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Being thankful for a dumpster fire seems like a weird thing.

And if I'm being honest, I don't suppose it's the actual shinola of 2020 that I'm thankful for. It's what that shinola provided.

Think of all the things that have been stripped away during the coronavirus pandemic. We've missed out on hometown sports and get-togethers and shopping and parades and ... well ... you name it.

Many of us have lost loved ones or suffered ourselves thanks to the virus' effects.

And we've gone through much more than COVID-19.

Our nation has seen a nasty election both sides were ugly and a media that seemed wildly unbalanced.

We've witnessed riots and looting as well police whose actions have warranted protests.

Through it all, we've had a chance to grow. A chance to be better. A chance to focus on the things that matter.

Because apparently we needed it.

In the end, it's 2020's reminders of what matters that really mean something.

The reminder that people still matter. Grace still matters. Love still matters.

Through all of the garbage we've witnessed this year, people have remained. People who are as loved by their Creator as you and I are.

That nasty Republican across the street? Yep, God loves him as much as He loves you.

That weird Democrat neighbor? God loves her, too.

That Antifa protester busting store windows and setting fires and taking whatever he pleases? Still loved by the Big Guy.

That alt-right white supremacist? Loved.

That governor who handed down the lockdown edict that closed your gym or shuttered your business or canceled your school year because, as you believe, he's on a power trip? God's love is for him.

That governor who refused to mandate masks or enact other COVID-19 mandates because, as you believe, he doesn't care if grandma dies? The cross covers him, too.

It's a crazy thing to consider, but 2020 has given us a lot of opportunities to remember that if God loves all of us that much, then the very least that we can do is to try to love each other that much.

We're not called to love just during the easy times, or to love only the people who are easy to love. That's not how real love works. Real love happens without consideration for situations or whether love will be returned.

True love just loves and that's all it does.

It's about everyone else all the time.

It's about coming alongside and just being with people.

It's about following God to people who are hurting and there are a lot of them and being there when they hit the ground hard. ("Catching people on the bounce," as Bob Goff puts it.)

It's about drawing a great big circle around everybody and saying they're all in your circle just like the circle grace drew around all of us.

This year has been ... something. A lesson for us all. A chance to love the way we should. A chance to just be with people.

Be thankful for that.

Link:
It's OK to be thankful for the 2020 dumpster fire - TheBlaze

We haven't seen the last of Pete Evans. Photo / Supplied

When word spread that Pete Evans was closing his Facebook account, people like Kaz Ross were optimistic but sceptical.

The political science expert knows too well how alternative "health and wellness" gurus like the former My Kitchen Rules judge can influence the public and perpetuate their often dangerous and misinformed ideas.

The lecturer predicted that brands that came out publicly dumping Pete this month would walk back their criticism as essential oil multi-level marketing company doTERRA did.

But now it appears Evans hasn't left Facebook after all.

The celebrity chef announced he was closing his account with 1.5 million followers nearly a week ago, but is still regularly posting to his page.

"He will find that without Facebook it's harder to draw traffic to his page," Dr Ross said of Evans' move to his Evolve platform that he has been promoting.

"They've been preparing to move to a separate economic network for a long time.

"We talk about whether he's stupid, crazy, alternative that's the wrong approach Pete Evans is a brand and we have to look at what is the brand doing to build it's brand market share?"

Evans announced he was quitting Facebook after being dumped by his publisher, Channel 10 and other brands he was associated with because of his controversial posts, most recently sharing a neo-Nazi cartoon.

He said he would not be "censored ever again".

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"He will just ride it out," said Dr Ross, who has become an expert on how the far right uses racism against the Chinese to foster neo-Nazi claims.

"When he gets censored, he can use that and incorporate that into his message.

"The message is we have the true story on health and wellness and the mainstream media and the global cabal don't want you to know this."

Global cabal theories centre around the idea that there is a single sinister group of people who secretly control the world.

