursue its ideological goals but didn't boil over into a genocide? The answer is that, if you picked another group, the rhetorical power of the comparison would be lost. But it would be a more honest comparison.
> you would think they would cynically propose a soft spoken figurehead who says inspirational things
Oh, but they did, just not from their own ranks.
Think about that. Who, among the entire political spectrum in the US, promises to the America's middle class and end to hostilities, a sense of harmony, and a partial absolution of the white guilt?
Hint: it's not one person but rather a team of two.
> Since BLM is an org with such “expertise” in what white people think, you would think they would cynically propose a soft spoken figurehead who says inspirational things. Instead, we get adversarial confrontation on the “fact” that all white people are racist and only white and white adjacent people can be racist. This is idiotic marketing strategy. You’d think they would avoid antagonizing their customer if they were serious about positive change.
Wow. You really are a racist. Or at least an authoritarian on some level.
You want people of color to convince you - a task of which is not theirs to fulfill - that they should have basic social rights in the US. You then refuse to be convinced because they aren't 'being nice' about it?
How on earth is fighting for social and civil rights a task of political suppression? BLM represents a bloc that has been disincentivised from voting from the founding of America until 2020.
Something screams authoritarian, and it certainly isn't protesting.
MLK is being used disingenuously by the right[1]. He was treated very similar to BLM during his activism and his death was openly celebrated by some political figures on the right. BLM has very consciously decided to foster a leaderless movement to prevent the vilification tactics used by right wing media to discredit movements (see AOC, Hillary, Kaepernick, etc..)[2]
The downvotes should be sufficient, but I think you are misinformed if you think the modern right’s perspective is the same as the 60’s right.
I don’t know anything about the perceived violence of MLK- but three quotes are in my brain on him:
“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”
“Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.”
“We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools.”
His legacy is his ideas- not the lens through which they were perceived. He had success because his ideas were compassionate and strong. A YouTube video that tries to slap a narrative on how he was perceived then to justify your current bigotry is irrelevant compared to the quality of his ideas.
I think I approach agreeing with you that it’s bad to make these analogies- but I don’t know of alternatives that clearly communicate the perceived potential for conflict.
Thanks for helping me understand your perspective.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding, are you advocating for continuing to follow a blog that is known to give misinformation because you like the writing style? Because if that is the case I would highly recommend changing your mind, the Bayesian prior has changed and unfortunately it is permanent.
He is a professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Washington, a fellow of the American Meteorological Society, and his resume [0] looks impressive to
me. I realize that this is an appeal to authority, but since I don’t know enough about meteorology to make an informed decision about the specific information that he gives, his qualifications seem to indicate that he is a trustworthy source of meteorological information.
I did a quick internet search and looked him up on Wikipedia. His Wikipedia entry [1] mentions the controversies surrounding his non-professional views, but I didn’t find anything about his meteorological views being in question.
Please correct me if I missed something! It can be hard to determine if someone is trustworthy on the internet.
Rephrasing what someone wrote in an uncharitable way is a toxic form of communication that will limit your ability to experience diversity of perspective. It annoys everyone around you and will hurt you in the long run.
Instead of slapping malignant narratives on people, try asking explorative questions that invite the OP to clarify or make an ass of themselves.
I don't have a dog in this fight. I don't follow the aforementioned blogger and don't live on the west coast. That said, your response is interesting, how is my query toxic? To be honest, I don't even think I'm being uncharitable; if a previously reliable information source starting being unreliable then I would expect folks to pay attention to notice that and cease to use it as a source.
Since you have an opinion on this, what sort of questions should I have asked the OP?
To be explicit; I'm not trolling, I'm genuinely curious.
“are you advocating for continuing to follow a blog that is known to give misinformation because you like the writing style?”
If you look at op’s comment, there is no mention of style.
I also have no visibility into misinformation from the blogger. Not sure that OP does either.
With respect to his weather writing, he’s been around for quite a while and is perceived as authoritative. He had a radio show dedicated to the weather on NPR. This isn’t some rando with a blog.
Questions you should have asked: “how do you feel about this posting where he makes this claim that is clearly misinformation?”
You may be right about your above questions- but as an outsider looking at this thread, I don’t see why you believe the things you do and I don’t know why OP would ever agree to that phrasing. You assumed conflict rather than misunderstanding by asking ~“are you advocating reading misinformation because it’s well written?” Is a question that assumes someone knows your context.
Trying not to be adversarial here- just underlining where reasonable people would not be super thrilled with the questioning style.
I don't think it's reasonable to characterize political comparisons we find offensive as "misinformation". More generally, standards of intellectual engagement that require you to import political battles into every other topic are destructive and unhelpful.
But, I think we should allow ourselves the nuanced perspective of continuing to enjoy his weather posts even if we disagree with his politics.
I think that we owe it to ourselves to be able to pick and choose information from a person rather than writing them off entirely.
Isn’t that what we do with family members that we have disagreements with but still have to get along with? Are we not all one big human family?