"The more censored he is, the more it builds his brand because he's saying they don't want the truth to get out," Dr Ross said.

"His fan base really swamps the media, his Facebook page, anyone writing about him and every time he's censored or critiqued, it proves his point.

"Controversy is good for him."

Dr Ross said she knew companies would renege on their dumpings because of the backlash they would get from his followers in doing so.

The same day doTERRA took a stand against him, it later came out saying the company had "felt mounting pressure from a public controversy" and had "reacted with a statement that failed to receive the required thoughtful review that it merited".

Dr Ross said Evans might have been cancelled this Christmas but "you'll see him back on the shelves pretty soon".

With the coronavirus pandemic fuelling conspiracy theories in 2020, Dr Ross said the alternative health and wellness world had embraced them because it suited their brands.

"Anti-Chinese sentiment has been really bad this year, particularly in Melbourne," she said, having started her career in Asian studies.

"The alternative wellness space people have latched on to QAnon and general conspiracy theories because they're good for their brand.

"I think that a lot of people have become more aware of Pete Evans through the conspiracy theory stuff and you see a lot of it with the wellness and anti-vax crew on Instagram.

"These people are getting a lot of exposure because of coronavirus.

"They can build their brand about health and healing and also position themselves against the mainstream media."

QAnon is a wide-ranging, unfounded conspiracy theory that centres on the idea US President Donald Trump is waging a secret war against corrupt and elite Satan-worshipping paedophiles in government, business and the media.

In a year where things "seem out of control" Dr Ross said you could see why people turned to wellness narratives.

"In a pandemic, people want to believe a simple narrative, and the alternative wellness movement offers that," she said.

"If you're a good person with good intentions and eat nice, clean food, you won't get sick, and that's very empowering.

"You can control your health by eating essential oils and grain-fed beef or whatever they do, and you can ward off illness, and that's a premise of the wellness industry your intentions can create health. But sometimes you get sick, it just happens, you can't control everything."

Dr Ross said it was easy for people just to think of Pete Evans as a personality but he used that to his advantage.

"He puts himself out as a natural, authentic person with a disarming smile and he'll say I don't know, I'm just asking the questions," she said.

"That's his technique. But you should know, you're head of a pretty big brand it's your business to know."

She highlighted how a huge number of people were actually required to keep Evans' brand going.

"The alternative wellness people, they are their own brand and there are huge numbers of people required to keep his business going," she said.

"When you think of it, you just think of Pete Evans as just the individual."

Dr Ross said another technique Evans used was plausible deniability when he posted the cartoon of the black sun and "walked back from it".

"It's a tactic used all the time by the alt-right, since about 2015," she said.

"You post a dodgy meme and say oh no, I didn't know it meant that.

"It's a dog whistle to those that understand it and then you can deny it if you're ever accused."

After Evans was condemned for sharing the cartoon, he later came out saying he didn't know what it represented and had to look up what a neo-Nazi was.

Dr Ross said Evans was not a neo-Nazi, simply an opportunist.

She said a number of the conspiracy theorist types had started to monetise those opportunities.

Alongside the pandemic she said those identities were also fuelled by the anti-vax movement.

Dr Ross said the anti-vaxxers claimed they were suppressed by the mainstream media.

"Someone like Pete Evans gets so much attention from so-called mainstream media, which itself is very misleading, because he does get coverage it's just the things he says are really stupid it doesn't mean there is a cover-up of truth," she said.

Dr Ross said the problems with the promises spruiked by alternative wellness types were they were not medically true.

"Nobody is going to say eating healthy is bad for you; it's just you need to be guided by science and science is contradictory, it isn't a straightforward process," she said.

"It's not we've got the answer now. This is the way science works and people don't think about contradictory science views."

See the rest here:
Why 'stupid, crazy, alternative' Pete Evans labels are the wrong approach - New Zealand Herald

Jeff Klein (left) with co-workers at GE Lynn, circa 1979. The Steam Turbine division of GE Lynn was closed in the late 1980s and Building 57, where the photo was taken, was torn down and made into a parking lot.

Im happy to be retired. After decades working as a machinist in New England factories and shops, I cant say I miss having to clock into the job at 7am.I dont miss the sweaty, dirty and sometimes dangerous work I had to do. And even though I have been fortunate to have jobs mostly in places with collective bargaining agreements, I surely dont miss working in a hierarchical environment where bosses and supervisors still had too much power.

But there is something I do regret about being retired. That is the daily interaction with working people from different communities, with social and political backgrounds and outlooks often very different from my own. Instead, like most MAPA members, I spend almost all my time in liberal/progressive social and political circles.I now rarely have meaningful contact with people who do the work often overlooked and disrespected to make our society function.

I dont idealize the working class. My co-workers and I were fortunate to have union jobs that were mostly highly skilled and relatively well paid. These workers, who were overwhelmingly white and male, could be selfish and individualistic. They not infrequently expressed racist or misogynist attitudes, though eventually not so much when I was present. They often adopted a kind of narrow patriotism that was tinged with white supremacy and American chauvinism.Many of them had problems with drugs or alcohol.

At GE in Lynn I was called a commie for my political views. At the Deer Island plant of the Mass Water Resources Authority a worker who belonged to another union (there were 5 different unions there) assumed a religious affiliation from my last name and once told me he wished they had a smart Jew like me to run their local. He thought it was a compliment.

But I also learned the lesson over the years that people could be more than just one thing. At the MWRA, these same workers elected me president of our local for consecutive terms.Together we fought and defeated an attempt to introduce a dual wage structure for new hires which would have affected only a minority of union members. We organized successfully to stop the privatization of the regional water and sewer systems. We won good contracts and defended union members often people of color targeted for unfair discipline.

A union member,thoughinfluenced by racism, could also stand up to support a fellow worker of color on the job.People whocould be very creative in slacking offatalso took pride in their skills as electricians, plumbers, carpenters, welders or plant operators. At the MWRA, these are the people who maintain and run the system that delivers drinking water to millions of Massachusetts homes 24/7 and who made possible the cleanupofBoston harbor. These were the members of my union.

The long-time Vice-President of my local was an Irish guy from the Charlestown projects who, in a kind of Townie rite of passage, was arrested robbing a liquor store.When the judge offered him a choice of jail or military enlistment, he chose the Marines. As a youth, he rioted against court-ordered busing to desegregate the Boston schools. In his mind, he saw this not so much as an expression of racism but an act of rebellion against the liberal elites he understood to run the city. Years later, he became atenacious and skillednegotiator who was elected president of the union for many years after I retired.

No doubt there were Trump supporters among the members of my union, as there were in many predominantly white working-class communities.We need to ask why. Racism was an important factor, but to my mind that does not explain it all.

Of course,there is a significant core of organized white supremacists and alt-right quasi fascists in Trumps base, but there were also masses of ordinary white working people and a not-insignificant number of Black men and Latinos among the more than 73 millionwho voted for Trump. Some of them had cast a ballot for Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012, or for Bernie Sanders in this years Democratic primaries.

Admittedly, people like the ones I used to work with represent only a part and a proportionately diminishing one of the US working class. Still, they and their families number in the tens of millions. Should we dismiss them entirely as hopeless? Instead, we should recognize that our failure to communicate effectively with white workers also applies to large sectors of the broader multi-national US working class, including workers of color.

Decades of neoliberal policies by both parties have shattered their hopes for decent secure jobs and a better future for their children. But what they get from Democrats is often condescension and ill-disguised disdain. Barack Obama, who on occasion could show grace and great empathy, once referred this way to working-class voters in old industrial towns decimated by job losses:They get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who arent like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

For those of us who dont profess religious belief and rarely mix with the many who do, it might be easy to recall the famous line that religion is the opium of the people.But we ignore Marxs preceding sentence that Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions.

We can laugh at rednecks on TV and react with self-satisfied disgust when religious people fall prey to huckster preachers or cynical rightwing political operatives.But we forget that sincerereligious conviction motivated many northern abolitionistsand that Blackchurches were the organizational backbone of the civil rights movement.

As for guns, yes, there is plenty of nuttiness, sometimes sinister and murderous, around firearms in our country. But for millions of Americans the possession of a weapon is also an expression of defiance toward a state machinery which almost never takes their side.

When Hilary Clinton spoke of deplorables, many understood this as a contemptuous denial of their own humanity. Acknowledging this does not mean that we should capitulate to the racism or xenophobia often internalized by white workers. It does suggest that we should struggle to challenge misguided beliefs with empathy and understanding for the causes rather than a blanket condemnation of the people holding them.

The Democratic Party establishment has allowed the Republicans, and especially Trump, to mobilize what amounts to class resentment in the service of plutocracy. Meanwhile, we on the left, with rare exceptions, have failed to offer a message that resonates with or sufficiently motivates millions of working-class voters and non-voters. We rarely encounter, nor have we learned to connect with, many of our fellow-citizens. We dont know how to talk to the working class.

It is possible that a coalition of African Americans and other people of color, together with college-educated liberals and only a small segment of white workers, can barely win some local or national elections. This happened in 2020, though thanks more to the Coronavirus pandemic rather than effective political messaging.

But it is hard to imagine a stable progressive future for our country with many millions of working-class Americans mobilized in angry opposition. At best this will create a political deadlock that frustrates possibilities for the lasting and radical reforms we so desperately need. At worst it is a recipe for civil war.

Read this article:
Can We Build a Progressive Future If We Dismiss a Large Part of the Working Class? - CounterPunch

White Noise director Daniel Lombrosos interest in the alt-right started in 2016, five months before Donalds Trumps election. Working as a reporter for The Atlantic magazine, he spent three years in the field, starting his research on Reddit and 4chan before gaining the trust of three of the movements brightest stars: Richard Spencer, organizer of the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville; social media personality Mike Cernovich; and Canadian activist Lauren Southern.

It was a slow process, says Lombroso. People had this idea that Trump had radical supporters, but no one had defined it. I was 23 years old at the time and I saw people my age [that were] really energized by this candidate that no one expected to win. I started with the profile of Richard Spencer and caught a room full of people doing Nazi salutes [at a conference in Washington], which went viral. It clarified that it was fundamentally a white nationalism movement.

Many reporters want a quick soundbite and then they leave, he continues, but I wanted to understand why they believe what they believe. And how their ideas work on other people, even though I find them completely abhorrent, dangerous and repulsive. I am Jewish and yet I spent hundreds and hundreds of hours with them, having lunch, dinner, taking flights. I was willing to spend 30 hours off the record to get 10 amazing seconds.

Such moments include Lauren Southern allegedly being propositioned by [Proud Boys founder] Gavin McInnes, Cernovich opening up about his insecurity, and Spencers breakdown in front of the camera after his speech at the Michigan State University resulted in protests. When I brought back these rushes everyone went: This is a crazy fucking scene, Lombroso recalls. Spencer is pacing around in his double-breasted suit, listening to Depeche Mode. Hes obviously scared, as his brand has already been damaged, but in a weird, sadistic way maybe that was the great performance he always wanted. Dreaming of becoming an avant-garde theater director.

One of the biggest takeaways from the film is that they built a powerful movement, but the leaders are broken people, he says. They are lost, and they created a community of lost followers. The goal was to demystify their public image by showing them in private. Mike Cernovich epitomizes it the mosthe is this avatar of alpha masculinity, and yet much of his money comes from alimony from his first wife.

That said, its Southern who embodies the most absurd contradictions, Lombroso says, calling her the most important character in the film. She embodies the feminist ideal, even through she is fighting against it! Shes like Phyllis Schlafly, he says, referring to the recent FX show Mrs. America. You cant talk about the alt-right without mentioning misogyny, as it came from mens rights activism and pick-up blogging. Having a family can be wonderful, but this is much more insidiousthis idea that we need to have babies to preserve the white race. Lauren is propagating anti-feminism, and then it comes back to bite her.

Although his film is, as he says, an unsympathetic eulogy to the alt-right, even as his protagonists continue to self-destruct, he accepts the fact that their ideas are already embedded in the mainstream. Its a terrible habit, but I continue to check on them, he admits. I will always be fascinated by extremismmy grandparents were Holocaust survivors. But the digital world has now become physical. Trump tweets something and thousands show up, although he claims there were millions. We see attacks by incels [involuntary celibates] and all these weird fringe communities coming alive. I think that will stay with us.

Even though Biden won, people wanted a decisive victory against Trumpism and that didnt come. His more radical base, which has now evolved into [internet conspiracy] QAnon, for example, is not going anywhere. In the past, if you were interested in white nationalism, you would meet a bunch of weirdos at a Home Depot parking lot and pass around pamphlets. Now you can sit in your room, and when you stumble upon someone like Lauren its easy to believe that you found the truth. Its called being red-pilled in this movement. As long as social media algorithms push people in that direction, as long as Trump refuses to concede, this stuff is just going to fester.

After White Noise, Lombroso has already started developing new projects, both dealing with themes that are, he says, at the core of his work: citizenship, ethnicity and what it means to belong. That includes a coming-of-age story about an Indian-American girl making sense of the unexpected death of her father and another film based on his pen-pal relationship with a Russian spy, currently serving a 15-year prison sentence. I will probably stick to documentary for now, he says, but eventually I hope to become a hybrid director.

Daniel LombrosoCourtesy of Daniel Lombroso

Read more:
White Noise Director on Alt-Right: As Long as Trump Refuses to Concede, This Stuff Is Just Going to Fester - Variety

Here, Isayamas convoluted racial coding comes to the foreground, because Isayama does construct many symbolic parallels between the Eldians and an ideal Nazi state. Eldian society is ethnically homogeneous, with the exception of a single Asian woman, and all the named Eldians have European names. (It is not clear if they are intended to be white. The pale mukokuseki or stateless default character design template used in most Japanese anime is often interpreted as Japanese in Japan and white in the U.S.) The coup against the state could be read as an anticolonial revolution, but the alt-right interprets it as a nationalist putsch against a pacifist state. The opening theme music of the show is even sung in German.

There are also parallels to Imperial Japan. Isayama explicitly based one heroic general on Imperial Japanese Army General Akiyama Yoshifuru, while fans on both the left and the right see close parallels between another character and Nazi General Erwin Rommel. Another character, Mikasa, shares her name with an Imperial Japanese battleship. Given these aesthetic decisions, perhaps it is unsurprising that one poster opened their thread, When did you realize this was fascist propaganda and that its commentary on how the good guys lost WW2?

Theres fodder for many other, sometimes contradictory, racist interpretations of the show. The Marleyan state is controlled secretly by an Eldian family, reminiscent of right-wing conspiracy theories around Jewish cabals and financiers. On the chan boards, alt-right Attack on Titan fans who detest the Eldians tend to think of the walled city as Israel and consider their expulsion and ghettoization well-deserved punishments.

A contingent of liberal commentators also identified the series as careless at best, and intentional at worst, in its invocation of antisemitic tropes. As one user tweeted, This boneheaded metaphor has the people analogous to holocaust victims literally turning into giant horrid man-eating monsters. As another observed, Attack on Titans whole Jews used to rule and brutally oppress the world and fled after losing a war and are the only people who can turn into Titans and literally eat people thing is, yknow, pretty gross and maybe a reason not to buy/read/watch it, just FYI.

Original post:
Why "Attack on Titan" Is the Alt-Right's Favorite Manga - The New Republic